The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “You shall, in time. I’m about to place a hard burden on your shoulders. I have often thought that you were the right one, but I wished to wait until you were older, stronger. But what has happened today cannot be ignored. I am old and weakening. It would be a mistake to wait another year.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Take the bracelet. Put it on your wrist.”

  Kathrin did as she was told. The bracelet opened on a heavy hinge, like a manacle. When she locked it together, the join was nearly invisible. It was a cunning thing, to be sure. But it still felt as heavy and dead and useless as the broken sword.

  Kathrin tried to keep a composed face, all the while suspecting that the widow was as mad as people had always said.

  “Thank you,” she said, with as much sincerity as she could muster.

  “Now listen to what I have to say. You walked across the bridge today. Doubtless you passed the inn known as the Winged Man.”

  “It was where Garret caught up with me.”

  “Did it ever occur to you to wonder where the name of the tavern comes from?”

  “My dad told me once. He said the tavern was named after a metal statue that used to stand on a hill to the south, on the Durham road.”

  “And did your father explain the origin of this statue?”

  “He said some people reckoned it had been up there since before the Great Winter. Other people said an old Sheriff had put it up. Some other people …” But Kathrin trailed off.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s silly, but they said a real Winged Man had come down, out of the sky.”

  “And did your father place any credence in that story?”

  “Not really,” Kathrin said.

  “He was right not to. The statue was indeed older than the Great Winter, when they tore it down. It was not put up to honour the Sheriff, or commemorate the arrival of a Winged Man.” Now the widow looked at her intently. “But a Winged Man did come down. I know what happened, Kathrin: I saw the statue with my own eyes, before the Winged Man fell. I was there.”

  Kathrin shifted. She was growing uncomfortable in the widow’s presence.

  “My dad said people reckoned the Winged Man came down hundreds of years ago.”

  “It did.”

  “Then you can’t have been there, Widow Grayling.”

  “Because if I had been, I should be dead by now? You’re right. By all that is natural, I should be. I was born three hundred years ago, Kathrin. I’ve been a widow for more than two hundred of those years, though not always under this name. I’ve moved from house to house, village to village, as soon as people start suspecting what I am. I found the Winged Man when I was sixteen years old, just like you.”

  Kathrin smiled tightly. “I want to believe you.”

  “You will, shortly. I already told you that this was the coldest time of the Great Winter. The sun was a cold grey disk, as if it was made of ice itself. For years the river hardly thawed at all. The Frost Fair stayed almost all year round. It was nothing like the miserable little gatherings you have known. This was ten times bigger, a whole city built on the frozen river. It had streets and avenues, its own quarters. There were tents and stalls, with skaters and sledges everywhere. There’d be races, jousting competitions, fireworks, mystery players, even printing presses to make newspapers and souvenirs just for the Frost Fair. People came from miles around to see it, Kathrin: from as far away as Carlisle or York.”

  “Didn’t they get bored with it, if it was always there?”

  “It was always changing, though. Every few months there was something different. You would travel fifty miles to see a new wonder if enough people started talking about it. And there was no shortage of wonders, even if they were not always quite what you had imagined when you set off on your journey. Things fell from the sky more often in those days. A living thing like the Winged Man was still a rarity, but other things came down regularly enough. People would spy where they fell and try to get there first. Usually all they’d find would be bits of hot metal, all warped and runny like melted sugar.”

  “Skydrift,” Kathrin said. “Metal that’s no use to anyone, except barbers and butchers.”

  “Only because we can’t make fires hot enough to make that metal smelt down like iron or copper. Once, we could. But if you could find a small piece with an edge, there was nothing it couldn’t cut through. A surgeon’s best knife will always be skydrift.”

  “Some people think the metal belongs to the jangling men, and that anyone who touches it will be cursed.”

  “And I’m sure the Sheriff does nothing to persuade them otherwise. Do you think the jangling men care what happens to their metal?”

  “I don’t think they care, because I don’t think they exist.”

  “I was once of the same opinion. Then something happened to make me change my mind.”

  “This being when you found the Winged Man, I take it.”

  “Before even that. I would have been thirteen, I suppose. It was in the back of a tent in the Frost Fair. There was a case holding a hand made of metal, found among skydrift near Wallsend.”

  “A rider’s gauntlet.”

  “I don’t think so. It was broken off at the wrist, but you could tell that it used to belong to something that was also made of metal. There were metal bones and muscles in it. No cogs or springs, like in a clock or tin toy. This was something finer, more ingenious. I don’t believe any man could have made it. But it cannot just be the jangling men who drop things from the sky, or fall out of it.”

  “Why not?” Kathrin asked, in the spirit of someone going along with a game.

  “Because it was said that the Sheriff’s men once found a head of skin and bone, all burned up, but which still had a pair of spectacles on it. The glass in them was dark like coal, but when the Sheriff wore them, he could see at night like a wolf. Another time, his men found a shred of garment that kept changing colour, depending on what it was lying against. You could hardly see it then. Not enough to make a suit, but you could imagine how useful that would have been to the Sheriff’s spies.”

  “They’d have wanted to get to the Winged Man first.”

  Widow Grayling nodded. “It was just luck that I got to him first. I was on the Durham road, riding a mule, when he fell from the sky. Now, the law said that they would spike your head on the bridge if you touched something that fell on the Sheriff’s land, especially skydrift. But everyone knew that the Sheriff could only travel so fast, even when he had his flying machine. It was a risk worth taking, so I took it, and I found the Winged Man, and he was still alive.”

  “Was he really a man?”

  “He was a creature of flesh and blood, not a jangling man, but he was not like any man I had seen before. He was smashed and bent, like a toy that had been trodden on. When I found him he was covered in armour, hot enough to turn the snow to water and make the water hiss and bubble under him. I could only see his face. A kind of golden mask had come off, lying next to him. There were bars across his mask, like the head of the angel on the tavern sign. The rest of him was covered in metal, jointed in a clever fashion. It was silver in places and black in others, where it had been scorched. His arms were metal wings, as wide across as the road itself if they had not been snapped back on themselves. Instead of legs he just had a long tail, with a kind of fluke at the end of it. I crept closer, watching the sky all around me for the Sheriff’s whirling machine. I was fearful at first, but when I saw the Winged Man’s face I only wanted to do what I could for him. And he was dying. I knew it, because I’d seen the same look on the faces of men hanging from the Sheriff’s killing poles.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “I asked him if he wanted some water. At first he just looked at me, his eyes pale as the sky, his lips opening and closing like a fish that has just been landed. Then he said, ‘Water will not help me.’ Just those five words, in a dialect I didn’t know. Then I asked him if there was anything else I
could do to help him, all the while glancing over my shoulder in case anyone should come upon us. But the road was empty and the sky was clear. It took a long time for him to answer me again.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Thank you, but there is nothing you can do for me.’ Then I asked him if he was an angel. He smiled, ever so slightly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not an angel, really. But I am a flier.’ I asked him if there was a difference. He smiled again before answering me. ‘Perhaps not, after all this time. Do you know of fliers, girl? Do any of you still remember the war?’”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth. I said I knew nothing of a war, unless he spoke of the Battle of the Stadium of Light, which had only happened twenty years earlier. He looked sad, then, as if he had hoped for a different answer. I asked him if he was a kind of soldier. He said that he was. ‘Fliers are warriors,’ he said. ‘Men like me are fighting a great war, on your behalf, against an enemy you do not even remember.’”

  “What enemy?”

  “The jangling men. They exist, but not in the way we imagine them. They don’t crawl in through bedroom windows at night, clacking tin-bodied things with skull faces and clockwork keys whirring from their backs. But they’re real enough.”

  “Why would such things exist?”

  “They’d been made to do the work of men on the other side of the sky, where men cannot breathe because the air is so thin. They made the jangling men canny enough that they could work without being told exactly what to do. But that already made them slyer than foxes. The jangling men coveted our world for themselves. That was before the Great Winter came in. The flier said that men like him—special soldiers, born and bred to fight the jangling men—were all that was holding them back.”

  “And he told you they were fighting a war, above the sky?”

  Something pained Widow Grayling. “All the years since haven’t made it any easier to understand what the flier told me. He said that just as there may be holes in an old piece of timber, one that has been eaten through by woodworm, so there may be holes in the sky itself. He said that his wings were not really to help him fly, but to help him navigate those tunnels in the sky, just as the wheels of a cart find their way into the ruts on a road.”

  “I don’t understand. How can there be holes in the sky, when the air is already too thin to breathe?”

  “He said that the fliers and the jangling men make these holes, just as armies may dig a shifting network of trenches and tunnels as part of a long campaign. It requires strength to dig a hole and more strength to shore it up when it has already been dug. In an army, it would be the muscle of men and horses and whatever machines still work. But the flier was talking about a different kind of strength altogether.” The widow paused, then stared into Kathrin’s eyes with a look of foreboding. “He told me where it came from, you see. And ever since then, I have seen the world with different eyes. It is a hard burden, Kathrin. But someone must bear it.”

  Without thinking, Kathrin said, “Tell me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I want to know.”

  “That bracelet has been on your wrist for a few minutes now. Does it feel any different?”

  “No,” Kathrin said automatically, but as soon as she’d spoken, as soon as she’d moved her arm, she knew that it was not the case. The bracelet still looked the same, it still looked like a lump of cold, dead metal, but it seemed to hang less heavily against her skin than when she’d first put it on.

  “The flier gave it to me,” Widow Grayling said, observing Kathrin’s reaction. “He told me how to open his armour and find the bracelet. I asked why. He said it was because I had offered him water. He was giving me something in return for that kindness. He said that the bracelet would keep me healthy, make me strong in other ways, and that if anyone else was to wear it, it would cure them of many ailments. He said that it was against the common law of his people to give such a gift to one such as I, but he chose to do it anyway. I opened his armour, as he told me, and I found his arm, bound by iron straps to the inside of his wing, and broken like the wing itself. On the end of his arm was this bracelet.”

  “If the bracelet had the power of healing, why was the Winged Man dying?”

  “He said that there were certain afflictions it could not cure. He had been touched by the poisonous ichor of a jangling man, and the bracelet could do nothing for him now.”

  “I still do not believe in magic,” Kathrin said carefully.

  “Certain magics are real, though. The magic that makes a machine fly, or a man see in the dark. The bracelet feels lighter, because part of it has entered you. It is in your blood now, in your marrow, just as the jangling man’s ichor was in the flier’s. You felt nothing, and you will continue to feel nothing. But so long as you wear the bracelet, you will age much slower than anyone else. For centuries, no sickness or infirmity will touch you.”

  Kathrin stroked the bracelet. “I do not believe this.”

  “I would not expect you to. In a year or two, you will feel no change in yourself. But in five years, or in ten, people will start to remark upon your uncommon youthfulness. For a while, you will glory in it. Then you will feel admiration turn slowly to envy and then to hate, and it will start to feel like a curse. Like me, you will need to move on and take another name. This will be the pattern of your life, while you wear the flier’s charm.”

  Kathrin looked at the palms of her hands. It might have been imagination, but the lines where the handles had cut into her were paler and less sensitive to the touch.

  “Is this how you heal people?” she asked.

  “You’re as wise as I always guessed you were, Kathrin Lynch. Should you come upon someone who is ill, you need only place the bracelet around their wrist for a whole day and—unless they have the jangling man’s ichor in them—they will be cured.”

  “What of the other things? When my father hurt his arm, he said you tied an eel around his arm.”

  Her words made the widow smile. “I probably did. I could just as well have smeared pigeon dung on it instead, or made him wear a necklace of worms, for all the difference it would have made. Your father’s arm would have mended itself on its own, Kathrin. The cut was deep, but clean. It did not need the bracelet to heal, and your father was neither stupid nor feverish. But he did have the loose tongue of all small boys. He would have seen the bracelet, and spoken of it.”

  “Then you did nothing.”

  “Your father believed that I did something. That was enough to ease the pain in his arm and perhaps allow it to heal faster than it would otherwise have done.”

  “But you turn people away.”

  “If they are seriously ill, but neither feverish nor unconscious, I cannot let them see the bracelet. There is no other way, Kathrin. Some must die, so that the bracelet’s secret is protected.”

  “This is the burden?” Kathrin asked doubtfully.

  “No, this is the reward for carrying the burden. The burden is knowledge.”

  Again Kathrin said, “Tell me.”

  “This is what the flier told me: The Great Winter fell across our world because the sun itself grew colder and paler. There was a reason for that. The armies of the celestial war were mining its fire, using the furnace of the sun itself to dig and shore up those seams in the sky. How they did this is beyond my comprehension, and perhaps even that of the flier himself. But he did make one thing clear. So long as the Great Winter held, the celestial war must still be raging. And that would mean that the jangling men had not yet won.”

  “But the Thaw … ,” Kathrin began.

  “Yes, you see it now. The snow melts from the land. Rivers flow; crops grow again. The people rejoice; they grow stronger and happier; skins darken; the Frost Fairs fade into memory. But they do not understand what it really means.”

  Kathrin hardly dared ask: “Which side is winning, or has already won?”

  “I don’t know; that’s the terr
ible part of it. But when the flier spoke to me, I sensed an awful hopelessness, as if he knew things were not going to go the way of his people.”

  “I’m frightened now.”

  “You should be. But someone needs to know, Kathrin, and the bracelet is losing its power to keep me out of the grave. Not because there is anything wrong with it, I think—it heals as well as it has ever done—but because it has decided that my time has grown sufficient, just as it will eventually decide the same thing with you.”

  Kathrin touched the other object, the thing that looked like a sword’s handle.

  “What is this?”

  “The flier’s weapon. His hand was holding it from inside the wing. It poked through the outside of the wing like the claw of a bat. The flier showed me how to remove it. It is yours as well.”

  She had touched it already, but this time Kathrin felt a sudden tingle as her fingers wrapped around the hilt. She let go suddenly, gasping as if she had reached for a stick and picked up an adder, squirming and slippery and venomous.

  “Yes, you feel its power,” Widow Grayling said admiringly. “It works for no one unless they carry the bracelet.”

  “I can’t take it.”

  “Better you have it than let that power go to waste. If the jangling men come, then at least someone will have a means to hurt them. Until then, there are other uses for it.”

  Without touching the hilt, Kathrin slipped the weapon into her pocket, where it lay as heavy and solid as a pebble.

  “Did you ever use it?”

  “Once.”

  “What did you do?”

  She caught a secretive smile on Widow Grayling’s face. “I took something precious from William the Questioner. Banished him to the ground like the rest of us. I meant to kill him, but he was not riding in the machine when I brought it down.”

  Kathrin laughed. Had she not felt the power of the weapon, she might have dismissed the widow’s story as the ramblings of an old woman. But she had no reason in the world to doubt her companion.

  “You could have killed the Sheriff later, when he came to inspect the killing poles.”

  “I nearly did. But something always stayed my hand. Then the Sheriff was replaced by another man, and he in turn by another. Sheriffs came and went. Some were evil men, but not all of them. Some were only as hard and cruel as their office demanded. I never used the weapon again, Kathrin. I sensed that its power was not limitless, that it must be used sparingly, against the time when it became really necessary. But to use it in defence, against a smaller target … that would be a different matter, I think.”