The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  “The fall of dice in gambling den

  The sporting bets of honest men

  Will bring them round again, again

  To their fairest friend, distraction…”

  It was not the words that were beautiful, for as I recite them here I see none of you crying or falling over. But the voices, the voices! Every hair on my neck stood as though a winter wind had caught me, and I felt the sorcery, sure as I could feel the stones beneath my feet. There was a compulsion weighing on us. The voices drew us on, all of us, cow-eyed, yearning to embrace the gorgeous burning shapes that called with such piercing loveliness. And that was the horror of it, friends, for I knew with some small part of my mind that if I touched one of those things, my skin would go like candle-wax in a bonfire. Still, I couldn’t help myself. None of us could. With every moment they sang, the pull of the fire-dancers grew, and our resolve withered.

  “When beauties into mirrors gaze

  Nor look aside for all their days

  Until they lose all chance for praise

  They wake too late from distraction…”

  I groaned and forced myself backwards, step by step, though it felt like hooks had been set in my heart and it was ten hells to pull against them. I saw Mikah, reeling dizzily, seize Brandgar by the collar.

  “Forgive me, lord!” Mikah cuffed their king hard, first across one cheek and then the other. Terrible fury flared for an instant beneath Brandgar’s countenance, and then he seemed to remember himself. He clutched at his King-Shadow like a man being pulled away from a pier by a riptide.

  “Gudrun,” yelled Brandgar, “give us strength against this sorcery, or we are all about to consummate very painful love-affairs!”

  Our sorceress, too, had steeled her will. She swung the strange drums from her back, gasping as though she’d just run a great distance, and began to beat a weak, hesitant counter-rhythm in the casual Ajja style:

  “Heart be stone and eyes be clear

  Gudrun sees the puppeteer—

  Fire sings eights, Gudrun sevens

  This spell your power leavens…”

  I felt the rhythm of Gudrun’s drumming like the hoofbeats of cavalry horses, rushing closer to bring aid, and for a moment it seemed the terrible lure of the fire-dancers was fading. Then they spun faster, and glowed fiercely white, and ribbons of smoke curled from their feet as they pirouetted across the tiles. Their voices rose, more lovely than ever, and I choked back a sob, balanced on the edge of madness. Why wasn’t I embracing them? What sort of damned fool wouldn’t want to hurl himself into that fire?

  “The fly with hateful flit and bite

  The swordsman’s feint that wins the fight

  The thief enshrouded in the night

  The world’s true king is distraction…”

  Mikah knelt and punched the tiles, hard, screaming as their knuckles turned red. “I can’t think,” they cried, “I can’t think—what’s the song beneath the song?”

  “The lasting truths poets compose

  The lowly tavern juggling-shows

  Friends over card games come to blows

  You’re chained like dogs to distraction…”

  “Fire!” bellowed Brandgar, who was stumbling with the eerie movements of a sleepwalker toward his destined fire-dancer, which was a scant few yards away. “Fire is beneath the song! No, stone! Stone is below the dancers! No, the mountain! The mountain is below us all! Gudrun!”

  None of Brandgar’s guesses loosened the coils of desire that crushed my chest and my loins and my mind. Gudrun shifted tempo again, and beat desperately at her drums in the stave-rhythm of formal Ajja skaldry:

  “Now to sixes singing,

  Ajja Gudrun knows well:

  Hellfire dancer’s contest

  Can be met with no spell.

  Grimly laughs the king-worm,

  Mortal toys must burn soon;

  Fly now spear of Wave-King,

  Breaking stones before ruin!”

  With that, Gudrun fixed herself like a slinger on a battlefield, and pitched her rune-stitched drums straight at Brandgar’s head. Their impact, or the repeated shock of such treatment at the hands of his companions, brought him round to himself one final, crucial time.

  “The wall,” shouted Gudrun, falling to her knees. “The song of distraction is the distraction! The song beneath the song... is beneath the song on the wall!”

  Heat stabbed the unprotected skin of my face like a thousand darting needles. Smoke curled now from the sleeves and lapels of my jacket; I breathed the scent of my own burning as my fire-dancer leaned in, looming above me at arm’s reach, and I had never known anything more beautiful, and I had never ached for anything more powerfully, and I knew that I was dead.

  In the corner of my vision, I glimpsed Brandgar steady on his feet, and with the most desperate rage I ever saw, he charged howling past his grasping fire-dancer and drove the point of Cold-Thorn into the center of the Helfalkyn Wormsong that glowed upon the chamber wall. Rock and dust exploded past him, and revealed there beneath the fall of shattered stone were lines of words glowing coldly blue. Quickly, clumsily, but with true feeling Brandgar sang:

  “From the death here, all be turning

  Still the song, forsake the burning

  Chance at mountain-top our earning

  Though golden gain is distraction!”

  Instantly the blazing heat roiling the air before my face vanished; the deadly whites and oranges of the fire-dancers became the cool blue of the new song on the wall. An easement washed over me, as though I had plunged my whole body into a cold, clear river. I fell over, exhausted, groaning with pleasure and disbelief at being alive, and I was not alone. We all lay there gasping like idiots for some time, chests heaving like the near-drowned, laughing and sobbing to ourselves as we came to terms with our memories of the fire-song’s seduction. The memory did not fade, and has not faded, and to be free of it will be both a wonder and a sorrow until the day I die.

  “Well-sung, son of Erika and Orthild,” said one of the gentled fire-dancers in a voice nothing like that which had nearly conquered us with delight. “Well-played, daughter of the sky. The gift you leave us is an honor. Your diminishment is an honor.”

  The blue shapes faded into thin air, leaving only the orange pillar of fire which still poured from the rock-chimney; it seemed our host was done with offering chances to escape. Then I saw that Brandgar was on his feet, staring motionless at a pair of objects, one held in each hand.

  The two halves of the broken spear Cold-Thorn.

  “Oh, my king,” sighed Gudrun, wincing as she stood and retrieved her drums. “Forgive me.”

  Brandgar stared down at his sundered weapon without answering for some time, then sighed. “There is nothing to forgive, sorceress. My guesses were all bad, and your answer was true.”

  Slowly, reverently, he set the two parts of Cold-Thorn on the floor.

  “Nine-and-twenty years, and it has never failed me. I lay it here as a brother on a battlefield. I give it to the stories to come.”

  Then he hefted his second spear over his shoulder, though he still refused to unbind the leather from its point, and his old grin appeared like an actor taking a curtain call.

  “Bide no more; the night is not forever, and we must climb. With every step, I more desire conversation with the dragon. Come!”

  FOURTH, HOW WE PASSED FROM THE BRITTLE BONES OF THE MOUNTAIN TO THE SNOW OF DEATH

  SHAKEN BUT GIDDY, we wandered on into many-pillared galleries, backlit by troughs and fountains of incandescent lava that flowed like sluggish water. The heat of it was such that to approach made us mindful of the burning we had only narrowly escaped, and by unspoken agreement we stayed well clear of the stuff. It made soft sounds as it ran, belching and bubbling in the main, but also an unnerving glassy crackling where it touched the edges of its containers, and there darkened to silvery-black.

  “A strangeness, even for this place,” said Gudrun, brushing her fin
gers across one of the stone pillars. “There’s a resting power here. Not merely in the drawing up of the mountain’s boiling blood, which is not wholly natural. There are forces bound and balanced in these pillars, as if they might be set loose by design.”

  “A new trap?” said Brandgar.

  “If so, it’s meant to catch half the Dragon’s Anvil when it goes,” said Gudrun. “Crale won’t be shielding us from that with his bottom.”

  “Is it a present danger to us?” I asked.

  “Most likely,” said Gudrun.

  “I welcome every new course at this feast,” said Brandgar. “Come! We were meant to be climbing!”

  Up, then, via spiral staircases wide enough for an Ajja longship to slide down, assuming its sails were properly furled. Into more silent galleries we passed, with molten rock to light our way, until we emerged at last beneath a high ceiling set with shiny black panes of glass. Elsewhere they might have been windows lighting a glorious temple or a rich villa, but here they were just a deadness in the stones. A cool breeze blew through this place, and Mikah sniffed the air.

  “We’re close now,” they said. “Perhaps not yet at the summit, but that’s the scent of the outside.”

  This chamber was fifty yards long and half as wide, with a small door on the far side. Curiously enough, there was no obvious passage I could see suited for a dragon. Before the door stood a polished obsidian statue just taller than Brandgar. The man-like figure bore the head of an owl, with its eyes closed, and in place of folded wings it had a fan of arms, five per side, jutting from its upper back. This is a common shape for a barrow-vardr, a tomb guardian the Ajja like to carve on those intermittent occasions when they manage to retrieve enough of a dead hero for a burial ceremony. I was not surprised when the lids of its eyes slowly rose, and it regarded us with orbs like fractured rubies.

  “Here have I stood since the coming of the master,” spoke the statue, “waiting to put you in your grave and then stand as its ornament, King-on-the-Waves.”

  “The latter would be a courtesy but the former will never happen,” said Brandgar, cheerfully setting his wrapped spear down. “Let us fight if we must, though I will lose my temper if you have another song to sing us.”

  “Black, my skin will turn all harm,” said the statue. “Silver skin forfeits the charm.”

  “Verse is nearly as bad,” growled Brandgar. He sprinted at the statue and hurled himself at its midsection, in the manner of a wrestler. I sighed inwardly at this, but you have seen that Brandgar was one part forethought steeped in a thousand parts hasty action, and he was never happier than when he was testing the strength of a foe by offering it his skull for crushing. The ten arms of the barrow-vardr spread in an instant, and the two opponents grappled only briefly before Brandgar was hurled twenty feet backward, narrowly missing Gudrun. He landed very loudly.

  Mikah moved to the attack then with short curved blades, and I swallowed my misgivings and backed him with my own daggers. Sparks flew from every touch of Mikah’s knives against the thing’s skin, and the air was filled with a mad whirl of obsidian arms and dodging thieves. Mikah was faster than I, so I let them stay closer and keep the thing’s attention. I lunged at it from behind, again and again, until one of the arms slapped me so hard I saw constellations of stars dancing across my vision. I stumbled away with more speed than grace, and a moment later Mikah broke off the fight as well, vaulting clear. Past him charged Brandgar, shouting something brave and unintelligible. A few seconds later he was flying across the chamber again.

  Gudrun took over then, chanting and waving her hands. She threw vials and wooden tubes at the barrow-vardr, and green fire erupted on its arms and head. Then came a series of silver flashes, and a great ear-stinging boom, and the thing vanished in an eruption of smoke and force that cracked the stones beneath its feet and sent chips of rock singing through the air, cutting my face. Coughing, wincing, I peered into the smoke and was gravely disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see the thing still standing there quite unaltered. Gudrun swore. Then Brandgar found his feet again and ran headlong into the smoke. There was a ringing metallic thump. He exited the haze on his customary trajectory.

  “I believe we might take this thing at its word that we can do nothing against it while its substance is black,” said Mikah. “How do we turn its skin silver?”

  “Perhaps we could splash it with quicksilver,” said Gudrun. “If we only had some. Or coat it with hot running iron and polish it to a gleam, given a suitable furnace, five blacksmiths, and most of a day to work.”

  “I packed none of those things,” muttered Mikah. Little intelligent discourse took place for the next few minutes, as the invulnerable statue chased us in turns around the chamber, occasionally enduring some fresh fire or explosion conjured by Gudrun without missing a step. She also tried to infuse it with the silvery light by which we had made our way up the darker parts of the mountain, but the substance of the barrow-vardr drank even this spell without effect. Soon we were all scorched and cut and thinking of simpler times, when all we’d had to worry about was burning to death in dancing fires.

  “Crale! Lend me your sling!” shouted Mikah, who was badly beset and attempting not to plunge into a trough of lava as they skipped and scurried from ten clutching hands. I made a competent hand-off of the weapon and a nestled stone, and was neither swatted nor burned for my trouble. Mikah found just enough space to wind up and let fly—not at the barrow-vardr, but at the ceiling. The stone hit one of the panes of black glass with a flat crack, but either it was too strong to break or Mikah’s angle of attack was not to their advantage.

  I admit that I didn’t grasp Mikah’s intent, but Gudrun redressed my deficiency. “I see what you’re on about,” she shouted. “Guard yourselves!”

  She gave us no time to speculate on her meaning. She readied another one of her alarming magical gimmicks and hurled it at the ceiling, where it burst in fire and smoke. The blast shattered not only the glass pane Mikah had aimed for, but all those near it, so that it rained sharp fragments everywhere. I tucked in my head and legs and did a creditable impersonation of a turtle. When the tinkling and shattering came to an end, I glanced up and saw that the sundering of the blackened windows had let in diffuse shafts of cold light, swirling with smoke. Mikah had been right; we were indeed close to open sky, and in the hours we had spent making our way through the heart of the Anvil the moons had also risen, shedding the red reflection of sunset in favor of silvery-white luster. This light fell on the statue, and Brandgar wasted no time in testing its effect.

  Now when he tackled the barrow-vardr it yielded like an opponent of ordinary flesh. The king’s strength bore it to the stones, and though it flailed for leverage with its vast collection of hands, Brandgar struck its head thrice with his joined fists, blows that made me wince in overgenerous sympathy with our foe. Imagine a noise like an anvil repeatedly dropped on a side of beef. When these had sufficiently dampened the thing’s resistance, Brandgar heaved it onto his shoulders, then flung it into the nearest fountain of molten rock, where it flamed and thrashed and quickly sank from our sight.

  “I shall have to look elsewhere for a suitable watch upon my crypt.” Brandgar retrieved the wrapped spear he had once more refused to employ, and wiped away smears of blood from several cuts on his neck and forehead. “Presuming I am fated to fill one.”

  The small door swung open for us as we approached, and we were all so battle-drunk and blasted that we made a great show of returning the courtesy with bows and salutes. The room beyond was equal in length to the chamber of the barrow-vardr, but it was all one great staircase, rising gently to a portal that was notable for its simplicity. This was no door, but merely a passage in stone, and through it we could see more moonlight and stars. The chamber was bitterly cold, and drifting in flurries across the stairs were clouds of scattered snow that came from and passed into thin air.

  “Hold a moment,” said Gudrun, kneeling to examine a plaque set into
the floor. I peered over her shoulder and saw more Kandric script:

  Here and last cross the serpent-touched snow

  In each flake the sting of many asps

  To touch skin once brings life’s unmaking

  “To be stymied by snow in the heart of a fire-mountain,” I said, shuddering at the thought of death from something as small as a grain of salt brushing naked skin. “That would be a poor end.”

  “We won’t be trying it on for fit,” said Gudrun. She gestured, and with a flash of silver light attempted the same trick I had seen in Underwing Hall, to move herself in the blink of an eye from one place to another. This time the spell went awry; with an answering flash of light she rebounded from some unseen barrier just before the stairs, and wound up on her back coughing up pale wisps of steam.

  “It seems we’re meant to do this on foot or not at all,” she groaned. “Here’s a second ploy, then. If the snow is mortal to this flesh, I’ll sing myself another.”

  She made a low rumbling sound in her throat, and gulped air with ominous croaks, and with each gulp her skin darkened and her face elongated, stretching until it assumed the wedge-shape of a viper’s head. Her eyes grew, turning greenish-gold while the pupils narrowed to dark vertical crescents. In a moment the transformation was complete; she flicked a narrow tongue past scaled lips and smiled.