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

by Jonathan Strahan

  The dragon charged back toward Gudrun, mighty claws hammering the stones. The sorceress chanted, and a barrier of blue ice took shape before her, thick and overhanging like the crest of a wave. Glimraug drew in another long breath, then expelled it, and for an instant the blazing light of its internal fire was visible. Then the dragon breathed forth a stream of molten silver, all that it had consumed and melted, like the great burst of a geyser, wreathed in crackling white flame. The wave of burning death blasted Gudrun’s ice-shield to steam and enveloped her in an instant. Then came eruption after eruption of green and orange fire as the things she had carried met their fate. I recoiled from the terrible heat and the terrible sight, but to the last she had not even flinched.

  I was forced to run to another pavilion as rivulets of crackling metal flowed toward me. Glimraug chuckled deep in its throat, orange-hot streams still dripping from between its fangs and cooling silver-black beneath its chin, forming a crust of added scales. Mikah howled furiously. They had quenched the flames, and however much pain they must have been bracing against, they did not reveal it by slowing down. Glimraug’s claws came down twice, and Mikah was there to receive the blow neither time. Once more the thief leapt for the dragon’s smoking back, but now they rebounded cannily and clung to the leading edge of the dragon’s left wing. Before the dragon was able to flick them away, Mikah pulled out one of their blades and bore down on it with both arms, driving it into the gossamer substance of the dragon’s wing-membrane. This yielded where the eye had not. Mikah slid down as the stuff parted like silk, then fell to the ground when they ran out of membrane, leaving a flapping rent above them.

  Glimraug instantly folded the hurt wing sharply to its side, as an unwary cat might pull back a paw that has touched hot fireplace-stones. Then, heaving itself forward, it whirled tail and claw alike at the Ajja thief, whip-smack, whip-smack. Nearly too late I realized that the next stroke would demolish my place of safety. I fled and rolled as Glimraug’s tail splintered the pavilion; a hard-flung wave of baubles and jewelry knocked me farther than I’d intended. I slid to a halt one hand-span from the edge of a cooling silver stream, and hundreds of coins rolled and rattled past me.

  I looked up just in time to see Mikah’s fabled luck run its course. Stumbling over scattered treasure, at last showing signs of injury, they tried to be elsewhere for the next swipe of a claw but finally kept the unfortunate rendezvous. Glimraug seized them eagerly and hauled them up before its eyes, kicking and stabbing to the last.

  “Like for like,” rumbled the dragon, and with two digits of its free hand it encircled Mikah’s left arm, then tore it straight out of the socket. Blood gushed and ran down the dragon’s scales; Mikah screamed, but somehow raised their remaining blade for one last futile blow. The dragon cast Mikah into a distant treasure pavilion like a discarded toy. The impact was bone-shattering; the greatest thief I have ever known was slain and buried in an explosion of blood-streaked gold coins.

  “One died in silver, one died in gold,” said Glimraug, turning and stalking toward me.

  “Tarkaster Crale won’t live to be old,” I whispered.

  Up went the blood-stained claw. I heaved myself to my knees, wondering where I intended to dodge to, and then the claw came down.

  Well short of me, clutched in pain.

  Brandgar had recovered himself, and buried the spear Glory-Kindler to the full length of its steel tip in the joint of Glimraug’s right wing. The blood that spilled from the wound steamed, and the stones burst into flames where it fell on them. Brandgar withdrew the smoking spear and darted back as the dragon turned, but it did not attack. It shuddered, and stared at the gash in its hide.

  “The venom of Elusiel, kin of our kin,” said the dragon with something like wonder. “A thousand wounds have bent our scales, but never have we felt the like.”

  Brandgar spun Glory-Kindler over his head, pointed it at the dragon in salute, and then braced himself in a pikeman’s stance. “Never have you faced the like,” he shouted. “Let it be here and now!”

  Ponderously the dragon turned to face him; some of its customary ease was gone, but it was still a towering foe, still possessed of fearsome power. With its wings folded tight and burning blood streaming from one flank, it spread its taloned arms and pounced. Brandgar met it screaming in triumph. Spear pierced dragon-breast, and an instant later the down-sweep of Glimraug’s talons shattered the haft of Glory-Kindler and tore through Brandgar’s kingly coat-of-plate. The man fell moaning, and the dragon toppled beside him, raising a last cloud of ashen dust. Disbelieving, I stumbled up and ran to them.

  “O king,” the dragon murmured, wheezing, and with every breath spilling more fiery ichor on the ground, “in all our ten thousand years, we have had but four friends, and we have only met them this night.”

  “Crale, you look awful.” Brandgar smiled up at me, blood streaming down his face. I saw at once that his wound was mortal; under smashed ribs and torn flesh I could see the soft pulse of a beating heart, and a man once opened like that won’t long keep hold of his spirit. “Don’t mourn. Rejoice, and remember.”

  “You really didn’t want the damned treasure,” I said, kneeling beside him. “You crazy Ajja! ‘Bring ending and eyes,’ meaning, find a way to kill a dragon... and bring a witness when you do it.”

  “You’ve been a great help, my friend.” Brandgar coughed, and winced as it shook his chest. “I was never made to retire quietly from valor and wait for the years to catch me. None of us were.”

  “It comes,” said Glimraug. Shaking, bleeding fire, the dragon hauled itself up, then lifted Brandgar gently, almost reverently in its cupped hands. “We can feel the venom tightening around our heart. The long-awaited wonder comes! True death-friend, let our pyre be shared, let us build it now! To take is not to keep.”

  “To take is not to keep,” answered Brandgar. His voice was weakening. “Yes, I see. It’s perfect. Will you do it while I can see?”

  “With gladness, we loose our holds and wards on the fires bound within the mountain.” Glimraug closed its eyes and muttered something, and the stone shifted below my feet in a manner more ominous than before. I gaped as one of the more distant treasure pavilions seemed to sink into the caldera floor, and then a cloud of smoke and sparks rose from where it had gone down.

  Then another pavilion sank, and then another. With rumbling, cracking, sundering noises, the dragon’s treasure was being spilled into reservoirs of lava. Flames roared from the cracks in the ground as wood, cloth, and other precious things tumbled to their destruction.

  “What by all the gods are you doing?” I cried.

  “This is the greatest of all the dragon-hoards that was ever built,” said Brandgar. “A third of all the treasures our race has dug from the ground, Crale. The plunder of a million lives. But there’s no true glory in the holding. All that must come in the taking... and the letting go.”

  “You’re crazier than the Ajja!” I yelled at Glimraug, entirely forgetting myself. “You engineered this place to be destroyed?”

  “Not so much as a shaving of scented wood shall leave with you, Tarkaster Crale.” Glimraug carefully shifted Brandgar into one palm, then reached out and set a scimitar-sized talon on my shoulder. Spatters of dragon-blood smoked on my leather jacket. “Though you leave with our blessing. Our arts can bear you to a place of safety.”

  “Wonderful, but what the hell is the point?”

  Cold pain lashed across my face, and I gasped. Glimraug had flicked its talon upward, a casual gesture—and all of you can still see the result here on my cheek. The wound bled for days and the scar has never faded.

  “The point is that it has never been done before,” said Glimraug. Another treasure pavilion was swallowed by fire nearby. “And it shall never be done again. All things in this world are made to go into the fire, Tarkaster Crale. All things raise smoke. The smoke of incense is sweet. The smoke of wood is dull haze. But don’t you see? The smoke of gold... is glory.”


  I wiped blood from my face, and might have said more, but Glimraug made a gesture, and I found that I could not move. The world began to grow dim around me, and the last I saw of the caldera was Brandgar weakly raising a hand in farewell, and the dragon holding him with a tenderness and regard that was not imagined.

  “Take the story, Crale!” called Brandgar. “Take it to the world!”

  After a moment of dizzy blackness, I found myself back at the foot of the Dragon’s Anvil, on the gentle path that led up to it from Helfalkyn. The sky was alight with the orange fire of a false dawn; no sooner did I glance back up at the mountain-top than it erupted in an all-out conflagration, orange flames blasting taller than the masts of ships, smoke roiling in a column that blotted out the moons as it rose.

  Glimraug the Sky Tyrant was dead, and with it my friends Brandgar, Gudrun, and Mikah. And I, having lost my purse somewhere in the confusion, was now even poorer than I had been before I successfully reached the largest pile of assorted valuables in the history of the whole damn world.

  I don’t know how I made my way down the path without breaking my neck. My feet seemed to move of their own accord. I could perhaps believe that I was alive, or that I had witnessed the events of the night, but I could not quite manage to believe them both at the same time. A crowd came up from Helfalkyn then, armed and yammering, bearing lanterns and an unwise number of wine bottles, and from their exclamations I gathered that I looked as though I had been rolled in dung and baked in an oven.

  They demanded to know what had happened atop the Anvil; most of Helfalkyn had roused itself when the thunder and lightning rolled, and by the time the flames were visible there wasn’t anyone left in bed. My occasionally dodgy instinct for survival sputtered to life then; I realized that the denizens of a town entirely dedicated to coveting a dragon’s treasure might not handle me kindly if I told them I had gone up with my friends and somehow gotten the treasure blasted out of existence. The solution was obvious—I told them I had seen everything, that I was the sole survivor, and that I would give the full and complete story only after I had received passage back to the Crescent Cities and safely disembarked from my ship.

  Thus I made my first arrangement for compensation as a professional storyteller.

  That, then, is how it all transpired. I heard that various scroungers from Helfalkyn sifted the shattered Anvil for years, but the dragon had its way—every last scrap of anything valuable had been dropped into the molten heart of the mountain, either burned or sunk from mortal reach forever. I retired from adventuring directly, and took up the craft of sitting on my backside at the best place by the fire, telling glib confabulations to strangers for generally reasonable prices.

  But one night a year, I don’t tell a single lie. I tell a true story about kindred spirits who chose a doom I didn’t understand at all when I walked away from it. And one night a year, I turn my bowl over, because the last thing I want to see for my troubles is a little pile of coins reminding me that I am an old, old man, and I sure as hell understand it now.

  THE DISCRETE CHARM OF THE TURING MACHINE

  Greg Egan

  Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) published his first story in 1983, and followed it with thirteen novels, six short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction – mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes – that established him as one of the most important writers working in the field. His work has won the Hugo, John W. Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His latest book is novel, Dichronauts, first in a new science fiction universe.

  1

  “WHAT IS IT, exactly, that you’re threatening to do to me?” The client squinted down at his phone, looking more bemused and weary than belligerent, as if he’d been badgered and harassed by so many people that the only thing bothering him about this call was the time it was taking to reach the part where he was given an ultimatum.

  “This is absolutely not a threat, Mr. Pavlos.” Dan glanced at the out-stream and saw that the software was exaggerating all the cues for openness in his demeanor—less a cheat than a workaround for the fact that his face was being rendered at about the size of a matchbox. “If you don’t take up our offer, we won’t be involved in any way with the recovery of your debt. We think it would be to your benefit if you let us step in and help, but if you don’t want us to intervene, we won’t become your creditors at all. We will only buy your debt if you ask us to.”

  The client was silent for a moment. “So... you’d pay off all the people I owe money to?”

  “Yes. If that’s what you want.”

  “And then I’ll owe it all to you, instead?”

  “You will,” Dan agreed. “But if that happens, we’ll do two things for you. The first is, we will halve the debt. We won’t ever press you for the full amount. The other thing is, we’ll work with you on financial advice and a payment plan that satisfies both of us. If we can’t find an arrangement you’re happy with, then we won’t proceed, and we’ll be out of your life.”

  The client rubbed one eye with his free thumb. “So I only pay half the money, in instalments that I get to choose for myself?” He sounded a tad skeptical.

  “Within reason,” Dan stressed. “If you hold out for a dollar a week, that’s not going to fly.”

  “So where do you make your cut?”

  “We buy the debt cheaply, in bulk,” Dan replied. “I’m not even going to tell you how cheaply, because that’s commercial-in-confidence, but I promise you we can make a profit while still getting only half.”

  “It sounds like a scam,” the client said warily.

  “Take the contract to a community legal center,” Dan suggested. “Take as long as you like checking it out. Our offer has no time limit; the only ticking clock is whether someone nastier and greedier buys the debt before we do.”

  The client shifted his hard-hat and rubbed sweat from his forehead. Someone in the distance called out to him impatiently. “I know I’ve caught you on your meal break,” Dan said. “There’s no rush to decide anything, but can I email you the documents?”

  “All right,” the client conceded.

  “Thanks for giving me your time, Mr. Pavlos. Good luck with everything.”

  “OK.”

  Dan waited for the client to break the connection, even though his next call was already ringing. Give me a chance to let them believe I’ll still remember their name five seconds from now, he pleaded.

  The in-stream window went black, and for a moment Dan saw his own face reflected in the glass—complete with headset, eyes puffy from hay-fever, and the weird pink rash on his forehead that had appeared two days before. The out-stream still resembled him pretty closely—the filter was set to everyman, not movie star—but nobody should have to look at that rash.

  The new client picked up. “Good morning,” Dan began cheerfully. “Is that Ms. Lombardi?”

  “Yes.” Someone had definitely opted for movie star, but Dan kept any hint of knowing amusement from his face; his own filter was as likely to exaggerate that as conceal it.

  “I’d like to talk to you about your financial situation. I think I might have some good news for you.”

  WHEN DAN CAME back from his break, the computer sensed his presence and woke. He’d barely put on his headset when a window opened and a woman he’d never seen before addressed him in a briskly pleasant tone.

  “Good afternoon, Dan.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  “I’m calling you on behalf of Human Resources. I need to ask you to empty your cubicle. Make sure you take everything now, because once you’ve left the floor, you won’t have an opportunity to return.”

  Dan hesitated, trying to decide if the call could be a prank. But there was a padlock icon next to the address, ruth_bayer@HR.thriftocracy.com, which implied an authenticated connection.

  “I’ve been over-target every week this quart
er!” he protested.

  “And your bonuses have reflected that,” Ms. Bayer replied smoothly. “We’re grateful for your service, Dan, but you’ll understand that as circumstances change, we need to fine-tune our assets to maintain an optimal fit.”

  Before he could reply, she delivered a parting smile and terminated the connection. And before he could call back, all the application windows on his screen closed, and the system logged him out.

  Dan sat motionless for ten or fifteen seconds, but then sheer habit snapped him out of it: if the screen was blank, it was time to leave. He pulled his gym bag out from under the desk, unzipped it, and slid the three framed photos in next to his towel. The company could keep his plants, or throw them out; he didn’t care. As he walked down the aisle between the cubicles, he kept his eyes fixed on the carpet; his colleagues were busy, and he didn’t want to embarrass them with the task of finding the right words to mark his departure in the twenty or thirty seconds they could spare before they’d be docked. He felt his face flushing, recalling the time a year or so ago when a man he’d barely known had left in tears. Dan had rolled his eyes and thought: What did you expect? A farewell party? An engraved fountain pen?

  As he waited for the elevator, he contemplated taking a trip to the seventh floor to demand an explanation. It made no sense to let him go when his KPIs weren’t just solid, they’d been trending upward. There must have been a mistake.

  The doors opened and he stepped into the elevator. “Seven,” he grunted.

  “Ground floor,” the elevator replied.

  “Seven,” Dan repeated emphatically.

  The doors closed, and the elevator descended.

  When it reached the lobby, he stepped out, then quickly stepped back in. “Seventh floor,” he requested breezily, hoping that a change of tone and body language might be enough to fool it.