Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  “This makes three.”

  “Too many?”

  “Three too many.”

  “That’s your problem, boy-child. Love the dead so much you stopped living. Man so afraid of death he doesn’t live is no man at all.”

  “I don’t need people.”

  “Yeah? How’d you do without a body manager, before me?”

  He smelled a hot, barren field. Bloody trampled grain. He felt the terrible thirst of a man dying alone in a field without another body in sight, without a stash of his own. He had believed so strongly in his own immortality during the early days of the war that when he woke inside the corpse of a man in a ravine who would not stop bleeding no matter how much he willed it, it was the first time he ever truly contemplated death. He had prayed to three dozen gods while crawling out of the ravine, and when he saw nothing before him but more fields, and flies, and heat, he’d faced his own mortality and discovered he didn’t like it at all. He was going to die alone. Alone and unloved, forgotten. A man whose real face had been ground to dust so long ago all he remembered was the cut of his women’s trousers.

  “I managed,” he said stiffly. His legs were numb.

  Tera was growing limp in his arms. “When I die in here, don’t jump into my body. Leave me dead. I want to go on in peace.”

  “There’s only darkness after—”

  “Don’t spray that elephant shit at me,” she said. “I know better, remember? I can … speak … to the dead now. You … leave me dead.”

  “You’re not going to die.” His legs and arms were already tired. He hoped for a second wind. It didn’t come. He needed a new body for that.

  Tera huffed more water. Eventually Tera would die. Probably in a few minutes. Another body manager dead. And he’d have nowhere to leap but her body. He gazed up at the lip of the cistern. But then what? Hope he could get out of here in Tera’s body when he couldn’t in his own, fitter one?

  Tera’s head dipped under the water. He yanked her up.

  “Not yet,” he said. He hated drowning. Hated it.

  But there was nowhere to go.

  No other body …

  “Shit,” he said. He pulled Tera close. “I’m going now, Tera. I’m coming back. A quarter hour. You can make it a quarter hour.”

  “Nowhere … to … no … bodies. Oh.” He saw the realization on her face. “Shit.”

  “Quarter hour,” he said, and released her. He didn’t wait to see if she went under immediately. He dove deep and shed his tunic, his trousers. He swam deep, deeper still. He hated drowning.

  He pushed down and down. The pressure began to weigh on him. He dove until his air ran out, until his lungs burned. He dove until his body rebelled, until it needed air so desperately he couldn’t restrain his body’s impulse to breathe. Then he took a breath. A long, deep breath of water: pure and sweet and deadly. He breathed water. Burning.

  His body thrashed, seeking the surface. Scrambling for the sky.

  Too late.

  Then calm. He ceased swimming. Blackness filled his vision.

  So peaceful, though, in the end. Euphoric.

  * * *

  Nev screamed. He sat bolt upright and vomited blood. Blackness filled his vision, and for one horrifying moment he feared he was back in the water. But no. The smell told him he was in the sewers. He patted at his new body, the plump priest they’d thrown down the latrine: the bald pate, the round features, the body he had touched and so could jump right back into. He gasped and vomited again; bile this time. He realized he was too fat to get up through the latrine, but wearing what he did made it possible to get in the front door.

  He scrambled forward on sluggish limbs, trying to work new blood into stiff fingers. His second wind came as he slogged back up onto the street. He found a street fountain and drank deeply to replace the vital liquid he’d lost. Then he was running, running, back to the God’s eye temple.

  They let him in with minimal fuss, which disappointed him, because he wanted to murder them all now: fill them full of purple plumed arrows, yelling about fire and elephants and unnecessary death, but he could not stop, could not waver, because Tera was down there, Tera was drowning, Tera was not like him, and Tera would not wake up.

  He got all the way across the courtyard before someone finally challenged him, a young man about fourteen, who curled his nose and said some godly-sounding greeting to him. Nev must not have replied correctly, because the snotty kid yelled after him, “Hey now! Who are you?”

  Nev ran. His body was humming now, rushing with life, vitality. A red haze filled his vision, and when the next armed man stepped in front of him, he dispatched him neatly with a palm strike to the face. He took up the man’s spear and long sword and forged ahead, following his memory of their descent to the cistern.

  As he swung around the first flight he rushed headlong into two armed men escorting Corez up, still wearing Tera’s sister’s skin. Surprise was on his side, this time.

  Nev ran the first man through the gut, and hit the second with the end of his spear.

  “God’s eye, what—” Corez said, and stopped. She had retreated back down the stairs, stumbled, and her wig was aslant now.

  “You take the scalps of your people, too?” Nev said. He hefted the spear.

  “Now you think about this,” she said. “You don’t know who I am. I can give you anything you like, you know. More bodies than you know what to do with. A workshop fit for the king of the body mercenaries. A thousand body managers better than any you’ve worked with. You’ve dabbled in a world you don’t understand.”

  “I understand well enough,” he said.

  “Then, the body. I can give you this body. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? I have others.”

  “I don’t care much for people,” Nev said. “That was your mistake. You thought I’d care about the bodies, or Tera, or her sister, or any of the rest. I don’t. I’m doing this for my fucking elephant.”

  He thrust the spear into her chest. She gagged. Coughed blood.

  He did not kill her, but left her to bleed out, knowing that she could not jump into another form until she was on the edge of death.

  Nev ran the rest of the way down into the basements. They had to have a way to fish the bodies out. He found a giant iron pipe leading away from the cistern, and a sluice. He opened up the big drain and watched the water pour out into an aqueduct below.

  He scrambled down and down a long flight of steps next to the cistern and found a little sally port. How long until it drained? Fuck it. He opened the sally port door. A wave of water engulfed him.

  He smacked hard against the opposite wall. A body washed out with the wave of water, and he realized it was his own, his beloved. He scrambled forward, only to see Tera’s body tumble after it, propelled by the force of the water. For one horrible moment he was torn. He wanted to save his old body. Wanted to save it desperately.

  But Tera only had one body.

  He ran over to her and dragged her way from the cistern. She was limp.

  Nev pounded on her back. “Tera!” he said. “Tera!” As if she would awaken at the sound of her name. He shook her, slapped her. She remained inert. But if she was dead, and yes, of course she was dead, she was not long dead. There was, he felt, something left. Something lingering. Tera would say it lingered in her bones.

  He searched his long memory for some other way to rouse her. He turned her onto her side and pounded on her back again. Water dribbled from her mouth. He thought he felt her heave. Nev let her drop. He brought both his hands together, and thumped her chest. Once. Then again.

  Tera choked. Her eyelids fluttered. She heaved. He rolled her over again, and pulled her into his arms.

  Her eyes rolled up at him. He pressed his thumb and pinky together, pushed the other three fingers in parallel; the signal he used to tell it was him inhabiting a new body.

  “Why you come for me?” Tera said.

  He held her sodden, lumpy form in his own plump arms an
d thought for a long moment he might weep. Not over her or Falid or the rest, but over his life, a whole series of lives lost, and nothing to show for it but this: the ability to keep breathing when others perished. So many dead, one after the other. So many he let die, for no purpose but death.

  “It was necessary,” he said.

  * * *

  They crawled out of the basement and retrieved Tera’s sister from the stairwell. It hurt Nev’s heart, because he knew they could only carry one of them. He had to leave his old form. The temple was stirring now. Shouting. They dragged her sister’s body back the way they had come, through the latrines. Tera went first, insisting that she grab the corpse as it came down. Nev didn’t argue. In a few more minutes the temple’s guards would spill over them.

  When he slipped down after her and dropped to the ground, he saw Tera standing over what was left of her sister, muttering to herself. She started bawling.

  “What?” he said.

  “The dead talk to me. I can hear them all now, Nev.”

  A chill crawled up his spine. He wanted to say she was wrong, it was impossible, but he remembered holding her in his arms, and knowing she could be brought back. Knowing it wasn’t quite the end, yet. Knowing hope. “What did she say?”

  “It was for me and her. Forty years of bullshit. You wouldn’t understand.”

  He had to admit she was probably right.

  They burned her sister, Mora, in a midden heap that night, while Tera cried and drank and Nev stared at the smoke flowing up and up and up, drawing her soul to heaven, to God’s eye, like a body merc’s soul to a three days’ dead corpse.

  * * *

  Nev sat with Tera in a small tea shop across the way from the pawn office. The bits and bobs they’d collected going through people’s trash weren’t enough for a workshop, not even a couple bodies, but they had squatted in rundown places before. They could eat for a while longer. Tera carried a small box under her arm throughout the haggle with the pawn office. Now she pushed the box across the table to him.

  Nev opened the box. A turtle as big as his fist sat inside, its little head peeking out from within the orange shell.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It’s a fucking turtle.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Then why’d you ask?” she said. “I can’t afford a fucking elephant, but living people need to care about things. Keeps you human. Keeps you alive. And that’s my job, you know. Keeping you alive. Not just living.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Just take the fucking turtle.”

  He took the fucking turtle.

  That night, while Tera slept in the ruined warehouse along the stinking pier, Nev rifled through the midden heaps for scraps and fed the turtle a moldered bit of apple. He pulled the turtle’s box into his lap; the broad lap of a plump, balding, middle-aged man. Nondescript. Unimportant. Hardly worth a second look.

  To him, though, the body was beautiful, because it was dead. The dead didn’t kill your elephant or burn down your workshop. But the dead didn’t give you turtles, either. Or haul your corpse around in case you needed it later. And unlike the guild said, some things, he knew now, were not as dead as they seemed. Not while those who loved them still breathed.

  Tera farted in her sleep and turned over heavily, muttering.

  Nev hugged the box to his chest.

  About the Author

  Kameron Hurley is the author of the novels God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture a science-fantasy noir series which earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschies Award for Best Debut Novel. She has won the Hugo Award (twice), and been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her most recent novel is the epic fantasy The Mirror Empire. The sequel, Empire Ascendant, will be out in October 2015. She writes regularly for Locus Magazine. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Copyright © 2015 by Kameron Hurley

  Art copyright © 2015 by Jon Foster

  I wander the hallways of the museum. I must know the truth. Past the snarling gargoyles and mummified vampires, past the lizards adrift in jars of formaldehyde, the fossils of ancient nautili, silver insects entombed in amber. To the attics, where seas of parchment seem to whirl in my madness, cracked dusty words, trunks smelling of cedar and oak. Words in languages only the dead understand, pages only to be read by the light of certain fireflies, known only to explorers of forgotten continents, tangled, shadowy scripts. The words have begun to reveal themselves to me; my ambition knows no bounds. In time I will know your history. Your secrets spread out like specimens upon the dissection table.

  It is winter in the city. Snow dusts the rooftops with a glistening silver, disguises the identity of certain streets, buries children on their way home. The naked statues of pale maidens are clothed now in dresses of frosty white. In the attic it is cold. Like the rats, I build a nest of papers, ancient texts, parchment and papyri, scrolls and palimpsests. I crumple them and stuff them beneath my coat, but still I shiver. I remember how warm your body was, as if for a heart, you had a tiny sun. We were planets, the two of us, orbiting in darkness.

  * * *

  I will always remember the museum as you first showed it to me. Cheap wine and cheap dreams, a confetti of an evening. Demented teenagers, with eyes like savants. I chased you through winding streets, cobbles and rooftops, taverns filled with smoke. We joined in the drunken revelries of strangers. You, twirling your hips, letting your sparkling dress fly in their faces. I tried to hold on to you, wobbling desperately. We wandered in and out of fogs and streetlamps, clouds of smoke, down rainspouts. Sliding. We jimmied a window in the skeleton wing. You said, “This is where I like to go sometimes.” I was in awe of your carelessness, of your perplexing smile.

  The museum was at its peak then; the glass cases were not cracked or smeared with greasy hands as they are now; dust had not yet settled on the vertebrae of the Allosaurus, nor had the jaw of the Planicoxa been stolen. You took me by the hand and led me through those secret halls; in the half-light the monsters seemed to dance. We gaped at the massive jaws of the Nothosaurus and watched as the electric crocodiles swam in their lustrous tank. At the diorama of gilded ammonites, you stopped and pulled me close. “There is something I want to show you.” We passed through rooms of improbable furniture, heavy and stained the color of dark ales, through chambers of ornamented silver, rooms of ancient timepieces and scrolls of painted papyrus which tell the history of the world.

  In a tiny room—if one did not know it was there, they would hardly notice it; perhaps they would think it a coat closet or a boiler room—on a pedestal is a single artifact, housed beneath a bell of glass. It sparkles faintly in the glow of gaslight. A faded label reads: “Music Box: Perthominthian Dynasty, circa 600.” It is made of azurite, a lustrous blue which fades to green where plumes of malachite erupt from its surface like tentacles of algae. It is carved with mermaids, ocean waves which become jaguars, and forests of bipedal fungi which seem frozen in the midst of a dance.

  I thought you were going to kiss me; what an arrogant fool I was. Instead you said, “Would you like to hear a story?” What could I say? Everything about the night intrigued me. Everything was a puzzle, a maze. You were the only one who knew the way. You were the only one I could follow.

  “We know little of the Perthominthians, not even their real name. Some say it is Als Seti; others that they called themselves Sthii-Eeth-Sethe, which means ‘the people of broken stones.’ But these are improbable conjectures. Another scholar claims that their name cannot be written in our orthography, or that of any other system which is known to us. He says that the sound of their name is like the sound the wind makes as it rustles the dried blooms of once-sweet flowers. We know only that their eyes were the color of the moon. That their temples were built so that when it rained they became living sculptures, kinetic gardens of water, which dripped and sang with purposeful rhythms, mel
odies of watery architecture.

  “Their temples were carved with feathered dolphins, which seemed to swim and frolic in the waves. Creatures—half-jaguar, half-men—did battle with colossal gods. Orchids wound around the temples’ pillars.

  “We know that their highest and most honored science was that of dreaming, and that they invented many elixirs and mechanical instruments to aid in their pursuit of these arts. We know that their written language consisted of stones encased in pouches of velvet, their shape, color, and texture, we surmise, corresponding to elements of phonology and grammar. Some travelers claim that the Perthominthians made love on the backs of tigers, or in nests during thunderstorms, but this is unlikely.

  “For lovers it was traditional to exchange music boxes carved by hand.

  “We know nothing else about them, except how they were destroyed. Oh, how many accounts have been written of the campaigns of Prince Artemia, of how his army descended in their chariots of iron. How he burned their cities and ground their statues to dust. How his alchemists brewed poisons, which he pumped into the air through giant bellows. How his enemies went mad. How their insides began to boil. Their fields were sown with salt. Their temples razed. Their libraries ransacked. The stones that made up their language scattered, traded away, until—lonely, lacking order or pattern—they lost their meaning as well, and became merely stones. The feathered dolphins which swam in their rivers were caught one by one, or else died when the rivers dried up. The jaguar men were hunted or fled to the hills; even their gods were murdered. It is said that in that region it no longer rains.

  “All that is left is this music box, but it has no key. It cannot be wound. We shall never hear it play. Sometimes I imagine I have found the key, that it creaks as I wind it, dislodging flakes of rust. What melodies of longing might I hear, what songs of joy?”

  You baffled me then as you do now. “I will find you the key,” I said; it was all I had to say. You laughed, an elegant, birdlike guffaw. I tried to laugh, but I vomited instead—thick and yellow. The rest of that night mixes with other nights, mad capers, foolish acts and rooftop trysts, broken locks and drunken regret. Other nights are layered on top of these. Nights in which I wandered alone, through the empty hallways of the museum, listening for ghosts.