The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Ritter released Shulamith.

  Without saying a word, she sank down to kneel at the old man’s side, gazing up at his ancient face. “Oh, my father!” she cried. Then, turning to Ritter, she said, “May I kiss his hand?”

  “It would do no harm, I suppose,” Ritter said, looking away in embarrassment.

  Shortly thereafter, face ashen, Shulamith rose. Almost conversationally, she said, “Look. There’s the gown my father made for the queen. It hasn’t been delivered. So her death wasn’t our doing, after all.” Turning toward the dressmaker’s dummy she indicated, Ritter saw a fire-orange gown whose tailoring was unquestionably worthy of royalty. He shrugged.

  “A man who can make one gown can make two. One to kill a queen. A second to deceive his daughter.”

  “Monster! My father would not do such a thing. He was a good man.”

  “Gnadige Fraulein, I work for your nation’s secret service, and I know far better than you what things a good man can be forced to do. Has he relatives back in the old country? Perhaps it was your own life that was threatened. There are ways around even the strongest conscience.”

  Slowly, emphatically, Shulamith said, “You disgust me.”

  “None of this is my doing,” he reminded her. “I am simply trying to understand the crime in as unemotional a manner as possible in order to bring its perpetrator to justice. Right now all evidence points toward the stubbornly absent Mr. Pinski. Does he live on the premises?”

  “Yes, on the third floor. In the servants’ quarters.” Answering his unspoken questions, Shulamith added, “We have a cook and a maid. This is their day off.”

  “For a crime this meticulously planned, I would expect nothing else.” Ritter briefly entered the wolf’s mind. Go to the front door, he commanded. Stand guard. He did not want to waste time by returning to the front to lock the door. But neither did he want strangers wandering in while he was investigating.

  The wolf trotted obediently away.

  “Let us see his room,” Ritter said. “And, if you will, please tell me something about Pinski’s personality.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” Shulamith said as they climbed the stairs. “Pinski showed up last year after our old clerk abruptly gave notice. Father never liked him much, though he did his job well enough. A very superficial man. Always making jokes, gossiping, flirting with the ladies. Not with me, of course, I was his employer’s daughter. At any rate, I don’t think he liked women in that way. Certainly, he had no girlfriends. He liked to do magic tricks.”

  Ritter paused with one foot on the stair ahead of him. “What kind of magic tricks?”

  “Card tricks, mostly. Pulling coins out of ears. Clever things with bits of string.”

  “Could he, by any chance, conjure up flames?”

  “I never saw him do anything like that.”

  Ritter started walking again. “A good pyromancer could have touched off the gown from a distance. You’re sure he never did anything remarkable with fire?”

  “I’d have remembered it.” They came to the top landing. “That’s his room over there.” Shulamith turned to Ritter and in a startled voice said, “There’s smoke coming from your jacket.”

  Simultaneously Ritter felt a prickling sensation, almost an itch coming from his chest. He snatched out the envelope containing a scrap of the fire gown, just in time to see it burst into flames.

  It happened in a flash, leaving nothing behind but ashes and astonishment.

  “Body heat,” Ritter said. “Of course. The—” he searched for the word “—conflagration was triggered by body heat. There was no need for your Pinski to be a fire-wizard at all.” He tried the door, found it locked, and took out his cigar case. Sliding a decorative rectangle of ivory, kept for this very purpose, out of its frame, he proceeded to slip the lock.

  Pinski’s room was small and Spartan. There was a thin-mattressed bed with a sheet and blanket and, beneath it, an enameled tin thunder-mug. There were also a chest of drawers with a washbasin resting atop it, a plain pine wardrobe, and, pushed flat against the wall opposite the bed and looking completely out of place, a horse trough filled with water.

  Ritter bent over the trough. In the water were the remnants of two bolts of reddish-orange cloth. Without bothering to doff his jacket or roll up his sleeves, he plunged his arms into the trough and pulled out both bolts. Turning, he dropped them onto Pinski’s bed. They thudded down on the blanket without leaving a stain, for they had dried instantly on making contact with the air.

  “Fire cloth,” Ritter announced. “Woven from thread made of the hair of fire-salamanders.”

  Shulamith touched it wonderingly. “I’ve never seen such a material.” Her fingers pinched the baize, stroked the weave. “This is extremely well-made. It must have cost a fortune.”

  “We shall be lucky if it has not cost us a kingdom.” Ritter threw open the wardrobe and began rummaging through the clothes, searching the pockets, looking for documents hidden in the linings. To his side, he heard Shulamith opening and closing drawers.

  Suddenly she gasped.

  “A box!” she cried. “With a note attached, saying ‘For Your Hospitality.’”

  Ritter whirled about. “Don’t—”

  Too late. Shulamith had already lifted the lid.

  In the instant she did so, hundreds of fleas cascaded out into the air. They leaped and hopped madly about the room, biting Ritter numerous times on his hands and face. Judging from the way she slapped at herself, they were biting Shulamith as well.

  Ritter had met many genuinely brilliant men in his time and knew that he was not their intellectual equal. But he possessed great firmness of mind and was capable of reasoning things through and then acting upon his conclusions in a fraction of the time it would take his betters.

  There was only one reason why a saboteur would leave a chest of fleas behind him. That was to create mischief. What kind of mischief? The only serious sort their kind carried—plague. Pinski had arranged to be well on his way out of London before those fleas were released. Therefore, Ritter was already as good as doomed to die a lingering and painful death from the disease. As were a great percentage of the population of the city, once these fleas escaped the dressmakers’ house.

  Unless something were done to destroy them first.

  “Quickly!” Ritter seized the topmost bolt of fire cloth and flung it, unreeling, across the room. “Help me spread out the cloth!” As Shulamith threw the second bolt into the air, he took one end of his cloth between his hands and rubbed it as hard and fast as he could. Generating heat.

  He could not help reflecting that it was a pity Shulamith was in the room with him. It would have been far nobler to die alone.

  Then the cloth exploded beneath his hands, knocking him backwards into the water trough and unconsciousness.

  “So!” Sir Toby said. “Awake at last. You were doubly lucky. First that the blast knocked you back into the water trough, and then that your wolf came and dragged you out of it before you drowned.”

  “Not…luck. Freki was trained to do that. To rescue me from…from fires and such.” Ritter’s entire body hurt horribly. “Am I dying?”

  With an explosive guffaw, Sir Toby said, “You should be, sir! You should be! Half-drowned, half-burnt, and filled to the tits with bubonic plague. There are not ten wizards in the world who could have regrown those hands of yours. You are damned lucky that I had access to two of them.”

  “Thank you,” Ritter rasped. “I think.” Then, “Did Miss Rosenberg…”

  Sir Toby lost all his jollity in an instant. Somberly, he said, “No. But our forensic magicians believe she died more or less instantly, if that’s of any consolation.”

  A wash of self-revulsion overcame Ritter. He had known that Shulamith was dead. Of course she was dead. It was weakness on his part to have asked. Disciplining himself to rise above his own petty concerns, he said, “And the king?”

  “The grieving widower,” Sir Toby replie
d, “dressed in austere black, addressed a joint meeting of both houses of Parliament. He dismissed the loss of his wife in a sentence. He spoke of the darkness rising in the East. He pledged himself to the cause of civilization and promised to pay any price, bear any burden, suffer any loss in order to preserve the freedoms we hold so dear.

  It was the most god-awful melodramatic claptrap imaginable. But it worked. Our nation is now officially at war with the Mongolian Wizard’s empire of evil.”

  “You wrote the speech yourself.” Ritter knew this for a fact.

  “Yes, I did. Now sleep. The alchemist’s report tells me that your system has been cleansed of disease, and your doctors say you have every chance of recovery. Sleep. Tomorrow will be a better day.”

  Ritter tried to respond to this cascade of information seriously, as a man of consequence should. But he could feel the bed falling underneath him as he himself was falling into sleep and oblivion and his adult persona did not seem to be accessible. All that he found within himself was the long-ago boy who had once thought that it would be grand fun to be a soldier. “This has not been a very satisfactory adventure,” he managed at last to say.

  “No, it has not. But it could have turned out worse.”

  Ritter emerged from rehab leaning heavily on a cane which, he had been assured, was only temporary. It was astonishing what the human body could accomplish when it had access to the very best medical magic in Europe.

  The first thing he did was to drop by Sir Toby’s offices in the Palace of Whitehall. There he learned that the elusive Gregori Pinski had been apprehended in Dover while trying to book passage out of the country. “Our best interrogators are questioning him now,” Sir Toby said.

  “If I were to plant a saboteur in my enemy’s capital, I should take great care that he know as little information useful to my enemy as possible.”

  “That is indeed my policy as well,” Sir Toby said. “But it can do no harm to try. Now let me look at you! Thin as a rail, pale as an Eskimo, and weak as my grandfather a month after he died. You are immensely improved.”

  “I am ready to return to work.”

  “Then work you we shall! There is much to be done. But not today. Today you must have a stroll in the park, eat a good dinner, and go to sleep early in your own comfortable bed. Come by tomorrow, and I will have something for you to do.”

  The spymaster went to his desk.

  “Incidentally,” Sir Toby said, “despite the devastation you wreaked on its top floor, much of the Rosenberg house survived. This was among the evidence we seized. I doubt anybody would object to your keeping it.” He handed Ritter a small framed crayon portrait of Shulamith Rosenberg.

  “A portrait of the Jewess? Why would I want such a thing?” Ritter said angrily.

  “I just thought you might.”

  Putting an arm over his shoulder, Sir Toby led Ritter to the door.

  Yet when he had dropped Freki off at the kennel and gone back home to his flat, Ritter found himself almost mechanically hammering a nail into the wall and hanging the portrait upon it. Strange how the picture gathered the emptiness of the wall around itself and made all of the room look as spare and devoid of character as Pinski’s had. Why had he never hung any pictures before this?

  Ritter sat down in a chair and rested his cane across his knees. He stared at Shulamith’s pale face and dark hair for a long time in silence, and then he burst into tears.

  Copyright (C) 2012 by Michael Swanwick

  Art copyright (C) 2012 by Gregory Manchess

  Books by Michael Swanwick

  The Dragons of Babel

  Bones of the Earth

  Jack Faust

  The Iron Dragon’s Daughter

  Griffin’s Egg

  Stations of the Tide

  Vacuum Flowers

  In the Drift

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Dog Said Bow-Wow

  The Periodic Table of Science Fiction

  Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures

  A Geography of Unknown Lands

  Gravity’s Angels

  Moon Dogs

  Puck Aleshire’s Abededary

  Tales of Old Earth

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  On a cold and misty morning during the Phony War, that strange period when Britain was officially at war with the Mongolian Wizard’s empire but no serious military engagements had yet taken place, Sir Tobias Willoughby-Quirke and his attaché, Kapitänleutnant Franz-Karl Ritter, stood on a dock on the Thames, watching a boatload of watermen hauling a wood-and-metal chest from the water’s depths. The diver who had attached a line to the chest huddled in the rear of the boat under several blankets.

  “How was it found?” Ritter asked. His wolf, Freki, sat, quiet and alert, at his feet.

  “By sheerest chance,” Sir Toby said. “The men who dropped it in the river were overseen by some mudlarks.”

  “Mudlarks!” Ritter exclaimed in astonishment. “Those ragged children who scrounge about in the tidal filth, looking for scrap metal?”

  “Indeed. It has been one of my little projects to befriend such creatures. A few loaves of bread a month will buy many sharp eyes among the poor. They followed the two men and, although they lost one in the crowds, trailed the other to his lodgings. Knowing I will pay for such information, they then came to me. I sent an agent to interrogate the fellow who, rather than face questioning, blew his own brains out. Which roused my suspicions considerably.”

  At last, the trunk was wrestled to solid ground. The workers looked relieved to be done with it. “Maybe you want to call in the bomb squad, sir,” one of them said to Sir Toby. “Might well be anything in it.”

  “I do not think that is necessary,” Ritter said. Pulling his pistol, which he always kept primed and loaded, from its holster in one smooth motion, he touched the muzzle to the lock and pulled the trigger.

  With a loud explosion, bits of metal went flying.

  Ritter threw back the top of the chest. Inside were pale spheroids, perhaps a foot across, coated with transparent slime. “Kraken’s eggs,” he said. “Had they been left undiscovered, in six months’ time the river would be infested with the monsters, and London would be worthless as a harbor.”

  Turning to the watermen, who were looking understandably alarmed, Sir Toby boomed, “Splendid work, all of you! You have my permission to tell your wives and girlfriends that you are the saviors of your city and entitled to such rewards as women traditionally endow upon heroes.” This caused several craggy faces to crack into smiles. One of the men laughed out loud. Sir Toby dug out his wallet and handed several bills to their captain. “You’re also entitled to a drink or two, at my expense.”

  This last earned Sir Toby a heartfelt cheer. Smiling jovially, he watched the men pile back into their boat, push off, and wave as they headed downriver toward the taverns. Then he turned to his attaché and said, “What chunderheaded notion was that? You almost frightened those poor men out of their wits. Half of them were convinced the chest contained explosives.”

  “When on duty, a portion of my thought is always inside Freki’s mind. He could smell the chest’s contents quite distinctly. There was no possibility of an explosion.”

  “Ritter,” Sir Toby said, “there are times when I think that, save for your ignorance of human behavior and utter lack of humor, you have the makings of a first-rate aide.” />
  “I have an excellent sense of humor,” Ritter said indignantly.

  “Have you really? I must remember to have you tell a joke someday in order to test this hypothesis. For now, I want you to stand guard over the chest while I arrange for a wagon to transport it to the armory. Then report to my office. Things are quiet today, but the saboteurs will strike again and in a completely different manner.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s what I would have them do, were they mine.”

  When the kraken’s eggs had been disposed of, Ritter decided to return to work the long way around. He stopped in a tobacconist’s and, after a leisurely inspection of the wares, bought a package of cheroots. Then he sauntered onward to a pie shop to buy some pork pasties for lunch and dropped by a butcher’s for meat scraps, which Freki received with great enthusiasm. It was only when he reached his ultimate destination that he discovered he had chosen the wrong day for so leisurely a stroll.

  The War Office had lent Sir Toby temporary facilities, so Ritter was not surprised to find the anteroom thronged with military men in a variety of uniforms. But there were also civilians, weeping women and choleric men loudly demanding a variety of actions, the sense of which Ritter could not untangle from the snarl of voices. On seeing him, Sir Toby’s long-suffering secretary Willice—lean, clad in black, and almost genderless—looked relieved and, without having to be asked, said, “The Mongolian Wizard is advancing on Berlin with giants and flights of wyverns. Meanwhile…oh, go in, just go in! Sir Toby will explain all,” and waved him into the office, slamming the door after him.

  Sir Toby looked up from his famously disorganized desk. “Ritter! Where in the name of Cernunnos have you been? Don’t answer that. Our saboteurs have been busy. Five children—all girls—were abducted from public spaces this morning, one after another. In each case, their guardians were with them, yet inexplicably allowed the children to be dragged into a carriage without taking action.” He took a map of London from a drawer and drew five crosses on it. “These are the locations of the crimes. Do you see the pattern?”