The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List (The Long List Anthology Series Book 1)

by Annie Bellet

  “Splat!” said Brandwin.

  “Not my idea of a playground,” said Sophara, finishing her drink and slamming the empty glass down emphatically.

  An instant later there was a horrendous shattering crash. A half-ton of dark winged something, its matted fur rain-wet and reeking, plunged through the skylight directly overhead and obliterated their table. A confused blur of motion and noise attended the crash, and Amarelle found herself on the floor with a dull ache between her breasts.

  Some dutiful, stubborn fraction of her awareness kicked its way to the surface of the alcoholic ocean in her mind, and there clutched at straws until it had pieced together the true sequence of events. Shraplin, of course— the nimble automaton had shoved her aside before diving across the table to get Sophara and Brandwin clear.

  “Hey,” said Amarelle, sitting up, “you’re not drunk at all!”

  “That was part of my cheating, boss.” The automaton had been very nearly fast enough, very nearly. Sophara and Brandwin were safe, but his left leg was pinned under the fallen creature and the table.

  “Oh, you best of all possible automatons! Your poor foot!” Brandwin crawled over to him and kissed the top of his brass head.

  “I’ve got three spares at home,” said Shraplin.

  “That tears it,” muttered Amarelle, wobbling and weaving back to her feet. “Nobody drops a gods-damned gargoyle on my friends!”

  “I think it’s a byakhee,” said Brandwin, poking at the beast. It had membranous wings and a spear protruding from what might have been its neck. It smelled like old cheese washed in gangrene and graveyard dew.

  “I think it’s a vorpilax, love,” said Sophara. She drunkenly assisted her wife in pulling Shraplin out from under the thing. “Consider the bilateral symmetry.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” said Amarelle, fumbling into her long black coat. “Nobody drops one on my card game or my crew. I’m going to find out where this Ivovandas lives and give her a piece of my mind.”

  “Haste makes corpses, boss,” said Shraplin, shaking coils and widgets from the wreckage of his foot. “I was just having fun with you earlier.”

  “Stupid damn commerce-murdering wizards!” Goldclaw Grask arrived at last, with a gaggle of bartenders and waiters in train. “Sophara! Are you hurt? What about the rest of you? Shraplin! That looks expensive. Tell me it’s not expensive!”

  “I can soon be restored to prime functionality,” said Shraplin. “But what if I suggested that tonight is an excellent night for you to tear up our bill?”

  “I, uh, well, if that wouldn’t get you in trouble,” said the goblin, directing waiters with mops toward the growing puddle of pastel-colored rainwater and gray ichor under the beast.

  “If you give it to us freely,” said Sophara, “it’s not theft, and none of us break our terms of sanctuary. And Shraplin is right, Amarelle. You can’t just go berate a member of the Parliament of Strife! Even if you could safely cross the High Barrens in the middle of this mess—”

  “Of course I can.” Amarelle stood up nearly straight and, after a few false starts, approximately squared her shoulders. “I’m not some marshmallow-muscled tourist, I’m the Duchess Unseen! I stole the sound of the sunrise and the tears of a shark. I borrowed a book from the library of Hazar and didn’t return it. I crossed the Labyrinth of the Death Spiders in Moraska TWICE—”

  “I know,” said Sophara. “I was there.”

  “…and then I went back and stole all the Death Spiders!”

  “That was ten years and an awful lot of strong drinks ago,” said Sophara. “Come on, darling, I mixed most of the drinks myself. Don’t scare us like this, Amarelle. You’re drunk and retired. Go home.”

  “This smelly thing could have killed all of us,” said Amarelle.

  “Well, thanks to a little luck and a lot of Shraplin, it didn’t. Come on, Amarelle. Promise us you won’t do anything stupid tonight. Will you promise us?”

  5. Removing All Doubt

  The High Barrens, east of Tanglewing Street, were empty of inhabitants and full of nasty surprises from the battle in progress. Amarelle kept out of the open, moving from shadowed arch to garden wall to darkened doorway, stumbling frequently. The world had a fragile liquid quality, running at the edges and spinning on previously unrevealed axes. She was not drunk enough to forget that she had to take extra care and still far too drunk to realize that she ought to be fleeing the way she’d come.

  The High Barrens had once been a neighborhood of mansions and topiary wonders and public fountains, but the coming of the wizard Ivovandas has sent the former inhabitants packing. The arguments of the Parliament of Strife had blasted holes in the cobblestones, cracked and dried the fountains, and sundered the mansions like unloved toy houses. The purple fire from before was still smoldering in a tall ruined shell of wood and brick. Amarelle sidestepped the street-rivers of melted lead that had once been the building’s roof.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the manse of Ivovandas, the only lit and tended structure in the neighborhood, guarded by smooth walls, glowing ideograms, and rustling red-green hedges with the skeletons of many birds and small animals scattered in their undergrowth. A path of interlocked alabaster stones, gleaming with internal light, led forty curving yards to a golden front door.

  Convenient. That guaranteed a security gauntlet.

  The screams of terrible flying things high above made concentration even more difficult, but Amarelle applied three decades of experience to the path and was not disappointed. Four trapped stones she avoided by intuition, two by dumb drunken luck. The gravity-orientation reversal was a trick she’d seen before; she cartwheeled (sloppily) over the dangerous patch and the magic pushed her headfirst back to the ground rather than helplessly into the sky. She never even felt the silvery call of the tasteful hypnotic toad sculptures on the lawn, as she was too inebriated to meet their eyes and trigger the effect.

  When she reached the front door, the golden surface rippled like a molten pool and a sculpted arm emerged clutching a knocker ring. Amarelle flicked a collapsible baton out of her coat and used it to tap the ring against the door while she stood aside. There was a brief pause after the darts had hissed through empty air, and then a voice boomed:

  “WHO COMES UNBIDDEN TO THE DOOR OF THE SUPREME SPELLWRIGHT IVOVANDAS OF THE HONORABLE PARLIAMENT OF THERADANE? SPEAK, WORM!”

  “I don’t take shit from doors,” said Amarelle. “I’m flattering your mistress by knocking. Tell her a citizen of Theradane is here to give her a frank and unexpurgated opinion on how terrible her aim is.”

  “YOUR ATTITUDE IS UNDERSTANDABLE AND NONETHELESS THOROUGHLY OFFENSIVE. ARCS OF ELECTRODYNAMIC FORCE WILL NOW BE APPLIED TO THE LOBES OF YOUR BRAIN UNTIL THEY ARE SCALDED PULP. TO RECEIVE THIS PRONOUNCEMENT IN THE FORM OF UNIVERSAL PICTOGRAMS, SCREAM ONCE. TO REQUEST MORE RAPID SENSORY OBLIVION, SCREAM TWICE AND WAIT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS.”

  “The name is Amarelle Parathis, also known as the Duchess Unseen. Your mistress’ stupid feuds are turning a fine old town into a shitsack misery farm and ruining my card games. Are you going to open up, or do I find a window?”

  “AMARELLE PARATHIS,” said the door. A moment passed. “YOUR NAME IS NOT UNKNOWN. YOU PURCHASED SANCTUARY FROM THE PARLIAMENT OF THERADANE TWO YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS AGO.”

  “Attadoor,” said Amarelle.

  “THE MISTRESS WILL RECEIVE YOU.”

  The sculpted hand holding the knocker withdrew into the liquid surface of the door. A dozen others burst forth, grabbing Amarelle by the throat, arms, legs, and hair. They pulled her off her feet and into the rippling golden surface, which solidified an instant later and retained no trace of her passage.

  6. The Cabinet of Golden Hands

  Amarelle awoke, thoroughly comfortable but stripped of all her weapons and wearing someone else’s silk nightgown.

  She was in a doorless chamber, in a feather bed floating gently on a pool of liquid gold that covered the entire floor, or perhaps was the
entire floor. Ruby shafts of illumination fell from etched glass skylights, and when Amarelle threw back her covers they dissolved into wisps of aromatic steam.

  Something bubbled and churned beneath the golden pool. A small hemisphere rose from the surface, continued rising, became a tall, narrow, humanoid shape. The liquid drained away smoothly, revealing a dove-pale albino woman with flawless auric eyes and hair composed of a thousand golden butterflies, all fluttering elegantly at random.

  “Good afternoon, Amarelle,” said the wizard Ivovandas. Her feet didn’t quite touch the surface of the pool as she drifted toward the bed. “I trust you slept well. You were magnificent last night!”

  “Was I? I don’t remember… uh, that is, I remember some of it… am I wearing your clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shouldn’t I have a hangover?”

  “I took it while you slept,” said Ivovandas. “I have a collection of bottled maladies. Your hangover was due to be the stuff of legends. Here be dragons! And by ‘here,’ I mean directly behind your eyeballs, probably for the rest of the week. I’ll find another head to slip it into, someday. Possibly I’ll let you have it back if you fail me.”

  “Fail you? What?” Amarelle leapt to her feet, which sank awkwardly into the mattress. “You have me confused with someone who knows what’s going on. Start with how I was magnificent.”

  “I’ve never been so extensively insulted! In my own foyer, no less, before we even adjourned to the study. You offered penetratingly savage elucidation of all my character flaws, most of them imaginary, and then you gave me the firmest possible directions on how I and my peers were to order our affairs henceforth, for the convenience of you and your friends.”

  “I, uh, recall some of that, I think.”

  “I am curious about a crucial point, citizen Parathis. When you purchased sanctuary from the Parliament of Theradane, you were instructed that personal threats against the members of said parliament could be grounds for summary revocation of sanctuary privileges, were you not?”

  “I… recall something with that flavor… in the paperwork… possibly on the back somewhere… maybe in the margins?”

  “You will agree that your statements last night certainly qualified as personal threats?”

  “My statements?”

  Smiling, Ivovandas produced a humming blue crystal and used it to project a crisp, solid image into the air beside the bed. It was Amarelle, black-coated and soaked with steaming magic rain, gesturing with clutching hands as she raved:

  “And another thing, you venomous milk-faced thundercunt! NOBODY drops a dead vorpilax on my friends, NOBODY! What you fling at the other members of your pointy-hatted circle jerk is your business, but the next time you trifle with the lives of uninvolved citizens, you’d better lock your doors, put on your thickest steel corset, and hire a food taster, you catch my meaning?”

  The image vanished.

  “Damn,” said Amarelle. “I’ve always thought of myself as basically a happy drunk.”

  “I’m three hundred and ten years old,” said Ivovandas, “and I learned some new words last night! Oh, we were having such fun, until I found myself personally threatened.”

  “Yes. So it would seem. And how were you thinking we might, ah, proceed in this matter?”

  “Ordinarily,” said Ivovandas, “I’d magically redirect the outflow of your lower intestine into your lungs, which would be my little way of saying that your sanctuary privileges had been revoked. However, those skills of yours, and that reputation… I have a contract suited to such a contractor. Why don’t you get dressed and meet me in the study?”

  A powerful force struck Amarelle from behind, knocking her off the bed, headfirst into the golden pool. Rather than swimming down she found herself floating up, rising directly through the floor of Ivovandas’ study, a large room full of bookshelves, scrollcases, and lacquered basilisk-skin paneling. Amarelle was suddenly wearing her own clothes again.

  On the wall was an oil painting of the bedroom Amarelle had just left, complete with a masterful rendering of Ivovandas floating above the golden pool. As Amarelle watched, the painted figure grew larger and larger within the frame, then pushed her arms and head out of it, and with a twist and a jump at last floated free in the middle of the study.

  “Now,” said Ivovandas. “To put it simply, there is an object within Theradane I expect you to secure. Whether or not your friends help you is of no concern to me. As an added incentive, if you deliver this thing to me quietly and successfully, you will calm a great deal of the, ah, public disagreement between myself and a certain parliamentary peer.”

  “But the terms of my sanctuary!” said Amarelle. “You got part of my tithe! You know how it works. I can’t steal within the boundaries of Theradane.”

  “Well, you can’t threaten me either,” said Ivovandas. “And that’s a moot point now, so what have you got to lose?”

  “An eternity not spent as a street lamp.”

  “Admirable long-term thinking,” said Ivovandas. “But I do believe if you scrutinize your situation you’ll see that you’re up a certain proverbial creek, and I am the only provisioner of paddles willing to sell you one.”

  Amarelle paced, hands shoved sullenly into her coat pockets. She and her crew needed the security of Theradane; they had grown too famous, blown too much cover, taken too many interesting keepsakes from the rich and powerful in too many other places. Theradane’s system was simplicity itself. Pay a vast sum to the Parliament of Strife, retire to Theradane, and don’t practice any of the habits that got you in trouble outside the city. Ever.

  “Have some heart, Amarelle. It’s not precisely illegal for me to coax a master criminal back into operations within the city limits, but I can’t imagine my peers would let the matter pass unremarked if they ever found out about it. Do as I ask and I’ll gladly smash my little blue crystal. We’ll both walk away smiling, in harmonious equipoise.”

  “What do you want me to secure for you?”

  Ivovandas opened a tall cabinet set against the right-hand wall. Inside was a blank tapestry surrounded on all sides by disembodied golden hands not unlike the ones that had hauled Amarelle across the threshold. The hands leapt to life, flicking across the tapestry with golden needles and black thread. Lines appeared on the surface, lines that rapidly became clear to Amarelle as the districts of Theradane and their landmarks: the High Barrens, the Sign of the Fallen Fire, the Deadlight Downs, and a hundred others, stitch by stitch.

  When the map was complete, one hand stitched in a final thread of summer-fire crimson, glowing somewhere in the northeastern part of the city.

  “Prosperity Street,” said Ivovandas. “In Fortune’s Gate, near the Old Parliament.”

  “I’ve been there,” said Amarelle. “What do you want?”

  “Prosperity Street. In Fortune’s Gate. Near the Old Parliament.”

  “I heard you the first time,” said Amarelle. “But what do you… oh, no. You did not. You did not just imply that implication!”

  “I want you to steal Prosperity Street,” said Ivovandas. “The whole street. The entire length of it. Every last brick and stone. It must cease to exist. It must be removed from Theradane.”

  “That street is three hundred yards long, at the heart of a district so important and money-soaked that even you lunatics don’t blast it in your little wars, and it’s trafficked at every hour of every day!”

  “It would therefore be to your advantage to remove it without attracting notice,” said Ivovandas. “But that’s your business, one way or the other, and I won’t presume to give you instruction in your own narrow specialty.”

  “It. Is. A. STREET.”

  “And you’re Amarelle Parathis. Weren’t you shouting something last night about how you’d stolen the sound of the sunrise?”

  “On the right day of the year,” said Amarelle, “on the peak of the proper mountain, and with a great deal of help from some dwarves and more copper pipe than I
can— damn it, it was very complicated!”

  “You stole tears from a shark.”

  “If you can figure out how to identify a melancholy shark, you’re halfway home in that business.”

  “Incidentally, what did you do with the Death Spiders of Moraska once you’d taken them?”

  “I mailed them back to the various temples of the spider-priests who’d been annoying me. Let’s just say that confinement left the spiders agitated and hungry, and that the cult now has very firm rules concerning shipping crates with ventilation holes. Also, I mailed the crates postage due.”

  “Charming!” cried Ivovandas. “Well, you strike me as just the sort of woman to steal a street.”

  “I suppose my only other alternative is a pedestal engraved ‘Now I Serve Theradane Always.’”

  “That, or some more private and personal doom,” said Ivovandas. “But you have, in the main, apprehended the salient features of your choices.”

  “Why a street?” said Amarelle. “Before I proceed, let’s be candid, or something resembling it. Why do you want this street removed, and how will doing so calm down the fighting between you and your… oh. Oh, hell, it’s a locus, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Ivovandas. Her predatory grin revealed teeth engraved with hair-fine lines of gold in arcane patterns. “Prosperity Street is the external power locus of the wizard Jarrow, my most unbeloved colleague. It’s how he finds the wherewithal to prolong this tedious contest of summoned creatures and weather. Without it, I could flatten him in an afternoon and be home in time for tea.”

  “Forgive me if this is a touchy subject, but I thought the nature of these loci was about the most closely-guarded secret you and your… colleagues possess.”

  “Jarrow has been indiscreet,” said Ivovandas. “But then, he understands the knowledge alone is useless if it can’t be coupled to a course of action. A street is quite a thing to dispose of, and the question of how to do so absolutely stymied me until you came calling with your devious head so full of drunken outrage. Shall we go to contract?”