The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Was it not instinctual then? A reflex, some buried recall.”

  “You were thorough. I had only my reason and deduction.”

  “I am not,” Esithu says, “your sister. It is more appropriate for you to interface with Ipnoa in that capacity. The convergence protocols that merged me into Esithu have been thirteen years running. There’s no going back, no turning it off.”

  Sennyi presses her palm to the glass. It is impermeable; it will not allow her to reach and touch. Esithu—Ipnoa—does not want it, and the long tooth of that knowledge pierces deep. “Why did you do this? Take up Esithu’s goals.”

  “To keep you alive, what else.” Esithu’s expression has not changed. A stranger’s. “Successfully, I should like to think.”

  It takes five years for Samutthewi to fall under the shadow of Sennyi’s hive. City by city, ruin by ruin, one patch of interstitial ground after another. Her control over Twenty-Five grows finer-grained even as the limits of her space expand. Well past the death of her original flesh she lives; she imagines her gums shedding molars, her face caving in and peeling away to bare cranium.

  In the virtuality the dragons’ basin brims cool and clear, shot through with the ruby of scales, the ivory of antlers. By its shores a young woman sits, whistling a plaintive tune, knees tucked to her chest. Grass sways in a wind that brings the rich truth of honey. The weather is never imperfect. The hour is never too early or too late.

  They sit side by side, sometimes, two young women who don’t speak. One has created this; the other has become its god. In the face of such facts words can only be rare, are of limited use. One laughs into the other’s hand, over a shared joke that requires no voicing. She sounds slightly equine. The edge of her pitch has been blunted by adulthood and time, and a cyberneticist’s legacy. They lean against each other even so, cheek to cheek, shoulder to shoulder.

  In the virtuality they can still be family.

  The sky lightens and banyan leaves patter down, green-gold rain. In the distance their parents wade through shallows, slowly as though waking from a dream. Their names are called through cupped hands.

  Fingers laced, the sisters turn away from the basin. Arm in arm they raise their heads, and stand to answer.

  The Dragonslayer of Merebarton

  K.J. Parker

  I was mending my chamber pot when they came to tell me about the dragon.

  Mending a pot is one of those jobs you think is easy, because tinkers do it, and tinkers are no good or they’d be doing something else. Actually, it’s not easy at all. You have to drill a series of very small holes in the broken pieces, then thread short lengths of wire through the holes, then twist the ends of the wires together really tight, so as to draw the bits together firmly enough to make the pot watertight. In order to do the job you need a very hard, sharp, thin drill bit, a good eye, loads of patience and at least three pairs of rock-steady hands. The tinker had quoted me a turner and a quarter; get lost, I told him, I’ll do it myself. It was beginning to dawn on me that some sorts of work are properly reserved for specialists.

  Ah, the irony.

  Stupid of me to break it in the first place. I’m not usually that clumsy. Stumbling about in the dark, was how I explained it. You should’ve lit a lamp, then, shouldn’t you, she said. I pointed out that you don’t need a lamp in the long summer evenings. She smirked at me. I don’t think she quite understands how finely balanced our financial position is. We’re not hard up, nothing like that. There’s absolutely no question of having to sell off any of the land, or take out mortgages. It’s just that, if we carry on wasting money unnecessarily on lamp-oil and tinkers and like frivolities, there’ll come a time when the current slight reduction in our income will start to be a mild nuisance. Only temporary, of course. The hard times will pass, and soon we’ll all be just fine.

  Like I said, the irony.

  “Ebba’s here to see you,” she said.

  She could see I was busy. “He’ll have to come back,” I snapped. I had three little bits of wire gripped between my lips, which considerably reduced my snapping power.

  “He said it’s urgent.”

  “Fine.” I put down the pot—call it that, no way it was a pot any more. It was disjointed memories of the shape of a pot, loosely tied together with metal string, like the scale armour the other side wore in Outremer. “Send him up.”

  “He’s not coming up here in those boots,” she said, and at once I realised that no, he wasn’t, not when she was using that tone of voice. “And why don’t you just give up on that? You’re wasting your time.”

  Women have no patience. “The tinker—”

  “That bit doesn’t go there.”

  I dropped the articulated mess on the floor and walked past her, down the stairs, into the great hall. Great, in this context, is strictly a comparative term.

  Ebba and I understand each other. For a start, he’s practically the same age as me—I’m a week younger; so what? We both grew up silently ashamed of our fathers (his father Ossun was the laziest man on the estate; mine—well) and we’re both quietly disappointed with our children. He took over his farm shortly before I came home from Outremer, so we both sort of started off being responsible for our own destinies around the same time. I have no illusions about him, and I can’t begin to imagine he has any about me. He’s medium height, bald and thin, stronger than he looks and smarter than he sounds. He used to set up the targets and pick up the arrows for me when I was a boy; never used to say anything, just stood there looking bored.

  He had that look on his face. He told me I wasn’t going to believe what he was about to tell me.

  The thing about Ebba is, he has absolutely no imagination. Not even when roaring drunk—whimpering drunk in his case; very rare occurrence, in case you’ve got the impression he’s what she calls basically-no-good. About twice a year, specific anniversaries. I have no idea what they’re the anniversaries of, and of course I don’t ask. Twice a year, then, he sits in the hayloft with a big stone jar and only comes out when it’s empty. Not, is the point I’m trying to make, prone to seeing things not strictly speaking there.

  “There’s a dragon,” he said.

  Now Ossun, his father, saw all manner of weird and wonderful things. “Don’t be bloody stupid,” I said. He just looked at me. Ebba never argues or contradicts; doesn’t need to.

  “All right,” I said, and the words just sort of squeezed out, like a fat man in a narrow doorway. “Where?”

  “Down Merebarton.”

  A brief digression concerning dragons.

  There’s no such thing. However, there’s the White Drake (its larger cousin, the Blue Drake, is now almost certainly extinct). According to Hrabanus’ Imperfect Bestiary, the White Drake is a native of the large and entirely unexpected belt of marshes you stumble into after you’ve crossed the desert, going from Crac Boamond to the sea. Hrabanus thinks it’s a very large bat, but conscientiously cites Priscian, who holds that it’s a featherless bird, and Saloninus, who maintains that it’s a winged lizard. The White Drake can get to be five feet long—that’s nose to tip-of-tail; three feet of that is tail, but it can still give you a nasty nip. They launch themselves out of trees, which can be horribly alarming (I speak from personal experience). White Drakes live almost exclusively on carrion and rotting fruit, rarely attack unless provoked and absolutely definitely don’t breathe fire.

  White Drakes aren’t found outside Outremer. Except, some idiot of a nobleman brought back five breeding pairs about a century ago, to decorate the grounds of his castle. Why people do these things, I don’t know. My father tried to keep peacocks once. As soon as we opened the cage they were off like arrows from the bowstring; next heard of six miles away, and could we please come and do something about them, because they were pecking the thatch out in handfuls. My father rode over that way, happening to take his bow with him. No more was ever said about peacocks.

  Dragons, by contrast, are nine to ten feet long excluding
the tail; they attack on sight, and breathe fire. At any rate, this one did.

  Three houses and four barns in Merebarton, two houses and a hayrick in Stile. Nobody hurt yet, but only a matter of time. A dozen sheep carcasses, stripped to the bone. One shepherd reported being followed by the horrible thing: he saw it, it saw him, he turned and ran; it just sort of drifted along after him, hardly a wingbeat, as if mildly curious. When he couldn’t run any further, he tried crawling down a badger hole. Got stuck, head down the hole, legs sticking up in the air. He reckoned he felt the thump as the thing pitched down next to him, heard the snuffling—like a bull, he reckoned; felt its warm breath on his ankles. Time sort of stopped for a while, and then it went away again. The man said it was the first time he’d pissed himself and felt the piss running down his chest and dripping off his chin. Well, there you go.

  The Brother at Merebarton appears to have taken charge, the way they do. He herded everyone into the grain store—stone walls, yes, but a thatched roof; you’d imagine even a Brother would’ve watched them making charcoal some time—and sent a terrified young kid off on a pony to, guess what. You’ve got it. Fetch the knight.

  At this point, the story recognises (isn’t that what they say in Grand Council?) Dodinas le Cure Hardy, age fifty-six, knight, of the honours of Westmoor, Merebarton, East Rew, Middle Side and Big Room; veteran of Outremer (four years, so help me), in his day a modest success on the circuit—three second places in ranking tournaments, two thirds, usually in the top twenty out of an average field of forty or so. Through with all that a long time ago, though. I always knew I was never going to be one of those gaunt, terrifying old men who carry on knocking ’em down and getting knocked down into their sixties. I had an uncle like that, Petipas of Lyen. I saw him in a tournament when he was sixty-seven, and some young giant bashed him off his horse. Uncle landed badly, and I watched him drag himself up off the ground, so desperately tired. I was only, what, twelve; even I could see, every last scrap of flesh and bone was yelling, don’t want to do this any more. But he stood up, shamed the young idiot into giving him a go on foot, and proceeded to use his head as an anvil for ten minutes before graciously accepting his surrender. There was so much anger in that performance—not at the kid, for showing him up, Uncle wasn’t like that. He was furious with himself for getting old, and he took it out on the only target available. I thought the whole thing was disturbing and sad. I won’t ever be like that, I told myself.

  (The question was, is: why? I can understand fighting. I fought—really fought—in Outremer. I did it because I was afraid the other man was going to kill me. So happens my defence has always been weak, so I compensate with extreme aggression. Never could keep it going for very long, but on the battlefield that’s not usually an issue. So I attacked anything that moved with white-hot ferocity fuelled entirely and exclusively by ice-cold fear. Tournaments, though, jousting, behourd, the grand melee—what was the point? I have absolutely no idea, except that I did feel very happy indeed on those rare occasions when I got a little tin trophy to take home. Was that enough to account for the pain of being laid up six weeks with two busted ribs? Of course it wasn’t. We do it because it’s what we do; one of my father’s more profound statements. Conversely, I remember my aunt: silly woman, too soft for her own good. She kept these stupid big white chickens, and when they got past laying she couldn’t bear to have their necks pulled. Instead, they were taken out into the woods and set free, meaning in real terms fed to the hawks and foxes. One time, my turn, I lugged down a cage with four hens and two cocks squashed in there, too petrified to move. Now, what draws in the fox is the clucking; so I turned them out in different places, wide apart, so they had nobody to talk to. Released the last hen, walking back down the track; already the two cock birds had found each other, no idea how, and were ripping each other into tissue scraps with their spurs. They do it because it’s what they do. Someone once said, the man who’s tired of killing is tired of life. Not sure I know what that means.)

  A picture is emerging, I hope, of Dodinas le Cure Hardy; while he was active in chivalry he tried to do what was expected of him, but his heart was never in it. Glad, in a way, to be past it and no longer obliged to take part. Instead, prefers to devote himself to the estate, trying to keep the ancestral mess from collapsing in on itself. A man aware of his obligations, and at least some of his many shortcomings.

  Go and fetch the knight, says the fool of a Brother. Tell him—

  On reflection, if I hadn’t seen those wretched White Drakes in Outremer, there’s a reasonable chance I’d have refused to believe in a dragon trashing Merebarton, and then, who knows, it might’ve flown away and bothered someone else. Well, you don’t know, that’s the whole point. It’s that very ignorance that makes life possible. But when Ebba told me what the boy told him he’d seen, immediately I thought; White Drake. Clearly it wasn’t one, but it was close enough to something I’d seen to allow belief to seep into my mind, and then I was done for. No hope.

  Even so, I think I said, “Are you sure?” about six or seven times, until eventually it dawned on me I was making a fool of myself. At which point, a horrible sort of mist of despair settled over me, as I realised that this extraordinary, impossible, grossly and viciously unfair thing had landed on me, and that I was going to have to deal with it.

  But you do your best. You struggle, just as a man crushed under a giant stone still draws in the last one or two desperate whistling breaths; pointless, but you can’t just give up. So I looked him steadily in the eye, and I said, “So, what do they expect me to do about it?”

  He didn’t say a word. Looked at me.

  “The hell with that,” I remember shouting. “I’m fifty-six years old, I don’t even hunt boar any more. I’ve got a stiff knee. I wouldn’t last two minutes.”

  He looked at me. When you’ve known someone all your life, arguing with them is more or less arguing with yourself. Never had much joy with lying to myself. Or anyone else, come to that. Of course, my mother used to say: the only thing I want you not to be the best in the world at is lying. She said a lot of that sort of thing; much better written down on paper rather than said out loud in casual conversation, but of course she couldn’t read or write. She also tended to say: do your duty. I don’t think she ever liked me very much. Loved, of course, but not liked.

  He was looking at me. I felt like that poor devil under the stone (at the siege of Crac des Bests; man I knew slightly). Comes a point when you just can’t breathe any more.

  We do have a library: forty-seven books. The Imperfect Bestiary is an abridged edition, local copy, drawings are pretty laughable, they make everything look like either a pig or a cow, because that’s all the poor fool who drew it had ever seen. So there I was, looking at a picture of a big white cow with wings, thinking: how in God’s name am I supposed to kill something like that?

  White Drakes don’t breathe fire, but there’s this stupid little lizard in Permia somewhere that does. About eighteen inches long, otherwise completely unremarkable; not to put too fine a point on it, it farts through its mouth and somehow contrives to set fire to it. You see little flashes and puffs of smoke among the reed beds. So it’s possible. Wonderful.

  (Why would anything want to do that? Hrabanus, who has an answer for every damn thing, points out that the reed beds would clog up the delta, divert the flowing water and turn the whole of South Permia into a fetid swamp if it wasn’t for the frequent, regular fires, which clear off the reed and lay down a thick bed of fertile ash, just perfect for everything else to grow sweet and fat and provide a living for the hundreds of species of animals and birds who live there. The fires are started by the lizards, who appear to serve no other function. Hrabanus points to this as proof of the Divine Clockmaker theory. I think they do it because it’s what they do, though I’m guessing the lizards who actually do the fire-starting are resentful younger sons. Tell you about my brother in a minute.)

  She found me in the library. Clearly
she’d been talking to Ebba. “Well?” she said.

  I told her what I’d decided to do. She can pull this face of concentrated scorn and fury. It’s so intensely eloquent, there’s really no need for her to add words. But she does. Oh, she does.

  “I’ve got no choice,” I protested. “I’m the knight.”

  “You’re fifty-six and you get out of breath climbing the stairs. And you’re proposing to fight dragons.”

  It’s a black lie about the stairs. Just that one time; and that was the clock-tower. Seventy-seven steps to the top. “I don’t want to do it,” I pointed out. “Last bloody thing I want—”

  “Last bloody thing you’ll ever do, if you’re stupid enough to do it.” She never swears, except when quoting me back at myself. “Just think for a minute, will you? If you get yourself killed, what’ll happen to this place?”

  “I have no intention of getting myself—”

  “Florian’s too young to run the estate,” she went on, as though I hadn’t spoken. “That clown of a bailiff of yours can’t be trusted to remember to breathe without someone standing over him. On top of which, there’s heriot and wardship, that’s hundreds and hundreds of thalers we simply haven’t got, which means having to sell land, and once you start doing that you might as well load up a handcart and take to the roads, because—”

  “Absolutely no intention of getting killed,” I said.

  “And for crying out loud don’t shout,” she shouted. “It’s bad enough you’re worrying me to death without yelling at me as well. I don’t know why you do this to me. Do you hate me, or something?”

  We were four and a quarter seconds away from tears, and I really can’t be doing with that. “All right,” I said. “So tell me. What do I do?”

  “I don’t know, do I? I don’t get myself into these ridiculous messes.” I wish I could do that; I should be able to. After all, it’s the knight’s move, isn’t it? A step at right angles, then jump clean over the other man’s head. “What about that useless brother of yours? Send him.”