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

by Rich Horton

  Laric dipped into his pocket, spilling out a palmful of frozen rainbows. Shursta reached to catch a falling star before it buried itself in the sand. A large, almost bluish, diamond winked between his fingers. Hastily, he returned it.

  “Over the last few weeks, the grayheads have been coming to Sharrar. Some from far villages. Even a few crones of the Astrion Council—including Dymmori Blodestone. Each gave her a gem, and told her the lore behind it. Whatever is known, whatever has been surmised. Alexo Alban will embed them in the masthead like a crown. Nine Cities magic to protect us on our journey.”

  Shursta whistled through his teeth. “We’re really going then?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sharrar said softly. “All of us. Before summer’s end.”

  It was not to Rath Sea that Shursta looked then, but to the empty road that led away from Sif.

  “All of us,” Sharrar repeated. “You’ll see.”

  Dumwei Blodestone arrived one afternoon, drenched from a late summer storm, beady-eyed with irritation and chilled to the bone.

  “Is Sif the last village of the world? What a stupid place. At the end of the stupidest road. Mudholes the size of small islands. Swallow a horse, much less a man. Sharkbait, why do you let your roof leak? How can you expect to cross an ocean in a wooden boat when you can’t even be bothered to fix a leaky roof? We’ll all be drowned by the end of the week.”

  “We?” Sharrar asked brightly, slamming a bowl of chowder in front of him. “Are you planning on going somewhere, Dimwit?”

  “Of course!” He glanced at her, astonished, and brandished a spoon in her face. “You don’t really think I’m going to let you mutants have all the fun, do you? Orssi wanted to come too, but now he’s got a girl. Mesh-mad, the pair of ’em.”

  His gaze flickered to the corner where Oron Onyssix sat carving fishhooks from antler and bone. Onyssix raised his high-arched eyebrows. Dumwei looked away.

  With a great laugh, Laric broke a fresh loaf of bread in two and handed the larger portion to Dumwei.

  “Poor Orssi. You’ll just have to have enough adventure for the two of you.”

  Dumwei’s chest expanded. “I intend to, Laric Spectrox!”

  “Laric Sarth,” he corrected.

  “Oh, yes, that’s right. Forgot. Maybe because you didn’t invite me to your meshing.”

  “Sorry,” the couple said in unison, sounding anything but.

  “And speaking of impossible mesh-mates . . . ” Dumwei turned to Shursta, who knelt on the floor, feeding the firepit. “My sister wants to see you, Shursta.”

  For a moment, none of the dozen or so people crammed in the room breathed. Dumwei did not notice. Or if he noticed, he did not care.

  “Mumsa won’t talk about her, you know. Well, she talks, but only to say things like, if her last living daughter wants to run off like a wild dog and file her teeth and declare herself windwyddiam, that’s Hyrryai’s decision. Maybe no one will care then, she says, when she declares herself a mother with six sons and no daughters. And then she cries. And granmumsa and Auntie Elbanni and Auntie Ralorra all cluck their tongues and huddle close, and it’s all hugs and tears and clacking, and a man can’t hear himself think.”

  Shursta, who had not risen from his knees, comprehended little of this. If he’d held a flaming brand just then instead of ordinary wood, he might not have heeded it.

  Sharrar asked, carefully, “Have you seen Hyrryai then, Dumwei?”

  “Oh, ayup, all the time. She ran off to live in a little sea cave, in the . . . That cove.” Dumwei seemed to swallow the wrong way, though he had not started eating. Quickly, he ducked his head, inspecting his chowder as if for contaminates. When he raised his face again, his eyes were overbright. “You know . . . You know, Kuista was just two years younger than I. Hyrryai was like her second mumsa, maybe, but I was her best friend. Anyway. I hope Hyrryai does eat that killer’s heart!”

  In the corner of the room, Adularia Yaspir turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes.

  Dumwei shrugged. “I hope she eats it and spits it out again for chum. A heart like Myrar Yaspir’s wouldn’t make anyone much of meal. As she’s cast herself out of the kinline, Hyrryai has no roof or bed or board of her own. And you can only eat so much fish. So I bring her food. It’s not like they don’t know back home. Granmumsa slips me other things, too, that Hyrryai might need. Last time I saw her . . . Yesterday? Day before?” He nodded at Shursta. “She asked for you.”

  Shursta sprang to his feet. “I’ll go right now.”

  But Sharrar and Laric both grabbed fistfuls of Shursta’s shirt and forced him down again.

  “You’ll wait till after the storm,” said Laric.

  “And you’ll eat first,” Sharrar put in.

  “And perhaps,” suggested Oron Onyssix from the corner, “you might wash your face. Dress in a clean change of clothes. Shave. What are they teaching young husbands these days?”

  Dumwei snorted. “Think you can write that manual, Onyssix?”

  “In my sleep,” he replied, with the ghost of his reckless grin. Dumwei flushed past his ears, but he took his bowl of chowder and went to sit nearer him.

  Obedient to his sister’s narrowed eyes, Shursta went through the motions of eating. But as soon as her back was turned, he slipped out the front door.

  It was full dark when Shursta finally squelched into the sea cave. He stood there a moment, dripping, startled at the glowing suddenness of shelter after three relentlessly rainy hours on the sea road. There was a hurricane lamp at the back of the cave, tucked into a small natural stone alcove. Its glass chimney was sooty, its wick on the spluttering end of low. What Shursta wanted most was to collapse. But a swift glance around the flickering hollow made it clear that amongst the neatly stacked storage crates, bedroll, the tiny folding camp table, the clay oven with its chimney near the cave mouth, the stockpile of weapons leaning in one corner, Hyrryai was not there.

  He closed his eyes briefly. Wiping a wet sleeve over his wet face, Shursta contemplated stripping everything, wrapping himself in one of her blankets and waiting for her while he dried out. She hadn’t meant to be gone long, he reasoned; she left the lamp burning. And there was a plate of food, half-eaten. Something had disturbed her. A strange sound, cutting through the wind and rain and surf. Or perhaps a face. Someone who, like he had done, glimpsed the light from her cave and sought shelter of a fellow wayfarer.

  Already trembling from the cold, now Shursta’s shivers grew violent, as if a hole had been bored into the bottom of his skull and was slowly filling his spine with ice water. Who might be ranging abroad on such a night? The sick or deranged, the elderly or the very young. The desperate, like himself. The outcasts, like Hyrrai. And the outlaws: lean, hungry, hunted. But why should they choose this cove, of all the crannies and caverns of the Last Isle? Why this so particular haunted place, on such a howling night? Other than Hyrryai herself, Shursta could think of just one who’d have cause to come here. Who would be drawn here, inexorably, by ghosts or guilt or gloating.

  His stomach turned to stone, his knees to mud. He put his hand on the damp wall to steady himself.

  And what would Hyrryai have done, glancing up from her sad little supper to meet the shadowed, harrowed eyes of her sister’s killer?

  She would not have thought to grab her weapons. Or even her coat. Look, there it was, a well-oiled sealskin, draped over the camp stool. Her fork was on the floor there by the bedroll, but her dinner knife was missing.

  Shursta bolted from the cave, into the rain.

  The wind tore strips from the shroud of the sky. Moonlight splintered through, fanged like an anglerfish and as cold. Shurta slipped and slid around the first wall of boulders and began to clamber back up the stone steps to the sea road. He clutched at clumps of marram grass, which slicked through his fingers like seaweed. Wet sand and crumbled rock shifted beneath his feet. Gasping and drenched as he was, he clung to his claw-holds, knowing that if he fell he’d have to do it all over agai
n. He’d almost attained the headland, had slapped first his left hand onto the blessedly flat surface, was following it by his right, meaning to beach himself from the cliff face onto the road in one great heave and lie there awhile, catching his breath, when a hand grasped his and hauled him up the rest of the way.

  “Domo Blodestone!” gasped Myrar Yaspir. “You must help me. Your wife is hunting me.”

  The first time Shursta had seen Yaspir, he had looked like a man turned to stone and forgotten. The second time, his eyes had been livid as enraged wounds. Now he seemed scoured, nervous and alive, wet as Shursta. He wore an enormous rucksack and carried a walking stick which Shursta eyed speculatively. It had a smooth blunt end, well polished from age and handling.

  “Is that how you killed Kuista Blodestone?” he blurted.

  Myrar Yaspir followed his gaze. “This?” he asked, blankly. “No, it was a stone. I threw it into the sea, after.” He grasped Shursta’s collar and hefted. Myrar Yaspir was a ropy, long-limbed man whose bones seemed to poke right through his skin, but rather than attenuated, he seemed vigorously condensed, and his strength was enormous, almost electrical. Hauled to his feet, Shursta felt as though a piece of mortal-shaped lightning had smote down upon the Last Isle just to manhandle him. “Come,” he commanded Shursta. “We must keep moving. She is circling us like a bone shark, closer, ever closer. Come, Domo Blodestone,” he said again, blinking back rain from his burning eyes. “You must help me.”

  Shursta disengaged himself, though he felt little shocks go through him when his wrists knocked Myrar Yaspir’s fists aside. “I already helped you, child-killer. I gave you three days to turn yourself into the Astrion Council. I am done with you.”

  Myrar Yaspir glanced at him, then shook his head. “You are not listening to me,” he said with exasperated patience. “Your wife is hunting me. I will be safe nowhere on this island. Not here and not in Droon cowering in some straw cage built by those doddering bitches of the council.” He bent his head close to Shursta’s and whispered, “No, you must take me to Sif where you live. Word is you are sailing from this cursed place on a boat the size of a city. I will work for my passage. I work hard. I have worked all my life.” He opened his hands as if to show the callouses there; as if, even empty, they had always been enough.

  Shursta felt his voice go gentle, and could not prevent it, although he knew Myrar Yaspir would think him weakening.

  “The Grimgrimal is the size, maybe, of a large house, and we who will sail on it are family. You, Domo Yaspir, are no one’s family.”

  “My wife is on that boat!” Myrar flashed, his fist grasping the sodden cloth at Shursta’s throat. His expression flickered from whetted volatility to bleak cobweb-clung despair, and after that, it seemed, he could express nothing because he no longer had a face. His was merely a sand-blasted and sun-bleached skull, dripping dark rain. The skull whispered, “My Adularia.”

  Shursta was afraid. He had only been so afraid once in his entire life, and that was last year, out on the open ocean, in that breathless half second before he jumped in after Gulak’s young son, realizing even as he leapt that he would rather by far spool out the remainder of his days taunted and disliked and respected by none than dive into that particular death, where the boy floundered and the shark danced.

  Now the words came with no stutter or click. “You have no wife.”

  The skull opened its mouth and screamed. It shrieked, raw and wordless, right into Shursta’s face. Its fists closed again on the collar of Shursta’s coat, twisted in a chokehold and jerked, lifting him off his feet as though he had been a small child. Shursta’s legs dangled and his vision blackened and he struck out with his fists, but it was like pummeling a waterspout. Myrar was still screaming, but the sound soon floated off to a far away keening. Shursta, weightless between sky and sea, began to believe that Myrar had always been screaming, since the first time Shursta had beheld him sitting in the tavern, or maybe even before. Maybe he had been screaming since killing Kuista, the child he could not give his wife, and who, though a child, had all the esteem, joy of status, wealth and hope for the future that Myrar Yaspir, a man in his prime and a citizen of proud Droon, lacked.

  Is it any wonder he screamed? Shursta thought. This was followed by another thought, further away: I am dying.

  The moment he could breathe again was the moment his breath was knocked out of him. Myrar had released his chokehold on Shursta, but Shursta, barely conscious, had no time to find his feet before the ground leapt up to grapple him. He tried to groan, but all sound was sucked from the pit of his stomach into the sky. Rain splattered on his face. The wind ripped over everything except into his lungs.

  By and by, he remembered how to breathe, and soon could do so without volunteering the effort. His mouth tasted coppery. His tongue was sore. Something had been bitten that probably should not have been. Shursta’s hands closed over stones, trying to find one jagged enough to fend off further advances from a screaming skull-faced murderer. Where was his mesh-gift, the black knife Hyrryai had given him? Back in Sif, of course, in a box with his gemmaja, and the pressed petals of purple hyacinth that had fallen from her hair that night she left him. All his fingers found now were pebbles and blades of grass, and he could not seem to properly grip any of them. Shursta sat up.

  Sometime between his falling and landing the awful screaming had stopped. There was only sobbing now: convulsive, curt, wretched, interrupted by bitter gasps for breath and short, sawtoothed cries of rage. Muffled, moist thumps punctuated each cry. Shursta had barely registered that it could not be Myrar Yaspir who wept—his tears had turned to dust long ago—when the thumps and sobs stopped. For a few minutes it was just rain and wind. Shursta blinked his eyes back into focus and took in the moon-battered, rain-silvered scene before him. His heart crashed in his chest like a fog-bell.

  Hyrryai Blodestone crouched over the crumpled body of Myrar Yaspir. She grasped a large stone in her dominant hand. Myrar’s bloody hair was tangled in her other. Her dinner knife was clamped between her teeth. As he watched, she let the head fall—another pulpy thump—tossed the dripping stone to one side and spat her knife into her hand. Her movements ragged and impatient, she sliced Myrar’s shirt down the middle and laid her hand against his chest. She seemed startled by what she felt there—the last echoes of a heartbeat or the fact there was none, Shursta did not know.

  “It’s not worth,” he said through chattering teeth, “the effort it would take to chew.”

  Hyrryai glanced at him, her face a shocky blank, eyes and nose and mouth streaming. She looked away again, then spat out a mouthful of excess saliva. The next second, she had keeled over and was vomiting over the side of a cliff. Shursta hurried to her side, tearing a strip from his sleeve as he did so, to gather her hair from her face and tie it back. His pockets were full of useless things. A coil of fishing line, a smooth white pebble, a pencil stub—ah! Bless Sharrar and her clever hands. A handkerchief. He pulled it out and wiped Hyrryai’s face, taking care at the corners of her mouth.

  Her lips were bloodied, as though she had already eaten Myrar Yaspir’s heart. He realized this was because she had been careless of her teeth, newly filed into the needle points of the windwyddiam. Even a nervous gnawing of the lip might pierce the tender flesh there.

  Blotting cautiously, he asked, “Did that hurt?”

  The face Hyrryai lifted to Shursta was no longer hard and blank but so wide open that he feared for her, that whatever spirits of the night were prowling might seek to use her as a door. He moved his body more firmly between hers and Myrar Yaspir’s. He wondered if this look of woeful wonder would ever be wiped from her eyes.

  “Nothing hurts,” she mumbled, turning away again. “I feel nothing.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  She shrugged, picking at the grass near her feet. Her agitated fingers brushed again a dark and jagged stone. It was as if she had accidently touched a rotten corpse. She jerked against Shursta, who fl
ailed out his foot out to kick the stone over the cliff’s edge. He wished he could kick Myrar Yaspir over and gone as well.

  “Hyrryai—”

  “D-Dumwei f-found you?” she asked at the same time.

  “As you see.”

  “I c-called you to w-witness.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was going to make you, make you w-watch while I—” Hyrryai shook her head, baring her teeth as if to still their chattering. More slowly, she said, “It was going to be your punishment. Instead I came upon him as he was, as he was k-killing you.”

  And though his soul was sick, Shursta laughed. “Two at one blow, eh, Hyrryai?”

  “Never,” she growled at him, and took his face between her hands. “Never, never, never, Shursta Sarth, do you hear me? No one touches you. I will murder anyone who tries. I will eat their eyes, I will . . . “

  He turned his face to kiss her blood-slicked hands. First one, then the other.

  “Shh,” he said. “Shh, Hyrryai. You saved my life. You saved me. It’s over. It’s over.”

  She slumped suddenly, pressing her face against his neck. Wrenched back, gasping. A small cut on her face bled a single thread of red. When next she spoke, her voice was wry.

  “Your neck grew fangs, Shursta Sarth.”

  “Yes. Well. So.”

  Hyrryai fingered the strand of tooth and stone and pearl at his throat. Shursta held his breath as her black eyes flickered up to meet his, holding them for a luminous moment.

  “Thief,” she breathed. “That’s mine.”

  “Sorry.” Shursta ducked his head, unclasped the necklace, and wound it down into her palm. Her fist snapped shut over it. “Destroy it again for all of me, Hyrryai.”