Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Novels from Top Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors

by Gwynn White

  Val continued up the stairs, rubbing his bruised arm, feeling dizzied by the momentary collision with weapons-grade wealth.

  “Here’s my report,” he said in German, sliding it in front of his boss’s secretary. His German was as good as his English. He had a spell to help with that, one of his more successful ones.

  “Go ahead and take it in. He wants to see you.”

  His heart thudded. I didn’t end it with Alyx. I have to. They’re onto me. They can’t be. The guilt and fear had followed him back, a common occurrence.

  Sliding through the door of the inner office, he forced his features into something resembling normality.

  “Sullivan, welcome back.”

  Seated behind his desk, Lom Klawitz, the manager of the conciliation department, looked like an ordinary man. The illusion vanished when he wheeled back from the desk, maneuvering his wheelchair towards the coffee-maker that stood on a low shelf. Val accepted a cup with a nod of thanks. Klawitz was infamous for making his own coffee and letting it sit on the hot plate all day. By this hour of the afternoon, it was the consistency of glue.

  “Good flight?”

  Val took a sip of coffee. The inside of his mouth pruned up. “Not so bad. It’s immigration that’s the worst of it. Soldiers barking at you, officials ripping your collar open, treating you like a criminal … and everyone just standing there and taking it, yes sir no sir. Sheep!”

  “Your problem is you’re not a German.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “If you were a German, you’d feel reassured by that crap. People like to know that BASI is watching over them.”

  “My report, sir.” He laid it on top of the charts that were already on Klawitz’s desk. He could not help glancing at them.

  Klawitz made no move to open Val’s report. He spun the top chart around. “You might as well have a look at this. The solid line is Wessex ten-year bond yields, the dotted line is the consolidated Wessex bond index, the dashed line is raw Wessex credit ratings averaged across the extended family.”

  Rarely did Val get a look at raw ratings data, as opposed to the massaged figures the IMF published. He surmised that the reason Klawitz had this chart out was because he’d been showing it to the Bismarcks. It showed that the conciliation department’s efforts were having an increasingly slight effect on the market. Wessex bond yields were up, prices and ratings down. The negatively correlated trends held over timeframes of five years, one year, and three months. In the last week, they had gone parabolic.

  Val’s finger rested on the place where the ten-year yields climbed through the symbolic ceiling of 5%. “This’ll have been that business of Harry’s relics.” He felt a saving flash of anger at Tristan Wessex. It was as if the king wanted to rub his House’s loss of sanctity in the world’s face. “They should have plastinated the hands and heart properly, separately … and turned them over to us for assay.”

  By this he meant so that we could switch them for better ones. This offer, rarely made, had been extended to House Wessex because the situation was so dire.

  “They could even have given us the head,” Klawitz sighed. When the IMF resorted to switching relics, they usually just did the hands and heart, which couldn’t easily be identified by penitents. But Prince Harry’s body had been so badly burned, they could have switched his head, too, without anyone suspecting. “If he’d ‘turned out,’ ahem, to be a puissant saint, it would have saved their credit rating. For a while.”

  “And they rejected our offer because it was immoral! That’s insulting, that is.”

  “Ja. After everything we’ve done for that House. They’re basically telling us to get fucked. On the worldwide news.”

  Klawitz laid his hands on the desk, palms up. The hands were dirty from the tyres of his wheelchair.

  “Sorry, Sullivan. You’re off the job.”

  “Sir, let me try again,” Val protested. “We can’t just give up on them. It’s House Wessex.”

  Klawitz drained his coffee, demonstrating that his taste buds were as hardened as his hands. “It’s already been decided. This is the mother of all sanctity crises, and it’s still spreading. We have to save what can be saved, cut our losses where there’s no hope. Our internal forecasts say regime change in Britain is pretty much inevitable at this point. So I’m anticipating the order to reallocate my resources. I’ll have a new assignment for you in the next couple of days.”

  Stunned, Val fumbled for his cigarettes and lit one. They sat in silence for a couple of minutes. This was uncharacteristic of Klawitz, and Val took it as an acknowledgement of the human dimension of the sanctity crisis, the unhealed sick and the unhallowed dead.

  “What’s causing it, sir? Why is this crisis so bad?”

  “The billion-mark question, huh? Most people stop asking that one within their first year on the job.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No. Just because a question has already been answered doesn’t mean it’s not a good one to ask.”

  Klawitz wheeled away from his desk.

  “C’mere.”

  Val went to stand at his side by the window. Located on the fourteenth floor of one of the new Agency buildings, the office commanded a view of Hamburg’s modest business district.

  “That’s what’s wrong,” Klawitz said, gesturing at the window. “That’s why it’s so bad this time.”

  “All I see is skyscrapers. Billboards. A few dragons in the sky …”

  “Temples of greed. Enticements to profligacy, gluttony, and debt. Symbols of lordly vanity.”

  Val sighed, he couldn’t help it. He’d thought Klawitz might have something new to say.

  “Everyone who asks, we tell them the same thing,” the older magician said. “You want to end the sanctity crisis? Stop being shitheads.”

  “You make it sound so easy, sir.”

  “Of course it isn’t easy. It’s the hardest thing imaginable. We’re telling them: Give up your way of life, or lose it anyway. Funnily enough their reaction is always the same: do nothing.”

  Amidst his gloom, Val felt a prick of pride. At least the IMF was doing something, ineffectual as it might be.

  I have to end it with Alyx.

  “That’s the human race for you.” Klawitz wheeled away from the window. “If you ask me, we set ourselves up for this. We smashed the Russians, yes, but at what a cost to ourselves! BASI seized power from the Kaiser, styled themselves his protectors, basically reduced him to a lawn ornament … they flaunt noble titles, but they’re nothing but a gang of war profiteers. And we wonder what happened to chivalry?” Darkness flashed in Klawitz’s eyes. “That saintly Dummkopf, Harold Wessex, should never have thrown the Worldcracker away.”

  “And then he calls BASI a gang of war profiteers. Blaming them for the sanctity crisis. It was as close to treason as makes no difference.”

  “It’s easy to blame BASI.” Mihal Zalyotin was always scrupulously fair. “But we’re to blame, too, for putting up with them.”

  “What choice have we got, when they pay the bills?”

  “It’s good to see you, Val.”

  “Ah, it’s good to see you, too.”

  Val forced himself to meet Mihal’s amused, open gaze, missing the days when he had nothing to hide from his friend.

  He and Mihal went back all the way to Kabul, where they’d both worked for Stephane Flambeault. They had joined the IMF together when Flambeault’s racket went tits-up. Now Mihal was married with a family. He no longer worked as a conciliator, but taught at the IMF’s private school.

  Val had arrived at the end of the school day. Children straggled out of the nondescript, warehouse-like building. A few of them swung along on crutches, victims of the water disease. But the rest skipped and shouted energetically. From a distance, you’d never have known they were all incurables.

  The IMF’s need for magicians outstripped the supply. Recruiting was the very devil, and you couldn’t exactly advertise in the newspapers. So, a few year
s back, Klawitz had implemented an ambitious new solution: rescue incurable children from slums, nomad encampments, and agrivilles, and train them up from scratch.

  Mihal’s two children, Sonya and Erik, both incurables, also studied at the IMF school. Val leaned into the window of his car and popped the glove compartment. “Look what I’ve got here for a good little boy and girl.”

  Sonya and Erik seized his gift of Choc-O-Cones with delighted squeals. It was fun being the irresponsible uncle figure—but Val’s glow of pleasure quickly soured.

  “I need to walk, Mihal. Come down the canal?”

  Sonya and Erik tore off ahead. Val and Mihal walked down to the dead end of the street and picked their way past swaybacked warehouses to the bank of the Goldbekkanal. Broken bicycles, old mattresses, and the rusting teeth of junk poked out of the reeds at the river’s edge. Medallions of yellow scum bobbed on the brown water. The air was as crisp as dead leaves. They strolled along the old towpath, avoiding cascades of rubbish bags.

  “Watch out for rats,” Mihal yelled, as a cat-sized rodent darted across the path, neatly avoiding Val’s stamping foot.

  “Ah, you bastard!” Val lit a cigarette, offered Mihal one. “Tough day?”

  “You kidding? Every day is a tough day. Some of those kids won’t make it to adulthood; too sickly. Others have been damaged by their birth families. Badly damaged. They’re almost unteachable.”

  “Poor wee creatures,” Val said absently, preoccupied with his own concerns. “Well, I’m off the Wessex case. It’s official: we’re leaving them to their fate.”

  Mihal whistled. “Whose decision was that?”

  “Guess who I met coming out of Klawitz’s office.”

  Mihal spread his hands: tell me.

  “Caspar, Leo, Klaus, and Anna Bismarck. I’m guessing they gave the order to cut Tristan and companyoff.” Val looked at his watch: half past five. “They’ll have just had time to phone their minions at the Bank Bismarck and tell them to dump their Wessex bonds before the close.”

  “Fight human nature, Val, and you’re always going to lose.”

  “So cynical,” Val said. “You don’t happen to be Russian, do you?”

  Mihal chuckled. He was Russian, of course. Tall and gangling, with his swarthy face a mass of smallpox scars, he descended from provincial royalty in the former Russian province of Uzbekistan. His family had served the Tsars loyally until the opportune moment came, late in the War, to betray Moscow and save their own hides. A charming lot. They’d disowned Mihal for being incurable; when Val first met him, he’d been selling lucky charms in the markets of Kabul.

  A fine recruit for Flambeault’s racket, Val had thought, and so it had proved. Flambeault’s game had been speculative equity. He used to scope out some small company—there were lots of those in the Occupied East, the vast swathe of Eurasia formerly known as the Russian Empire, and now administered mostly by BASI. When he found a target, he would set his magicians to curse it into the ground. When the company was on the edge of bankruptcy, Flambeault would buy up their bonds and own them from teeth to toenails. The racket had been outlawed when the Occupation authorities caught onto it. Magic couldn’t be any more outlawed than it already was, but the German authorities had blacklisted the known speculative equity operators, driving Flambeault out of business, and Val and Mihal into the arms of the IMF. Val still felt ashamed that he hadn’t quit on his own.

  “But here we are,” he murmured, trying to convince himself that the past was behind them. “And here they are.” He gestured at Sonya and Erik, skipping ahead of them. The two children hadn’t even been born before the close of the Flambeault chapter. They were striking in appearance, half-Uzbeki and half-German, with their father’s black eyes and their mother’s blonde hair.

  “Here we are,” Mihal agreed flatly. “And when I’m out with them, upstanding Germans not infrequently call loyalty enforcement to report that a swarthy Easterner is kidnapping two little blond German children.”

  “Do they? The cunts.”

  Mihal shrugged. A tugboat churned down the river, towing a string of barges loaded with lumber. The smell of freshly sawn wood blew onshore. The sky was cerulean blue, as vast as the distances of Germany.

  “Sure the virtue theory makes no sense at all,” Val burst out, returning to the topic of the sanctity crisis. “You can be an evil bastard and still end up a saint. I lost my faith when I was about their age. Someone told me that Niall Sauvage was a saint. That was the sadistic old earl they set to govern Ireland after the War. He came back from Russia with a collection of human ears and he would add to it every time his men-at-arms arrested a sympathizer. I thought, him a saint? You’re fucking having me on. That was it. Oh, sure, God is supposed to work in mysterious ways. But I knew even back then that if old Niall was a saint, it wasn’t God at the back of it.”

  “And yet people still believe.”

  “Saints are like sausages. Most people don’t want to think about where they come from.”

  “What’s your theory, Val?”

  Val was about to give a flippant answer, and then he changed his mind. “Maybe there’s more than one god.”

  Mihal stared at him and twiddled a finger at his temple.

  “No, hear me out.” He’d never said anything like this to Mihal before. But the times seemed to call for an exploration of all the possibilities. “My parents are believers. They’re loyal to the Church and the Lord of Miracles. And I’ve never told you this, but that’s why they left Ireland. They ran, Mihal. They ran away to the other side of the fecking world, because there was a story going around that she had come back.”

  “‘She’?”

  “We don’t say her name, or she might appear.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  Val was feelng stupider by the second for having brought this up. “Ah, never mind. It’s just a superstition.”

  “You don’t happen to be Irish, do you?” Mihal said lightly. But the lightness seemed forced. Sutting off the conversation, he shouted, “Sonya! Erik! We’re going home.”

  They walked back along the canal bank. Val shivered in the increasingly cold air. The water glistened in the sunset. Ducks launched themselves like missiles from the far bank.

  Back at his car, he offered the Zalyotins a lift. “That’s all right, we’ll walk,” Mihal said. “It’s not far.”

  Val panicked. “Ah, I was hoping to invite myself to dinner,” he blurted with the most ingratiating smile he could manage. “There was something I wanted to talk to Greta about.”

  “You’ve always got ulterior motives,” Mihal said. Then he smiled, stiffly. The effort it cost him was obvious, but so was the fact that he was trying like hell to honor their friendship, what was left of it. “Sure, come on.”

  “Ding, ding … no, it’s not clicking,” Greta Zalyotin said. “I think I’ve seen it before somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it. Let me have a look in Who’s Who.”

  She rose and went out to the garage where she worked from home while minding other people’s babies and toddlers. Greta worked for the IMF, too, as a tag designer. She did not keep any blank tags here, of course, so Val had never been tempted to steal them. He took them from the so-called secure vault on campus.

  Never again, so help me. Never again.

  The Zalyotins lived in a dinky little prefab house in one of Hamburg’s northern suburbs, close enough to the woods that you saw the occasional deer. The deer attracted wolves, which was Mihal’s excuse for having planted a quickstone fence that was now eight feet tall. Little Erik had the ‘stone-mason’s knack, in addition to being an incurable, and Mihal had let him shape parts of the fence into a climbing frame and a support for a swing. This was Mihal’s castle, moped in the garage, geraniums by the door, all the trappings of a normal life… all thanks to the IMF. Val felt like a complete heel for his treacheries, big and little.

  Greta came back into the room before the silence grew unbearable. She held a stapled pamphlet b
ut she said nothing, her gaze darting back and forth between Val and Mihal.

  “You’ll never guess who I saw today, Greta!” Val tried to sound normal. “Your old mistress.”

  “Anna? She was here? Oh my God! Tell me exactly what she was wearing.”

  Before marrying Mihal, Greta had worked as a lady-in-waiting to Anna Bismarck. The daughter of a knight herself, she had abandoned a promising career and her own family for Mihal’s sake. She hung so eagerly on Val’s description of Lady Anna’s outfit and accessories that he sensed she missed that world. He shouldn’t have brought up the encounter. He changed the subject. “Have you got anything on that emblem of mine, then?”

  “Oh, that went right out of my head! Yes, I found it.”

  “You did? You’re a lifesaver, Greta.”

  She brushed crumbs off the table, spread out her pamphlet in the candlelight. “It wasn’t in Who’s Who. This is a supplement. They print them every couple of months. We call them Who’s In and Who’s Out. They’re lists of knights who’ve been newly entitled or stripped of their titles.”

  “And which is my fellow?”

  “Out. This supplement’s two years old. That’s why it took me a while to track him down.” She flipped to a color reproduction of the narwhal-and-flower badge. “Sir Gustaf Scholens. Or rather, plain old Monsieur Scholens, now.”

  Val read the accompanying text. The flower turned out to be a poppy, an unusual heraldic choice to say the least. Poppies were pretty but they were also grown illegally in Afghanistan for a very specialized market: doctors. Val had often relied on poppy-based draughts himself when ill. The narwhal was a standard heraldic symbol representing resources of the sea.

  “Formerly sworn to Haus Bismarck,” Greta said, reading over his shoulder. “I wonder what he did to get stripped of his title.”

  “I wonder, too.” Val wrote down the ex-knight’s address on the paper where he’d sketched a copy of Heinrich Ende’s brand. “I’d better be going. Greta, thanks for dinner—thanks for everything. This is a huge help.”