The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  Then out of the last armful of cloth-stuff, a head-dress of uncertain design but suggesting once having been plumed, and a ragged mask, skull-like and dog-like and altogether repellent—these emerged and finally covered our king’s handsomeness, so that all I could recognise him by was his bearing within the threads and tatters, by his stillness when all about were leaning to each other, and whispering, and shifting from foot to foot. His stillness seemed to me an actual substance, like a smoke or smell, that spread out among his followers and froze them too in their places, turned the guard to stone who had just ushered the house servants out of the chamber.

  It had no need to still the Captain and me, for we were already motionless, all but unbreathing above the gathering. My eyes took in the last tiniest movements: the settling of reeds on the flags, the wagging shaft of light from a knife-blade as it rocked to a halt. The woman herself, positioned at the scorpion’s head where the knives were laid densest, moved not a hair or a finger, but against the King’s fearsome stillness—I felt it, I almost saw it—she poured out her own, which was of a different make, radiant and graceful, and careless of all the fear that infected the air around.

  Several moments of perfect stillness passed. Then His Majesty drew a mighty breath; it whistled in through the mask’s apertures; it swelled the chest of his webbed and ragged drapery.

  When he spoke, it was with a voice not his own. Monstrously deep, was this voice, and breathy with the breath of different lungs, not a king’s, not any kind of man’s. Vast hollows full of smoke and stone were these caves of lungs, and the chamber rang enlarged with the breath and voice of them, and the air stung with the burning, with the danger introduced to the place.

  The woman regarded him, uncowed by the wordless noise spilling from the mask, or by the force with which its sounding filled and tested the limits of the room.

  And then I did not see what she did, or how the king-monster next moved, for the reeds on the floor began to hiss together and to rattle and to rise, and the knives to glint and stand, some on their handles, some on the tips of their blades.

  Then they leaped up, and I gasped—but they did not come at us. At the scorpion’s head they fitted their blades together, and grew and worked against each other; along its spine they danced up in an arch and bobbed there, winking. The reeds flew out, to make a fine weaving, to indicate an outline: a long sketchy crocodile-head, muscled shoulders, strong haunches, between them a bulky belly flattened as yet to the floor. The tail went from wisps to cable at the foot of the platform, and the knifelets busied and tinkled along its length, then firmed in their places, and even the reedy parts began to smoothen out, and their green-ness to gleam, and when I looked up to the rest it was bulked there clearly alive, trembling with a pulse from some big magicked heart inside it, swelling and shrinking and swelling with its ongoing breath. And eager, it was, restrained—only just—by the King’s voice pouring through the mask.

  Completed, the creature described a great hunched curve, nearly to my eye-level on the high platform; all men were dolls beside it, and the shepherdess was the smallest doll of all. Spiked head to tail-tip, was the beast, with knife-blades become spines, and its claws were of the same sharpness. Its mouth could not contain all its mass of teeth, but two of them must needle upward and another two down, outside its lips of glinting mail. From its nostrils puffed an air choking in its heat and smell, and the thing did not care that we could not breathe it, we courtiers, we watchers. All its attention, as a cat’s is with a sparrow, was directed from the limits of its poised body, its bunched muscles, through its dazzle-yellow eyes, upon the woman before it, standing in my view like a priest between candles, between the two gleaming uprights of its projecting teeth.

  As the King spoke, it huffed a breath at her. She blinked, but no more than that; her clothing sizzled dry at the front, and a lock of her hair glowed and fell to white ash on her bodice. She gazed at the teeth massed before her—we all did, for they were like lanterns in the dark chamber—at the tongue, golden, curved and crackled on the surface, and within the cracks red, bright as blown-upon coals.

  The King ceased his awful ventriloquy. The great lizard grinned, or perhaps only prepared its mouth. It did not pounce like a cat, or like a cat toy with its prey; in a bite it had taken the woman in down to the thighs; in a second one, she was gone, and the thing was reared-headed, tossing her back into its throat as a bird must do a beakful of water, swallowing her down a neck that it stretched out as if purposely to show her traveling down its length and narrowness. The fire-tongue flailed against the scaly lips and the skin stretched and winked, and I will never forget the sound of the lizard gulping—relishless, only mechanical, the kiss and slide of searing flesh within its throat.

  The Captain hissed so hard, I felt his spittle on my cheek. “Is what happens when you do not marry as you are told!”

  He shook with fear, though, and I did not. Nonsense, I thought. As if the King himself would go through such a business for only me, a captain’s daughter of his vast military. Still it did speak to me, this horror before me and my father’s spittle cool on my skin. It told me the size of his rage; it showed me the enormity of refusing a king’s, or a father’s, demands. I could not deny that it impressed itself upon me as a lesson: however enraged the Captain was with my refusal of that foolish soldier, his wrath when he learned the rest of it would be something else again to witness.

  Then there was no more space or time or breath for learning, for the creature sprang and bucked as if speared. Flame spouted from its mouth, shrivelling the flesh and igniting the clothing of a guard, and throwing him back so that he fell, and rolled, and tumbled into the cat-pit. Forgotten, he was, immediately, by me and all the company, because the lizard folded, flopped open again and contorted, hugely, dangerously above and below us. It leaped and whipped, growling gasps in its throat, fire and fumes sputtering at its lips. It flung itself to the floor, coiled and writhed there; its tail broke the wheel in a single swipe, and set the pieces burning; it coughed forth a fire-ball that flew against a wall and burst, leaving a vast black star-shape on the stone.

  And then, the belly-skin of the beast opened, like a dreadful flower, like a house-fire bursting up through thatch and timbers. Think of any bird you have gutted, any fish or four-legged thing; add fire and magic and stupendous size to the wonders of those internals, and then picture from the glare, from the garden of flame, from the welter of dragon-juices, through the smoke of its dying gasps, a small, cool woman climbing towards you.

  The sight of her froze the Captain faster in his fear than had any of the lizard’s cavorting. “No!” he whispered at my ear, as I leaned out elated, all but cheering.

  She stepped down free of the dying ruin of the creature, to stand on a dagger-shape of flayed skin like some weird cindered carpet, the beast’s last breaths heaving behind her. “Sir!” she said, to the King and to the power within and beyond him. “You see you are matched and bettered! I tell you!” She laughed, which in that chamber full of fear, the courtiers piled wide-eyed on the steps where they had scrambled to escape the monster’s flailing, was the clearest, refreshingest sound, like water filling a cup when you are thirsty. “I tell you, sir: my Lord’s and my Lady’s powers are greater than myself, and longer than my life. To kill me, foolish man, makes no mark upon Them. And should you succeed, further I tell you this: Does anyone tell my life, or pen it onto skin, or rush-paper, or read it off again, or even only hear it said, at nurse’s knee or among the gossips in the marketplace, they will be blessed, and the women of their family kept strong and fruitful and safe in childbed. My faith is pure and powerful, here and beyond the grave; it is only the very hem of the mantle of the King and Queen who work the world, from the depths of the seas to the heights of the stars, and every continent and creature in between.”

  The Captain was gone from behind me; others had taken his place, pressing forward, staring down, marvelling at the beast’s remains, the straight-backed wom
an defying the King, the smouldering rack, the flaming wheel, the burnt guard dead in the pit.

  And then there he was, my father at the foot of the steps, pushing free of the crowd, drawing his sword.

  “I will rid you of her, Your Majesty!” he cried.

  He strode to her; she watched him come, unmoved, unafraid ,a woman indulging a child. I so strongly expected his humiliation, his defeat, her continuing, that I waited in utter calm as he slashed her throat through to the spine-bones, as she fell, as she bled, her heart living on, unaware that the head was gone, flinging and spreading the bright blood on the charred dragon-skin, slowing, slowing, stopping. My father stood over her the while; we all stood over her, attentive, as closely as the dragon had attended in the moments before it ate her.

  But she only died, the shepherdess, and was dead; there were no more miracles to her.

  I cried out, loud and high in the huge room under the smoking roof-beams. They held me back from clambering over the railing, from crawling underneath it and smashing my own life away on the flags before my father. “She is maddened,” someone said. “She should never have been allowed to see—it has unhinged her.” But I was clear in my own mind, afflicted indeed by a terrible sanity, a terrible seeing of this moment as it truly was, with the miracle woman gone from the world and me still prisoned in it, with my lover and my baby and my punishments awaiting, with my angry father—while she was free, dissolved into her faith, glorifying her gods among all the saints there. Such a stab of jealousy I suffered! Such rage did I try to loose, at her and my father both, such grief that a soul so freshly known, so marvellous, was so quickly snatched from my sight.

  They tried to help me down; I would not be helped. They had to bind and carry me, and quickly, for the roof was fully afire now, and the King and his closest had been hurried away. My father met us at the foot of the stairs, took me up and slung me like a carcass over his shoulder. I banged away my tears against his back, and strained, as we passed the swollen smouldering corse of the dragon, its juices running out black, to see the body and the skewed head of the saint who had burst him open with her holiness. She lay there uncovered; she would not even be buried with her own rites and customs, but roof slates would rain upon her as she stewed and shrank in the lizard-blood. Beams would crush her bones; fire would consume them.

  My father carried me out, through the long halls of the prison and into the day. The courtiers and councillors and soldiers flowed out with us, exclaiming, into the crowd, into the clamour of the town; my noise went unheard among them, and the tears ran unnoticed through my eyebrows, down my forehead, and onto the leather of the Captain’s back-plate, drawing long dark lines there.

  THE TASTE OF NIGHT

  PAT CADIGAN

  Pat Cadigan is the author of about a hundred short stories and fourteen books, two of which, Synners and Fools, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. She was born in New York, grew up in Massachusetts, and spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area. She now lives in London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, her son, musician and composer Robert M. Fenner, the Supreme Being, Miss Kitty Calgary, and co-conspirator, writer, and raconteuse Amanda Hemingway. She is pretty sure there isn’t a more entertaining household.

  The taste of night rather than the falling temperature woke her. Nell curled up a little more and continued to doze. It would be a while before the damp chill coming up from the ground could get through the layers of heavy cardboard to penetrate the sleeping bag and blanket cocooning her. She was fully dressed and her spare clothes were in the sleeping bag, too—not much but enough to make good insulation. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, though, she would have to visit a laundromat because phew.

  Phew was one of those things that didn’t change; well, not so far, anyway. She hoped it would stay that way. By contrast, the taste of night was one of her secret great pleasures although she still had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Now and then something almost came to her, almost. But when she reached for it either in her mind or by actually touching something, there was nothing at all.

  Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.

  Memory sprang up in her mind with the feel of pale blue stretched long and tight between her hands.

  The blind discover that their other senses, particularly hearing, intensify to compensate for the lack. The deaf can be sharp-eyed but also extra sensitive to vibration, which is what sound is to the rest of us.

  However, those who lose their sense of smell find they have lost their sense of taste as well because the two are so close. To lose feeling is usually a symptom of a greater problem. A small number of people feel no pain but this puts them at risk for serious injury and life-threatening illnesses.

  That doctor had been such a patient woman. Better yet, she had had no deep well of stored-up suspicion like every other doctor Marcus had taken her to. Nell had been able to examine what the doctor was telling her, touching it all over, feeling the texture. Even with Marcus’s impatience splashing her like an incoming tide, she had been able to ask a question.

  A sixth sense? Like telepathy or clairvoyance?

  The doctor’s question had been as honest as her own and Nell did her best to make herself clear.

  If there were some kind of extra sense, even a person who had it would have a hard time explaining it. Like you or me trying to explain sight to someone born blind.

  Nell had agreed and asked the doctor to consider how the other five senses might try to compensate for the lack.

  That was where the memory ended, leaving an aftertaste similar to night, only colder and with a bit of sour.

  Nell sighed, feeling comfortable and irrationally safe. Feeling safe was irrational if you slept rough. Go around feeling safe and you wouldn’t last too long. It was just that the indented area she had found at the back of this building—cinema? auditorium?—turned out to be as cozy as it had looked. It seemed to have no purpose except as a place where someone could sleep unnoticed for a night or two. More than two would have been pushing it, but that meant nothing to some rough sleepers. They’d camp in a place like this till they wore off all the hidden. Then they’d get seen and kicked out. Next thing you knew, the spot would be fenced off or filled in so no one could ever use it again. One less place to go when there was nowhere to stay.

  Nell hated loss, hated the taste: dried-out bitter crossed with salty that could hang on for days, weeks, even longer. Worse, it could come back without warning and for no reason except that, perhaps like rough sleepers, it had nowhere else to go. There were other things that tasted just as bad to her but nothing worse, and nothing that lingered for anywhere nearly as long, not even the moldy-metal tang of disappointment.

  After a bit, she realized the pools of color she’d been watching behind her closed eyes weren’t the remnants of a slow-to-fade dream but real voices of real humans, not too far away, made out of the same stuff she was; either they hadn’t noticed her or they didn’t care.

  Nell uncurled slowly—never make any sudden moves was another good rule for rough sleepers—and opened her eyes. An intense blue-white light blinded her with the sound of a cool voice in her right ear:

  Blue-white stars don’t last long enough for any planets orbiting them to develop intelligent life. Maybe not any life, even the most rudimentary. Unless there is a civilization advanced enough to seed those worlds with organisms modified to evolve at a faster rate. That might beg the question of why an advanced civilization would do that. But the motives of a civilization that advanced would/could/might seem illogical if not incomprehensible to any not equally developed.

  Blue-white memory stretched farther this time: a serious-faced young woman in a coffee shop, watching a film clip on a notebook screen. Nell had sneaked a look at it on her way to wash up in the women’s restroom. It took her a little while to realize that she had had a glimpse of something to do with what had been happening to her, or more precisely, why it was happening, what it was supposed
to mean. On the heels of that realization had come a new one, probably the most important: they were communicating with her.

  Understanding always came to her at oblique angles. The concept of that missing sixth sense, for instance—when she finally became aware of it, she realized that it had been lurking somewhere in the back of her mind for a very, very long time, years and years, a passing notion or a ragged fragment of a mostly forgotten dream. It had developed so slowly that she might have lived her whole life without noticing it, instead burying it under more mundane concerns and worries and fears.

  Somehow it had snagged her attention—a mental pop-up window. Marcus had said everyone had an occasional stray thought about something odd. Unless she was going to write a weird story or draw a weird picture, there was no point in obsessing about it.

  Was it the next doctor who had suggested she do exactly that—write a weird story or draw a weird picture, or both? Even if she had really wanted to, she couldn’t. She knew for certain by then that she was short a sense, just as if she were blind or deaf.

  Marcus had said he didn’t understand why that meant she had to leave home and sleep on the street. She didn’t either, at the time. But even if she had understood enough to tell him that the motives of a civilization that advanced would/could/might seem illogical if not incomprehensible to any not equally developed, all it would have meant to him was that she was, indeed, crazy as a bedbug, unquote.

  The social worker he had sent after her hadn’t tried to talk her into a hospital or a shelter right away but the intent was deafening. Every time she found Nell it drowned everything else out. Nell finally had to make her say it just to get some peace. For a few days after that, everything was extra scrambled. She was too disoriented to understand anything. All she knew was that they were bombarding her with their communication and her senses were working overtime, trying to make up for her inadequacy.