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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Tink awoke with Valentine’s hand brushing her cheek. At first she thought she had died and had gone to someplace better. But when she touched his face and saw her aged hand, she knew she was still an old woman. Her pillow was moist with tears.

  His eyes gleamed. Perhaps not as brightly as they once had, but enough to cause a stutter in her metronome heart. “I’ve come to take you to the Festival.”

  That caused a jolt of alarm. “But my work—”

  “Is finished. Completed to your every specification. Although nobody can tell me what your instructions mean.”

  His face was smudged with dirt.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been gardening,” he said, and winked.

  Valentine carried her to her cart. She dozed with her head on his shoulder as he drove to the Palazzo. Once, when the jouncing of the cart roused her, she glimpsed what might have been an honor guard with shining epaulettes and flapping pennants. It may have been a dream.

  Tink dozed again during the funicular ride up the Spire. The view did not transfix her: she had seen it every year for the past sixty (measured, as always, by the beating of her failing heart). She preferred the drowsy sensation of resting in Valentine’s arms, no matter how chaste the embrace. Her glimpses of Nycthemeron, between dreams and sighs, showed an unfamiliar city.

  Ah, she recalled. Yes. The Festival. It had seemed dreadfully important once, this final gift. But she was too exhausted and too full of regrets to care.

  “Why do you cry, Timesmith?”

  “I’m a foolish old woman. I’ve spent my entire life just to have one hour with you.”

  She closed her eyes. When next she opened them, Valentine was setting her gently upon a cushioned chair in the gilded grand ballroom. It was, she noticed, a place of honor beside Queen Perjumbellatrix. The queen said something, but it was loud in the ballroom. Tink nodded, expressed her thanks, then returned to her dreams.

  A jostling woke her, several minutes or decades later. Her chair floated toward the balcony. Valentine lifted it, as did the courtier in the scarlet cravat, and several others whom she felt she ought to recognize but didn’t.

  Silence fell. All eyes turned to Tink.

  She stood, with Valentine’s assistance. (His hands were so strong. So warm. So young.)

  “This is for you,” she said to Nycthemeron.

  The fog brightened, then thinned, then dissipated. A brilliant sun emerged in a sky the color of Valentine’s eyes. The Spire cast a shadow across the sprawling castle-city. Its tip pierced the distant gardens where so many had labored according to Tink’s specifications.

  Nycthemeron had become a sundial.

  Cheers echoed through the city, loud even to Tink’s feeble ears high atop the Spire.

  Everyone understood what Tink had done. She had ended Nycthemeron’s exile. She had given the people a future.

  Tink collapsed. Her metronome heart sounded its final tickticktick. Her time had run out.

  But not quite.

  Time understood that this magnificent work, this living sundial called Nycthemeron, was an expression of her love for Valentine. She had set him free.

  Tink found herself in a patch of grass, staring up at a blue sky. The grass was soft, the sky was bright, and her body didn’t ache.

  “Ah, you’re awake.”Valentine leaned over her, eclipsing the sky with his beautiful face. He wasn’t, she noticed, wearing the cormorant mask. Nor his ribbons. And his shirt was new. “I have something to show you,” he said.

  When Tink took his hand, she saw that her skin was no longer wrinkled, no longer spotted and weak.

  These were the Spire-top gardens. But everything looked new and different in the sunlight. Even the trees were strange: row upon row upon row of them. Strange, and yet she felt she somehow knew them.

  Valentine saw the expression on her face. He said, “They’re intercalary trees. It seemed a waste to toss the seeds after they’d been spent. So I planted them.”

  Seeds? Ah… Tink remembered when she’d first met Valentine, decades ago, when he’d wanted to charm a flaxen-haired beauty. Back when Tink had been young.

  The first time she had been young.

  And time, knowing it had failed to win Tink’s heart, had given her a parting gift, then set her free.

  AMOR VINCIT OMNIA

  K. J. PARKER

  K. J. Parker is the author of eleven fantasy novels, including the “Fencer,” “Scavenger,” and “Engineer” trilogies, as well as standalone novels The Company and The Folding Knife, and novellas “Purple and Black” and “Blue and Gold.” According to biographical notes, Parker has worked in law, journalism, and numismatics, and now writes and makes things out of wood and metal. Upcoming is a new novel, The Hammer. Parker is married to a solicitor and lives in southern England.

  Usually, the problem was getting the witnesses to talk.

  …He just walked down the street looking at buildings and they caught fire. No, he didn’t do anything, like wave his arms about or stuff like that, he just, I don’t know, looked at them…

  This time, the problem was getting them to shut up.

  …Stared at this old guy and his head just sort of crumpled, you know, like a piece of paper when you screw it into a ball? Just stared at him, sort of annoyed, really, like the guy had trodden on his foot, and then his head just…

  As he listened, the observer made notes; Usque Ad Peric; Unam Sanc (twice); ?Mundus Verg ?? variant. He also nodded his head and made vague noises of sympathy and regret, and tried not to let his distaste show. But the smell bothered him; burnt flesh, which unfortunately smells just a bit like roasted meat (pork, actually), which was a nuisance because he’d missed lunch; burnt bone, which is just revolting. His moustache would smell of smoke for two days, no matter how carefully he washed it. He stopped to query a point; when he made the old woman vanish, was there a brief glow of light, or—? No? No, that’s fine. And he jotted down; Choris Anthrop, but no light; ?Strachylides?

  The witness was still talking, but he’d closed his eyes; and then Thraso from the mill came up behind him and shot him in the back, and nothing happened, and then he turned around real slow and he pointed at Thraso, and Thraso just—

  He frowned, stopped the witness with a raised hand. “He didn’t know—”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t know he was there. This man—” Always hopeless at names. “The miller. He didn’t know the miller was there.”

  “No, Thraso crept up on him real quiet. Shot him in the back at ten paces. Arrow should’ve gone right through him and out the other side. And then he turned round, like I just said, and—”

  “You’re sure about that. He didn’t hear him, or look round.”

  “He was busy,”the witness said.“He was making Cartusia’s head come off, just by looking at it. And that’s when Thraso—”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The witness carried on talking about stuff that clearly mattered to him, but which didn’t really add anything. He tuned out the voice, and tried to write the word, but it was surprisingly difficult to make himself do it. Eventually, when he succeeded, it came out scrawled and barely legible, as though he’d written it with his left hand;

  Lorica?

  “Unam Sanctam,” the Precentor said (and Gennasius was leaning back in his chair, hands folded on belly, his I’ve-got-better-things-to-do pose), “is, of course, commonly used by the untrained, since the verbal formula is indefinite and, indeed, often varies from adept to adept. Usque ad Periculum, by the same token, is frequently encountered in these cases, for much the same reason. They are, of course, basic intuitive expressions of frustration and rage, strong emotions which—”

  “It says here,” Poteidanius interrupted, “he also did Mundus Verg. That’s not verbal-indefinite.”

  The Precentor glanced down at the notes on the table in front of him. “You’ll note,” he said, “that our observer wa
s of the opinion that a variant was used, not Mundus Vergens itself. The variants, of which Licinianus lists twenty-six, include some forms which have been recorded as indefinite. The same would seem to apply to Choris Anthropou.”

  “Quite,” said the very old man at the end, whose name he could never remember. “Strachylides’ eight variants, three of which have been recorded as occurring spontaneously.” So there, he thought, as Poteidanius shrugged ungraciously. “I remember a case back in ’Fifty-Six. Chap was a striker in a blacksmith’s shop, didn’t know a single word of Parol. But he could do five variants of Choris in the vernacular.”

  “Our observer,” the Precentor said, “specifically asked if there was an aureola, and the witness was quite adamant.”

  “The third variant,” Gennasius said. “Suggests an untrained of more than usual capacity, or else a man with a really deep-seated grudge. I still don’t see why you had to drag us all out here. Surely your department can deal with this sort of thing without a full enclave.”

  He took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. “If you’d care to look at paragraph fourof the report,” he said, trying to keep his voice level and reasonably pleasant, “you’ll see that—”

  “Oh, that.” Gennasius was shaking his head in that singularly irritating way. “Another suspected instance of Lorica. If I had half an angel for every time some graduate observer’s thought he’s found an untrained who’s cracked Lorica—”

  “I have interviewed the observer myself,” the Precentor said—trying to do gravitas, but it just came out pompous. “He is an intelligent young man with considerable field experience,” he went on, “not the kind to imagine the impossible or to jump to far-fetched conclusions on the basis of inadequate evidence. Gentlemen, I would ask you to put aside your quite reasonable scepticism for one moment and simply look at the evidence with an open mind. If this really is Lorica—”

  “It doesn’t exist.” Gennasius snapped out the words with a degree of passion the Precentor wouldn’t have believed him capable of. “It’s a legend. A fairy tale. There are some things that simply aren’t possible. Lorica’s one of them.”

  There was a short, rather painful silence. Raw emotion, like raw chicken, upset elderly gentlemen of regular habits. Then the Preceptor said gently, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred human beings would say exactly the same thing about magic.” He allowed himself to dwell on the word, because Gennasius hated it so. “And of course, they would be right. There is no such thing as magic. Instead, there is a branch of natural philosophy of which we are adepts and the rest of the world is blissfully ignorant. Gentlemen, think about it, please. It may well not be Lorica. But if it is, if there’s the slightest chance it could be, we have to do something about it. Now.”

  “I’m sorry,” the young man said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  The Precentor smiled. “Of course you haven’t.” He half-filled two of his notoriously small glasses with wine and handed one to the young man, who took it as if the stem was red-hot. “For one thing, it doesn’t exist.”

  The young man looked at him unhappily. “Ah,” he said.

  “At least,”the Precentor went on, “we believe it doesn’t exist. We hope like hell it doesn’t exist. If it does—” He produced a synthetic shudder of horror that actually became a real one.

  The young man put his glass down carefully on the table. “Is it some kind of weapon?”

  The Precentor couldn’t help smiling. “Quite the reverse,” he said. “That’s the whole point. Lorica’s completely harmless, you might say. It’s a defense.”

  “Ah.”

  “A total defense.” The Preceptor paused and watched. He’d chosen young Framea for his intelligence and perceptiveness. This could be a test for him.

  He passed. “A total defense,” he said. “Against everything? All known forms?”

  The Preceptor nodded slowly. “All known forms. And physical weapons too. And fire, water, death by suffocation and falling from a great height. Possibly some diseases too, we don’t know.”

  “That would be—”Framea frowned, and the Preceptor imagined a great swelling cloud of implications filling the young man’s mind. He didn’t envy him that. “That could be bad,” he said.

  “Extremely. An individual we couldn’t harm or kill; therefore outside our control. Even if he was a mediocre adept with limited power, knowledge of the basic offensive forms together with absolute invulnerability, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Even if his intentions were benign to begin with, the mere possession of such power would inevitably turn him into a monster. Hence,” he added gently, “our concern.”

  “But I still don’t quite—” Framea looked at him, reminding him vaguely of a sheep. “If it doesn’t exist—”

  “Ah.” The Preceptor held up a hand. “That’s the question, isn’t it? All we know is that it could exist. Blemmyes, a hundred and seventy years ago, proved that it could exist; his reasoning and his mathematics have been rigorously examined and found to be perfect. There is a potential for such a form. Of course, nobody has yet been able to produce it—”

  “You mean people have tried?”

  The Preceptor nodded slowly. “Unofficially, you might say, but yes. Well, you can imagine, the temptation would be irresistible. Some of the finest minds—But, thankfully, none of them succeeded. Several of them, indeed, wrote papers outlining their researches, basically arguing that if they couldn’t do it, nobody could—flawed logic, you’ll agree, but when you’re dealing with men of such exceptional vanity—”

  “I think I see,” Framea interrupted. “Trained adepts have tried, using proper scientific method, and they’ve all failed. But an untrained—”

  “Exactly.” The Preceptor was relieved; he’d been right about the boy after all. “An untrained might well succeed where an adept would fail, because the untrained often possess a degree of intuitive power that tends to atrophy during the course of formal education. An untrained might be able to do it, simply because he doesn’t know it’s impossible.”

  Framea nodded eagerly. “And an untrained, by definition—”

  “Quite. Unstable, probably mentally disturbed by the power inside him which he doesn’t understand or know how to control; if not already malignant by nature, he would rapidly become so. And with Lorica—Really, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  Framea hadn’t been cold for as long as he could remember. It was always warm in the Studium; warm, unpleasantly warm or downright hot,depending on who’d been nagging the Magister ad Necessariis most recently. Old men feel the cold, and the adepts of the Studium didn’t have to worry about the cost of fuel.

  He pulled his coat up round his ears and quickened his pace. He hadn’t been out in the dark for a long time, either. It didn’t frighten him (“an adept of the Studium fears nothing, because he has nothing to fear;” first term, first day, first lecture) but it made him feel uncomfortable. As did the task that lay ahead of him.

  You will, of course, have to seduce a woman—

  Well, fine. And the rest of the day’s your own. He winced as he recalled his reaction.

  (“I see,” he’d said, after a moment of complete silence. “I don’t know how.”

  “Oh, it’s quite straightforward. So I’m told.”

  “Is there, um, a book I could—?”

  “Several.”)

  More than several, in fact; from Flaminian’s Art of Seduction, three hundred years old, eight thousand lines of impeccable hexametric verse, to Bonosius Brunellus’ On the Seduction of Women, three hundred pages with notes and appendices, entirely drawn from the works of earlier authors. The librarian had given him a not-you-as-well look when he’d asked for them, and they’d been no help at all. He’d asked Porphyrius, the only adept in the Studium who might possibly have had first-hand experience of such things, but he’d just laughed like a drain and walked away.

  Lorica, he reminded himself.

  The inn was, in fact, just another farmhouse, where the
farmer’s wife sold beer and cider in her kitchen, and you could pay a half-turner and sleep in the hayloft; not the sort of inn where you could rely on finding a prostitute at any hour of the day or night. In fact, he doubted very much whether they had prostitutes out here in the sticks. Probably, it was one of those areas of activity like brewing or laundry; you only got specialist professionals in the towns. Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  “You what?” the woman demanded.

  He repeated the question. It was unambiguous and politely phrased. The woman scowled at him and walked away.

  He took his mug of beer, which he had no intention of drinking, and sat down in a corner of the room. Everybody had turned to look at him when he came in, and again when he asked the question, but they’d lost interest. He stretched out his legs under the table, closed his eyes and tried to think.

  (“You will, of course, have to seduce a woman,” the Preceptor had said. “To use as a source.”

  The second statement was infinitely more shocking than the first. “That’s illegal,” he said.

  “Yes, well.”The Preceptor had frowned at him.“I hereby authorise you to use all means necessary. I suppose you’ll want that in writing.”

  “Yes, please. Also,” he’d added, “I don’t know how.”)

  He reached into his pocket and took out the book. It was only just light enough for reading, even with Bia Kai Kratos to enhance his eyesight. He wondered if anybody had ever read a book in this room before and decided no, almost certainly not. He tried to concentrate on the analysis of the necessary forms, which were difficult, abstruse and in some cases downright bizarre; not all that different from the exercises he’d read about in Flaminian and Brunellus, come to that. The thought that he was going to have to perform both the forms and the other stuff simultaneously made him feel quite ill.

  “Excuse me.”

  He looked up and saw a woman. At first he guessed she was about thirty-five, but she seemed to get younger as he looked at her. She was very pale, almost milk-white, with mouse-colored hair that seemed to drip off her head, like a leak in the roof. He wondered what she wanted.