Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

by Jonathan Strahan

  All at once she felt the warmth of him, the clothes that still smelled of her husband, his breath in her ear. The cellar stairs would be in shadow, black as pitch. She would just lean forward a little, as though groping for the wall. A reverse grip on the weapon. A backwards thrust.

  Her left hand felt the touch of his fingers.

  “They told me you were beautiful.”

  “And wanton?”

  His fingers released her. “Yes, but they lied. That was their envy speaking. I’m a good judge of such things.”

  She turned the doorknob.

  “Take me first.”

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  “In the cellar, where Udi won’t hear. I want it once more before I die.”

  “You want no such thing. And I, even less.”

  She reached back to fondle him: there was proof of his lie. Then she bit down on the wailing in her soul and pushed open the door and slid her hand along the wall.

  Nothing.

  She lurched down a step, groping wildly. “Your machete is at the bottom of the stairs,” he said. “Don’t go for it, please.”

  She whirled, snarling. Time to kill, she was the savage one, she still had hands and teeth.

  And then her legs simply buckled and she dropped on the stairs. To fight this man was to die and save no one. Tear-blinded, she pawed at his feet. Babbling, apologizing, begging him to let Udi go.

  “It was a fine idea, the machete,” he said. “I hid your axe, of course, but I could do nothing about a weapon already in the house. And when you went to fetch these clothes I had only a moment. I might have overlooked the cellar, distracted as I was by your charms.”

  Mockery. She couldn’t care less. She pressed her head against his leg. Fighting not to howl, scared witless at the thought of Udi waking and rushing from his bedroom.

  He crouched down, placed a rough hand on her cheek.

  “You must try to understand.”

  “Go rot in the Pits.”

  “One day, no doubt,” he said. “But tonight there’s still work to be done. And you must help me.”

  “Help you kill us?”

  “No, Majka. Help me stop that man, and his long line of bloodsuckers. Help me ruin them for good. I’ve thought about it for years. Now at last it can be done.”

  He was a lunatic and no more. This was all much simpler than she’d supposed. “You should rest a little,” she said. “Sit down, there’s still soup in the kitchen, or I could bring you some—”

  He pulled her roughly to her feet. “You’ll bring me those bones.”

  “Bones?”

  “The bones of the Ve’saqra, woman. Haven’t you been listening? My master is a beast and the descendant of beasts, but he could win. The family has been washing out stains for generations, now, and their work is almost done. Only proof of the massacre will stop him. Can you give it to me?”

  She felt her own words doom her, but she spoke them all the same: “I can’t. I never would anyway. You’re his—dog.”

  Once again the man grew still.

  “It’s worse than that. I’m one of his bastard sons. My mother washed linens on his estate: she probably washed her own blood from the sheets, after he dragged her to his room. His spymaster took me from her when I was half Udi’s age, and when that old killer died I inherited the job. And I’ve done my share of killing. Three senators. Four heads of rival families. Never fear, I’ll spend eternity in the Pits.”

  He was sweating, his gaze naked at last.

  “There was a time before it started. A few mornings in our shack in the servants’ ghetto. My mother brought apple cores back from his kitchen. They were delicious, if you chopped them fine.”

  She couldn’t help him, or kill him. She did not know which of the two she should want. Perhaps they were one and the same.

  “The bones are the only proof,” he said. “Where are they, Majka? You can’t have lived here your whole life and not know.”

  She couldn’t speak. Udi’s life, the lives of all the villagers, caught in her throat.

  “Where?”he demanded.

  “They’re lost,” she said at last. “Graverobbers. It’s been four hundred years.”

  “Graverobbers made off with bones that scald at a touch?”

  “People will buy anything,” she said. “And there are ways of carrying them—”

  Wren’s eyes narrowed. Majka stammered: “I mean, couldn’t you? If there were any? In pails of water, or—”

  “Across the hayfield,” he interrupted, “in that ruin of a barn, six men await my signal, Majka. Chewing mutton, sharpening their spears.”

  “Just six?”

  “Six is quite enough. You have no fighters here to resist them. And they are terrible, terrible men.”

  “Send them away!” Majka forced herself to lean against him, touch his face with her fingertips. “Do it, please do it, send them off, just make up a story—”

  “They would never dare return to our master with the job undone.”

  “The job! Killing us, slaughtering us like a village of pigs.”

  He broke away from her, walked back to the stove. Crouching, he opened the iron door and warmed his hands.

  “They will not be turned,” he said, “and if I do not return by daybreak they will strike without me. They are too strong for Chamsarat, even if you faced them together. But with Shyram’s aid things might be different. There I saw at least twenty young men.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Half of them are Pankolo’s cousins.”

  “That is why I sent him there.”

  “You what?”

  “On his fastest horse. I told him the village would be dead by morning, if he did not bring aid. When he returns I shall fight beside them, and we will win.”

  A lunatic. Majka put her face in her hands. “Pankolo,” she said, “will never show his face in Chamsarat again.”

  “You don’t know that. For all of us there is a path beyond fear. Majka, where are the bones of your ancestors?”

  He waited, still crouching, one side of his face gold in the firelight, the other a featureless shadow. For a long moment she stood leaning against the wall by the cellar door. Then she stood straight and crossed the parlour and lifted her coat.

  THE DESCENT INTO the ravine was slippery and black. Wren carried the ash bucket and a pair of iron tongs, Majka the oil lamp. When the storm defeated the little flame she crept forward like a blind woman, trusting feet and fingertips. She had used this trail all her life, until four years ago.

  The bottom of the ravine was a maze of boulders and underbrush and gnarled pines. They crept upstream until the gorge narrowed and the river lapped the feet of the cliffs. Majka told him to remove his boots. “From here we wade upstream.”

  “Good God.”

  “Never mind the cold,” she said. “You won’t be feeling it long.”

  They wallowed and stumbled among the high black stones. While it lasted the cold was a torture, animals gnawing their flesh. But soon she felt the familiar weakening of those teeth. The river became chilly, then merely cool. “I hear a waterfall,” said Wren.

  She could see now, just barely: the clouds were unbroken, but had thinned enough to glaze the river’s surface with an eggwash of moonlight. There were the falls, broad and snaggletoothed. And there were the three squat boulders, hunkering together by the cliffside. Majka flailed across the river. She squeezed into a narrow gap between the two nearest boulders, and sighed. Before her stretched a narrow, crescent-shaped pool. The water flowing from it was almost hot.

  She clawed her way onto the ledge she remembered, then reached back and took the bucket and tongs from Wren. He floundered onto the ledge. Majka could barely see the man; he was a breathing blackness at her side.

  “Gods of death,” he said. “It’s all true. It happened. Eight thousand souls.”

  “My husband found the pool,” she said. “He was a very clever man. Grave robbers still waste time in the ruins, but they w
ere picked clean before I was born. My husband knew better. He guessed what our ancestors did with the bones.”

  “Into the river, eh? Where they’d draw no more attention.”

  “And start no more fires,” said Majka. “They were thrown from the old battlements, miles upstream. Of course they were mostly smashed to bits and washed away. But not here. The pool’s too deep. Whatever washes in here sinks to the bottom and stays.”

  “You’ve been back since he died?”

  She nodded. “This end’s a bit shallower. I used to sink straight down and dig with my toes and find coins—gold coins; they washed down here too. But they’re gone now.”

  “Why don’t you try the deep end?”

  “Because I can’t swim, that’s why. And it’s a death trap. The current tries to suck you down under those rocks. If it does, you’re finished. Horses couldn’t pull you out.”

  A weird sound came from above them. Feral, pitiful, pliant: it was the chelu, somewhere in the brush atop the cliff. Wren’s shadow moved. He was kneeling, removing her husband’s shirt.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m a very good swimmer.”

  “So was he.”

  In the darkness she felt him study her once more. Then his wet lips brushed her forehead: not an accident, nor quite a kiss. She placed a hand on his thigh, but he drew it away and took up the iron tongs. She saw him stand and begin to creep along the ledge.

  A minor miracle, then, the gray veil of the clouds torn away, and there he was in the moonlight, naked, pale gold, and Majka scrambled to her feet as he dived. For a moment he vanished, but then she had him once more, pulling for the depths, a trick of the water making him look small and fragile-limbed and anxious as a child.

  SPONDA THE SUET GIRL AND THE

  SECRET OF THE FRENCH PEARL

  ELLEN KLAGES

  TIMES WERE LEAN. The capital had been under siege for months and supplies were running low. In the provinces, drought and disease had decimated the herds and parched the fields at the height of the summer growth. Food prices had soared, and little was available, even on the clandestine market, which was bad news indeed for a scrawny thief called Natto.

  He stood at the counter of a tavern by the wharves one afternoon, nursing a tankard of sour ale and hoping to glean a lead that might put some coins in his rattling purse. Natto was not overly particular about where his profits came from, as long as they came steady and often, which they had not, recently.

  “It’s called the French Pearl,” a man named Petin said from one of the tables. “The emperor has offered a prize of a thousand royals for the man who discovers its secret and delivers it to him. A thousand royals!” He slapped his hand onto the battered wood for emphasis.

  Natto’s mouth twitched. Petin was no friend of his, nor was his companion Masquiat. They would not speak if they noticed his attention. He brought out his little knife and began to dig at his filthy nails, feigning disinterest as he listened.

  “All that for a pearl?” Masquiat asked.

  “Not just any pearl. Some say it has the power of everlasting life.” He looked over to the counter, smiled, then signaled for another cup of dark wine. “But its secret is hidden in a wizard’s lair.” He shook his head and drank.

  “I see,” said Masquiat. “And how do you come to know this?”

  “Three nights ago I made the acquaintance of a man, a tax collector, who had been traveling for a fortnight. Twitchy fellow, always scratching at one part or another. He was forced by weather to spend the night in a wretched village at the back of beyond, and saw the wizard himself.”

  “He told you?”

  “After a fashion. He was not used to strong drink. A small investment on my part loosened his tongue.” Petin shrugged. “After he’d had a few, I relieved him of his purse, and was quickly repaid.”

  “Where is he now? Describing your ugly face to the authorities?”

  “No. Sadly, late that evening, he lost his footing out on the docks. But not before he drew me a map.” Petin opened his coat, allowing a glimpse of ragged paper.

  “Then why are you not gone in search of this so-called treasure?”

  “What, do battle with a wizard? I have a bad leg.” Petin laughed. “And I like it here just fine. But wine does not come cheap. This map will bring a pretty penny when I find a fellow with a few pieces of silver who fancies himself an adventure.”

  “True,” Masquiat said. “But where will you find such a man?”

  “I have prospects. Tomorrow I’m meeting—”

  “How much?” Natto said, standing.

  Petin looked up. “I don’t barter with scum like you.”

  Natto laid his hand on his knife. “How much?”

  “More than your purse has seen in years.”

  “How much?”

  There was silence, the sort that made a few men reach for their weapons. Finally Petin smiled. It was not a friendly smile. “Ten silver crowns. Take it or leave it.”

  Natto had the money, but only just. Still, ten crowns against a prize of a thousand royals? He would be a fool not to take that wager. “Done,” he said. He dug the coins out and laid them, one by one, onto the wood.

  Petin picked the first up and bit it to be sure, then reached into his coat and took out the map. “It is yours.”

  The paper was rough, and the map was crude, but Natto recognized the capital and its bay and the steep mountain ridges surrounding it. One road wound up and through them, a jagged line that ended at a labeled X. “Fossepuante?”

  At the sound of that name, Masquiat quickly made the sign of warding. He stared at Petin, who laughed.

  “Ah, now even you see why I was in no hurry to make the journey.” Petin quickly scooped the coins from the table and jabbed his knife into the wood. “I would wish you good luck,” he said, waving a hand, dismissing Natto, “but in times like these, one hates to waste a wish.”

  THE WHITEWASHED ROOM of the outbuilding behind the inn was small and extremely tidy, two walls lined with shelves of jars and bottles containing powders and tinctures of a hundred hues and consistencies, all neatly labeled. A wide table ran the full length of a third wall. At one end stood a row of brown crocks filled with a pale opalescent substance. At the other, next to a stack of leather-bound books, paper flags sticking out from a dozen pages, a chemist’s apparatus consisting of flame and stand and beaker bubbled with a smell faintly reminiscent of a Sunday roast.

  Standing at the center of the table a trim, bespectacled young woman in a linen smock, her dark hair pulled back into a tail, took up a knife and a thick block of suet and minced the brittle beef fat into a small pile. She weighed the shreds, made a notation in a lined journal, and added the mass to the beaker, stirring it with a glass rod. She was reaching for a jar marked ‘Potash’ when a knock came at the door.

  “Anna?”

  “Who’s there?” she called.

  “Just me, Sponda.”

  “Oh. Come in, come in.”

  A red-haired girl entered the room.

  “This is a nice surprise,” the chemist said, kissing her on the cheek. “I didn’t think I’d see you until supper.”

  “I wanted to bring this back, before it got mixed up with my kitchen spices.” She set down a jar marked ‘Dried Rosehips’. “It worked like a charm. That so-called tax-collector only stayed one night.”

  “A bed full of itching powder will do that.” Anna replaced the jar on its proper shelf.

  “Do you really think he was here to steal your—?” She glanced at the row of crocks.

  “The emperor is offering a thousand crowns as a prize, Sponda. That’s temptation enough.”

  “I suppose. How’s it coming?”

  “I made a new batch this morning, and added both lime and potash. That helped the texture. It’s creamy as butter, and spreads as smooth.”

  “But—?”

  “But the flavor still isn’t right. Nor the color. Too white. This morning I boiled some carrots.
Once the paste dries, I’ll grind it into powder. A pinch should make the spread yellow enough for a proper presentation.”

  Sponda stuck a finger into one of the crocks and licked off a bit of the creamy substance. “It doesn’t taste bad,” she said. “Makes me think of a farm, wholesome and fresh. But I don’t think I’d care for it on my morning toast.”

  “I know. And it’s that last bit of caring that’s going to get us the prize, if I can figure it out before anyone else does.” She smiled. “The first man-made, edible fat. Cheap, plentiful, and will last for weeks without going rancid. Imagine what that will mean for the poor, not to mention the navy, which I think is the emperor’s first concern.”

  Sponda licked her finger again. “It does need a little something.”

  “I know, and I’ve got a few ideas. We’re getting close.” Anna smiled. “But it won’t get done if I stand here talking.”

  “I’ll leave you to your experiments.” Sponda went to the door, stopped, and blew a kiss. “Supper’s at six. Raisin clootie for dessert.”

  NATTO WAS UNCERTAIN of his purchase; Petin could not be trusted. But having spent the silver, he readied himself for a journey. He stole a full wineskin and a loaf of bread, and bedecked his coat with a handful of rude charms and amulets in case there was a wizard.

  He made further enquiries about the village, Fossepuante, and was not reassured when, a number of times, the response was widened eyes and the sign of warding. But he had been able to discover that there was an inn. Not the finest lodgings, although one man said that his supper had been the most delicious suet pudding he had ever eaten.

  This was the first good news Natto had gotten since he bought the map. He fancied himself a gourmet—although glutton would be closer—and nothing delighted him more than a good pudding.

  Putting that thought ahead of any others, he set out from the capital on a crisp autumn morning. Once he passed the army checkpoints that ringed the city he had the road to himself. It narrowed as it climbed, the sound of his horse’s hooves muffled by a carpet of fallen leaves, scarlet and golden and copper. The trail had not been much traveled; few had business in the region beyond the cliffs, which was populated more by cattle than people.