Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

by Jonathan Strahan

  “You being a wiseass?”

  “No. I feel her emotions. She’s excited about being free, down on herself about not being strong enough to refuse to do the evil he made her do, and open about how they planned to use us the way we meant to use them.”

  “What?”

  “They knew we were in the forest from the start. They knew they couldn’t avoid a collision with the Taken. There’s bad blood from olden times. The mule people serve them, raising most of the food for the people at the ruin. They have been making bang stuff for over a month. They never thought we’d find the road and the bridge. They thought those were hidden too well. They didn’t know we had One-Eye in our trick bag.”

  Elmo muttered something about adding a hundred bricks and chucking that bag into a handy river. Then, “Am I wrong, guessing your new girlfriend wouldn’t be running loose if the Lady hadn’t been interested?”

  I had abandoned all hope of ever clarifying my relationship with the Lady. “Probably.”

  “So even if Whisper and them are dead and half their troops besides, them that survived will come after us as fast as they can stagger. This shit ain’t going near as fast as I hoped. See if you can get her to help.”

  “How? Doing what?”

  “How the fuck do I know? Somehow. Anything. Don’t look at me. I’m day labor. I don’t get paid to think. I been told that plenty.”

  A WAY TO make kegs bang bigger slithered into my head. I told Elmo. One-Eye disagreed. “One of them gobble jockeys told me, knock a hole…”

  “I got it from Blind Emon. The inventor. We pack those sacks of beads around each keg. She sends a curse and the Bam! is way bigger.”

  Blind Emon was feeling vindictive. She hoped people would be on the bridge when she made her wish. She did not much care who.

  One-Eye wanted to use burning rope fuses. I wondered where he would get them. Elmo said, “They’d smell the smoke.”

  “If we do it like Croaker and his new honey want, we have to start all over to pack the stuff the way she wants.”

  “Then you better not waste time complaining.”

  I demonstrated the way Emon wanted the bead sacks installed. “And stop asking why. I just know there’ll be more bang.”

  Later, One-Eye announced, “Time to get quiet. Company is coming.”

  For sure. The enemy, neither sneaking nor hurrying. They had no one pushing them. Their command authority remained engaged with the Master. Chatter suggested that two Taken were gone forever.

  I hoped Whisper was one. She had been a pain in the ass for ages.

  The Imperials reached the bridge. In moonlight it seemed ephemeral. It caused a lot of awed chatter. Underneath, there was angry muttering bearing on the name of Blind Emon’s new boyfriend.

  The Imperials were not looking for us. They had been sent to secure a bridge they had not believed existed. They did mention a bounty that had been offered for me.

  Some of my brethren probably wondered how they could collect.

  The bridge became crowded. The Lady had sent a lot of men. We kept on working underneath, slowly and quietly, me enduring a drizzle of catty whispers. We would have been long gone if that asshole Croaker had not insisted that the kegs and sacks be rearranged.

  Even Elmo had an unhappy remark or seven.

  The lieutenant did not blow us up, possibly only because he lacked the means.

  WE WERE ABOUT done. Only Whittle, One-Eye, and I were still under the bridge. Clever Goblin had charted a pearl string of potent glamours that could be used to slink off to the forest unnoticed. Whittle was shaving a bit off a last keg so it would fit where Emon wanted it. One-Eye was doing a whole lot of nothing but being disgruntled. I was trying to manage two sacks of beads while trying not to be distracted by Emon nagging me to hurry. The bridge creaked and rattled as a heavy infantry battalion crossed leisurely. Those not troubled by heights paused to gawk at the spectacular moonlit Rip, where exposed granite looked like splotches of silver.

  One-Eye muttered, “Marvelous! And now it’s raining!”

  Whittle was quickest. He cursed so loud a couple guys up top wondered what they had heard. We were, for once, blessed by Whittle’s fierce dialect.

  What it was, was, those guys were pissing off the bridge to watch the liquid fall. The breeze broke that up and pushed it under the deck.

  Naturally, them amusing themselves that way was all my fault.

  One-Eye offered to throw me overboard. He did not do so only because he figured I would glom on and take him with me. All the screaming during the fall might alert the Imperials that something was up.

  Finished work, we weaseled carefully out of the trestle into a glamour patch just yards from a clutch of officers debating what to do next. A break for supper and sleep was the more popular proposition. The bridge was secure. The old bitch was busy elsewhere. She would never notice.

  A crow squawked angrily.

  Crows do not, usually, jabber much after nightfall.

  I WAS BEHIND some brush, inside a glamour reinforced by Blind Emon. She lurked beside me, like a heap of dirty rags, emotion and agony held in check. Most of Elmo’s patrol were close, plus the lieutenant and some henchmen. One-Eye never stopped muttering. He could not let the golden rain go. He would have to take a bath. He had not suffered through one for years. Baths were not healthy. Everyone knew that.

  One nocturnal crow nagged on, almost conversationally. Hell! It was conversational. One-sided conversational. Listening closely, I could make out most of it.

  A generous ass-chewing was in progress. The Lady was not pleased with the day’s outcome. She was almost displeased enough to come out her own physical self instead of just relying on a spiritual messenger.

  Commanders fell over one another assuring her that a personal visit would be unnecessary.

  The lieutenant asked, “What now, Croaker?” He, Elmo, One-Eye, and a dozen others looked at me like the future was mine to design.

  Blind Emon sent, There is only one way. To her surprise and mine, she had been regaining strength, probably at my expense.

  “Huh?” A rejoinder scintillating in its Croakeresqueness.

  The conversation between the Imperials and crow drifted our way. I had not paid close attention for several seconds.

  “They are here!” the crow insisted. “I smell them!”

  “Oh, shit! Get the hell out of here!” I said, having a hard time keeping my voice down. “Run!”

  Most of the gawkers had recognized the wisdom of that action already. The lieutenant said, “Whatever the hell the plan is, Croaker, it’s time to do it.”

  “Run.”

  Then there was just Emon and me, with a hostile horde bearing down and me unable to get my feet to move. Then Blind Emon bloomed.

  Petals waving like tentacles, she rose and swept toward our enemies. They produced squeals of awe and fear. Dumbass Croaker got his feet unstuck. He stumbled along after Emon.

  Several petals extended. One thirty yards long snapped a fleeing crow from the air with a vicious crack! Others snatched at officers’ throats.

  Get down. Cling to the earth like it is your mother’s teat if you want to live.

  I did so. That Blind Emon was one smooth talker.

  I could still see her and the bridge. She soared over the Rip. Petals reached into the trestlework.

  Flash! And then a parade of flashes, with rolling thunder. The middle of the bridge humped up eight feet like the back of a sea serpent surfacing. The rest of the deck rose off its supports. The roar deafened me. I did not hear the screams of the hundreds falling into the gorge.

  Nasty smoke masked everything. It swallowed Blind Emon. I never saw her again. She sent no farewells.

  In time the breeze pushed the smoke away.

  And there stood that gods-be-damned bridge, singed, but... The gods-be-damned deck had dropped back exactly where it was before it flew up. Imperials lighted torches and started checking its stability.

  Shee-it! O
h holy fecal fall!

  Time to run!

  Run, Croaker, run. Run like hell is on your ass, because it is for sure going to be, real soon now, and it will be very, very hungry.

  The miracle in this latest miracle escape had just turned out to have a great big old hairy-assed shaggy dog story ending.

  THE GHOST MAKERS

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  THE FACELESS MAN walked out of the desert at sunset, when the gates of the City of Jackals wound ponderously closed on silent machinery. He was the last admitted. His kind were made by Wizards, and went about on Wizards’ business. No one interrogated him.

  His hooded robe and bronze hide smoked with sun-heat when the priest of Iashti threw water from the sacred rivers over him. Whether it washed away any clinging devils of the deep desert, as it was intended, who could have said? But it did rinse the dust from the featureless oval of his visage so all who stood near could see themselves reflected. Distorted.

  He paused within and he lowered the hood of his homespun robes to lie upon his shoulders. The gates made the first sound of their closing, a heavy snap as their steel-shod edges overlapped and latched. Their juncture reflected as a curved line up the mirror of the faceless man’s skull. Within the gates, bars as thick as a man glided home. Messaline was sealed, and the date plantations and goats and pomegranates and laborers of the farms and villages beyond her walls were left to their own devices until the lion-sun tinted the horizon again.

  Trailing tendrils of steam faded from the faceless man’s robe, leaving the air heavy with petrichor—the smell of water in aridity—and the cloth over his armored hide as dry as before. His eyeless mask trained unwaveringly straight ahead, he raised his voice.

  “Priest of Iashti.” Though he had no mouth, his voice tolled clear and sonorous.

  The priest left his aspergillum and came around to face the faceless man, though there was no need. He said, “You already have my blessing, O Gage... of...?”

  “I’d rather information than blessings, Child of the Morning,” said the Gage. The priest’s implied question—to whom he owed his service—the faceless man left unacknowledged. His motionlessness—as if he were a bronze statue someone had draped in a robe and left inexplicably in the center of the market road—was more distressing than if he’d stalked the priest like a cat.

  He continued, “Word is that a poet was murdered under the Blue Stone a sennight since.”

  “Gage?”

  The Gage waited.

  The priest collected himself. He tugged the tangerine-and-gold dawn-colored robe smooth beneath his pectoral. “It is true. Eight days ago, though—no, now gone nine.”

  “Which way?”

  Wordlessly, the priest pointed to a twisting, smoky arch towering behind dusty tiers of pastel houses. The sunset sprawled across the sky rendered the monument in translucent silhouette, like an enormous, elaborate braid of chalcedony.

  The faceless man paused, and finally made a little motion of his featureless head that somehow still gave the impression of ruefully pursed lips and acknowledgement.

  “Alms.” He tossed gold to the priest.

  The priest, no fool, caught it before it could bloody his nose. He waited to bite it until the Gage was gone.

  THE GAGE MADE his way through the Temple District, where great prayer-houses consecrated to the four major Messaline deities dominated handfuls of lesser places of worship: those of less successful sects, or of alien gods. Only the temple to the Uthman Scholar-God, fluted pillars twined about with sacred verses rendered in lapis lazuli and pyrite, competed with those four chief temples for splendor.

  Even at dusk, these streets teemed. Foot traffic, litter bearers, and the occasional rider and mount—mostly horses, a few camels, a mule, one terror-bird—bustled through the lanes between the torch bearers. There were soldiers and merchants, priests and scholars, a nobleman or woman in a curtained sedan chair with guards crying out “Make way!” The temples were arranged around a series of squares, and the squares were occupied by row upon row of market stalls from which rose the aromas of turmeric, coriander, roses, sandalwood, dates, meat sizzling, bread baking, and musty old attics—among other things. The sweet scent of stitched leather and wood-pulp-and-rag paper identified a bookseller as surely as did the banner that drifted above his pavilion.

  The faceless man passed them all—and more than half of the people he passed either turned to stare or hurried quickly along their way, eyes fixed on the ground by their shoes. The Gage knew better than to assign any quality of guilt or innocence to these reactions.

  He did not stay in the Temple District long. A left-hand street bent around the temple of Kaalha, the goddess of death and mercy—who also wore a mirrored mask, though hers was silver and divided down the center line. The temple had multiple doorways, and seemed formed in the shape of a star. Over the nearest one was inscribed: In my house there is an end to pain.

  Some distance behind the temple, the stone arch loomed.

  At first he walked by stucco houses built cheek to cheek, stained in every shade of orange, red, vermilion. The arches between their entryways spanned the road. But soon the street grew crooked and dark; there were no torch-bearers here. A rat or two was in evidence, scurrying over stones—but rodents went quickly and fearfully here. Once, longer legs and ears flickered like scissors as a slender shadow detached itself from one darkness and glided across the open space to the next: one of the jackals from which Messaline took its epithet. From the darkness where it finished, a crunch and a squeak told of one scurrying at least that ended badly for the scurrier.

  In these gutters, garbage reeked, though not too much of it; things that were still useful would be put to use. The people passing along these streets were patch-clothed, dirty-cheeked, lank of unwashed hair. Many wore long knives; a few bore flintlocks. The only unescorted women were those plying a trade, and a few men who loitered in dark doorways or alleys drew back into their lairs as the Gage passed, each footstep ringing dully off the cobbles. He was reminded of tunnel-spiders, and kept walking.

  As he drew closer to one base of the Blue Stone, though, he noticed an increase in people walking quickly in the direction opposite his. Though the night sweltered, stored heat radiating back from the stones, they hunched as if cold: heads down and shoulders raised protectively.

  Still no-one troubled the faceless man. Messaline knew about Wizards.

  Others were not so lucky, or so unmolested.

  The Gage came out into the small square that surrounded one foot of the Blue Stone. It rose above him in an interlaced, fractal series of helixes a hundred times the height of a tall man, vanishing into the darkness that drank its color and translucency. The Gage had been walking for long enough that stars now showed through the gaps in the arch’s sinuous strands.

  The base of the monument separated into a half-dozen pillars where it plunged to earth. Rather than resting upon a plinth or footing, though, it seemed as if each pillar had thrust up through the street like a tree seeking the light—or possibly as if the cobbles of the road had just been paved around them.

  Among the shadows between those pillars, a man wearing a skirted coat and wielding a narrow, curved sword fought silently—desperately—valiantly—for his life.

  THE COMBAT HAD every appearance of an ambush—five on one, though that one was the superior swordsman and tactician. These were advantages that did not always affect the eventual result when surrounded and outnumbered, but the man in the skirted coat was making the most of them. His narrow torso twisted like a charmed snake as he dodged blows too numerous to deflect. He might have been an answer to any three of his opponents. But as it was, he was left whirling and weaving, leaping and ducking, parrying for his life. The harsh music of steel rang from the tight walls of surrounding rowhouses. His breathing was a rasp audible from across the square. He used the footings of the monument to good advantage, dodging between them, keeping them at his back, forcing his enemies to coordinate their m
ovements over uneven cobblestones.

  The Gage paused to assess.

  The lone man’s skirts whirled wide as he caught a narrower, looping strand of the Blue Stone in his off hand and used it as a handle to swing around, parrying one opponent with his sword hand while landing a kick in the chest of another. The kicked man staggered back, arms pinwheeling. One of his allies stepped under his blade and came on, hoping to catch the lone man off-balance.

  The footpad—if that’s what he was—huffed in pain as he ran into the Gage’s outstretched arm. His eyes widened; he jerked back and reflexively brought his scimitar down. It glanced off the Gage’s shoulder, parting his much-patched garment and leaving a bright line.

  The Gage picked him up by the jaw, one-handed, and bashed his brains out against the Blue Stone.

  The man in the skirted coat ran another through between the ribs. The remaining three hesitated, exchanging glances. One snapped a command; they vanished into the night like rain into a fallow field, leaving only the sound of their footsteps. The man in the skirted coat seemed as if he might give chase, but his sword was wedged. He stood on the chest of the man he had killed and twisted his long, slightly curved blade to free it. It had wedged in his victim’s spine. A hiss of air escaping a punctured lung followed as he slid it free.

  Warily, he turned to the Gage. The Gage did not face him. The man in the skirted coat did not bother to walk around to face the Gage.

  “Thank...”

  Above them, the Blue Stone began to glow, with a grey light that faded up from nothingness and illuminated the scene: glints off the Gage’s bronze body, the saturated blood-red of the lone man’s coat, the frayed threads of its embroidery worn almost flat on the lapels.

  “What the—?”

  “Blood,” the Gage said, prodding the brained body with his toe. “The Blue Stone accepts our sacrifice.” He gestured to the lone man’s prick-your-finger coat. “You’re a Dead Man.”