The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  He managed to whisper, “What do you mean?” before the dance separated them again. Her pitying smile scorched the back of his eyelids.

  When their hands touched again, it was not Nyx who partnered him.

  A woman clothed in silver leaves and pale yellow petals clung to him like spider silk to a struggling butterfly. Her hair was the color of leeched butter; her pupiless eyes, a wash of gold. Her hands were long. Long, and strong, and hideously spackled white. Like linden branches covered in snow.

  “Gideon, my love,” said Gideon’s earliest and worst nightmare, “truly it has been too long.”

  Gideon jerked his hands from hers, though her fingers tore through the ivory satin of his sleeves, tore through his skin almost to the bone. He stumbled back, clutching his bleeding arms close, hoping to lose himself in the other dancers.

  But there weren’t any other dancers.

  The Great Hall of Breaker House had vanished. Gideon stood in a twilight courtyard near a fountain that spewed something more like quicksilver than water from the mouths of an orgiastic tangle of swans and maidens. Surrounding him were rank upon rank of blank white statues, each of which stared at him with cold black eyes.

  PART THREE: VALOR IN THE VALWODE

  Analise woke from a semi-doze to see Nixie in the hallway, surveying the three of them. Elliot snored gently on the carpet. The statue was curled in a fetal position, its head in Analise’s lap. Nixie did not ask what happened; her sigh was one of utter comprehension.

  “I thought to protect Elliot by leaving him here,” she said. “Is he badly hurt?”

  “Battered and bruised,” Analise replied softly. “He probably shouldn’t speak much for the next few days—but he’ll live. How was . . . ” She swallowed. “Everything?”

  Nixie laughed softly. “A great success on many counts.”

  “Oh?” Analise tried not to infuse the syllable with anything more than a mild curiosity, as if tonight had been any other party, and her time not attending it spent like any other night at home.

  For a moment it seemed Nixie would play along. She leaned against the wall, her gleaming eyes half-lidded. “Certainly a social coup for the Mannerings. Who of note was not there?” Her deep voice husked lower. Almost, Analise fancied, it took on an echo. “For others, this little masquerade was not so pleasant a pastime. A fat tithe of bodies was this night rendered to His Dark Majesty of the Bone Kingdom. Those he chose to be his own will no more walk beneath the blue skies of Athe.”

  Analise stared down at the heavy, cool head in her lap. If she didn’t acknowledge Nixie’s words, pretended not to understand them, perhaps they would roll through her like a lullaby or nursery story, one that whispered of creatures existing only on the edge of night, the borders of sleep. But Nixie’s voice, so low and stark, held the cadence of factual recitation, not of tall tales.

  “The Mannering family pays its debts as lavishly as it does anything. Years ago, one of Harlan Hunt Mannering’s mining companies sunk a shaft too deep, and met with opposition from the underworld. That day was a bargain struck between mortal and goblin. Mutually beneficial, of course. Harlan Hunt Mannering agreed, in exchange for certain rights and privileges for his mines, to pledge the best products of mortal flesh, the cream of the cream, to tithe to the Goblin King of Bana. Desdemona continues her father’s work. Tonight, she handed over that famous perfumer . . . What’s her name? Aniqua something . . . ? As well as her top three apprentice noses. They’ll be distilling essences and blending oils for the Shadow Court many centuries after the mortals of Athe have forgotten them.”

  Nixie bent down and picked up a framed autochrome, returning it to its lopsided nail in the wall. In it, Elliot and Nixie stood clasping hands before Elliot’s most renowned painting, The Breaker Queen.

  “And of course,” she said softly, “The Gentry Moon Masquerade was a victory for Loreila the Winter-Touched. She stole Gideon Alderwood back to Dark Breakers, where once she bound him as a child in her fell enchantments. Now she will torment an army out of his own bleeding hands in her effort to win my former throne.”

  Analise was glad she was already sitting, for the floor gave a lurch, as if all three worlds and the seven hells beneath them grumbled and shifted. Just like that, she believed Nixie. She believed everything. She believed, as she never let herself before, in the statue whose head she cradled.

  It was not asleep, she realized. It was listening, even now. Beneath her fingers, the living marble thrummed, as though the statue trembled.

  “Nixie,” Analise said, willing her fingers to unclench. “Where is Gideon?”

  Nixie opened her eyes fully and stared down, recognizing the change in Analise almost before Analise did. Her black eyes shone all the brighter in the dark hall. Analise had always thought her a small, wiry woman, but now she seemed impossibly tall and fierce, as if the patterns Elliot had painted upon her had become armor, and that armor had seen battle, and Nixie herself had just returned, battered but whole, from the front.

  Which, she thought, perhaps Nixie had.

  “It means, Analise Field, that unless an Heir to the Antler Crown appears in the Valwode, anointed and blessed by the previous Queen, crowned there in full view of the Gentry Court at Dark Breakers, Loreila will win the throne by sheer force of numbers. And Gideon Alderwood, tapped dry providing those forces for her, will surely die.”

  Slap. Slather. Scrape. Shape.

  They met because he’d fainted. Stupid. Weak. As if he were a child who stood in church on a hot holiday morning, locking his knees too long beneath scratchy woolen breeches and waking to find himself in unintentional obeisance to an altogether over-curious goddess.

  No, not a goddess. Only Analise. Close enough.

  Now the hands. The fingernails. The fine crescent of the cuticles.

  They met because she was nosy. Because she had six brothers, and as the middle child of her large farmer family never had any privacy to lose and so didn’t regard his. Because he never locked his door, hoping someday a strung out street weasel with a nose full of tardust and a wobbly trigger finger would burst in for a fast fistful of cash and leave Gideon several bullets the better.

  Now the calf. The long muscles. The perfect protrusion of the ankle.

  They met because she’d dragged him back to his cot, heaped him high with blankets, dribbled water down his throat, and when he was still helpless and weak, force-fed him the most delicious, rich, aromatic, unbelievable soup (“Hush, it’s just chicken broth; it won’t kill you,” her first words to him), until he finally opened his eyes and saw a girl about his age hovering over him. Her forehead was anxious. She had too many freckles to find the constellations in them. Her hair was like the sunrise over the Bellisaar Wastelands. And he’d smiled at her before perceiving that she had just saved his life—and then he’d knocked the bowl from her hand.

  It was not scalding, but it burnt them both.

  He’d banished her from his room then, but she kept coming back. She always came back, and he owed her for that. He owed her his life, so he’d gotten her first book published, and made her know it was a favor, just connections, not merit.

  How many times had he made her cry? Too many to count.

  No. He had counted. Thirty-six times in three years. That he could hear through the wall, that is. He always listened as she cried herself to sleep.

  Now the indentation above the lips.

  “Devil’s kiss,” Gideon murmured, stepping back from his work. “Good morning, infant. Welcome to the hell.”

  The laughter behind him stuck like spines of ice between his shoulder blades.

  “What nonsense, Gideon,” said Loreila the Winter-Touched. He shivered at the sound of her voice and closed his eyes against the chill. “This is the Valwode. The Seven Hells are still a whole world away, with all the goblins of Bana between us. Thank the Horned Lords for it too! The devils below find Gentry flesh as sweet as baby meat.”

  When her sparkling voice ceased speaking
, Gideon opened his eyes again. His newest statue stared at him, bewildered at its abrupt awakening, already terrified. And why shouldn’t it be? Before it there stood the creator who wanted to destroy it, and behind him, the one who would let it live. It would live, and suffer, and be put to use . . .

  This was statue number . . . what? Gideon long ago lost count of how many of these things he built in a day. How many days he’d been here. Years. Hours. Ages. All time was the same. All time was twilight in the quicksilver halls of Dark Breakers.

  Unlike in his Seafall garret, here in the Valwode the statues seemed to harden and quicken between one breath and the next. They were taken away almost as soon as he completed them. His fingers shook. Blood crusted with clay.

  Loreila took his hands in her long white-spackled grasp and studied them. Blood rose up from his skin in reverse raindrops, disappearing into the sky, leaving his wounds clean. Clay crusted off and turned to glitter, whipped away in a conjured breeze. His hands were whole again, though they trembled still. Gideon would look nowhere but her hands. Not her golden eyes or ragged yellow hair. Not the tiny sharps of her many, many teeth. He had looked once already, the first time he’d come here as a child. Had caught her attention. Once was enough.

  “Lovely work,” she said. “Now make another.”

  The old familiar fever washed over him. The dizzy red darkness. Gideon came to himself again bent before an enormous slab of half-formed clay. By the ache in his arms, the cold sweat running off his bare skin, Gideon judged he had just about finished roughhousing the clay into humanoid shape. But this was no human. It was taller, stronger, faster, more perfect, without gender, without any agenda but service.

  He worked on, grimly, his body hardly his own. Only his thoughts were his own. And his thoughts were of her. Not the woman with the linden branch hands. Her.

  Slap. Slather. Scrape. Shape.

  They met because she’d saved his life.

  And he hated her for it.

  And he prayed she wouldn’t come anywhere near him in a fool’s attempt to do it again.

  “Gods, Ana, stay away,” he prayed.

  Gods above and gods below. Gods crowned in horns, hunting down the sky. Goddess of the anxious forehead, the thousand freckles, the sunset hair. Goddess of the thirty-six nights of tears. Protect her. Watch her. Keep her far away from him.

  Analise Field had a plan, a backpack, and a statue on a hand truck. The plan was partial, the backpack was almost entirely empty, and the statue was—for the first time since she’d met it—behaving like a statue. All part of the plan.

  She pushed the hand truck with its heavy burden all the way from the Seafall train station to Oak-and-Acorn Avenue, where the acorns from the oak trees and the conkers from the chestnut trees and the fat fan-like leaves from the catalpas crunched underfoot. The iron gates to Breaker House were closed and padlocked. Analise rattled the bars and rang the bronze bell. Nothing.

  A cold hand fell upon her shoulder. She patted it reassuringly.

  “Can you climb?” she asked the statue.

  In response, it stepped down off the hand truck and lifted her in one of its arms. Hand truck firmly grasped in the other, it took three quick leaps forward, vaulting them over the gate in a single bound. Loosely it landed, lightly in a crouch, and Analise scarcely felt the thump. The statue slid her down its body until her feet touched gravel, releasing her only reluctantly as if she were some precious thing. Like a baby. Or a bride.

  Analise blushed, grateful that the statue was not human, and had no blood of its own, and couldn’t know what blushes meant. Not like Gideon who read the changing tides and temperatures of her face and scoffed at them, responding to whatever she didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t say—as if her skin had already said it all. Or like Elliot, who either politely ignored her reds and pinks, or kindly looked away until she returned to normal.

  The statue stepped back onto the hand truck and assumed a more sessile position. Analise leaned forward and wheeled her burden up the gravel drive and around the West Wing to the sunken garden.

  “Ha,” she muttered. “I see our quarry coming back from the Cliff Walk. Stay here a moment while I catch her, would you?” She patted the statue on the arm and started off at a trot across the lawn.

  “Miss Mannering!” she shouted. “Miss Mannering! Desdemona!”

  The figure at the cliff’s edge turned, surprised, black hair whipping around it like squid ink released into turbulent waters. For a moment, Analise thought she had been mistaken in her object. The Desdemona Mannering she knew was as golden and implacable as an idol, composed as a symphony, as calculated in her manipulations as a recipe for the finest perfume. She was a woman of the world, the Anthracite Princess, privileged, petted, adored.

  This woman was . . . ravaged.

  Her eyes were swollen, her lips cracked. Her face was a mess of streaked silver paint and smudged maquillage. She wore a ratty brown overcoat with patched elbows that was at least three times too large for her over a tattered gown of silver silk, and her feet were muddy and bare. She stared at Analise out of dangerous dark eyes that seemed to crackle and snap with lightning.

  She looked, Analise thought, like Gideon on his fever days.

  “What happened?” she blurted out.

  Desdemona let out a hoarse noise. Like a crow laughing.

  “Hung over,” she croaked. “Can’t you tell?”

  Analise shook her head. Desdemona stared a few minutes longer, as if daring her to speak again. Finally she looked away, out to sea, and wiped her eyes.

  “What are you doing here, Leez?” Desdemona was the only person in the world who called Analise by that name. Analise ventured a step closer.

  “I . . . did something a bit naughty, I’m afraid.” She cleared her throat, and tried suffusing her tones with conspiratorial confession. “I thought you might advise me? It has to do with your cousin.”

  Desdemona spun around and cut across a patch of sweet grass to take Analise by the elbows. “Gideon? Did you see him? Did he go back to the garret last night?” Her knuckles poked out, painfully white, against her tawny skin.

  Analise forced herself to laugh. “I don’t know! I was at Elliot’s. That’s the thing, Miss Mannering. I’m afraid I . . . I stole something from Gideon. Nothing he cared about. He was always smashing them up anyway. But it was so pretty, you know. One of his statues. I thought . . . sort of as a practical joke . . . I might donate it to one of the local art museums anonymously. Just leave a card saying it was the work of a Seafall artist. It really would be such a shame to let it go the way of Gideon’s sledgehammer. But then I felt so guilty . . . I didn’t know what to do. So I brought it to you.”

  “You found one? You kept one? Whole?”

  “Whole!” Analise agreed. “And very beautiful. Sexless as an angel but kind of, um, you know, sexier for all of that. I left it in your garden. Come and see.”

  She tucked her hand in Desdemona’s elbow and dragged her back to the place she’d left the statue. It had shifted positions somewhat, Analise suspected in order to keep her in its view, but now its eyes were closed. It stood straight-backed, head tilted to the sky, arms hanging loose with the palms open in supplication. Analise could feel the tension ebb from Desdemona’s body as she stared at it.

  “I had no idea,” she said quietly. “Gideon . . . As a child, Gideon used to whittle silly little animal sculptures out of blocks of wood. Then one day he just . . . stopped. Took up with clay instead. Started churning out larger projects. Like this one. Hopeless at first, ill-shaped and lumpy, nothing like the whimsical work he used to do with wood. He was never the same, after. All the soft light went out of him. Snuffed. Replaced by a sort of bleak inferno in its stead. But I only ever caught a glimpse of his earliest work in clay. Never complete. And never in the last several years, since he took to living in that garret like a pauper. He’s gotten so . . . Look at it. It’s breathtaking.”

  “It’s unbelievable,” Analise agr
eed under her breath.

  Desdemona looked as if she wanted to stroke the statue, but instead dug her fists in her pockets.

  “Why did you bring it to me?” she asked.

  “Well. You’re a collector, aren’t you? You know all about the art world. You collect all of us artists. Writers, painters, perfumers . . . ”

  Desdemona blanched and backed away. “I didn’t collect Gideon,” she cried. “I don’t do that to family. I would never . . . !” Swallowing whatever might have burst out next, she drew in a shuddering breath. “It really was very naughty of you, Leez,” she continued, with her customary curving smile. “I can see why you were tempted. But really. If an artist wishes to destroy his work, that is his prerogative. I remember you told me once that you wanted to write into your will that all personal correspondence should be burnt upon your death. Imagine learning that your relatives planned instead to sell your papers to your publishing company before your corpse was even cold! It would be enough to make you sue from the grave.”

  Analise pretended to squirm. “That’s different.”

  “How so?” Desdemona asked coolly.

  “To destroy such a thing in this case would be criminal. This statue is far superior to anything I have written.”

  “Doubtless,” said Desdemona. “But it is not yours.” She sighed. “I will agree to keep it here until Gideon returns. He will be relieved to have it returned, and I promise I won’t tell him who dropped it off. Is that acceptable?” Her tone did not brook any response but the affirmative.

  Analise grinned at her. “Certainly! I knew it was very bad of me.” She turned to trudge away, but pulled out her pocket watch as she did so, and cursed roundly, spinning on her heel.

  “Forgive me, Miss Mannering. The last train back to my borough was,” she checked her watch again, “ten minutes ago. May I crash in one of your rooms? Or even a couch? I swear I’ll leave first thing in the morning?”