The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition

by Rich Horton (ed)

  She glanced down at him when she paused for breath to find him looking at her in a way that she knew all too well.

  Finally, an advantage.

  She let her voice falter when he ran a finger up the side of her leg, lifting her skirt a few inches above her knee.

  She did not stop reading—it was working, something in him had changed as she read. Sex was a weak foothold, but it was the only one she had, and perhaps it would be a step toward getting into his mind.

  “He dragged some sharp, flat pieces of ice to and fro, and placed them together in all kinds of positions, as if he wished to make something out of them. He composed many complete figures, forming different words, but there was one word he never could manage to form, although he wished it very much. It was the word ‘Eternity.’ ”

  He fingered the cord tied at her waist, and tugged it gently at first, then more insistently. He leaned forward in the chair, and unfastened the last hook on her corset.

  “Just at this moment it happened that little Gerda came through the great door of the castle. Cutting winds were raging around her, but she offered up a prayer and the winds sank down as if they were going to sleep; and she went on till she came to the large empty hall, and caught sight of Kay; she knew him directly; she flew to him and threw her arms round his neck, and held him fast, while she exclaimed, “Kay, dear little Kay, I have found you at last.’ ”

  His fingers stopped their manipulations. His hands were still on her, the fastenings held between his fingertips.

  She dared not breathe.

  Whatever control she had for those few minutes was gone. She tried to reclaim it, to keep going as if nothing had happened. She even dropped a hand from the book and reached out to touch him. His hand snapped up and caught hers; he stood, pulling hard on her arm.

  “Enough.” He left the room without looking back. She heard the front door slam.

  Audra straightened her clothes in frustration and wondered again what had gone wrong.

  It took only a moment’s thought for Audra to decide to follow him. She peered out into the street: there he was, a block away already, casting a long shadow in the lamp light on the wet pavement.

  Her feet were cold and her shoes wet through by the time he finally stopped at a warehouse deep in a maze of brick complexes. He manipulated a complex series of locks on the dented and rusting steel door, and disappeared inside.

  So this was where he went at night? Not to clubs and parlors as she had thought, but here, on the edge of the inhabited city, to a warehouse only notable for having all its window glass.

  The windows were too high for her to see into, but a dumpster beneath one of them offered her a chance. The metal bin was slick with mist, and she slipped off it twice, but on her third try she hoisted herself on top and nervously peered through the filthy glass of the window.

  In the dim light she could just make out the shape of Miles, rubbing his hands fiercely together as if to warm them, then unrolling something—paper, or parchment—spreading it out carefully in front of him on the concrete floor. He stood, and began to speak.

  The room grew brighter, and a face appeared in front of him, suspended in the air—a familiar face made of dim green light; Audra could see little of it through the dirty glass. She could hear Miles’s voice, urgent and almost desperate, but the words he shouted at the thing made no sense to her.

  She shifted her weight to ease the pain of her knee pressing against the metal of the dumpster, and slipped. She fell, and cried out in pain as she landed hard on the pavement. She didn’t know if Miles had heard, but she did not wait to find out. She picked herself up—now wet, filthy, and aching—and ran.

  When she reached the house she went straight to the library. Audra shifted the books on the shelf so that the remaining volumes were flush against each other, and she hid her book in the small trunk where she kept her few clothes.

  The Mirror’s face emerged from its hiding place behind the frame, looking worried and wan.

  “It’s my story, after all,” she told it. “I won’t let him do any more damage. What if he takes the cottage? The woods? Where would I have to go home to? No, he can’t have any more of our story.”

  The language of the scroll was not as impossible as the little man had said—while it was not his own, it was similar enough that someone as clever as Emil could puzzle it out. He applied himself to little else, and before long Emil could struggle through half of the first spell. But when he thought of arriving home after so long, still unable to execute even the simplest of the three, the frustration in him grew.

  Surely, he thought, he should begin with the hardest, for having mastered that the simpler ones will come with ease.

  So thinking, he set out to learn the last of the three spells before he arrived home.

  When Miles finally returned the following evening at dusk, he looked exhausted and filthy, as if he had slept on the floor of the warehouse. She met him in the kitchen, and didn’t ask questions.

  He brooded on a chair in the corner while she chopped vegetables on the island butcher block, never taking his eyes off her, then stood abruptly and left the room.

  The hiss and sputter of the vegetables as they hit the pan echoed the angry, inarticulate hiss in her mind. She had been here for days, and she was no closer to getting home.

  The knife felt heavy and solid in her hand as she cubed a slab of marbled meat. She imagined Miles under the knife, imagined his fear and pain. She would get it out of him—how to get home—and he would tell her what he had done to her Emil before the miserable bastard died.

  Sounds from the next room were punctuated with curses. The crack of heavy books being unshelved made her flinch.

  “Where is it?” he first seemed to ask himself; then louder, “Where?” he demanded of the room at large; then a roar erupted from the doorway: “What have you done with it, you vicious witch?”

  A cold wash of fear cleared away her thoughts of revenge.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My book,” he said. “Where is it? What have you done with it?”

  He came at her hunched like an advancing wolf. They circled the butcher block. She gripped the knife and dared not blink, for fear that he would take a split second advantage and lunge for her.

  “You have many books.”

  “And I only care about one!” His hand shot out and caught her wrist, bringing her arm down against the scarred wood with a painful shock. The knife fell from her hand.

  He dragged her into the library. “There,” he said, pointing to the shelf where her book had been. “Six of twelve. It was there and now it’s not.” He relaxed his grip without letting go. “If you borrowed it, it’s fine. I just want it back.” He released her and forced a smile. “Now, where is it?”

  “You’re right,” she said, “I borrowed it. I didn’t realize it was so important to you.”

  “It’s very special.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice low and hard, “it is.”

  And with that, she knew she had given herself away.

  Miles shoved her away from him. She fell into the bookcase as he left the small library and shut door behind him. A key turned in the lock.

  It was too late.

  She rested with her forehead against the door and caught her breath. She tried to pry open the small window, but it was sealed shut with layers of paint. She considered breaking the glass, and then thought better of it; she could escape from this house, it was true, but not from this world. For that, she still needed Miles.

  She watched the sun set through the dirty window, and tried to decide what to do when he let her out. She heard him pacing through the house, talking to himself with ever greater stridency, but the words made no sense to her. It gave her a headache.

  The sound of the key in the door woke her. She grabbed at the first thing that might serve as a weapon, a sturdy hardcover. She held in front of her like a shield.

  Miles stood in the doo
rway, a long, wicked knife in his hand.

  “Who are you?” he finally asked, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And how did you know?”

  “Someone whose life you destroyed. Liar. Thief. Murderer.” She produced Emil’s ring.

  He seemed frozen where he stood, his eyes darting back and forth between the ring in her hand and her face. “I am none of those things,” he said.

  “You took all of this,” she gestured around the room. “You took him, and you took me. And what did you do with the things that were of no use to you?”

  She had been edging toward him while he talked. She threw the book at his arm and it struck him just as she had hoped. The knife fell to the floor and she dove for it, snatching it up before Miles could stop her.

  She had him now, she thought, and pressed the blade against his throat. He tried to push her off but she had a tenacious grip on him and he ceased his struggle when the knife pierced his thin skin. She felt his body tense in her hands, barely breathing and perfectly still.

  “You still haven’t told me who you are.”

  “Where is he?” she demanded.

  “Where is who?” His voice was smooth and controlled.

  “The man you stole, like you stole me. Like you stole all of it. Where is he?”

  “You’re obviously very upset. Put that down, let me go, and we’ll talk about it. I don’t know about any stolen man, but maybe I can help you find him.”

  He voice was calm, slightly imploring, asking for understanding and offering help. She hesitated, wondering what threat she was really willing to carry out against an enemy who was also her only hope.

  She waited a moment too long. Miles grabbed a heavy jar off the shelf and hurled it at the wall.

  The East Wind ripped through the room, finally free.

  Fatigued and half-starved, Emil made his way slowly toward his home, and tried to unlock the spell. Soon he had three words, and then five, and soon a dozen. He would say them aloud, emphasizing this part or that, elongating a sound or shortening it, until the day he gave voice to the last character on the page, and something happened: a spark, a glimmer of magic.

  He had ciphered out the spell.

  Finally, on the coldest night he could remember, with not a soul in sight, he raised his voice against the howling wind, and shouted out the thirteen words of power.

  As weeks turned into months the stories of Emil the Sorcerer grew, until finally even the King had heard, and wanted his power within his own control.

  But Emil could not be found.

  The angry vortex threw everything off the shelves. Audra ducked and covered her head as she was pummeled by books and debris. Miles crouched behind the trunk, which offered little protection from the gale.

  There was a crash above Audra’s head; her arms flew up to protect her eyes; broken glass struck her arms and legs, some falling away, some piercing her skin.

  The window broke with a final crash and the captive wind escaped the room. The storm was over. Books thumped and glass tinkled to the ground.

  Audra opened her eyes to the wreckage. Miles was already sifting through the pages and torn covers.

  “No,” he said, “no! It has to be here, my story has to be here . . . ” He bled from a hundred small cuts but he paid them no mind. Audra plucked shards of dark glass out of her flesh. The shards gave off no reflection at all.

  A cloud drifted from where the Mirror had hung over the wreckage-strewn shelves, searching. On the floor beside Audra’s trunk, the lid torn off in the storm, it seemed to find what it was looking for. It slipped between the pages of a blue cloth-bound volume and disappeared.

  “Here!” Audra said, clutching the volume to her chest. He scrambled toward her until they kneeled together in the middle of the floor, face to face.

  Smoke curled out of the pages, only a wisp at first. Then more, green and glowing like a sunbeam in a mossy pond, crept out and wrapped itself around both them.

  “The Guide you sought was always here,” a voice whispered. “Your captive, Emil, and your friend, Aurora.” Audra—Aurora—looked at the man she had hated and saw what was there all along: her Emil, thirty years since he had disappeared, with bald head and graying beard. Miles, who kept her because she looked like his lost love, but who wouldn’t touch her, in faith to his beloved.

  Emil looked back at her, tears in the eyes that had seemed so dead and without hope until now.

  “Now, Emil, speak the words,” the voice said, “and we will go home.”

  So should you happen across a blue cloth-bound book, the sixth in a set of twelve, do not look for “The Magician and the Maid,” because it is not there.

  Read the other stories, though, and in the story of the fairy who brought the waterfall to the mountain, you may find that she has a friend called Audra, though you will know the truth: it is not her real name.

  If you read further you may find Emil as well, for though he never did become the King’s magician, every story needs a little magic.

  LETTER FROM THE EMPEROR

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  A mishap occurred four sleeps from landfall. Jacob had been logging observations when he heard the alarm, so by the time he got down to the cargo bay it was all over. The bay door was breached. He stared at the switch through the window—it had been opened from inside the bay. Whatever had been inside the bay had been swept out into space.

  “Anders?” he called through com. He waited. There was no answer. Ship command buzzed in his ear. There are indications that Anders Nils . . . Jacob shut the communication off. He didn’t want to hear what command had to say. He went looking for Anders.

  The forward crew cabin was empty. As were the toilets, the shower, records, navigation, engineering, recreation, general stores. Jacob had been in the recording room when the alarm went off. He systematically tried every compartment, passage, pipe, even the output trays of the garbage grinders. There was no place left to look. “Anders, please report your whereabouts,” he called through com. Again no answer.

  He waited. He turned the link to ship command back on. “Please report the whereabouts of Anders Nils,” he said aloud.

  Anders Nils is not on board, a woman’s voice spoke softly into his ear. Procedure is to query ship command first when there is an unscheduled breach of the cargo bay. Why did you fail to query ship command? Why did you shut off initial communications from ship command?

  Jacob didn’t answer. He didn’t know why he hadn’t followed procedure. Maybe he already knew Anders was gone, but didn’t want to hear command’s confirmation. Was that it? It made very little sense—despite their long service together on messaging and data collection ships he and Anders weren’t even friends, as far as he understood. Suddenly he wasn’t sure. Was that possible?

  How had they not become friends, enemies, something? Somehow he had avoided entanglement. He’d spent his long hours listening, the job they’d been trained to do, snatching the words out of space and trying to understand, and whenever possible delivering these stray messages to their intended destinations.

  Please respond to official queries. Command’s voice had lost some of its warmth, its naturalness. You have a duty to respond to these questions. Command was beginning to show its mechanical roots.

  He was a professional, a sensor for the emperor, or for who- or whatever passed for the emperor these days, capturing the nuances machinery was still incapable of. “You record every stray fart,” was the usual, vulgar summation of their duties. Such attention to detail discouraged both amity and enmity, as far as he was concerned.

  He would be finishing the assignment alone. Perhaps even the entire tour of duty. The realization left him cold, furious. How was he supposed to manage it? Besides recording local observations and handling messaging, the ship delivered statements of regulation, and proclamations to the outlying settlements. But a quick replacement was impossible, out here on the farthest reaches of the empire, where the dividing line between empire and not-empire
wasn’t all that clear.

  Did Anders Nils speak to you before going to the cargo bay?

  Jacob gathered Anders’s spare clothing into a bag. He catalogued his former crewmate’s personal effects, his toiletries, his player, various small art objects.

  Please respond. Did Anders Nils speak to you of his intentions?

  Jacob ignored command’s transmissions. He separated out all written notes and recordings, checking the storage on Anders’s personal devices for data files and images. Anders’s diary files were extensive and detailed, and he only had time to go through a sampling. The entries surprised him, but he had no time or inclination to be surprised.

  Did Anders Nils show observable signs of depression?

  He’d never liked talking to ship command. The fact that it appeared to possess more charisma and compassion than he did . . . grated.

  He caught his first yawn while carefully placing Anders’s personal documents into a sealed container. Over the next brief interval the yawns multiplied rapidly. There was no way to fight ship command’s enforced sleep—he barely made it back to his bunk before oblivion wiped him away.

  After sleep, command brought him up to dialogue regarding the incident. The temperature in the recording room had dropped noticeably into the discomfort zone.

  “Please change your uniform to the appropriate formality.” The voice out of the speaker was soft again, lush. He considered how brittle his own voice was in comparison. He brushed two fingers over his cuff until the correct dark blue color swam beneath them. “Correct.” Pause. “The Emperor expresses his condolences for the loss of crewman reporter Anders Nils.” The voice sounded achingly sincere. It made Jacob ashamed of his own underdeveloped powers of empathy. Another, awkwardly long pause. “How long did you serve with Anders Nils?”

  “It would have been four years in a few sleeps.”

  “More precise, please.”

  “You have this information.” He didn’t bother to mask his annoyance,