The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Singer,” I said. “Do you sing? Professionally?”

  She laughed. “People might well give me money to stop,” she said.

  I leaned across and kissed her mouth. “This money you get from time to time,” I said. “How do you get it? Come on,” I added, with my best smile. “You can’t say I haven’t been straight with me.”

  “Oh all right, then,” she said. “I’m a witch.”

  Properly speaking, since I’d been acquitted, I’d have been within my rights to go to the prefecture and demand the return of all the stuff they’d taken off me when I was arrested: my entire inventory of worldly goods, as it happened—one heavy wool traveling coat, one bag containing five hundred angels in gold, and a copy of Vicentius’ Garden of Entrancing Images (with pictures), not to mention the nine hundred angels’ worth of uncut rubies sewn into the lining. Somehow, though, I figured that that would be pushing my luck, something I’ve always been hesitant to do. Now there’s irony.

  She was talking to me again. “It’s humiliating,” she said. “Having to go to court to reclaim you, like a lost dog or something. I wish you wouldn’t do it.”

  “You can’t blame a man for trying.”

  Actually, she could. “Not to mention,” she went on, “drawing attention to us. You do realize, we’re going to have to clear out again. Everybody knows who we are.”

  That made me laugh out loud.

  “You know what I mean,” she said irritably. “And you know what I think about being conspicuous. How much money have you got?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  She sighed. “How do you fancy Mezentia?”

  “I don’t even know where it is.”

  “It’s about as far south as you can go without getting your feet wet. About twelve hundred miles.”

  She’d have been there, of course, a long time ago. She’s been everywhere. I remember we were in this ruined temple in Prochoris; circumstances had dictated that we should live rough for a while, and the locals were afraid to go inside. There was this painting on the wall—it was sheltered, but only a little bit had survived, the rest had all crumbled away centuries ago—and I looked at it and thought, I know that face. Quite a good likeness, in fact. She told me it was supposed to be Aedoea the Bringer of Death. Well, yes, I thought.

  “I’m sick of traipsing around all the time,” I said.

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “And I hate the south. It’s so hot. Why can’t we go somewhere nice, for a change?”

  I don’t like myself when I whine. I never used to do it. Play the cards you’re dealt, was always my motto: When it’s time to fold, then fold, and if you lose, well, that’s how it goes. I’m not like that now, of course.

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll go to Thuria.”

  “No way in hell,” I said. A woman passing by stopped and looked at me. I lowered my voice. “It’s freezing cold and the people smell. And what could there possibly be for us in Thuria?”

  “You don’t know anything about it. Actually, it’s quite nice there.” Pause. “And there are silver mines.”

  “I don’t give a shit. I refuse to spend six weeks rattling around in a coach to get to some godforsaken ice floe in the middle of nowhere.”

  She sighed. “All right,” she said. “What do you want?”

  The silly part of it is, I really am a gentleman. More than that, I’m your actual nobility; first cousin to a duke, my name (the real one, I mean) cut into the stonework of the arch in the front courtyard of a great house. Or at least it was. I expect it was chiseled out long since. What I mean to say is, I’m actually a lot more than I pretend to be. When I used to go around impersonating the nobility, I was invariably demoting myself by at least five grades, because if you show up out of the blue somewhere and announce that you’re a what-I-really-am, nobody’s going to believe you. Also, the minor public officials I used to pass myself off as were by definition men who had to make at least some show of working for a living. When I was twelve, I wouldn’t have deigned to notice the sort of people I chose to become, when I was still working.

  I guess I officially went to the bad when I was nineteen. My mother, bless her, really didn’t want me to go to the University; she knew me too well, I guess. But father insisted. That was where young men of quality went when they were my age, and he could no more dream of interfering than of stopping the sun from rising. So, to the University I went, and a very congenial place I found it. Under other circumstances—if we’d been poor, for example, and I’d gone there to be educated rather than to get me out of the house for a bit—I might well have knuckled down and learned something. I genuinely enjoyed reading some of the books, though of course I daren’t let on to the crowd I was in with, they’d have ragged me unmercifully, and I often think about them to this day: Saloninus’ Precepts (my special favorite, what a genius that man was) and Eutropius’ Moral and Political Dialogues, all that. Mostly, though, I drank and played cards and dice and chased skirts and went through money, which was what I was supposed to be doing, according to my father’s view of the world; I was nothing if not a dutiful son.

  Every letter home begging for money was answered by return, enclosing a draft drawn on the Stamen Brothers. I was surrounded on all sides by wild, eager young men desperate for money, hounded by creditors, terrified that their fathers and uncles would find out what they’d been up to and how much trouble they were in, but as far as I was concerned I had a bottomless purse and all my sins were not only condoned but encouraged. Enjoy yourself while you’re young, my boy, the old fool used to say, plenty of time for the other stuff later; what’s the use of being who you are if you don’t make use of it?

  Quite. But it made me wretched. I didn’t fit in. Everyone I knew was either mortally jealous or desperate to ingratiate themselves in the hope of scoring a loan. My personal appearance didn’t help, either. Truth is, I’ve never enjoyed being outstandingly handsome. It’s like the money, something I never had to earn, which made everything too easy. In my second year, I even grew a beard, and then everyone said how much it suited me, so I shaved it off again, before I started a fashion.

  So that’s why I went to the bad: out of altruism. It started when the nearest thing I had to a friend (won’t tell you his name because he’s a Chief Magistrate now, a real one) came whining round begging for money, or else some tailor or other was going to write to his father and cause the most almighty row.

  “How much do you need?” I asked him.

  “Forty angels,” he said. “Go on, be a sport. Forty angels is nothing to you. I’ve seen you spend that in an evening down at the Golden Feather.”

  Perfectly true. As it happened, I had forty angels in my coat pocket at that very moment. We were walking down Westgate together, just south of the New Temple. “Nothing doing,” I replied.

  “Oh go on, please. Really, I’m at my wit’s end. If I don’t get that money, I might as well jump off a bridge.”

  I sighed. “You’re pathetic,” I said. Then I looked round for a brick.

  As I said earlier, there’s never a brick when you need one. So we had to go down to the riverbank and fumble about in the dark until I found a stone about the right size and weight. “What the hell do you want that for?” he asked.

  I stuffed it under the lapels of my greatcoat. “You’ll see,” I said.

  It was around third watch; middle of the night, when all the drunks have finally wandered off, but before the first early-bird tradesmen begin to stir. We didn’t encounter a living soul between Holy Bridge and the New Temple. Looking back, of course, I realize that was the most colossal stroke of beginner’s luck. I led the way down the little winding alley that goes round the back of the New Temple and comes out on Foregate, just shy of the old Tolerance & Mercy.

  You never really know how your mind works, do you? I guess I must’ve noticed that window at the back of the chancel, subconsciously, and figured that it would be an
ideal place if ever anyone wanted to break in. Yet if you’d asked me, twenty-four hours earlier, I’d have told you in all sincerity that breaking into a temple and stealing the silver was the last thing I could ever see myself doing. Well, there you go. I took off my coat and he held it over the glass while I stoved it in with the stone. Practically silent. I’d like it noted that I’ve always been entirely self-taught, and have figured out all the basics of the profession from first principles, which is rather clever of me, you’ve got to admit.

  “What the hell are we doing?” he asked in a hoarse, horrified whisper.

  “Robbing a temple,” I told him. “Wait there. If anyone comes, let me know. All right?”

  He stared at me. I remember the look on his face, serendipitously illuminated in red and blue by a shaft of moonlight through the remains of the stained glass. He looked like he’d been horribly burned in a fire. “You’re mad,” he said. “We can’t do this.”

  “Watch me.”

  And it was so easy. I climbed in, carefully not cutting my legs to ribbons on the broken window, strolled down the aisle, stopped at the altar, reached for the first piece of silverware I came to; stopped, engaged my brain. I’d been about to steal the Three Angels Chalice, a masterpiece of post-Mannerist art that’d be instantly recognizable anywhere in the Empire. No bloody good at all. Instead, I fumbled about until I came across a rather ugly silver paten, about seventy years old, quite plain. I traced all over it with my fingertips and I couldn’t feel any kind of inscription. About forty angels’ worth of silver, intrinsic value. I bowed to the altar and said thank you politely, then went back to where he was waiting for me.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” he said.

  Pathetic. “I don’t know, do I? Sell it. Melt it down.”

  “Put it back, for crying out loud, and let’s get out of here. If I get caught, my dad’ll kill me.”

  I put the paten down on the ground. Then I punched him in the mouth, as hard as I could. “Pull yourself together, will you?” I said quietly. Then I picked up the paten, and we went home.

  I spent the rest of the night thinking about it. Then, as soon as it was light, I went out and bought a pair of tinsmith’s shears. I cut the paten up into little squares, about the size of a two-angel piece. Then I went for a walk down Silversmiths’ Row. I knew instinctively who I could do business with. You just had to look at their faces.

  “Do you want it or not?” I remember saying.

  The man sort of leered at me. “Sure it won’t be missed?” he said.

  I shrugged. “One of our footmen steals things,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Thirty angels.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  I’ve always done well in my dealings with fences. I guess I trust men who are more interested in things than people. I’ve often wished I could be like that. I gouged him for forty-six angels: forty for my friend, six for the poor box outside the New Temple. The idea that I should profit in any way from the transaction never crossed my mind, and besides, I didn’t need the money.

  The operation was successful, in that my friend never tried to borrow money from me again. He stopped being my friend, of course, but I wasn’t too bothered. Plenty more where he came from. And came they did—twenty angels here, thirty there, and though I say it myself, I was the soul of generosity. I spent my evenings strolling through the streets looking for vulnerable windows, convenient waterpipes, back doors not overlooked by neighboring houses. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was on one of those rolls you occasionally get in the profession, when it seems like you can’t go wrong and the dice always fall your way, even when you’re incredibly careless and overconfident. All that came to a shuddering halt, of course, one night when I carefully prised open a goldsmith’s shutters to find the goldsmith and his son sitting in the dark with drawn swords across their knees.

  To this day I wish I knew what possessed me. If I’d held still, acted drunk, pretended it was all a lark or a dare or something, I’m a hundred per cent sure my father would’ve bought them off, and no harm done to anyone. Instead, I pulled out this stupid knife I’d got into the habit of carrying, and there was this farcical sort of a scrimmage, and I stabbed the goldsmith’s son in the eye. I’d like to say it was an accident, the result of three large men blundering about in the dark being careless with sharp objects. That’d be entirely plausible, and nobody could prove it wasn’t true. But no. The boy had tripped over his father’s feet; he latched on to my ankles and I couldn’t get him off me. So I killed him.

  Why did I do that? As you’d expect, I’ve given it a degree of thought over the years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I did it because that’s who I am. Let me explain. I was born a nobleman’s son, but that must’ve been a mistake. Really, I’m a thief. A nobleman’s son, caught red-handed committing a crime, treats the whole thing as a joke and pays the price for his fun with his father’s money. A thief, caught by the ankle in a dark shop, kills someone. I must have known that, or I wouldn’t have taken the knife with me in the first place.

  I’m telling you this so as to kill any misplaced sympathy you might be inclined to have for me. As I’ve told a long succession of judges in most of the jurisdictions right across the known world, I’m guilty. I suppose I always have been. Born like it.

  We went to Thuria.

  I remembered it when we got there. We’d been there ten years or so earlier. It was where I’d thrown myself out of a twelfth story window. She gave me hell over that. You think I’ve got nothing better to do, and so on and so forth. I’ve heard it so often I can say the words along with her.

  “Well,” I said, as we clambered out of the coach and stretched our backs. There was snow on the ground, needless to say. “Here we are. Now what?”

  She stooped and flipped over a stone. No dice. Insects can’t live in such a cold place. “I told you,” she said. “They have silver mines.”

  I yawned. “Big deal.”

  “I don’t want you getting bored,” she said. “You always do stupid things when you’re bored.”

  “We should go to Shansard,” I said, not that I meant it. “There’s a temple there with the best collection of Resolutionist icons in the world, and all they’ve got guarding it is six old priests and a lock I could pick with a blade of grass.”

  She looked at me and sighed. “All right,” she said, and she dropped the bag she was carrying. “If that’s what you want.”

  “No, we’re here now,” I said. “Come on, we’d better find an inn or something. Assuming they’ve got inns in this armpit.”

  Kuvass City is actually not bad at all. The center was completely rebuilt by the Imperials about thirty years ago; a bit generic, but the streets are paved and there are a few quite good buildings. The best inn in town is the Flawless Diamonds of Orthodoxy. Rather grand, very expensive, heavily based on the Silver Star in the City—a bit like a page of manuscript copied out by a careful but illiterate copyist. So, to the Doxy we went. They looked at us a bit sideways, but we had money. They gave us a room on the third floor, with an impressive view out over the sawmills. Lumber is the big business in Kuvass City. I stood in front of the window for a while and drank in the scene. “I might like it here,” I said.

  “Come to bed,” she said.

  “In the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Please.”

  That’s the ridiculous thing. She really does love me. After all I’ve done to her, all I’ve tried to do. For crying out loud, I’ve killed her sixteen times.

  The first time was in Podarga. We’d been together for about three months. The first month hadn’t been bad at all. Imagine: you pick up a really attractive girl, nice manners and sexually adventurous, apparently besotted with you, not in the least adverse to a bit of criminal activity, and who happens to be a witch with genuine and wide-ranging magic powers. We’d had a lot of fun together, I freely admit. I’d reverted from the con game to straightforward breaking an
d entering, not that you need to do much breaking when your accomplice can turn herself into a cockroach, crawl in under the door and turn the key from the inside. We did the Stamen brothers, for old times’ sake. I’ll never forgive them for how they treated my father, after the big crash. That was the first time we did the cockroach thing. I filled two big grain sacks with gold coin, then found they were—surprise, surprise—far too heavy to lift. Silly, she said, with a tender smile, and did this weightlessness spell. It was like carrying pillows.

  That night I was really worried about her. She collapsed about an hour after we got back to the inn; she was pale as death, could hardly breathe, severe bouts of fever and vomiting. It’s all right, she told me, it’s perfectly normal, I’m used to it. I wanted to call a doctor, but she just grinned weakly. It was the transformation, she explained. You’re all right if you transform for under a minute. Longer than that, you get the shakes and so forth. I was horrified. Why didn’t you tell me, I said, I’d have thought of something else? No, that’s fine, really, she said. I’m used to it. She was sweating like a block of ice melting. The things I do for love, she said. At the time, I thought that was really sweet.

  After the Stamen brothers, we did the Charitable Bank, the Sword Blade Bank, the Merchant Adventurers; so much money, so very easy. It made me nervous. We ought to quit while we’re ahead, I said to her, at the very least we ought to cool it for a while. That made her laugh. Why stop when we’re having so much fun? she said.

  “Because we don’t need to do any more,” I told her. “We’ve got enough.”

  She looked at me. “Enough,” she repeated. “What’s that supposed to mean? Enough for what?”

  “Enough money,” I said. I pointed to the big trunk I’d bought to keep the money in. “There’s over five thousand angels in there.”

  She shrugged. “How much money did your father have?” she said.

  “What? I don’t know.”

  “More than five thousand angels?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Six thousand? Sixty thousand? Six hundred thousand?”