The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  “Something like that, sir,” he said.

  The next day, and the day after that, I tried to spot her as we marched, but she was too smart for that. I guess she stayed at the rear; I was stuck at the front, of course, the shiny figurehead, and I couldn’t desert my post and go looking for her. I thought of giving orders for her to be shot or driven off, but I knew I couldn’t do that; so popular with the men, mascot, good luck. I tried to bribe my sergeant to poison her, discreetly, when no one was watching; he looked shocked and pretended he hadn’t heard me. That was when I knew she’d outsmarted me good and proper.

  Which left me with Plan B; unfortunate, but there it was.

  The sergeant must have known we were walking into a trap. If I could figure it out, so could he. I remember him pointing out the dangers, gently reminding me of our orders, which didn’t include riding straight into a narrow, high-sided ravine. At one point he told the trumpeters to sound the general halt, without a word from me. I had to be quite sharp with him. I knew exactly what I was doing, of course; because I knew how my opposite number’s mind worked, because he’d be just like me, a rich man’s son. So, when they blocked both ends of the ravine and displayed their archers and slingers, leering down at us, I was ready. I told the trumpeters to blow to parlay. Sure enough, down came their heralds. Surrender, they said, you’re trapped, we’ll slaughter you. I smiled. I challenge your leader to single combat, I said. Him or his duly appointed champion.

  The herald looked at me and grinned, and rode away without a word. That was too much for my sergeant. He grabbed me by the shoulder. Have you gone mad, he said. Are you out of your tiny little mind? I shook my head. We were screwed anyway, I said. We were at the very furthest extent of our supply line—I, a mere civilian, could see that clearly, whereas the general and his staff appeared not to have noticed. But what the hell. Any day now, they were going to launch a big attack, and we’d all be killed. This way, however, we stood a chance; not me, naturally, because they would choose the best fighter they’d got as their champion, and he’d go right through me in three seconds flat. Everyone else, however, would be allowed to surrender calmly and peacefully, and then it’d be up to the Sashan to provide food and water for three hundred men in the middle of the desert, something that our own side seemed incapable of doing.

  Just for once, my sergeant didn’t have anything to say. I enjoyed that moment, almost as much as if the heroism and altruism had been genuine. All phony, of course. I had my own agenda, and they were just accessories, props. I, however, was wallowing in a confluence of two streams of joy. One: I’d saved my men, they’d live when they should’ve died. Two: the enemy champion would kill me, and then at last, I’d finally be rid of her and free.

  They chose their man well. A lot of commanders would’ve gone for mere size and bulk, not realizing that in a duel, a big man’s at a disadvantage. There’s more of him to move about, so he’s slow, and he’s a bigger target. Instead, they went for a short, lean chap, quick as a snake. I knew as I watched him walk toward me that he knew exactly what he was doing. And so it proved. I came out swinging. He did this delicate little sideways-and-back step, and I looked down and saw that I’d walked straight into his sword point and skewered myself on it.

  Didn’t hurt all that much. The world suddenly went quiet, and the edges of my vision began to darken, as though I was falling down a hole. I knew at that point he’d got me, but he was a professional, the sort who does a thorough, workmanlike job. He took a further half-step back, lifted his arm and cut my head off.

  Everything went dark. Then I opened my eyes.

  She smiled at me. “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re going to be just fine.”

  Over her shoulder I could see the sun. It was directly overhead, whereas when I’d faced the enemy champion, it was considerably farther over to the east. So: three, maybe four hours later. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the sand I was lying on was caked brown—my blood, presumably.

  “You clown,” she said.

  I opened my mouth. No sound came.

  “Typical of you,” she went on, “the big, noble gesture. Did you really think you’d be able to win a duel? Anyway, it’s fine. They took your men away in a column. The Sashan look after their prisoners, they’re known for it. They’re going to be all right.”

  She honestly believed I gave a damn. That’s love for you.

  Things you never knew about witches.

  Coming back to life, she explained to me once, isn’t that big a deal. Bringing someone else back, by contrast, is a total pain, which explains, she said, why it’s done so rarely. There are two stages, apparently. You have to go Upstairs (we’re reverting to our metaphor of the house) and into the Very Bad Room, and you have to find who you’re looking for and persuade them to come back, which they’re always extremely reluctant to do. It can only be done, she told me, if the person really and truly wants to come back—try explaining that to a crowd of grieving relatives: actually, he’d far rather be dead and rid of the lot of you—which only happens when the person has unfinished business here. And that unfinished business, she told me, is always, invariably, love.

  Shows how much she knows.

  The other part, which you have to do first, is putting the damaged body back together again, to the point where it can once again sustain life. That, she said, is sheer miserable hard work. To do it, you make yourself small—really, really small, so you can crawl down inside veins and arteries and patch them up from the inside, or sew them back together when they’ve been severed. Same with the nerves and the skin. It’s days, or weeks, of grueling hard work, in conditions a coal-miner would find unbearable. Time passes in a different way when you’re that size, she said, which is why a month of hard labor inside someone’s veins can be accomplished in an hour of our time, before the body gets too cold to restart. Leave it too long, and nothing can be done, which is why you’ve got to be there, on the spot, and get in as soon as you can after the death.

  You wouldn’t do it for any money, she said. You wouldn’t do it for a dear friend, or the man you admire the most, or an uncle or an aunt. Only for love, she said. Only for love.

  I scrambled up onto the low wall. The man who’d spotted me left what he was doing and headed for me, yelling, though I couldn’t hear anything for the noise of the saw-blades. I picked my spot and jumped like a diver.

  For a moment I thought I’d got it all wrong. I landed on my knee on the nearest blade, and I was sure I’d slide off and be kicked free. But then I felt the saw-blade slice through my leg, and I fell forward, belly-flopped onto three saw-blades running in parallel—

  After she brought me back to life on the battlefield, I confess, I loved her; more, I have to say, than I’d have thought possible. To owe someone your life, to know that you left her, and she followed you, and she was there when you needed her most, because she loves you—I realized just how wrong I’d been, running away from the most wonderful thing life could possibly give me. To think, I told her, to think I could’ve died, and never realized. There, she said, it’s all right now. It’s going to be all right forever.

  We robbed the state treasury in Mnasthe, or at least, I did. Let me do this one by myself, I said to her, just to see if I can. I explained that maybe what had gone wrong and made me feel so depressed was this idea that she’d taken over my life—she did everything, provided everything, so long as she was with me I need fear no evil, and that, I conjectured, left me feeling trapped and helpless. So, if I did the robbery myself (with her help, because it’d be impossible to do it alone, but me making the plans and deciding how we’d do it), I’d reassure myself that I was still me, an independent free agent, not just an extension of her. What a good idea, she said, we’ll do that.

  I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Hours of quiet observation, miles trudged round and round the city, pages and pages of scrupulous notes, timings, calculations, extrapolated measurements. I went to the library and read book
s on geometry and trigonometry, so I could figure out the precise height and thickness of the walls, the exact amount of rope I’d need, the weight of the sacks of gold coins I’d have to haul up out of there with my cunningly-modified block and tackle. No magic, I’d insisted, just unaided human effort. We spend two whole days trudging up and down the mountains looking for archers’ root, to make the knockout potion we were going to dribble, drop by drop, down a piece of string dangled from the skylight into the nightwatchman’s beer. The closer we got to the big day, the more improbable contingencies I came up with for us to take into account and guard against. What if there’s a dog? We’d seen no sign of one, but I went out and bought an oilskin bag to put the slab of raw liver spiked with archers’ root in. I kept telling myself how much I was enjoying it all: the challenge, the uncertainty, the pleasure of the two of us working side by side, not witch and familiar but two equal human beings. I might be a mere mortal, I told her, but I’m smart. Who else would have thought to cut the soles off a perfectly good pair of boots and sew them back on the wrong way round, so that any footprints I left in the mud would appear to be going the other way?

  It goes without saying, I made a total pig’s ear of it. I climbed up onto the roof, dribbled the sleepy stuff into the guard’s beer, waited till he fell asleep, climbed down, got the keys off his belt, opened the vault door, started filling sacks. What I hadn’t taken into account was that the open skylight funneled in a draft that blew the vault door shut. I’d left the key in the lock, on the outside. I was shut in.

  I didn’t have to wait till morning. Three or four hours later, the door opened and in came a half-platoon of kettlehats, with drawn swords. I gave them a big, sheepish grin.

  She got me out, of course. She made an invisible hole in the prison wall, and another in the outside wall of my cell. I remember staggering out into the corridor and looking all round for her, until I felt a nip on the back of my neck. “Which way?” I said. A slight delay, then something bit my left ear. I went left. Out of there in two minutes flat, stepping over the bodies of five stunned guards. I’m not fit to be let out without a nanny.

  I said to her, “I think I’ve had enough of the stealing business. Let’s do something else.”

  “Fine,” she said, and poured me a drink. “Let’s do something else.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What?”

  So we tried philanthropy.

  We had this enormous stash of money. Previously we’d cleaned out most of the banks, major mecantiles, and revenue offices in Carmandua, North Piria, Molossene, and the Espide Confederacy. It was far too much to take around with us—a dozen big iron-ore carts, each drawn by six horses—so we sank it into the side of a mountain in Rhouna Penaul, quite safe, you’d have had to chip away twenty feet of granite to get to it. She just closed her eyes and muttered something. It’s so easy for some people, like being born rich, I guess.

  “There’s two ways we can go about doing this,” I remember telling her. “We can just stand on a street corner and hand out money, or we can use this lot to change the way things are done, make a real difference.”

  She looked at me, shrugged. “All right,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

  I started explaining to her about the Republic. Once upon a time, I told her, there was a small city, ruled by kings. But the city grew strong and came to dominate its neighbors. Tribute and taxes flowed into the Exchequer, and the kings took that money and spent it on stupid luxuries, gorgeous palaces, pensions and monopolies for their favorites, while the poor starved. Then along came a man called Victorinus, a nobleman from an ancient family. He started saying that the way things were done was all wrong. The wealth that the hardworking people created and the brave soldiers took from the conquered provinces should be shared equally among the citizens; hereditary monarchy was idiotic, the king should be elected by the people. The king tried to have him strung up, but the people wouldn’t allow it; instead, they chased out the king and made Victorinus their leader. The king raised an army of mercenaries, but the people’s army slaughtered them like sheep. The Republic was born. And then (I told her) it changed. Slowly, gradually, without anyone noticing. And anyway, most of the time the people were looking the other way, watching the invincible armies of the Republic conquering the known world—mercy to those who submit, but grind down the warlike with war, as the poet so charmingly puts it. There was always plenty to watch and feel good about, but meanwhile—well, you know the saying, how all women eventually end up turning into their own mothers. Same with the Republic. Instead of the king there was the Council of Ten; once you’d said that, you’d said everything.

  She heard me out, then nodded. “Right,” she said. “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “We can change all that,” I said. “We can put it all right again. With the money, and your powers, we can be Victorinus all over again. Overthrow the Republic. Stick the heads of the Ten up on pikes and set the people free. I understand now,” I said, “it’s actually starting to make some sense, that’s why I met you.”

  She had this odd sort of smile on her face. “Any minute now,” she said, “you’re going to use the word Destiny.”

  I glowered at her. “And why not?” I said. “I mean, just ask yourself: why was I born into the upper crust, when all my instincts are straight in off the street? But that’s just what Victorinus was like, the greatest man who ever lived. Now, God knows I’m not like him, brave and noble and wise, but that’s why I’ve got you. There’s a purpose to it, there has to be. And I’m so stupid, it’s taken me all this time to realize.”

  She was quiet for a while, thinking. Then: “All right,” she said.

  I gave her a huge smile. “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you too,” she said. But my mind was on other things.

  So, a boy and a girl, very much in love, decide to overthrow the State. How do they go about it?

  “We’ve got to think this through carefully,” I said. We were in bed, looking out through an open window over Beloisa Bay. The sun was rising; the sea was purple and the sky was dark blue and red.

  “Of course,” she said. I got the impression she wasn’t really interested.

  “The people,” I went on, “are stupid. The trouble with them is, they don’t know when they’re unhappy. You can bully them and starve them and cheat them out of their land and send their sons off to die in the desert, and they just sit there and take it.” I leaned across her and picked a grape off the bunch. “That’s where all the revolutions of the past have come unstuck,” I went on, “that’s where my father went wrong. He thought it was just a case of bribing a few senior officers in the palace guard. Never occurred to him that the Council of Ten had far more money than he did and could match any offer he could make out of petty cash. No, you’ve got to start with the people.”

  She nodded. “You’ve got to make them unhappy,” she said.

  She was being a bit dim. “They are unhappy,” I said. “You’ve got to make them realize it.”

  “Oh I see.” She yawned. “Would you like to go for a swim later?”

  “I don’t know, I’ll see. And then,” I went on, “it’s not enough for them to know they’re unhappy, there’s got to be a catalyst, a spark, a moment of no return. There’s got to be one specific thing. Like the arrest of the four priests in Semnia Brevis, or the simony scandal in Beal Defoir. Something to bring them out on the streets. Otherwise, they’ll just stay at home and moan to each other.”

  “All right,” she said. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  I took another grape. Very good grapes, imported. “And of course you do need the army on your side, no question about it,” I went on. “Not just a hatful of colonels, you need the captains and the junior officers as well. And you’ll only get them if they’re really angry about something.”

  “Such as?”

  I thought about the precedents. “In Joiceau it was a massacre of civilians,” I said. “When the Sas
han threw out the Third Dynasty, it was because the emperor had ordered the army to kill all the women and children in Ap’ Ereme. It’s always a sort of gut feeling of revulsion, like, we can’t possibly do this. Otherwise, they just knuckle under and obey orders, even when they know it’s wrong.”

  “I get you,” she said. “You really do have to think of everything, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “You’ve got to have a sort of vicious spiral,” I said, “where everything the government does to stay in power turns against them. They try appeasement, it just makes the people demand more. They try force, that pisses off the junior officers. That’s what I mean about the point of no return. Some really terrible thing. That’s when it becomes inevitable, and nothing anyone does can stop it.”

  “And that’s what we need to think up,” she said. “I see.”

  At that point there was a knock on the door, the maid with breakfast. Then we went for a swim, the sea was calm and warm, and then we went back to the inn and made love. I was still thinking things over, trying to create the shape of a successful rebellion in my subconscious mind. She didn’t bring the subject up again, so I assumed she was happy to leave the strategic planning to me.

  “It’ll be fine,” she said. “It’ll be something we can do together.”

  Now I have to confess, I’m not a morning person as a rule. Qualify that; dawn is fine by me so long as I’ve been up all night. But waking to see Her rosy fingers spreading across a dark blue sky is my idea of a total drag.

  So, when she shook me awake and through the open window I saw blue and pink, I mumbled, “Leave me alone. Go back to sleep.”

  She stabbed me in the ribs with two fingers. That got the job done. “What?” I whined.

  “Get up,” she said, “quickly. We’ve got to go.”

  Now that was a sentiment I could relate to. A lot of people, many of them early-morning women, have said that to me, invariably with good reason—bailiffs, law enforcement officers, husbands. A heartbeat later, I was out of bed and fumbling for my shoes. “What?” I said. “What’s the matter?”