Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  The Serpent’s Court was no Hummingbird’s Palace. It was garishly modern where the Palace was determinedly antique. Tinny modern music coming out of a beat-up horned machine grated the nerves and set the mood. Its clientèle was way down the scale as well, but Uncle Tlaloc’s word carried weight here and some of the clients might prove useful.

  I paused in the entrance alcove and shook the rain off my hat as the blast of the air conditioning chilled me in my rain-soaked cloak. I scanned the room for a useful face.

  There weren’t many possibilities. The watchmen from the evening shift had finished their drinks and had gone home long ago, and the night shift would not end until dawn. The other patrons, criminals, whores and hangers-on, couldn’t help me. The only one who looked likely was Sevenrain, sitting by himself in the corner. Not my first choice, but he would do.

  Sevenrain was well into his fourth decade, with lines on his face, scars cutting through the tattoos on his arms and chest, and the burly, slightly bloated build of a man who likes corn beer too much and exercise too little. A sneer formed on his face as I crossed the room.

  “Well, young lordling,” he said just a little too loudly as I approached. “You honour us with your presence.”

  I gave it back to him with a condescending nod. “The honour is mine entirely, oh estimable hound of men,” I lisped in a parody of a noble accent. “Allow me a small token of my appreciation by purchasing your next pot of beer.”

  He glared at me as I sat down next to him, trying to decide if the game was worth continuing. He apparently remembered what had happened the last time he had pursued it—or who I still worked for—and decided it wasn’t.

  “What in the Nine Hells do you want?” he growled.

  “Just a few minutes’ conversation, and perhaps a chance to show my gratitude afterwards.” Sevenrain knew damn well whose gratitude might be shown; and so, probably, did everyone else in the bar who was at all interested. But better not to mention such things.

  I shifted my stool so no one else could see my lips move. “There was a killing today down in the warehouse district.”

  “Quetzalcoatl’s dick! Do you expect me to remember every miserable person who gets his throat slit in my precinct?”

  “I didn’t say it was a person.” I said softly.

  His face froze. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “There was one of those.”

  “Where exactly?”

  His eyes darted left and right, but his lips hardly moved at all. “Behind the warehouses off the English Docks. Between the third and fourth one.”

  “Time?”

  “Found it an hour before dawn. Not one of our people, a sailor looking for a place to puke.” His face split in a mirthless grin. “Puked his fucking guts out when he saw.”

  “Any leads?”

  A longer pause this time. “No. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. Nothing at the scene but that—and a big puddle of sailor puke.”

  I nodded. “You’ll send word if you learn anything more?”

  “I’ll see it reaches the right ears.” Meaning he wasn’t going to take a chance on me cutting him out of Uncle’s generosity.

  I nodded and rose, flipping a coin down onto the table so that the silver rang loudly on the stone top. “For your refreshment, my good man,” I lisped and swaggered out to the metaphorical sound of grinding teeth behind me.

  The night was heavy with the Storm Goddess’ moist, salty breath. I could feel more than the usual number of disease spirits floating in the air. My sweat soaked my bed. I threw off the blanket. Sleep was impossible on nights like this.

  My eyes caught something. I strained to see it in the darkness. There was a figure at the door, walking towards the foot of my bed.

  I wanted to run. I wanted to reach for the sword by my pillow. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe.

  The figure knelt at the foot of my bed. It picked up the box I kept there.

  When it opened the box, a cold, green light was released that lit up its skinless face.

  Skinless, not fleshless. The eyes, muscles, and other meat of the body were still present. It was a flayed man. Of course, there was only one flayed man of great significance in my life.

  I looked into the lidless eyes, and recognized them. The colour of watery chocolate.

  “Smoke?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was smiling. He didn’t have lips.

  “I’ve come to visit my skin,” he said. “A night like this can be cold to one without skin.”

  “How sweet.”

  His teeth glistened in the green light. “I also came to remind you that your life grew in my death as corn grows in the death of the Corn God.”

  “My life. How marvellous.”

  “And to remind you that you could be the one who walks at night without his skin.”

  He snapped the box shut. The light was gone. I was alone.

  Shaking, I crawled to the foot of the bed. I could barely see in the moonlight from the window, but I could feel that the layer of grime on the box had not been disturbed. No one had touched the box. Smoke was not here. It was a dream.

  I had only looked into the box at Smoke’s skin once, when Uncle Tlaloc gave it to me after he had saved what was left of my life. I haven’t been able to make myself open it and look at the dried and neatly folded, tattooed skin since.

  “The thing you desire most,” Uncle had said when he presented me the box with his own hands. And he was right—then. Then I desired nothing more than Smoke’s slow, painful death for leading me into shame and abandoning me to save himself. But like most of Uncle Tlaloc’s gifts, this one had two edges, and a point keener than obsidian. By killing my enemy in such a fashion, he cut me off from any possibility of return to my former life. By presenting the skin to me, he tied me inexorably to the deed. And he reminded me, oh so subtly, who held the power of life and death in English Town.

  Smoke did not return that night, but my dreams were uneasy and peopled with things I would rather forget. I awoke bolt upright, clutching a dagger before I realized that someone had nudged the foot of my bed. It was my man, Uo, standing over me, impassive despite the knife in my hand. “One to see you,” he said as soon as he was sure I was awake.

  “Who?”

  He shrugged. “She is veiled.”

  “Weapons?”

  His flat peasant face didn’t change expression. “A high-born lady.”

  My visitor was standing in the middle of my front room, arms at her sides and rigid, as if to touch anything was to contaminate herself. Her mantle bore a single conservative row of embroidery which proclaimed her status without specifying her clan.

  “My Lady.”

  She turned to face me, cotton mantle still over her head. Her eyes were large and dark, but not crossed enough to be truly beautiful. Like the eyes of another woman, from a long time ago. The memory grabbed at my gut with chilled talons.

  “Are we alone?” she asked when my servant had withdrawn. I nodded and she dropped her mantle, showing her face.

  She was handsome without being beautiful. Her skull was not flattened in the Frog fashion. Her hair was lustrous, her lip plug small like the jade spools in her ears. On her chin were the four lines of a high-class married lady. It took me a second to put the picture together and recognize her.

  “Well, at least you are not drunk,” she remarked.

  “Threeflower?”

  “Lady Threeflower.” Her voice was hard and cold. She would not unbend an inch.

  “And how may I serve the gracious lady?”

  Her eyes flashed. Once, in another life, she was the elder sister of the one I was supposed to marry. Now what was she?

  “Ninedeer told of meeting you.”

  “I am not surprised my cousin could not keep the news to himself. But was that enough to bring you running to me?”

  She snorted. “Let us say he reminded me of your existence.” She stressed the last word as if I were actually dead. Which, I suppose
I was, from her viewpoint.

  “Then what brings you to English Town?”

  “A relative. Fourflower.”

  Oh ho. A gambling debt perhaps, and Threeflower using our past connection to charm her way out of it? That didn’t seem right. “I do not know the lady.”

  “She was hardly a child when you left.” Again that emphasis.

  By now I was sick of her attitude, sick of the things she represented, and sick of the skinless face of Smoke floating in my mind. I softened my voice. “My Lady, you obviously want something. Will insulting me help you to gain your end?”

  A pause. “You are correct,” she said, suddenly coldly gracious. “I am trying to find Fourflower. She disappeared three days ago, seemingly kidnapped at the Forest Market.”

  “Seemingly?”

  “Her maid heard a muffled scream, and when she turned her mistress was gone.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at her and she flushed. “The maid was questioned very thoroughly. She held to her story to the end.”

  “Then Fourflower probably has been kidnapped.”

  Lady Threeflower glared at me. “I wish her return.”

  “Then I would suggest contacting a go-between. I can give you a name… “

  “The go-betweens say they know nothing of the matter,” she cut in.

  That stopped me. Kidnapping was an old, if not honourable, profession, and one of the reasons the nobles kept their women and children close. But there was an order to these things, a procedure. And that called for the approach to be made through a go-between.

  “Three days, you said?”

  “Mid-morning on the day of the Ocelot last.” Plenty of time for a go-between to contact the family.

  Mentally I ran down the list of possibilities. The most obvious one was that the snatch team had bungled the job and the girl was dead. Or perhaps this was an unusually complicated bit of business. Someone had dropped the ball, or the girl’s other relatives had been contacted and were keeping it quiet. Too many things could have happened.

  “Was Fourflower important?”

  “She was of the line of the Emperor Montezuma Himself.”

  Which was a polite way of saying she was very well-born and had nothing else. No position, no title of her own, no fortune, and no prospects. A cousin-companion to Threeflower, perhaps chosen for her name, and ranking little higher than a servant. But a young noblewoman could become attached to such a one. Especially if her blood sister was a beautiful, faithless, empty-headed ninny. I broke that train of thought off sharply.

  “Then there is more to this than you think. Best you go home and await word.”

  “I want her found!”

  “Do you think I can snap my fingers and conjure her here for you?”

  “I think you can contact your friends who kidnap.”

  “They are my associates, not my friends, and they only kidnap for ransom.” A thought came. “Was Fourflower pretty?”

  “Very,” she snapped, and the colour drained from her cheeks as she caught the implication. “I suppose you know brothel keepers as well,” she said with cold fury.

  “Many of them,” I said and smiled at her discomfiture. “But none of the ones I know would be foolish enough to kidnap a high-born maid off the streets in broad daylight.” Not unless they were very well paid, I thought, and well enough protected not to fear Uncle Tlaloc and his peers. But word of something that big should have got around. This was beginning to sound interesting.

  “Did she have lovers?”

  “She was untouched,” Threeflower said. “The maid confirmed that before she died.”

  “A flirtation, then?”

  “I would have known even that.”

  “So.” I was silent for a long time.

  “I will pay well for Fourflower’s safe return,” Threeflower said.

  “Undoubtedly, Lady. But I will be honest with you. I doubt very much the child is still alive.”

  “Then I will pay for her killers.”

  If the girl had died in a bungled kidnapping, the head of the ring would gladly give the skins of her killers as a peace offering and pay wergild besides.

  “I will see what I can discover.”

  She nodded, reached beneath her mantle and tossed something at me. I dodged instinctively, and the deerskin pouch hit the floor with the metallic clink.

  “That will do for a start, I think.”

  I kicked the pouch back to the hem of her skirt. “I am not doing this for money,” I told her.

  She smiled for the first time. “You shall have nothing else of me. My husband cannot restore you and I would not ask it of him even if he could.”

  “You misread me,” I said coldly.

  “I read you well enough to know that in an age when things were done properly you would have been killed instead of merely banished.”

  “And in an age when things were done properly you would be whipped naked from one temple plaza to the next for visiting a man not a relative, unescorted, and at night.” I looked at her speculatively. “That could still happen, you know.”

  She snorted, threw her mantle over her head and stalked out. Uo must have met her at the door because I did not hear it slam as she left. I was already reaching for the tequila.

  It was late the next afternoon when I awoke with a pounding head, a foul taste in my mouth and a sourness in the pit of my stomach that was more than physical. Twice in two days I had had to deal with ghosts from my former life and that was two times too many.

  I dressed in a clean tunic and cloak, bolted down a cold tamale that settled in my stomach like a lump of basalt, and hurried out. It was not long until the market gates would close, and there was someone I wanted to see, as much for my own peace of mind as anything else.

  The streets about the Fireflower Market were thronged with porters, slaves, housewives and their maids. Here and there were caged parrots with their mouths open, hanging their wormlike tongues as if they were dying of thirst. A barefoot Frog girl, barely old enough to be married, blocked my way to the entrance. She was holding a baby who had wooden blocks tied to his skull to make it slope like the forehead of a reptile, but she broke off her plea as we were pressed back against the wall to make way for a green-plumed noble and his retinue.

  I followed in his convenient wake, being forced to pause only twice, as he stopped to watch the tiny daughter of a featherworker delicately plucking the feathers off of a skewered hummingbird with thin bone tweezers; and then as he paused by the tattooist, who was beating the line that would make a young man’s pretty face look as if it were covered with scales. Around us, the busy market was beginning to clear out. A few of the vendors had already shut their stalls, and here and there sweepers were at work. I dove into the maze of twisty lanes between the stalls, checked my bearings once, and pulled up before a narrow doorway hidden by a reed mat which still bore the stained and weary outline of a jaguar.

  “Who comes?” A voice croaked as I thrust aside the matting and stepped through the door into the darkness.

  “A pilgrim seeking wisdom from Mother Jaguar,” I answered. There was a shifting sound behind me, as if someone had just relaxed, and perhaps lowered a weapon.

  “Enter then and be welcome,” the voice called, stronger this time. I stepped through the second doorway, thrust aside a cotton curtain and came face to face with Mother Jaguar.

  She was kneeling at a low clay altar table, casting and recasting knucklebones too small for a deer or a pig. “Sit, my son,” she said in a voice that was stronger and younger than the one which had greeted me at the door. “What do you seek?”

  She didn’t look up until I tossed three silver coins onto the table next to the knucklebones. She was ancient, but her eyes were black and sharp as obsidian points in her wrinkled, tattooed face.

  “There is a maid named Fourflower, a high-born maid,” I began. “It is said she was stolen from the marketplace on the day of the Ocelot, last. Her family seeks her and would be grateful
for any aid.”

  Mother Jaguar nodded. “I have heard this story, but I know nothing of such a maid or such a stealing. Nor do any of my ones in the world of spirits know of such a thing.”

  “A kidnapping for private reasons then? Perhaps lust?”

  Mother Jaguar cast the bones again and shook her head. “I and my spirits know nothing,” she repeated.

  I nodded. If you paid Mother Jaguar for information, and if she took your money, then she would tell you the truth. Which meant that neither Mother nor any of her kind knew anything about what had happened to Fourflower.

  “Thank you for your wisdom,” I said and rose to go.

  “Your money,” Mother Jaguar said.

  I tossed a fourth coin on the table. “It is yours. I asked, and you gave of your wisdom. It is not a fault that the answer was other than I hoped.” I turned to pass through the curtain.

  “Wait,” Mother Jaguar said. I turned and she cast the bones, once, twice, and again, while I waited.

  “Your maid is not the only one so taken,” Mother Jaguar said at last.

  “There have been several others, all of impeccable lineage, but perhaps not favoured by fortune.”

  “All maids?”

  “Some maids, some boys, a few unmarried men and women, perhaps a hand count in all. All in the last two cycles of days.”

  “Who?”

  “No one knows. Nor why.” She turned again to her casting and the coins vanished from the altar as if by magic.

  Uncle Tlaloc was impassive when I told him what I had found out about the kidnapping that evening.

  It was still early and Uncle was drinking mate rather than alcohol. He took a last long pull on the gourd through his golden straw as I finished my report. “Diverting perhaps,” he rumbled, “but I fail to see why it should be of concern to us.”

  I frowned. “There are ransoms, Uncle.”

  He waved that away. “Assuming they are alive.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “The odds are strongly against it. Besides, I understand the Emperor’s Shadow has taken an interest in the matter.”

  I started to ask why, realized it was a stupid question and closed my mouth. Kidnapped humans could be sacrificed, especially ones of little note but of excellent lineage. And, of course, it was treason for anyone other than the Emperor or the Imperial Priests to conduct a human sacrifice, since it implied a relationship to the Gods which was the Emperor’s alone. Yes, the Emperor’s Shadow would investigate a thing like that. And the Emperor’s Shadow was very bad news indeed.