The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  There was no sign of pursuit. Only the mist, the endless mist, whipping and curling like a thing alive.

  He slipped the packet, now somewhat slimy, into his ragged coat and limped on, clutching at his bruised buttock and still struggling to spit that rotten-sweet taste from his mouth. Not that it was any worse than his breakfast had been. Better, if anything. You know a man by his breakfast, his fencing master always used to tell him.

  He pulled up his damp hood with its faint smell of onions and despair, plucked the purse from his sword and slid blade back into sheath as he slipped from the alley and insinuated himself among the crowds, that faint snap of hilt meeting clasp bringing back so many memories. Of training and tournaments, of bright futures and the adulation of the crowds. Fencing, my boy, that’s the way to advance! Such knowledgeable audiences in Styria, they love their swordsmen there, you’ll make a fortune! Better times, when he had not dressed in rags, or been thankful for the butcher’s leftovers, or robbed people for a living. He grimaced. Robbed women. If you could call it a living. He stole another furtive glance over his shoulder. Could he have killed her? His skin prickled with horror. Just a scratch. Just a scratch, surely? But he had seen blood. Please let it have been a scratch! He rubbed his face as though he could rub the memory away, but it was stuck fast. One by one, things he had never imagined, then told himself he would never do, then that he would never do again, had become his daily routine.

  He checked again that he wasn’t followed then slipped from the street and across the rotting courtyard, the faded faces of yesterday’s heroes peering down at him from the newsbills. Up the piss-smelling stairway and around the dead plant. Out with his key and he wrestled with the sticky lock.

  “Damn it, fuck it, shit it – Gah!” The door came suddenly open and he blundered into the room, nearly fell again, turned and pushed it shut, and stood in the smelly darkness, breathing.

  Who would now believe he’d once fenced with the king? He’d lost. Of course he had. Lost everything, hadn’t he? He’d lost two touches to nothing and been personally insulted while he lay in the dust but, still, he’d measured steels with his August Majesty. This very steel, he realised, as he set it against the wall beside the door. Notched, and tarnished, and even slightly bent towards the tip. The last twenty years had been almost as unkind to his sword as it had been to him. But perhaps today marked the turnaround in his fortunes.

  He whipped his cloak off and tossed it into a corner, took out the packet to unwrap it and see what he had come by. He fumbled with the lamp in the darkness and finally produced some light, almost wincing as his miserable rooms came into view. The cracked glazing, the blistering plaster speckled with damp, the burst mattress spilling foul straw where he slept, the few sticks of warped furniture – There was a man sitting in the only chair, at the only table. A big man in a big coat, skull shaved to greying stubble. He took a slow breath through his blunt nose, and let a pair of dice tumble from his fist and across the stained table top.

  “Six and two,” he said. “Eight.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Kurtis’ voice was squeaky with shock.

  “The Quarryman sent me.” He let the dice roll again. “Six and five.”

  “Does that mean I lose?” Kurtis glanced over towards his sword, trying and failing to seem nonchalant, wondering how fast he could get to it, draw it, strike – “You lost already,” said the big man, gently collecting the dice with the side of his hand. He finally looked up. His eyes were flat as those of a dead fish. Like the fishes on the stalls at the market. Dead and dark and sadly glistening. “Do you want to know what happens if you go for that sword?”

  Kurtis wasn’t a brave man. He never had been. It had taken all his courage to work up to surprising someone else, being surprised himself had knocked the fight right out of him. “No,” he muttered, his shoulders sagging.

  “Toss me that package,” said the big man, and Kurtis did so. “And the purse.”

  It was as if all resistance had drained away. Kurtis had not the strength to attempt a ruse. He scarcely had the strength to stand. He tossed the stolen purse onto the table, and the big man worked it open with his fingertips and peered inside.

  Kurtis gave a helpless, floppy motion of his hands. “I have nothing else worth taking.”

  “I know,” said the man, as he stood. “I have checked.” He stepped around the table and Kurtis cringed away, steadying himself against his cupboard. A cupboard containing nothing but cobwebs, as it went.

  “Is the debt paid?” he asked in a very small voice.

  “Do you think the debt is paid?”

  They stood looking at one another. Kurtis swallowed. “When will the debt be paid?”

  The big man shrugged his shoulders, which were almost one with his head. “When do you think the debt will be paid?”

  Kurtis swallowed again, and he found his lip was trembling. “When the Quarryman says so?”

  The big man raised one heavy brow a fraction, the hairless sliver of a scar through it. “Have you any questions... to which you do not know the answers?”

  Kurtis dropped to his knees, his hands clasped, the big man’s face faintly swimming through the tears in his aching eyes. He did not care about the shame of it. The Quarryman had taken the last of his pride many visits before. “Just leave me something,” he whispered. “Just... something.”

  The man stared back at him with his dead fish eyes. “Why?”

  FRIENDLY TOOK THE sword too, but there was nothing else of value. “I will come back next week,” he said.

  It had not been meant as a threat, merely a statement of fact, and an obvious one at that, since it had always been the arrangement, but Broya’s head slowly dropped, and he began to shudder with sobs.

  Friendly considered whether to try and comfort him, but decided not to. He was often misinterpreted.

  “You should, perhaps, not have borrowed the money.” Then he left.

  It always surprised him that people did not do the sums when they took a loan. Proportions, and time, and the action of interest, it was not so very difficult to fathom. But perhaps they were prone always to overestimate their income, to poison themselves by looking on the bright side. Happy chances would occur, and things would improve, and everything would turn out well, because they were special. Friendly had no illusions. He knew he was but one unexceptional cog in the elaborate workings of life. To him, facts were facts.

  He walked, counting off the paces to the Quarryman’s place. One hundred and five, one hundred and four, one hundred and three . . .

  Strange how small the city was when you measured it out. All those people, and all their desires, and scores, and debts, packed into this narrow stretch of reclaimed swamp. By Friendly’s reckoning, the swamp was well on the way to taking large sections of it back. He wondered if the world would be better when it did.

  ... seventy-six, seventy-five, seventy-four...

  Friendly had picked up a shadow. Pickpocket, maybe. He took a careless look at a stall by the way and caught her out of the corner of his eye. A girl with dark hair gathered into a cap and a jacket too big for her. Hardly more than a child. Friendly took a few steps down a narrow snicket and turned, blocking the way, pushing back his coat to show the grips of four of his six weapons. His shadow rounded the corner, and he looked at her. Just looked. She first froze, then swallowed, then turned one way, then the other, then backed off and lost herself in the crowds. So that was the end of that episode.

  ... thirty-one, thirty, twenty-nine...

  Sipani, and most especially its moist and fragrant Old Quarter, was full of thieves. They were a constant annoyance, like midges in summer. Also muggers, robbers, burglars, cut-purses, cut-throats, thugs, murderers, strong-arm men, spivs, swindlers, gamblers, bookies, moneylenders, rakes, beggars, tricksters, pimps, pawnshop owners, crooked merchants, not to mention accountants and lawyers. Lawyers were the worst of the crowd, as far as Friendly was concerned. Sometimes it seemed that no one i
n Sipani made anything, exactly. They all seemed to be working their hardest to rip it from someone else.

  But then Friendly supposed he was no better.

  ... four, three, two, one, and down the twelve steps, past the three guards, and through the double doors into the Quarryman’s place.

  It was hazy with smoke inside, confusing with the light of coloured lamps, hot with breath and chafing skin, thick with the babble of hushed conversation, of secrets traded, reputations ruined, confidences betrayed. It was as all such places always are. Two Northmen were wedged behind a table in the corner. One with sharp teeth and long, lank hair had tipped his chair all the way back and was slumped in it, smoking. The other had a bottle in one hand and a tiny book in the other, staring at it with brow well-furrowed. Most of the patrons Friendly knew by sight. Regulars. Some come to drink. Some to eat. Most of them fixed on the games of chance. The clatter of dice, the twitch and flap of the playing cards, the eyes of the hopeless glittering as the lucky wheel span.

  The games were not really the Quarryman’s business, but the games made debts, and debts were the Quarryman’s business. Up the twenty-three steps to the raised area, the guard with the tattoo on his face waving Friendly past.

  Three of the other collectors were seated there, sharing a bottle. The smallest grinned at him, and nodded, perhaps trying to plant the seeds of an alliance. The biggest puffed himself up and bristled, sensing competition. Friendly ignored them equally. He had long ago given up trying even to understand the unsolvable mathematics of human relationships, let alone to participate. Should that man do more than bristle, Friendly’s cleaver would speak for him. That was a voice that cut short even the most tedious of arguments.

  Mistress Borfero was a fleshy woman with dark curls spilling from beneath a purple cap, small eyeglasses that made her eyes seem large, and a smell about her of lamp oil. She haunted the anteroom before the Quarryman’s office at a low desk stacked with ledgers. On Friendly’s first day she had gestured towards the ornate door behind her and said, “I am the Quarryman’s right hand. He is never to be disturbed. Never. You speak to me.”

  Friendly, of course, knew as soon as he saw her mastery of the numbers in those books that there was no one in the office, and that Borfero was the Quarryman, but she seemed so pleased with the deception that he was happy to play along. Friendly had never liked to rock boats unnecessarily. That’s how people ended up drowned. Besides, it somehow helped to imagine that the orders came from somewhere else, somewhere unknowable and irresistible. It was nice to have an attic in which to stack the blame. Friendly looked at the door of the Quarryman’s office, wondering if there was an office, or if it opened on blank stones.

  “What was today’s take?” she asked, flipping open a ledger and dipping her pen. Straight to business without so much as a how do you do. He greatly liked and admired that about her, though he would never have said so. His compliments had a way of causing offence.

  Friendly slipped the coins out in stacks, then let them drop, one by one, in rattling rows by debtor and denomination. Mostly base metals, leavened with a sprinkling of silver.

  Borfero sat forward, wrinkling her nose and pushing her eyeglasses up onto her forehead, eyes seeming now extra small without them. “A sword, as well,” said Friendly, leaning it up against the side of the desk. “A disappointing harvest,” she murmured.

  “The soil is stony hereabouts.”

  “Too true.” She dropped the eyeglasses back and started to scratch orderly figures in her ledger. “Tough times all over.” She often said that. As though it stood as explanation and excuse for anything and everything.

  “Broya asked me when the debt would be paid.”

  She peered up, surprised by the question. “When the Quarryman says it’s paid.”

  “That’s what I told him.”

  “Good.”

  “You asked me to be on the lookout for... a package.” Friendly placed it on the desk before her. “Broya had it.”

  It did not seem so very important. It was less than a foot long, wrapped in very ancient stained and balding animal skin, and with a letter, or perhaps a number, burned into it with a brand. But it was not a letter that Friendly recognised.

  MISTRESS BORFERO SNATCHED up the package, then immediately cursed herself for seeming too eager. She knew no one could be trusted in this business. That brought a rush of questions to her mind. Suspicions. How could that worthless Broya possibly have come by it? Was this some ruse? Was Friendly a plant of the Gurkish? Or perhaps of Carcolf’s? A double bluff? There was no end to the webs that smug bitch span. A triple bluff? But where was the angle? Where the advantage?

  Friendly’s face betrayed no trace of greed, no trace of ambition, no trace of anything. He was without doubt a strange fellow, but came highly recommended. He seemed all business, and she liked that in a man, though she would never have said so. A manager must maintain a certain detachment.

  Sometimes things are just what they seem. Borfero had seen strange chances enough in her life.

  “This could be it,” she mused, though in fact she was immediately sure. She was not a woman to waste time on possibilities.

  Friendly nodded.

  “You have done well,” she said.

  He nodded again.

  “The Quarryman will want you to have a bonus.” Be generous with your own people, she had always said, or others will be.

  But generosity brought no response from Friendly.

  “A woman, perhaps?”

  He looked a little pained by that suggestion. “No.”

  “A man?”

  And that one. “No.”

  “Husk? A bottle of –”

  “No.”

  “There must be something.”

  He shrugged.

  Mistress Borfero puffed out her cheeks. Everything she had she’d made by tickling out people’s desires. She was not sure what to do with a person who had none. “Well, why don’t you think about it?”

  Friendly slowly nodded. “I will think.”

  “Did you see two Northmen drinking on your way in?”

  “I saw two Northmen. One was reading a book.”

  “Really? A book?”

  Friendly shrugged. “There are readers everywhere.”

  Deep and Shallow were sitting near the entrance. If one had been reading, he had given up. Deep was drinking some of her best wine straight from the bottle. Three others lay scattered, empty, beneath the table. Shallow was smoking a chagga pipe, the air thick with the stink of it. Borfero did not allow it normally, but she was obliged to make an exception for these two, as she had to with so much else. Why the bank chose to employ such repugnant specimens she had not the slightest notion. But she supposed rich people need not explain themselves.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, insinuating herself into a chair.

  “Where?” said Shallow, and gave a croaky laugh. Deep slowly tipped his bottle up and eyed his brother over the neck with sour distain.

  Borfero continued in her business voice, soft and reasonable. “You said your... employers would be most grateful if I came upon... that certain item you mentioned.”

  The two Northmen perked up, both leaning forward as though drawn by the same string, Shallow catching an empty bottle with his boot and sending it rolling in an arc across the floor.

  “Greatly grateful,” said Deep.

  “And how much of my debt would their gratitude stretch around?”

  “All of it.”

  “The whole party,” said Shallow, tapping the embers from his pipe across her polished tabletop.

  Borfero felt her skin tingling. Freedom. Could it really be? In her pocket, even now? But she could not let the size of the stakes make her careless. The greater the payoff, the greater the caution. “My debt would be finished?”

  Shallow leaned close, drawing the stem of his pipe across his stubbled throat. “Killed,” he said.

  “Murdered,” growled his brother, suddenly no furth
er off on the other side.

  She in no way enjoyed having those scarred and lumpen killer’s physiognomies so near. Another few moments of their breath alone might have done for her. “Excellent,” she squeaked, and slipped the package onto the table. “Then I shall cancel the interest payments forthwith. Do please convey my regards to... your employers.”

  “Course.” Shallow did not so much smile as show his sharp teeth. “Don’t reckon your regards’ll mean much to them, though.”

  “Don’t take it personally, eh?” Deep did not smile. “Our employers just don’t care much for regards.”

  Borfero took a sharp breath. “Tough times all over.”

  “Ain’t they, though?” and Deep stood, and swept the package up in one big paw.

  tHE COOL AIR caught Deep like a slap as they stepped out into the evening. Sipani, none too pleasant when still, had a decided spin to it of a sudden.

  “I have to confess,” he said, clearing his throat and spitting, “to being somewhat on the drunk side of drunk.”

  “Aye,” said Shallow, burping as he squinted into the mist. At least that was clearing somewhat. As clear as it got in this murky hell of a place. “Probably not the bestest notion while at work, mind you.”

  “You’re right.” Deep held the baggage up to such light as there was. “But who expected this to just drop in our laps?”

  “Not I, for one.” Shallow frowned. “Or for... not one?”

  “It was meant to be just a tipple,” said Deep.

  “One tipple does have a habit of making itself into several.” Shallow wedged on that stupid bloody hat. “A little stroll over to the bank, then?”

  “That hat makes you look a fucking dunce.”

  “You, brother, are obsessed with appearances.”

  Deep passed that off with a long hiss.

  “They really going to score out that woman’s debts, d’you think?”

  Deep hardly even cared enough to discuss it. “For now, maybe. But you know how they are. Once you owe, you always owe.” He spat again and, now the alley was a tad steadier, started walking off with the baggage clutched tight in his hand. No chance he was putting it in a pocket where some little scab could lift it. Sipani was full of thieving bastards. He’d had his good socks stolen last time he was here, and worked up an unpleasant pair of blisters on the trip home. Who steals socks? Styrian bastards. He’d keep a good firm grip on it. Let the little fuckers try to take it then.