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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Well?”

  He hesitated; not from uncertainty or doubt, but because he was choosing exactly the right words. “I could teach you,” he said. “I have the ability. I also have the ability to jump out of the window and kill myself. I don’t choose to do the latter, but I could.”

  “You don’t want to teach me?”

  The frown was still there, as if I were the words of a familiar song he couldn’t quite remember. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve only just met you. Also, you may not be able to learn from me.”

  Ah, I thought, here we go. The let-out clause. He will now proceed to give me some plausible but spurious reason why I turn out to be the one student in a hundred who won’t be able to do it. Only after I’ve finished the course, naturally.

  “In order to learn from me,” he said, “there’s something you need to do. Most people won’t do it. A great many people simply can’t. Unfortunate, but there it is.”

  “I see,” I said. “Do what, exactly?”

  Hi face was blank, open and totally sincere. “You need to pay me one hundred and seventy-five thalers,” he said.

  Well, he’d annoyed me. We’d played a game of body-language chess, and it had been checkmate in four. And besides, you don’t need a horse if you’re living in Town. So I sold mine – two hundred and six thalers, fifteen more than I paid for it – and turned up the next morning with the money in a faded red velvet bag. As before, he was alone, sitting in the one chair behind the chipped-and-scratched softwood desk, reading a book; no lecture in progress, no enthralled students sitting at his feet eagerly taking notes. And I still didn’t believe him.

  “Here you are,” I said, dumping the bag heavily on the desk. “Count it if you like.”

  He sort of squinted at it; if I hadn’t known better I’d have sworn he was counting the coins through the cloth. “I don’t know,” he said. Under the desk I could see where he’d tried to stick the uppers of his shoes back onto the soles with fish-scale glue.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A man walks into a cutler’s shop,” he said. “He wants to buy a knife. The cutler says, what do you want a knife for?”

  “Not where I come from.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard me. “Why does the cutler ask the question?” he went on. “Because, unless he knows what the customer has in mind, he can’t sell him one that’s suitable for his purpose. Or perhaps he suspects the customer wants to kill his wife.”

  “I’ve got a knife,” I said. “Several.”

  He smiled. “And,” he said, “if you wanted to kill someone, you’d have the means to do it. Therefore, teaching you the basilisk stare would not be an irresponsible act on my part. Fair enough. But, the cutler replies, if you don’t want to kill someone, why do you want to buy a dagger?”

  I shrugged. “In case someone wants to kill me.”

  He sighed. “Indeed,” he said. “And the customer could quite properly say, if you’re that concerned, why do you make and sell daggers? To which the cutler could only reply, because that’s what I do.” He clicked his tongue, a surprisingly loud and vulgar noise. “A hundred and seventy-five thalers?”

  “Cash money.”

  He looked at the bag. He seemed to find an answer in it. “Plus,” he added, “fourteen thalers for materials and other incidentals.”

  “Incidentals?”

  “Bits and pieces,” he said. “I could explain, but until you’ve started the course you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Ah,” I said, and gave him three five-thaler bits. They seemed to disappear into his hand, like water poured on gravel. “I’ll owe you the change,” he said.

  I still didn’t believe any of it. “So,” I said, “do we start now?”

  He shook his head. “The introductory class is tomorrow at noon sharp,” he said. “Don’t be late.”

  I hesitated, then headed for the door. I looked back; he was reading his book, slumped back a little in his chair, frowning, in the exact centre of a large, empty room. I went back down the stairs into the street. I got a splinter in my hand, from the banister.

  SO, YOU MAY well be asking, why did I want to learn how to walk through walls, suspend the passage of time and kill people with a single stare? Well. Wouldn’t you?

  All right, but you wouldn’t sell your horse. Unless your reasoning was: if I could do all that stuff, I could stroll through the walls of the King’s Vault, fill my pockets, take out the guards with a single well-directed glare, I could buy all the horses I could possibly want; and I’d have the perfect alibi when the kettlehats came to arrest me – I was in the Integrity Triumphant playing shuttlejack with the regular crowd all that evening, ask anyone, they’ll remember me. Also, I couldn’t have killed those guards, didn’t you say there wasn’t a mark on them? You could be the greatest criminal ever.

  Yes; but so far, nobody was. Put it another way: if the capability existed, surely by now someone would’ve got hold of it and misused it (because that’s what people do, whenever some powerful new thing comes along. If we’d all been born in darkness and someone invented the Sun, the first we’d know about it was when someone used it to burn his way into the First Consolidated Bank). But this hadn’t happened. The strange man sat there all day in his room over the cordwainer’s shop, purporting to teach the art, but so far there were no reports of inexplicable burglaries and impossible deaths. Therefore, it didn’t work.

  And I’d paid the man a hundred and seventy-five, belay that, a hundred and ninety thalers; presumably non-refundable – do you walk up to a man who might just be able to stop your heart with a frown and ask for your money back? I don’t think so. Not unless you’re totally convinced. And I wasn’t.

  I know; I haven’t answered my own question. Be patient.

  IN CORNMARKET THERE’S this clock. Well, you know that. It’s what the city’s famous for. Ten kreuzers buys you the view from the top of the clock tower. For half a thaler: they show you the mechanism; it’s this crazy room, twelve feet by fifteen by ten, crammed full of cogs, wheels, pulleys, camshafts, escapements, huge restless circles cut with hundreds of thousands of tiny sharp teeth – for eating time with, presumably. This machine, they tell you, makes all the time used in the whole Empire. You’d think that seeing the mechanism, how it works, would take the magic out of it, but no, quite the reverse. I think it’s because the power train moves so slowly you don’t notice it; therefore, all the belts and wheels seem to be turning and spinning of their own motion, powered only by magic and some invisible sympathy with the inherent forces of the Earth.

  At any rate, if you’re in earshot of Cornmarket, you have no excuse for being late. I ran up the stairs just as the chimes were sounding. On the tenth out of twelve, I knocked on the door. As the twelfth chime died away, I heard him say, “Come in.”

  He was sitting exactly where I’d left him. “You’re late,” he said. I blinked. “No I’m not.”

  He shook his head just a little. “The clock is slow,” he said. “Three minutes.”

  I wanted to say, that’s not possible. The clock is the time, the Emperor made a decree. Also, how the hell would you know? I didn’t. I said, “Sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Try to be punctual,” he said. “After all, it’s your money you’re wasting.”

  He made a sort of vague gesture, which I interpreted as, sit on the floor. I sat.

  I was just starting to wonder if I’d become invisible when he coughed awkwardly and said, “I can only teach you what you already know. You do appreciate that, don’t you?”

  I thought, one hundred and ninety thalers. “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He sighed. “Let’s start with some breathing exercises,” he said.

  MY FATHER, YOU see, was a thief. Not a bad one, because he never got caught – not once, in fifty years in the profession. Not a particularly good one, because he never made any money. He was in the bulk-stealing end of the trade. He stole high-volume, low-value – sawn lumber, bricks, fire
wood, sand, pit-props, that sort of thing. If there was a big heap of something anywhere in the City, waiting to be used or shipped, Dad would roll up in the early hours of the morning with his cart, load it up and take it away. It was relentless hard work, but Dad didn’t mind that, he was a grafter, a willing horse. As soon as I turned thirteen I had to go with him; I’m not a willing horse, and I take after my mother, not physically strong, so I had to compensate with extreme effort. I used to tell him: Dad, you could make just as much money – more, probably – just hiring out as a carter; you’ve got the rig and the horses, where’s the difference, except we could do this in daylight, and you wouldn’t have to punch out night-watchmen. He’d just look at me.

  No money in it; not after he’d paid for feed for the horses – bloody things lived better than we did most of the time. Back then, remember, they still hung thieves. Hell of a way to make a living.

  So I grew up thinking; everything is difficult. Everything; even stealing, for crying out loud, is backbreaking, merciless slog. The world is so hard, so absolutely unyielding, all human life is basically quarrying stone, millions of little chips, and each one jars your bones and makes your brains rattle, until you’re worn out, shaken to bits, steel on stone every minute of every day. Unless – ah, the dream – somehow, somewhere, hidden from the sight of all us losers, there’s an easier way, a hidden door in the rock face that leads to the perfumed palaces of the nobility –

  Ever seen a blind man looking for a door? He gropes the wall, methodically, inch by inch. That’s me, looking for the easy way. Of course, I put more effort into that than I’d need to expend if I was digging coal. Just like Dad.

  That’s one reason, anyhow.

  “THERE NOW,” HE said. I took that as permission to breathe out. My vision was starting to blur. “I’ve taught you something you already knew.”

  The evil sadistic bastard had made me hold my breath while he counted to a hundred. What was that supposed to achieve, for crying out loud? “Quite,” I croaked, trying not to let him hear me gasping. “I’ve been breathing for years.”

  “Of course you have. All living things breathe, by definition.”

  I looked at him. Holding my breath hadn’t conferred on me the gift of the basilisk stare. Pity. “So?”

  He gave me a sad smile and stuck his hand into the wall.

  Into. Fingers, knuckles, wrist. I tried to see what the boundary looked like, the interface, the point where his arm disappeared into the pale yellow plaster, but I was too far away.

  “Happy now?” he said.

  “Intrigued,” I managed to say. “Hallucination. Brought on by lack of air.”

  He grinned and pulled his hand out again. “Of course it is,” he said. “Now you do it.”

  I really wanted to, just in case I could. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to try. I could already feel the juddering halt as my fingertips didn’t pass through the plaster and the brick, as they bent back under pressure. You could break a bone so easily. The thought made me feel slightly sick.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Ah well.” He picked the book up off his desk and opened it. “Same time tomorrow,” he said. “That’s assuming you want to continue.”

  I stood up and headed for the door. As I passed him, he must’ve stuck out a foot to trip me. I fell sideways, awkwardly, against the wall.

  Into the wall. Through it.

  MY MOTHER WAS a silversmith’s daughter from Scona. I have no idea why she married my father. She made no secret of the fact that she intended me to atone for her mistake. I would go to school, get a good education, join either the Imperial civil service or the Studium; I could be, she told me over and over again, whatever I wanted to be. Trouble was, I believed her.

  Also, I was in a hurry; and I knew, from observing my father’s losing battle with the universe, that if you play it straight you’ve got no chance. You have to cheat, and even then it’s a long, dreary, miserable slog just to stay in the same place, let alone move forward. My way out of that was to follow my mother’s advice, to the letter.

  I began – Now, let’s see. I was seventeen, almost, and we were living in a sort of shed beside the main road into Ap’ Escatoy (that was before some idiot burned it down, of course). Every day, just after dawn, this fancy carriage used to trot past. It was lacquered black, with huge spindly wheels and two armed coachmen, and inside was this kid, about my age, always with his nose in a book; thin, wispy, sad face. I thought; what’s he got to be sad about? So one day I followed him, running after the coach (nearly killed me; I was sure I’d cracked a rib just panting for breath) and saw him get down outside a rich merchant’s house on Riverside. Then, quite suddenly, I knew all about him. To this day, I have no idea if any of it was true, but it was such a thoroughly plausible, convincing picture that it didn’t matter.

  I saw him as the younger son of some good but slightly impoverished family in the City, sent out to the sticks with a letter of introduction to a friend of the family, given a place (not too strenuous, not too demanding) in the merchant’s house, with a view to working his way up and eventually becoming a minor merchant princeling. And then I thought, I can be anyone I want to be.

  So I wrote a letter. Actually, I copied it out of one of those books – the complete epistolary, letters for all purposes and occasions. A little research, mostly in inns and cockpits, gave me the names of a few leading merchants in BocBohec (thirty miles away, where nobody knew us), and there were books in the Cartulary library that told me who was related to who among the people that matter. I gave myself a suitably poncy name – Thrasamund, I think I was – and luck gave me a helping hand, six kreuzers on a scrawny little Perimadeian gamecock at fifteen to one, and it shredded a bird nearly twice its size in the time it takes to blow your nose. Nine thalers bought me two outfits of decent second-hand clothes. All I had to do was the easy bit. I had to be Thrasamund.

  And it really was so easy. By the time I came to knock on the merchant’s door and hand over my letter to the porter, I knew Thrasamund perfectly, I was him, and being Thrasamund was simply being myself. After an awkwardly polite conversation over weak red wine and seed cake I got a job, junior clerk. I knuckled down, paid attention, applied myself, very quickly learned how to make myself useful; three months later I was out of the clerks’ room and on my way to Beal Bohec with a letter of credit for nine hundred thalers, to buy seasoned rosewood boards and ebony dowel for my masters. I did a splendid job, though I do say so myself. In fact, if I’d gone back to Boc and carried on with my career there, instead of selling the lumber the next day at a thirty per cent profit and shipping out to the Vesani republic with the money, I would almost certainly have been a great success and made something of myself.

  UNFORTUNATELY, IT WAS an outside wall.

  Also unfortunately, his rooms were three stories up. It’s true what they say; as you fall through the air, time does seem to stand still, and you do get to revisit crucial scenes from your past life – rather depressing, in my case. At any rate, I managed to solve one mystery that had been bugging me for years: how do they know that?

  Answer: because at some point, someone must’ve fallen a very long way, and yet somehow survived to tell the tale. That’s what I did. I fell three stories and landed in a cart full of straw that just happened to be drawn up outside the stables which just happened to be directly underneath the room I’d just fallen from. Wonderful.

  Straw is marvellous stuff to fall on, but it’s still a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I hit the cart hard enough to smash through the plank floor. I’d landed on my backside, so I was kind of sitting in the hole, supported by the insides of my knees and the small of my back, when he came bustling up, looking scared to death. He grabbed my wrist and hauled me out.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “I fell through the wall,” I said.

  Apparently I’d stated the obvious. “Yes,” he said. “Can you move your hands and feet? Are you feeling di
zzy?”

  “Through the wall,” I repeated. “I just –”

  “Well, of course you did,” he said, with just a hint of irritation. “You’re my student. I taught you.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  He was looking over his shoulder. “Let’s continue this discussion inside,”

  he said. “People are staring.”

  He had a valid point. The owner of the cart would probably be along in a minute. Even so. “All you did was make me hold my breath. And that wasn’t it, because I looked at you and you’re still –”

  “Inside,” he said. “Please,” he added.

  I’m a sucker for good manners. We went inside.

  “I thought I’d had it then,” I said, as I wheezed up the stairs. My back was killing me.

  “Oh, you weren’t in any danger,” he said blithely. We’d reached his landing. I went in, taking great care to stay away from the walls, which I no longer trusted. And if you can’t trust walls, what can you do?

  “Yes I bloody well was,” I felt constrained to say. “You might have warned me.”

  “What, that you were in danger of succeeding? If you didn’t want to pass through walls, why did you enrol in the first place?”

  “You might have warned me,” I repeated, but it came out sounding merely petulant.

  He sat down. I did the same, only much more slowly. “You were in no danger,” he said. “You weren’t falling fast enough for that.”

  Oh really, I thought. “Yes I was.”

  “No you weren’t. It took you twenty-seven seconds to reach the ground.”

  Bullshit, I thought. Less than a second, surely. Of course, it had felt much longer than that, but that was because of the well-known psychological effect – “You what?”

  “I was counting,” he said, “under my breath, as I ran down the stairs. I got there before you did. Twenty-seven seconds.” He laughed. “For heaven’s sake,” he said. “You don’t think that little bit of straw –”