The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  Only later did she remember how much debris there had been, flung in newly unpredictable ways: wings torn from flyers, struts, bulkheads, even an improbable crate with small reddish fruit tumbling from the hole in its side.

  Later, too, it would trouble her that she had not been able to keep count of the people in the tumult. Most were dead already: sliced slantwise, bone and viscera exposed, trailing banners of blood; others twisted and torn, faces ripped off and cast aside like unwanted masks, fingers uselessly clutching the wrack of chairs, tables, doorframes. A fracture in one wall revealed three people in dark green jackets. They turned their faces toward the widening crack, then clasped hands before a subvortex hurled them apart. The last Lisse saw of them was two hands, still clasped together and severed at the wrist.

  Lisse found an escape. Took it.

  She didn’t know until later that she had destroyed 40% of the aerie’s structure. Some people survived. They knew how to rebuild.

  What she never found out was that the disrupter’s effect was sufficiently long-lasting that some of the survivors died of thirst before supplies could safely be brought in.

  In the old days, Lisse’s people took on the ghostweight to comfort the dead and be comforted in return. After a year and a day, the dead unstitched themselves and accepted their rest.

  After Jerengjen Day, Lisse’s people struggled to share the sudden increase in ghostweight, to alleviate the flickering terror of the massacred.

  Lisse’s parents, unlike the others, stitched a ghost onto a child.

  “They saw no choice,” the ghost told her again and again. “You mustn’t blame them.”

  The ghost had listened uncomplainingly to her troubles and taught her how to cry quietly so the teachers wouldn’t hear her. It had soothed her to sleep with her people’s legends and histories, described the gardens and promenades so vividly she imagined she could remember them herself. Some nights were more difficult than others, trying to sleep with that strange, stabbing, heartpulse ache. But blame was not what she felt, not usually.

  The second target was Base 454 Qo, whose elite flyers were painted with elaborate knotwork, green with bronze-tipped thorns. For reasons that Lisse did not try to understand, the jerengjen disremembered the defensive flight but left the painted panels completely intact.

  The third, the fourth, the fifth – she started using Scorch card values to tabulate the reported deaths, however unreliable the figures were in any unencrypted sources. For all its talents, the kite could not pierce militarygrade encryption. She spent two days fidgeting over this inconvenience so she wouldn’t have to think about the numbers.

  When she did think about the numbers, she refused to round up. She refused to round down.

  The nightmares started after the sixth, Bridgepoint 977 Ja-Esh. The station commander had kept silence, as she had come to expect. However, a merchant coalition had broken the interdict to plead for mercy in fourteen languages. She hadn’t destroyed the coalition’s outpost. The station had, in reprimand.

  She reminded herself that the merchant would have perished anyway. She had learned to use the firebird to scathing effect. And she was under no illusions that she was only destroying Imperial soldiers and bureaucrats.

  In her dreams she heard their pleas in her birth tongue, which the ghost had taught her. The ghost, for its part, started singing her to sleep, as it had when she was little.

  The numbers marched higher. When they broke ten million, she plunged out of the command spindle and into the room she had claimed for her own. She pounded the wall until her fists bled. Triumph tasted like salt and venom. It wasn’t supposed to be so easy. In the worst dreams, a wolf roved the tapestries, eating shadows – eating souls. And the void with its tinsel of worlds was nothing but one vast shadow.

  Stores began running low after the seventeenth. Lisse and the ghost argued over whether it was worth attempting to resupply through black market traders. Lisse said they didn’t have time to spare, and won. Besides, she had little appetite.

  Intercepted communications suggested that someone was hunting them. Rumors and whispers. They kept Lisse awake when she was so tired she wanted to slam the world shut and hide. The Imperium certainly planned reprisal. Maybe others did, too.

  If anyone else took advantage of the disruption to move against the Imperium for their own reasons, she didn’t hear about it.

  * * *

  The names of the war-kites, recorded in the Imperium’s administrative language, are varied: Fire Burns the Spider Black. The Siege of the City with Seventeen Faces. Sovereign Geometry. The Glove with Three Fingers.

  The names are not, strictly speaking, Imperial. Rather, they are plundered from the greatest accomplishments of the cultures that the mercenaries have defeated on the Imperium’s behalf. Fire Burns the Spider Black was a silk tapestry housed in the dark hall of Meu Danh, ancient of years. The Siege of the City with Seventeen Faces was a saga chanted by the historians of Kwaire. Sovereign Geometry discussed the varying nature of parallel lines. And more: plays, statues, games.

  The Imperium’s scholars and artists take great pleasure in reinterpreting these works. Such achievements are meant to be disseminated, they say.

  They were three days’ flight from the next target, Base 894 Sao, when the shadow winged across all the tapestries. The void was dark, pricked by starfire and the occasional searing burst of particles. The shadow singed everything darker as it soared to intercept them, as single-minded in its purpose as a bullet. For a second she almost thought it was a collage of wrecked flyers and rusty shrapnel.

  The ghost cursed. Lisse startled, but when she looked at it, its face was composed again.

  As Lisse pulled back the displays’ focus to get a better sense of the scale, she thought of snowbirds and stormbirds, winter winds and cutting beaks. “I don’t know what that is,” she said, “but it can’t be natural.” None of the Imperial defenses had manifested in such a fashion.

  “It’s not,” the ghost said. “That’s another war-kite.”

  Lisse cleared the control panel. She veered them into a chancy voidcurrent eddy.

  The ghost said, “Wait. You won’t outrun it. As we see its shadow, it sees ours.”

  “How does a kite have a shadow in the void in the first place?” she asked. “And why haven’t we ever seen our own shadow?”

  “Who can see their own soul?” the ghost said. But it would not meet her eyes.

  Lisse would have pressed for more, but the shadow overtook them. It folded itself back like a plumage of knives. She brought the kite about. The control panel suggested possibilities: a two-headed dragon, a falcon, a coiled snake. Next a wolf reared up, but she quickly pulled her hand back.

  “Visual contact,” the kite said crisply.

  The stranger-kite was the color of a tarnished star. It had tucked all its projections away to present a minimal surface for targeting, but Lisse had no doubt that it could unfold itself faster than she could draw breath. The kite flew a widening helix, beautifully precise.

  “A mercenary salute, equal to equal,” the ghost said.

  “Are we expected to return it?”

  “Are you a mercenary?” the ghost countered.

  “Communications incoming,” the kite said before Lisse could make a retort.

  “I’ll hear it,” Lisse said over the ghost’s objection. It was the least courtesy she could offer, even to a mercenary.

  To Lisse’s surprise, the tapestry’s raven vanished to reveal a woman’s visage, not an emblem. The woman had brown skin, a scar trailing from one temple down to her cheekbone, and dark hair cropped short. She wore gray on gray, in no uniform that Lisse recognized, sharply tailored. Lisse had expected a killer’s eyes, a hunter’s eyes. Instead, the woman merely looked tired.

  “Commander Kiriet Dzan of—” She had been speaking in administrative, but the last word was unfamiliar. “You would say Candle.”

  “Lisse of Rhaion,” she said. There was no sense in hiding
her name.

  But the woman wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at the ghost. She said something sharply in that unfamiliar language.

  The ghost pressed its hand against Lisse’s. She shuddered, not understanding. “Be strong,” it murmured.

  “I see,” Kiriet said, once more speaking in administrative. Her mouth was unsmiling. “Lisse, do you know who you’re traveling with?”

  “I don’t believe we’re acquainted,” the ghost said, coldly formal.

  “Of course not,” Kiriet said. “But I was the logistical coordinator for the scouring of Rhaion.” She did not say consolidation. “I knew why we were there. Lisse, your ghost’s name is Vron Arien.”

  Lisse said, after several seconds, “That’s a mercenary name.”

  The ghost said, “So it is. Lisse—” Its hand fell away.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Its mouth was taut. Then: “Lisse, I—”

  “Tell me.”

  “He was a deserter, Lisse,” the woman said, carefully, as if she thought the information might fracture her. “For years he eluded Wolf Command. Then we discovered he had gone to ground on Rhaion. Wolf Command determined that, for sheltering him, Rhaion must be brought to heel. The Imperium assented.”

  Throughout this Lisse looked at the ghost, silently begging it to deny any of it, all of it. But the ghost said nothing.

  Lisse thought of long nights with the ghost leaning by her bedside, reminding her of the dancers, the tame birds, the tangle of frostfruit trees in the city square; things she did not remember herself because she had been too young when the jerengjen came. Even her parents only came to her in snatches: curling up in a mother’s lap, helping a father peel plantains. Had any of the ghost’s stories been real?

  She thought, too, of the way the ghost had helped her plan her escape from Base 87, how it had led her cunningly through the maze and to the kite. At the time, it had not occurred to her to wonder at its confidence.

  Lisse said, “Then the kite is yours.”

  “After a fashion, yes.” The ghost’s eyes were precisely the color of ash after the last ember’s death.

  “But my parents—”

  Enunciating the words as if they cut it, the ghost said, “We made a bargain, your parents and I.”

  She could not help it; she made a stricken sound.

  “I offered you my protection,” the ghost said. “After years serving the Imperium, I knew its workings. And I offered your parents vengeance. Don’t think that Rhaion wasn’t my home, too.”

  Lisse was wrackingly aware of Kiriet’s regard. “Did my parents truly die in the consolidation?” The euphemism was easier to use.

  She could have asked whether Lisse was her real name. She had to assume that it wasn’t.

  “I don’t know,” it said. “After you were separated from them, I had no way of finding out. Lisse, I think you had better find out what Kiriet wants. She is not your friend.”

  I was the logistical coordinator, Kiriet had said. And her surprise at seeing the ghost – It has a name, Lisse reminded herself – struck Lisse as genuine. Which meant Kiriet had not come here in pursuit of Vron Arien. “Why are you here?” Lisse asked.

  “You’re not going to like it. I’m here to destroy your kite, whatever you’ve named it.”

  “It doesn’t have a name.” She had been unable to face the act of naming, of claiming ownership.

  Kiriet looked at her sideways. “I see.”

  “Surely you could have accomplished your goal,” Lisse said, “without talking to me first. I am inexperienced in the ways of kites. You are not.” In truth, she should already have been running. But Kiriet’s revelation meant that Lisse’s purpose, once so clear, was no longer to be relied upon.

  “I may not be your friend, but I am not your enemy, either,” Kiriet said. “I have no common purpose with the Imperium, not anymore. But you cannot continue to use the kite.”

  Lisse’s eyes narrowed. “It is the weapon I have,” she said. “I would be a fool to relinquish it.”

  “I don’t deny its efficacy,” Kiriet said, “but you are Rhaioni. Doesn’t the cost trouble you?”

  Cost?

  Kiriet said, “So no one told you.” Her anger focused on the ghost.

  “A weapon is a weapon,” the ghost said. At Lisse’s indrawn breath, it said, “The kites take their sustenance from the deaths they deal. It was necessary to strengthen ours by letting it feast on smaller targets first. This is the particular craft of my people, as ghostweight was the craft of yours, Lisse.”

  Sustenance. “So this is why you want to destroy the kite,” Lisse said to Kiriet.

  “Yes.” The other woman’s smile was bitter. “As you might imagine, the Imperium did not approve. It wanted to negotiate another hundred-year contract. I dissented.”

  “Were you in a position to dissent?” the ghost asked, in a way that made Lisse think that it was translating some idiom from its native language.

  “I challenged my way up the chain of command and unseated the head of Wolf Command,” Kiriet said. “It was not a popular move. I have been destroying kites ever since. If the Imperium is so keen on further conquest, let it dirty its own hands.”

  “Yet you wield a kite yourself,” Lisse said.

  “Candle is my home. But on the day that every kite is accounted for in words of ash and cinders, I will turn my own hand against it.”

  It appealed to Lisse’s sense of irony. All the same, she did not trust Kiriet.

  She heard a new voice. Kiriet’s head turned. “Someone’s followed you.” She said a curt phrase in her own language, then: “You’ll want my assistance—”

  Lisse shook her head.

  “It’s a small flight, as these things go, but it represents a threat to you. Let me—”

  “No,” Lisse said, more abruptly than she had meant to. “I’ll handle it myself.”

  “If you insist,” Kiriet said, looking even more tired. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Then her face was replaced, for a flicker, with her emblem: a black candle crossed slantwise by an empty sheath.

  “The Candle is headed for a vortex, probably for cover,” the ghost said, very softly. “But it can return at any moment.”

  Lisse thought that she was all right, and then the reaction set in. She spent several irrecoverable breaths shaking, arms wrapped around herself, before she was able to concentrate on the tapestry data.

  At one time, every war-kite displayed a calligraphy scroll in its command spindle. The words are, approximately:

  I have only

  one candle

  Even by the mercenaries’ standards, it is not much of a poem. But the woman who wrote it was a soldier, not a poet.

  The mercenaries no longer have a homeland. Even so, they keep certain traditions, and one of them is the Night of Vigils. Each mercenary honors the year’s dead by lighting a candle. They used to do this on the winter solstice of an ancient calendar. Now the Night of Vigils is on the anniversary of the day the first war-kites were launched; the day the mercenaries slaughtered their own people to feed the kites.

  The kites fly, the mercenaries’ commandant said. But they do not know how to hunt.

  When he was done, they knew how to hunt. Few of the mercenaries forgave him, but it was too late by then.

  The poem says: So many people have died, yet I have only one candle for them all.

  It is worth noting that “have” is expressed by a particular construction for alienable possession: not only is the having subject to change, it is additionally under threat of being taken away.

  Kiriet’s warning had been correct. An Imperial flight in perfect formation had advanced toward them, inhibiting their avenues of escape. They outnumbered her forty-eight to one. The numbers did not concern her, but the Imperium’s resources meant that if she dealt with this flight, there would be twenty more waiting for her, and the numbers would only grow worse. That they had not opened fire already meant they had
some trickery in mind.

  One of the flyers peeled away, describing an elegant curve and exposing its most vulnerable surface, painted with a rose.

  “That one’s not armed,” Lisse said, puzzled.

  The ghost’s expression was unreadable. “How very wise of them,” it said.

  The forward tapestry flickered. “Accept the communication,” Lisse said.

  The emblem that appeared was a trefoil flanked by two roses, one stem-up, one stem-down. Not for the first time, Lisse wondered why people from a culture that lavished attention on miniatures and sculptures were so intent on masking themselves in emblems.

  “Commander Fai Guen, this is Envoy Nhai Bara.” A woman’s voice, deep and resonant, with an accent Lisse didn’t recognize.

  So I’ve been promoted? Lisse thought sardonically, feeling herself tense up. The Imperium never gave you anything, even a meaningless rank, without expecting something in return.

  Softly, she said to the ghost, “They were bound to catch up to us sooner or later.” Then, to the kite: “Communications to Envoy Nhai: I am Lisse of Rhaion. What words between us could possibly be worth exchanging? Your people are not known for mercy.”

  “If you will not listen to me,” Nhai said, “perhaps you will listen to the envoy after me, or the one after that. We are patient and we are many. But I am not interested in discussing mercy: that’s something we have in common.”

  “I’m listening,” Lisse said, despite the ghost’s chilly stiffness. All her life she had honed herself against the Imperium. It was unbearable to consider that she might have been mistaken. But she had to know what Nhai’s purpose was.

  “Commander Lisse,” the envoy said, and it hurt like a stab to hear her name spoken by a voice other than the ghost’s, a voice that was not Rhaioni. Even if she knew, now, that the ghost was not Rhaioni, either. “I have a proposal for you. You have proven your military effectiveness—”