The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Moon waved one hand. “If I’d meant an academy weatherfinder, I’d have said that. A blue coat and a degree isn’t evidence of an ounce of real talent. The old weatherfinders, it’s said, could feel the wind in their blood.”

  Ivana met his pointed gaze, and her own did not waver. “I didn’t tell you that so you could use it against me. Besides, it was a—a madness. Altitude sickness. I’ve never even been as high as the port tower before now.”

  “Your family avoids the winds?”

  “Maybe your scientist had hallucinogens in the cargo.”

  Moon was not distracted. “Most people don’t believe that born ability still exists, or ever did. But what you said you felt—look at that book over there, the brown one, Lives Aloft. Eliza says it could do with an editor’s hand, but it’s an old book and that’s what it talks about: ‘a knife of blue freedom.’ If I’d thought to look in doctors’ offices . . . ” He stood up again and began sorting through his books. “You’ll have plenty to learn, I daresay, you can’t just tell a steersman what to do by vague feelings, but books and experience will teach you that. As far as I can make out, it should just be a matter of translating for the laity. Do you know what it would mean to have a true weatherfinder? With that and a good old ship, a man could have the run of the skies. I had hopes of the money Fuille’s cargo would bring, but this has turned out better than I could have hoped. You could be a legend, Ivana Arden. We both could.”

  “Captain!” said Ivana shortly. He looked up from his visions and books. “I’m only here to find my brother,” she said, slowly and clearly. “He left us and changed his name and went to study of his own accord, but he’s been missing too long. I’m sure Fuille knows something. I want to look in the cargo hold again.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise,” said Moon, briefly diverted. “I’d rather not upset him further. He might still declare himself. Let’s ask him to dinner instead.”

  Both the meal and the conversation were cool, for heating was minimal on an old gas-ship and Fuille’s rage had settled to a peevish disgruntlement. The scientist only once mentioned Ivana’s brandy, bitingly, as she hesitated over the simple Poorfortune table-service, but he watched the captain and the weatherfinder steadily throughout the meal.

  “You have a broad experience, Arden,” he said to Ivana sardonically. “Such an illustrated past.”

  Ivana looked at the single stem of hyssop drawn on her arm. The ink had bled lightly into her skin.

  “She’s articled to the Hyssop,” said Moon, to draw Fuille’s attention from the ink. “Everyone has to start somewhere.”

  “Indeed,” said Fuille. He glanced around the cabin before narrowing his eyes at Ivana. “You have the look of someone about you, and your name a certain ring. Tell me, this penchant for cloud-watching—does it run in the family?”

  “My brother—” said Ivana and Moon kicked her under the table. Her face was already too windburned to betray a blush.

  Moon supplied glibly, “Her brother said she never has her feet on the ground. Old friend of mine. Took her on as a favour.”

  “Hmm,” said Fuille. “One can be too high-minded. You should widen that experience of yours, before you get walled in. One can be . . . limited, staying too long on a small boat, or so I understand. It is not, of course, my sphere.”

  Ivana did not have Eliza’s speed of reply, and Moon took pity on her.

  “What is your sphere, Mr. Fuille?” he asked.

  “Aerodynamics,” said Fuille. “It is a vitally important work, though often looked over or, perhaps, under. As you know, the lifeblood of Their Majesties’ Empire and, indeed, of the nations streams through the currents of the sky. I have sacrificed my life to that work—the interaction of the organic with the atmospheric, that delicate interplay of wing and wind, bone and billow, mind and the mellifluosity of flight.” He seemed lost for a moment in some glorious vision. Then he reached across the table and took Ivana’s hand in his large, colourless one. Moon saw sudden distaste convulse her mouth, although a heartbeat later she had concealed it. Fuille, unaware, turned her hand over clinically, and said, “I should like to examine you, my dear. It is always charming to add new data to my research. My collection would, I think, fascinate you.”

  “You don’t like him,” said Moon, after Fuille retired and before Ivana escaped to the storage cupboard she had insisted upon occupying. His cabin was now uncomfortably cluttered with evicted buckets and pulleys, stored in the few corners and under—and on—his bed. “I can’t say I don’t sympathise, but in the interests of getting to Poorfortune peaceably, and getting paid, perhaps you could conceal it better.”

  “He touched me,” said Ivana, leaning against the cabin wall, her arms folded across her body. “It was like shaking hands with a walking corpse.”

  “Just a bureaucrat,” said Moon.

  “Not that,” said Ivana. “He’s . . . ” she shifted and fiddled with the latch of the window. “Unsavoury,” she finished at last, as if the word did not satisfy her, and then added hastily, “I wouldn’t trust him.”

  “You don’t have to. Just don’t let your nerves make you so chatty!”

  “Don’t assume I’d tell him more than I must!” sniped Ivana.

  Moon was tempted to return in kind, but long experience with Eliza’s robust company had taught him circumspection. He sat on his desk, crossed his ankles and waved one hand. “Perhaps he was fascinated by something more than your conversation.” His evil genius prompted him to add, “You think sailors get bad, it’s nothing on bureaucrats. Inviting you to ‘see his collection.’ ”

  “I’m not a fool,” said Ivana, witheringly. “He was serious about his collection, but I don’t believe he would really care to have it seen. So I want to see it.”

  “I don’t,” said Moon. “And I don’t want you to go prancing about the ship with him either.”

  “I don’t intend to prance with anyone,” said Ivana. “Or be any nearer to him than I have to. I’ll go on my own. You invite him in here again for drinks.”

  “Not until you tell me why.”

  Ivana glared at him. “Feminine intuition!”

  “You haven’t any,” said Moon. “You took against him like—like a judge that just heard evidence. Like a journalist spotting bad grammar. Pure professional hatred. He’s on my ship, and your job is to keep me out of hard weather, so tell me: what put the wind up you?”

  He held her gaze. She did not blink, but her expression was searching rather than hard.

  “I pulled you out of the street,” said Moon. “I paid you for that coat, I didn’t throw you off the ship. I might even want to help you again, though I don’t know why. I don’t believe you’ve told me any more of the truth than suits you.”

  At last, with an air of acceptance rather than capitulation Ivana left the wall and took a step towards him. “Give me your hand.”

  Moon obliged, and felt his hand folded between her rope-burned palms.

  “Fortune teller?” he asked, wryly.

  “Not quite,” said Ivana. Her hands were not otherwise work-roughened, but her cool dry fingers felt strong. If she was a secretary, the only ink he had seen on her hands was from his pen.

  That’s odd,” she said after a silence during which Moon sat and felt her pulse beat against his.

  “What?” said Moon.

  She nodded at the pipe in his pocket. “You don’t smoke, and you never have. You get a cold foot at night, though, and the other foot—ah.” She glanced at him with almost a smile. “You don’t have the other foot. You’re not quite used to that yet, but you hide it well, I thought before that you were only a little lame. And it explains the bruises. Your liver isn’t all it could be. And you have an ingrown fingernail on your other hand and it’s getting unpleasant, but I saw that at dinner.”

  She released his hand. “I don’t know if any of that’s useful.”

  “Nothing I didn’t know,” said Moon. He stared at her and she looked down at her ow
n hands. “But I don’t know how the hell you know it. What was that?”

  “I showed you so that you’ll believe me when I say there is something I don’t like about Fuille,” she said.

  “Maybe it was a lucky guess,” said Moon. “Maybe you’re a—a charlatan. Or maybe you really are a doctor’s secretary and can guess when someone is liverish. Try it on someone else. I’ll get Alban, there’s got to be something wrong with him.”

  “Please, no!” said Ivana. “I only showed you so that you’ll believe me about Fuille. I much rather nobody else know.”

  Her alarm was sincere enough that Moon subsided back onto the desk. “It could still have been a lucky guess,” he grumbled, to keep the curious mix of discomfort and excitement at bay.

  “Your journalist!” said Ivana abruptly.

  “Eliza?”

  “Yes. She took my hand back in Port Fury. She has a tearing scar, up her side and her hand will ache from writing, at times. She wears shoes that are too small—”

  “She’s vain,” supplied Moon.

  “And she’s pregnant.”

  “Hell,” said Moon, mildly. He took out his pipe and held it meditatively.

  “She didn’t tell you,” said Ivana, her face falling. “I thought—”

  “I was distracted by weatherfinders,” said Moon. “She promised me news in Poorfortune.” He raised his eyebrows in thought, then returned the pipe to his pocket. “I shall have to endeavour to appear surprised.” He supposed he ought in good conscience have been preoccupied by Eliza’s interesting predicament, but was more interested to find he did not doubt Ivana.

  “How do you do it?” he asked.

  Ivana, taken up by her own thoughts, answered almost without noticing. “I see the patterns in blood,” she said. “More clearly than in air.” Her focus returned to him and she said, “Not destiny, or fortune, or any of that, and I can’t heal anything. At least, only by ordinary means.”

  “Doctor’s secretary,” murmured Moon.

  Ivana ducked her head. “I see paths and eddies, what’s going right and what’s wrong. I feel it the same way I felt the wind, only people are so much smaller. You said experience and books would teach me about the wind, and I’m not a fool. I’ve studied to understand what I see in a man’s veins. But the wind was so huge. I felt as if my mind was being scoured.”

  This revelation, beyond the legends of weatherfinders in his books, was too important for Moon to take in all at once. Concentrating on the immediate issue, he said, “And you don’t like Fuille.”

  She shook her head. “He’s got chemicals—things in his blood that embalmers use, and anaesthetists. Not a sudden concentration, but little pieces, all the way through, as if he uses them all the time. Drugs that must alter the way he moves and sleeps and thinks. That’s why I don’t like him, together with the things he said, and—other reasons.”

  “He’s a government scientist,” said Moon, but the explanation sounded poor besides Ivana’s recital. He told himself he was put off-kilter by Eliza’s news, but that wasn’t it. It struck him that a government scientist might be interested in Ivana’s broad talents. But it was too late in the evening to worry about mad scientists, or the confidence Ivana had given to his keeping.

  “What happened to your leg?” she asked at last.

  Moon shook himself, glad of a lighter turn to the conversation.

  “The People’s Poorfortune Hospital cut it off,” he said. “I don’t have time for doctors—always saying you should have gone looking for them after every fight, instead of waiting to be carried in. I think they amputated out of spite. But I got out of it with a bulletproof leg, which isn’t something to sneeze at.”

  “Do you get into a lot of fights?” asked Ivana.

  “Not for want of trying,” said Moon. His thoughts were straying again. “What you did isn’t normal. People might be interested. To the tune of State Interests, and money.”

  “I know,” said Ivana quietly. She did not say that she trusted him not to betray her. Her silence was more persuasive than words might have been.

  Moon thought a little longer, until Ivana said, “You’re looking at me like you look at your ship.”

  “Apologies,” said Moon, pulled from his reverie. He stood up to show her out of the cabin and to her closet. There was much he felt he ought to say in parting, but he settled for, “Just don’t tell Fuille.”

  Fuille had indicated a preference to eat alone in his cabin for the past two days, relieving Moon of the need to be civil to the man or observe Alban and Tomasch’s attempts at table-waiting.

  “Where is that weatherfinder of yours?” the scientist demanded, as soon as he had taken a seat in Moon’s cabin. His careful grey fingers toyed carelessly with the delicate glass Moon had provided. The port-wine moved in it like old blood.

  “About some atmospheric business,” said Moon. It could even have been true. His small library was outdated, but Ivana had applied herself to it single-mindedly in the preceding days. Alban and Tomasch were incapable of conversing with her, so meals were silent, and she proved to be a faster reader than Moon, who had sat across from her at meals, his own plans unrolled on the table, trying to guess her thoughts from her expressions while she read.

  She had stood, too, beneath the Hyssop’s glass dome, talking to Cally and staring at the clouds. When the bitterwind fell, she borrowed Moon’s glass eye-mask, belted the fur-lined overjacket and clambered about the sides, always too close to falling. She had gained her airlegs quickly enough, Moon hoped, to convince Fuille she had always been only an ordinary weatherfinder after all, and not an untrained prodigy. Still, neither he nor Alban, who shut his eyes each time, liked to see her going over the side of the ship again.

  “We will make Poorfortune the day after next, all going smoothly,” said Moon.

  “I count on you to make it smooth,” growled Fuille. “There will be lawsuits enough if any of my cargo has already been damaged by the events of this voyage, let alone by further delay. It does not pay to thwart the plans of Their Majesties’ Government, Captain.”

  Moon did not answer. As he had bowed Fuille into his cabin, he had seen Ivana descending through the grilled hatches. Fuille pushed back his glass now and stood. As he did so, he brushed his hand against a line in the timber of the cabin wall, almost idly. “It is a very old ship, is it not?”

  “The builder would be flattered,” lied Moon glibly. “She’s a replica. The colours are based on a pleasure ship from the last century, but I’m afraid she’s all modern, and cost considerably more than she’s worth. Let me pour you another.”

  “How did you come by it, then?” asked the scientist, not sitting down. Suspicion lined his pallid face. “Even this copper in the walls is not cheap.”

  “Very accurate, isn’t she?” said Moon. “On the surface at least. Underneath I’m afraid she has new bones. Still, I call it good luck that brought her to me. Won her in a game of squares.” He spoke quickly, but it was clear Fuille was inclined to leave. Moon did not know if he worried more that Fuille would find Ivana in the cargo hold, or that she would blame Moon for not holding Fuille longer.

  “You know a lot about the era?” went on Moon, brightly. He crossed to the front of the cabin. “Perhaps you could give me advice on these window fittings. My friend on the Orient says they should be brass but I think it would be more accurate—”

  “Window fittings,” growled Fuille, “are beneath . . . ” then stopped, slammed open the door of the cabin and left.

  I’m going to be down a weatherfinder, thought Moon. While he waited for the shouting to begin, a shadow flickered through the light from the cabin window behind him.

  Moon turned. The window showed blue sky and then a flurry like black wings. Cursed ravens, he thought, and then, we’re too high for birds. He opened the window and caught a fold of heavy blue cloth as it swung once more towards him. It was anchored by something below, and the icy wind struck dull the sound of Ivana’s voice as s
he shouted, “Pull me up!”

  For the second time, Moon hauled her in, his good foot braced against the wall. As he dragged her over the windowsill she yelled. “It’s murder!”

  “Not yet, but it will be,” said Moon through gritted teeth, thinking of Fuille.

  He set her on her feet as she said, “Necessary sacrifice, then? Hazards of employment? Those who live by the wind—” her voice broke.

  “Calm down,” said Moon. “No-one’s died. Everyone’s at their stations.”

  Before he could close the window fully, Ivana gripped the edge with a thick-gloved hand. “There’s something ugly coming,” she said, and tugged down the fur collar of the coat to speak more clearly. Her voice was flat. “I’m only warning you because I’m on this ship too, or else you might have your fate and welcome to it. There’s a coiling twisting in the air, a big storm. And I need something hard and heavy.” She darted past Moon to get the rubber-dipped line hook. He grasped it as she returned.

  “Are you going to stop the storm with this?” he asked.

  “No.” said Ivana. “Fuille.” She pulled the line hook free and opened the window again fully.

  Moon put his hand up against the cold air. “Fuille didn’t go that way.”

  Ivana stopped with one leg over the window sill. She tugged up the heavy goggles and looked at him, no merriment left in her eyes. “No, Captain. My brother did,” she said. “He won’t be coming back.” Then she shook herself and added, with bitterness and no sincerity, “Not that you have reason to care. I’m terribly sorry about your precious figurehead.” She folded herself out the window.

  “No, wait, what?” said Moon, but Ivana had already dropped and scrambled to the base of the figurehead. One hand gripping the lines, she swung at the graceful figure with a will.

  “No!” said Moon, “This is my ship! Ignore everything I said. I will throw you over the side!” The wind choked the words back into his throat. He slammed the window shut, latched it and turned, fuming, to find himself face to face with Fuille.