The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009
Page 46
That someone was hunting power through the Dancing Mistress now, so soon after the Duke’s fall, meant old, old trouble returning. The man being a high country shaman with too much knowledge of their kind was only a seal on that trouble.
The cinnamon-woman broke the renewed silence. “You have the right of it. If we stop the Duke’s man now, we may crush the seed before the strangler vine has a chance to grow.”
The glumper stared up from the cup of wine clutched his hands. “Crushing is not our way.”
“Not now.” The cinnamon-woman looked around, catching their eyes. “Once . . . ”
“Once we were warriors,” said the Dancing Mistress. “We called storms from the high crags.” They all knew those stories, too. “If we cry the hunt now, we will spare lives.”
“And what do we give up in following your plan?” asked the glumper. “The old ways are gone for good reason.”
The Dancing Mistress felt anger rising within her, a core of fire beneath the cool sense of purpose to which she’d hewn all her life. “They are gone because of what the Duke took from us.”
He gave her a long stare. “Did you ever think we might have given our power away with a purpose?”
Even in argument, the mesh-mind was knitting together, the edges of the room gleaming and sharpening. The Dancing Mistress set down her cup. “It is time,” she said in their language. “We will find this shaman and stop his scheming, before he drags all of us down into darkness.”
The moon glowed faintly through the low clouds, but the shadows outflanked the light at every turn. Torches burned at compound gates while lamps hung at intersections and in the squares. The nighttime streets of Copper Downs were streaked with smears of heat and scent.
The hunt slid through the evening like a single animal with four bodies. Her vision was complex, edges gleaming sharp at all distances and ranges. Odors told stories she could never read on her own, about the passage of time and the sweat of fear, passion, even the flat, watery smell of ennui. The very feel of the air on her skin as she ran had been magnified fourfold. She saw every door, every hiding place, every mule or person they passed, in terms of force and danger and claws moving close to the speed of thought.
The sheer power of the hunt was frightening in its intoxication.
They slipped through the city like a killing wind, heading toward the Ivory Quarter and the black gate through which she’d passed before. She’d never run so fast, so effortlessly, with such purpose.
Why had her people not stayed like this always? she wondered. All the logic of civilization aside, surely this was what they’d been made for.
It seemed only moments before they’d crossed the city to the old ochre walls of the compound, now glowing in the moonlight. The ancient stucco seemed to suck the life of the world into itself, though the trees beyond and above the wall practically shouted to her expanded sensorium.
Three times in as many minutes they circled around the shadowed walls, and found no sign of the shaman’s black gate. Not even a significant crack where it might have stood.
There was power aplenty in the world, but it was not generally spent so freely as this man had done. Opening that gate was the magical equivalent of a parlor trick: flashy, showy, a splash of self such as a child with a paintpot might make. But costly, very costly. The greatest power lay in subtlety, misdirection, the recondite support and extension of natural processes.
It was here, she thought, and the hunt took her meaning from the flick of her eyes, the set of her shoulders, the stand of her fur. They believed her. She knew that just as they’d known her meaning.
Together they drifted back to the main gate. It had stood propped open years before the Dancing Mistress had come to Copper Downs, but no one ever passed through it. The squatters who lived within used the servants’ gate beside the main gate, and so observed the blackletter law of the city even as they had built their illegal homes upon the grounds. The trail of their passing back and forth glowed in the eyes of the hunt. It was human, but there was something of their people mixed in with it.
The hunt slipped through the narrow door one by one, their steps like mist on the furze within. The path followed the old carriage drive through a stand of drooping willows now rotten and overgrown with wisteria. Trails led off between the curtains of leaves and vines toward the hidden homes beyond.
There was no scent to follow here. The shaman might as well have been made of fog.
A thought passed between the hunt like breeze bending the flowers of a meadow: An herbalist lives here, a woman of their people.
She felt her claws stiffen. The wisdom of the hunt stirred, the mesh-mind reading clues where ordinary eyes saw only shadow.
Is the Duke in fact still dead?
It was the same question she’d almost asked herself on her way to this place the first time.
Sage-man twitched aside a mat of ivy and stepped into the darker shadows. A brighter trail well-marked with the traces of one of her people led within. Of course, cloaked in the magic of her people the shaman could also have left his tracks so.
The Dancing Mistress nodded the rest of her hunt through—cinnamon-woman and the glumper—and followed last.
The hut was a shambles. Jars shattered, sheaves scattered, what little furniture there had been now smashed to splinters. While there didn’t seem to be any quantity of blood, the stink of fear hung heavy in the close air, overlaying even the intense jumble of odors from scattered herbs and salves.
The glumper trailed his fingers through the leaves and powders and shattered ceramic fragments on the floor. He sniffed, sending a tingle through the Dancing Mistress’ nose. “I might have thought one of us had done this thing.” He had yet to speak a word of Petraean within her hearing. “But knowing to search, I find there has been a human here as well. Wearing leather and animal fat. He first took her unawares, then he took her away.”
The shaman, the Dancing Mistress thought. Inside the mesh-mind, they shared her next question. What path did he follow now?
The hunt had the shaman’s scent, and the herbalist’s besides. It was enough.
A warm, damp wind blew off the water to carry the reek of tide rot and the distant echo of bells. Even the rogue squads of the Ducal guard seemed to be lying low, doubtless surrounded by wine butts, and hired boys wearing slitted skirts and long wigs. The city was deserted, waiting under the smell of old fires and dark magic.
That was well enough, the Dancing Mistress thought with the independent fragment of herself that still held its own amid the flow of the mesh-mind. It would not do for her people to be seen gliding over the cobbles at preternatural speed, moving silent as winter snowfall.
The hunt’s grip on shaman’s scent and herbalist’s soul path was sufficient, even when running through fire reek and the alley-mouth stench of dead dogs. They moved together, heeding the Dancing Mistress’ will, following the glumper’s trace on the scent, using cinnamon-woman’s eyes, sage-man’s hearing. Most of all they pursued the dread that stalked the night, the banked fires of the hunt flaring only to seek a single hearth within Copper Downs.
They followed a dark river of fear and purpose into the Temple Quarter. That had long been the quietest section of the city. Once it must have brawled and boiled with worshippers, for the buildings there were as great as any save the Ducal Palace. In the centuries of the Duke’s rule, the gods of the city had grown withered and sour as winter fruit. People left their coppers in prayer boxes near the edges of the district and walked quickly past.
Even with the gods fallen on hard times, locked in the embrace of neglect and refusal, no one had ever found the nerve to tear down those decaying walls and replace the old houses of worship with anything newer and more mundane.
The hunt pursued the scent down Divas Street, along the edge of the Temple Quarter, before leading into the leaf-strewn cobwebs of Mithrail Street. They bounded into those deeper shadows where the air curdled to black water and the dead eyes of the
Duke seemed to glitter within every stygian crevice.
They came to a quivering halt with claws spread wide before a narrow door of burnt oak bound with iron and ebony laths. Darkness leaked from behind it, along with a fire scent and the tang of burning fat.
The man-smell was strong here. They were obviously close to the shaman’s lair, where the cloak of the people’s power grew thin over his layered traces of daily use—sweat and speech and the stink of human urine. The doorway reeked of magic, inimical purpose and the thin, screaming souls of animals slit from weasand to wodge for their particles of wisdom.
That was his weakness, the Dancing mistress realized, surfacing further from the hunt for a moment even as those around her growled. He used the people’s power only as a cover, nothing more. The shaman could build a vision of the world from a thousand bright, tiny eyes, but animals never saw more than they understood. Her people knew that to be a fool’s path to wisdom.
Now he worked his blood magic on the herbalist, summoning the Dancing Mistress. He had drawn her here to cut her secrets from her. The mesh-mind overtook her once more in the rush of angry passion at that thought, and together the hunt brushed someone’s claw-tipped hand on the cool wooden planks of the door.
“Come,” the shaman called. His voice held confident expectation of her.
The hunt burst in.
The four of them were a surprise to the shaman. They could see that in his face. But his power was great as well. The ancient stone walls of this abandoned temple kitchen were crusted with ice. The herbalist hung by ropes from a high ceiling beam, her body shorn and torn as he’d bled her wisdom cut by cut, the way he’d bled it from a thousand tiny beasts of the field.
He rose from his fire, kicked a brazier and coals toward them, and gathered the air into daggers of ice even as the four claws of the hunt spread across the room.
Though they called the old powers of their people, none of them had ever trained to stand in open battle. Their purpose was strong, but only the Dancing Mistress could move below a slicing blade or land a strike upon a briefly unprotected neck.
If not for their number they would have been cut down without thought. If not for the shaman’s need to capture an essence from the Dancing Mistress he might have blown them out like candles. She knew then that he had set the thugs upon her that day so he could render aid, only to draw her in to him now, when suasion had failed him.
The fight came to fast-moving claws against restrained purpose. His ice made glittering edges that bent the vision of the mesh-mind. The blood of his sacrifices confused their scent. He moved, as he had on the street that day, with the brutal grace of one raised to war, working his magic even as he wielded his yatagan. The glumper’s chest was laid open. Cinnamon-woman had her ear shorn off. Sage-man’s thought were flayed by a dream of mountain fire that slipped through the mesh-mind.
But for every round of blows the hunt took, they landed at least one in return. Claws raked the shaman’s cheek with the sound of roses blooming. A kick traced its arc in blurred colors on their sight to snap bones in his left hand. A brand was shoved still burning brightly sour into his hair, so the grease there smoldered and his spells began to crack with the distraction of the pain.
The hunt moved in for the kill.
The Dancing Mistress once more emerged from the blurred glow of the hunt to find herself with claws set against the shaman’s face. The cinnamon-woman twisted his right arm from his shoulder. She looked up at the herbalist, who dangled bleeding like so much meat in the slaughterhouse, and thought, What are we now?
“Wait,” she shouted, and with the pain of forests dying tore herself free from the mesh-mind.
Cinnamon-woman stared, blood streaming from the stump of her ear. The look sage-man gave the Dancing Mistress from his place bending back the shaman’s legs would have burned iron. Their mouths moved in unison, the mesh-mind croaking out the words, “He does not deserve to live!”
“He does not have a right to our power,” she countered. “But we cannot judge who should live and who should die.”
The shaman bit the palm of her hand, his tongue darting to lick the blood, to suck her down to some last, desperate magic.
Steeling herself, the Dancing Mistress leaned close. Her claws were still set in his face. “I will take your wisdom as you have taken the wisdom of so many others. But I shall let you live to know what comes of such a price.”
“Wait,” he screamed through her enclosing palm. “You do not underst—”
With a great, terrible heave, she tore his tongue out with her claws. “We will not have the Duke back,” the Dancing Mistress whispered venomously. She slit into him, plucking and cutting slivers from his liver and lights. The hunt kept the shaman pinned tight until blood loss and fear erased his resolve. Then the remainder of mesh-mind collapsed. The cinnamon-woman began to tend to the glumper and the herbalist. Sage-man rebuilt the fire before ungently sewing shut the slits that the Dancing Mistress had made in the shaman’s chest and belly.
Ice from the walls turned to steam as the Dancing Mistress fried the organ meats, the tongue and two glistening eyes in a tiny black iron pan graven with runes. The blinded shaman wept and gagged, spitting blood while he shivered by the fire.
When the bits were done the Dancing Mistress dumped them to the blood-slicked mess that was the floor. She ground the burnt flesh to mash beneath her feet, then kicked it into the coals. The shaman’s weeping turned to a scream as his wisdom burned away.
“Our water matter is discharged,” she whispered in his ear. “If your Duke’s ghost comes to you seeking restoration, send him to knock at my door.”
Then the Dancing Mistress gathered the herbalist into her arms. Cinnamon-woman and sage-man brought the glumper between them. The shaman they left to his fate, blind, mute and friendless among the lonely gods.
The Duke of Copper Downs was still dead, the Dancing Mistress reflected as the night faded around her. Oddly, she remained alive.
She sat at the door of the herbalist’s hut. The woman slept inside, mewing her pain even amidst the thickets of her dreams. There was a new water matter here, of course. The ties among her people ever and always were broad as the sea, swift as a river, deep as the lakes that lie beneath the mountains. She was bound for a time to the herbalist by the steam that the hunt had burned from the shaman’s icy walls.
That man did not have much of life left to him, but at least she had not claimed it herself. Her people had the right of things in centuries past, when they gave up their power. She only hoped that rumor of the hunt was small and soon forgotten by the citizens of Copper Downs.
The shadows beneath the rotten willows lightened with the day. The spiced scent of cookery rose around her, tiny boiling pots and bumptious roasts alike. The Dancing Mistress rose, stretched, and went to tend her patient.
THE GOLDEN OCTOPUS
BETH BERNOBICH
I first met Breandan Reid ó Cuilinn in my father’s Court, in Cill Cannig, on a bright cold November day. I was seventeen, a Princess Royal and heir to the throne of Éireann. He, I knew from reports assembled by the King’s Constabulary, was the son of a country gentleman, thirty years old, with a doctorate from Awveline University in physics and philosophy.
He never even noticed me.
But then, he was there to impress my father, the king, and the many astrologers, scientists, and councilors who made up the King’s Court in those days, not a young girl watching from the shadows. Ah, but I’m rambling on without purpose. Let me tell you what happened that day.
It was late November, as I said. We were all gathered in the smallest of my father’s audience chambers, the one where he liked to hold such demonstrations. (Miscellaneous Scientific Inquiries, Etc. is how the steward labeled them.) Sunlight poured through the high square windows; an early morning rain shower had spattered droplets over the panes, which made a hundred tiny rainbows over the gray marble floor. A raised platform ran around three sides of the room, wi
th a series of recessed alcoves. I sat in my usual place, the middle alcove, which gave me the best view of my father and ó Cuilinn both.
“Tell me,” my father said, “what you hope to discover.”
Breandan ó Cuilinn—excuse me, Doctor ó Cuilinn—said, “I cannot tell yet. I can only report on what I have achieved.”
The old astrologers, those who had served my grandfather and great-grandfather since the middle of the century, nodded. They recognized temporizing, no matter what form it took. “True, true,” one old man mumbled through his toothless gums. “We can chart the moon and all the stars of heaven, but there are subtleties beyond even the most learned of the cloud diviners.”
The Court scientists and mage-mathematicians, whose philosophies belonged to both the old and the modern schools, merely shrugged and stared hard at the strange machine he had brought, and which now sat upon a large battered worktable, evidently provided by the steward from the palace stores.
He was not a rich man, this Doctor ó Cuilinn. He had arrived in a hired van, with no servants, no assistants, and had transported the five large crates to the interview chamber himself using a freight trolley. He must have assembled the machine as well. That would account for the oil stain on the sleeve of his frock coat, and the dusty knees of his trousers.
The machine itself gleamed in brass and silver splendor upon the table. It was as large as a man’s torso and shaped like an octopus, with shining glass tubes writhing about the massive central orb. Wires ran through the center of the tubes, like thin black veins; more wires snaked over the table and connected the device to a crate of batteries sitting on the floor. The metals themselves, however beautiful, were likely chosen for their properties, I thought, remembering the man’s initial letter. And it required a great deal of electricity. But what were those strange knobs and dials for?