The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009
Page 51
Those were the days of confusement, as I called them.
Now to explain how I remembered what had never been.
(Or rather it had been. Once. In a different world.)
It was a bright cold November day. For once, I had an hour of leisure from my duties. A restlessness overtook me, and so, trailed by my guards, I wandered far from my usual paths, away from the public galleries and audience halls, through a series of ever-narrower corridors into an unused wing of the palace. On and on, to a pair of high metal doors, with a heavy bar across them. My curiosity piqued, I ordered my guards to remove the metal bar. Leaving them behind, I entered the vast chamber that lay beyond.
Inside, it was dark and empty. A puff of cold stale air met my face. The scent of something old and forgotten. Memory pricked at me.
We had lately added electric illumination to the palace. I pressed the switch, and light flooded the room.
It was empty. A cavern filled with dust and shadows. But my skin itched, and I took another few steps forward. Saw my first impression was not entirely correct. Off to one side, empty shelves stretched from floor to ceiling. And there, in the nearest corner, a few scraps of crumpled paper, also coated with dust, as though someone had abandoned them years before. Ahead of me, however, the room stretched unimpeded by any obstacles. It was amazing, I thought, that such an enormous space could exist within Cill Cannig without me knowing it . . .
It was then I saw the bright patch on the floor. I bent down to inspect it.
The air shimmered. Startled, I plucked back my hand.
And stopped.
There, in the middle of the bright patch, lay a miniature balloon and a pile of loose papers. The balloon had once been an exquisite work of art, I saw at once, constructed of gold and silver and set with tiny ruby and emerald jewels along the jet-black basket and over the perfect red sphere of the balloon itself. But the wires connecting the balloon to its basket were bent, and spots on the carriage itself were blunted, as though someone had set the balloon too close to a hot fire.
I set the balloon aside and took up the papers, which were even stranger than the balloon. They looked as though they had been sewn into a book, but the edges near the binding were torn, and the rest had turned brown, obscuring the rows and rows of neat dark handwriting. Curious, I picked up the top page.
June 18th, 1900. Cill Cannig, Osraighe. To Áine Lasairíona Devereaux, Queen of Éireann, and my patron and benefactress in these investigations into the nature of the future . . .
An electric shock traveled through me. I snatched up another page. Here were formulas and schematics for a strange machine, one that resembled nothing I had ever seen before.
Except I had.
More pages. More electric shocks. The pages were from a journal, written by a scientist detailing his research. It was all fantastic, and yet, not entirely so. As I read about balloons and time travel, about batteries and energy sources based upon work from certain Frankonian scientists, I recognized terms from my father’s discourses about philosophy, about a certain young scientist with theories about time fractures and travel between the present and the future . . . .
Time fractures.
I release a long-held breath.
And remembered.
Breandan, I thought. Breandan, what have you done?
Except I knew. Or thought I knew.
My hands shook as I set aside the paper. I glanced upward to the darkened ceiling, half expecting a rain of papers to descend upon me, describing an unknown past and future. Memory pricked at my brain, reminding me of a past I had forgotten.
(Forgot. Or never lived.)
I took up a second page from the middle of the set. Glanced over a description of a failed experiment. Once more the name Breandan Reid ó Cuilinn made my brain ache with half-remembered events. He had demonstrated a machine to my father. That much I was certain. But the rest . . . a balloon, a diary of experiments conducted here, at Cill Cannig?
I took the balloon and the papers back to my private chambers. It was strange, but their presence gave me a stability I lacked and longed for these past four weeks. And so, between brief investigations into the past, and certain inquiries onto the Continent concerning recent findings about time fractures, or the inconsistencies in present times. The more I investigated, the more I remembered from that other time, from that other past. Someone had closed the time fractures over Osraighe and Awveline City. Murders were undone, the past rewritten. Because of that, Lord Kiley’s daughter lived, and Breandan had died.
(Perhaps. Or if he lived, it was in a different time. In a different world from the Éireann I knew.)
And what if I could travel into the past, forbid Breandan to make his fateful journey through time? Would he listen to me, a stranger? Or would he nevertheless press onward, to be the first of all scientists, to breach the walls of time?
I thought I knew the answer to that question.
Oh, Breandan, what have you done?
Except I knew.
He had launched himself forward to a future that had vanished. No, not vanished. According to the many treatises I had read, his future had jumped to a different path, severed from mine.
And now I knew the choices my father had faced, when my mother died. It was not merely an acceptance of death. It was the knowledge that our duties and our path lay with Éireann, not with any other person who happened to share our lives.
I picked up the miniature balloon and ran my fingers over its delicate tracery of wires, over the perfect sphere, now marred and blunted by its impossible passage through time. I would keep it, and its companion record of the vanished past. Ah, but that was all.
Wherever you are, Breandan Reid ó Cuilinn, I thought. Wherever you travel. Fare thee well.
BLUE VERVAIN MURDER BALLAD #2: JACK OF DIAMONDS
ERIK AMUNDSEN
The girl played a banjo with a ghostwood neck as she sang a tune in the ghostwood tree. Peep frogs sang with her, sweet as Sunday gospel, and on the ground, at the crossroads, his watch reading a quarter to midnight, cat-eyed Hector Brown edged for the shadows. He asked them in the voice under his breath to take him back, but they weren’t having him anymore. The girl opened her eyes at the end of her song and they fled, like she’d shone a light on him, but there was no light he could see.
The girl tilted her head down until the point of her chin seemed to transfix Hector through the chest and then she jumped from the high limb that had been her perch. She didn’t fly, but she made no sound when she landed. She rolled with the landing, right to her feet, kicking up dried leaves and straw.
Her toes were touching his. Her eyes were the color of the ghostwood and she leaned on her banjo like a cane.
“You’re early,” said Hector, and he chuckled. It sounded dry and badly balanced on his words.
“Would hell find a lady Satan for you, Hector Brown, and you alone?” asked the girl.
Hector composed up his face for the table, though, in his heart, he was cursing what he must have already let her know.
“Would they send such a celebrated sinner as yourself one cleft in place of two? No, the devil has passed on offering for your soul three times, Hector. That ought to tell you something.”
“Three?” Hector searched himself and found only once at the crossroads, one bad oath in a tavern; the third was a mystery to him.
“The fact that you’ve brought your soul to market again after the first day ended without a sale should have been instructive,” the girl said, “and that first failure to sell doubly so. When the devil looks into his ledger book, he finds he already has you without further investment.”
Hector had nothing to say, his hand crept for his waist and the dagger belted there; it crept and it searched and felt an empty sheath. The girl winked, she looked over her shoulder at the river, then, and back at Hector, and she sighed.
“Who is it that you’ve come to sell your soul to get?”
“I don’t see how it much matt
ers,” said Hector. “If my soul isn’t mine, but you seem to be able to pierce through to my heart with a look, it shouldn’t be that hard for you to divine without my saying.”
“If it’s a heart you want pierced, Hector,” said the girl, holding up his dagger, “you’ve lent me a tool far better suited for the work than my sight. I haven’t so much as glanced at your heart, just your history. Having taken my fill of that, I find myself in want of a name, but nothing else.”
Hector looked down at his shoes, scuffed and worn; looked at how they rubbed against the toes of the girl’s shoes, and when he looked up, he spoke the name.
“Her name is Rachel,” he said.
The girl’s hand whip-snaked to Hector’s brow and pushed his eye wide open. She leaned up and looked deep inside.
“This one?” the girl said. “How have your guiles and your persuasions failed you this time? How is it that the sweet face your mother gave you has come in second, and to what?”
“I met her in the gambling halls,” said Hector, “a shill for the house, with a blue dress on, with blue eyes like corn flowers on a full moon night.”
“They call her Rachel Rocket?” said the girl. “I’ve heard the name around the way. When the house has lost enough, she puts a white chip with a heart inscribed in the center, and you and dozens more have thrown winnings and livelihoods away, chasing that chip, haven’t you?”
Hector pressed his lips together, tried to shuffle like a guilty boy standing for a hymn, but his feet would not leave the earth, so he rocked in place. The girl looked down at their feet and back up at his face.
“I notice you’re not wearing those shiny shoes that made you so proud, anymore, or perhaps those on your feet were that pair. In either case, Hector, I thought you would be more practical.”
“This is different,” he said. “You must have heard I have an understanding with the cards, the way they come and the way they fall.”
“I have heard,” said the girl, “that it came by way of your cat-eyed daddy, with his eyes and his heart.”
“I’ve played against shill girls before,” said Hector, “and had my way with all of them; I do not see them over the cards, not the way I’m meant to see them.”
“But you saw this one,” said the girl, “you saw her the way she wanted you to see her.”
“I didn’t,” said Hector, and he stepped back from the girl, “and if you can see my heart at all, you’ll see I’m telling the truth. If you see my history, you’ll see my pride that will stand as my witness. I swear to you on it that I didn’t want Rachel at all until I saw her take my last chip from the table.”
The girl glanced toward the river again, there was a cloud passed across her face.
“But now you lack the funds to try her again at the table,” said the girl.
“I can raise funds, if that were truly the matter,” Hector said, “but Rachel’s contract belongs to Askance the Pike, now, and she plays on his riverboat in the wide Indigo behind you. Askance only allows those of high degree on his gambling cruises, and degree is something that I cannot win at cards.”
“Is it love?” said the girl. “When you play, the colors of the suits change over; the clubs and spades show red and the hearts and diamonds black. So I ask, do you feel that thing, or is this a simpler craving?”
“They gnaw on my heart the same.”
The cloud moved on, the girl stepped forward, slinging her ghostwood banjo over her shoulder as she did, and again, her toes fetched up against his, and again, he could not move them.
“A matter of degree,” she said, “is a simple one. Entertain my offer, Hector Brown. I can lend you a glamour that will hold in place of degree, find you passage on Askance’s boat, and invest in you the funds you will need. All I ask is threefold return on my investment.”
“Three?” said Hector. “That sounds a great deal like charity, and makes me suspicious.”
“Ninefold, then, if you like,” said the girl, “to salve your conscience; open up that mouth again with anything other than a yes or no and I will multiply it by three again.”
“Shall we shake on it?” said Hector. “Nine times your stake is still a lower price than what I was prepared to take.”
“No,” said the girl, as another cloud passed into her face, “we won’t shake, we’ll kiss on it.”
Hector Brown smiled.
“Yours is a face I would kiss for free,” he said, and the cloud passed her by again. The girl glanced at the river and leaned close.
Before their lips parted, she reached for his left hand and tied something around his third finger there. Then she stepped back from him, two steps away. It was a little twist of her own black hair that Hector saw when he raised his hand to see; the same shiny black that made the strings of her banjo.
“Don’t be distressed, Hector,” she said, “we’re not wed; that’s the anchor for the glamour you will need to fool the Pike. Beware of him, he does not feel the lusts of men, but he does have the pride and he is jealous, and his temper is very bad. Do not mention me when you play on the boat, or he will hear and his men will throw you overboard. If you’re lucky, the paddlewheel will get you before he does.”
“How can I mention you?” Hector said. “I don’t know your name.”
“You can call me Blue Vervain,” said the girl, “but not until both your feet touch the land again.”
“Now that we’re partners,” said Hector, “may I have back my dagger?”
“You’d be better served throwing this thing in the river,” said Blue Vervain. “I smell blood on it.”
“I insist,” said Hector. “My mother gave it to me; she said it was my father’s and it’s all of either I have.”
“If only that were the case,” said the Blue Vervain. “But no, I shouldn’t keep it from you, take it back with my compliments. If you follow the road along the river for a quarter mile downstream, you will find a dock that will lead you to the riverboat. Your name will be Cody Jaye, don’t mention your real name or mine or the pike will have your blood.”
“Blue Vervain isn’t your real name, is it?”
The girl looked again toward the river, and then she sighed.
“No,” she said, “it isn’t. It’s Ayelish, but if that name ever passes your lips, it will be bad for you.”
Hector Brown left the crossroads, crossed the bridge by the frog pond, where the peep frogs had gone quiet and walked to the banks of the river. He followed the road downstream to the place where the river mist hung thick over a moonless night, and a narrow old dock stretched out into darkness.
The shoe of his first foot on that dock began to shine; the scuffs and age and wear melting away into new tooled leather and gloss. The second followed, and his clothing became a fine suit, his worn satchel a suitcase; the lock of hair on his finger cinched tight, and made him gasp. Ayelish had assured them they were not wed, but the tightening around his finger; he could not fear a comparison less apt.
The dock creaked, and beneath his weight, he could hear the old worn-silver wood shedding splinters as he passed. The dark of night melted into the mute gray of mist as he went, and, at the end of the dock, where a podium and a book stood, Hector felt as though he had walked the length of the dock for the hours from midnight until morning.
There was an inkwell and a pen standing at the podium, the page open, bearing the heading GUEST BOOK. Hector took the pen, and with a moment’s hesitation, he wrote the name he’d been instructed into the ledger.
For another moment, nothing happened; then the water began to boil.
A great fish head rose up from the water with a long, sharp-tapered snout and a great, copper-tinged eye, big around as a wagon wheel on either side.
“Cody Jaye,” said the pike, his voice deep and dark and gravel on a breath that reeked of river bottom.
“I am, sir,” said Hector, and, without his volition, his tongue continued, “Cody Jaye of the Blue Hill Jayes.”
“We know this,”
said the pike, “we’ve seen your face before, in two places, and welcomed one upon our boat before.”
“In two places?” asked Hector. “Do you mean to say someone else has been using my face?”
“Interesting that you should come to that conclusion,” said the pike, “for it is the correct one. I’ve heard your name and face have been taken up by a no-account, yellow-eyed bastard named Hector Brown, conceived by rape in a bed that was wet with murder before the sun rose.”
Hector held his tongue and showed the pike the face he wore at cards.
“He’s yet to do any violence to your reputation, and I assure you, he will be found before he gets the opportunity. How fares your sister?”
“You must mean my sister-in-law, Maryanne?” said Hector, not fully appreciating, until now, how the words had gotten into his head. “For as you know, I’ve three brothers, but no sisters save those gotten in marriage. It was a difficult delivery, but both she and my new nephew pulled through, thank God.”
“Ah, yes,” said the pike, “I misspoke. Welcome to my boat; your stateroom is prepared and your accounts will be made available to you by the purser.”
Hector could see lights, gold and red, through the mist now, hear the churn of the engines, and a smaller craft, rowed by four men in Askance’s slate-colored livery was approaching. He let them take his luggage and stepped aboard.
The riverboat was tall and painted red and yellow, with black whorls and swoops detailing the hull; it was hung with electric bulbs and exotic red paper lanterns. Hector could hear music floating across the deck, chamber music; he found himself listening for the pick of the banjo, shook his head. Somewhere in the back there, in the dark of his mind, he could hear his own voice whispering that name, Ayelish, that strange name, trying it out; tasting it.