The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  “What happened to everyone else?” I asked on a whim during one of our brief pauses. When last I’d sojourned in the Never-Throned’s company, he’d had eight of his original boon companions yet unslain, enough to crew his ship and drink up truly heroic quantities of something irresponsible whenever they paid call to a landed king or queen. “Asmira? Lorus? Valdis?”

  “Asmira was pitched from the mast during a storm,” said Brandgar. “Lorus challenged a vineyard-wight to a game of draughts and kept it occupied ’til dawn. It killed him in its fury just before the first light of the sun slew it in turn. Valdis died in the battle against the Skull Priests at Whitefall.”

  “What about Rondu Silverbeard?”

  “The Silverbeard died in bed,” chuckled Gudrun.

  “Under a bed, to be precise,” added Mikah. “The defenders dropped it on us at the siege of Vendilsfarna.”

  “I hope our friends know joy in the Fields of Swords and Roses,” I said, for that is where worthy Ajja are meant to go when they die, and if it’s true I suppose it keeps all of our own heavens and hells a bit quieter. “Though I hope I give no offense if I wish we had a few more of them with us tonight.”

  “They died to bring us here,” said Brandgar. “They died to teach us what we needed to know. They died to show us the way, and when our numbers dwindled and our duties grew lean, we three knew where we were called.” Gudrun and Mikah nodded with that sage fatalism I had long lamented in my Ajja friends, and though my presence on that mountain reinforced my assertion that I had never in my life behaved with any particular wisdom, neither was I boorish enough to voice my concerns with their philosophy. Perhaps they had always mistaken this tact for fellow-feeling. No, I admit I could fight with abandon when cornered, but when I could see a meeting with Death obviously scrawled in the ledger, I always preferred to break the appointment. How any of the Ajja ever survived long enough to span the seas and populate their holdings remains a mystery of creation.

  We resumed our climb, and soon heaved ourselves over the edge of a cleft promontory where a hemispherical stone ceiling, open to the night like a theater, overhung a darkness that led into the depths of the mountain. The wind had risen and the air was sharp against my skin. We gazed out for a moment at the lights of the town far below us, and the white-foamed blackness of the sea capped with mists, and the hair-thin line of sunset that still clung to the horizon. Then rose a scraping, shuffling noise behind us, and Brandgar turned with Cold-Thorn held high.

  Red lights glowed in answer, throbbing like a pulse-beat within the cavern. Whether they were lanterns or conjurations I could not discern, but in their rising illumination I saw an arched door wide enough to admit three wagons abreast. I wondered whether the dragon had left itself ample room in setting this passage, or if it could tolerate a tight squeeze. Unhelpful conjecture! In the space between us and the door stood two straight lines of pillars, and beside each pillar stood the shape of a man or woman.

  Brandgar advanced, and the man-shape nearest us held up a hand. “Bide,” it whispered in a hoarse sickbed voice. “None need enter.”

  “Unless you propose to show us a more convenient door,” said Brandgar, “this path is for us.”

  “Time remains to turn.” There was enough light now to see that the hoarse speaker and all of its companions were unclothed, emaciated, and caked with filth. A paleness shone upon their breasts, where each on their left side bore a plate of something like dull nacre, sealed to the edges of the bloodless surrounding flesh by the pulsing segments of what seemed to be a milk-white centipede. The white segments passed into the body like stitches and emerged in a narrow, twitching tail at the back of the neck. From these extremities hung threads, gleaming silver, connecting each man or woman to a pillar. Atop those, in delicate brass recesses, pulsed fist-sized lumps of flesh. I’d been near enough death to know a human heart by sight, and felt a tight horror in my own chest. “The master grudges you nothing. You may still turn and go home.”

  “Our thanks to your master.” Brandgar set his leather-wrapped spear down and spun Cold-Thorn, casting about a light like the sun’s rays scattering from rippling water. “We are here on an errand of sacred avarice, and will not be halted.”

  Some enchanted guardians never know when to shut up, but this one had a reasonable sense of occasion, so it nodded and proceeded directly to hostilities. Each of the heart-wraiths took up handfuls of dust, and in their clenched fists this dust turned to swords. Eight of them closed on four of us, and with a merry twirl of my daggers I joined most of my companions in making royal asses of ourselves.

  It was plain to Mikah, Brandgar, and myself, as veterans of too many sorcerer’s traps and devices to enumerate here, that the weakness of these creatures had to be the glittering threads that bound them to their heart-pillars. Dodging their attacks, we wove a dance of easy competence and with our weapons of choice swung down nearly simultaneously for the threads of our targets. What it felt like, to me, was swinging for dandelion fuzz and hitting granite. I found myself on the ground with my right hand spasming in cold agony, and was barely able to seize my wits and roll aside before a blade struck sparks where my head had just been.

  “I had thought,” muttered Brandgar (shaking Cold-Thorn angrily, for either his rude health or some quality of the spear had let him keep it when Mikah and I had been rendered one-handed), “the obvious striking point—”

  “So did we all,” groaned Mikah.

  “Speak for your cloddish selves,” shouted Gudrun, who had cast lines of emerald fire upon the stones, where they flashed and coiled like snakes in response to the movements of her hands, and were holding several of the heart-wraiths at bay.

  I sidestepped a new assault, rebalanced my left-hand dagger, and judged the distance to the nearest pillar-top heart. If the threads had been a distraction, the weakness of the magic animating our foes surely had to lie there. I was not left-handed, but I threw well, and my blade was a gratifying blur that arrived dead on target, only to be smacked aside by one thrown with even greater deftness by Mikah, aimed at the same spot.

  “Damnation, Crale, it takes impressive skill to fail so precisely!” said the King-Shadow as they whirled and wove between onrushing heart-wraiths.

  “If I live to tell this story in taverns I shall amend this part to our advantage,” I said, though you apprehend, my friends, that I have done otherwise and will sleep soundly in my conscience tonight. Mikah found a fresh dagger and made another cast, this time without my interference. The blade struck true at the visibly unprotected heart, and rebounded as though from an inch of steel. We all swore vicious oaths. Magic does from time to time so boil one’s piss.

  Mikah rolled one of the silk ropes off their shoulders, and with a series of cartwheels and flourishes deployed it as a weapon, lashing and entangling the nearest heart-wraiths, quick-stepping between them like the passage of a mad tailor’s needle. I had no such recourse, and my right hand was still useless. I scrambled across the stones, swept up a dropped blade in my left hand once more, and whirled toward the two wraiths assailing me. “Hold,” I cried. “Hold! I find I’m not so eager for treasure as I was. Would your master yet give me leave to climb back down?”

  “We are here to slay or dissuade, not to punish.” The heart-wraith before me lowered its weapon. “Living with yourself is your own affair. You may depart.”

  “I applaud the precision and dedication of your service,” I said, and as the heart-wraith began to turn from me, no doubt to join the fray against my companions, I buried my dagger in its skull with an overhand blow. The segments of the insectoid thing threaded into its abdomen shook, and something like creamy clotted bile poured from the mouth and ears of what had once been a man. It collapsed.

  “That was a low trick,” rasped the other heart-wraith, and came for me. I wrenched my dagger free, which wafted a sickly vinegar odor into my face, and waved my hands again.

  “Hold,” said I. “It’s true that I’m a gamesome and un
scrupulous rogue, but I feared you were playing me false. Are you really prepared to let me go in good faith?”

  “Despite your unworthy—”

  I never learned the specifics of my unworthiness, as I took the opportunity to lunge and sink my dagger into its left eye. It toppled beside its fellow and vomited more disgusting yellow soup. I am the soul of pragmatism.

  “Enough!”

  I saw that only one heart-wraith remained, and before my eyes the sword in its hand returned to dust. I had slain two, Gudrun had scorched two with her fire-serpents, and Mikah had at last bound their pair tightly enough to finish them with pierced skulls. Brandgar had beaten one of his foes to a simple pulp, breaking its limbs and impaling it through the bony plate where its heart had once been. As for those hearts, I saw at a glance that those atop seven of the eight pillars had shriveled. Dark stains were running down the columns beneath them.

  “You have proven your resolve,” rasped the final heart-wraith. “The master bids you onward.”

  The eerie red lights of the cavern dimmed, and with the crack and rattle of great mechanisms the arched doors fell open. Brandgar advanced on the surviving heart-wraith, spear held out before him, until it rested gently on the white plate set into the thing’s chest.

  “Onward we move,” said Brandgar, “but how came you to the service of the dragon?”

  “I sought the treasure and failed, three score years past. You may yet join me, when you fail. If enough of your flesh remains the master may choose to knit watch-worms into the cavern of your heart, so be advised… to consider leaving as little flesh as possible.”

  “After tonight your master Glimraug will have no need of us.” Smoothly and without preamble, Brandgar drove his spear into the wraith’s chest. “Nor any need of you.”

  “Thank… you…” the wraith whispered as it fell.

  “Did we amuse you in our stumblings, sister Sky-Daughter?” said Mikah, massaging their right hand. My own seemed to be recovering as well.

  “Spear-carriers and knife-brains love to overthink a problem,” laughed the sorceress. “Feeds your illusionary sense of finesse. The truly stupid and the truly wise would have started with simply bashing at the damn things, but since you’re somewhere in between, you tried to kill everything else in the room first. Good joke. This dragon knows how adventurers think.” She looked up at the mountain and sighed. “Tonight could be everyone’s night to stumble, ere we’re through.”

  THIRD, HOW I PUT MY ASS ON THE LINE AND HOW WE SOUGHT THE SONG BENEATH THE SONG

  PAST THE ARCHED doors we found ourselves in a vaulted hall, lit once more by pale scarlet fires that drifted in the air like puffs of smoke. For a moment I thought we stood in an armory, and then I saw the jagged holes and torn plates in every piece displayed, tier on tier and rank on rank, nearly to the ceiling. Broken blades and shattered spears, shields torn like parchment-sheets, mail shirts pierced and burnt and fouled with unknown substances—here were the fates of all our predecessors memorialized, obviously. The dragon’s boast.

  “Perhaps a part-truth,” responded Mikah, when I said as much. “Surely all dragons are braggarts after a fashion. But consider how this one seems determined to play fair with its challengers. The ascent up the mountain, with its gradual reduction of ease. The guardians at the door, willing to forgive and forget. Now this museum show for the faint-hearted. At every step our host invites the insufficiently motivated to quit before they waste more of anyone’s time.”

  Proud to be numbered among the sufficiently motivated, no doubt, I followed my companions through the dragon’s collection, uneasily noting its quality. Here were polished Sulagar steel breastplates and black Harazi swords of the ten thousand folds. Here were gem-studded pauldrons of ageless elven-silver, and gauntlets of sky iron that glowed faintly with sorcery, and all of these things had clearly been as useful as an underwater fart against the fates that had overtaken their wielders. At the far end of the hall lay another pair of great arched doors, and nested into one like a passage for pets was a door more suited to those of us not born as dragons. On this door lay a sigil that I knew too well, and I seized Brandgar by his cloak before he could touch it.

  “That is the seal of Melodia Marus, the High Trapwright of Sendaria,” said I, “and I’ve had several professional disagreements with her. Or, more precisely, the mechanisms she devises for the vaults and offices of her clients.”

  “I know her work by reputation,” said Mikah. “It seems Glimraug is one of those clients.”

  “She’s the reason I once spent three months unconscious in Korrister.” I twitch at the memory, friends, but not all of one’s ventures can end in good fortune, as we have seen. “And six weeks in a donjon in Port Raugen. And why I only have eight toes.”

  “Another fair warning,” said Gudrun. “A frightful spectacle for all comers, then a more specific omen for those professionally inclined to thievery.”

  “We have two master-burglars to test our way,” said Brandgar, who seemed more cheerful with every danger and warning of greater danger. “And if this woman’s creations were perfect surely she’d have more than two of Crale’s toes by now.”

  The craft of trap-finding is much sweat and tedium, with only the occasional thrill of accident or narrow escape, and we spent the next hour absorbed in its practice. All the stairs and corridors in that part of the dragon’s domain were richly threaded with death. Some halls were sized to us and some to the transit of larger things, and these networks of passages were neither wholly parallel nor entirely separate. This was no citadel made for any sensible court, but only a playing field for Glimraug’s game, a stone simulacrum of what we would call a true fortress. Up we went floor by floor, past apertures in the walls that spat razor-keen darts, over false floors that gave way to mangling-engines, through cleverly weighted doors that sprang open with crushing force or sealed themselves behind us, barring retreat from some new devilment.

  In one particularly narrow hall both Mikah and myself had a rare bout of all-consuming nincompoopery, and one of us tripped a plate that caused iron shutters to slam down before and behind us, sealing our quartet in a span of corridor little bigger than a rich merchant’s water-closet. An aperture on the right-hand wall began to spew a haze at us, the stinging sulphur reek of which was familiar to me from a job I’d once pulled in the mines of Belphoria.

  “Dragon’s breath,” said Brandgar.

  “More like the mountain’s breath,” I cried, and with a creditable leap I braced myself like a bridge across the narrow space and jammed my own posterior firmly into the aperture. The thin cloud of foulness that had seeped into the hall made my eyes water, but was not yet enough to cause us real harm. Though once a few minutes passed and I could no longer maintain such an acrobatic posture, my well-placed buttocks would no longer avail us. “It’s what miners call the stink-damp, and it will dispatch us with unsporting speed if I can’t hold the seal, so please conjure an exit.”

  “Fairly done, Crale!” Brandgar waved a hand before his face and coughed. “To save us, you’ve matched breach to breeches!”

  “All men have cracks in their asses,” said Gudrun, “but only the boldest puts his ass in a crack.”

  “Henceforth Crale the Cracksman will be celebrated as Crale the Corksman,” said Mikah.

  I said many unkind things then, and they continued making grotesque puns which I shall not torture any living soul with, for apparently to ward off a stream of poisonous vapor with one’s own ass is to summon a powerful muse of low comedy. Eventually, moving with what I considered an unseemly attitude of leisure, Mikah tried and failed to find any mechanism they might manipulate. Then even the strength of Brandgar’s shoulder failed against the iron shutters, and our salvation fell to Gudrun, who broke a rune-etched bone across her knee and summoned what she called a spirit of rust.

  “I had hoped to reserve it for some grander necessity,” said she. “Though I suppose this is a death eminently worth declining.”
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br />   In a few moments the spirit accomplished its task, and the sturdy iron shutters on either side were reduced to scatterings of flaked brown dust on the floor. I unbraced with shudders of relief in every part of my frame, and we hurried on our way, kicking up whorls of rust in our wake to mingle with the lethal haze of the broken trap. We moved warily at first, and then with more confidence, for it seemed that we had at last cleared that span of the mountain in which Melodia Marus had expressed her creativity. I do hope that woman died in a terrible accident, or at least lost some toes.

  The red lights the dragon had graciously provided before were not to be found here, however, so we climbed through the darkness by the silver gleam of Gudrun’s sorcery on our naked weapons. Eventually we could find no more doors or stairs, and so with painful contortions and much use of Mikah’s ropes we ventured up a rock chimney. I prayed for the duration of the ascent that we had discovered nothing so mundane as the dragon’s privy-shaft.

  Eventually we emerged into a cold-aired cavern with a floor of smooth black tiles. Scarlet light kindled upon a far wall, and formed letters in Kandric script (which I had learned to read as a boy, and which the Ajja had long adopted as their preference for matters of trade and accounting), spelling out the Helfalkyn Wormsong.

  “As if we might have forgotten it,” muttered Mikah. At that instant, a burst of orange fire erupted from the rock chimney we had ascended and burned like a terrible flickering flower twice my height, sealing off our retreat. White-hot lines spilled forth from the ragged crest of this flame, like melted iron from a crucible, and this burning substance swiftly took the aspect of four vaguely human shapes, lean and graceful as dancers. Dance they did, whirling slowly at first but with ever-increasing speed, and then toward us they came, gradually. Inexorably.

  “Seek the song beneath the song,” rang a voice that touched my heart, a voice that echoed softly around the chamber, a voice blended of every fine thing, neither man’s nor woman’s but something preternaturally beautiful. To hear it once was to regret all the years of life one had spent not hearing it. Even now, merely telling of it, I can feel warmth at the corners of my eyes, and I am not ashamed. The four fire-dancers glided and spun, singing with voices that started as mere entrancement and became more painfully beautiful with every verse.