Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  There is a faint bloodstain along the bottom; the boy had this picture while he was being tortured. I think of the marks on the sketch they brought me with Uri’s things.

  The boy’s family will never have this picture. Thinking of them, I fold it and tuck it into the silk bag at my throat.

  “What do you think of me?” she asks.

  She has come alone, her clothes already red from the day’s work. I look at her face to avoid seeing the stains. It does no good; her eyes are the color of dried blood.

  “I think you are a monster,” I say.

  “Did it occur to you that monsters might be kept on a leash? That they have to eat what they are fed?” Her skin is too dark to show a blush, but the way she turns her head away makes me think she regrets the question. Her throat tightens as she swallows. “Miriam,” she says, nearly whispering, “hold on to what the King gave you.”

  “He gave me nothing,” I say. “Nothing but pain, and grief, and hunger, and fear.”

  “He gave you vengeance,” she says.

  She looks a long time at the silk bag, and before she goes, she slips a bit of paper between the bars.

  It is a picture of Uri’s monster.

  Hunger did not scream last night, and this morning he sits quietly on his mattress. He reaches for the straw sometimes, not as though he is going to play with it, but as though it is hiding something.

  The guards are agitated. They chatter in their brittle language, the sound like metal on metal. She is nowhere to be seen.

  Perhaps I am mad, but I think I heard her voice last night. It sounded like she was singing.

  There is something I did not tell Grief; Uri sang, the night he was captured.

  Old King Folly sat on a wall, Old King Folly had a great fall,

  and all the King’s monsters and all the King’s men

  could not put the King back together again.

  “Children’s rhymes,” I said, kissing his forehead. “Hush, love. They’d kill you for less than that.”

  He laughed, drawing me down into his lap. “They’d have to find me first.”

  “You’re so certain you can beat them.”

  “They’ve given me my greatest weapon.”

  I wrapped my arms around him, pressing his face against my chest. His lips lay against the skin that rose and fell with my heartbeat. “You can’t trust them, love,” I said.

  “Them?”

  “Whoever’s telling you these things—your greatest weapon, the names of the King’s monsters, these foolish children’s rhymes. The King’s monsters, Uri. You have to remember whose they are.”

  “I’ll steal the King’s monsters away from him,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Who wants to own a monster?”

  In the end, he was wrong. We do not need to steal our monsters. Sometimes, they are handed to us in a scarred leather bag.

  The men who brought me my food take Hunger on their way out.

  This is the first time she has not come for the prisoner herself. I strain my ears; sometimes when I do this, I can hear them screaming. This time, I hear nothing.

  My appetite is gone; the bread tastes like ash in my mouth. I think suddenly that I am about to die. This feeling has been with me every day since my arrest, but now it is overpowering.

  Every breath becomes precious to me. The moldering straw, the fetor of the dungeons seem suddenly as sweet as perfume.

  I do not want to die.

  The guards come to my cell next.

  When he was dead, I went out into the riverside garden he had loved so well and ripped up the tulips, scattering their petals in a mockery of the wedding ceremony. I chopped down the cherry trees and burned them in a fire hot as a blacksmith’s forge. I stood over the flames, choking on the ash and wishing I could die.

  “Here is your monster,” I said, and threw the sketch onto the fire. “I was wrong. It is yours, after all, and what’s yours can die with you.”

  The picture burned, and even though I wished to, I did not.

  This is where he died, I think as she locks the door behind the departing guards. I want to say it out loud, because I cannot make myself believe it any other way. This room is too dark, too dry, like a cell made of old bones. There is no smell of blood here, only rust and dry sweat.

  “You asked me what he was like,” I say. She turns to me, her eyes blunt and penetrating like awls. “It should be enough for me to say that if you hadn’t killed him, this place would have.”

  “This place did.” She rests her hand on her hip, hooking the iron keys around her thumb. “He brought himself here, Miriam, and I did what I had to do. The time was wrong. He was to lay low, wait for me to tell him—well, you’ll understand soon enough.”

  She walks to a part of the floor that is smoother than the rest and kneels. I follow slowly. “The time was wrong—for what?”

  “You’ll have to take his place. Pride was his, built for him, but she will serve you just as well.” Creaking, the paving stones beneath her begin to skin. She catches my wrist roughly and pulls me onto the platform. “This is it, Miriam—Uri’s rebellion. For the first time in months, the King is without his monster. We must catch him while he is weak.”

  “We? What’s happening?”

  And then the floor opens away above us, and I see.

  The room is full of monsters. Short and corded, tall and sleek, glittering iron claws and fangs, rippling silver scales. I could name them at a glance: long-toothed Hunger, crooked dark-eyed Grief, Anger with his graceless jaw and powerful neck. The King’s monster crouches at the end of the hall, a mighty emperor among his subjects.

  She takes me by the hand and leads me up to Pride.

  I brush my fingers along the monster’s graceful tasseled neck, and the dull iron against my skin feels as hot and vibrant as the torturer’s hand—the blacksmith’s hand, the hand that shaped all the King’s monsters. Pride is beautiful. Her deep eyes flicker as I look into them; her breath on my cheek is cool and sweet.

  The blacksmith hands me her reins. “Mount up,” she says. “The others will join us soon. But I wanted you to be the first—you’ve lost so much you didn’t choose to give.”

  I have no voice. Pride nudges her iron head against mine, cruel and gentle at once; this pain is hers, too. She belonged to Uri, and Uri to her, more than I ever did.

  The blacksmith turns her back, and leaves Pride and I to become each other’s.

  We take to the skies, all the King’s monsters, with drawn swords and cruelly-tipped darts, with steel fangs and claws gleaming. Our queen and mother rides at the head, cutting through the air on the King’s own monster like a ray of light.

  The King has taken much from us, but he will learn to fear the things he’s given, the things he’s made of us.

  We are all the King’s monsters, and we fly.

  About the Author

  Megan Arkenberg is a writer and poet in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and dozens of other places. In 2012, her poem “The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages” won the Rhysling Award in the long form category. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance.

  Torquing Vacuum

  Jay Lake

  Spanich had been up three shifts straight working on a drive alignment issue aboard ICV Mare Imbrium {13 pairs}. She was a charter—a rare thing, in a starship, which signified pockets deeper than planetary budgets—and the passengers reportedly wanted to lift out, but her pilot wasn’t lighting up without the alignment problem being solved. Spanich could get behind this. Faced with the choice of a well-monied tongue lashing or being smeared in rainbow quarks across a few dozen lightyears, he’d take the dressing down every time.

  Besides, he was the only drive tech on Estacada Orbital certified to work the finicky and bizarre paired drives that post-Mistake starships relied upon. Supraluminal travel was so sporadic that if the system got half a dozen outside visitors a year, it wa
s considered busy. And most of them flew with their own maintenance crews as a matter of course. Mare Imbrium {13 pairs} was practically a yacht, the smallest starship he’d ever seen or heard of.

  The shipmind kept whispering specs and test results to him in a voice that made the hairs on his arms prickle and stiffen. Fair enough. A man shouldn’t get too comfortable with the machines that kept him alive. Mistrust was healthy.

  Thank the saints he wasn’t signed onto this bucket for this run. Their quantum bloc cross-processors weren’t piping temporal data flow correctly. No one had liked his suggestion to pull the whole rig and reconfigure on a bench back at the station. A week’s work, at a minimum. But Spanich wouldn’t trust his life to the jigger he’d been ordered to attempt in the name of expediency.

  He sighed and focused on the circuit joins. Nose-to-panel, flat on his back, falling asleep with the smartprobe in his hand, Spanich knew he was still better off working here than back in the engineering pool rotation.

  “Domitian,” said the shipmind. “I think it’s time for you to stand down.”

  “What!?” Spanich snapped.

  “You’ve just probed the same shunt five times.”

  He sighed, unclipped his instruments, and wriggled back into the engineering bay. That was only moderately less claustrophobic than the service accessway he’d just spent twenty hours in, minus breaks for pee and chow. “Home,” Spanich said to no one in particular, then began packing up.

  Ribo thumped from the big speakers embedded in the floor of the Bar Gin. When the bass riffs hit, peanut shells danced across the table like cootch girls on payday. Most places used ambient nano to whisper music, but Bar Gin was so old school they probably hadn’t even invented reading, writing or differential equations back when the place had been founded.

  Spanich huddled in a booth and wondered why he hadn’t gone home to sleep. ‘Home’ being a two-point-two meter-long tube, a meter in diameter. He paid extra for rack space for his hardsuit, and extra extra to make sure parts didn’t vanish from it during off shifts. Still, sleep would have made more sense for him than crouching here over some of Bitter Jane’s homebrew algae beer listening to music which had been crap when he was a kid, and not improved since.

  Then Austen wandered into the joint, and Spanich’s world grew a little brighter. That boy just moved right. Cute enough kid, and buff in a way that kept the eye resting easy, and he smelled like heaven on a Friday night, but the way Austen walked sometimes kept Spanich up late, sweating.

  He raised his hand, waved to Austen, but the kid’s gaze slid right over Spanich like he wasn’t there. Was it too dark back here in the booth? Maybe too much toke smoke in the air.

  Who the hell was he kidding?

  Austen No Last Name didn’t give a shit about Domitian Spanich. Sometimes the kid gave a shit about Domitian Spanich’s pay chitty, when the keycard was fat with local thalers, or more rarely, Imperial schillings. Except payday was seventeen shifts away right now, and Austen could scent ‘broke’ the way a sniffer could find a carbon dioxide breach in a scrubber tank.

  Spanich sank deeper into his algae beer and wondered why the hell he couldn’t ever fall in love with anyone available. There was no lack of available talent. Half the guys torquing vacuum here on Estacada Orbital swung his way. For his own part, Spanich knew he was decent enough looking, and a good lover—it didn’t take raging egotism to sort out those kinds of truths, not once you’d left teen hormones behind. But somehow he always tumbled for the pretty boys, the working kids, who’d roll over and whisper sweet nothings while they let him play their bodies like harps, but always ran off with each other for the real laughs or the quiet times.

  “Dommie,” said a voice for the second time.

  Startled, he looked up from his beer, slopping some of it onto the tabletop. A warning blinked with pixel-rotted irritation from beneath the greenish puddles, but he ignored that.

  Austen!

  Spanich tried desperately to stay cool. “Hey.”

  His sometime-lover sat down. “Mind if I join you?”

  That crooked smile always melted Spanich. “Uh, yeah. Let, let me get you something.”

  “I’m locked and stocked,” Austen said. Those violet eyes seemed to glitter in the bar’s lousy lighting. “Bitter Jane’s sending something over. Said she’d put it on your tab.”

  “I don’t have a—” Spanich managed to shut himself up before he looked any stupider. “Oh, right. Good. Happy to buy you one.” He tried to fight the goofy grin he could feel taking over his face. “Or more,” he blurted. Lots more.

  Thank the pressure demons this place was so dark. Austen couldn’t see him blush, at least.

  “Don’t mind if I don’t.” The kid’s crooked smile flashed into an answering grin that looked so free, so easy, that Spanich wondered why he even bothered to try.

  He kept himself cautious. Don’t hope, don’t hope, don’t hope. “So, uh, what’s up?”

  A drink arrived on a rollerbot, a cybernetic waiter converted from a level one security drone. For all Spanich had ever been able to tell, it might still be a kill platform. You couldn’t know, not with Bitter Jane in play.

  Austen picked up the long, graceful ceramometallic stem, frost sparkling diamond bright as mist curled off its sides.

  Great, thought Spanich. One of Jane’s thousand-thaler cryoliquid specials. Someone here was pushing their luck. Spanich had a sick fear that he was the chump. There was his next pay chitty gone, and a decent portion of his liquid savings. So to speak.

  “Well . . . ” The kid took a long, slow sip, batting his eyelashes.

  Focus, focus.

  “You’ve been working on the Mare Imbrium, right?”

  Spanich winced. Austen even pronounced the old, old term wrong, as if he were speaking Classical English instead of Preclassical Spanish or Mayan or whatever language of lost Earth those words came from.

  “Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs.” Spanich corrected the kid’s pronunciation and usage both. “And the shipminds are mighty picky about getting their numbers right.”

  “Shipminds,” Austen said. “Yeah. Whatever.”

  In that moment, Spanich suddenly wondered what it was he’d found so alluring about Austen. Sure, the kid was smoking hot, like fire in an oxygen plant, but had he never noticed how dumb Austen was. Maybe some dirtball farmer wouldn’t know the difference, but how could anyone survive in an orbital habitat and be so ignorant of the basic etiquette of ships and shipminds? The kind of ignorant that got people spaced out an airlock, or their breathing license erased from the station records.

  “Look . . . .” Spanich felt obscurely deflated and betrayed. “Don’t worry about Mare Imbrium thirteen. There’s a charter riding her this trip, and I hear the woman is deep-fried trouble on a fuckstick, if you catch my datastream. Let’s have a drink and, I don’t know, go dancing. Forget about starships, kid. They never mattered to you before, did they?”

  Austen shrugged and smiled. The wattage seemed to have gone out of his expression, but maybe that was just Spanich. “I need something, Dommie. Something only you can help me with.”

  “Only me, huh?” The words just slipped out of his triple-shift exhausted mouth. “And that’s why you’re sucking down a thousand-thaler drink on my tab? To get in good?”

  The ceramometallic stem hit the table with a click that would have cracked ordinary plastic. “Dommie, please . . . ”

  Spanich stood up. “I’m tired, I need to sleep, I’m going home.”

  Austen shot out of his chair, grabbing for Spanich’s rough, greasy hand with his own slim, manicured fingers. “At least let me come with you.”

  Close, with that smell, though he knew them both for idiots, Spanich couldn’t say no to that. Even if he’d been awake enough to stop this disaster before it got any worse, with Austen standing so close his hormones were kicking ass and taking names.

  Home they went, together.

  The tube’s comm panel beeped him out of
dreams into the reality of an itching belly—cum always dried that way on his skin—and a gently snoring Austen. Spanich nudged a crusty towel aside and punched the sleepshift override.

  That didn’t stop the beeping.

  He focused on the little display. Priority message, channel two. His blood chilled. Station ops.

  “What the . . . ?” He stabbed again, brought up voice-no-video mode. “Spanich.”

  Austen groaned, tucked in tighter to his side. Spanich patted the kid, trying to soothe him enough not to make noise on this call.

  The speaker crackled, shitty cheap tech like everything his type ever got, other than the tools of their trade. “Engineering Supervisor Spanich?”

  “Yeah. ’s what I said.” He blinked some sand from his eyes, and ignored hot memories of the most recent midshift here inside the comfortably tight confines of his sleeping tube.

  “This is Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome, Adjutant-Intendant of Estacada Orbital operations.”

  Whoa. Only flash brass used names that long. And most of the hypercrust didn’t bother to work for a living. “Alright. I’m impressed now.” Damn, he needed to be smarter.

  Austen stirred. “Whu . . . ?” Spanich jammed his fingers in the kid’s mouth. Reflexively, Austen began to suckle.

  “Your presence is requested and required at berth eleven, docking boom gamma.”

  Shit on an airfilter! That would be the current hookup of ICV Mare Imbrium {13 pairs}. “I’m not due back til thirteen hundred hours.”

  “Requested and required, Engineering Supervisor Spanich. Would an escort facilitate your prompt presence?”

  Shit! What was this about? “Ah, no. I’ll be there fast.”

  “Adjutant-Intendant out.”

  His comm panel died with a definitive pop that suggested further conversation would not only be pointless, but impossible. Spanich looked down at Austin, who was busy slurping the last of their midnight passion off his fingertips.

  He was the chump, alright. Flash brass played for fatal stakes. Not their lives, of course, but the lives of people like him. And people like Austen.