The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Which I don’t, he admitted. And I’d really rather not dwell on the reasons behind that. The very idea that I’m going soft, going native, turning into one of them – well, might as well grow a tail and put in a bulk order for bananas. He slipped his key into the lock and let himself in.

  “Hello.”

  This time it was his turn to say, “You.”

  She nodded to him; distant, polite. “Hello, Dad,” she said.

  He frowned. “You what?”

  “Also,” she went on, “hello grandad, great-grandad, great-great-grandad, and great-grandad to the power of twelve recurring. You bastard,” she added, with feeling.

  “Ah,” he replied. “Got you. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.”

  She shook her head. “I quite understand,” she said. “After all, I look different each time round, and you haven’t seen me this time since I was two. Did you get your paper, by the way?”

  “My what?”

  “Newspaper. The one you were just nipping out for, last time I saw you. Ah yes, there it is in your side pocket.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry about that –”

  She thew an ashtray at him. It shattered against his forehead. She scowled.

  “Didn’t hurt, did it?” she said.

  “Well,” he admitted, “no.”

  “I thought not. Pity. Is there anything that hurts you? Anything at all? Because –”

  He smiled. “Only being stuck on this planet,” he replied. “Ignore me,” he added. “Private –”

  “Yes, private joke,” she interrupted. “Only, not any more. You see, I’ve remembered. All of it, or all of them, whatever. Sheer fluke,” she went on, “regression under hypnosis, which I’m having to help me quit smoking, which I only started doing because of the stress I was under at home, because my mum’s a complete emotional wreck, because –”

  He nodded. “Chains of causality are bitches, aren’t they?” he said. “Any point in asking how you found me? This address is meant to be – well, private, and . . .”

  “Yes,” she said icily, “but I seem to have inherited some of my dad’s low cunning and utter ruthlessness, so I hacked into the Department’s database and there it was. You should be very proud.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Not really,” he said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I couldn’t have your liver raw on a slice of toast instead?”

  He shook his head. “Scalpels snap on me,” he replied, “and I just seem to absorb industrial lasers. But I happen to have some chocolate mini-rolls in the fridge, and since they’re my favourite, it’s a fair bet you like them too . . .”

  An unslakeable thirst for revenge is one thing, but chocolate is something else. “Go on, then,” she said. “But I still hate you to death.”

  “Me too,” he said with a mild grin, and filled the kettle.

  “So there I was,” he said, half an hour later, “alone, stranded under the glare of an alien sun, who knows how many thousands of light-years away from home, with no prospect of escape, doomed to an eternity of exile on an inhospitable planet at the mercy of a race of savage primitives.” He sighed. “And all because my evil friends though it’d be a good stag-night prank to get me drunk and lock me in the hold of an unnumbered deep space probe on the night before my wedding. If ever I get my hands on them –”

  “Hardly likely,” she interrupted. “That was three thousand years ago, they’ll all be dead by now.”

  He sighed, and explained about the relativistic distortions. “So really,” he went on, “I’ve only been away, what, twenty-five Home years. And since where I come from we don’t start drawing our pensions till we’re 200 . . .” He shrugged. “Not that it matters a damn,” he continued, “because it’s bloody obvious, I’ve finally accepted it, I’m not going home. Not ever. Damn it, I don’t even know where home is.” He paused. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “But of course you know,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No, I thought I knew; Mars, because it’s sort of red-coloured, and so’s the Spinning Rose. But I was wrong, as I found out just the other day. So –”

  “Oh!” She stared at him, then giggled. “You thought that, did you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You thought Mars was your homeworld? Really?”

  “Yes.”

  She sniggered. “Really?”

  “All right, there’s no need to be offensive. I got it wrong, I admit that –”

  “But it’s so obvious,” she interrupted. “Where it is, I mean. Your planet.”

  He frowned. “Really? And how the hell would you know?”

  She smiled. “Because you had me figure it out for you, silly,” she explained patiently. “In 1894; you know, when I was married to that incredibly boring astronomer person. All those hints you dropped when I was a kid; all those stories about the planet far away in the sky where the elves live. You were feeding me everything you could remember about your home, so I’d grow up with a lifelong ambition to find it. And I did.”

  He stared. “You what?”

  “I found it. With George’s telescope. And then I told him, and he wrote it up for the journals, said he’d found it himself, of course, and they made him a Sir and a Regius professor and everything.” She looked at him. “You mean to say,” she said, “I went to all that trouble, and you didn’t even realize?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was so convinced it was Mars, and –”

  “And all you wanted was a son-in-law with a really powerful telescope you could borrow at weekends, and of course anything I came up with couldn’t have been important because I’m only a girl . . .”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Fine,” she said. Then suddenly she grinned. “That explains the other thing that was puzzling me. I mean, why you were so dead keen to go fooling about on a stupid little sub-light rocket ship poking around the solar system, when I’d already invented a faster-than-light stardrive –”

  The sound he made couldn’t actually be produced by a human larynx; the nearest equivalent would be something like tweep, but a good deal of the effect is wasted in transcription.

  “A faster-than-light stardrive,” she repeated. “Last time round, when I was a scientist, remember? Oh sure, you just wanted me to solve the artificial gravity thing so you wouldn’t have to pee down a straw all the way to Mars, so obviously once I’d done that you lost interest. And,” she admitted, “it didn’t help that I died the day after I finished the design –”

  “And nobody bothered to read through the papers you left behind, because you were just –”

  “Exactly.” She clicked her tongue. “But I did take the precaution of bequeathing all my notes and stuff to the University of Florida, and I know they won’t have chucked them out or anything because they’re so historically important. Because of all the really famous male scientists I worked with over the years –”

  “All right, yes.” He pulled a face. “Point made and duly hammered into the ground. And now, perhaps,” he added, “you can see why I’m not so desperately fond of this planet and its dominant species. Well?”

  She looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “Quite,” she said.

  Forty-three years and six months later, on the day when she was due to retire as McConnell professor of applied micro-physics at MIT, she got a postcard. It was slightly creased; and the gum on the back of the stamp contained at least seven elements not known to Earth science, though the post office probably hadn’t spotted that. It read –

  Well, I’m back. Ride a bit bumpy – lost a phase integrator coupling relay in a paraspatial vortex just outside the Crane nebula, and all the condensed milk curdled, but better than walking nonetheless. Home’s much the same as when I left, except of course I’m legally dead, which means I’ll be lucky to get a job flipping burgers, and I can’t murder my best man and groomsmen after all, because they died l
ast autumn in a freak ashslide. Also, I’d forgotten just how damp and miserable this rotten planet gets in winter. Like England, only worse.

  Even so. Thanks.

  Cordially,

  Dad.

  She grinned. “No worries,” she said, and put the card on the mantelpiece, behind the clock.

  RETURN OF THE WARRIOR

  Laird Long

  In the Province of Sull, in the Kingdom of Ronn, all seemed right with the world – the potters potted, the sculptors sculpted, the painters painted, and the scriveners did whatever their name implies. For Sull was home to the kingdom’s artisans, a colourful colony of creative cranks who used well their artistic endowments, for satisfaction of the soul, and sale. And they toiled truly and profitably.

  But beneath the placid, pleasant exterior of the province and the people, lay a seething resentment bubbled to near-surface boil by the erratic, practicality-impaired nature of the creative personality, and the indolence of a King who listened not to ill-formed complaints some two hundred leagues removed. A prickly current of unrest sparked and shocked the citizenry, for many held the opinion that the provincial governor, the Wizard Kadil, was in no uncertain terms fudging the books, collecting taxes beyond what the law allowed. And though the people of Sull claimed to be moved primarily by muse, so, too, were they moved by a love of the good old gold stuff.

  The Wizard Kadil ruled the Province of Sull at the pleasure of King Dorn, a fatted lion of an emperor who oversaw his vast and vibrant kingdom with the sure and sleight-handed aid of Zaric, Wizard of all Wizards, to whom the wizard governors reported directly. And foremost amongst the Wizard Kadil’s tools of governance, beyond the merciless armies of Dorn, was the Tithle – the ancient, righteous code of tithes and taxation written by those wise sages whom first trod the fair plains and lush valleys, climbed the craggy mountains, and forded the blue lakes and turgid rivers of the Kingdom of Ronn. These founding deities well-knew that a fair and just system of levies would serve to cornerstone the advanced civilization that they envisioned, just as the hand-hewn dung bricks, stenched though they may be, still serve as the cornerstones of the true and sturdy homes of the kingdom’s citizenry.

  So it was that this code of taxation, embodied in the Tithle and enforced by the army, served to unite the kingdom, furnish it with communal roads and bridges and dungeons, furnish the King and his wizards with a lifestyle befitting their status. As certain as death and taxes, the non-payment of the latter summoning forth the former, was the smooth governance and functioning of the Kingdom of Ronn.

  “We are gouged!” Aynd the actor railed, in a back-rows voice much larded with indignation.

  Jodd the juggler supped at his grog and glanced nervously about the dim tavern. “You can’t be sure,” he whispered, twirling one bar of his mustaches. “How can you be sure?”

  The subject of heathen coin never failed to fire the fine-tuned temperaments of the artisans, like flame to flower, not only because of their unspoken love for the stuff, but more so because of their abysmal ignorance of the handling and the bookkeeping of it, their impotence in the face of matters monetarily technical.

  “The Tithle is being abused!” Aynd yowled, in exquisite profile, causing shaggy heads to rise from their gourds of inspiration. “I know for a fact that my brother Wass, in the Province of Dramm, is paying far less to his wizard than I am paying to ours.” Aynd uplifted his arms in supplication. “Yet he earns much more than I, as a mule-brusher and stall-sweeper of many years experience.”

  “Hmmm,” Jodd mused, tugging now on his twin strands of facial hair. “But – but the founding principle of the Tithle is that each shall pay according to their earnings.”

  “Yes!” Aynd roared, his sensitive eyes registering a much baser emotion, one coined in gold.

  Jodd chugged at his grog, choked on it, his face burning as red as the copper drachma. “But how can we – you prove this gouging of which you and you alone speak? The Tithle is thousands of parchments long, written in a scrip so cramped even Blan’s seeing-eye dwarf could hardly read it. And complex? T’would be easier to swim naked and unscathed through the rock-bladed rapids of the snake-filled Kaidel River than it would be to comprehend the Tithle and all it contains. That is why a tax wizard is needed.” Jodd shrugged, defeated. “We are artisans, after all, and know no more of numbers and clauses and calculations than a sloth knows of busywork.”

  “True enough,” Aynd agreed, his voice dropping to the level of conspiracy, his lips leaking it. “But we now have among us one who can wrestle sense out of the Tithle, rebates out of the Wizard Kadil.”

  Jodd’s blackened eyes widened. “Who?”

  Aynd held the suspense a perfect ten beats, then tapped the right flank of his equine nose. “Ihor!”

  Jodd dropped his gourd. “What!? You can’t be serious! Can you? The newcomer who dwells in the burnt-orange cottage at the lee end of Sunset Road? He is but an ironmonger, with the thew-thick arms and shoulders to prove it.”

  “Once was tax warrior,” Aynd commented wryly, nodding both of his gourds.

  Thus it was that the Province of Sull, in the Kingdom of Ronn, grew abuzz with the prospect of tax relief, as a swarm of bees grows agitated at the sight and the scent of a field of goldenrod, the prospect of pollination and the honey that will come of it. The people began to believe that if only the massive, mysterious stranger known as Ihor could be cajoled into challenging the Wizard Kadil, then the truth could be revealed, and more importantly, the artisans refunded.

  “You must help us – help yourself!” Aynd argued, at the head of the twenty-strong delegation – Artisans for Accountability – that had marched on Ihor’s cottage. They stood as a group under a blazing noonday sun that set their fair skin to burning and weeping, anxious for an answer.

  Ihor shook his boulder-like head. “I am but an iron-monger,” he protested, platter-sized paws full of tongs and bellows, “hammering out abstracts and objects d’art – an artisan like yourselves. Matters of money and the taxation of money are beyond my realm and beneath my dignity.”

  “As an artisan, yes,” Aynd agreed, the delegation, in turn, nodding their collective, somewhat pointed heads. “But we know that you were once a mighty tax warrior, Ihor, a cruncher of numbers and a counter of beans, a holy disciple of the sacred Tithle.”

  The stave-thick thews on Ihor’s tree-trunk arms corded and uncorded, and a bloated, purple-pink worm of a vein throbbed in his temple. “How do you know?”

  Punt the painter spoke up. “My cousin, Zalt, tells tales of how you fought, alone and armed but with a magnifying glass, through the maze-like fine print of the Regulations of Roinder, to forge better trade ties with the Kingdom of Nann!”

  “And my father saw you rush from the customs offices of Azul, howling at the head of a team of tax warriors, during the Ronn–Azul tariff wars of many moons past!” Natd the needle-pointress pointed out, her eyes uncrossing ever so briefly.

  Ihor’s instruments of forging artistry thudded to the ground. “I – I –”

  “And look at your hands!” Aynd wailed, grasping the he-man’s fearsome fists and flipping them over.

  The assemblage oohed and then aahed, as they saw for themselves the baby’s-bottom palms of the giant, pale palms tinted with streaks of ledger ink – the unmistakable signs of accountancy.

  Ihor sighed as bellows sigh when fully deflated, his mammoth body sagging. He had painstakingly built up a physique of sun-burnished sinews, worn it like a suit of armor in order to shield him from his past, but his bookish hands had betrayed him, subverted his desperate attempt to broach the cavernous gulf between a career of destruction and one of creation. “You think the Wizard Kadil is cheating you?” he said, in a voice grown low and weary with the remembrance of grueling account examinations past.

  The delegation roared.

  So it was that the reluctant warrior – armed only with a razor-sharp charcoal stick, a blood-red beaded abacus, and a brass-bound folio loaded
with seven-column parchment – and his self-serving entourage trod the dusty, hallowed ground that led to the imposing castle of the Wizard Kadil. Once arrived, Ihor pounded on the drawbridge, his tacit supporters scuttling to safety in the surrounding shrubbery.

  Kadil appeared at a parapet, looked down at the giant, the frightened eyes peering out of the bushes. “What is it you want!?” he asked, in a voice both foul and fearsome, his rancid breath stirring the warrior’s night-shaded locks, and nostrils.

  “I am demanding an examination of your records!” Ihor replied, implacable and erect.

  Kadil stroked his wattled, wart-laden jowls and considered. The wizard collected taxes on all manners of citizens’ incomes and transactions and usages in the Province of Sull, under authority of the King, in full compliance with the terms of the Tithle, it was understood. But it was the right of any citizen to inspect their wizard-kept records, consult one of the ten handcalligraphed copies of the Tithle that resided at the wizards’ castles. But no citizen ever did, for all knew that none but a tax wizard, schooled and steeped in the ways of the Tithle, could ever hope to come to grips with the sheer immensity of material, the complexity therein.

  “Surely you jest,” Kadil finally replied.

  “I jest not!” Ihor bellowed. “I demand entrance and audit!”

  “Audit!?” Kadil was shaken to the fawn-skinned bottoms of his pointy, ankle-high boots – such a word was anathema to the financially ignorant colony he ruled. “W-well . . . come in!” he hissed eventually, the sleeves of his monochrome tunic already writhing with the tricks that they held.

  Ihor and the band of artisans followed the wizard deep into the booklined bowels of the granite, gold-fixtured fortress, through wending, spike-walled hallways, down tottering, kindle-dry staircases, across open, leech-thick plumbing, till at last, with half of the group still somewhat intact, they came upon the entrance to a small, stuffy, single candle-lit room crammed to the cobwebbed rafters full of sharp-edged parchment and paper, splintery chunks of pulpwood, stone-heavy journals and ledgers, and reams and reams of bland, boilerplate forms bearing scrawls and figurings in what was supposed to be the language of numerology. And there, amidst the dangerous disorder that threatened to break into chaos, nesting in a towering, bristling stack of papyrus atop a wobble-legged desk of flammable balsam minus its chair companion, lay a copy of the Tithle – all ten thousand, two hundred, and forty-eight word-cramped, onion-skinned pages of it, complete with two hundred and fifty-seven attached appendices, shoulder-to-shoulder with one hundred and forty-nine companion volumes of euphemistically entitled Clarifications.