Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Naw. Daiera, Damia, something like that. Maybe Danae. Only reason I recollect at all is that I asked Buggane once was she a pixie or a russalka or what and he said she was a diener. Deianira the Diener, that was it. That's a new one on me. I thought I knew all the ethnics, but I ain't never heard of a diener before. Listen, kid, I really have got work to do."

  “I'll be out of your way, then,” Will said. “Thanks for your help.” He took one last look around the gym. “I guess Buggane should have stayed in the ring."

  “Oh, he wasn't a ring boxer,” the ogre said. “He was a pit boxer."

  “What's the difference?"

  “Pit boxing's strictly death-match. Two fighters climb down, only one climbs out. Buggane had a three-and-two record when he quit."

  “How the fuck,” Will said, “can somebody have a three-and-two record when he's fighting to the death?"

  The ogre grinned. Then he explained.

  * * * *

  Less than an hour later, Will, Salem Toussaint, and Ghostface stood waiting in the shadows outside the city morgue. “Okay,” Ghostface said. “I thought I knew all the racial types from Litvak night-hags to Thai shit demons, but you say this girl is a what?"

  “A diener. It's not a type, it's a job. A diener is a morgue attendant who's responsible for moving and cleaning the body. She also assists the coroner in the autopsy. I made a few calls and Deianira's on night duty this week. Though I'm guessing she might take off a little early tonight."

  “Why's that?"

  “This is where Bobby Buggane's body wound up."

  “I think, boy,” Toussaint said firmly, “you'd best tell us the whole story."

  “All right,” Will said. “Here's how I put it together. Buggane and Ice steal a truckload of jewelry-grade jade together and agree to wait six months before trying to fence it. Buggane keeps possession—I'm guessing it's stashed with his girlfriend, but that's not really important—and everyone has half a year to reflect on how much bigger Buggane's share will be if he stiffs Ice. Maybe Ice starts worrying about it out loud. So Buggane goes down to the basement to talk it over with his good buddy. They have a couple of drinks, maybe they smoke a little crack. Then he breaks out the crystal goon. By this time, your brother's lost whatever good judgment he had in the first place, and says sure."

  Ghostface nodded glumly.

  “Ice shoots up first, then Buggane. Only he shoots up pure water. That's easy to pull—what druggie's going to suspect another druggie of shortchanging himself ? Then, when Ice nods off, Buggane goes back to his room, takes down the ward, and flushes it down the toilet. That way, when he's found dead, suspicion's naturally going to fall on the only individual in the building able to walk through a locked door. One who he's made certain will be easy to find when the police come calling."

  “So who kills Buggane?"

  “It's a set-up job. Buggane opens the window halfway and checks to make sure his girlfriend is waiting in the alley. Everything's ready. Now he stages a fight. He screams, roars, pounds the wall, smashes a chair. Then, when the neighbors are all yelling at him to shut up, he goes to the window, takes a deep breath, and rips open his rib cage with his bare hands."

  “Can he do that?"

  “Boggarts are strong, remember. Plus, if you checked out the syringe on his dresser, I wouldn't be surprised to find traces not of goon but of morphine. Either way, with or without painkiller, he tears out his own heart. Then he drops it out the window. Deianira catches it in a basket or a sheet, so there's no blood on the ground. Nothing that will direct the investigators’ attention outside.

  “She leaves with his heart.

  “Now Buggane's still got a couple of minutes before he collapses. He's smart enough not to close the window—there'd be blood on the outside part of the sill and that would draw attention outward again. But his hands are slick with blood and he doesn't want the detectives to realize he did the deed himself, so he goes to the bathroom sink and washes them. By this time, the concierge is hammering on the door.

  “He dies. Everything is going exactly according to plan."

  “Hell of a plan,” Toussaint murmured.

  “Yeah. You know the middle part. The cops come, they see, they believe. If it wasn't for Ghostface kicking up a fuss, we'd never have found all this other stuff."

  “Me? I didn't do anything."

  “Well, it looked hinky to me, but I wasn't going to meddle in police business until I learned it mattered to you."

  “You left out the best part,” Toussaint said. “How Buggane manages to turn killing himself to his own advantage."

  “Yeah, that had me baffled too. But when a boxer picks up a nickname like ‘the Deathless,’ you have to wonder why. Then the ogre at the gym told me that Buggane had a three-two record pit boxing. That's to the death, you know. It turns out Buggane's got a glass heart. Big lump of crystal the size of your fist. No matter how badly he's injured, the heart can repair him. Even if he's clinically dead."

  “So his girlfriend waits for his body to show up and sticks the heart back in?” Ghostface said. “No, that's just crazy. That wouldn't really work, would it?"

  “Shhh,” Will said. “I think we're about to find out. Look."

  A little door opened in the side of the morgue. Two figures came out. The smaller one was helping the larger to stand.

  For the first time all evening, Toussaint smiled. Gold teeth gleamed. Then he put a police whistle to his mouth.

  * * * *

  After Buggane and his girlfriend had been arrested, Ghostface gave Will a short, fierce hug and then ran off to arrange his brother's release. Will and the alderman strolled back to the limousine, parked two blocks away. As they walked, Will worried how he was going to explain to his boss that he couldn't chauffeur because he didn't have a license.

  “You done good, boy,” Salem Toussaint said. “I'm proud of you."

  Something in his voice, or perhaps the amused way he glanced down at Will out of the corner of his eye, said more than mere words could have.

  “You knew,” Will said. “You knew all the time."

  Toussaint chuckled. “Perhaps I did. But I had the advantage of knowing what the city knows. It was still mighty clever of you to figure it out all on your own."

  “But why should I have had to? Why didn't you just tell the detectives what you knew?"

  “Let me answer that question with one of my own: Why did you tell Ghostface he was the one who uncovered the crime?"

  They'd reached the limo now. It flickered its lights, glad to see them. But they didn't climb in just yet. “Because I've got to live with the guy. I don't want him thinking I think I'm superior to him."

  “Exactly so! The police liked hearing the story from a solid boy better than they would from me. I'm not quite a buffoon in their eyes, but I'm something close to it. My power has to be respected, and my office too. It would make folks nervous if they had to take me seriously as well."

  “Alderman, I..."

  “Hush up, boy. I know everything you're about to say.” The alderman opened a door for Will. “Climb in the back. I'll drive."

  Copyright © 2007 Michael Swanwick

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  WOLVES OF THE SPIRIT

  by Liz Williams

  "When I sent my first story to Asimov's SF, I thought it didn't have a hope. I literally could not believe the acceptance letter; it was rather like slipping into a parallel universe. Things haven't changed much. Great going to all of you and happy thirtieth!"—Liz Williams

  Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply shop. In the US, her novels and story collections have been published by Bantam Spectra and Nightshade Books. Liz appears regularly in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov's SF, and other magazines. In her latest tale, she takes an icy look at some haunting songs and some ominous...

  I am the keeper of the Baille Atha light now th
at my mother is dead, a princess in an ice-colored tower. My kingdom is the last hummock of land before the wastes of the Western Ocean, the final island before Darkland, and the enemy, and the start of storms.

  Generations of women, generations of lighthouse keepers. It's all kept in a book, a real one, bound with leather and iron as well as being stored in the computer database of the light. The book isn't necessary, of course, and neither is it necessary for a living person to tend a lighthouse—they'd even stopped it on old Earth, long before we left for the stars, but something about Muspell, something about the sea and the mist and the ice, the way that ships vanish between midnight and morning, the way that you hear a sudden voice on the open ocean, seems to have convinced my ancestors that you need a living soul in a lighthouse, a small stand against the dark.

  And there's a lot of darkness, on Muspell.

  My mother hated the winters here, the short bleak days followed by the quick fall of the sun, and she loved the long light summers, with the Northern Fire playing greengold above the horizon and the sky flowering with the summer stars. But I am the opposite, liking the stormy nights and the crash of dark, restless in summer with the gleaming length of days.

  Shoredwellers always ask if you become lonely, out on the ice. They don't realize that you are never alone: the weather is always with you, and the sea, and these are the great presences beyond the smaller spirits, of birds and sealstock and the selk. And others, too: once I went out onto the field at the end of winter to see an old woman standing at the very end of the crags, above the sea. She raised a hand and waved to someone, but when I reached her, she was no longer there.

  You would have thought that I'd have dreamed of a man, coming across the sea to claim me, a young girl's dreams, but I was content with what I had. There seemed enough time for that; I would wait, I told myself, until I became lonely, but somehow I never did.

  Then, one day, a man did come.

  * * * *

  This is the way things are done. My own father was an island-man from Haut-terre, blown off course by the equinoctial gales, his little boat crashing onto the rocks beneath the lighthouse. My mother nursed him back to health; they fell in love, she fell pregnant.

  He left anyway, when the next provisions drop came. They winched him up onto the copter and that, my mother said, was the last she saw of him. She cried, but not for long. There was too much to do. He did not come back.

  She stayed, and brought me up, here at the Baille Atha light. We were not confined to the lighthouse itself. We would skate out across the green expanse to where the birds are, so thick along the ice cliffs that the air is one great shriek. And beyond the birds are the selk, and in winter, the selk sing.

  Until the arrival of the man, I heard them only once, when I was a child and my mother had taken me out onto the icefield.

  “Mother?” I said, when we had skated almost as far as the edge of the cliffs, our high-proof slickskins barely keeping out the cold. “Where are we going?"

  And she said, “Why, we're going to the end of the world."

  Beyond the cliff, the sea was like metal. As we reached the top and looked out over miles of silver water, the seabirds came up in a cloud and settled back down again. Their shrieking ended. The icefield was suddenly very quiet.

  “Why have they stopped?” I asked. I looked up at my mother's face behind the translucent film of her slickskin; it was rapt and distant, her grey eyes fixed on the far horizon.

  “Why?” I asked again, but she ignored me.

  I didn't know what it was when I first heard it. It was thin and high, as cold as the wind. It drifted out across the icefield and we stood still in its path, frozen in the wake of sudden song.

  “Mama?” but I never knew whether I had spoken the word aloud or whether the song had conjured it, was speaking to me out of the air. But my mother reached out and took my hand and drew me forward, to the very lip of the ice.

  The sea churned, hundreds of feet below. I felt dizzy if I looked down, so I stared ahead instead, out to the bright line between sea and sky, and let the song go on.

  My mother nudged me. “There. Can you see them?"

  I looked down, wished I hadn't, but she was holding tightly onto my arm and then I realized that the song itself would not let me fall.

  The selk lay on the rocks below. They are nothing like the sirens of old Earth: there is little that is womanly or fair about them, although they were interbred with human genes. Like seals, but larger and more tapered, with front paws that are almost hands and with which they are able to manipulate basic tools. But they had no real need of tools, not with that song. It crept into my head and it spoke to me of the northern seas, the deep green, the dive and the rush. Listening to that song, I knew what it was like to be something other than myself.

  I don't know why they stopped. Perhaps they glimpsed us far above and took us for predators. But abruptly, their song ended and they slid over the edge of the rocks and into the water, one, two, three. A ripple marked the point of their dive and we did not see them again. The weather was changing, a storm driving down out of the north, and we skated fast before it, arriving back at the lighthouse just as the first flakes of snow hit. We locked the doors behind us and looked out at white sea, white sky.

  “There,” I said. “That place, the cliffs. Is it really where the world ends?"

  “No,” my mother replied. “Beyond the sea is Darkland, the home of our enemies, where the vitki come from."

  “The vitki,” I said. I'd heard the word before; my mother had used it to frighten me, when I was younger: don't go out on the ice alone, the vitki will come, they will take you away and change you into something terrible.

  “Who are the vitki?” I asked now, and my mother answered, “They are the wolves of the spirit."

  But that night, I dreamed of the selk, and of songs.

  When I was nineteen, my mother died, of an infection in the lungs that might have been cured if she had lived on the shore. But the winter storms had come again and we were too far from a medical center. She went downhill fast, so quickly that I could not believe it, and I do not think I believed until several days after I had sent her body, in its burial pod, down into the green depths of the sea. I used to see her all the same, standing by the light, a younger woman than I had ever known, and nothing about this ever struck me as strange.

  I ordered supplies, and a replacement pod, and carried on. That spring, I went out onto the ice again, finding a freedom in not having to ask permission of anyone, and visited the selk, but I did not hear them sing, neither that year, nor any year that followed. I dreamed of it, all the same.

  * * * *

  When the man appeared, I did not know at first whether he was real. I was used to ghosts, by then. I took up the binoculars and watched him trudge over the ice: an ordinary fisherman's slickskin, a half-moon of face under the hood. He was dragging something behind him, something grey.

  I went down to the intercom. Moments later, his voice came through.

  “Is anyone there?"

  “I'm the lighthouse keeper. My name is Siri Clathe. Do you have ID?"

  The scan glowed blue and data showed on the screen: Edri Lailoken, out of Harkness, the registry numbers of a fishing rigger.

  “You'll do,” I said to Edri Lailoken through the intercom, and opened the door.

  He wasn't so much older than I was, perhaps ten years or so, in his early thirties. When he pulled back the hood I saw blue eyes, dark hair, a face that was all harsh, sharp angles. But he had a winning smile.

  “I've got a problem,” he told me. “Got blown down out of Uist last night; my rigger's a wreck. Spring gales, you see. Come up faster than the eye can blink."

  “Where is it?"

  He gestured towards the northwest of the icefield. “Up there, at the base of the cliff."

  “You were lucky,” I said.

  He grimaced. “You won't say that when you see the rigger."

  He dumped a sm
all pack on the floor and moved to open it, and it was then that I saw what he'd been dragging across the ice.

  Dapple and pale, like a shadow made flesh. I felt as though he'd brought in the flayed skin of a man.

  He saw me looking. “I know.” His voice was very quiet. “I found it. Someone's been hunting."

  “I'll have to report this.” I felt sick. “The spring equinox was a fortnight ago—you know they're sentient, now?"

  “Of course. But Siri, there are plenty of folk even in the Reach who think the selk are nothing more than animals. Even when they plead for mercy under a hunter's club."

  “Why did they leave the skin?” I forced myself to look at it.

  “Maybe they're just after the meat—but I think it's more likely to be this.” He tugged the skin over and I saw the black bands around it. “See? It's a young one. The pelt-merchants don't like the banding, it's not fashionable."

  “So they just dumped it."

  I could see the disgust in his eyes. It had struck me, of course, that he'd been the one to kill the selk, but that expression convinced me otherwise. “You need to get someone out here, Siri."

  “I don't know if they'll come for only one selk.” The culls were another matter; I'd seen those on the newsfeeds, the ice running red, the pups begging for their lives.

  “It won't be just one. It's so far out here, I suppose they thought they'd be undisturbed. Would you have gone out there, in this weather?"

  I shook my head. “I'll put that report through,” I said, and did so.

  Communications this far out are often subject to delay. It was evening before I got a reply, telling me that the report had been filed and a response would be with me in the next couple of days.

  “When is the next provision copter through?” Lailoken asked.

  “Another week."

  “I'm afraid in that case, you'll just have to put up with me, Siri."

  He said it with a smile. A lot can happen in a week, the thought came to me.

  On the following morning, we went out to look at Lailoken's rigger.