by Rich Horton
“I don’t think Sir Albert is coming out,” said Ivan. “You volunteered before me. Would you like to go next?”
“You know, I’m not so sure about going in after all,” said Oswald. “I can’t very well rule a kingdom if I’m eaten, can I?”
“That might be difficult,” said Ivan.
“You go ahead,” said Oswald, starting to back away. “I think I’m going to turn another rock into gold coins. That seems like a better idea.”
He turned and ran up the street, leaving Ivan alone in front of the bank. Ivan sighed. Well, there was no reason to wait any longer. He might as well go in now.
Instead of going in by the front door, he went in through the hole that the dragon had made in the side of the bank. He walked noiselessly, as he had done in the forest. It was easy to find the dragon: he was lying on a pile of gold coins in the great stone room that had once been the vault. Near the door of the vault, which had been smashed open, Ivan could see a suit of armor and a sword, blackened by flames. He did not want to think about what had happened to Sir Albert.
An arrow would not penetrate the dragon’s hide. He knew that, because while he had been eating at the palace, he had asked Professor Owl’s tail feather to write out the entire Encyclopedia entry on dragons. He had a plan, and would get only one chance to carry it out. It would depend as much on luck as skill.
But even if it worked, he knew how it would feel, slaying a dragon. He remembered how it had felt, killing the troll. Could he survive the pain? Was there any way to avoid it? He had to try.
He stood in a narrow hallway off the vault. Keeping back in the shadows, he called, “Dragon!”
The dragon lifted his head. “Another dragon slayer? How considerate of the King to sent me dessert! Dragon slayer is my favorite delicacy, although the policemen were delicious. I much preferred them to farmers, who taste like dirt and leave grit between your teeth, or fishermen, who are too salty.”
“Dragon, you could fly north to the mountains. There are plenty of sheep to eat there.”
“Sheep!” said the dragon. “Sheep are dull and stringy compared to the delicious men I’ve eaten here. Just the other day, I ate a fat baker. He tasted of sugar and cinnamon. There are plenty of teachers and accountants to eat in this city. Why, I might eat the Princess herself! I hear princess is even better than dragon slayer.”
The dragon swung his head around, as though trying to locate Ivan. “But you don’t smell like a man, dragon slayer,” said the dragon. “What are you, and are you good to eat?”
I must still smell like the wolves, thought Ivan.
He stepped out from the hallway and into the vault. “I’m an Enigma, and I’m delicious.”
The dragon swung toward the sound of his voice. As his great head came around, Ivan raised his bow and shot an arrow straight up into the dragon’s eye.
The dragon screamed in pain and let out a long, fiery breath. He swung his head to and fro. Ivan aimed again, but the dragon was swinging his head too wildly: a second arrow would never hit its mark. Well, now he would find out if the Captain’s charm worked. He ran across the floor of the vault, ignoring the dragon’s flames, and picked up Sir Albert’s sword. It was still warm, but had cooled down enough for him to raise it.
The pain had begun the moment the arrow entered the dragon’s eye, but he tried not to pay attention. He did not want to think about how bad it would get. Where was the dragon’s neck? It was still swinging wildly, but he brought the sword down just as it swung back toward him. The sword severed the dragon’s neck cleanly in two, and his head rolled over the floor.
Ivan screamed from the pain and collapsed. He lay next to the dragon’s head, with his eyes closed, unable to rise. Then, he felt something rough and wet on his cheek. He opened his eyes. Blanchefleur was licking him.
“Blanchefleur,” he said weakly. “What are you doing here?”
“I followed you, of course,” she said.
“But I never saw you.”
“Of course not.” She sat on the floor next to him as he slowly sat up. “Excellent shot, by the way. They’ll call you Ivan Dragonslayer now, you know.”
“Oh, I hope not,” he said.
“It’s inevitable.”
The King met him with an embrace that made Ivan uncomfortable. “Welcome home, Ivan Dragonslayer! I shall have my attorney drawn up the papers to make you my heir, and here of course is my lovely Alethea, who will become your bride. A royal wedding will attract tourists to the city, which will help with the rebuilding effort.”
Princess Alethea crossed her arms and looked out the window. Even from the back, she seemed angry.
“Forgive me, your Majesty,” said Ivan, “but I have no wish to marry the Princess, and I don’t think she wants to marry me either. We don’t even know each other.”
Princess Alethea turned and looked at him in astonishment. “Thank you!” she said. “You’re the first person who’s made any sense all day. I’m glad you slayed the dragon, but I don’t see what that has to do with getting my hand in marriage. I’m not some sort of prize at a village fair.”
“And I would not deprive you of a kingdom,” said Ivan. “I have no wish to be king.”
“Oh, goodness,” said Alethea, “neither do I! Ruling is deadly dull. You can have the kingdom and do what you like with it. I’m going to university, to become an astronomer. I’ve wanted to be an astronomer since I was twelve.”
“But . . . ” said the King.
“Well then, it’s decided,” said the Lady. “Ivan, you’ll spend the rest of your apprenticeship here, in the palace, learning matters of state.”
“But I want to go back to the wolves,” said Ivan. He saw the look on the Lady’s face: she was about to say no. He added, hurriedly, “If I can go back, just for the rest of my apprenticeship, I’ll come back here and stay as long as you like, learning to be king. I promise.”
“All right,” said the Lady.
He nodded, gratefully. At least he would have spring in the mountains, with his pack.
Ivan and Blanchefleur rode north, not on a farm horse this time, but on a mare from the King’s stables. As night fell, they stopped by a stream. The mountains were ahead of them, glowing in the evening light.
“You know, before we left, Tailcatcher asked me again,” said Blanchefleur. “He thought that my time with you was done, that I would go back to the Castle in the Forest with my mother. I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?” asked Ivan.
“Why did you refuse the hand of the Princess Alethea? She was attractive enough.”
“Because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her,” said Ivan. “I want to spend it with you, Blanchefleur.”
“Even though I’m a cat?”
“Even though.”
She looked at him for a moment, then said, “I’m not always a cat, you know.” Suddenly, sitting beside him was a girl with short white hair, wearing a white fur jacket and trousers. She had Blanchefleur’s eyes.
“Are you—are you Blanchefleur?” he asked. He stared at her. She was and she was not the white cat.
“Of course I am, idiot,” she said. “I think you’re going to make a good king. You’ll have all the knowledge in the world to guide you, and any pain you cause, you’ll have to feel yourself, so you’ll be fair and kind. But you’ll win all your battles. You’ll hate it most of the time and wish you were back with the wolves or in Professor Owl’s tower, or even taking care of the lizards. That’s why you’ll be good.”
“And you’ll stay with me?” he asked, tentatively reaching over and taking her hand.
“Of course,” she said. “Who else is going to take care of you, Ivan?”
Together, they sat and watched the brightness fade from the mountain peaks and night fall over the Wolfwald. When Ivan lay down to sleep, he felt the white cat curl up next to his chest. He smiled into the darkness before slipping away into dreams.
Effigy Nights
&n
bsp; Yoon Ha Lee
They are connoisseurs of writing in Imulai Mokarengen, the city whose name means inkblot of the gods.
The city lies at the galaxy’s dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.
Imulai Mokarengen has been unmolested for over a hundred years. People come to listen to the minstrels and drink tea-of-moments-unraveling, to admire the statues of shapeshifting tigers and their pliant lovers, to look for small maps to great fortunes at the intersections of curving roads. Even the duelists confront each other in fights knotted by ceremony and the exchange of poetry.
But now the starships that hunt each other in the night of nights have set their dragon eyes upon Imulai Mokarengen, desiring to possess its arts, and the city is unmolested no more.
The soldiers came from the sky in a glory of thunder, a cascade of fire. Blood like roses, bullets like thorns, everything to ashes. Imulai Mokarengen’s defenses were few, and easily overwhelmed. Most of them would have been museum pieces anywhere else.
The city’s wardens gathered to offer the invading general payment in any coin she might desire, so long as she left the city in peace. Accustomed to their decadent visitors, they offered these: Wine pressed from rare books of stratagems and aged in barrels set in orbit around a certain red star. Crystals extracted from the nervous systems of philosopher-beasts that live in colonies upon hollow asteroids. Perfume symphonies infused into exquisite fractal tapestries.
The general was Jaian of the Burning Orb, and she scorned all these things. She was a tall woman clad in armor the color of dead metal. For each world she had scoured, she wore a jewel of black-red facets upon her breastplate. She said to the wardens: What use did she have for wine except to drink to her enemies’ defeat? What use was metal except to build engines of war? And as for the perfume, she didn’t dignify that with a response.
But, she said, smiling, there was one thing they could offer her, and then she would leave with her soldiers and guns and ships. They could give her all the writings they treasured so much: all the binary crystals gleaming bright-dark, all the books with the bookmarks still in them, all the tilted street signs, all the graffiti chewed by drunken nanomachines into the shining walls, all the tattoos obscene and tender, all the ancestral tablets left at the shrines with their walls of gold and chitin.
The wardens knew then that she was mocking them, and that as long as any of the general’s soldiers breathed, they would know no peace. One warden, however, considered Jaian’s words of scorn, and thought that, unwitting, Jaian herself had given them the key to her defeat.
Seran did not remember a time when his othersight of the city did not show it burning, no matter what his ordinary senses told him, or what the dry pages of his history said. In his dreams the smoke made the sky a funeral shroud. In waking, the wind smelled of ash, the buildings of angry flames. Everything in the othersight was wreathed in orange and amber, flickering, shadows cinder-edged.
He carried that pall of phantom flame with him even now, into the warden’s secret library, and it made him nervous although the books had nothing to fear from the phantoms. The warden, a woman in dust-colored robes, was escorting him through the maze-of-mists and down the stairs to the library’s lowest level. The air was cool and dry, and to either side he could see the candle-sprites watching him hungrily.
“Here we are,” the warden said as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
Seran looked around at the parchment and papers and scrolls of silk, then stepped into the room. The tools he carried, bonesaws and forceps and fine curved needles, scalpels that sharpened themselves if fed the oil of certain olives, did not belong in this place. But the warden had insisted that she required a surgeon’s expertise.
He risked being tortured or killed by the general’s occupation force for cooperating with a warden. In fact, he could have earned himself a tidy sum for turning her in. But Imulai Mokarengen was his home, for all that he had not been born here. He owed it a certain loyalty.
“Why did you bring me here, madam warden?” Seran said.
The warden gestured around the room, then unrolled one of the great charts across the table at the center of the room. It was a stardrive schematic, all angles and curves and careful coils.
Then Seran saw the shape flickering across the schematic, darkening some of the precise lines while others flowed or dimmed. The warden said nothing, leaving him to observe as though she felt he was making a difficult diagnosis. After a while he identified the elusive shape as that of a girl, slight of figure or perhaps merely young, if such a creature counted years in human terms. The shape twisted this way and that, but there were no adjacent maps or diagrams for her to jump to. She left a disordered trail of numbers like bullets in her wake.
“I see her,” Seran said dryly. “What do you need me to do about her?”
“Free her,” the warden said. “I’m pretty sure this is all of her, although she left a trail while we were perfecting the procedure—”
She unrolled another chart, careful to keep it from touching the first. It appeared to be a treatise on musicology, except parts of it had been replaced by a detritus of clefs and twisted staves and demiquavers coalescing into a diagram of a pistol.
“Is this your plan for resistance against the invaders?” Seran said. “Awakening soldiers from scraps of text, then cutting them out? You should have a lot more surgeons. Or perhaps children with scissors.”
The warden shrugged. “Imulai Mokarengen is a city of stories. It’s not hard to persuade one to come to life in her defense, even though I wouldn’t call her tame. She is the Saint of Guns summoned from a book of legends. Now you see why I need a surgeon. I am given to believe that your skills are not entirely natural.”
This was true enough. He had once been a surgeon-priest of the Order of the Chalice. “If you know that much about me,” he said, “then you know that I was cast out of the order. Why haven’t you scared up the real thing?”
“Your order is a small one,” she said. “I looked, but with the blockade, there’s no way to get someone else. It has to be you.” When he didn’t speak, she went on, “We are outnumbered. The general can send for more soldiers from the worlds of her realm, and they are armed with the latest weaponry. We are a single city known for artistic endeavors, not martial ones. Something has to be done.”
Seran said, “You’re going to lose your schematic.”
“I’m not concerned about its fate.”
“All right,” he said. “But if you know anything about me, you know that your paper soldiers won’t last. I stick to ordinary surgery because the prayers of healing don’t work for me anymore; they’re cursed by fire.” And, because he knew she was thinking it: “The curse touches anyone I teach.”
“I’m aware of the limitations,” the warden said. “Now, do you require additional tools?”
He considered it. Ordinary scissors might be better suited to paper than the curved ones he carried, but he trusted his own instruments. A scalpel would have to do. But the difficult part would be getting the girl-shape to hold still. “I need water,” he said. He had brought a sedative, but he was going to have to sponge the entire schematic, since an injection was unlikely to do the trick.
The warden didn’t blink. “Wait here.”
As though he had somewhere else to wait. He spent the time attempting to map the girl’s oddly flattened anatomy. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to intrude on her internal structures. Her joints showed the normal range of articulation. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said she was dancing in the disarrayed ink, or perhaps looking f
or a fight.
Footsteps sounded in the stairwell. The woman set a large pitcher of water down on the table. “Will this be enough?” she asked.
Seran nodded and took out a vial from his satchel. The dose was pure guesswork, unfortunately. He dumped half the vial’s contents into the pitcher, then stirred the water with a glass rod. After putting on gloves, he soaked one of his sponges, then wrung it out.
Working with steady strokes, he soaked the schematic. The paper absorbed the water readily. The warden winced in spite of herself. The girl didn’t seem capable of facial expressions, but she dashed to one side of the schematic, then the other, seeking escape. Finally she slumped, her long hair trailing off in disordered tangles of artillery tables.
The warden’s silence pricked at Seran’s awareness. She’s studying how I do this, he thought. He selected his most delicate scalpel and began cutting the girl-shape out of the paper. The medium felt alien, without the resistances characteristic of flesh, although water oozed away from the cuts.
He hesitated over the final incision, then completed it, hand absolutely steady.
Amid all the maps and books and scrolls, they heard a girl’s slow, drowsy breathing. In place of the paper cutout, the girl curled on the table, clad in black velvet and gunmetal lace. She had paper-pale skin and inkstain hair, and a gun made of shadows rested in her hand.
It was impossible to escape the problem: smoke curled from the girl’s other hand, and her nails were blackened.
“I warned you of this,” Seran said. Cursed by fire. “She’ll burn up, slowly at first, and then all at once. I suspect she’ll last a week at most.”
“You listen to the news, surely,” the warden said. “Do you know how many of our people the invaders shot the first week of the occupation?”
He knew the number. It was not small. “Anything else?” he said.
“I may have need of you later,” the warden said. “If I summon you, will you come? I will pay you the same fee.”
“Yes, of course,” Seran said. He had noticed her deft hands, however; he imagined she would make use of them soon.