by Charlie Nash
His back prickled. Siah stopped, a sick feeling replacing confidence. Even under the dappled moon glow, the ruined wall before him was clear, his vision crisp. He waited for the ripple to pass, but it didn’t. He knew his mistake. He’d gotten too far ahead, made a goddam plan … that was always when they came. The breeze smelled sweet.
Oh, gods.
Drel. Already here.
His heart heaved as he looked for the monster.
Pressure jacked inside his skull. Drel! it said, Run!
His eyes tracked through the shadowed holes where cold air huddled, across the crumbling wall nooks and into the edge of the wastes beyond. He wheeled in all directions, waiting for movement to show him what he sought …
He cursed himself. These were a hunter’s tricks: look for the prey in the places it will hide, wait for it to move. But a Drel would do no such things. A Drel saw what was most unlikely, that was its opportunity. So it would lurk where Siah would least look, and it would not betray itself. Probability monsters, exploiting his every weakness.
He looked again.
There it was. Right in the open, crouched atop the jagged line of the wall. Close, and above him.
The moon made a wiry halo of its matted hair, and etched the ropy muscles of its torso. Its fingers clawed the wall edge. Watching, just watching.
Siah had never been so close, and he knew his clear vision meant a certainty chute: in a probabilistic universe, being here with the Drel had escaped likelihood. It was set, no escape, at least while the chute persisted. This was how Drels caught ordinary men.
But Siah was not ordinary. His long-suppressed drive to quantum switch, to unwrite reality, burned his nose. He swallowed convulsively, tasting metal like he’d drunk molten steel.
But the Drel did not move. Siah met its gaze. Intent, purposeful. A once-was-man creature. A thing that stole people to make more of itself. That exploited the universe in a way men could not. Intelligent but mad. Utterly dangerous.
And Siah knew it wanted him to see.
Something fizzed deep in Siah’s head, as if his thoughts were the bursting scum on a boiling pot. As the Drel watched, a single idea gathered in the foam. A familiar idea, a desire … no, an invitation. Siah shifted his weight. The Drel mimicked him, and suddenly they were locked. The idea focused.
Brother.
Siah frowned, pushing on the Drel’s thought. It pushed back.
Brother.
Siah recoiled.
The chute broke. The Drel blurred into grays and silvers streaked across the smudged moon. Siah fumbled for his blade, the thought reverberating. Brother, brother, brother. Then the wall was empty, the broken moon alone above. The Drel had left him. But it wanted him. Knew him.
Siah fell forward, slashing at the empty air, screaming his rage. No, he was not that! Brick mortar broke between his fingers and he collapsed in a dust-covered crouch. His heart lurched through his ribs. Brother, brother, he heard in his head. Persistent, whispering.
Telling.
Siah snatched his blade and pressed the point between his ribs. No. No. No, he hissed. The blade cut, and with pain, the panic eased. For all the evils he had done, he was not Drel-kin. Those multiverse fuckers, childstealers, man-eaters!
He. Was. Not. That.
Frantic, he climbed the wall, scanning the wastes, shaking. The forest was a dappled gray sheet, punctured with deep, black holes. Behind, the wrecked mall glowed white between its shadows. No sign of the Drel.
Siah tried to remember his sister’s face, but all he could see was Drel-matted hair in the moonlight. His gut curdled. How was he different to them, really? He’d caused the fire that had ended his mother and father. He tried not to think of his daughter, but her eyes had been so like his. Blood on his hands.
His sister had protected him, but she couldn’t change what he was. Q-liner. Do-no-gooder. Sometime, he would slip and bad things would come again; not wanting it to happen wouldn’t be enough. And the Drels wanted him.
Go, Brother.
The note was a lump in his belt. He dug out the paper, smoothed it out. The Seer accepts. She had made him a messenger. Had her knowing look.
Siah swallowed. His earlier assumption had not gone far enough. Yes, she had given him a way in, but she also knew about him. He didn’t need a weapon. He could do what no one else could. He could walk into the enemy Hold and unwrite them all. It didn’t matter what probabilistic chaos he produced, and long as it destroyed them … and him too. No loose ends, and their own Hold would be safe.
Two ripples coursed through his skull bone, as if his brain were being ripped from the dura. Siah took this as endorsement. He scrambled down, dazed. This was really happening. Would happen.
So, it had come to this.
He paused only a moment. He did not want life to end, but there were worse things. Once, from a distance, he’d seen a man the Drels had taken, one they hadn’t killed. He wasn’t a man anymore. He’d run, four-legged, fingernails black with old blood, slipping in and out of time. A quantum cheat, a true multiverse creature.
Siah knew the Drel he’d seen would come for him. And when they took him, he wouldn’t be just like them, he’d be a Q-liner among them, untroubled by conscience.
Well, fuck that shit.
Siah moved, his hide shoes quiet on the rubble. He was marked. One fate or another would kill him. His sister knew this. His only choice was to go first. He could destroy the enemy and himself more surely than any fire, or he could let the Drels take choice from him.
He ran, his breath ragged, crashing into the forest wastes, dodging the great new trunks and the houses they had eaten. Ripples cut through, strengthening, his sight focused and released, and he struck himself on branches and corners. But even with blood and bruises, the world made way for him, and in some corner of his mind, it seemed beautiful now, in the way all fleeting things do.
Breathless and steaming, he came on the enemy Hold. It was an old school hall, boarded and barricaded, elevated from the shadowy wastes. Siah’s thoughts had frayed, his skin puckered with welts. His nose burned, the urge to quantum switch building. He put his arms over his head and half fell into the torchlight, the note crunched in his fist.
Their watch called the warning. Two enemy hunters materialized, wide-eyed and angry, burning torches held high. Siah let them kick him down and strip his blades. They emptied his revolver, click-click, click-click. Burning pitch dripped, its acrid smoke coating his throat. Then he was hauled up and two blade tips dimpled his back.
They asked him something; he missed it. They struck him.
Purpose, they demanded again.
Siah got his tongue moving. Messenger, he growled, unfurling his fist to show the crumpled paper, now spotted with blood.
They checked him once more, then shoved him towards the Hold. Candles flickered in the windows like fireflies. News of his arrival would be racing. Brother to sister, mother to son. Enemy to enemy. The burn increased.
Sound assaulted him as they pushed him inside. He fooled himself that he would control what was coming: not yet, not yet. The world become a vaulted room, its air rich with torch smoke. The enemy were dark-eyed masses. Siah smelled the hunters: male stink of blood and sweat. They forced him down before a gathered half-circle. Sweat stung his scrapes, his breath shuddered. Dozens of enemy in the room. The burn to switch became a painful focus, now easier to give into than suppress. He thought of fire that climbed walls, bricks that crumbled to dust. Waited only for the right moment to manifest.
And before, the chute would come. Almost …
Then Siah looked the enemy in the face.
Two black eye-blurs in pale disc face. The burn held, teetering. Siah felt the strangest sensation: ripples washing through him, back and forth, in regular rhythm. Something like he experienced when he switched, but stable, not staccato.
His vision cleared fully and his scalp crawled. A man stared back. A battle-scarred face with a broken nose and dark hair. He had six-s
hooter at his hip, a wolf-pelt across his chest. This was their leader, Siah realized. The one his sister had accepted.
Siah could not switch. He stared, shocked. The man’s eyes were creased in deliberate squint. His gaze shifted, but the telltale movements were so suppressed that no one normal would notice. This man was the source of the ripples, of Siah’s cleared vision.
Another Q-liner. But a leader, a man in control.
Siah froze solid. The edge of his anger dulled; he had never imagined this possible. Q-liners were killed and exiled; they couldn’t lead, couldn’t have success. And yet here …
The leader concealed the shock that Siah saw plainly and briefly in his face, but did not pretend. In this moment, they were men to each other.
Siah felt the message in his palm. He finally saw his sister’s face again, her knowing look. Go, brother.
Slowly, he extended his hand. The paper stuck to his skin, message bound to messenger, four words that had brought him to a new world. This was what she had known. He took a single, shuddering breath. For all he had thought, he had not imagined this.
The leader gripped Siah’s hand around the paper. Siah felt their calluses meet, a brief contact of alliance forged. Siah looked again and the message was gone.
He slumped, the burn gone, his body spent. He tried not to think of how close this night had come to ending differently. He had expected to unwrite himself into scrambled nothingness. Instead, he was here, and it was done. That his flaw was both destruction and salvation—that was too much to process now. But for the first time, he did not feel alone.
The note passed around the circle; tension eased, the mood warmed. The hunters’ faces were relief. Then cheers, a party began. The war was over.
Siah and the leader were alone in the thick of it. Siah found himself kneeling, the night ending as it had begun. The leader pulled him up. A strong grip, a direct blue stare. They were the same height, carried the same weight.
“Your name,” said the leader, offering his hand.
Siah thought a long time, then took it.
“Brother,” he said.
Alchemy & Ice
Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Story
Cold is the language of the world now, its syllables snow and frost and ice. City towers crumble white and gray, the backdrop sky rinsed pale blue, the pavements sunk with indigo pools. But life is a warm thing, like steam and embers. Red, vermillion, orange. Colors now bled from the everyday, reserved for the Steam Daemon alone. And so nothing speaks like the flush of life in the palate of this algid city.
That is how Fortescue finds The Soldier in the snow, her cheeks tinted with the last of her body’s heat. Under her cloak her uniform is rags, snow cams in white and smudge and charcoal. A soldier like him, frozen on patrol. Another unit’s field hands, far from home, and in the forbidden quarter, just as he is.
Neither of them should be here.
He can no longer see the path she’s taken; all above and around covered in white, the steely sky promising more. He knows from that building, on that angle, that the great sinkhole is near, and he debates the wisdom of leaving her. Sometimes, the cold and desperate try for the heartland of the Steam Daemon, go mad for its reverse mirage, tendrils of heat rising from the deep, promising a thaw. But if the frost doesn’t claim them, the crawlies will. If either is her fate, his thick heart has a beat of sympathy. But only one.
He unclenches his hands from his weapon and reaches for her tattered cloak. Probably she will die. Never awaken from the snow-cold slumber. The pump in his chest keeps its ragged pace; she is nothing to him. This is nothing to him.
Dragging her loose sets her flailing, and a shivering wracks her limbs as she flings herself confusedly forth. He has to use his weight on her shoulders, sharp bones under his hardened hands. And when he’s wrapped her in his issued cloak, with its captain’s pips stitched in faded red like her cheeks, she resists him, making to run on legs that cannot support her. She dives back into the snowdrift, shifting frantic flurries like an animal. She is mad, then. He should leave her to wander here until the cold and crawlies claim her end.
Then she drags a limp corpse from the drift.
He stumbles back, falls, the shock sharp as the tundra on the seat of his pants. In her white fingers is the coarse black fur he sees in his worst dreams. A giant rat-like thing, its face deformed, features cast sideways under a heavy blow. Thick, torn ears. Copper-pressed teeth. A rent has opened in its side, spilling thick grease and loose cogs. Its fur is crowned with a welder-tip tail, now kinked and spark-less.
Crawlie.
Even dead, it shoots panic into his frozen muscles. It is an agent of the Daemon infecting the city’s pipes and boilers. Chasers, harassers and disappearers of men. Fortescue has only once seen one this close, and has never seen one dead. He didn’t know they could die.
He drags his gaze to The Soldier’s half-frozen face. In the ten years of war, the resistance has wanted this, and never had it. A chance to know the enemy. To find weakness.
Now, she holds such a chance.
A tiny patch of color blooms on his blue heart. Pale red, like her cheeks, like the insignia of his rank. Like hope.
With his arm under her shoulder, he drags her back to the line he should not have crossed, the exclusion around the sinkhole, that creeps outwards every year. He carries the crawlie in his fist, its broken internals shifting as he swings his arm. The weight of it unnerves him, draws a splinter of memory that he plucks before it can grow. He tries to see it for what it is: a fur bag of cog-driven grease soup, made to serve the Daemon. A thing that inch by inch has taken his life, until all that remains in him is the soldier.
Back on safer ground, he pulls them into an abandoned concrete crevice and pulls a precious vial of blue fire from his pocket. Three drips set a wet log burning, a slim, illicit flame sending its smoke into a catching roof. Later, when he is long gone, the smoke will leak skywards and the crawlies will come. For now, Fortescue throws the dead one onto the snowdrift. SentryOne, the best crawlie cat, hisses from the shadows as he lays the woman afore the fire. The hiss is partly from the smell of crawlie, and partly remonstration for being left behind, a decision Fortescue allowed no choice in. He’ll risk his own ass, but SentryOne is too important to fall in a border violation. Soon, the cat is sniffing around the dead crawlie.
“Leave it,” rumbles Fortescue. SentryOne bats the misshapen face with his claw.
The Soldier wraps her arms around her legs, her cheekbones hills atop her too-thin face. Fortescue looks closer. Her regiment patch is defunct; two seasons old, at least. She has been gone a long time. Long enough for a deserter. This knowledge thickens the silence as they thaw.
“Do I take you back?” he asks her. “Or do you want to run?”
She turns up her chin, glances at her prize. A piece of the enemy, hard won. He sees blood clotted at her neck now, and red welts over her arms returning with her circulation. She peels the cloak from her shoulder. Her rank stares back, far above him, taking his breath, snapping his fingers to his temple.
“Take me to command,” she says.
And her voice is pure and clear, ringing in his blushing heart like a snow-cleaned bell.
The guards take her roughly at the barracks gate, more roughly than they need to. Fortescue knows what they are thinking: of the crawlie-swarm that claimed the last safe place, two seasons before. A dead crawlie is more than enough to invoke the memory.
But she marches between them as if they have welcomed her, her back straight, her bearing proud. Fortescue watches her go, SentryOne curled about his shoulder. He is dismissed. But he knows he will be called to answer questions soon and knows not what he will say. His fingernails scratch through SentryOne’s fur, comforted by the cat’s insides, bone and blood, not grease and gear.
He treks to his bunk, in the frosty barrack hall, and closes his eyes with the furry puddle between his hands. An unfamiliar feeling chases its
elf around his guts: he wonders how the truth might hurt her: finding her in the forbidden zone like that. And he doesn’t know why he should have such a thought.
They wake him to answer before he is really asleep. A panel of them, majors and above in the best of threadbare uniforms. She is there, too. Sitting where she has been told, to the side like a prisoner, though she ranks as high as they do. The crawlie prize stretches atop a center table, like an accusation.
“Captain Fortescue,” begins the Major. “You will tell us your version.”
Fortescue doesn’t know what she has told them, but when he looks at her, he knows she has not the bearing for lies. So he tells them he found her in a snowdrift with the captured beast, that he warmed her and brought her back. He leaves out details of where, exactly, no need to admit freely what’s worth licks and discharge.
The Major’s brows descend, but they do not press, not when the alchemists are straining to get at the prize. Fortescue is sent to the mess, to be fed what meagers can be had. In the wood-lined hall, he will look for Fingle and Bobs, two alchemists who drift together. They try not to call each other friends. Friends are things of the past-world. Now, there are allies and enemies. The ones who help you survive, and the ones who will help themselves.
Fortescue knows, somewhere in the cold heart of him, that the panel are deciding which one applies to The Soldier in the snow. He should not care about this. She is not part of his orders. But something of her has stuck with him, resting on his soul like a snowflake.
Fingle and Bobs are not in the mess and soon Fortescue climbs the stair to the tower watch, huddled with another sentry under the Steam Daemon’s night. This kid’s been here only a month, cheeks child-soft. But his eyes are specks of flint as they search the snowdrifts for crawlie signs—tracks or furrows, a movement in the shadows, things that freeze an ordinary man with fear. Their gaze returns to the sinkhole’s distant plume, again and again. Sometimes, on the clear nights, they can see the glow of coals reflected in the city towers. Fortescue latches his mind on the zone around the sinkhole; it is where he escaped a long-ago death, where he lost all things … and since, a pilgrimage he’s made many times. But now, it’s where he found The Soldier, his damnation turned would-be salvation. He imagines pitching the blue fire into the depths.