Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  The Saint of Guns burned up within a week, as Seran had predicted. The official reports were confused, and the rumors not much better, but he spent an entire night holed up in his study afterward estimating the number of people she had killed, bystanders included. He had bottles of very bad wine for occasions like this. By the time morning came around, he was comprehensively drunk.

  Six-and-six years ago, on a faraway station, he had violated his oaths as a surgeon-priest by using his prayers to kill a man. It had not been self-defense, precisely. The man had shot a child. Seran had been too late to save the child, but not too late to damn himself.

  It seemed that his punishment hadn’t taught him anything. He explained to himself that what he was doing was necessary; that he was helping to free the city of Jaian.

  The warden next had him cut out one of the city’s founders, Alarra Coldly-Smiling. She left footsteps of frost, and where she walked, people cracked into pieces, frozen all the way through, needles of ice piercing their intestines. As might be expected, she burned up faster than the Saint of Guns. A pity; she was outside Jaian’s increasingly well-defended headquarters when she sublimated.

  The third was the Mechanical Soldier, who manifested as a suit of armor inside which lights blinked on-off, on-off, in digital splendor. Seran was buying more wine—you could usually get your hands on some, even during the occupation, if your standards were low—when he heard the clink-clank thunder outside the dim room where the transaction was taking place. The Mechanical Soldier carried a black sword, which proved capable of cutting through metal and crystal and stone. With great precision it carved a window in the wall. The blinking lights brightened as it regarded Seran.

  The wine-seller shrieked and dropped one of the bottles, to Seran’s dismay. The air was pungent with the wine’s sour smell. Seran looked unflinchingly at the helmet, although a certain amount of flinching was undoubtedly called for, and after a while the Mechanical Soldier went away in search of its real target.

  It turned out that the Mechanical Soldier liked to carve cartouches into walls, or perhaps its coat of arms. Whenever it struck down Jaian’s soldiers, lights sparked in the carvings, like sourceless eyes. People began leaving offerings by the carvings: oil-of-massacres, bouquets of crystals with fissures in their shining hearts, cardamom bread. (Why cardamom, Seran wasn’t sure. At least the aroma was pleasing.) Jaian’s soldiers executed people they caught at these makeshift shrines, but the offerings kept coming.

  Seran had laid in a good supply of wine, but after the Mechanical General shuddered apart into pixels and blackened reticulations, there was a maddening period of calm. He waited for the warden’s summons.

  No summons came.

  Jaian’s soldiers swaggered through the streets again, convinced that there would be no more apparitions. The city’s people whispered to each other that they must have faith. The offerings increased in number.

  Finding wine became too difficult, so Seran gave it up. He was beginning to think that he had dreamed up the whole endeavor when the effigy nights started again.

  Imulai Mokarengen suddenly became so crowded with effigies that Seran’s othersight of fire and smoke was not much different from reality. He had not known that the city contained so many stories: Women with deadly hands and men who sang atrocity-hymns. Colonial intelligences that wove webs across the pitted buildings and flung disease-sparks at the invaders. A cannon that rose up out of the city’s central plaza and roared forth red storms.

  But Jaian of the Burning Orb wasn’t a fool. She knew that the effigies, for all their destructiveness, burned out eventually. She and her soldiers retreated beneath their force-domes and waited.

  Seran resolved to do some research. How did the warden mean to win her war, if she hadn’t yet managed it?

  By now he had figured out that the effigies would not harm him, although he still had the scar the Saint of Guns had given him. It would have been easy to remove the scar, but he was seized by the belief that the scar was his protection.

  He went first to a bookstore in which candles burned and cogs whirred. Each candle had the face of a child. A man with pale eyes sat in an unassuming metal chair, shuffling cards. “I thought you were coming today,” he said.

  Seran’s doubts about fortunetelling clearly showed on his face. The man laughed and fanned out the cards face-up. Every one of them was blank. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but they only tell you what you already know.”

  “I need a book about the Saint of Guns,” Seran said. She had been the first. No reason not to start at the beginning.

  “That’s not a story I know,” the man said. His eyes were bemused. “I have a lot of books, if you want to call them that, but they’re really empty old journals. People like them for the papers, the bindings. There’s nothing written in them.”

  “I think I have what I came for,” Seran said, hiding his alarm. “I’m sorry to trouble you.”

  He visited every bookstore in the district, and some outside of it, and his eyes ached abominably by the end. It was the same story at all of them. But he knew where he had to go next.

  Getting into the South Archive meant hiring a thief-errant, whose name was Izeut. Izeut had blinded Seran for the journey, and it was only now, inside one of the reading rooms, that Seran recovered his vision. He suspected he was happier not knowing how they had gotten in. His stomach still felt as though he’d tied it up in knots.

  Seran had had no idea what the Archive would look like inside. He had especially not expected the room they had landed in to be welcoming, the kind of place where you could curl up and read a few novels while sipping citron tea. There were couches with pillows, and padded chairs, and the paintings on the walls showed lizards at play.

  “All right,” Izeut said. His voice was disapproving, but Seran had almost beggared himself paying him, so the disapproval was very faint. “What now?”

  “All the books look like they’re in place here,” Seran said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing obviously missing.”

  “That will take a while,” Izeut said. “We’d better get started.”

  Not all the rooms were welcoming. Seran’s least favorite was the one from which sickles hung from the ceiling, their tips gleaming viscously. But all the bookcases were full.

  Seran still wasn’t satisfied. “I want to look inside a few of the books,” he said.

  Izeut shot him a startled glance. “The city’s traditions—”

  “The city’s traditions are already dying,” Seran said.

  “The occupation is temporary,” Izeut said stoutly. “We just have to do more to drive out the warlord’s people.”

  Izeut had no idea. “Humor me,” Seran said. “Haven’t you always wanted to see what’s in those books?” Maybe an appeal to curiosity would work better.

  Whether it did or not, Izeut stood silently while Seran pulled one of the books off the shelves. He hesitated, then broke the book’s seal and felt the warden’s black kiss, cold, unsentimental, against his lips. I’m already cursed, he thought, and opened the covers.

  The first few pages were fine, written in a neat hand with graceful swells. Seran flipped to the middle, however, and his breath caught. The pages were empty except for a faint dust-trace of distorted graphemes and pixelated stick figures.

  He could have opened up more books to check, but he had already found his answer.

  “Stop,” Izeut said sharply. “Let me reshelve that.” He took the book from Seran, very tenderly.

  “It’s no use,” Seran said.

  Izeut didn’t turn around; he was slipping the book into its place. “We can go now.”

  It was too late. The general’s soldiers had caught them.

  Seran was separated from Izeut and brought before Jaian of the Burning Orb. She regarded him with cool exasperation. “There were two of you,” she said, “but something tells me that you’re the one I should worry about.”

  She kicked the table next
to her. All of Seran’s surgical tools, which the soldiers had confiscated and laid out in disarray, clattered.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” Seran said through his teeth.

  “Really,” Jaian said. “You fancy yourself a patriot, then. We may disagree about the petty legal question of who the owner of this city is, but if you are any kind of healer, you ought to agree with me that these constant spasms of destruction are good for no one.”

  “You could always leave,” Seran said.

  She picked up one of his sets of tweezers and clicked it once, twice. “You will not understand this,” she said, “and it is even right that you will not understand this, given your profession, but I will try to explain. This is what I do. Worlds are made to be pressed for their wine, cities taste of fruit when I bite them open. I cannot let go of my conquests.

  “Do you think I am ignorant of the source of the apparitions that leave their smoking shadows in the streets? You’re running out of writings. All I need do is wait, and this city will yield in truth.”

  “You’re right,” Seran said. “I don’t understand you at all.”

  Jaian’s smile was like knives and nightfall. “I’ll write this in a language you do understand, then. You know something about how this is happening, who’s doing it. Take me to them or I will start killing your people in earnest. Every hour you make me wait, I’ll drop a bomb, or send out tanks, or soldiers with guns. If I get bored I’ll get creative.”

  Seran closed his eyes and made himself breathe evenly. He didn’t think she was bluffing. Besides, there was a chance—if only a small chance—that the warden could come up with a defense against the general; that the effigies would come to her aid once the general came within reach.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take you where it began.”

  Seran was bound with chains-of-suffocation, and he thought it likely that there were more soldiers watching him than he could actually spot. He led Jaian to the secret library, to the maze-of-mists.

  “A warden,” Jaian said. “I knew some of them had escaped.”

  They went to the staircase and descended slowly, slowly. The candle-sprites flinched from the general. Their light was almost violet, like dusk.

  All the way down the stairs they heard the snick-snick of many scissors.

  The downstairs room, when they reached it, was filled with paper. Curling scraps and triangles crowded the floor. It was impossible to step anywhere without crushing some. The crumpling sound put Seran in mind of burnt skin.

  Come to that, there was something of that smell in the room, too.

  All through the room there were scissors snapping at empty space, wielded by no hand but the hands of the air, shining and precise.

  At the far end of the room, behind a table piled high with more paper scraps, was the warden. She was standing sideways, leaning heavily against the table, and her face was averted so that her shoulder-length hair fell around it.

  “It’s over,” Jaian called out. “You may as well surrender. It’s folly to let you live, but your death doesn’t have to be one of the ugly ones.”

  Seran frowned. Something was wrong with the way the warden was moving, more like paper fluttering than someone breathing. But he kept silent. A trap, he thought, let it be a trap.

  Jaian’s soldiers attempted to clear a path through the scissors, but the scissors flew to either side and away, avoiding the force-bolts with uncanny grace.

  Jaian’s long strides took her across the room and around the table. She tipped the warden’s face up, forced eye contact. If there had been eyes.

  Seran started, felt the chains-of-suffocation clot the breath in his throat. At first he took the marks all over the warden’s skin to be tattoos. Then he saw that they were holes cut into the skin, charred black at the edges. Some of the marks were logographs, and alphabet letters, and punctuation stretched wide.

  “Stars and fire ascending,” Jaian breathed, “what is this?”

  Too late she backed away. There was a rustling sound, and the warden unfurled, splitting down the middle with a jagged tearing sound, a great irregular sheet punched full of word-holes, completely hollowed out. Her robe crumpled into fine sediment, revealing the cutout in her back in the shape of a serpent-headed youth.

  Jaian made a terrible crackling sound, like paper being ripped out of a book. She took one step back toward Seran, then halted. Holes were forming on her face and hands. The scissors closed in on her.

  I did this, Seran thought, I should have refused the warden. She must have learned how to call forth effigies on her own, ripping them out of Imulai Mokarengen’s histories and sagas and legends, animating the scissors to make her work easier. But when the scissors ran out of paper, they turned on the warden. Having denuded the city of its past, of its weight of stories, they began cutting effigies from the living stories of its people. And now Jaian was one of those stories, too.

  Seran left Jaian and her soldiers to their fate and began up the stairs. But some of the scissors had already escaped, and they had left the doors to the library open. They were undoubtedly in the streets right now. Soon the city would be full of holes, and people made of paper slowly burning up, and the hungry sound of scissors.

  About the Authors

  Helena Bell is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and a Tax LLM which fulfills her lifelong dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer Magazine, Brain Harvest, and Rattle.

  Elizabeth Bourne lives in Seattle surrounded by books and yarn. Her super power is always having exact change and she loves waking up to the smell of salt water. Bourne enjoys the companionship of a large malamute named Kai, who helps with her writing by eating the bad pages. Previously published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, Interzone, and Black Lantern, Bourne was a finalist in the 2012 Pacific Northwest Writers novel competition for her historical novel, The Seventy. She is currently working on a second-world fantasy.

  Elizabeth Bourne’s late husband Mark was a film critic and science fiction writer whose work was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, Asimov’s, and a number of anthologies. Mark was a renowned expert on classic sci-fi films and silent comedy. If he could have been anyone, it would have been Buster Keaton. Mark Bourne’s criticism can be found on IMDB.

  Vajra Chandrasekera lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apex Magazine, Ideomancer and Through the Gate, and has been nominated for a Rhysling Award. He’s @_vajra on Twitter, where he flouts all social convention by not talking very much.

  Maggie Clark is a doctoral student of English Literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, where her work with the literary analysis of scientific non-fiction amply complements her passion for speculative fiction. Her science fiction has been published to date in Lightspeed and Daily SF, and her first scifi short story, “Saying the Names,” won a 2011 Parsec Award.

  Jacob Clifton is a freelance writer and critic in Austin, Texas. Besides his long-term gig writing about TV for the website Television Without Pity, and blogging about culture and entertainment for Tor.com, he can be found online at jacobclifton.com. “This Is Why We Jump” was written for Catherynne M. Valente.

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a computer engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction—she is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

  Andy Dudak’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Abyss & Apex, Ray Gun Revival, and other fine venues. He is a published illustrator and aspiring translator. He lives in Beijing, and knows the Forbidden City bett
er than most natives.

  Thoraiya Dyer is an Australian writer, archer and ex-veterinarian. Her short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Cosmos, Apex, Nature and Redstone SF. Fans of “The Wisdom of Ants” can get hold of the Australian-inspired stories, “Yowie” (Aurealis Award winner for Fantasy Short Story) and “Night Heron’s Curse” (Aurealis-shortlisted) from Twelfth Planet Press and Fablecroft respectively. “Asymmetry,” a collection of four original stories, will be published in 2013 as part of Twelfth Planet Press’ Twelve Planets series.

  Theodora Goss’s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. She has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

  Lisa L Hannett hails from Ottawa, Canada but now lives in Adelaide, South Australia—city of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. Her short stories have been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Shimmer, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010 & 2011), and Imaginarium 2012: Best Canadian Speculative Writing, among other places. She has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection 2011 for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony (Ticonderoga), which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Midnight and Moonshine, co-authored with Angela Slatter, will be published in 2012. Lisa has a PhD in medieval Icelandic literature, and is a graduate of Clarion South. You can find her on Twitter @LisaLHannett.

  James Patrick Kelly is pleased to have another story in Clarkesworld. If all goes according to his ingenious master plan, it won’t be his last. Jim has published over a hundred stories, five novels and four short story collections. He has won several awards, all of which need dusting. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and teaches at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He lives on a lake in New Hampshire where he enjoys gardening, kayaking, snowshoeing and listening to stories read aloud by Kate Baker.