The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Most magicians would have left it at that, but Kodai wasn’t just a magician. She had been one of the best magicians of her class. And her mastery of graphological principles had only improved in her years of field practice.

  So Kodai put together the puzzle pieces: the telltale leftward drift of the columns of text, the elongated water-radical and its association with strategic thinking, the slight tendency to roll the brush at the end of horizontal strokes (unattractive, but no one was perfect), even the preference for brushes too large for the size of the handwriting. The finicky attention to detail, with no smears or smudges or thumbprints. Kodai reflected that her instructors would have liked her to be this good with ink. Not that trying harder would have saved her from exile.

  Captain Arvash-mroi’s letter mentioned a gift of a fine bolt of cloth and (in surprisingly mawkish terms) anticipated embraces. It then launched into a tirade about how his boots pinched his toes. Interesting. Kodai would have expected him to be able to afford better than army issue.

  More interestingly, the graphological signs in Arvash’s letter spoke of conquests. Not just in bed, although Kodai saw that, too, especially in the vigorous club-ended downstrokes. But there was more, pointed at by forked marks and tapering lines and narrow diagonals: villages encircled and eaten by fire. Torched women. The lamentations of the drowned. The ugly seesaw balance of fire and water dominated his writing, as sharp as swordfall.

  Kodai kept track of these traits, using them to focus her hatred of Arvash and writing them down in a notebook with dog-eared pages. Whenever she grew weary of her mission, she returned to the notebook and reread her notes, and went to the next page to write the name of her dead classmate over and over again in stab-shaped columns.

  Nawong remembered the first time he had met Kodai. She had been sitting in a precarious folding chair, lips moving slightly as she read a book and, occasionally, nibbled green tea cookies. He had been prepared to dislike her; he couldn’t imagine that a daughter of the Tepwe family wouldn’t be spoiled rotten. But instead, when he saluted, she waved him down and said, “Lieutenant, I trust you will consider it your duty to help me finish this box of cookies?” She added, “I used to love green tea cookies, but there’s love and then there’s being inundated with the things.”

  He was dying to find out what a Tepwe daughter had done to get herself exiled to the military, when she could instead be languishing amid silk cushions and (presumably) a greater variety of cookies. But it wasn’t for him to ask. As much as she confided in him about everything from cookies to insect bites, she rarely dropped any hints about that part of her past.

  So Nawong contented himself by making up stories, none of which he expected to have any relationship to the truth: Kodai was the reincarnation of a general who had died without winning their last battle (not that most people in the Empire believed in reincarnation). Kodai had followed a lover into the army—except she showed no signs of being lovesick. Kodai had fled an unhappy engagement—but would her family have permitted such a thing? All in all, he liked the reincarnation story best. If nothing else, it gave him an excuse to speculate about the legendary generals she could be.

  He should have remembered that legendary generals rarely enjoyed happy endings.

  Kodai collected books. One of them was a collection of military aphorisms, which she treasured. It wasn’t the only such collection she owned, but it came from a country called Maeng-of-the-Bridges, which no longer existed. Maeng was conquered by the Empire half a generation ago and razed the way all things beautiful and defiant were razed. Kodai knew a little about Maeng, about its dueling aristocrats and its high gardens with the prized sullen orchids and the fabled crown of its king, set with seventy-six sapphire and aquamarine cabochons. (The rumor that nine of the aquamarines were in fact heat-treated topazes of much lower value was surely invention.)

  She had carried it for the length of the Spider campaign, even when she was footsore and sleep-deprived and any modest decrease in the weight she was carrying would have brought her ease. Although no one had been able to teach her to read the dead Maeng language, she could still say a little about the calligraphic style. That was what mattered, not the book’s fragile but exotic stab binding, in contrast to the link stitches favored in the Empire, or the book’s cover, in fibrous dark red paper that was worn at three edges.

  The book’s aphorisms weren’t organized in any useful manner, as though the unattributed author simply sat down to dinner and spilled out whatever came to mind. They were written untidily. Kodai got headaches when she examined the characters too closely. Both the Maeng and the Empire wrote with the brush, and in times past Kodai pored over the calligraphy style used in the book, which bore a distant resemblance to the Imperial one called The Stars Fall Slowly. Kodai’s least favorite instructor in academy had used The Stars Fall Slowly, yet she couldn’t deny the beauty of the script, with its deceptively relaxed spacing and dramatic, almost blot-like serifs.

  Lately Kodai hadn’t opened the book at all. In the evenings leading up to the ritual against the Spiders, Nawong had watched her sitting with her head bent, book cradled in her tense hands. Open it, he had wished her, but she refused herself that small comfort, as though she didn’t think she deserved it.

  When spoken indistinctly (and face it, drunken soldiers were a universal), the name of the nation of Pekti-pehaktuch sounded similar to the Imperial word for “spider.” Thus the Imperials called the Pektis Spiders.

  Kodai was familiar with the official Imperial maps of the region. The old surveys weren’t as useful as she had hoped, given the cartographers’ tendency to stylize topographical features and the fact that local roads were easily damaged. For military applications, she relied heavily on the scouts’ investigations and on local informants.

  Still, the official maps did hold some interest for Kodai, and this was in the realm of (what else?) calligraphy. Imperial cartographers were a conservative lot, and they wrote in what was called, unimaginatively, Cartographers’ Hand. The characteristics of Cartographers’ Hand had proved stable despite the ebb and flow of calligraphic fashion in the Imperial court and among the government’s ministries.

  Cartographers’ Hand (according to Kodai’s notes, terse but readable, and the few remarks she made to Nawong on the subject) had the following traits: extreme vertical alignment, as though the calligrapher labeled everything while being hounded with a knife-edged ruler. This signified rigidity, conformity, reverence for tradition. Minimal variation from the beginning and end of a brushstroke, in contrast, for instance, to the dramatic flourishes favored in Evening Flight of Swans. In fact, the permitted variation was so minimal that it made reading the script at small sizes difficult. The implication was of narrow vision and institutional incestuousness.

  One final quirk of the cartographers’ art was that borders were not drawn with simple lines (if any line, following the twist-weave of political entanglements, river boundaries, and the habitations of different ethnic groups, was ever simple). They were inked, carefully, with the same character repeated over and over, like textual bricks: lio, for Imperial jade. In other words, the Empire was being carved out of the substance of other nations, which existed for this purpose.

  Kodai had her favorites in the collection of letters. Her interest should have been strictly military, focused on the task of reducing the Spiders to a name spoken only by the wind. But she was human, and anyway it was impossible not to take interest in the Spider soldier Gevoh-an’s recipes when she spent so many days eating cold rice and longing for jellied anchovies, pickled lotus root, or beef braised in summer wine—any smidgen of flavor. She liked to talk about food with Nawong: specifically, she talked about food, and he made fun of her nostalgia for anchovies. They both took a certain consolation from this conversation.

  Her favorite recipe was the one for shadow soup. Gevoh’s instructions neatly paralleled those for some of the fish soups that they’d eaten in the past. Kodai hated fish, but not more tha
n she hated starving. In any case, the concept was to catch a shadow in a pot with green onions, ginger, winter melon, and whatever other vegetables you could steal from stores or bully from the local peasants. If you boiled the shadow for long enough, it might become palatable. Or nourishing. Or something.

  Gevoh’s recipes had inconsistent letterforms, although in this case this indicated a partial education—he might even have been self-taught—rather than mental instability. His columns drifted right and left in the minor way that indicated humor rather than the major way that suggested a dangerous temper.

  Kodai showed some of the recipes to Nawong from time to time, and they shared a chuckle over their fancifulness. But when she came to the one for shadow soup, her eyes darkened, and she murmured, “It may be a fake soup, but that’s real hunger talking.”

  Kodai first explained the solution to the Spiders to Nawong on a cold, sleety night while the ruddy light of a full moon filtered through the clouds. They had been talking about something else entirely—the way local berries were mouth-puckeringly unappetizing, which guaranteed that the cook would incorporate them in desserts—when Kodai said abruptly, “If you think about it, graphology is stratificational.” Her voice was soft but not drowsy in the slightest, above the soprano cry of the frogs. “We’ve been focusing all this time on characteristics, as though people and their cultures could be factored into motes. But a person is more than the sum of their traits, just as a grapheme is more than the sum of its strokes. A person is a character, just as a word is represented by a character. If you can specify people entire, not just the traits, you can narrow the focus of the spell. You can direct it against Spiders rather than against Imperials. The Spiders won’t know what hit them.”

  Nawong wasn’t a graphological theorist. But he wasn’t stupid, either, and he didn’t like where this was going. “You can’t say that,” he said more familiarity than their relative stations would ordinarily permit. Except it was a cold, sleety night, and they had come to know each other well. “ ‘Character,’ like a person in a book.”

  “Oh, but everyone’s in a book,” Kodai said, suddenly fierce, “if the whole damn Empire and its ever-growing pile of decrees and statutes and declarations is a book.”

  Now, several years after that discussion, Kodai and Nawong were on the hillside, hoping it would and wouldn’t rain. No frogs this time. Kodai was gnawing her lip, not realizing it, as she wrote more and more exactingly, approaching the knot of characters that would complete and activate the spell.

  She paused, withdrew her brush so it wouldn’t drip over the paper, grimaced. Nawong, recognizing the signal, bent to massage her shoulders. She let him do this for a while, then straightened. He backed off, resolved to watch. For a moment, he thought she was about to say something. Then she lifted the brush and wrote the final few strokes with a sure hand.

  Here’s the final piece, the key, the piece you must have discerned from the beginning: Kodai’s own hand, distinct from the style she would rather have used, itself distinct from the style she was originally taught by tutors in her parents’ house.

  Extremely crisp brushwork, as though chiseled. A broadening of the spacing of the characters as the text marched across the page. Vertical strokes like perfect spear hafts. Most of all, if you looked sideways at the page, diagonal spaces falling through the columns like rain.

  Kodai’ couldn’t read any of this anymore. Kodai, as she had known, and had explained to her aide, was gone. The side-effect of writing the Spiders into the narrative of their own destruction, even if she spared the Imperials, was that the author, too, was an implicit character in that selfsame narrative.

  She had been obliterated along with them.

  Everywhere the Spiders bled from punctures like crescent moons, in the villages, in the towns, upon the battlements of castles. Their bones burned up from the inside and candled the night. Their outposts ran red like hemorrhage and black like rot.

  On the hillside, Lieutenant Nawong lingered beside the crumpled mass of charred meat that had once been Kodai, knowing that he would never remember her name, and trying to anyway. After all, there was no hurry now. Then he gathered up the spell-pages, even if Kodai couldn’t read any of them anymore.

  Like the Spiders she had destroyed, she was no longer part of the story.

  The Game of Smash and Recovery

  Kelly Link

  If there’s one thing Anat knows, it’s this. She loves Oscar her brother, and her brother Oscar loves her. Hasn’t Oscar raised Anat, practically from childhood? Picked Anat up when she’s fallen? Prepared her meals and lovingly tended to her scrapes and taught her how to navigate their little world? Given her skimmer ships, each faster and more responsive than the one before; the most lovely incendiary devices; a refurbished mob of Handmaids, with their sharp fingers, probing snouts, their furred bellies, their sleek and whiplike limbs?

  Oscar called them Handmaids because they have so many fingers, so many ways of grasping and holding and petting and sorting and killing. Once a vampire frightened Anat, when she was younger. It came too close. She began to cry, and then the Handmaids were there, soothing Anat with their gentle stroking, touching her here and there to make sure that the vampire had not injured her, embracing her while they briskly tore the shrieking vampire to pieces. That was not long after Oscar had come back from Home with the Handmaids. Vampires and Handmaids reached a kind of understanding after that. The vampires, encountering a Handmaid, sing propitiatory songs. Sometimes they bow their heads on their long white necks very low, and dance. The Handmaids do not tear them into pieces.

  Today is Anat’s birthday. Oscar does not celebrate his own birthdays. Anat wishes that he wouldn’t make a fuss about hers, either. But this would make Oscar sad. He celebrates Anat’s accomplishments, her developmental progress, her new skills. She knows that Oscar worries about her, too. Perhaps he is afraid she won’t need him when she is grown. Perhaps he is afraid that Anat, like their parents, will leave. Of course this is impossible. Anat could never abandon Oscar. Anat will always need Oscar.

  If Anat did not have Oscar, then who in this world would there be to love? The Handmaids will do whatever Anat asks of them, but they are built to inspire not love but fear. They are made for speed, for combat, for unwavering obedience. When they have no task, nothing better to do, they take one another to pieces, swap parts, remake themselves into more and more ridiculous weapons. They look at Anat as if one day they will do the same to her, if only she will ask.

  There are the vampires. They flock after Oscar and Anat whenever they go down to Home. Oscar likes to speculate on whether the vampires came to Home deliberately, as did Oscar, and Oscar and Anat’s parents, although of course Anat was not born yet. Perhaps the vampires were marooned here long ago in some crash. Or are they natives of Home? It seems unlikely that the vampires’ ancestors were the ones who built the warehouses of Home, who went out into space and returned with the spoils that the warehouses now contain. Perhaps they are a parasite species, accidental passengers left behind when their host species abandoned Home for good. If, that is, the Warehouse Builders have abandoned Home for good. What a surprise, should they come home.

  Like Oscar and Anat, the vampires are scavengers, able to breathe the thin soup of Home’s atmosphere. But the vampires’ lustrous and glistening eyes, their jellied skin, are so sensitive to light they go about the surface cloaked and hooded, complaining in their hoarse voices. The vampires sustain themselves on various things, organic, inert, hostile, long hidden, that they discover in Home’s storehouses, but have a peculiar interest in the siblings. No doubt they would eat Oscar and Anat if the opportunity were to present itself, but in the meantime they are content to trail after, sing, play small pranks, make small grimaces of—pleasure? appeasement? threat displays?—that show off arrays of jaws, armies of teeth. It disconcerts. No one could ever love a vampire, except, perhaps, when Anat, who long ago lost all fear, watches them go swooping, sail-winged, away and o
ver the horizon beneath Home’s scatter of mismatched moons.

  On the occasion of her birthday, Oscar presents Anat with a gift from their parents. These gifts come from Oscar, of course. They are the gifts that the one who loves you, and knows you, gives to you not only out of love but out of knowing. Anat knows in her heart that their parents love her too, and that one day they will come home and there will be a reunion much better than any birthday. One day their parents will not only love Anat, but know her too. And she will know them. Anat dreads this reunion as much as she craves it. What will her life be like when everything changes? She has studied recordings of them. She does not look like them, although Oscar does. She doesn’t remember her parents, although Oscar does. She does not miss them. Does Oscar? Of course he does. What Oscar is to Anat, their parents must be to Oscar. Except: Oscar will never leave. Anat has made him promise.

  The living quarters of the Bucket are cramped. The Handmaids take up a certain percentage of available space no matter how they contort themselves. On the other hand, the Handmaids are excellent housekeepers. They tend the algae wall, gather honey and the honeycomb and partition off new hives when the bees swarm. They patch up networks, teach old systems new tricks when there is nothing better to do. The shitter is now quite charming! The Get Clean rains down water on your head, bubbles it out of the walls, and then the floor drinks it up, cycles it faster than you can blink, and there it all goes down and out and so on for as long as you like, and never gets cold. There is, in fact, very little that Oscar and Anat are needed for on board the Bucket. There is so much that is needful to do on Home.