The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Gideon understood the message. He did not dare answer his cousin, but he understood. He gave a grim nod in the direction of his court shoes, imagining himself leaving the masquerade ball early, and breaking down Elliot’s front door, and pushing past Ana, and kicking off those very shoes, and shattering the statue’s face with one of his absurdly high heels as the horrified babysitters gaped at the slaughter.

  His breath left him in a shudder.

  He could.

  But she’d be expecting it.

  He’d have to attack when she was off her guard. When she was sleeping.

  Did she sleep in the same bed with the statue, her body curved around it in protection? Did it watch her while she dreamed, and brush the frizzy red curls from her forehead, and think its alien thoughts even as it leeched the warmth from her body with the chill of its own?

  “Gideon. Gideon!”

  Gideon blinked. Desdemona stared with outrage and astonishment . . . and fear. He became aware, suddenly, of a suffocating onslaught of scent: orange blossom and ambergris and a touch of wood smoke. It stung his nose and coated the insides of his mouth and crawled down his throat.

  “You just smashed my perfume bottle,” Desdemona told him.

  “Oh.” Gideon glanced down at his hands. Bits of crystal and blood clung to his palms.

  “It’s an Aniqua Adrian.” Desdemona bent to scoop up a sparkling, faceted, orange thing from the floor. It was the sapphire-topped stopper for the perfume bottle, Gideon saw when she set it down on the vanity.

  “It’s from her Fire Festival line,” Desdemona continued. “It costs fourteen hundred monarchs an ounce, you fool.”

  Gideon looked at his cousin steadily until her fury faded and her face settled into an impassive grin.

  “I should tell Aniqua that a hint of copper and blood is just what the perfume needed!” Her silvery shoulders shook with laughter. “She’ll be here tonight, with her usual entourage. We’ll smell them before we see them. Go on, old thing.” She waved at him. “Wash your hands. I’ll ring one of the girls to come clean this up.” Turning her back to Gideon, she picked up the telephone on her vanity table and murmured an order into it, before setting the earpiece carefully into the cradle. Knowing himself dismissed, he headed for the door.

  “Gideon.”

  Gideon stopped, but did not turn.

  “It’s better,” the tone in her voice was unlike any he had heard, “that she’ll not be here tonight. Of all nights. You know that, don’t you?”

  Gideon’s fingers tightened on the handle, smearing blood on the bronze. They had never spoken of it. He had not guessed until now that she was even aware of the nature of her own house. He should have known better.

  “Gentry Moon,” his cousin whispered. “Tonight is Tithing Night.”

  Gideon shut the door behind him.

  The look on Elliot’s face when his wife kissed him goodbye and walked out the door that night went like a needle through Analise’s heart.

  “It’s just a dance,” she tried to reassure him. “Isn’t it?”

  Slumping against the doorjamb, Elliot stared into the darkness; Nixie was notorious for leaving doors open. “Ana. I have this terrible feeling.”

  Analise shivered. Over the years, she had learned to trust Elliot’s feelings, at least in moments like these, when his voice went hollow and his round blue eyes took on took on the luminous opacity of favrile glass, like the stained panes of the skylight above the grand staircase at Breaker House.

  It was less a noise than the sense of an approaching coolness behind them that announced the presence of the statue. If Gideon had shaped it of velvet instead of clay, the statue could not have moved more silently. It too stared out toward night.

  Analise slipped her arm through Elliot’s elbow, smiling a bit crookedly when the statue did likewise to hers. Covering its hard, cold hand with her fingers, Analise whispered, “What are you thinking, Elliot?”

  “I’m thinking,” he breathed, “that tonight, I am afraid of moonrise.”

  “Alderwood, that face of yours would curdle cream. Deep’s sake, couldn’t you have camouflaged the wreckage with a mask?”

  Gideon turned his head a fraction of a millimeter from his contemplation of the dancers, acknowledged the comment with a freezing half-second glance, then turned back. The Great Hall had been cleared of furniture, its enormous and ornate Skahki tapestries rolled up and packed away. The creamy limestone arches and pilasters made a neutral backdrop for the sparkling company beneath them.

  Some company, Gideon thought—well, most of it—he could do without. Present company included.

  Chaz Mallister snickered behind his full-bearded King of Court Jesters mask. The beard consisted of green and blue plumes. Peacock, of course. It matched the jewels (probably not paste peridots and aquamarines, Gideon surmised) lining the holes of the mask’s eyes. Chaz’s painted curls had been piled high on his head and lacquered like a Leechese puzzle box.

  Chaz whoomfed Gideon’s chin with his feathered fan. “You’re so handsome when you cut one dead, my dear boy.”

  Chaz’s particular snicker, Gideon reflected, was a sound that had plagued him since early childhood. He’d first heard it that fateful morning Chaz’s nanny had dropped off her plump, redheaded charge, age five, at the Palace of Dolls. This was the scaled-down model of Breaker House that Harlan Hunt Mannering had presented to his daughter on her seventh birthday. Abandoned by his nanny to his own devices, Chaz promptly terrorized Gideon’s greyhound puppy, broke three saucers and the sugar bowl of Desdemona’s porcelain tea set, and set the playhouse curtains on fire.

  To be fair, he had been provoked. The three children, having sized each other up long before introductions were completed, immediately perceived that the game of competitive loathing (with occasional truces to band together against nurses, governesses, and tutors) would be far more amusing than merely getting along.

  “So many delectable young things,” sighed Chaz, licking his lips. “Which one are you staring at?” His elbow jostled Gideon’s. The satin of their suits slicked sensuously off each other. Gideon suppressed an eye roll. Chaz was always touching him in these small ways. He was worse with Desdemona, pinches and tweaks and nips, but she manhandled him right back. Those two were like lion cubs, worrying at each other’s tender spots.

  “I am watching Desdemona,” Gideon answered briefly.

  Chaz flinched. Not, Gideon thought, on purpose. But he recovered quickly enough to sidle up again and smirk. “Alderwood. Really. Your first cousin?”

  When Gideon did not answer, Chaz shrugged. “Oh, why not? It’s done in all the best families, I’m sure, from Southern Leressa to the Holy See at Winterbane. I have to admit, she suits you far better than that fat little farm girl who styles herself a writer.”

  Gideon was glad for the smeared white clown paint upon his cheeks and the smoked spectacles he wore, for he knew his eyes and pallor betrayed him whenever he lost his temper, and he was about to lose it now. But his voice, to his satisfaction, was distant, indeed almost absentminded, when he replied, “Miss Field’s next book is greatly anticipated by critics and readers alike.”

  Chaz snorted, so Gideon continued maliciously, “I have never seen Desdemona laugh like that before. Do you know with whom she is dancing?”

  Impossible to tell what color Chaz turned beneath his mask and paint. Yet Gideon felt a wave of jealous heat rise off him, and was not surprised at the curt, “No,” followed by Chaz turning heel and striding away.

  Gideon felt no triumph. He knew with whom—or rather, with what—Desdemona danced, her silver skin and silver silk and mask of silver lace glowing against the stranger’s towering darkness.

  Tower he did, though slenderly. The stranger was far, far too thin for his height, attenuated like a late afternoon shadow. He wore something that looked like scorched cobwebs, like ashes newly swept from a grate, a few cinders still burning, to settle swirling about his figure. And though the clothes fell
in rags and ribbons, still they conveyed richness beyond imagination, as if the ashes remembered having once been black silk, grackle feathers, dark velvet, the iridescent scales of some monstrous fish. His skin and eyes and tangled hair were as cinder-dark as his clothes, and as he edged Desdemona off the ballroom floor and against a pillar, he reached to cradle her face with long, slim hands . . .

  Gideon shut his eyes, hearing for the first time the bone bells. They had been ringing midnight all the while he stared. They rang the thirteenth bell now, and when he opened his eyes again, the company in the Great Hall had swelled to three times its previous size. Only this time, he knew, those birds’ heads perched atop petal-clad bodies were not masks. Those rainbow-spangled wings and gem-encrusted tails, those silver hooves and velveted paws, those monsters gilded in moonbeams, were not costumes created for the occasion. The walls of Breaker House had opened. Still the mortals danced on, oblivious to the nature of their new partners.

  Gideon stared at the stranger grasping Desdemona’s dazed and dreamy face. He had bent his head and was whispering in her ear. Her eyelids fluttered down. His hands had several fingers too many, all impossibly long. The nails—no, talons—were at least half the length of those fingers, lit with the hard green smolder of emeralds, their keen tips filigreed in copper.

  Inhaling sharply, Gideon started toward his cousin. Was intercepted. Someone slammed a hand against his chest, right over his heart.

  Not Chaz.

  “That one,” said Nixie Howell, “can take care of herself. Will you dance, boy?”

  It was midnight when the statue went wild.

  The book Analise was reading aloud from flew across the room as the statue slapped it from her hands. It threw itself from the mattress where it had reclined, its head near Analise’s knee, and landed with a jarring thump on the floor. For a moment Analise held her breath, fearing the statue had fractured itself, that it would splinter and crumble before her eyes, as if the wreckage Gideon would have wrought of it were its destiny. But it just rose from a crouch and sprang forward, marble-pale limbs suddenly blue-veined and aglow, as if highways of blue lightning ran through it.

  “Elliot!” Analise shouted. The statue pounded toward the door, without, it seemed, any intention of opening it before barreling through.

  A tinkle in the distance—perhaps Elliot dropping a glass he’d been drying—footsteps down the short hall. The door yanked open just before the statue made a new one, with the result that the statue slammed into Elliot instead, driving him back against the hallway wall. Several framed photographs crashed down. Plaster debris tumbled from abrupt fissures.

  But Elliot, who was of a size with the statue, grasped its torso in a bear hug and grappled it to the floor. The statue rolled Elliot onto his back, one hand crushing his throat, the other digging hard fingers into his face. Analise leapt at the statue, hooking her arms beneath its colossal ones and heaving back with all her strength. As she had hoped, the statue whipped about, abandoning Elliot to gasp on the carpet, and plucked her off its back, hauling her into its arms.

  For a moment as those panicked black eyes stared into hers, the green sheen of them catching a glaze of blue from the fire in its veins, Analise thought it was going to dash her to the floor, then step on her skull for good measure. But it caught her up instead, high in its arms, and clasped her close. She could feel its quick shallow breaths, though its nostrils and mouth were closed seams that never opened. She felt the hummingbird buzz in its breast that was not—quite—a heartbeat. It turned left, then right, squeezing Analise ever nearer, like a mother with an infant in a building burning down all around her.

  Trying to catch her breath, Analise flung her arms about the statue’s neck, and put her lips to its carved ear, whispering, “It’s all right. It’s all right. Calm down. Nothing here will hurt you.”

  “Ana . . . ” Elliot croaked from the floor.

  “It’s all right,” Analise said, but still the statue shook. So Analise did what she had always done whenever Gideon came to her, feverish and afraid and babbling of women with linden branch hands; she laid her cheek against the statue’s and sang a snatch of lullaby from her childhood.

  “Hush, love, sleep easy, no need to be strong

  I can’t slay your dragons, but I’ll sing you a song . . . ”

  The statue softened its crushing hold, and turned its face into Analise’s neck. She hummed the melody, suddenly uncertain of the next lyric, and hoped the vibration was enough to calm it down.

  “Ana . . . ”

  “Hush love, be easy, and sleep in my arms—Elliot, are you hurt?—I can’t stop your nightmares, but I’ll keep you from harm . . . ”

  “Nothing broken, Ana. Just bruised. Keep singing.”

  So Analise sang. She sang until the statue slid down the length of the wall and sat in the plaster dust of the carpet, holding her in its lap. Analise sang, and stroked immovable curls from a marmoreal forehead that seemed damp with distress, watching the blue light fade from its pale surface, leaving faint streaks like scorch marks. Sang until whatever it was that had frightened the statue returned whence it came, and shut the door behind it.

  “Queen Nyx of the Valwode.”

  Nyx said, “Former queen,” and winked in a startlingly mortal way that reminded Gideon of Elliot. “Queen in exile. No queen at all, really,” she laughed, “for I abdicated my title and came to Seafall to live with my beloved, setting my own heart to the hour of his death.” She tapped her breastbone as she danced. “This ticking time bomb, Gideon. It makes me as mortal as . . . you. For example.”

  “Perhaps slightly less,” Gideon countered. When he’d first met her on this side of the Veil, he could scarcely breathe in her presence. He’d feared she would turn on him, raking the air with her blue-black fingernails and ripping open a window for her monsters to crawl through. Now he knew her better. More or less. How could anyone know such an ancient, terrible mystery? And though he feared her still, he did not precisely know why.

  Nyx smiled, and Gideon shivered inwardly. Blue-black tattoos danced upon her cheekbones. Elliot had painted a mask around those marks for the Gentry Moon ball, matching the color with a swirling mix of pigments. His designs scalloped her eyes, webbed her mouth and neck. They continued across her breastbone like the suggestion of lace. She was dressed plainly otherwise, in a long gray shirt—probably Elliot’s—that she had belted at the waist with a black sash. The designs continued down her bare legs and feet.

  “This is formal dress?” he asked, keeping his voice light and incredulous.

  “A great master artist used me for his canvas,” she said. “Need I tell you what his last painting sold for? I am wearing the most expensive costume here tonight!”

  The dance parted them for a moment. When they came together again, she was no longer in a mischievous mood. Her smile had changed. Her dark voice, already low and husky, hit him in a hollow place, a bone clapper crashing against a bone bell.

  “This design I wear is Elliot’s way of warding me tonight. As you know, a mortal’s greatest protection against us is also its greatest attraction for us. We live forever unless we kill ourselves—or are killed. The art we make, we make to wile eternity. Gentry creations are exquisite, but essentially hopeless. This is not to say we create out of despair. Rather, out of ennui. Mortal makings . . . ” She lifted her hand from Gideon’s arm to caress her own face. “They are your cry against death. Your art is at once your hope of eternity and an acknowledgement of your own grave. You, Gideon Alderwood, have walked the Valwode in a dream of beauty and horror, transfixed by the work of our hands, no?”

  Gideon’s neck felt like it was collared in steel. He could not even nod. Nyx went on as though he had. “It is the same for us. Sometimes I wander into Elliot’s studio, and find myself staring at one of his paintings. Hours later, he comes upon me, and has to shake me from the reverie. Ana’s book . . . ” She shook her head. “Ana’s book, I cannot tell you. I sob like a lost child before
I am finished with the first paragraph—I know you think it’s an awkward and jejune work, but to me it’s . . . ”

  “Wind and fire,” Gideon murmured.

  “It is her,” Nyx agreed, nodding. “It’s her soul, joyous and naked, shining up from the printed paper. It ensorcels me. I have to be very careful what I read, what I expose myself to, because I have no defense against it.”

  Her hand strayed to her belly, just for a moment. “I was lucky, I think, to have read Ana’s book first. It is kindly and inviting; it wished me no harm.” Her strange blue-black, all-black, no-white gaze met his, dead on.

  “Do you understand then, Gideon Alderwood, the great harm of which your statues are capable? They are the perfect marriage of mortal art and Gentry magic, creations that will live forever in the Valwode, indestructible by Gentry hands because any Gentry who sees one is struck to deathly stillness by its beauty. That Gentry must remain still even if the statue strides forth, rips her arms off, or staves in her skull, or plucks her still beating heart from her breast and crushes it underfoot. Your statues are the perfect warriors.”

  “That’s why I destroyed them.”

  The words seemed to shred his throat as he gasped them. “It wasn’t my choice to walk through those walls, or have that compulsion laid on me. Once I learned what she meant to . . . That they were weapons for her war . . . I tried everything to stop making them. From starving myself to cutting off my own hands. But no sooner do I climb out a high window with no intention of climbing back in, or put a razor to my veins, than I find myself wandering around outside in Market Circle buying another ton of clay. Or—Horned Lords help me—stealing Ana’s toilet paper. Or facedown on my bed, crusted and smeared with another statue staring down at me . . . ”

  “You didn’t destroy the early ones,” Nyx interrupted him. “You made many statues before you realized their purpose. How did you anyway . . . ?” She snapped her mouth shut when she saw the shudder wracking him. “Poor child,” she said. “You have been slave to this enchantment too long. Why, there’s hardly anything left of you, is there? And soon to be less.”