The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  It is likely that they did this more than once.

  Many of Chindalla’s astronomers believe that, since this sun indisputably supports learned civilizations, other stars must do the same. Some astronomers have produced lengthy essays, complete with computations, to support this position.

  Reckoning whether any such civilization would survive the extinction of its sun, on the other hand, requires no arduous calculation.

  Iseul’s handler, Shen Minsu, was a tall, plain woman with a strong right arm. Before the invasion, she had been known for her skill at archery. Iseul had seen her split one arrow with another at 130 meters during a private display. “Useless skill,” Minsu had said afterwards, “people dead of arrows to the heart find it hard to confess what they’re up to. Much better to make use of the living.”

  They met now in the upper storage room of a pharmacy in a small town. The Shen family had risen to prominence by running pharmacies. One of the earlier Shens had been elevated to a noble after one of his concoctions cured a beloved king-consort’s fever. Even in the south, the Shen family maintained good ties with medicine-sellers and herb-gatherers. Yegedin medicine was not terribly different in principle from Chindallan medicine, and the Yegedin prized Chindalla’s mountain ginseng, which was said to bestow longevity. Iseul had grown up drinking the bitter tea at her mother’s insistence, but from observation of her mother’s patrons, it didn’t do anything more for you than any other form of modest living.

  Minsu didn’t care for ginseng tea, ironically, but she always insisted that they drink tea of some sort whenever they met. Iseul took a sip now. She was wearing clothes cut more conservatively, and she had switched her hairstyle to the drab sort of thing a widow might favor. Shen Minsu was wearing subdued brown and beige linen, which suited her surprisingly well, instead of the sumptuous embroidered robes she would have worn in northern Chindalla.

  Minsu was going methodically through the incomplete Chindallan lexicon. She had already glanced through the Yeged-dai lexicon. “You’re certain,” Minsu said for the third time this meeting, which showed how unsettled she was.

  “I killed a Yegedin guard on the way out, to be sure,” Iseul said bleakly. She had agonized over the decision, but it wouldn’t be the first time she had killed a Yegedin on Chindalla’s behalf. The dagger had performed flawlessly, which meant the issue wasn’t that the charm had stopped working; the issue was that the charm only triggered on human blood. “And the last thing the Genial One said—”

  You can kill one of us, but not all of us. We won’t accept this—and then the unfamiliar term.

  “My guess is that the Yegedin are as much in the dark as we are,” Minsu said. “I find it hard to believe that even they would knowingly ally with the Genial Ones.”

  “I wish I believed that Yeged conquered Chindalla so handily by allying itself with monsters,” Iseul said bitterly.

  Both of them knew that Yeged’s soldiers hadn’t needed supernatural help. In the previous century, Chindalla had turned inwards, its court factions squabbling over ministry appointments and obscure philosophical arguments. The Yegedin had also been a people divided, but that division that taken the form of vicious civil wars. As a result, when a warlord united Yeged and declared himself Emperor, he was sitting on a brutally effective army that had grown accustomed to the spoils of war. It had only been natural for the Emperor’s successor to send his soldiers overseas in search of more riches to keep them loyal.

  “I feel as though we’ve walked into a children’s story,” Minsu said. “When I was a child, the servants would scare us out of trouble by telling us tales—you know the ones. Don’t pull the horses’ tails, or the Genial Ones’ falcons will come out of the shadows and eat your eyes. If you pinch snacks from the kitchens at night, the Genial Ones will turn your fingers into twigs and use them for kindling. Or if you tear your jacket climbing trees, the Genial Ones will sew you up with your little brother and use you as a ceremonial robe. That sort of thing.”

  “Except they were real,” Iseul said. “All the histories in all the known nations agree on the basics. It’s difficult not to believe them.”

  Minsu sighed. “The Yegedin haven’t mentioned anything in their official dispatches so far as we know, but one of my contacts in Mijege-in has remarked on how the censor has been terribly quiet. A very long-running hangover after entertaining the guest from Yeged. No doubt the Yegedin authorities are looking for the murderer as we speak.” She looked sideways at Iseul; her eyes were dark and very grave. “And that means the Genial Ones are looking for the murderer, too.

  “We don’t know how many of them there are,” Minsu went on, “although if they’re researching the world’s languages it’s certain that they’re widely dispersed. You’re lucky to have survived, and you’re also lucky that he tried to take care of you himself instead of raising the alarm.”

  “He probably didn’t want to risk anyone else finding out about his collection of lexicons,” Iseul said, “if he ran afoul of some Yegedin magician.”

  “This is a complication that I didn’t need,” Minsu said, “but it can’t be helped. We’re going to have to pull out.”

  “It’s hardly unexpected,” Iseul said. People were talking about it in the markets, not least because the prices for ordinary necessities had gone up again.

  The Yegedin were preparing to break the thirteen-year truce and move on free Chindalla to the north. Reinforcements had been filtering into the territory, some crossing the ocean from Yeged itself.

  “I assume you have dedicated assassins,” Iseul said, “but we need to find out if there are any Genial Ones associated with the Yegedin army. One of them might have been mediocre at hand-to-hand combat, but we don’t know how closely connected they are with Yeged’s plans. If they intervene as magicians, or trained the Yegedin magicians, the border defenses could be in a lot of trouble. At least we know that they can be killed.”

  Humans had battled the Genial Ones as a matter of necessity, even if they hadn’t done as thorough a job of obliterating them as everyone had thought.

  “Well,” Minsu said, “it’s clear you can’t rely on the charms anymore since they’ll be suspicious of anyone using magic. You’re in a lot of danger.”

  Iseul looked at her bleakly. Like everyone in Chindalla, she had grown up with stories of the Genial Ones’ terrible horses, whose hooves opened cracks in the earth with bleak black eyes staring out until they boiled poisonously away; the Genial Ones’ banquets, served in the skulls of children; the Genial Ones’ adulthood ceremonies, where music of drum and horn caused towers of glistening cartilage to grow out of mounds of corpses. Even in the days of their dominion, the histories said, there had been humans who objected not to the Genial Ones’ methods, but to the fact that they didn’t have mastery of those terrible arts for themselves. After the Genial Ones’ downfall, they had lost no time in learning. The wars in the wake of General Anangan’s assassination had been wide-reaching and bloody.

  “Everything has been dangerous,” Iseul said. “We just didn’t realize it until now. And who knows—maybe if I can lure them out, we can get them to reveal more about whatever it is they’re up to.”

  They discussed possible options for a while. “Your tea’s getting cold,” Minsu said eventually. “Drink up. You never know when you’ll next taste Three Pale Blossoms tea harvested before the Yegedin took over the plantation.” Her smile was bitter. “I keep track, you know. Not many people care, especially when the stuff is a luxury to begin with, but it matters.”

  “I know,” Iseul said. “You don’t have to remind me.” She drank the rest of the cup with slow sips. She didn’t like the tea, but that wasn’t the point.

  himmadaebi, noun: More literally, “great white horse rains.” A Chindallan term used of the worst storms. Originally reserved for the storms that the Genial Ones used to call down on cities that defied them. Usage shifted after the Genial Ones’ defeat by General Anangan, although attempts to date the change
have been hampered by the fact that literacy rates in Chindalla at the time were much lower than they are now, and only a few reliable sources are extant.

  Not long after Iseul’s run-in with the magician, the second Yegedin invasion began with a storm, and with horses.

  The horses were the color of foam-rush and freezing ice. They had wide, mad eyes and hooves that struck the earth as though it were a breaking drum. Their shadows broke off behind them every fourth stride and unfurled into tatters that sliced off tree branches and left boulders in crumbled ruins.

  Iseul had been traveling with the soldiers ever since they decamped from the city that the Yegedin had renamed Mijege-in, heading north toward the border of free Chindalla. The infantry soldiers had wan, anxious expressions, and the highborn cavalrymen didn’t look much better. Their horses were blinkered, and the blinkers were made of paper covered with cryptic words: charms. She had checked one night. Too bad she couldn’t cause a little confusion by making off with all the blinkers, but it wasn’t feasible and she had a more important task.

  She had been tempted to report to Minsu for further instructions the moment she saw the horses. The storm-spell had been defunct for over two centuries. There were accounts of it in the old histories. One of the northwestern Chindallan forts had been thundered down by such a storm generations past. To this day the grasses and trees grew sickly and stunted where the stones had once stood. It wasn’t surprising that the Yegedin had more magicians in their employ, but the fact that an old charm had been resuscitated suggested that at least one of the magicians was a Genial One, or had been trained by one. Perhaps a Genial One could pass the charm off as a brilliant research discovery, even though the problem of magic that didn’t work anymore had vexed the human nations ever since the phenomenon was noted.

  But Iseul needed better information. It had taken an alliance of all the human nations to defeat the Genial Ones the last time, and some of them had survived anyway. There were probably much fewer of them now, but she was under no illusions that the human nations of the present time were likely to unite even for this, especially if they had a chance of claiming the Genial Ones’ magics for themselves.

  She had spent cold hours thinking about the fact that at least one of the old spells worked again, which meant others might, too. And which meant that human magicians and their masters would seek those spells for their own ends, no matter how horrible the cost.

  Tonight Iseul was dripping wet and huddled in a coat that wasn’t doing nearly enough to keep out the chill. She had killed a scout early on and was wearing his clothes. Her hair was piled up underneath his cap and she had bound her chest tight. It wouldn’t pass a close inspection, but no one was looking closely at anyone in such miserable weather.

  Iseul was helped by the Yegedin themselves. Not that the Chindallans were known for tight military discipline either, but the Yegedin force was doing unusually poorly in this regard. Part of the problem was that no one felt comfortable near the storm-horses. The other part was that orders from Yeged had apparently assigned the initial attack to not one but two rival generals. No doubt the theory was that the two would spur each other on to ever greater feats in battle, but in practice this meant the two generals’ soldiers squabbled over everything from watch assignments to access to the best forage. Iseul had situated herself at the hazy boundary between the two armies so she could claim to be on either side as necessary.

  Tonight she had decided that she would try approaching the magicians’ tent again. The Yegedin were sheltering in hills perhaps two days’ march from the nearest Chindallan border-fort. The Chindallan sentries would have seen the storm, although the knowledge wouldn’t save them. They almost certainly wouldn’t realize what it signified.

  She was tempted to assassinate the Yegedin magicians. But she would undoubtedly die in the attempt. Besides, as terrible as it would be to lose the fort, it was more important to determine how the Genial Ones meant to threaten all of Chindalla.

  Iseul eased her way toward the magicians’ tent a little at a time. She had learned that there were two of them and that they kept to themselves, although not much else. Even the officers didn’t like speaking of them too loudly. When they did mention the magicians, it was with careful distaste. Iseul was only a little reassured to find out that Yegedin attitudes toward magicians weren’t far different from Chindallan attitudes, considering that she knew how to use charms herself.

  Most of the soldiers who weren’t on watch were, sensibly, sleeping. But a few exchanged ribald jokes about shapeshifting badgers, or spoke of how much they missed proper plum pickles from home, or mentioned pilgrimages they had made to Yeged’s holy mountains in the past. Some of them looked quite young.

  One of the younger ones mentioned a pretty Chindallan woman who was waiting for him in a southern town. Iseul kept her face blank at the coarse remarks that followed. She had long practice controlling her expression, and it wasn’t news that a number of the Yegedin had taken lovers among the Chindallans. South Chindalla had been occupied for thirteen years, after all. There were Chindallans who had grown up thinking of the Yegedin as their natural rulers, and whose only memories of freedom were a child’s memories of stubbed toes and overripe persimmons and picking cosmos flowers in the fall.

  Iseul clutched the satchel of the unfortunate scout and continued to the magicians’ tent, which stood by itself with two reluctant sentries at the tent flap. A pale, unsettling light burned from the tent. She wound her way to the back. The sentries were exchanging riddles. She wished she could stay and listen; the Yegedin, for all their faults, knew the value of a good riddle.

  She was going to have a hard time getting past the sentries into the tent, and from the sounds of it the magicians were having a discussion. The fact that there were always sentries was bad enough. She might have dealt with them, but usually at this hour the magicians were speaking to one or the other of the generals in the command tent. Rotten luck.

  Of course, all the rotten luck in the world didn’t make a difference when the magicians’ defensive charms were certain still to be in place. She had glimpsed some the first time she approached the tent nights ago. While some of them were unfamiliar, she recognized the ones that would have detected the use of concealment magic. Another was a boundary-warden, which would have caught her if she had attempted to cut her way into the tent.

  This was no doubt just punishment for developing a dependence on the Genial Ones’ tools all these years, but Iseul couldn’t help but grit her teeth. She wondered if a passage charm would work, but the Genial Ones might have a countermeasure for that, too. Keeping her expression placid, she strolled on by.

  The magicians’ voices carried remarkably well in the chilly damp. They spoke the language of magic with an accent similar to that of the Genial One Iseul had killed. She had difficulty understanding their pronunciation, as before, but her mother had taught her how to sing in foreign languages by concentrating first on the sounds without worrying about the meaning. As she traced a meandering path, she committed the conversation, which had the rhythms of an argument, to memory.

  Iseul slouched her way to a less conspicuous location, avoiding contact with Yegedin soldiers as much as possible. She had only two days to figure out a better approach. If she had Minsu’s astonishing skill with a bow—but going around with a Chindallan weapon, especially one so difficult to conceal as a bow, would be a sure way of getting herself killed for no gain.

  The storms grew worse in the next two days. Iseul drifted to the rear with other laggards. The generals had people whipped for it, but nothing could change people’s opinion of the storm-horses.

  She tried again the next night. The guards were clearly bored. One of them kept peeling back the tent flap to look in and make snide comments about the magicians’ furnishings. Time to risk a more direct approach if it would get her a glimpse of the tent’s contents. She made sure to spill some of the scout’s rice wine on her coat and take a long sip before she strolled
on by just as one of the guards was finishing up a joke about an abbot and an albino bear.

  “Hey, you’d better move on,” the other guard said, noticing Iseul. “The only things that go on in there are related to spiders.” He shuddered.

  The guard was probably referring to the moving shadows. Iseul staggered a little as she approached him. Inside, there was a charm on the small table right next to a telltale sheaf of papers, but it was hard to see—ah, there it was. Two quills, curving in opposite directions. She guessed that they complemented each other, one to send letters and one to receive.

  “If he’s drunk, maybe he’s drinking something better than we are,” the first guard said. “Want to share what you have, friend?”

  “It’s no good if they catch us drinking on duty,” the second guard said.

  “Like they pay attention to people like us.”

  “Ah, what’s the harm,” Iseul said in her gruffest voice, which wasn’t very, and handed over her flask. It was terrible wine, but maybe terrible wine was better than no wine. She didn’t hang around to find out what the guards decided to do with the flask.

  The information about the quills was all she had gotten out of the miserable journey, but it might allow her to figure out a charm to spy on the Genial Ones’ future communications. She worked her way to the rear again, and left six hours before dawn the day the siege began. Without an army’s impedimenta to trouble her, she could make better time. Not that the storm wasn’t obvious, but it wasn’t clear to her the Chindallan watchers would realize just what it signified.

  She shed the Yegedin clothing while hiding behind some shrubs, exchanging it for the plain brown dress—now quite rumpled—she had been carrying with her, although she resented even the moments that this took. Then she ran for the border-fort, pacing herself. It was hard to make herself concentrate on the dubious paths, but she would be no use if she sprained an ankle on the loose rocks. She had not eaten well while she traveled with the Yegedin army, and it took its toll now. Her breath came hard, and she could feel the storm-winds drawing ever closer behind her.