The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (2 page)

I’m often asked, was this a good year? The stories in this book come from a 365 day period during which thousands of stories appeared in magazines, in anthologies and collections, shoehorned into the back of novels and downloaded as giveaways, featured on websites and sent as email. So many stories were published, and often on such short turnarounds, that I was still being sent new ones as I sat down to write this introduction. Was it a good year? Well, it depended what you stumbled upon. I think you could have had a great reading year, or a pretty ordinary one, based on nothing more than luck. It was certainly an interesting one. I was encouraged by the way SF stories in books like
Twelve Tomorrows
,
An Aura of Familiarity
, and
We See a Different Tomorrow
engaged with the world in a way SF sometimes manages to avoid, while I felt the fantasy in books like
Rags and Bones
and
Once Upon a Time
helped to push the boundaries of fantasy. It was a good year for me, and I think you’ll see that as you read through this book.

Were there stories I’d like to have included that aren’t here? Certainly. A handful of stories eluded me for contractual and other reasons, and practical limitations meant that I avoided really long stories. If I could encourage you to seek out one story that’s not in this book (if I could sneak one more in) it would be Caitlín R. Kiernan’s extraordinary and hallucinatory SF novella “Black Helicopters”, which deserves to be here and to be seen as one of the best stories of the year.

There is one final thing I should mention here. This year sees
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year
moving to a new home. After seven years in sunny California, the book now comes to you from Solaris Books in what sounds like an almost perpetually rainy part of England. I’d like to thank Jonathan Oliver (a talented anthologist in his own right and, very happily for me, my editor), Ben Smith and the Solaris crew for making me and the series feel so welcome and for doing such an incredible job on it. I’d also like to thank you for picking up this book. If you’re a long-time reader: welcome back. If you’re new to the series: pull up a chair, I think you’re going to enjoy yourself.

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, Western Australia

January 2014

SOME DESPERADO

Joe Abercrombie

Joe Abercrombie (
www.joeabercrombie.com
) attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. His first novel,
The Blade Itself,
was published in 2004, and was followed by sequels
Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings
, and standalone novels
Best Served Cold, The Heroes,
and
Red Country.
His next book is young adult fantasy novel
Half a King
. Joe lives in Bath with his wife, Lou, and his daughters, Grace and Eve, and his son Teddy. He still occasionally edits concerts and music festivals for TV, but spends most of his time writing edgy yet humorous fantasy novels.

S
hy gave the horse her heels, its forelegs buckled and, before she had a notion what was happening, she and her saddle had bid each other a sad farewell.

She was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Not a good one at a brief assay, and the impending earth gave her no time for a longer. She did her best to roll with the fall – as she tried to do with most of her many misfortunes – but the ground soon uncurled her, gave her a fair roughing up and tossed her flopping into a patch of sun-shrivelled scrub.

Dust settled.

She stole a moment just to get some breath in. Then one to groan while the world stopped rolling. Then another to shift gingerly an arm and a leg, waiting for that sick jolt of pain that meant something was broke and her miserable shadow of a life would soon be lost in the dusk. She would've welcomed it, if it meant she could stretch out and not have to run no more. But the pain didn't come. Not outside of the usual compass, leastways. As far as her miserable shadow of a life went, she was still awaiting judgement.

Shy dragged herself up, scratched and scuffed, caked in dust and spitting out grit. She'd taken too many mouthfuls of sand the last few months but she'd a dismal premonition there'd be more. Her horse lay a few strides distant, one foamed-up flank heaving, forelegs black with blood. Neary's arrow had snagged it in the shoulder, not deep enough to kill or even slow it right off, but deep enough to make it bleed at a good pace. With her hard riding that had killed it just as dead as a shaft in the heart.

There'd been a time Shy had got attached to horses. A time – despite reckoning herself hard with people and being mostly right – she'd been uncommon soft about animals. But that time was a long time gone. There wasn't much soft on Shy these days, body or mind. So she left her mount to its final red-frothed breaths without the solace of her calming hand and ran for the town, tottering some at first but quickly warming to the exercise. At running she'd a heap of practice.

Town was perhaps an overstatement. It was six buildings and calling them buildings was being generous to two or three. All rough lumber and an entire stranger to straight angles, sun-baked, rain-peeled and dust-blasted, huddled about a dirt square and a crumbling well.

The biggest building had the look of tavern or brothel or trading post or more likely all three amalgamated. A rickety sign still clung to the boards above the doorway but the name had been rubbed by the wind to just a few pale streaks in the grain.
Nothing, nowhere
, was all its proclamation now. Up the steps two by two, bare feet making the old boards wheeze, thoughts boiling away at how she'd play it when she got inside, what truths she'd season with what lies for the most likely recipe.

There's men chasing me!
Gulping breath in the doorway and doing her best to look beyond desperate – no mighty effort of acting at that moment, or any occupying the last twelve months, indeed.

Three of the bastards!
Then – provided no one recognised her from all the bills for her arrest –
They tried to rob me!
A fact. No need to add she'd good and robbed the money herself from the new bank in Hommenaw in the company of those three worthies plus another since caught and hung by the authorities.

They killed my brother! They're drunk on blood!
Her brother was safe at home where she wished she was and if her pursuers were drunk it would likely be on cheap spirits as usual, but she'd shriek it with that little warble in her throat. Shy could do quite a warble when she needed one, she'd practiced it 'til it was something to hear. She pictured the patrons springing to their feet in their eagerness to aid a woman in distress.
They shot my horse!
She had to admit it didn't seem overpowering likely that anyone hard-bitten enough to live out here would be getting into a sweat of chivalry but maybe fate would deal her a winning hand for once.

It had been known.

She blundered through the tavern's door, opening her mouth to serve up the tale, and stopped cold.

The place was empty.

Not just no one there but nothing, and for damn sure no winning hand. Not a twig of furniture in the bare common room. A narrow stairway and a balcony running across the left hand wall, doorways yawning empty upstairs. Chinks of light scattered where the rising sun was seeking out the many gaps in the splitting carpentry. Maybe just a lizard skittering away into the shadows – of which there was no shortage – and a bumper harvest of dust, greying every surface, drifted into every corner. Shy stood there a moment, just blinking, then dashed back out, along the rickety stoop and to the next building. When she shoved the door it dropped right off its rusted hinges.

This one hadn't even a roof. Hadn't even a floor. Just bare rafters with the careless, pinking sky above, and bare joists with a stretch of dirt below every bit as desolate as the miles of dirt outside.

She saw it now, as she stepped back into the street with vision unhindered by hope. No glass in the windows, or wax-paper even. No rope by the crumbling well. No animals to be seen – aside from her own dead horse, that was, which only served to prove the point.

It was a dried-out corpse of a town, long since dead.

Shy stood in that forsaken place, up on the balls of her bare feet as though she was about to sprint off somewhere but lacked the destination, hugging herself with one arm while the fingers of the other hand fluttered and twitched at nothing, biting on her lip and sucking air fast and rasping through the little gap between her front teeth.

Even by recent standards, it was a low moment. But if she'd learned anything the last few months it was that things can always get lower. Looking back the way she'd come Shy saw the dust rising. Three little grey trails in the shimmer off the grey land.

"Oh, hell," she whispered, and bit her lip harder. She pulled her eating knife from her belt and wiped the little splinter of metal on her dirty shirt, as though cleaning it might somehow settle the odds. Shy had been told she had a fertile imagination, but even so it was hard to picture a more feeble weapon. She'd have laughed if she hadn't been on the verge of weeping. She'd spent way too much time on the verge of weeping the last few months, now she thought about it.

How had it come to this?

A question for some jilted girl rather than an outlaw with four thousand marks offered, but still a question she was never done asking. Some desperado. She'd grown expert on the desperate part but the rest remained a mystery. The sorry truth was she knew full well how it came to this – the same way as always. One disaster following so hard on another she just bounced between 'em, pinging about like a moth in a lantern. The second usual question followed hard on the first.

What the fuck now?

She sucked in her stomach – not that there was much to suck in these days – and dragged the bag out by the drawstrings, coins inside clicking together with that special sound only money makes. Two thousand marks in silver, give or take. You'd think a bank would hold a lot more – they told depositors they always had fifty thousand on hand – but it turns out you can't trust banks any more than bandits.

She dug her hand in, dragged free a fistful of coins and tossed money across the street, leaving it gleaming in the dust. She did it like she did most things these days – hardly knowing why. Maybe she valued her life a lot higher'n two thousand marks, even if no one else did. Maybe she hoped they'd just take the silver and leave her be, though what she'd do once she was left be in this corpse town – no horse, no food, no weapon – she hadn't thought out. Clearly she hadn't fixed up a whole plan, or not one that would hold too much water, leastways. Leaky planning had always been a problem of hers.

She sprinkled silver as if she was tossing seed on her mother's farm, miles and years and a dozen violent deaths away. Whoever would've thought she'd miss the place? Miss the bone-poor house and the brokedown barn and the fences that always needed mending. The stubborn cow that never gave milk and the stubborn well that never gave water and the stubborn soil that only weeds would thrive in. Her stubborn little sister and brother too. Even big, scarred, soft-headed Lamb. What Shy would've given now to hear her mother's shrill voice curse her out again. She sniffed hard, her nose hurting, her eyes stinging, and wiped 'em on the back of her frayed cuff. No time for tearful reminiscences. She could see three dark spots of riders now beneath those three inevitable dust trails. She flung the empty bag away, ran back to the tavern and –

"Ah!" She hopped over the threshold, bare sole of her foot torn on a loose nail head. The world's nothing but a mean bully, that's a fact. Even when you've big misfortunes threatening to drop on your head, small ones still take every chance to prick your toes. How she wished she'd got the chance to grab her boots. Just to keep a shred of dignity. But she had what she had, and neither boots nor dignity were on the list, and a hundred big wishes weren't worth one little fact – as Lamb used boringly to drone at her whenever she cursed him and her mother and her lot in life and swore she'd be gone in the morning.

Shy remembered how she'd been, then, and wished she had the chance now to punch her earlier self in the face. But she could punch herself in the face when she got out of this.

She'd a procession of other willing fists to weather first.

She hurried up the stairs, limping a little and cursing a lot. When she reached the top she saw she'd left bloody toe prints on every other one. She was working up to feeling pretty damn low about that glistening trail leading right to the end of her leg, when something like an idea came trickling through the panic.

She paced down the balcony, making sure to press her bloody foot firm to the boards, and turned into an abandoned room at the end. Then she held her foot up, gripping it hard with one hand to stop the bleeding, and hopped back the way she'd come and through the first doorway, near the top of the steps, pressing herself into the shadows inside.

A pitiful effort, doubtless. As pitiful as her bare feet and her eating knife and her two thousand mark haul and her big dream of making it back home to the shit-hole she'd had the big dream of leaving. Small chance those three bastards would fall for that, even stupid as they were. But what else could she do?

When you're down to small stakes you have to play long odds.

Her own breath was her only company, echoing in the emptiness, hard on the out, ragged on the in, almost painful down her throat. The breath of someone scared near the point of an involuntary shitting and all out of ideas. She just couldn't see her way to the other side of this. She ever made it back to that farm she'd jump out of bed every morning she woke alive and do a little dance, and give her mother a kiss for every cuss, and never snap at her sister or mock Lamb again for being a coward. She promised it, then wished she was the sort who kept promises.