Year’s Best SF 15 (30 page)

“Do you think my granddaughter is still alive?”

Hamilton pursed his lips. “There are Prussian yachts on the river. They're staying on for the season. I think they'd want the bonus of taking the Princess back for interrogation.”

“That's the plan!” Parkes yelled. “Please—!”

“Get him some anesthetic,” said the Queen Mother. Then she turned back to Hamilton. “The balance will be kept. To give him his due, cousin Wilhelm was acting within it. There will be no diplomatic incident. The Prussians will be able to write off Sandels and any others as rogues. We will of course cooperate. The Black Eagle traditionally carry only that knowledge they need for their mission, and will order themselves to die before giving us orders of battle or any other strategic information. But the intelligence from Parkes and any others will give us some small power of potential shame over the Prussians in future months. The Vatican will be bending over backwards for us for some time to come.” She took his hand, and he felt the favor on his ring finger impressed with some notes that probably flattered
him. He'd read them later. “Major, we will have the fold opened. You will enter it. Save Elizabeth. Kill them all.”

 

They got him a squad of fellow officers, four of them. They met in a trophy room, and sorted out how they'd go and what the rules of engagement would be once they got there. Substitutes for Parkes and his crew had been found from the few sappers present. Parkes had told them that those inside the fold had left a minuscule aerial trailing, but that messages were only to be passed down it in emergencies. No such communications had been sent. They were not aware of the world outside their bolt hole.

Hamilton felt nothing but disgust for a bought man, but he knew that such men told the truth under pressure, especially when they knew the fine detail of what could be done to them.

The false Liz had begun to be picked apart. Her real name would take a long time to discover. She had a maze of intersecting selves inside her head. She must have been as big an investment as the fold. The court physicians who had examined her had been as horrified by what had been done to her as by what she was.

That baffled Hamilton. People like the duplicate had the power to be who they liked. But that power was bought at the cost of damage to the balance of their own souls. What were nations, after all, but a lot of souls who knew who they were and how they liked to live? To be as uncertain as the substitute Liz was to be lost and to endanger others. It went beyond treachery. It was living mixed metaphor. It was as if she had insinuated herself into the cogs of the balance, her puppet strings wrapping around the arteries which supplied hearts and minds.

They gathered in the empty dining room in their dress uniforms. The dinner things had not been cleared away. Nothing had been done. The party had been well and truly crashed. The representatives of the great powers would have vanished back to their embassies and yachts. Mother Valentine would be rooting out the details of who had been paid
what inside her party. Excommunications
post mortem
would be issued, and those traitors would burn in hell.

He thought of Liz, and took his gun from the air beside him.

One of the sappers put a device in the floor, set a timer, saluted and withdrew.

“Up the Green Jackets,” said one of the men behind him, and a couple of the others mentioned their own regiments.

Hamilton felt a swell of fear and emotion.

The counter clicked to zero and the hole in the world opened in front of them, and they ran into it.

 

There was nobody immediately inside. A floor and curved ceiling of universal boundary material. It wrapped light around it in rainbows that always gave tunnels like this a slightly pantomime feel. It was like the entrance to Saint Nicholas's cave. Or, of course, the vortex sighted upon death, the ladder to the hereafter. Hamilton got that familiar taste in his mouth, a pure adrenal jolt of fear, not the restlessness of combat deferred, but that sensation one got in other universes, of being too far from home, cut off from the godhead.

There was gravity. The Prussians certainly had spent some money.

The party made their way forward. They stepped gently on the edge of the universe. From around the corner of the short tunnel there were sounds.

The other four looked to Hamilton. He took a couple of gentle steps forward, grateful for the softness of his dress uniform shoes. He could hear Elizabeth's voice. Not her words, not from here. She was angry, but engaged. Not defiant in the face of torture. Reasoning with them. A smile passed his lips for a moment. They'd have had a lot of that.

It told him there was no alert, not yet. It was almost impossible to set sensors close to the edge of a fold. This lot must have stood on guard for a couple of hours, heard no alarm from their friends outside, and then had relaxed. They'd have been on the clock, waiting for the time when
they would poke their heads out. Hamilton bet there was a man meant to be on guard, but that Liz had pulled him into the conversation too. He could imagine her face, just round that corner, one eye always toward the exit, maybe a couple of buttons undone, claiming it was the heat and excitement. She had a hair knife too, but it would do her no good to use it on just one of them.

He estimated the distance. He counted the other voices, three…four, there was a deeper tone, in German, not the pidgin the other three had been speaking. That would be him. Sandels. He didn't sound like he was part of that conversation. He was angry, ordering, perhaps just back from sleep, wondering what the hell—!

Hamilton stopped all thoughts of Liz. He looked to the others, and they understood they were going to go and go now, trip the alarms and use the emergency against the enemy.

He nodded.

They leapt around the corner, ready for targets.

They expected the blaring horn. They rode it, finding their targets surprised, bodies reacting, reaching for weapons that were in a couple of cases a reach away among a kitchen, crates, tinned foods—

Hamilton had made himself know he was going to see Liz, so he didn't react to her, he looked past her—

He ducked, cried out, as an automatic set off by the alarm chopped up the man who had been running beside him, the Green Jacket, gone in a burst of red. Meat all over the cave.

Hamilton reeled, stayed up, tried to pin a target. To left and right ahead, men were falling, flying, two shots in each body, and he was moving too slowly, stumbling, vulnerable—

One man got off a shot, into the ceiling, and then fell, pinned twice, exploding—

Every one of the Prussians gone but—

He found his target.

Sandels. With Elizabeth right in front of him. Covering every bit of his body. He had a gun pushed into her neck. He wasn't looking at his three dead comrades.

The three men who were with Hamilton moved forward, slowly, their gun hands visible, their weapons pointing down.

They were looking to Hamilton again.

He hadn't lowered his gun. He had his target. He was aiming right at Sandels and the Princess.

There was silence.

Liz made eye contact. She had indeed undone those two buttons. She was calm. “Well,” she began, “this is very—”

Sandels muttered something and she was quiet again.

Silence.

Sandels laughed, not unpleasantly. Soulful eyes were looking at them from that square face of his, a smile turning the corner of his mouth. He shared the irony that Hamilton had often found in people of their profession.

This was not the awkward absurdity that the soldiers had described. Hamilton realized that he was looking at an alternative. This man was a professional at the same things Hamilton did in the margins of his life. It was the strangeness of the alternative that had alienated the military men. Hamilton was fascinated by him.

“I don't know why I did this,” said Sandels, indicating Elizabeth with a sway of the head. “Reflex.”

Hamilton nodded to him. They each knew all the other did. “Perhaps you needed a moment.”

“She's a very pretty girl to be wasted on a Swede.”

Hamilton could feel Liz not looking at him. “It's not a waste,” he said gently. “And you'll refer to Her Royal Highness by her title.”

“No offense meant.”

“And none taken. But we're in the presence, not in barracks.”

“I wish we were.”

“I think we all agree there.”

“I won't lay down my weapon.”

Hamilton didn't do his fellows the disservice of looking to them for confirmation. “This isn't an execution.”

Sandels looked satisfied. “Seal this tunnel afterwards, that should be all we require for passage.”

“Not to Berlin, I presume.”

“No,” said Sandels, “to entirely the opposite.”

Hamilton nodded.

“Well, then.” Sandels stepped aside from Elizabeth.

Hamilton lowered his weapon and the others readied theirs. It wouldn't be done to aim straight at Sandels. He had his own weapon at hip height. He would bring it up and they would cut him down as he moved.

But Elizabeth hadn't moved. She was pushing back her hair, as if wanting to say something to him before leaving, but lost for the right words.

Hamilton, suddenly aware of how unlikely that was, started to say something.

But Liz had put a hand to Sandels's cheek.

Hamilton saw the fine silver between her fingers.

Sandels fell to the ground thrashing, hoarsely yelling as he deliberately and precisely, as his nervous system was ordering him to, bit off his own tongue. Then the mechanism from the hair knife let him die.

The Princess looked at Hamilton. “It's not a waste,” she said.

 

They sealed the fold as Sandels had asked them to, after the sappers had made an inspection.

Hamilton left them to it. He regarded his duty as done. And no message came to him to say otherwise.

Recklessly, he tried to find Mother Valentine. But she was gone with the rest of the Vatican party, and there weren't even bloodstains left to mark where her feet had trod this evening.

He sat at a table, and tried to pour himself some champagne. He found that the bottle was empty.

His glass was filled by Lord Carney, who sat down next to him. Together, they watched as Elizabeth was joyfully reunited with Bertil. They swung each other round and round, oblivious to all around them. Elizabeth's grandmother smiled at them and looked nowhere else.

“We are watching,” said Carney, “the balance incarnate.
Or perhaps they'll incarnate it tonight. As I said: if only there were an alternative.”

Hamilton drained his glass. “If only,” he said, “there
weren't.
”

And he left before Carney could say anything more.

Sarah L. Edwards lives in Rathdrum, Idaho. She says, “I have a degree in math that I'm still trying to figure out how to use. I've lived all over the U.S. but my heart belongs to the parts with mountains.” She writes fantasy and the occasional science fiction piece, such as this one. She's written several stories in her steampunk-fantasy Dark Quarter universe, which began with her Writers of the Future-winning story “Simulacrum's Children.” Her stories have appeared in a number of small-press online venues, including often in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in 2009 began to appear in print magazines. Aside from writing, she says her “major project these days is teaching sixth grade at a bilingual school in Honduras.”

“Lady of the White-Spired City” was published in
Interzone.
A woman returns from a powerful interstellar civilization to an isolated and backward village on a cold planet, searching for her past. We find the mood and atmosphere compelling.

S
he came, Evriel Pashtan, emissary of his justice the high regent. Weary, silver-haired, faint-hoped she came to Kander, near-forgotten colony circling its cold little rose-hued sun. She greeted the honcho of Colonth, its foremost city; she nodded politely and distributed vids and holos; she attended a festival in her honor. And then she left the ship to the city's technicians for refitting and she flew off in her personal carrier to the far side of the planet, to a highland village enfolded in the deep of winter.

No one came out into the falling dusk to greet her. She pulled her layers of corn-silk closer around her and trudged the few meters through knee-deep drifts of snow to the single village street.

It had not changed so much. The houses were all different, rebuilt ten times or more since she had known them, and yet their number was nearly the same. There in the middle rose the sharp-peaked roof that marked the travelers' rest, its edging still painted scarlet like those in the regent's city—did anyone remember, or was it only tradition now? She paused in front of its door, glancing to the empty street behind her, and then she knocked.

It was a girl of maybe ten or twelve who opened the door, and her dark eyes widened in wonder when she saw Evriel.

“I've come a long way,” Evriel said. “I wonder if I might stop here a while?”

The girl reached tentative fingers towards Evriel's over-robe. “Are you from down the mountain?”

Evriel smiled. “I'm from a good deal farther away than that.”

The girl stepped aside. “Mother will want to see you.” If she was surprised when Evriel walked unerringly to the welcome room with its coal-brimming brazier and its piled cushions, she didn't show it. She left Evriel there among the cushions and soon returned with a tea mug in her hand. Behind her came a woman, ebon-haired, with eyes older than her thirty-odd years.

Evriel rose and offered her hands in the old way. After a pause, the woman clasped them both in hers and kissed them, and Evriel kissed the woman's in turn.

“Sit, stranger, and be welcome,” the woman said, the formal words old and familiar, long though it was since Evriel had heard them last. The woman motioned her to the cushions again while the girl handed Evriel the hot tea mug. “I am Sayla, and this house is open to any who seek shelter. This is my daughter, Asha.” The girl nodded, setting her curls bobbing.

“I am Evriel Pashtan, emissary of our lord the high regent.”

“Emissary?” the woman said, blankly.

“You
are
?” blurted the girl. “From Alabaster?”

“From Alabaster,” Evriel agreed.

“From the home star—it's not possible,” said Sayla. “The ships don't come anymore, not even to Colonth.”

“Not for years and years,” Asha added. “They talk about how a ship fell like a burning egg onto the Colonth plain, and how the people wore strange clothes—like yours.” She reached for Evriel's robe again, then drew back. “But they're all gone now.”

“Why have you come to the village?” said Sayla. “I don't understand. Did you wish to speak with my husband? You cannot. The fever took him this summer past.”

“No, I'm not looking for your husband,” said Evriel. Then she realized what the woman had said. More softly, “I'm so sorry for your loss.”

The woman shrugged. “It was bad timing, was all.”

And what bitterness lay
there
, Evriel wondered. She turned the thought aside. “I should say, I
have
been emissary of the
high regent. I'm on leave now, to travel as I wish for a little while.”

A faint smile, not quite ironed of the pain that had creased it before. “And you come here? What ever for?”

Evriel could not put it so baldly as she wanted—not because of politics, for once, but because the truth sounded feeble, even narcissistic. It
was
narcissistic, looking for one's old footprints on the world. She shouldn't have come.

“Certainly you needn't tell us such things,” Sayla was saying, with careful incuriosity. “It is not a season when we see many visitors”—
not that we ever see many
, the tone implied—“but you are welcome to what we have. Asha, bread and cream for the emissary.”

Asha dashed off, eyes still wide. She returned in moments with a cloth of rye bread and a bowl of goats' milk cream, which she handed to Evriel, and then she stood at the door as both daughter and servant of the house.

“I've visited your village before,” Evriel told Sayla, “long ago. It was…a very peaceful time in my life.” She paused, wondering how to put into words what she'd come so far to ask. “I knew a family before. I can't remember them very well now, it was so long ago. They lived here, I think. Their name was Reizi.”

Sayla's eyebrows rose. “There are Reizis in a village down the mountain. They are my cousins, very distantly. But none have lived here since before I was born—perhaps you confused the villages. One is very much like another.”

Cousins to the Reizis.

Only years of diplomacy kept Evriel's fingers from reaching to touch this woman, so distant a connection and yet nearer than any she'd had since…Since.

Maybe Sayla saw some of that hunger in her eyes. She said something about chores for the night and took herself away. Asha settled into the cushions nearby and paused, apparently trying to decide where to start. Evriel turned her attention to the bread cloth and waited.

“You're really from Alabaster,” Asha said finally.

“I really am,” said Evriel, dipping a chunk of bread into the cream.

“So you've been traveling years and years to come here, haven't you?”

“It has seemed only a bit more than a month to me. But yes, it's been many years since my ship left Regent City.”

“So if you went back…everyone you knew would be dead?” There was no malice in her voice, only curiosity.

“Yes,” Evriel said quietly. “Everyone is already dead except for a handful of emissaries, like myself, off in their starships.”

“Then everyone you visited
here
, when you were here before, is dead as well?”

Evriel nodded.

“You knew the Reizi family when they lived in this village.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew their names?”

“Ander and Ivolda Reizi. And”—Evriel's voice caught—“and a little girl named Lakmi.”
Lakmi, child of my body, daughter of my heart.

Sayla returned and announced it was time for sleep, and led Evriel to the room at the center of the house. A blanket large enough to span the entire room was half-draped over the covered grate in the center, already brimming with coals. Evriel laid aside her heaviest robes and burrowed under the blanket, into the sleeping cushions beneath. Nearby Asha did the same as Sayla closed the door and blew out the candle.

Evriel closed her eyes against the sudden darkness and steadied her breathing, shallowing it, drawing to herself the sleep that threatened not to come. Asha lay only an arm's length away. Would Lakmi have looked like her, at her age?

 

The next morning Evriel woke to a sharp draft blowing past Sayla, standing in the doorway. “They've come to talk to you,” Sayla said. “The other folk of the village. They want to talk to the regent's emissary.”

Of course, her carrier. It was bound to draw curiosity, and hadn't she wanted to talk to them, anyway? Though perhaps not all at once. She pulled on her robes and tidied her white
hair back into its braid, and then followed Sayla to the front door.

For a moment she could only see the deceptive, almost depthless view of brilliant snow and blue shadow. Then the shadows resolved into the long rolling hills down to the Serra River, miles away. It was a view she hadn't seen in forty-five years—or several hundred. Either way, it hadn't changed.

Then somebody coughed, and she realized the lane in front of the house was crowded with villagers—half the population, at least.

Evriel smiled on them all and turned to Sayla. “Bring them to the meeting room one at a time, or in small groups, as they wish.”

Soon enough a small balding man stood in front of her, bowing and nodding, his young wife and three small children behind him. “We come to bless the regent and his emissary, and wish fair success,” he said, stumbling over the formal words but managing to get them all out. His wife nodded while the children stared at Evriel, wide-eyed.

Comforting to hear the old phrases spoken here, when even the honcho of Colonth hadn't known them. Evriel gave them a genuine smile, no hint of diplomatic edge about it. “The regent and his emissary thank you, and bless you likewise.” More bowing, and then they were gone and replaced by another family, with similar greetings.

It wasn't until the third group of well-wishers that Evriel remembered to ask questions: did they know the Reizis, or their kin? What of other emissaries passing between the regent and his colony? “Old Mergo Reizi lives down by the Serra,” she heard, “but he's the last of his kin I know of.” Or, “There was an emissary off in the spacewalker city, I hear. But that was a long time ago.” Or, “I just mind my sheep, Lady Emissary.”

When the last of them was gone, Sayla brought tea and a plate of bread heaped with cured meat—goat, Evriel guessed. She took mug and tea from Sayla and said, “Will you sit with me?”

Sayla crossed her legs and sat down, silent.

“Sayla, how would
you
suggest I look for traces of a little girl? You know better than I who would know, who remembers things.”

“There's the archivist,” Sayla said. “Likely you'll want to see him.”

“You've an archivist here? Yes, I should like very much to speak with him.”
Not yet,
something whispered. If there was nothing, she didn't want to know. Not yet. “And what of your cousin down the mountain, this Mergo Reizi?”

The smallest of grimaces crossed Sayla's face, and was gone. “I doubt you'll get anything from him.”

“Oh?”

“He…hasn't much of a memory anymore. Won't have anything to tell you.”

“I see.” Evriel frowned at a strip of goat and bit in. Excellent; probably supplied to the travelers' rest by a local goat-herd. “Still, I rather think I'd like to meet him.”

Sayla shrugged. “I'll tell you how to get there—you taking your flyer?” When Evriel nodded, she said, “Take Asha with you, she can tell you the landmarks.”

“That sounds like just the thing.”

“I'll tell you,” Sayla repeated. “Just don't go giving any greetings from me.”

 

A beaten track of small footprints circled the carrier. “Kids,” Asha said scornfully, but she approached the carrier cautiously, reaching out to stroke one gleaming wing. Evriel settled her in the cockpit and she peered all around at the dials and switches, her hands carefully folded in her lap. Once in the air she kept her eyes on the white expanse below and said very little, except to point out landmarks: a solitary copse of pines; the long blue shadow that marked a boundary wall.

Mergo Reizi was a rheumy-eyed, suspicious man who declared he had little use for “up-hillers.” He lived in a hut of mud reinforced with straw. Evriel felt a flash of sorrow to think of Lakmi living in such a place, until she reminded herself that the structure couldn't be more than five years old. The man had never heard of any ancestress or cousin
named Lakmi, though if he had Evriel wasn't sure he would have told them. But he was, she thought, telling the truth. He claimed no living relatives.

It was hardly surprising; the girl would have taken another name when she married. A complete sweep of genealogical records for the area might conceivably turn up a Lakmi Reizi, married to a Master So-and-So and proud matriarch of the Clan Such-and-Such.

But this was to have been a short stay; she and the small, ship-merged crew would begin the long voyage home as soon as the ship was refitted. She had already fulfilled the mission's purpose: to appear in Colonth, deliver the regent's many gifts and promises, and remind the colonists of their allegiance to the Regency—for all it mattered to them.

It was Asha who finally broke the silence. “Mother would tell me it was rude to ask questions.”

“I wouldn't,” Evriel said. “Unless you mean to ask rude questions.” She gave Asha an encouraging smile.

Asha shook her head. “No—at least, I don't think they are. But there are things I have to know. If you would tell me,” Asha added, bobbing her head nervously.

“Yes?”

“Is it—that is—we are a very small village, aren't we?”

Evriel thought of Colonth's swinging gates, wider than two village houses together. And then of Regent City, vast anthill of tunnels and streets and spires. “Yes.”

“That must be why you went away?”

“Went away? I visited once before…”

“But you lived here, didn't you? The ‘shining star of the regent king, shot to Kander to speak his words'—that's you, isn't it?”

“Is it a song? I don't…”

“‘Married a son of Kander's earth, a shepherd rough but warm of eye'—don't you know it? But I suppose they didn't write it until you'd gone back to the regent.”

Evriel shook her head, but she was beginning to get the idea. “You've a song about a regent's emissary?”

Asha nodded, and red curls bobbed free of her hat. “I'll sing you all of it, if you like. It's of an emissary that came to
our very village, perched on the tumbling plains, and fell in love with one of the folk and decided to stay, never to fly the long journey across the stars to the city of the regent.” Cadence crept into her voice. “But her love died of the summer fever, and in grief she flew away again, weeping her loss and raging against the planet that killed him. And as she flew she promised that when she came again, it would be with scourging fire.”