The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  “Out of the way. Please!” she cried, trying to push through them, but the people wouldn’t move.

  Someone spoke to her from the crowd, then, a quiet voice, telling her calmly that the police had been called, that she needed to go. Numb and hollow inside, she could only stare over the heads of the people gathered around her at the red balloon, bobbing happily in the air, wilting even as it receded into the distance. The balloon vanished around a corner as the mother and son walked out of sight.

  As kind hands turned her around and got her walking away from the crowd, it occurred to her that she had gotten what she wanted. She had taken away James’s most precious possession. She had hurt him. In return, the son of a bitch had tried to kill her.

  I win, she thought, her mind and heart brittle. I get to live.

  Then the tears came, in great, wracking sobs.

  I get to live.

  ARAMINTA, OR, THE WRECK OF THE AMPHIDRAKE

  NAOMI NOVIK

  Lady Araminta was seen off from the docks at Chenstowe-on-Sea with great ceremony if not much affection by her assembled family. She departed in the company of not one but two maids, a hired eunuch swordsman, and an experienced professional chaperone with the Eye of Horus branded upon her forehead, to keep watch at night while the other two were closed.

  Sad to say these precautions were not entirely unnecessary. Lady Araminta—the possessor of several other, more notable names besides, here omitted for discretion—had been caught twice trying to climb out her window, and once in her father’s library, reading a spellbook. On this last occasion she had fortunately been discovered by the butler, a reliable servant of fifteen years, so the matter was hushed up; but it had decided her fate.

  Her father’s senior wife informed her husband she refused to pay for the formal presentation to the Court necessary for Araminta to make her debut. “I have five girls to see established besides her,” Lady D—said, “and I cannot have them ruined by the antics which are certain to follow.”

  (Lest this be imagined the fruits of an unfair preference, it will be as well to note here that Araminta was in fact the natural daughter of her Ladyship, and the others in question her daughters-in-marriage, rather than the reverse.)

  “It has been too long,” Lady D continued, severely, and she is spoilt beyond redemption.”

  Lord D—hung his head: he felt all the guilt of the situation, and deserved to. As a youth, he had vowed never to offer prayers to foreign deities such as Juno; and out of obstinacy he had refused to recant, so it had taken three wives and fourteen years to acquire the necessary son. Even then the boy had proven rather a disappointment: sickly and slight, and as he grew older preferring of all things literature to the manly arts of fencing or shooting, or even sorcery, which would at least have been respectable.

  “But it is rather messy,” young Avery said, apologetic but unmoving, even at the age of seven: he had inherited the family trait of obstinacy, in full measure. It is never wise to offend foreign deities, no matter how many good old-fashioned British fairies one might have invited to the wedding.

  Meanwhile Araminta, the eldest, had long shown more aptitude for riding and shooting than for the cooler arts, and a distressing tendency to gamble. Where her mother would have seen these inappropriate tendencies nipped in the bud, Lord D—, himself a notable sportsman, had selfishly indulged the girl: he liked to have company hunting when he was required at home to do his duty to his wives—and with three, he was required more often than not.

  “It is not too much to ask that at least one of my offspring not embarrass me on the field,” had been one of his favorite remarks, when chastised; so while her peers were entering into society as polished young ladies, beginning their study of banking or medicine, Lady Araminta was confirmed only as a sportswoman of excessive skill, with all the unfortunate results heretofore described.

  Something of course had to be done, so a match was hastily arranged with the colonial branch of a similarly exalted line. The rumors she had already excited precluded an acceptable marriage at home, but young men of good birth, having gone oversea to seek a better fortune than a second son’s portion, often had some difficulty acquiring suitable wives.

  In those days, the journey took nearly six months, and was fraught with considerable dangers: storms and pirates both patrolled the shipping lanes; leviathans regularly pulled down ships, mistaking them for whales; and strange fevers and lunacies thrived amid the undersea forests of the Shallow Sea, where ships might find themselves becalmed for months above the overgrown ruins of the Drowned Lands.

  Naturally Lady Araminta was sent off with every consideration for her safety. The Bluegill was a sleek modern vessel, named for the long brightly-painted iron spikes studded in a ridge down her keel to fend off the leviathans, and armed with no fewer than ten cannon. The cabin had three locks upon the door, the eunuch lay upon the threshold outside, the maids slept to either side of Araminta in the large bed, the chaperone had a cot at the foot; and as the last refuge of virtue she had been provided at hideous expense with a Tiresian amulet.

  She was given no instruction for the last, save to keep it in its box, and put it on only if the worst should happen—the worst having been described to her rather hazily by Lady D—, who felt suspiciously that Araminta already knew a good deal too much of such things.

  There were not many tears in evidence at the leave-taking, except from Lady Ginevra, the next-oldest, who felt it was her sisterly duty to weep, though privately delighted at the chance of advancing her own debut a year. Araminta herself shed none; only said, “Well, good-bye,” and went aboard unrepentant, having unbeknownst to all concealed a sword, a very fine pair of dueling pistols and a most inappropriate grimoire in her dowry-chest during the upheaval of the packing. She was not very sorry to be leaving home: she was tired of being always lectured, and the colonies seemed to her a hopeful destination: a young man who had gone out to make his fortune, she thought, could not be quite so much a stuffed-shirt.

  After all the preparations and warnings, the journey seemed to her so uneventful as to be tiresome: one day after another altered only by the degree of the blowing wind, until they came to the Drowned Lands and the wind died overhead. She enjoyed looking over the railing for the first few days, at the pale white gleam of marble and masonry which could yet be glimpsed in places, when the sailors gave her a bit of spell-light to cast down below.

  “There’s nowt to see, though, miss,” the master said in fatherly tones, while she peered hopefully. Only the occasional shark, or sometimes one of the enormous sea-spiders, clambering over the ruined towers with their long spindly red legs, but that was all—no gleam of lost treasure, no sparks of ancient magic. “There’s no treasure to be had here, not without a first-rate sorcerer to raise it up for you.”

  She sighed, and insisted instead on being taught how to climb the rigging, much to the disgust of the sailors. “Not like having a proper woman on board,” more than one might be heard quietly muttering.

  Araminta was not perturbed, save by the increasing difficulty in coaxing interesting lessons from them. She resorted after a while to the privacy of her cabin, where through snatched moments she learned enough magic to hide the grimoire behind an illusion of The Wealth of Nations, so she might read it publicly and no-one the wiser. The amulet she saved for last, and tried quietly in the middle of the night, while the chaperone Mrs. Penulki snored. The maids, at first rather startled, were persuaded with only a little difficulty to keep the secret. (It must be admitted they were somewhat young and flighty creatures, and already overawed by their noble charge.)

  Two slow months they spent crossing the dead shallow water, all their sails spread hopefully, and occasionally putting men over the side in boats to row them into one faint bit of current or another. All the crew cheered the night the first storm broke, a great roaring tumult that washed the windows of her high stern cabin with foam and left both of the maids moaning weakly in the water-closet. Mrs. Pe
nulki firmly refused to entertain the possibility that Araminta might go outside for a breath of fresh air, even when the storm had at last died down, so she spent a stuffy, restless night and woke with the changing of the watch.

  She lay on her back listening to the footsteps slapping against the wood, the creak of rope and sail. And then she was listening only to an unfamiliar silence, loud in its way as the thunder; no cheerful cursing, not a snatch of morning song or clatter of breakfast.

  She pushed her maids until they awoke and let her climb out to hurry into her clothes. Outside, the sailors on deck were standing silent and unmoving at their ropes and tackle, as if preserved in wax, all of them watching Captain Rellowe. He was in the bows, with his long-glass to his eye aimed out to port. The dark tangled mass of storm-clouds yet receded away from them, a thin gray curtain dropped across half the stage of the horizon. The smooth curve of the ocean bowed away to either side, unbroken.

  He put down the glass. “Mr. Willis, all hands to make sail, north-northwest.And go to quarters,” he added, even as the master cupped his hands around his mouth to bellow orders.

  The hands burst into frantic activity, running past her; below she could hear their curses as they ran the ship’s guns up into their places, to the complaint of the creaking wheels. “Milady, you will go inside,” Captain Rellowe said, crossing before her to the quarterdeck, none of his usual awkward smiles and scraping; he did not even lift his hat.

  “Oh, what is it?” Liesl, one of the maids said, gasping.

  “Pirates, I expect,” Araminta said, tugging her enormously heavy dower chest out from under the bed. “Oh, what good will wailing do? Help me.”

  The other ship emerged from the rain-curtain shortly, and became plainly visible out the windows of Araminta’s stern cabin. It was a considerable heavier vessel, with a sharp-nosed aggressive bow that plowed the waves into a neat furrow, and no hull-spikes at all: instead her hull was painted a vile greenly color, with white markings like teeth also painted around.

  Liesl and Helia both moaned and clutched at one another. “I will die before you are taken,” Molloy, the eunuch, informed Araminta.

  “Precious little difference it will be to me, if I am taken straightaway after,” she said practically, and did not look up from her rummaging. “Go speak to one of those fellows outside: we must all have breeches, and shirts.”

  The chaperone made some stifled noises of protest, which Araminta ignored, and which were silenced by the emergence of the pistols and the sword.

  The jewels and the trinkets were buried amid the linen and silk gowns, well bundled in cloth against temptation for straying eyes, so they were nearly impossible to work out. The amulet in particular, nothing more than a tiny nondescript silver drachma on a thin chain, would have been nearly impossible to find if Araminta had not previously tucked it with care into the very back corner. It was just as well, she reflected, glancing up to see how the pirate vessel came on, that boredom had driven her to experimentation.

  From the quarterdeck, Captain Rellowe too watched the ship coming up on their heels; his glass was good enough to show him the pirates’ faces, lean and hungry and grinning. He was a good merchant captain; he had wriggled out of more than one net, but this one drew taut as a clean line drawn from his stern to her bows. The once-longed-for steady wind blew into his sails with no sign of dying, feeding the chase still better.

  Amphidrake was her name, blazoned in yellow, and she was a fast ship, if rigged a little slapdash and dirty. Her hull at least was clean, he noted bitterly, mentally counting the knots he was losing to his own hull-spikes. Not one ship in a thousand met a leviathan, in season, and cannon saw them safe as often as not; but spikes the owners would have, and after the crossing of the Shallow Sea, they would surely by now be tangled with great streamers of kelp, to say nothing of barnacles and algae.

  (The storm, of course, would have washed away any kelp; but the spikes made as satisfying a target to blame as any, and preferable to considering that perhaps it had not been wise to hold so very close to the regular sea-lanes, even though it was late in the season.)

  In any event, the pirate would catch the Bluegill well before the hour of twilight, which might otherwise have given them a chance to slip away; and every man aboard knew it. Rellowe did not like to hear the mortal hush that had settled over his ship, nor to feel the eyes pinned upon his back. They could not expect miracles of him, he would have liked to tell them roundly; but of course he could say nothing so disheartening.

  The Amphidrake gained rapidly. The bo’sun’s mates began taking around the grog, and the bo’sun himself the cat, to encourage the men. The hand-axes and cutlasses and pistols were lain down along the rail, waiting.

  “Mr. Gilpin,” Captain Rellowe said, with a beckon to his first mate, and in undertone said to him, “Will you be so good as to ask the ladies if for their protection they would object to putting on male dress?”

  “Already asked-for, sir, themselves,” Gilpin said, in a strange, stifled tone, his eyes darting meaningfully to the side, and Rellowe turning found himself facing a young man, with Lady Araminta’s long black curls pulled back into a queue.

  Rellowe stared, and then looked away, and then looked at her head—his head—and then glanced downward again, and then involuntarily a little lower—and then away again—He did not know how to look. It was no trick of dress; the shirt was open too loose for that, the very line of the jaw was different, and the waist.

  Of course one heard of such devices, but generally only under intimate circumstances, or as the subject of rude jokes. Rellowe (if he had ever thought of such things at all) had vaguely imagined some sort of more caricaturish alteration; he had not gone very far in studies of sorcery himself. In reality, the line between lady and lord was distressingly thin. Araminta transformed had a sword, and two pistols, and a voice only a little high to be a tenor, in which she informed him, “I should like to be of use, sir, if you please.”

  He meant of course to refuse, vocally, and have her removed to the medical orlop if necessary by force; and so he should have done, if only the Amphidrake had not in that very moment fired her bow-chasers, an early warning-shot, and painfully lucky had taken off an alarming section of the quarterdeck rail.

  All went into confusion, and he had no thought for anything but keeping the men from panic. Three men only had been hit even by so much as a splinter, but a drop of blood spilled was enough to spark the built-up store of terror. The mates had been too free with the grog, and now the lash had less effect: a good many of the men had to be thrust bodily back into their places, or pricked with sword-point, and if Araminta joined in the effort, Rellowe managed not to see.

  She was perfectly happy, herself; it had not yet occurred to her they might lose. The ship had been very expensive, and the cannon seemed in excellent repair to her eye: bright brass and ebony polished, with fresh paint. Of course there was a personal danger, while she was on-deck, but high spirits made light of that, and she had never balked at a fence yet.

  “You cannot mean to be a coward in front of all these other stout fellows,” she sternly told one sailor, a scrawny underfed gaol-rat attempting to creep away down the forward ladderway, and helped him back to the rail with a boot at his back end.

  The crash of cannon-fire was glorious, one blast after another, and then one whistling by overhead plowed into the mizzenmast. Splinters went flaying skin in all directions, blood in bright arterial spray hot and startling. Araminta reached up and touched her cheek, surprised, and looked down at the bo’sun, staring glassy-eyed back at her, dead at her feet. Her shirt was striped collar to waist with a long sash of red blood.

  She did not take it very badly; she had done a great deal of hunting, and stern lecturing from her father had cured her of any tendency to be missish, even when in at the kill. Elves, of course, were much smaller, and with their claws and pointed teeth inhuman, but near enough she was not tempted in the present moment either to swoon or to be
inconveniently ill, unlike one small midshipman noisily vomiting upon the deck nearby.

  Above her head, the splintered mizzen creaked, moaned, and toppled: the sails making hollow thumping noises like drum skins as it came down, entangling the mainmast. Araminta was buried beneath a choking weight of canvas, stinking with slush. The ship’s way was checked so abruptly she could feel the griping through the boards while she struggled to force her way out through the thick smothering folds. All was muffled beneath the sailcloth, screams, pistol-shots all distant, and then for a moment Captain Rellowe’s voice rose bellowing over the fray, “Fire!”

  But their own cannon spoke only with stuttering, choked voices. Before they had even quite finished, a second tremendous broadside roar thundered out in answer, one ball after another pounding into them so the Bluegill shook like a withered old rattle-plant. Splinters rained against the canvas, a shushing noise, and at last with a tremendous heave she managed to buy enough room to draw her sword, and cut a long tear to escape through.

  Pirates were leaping across the boards: grappling hooks clawed onto whatever was left of the rail, and wide planks thrust out to make narrow bridges. The deck was awash in blood and wreckage, of the ship and of men, torn limbs and corpses underfoot.

  “Parley,” Captain Rellowe was calling out, a shrill and unbecoming note in his voice, without much hope: and across the boards on the deck of the other ship, the pirate captain only laughed.

  “Late for that now, Captain,” he called back. “No, it’s to the Drowned Lands for all of you,” cheerful and clear as a bell over the water. He was a splendidly looking fellow, six feet tall in an expansive coat of wool dyed priest’s-crimson, with lace cuffs and gold braid. It was indeed the notorious Weedle, who had once taken fourteen prizes in a single season, and made hostage Lord Tan Cader’s eldest son.