The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight, Page 31

  “Under a wooden bridge. How sensible.”

  He sighed patiently. There was a green flare, and a smell of brimstone. I have to confess, my curiosity was piqued. As you may have gathered, I can’t resist a curiosity. “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “In hell,” he replied, “there’s one material fire, and yet it shall not burn all men alike.” He grinned. “Allardyce, Duchess of Cremona.”

  I sat down. “Which he never finished,” I pointed out. “Pity, it would’ve been a good play. You know Master Allardyce, then.”

  He nodded. “Oh yes. Sold his soul for a mighty line. Stupid thing to do, he hasn’t written anything worth a damn since.” He grinned. “Worth a damn. Unintentional, I assure you.”

  I shivered. Like poor old Morley’s Faustus, three acts of fatuous clowning. “So that’s hell fire, is it? Interesting.”

  He nodded. “The genuine article,” he said.

  I reached out. It was certainly warm enough. “No smoke.”

  “Some of us have to work there.”

  It was good to be warm again. “So that’s what I’ve got in store for me, is it? Better get used to it, I suppose.”

  “You?” He gave me a pained look. “Hardly. No, feast your eyes on it while you can. You’ll never see it again. Not unless you’re very wicked hereafter, which is unlikely.”

  I frowned. “But I thought—”

  “You were led into temptation. You were strong. I am content, you said.”

  “But I thought,” I repeated, “I’d committed the sin of pride. Hence one burnt theatre, one wrecked ship, my tannery and my ropewalk closed down by the plague—”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “My three farms on the Pembrokeshire coast washed into the sea,” I pointed out. “Give me some credit. That’s divine retribution.”

  He gave me a look that made me feel four inches tall. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “All right, here.” From inside his coat he pulled out a roll of parchment. I recognised it at once. “Where did you get that?”

  “What? Oh, from my lord Devereaux’s sale. Didn’t you hear? Attainted for treason, his goods sold off at auction. I got this very cheap. Of course, it’s not genuine.”

  The book of Job, in Job’s own handwriting. “Of course it isn’t,” I said. “For a start, it’s in Latin.”

  He nodded, and put it down on the ground. “The damned,” he said, “lead happy, prosperous lives, unless they’re idiots like Master Allardyce, who doesn’t know what he wants. They screw the poor, steal, utter false coin, forge their rich uncles’ wills and murder them; outward prosperity is no reliable indication of moral virtue. Or they want what they’re not supposed to have, and get it. This doesn’t make them unhappy. Usually, quite the reverse. The man who loses everything at one fell swoop, on the other hand—” He nodded at the book. “A signal honour. Many are called, but few are comprehensively dumped on. I really only wanted to tell you you’d won.”

  I could have strangled him. “Is that right?”

  “If right means correct, yes. If right means fair or just, I’d have to refer that to my superiors. I don’t have input,” he explained. “I just do as I’m told.”

  It was a long time before I felt like saying anything. “In the book,” I said, “Job gets it all back again in the end.”

  “Quite. However, it’s a moral exemplar, not a template. You can’t rely on it, is what I’m saying.”

  I sighed. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “I was led into temptation.”

  “You were.”

  “I said, no thanks, I have everything I could possibly want. I passed the test.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Fine. So everything was taken from me, and here I am under a bridge, no money, half a stale loaf, and you for company.”

  “There’s no need to be nasty,” he said. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  Our exits and our entrances. “Delighted,” I said. “When I die of hunger or cold or rheumatic of the lungs, I’ll go straight to heaven. Isn’t that nice.”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “That’s the point.”

  I shook my head. You know that distinct muzziness when you’ve got a cold coming. “I take it you’re familiar with scripture.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course you are. In that case, please be so good as to explain the book of Job to me. As a favour. If you’ve got two minutes.”

  He looked puzzled. “It’s really quite straightforward,” he said. “God tests His servant. The servant passes the test. Everybody wins. That’s it.”

  I might have known. After all, I’ve spent a big slab of my working life with audiences. “That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is presently winging its way over your head like a flock of geese. Really, don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “Fine.” I leaned back against the floorboards of the bridge. “Job complains to God. Why are you doing this to me? Remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “God says, where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Which is a weak and ambivalent answer, but I assume what He’s saying is, puny mortal, you can’t begin to understand the mysteries of My providence, so don’t even bother trying. Essentially correct?”

  He shrugged. “More or less.”

  “Fine. Now try and look at it the way I do, as if it was a play I was thinking about putting on at the theatre. God says all that to Job, yes? But, a few scenes earlier, we saw it all for ourselves. We saw Satan leading God into temptation; bet you your faithful servant will crumple up like a dead leaf, he says, and God falls for it like a ton of bricks. He tortures this good, pious man—kills his sons, brings him out all over in boils, for crying out loud—and why? Because the tempter tempted Him, and the tempter won. And what’s His excuse? Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth? Which,” I added bitterly, “is garbage—”

  He was shocked. “Steady on,” he said.

  “Yes, but it is. How dare He say His divine plan is ineffable and too sublime for mortal brains, when we’ve just seen it for ourselves? And it’s not even a plan, it’s God being made a monkey of by the Devil.” I shook my head, rather ostentatiously. “Take away the fool, gentlemen. They’d boo it off the stage in Southwark.”

  He was looking at me, but I couldn’t help that. “Fine,” he said. “You may just have a point, though I’m not saying you do, I’m just—”

  “Saying?”

  He nodded. “But I still don’t see the difficulty. You’ve achieved salvation. What more could you possibly want?”

  I smiled. “You mean, I should be content. As I was before all this started.”

  You know when you’re playing chess, and you think you’re doing rather well, and then your opponent says, Checkmate, and you look, and he’s right. He stared at me. “So?”

  “Ask me what I want.”

  “All right. What do you—?”

  “I want it all back,” I said. “I want my theatre and my ship and my businesses and my farms. And if God isn’t inclined to give them to me, I’m asking you. Your lot.”

  He was horrified. “You can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “There would have to be a price.”

  I laughed out loud. I’d had a hunch for some time, and now was the time to see if I was right. I stuck my hand into the heart of the fire and held it there.

  He was gawping at me as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “Of course not. I can spot a fake a mile off.”

  “But it’s—”

  “Just stage fire. Like stage blood, or the fake daggers that retract when you stab someone.” My fingers weren’t even warm. “My stuff,” I said. “Do I get it back, or not?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “Yes, please.”

  ~ ~ ~

  And it was so. Just like that. Magic.

  W
hen he vanished into thin air, I fished an ember out of the root of the fire, wrapped it in moss and tucked it into the heel of one of my spare clogs. It was still faintly smouldering when I got back to London. I called to see my lord Devereaux, newly released from the Tower, with a full pardon. In this shoe, I told him, I have an ember of genuine authentic hell-fire. How much do you want for it? he asked.

  With the proceeds, I rebuilt my theatre. Master Allardyce’s play—well, you don’t need me to tell you, you’ll have been to see it, six or seven times, like everybody else in London. Within six months, I was better off than I’d ever been. And now? I’m content. I have everything I could possibly want. I mean it.

  ~ ~ ~

  When I was a boy, I found a message in a bottle. Last week, Master Cork came to see me. “You’ll like this,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “What is it?”

  He showed me a tiny scrap of parchment. “This is Merlin’s handwriting,” he said. “It was found in a bottle by a boy on a beach in Wales, a hundred years ago. Great scholars of the church tried to decipher it, but none of them was wise or good enough, and they failed. In frustration, they threw it away. But only last week, it turned up in a sack of old scraps on its way to the paper-mill, and by some miracle I was there and recognised it for what it was. And now it can be yours,” he added, “for a mere five pounds.”

  Sometimes you don’t argue, even when you know you could get it for less. When I’d got rid of him, I spread it out on my desk. It kept trying to curl up at the corners. The writing, as I’d guessed some time ago, was just ordinary Welsh, which none of the learned, high-born Fathers could read. All it said was—

  The plague is carried by the fleas that infest rats.

  Which is just the sort of thing you’d expect Merlin to know; that wise, humane, practical pagan Welshman. Was it genuine? I think so. My poor old friend the priest died of the plague, remember.

  My mother used to preserve things in bottles. Properly sealed, they keep good indefinitely.

  I walked down to Westminster and squelched through the sticky black mud until I found what I was looking for. It was there, sure enough; a bottle, its green head sticking up out of the loathsome glop. I knelt down and washed it out, then popped the scrap of parchment into it, shoved in the cork I’d had the forethought to bring with me, and threw the bottle out as far as I could make it go.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  K.J. Parker is the author of the best-selling ‘Engineer’ trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous ‘Fencer’ (The Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and ‘Scavenger’ (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies, and has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. K.J. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.

  FOXFIRE, FOXFIRE

  Yoon Ha Lee

  IF I’D LISTENED to the tiger-sage’s warning all those years ago, I wouldn’t be trapped in the city of Samdae during the evacuation. Old buildings and new had suffered during the artillery battle, and I could hear the occasional wailing of sirens. Even at this hour, families led hunched grandmothers and grandfathers away from their old homes, or searched abandoned homes in the hopes of finding small treasures: salt, rags, dried peppers. As I picked my way through the streets tonight, I saw the flower-shaped roof tiles for which Samdae was known, broken and scattered beneath my feet. Faraway, blued by distance, lights guttered from those skyscrapers still standing, dating to the peninsula’s push to modernization. It had not done anything to prevent the civil war.

  I had weighed the merits of tonight’s hunt. Better to return to fox-form, surely, and slip back to the countryside; abandon the purpose that had brought me to Samdae all those years ago. But I only needed one more kill to become fully human. And I didn’t want to off some struggling shopkeeper or midwife. For one thing, I had no grudge against them. For another, I had no need of their particular skills.

  No; I wandered the Lantern District in search of a soldier. Soldiers were easy enough to find, but I wanted a nice strapping specimen. At the moment I was posing as a prostitute, the only part of this whole affair my mother would have approved of. Certain human professions were better-suited to foxes than others, she had liked to say. My mother had always been an old-fashioned fox.

  “Baekdo,” she had said when I was young, “why can’t you be satisfied with chickens and mice? You think you’ll be able to stop with sweet bean cakes, but the next thing you know, it will be shrimp crackers and chocolate-dipped biscuits, and after that you’ll take off your beautiful fur to walk around in things with buttons and pockets and rubber soles. And then one of the humans will fall in love with you and discover your secret, and you’ll end up like your Great-Aunt Seonghwa, as a bunch of oracle bones in some shaman’s purse.”

  Foxes are just as bad at listening to their mothers as humans are. My mother had died before the war broke out. I had brought her no funeral-offerings. My relatives would have been shocked by that idea, and my mother, a traditionalist, would have wanted to be left to the carrion-eaters.

  I had loved the Lantern District for a long time. I had taken my first kill there, a lucky one really. I’d crept into a courtesan’s apartment, half-drunk on the smells of quince tea and lilac perfume. At the time I had no way of telling a beautiful human from an ugly one—I later learned that she had been a celebrated beauty—but her layered red and orange silks had reminded me of autumn in the forest.

  Tonight I wore that courtesan’s visage. Samdae’s remaining soldiers grew bolder and bolder with the breakdown in local government, so only those very desperate or stubborn continued to ply their trade. I wasn’t worried on my own behalf, of course. After ninety-nine kills, I knew how to take care of myself.

  There. I spotted a promising prospect lingering at the corner, chatting up a cigarette-seller. He was tall, not too old, with a good physique. He was in uniform, with the red armband that indicated that he supported the revolutionaries. Small surprise; everyone who remained in Samdae made a show of supporting the revolutionaries. Many of the loyalists had fled overseas, hoping to raise support from the foreign powers. I wished them luck. The loyalists were themselves divided between those who supported the queen’s old line and those who wished to install a parliament in place of the Abalone Throne. Fascinating, but not my concern tonight.

  I was sauntering toward the delicious-looking soldier when I heard the cataphract’s footsteps. A Jangmi 2-7, judging from the characteristic whine of the servos. Even if I hadn’t heard it coming—and who couldn’t?—the stirring of the small gods of earth and stone would have alerted me to its approach. They muttered distractingly. My ears would have flattened against my skull if they could have.

  Superstitious people called the cataphracts ogres, because of their enormous bipedal frames. Some patriots disliked them because they had to be imported from overseas. Our nation didn’t have the ability to manufacture them, a secret that the foreigners guarded jealously.

  This one was crashing through the street. People fled. No one wanted to be around if a firefight broke out, especially with the armaments a typical cataphract was equipped with. It was five times taller than a human, with a stride that would have cratered the street with every step, all that mass crashing down onto surprisingly little feet if not for the bargains the manufacturers had made with the small gods of earth and stone.

  What was a lone cataphract doing in this part of the city? A scout? A deserter? But what deserter in their right mind would bring something as easy to track as a cataphract with them?

  Not my business. Alas, my delicious-looking soldier had vanished along with everyone else. And my bones were starting to hurt in the particular way that indicated that I had sustained human-shape too long.

  On the other hand, while the cataphract’s great strides made it faster than I was in this shape, distances had a way of accommodating themselves to a fox’s desires. A dangerous idea took shape in my head. Why settle for a common soldier when I could
have a cataphract pilot, one of the elites?

  I ducked around a corner into the mouth of an alley, then kicked off my slippers, the only part of my dress that weren’t spun from fox-magic. (Magical garments never lasted beyond a seduction. My mother had remarked that this was the fate of all human clothes anyway.) I loved those slippers, which I had purloined from a rich merchant’s daughter, and it pained me to leave them behind. But I could get another pair of slippers later.

  Anyone watching the transformation would only have seen a blaze of coalescing red, like fire and frost swirled together, before my bones resettled into their native shape. Their ache eased. The night-smells of the city sharpened: alcohol, smoke, piss, the occasional odd whiff of stew. I turned around nine times—nine is a number sacred to foxes—and ran through the city’s mazed streets.

  The Lantern District receded behind me. I emerged amid rubble and the stink of explosive residue. The riots earlier in the year had not treated the Butterfly District kindly. The wealthier families had lived here. Looters had made short work of their possessions. I had taken advantage of the chaos as well, squirreling away everything from medicines to salt in small caches; after all, once I became human, I would need provisions for the journey to one of the safer cities to the south.

  It didn’t take long to locate the cataphract. Its pilot had parked it next to a statue, hunched down as if that would make it less conspicuous. Up close, I now saw why the pilot had fled—whatever it was they were fleeing. Despite the cataphract’s menacing form, its left arm dangled oddly. It looked like someone had shot up the autocannon, and the cataphract’s armor was decorated by blast marks. While I was no expert, I was amazed the thing still functioned.

  The statue, one of the few treasures of the district to escape damage, depicted a courtesan who had killed an invading general a few centuries ago by clasping her arms around him and jumping off a cliff with him. My mother had remarked that if the courtesan had had proper teeth, she could have torn out the general’s throat and lived for her trouble. Fox patriotism was not much impressed by martyrs. I liked the story, though.