Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (30 page)

Onalli shifted, and pressed her again. Tecipiani parried; and again, and again.

Neither of them should have the upper hand. They were both Jaguar Knights; Tecipiani might have been a little less fit, away from the field for so long—but Onalli was hampered by Xochitl’s body, whom she had to keep cradled against her.

Still—

Still, Tecipiani’s gestures were not as fast as they should have been. Another one of her games?

Onalli didn’t care, not anymore. In one of Tecipiani’s over-wide gestures, she saw her opening—and took it. Her blade snaked through; connected, sinking deep above the wrist.

Tecipiani jumped backward—her left hand dangled uselessly, but she’d shifted her knife to the right—and, like many left-handers, she was ambidextrous.

“You’re still good,” Tecipiani admitted, grudgingly.

Onalli looked around once more—the lights were still on—and said, “You haven’t brought anyone else, have you? It’s just you and me.”

Tecipiani made a curt nod; but, when she answered, it had nothing to do with the question. “The House still stands.” There was such desperate intensity in her voice that it stopped Onalli, for a few seconds. “The Eagle Knights were burnt alive; the Otters dispersed into the silver mines to breathe dust until it killed them. The Coyotes died to a man, defending their House against the imperial guards.”

“They died with honor,” Onalli said.

“Honor is a word without meaning,” Tecipiani said. Her voice was steady once more. “There are five hundred Knights in this House, out of which one hundred are unblooded children and novices. I had to think of the future.”

Onalli’s hands clenched. “And Xochitl wasn’t part of the future?”

Tecipiani didn’t move. “Sacrifices were necessary. Who would turn on their own, except men loyal to the Revered Speaker?”

The cold was back in her guts, and in her heart. “You’re sick,” Onalli said. “This wasn’t worth the price of our survival—this wasn’t—”

“Perhaps,” Tecipiani said. “Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do. But we won’t know until long after this, will we?”

That gave her pause—so unlike Tecipiani, to admit she’d been wrong, to put her acts into question. But still—still, it changed nothing.

“And now what?” Onalli asked. “You’ve had your game, Tecipiani. Because that’s all we two were ever to you, weren’t we?”

Tecipiani didn’t move. At last, she made a dismissive gesture. “It could have gone both ways. Two Knights, killed in an escape attempt tragically gone wrong . . .” She spoke as if nothing mattered anymore; her voice cool, emotionless—and that, in many ways, was the most terrifying. “Or a success, perhaps, from your point of view.”

“I could kill you,” Onalli said, and knew it was the truth. No one was perfectly ambidextrous, and, were Onalli to drop Xochitl as Tecipiani had dropped the boy, she’d have the full range of her abilities to call upon.

“Yes,” Tecipiani said. A statement of fact, nothing more. “Or you could escape.”

“Fuck you,” Onalli said. She wanted to say something else—that, when the Revered Speaker was finally dead, she and Xochitl would come back and level the House, but she realized, then, that it was only thanks to Tecipiani that there would still be a House to tear down.

But it still wasn’t worth it. It couldn’t have been.

Gently, she shifted Xochitl, catching her in her arms once more, like a hurt child. “I didn’t come here to kill you,” she said, finally. “But I still hope you burn, Tecipiani, for all you’ve done. Whether it was worth it or not.”

She walked to the end of the courtyard, into the blinding light—to the wall and the ball-court and the exit. Tecipiani made no attempt to stop her; she still stood next to the unconscious body of the boy, looking at some point in the distance.

And, all the way out—into the suburbs of Tenochtitlan, in the aircar Atcoatl was driving—she couldn’t get Tecipiani’s answer out of her mind, nor the burning despair she’d heard in her friend’s voice.

What makes you think I don’t already burn?

She’d always been too good an actress. “Black One take you,” Onalli said, aloud. And she wasn’t really sure anymore if she was asking for suffering, or for mercy.

~ * ~

Alone in her office once more, her hands—her thin, skeletal hands—reach for the shriveled mushrooms of the
teonanácatl
—and everything slowly dissolves into colored patterns, into meaningless dreams.

Even in the dreams, though, she knows what she’s done. The gods have turned Their faces away from her; and every night she wakes up with the memories of the torture chambers—the consequences of what she’s ordered, the consequences she has forced herself to face, like a true warrior.

Here’s the thing: she’s not sure how long she can last.

She burns—every day of her life, wondering if what she did was worth it—if she preserved the House, or corrupted it beyond recognition.

No. No.

Only this is worth remembering: that, like the escaped prisoner, Onalli and Xochitl will survive—going north, into the desert, into some other, more welcoming country, keeping alive the memories of their days together.

And, over Greater Mexica, Tonatiuh the sun will rise again and again, marking all the days of the Revered Speaker’s reign—the rising tide of fear and discontent that will one day topple him. And when it’s finally over, the House that she has saved will go on, into the future of a new Age: a pure and glorious Age, where people like her will have no place.

This is a thought the mind can hold.

~ * ~

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a computer engineer and way too much imagination for a normal hobby. After unsuccessfully trying to make it as an origami artist and a guitar player, she’s now writing speculative fiction, which gives her an excuse for indulging her love of history and mythology. Her short fiction has appeared in
Interzone, Asimov
’
s,
and
The Year
’
s Best Science Fiction,
among other venues. Her novels, the Aztec noir fantasies
Obsidian
and
Blood,
are published by Angry Robot.

<
>

~ * ~

AUTHOR
’
S INTRODUCTION

I’m a first-generation Lebanese Canadian, but the last three years have seen me living in the southwest of England: above a wine bar, on the head of a hill, and in an old library built from dismantled ships, while working on a PhD about fairies in Romantic-era writing.

“The Green Book” began in an actual green journal I bought for Nicole Kornher-Stace. I didn’t want to give it to her empty, so I began scribbling a story in it, about a woman who was absorbed into a book as she died. I filled it with ink blots and different handwriting, tried to build an artifact of it. Nicole later transcribed it for me at my request, so I could work on it further.

Fast forward a year, and Cat Valente was asking me to contribute to
Apex.
I’d been stewing a story about sentient diamond oceans on Neptune for some time, but didn’t yet have the language necessary to write it, and as the deadline approached, was getting more and more frustrated. With a day to go, I gave up and told Cat I couldn’t do it, I was sorry. Cat became Very Stern, said she knew otherwise, and gave me an extra day; I dropped the diamond oceans and picked up “The Green Book” again. Eight hours later, I had a story. I hid from the Internet for a whole day after sending it in, convinced it wasn’t any good—and here I am now, writing this. I’m amazed.

THE GREEN BOOK

A
mal El-Mohtar

MS. Orre. 1013A Miscellany of materials copied from within Master Leuwin Orrerel’s
(d.
Lady Year 673, Bright Be the Edges) library by Dominic Merrowin
(d.
Lady Year 673, Bright Be the Edges). Contains Acts I and II of Aster’s
The Golden Boy
’
s Last Ship,
Act III scene I of
The Rose Petal,
and the entirety of
The Blasted Oak.
Incomplete copy of item titled only THE GREEN BOOK, authorship multiple and uncertain. Notable for extensive personal note by Merrowin, intended as correspondence with unknown recipient, detailing evidence of personal connection between Orrerel and the Sisterhood of Knives. Many leaves regrettably lost, especially within text of THE GREEN BOOK: evidence of discussion of Lady Year religious and occult philosophies, traditions in the musical education of second daughters, and complex reception of Aster’s poetry, all decayed beyond recovery. Markers placed at sites of likely omission.

~ * ~

My dear friend,

I am copying this out while I can. Leuwin is away, has left me in charge of the library. He has been doing that more and more, lately—errands for the Sisterhood, he says, but I know it’s mostly his own mad research. Now I know why.

His mind is disturbed, Twelve years of teaching me, and he never once denied me the reading of any book, but this—this thing has hold of him, I am certain plays with him. I thought it was his journal, at first; he used to write in it so often, closet himself with it for hours, and it seemed to bring him joy. Now I feel there is something fell and chanty about it, and beg your opinion of the whole, that we may work together to Leuwin’s salvation.

The book I am copying out is small—only four inches by five. It is a vivid green, quite exactly the color of sunlight through the oak leaves in the arbor, and just as mottled; its cover is pulp wrapped in paper, and its pages are thick with needle-thorn and something that smells of thyme.

There are six different hands in evidence. The first, the invocation, is archaic: large block letters with hardly any ornamentation. I place it during Journey Year 200—250, Long Did It Wind, and it is written almost in green paste: I observe a grainy texture to the letters, though I dare not touch them. Sometimes the green of them is obscured by rust-brown stains that I suppose to be blood, given the circumstances that produced the second hand.

The second hand is modern, as are the rest, though they vary significantly from each other.

The second hand shows evidence of fluency, practice, and ease in writing, though the context was no doubt grim. It is written in heavy charcoal, and is much faded, but still legible.

The third hand is a child’s uncertain wobbling, where the letters are large and uneven; it is written in fine ink with a heavy implement. I find myself wondering if it was a knife.

The fourth is smooth, an agony of right-slanted whorls and loops, a gallows-cursive that nooses my throat with the thought of who must have written it.

The fifth hand is very similar to the second. It is dramatically improved, but there is no question that it was produced by the same individual, who claims to be named Cynthia. It is written in ink rather than charcoal—but the ink is strange. There is no trace of nib or quill in the letters. It is as if they welled up from within the page.

The sixth hand is Leuwin’s.

I am trying to copy them as exactly as possible, and am bracketing my own additions.

Go in Gold,

Dominic Merrowin

~ * ~

[
First Hand: invocation]

Hail!

To the Mistress of Crossroads,
[blood stain to far right]

The Fetch in the Forest

The Witch of the Glen

The Hue and Cry of mortal men

Winsome and lissom and Fey!

Hail to the
[blood stain obscuring]
Mother of Changelings

of doubled paths and trebled means

of troubled dreams and salt and ash

Hail!

~ * ~

[Second Hand: charcoal smudging,
two pages; dampened and stained]

cold in here—death and shadows—funny there should be a book! the universe provides for last will and testament!
[illegible]

[illegible]
I cannot write, mustn’t
[illegible]
they’re coming I hear them they’ll hear scratching
[illegible]
knives to tickle my throat oh please

they say they’re kind. I think that’s what we tell ourselves to be less afraid because how could anyone know? do
[blood stain
] the dead speak?

do the tongues blackening around their necks sing?

why do I write? save me, please, save me, stone and ivy and bone I want to live I want to breathe they have no right
[illegible]

~ * ~

[Third Hand: block capitals. Implement uncertain—possibly a knife, ink-tipped.]

What a beautiful book this is. I wonder where she found it. I could write poems in it. This paper is so thick, so creamy, it puts me in mind of the bones in the ivy. Her bones were lovely! I cannot wait to see how they will sprout in it—I kept her zygomatic bone, but her lacrimal bits will make such pretty patterns in the leaves!

I could almost feel that any trace of ink against this paper would be a poem, would comfort my lack of skill.

I must show my sisters. I wish I had more of this paper to give them. We could write each other such secrets as only bones ground into pulpy paper could know. Or I would write of how beautiful are sister-green’s eyes, how shy are sister-salt’s lips, how golden sister-bell’s laugh