Page 27

Time is an illusion. Lifetimes doubly so.

Collapsing the Wavefunction: A Compendium of Maybes , by Boris

Clovis

Something tugged at Clovis. She yawned hugely, batting a lazy hand at the irritation, still wrapped in sleep. She had been dreaming that she was falling, but the nightmare had given over to dreams of sunshine, blue skies, and smooth fingers interlocked with her own.

Something tugged at her. A faint, sourceless ripple of worry ran through her. She hunched in on herself.

Fear, like other weaknesses, was something Clovis admitted to herself, but not to others. To deny such things would be to omit them from strategy and tactics, leaving oneself vulnerable. To share them would be to put those weaknesses in the hands of potential enemies, and everyone she had ever met was a potential enemy.

Heights frightened her. The library, as she’d experienced it for the first twenty years of her life, was flat. Spilled water did not run. Falling from any elevation more than that of a reading desk was a rarity. She had faced her fear in the Mechanism, but somehow the heights and drops of the real world had still had surprises to offer her. Surprises that had remained undiscovered until very recently, when she’d reached her second chamber. She’d had her revelation when standing up for the first time on top of a bookcase many times taller than she was. The unfamiliar quantity of “down” on either side pulled at her with a worrying, sick-making urgency. There had been some new ingredient in the mix. Perhaps the slight wobble of the shelves beneath her feet. Perhaps the anxiety drifting up from her brothers. Or maybe just the cold hard knowledge that a fall in the real had so much more bad stuff to offer than the forgiveness of the Mechanism did.

There had been little time to investigate the fear, however. The huge mechanical killing machine pursuing her had required her to jump endlessly from shelf top to shelf top, and her fear of falling had been pushed aside by a fear of being ripped into pieces. It hadn’t been until she and her brothers escaped the library entirely and met the mountains that Clovis’s abstract fear of dropping had been augmented by actual experience, at which point her vertigo had solidified.

She’d found that in the heat of battle, such as when chasing down the human king’s army in an attempt to save Arpix, she could shoulder the feeling aside, focusing on her prey while her body obeyed her orders. But when she’d jumped into the pool in the Exchange, an unexpected fall had seized her. No water reached up to take her weight, just an endless plummeting that had drawn a howl from her mouth and made her forget all about the hands she had been supposed to hold on to.

She’d fallen, tumbling, expecting at any moment a crushing impact. Instead, the softness of a dream had received her, and she lay now, still enfolded in the remnants of it, not wanting to open her eyes.

Something tugged at her.

“What?” Clovis sat up sharply, her fingers now encircling the wrist behind the intruding hand.

Half a dozen small figures scattered shrieking into the mist. The human child whose wrist Clovis held bent its head of dirty blonde hair and sank small teeth into the meat of one of Clovis’s fingers.

Clovis snarled and with her other hand dragged the head back by the hair, revealing the grime-streaked face of a young girl. A skinny one.

The girl snarled back, and one of her accomplices ran out of the mist, swinging a length of timber at Clovis’s head. Clovis rose so that the blow landed across her shoulders. The shock of the impact shook the weapon from her assailant’s hands, and the young boy had retreated into the mist by the time Clovis reached her full height.

“What were you doing?” Clovis lifted the young female by her arm until they were face to face.

“Robbin’ you.” The child winced and reached up to try to share the load with both arms. “Thought you were drunk.”

It took Clovis a few moments to understand what that meant. “I’ve never been drunk.”

She looked around. The mist concealed everything save the glow of the portal. She lowered the child to the ground, then pulled her in the direction of the shimmering circle. “Have you touched this?”

“Have I touched the wall?” The human girl eyed her with less fear than a canith three times her height and nine times her weight should inspire. “You sure you’re not drunk? You were asleep in the gutter. And you’ve got no money.”

Clovis’s hand went to the hilt of her sword in sudden panic and relaxed a little on finding she still had it. “You can’t see this?” She set her fingers to the middle of the circle of shimmering light set into the wall.

“I can see it,” the girl said.

“You don’t find it odd?”

“Why would I find a brick odd?” The girl frowned, tried to pull free, then stared up at Clovis. “Maybe you ate fligar mushrooms? ’Cos you’re acting really weird.”

“What city is this?”

“Like that.”

“What city?” Clovis shook the girl.

“New Kraff! New Kraff!” the girl shouted. “Stop hurting me!”

Clovis released her grip and the ragged child scampered away to be lost with the others in the mist. Clovis stood, considering the portal. It seemed that just as the Exchange and its doorways often played games with perception, going so far as to translate both languages and appearances to meet expectations, it also disguised its exits, at least to those in the places they led to. Children were inquisitive in the same way that locusts were hungry. The only way a band of street urchins would not have investigated the portal was if they had been unable to see it.

Muffled sounds reached her. Knowing herself to be in a human city, Clovis resisted the impulse to draw her sword. Cutting a child in half would likely not recommend her to the locals. And it would disappoint Arpix too. She inspected the bitemark in her finger and snorted. The girl had spirit.

She moved cautiously along the paved street, sniffing the damp air. A great number of scents laced the mist. Many of them made her stomach rumble, others variously intrigued or repelled. None were familiar. As a whole, the city smelled neither good nor bad. It was something complex and new. Therefore dangerous.

She sniffed for traces of the others. Her brothers would be fine, but Arpix…despite his wisdom Arpix was an innocent in many ways. She felt that their ignorance complemented each other, his expertise lying where she lacked the most, and hers where his was absent.

The road sloped. Clovis chose “up.” She passed several doors and shuttered windows. Thirty yards on, an adult human passed her in the street, little more than a darker blot in the enfolding grey, paying no heed to her height. Twenty more yards took her to a crossroads. Another long inhale brought more confusion, and the faintest rumour of something known. She twisted her head this way and that, sniffing.

“Hey!” A figure swerved to avoid her. “Watch where you’re going.”

Clovis stared at the retreating shape until the fog swallowed it, too shocked to take offence, and in truth the near collision had been her fault. “A canith…”

The humans’ indifference to her hadn’t been due to the Exchange’s illusions. The small girl and the passing adult shared the city with canith. Clovis put her surprise aside for later and sniffed again. “Arpix?” It was possible. It was also possible that the intensity of her desire to find him was playing tricks on her.

With nothing else to suggest a direction, Clovis followed her nose. The sniff of Arpix was probably a figment of imagination, but that made it no more likely to be the wrong choice.

The path she took led her higher. The mist thinned. Sunlight set the remnants glowing. The city, built of stone and brick, rose around her, impressing her with its architecture. The streets began to fill, or perhaps the citizens had been there all along, concealed under a grey blanket.

“…mercenary…”

“A striking one!”

Clovis turned towards the speaker who had raised his voice for her benefit. He was one of three canith in a doorway, all male, all of them in uniform, all with the projectile weapons Arpix called ’sticks slung across their backs, and sabres at their hips.

“Come to join the potentate’s liberation?”

“No feast’s complete without rats waiting in the wings.”

“She’ll get her crumbs, that one. Look at the evil eye she’s giving us!”

All three of them smirked and elbowed each other, as if the idea that Clovis might be a danger had never occurred to them.

Clovis walked on. Another sniff confirmed her suspicion. Arpix had been this way. For the first time Clovis found herself grateful that he’d been unable to have a decent wash for five years. She picked up her pace, weaving her way up a more crowded street.

In the distance she could hear a drumbeat, and at a crossroad she glimpsed a seemingly endless column of soldiers marching down an adjoining road. She pressed on into the outskirts of a market whose stalls spread down either side of the street.

“You. Stop.” A tall canith sought to cut her off, head and shoulders above the humans thronging around streetside stalls. He wore a dark uniform of black leather different to that of the three soldiers, and on his head a black cap with a brim at the front. People got out of his way as he approached Clovis, their attention suddenly drawn to random things as if they were striving not to catch his eye. An officer of some sort then, set to policing the populace.

“Me?” Clovis tented her fingers over her breastbone.

“You.” The canith’s mane was braided and drawn back behind his head. A silver death’s head glimmered on his chest, and a similar but smaller badge adorned his cap. “Show me your papers.”

“Papers?” Clovis kept her hand away from her sword hilt.

“Papers.”

“I’m in a hurry—” Clovis began.

The officer swung a backhanded blow intended to strike Clovis’s cheek and snap her head around. Clovis caught his wrist and frowned at him.

“I really am in a hurry. Let’s not make a big fuss—”

As the man opened his mouth to shout, Clovis jerked him forward into a savage headbutt, caught his limp form against her, and wrapped the arm she held over her shoulders. Supporting the unconscious officer as best she could, Clovis steered for the nearest alleyway, squeezing between a stall selling an array of cheeses and a stall selling a…different array of cheeses.

One fortuitous aspect of the aura of fear the man generated was that everyone turned away from the pair of them, except for one small canith boy tugging his mother’s hand on the far side of the street. Clovis dumped the man on a refuse heap a few yards behind the cheese stalls. She took a moment to rub her forehead before hurrying on down the narrow passageway. The canith had a thick skull.

A short while later Clovis had looped around and re-entered the street where she’d scented Arpix. Now though, however hard she tried, his trail eluded her, submerged beneath the aroma of cooking pots, ripe cheeses, cold sausage, and a hundred other things demanding that she put them in her stomach immediately.

Ahead of her the market spread into a large square fronted by grander buildings, though by no means palaces. On the far side, over the heads of humans and canith alike, Clovis could see a curious wooden platform with a trio of timber uprights that might be used to load market supplies onto carts, though it seemed like over-engineering. Surely, a few strong canith could heft anything the market needed on and off carts and wagons.

Clovis advanced, frustrated by the crowd, but also pleased by the anonymity. The market stalls drew New Kraff’s citizens to the sides of the square, allowing her more space as she crossed towards the centre. It seemed there had been a sizeable crowd before the curious wooden platform but that it was now dispersing. Clovis made her way towards it. A canith heading in the opposite direction shook his head as he passed her.

“You missed it. No more hangings till tomorrow.”

Something cold knotted itself in Clovis’s stomach. She suddenly understood what she was looking at. Three gallows. “More tomorrow? Where do they come from?”

The man paused and stared at her. He was richly dressed in dark velvets, older than her though she found it hard to judge by how much. A heavy silver chain hung over his shoulders and down to his large belly, the first belly Clovis had ever seen on a canith. “You’re not from around here, are you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Mercenary?” His gaze dipped to the white hilt of her sword.

“I’m not.” The answer served for both questions.

“They always find more.” The man snorted. “I think the potentate sets a quota. If they can’t find enough rebels, they’ll hang thieves, and if they can’t find enough thieves, they’ll just smoke out some Amacars and call them thieves.” He shrugged. “Can’t say they don’t deserve it.” And with that he moved on, casting “Glory to the potentate” over his shoulder without great enthusiasm.

Clovis thought back to when she’d scented Arpix on her approach up the hill. Just the faintest detection, a half-recalled memory that might have been a dream. Her eyes found the gallows arms again, one, two, three. She started to walk towards them. A heavyset man stumbled into her path, and she deflected him to the flagstones without a glance. One. Two. Three.

It wasn’t possible. A cold, tingling sensation spread from her upper arms, across her back, down into her fingertips. A sense of detachment, of floating above her body, watching as some sixth sense concerned with self-preservation, and possessed collectively by crowds, cleared a path ahead of her more effectively than even the black-clad officer’s aura of bad news had managed.

It wasn’t possible that while she had lain, sleeping in a gutter, enfolded in the mist, Arpix had wandered into trouble. It wasn’t possible that these people had found him. It wasn’t— And yet, there by the base of the platform, still watched by a scattering of ghoulish elders and mesmerized children, was a pile of bodies poorly concealed beneath a stained tarpaulin. A canith in executioner black stood beside the dead, beckoning to a cart that looked just about large enough to carry all the corpses away.

Clovis found herself shaking, remembering Arpix’s scent so strongly that she could no longer tell if it was there around her or in just her memory, remembering his unfathomable combination of fragility and strength, the reserve that armoured him, and the smiles which sometimes cracked that armour.

“No.” It wasn’t possible that the longest pair of legs escaping the cover were his. Those were not his rag-bound feet, his tattered clothes. It would not be his face, distorted in death, that she saw if she had the strength to snatch the tarp away. “No.” She could smell him though. The growl that escaped through her bared teeth proved sufficient to clear the last onlookers without further prompting. The man closest to her flat-out ran away as if knowing that his life depended upon it.

“No!” She found herself on her knees, nails scoring the flagstone beneath her hands. “…no…”

“Clovis?”

Her eyes fixed on the corpse pile. She’d read about madness visiting at such moments but hadn’t expected it to call on her.

“Clovis!” Coming from behind her.

She turned and rose in the same motion.

Arpix started to run towards her, only to be brought to a halt as the canith behind him, a soldier in a fancy uniform, caught hold of his shoulder. Behind Arpix and his captor came a huge canith at the head of a six-strong patrol, four canith and two humans, all in less showy uniforms than the first.

Clovis drew her sword. A muted gasp ran through the closest fringes of the thinning crowd. She walked towards Arpix. “Did they bring you here to kill you?”

Arpix hesitated. He looked as if his mind were furiously hunting for some answer that might avoid what was going to follow. He nodded, pale-faced.

“Who the fuck are you?” the huge canith demanded.

The closest of the two executioners unhitched the iron-bound club from his belt.

Clovis closed most of the gap between her and Arpix in four unhurried strides, ignoring the barked command to stop. Her body still trembled, but that had nothing to do with the threat in front of her, just the one that had now passed.

Before coming close enough to swing, Clovis thrust her sword tip between two flagstones so that it remained standing when she withdrew her hand.

“Is she mad?” the big canith asked, coming to the shoulder of the fancy soldier holding Arpix.

Both executioners were approaching from behind with their clubs at the ready. The rest of the big canith’s patrol were standing a few yards away, confused.

“This is Private Hadd,” Arpix said, still pale, eyes wide. “He’s having a bad day. Don’t kill him.”

Both Hadd and the big canith burst out laughing at that. Clovis launched herself forward and upward, setting her hands to the big canith’s shoulders, and driving her knee into his face as she vaulted. She rode him down when he fell, stretching out an arm to catch hold of Hadd’s forehead and topple him backwards, driving his head down onto the flagstones.

She was among the six-strong patrol before they knew it, her body scything the legs from beneath the two leading canith, surging up to drive stiff fingers into the eyes of the second pair, and lunging between them as they staggered. Her lunge brought her to the two human soldiers, whose hands were only now closing around the hilts of their sabres. She slammed their heads together.

Clovis stood, kicking the back of one of the blinded canith’s knees. The joint crunched and he collapsed to the ground clutching it. She straightened, rolled her neck, and eyed the approaching executioners over the front pair now starting to stand.

A side kick to the stomach folded the other blinded canith in half. She caught the muzzle of the first canith’s ’stick as he tried to point it at her. The thing roared, spitting its projectile over their heads with a cloud of smoke. Clovis twisted it from his grasp, breaking at least one finger, and slammed the stock into the face of his companion.

The executioners came in swinging. Clovis ducked beneath one blow, blocked the other on the ’stick, then felled both opponents with a flurry of punches and kicks targeting face, throat, groin, and knees.

Leaving them groaning on the ground, she walked back over the big canith’s motionless body and kicked teeth from Hadd’s mouth as he struggled to rise. She met Arpix’s eyes as she passed him. “Keep low.”

She pulled her sword free and turned to face her opponents. One of the humans had a thicker skull than she’d imagined and stood, dazed, blood sheeting down her face from a scalp wound, ’stick wandering but pointed generally in Clovis’s direction.

“Take your shot,” Clovis called, her gaze narrowing to the finger the woman had on the weapon’s trigger. “But I will kill everyone if you do. Or, I can just walk off with this man, and you can go on with your lives.”

Clovis waited. She should have killed them all already. She knew that. It had been a strange combination of anger, relief, hubris, and the desire not to disappoint Arpix that had made her leave her sword behind.

The woman’s aim swayed, and for a moment she started to lower her weapon. But as the broken-fingered canith gained his feet, and another, with one eye screwed shut and the other weeping crimson tears, drew his sabre, her resolve strengthened, and she steadied her aim.

More soldiers were approaching through the crowd that had drawn back to form a perimeter at what consensus deemed a safe distance. Three human troopers broke clear and started running towards Clovis, presumably so bold because they’d not seen her in action.

“You win.” Clovis shrugged and stabbed her sword back into its place. Arpix’s wide eyes widened further.

Clovis spread her arms, turning towards the first soldier as he reached her.