The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
Into a woman, clothed in bronze-brown skin. Two-pronged horns grew from the woman’s head, in a shape exactly like those of the dragon. Asvi stared at her, struck speechless at the change.
The woman gestured for her to look east.
The escarpment ran roughly along a north-south line. The mountainous massif they’d just flown over rose west behind them like the shoulders and back of a huge beast. The drop of the escarpment’s cliff face was too great for Asvi to measure. Here and there, waterfalls cut notches and funnels into its side. Falls of rock had accumulated into mysterious patterns at its base.
East lay an impossibly wide landscape shrouded in shifting mist, the distant horizon hidden by haze. Here and there the mist would shred, revealing a glimpse of meandering river or a forest whose moon-pale branches were surely those of ghoul-trees. Amid the ghostly pallor of the woodland the occasional solitary tree stood out for its startling color, as if grown from a precious gem. There were other sights as welclass="underline" a city whose elegant ruins sprawled between the fork of a river; a towering bluff carved with the giant shapes of noble figures, crowned and robed, who didn’t quite look like men; a road paved in white stone, leading to some far-off realm, although from this distance the route appeared empty and untraveled.
These glimpses emerged and vanished within the ever-winding mist.
“Is that the land of demons?” Asvi shivered in the cold wind that howled across the height.
“Once we lived there and hunted there together with many other beings. Then the demons came.”
“Where did they come from?”
The woman tilted her head to one side as if listening to a voice Asvi could not hear. “The ancestors do not know. But in their relentless way, the demons have slowly driven us back to these mountains. We thought our kind were doomed because the demons destroyed our nests. We could no longer brood our young. Then your people came from over the sea.”
“Did we drive you out of the lowlands? Away from the ocean?”
“Oh, no. You do not have that kind of power.”
“What difference do we make, then? The demons kill us, too.”
“Yes. So we have observed. At first we thought you also were vermin, small and weak and with the native cunning and cruelty necessary to small, weak creatures if they wish to survive. But your kind wields a magic we cannot.”
“The magic the priests use to keep demons out of our land?”
“They harness death. But we can harness life.”
“Then why do you demand the sacrifice of women like me?”
“We ask merely a chance to harvest what is already being thrown away.”
Asvi thought of the chasm that separated the uplands from dragon country and how the priests evidently did not know about what lay beyond. She thought of quiet villages and tidy lives, of women standing sentry duty in watchtowers as if it were commonplace and perfectly normal for women to take on tasks that were elsewhere considered suitable only for men. She remembered the hunters she’d seen, with their budding horns and their youth and vigor. The outlying villages surrounded by bone fences and heaps of sand radiating heat under the summer sun. The strange vegetation never seen in the lowlands where people lived.
Maybe she should have gone with the Aivur sailor who’d offered her adventure so long ago. Maybe she should have settled into the room by the kitchen and accepted its boundaries for the rest of her life.
But what use are regrets? She was here now. There was no going back to what might have been. Anyway, here at the edge, she was glad to have seen this much.
“Did you bring me here to eat me?”
“Eat you?” The woman laughed. A deep echo of the dragon’s belling call shivered within her mirth, a reminder of how exceedingly large and powerful a dragon was. “I have not tried human flesh myself, but the ancestors say it is sour and either too greasy or too gristly. I brought you here, sister, because you asked to travel on.”
“Is this the end of the journey?”
“You tell me.”
Asvi again looked east over the wide wilderness and its hidden contours. A thread of fog had undulated out of the undifferentiated tangle of mist and was crawling up the face of the escarpment toward the very spot where she was standing.
“They never rest and will never rest until we have destroyed every last one.”
The woman stepped back just as Asvi heard a scrape of claws and a hiss of breath like the boiling of a kettle. A thick smear like an oily cloud of white slithered over the lip of the cliff and solidified into a demon. Once before, she had stood this close to a demon. It was about as big as she was, with six tentacle-like legs, a pair of lipless mouths, and a stack of pipelike tendrils clustered atop its dome of a head that pumped a steady stream of stinking mist into the air. Rearing back, it braced itself on its four hind limbs as its forelimbs waved to taste the air and find her scent.
Run.
If you run, they will chase you, her father had taught his children. Her brother had panicked and run. But even if you didn’t run, it would still see you.
Its head swung around, getting a fix on her. The dull round nodules in its head lit as if fired from within to an almost blinding blaze of garish color, like molten gems. The eyes had woken and would not sleep until they had fully absorbed every last fiber of its prey.
It opened its upper mouth and spat toward her. Too far to do real damage; still, the spray of mist spattered across her face, raising welts as she put up her hands too late to shield herself. Only then did her shock evaporate as a vision of her scalded brother flashed in her mind’s eye, how he had writhed in the grip of an unspeakable agony, unable even to cry or moan. Maybe it would have been better if the demon had eaten him to cut short the torment of his slow dying.
The demon slid closer to her, gurgling as it readied a bath of acid in which to boil her alive, so she couldn’t move while it sucked her dry.
The dragon—she hadn’t seen it change—dived from above and behind her. Too late the demon sheared away, making for the cliff. The dragon’s claws fastened over the demon’s hindquarters and lifted it as the demon spat harmlessly toward the receding ground. The dragon flew in a spiral upward into the cloudless blue of the sky. From that great height, it dropped the demon. When the creature hit the base of the escarpment, it cracked like stone into shards.
Asvi’s legs gave way. She collapsed onto her knees, hands shaking, breath coming in gasps. Yet it was exhilarating, too. So easily the dragon had disposed of the deadly beast.
With a scuff, the dragon landed many paces away from her. The air shimmered, drawn in and drawn out, and the woman with horns walked over to her, dusting off her hands.
“We were not the only beings who retreated, or died, when the demons invaded,” she remarked as she came up to Asvi. She indicated the wilderness. “When we became too few to keep their numbers in check, the ancestors made peace with the inevitability of our obliteration.”
“Until my people came from over the sea.”
“All beings in the world are woven with the weft and warp of the world’s magic. But each may wield it differently.”
“Do dragons weave?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know about weaving?”
“She who gave herself to the sands was a weaver in a town called Gedaala. Do you know that place?”