The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

THE COLD STEP BEYOND by Ian R. MacLeod

In a clearing in an unnamed forest in a remote part of the great Island City of Ghezirah, there moved a figure. Sometimes, it moved silently as it swirled a sword in flashing arcs. Sometimes, it made terrible cries. It was high noon in midsummer, and the trees and the greensward shimmered. The figure shimmered as well; it was hard to get a proper sense of the method of its motion. Sometimes, it was here. Sometimes, there. It seemed to skip beyond the places that lay between. Then, when the figure finally stopped moving and let the sword thing fall to its side and hung its head, it became clear that it was scarcely human, and that it was tired and hot.

Bess of the Warrior Church sunk to a squat. The plates of her body armor—mottled greenish to blend with the landscape—were ribboned with sweat. Her limbs ached. Her head throbbed in its enclosing weight of chitin and metal. She swept her gaze around the encircling sweep of forest, willing something to come. She had been here many weeks now; long enough for grass to have grown back in the seared space beneath the caleche that had brought her here, and for its landing gear and rusty undersides to become hazed in bloodflowers.

She looked up across Ghezirah, arching away from her under Sabil’s mirrored glare. There, off to the east and rising into the distance, hung the placid browns of the farm islands of Windfell. The other way flashed the grey-blue seawall of the Floating Ocean. Somewhat closer, looming smudgy and indistinct over the forest, lay the fabled Isle of the Dead. But she knew she had no calling in any of those places.

The intelligences of her church had directed her to this clearing. Yet until her foe arrived in whatever shape or form it might take, until the killing moment came, all she could do was practice. And wait.

Yet something told her that, today, she was no longer alone. Her fingers retensed upon the hilt of her sword. She opened her mind and let her senses flow. Something was moving, small and quick, at the shadow edge of the forest. The movement was furtive, yet predatory. If Bess had still possessed hairs along the back of her spine, they would have crawled. She would also have shivered, had she not learned in her novitiate that tension is part of the energy of killing, and thus must be entirely reabsorbed.

Slowly, and seemingly more wearily than ever, Bess hauled her torso upright in a gleam of sweating plates. She even allowed herself to sway slightly. The weariness was genuine, and thus not difficult to fake. By then she was certain that she was being watched from the edge of the forest.

The blade of her sword seemed to flash in the hairsbreadth of an instant before movement itself. It flashed again. Bess seemed to slide across the placid meadow in cubes and sideways protrusions. She was there. Then she wasn’t. She was under the trees perhaps a full half second after she had first levered herself up from a squat.

Three severed leaves were floating down in the wake of her sword’s last arc, and the thing crouched before her was small and bipedal. It also looked to be young, and seemed most likely human, and probably female, although its sole piece of clothing was a dirty swatch wrapped around its hips. Not exactly the sort of foe Bess had been expecting to end her vigil; just some feral forest-rat. But it hadn’t scurried off into the green dark at her arrival even now that the three leaves had settled to the ground. It was holding out, in something that resembled a threatening gesture, a small but antique lightgun. The gun was live. Bess could hear the battery’s faint hum.

“If you try to shoot that thing…” She said, putting all the power of command into her voice. “… you will die.” The sound boomed out.

“And if I don’t?” The little creature had flinched, but it was still wafting that lightgun. “I’ll probably die anyway, won’t I? You’re a warrior—killing’s all you’re good for.”

Bess’s expression, or the little of it which was discernable within her face’s plated mask, flickered. Since first leaving the iron walls of her church and setting out across Ghezirah in her caleche three moulids ago, she had discovered that warriors were most often thought of by those who lived outside her calling as little more than heedless bringers of death. Scarcely better, in essence, than the monstrous things they were trained to kill. Not to mention the stories that had passed in her wake of soured milk, broken mirrors, and malformed births. Or the taunts, and the curses, and the things thrown…

“I’ll put this gun down if you put down your sword,” the little creature said. “You’re quick—I’ve seen that. But I don’t think you’re quicker than light itself…”

Technically, of course, the runt was right—but was it worth explaining that the killing movement of any weapon was the last part of a process that could be detected long before it began by those trained in the art of death? Bess decided that it was not. It was apparent from the thing’s stance that it was used to using this lightgun, but also that it had no intention of doing so within the next few moments.

Bess lowered her sword to her side.

The creature did the same with the lightgun.

“What’s your name?” Bess asked.

“Why should I tell you that? And who are you?”

“Because…” If there were any particular reasons, she couldn’t immediately think of them. “My name is Bess.”

The creature smirked. “Shouldn’t you be called something more terrible than that? But I’ll call you Bess if you want…”

“Do you have a name?”

“I’m Elli.” The smirk faded. “I think I am anyway.”

“You only think? Don’t you know who you are?”

“Well, I’m me, aren’t I?” The creature—although Bess now felt that she could safely assume that she was merely female and human, and not some monstrous anomaly or djinn—glanced down at her grubby, near-naked self. “Names are just things other people give you, aren’t they? Or just plain make up…?”

The helm of Bess’s head, which had now absorbed the forest’s shades, gave a ponderous nod. She understood the Elli-thing’s remark, for she, too, had no proper idea of how she had got her name.

“Been watching you…” Elli nodded across the clearing. “Dead clever, the way you flicker in and out as if you’re there and then not there.”

“So why in the name of all the intelligences didn’t you back off when I approached?”

Elli shrugged. “I could tell you were just practicing. That you didn’t mean it…”

Not meaning it being about the worst insult that, in all Bess’s long years of training within the walls of her church, had ever been flung her way.

“But it was still very impressive,” Elli added. “If you could show me some more, I’d really like to watch.”

The Dead Queen’s Gambit. The Circle Unleashed. The Upwards Waterfall. The WelcomingBlade. The Twice-Backwards Turn. The Belly Becomes the Mouth. The Leap of Steel. Even The Cold Step Beyond, a maneuver of sword and space that Bess still found difficult to execute. She performed them all.

Before, she had felt tired and bored. But now that she had an audience, even one as lowly as this Elli-thing, she felt re-energized. Her blade sliced though the warm air and the fabric of local spacetime, drawing her sideways and backwards in intricate twists and turns. She remembered her dizzy exhilaration when she first managed this near-impossible trick in the practice yards. This was like that, but better.

“Bravo! Bravo!” Elli was clapping.

For want of anything else, and no longer feeling in the least goaded or stupid, Bess gave her sword a final flourish and made as much of a bow as her armored midriff would permit.

It was late afternoon. The shade beneath the trees was spreading. As Bess straightened, she saw that the Elli-thing had already vanished into the wood-scented dark.

Bess felt different that night as she squatted inside the iron womb of her caleche.

Laid before her at the central altar of the cabin’s console, set around with the glow of the more ordinary controls, was the steel eye of the keyhole that admitted the will of her church’s intelligences. Briefly, it had flashed the message that had borne her here, and all the time since it had remained blank and blind. The other instructions since her changing into warrior form and setting out on her first quest had been plain—at least in their seeming purpose, if not in their execution and result…

That great seabeast that had supposedly been terrorizing a community of fisherwomen who lived in a desolate village on the far side of the Floating Ocean. A task that had seemed worthy of her first killing until she had faced the creature itself. A slobbering thing, true. Big and grey and, at least in appearance, monstrous. But it had been old and in pain and helpless. She had realized as it sobbed and moaned on that rocky shore and she drove her sword into its quivering flesh that she had been summoned to do this work not because the women of the village feared to kill the creature, but because they pitied it too much.

Then had come her duties in guarding a senior imam of the Church of the Arachnids, who was supposedly under threat from the incursion of an assassin djinn from other unspecified dimensions. But her arrival and attendance upon this plump and near-regal personage had coincided with a summit meeting of all the churches of the animalcules in Eburnea regarding various issues of precedence and money. It soon became clear to Bess that her presence at the canny witch’s brocaded shoulder through those interminable meetings in vast halls was intended not as protection, but as an implied threat of force.

And so it had gone, and then her third instruction had come, and now she was set down here amid this nowhere forest, waiting to do battle with an unexplained something.

Bess shuffled down into her night couch. There was little space inside this vessel for much else—after all, what else did a warrior need other than her will and her sword?—but she had been permitted to bring one small chest containing her personal belongings, although she would just as happily have gone without it. The lid gave a pleading scream as she lifted it. This, she thought, as she gazed inside in the caleche’s dull glow and breathed a stale waft of air, reminds me why I don’t bother to look.

Other new novitiates were brought to the great walls of the Warrior Church by a variety of means and accidents. Lesser daughters. Unwanted or unexpected products of the vats. Those cursed with malformations, either of the body or the mind, which other and more squeamish churches found themselves unable to accept. Girls who had performed some sacrilege or debasement that placed them beyond the pale, in the antique phase. Downright criminals. They were all admitted in an unholy gaggle through the iron gates of the Warrior Church, although almost as many were soon found to be lacking and cast back out.

Bess remembered the rusty towers, and the courtyards of trial and test and battle. She remembered the light from classroom windows that washed through drapes of platinum gauze as they were schooled in all the near-endless varieties of monstrosity: djinn, interjection, tulpa, dragon, quasi-dragon, behemoth, and demon that they would be expected to destroy. Most of all, though, she remembered the faces of her fellow novitiates, and night-silence in the dormitories, and the laughter that exploded as soon as the junior imams doused the lights.

Clubfoot Nika. Humble Talla of the auburn tresses. And Afya of the shadows. All now transformed into hulking warriors like her. Out fighting some terror in the great Island City of Ghezirah or across one or the other of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. Or already dead. Bess gazed down at the few dry leavings of her past. A shriveled starflower. A tress of auburn hair. A hand-written note about soon returning, casually left.

Just one other item lay in there. Bess’s taloned fingers struggled to pinch the fine loop of chain.

Who are you, Bess…?

Where do you come from…?

What are you doing here…?

Bess no-name—Bess who had struggled to belong even in those dormitories of the dispossessed and deformed. From all the other novitiates, sitting along the dark lines of bunks, hands clasped around knees with eyes rapt and mouths agape, there was always some story to be heard. High schemes or low robberies. A birth mother knifed by a jealous bond mother. A hand let go in a market of slaves. Over the nights, the whispers echoed through the dormitory as the tales flowed on. And grew more elaborate, Bess began to notice, as well. So the suckling child came to remember the taste of her dying birth mother’s blood, and the slave-sold underling survived a jumpship’s spectacular crash. But the essential seed of truth of some lost life remained, and could thus be embroidered upon much as a basic sword thrust can once—but only once—it is entirely mastered.

But Bess was mute when the eyes turned to her…

What about you, Bess?

What do you remember about the time before you were chosen?

She couldn’t answer such questions. She was Bess simply because that was what some lesser manifestation of the church’s intelligences had deigned to call her. All there was was this great iron-enclosed edifice, and her friends, and dormitory nights such as these, and all the days of learning and practice. Nothing else. She had no sense of who or what she had been before. She might as well have come from nowhere, just as the chants and the jibes insisted. But for this one object…

It was called a locket. Or so she supposed; the terminology for items of jewelry was not a form of knowledge in which warriors were expected to be versed. But the word seemed to come with possession of the item. Which might mean something. Or might not.

She had rarely worn the thing, even when her head and neck would have allowed such a vanity before she changed into full warrior form. But she had kept it. The chain was as finely made as were the great chains which anchored the islands against the spin of Ghezirah’s vast sphere. From it, flashing bright then dull in the glow globe’s light, depended the silver teardrop which was the locket itself, engraved with dizzying fractal patterns and swirls.

Bess felt that she was being drawn into the pattern, and permitted herself the wasted energy of a small shudder as her armored fingers unslipped the chain and re-closed the lid of her chest. Then she stretched down to rest.

She was already awake when the caleche’s interior brightened to signal the onset of dawn. A fizzing buzz, a sense of some invisible liquid cleansing her scales, and she was ready for yet another day of waiting. She raised the hatch and reached for her sword. Outside, as the dawn-singers called in the light from their mirrored minarets, her footsteps left a dark trail like the last of the night. When she drew her sword and made her first leap, the trail vanished into misty air.

She was just re-practicing The Circle Unleashed in its rarely attempted more elaborate form when she knew that once again she was being watched. She hadn’t considered how well this particular sword-stroke was fitted to the brief and spectacular series of leaps across the bloodflower-strewn meadow that she then executed. But it was.

There was the Elli-thing, standing undaunted but admiring at the edge of the forest, where today Bess’s arrival had stirred or severed not one single leaf.

“Salaam,” Bess said, a little breathlessly.

“Sabah al Noor, Bess of the Warrior Church.” Elli replied with surprising formality, and Bess wondered as the creature then made a small bow at her own flush of pleasure to be greeted thus. Then a thought struck her. “You haven’t been out here all night, have you?”

“Oh no.” Elli gave a quick shake of her head.

“Then where do you live?”

“Oh…” A quick shrug. A backwards point with a grubby thumb. “… just back there awhile. Would you like to come and look?”

A small, pale figure. A larger shape that was scarcely there at all. They both moved ever deeper into the nameless forest through dark avenues and spills of birdsong.

This more resembled, Bess supposed, the kind of adventure that was sometimes associated in the popular mind with members of her church. Dragons to be slain. Monstrous shifts and anomalies in the fabric of spacetime to be annulled.

Maidens, even, to be rescued. Bess should, she supposed, feel a deep unease to be deserting the precise spot where her church’s intelligences had instructed her to stay.

But warriors had to show bravery and initiative, didn’t they? And how long could any human being, no matter how extensively changed and trained, be expected to wait?

They paused to take refreshment beside a tree hung with a kind of red fruit that Elli said was called pomegranate, and had existed as far back as the Gardens of Eden on the legendary first planet of Urrearth. They were also to be found, she added matter of factly, in Paradise itself. They were best cut apart with a sharp utensil.

“The trouble being with this thing”—she patted the lightgun she had tucked into the tie around her waist, then glanced at Bess expectantly—“is that it cooks them as well.”

Bess studied the fruit, an odd-looking thing with a crown-like eruption at one end, which Elli was holding out. Her hand went to the hilt of her sword, although she knew what the imams of the Warrior Church would have said about using her sacred blade for such a menial task. If they had happened to be here and watching her, that was.

“Tell you what, Bess—I could throw it up like this.”

Quicker than an instant, Bess drew her blade, and, in executing the Spatchcock Goose, vanished and reappeared as the pomegranate, now separated into two halves, still span up.

“Wooh!”

Elli caught one half as it descended. Bess, the other.

“So…? What do you think of pomegranate? Not bad, is it, if you can deal with the seeds.”

Bess had to agree. All in all, pomegranates were delicious. But, at least when it came to eating, they were a frustrating fruit. Her huge hands soon grew sticky, and so did her plated face. It was just as enjoyable, they decided, simply to toss the things up for the joy of slicing them in half. Pith and fruit were soon flying, and Bess’s armor acquired the mottled reds, whites and pinks of pomegranate flesh.

“So…?” Elli asked eventually, after Bess had demonstrated so many ways of slicing the fruit that much of what was left lying around them seemed to exist in some sideways dimension. Or, perhaps, was just a sticky mess. “This is what you do, is it? Cut things up in odd and interesting ways?”

Bess had been laughing too much to take offense. But she now explained how the origins of her church could be traced back to the time of the first jumpships, when gateways had been discovered where all time, space, and matter turned back in a cosmic rent. It had been a great breakthrough for womankind and every other sentient species, but it had also brought an end to the simplicity of one reality and the linear progression of time. Now, other forms of existence that had previously been thought of as nothing but useful constructs in understanding the higher dimensions of physics rubbed close against our own. The true aliens, the real horrors and monstrosities, lay not in the far-flung reaches of the galaxy, but sideways. And each passage of a jumpship disturbed enough of the fabric of this reality to allow, like a breath of dark smoke from a creak beneath a door, a little more of the seepage of these other realities in. Sometimes, they were comical or harmless. Often, they weren’t noticeable at all. But sometimes they were the stuff of abject nightmare.

Only through the use of creatures who were themselves close to nightmare could these monstrous interjections be fought.

Bess wiped her sword on a patch of grass and made to re-sheath it in her scabbard.

But then Elli had laid her hand on a part of her forearm that still retained some sensitivity. It felt sticky and warm.

“That sword of yours—I suppose it does something similar? The way it seems to cut through the world.”

“Well… You could say that, I suppose. Although the principle is much more controlled.”

“Can I have a go?”

The request was ridiculous. It was sacrilege. So why hadn’t she yet sheathed her sword?

“You can try this, Bess.” Elli held out her cheap lightgun. “It’s quite deadly.”

“No,” Bess rumbled.

“Well, perhaps you could at least let me give the handle-thing a quick hold.”

“It’s called the hilt.” Bess watched in something like horror or amazement as her own hand took the flat of the blade and held it out.

“Hilt, then.”

Elli’s fingers were so small they barely circled the banded metal. Yet Bess felt a small shiver—something akin to the sensation that she had experienced last night when she studied that locket—run through her. The sword shivered, too. Sensing a new presence, it had responded with a blurring hint of the final darkness beyond all dark that was woven into the exquisite metal.

Elli’s fingers retracted. She let out a shuddering breath. “It feels like… Everything and nothing at all.”

It was getting colder and dimmer now when, by rights, even in a place as overshadowed as this forest had become, it should have been growing warmer and brighter.

The trees were giant things, spewing mossy boughs over which they had to clamber. Elli was quick and sure and sharp as she scampered over the deadfalls. Bess, meanwhile, felt clumsy and lost. Vulnerable, as well. She stole glances at this odd little creature. What exactly was she? And how did she survive in this confusing jungle?

A giant beetle, a crimson thing more jagged and threatening than her own helmeted head, regarded Bess with its many eyes before raising some kind of stinging tail and finally, reluctantly, backing off. There were probably more fearsome things than that out here in this forest—perhaps even monstrosities fierce enough to merit the attentions of a member of the Warrior Church. What defense could this near-naked young thing with only a cheap toy of a lightgun possibly put up? Unless she was far more dangerous than she seemed…

The thought that all of this could be some kind of deathly trap niggled in Bess’s mind. But, at the same time, it was good to explore and make new friends, and her caleche with all its duties lay only a few miles off, and she was enjoying herself too much to want to stop.

The forest’s branches were now so crisscrossed as to give no sense of light or sky. It was more like a vast and twisty ceiling from which drapes of a livid moss provided the only illumination.

Then Elli stopped.

“Where are we?” Bess asked.

“Just have to go up here…”

Here being a winding step of roots that then became branches, leading through a wanly glowing archway inside a rotting trunk. Was this where Elli lived? Oddly, though, this strange little hideaway had a further stairway within it, lit by strips of light that gleamed as they ascended over beautifully carved stretches of floor and roof. The fine-grained stairway swirled on and up. There were intricate settings of jewel and marquetry. And now, at last, there was sunlight ahead.

“… Nearly there…”

An ivy-embroidered gate screeched on a final rise of marble steps. Bess had expected to emerge at some eyrie close to Ghezirah’s roof, but it was immediately apparent that they were on solid ground. This was a kind of garden—trees, buildings, and strange eruptions of statuary tumbled all around them—yet it was oddly quiet; filled with a decrepit kind of peace.

“Where by Al’Toman is this?”

“Can’t you tell?”

It wasn’t so very hard. In fact, now that Bess was getting her bearings, it was obvious.

Over there, seen at a slightly different angle from the view she was used to, lay the placid browns of the farm islands of Windfell. That way, churning with what was surely the beginnings of a storm, was the vast seawall of the Floating Ocean.

And below them, yet curling upwards in ways that the air and Bess’s own senses struggled to bridge, marched the green crowns of the nameless forest, and beyond that, flecked with the red hollows where the bloodflowers flourished, lay the small circle of her meadow.

“You can’t live on the Isle of the Dead?”

“Why not? You live inside that iron carbuncle.”

It was a given even in nursery books that the Island City of Ghezirah was more than simply a smooth globe encircling Sabil’s star in three plain dimensions. Yet it was dizzying, and more than a little disturbing, to think that they had contrived to reach this place of the dead by climbing through the forest’s roof. Still, Bess followed Elli as they explored.

Most of the tombs were very old, but older ones still were said to be buried in their foundations. Indeed, the most fanciful version of the tale of the Isle of the Dead’s origins told of how the entire island consisted of nothing but mulched flesh, bone, and memorial. The place was certainly alarmingly uneven and ramshackle, and little frequented in modern times. The major churches now all had their own mausoleums, while many of the lesser ones favored remote planets of rest. The Warrior Church, meanwhile, found no home for its servants other than in its memories, for its acolytes were always expected to die in battle.

Hayawans ambled around carved sandstone pillars. Spirit projections flickered and dissolved like marshghosts. The voices of ancient recordings called from stone mouths muffled by birds’ nests. But it was the fecund sense of life in this place that struck Bess most. The bumbling insects. The frantic birdsong. The heady scents and colors of the blooms. There were fruits, as well, which would have made the pomegranate seem homely, and Elli explained that this island was also a fine place for trapping foxes, for catching airhorses, for collecting honeyseed, and for digging up and broiling moles.

“So you live here alone?”

Elli gave a shrugging nod. That much was obvious, Bess supposed.

“So how did you—”

“Come here? Is that what you’re wondering?” Elli’s face was suddenly flushed. “You think I’m some kind of grave-robber or ghoul?”

Bess attended to removing a speck of grit from her scabbard. After all, she could hardly accuse someone else of being secretive about their origins when there was an empty space where there should have been her own. Just that noisy dormitory, and no sense of anything before. As if, impossibly, she had been born into her novitiate fully functioning and whole. Apart from that locket, which meant nothing at all. But no, there was something more than that, she thought, looking around at this pretty home of the long-dead. Some bleak moment of horror from which her mind recoiled.

The most sense she could make of it was that her church had plucked her from something so terrible that the best way to keep hold of her sanity had been to empty the knowledge from her brain. And now, somehow, the shivering thought trickled through her, something was pulling her back there.

Elli pointed. “You see that building, the one with the copper birch tree growing out of the middle?”

It was a dome that still partly retained its covering of mosaic glass. It looked to be on fire, the way the leaves flickered above them.

“Do you want to take a look?”

Bess’s head gave its usual slow nod.

“There was a girl buried there. Oh… a long time ago,” Elli explained as they clambered over the ruins. “Before the War of Lilies, when the seasons were unchanging, and even time itself was supposed to run more slow. Anyway, she was young when she died, and her birth mother and her bond mothers were stricken. So they made this fine mausoleum for her, and they filled it with everything about their daughter, every toy and footstep and giggle and memory. You see…”

They were standing beneath the dome. The tree shifted through its fractured lenses, giving the displays a dusty life. Animatronic toys seemed to jerk. Strewn teddy bears still had a residual glint of intelligence in their button eyes. But that, and the swishing leaves, only made the sense of age and loss more apparent.

“And they visited her here… And they prayed… And they cried… And, dead though their daughter was, they swore that her memory would never die. But of course—”

“What was this girl’s name? Are you—?”

“—Shut up and listen, will you, Bess! And her name was Dallah, and I’m called Elli if you haven’t noticed. So no, I’m not Dallah. Although Dallah was my friend. My best friend, you might say. In fact, my only one. You see, Dallah was like most only children who’ve been longed for a bit too much by their mothers, and find themselves over-protected and alone. Of course, Dallah had all these toys…” Elli pinged a bike bell.

“And she could have anything else she ever wanted. She only had to ask. But what she really wanted, the one thing her mothers couldn’t give her for all their kindness and wealth, was a friend. So…” Elli ran a finger over a cracked glass case that seemed to be filled with nothing but leaves and dust. “… she did what most girls have done since Eve first grew bored with Adam. She made one up. And her name was Elli. And that’s me. That’s who I am.”

Bess had been gazing into a hologlass pillar that contained the floating faces of three women. They looked kindly, but impossibly sad.

“I was just intended as another part of the memorial,” Elli said. “They extracted me from every breath and memory of their beloved daughter. Sweet little pretend-Elli, who always had to have a place laid for her at table, and did all the naughty and disruptive things to which Dallah herself would never confess. Elli who stole all the doughnuts, even though it was Dallah who fell sick. Elli who crayoned that picture of a clown’s face on the haremlek wall. They’d come to me in the years after to reminisce. This whole mausoleum, they couldn’t stop building and refining it. Nothing was ever enough. They kept Dallah herself within a glass coffin inside a suspension field so she didn’t decay. Not, of course, that they could ever bring themselves to actually look at their dead daughter, but she was unchanging, perfectly there. They couldn’t let her go. Even when they were old, the mothers came. But then there were only two of them. And then just the one, and she grew so confused she sometimes thought I was Dallah. Then she stopped coming as well, and the slow centuries passed, and the gardeners rusted and the maintenance contracts expired. And people no longer came to pay their respects to anyone on the Isle of the Dead. There were just these crumbling mausoleums and a few flickering intelligences. The thing is, Dallah’s mothers had tried too hard, done too much. And the centuries are long when you’re an imaginary friend and you have nobody to play with—and I mean body in every sense…”

Elli had been wandering the mausoleum as she talked, touching color-faded stacks of studded brick and dolls with missing eyes. But now she was standing beside that long glass case again. Which, Bess now saw, was shattered along one side.

“So you took hold of Dallah’s corpse?”

“What else was I do to? She had no use for it, and her mothers are long dead. If I looked in a mirror, if there was a mirror here that was clear enough, I suppose I might see a face that would remind me a bit of Dallah. But I’m not Dallah. Dallah’s dead and mourned for and in Paradise or wherever with William Galileo and Albert Shakespeare and all the rest. I’m Elli. And I’m me. And I’m here.” She stuck out her tongue. “So there!”

Bess had heard of the concept of body-robbing, and knew that most of the major churches forbade it. The punishments, she imagined, would be severe, especially if the robber happened to be something that couldn’t properly call itself sentient. But Elli’s tale, and that final pink protrusion of her tongue, made the deed hard to condemn.

It was better, though, that she stayed eating berries and broiling moles on the Isle of the Dead. In any other part of Ghezirah, or any of the other Ten Thousand and One Worlds, life for her would be not so much difficult as impossible, and would most likely be brought to a rapid end.

“How long have things been like this?”

Elli now looked awkward. “I don’t know. I…” She looked up at the hissing, dancing roof. “… Can we leave this place?”

It was good to be back out in the warm afternoon, even if all the falling memorials were now a constant reminder to Bess that this was a place of the dead. But as for Elli, she thought, as she gazed at her friend sitting on a pile of rocks with her arms wrapped around her grubby knees, she’s right in what she says. She isn’t some ghoul or monster. She’s truly alive. Then Bess’s eyes trailed down to that lightgun. The reason it looked like a toy, she realized, was that it had probably once been one. But she didn’t doubt that it was now deadly, or that Elli knew how to use it. In her own way, this little grave-runt was as much a warrior as Bess was.

It seemed a time for confidences, so Bess explained what little there was to explain about her own life. The long days of endless practice. The even longer dormitory nights. The laughing chants. That sense of not properly belonging even in a community of outcasts. And now—the way her entire church and all its intelligences seemed to have withdrawn from her, when she’d been expecting to face some kind of ultimate challenge through which she could prove her worth.

“You mean, like a dragon or something? A monster that needs killing?”

She nodded. A dragon, or even a quasi-dragon, would certainly have done. Anything, no matter how terrible, would have been better than this. It was as if she’d been thrown back into the empty nowhere from which she had come, but pointlessly trained in swordplay and changed into the thing she now was…

Something patted down Bess’s scales, leaving blurry silver trails that her camouflage struggled to mimic. After a long moment’s puzzlement, she realized it was tears.

“Don’t you have any idea of your earlier life?” Elli asked. “I mean, some hint or memory?”

Bess gave an armor-plated shrug, and rumbled about the piece of jewelry that she happened to possess. A thing on a chain, oval-shaped.

“You mean a locket?”

“I think it’s called a locket, yes. You’ve heard of them?”

“Of course I have. I’ve got one myself. So—what’s inside yours?”

“What do you mean, inside?”

Elli laughed and leapt down from her perch.

“You really don’t know much about anything other than killing things, do you, Bess?”

Then she explained how lockets came in two hinged halves—there were, after all, plenty of examples of this and every other kind of trinket to be found on this isle—although the main thing that Bess was conscious of as they talked was her friend’s close presence, and the strange and peculiarly delicious sensation of a hand touching her own strange flesh.

It was getting late. The dawn-singers had already made their first preparatory cries, stirring up an evensong of birds. Contrary to the once-popular saying, it proved far easier to depart the Isle of the Dead than to get there, and Elli soon led Bess back toward the same marble steps through which they had entered, and down into the depths of the forest that lay below. Moving through the pillared near-dark, Bess was conscious again of the danger of this place. Far more than the island above them, this was a landscape wherein monsters and wonders might abide. Yet Elli led on.

The clearing lay ahead.

“You’ll be here tomorrow?”

“Yes.” Elli smiled. “I will.”

Bess shambled across the meadowgrass, which, amid darker patches of bloodflower, already shone with dew. The caleche hissed open its door. She climbed in and laid down her sword. The keyhole eye at the center of the cabin’s altar, which would surely soon bear her a fresh instruction, and perhaps even apologies for this pointless waste of her time, remained unseeingly dark. The food tray hissed out for her, and she ate. Then, as she prepared to lie down, she remembered what Elli had said about lockets. Vaguely curious, but somehow still feeling no great sense of destiny, she opened her small chest and lifted the thing out. After a moment of struggle, the two sides broke apart.

Another morning, and, although it was still too early for dawn, Bess was standing in the dim clearing outside her caleche with her sword. She, too, was a thing of dimness; her armor saw to that. But already the dawn-singers were calling. Light would soon be spilling from tower to tower. And there was Elli, standing out from the shadow trees, pale as stripped twig.

“Bess! You’ve come!” She was almost running. Almost laughing. Then she was doing both.

“I said I would, didn’t I?” Bess’s voice was as soft as it was capable of being. And as sad. It made Elli stop.

“What’s happened?” They stood a few paces apart beside the rusty beetle of the caleche in the ungreying light. “You seem different.”

“I haven’t changed,” Bess rumbled. “But I’ve brought you this. I want you to take it…” She held out the locket, glinting and swinging on its silver chain, from her hand’s heavy claw.

“It’s that thing you described…” Elli looked puzzled, hesitant. “The locket. But this is…” She took it in her own small fingers. Here, in the spot in which they were standing, the gaining light had a rosy flush. “… mine.”

“Open it.”

Elli nodded. Red flowers lay all around them. The silver of the locket was taking up their color, and Bess now seemed a thing entirely made of blood. Swiftly, with fingers far more practiced and easeful than Bess’s, Elli broke open the locket’s two sides. From out of which gleamed a projection, small but exquisite, of the faces of three women. They were the same faces that hung in the hologlass pillar of Dallah’s mausoleum. But in this image they looked as happy as in the other they had been sad.

“Dallah’s mothers.” Elli breathed. “This thing is yours, Bess. But it’s also mine…”

“That’s right.”

Elli snapped it shut. Dawn light was flowing around them now, and the bloodflowers made Elli beautiful, and yet they also made her pale and dangerous and sharp. “This doesn’t really have to happen, does it?” she whispered.

“I think it does.”

“Don’t tell me, Bess.” She almost smiled. “You remember it already…?”

“I didn’t—not at all. But I’m beginning to now. I’m sorry, Elli.”

“And I’m sorry as well. Isn’t there some way we can both just go our separate ways and live our own lives—you as a warrior and me just as me? Do I really have to do this to you?”

“We both do. Nothing is possible otherwise. We’re joined together, Elli. We’re a monstrosity, a twist in spacetime. Our togetherness is an affront to reality. It must be destroyed, otherwise even worse things will break through. There are no separate ways.”

The killing moment was close. Bess could already hear the lightgun’s poisonous hum. She knew Elli was quick, but she also knew that the use of any weapon, be it blade or laser, was the last part of a process that any trained warrior should be able to detect long before the final instant came. But how by all the intelligences was she supposed to do such a thing, when Elli was her own younger self?

Then it happened. All those hours of practice and training, all the imam’s praises and curses, seemed to collide in a moment beyond time, and emerged into something deadly, precise, and perfect. For the first time in her fractured life, Bess executed The Cold Step Beyond with absolute perfection, and she and her blade were nowhere and in several places at once. Elli was almost as quick. And could easily have been quicker.

Yet she wasn’t.

Or almost.

And that was enough.

Bess swung back, a blur of metal and vengeance, into the ordinary dimensions of the spreading dawn. Around her, still spraying and toppling, spewed the remains of Elli of the Isle of the Dead. Nothing but hunks of raw meat now, nothing you could call alive, even before the bits had thunked across the ground.

Bess stood there for a moment, her breathing unquickening. Then she wiped and sheathed her sword. She knew now why the bloodflowers bloomed so well across this meadow. Without them, the strew of flesh that surrounded her would have been too horrible to bear. But something glinted there, perfect and unsullied. She picked it up.

Her blade had cut through everything else—time, life, probability, perhaps even love—but not the chain and locket. It was the one strand that held together everything else.

She remembered it all now. Remembered as if it had never been gone. Playing with Dallah—who had called her Elizabeth, or sometimes Elli, or occasionally Bess—all those aeons ago when she’d been little more than a hopeful ghost. Then pain and emptiness for the longest time until some kind of residual persistence took hold. It was, Bess supposed, the same kind of persistence that drives all life to strive to become, even if the body of someone once loved must be stolen in the process. Long seasons followed. There was little sense of growth or change. The once-sacred island around her slid further toward decay and neglect. But now she was Elli, and she had Dallah’s discarded body and she was alive, and she learned that living meant knowing how to feed, which in turn meant knowing how to kill.

Elli had always been alone apart from a few of the other mausoleums’ residual intelligences.

But it wasn’t until one warm summer’s morning when the light seemed to hang especially pure that she looked down across at the other great islands, and saw something moving in a clearing with jagged yet elegant unpredictability, and realized that she felt lonely. So she found a way down through the twisty forests that lay below the catacombs, and came at last to a space of open grass, and watched admiringly until she was finally noticed, and the monstrous thing came over to her in blurring flashes, and turned out to be not quite so monstrous at all.

But that locket. Which had once been Dallah’s. Even as the Bess-thing held it out, Elli had understood that there was only one way that Bess could own it as well. That time, like the locket’s chain, had looped around itself and joined them together in a terrible bond. And Elli then knew that only one of them could survive, because she was the monstrosity that this creature had been sent to kill.

The killing moment, when grace, power, and relentlessness are everything. But in the memory Bess now had of holding Elli’s lightgun, the warrior-thing had hesitated, and her own laser had fired a jagged spray. Even as Bess gazed down at the remains of Elli’s butchered body lain amid the bloodflowers, the memory of the burning stench of her own wrecked chitin and armor came back to her. She had died not once this dawn, but twice. And yet she was still living.

It was fully day now. The clearing dazzled with dew. Looking back toward her caleche, Bess saw that its door had opened, and that, even in this morning blaze, the light of her altar shone out. More questing, perhaps. More things to kill. Or an instruction for her to return and recuperate within her church’s iron walls.

The intelligences of the Warrior Church were harsh and brutal, but they also welcomed the sorts of creature that no other church would ever think to accept. And now they had given Bess back her memory, and made her whole. She realized now why her earlier quests had seemed so pointless, and why she hadn’t yet felt like a true warrior at all. But she was truly a warrior, for she had taken that final step into the cold beyond, and been found not to be wanting.

Bess gazed at the open door of her caleche, and its eerie, beckoning glow. She had climbed in there once clutching that locket, been borne away in a long moment of forgetting to begin the life that had eventually brought her back here. But now her gaze turned toward the encircling forest, and she remembered that sense she had had of different dangers and mysteries lurking there. Wonders, perhaps, too.

The caleche awaited.

The light from its doorway blared.

Its engine began to hum.

Bess of the Warrior Church stood bloodied and head-bowed in a clearing in a nameless forest, wondering which way she should go.