Best of British Fantasy 2018 by Jared Shurin

Author:Jared Shurin [Shurin, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2019-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

After the tenth time he had performed this ‘operation’, as he called it, Alphronz returned again to the Isle of Tortoises in the Tepid Sea. Here he had a comfortable house situated on a bluff above the harbour at Port Amberlyne and was known to be a man who kept himself to himself but scrupulously paid all his accounts in full and on time. His habit of giving handsome gratuities to waiters and doormen won him excellent service at the places he liked to frequent.

But after a massage to take the kinks of the long sea voyage from his muscles and a celebratory meal at The King’s Plate, Alphronz came home and went down to his strongroom to make a final enumeration of the latest operation’s takings. He calculated that he could live, in the style he preferred, for seven months. Then he would have to go forth once more into the world, choose a new town to infiltrate, and repeat the process.

The heap of coins and ingots that would keep him at leisure for seven months made a substantial pile on his counting table. Next to it was a smaller but not inconsiderable pile of specie: the seed money for his next harvest of the people he thought of privately as ‘the crop’. It would pay for the rental of property and furnishings, the engaging of servants and a carriage, and all the meals and drinks to which he would treat the crop as he cultivated it and prepared for the gathering of the fruits.

It occurred to Alphronz, not for the first time, that the seed money would see him through several more months of living expenses on the Isle of Tortoises. If he could devise a means of carrying out an operation without putting in so much of his hard-earned wealth, he would not have to work as often as he did. He would have more time to enjoy existence. Now, as he locked up the strongroom and went up to his favourite chamber, the one with a balcony that caught the evening breeze, he turned his agile mind to the question of how. His day servant had decanted a bottle of pale wine and set it with a glass on the balcony’s wrought-iron table. Alphronz settled into the plush-cushioned chair and poured himself a measure. He inhaled the wine’s bouquet, swirled it twice in the stemmed glass, then took the first fragrant sip.

As he did so, his memory took him back to an evening several weeks before, when he had been dining and wining with some members of the crop. A prosperous horse-coper who dealt in thoroughbreds for the racing crowd was telling of what he had learned during a trip to the Great Dry Plain to buy breeding stock.

“On the way back,” the fellow said, “I passed through the city of Barstandle, just to see what I might pick up from a couple of stables I know there. I could hardly do any business, because the entire city was in a frenzy of fear.

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