Clarkesworld Year Eleven by Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace

Author:Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace [Clarke, Neil & Wallace, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, clarkesworld, science fiction, Science Fiction - Anthologies, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy
ISBN: 9781642360257
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2019-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Last Chance

Nicole Kornher-Stace

Mama was the very best torturer in all the Three Valleys. Everybody said so. Torturer means somebody who’s good at making you tell secrets, even when you don’t want to. It’s hard to lie to Mama. So I know she’s really good at her job.

Even the king up in Grayfall knew Mama was the best. He probably had his own torturer, because a king has everything, but who was it getting brought in the fancy cart all the way up the highroad whenever the king had a secret-keeper in his jail? You guess who.

I don’t know why Mama didn’t want to move to Grayfall. We spent so much time going back and forth, Sunrise to Grayfall along the highroad and back. The first time in the cart was okay, sitting on the soft seats with Mama, looking out the windows, playing I Spy and Count the Fires and Who Can Hold Their Breath the Longest, but on the way home it was already getting boring, and Mama said there’d be lots of next times after that, a job’s a job, so I better just get used to it.

Deep down I didn’t want to move to Grayfall either, not really. I liked it in Sunrise. Even if there was no king and no fancy cart and no kingsguard bringing me blackberry pastries from the castle kitchen while Mama was off working. In Sunrise we had our very own house, just me and Mama, with our very own mint plant and our very own tree, with a swing on the low branch that’s the perfect height for me and I didn’t have to share it with anyone.

But the best part about Sunrise was the giants. Sometimes for Mama’s work she puts a secret-keeper’s feet into a box of stones and makes them stand in the river with just their face sticking out until they tell her all the secrets the king wants to know. These two giants have their feet stuck in the earth pretty much exactly like that, their heads tilted back in just the same way, the Waste drifting up around their ankles like snow. The rest of their bodies are rusty like an old knife and you can’t really tell what they used to look like, but I like how the highroad to Sunrise runs between them and you can look up and imagine that they were in the middle of play-fighting like me and Jamie sometimes do when our chores are done and somebody said FREEZE and so they froze there, one of them grabbing the other one’s fists in midair.

Jamie’s dad says the giants are old old magic. Older than any house in Sunrise. Older than the castle in Grayfall. Older than the highroad, which is so old it’s mostly gone in places and workers have to go out with flat rocks to patch up the places where the road disappears and it’s just Waste where the road should be. Older even than the Grayfall songkeeper, who’s so old her face looks like a dried apple with no juice left in it at all.

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