The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

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…”