SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

"I live just fine here, Ogmund!" Sigrid stepped back and planted her hands on her hips. Leave the valley! She couldn’t even think of it.

Ogmund looked confounded. He glanced about the burnt and salted landscape while his mouth worked out the words.

“But Sigrid,” he finally said, standing and taking her little hand in his great big ones. “There’s nothing left.” He paused. “Who did you say you were staying with, again?”

“If you must know,” Sigrid said, avoiding eye contact. “I’m staying with the kobolds.”

A succession of competing demeanours took hold of Ogmund. Sigrid watched as confusion, alarm, confusion again, and then a moment of panic played over her husband’s features; then helplessness and, finally, anger. He dropped her hands and tightened his great fists around his sword’s hilt instead.

" Kobolds? " he hissed, face reddening. "You’ve been captured by kobolds?"

“Not captured, Ogmund. Don’t be dense.” Sigrid folded her arms over her chest and braced herself for the storm. Ogmund turned purple.

“You have been living with kobolds?” Ogmund raised his voice. “And you’d rather stay with them than live in a manor with me?”

“Oh, Ogmund.” Sigrid sighed. “This isn’t about you.”

“I will kill them all,” Ogmund thundered, gripping his sword and taking off for the verge of the woods. “I will not lose my wife to kobolds!”

“Ogmund!” Sigrid called, hiking her skirt and starting after him. “You stop this instant! Ogmund! Did you hear me? If you harm one red hair on their heads, I’ll never speak another word to you, do you hear?”

“They’ve ensorcelled you!” Ogmund raged, casting his eyes about for something to hit. “Groa One-Eye has cursed you! I’ll free you, my love. They will rue the day they meddled in the affairs of Ogmund Ironbreaker!”

Ogmund what ? "Ogmund! Nobody has put any bloody pox on me! Would you stop a minute!" The big warrior had crossed the salted fields in a half-dozen paces and was searching the verge for tracks. Sigrid’s boot got stuck in the half-melted spring mud. She considered leaving it behind. "Ogmund!" she called. "Stop!"

The urgency in her voice made him look up and the look on his face plucked a string in her heart. He was lost, betrayed, confused, and upset. Though his hair was greyer and his teeth fixed with gold, though his chest plate could have been sold to buy half the farms in the county and his sword the other half; she saw the man who could never remember to close the cow pen, and the man who couldn’t reach the buttons on his jerkin without her help. The man who loved her lamb stew to reckless indulgence, and the man who was so proud each and every time he brought home a boar, as if he hadn’t gone hunting three thousand times in his life. The man who kept coming back for her month after month, year after year, though she was sure he could have had his pick of foreign princesses and wild-eye courtesans. Ogmund, her husband.

“Ogmund, please,” she begged, “I’m stuck.” She tried to haul her foot out of the mire with dignity and half-slipped instead, dropping to one knee with a decidedly undignified squeak.

She was so consumed trying to get up again without soiling her entire outfit that she didn’t notice Ogmund come to her side. She took his thick forearms out of habit, holding tight as he hauled her bodily to her feet. After another moment’s struggle with the stuck boot, she pulled her bare foot out and slipped into him, snagging her hair in the buckles of his armour.

“There you go,” he said gently, setting her more or less right on one foot. Sigrid hopped a couple of times and laughed despite herself. When she looked into his eyes, he was smiling too.

“Please come with me, Sigrid,” he said softly. Sigrid set her jaw and smiled again, sadly this time.

"No, Ogmund," she replied. "I don’t want to. I don’t belong in the city."

“But you don’t belong under the mountain either,” Ogmund pleaded. “I certainly don’t.”

“No, you don’t,” Sigrid said apologetically. “You’ve gone on to great things. I’m very proud of you, Ogmund, but I want to live here. The kobolds are quite sensible once you get used to them. And I—I can manage without you.”

Ogmund swallowed thickly and looked grieved, but seemed to understand her. He wordlessly picked her up and carried her over the rest of the field to the verge, where he followed her prints back to the solid wooden door in the ground. He put her down there and stood back uneasily.

“I can build you a house here, Sigrid,” he offered. “You don’t have to live in a hole.”

“After the war is over,” Sigrid agreed, nodding. “And you can always come visit.”

Ogmund stiffened, his frown lost in his beard. Then he nodded too.

“I could,” he conceded. Then he looked at the door. “I don’t think I could fit down there.”

“You’re very big, Ogmund,” Sigrid said, stepping off the door so he could open it for her. “But I am very small.”

She stepped into the darkness of the tunnel and let door snap shut behind her.

First published in Great Britain in ebook format by HarperVoyager, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2015. Copyright © John Ayliff 2015

The Worldbreaker was hours away, but Konrad’s Hope was already coming apart. Most of the starscrapers were dark, and the surface bore scars where solar panels and heat sinks had been stripped away. The end of the docking spindle was a twisted, molten ruin, no doubt damaged during the evacuation riots. The true-borns and their favoured servants would have gone first, followed by any tank-borns who could scare up the cost of an evac ship berth. With the last evac ships gone, maybe fifty thousand tank-borns would be in the city, with nothing to do but wait for the end.

The space around the city was clear of the normal controlled traffic chaos. The industrial orbitals would have been nudged into orbits towards other cities, and even the smallest tugs and shuttles would be carrying refugees in desperate escape attempts. The only bodies orbiting the city now were smaller rocks and the debris from the shattered spindle.

‘ Thousand Names , this is the Konrad’s Hope evacuation committee. We’ve gathered the high-priority evacuation cases in one location. Send your shuttle to these coordinates…’

‘ Thousand Names , my name is Jananna Smith. I’m the only true-born left. I’ve got a lot of wealth tied up in other cities—take me away from here and I’ll see that you’re rewarded—’

‘ Thousand Names , please, there’s a birthing village full of children still here. They don’t even know what’s happening. For God’s sake, you’ll have room for them, please—’

The breathless voices sounded in the background of the Thousand Names’s bridge, coming across what had once been the city’s traffic control channels. Everyone with the means to detect them would hope that they were a late-coming evac ship, and everyone with access to a transmitter was bargaining for passage.

‘ Thousand Names , this is Sister Greyda of the Konrad’s Hope Scriber chapel. We’re delighted you’ve chosen to join us—’

‘Brenn, turn that shit off.’ Olzan’s voice came out more strained than he had expected.

Brenn looked a little startled, but the voices shut off. Vazoya squeezed his hand and muttered something reassuring, but Olzan knew whom she was really trying to reassure.

Without the chatter, the silence was oppressive. Olzan replaced the live view on the screen with a city map, and began running through the plan again, to take his mind off the approach as much as anything else. ‘The collection is housed in a hangar near the bottom of that starscraper,’ he said, pointing. ‘We’ll take a shuttle in. Docking with a rotating ’scraper will be tricky but Vaz can do it.’