by Jeffrey Ford
Many of them will recount for you, as if they were there, the Coral Heart’s battle on the island of Saevisha, against the cyclopean ogre Rotnak, tall as a watchtower and ever ravenous for human flesh. They’ll supply the details, no doubt—the whistling wind from the swing of the giant’s club, the tremble of the earth in the wake of his monstrous stride, Toler’s thrust to that single eye, and the whole massive body crackling into a weight of red coral the size of a merchant ship. I hate to disabuse you, but the incident never happened. Please, an ogre? Remember we live in the world, dear reader, not a children’s bedtime story.
One of the aspects of Toler’s life most abused by these fabrications is the story of his upbringing in the Sussuro Mountains. Yes, they manage to capture well enough the location and the fact that he lived out his childhood in a cave in the side of a cliff—common knowledge—but that’s about the extent of any accuracy. All of these tale-tellers have him raised by a hermit, who taught him the art of swordsmanship. The old man was a master of the blade, a fallen knight who had fled the world for a life of contemplation. And even some of this is truth, because Toler was raised by a hermit. The difference between legend and truth, though, is that the hermit was a woman—an assassin who had spent half her life killing for the Alliance of the Back of the Hand, a clandestine society of the very wealthiest of aristocrats who pulled the strings of commerce and manipulated the fate of the powerless.
She was known, or more her work was known, under the alias, -I-. Even those in the secret council of the Alliance, those who sent her on her missions, had never seen her face. What they knew was her black cloak, her silk boots, the speed and grace of her sword. And they knew her mask, a blank white shell with two small circular eye holes and a small circle for a mouth. She killed swiftly, simply, and accurately and moved like an eel through a sunken pasture in the escape. Most of her victims practiced sorcery. The Alliance had secretly declared war on all magic, fearing its promise of hope to the powerless. In -I-’s years of killing, her prey had thrown spells at her, frightening illusions, distracting dreams, creatures of the imagination. She trusted in her sword, her darts, her leather club, and dagger. Once she parried with an enchanted hog, wielding a sword. Once she wrestled with an angel in the heat of the afternoon. She kept her focus as sharp as the blade, able to cut through illusion, sharper than magic.
In the summer of her fortieth year, she was sent on a mission to kill a witch, the crone of Aer, who lived on the outskirts of the city of Camiar. There, in a small cottage, she kept a vast flower garden from which she drew her sorcery. The warm sun and cloudless blue skies did their best to distract the assassin as she rode out of the city to the edge of the Forest of Sans. Along the way, she repeatedly caught herself daydreaming. When she neared the spot where the council had told she’d find the witch’s cottage, she slipped off her horse and sent it silently away to graze in the pasture of tall grass. Moving against the breeze, she crept amid six-foot stalks swarming with yellow butterflies. Some small pest stung her on the back of the neck but she ignored the distraction. At the edge of the pasture, with the place finally in sight, she drew her sword.
She found the door of the cottage wide open and a black cat sitting on the top of three short steps. It never so much as cast a glance her way. Stepping through into the cool shadows of the cottage, she felt the adrenalin pulse and crouched into the fighting stance known as the fly trap. Her eyes immediately adjusted and she noted the basket of fruit on the table, the collections of animal skulls and cleaved rocks displaying green and purple crystals at their centers. Melted candles and crudely fashioned furniture made from tree branches. Crystals hung by twine in the place’s one window; blown glass bottles on the sill held nasturtiums. -I- moved cautiously from one room to the next till she’d searched all three. Then from the kitchen, through a back door, she let herself into the garden.
The aroma of the blossoms was relaxing. She felt the muscles in her sword arm slacken and released a sigh she’d not intended, which she knew was enough of a slip to get her killed. The garden had a fountain and diverging paths lined with egg-like stones shining in the summer sun and radiating warmth through the soles of her boots. More butterflies and grasshoppers and thickets of flowers of all types and colors spilling onto the edges of the walk. Passing a shock of blue daffodils twice her height, she was startled by a figure standing amid a bed of foxglove. Her blade instantly swept through the air and stuck with a knock three inches in the neck of a wooden statue. Its eyes were seashells, its heart a puffball. She pulled the sword free and spun around to see if anyone had heard. There was only a breeze and the sun in the sky.
-I- found her target farther down the path, sitting in a wicker chair beneath an awning of huge, broad leaves. Beside the old woman there was a table on which sat a teapot, two cups, a lit taper, and a pipe. Upon noticing -I-, the witch smiled and motioned for the assassin to join her. She pointed to the empty wicker chair across from hers. -I- was startled by the realization that she’d let herself be detected.
The witch pushed her gray hair behind her ears and said, “Come sit down. There’ll be plenty of time for killing later. And take that ridiculous mask off.”
Disarmed as she was, realizing that any chance of surprise was gone, she walked forward, sheathed her sword, and sat down. “Did you hear me coming?” she asked.
“I smelled you two days off,” said the witch. “Sweet enough but somewhat musty. Please, dear, the mask.”
“Brave for a woman who’s about to die,” said -I-, unable to believe she was speaking to her prey. Until that moment, she’d never have conceived of the possibility. By every measure, it was bad form. Still, she removed her mask and set it on the table. The witches’ glance made her blush. “Do you mean me or you?” asked the crone of Aer.
“You intend to kill me?” -I- went for her sword.
“Easy, dearest,” said the witch. “For someone who’s killed so often, you know little of death.”
-I- returned her sword and sat back. From her years of assessing her prey, her glance instantly registered the woman’s lined face and hunched form, noted her strange beauty—ugliness made a virtue—and the grace with which she poured a cup of tea.
“If I’d wanted you dead, I’d have sent a thought-form servant with a silver rope to strangle you in your sleep two days ago,” said the witch. She pushed the steaming tea cup across the table.
-I- shook her head at the offering.
“Drink it.”
She reached for the teacup at the same time she wondered which poison the old lady had used. Bringing it to her lips, -I-’s senses were enveloped with the aroma of the pasture, its steam misting her vision. She meant to ask herself what she was doing but felt it would have to wait until after she’d tasted the tea. It was soothing and made her body feel cool in the breeze of the hot day. Drinking in small sips, she quickly downed the cup while the witch packed a pipe with dried leaves from a possum-hair pouch.
As -I- placed the empty cup back on the table, the witch handed her the smoldering pipe—a thin, hollowed-out tibia with a bowl carved to resemble the form of an owl.
“What was the tea? And what is this?” asked the assassin.
“The tea was clippings from the garden, stored underground through a frost, drying in sugar. The smoke is Simple Weed.”
“It makes you simple?”
“Does everything need to be complicated?”
-I- laughed and accepted the pipe and candle with which to spark it. She forsook caution, drew deeply, and woke in the middle of the night, the stars shining overhead. She sat up suddenly, confused, her joints aching from the cold ground she’d slept upon. She staggered to her feet and drew her sword only to find she was completely alone. The starlight was enough to show her she’d lain among the ruins of an old stone building, roof gone and walls three-quarters shattered. Grass grew up around the fallen
masonry and crickets sang.
She reached her free hand to the back of her neck and found the tiny dart she’d put off to an insect still lodged there. It was instantly clear that she’d been out cold since the moment she’d felt the sting amid the tall grass, and all else had been a dream. She called for her horse, and it approached from the pasture. Mounting it, she rode fiercely toward Camiar, and within the first mile realized the witch in the dream was her future-self. It was then she decided to assassinate all in the secret council of the Alliance of the Back of the Hand.
And she did just that. Five fat, miserable old men. She stalked them and dispatched them without remorse. Each of the three remaining after the first councilor was found, his head stuffed in his hindquarters, hired his own small army of bodyguards and assassins, but -I- cut through all of them. It was a time known to those in the know as the “Hemorrhage,” for there was a great bleeding although none of the blood seeped into public view. She killed the councilors and their minions, quietly, secretly, each assassination merely a whisper. She killed the head of the Alliance, the so-called “middle finger of the Back of the Hand,” so exquisitely that it took him an hour to realize he was dead before dropping over. And when the last was opened like a mackerel to let the insides become the outside, she rode out of Camiar and lost herself in the Sussuro Mountains.
She ate what hermits eat, locusts and honey, weeds and flowers, fruit and fish. She hunted with her sword, facing off against mountain goats, bears, wildcats, badgers. Those she assassinated for the Alliance rarely had a chance to fight back, but these creatures were cunning and fast and fought to the death every time. Her style of engagement became more calculated than ever, seeing that the fierceness in creatures was a mask of fear. While they pounced, she analyzed and then in the last instant struck with accuracy—one thrust of the blade to let the fear out.
Her dagger trimmed the hide from the meat, which she wrapped in an animal skin and dragged back to her cave. There she had fire and fresh clothes she stole on raids of Camiar’s clotheslines. At night she read her only book, The Consolation of the Constellations, by the light of a lantern that cast a silhouette of an ibis on the wall of the cave. When reading wouldn’t do, she worked through her imagination to create a thought-form servant like the one mentioned by her dream witch.
When she finally climbed into her sleeping bag nestled upon willow branches, let the fire burn low, and closed her eyes, she always wondered who it was who’d cast the dart that day she’d gone to kill “the witch.” She wondered if there’d ever been such a sorceress as the crone of Aer or if the whole thing had been an ambush. Since she wasn’t killed, she believed that perhaps a larger spell had been cast that might strike a blow against the Alliance and remove her deadly art from the covert war between the powerful and the people. The longer she stayed away from Camiar, the more she considered that dart an act of kindness.
In spring of her second year in the mountains, while chasing down a stag, she followed the creature into a place she’d never been before. It led her down a canyon as wide as an alley to the floor of a gorge. There, things opened up to a vast mudflat shadowed by three-hundred-foot vertical walls of granite. She looked up and saw the blue sky over the rim of the cliffs, and the sight of it made her cold. In an instant, she felt that the place was haunted and she turned to flee. It was then that she noticed the bodies, lying here and there, dressed in finery, decomposing in the mud. They were badly broken, limbs in odd twisted positions, obviously having fallen from the cliffs.
Seeing the manner in which the corpses were dressed, she remembered from her days with the Alliance having heard of a place in the mountains where people were coaxed to commit suicide by leaping to their deaths. The natural setting of the gorge was staggeringly beautiful, and so the secret council gave some of their victim’s the choice—either -I- could come for them or they could willingly take the plunge at Churnington’s Gorge surrounded by nature and with a modicum of dignity. When she realized who the dead were, she rifled their pockets and took the mink coat of a recent arrival. Her fear of spirits was strong every second she delayed to pillage them, and eventually she left behind a string of pearls she easily could have had and ran, heart pounding, back through the narrow canyon.
That night, lying in the cave, the fire burning low, -I- remembered looking up to the cliffs and seeing that sliver of blue sky. With that image in mind, she had an idea that wealthy people about to jump might leave something behind for the world to remember them by. She daydreamed a large man in a violet suit, brandishing a cane, leaving behind a short stack of books before stepping over the side, and realized she would go there, to the top of the gorge and see what treasures could be found.
The journey was arduous, the trail leading over a mountain and then a descent to the plateau that ended at Churnington’s. What she found at the edge of the cliff was a small boy, sitting, staring out at the afternoon sun. In his pocket, she found a note that read, “I am Ismet Toler.” She judged him to be three years old. When she leaned down to him and reached out her hand, he took it. “Come,” she said, and led him back to the cave where she raised him.
Little is known about Toler’s younger years. Although there are many opinions about what kind of mother -I- made for the boy, or what kinds of qualities he’d carried over from the poor soul who’d chosen to leap to his doom, there exists no proof for any of it. The only verifiable record from this time was a letter written by a sixteen-year-old Toler to himself about his training in swordsmanship. There were cadavers dragged from the gorge and strapped to the trunks of trees or hung by a rope from a branch—lifelike dummies on which one could practice the precise arc and velocity necessary to slice the heel tendon of a large man. There was dance. There was acrobatics and contemplation. About sparring with -I-, he confessed to himself, he couldn’t conceive of victory.
The only other verifiable incident from Toler’s youth was related to me by Lady Etmisler, who had heard it from The Coral Heart himself at a banquet they’d both attended in the palace at Camiar. He told her that when he became masterful with the sword, -I- told him that he’d reached the second of three levels of development. She told him to leave the cave and go out in the world and ply his trade. He wanted to know when the third level began, and she told him, “In five years, you can return to me if by then you’ve renounced the sword. We can only continue if you forsake it.”
That night she told him the story of how she came to the mountains and discovered him on the ledge at Churnington’s Gorge. In the morning, he kissed her good-bye, and she told him that at the end of five years she would send a thought-form servant to him to ask if he’d renounced the sword and was returning. He nodded as he walked away, his sword upon his back. In the valley of the known world, he soon found employment as a bodyguard to a corrupt bishop who was often the target of assassination attempts. From there his reputation as a swordsman grew. He moved on to work as a mercenary and fought for the side that paid the most in any conflict, often changing sides in mid-battle for the promise of better. By his fourth year away from the mountains, Ismet Toler was a name to be reckoned with.
But as that fourth year drew to a close, after proving the effectiveness of his blade, he felt he’d had enough of slaughter. The disfigurement of his victim’s bodies, the blood and severed flesh, had become nauseating to him. It was all too much of the same gore, and he felt a need to move on to the next level. His diary from this time proves he was on the verge of renouncing the sword and returning to -I-. For the remaining months of the year, he decided to leave his position, training assassins for the Igridot royalty, and head for Camiar, where he would rent rooms, live off the spoils of his killing, and wait for -I-’s servant to appear.
In that brief space of days that he travelled north on the road to Camiar, Fate in all its bad timing and low humor stepped in, and he somewhere, somehow, acquired the Coral Heart, the blade, whose magical p
roperties would eventually make him a legend. Toler swore to never reveal how he came by it, and so this crucial juncture in the story is blank. I constantly comb the valley of the known world for clues to those few days he spent retreating along that road, and have found nothing. I could spin a fanciful tale, but instead, I merely direct you to where the trail of known fact resumes.
By the time Toler entered the city, he’d already turned to red coral a band of highwaymen who’d foolishly tried to rob him and take his horse. It was the trio of palace guard, though, who confronted him in the marketplace at Camiar and wound up red statues of their former selves, that caused the trouble. He knew he would have to flee. Learning the feel of the sword, he was eager to use it, but he’d not yet mastered its extra weight or reckoned the sharpness or balance to the point where he could yet defeat the entirety of the royal guard of the palace of Camiar. He left the city by night as door-to-door torchlight searches for him were being conducted. There had been witnesses.
Two days later, he arrived in a village, a hundred miles away, separated from Camiar by the Forest of Sans. He chose Twyse as his hideout as it was off the main trails that linked the palaces of the realm. If the snowy, sleepy place had any reputation it was as a home for hunters who stalked the forests that lay just beyond. The furs and skins of Twyse were renowned among the royalty, but its inhabitants cared little for news from outside its borders and would have cheered a tale of the demise of three of the royal guard of Camiar. Toler had stayed there once before and came to know the people as that rare stock who could mind their own business.