by William King
The knights let out a great shout and raced into battle. Hearing them or perhaps perceiving the vibration of their movement, the Spider Mother responded, moving forward, pinning one man beneath her carapace-armoured leg, crushing another with her great bulk.
On the carpet of bones and skulls men fought to maintain their balance. Kormak danced and slashed at elves. Weaver looked down from the ceiling, smiling mockingly, chittering something in a strange tongue. As she did so the Spider Mother wheeled left and right, trapping the knights, crushing them, spraying out webbing from one nozzle in her face. Kormak realised that the great beast was responding to Weaver’s instructions.
Grogan was reaching up for him, trying to say something. “Bow,” he muttered. “Kill the bitch. I’d do it myself but I don’t seem capable of moving.”
Kormak looked down into Grogan’s dying eyes. It was not a trick. Maybe Kormak’s sword had purged him of the taint of Shadow and freed his mind and soul in death. The Guardian bent over, picked up the bow and knocked an arrow. He was not the greatest shot in the world but he did know how to use the weapon. He took careful aim at Weaver, even though his wounded flank felt like it was burning, and fired. The arrow flew true and smashed into the witch’s armour. A scream emerged from her mouth. The Spider Mother halted for a moment.
Howling his battle-cry Baron Enderby raced forward and slashed at her leg with his battle-blade. It bit deep, partially severing the limb. The Spider Mother wheeled to attack him but with surprising quickness he leapt away, stumbling and falling as a pile of bones gave way beneath him.
Weaver scuttled across the ceiling, clutching at the shaft of the arrowhead. Kormak took another arrow from Grogan’s quiver, aiming again. This time Weaver was ready and dropped from the ceiling, landing atop the Mother’s back. Kormak fired a third arrow, this time hitting Weaver and sending her spinning. She was chittering at the Mother again, and her fall put her out of Kormak’s line of sight high atop the giant spider’s back.
He scabbarded his blade and raced forward. Leaping up and grabbing the Spider Mother’s side, he hauled himself onto her back. The pain in his wounded side was awful. He thought he was going to black out but he needed to finish this. The Spider Mother swayed in response to Weaver’s chittering, turning to assault the spot where Kormak had been. She reared up and brought her full weight down. He was glad he was no longer standing there, as he listened to bones break and skulls crunch.
He pulled himself upright, swaying with the violent motion of the great arachnid. He saw Weaver waiting there and realised that she had the advantage. She could maintain her position just as easily here as she had on the wall. He could barely remain upright.
Weaver saw him coming and shrieked. She raised her skull tipped staff. Its eye-sockets glowed with a horrible greenish light. She pointed it at him and a fog of bile-coloured ectoplasm seethed towards him, swirling around him in a hideous cloud that made his skin itch and threatened to clog his lungs. He felt the Elder Sign grow warm on his chest as it fought the dark magic. He reached up to unsheathe his sword. The pain almost made him howl. Blood flowed in his mouth from where he had bit the inside of his lips. He felt as if he was choking.
He staggered forward along the Mother’s back, hardly able to keep his balance. Weaver smiled evilly as he closed and brought her staff sweeping down towards him. He tried to parry but was too slow. The staff hit him on the chest near where he was wounded. Agony surged through him. The Elder Sign felt as if it was branding his flesh.
Two of Weaver’s limbs flickered out towards him. He could see sharp points extrude. The curved over his shoulders and buried themselves in his back. He felt himself hoisted aloft like a joint of meat. Warm blood ran down his back beneath his armour. Weaver smiled at him and he could see the fangs in her mouth. The stab of pain sent the dwarf-forged blade falling from his grip.
“If nothing else, I will have the pleasure of sending you to hell before me,” she said. She paused for a second, considering him. He felt all strength drain from him. He was weaponless and at her mercy and she was enjoying the sensation for a few extra moments.
Kormak writhed in her grip. The arrow felt like fire in his side where it pushed against her armour. He reached down with his hand and pulled it free. Blood came out in a spurt and splattered her face. She turned her head to one side in a reflex action; when she brought it back, Kormak drove the sharpened obsidian point of the arrow in her eye and down into her brain. He twisted it and then struck her beneath the jaw with the heel of his hand. She spasmed reflexively, pulled her claws clear of his flesh and fell off the back of the great spider.
Kormak tumbled forwards into blackness.
He awoke. His body felt as if it was on fire. Above him, the ceiling rippled and it took him a moment to realise he was in a silk pavilion. There were several other people present.
He looked up to see Gilean looking down at him. With her was Master Graydon and Baron Enderby.
“It seems you are not ready to march into the Kingdoms of Dust yet,” said Graydon.
“I am not so certain my body agrees with you. I feel like I have been chewed up by a dragon and spat out.”
Graydon gave him a wintery smile. “You may yet have a chance for that to happen but for the moment you seem well. The master alchemist has been dosing you with the universal antidote and the master herbalist has been treating your wounds. He says that given time, you should make a full recovery. Your shoulder muscles should heal and the arrow in your side did not touch your lung.”
“The Blight,” Kormak asked.
“We have found the source of the corruption— in the rotting corpse of the great tree. We will burn it with alchemical fire and salt the ground. We shall burn out the corrupted groves. It will take time but I am hopeful that we will cauterise this foul growth.”
“Weaver?”
“She won’t be coming back after what you did to her. The Baron and his men took her body and chopped it to pieces. We burned them.”
“How did you get the Spider Mother?”
“After you killed Weaver, she keeled over and died. The bloody beast had already taken a lot of wounds, and the amount of hacking we did probably did not improve her health,” the Baron said. “We’ve won.”
“It’s over,” said Gilean.
“For the moment,” Kormak replied. He knew the war against the Shadow was never really over.
THE END
EXTRAS
Author’s Notes
Guardian of the Dawn is my personal favourite of all the sword and sorcery short stories I have written. I can still remember sitting down one evening at the table in the living room in our old shabby flat in Modrany and starting to write it. It came out of nowhere as many stories do. I began in the middle, with Kormak in the forest about to confront the elder world demon. It was a scene that surprised me with its odd echoes of Kipling in the language used and a formal structure of challenge and response between man and monster. I thought I was going to do Beowulf and Grendel. I ended up with something like a confrontation between two samurai. It pleased me no end.
Of course, there were some questions. Who was this knight dispatched into the heart of a haunted forest to confront a terrifying ancient power? Why was he doing it? Clearly he has his own doubts. He was not a simple man, this Kormak, no matter what it looked like on the surface.
To answer these questions I wrote the opening scene with Kormak erupting into the lives of a poor peasant family, wounded and ready for violence. We learn he is wanted for murder. He is a menacing man, no doubt about that, and a very dangerous one, who lives in a world of paranoiac violence; watching a woman bring him a bowl of soup, his first thought is to be ready in case she throws the hot liquid in his face. For all that, he seems quite sane and, more than that, noble in an odd sort of way. He is prepared to threaten innocents for his own purposes and yet those purposes make him the protector of those same people. We can see the worm of doubt is eating away at the iron core of his ruth
lessness.
The opening scene and the resolution of the confrontation with the Old One suggested the ending with a certain inevitability so I wrote that and was done.
Over the years since Guardian of the Dawn was set down, I finally realised where Kormak came from. He is descended from Callan, the anti-hero of a spy series starring the late, great Edward Woodward, that my parents watched compulsively when I was a kid. Callan was an assassin for the British government who had started to question why he was being sent to kill people and yet was trapped in the role he played. I was too young to really appreciate the story-lines back in the Swinging 60s but Channel Four re-ran Callan in the 80s and it blew me away. The memory stayed with me till I bought Callan: the Monochrome Years on DVD recently. Watching Woodward’s chillingly decent assassin go about his business I saw where Kormak, a very hard man going soft in a business where that will get him killed, came from.
Author’s Notes
Stealer of Flesh is a book that Amazon made possible. Seriously. All of my life I have wanted to write something like it but I was born at the wrong time. In order to explain that we need to rewind to when I was a very young teenager. I grew up reading, among other things, lots of good, old-fashioned sword and sorcery; Robert E Howard’s Conan and Solomon Kane; Michael Moorcock’s Elric, Corum and Hawkmoon books; Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique and Hyperborea and Averoigne stories and many more. These were not the sort of fantasy novels or series that fill the shelves these days.
For the most part they were relatively short books, often made up of collections of short stories or novellas. They very often featured a recurring hero or heroes in a quasi-medieval fantasy world. They were often very dark, and while they featured magic, it was not the sort of Swiss Army Knife tech substitute easily adaptable to a fully developed game system that we see in a lot of modern fantasy. It was often something that inspired awe and dread, fear and horror, in about equal measures. The stories were tales of a swordsman or swordsmen (only very occasionally woman like Jhirel of Jhoiry) fighting against wizards and monsters. They were fast-moving, hard-hitting and a product of a pulp sensibility. I loved them then as I love them now.
By the time I was a full-time professional writer, the time for such stories seemed to have passed. Somewhere down the line the market changed. Fantasy books got longer (and longer and longer), old-fashioned sword-swinging heroes went out of fashion. Magic became a good thing, a new form of power-fantasy for an age that put more emphasis on the intellectual and on technique. (I strongly suspect the rise of Dungeons and Dragons and such role-playing games had something to do with this but that’s a topic for another day.) It became almost impossible to get the sort of sword and sorcery books I wanted to write into print. They were too short and too focused for the era of fat-book fantasy. I got close once with Trollslayer which was a collection of the Gotrek and Felix short stories but that was about it. I took to writing long-form novels and my short story writing was put on hold to say the very least.
Back in 2005 though I wrote a story called Guardian of the Dawn about a monster-hunter called Kormak. I had the vague plan of building a fantasy world by writing a series of short stories. Guardian was picked up by Howard Andrew Jones then the editor of the Flashing Swords website. The story was popular and many people asked for a sequel. I thought the character had potential and I set myself to writing some.
I immediately ran into some problems, the main one being that I make my living from writing, and short stories are not an economical way of supporting myself and my family. The obvious solution was to write a novel. I tried and I tried and I tried. I just could not wrestle Kormak into the form or at least the variant of the form that was needed to sell to a publisher, you know a 90-120,000 word quest fantasy. I wanted to do something shorter, punchier, more like the series of my youth. I added sub-plots, I tried to do epic quests, I spliced in multiple story-lines, I outlined, I wrote 35000 words and abandoned it because I just could not make it fly. It did not want to fit the shape I was trying to force it into. Oh well, I thought. I’ve abandoned projects before, I’ll abandon them again. Time to move on.
Fast forward 6 years or so. It’s late 2011 and I had just released the first of my Terrarch novels as an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle. I was thinking about the possibilities opened up by this new publishing format and distribution system. It dawned on me that I was not limited to the word count limits and formats of conventional publishing. I released Guardian of the Dawn as an e-book and it sold very well, better than the first novels in the Terrarch series had on their release. It seemed possible that there was a way to proceed with the Kormak series after all. I could release them myself as short stories and then collect them together at the end. There was no need to worry about finding someone to publish them. I could do that myself with the minimum of fuss.
So, working in the inevitable intervals that occur in writing books and in my spare time and on my weekends, I started work on another Kormak story. It was set in a city, and it involved him in a hunt for a body-shifting demon. He met an attractive lady thief and an expatriate mage and there were hints of things darker and deeper in the background. I called the story Stealer of Flesh. It was novella length by the time I finished it and I was pleased.
I realised that the story hinted at a much greater arc. It began in medias res near the climax of Kormak’s hunt for the demon prince Razhak and spoke of a hunt across the length of a continent. I decided I would write about that hunt and how it started. So I wrote The Demon Unleashed showing how a cabal of immortality seeking sorcerers had freed Razhak using Kormak’s own enchanted blade. It came to me then that I could write a book somewhat like Moorcock’s Stormbringer, which was a collection of linked novellas released individually that eventually built into an epic novel.
I pushed on. Next came the Wolves of War, as Kormak’s hunt for the demon took him across a land haunted by ethnic cleansing werewolves and refugees from that terrible struggle, a place where Light and Shadow were just masks worn by old historic hatreds.
I had a false start with the next story although it came with a truly haunting opening, Kormak riding across an icebound lake filled with frozen corpses. I could not quite make it gel though so I pushed on.
Along the way the stories and fragments provided me with glimpses of Kormak’s world, of how the demon race that Razhak was a member of had come to be, and of the ancient empires that had shaped the world. It was an odd place, with echoes of Tolkien filtered through Robert E Howard. It was a place that looked a bit like a traditional epic fantasy world but seen through the lens of realpolitik. People claimed to represent the Light and that their foes were of the Shadow but mostly they behaved like the amoral denizens of an old-style sword and sorcery world, which is to say like most people have behaved through most of history. At the centre of it all stood Kormak, watchful, decent, struggling to do the right thing in a world where what was right was often hard to get at.
I rewrote the novellas as I went along incorporating all the new information as it came up. My original plan had been to release them as I wrote them, but I realised if I was going to be constantly rewriting and adding new bits of history I could not do that. No matter, I would just run with it. I was keen to see how it all turned out. I wrote a final novella, This Way Lies Death as a capstone to it all. The whole story of the chase came to a climax in the haunted city on the edge of the world where the demons had been born.
And so I was done. All I needed to do was put the stories together and release the e-book, which is what I did. I never did get the frozen lake story finished in a way I liked so I left it out but I am sure that some day I will find a way to complete it.
Author’s Notes
I started work on Defiler of Tombs almost seven years ago, back in 2006. I really wanted to write a novel about Kormak, the monster-hunting hero of The Guardian of the Dawn but I was trying to fit it into the template that would be acceptable to a conventional
fantasy publisher. I’ve written about what a struggle that was elsewhere, but to recap, I was trying to fit a lean, taut sword and sorcery tale into an oversized vessel, to make it longer than it was meant to be. It could not to be done (by me at least) and thus I abandoned it.
I always thought it was a real pity, because the story had many strengths. There was Kormak himself, a somewhat different take on the conventional sword and sorcery hero, a savage outcast trained by an order of warrior-priests to battle the ancient demigods and demons of his world. There was the world: a dark strange place with echoes of Tolkien and Robert E Howard, where immortals walked the night, and elder races lurked on the edges of civilisation.
And there was the opening, one of the strongest I had written, as Kormak prepared himself to enter the freshly opened tomb of an ancient king to save a group of children from the awakened wight therein. It was dark and it was scary and it showed the Guardian going about his business in a way that made it clear he was a somewhat different kind of hero. Unfortunately, in my original draft the story then went off at various tangents after that and just kind of petered out. It had suffered because I had tried to develop the storyline organically, without any sort of outline and I had just ended up rambling.
When I came back to it I knew the best thing to do was to strip it down and concentrate on the ramifications of the first chapters. It turned out that one of the main problems was my sloppy approach to plotting and my inability to see what was in front of my face. Right, I thought, let’s deal with this. Someone is opening long closed tombs and letting out the undead horrors therein. That begs a number of questions that need to be answered. Who would open tombs containing barrow wights and why would they do it? And how did all of those ancient undead evils get in there in the first place. There were a lot of questions for Kormak and myself, so I set myself to getting the answers.