Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  Goblin said, “It’s earlier than is my custom but in honor of our success I will join you, sir.”

  We entered. The interior of the Dark Horse exactly reflected its exterior. There were no Company brothers out there, drinking and playing tonk. There were none inside, either.

  In fact, there was no one behind the bar.

  Goblin rectified that by observing, “Nobody’s home. Let’s get back there and…”

  Markeb Zhorab materialized. Goblin said, “Hello, magic man. We’ve done a hard day’s work. Beer is in order.”

  Zhorab drew two mugs while eyeing us with unnerving intensity. “Did you catch who you were after?”

  The man was incredibly tense. “Yes. Why does that mean so much to you?”

  Zhorab raised a finger in a “wait one” gesture. He dug out the hidden cash box he thought was secret but was not to any sharp-eyed regular. He looked around furtively while fumbling it open. He produced a ragged deck.

  “My cards.” Last seen in the hands of Corey and his pals. “Where did you get those?”

  “Goblin said to hang on to them till you arrested the person the Taken is here to collect.”

  The little wizard and I exchanged puzzled looks.

  “Oh. It’s not really the cards.” He spread the deck across the bar, hand shaking. He watched the door like he expected doom to thunder through any second.

  Goblin asked, “You haven’t sold us out to somebody, have you?”

  “Huh? Oh! No! Never!”

  “Then how come this place is so empty? How come you’re so nervous?”

  I said, “The place is empty because everybody is back at the compound. Hello.” I plucked a piece of parchment from amongst the scattered cards.

  I unfolded it.

  I stared.

  I started shaking. Memories buried monstrously deep gurgled to the surface. “Goblin. Check this out.”

  Goblin started shaking, too.

  Zhorab asked, “I did it right?”

  I pushed a silver piece across. “You did it perfectly.” I had found the copy now, too. “Just one more step. You had the letter writer make an extra copy. We’ll want that one, too.”

  Zhorab wanted to lie but desisted after a look into Goblin’s eyes. “It will take a few minutes.”

  I put another coin on the bar, with an ugly black knife for a companion. The knife was not special but looked like it ought to be.

  Zhorab gulped, nodded, vanished.

  Goblin observed, “He gave that up pretty easy.”

  “Probably has more than one copy.”

  “You want them all?”

  “I don’t mind there being a few extras floating around, maybe getting back to the Tower someday.”

  “Your honey would run our smelly friend through the reeducation process again.”

  I shuddered. I had had my own brush with the Eye. Everything inside me had been exposed had the Lady cared to look. It had been her way of getting to know me. What the Limper would endure would be a hundred times worse, but not fatal. He was much too useful—when he confined himself to being an extension of the Lady’s will.

  Zhorab returned. He gave me another folded parchment. I sheathed my knife. “We have to go. Be ready for a big rush later on.”

  We encountered Hagop halfway to the compound. “There you are. The Captain sent me to get you guys. He wants Goblin to connect with the Tower so the Lady will know we got the girl, in perfect shape, before the Limper takes her and heads out.”

  “Shit.” Goblin looked back, considering making a run for it.

  It had been a while since he had made direct contact. He did not want to endure that again. Not voluntarily.

  I said, “It must be damned important if he’s willing to put you through that.”

  Hagop said, “He really wants to make sure she knows. He doesn’t trust the Limper.”

  “Who would?” And, “The temple girl really is Tides Elba?”

  “Yes. She doesn’t deny it. She claims she’s no Rebel or Resurrectionist, either. But she’s got some girl magic.”

  Goblin asked, “Croaker, it ever feel like everybody knows more than you do?”

  “Every damned day since I joined this chicken-shit outfit. Hagop. Take this. First chance you get, plant it right back where you found it.”

  He took the folded parchment. “This isn’t the one I gave you.”

  The Captain was behind his table. Tides Elba sat on one of his rude chairs, wrists and ankles in light fetters. She looked to have gone numb, emotionally beyond the point where she could not believe this was happening. A torc had been placed around her neck, the sort used to manage captured sorcerers. If she tried to use sorcery, it would deliver terrible pain.

  The Lady must have probed far into the future. The child was sitting on the only magic she controlled right now.

  The Captain scowled. “You’ve been drinking.”

  “One mug, in celebration of a job well done,” Goblin replied.

  “It’s not done yet. Contact the Lady. Let her know. Before the Limper finds out we have her.”

  Goblin told me, “Welcome to the mushroom club.”

  The Captain said, “I don’t need you here, Croaker.”

  “Of course you do. How else am I going to get it into the Annals right?”

  He shrugged. “Move it, Goblin. You’re wasting valuable time.”

  Goblin could make contact on the spur of the moment because he had made the connection so often before. But familiarity did not ease the pain. He shrieked. He fell down, gripped by a seizure. Startled, concerned, the Captain came out from behind his table, dropped to a knee beside Goblin, back to the girl. “Will he be all right?”

  “Make sure he doesn’t swallow his tongue.” I took the opportunity to cop a feel of a firm, fresh breast and to slip a square of parchment in with the sweet young jubblies. The girl met my eye but said nothing. “My guess is, he’s having trouble getting through.”

  The Lady heard Goblin but chose another means of response. Just as the Limper burst in through an exploding door.

  A circle of embers two feet across appeared above Goblin, almost tangled in the Captain’s hair. The Lady’s beautiful face came into focus inside. Her gaze met mine. She smiled. My legs turned to gelatin.

  Goblin’s seizure ended. As did the Limper’s charge.

  A voice like a whisper from everywhere asked, “Is this her?”

  The Captain said, “So we believe, ma’am. She fits all the particulars.”

  The Lady winked at me. We were old campaign buddies. We had hunted down and killed her sister during the fighting at Charm.

  The whisper from everywhere said, “She’s striking, isn’t she?”

  I nodded. Goblin and the Captain nodded. The Limper, oozing closer behind his miasmic stench, dipped his masked face in agreement. Tides Elba was indeed striking, and growing more so by the minute—employing an unconscious sorcery to which her torc did not respond.

  “Every bit as much as my sister was. This one’s remote grandmother, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance.”

  Different sister, I presumed. Tides Elba bore only a passing resemblance to the one I helped kill. I started to ask a question. Needlessly. Our employer was in an expansive mood.

  “Her male ancestor was my husband. He futtered anything that moved, including all my sisters and all the female Taken. Enough. She was about to mate with another of his descendants. Their child would become a vessel into which the old bastard could project his soul.”

  The Limper might have considered all that in whatever he had planned. The rest of us gaped. Excepting the girl. She did not understand a word. The language the Lady spoke was unknown to her.

  Her whole being was focused on what hung in the air, there, though.

  She voided herself. She knew where she was bound.

  Something passed between the Lady and the Limper. The stinky little sorcerer bowed deeply. He moved in on the girl, took hold of her arm, forced her to
her feet. He pushed her toward the door he had wrecked.

  The rest of us watched, every man wishing he had the power to stop them, every man knowing that, if the Lady had spoken truly, Tides Elba was a threat to the entire world. She could become the port through which the hideous shadow known as the Dominator could make his return. No doubt she was sought by and beloved of every Resurrectionist cult hoping to free the old evil from his grave. No doubt she was a prophesied messiah of darkness.

  I glanced back. The Lady was gone. The end, here, was almost an anticlimax. But that was because we were out there on the margins, able to see only the local surface of the story. For the Company, the central fact would be we had survived.

  We all went out and watched the Limper get ready to go.

  He seemed nervous and unhappy. He shoved the girl into a sack. He sewed that shut, then secured it to his carpet with cording. Tides Elba would not evade her fate by rolling off the carpet while it was in flight. His liftoff into the late-afternoon light seemed erratic. He wobbled as he headed west.

  I found Hagop in the shadows near where the Limper’s carpet had lain. He gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up. “He spotted it right away. Took it out, looked at it, and jumped like somebody just hit him with a shovel.”

  “He got the message, then.”

  Goblin stared westward, eyes still haunted, but said only, “What a waste of delicious girl flesh.” And then, “Let’s round up Elmo and One-Eye and go tip a few at the Dark Horse. Elmo has got the cards, don’t he?”

  * * *

  GENE WOLFE worked as an engineer, before becoming editor of trade journal Plant Engineering. He came to prominence as a writer in the late 1960s with a sequence of short stories in Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies. His early major novels were The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace, but he established his reputation with a sequence of three long, multivolume novels—The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, and The Book of the Short Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, Endangered Species, Strange Travelers, and, most recently, The Best of Gene Wolfe. He is the recipient of the Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, John W. Campbell Memorial, British Fantasy, British SF, and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Awards. Wolfe’s most recent book is the novel An Evil Guest. Upcoming is his new novel The Sorcerer’s House.

  * * *

  BLOODSPORT

  Gene Wolfe

  Sit down and I’ll tell you.

  I was but a youth when I was offered for the Game. I would have refused had that been possible; it was not—those offered were made to play. As I was already large and strong, I became a knight. Our training was arduous; two of my fellows died as a result, and one was crippled for life. I had known and liked him, drank with him, and fought him once. Seeing him leave the school in a little cart drawn by his brothers, I did not envy him.

  After two years, I was knighted. I had feared that I would rank no higher than bowman; so it was a glad day for me. Later that same day I was given three stallions, the finest horses ever seen—swift golden chargers with manes and tails dark as the darkest shadows. Many an hour I spent tending and training them; and I stalled them apart, never letting them graze in the same meadow or even an adjoining meadow, lest they war. If I were refused that many meadows on a given day, one remained in his stall while the other two grazed; but I was never refused after my first Game.

  Now the Game is no longer played. Perhaps you have forgotten it, or perhaps you never had the ill fortune to see it. The rules are complex—I shall not explain them.

  But I shall say here and say plainly that it was never my intention to slay my opponent. Never, or at least very seldom. It was my task to defeat my opponent—if I could. And his to defeat me. Well do I recall my first fight. It was with another knight, and those engagements are rarest of all. I had been ordered to a position in which a moon knight might attack me. It seemed safe enough, since our own dear queen would be sure to attack him if he triumphed. Yet attack he did.

  Under the rules, the attacker runs or rides to the defender’s position, a great advantage. I had been taught that; but never so well as I learned it then, when I did not know I was to be attacked until I heard the thunder of his charger’s hooves. That white charger cleared the lists with a leap that might have made mock of two, and he was upon me. The ax was his weapon, mine the mace. We fought furiously until some blow of mine struck the helm from his head and left him—still in the saddle—half-stunned. To yield, one must drop one’s weapon; so long as the weapon remains in hand, the fight continues. His eyes were empty, his flaccid hand scarce able to grasp his ax.

  Yet he did not drop it. I might have slain him then and there; I struck his gauntlet instead. A spike breached the steel, nailing his hand—for a moment only—to the haft of his ax. I jerked my mace away and watched him fall slowly from his game saddle. His head struck the wretched stony soil of the black square first, and I feared a broken neck. Yet he lived, and was mewing and moving when they bore him away. The spectators were not pleased with me, but I was pleased with myself; it is winning that matters, not slaying.

  My next was with a pawn. She was huge, as they all are; bred like chargers, some say. Others declare that it is only a thing the mages do to baby girls. As you are doubtless aware, pawn’s arms are the simplest of all: a long sword and a shield nearly as tall as the pawn herself, and wider. Other than those, sandals and a loincloth, for pawns wear no armor. I thought to ride her down, or else to slay her readily with my sword. One always employs the sword against pawns.

  It was not to be. She sprang to my left, my stroke came too late, and she stripped me from the saddle. A moment more and I lay upon the fair green grass of a sun square, with her sword’s point tickling my throat. “I yield!” I cried, and she grinned her triumph.

  I was taken from the game, and Dhorie, my trainer, found me sitting alone, my head in my hands. He slapped my back and told me he was proud of me.

  “I charged a pawn,” I mumbled.

  “Who bested you.”

  I nodded.

  “Could happen to anybody. Lurn is the best of the moon pawns, and you had been charged by a knight scarcely a hundred breaths before.” (This last was an exaggeration.) “You had given mighty blows and received them. Two moves and you were sent again. Do you know how often a knight is charged by another, but defeats him? The stands are still abuzz with your name.”

  I did not believe him but was comforted nonetheless. Soon I learned that he had been correct, for my bruises had not yet faded when I was put forward in a new game. That game I shall not describe. Nor the others.

  We do not mix, yet I saw the pawn who had bested me twice more. Once we occupied adjacent squares, and though speaking is forbidden, her face told me she knew me just as I knew her. She spun her sword, grinning, and I raised my own and pointed at the sun. Her hair was black as night, her shoulders broad, and her waist small. Her muscles slid beneath her moon-white skin like so many dragons, and I knew I could scarcely have lifted the crescent moon-sword that danced for her.

  The Hunas swept down upon us, and the games were ended. There was talk of employing us in battle; and I believe—yes, I believe still—that we might have turned them back. Before it could be done, they rushed upon the city by night. We fought and fled as best we could, I on Flare, my finest charger. For four days and three nights he and I hid in the hills, where I bandaged our wounds and applied poultices of borage and the purple-flowered high-heal that none but a seventh son may find.

  The city had been put to the torch, but we returned to it. My father had been a mage of power, I knew, and I felt that his house might somehow have survived. In that I was mistaken; yet it had not been destroyed wholly. The south wing stood whole, and thus I was able to return to the very chamber I had called my own as a boy. My bed was there and waiting, and I felt an attraction to it by no means strange in a weary, wounded man. I saw to Flare as well as I could—water, a roof, and a little stale brea
d I found in the larder—and slept where I had slept for nights that had seemed endless so long ago. In the hills I had not dreamt; the imps and fiends that sought me out there had been those of waking. Returned to my own bed in the bedchamber that had been my own, I dreamt indeed.

  In dream, my father sat before me, his head cloven to the jaw. He could not speak, but wrote upon the ground for me to read: I blessed and I cursed you, Valorius, and my blessing and my curse are the same. You will inherit.

  I woke with his words ringing in through my thoughts, and I have never forgotten them. Whether they be so or no, who is to say? Perhaps I have inherited already, and know not of it. Perhaps they are as false as most dreams—false as most words, I ought to have said. For it is only those words that hold power over the thing they represent that are not false, and they are few and seldom found.

  A league beyond the Gate of Exile, I saw Lurn sleeping in the shade of a spreading chestnut. Dismounting, I went to her; I cannot say why. Seeing that she slept soundly and was not liable to waken soon, I unsaddled Flare and let him graze, which he was eager to do. After that I sat near her, my back propped by the bole of the tree, and thought upon many things.

  “What puzzles you so?”

  Hearing her voice for the first time, I knew it was hers, deeper than my own yet a woman’s. I smiled, I hope not impudently, and said, “Gaining your friendship. I fear that you will wish to engage, and that would be but folly as the world stands today.”

  “Folly indeed, for it stands not but circles the moon as both swim among stars.” She laughed like a river over stones. “As for engaging, Valorius, why, I bested you. I choose to stand upon my victory, for you might die were we to engage again.”

  “You would not see me dead.”

  “No,” she said; and when I did not speak, she said, “Would you see me so? You might have killed me while I slept.”