IGMS Issue 44

by IGMS

  The rot is all.

  I'm tired, papa. I want to lie down. I don't want to be a hero anymore.

  I lower my shield. Across the short distance from me is another warrior. No, he can't be a warrior. Is he even a man? I stare for moments, motionless before I realize what is wrong.

  He has no weapon. His hands are open and empty.

  And that isn't all. He is like no Northman I have ever seen. What remains of his skin is dark and patchy, like a Greek trader. His black hair is bound with a green rag bearing some white script I have never seen.

  A thick belt holds his mid-section together, punctuated by what looks like long scroll-tubes burned hideously black. Most of the rest of him is gone.

  He shambles towards me. I cannot move. I keep looking to his hands. My eyes do not lie. He is weaponless.

  He throws his arms around my neck and whispers to me.

  "Please . . . Lie down. You don't have . . ."

  His words are strange and yet I understand them

  "Who are you? Where is your sword?" I ask. He stares. I cannot move. Finally I manage, "What are you doing here?"

  "Want to go home," he whispers. "Back to the queen of cities."

  The queen of cities. What the Greeks call Constantinople. So, he is a man of Mikkelgard. Perhaps it is not so strange to find him here, then. The Varangian seed has given some of the Mikkelgard Greeks the blood of Northmen. But I have still never seen a Greek here before. The newness of it overwhelms me.

  At last, I find my feet. I begin to walk backwards; his grip on my neck carries him with me. Something is wrong. This man is no hero. He can't belong here.

  "Please."

  A flash of emotion breaks the tired monotony of my time here. It takes me a moment to recognize it as fear.

  This strange man terrifies me.

  "Get off!" I scream. "Let go of me!"

  "Please . . ." he hisses, his eyes are wide and mad. The burned smell is overwhelming. "You don't have to . . ."

  And then Illugi crashes into him, tearing him from me and smashing him to the ground. Illugi stomps viciously on him. Unlike the other heroes here, inured to pain, the strange man screams.

  I strain for a glance at the man, but the heerth surges forward, carrying me with it. The benches. I must.

  The "enemy" hall is not the incorruptible valhal. Like my shield, it gave way to axe strokes, flames and the bite of wood-worms long ago. Little stands apart from the foundation stones. A few rotting benches remain, and the defenders cluster around them, back-to-back. They snarl at us, feral in their desire to protect them.

  Oddr is beside me. In life he was one of our baersarks, our battle-mad warriors. His insanity was legendary. He would spark it by chewing his shield edge. Here, the shield has been chewed to fragments, and much of his hand as well.

  "Heroes!" he croaks at me over the crunching of his hand. My father echoes the word in my mind. Oddr's face does not appear convinced by his own words. I don't have a chance to confirm this before the frenzy takes hold and he goes spinning into the melee, tossing bodies like rag-dolls with great sweeps of his battle hammer.

  The heerth presses towards the benches, stomping the defenders underfoot. Something glints from the twirling heavens. It was probably lightning. No, it was too soft. Gentler. A shaft of wafting wheat. Groa's beautiful hair, falling from her neck to tickle my nose as I lay in her lap. Then there are wide eyes, a whispering voice, begging me, telling me that I don't have to . . .

  Too fast. Too fast. The benches. I must. Stupid of course, the same thing happens every time.

  Just as the defenders look as if they will finally give way before us, the signal about goes up from the heerth as if for the first time.

  " 'Ware arrows!"

  "Shields up!"

  My arm is so tired. The exhaustion, like the pain, is a dull undercurrent.

  The hail of fire lets the defenders regroup. It throws us back from the benches and the ruins of the hall, as it has a thousand times before. Ten thousand. Who can remember?

  Sword in your hand lad! Glorious! Glorious! Shut up, you fool.

  My back fetches up against something hard. I turn and crane my neck to see a valkyr, motionless, one arm outstretched in warning or encouragement. Her glass eyes stare blankly over the throng. One marble breast is exposed. Lightning reflects off the hard surface of the areola.

  I stare up at her. "What do you want from us?" I shriek.

  She does not reply. She doesn't have to. I can feel her like a tremor in my head. We fight because it amuses them. It is not for us to know why.

  "It must end! When does it end?" But I already know the answer. It will end when they decide it should.

  Until then, we fight like the heroes we are.

  My father's voice explodes across my thoughts. Hero! Back into it! The fray! I stand and stare up at the valkyr. My father's voice repeats, more loudly this time.

  Wide, mad eyes in my mind. The eyes of a Greek, a man of Mikkelgard. My nose fills with the stench of burning flesh. Something is different. The pain is no longer a background noise. It is genuine. Sharp, driving in my skull. Unpleasant, but a change.

  I pound the hilt of my sword into the valkyr's legs. The rust finally wins out and the pommel snaps off.

  "Enough, you bitch! Enough!" I scream up at her. My voice croaks out as dust.

  If she notices she gives no sign. She towers silently.

  A voice whispers "please." I feel something brush my foot, but it is only a severed arm grasping my ankle. I try to kick it away and give up.

  What are you doing? Back to it! Shut up, old man.

  This is not glory.

  Oddr is watching me like a furtive child; he chews sheepishly.

  "You're no hero," I try to say. It doesn't come out right. I'm not sure he understands me.

  I look back to the valkyr. Her eyes are fixed far away.

  Oddr casts a nervous glance over his shoulder. The heerth is being driven back. The line will reach us soon.

  The pain in my head is fresh and real, and I can feel it moving through me. It brings with it warm memories. Gora and sun and waving grass. Skies without lightning.

  How long has it been since I unclenched my right hand? It takes some doing, flexing of fingers, muscles locked in rigor mortis. I pound on it with my shield. Some bones snap and that pain is real too. I scream in spite of myself.

  Oddr continues to watch. The battle has moved closer, the noise is rising.

  Another shot and the sword comes loose, dropping onto the arm and about my ankle.

  Sword in hand, you fool! Pick it up! Pick it up!

  Oddr and I both stare stupidly at my hand. It looks short and withered without a weapon. The valkyr pays no attention.

  The sky flickers again. I raise my sword hand to my head in what I realize is a pained gesture. Oddr looks afraid.

  Then he is swept away as the battle reaches us.

  My father's screaming has become agonizing. The pain is fresh, real and most importantly, altogether new. Pick it up! Up! Up! Up! You're a hero! Sword in hand!

  No, papa. I'm no hero. Illugi runs towards me, axe held high, shrieking a war cry. He doesn't even recognize me without my sword. Not that it matters

  "Illugi," I yell, the pain giving my voice pitch and edge, "drop your blade. Let's lie down together."

  Illugi picks up short of me, his eyes clouded with confusion. He keeps staring at my empty hand.

  "Come on, Illugi. Enough of this. This goes nowhere. We will fight until we're twitching meat. There is no death here. No glory."

  Illugi sputters. "We are heroes! The songs have said . . ."

  "The songs lied, Illugi. I don't want to be a song anymore. I'm tired."

  I try to jerk my thumb in the direction of the valkyr before I realize the digit is missing. "Don't give her the satisfaction."

  Illugi looks around him as if to confirm his surroundings. An armless corpse knee-walks towards him, biting at his legs. He decapitates it ab
sentmindedly.

  "I'm tired, Illugi. Aren't you?"

  In answer, he buries his axe in my chest. The pain is again real, the fatigue overwhelming. I let it carry me into the dust and swarming bodies.

  He shakes his head, freeing himself and then moves back into the fighting, shouting reassurance, though I can't tell for whom.

  Hands under my arms. Oddr is dragging me back to the valhal. Let him. I'm too tired to move anyway. I gesture to the hole between my ribs where Illugi's weapon pierced me. "Hurts!" I say, grinning. Oddr grins back. His teeth have long since been filed into yellow points. I notice for the first time that he is missing an eye and an ear, both on the same side of his head. His nose is a gray hole in his face.

  He drops me by the hall and regards me for one more moment. I prop myself up on my elbows and watch him.

  His torn face stretches into a grin as he props his hammer against the hall. He flexes his empty hands and looks at them as if for the first time.

  The battle spins and pulses, shouts of greeting and of rage echo out to me.

  That's fine. This battle has gone on for as long as any of us can remember. This dawn spans centuries. Time is my ally. We can reach them. With time we can reach them all.

  Hands around my neck, a voice pleading, begging me to lie down.

  My head is still throbbing, but there is a curious silence.

  I can't hear my father.

  We have time. I stand to reenter the melee, no weapons in my hands, my shield a useless nub of rusted metal. Oddr, also weaponless, jogs along at my side.

  The familiar cry rises to welcome us.

  " 'Ware arrows!"

  "Shields up."

  InterGalactic Interview With Myke Cole

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  Myke Cole is a solidly-built, muscular man with an undeniable "military bearing," which can be readily explained by the background described below. Your fleeting first thought upon meeting him might be "I'm glad he's on our side," but as soon as he cracks a smile, you realize he's one of us, a fan of science fiction, comics, gaming, the whole works. I met him first when he showed up at the house of the late George Scithers to read slush for Weird Tales (which I co-edited with George). We bought Myke's first story. Since then he has published much more, most notably the Shadow Ops series of novels from Ace, which have come close to inventing a new genre of military fantasy.

  SCHWEITZER: So, tell our readers something about your background, who you are, where you come from, your education and real-life career outside of writing.

  COLE: I'm most known for my career in intelligence, the military and law enforcement. I started out in intelligence during the post 9/11 furor when the country went collectively mad and started allowing "Private Military Contractors" (read: Mercenaries) to do all sorts of jobs that had previously been reserved for government officials and uniformed personnel. I was trained at a private boot camp known as "The Crucible" (it's still in business - http://www.team-crucible.com/) and did two tours in Iraq in this status. I began to sour on profit-driven armed service after my second tour, and secured a position as a federal intelligence officer (read: Spy) with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) where I did one more tour in Iraq for which I received the Secretary of Defense's Global War on Terrorism Medal and the Joint Service Commendation Medal from Admiral McRaven, the head of U.S. Special Forces. After a few years with DIA, I got a management gig at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). By this time I was starting to sour on the intelligence mission. It is the mission of intelligence to break the laws and steal the property of other countries, and while I understand that this is sometimes necessary, it is also nasty, and I didn't want to do it anymore. I promised myself that if I ever got a book deal, I would quit the business and move to Brooklyn to be a writer, and that's exactly what happened.

  During my civilian career in intel, I also served as a reservist with the U.S. Coast Guard, which I left (reluctantly, but I was souring on the U.S. military mission as well) just last month. I loved my time in the guard, where I led the law enforcement and search-and-rescue boat squadron in New York City. The focus of my unit was life-saving, rather than life-taking (you could think of us as patrol cops and an ambulance combined), and that made all the difference for me. It's only been a month and I already miss it like hell. I currently do specialized work for a large metropolitan police force.

  Other than that, it's the standard nerd fare: I'm a huge comic book, F/SF reader, and gamer. I grew up on D&D, Lovecraft, Tolkien and Orson Scott Card, much as I imagine you and many of your readers did. I'm a frustrated academic who never pursued real scholarship because I wanted to make money. I have dreamed of being a fantasy writer all my life, and I still can't believe I'm actually doing it, three years after going pro.

  SCHWEITZER: How do you think the editorial work you did (for Weird Tales) influenced the beginning of your career? Did it, at the very least, enable you to avoid some of the obvious errors you saw over and over again in the slush pile?

  COLE: I always get a tear in my eye when I remember my time at Weird Tales. I would drive the three hours from DC to George Scithers' house at 123 Crooked Lane, and we would spend the day in his basement crunching slush. George had such an unbridled enthusiasm for the fan scene, joyous and infectious, and it couldn't help but lift your mood. I have spent my entire life in very dark fields, where everything is draped in serious cloth and weighted down with gravitas. I see the worst humanity has to offer. Many don't know that George was also an army officer, so he spoke my language, but he never let it interfere with his first love - genre. I needed that contact. When George moved to Maryland, he contacted me a few times and asked me to visit, and I always put it off, being busy. I knew he was there, and I missed him. I just always assumed there would be time.

  There wasn't. I know it isn't the question you asked, but thinking about Weird Tales always makes me want to remind people to tell those around them how much they love them, and to make time to see them. Life can be uncertain. Tempus fugit, memento mori.

  My time editing taught me less about craft, and more about numbers and the inherent callousness of the business. Every time I sat down to tackle the slush pile, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of manuscripts. We would work in that warm, comfy basement for 12 hours sometimes (laughing and joking the whole while), and it wasn't nearly enough time to give any manuscript more than a cursory read (we're talking the first couple of paragraphs before putting it down, unless those couple of paragraphs absolutely blew me away). The lesson here was this: George and I were fans, passionate genre advocates, and dedicated to finding exciting new voices in the field. Even with all that, the volume of submissions was just too massive to be anything other than utterly callous. If it didn't grab us, it got rejected. We didn't have time to be nice. We didn't have the bandwidth to take more time. The task bent me around it, shaped me into the kind of editor that I'd most feared as an aspiring writer. As manuscript after manuscript went by, the hard lesson was drilled in: It wasn't enough to be good. It wasn't even enough to be great. You had to be the best. Your writing had to be sublime.

  We have a saying in the guard that I intend to have tattooed around my forearm once I finish the current quarter-sleeve I'm working on: "The sea doesn't care about you." This sounds cruel, but it isn't. Clear observation of reality and sympathy aren't at odds, and there isn't a zero sum game here. I feel for every aspirant, and absolutely sympathize with how tough it is to both break in, and to maintain momentum once you do. But working at Weird Tales taught me one thing and that is this: that once you've tipped your hat to the challenge, there's nothing more to do other than the work. It is the only thing that ever makes a difference.

  SCHWEITZER: So, we can't help but notice that a good deal of what gets published is somewhat less than sublime when you actually see it on the printed page. Much of it falls into the "this is kind of okay, I guess we could publish it" category. Do you think there's some distortion here
, in the sense that after a day of reading awful slush, a more or less competent story suddenly looks brilliant?

  COLE: I think that art is subjective. Art is . . . art, not science. I just saw the highly acclaimed film Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson. This is one of the most critically praised SF films ever, and named by many critics as the best film of 2014. I absolutely hated it. Not normal hate. Not just, "I'd rather not see this," but "DEAR GOD WHAT IS THIS CATASTROPHE DOING TO MY BRAIN?" For a long time after, I was really upset with myself. If I so violently disagreed with so many reputable people, didn't that mean that I was clueless? That I had poor taste? That I didn't understand what made a great story?

  But after I'd had some time to think on it, I realized that this is just the way it is with a subjective discipline. I just finished Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and didn't enjoy it because I felt his gorgeous prose obscured a clear narrative. I don't like Neil Gaiman's prose, but love his comic books. I am not blind to the fact that I'm swimming against the current with both of those positions.

  Our appreciation for a work of art is also dependent on who we are at the time we read it. Our lens changes with experience, and the same work may affect us in different ways. If I'd read Something Wicked as a 14 year old, I might have loved it, because it's essentially a kind of manic bildungsroman about early adolescence. Who knows what I'll think if I read it again at age 70?

  This is why I get annoyed when people say that 50 Shades of Gray or Twilight are "bad" books. I certainly didn't like 50 Shades, but who the hell am I to say that it's bad? Art is like sex, if it isn't hurting anyone, you've no call to cast aspersions at it.

  SCHWEITZER: So, tell me how the Shadow Ops series started. That's been your big breakthrough so far, it would seem.

  COLE: Nerds do the same thing everywhere we go - asking the "what if?" questions that are the core of genre fiction. I was working at the Pentagon at the time, and I was amazed by how tightly regulated everything was. There was a rule for everything, from how to brush your teeth, to how to write an email. I realized that this was necessary. Billions of dollars in taxpayer resources and the power of deadly force cannot be subject to the whim of individuals. But humans aren't binary. We are chaotic and unpredictable, and that's the best of us. There's no way a web of rules, no matter how complex, can do justice by every single special case. We see this in our own criminal justice system. I don't know much, but I know this: There is no way any government would ever allow anything powerful enough to unseat it to exist, unless it was tightly held and regulated. This is certainly what would happen if magic existed. The recent showdown over Net Neutrality is a great example of this. People don't allow powerful things to just exist on their own with open/free use for all. Someone, sooner or later, usually the government, will step in to take ownership.