Legends

by Joe Abercrombie

  Does he sing? Yes, all Lighurds sing, but I have yet to be driven to despair by the sound. He makes up songs in the evening about what he’s seen during the day. But he is young, and for now I am happy he has innocence and a sense of wonder at the world. Only with the passing of time does history have more relevance to us.

  Ran’zar will be less changed by his life here among us than I was from the brief time I spent in Kyla. I will go back. It’s as if I have no choice in the matter. There is a secret life to Kyla that I am compelled to discover. No, not yet, but in some years’ time. And I will see again the pale ruins of Gyth, the golden orchards around her and the white deer who graze there. I will take rarer paths into the mists, amid the shadows of great leopards and the creatures that swim in the sky. Led by ghostly bells, I will discover the most ancient of tombs and palaces, and the knowledge of who subjugated the Lighurd, who razed their cities, but did not quell them, who are now only dust. Yes, the land has crept into my blood and the songs still call to me from there, at night, in my sleep. I believe Agouzi knew how my vision in Gyth would affect me, and that was why he entrusted Ran’zar to my care. In truth, the child is my guardian, rather than the other way round. He will stay with me until death, as was promised. And when the time comes he will lead me home to whatever waits for me there.

  A Tower of Arkrondurl

  Tanith Lee

  Alas, poor ghost!

  ‘Hamlet’ – Shakespeare

  1

  He had been dead so long, the Sorcerer, here. Yet the tower, tall and iron-grim, was still deeply feared and scrupulously avoided.

  To come into that region therefore was to discover no human conurbation, not a single human dwelling, for miles. The woods flocked over the rise and fall of the land. But these even seemed empty of animal life or birds. Once he saw a white owl cleave the twilight with its wide-winged passage. Before suddenly it veered aside again. But the sun shone by day, and by night the stars; the moon rose, though she was thin as a nail’s edge with waning. The moon… one second he allowed himself to dream of her – candlelight on amber hair – then closed the dream away.

  Cyveth’s horse was tired by now, the seventy-seventh evening of this particular trek. Tiredness was not unreasonable. Not only must the horse support Cyveth, but his personal baggage, which included a sealed casket heavily containing one of the reasons for the journey. When the horse spontaneously stopped, Cyveth allowed this. He looked out across the dusken countryside. Below lay a valley, already mostly smoored in shadows. Bridging the gap, a broad stone causeway stretched with, at its farthest end, a tower.

  Cyveth recognised the tower at once. Aside from all else, he had been told of it throughout his current ride north. They had spoken, those that did, in forthright bursts, or in whispers, of Arkrondurl the Sorcerer. It was as if they must speak of him. As if to speak about him, one way or another, was like uttering a prayer, or – now and then – vomiting. Since these procedures relieved them, if only for a little while.

  For minutes, or hours, they recounted his supernatural cruelties and murders, his evil games and horrendous raping scourges. Nothing they said of him was good. Nor ever dull. A new if freelance vocabulary had required to be coined in order to illustrate what he had done. The occasionally extraordinary descriptions had always made an implacable sense. By the time anyone, and certainly one such as Cyveth, reached this causeway and looked across at this tower, he must have become a scholar of Arkrondurl.

  And Arkrondurl was dead. While, according to every muttered or shouted sentence, rumour, tale or inadvertent proof – the one-eyed man three days before, the three-legged man a month ago – death had only briefly interrupted, and then transfigured, the malevolent concentration of the Sorcerer. Flesh and blood he might no longer be, but intransigently vile and inexorably powerful he had remained.

  Bats flickered now over the hills, like the paling-darkening blink of sudden eyes.

  Cyveth dismounted, heaved off as much of his luggage as was needed, and left his well-versed horse to stand at ease. He crossed the causeway alone and on foot.

  Beneath the tower he did pause to stare up at it, and saw with no surprise it was still, despite the intervention of decades, in full repair.

  As he pushed open the metallic door, its hinges hardly creaking, he noted that after all, there were no living bats in the upper air. It was merely some disturbance of the dying light.

  2

  For things were not always what they seemed.

  Cyveth had learned that years before. His father had been a magician of some ability, who used his talents mostly to entertain the crowds for money, or to process cures for illness or injury – generally also to make a living, but sometimes unpaid, from compassion. If ever Cyveth’s father had committed any wrong act through his gift, Cyveth never either saw or subsequently heard of it.

  Even so, there had been others in that trade. The tall thin man, for example, known as the Waspion. Or the shorter, plumper man known only as Myself. What they had done, or were said to have done here and there, was in itself a lesson, both in wickedness – and the human knack for uncovering it and awarding it great publicity.

  Yet there had been warm and multi-starry nights in those southern regions of the past, times seated in the open, or in various secluded dens. And then the magical miracles were wrought – the horse which flew on the wings of a swan, the girl who walked – and danced – though the rock fall had broken her back twenty days before.

  Sorcery was not only for villainy, or for gain and show.

  Nor was the reality of the world formed from granite, merely seemed to be. The world’s reality was malleable. And death, of course, was not the end.

  3

  Inside the tower was a hollow gut of stone, out of which a stone stair hauled itself upward into an overhanging stony enclosure that hid it. The coming of night was hiding it too, draping long thick curtains of shadow, veil by veil…

  Lugging his essential gear, Cyveth took the stair and climbed into utter black.

  But he was counting now. Formerly it had been on the thirty-third (twice), the seventy-seventh (five times), the ninety-ninth (once) step that a response took place. Not, however, here.

  Moving on to the hundredth stair Cyveth nevertheless hesitated. Remarkably strong and well-conditioned, he was not yet either weary or winded. But a sensation – less caution than expectancy – caused him to halt. Despite this no reaction came. The tower felt empty – not of sentient occupancy, but of the presiding unlife, the undead.

  Presently, Cyveth resumed the climb. A hundred and one, a hundred and two, a hundred and three –?

  And something rolled across his feet.

  It failed to stagger him, physically or mentally. The ever-awareness of a number three, seven or nine in the equation could never be lost on the son of a magician.

  The stair itself moved, then. It swung smoothly along and to the side, bearing him, primed and balanced, with it, and so into another wide gulp of open stony space. Which, as Cyveth was borne in on the magic stone carpet, bloomed up into ghoulish, greenish visibility.

  Corpse-lights, the kind to haunt marshes, blossomed on all sides. They illumined like verdigris a high vault and the mathematics carved into it, the meanings of which were partly translatable by the visitor. Strange pillars, like misshapen limbs fossilized to basalt, strained up to support, or only clutch at, the ceiling. On the vacant floor was scattered a vague yet ominous type of dust, marked with indecipherable tracks, very narrow and broken, and always dimming out before they reached anywhere – or indeed before they had come from anywhere.

  Cyveth jumped off the stair. He dropped his luggage on the dusty floor. It did not matter. If he succeeded, he would bear it out with him again. If he failed, he and it would simply remain to blend with the rest of the filth.

  Along with all the other disparate training he had received, Cyveth had learned, from childhood, an actor’s resonant and controlled voice.

  “Greetings
, if you are present, peerless and mighty Mage-Lord, Arkrondurl of the Towers.”

  Nothing stirred. Cyveth had not anticipated it would. As an actor, this was not the first and only time he had given such a performance. And though the setting of the stage might vary, the other leading actor must normally arrive on cue, despite the fact his timing was his own to choose. It was a law of sorcery as much as the theatre.

  The curtains of gloom and gris green parted.

  The master performer entered, from nowhere, and the silence rang with its deaf applause.

  “Who speaks?” he inquired.

  “I.”

  “I do not know you,” said Arkrondurl the Sorcerer.

  And Cyveth sighed. It was the only indication, infinitely misinterpretable, that an iota of his tension had left him.

  “How,” he said, “should you know me, Lord? I am nothing. While your golden name is fame itself.”

  Vanity. Playing to it might – did – often work. Fairly infallibly. And did so now.

  “True,” affirmed the hellish ghost. And flexing his long-fingered, pallid hands, Arkrondurl spun a brief episode of showy lightning round the space. “Yet, I am a revenant only. What need you fear?” Cat and mouse then, it seemed. Not quite unknown…

  “I have heard the stories, Lord.”

  “Have you. All?”

  “I have heard enough to freeze my heart and turn my bones to powder.”

  “And even so,” said the Sorcerer, “you are here. Do you wish to become, yourself, a story?”

  Cyveth laughed softly. “Perhaps.”

  Arkrondurl’s long, pale face, intellectual and severe, ugly in its aesthetic elegance, terrifying in the sour and sadistic cant of lips and fleer of toneless eyes, now gelling in a kind of – pleasure?

  Cyveth said, “For a nonentity such as myself, Lord, glory can only come through service to a far more dynamic being.”

  “Which being could that be?” (This was like verbal fencing with a flighty girl.)

  “None other than yourself, inestimable Sorcerer.”

  “Let me show you,” said the ghost, “a few small pictures; past events that have gone on here in my tower, as at other times in others of my towers. There are nine in all. Did you know this?”

  “Oh yes, my Lord.”

  “It seems you have studied me like a book. It shall be your reward to learn a little more. See, then.”

  The lightning roiled again, and in the ropes of it, vivid and sudden, awful scenes splashed up in fragments, like splintered panes of coloured glass, each spiteful and foul enough to tear any eyes that looked on them, men and women – children – were caught inside the broken pieces; human creatures that suffered torture and obscenity beyond (beneath) description, and struggled, shrieked and died, in adverse tints, to a music of sounds that, in their turn, rent the hollows of a listening ear. Another man would have crumpled, puked, swooned; maybe died too. But Cyveth, if sufficiently white now to rival the ghost’s bleached visage, stayed upright, motionless and quiet. He watched all, attentively. Although, of course, as with so much else, he had seen such stuff more than once before.

  4

  Nine – the number of the unholy lives of Arkrondurl. And the number of his towers, built, unalike yet siblings, and dotted all about the north and eastern map of the earth. In woods or a forest you would find them, on hillsides, as here, on mountaintops, on a tiny isle that stood up from a lake, on a rock that had set its foot deep into an open sea. One, so it was said, (and so at last it had been found to be) rose underground, far down in a cavern, where neither night nor day ever came – and glad perhaps they were to be excluded.

  How he made the nine towers was easily comprehended: through sorcery. And in them, one by one, his nine separate mortal lives had followed each other, after certain accidents – when he had overreached his own perfidious cunning, or Fate, as once or twice it had, sent a hero wise and swift enough to tackle and destroy him. Through his nine lives, Arkrondurl, returning, had persisted on every occasion (until once more slain) in unspeakable power and ungrace. The whole span had amounted to three centuries. But then there followed his alternative existence, as exemplified tonight. A ghost. It was, always, a phantom in which the perverse and soulless expertise and sagacity remained, if anything enhanced by non-corporeality. His ghostly practices, they said, (they did not lie) exceeded those encompassed by him when simply living.

  How had Arkrondurl managed, post mortem, to linger in the world?

  They said, again, and some believed them, that no god at all would let that spirit through the gate of Otherlife. And even the demons of the icy pits of hell refused him. Only the long-suffering world, it seemed, had no say. And so he lodged on with her, abusing, as ever, his domicile, nor needing any more to pay the rent. A squatter unworthy of the name, as also of the name of man.

  The stories and their trappings had been absorbed by Cyveth years prior to the evening of this call upon the ninth tower. He had heard tell of all of it and been at a loss. Until he learned, elsewhere, a mystery – which was itself the second half to another, the first portion being already known to him. Both were benign, though doubtless prodigious – and according to the majority of sources blasphemous and unforgiveable.

  Till that second knowledge, the question had gone unanswered, the demand as to how to destroy a ghost, when exorcism (it had been tried with Arkrondurl so many ghastly times) had fearsomely failed.

  For could there be any alternate way to render back to death that non-sentient being that would not, did not die? You could not rob the dead – of life.

  5

  The show of moving pictures was done.

  Arkrondurl poised, another pillar – this one of poisonous salt amid obliging shadows.

  “Well. And did you like what you saw?” The relentless voice probing, turgid with pride and satisfaction.

  “Lord, whatever you see fit to do, in my eyes, has the gleam of gold and the brilliance of diamond. In my eyes, Lord – the only sin is to deny you.”

  Not all the self-in-love were blind. Arkrondurl, it would seem, had been, and was. Impassive and flaunting as a peacock he waited there, evidently grasping the idea that a gift was to be offered.

  “My Lord,” said Cyveth, “will you permit me to assist you?”

  “You.” Arkrondurl laughed. “You... to assist – myself.”

  “In the most fundamental and servile manner, Lord. Solely that. May I detail my plan?”

  “Amuse me. Do so.”

  Cyveth bowed low. And obeyed.

  How many performances had he given in this role? Was he confident – as much so as any fine and tempered actor. Was he word perfect? Oh yes.

  6

  It was the Waspion who had disclosed the first secret to him. Cyveth, then just sixteen, and always curious, and – sometimes to a foolhardy degree – eager to learn, had risked half a day in the Waspion’s uncomfortable company in order to be educated. Cyveth had also worked out a strategy with the Waspion, as with others one was ill-advised to trust. Cyveth pretended that he had only a slight talent in the magical arts. He could perform the odd crowd-pleasing trick, but had no aptitude for much else. In this way he had been shown, and so picked up, quite a number of skills. Then again, Cyveth was abstemious in their use. Magic both fascinated and perturbed him. As with fire, it could keep you warm and improve your diet, but you stopped short generally of burning down the house.

  The Waspion was prone to drunkenness. He revealed the terrifying formula of the spell under the influence of black wine and red brandy. If afterwards he recalled what he had done, he did not allude to it, nor did Cyveth give any indication, let alone demonstration, of having found out anything unusual he could copy.

  Of course also it had been obvious the gambit involved two processes. One could not be fulfilled without the other. The second and perhaps most needful of these Cyveth set himself to master some years further on. And that had been when first Cyveth heard of the Sorcerer Arkrondurl, his nine
towers and nine lives and the enduringly indestructible problem of his ghost.

  7

  “Behold, Lord. Here in this box –”

  The casket, about half the length of a donkey’s back and the width only of a man’s arm, lay out now on the dust. It was very plain, and its clasps of inferior steel had not yet been released.

  (The ghost stood watching adamantly enough.)

  Cyveth clicked his tongue – once, twice, three times.

  The clasps scraped rustilly from their sockets, the lid reared up, and fell back on the floor with a clatter.

  “What is that?” Did the great Sorcerer not know? Surely – no, no. He did not.

  “It is, inimitable sir, a man. Or, the body of a man in miniature. May I invite you, Lord, to examine it?”

  “Why should I trouble?”

  “Because, Lord, it might be worth your while. I could not dare suggest it otherwise.”

  For a moment, nothing. And then Arkrondurl gliding forward, gazing down.

  Though less than the size of a year old infant, the male figure in the casket was in every and all ways adultly in proportion, and perfect. Had it been full-grown in stature and girth, plainly it must have been a figure of more than seven feet in height, wide-shouldered and lean of pelvis, muscular and formed – not well but flawlessly – with a complexion like fine bronze, hair black as death’s river, and – for the eyelids stayed open – silver-eyed. So Arkrondurl had been, in youth, they said, at least in his colouring. The heroic and beautiful stature here possible was never his, except in illusion, through sorcery. The face too, no mistake – even at doll size – was that of an Arkrondurl not only young, and physically without fault, but of exceptional handsomeness. No mote of the sadistic, the debased or rotten had infected any aspect. Few women, or come to that few men, would look unmoved on such a sunrise of mortal gorgeousness.