The Mammoth Book Of Warriors and Wizardry (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Sean Wallace

  If the fight had been between Morlock and Viklorn, Morlock would have won easily. True, Morlock was a drunk rather badly in need of a drink, not at all the man he had been. But Viklorn was not well either: his face was the face of a dying man; God Sustainer knew when he had last slept, or if he ever ate or drank.

  But the fight was really between Andhrakar and Morlock. Viklorn looked on in bemusement as his dark blade feinted and lunged at the man who had made it. Andhrakar didn’t need sleep, or food, or water, or air. All it needed was human life; all it hungered for was the savor of dying men and women. Though it still dripped with fresh blood, it was clearly thirsty for more; it began to sing, faintly at first, but then louder and louder. Viklorn laughed, excited and pleased, and Morlock cursed. The singing tone rose and fell and rose again, like a bell, like the baying of a dog. Andhrakar would kill again, and soon.

  The spear lashed out. Morlock ducked away from the spearhead and grabbed the shaft just above Viklorn’s lifeless hand. Morlock brought down his dark blade and slashed off Viklorn’s spear-hand at the wrist. The severed hand still clutched the shaft of the spear in an unbreakable grip. The spear still sang, louder than ever now, drowning all other noises. Morlock spun the business end of the spear about. As Viklorn stood there, blinking at the gushing stump of his arm, Morlock buried the dark shining spearhead in his neck. Viklorn fell backward to the ground and the singing spear fell silent, slaked by his death.

  Morlock! The voice of the demon Andhrakar sounded in his head. Will you free me now from this prison you made for me?

  Morlock laughed harshly as he cleaned and sheathed his dark blade. “Hope springs eternal in the demonic breast. Learn despair, Andhrakar: I won’t free you to hunt human souls. I can’t understand how you caught this one. I bound you in the spearhead, then buried you in a crypt full of traps, and then posted a warning outside the crypt. How did you get free?”

  Warning – or advertising? the demon whispered in his mind. Generations of heroes died seeking the lost treasure left by Morlock the Maker. Finally one succeeded. His people would be making songs about him now – if I hadn’t persuaded him to kill them all.

  Morlock scowled and turned away to bury Leen. He laid him in the ground and put the still and a few gold pieces beside the butchered corpse, then covered him up. He broke some boards from the wagon and made a grave-sign for the dead innkeeper. He supposed the people that Leen had died to save would come back eventually, so he wrote the grave-message to them, in the great, sprawling runes of Ontil: LEEN DIED HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?

  He returned to the dead body of Viklorn. He kicked it furiously several times, then grabbed the shaft of Andhrakar and drew it from the wound. Morlock let the dead pirate’s hand stay where it was, gripping the shaft, as he carried the spear away. He looked back once from the ridge: a few carrion birds were already circling the pirate’s unburied body.

  Will you at least keep me and use me? the demon whispered. I am a powerful weapon. If you feed me human lives, I can give you vengeance on your enemies.

  Morlock said nothing, but carried Andhrakar back to the village where the Broken Fist stood. He found the town abandoned: everyone had fled to escape Viklorn and Andhrakar. Morlock broke into the blacksmith’s shop, kindled a fire in the forge, and assembled a set of tools at the anvil.

  You cannot destroy my prison in a primitive smithy like this, the demon said, sounding somewhat uneasy.

  “You don’t know what I can do,” Morlock disagreed. “Nor have you guessed what I’m going to do.”

  He fashioned a spearhead, exactly like Andhrakar in form. He even managed to give its surface a glassy basaltic glaze, something like the dark crystalline surface of Andhrakar. He tempered it, hammered it, let it cool, and polished it. He unfixed Andhrakar from its shaft and put the new spearhead on the shaft, with Viklorn’s severed hand still attached. Then he took the greatest hammer in the smithy and he struck the new spearhead until it lay in fragments.

  Morlock took a chisel and carved on the side of the anvil: HERE I, WHO MADE ANDHRAKAR, DESTROYED IT, BECAUSE IT KILLED MY FRIEND LEEN. FORGIVE ME AND REMEMBER ME: MORLOCK AMBROSIUS.

  Liar! the demon screamed inside his mind.

  Morlock shrugged. “The world thinks I made you, which is a lie. I only imprisoned you. If I could have imprisoned you in a spittoon, or a wooden doorstop, or something not obviously deadly I would have done so. The magical laws which govern imprisoning demons limited me. But I can negate one lie with another. These fragments of the accursed spear Andhrakar will become cherished heirlooms, perhaps to be reforged as a new weapon someday—”

  They’ll know! They’ll know it’s not me!

  “—not as effective as the old weapon, of course, but they don’t make anything like they used to. And no one will go looking for Andhrakar, since everyone knows where it is. There will be no advertising for your new resting place. You will wither and die in the dark and you will eat no more human souls.”

  I am immortal.

  “You say so, but I never believed it. You eat things; I think you’ll starve to death if you never eat again. Anyway, we’ll try the experiment. I’ll stop by in a few hundred years to see how you’re doing.”

  He threw the accursed spear-blade imprisoning the demon Andhrakar into the pit under an outhouse. Then he shoveled a hundredweight of soil atop it.

  At last, he wanted a drink rather badly. He broke into the Broken Fist and availed himself of Leen’s left-behind stock. At least, he poured himself a cup of wine and stood at the bar, preparing to drink it. He stood there for a moment, watching his distorted reflection in the smooth, dark surface of the wine.

  When people returned to the town, they found the inscription on the anvil, and the fragments of the spearhead, and they reacted much as Morlock had anticipated. They also found the broken door of the Broken Fist, and they saw the wine cup, full to the brim, standing untouched on the bar. But they did not see Morlock, then or ever again.

  SO DEEP THAT THE BOTTOM COULD NOT BE SEEN

  Genevieve Valentine

  Anna woke up knowing the last narwhal had died.

  It was a note in the air as she dressed; when she opened her door, the wind sighed it into her face, across her fingers.

  (She didn’t bother with gloves anymore. Winters weren’t what they used to be.)

  It was still dark as she walked over the dirt flats to the observation post, her shadow dotted by the fence that marked the last four acres of protected Inuit territory.

  Nauja Marine Observatory had been a three-room school, back when. After the new state schools had swallowed up all the students, the government cleared out the building for Anna (“A gesture of goodwill,” the representative said with a straight face). Now it housed third-hand equipment gifted from the territorial government.

  The observatory was on the water’s edge. When Anna went down the embankment in summer, she could look past the electric-green shallows to where the shore fell into the sea and left nothing but fathomless black water and slabs of milky ice. The sheet ice was already turning greasy and breaking, rotting through as it melted.

  The creeping spring made Anna ill; she didn’t look.

  Inside, she pulled up the computer and was registering the date of death when the knock came.

  The man at the door was in a parka and gloves and a hat and was still shivering.

  “Anna Sitiyoksdottir?”

  Her State name.

  After a second, she said, “Sure.”

  This seemed to cheer him up. He checked his handheld. “Miss Sitiyoksdottir, my name is Stephens. I’m here to invite you to the First International Magical Congress.”

  She snorted.

  He glanced at his handheld to find his place. “The United Nations has called a task force of magic-users to discuss our rapidly changing magical and environmental climate, and to begin cooperation on future initiatives. As a shaman with natural magic, your input will be invaluable. The conference begins tomorrow and goes for
two days.”

  “No,” she said.

  He smiled and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I will be your escort and aide while you’re a delegate. We can go now, if you’re ready. I’ll wait while you pack.”

  “I’m not a shaman,” she said. “And when the last one was alive, spellcasters and the UN didn’t find her input valuable in the least. Pass.”

  His smile thinned out. “Miss Sitiyoksdottir, you’re the last Inuit with any shaman status on record, and the government of the Northern States insists you be present. Please reconsider. I have authorization to involve the police if necessary.”

  So it was the usual sort of government invitation.

  “I need an hour,” she said finally. “Narwhals became extinct last night. I have to find the body on radar and send a report in to the Wildlife Council.”

  He blinked. “How do you know they’re extinct if you didn’t see anything?”

  She looked at him and didn’t answer. After a moment, he had the good manners to blush.

  The narwhal had thrown itself on to the shore to die. Anna saw that the sand around it was undisturbed – it hadn’t fought to get back to the water, hadn’t so much as tossed its head to call out.

  “Are you going to move it?” Stephens was breathing heavily from the scramble over the rocks. When he pulled off his cap to fan his face, she saw that his hair was thinning.

  Narwhals, like winters, weren’t what they used to be, but the carcass still weighed 600 kilograms.

  “No,” she said, then added, “It’s right that the birds have it.”

  “Oh,” he said slowly, as if he was in the presence of great and terrible magic.

  She wished the sea would swallow him.

  The whale’s skin was pale grey and utterly smooth, like a pup, even though it was adult. Anna knew it meant something, but she couldn’t sense what. She stepped forward and touched it with a flat hand, waiting. Listening. She rested her forehead on the cool, clammy hide.

  Talk to me. Talk to me. What should I do?

  “Miss Sitiyoksdottir, if you’re not planning to move the animal, we should get you to the airport.”

  It was an answer of sorts.

  So Anna went. It wasn’t like narwhals would be less extinct in two days.

  Her mother, Sitiyok, had moved to Umiujaq as soon as the rest of the province began to fill up with refugees from the Southern States.

  Everyone thought Sitiyok was a worrier and a coward to go. She was the shaman; how could she leave them? The land had been given to them; the land was theirs. Nothing would happen. Just because the Southern States were warming up didn’t mean anything. Let some people move north. Who wanted to live in the south anyway, if they could help it?

  Sitiyok had smiled at them all, and had moved as far north as she could.

  It was not a comfort to know, years later, that she had been right. Her parents’ cities were concreted over to make room for newcomers from the south.

  Most Inuit tried to live off the new landscape as they had tried to live off the old one. They gave up hunting and waited tables; they gave up tanning hides and minded stores. They became government workers, or hotel managers, or pilots. Around them the air got warmer; winter was carved away from the land a little more each spring, and Southerners filled in the cracks like a rockslide.

  In Umiujaq, Sitiyok took dogs out on to the ice to hunt for seal. She sold the skins she could spare; eventually she sold the dogs. When the sea warmed up and the seals didn’t return, the others in Umiujaq moved inland to find work, one family at a time.

  “You can’t stay,” they said. “Come with us.”

  Sitiyok smiled, and stayed where she was.

  She and a few others remained in the ghost town, slowly starving out on their homeland. Sitiyok learned how to hunt rabbit; how to snare fish; how to go hungry.

  One winter, she had a child, and named her Annakpok – the one who is free.

  The Congresse Internationale du Magique was held in the Amphitheatre at Aventicum, in Switzerland; it avoided any question about the host country unduly influencing the proceedings.

  As they left the hotel and the morning hit her, Anna frowned against the baking sun. “And we’re meeting in the Amphitheatre because?”

  “For the magic,” Stephens said, waving one hand vaguely before he caught himself. “No disrespect. It’s just – my faith is in science. I studied biology.”

  She said, “So did I.”

  He coughed. “Here’s our car.”

  The Amphitheatre was ringed with police. Under a sign that read PLEASE KEEP ALL AMULETS VISIBLE, two security guards were peering at talismans, necklaces, and tattoos. Inside the Amphitheatre, food stands and souvenir booths had been set up, and the vendors were shouting over one another in their attempts to reach the milling crowd.

  The tiers above the gladiatorial floor were marked off by country. She saw signs for Kenya, Germany, the Malaysian Republic, Russia. (She wondered if the Nenets still had real winter.)

  “How long did it take to find enough natural magicians to fill the quota? Are there decoys? You can tell me.”

  Stephens said, “Please keep your voice down.”

  Her name was at the Canadian United Republic table, beside a man whose nameplate read James Standing Tall. He was older – as old as her mother would have been – and when he saw her approaching he blinked.

  “I didn’t know there were still shamans in the Northern States,” he said by way of greeting.

  “There aren’t,” she said as she sat. “They’ll take anyone these days.”

  The sorcerer Adam Maleficio, Greater Britain delegate, was the last of them to arrive – under a suddenly dark sky, in a single crack of lightning and a plume of smoke.

  Several of the spellcasters stood and pointed their wands, canes, and open palms at the source of the disruption.

  “Hold!” one shouted, and another cried, “Pax!”

  Adam Maleficio held up his hands. “Friends, hold back your spells! I come among you as a brother, to speak with you of future friendship.” Absently, he brushed off his cape and his lapels. “Absit iniuria verbis, no?”

  A handful of sorcerers laughed. He laughed as well, his eyes glinting red, his teeth glinting white.

  From behind Anna’s chair, Stephens leaned forward and translated, “May our words not injure.”

  Anna said, “We’ll see about that.”

  The Congress Director called for comments before the floor opened for debate.

  Maleficio stood up with great ceremony and said, “I have been elected to deliver a statement on behalf of all users of magic.”

  James Standing Tall looked at Anna. “Too late to opt out?”

  “Eight hundred years too late,” she said.

  Maleficio delivered an erudite and lengthy Statement of Brotherhood to the assembled. (There was no telling who had elected him to speak, since some spellcasters’ wands stayed pointed at him the whole time he read.)

  After the first twenty minutes, Anna and James wrote notes to each other on their programs.

  She learned he was Cree, one of the last of his nation. He had remained in the Southern States even after Canada had annexed them. He would come home to a spring of 130 degrees.

  I can call the wind with prayer, he wrote. It’s better than leaving.

  She didn’t question why he stayed. Anna had no questions to ask about where people dug the trenches for their last stands.

  Instead she wrote, Why did you come?

  He wrote, I wanted a voice.

  What are you fighting for? she wrote.

  He wrote, Everything. We will have to fight everything, if we are to have any power.

  After a moment she wrote, My mother was the shaman, not me. I have no real magic.

  On the floor of the Amphitheatre, Adam Maleficio was saying, “Unity is more important now than ever, when magic-users are taking a unique and visible position in a changing world. Let us not forget this is a place we
made. This is a place of magic. This is a place for magic. And without unity, we weaken.”

  James wrote, As long as you can fight.

  Maleficio was still going, enjoying the podium and trying to drown out the translators for good measure. “This is a place for those who know true magic to meet with respect and understanding, to come together with a single vision, and, conjunctis viribus, we shall succeed in all we try to do on this sacred ground.”

  “With united powers,” Stephens translated.

  “May this be a milestone of a new era,” Maleficio finished.

  He crushed the pages in his hands and threw his arms wide; the paper turned into six doves and flew away.

  The day was boiling hot and fruitless, and during the Magic-Assisted Environment Preservation referendum Anna decided she would leave. There was no reason for her to pretend she had a voice in a council full of wand-wavers.

  Then one of the delegates from Japan stood up to address the assembly.

  She was wrapped in a fox stole so long that half a dozen fox heads knocked against one another as she stood. Under the stole her suit was the grey of rotting ice; the grey of the narwhal.

  Anna sat up in her chair.

  “While I can’t speak for all natural magicians,” the woman said, her voice carrying over the hum of translation, “I know my own magic has already been compromised by the problem that you ask us to solve. Without a natural world for us to call upon, we are powerless.”

  Maleficio called, “Don’t pretend you’re powerless, foxwitch!”

  Her stole rippled as the six fox heads lifted and hissed at the crowd.

  “No magic, no speaking out of turn,” called the Congress Director. “Delegate Hana, thank you, you may sit down – no magic, ladies and gentlemen, please!”

  The woman sat, amid a chorus of derisive laughter from the spellcasters.

  James said, “If they had to call their spells from the grass, they wouldn’t be laughing.”

  “If they had to call their spells from the grass,” Anna said, “we’d still have grass.”