So, who?
“A little bird told them,” Bijou muttered.
“Pardon?” Brazen said.
“Never mind,” said Bijou. She shook herself into a smile. “Come on. Let’s enjoy the party, shall we, Master Wizard, sir? These starlings will probably disperse once night falls.”
“Owls are bigger,” Brazen said cynically, as he lifted a drink from a passing tray.
* * *
—
“Not to interfere in a feud between two other wizards, but I’m here to tell you that I don’t appreciate you trying to kill my former apprentice.” Bijou took a seat in the comfortable armchair beside the brazier. She sat carefully, so as not to discommode Ambrosias at her waist, with his recently repaired legs, or the several crab-shell artifices tucked inside her robes. Morning light streamed into the pleasantly appointed little parlor. “Although, believe me, I understand why you might feel the urge to.”
The woman opposite brushed long, fine, black hair from her oval face with a suggestion of a smile. Her forehead was high, her cheeks full, the embrasure of her eyes narrow under a hooded lid. Her hands rested in her lap with her knitting, an elegant openwork tangle of rough-spun white and crimson silk yarn.
“I should have realized that you’re a wizard,” Bijou continued. “ ‘Najma.’ Star. But that’s an odd wizard-name for someone who talks to animals.”
“Just birds,” Najma said. “They too decorate the sky.”
“Brazen didn’t know it?” Bijou asked.
Najma shrugged. Behind her, in a cage, a canary twittered. His wings were the clear variegated red of precious agates. Bamboo cages full of white and stripe-winged finches sang in the open window arches that led out to a garden balcony. Beyond, the city stretched into the distance, under a morning haze of smoke as people warmed their bread and boiled their tea. “He could have paid close enough attention to learn.”
“So he’s a terrible boyfriend. Is that worth murdering for?”
“Well.” Najma seemed to do almost everything judiciously. It was certainly how she sipped her tea. “If I’d really wanted to murder him, I probably could have done better than starlings.”
“Starlings,” Bijou said, and put her hand to her eyes.
“The tea really is very nice,” Najma said.
“So you were…just trying to get his attention?” Bijou, as directed, sipped the tea. It was, really, very nice.
“Just trying to remind him that there are consequences to his poor choices.” Najma set the tea aside and picked up her ball of yarn. “Out of female solidarity. For the sake of the next girl.”
“And perhaps a little bit of revenge?”
Najma’s smile revealed white teeth and wickedness. Bijou…liked her. “Some men are slow to learn.”
Bijou thought of Kaulas the Necromancer, and sighed. “Some men are.”
“I realize that he was orphaned of his mother, and that his father is an evil necromancer. But couldn’t you have…”
“Raised him better?”
Najma saluted her with the ball of yarn.
Bijou thought about that. About her own mother, standing and watching, arms folded, as Bijou walked away from her birth village into the desert, under a hail of stones. About Bijou’s own choice to keep affection—oh, call it love, after its own fashion—in one hand and sex in the other, firmly separate, forever. If it had been a choice, and not just the way she were made. Or bent so early she might as well have been made that way.
About her best friend, and the man they had sometimes shared and sometimes quarreled over, though neither one had particularly liked him.
If somebody had managed to like him, would he have turned out better? Was that really even their problem, or was it his own?
“Perhaps,” Bijou said cordially, “blaming a woman for the failings of the man is not, in itself, constructive?”
Najma pursed her lips. She tilted her head and raised one finger as if about to make a point—and perhaps she whistled, too high to hear. A little dappled brown wren, least colorful of songbirds, flitted in the window and perched on her finger, chirrupping. Najma, without taking her gaze from Bijou’s, tilted her own face down and brushed her lips lightly across the bird’s small head. It turned to her like a nestling seeking feeding.
Ambrosias stirred at Bijou’s waist. Bijou stroked him silent again.
“But it is a woman who has come to see me,” Najma replied.
Bijou paused with her tea at her lips, once more. “It is.”
“Have you discussed this with Brazen?”
Bijou shrugged the question away.
“So you are trying to solve his problems for him.”
“I may also enjoy still being a little more clever than my apprentice.”
The wren flew away, twittering. Bijou wondered that Najma could treat it as such a pet and spend the lives of her other familiars so profligately. That was a thing to remember, even when she found the young wizard charming. Just as there were things to remember about Brazen, even if they did not affect Bijou personally.
But one wizard did not avoid feuds with another—and the concomitant collateral damage to property and bystanders—by correcting her—or his—ethics continually.
They enjoyed their tea. A heavy scent of flowers—jasmine, ylang-ylang—drifted in from the balcony as the breeze shifted.
“Do me a favor?” Najma asked. “One woman to another?”
“Perhaps.”
“Let him figure this one out on his own.” The younger wizard smiled. “It will do him more good in the long run.”
“It is not my job to watch him.” Bijou set her empty teacup down and slipped a folded paper under the saucer.
“What’s that?” Najma asked.
Bijou smiled as she reached for her cane. “It is my cleaning bill.”
◆ ◆ ◆
Here’s another of Lavie Tidhar’s tales of “guns and sorcery,” featuring the bizarre and often ultraviolent adventures of Gorel of Goliris, a “gunslinger and addict” in a world full of evil sorcery and monstrous creatures. (Further adventures of Gorel can be found in the chapbook novella Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, in my anthology The Book of Swords, and in the collection Black Gods Kiss.)
So let yourself be swept along with Gorel on his latest dark and twisted quest, for something better not found, but we warn you, it’s not going to be an uneventful journey.
Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, has traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London, the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, and Laos; after a spell in Tel Aviv, he’s currently living back in England again. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), was the editor of Michael Marshall Smith: A Bibliography, and the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults, the three-volume The Apex Book of World SF series, and two anthologies edited with Rebecca Levene, Jews vs. Aliens and Jews vs. Zombies. He is the author of the linked story collection HebrewPunk, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier, and the novella chapbooks An Occupation of Angels, Cloud Permutations, Jesus and the Eightfold Path, and Martian Sands. A prolific short-story writer, his stories have appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Nemonymous, Infinity Plus, Aeon, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau, Old Venus, and elsewhere, and have been translated into seven languages. His novels include The Bookman and its two sequels, Camera Obscura and The Great Game, Osama: A Novel (which won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Novel in 2012), The Violent Century, and A Man Lies Dreaming. His most recent book is a big, multifaceted SF novel, Central Station, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2017.
◆ ◆ ◆
LAVIE TIDHAR
1.
They were walki
ng through the narrow, jagged walls of an icy ravine when Pitong Narawal, who was first scout, hit a strip-mine. He did not even have time to scream.
It was a crude device, but effective. Once, they had been dropped down from the skies in their thousands, mass-produced in the distant factories of vanished Zul: their charge of minute, compressed sorcery waiting now under the ice all around them, for anyone careless enough—unlucky enough—to find one.
Gorel watched as the strip-mine explosion spiralled out of the frozen ground. The whirlwind draped Pitong Narawal in rings of metal-blue flame and shredded his skin, making the howling sound of a saw cutting through bone, the red blood splattering out of the revolving fire and staining the ice in a painting of death.
When it was over, a last crackling of the ancient stored sorcerous charge dissipated in the chill air, and there was a short silence. Then Lord Khalen said, “Turnir Gerad, you take first scout position,” and the bandy-legged man in his wrappings of fur shrugged and came forward, and soon they were moving again, climbing through the desolate landscape of ice.
2.
The city of Uzur-Kalden, Gorel thought, was a typical barbarian outpost: which is to say, it had been built by someone else. Tall spires rose into the air, astronomers’ towers long fallen into disuse, and once-sprawling and perfectly manicured private gardens had been converted for use as butchers’ markets. The temples for old gods had been turned into gaudy palaces for the rich.
There was a gallows in the center of town but only two corpses hanging there, preserved still in the cool air below the mountains. Uzur-Kalden was dominated by the mountains above it, and their breath of ice fell on the city as on a naked shoulder that was unable to pull away. It had once been a Ware’i city, and marks of the old war were still visible in unexpected moments—deep pools of water revealed as ancient blast craters, a stain on an old wall suddenly resolving into a human shape. And in the markets they still sold the remnants of the Zul’s assault: the scatter-bombs and strip-mines and the containers of yet worse, much worse, devices, which were sold for scrap metal and for what sorcery they may yet contain. Every year there were many deaths in the small, isolated villages above the snowline, as the scavengers for Zul remains encountered live bombs. But the price in the markets of Uzur-Kalden was profitable, and the trade brisk, and livelihood on the slopes of the great mountains hard.
Yet Gorel had little interest in the Zul’s armaments. They were abhorrent to him, the bastard progenies of sorcery; Gorel trusted only to his guns. In a small lean-to at the edge of the artificers’ market, set in the once-grand remnants of a public square where now broken columns rose above fallen statues whose namesakes no one knew, he had purchased powder and shells. And in another, at the edge of town by the ruined temple of a long-forgotten god, he had purchased the substance which is sometimes white and sometimes black and sometimes all the colors of the rainbow, and which men call the Black Kiss, or gods’ dust.
He had come to Uzur-Kalden after a long and weary road, and his funds were few. He sought accommodation in the common hall of the Abbey of Forgotten Gods, which lay at the other edge of town, closest to the mountains, and was granted it.
There were many forgotten gods in Uzur-Kalden. Many who were once worshipped and were now reduced, or gone—a poverty of gods where once there had been riches. The monks sought to preserve the knowledge of Ware’i, and of Zul, and to understand their conflict. They offered cheap beds.
Shower was a bucket of ice-cold water in the yard. As he washed, Gorel watched the mountains overhead as the sky darkened and the first stars began to appear, like the first fat drops of rain. He stared up at them, the water drying slowly on his chest and arms. They were cold, the stars, like the eyes of dead men, glaring down balefully from above, but all the while the mountains dominated them.
When he was done he went out of the yard and into the town. The once grand, surfaced streets were now a confusion of mud and broken stones, and open fires burned to provide both light and warmth. He went into a low-lying hut, a makeshift affair of hastily assembled wood, where there was smoke and laughter and the smell of spilled beer; someone played a song, badly, on a stringed instrument that quite possibly had never been tuned. Gorel ordered a half bottle of rice whiskey and took it, along with a brown earthen mug, to an empty seat by the window. An old woman turned a spit of meat over coals nearby, the smell filling up the immediate area, and he went and purchased two sticks of fatty meat and brought them back. He drank slowly, and ate one of the sticks, and then he opened the packet he had purchased earlier that day and carefully drew a line of dust on the tabletop.
“It’s a bad habit you got there, friend,” a voice said.
Gorel bent his head down low and snorted the dust. The power of the Black Kiss surged through his body, and he almost rocked back.
When he turned his head to the speaker, he saw a small, wizened form. “What’s it to you?” he said.
“Nothing, nothing. I was merely observing that health considerations—”
There seemed to be no transition: one moment the gun was by his side, and the next it was in Gorel’s hand. The small figure smiled. He was a wizened old man, and Gorel noticed with distaste that he wore a tall, shapeless hat with silver stars badly sewn on to it.
“I do beg your pardon—” the man said. “May I join you?”
Without waiting for an answer he sat down opposite Gorel, putting his own empty mug on the table, and helped himself to Gorel’s whiskey.
“I see you are experienced with weaponry. A steady hand. Excellent.” The man brought out a small leather pouch and began rolling himself a cigarette. “And your guns, they are from the Lower Kidron? The workmanship is really quite unique.”
Gorel’s estimation of the small man rose sharply.
“Yes…” he said. The gun was back in its holster.
“My name,” the man said, sticking the rolled cigarette in his mouth and setting it alight, “is Orven. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” His pouch had disappeared just as it had appeared, without Gorel noticing. “And you are—?”
“What do you want?” Gorel said.
“Me? Nothing, nothing. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“It occurred to me you might be looking for work,” Orven said, and belched. Smoke rose out of his mouth as he did so. “And I know someone who’s hiring.”
“You a wizard?”
“Sometimes, sometimes…”
“What’s the job?”
Orven gestured out of the small window. Gorel looked out, saw nothing but tall, impossible mountains.
“There?” he said.
The other nodded.
“What’s up there?” Gorel said.
“Death, most likely,” Orven said.
“Death?”
“And, well, treasure.”
“Of what sort?”
“Of the sort,” Orven said quietly, “that killed the Zul and the Ware’i.”
“A weapon?”
“The final weapon,” Orven said. “The widow maker.” And he glanced about the room as though wary of being overheard. “You interested?”
“In almost certain death and an impossible quest?”
“It pays,” Orven said, with unassailable logic.
Gorel did a line of dust. The power of the Black Kiss coursed through him. Pure, distilled faith: there was nothing like it in all of the world.
“Sure,” Gorel said.
3.
Lord Khalen was a prince consort from some faraway northern principality, whose wife had died in mysterious circumstances and whose people elected for him not to stick around after that. By all accounts he’d packed up in a hurry, taking with him much of his tragically deceased wife’s wealth, and had since established a name for himself as an explorer of some renown.
He had the hereditary nobleman’s stiff resolve, a sort of bright and endearing dim-wittedness, and the useful inability never to admit an obstacle or face responsibility. He was, in other words, an ideal leader of men.
“This the gunslinger?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you good?”
“Am I good?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Gorel said, considering the question carefully, “I’m still alive, if that’s what you mean.”
“What’s up there,” Lord Khalen said, “is no ordinary battlefield. Up there, the membrane between the worlds is thin and perforated with bullet holes. Reality has been twisted and broken by the Zul–Ware’i war. The mountains are littered with traps, mines, bombs…monsters.”
“I’ve fought monsters before.”
“Some would say the worst monster of all is man,” Orven said, and sniggered. “Though I always thought the grass giants of Gomrath and the demon-priests of Kraag were far worse, personally.”
“If something lives, it dies,” Gorel said and shrugged. “All you have to do is hasten it along.”
“Fine, fine,” Lord Khalen said. “You’re hired. We leave in two days’ time. How are the preparations coming along, Orven?”
“The porters are ready, sir. And now we have the muscle”—he leered at Gorel—“all we need is a guide.”
“Well, make sure to find one,” Lord Khalen said.
“Yes, sir,” the wizard muttered.
4.
The next morning, Gorel visited the library in the Abbey of Forgotten Gods. This structure, at least, had escaped destruction. Columns rose up from the smooth marble floor and into the high, vaulted ceiling. It was both well lit and airy inside, and all around were shelves of books—large tomes bound in all the varieties of dead animals’ skins. The apprentice monk assigned to Gorel was a short, cheerful boy called Kay.
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