by Paula Guran
And here were the demons now. As I set my blade sweeping through that thorny surf of claws and jaws, I saw with great relief hundreds of the dead army leave off their relay of rocks, draw their blades, and turn with us to hew this demon-flux.
Dead allies! I can see them still, sharp-etched in moonlight! Though their gaunt jaws seemed to gnaw the air, though leather their flesh and their limbs scarce more than bones—though they had mere moonlight for eyes in their sockets—the smell that came off those twice-dead warriors was not of the grave, not at all! Not of the tomb, though they’d lain twice entombed. The smell that came off these dead warriors was of ice and stone and midnight wind, all laced with the lovely bitter smell of steel . . .
We lifted our blades and on came the demons. A beetle-backed one with triple barbed bug-jaws had at me, and I blessed this chance for a shield. I sheared off his up-reaching jaws with a cross-stroke, sliced five of his legs out from under, and as he buckled down before me, hacked out a great square of his leathery carapace, and ripped it free of his back—a shield!
But no, Shag—I’ll spare you the details of my own small doings, and show you the grand tides in flux here, the whole sea of war in its surgings.
Full half of the twice-raised dead had come down off the crater and—raising a skullish hiss, a windy war-cry from their leathery lungs—swept down in a scything line that bagged the demon onslaught in a vast net of bony, tireless limbs and whistling swordblades.
Up on the crater their twice-dead brethren in two chain-lines passed wall-wrack back up to the wall. Aloft, Hylanais was blasted, scorched and thunderbolted from two sides by her risen mate and his subworld scion. Though scathed with blazing energies, the witch remained impossibly aloft, her wings a blur, though her wearied sorcery was all shield-work now, all incandescent hemispheres she deployed left and right of her to contain and cancel her husband’s and the Narn-son’s bolts and blazes.
While through it all Yanîn’s brute energy launched huge stones moonward that plunged, plunged, plunged into the great wound, the healed rock rising in the gap like pale wine in a goblet.
When you are sunk in combat on a grand scale, you can feel a touch of the eternal. When did this all-engulfing turmoil start? How could it ever end?
But end it did! It ended with the hurling of a single stone. Just as my eye chanced to be turned that way, Yanîn launched a mighty boulder, and I saw—astonished—that it was the final fragment of Rainbowl’s collapse.
It arced up, up through the moonlight—big as a three-storey manse it was!—and as it soared, dead silence fell upon that whole infernal battlefield, for it soared up to an almost perfectly completed crater, and fell into the one little notch of vacancy that remained, high up upon the crater’s crown.
It seemed that Hylanais had never doubted this would come to pass, for she had shot aloft, and already she hung there, centered high above the bowl, as that last fragment found its niche.
And then quite leisurely—for an odd paralysis seemed to befall both Zan-Kirk and his son—she stretched out her hand, and dropped a tiny clot of light down into the high, gigantic basin.
What an audience we were in that moment! A true and single audience, united by our sudden stillness and our rapt attention. Furiously though the demon army and its generals had fought to reach the crater and to kindle there the summons to the Sojourners, we had beaten them.
And now every one of us—human, demon, dead and living—raptly awaited what would answer the summons. A dire and various audience we were, to be sure: claws, clubs, blades, and fangs all cocked to rend and slay, but all our eyes, human and hellish, were in unison now fixed aloft; a host of living warriors, hilts gripped, lifted axes taking the moonlight; a host of dead warriors in a killing frenzy, to whom this moment was the more apocalyptic for their having lain so long in death before waking to possess it . . . But all of these awaiting the outcome, all now realizing that whatever would spring from the witch’s spark, it would befall every one of us.
None in all that host but the airborne—none but the witch, and the warlock, and the Narn-son—could see what that little clot of radiance illuminated as it dropped inside the crater. But every one of us reckoned—from the speed of its plunge—the rate of its unseen journey to the imagined crater floor.
And such a concord was there in that monstrous throng’s silent reckonings, that a single shudder moved across the whole grim host of us upon the mountainside—every corpse, and demon, and every living soul of us shuddered just one heartbeat before the crater erupted.
It was the eruption, huge and silent, of a perfect inverted cone of rose-red light up to the stars.
The full moon had somewhat declined from zenith, and the rubescent beam, spreading as it rose, just nicked the lunar rim, painting there a red ellipse like a bloody thumbprint . . .
Still that impossible stillness held us all. Rapt, our eyes or empty sockets scanned aloft as that great chalice of light beamed up at the stars . . . and as something began to fill that chalice.
Indistinct it was at first, a kind of granulation within the rosy cup of radiance . . . until these contents began to seem more like the substance of the cup itself.
Faces! Tier upon tier of them spiraling upwards and outwards, these were the vast chalice’s substance! They were a towering tribunal—rank on widening rank of faces rising toward the stars, every one of them preternaturally distinct within their dizzying distances, and every one of them gazing down on Lebanoi, upon her war-torn slopes, her sprawling butchery of man and demon.
It froze us even stiller than before—every one of us it froze. Something in the unearthly concord of those sky-borne gazes unutterably diminished us, annihilated us with the sad austerity of their ageless, alien regard.
Within their great cyclone of sentience they grieved, that sad tribunal of the Sojourners. It was grief with a shudder in it they showed us, as they gazed down on the wide, bleeding wreckage we’d spread for their welcome.
That witnessing host roofed our world, and their somber regard showed us starkly the inferno that our bodies blazed in. My flesh felt thin as a shadow sheathing my bones, while the eyes of the Sojourners seemed to gaze down into a pit centuries deep, upon some holocaust of remote antiquity.
Beheld by that tribunal, we felt ourselves to be the briefest of echoes from some distant past, a rumor roaming the reverberant corridors through which had thronged a great host long ago . . .
That high tribunal of skyborn faces! The gravity of them had turned us to stone in mid-slaughter. Stunned we stood, sword-arms hanging slack. It was among the strangest moments of my life, Shag! To stand arms-length from demons and to think no more of them than that they were residents like me on this strange earth! But in truth, no more than that they seemed when this host—eyes immutable as constellations—paved the night sky . . .
The somber knowledge of that multitude! Knowing our future as well as our past . . . It seemed they had gathered to witness our metamorphosis. To witness this strange crescendo our old world—once theirs—was rising towards.
I felt it through my legs: whatever was to come of this, would not be long in coming.
A true thought, that one. Yanîn leapt prodigiously aloft, and stood astride the Flume just below its shattered terminus. Looking back down upon the mingled army of demons just emerged from the trees, and of dead still climbing from their fen, he bellowed, “Come up! Climb up! Come see and be seen!”
Those demons in their homicidal fever required no prompting to come up. That wry-framed giant with his equine eyes—had he sided with the warlock? It was the witch had my allegiance from the first. But did Hylanais’s son embrace the subworld?
I looked up at the witch’s army on the crater wall—those twice-dead veterans of sorcerous war. My allegiance went to them completely, such that it made the hair stir on my neck to see that demon column—shields and axes high—come foaming up the mountainside at them.
“Let them come to you!” Hylanais from astride h
er winged demon called down: “Wrack and dark ruin upon you both!” and she gestured obscenely, first at Gothol on his raft, then at Zan-Kirk astride his monster.
Come they did, and hurtling up the steep terrain those subworld soldiers—so variously limbed and bodied—looked agile as insects swarming up a wall. They looked every bit as swift as the dead that were avalanching to meet them, and deploying to fill the whole slope below Rainbowl.
You must keep in mind, Shag, how moon-drenched it was, how stark white-and-black; the twice-killed soldiers, bare bone showing everywhere, plunging down against the muck-dark demons baying their hunger as they climbed . . .
But the collision of their ranks astonished every combatant—living, dead and demon alike. For as those warfronts, those harrows of hammering steel, collided high on the slope, the astonishment of it filled every eye for sixty leagues around, and half a dozen other cities saw it.
For colors bloomed as blazing rich as any tropic jungle at full noon—this in the night, mind you, in moonlight only!
The battle lines seemed to merge and swell as impossible night-blazing colors erupted everywhere from the hillside. From our post just below Rainbowl’s wall we saw what caused this profusion. For as every demon with one of the dead collided, the both of them exploded into a branching, blossoming skeleton, its every bone a limb that flowered, blossomed purple, saffron, blood-red and cerulean . . .
Branching and budding and blooming, a rainbow growth overspread that battlefield, and climbed the Flume’s mighty legs. A forestation of hues that blazed even in darkness, knit from every shape of branch, leaf, tendril, limb and frond.
So like an earthquake was this efflorescence to my astonished mind, that it was almost detachedly I watched as Gothol’s raft—the Narn-son’s wrath proclaimed in his raised fist—and Zan-Kirk’s hairy-winged mount both plummeted to the earth. As he plunged, Gothol stood mute. The warlock barked one hoarse curse at his mate: “Forever the dark then, witch!”
On impact came their writhe of metamorphosis . . . and both those grim, dire men were . . . flower trees!—their legs gnarled roots, and their arms all blossoms scooping up the moonlight and the air . . .
And as these two, so the hosts they led also rippled with mountain-wide metamorphosis, and their forest of lifted blades and brandished lances were trunks and boughs and branches multifoliate, and the screams and butchering grunts of war sank to the wide whisper of foliage rattling, muttering and whispering in the night wind off the sea . . .
The Sojourners, that watching host which filled the sky—all those faces softened with something like assent, and then grew vague, grew smoky, and dispersed, and left just moon-drenched night behind.
I stood still staring, straining still to see that host of unsuspected witnesses, straining still to feel their cosmic fellowship—undreamed of, and then so briefly known.
“Would you not like to see where they have gone?” Though softly spoken, the depth of Yanîn’s voice at my ear caused me a tremor.
I weighed my answer. “I would like to, but only if I could certainly return here from there. For this strange world is marvel enough for me.”
We two looked about us. Shaggy with blossom the whole upper Flume had grown. The crater wall and its under-slope, that had been so starkly stony for so long, was growing even as we watched, growing ever more richly encrusted with color and form. Judging by the vernal riot of blossoming, foliate and fronded forms emerging everywhere, there was just no telling what might spring up next . . .
James Enge’s first story was published in Black Gate (Summer 2005). His fiction features Morlock Ambrosius, a Maker (wizard) and Seer, who has (so far) been featured in six novels and a number of short stories. The hunchbacked, often drunk, Morlock is a skilled swordsman, but not truly a warrior. Tim Pratt, of Locus, has written of Enge’s work:
One of Enge’s great virtues as a writer is weirdness—he’s not afraid to do the unexpected, and his imagination is formidable. But there’s an underlying emotional power here, too. The author excels at depicting the bonds of friendship, the pain of betrayal, and the tragedy of well-laid plans going awry, and that emotional payload is what makes this novel into more than just an entertaining adventure story about a guy with a magical sword who fights monsters.
Payment Deferred
James Enge
There is the house whose people sit in darkness;
dust is their food and clay their meat.
—The Epic of Gilgamesh
(English translation: N. K. Sandars)
The thug’s first thrust sent his sword screeching past Morlock Ambrosius’s left ear. He retreated rather than parry Morlock’s riposte; then he thrust again in the same quadrant as before.
While the thug was still extended for his attack, Morlock deftly kicked him in the right knee. With a better swordsman this would have cost Morlock, but he had the measure of his opponent. The thug went sideways, squawking in dismay, into a pile of garbage.
The point of Morlock’s blade, applied to the thug’s wrist, persuaded him to release his sword. The toe of Morlock’s left shoe, applied to the thug’s chin, persuaded him to keep lying where he was.
“What’s your story, Slash?” Morlock asked.
“Whatcha mean?”
Morlock’s sword point shifted to the thug’s throat. “I’m in Sarkunden for an hour. You pick me out of a street crowd, follow me into an alley, and try to kill me. Why?”
“Y’re smart, eh? See a lot, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Dontcha like it, eh? Dontcha like to fight, eh?”
“No.”
“Call a Keep, hunchback!” the thug sneered. “Maybe, I dunno, maybe I oughta—” He raised his hand theatrically to his mouth and inhaled deeply, as if he were about to cry out.
Morlock’s sword pressed harder against the thug’s neck, just enough to break the skin. The shout never issued from the thug’s mouth, but the thug sneered triumphantly. He’d made his point: Morlock, as an imperial outlaw, wanted to see the Keepers of the Peace—squads of imperial guards detailed to policing the streets—even less than this street punk with a dozen murders to his credit. (Morlock knew this from the cheek rings in the thug’s face. The custom among the water gangs was one cheek ring per murder. Duels and fair fights did not count.)
“Ten days’ law—that’s what you got, eh?” the thug whispered. “Ten days to reach the border; then if they catch you inside it—zzccch! When’d your time run out, uh, was it twenny days ago? Thirty?”
“Two months.”
“Sure. Call a Keep, scut-face. By sunrise they’ll have your head drying on a stake upside the Kund-Way Gate.”
“I won’t be calling the Keepers of the Peace,” Morlock agreed. The crooked half-smile on his face was as cold as his ice-gray eyes. “What will I do instead?”
“You can’t kill me, crooky-boy—” the thug began, with suddenly shrill bravado.
“I can kill you. But I won’t. I’ll cut your tendons and pull your cheek rings. I can sell the metal for drinking money at any bar in this town, as long as the story goes with it. And I’ll make sure everyone knows where I last saw you.”
“There’s a man; he wants to see you,” said the thug, giving in disgustedly.
“Dead?”
“Alive. But I figure: the Empire pays more for you dead than this guy will alive.”
“You’re saying he’s cheap.”
“Cheap? He’s riding his horse, right, and you cross the road after him and step in his horse-scut. He’s gonna send a greck after you to charge you for the fertilizer. You see me?”
“I see you.” Morlock briefly weighed his dangers against his needs. “Take me to this guy. I’ll let you keep a cheek ring, and one tendon, maybe.”
“Evil scut-sucking bastard,” hissed the thug, unmistakably moved with gratitude.
“The guy’s” house was a fortresslike palace of native blue-stone, not far inside the western wall of Sarkunden. Morlock and the limping th
ug were admitted through a heavy bronze door that swung down to make a narrow bridge across a dry moat. Bow slits lined the walls above the moat; through them Morlock saw the gleam of watching eyes.
“Nice place, eh?” the thug sneered.
“I like it.”
The thug hissed his disgust at the emblems of security and anyone who needed them.
They waited in an unfinished stone anteroom with three hard-faced guards until an inner door opened and a tall fair-haired man stepped through it. He glanced briefly in cold recognition at the thug, but his eyes lit up as they fell on Morlock.
“Ah! Welcome, sir. Welcome to my home. Do come in.”
“Money,” said the thug in a businesslike tone.
“You’ll be paid by your gang leader. That was the agreement.”
“I better be,” said the thug flatly. He walked back across the bronze doorbridge, strutting to conceal his limp.
“Come in, do come in,” said the householder effusively. “People usually call me Charis.”
Morlock noted the careful phrasing and replied as precisely, “I am Morlock Ambrosius.”
“I know it, sir—I know it well. I wish I had the courage to do as you do. But few of those-who-know can afford to be known by their real names.”
Those-who-know was a euphemism for practitioners of magic, especially solitary adepts. Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders, dismissing the subject.
“I had a prevision you were coming to Sarkunden,” said the sorcerer who called himself Charis, “and—yes, thank you, Veskin, you may raise the bridge again—I wanted to consult with you on a matter I have in hand. I hope that gangster didn’t hurt you, bringing you in—I see you are limping.”
“It’s an old wound.”
“Ah. Well, I’m sorry I had to put the word out to the water gangs, but they cover the town so much more thoroughly than the Keepers of the Peace. Then there was the matter of your—er—status. I hope, by the way, you aren’t worried about that fellow shopping you to the imperial forces?”