“Aumerra,” Ralandra said patiently, “I am digging, see? But I’m not going to stop complaining! We’re all wizards, we could blast this rock to dust with one spell and float all the dust out of here with another and sit down to a two-day feast and still carve it out faster than we’re doing with these old picks and prybars and shovels! Besides, what happens when we meet the Amarrandans? And they overwhelm us and invade our last refuge because we helpfully dug out their invasion route for them? Right here under the queen’s very throne! This is stupid, I tell you! Stupid!”
“Ralla,” the older mage said, not unkindly, “which of we three anointed wizards of Syndaelia is the oldest? And the highest ranking?”
“You, of course. I’m well aware of—”
“And I’m more than well aware of your arguments, having heard them so often these last few days. As it happens, I agree with them, but the queen’s orders were very clear: dig to intercept the invaders and blast them when we see them.”
Ralandra sighed. “May I point out that they have wizards, too? We may not be the ones doing the last and best blasting.”
“I don’t think they’ll have to blast us,” the third, youngest, and lowliest mage piped up. He was covered with sweat and rock-dust and had flung down his pick to wring his hands from the pain of all his breaking blisters. “Not when they can send their armies of rats to swarm us and bite us to bare bones!”
“Doran! We’re not supposed to discuss that!” Aumerra snapped.
Doran rolled his eyes. “Or the rocks’ll hear? Surely, they’ve already heard the screams of the wizards who got gnawed to death! And we don’t even know what spell the Amarrandans are using to conjure the rats! Wouldn’t it be more prudent—?”
“I believe it would be more prudent,” Aumerra interrupted, in a voice that promised swift and cold doom was coming to argumentative young wizards of Syndaelia, and soon, “to shut up and swing your picks at yon rocks!”
“Ah, Merra,” Ralandra replied in quite a different voice, plucking at Aumerra’s sleeve, “I, ah, think it might be a little late for that.” Letting her pick fall, she used her freed hand to point back down the tunnel they’d so laboriously hewn over these last however many days.
To where thousands of tiny eyes shined back the light of Aumerra’s conjured magelight, and a tittering was rising. Higher it rose, eerily shrill and strong, as the rodents came charging, in a roiling, racing wall.
Hisseel was the size of a dozen young rats, and his snout was gray with age and white with small patches of mange he could never quite seem to get entirely rid of these days. They’d drag him down and eat him soon enough but, for now, they still obeyed and accorded him a bodyguard of ten veterans.
He looked down from his ledge at the bedraggled rats crawling and limping up to the outermost of his guards below, and then across the cleft to the other ledge where Ulmalask lay. The rival commander was as old and wizened as he, but only rated a bodyguard of eight, who warily stood ranks side by side with his own, in the cleft below.
“Halt!” came the barked challenge. “No closer!”
The foremost rat halted. “I come to report to Hisseel. Is he within hearing?”
“He is,” the bodyguard made reply. “Speak.”
“The siege is over. The Amarrandans are dying in droves from the plague we spread among them, and those who can still walk or ride are fleeing back home to their own land as fast as they can.”
“So, we can eat all the Syndaelian humans now?” one of Ulmalask’s guards asked hopefully.
“What?” Hisseel’s head bodyguard roared into his face. “You idiot, that’s our winter food store you want to devour! Foolbrains!”
“I’m not!” the other rat hissed. “The Old Wise Rat said the human spells made us all smarter! I’m no more a fool than you!” And he pounced, biting viciously.
In half a breath, the cleft was alive with snarling, shrieking, hissing rats and their bitten-out hair and their flying blood, too.
Hisseel looked over at Ulmalask. They regarded each other across the bloody mayhem and smiled.
“Back to normal. The human doom seems averted,” Ulmalask observed calmly.
“So, we can get back to making war on each other,” Hisseel agreed with a satisfaction he didn’t bother to hide. “Ah, I love the smell of fresh blood.”
Good Steel
Zachary Barnes
Most births are bloody, but mine was not. That would come later.
I was born into fire and brightness, wrenched shrieking from the womb's warmth. Formless sleep to a splintered cradle. Then movement.
Taken up in grimy hands, inspected. Cold air stung my naked body for the first time.
Soon, I was in a metal bed suspended over the crackle of flames whose tongues licked my body. But that reprieve quickly burned away as that mounting heat swaddled me, melted through me.
I began to scream.
The heat withdrew.
Slowly—so slowly—that agony faded, replaced instead by a silence in which I existed listlessly, a place of waking dreams, of smoke and scrimshaw.
A hand descended. Please, I gasped. No more.
But I was lifted back to the torment of white-hot coals. I wailed and dreamt of the warm darkness of the womb, but the memory was already fading. Cold metal kissed my back now. Movement in the air above me.
The hammer's head cracked against my face, but the pain it brought was so sudden I could not even scream. Not at first.
It lifted. Fell. My body bent, buckled, deformed, leaving me gasping.
Returned to the coals. But now their heat was a numb, faraway throb that could not compare to the mutilation of the hammer. Back and forth, back and forth, until I was battered to unconsciousness. It was a welcome darkness.
I woke to murmuring human voices. Something was quite wrong, and it wasn't just this raw new form. Have I been impaled?
Indeed, fibrous wood scratched at my insides, but before I could panic, its touch brought an alien consciousness abreast with my own.
I wasn't sure if you'd ever wake. It was the wood I heard, its every thought dripping with sap. Or it you even survived...
The voices above us paused, and we rose through the air.
Among the next string of words, one alone stood out. "Hoe."
We're named "Hoe?"
I suppose, the wooden haft thought. Its confusion matched my own.
But then, a new hand brushed against me, nail testing my sharpness. Calluses kneaded my body. I bristled at first, but then warmed to the grasp.
"It's good steel." Sturdy. Confident. "I'll take it."
It was a solid voice and stirred a wisp of emotion in my deep insides: happiness?
The shed—our new home—smelt of sawdust and oil and musty earth. By my elbows I was hung, nestled against an ancient spade with gentle care.
Hello, the spade grunted once the door had slid shut.
Haft squeaked. Around us, scarred veterans lounged, peering at us from shelves and hooks. They were worn but clean, to a tool.
Don't mind them. This life'll become more familiar, the spade quietly promised. Our work here is tough but fair. Even rewarding. And the farmer is a good man.
I hoped he was right. For a time, at least, those words held true.
At the height of summer, toiling beneath the sun's unbending beat, Haft and the farmer and I waged war, as we had the last three years. As I had come to expect, our enemy was strong, well-fortified, and vast in number, whereas we were but a single hoe in the hands of a single man. Yet each morning, our farmer bent to his task with something akin to relish affixed in his silent snarl. Swiftly, brutally, I rose and fell in his hands. Crunch. With expert ease, he turned my blade deeper into the sward. Cowering in a clod of dirt, the felled thistle surrendered, roots exposed, lacy petals all aflutter.
"Out you get, you shitter," the farmer grunted, grabbing the thorny carcass with one gloved hand and depositing it in the pail behind him. Victorious, he raised his eyes, w
iped sweat from his grimy brow, and surveyed the length of his field. It was rife with the enemy, but he was as tireless as I was sharp.
We were taking our midday rest when the stranger came.
Haft grunted as the farmer's grip tightened.
"Hmm. Been a long time."
The stranger's breathing sounded in heavy response.
"Say what you came to say," our farmer said, brandishing us. The sweat of his palms tasted wrong.
"You know why I'm here."
"Aye." Our farmer was shaking now. "But I'm not fighting your nonsense war, not when I've got land to tend and a family to feed. That hasn't changed."
The stranger spat at the farmer's feet.
"That how it's going to be then?" Without waiting for a response, the farmer swung us hard, not with the solemn strength of the field, but something sharper, altogether deadlier. And, for the first time, I tasted the blood of a man.
A grunt.
I fell, bit into the dirt, and wished it could wash away this sticky, metallic mess. Haft cringed at the snarls and thumps above us before we were lifted into the air once more, but this time in new hands.
"Fucking coward," the stranger gasped.
Though I strained against the motion with every ounce of my being, my sharp edge, so meticulously honed, punched into the farmer's chest, through his ribs, and I felt his insides wash over me, arterial blood hot as it spurted into the air.
The stranger wrenched me free, left me to drip as he swayed and shivered and cursed.
He didn't clean us, was the only thought I could muster as the stranger bore us away. Away from the farmstead, away from those tough, yet caring hands, now cold with death.
By the time the stranger set us down, the farmer's blood had hardened to a crust along my edge and across my face. It itched, and to that itch, the nightmare of slopping guts held fast in my mind. As the days passed, the itch grew worse.
Other tools had whispered about this, but for so long, rust had only been a distand threat to me. Never had I known his gnawing rot, but I met him then and realized with sinking finality that he was here to stay.
The war came for us...or we went to it. Not some struggle against the field's weeds, which we had played at before, but real war. Of men cutting down men, of steel biting steel and sparking in anger and pain. The stranger was no coward, as he would mutter to himself some nights. I tasted blood again, the blood of a few men, and dulled myself against armor—worse a feeling than skittering over any field-rock—but those moments became a blur of hate and blood and violence.
It was not long before Haft broke. When the mace shattered him, he wailed, louder a sound than he had ever made before, and then was silent.
That is when we fell, me and Haft's corpse. To the blood-drenched dirt, buried edge-first. My rust-pocked face sank into the mire. A boot crushed us, drove us deeper down. There, entombed in mud, the horror above became a muted thing. My birth, the pain of exposure, of the forge, rushed back, and then the glorious memory of soil's taste against my blade. But the mud was bitter and cold.
I wish we could stay here, I muttered to Haft. I wish we could die here.
There was no reply.
Gradually, the angry footfalls passed, the gore dried under the sun's kiss, and the carrion feeders gorged on flesh, leaving the bones to bleach and sink into the mud as well. And the stranger did not return. Every moment away from his darkening, hungering presence left an emptiness in a part of me. He should have answered for what he did to the farmer. For what he made me do. Instead, he was gone. Just gone.
Months passed, perhaps years. I could not tell, not in the murk and mire. My only measure of time was the slow-pain of rust devouring my poll, my shoulder, my heel, crawling through my eye-hole, and rasping at my body.
Against the gnaw of worms and thrust of roots, Haft's body rotted away, but I could only happiness at his parting for I knew he had finally escaped this hell. Perhaps it was better that way. So, I lie, alone with my thoughts, and endured the peculiar torture of being eaten away little by little.
Scrape.
Boots?
Pressure above me. As the earth moved, the grasses' roots shivered in the wind. A lick of sun grazed my body.
Then the smooth touch of a hand, chafing at the orange-armored rust. With a squelch, I surfaced into glorious sunshine. A thumb brushed away sheafs of corrosion.
We departed that place.
Trepidation grasped me as I bounced in the saddle-bag. No more blood. No more, I cannot taste it again.
I was placed in liquid.
Not blood, but oil. Soothing.
Wire bristles scraped at my side, massaged at the rust, which fell away like scabs of dandruff. My worry fell away, too.
Then to the hone. I winced at the bite of the grindstone. It was a long-forgotten, yet welcome hardness, a welcome pain. Any pain would have been better than wasting away in a murky grave.
But the strangest thing by far was the fresh haft fitted inside my embrace. A young, new being, still strong with sap.
We were off, redolent with the smell of oil, of wood and dirt. The new haft quavered, cringed.
Be still, friend, I murmured to the haft as my newly-sharpened edge whistled through the air and sliced into the soil's familiar warmth with a glorious crunch.
The Cost of Power
Ulff Lehmann
Drammoch felt old this morning. As was his habit since he had come of age, he had risen with the morning gong. And true to his ritual, he had washed and again determined it was more effective when he defecated before rather than after washing. Nothing had changed in his routine, yet everything else had. Or so he told himself.
Breaking his fast accompanied by a flurry of courtiers, he wondered if today was the day he would snap and break one of their necks. Even with everything all right, these sycophants found some obscure issue to piss and moan about. Usually, it was the same ludicrous thing, if only viewed from a different vantage. “Majesty, House Cirrain doesn’t guard the highland passes.” “My King, House Farlin’s taxes are too high.” “One of House Argram’s men raped a villein’s daughter.”
“My lord demands a solution” was the usual ending of most of these litanies, and Drammoch had grown tired of it. If Wadram Cirrain had withdrawn his patrols, it meant serious trouble in the highlands. “Hire more guards,” he told the lickspittle of the Drovers Guild. That was the easiest solution of the three. “As for Farlin’s taxes, speak with the master of coin.”
“What about House Argram?” demanded the third petitioner, a woman wearing House Trileigh’s colors.
“I take it you have sought out one of Lliania's clergy?” he asked, finishing his porridge. The mere mention of House Argram soured his appetite.
“All the lawspeakers excused themselves, Majesty.”
“All, eh?” Nothing new there, Drammoch thought. Duncan Argram the Elder made sure his men only raped villeins, a minor crime compared to raping a freeborn. How he loathed the system, the society he had inherited.
“A girl’s life means less than a cow’s if she is a villein,” the woman said, her face betraying her rage.
Swallowing the rising bile, he stood. “Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention,” he said. There was little else he could say. “I will have words with Lliania’s Justiciar.”
“But, milord,” the woman said.
“Thank you!” Drammoch repeated. Short of risking a war with House Argram, there was very little he could do. Noel Trileigh was his cousin, and he knew full well how futile these complaints were. Or were they?
One look down the lichen and moss-covered stairs that led down to Herascor city from the palace made the decision for him. “The long way to town it is, lads,” Drammoch told the warriors of his guard. Waving over the ever-attentive cupbearer, Liam, he said, “Find the steward, lad, and tell him I’ll feast on his balls if the stairs aren’t cleared by noon.”
Liam grinned, turned, and ran back to the fortress.
Once more the king wondered how this outlander had risen through the ranks of his court so quickly. Always he was a hint more competent, a bit more effective than the person he inevitably replaced. Justiciar Padraig found the man truthful, not that Lady Justice's clergy caught all lies, and spies had uncovered no damning evidence against the man, either. Yet something felt wrong, especially since Zamar now held several advisory positions. “High Advisor Zamar,” Drammoch said, “I leave the matter of dealing with the Danastaerian envoy in your capable hands.”
Zamar bowed, motioning for some of his guards to remain. “Your wish is my command,” drawled the southerner.
“Good, good,” Drammoch replied. “Then take your black guards and shove them up your ass. My warriors suffice!”
He caught the hint of a smile on Zamar’s face as the man bowed. Pompous bastard, the king thought. But for now, the man had his uses. He watched as the Dragonlander and his black-clad guards headed back to the castle.
Most of Herascor’s temples to the gods were flashy affairs, polished marble and bronze and gold. To Drammoch, they looked like whores painted colorful to attract customers. The few exceptions were those temples dedicated to the gods of Justice, Death, and Knowledge, and it was the latter’s library that was Drammoch's goal.
Chief Librarian Marghread was already waiting for him. The stout high priestess with her ink-stained lips and fingertips showed Chanastardh’s king her respect by receiving him on the library’s porch.
“You look as lovely as ever,” Drammoch said, embracing his old teacher.
“And for a man who must lie to others most of the time,” she replied with a laugh, “you are a pathetic liar.”
Art of War Page 30