Harrad looked at the immense mound of bodies. His gut twisted. It was a monstrosity, not a funeral pyre. Soldiers climbed to the top, crushing limbs beneath their feet, hauling more corpses, tossing them to the peak. Most of the dead had been collected now. The troops not involved in the assembly of the mound lined up at its base.
‘They are still fighting,’ the Grey Queen said. ‘I am here to offer you a last chance to surrender.’
Harrad choked on his astonishment. He stared at the Grey Queen. He must have misheard. She gazed back, calm.
At the mound, executions began. The rank and file walked forward, one at a time, and the commanders ran them through with their swords. New bodies were added to the hill.
Harrad blinked. ‘You’re demanding I surrender at the same time that you are killing your troops for being defeated?’
‘My soldiers are sacrificing themselves to our cause. This is the last and greatest gift they will grant me. And yes, I am demanding your surrender. The day has seen enough horror, don’t you think?’
‘Your position is absurd. You will soon have no army at all.’
‘Another is being raised as we speak. It will push you from our lands. But none of this is necessary if you withdraw.’
The wind shifted, blowing the smell of the bodies Harrad’s way. He grimaced. ‘You are very sure of yourself.’
‘I am sure of the loyalty of my people.’
‘Are they loyal or afraid?’
‘I give them peace and security,’ the Grey Queen said.
‘That does not answer my—’
‘You brought war,’ she continued, speaking over his objection. ‘You must understand, Lord Harrad. Your ambitions do not concern me. You may do what you like, but not in my lands. You have invaded, and when war comes, we will win, no matter what the cost. That is the precondition of our security.’ Without turning her head, she gestured at the executions. ‘This is part of that cost. Yours will be greater.’
Harrad shook his head. ‘I believe you’re quite mad. It is clear to me that your time has passed. But it does not have to end tonight. This is my counter-offer. Finish your demented ritual and leave. If you or any of your forces are still here by tomorrow dawn, I will attack.’
Her expression did not change, but the fire in her gaze burned darker. ‘You have a family, I believe.’
‘I do,’ he said, confused.
‘They are here?’
‘They are.’
‘Then for their sake, I ask you one last time, Lord Harrad: will you surrender?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I see.’ She raised her arm as if the stone gauntlet were weightless and pointed the open hand towards the massive walls of Barragano. ‘Then you should return to your city.’ She paused. ‘Go to your family.’
* * *
The executions lasted until nightfall. By then, the mountain of bodies had doubled in size. The Grey Queen stood at its base and acknowledged her soldiers as they bent their knee to her before they were killed. The deaths walked up the ranks until only Themis and Gascon remained. Gascon handed his sword to Themis, bowed to the Grey Queen, and said, ‘I rejoice in the peace that is coming.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Grey Queen.
Gascon straightened. Themis plunged the sword into his heart.
He fell.
‘Will you ascend with me, your highness?’ Themis asked as she took the corpse’s arms.
‘No. I am sorry, but I must play my part in the labour.’
‘Of course.’
It took close to an hour for Themis to drag Gascon to the peak of the hill and descend once again. Then she stood before the Grey Queen and waited.
The Grey Queen looked at Themis’ face. Beneath the grime and the blood, it was pale in the torchlight. Are they loyal or afraid? Harrad has asked.
Both, was the answer.
And did that matter? Did it change anything? Would it stay her hand?
No.
Do you act from necessity or desire?
And again: both.
And again, it didn’t matter.
She drew the dagger from her belt. Like her gauntlet, its blade was fashioned of old iron and older stone.
‘You honour me,’ Themis said.
‘You deserve no less,’ said the Grey Queen. ‘And it is you who honours me. All of you do.’
Themis kept her eyes open. The Grey Queen stepped forward and drew the blade across the general’s throat. Themis’s blood sprayed over the Grey Queen. It ran down her face, was absorbed by the linen of her robes, and the red vanished into the grey. She caught Themis as she slumped forward. She held the general until the blood stopped flowing. Then, with her left arm, she hoisted the body over her shoulder, sheathed the dagger, and began to climb.
Limbs shifted beneath her feet. Dead flesh muffled the crack of bone. Eyes were deep hollows in the dim light, shadows staring into the dark. Her boots slipped on blood-matted hair. In my name, she thought. Each death. In my name. Not the name she had been born with, though. She had lost it so long ago, she could no longer remember what it had been.
Honour the dead. Do what must be done. And then face the consequences of that act.
The other voice, the hungry one, was silent for the moment. It had retreated behind a smile now that the moment had almost come.
She reached the peak and placed Themis at the top. The Grey Queen stood on a mountain of death. It was soft with flesh and hard with bone. To the west, she looked down on the darker patch of the forest. To the east, the torches on the ramparts of Barragano were wavering pinpricks. Above was the dark of pure void. She could feel the weight of the clouds. They pressed down, massive with the tension of a storm that refused to arrive.
The storm would be hers to unleash, and there would be nothing cleansing about it.
Still facing Barragano, she crouched. With her left hand, she unfastened the gauntlet. It slid off her arm with a squelch.
Below the elbow, her right limb still had the shape of a forearm and hand. It ended in five fingers. But it was a deeper grey than her robes. It was mottled, and the patches suppurated. It was boneless. It coiled and flexed. Then she touched a serpentine finger to a splayed hand jutting from the corpse mound.
Putrefaction radiated from her hand. It spread throughout the hill of the dead. It ate into the bodies. They rotted. They dissolved. The mound trembled and began to settle. It turned to sludge beneath her, and she dropped into a mire of deliquescing flesh. Down and down, deep into a morass of bubbling muscle, of bones that broke into jagged splinters, crumbled, and then jellied. Deep into the stench of grey, the enveloping sea of grey, the grievous cost of grey. The sludge pressed into her nose, her mouth, down her throat. She took it in, but did not drown. She absorbed the gift of her people.
Every body. Every life. Every dissolving scrap of flesh a sacrifice to her. The great dissolution poured into her. It fed her, filling her with the inevitability of decay.
At last she sank to the ground. The mountain fell away, turning into a viscous liquid covering the plain, and flowing to her, oozing into her pores, coating her limbs with fragments of bone and pieces of curling skin. She began to walk towards the slope. She struck out her right arm as a viper attacks, and the decay that was now hers rushed forward.
It was unseen and swift as the wind. It was unstoppable as a wave.
For the first few seconds, as the rot climbed the slope to Barragano, the effect was subtle. There was little vegetation. Lichen turned to dust. Stone eroded and softened. Then the Grey Queen’s gift touched the walls. The screams reached her a moment later. They began on the ramparts. Their volume grew. The Grey Queen listened to thousands of voices crying out as corruption took them. The choir was ragged. Soon it was wet, choking with rattling throats.
She wondered if Harrad was on the walls when her grasp came for him. Or if he had listened to her, and was with his family. She wondered if her admoniti
on had been cruel.
No matter. Wherever he was, he would know, in his final moments, that what he loved died as he did.
The Grey Queen found her gauntlet. She slithered her arm back inside.
The human voices fell silent. They were replaced by the thunder of collapsing structures as timber rotted to powder and mortar flaked away. The Grey Queen wound her way up the road, and when she reached the gates, they had fallen down, corroded with rust. The walls of Barragano stood, but they had crumbled under the attack of sudden centuries.
The Grey Queen passed into the city. There were many piles of rubble. It was almost all stone. There were few traces of anything else. But she walked through the open spaces, her feet kicking up the dust. She was waiting now for the dawn, when she would see the full extent of her works. There would be some fragments of bone still, some faint physical memories of the bodies.
Some of them would be very small.
She had brought ruin, and she must own it. She would make herself look at the brittle remains of civilians. She would force herself to confront what she had done. She would think, not of the soldiers she had defeated, but of the innocents she had slaughtered. This was the most vital act of all. This knowledge, and the grief it brought, was what kept her from misusing her power. It was what kept her from revelling in the glory of decay.
This was what she told herself.
This was how she lied.[GdM]
David Annandale writes Warhammer 40,000 and Horus Heresy fiction for the Black Library, including the recent novels Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon and The Damnation of Pythos. He is also the author of the horror novel Gethsemane Hall (Dundurn Press and Snowbooks). For Turnstone Press, he has written a series of thrillers featuring rogue warrior Jen Blaylock (Crown Fire, Kornukopia, and The Valedictorians). His short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters and Occult Detective Monster Hunter: A Grimoire of Eldritch Inquests. David’s non-fiction has appeared in Black Treacle and such collections as Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imagery and The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto. He writes film reviews for The Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope. He teaches film, creative writing and literature at the University of Manitoba.
Follow David at his website, www.davidannandale.com, and on Twitter @David_Annandale.
Review: The Witcher 3
C.T. Phipps
The Witcher series by Andrjez Sapkowski is one of the seminal works of grimdark literature in Europe. The video game adaptations of the series have since gone on to popularize the series globally. The premise of both the books and the games is a mutated monster-hunter named Geralt of Rivia exists in a low fantasy world of extra-dimensional creatures menacing an un-idealized medieval world. The monarchs are cruel and selfish, the peasantry superstitious and racist; nonhumans are brutally discriminated against but respond with terrorism against civilians; and our hero is never more than a few coins ahead of bankruptcy.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a direct sequel to The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, and culminates a trilogy which purports to wrap up not only Geralt's story from the video games but his lingering threads from the novel series. Although not all of Sapkowski's works have been translated into English at the time of this article's writing, I strongly recommend readers check out the ones that have. Not only are they excellent grimdark fiction but they also serve as a good introduction to the nuanced relationships in the game. Newcomers to the game series won't be completely lost, however, as the game generally gives you a decent enough introduction to all of the characters.
The gameplay starts as Geralt of Rivia has received a mysterious letter from his former lover, Yennefer of Vengerburg, a sorceress who has been missing for years. Geralt, travelling with his old friend Vesemir, sets out to reunite with her. Their journey is complicated by the brutal and authoritarian Nilfgaard Empire, who have invaded the kingdoms of the North.
Geralt, unlike virtually every other vanilla fantasy hero in fiction, knows the 'Empire' isn't necessarily worse than the local tyrants, and the majority of people who will suffer during the war are those caught between the two sides. The issue of Yennefer is resolved fairly early but only leads to a wider adventure with the discovery that Geralt's long-lost adopted daughter, Ciri of Cintra, is still alive and in danger of being killed by the terrifying otherworldly Wild Hunt.
If this sounds complex, well, it is.
The developers at CD Projekt Red (http://en.cdprojektred.com/) have done a magnificent job at realizing the world from Sapkowski's novels and adding their own spin to things. This is quite possibly the most vividly realized fantasy world in gaming history, rivalled only by Dragon Age's Thedas and the Elder Scrolls universe.
The world is also a great deal more “realistic” than any of these others: full of sex, lies, human weakness, betrayal, and sadness. It is an RPG, so the player can select Geralt's reactions to almost every situation, but the game frames it so anything is potentially “in-character” for Geralt. There's no “Good”, “Evil”, or “Indifferent” choices. Instead, they're more like “Lesser Evil”, “Self-Interested”, and “Not my problem.”
One of the early side-quests in the game illustrates the kind of grey morality that pervades The Witcher. When a local blacksmith asks Geralt to investigate who burned down his forge. Geralt swiftly finds out that it was a nearby teenager who, while drunk, did so because the blacksmith is being forced to shoe horses for the invading Nilfgaard. The penalty for the young man’s “resistance” would be hanging, but he also thinks the largely-innocent blacksmith should die for his “collaboration.” There's no magical third option that leaves everyone happy and alive.
My favorite plotline in the game is an extended storyline in the Second Act that deals with a local nobleman who has chosen to fully collaborate with the Nilfgaardian invasion and whose men are, by and large, complete scum. The nobleman, obviously inspired by Mark Addy's portrayal of Robert Baratheon in the Game of Thrones TV series, is an alcoholic spouse-abuser, who also suffers severe mental scars from the horrors he witnessed in the king's army as well as remorse for his actions while drunk. He's one of the most nuanced, pathetic, and affecting characters in gaming.
This is when the game is at its best.
Sometimes the game isn't so well developed: as the final third is rushed, lacking in side-quests, and contains rather generic, one-dimensional villains who lack the complexity of the ambiguous, three-dimensional antagonists Geralt faces in the first two-thirds of the game. There's nothing, for example, quite as interesting in the main plot as in one of the later side-quests where you must decide whether to let three friends die in order to guarantee the North a victory against Nilfgaard.
But how does it play?
The combat is, generally, fast and fun. Geralt fights with a steel sword for humans and a silver sword for monsters, which he switches between as the circumstances dictate. He can also use a combination of minor magic spells, bombs, and potions to supplement his battle against a wide variety of creatures. The gore is visceral: Geralt possesses far greater strength than a normal man and is thus able to decapitate or maim his opponents with ease.
Travel is something of a pain in the ass as the wide-open sandbox world requires extensive travelling on horseback or foot to get anywhere of interest. While it's the largest open world in the history of gaming, I'd much rather they reduce the size of the map so I could get everywhere without minutes of event-less travel.
The inventory system could use some tweaking: Geralt accumulates large amounts of junk like books, which, really, just clutter up the things he could be focusing on. I've heard this is going to be fixed in patches, but it was troublesome during my playthrough. You can spec Geralt to specialize in swordsmanship, sorcery, potions, or magic, each giving different options for completing the game.
One area where The Witcher both shines and falls flat is the handling of its romances. In previous games
, Geralt was able to have nearly unlimited amounts of casual sex with virtually every female character in the game. This time, there are only a couple of romance options available (as well as prostitutes). These are far more meaningful and interesting to me than previous versions, although some gamers may miss the option to play Geralt as a kind of chivalric James Bond. There is nudity in the game, but it is tastefully animated and avoids showing genitalia (as if that would scar the 18+ Mature audience this game is meant for—oh, the horror!).
One very interesting character is the grown-up Ciri of Cintra, who the player takes control of during several sections of the game. While the Targaryen-looking, bisexual Witcheress could have easily been a fanboy's wet dream, she's actually a nuanced character I swiftly bonded with. Idealistic but scarred, Ciri is a woman who reacts to the world around her in a fundamentally different way than Geralt and provides an interesting contrast when you step into her boots.
Finally, a comment on the game’s graphics: The Witcher 3 is a beautiful game; its various game areas are artistically designed and rendered. White Orchard is a stereotypically pastoral fantasy farmland which is punctuated by burned villages and weeping women; Velen is a hellish No Man’s Land where hundreds of bodies hang from trees next to empty battlefields; Novigrad is a rich but decadent city kept in line by the tyranny of a corrupt church: and while Skellige is a primitive Viking-ruled Ireland analogue that hangs a couple of centuries behind the rest of the continent. The characters are gorgeous, too, including some truly breathtaking ladies (my wife comments that the men aren’t too shabby either).
I heartily recommend The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It is not a perfect game, but there is a massive-massive amount of content available, most of which is very good. It's really like purchasing three, previous generation RPGs merged together. I got almost 120 hours of gaming out of my first playthrough, and I may go back for more. It's also some of the grimmest, grittiest, and most maturely-written fantasy gaming I've seen which bodes well for grimdark in gaming. [GdM]
Grimdark Magazine Issue #5 ePub Page 7
