Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

  Here a page of the manuscript is unfortunately missing. On the next page is written, in large, straggling writing:

  “Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!”

  Such in its entirety is the Joyce-Armstrong Statement. Of the man nothing has since been seen. Pieces of his shattered monoplane have been picked up in the preserves of Mr. Budd-Lushington upon the borders of Kent and Sussex, within a few miles of the spot where the note-book was discovered. If the unfortunate aviator’s theory is correct that this air-jungle, as he called it, existed only over the south-west of England, then it would seem that he had fled from it at the full speed of his monoplane, but had been overtaken and devoured by these horrible creatures at some spot in the outer atmosphere above the place where the grim relics were found. The picture of that monoplane skimming down the sky, with the nameless terrors flying as swiftly beneath it and cutting it off always from the earth while they gradually closed in upon their victim, is one upon which a man who valued his sanity would prefer not to dwell. There are many, as I am aware, who still jeer at the facts which I have here set down, but even they must admit that Joyce-Armstrong has disappeared, and I would commend to them his own words: “This note-book may explain what I am trying to do, and how I lost my life in doing it. But no drivel about accidents or mysteries, if you please.”

  The Fires of Mercy

  Spencer Ellsworth

  The assassin, the mother, and the child fled into the desert.

  * * *

  The sandstorm had blanketed the world the night before. Sand hung still on the leaves of the palm trees; sand sat on a skim atop the water; sand pillowed against rocks. Grains swept the crevices of palm trees, shone like jewels in the sun.

  The assassin emerged from the rocks and used her hand to sweep away the drifts that had piled against the cave entrance. She breathed through a light veil, as much to hide her face as keep sand out, and she prayed.

  She praised the Thousand Names, the one and many, and she praised the Prophets, and she spoke the forbidden name of the Thirteenth Prophet, a heresy. She prayed for a guiding hand, and felt a fool.

  She turned then, and motioned for the mother and child to emerge from the hollow in the rock.

  They peered around the world. The mother’s face was dark with stains; two days ago kohl had run with her tears and smeared the paint on her face. Sand clung to her face and bedraggled her hair. She still wore pearls around her neck, and bits of fine clothing showed through under the wool robe the assassin had given her. She cleared sleep from the child’s eyes.

  The child, for his part, was quiet. He had always been so, in the eight months of his life. He rarely cried, even when cold. He took only as much breast milk as he needed. He watched and listened.

  And so the child watched while the assassin told his mother there would be no fire, and his mother made sounds of protest, but not many. The assassin was not tall, nor particularly strong. She was so thin and featureless she was often mistaken for a man. Her eyes, though, stopped speech. They were deep black wells rimmed with silver, like the sun on those wild days when it is covered by the moon.

  The mother groaned. She wept a little. She often had, since the night of horror.

  The assassin shared out dried meat. Her cold silver eyes scanned the horizon.

  They crossed the dunes in the morning. The assassin timed their trip well. As the air began to shimmer around them, and the dunes wavered under the sun, and their tongues began to feel like lead weights, they sighted a familiar stand of rocks. The assassin topped a dune, looked back at the mother and child slowly wading up the mountain of sand, and wished she could see through the haze of heat to tell who waited in those rocks.

  “Shade,” the mother said. “Gods-blessed shade!”

  “Slowly,” the assassin said.

  The child watched with interest, and a little trepidation. In the last few days the child had looked more and more on the assassin, and less on his crying, confused mother.

  “Slowly,” the assassin said, for lack of something better.

  Slowly they walked toward the rocks.

  An arrow struck the assassin’s shoulder. She spun, threw the mother and child to the hot sand, and ran.

  More arrows came. One, two, three. The child watched with interest, the mother with horror. The assassin spun around the second arrow, around the third. Knives, gleaming, left the assassin’s sleeves. They caught the sunlight and shivered in the light. The mother and the child did not see the men who were found by the assassin’s blades, but they heard bodies fall.

  She went on running. After a time, she came back to the mother and the child. The arrow still emerged from her shoulder.

  “These were just bandits,” the assassin said. “They have not found us yet.”

  The assassin took the dead bodies into the desert, left them to desiccate in sand and be eaten by jackals.

  She kissed their knife-marred bodies, for every act of war has, at its heart, an act of mercy.

  Together, they waited in the cool under the rocks, waited out the worst of the days heat. The assassin extracted the arrow herself. She sat and rinsed it with what water she could spare. She drank a bit of henbane and dark potent liquor, but carefully. One could not choose which senses were dulled.

  The arrow was buried in a black, swollen mess of meat and blood. It was a familiar wound, familiar and easily treatable – when the assassin was in her element.

  Her lesser assassins, kept in sway by her fierce mind and blood oaths, could have treated it. Others like her, with flecks of silver in their eyes, could knit her together with a magic of blood and fire, stone and shadow.

  But now she broke the shaft high, and carefully pulled the point from her shoulder, and it screamed pain at her, and her eyes swam, shuttered, like the heat.

  Not enough. This is not enough!

  She remembered being strapped to a post and whipped, remembered the flesh of her back hanging down in strips like stalactites. She remembered the sand in her fists as she crawled. She remembered her brother in a killing pit, remembered her knife at his throat, and she remained conscious.

  She was a mind-eater. She would live.

  She made a poultice and stuffed it inside the open wound. Despite her best efforts, grains of sand fell into the wound.

  * * *

  The mother dreamed. She dreamed of her childhood, before she came to the palace, and before the desert.

  Little men came from far to the east to trade with her father. They brought fireworks. Her father called for pigs – not heretics, actual pigs! Since the Eighth Prophet had banned the eating of swine flesh hundreds of years ago, no one had seen the actual animal near her home.

  These were the real thing; little snorting unclean monsters, spotted brown over pink skin. The little eastern men liked pigs, he said, and a wise man honors his guests before he honors his house. It seemed a foolish point of view. But he had the pigs slaughtered, and he fed them to the little men, and in return they sold him fireworks and put on a display that honored their house for a year.

  Even then, she had been marked for marriage to wealth. Thus her mother wouldn’t let her near the pigs. Warts, goiters, leprosy, sluttishness – all came from swine flesh.

  She snuck in to the pens late at night, as a child, the night before they were slaughtered, and touched a pig. She was surprised by how much fine hair there was on that skin, hair just beginning to darken.

  Her son had been born with light hair that soon darkened. She sometimes thought of the pigs, and thought of her son slurping at her breast, and was amused as he slurped at the breast milk.

  This morning, in the desert, she managed only a trickle of thin, nearly clear breast milk.

  They kept walking.

  Three nights ago, a c
arved door of rare wood had shattered. The dark figure had swept into the harem and cut the throat of one woman, and another. More figures came. They killed the concubines. They killed the children. Old faces, kind faces, bitter faces. The strong women, beautiful and tall, who turned the harem on the whims. Their weak, pale girls from the north who spoke little. Every soul in the king’s palace had died under those blades.

  She had hidden, shut herself, gasping, in a shed. Until the sun peered through the door, and the assassin tore that door open. And taken her by the wrist, and raised the curved knife …

  The mother saw something else in the assassin’s silver-flecked eyes, that bloody morning.

  As night fell, the assassin’s wound ached worse and worse for the walk they made to water.

  She touched the pendant around her neck, ran her hands across the calligraphy. The simple Name, one of the Thousand Names, swept up into points, toward the sky, around the dots and curls of vowels. She traced the grooves. Dots and curves of vowels, grooves worn deep.

  There were words, she thought. Words, carved in stone. Carved with blood that had dried before the seas dried up over this desert.

  The language was that of air and fire, the words the keys to burning the whole world. It was a weapon, but one only a fool would dare. It was forbidden, in every text in every history, to call upon the children of air and fire.

  She had taken the pendant from its secret place, as she embarked upon this most secret of missions. If the assassin and her subordinates had been caught by the emperor’s soldiers, if the blood magic had been broken and secrets stripped from their minds, she would have called the children of air and fire to burn the world, for there were secrets in her Order that could not come to light.

  But their mission had failed in a far different way.

  The mother asked the question that night. “Why? Why did you save us?”

  The assassin didn’t answer. The mother didn’t try a second time.

  While the mother slept, the assassin lay against the rock and tried to ignore the ache from her wound. She had treated such, and deeper, darker wounds. She had worked with blood and silver, found the healing that balanced the killing, as the haft of a knife balances the blade. Another mind-eater could have healed her, but they would insist on weighting the action, balancing it with the mother and child’s death.

  The next morning, the mother asked, “Where are we going? How do you find water in this desert?”

  The assassin looked at the horizon, a tangle of sand and rocks. She knew the trail of water here, strung out like the pearls the mother still wore. Scattered across a land better traveled than the assassin would have liked. “I know,” was all she said.

  They walked that day, to a small, filthy pool of water that left them belching sulfur. The baby cried when the mother washed his face with the water. In the middle of the night the baby woke screaming and flatulent; he soiled all the clothes and the mother and assassin washed what they could and tore new ones.

  “The servants wound him with more rags than this,” the mother said.

  The assassin stroked the baby’s cheek. “This is all we have.”

  * * *

  The attack came the next day. The arrows recoiled, black, thin, like serpents, off the rocks around them. The assassin turned and shouted at the mother. The mother ran to shelter.

  They were feeling her out, the assassin knew. Her men were still afraid of her. So they hung back, fired arrows from a distance.

  These were her men, who had woken confused at the king’s palace, finding her gone. They were still afraid of her, testing her resolve.

  That was their mistake.

  “We cannot run from the mind-eaters,” the mother sobbed as they did just that. “We cannot run from them!”

  The assassin didn’t answer. She knew. All her former compatriots had to do was head the three off, send them deeper into the desert, and the assassin, mother and child would die.

  She looked at the rocks where she knew her compatriots waited. She would go. She would go, and they would come at her, and her mind would be quicker. The fingers of her soul would reach out through the blood oath and wrap around one, two, three of them. Her knives would cut their throats while their bodies would not react. She would see the fear in their silver eyes, and then their eyes would fade.

  Except she had no more knives. Her soul was weak and quavering from lack of food and water. And if she killed them, more would come. One step wrong, and death.

  The assassin stared the other way, at the eastern horizon. Somewhere beyond that thousand thousand leagues of empty sand, that waterless abyss, lay the east. There lived little men who did not speak the Thousand Names. Not the name of the Thirteenth Prophet, nor any Prophet. There the mother and child would go unknown. It would not matter if the child was an emperor here; there he would be but a boy.

  Somewhere beyond death.

  The mother caught the assassin staring. “I’ve heard there’s no water,” she said. “No water, and ghosts, and monsters, and death.”

  The assassin stared into the dunes.

  “We need to get to a town.”

  “Mind-eaters hide in towns,” the assassin whispered. “The darkness does not guard against our knives, nor the light.” The assassin thought of a firelit study, of old, old books bound in skin, of dark words. She thought of words in a tongue of fire, of a question that could not be asked. She thought of that knife, the balance, the haft and the blade. She touched the pendant around her neck.

  “We can circle around to the south,” the assassin said. “A few days in the dunes.” She looked at their pitiful waterskins. “A few days without water; we can survive.”

  The mother wept. “No, no, no. I have no milk, I have no strength, I can’t walk, I can’t …”

  The assassin reached into the mother’s mind, and stroked it, calmed it. It was much like giving calm to the dying.

  They filled the waterskins and went back into the desert.

  They went up dunes the size of mountains, sinking in sand to their knees, slipped down the other side. The mother slurped all her water the first day, tried to breastfeed the baby, but the baby slept now, slept all day and night, and breathed shallowly and whimpered.

  The heat tore at the assassin’s wound, seemed to scour it. She imagined it was boiling wine, cleansing the infection.

  The dunes froze at night, cold emptiness rushing into what had been warm air, sucking life out of them. The assassin and the mother and baby huddled together. Now her wound raged with a cold, maddening pain, tearing at the assassin’s brain. She thought of her life, buried in vengeance, of her order, and it seemed such a silly thing to be a part of such a foolish world.

  The assassin stared into the desert. She saw ghosts, travelers long-dead, the shadowy caravans traveling across the lines of the dunes to the lands of the dead. Their jewels glittered, their clothes fine in long-gone suns, but she had eyes only for their bulging waterskins. The ghosts wandered, forever, to wells dried for centuries, to kingdoms swept into the desert.

  She thought she saw herself, black-clad, forever leading the mother and the child deeper into the desert, another shade doomed to wander.

  Morning came and with it, the heat.

  The dunes went on forever, red waves, empty, burning. The assassin’s arm flesh had turned black at the edges of the wound, red veins lancing outward from the rot.

  They stumbled up dunes and down again. The assassin turned toward the towns of the south, looked for them in vain. The mother could hardly walk, sinking in sand, gasping. The baby lay too still in the mother’s arms.

  They were days from anywhere.

  The assassin looked at the endless blue sky. It seemed beautiful, a great gem descending on the world, overwhelming them. She stared into the sky, and realized she had collapsed as well, fallen to the sand.

&nbs
p; She closed her eyes.

  She recalled that night, the knife in her hand, the close purpose. She had waited for the emperor of the whole world, behind a fine satin curtain. She had sprung from her place and slit his throat, and his words had come easy. “Die, by blood and fire, stone and shadow.” His blood had run over her hands. She had laughed as it ran down her forearms, rich and dark like wine. The most precious vintage in the world.

  The harem must die. They had agreed; every soul in the palace dead by midnight. Such was vengeance, for this emperor had burned their people and laughed, mocked the heretical pigs who believed in the Thirteenth Prophet. They were the shadows that took revenge, and this emperor’s crimes were legion. It was time for war, in return.

  The assassin had opened the door to the harem, and consumed their minds, quelled their resistance, and slit the throats. She cut perfect, soft, swanlike necks. She cut the fleshy throats of babes, and children, and the swarthy throats of servants.

  She had been made for this, in fighting pits, in a place where she put her own brother to the knife. She had been put in the hands of justice, a blade in the hand of the Thousand Names. A blade could not question the hand that wielded.

  Such a night of blood it had been, the night she killed the ruler of the world. Dozens of women. Scores of children, all by her knife. Blood running like rivers, across tiled floors, pooling with the bodies that lay in the fountains.

  Enough to give even a mind-eater pause.

  She had thought the business done when the sun rose. She had gone to the river to cleanse herself. Blood had come away from her in great scabby brown flakes, scrubbed roughly from her skin by river sand. No matter how she tried, it stained her – the cracks on her fingers, grooves of her fingerprints, the creases at her elbows, the soft hollow of her collarbone.