The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Finally one day, impatient that he was doing nothing to achieve his revenge, Cer went to the tribemaster and asked him how one learned the magic of sand.

  “Sandmagic? You’re mad,” said the tribemaster. For days the tribemaster refused to look at him, let alone answer his questions, and Cer realized that here on the desert the sandmagic was hated as badly as the treemage hated it. Why? Wouldn’t such power make the Abadapnur great?

  Or did the tribemaster refuse to speak because the Abadapnur did not know the sandmagic?

  But they knew it.

  And one day the tribemaster came to Cer and told him to mount and follow.

  They rode in the early morning before the sun was high, then slept in a cave in a rocky hill during the heat of the day. In the dusk they rode again, and at night they came to the city.

  “Ettuie,” whispered the tribemaster, and then they rode their horses to the edge of the ruins.

  The sand had buried the buildings up to half their height, inside and out, and even now the breezes of evening stirred the sand and built little dunes against the walls. The buildings were made of stone, rising not to domes like the great cities of the Greetmen but to spires, tall towers that seemed to pierce the sky.

  “Ikikietar,” whispered the tribemaster, “Ikikiaiai re dapii. O ikikiai etetur o abadapnur, ikikiai re dapii.”

  “What are the ‘knives’?” asked Cer. “And how could the sand kill them?”

  “The knives are these towers, but they are also the stars of power.”

  “What power?” asked Cer eagerly.

  “No power for you. Only power for Etetur, for they were wise. They had the manmagic.”

  Manmagic. Was that the darkest magic spoken of by the treemage?

  “Is there a magic more powerful than manmagic?” Cer asked.

  “In the mountains, no,” said the tribemaster. “On the well-watered plain, in the forest, on the sea, no.”

  “But in the desert?”

  “A huu par eiti ununura,” muttered the tribemaster, making the sign against death. “Only the desert power. Only the magic of the sand.”

  “I want to know,” said Cer.

  “Once,” the tribemaster said, “once there was a mighty empire here. Once a great river flowed here, and rain fell, and the soil was rich and red like the soil of Greet, and a million people lived under the rule of the King of Ettue Dappa. But not all, for far to the west there lived a few who hated Ettue and the manmagic of the kings, and they forget the tools that undid this city.

  “They made the wind blow from the desert. They made the rains run off the earth. By their power the river sank into the desert sand, and the fields bore no fruit, and at last the King of Ettue surrendered, and half his kingdom was given to the sandmages. To the dapinur. That western kingdom became Dapnu Dap.”

  “A kingdom?” said Cer, surprised. “But now the great desert bears that name.”

  “And once the great desert was no desert, but a land of grasses and grains like your homeland to the north. The sandmages weren’t content with half a kingdom, and they used their sandmagic to make a desert of Ettue, and they covered the lands of rebels with sand, until at last the victory of the desert was complete, and Ettue fell to the armies of Greet and Nefyryd – they were allies then – and we of Dapnu Dap became nomads, living off that tiny bit of life that even the harshest desert cannot help but yield.”

  “And what of the sandmages?” asked Cer.

  “We killed them.”

  “All?”

  “All,” said the tribemaster. “And if any man will practice sandmagic, today, we will kill him. For what happened to us we will let happen to no other people.”

  Cer saw the knife in the tribemaster’s hand.

  “I will have your vow,” said the tribemaster. “Swear before these stars and this sand and the ghosts of all who lived in this city that you will seek no sandmagic.”

  “I swear,” said Cer, and the tribemaster put his knife away.

  The next day Cer took his horse and a bow and arrows and all the food he could steal and in the heat of the day when everyone slept he went out into the desert. They followed him, but he slew two with arrows and the survivors lost his trail.

  Word spread through the tribes of the Abadapnur that a would-be sandmage was loose in the desert, and all were ready to kill him if he came. But he did not come.

  For he knew now how to serve the desert, and how to make the desert serve him. For the desert loved death, and hated grasses and trees and water and the things of life.

  So in service of the sand Cer went to the edge of the land of the Nefyrre, east of the desert. There he fouled wells with the bodies of diseased animals. He burned fields when the wind was blowing off the desert, a dry wind that pushed the flames into the cities. He cut down trees. He killed sheep and cattle. And when the Nefyrre patrols chased him he fled onto the desert where they could not follow.

  His destruction was annoying, and impoverished many a farmer, but alone it would have done little to hurt the Nefyrre. Except that Cer felt his power over the desert growing. For he was feeding the desert the only things it hungered for; death and dryness.

  He began to speak to the sand again, not kindly, but of land to the east that the sand could cover. And the wind followed his words, whipping the sand, moving the dunes. Where he stood the wind did not touch him, but all around him the dunes moved like waves of the sea.

  Moving eastward.

  Moving into the lands of the Nefyrre.

  And now the hungry desert could do in a night a hundred times more than Cer could do alone with a torch or a knife. It ate olive groves in an hour. The sand borne on the wind filled houses in a night, buried cities in a week, and in only three months had driven the Nefyrre across the Greebeck and the Nefyr River, where they thought the terrible sandstorms could not follow.

  But the storms followed. Cer taught the desert almost to fill the river, so that the water spread out a foot deep and miles wide, flooding some lands that had been dry, but also leaving more water surface for the sun to drink from; and before the river reached the sea it was dry, and the desert swept across into the heart of Nefyryd.

  The Nefyrre had always fought with the force of arms, and cruelty was their companion in war. But against the desert they were helpless. They could not fight the sand. If Cer could have known it, he would have gloried in the fact that, untaught, he was the most powerful sandmage who had ever lived. For hate was a greater teacher than any of the books of dark lore, and Cer lived on hate.

  And on hate alone, for now he ate and drank nothing, sustaining his body through the power of the wind and the heat of the sun. He was utterly dry, and the blood no longer coursed through his veins. He lived on the energy of the storms he unleashed. And the desert eagerly fed him, because he was feeding the desert.

  He followed his storms, and walked through the deserted towns of the Nefyrre. He saw the refugees rushing north and east to the high ground. He saw the corpses of those caught in the storm. And he sang at night the old songs of Greet, the war songs. He wrote his father’s name with chalk on the wall of every city he destroyed. He wrote his mothers name in the sand, and where he had written her name the wind did not blow and the sand did not shift, but preserved the writing as if it had been incised on rock.

  Then one day, in a lull between his storms, Cer saw a man coming towards him from the east. Abadapnu, he wondered, or Nefyrre? Either way he drew his knife, and fit the nock of an arrow on his bowstring.

  But the man came with his hands extended, and he called out, “Cer Cemreet.”

  It had never occurred to Cer that anyone knew his name.

  “Sandmage Cer Cemreet,” said the man when he was close. “We have found who you are.”

  Cer said nothing, but only watched the man’s eyes.

  “I have come to tell you that your vengeance is full. Nefyryd is at its knees. We have signed a treaty with Greet and we no longer raid into Hetterwee. Driplin has seize
d our westernmost lands.”

  Cer smiled. “I care nothing for your empire.”

  “Then for our people. The deaths of your father and mother have been avenged a hundred thousand times, for over two hundred thousand people have died at your hands.”

  Cer chuckled. “I care nothing for your people.”

  “Then for the soldiers who did the deed. Though they acted under orders, they have been arrested and killed, as have the men who gave them those orders, even our first general, all at the command of the King so that your vengeance will be complete. I have brought you their ears as proof of it,” said the man, and he took a pouch from his waist.

  “I care nothing for the soldiers, nor for proof of vengeance,” said Cer.

  “Then what do you care for?” asked the man quietly.

  “Death,” said Cer.

  “Then I bring you that, too,” said the man, and a knife was in his hand, and he plunged the knife into Cer’s breast where his heart should have been. But when the man pulled the knife out no blood followed, and Cer only smiled.

  “Indeed you brought it to me,” said Cer, and he stabbed the man where his father had been stabbed, and drew the knife up as it had been drawn through his father’s body, except that he touched the man’s heart, and he died.

  As Cer watched the blood soaking into the sand, he heard in his ears his mother’s screams, which he had silenced for these years. He heard her screams and now, remembering his father and his mother and himself as a child he began to cry, and he held the body of the man he had killed and rocked back and forth on the sand as the blood clotted on his clothing and his skin. His tears mixed with the blood and poured into the sand and Cer realized that this was the first time since his father’s death that he had shed any tears at all.

  I am not dry, thought Cer. There is water under me still for the desert to drink.

  He looked at his dry hands, covered with the man’s blood, and tried to scrub off the clotted blood with sand. But the blood stayed, and the sand could not clean him.

  He wept again. And then he stood and faced the desert to the west, and he said, “Come.”

  A breeze began.

  “Come,” he said to the desert, “come and dry my eyes.”

  And the wind came up, and the sand came, and Cer Cemreet was buried in the sand, and his eyes became dry, and the last life passed from his body, and the last sandmage passed from the world.

  Then came the winter rains, and the refugees of Nefyryd returned to their land. The soldiers were called home, for the wars were over, and now their weapons were the shovel and the plow. They redug the trench of the Nefyr and the Greebeck, and the river soon flowed deep again to the sea. They scattered grass seed and cleaned their houses of sand. They carried water into the ruined fields with ditches and aqueducts.

  Slowly life returned to Nefyryd.

  And the desert, having lost its mage, retreated quietly to its old borders, never again to seek death where there was life. Plenty of death already where nothing lived, plenty of dryness to drink where there was no water.

  In a wood a little way from the crest of the Mitherkame, a treemage heard the news from a wandering tinker.

  The treemage went out into the forest and spoke softly to the Elm, to the Oak, to the Redwood, to the Sweet Aspen. And when all had heard the news, the forest wept for Cer Cemreet, and each tree gave a twig to be burned in his memory, and shed sap to sink into the ground in his name.

  DREAM A LITTLE

  DREAM FOR ME…

  Peter Crowther

  Although a Yorkshireman through and through, Peter Crowther (b. 1949) seems as much at home in the United States, where many of his stories are set. His fascination for the machinery that runs the world makes me think of him as the British Ray Bradbury. He has worked in IT, journalism and PR, but has been writing his idiosyncratic stories since the 1980s. His books include Escardy Gap (1996), written with James Lovegrove, Lonesome Roads (1999) and The Spaces Between the Lines (2007). Not content with writing he has also edited a number of anthologies and has turned publisher with the award-winning PS Publishing which, in addition to its many excellent books, also publishes the quarterly magazine Postscripts. Several stories from that are included elsewhere in this volume.

  This is not the first extreme fantasy of Peter’s that I have published. There was “The Eternal Altercation” in The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers Tales. This story might seem a little closer to home but don’t be misled. Not only will you go to Hell and back, but you’ll see the end of all…well, you’ll see.

  His website is at http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/

  We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on; and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  –William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  Behold, this dreamer cometh.

  – The Book of Genesis, 37:19

  Everybody has a dream; everybody dreams. The man who told me that – the same man who spent his time showing an old dog-eared piece of card around in Vinzenz Richter’s Wine Tavern, in the long shadow of Meissen’s Albrecht Castle – was a long way from home…always assuming, of course, that the dead have someplace to hang their hat at the end of a busy working day. And something to do when they get there.

  When I was in full time employment, for a big financial organization, all I ever wanted to do when I got home from work was write.

  Every evening I would finish dinner as fast as I could reasonably chew it, and then high-tail it into my small book-lined office and boot up the trusty computer. Seems I had more energy for writing then, though that seems ridiculous when all I have to do now is write.

  Back then, when I was in and out of meetings filled with corporate types who felt they needed permission to break wind, I made silent (and sometimes not so silent) promises to whatever deities ruled the world that if I could ever get out of the mindless slog of listening to minutes being read out day in, day out, and into a silent world of my own thoughts and words I would never ever complain again. And, when it happened, I didn’t. I was true to my word. For a while. Well, why not: after all, I had nurtured a dream – as the woman by the statue of the pissing boy in Hamburg had known…among many things, as it turned out – and my dream had become a reality.

  But it was the dead man with the old card that was to enable me to recognize that my dream was not the only one. Nor was it the most important.

  But first things first.

  My first novel, a minor espionage epic set in Britain, Holland and the United States and over which I had pondered and sweated and agonized for almost three years, sold to the third publisher who read it. And it sold well, made a second printing in hardcover and a couple of nice book club sales and then went into a paperback edition which hovered around the lower edges of the bestsellers listing for almost two months. The all-important second book was eagerly awaited. Mostly by my publisher.

  “So how’s the book coming along?” James Farraday asked me a couple of weeks before events were set in motion to change my life forever. He posed the question as nonchalantly as the mouthful of tossed salad would allow.

  We were in a small restaurant off Columbus Circle, sitting in the smoking section – and there’s not many of those around these days – and I was pulling on a Salem Light and pushing olives around on my plate like toy soldiers on a military campaign map. He waited a few seconds, washing most of the salad from his teeth with a mouthful of Shiraz, before grunting, “Well?”

  The truth was, the book hadn’t been coming along too well at all. In fact, the book wasn’t actually started as such. After four months, since the day I had proudly announced in Farraday’s office that I would be starting that very afternoon, typing in those mystical and terrifying words “Chapter One”, I still had nothing. Worse still, since the advent of computers and word processors, I couldn’t even take him back to my apartment and show off a full wastepaper basket brimming with scrunched-up starts. With the exception of a loose-leaf noteboo
k containing a few pages of scribbled notes, I had zilch. Nada.

  “Well,” I started, pacing the lie so that it tumbled out easy and sounded more like the Artist’s reluctance to say too much about his next project until the final period was typed in and pored over a while, “it’s coming along. It’s coming along a little slower than I’d like but, you know, it’s coming along.”

  James nodded and splashed more wine into our glasses. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  We were as close as most authors and their editor could reasonably hope to be, and closer than many. We had shared other bottles of wine and other meal-table chats, some even when there was no real need for him to be there. But I think he saw something in me that struck a chord. Just as I think there were few people he could call real friends. His real friends, I believe, were the books he worked on.

  “But it is coming along,” he said, returning to the promised novel.

  I nodded. “But like I say, slow.”

  “Mmm.” He forked a piece of pasta into a mound of lettuce and transferred it to his waiting mouth. “Is it started?”

  His expression told me that he knew the answer already but I decided to persevere. “Let’s just say it’s not going as well as I’d hoped.”

  For a long minute, he said nothing. Then, “You know,” he said, chewing, “maybe you need to take a break. You thought about doing that? Taking a break?”

  I stubbed out my cigarette and thought about lighting another, but it was difficult enough making him out through the haze I had already created. I pushed the ashtray away from me and thanked whatever god looked after diners that most good restaurants train their staff to empty ashtrays after each butt. Sure enough, a young man with a smile that looked like it had come from a catalog appeared as if by magic and replaced the offending item with a clean version. Before I could say anything, James leaned forward and, with a sly wink, said, “You could put it down as research.” He straightened up again and forked the last of the salad onto the final few strands of linguini. “Think about it. Somewhere you’ve always wanted to go. Shoe-horn it into the book someplace and write it off.” He laid his fork on the cleared plate and snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Say four weeks. Six maybe. Then we can see how things are coming along when you get back.” He lifted his glass, swirling the wine around as he studied me. “Can you think of anywhere?”