Guilds & Glaives

by David Farland

  Xudnas’ place at Morlock’s side was taken by the fox-haired necromancer, Clivia. Her familiar was still draped across her shoulders, and his narrow face gazed down at Morlock, squinting with concern.

  “I don’t know!” Gawr said to Morlock. “The guy says he wants to talk to you! I don’t know he’s doing this to you!”

  “Shut up, Gawr,” Clivia said. She pulled on a pair of fireproof glass gloves and stuck a needle in Morlock’s bare arm, drawing a quantity of smoking dark blood into a glass jar.

  “You shut up,” Gawr said, after some thought. “You shut up. This is the same meatlocker you were in.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It is.”

  “I was on a different floor.”

  “It’s the same even if it’s not the same!” the fox barked shrilly.

  “We’ll discuss this later.”

  “We’ll discuss you later,” the fox sobbed.

  Clivia finished the job and wrapped Morlock’s wounded arm with a fireproof bandage. “I am sorry, too,” she whispered.

  Morlock didn’t answer and she left. His eyes could move enough to watch her go; he saw her use an intricate blackiron key to open the cell door. For a moment, just a heartbeat, as she passed through the door, Morlock could again feel the talic weight of Tyrfing somewhere on the other side. Then the cell door slammed shut and the connection was broken.

  In time the poison left Morlock’s veins and he could move again. The cell in which he found himself was much as Gawr described it: a meatlocker. There were human beings and other animals hung from the walls in various stages of disassembly: the upper torso of a sallow-skinned man, the ragged ends of his entrails neatly braided together; the left half of a goat, its internal organs glazed to prevent leaking; a gigantic newt with roughly a hundred eyes (and bleeding gaps for at least fifty more), floating in a globe of bluish fluid affixed to the wall, and so on. The warm-blooded animals seemed to be alive; their bodies were hot and stank like live things rather than dead ones. But none of them seemed to be conscious. If it weren’t for the jars of dead necromancers, Morlock would have had no one to talk with at all, which would have suited him better.

  There was a shelf of them: yellow unglazed jars about the size of a man’s head, each adorned with a single waxen ear and a pair of grayish lips. Each one contained the soul of a necromancer who had been found guilty of some more or less serious infraction of the guild rules and sentenced to death. For those judged the most guilty, it was death without parole. When the time came, their jars would be taken out to be consumed by Legion. For the less guilty, this was a temporary death, and they would eventually be granted access to a new body (not necessarily their own).

  They talked endlessly: to each other, to Morlock, to themselves; about their crimes, their appeals, the injustice or justice of their sentences, constant threats to inform the collegium about something some other jar had said. The chatter in the room was worse than the stench. He stood it as long as he could, and then he started turning the jars toward the wall so that their flapping lips were muffled by the stones. After he had turned three, the minds in the rest of the jars took the hint and ceased their endless babbling.

  The walls, the cell, and the window of the cage carried some magical seal. They were opaque to visionary rapture, and sound did not seem to pass through them in either direction. The barred door of the cage was secured with a blackiron lock of no particular subtlety. But a blackiron lock can only be turned with a blackiron key.

  Light and air passed between the bars of the doorway, however, and (even more importantly) the window looking out at the eastern edge of the world. He spent many hours pacing the narrow length of the cage, ignoring the muttered remarks of the jars, trying to think of a way out. When he tired of that, and of the dreckish, rotting reek of the cage, he stood at the barred window and breathed deep, watching the vermilion sheep and the endless blue beyond the end of the world.

  At least once every day, he would fall into darkness. He awoke on his cot, with some of his blood gone and a tray of food and a goblet of water tinged with wine at his side. The food was plain bread and sheep’s cheese—nothing extraordinary, but edible even in the slaughterhouse reek of the cage.

  This went on for some time. He didn’t count the days. But he was sensing the growth of something gentle and terrible in his mind and heart. It was not docility, exactly. It was despair. His recklessness and folly had put him here and he would stay here until he died—or until it was safe for the necromancers to let him out, because he had become so tame, so harmless. He doubted that day would ever come. But, increasingly, he feared that it might. Those were the darkest moments of all, darker than the sleep when they stole his blood.

  One day he woke to find the wound in his arm deeper and wider than ever. His arm ached when he moved it. He wondered if this constant blood drain was beginning to kill him. It was the first hopeful thought he’d had in a long time.

  It wasn’t the last. He found that his arm hurt because something had been inserted in the wound. He drew it out carefully, spilling as little as he could of blood and fire. Eventually it lay gleaming in his bloodstained, smoking hand: a long, stiff wire of blackiron.

  Morlock was not a thief, but he’d made many a lock and every locksmith must perforce have some skill at picking locks. But he had to work quickly: the next time they came in to take his blood, they might find the wire and take it as well. And he had to work out of the sight of anyone passing by in the corridor, and of the few remaining jars that he had not turned toward the wall.

  Morlock palmed the wire and went to the window. He worked the wire by feel, seeing it in his mind’s eye, gazing somberly with his body’s eyes at the edge of the world, bone-bare and bone-brown like the rib of some monstrous beast.

  “You’re moping again,” one of the jars said to him. “When will you stop?”

  “At my convenience,” Morlock said. “No one else’s.”

  “Things could be worse.”

  Obviously, they could be. Morlock had discovered that, no matter how little you have, you could always have less. But he was more interested in deflecting the mind in the jar than engaging it.

  “How?” he grunted.

  “You could be dead. Like me.”

  The dead necromancers in the jars would betray him to their captors for anything, or for nothing. So Morlock believed. He kept on looking out at the edge of the world, at the vermilion sheep, and shaped the lockpick with his fingers and his mind.

  The thing was done at last, or as close as it could be. He palmed the wire and turned toward the shelf of dead necromancers.

  “Hey!” said one of the jars. “What’s that—?”

  He turned them all to the wall, muffling their empty, angry voices.

  His heart was pounding in his chest, as if he were a child again, sneaking down to the workshop to implement his first fourth-dimensional seedstone. He’d blown up a big chunk of the mountain that night. Thank God Sustainer no one was killed. It was a huge disaster, a terrible thing. And it was the moment he had begun to know what he could do, who he was. Maybe it was time to remember that again.

  The blackiron lock was as simple as it had seemed. On the fifth pass he had turned all three cylinders. The door drifted open.

  The magic seal was broken. Sounds came to him: footfalls, voices. He felt a slight, unmistakable psychic pressure that had been missing: his sword Tyrfing. It was within calling distance.

  He carefully moved the cage door aside and stepped into the corridor. No one was in sight. He turned to the left and walked quietly down the corridor of cells: meatlockers like the one where he had been caged, or worse.

  Morlock followed the hallway around a corner where it crossed two others and ran into a necromancer in a stained smock with a sample dish and a clutch of dissection tools in his hands. His face was pale as marble; his blue eyes gaped wide as he saw Morlock; his mouth gaped wide, preparing to shout. Morlock caught his throat with his left hand
and broke it. He caught the instruments as they fell, but the collecting dish slipped away and rang on the floor like a bronze bell.

  Voices spoke in inquiring tones up the hallway to the left. Morlock ran straight up the hallway before him: it was dark and windowless. From the weight and feel of the air, he felt it was taking him underground. He leapt up the next stairway he found until he saw the light of a window.

  He was standing at a side entrance into the vast workshop staffed by adjuncts. He recognized the finials on the arch of the main entrance. Opposite it, then, would be the stairway down to the body garden and its life trees. And the shape of his sword cast a shadow on his insight: it was near, very near.

  Morlock entered the workshop. An adjunct stood in his way: gray of hair, of face, of eye. “Who the hell are you and where do you think you’re going?” the adjunct snarled in a bitter, gray voice.

  “Graverobber,” he replied, “I am Morlock Ambrosius and I go where I will.” He took the bitter gray adjunct by the scruff of his smock and tossed him into the nearest table.

  “Ambrosius has escaped!” someone shouted and someone else cried, “Summon Legion!” and others began incantations of protection or attack.

  Morlock threw back his head and called out, “Tyrfing!”

  His sword flew across the room, smashing alembics and rune-hearths as it came. The grip landed in his hand like a bird coming to roost.

  A shocked silence followed, and then Morlock heard the barking laugh of a talking fox.

  “The wreckinging!” Gawr laughed. “The wreckinging!”

  “Gawr!” hissed Clivia’s voice. “What did you do!”

  “I did it! You woody done it if you thought! These old farklebrugs say, ‘Do this!’ and you do it. But they’ll never let you in! They’ll never let you in! You’ll always be an adjunk, you’ll all always be adjunks!”

  “The little fox is wiser than you, graverobbers,” Morlock said. “I was a prisoner here, but you are prisoners in a worse cage than mine. Make them give you your due. They’ll never give it else.”

  He dashed past them then and ran heedless down the stair. There was an ominous chanting in the shadowy studium on the ground floor: the full members of the collegium were aware of their danger and taking sorcerous steps to combat it.

  But Morlock had a plan, long-simmered in his mind through the days of captivity. He leapt down the stairs a landing at a time until he came to the bilious garden of bodies under the earth.

  Wielding his shining sword like a scythe, he began to harvest bodies from the life trees. As he cut the green-gold cords that bound them to the trees, the bodies fell gasping to the ground, their eyes snapping open as if they were awaking from nightmares.

  “You know what I know, and more besides,” he called out, as many had risen to their feet and were blinking at each other in wild surmise. “You know your danger and your opportunity. Your progenitors are coming to reclaim you. Fight them or die.”

  Some of the freed bodies began freeing their peers, gnawing through the green-gold branches of their life trees. Others began to climb the steps to the heart of the collegium. Morlock kept on slashing the branches until all were free. Then, although it took long moments he might have used escaping, he rewove the talic impulse in Tyrfing’s crystalline lattice. At last he followed the riot of naked bodies climbing the stairs in quest of freedom or death

  When Morlock reached the members’ studium it was not the calm meditative place that he had once seen. The dim air was filled with cloudy, fire-eyed spirits, summoned by the members to defend them. But each of the members was struggling with one or more younger versions of themselves. Morlock sauntered past Xudnas. He would have liked to say something cutting to the High Sarkoptic—remind him of his broken oath. But it would have been wasted air: Xudnas’ infant self had climbed him like a tree and was chewing with desperate intent on one of the High Sarkoptic’s golden eyes.

  Morlock wove his way through the room, warding off stray spirits with Tyrfing, and finally crossed the threshold to the entryway.

  Legion was there waiting, an edged weapon in each one of its seven hands.

  “Get back to your pantry, meat,” one of its heads said.

  Morlock, in turn, said nothing at all. He knew better than to bandy words with a demon. He raised Tyrfing to guard and barely fended off slashing attacks by two swords and an axe.

  That was not the real danger, though. He could hear voices whispering in his head, offering assistance, offering power, offering escape.

  He raised up his confidence like a burnished shield. He had learned the way of the sword from Naevros syr Tol, greatest swordsman of the old time. He did not fear death. He rejected the whispers.

  Furiously, Legion spun around the entry, slashing deftly with all its blades. Morlock guarded himself, shifted his footing as necessary, and watched the thing move. It was ungainly to look at, as was Morlock himself, but the body was built by people who knew how bodies worked. It could threaten him, perhaps kill him.

  But it was alive. It breathed. It sweated with exertion. It took moments to rest. The soul-eating demon within was bound to this body. If it died, the demon would need another host. Morlock juggled the risks, the possible and impossible futures, in his mind.

  In that moment, he felt an exaltation greater than any drunkenness. A bright window opened to the past and future and he was again, for a moment, the man he once had been, the man he might yet be.

  He rose to the challenge and ascended to the first level of visionary rapture. It was a fearful risk: the talic realm was the demon’s native heath: it could reach him there, perhaps infect him with itself, its despair, its insatiable satiation. But it was the risk on which all his futures hinged.

  He saw the thing then in two realms: physical and non-physical, the sweating mask of matter and the dark knot of talic energy within. That was the place—there—where its heart would be, if it had a heart. That was the demon’s anchor in this crooked house of flesh.

  Morlock was ware of a talic incursion by the demon and dropped like a stone out of the visionary realm to the mundane one.

  He threw Tyrfing like a spear. The black and white crystalline blade, glittering like volcanic glass, sank deep in the seamed chest of the shambling harthrang. The demon was bemused by the unexpected move and hesitated as Morlock dove past its weaving arms and plunged into the sunlight beyond the threshold.

  “Tyrfing!” he called, and held out his hand.

  The blade burst through the back of the harthrang, scattering gobbets of rotten flesh as it flew from the ruins of the monstrous chest cavity, spinning about to land in Morlock’s hand like a bird coming to roost. The grip was a little slimy, though.

  Legion’s body staggered, dying, into the light. It let its weapons fall. It reached out with its many hands for supports that were not there. It fell to the ground among the tiger-lilies and was still. The body was dead.

  But the demon lived. Morlock felt its approach like a cloud of dread through the sunny day. It needed a new host; it would have one; and Morlock’s body was the nearest at hand.

  Morlock leapt up into the talic realm, letting his body fall unregarded to the earth. His visionary avatar—a black-and-white tornado of talic flames, armed with Tyrfing, a weapon in both realms—struck out at the dark fiery cloud of the unrooted demon.

  It expected no such resistance and quailed, fled toward the edge of the world. The only bodies nearby were in the flock of vermilion sheep and the demon settled amongst them, darkening the dim light of their souls with its hunger and its hate.

  A streak of fiery tal approached, a wild fuzzy comet of a mind: Gawr. His necromantic insight perceived the demon in the sheep, knew what must be done.

  Morlock fell from vision into flesh. His body lay aching on the ground and his sword lay, lifeless and bereft of tal, beside him. He seized it and forced his aching muscles to lift him to his feet.

  The vermilion sheep were still convulsing from the onset of the de
monic possession. Gawr was dashing at the edges of the flock, chivvying them towards the verge. Morlock rushed at them as well, shouting vile insults in Dwarvish. The sheep started to move, and then run away from these irritants, straight to the end of the world, bone-bare, bone-brown, with nothing to stop their plunge over the side.

  Morlock and Gawr stood there in companionable silence, not speaking or needing to speak, as they watched the sheep fall into the endless blue beyond the end of the world. They watched for a long time, but the sheep kept on falling.

  In fact, they are falling there yet. If you ever get to the eastern edge of that world (not impossible with all the advances being made in interplanar travel these days), you should definitely visit the Free Institute of Necromancy and Gawric Studies, on the site of the old Collegium Necromanticum. They have an array of far-seers and telescopes there, and in the more powerful ones you can still see the bright red sheep falling ever more slowly into the end of the world and time.

  But don’t expect to see Morlock there. He has long since moved on to the next town, the next drink, the next mistake.

  Assassinsssss

  Jason Palmatier

  The hidden trebuchets groaned and whirled in the muggy darkness, flinging barrels from their slings in flat arcs that slid them just over the high walls of Castle Noway. The barrels smashed in a skittering mess on the innermost courtyard, releasing dark shapes that tumbled wildly before springing up in front of stunned guards.

  Shing!

  The first guard dropped, blood spurting from his slit throat. His killer spun around the body as it fell, slinging a second blade up the left nostril of a wall sentry twenty feet above who had leaned over to investigate the noise. As the sentry’s body smacked onto the filthy cobblestones near the killer’s feet, the victorious assassin threw back her jet-black hood and hissed to her BAFE (Best Assassin Friend Ever) Candace, “Baaaadddddd Assssssss …”

  Candace glanced over with a wicked gleam in her eye as she pulled a dagger from a third guard’s chin and finished her friend Angela’s catch phrase. “… Assassinsssss.”