Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  They sat in a row, saying nothing, for some time.

  And then the eldest among them, a broad-shouldered, pale-skinned woman with a flat face seamed in scars, nudged her mount down onto the stony descent. The others fell in behind their captain.

  The boy came running to find Graves, chattering about strangers coming down from the border pass. Five, on horses, with sunlight glinting on chain and maybe weapons. The one in the lead had long black hair and pale skin. A foreigner for sure.

  Graves finished his tankard of ale and pushed himself to his feet. He dropped two brass buttons on the counter and Swillman’s crabby hand scooped them up before Graves had time to turn away. From the far end of the bar, Slim cackled, but that was a random thing with her, and she probably didn’t mean anything by it. Though maybe she did. Who could know the mind of a hundred-year-old whore?

  The boy, whom Graves had come to call Snotty, for his weeping nose and the smudges of dirt that collected there, led the way outside, scampering like a pup. To High Street’s end, where Graves lived and where he carved the slabs he and the boy brought down from the old quarry every now and then.

  Snotty went into the tiny one-stall stable and set about hitching up the mule to the cart. Graves tugged open the door to his shed, reminding himself to cut back the grass growing along the rain gutter. He stepped inside and, though his eyes had yet to adjust, he reached with overlong familiarity to the rack of long-handled shovels and picks just to the left of the door. He selected his best shovel and then the next best one for the boy, and finally his heavy pick.

  Stepping outside, he glared up at the bright sun for a moment before walking to where Snotty was readying the cart. The three digging tools thumped onto the bed in a cloud of dust. “Five you say?”

  “Five!”

  “Bring us two casks of water.”

  “I will.”

  Graves went out back behind the shed. He eyed the heap of slabs, dragged out five—each one dressed into rough rectangular shapes, sides smoothed down, one arm’s-length long and an elbow-down wide—and he squatted before them, squinting at the bare facings. “Best wait on that,” he muttered, and then straightened when he heard the boy bringing the cart around.

  “Watch your fingers this time,” Graves warned.

  “I will.”

  Graves moved the pick and shovels to the head of the cart bed to make room for the slabs. Working carefully, they loaded each stone onto the warped but solid planks. Then Graves went around to the mule’s harness and cinched the straps tighter to ease the upward pull on the animal’s chest.

  “Five,” said the boy.

  “Heavy load.”

  “Heavy load. What you gonna carve on ’em?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Graves set out and Snotty led the mule and the creaking cart after him, making sure the wooden wheels fell evenly into the ruts on the road, the ruts that led to the cemetery.

  When they arrived, they saw Flowers wandering the grassy humps of the burial ground, collecting blossoms, her fair hair dancing in the wind. The boy stopped and stared until Graves pushed the second-best shovel into his hands.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Graves warned.

  “I’m not,” the boy lied, but some lies a man knew to just let pass. For a time.

  Graves studied the misshapen lumps before them, thinking, measuring in his head. “We start a new row.”

  Shovels in hand, they made their way into the yard.

  “Five, you said.”

  “Five,” answered the boy.

  It took most of the morning for the riders to reach the floodplain. The trail leading down into the valley was ill-frequented and there had been no work done on it in decades. Seasonal runoff had carved deep, treacherous channels around massive boulders. Snake holes gaped everywhere and the horses twitched and shied as they picked their way down the slope.

  The cooler air of the pass gave way to cloying heat in the valley. Broken rock surrendered to brambles and thickets of spike-grass and sage. Upon reaching level ground, the trail opened out, flanked by tree stumps and then a thin forest of alder, aspen, and, closer to the river, cottonwoods.

  The approach to the hamlet forked before reaching the bridge. The original, broader track led to a heap of tumbled blackstone, rising from the bank like the roots of shattered teeth with a similar ruin on the other side of the river. The wooden bridge at the end of the narrower path was barely wide enough to take a cart. Built of split logs and hemp rope, it promised to sway sickeningly and the riders would need to cross it one at a time.

  The man who rode behind the captain was squat and wide, his broad face a collection of crooked details, from the twisted nose to the hook lifting the left side of his mouth, the dented jawline, one ear boxed and looking like a flattened cabbage, the other clipped neatly in half with top and bottom growing in opposite directions. His beard and mustache were filthy with flecks of dried spit and possibly froth. As he guided his horse over the bridge, he squinted down at the river to his left. The remnants of the stone pillars that had held up the original bridge were still visible, draped in flowing manes of algae.

  Horse clumping onto solid ground once more, he drew up beside his captain and they sat watching the others cross one by one.

  Captain Skint’s expression was flat as her face, her eyes like scratched basalt.

  “A year ago,” said the man, “and it’d take half the day for alla us t’come over this bridge. A thousand Rams, hard as stone.”

  The third rider coming up alongside them, a tall, gangly woman with crimson glints in her black hair, snorted at the man’s words. “Dreaming of the whorehouse again, Sarge?”

  “What? No. Why’d ya think—”

  “We ain’t Rams anymore. We’re goats. Fucking goats.” And she spat.

  Dullbreath and Huggs joined them and the five mercenaries, eager for the respite the hamlet ahead offered them—but admitting to nothing—fell into a slow canter as the track widened into something like a road.

  They passed a farm: a lone log house and three stone-walled pens. The place stank of pig shit and the flies buzzed thick as black smoke. The forest came to a stumpy end beyond that. A few small fields of crops to the left, and ahead and to the right stood some kind of temple shrine, a stone edifice not much bigger than the altar stone it sheltered on three sides. Surrounding it was a burial ground.

  The riders saw a man and a boy in the yard, digging pits, each one marked out with sun-bleached rags tied to trimmed saplings. A mule and cart waited motionless beneath an enormous yew tree.

  “That’s a few too many graves on the way,” Sergeant Flapp muttered. “Plague, maybe?”

  No one commented. But as they rode past, each one—barring the captain—fixed their attention on the two diggers, counting slow to reach…five.

  “Five flags.” Flapp shook his head. “That’s probably half the population here.”

  A small girl walked the street a short distance ahead of the troop, clutching in one hand a mass of wildflowers. Honeybees spun circles around her tousled head.

  The riders edged past her—she seemed oblivious to them—and cantered into the hamlet.

  Slim came back from the doorway and slid along the bar rail to lurch to a halt opposite Swillman. “Give us one, then. I’ll be good for it.”

  “Since when?”

  “Them’s soljers, Swilly. Come from the war—”

  “What war?”

  “T’other side of the mountains, o’course.”

  Swillman settled a gimlet regard on the ancient whore. “You hear anything about a war? From who? When?”

  She shifted uneasily. “Well, you know and I know we ain’t seen traffic in must be three seasons now. But they’s soljers and they been chewed up bad, so there must be a war. Somewhere. And they came down from the pass, so it must be on t’other side.”

  “On the Demon Plain, right. Where nobody goes and nobody comes back neither. A war…over there. Right, Slim. Whatev
er you say, but I ain’t giving you one unless you pay and you ain’t got nothing to pay with.”

  “I got my ring.”

  He stared at her. “But that’s your livelihood, Slim. You cough that up and you got nothing to offer ’em.”

  “You get it after they’ve gone, or maybe not, if I get work.”

  “Nobody’s that desperate,” Swillman said. “Seen yourself lately? Say, anytime in the last thirty years?”

  “Sure. I keep that fine silver mirror all polished up, the one in my bridal suite, ya.”

  He grunted a laugh. “Let’s see it, then, so I know you ain’t up and swallowed it.”

  She stretched her jaw and worked with her tongue, and then hacked up something into her hand. A large rolled copper ring, tied to a string with the other end going into her mouth, wrapped around a tooth, presumably.

  Swillman leaned in for a closer look. “First time I actually seen it, y’know.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s my vow of celibacy.”

  “Since your wife died, ya, which makes you an idiot. We could work us out a deal, y’know.”

  “Not a chance. It’s smaller than I’d have thought.”

  “Most men are smaller than they think, too.”

  He settled back and collected a tankard.

  Slim put the ring back into her mouth and watched with avid eyes the sour ale tumbling into the cup.

  “Is that the tavern?” Huggs asked, eyeing the ramshackle shed with its signpost but no sign.

  “If it’s dry I’m going to beat on the keeper, I swear it,” said Flapp, groaning as he slid down from his horse. “Beat ’im t’death, mark me.” He stood for a moment, and then brushed dust from his cloak, his thighs, and his studded leather gauntlets. “No inn s’far as I can see, just a room in back. Where we gonna sleep? Put up the horses? This place is a damned pustule, is what it is.”

  “The old map I seen,” ventured Wither, “gave this town a name.”

  “Town? It ain’t been a town in a thousand years, if ever.”

  “Even so, Sarge.”

  “So what’s it called?”

  “Glory.”

  “You’re shitting me, ain’t ya?”

  She shook her head, reaching over to collect the reins of the captain’s horse as Skint thumped down in a plume of dust and, with a wince, walked—in her stockings as she’d lost her boots—to the tavern door.

  Huggs joined Wither tying up the horses to the hitching post. “Glory, huh? Gods, I need a bath. They should call this place Dragon Mouth, it’s so fucking hot. Listen, Wither, that quarrel head’s still under my shoulder blade—I can’t reach up and take off this cloak—I’m melting underneath—”

  The taller woman turned to her, reached up, and unclasped the brooch on Huggs’s cloak. “Stand still.”

  “It’s a bit stuck on my back. Bloodglue, you know?”

  “Ya. Don’t move and if this hurts, I don’t want to have to hear about it.”

  “Right. Do it.”

  Wither stepped around, gripping the cloak’s hems, and slowly and evenly pulled the heavy wool from Huggs’s narrow back. The bloodglue gave way with a sob, revealing a quilted gambeson stained black around the hole left by the quarrel. Wither studied the wound by peering through the hole. “A trickle, but not bad.”

  “Good. Nice. Thanks.”

  “I wouldn’t trust the bathwater here, Huggs. That river’s fulla pig shit and this place floods every spring, and I doubt the wells are dug deep.”

  “I know. Fucking hole.”

  The others had followed Captain Skint into the tavern. There was no shouting from within—a good sign.

  The shorter, thinner woman—whose hips were, however, much broader than Wither’s—plucked at the thongs binding the front of the gambeson. “Sweat’s got me all chafed under my tits—lucky you barely got any, Withy.”

  “Ya. Lucky me. Like every woman says when it’s hot, ‘Mop ’em if you got ’em.’ Let’s go drink.”

  The soldier woman who walked into the bar didn’t look like the kind to give much away. She’d be a hard drinker, though, or so Swillman judged in the single flickering glance he risked taking at her face. And things could get bad, because she didn’t look like someone used to paying for what she took; and the two soldier men who clumped in behind her looked even uglier to a man like Swill—who was an honest publican just trying to do his best.

  The woman wasn’t wearing boots, which made her catlike as she drew up to the bar.

  “Got ale,” said Swillman before she could open her mouth and demand something he’d never heard of. The woman frowned, and Swill thought that maybe these people were so foreign they didn’t speak the language of the land.

  But she then said, in a cruel, butchered accent, “What place is this?”

  “Glory.”

  “No.” She waved one gauntleted hand. “Kingdom? Empire?”

  Swillman looked over at Slim, who was watching with a hoof-stunned expression, and then he licked his lips and shrugged.

  The foreign woman sighed. “Five tankards, then.”

  “Y’got to pay first.”

  To Swillman’s surprise, she didn’t reach across and snap his neck like a lamp taper. Instead, she tugged free a small bag looped around her throat—the bag coming up from between her breasts somewhere under that chain armor, and spilled out a half-dozen rectangular coins onto the countertop.

  Swillman stared down at them. “That tin? Lead?”

  “Silver.”

  “I can’t make no give-back on silver!”

  “Well, what do you use here?”

  He reached down and lifted into view his wooden cash tray. Its four sculpted bowls held seven buttons in three different sizes, a few nuggets of raw copper, a polished agate, and three sticks of stale rustleaf.

  “No coins?”

  “Been years since I last seen one a those.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Oblong, not like yours at all. And they was copper.”

  “What was stamped on ’em?” asked the short, bearded man who’d sidled up between the woman and Slim. “Whose face, I mean? Or faces—three faces? Castle in the sky? Something like that, maybe?”

  Swillman shrugged. “Don’t recall.”

  “One of these should do us for the night, then,” said the woman, nudging one of the silver coins in Swill’s direction.

  “A cask of ale for you and meals, too, that would be about right.”

  He could see that the woman knew she was being taken, but didn’t seem much interested in arguing.

  The bearded man was eyeing Slim, who was eyeing him back.

  The other man, leaning on the rail on the other side of the stocking-footed woman, was big and stupid-looking—Swillman could hear his loud breathing and the man’s mouth hung open.

  Probably too dumb to understand what was going on about anything, from that empty look in his eyes and those snaggled teeth, yellow and dry jutting out like that.

  Drawing the first three tankards, Swillman served them up. A moment later, two more women soldiers clumped in.

  Slim scowled and did her usual shrink-back when people she thought of as competition ever showed up, but the bearded man just went and moved closer. “Keep,” he said, “give this sweet lass another one.”

  Swillman gaped, and then nodded. He was already drawing two more tankards for the new women—gods, they were all cut up and bruised and knocked about, weren’t they just? All five of ’em. Addled in the heads, too, he suspected. Imagine, calling Slim a sweet lass! Bastard was blind!

  The loud breather startled him by speaking up. “Seen no stables—we need to put up for the night. Horses need taking care of. We want somewhere to sleep under cover. We need food for the ride, too, and clean, boiled water. Is there a drygoods here? How about a blacksmith? Anyone work leather and hide? Is there a whetstone? Anyone selling blankets?”

  Swillman had begun shaking his head with the very first query, an
d he kept shaking it until the man ran down.

  “None of that?”

  “None. Sorry, we’re not on, uh, any road. We see a merchant once a year, whatever he don’t sell elsewhere by season’s end, we can look at.”

  Slim drained her tankard in one long pull and then, after a gasp, she said, “Widow Bark’s got some wool, I think. She spins something, anyway. Might have a blanket to sell. The stable burned down, we got no horses anyway. We got pigs, and sheep a walk south of here, near the other end of the valley, but all that wool down there goes into the next valley, to the town there—to Piety.”

  “How far away is Piety?” the bearded man asked.

  “Four days on foot, maybe two on horseback.”

  “Well,” the breather demanded, “where can we sleep?”

  Swillman licked his lips and said, “If it’s just a dry roof you’re looking for, there’s the old keep on the hill.”

  They’d dug one of the pits too close to a barrow, and from one end of the rectangular trench old bones tumbled out in lumps of yellow clay. Graves and Snotty stared down at them for a time. Splinters and shards, snapped and marrow-sucked, and then Graves scooped up most of them with his shovel.

  “We’ll bore a hole in the mound,” he said.

  Snotty wiped his running nose and nodded. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Let’s break, then.”

  “They going up to the keep?”

  Graves lifted the mud and bones and tipped the mess onto the ground opposite the back pile. “I expect so.” He set the shovel down and clambered out, then reached back to pull the boy out of the hole.

  “They was looking at us as they went past.”

  “I know, boy. Don’t let it bother you.”

  “I don’t. I was just noticing, that’s all.”

  “Me too.”

  They went over to broach the second cask of water, shared the single tin cup back and forth a few times. “I shouldn’t have had all that ale earlier,” said Graves.

  “You wasn’t to know, though, was you?”

  “That’s true. Just a normal day, right?”