Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  Rising, she pulled down the visor to try it; and I saw that there was a white face graven upon the visor now—and that white face was her own.

  “I am a queen!” It might have been ten-score trumpets speaking.

  I nodded.

  “We will restore the kingdom, Valorius!”

  I nodded as before. It had been my own thought.

  “I shall restore the kingdom, and the Game will be played again. The Game, Valorius, and I a queen!”

  I knew then that she whom I had kissed so often must die. Men have said my sword springs to my hand. That is not so, yet few draw more swiftly. She parried my first thrust with her gauntlet and sought to seize the blade; it escaped her—thus I lived.

  Of our fight in that moonlit garden I will say little. She could parry my blows, and did. I could not parry hers; she was too strong for it. I dodged and ducked and was knocked sprawling again and again. I hoped for help, and received none. If longing could foal a horse from air, I would have had two score. No horse appeared.

  What came at last was Our Lord the Sun, and that was better. I turned her until she faced it and put my point through her eye-slot. The steel that went in was not so long as my hand and less wide than two fingers together, yet it was enough. It sufficed.

  Now?

  Now I wander the land. Asked to prophesy, I say we shall overthrow the tyrants and make a new nation for ourselves and our children. Should our folk require a sword, I am the sword that springs to their hands. Asked to heal, I cure their sick—when I can. If they bring food, I eat it. If they do not, I fast or find my own. And that is all, save that from time to time I entertain a lost traveler, such as yourself. East lies the past, west the future. Go north to find the gods, south to find the blessed. Above stands the All High, and below lies Pandemonium. Choose your road and keep to it, for if you stray from it, you may encounter such as I. Fare you well! We shall not meet again.

  * * *

  JAMES ENGE has been developing his stories of Morlock Ambrosius for years, but had to wait for the pendulum to swing back in favor of sword and sorcery before he made a splash. Appearing only recently in the pages of Black Gate, Flashing Swords, and everyday fiction.com, his tales of a wandering wizard and swordsman built up a loyal following in a very short time, before leaping into novel form with the books Blood of Ambrose, This Crooked Way, and The Wolf Age. Strange Horizon writes of him: “There’s a kind of literately sensuous pleasure in Enge’s writing…the pleasure of an intelligent, skillful writer amusing himself and us.” Little surprise then that Enge is an instructor of classical languages at a Midwestern university. Speaking to Fantasy Book Critic, he said, “The modern realistic novel, increasingly in the twentieth century, concerned itself with character above all else: what the character felt and perceived. I’m not knocking this: realistic fiction has some triumphant achievements in this line…But I think it’s an approach that is susceptible to diminishing returns. Genre fiction, like medieval and classical traditions of storytelling, tends to concentrate much more on what people do and the context in which they do it. I love this concentration on conduct, on action (but not necessarily in the car-chases-and-gunfights sense) and on the world…I find it in the older narrative traditions; I find it in genre fiction; and I think it’s the reason that twenty-first-century literary fiction is looking to refresh itself at the wells of genre.”

  * * *

  THE SINGING SPEAR

  James Enge

  To drink until you vomit and then drink again is dull work. It requires no talent and won’t gain you fame or fortune. It’s usually followed by a deep dark stretch of unconsciousness, though, so it had become Morlock Ambrosius’ favorite pastime.

  In a brief lapse from chronic drunkenness he had invented a device which intensified the potency of wine many times. Because he had no use for gold (he could make it by the cartful if he needed it), he gave the device to Leen, the owner of the Broken Fist tavern. Leen proceeded to make gold by the cartful, through the more mundane method of selling distilled liquor. By his order, Morlock’s cup was never to be left empty when he entered the Broken Fist. Morlock entered the Broken Fist on a daily basis thereafter and stayed until the disgusted potboys tossed him, snoring, into the street. In another time and place, Morlock might have been called an alcoholic. In the masterless lands east of the Narrow Sea, he was simply a man drinking himself to death—and not quickly enough for those few who had to deal with him.

  One evening, as Morlock was just settling down to work, a man came up to him and asked, “Is it true that you’re Morlock the Maker?”

  If Morlock had been a little more sober, he would have just denied it. If he’d been a little drunker, he would have embarked on an elaborate series of lies to make the questioner suspect that he himself might be Morlock the Maker. And if Morlock had been very much drunker, he wouldn’t have been able to answer at all. But, as it happens, he was at that precise state when he was able to know the truth and not care. Apart from actual oblivion, it was the state of mind he enjoyed the most.

  “I’m Morlock,” he said, lifting his slightly crooked shoulders in a shrug. “What’s your poison? They have to serve you for free if you drink with me, you know. Drink with me, get served for free—that’s practically a song, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t want a drink,” the questioner said, sitting down at Morlock’s table. “I want help.”

  “I’m not in the help business. I’m in the drinking business.”

  “That’s not a business.”

  “Not with your lacka—lacka—lackadaisical attitude, no. But I take these things more seriously.”

  Morlock drank several cups of distilled wine while the other told him a long, involved story and then concluded, “So you see, don’t you, that you have to help?”

  “I might, if I’d been listening,” Morlock admitted. “Thank God Avenger, I wasn’t.”

  “You useless bucket of snot!” the other shouted. “Didn’t you hear me tell you that Viklorn has the Singing Spear?”

  “I heard you that time. Who’s Viklorn—some juggler or carnival dancer?” Morlock could see how a singing spear might be useful in a carnival act. Almost involuntarily, his mind began to envision various ways to make a spear sing on cue.

  “Viklorn!” shouted the other man. “The pirate and robber! He’s been using the singing spear to kill and rob all along the coast of the Narrow Sea. And now they say he’s killed his own crew with it and is coming inland with Andhrakar.”

  “Wait a moment.”

  “And you sit there sucking down that swill—”

  “You’re telling me that this ‘singing spear’ is the weapon called Andhrakar?”

  “Yes. And if you—”

  “Just who was stupid enough to take the spear and start using it?”

  The other looked at Morlock almost pityingly. “Viklorn. A pirate and robber.”

  “Moron, you mean. Well, it’s no skin off my walrus.”

  “You mean you won’t help?”

  “I knew you’d catch up eventually. Drink? No? Mind if I do?”

  “You made the damned thing! It’s your responsibility to do something about it!”

  “I made the weapon called Andhrakar,” Morlock admitted. “Arguably, I also damned it. I didn’t make Viklorn, though. Perhaps you’ll have better luck if you consult his creator.”

  The other stared at Morlock for a while, then got up and walked off without a word. He rode away west that night to fight Viklorn, and was killed by the weapon called Andhrakar. It was also called “the singing spear” because, before it killed someone, it began to emit a faint musical tone, which grew louder and deeper until it sank into a human body and was satisfied with blood and life.

  That’s how it was with Morlock’s questioner. He came upon Viklorn in the night, hoping to surprise him. But Viklorn did not sleep, could not sleep, remembering the things he had seen and done, and watching the visions that Andhrakar put in his head. He heard the man appro
aching stealthily through the brush and leapt up from his bedroll. Andhrakar, the singing spear, was ready in his hand—in fact, he could not let go of it now. Through Andhrakar’s magic, his fingers were oak-hard, growing into the wooden shaft of the spear, bound in an unbreakable grip on the damned weapon he had chosen to wield.

  Viklorn fought the man who longed to kill him, silently in the dark, until both men heard the spear begin to sing (faint and high at first, but then stronger, deeper, louder), and both men groaned (the one with fear, the other with anticipation). Soon Andhrakar split the attacker’s torso and grew still. Viklorn left the corpse unburied in the dark and lay back down on his bedroll, next to the spreading pool of blood. Thus died the man Morlock would not help, a brave man but not very shrewd. No one remembers his name.

  Morlock was shrewd, on occasion, but he didn’t think of himself as brave. Some drunks, perhaps, display courage, but Morlock wasn’t that type. He drank because he was afraid, of life and of death. It hadn’t always been that way. Once Morlock had been a hero, at least in the eyes of some—in any case, he’d been a more useful sort of person than he was now. But that part of him was used up. So he jeered at himself: only a coward would drink and drink because he was afraid of the pain life held.

  Viklorn continued to rob and kill throughout the region. You had to call it robbery, for he took stuff and destroyed what he couldn’t take. But he was likely to leave what he took by the roadside or in an open field. He stole because part of him was still Viklorn, a robber. But there was not enough of the man left to remember what robbers robbed for, what use they made of the things they took. Increasingly, he simply killed and killed, destroying with fire what he could not kill with Andhrakar.

  “Why did you make that damn spear?” the barkeep asked Morlock one night, before he was too drunk to answer sensibly.

  “I had my reasons,” Morlock answered sensibly.

  Later that night, Leen, the owner of the Broken Fist and the man to whom Morlock had entrusted the invention of the still, sat down beside him. Now that Leen was wealthy, he never stood behind the bar himself; he was so short that he had trouble seeing over it. Back in the days when he couldn’t afford to hire help, he’d kept a series of boxes behind the bar, and it had been fun to watch him deftly leaping from box to box. And if he ever needed to climb over the bar to take care of an unruly customer, he saw to it that the customer would never be a problem again. Morlock rather liked him, although he understood that to Leen he was just another gullible drunk.

  “Morlock,” Leen began.

  “Leen.”

  “Morlock, what do you think you can do about Viklorn and Andhrakar?”

  “Leen,” Morlock answered sensibly (but just barely), “what do you think I can do about Viklorn and Andhrakar?”

  Leen stood up and walked away. The faces scattered around the barroom, never friendly, turned to Morlock afterward with especial distaste. Morlock, never sensitive, was uncomfortable enough to leave while he was still conscious, an unusual event.

  He was back at the usual time the next day, but the Broken Fist was closed. Closed permanently: the door and window-shutters of the inn were nailed shut. He asked a passing townswoman, who told him that Leen had packed up in the night.

  “People say he’s moved north to Sarkunden,” she said. “I’m going south, myself. People say Viklorn’s already been there: why would he go back?”

  Morlock brushed aside people and their concerns and stuck to the essential point. “Leen went to Sarkunden—a thousand miles away?” he shouted. “Is he insane? What am I supposed to drink?”

  The townswoman made a suggestion. Morlock declined (the fluid she mentioned was not an intoxicant), and went back to his cave.

  For a day or so, Morlock suffered the delirium that comes sometimes at the end of a drunken binge. Finally he fell asleep and dreamt a prophetic dream. (Among his other wasted talents, Morlock was a seer.)

  In the dream, Morlock saw himself confronting Viklorn and Andhrakar. Viklorn was a tall pirate with eyes as red as a weasel’s. He wore dirty, pale, untanned leather with golden fittings, and a gold clip kept his shaggy blond hair out of his face. He said nothing; they fought silently, except for the sound of Andhrakar’s deadly unbreakable blade clashing against Morlock’s sword. Andhrakar dripped with fresh blood, but it was still hungry for life, and soon it began to sing, faintly at first, but then louder and louder. Viklorn laughed, excited and pleased, and Morlock awoke with a curse in his mouth.

  This was bad, he thought, sitting up. Never in a thousand years would he have chosen to fight someone armed with Andhrakar. But, although he might be not especially brave (a phrase Morlock preferred, when sober, to the franker coward), he wasn’t stupid. He would fight Viklorn: so the vision told him. He needed to act swiftly if the meeting was to be on his own terms.

  He consulted a crow he knew in the neighborhood, who promised to locate Viklorn for him. He spent that day and the next doing exercises to bring his agility and wind closer to what they once had been. When the crow came and told him that Viklorn was at Dhalion, a day’s walk north and west, he thanked it and fed it some grain. Then he threw his backpack on his shoulders, belted on his sword, and started loping with a long, uneven stride northeast on the old Imperial Road. The chances were he would run into Viklorn, if Viklorn was moving eastward from the Narrow Sea.

  The road was bad. The old Empire of Ontil had been out of business for centuries, and its roads were returning to nature. Often Morlock walked next to the “pavement” of shattered rocks, dense with tree-roots and overgrowth. But he made pretty good time going on foot. He had a serenely unpleasant feeling he was headed straight for his destined meeting with Viklorn, and it turned out he was right.

  It happened this way. Morlock topped a ridge and, looking downward, he saw a wagon overturned beside the road. This was not uncommon. The road was the only route through the masterless lands, but it was terrible for carting goods. Morlock found with surprise, though, that he recognized the man standing beside the cart: it was Leen. He’d had at least three days’ head start on Morlock, but his property must have slowed him down. Morlock saw some people running away from the cart, farther up the road. Perhaps they were going for help, although there was little help to find along this road. Then Morlock saw a man approaching Leen. Morlock knew this man also, but not from seeing him in his waking life. It was the hulking blond man in his dream, the man who carried Andhrakar: Viklorn the killer.

  “Leen!” shouted Morlock, lifting his leaden feet and running down the hill. “Run away, you fool! Leave your stuff! I’ll make you a new still! I’ll make you new gold! Run like hell!”

  But Leen didn’t run. He turned to face Viklorn the killer, with a piece of wood in his hand and no hope in his face. Against Viklorn, he was like a squat mountain peak, impinging on the great golden face of a rising moon. He didn’t seem to hear Morlock, and as Morlock ran closer he heard what Leen must have heard before: the sweet musical tone of the singing spear, growing deeper and stronger as the foredestined moment of death approached.

  Leen had stayed behind intentionally, Morlock realized—stayed to confront Viklorn, knowing he would die, giving the others a chance to run for their lives. Leen struck out at Viklorn with his makeshift club. The killer easily evaded his blow; Andhrakar slashed twice and Leen fell in three pieces on the ground. Viklorn laughed a high-pitched, weary, hysterical laugh. So Leen died—a shrewd man and brave, though that didn’t save him.

  “You son of a bitch!” Morlock shouted, tears stinging his eyes. “You’ve killed my bartender!”

  Viklorn turned to face him. His eyes were red as a weasel’s—as red as the fresh blood dripping from the spear. He pointed at Morlock with the dark blade—crystalline, unbreakable, fashioned by the greatest magical craftsman the world had ever known—and smiled.

  Morlock shrugged his backpack off onto the broken road behind him and drew his sword. Viklorn’s smile dimmed as he saw the blade, kin to the spearhea
d on his own weapon: dark, crystalline, unbreakable. Morlock demonstrated the latter fact by passing the sword through a broken pillar beside the road. It fell obligingly to pieces, raising a great cloud of dust. Morlock leapt through the cloud, lunging at Viklorn.

  If the fight had been between Morlock and Viklorn, Morlock would have won easily. True, Morlock was a drunk rather badly in need of a drink, not at all the man he had been. But Viklorn was not well either: his face was the face of a dying man; God Sustainer knew when he had last slept, or if he ever ate or drank.

  But the fight was really between Andhrakar and Morlock. Viklorn looked on in bemusement as his dark blade feinted and lunged at the man who had made it. Andhrakar didn’t need sleep, or food, or water, or air. All it needed was human life; all it hungered for was the savor of dying men and women. Though it still dripped with fresh blood, it was clearly thirsty for more; it began to sing, faintly at first, but then louder and louder. Viklorn laughed, excited and pleased, and Morlock cursed. The singing tone rose and fell and rose again, like a bell, like the baying of a dog. Andhrakar would kill again, and soon.

  The spear lashed out. Morlock ducked away from the spearhead and grabbed the shaft just above Viklorn’s lifeless hand. Morlock brought down his dark blade and slashed off Viklorn’s spear-hand at the wrist. The severed hand still clutched the shaft of the spear in an unbreakable grip. The spear still sang, louder than ever now, drowning all other noises. Morlock spun the business end of the spear about. As Viklorn stood there, blinking at the gushing stump of his arm, Morlock buried the dark shining spearhead in his neck. Viklorn fell backward to the ground and the singing spear fell silent, slaked by his death.