Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  Instantly, some bowls of scented water were brought to them, by a pair of white rabbits. Without comment, each man rinsed his hands, at which two black rabbits appeared to offer linen towels. All four rabbits had come from under the table draperies, to which area they next withdrew. But, unceremoniously yanking up the drapery, Zire and Bretilf peered beneath—to find no sign of rabbits, bowls, towels, nor any hatch that might afford entry and exit.

  Reemerging from under the cloth, the two found instead their beautiful hostess had herself sat down at the table’s central position. Her serenity was exquisite.

  “Brave sirs, do choose whatever you wish to eat. Munch and Janthon there will serve you.”

  Anticipating further rabbits, Bretilf and Zire were startled when a handsome, long-haired white cat appeared, walking upright out of a bouquet of pale flowers at the table’s southern end. In another breath, a larger, but also handsome, short-haired black dog manifested at the table’s northern end. This being stood on the floor by Zire’s chair. The dog, too, walked upright, which meant its head was level with Zire’s own—it was a large canine indeed.

  Zire pulled himself around with a little effort. “Good evening, Janthon,” said Zire. “If you’ll be so kind, I will have—”

  “No trouble, sir,” replied the dog with faultless articulation. “Your mind is read.” And, taking the proper implements from the board, dexterously began to slice for Zire the very cooked fowl he had been intent on. That done, Janthon stalked to Bretilf’s place and, unasked, extended agile front paws and carved up for him a paté and a pie. Munch the cat meanwhile filled Bretilf’s crystal glass of spirit, and now came to Zire to pour his silver tankard of beer.

  Unnoted during these operations, three white owls had entered through a high window. Perching upon golden stands, they now began to sing a quiet but melodious trio, to the accompaniment of three black, crow-like birds, which seemed to have arrived via the mansion’s open door. One beat a drum with its claws, another performed on a small harp, which it struck tunefully with one wing. The third whistled through its beak.

  Zire and Bretilf ate and drank some while without a word exchanged.

  At last, Bretilf spoke levelly to Zire. “Have we gone mad?”

  “I think so,” answered Zire in an offhand way. “Probably some effect of the geas, or else too strong a drug used to subdue us in the city.”

  “Or, alternatively, perhaps it’s a dream.” Bretilf turned to their delicious female companion, who sat quietly sipping a goblet of sherbet laced with wine. “Would you say so, madam?”

  “All life is a dream,” she replied, smiling. “Or so it is said.”

  “You are then a philosopher, lady,” said Zire.

  “No. I am a witch. Whose name is Ysmarel Star.”

  Zire and Bretilf put down their silver knives and drinking vessels. Each man rose.

  “A witch. What else? I fear,” said Zire, “we must be on our way.”

  “Urgent business at a castle,” elaborated Bretilf, “involving doom and horrible death.”

  Ysmarel Star nodded. “So many have passed by, en route to such a fate. Few ever listened to my messenger, Loë.”

  “Perhaps, unlike ourselves, they knew your true vocation—witchcraft—and were too…respectful to call. There is sorcery enough in the city and the forest, surely. It tends to make even desperate men—among whom we must be counted—reluctant.” This, from Zire.

  “We trust not to offend by such frankness,” finished Bretilf.

  But Ysmarel paid no attention. She went on as if neither of her guests had spoken a word.

  “Of the few who did heed Loë, none before, suspecting a trap, dared enter my house. There were others who, having seen Loë, failed to see my gate, or anything else. It takes, gentlemen, a particular type of acuteness and sparkle, to note such things. Even that a rabbit, cat, or dog waits on them at table. That owls make music. Let alone the presence of my humble self.”

  “Any man who missed seeing you, fair lady,” said Zire, “would need to be blind, and other things besides, perhaps more personally unhappy in his lower regions.”

  Bretilf said, “Any man who failed at seeing you, Ysmarel, would need to be dead.”

  “However,” continued Zire, “we must get on.”

  “To be late for a doom is the worst bad manners,” augmented Bretilf.

  Ysmarel still gave no heed.

  “I have known for long months the imposed task which the False Prince of Cashloria sets any transgressor: to steal back the Robe of War-Winning. It is a hopeless venture. Men of great courage and genius have gone to the doom you refer to. Even thirteen women of unusual battle-skills and wisdom. But all perished, male and female alike. And each, it’s true, ended horribly.

  “For example,” continued Ysmarel Star, modifying her stance rather in the manner of certain feminine storytellers, “the glamorous and gifted sword-mistress, Shaiy of the Red Desert, having killed two guards who attempted unwanted affection, was sentenced to seek the Robe.

  “Shaiy was well known for her varied warrior talents, not to mention her learning and quick wit. It’s said she could compose an ode worthy of the greatest poets in twice ten minutes. Or a bawdy song inside three slow heartbeats. Riddles she could answer while asleep. She was a notoriously sage robber, said to have stolen the Great Emerald of Gullo. Though she then kindly gave it away to a destitute lover. But even Shaiy only returned from the evil castle dead, and minced small, everything of her in a tiny box, all but her dainty white ears—which were pinned on the lid in the exact form of a butterfly.”

  Zire studied his boots; Bretilf cleared his throat.

  Ysmarel simply clapped her slender hands. At the signal, every light in the mansion died, every waft of perfume, tasty dinner, or music—fled. A dog barked once, a rabbit squeaked, and a cat spat. A rattle of wings and clatter of discarded perches and instruments revealed where crows and owls beat it at top speed through a window and a door. The room had become black as tar. Only the star gleamed on the garden outside.

  Male voices uttered.

  “Are you able, Bretilf, to move at all?”

  “Not I. And you, Zire?”

  “Neither.”

  “Rest, my friends,” murmured the seductive tones of the witch. “I have concocted, for your intelligence and reckless natures, another destiny than you predict.”

  “A witch, what else? That food,” said Bretilf next, now in a slurred and impersonal way.

  “Or that witchy bloody beer,” grumbled Zire. “To the lowest hell with it, we have yet again—”

  “—been drugged and enspelled,” explained Bretilf.

  In the darkness, there now sounded a discordant slumping couple of thuds, as of two muscular young men dropping on a tiled floor, amid their boots, garments, a part-sculpted stag, swords, and other accessories.

  There followed a woman’s provocative laugh. And night extinguished the scene both inside and out, as the low diamond of the abnormal star capsized in clouds.

  In sleep, there was no respite either. Each man dreamed a selection of episodes concerning those luckless heroes—and heroines—who had entered the infamous castle.

  Bretilf beheld Drod Laphel, tall and powerful, with golden locks, striding through an enormous sable building, sword ready, while a huge serpent oozed toward him. It was scaled like an alligator, yet black-blue as midnight. It opened its scarlet jaws and made a noise as of steam rising from a hot spring. At that, Drod chanted some spell so hypnotic even the actually ensorcelled and drugged and anyway non-serpentine Bretilf grew helpless. Surprisingly, the serpent did not. It surged forward, a scaly wave from a midnight ocean, and the golden swordsman vanished in its coils.

  Zire, too, dreamed, but his surreality concerned the beautiful Shaiy. She was a lightly sturdy young woman, with skin of cream and eyes like green embers. Now, standing inside a huge vaulted hall, she confronted a sort of puma, with the head of a falcon and falcon wings. The falcon-puma had challenged
her, it seemed, to solve some conundrum, and to sing her reply. This Shaiy proceeded to do. But no sooner did her excellent mezzo-soprano fill the space than the echo of her voice itself became a living entity, which boomed and howled like thunder. Blocks of masonry started to fall. And both Shaiy and the cat-bird-sphinx were lost to view.

  Thereafter there were endless such dreams. Maybe even fifty or more of those condemned to seek the Robe appeared before Bretilf and Zire. All foundered. In each case, definite clues were given as to the vile methods of their ending.

  Then at last Bretilf dreamed, and Zire, too, that they themselves—each solo—entered the same lapideous building. Their names had altered, for some reason. Zire was called Izer, Bretilf—Ibfrelt. Knowing this was less than useful to them.

  Upon Zire, from the shadowy architecture rushed flapping creatures, most like colossal books, and he, spinning and leaping, wielding Scribe to parry and slash and pierce, the knife to stab and slice, still battled them in vain. They closed on him, and slammed him shut inside their covers.

  Bretilf found that he had tried to draw, or carve out on the walls, talismans of beneficent gods. But they erupted like boiling black milk, grew solid, ripped away his weapons from his grip. After which a giant stag rose out of the floor and tore at him, and stove in his ribs, with antlers and feet.

  Slaughtered personally over and over in their dreams, Izer-Zire and Ibfrelt-Bretilf longed for day and awakening, whether in a hell or heaven, or—the favorite choice—the world.

  Dawn though, as was its habit, took its own time.

  A century later, perhaps, it seemed, the metal-leafed forest flooded pink as a blush. The sun rose. The things of darkness…fled?

  The mansion of the witch was somber and deserted-looking in the morning. No owls, or any birds, were evident. The white roses had folded tight as buds, as if only after sunset could they open.

  Even so, the door to the mansion remained wide. As did the outer gate.

  In a while, something might be seen to be moving through the garden.

  If the sun watched for Zire and Bretilf, the sun was due for a disappointment, since what presently padded through the gates on to the hillside, though two in number, were a pair of young lions. Once outside, both paused to sniff the gate-posts, the air. One growled, the other lashed its tail. Roughly of an age, and having the same lean girth and obvious male stamina, tawny and limber, white-fanged, and tail tufted and maned—one dark red, the other more a tangerine shade—they might have been brothers of a single pride.

  A look of slight unease was swiftly concealed by them, in the way of animals. They turned and cuffed each other, and rolled about play-fighting—until suddenly rolling right across on to the track. Here they got up, shook themselves, touched noses, and glanced around, one with topaz eyes, the other with eyes of shined silver.

  To anyone who knew no better than to credit all sorcery, they would be taken for Bretilf the Artisan and Zire the Scholar magicked into feline beasts.

  Both lions, anyway, now raced off along the track, perhaps coincidentally in the very direction the geas prescribed.

  A lion knows it is a lion, even if it has no occasion to tell itself so. Had it found occasion, it would, and using whatever words make up the lionesque language. All animals, naturally, employ language. Human ignorance of this results from the fact most humans have never understood most of the animal tongues. The reason being perhaps because, beyond the very obvious, animal language is formulated to convey states, ideas, and principles of conduct quite out of the range of human grasp. Certain schools of thought even maintain that what man sees in himself as “acting like an animal,” rather than a sign of degeneracy, is a sadly inadequate effort on mankind’s part to copy the philosophical intellectual animal technique in the mastery of life, love, and death.

  Zire, then, knew himself a lion. And Bretilf likewise knew himself a lion. That they were brothers was undeniable, fundamental, and largely irrelevant. As for a strange jumble each vaguely noticed as being a name, and a distorted name, neither bothered with it.

  Nevertheless, both lions were slightly conscious of bizarre concepts, which sometimes swirled about in their maned and noble heads. To these also they paid little attention. What they knew was this: the day was warm, the earth and trees smelled good, and everywhere blew the scents of interesting things both to experience and to eat. Something excited and pushed them on in a particular direction. It went without saying therefore this direction was desirable, and promised much. To resist the tug of it was not even considered.

  For hours the lions bounded through the forest. By now verdure was thick, and the track less than a thread between the roots of trees and laceries of fern. Now and then they paused to investigate some interesting odor, sight, or noise, rested in shade under the sun-flamed canopy, drank from a streamlet dark as malachite. All was as it should be.

  Noon filled the sky and so the forest. From safe tree-tents, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, and wood pigeons watched the lions, most respectfully.

  To a man, the scene that now appeared between the trees was that of a huge clearing. For almost a mile all vegetation had been mown down or dredged up, and then a floor laid there, made of odd triangular flagstones, which seemed of polished basalt. In this surface the unhidden sky reflected, so it glimmered like a black lake. At its center rose a building. To a man, again, or a woman, it was instantly apparent this structure had been formed from the trunks and heavy summer crowns of many living trees. Yet they had also been deformed. Some leaned askew, some were warped in unnerving hoops, and some forced together at their tops to provide a roof with branches, boughs, and foliage. After that, sorcery had struck them. They had turned to stone—not the smooth basalt of the paving, but petrified coal of dense, ashen black.

  As no men were in the clearing, but rather lions, that analysis did not occur. The lions saw a cave-like mass, cool in the day’s heat, and having to it an olfactory tang of human flesh and blood. In other words, recent fresh corpses.

  Pausing only to dip cautious paws into the lake which surrounded the caves, and so learn it was solid, they sprang forward, and vanished through the entrance.

  Izer, the lion who had been Zire, darted through a succession of lowering, gaping, all-black vistas. Space led into space, some more narrow, others wider or more winding. Izer galloped blithely through them all. Their enormity, and cranky arboreal sculpting, did not faze him. He did not feel made small and vulnerable, as a man might. Instead, curious as a young cat, he climbed where able up the malformed sides of the stone trees, and stuck his long, big nose into holes and fissures. He raised his paw and scraped the petrified material with a single claw. At which blue sparks flew and he veered away.

  From the guts of this inert yet nastily intestine-suggestive labyrinth, came the most insidious wavering drone of sound. It was the sound of utter soundlessness, disturbed only in the ear of the listener by the tempo of pulse and heart. Izer paid it little attention. His hearing was honed for more informative noises. Of these there seemed to be none.

  Then with no warning, something rushed sharply through the air, about three lion-lengths above him. Izer raised his head.

  It was a bird. But a bird Izer had never seen, nor been self-trained to expect. It had no beak, nor even a head. Its outflung, fluttering wings were dark above, with complex paler featherings below, but they supported nothing. The bird had no body either.

  Izer did not identify the flying object as a book, which, to a human, it would appear to be. For him it was only logical to classify it as a bird. And as lions are generally a match for most birds, save those of supernatural size, such as a roc, he leapt straight at it, bore it to the earth and smashed it there. The book’s spine broke. Izer tore at its feather pages, champed and spat them out. The bird was not good eating, good for nothing, aside from a bit of swift exercise. When the next one came flapping at him, Izer took this in sporting spirit, sprang at it and batted it about a while, before destroying it on the gro
und. Other books followed in streamers, though not very many. Izer danced about with them, enjoying himself. When the last was felled, he noted tiny scurrying things that were spilling from the carcasses. He put his paws on them, bit and squashed them. They were written words, yet Izer did not know this. They meant nothing at all to him beyond a playful moment or two. They tasted only of ink anyway. He also spat their shredded bodies forth, rolled on his back, shook his henna mane, and trotted off deeper into the petrified maze.

  Elsewhere, Ibfrelt, the lion who had been Bretilf, was nosing around some knots in the floor that might, once, have been edible fungi. He, too, was uninterested in the persistent yodel of the silence. However, presently he heard a curious scraping noise, and looking around saw some sharp implements worming out of a wall. No sooner were they ejected than they began to crawl over the floor, scratching irritatingly as they did so. Ibfrelt went to examine them, batting at them rather as Izer had at the books. Their steel edges made no impression on his well-toughened lion pads. In the end, he became bored with the things and loped off. He did not actually realize that they then pursued him in a highly sinister manner. To Ibfrelt, there could be nothing sinister about them. Nor did he see when, by then some way behind him, they lost momentum, rusted, flaked, and fell apart.

  Wandering on into another chamber of the building, Ibfrelt paused only when a sudden form reared up from the floor. A man would have known this figure at once for a fellow man—a sword fighter for a fellow swordsman, and a dangerous one. He was tall, and laden with muscle, clad in mail, and armed both with a broadsword of considerable size and a dagger of extraordinary length. At Ibfrelt, he glared with flashing, maniacal eyes, and from a sneering gob let out a challenge: “Match me then, you damnable nonentity!”

  But Ibfrelt evidently only knew men—when he had known them—as menu-worthy pieces of prey. Shows of weapons, of aggression, protective armorings—they meant nothing at all, to a lion. Ibfrelt smelled live meat, and he gave a snarl of appetite, then launched himself, like a vast ginger firework, at the threatening hulk.