Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  “I’m no longer associated with that society. I was forced to leave them under less than honorable circumstances. Kill me and I suspect the only reason they’d even think of hunting you down would be to thank you.” I always correct those who believe me to still be a part of the Waterhouse Brotherhood. Always. They’re more fanatic about hunting down those who pretend association with them than they are about those who kill one of their members.

  “An odd moment for full candor,” Roe said. He paced, circling just out of sword reach, avoiding the bloodstain on the floor, which had already begun to grow tacky. Roe’s slippers whispered against the tiles. He was careful to keep his wary eyes on me. Though he might be willing to be friends, we weren’t there yet.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I can’t accept your offer anyway. Tywar and Jonar were friends. I have an obligation to try to avenge them.”

  “They were thugs. Refined men owe nothing to such animals.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “You won’t succeed. Nor will you survive this house. I’ve constructed so many wonderful snares, subtle and deadly. You’ve already met my Golems Decapitant. They’re just to ensure the mouse stays inside the trap.”

  “I thought they were Ulmore’s creations.”

  “Hardly. My master is great in power, but lacking in art. He wields his power strictly in the old ways, like a blunt instrument. That monstrous thing growling and groaning downstairs is one of his creatures, summoned up from one of the many hells where the old gods were thrown down. I created the other protections, constantly improving and refining them. That’s another reason why your two companions were invited to do their thieving here. My work needs frequent testing.”

  “So it wasn’t all a selfless urge to better serve your adopted hometown.”

  “Try one of the doors,” he said. “They all lead to freedom—eventually. But first you’ll have to get through my gauntlet. Survive the wire hounds and you’ll have to face the Shades Perilous, and perhaps then the fragrance room, or the black pattern, or—well, I’ve written a number of elegant murder stories, each one a variation on a central theme.”

  “Care to tell me which door leads to which trap?”

  “All to each. Choosing a specific door just changes the order in which you encounter them.”

  “And how were you planning to let me get out alive?”

  “By accompanying you. They won’t activate if I’m present.”

  “Then I should bring you with me, shouldn’t I?” For the most part, swordplay in our world is a matter of closing with an opponent and hacking at him with the broad edge of a heavy blade. Roe was still safely outside the range of that sort of business. But at the Waterhouse, we’d learned a different kind of bladework, with improved weaponry. In a single motion, I drew my long, thin, and flexible waterblade from its sheath and thrust it, point-forward, in a deep lunge that more than doubled the effective range of a sword. Roe was taken entirely by surprise. My blade plunged deep into his chest. Several inches of its tip passed out the other side.

  For a second, he just stood there, looking down at the sword stuck through him, a mild look of wonder on his face. Then he crumpled, lifeless, to the floor.

  I put a foot in his gut, pulled my blade out from him, and wiped it off on his robes before sheathing it. With both hands free again, I picked up his corpse and hoisted it over one shoulder.

  “I hope the protection of your company still works when you’re dead.”

  I picked a door more or less at random and started towards it. Before I’d gone a dozen steps, I felt myself losing my grip on Roe’s body. It was rapidly growing lighter, and falling apart. I dropped the thing back on the floor and watched it turn to dust before my eyes. Then the dust turned into smaller specks that blew about for a bit, before disappearing entirely. Laughter echoed throughout the chamber.

  “I withdraw my offer of release,” the voice said, coming from everywhere, or nowhere. It was unmistakably Roe’s voice. “You’ll just have to win your own way out. I doubt you’ll make it. No one ever has before. But I hope you do. Oddly, I’ve come to like you in our short acquaintance, and I’d enjoy continuing our conversation sometime.”

  I didn’t reply. It seemed we’d said all that needed to be said. Since I was already pointed at one of the doors, I continued in that direction and opened it. There was a darkened corridor behind the door, leading only a few feet inward before it took a sharp right turn. I could smell a heavy and cloying musk from somewhere within, both attractive and repellent, fragrant decay. I also heard the distant sharpening of many knives, odd skittering sounds, and the musical notes of a thousand glass shards brushing against each other. The attractive part of the odor grew stronger, tugging at me, almost compelling me to enter.

  I slammed the door and stepped back.

  In the central room, the blade-armed golems had been released from whatever invisible force was confining them to the upper landing. They were shuffling down both staircases, increasing speed with each step. Swords and knives and spears were twisting and shaking in the grips of the statues, screeching, metal against metal, straining to be free of them. And the animal sounds from downstairs were growing louder, more agitated, and more proximate. Whatever it was down there was on its way up.

  Okay, I may be in some trouble here.

  * * *

  JOE ABERCROMBIE attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. His first novel, The Blade Itself, was published in 2004, and was followed by two further books in the First Law trilogy, Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. His most recent book is a stand-alone novel set in the same world, Best Served Cold, and he is currently at work on another, The Heroes. Joe now lives in Bath with his wife, Lou, and his daughters, Grace and Eve. He still occasionally edits concerts and music festivals for TV, but spends most of his time writing edgy yet humorous fantasy novels.

  * * *

  THE FOOL JOBS

  Joe Abercrombie

  Craw chewed the hard skin around his nails, just like he always did. They hurt, just like they always did. He thought to himself that he really had to stop doing that. Just like he always did.

  “Why is it,” he muttered under his breath, and with some bitterness too, “I always get stuck with the fool jobs?”

  The village squatted in the fork of the river, a clutch of damp thatch roofs, scratty as an idiot’s hair, a man-high fence of rough-cut logs ringing it. Round wattle huts and three long halls dumped in the muck, ends of the curving wooden uprights on the biggest badly carved like dragon’s heads, or wolf’s heads, or something that was meant to make men scared but only made Craw nostalgic for decent carpentry. Smoke limped up from chimneys in muddy smears. Half-bare trees still shook browning leaves. In the distance the reedy sunlight glimmered on the rotten fens, like a thousand mirrors stretching off to the horizon. But without the romance.

  Wonderful stopped scratching at the long scar through her shaved-stubble hair long enough to make a contribution. “Looks to me,” she said, “like a confirmed shit-hole.”

  “We’re way out east of the Crinna, no?” Craw worked a speck of skin between teeth and tongue and spat it out, wincing at the pink mark left on his finger, way more painful than it had any right to be. “Nothing but hundreds of miles of shit-hole in every direction. You sure this is the place, Raubin?”

  “I’m sure. She was most specifical.”

  Craw frowned round. He wasn’t sure if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause he was the one that brought the jobs and the jobs were usually cracked, or if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause the man was a weasel-faced arsehole. Bit of both, maybe. “The word is ‘specific,’ half-head.”

  “Got my meaning, no? Village in a fork in the river, she said, south o’ the fens, three halls, biggest one with uprights carved like fox heads.�
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  “Aaaah.” Craw snapped his fingers. “They’re meant to be foxes.”

  “Fox Clan, these crowd.”

  “Are they?”

  “So she said.”

  “And this thing we’ve got to bring her. What sort of a thing is it, exactly?”

  “Well, it’s a thing,” said Raubin.

  “That much we know.”

  “Sort of, this long, I guess. She didn’t say, precisely.”

  “Unspecifical, was she?” asked Wonderful, grinning with every tooth.

  “She said it’d have a kind of a light about it.”

  “A light? What? Like a magic bloody candle?”

  All Raubin could do was shrug, which wasn’t a scrap of use to no one. “I don’t know. She said you’d know it when you saw it.”

  “Oh, nice.” Craw hadn’t thought his mood could drop much lower. Now he knew better. “That’s real nice. So you want me to bet my life, and the lives o’ my crew, on knowing it when I see it?” He shoved himself back off the rocks on his belly, out of sight of the village, clambered up and brushed the dirt from his coat, muttering darkly to himself, since it was a new one and he’d been taking some trouble to keep it clean. Should’ve known that’d be a waste of effort, what with the shitty jobs he always ended up in to his neck. He started back down the slope, shaking his head, striding through the trees towards the others. A good, confident stride. A leader’s stride. It was important, Craw reckoned, for a chief to walk like he knew where he was going.

  Especially when he didn’t.

  Raubin hurried after him, whiny voice picking at his back. “She didn’t precisely say. About the thing, you know. I mean, she don’t, always. She just looks at you, with those eyes…” He gave a shudder. “And says, get me this thing, and where from. And what with the paint, and that voice o’ hers, and that sweat o’ bloody fear you get when she looks at you…” Another shudder, hard enough to rattle his rotten teeth. “I ain’t asking no questions, I can tell you that. I’m just looking to run out fast so I don’t piss myself on the spot. Run out fast, and get whatever thing she’s after…”

  “Well that’s real sweet for you,” said Craw, “except insofar as actually getting this thing.”

  “As far as getting the thing goes,” mused Wonderful, splashes of light and shadow swimming across her bony face as she looked up into the branches, “the lack of detail presents serious difficulties. All manner of things in a village that size. Which one, though? Which thing, is the question.” Seemed she was in a thoughtful mood. “One might say the voice, and the paint, and the aura of fear are, in the present case…self-defeating.”

  “Oh no,” said Craw. “Self-defeating would be if she was the one who’d end up way out past the Crinna with her throat cut, on account of some blurry details on the minor point of the actual job we’re bloody here to do.” And he gave Raubin a hard glare as he strode out of the trees and into the clearing.

  Scorry was sitting sharpening his knives, eight blades neatly laid out on the patchy grass in front of his crossed legs, from a little pricker no longer’n Craw’s thumb to a hefty carver just this side of a short-sword. The ninth he had in his hands, whetstone working at steel, squick, scrick, marking the rhythm to his soft, high singing. He had a wonder of a singing voice, did Scorry Tiptoe. No doubt he would’ve been a bard in a happier age, but there was a steadier living in sneaking up and knifing folk these days. A sad fact, Craw reckoned, but those were the times.

  Brack-i-Dayn was sat beside Scorry, lips curled back, nibbling at a stripped rabbit bone like a sheep nibbling at grass. A huge, very dangerous sheep. The little thing looked like a toothpick in his great tattooed blue lump of a fist. Jolly Yon frowned down at him as if he were a great heap of shit, which Brack might’ve been upset by, if it hadn’t been Yon’s confirmed habit to look at everything and everyone that way. He properly looked like the least jolly man in all the North at that moment. It was how he’d come by the name, after all.

  Whirrun of Bligh was kneeling on his own on the other side of the clearing, in front of his great long sword, leaned up against a tree for the purpose. He had his hands clasped in front of his chin, hood drawn down over his head and with just the sharp end of his nose showing. Praying, by the look of him. Craw had always been a bit worried by men who prayed to gods, let alone swords. But those were the times, he guessed. In bloody days, swords were worth more than gods. They certainly had ’em outnumbered. Besides, Whirrun was a valley man, from way out north and west, across the mountains near the White Sea, where it snowed in summer and no one with the slightest sense would ever choose to live. Who knew how he thought?

  “Told you it was a real piss-stain of a village, didn’t I?” Never was in the midst of stringing his bow. He had that grin he tended to have, like he’d made a joke on everyone else and no one but him had got it. Craw would’ve liked to know what it was, he could’ve done with a laugh. The joke was on all of ’em, far as he could see.

  “Reckon you had the right of it,” said Wonderful as she strutted past into the clearing. “Piss. Stain.”

  “Well, we didn’t come to settle down,” said Craw, “we came to get a thing.”

  Jolly Yon achieved what many might’ve thought impossible by frowning deeper, black eyes grim as graves, dragging his thick fingers through his thick tangle of a beard. “What sort of a thing, exactly?”

  Craw gave Raubin another look. “You want to dig that one over?” The fixer only spread his hands, helpless. “I hear we’ll know it when we see it.”

  “Know it when we see it? What kind of a—”

  “Tell it to the trees, Yon, the task is the task.”

  “And we’re here now, aren’t we?” said Raubin.

  Craw sucked his teeth at him. “Brilliant fucking observation. Like all the best ones, it’s true whenever you say it. Yes, we’re here.”

  “We’re here,” sang Brack-i-Dayn in his up-and-down hillman accent, sucking the last shred o’ grease from his bone and flicking it into the bushes. “East of the Crinna where the moon don’t shine, a hundred miles from a clean place to shit, and with wild, crazy bastards dancing all around who think it’s a good idea to put bones through their own faces.” Which was a little rich, considering he was so covered in tattoos he was more blue than white. There’s no style of contempt like the stuff one kind of savage has for another, Craw guessed.

  “Can’t deny they’ve got some funny ideas east of the Crinna.” Raubin shrugged. “But here’s where the thing is, and here’s where we are, so why don’t we just get the fucking thing and go back fucking home?”

  “Why don’t you get the fucking thing, Raubin?” growled Jolly Yon.

  “’Cause it’s my fucking job to fucking tell you to get the fucking thing is why, Yon fucking Cumber.”

  There was a long, ugly pause. Uglier than the child of a man and a sheep, as the hillmen have it. Then Yon talked in his quiet voice, the one that still gave Craw prickles up his arms, even after all these years. “I hope I’m wrong. By the dead, I hope I’m wrong. But I’m getting this feeling…” He shifted forwards, and it was awfully clear all of a sudden just how many axes he was carrying, “like I’m being disrespected.”

  “No, no, not at all, I didn’t mean—”

  “Respect, Raubin. That shit costs nothing, but it can spare a man from trying to hold his brains in all the way back home. Am I clear enough?”

  “’Course you are, Yon, ’course you are. I’m over the line. I’m all over it on both sides of it, and I’m sorry. Didn’t mean no disrespect. Lot o’ pressure, is all. Lot o’ pressure for everyone. It’s my neck on the block just like yours. Not down there, maybe, but back home, you can be sure o’ that, if she don’t get her way…” Raubin shuddered again, worse’n ever.

  “A touch of respect don’t seem too much to ask—”

  “All right, all right.” Craw waved the pair of ’em down. “We’re all sinking on the same leaky bloody skiff, there’s no help arguing about it.
We need every man to a bucket, and every woman too.”

  “I’m always helpful,” said Wonderful, all innocence.

  “If only.” Craw squatted, pulling out a blade and starting to scratch a map of the village in the dirt. The way Threetrees used to do a long, low time ago. “We might not know exactly what this thing is, but we know where it is, at least.” Knife scraped through earth, the others all gathering around, kneeling, sitting, squatting, looking on. “A big hall, in the middle, with uprights on it carved like foxes. They look more like dragons to me, but, you know, that’s another story. There’s a fence around the outside, two gates, north and south. Houses and huts all around here. Looked like a pig pen there. That’s a forge, maybe.”

  “How many do we reckon might be down there?” asked Yon.

  Wonderful rubbed at the scar on her scalp, face twisted as she looked up towards the pale sky. “Could be fifty, sixty fighting men? A few elders, few dozen women and children too. Some o’ those might hold a blade.”

  “Women fighting.” Never grinned. “A disgrace, is that.”

  Wonderful bared her teeth back at him. “Get those bitches to the cook fire, eh?”

  “Oh, the cook fire…” Brack stared up into the cloudy sky like it was packed with happy memories.

  “Sixty warriors? And we’re but seven—plus the baggage.” Jolly Yon curled his tongue and blew spit over Raubin’s boots in a neat arc. “Shit on that. We need more men.”

  “Wouldn’t be enough food then.” Brack-i-Dayn laid a sad hand on his belly. “There’s hardly enough as it—”

  Craw cut him off. “Maybe we should stick to plans using the number we’ve got, eh? Plain as plain, sixty’s way too many to fight fair.” Not that anyone had joined his crew for a fair fight, of course. “We need to draw some off.”