The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Then of course he tripped on that cursed loose plank.

  He went down hard on his backside. Sucking in a sharp breath, he took hold of the threads that stitched him together, making ready to release them. He was bound by the curse to never reveal to any inhabitant of this world what he truly was, and doing so would trap him in this world forever, but to survive a killing blow he would have to scatter.

  Yet no steel pierced him. She pelted back to the stairwell. By the time he picked himself up and ran after, she and the mysterious sketchbook were halfway down the steps.

  He plunged after, sure there must be a side gate through which she would escape. Instead a stunning sight met his startled gaze: Despite the disparity in numbers, the imperial soldiers had defensively backed together into an outward-facing circle. They were hampered by a lack of light, for none of the lanterns they carried flickered with even the weakest flame. Only a cold white sphere of light drifted above the head of the particularly handsome man, who stood over to one side away from the altercation, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed like he was annoyed that his reading had been so rudely interrupted.

  Round and around the soldiers prowled the two feathered ones with their claws and teeth and height and speed proving a formidable barrier. One of the soldiers made a probing stab, only to have a claw slash the sword right out of his grip. It clattered away onto the pavement. As the soldier leaped boldly forward to retrieve it the young man Apollo Crow had met at the tavern gate bolted out of the shadows. He melted in a smear and twist of shadow and became a large black saber-toothed cat.

  Apollo Crow stared, almost losing control of his selves as a shock of recognition pulsed through him. Here was another creature like himself, a denizen of the spirit world who like all the inhabitants of the spirit world had the capacity and necessity to change.

  The huge cat roared into the soldier’s startled face. The man staggered back to the safety of his soldierly flock, drawing a knife. By now all were quaking.

  The Honeyed Voice marched forward to confront the hapless men. She looked very powerful with her flock around her.

  “Throw down your swords and you may go in peace, my friends. You labor for a power that will happily sacrifice you for its own selfish purposes.”

  “What strengthens Rome strengthens us all,” said one of the soldiers stoutly.

  Her back was to Apollo Crow, and the bag slung there invitingly, gapping open, as he crept on soft feet forward. She kept talking, perhaps a little too accustomed to hearing herself speak.

  “They who rule give you just enough rope that you feel you can walk freely, while they keep all the advantage to themselves. They pay you a pittance while they sit on a vast treasury…”

  He slid the sketchbook out of the bag and took a step back.

  “…They allow you to till the land as long as you pay a tithe to them for the honor.”

  A flutter of air disturbed his senses for he was adept at adapting to any slight change in the loft and direction of the winds. The currents of movement suggested something moving alongside him and yet he saw no one. Not until the seamstress appeared as out of the air itself. Her edged blade pressed across his chest.

  “Stop there,” she said.

  Apollo Crow laughed out of sheer surprise. Her sudden materialization where she had not been before caused the poor soldiers to lose their tenuous hold on courage. As one, they bolted for the street. The feathered ones stood politely aside to let them pass. The big cat chased them to the gate and lashed its tail with vigor.

  “What manner of creature are you?” he asked the seamstress.

  “I might ask the same of you,” she said. “For you are wrapped in many threads, a skein of shadows, but I don’t know what it means.”

  “Those are the threads of a curse laid on me when I was exiled from my home.”

  “How interesting!” said the seamstress, looking as delighted as a child settling in for a thrilling tale. “Why were you exiled?”

  “I took back something that belonged to me, but it was deemed theft by those with more power than me. So I was cursed into exile on the charge of being a thief.”

  The Honeyed Voice turned to meet his gaze, her attention as bold and solid as truth. Just for an instant it seemed that within her eyes he glimpsed a vast and silent vision of shapes and colors tumbling like flashes of light and line.

  “That is the most honest thing I’ve heard you say,” she began, but broke off as a crow fluttered down to land on his shoulder.

  The big cat hissed.

  The seamstress vanished, like a thread pulled out of the fabric of the world.

  The emperor of Rome and a company of imperial soldiers marched through the gate, their ranks bristling with spears, swords, and crossbows. The cat retreated, teeth bared. The feathered ones lifted their crests threateningly, while the well-dressed and unfortunately handsome man remained standing quietly in the shadows, easy to overlook.

  The Honeyed Voice faced down the emperor with the look of a person sure that her confederates will back her up, that as a flock they are stronger together than alone.

  “As much as this may come as a surprise to you, I confess I did not expect to meet you in Nikaia,” she remarked, as if she and the emperor were well acquainted and accustomed to sparring.

  “Foment revolution among the principalities if you must, my dear Beatrice.” His avuncular tone made her lips pinch. “The turmoil you and your associates create among the border lords serves me well enough.”

  “You mean to expand the empire to its old borders. You will start by moving your troops into areas where you think the ruling princes are too weak to resist or will be grateful for imperial protection against radical agitators.”

  “Do you say that with certainty, or is it a guess?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I do not intend to share my plans with you. When you bring your radical ideas into my empire, then you become my business.”

  “Is it your intention to arrest me?”

  The emperor of Rome looked past her. “Do you have it?”

  Apollo Crow tucked the sketchbook under his arm. “Yes.”

  One luxuriant eyebrow the Honeyed Voice raised, and her lips quirked in a silent laugh.

  There came a pause, a sort of expectant silence, a drawing in as of breath.

  The emperor of Rome suddenly caught sight of the man standing almost hidden at the wall. “Archers! Kill him!”

  “Your mistake,” uttered the Honeyed Voice.

  Crossbows raised, the archers targeted the man just as the temperature in the courtyard plunged from a summery balm to an eye-stinging freeze. The cold hit like a hammer, slamming the emperor and his troops to the ground.

  The magic hit so hard, like an invisible downward slap, that Apollo Crow almost came undone. He held himself together by sheer will, kneeling on the ground as his thoughts swirled. In his time in this world he had encountered magic rarely; he stayed away from mages as a wise bird avoids sunning itself on a rock beside snakes: They might not wish to harm him but it was better not to find out.

  By the time the emperor and his soldiers picked themselves up from the ground, the Honeyed Voice and her associates had fled into the darkened streets. The soldiers turned toward the gate, then paused, awaiting orders.

  “Let me see,” said the emperor, extending a hand.

  Apollo Crow handed him the sketchbook.

  A soldier lit a lamp, and by its light the emperor flipped through the pages, at first with a self-congratulatory smile then with an increasingly furrowed frown.

  “This isn’t her sketchbook!” he roared, and flung the book so abruptly at Apollo Crow that he didn’t have time to dodge. It thumped against his chest and thudded to the ground in a crush of paper.

  “Curse it!” shouted the emperor. Then, “Go after them! Search the premises. And arrest this useless thief.”

  Apollo Crow hastily picked up the sketchbook but since he was immedia
tely surrounded by bristling spears and angry soldiers who acted as if this was all his fault, he had no chance to look at it. The puzzling question of what he had stolen and why it wasn’t the right thing nipped at his heels all the long march to Castle Hill and down ill-lit steps to a corridor of prison cells dug into the rock. Rough hands shoved him into a narrow chamber, then slammed shut the door, leaving him alone with the smell of old urine. High up, right against the ceiling, some manner of opening allowed in a breath of salty sea air. It was too dark to see anything so he groped around until he found a cot. There he sat.

  Not long after, light gleamed beneath the cell door amid the drum of footsteps and the jangle of keys. The door clanged open, and he hastily got to his feet as two soldiers entered, carrying lamps. The emperor appeared.

  “You shouldn’t promise what you can’t deliver,” said the great man without preamble.

  Apollo Crow let the book fall open into the glow of lamplight. A blank page greeted him, and another, and another: all blank.

  “She substituted this unused one for the other one.”

  “They played you.” The emperor shook his head, jaw set with anger. “And to think I actually believed you could manage what you promised.”

  “From your description I thought there was only the woman involved, a persuasive speaker hiding secrets from you in her journal. I thought she’d be accompanied by a few fellow radicals and malcontents. I didn’t realize her comrades would be two feathered ones, a shape changing saber-toothed cat, a woman who can vanish at will, and a powerful mage. Had you warned me, I would have changed my strategy.”

  “So you say now that you’ve failed.” The emperor walked to the door and, pausing at the threshold, spoke to the guards. “Keep her locked in here until I return.”

  “Her?” said Apollo Crow.

  After a generous pause, like an actor deciding whether to give the final flourish to a bow the audience is anticipating, the emperor turned back.

  “I have my own spies. You are in fact Apollonia Crow, a notorious lady thief and smuggler, whose last known residence was the Illyrian city of Salona.” The emperor eyed the fine, glossy black garments Crow wore, then gave a grimace of disgust. “There is a simple way to reveal the truth about you but I disdain violent and humiliating methods.”

  “But you are an emperor. Empires are always violent.”

  “Empires bring peace and order and justice when an enlightened person rules.”

  “If that enlightened person is you?”

  “This sparring is pointless. What I know is that when it suits your purpose, you use a male disguise, as now.”

  “In this world I find my path is better smoothed when people believe I am a man.”

  “So you admit I have seen through your lie?”

  Crow offered a polite bow and tried very hard not to make it mocking although he wanted to laugh out loud. “I disguised myself as a man when I am really a woman. Allow me to introduce myself properly, Your Excellency. I am Apollonia Crow, espionage agent and recoverer of stolen objects, at your service.”

  “You are a thief and a swindler. You’ll serve a year in Nikaia’s prison for your crime.”

  He stepped out into the passage, followed by the guards.

  To his back, Apollo Crow remarked, “Three lies uncaught.”

  “What?” said the emperor impatiently over his shoulder.

  “The curse forces me to accept any offer of employment made to me, and compels me to finish the work to my employer’s satisfaction whatever I may think of the job. But three lies uncaught allow me to walk away from the contract as long as I tell the truth about the curse to the employer I’m leaving. As I am leaving you now.”

  “I’ve heard enough of this farrago. Close the door!”

  The cell door slammed shut. Bars dropped into place. Locks clicked. The sound of footsteps receded.

  Apollo Crow tossed the blank sketchbook on the cot and waited a little longer to make sure everyone had gone back to their expected routine. Then he unstitched the threads that held him together and became a murder of crows, one hundred and thirty-four pair of wings. Each crow easily fit through the barred slit built to be too narrow to admit a human body.

  Most of the flock flew down to the harbor and roosted in the masts until the crack of dawn as ships began to sail with the tide. Although they circled in their numbers, they saw no sign of the Honeyed Voice or her confederates on any deck, escaping by sea. At length two of the farthest-flung scouts returned with news of a coach fleeing west on the coastal road. By the time the flock caught up with the coach, the vehicle had crossed out of Roman territory and into the bordering nation of Oyo, beyond reach of any but the most foolhardy of imperial soldiers.

  Crows are perfect scouts. They accompanied the travelers all day without being spotted. At dusk the coachman and groom put into a well-guarded inn. Soon after the woman opened the shutters to an upstairs room. She sat down at a small table, opened her sketchbook, and began to draw.

  Apollonia Crow took shape in the carriage house and thus avoided the guards at the gate. Climbing the back steps, she knocked on the appropriate door and, when it was opened, stepped inside with a charming smile.

  “You!” said the Honeyed Voice.

  “You recognize me?”

  “You’re very striking. What are you doing here? And why, Mr. Crow, have you affected this disguise as a woman? Did you think to confuse me with a fashionable gown and your hair styled in the antique Hellene fashion?”

  Apollonia Crow paused to look at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. Her black hair fell in pleasing ringlets past her shoulders, but perhaps her chin was a little too square for this face. What a wonder it always was to know that a mere change of clothing and outward presentation altered so radically how people responded to you, whether they thought you too manly for beauty or too feminine for handsomeness.

  “The emperor discovered my ruse.” Apollonia Crow’s gaze slid toward the sketchbook.

  The woman closed it and sat on it. “Your ruse? What ruse is that?”

  “That I disguised myself as a man when really I am a woman.”

  She tilted her head to one side, examining him as if to untangle the threads of his being. “No, you aren’t.”

  “I’m not?”

  The Honeyed Voice seated herself prettily at the table, opened the sketchbook, and resumed her drawing with a speed and precision that made the images emerge as if by magic although it was merely skill. Crows and yet more crows flowed out of her pencil and across the page, flocking, roosting, arguing, spying. They were handsome crows, too, not a single ugly caricature among them.

  “Do you know, I was once infatuated with the emperor of Rome, before he became emperor. I offered to marry him, even though he is old enough to be my father, and yet he turned me down even though he wanted my dreaming for his own uses. How strange that he rejected such a facile way to gain my undying loyalty.”

  “I should think it puzzling he did not choose you as his life-mate when he had the chance.”

  She pressed a hand against her bosom and fluttered her beguiling eyes. “Do you think so?”

  “Yes, of course. You are loquacious and intelligent.”

  “Why, you flatter me.”

  “Why would I need to flatter you when you are already so fine a figure, almost as fine as me?”

  “Why, indeed!” she said with a laugh. “Alas that he had scruples and was loath to take advantage of my infatuation in that particular way. Yet it was a fortunate escape on my part, for otherwise I might be a very different person with a very different outlook on the world than I am now. Rather than calling for revolution I would be standing among those trying to stamp it out. An irony, do you not think?”

  “What are your dreams to him?”

  She set down her pencil. “I can see the future in a manner of speaking. My dreams give me glimpses of what is to come. Often I cannot interpret the visions because they appear as details without cont
ext. A hat. A flowering branch. A broken tea set. So I draw the visions I see in my dreams in my sketchbook. If their details and context can be properly untangled—which is no simple task—my drawings may be said to predict the future.”

  “A lion—that would be the emperor—chaining Queen Europa.”

  “Ha! That was no dream. That was just a metaphorical sketch.” She tapped the pencil against the page. “For example last week I dreamed of crows. One hundred and thirty-four crows. Isn’t that an unusual number?”

  For once, Crow had no answer.

  “Crows are messengers. Of all creatures, they can pass most easily from the spirit world to this world. If a saber-toothed cat can become a man, then why not a flock of crows become a man, or a woman for that matter? Since a flock contains both male and female crows, why be limited to one or the other?”

  Almost the crows fell apart, so shocked by how casually the Honeyed Voice dropped the truth upon them.

  “What brought you across from the spirit world to bide in this world?”

  “None of your business.” The words came out more of a harsh caw.

  “But you already told us, didn’t you? You just thought we wouldn’t believe you, that we’d think you were telling a tale. What did you steal?”

  “I stole back part of myself,” Crow snapped. “Two of my number, stolen by a power greater than mine to serve his needs, as kings and emperors do. That is why I was punished, and exiled to this world, cursed to serve anyone who offered to pay me as if I am nothing more than a petty mercenary.”

  “And here you have landed. Are you back to make another attempt on my sketchbook?”

  “No. I am no longer obligated to serve the emperor of Rome. Now I have come to make an offer to you.”

  “To me?”

  “You caught me in three lies. Therefore, I must henceforth always tell you the truth.”

  She frowned consideringly and made no retort.