The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  The people of the township viewed the thief as the greater curiosity. He walked through the streets, eyes hidden but with a cheerful smile. The empty scabbard bumped against his back with every step.

  The Traveler’s Hearth stood just down from the square and at an angle, like a servant with eyes politely averted. The thief went to it as if he stayed there often. The keeper—a fat man wearing the traditional iron chain of hospitality wrapping his left arm—greeted him in the courtyard.

  “I need only a small room,” the thief said.

  “No small rooms, nor any big ones either,” the fat man said. “Just rooms is all.”

  “All people claim the same dignity before the Imagi?” the thief said as if joking.

  “Just so. Just so. Simin can take your horse if you have one.”

  Simin—a lanky, dark-haired boy with a simple, open face—nodded hopefully. The thief shook his head and handed three of the square, silver coins to the fat man. “I only take what I can carry.”

  The keeper considered the coins as if they spelled out the future, then pressed his lips tight and shrugged. The iron chain clinked as if offering its own metallic thoughts. Simin broke the silence. “I can show you the way anyhow.”

  “Very kind of you,” the thief said.

  Simin trotted ahead, leading the thief down short halls and into a hidden courtyard of cherry trees. A stone cistern loomed in a corner where a thin-limbed girl scrubbed away moss with a black-bristled brush and tried not to stare. The thief nodded to her. She blushed and nodded back.

  Simin stopped at a high door the color of fresh cream, opening the brass latch with a click. The thief stepped into his private room and the boy trotted along behind him. The air smelled of soap and lilac. Shadows clung to the pale walls, like stepping into a sudden twilight. A modest bed with a dark brown, rough-woven blanket of the sort common to the southern tribes a hundred years before. An ironwork sculpture of an iris in a frame hung on the wall opposite the only window. An earthenware jug and cup sat on a low table beside three unlit candles. Simin, smiling, closed the shutters as if the thief had asked him to. The shadows grew deeper.

  The thief sank slowly to the bed. The empty scabbard clattered on the floor where he dropped it. He swept off his hat and let it sit beside him, covered in pollen and dust. Sweat-dark locks of hair stuck to his balding scalp. His cheerful smile vanished and fear took its place. He shook his head, pressed a palm to his brow, and shook his head again.

  “I can’t. I can’t do this.”

  “You can,” Simin—whose name was not Simin—snapped, his own affectation of boyish goodwill falling away. “And you will.”

  “Did you see that tower? I’ve heard tales of the Mocking Tower, everyone has. I thought it would…I don’t know. Catch the sunlight oddly. Cast weird shadows. ‘Seems to shift moment by moment’ they say, ah? Too damned true. How do I put myself against a wizard who can do that?”

  Simin leaned against the wall, arms folded across his chest. “You don’t. I do.”

  “We’re making a mistake. We should go back.”

  “Back to what? Fire and death? We keep to the plan,” the boy said. “Get the sword. End the war.”

  The thief sagged forward, elbows against his knees, head in his hands. “If you say. If you say.” Then, gathering himself. “Did you find it?”

  Simin poured water from the jug into the cup and handed it to the thief as he spoke. “No. But with you here, they’ll show me. Whatever changes, wherever the guard increases, whatever they keep you from. That’s how I’ll know. You strike the drum, and I listen to the echoes for answers. It works that way. And the more they watch you, the less they watch me.”

  “I know, I know,” the thief said, then paused to drink the cup dry. He handed it back, wiping his lips with a sleeve. “I liked this plan better before I came here. Successions and thrones and blood and armies in the field. Now magic swords and wizards and a tower like something that’s crawled out of a bad dream. I don’t belong in something like this.”

  “Go in the morning. Talk to everyone you can find. Ask about green glass.”

  “Green glass? Why?”

  “I found a private temple not far from the tower fashioned from it. I think the blade may be there.”

  “Green glass, then. And boasting about crossing the Imagi Vert in front of the people most loyal to him. And acting mysterious and charming. When the wizard kills me over this, you can carry the guilt.”

  “What news from the war?” Simin asked, and his tone said he already knew. The swamping of Loon Channel. The murder of Prince Tauen. The starvation in Cai Sao Station. A question that carries its own answer argues something more than its words. The thief understood.

  “The payout justifies the risk,” the bald man said to the boy. “I never said otherwise.”

  “We start tomorrow, then,” the boy said, and left, closing the door behind him.

  “I already started today,” the thief muttered to an empty room.

  —

  King Raan took the throne, and with it control of the Empire, a week before his twentieth name day. A boy still with the glow of youth in his skin, he sat in a chair of gold and gemstones and bones. He ruled for six decades through peace and strife, famine and plenty. Many people born on the day of his ascension lived out their whole lives not knowing any other ruler. The idea of governance and King Raan grew together in the minds of his subjects like two saplings planted side by side twining around each other until neither could exist without the other. King Raan and the Empire and the right function of the world all named the same thing.

  Easy enough, then, to forget the man who bore that weight. He alone of everyone from the Sea of Pearls to the knife-peaked Dai Dou mountains, the ice sheets of High Saral to the deserts of the Heliopon, understood that the man called King Raan who controlled the Empire as a normal person commanded their own hands, and the one named Raan Sauvo Serriadan born of Osh Sauvo, princess of Hei Sa and third wife to King Gaudon, did not share everything. The man and the office that demanded all his days only appeared at peace with each other. If anything, Death’s shadow oppressed him more than it did others because he could not pretend that more power and influence would bring a deeper meaning to his life. Wealth and status could not dispel the questions that haunted him. He sought his consolation in sex and philosophy and—near the end—the occult.

  The sex led to a legion of children both within and outside the political labyrinths of marriage; the philosophy, to a series of melancholy letters which detailed his conception of the human soul and the nature of a well-lived life; and the occult, inevitably, to his friendship with the Imagi Vert.

  The Imagi Vert: a name that conjured up a whole mythology of threats and wonders. Even more than the bodiless voice of the Stone Oracle at Kalafi or the Night Children that played in the waves off the coast of Amphos, the Imagi Vert embodied the deeper mysteries of the world. Some claimed that the Imagi began life as a human and suffered transformation by falling down a cliff and into a flaw in the universe. Others, that God could not breathe life into the clay of the world without opening a crack between heaven and earth, and the scar from that wound took a name and a tower and a circle of land for itself. Or that a great wizard cheated death itself by learning to live backward to the beginning of all things. All the different versions agreed on three things: the Imagi held the Mocking Tower and the land around it inviolate, those who sought to bend the Imagi to mere human will ended poorly, and wonders beyond the understanding of the most outlandish imagination lay hidden in the shadow of that changing and eternal tower. King Raan’s studies of the occult drew him to the low stone wall and the town and the tower as inevitably as water running down.

  No one can know the nature of that first meeting, but many have guessed. Perhaps the emperor could only experience humility before the ageless, timeless thing that called the Mocking Tower home. Or perhaps two people set so far above humanity that power became isolation more resembled
refugees in a vast wilderness clinging to each other. No one witnessed the time those two kept in each other’s company, and King Raan shared little with his court. His trips to the Mocking Tower became first a yearly pilgrimage, then once in the high summer and another in winter’s depth. And then, as his years thinned him and travel from the palaces became impossible, a beloved memory that outlasted all others.

  Death came to King Raan as with anyone. The throne of Empire did not exempt him. Physicians came from every corner of the world bearing vials of salt and herb, charms and chants and leeches. King Raan allowed them all to minister to him like an uncle indulging his nieces and nephews in their games. If he held any real hope of prolonging his life, he didn’t express it. The princes and princesses gathered around the palaces. The eldest—Prince Kinnan—bore his diadem on hair already grown thin and pale by fifty-eight years of life. Princess Magren, the youngest present, still wore braids like a child, celebrating a youth she had not quite outgrown. The palaces grew dense with the volume of servants and wealth and ambition, like a tick ready to pop with blood.

  At the moment of his death, a darkness passed over the palaces. The torches and lamps and the fires in their grates all shuddered and went out. Some claim to have heard the sound of wings, as if the blackness hid a vastness of huge birds. Others, a low, musical whistling that came from the walls themselves. Only King Raan’s nurse and Prince Tauen, who fortune placed at his bedside, heard King Raan’s last words—You remembered your promise—and at the time, they placed no great importance upon them. When the servants finished rekindling the torches and candles, fire logs and lanterns, King Raan lay dead and the Empire changed.

  For a time, it seemed as if this new order might fall close to the old. The legal scholars and priests who studied the arcana of dignified bloodlines identified those of King Raan’s children with just claims to the throne. As eldest, Kinnan held the strongest claim, but Naas—younger but of a higher-born mother—ran a near second. Then Tauen and Clar, Maush, and Tynnyn. Princess Saruenne of Holt cut her hair and her name together, declaring herself Prince Saru in a gesture which the priests said had many precedents. For the weeks of mourning, the Empire held its breath. Then Prince Kinnan announced the date of his ascension and invited his siblings to come in peace to honor the memory of the father they shared.

  Even now, the identity of the men who slaughtered Kinnan’s wife and children remained unclear. But they failed to kill the prince, and the War of Seven Princes began.

  In the years since the first blood spilled, only chaos reigned. News traveled across mountains and plains, lakes and oceans, and it spoke of death and loss and palace intrigue. And, sometimes to those who cared to listen for it, of the Imagi Vert. A fisherman whose cousin worked in the palace kitchens said that on the night of King Raan’s death, when the fires died, a shape—human or nearly so—had been seen flying across the face of the moon. It came from the direction of the Mocking Tower and returned the same way. A woman traveling through the lands of the Imagi Vert at that same time reported that the townsfolk had kept inside that night, leaving the mild summer evening as empty as if a wild storm had raged.

  Some tales could even be verified. Yes, agents of the Imagi had sought out half a dozen of the best swordsmiths in the Empire in the months of King Raan’s decline. Yes, a forge had been built in the lee of the Mocking Tower, then—a month after the death of the king—collapsed. Yes, a stranger had arrived at the library of Ahmon Suer in the weeks after the king’s first decline and demanded an obscure treatise on the nature of the soul.

  Little more than whispers in a high wind, yet the links between the Imagi Vert and the death of the king began to tell a larger tale. This new mythology began in the king’s dying words and ended in one man’s plan to end the war.

  The patchwork of truth and surmise came together this way: In his age, King Raan came to fear death, or if not fear it, at least regret its necessity. He appealed to his deathless friend and companion, the Imagi Vert. Together, they plotted a way that King Raan might shed the clay of his flesh and yet remain undying. The Imagi Vert, through means unknown to the pious, collected the king’s soul when it fled his body, returned with it to the Mocking Tower, and there forged it into a sword. Steel and fire formed a blade in which Raan could escape all endings.

  And then…what would the wizard who lived outside of time do with such a blade? What power could a true soulsword give? Mere human guesses seemed unlikely to plumb the depths of the Imagi’s schemes and plots. Perhaps the sword gave some advantage a thousand years hence. Perhaps it only offered the pleasure of accomplishing a task no other alchemist dared to hazard. But for the heirs of the Empire? For the men and women and children who faced the prospect of war, it was an object of even greater power.

  And so, in the capital of a small nation where King Raan had made one of his last visits, in the home of a woman who, almost two decades before, had been charged with the raising of young Prince Aus, the heir farthest from his father’s throne built schemes of his own.

  He had lived alone his whole life, knowing nothing of his father and mother beyond a direction over the sea and an assurance that his blood gave him honor and dignity, if not love. He covered the fine stone walls in charcoal and wax as he mapped out his journey, the paths of his little armies. The eighth in the War of Seven Princes, and the one with the least hope of victory in the field.

  The field did not concern him. For Aus, the path of victory wound through no battlefields. Only the gardens and grounds of the Mocking Tower. The ruins where ivy already overgrew the charred bones of a forge. A temple of green glass. The streets and stables, mills and kitchens and farmyards of the lands that no king claimed. There or nowhere lay the key to the ambitions of Aus, the Forgotten Prince.

  Aus, whose name was not Simin.

  —

  “I have always had a fondness for…green glass,” the thief said and smiled knowingly. The woman standing before him—dark-haired and broad-shouldered—rested her axe on her shoulder and said nothing. The thief smiled as if the two of them were sharing a joke, tipped his wide-brimmed hat, and moved on down the street. The town betrayed no trace of its eerie status apart from the Mocking Tower itself. Men and women went about the business of their days here as they would anywhere. Dogs and children chased each other over rough stone paving and through wide puddles of standing mud. Birds watched from the tree branches thick with leaves. So long as the constantly changing tower remained hidden, forgetting it seemed possible. And the thief found ways to keep the tower out of sight.

  A thick-faced man hauling a cartload of fresh-cut hay made his way along the street, a creature of soft grunts and sweat. The thief stepped in front of him. “A fine morning. I wonder, friend, if you might know something interesting about green glass? I have good silver to trade for good words.”

  The hauler paused, scowled, and shrugged his shoulders before he shoved on. The thief smiled after him as if his reticence told a clearer tale than all the eloquence in the world. He drew an old tin sextant from his robe, hung a plumb line with a lump of gem-bright crimson glass for a bob, and pretended to take readings of the tops of the trees. He felt like an idiot, and a frightened one at that. He expected to end the day facedown in a ditch with fish eating his eyes. But he also took his work seriously, so he made a mysterious ass of himself and hoped for the best without being too specific about what that best might be.

  In the stables, Prince Aus played at Simin, nodding and helping wherever he found a chance, and above all else listening.

  The keeper to his wife as they tended to the grapevines behind the main house: Of course I sent word to the tower. Went there myself as soon as I saw him off to his room. Expect the Imagi knew well before I said anything, though.

  The cleaning girl to her mother as they walked toward the market with the day’s eggs: The Imagi sent instructions in the night. Little finches with hollowed eyes that carried bits of parchment in their beaks. Bir—(who Simin knew as
the blacksmith’s apprentice)—got one, and so did Soylu.

  One of the little girls wearing as much mud as dress as she clapped her hands in the filthy water by her house: Thieves and rats, thieves and rats, and all of us are blades and cats.

  Everyone knew, as Simin hoped they would. But if any panicked, he didn’t see it. Like a man walking toward a dog on a road at twilight, the town watched, calm and steady, as it judged the threat. But at least it felt threatened or amused or at least interested. Of his greatest fears—boredom, complaisance, indifference—he saw nothing. The thief loomed in the news of the town, and that sufficed.

  After lunch, when Simin traditionally slipped away to the hayloft for a long nap, Prince Aus slipped away down the track that pretended to be a deer trail. He walked carefully, his ears straining over the buzzing of summer flies and the hushing of the high grass. The midday heat drenched him with sweat and the thick air went into his lungs like steam. The Mocking Tower shifted: a spiral of smooth white stones reaching to the sky; a pair of massive yellow curves nesting one within the other like the beak of an impossible huge bird; a single uncarved block of smoky obsidian. As he neared the site of the green-glass temple, he slowed even more.

  The little marks set to warn of others passing along the track remained. The long blade of grass bent at knee height still leaned across the path. The thread thin as spider’s web at waist height still caught the thick, sluggish breeze between a dead tree and a thick, sharp-leaved bush. Prince Aus felt the disappointment growing in his heart even before he made the last turn and the green-glass temple came into view.

  Perhaps it had grown smaller since first he’d discovered it—anything seemed possible so close to the Mocking Tower. Or perhaps the first dissonant chords of disappointment only made it seem so. The afternoon sun shone against the undulating emerald surfaces, but he only saw the dust now. When he stepped inside and stepped to the low altar, he felt none of the sense of wonder and certainty that bore him up the night he’d found it. The dust he’d spread so carefully in hopes of showing where the footsteps of the unwary had passed remained unstirred.