The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  The thief had come, made his threat, and no one had reacted. Not the townsfolk. Not the Imagi Vert. Prince Aus told himself to be pleased. He preferred finding the blade’s true hiding place, but knowing for certain that the temple did not hold it added to his knowledge, subtracted from the possibilities that remained. He cultivated patience. Mostly. His single frustrated shout set the birds in the treetops to flights, but only once. He didn’t repeat it.

  He walked back along the trail, hurrying to get back to the hayloft before anyone expected Simin to wake. Even as he broke into a trot, he felt his false persona slipping into place. Simin the vagabond. The boy too dull to have a story of his own worth knowing. Simin the unremarkable. And perhaps it was because of this—the role he’d inhabited before fitting so well into place—that the cleaning girl walking along the road away from town and tower failed to notice him.

  The market lay nowhere near. The girl’s mother no longer limped at her side. And something bounced and bobbled against her back. A little cloth bag, grease-stained. The sort that might hold a bit of food carried for not too long a journey.

  Aus or Simin paused, pulled between two impulses: return to safety before anyone could penetrate his disguise or else…or else see what this girl meant by traveling alone so far from where her usual paths led her. And with food. And—yes—just the faintest air of furtive excitement. Aus felt his belly tighten, a knot form in the back of his throat.

  He turned, following her at a distance, and with all the stealth he could.

  The girl led him to the north, away from the green-glass temple, and around to the uncanny, shifting tower. The sun caught the crimson of her scarf and the sway of her hair as brightly as a banner on the field. The sun’s heat stood on the edge between pleasant and oppressive. The thickness of the air felt like a coming storm. He kept to the shadows under boughs and edges of the tall grass where the path’s curve took her nearly out of sight. His fear of being seen grew in him, changing as it did into a vibrating excitement. At any moment, the keeper of the Traveler’s Hearth would come looking for him. The urge to break off tugged at him, but the sense of teetering on the edge of something critical pulled him forward. The girl, unaware that his world now centered on her, walked and skipped, paused and looked back, walked on. A patch of sweat darkened the back of her dress.

  And in a stretch of dappled shade where two trees overhung the path, she vanished.

  A cold rush of panic filled the prince’s chest. The girl had been an illusion, the bait in a trap. Or she had escaped him and even as he stood there, she hurried to raise the alarm. He waited, his body stiff as wood, and only when nothing happened for ten long, shuddering breaths together did he move forward. The path between the trees stood empty. The leaves shuddered in a barely felt breeze. The rough-worn earth went before and behind. Nothing seemed odd or out of place apart from his memory of the girl and her present absence. The prince turned slowly, blinking in confusion and wonder.

  The complication of air nearly escaped him. Made from nothing, it looked like nothing. Only a flaw in the light like the smallest ripple in a glass. Even when he saw it, he doubted. But he stepped forward, one foot before the other, and the landscape unfolded around him as if by walking straight ahead, he rounded a bend in the path and exposed new and unseen vistas. A hillside rose green-grassed and dandelion-spattered to the very foot of the Mocking Tower. A lintel of stone stood at the mouth of a cave, and in the place of twilight between the darkness underground and the shining daylight, the cleaning girl sat with Bir, the blacksmith’s apprentice, beside her. A lunch of chicken and bread spread out by their side and the little cloth bag collapsed behind them. The two saw nothing but each other, but Prince Aus saw everything. The girl’s awkward smile. The apprentice blacksmith’s ill-fitting armor and leather-handled axe. The shuddering shape after shape after shape of the tower. He walked backward, the world refolding itself around him until he stood alone on the path again, in the same place but no longer entirely the same man.

  A pathway hidden by magic. A man set to guard it even at the cost of his usual duties. The abandoned temple no longer pained him. What he’d sought, he’d found. The Imagi Vert, alarmed by the thief, drew up his defenses, and in doing so, showed what wanted defending. Simin or Aus retreated to the town, walking often forward and often backward, hurrying to avoid suspicion in his absence but also committing the path to memory for the time when he returned.

  The rest of the day Prince Aus committed himself to being Simin. He mucked out the stalls and repaired the place in the chicken run where something from the woods failed to force its way in. He hauled water from the well to the hearth’s kitchen and carried pies from the kitchen to the miller as exchange for the uncooked flour. When the keeper made a joke, he laughed. When the cleaning girl trotted by near sundown with her cheeks bright and her sleeve stained green with grass, he pretended not to notice. The Mocking Tower changed: a moon-pocked shaft of white and gray; a block of iron like a great anvil with glowing windows around the top; a ramshackle construction like all the buildings of a rough village stacked one atop the other and swaying in the slight breeze.

  The thief came to the common room for dinner, ate and drank and laughed without appearing to have a care in the world or any interest in Simin. His merry blue eyes danced and glittered in the candlelight, and he drank wine and sang songs as if everything that happened fit in with some unimaginably complex plan. Near midnight, when Prince Aus snuck across the grounds to the thief’s room, the door stood ajar, and the man hunched on the bed seemed like someone else entirely. The thief’s eyes watered and deep grooves of concern bordering on fear carved themselves into his forehead and the corners of his mouth.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” he said, as the prince stepped into the room. “They smile and talk when I face them, but as soon as I turn my back, they plot murder. A day more, two at most, and a knife’s going to sprout right between my shoulder blades. I can feel it already.”

  “Can you, now?” the prince said, shutting the door.

  “I can. It itches.” The thief ran a hand over his scalp, disarranging his hair.

  The prince sat beside him. “Good that we leave tonight, then.”

  The thief started then went still. His wide eyes flickered over the Prince’s face. “Seriously?”

  “I found a place. A hidden cave at the base of the tower. Guarded by a man who isn’t a guard by trade and shrouded by magic.”

  “Well,” the thief said, then laughed like a brook in flood. “The plan worked? The plan actually worked? I’m damned. I figured us both for dead.”

  “Working,” the prince said. “Not worked. Not yet. You stay here. Rouse no more suspicions. But when I come back, we ride.”

  “Understood,” the thief said. And as the prince rose to go, he leaped to his feet, scrabbled under the bed, and stood again. He held out the green-and-brass scabbard. “Take this. To carry the blade when you find it.”

  Gently but firmly, the prince pushed the scabbard back. The thief blinked his confusion.

  “I don’t want to claim my father’s soul,” the prince said. “I came here to destroy it.”

  —

  The prince moved through the darkness, a shadow among shadows. The night held no terror for him. His tightly cut black cloak and the sheathed knife at his hip, soft boots and dirtied face, left him feeling like a dockside cutthroat. He told himself that the tightness in his throat and the tripping of his heart only meant excitement, not fear, and the telling made it true.

  The scrub and grass along the path had lost its green. Moonlight remade the world in black and gray. Animals shuffled in the darkness of the scrub. The trees rubbed their leaves together with a sound like soft rain. The Mocking Tower shifted and changed like a sleeper made uneasy by spoiled dreams, but in the darkness he could not make out the details. Without so much as a candle, the prince retraced the way the cleaning girl had brought him.

  Where the two trees spanned the path,
he paused. Gloom made the fissure of light and air invisible, but he remembered it. Crouching low, he crept forward. His eyes strained. The glamours and spells of the Imagi Vert might not hold to the laws of human experience. What worked in daylight could fail in the night. But no, the world shifted as it had before. The mere wild unfurled a path, a hill, a cave. And the shifting tower where his father’s soul lay, fashioned now in steel. A flicker of light from the mouth of the cave. A lantern imperfectly shuttered. He slipped forward, cultivating silence.

  He recognized the night guard but didn’t know his name. Simin had perhaps nodded to him at the market or waved to him at the mill; the simple exchange of fellow citizens. But circumstances transformed them now to a prince of the Empire and the servant of his enemy. Aus attacked from the dark, killing the man before he could cry out. The prince watched the life fade from the man’s eyes. The war claimed other people all across the Empire. Children and women died in the streets of Low Shaoen. Soldiers irrigated the fields of Mattawan Commons with their blood. The guard choking on surprise and his own blood deserved no more or less than the other thousands of dead. Prince Aus stood over him as man became corpse. The murder didn’t belong to him. King Raan put all of it in motion, and so the responsibility lay with him and his still-unjudged soul. If the prince’s hands trembled after the violence, it only proved that death still moved him. That his humanity still stood higher than that of the man who sired him.

  He took the keys from the dead man’s hip and the lantern from beside the guard stool that now stood empty, and moved deeper into the cave. The walls of rough stone, simple and uncarved, curved and dipped and rose without offering any corners or doorways. Cool air carried the smell of soil. The profound silence made even his stealthy footsteps seem like shouts. And in one stretch of hallway, unremarkable from all that came before, the prince’s ears ached suddenly and the air pressed in on him like a storm front, and he knew the Mocking Tower stood above him.

  A glimmer came from the deeper darkness before him, something catching the lantern’s fragile beam. Part of the prince’s soul warned him to turn back, but the stronger command of his purpose drove him on. The glimmer grew and brightened until it resolved into a wide brass doorway with three panels and carvings of glyphs and designs that teased him from the edge of legibility. Had he seen it anywhere else, Prince Aus would still have recognized it as the entrance to the Imagi Vert’s sanctuary and seat of power. It took long, anxious minutes to find the keyhole hidden among the carvings—a tiny plate of brass that shifted to reveal a darkness just the right shape—but the dead guard’s key fit and it turned and the door opened.

  Prince Aus stepped into the chamber beyond.

  Candles burned along the walls but without any scent of tallow or wax, and their light settled softer than snow. In all, the chamber reached no deeper or wider than the common room of the Traveler’s Hearth, but rather than stools and tables and the long, low fire grate, plinths stood scattered about the space as if the stone had grown up from the bones of the earth. On each, an object stood. A cut gem the red of blood and the size of two clenched fists together. A rough doll fashioned from a twist of rope and a handful of dried grass. The skull of a child so young a staggered row of teeth still haunted the jawbone, waiting for a chance to displace tiny, sharp milk teeth. Aus walked slowly. No sounds troubled him. The stillness of the room felt profound. Even his breath seemed close to sacrilege in the space. A cup formed to resemble a cupped, thick-knuckled hand. A simple clay pot painted over with black lines as fine as a feather. Treasures, the prince thought, of a life prolonged centuries beyond its due. A sheet of vellum with a handprint in green. A bird’s nest made of long, thin bones.

  A sword.

  The prince’s throat went tight, his mouth suddenly dry. The blade lay on its side. Gems and worked silver formed a hilt like the writhing body of a man. Knotwork etching ran the length of the blade, twisted as a labyrinth. He reached out to it, hesitated, then, almost against his will, took it in his hand. It felt cooler than the room, as if eating the warmth of his flesh. It balanced perfectly. The finest sword ever forged. A sword of empires. A sword forged from steel and dark magic and his father’s willing soul. He swung it gently, half expecting its edge to cut the air itself.

  “You admire it?”

  The voice, harsh and low as stone dragged over earth, came from behind him. The man stood in the candlelight where the prince would swear no one had been only a moment before. The man’s dark robe moved stiffly, like the bark of a tree remade as cloth. Dark veins welled up under flesh as pale as bone. His mild eyes considered the prince.

  “I admire it too,” the pale man said. “Good workmanship deserves respect, I think. However much you may disapprove of the project.” He tried a smile, then sighed.

  “You are the Imagi?” the prince said, his voice high and tight. Fear vibrated in his blood and his grip on the sword tightened.

  “Am I?” the pale man said, and tilted his head. “Before, I was part of something greater than myself, and darkness was my home. But now? I play the role of the Imagi now, I suppose. Yes. For this I might as well be the Imagi Vert.”

  “I am Aus, son of Raan. You have stolen something from me and from my people. I have come to restore the balance of the world.”

  The pale man seemed to settle into himself. Not a movement of peace or acceptance, but a grounding like a bull setting himself in place and refusing to be moved. A vast stillness radiated from him like cold from ice. The prince felt the sword pulsing in his hand, but it might only have been the beating of his own half-panicked heart.

  “What balance is that?” the Imagi Vert asked, as if the matter held some trivial interest but no more than that.

  “My father sinned against the gods,” the prince said, his voice wavering. “He used your powers to cheat death. To live forever. All the evil that the world has seen flows from that sin. The war raging through the Empire now? It’s because no one can take the power of the Empire while the former emperor still lives.”

  “Is that the case?” the Imagi Vert said, lifting pale, hairless brows. “Ah.”

  “My brothers die at each other’s hands. The wonders of the Empire burn. The right order of the world lies scattered like bones on the plain. Because of this.” The prince raised the sword between them. “Because one cowardly old man feared too much to die as he should have. And because his pet wizard chose to break the world. Do you deny it?”

  “Would you like me to?” The Imagi’s smile could have meant anything. “If you wish. Let me think on it. Yes. Yes, all right. The war first, yes? You say it comes because the rightful heir cannot claim while the emperor still lives. But there have been usurpers before now. If the rightful king cannot rise, an unrighteous one could but hasn’t. The history of the world is studded with kings who have abdicated out of weariness or love or religious zealotry. Consider that the war came not because King Raan was a greedy man or an evil one but because he was unhappy.”

  “Unhappy,” the prince said. Neither a question nor an agreement. A distance had come into his eyes and the feeling of hearing everything said before him as if he were eavesdropping from another room.

  “His life was never his own. Duty and necessity kept him in the most glorious prison humanity could devise, and the envy of others made that confinement solitary as a monk’s. Even when among the throngs who worshipped him, your father lived his life alone. Others dream of power and kingship. Of more money and more sex and more respect. Just as you do. You say you’ve come here to…what? Save the world from your father? By taking your revenge upon the man who left you behind? And the confluence of those motives gave no pause, eh?”

  The prince took a step back. The floor felt as if it had shifted beneath him, but the candle flames stood straight. None of the treasures in their places shook.

  The Imagi shrugged, a slow, powerful gesture. “All right. All right. Let’s imagine you get what you claim you want. You kill the undying king and take hi
s throne. What will you want then? When the loneliness and melancholy come upon you and you already have everything you aspired to and there is no higher reach, what will you wish for as a balm?”

  “I would not need one.”

  “You’re mistaken,” the Imagi said, and the words struck his chest like a blow. “Your father wished for a life he had not lived. A simple one with the freedoms invisible to you and the others. A baker, perhaps, spending his early hours kneading dough and smelling yeast and salt. Sweating before the oven. Or a fisherman mending nets with his brothers and sisters, daughters and sons. A brewer or a gardener or the manager of a dye yard. These were as sweet and exotic to him as he was to the lowborn. And he longed for the things denied to him. Badly.

  “He lost sight of the challenge his children faced. Bearing his misery in silence cost him the strength to be a good father. Kept him from preparing his sons for the prison cell. Perhaps he thought of it as a kindness, yes? In some subterranean way, he hoped that by cutting you and your brothers away, he could protect you from all that he bore. Love’s cruel that way, and men are fools. But wouldn’t that be enough to explain why so many of you—yes, and yourself not the least—are so desperate to slaughter each other for what your father didn’t want?”

  “The sword,” the prince said. “My father’s soul.”

  The pale man shook his head, but whether his expression meant sorrow or disgust, the prince didn’t know. “You have misunderstood everything. There is no soul in that blade. It’s well made, but it means nothing. Take it if you think it will help you. Melt it if you’d rather. I’m beyond caring.”