The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Lzi struck again. This time it flared, and the powder caught. She backed hastily away from a shower of sparks and the strange dry smoke of burning mummy. King Fire Mountain Dynasty burned like a torch once he caught, and said nothing further in Lzi’s head. Not even the whisper of a thank-you.

  Well, it was what she should have expected of a King.

  “You ruined me,” Ptashne said dully. “You have ruined everything.”

  Lzi glanced at the wasps, which seemed to have no intention of charging these dangerous creatures again. They buzzed menace and held the door. Lzi and her mercenaries were going to have to climb out a window.

  “He gave you jewels,” she said to Ptashne. “Take whatever you can carry. May you find joy in it.”

  —

  Lzi sat alone on the beach beside a tree, waiting for the sun to rise and the Auspicious Voyage to return. She fretted the edge of her machete with her thumbnail. It was, understandably, dull.

  She looked up as two silhouettes approached. “Did you get him?”

  The Gage shook his head, which gleamed softly in the moonlight. He sat down on her left, the Dead Man on her right. “We looked. The wasps must have taken their last offspring somewhere safe from the likes of us.”

  “Poor man,” Lzi said.

  After a while, the silence of lapping waves was broken by the Dead Man’s voice. “So,” he said. “We shall collect our pay soon, and be traveling on. And then, where do you go from here, Doctor Lady?”

  “It’s not hard to live here,” she said. She gestured to the jungle behind them, the sea before beyond. “Many people are content with the breadfruit, the harvest of the lagoons, the coconuts and mangoes and the pounded hearts of palm. Many people are content to sail, and swim, and find somebody to fight and make babies with.”

  “But it was never enough for you.”

  Lzi heard the length of her own pause, and the snort that followed. “Maybe the restlessness runs in the blood like the sea. My parents sailed off in search of an uncharted island and never returned, did you know that? Into the dragon-infested Sea of Storms. They took my brother with them. I was judged too young. They had ambition and it killed them. I had ambition…and also I was afraid.”

  “So you studied the arts of science?”

  “I learned to read,” she said. “I learned to heal. I learned to kill by poison and by blade, because you cannot learn to create without learning to destroy, and the reverse of course holds true as well. I made a place for myself in the service of King Pale Empire. My life at his command.”

  The Dead Man nodded, perhaps sympathetically. He leaned against the tree she sat beside. “But.”

  “But it wasn’t enough. I felt like I was scraping mud from the bottom of the well, that it was filling with salt water from beneath.”

  “You can only give so much from a well until you fill it again. With rain or with buckets, or with time and the water that rises from within. When you are doing something entirely for somebody else—out of altruism, or out of a need to feel some purpose—”

  “What else is there?”

  “What are you good for?” He might have smiled. In any case, the shadowy stretch of the veil across his face altered. “You could try wanting something. For yourself. For its own sake. Or getting mad enough about something unfair to decide to do something about it.”

  She considered it. So strangely attractive. Find something worth fighting for, then fight for it.

  “But what?”

  He blinked sleepily. “Doctor Lady Lzi, if you come to that understanding, you will have exceeded the accomplishments of fully half of humanity. And now please excuse me. It will be day before long, and I am going to look for some dry wood for the signal fire.”

  She sat on the beach beside the Gage and watched the sun go down. The wind off the water grew chill; the sand underneath her stayed warm.

  The Gage spoke before she did. “Do you want to wind up like maggot man back there? That’s what service to the unappreciative gets you. Ask a Gage how he knows.”

  She decided not to. “What if you don’t have anything but service?” she asked starkly.

  There was a silence. The stars burned through it, empty and serene as Lzi wished she could be.

  “I had a family for a time as well,” said the Gage, over the hush of the waves.

  “You?” Lzi’s expression of confusion was making her forehead itch. “But you are…”

  “Gages are born before we’re made,” said the Gage. “The Wizard needs something to take apart, to animate the shell when she puts it back together again.”

  “By the Emperor’s wings,” Lzi said softly.

  “I volunteered.”

  She stared at him, rude though it was. The light of the moons made blue ripples on his hide.

  “Well,” the Gage said, reasonably, “would you want something like me around if it hadn’t decided it wanted to be made and serve you?”

  “Were you dying?” Lzi covered her mouth with her hands. She was catching rudeness from these foreigners.

  “Not yet. But I needed to live long enough to exact a kind of justice. For my family.”

  Lzi hadn’t heard the Dead Man come up behind her. His voice made her jump. “I did live for service. Very like you. And then the service was taken from me.” He thumped a pile of sticks down on the sand. “In this life, one cannot rely on anything.”

  “What kept you going past that point?”

  “For me,” the Dead Man said, “it was also revenge.”

  The Gage had called it justice. Lzi asked, “Revenge for your Caliph?”

  The naïve might have mistaken his bark of pain for a laugh. “For my daughters,” he said. “And my wife.”

  Lzi couldn’t think what to say, and said nothing, for so long that the Dead Man collected himself and went on.

  “That desire kept me alive long enough for others to assert themselves.”

  The Gage tilted his polished head. It gleamed with a soft luster in the tropic dark. “Revenge led me to become a Gage,” he admitted. “Since then, I have not met anything that could put a stop to me. So here I am.”

  “Is that the only effective purpose? The only way to make a space for yourself in the world that is not…serving someone else’s whim?” Lzi asked. “Vengeance?”

  “It is the worst one,” the Gage replied. “But it’s something to go forward on.”

  “I don’t have anyone to punish.” Not even the parents who had abandoned her, she realized. For how do you punish those who are dead and gone? But she realized also that she could never make herself good enough, small enough, useful enough to lure them home. Because they were dead, and they were gone.

  “All this for family?” Lzi said, and felt that expression push her mouth thin. “She was right, you know. This is the only power of her own that she would ever have had.”

  “Yes,” said the Gage quietly. “I know.”

  He was silent for a moment or two.

  “Then a harder question. What would you be, beyond a servant?” the Dead Man asked her. “What else would you seek?”

  Lzi shrugged. “I am not giving up my service. I am useful where I am.”

  “What does your soul crave, though, besides being useful?” There was enough light now to see him shift slightly from foot to foot. Morning was coming.

  “I suppose the first thing I seek is what I am seeking.”

  He touched his nose through the veil, which she thought signified a smile. “Write me a letter when you find it.”

  “You’re not staying?”

  He shrugged.

  The Gage rolled his enormous shoulders, as if settling his tattered homespun more comfortably. Lzi would have to see if the Emperor’s gratitude for the sapphires in her pack would extend to a new raw-silk robe for the brazen man.

  He didn’t turn his polished metal egg, but Lzi had a sense that he was looking at the Dead Man…fondly?

  “Not here,” the Gage supplied for his partner
. “He’s seeking…something else.” He waited a moment, watching a pale line creep across the bottom of the sky. “You could come with us. We’re short a naturalist.”

  He’s seeking a home, she thought. Does the destination matter, or is the value in the journey and whom you make it with? “Let me think about it,” she said, and watched the Auspicious Voyage’s silhouette approach across the broken mirror of the lagoon.

  ⬩  ⬩  ⬩

  I had to think hard about whether it was proper to include one of Lavie Tidhar’s tales of “guns & sorcery,” featuring the bizarre and often ultraviolent adventures of Gorel of Goliris, a “gunslinger and addict” in a world full of evil sorcery and monstrous creatures. Did a story without swords belong in a Sword & Sorcery anthology? But swords or no swords, the Gorel stories are true to the spirit of Sword & Sorcery, and their antecedents are clear—there’s the strong influence of Stephen King’s Gunslinger stories, obviously, but equally strong are the traces of C. L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and Robert E. Howard. The Gorel stories especially remind me of Howard’s early Conan the Barbarian stories. What they are is almost the pure essence of Sword & Sorcery—violent, action-packed, paced like a runaway freight train, politically incorrect and socially unredeemable, in your face. They’re also a lot of fun, and yet another example, along with the work of many of the other writers here, of the interesting and sometimes surprising directions this particular subgenre is evolving in as we progress deeper into the twenty-first century.

  So let yourself be swept along with Gorel on his latest dark and twisted quest, but buckle your seatbelts—it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

  (Further adventures of Gorel can be found in the chapbook novella Gorel and the Pot Bellied God and in the collection Black Gods Kiss.)

  Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, has traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London, the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, and Laos; after a spell in Tel Aviv, he’s currently living back in England again. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), was the editor of Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography, and the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults, the three-volume The Apex Book of World SF series, and two anthologies edited with Rebecca Levene, Jews vs. Aliens and Jews vs. Zombies. He is the author of the linked story collection HebrewPunk, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier, and the novella chapbooks An Occupation of Angels, Cloud Permutations, Jesus and the Eightfold Path, and Martian Sands. A prolific short-story writer, his stories have appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkseworld, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Nemonymous, Infinity Plus, Aeon, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau, Old Venus, and elsewhere, and have been translated into seven languages. His novels include The Bookman and its two sequels, Camera Obscura and The Great Game, Osama: A Novel (which won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Novel in 2012), The Violent Century, and A Man Lies Dreaming. His most recent book is a big, multifaceted SF novel, Central Station.

  ⬩  ⬩  ⬩

  1.

  Gorel of Goliris rode slowly, half-delirious in the saddle of his graal. The creature lumbered beneath him, moving sluggishly. It was a multilegged beast, native to the sands of Meskatel, which lay far to the south. Its tough carapace would turn a pleasing green in sunlight, as it depended on the solar rays for sustenance: but right now its skin was a dark and unhealthy-looking mottled grey, as the storm clouds had been amassing steadily over the deadlands and the creature was starved of nutrition just like its master, in his own way, was. Its tail was raised like the stem of a flower, the better to catch moisture in the air, the sting at its end naked like a spur.

  They were much alike, master and beast. Hardy, obstinate, durable, and deadly. Gorel’s head hung limp on his chest. His gums hurt and his eyes felt fused shut, and everything ached. His hands shook uncontrollably.

  Withdrawal.

  He needed it.

  He needed the Black Kiss.

  What drove him into the deadlands was a mixture of heartache, desire, and need. Somewhere far behind him lay the Black Tor, and its enigmatic master, the dark lord whom Gorel knew only as Kettle. The Avian mage was a small, slight being, his fragile bones like those of a bird. The two had been together when great Falang-Et fell, and the river Thiamat flooded, its god dead…

  Kettle had used Gorel, and Gorel could not forgive his onetime lover for that betrayal.

  His journey since had taken him far and wide: to the great cemetery of Kur-a-len, where the dead still walk, and to the Zul-Ware’i mountains, where the remnants of an ancient war still littered the glaciers with deadly unexploded ordnance. What drove him, always, was his quest. The search for lost Goliris, that greatest of empires, the biggest and most powerful the World had ever known. His home, from which he had been taken as a child, to which he must return, and claim his throne…

  Yet in all the World, in all of his searching, throughout the long years, he had never found a trace of his homeland, as though—he sometimes thought, in dark moments—it had been erased entirely from the memory of all living beings.

  But the World was large—infinite, some even claimed. And Gorel would not rest until he found it once again.

  Goliris…

  Heartache, then, and need. Yet, what of desire?

  It had happened long before, in the jungle lands where the Urino-Dag, the ghouls of the bush, haunt the unwary traveller in the thicket. Where the smell of rotten leaves and decay fills the still air, where a village once stood, where Gorel had come in his search…only to encounter the twin goddesses, Shar and Shalin, who bit him, laughing, with the Black Kiss…and even as he murdered them both, and all their followers, their curse was in him, and he was forever hooked.

  Gods’ Dust.

  But there were no gods in the deadlands. There were barely any human habitations to attract them, no subsequent illicit transaction of pleasure for faith. And Gorel was driven on blindly, across a land cracked with drought, under a black sky, driven as much away as towards, growing weak, growing delirious…

  And in his delirium tremens, he remembered.

  He remembered Goliris.

  2.

  The great towers of dread Goliris rose like an infection out of the fertile ground. They were not so much built as cultivated, planted there in aeons past by the magus-emperor Gon, the fungimancer. Where he had bought these spores, at what cost, or in what far-flung corner of the great empire of Goliris, was lost to the mists of time, but the towers grew, tall graceful stems with bulbous caps, gills protruding, and a small army of wizard-gardeners tending to their constant maintenance.

  Goliris, mother-city, sat atop the shores of a great ocean. Its black ships, unequalled in all the World, departed from its shores to all corners and returned laden with goods and pillage. The hot, humid air was cooled by the sea breeze, and in its wide avenues and canals there strode, flew, and swam the ambassadors of a thousand races, come to pay tribute.

  Gorel remembered standing at the top of the palace, holding his father’s hand. The room was cool and dark, and through the gills one could see the ocean spread out to the horizon, where a blood-red sun was slowly setting. Its dying light illuminated the great fleet, black sails raising overhead the seven-pointed-star flag of Goliris.

  “Where are they going, Father?” the young Gorel had asked.

  “To conquer new lands,” his father said. “To further spread the fame and power of Goliris. Gorel…one day, all this will be yours. For untold generations our bloodline held pure and strong, commanding empire. To rule is your destiny, as it was mine. Will you be ready?”

  The young Gorel held his father’s hand and stared out to sea. The thought of his future, the terrible responsibility, both excited and frightened him. But he could not disappoint his father, could not reveal his inner turmoil.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Father, I will be ready.”

&
nbsp; “Good boy!” his father said. Then he scooped him in his arms, and for one brief, wondrous moment Gorel felt warm, and safe, and loved.

  …but already their downfall was underway. And that terrible night came not long after, though he could no longer remember the exact sequence of events, what followed what…he was only a boy, and they had schemed in secret, in the shadows, the mages of Goliris, servants burning with a hatred of mastery. He remembered that awful night, the screams, the cruel, laughing faces. The stench of wizardry.

  Then he was taken. Taken from his home, from his World, from all that he knew and loved. Transported, in the blink of an eye, away from there, the screams still echoing in his ears, and that awful smell, until he woke and found himself in a foreign land, by the side of a hill, and he was crying, for he was only a boy…

  Now he lolled in the saddle, and his hands caressed the six-guns hanging on his sides. He had fashioned them himself, and each bore the seven-pointed stars of Goliris.

  The land he found himself in as a boy was called the Lower Kidron, and the couple who had found and adopted him were gunsmiths. In that wild, untamed land the boy Gorel learned the ancient way of the gun, and it was from there that he set out on his journey, to claim back his ancient throne—though the journey had been taking longer than anticipated, and though he had killed many on the way, he was no closer to his goal…

  Overhead, the clouds amassed. Somewhere, no doubt, the Avian called Kettle was planning the next stage in his inexplicable conquest of this part of the World. There had always been dark mages, and they were always bent on conquest, yet there was something different about Kettle, a hidden purpose, as though he alone could see some grand and troubling design no one else could discern…

  But this was no longer Gorel’s concern. In truth, he had a job. And, despite all the current set-backs, he was intent on following it through.

  The job was simple, as such jobs usually were. Find a man—and then kill him. And Gorel was good at the first, and very, very good at the second…