Elida quashed a spark of irritation. Roth was easy on the eye, in a rough and rugged sort of way, but he'd never been that bright. On the other hand, he had connections – connections that she'd need. Mechtrites weren't exactly something she could sell on a market corner. She scratched at the back of her scalp, trying to stop a sudden itch. It didn't help. Instead, the sensation grew worse. It felt like it was on the inside of her head, not the outside. ‘Does he look under control?’
Roth opened his mouth to reply, but Vortane cut him off. ‘Ah, Roth Taricon. Second-rate fence, third-rate hired gun. Used to run with Briadon's gang, until that unfortunate misunderstanding two years back. I suppose the idiots clanging around up above are the rest of your rabble? Mackon, Drost, etcetera, etcetera?’
Roth scowled. ‘How did...’
‘Tell him nothing,’ said Elida. She'd seen Vortane try this before. Conversational ranging shots; not intended to illicit information by themselves but to identify weaknesses in resolve. She couldn't see how it would help him, but that didn't stop it being annoying. ‘In fact, I don't think we need to keep him alive any longer.’
‘What, kill him?’ asked Roth. ‘But he's a shadow. That's trouble. Lawkeepers is one thing, I don't need the clan looking.’
Vortane raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, that's a compelling point, if made with questionable grammar. What do you think, Elida? Prepared to give it all up?’
‘Shut up,’ she snapped, and turned her attention to Roth. ‘If we let him live so he can talk about what we've done, that's going to end better for us, is it?’
‘Sorry Roth,’ said Vortane. ‘I'm afraid she's not going for it. It looks like the lovely Elida is looking to leap a few rungs higher on the underworld ladder.’ He leaned close to Roth – or at least as close as he could, given that his arms were still pinned. ‘Between you and me, I don't think it's going to work out.’
Elida glared at him. The itch at the back of her mind was getting stronger, making it hard to think. ‘I said, 'shut up.' Roth, kill him.’
Roth looked from Vortane, to Elida, and back to Vortane again. He lowered his gun. ‘No. No, I don't think so. You want him dead, you do it.’
Vortane nodded approvingly. ‘Good choice, Roth. Cowardly, but with a hint of principle. If you leave this asteroid, you'll go far.’
‘Enough!’ Elida shouted. ‘I'll do it.’ One of the mechtrites left the side of her throne, and advanced towards Vortane.
‘You're not going to kill me.’
She laughed. ‘Appealing to my better nature?’
‘Oh no, I've spent three years looking for that and found not a trace, despite the search.’ Vortane's voice hardened. ‘It's not an appeal, or a prediction; it's an instruction. You're not going to kill me.’
‘We'll see about that.’ Focusing on the mechtrite, Elida ordered it to snap her former master's neck. The command wouldn't form, the thought dissipating like mist even as it took shape. It was like having a word on the tip of her tongue, but a hundred times worse.
‘Having trouble?’ asked Vortane.
Elida tried to send the command to another mechtrite, but again the order slipped from her mind before it was fully formed. The strange itch was getting worse, like raw static arcing across her brain. She screamed in frustration. ‘What have you done to me?’
‘You did it to yourself. Let me go.’
‘No,’ she said. Nonetheless, the command coalesced at the back of her mind.
The mechtrites released their grip. Vortane took a step towards her, then stopped as Roth jammed the barrel of his pistol into the shadow's temple. ‘What's going on?’
‘I don't know.’ Elida's mind was filled with a gabble of thoughts. She couldn't tell which belonged to her, not anymore. The scene of Vortane and Roth seemed no more distinct than the images being relayed from the mechtrites' eyes. For a moment, she forgot who she was. A surge of panic brought the memory floating to the surface. Elida Tyren, she was Elida Tyren. But that wasn't quite true, was it? She could feel another consciousness writhing around in her mind, cold and clear, where her own awareness was growing increasingly hazy. Elida felt it probing at her memories, her feelings.
‘I'm afraid Elida's not quite herself anymore,’ said Vortane, the sound seeming to come from far away. ‘She's part of the interface now, a living, breathing component of the mechtrite hive. Their queen, I suppose you could say.’ He raised his amulet between finger and thumb and shook it gently from side to side. ‘And the queen only obeys someone who has one of these.’
‘Give it here!’ shouted Roth. ‘Give it here, or I'll kill you!’ He ground the pistol into Vortane's temple, forcing him to tilt his head.
The shadow sighed. ‘I'm sorry, Roth, but you should have stayed a coward. There's no room for heroes in our little drama, only the dead and the damned.’ He shifted his gaze, and Elida felt his eyes boring into hers. ‘Kill him. Kill them all.’
What? No! But the command was already sent. She saw Roth's finger tighten on the trigger. Then a mechtrite clamped its brazen hand around his, the sound of cracking bone almost lost beneath his scream. The mechtrite released him, and Roth collapsed to his knees, screaming and cradling his mangled hand. The mechtrite reached down and clamped Roth's head in both hands. There was a sodden crack, and Roth's scream stopped.
Desperate shouts rang out to take its place as the mechtrites hunted the rest of Roth's gang amongst the hibernation cells. Elida saw it all through the mechtrites' eyes: every crushed skull, every snapped neck, every torn throat. Some of the gangers fought back, guns blazing as they pumped plasma bullets into their remorseless pursuers. Elida felt a flash of sympathetic pain with each impact. One mechtrite went dark entirely, fading from her mind. Its destroyer had little time to celebrate his victory. Two more mechtrites closed in from behind and tore him limb from limb. A small part of Elida shuddered at the gruesome scene; a larger, alien part revelled in the satisfaction of a task well done.
‘What is it doing to me?’ she breathed.
Vortane glanced down in distaste and brushed a dribble of brain from his robes. ‘Replacing you with something more... tractable. You see, the interface needs a human host to convey instructions to the rest of the hive. As I understand it, a mechtrite's brain simply can't handle the strain of autonomy – that's why so many go mad. But a human mind can, once it's been adjusted.’
‘This... this... was always your plan.’ Even the small effort to speak was almost beyond her, suffocated by the presence in her mind.
‘Let's say rather that I gave you the opportunity to disappoint me. I would gladly have found someone else.’ For the first time, a hint of anger touched his expression. ‘I'm a shadow, you stupid child. Did you really think a gutter-rat like you can sneak around behind my back without my knowing it?’ He shook his head. ‘I thought you had potential; I wanted to raise you up, give you an honourable cause that you could serve willingly. No matter. You'll still serve, and serve faithfully, won't you?’
‘Yes,’ said the new mechtrite queen.
Deep inside her mind, Elida screamed.[GdM]
Matthew Ward When the young Matthew Ward wasn't reading of strange worlds in the works of C S Lewis, Tolkien and Douglas Hill, he was watching adventure and mystery in Doctor Who, and Richard Carpenter's excellent Robin of Sherwood series.
In 2002, he joined Games Workshop and spent the next decade developing characters, settings and stories for their Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes, as well as for a successful series of licensed books set in J.R.R Tolkien's Middle-earth.
In 2014, Matthew embarked on an adventure to tell stories set in worlds of his own design. He firmly believes that there's not enough magic in the world, and writes to entertain anyone who feels the same way. He lives near Nottingham with his extremely patient wife, and three attention-seeking cats.
Look for Vortane in a full length novel in the near future. If you can't wait that long, Matthew's fantasy novels Shadow of th
e Raven and Queen of Eventide are available from all good eBook vendors. Why not visit his website at http://www.thetowerofstars.co.uk/ for details?
The Mud, the Blood, and the Years
Why Grimdark is the New Sword and Sorcery
John R. Fultz
"Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer...."
–Robert E. Howard
It was born in 1929, named in 1961, and died sometime in the early 80s. Yet its rotting, shambling corpse would never rest. It lumbered ahead, losing vital pieces of itself along the way, stumbling toward a dark rebirth in the early twenty-first century.
I'm talking about the fantasy sub-genre known as "sword-and-sorcery." It was by most accounts invented by Robert E. Howard with his King Kull story "The Shadow Kingdom," published in the legendary pulp mag Weird Tales in August, 1929. Howard's gritty and blood-soaked take on heroic fantasy stood in stark contrast to the fantasy works that inspired it, works by authors such as Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Dunsany, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Howard wrote the poetic prose exploits of sword-swinging protagonists who were usually not out to save the world but were motivated by their own survival, tribal affiliations, or hot-blooded desires. A believer in the essential purity of barbarism, Howard never flinched from the clashing of steel on helm, the spattering of brains and gore, or the exploration of primal savagery versus decadent civilization. He wrote pulp fiction that was primarily read by men, so his heroes tended to be brawny and clever alpha males.
Howard's writing reached the height of popularity with his Conan of Cimmeria tales, and this character all but eclipsed Kull, who was Conan's literary progenitor. The Conan tales became one of Weird Tales’ most popular attractions, even though Howard only wrote 17 stories of the Cimmerian (including one serialized novel). While Howard was cranking out these tales of the lost Hyborian Age and defying the romantic tropes of high fantasy, he probably never imagined he was creating something that would endure for decades after his death. As a pulp writer, he got very little respect and no literary credibility. But the Weird Tales readers loved his work.
After Howard's death in 1936, Weird Tales tried to fill the void of his passing by having other authors create heroes in the mould of Conan (Henry Kuttner's Elak of Atlantis, for example). Yet there was only one Howard and he was gone. His stories, however, endured — especially his Conan stories. They were collected over the years and inspired generations of writers to follow in his footsteps.
Long after Howard died, Clark Ashton Smith continued to write sword-and-sorcery-flavoured tales set in the worlds of Zothique and Hyperborea. Smith took the genre to a darker and more frightening place by having most of his swashbuckling heroes die horrible deaths in the course of their adventures. Smith's fantasy tales were equal parts sword and sorcery and weird horror, but until '61 they were simply considered examples of "dark fantasy."
In 1961 author Fritz Leiber coined the phrase "sword and sorcery" to describe the fantasy-adventure phenomenon that Howard had created decades earlier with only a handful of unforgettable stories. Leiber did this coining in the pages of the fanzine known as AMRA, itself named after one of Conan's pseudonyms. Leiber's own contribution to the genre was his tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, a legendary rogue-and-barbarian duo. Michael Moorcock soon turned the sword-and-sorcery genre on its head with his Elric of Melnibone stories.
For the next two decades sword-and-sorcery literature continued to rise in popularity, and new authors arose to continue the tradition: Karl Edward Wagner, L. Sprague DeCamp, Andrew J. Offutt, Poul Anderson, Lin Carter, and others. Marvel Comics adapted Howard's Conan and Kull into the comic book medium with astounding success, spawning a generation of comics that tapped the sword-and-sorcery vein. The most successful of them all was Barry Windsor-Smith's Conan the Barbarian, which launched in 1970 and began a decade of sword-and-sorcery popularity the likes of which has never been seen since. The comic's success spawned a "mature readers" black-and-white comic magazine, Savage World of Conan, which amped up the levels of blood, nudity, and violence. Now the stories could weave closer to Howard's original vision, unrestricted by the limits of the "Comics Code Authority" that toned down colour comics.
Conan became the undisputed king of sword and sorcery, culminating in the 1982 major motion picture Conan the Barbarian, directed by John Milius and co-written by Oliver Stone. I was twelve years old that year — a big fan of the comics and the magazine — when I saw Conan brought to life on the silver screen. It was stunning. While the movie took some liberties with the narrative history of Howard's barbarian, it stayed true to the core of the character and brought the Hyborian Age to life in all its big-budget glory. It was a perfect storm of blood, action, grit, sorcery, and exotic wonder that represented the absolute pinnacle of the sword-and-sorcery genre itself. It was also the last time sword and sorcery would be taken seriously, if indeed it ever had been.
After the '82 Conan movie, the inevitable low-budget, low-quality imitations began. A slew of terrible movies with none of Milius' vision, style, or respect for the genre appeared one after the other. Even the sequel to the original Conan movie was entirely unlike the first movie — no Milius, no Stone, a lower budget, and pressure from the studio to make it more kid friendly. All these factors contributed to making a sequel that didn't seem like a sequel at all, but more like a weak parody of the genre. Even as a fourteen-year-old moviegoer I remember being disappointed and a bit angry at how bad it truly was. But this was to be the new paradigm for all ensuing sword-and-sorcery movies. I won't offer the names of any more awful 80s sword-and-sorcery movies in the interests of not promoting them and staying on-point with this article. But there were a lot of them.
The entire sword-and-sorcery genre had grown so popular it had become a parody of itself. The best (i.e. worst) example of this decline was certain cartoon hero of Eternia, who shall remain nameless. The sword-and-sorcery genre was never meant for the "wee ones," but it had been watered down specifically to capture the pre-teen demographic. New sword-and-sorcery novels kept appearing as well, and few of them did anything original with the genre. In the 80s, sword and sorcery became associated with misogynist imagery, bad prose, and cheesy artwork. That is, when it wasn't being watered down to fuel various children’s cartoons.
By the mid-80s book publishers had figured out that the term "sword and sorcery" — once used to sell hundreds of thousands of comics and novels — did not work anymore. Publishers went back to the generic term "fantasy" or upgraded to "epic fantasy" or started calling their fantasy books "science fiction" in the hope that nobody would notice how different sci-fi and fantasy actually were. Meanwhile, writers such as Tanith Lee, Gene Wolfe, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Darrell Schweitzer (to name only a few) had created their own versions of sword and sorcery—each one adding something special and decidedly more "literary" to the basic concept.
Weird Tales had reappeared many times and became known as The Magazine That Wouldn't Die — just like the genre it had given birth to in 1929. Moorcock's Elric saga and Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books were reprinted many times over, and never seemed to go out of print. Jack Vance's Dying Earth tales were continually re-appearing in new volumes as well. Yet nobody was calling any of this stuff "sword and sorcery" anymore. At least not in public.
Epic fantasy, meanwhile, was doing quite well. Authors like David Eddings, Robert Jordan, and Raymond Feist were hitting it big. But sword and sorcery was the bastard stepchild of fantasy, neglected and forgotten, if not openly mocked as inferior to epic fantasy. To be fair, a lot of it truly was inferior by this time. Still, those of us who grew up reading sword and sorcery cherished our mouldering paperbacks and our dog-eared comics: Conan, Kull, Claw, Warlord, Beowulf, Red Sonja, Savage Tales, and Savage Sword. I remember an "All Sword and Sorcery" issue of Creepy that I bought in 1979 — I was ten. All the stuff we loved as kids linge
red in our psyches and became part of our deep creative drive. A new generation of fantasy writers-in-training started channelling sword-and-sorcery inspirations to create new forms of adventure fantasy.
In 1996 George R.R. Martin released his well-received novel A Game of Thrones, the first volume in his Song of Ice and Fire series. Although it was marketed as "epic fantasy," A Game of Thrones was heralded for its realistic and "gritty" depiction of medieval-style life and its highly complex and believable characters. Sure it was light on the sorcery, and sometimes on the sword-fighting too, but Martin knew exactly what he was doing. He drew readers in over the next fifteen years with his less-is-more approach. Each book revealed more of his fantastic world and slowly unveiled the mystical forces that permeated it.
This grimmer, darker, and more realistic approach to epic fantasy caused some to dub Martin the "anti-Tolkien." The monumental work of J.R.R. Tolkien, after all, was the yardstick against which all fantasy used to be judged, and often still is. Yet Martin had done in the 90s what Robert E. Howard did in the late 20s: He removed the idealism, cut out the pastoral myth and infallible heroes, and replaced them with mud, blood, shit, and a focus on the darker aspects of human nature. Martin's epic resembled historical fiction far more than traditional fantasy; it smacked of realism. Yet fantasy it remained—simply a more relatable form of fantasy. Psychology replaced ideology. Brutality replaced honour. Sword and sorcery had finally "grown up," or at least been transmogrified into something that modern audiences craved. None of the previous fantasy labels seemed to fit Martin's saga. A Game of Thrones is widely credited as the beginning of the "Grimdark" genre (along with certain fiction inspired by the tabletop strategy game Warhammer 40,000).
Grimdark Magazine Issue #4 ePub Page 2
