Legends

by Joe Abercrombie

  “Very pretty,” said the Sorcerer. His offhand tone would deceive only the most obtuse or silly. “But what does it do?”

  Cyveth, showman, actor, trickster, mage, quietly and reverently told him.

  “First, Lord, through my lesser and far subordinate art, I can make it grow to its full height and dimensions, strength and virility. Then, also through the one other huge secret I have learned, I will open it to receive your lifeforce, and your colossal intelligence. Beside which, my own meagre craft, or that of most, is like a sigh to a sound of thunder.”

  Arkrondurl turned on Cyveth then the blaze of his awful eyes. No more were they silver, but – a nothingness. Some colours were spectres never even born.

  “And then – I shall live... in the flesh once more?”

  Inside the voice was there the vaguest childish tremor? Or not? Who could tell. Cyveth could. He had, before, unforgettably, heard these giveaways.

  “You will live, my Lord,” said Cyveth passionately and fiercely, “not merely as in the flesh you did, but to the extreme capacity your power, your genius and your knowledge deserve and have merited. So, lesser men must die to please you? Let them make room – make room for choicer men. You have earned this renewal, exalted master. Let me serve you.”

  Only then did Arkrondurl toss towards him one slightly, playfully questioning look. “And your own reward?”

  Cyveth laughed. “To live in legend. The wolf in shadow – blotted out – yet there. A mere human – who gave Arkrondurl back his life.”

  “You will be cursed. Perhaps sought and destroyed.”

  Cyveth shrugged. “But not forgotten.”

  It was now Arkrondurl who truly laughed. Inevitably, a repulsive noise. “Or I may kill you. You will know too much.”

  Cyveth lowered his eyes (another falsely modest and flirtatious maiden).

  “Let us see,” he said. And lifted the creature free of the casket.

  8

  Making the spell was, once the technique had been gained, comparatively straightforward, even rapid. And by now Cyveth was well-versed; he had performed it several times before. (The construction of the mortal receptacle – the miniaturized male figure – took far longer and was an act of many scenes, every version involving thirty-three days and nights. As with the ordinary miracle of conception, the creature must be securely planted and next grown, but this inside an alchemic crystalline womb, the nature of which was so bizarre it had, on each venture, startled Cyveth afresh.) But now – the spell was activated –

  The quickness with which the figure expanded was epic. Within three minutes it had grown to the size of a twelve-year-old child. In three more it had achieved the fully-proportioned height and girth of a statuesque male deity. From its head the thick river of hair poured out. Within its open eyes moisture glittered; its lips parted to reveal the white and polished teeth of a healthy man some twenty years of age. By the ninth minute all was complete. If perfection had been merely obvious before, now it was overwhelming.

  A god would not be shamed to put on such a physical garment.

  Cyveth did not glance towards the Sorcerer. Cyveth, by now, had slight doubt as to Arkrondurl’s reaction.

  But when Arkrondurl spoke, the greedy lust anyway dripped from his voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “I will inhabit that. Never fear, I shall reward you. Now get on – make haste. Rehouse me.”

  Cyveth gave a cry of acquiescence.

  He rushed to obey.

  And as he drew, in palest light, the necessary arcane symbols on the ground, the walls, the air, and sprinkled there from pouches needful tinctures, smokes, sands, Cyveth held his own racing brain in check. The only danger in these final moments was that he might after all, though never before had he done so during the past teem of years, make some mistake. Less from carelessness than over-familiarity...

  Far off in his mind as he worked, he glimpsed the sections of Arkrondurl’s prologue. The heroes with swords who had come to slay the Sorcerer while he lived, some successful, most not. And the exorcists who had, all of them, failed. And the countless innocents and undeservers who had perished. And time itself. And eventually a hero who was not any such thing and his deed that, for the major part, could not earn him fame or lasting glory, being too unglamorous, and too subject to repetition. Or, seen another way, potentially too doomed, too unconclusive. For this ‘hero’ (Cyveth), was as yet young, and strong. But later... later... What then?

  In the seventieth minute of his being with Arkrondurl, Cyveth grew still.

  “Great Lord, all is prepared. There are three seconds of passage. In the first you will vanish. In the next you will enter he that waits to assist your avatar. In the third you will be within his envelope of flesh, anchored as any living man in his mortal frame. You will be him, and he – will be yourself. Your vehicle and your kingdom. Live long, and to the most entire scope you may, unsurpassable Lord, in this well-earned and apposite mortal life.”

  Arkrondurl, like a grinning scar on the grizzled sheen of the tower. An image made only the more disgusting by duplication.

  And then the two words spoken.

  The showman and trickster missing nothing, getting all right, as he must, and always had. Again word perfect. All perfect. Perfection.

  A flash of flame, like that of an exploding star. Searing brightness, tumbling dark. Soundless cacophony. The deafening quiet.

  Cyveth turned, slow and stiff as an ancient a hundred years of age. The ghost of the Sorcerer was gone. On the floor, the beautiful and full-grown man was stirring.

  Wrapped in his own half-paralysis of horror, Cyveth watched, breath stopped, heart shuddering, all eyes.

  A god, re-bodied, rising up in returning vitality, flexing and smiling, laughing as a lion roars – No. Not that. Instead – the creature on the ground – was writhing, rolling, foaming at the lips, its eyes wide and wild, noises spewing from its throat and nostrils, hands clawing – and now all of it, a composite chaos, leaping to its feet and at once falling down again, crawling, sprawling, mewling and screeching – slamming its handsome flawless skull against the stony wall over and over.

  Cyveth swept up his magician’s luggage, the emptied casket with it. A hero with a sword? The baggage Cyveth carried, that was Cyveth’s sword.

  Springing past the howling slathering mad thing, which did not somehow seem to see him, Cyveth reached the steps, jumped a perceived gap, and pelted down them. As he descended the length of the tower of Arkrondurl, and sprang out through the doors on to the causeway, the mindless outcry echoed on and on behind him, inside the stone. And while Cyveth ran back across the causeway under the star-prickled night, the notes of torment and despair continued, if anything more loud. The godlike body was strong. It could support an incredible amount, as it would be required to. Like the tower, the creature had been built to last.

  Safely returned to the woodland on the causeway’s far side, Cyveth found his horse. It was staring at the tower sidelong, less in fear than in a disapproving recognition. Which again was not unreasonable. Like Cyveth, this horse had witnessed eight times already an identical tumult.

  Cyveth spoke the finishing word, the third of the spell – there must always be three (or seven, or nine).

  Despite the lack of light – the starved moon was hiding in the trees – anyone might notice a peculiar change occur then to the tower. It appeared to have grown – solid. That was, solid all through, as if the mass of stone had knitted suddenly internally together. Not a window now or door, facing out. Inside, no staircase or space or vault or ceiling, no smallest hole or crack. A block of granite only. With, somewhere inside, locked, packed, trapped, the tortured and wailing new-gained body of the Sorcerer Arkrondurl, and the lifeforce of Arkrondurl. Which was in turn, doubly held, in body and in tower, both. It went without saying, had Arkrondurl been as he had been, flesh or ghost, he could have smashed instantly any prison, stone or flesh, to pieces. But Arkrondurl was not, now, as he had been. Why not?
<
br />   As a living man, able once to be born and thereafter to return himself to life – if only eight further times – his ability had been virtually infinite. And as a ghost, his powers stayed incorrigible and supreme. Since the lifeforce, disembodied, and keeping still its personality, retained unimpaired the will and acumen of its physical former brain. If next this non-corporeal but vital force were reinvested in an unoccupied but viable fleshly form, it would at once control the new physical brain it had inherited. However.

  9

  As he rode the horse, at a regular yet peaceful pace, back towards the distant south, Cyveth allowed himself (at last, at last) thoughts of home.

  Certain family members still lived there, in the mild warm lands, among the orchards and the vines, under a yellower sun and those nocturnal stars, burning thick as meadow flowers, and held up only by the low brown mountains and the faith of men. But he thought of her, too, free to do so (at last) – or for a while. She was the young woman he would marry. A year his senior, tall and slender, with hair like an amber waterfall. Myself, the other untrustworthy magician Cyveth had known in youth, had foretold such a lover and been proved, that once, honest and correct. Three future sons had been promised too, born without trouble, lucky and bold. Whether they might inherit showman’s gifts, and the knack of learning sufficient magic, Myself had never said. Cyveth must trust that one at least would do. Or, failing this, that Cyveth might find another boy able and prepared to serve an apprenticeship, and, when Cyveth had grown old and lost the flair, who would agree to take on Cyveth’s unavoidable, repetitive task. For of course, one could not lie to oneself, someone would have to do it.

  While he lived and had his strength, Cyveth might well be called on to do it all again. And again. It might only be one single time, but he doubted that. It would be at least three times. Or seven. Or, once more, the full set of nine. Just as for the past many years he had done it, and ended only here, with the ninth tower visited, and the ninth undead version of Arkrondurl confined to his total internment. Again.

  How to destroy the deathless undead? Make them alive. Yet an aliveness with a proviso.

  Despite its faultless beauty, the alchemically fashioned male human body that had so lured – and captured – the ghost inside it, was in fact imperfect: it contained one invisible but pertinent omission. A brain. Certainly some of the vestiges of the organ were present, enough to allow consciousness, a type of sight, and of vocality, gesture and movement – but these nevertheless active only in their most crass and fundamentally useless capacity. Presumably the Sorcerer would have essayed some check of the creature, as it lay tantalizingly on offer before him, but any supernatural scan he had tried had been satisfied. For sure, he would have noted workable heart and lungs, stomach and other intimate inner areas, a skeleton and muscles of flexibility and endurance. For the brain, however, there was only a facsimilous shell equipped with feeble rudiments, a wheelless cart that no mind, small or great, could cause to move one inch. But it had fooled him, that self-enamoured monster, his evil genius blinded by self to all reality. So sure he was of the flawless case into which he was about to be poured – for he credited only his own ultimate triumph. And in he went, and behind him the door of flesh was slammed. And there Arkrondurl found himself, trapped in a body where he could enjoy no single second of sorcerous power, let alone individual governance. He would be now like any human thing whose brain and mind no longer functioned. While remaining always mindlessly aware, mindlessly awake, helpless, hopeless. Howling.

  And the body was otherwise so healthy and virile. It could live for ten decades or more – unless, as had three times happened, in his transports of agonized physical uncontrol, the Sorcerer should accidentally kill it. Then, out the ghost would seethe again. Nor only one ghost, for like his lives there were nine of them, one for each tower.

  These nine ghosts never remembered, it seemed, anything of Cyveth – nothing of the trickster who had promised ideal rebodyment and glory, and instead condemned to hell-on-earth. Brainless, they had not kept the memory. And therefore Cyveth had been enabled to return and spring the cage again. (Cyveth, travelling these paths over, months and miles, listening to the gossipings of nightmare all heard before... Cyveth the jailor, himself perhaps also condemned – to his quest, forever.)

  Or not forever. When old, weakened and exhausted – then his son, or some adopted heir, would take on the leading role. Three times, seven times, nine. Over and over, over and ever, for Hell’s pit would not accept Arkrondurl and any sweeter Otherworlds were shut. Earth must imprison him, and men of earth, the men of Cyveth’s line, see to the business.

  Cyveth, riding south through the sun-petalled days, the high-roofed full-mooned nights, wondered how eventually he could come to tell his son about the quest and that he too would, ever after, be shackled to it. And Cyveth grasped it would be far harder, this telling, than going to see a tower of Arkrondurl and risking there everything in order to save the world. But he would do that, too. For though they mostly do not wish to, with no choice all mortal men one day must die. And perhaps, although this also they do not always wish, must return to life again.

  Who Walks With Death

  Jonathan Green

  “Soth!” Jormungard cursed, gazing upon the scene in abject horror.

  Even for one of his years and experience, the sight that greeted his unblinking eyes sickened him to the core.

  Dead soldiers on a battlefield, who had met their ends with honour in mortal combat, their souls shriven, ready to be claimed by the raven’s feast, that was what every warrior of Farrhold hoped for. Either that, or to die in a drinking binge such as was spoken of in the ancient sagas of the Farrmen.

  But women and children, ripped to shreds, viscera strewn about the farmstead like Solstice garlands? No man of Farrhold wanted to see that – none but the depraved, cannibalistic cults of Namarr – and never was that more true than in the case of Jormungard of the House of Vanyr. The massacre of innocents was something he had hoped never to set eyes upon again.

  “Soth?” his companion challenged him.

  Jorm looked to the other man. Thorkill was squatting on his haunches, casting an experienced eye over the scene, hoping to pry its secrets from what the tracks and other bloodied signs told him.

  “This wasn’t the work of the worm god, although he will eat his fill this night. A beast did this.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You were always handy with a sword, young master,” the older man laughed coarsely, “and you know your way round a bow, but you don’t have a tracker’s eye do you? You never did.”

  Jormungard grunted. “That’s what I keep you around for.”

  He had been a man these past five winters and yet still the grizzled veteran spoke to him sometimes as if he were a mere stripling. And he certainly wasn’t that. He hadn’t been that for a long time, not since he had sworn vengeance against the slave-servants of the death god for the slaughter of his family. It was such slaughter that he had never wished to see again, and yet here he was…

  “You see this, here,” Thorkill said, pointing with a hand thick with rings at a blood-filled impression in the ground, “and here?”

  Jormungard forced himself to cast a critical gaze over the scene of the massacre once more, trying to see beyond the blood and gore, and faces forever frozen in shock and fear. He could see the prints, now that Thorkill was pointing them out. Whatever had made them was large, larger than a bear, and, more disconcertingly, the footprints looked to be closer to those of a man than anything else.

  “What do you think it was?”

  Thorkill breathed in through his teeth. “Of that I’m not sure.”

  “A troll,” Jorm wondered aloud, “leaving its mountain fastness in search of food in these bitter months?”

  “Maybe.” Thorkill sounded unconvinced.

  “You’re sure this wasn’t the work of… raiders?”

  “Such savagery? I very much doubt…” Thorkill
broke off seeing the look in the younger man’s eyes. “You think Namarrans did this?”

  “I have only seen savagery such as this once before,” Jorm pointed out, the memory of his family’s massacre overlaid upon this one in his mind’s eye, crystal clear in every minute detail.

  “No, this was the work of an animal. See these wounds? They were not made by a keen-edged blade. They were made by an animal’s claws.”

  Silence descended between them again as they examined the disembowelled bodies of the farmer and his family. An axe lay by the farmer’s side, as did the purple-grey ropes of his spilled intestines. Whether the blood on the axe’s blade was that of the farmstead’s attacker or the farmer himself, it was impossible to tell.

  The silence was broken by a cry, bestial and savage – a sound like death and rage and hunger – that rang out around the bowl of the valley. As one, the two men looked to the misted slopes above and then at each other.Thorkill held Jorm’s gaze with a steely look, as much as to say, “Told you so.”

  The echoes of the cry faded but it was still several moments more before either of them spoke again, or Jorm’s sword hand strayed from the hilt of his scabbarded blade.

  They built a pyre from what wood they could find, and laid the family together atop it, their feet pointing west, their heads to the east, so that their departing souls might see the setting sun and know which way to go, to follow the fiery orb to the lands hereafter.