The Sword & Sorcery Anthology

by David G. Hartwell

  When Cori first learned it the stride had demanded an empty mind. Now she knew the further trick of experiencing thought without creating will. Undirected, her mind filled with memories. The sea and the time after her first kill, when she’d swum out in a storm, hoping to drown, only to find her desire to live stronger than shame, or horror at what she was. The Guild hall in the capital, with its stark brown chairs and wonderful wine. And Sorai, with its up and down streets and bleached white houses.

  She thought also of Morin Jay’s strange enemy. The house Morin had bought for himself outside Sorai sat on a piece of land that also hosted, a little farther inland, the remains of an old castle or fortified town. No one really knew the name or purpose of the place except that the strange architecture, the oddly shaped and colored stones, suggested some old wizard centef. Very ancient. Harmless. Empty as long as anyone could remember. So they said.

  Morin had lived there three years, building up his business, when one night, while he stood in his office watching a small fleet of his ships sail past his house on their way to the Sorai docks, he heard a wild rushing noise. A moment later, to his amazement as much as terror, a dragon, a genuine winged worm longer than any of his boats (Cori allowed for considerable enlargement through fear), fell upon the fleet, smashing the flagship and breaking the other ships’ masts, so that one of them foundered and the other two barely made it to port. Miraculously, no one was killed, but half the cargo sank into the sea.

  Over the next two years the dragon attacked three more times; the last two, however, had come only two weeks apart. Always the same pattern prevailed, ships, caravans, storehouses destroyed, but never the men and women who tended them. Morin Jay himself was the target, though the beast never went for him or his house.

  From an overpriced wizard the merchant had learned that the creature apparently lived in the old ruined town, perhaps as a guardian for the long dead. Somehow Morin had angered it, maybe just by being there, and only its death could release him. Moving would accomplish nothing, the wizard said. Angry dragons never changed their minds. After two ineffectual tries at killing the creature the wizard admitted that the spells guarding the ruins lay beyond his comprehension. An obsolete style. When he’d collected his fee—Morin Jay had tried to haggle but a vengeful demon is trouble enough—the wizard had given Morin one last suggestion. If you want something dead—hire a specialist.

  Cori slept one night in the wild, stretched out on a rock. There was no need for shelter. She knew it wouldn’t rain—the Earth had “told” her—and even asleep an Assassin’s reflexes were more than equal to any beast or bandit. She arrived in Sorai the following evening, only five hours after Morin Jay’s coach had rolled into the center of the city.

  Cori had visited Sorai twice before, and both times found it charming with its streets stepped like stairways, its open air jewel markets bringing traders and thieves from hundreds of miles, its wandering bands of child singers (half of them pickpockets), its thick black ale. But those times she’d gone disguised, first as a Free Messenger, and then as an aristocrat observing the common people. This time, when Cori stood in the center square, with its empty stalls from the closed markets and its rows of grotesque statues decorating the doorways of the guild halls, this time she wore the “uniform” of her calling: black leggings, soft leather slippers (rimmed, like the scarf, with a strip of diamond blade), dark green tunic with a small red leather bag tied to her waist, and the scarf covering her Mark. A simple enough costume; but one immediately recognized.

  On all sides the traffic stopped. Some people stared, others darted into the guild halls (what would they say, she wondered, if her guild had asked to open a hall here?). Two teenage boys edged forward, their eyes partially on each other as if each hoped the other would stop first. Crossing her arms Cori looked them up and down, and the two ran back to the line of adults pressed against the buildings.

  Somewhere in the crowd a child said, “Momma, why is everybody looking? I want to see.” The mother slapped a hand on the child’s mouth, then nearly smothered it when it started to cry. Cori could see the woman staring at an alley leading away from the square.

  “Oh, let her alone,” Cori called. “I’m not going to swallow her.”

  With a sob the woman grabbed up the yowling child and ran for the alleyway.

  A man shouted, “Go back where you belong.” Cori shrugged. Where the blood would that be?

  She looked around the square. On one side the setting sun lit the gold plates of the different guilds. Everything else lay in shadows. Near her stood the tables and chairs of an outdoor café. Usually, she knew, people crowded it after the market closed, laughing, drinking, the merchants bragging of their sales, the artists drawing the statues or the crowd, the pickpockets with one eye on their “customers” and the other on the waiters who doubled as market police. Now the chairs stood empty, the tables bare except for a few abandoned drinks. Cori walked over and sat down.

  She raised an eyebrow at the burly waiters lined up by the doorway of the café. “You’ve got a customer,” she told them. “Why don’t you see what she wants?”

  “We don’t serve murderers,” one of them said.

  Cori smiled at him. “You served me with enough eagerness last winter, when I came in different clothes. If I remember—yes, weren’t you the one who suggested I could serve you below the Sea Wall?” A few people laughed; a few more joined in when the waiter blurted out, “That’s a lie. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  An older waiter slapped him on the back. “Forget it, Jom,” he said. “You’ve tried with so many, you might as well count an Assassin in with the rest of them.” He stepped up to Cori. “What can I bring you?” he asked.

  “Ale. A double tankard. And free drinks for anyone who wishes to join me.” A safe offer; no one sat down. Cori sipped her drink as the crowd began to calm itself. She watched them slide away and she thought how it never changed. In the larger towns the people might show a little more sophistication, but behind each pair of casual eyes lay the same thought displayed so openly on all these frightened faces; she’s come for me, someone’s hired her to kill me.

  They were mostly gone when a boy threw a rock at her. Cori caught it with one hand, slapping down the ale with the other. She’d half risen and had her arm cocked when the anger exploded out of her. She sat down heavily. Idiot, she scolded herself, you’ve come for a dragon, you’ll spill the hunger on some brat? Shaking slightly she threw some money down and left the square.

  Though Cori wasn’t due to see Morin Jay until the following morning, she didn’t much feel like imposing herself on some trembling tavern owner. She headed for the Sea Wall, still upset by the fury that had swept her. Anger—the worst thing that could happen to an Assassin. It threatened all the years she’d spent training, practicing, learning to control the hunger and not release it until she’d found the right target. If she let it burst out of her at the slightest insult then she deserved everything those pompous fools thought about her.

  Maybe I deserve it anyway, she thought. Maybe we all do.

  “Choose a proper target.” What gave her the right? She sighed. Necessity. And wasn’t a dragon a better choice than a boy?

  She climbed the stone stairs of the Wall, stopping for a moment to look through the bars of a cell. The Wall, which ran for several hundred miles along the coast, protecting the various towns and provinces from storms and pirates, contained catacombs of cells. In the small room the single prisoner looked up curiously at the face peering in at her. Either she couldn’t tell what Cori was, or she didn’t care, for a moment later she sank back on her cot, her elbows on her knees.

  At the top of the stairs Cori stepped onto the wide grassy surface. To the right a solitary guard post shined its yellow wizardlight on the sea. Cori walked some few hundred feet to the left and sat down.

  The sea leapt nervously at the sloping wall. Like someone trying to break in, she thought. In minutes the cold spray had coa
ted her, soaking right through her clothes. She didn’t mind; through narrow eyes she watched the waves, her hands around her knees as she remembered the time she’d swum a mile underwater to rip open the bottom of a ghost ship. What a beautiful kill that was. The hunger had exploded out of her with enough force to boil away the chunks of ice banging into her. She remembered how she’d half swum, half floated back to shore. So empty. So light. And she remembered the cheers of the villagers who’d lifted her from the water and wrapped her in fur blankets.

  What a difference from Sorai. Or was it? She’d done a job for them. How would they greet her now if she ever came back for a visit?

  She thought about Laani, speaking to Cori that first night in the Guild Hall. She’d just arrived, filthy and hysterical, screaming any time someone approached her. Only much later did she find out how much her anger and fear had threatened everyone sitting there. Then, all she knew was that she wanted her mother. Laani, not much older than Cori herself, had managed to grab the flailing arms and pin the kicking legs with her knees. “Forget your parents,” she’d told Cori over and over. “We’re your family now. No one else but us. No one.”

  Without thinking, Cori began to breathe along with the waves, following the Moon rhythm that lay underneath the wind-driven frenzy. Her body swayed as she closed her eyes and breathed in the dark water, breathed out all her memories, the kills, the loneliness. In and out, rising and falling. She could let herself open like the paper flowers in the Crystal City, let the sea enter her and carry her away until nothing was left but the waves, rising and dying forever.

  With a sharp cry Cori shook herself loose. She stood up and rubbed her arms. What was happening to her? First she almost spills herself on some nameless brat, now she comes close to emptying the hunger into the sea. Was she scared? Of the dragon? Maybe she was just tired. Sick of it all.

  She began to walk along the muddy road that formed the top of the Wall. What would have happened if she’d let herself drift off like that? With the hunger so high. Burn the whole town probably. What they deserve, she thought sourly.

  Memory again. Huddling in the corner of her parents’ stone floor kitchen—her dress torn, blood spattered—her ears battered by her mother’s gulping sobs, her father’s groans and whimpers, the shouts from Rann’s father and brothers, and from the mob throwing rocks at the walls and the closed wooden shutters. And then the stillness. It started outside the house and spread inside, even silencing her mother, as they appeared in the doorway, three of them, neither men nor women it seemed, despite their close-fitting tunics. Weaponless, silent, they walked her through the enraged crowd, and even Rann’s father didn’t dare throw the stone he held so tightly in his hand. “We’re your family now. No one but us.”

  “Rann,” Cori said softly and squinted at the wet night as if the sea would fling his burned body at her. She started walking again, then stopped when she saw another guard outpost. Don’t want to give the poor boy a shock, she thought. She lay down on the road, so soaked it didn’t make a difference. Mother Earth, she thought, when are you going to let go of me?

  2

  Morin Jay lived in a turreted house with too many rooms. A servant met her at the door. Despite his blousy shirt and balloon trousers, the costume of a middle-rank Hrelltan, the man’s accent betrayed his local origins. He led her through a long hallway to a large room overlooking the sea. Cori glanced at the paintings in their gold-edged frames (expensive but she would never have hung them), the long desk covered with symbols of the Yellow God, the graceful gold and red rug before the desk, and she thought how the god had favored Morin Jay more than he cared to admit.

  The merchant stood up, his hands politely extended, then dropped them as Cori stood motionless. He offered her a room in his house; she said she preferred to camp on the grounds. He vaguely suggested lunch; she suggested they go look at the ruins. Obviously relieved he wouldn’t have to entertain her, Morin dismissed his servant (even more relieved) and led her from the house.

  The dragon’s former town (or castle, or spell-casting ground) covered the flat top of a hill somewhat higher than that of Morin’s house. Though the winding road upward appeared gentle, Cori soon found herself struggling, almost as out of breath as Morin Jay, who gulped air at every step. Entry barrier, she thought, probably very strong at one time. But when she tried to reach past it to ground her nerve ends in the Earth she discovered a very different barrier. For the first time in years she couldn’t sink her mind through the pathways in the rock to that endless source of power. She could sense a kind of fever, a sickness in the Earth itself.

  “What’s wrong?” Morin whispered. “Should we turn back?”

  “Shut up.” Panic shook her like an infant who can’t find her mother. Panic, and a wild urge to smash her elbow into Morin Jay’s face, to cut his belly with her sharp, hardened fingernails. Calm, she ordered herself. The memory of what the Guild had done to Jabob, the “client killer,” helped her to throw off the tension from her eyes and mouth, then move the calm down her body to the toes and fingers. “Come on,” she said, and strode up the hill. Morin puffed behind her.

  Cori had never seen ruins like these. The building or buildings must have been built of some artificial rock, if such a thing could exist, for she knew of no way to carve stone in such graceful spirals, or in such fine and regular points. Nor could anyone dye stone in such vivid delicate colors. There was rubble everywhere, from pebbles and formless chunks of jagged “rock,” some as big and lumpy as a sleeping horse. Cori picked up some small pieces, found them cold, more smooth than the grainy look suggested, and amazingly heavy. She stared at a flattish piece smaller than the palm of her hand—and found herself thinking how she could crack Morin Jay’s skull with it. Shaking, she threw it behind her.

  Though no complete buildings remained, several half structures rose from the ground like plants. One, a kind of vertical maze, began as a narrow tower, then impossibly curled around and back on itself, until Cori grew dizzy trying to follow all the twists of “stone.” In the center of the ruins Cori found some sort of well, a tube of glistening dark blue stone about four feet in diameter and broken off a short distance above Cori’s head. She found a smooth edge and hoisted herself up to look inside. Dizziness seized her; she got a glimpse of a deep tunnel, murky dark with a pinpoint of light far below the hill. Her fingers came loose and she fell heavily to the pebbly dirt. Morin hovered over her. “What was it? Did you see something?”

  She ignored him, trying to ignore as well the urge to run down the hill. What was this place? What was it for? Cori sighed. To her client she said, “Where exactly does this dragon of yours keep himself when he’s not smashing things?” She’d expected some cave, a building large enough to act as one.

  “I don’t know,” Morin whispered, and added stupidly, “I’m sorry.”

  “What do you mean? You told me it came from this—this place. Well, where?”

  “But that’s all I know. The wizard—”

  “The expensive master of wisdom.”

  “He told me it lived here—somewhere—but that’s all he said.”

  Cori made a face. She’d have to search the whole area. Later, without this overdressed fool. She walked back to the road, her client scurrying after her.

  They were just beyond the ruins when Cori sensed the ground trembling, and then the Earth itself seemed to come to pieces, torn open like a cloth screen. “Run,” she shouted, and took off down the hill. Pain entered her through her feet, and a noise like grinding rocks. She fell, half got up and fell again, before she could break loose from the Earth’s agony.

  The ground was heaving now, and even Morin Jay could sense the terror. “I can’t move,” he cried. “Help me.” Cori braked, swore against all clients, and ran back to hoist him from all fours onto her shoulder. “Stop squirming, you stupid ape,” she shouted.

  Noise. A boom, suddenly rising to a shriek, then sinking again to a shaky roar. Cori looked over her free shoulder—
and sat down with a thud, dropping Morin beside her. On top of the hill the ruins shimmered like sculptured smoke, then suddenly vanished. A beast stood there, green scales heavier than ship armor, yellow tongue longer and thicker than a cobra and snaking out from a gateway of fanged teeth, hooded eyes bulging in a head all lumps of stone. Four wings unfolded across the entire sky, and then the largest creature Cori had ever seen took off into the air with the gracefulness of a gull.

  Three times it circled over their heads, while Morin shrieked and Cori stood over him, staring at the granite-hard underbelly and a dark red penis as thick as the battering ram the underdemons used against heaven. At last it flew off toward the sea. When Cori could breathe again and Morin’s screams had settled into whimpers the Assassin looked up at the hilltop. The ruins had returned, still and silent. Gingerly her senses reached into the Earth. No barrier stopped her, no noise or agony; only a rawness.

  Later that day, the news came, via runner, that the dragon had attacked a grain storehouse on the edge of the town, leveling the building and scattering the already sold grain with his wings. To Morin’s loss was added the cost of placating his hysterical workers and the town at large with extravagant gifts and promises of action. “You’ve got to do something,” he fumed at Cori, who sat cross-legged in a corner of his office.

  “I already have,” she said. “I saved your life.” She wasn’t sure that was true, but it sounded good.

  “That’s not enough. I mean—oh, you know what I mean.”

  “He’s very selective, this dragon of yours.”

  Morin squinted at her. “What are you trying to say?”

  “He’s attacked six times without taking a single life.”

  “What’s the difference? He’s destroyed enough property.”