Swords Against Darkness

by Paula Guran

  Soon after, when the row-master had gone to the other side of the ship to harangue the portside oarsmen, Snoori whispered, “Brimm—you see the storm clouds there, off to the west?”

  “What of it? They are not coming this way.”

  “But what if they could? What if they changed their minds? Did you not tell me you learned a spell to draw a storm?”

  “Why . . . ” He almost lost rowing rhythm, considering it. Did he indeed remember the incantation? Had he the energy of spirit required to summon an air elemental? “Perhaps. If I ponder it. But—were I to summon a storm it might well send us to the bottom in our chains. What good would it do us?”

  “Look yonder—to the south. Do you see that streak of blue?”

  “That cloud bank?”

  “I have been to Atlantis, you remember. It was just once, trading with my uncle. That streak of blue on the horizon—why that is the ramparts of Poseidonia—one of the ten kingdoms of Atlantis.”

  “The land of your mythical ‘Poseidonian princess,’ ” Brimm sniffed. “We will see the docks, and no more of Atlantis than that.”

  “Just so. If the captain fetches up to the docks of Poseidonia, he will never unchain us, unless it is to sell us into worse conditions. But—if the ship is driven carefully, there are sandbars just under those ramparts. My uncle’s ship ran aground on them. In about an hour, with the diminishing tide . . . ”

  “We would capsize in these waves and drown.”

  Snoori sighed. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “But on the other hand—” Brimm was in a desperate mood “—if indeed we merely ran aground. Then . . . ”

  Dusk was upon them when the sails were raised, and the rowers were given a rest and their thin fishy stew. The other rows were bemused by the murmured incantations of the lean Hyperborean with long black hair, the sunburn turning his pale skin the color of cherries. Clearly he had surrendered to madness. Only one of them, an old, blue-dyed Pict, recognized his hand-motions as magical passes. The Pict only shrugged. He had tried calling on his own gods. But it was useless, for they reigned far from here. As far as the Pict could tell, the Hyperborean’s hand motions only succeeded in making his chains clink.

  But Brimm was scarcely aware of the chains, or the galley to which they bound him. He was in a state of mystical trance, the deep inward focus that Urgus had taught him; in his weakened state his spirit energy was not at its most potent, in the somatic sense—but fury too is tinder for a blaze, and of fury he had an abundance. He expanded the flickering rainbow of his emanation, and drew on the electricity in the air to expand it further; he firmed it, then extended unseen fingers toward the flaring, brooding storm to the west. His unseen fingers beckoned. They could be seen only by a creature of astral form . . .

  Brimm spoke the name of the aerial elemental, Zirrish: he who was known to revel in storms. Brimm promised two ritual sacrifices, the lives of two men, if Zirrish should bring the storm hither and turn the ship with a precision that would glorify Zirrish in the stories Brimm would tell of the air god’s glorious power . . .

  There was a pause. Then—thunder responded, from just overhead.

  For a moment Brimm thought the thunder a rebuke. Then the waves from the west rose, rearing up as the storm changed directions; black clouds rushing toward them on long crooked legs of blue-white lightning.

  Onward the storm came, with unnatural haste, and Captain Zenk gave orders to shorten sail—but it was no use, the ship’s hull itself was driven ahead of the storm, and men cowered in terror as lightning stampeded toward them; as ragged bolts flashed about them and the ship plowed a new furrow in the sea, turning to the southeast, toward the sandbars beneath the northerly ramparts of Atlantis . . .

  Snapped from his trance by a flash of lightning and a wall of pelting rain, Brimm struggled with his own rising fear. Already lightning had struck one of the two masts, and set it afire; already the ship’s timbers were working, intermittently spitting water. The aft was lifted, the prow dipped, the galley surging headlong toward the cliffs of Atlantis. Oars snapped off; men groaned and cried out, each to his own gods.

  “This was a ghastly mistake!” Brimm cried—but Snoori was huddled with his head under his arms, terrified of the lightning and the high, sharp-peaked waves looming over them; the onrushing cliffs of glassy stone ahead.

  Then they struck the sandbar at just the angle planned. Everyone on board was tossed and jolted, slaves in their chains howling with terror at the impact, the burning mast snapping to fall into the sea.

  But the ship held together, taking little brinewater, and in seconds the storm diminished, pounding thunderously away like one of the great angry mammoths that yet roamed upper Hyperborea. The darkness thickened, but the galley steadied. Waves still assaulted it and the tide had only just dropped. Reavers and scavengers might come upon them, Brimm thought, and make short work of the crew to take its cargo of furs and northern iron and Hyperborean ale.

  The ship must be pulled free of the sandbar. As the waves slackened, crewmen brought levers and tools to use to force it off the bar.

  As Brimm and Snoori had calculated, the row-master and the Hyperborean brute hurried to unchain the oarsmen—their collective muscle would be needed to free the ship. They were meant to work at the incentive of a snapping whip and threat of the blade.

  Unchained, stretching his limbs with the row-master’s whip cracking over his head, Brimm saw his chance. The row-master and the brute were turned away, shouting at other men, and the captain had gone to the rail to assess their position—Zenk standing only a stride away, with his back to Brimm.

  It was the work of a hate-energized moment to snatch his silver piercer from the captain’s waistband.

  Zenk turned in startlement, just in time to receive the sword’s thrust through his heart. Brimm shouted at the sky, “Zirrish! I offer these, my enemies, to thee!” He added a few arcane words, dedicating Zenk’s lifeforce to Zirrish.

  Captain Zenk gawped down at the blade in his chest and then sank to the deck, eyes glassy. Brimm pulled the blade free with an expert motion.

  The row-master roared and rushed at Brimm—but Snoori tackled the whip-wielder’s bowed legs, knocking him to the deck. With a swift stroke, Brimm struck the slaver’s head from his shoulders. Snoori snatched up the whip and snapped it in the faces of the crew, driving them back. The rowers took pieces of shattered oars and used them as clubs, battering the crew.

  The Brute was swinging his great spiked hammer at Brimm who ducked easily under it, pivoting and lunging in one motion, to slash the tip of his light, powerful blade at the Brute’s throat. It struck quick and deep, and the great vein there spurted blood, which arced over the rail into the sea, as Brimm muttered again to Zirrish, offering up another life. The air about him whispered and hissed in pleasure . . . as the Brute raised his hammer again, and staggered toward Brimm, who only had to back away, staying out of the range of that whirling hammer, until the Brute had lost enough blood. The scarred Hyperborean fell heavily to his knees, then forward onto his face, twitching.

  The other slaves gasped—and then cheered. They rushed headlong at the retreating crew, who as one man jumped over the rails into the sea. Brimm found his old dagger and cloak—the row-master had used the one to pick his teeth and the other to wipe his sweat—and called for Snoori.

  Javelins were caught up from their racks and thrown after the swimming crew; Snoori plucked one for himself, and then ran to Brimm at the rail. “What now?”

  A one-eyed Hyperborean oarsman, mane and beard of flowing red, roared in triumph and urged the freed rowers to declare him their new captain. He extolled himself as a former pirate and wise in the ways of the sea. “And if I’m to have a ship to captain and you to share we must move it from the sandbar!”

  But before the matter was decided, Brimm and Snoori were over the rail, dropping feet first into the sea. They were scarcely under water before they found footing and lurched across the sandbar, the wa
ves up to their chins, with the confidence of true Hyperboreans.

  Snoori knew the way to spiral stone stairs below the blue-painted ramparts of Poseidonia. His first journey here had brought him to the sandbars, and with his uncle he had gone up the stairway to the well-defended gates, the two of them seeking aid for their grounded vessel. As Snoori’s uncle was a trader who had business with Atlantis, his ship was, in due course, pulled off the sandbar.

  But the two wet, bedraggled escaped slaves who presented themselves now at those same gates seemed to the guards more like undesirables. None of the guards remembered Snoori. His journey here had taken place nine years ago.

  And so . . .

  “From a slave galley to a dungeon. Thank you, Snoori.”

  “I was astonished they didn’t remember me, Brimm! Of course I didn’t have a beard then and they spoke only to my uncle and . . . Could you conjure up some gold? We could bribe our way out.”

  “There is no such spell that actually works, Snoori. If there were, I’d have used it long ago. Why am I explaining this to you? You know, there is enough slack in these dungeon chains to strangle you with . . . ”

  “You wouldn’t! The faithful friend of your youth! You’re not so crass!”

  It was morning, something Brimm surmised only thanks to the spare shaft of dawn light slanting through the dungeon’s single high window. The morning light illuminated a sweating stone wall slathered with some slick green growth, and a rat-sized roach scuttling to a crack in a corner. The air reeked of urine and moldy straw. They were sitting on the damp straw, their arms numb from half a night pinioned over their shoulders, and Brimm had spent hours wracking his brains for a suitable spell.

  Again, he was bereft of his sword. How long before that bastard of a jailer sold it?

  “A sword,” Brimm growled. “I much prefer them to magic. The piercer always works. One can use it to shave, as well as cut throats; it can be used to stir a pot, or to pry at a stone wall.”

  “Are you becoming delirious?” Snoori asked, as if merely curious.

  There was a rattling at the door, which then squeaked open, and a bear-like man in a yellowing tunic came in: the jailer, carrying a lantern in one hand and keys in the other. He led the way for two men in gold-threaded gray-black livery. One of the men was red faced, gray bearded, and hawk eyed. His beard was coated in fragrant unguents. The other, younger, clean-shaven man had the raptor-eyed look too. He was probably the bearded man’s son. Their eyes were lined with kohl.

  The younger man raised a lace kerchief to his nose as he approached the staring prisoners. He looked doubtfully from one to the other. “I am Fress—this is my father Remnon. We are the king’s sacred retainers. Are you the fools who asked to serve the princess?”

  Their weapons returned to them, each awarded an ill-fitting helmet of thin iron and oak, Brimm and Snoori stood beside Remnon and Fress and gazed down upon the fabled land of ten kingdoms.

  Atlantis was not quite a continent; yet it was enormous, a very big island shaped like a slightly off-center diamond; a land big enough to be divided into ten distinct fiefdoms of various sizes. The kingdoms were now ruled by the descendants—or so the rulers claimed—of the demigods who had ruled Atlantis after its establishment by Poseidon.

  Several of those kingdoms, including Squema, Thothia, and Poseidonia, spread out before Brimm and Snoori as if on a map, for they stood upon the high bricked road just under the walls of the city. Also called Poseidonia, the hoary city of mossy, settling blocks at their back was splayed along the upper stone rim overlooking succeeding valleys that receded, each flatter and lower, to the several circular inner canals that gave Atlantis one of its geographical distinctions. To the east the cliffs of Atlantis parted, and here a deep inlet entered the island from the sea. The inlet was wide enough for three ships abreast and flowed into a channel connecting the ring-like canals—one canal inside the next—that curved to follow the island’s natural outer walls of volcanic glass. Dug out centuries before by legions of slaves and linked by a transverse channel, the canals contacted each of the kingdoms; thus, each King had his own port. On the beetling prominences overlooking the inlet stood catapults, in the distance seeming to Brimm like insects poised to leap. Mechanisms like gigantic crossbows stood beside the catapults, pointed warningly out to sea; countless warships and merchant vessels anchored along the canals within, or moved with stately ease to Inner Atlantis, slowly propelled by galley oarsmen.

  Much of the land was lost in the haze of distance; But immediately below Brimm and Snoori, terraced orchards and fields of velvety green hugged the canals; rustic castles of wood and stone—none coated in gold—rose atop stony bosses of land clustered round by hamlets emitting a haze of dun woodsmoke. Low walls of piled black stone divided fields and borders.

  Separated from the canals by a curving causeway was a dark lake within the crater of a volcanic vent. Even now, hot vapors rose fitfully from it; sulfurous bubbles burst on its bleak surface to exhale a yellow mist that rose to blur the sun into a coppery oval. Lifted on gray stone buttresses overlooking the lake, in the shadow of the outer rim of the island, rested the partly tumbled ruin of an ancient palace.

  “There lies the palace Great Poseidon erected for his mortal love, Cleito!” said Remnon, pointing at the palace with a trembling finger. Remnon wore the livery of King Merz: gold sea dragons embroidered on flat black silk. His speech was High Atlantean, a variant of the cruder language spoken by most of those who lived and wandered ’round the Great Sea—but the accent seemed quaint to Brimm.

  “Cleito, you say?” Brimm frowned. “But surely that is the name of the princess we are asked to rescue? It cannot be the same one! If that is the palace of a Cleito she lived centuries in the past.”

  “Of course it’s not her, oaf,” declared the younger retainer. “She is the great-great-granddaughter, and then some, of Poseidon’s love. She is Cleito the Ninth.”

  “The eleventh, Fress!” his father corrected irritably, wincing.

  Fress scratched his head. “I thought it was the ninth. Are you sure?”

  Brimm gazed uneasily at the palace. The rectilinear, blocky ruins seemed to squirm in the rising vapors of the lake. “Perhaps, after all, we might simply sign on with good King Merz—we should be happy to guard his palace.”

  “The king has all the help he needs—except at the old palace of Poseidon, yonder.”

  “Does King Merz have a harem?” Snoori asked, trying to make it sound like innocent curiosity.

  Remnon shot Snoori a glare. “You will never get near enough to that to so much as smell the perfume, that I assure you!”

  “The sun tilts high, Father,” said Fress. “We’d best be off.”

  “Yes. The eight who’ve already come are drinking good wine and devouring sausages as they await us. With you two, we have the Ten who count themselves the Swords of Her Heart, and we need delay no more. We’ll take a cart from the stables to the cliff road!”

  Their guides strode toward the stables. Brimm hesitated, and caught Snoori’s arm. “Snoori—perhaps we might dash down the hillside here, and find another employer in some other kingdom.”

  “I haven’t eaten since yesterday—and they spoke of sausages and wine! Come on! Besides—the treasure!” Snoori hurried after them. Sighing and pondering the insatiable demands of friendship, Brimm followed.

  What remained of the repast was scattered across a block of fallen stone, which served as a table, outside the palace gates. The sausages and wine were mostly depleted, but Brimm and Snoori managed a small meal from the scraps and the dregs of several bronze goblets. Remnon and Fress waited impatiently until they finished, then waved them into the Hall of Supplicants, where the rest of the Ten awaited . . .

  The Hall of Supplicants was a high-ceilinged chamber alive with shadows and echoes. Twitching yellow light from a few torch sconces scarcely penetrated the darkness. The sound of their boot-steps came back to them as Brimm and Snoori strode to join the oth
ers waiting at the high metal doors at the other end of the hall. The cracked blocks of the walls were carved of red granite; the pilasters along the walls were trimmed in red coral and volcanic glass, some of it fallen about the bases of the square columns; in a panel along the upper walls porphyry glittering with quartz was carved to represent the waves of the sea. Dust and rubble hid the corners of the marble floor.

  The squirming shadows hid most of the sagging ceiling; Brimm could faintly make out a patchily intact mosaic of something like a giant squid, watched over by a bearded man wearing a diadem. Poseidon?

  The eight soldiers raggedly assembled before the high doors seemed to be from everywhere but Atlantis. There were two northern nomads, with their high cheekbones, dark skin, almond eyes; they were clad only in rancid beast-furs, their weapons hammers of bronze and stone. The company included one sleek, armored man of Ur, wielder of a short curved iron sword and stubby spears, his bronze helmet topped with the silver disk of the moon god, his face masked. There was an ebon warrior of the far south, his face ornately decorated with scars. He was clad in a long red robe. He towered over the rest of them, but his flint-tipped spear was longer than he was tall. Beside him was a painted, intricately garbed, ruddy-skinned warrior wearing a headpiece resembling a feathery snake—he hailed from the far western continents, where rose mighty civilizations centered around stepped pyramids; there was a blue-dyed Pict armed with a stone-tipped club and a bronze dagger. The other three looked to be ragtag vagabonds, peering fearfully about them as they hefted cast-off Atlantean battleaxes.

  The door before them was of the same silvery metal, Brimm judged, as his own slender sword, but less polished. It had once been inset with gems, but they’d evidently been pried away by thieves and only scratched indentations remained.

  The palace was in large part a ruin; everything about it spoke of disuse and abandonment and fear. A rankness caught at Brimm’s nostrils, carried by a faint draft from under the slightly bent metal doors. Rotting fish?