by Paula Guran
The imp crouched, quivering, hugging itself, and crooned its grief. Then it shook itself, drawing free its tiny sword. Enough of these evil tunnels and warrens! To the ladder! Flee this cruel place!
With renewed determination, and a healthy dose of terror, it scampered.
Breathing hard, the demon froze, nose testing the pungent, bitter air. Its eyes were wide, seeking the telltale bloom of body heat—those cursed cloaks, they’d been sopping wet, cold to the touch, blind to the demon’s eyes; and the iron chain wasn’t much better. Even so, there was no way a human could sneak up on it. No way.
It needed to find somewhere to hide. A privy hole, maybe. A crack in a wall. Anywhere.
The demon edged forward, and suddenly the human stench was overpowering. Mewling, it slowly straightened—and then turned around.
The bearded face hovering a hand’s width in front of its snout elicited a piercing scream of horror from the demon.
“Looking for me?” And then a red-stained studded fist rammed into its face. Twice, thrice, eight, nine, twelve times.
As the demon crumpled at his feet, Flapp grunted and said, “Didn’t think so.”
The two demons, boon companions for centuries, clutched each other, sharing a puddle of rank piss pooling around them, as two female humans stepped into view. Ferocious barbed bolts flung the two demons apart like rag dolls.
Wither began working the crank to reload her weapon, whilst Huggs limped forward. “You see them? Fucking pathetic.”
“You’re getting soft, Huggs.”
“Loaded?”
“Yes.”
“My turn. Keep an eye peeled, Withy.”
“Count on it.”
The imp could hear random death-cries echoing down the corridors, each one trembling through its scrawny, puny form. Reaching the iron ladder, it clambered upward as fast as its little limbs could carry it.
Not fast enough.
“Got ya.”
A mailed hand snatched the imp up, plucked it from the railing.
The imp squealed and thrashed about, but it was no use. It struggled to bring its sword to bear, but the man reached with his other hand and broke the imp’s sword arm. Snap, like a twig. Broke the other one, too, and then both legs. That really hurt!
Helpless, the imp dangled limp in the man’s grip. He stared down at it, breathing loud, mouth hanging open.
And then he bit down on the imp’s head and held it in his mouth as he climbed the ladder.
That breath! The imp cringed, even through its agony of broken bits everywhere. That breath!
As soon as they reached the top, and the man walked out of the armory, along the corridor, and out to the main chamber, the imp sent forth a frantic cry, a sorcerous plea bristling with desperate power.
Mommy! Mommy! Help me!
None left. Of course they could not be entirely certain of that, but they’d scoured every possible hiding place, rooting out the snarling oversized rats and chopping them to pieces.
Skint led them back to the arbalest armory, where they loaded up on bolts, including the assault quarrels with their looped ends, as well as bundles of thick cables. The walk back to the ladder was slow and awkward, with all the blood, corpses, and gore cluttering the passageways. By the time they strode out into the main chamber, Dullbreath was waiting for them. He nodded to a small figure pinned by a tiny sword to the floor in the center of the room.
“Still breathing?”
“Hard to say. Hard to kill for real, those things.”
“All right. Good work, Dullbreath. Let’s get ready then.”
The girl who walked in through the keep’s doors clutched a bundle of plucked flowers, her blond hair drifting like seed fluff. Her large eyes settled on the tiny figure of the imp nailed to the floor, and she edged closer.
Her expression fell as she looked down on her dead child. Kneeling, she set aside her flowers and reached out to brush that tiny, cold forehead.
Then, as she straightened, five soldiers stepped out from behind pillars, each bearing loaded arbalests.
The girl raised her scrawny arms and vanished inside a blurry haze. Spice-laden clouds rolled from where she stood, and the soldiers stared as she awakened to her true form, burgeoning, towering at almost twice the height of an average man, and easily twice as wide. Fangs as long as short swords, a mass of muscles like bundles of rope, hands that could crush armored soldiers as if they were frail eggs.
Huggs snorted. “A demon, huh? That’s not just a demon, Captain. That’s a fucking Harridan!”
“Commander of a legion,” added Dullbreath. “What were they thinking?”
The demon opened its maw and howled.
The sound deafened them, shook plaster loose from ceiling and walls.
The soldiers lifted their weapons. And fired.
The bolts pounded deep into the giant beast, and each dart snaked cables behind it—cables bound around the base of a pillar. The hinged barbs on the heads snagged deep in the demon’s flesh. Shrieking, it sought to pull away, but the thick ropes snapped taut—to tear loose of any one of the quarrels would break bones and spill out organs and who knew what else.
“Reload,” growled Skint.
And so they did.
Dawn’s light slowly stole in through the entrance, crept across the floor of the main chamber.
“Last crate,” said Flapp in a ragged, exhausted voice.
He went around, passing out the last of the bolts. Cranks clanked, but slowly.
Wither stepped up to squint at the pin-cushioned heap of mangled flesh huddled in the center of the chamber, and then shrugged and returned to her arbalest.
Five weapons clanged. Five bolts sank into the body.
“Quivered some,” observed Flapp.
“So would you,” said Huggs. “No whimpers though. Those stopped some time ago.” She turned to the captain. “Could be it’s finally dead.”
“Prod it with your sword,” Skint commanded.
“Me and my big mouth.” But Huggs drew her weapon and edged closer. She gave the thing a poke. “Nothing.” She poked harder. Still no response. So she stabbed. “Hah! It’s dead all right.”
Arbalests dropped from exhausted arms.
“Saddle us up, Withy. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“You got it, Captain.”
Graves had been up all night. No amount of beeswax could have stoppered up that seemingly endless chorus of screams and howls from the keep. It had never been so bad. Ever. Those soldiers, they’d died hard. Damned hard.
He rigged up his mule and cart and led the procession—a quiet bunch this morning, for sure—up to collect the remains and whatever loot came out with it. Work was work, wasn’t it just. People did what they did to get by, and what else was life all about? Nothing. That was it. It and nothing more. But, dammit, he didn’t want the boy to spend his whole cursed life here in Glory, didn’t want him taking over when Graves gave it up, not stepping in when Slim finally swallowed her ring and choked to death—the gods knew she wasn’t going to die naturally. Didn’t want any of that, not for the boy.
After sending a few scowls at the bleary-eyed but ever-greedy faces arrayed behind him, he tugged the reluctant mule up to the first of the hillside’s switchbacks.
And then stopped.
As the first clump of horse hoofs sounded up ahead.
The captain was in the lead. The others followed. Every one of them. Five, aye, five one by one by one by one by one.
Graves stared.
As she passed him, Skint flung a bloody mass of something at him. Reflexively, he caught it and looked down at the wilted remnants of flowers. Dripping red.
The sergeant was next. “Five graves? Not enough, sir, not by a long shot.”
Wither added more as she rode past, “Try about ninety-five more.”
Huggs snorted. “And a big one, too, and I mean big. Oh, and a tiny one, too.”
Dullbreath halted opposite Graves and looked down
at him with jaded eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Graves, we kill those fuckers for a living.”
He rode on. They all did.
Graves looked down at the flowers in his hand.
People do what they do, he reminded himself. To get by. Just that, to get by.
“Two days to Piety,” said Flapp as they rode along the track on the slow climb to the distant valley mouth.
“And then—”
“Captain,” called out Dullbreath from the rear.
They all reined in and turned.
Slim was riding a mule after them, the old whore rocking back and forth like she’d never learned how to ride, and that struck Flapp as damned funny. But he didn’t laugh.
“We got us a camp follower,” said Wither. “I don’t believe it.”
Flapp opened his mouth and was about to say something, and then he stopped—he’d caught a glint of metal—from way up the trail they’d come down yesterday. “Captain! I saw a flash of steel! Halfway up to the pass!”
Everyone stiffened. Stared, breaths held.
“There! You seen it?”
And the look Skint turned on him was twisted into a mask of unholy terror. “He’s still after us! Ride, soldiers! To save your lives, ride!”
Reviewer Liz Bourke has written that Elizabeth Bear’s (1971– ) Eternal Sky trilogy [Range of Ghosts (2012), Shattered Pillars (2013), and Steles of the Sky (2014)] “subverts the expectations of epic fantasy even as it uses them to create a narrative with mythic resonance and force.” The trilogy is filled with “wonder, amazing world-building, heroism, and tragedy—and also filled with grit, emotional realism, and a light, ironic, humane sense of humor. . . . [its] world [is] inspired by Central Asia and the Silk Road, by the Chinese kingdoms and Tibet and the Mongolian steppe and the caliphates of Turkey and Iran.” Bear’s characters “feel like real people with real motivations and desires and complexities.” A sequel trilogy, The Lotus Kingdoms, launches this fall with The Stone in the Skull. Its protagonists—the Dead Man, an exiled royal guard, and the Gage, a wizardly automaton—are introduced in “The Ghost Makers.”
The Ghost Makers
Elizabeth Bear
The faceless man walked out of the desert at sunset, when the gates of the City of Jackals wound ponderously closed on silent machinery. He was the last admitted. His kind were made by Wizards, and went about on Wizards’ business. No one interrogated him.
His hooded robe and bronze hide smoked with sun-heat when the priest of Iashti threw water from the sacred rivers over him. Whether it washed away any clinging devils of the deep desert, as it was intended, who could have said? But it did rinse the dust from the featureless oval of his visage so all who stood near could see themselves reflected. Distorted.
He paused within and he lowered the hood of his homespun robes to lie upon his shoulders. The gates made the first sound of their closing, a heavy snap as their steel-shod edges overlapped and latched. Their juncture reflected as a curved line up the mirror of the faceless man’s skull. Within the gates, bars as thick as a man glided home. Messaline was sealed, and the date plantations and goats and pomegranates and laborers of the farms and villages beyond her walls were left to their own devices until the lion-sun tinted the horizon again.
Trailing tendrils of steam faded from the faceless man’s robe, leaving the air heavy with petrichor—the smell of water in aridity—and the cloth over his armored hide as dry as before. His eyeless mask trained unwaveringly straight ahead, he raised his voice.
“Priest of Iashti.” Though he had no mouth, his voice tolled clear and sonorous.
The priest left his aspergillum and came around to face the faceless man, though there was no need. He said, “You already have my blessing, O Gage . . . of . . . ?”
“I’d rather information than blessings, Child of the Morning,” said the Gage. The priest’s implied question—to whom he owed his service—the faceless man left unacknowledged. His motionlessness—as if he were a bronze statue someone had draped in a robe and left inexplicably in the center of the market road—was more distressing than if he’d stalked the priest like a cat.
He continued, “Word is that a poet was murdered under the Blue Stone a sennight since.”
“Gage?”
The Gage waited.
The priest collected himself. He tugged the tangerine-and-gold dawn-colored robed smooth beneath his pectoral. “It is true. Eight days ago, though—no, now gone nine.”
“Which way?”
Wordlessly, the priest pointed to a twisting, smoky arch towering behind dusty tiers of pastel houses. The sunset sprawled across the sky rendered the monument in translucent silhouette, like an enormous, elaborate braid of chalcedony.
The faceless man paused, and finally made a little motion of his featureless head that somehow still gave the impression of ruefully pursed lips and acknowledgment.
“Alms.” He tossed gold to the priest.
The priest, no fool, caught it before it could bloody his nose. He waited to bite it until the Gage was gone.
The Gage made his way through the Temple District, where great prayer-houses consecrated to the four major Messaline deities dominated handfuls of lesser places of worship: those of less successful sects, or of alien gods. Only the temple to the Uthman Scholar-God, fluted pillars twined about with sacred verses rendered in lapis lazuli and pyrite, competed with those four chief temples for splendor.
Even at dusk, these streets teemed. Foot traffic, litter bearers, and the occasional rider and mount—mostly horses, a few camels, a mule, one terror-bird—bustled through the lanes between the torch bearers. There were soldiers and merchants, priests and scholars, a nobleman or woman in a curtained sedan chair with guards crying out “Make way!” The temples were arranged around a series of squares, and the squares were occupied by row upon row of market stalls from which rose the aromas of turmeric, coriander, roses, sandalwood, dates, meat sizzling, bread baking, and musty old attics—among other things. The sweet scent of stitched leather and wood-pulp-and-rag paper identified a bookseller as surely as did the banner that drifted above his pavilion.
The faceless man passed them all—and more than half of the people he passed either turned to stare or hurried quickly along their way, eyes fixed on the ground by their shoes. The Gage knew better than to assign any quality of guilt or innocence to these reactions.
He did not stay in the temple district long. A left-hand street bent around the temple of Kaalha, the goddess of death and mercy—who also wore a mirrored mask, though hers was silver and divided down the center line. The temple had multiple doorways, and seemed formed in the shape of a star. Over the nearest one was inscribed: In my house there is an end to pain.
Some distance behind the temple, the stone arch loomed.
At first he walked by stucco houses built cheek to cheek, stained in every shade of orange, red, vermilion. The arches between their entryways spanned the road. But soon the street grew crooked and dark; there were no torch-bearers here. A rat or two was in evidence, scurrying over stones—but rodents went quickly and fearfully here. Once, longer legs and ears flickered like scissors as a slender shadow detached itself from one darkness and glided across the open space to the next: one of the jackals from which Messaline took its epithet. From the darkness where it finished, a crunch and a squeak told of one scurrying at least that ended badly for the scurrier.
In these gutters, garbage reeked, though not too much of it; things that were still useful would be put to use. The people passing along these streets were patch-clothed, dirty-cheeked, lank of unwashed hair. Many wore long knives; a few bore flintlocks. The only unescorted women were those plying a trade, and a few men who loitered in dark doorways or alleys drew back into their lairs as the Gage passed, each footstep ringing dully off the cobbles. He was reminded of tunnel-spiders, and kept walking.
As he drew closer to one base of the Blue Stone, though, he noticed an increase in people walking quickly in the direction opp
osite his. Though the night sweltered, stored heat radiating back from the stones, they hunched as if cold: heads down and shoulders raised protectively.
Still no one troubled the faceless man. Messaline knew about Wizards.
Others were not so lucky, or so unmolested.
The Gage came out into the small square that surrounded one foot of the Blue Stone. It rose above him in an interlaced, fractal series of helixes a hundred times the height of a tall man, vanishing into the darkness that drank its color and translucency. The Gage had been walking for long enough that stars now showed through the gaps in the arch’s sinuous strands.
The base of the monument separated into a half-dozen pillars where it plunged to earth. Rather than resting upon a plinth or footing, though, it seemed as if each pillar had thrust up through the street like a tree seeking the light—or possibly as if the cobbles of the road had just been paved around them.
Among the shadows between those pillars, a man wearing a skirted coat and wielding a narrow, curved sword fought silently—desperately—valiantly—for his life.
The combat had every appearance of an ambush—five on one, though that one was the superior swordsman and tactician. These were advantages that did not always affect the eventual result when surrounded and outnumbered, but the man in the skirted coat was making the most of them. His narrow torso twisted like a charmed snake as he dodged blows too numerous to deflect. He might have been an answer to any three of his opponents. But as it was, he was left whirling and weaving, leaping and ducking, parrying for his life. The harsh music of steel rang from the tight walls of surrounding rowhouses. His breathing was a rasp audible from across the square. He used the footings of the monument to good advantage, dodging between them, keeping them at his back, forcing his enemies to coordinate their movements over uneven cobblestones.
The Gage paused to assess.
The lone man’s skirts whirled wide as he caught a narrower, looping strand of the Blue Stone in his off hand and used it as a handle to swing around, parrying one opponent with his sword hand while landing a kick in the chest of another. The kicked man staggered back, arms pinwheeling. One of his allies stepped under his blade and came on, hoping to catch the lone man off-balance.
