Jonathan Strahan - Swords & Dark Magic - The New Sword and Sorcery

The rich chambers of centuries past had been looted, and here and there defiled. Their carpets were gone, and their hangings likewise. In many chambers we saw where fires of broken furniture had once blazed. Their ashes had been cold for heaped years no man could count, and their half-burned ends of wood, their strong square nails, and their skillfully wrought bronze screws had been scattered long ago, perhaps by the feet of the great-grandsons of those who had kindled them.

“This is a palace of ghosts,” I told Lurn.

“I see none.”

“I have seen many, and heard them, too. If we stay the night here…” I let the matter drop.

“Then we will go.” She shrugged. “This was an error, and an error of my doing. We must first find food, and afterward another.”

“No. We must go into the vaults.” My own words surprised me.

She looked incredulous, but the ghost in the dark passage ahead nodded and smiled; it seemed almost a living man, though its eyes were the eyes of death.

“What’s gotten into you?”

“I must go, and you with me,” I told her. “I must go and bring you. You are afraid. I—”

“You lie!”

“Fear better suits a woman than a man. Even so, I am the more frightened. Yet I will go, and you will come with me.” I set off, following the ghost, and very soon I heard Lurn’s heavy tread behind me.

The corridor we traversed was dark as pitch. I slung my shield over my back, traced the damp stone walls with my left hand, and groped the dark before me with my sword point, testing the flagstones with every step. None of which mattered in the least. The ghost led me, and there was no treachery.

We descended a stair, narrow and steep, and I saw light below. Here was a cresset, filled with blazing wood and dripping embers. The ghost, which ought to have dimmed in the firelight, seemed almost a living man, a man young and nearly as tall as I, in livery of grey and crimson.

“Who is that?” Lurn’s voice came from behind me, but not far behind.

I did not speak, but followed our guide.

He led us to a second stair, a winding stair that seemed at first to plunge into darkness. We had descended this for many steps when I took notice of a faint, pale light below.

“Where are we going?” Lurn asked.

I was harkening to a nightingale. It was our guide who answered her: “Where you wished to go, O pawn.”

“Why are you talking to me like that, Valorius?”

I shrugged, and followed our guide into a garden lit by stars and the waning moon. He led us over smooth lawns and past tinkling fountains. The statues we saw were of pieces, of kings and queens, of slingers and spearmen, of knights such as I and pawns like Lurn. Winged figures stood among them, figures whiter than they and equally motionless; though these did not move or appear to breathe, it seemed to me they were not statues. They might have moved, I thought, this though they did not live.

“There can be no such place underground!” Lurn exclaimed.

I turned to face her. “We are not there. Surely you can see that. We entered into the stone of the mountain, and emerged here.”

“It was broad day!”

“And is now night. Be silent.”

That last I said because our guide stood behind her, his finger to his lips. He pointed, but I saw only a thick growth of cypress. I went to it, nonetheless; and when I stood before it I heard a muted creaking and squeaking, as though some portal long closed were opening. I pushed aside the boughs to look. There my eyes saw nothing. My father (who seemed to sit before me, his head cloven by the ax) had entered my mind and let me see him there.

I knelt.

He took his mantle from his shoulders and fastened it about mine. For a moment only I knew the freezing cold of the gold brooch that had held it. I reached for it. My fingers found nothing, yet I knew then (as I know now) where that mantle rests.

“What’s in there?” Lurn asked.

“A tomb,” I told her. “You did not come here to see a tomb, but to become a queen. See you the moon?”

“My lady? Yes, of course I see her.”

“She rises to behold your coronation, and is already near the zenith. There is a circle of white stones, just there.” I pointed. “Do you see it?”

It appeared as I spoke.

“No—yes. Yes, I see it now.”

“Stand there—and wait. When the moon-shadows are short and every copse and course is bathed in moonlight, you will become a queen.”

She went gladly. I stood before her; the distance was half as far, perhaps, as a boy might fling a stone.

I recall that she said this: “Won’t you sit, Valorius? You must be tired.”

“Are you not?”

“I? When I am to become a queen? No, never!”

That was all. That, and this: “Why do you rub your head?”

“It is where the ax went in. I rub it because the place is healed and my father at rest.”

The moon rose higher yet, and one of the white figures came to kneel before me. She held a pillow of white silk; upon it lay a great visored helm white as any pearl, and upon that a silver crown.

I accepted it and rose. Six more were arming Lurn, armor of proof that no sword could cleave: breastplate and gorget, tasset and tace. As earth circles moon, I circled her; and when her arming was complete save for the helm, poised that as high as I might. “From the goddess whom you serve, receive the crown that is your due.” Standing, her head was higher than my upstretched arms; but she knelt before me to receive helm and crown, and I set them upon her head. They felt no heavier than their own pale plumes.

Rising, she pulled down the visor to try it; and I saw that there was a white face graven upon the visor now—and that white face was her own.

“I am a queen!” It might have been ten-score trumpets speaking.

I nodded.

“We will restore the kingdom, Valorius!”

I nodded as before. It had been my own thought.

“I shall restore the kingdom, and the Game will be played again. The Game, Valorius, and I a queen!”

I knew then that she whom I had kissed so often must die. Men have said my sword springs to my hand. That is not so, yet few draw more swiftly. She parried my first thrust with her gauntlet and sought to seize the blade; it escaped her—thus I lived.

Of our fight in that moonlit garden I will say little. She could parry my blows, and did. I could not parry hers; she was too strong for it. I dodged and ducked and was knocked sprawling again and again. I hoped for help, and received none. If longing could foal a horse from air, I would have had two score. No horse appeared.

What came at last was Our Lord the Sun, and that was better. I turned her until she faced it and put my point through her eye-slot. The steel that went in was not so long as my hand and less wide than two fingers together, yet it was enough. It sufficed.

Now?

Now I wander the land. Asked to prophesy, I say we shall overthrow the tyrants and make a new nation for ourselves and our children. Should our folk require a sword, I am the sword that springs to their hands. Asked to heal, I cure their sick—when I can. If they bring food, I eat it. If they do not, I fast or find my own. And that is all, save that from time to time I entertain a lost traveler, such as yourself. East lies the past, west the future. Go north to find the gods, south to find the blessed. Above stands the All High, and below lies Pandemonium. Choose your road and keep to it, for if you stray from it, you may encounter such as I. Fare you well! We shall not meet again.

JAMES ENGE has been developing his stories of Morlock Ambrosius for years, but had to wait for the pendulum to swing back in favor of sword and sorcery before he made a splash. Appearing only recently in the pages of Black Gate , Flashing Swords , and everyday fiction.com, his tales of a wandering wizard and swordsman built up a loyal following in a very short time, before leaping into novel form with the books Blood of Ambrose , This Crooked Way , and The Wolf Age . Strange Horizon writes of him: “There’s a kind of literately sensuous pleasure in Enge’s writing…the pleasure of an intelligent, skillful writer amusing himself and us.” Little surprise then that Enge is an instructor of classical languages at a Midwestern university. Speaking to Fantasy Book Critic , he said, “The modern realistic novel, increasingly in the twentieth century, concerned itself with character above all else: what the character felt and perceived. I’m not knocking this: realistic fiction has some triumphant achievements in this line…But I think it’s an approach that is susceptible to diminishing returns. Genre fiction, like medieval and classical traditions of storytelling, tends to concentrate much more on what people do and the context in which they do it. I love this concentration on conduct, on action (but not necessarily in the car-chases-and-gunfights sense) and on the world…I find it in the older narrative traditions; I find it in genre fiction; and I think it’s the reason that twenty-first-century literary fiction is looking to refresh itself at the wells of genre.”