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

Morlock scowled and turned away to bury Leen. He laid him in the ground and put the still and a few gold pieces beside the butchered corpse, then covered him up. He broke some boards from the wagon and made a grave-sign for the dead innkeeper. He supposed the people that Leen had died to save would come back eventually, so he wrote the grave-message to them, in the great, sprawling runes of Ontil: LEEN DIED HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?

He returned to the dead body of Viklorn. He kicked it furiously several times, then grabbed the shaft of Andhrakar and drew it from the wound. Morlock let the dead pirate’s hand stay where it was, gripping the shaft, as he carried the spear away. He looked back once from the ridge: a few carrion birds were already circling the pirate’s unburied body.

Will you at least keep me and use me? the demon whispered. I am a powerful weapon. If you feed me human lives, I can give you vengeance on your enemies.

Morlock said nothing, but carried Andhrakar back to the village where the Broken Fist stood. He found the town abandoned: everyone had fled to escape Viklorn and Andhrakar. Morlock broke into the blacksmith’s shop, kindled a fire in the forge, and assembled a set of tools at the anvil.

You cannot destroy my prison in a primitive smithy like this, the demon said, sounding somewhat uneasy.

“You don’t know what I can do,” Morlock disagreed. “Nor have you guessed what I’m going to do.”

He fashioned a spearhead, exactly like Andhrakar in form. He even managed to give its surface a glassy basaltic glaze, something like the dark crystalline surface of Andhrakar. He tempered it, hammered it, let it cool, and polished it. He unfixed Andhrakar from its shaft and put the new spearhead on the shaft, with Viklorn’s severed hand still attached. Then he took the greatest hammer in the smithy and he struck the new spearhead until it lay in fragments.

Morlock took a chisel and carved on the side of the anvil: HERE I, WHO MADE ANDHRAKAR, DESTROYED IT, BECAUSE IT KILLED MY FRIEND LEEN. FORGIVE ME AND REMEMBER ME: MORLOCK AMBROSIUS.

Liar! the demon screamed inside his mind.

Morlock shrugged. “The world thinks I made you, which is a lie. I only imprisoned you. If I could have imprisoned you in a spittoon, or a wooden doorstop, or something not obviously deadly I would have done so. The magical laws which govern imprisoning demons limited me. But I can negate one lie with another. These fragments of the accursed spear Andhrakar will become cherished heirlooms, perhaps to be reforged as a new weapon someday—”

They’ll know! They’ll know it’s not me!

“—not as effective as the old weapon, of course, but they don’t make anything like they used to. And no one will go looking for Andhrakar, since everyone knows where it is. There will be no advertising for your new resting place. You will wither and die in the dark and you will eat no more human souls.”

I am immortal.

“You say so, but I never believed it. You eat things; I think you’ll starve to death if you never eat again. Anyway, we’ll try the experiment. I’ll stop by in a few hundred years to see how you’re doing.”

He threw the accursed spear-blade imprisoning the demon Andhrakar into the pit under an outhouse. Then he shoveled a hundredweight of soil atop it.

At last, he wanted a drink rather badly. He broke into the Broken Fist and availed himself of Leen’s left-behind stock. At least, he poured himself a cup of wine and stood at the bar, preparing to drink it. He stood there for a moment, watching his distorted reflection in the smooth, dark surface of the wine.

When people returned to the town, they found the inscription on the anvil, and the fragments of the spearhead, and they reacted much as Morlock had anticipated. They also found the broken door of the Broken Fist, and they saw the wine cup, full to the brim, standing untouched on the bar. But they did not see Morlock, then or ever again.

C. J. CHERRYH began writing stories at the age of ten, when she became frustrated with the cancellation of her favorite TV show, Flash Gordon . She has a Master of Arts degree in classics from Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Woodrow Wilson fellow, and taught Latin, Ancient Greek, the classics, and ancient history in Oklahoma. Cherryh wrote novels in her spare time when not teaching, and in 1975 sold her first novels Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth to Donald A. Wollheim at DAW Books. The books won her immediate recognition and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977. In 1979, her short story “Cassandra” won the Best Short Story Hugo, and she quit teaching to write full-time. She has since won the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice, first for Down-below Station in 1982 and then again for Cyteen in 1989. In addition to developing her own fictional universes, Cherryh has contributed to several shared world anthologies, including Thieves’ World , Heroes in Hell , and the Merovingen Nights series, which she edited. Her most recent novels are major new Alliance novel, Regenesis , and new Foreigner novel, Conspirator . She lives near Spokane, Washington, and enjoys skating and traveling. She regularly makes appearances at science fiction conventions.

It was an old city up an old river, Wiscezan-on-Eld.

The sea had used to be closer.

The trade had used to be more profitable.

The city had sold its timber off the heights, and the streams had poured silt down to the wharves where the big boats loaded. The silt had made little shallows, and then little channels, and then a bog around the edges. That let in the smallest enemies: buzzing swarms in summer that brought fever and unhealth.

The timber was gone. The soft hills grew lower by the year, the silt grew deeper, the bog thicker and now overgrown with substantial trees, and the little trading outpost southward on the coast, on the little Yliz River, Korianth, built wharves to take the trade. They dealt in dried fish, in carpets and dyed goods, in hammered bronze and leather, amulets, wines, and grain and beer from the sunny east.

Korianth prospered. It got itself a king, and ruled up and down the coast. It traded that king for a better one and lately thrived.

Wiscezan still, stubborn in its ways, traded a few cypress logs down its river and down the coast. It traded pottery, and furs, and building stone from the hard heart of the hills, but it was no longer what it had been.

Its last duchess of the old blood died. The last nobles lived in fair luxury, still. But Korianth under King Osric was too occupied with its own difficulties, its troublesome gods and ambitious allies, to trouble itself when Jindus ait Auzem moved in, bringing his mercenaries with him.

Jindus married a third cousin of the last duchess, a vain and silly, though noble, girl, who within three months died of a dish of mushrooms—leaving Jindus widowed and ennobled, so far as inheritance went.

Wiscezan therefore had a new duke, one with ambitions far exceeding Wiscezan’s humbled circumstances. He collected taxes. He hired mercenaries, he hired a wizard of dark reputation, and he married several more wives, soon deceased, their noble names linking Jindus deeper and deeper into the ancient lineages of the Eld.

Were the nobles of Wiscezan alarmed? That they were. Even the related houses off in Korianth were alarmed at the state of affairs and appealed to King Osric to do something. But in a very little time Duke Jindus had become a potent threat beyond this fever-ridden city. Nobles in several cities prayed the right mosquito would find the duke…and a few tried, with small spells, to assure that happened.