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

The third rider coming up alongside them, a tall, gangly woman with crimson glints in her black hair, snorted at the man’s words. “Dreaming of the whorehouse again, Sarge?”

“What? No. Why’d ya think—”

“We ain’t Rams anymore. We’re goats. Fucking goats.” And she spat.

Dullbreath and Huggs joined them and the five mercenaries, eager for the respite the hamlet ahead offered them—but admitting to nothing—fell into a slow canter as the track widened into something like a road.

They passed a farm: a lone log house and three stone-walled pens. The place stank of pig shit and the flies buzzed thick as black smoke. The forest came to a stumpy end beyond that. A few small fields of crops to the left, and ahead and to the right stood some kind of temple shrine, a stone edifice not much bigger than the altar stone it sheltered on three sides. Surrounding it was a burial ground.

The riders saw a man and a boy in the yard, digging pits, each one marked out with sun-bleached rags tied to trimmed saplings. A mule and cart waited motionless beneath an enormous yew tree.

“That’s a few too many graves on the way,” Sergeant Flapp muttered. “Plague, maybe?”

No one commented. But as they rode past, each one—barring the captain—fixed their attention on the two diggers, counting slow to reach…five.

“Five flags.” Flapp shook his head. “That’s probably half the population here.”

A small girl walked the street a short distance ahead of the troop, clutching in one hand a mass of wildflowers. Honeybees spun circles around her tousled head.

The riders edged past her—she seemed oblivious to them—and cantered into the hamlet.

Slim came back from the doorway and slid along the bar rail to lurch to a halt opposite Swillman. “Give us one, then. I’ll be good for it.”

“Since when?”

“Them’s soljers, Swilly. Come from the war—”

“What war?”

“T’other side of the mountains, o’course.”

Swillman settled a gimlet regard on the ancient whore. “You hear anything about a war? From who? When?”

She shifted uneasily. “Well, you know and I know we ain’t seen traffic in must be three seasons now. But they’s soljers and they been chewed up bad, so there must be a war. Somewhere. And they came down from the pass, so it must be on t’other side.”

“On the Demon Plain, right. Where nobody goes and nobody comes back neither. A war…over there. Right, Slim. Whatever you say, but I ain’t giving you one unless you pay and you ain’t got nothing to pay with.”

“I got my ring.”

He stared at her. “But that’s your livelihood, Slim. You cough that up and you got nothing to offer ’em.”

“You get it after they’ve gone, or maybe not, if I get work.”

“Nobody’s that desperate,” Swillman said. “Seen yourself lately? Say, anytime in the last thirty years?”

“Sure. I keep that fine silver mirror all polished up, the one in my bridal suite, ya.”

He grunted a laugh. “Let’s see it, then, so I know you ain’t up and swallowed it.”

She stretched her jaw and worked with her tongue, and then hacked up something into her hand. A large rolled copper ring, tied to a string with the other end going into her mouth, wrapped around a tooth, presumably.

Swillman leaned in for a closer look. “First time I actually seen it, y’know.”

“Really?”

“It’s my vow of celibacy.”

“Since your wife died, ya, which makes you an idiot. We could work us out a deal, y’know.”

“Not a chance. It’s smaller than I’d have thought.”

“Most men are smaller than they think, too.”

He settled back and collected a tankard.

Slim put the ring back into her mouth and watched with avid eyes the sour ale tumbling into the cup.

“Is that the tavern?” Huggs asked, eyeing the ramshackle shed with its signpost but no sign.

“If it’s dry I’m going to beat on the keeper, I swear it,” said Flapp, groaning as he slid down from his horse. “Beat ’im t’death, mark me.” He stood for a moment, and then brushed dust from his cloak, his thighs, and his studded leather gauntlets. “No inn s’far as I can see, just a room in back. Where we gonna sleep? Put up the horses? This place is a damned pustule, is what it is.”

“The old map I seen,” ventured Wither, “gave this town a name.”

“Town? It ain’t been a town in a thousand years, if ever.”

“Even so, Sarge.”

“So what’s it called?”

“Glory.”

“You’re shitting me, ain’t ya?”

She shook her head, reaching over to collect the reins of the captain’s horse as Skint thumped down in a plume of dust and, with a wince, walked—in her stockings as she’d lost her boots—to the tavern door.

Huggs joined Wither tying up the horses to the hitching post. “Glory, huh? Gods, I need a bath. They should call this place Dragon Mouth, it’s so fucking hot. Listen, Wither, that quarrel head’s still under my shoulder blade—I can’t reach up and take off this cloak—I’m melting underneath—”

The taller woman turned to her, reached up, and unclasped the brooch on Huggs’s cloak. “Stand still.”

“It’s a bit stuck on my back. Bloodglue, you know?”

“Ya. Don’t move and if this hurts, I don’t want to have to hear about it.”

“Right. Do it.”

Wither stepped around, gripping the cloak’s hems, and slowly and evenly pulled the heavy wool from Huggs’s narrow back. The bloodglue gave way with a sob, revealing a quilted gambeson stained black around the hole left by the quarrel. Wither studied the wound by peering through the hole. “A trickle, but not bad.”

“Good. Nice. Thanks.”

“I wouldn’t trust the bathwater here, Huggs. That river’s fulla pig shit and this place floods every spring, and I doubt the wells are dug deep.”

“I know. Fucking hole.”

The others had followed Captain Skint into the tavern. There was no shouting from within—a good sign.

The shorter, thinner woman—whose hips were, however, much broader than Wither’s—plucked at the thongs binding the front of the gambeson. “Sweat’s got me all chafed under my tits—lucky you barely got any, Withy.”

“Ya. Lucky me. Like every woman says when it’s hot, ‘Mop ’em if you got ’em.’ Let’s go drink.”

The soldier woman who walked into the bar didn’t look like the kind to give much away. She’d be a hard drinker, though, or so Swillman judged in the single flickering glance he risked taking at her face. And things could get bad, because she didn’t look like someone used to paying for what she took; and the two soldier men who clumped in behind her looked even uglier to a man like Swill—who was an honest publican just trying to do his best.

The woman wasn’t wearing boots, which made her catlike as she drew up to the bar.

“Got ale,” said Swillman before she could open her mouth and demand something he’d never heard of. The woman frowned, and Swill thought that maybe these people were so foreign they didn’t speak the language of the land.

But she then said, in a cruel, butchered accent, “What place is this?”

“Glory.”

“No.” She waved one gauntleted hand. “Kingdom? Empire?”

Swillman looked over at Slim, who was watching with a hoof-stunned expression, and then he licked his lips and shrugged.

The foreign woman sighed. “Five tankards, then.”

“Y’got to pay first.”

To Swillman’s surprise, she didn’t reach across and snap his neck like a lamp taper. Instead, she tugged free a small bag looped around her throat—the bag coming up from between her breasts somewhere under that chain armor, and spilled out a half-dozen rectangular coins onto the countertop.