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

“It can’t. And neither can your blade. Jave, I have a secret, and if I speak it to you, you’ll be only the second person to know.” She let go of his arm and leaned against the carriage.

“You!” Jave said, nodding at the two Blades who had been guarding her. “Help them protect the prisoner.” They left Jave and Jan Ray alone.

“Bamore is a sorcerer,” Jan Ray said. Jave smiled.

“A sorcerer? What, like magic?”

“Magic,” she said. She nodded at the quivering body parts strewn across the street, all that remained of those strange, raving Wreckers. One severed head seemed to tilt this way and that, and she saw the moist pinkness of its tongue licking its lips. “They’re his.”

“I’ve seen worse on bad slash,” he said.

“Really?”

Jave frowned, and she knew that he believed. Any other soldier would think me a fool, she thought.

“So let me kill him.”

“He has to die on the Wall!” she said. “Anything else—anything unseen—and he’ll become a martyr, and they’ll follow him as a god. There’s one chance to rid ourselves of him, and I’ve taken it.”

Someone shouted, a man charged from the shadows beneath a shop awning, and his sword met a Blade’s. He was a Wrecker, tattoos and heavy piercings giving him a threatening countenance, but he looked terrified. He seemed to be looking past the soldier as he fought, striving to see his master. The Blade gutted him in the street, stepping back to avoid getting more blood on his boots.

“They still have us pinned down,” Jave said hesitantly.

“Get him in the carriage with me.”

“Are you mad?”

“You dare to talk to a Hanharan priestess like that, soldier?” she asked softly. Jave nodded slowly, and something about his face changed. Did I just spoil something special? she wondered. She could not care.

“Bring the prisoner here!” Jave shouted. The Blades dragged Bamore’s rack a dozen steps to the carriage, skirting around bodies, using the fallen tusked swine as cover. Five archers providing covering fire all the way. Now that the hand-to-hand fighting had died down, the ongoing battle had taken on an almost peaceful air. Arrows whipped at the air, feet scraped on ground muddied with blood, and occasionally someone grunted when an arrow found home. From along the street some people started to cheer, but a Blade fired an arrow their way. Shapes shuffled away and hid.

“I mean it, Jave,” she whispered as she climbed steps into the carriage. “His life is more important than yours, and mine. If he’s killed here, his death will be denied. If they take him, he heals himself of those wounds and becomes a god. Our only hope to rid ourselves of him is public trial and crucifixion.” The carriage’s inside was stuffy, and light slanted across from several places where arrows had struck.

“Get him in,” Jave instructed. A Blade slashed Bamore’s bonds and two of them threw his loose body into the carriage.

Jan Ray pressed herself back into one corner. She saw Jave looking, and knew that he believed.

Then he shut the door and locked the sorcerer in there with her, and the tortured man said, “What have you done to me, bitch?”

He shouts and rages as she turns to leave the torture chamber. She sees him bringing his hands up, forming shapes, whispering strange words, coughing phrases she cannot understand, casting sigils into the floor that glare briefly before fading away. The shapes his hands make remain silhouetted on the wall for a moment, but then they too fade, shriveling to nothing when he had expected them to grow.

“What have you done to me, bitch?” he shouts. She’s surprised that he can even speak that loud; one of Trivner’s favorite tortures is fire ants down the throat.

She slams the cell door behind her, and his shouts become distant. In three days he will be dead. And if all goes to plan, she’ll never have to tell a soul.

They were concentrating on the carriage now. Arrow after arrow struck the wooden shutters enclosing it, and as the timber splintered, so more light came in. Jan Ray was huddled down in one corner away from the raving sorcerer, knife in her hand even though she could never use it, and she was beginning to fear how this would end.

They’re not afraid of hurting him, she thought. They know what he can do—he’s united the Wreckers, after all. They know if an arrow hits him he’ll get better, that his powers will protect him…

But they don’t know what I’ve done to him.

If Bamore did die now, the Wreckers would turn their sorcerer into a god and await his triumphant return. News of his powers would spread, rumors of magic would filter through the city, and Hanharan might not look so appealing with Bamore offering such romantic notions. The only thing that ever kept peace in the city was the Order of Hanharan, and those who preached and policed it.

“I made you normal,” she said. “For long enough to hang on the Wall, at least. You bloody fool, Bamore. You bloody, stupid fool, you think you pluck up a bit of knowledge from some slummy side-street and make yourself a god?”

“Gods don’t make themselves.” He spat, groaned as he rolled onto his side. “Their followers do it for them.”

“How did it happen? The magic, the sorcery…where did you find it?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because your people are going to kill me,” she said.

He watched her with his one good eye, smiling slightly, glancing away, listening to the sounds of battle from outside. The fight was louder again now, closer, and Jan Ray imagined her soldiers surrounding the carriage and holding off a sustained attack. If there were more Wreckers like those ravers…if there was something else they were hiding…

But reinforcements would be with them soon.

“Fair enough,” he said. And Jan Ray thought, It’s always in a madman’s nature to gloat.

“It’s Deathtouch, not magic. Stronger than the older magics. More specific. I bestow death, or take it back. You saw those raving bloody monsters out there? Mine. As for where I found it…” He started laughing. It was a horrible sound, rising from a chest half-flooded with blood and passing through a throat damaged by Trivner’s awful tortures. But Jan Ray thought that even were he fit and whole, Bamore’s laughter would have been dreadful. They’d failed to discover what he had been before he took the name Bamore; now she was glad.

“What?” she asked. “Where?”

“Under your very noses,” he said. “Not all Marcellans are as pure as you wish to imagine.” He pressed his hands together and grunted, trying another Deathtouch spell but failing.

“And without it, you’re just swine shit on my shoe,” she said.

Something struck the carriage. It rocked on its axles, wood creaking and cracking, and another hail of arrows struck the left side, the impacts continuing for some time as if the shooters were reloading again and again.

“They’ll have me soon,” Bamore said. “I’ll be unconscious from your tortures, of course. And once whatever you’ve done to me lifts, I’ll wake, and heal. As a victim of your cruelties, my followers will increase tenfold overnight.”

“You’re going to die on the Wall.”

He groaned and sat up, and she pressed back into the corner. He’s weak, but if he comes at me now…? I’m just an old woman. And she was injured. The bolt in her shoulder seemed to be super-heated, and she feared she might have been poisoned. An insidious infection, perhaps, that would kill her in days, not moments. She would not put such a cruel death past Dal Bamore.

More shouts came from outside, and then a terrible scream, loud and long, that seemed to come from many voices.