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

“Ahh,” Bamore said, “more of my children.”

Jan Ray heard Jave shouting to his remaining soldiers, and then his voice was snapped off, and the sound of chaos took over. Screams and shouts, the hacking of metal into flesh, and then the door of the carriage was ripped open.

Jave’s face appeared, and for a moment Jan Ray almost went to him, mouth opening to ask if it was over. But then she saw that below his face was nothing, only the spewing, ragged mess of his severed neck.

“Time to leave you, I think,” Bamore said. “But first, I’ll have one of my creations service your dry—”

An arrow struck him in the right cheek. His right eye flushed red, mouth opened, and he raised one hand and pointed at Jan Ray.

A Wrecker climbed into the carriage and glared at the priestess. The man’s throat had been torn out, half of his scalp ripped off, and yet he did not bleed.

Dead, Jan Ray thought. She lifted her knife and pressed it to her own throat.

She does not sleep that night. To defeat a sorcerer she has used magic herself, a remnant from an ancient conflict that the Hanharans have kept in their possession simply because they cannot let it go. She did not perform a spell, but administered it, and yet…

She has betrayed Hanharan, who said that the only magic is in him. She has denied his status as the one true god. Confused, angry, terrified, empowered, Jan Ray cries and smiles her way through the night.

They killed Bamore. The dead man went first, falling on the tortured sorcerer and hacking away with his short sword. Jan Ray watched with her breath held, trying to understand, wondering if they really thought their god could come back from this, refreshed and renewed. Then the dead man fell to the side, and someone else entered the carriage.

It was a tall man, with heavy piercings and tattoos displaying some high rank in the Wrecker gang. He glanced at Jan Ray, looked down at his bloody sword, then took turn hacking at Bamore’s corpse.

The sorcerer was meat. The man took his head and threw it from the carriage.

“Stamp on it!” he shouted. “Crush it, and grind his brains into the dust. There can be nothing left.”

Jan Ray lowered her knife and waited for the man to turn around and kill her. But when he did turn, he merely looked, fascination and disgust mingling in his eyes.

“So you’re a Hanharan Priestess,” he said. “Well…you’re not much to look at. And I thought suicide was forbidden under Hanharan’s word.” The man’s voice was empty, as if he cared about nothing at all.

“You just killed…”

“The man who would be god.” He dragged one foot through Bamore’s grisly remains. “He was a monster. What he did to my brother…what he put our people through, in the name of his damned Deathtouch…” The man shook his head, and Jan Ray wondered whether the other body in the carriage—still now, given itself over to death at last—was someone he had known.

She leaned to one side and looked out into the street. There were no Scarlet Blades left standing. A group of men and women squatted in the middle of the road, blood on their chins and painting their grins, and in their vacant eyes she saw a reflection of the dead man on the floor.

“So you’ll kill me now?” she asked softly.

“ He’s dead. That’s all that matters. We couldn’t risk you letting him live. And I…for me it was only revenge.” The man was crying. Tears coursed a path down his tattooed cheeks, and he did nothing to hide them. It was as if Jan Ray were not there at all. “He destroyed us all ,” he said. He dropped his sword and climbed from the carriage, slipping in blood and sprawling to the ground. No one came to help. She saw them dispersing, the surviving Wreckers and those raving people who’d finished their fight, and who perhaps now would find some sort of peace in death.

The carriage stank, so she slowly climbed out, wincing at the pain in her shoulder. Under your very noses, Bamore had said when she’d asked him where the Deathtouch had originated. She wondered if she could ever trust another Hanharan ever again.

The street was red, and it grew redder as a flood of Scarlet Blade reinforcements arrived to fight in a battle already lost. Or won. Jan Ray wasn’t quite sure.

It would be some time before she could make up her mind.

ROBERT SILVERBERG, born in New York City, is a science fiction Grand Master, and a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author. He published his first novel, the children’s book Revolt on Alpha C , in 1955. Silverberg won his first Hugo Award for Best New Writer the following year, 1956, the same year he completed an AB in English Literature from Columbia University. A prolific author, he contributed to the genre such classics as Dying Inside , Nightwings , and Downward to the Earth . In 1980 he published Lord Valentine’s Castle , the first book in his landmark sci-fantasy Majipoor series. He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author and editor Karen Haber.

Business was slow nowadays for the spellmongers of Bombifale’s famed Midnight Market, and getting slower all the time. No one regretted that more than Ghambivole Zwoll, licensed dealer in potions and spells: a person of the Vroonish race, a small many-tentacled creature with a jutting beak and fiery yellow eyes, who represented the fourth generation of his line to hold the fifth stall in the leftmost rank of the back room of the Midnight Market of Bombifale.

Oh, the glorious times he could remember! The crowds of eager buyers for the wizardry he had for sale! The challenges triumphantly met, the wonders of conjuring that he had performed! In those great days of yore he had moved without fear through the strangest of realms, journeying among the cockatrices and gorgons, the flame-spitting basilisks and winged serpents, the universes beyond the universe, to bring back the secrets needed to meet the demands of his insatiable clients.

But now—but now—!

Popular interest in the various thaumaturgic arts, which had begun to sprout on Majipoor in the reign of the Coronal Lord Prankipin, had grown into a wild planetwide craze in the days of his glorious successor, Lord Confalume. That king’s personal dabblings in sorcery had done much to spur the mode for it. But it had been gradually waning during the reigns of the more skeptical monarchs who had followed him, Lord Prestimion and then Lord Dekkeret, and now, a century and more after Dekkeret’s time, sorcery had become a mere minor commodity, neither more nor less in demand than pepper, wine, dishware, or any other commonly used good. When one had need, one consulted the appropriate sort of wizard; but the era when a magus would be besieged by importunate patrons all through the hours of the clock was long over.

In those days the sorcerers’ section of the market was open only on the first and third Seadays of the month, creating pent-up demand that helped to spur a sense of urgency among the purchasers. But for the past decade the wizards had, of necessity, kept their shops open night after night to make themselves readily available to such few customers as did appear, and even so their trade seemed to be waning steadily year after year.

Even a dozen years ago Ghambivole Zwoll had had more work than he could handle. But two years back he had been forced to take in a partner, Shostik-Willeron of the Su-Suheris race, and together they barely managed to eke out a modest living in this era of diminishing fascination with all forms of magecraft. Their coffers were dipping ever lower, their debts were mounting to an uncomfortable level, and they were near the point where they might have to discharge their one employee, the stolid, husky Skandar woman who swept and tidied for them every evening before the shop opened. So it was a matter of some excitement one night, three hours past midnight, when a tall, swaggering young man clad in the flamboyant garb of an aristocrat—close-fitting blue coat with ruffled sleeves trimmed with gold, flaring skirts, wide-brimmed hat trimmed with leather of some costly sort—came sweeping into their shop.