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

He managed it, but realized he’d missed something Inah was saying.

“What?” he asked.

“I said, will you still feel this way when they take us to be executed?”

“We’ll see,” Fool Wolf replied. “We’ll see how I feel then.”

She was silent for a moment, then laughed lightly.

“You love me, don’t you? That’s why you keep her in.”

“Darken your mouth,” he said. “You don’t even know what that means.”

Men came for them sometime later, young men with pale, almost blue skin, dressed in brown sarongs and shirts batiked with turtles, snakes, and scorpions.

“This would be a good time,” Inah pointed out, in her native tongue. “There are only eight of them.”

He didn’t answer.

Presently, they were brought into the light and hustled into an enormous cedar house roofed in greenish slate. A narrow entrance hall brought them into a large room with high benches rising in tiers on three sides. Seated on the benches were men—he didn’t have time to count them, but there were more than twenty. They were of the same unfortunate paleness as the guards who had escorted them there, and they were all quite young—some looked no older than sixteen. They wore quilted coats that left their arms free, and all were armed, variously, with swords or spears. Some had shields resting against their knees.

One fellow sat alone, directly before them, in a chair with armrests. While the others wore their hair long, in complicated braids, his head was shorn.

He looked down at them for a moment, then spoke, in a language similar enough to that of Nah that Fool Wolf understood it.

“I am Hesqel, the Voice. What is your business in QashQul, other than petty thievery?”

“We have no other business here,” Fool Wolf replied. “We were only trying to procure enough food to be on our way. We would be happy to provide some service for what we took—”

“Your crime isn’t theft,” Hesqel replied. “Your crime is in coming here. Didn’t the Urled tribes tell you this valley is forbidden?”

Fool Wolf decided it was probably best not to point out that the Urled tribes had chased Inah and him into the valley, following another disagreement over property.

“They neglected to tell us that,” he said.

“Well. Normally this would be a clear case, and you would be executed, but at the moment we have need of an outlander, someone unhampered by the curse. And so your offer of service is accepted.”

This isn’t going to be good, Fool Wolf thought.

“Curse?” he asked.

Hesqel’s tone changed a bit, became a bit more like singing.

“In the ancient times, our people were lost in these mountains, starving and freezing. Then we came to this valley and found it fertile. But the gods here were wild, having never known men before. Many sacrifices were made, but all ignored. The goddess in the uplands, Qul, and Qash—the god of the river and its lands—were bitter enemies, and neither would allow the smaller gods to deal with our ancestors. But at last a sacrifice was found that appeased Qash, and through it gave him the power to subjugate Qul, and they became one—QashQul. We—those of us in this room—descend from him, and thus share his need for the same sacrifice that won him to sustain us.”

This could be very, very bad, Fool Wolf thought.

“So the curse is your need for this…sacrifice?”

Hesqel blinked and looked as if the question didn’t make any sense. Low laughter rippled through the benches.

“No,” Hesqel said, now speaking as if to a child. “We are the Sons of Qash, the Undefiled. The sacrifice is part of our nature and is our honor to perform. If we fail to keep the ritual, we wither with time and Qash himself will starve. The curse lies in the schism. QashQul was broken again with the aid of the sorceress Ruwhere. Qul reclaimed her ancient domain, and no descendant of Qash may step there.” He leaned forward. “Our curse is that our sacred sword rests in Qul’s domain. And it is also to her realm that Ruwhere has taken our rightful sacrifices.”

“Ah,” Fool Wolf said, relieved. “And you want me—”

“You will recover our sword,” Hesqel said.

That seemed straightforward enough.

He didn’t believe it.

“I’ll be glad to help,” he replied.

And like that, he was free, dressed in quilted armor and armed with a short, double-edged sword. He was smiling as he left the walls of QashQul behind him. His step felt light, the future replete with possibility. Of course, they’d kept Inah to ensure he would return, which only proved they didn’t know him very well. Oh, he might come back for her, one way or another—he was, after all, fond of her. But given her own powers—which the QashQulites seemed blissfully unaware of—she would probably find her own escape. The point was, he had choices.

The trail went by a clear pool, where he bathed and dallied, watching dragonflies dance in the warm sun. A bit after noon he dressed and—after some hesitation—continued to follow the directions he’d been given. He might as well see what the situation was. Perhaps the sorceress could be bargained with, if she seemed dangerous. Of course, he didn’t have much to negotiate with…

It’s best this way, just you and me, Chugaachik said.

“Best if it was just me,” he said.

You know better than that by now, sweet thing. Don’t you?

Fool Wolf slowed his step. Yes, a sorceress powerful enough to split a god in half bore talking to.

“This god they’re talking about,” he mused. “I’m curious. Let’s have a look at him, under the lake.”

Deep in his mansion of bone, she stirred. His skin felt like flint, his teeth like knives. He smelled blood all around him, practically tasted it.

Then he sank beneath the lake, what his people called the upper skin of the world that most people never saw beyond. The trees and mountains faded to shadow, and the light bled through them. The gods appeared.

He’d seen his first god when he was thirteen. It had been the god of a white juniper tree, a minor spirit, and yet the sight of it had driven him into madness and fever that nearly killed him, for Human Beings were not meant to look directly at gods. Only a few, born to be shamans, could see unmanifested spirits—and unless they became shamans by taking a helping spirit into themselves, they went mad.

His father found him such a spirit, believing her to be that of a lion goddess.

He’d been wrong.

But now, with Chugaachik to open his eyes, he could see beneath the lake and not lose his mind. Usually.

He distinguished the little gods first, those that belonged to things—trees, stones, the pool he had bathed in. Like most gods, their forms were not set; they played at many shapes. He wondered at how few they were; there should have been hundreds, but instead he saw only dozens, and all appeared somehow ill.

Qash was everywhere; he was a god of land, of place. Beneath the lake, these usually had no form either.

But Qash did. He appeared as an obscene, naked older version of the white-skinned men who held Inah, and he sat crouched upon the land, hands shifting aimlessly as if searching for something. His eyes were mirrors of insanity and his drool dripped upward into the streams and pools of his country. Veins erupted from his flesh and went out to connect him to the little gods, to the men in the city—and one sickly yellow quivering string went off ahead, in the direction Fool Wolf was supposed to travel. He could not see where it went; something blocked him there.

Something to bargain with, he thought.

He reached, and with Chugaachik’s power he plucked at one of the strands, pulled a new one from it and tied it to a nearby grapevine.