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

As no men were in the clearing, but rather lions, that analysis did not occur. The lions saw a cave-like mass, cool in the day’s heat, and having to it an olfactory tang of human flesh and blood. In other words, recent fresh corpses.

Pausing only to dip cautious paws into the lake which surrounded the caves, and so learn it was solid, they sprang forward, and vanished through the entrance.

Izer, the lion who had been Zire, darted through a succession of lowering, gaping, all-black vistas. Space led into space, some more narrow, others wider or more winding. Izer galloped blithely through them all. Their enormity, and cranky arboreal sculpting, did not faze him. He did not feel made small and vulnerable, as a man might. Instead, curious as a young cat, he climbed where able up the malformed sides of the stone trees, and stuck his long, big nose into holes and fissures. He raised his paw and scraped the petrified material with a single claw. At which blue sparks flew and he veered away.

From the guts of this inert yet nastily intestine-suggestive labyrinth, came the most insidious wavering drone of sound. It was the sound of utter soundlessness, disturbed only in the ear of the listener by the tempo of pulse and heart. Izer paid it little attention. His hearing was honed for more informative noises. Of these there seemed to be none.

Then with no warning, something rushed sharply through the air, about three lion-lengths above him. Izer raised his head.

It was a bird. But a bird Izer had never seen, nor been self-trained to expect. It had no beak, nor even a head. Its outflung, fluttering wings were dark above, with complex paler featherings below, but they supported nothing. The bird had no body either.

Izer did not identify the flying object as a book, which, to a human, it would appear to be. For him it was only logical to classify it as a bird. And as lions are generally a match for most birds, save those of supernatural size, such as a roc, he leapt straight at it, bore it to the earth and smashed it there. The book’s spine broke. Izer tore at its feather pages, champed and spat them out. The bird was not good eating, good for nothing, aside from a bit of swift exercise. When the next one came flapping at him, Izer took this in sporting spirit, sprang at it and batted it about a while, before destroying it on the ground. Other books followed in streamers, though not very many. Izer danced about with them, enjoying himself. When the last was felled, he noted tiny scurrying things that were spilling from the carcasses. He put his paws on them, bit and squashed them. They were written words, yet Izer did not know this. They meant nothing at all to him beyond a playful moment or two. They tasted only of ink anyway. He also spat their shredded bodies forth, rolled on his back, shook his henna mane, and trotted off deeper into the petrified maze.

Elsewhere, Ibfrelt, the lion who had been Bretilf, was nosing around some knots in the floor that might, once, have been edible fungi. He, too, was uninterested in the persistent yodel of the silence. However, presently he heard a curious scraping noise, and looking around saw some sharp implements worming out of a wall. No sooner were they ejected than they began to crawl over the floor, scratching irritatingly as they did so. Ibfrelt went to examine them, batting at them rather as Izer had at the books. Their steel edges made no impression on his well-toughened lion pads. In the end, he became bored with the things and loped off. He did not actually realize that they then pursued him in a highly sinister manner. To Ibfrelt, there could be nothing sinister about them. Nor did he see when, by then some way behind him, they lost momentum, rusted, flaked, and fell apart.

Wandering on into another chamber of the building, Ibfrelt paused only when a sudden form reared up from the floor. A man would have known this figure at once for a fellow man—a sword fighter for a fellow swordsman, and a dangerous one. He was tall, and laden with muscle, clad in mail, and armed both with a broadsword of considerable size and a dagger of extraordinary length. At Ibfrelt, he glared with flashing, maniacal eyes, and from a sneering gob let out a challenge: “Match me then, you damnable nonentity!”

But Ibfrelt evidently only knew men—when he had known them—as menu-worthy pieces of prey. Shows of weapons, of aggression, protective armorings—they meant nothing at all, to a lion. Ibfrelt smelled live meat, and he gave a snarl of appetite, then launched himself, like a vast ginger firework, at the threatening hulk.

Over went the hulk, amid a resounding bash and clamor, sword flying one way, and dagger doing no more damage than to shave four of Ibfrelt’s impressive whiskers, before a couple of jaws, equally impressively toothed, met in his esophageal tract.

Ibfrelt was already feeding greedily when, to his disgust, his kill dissolved like a mist and faded into thin air.

Some snaggle of labyrinthine turns away, Izer was just undergoing a similar disillusion. His adversary had been a rapier-brandishing swordsman, with a back-up ax. But Izer had simply jumped on him in the midst of the fellow’s posturing, fangs seeing to the rest. When this nice hot meal vanished, Izer let out a complaint so loud even Ibfrelt paid attention, and rumbled back.

Rising from the teasing absent carcass, Izer padded through the maze and, with leonine instincts of scent, vision, hearing, and sub thought, located Ibfrelt inside two minutes.

The lions commiserated with each other. This was a poor place after all. It would be better to depart instantly.

It was then that a blazing light flared up in the next cave or chamber. They were lions; they took it for the undoing of an exit into the afternoon forest. Shoulder to shoulder, they flung themselves toward it—

They found themselves contrastingly inside a gargantuan inner region of the complex. The compartment would have evoked, to most human eyes, a colossal temple hall. To the lions, it was just an especially oversized cavern. Yet light from some invisible source filled it full.

In the very middle of the space stood a solitary living tree, or so it appeared. The tree was a sort of maple, but of absurd dimensions, and with autumnal leaves colored raspberry, orange, and ripe prune. From the boughs hung a dowdy banner—or a garment? It seemed stranded there, whatever it was, by mistake, shoddy and threadbare, stained, and itself the hue of over-cooked porridge.

Neither lion glanced at it. A spectacle of greater fascination pended. The living trunk was slowly splitting along a hinge of softer, more elusive light. When the gap was wide enough, a form burst from within. It cantered into the cavern, a sight to render any warrior numb with astonished horror.

Directly before the lions epically bulged a stag of unusual size. It was almost spotless white, its antlers like boughs, its eyes glittering like fires. It snorted, and from its nostrils black smolders gushed out.

Lions do not shake hands, or smite paws together to announce brotherhood. If they did, these two would have done.

Without preamble, both vaulted headfirst at the stag. They hit it square, one to each side of the breast. Fearful splinterings, jangles, cracks, and clangs engulfed the air. In a thousand shards, the stag, which seemed fashioned from one house-huge bone, collapsed. The giant maple shook at the detonation. Leaves rained like— rain . One other item was dislodged and drifted foolishly down, like dirty washing. Izer and Ibfrelt, Ibfrelt and Izer, ignored this. They were busy. The bone of which the monster stag had been constructed had once belonged to some improbably prodigious roast. They were engaged in extracting the marrow, any shreds of meat, savoring the cooked tastes, finding every splinter on the ground.