Swords & Dark Magic (33 page)

“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.

“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.

DARK TIMES AT THE MIDNIGHT MARKET

Robert Silverberg

B
usiness 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.