Swords & Dark Magic (2 page)

During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, led by Lin Carter, the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America promoted the interests of the subgenre. From 1973 to 1981, SAGA produced five anthologies, edited by Carter and featuring the contributions of their members, under the series title Flashing Swords! The year 1974 saw the debut of Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro tales, which appeared first in the fanzine
Dark Fantasy
but, by way of Lin Carter’s
Year’s Best Fantasy Stories
(DAW Books, 1975), eventually found their way to publisher Donald A. Wolheim, who urged Saunders to publish them as a novel in 1981.
Imaro
was followed by
The Quest for Cush
(1984) and
The Trail of Bohu
(1985).
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The stories are notable for being the first sword and sorcery penned by a black author and starring a black protagonist. The title character, Imaro, inhabited the “black continent” of Nyumbani, an “alternate Africa” that existed thousands of years ago, perhaps contemporaneously with Robert E. Howard’s Hyperborea.

Then, in 1984, Marion Zimmer Bradley made a significant contribution to the field with her Sword and Sorceress anthology series. Feeling that, C. L. Moore excepted, the subgenre was dominated by men and typified by some fairly reprehensible attitudes toward and depictions of women, she produced twenty volumes (two published posthumously) of adventure tales featuring strong female protagonists and promoting such notable authors as Bradley herself, Glen Cook, Emma Bull, Charles R. Saunders, Charles de Lint, Pat Murphy, C. J. Cherryh, Jennifer Roberson, Mercedes Lackey, and many more. After Bradley’s death in 1999, the anthology series continued in a new volume edited by Diana L. Paxson (
Sword and Sorceress XXI,
DAW, 2004) and, recently, in two volumes from editor Elisabeth Waters (Norilana Books, 2007).

But, generally speaking, the last few decades was a time when sword and sorcery fiction was once again out of favor. The 1982 film
Conan the Barbarian,
which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name, spawned a sea of poorly executed sequels and imitations that had the effect of stigmatizing the subgenre’s image. Though its practitioners never entirely went away, the fantasy genre came to be dominated by the post-Tolkien variety of epic fantasy. At the short form, sword and sorcery fiction fell out of favor with the larger magazine venues, and the type of adventure fantasy that Robert E. Howard once epitomized was relegated to the domain of the small press (most notably,
Black Gate
magazine, which has been the definitive source for sword and sorcery short-form works since its launch in 2000). But recently, sword and sorcery has been making a comeback. In the wake of George R. R. Martin, whose Song of Ice and Fire series is notable for bringing a moral ambiguity and gritty realism to the fantasy epic, a host of younger writers have emerged to bring a “sword and sorcery sensibility” back to the epic subgenre. Writers like Steven Erikson, Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, Tom Lloyd, David Anthony Durham, Brian Ruckley, James Enge, Brent Weeks, and Patrick Rothfuss are pioneering a new kind of fantasy, one that blends epic struggles with a gritty realism, where good and evil mixes into realistic characters fraught with moral ambiguities, and struggles between nations are not so one-sided as they are colored by a new, politically savvy understanding. These hard-hitting tales are reinvigorating the fantasy genre, while at the same time its classic forebears are finding new readers. For the first time in many years, Robert E. Howard’s and Michael Moorcock’s original stories are available again, in new, lavishly illustrated editions that restore their original texts, complete with copious historical notes. Leiber’s full saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is back on shelves, just as C. L. Moore’s oeuvre is out in a complete collection. The MMORG
Age of Conan
is a huge success, and both Conan and Elric movies are currently in development. While Howard, sadly, left us in 1936, Moorcock has recently been writing new tales of the Melnibonéan, one of which appears in this volume. With all the excitement surrounding this new cadre of writers, combined with the recent celebration of their historic roots, there is no better time for a definitive look at the new fantasy. Here, then, are seventeen original tales of sword and sorcery, penned by masters old and new. What follows are stories of small stakes but high action, grim humor mixed with gritty violence, dry fatalism in the face of strange magics, fierce monsters and fabulous treasures, and, as ever, lots and lots of swordplay. Enjoy!

Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan
Alabama & Australia

STEVEN ERIKSON is the pseudonym of Canadian novelist Steve Rune Lundin, best known for his ongoing fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen, beginning in 1999 with
Gardens of the Moon
. Trained as an archaeologist and anthropologist, Erikson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is a World Fantasy Award–nominated author.
SF Site
has called the series “the most significant work of epic fantasy since Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.” Known for his portrayal of multidimensional characters, he said in an interview conducted by suite101.com, “It’s often commented that my stuff is all shades of gray rather than black and white, but that’s not the same as saying every character is similarly gray—the effect is an overall one rather than a specific one. Most of the characters I come up with have pretty fixed notions of right and wrong, they have a moral center, in other words, whether consciously recognized or not. But in coming at something from more than one side, the reader is left free to choose which one they’ll favor.” Erikson now lives in Cornwall, England.

GOATS OF GLORY

Steven Erikson

F
ive riders drew rein in the pass. Slumped in their saddles, they studied the valley sprawled out below them. A narrow river cut a jagged scar down the middle of a broad floodplain. A weathered wooden bridge sagged across the narrow span, and beyond it squatted a score of buildings, gray as the dust hovering above the dirt tracks wending between them.

A short distance upriver, on the same side as the hamlet, was a large, unnatural hill, on which stood a gray-stoned keep. The edifice looked abandoned, lifeless, no banners flying, the garden terraces ringing the hillsides overgrown with weeds, the few windows in the square towers gaping black as caves.

The riders rode battered, beaten-down horses. The beasts’ heads drooped with exhaustion, their chests speckled and streaked with dried lather. The two men and three women did not look any better. Armor in tatters, blood-splashed, and all roughly bandaged here and there to mark a battle somewhere behind them. Each wore a silver brooch clasping their charcoal-gray cloaks over their hearts, a ram’s head in profile.

They sat in a row, saying nothing, for some time.

And then the eldest among them, a broad-shouldered, pale-skinned woman with a flat face seamed in scars, nudged her mount down onto the stony descent. The others fell in behind their captain.

The boy came running to find Graves, chattering about strangers coming down from the border pass. Five, on horses, with sunlight glinting on chain and maybe weapons. The one in the lead had long black hair and pale skin. A foreigner for sure.

Graves finished his tankard of ale and pushed himself to his feet. He dropped two brass buttons on the counter and Swillman’s crabby hand scooped them up before Graves had time to turn away. From the far end of the bar, Slim cackled, but that was a random thing with her, and she probably didn’t mean anything by it. Though maybe she did. Who could know the mind of a hundred-year-old whore?

The boy, whom Graves had come to call Snotty, for his weeping nose and the smudges of dirt that collected there, led the way outside, scampering like a pup. To High Street’s end, where Graves lived and where he carved the slabs he and the boy brought down from the old quarry every now and then.

Snotty went into the tiny one-stall stable and set about hitching up the mule to the cart. Graves tugged open the door to his shed, reminding himself to cut back the grass growing along the rain gutter. He stepped inside and, though his eyes had yet to adjust, he reached with overlong familiarity to the rack of long-handled shovels and picks just to the left of the door. He selected his best shovel and then the next best one for the boy, and finally his heavy pick.

Stepping outside, he glared up at the bright sun for a moment before walking to where Snotty was readying the cart. The three digging tools thumped onto the bed in a cloud of dust. “Five you say?”

“Five!”

“Bring us two casks of water.”

“I will.”

Graves went out back behind the shed. He eyed the heap of slabs, dragged out five—each one dressed into rough rectangular shapes, sides smoothed down, one arm’s-length long and an elbow-down wide—and he squatted before them, squinting at the bare facings. “Best wait on that,” he muttered, and then straightened when he heard the boy bringing the cart around.

“Watch your fingers this time,” Graves warned.

“I will.”

Graves moved the pick and shovels to the head of the cart bed to make room for the slabs. Working carefully, they loaded each stone onto the warped but solid planks. Then Graves went around to the mule’s harness and cinched the straps tighter to ease the upward pull on the animal’s chest.

“Five,” said the boy.

“Heavy load.”

“Heavy load. What you gonna carve on ’em?”

“We’ll see.”

Graves set out and Snotty led the mule and the creaking cart after him, making sure the wooden wheels fell evenly into the ruts on the road, the ruts that led to the cemetery.

When they arrived, they saw Flowers wandering the grassy humps of the burial ground, collecting blossoms, her fair hair dancing in the wind. The boy stopped and stared until Graves pushed the second-best shovel into his hands.

“Don’t even think about it,” Graves warned.

“I’m not,” the boy lied, but some lies a man knew to just let pass. For a time.

Graves studied the misshapen lumps before them, thinking, measuring in his head. “We start a new row.”

Shovels in hand, they made their way into the yard.

“Five, you said.”

“Five,” answered the boy.

It took most of the morning for the riders to reach the floodplain. The trail leading down into the valley was ill-frequented and there had been no work done on it in decades. Seasonal runoff had carved deep, treacherous channels around massive boulders. Snake holes gaped everywhere and the horses twitched and shied as they picked their way down the slope.

The cooler air of the pass gave way to cloying heat in the valley. Broken rock surrendered to brambles and thickets of spike-grass and sage. Upon reaching level ground, the trail opened out, flanked by tree stumps and then a thin forest of alder, aspen, and, closer to the river, cottonwoods.

The approach to the hamlet forked before reaching the bridge. The original, broader track led to a heap of tumbled blackstone, rising from the bank like the roots of shattered teeth with a similar ruin on the other side of the river. The wooden bridge at the end of the narrower path was barely wide enough to take a cart. Built of split logs and hemp rope, it promised to sway sickeningly and the riders would need to cross it one at a time.

The man who rode behind the captain was squat and wide, his broad face a collection of crooked details, from the twisted nose to the hook lifting the left side of his mouth, the dented jawline, one ear boxed and looking like a flattened cabbage, the other clipped neatly in half with top and bottom growing in opposite directions. His beard and mustache were filthy with flecks of dried spit and possibly froth. As he guided his horse over the bridge, he squinted down at the river to his left. The remnants of the stone pillars that had held up the original bridge were still visible, draped in flowing manes of algae.

Horse clumping onto solid ground once more, he drew up beside his captain and they sat watching the others cross one by one.

Captain Skint’s expression was flat as her face, her eyes like scratched basalt.

“A year ago,” said the man, “and it’d take half the day for alla us t’come over this bridge. A thousand Rams, hard as stone.”

The third rider coming up alongside them, a tall, gangly woman with crimson glints in her black hair, snorted at the man’s words. “Dreaming of the whorehouse again, Sarge?”

“What? No. Why’d ya think—”

“We ain’t Rams anymore. We’re goats. Fucking goats.” And she spat.

Dullbreath and Huggs joined them and the five mercenaries, eager for the respite the hamlet ahead offered them—but admitting to nothing—fell into a slow canter as the track widened into something like a road.

They passed a farm: a lone log house and three stone-walled pens. The place stank of pig shit and the flies buzzed thick as black smoke. The forest came to a stumpy end beyond that. A few small fields of crops to the left, and ahead and to the right stood some kind of temple shrine, a stone edifice not much bigger than the altar stone it sheltered on three sides. Surrounding it was a burial ground.

The riders saw a man and a boy in the yard, digging pits, each one marked out with sun-bleached rags tied to trimmed saplings. A mule and cart waited motionless beneath an enormous yew tree.

“That’s a few too many graves on the way,” Sergeant Flapp muttered. “Plague, maybe?”

No one commented. But as they rode past, each one—barring the captain—fixed their attention on the two diggers, counting slow to reach…five.

“Five flags.” Flapp shook his head. “That’s probably half the population here.”

A small girl walked the street a short distance ahead of the troop, clutching in one hand a mass of wildflowers. Honeybees spun circles around her tousled head.

The riders edged past her—she seemed oblivious to them—and cantered into the hamlet.