The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (38 page)

He turned back to his barrow. At the entrance, still smoking,
waited the body of what had been the troll.

Unacquainted with Defeat

GLEN COOK

I

H
is
name
was
T
ain
and he was a man to beware. The lacquered armor
of the Dread Empire rode in the packs on his mule.

The pass was narrow, treacherous, and, therefore, little used. The
crumbled slate lay loose and deep, clacking underfoot with the ivory-
on-ivory sound of punji counters in the senyo game. More threatened
momentary avalanche off the precarious slopes. A cautious man, Tain
walked. He led the roan gelding. His mule’s tether he had knotted to
the roan’s saddle.

An end to the shale walk came. Tain breathed deeply, relieved.
His muscles ached with the strain of maintaining his footing.

A flint-tipped arrow shaved the gray over his right ear.

The black longsword leapt into his right hand, the equally dark
shortsword into his left. He vanished among the rocks before the
bowstring’s echoes died.

Silence.

Not a bird chirped. Not one chipmunk scurried across the slope,
pursuing the arcane business of that gentle breed. High above, one
lone eagle floated majestically against an intense blue backdrop of
cloudless sky. Its shadow skittered down the ragged mountainside like
some frenetic daytime ghost. The only scent on the breeze was that
of old and brittle stone.

A man’s scream butchered the stillness.

Tain wiped his shortsword on his victim’s greasy furs. The dark
blade’s polish appeared oily. It glinted sullen indigoes and purples
when the sun hit right.

Similar blades had taught half a world the meaning of fear.

A voice called a name. Another responded with an apparent,
“Shut up!” Tain couldn’t be sure. The languages of the mountain
tribes were mysteries to him.

He remained kneeling, allowing trained senses to roam. A fly
landed on the dead man’s face. It made nervous patrols in ever-
smaller circles till it started exploring the corpse’s mouth.

Tain moved.

The next one died without a sound. The third celebrated his
passing by plunging downhill in a clatter of pebbles.

Tain knelt again, waiting. There were two more. One wore an aura
of Power. A shaman. He might prove difficult.

Another shadow fluttered across the mountainside. Tain smiled
thinly. Death’s daughters were clinging to her skirts today.

The vulture circled warily, not dropping lower till a dozen sisters
had joined its grim pavane.

Tain took a jar from his travel pouch, spooned part of its contents
with two fingers. A cinnamon-like smell sweetened the air briefly,
to be pursued by an odor as foul as death. He rubbed his hands till
they were thoroughly greased. Then he exchanged the jar for a small
silver box containing what appeared to be dried peas. He rolled one
pea round his palm, stared at it intently. Then he boxed his hands,
concentrated on the shaman, and sighed.

The vultures swooped lower. A dog crept onto the trail below, slunk
to the corpse there. It sniffed, barked tentatively, then whined. It was a
mangy auburn bitch with teats stretched by the suckling of pups.

Tain breathed gently between his thumbs.

A pale cerulean light leaked between his fingers. Its blue quickly
grew as intense as that of the topless sky. The glow penetrated his
flesh, limning his finger bones.

Tain gasped, opened his hands. A blinding blue ball drifted away.

He wiped his palms on straggles of mountain grass, followed up
with a dirt wash. He would need firm grips on his swords.

His gaze never left the bobbing blue ball, nor did his thoughts
abandon the shaman.

The ball drifted into a stand of odd, conical rocks. They had a
crude, monumental look.

A man started screaming. Tain took up his blades.

The screams were those of a beast in torment. They went on and
on and on.

Tain stepped up onto a boulder, looked down. The shaman writhed
below him. The blue ball finished consuming his right forearm. It
started on the flesh above his elbow. A scabby, wild-haired youth beat
the flame with a tattered blanket.

Tain’s shadow fell across the shaman. The boy looked up into
brown eyes that had never learned pity. Terror drained his face.

A black viper’s tongue flicked once, surely.

Tain hesitated before he finished the shaman. The wild wizard
wouldn’t have shown him the same mercy.

He broke each of the shaman’s fetishes. A skull on a lance he
saved and planted like a grave marker. The witch-doctor’s people
couldn’t misapprehend that message.

Time had silvered Tain’s temples, but he remained a man to
beware.

Once he had been an Aspirant. For a decade he had been
dedicated to the study of the Power. The Tervola, the sorcerer-lords
of his homeland, to whose peerage he had aspired, had proclaimed
him a Candidate at three. But he had never shown the cold will
necessary, nor had he developed the inalterable discipline needed,
to attain Select status. He had recognized, faced, and accepted his
shortcomings. Unlike so many others, he had learned to live with the
knowledge that he couldn’t become one of his motherland’s masters.

He had become one of her soldiers instead, and his Aspirant
training had served him well.

Thirty years with the legions. And all he had brought away was a
superbly trained gelding, a cranky mule, knowledge, and his arms and
armor. And his memories. The golden markings on the breastplate
in his mule packs declared him a leading centurion of the Demon
Guard, and proclaimed the many honors he had won.

But a wild western sorcerer had murdered the Demon Prince. The
Guard had no body to protect. Tain had no one to command.... And
now the Tervola warred among themselves, with the throne of the
Dread Empire as prize.

Never before had legion fought legion.

Tain had departed. He was weary of the soldier’s life. He had seen
too many wars, too many battles, too many pairs of lifeless eyes staring
up with “Why?” reflected in their dead pupils. He had done too many
evils without questioning, without receiving justification. His limit
had come when Shinsan had turned upon herself like a rabid bitch
able to find no other victim.

He couldn’t be party to the motherland’s self-immolation. He
couldn’t bear consecrated blades against men with whom he had
shared honorable fields.

He had deserted rather than do so.

There were many honors upon his breastplate. In thirty years he
had done many dread and dire deeds.

The soldiers of Shinsan were unacquainted with defeat. They
were the world’s best, invincible, pitiless, and continuously employed.
They were feared far beyond the lands where their boots had trod and
their drums had beaten their battle signals.

Tain hoped to begin his new life in a land unfamiliar with that fear.

He continued into the mountains.

One by one, Death’s daughters descended to the feast.

II

The ivory candle illuminated a featureless cell. A man in black faced
it. He sat in the lotus position on a barren granite floor. Behind a
panther mask of hammered gold his eyes remained closed.

He wasn’t sleeping. He was listening with a hearing familiar only
to masters of the Power.

He had been doing this for months, alternating with a fellow
Aspirant. He had begun to grow bored.

He was Tervola Candidate Kai Ling. He was pursuing an assignment
which could hasten his elevation to Select. He had been fighting for
the promotion for decades, never swerving in his determination to
seize what seemed forever beyond his grasp.

His body jerked, then settled into a tense lean. Little temblors
stirred his extremities.

“West,” he murmured. “Far, far to the west.” The part of him that
listened extended itself, analyzed, fixed a location.

An hour passed.

Finally, Kai Ling rose. He donned a black cape which hung beside
the nearly invisible door. He smiled thinly behind his mask. Poor
Chong. Chong wouldn’t know which of them had won till he arrived
for his turn on watch.

III

Tain rested, observing.

It seemed a calm and peaceful hamlet in a calm and peaceful land.
A dozen rude houses crowded an earthen track which meandered
on across green swales toward a distant watchtower. The squat
stronghold could be discerned only from the highest hilltops. Solitary
shepherds’ steads lay sprinkled across the countryside, their numbers
proclaiming the base for the regional economy.

The mountains Tain had crossed sheltered the land from the east.
The ivory teeth of another gigantic range glimmered above the haze
to the north. Tain grazed his animals and wondered if this might be
the land he sought.

He sat on a hillside studying it. He was in no hurry to penetrate
it. Masterless now, with no fixed destination, he felt no need to rush.
Too, he was reluctant. Human contact meant finalization of the
decision he had reached months ago, in Shinsan.

Intellectually he knew it was too late, but his heart kept saying that
he could still change his mind. It would take the imminent encounter
to sever his heartline’s home.

It was...
scary
...this being on his own.

As a soldier he had often operated alone. But then he had been
ordered to go, to do, and always he had had his legion or the Guard
waiting. His legion had been home and family. Though the centurion
was the keystone of the army, his father,Tervola, chose his companions,
and made most of his decisions and did most of his thinking for him.

Tain had wrestled with himself for a year before abandoning the
Demon Guard.

A tiny smile tugged his lips. All those thousands who wept on
hearing the distant mutter of drums—what would they think, learning
that a soldier of the Dread Empire suffered fears and uncertainties too?

“You may as well come out,” he called gently. A boy was watching
him from the brushy brookside down to his right. “I’m not going
anywhere for hours.”

Tain hoped he had chosen the right language. He wasn’t sure
where he had exited the Dragon’s Teeth. The peaks to the north,
he reasoned, should be the Kratchnodians. That meant he would be
in the part of Shara butting against East Heatherland. The nomadic
Sharans didn’t build homes and herd sheep, so these people would be
immigrants from the west. They would speak Iwa Skolovdan.

It was one of four western tongues he had mastered when
the Demon Prince had looked westward, anticipating Shinsan’s
expansion thither.

“I haven’t eaten a shepherd in years.” An unattended flock had
betrayed the boy.

The lad left cover fearfully, warily, but with a show of bravado. He
carried a ready sling in his right hand. He had well-kempt blond hair,
pageboy trimmed, and huge blue eyes. He looked about eight.

Tain cautioned himself: the child was no legion entry embarking
upon the years of education, training, and discipline which gradually
molded a soldier of Shinsan. He was a westerner, a genuine child, as
free as a wild dog and probably as unpredictable.

“Hello, shepherd. My name is Tain. What town would that be?”

“Hello.” The boy moved several steps closer. He eyed the gelding
uncertainly.

“Watch the mule. She’s the mean one.”

“You talk funny. Where did you come from? Your skin is funny, too.”

Tain grinned. He saw things in reverse. But this was a land of
round-eyes. He would be the stranger, the guest. He would have to
remember, or suffer a cruel passage.