The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (75 page)

“Spears!”
Dany heard one Astapori shout. It was Grazdan, old
Grazdan in his
tokar
heavy with pearls. “
Unsullied!
Defend us, stop
them, defend your masters! Spears! Swords!”

When Aggo put an arrow through his mouth, the slaves holding
his sedan chair broke and ran, dumping him unceremoniously on the
ground. The old man crawled to the first rank of eunuchs, his blood
pooling on the bricks. The Unsullied did not so much as look down
to watch him die. Rank on rank on rank, they stood.

And did not move.
The gods have heard my prayer.

“Unsullied!”
Dany galloped before them, her silver-gold braid
flying behind her, her bell chiming with every stride. “Slay the Good
Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a
tokar
or holds
a whip, but harm no child under twelve, and strike the chains off
every slave you see.” She raised the harpy’s fingers in the air...and
then she flung the scourge aside.
“Freedom!”
she sang out.
“Dracarys!
Dracarys!”

“Dracarys!”
they shouted back, the sweetest word she’d ever
heard.
“Dracarys! Dracarys!”
And all around them slavers ran and
sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was filled with spears
and fire.

MICHAEL SWANWICK

Xingool the Sorcerer

O
n
the
Day
of
the
Toad
in the Month of the Fire Horse of the Year
of the Three Monarchs, the necromancer-king Xingool prepared to
conquer the world.

Dressed in robes whose warp was blackest ebon and whose weft
was deepest scarlet so that they shimmered in the sight like infernal
flames, Xingool stood on a balcony of his palace on the edge of the
Floating City of Ilyssia and reviewed his forces on the plain below: the
squadrons of dragons that would rain fire down upon cities stubborn
enough to resist him, the lines of hellhounds held on short leashes by
their demon trainers, the war chariots pulled by tireless bronze steeds,
the battle mammoths with their steel-clad tusks, the numberless
legions of human death-fodder arrayed in endless ranks. And he was
pleased.

At his shoulder stood the only being in all the universe he
unequivocally trusted: his bodyguard, Kangor the Swordsman. When
Kangor had first wandered out of the barbarian wastes, Xingool had
seen potential in the scrawny youth with a murderous cast to his face.
He had fed and tamed the boy, as one might a starveling wolf, so that
he had grown large and strong and loyal. For this Xingool had been
rewarded many times over. Thrice, Kangor had saved his life.

In gratitude, Xingool had showered his bodyguard with wealth,
influence, luxuries, and courtesans. The first three Kangor received
with indifference. The last he more obviously enjoyed, but no more
so than the cheapest bought-woman in the low taverns he liked to
frequent when not on duty. There was, it seemed, nothing he desired
other than to serve.

Thus it was that when Xingool leaned over the balustrade,
luxuriating in the destructive force of his armies, he gave not a
thought to the man who stood at his back, silently sliding a dagger
from its sheath.

Kangor struck.

Xingool spun about, clutching his side, a look of baffled pain on
his face. Before he crumpled to the marble floor of the balcony, he
had just time enough to utter one single word: “Why?”

Smiling grimly, the barbarian reached down to take the Diamond
Crown of Ilyssia from Xingool’s brow and place it on his own. “Because
you never had anything I really wanted before now,” King Kangor
told the dying sorcerer. “Gold, power...these mean nothing to me. But
this army? This war?
Those
I want.”

Kangor the Swordsman

It was good to be the king—any king. But it was particularly good to
be the King of the Floating City of Ilyssia with the greatest army ever
assembled at one’s feet and under one’s control. Kangor, formerly
the Swordsman and now the King, smiled down upon all. It did not
matter to him that he had gained his new position by treachery and
the betrayal of the one man in all the world who had trusted him
unquestioningly and, indeed, loved him as a brother. In one step he
had gone from bodyguard to monarch. It had been a good day, and
he had an Age of War before him, ready to be launched with a single
word.

First, however, there were chores to be done.

“Sire?” his chamberlain said. “Your generals are gathered as you
requested.”

“Good.”

Mighty of limb and sure of his strength, Kangor strode into the
throne room and found it full of servitors. Which he welcomed, for he
wanted many witnesses. To his generals he said, “Who here remains
loyal to the old king?”

The generals eyed one another uneasily. Only General Abatraxas
stepped forward.

Kangor tore off his robes, slamming them down upon the Phoenix
Throne. More carefully, he placed the Diamond Crown atop them.
Naked, he turned to Abatraxas. “Then wrestle me—and let the
kingship go to the survivor.”

Abatraxas was a powerful man and his skill in wrestling was
legendary. Nevertheless, it took Kangor less than ten minutes to pin
him and, twisting his head around, snap the man’s neck.

Dressed once more, and seated upon the Phoenix Throne, the new
king called in his scribes and dictated list after list of names: a captain
who was to be promoted to fill General Abatraxas’s position; nobles
who were to be immediately put to the garrote as traitors; palace
functionaries who were to be demoted, lifted up, or cast out, each
according to his deserts; advisors who were to be blinded, reduced to
penury, and put out on the streets to beg. For he had been planning
his ascendancy for a long, long time.

When he was done, he turned to Mencius, the chief of his scribes,
and asked, “Have I left anything out?”

“Just one, sire,” the scribe replied. “Who is to be your bodyguard?”

King Kangor froze. Then, slowly, his eyes moved from person
to person: from his resentful and over-powerful generals to the
privileged and envious nobles, to the courtiers who served without
qualm whoever happened to wear the Diamond Crown, to the slaves
who had never tasted freedom and lusted for it almost as much as
they did for revenge. None had reason to love him. Their eyes all
glittered with ambition.

“Sire?” Mencius said again. “Your bodyguard?”

But to this question Kangor had no answer.

Slythe the Thief

As an offering to the goddess of thieves, whose name no man knows,
Slythe carefully cut off the long fire-red tresses that were her crowning
pride and placed them atop the cattle-dung fire lit to that dread lady’s
honor. A lesser thief would have held that it was by her own skill that
she had acquired the griffon’s egg stolen from a cliff-side nest high
in the Riphaen Mountains, and the cloak of stealth pilfered from a
castle guarded by a thousand fanatic warriors in the Lands of Fire,
and the ouroborean ring acquired by means so arduous that even she
shuddered at the memory. But Slythe knew that the gods loved to
punish hubris and so she was modest, even as she planned her great
heist: first of the Floating City of Ilyssia and then of the world.

Mounting her griffon, Slythe traveled faster than fast to the Floating
City, ruled by the paranoid king Kangor. Abandoning her mount and
wrapping about herself the cloak which had once belonged to the
North Wind, she slipped through its streets like a breeze and up the
empty stairways of the Marble Castle. There, she found King Kangor
standing on a balcony, staring bleakly off into the distance. Throwing
aside her cloak (for with it on she was insubstantial and unable to
interact with the physical world), she drew a knife across his throat.

Kangor wheeled about, blood gushing between the fingers that
clutched at his neck. His eyes were mad and staring under the glittering
Diamond Crown but not one whit surprised. In that instant it seemed
to Slythe that she was doing the king a favor by thus ridding him of
his famously unending fear. He could not speak but the question was
obvious in his agonized expression:
Who...?

Slythe knew better than to bandy words at such a moment. She
put a hand on Kangor’s chest and shoved.

Over the parapet he went, and down to the ocean.

When the castle guards burst upon her, Slythe triumphantly
exclaimed, “The tyrant is dead and I have killed him. I am now your
ruler.”

But, “Our loyalty is not to the man but the office,” the captain
of the guards said. “You do not wear the Diamond Crown of Ilyssia.
Therefore you must die.” And all rushed toward her, spears extended.

Slythe, however, had a trick worth three of theirs. She slipped the
ouroborean ring upon her hand and rubbed it, wishing herself exactly
five years earlier, when the barbarian Kangor had killed his liege, the
necromancer king Xingool. She would appear behind the barbarian’s
back and, her dagger already damp with his blood, wait for him to
seize the crown from his predecessor and then snatch it from him
while simultaneously driving the dagger home.

The plan was foolproof.

Back in time she went.

Only to discover that three years earlier the Floating City had not
rested above the Sea of Tethys but over the distant, dusty plains of
Angeddron. So, there being no floor underfoot nor castle anywhere
in sight, she found herself a hundred feet in the air and falling, falling,
falling, toward the cold waters of oblivion.

Far away, Kangor was lifting the Diamond Crown to his head. Even
further away, Slythe’s younger self was scaling a cliff in the Riphaen
Mountains. Farthest of all, the goddess of thieves cocked an ear as
Slythe called out a name that only a few women knew.

So it was that, deep beneath Tethys’s waters, Slythe the Thief saw
the corpse of Kangor afloat beside her. Her panicked hands seized the
Diamond Crown from his head and planted it firmly on her own. For
Slythe had only had time for the briefest of prayers as she fell, and
now it had been answered.

She died a queen.