Finally, what awaited us at the top of the dragon’s Anvil 6 страница

You are my only family. She stopped herself from saying it—thinking it—out loud. Whatever she was or was not, she would not guilt-trip a man who had been alone for six hundred years because she was lonely.

“Well, no, actually,” Lzi said. She closed her eyes. She liked this long-undead ancestor whom she had so swiftly become acquainted with. She felt a great, tearing sense of loss as she took a deep breath and said, “I want you to destroy him.”

If she expected an outraged outburst, she didn’t get it. The Dead Man just said, curiously, “So there is in truth no curse?”

“Of course there’s a curse,” she scoffed. “Do you think any of this stuff would still be in there if there wasn’t a curse? But he wanted to be left alone, not protected. And now, he has been alone a very long time, and what he wants is to be gone. ”

“How can you know that?” Ptashne said. “ You can’t talk to him. I am his Voice!”

“She’s got the contracts,” the Gage said tiredly. “Or rather, her King does. Please stand aside, Lady Ptashne.”

The Brass Man took a step forward. The lady in the white skirt did not step aside. She wheeled and fell to her knees, clutching the mummified legs of the ancient King. They flaked and crumbled at her touch.

“Let me serve you, ancestor!” Ptashne cried.

Lzi felt her mouth shape words, her throat stretch to allow a voice of foreign timbre to pass.:The only service I require is destruction, child,: she said aloud.:What service you offer is for yourself, and not for the kingdom.:

Ptashne’s sobs dried as if her throat had closed on them. She rose gracefully, the cultivated daintiness of a lady. Lzi wondered where she had come from, and what had brought her here. It itched in her conscience and her curiosity that she would probably never know.

Ptashne turned to face the Gage. He towered over her, and she seemed frail and small. Her hands twisted in the waistband of her skirt, clutching at the amulets sewn there.

Her mouth pressed together until no red was left, and Lzi thought if there hadn’t been flesh and teeth in the margin, bone would have rasped on bone. It was the expression of an unwanted child who is reminded that there are children for whom parents make sacrifices.

Lzi felt it in her bones, and knew the interior shape of it intimately.

There are children for whom parents make sacrifices. It’s a thing some take a long while to understand in their hearts even if they see it with their eyes.

Experience is a more potent teacher than observation. And Lzi had never had a sacrifice made for her sake either. A terrible pity took her.

Ptashne looked Lzi in the eyes, forward as a lover, and spoke to her as if to King Fire Mountain Dynasty. “Let me serve you, Grandfather. You are my family. I need you. You are my ancestor, Grandfather. I honor you. I have honored you, and all my ancestors, all my life. With my sorcery and with my search. You owe me this small thing.”

Lzi’s lips moved around that voice that came not from her lungs, but somewhere else.:I am tired, Granddaughter. Take half my jewels. Make a life with that.:

Why do you speak through me? Lzi asked. Why not her?

: She has protections in place for that, as well. I can speak to her, but not through her, and these words need to be spoken aloud.:

“I do not want your jewels, Grandfather.” Ptashne straightened up, her muddy feet in their laced sandals set stubbornly on carpet that was more moth-hole than knot and warp. “I want to be your Voice.” The hard line of her mouth softened. She looked up at the Gage, who had stopped just out of his own ability to reach her, like a man trying not to frighten a cornered kitten.

She said to the giant metal man, “I’ve come all this way for him and it’s not fair, women are only allowed to hold power through men, why won’t he help me?”

It was a child’s voice. It cut Lzi like a knife. The ridges of wound, gummed cloth on the hilt of her machete were rough against her palm.

And then Ptashne steeled herself, and said, “Then I shall help myself.”

She twisted her hands in her skirts. She shouted, a shrill and wavering scream. One of the amulets at her waistband swelled with a green glow like light through young leaves. It streamed between her fingers in rays like the sun parting clouds. The Gage took a step forward, ornate tiles powdering under his foot. The Dead Man reached for his gun.

They were both too late.

The sidelight windows flanking the dead King’s chair of estate shattered in a hail of glass and buzzing. Two infected, flailing men stumbled into the room, followed by a half dozen corpse-wasps. The men both waved machetes haphazardly. The wasps brandished daggerlike stingers damp at the tip with droplets of paralytic poison.

Lzi, with her hand on her sheathed knife, froze. She made one startled sound—a yelp of surprise rather than a moan of terror—and then her body locked in place as surely as if the wasps had already had their way with her. She watched her reflection grow in a gargantuan, glossy green-black thorax. The part of the brain that screams run, run in those dreams where your body seems immured in glass was informing her calmly that this was the last instant of her life.

The Dead Man stepped in front of her and shot the corpse-wasp between the eyes.

Dust sifted from between the stones overhead. The shot wasp tumbled to the floor and buzzed, legs juddering, the spasms of its wings trembling the stones under Lzi’s feet. The sound…the sound of the gun was enormous. It filled Lzi’s ears and head and left room for nothing else. No other sound, no thought—and not even the paralyzing fear.

She fumbled her machete into her hand. She hacked at the nearest threatening thing—the convulsing wasp’s stinger. She severed it in two sharp whacks and looked up to see the Dead Man still standing before her, parrying wild swings by one of the parasitized men. The Gage was fending off two wasps, their stingers leaving venom-smeared dents in his carapace. Ptashne, her hair escaping its thick braid, had fallen back to stand before the chair of estate of the corpse she would have be her King. She had her own long knife drawn from its sling at the small of her back, but was holding it low and tentatively, as if she did not know how she would fight with it.

And between Lzi and Ptashne were five angry hornets and two pathetically disgusting not-quite-corpses. So that wasn’t really a solution.

A wasp came in from the left, furiously intent on the Dead Man as he drove Ptashne’s parasitized companion back, step by step. Its wings and the back of its thorax struck the ceiling as it curved, bringing its stinger to bear.

Lzi stepped forward and brought the machete down hard and sharp, as if she were trying to cut a poison-sap vine with one blow. It struck the underside of the heavy chitinous abdomen and stuck there with a sound like an axe buried in wood. Splinters of the insect’s carapace and splatters of pulpy interior flew, and the machete stuck fast.

With an angry buzz and a clatter of its mandibles, the sapphire-eyed insect tried to turn on her. Its feet scratched at her face and hair. She ducked to shield her eyes and held frantically to the long knife’s handle, locking her elbow and pushing the pulsing, seeking stinger away. The Dead Man was too busy with his maggot man and another of the wasps to come to her aid.

Lzi screamed with all her might and twisted the blade sharply.

The wasp’s carapace shattered with a crack, and the stinger twisted and went slack. The thing made a horrible buzz and tried to bite. She hammered at the jeweled eye with the pommel of the long knife, as it was too close to use the blade. Now she screamed, or at least yelled vigorously.

There was a revolting crunch, and the enormous wasp—which was terribly light, she realized, for its size, as if it were mostly hollow inside—scrabbled at her once more and fell away. She looked up into the featureless face of the Gage, smeared with ichor and more nameless things.

“The wasps are protecting the larvae,” Lzi said, as sure of the truth behind the inspiration as if she had learned it at her father’s knee. “Ptashne doesn’t control the adults. Just the larvae in the corpses.”

“Destroy the King.” The Gage’s head did not turn as his left hand flashed out to snatch at the wing of another wasp as it darted toward the Dead Man. He used its own momentum to slam it into the ceiling, his metal body pivoting inhumanly, like a turret, at the waist. He continued in a level tone—or maybe it was just that all its nuances were flattened by her deafness. “If Ptashne has nothing to fight for, she’ll stop.”

Dragon’s breath, I hope so. Lzi thought she might be desperate enough to keep fighting anyway, having nothing else to live for. “Get me through.”

The Gage did not respond in words. Instead it turned again, seamlessly, and lurched forward, flailing with its enormous arms. It didn’t attempt to prevent the enemies from striking it, and it didn’t seem to care if it struck them. It just created a flurry of motion that surrounded Lzi and fended the enemies away. It walked sideways, crabwise, toward the dead King and his Voice.

He turned, still keeping her in the shelter of his parries, and Lzi was next to the place where King Fire Mountain Dynasty slumped in his finery. She could smell him: not rot, but salt and natron and harsh acetone.

Ptashne seemed to realize what they were about and whirled on them. “No,” she shouted. She would have rushed at Lzi, but the Gage caught her effortlessly around the waist and held her tight. She hammered at him with the pommel of her long knife, and the room might have rung like a bell if Lzi’s ears had not still felt stuffed with wool. Holding on to Ptashne limited the Gage’s effectiveness in fending the wasps away from Lzi, but the Dead Man was between her and the enemy, a whirl of blades and faded crimson coat-skirts.

It was hard, so hard, to turn her back on the fight, on the slashing stingers and whirling blades, the clang of machete on scimitar, the screaming and flailing of the would-be Voice. But she did, ran two steps through the chaos, hefting her long knife, and stopped by the chair of the King.

: That will not do the job, Granddaughter. For this, you need fire.:

“Fire,” she said aloud. She didn’t look, but somehow there was a powder horn in her hand, and a flint and steel.

The Dead Man’s powder horn.

Fire. Black powder would burn nearly anything.

She poured it over the dead King, his rotting robes, his ropes of gold and jewels, his crooked slipping crown. His face drawn tight to the skull, the nose a caved-in hole. His eye sockets empty with the withered lids sagging into them.

She poured the contents of the horn over him, into his lap, into the tired wisps of his staring hair. She dropped the horn. She clutched the flint and iron and raised them over the corpse of the King.

Behind her, all the sounds of battle ceased. The buzzing continued, but when Lzi risked a glance, she saw that the one remaining parasite host had staggered back and was leaning against the wall by the door, and the two adult wasps that were still alive and mobile crouched in front of him, one on the ceiling and one on the floor, protecting the young of the hive but not, themselves, immediately attacking.

“Please,” Ptashne said. She had stopped struggling as well, and now just hung in the Gage’s grasp, bedraggled and bruised, her long knife on the floor where it had fallen from her hand.

“All this for a family,” Ptashne said, tiredly.

:My family is gone,: King Fire Mountain Dynasty said, through Lzi.:And you gave yours to the wasps in exchange for a weapon, Grandchild.:

The Dead Man looked at him, head sideways. At the mummy, Lzi noticed, and not at the Voice. Used to marvels, this mercenary. “You have family in this room.”

I would have given you my life.

: Keep it for yourself,: he counseled.: End this.:

Lzi struck a spark. She had been too cautious and kept her hand too far away. It fell and fizzled. Ptashne screamed.

Lzi struck again. This time it flared, and the powder caught. She backed hastily away from a shower of sparks and the strange dry smoke of burning mummy. King Fire Mountain Dynasty burned like a torch once he caught, and said nothing further in Lzi’s head. Not even the whisper of a thank-you.

Well, it was what she should have expected of a King.

“You ruined me,” Ptashne said dully. “You have ruined everything.”

Lzi glanced at the wasps, which seemed to have no intention of charging these dangerous creatures again. They buzzed menace and held the door. Lzi and her mercenaries were going to have to climb out a window.

“He gave you jewels,” she said to Ptashne. “Take whatever you can carry. May you find joy in it.”

—

Lzi sat alone on the beach beside a tree, waiting for the sun to rise and the Auspicious Voyage to return. She fretted the edge of her machete with her thumbnail. It was, understandably, dull.

She looked up as two silhouettes approached. “Did you get him?”

The Gage shook his head, which gleamed softly in the moonlight. He sat down on her left, the Dead Man on her right. “We looked. The wasps must have taken their last offspring somewhere safe from the likes of us.”

“Poor man,” Lzi said.

After a while, the silence of lapping waves was broken by the Dead Man’s voice. “So,” he said. “We shall collect our pay soon, and be traveling on. And then, where do you go from here, Doctor Lady?”

“It’s not hard to live here,” she said. She gestured to the jungle behind them, the sea before beyond. “Many people are content with the breadfruit, the harvest of the lagoons, the coconuts and mangoes and the pounded hearts of palm. Many people are content to sail, and swim, and find somebody to fight and make babies with.”

“But it was never enough for you.”

Lzi heard the length of her own pause, and the snort that followed. “Maybe the restlessness runs in the blood like the sea. My parents sailed off in search of an uncharted island and never returned, did you know that? Into the dragon-infested Sea of Storms. They took my brother with them. I was judged too young. They had ambition and it killed them. I had ambition…and also I was afraid.”

“So you studied the arts of science?”

“I learned to read,” she said. “I learned to heal. I learned to kill by poison and by blade, because you cannot learn to create without learning to destroy, and the reverse of course holds true as well. I made a place for myself in the service of King Pale Empire. My life at his command.”

The Dead Man nodded, perhaps sympathetically. He leaned against the tree she sat beside. “But.”

“But it wasn’t enough. I felt like I was scraping mud from the bottom of the well, that it was filling with salt water from beneath.”

“You can only give so much from a well until you fill it again. With rain or with buckets, or with time and the water that rises from within. When you are doing something entirely for somebody else—out of altruism, or out of a need to feel some purpose—”

“What else is there?”

“What are you good for?” He might have smiled. In any case, the shadowy stretch of the veil across his face altered. “You could try wanting something. For yourself. For its own sake. Or getting mad enough about something unfair to decide to do something about it.”

She considered it. So strangely attractive. Find something worth fighting for, then fight for it.

“But what?”

He blinked sleepily. “Doctor Lady Lzi, if you come to that understanding, you will have exceeded the accomplishments of fully half of humanity. And now please excuse me. It will be day before long, and I am going to look for some dry wood for the signal fire.”

She sat on the beach beside the Gage and watched the sun go down. The wind off the water grew chill; the sand underneath her stayed warm.

The Gage spoke before she did. “Do you want to wind up like maggot man back there? That’s what service to the unappreciative gets you. Ask a Gage how he knows.”

She decided not to. “What if you don’t have anything but service?” she asked starkly.

There was a silence. The stars burned through it, empty and serene as Lzi wished she could be.

“I had a family for a time as well,” said the Gage, over the hush of the waves.

“You?” Lzi’s expression of confusion was making her forehead itch. “But you are…”

“Gages are born before we’re made,” said the Gage. “The Wizard needs something to take apart, to animate the shell when she puts it back together again.”

“By the Emperor’s wings,” Lzi said softly.

“I volunteered.”

She stared at him, rude though it was. The light of the moons made blue ripples on his hide.

“Well,” the Gage said, reasonably, “would you want something like me around if it hadn’t decided it wanted to be made and serve you?”

“Were you dying?” Lzi covered her mouth with her hands. She was catching rudeness from these foreigners.

“Not yet. But I needed to live long enough to exact a kind of justice. For my family.”

Lzi hadn’t heard the Dead Man come up behind her. His voice made her jump. “I did live for service. Very like you. And then the service was taken from me.” He thumped a pile of sticks down on the sand. “In this life, one cannot rely on anything.”

“What kept you going past that point?”

“For me,” the Dead Man said, “it was also revenge.”

The Gage had called it justice. Lzi asked, “Revenge for your Caliph?”

The naïve might have mistaken his bark of pain for a laugh. “For my daughters,” he said. “And my wife.”

Lzi couldn’t think what to say, and said nothing, for so long that the Dead Man collected himself and went on.

“That desire kept me alive long enough for others to assert themselves.”

The Gage tilted his polished head. It gleamed with a soft luster in the tropic dark. “Revenge led me to become a Gage,” he admitted. “Since then, I have not met anything that could put a stop to me. So here I am.”

“Is that the only effective purpose? The only way to make a space for yourself in the world that is not…serving someone else’s whim?” Lzi asked. “Vengeance?”

“It is the worst one,” the Gage replied. “But it’s something to go forward on.”

“I don’t have anyone to punish.” Not even the parents who had abandoned her, she realized. For how do you punish those who are dead and gone? But she realized also that she could never make herself good enough, small enough, useful enough to lure them home. Because they were dead, and they were gone.

“All this for family?” Lzi said, and felt that expression push her mouth thin. “She was right, you know. This is the only power of her own that she would ever have had.”

“Yes,” said the Gage quietly. “I know.”

He was silent for a moment or two.

“Then a harder question. What would you be, beyond a servant?” the Dead Man asked her. “What else would you seek?”

Lzi shrugged. “I am not giving up my service. I am useful where I am.”

“What does your soul crave, though, besides being useful?” There was enough light now to see him shift slightly from foot to foot. Morning was coming.

“I suppose the first thing I seek is what I am seeking.”

He touched his nose through the veil, which she thought signified a smile. “Write me a letter when you find it.”

“You’re not staying?”

He shrugged.

The Gage rolled his enormous shoulders, as if settling his tattered homespun more comfortably. Lzi would have to see if the Emperor’s gratitude for the sapphires in her pack would extend to a new raw-silk robe for the brazen man.

He didn’t turn his polished metal egg, but Lzi had a sense that he was looking at the Dead Man…fondly?

“Not here,” the Gage supplied for his partner. “He’s seeking…something else.” He waited a moment, watching a pale line creep across the bottom of the sky. “You could come with us. We’re short a naturalist.”

He’s seeking a home, she thought. Does the destination matter, or is the value in the journey and whom you make it with? “Let me think about it,” she said, and watched the Auspicious Voyage ’s silhouette approach across the broken mirror of the lagoon.

⬩  ⬩  ⬩

I had to think hard about whether it was proper to include one of Lavie Tidhar’s tales of “guns & sorcery,” featuring the bizarre and often ultraviolent adventures of Gorel of Goliris, a “gunslinger and addict” in a world full of evil sorcery and monstrous creatures. Did a story without swords belong in a Sword & Sorcery anthology? But swords or no swords, the Gorel stories are true to the spirit of Sword & Sorcery, and their antecedents are clear—there’s the strong influence of Stephen King’s Gunslinger stories, obviously, but equally strong are the traces of C. L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and Robert E. Howard. The Gorel stories especially remind me of Howard’s early Conan the Barbarian stories. What they are is almost the pure essence of Sword & Sorcery—violent, action-packed, paced like a runaway freight train, politically incorrect and socially unredeemable, in your face. They’re also a lot of fun, and yet another example, along with the work of many of the other writers here, of the interesting and sometimes surprising directions this particular subgenre is evolving in as we progress deeper into the twenty-first century.

So let yourself be swept along with Gorel on his latest dark and twisted quest, but buckle your seatbelts—it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

(Further adventures of Gorel can be found in the chapbook novella Gorel and the Pot Bellied God and in the collection Black Gods Kiss.)

Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, has traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London, the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, and Laos; after a spell in Tel Aviv, he’s currently living back in England again. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), was the editor of Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography, and the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults, the three-volume The Apex Book of World SF series, and two anthologies edited with Rebecca Levene, Jews vs. Aliens and Jews vs. Zombies. He is the author of the linked story collection HebrewPunk, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier, and the novella chapbooks An Occupation of Angels, Cloud Permutations, Jesus and the Eightfold Path, and Martian Sands. A prolific short-story writer, his stories have appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkseworld, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Nemonymous, Infinity Plus, Aeon, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau, Old Venus, and elsewhere, and have been translated into seven languages. His novels include The Bookman and its two sequels, Camera Obscura and The Great Game, Osama: A Novel (which won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Novel in 2012), The Violent Century, and A Man Lies Dreaming. His most recent book is a big, multifaceted SF novel, Central Station.

⬩  ⬩  ⬩

1.

Gorel of Goliris rode slowly, half-delirious in the saddle of his graal. The creature lumbered beneath him, moving sluggishly. It was a multilegged beast, native to the sands of Meskatel, which lay far to the south. Its tough carapace would turn a pleasing green in sunlight, as it depended on the solar rays for sustenance: but right now its skin was a dark and unhealthy-looking mottled grey, as the storm clouds had been amassing steadily over the deadlands and the creature was starved of nutrition just like its master, in his own way, was. Its tail was raised like the stem of a flower, the better to catch moisture in the air, the sting at its end naked like a spur.

They were much alike, master and beast. Hardy, obstinate, durable, and deadly. Gorel’s head hung limp on his chest. His gums hurt and his eyes felt fused shut, and everything ached. His hands shook uncontrollably.

Withdrawal.

He needed it.

He needed the Black Kiss.

What drove him into the deadlands was a mixture of heartache, desire, and need. Somewhere far behind him lay the Black Tor, and its enigmatic master, the dark lord whom Gorel knew only as Kettle. The Avian mage was a small, slight being, his fragile bones like those of a bird. The two had been together when great Falang-Et fell, and the river Thiamat flooded, its god dead…

Kettle had used Gorel, and Gorel could not forgive his onetime lover for that betrayal.

His journey since had taken him far and wide: to the great cemetery of Kur-a-len, where the dead still walk, and to the Zul-Ware’i mountains, where the remnants of an ancient war still littered the glaciers with deadly unexploded ordnance. What drove him, always, was his quest. The search for lost Goliris, that greatest of empires, the biggest and most powerful the World had ever known. His home, from which he had been taken as a child, to which he must return, and claim his throne…

Yet in all the World, in all of his searching, throughout the long years, he had never found a trace of his homeland, as though—he sometimes thought, in dark moments—it had been erased entirely from the memory of all living beings.

But the World was large—infinite, some even claimed. And Gorel would not rest until he found it once again.

Goliris…

Heartache, then, and need. Yet, what of desire?

It had happened long before, in the jungle lands where the Urino-Dag, the ghouls of the bush, haunt the unwary traveller in the thicket. Where the smell of rotten leaves and decay fills the still air, where a village once stood, where Gorel had come in his search…only to encounter the twin goddesses, Shar and Shalin, who bit him, laughing, with the Black Kiss…and even as he murdered them both, and all their followers, their curse was in him, and he was forever hooked.

Gods’ Dust.

But there were no gods in the deadlands. There were barely any human habitations to attract them, no subsequent illicit transaction of pleasure for faith. And Gorel was driven on blindly, across a land cracked with drought, under a black sky, driven as much away as towards, growing weak, growing delirious…

And in his delirium tremens, he remembered.

He remembered Goliris.

2.

The great towers of dread Goliris rose like an infection out of the fertile ground. They were not so much built as cultivated, planted there in aeons past by the magus-emperor Gon, the fungimancer. Where he had bought these spores, at what cost, or in what far-flung corner of the great empire of Goliris, was lost to the mists of time, but the towers grew, tall graceful stems with bulbous caps, gills protruding, and a small army of wizard-gardeners tending to their constant maintenance.

Goliris, mother-city, sat atop the shores of a great ocean. Its black ships, unequalled in all the World, departed from its shores to all corners and returned laden with goods and pillage. The hot, humid air was cooled by the sea breeze, and in its wide avenues and canals there strode, flew, and swam the ambassadors of a thousand races, come to pay tribute.

Gorel remembered standing at the top of the palace, holding his father’s hand. The room was cool and dark, and through the gills one could see the ocean spread out to the horizon, where a blood-red sun was slowly setting. Its dying light illuminated the great fleet, black sails raising overhead the seven-pointed-star flag of Goliris.

“Where are they going, Father?” the young Gorel had asked.

“To conquer new lands,” his father said. “To further spread the fame and power of Goliris. Gorel…one day, all this will be yours. For untold generations our bloodline held pure and strong, commanding empire. To rule is your destiny, as it was mine. Will you be ready?”

The young Gorel held his father’s hand and stared out to sea. The thought of his future, the terrible responsibility, both excited and frightened him. But he could not disappoint his father, could not reveal his inner turmoil.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Father, I will be ready.”

“Good boy!” his father said. Then he scooped him in his arms, and for one brief, wondrous moment Gorel felt warm, and safe, and loved.