Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

At which moment, the Brother (who’d come out of the back door, crawled up on the roof behind him, and edged down the roof-tree toward him until he was close enough to reach his neck with the ax he’d brought with him) raised his arms high and swung. No sound at all; but at the last moment, the dead man leaned his head to one side, just enough, and the ax-blade swept past, cutting air. I heard the Brother grunt, shocked and panicky. I saw the dead man—eyes still fixed on me—reach behind him with his left hand and catch the swinging ax just below the head, and hold it perfectly still. The Brother gasped, but didn’t let go; he was pulling with all his strength, like a little dog tugging on a belt. All his efforts couldn’t move the dead man’s arm the thickness of a fingernail.

“Now,” the dead man said. “Let’s see.”

The delay on my part was unforgivable, completely unprofessional. I knew I had to do something, but my mind had gone completely blank. I couldn’t remember any procedures, let alone any words. Think, a tiny voice was yelling inside my head, but I couldn’t. I heard the Brother whimper, as he applied every scrap of strength in a tendon-ripping, joint-tearing last desperate jerk on the ax-handle, which had no effect whatsoever. The dead man was looking straight at me. His lips began to move.

Pro nobis peccatoribus—not the obvious choice, not even on the same page of the book, but it was the only procedure I could think of. Unfortunately, it’s one I’ve always had real difficulties with. You reach out with your hand that is not a hand, extend the fingers that aren’t fingers; I’m all right as far as that, and then I tend to come unstuck.

(What I was thinking was: so he failed the exam, and I passed. Yes, but maybe the reason he failed was he didn’t read the questions through properly, or he spent so long on Part One that he didn’t leave himself enough time for Two and Three. Maybe he’s really good, just unlucky in exams.)

I was mumbling: Sol invicte, ora pro nobis peccatoribus in die periculi. Of course, there’s a school of thought that says the magic words have no real effect whatsoever, they’re just a way of concentrating the mind. I tend to agree. Why should an archaic prayer in a dead language to a god nobody’s believed in for six hundred years have any effect on anything at all? Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, I repeated urgently, nobis peccatoribus in die periculi.

It worked. It can’t have been the words, of course, but it felt like it was the words. I was in, I was through. I was inside his head.

There was nothing there.

Believe me, it’s true. Nothing at all; like walking into a house where someone’s died, and the family have been in and cleared out all the furniture. Nothing there, because I was inside the head of a dead man; albeit a dead man who was looking at me reproachfully out of blank white eyes while holding an ax absolutely still.

Fine; all the easier, if it’s empty. I looked for the controls. You have to visualize them, of course. I see them as the handwheels of a lathe. It’s because I had a holiday job in a foundry in Second Year. I don’t know how to use a lathe. What I mostly did was sweep up piles of swarf off the floor.

Here is the handwheel that controls the arms. I reached out with the hand that is not a hand, grabbed it and tried to turn it. Stuck. I tried harder. Stuck. I tried really hard, and the bloody thing came away in my hand.

It’s not supposed to do that.

I re-visualized. I saw the controls as the reins of a cart, the footbrake under my boot that was not a boot. I stamped on the brake and hauled back hard on the reins.

I haven’t got around to writing that paper for the journals, so here it is for the first time anywhere. The gift does not survive death. Nothing survives. The room was empty. And the handwheel only broke off because I’m clumsy and cack-handed, the sort of person who trips over cats and breaks the nibs of pens by pressing too hard.

I heard the Brother gasp, as he jerked the ax out of the dead man’s grip. The dead man didn’t move. His eyes were still fixed on mine, right up to the moment when the ax sheared through his neck and his head wobbled and fell, bounced off his knee and tumbled off the roof into the short grass below. The body didn’t move.

I know why. It took ten of us, with an improvised crane made of twelve-foot-three-inch fir poles, to get the body down off the roof. It must’ve weighed half a ton. The head alone was two hundredweight. Two men couldn’t lift it; they had to use levers to roll it along the ground. There was no blood, but the neck started to ooze a milky white juice that smelt worse than anything you could possibly imagine.