Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

The soldier woman who walked into the bar didn’t look like the kind to give much away. She’d be a hard drinker, though, or so Swillman judged in the single flickering glance he risked taking at her face. And things could get bad, because she didn’t look like someone used to paying for what she took; and the two soldier men who clumped in behind her looked even uglier to a man like Swill—who was an honest publican just trying to do his best.

The woman wasn’t wearing boots, which made her catlike as she drew up to the bar.

“Got ale,” said Swillman before she could open her mouth and demand something he’d never heard of. The woman frowned, and Swill thought that maybe these people were so foreign they didn’t speak the language of the land.

But she then said, in a cruel, butchered accent, “What place is this?”

“Glory.”

“No.” She waved one gauntleted hand. “Kingdom? Empire?”

Swillman looked over at Slim, who was watching with a hoof-stunned expression, and then he licked his lips and shrugged.

The foreign woman sighed. “Five tankards, then.”

“Y’got to pay first.”

To Swillman’s surprise, she didn’t reach across and snap his neck like a lamp taper. Instead, she tugged free a small bag looped around her throat—the bag coming up from between her breasts somewhere under that chain armor, and spilled out a half-dozen rectangular coins onto the countertop.

Swillman stared down at them. “That tin? Lead?”

“Silver.”

“I can’t make no give-back on silver!”

“Well, what do you use here?”

He reached down and lifted into view his wooden cash tray. Its four sculpted bowls held seven buttons in three different sizes, a few nuggets of raw copper, a polished agate, and three sticks of stale rustleaf.

“No coins?”

“Been years since I last seen one a those.”

“What did it look like?”

“Oblong, not like yours at all. And they was copper.”

“What was stamped on ’em?” asked the short, bearded man who’d sidled up between the woman and Slim. “Whose face, I mean? Or faces—three faces? Castle in the sky? Something like that, maybe?”

Swillman shrugged. “Don’t recall.”

“One of these should do us for the night, then,” said the woman, nudging one of the silver coins in Swill’s direction.

“A cask of ale for you and meals, too, that would be about right.”

He could see that the woman knew she was being taken, but didn’t seem much interested in arguing.

The bearded man was eyeing Slim, who was eyeing him back.

The other man, leaning on the rail on the other side of the stocking-footed woman, was big and stupid-looking—Swillman could hear his loud breathing and the man’s mouth hung open.

Probably too dumb to understand what was going on about anything, from that empty look in his eyes and those snaggled teeth, yellow and dry jutting out like that.

Drawing the first three tankards, Swillman served them up. A moment later, two more women soldiers clumped in.

Slim scowled and did her usual shrink-back when people she thought of as competition ever showed up, but the bearded man just went and moved closer. “Keep,” he said, “give this sweet lass another one.”

Swillman gaped, and then nodded. He was already drawing two more tankards for the new women—gods, they were all cut up and bruised and knocked about, weren’t they just? All five of ’em. Addled in the heads, too, he suspected. Imagine, calling Slim a sweet lass! Bastard was blind!

The loud breather startled him by speaking up. “Seen no stables—we need to put up for the night. Horses need taking care of. We want somewhere to sleep under cover. We need food for the ride, too, and clean, boiled water. Is there a drygoods here? How about a blacksmith? Anyone work leather and hide? Is there a whetstone? Anyone selling blankets?”

Swillman had begun shaking his head with the very first query, and he kept shaking it until the man ran down.

“None of that?”

“None. Sorry, we’re not on, uh, any road. We see a merchant once a year, whatever he don’t sell elsewhere by season’s end, we can look at.”

Slim drained her tankard in one long pull and then, after a gasp, she said, “Widow Bark’s got some wool, I think. She spins something, anyway. Might have a blanket to sell. The stable burned down, we got no horses anyway. We got pigs, and sheep a walk south of here, near the other end of the valley, but all that wool down there goes into the next valley, to the town there—to Piety.”

“How far away is Piety?” the bearded man asked.

“Four days on foot, maybe two on horseback.”

“Well,” the breather demanded, “where can we sleep?”

Swillman licked his lips and said, “If it’s just a dry roof you’re looking for, there’s the old keep on the hill.”

They’d dug one of the pits too close to a barrow, and from one end of the rectangular trench old bones tumbled out in lumps of yellow clay. Graves and Snotty stared down at them for a time. Splinters and shards, snapped and marrow-sucked, and then Graves scooped up most of them with his shovel.

“We’ll bore a hole in the mound,” he said.

Snotty wiped his running nose and nodded. “I’m thirsty.”

“Let’s break, then.”