Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

“We win anyway. Tomorrow we take you to Gaol Ten. Three days later you go on trial for heresy, for which you will be sentenced to death. You’ll be taken to the Wall, nails hammered into your wrists and ankles. We’ll pierce you with thirteen mepple shoots to attract the lizards, and leave you to die. And after you die you rot, in sight of anyone who cares to look. I’ve heard of people staying up there for thirty days before they decay enough to rip free of the nails and fall.”

“I’ll be dead. It doesn’t matter.”

“If you accept Him, I can arrange for the executioner to stick you with a poisoned knife. You’ll be dead before he descends the ladder.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” He grins at her. It is a grotesque expression, his startling white teeth glaring from a mask of blood and excrement.

Jan Ray turns and walks to the far end of the chamber. Trivner has his tools of torture set out here, an array of metal, stone, leather, paper, wood, bone, and jars containing living creatures, that is in itself enough to give anyone nightmares for life. The tools are exquisitely clean, the insects well-kept, and the thought of someone tending lovingly to such things is horrific. She wonders if Trivner has a wife and children, and hopes not.

“So why you?” she asks, picking up a long, pointed bone. It’s hollow, and dozens of small holes give it barbs.

“Why me what?”

“Why have the Wreckers become organized under you?”

“Have they?” he asks, and for the first time she hears doubt. She remains facing away from him, putting down the hollowed bone in favor of a clawed glove. Each flapping finger is tipped with a razor-sharp hook. She can barely imagine the damage this would do to a human body.

She slips her hand inside and grimaces at the slick, oiled feel.

“Of course they have. And they’re little more than gangsters calling themselves terrorists. The name they choose for themselves says it all. They want anarchy, but for their own ends. They spout secularism, but only if it means they line their pockets, get all the slash they want. They claim to shun false gods—”

“All gods are false,” Bamore says, “and the Wreckers—”

“No!” Jan Ray shouts. She turns and advances on the bloodied man, and as she swings her gloved hand she sees something in his eyes that confuses her. The hooks bite in and she uses her weight to tear them through his skin. He screams—

He screams but he’s laughing at me.

—and the hooks open him across the chest. Blood flows. Dal Bamore falls onto his side, and Jan Ray steps back and drops the glove. She has lowered herself to this out of anger and rage, but also because she has feared this man ever since he stood before the Council and said, If Hanharan is a raindrop, I am the storm; if Hanharan is a fly, I am the spider. Now take me and make me God.

“How can you be a god hanging from that Wall?” she shouts, and his cries fade away into a chuckle.

As he sits up, the wounds across his chest cease bleeding.

“No,” she says, backing away. She starts hammering on the door, screaming for Trivner, feeling her old heart fluttering in her chest like a bird trapped in a clenching. “No!”

Bamore stops laughing, closes his eyes, and grimaces, and the cuts heal, leaving only pale streaks beneath the dried blood flaked across his body.

“Whatever you do, they’ll remember me,” he says. As the door behind her opens and she falls out into the unlit hallway beyond, Jan Ray thinks, There’s no way that can happen.

The last time there was a sorcerer in Echo City was almost four hundred years before.

More screams, more shouts, and being blind was driving her mad. Jan Ray poked at knotholes in the wooden shutters with her ceremonial knife, popping out one knot large enough for her to see through. It afforded her a view of the street ahead of them, the dead tusked swine, the Blades gathered around Bamore’s rack, and the facade of one row of buildings. But she only had eyes for Bamore.

Don’t let him wake, she thought. I had no idea how much to give him, or how little; no inkling of how effective it would be. I was flailing in the dark even before this, and now…

If the Wreckers achieved the unbelievable and managed to take him away, there was no telling what Bamore would do. He had come to them supercilious and aloof, welcoming the tortures because they would allow for a miraculous recovery. But he had not expected what had happened after the torture. If he gained time to let it wear off, then perhaps his air of superiority would transform into a need for revenge. And powerful though the Marcellan family was, sorcery was anathema to them, evil and unknown.