Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

He shouts and rages as she turns to leave the torture chamber. She sees him bringing his hands up, forming shapes, whispering strange words, coughing phrases she cannot understand, casting sigils into the floor that glare briefly before fading away. The shapes his hands make remain silhouetted on the wall for a moment, but then they too fade, shriveling to nothing when he had expected them to grow.

“What have you done to me, bitch?” he shouts. She’s surprised that he can even speak that loud; one of Trivner’s favorite tortures is fire ants down the throat.

She slams the cell door behind her, and his shouts become distant. In three days he will be dead. And if all goes to plan, she’ll never have to tell a soul.

They were concentrating on the carriage now. Arrow after arrow struck the wooden shutters enclosing it, and as the timber splintered, so more light came in. Jan Ray was huddled down in one corner away from the raving sorcerer, knife in her hand even though she could never use it, and she was beginning to fear how this would end.

They’re not afraid of hurting him, she thought. They know what he can do—he’s united the Wreckers, after all. They know if an arrow hits him he’ll get better, that his powers will protect him…

But they don’t know what I’ve done to him.

If Bamore did die now, the Wreckers would turn their sorcerer into a god and await his triumphant return. News of his powers would spread, rumors of magic would filter through the city, and Hanharan might not look so appealing with Bamore offering such romantic notions. The only thing that ever kept peace in the city was the Order of Hanharan, and those who preached and policed it.

“I made you normal,” she said. “For long enough to hang on the Wall, at least. You bloody fool, Bamore. You bloody, stupid fool, you think you pluck up a bit of knowledge from some slummy side-street and make yourself a god?”

“Gods don’t make themselves.” He spat, groaned as he rolled onto his side. “Their followers do it for them.”

“How did it happen? The magic, the sorcery…where did you find it?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because your people are going to kill me,” she said.

He watched her with his one good eye, smiling slightly, glancing away, listening to the sounds of battle from outside. The fight was louder again now, closer, and Jan Ray imagined her soldiers surrounding the carriage and holding off a sustained attack. If there were more Wreckers like those ravers…if there was something else they were hiding…

But reinforcements would be with them soon.

“Fair enough,” he said. And Jan Ray thought, It’s always in a madman’s nature to gloat.

“It’s Deathtouch, not magic. Stronger than the older magics. More specific. I bestow death, or take it back. You saw those raving bloody monsters out there? Mine. As for where I found it…” He started laughing. It was a horrible sound, rising from a chest half-flooded with blood and passing through a throat damaged by Trivner’s awful tortures. But Jan Ray thought that even were he fit and whole, Bamore’s laughter would have been dreadful. They’d failed to discover what he had been before he took the name Bamore; now she was glad.

“What?” she asked. “Where?”

“Under your very noses,” he said. “Not all Marcellans are as pure as you wish to imagine.” He pressed his hands together and grunted, trying another Deathtouch spell but failing.

“And without it, you’re just swine shit on my shoe,” she said.

Something struck the carriage. It rocked on its axles, wood creaking and cracking, and another hail of arrows struck the left side, the impacts continuing for some time as if the shooters were reloading again and again.

“They’ll have me soon,” Bamore said. “I’ll be unconscious from your tortures, of course. And once whatever you’ve done to me lifts, I’ll wake, and heal. As a victim of your cruelties, my followers will increase tenfold overnight.”

“You’re going to die on the Wall.”

He groaned and sat up, and she pressed back into the corner. He’s weak, but if he comes at me now…? I’m just an old woman. And she was injured. The bolt in her shoulder seemed to be super-heated, and she feared she might have been poisoned. An insidious infection, perhaps, that would kill her in days, not moments. She would not put such a cruel death past Dal Bamore.

More shouts came from outside, and then a terrible scream, loud and long, that seemed to come from many voices.

“Ahh,” Bamore said, “more of my children.”

Jan Ray heard Jave shouting to his remaining soldiers, and then his voice was snapped off, and the sound of chaos took over. Screams and shouts, the hacking of metal into flesh, and then the door of the carriage was ripped open.