Blackguards Read online

  They began to mumble and murmur, more and more of their number waking from the dream they shared. At first they stepped forward like boneyard shamblers, but with every moment that passed they seemed to come more alive.

  Behind them, the highborn woman Rümayesh controlled railed against her bonds. She was more angry, more aware of herself, than she’d been in years, but she was buoyed by the anger of those around her. Rümayesh’s will was still strong, however. She held against the assault, the two of them at a stalemate. Soon, though, the woman’s anger would ebb. Soon Rümayesh would regain the control she’d had over this woman for so long.

  Çeda had lost track of those around her. She realized with a start that one of the men was holding a kenshar. A woman on Çeda’s opposite side drew a slim knife of her own. A remnant of Çeda’s earlier lethargy still remained, but fear now drove her. She rolled backward, coming to a crouch, waiting for any to approach.

  A moment later the man did, the woman right after, but they both gave clumsy swipes of their blades. Çeda leapt over the man, snaking her arm around his neck as she went. She landed and levered him so that he tipped backward, then controlled him, moving him slowly toward the door.

  He tried to use his knife to strike at her arm, but she was ready. She released his neck at the last moment and snatched the wrist holding the knife with one hand, closed her other hand around his closed fist, the one wrapped around the weapon. Then she drew his own knife toward his neck. He was so surprised he hardly fought her, and by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late. The knife slipped into his throat like a needle through ripe summer fruit.

  For a moment, everyone stared at the blood running hot over Çeda’s hands.

  They were not only witnessing his death; they felt it through their shared bond. As his heart slowed and finally stopped, the irindai burst from the walls and from the ceiling. The air became thick with them, fluttering, touching skin, batting eyes, becoming caught in hair.

  Çeda’s mind burned in the thoughts and the emotions of all those gathered. They were of one mind, now, sharing what they’d known, what they hoped to be, what they feared in the deepest recesses of their minds. It was too much, a flood that consumed them all, one by one.

  Çeda screamed, a single note added to the cacophony of screams filling this small space, then fell beneath the weight of their collected dreams.

  #

  Çeda opened her eyes, finding a dark-skinned boy with bright blue eyes staring at her.

  “The sun shining bright, girl,” Makuo said. “Time you return to it, let it see your face before it forget.”

  “What?” Çeda sat up slowly, her mind still lost in the land of dreams. She remembered who she was now—her name, her purpose here—but it seemed like an age and a day since she’d fallen to the weight of the minds around her.

  Across the floor of the cellar, bodies lay everywhere like leaves tossed by the wind. Layer upon layer of dead moths covered their forms. Hidi stood by a sarcophagus, staring into its depths. It was what Çeda had been lying upon, she realized. The lid had been removed and now lay cracked and broken to one side.

  Çeda stood and took one step toward the sarcophagus, but Makuo stopped her. “This isn’t for you,” the boy said.

  Within the sarcophagus, she saw the crown of a head, wiry black hair, two twisted horns sweeping back from the forehead.

  She thought of pressing Makuo. They’d won, she knew. They’d beaten Rümayesh with her help, and until now they’d considered her their ally, but that could change at any moment.

  Steer you well wide of the will of the gods, old Ibrahim had always said after finishing one of his tragic stories. She’d heard dozens of those stories, and none of them ended happily. She’d always thought it a trick of Ibrahim’s storytelling, to end them so, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  “What of Ashwandi?” Çeda asked.

  Hidi looked up from whatever it was that had him transfixed, his scar puckering as he bared his teeth. “She free now. Her sister’s wish was always for Ashwandi to leave the ehrekh’s side, to return to the grasslands.”

  An ehrekh, then…

  Rümayesh was an ehrekh, a twisted yet powerful experiment of the god, Goezhen. Few remained in the desert, but those that did were powerful indeed.

  “Is she alive?”

  “Oh, yes,” the boys said in unison, their eyes full of glee.

  “What will you do with her?” Çeda asked, tilting her head toward the sarcophagus.

  At this they frowned. Hidi returned his gaze to Rümayesh’s sleeping form, while Makuo took her by the shoulders and led her away. “The sun shining bright,” he said. “Time you return to it.”

  Çeda let herself be led from the cellar, but her tread was heavy. Rümayesh may have tricked Çeda, may have wanted to steal her memories, but something didn’t feel right about leaving her to these godling boys.

  Makuo led her up a set of winding stairs and at last to a metal door. Çeda paused, her hand resting above the handle.

  Steer you well wide of the will of the gods.

  There was wisdom on those words, she thought as she gripped the door’s warm handle. Surely there was wisdom. Then she opened the door and stepped into the sunlight.

  The Subtler Art

  Cat Rambo

  This is the second time I've written about Serendib (the first story featured the antagonist from this one), but the world's been floating around in my head for a couple of decades now, originally as a game setting, and I can tell more stories and a possible novel are lurking within it as well. I chose a middle-aged married couple as my protagonists because I don't see much heroic fantasy with characters like that, and it seems like a definite lack to me.

  ~

  Anything can happen in Serendib, the city built of dimensions intersecting, and this is what happened there once.

  The noodle shop that lies on the border between the neighborhood of Yddle, which is really a forest, houses strapped to the wide trunks, and Eclect, an industrial quarter, is claimed by both, with equally little reason.

  The shop was its own Territory, with laws differing from either area, but the same can be said of many eating establishments in the City of a Thousand Parts. But the noodles were hand shaved, and the sauce was made of minced ginger and chopped green onions with a little soy sauce and a dash of enlightenment, and they were unequaled in Serendib.

  It was the Dark’s favorite place to eat, and since she and Tericatus were haphazard cooks at best and capable of (usually accidentally) killing someone at worst, they often ate their meals out. And because the city is so full of notorious people, very few noted that the woman once known as the best assassin on five continents on a world that only held four and her lover, a wizard who’d in his time achieved wonders and miracles and once even a rebirthed God, were slurping noodles only an elbow length’s away at the same chipped beige stone counter.

  Though indifferent cooks, both were fond enough of food to argue its nuances in detail, and this day they were arguing over the use of white pepper or golden when eating the silvery little fish that spawn every seventh Spring in Serendib.

  “Yellow pepper has a flatness to it,” the Dark argued. Since retirement, she had let herself accumulate a little extra fat over her wiry muscles, and a few white strands traced themselves through her midnight hair, but she remained the one of the pair who drew most eyes. Her lover was a lean man, sparse in flesh and hair, gangly, with long capable hands spotted with unnatural colors and burns from alchemical ventures.

  “Cooking,” said another person, newly arrived, on the other side of her, “is an exceedingly subtle art.”

  “Cathay,” the Dark said, recognizing the newcomer. Her tone was cool. Cathay was both acquaintance and former lover for both of them, but more than that, she was a Trickster mage, and you never knew what she might be getting into.

  Tericatus grunted his own acknowledgment and greeting, rolling an eye sideways at the Dark in warning. He k
new she was prone to impatience and, while Tricksters can play with many things, impatience is a favorite point to press on.

  But the conversation Cathay made was slight, as though the Trickster’s mind was elsewhere, and by the time the others had tapped coin to counter in order to pay, most of what she’d said had vanished, except for those few words.

  “A subtle art,” the Dark repeated to Tericatus, letting the words linger like the pepper on her tongue. “It describes what I do, as well. The most subtle art of all, assassination.”

  Tericatus leaned back in his chair with a smile on his lips and a challenging quirk to his eyebrow. “A subtle art, but surely not the most subtle. That would be magery, which is subtlety embodied.”

  The Dark looked hard at her mate. While she loved him above almost all things, she had been – and remained – very proud of her skill at her profession.

  The argument hung in the air between them. So many words could go in defense of either side. But actions speak stronger than words. And so they stood and slid a token beneath their empty bowls and nodded at one another in total agreement.

  “Who first?” the Dark asked.

  “I have something in mind already, if you don’t care,” Tericatus murmured.

  “Very well.”

  #

  Serendib has no center – or at least the legend goes that if anyone ever finds it, the city will fall – but surely wherever its heart is, it must lie close to the gardens of Caran Sul.

  Their gates are built of white moon-metal, which grows darker whenever the moon is shadowed, and their grounds are overgrown with shanks of dry green leaves and withered purple blossoms that smell sweet and salty, like the very edges of the sea.

  In the center, five towers reach to the sky, only to tangle into the form of Castle Knot, where the Angry Daughters, descended from the prophet who once lived there, swarm, and occasionally pull passersby into their skyborne nests, never to be seen again.

  Tericatus and the Dark paid their admittance coin to the sleepy attendant at the entrance stile outside the gate and entered through the pathway hacked into the vegetation. Tericatus paused halfway down the tunnel to lean down and pick up a caterpillar from the dusty path, transferring it to the dry leaves on the opposite side.

  The Dark kept a wary eye on the sky as they emerged into sunlight. While she did not fear an encounter with a few Daughters, a crowd of them would be an entirely different thing. But nothing stirred in the stony coils and twists so far above.

  “This reminds me,” she ventured, “of the time we infiltrated the demon city of S’keral pretending to be visiting scholars and wrestled that purple stone free from that idol.”

  “Indeed,” Tericatus said, “this is nothing like that.”

  “Ah. Perhaps it is more like the time we entered the village of shapeshifters and killed their leaders before anyone had time enough to react.”

  “It is not like that either,” Tericatus said, a little irritably.

  “Remind me,” she said, “exactly what we are doing here.”

  Tericatus stopped and crossed his arms. “I’m demonstrating the subtlety with which magic can work.”

  “And how exactly will it work?” she inquired.

  He unfolded an arm and pointed upward towards the dark shapes flapping their way down from the heights, clacking the brazen, razor-sharp bills on the masks they wore.

  “I presume you don’t need me to do anything?”

  Tericatus did not deign to answer.

  The shapes continued to descend. The Dark could see the brass claws tipping their gloves, each stained with ominous rust.

  “You're quite sure you don’t need me?”

  A butterfly fluttered across the sky from behind them. Dodging to catch it in her talons, one Daughter collided with another, and the pair tumbled into the path of a third, then a fourth…

  The Dark blinked as the long grass around them filled with fallen bodies.

  “Very nice,” she said with genuine appreciation. “And the tipping point?”

  Tericatus smirked slightly. “The caterpillar. You may have noticed that I moved it from one kind of plant to another…?”

  “Of course.”

  “And when it eats jilla leaves, its scent changes, attracting adults of its species to come lay more eggs there.”

  “Well done,” she said. “A valiant try indeed.”

  #

  The Home for Dictators is, despite its name, a retirement home, though it is true that it holds plenty of past leaders of all sorts of stripes, and many of them are not particularly benign.

  “Why here?” Tericatus said as they came up Fume and Spray and Rant Street, changing elevations as they went till the air grew chill and dry.

  “It grates on me to perform a hit without getting paid for it,” the Dark said, a little apologetically. “It feels unprofessional.”

  “You’re retired. Why should you worry about feeling unprofessional?”

  “You’re retired too. Why should you worry about who’s more subtle?”

  “Technically, wizards never retire.”

  “Assassins do,” the Dark said. “It’s just that we don’t usually get the chance.”

  “Get the chance or lose the itch?”

  She shrugged. “A little of both?”

  Tericatus expected the Dark to go in through the back in the way she’d been famous for: unseen, unannounced. Or failing that, to disguise herself in one of her many cunning alterations: an elderly inmate to be admitted, a child come to visit a grandparent, a dignitary there to honor some old politician. But instead she marched up the steps and signed her name in bold letters on the guestbook: THE DARK.

  The receptionist/nurse, a young newtling with damp, pallid skin and limpid eyes, spun the book around to read the name, which clearly meant little to him. “And you’ve come to see…?” he said, letting the sentence trail upward in question as his head tilted.

  The Dark eyed him. It was a look Tericatus knew well, a look that started mild and reasonable but which, as time progressed, swelled into menace, darkened like clouds gathering on the edge of the horizon. The newtling paled, cheeks twitching convulsively as he swallowed.

  “Simply announce me to the inhabitants at large,” the Dark said.

  Without taking his eyes from her, the newtling fumbled for the intercom, a device clearly borrowed from some slightly more but not too advanced dimension, laden with black-iron cogs and the faint green glow of phlogiston. He said hesitantly into the bell-like speaking cup, “The, uh, Dark is here to see, uh, someone.”

  The Dark smiled faintly and turned back to the waiting room.

  After a few moments, Tericatus said, “Are we expecting someone?”

  “Not really,” the Dark replied.

  “Some thing?”

  “Closer, but not quite,” she said.

  They glanced around as a bustle of doctors went through a doorway.

  “There we go,” the Dark said.

  She tugged her lover in their wake and up a set of stairs where they watched the doctors gather in a room at the head. An elderly woman lay motionless in her bed there.

  “The Witch of the Southeast,” the Dark murmured. “She’s always feared me, and her heart was as frail as tissue paper. Come on.”

  They drifted further along the corridor. The Dark paused in a doorway. A man in a wicker and brass wheelchair wore an admiral’s uniform, but his eyes were unseeing, his lips drawn up in a rictus that exposed purple gums.

  “Diploberry,” the Dark said. “It keeps well, and just a little has the effect one wants. It is a relatively painless means of suicide.”

  Tericatus looked at the admiral. “Because he heard you were coming?”

  The Dark spread her hands in a helpless shrug, her grin fox-sly.

  “And you’re getting paid for all of them? How long ago did you plant some of the seeds you’ve harvested here?”

  “The longest would be a decade and a half,” she mused.
/>
  “How many others have died?”

  “Three. All dictators whose former victims were more than willing to see their old oppressors gone.”

  Tericatus protested, “You can’t predict that with such finesse!”

  “Can I not?” She pointed at the door where three stretchers were exiting, carried by orderlies in the costume of the place; gold braids and silver sharkskin suits.

  She smiled smugly. “Subtle, no?”

  Tericatus nodded, frowning.

  “Come now,” she said. “Is it that hard to admit defeat?”

  “Not so hard, my love,” he said. “But isn’t that Cathay?”

  The Dark felt another touch of unease. You never know what a Trickster Mage is getting you into. And there indeed stood Cathay at the front desk, speaking sweetly to someone, a bouquet of withered purple blossoms in her hand, more of them in her hair, exuding a smell like longing and regret and the endless sea.

  The Dark murmured, “She always loved those flowers, and yet did not like contending with the Daughters.”

  Tericatus said, “She had lovers here, I know that. No doubt she has five inheritances coming.”

  Cathay turned and smiled at them. The Dark bowed slightly, and Tericatus inclined his head.

  #

  “But,” the Dark finally said into the silence as they walked away, headed by mutual accord to the bar closest to the noodle shop, “we can still argue over which of us exercises the second most subtle art.”

  Seeds

  Carol Berg

  The scoundrel hero of my Lighthouse Duet, Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone, is a renegade sorcerer with a serious addiction problem and a unique outlook on life. My new Sanctuary Duet, Dust and Light and Ash and Silver, is a parallel story set in the same world as the Lighthouse books. But Dust and Light involves a very different sorcerer, an upright young portrait artist who is, to his disgust and humiliation, contracted to a testy, common man of the law with shady doings in his past. "Seeds" recounts a chance encounter between my scoundrel and my lawman some five years before the cataclysmic events of these two duologies—a civil war, a disastrous winter, rampaging fanatics, and the roots of myth in a realm just beyond the world we can see.