Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,106

“But first, I’ll have one of my creations service your dry—”

An arrow struck him in the right cheek. His right eye flushed red, mouth opened, and he raised one hand and pointed at Jan Ray.

A Wrecker climbed into the carriage and glared at the priestess. The man’s throat had been torn out, half of his scalp ripped off, and yet he did not bleed.

Dead, Jan Ray thought. She lifted her knife and pressed it to her own throat.

She does not sleep that night. To defeat a sorcerer she has used magic herself, a remnant from an ancient conflict that the Hanharans have kept in their possession simply because they cannot let it go. She did not perform a spell, but administered it, and yet…

She has betrayed Hanharan, who said that the only magic is in him. She has denied his status as the one true god. Confused, angry, terrified, empowered, Jan Ray cries and smiles her way through the night.

They killed Bamore. The dead man went first, falling on the tortured sorcerer and hacking away with his short sword. Jan Ray watched with her breath held, trying to understand, wondering if they really thought their god could come back from this, refreshed and renewed. Then the dead man fell to the side, and someone else entered the carriage.

It was a tall man, with heavy piercings and tattoos displaying some high rank in the Wrecker gang. He glanced at Jan Ray, looked down at his bloody sword, then took turn hacking at Bamore’s corpse.

The sorcerer was meat. The man took his head and threw it from the carriage.

“Stamp on it!” he shouted. “Crush it, and grind his brains into the dust. There can be nothing left.”

Jan Ray lowered her knife and waited for the man to turn around and kill her. But when he did turn, he merely looked, fascination and disgust mingling in his eyes.

“So you’re a Hanharan Priestess,” he said. “Well…you’re not much to look at. And I thought suicide was forbidden under Hanharan’s word.” The man’s voice was empty, as if he cared about nothing at all.

“You just killed…”

“The man who would be god.” He dragged one foot through Bamore’s grisly remains. “He was a monster. What he did to my brother…what he put our people through, in the name of his damned Deathtouch…” The man shook his head, and Jan Ray wondered whether the other body in the carriage—still now, given itself over to death at last—was someone he had known.

She leaned to one side and looked out into the street. There were no Scarlet Blades left standing. A group of men and women squatted in the middle of the road, blood on their chins and painting their grins, and in their vacant eyes she saw a reflection of the dead man on the floor.

“So you’ll kill me now?” she asked softly.

“He’s dead. That’s all that matters. We couldn’t risk you letting him live. And I…for me it was only revenge.” The man was crying. Tears coursed a path down his tattooed cheeks, and he did nothing to hide them. It was as if Jan Ray were not there at all. “He destroyed us all,” he said. He dropped his sword and climbed from the carriage, slipping in blood and sprawling to the ground. No one came to help. She saw them dispersing, the surviving Wreckers and those raving people who’d finished their fight, and who perhaps now would find some sort of peace in death.

The carriage stank, so she slowly climbed out, wincing at the pain in her shoulder. Under your very noses, Bamore had said when she’d asked him where the Deathtouch had originated. She wondered if she could ever trust another Hanharan ever again.

The street was red, and it grew redder as a flood of Scarlet Blade reinforcements arrived to fight in a battle already lost. Or won. Jan Ray wasn’t quite sure.

It would be some time before she could make up her mind.

* * *

ROBERT SILVERBERG, born in New York City, is a science fiction Grand Master, and a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author. He published his first novel, the children’s book Revolt on Alpha C, in 1955. Silverberg won his first Hugo Award for Best New Writer the following year, 1956, the same year he completed an AB in English Literature from Columbia University. A prolific author, he contributed to the genre such classics as Dying Inside, Nightwings, and Downward to the Earth. In 1980 he published Lord Valentine’s Castle, the