Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

The Lady winked at me. We were old campaign buddies. We had hunted down and killed her sister during the fighting at Charm.

The whisper from everywhere said, “She’s striking, isn’t she?”

I nodded. Goblin and the Captain nodded. The Limper, oozing closer behind his miasmic stench, dipped his masked face in agreement. Tides Elba was indeed striking, and growing more so by the minute—employing an unconscious sorcery to which her torc did not respond.

“Every bit as much as my sister was. This one’s remote grandmother, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance.”

Different sister, I presumed. Tides Elba bore only a passing resemblance to the one I helped kill. I started to ask a question. Needlessly. Our employer was in an expansive mood.

“Her male ancestor was my husband. He futtered anything that moved, including all my sisters and all the female Taken. Enough. She was about to mate with another of his descendants. Their child would become a vessel into which the old bastard could project his soul.”

The Limper might have considered all that in whatever he had planned. The rest of us gaped. Excepting the girl. She did not understand a word. The language the Lady spoke was unknown to her.

Her whole being was focused on what hung in the air, there, though.

She voided herself. She knew where she was bound.

Something passed between the Lady and the Limper. The stinky little sorcerer bowed deeply. He moved in on the girl, took hold of her arm, forced her to her feet. He pushed her toward the door he had wrecked.

The rest of us watched, every man wishing he had the power to stop them, every man knowing that, if the Lady had spoken truly, Tides Elba was a threat to the entire world. She could become the port through which the hideous shadow known as the Dominator could make his return. No doubt she was sought by and beloved of every Resurrectionist cult hoping to free the old evil from his grave. No doubt she was a prophesied messiah of darkness.

I glanced back. The Lady was gone. The end, here, was almost an anticlimax. But that was because we were out there on the margins, able to see only the local surface of the story. For the Company, the central fact would be we had survived.

We all went out and watched the Limper get ready to go.

He seemed nervous and unhappy. He shoved the girl into a sack. He sewed that shut, then secured it to his carpet with cording. Tides Elba would not evade her fate by rolling off the carpet while it was in flight. His liftoff into the late-afternoon light seemed erratic. He wobbled as he headed west.

I found Hagop in the shadows near where the Limper’s carpet had lain. He gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up. “He spotted it right away. Took it out, looked at it, and jumped like somebody just hit him with a shovel.”

“He got the message, then.”

Goblin stared westward, eyes still haunted, but said only, “What a waste of delicious girl flesh.” And then, “Let’s round up Elmo and One-Eye and go tip a few at the Dark Horse. Elmo has got the cards, don’t he?”

BLOODSPORT Gene Wolfe

GENE WOLFE worked as an engineer, before becoming editor of trade journal Plant Engineering. He came to prominence as a writer in the late 1960s with a sequence of short stories in Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies. His early major novels were The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace, but he established his reputation with a sequence of three long, multivolume novels—The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, and The Book of the Short Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, Endangered Species, Strange Travelers, and, most recently, The Best of Gene Wolfe. He is the recipient of the Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, John W. Campbell Memorial, British Fantasy, British SF, and World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Awards. Wolfe’s most recent book is the novel An Evil Guest. Upcoming is his new novel The Sorcerer’s House.

Sit down and I’ll tell you.