Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

C. J. CHERRYH began writing stories at the age of ten, when she became frustrated with the cancellation of her favorite TV show, Flash Gordon. She has a Master of Arts degree in classics from Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Woodrow Wilson fellow, and taught Latin, Ancient Greek, the classics, and ancient history in Oklahoma. Cherryh wrote novels in her spare time when not teaching, and in 1975 sold her first novels Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth to Donald A. Wollheim at DAW Books. The books won her immediate recognition and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977. In 1979, her short story “Cassandra” won the Best Short Story Hugo, and she quit teaching to write full-time. She has since won the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice, first for Down-below Station in 1982 and then again for Cyteen in 1989. In addition to developing her own fictional universes, Cherryh has contributed to several shared world anthologies, including Thieves’ World, Heroes in Hell, and the Merovingen Nights series, which she edited. Her most recent novels are major new Alliance novel, Regenesis, and new Foreigner novel, Conspirator. She lives near Spokane, Washington, and enjoys skating and traveling. She regularly makes appearances at science fiction conventions.

It was an old city up an old river, Wiscezan-on-Eld.

The sea had used to be closer.

The trade had used to be more profitable.

The city had sold its timber off the heights, and the streams had poured silt down to the wharves where the big boats loaded. The silt had made little shallows, and then little channels, and then a bog around the edges. That let in the smallest enemies: buzzing swarms in summer that brought fever and unhealth.

The timber was gone. The soft hills grew lower by the year, the silt grew deeper, the bog thicker and now overgrown with substantial trees, and the little trading outpost southward on the coast, on the little Yliz River, Korianth, built wharves to take the trade. They dealt in dried fish, in carpets and dyed goods, in hammered bronze and leather, amulets, wines, and grain and beer from the sunny east.

Korianth prospered. It got itself a king, and ruled up and down the coast. It traded that king for a better one and lately thrived.

Wiscezan still, stubborn in its ways, traded a few cypress logs down its river and down the coast. It traded pottery, and furs, and building stone from the hard heart of the hills, but it was no longer what it had been.

Its last duchess of the old blood died. The last nobles lived in fair luxury, still. But Korianth under King Osric was too occupied with its own difficulties, its troublesome gods and ambitious allies, to trouble itself when Jindus ait Auzem moved in, bringing his mercenaries with him.

Jindus married a third cousin of the last duchess, a vain and silly, though noble, girl, who within three months died of a dish of mushrooms—leaving Jindus widowed and ennobled, so far as inheritance went.

Wiscezan therefore had a new duke, one with ambitions far exceeding Wiscezan’s humbled circumstances. He collected taxes. He hired mercenaries, he hired a wizard of dark reputation, and he married several more wives, soon deceased, their noble names linking Jindus deeper and deeper into the ancient lineages of the Eld.

Were the nobles of Wiscezan alarmed? That they were. Even the related houses off in Korianth were alarmed at the state of affairs and appealed to King Osric to do something. But in a very little time Duke Jindus had become a potent threat beyond this fever-ridden city. Nobles in several cities prayed the right mosquito would find the duke…and a few tried, with small spells, to assure that happened.