The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (59 page)

She didn’t dare go for the thing on her own, not without real
knowledge of its powers, and herself still fragile. So she ran, as far
from the hill and the sea as the Stride would carry her. The warm
wind blew away her tears.

Back in her house, protected (she hoped) by the markings on
the door and windows and along the foundation lines, Cori sat in
perfect stillness in the room where she’d first promised her services
to the thing that had stolen Morin Jay’s name. The paintings and
the cushions were gone, the windows draped in black cloth. Eyes
half closed, Cori sat before the engraved disc, emblem of her guild.
Furiously, she drove away all thoughts, until she remembered that
she needed calm as well as emptiness. She allowed the thoughts to
approach her, then drift away, the whole time fighting the feeling that
she was betraying Jay by releasing her memories of him. The thoughts
became birds seen far away and then gone.

A deeper darkness rose in the dim room. It covered her, like
smoke, and then like a thick jelly. Terror nearly came in with it, but
Cori knew they were not the same, and released the fear even as she
embraced the Dark. At last there was nothing left, no thoughts, no
room, no memories, not even her body, just the Dark filling her ex
istence.

In that blackness a light began, a point of dull red quickly growing
in size and brightness, gaining form as it grew until it became Cori’s
mark, sprung from her neck and burning like a newborn star.

All across the land her sisters and brothers saw it, in Guild halls,
in homes and forests, in taverns and markets. It woke them up and
stopped their meals; it even turned them away from their contracted
kills. Wherever they were they found some place where they could
open their necks to the air. The hunger rose in them. At the moment
that it flared they propelled it, like lovers thrusting toward orgasm,
through the image of Cori’s whirling mark.

She reeled, pressed down by the weight of all that power. Somehow,
she stepped back from the onslaught, seized control of it, and then,
with a shout of hate and joy, sent it hurtling at a house on a hilltop
outside the town of Sorai.

Cori never knew what defense the demon mounted. She felt a
moment’s resistance, and then the uncontrollable hunger of the
entire Guild swept over the house and its owner like a hurricane
striking a nest of bees.

In the very moment that the storm blasted the ancient center of
the monster’s being something struck Coriia as well. Ecstasy. Floods
of joy roared over her body, wave and wave of release, from her own
hungry body, and from the joy of all those other men and women
linked together in a way no one who was not an assassin could ever
understand. No one.

Cori tried to hang on to her memories of Jay, of the time they’d
spent together. Shame filled her as she realized the pettiness of what
she’d given and taken from him. Then all memories and thought gave
way to that ecstatic sea.

4

Cori knew it was him as soon as she heard the knock. Slowly, she set
down her brush and paint and walked through her bare house to the
door. “Cori!” he cried, arms out, only to drop them clumsily when she
stood there, impassively looking at him.

“I thought you’d find me,” she said, not inviting him.

“It was quite a search.” He laughed, trying to make it a joke. “Are
all your Guild halls pledged to secrecy or something?” He wore a
yellow silk robe, unembroidered. The bright clothes set off the color
that was coming back to his skin, and Cori had to clench her fists to
keep from touching his face, from feeling just once, the full weight
of him pressed against her. “Aren’t you going to let me in?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen an assassin’s home.”

“There’s nothing to see. Jay, I’m sorry you came all this way, but
please, there’s nothing for you here. Believe me.”

“Nothing? All this way? Cori, darling, what are you talking about?
You know how far I’ve come to be with you. No one in the world can
know that but you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Oh my gods, Cori, what’s happening? When I came
back I looked around for you. I thought you’d be there on the hill
waiting for me. But I told myself, she thinks I’m dead, she thinks
I didn’t make it. All I’ve got to do, I told myself, is find you. Then
we’ll be together again. Really together.” He stepped towards her.
She pushed him back. “Cori, you’re my lover. Have you forgotten or
something? Is that it? Let me touch you and the memories’ll come
back. Believe me, they’ll come flying back.” He reached out.

Cori stepped away. “I’m an assassin, Jay. A killer. Don’t you under
stand that? That’s my only pleasure, my only love. Murdering helpless
people.”

“I know what you are,” he said. “What you’ve been. I’ve thought
and thought about it. Cori, darling, I don’t care. We’ll—in some way
we’ll handle it.”

She half shouted, “Won’t you please just
go away?"
Tears threatened
to ruin the whole thing, so many times rehearsed.

“No. I won’t let you chase me. What we had, it wasn’t just to pass
the time. I know it wasn’t.”

“What happens in Nowhere doesn’t count. We were just keeping
each other from losing our minds. That’s all it was.”

“We were lovers, Cori.”

“We were nothing.”

He shook his head, started to say something, and found his throat
too full of tears. Abruptly he turned and walked down the road back
to the little market town, his back straight, his steps jerky.

Cori closed the door, shaking. Would he come back? Probably. Jay
wasn’t the type to just give up. She hoped it would go easier the next
time, but she didn’t think so. If only she could do it without hurting
him. “Jay,” she whispered, feeling his name inside her.

But when she sat down in an old green leather chair and closed
her eyes it wasn’t Morin Jay she saw but Rann, the skinny red-faced
boy who’d led her, a girl of twelve, with promises and fantasies and
caresses to a gentle hill on his father’s farm. For the thousandth time
Cori remembered every touch, his grin as he broke her hymen, the
sudden fury of her own desire. And then the flames, the shrieks of
pain and terror, Rann’s stunned look as he pulled back from her, his
mouth and eyes open until the flames roared over them, and the
way he rolled on the ground, then slowly came to a stop, lying there
all charred and stiff, the last flames dying out, with nothing left but
smoking flesh and bone.

She remembered running back to town, remembered the mob and
her mother’s shrieks, remembered the assassins walking her through
the crowd, whose fear had suddenly overcome their rage. From now
on, they told her, forget any life but us. Any lover but us. What
happened to Rann will happen again and again, to anyone you touch
with desire. And once it gets stronger it will happen without sexual
contact, once, twice a year, destroying people, land, anything near
you. Unless we train you. Unless you release it before it builds up.
Release it the only way possible.

“No!” she’d shouted back. “I won’t kill. You can’t make me.”

You must, they told her. When the hunger rises you cannot fight
it. You can only choose your target.

“How can I make a choice like that? How can anyone?”

Because you must. There is no other answer. We will help you.
Remember, Coriia. You belong to us now. To the Red Guild.

GENE WOLFE

T
hane
of
O
phir
he called himself (though it was not his true name)
and Thane he will be called here. His hair was black, his skin olive,
the cast of his face one we have not seen upon Earth for ten thousand
years: a mobile mouth so wide it seemed a deformity, hawk nose, and
wide cheekbones. The eyes that drank the wealth of the ivory towers
were narrow and slant, of a green so dark it seemed black. Gates of
horn and ivory there were here. He bade his men wait, and stepped
through the ivory alone.

The path had been gravel; as he passed the gleaming towers, its
stones turned to gems. Stooping, he picked one up. Topaz, he judged
it, and well fit to draw gold. He breathed upon it, polished it on the
rawhide of his sword belt, admired it again, and dropped it into...

Nothingness. Or so it seemed.

A woman stepped smiling from a tangle of flowering vines. Her
golden hair blazed with gems. Deep cups of red-gold struggled to
contain breasts so large they threatened to break the precious chains
uniting them.

It was a good topaz, Thane reflected.

“Our king,” the woman said, “shall learn that you have stolen from
him. What he will do when he learns, I know not, but learn he will.
Will you step into the vines with me, stranger? Only for a moment.”

He shook his head.

She approached him. “The perfume of those flowers halts the flow
of time. In them a moment can outlast the waning of the moon—if
we will it so. Do you think me beautiful?”

“I do,” Thane said.

“I have been so for whole centuries. Because I have lain there,
where the years for me have ceased their flow.”

“I have been offered the black lotus. I refused it. I refuse this, too.”

“Your loss and mine.” She linked arms with him. Her arm was soft
and smooth, rich with strange perfumes. His was hard, brown, and
scarred.

“You have seen strange lands.”

He shook his head.

“The smell of the sea is in your hair.”

He whirled on her, and his left had held a long knife. “The sea
has swallowed my house and my sister, with the nation that bred us.
Gulped all down whole, and is still unsatisfied. It hungered—and we
are gone. It hungers still. Know you why we were thus devoured?”

She stepped from the path. The roses had fled her cheeks, and her
sapphire eyes were full of fear.

“Earth permits only a certain deviation from the norm,” Thane
taught her. “We were great and wise, thus doomed. Our land was like
no other and held ten thousand things for which you would find no
name. My house was not a house such as you know, nor was my sister
a sister. Take me to your king.”

“He will kill you!”

Thane smiled, revealing teeth strong and of strange forms. “Many
have said that. I tire with hearing it, and saw no bowmen in the ivory
towers.”

“What need has he of guards? He is greater than an army!”

“So we have heard.” Thane’s sword-hand caught her arm below
its broad gold bracelet. “Thus I come alone, hoping he will not fear
me. My crew—they are but five—await my return beyond the gate.”

“They will wait long.”

“Show me,” he said, and his grip was such that she cried out and
he released her.

Through alabaster passages she led him with linked arms, and at
last into a hall so vast its lapis lazuli dome seemed a new sky. To
left and right it stretched till its walls were lost to sight; but the way
they followed was hemmed by rows of crystal jars, each taller than a
man. These held the silver coins of many empires, coins heaped and
overflowing.

Farther, and gold mingled with the silver.

Farther yet, and gold predominated. Soon it was mingled with
jewels whose inner fires flashed through the crystal, lighting it from
within.

Then Thane saw far ahead a mighty throne, and on it an ape
greater than any ape. Huge and hairy, swag-bellied and fanged like
the nightmare dragons a million years dead, it leered and sneered.

Before it, three lovely women supported a great golden bowl of
melons. These melons—green and yellow, scarlet, spotted, spattered,
and striped—the ape took between thumb and forefinger and
consumed like grapes.

A woman taller than the rest rose from the steps of the throne.
Seeing her fiery hair and the nobility and savagery of her glance,
Thane recalled Red Sonya and licked his lips.

This woman bore a long rod of gold topped with a jewel of ten
score facets that shone like a star. At her back, four women more
arranged themselves. Two held trumpets, and two swords. All were
fair to the sight; yet it seemed to Thane that the woman who bore the
star was fairest of all.

“Prostrate yourself before our king.” She spoke in ringing tones,
and gestured with her rod of gold. “Tell us your mission.”

Thane stretched his length upon the floor, then rose again.

“You were not to stand,” the woman who bore the star told him.
“By that act you have forfeited your life.”

“Many times over, I fear, since I stand so every morning.”

The woman who had linked arms with Thane took his arm again.
“Touch me,” she whispered. “Stroke me where you will. Thus you
may know joy before death.”

The ape on the throne grunted; and the woman who bore the
star went to him, caressing him while she harkened to such sounds as
beasts make when caressed.

When she returned, she said, “He admires your courage. He will
tear out your heart and preserve it with the rest, for such is his custom.
He assures you, however, that your conflict will be fair, and wishes to
know why you have come here to die.”

She lowered her voice. “State your business. It may be that he will
change his choice and spare you. That is rare, but not unknown.”

The woman who held Thane’s arm whispered, “Speak, for the
longer you speak the longer you shall live.”

“I am merely a poor but honest slave trader,” Thane explained.
“Mine is counted, as your majesty must know, the most humane
of professions. For profits that are vanishingly small, and too often
vanish altogether, I bring the poorest savages to civilized lands and
there procure them useful employment. I beg his majesty to permit
me to free his glorious kingdom from the most troublesome of his
subjects. You yourself, my lady, would be most welcome aboard my
ship—as welcome as old wine and a new wind, even if you came only
as a visitor.”

The woman who bore the star smiled. “I said truly that our king
admires your courage. I admire it as much as he now, and regret that
I have come to know you only this day, which is to be the day of
your demise. Have you bags weighted with turquoise or jasper? These
might allay our king’s wrath, though I do not promise it.”

The woman who held Thane’s arm whispered, “Say yes.”

Thane shook his head. “None.”

“Mules loaded with bullion?”

“Had I such things,” Thane said, “I should buy myself a fair estate
in some dull land of peace and plenty, there to dream of home.”

The monstrous ape grunted, and she went to it again.

When she returned, she said, “Our king wishes you to learn that
gold and gems and all such things draw fair women, even as the topaz
you stole draws gold. He has these things, and thus we whom you see
are come to him from the farthest reaches of Earth. He advises you
to acquire such things in the life to come. Thus you shall surround
yourself with beauty.”

The woman who held Thane’s sword-arm screamed and freed it.
As she did, the women who held trumpets put them to their lips.
There was naked power and towering port in the golden notes—a
sullen fury, too, and terror.

For the ape was rising, a beast to shake the world.

Thane, who had known many kings and many governments,
reflected that this one was at least honest. He drew his sword.

Three times he skipped aside, dodging such blows as might have
broken walls. Three times he slashed at the great hands that sought
his life.

Other hands, smaller and more fair, caught him from behind. The
fourth blow landed, flinging him as far as a strong man might cast
a spear. There he lay motionless, his blood staining the chalcedony
slabs.

There one of the women who had held the bowl picked up Thane’s
sword and offered it to the ape. It waved her aside and picked up
Thane, holding him as a child might hold a broken doll.

One by one, the ape exhibited Thane’s body to the women, first to
her who bore the star, then to her who had three times held Thane’s
arm, and last to her who held Thane’s sword. The ape’s eyes were full
of questions, for beasts no more than men understand death.

“He will not move again,” the woman who held Thane’s sword
declared.

“His spirit has flown, O king.” So the woman who had lived for
centuries among flowering vines seconded her.

“His life has been added to your own,” the woman who bore the
star assured the ape.

When that last had spoken, the ape raised Thane’s body to its own
face that it might sniff it; as it did, Thane’s left hand drew the long
knife and plunged it into the ape’s throat.

Of all Thane’s fights, the one that followed was strangest, for
no sooner had he snatched his sword than the women who held
swords were at him, double his number and by no means ignorant of
swordcraft. Hard they pressed him, while the woman who bore the
star struck at him with her rod of gold.

When every other woman was dead or fled, she who had thrice
held his arm kissed his feet and begged her life.

“Rise,” he said.

She did not dare. “I am your slave. Use me! Sell me! Only spare
me.”

He was wiping his sword with the skirt of the woman who had
borne the star. “Will you obey me in all things?”

“I will, I swear it! Am I not fair?”

“You are a delight to the eye,” he told her, “and no doubt to the
hands. I only wish your own were larger.” So saying he sheathed sword
and knife. “Hold them out.”

She did, and he filled them with jewels. He himself took up the
star-tipped rod, and motioned to her to follow him. He bled and he
limped, but he grinned as well.

When they had gone beyond the ivory towers, he called his crew
and had each take one stone from her, one after another, until the last
was gone. Then Thane himself took those that had shone in her hair.
They vanished between his hands, and where they went no living
man can say.

“She is fair to look upon,” he told the five who had filled pockets
and pouches with jewels, “but she has been the concubine of an ape.
Will you have her to wife?”

One by one, they shook their heads.

“Nor will I,” he told her. “Go. I leave you to the years.”