by Jason L. Corner
in Issue 120, January 2022
When Chelene the summoner and Roshankar the assassin emerged from the woods, the first thing they saw was the corpse. A dead man hung like a scarecrow on a rough criss-cross of wood, throat cut and dry blood crusted over the scar.
“Nice hat,” Roshankar said. A red cap with two forearm-length peacock feathers stuck sat on the corpse’s head, a jaunty note amid the nasty skull-grin.
Chelene sniffed. “Rosemary. Some other herbs. Somebody took trouble to make him smell fresh, which is odd for an execution or a beast-frightener. Perhaps a local custom?”
Roshankar pointed to the valley with his knuckle-blades (he had gone fighting-ready at first corpse-sight); a patch of houses sat in the green. “A custom perhaps theirs. A named place?”
Chelene drew her skirts aside as she passed the dead man and his hat, settled her knapsack, drew out a book. “Hetross’s Guide to the World finds no named town here, but notes, a century and remainders ago, mining for . . . electrum.”
“Ah, you’ve been saying you were low.”
“Can’t do summonings without it. Shall we go trade?” She looked back to the dead fellow and his hat. “Wish us luck, friend. Better luck than you, gods’ grace.”
By late day, they entered the public-hall. “Pack your arms away, ‘Shank,” Chelene said. “We’re coming as friends, remember?”
“Coming as friends doesn’t equal greeted as such.” Nevertheless, he packed his knuckle-blades and double-headed spear, unlocked and separated, into his knapsack, before they entered. And he saw her point. They made an odd enough pair – he, wiry and stubbly and eye-patched, she, a head taller and night-like in her midnight blue summoner’s-gown with hair dyed to match – that walking in a-bristle with weapons was odder than they needed.
A quick round of gasps as they entered – then a woman a bit over fifty, in a black gown and two enormous bracelets, stepped in front of them with arms outstretched.
“We weren’t expecting strangers.” She near-shouted the last word. “But if you’ve business . . . ?” She spoke to Chelene, but kept glaring at Roshankar. He essayed what he hoped was a winning smile – he’d always felt himself quite the charmer with matrons – but got nothing back, not even a blush or a wink.
Chelene said, “We’re just passing through, between . . . this and that.” Roshankar approved her tact; the this and that of their lives tended south of the law, and even farther south from delicate conversations. “We’ve coin for dinner, though. And maybe for wares? I was admiring your decorations.” Chelene swept hand over the braceleted woman’s head at a number of medallions and charms hanging by twine from the roof, each of shining electrum.
“You’re welcome to sit for a meal!” Again, the braceleted woman said too loudly for them- the audience must be behind her.
Roshankar found himself at one end of a long table, across from Chelena and catty-cornered with the braceleted woman. She snapped her fingers, and a boy appeared, twelve or thirteen. He stared at Roshankar.
“Quit gaping, boy,” their hostess said, “and get wine, bread, and stew.” But the boy kept staring.
Roshankar had no gift with children as he did with their mothers, and sat back. They might have eye-jousted all night, but a red-haired woman from the other long table reached over and slapped the boy’s arm.
“If I have to tell you twice, Persis.” She slurred. “After a day like today!”
Persis left, and his mother returned to her cup, two female friends at her wings speaking soothingly. “It was intense, wasn’t it? But all worth it; you’ll see . . .” Their murmurs became unintelligible.
Chelene continued to speak with the braceleted woman as Roshankar observed the room. Persis returned, with bread and stew. Roshankar dipped a piece of bread, chewed it, and met Persis’s stare. “Where’s your father, boy?”
“My father’s dead.” Persis trembled a bit as he spoke.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Is your father dead?”
It seemed a cheeky question, but Roshankar thought he’d game it. “He is, Persis. He died when I was younger than you are now.”
“Did he die in the usual way?”
Peculiar. “That depends. Is the usual way to vanish before sunrise, and to be buried in an unknown grave? Perhaps not the most usual. But when a man has debts to the Guild of Assassins, and the only other choice is letting wife and child be made into pieces and strips, perhaps it is the usual way. *I’ve* never had a father die some other way.”
He mystified himself. Rarely did he bring out this pain he lived by. It puzzled Persis; he asked the boy, “What is the usual way?”
Roshankar noticed that red-haired mother and her handmaidens were staring in silence at the squirming boy.
Persis stammered something, and his mother rose to drag him. “After the day I’ve had!” she growled.
The braceleted matron rose. “This looks to need attending. Please. Have stew.” She left, and Roshankar leaned head into Chelene’s.
“Notice something odd?”
“A few things. What strikes closest?”
“See any men?”
“Good point,” Chelene said. “It seems a town of women.”
“Poor Persis seems the only hint that the gods created sexes.”
“Could the rest be working in the electrum mines?”
“Mining at night? Even grandfathers? Something’s amiss.”
“Amiss, or just different. There’s a tribe in the north where women and men speak their own languages. It could be . . .”
The door opened. The smell of rosemary came in a cloud; a pale man stumbled in, his gait like the gods hadn’t finished making him.
“My husband,” the redheaded woman said. “He’s been ill. So . . .”
“Ill?” Chelene shot up and pointed at the man’s red hat sprouting peacock-feathers . . .
The red-haired woman, holding a sobbing Persis by the arm, pointed at the man-corpse. “Husband! Seize them!”
Other man-corpses emerged, from closets or who knows where. Roshankar dashed for the knapsack with his weapons, but the braceleted woman had it, and then a hydra of cold hands had him. One hand covered his mouth and face, and he felt himself dragged away in the darkness.
“Father, father, father . . .” Persis wept as he stood six feet from his peacock-feathered corpse-father, neither willing to move closer nor to run.
Chelene sat cross-legged and watched carefully. She had been seized and taken to this well-rusted cell, and this family – Persis, red-haired mother holding a girl of one or so, and corpse-father – watched them for now. Roshankar brooded in the back, boy cried, and man-corpse stood still.
Higonda – the name of the woman with the large elctrum bracelets – entered, followed by a girl in early teens who had to be her daughter, and a white-haired woman who could be her mother. Higonda stared at Chelene, and Chelene stood to meet her gaze.
“We would have preferred you never visited at all,” Higonda said. “The outside world is for buying electrum, not seeing how it’s extracted.”
“Mined by dead-walking slaves?” Chelene said. “Husbands and fathers? And sons?”
“They grow, they marry, the breed – one son and one daughter, preferably – and that constitutes their contribution as live men,” Higonda said. “I’m not interested in debate. This is how we’ve always done it.”
“Yes, indeed,” the old woman said. “’Make sure to breed two, then the Tree needs you,’ as my mother told my father. She’s gone, but he’s still here, down in the mines, just like my husband and my son, eh?”
The whole ghastly system came clear to Chelene “What did you find in those mines? What did you awaken?”
“Obviously, we need you to stay now, to keep our privacy,” Higonda said. “You’ll stay on terms of the law, like everyone else.”
HIgonda’s little speech was interrupted by a wailing Persis, who had wrapped himself around his father’s leg. “Can’t you say something?” the boy cried. “Just my name . . . can you say my name, Daddy . . .”
His mother roughly peeled him off with one hand, keeping daughter forcefully in the other. “Enough out of you,” she growled. “This is the way. He knew it would be when we wed, and so it’ll be . . .”
The girl with Higonda smirked. “I think Persis should marry me when he’s old enough. Then I’d get to . . .”
“Enough time for that later,” Higonda said. “Maybe he’ll be mate for our new guest. As to that.” She handed Chelene an electrum-handled knife through the bars, then stood back. “Now, you’ve got the night to work yourself up to it. Cut his throat or bleed him out to the guts – I did my husband slow, but you might have scruples – and in the morning we can take him up to the Tree. Then you’ll be glued in. And another pair of hands – that’s useful.”
Chelene trembled in her cross-legged posture, like a raindrop on a window. “Do you really believe I’d stuff such sin down my throat?”
(Father, father, Persis moaned, and man-corpse trembled, wet-eyed, but red-haired mother slapped son into silence.)
“I believe you’re not too fool to see his throat is already cut, by one hand or another,” Higonda said. “So no extra harm for you to use the dagger. Then, when we know we can trust you, we can find you some strapping man of your own, and then . . .”
“’Old enough to wed, children are bred, then best off dead!’” the old woman cackled. They processed out, leaving Roshankar and Chelene – and the polished blade, the third cellmate.
Roshankar lifted his eyebrow. “I know getting Persis for a mate is tempting, but I promise to make cutting my throat slow going.”
“Don’t be a fool, ‘Shank.” Chelene put the knife between her teeth and squeezed just enough of her hand through the bars to grasp a hanging ornament and tug it free.
“This, and what I have left, should be enough.” She sat cross-legged and placed the ornament and a few trinkets in front of her. “I’m surprised these lady corpse-slavers left all this electrum lying around. You’d think they didn’t recognize a summoner when they saw one.”
As Chelene arranged the straw on the floor in the necessary symbols, she hypothesized that whatever they’d woken in the mines – whatever they were sacrificing the wills and life-force of father, husband, and son to – was jealous (name the god that wasn’t) and, having the run of the village as a feeding-farm, kept out any of the briefer incursions of the divine, such as managed by her guild.
They had no summoners. Perhaps they didn’t know what summoners were. That gave her some advantage.
“I’ve nothing to make a fire,” Roshankar said.
“It’s got to be blood, then.” She put her blade to her left palm, a battlefield of scars, and made her cut. A droplet struck her electrum-heap in the center of her circle, and her chant began. With the first syllable, a blue flame leapt up where the blood struck metal, and the words poured out of her – she was the chant, and the song the singer.
Soon the room wavered and blurred. More blood from her palm fed the fire, and her muscles fell weak. In a spasm, beams of light shot from her eyes and mouth as she jerked – she was a living lantern – and the electrum exploded, tearing a seam in the air, and then . . .
A column of glowing green smoke. Human-sized, yet giving the impression of mountain or planet size. Waves of heat and cold emanated – fever followed it.
It coalesced – a woman, naked-breasted. Four arms. Head of a cow.
Yezzaram the Most Ancient. Her voice entered Chelene’s mind directly. Immortal. Of the Realms Beyond. Worshipped in a thousand temples on a dozen worlds. Queen of childbirth, harvests, pregnancy, and growing things. I hear your summons, mortal.
(Gods could be vexed to be summoned, and their vexation was like hot coals or plagues or suicidal misery. But gods were cold even at their friendliest.)
Chelene dipped her head low and extended her palms up. “Immortal, magnificent, indescribable Yezzaram – I supplicate, I kowtow. So wormlike I am.”
(Silence. Few gods could do without submission; some demanded the telling of humiliations or the enacting of rituals – and this was just to begin negotiations.)
“Great, Infinite Yezzaram . . . A boon I ask, a miserable boon. My companion and I are imprisoned; we would be released. Surely Yezzaram can do this thing; surely it would be an afterthought, a forgettability.”
I can do this boon.
“Yezzaram, oh astounding Yezzaram, how may I give you my gratitude? What price do you name?”
(This was where the Summoner’s life became tricky. No two gods asked the same price. Giving of alms or temple donations were luck one hoped for. But if you weren’t prepared for higher prices, leave the Summoner’s path. No Summoner had all ten fingers and toes past her or his first year. Taking years of life was not unknown; Chelene herself had a deficit of four, plus a day. And sometimes they asked you to bloody an altar . . .)
You will fast four days in my honor. And at its conclusion, you will tattoo my symbol on your ankle. That is my price.*\
Chelene exhaled. “I accept your price.”
“Goddess of childbirth?” Roshankar asked her when the light faded as he sprawled, exhausted. “I fail to see anything helpful there.”
“Of childbirth, harvest, pregnancy, and growing things. If a goddess says she’ll grant a boon, it’s not for us to say what’s possible.”
The earth beneath them trembled.
Chelene shot up the instant she felt the ground shaking, and saw Roshankar, too, had leapt into stance, back to the wall, as if ready for a fight with the earth itself.
A stream of green shot up, like from a geyser – until one saw it was not a stream at all, but a stalk, with a chunky, mottled head. It grew, hitting the top of the cell and leaning and turning a drab yellow.
Roshankar fingered its top. “Wheat,” he said.
Another shoot went up, next to it, then a ring around Chelene. She pressed them and waited.
The ground pounded harder as if it were a cellar with a giant imprisoned. The ground in the center parted as a brown-green stalk emerged, then thickened and grew and sent off branches. Thick with leaves, it soon grew wider than either of them and cracked through the roof, showering the floor with apples.
Roshankar picked one up. “We can climb out . . .”
But Chelene knew there would be more to Yezzarm’s work. As each plant grew from their prison floor, the dirt was pushed outward, strainng the walls – with the tree, the walls were leaning, as if about to fall on them, stopped only by the cracked and quivering roof.
Vines had twined around every prison bar, and then grown so thick that the gaps between them had vanished, leaving only a wall of green – but the vines kept growing, fatter and fatter columns crammed next to each other, pushing outward. The metal bars, prison-makers themselves imprisoned, were vibrating and singing, wailing the birth-pangs amid the riot of new life.
Praise Yazzaram, aoh praise Yazzaram, Chelene whispered, overcome. How I will joy to fast for your glory, what praises I shall sing, joyful in my hunger, to your name . . .
The roof cracked. Plates of plaster plummeted.
With nothing holding it back, the roof and walls exploded, falling with the rising earth. Chelene felt a hundred tiny hands, wheat-stalk and rose-bush and fruit-tree and grape-vine, buoy her up from beneath, elevating her and tossing her into an air with nothing between her and the stars.
“I think you should go back.”
Roshankar, sitting on a log on the hill overlooking the village, stared. The garden in an instant had been astonishing – but Chelene’s words were more so.
“I’ll let you explain why,” he said slowly, “but that seems insane.”
“Persis.”
“Yes . . . ?”
“We can’t leave him there. Let him live long enough to wife, give them a daughter to pamper and son to enslave, then be killed by his own mate and made to toil forever as a rotting husk? You can’t leave him to that.”
“Seems your you – a me, for me – omits the us.”
“It’s the kind of thing you do well.”
Roshankar stood and paced, trying to assassinate his own pity.
“We cannot – this assuming I can retrieve him without myself joining that band of voiceless laborers down there – keep him with us forever. We release him into the wild? He’d end up wolf-food, or found by some slaver.”
“But either fate alone is better than the combination that awaits him down there. We need only go to the nearest town.”
“I don’t care for children.”
“You are only wasting time,” Chelene said. “Think of what your own father did for the child you.”
This plucked at him. “Give me that knife. The birth of farm-in-a-moment doubtless has every queen ant scurrying over the hill down there.”
A corpse shambled by, followed by a figure muttering at it, and Roshankar made himself flat against the wall. He had moved from window to window, peering in, and seen no Persis yet – but what if he were under blankets, or on the wrong side of the window? He needed to do this another way.
As the pair passed, Roshankar spied, on the woman, bracelets. Higonda, queen ant of the queen ants. He stole up behind her and put arm around waist and knife to throat.
“I’m guessing you won’t walk again if this slips. Just the men, eh? Now stay quiet.”
“Don’t . . . leave . . . me . . .” she wheezed to her husband, who stood stone-still. She moved her arms a little, showing her bracelets. “I’ve . . . more jewelry . . . at home . . .”
“No, I’m not here for that. This blade is hard, but my heart, it seems, is soft. Where’s Persis? I’m thinking he can find a wife out there in the world that’s safer than you She-Ghouls. Know where he is?”
“Of . . . course. With . . . his mother.”
“Perfect place for a boy.” He kept his grip tight on her waist. “A clumsy dance, this, so I ask the lady to lead.”
Persis sat in a corner, saying something inaudible to his fresh-dead father, who moved and answered not – though Roshankar thought he detected a glistening spot on the fellow’s cheek. Could the dead cry? Here, they might well.
Mother sat two paces off, dipping a loaf of bread in stew. “Get used to it, boy,” she said. “And you’d be *lucky* to be paired with Higonda’s daughter. *Lucky*. You’d have some nice years before you serve.”
“Will . . . we be able to talk to each other then? Father and I?”
She tossed something at him. “Don’t act a fool. A cut throat’s nothing to say.”
Roshankar figured plucking him out, while the rest of his family – such as it was – stood by would be quick work. What to do with Mistress Higonda, now . . .
She waved her bracelets in his face. “Sure you don’t want . . .”
“Well, I suppose . . .”
She turned her wrists fast, and jammed the edges into his face, jabbing eyes and nose. It didn’t wound him, but it got her free and shouting, “Husband! Kill him! All husbands, come and kill!”
The man-corpse jerked towards him, bigger right steps than left. Roshankar feinted with the dagger, slashed into his hands, then kicked him over.
“Killing you . . . that’s the trick. Severing you, I imagine, just makes you pieces.” As the man-corpse started to rise, Roshankar stomped his face. He hoped there might at least be a man-corpse unconsciousness (haps with man-corpse dreams of a world without women), but no such luck; the head bounced and unblinking eyes stayed fixed on him.
Roshankar let him rise, then charged, shoulder into the gut, and sent him tumbling into pile of wood; the logs spilled and buried him. That might get Roshankar enough time for his errand. He kicked open the Persis door.
Forewarned by his racket, mother stood against the far wall – one brandished torch in one hand, claw-grip on boy with the other. Roshankr was greeted by father’s fist, straight to the jaw.
“You don’t hit like a dead man.” Roshankar rubbed his chin, then swung blade. Man-corpse dodged it – by the gods, he must have been an athlete in life – and grabbed Roshankar’s knife-wrist.
“Try not to kill him, husband. We can always use another pair of arms in the mines.”
Something about her voice – honeyed, cozening – made Roshankar tiger-raged, and he ripped his wrist free, then gripped man-corpse under the shoulders and flipped him onto his head. He kicked him into the doorway, then rushed over, easily avoided the torch, and pulled Persis to him.
“No!” his mother shrieked. “You don’t get him! He’s mine – he’s ours!”
Roshankar turned to go – but Persis’s father had risen in the doorway. He grabbed Roshankar’s wrist again, pried the dagger free to toss it aside, and drove his fist against Roshankar’s face; Roshankar dropped to the floor.
Roshnakar saw the man-corpse stand over him, some tool in his hand – and then Persis ran between them. “No, father! No!”
The man-corpse’s hand holding the tool shook. Tears dripped from both his eyes and a wordless howl escaped from gritted teeth.
“Kill him!” Mother shrieked.
“Please,” Persis said.
The man-corpse’s eyes glowed bright red. He spasmed, droped the tool, stumbled about – and then, as if desperate love was overcoming whatever foul magic the women had dredged up from the mines, blazed up, his whole body in flames.
Roshankar put the boy under his arm and barreled through. He ran through a gauntlet of grasping, slow man-corpses, shoving off those he couldn’t evade, and sprinted through streets where every doorway and window moaned and shrieked. Only when his feet were bleeding, and he realized he was running through thorns on open land, did he stop, feel the weight of Persis under his arms, and allow himself to see the stars of their liberty.
“Rabbit?” Roshankar offered Persis a chunk of meat from the fire, cooked only to bloodiness.
“None for me. My fasting has begun,” Chelene said, cross-legged and staring sadly at the meat.
“More for us,” Persis said, gobbling.
“Aye, and we’ll save coin on food on the road,” Roshankar said. “All my weapons are gone. I’ll be replacing them for months.”
Chelene said, “I may address this in my next summoning. But only after a meal.”
“So there are places where wives don’t kill their husbands?” Persis said.
“Yes,” Chelene said. “Though there is no place where marital arrangements are perfectly satisfactory.”
©January 2022, Jason L. Corner
Jason L. Corner‘s work has appeared in the anthology The Big Bad II and magazines including Abyss & Apex, Allegory, Mirror Dance, TQR, Perihelion, and Electric Spec. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.