by Peter Medeiros
in Issue 118, November 2021
Kerdimma counted six slavers around the boat. Five slavers and one navigator—the man she had been hired to recover. The slavers were loading their boat with enough food for a long trip, with barrels of honey ale and apple mash—she could smell both even crouched where the jungle met the beach, hidden in darkness. These were not bright people if their barreling was so sloppy. They would not have made it very far, even if she and her husband, Rtur, hadn’t been hired to rescue the kidnapped navigator.
Rtur crouched next to her, darkspear in hand. He wore a cloak of blue to hide his pale, pale skin. Where Kerdimma had streaks of green across her face that helped her blend into the jungles of Uvhag, Ertur was white as the snow of their homeland, his eyebrows a dangerous silver in the moonlight.
He clutched his darkspear. “We could wait until they’re on the boat,” he said. “And then simply sink it. Catch them as they struggle back for shore.”
“Too risky,” Kerdimma said. “The navigator could drown and we need him alive. I’ll distract them. You circle around and take them from the back. They’ll try to rally together before they realize that’s not going to work.”
She touched the stone half-embedded in her chest. When she and Rtur fled their homeland, they had taken two things with them, treasures both: his darkspear, and the rorock she had embedded in her own flesh, imbuing her body with the deep magic of Mt. Eppo, far to the north.
Rtur nodded and set off through the brush, advancing quietly in fits and starts, waiting for the screech of distant birds to mask the faint rustle of leaves as he moved.
After counting to one hundred, Kerdimma stepped into the clearing, hands at her sides. “Give us the navigator and we’ll leave you in peace,” she said.
All five of them slavers turned at once. One hauled the navigator, who was sitting miserably near a fire with his knees drawn to his chest, towards the boat and dumped him unceremoniously in the surf, where he sputtered. Then, predictably, the slavers picked up spears, each the height of a man and half again, and leveled them at Kerdimma.
Two men and three women. One of the women was nearly as pale as Rtur, Kerdimma thought, a sign that the island of Uvhag had once been more open to traffic with the continent than it was now. The pale woman said, “You should turn around and leave.” She cut her eyes to the jungle, squinting. “No matter how many of you there are.”
One of the men, a handsome fellow with his hair tied back in a long braid and a necklace of flat, hammered metal straightened and stuck his spear in the ground. “She would have just attacked us outright if they had the numbers for a fight.”
“I’m giving you a fair chance,” said Kerdimma. She felt mixed emotions. It would be easier (and less bloody) if they handed over the navigator. But the rorock in her skin felt hot as an oven, her pulse was a drum in her veins, and she felt thrilled with the anticipation of battle, like a lover’s lips so close you can feel their breath. Since she had left her home, this feeling was her greatest comfort, ugly as that was to admit.
And besides, these were slavers. Gallora made men free, carved the world out of the sky so her children could live, for a time, away from the harsh void and its roving dangers. These slavers went against Gallora’s will, against their own nature. Kerdimma felt a dull hate in her belly like she had eaten warm coals.
“Gallora is fair,” said the man, blaspheming. “But her world is not.”
With that, he removed his necklace, hucked it into the air—and it disappeared.
A bordier, a magician. Though a crude one, thought Kerdimma. She threw up her arms.
As Kerdimma expected, the necklace reappeared, whirling through the air, a few feet behind her. A normal woman would have no time to respond, but Kerdimma called on the power of the rorock in her chest. Her whole body was suddenly flush with heat, and her skin steamed even in the damp, humid night air as she rolled to the side, kicking up a line of sand.
The necklace went sailing back towards the group of slavers, cut through one of their spears, and sank into one man’s belly.
“Idiot!” said the slaver woman to her bordier. “Jullo, hold on and we’ll patch you up. Everybody else—”
She never got to give her command, because at that moment Rtur’s darkspear sailed through the air and found her, cutting off her words for good. The magician, panicked, tried to draw it out—only to reel back as the darkspear pulled itself free as if on its own accord and sailed right back into Rtur’s hands.
Rtur came running down the beach. His hood was thrown back and he looked like a white birch wrapped in a cloak and taught to fight.
At the sight of her husband, Kerdimma’s rorock thrummed even harder in her chest. She blurred forward at the three slavers left standing.
They fought well, but too cautiously. Both Kerdimma and Rtur had come to view caution as a particular virtue of Uvhag, one they did not share. They could be patient—”Patient as the mountain,” was one of the highest compliments among the Roera, their people—but there was a time for action when you had to move or die.
After a second’s melee, the only slaver who remained was the magician. He picked up his spear and tried to stab directly at Kerdimma’s head. Rtur slapped the spear down with his own and held it there while Kerdimma rushed forward and struck the magician across the face hard enough to make his head spin. He fell down to the ground, quite dead. It didn’t take long to see that the spearman with the necklace in their belly would not survive long; they were unconscious in the surf, staining the white foam around them a faint pink.
It reminded both Kerdimma and Rtur of subtle veins of color between the stars, visible during winter in the extreme north. Scars in the sky, or rivers, left by Gallora Rainqueen’s passing as she and the Sundered Gods fled across the cosmos.
Kerdimma checked the navigator for any wounds as she undid the ropes that bound his hands. “You’re a lucky man,” she said. “Or else a valuable one. One of the Gate Keepers in the capital heard of your capture and hired us to find you.” She did not tell him that they would get a small bonus for killing the slavers.
The navigator said his name was Magio, and he met his rescuers with a mixture of gratitude and naked fear that they might still kill him—or that others might come.
“What others?” said Rtur, gesturing with his spear. “They would need to cross the beach to get at us here. And they are not as fast as my wife and I. How many can there be?”
“Just a few,” said Magio. “But they are mad. These ones were going to sell me as a guide for *expatriates*.” He filled the word with the kind of hatred you only ever heard from people in Uvhag; they guarded their secrecy above all else and allowed no one to leave their island.
Kerdimma and Rtur shared a nervous look. They had only managed to avoid execution when they had wandered into Uvhag and the Protected Cities by bartering with their very lives. They were not allowed to leave the island, and their services were readily available to the Gate Keepers of the island—though for a fee.
“That’s not our problem,” said Kerdimma. “Here, help us check these pockets.”
They found a handful of silver pieces between the five slavers. It was, by their standards, a small fortune.
“We could buy ourselves a house with this,” Rtur pointed out, shaking the leather satchel he used to hold their savings. “We’ll need to open an account in Gallurtown—”
“We’ll talk about this later,” said Kerdimma, as she always did when Rtur brought up the subject. She did not have the heart to tell him that she still dreamt of season’s first snow over Mt. Eppo. Exile was final, but maybe there was some way…if not to return to the north, then to find other exiles like themselves. To make a home where they were more than tolerated.
She turned on Magio, eyed him fretfully as she scratched at her chest. The rorock that gave her advantage in a fight had begun to cool, and the skin around it was irritated.
She kicked the nearest of the bodies. “How much can you carry?”
They sold the spears and scrap for a measly two silver pieces, plus a small jar of preserved pork, cut into long strips. They dropped Magio off with the local Gate Keepers to report everything he’d seen during his capture. Rtur insisted they take the money they’d made to the Uvhag Central Bank, though Kerdimma hated giving their money over to a stranger. They had argued about that many times, however, and she didn’t feel the need to bring it up again. So they ate a meal of barbecued pork served over mashed fruit in silence. Two days later, they returned to their contact in the Eastern Gate, a woman named Atathli.
Atathli sat in her office, the highest point of the eastern-most tower of the capital, Gallurtown. Its eastern window was a long strip cut into the sandy stone, open to the air. It made her office permanently uncomfortable; the wind whipped past her window night and day. It also gave anyone facing her in an impressive view of the vast Uvhag jungle that stretched to the coast.
The room itself was permanently cast in blue light. Kerdimma and Rtur didn’t know what Atathli burned in the small firepit that was the center of her chamber, but she had explained that the idea was to hide the light from anyone approaching from the east. Against the night sky, it would look like one a million stars. Rtur had expressed doubt at this, but since then neither of them had been able to pick out the fire that lit her office when they returned to the Eastern Gate, not until they were nearly up against the tower itself.
“Are you looking to make some more coin?” Atathli said, without preamble.
“Always,” said Rtur, before Kerdimma could respond.
“The navigator said the slavers were taking him for someone else. They were intermediaries for would-be expatriates trying for the mainland. There’s four of them, but their bordiers all. Led by a woman named Neektah. I didn’t know her personally, but she was a Gate Keeper herself. We can’t have anyone make it to Llorusta, or else the Protected Cities will be…harder to protect. Uvhag depends on its secrecy.”
“What do you want us to do?” said Kerdimma.
“And what’s the pay?” Rtur didn’t try to hide the grin he sent his wife. He had huge teeth, almost the same shade as his pale skin. He looked cruel as a shark, and Kerdimma loved him fiercely through her exasperation.
“Stop them from leaving the island,” said Atathli. “Without a navigator, they’ll need to follow the Dexia River south to the coast, where the crossing is narrow.” She ran her hands over her face. “These people are so predictable.”
“Why can’t you send someone else?” Kerdimma asked.
“We would rather this all be kept quiet,” Atathli said. “We don’t want anyone else following in their footsteps. And the two of you will go faster alone. We’ll be loaning you one of our river skiffs. A bordier has been at it, and…you’ll find it much faster than paddling.”
“And the pay?” Rtur repeated.
“It will be forty pieces of silver, for each of you. But if you break the skiff, we take it out. Can you do it?”
Kerdimma felt exhausted. But before she could say anything further, Rtur had already accepted the deal.
“Maybe when we are back,” Kerdimma said, “you can tell us more about your work. Over some tolé, maybe.”
Atathli’s eyebrows shot up. Kerdimma had never seen the Gate Keeper seem surprised. She muttered without making any commitments and dismissed them.
“And be careful,” Atathli said as they left. “These expatriates will be desperate now that they don’t have their navigator. Who knows what they’ll do.”
Kerdimma and Rtur bought hard bread, cured meat, and bottled oranges for the journey south. While they walked around Eastern Gate, Rtur pointed out every home they could afford once they had the payment.
Like all cities in Uvhag, the Eastern Gate was built around a huge, tiered fountain, with more expensive homes higher up near the stone fountain’s apex. Clean water flowed freely from the top of the fountain, so high it was just visible above the tree line if you approached from the west. Rtur pointed out wooden, thatch-roofed huts right near the edge of the rolling water, some of them with two rooms and clay chimneys and tanning racks built into the walls. At least one had a small water wheel, which fascinated Rtur; before coming to Uvhag, he didn’t know you could make one so small. He didn’t hesitate to ask people working or lounging outside their homes how much the homes cost.
“By Ro’s mountains, we could buy one right now!” he said. “No more camping just outside of town.”
Kerdimma had a protest on her tongue—it had something to do with Atathli’s hesitance, her confusion that Kerdimma would want to spend time with her away from her office—but it never came out. He looked so excited. She couldn’t say a thing. She closed her eyes and remembered string music around warm fires, back where warmth had been a welcome reprieve instead of a near-constant blanket that turned the world soft and oppressive around her.
The boat was a shallow thing, a river craft made of pliable wood and deep green leaves, preserved and made waterproof through the arts of the Protected Cities. Dark red runes were burnt into the aft of the small vessel. Atathli’s man at the docks said you only had to hold your hand against the runs and the boat would go. It was a simple enough enchantment, transferring air from inside the boat into the water behind it.
When Kerdimma put her hand to the runes, a sudden wind filled the boat’s interior and wouldn’t leave, like a miniature tornado—the air from above filling the sudden absence in the hull. The water behind them turned white, roiling, and they shot off down the river.
“At this pace,” said Rtur, shouting to be heard over the localized wind, “we’ll have them in two days! My love, maybe we’ll have enough left over once we have the house to buy one of these for ourselves!”
“I don’t know if I want to buy a house yet,” Kerdimma said. “I don’t like having our money in their bank. What if there’s somewhere else we want to go?”
But Rtur couldn’t hear her over the wind, or else he did not want to hear her.
Rtur was right about their pace. They traversed the whole jungle in a day and a half by sleeping in shifts so one of them could have a hand against the boat’s runes, powering the vessel forward. Once, they almost capsized when the boat hit a massive alligator, large enough it got teeth around the edge of the boat and held it in place. Before it could overturn them, Kerdimma grasped her husband’s wrists and swung him onto the alligator’s back so he could stomp on its eye until it let go. They laughed wildly as the boat resumed its rapid journey south, and Kerdimma felt her heart swell in her chest, in a way that had nothing to do with her rorock’s magic.
They spied their quarry from a distance; the ship was a three-masted fluyt, a round ship with a mess of rigging. How had the expatriates acquired the ship? Kerdimma suspected these expatriates were rich; the poor knew better than to try and outrun the Gate Keepers’ reach.
“Good,” said Rtur. “More for us to take. I’m thinking we can get one of those two-floor houses a tier up from the ones we looked at. Imagine that little stream right outside your door.”
They hid the boat and began to creep through the jungle. The sun had just begun to peak over the trees, and thin honeyed light made long shadows out of the crew loading up the ship. The expatriates’ fluyt wasn’t anchored but instead run onto the sand where the river widened out and met the sea; they would push it off, possibly with some transference. Kerdimma counted five sailors hastily loading furniture and chests from a long cart tied to a pair of striped jungle horses, their taloned claws nervously worrying the sand.
Neektah, their quarry, was not hard to find. She was a tall woman, as true-black as Kerdimma was true-white, with a floral print dress that wrapped around her and hung above her knees, fine boots that would be ruined by the beach, hair held back in a complicated weave. She had a leather satchel at her side, and strips of cloth and pieces of stone hanging from a thin belt. She was a bordier, more accomplished than the wizard who had helped the slavers. Neektah was in deep conversation with three others, all with similar fine prints, all with smaller versions of the bordiers’ kit she wore.
“I think that must be her family,” Kerdimma said.
“The furniture will fetch a fine price,” said Rtur. “If we can get it back. Must be why they’re still here, the fools. Once their navigator didn’t show, they should have fled.”
“Maybe the meeting time hasn’t come yet,” Kerdimma said.
“Some of them are…young,” Rtur observed. “It’s a tough fight if they’re all bordiers. They could cut us down with stones and darts before we make it close. It won’t be like with the slavers. I can hit one of them from here…maybe. But then they’ll hold us down in the jungle.”
Kerdimma did not like their odds. Four bordiers? And what if the sailors joined in, with the broad hacking blades at their waists? If she were able to get in close among them, it would not be hard to fight; most bordiers, however skilled in their art, were not comfortable with close quarters combat, would not be able to divide their attention between her flashing fists and her husband’s darkspear.
But something else was holding her back. The younger bordiers looked scared, even at a distance. Neektah put a hand on one’s shoulder and spoke directly into their ear. Then she pointed at the gangplank, and the sailors loading their furniture…
“What if we don’t kill them?” Kerdimma said. “We only need to stop them leaving.”
“We need more cover,” Rtur said, understanding. “So we get more cover.”
They exploded out of the jungle, laying down in the scooped-out floor of the craft, Kerdimma stretching her hand to keep a connection with the activating runes. Her whole body shook when the tiny boat leapt out of the water and started sputtering across the sand. Rtur lay down the opposite direction. He gripped the edge of the boat with both hands, rocking his body side to side to steer it.
The boat wasn’t designed for this, Kerdimma knew, and she felt it keenly as the wood beneath her shook, bent—but held. Wet sand sprayed all around them in a high sheet, like laundry whipping on the line. There was no point in stealth now, and Kerdimma smiled as her husband cried out on the other side of the boat.
“We need to one of these for ourselves, my dear!” he said.
“You’d break it in a day!” Kerdimma called back.
An arrow sang over them, its momentum stolen by the spray of sand they were kicking up—and then it was followed by a barrage. They hadn’t seen any bows among the sailors, but it would have been a simple thing for them to run and fetch them from belowdecks. An arrow sank into the side of the boat and stopped inches from Kerdimma’s side. Her rorock would do her no good now; as much as the boat gave them cover, it also meant she could not see their attackers. All Kerdimma could do was keep her hand on the runes and pray.
Ro, Mountainwoman, she thought. Keep me and my husband safe. Let us be like this forever.
But she knew nothing was forever. It was the central tenet of the Roera, her people. Endurance was the highest virtue, the only way people accomplished anything of consequence—but no endurance was limitless, all things crumbled and ended someday. Why was it that the idea of a home made her heart heavy?
Kerdimma shook the thought away as the arrows were joined by a line of…clouds, it looked like, that arced over the boat. One of the bordiers was pulling cold air from the sky and sending it like a lance at them; Kerdimma has seen the trick before, though usually used by Uvhag aristocracy to cool their homes in the summer months.
Then they had made it to the far side of the fluyt, its bulky round hull between them and the expatriates.
“Well, the first part went well!” said Rtur, standing up to his knees in the water. “Now as they come around, I’ll pick them off…”
“No!” said Kerdimma. “You take the boat.”
Rtur looked pointedly at her hands. “My rock, my love…you could make shorter work of it.”
They heard footsteps sloshing through the water. Their attackers were almost upon them.
“We don’t have time to argue!” said Kerdimma
Rtur shrugged, hefted his darkspear, and began stabbing it into the hull of the ship. It pulsed with gray and black light, as if it existed in a different time of day, a permanent twilight defying the island’s dawn. He sank it deep into the wood as if it were spearing a simple, stupid animal, then pushed down like he was working a lever—creating a small hole in the ship’s hull. Seawater began to rush in.
The plan was simple: make a hole big enough that the expatriates would need it patched before they could leave.
But to do that, Rtur would need time.
He was right: Kerdimma could have finished the work faster, with her powerful fists sped up by the rorock.
But she wanted this fight to go differently than their usual work.
The first two sailors came around the ship at a run, flat blades held high.
Water steamed around Kerdimma’s ankles as the rorock sang in her chest. Water sprayed around her as she charged. In four bounds she crashed among the sailors. She punched at the flats of the blades, once, twice, and then went tumbling into the waves. She punched one man the gut hard enough to send him against the hull of the ship. The other was cannier, a bald woman with jangling earrings that Kerdimma knew meant something among the Uvhag peasants, and she ducked Kerdimma’s fists and tried to grapple her legs. Kerdimma brought up her hands and pounded on her back until the sailor let go and fell, gasping, in the surf.
Kerdimma only had a second to ready herself before the other sailors came around the ship at a run, two with blades and one now hefting a spear. Neekhtah was with them, walking with a tiny speck of white light so bright Kerdimma could not look straight at it. She’d heard of this before: a bordier who could pull a mote of starlight from the sky. It was forbidden among the Roera—and, she thought, nearly impossible.
“You will not stop us!” Neekhtah yelled, and loosed the bit of stardust at Kerdimma.
Kerdimma dove to one side. The heat from the starlight was so intense, she felt as though it tanned her skin as it passed when no sunlight ever could. The ocean surf roared around her, jetting up in massive plumes as the starlight burned off the water.
The remaining sailors came at her then, using the spray for cover. The fight became a desperate mess. Kerdimma ducked and wove around them, blinking in the saltwater fog that hung like a tapestry in the air, always trying to keep an eye on Neekhtah, who watched from the shore with her hands held ready. At least the would-be expatriate didn’t seem eager to summon anymore starlight, for the moment.
Not that Kerdimma could afford to give her an opening.
The sailors began to back her into the waves—but here, Kerdimma had an advantage, her rorock allowing her to move through the water more quickly than her opponents. But she could only keep going for so long. Sooner or later, she would slip up, or else she would need to dodge far enough away from an attack’s blade that it would give the bordier on shore a chance to hit her. Starlight was only the most extreme thing a bordier could transfer. A jet of sand from the beach, if it hit Kerdimma in the eyes, would be just as deadly in this fight.
“My love!” Rtur yelled. He swore at the sailors as he ran to her side, calling them cowards and dogs and worse, threatening them with every torture he could imagine if they laid a hand on his wife again.
“No!” Kerdimma cried back. “Keep at it!”
Something in her voice must have made an impression on her husband because for once he didn’t argue.
The fight went on for a few more agonizing heartbeats. Finally, one of the sailors slipped in close enough that Kerdimma could not avoid their blade, but instead had to lunge forward, grappling her attacker’s wrist and breaking their arm. This gave another sailor all the time they needed to hit Kerdimma’s back, a glancing blow but painful nonetheless. She screamed fiercely, whirled around, and slapped the sword out of his hand—but it was too late. She could feel blood flowing from her back muscles. Without a way to see the wound, she couldn’t tell how deep the injury went…
Everyone froze at the sound of cracking wood, so loud it sounded like a dock collapsing into the water. Rtur had done it; he had punched his darkspear through the hull of the ship dozens of times, weakening a section of hull until he could dig his darkspear down from above, jump into the air, lever the darkspear down—and take a huge chunk of wood with him. Now the hull sported a gaping hole twice as wide around as a portly man’s belly. The ship took on water at a rapid pace.
“Mercy!” said Kerdimma.
“Darling, we can still take them,” Rtur said, running towards her with his darkspear held high.
Kerdimma held on hand in his direction. “No! We don’t need to fight. You’re in no rush now,” she called to Neekhtah, who stood on the shore with her hand raised. “You’re not going anywhere. We want to talk.”
“You just put a hole in our ship,” said Neekhtah. “Why shouldn’t we kill you now?”
“We’ve killed none of yours,” Kerdimma said, gesturing at the sailors she had injured. “And you see that I could have. And if you kill us now, others will follow you. They will not be so eager to talk.”
A moment of silence dragged on between them. Kerdimma felt her rorock going quiet in her chest. The ocean surf stopped steaming around her.
“Fine,” said Neekhtah. “Stand down. But no matter the deal, you will help us patch the hull.”
Kerdimma told Rtur to hold his tongue and follow her lead. He didn’t like it, clutching his darkspear close. Kerdimma could feel the tension coming off him, hot as a campfire. But he trusted her, trusted her so much it was frightening
Neekhtah poured them tolé and they sat on the beach to deal. She explained that the other bordiers were her cousins. They had been studying the stars and ascertained (they believed) that other stars were still being made, creation still happening in the wake of Gallora and the Sundered Gods’ flight across the heavens. This presented new opportunities for study—but the Gate Keepers would not allow it. And so they sought the mainland, and the forests of Oallor, where they could continue their studies in secret.
“It is better to be free,” said Neekhtah, “than to be safe.”
Kerdimma was not sure she agreed, but she sympathized.
“Here is our deal,” said Kerdimma. “Let us leave you here, and we will return to our contact with the Gate Keepers and tell them we sunk your ship and picked you off one by one as you came ashore. You will not be followed. If you kill us, however—”
“Yes, they’ll send more assassins,” said Neekhtah.
“We’re not assassins,” Rtur muttered. “Never killed somebody not in a fair fight.”
“What do you want in exchange?” said Neekhtah. “We do not have much silver, nor any other currency of the west.”
“Wait five days before you leave,” said Kerdimma. “So we can come and join you if we wish. No one will seek you, once we tell the Gate Keepers you are dead. We can act as escorts. We would ask no payment for the voyage—”
“Though we’d negotiate a price for after,” Rtur put in.
“—and you could use fighters when you make the forests of Oallor’s domain. There are creatures there unlike any you know.”
“If you were not exiles yourselves,” Neekhtah said, “I would not take this deal. As it is, you have five days.”
Rtur opened his mouth to say that they were not exiles, but Kerdimma cut him off and expressed her thanks.
It was Rtur who held his hand against their boat’s runes on the way north, back to the Eastern Gate of the Protected Cities. He was uncharacteristically quiet.
“I’m embarrassed,” he said, finally, and stopped the boat. “I should have asked you what you wanted. A long time ago. I assumed…” He shook his head. “You want to leave Uvhag?”
“I don’t know,” Kerdimma said, honestly, and it felt wonderful to say. “But I don’t know if I want to buy a home here. I love fighting by your side, and I could do that anywhere. That could be enough. But…”
“You want to go somewhere else? My love, we cannot go home.”
“What I want is for you to talk to me before we decide where we will live. I miss Mt. Eppo. I miss our people.”
“What other options do we have? We cannot go back, however much we may wish it. We have carved out a life here, or the start of one.”
“That’s a good point,” Kerdimma said. “I’d like to hear more. Two days up the river, two days back. That leaves us a day to look at homes. Maybe we’ll find one we both like.”
“And maybe we won’t,” said Rtur. “You know, if we killed them, we could afford one higher up, closer to the top of the fountain.”
“Is that what you want?” asked Kerdimma.
“My love, my rock, what I want is to be with you.”
Kerdimma did not feel the way Rtur felt about the homes in Uvhag, but in this, at least, they were in perfect agreement.
The rest, they would figure out. They had enough time.
©November 2021, Peter Medeiros
Peter Medeiros’s fiction has been published in Crossed Genre’s Hidden Youth Anthology, SQ Magazine, Strangelet Journal, Mirror Dance Magazine, and Red Planet Magazine. His poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.