If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by The Masterless Apprentice and The Masterless Assassin by T. Neil Thomas. The third volume, Masterless Apex is due out soon. These books follow the adventures of Tin the Necromancer who has been imprisoned in a glass bottle for three hundred years. He emerges into a world that has banned necromancy. It’s a good thing Tin is now seven plus feet tall with claws and horns for he’s going to need everything he can to deal with a world hostile to his magic. He has the help of Lenara and the other assassins of the guild, won over by Tin’s new ideas on management. This rolling romp is both Sword & Sorcery and fun.
Wow, this is the fourteenth outing in the “Sword & Sorcery Stories You May Have Missed” series (with plenty of untapped gold out there still!) And like with the other thirteen times we are going to look at Heroic Fantasy short fiction that is worthy of your going and finding it and reading it. There are many great tales in magazines and anthologies that you might have missed. The batch of five here in this post all came from the 1980s. The Eighties was a great time for stories because there was plenty of it still around, and much of it was an improvement on the fun but basic stuff written in the 1970s. Some of these writers might even say their work isn’t Sword & Sorcery at all. And perhaps it isn’t if you have a very small definition of Heroic Fantasy fiction. If it has weapons (not just swords) and magic, well, then I feel it belongs. Monsters are also good. These stories weren’t chosen to create a definition for a giant blob of a sub-genre. They were picked because you should read them.
“The Inn at World’s End” by Richard K. Lyon’s and Andrew J. Offutt appeared in Ares #2, May 1980. Ares was a role-playing game magazine. (RPG magazines fiction was easily identified as Heroic Fantasy.) This story is one of the Druin tales. A sequel, “The Whispering Mirror” appeared in the next issue, Ares #3, July 1980. Both were chapters in an unpublished novel, The Long Road to Wizardry. The duo wrote the Sword & Sorcery trilogy, The War of the Wizards together in 1978, 1980 and 1981. The fact that this story was illustrated by the fabulous Charles Vess is a lovely bonus!
The plot is episodic with Druin and his men trying to cross the Valley of Bones to reach the Floating Mountain, where Druin’s grandfather, the wizard Mardarin dwells. The valley is haunted by a female goddess who lures each man to his death, drained each of his life. Only Druin survives and flees across the plain to arrive at the inn of the title. First, he meets the giant cannibal, Bungamin, who takes Druin inside, where the newcomer pays a gold coin to the old man who runs the inn. Then he meets all the others who are also waiting for the Floating Mountain to appear so they can climb it to Mardarin. These include Count Kainus of Thunland, who Druin suspects is a werewolf and Torguadis, formerly a priest of the Great Spider of Shamash. All three have suffered losses like Druin, who had his family murdered and his throne taken. Mardarin offers magical help. The price for this help will be high since the Wind-wolves lurk outside the inn, ready to kill those who follow the floating mountain. All three guests have brought a retinue of underlings to sacrifice to the wolves as they chase unlike Druin who lost all his followers.
There is a fourth guest, the beautiful ice lady who drank Druin’s friends. She appears and takes Druin to her tent. There she strips naked and offers herself to him. She claims to be the goddess Theba, the All-Mother. To touch her is to die like his fellows. Druin resists, dousing her in flame from a hidden brazier. When the others discover what Druin has done they are ready to kill him. Only the mountain has shown up and they must run. Bungamin stays long enough to throw a spear at Druin, who dodges it. The three lords and followers run after the mountain while the wolves tear them apart. (The authors have a lot of fun describing these deaths.)
Druin doesn’t follow, but goes inside the inn to eat his supper. He talks to the old innkeeper, admitting he knows the mountain is a mirage, a trap for the stupid. The story ends with Druin saying about the stew, “And by the way, grandfather, this wants salt.” A wonderful story with many intriguing ideas and characters. I just wish the full novel had been published.
“The Valley of the Troll” by Charles de Lint (Sword & Sorceress #1, 1984) has a fascinating intro. Marion Zimmer Bradley had asked Charles de Lint to change the name of one of his characters because MZB had the third Thorn and Frostflower story “The Garnet and the Glory” in the same volume. She was worried readers would be confused by two very different characters named Thorn. In the end, Charles agreed to reduce the number of Thorns used in the story. More interesting is that de Lint had originally sold the story to fellow Canadian, Gene Day. Day passed away and the story became available again. Charles and Bradley dedicated the tale to Gene Day.
Anyber the swordmaiden and the wizard Thorn Hawkwood are on the trail of Guil and his men but get sidetracked to look for treasure when Thorn buys a map from a fellow mage. Anyber isn’t happy about this but when Thorn’s horse gets taken by a troll under a bridge she sees the cave where the loot is stashed.
Hawkwood casts a spell to make the troll sleep. Aynber enters the cave and finds the creature dozing. It awakens and attacks her after she grabs a sack full of treasure. The monster chases her out of the cave and onto the bridge. The swordwoman finishes the fight by cutting the bridge and using the troll’s fear of water. She and an unconscious wizard escape with the gold. The troll begins chanting a spell of revenge.
Aynber rides far from the troll’s cave and falls asleep in the woods. When she wakes she finds Guil and four of his men have captured her and Thorn Hawkwood. One of the men wants to rape her but Guil tells him to leave her alone. He wants to collect the bounty on her. A bounty on a bounty hunter! (I guess Aynber had a previous adventure that created some bad blood.) Hawkwood frees her by burning off the ropes with a spell. They flee. Weeks later, Guil and his men go to an inn to start spending the treasure. Too bad it’s all turned into dung! The troll’s curse has come to rest. Aynber and Hawkwood show up to capture the gang and get gold for their bounties.
I have to admit I haven’t read much Charles deLint despite the fact that we are both Canadian and fans of English folklore. I will certainly want to read more of Aynber and Hawkwood.
“The Gate of the Damned” by Janet Fox (1984) also originally appeared in Sword & Sorceress (1984). Amazon warrior, Scorpia, beats a soldier who is trying to rape her while she bathes. The fight ends when the leader of the soldiers, Telis, shows up. Scorpia joins up with Telis and his band short-term. Telis and his men are mercenaries going to Abzu Rii to fight the locals. In the town of Under-the-Mountain, Telis engineers a bar fight so that he can take Scorpia with him to the battle.
On their way to the Gate of Damned, a mudslide wipes out half the army. Telis gives Scorpia back her sword when the enemy army comes, made up of men and weird creatures. Scorpia kills one of the gigantic bear-warriors before being knocked out. When she awakens she is captured and taken to a cell. There she meets Ylissa’s son, an obscene, fat effeminate that tries to drain her blood. Scorpia knocks him out then kills the Shadow People (the weird creatures that captured her) and escapes.
She meets a servant girl who takes her to Ylissa and her captives. Posing as a servant, Scorpia finds Telis and the remaining soldiers. Ylissa is a magically beautiful woman. She uses a magic dart-gun on Telis to drive him mad with passion. When Scorpia blunders she has no choice but to fight. In the fight with two bear-warriors she pulls down the curtains exposing Ylissa to light. Scorpia sees Ylissa is actually a diseased and hideous creature. The light kills her and her guards. Scorpia releases all the prisoners before she and Telis leave. Once free Telis tries to use the dart-gun on Scorpia to make her his love slave but it doesn’t work. Scorpia rides away.
Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote in her intro “‘Gate of the Damned’: “I feel, walks the tightrope between fantasy and pure horror–and does it well.” I can’t entirely agree with her. The horror elements are no more evident than those in John Jakes’ Brak and the Mark of the Demons (1969) or Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails” (1936). The best S&S always has a good dollop of horror. That is what makes it different from Vanilla Fantasy. The rest of the story strikes me as a good Conan adventure. What makes it for MZB is the well-rounded (no pun intended) character of Scorpia. She is no shrinking violet, nor a man-hater. The failure of her relationship is entirely Telis’s fault.
“The Demon Queen” (Amazing Stories, January 1984) by Phyllis Eisenstein, who wrote the Alaric S&S series, is a standalone tale. The Duke has been besieged by his enemies for a year and is on the verge of defeat. His wife, the Duchess, uses her magic to help but the cold truth is setting in, they don’t have much time. The Duke’s right hand is a tall blond warrior-woman named Gera. The lord and lieutenant finally, after years, go to bed together. This is reported to the duchess who casts a death spell against Gera.
The result is not quite what you’d expect. A horde of demon phantoms appear. It turns out Gera is not human but the queen of the demons who took human form and has been hiding away for decades. She is madly in love with the Duke and would do anything to save him. She does this by abandoning the flesh of her body, returning to phantom form and leading her demon army to destroy the besiegers. The Duke and Duchess make up after a fashion, spreading the false rumor that the Duchess is a great sorceress so enemy factions will be afraid to attack them. They have sons and grow old together. Despite all this, the Duke likes to walk the walls of the castle at night, dreaming of lost Gera. This is a tale of swords and sorcery but also human emotions and relationships. Not your old granddad’s barbarian kills the wizard and bangs the maiden tale.
“A Vision of Rembathene” (Fantasy Tales, Summer 1988) by Darrell Schweitzer is by an author who is always a favorite of mine. Darrell pens the best stories, which flies in the face of the “if you can’t write then teach” school. Or in this case, edit. Darrell was editor on the late 1980s-1990s Weird Tales, where he included plenty of good Sword & Sorcery. We did an interview long, long ago that you can read here.
This Dunsanyian tale has storytellers relating the times of Anahai the young king. A plague descends on the land and the king asks how his physicians fared against the disease. The plague has claimed them. What of his wizards? They too are gone. A surviving mage tells him that the plague has happened because an unknown God of Mysteries has fallen asleep while looking at a book at the page on Rembathene. This allows evil spirits to torment the denizens of that city.
The king wishes to find this god and wake him up. The mage takes him to a tower where an artist has carved the unseen face of the God, then was killed. Anahia begs for succor but nothing happens. He sleeps and dreams of a long journey that takes him back to the city then to forest and finally to a mountain where he plays a game with the stranger God. He wins, gaining more worlds than his opponent, and asks for the God to end the plague. Which He does. Anahai sees him with his long beard, scythe and hourglass and knows who the God is.
Returning to Rembathene, he finds everything different. People laugh at him when he says he is king. The plague in Rembathene is but a half-forgotten memory, erased by Time. This bleak style of Fantasy could often been found in Stephen Jones’s Fantasy Tales, which was also a Horror magazine.
Conclusion
Labels are useful for people who sell books. Not really for the rest of us. The book vendor wants to make sure all the “Science Fiction” is on a certain shelf, and the “Romance” on another. With Heroic Fantasy, with Sword & Sorcery, these definitions are less useful. Is S&S only tales of Conan killing wizards? Or Elric seeking the Gods? For some readers, perhaps. But I like to think that people who enjoy a good tale with a hero or heroine filled with magic and monsters, are less worried about what it says on the spine. Or what Darrell K. Sweet or Frank Frazetta cover is the front. These are again useful for the bookseller.
For example, Darrell Schweitzer’s “A Vision of Rembathene” has no sexy maidens in it. It is very much the kind of story Lord Dunsany told in his mock King James Bible style, with an irony at its heart. Is it Sword & Sorcery? Not really, but the works of Dunsany have had a profound influence of S&S writers from Robert E. Howard to Roger Zelazny. It is part of the spectrum that is Fantasy fiction. And the 1980s was a good time to see this broadening in action. While writers like Charles de Lint, Phyllis Eisenstein and Darrell Schweitzer have read their share of old Pulp S&S I don’t doubt, they bring more than Brak the Barbarian pastiche to their work. (Which isn’t to say I don’t like Brak.) I am more in love with their fine story-weaving than I am of any label. Call it what you like. Just read it.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
