The Dark Issue 5: The Dark, #5

By Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace

The Dark is a quarterly magazine co-edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace, with the fifth issue featuring all-original short fiction by Stephen Graham Jones, Octavia Cade, Emily B. Cataneo, and Darja Malcolm-Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Jul 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781501452567

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 5, August 2014

When Swords Had Names by Stephen Graham Jones

Tommy Flowers and the Glass Bells of Bletchley by Octavia Cade

Not the Grand Duke’s Dancer by Emily B. Cataneo

A Fairy Tale Life by Darja Malcolm-Clarke

Cover Art: Stygian Darkness by Timothy Lantz

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Jack Fisher & Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

Copyright © 2014 by TDM Press.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

When Swords Had Names

by Stephen Graham Jones

Some men are born soldiers.

The blood, the killing, the violence. All the idle hours between.

Some men can spend their nights stationed on a stony battlement at the edge of the known lands, guarding against an imaginary horde, against creatures not seen since their grandfathers’ boyhoods. The dragon that rose from the waters on the other side of the kingdom, destroyed all the boats at the port. The giantess in her cave on the mountain, sharpening tree trunks into spears.

Stories to get the boys our grandfathers were home before darkfall.

Now their grandchildren guard against those stories.

Some men can stand up on that battlement night after night, pissing into a warm clay jar, and not feel that their best years are being drained from them. Some men can stand up there and not feel the darkness is going to swallow them whole.

And some men, they fling their halberd out into the river, and then they climb down, walk away from their duty with their hands clenched into fists.

Me, I ran.

Two days out, I buried my helmet deep in a creek bank.

On the fourth night, spying for hours on the flickering lights of a lonely inn, I sifted my faded military raiments over a packrat nest. The rats took my offering.

Skulking up to the inn, working on my story, my excuse for having no horse, no blanket, four soldiers rode up in a swirl of dust and beating hooves.

They had a fifth horse trailing on a rope, for me. There was no saddle. The dead need no saddles.

I made quietly for the stables, stepped into a sleeping mass of the children that always haunt these kinds of places. They stirred, moaned, and I wanted to lie down there with them, start over, choose a different path. Instead I folded myself out a back window and kept moving south, my heart pounding in my throat.

The sixth night, I peeled the dry bark from a tree I didn’t recognize, to eat the moist inner bark.

It wasn’t enough.

As deep as I was in the forest, now, the trees were tangled and ancient, too far from the road to ever have lost their branches and deadfalls to campfires.

It was like stepping back in time. To when swords had names.

At night there were wolves, and then there were things that cut the wolves off short.

The morning of the eighth day, I collapsed.

At least my bones wouldn’t be hung from the cage that swings off the battlement, I told myself.

Death would be worth never seeing the blinding surface of that accursed river again.

But I was spared.

An hour or a day into my slow dying, hooves stabbed down into the ground before my face and thick hands hauled me up, and up, and I was held such that all I could see was the horse’s tail, flicking at flies.

I wanted to eat them, but just as I mustered the strength to raise a pinned arm, the forest opened its black mouth, swallowed us.

It could have been days later when I woke, except if it had been days, I’d have not woke.

Hours, then.

I was rolled in a blanket by a campfire. It was nighttime, cold.

There was meat thick on the air.

I sat up as best I could, and the men stopped their low discussion, studied me.

St—starving, I coughed out, nearly vomiting though I was empty.

One of them chuckled, looked to the others for confirmation.

The meat on the spit was thin and marbled, dripping blood, the individual drops hissing in the fire.

Their horses stamped back in the trees, blowing like a big cat was close.

The men were unconcerned.

"Food," I said, suddenly sure they didn’t know my language. Or that it was me who had forgotten it.

There’s not enough, one of the men said gruffly, not looking at me when he said it.

Just us, another said.

If not for him, though, a third said, staring right at me.

It’s been too long, the one I judged the leader said.

It would have been longer, the third said. We’ve been hunting them like deer. But we should have been hunting them like you hunt a bear.

Ayuh, the man farthest away said. Traps, bait. Dogs.

They’re too smart, the leader said.

Evidently not, the third man said.

From your portion, then? a man who hadn’t spoken up to that point said.

The third man didn’t answer. I’m just saying, he said instead. It was like he knew. Like he had been placed there.

Where? I said, sitting up