Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,3

appears in this volume. With all the excitement surrounding this new cadre of writers, combined with the recent celebration of their historic roots, there is no better time for a definitive look at the new fantasy. Here, then, are seventeen original tales of sword and sorcery, penned by masters old and new. What follows are stories of small stakes but high action, grim humor mixed with gritty violence, dry fatalism in the face of strange magics, fierce monsters and fabulous treasures, and, as ever, lots and lots of swordplay. Enjoy!

Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan

Alabama & Australia

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STEVEN ERIKSON is the pseudonym of Canadian novelist Steve Rune Lundin, best known for his ongoing fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen, beginning in 1999 with Gardens of the Moon. Trained as an archaeologist and anthropologist, Erikson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is a World Fantasy Award–nominated author. SF Site has called the series “the most significant work of epic fantasy since Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.” Known for his portrayal of multidimensional characters, he said in an interview conducted by suite101.com, “It’s often commented that my stuff is all shades of gray rather than black and white, but that’s not the same as saying every character is similarly gray—the effect is an overall one rather than a specific one. Most of the characters I come up with have pretty fixed notions of right and wrong, they have a moral center, in other words, whether consciously recognized or not. But in coming at something from more than one side, the reader is left free to choose which one they’ll favor.” Erikson now lives in Cornwall, England.

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GOATS OF GLORY

Steven Erikson

Five riders drew rein in the pass. Slumped in their saddles, they studied the valley sprawled out below them. A narrow river cut a jagged scar down the middle of a broad floodplain. A weathered wooden bridge sagged across the narrow span, and beyond it squatted a score of buildings, gray as the dust hovering above the dirt tracks wending between them.

A short distance upriver, on the same side as the hamlet, was a large, unnatural hill, on which stood a gray-stoned keep. The edifice looked abandoned, lifeless, no banners flying, the garden terraces ringing the hillsides overgrown with weeds, the few windows in the square towers gaping black as caves.

The riders rode battered, beaten-down horses. The beasts’ heads drooped with exhaustion, their chests speckled and streaked with dried lather. The two men and three women did not look any better. Armor in tatters, blood-splashed, and all roughly bandaged here and there to mark a battle somewhere behind them. Each wore a silver brooch clasping their charcoal-gray cloaks over their hearts, a ram’s head in profile.

They sat in a row, saying nothing, for some time.

And then the eldest among them, a broad-shouldered, pale-skinned woman with a flat face seamed in scars, nudged her mount down onto the stony descent. The others fell in behind their captain.

The boy came running to find Graves, chattering about strangers coming down from the border pass. Five, on horses, with sunlight glinting on chain and maybe weapons. The one in the lead had long black hair and pale skin. A foreigner for sure.

Graves finished his tankard of ale and pushed himself to his feet. He dropped two brass buttons on the counter and Swillman’s crabby hand scooped them up before Graves had time to turn away. From the far end of the bar, Slim cackled, but that was a random thing with her, and she probably didn’t mean anything by it. Though maybe she did. Who could know the mind of a hundred-year-old whore?

The boy, whom Graves had come to call Snotty, for his weeping nose and the smudges of dirt that collected there, led the way outside, scampering like a pup. To High Street’s end, where Graves lived and where he carved the slabs he and the boy brought down from the old quarry every now and then.

Snotty went into the tiny one-stall stable and set about hitching up the mule to the cart. Graves tugged open the door to his shed, reminding himself to cut back the grass growing along the rain gutter. He stepped inside and, though his eyes had yet to adjust, he reached with overlong familiarity to the rack of long-handled shovels and picks just to the left of the door. He selected his best shovel and then the next best one for the boy, and finally his