The spellbook ofBlack Magic

The hired sword who comes over the wall of the sorcerer's estate outside Kuru is quick, and he is already halfway across the moonlit garden when Nkosana steps out onto the balcony. She does not shout a warning. She points, and a bolt of black energy the length of a spear leaps from her fingertip and crosses the hundred feet between them before he can blink. He throws himself flat among the lilies and it only grazes him, tearing a smoking strip from his cloak. He does not get up for a while.

The market thief has three city guards on his heels when he dives past the fortune teller's stall in Tartessos. Teodor, a charlatan who once took the boy's coin for a bad prophecy and likes him anyway, mutters a single dark word and flicks his wrist toward the square behind them. A circle of blackness forty feet across drops over the fountain like a lid. The guards stumble in, cursing and blind, and have to feel their way out the far side. By then the thief is long gone, and so is Teodor.

The Scythian chief who burned Zarina's village left one riding glove behind in the ashes, and the witch has kept it for a year. Tonight, from a hilltop above his camp, she watches him laughing by his fire, lays the glove across her knees, and speaks the curse. He does not even feel it land. But from that night on the chief cannot sleep properly. He lies awake uneasy for no reason he can name, snaps at his sons, and grows weaker and uglier in temper by the month.

The warriors of Zimba are painted and ready to march on the copper mines when the witchdoctor Tafadzwa raises his staff and asks the lower planes whether the raid will go well for them. Everyone looks up at the sky, waiting. For a long moment nothing comes. Then a small gray dove flutters down out of the evening and settles on the war-chief's shield, cooing softly. The war-chief stares at it. Tafadzwa says nothing at all, and slowly, man by man, the warriors begin to unpaint their faces.

The dealer in the back room of a Tartessian wine shop swears the dagger holds a bound demon, and he wants a price to match. Varro, a wizard with a sideline in black magic and a long memory for swindles, asks him to lay it on the barrel head and step back. He speaks a short word and watches. For one minute the room within arm's reach blooms with faint lights: the dealer's rings, a charm on the doorframe, a trace in his own purse. The dagger stays stubbornly dark. Varro laughs.

The Netherman necromancer Grishak has never been welcome in Cimmeria, so he enters the stockade looking like a lean, dark-haired trapper with a pack of furs. His borrowed face is flawless. The dogs do not bark and the headman offers him a seat by the fire. Then the headman's wife asks where he comes from, and Grishak answers in his own voice, a deep goblin rasp like gravel in a bucket. The room goes very quiet. He has most of an hour left, and no idea how to spend it.

In a willow hollow of the Weeping Forest, the witch Morgause burns a pinch of grave dirt and calls whatever small, sad things are listening. Two answer: faint shapes like breath on cold glass. She shows the first a rune scratched on a stolen amulet, and it whispers what the sign means. She hands the second a gold ring pulled from a drowned man, and it hisses a name, the name of the last man who owned it. Morgause smiles thinly. She knows that man.

The Tharshi harbor guard have the elven sorcerer cornered between the warehouses of Tartessos when Aelwen flings out her hand and the alley behind her fills with thick gray vapor, wall to wall. The guards charge straight in. The first falls over a coil of rope, the second walks face first into a pillar, and the third, going slowly and sensibly, can see no further than the end of his nose. Somewhere beyond the mist, a boat pushes off. The fog will hang there, gray and silent, for a long time yet.

The priest of Heru has called down a being of light, and it is striding across the tomb floor toward Khaemwaset with a blazing sword. The necromancer does not run. He draws his circle, ten feet across, with a single sweep of his staff and a word from the lower planes. The shining one reaches its edge and stops as though it has met a wall of glass. It cannot step in. The priest shouts a prayer, sweating. Khaemwaset counts the minutes he has left, and begins to chant.

Elowen has studied the black arts only as a sideline to her sorcery, so she cannot choose what answers her summons. She hopes for an owl. She lights the candles in her tower above the Straits of Ys, speaks the words she will not be allowed to speak again for a year, and waits. What climbs out of the smoke is a gremlin: gray, knobbly and grinning, already chewing on her best quill. It will serve her faithfully until she tires of it. She suspects that could take a while.

The Vanir sentry on the stockade wall at Haloga hears a woman's voice from the dark below, speaking his own tongue, calm and low. Open the gate, it says. Hild the witch feels his will fold under hers like wet paper. He climbs down and lifts the bar while his comrades sleep. Then, because she is cruel and curious, she tells him to put his hand in the brazier. He stops with his fingers an inch from the coals, shudders, and shakes himself free. Hild slips through the gate anyway.

Among the vine-choked step pyramids of Huac, where no one has lived for a thousand years, Itzel the witch stops on the stair and lifts her head. The spell spreads out around her like ripples in a pool. Something is standing on the step above her, a little to the left, close enough to touch. There is nothing to see. She cannot tell what it is, or what it wants, only that it is there. She has ten minutes to decide what to do. She decides to go back down.

For a whole week the witchdoctor Mandla sits in his hut above Okalo, carving the mandrake root he dug from beneath the hangman's gibbet, with the rival shaman's stolen necklace lying in his lap. The little figure has the shaman's jutting jaw and bandy legs. On the eighth night Mandla takes a long thorn and pushes it slowly into the figure's right knee. Across the valley, the shaman screams and falls in the dust, and for as long as the thorn stays in, his right leg will not move at all.

The caravan guards of Ispahan ride in a tight ring around the sultan's camels, and the witch Leyla has no wish to fight them. From the shelter of a dune she sends a slow gray cloud rolling across the sand toward them. It swallows the whole column. Guards slump in their saddles and slide gently to the ground; camels fold their knees and snore. One grizzled captain coughs, shakes his head, and draws his sword against nothing. He has an hour to guard sleeping men alone. Leyla sighs.

The ghoul has taken a spear through the ribs guarding its master's tomb in the Vale of Avernus, and it crouches whimpering in a corner, black ichor pooling beneath it. Varinius the necromancer kneels beside it with the tenderness another man might show a hound. He lays one gray hand on the wound and speaks a word of the lower planes. The torn flesh knits, and far more of it closes than ever would on a living man. The ghoul rises, sniffing, eager again for the dark and for the next intruder.

The Scythian rider comes thundering across the steppe with his lance leveled at the elven wizard, and Caelith has time for only one spell. She fixes him with her eyes and speaks a word that hurts. The horseman folds over his saddle, howling, his lance tumbling into the grass. His horse slows to an uncertain walk. For the next few minutes he can do nothing but clutch himself and moan, and his hand will not close on his axe. Caelith catches his horse's bridle and turns it gently around.

The merchant was found face down in the Fountains of the Moon at dawn, and by evening his body lies on a slab in the Temple of Anu. The necromancer Neferhotep, who keeps the temple's accounts and its secrets, has been paid by the family to find out why. He sets a copper coin on each eye, speaks the words, and the dead lips move. He has four questions. The killer? His partner. The reason? The ledgers. Their hiding place? Under the third floor tile. Neferhotep hesitates over the last one, then asks whether it hurt.

Inside the barrow on the downs of Alba lies a ring the necromancer Cadoc wants, and a barrow wight he does not wish to meet in person. So he draws his magic circle and triangle on the turf outside, whispers down into the earth, and calls something far weaker than himself out of the dark: a dead thing that was once a spearman. It stands in the triangle waiting. Fetch me the ring, Cadoc tells it. It goes in, comes out, drops the ring, and sinks back into the ground.

The battle on the Scythian steppe ended at noon, and by dusk only the crows and the necromancer Borvik are left. He walks slowly among the fallen horsemen, choosing with care, touching one here and one there with the butt of his staff and muttering. The dead men stir, sit up and climb to their feet, faces slack and eyes empty. Six of them, then seven. They will follow him now until someone cuts them down or unmakes his work. He points them east, toward the next village.

The three knights of Avalon have the warlock trapped at last in the ruined chapel, until Emrys flings his arm out and a ring of red hellfire erupts around them, twenty feet across, roaring waist high. The youngest knight tries to leap through and comes out the other side with his surcoat blazing and his skin blistered. The other two stay put, swords raised, sweating. Emrys's imp familiar strolls through the flames with its arms folded, unscathed, and grins up at them.

The cavalry officer who had Ysolde flogged in the square at Iber rides out of the fort the next morning without a care. The witch watches from the tree line, three hundred yards off, clutching the spur he lost on her doorstep, and speaks the malediction. By noon his own charger has thrown him twice. By evening every horse in the stables screams and kicks when he comes near. Within the week he is walking everywhere, and the other officers have begun to wonder what he did.

The Vanir longship grinds onto the shingle at Ku, and twenty raiders leap into the surf with axes raised. From the dunes the old witch Sigrun sends a rolling bank of gray vapor down the beach to meet them. It clings like wet wool. Raider after raider finds his legs locked, his arms pinned, his axe held fast halfway through a swing. Two of the biggest men tear themselves loose and stagger on, half blind. The rest stand frozen in the fog, cursing, while the villagers come down with nets.

The magistrate's men kick in the door of the tower in Kuru to find the necromancer Sipho standing calmly at his window. Before they can reach him he is a vampire bat, flitting out between the bars. In the courtyard he drops to the flagstones as a lean gray wolf and lopes for the gate, and when the gate proves shut he pours beneath it as a thin cold mist. The guard dogs outside do not chase him. They whine and back away, tails low, from the smell of him.

The beggars of the Grand Marketplace in Acheron descend on every rich foreigner, but they learn fast. The sorcerer Anath steps down from her litter wrapped in an invisible chill that reaches ten feet all round her. The first beggar to come near stops dead, his outstretched hand trembling, and cannot bring himself to take one more step. A pickpocket behind him hesitates, then shrugs and presses in anyway, grinning. Anath takes the boy's wrist in one cold hand and looks at him. He stops grinning.

In the cellar of his house in Mohenjo-Daro, the wizard Vikram has spent an hour inscribing his circle of protection and the thaumaturgic triangle beside it, checking every line twice. He speaks the summoning, and after a long minute a gargoyle hunches in the triangle, gray wings folded, stone eyes smoldering. It does not want to serve. He offers gold, and it sneers; he offers it a rival's statue to deface, and it thinks, and then its lips peel back in a slow and terrible smile.

On the cliffs of Thule, above the crevasse the Scritifi say reaches Hell, the necromancer Ragnhild whispers down into the dark a name she paid for with ten years of her life. A cacodaemon answers from very far below. She is allowed one question, and she asks it carefully: where lies the body of the wizard Othar? The voice that answers is true, as such voices always are. It says: where the ice remembers fire. Ragnhild spends a month working out what that means.

The paladins of Quechua have the witch cornered on the temple stair, and she no longer bothers with subtlety. Coyllur flings her arm down and a gray fog boils up from the steps below her, swallowing the first rank of warriors whole. At once they are choking, clawing at their throats as the vapor tightens like a noose. One of them tries to shout a prayer and cannot get a word out. The survivors have only one hope, and they take it: they run blind out of the mist.

The bounty hunter has been following Ashkan across half the Wilderness of Zin, and at last he catches the warlock asleep, or so he thinks. When he leans in with the manacles, Ashkan's hand snaps up and closes around his wrist. There is no struggle. The hunter goes rigid from head to foot, frozen in a crouch with his mouth half open and his eyes wide, as still as a statue in a desert shrine. Ashkan takes his horse, his water and his boots, and is gone within the quarter hour.

The necromancer Dahlia pays for her servant in blood. As the shape rises from the floor of her crypt beneath Tartessos, she feels her strength drain away in a single sick rush, and the phantom thickens into a thing of cloak and shadow with long, grasping hands. By day it will wait hooded in the corners, half blind. By night it will be her knife. That same night it drops from a rafter onto a moneylender who never heard it coming, and does not let go of his throat.

The sorcerer Ma Jian has taken great care with his circle and triangle, chalked on the roof of a rented warehouse in the East Market of Tang. He speaks the summoning at midnight. A minute later the stars are blotted out by leathery wings, and a winged demon settles into the triangle with a sound like a sack of wet meat. It demands a life. He offers silver instead, a great deal of it, and the thing's hunger wavers. On the third offer it bows, and agrees to fly where he tells it.

The rival vintner in Saturnia refused to sell, so the warlock Lucan pays a visit at harvest time. He stands at the edge of the vineyard, a stone's throw from the nearest rows, and draws one slow breath. The vines in front of him shiver. Leaves curl and brown, grapes shrivel to black beads, and a patch of the best rows, no bigger than a farmhouse kitchen, dies in the space of a heartbeat. It is a small wound. But it is the oldest stock, the vines the family has tended for six generations, and Lucan knows exactly where to cut.

The Fomorian patrol has the witch Rhiannon trapped at the edge of a cliff in the Fells, and they are grinning as they close in. She throws back her head. Black, leathery wings burst from her shoulders, tearing her cloak, and she drops off the edge, catches the wind, and swoops back up past them at twice the pace she could ever run. From above she spits a curse down at the nearest giant for good measure. Then she wheels away east over the mist, with an hour of flight still to spend.

For a week the sorcerer Galen has worked in his rooms above the Black Skull, carving a little wax figure of the harbormaster of Acheron and covering it with tiny, crawling glyphs. Tonight he holds it over a candle and speaks. Across the city, the harbormaster doubles over his supper in agony. It passes. Galen frowns and tries again, and this time the pain wins: sign the release for the Tartessian ship, he commands silently, and the man rises, weeping, and goes for his seal. Two more refusals and the figure will crumble, but Galen does not expect many.

The Nethermen raiders thought the necromancer's tower on the edge of the Black Forest would be an easy mark. Their leader meets Gorzha on the stair and swings, and misses, and the necromancer lays a bare palm flat against his chest. The warrior's face grays. His knees buckle as life pours out of him through that single touch. He staggers back down the steps, gasping, alive but hollowed. No amount of rest will bring that strength back. Only a healer's spell or a potion could, and he has neither.

The Order of Baal does not forgive, and the witch Mairead has been sent to deal with the deserters hiding in the monastery ruins of Pictland. From the ridge she sends a slow red mist rolling down into the cloister, where it fills the courtyard for ten long minutes. Some of the deserters hold their breath and live. The rest cough, look puzzled, and walk on as if nothing has happened, and then within a few minutes they lie down in the cloister and do not get up. Nobody has an antidote, and nobody knows the spell that might save them.

The necromancer Tzeltal has knelt for an hour in the ruined temple of Huac, drawing his circle and triangle with blood and chalk, and now he speaks the words. After three long minutes, the triangle fills with smoke and something vast unfolds within it, a greater demon with a crown of horns and a voice like a landslide. It tests the lines of the triangle with one claw. They hold. Tzeltal names his price, a sacrifice it will enjoy, and on his first attempt the demon agrees. That frightens him more than refusal would.

The mob of torch-waving villagers finally reaches the witch's hut in the Borean Forest, and Grima steps out to meet them. An aura of pure dread rolls out around her. The front rank breaks at once, dropping torches, pitchforks and even their own injured brother, and flees shrieking into the trees. A burly woodcutter grabs a fleeing friend's arm to stop him, and the man turns on him like a wild animal. Only two stubborn men remain, white-faced. Grima walks toward them, and every minute they stand near her is a fresh test of their nerve.

The masked envoy at the court of Babilary claims to be a merchant prince from Khitai. The necromancer Xiu Mei, standing among the queen's advisors, opens her eyes in a particular way and sees what everyone else cannot: that his fine robes cover a shape-shifted changeling; that an invisible servant stands at his left shoulder; that there is a hidden door behind the tapestry; and that the creature's poorest quality is its courage. It is terrified of fire. She smiles and asks, very politely, for more torches.

The sorcerer Idris is being held in a tower on the coast of Galecea, but his captors have not taken away his voice. He leans out between the bars and speaks seven words into the evening: The sunset tower. Two guards. Come tonight, quickly. The wind snatches them away eastward over the hills. Eighty miles off, in a smoky tavern, his apprentice suddenly hears his voice whispering in her ear, as clearly as if he stood beside her. She spills her ale, grabs her cloak, and goes to saddle the horses.

The Gorgon warrior-priestess is quick with her spear, and for a long, desperate minute the Druas wizard Sefani can do nothing but twist away from its point among the jungle ferns. Then the woman overreaches. Sefani steps inside the thrust and lays an open palm flat against her ribs. The priestess shudders from head to foot, her eyes rolling, and crumples to her knees, gasping. She does not die. She is tougher than that. But half the life has gone out of her at a stroke, and, gray-lipped and trembling, she lets her spear roll from her fingers.

The young king of Zimba is laughing at a juggler when the witchdoctor Kudzai, standing unnoticed among the courtiers some sixty feet away, closes his eyes and lets his own body slump against a pillar. The king stops laughing. He blinks once, slowly, and smiles a smile no one has seen him use before. His voice is the same, his memories are all there, and he knows every courtier's name. That evening the king signs three new laws and sends his loyal captain to the frontier. No one suspects anything.

The necromancer Oyelaran has kept a human skull on the shelf of the old Hesperian watchtower above Pemba for five years, precisely for this purpose. Now he returns, sets it on the table, and speaks the words. The skull's jaw works stiffly. For the next hour it tells him everything that has happened in the tower and around it since he left: who has come and gone, what they searched for, what they whispered, where one of them buried a strongbox. Every word is true. Oyelaran takes careful notes.

Deep on the Isle of Dread, where the ash never stops falling, the necromancer Iskander completes the inscriptions he has checked six times over and begins the summoning. The ground groans. A few minutes later a nether demon crouches in his triangle, a thing of burning coals and too many joints, and its heat makes the air above the triangle shimmer. It laughs at his gold. It laughs at his threats. On the third attempt Iskander offers it the life of his treacherous apprentice, and the laughter stops.

The Atlantean fleet wizard has evoked a water elemental to drown the necromancer Khalid on the shore at Taenerus, and it is rising out of the surf like a green wall. Khalid sends a whirlwind of black vapor spinning across the sand toward it, as fast as a man can run. The elemental falters inside the storm, then bursts apart and vanishes, hurled back to its own plane. The wizard, caught on its edge, reels away with his eyes streaming and blinded, bleeding from a hundred stinging cuts of flying grit.

The priestess of Isa has turned the necromancer's zombies, and they are shuffling away from the temple steps in a helpless shambling herd. Then Senbi, standing at the back of the plaza in his black robes, speaks a single word that rings like a cracked bell. Every zombie within hearing stops, turns, and looks at him. They are his again. The priestess raises her holy symbol and shouts, but the word has already done its work. Senbi points at the temple doors, and the dead begin to climb.

The Makara war band swarms up the beach below Valum Chivum with their spears, twenty of them, and the necromancer Karsten, alone and cornered against the rocks, speaks one word. It is not loud. Within twenty feet of him, the lesser warriors simply fall, lifeless before they hit the sand, and the war band's charge breaks in stunned silence. A few of the tough ones stagger but stay standing. Their chief, older and far stronger than Karsten, did not even notice the word. He keeps coming.

The Tharshi raiders have pulled up their drawbridge and are jeering from the walls of their stolen fort. Sabir, a wizard with a necromancer's grim patience, walks to within a hundred feet of the wall, points at the thick oak and iron gate, and speaks. The wood blackens and slumps like wet bread. The iron bands blister into flaking red rust. In the space of a breath the whole gate collapses in a heap of rot and dust, leaving an open archway. The jeering stops. Sabir's mercenaries stroll in through the gap.

From the cliff tombs of Madaan the necromancer Zahir calls a wind that should never blow. It rises from the sealed tombs as a pale mist heaving with howling faces and drifts out over the desert toward the bandits' camp, not quite a thousand feet away. It swallows the tents whole. For ten minutes the camp is full of screaming. When the mist thins, most of the bandits are sitting motionless in the sand, staring at nothing, and they will never speak again. One stands among them, trembling but sane.

For two weeks the necromancer Harith has engraved a flawless ruby worth a small kingdom with the name of a Jinn and a thousand crawling symbols. At last he faces the creature in the desert beyond Ispahan and reads the engraving aloud. The Jinn staggers, feeling its essence drain away, and cries out, offering service after service in exchange for mercy. Harith keeps reading. The Jinn's body collapses into a heap of fine sand, and the ruby in his hand burns warm with the power of flight.

Three nights the witchdoctor Okonkwo has prepared, and on the fourth he stands in his circle beneath the dead baobab on the veldt of Marhashi and speaks the summoning. The wind dies. The stars go out one by one. Within the triangle a great shape unfolds, and it is Nergal, and a wave of pain rolls out from the eyeless thing, stopping just short of the circle. The arch demon turns its ruined face toward the little man in his little circle, vastly amused. It will not be compelled by a name. It asks what Okonkwo can possibly offer.

The witchdoctor Nhamo spent a pleasant hour drinking beer in the headman's great hut in a Nubian village last spring, laughing at his jokes. Tonight, having been cheated over the price of a cow, he returns to the village edge and speaks the curse. By the third day the headman's wife notices that the roof beams have begun to sag. By the seventh the walls bulge and groan, and the door will not close. On the thirteenth morning, with the whole village watching from a safe distance, the great hut falls in.