Tales From the Magician’s Skull produced its tenth issue in March, offering a great mix of stories that all meet editor Howard Andrew Jones’ definition of sword and sorcery, which manages to be both rigorous and generous at the same time.
Fully ten stories are included in the magazine’s 80 pages, with the many illustrations fitting the “old school gaming” aesthetic prevalent in all of publisher Goodman Games’ products. As usual, there’s little in the way of apparatus, with just a brief editorial by Jones and the now-mandatory humorous message from the supposed publisher of the magazine, the titular Skull.
But let’s get to the stories.
C.L. Werner returns with another entry in his “Tales of Shintaro Oba.” At 9,000 words, “The Demon Rats” rates as a novelette and is the longest story in the issue. Werner has settled into a comfortable style with this character, a samurai in a Japan-analogue setting who has had several adventures seeking to save his late clan daimyo’s soul (all while being on the lookout for assassins or other agents of the Shogun). Shintaro Oba is a demon-hunter, effectively armed for the fight with a magical blade, “Koumakiri, the famed Demon-Killer of Sekigahara.”
The samurai’s quest is continuing as the story opens and he is immediately met with a mysterious woman who calls herself Mika-Myobu. She tells him that he needs to stay where he is because a person who needs his help is approaching. This is true, and it turns out that an old friend of Oba’s, the monk Junchiro, is seeking aid ridding his monastery of an infestation of demon rats. The mysterious Mika is revealed to be a kitsune, one of the legendary foxfolk of East Asian myth, who is interested in the situation for what one might call puckish reasons.
Event piles on event as the trio returns to the monastery and immediately engages in combat in its great library, where the demon rats are pouring in through gnaw holes and snacking on invaluable texts while the monks ineffectively attempt to stop them. There’s more than one fight in the library, and eventually Oba concocts a plan that depends on the kitsune’s deceitful qualities to find the secret mastermind behind the attacks.
There is some very effective writing in this piece, especially in the closing sequence where a genuinely disturbing transformation is described in great detail. My only complaint is that Werner takes a scene or two too long to get there. Some of the fighting gets a little
“The Eye of Kaleet,” by Jeffery Sergent, is up next. Here we find the traveler Jade, far from her adopted home in the Middle Kingdoms, come to the desert city of Quarmess and quickly involved with a bit of skullduggery. She’s offered a fabulous gemstone—the “eye” of the title—at a suspiciously low price, but lets greed get the better of her and makes the purchase. The seller seems more relieved than anything and makes a hasty exit, just before a visit by the city guards.
As a foreigner—and as a foreign woman, at that—Jade is in no position to bargain with the authorities but manages to secret the gemstone from the officer of the guard who questions her. Jade is already very clear in the reader’s mind even on the first fast-paced page, and it’s a credit to Sergent that he makes the (for now) nameless guardsman as vivid and interesting as his protagonist.
At least for the moment, Jade is left to go free. After undergoing the unpleasant process of retrieving the Eye of Kaleet from its hiding place, she has another encounter with the officer, who gives her some crucial information about the nature of the gem and the folkways and religious practices of the city. Using this newfound knowledge, Jade follows her instincts and winds up encountering something a lot more magical and profound that the city guard.
I don’t think I’ve read anything of Sergent’s before. I found the prose clean and professional and the ideation top-notch. Editor Jones makes a point in his editorial of saying that many of the stories in this issue came from an open call rather than being the usual solicited pieces he presents. I wonder if Sergent’s story is from that call—there are no publication credits listed in his biography. If this is a debut, it’s an excellent one. If it’s not, it’s still excellent.
Marc Desantis is another name new to me, but he’s apparently an experienced writer of both non-fiction (an intriguing sounding history of Roman naval power) and of fiction (a series of far-future science fiction novels). In “Green Face, Purple Haze,” he’s working in a tradition that pulp readers will be familiar with from various texts, perhaps most famously A Princess of Mars, to wit; here we have a protagonist from “our world” transported to a other-worldly fantasy setting and taking up the sword.
The wheres and whens of the hero’s situation at the beginning are unique, though. The soldier in question doesn’t give us his “Earth name,” but as the story begins, he’s walking through the Laotian jungles attempting to make his way back across the border to Vietnam after a disastrous mission to stop supplies from coming along the Ho Chi Minh trail sometime shortly after the Tet Offensive. There’s some wonderfully evocative scene-setting here, as with this line: “The rain is like hot glue in Southeast Asia.”
Finding himself magically shifted to a temperate forest inhabited by people who are definitely neither Laotian or Vietnamese, he quickly determines that his 20th-century weapons and equipment will not work. Not even gunpowder poured from one of his shells will set light, leaving him with only his relatively primitive Army-issued Ka-Bar and tomahawk.
Desantis doesn’t take much time in getting the action going, using summary to give his protagonist a role as a leader in the fight against invading green-skinned “urks” (the inspiration is obvious). This is quite a brief story, told more in reportage than in the building of scenes, but it has some strong merits, most of all the “origin story” of the protagonist.
I’ve recently written about Jason Ray Carney’s series hero, the Rogue, and “The Sorcerer’s Mask” is just the latest account of that mysterious figures wanderings. You can read my essay on the series for plot elements, but I’ll repeat here that this is something of a departure in style for tales of the Rogue, and a very effective departure indeed. This story is a strong candidate for best of the issue to my mind.
At the magazine’s halfway point, we find a Skull debut by the very experienced and widely published Cynthia Ward. The setting of “The Black Pearl of the Sunken Lands” is suggested by the title, and indeed, the hero is a “nerei” and his redoubtable companion, Wanders Far From His Pod, is a dolphin, their two aquatic peoples being old allies. The hero, the impetuous warrior Bruko, is wooing the beautiful Ria, who puts him off saying, more or less, that he’s a fine friend-with-benefits but not husband material.
An incensed Bruko vows to swim to a place from which no nerei, dolphin, human, or mer (never on the page) has ever returned, the Sunken Lands. A clear Atlantis analog, Attala is the resting place of a drowned civilization and its artifacts, including the Black Pearl of the title, which Bruko has vowed to take to Ria as a bridesgift. With Wanderer at his side, Bruko undertakes the dangerous journey.
Ward, as has been mentioned, is an old hand at genre fiction, and is clearly well-versed in the tropes she’s working with. The “rage” that comes over Bruko when he’s in combat is as old as western narrative, of course, but she’s just as familiar with Ray Harryhausen. Once the heroes have found the requisite sunken temple, the action is non-stop. If things don’t work out quite the way the impetuous young warrior wants, well, that’s to be expected in these kinds of stories, isn’t it? I don’t know Ward’s intentions with the character, but this definitely has a “first in a series” feel.
Next up is fan-favorite Matthew John with “A Simple Errand.” We open with Lachmannon, a warrior from a people known as the Kael, imprisoned under a death sentence after, well, partying hard enough that some people got maimed or killed in the city where he’s come to celebrate some recent successful adventures. Things are looking grim for Lachmannon when he’s offered a bargain by a sorcerer—apparently the Kael call such “meddlers”—that being freedom in exchange for undertaking the task of the title.
Is it simple? Can it properly be called by the diminutive word “errand,” even? Of course not.
The practical magic in this piece is particularly entertaining, with the meddler using pipe-smoking to transport the pair of them to another world. I’ve already mentioned the Barsoom stories once in this review; here, the tie-in is that the other world has lighter gravity so Lachmannon is able to be a Burroughsian “leaper.” This is very much required because the bizarre aliens who inhabit and build the green towers of this world fly, or rather, float high in the air.
The errand, as it develops, is to slay a god. I’ll leave it to you to learn the outcome, but I must say that John writes a vivid and fast-paced action scene with original settings and strongly-drawn characters. Excellent work.
Another of the shorter works in the issue is “Nzara” by D.J. Tyrer. Tyrer’s is another name I believe to be new to me, but his heroes in this story, the warrior Ini-ndoga and his tracker companion Mbeva certainly feel like series characters. This story is set in an African savannah-analog and involves a hunt for lions who are more than they seem. Tyrer doesn’t allow themself enough time to provide much more than theme and special effects, with the special effects being particularly well-limned. I think the story would benefit from a greater wordcount.
My other candidate for best of the issue is “The Silent Mound” by Charles D. Shell. This story is set in the early 17thcentury, in what modern Americans call Virginia. If that time and place makes you think of the Jamestown Colony, then your thinking is correct. The protagonist, though, is not a colonizer, but an Indigenous warrior of one of the many Tidewater peoples who inhabited the area at that time. As with the John piece discussed above, we open with the hero bound by enemies (and this isn’t even the last time in this issue we’ll see that), in this case, some gold-seeking Englishmen who are surprised to learn that their captive, Nthokna, speaks their language.
There’s a bit of scene-setting and background—two of the three treasure-seekers are very firmly established as right bastards—and once things get started, we are in, to coin a phrase, Lovecraft country. I’m not familiar enough with the cultures Shell is portraying to know just how far from the real he’s roamed in telling his story of an ancient “Talking Folk,” who terrorized the peoples of the area long before the arrival of the colonizers. Whether based on an actual Indigenous legendarium or spun up whole cloth, though, the past and present of the Talking Folk—and their fate—is very effectively written.
The story follows time-honored Lovecraftian beats and the horror element is right out of a 1920s issue of Weird Tales. I liked this one a lot.
Closing out the issue is W.J. Lewis’ “Dakagna and the Blood Scourge.” As the story opens, we find our hero…in chains. This time, though, instead of jumping straight to her escape, the story flashes back to the series of incidents that found the powerful warrior bound to a stake and scheduled for a visit to a pyre. To go by the lack of previous credits given in the author’s provided biography, Lewis may very well be another new writer. If that’s the case, it seems clear to me that he’s spent a lot of time working out his worldbuilding and, even more so, the biography of his character, Dakagna, “the Blade, the Sea Viper, the Queen of Swords.”
This story strongly reminded me of Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold with the appearance of enemies from the past and with things not quite going as the heroine would wish. She’s under a curse to forever wander, and her considerable prowess hasn’t been enough to take care of that problem. The way she takes care of the problem(s) lain out here is vivid and exciting, hampered only by the writer’s tic of using incomplete sentences and broken clauses to (ineffectively) suggest movement and action.
Tales From the Magician’s Skull continues to go from strength to strength as the category-leader in the vibrant small press/semipro world of contemporary sword and sorcery. Color me impressed. (Also color me wanting more Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Nathan Long, but I’ll be patient.)
