From its beginnings, the sword and sorcery genre’s most popular stories—and frequently the most artistically successful—have featured recurring characters. The most famous of these are, of course, the heroes or anti-heroes created by Robert E. Howard (Conan the Cimmerian), Fritz Lieber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser), and Michael Moorcock (Elric of Melniboné).
In today’s hothouse ecosystem of sword and sorcery, thriving mostly in a very active small press scene, things are no different. Series characters abound, jumping from magazine to anthology to collection. There seems to be something irresistible to the writers of this subgenre about chronicling the “career” (or careers in the case of heroic pairs or, very rarely, groups) of their characters.
I will set aside for today the question of reading order. While I feel strongly that stories of such characters should be read in their order of publication that is a subject for another day.
The reason I’m thinking about series characters is because I have just read the five publicly available stories featuring Jason Ray Carney’s character, the Rogue. (Note that Carney has stated that he’s published a half dozen shorter stories about the character in the pages of a private amateur press association publication available only to contributing members.)
The Rogue is a mysterious figure and is never given any name other than his (judgmental?) sobriquet. The physical descriptions provided of him are scant; we know that he is tall, that he has “ageless features,” and that he has “depthless black eyes,” but not much beyond that. He is a skilled fighter and occasionally works magics—including what may be the most potent magic there is, a magic often reserved to gods in fantasy fiction. We know that he is ageless.
Where is he from? We do not know. Where is he going? Even he doesn’t seem to know.
The Rogue’s first appearance was in “Two Silvers For a Song of Blood,” which appeared in Carney’s 2020 Pulp Hero Press collection, Rakefire and Other Stories. In what will prove to be a recurring motif, the opening passages offer a lyrical description of a strange setting, in this case a city beholden to “Atok-the-Million-Eyed,” a god whose tenets forbid any and all sorcery. Among the examples of things that would warrant a death sentence are “a mathematical map to another world,” a delightful phrase, and one typical of Carney’s lush style.
In this introductory adventure, the Rogue is working anonymously (he is always anonymous) as a stevedore at the docks. The entire story is a masterclass in Aristotelian unity, taking place over an hour or two in a single room (excepting Carney’s introductory material and his “zooming out” at the end, another device that will be returned to in the series). In this brief tale, we find hints that the Rogue is something altogether more than, or even other than, human. His life touches those of some “normal” people, there is a spectacular clash of magic and violence, and then he is gone.
The second story in the sequence to appear was “The Rogue and the Ragling,” which was published in the Winter 2021 number of the annual Cromcast Chronicle. As with the first piece, we open with a description of a strange city, though this one is a stronghold of sorcery instead of being a place where it is held anathema. It is “Litra: an ornamental bauble, a god’s fragile curio,” and in the space of a page or two it is “swept crashing to the floor of the universe.”
The hand that did the sweeping is that of the “Covenant Emperor” and the means he used was a vast working called “The Sword of Peace.” The city is in ruins, both the defenders and the attackers decimated, as we learn that the Rogue had been serving as a mercenary in the Covenant Emperor’s forces.
As an aside, another fantastic feature of these stories is the way Carney suggests rather than outlines his secondary world setting. We never learn much more about the Covenant Emperor than the fact that he exists and that it was by his will that gleaming Litra was destroyed. This author is an absolute master of the proper noun phrase, leaning on evocative, colorful, and creative diction to do in a word or two what other writers do in a chapter.
But, back to our “ragling,” who is a child who has survived the devastation of the city and who seeks vengeance. He stumbles across the Rogue, who is meditatively wandering the ruins, and announces his intent to kill one of the invaders or die trying. As it happens, neither of those things happen, and we learn more about the Rogue’s nature in the temporal telescoping that closes the tale.
In the second issue of Old Moon Quarterly, dated Autumn 2022, Carney offered “The Silence of the Rogue.” This time our context is provided by opening with the information that a group of merchants who have enslaved the Rogue. How this happened, or how they even managed it, is never revealed. The merchants are fleeing cultists called “the Pureborn Keyholders of Blore.” Positively Vancian.
The Keyholders, whoever they are, are religious foes of the merchants, who profess to be pious followers of an unnamed faith that sees them stopping for prayers three times each day. This continues even as after they are saved by the Rogue from a sandstorm that sees them take shelter in some ancient caverns.
The theme here is religion. The notion that gods (or at least spirits) are created and sustained by the worship of their followers is not a new one, but here Carney rings enough changes to make his an original take. There’s some wonderful Lovecraftian body horror here, as well.
This time, the ending is circular, with the Rogue’s circumstances little changed despite the fantastic occurrences of the tale, and his heroism in it.
In his fourth appearance, the Rogue returned to the pages of The Cromcast Chronicle for their Winter 2022 issue. “The Form of the Rogue” may be the strongest entry in the series so far, as it not only features more hints about the character’s outer nature but also does a fascinating job of exploring his inner nature. Carney manages this from an external point of view (all of the Rogue stories are told in the omniscient).
Here we find the Rogue fleeing from a sorcerous enemy, having been badly injured in combat. He is rescued by a young woman and her reluctant grandfather, who attempt to nurse him back to health over a period of months, seemingly to no avail. The action scenes in this one are brief and effective, but the great strength of the piece is its characterization. It’s a rare story in which the supposed protagonist is unconscious for much of its length, but it works here because all the other characters are so deftly drawn.
For the first time, there’s an indication that Carney’s world is more built out—at least in his imagination—than the series has given evidence of so far. The grandfather makes mention of the god Cajuls, elsewhere called “The Tearfather” in the sequence. This is the first, and I believe only time so far that one of those proper nouns has recurred.
The most recent tale of the Rogue appeared in the tenth issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull (March 2023). “The Sorcerer’s Mask” is the longest of the stories to appear so far and is a departure in form in other ways as well, ways both subtle and pronounced. Once again, we find the Rogue arriving in a fantasy city, Chel (“that onyx crucible”), one not-so-secretly ruled by a subterranean-dwelling wizard named Lech (a name suggestive of “lich”).
After completing an undescribed mission, the Rogue is set upon by agents of the paranoid Lech. Unusually, he chooses to spare the lives of his attackers and is imprisoned in a dungeon with various other people who have aroused the wizard’s ire. Or have they aroused his fear?
The Rogue learns from one of his fellow inmates that Lech recently came to believe that his doom is shortly forthcoming, having received this information from a seeress. After the inevitable jailbreak and some nasty business with some nasty creatures dwelling in the depths, the Rogue finally confronts the masked sorcerer of the title. The ending is completely unexpected and casts both more light and more shadows on the nature and origin of our hero.
As alluded to above, Carney’s creation is part of a tradition established from the beginnings of sword and sorcery, a protagonist designed to be tested against a strange world of fantastic settings and horrific, usually magical, enemies. The Rogue is not unique in being an (apparently) immortal wanderer—stories by Karl Edward Wagner and David C. Smith come to mind—but he is unique in the leavening of compassion evident in both his character and in the writing qua writing of his adventures. Will readers ever come to know the source of that compassion, the reasons for it? Perhaps not. But sometimes, the elided answer is more compelling than the clear one.
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