Swords and Sorcery Magazine, May 2023 (#136)

Swords and Sorcery Magazine continues its astonishingly consistent publication schedule with this, the 136^th issue. Since launching over ten years ago, the magazine has only very rarely missed a month, usually offering up three stories, those usually being of excellent quality. Here are my thoughts on this month’s offerings.

 
Mike Adamson, a small press stalwart with over 75 published stories to his name, starts us off with “The Black Cult of Tarantium,” which is as sword and sorcery a title as you could possibly ask for. The story opens with several paragraphs of worldbuilding in the form of summary, making me wonder if this story, and its protagonist the warrior priest Zareft, are part of a series. It’s not an overly-elegant beginning, throwing a bunch of unfamiliar proper nouns at readers—a technique that can work splendidly (“Know, oh prince…”)—but here is a bit of a slog.
 
The reportage continues until the first line of dialogue, which doesn’t show up until well past the halfway point of the story. Descriptions of both the physical setting and of recent events are only very occasionally interspersed in the first half with a paragraph or two about actions being taken by Zareft, but even those are static.
 
Adamson writes here in consistently long paragraphs, usually of 150 to 200 words, only very rarely breaking the pattern with a welcome paragraph of one or two sentences. Even his dialogue is buried in such paragraphs, consisting mostly of long recitations of the villain about his plans and powers. The hero never speaks.
 
The story itself would be quite interesting but for the stylistic choices the author has made. Sword and sorcery characters who depend upon religious faith (upon even efficacious prayer, as is the case with Zareft) are few and far between. The world of the story is interesting and feels like it has a real history, but it is described rather than inhabited, just as Zareft remains something of a cypher despite the reader’s access to his inner thoughts. The piece has its merits but was ultimately a miss for me.
 
“In the Attic of the Mountain King” is by Dan Crawford, who has been writing material of genre interest for almost forty years—including a fantasy trilogy from Ace in the 1990s—most recently in Wyngraf. I love the allusion to Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite” in the title, but far from being an otherworldly “hall,” the “attic” of the title turns out to be an over-crowded curiosity shop.
 
The proprieter is one Olki, who has been in business for at least four and a half centuries. He is happy for an interruption to a task he loathes—tidying up—when he welcomes a customer, a would-be future queen of a dynasty that lost its throne seven hundred years in the past.
 
The secret of this delightful story is that it is anthropological in its methodology. Just as archeologists and anthropologists construct the past out of physical culture, here, the author constructs an entire fantasy world out of magical swords, self-thumping drums, and, of course, ancient tomes of wisdom, all haphazardly arrayed in Olki’s enormous shop, itself concealed somewhere deep in a swamp. 
 
But despite how dusty everything on the shelves is, there’s no dustiness to this prose and this worldbuilding. Crawford knows what he’s doing, and he plays tropes like the strings of one of his magical harps. Everything the proprietor and his customer seek or examine will be familiar to readers of fantasy in its generalities if not in its particularities, and those particularities are rendered with warmth and humor. Any fan of secondary world fantasy, not just sword and sorcery, will find much to admire in this piece.
 
At 8,000 words, “The Bog Witch of Dirk-au-fen” by Vincent Wolfram just nudges into novelette territory and is quite a bit longer than either of the other offerings in this month’s issue. Wolfram has trod light upon the internet indeed, but his biography here lists several previous publications and I assume he’s the same Vincent Wolfram who wrote Dread Sonnets, a horror poetry collection.
 
The language of this story certainly shows a poet’s hand. Here is one exemplary sentence from the very beginning of the tale: “The highland fields he had crossed were green, the mournful rains of autumn sustaining the grasses a little longer before frost turned them as white-haired as old men.” Lovely.
 
Our protagonist is a giant, “twenty hands tall,” named Bron of Sindrum. He and his long-horned bull mount, Vincarlo, are far from home and on an early winter’s day come to the village of Dirk-au-fen, which he finds being whipped into a paroxysm of witch finding.
 
The religious leader of the village recognizes Brom as the “Banesman of Chokefast,” a dragonslayer. Brom’s reaction to being so named, and his reaction to the villagers’ chattering about his legendary deed, bring to mind Barbara Hambly’s extraordinary novel Dragonsbane, with its reluctant foe of wyrms. For me, that’s high praise indeed.
 
Befriended by a villager, Brom accompanies the man into the swamp to fish for dinner. Brom is a vegetarian but agrees to haul in catfish for his host and his ailing wife. They are attacked by a monstrous agent of the witch of the title, but Brom handily deals with the matter, laughing all the while. The witch appears, “beautiful for a ghost-woman of the fen” with “moon-wan hands.” More poetry. (As an aside, I’m always delighted when I get to log on to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up a word new to me; here, one is “ingleside,” a chiefly Scots term for fireside. Even better, “treacher,” an obsolete word from Middle English describing a deceiver or a cheat.)
 
From there, the plot unfolds first at a leisurely, then at a quickened pace. Everything that is revealed is logical, and the secret behind the village’s woes is refreshingly original and topical at the same time. The relationships in the story are earned on the page with solid characterization and excellent dialogue.
 
A question raised at the outset is left unanswered at the ending, one having to do with a burden Brom carries, and his apparent quest to rid himself (and the world?) of it. This indicates that there may have been further tales of Brom, or at least, hopefully, that there will be more.