The Year of the Three Monarchs
MICHAEL SWANWICK
Xingool the Sorcerer
On the Day of the Toad in the Month of the Fire Horse of the Year of the Three Monarchs, the necromancer-king Xingool prepared to conquer the world.
Dressed in robes whose warp was blackest ebon and whose weft was deepest scarlet so that they shimmered in the sight like infernal flames, Xingool stood on a balcony of his palace on the edge of the Floating City of Ilyssia and reviewed his forces on the plain below: the squadrons of dragons that would rain fire down upon cities stubborn enough to resist him, the lines of hellhounds held on short leashes by their demon trainers, the war chariots pulled by tireless bronze steeds, the battle mammoths with their steel-clad tusks, the numberless legions of human death-fodder arrayed in endless ranks. And he was pleased.
At his shoulder stood the only being in all the universe he unequivocally trusted: his bodyguard, Kangor the Swordsman. When Kangor had first wandered out of the barbarian wastes, Xingool had seen potential in the scrawny youth with a murderous cast to his face. He had fed and tamed the boy, as one might a starveling wolf, so that he had grown large and strong and loyal. For this Xingool had been rewarded many times over. Thrice, Kangor had saved his life.
In gratitude, Xingool had showered his bodyguard with wealth, influence, luxuries, and courtesans. The first three Kangor received with indifference. The last he more obviously enjoyed, but no more so than the cheapest bought-woman in the low taverns he liked to frequent when not on duty. There was, it seemed, nothing he desired other than to serve.
Thus it was that when Xingool leaned over the balustrade, luxuriating in the destructive force of his armies, he gave not a thought to the man who stood at his back, silently sliding a dagger from its sheath.
Kangor struck.
Xingool spun about, clutching his side, a look of baffled pain on his face. Before he crumpled to the marble floor of the balcony, he had just time enough to utter one single word: “Why?”
Smiling grimly, the barbarian reached down to take the Diamond Crown of Ilyssia from Xingool’s brow and place it on his own. “Because you never had anything I really wanted before now,” King Kangor told the dying sorcerer. “Gold, power...these mean nothing to me. But this army? This war? Those I want.”
Kangor the Swordsman
It was good to be the king—any king. But it was particularly good to be the King of the Floating City of Ilyssia with the greatest army ever assembled at one’s feet and under one’s control. Kangor, formerly the Swordsman and now the King, smiled down upon all. It did not matter to him that he had gained his new position by treachery and the betrayal of the one man in all the world who had trusted him unquestioningly and, indeed, loved him as a brother. In one step he had gone from bodyguard to monarch. It had been a good day, and he had an Age of War before him, ready to be launched with a single word.
First, however, there were chores to be done.
“Sire?” his chamberlain said. “Your generals are gathered as you requested.”
“Good.”
Mighty of limb and sure of his strength, Kangor strode into the throne room and found it full of servitors. Which he welcomed, for he wanted many witnesses. To his generals he said, “Who here remains loyal to the old king?”
The generals eyed one another uneasily. Only General Abatraxas stepped forward.
Kangor tore off his robes, slamming them down upon the Phoenix Throne. More carefully, he placed the Diamond Crown atop them. Naked, he turned to Abatraxas. “Then wrestle me—and let the kingship go to the survivor.”
Abatraxas was a powerful man and his skill in wrestling was legendary. Nevertheless, it took Kangor less than ten minutes to pin him and, twisting his head around, snap the man’s neck.
Dressed once more, and seated upon the Phoenix Throne, the new king called in his scribes and dictated list after list of names: a captain who was to be promoted to fill General Abatraxas’s position; nobles who were to be immediately put to the garrote as traitors; palace functionaries who were to be demoted, lifted up, or cast out, each according to his deserts; advisors who were to be blinded, reduced to penury, and put out on the streets to beg. For he had been planning his ascendancy for a long, long time.
When he was done, he turned to Mencius, the chief of his scribes, and asked, “Have I left anything out?”
“Just one, sire,” the scribe replied. “Who is to be your bodyguard?”
King Kangor froze. Then, slowly, his eyes moved from person to person: from his resentful and over-powerful generals to the privileged and envious nobles, to the courtiers who served without qualm whoever happened to wear the Diamond Crown, to the slaves who had never tasted freedom and lusted for it almost as much as they did for revenge. None had reason to love him. Their eyes all glittered with ambition.
“Sire?” Mencius said again. “Your bodyguard?”
But to this question Kangor had no answer.
Slythe the Thief
As an offering to the goddess of thieves, whose name no man knows, Slythe carefully cut off the long fire-red tresses that were her crowning pride and placed them atop the cattle-dung fire lit to that dread lady’s honor. A lesser thief would have held that it was by her own skill that she had acquired the griffon’s egg stolen from a cliff-side nest high in the Riphaen Mountains, and the cloak of stealth pilfered from a castle guarded by a thousand fanatic warriors in the Lands of Fire, and the ouroborean ring acquired by means so arduous that even she shuddered at the memory. But Slythe knew that the gods loved to punish hubris and so she was modest, even as she planned her great heist: first of the Floating City of Ilyssia and then of the world.
Mounting her griffon, Slythe traveled faster than fast to the Floating City, ruled by the paranoid king Kangor. Abandoning her mount and wrapping about herself the cloak which had once belonged to the North Wind, she slipped through its streets like a breeze and up the empty stairways of the Marble Castle. There, she found King Kangor standing on a balcony, staring bleakly off into the distance. Throwing aside her cloak (for with it on she was insubstantial and unable to interact with the physical world), she drew a knife across his throat.
Kangor wheeled about, blood gushing between the fingers that clutched at his neck. His eyes were mad and staring under the glittering Diamond Crown but not one whit surprised. In that instant it seemed to Slythe that she was doing the king a favor by thus ridding him of his famously unending fear. He could not speak but the question was obvious in his agonized expression: Who...?
Slythe knew better than to bandy words at such a moment. She put a hand on Kangor’s chest and shoved.
Over the parapet he went, and down to the ocean.
When the castle guards burst upon her, Slythe triumphantly exclaimed, “The tyrant is dead and I have killed him. I am now your ruler.”
But, “Our loyalty is not to the man but the office,” the captain of the guards said. “You do not wear the Diamond Crown of Ilyssia. Therefore you must die.” And all rushed toward her, spears extended.
Slythe, however, had a trick worth three of theirs. She slipped the ouroborean ring upon her hand and rubbed it, wishing herself exactly five years earlier, when the barbarian Kangor had killed his liege, the necromancer king Xingool. She would appear behind the barbarian’s back and, her dagger already damp with his blood, wait for him to seize the crown from his predecessor and then snatch it from him while simultaneously driving the dagger home.
The plan was foolproof.
Back in time she went.
Only to discover that three years earlier the Floating City had not rested above the Sea of Tethys but over the distant, dusty plains of Angeddron. So, there being no floor underfoot nor castle anywhere in sight, she found herself a hundred feet in the air and falling, falling, falling, toward the cold waters of oblivion.
Far away, Kangor was lifting the Diamond Crown to his head. Even further away, Slythe’s younger self was scaling a cliff in the Riphaen Mountains. Farthest of all, the goddess of thieves cocked an ear as Slythe called out a name that only a few women knew.
So it was that, deep beneath Tethys’s waters, Slythe the Thief saw the corpse of Kangor afloat beside her. Her panicked hands seized the Diamond Crown from his head and planted it firmly on her own. For Slythe had only had time for the briefest of prayers as she fell, and now it had been answered.
She died a queen.
