© Swords and Sorcery Magazine
Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a second short story published in 2023. As with the previous Foster story, The Pyre of Larros, which appeared in print five months ago, this one is featured in Swords and Sorcery Magazine and has as its main character the swordsman Drayak Shathsprey, who seems doomed to get into serious trouble wherever he goes. In The Gibbeting of Azmyre, now available to read in issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, that trouble involves being hired by a shady character to retrieve an insalubrious item – the corpse of an executed criminal, currently hanging on display in a city’s main street.
The idea for The Gibbeting of Azmyre came to me a while back when I started reading the 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel by one of my literary heroines, Daphne du Maurier. This begins with an account of how the narrator, Philip, is brought by his cousin and guardian Ambrose to view the gibbeted body of a murderer. “I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet. His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation. He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.”
Meanwhile, the windswept and snow-scoured city street where the action in The Gibbeting of Azmyre takes place – “its floor a band of flagstones and cobbles carpeted with snow, its walls two towering rows of facades and edifices, spires and turrets, five and six-storeyed townhouses” – was inspired by the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. (Yes, it’s appropriate that I had the Scottish capital in mind while I wrote a story about bodysnatching, although strictly speaking Edinburgh’s two most famous bodysnatchers – Burke and Hare – didn’t actually snatch bodies. They murdered people, and then flogged off their victims’ remains to Dr Robert Knox for vivisection during his anatomy lectures.) The Royal Mile doesn’t experience many snowstorms in these globally-warmed times, but it’s still a challenge to walk along when there’s a stark east wind flaying in from the nearby North Sea.
For the next month, The Gibbeting of Azmyre can be read here, while the main page for issue 138 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is accessible here.