Who Goes There?

Karl Edward Wagner is one of those recent discoveries for me who sadly I’ve not been able to read a lot more of as of yet, because his works are not exactly easy to find. Wagner is (I’ve been told) arguably the best of the generation of writers to hop on the sword-and-sorcery revival of the late ’60s and early ’70s. He debuted in 1970 with the novel Darkness Weaves with Many Shades…, which was also the first to star his nigh-immortal anti-hero Kane, seemingly based on the Cain of the Bible. In an interview for the fanzine Dagon, Wagner had this to say on his biggest contribution to heroic fantasy:

The idea of Kane came from all the villains that I saw as heroes, derived from reading books, comics and watching movies: the bad gunfighter who would get shot down, who was really faster than the good guy. Good always had to win so I thought I’d write about a villain who always wins. Villains always had to be either like Fu Manchu, or intensely intelligent super scientific geniuses, but they couldn’t really break somebody in half, or else they were big hulking creatures like Rondo Hatton. So I thought what happens if you got the super intelligent villain who could break somebody in half if he wanted to? That’s how Kane came about. He was a villain who was going to win at the end and be smart enough to control the situation when things got bad. If he had to mow down sixty other people he could handle that, that is if he didn’t summon up something supernatural in the process. I thought let’s do something totally all out, and that’s Kane.

“Two Suns Setting” is one of the more notable Kane stories, and even won Wagner his second British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story; the first was for his Lovecraftian horror story (and his most famous story overall) “Sticks.” This also marked Wagner’s first and only appearance in Fantastic, which is weird because you’d think Wagner and Fantastic in the ’70s, when it had become the most high-profile outlet for heroic fantasy, would make a perfect pair. Wagner mostly stuck to fanzines and semi-pros for his stories, which might explain why he’s not as widely read as he should be: few people would’ve been able to read his stuff at the time, but the few who did thought it A+ material. (The fact that he also died young, from severe alcoholism, no doubt helped doom him to obscurity.) He’s probably known more nowadays for his horror stories, which are also highly regarded and which have been reprinted more often than his Kane stories.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1976 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 3 (ed. Lin Carter) and the Wagner collections Night Winds and Midnight Sun: The Complete Stories of Kane.

Enhancing Image

Normally I don’t talk about the quality of a story’s title, but I really like how this one both sets the tone and expectations for the reader. We can infer that the second sun in the title is a metaphorical one—perhaps a person’s life. We immediately get the sense that there will likely be a death in the narrative, but unlike most deaths in heroic fantasy tales which happen to side characters and mooks, this one will be more bitter, more funereal. Since Kane is a recurring protagonist who has something close to immortality we can guess ahead of time that Our Anti-Hero™ will make it out fine—whoever happens to be with him, not so sure. Anyway, about that special power. Obviously there’s a wish-fulfillment element with Kane aging extremely slowly, to the point of living for centuries whilst barely showing any change, but he can be killed. Kane committed some horrible crime in the past, possibly the killing of his brother although this is not told explicitly, that cursed him with a mark, so that passersby would know him by appearance. Even at this early stage in man’s history (the time of Genesis, when it seemed giants and other mythical beings roamed the earth), he has become infamous. At the beginning of the story he had just left Carsultyal, the first great human city, partly because of said infamy and partly out of boredom.

The spirit of discovery, of renaissance that had drawn him to Carsultyal in its earliest years was burned out now, so that boredom, his nemesis, had overtaken Kane once more. To be sure, he had been restless, his thoughts drawn more and more to the world beyond Carsultyal—lands yet to know the presence of man. But that he returned to his pathless wandering without much forethought could be judged in that Kane had left the city with little more than a few supplies, a double handful of gold coins, a fast horse, and a sword of tempered Carsultyal steel.

So Kane traverses the desert, without a clear destination in mind, aside from the immediate need to find food and water; his supplies are running low. Thankfully he comes across a fellow traveler who has set up camp—a giant named Dwasslir. Eighteen feet tall, the giant is cooking an entire mountain goat for himself. “Kane had seen, had spoken with giants in the course of his wanderings, although in recent decades they were seldom encountered.” Indeed, so Dwassllir admits, his race is surely but slowly dwindling—not for any particular reason it seems but, so Dwassllir suspects, the giants, being a race much older than man, have become collectively weary. Humans, still very young, have already built cities and encroached on nature’s domain, bringing civilization into the world. The giants don’t have cities, or much in the way of civilization, but as Dwassllir argues they are accustomed to living off the fat o’ the land; they don’t need civilization. Humans, being small and rather flimsy compared to their much bigger cousins, use civilization as a “crutch,” as the friendly giant says. Kane, who believes wholly in the glory of man despite being cursed, has found a philosophical opponent in the giant.

Even a giant who lives outside man’s domain and who presumably doesn’t have fast internet knows who Kane is simply by looking at him, which proves to be a bit of a problem for the latter. The two strike up something of a friendship, or at least friendly companionship as one would want while traveling, but Kane a) knows that if he pisses the giant off that the big guy could crush his skull with his bare hands like a musclebound bitch could crush a watermelon with her thighs, and b) is intrigued by a certain treasure Dwassllir mentions that he is in search of: the crown of King Brotemllain, an ancient giant ruler. “Although our wars and our kings are all past now, I believe that resurrection of this legendary symbol might unlock some of the old energy and vitality of my people,” says Dwassllir. He has long been in search of the king’s tomb, and thinks he is finally on the verge of holding this no-doubt valuable treasure in his hands—assuming Brotemllain’s tomb has not already been stripped clean by raiders. But then a royal giant’s burial place would have its own unique traps, different from what one would find in tomb built for humans.

The first half or so of the story has no action to speak of, and yet if I had to pick which is my favorite I would say it’s this one. I’m biased, and not given to action scenes much, but it helps also that Wagner is a deeply moody writer, showing a mastery of atmosphere that I had only been able to see in his horror writing prior to this, my first Kane story. I mean this as a compliment when I say “Two Suns Setting” could work as a stage production, since there are only two locations (the desert and later the tomb), two human actors (surely a very tall and muscly actor could convey Dwassllir’s enormity compared to Kane), and while there is some action that we’ll get to in a minute, this is primarily a character- and dialogue-driven narrative. It’s a kind of Socratic dialogue in which the philosophical problem of what constitutes achievement for a civilization is raised, with Kane believing the giants, having very little to show for their troubles in human terms, are a race that will be forgotten once they’ve died out, while Dwassllir thinks his people were once glorious and indeed still have the capacity for glory, despite the humans overtaking them. As if to prove this, Dwassllir will take Brotemllain’s crown, with Kane bearing witness to this moment of glory. It’s possible the giant will not even try selling the crown, but would rather keep it as a memento.

There Be Spoilers Here

Having found the tomb, the companions come pretty close to getting the crown, only for some of the architecture to give way (the tomb is old enough apparently that the stonework has become infirm), with the human and giant becoming separated. Interesting little moment leading up to this is that Kane contemplates murdering Dwassllir and taking the crown for himself, although this thought seems to vanish as suddenly as it had entered his mind. This is a startling passage, and it would be considered an out-of-character moment if not for the reader’s foreknowledge that Kane is capable of committing such a horrific deed and for such a petty reason as this. He’s a bit more of an anti-hero than Conan, who happily partakes in criminal activities but who usually tries to not take the life of innocents, whereas Kane, whether out of pragmatism or a bad mood, could stab an ally of his in the back. Right after this we’re confronted with the “monsters” of the story, as the rockslide has made a gaping hole or “aperture” to the world below. It seems the tomb was built on top of a vast underworld, where creatures live without any sunlight and having for some reason grown to enormous sizes—perhaps befitting a tomb of the giants. (By the way, people meme up Blighttown a lot, but Tomb of the Giants is a contender for the worst area in Dark Souls.) We have rats “the size of jackals,” along with something much more threatening in the form of a massive (and mostly blind) saber-toothed cat.

Kane, at first facing the big kitty alone, would surely have been toast if not for the cat having very poor eyesight, made worse by being unaccustomed to sunlight. Dwassllir comes in for the rescue, and it’s here that we get our obligatory climactic battle, man against beast, giant against giant. The fight itself is particularly badass, but more importantly for me, it clearly means something to one of the combatants. Dwassllir is literally fighting for his life, and so he can get his hands on the crown, but symbolically he’s also fighting this saber-tooth to prove a point to Kane—that the giants, in their prime, fought beasts like these and came out victorious. Even as he’s taking some pretty serious damage, by the end of it being mortally wounded, the giant still comes out seeming like a noble figure, as if he were the deserving successor to the throne on which Brotemllain’s skeleton sits. After crushing the cat’s ribcage and turning its head all the way around in what almost seems like a wrestling maneuver, Dwassllir goes to take what’s his. It’s unclear if this is due to the fact that Dwassllir is clearly dying or if he really was moved by the fight, but while Kane is perfectly capable of taking the crown for himself, he decides to hand it to the giant; he has earned it. It’s a bittersweet ending, made even more so by Kane wondering at the very end of Dwassllir, being already of a dwindling species, is maybe the last remnant of the “age of heroes.” Maybe this marks the end of an era.

A Step Farther Out

It’s almost deceptive in its simplicity. I think what I really liked about “Two Suns Setting,” aside from the beauty of Wagner’s language (especially in the first half of the story), is that it functions perfectly as a short story. It does what Edgar Allan Poe thought a good short story should do, which is provide the reader with a singular experience that’s transformative and yet which can be easily read in one sitting. Despite only taking about an hour or two to read, we come out of the experience feeling like something in the air or in ourselves has changed somehow. It’s essentially a two-act (the first in the desert, the second in the tomb) play starring two guys who not so much act as individuals as represent different states of existential dread. The action is engrossing (a rarity for me, mind you) because Wagner has set up the emotional and thematic stakes in advance, so that we understand the meaning behind the climactic fight beyond the mere physicality of it. And of course anything that gives me the itch to play Dark Souls again must be doing something right.

See you next time.