A Hero Born

by Michael A. Stackpole

  In the middle came the heavier but straight-bladed weapons. Broadswords, longsword and greatswords, their grips varying from short for the smaller blades up to thick and long enough to wrap two hands around them for the heaviest. Although best suited to crushing blows, especially against foes in heavy armor, their thrusting points did make them appropriate for limited amounts of dueling.

  Nearest the door, however, I found the swords most suited to me and to the city. With slender blades of well-tempered steel, the rapiers varied in length from three to five feet. I knew, being as small as 1 was, that the shorter blade would make me overly vulnerable to anyone with a longer reach. While the tallest of the blades might more than make up for that advantage in a foe, I knew the long blade would be too clumsy for me to best a skilled enemy.

  I reached for a swept-hilted sword of medium length and slid it from its scabbard. The sword felt perfect in my hand and hissed through the air as 1 flipped it around in a couple of experimental cuts. The balance put sufficient weight in my hand to let me control the blade with ease, yet left enough heft in the blade itself so a slash could carry through a light leather jerkin.

  This was the weapon for me. As I slid the leather scabbard back onto it, watching the blade fill it like bones filling an empty snakeskin, a shiver ran down my spine. The sword I had chosen was the one 1 had used the night before. It was the one nearest the door, and I realized it had been placed there deliberately to come to hand easily.

  Apparently my father truly did possess the foresight all the tales had credited to him.

  1 slid my belt through the loops on the scabbard’s harness and refastened it around my waist. The blade hung perfectly at my left hip, and I practiced a quick flip of the cloak back from my left shoulder so I could draw the sword with my right hand. My hand fell to the hilt as easily as breathing, and I smiled. No country bumpkin was I to be accosted by city ruffians.

  By the time I returned to the kitchen Nob had finished my bowl of porridge, but Rose had just started in on him for wanting “his” bowl as well. Marija and I quickly headed out of doors to avoid the domestic tiff, though I gathered it was more a game than a true fight, and mentioned that to Marija.

  “Ah, you noticed. Yes, they love each other, but seem to get a great deal of enjoyment out of battling like that. Rose rules with an iron fist in the house, but she defers to Nob for anything outside those four walls.”

  “Not unlike your little matches with Kit.”

  Marija’s eyes flashed as her head jerked around. “Master Christoforos and I are not in love, Master Lachlan.”

  “Locke, please, or 1 start calling you Missy Marija.” Steaming breath trailed from my mouth as we left my grandmother’s courtyard and stepped into the street. “Were your antics with Kit measured against the yardstick of Rose and Nob, I’d have to judge you a couple bound by long years.”

  “It might seem that, but our fighting is more the teasing of brothers and sisters, I think. I do not know that for certain, however. Do you not engage in verbal sparring with your brothers?”

  I smiled, remembering them, then shook my head. “Not that often. Dalt is not a man of many words, and Geoff is quick enough that I would be the loser in any battle of wits with him. I take it, though, from what you said, you have known Kit for a long time, and you have no siblings. How long have you known Kit?”

  She turned her face from me and looked farther up the road. “Since before I can remember, actually. I have lived in your grandmother’s house for just shy twenty years. I was even there when you first came to the house.”

  “But you would have been …”

  “A wee babe. That is true; I was.” She smiled slightly. “My father, Seoirse, was a lieutenant to your father. He had served in the Valiant Lancers and proved himself intelligent and resourceful. Cardew, Driscoll, and my father got on famously. In fact, your father and uncle all but adopted my father as the younger brother they never had. And when I came along, well, my mother often told me of the wonderful celebration thrown by your father for my naming.”

  I smiled at the laughter in her voice. “The party last night doubtless paled in comparison.”

  “As my mother told it, even the Emperor’s Ball would seem but a drink hoisted between friends compared to this feast. At one point your father looked at me and said 1 was the most beautiful baby he’d ever seen. He added that if his wife chanced to die before he did, he’d seek me out and make me his new bride.” She glanced down at the ground. “My mother, may the gods safekeep her soul, was very proud of that.”

  “I learned earlier this morning my father possessed foresight, but now 1 must think of him as being as clairvoyant as Xoayya.”

  Marija nodded as we passed onto Butcher’s Row. She kept toward the center of the street to avoid the iced-over puddles. I followed closely to catch her if she slipped, but she negotiated the iciest part without trouble, then crossed to a wooden boardwalk on the east side of the street.

  The majority of the buildings in this particular section of the city had been built of wood. Given the differences in architectural style between these buildings and my grandmother’s house, I decided they were much newer than my grandmother’s. 1 assumed these double-story boxes had been put up to replace buildings destroyed by some calamity or other. The buildings felt alien to me, as if they did not really belong here.

  As 1 walked at Marija’s side, a feeling of dread cored a hole through my stomach. “Seoirse accompanied my father and uncle on their last expedition into Chaos, did he not?”

  She nodded mutely. “My mother was crushed when the Valiant Lancers did not return. We were left in utter poverty. Your grandmother tried to take us in, but my mother refused to accept charity. Your grandmother countered by hiring her to be a live-in nurse for Christoforos, as his mother had died of childbed fever when bearing him three years earlier.”

  “So you were raised together?” 1 had to shout my question as a dray wagon clattered past us, and stray curs barked at the horses.

  “Fought like cats and dogs. We refined our battling into the civilized form you have seen because my mother thought it disrespectful for me to fight with Kit.” Marija smiled as an embarrassed blush added yet more color to her rosy cheeks. “1 think she hoped Kit and I would fall in love and marry someday.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “What, and ruin a perfectly workable friendship? Despite what you have seen, Kit and I are able to confide in each other, and woe be to anyone who chooses to attack one of us because he will find us side by side in any fight.” I started laughing, and her hot-eyed stare spitted me like a rabbit on a spear. “What is it?”

  “Nothing, really, but I think you know exactly what it is to have a brother. Dalt and I do not get along at all, but I remember when some of the cooper’s boys decided they wanted to beat someone up, and I was their target. They’d surrounded me and had taken turns seeing who could punch me the hardest when Dalt waded into them all fists and feet and fire in his eyes. Thrashed the lot of them.”

  A smile softened her face. “You are very lucky to have Dalt for a brother.”

  “That was what I was thinking at the moment, but then he gave me a cuff or two for having been stupid enough to have been trapped in that situation.”

  Butcher’s Row went slightly up a hill, then curved to the right, where it became Jewelpath Road. Here, likewise, the buildings were made up mostly of wood, but they all started from a solid first story of stone, so they felt more familiar to me. Marija stopped at one tiny place with a high stone arch over a narrow doorway. A mortar and pestle hung from the keystone, making it easily identified as an apothecary.

  We squeezed in past two old women swaddled in enough cloth to make both of them as thick as trolls. I heard snatches of gossip pass between them, but as I heard no names I recognized, I let their droning voices drift into the background. Not only did I not have a real taste for gossip, but the shop itself held more than enough to keep my attention occupied for a l
ifetime.

  The walls on either side rose up two full stories and had built into them countless wooden drawers. Ladders fitted to a cast-iron track at the top and bottom of the wall rolled along to provide access to the upper drawers. Hanging down from the blocky support beams bridging the space beneath the arched roof, dried plants, bones, and one or two arcane devices I did not recognize filled the room’s middle reaches. Down on the floor level, aside from three casks of pickled vegetables along the far wall, a display of two standing chests—each of which brimmed with enough drawers to make it a simulacrum of the walls—took up all the floor space excepting a narrow pathway toward a counter in the corner.

  “Good morning to you, m’lady Marija,” the thickset man behind the counter happily greeted her. “You would be wanting more of Lady Evadne’s tonic, I would guess.”

  “Correct, Goodman Birger.” Marija turned toward me. “I would also like to introduce to you Master Lachlan, one of Lady Evadne’s grandsons from Garik.”

  The apothecary offered me his meaty right arm, and I grasped it firmly. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Goodman. Please called me Locke.”

  “And you, Master Locke.” His smile forced his cheeks to widen his face enough to partially eclipse his ears. “1 will have more of that tonic for you in a moment or two.”

  I had seen, from the rank badge sewn on the breast of his yellow tunic that he was a Chemist. This meant he was the rough equivalent of my grandfather’s being a Bladesmaster. As he moved from drawer to drawer, he pulled out pinches of this, or great hunks of that. He piled each ingredient on a white marble table beside a mortar and pestle made of some gray stone 1 did not recognize.

  “1 have seen my grandmother take this tonic, and it does seem to enliven her, but 1 was wondering what is wrong with her?”

  The florid-faced man’s smile lessened a bit. “She has the disease that will be the death of us all, save those who go as your father did.” He shook his head. “She is old, and her heart is not quite as strong as it once was. This tonic eases some pains, reduces some swellings, and makes it easier for her heart to do its job.”

  I frowned. “If her heart is the problem, could not a magicker use his art to make her heart strong again?”

  Birger turned from the mixing table and planted both of his hands on the counter. The look he gave me was serious, yet I sensed no anger in him. Instead he reminded me of Audin preparing to lecture me on some point of swordsmanship I had clearly misunderstood.

  “Magick, my boy, has its limitations. So does your understanding of it—unless, of course, you’ve spent time studying it and are hiding your rank badges.”

  I shook my head and noticed, to my mortification, that Marija seemed amused by my being lectured.

  “Now if you were cut in a fight and you went to a magicker and he spelled your wound shut, you’d think yourself healed, wouldn’t you? Of course you would, but you would be wrong. The first thing you have to learn about magick is that almost anything done by magick can be undone by it—and there are times the undoing magick carries only a fraction of the power of the spell it undoes. When you have a wound spelled well, what the magick does is to knit you back together long enough for your body to repair itself. Yes, it might even speed the healing process, but if dispelled, you’d be in the same fix you were in before the first spell was cast.”

  “Less any healing my body had done?”

  “Smart lad. Now, in your grandmother’s case, there just is no cure for aging. There is no way for the body to heal itself. To be certain, spells might work to do the things this elixir will do, but this combination of herbs and things works in a manner too complex for spells to mimic easily.”

  He went back to the mixing table and carefully added the ingredients to his mortar. He splashed in some water, then mumbled something as he picked up his pestle and pressed it down into the mix. Grinding and stirring, he blended the tonic’s parts into a smooth syrup that he repeatedly diluted with more and more water.

  As he worked I saw the grayish mortar shift color, it brightened slightly as if the elixir was leaching color from it. I knew instantly that he was using magick to create the tonic, but I did nothing to interrupt him as he continued mixing and talking to himself. When he finally tapped the pestle clean on the edge of the mortar and reached for a bottle and funnel, I asked another question.

  “You said magick would not help my grandmother, yet you used magick to create her medicine. How is that, especially given that you are not ranked in the ways of magick?”

  “1 am not skilled in the ways of magick, but the Sorcerer who created this mortar and pestle was. By speaking precise instructions over it, 1 am able to condense the work of weeks into a few minutes. This tonic, for example, would require long steeping and repeated distillations to produce without magick. And to answer the question in your mind, no, dispelling the magick now would not return this to its component parts. At best a spell cast during the mixing could stop the brewing in the middle, but what was crushed would remain crushed and what was wet would still be sopping.”

  The Chemist poured the tonic into the bottle and stoppered it with a bit of cork. “There you go, Miss Marija.”

  Marija took the bottle and placed a gold Imperial on the counter, but Birger waved it off. “No, I’ll not be hearing of Lady Evadne paying for this batch. Tell her it is my Bear’s Eve gift to her.” Marija frowned, but Birger perched his fists on his wide hips and clearly would brook no argument.

  “Then the warmth of the season be upon you and yours, Goodman Birger.”

  “Likewise, m’lady.” Birger looked past me toward the two women by the door. “Triona, leave off gossiping like a fishwife and meet Master Locke, Lady Evadne’s grandson.”

  The woman nearest me turned and snarled at Birger. “We are not gossiping, husband mine, but discussing what happened down in Old Town. You remember how it was said the baker there, Bald Ugo, was a member of the Black Church?” Triona thrust her face forward in a challenge to Birger, but being between them, I felt uneasy.

  “Unproved tripe, lies spread by Jurik because Ugo had more customers.”

  “Well then, how come is it, that this morning the Emperor’s constabulary forced its way into the shop when it had not opened for two days and began to stink bad? When they went in, or so it is told, they found a trapdoor leading down to a hidden cellar. There they found Black Church things, and Ugo’s whole family dead.”

  “Dead?” I heard myself ask quietly.

  Triona nodded, her dark eyes glittering like stars. “Worse than dead, Master Locke. Carved up. Carved up by something horrid that opened them like a fisherman gutting his catch. And, mind you, lad, it ate most of what it caught, too.”

  10

  D

  espite the festive nature of the season, the news of the murders in Old Town was a topic of fascination for most folks in the capital. Throughout the rest of the week 1 heard the story repeated and embellished to the point where a whole congregation of Black Churchers had died when they summoned Fialchar from his sanctum in Chaos, and he was displeased with their efforts. The manner of death of Bald Ugo and his family also varied, from the bodies being desiccated into parchment skeletons to their having been reduced to puddles of boneless flesh that begged to die.

  In very short order the whole incident became wrapped in a fabric of fantasy that could have made me think it all a fable. If Triona’s version of it had not painted an image into which I could slip the person of a Bfiarasfiadi sorcerer, I would have refused to believe any of it, I think. Kit, who heard his own versions of the story, did not comment on it overmuch, but told me enough to keep my wild speculations alive.

  Despite the story’s seeming confirmation of my dream, I stuck with my decision to keep it to myself. Kit and his people had chased the creature back toward the city and, apparently, were involved in a search for signs of it within the capital, so they didn’t need the distraction. Moreover, Kit already knew it could use magick, and he had s
een enough evidence of what it could do to link Bald Ugo’s death with it if facts warranted that linkage. What 1 had to offer was a bad dream that clothed itself in bits and pieces of stories I had heard as a child.

  I could not imagine the Warlord not already working on the worst-case scenario—namely that the creature was a sorcerer with a mission to perform in the capital. Try as I might to spy out clues to what was being done, I saw no signs of extra preparedness or caution. Then again, not having been in Herakopolis before, 1 had no way of judging if any special precautions had been taken or not.

  The holiday season in the capital lasted longer than it did in Stone Rapids and seemed more powerful. Whereas in the village where 1 had spent my entire life to this point we would prepare gifts for our kin and close friends in anticipation of the single Bear’s Eve celebration, here parties appeared to be as much a part of the season as snow and ice. As the days shortened and the night grew toward the longest it could possibly be, the festive atmosphere became frenzied, and I found myself quite caught up in it.

  James took me to a tailor the afternoon of the day Marija and I ventured out. In that shop I was measured every which way and that, then shown countless fabrics from all corners of the Empire. Because the invitation for the Emperor’s Ball had specified white and silver as the dominant colors, with an accent color allowed for each person, the patterns and weaves and fabrics themselves became important to create the proper social image.

  The tailor steered me away from anything heavy with a sniffed, “They do have fireplaces in the palace, m’lord.” We settled on a tunic of silver silk with a quilted cotton jacket and cotton pants that 1 could tuck into the top of my boots. The tailor suggested I choose a green ribbon for my accent color to match my eyes and that 1 have it run up the sleeves and down the legs of my suit.