The Seven Altars of Dusarra

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Unfortunately, Garth knew the Baron of Skelleth and his guards would not be so easily swayed. His previous visit to this northernmost outpost of humanity had ended messily, and the Baron had ordered his death, more for being an overman and uncooperative than for any specific crime.

  Of course none of Skelleth’s pitiful guardsmen were likely to try and tackle four overmen; Garth thought it unlikely that the village’s full complement of three dozen would have been a match for his party if he hadn’t insisted his companions be unarmed. They were on a peaceful trading mission, and he was determined to see that it stayed peaceful. For far too long had the overmen of the Northern Waste been dependent upon the sea traders of Lagur, who missed no opportunity to exploit their monopoly; if Garth succeeded in opening a land trade route through Skelleth the monopoly would be broken, and his people would have their first chance at a decent life since the bitter Racial Wars of three centuries earlier—and incidentally Garth would be honored and wealthy, which would be enjoyable.

  The door was open now, and three guardsmen stepped through, blinking in the bright summer sunlight; Garth recognized one of them. The tall one in the steel helmet was Herrenmer, captain of the guard.

  The unknown pair took up their posts, one on either side of the door. Herrenmer, having stationed his men, took a casual glance around, his duty done for the moment. His gaze fell on the overmen and Garth saw him tense. He spoke to his men, but Garth could hear nothing over the noise of the market; then all three started across the square toward the outlanders, Herrenmer in the lead, all three with hands near their swords.

  Garth put down the wolfskin he had been showing to an overweight woman and said, “Larth, keep an eye on my goods while I speak to these men.” He stood and stepped forward to meet the soldiers.

  The trio stopped a dozen paces from the displays; Garth stood halfway between. There was a moment’s pause, then Herrenmer demanded, “What are you doing here?”

  “We have come to trade.”

  “You know that the Baron wants no overmen in Skelleth.”

  “I was aware that he wanted no armed overmen adventurers, an attitude I can fully understand, since such would tend to disturb the peace of your town; but surely he can have no objection to four unarmed traders, whatever their race or nation!” Garth had carefully thought out this little speech in advance, and was pleased to see that it had the desired effect, leaving Herrenmer momentarily confused and speechless. He pressed his advantage.

  “I have heard the Baron himself express dismay at Skelleth’s poverty and lack of trade; surely, then, he will be glad to have a whole new people eager to deal with Skelleth. We have gold and furs and other goods to trade for our needs, which will make Skelleth’s merchants wealthy when sold in the south, where we dare not venture. Surely the Baron cannot object to that, for where the merchants are wealthy the government cannot fail to profit thereby.”

  “I know nothing of that; it is not my concern.” Herrenmer paused, considering, then went on, “I will speak with my lord further about this.” He turned and strode angrily back to the mansion; his two men followed, and when Herrenmer vanished through the still-open door, slamming it behind him, they took up their posts once more.

  Garth watched them go, then turned back toward his companions. Before he could take a step, however, he heard his name called. He stopped and looked about for the source.

  A waving hand caught his eye, and he recognized a man approaching across the market. “Greetings, Saram,” he called.

  “Greetings, Garth,” the man replied.

  Saram was heavily built, of medium height; he wore his hair short and kept his full black beard neatly trimmed, though he claimed it was not from vanity but practicality. When last Garth had seen him, he had worn the mail shirt and short sword of the Baron’s guards, with iron studs in his leather helmet marking him as a lieutenant; now he wore a ragged but clean tunic of gray homespun and went bareheaded. Only the leather pants and heavy boots remained the same.

  He drew up within convenient speaking distance and remarked, “So you have returned as you promised.” His tone was casual, but his green eyes flicked warily about, missing nothing.

  “I have,” Garth answered politely. Saram had done him considerable good when last he was in Skelleth by refusing to attempt to kill him.

  “The old man said you would.” Saram’s eyes focused on Garth’s face as he spoke.

  The overman shrugged, his face impassive, and said nothing.

  “I had my doubts, but here you are. Where is your warbeast? I was sure you’d bring it if you came.” Saram glanced idly about.

  “It’s hidden nearby. I saw no need to frighten your townspeople.”

  “Wise of you, no doubt. And you brought friends with you this time.”

  “Companions, rather; I am not myself adept at the ways of buyer and seller, so I brought the master trader Galt, his apprentice Tand, and my double-cousin Larth.” He pointed out each of the other overmen as he named them; young Tand and stolid Larth did not notice, but Galt nodded in acknowledgment.

  “Pleased to meet them all, I’m sure. Gods, what are those?” This last was in response to glimpsing the yackers, just visible from where he stood.

  Garth was startled. “Yackers. Don’t you know them?” He glanced down the alley at the great beasts of burden, which stood quietly meditating, safely out of the bustle of business.

  “No. I never heard of them.” Saram stared at them momentarily, then turned back to the overman and said, “Garth, I have a message for you. The old man wants to talk to you.”

  Garth replied, “I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “No? He claims to have a proposition for you.”

  “I am not interested; when last I made a bargain with him it resulted in nothing but deaths and difficulties.”

  “Just as your agreement with the Baron did him little good,” Saram said smiling crookedly. “Yet you expect him to listen to your explanations about your renewed presence in his domain.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Garth said, “Your point is made. I will hear the King out. Where is he?”

  “Need you ask?”

  “No. A moment, then.” He turned and called to his companions, “I have an errand; Galt, you take charge here.” Then to Saram he said, “Come on,” and the pair ambled off across the market square.

  Their goal was an ancient tavern called the King’s Inn, though no one knew of any connection between the inn and any recognized monarch; it stood on an alley that had once been but a few steps from the village market, but which had been cut off and left to die when the first Baron of Skelleth erected his mansion across the north side of the square, leaving no opening to the streets beyond. The alley, now accessible only by a winding route through the maze of byways that made up most of Skelleth, had sunk into a state of decay and filth unequaled throughout the known lands; yet the King’s Inn remained an island of comfort amid the surrounding squalor and retained a steady clientele. Among its regular patrons, so regular in fact that he had never been seen outside its walls, was a strange old man, so very old that none remembered a time when he had not been there daily, crouched silently over his corner table. This man Garth knew as the Forgotten King, having been given this title for him by the Wise Women of Ordunin, but the townspeople had no name for him at all. Until the overman first came, some three months earlier, few ever spoke to him, fewer received an answer, and none sought him out; but in recent days, since being expelled from the Baron’s guards for insubordination, Saram had spent many hours sitting at his table, trying to coax him into conversation and receiving only a few cryptic words for his trouble. Among those few words were instructions that when—not if, but when—Garth returned, Saram should bring him immediately to speak with the mysterious ancient.

  Saram led the way through the stinking streets, fortunately dry from the recent lack of rain, and Garth followed, his reluctance concealed by the casual stroll he affected. The slanting sunl
ight had not yet made its way past the upper story of the inn in its slow daily crawl down the building’s sagging half-timbered façade; the ordure that lined the alley was still hidden by shadow, but its smell was not so easily to be concealed, and not for the first time Garth marveled that humans could live with it. He held his breath as he and Saram picked their way to the door and wiped their feet on the stone step before entering.

  The tavern’s interior was a welcome change from the filth of the alley; not so much as a speck of dust marred the ancient floor, worn by centuries of shuffling feet into a subtle wooden landscape of low hills and gentle valleys that showed clearly that its furnishings had not shifted nor its patrons changed their habits in many a long year. Each table crowned a hillock, each chair rested in wide grooves cut by the dragging of its legs. The great barrels of ale and wine that lined the western wall loomed above flooring so stained and worn that Garth wondered how it still held—he had no way of seeing the thickness of wood beneath, but only that this most popular part of the room had a good two inches less floor remaining than elsewhere. The slate hearth that stretched along half the eastern wall before the vast cavernous fireplace showed little wear, being harder stuff than the soft floorboards; curiously, the ancient stair that crossed the back wall had only the slightest indentation in each tread. Plainly, it was as a tavern rather than an inn that the establishment survived, since those stairs were the only access to the rooms upstairs.

  Though every inch of the room was clearly old, worn, and well-used, none could ever think it deserted for it was spotlessly clean, save for the oft-scrubbed stains left by centuries of spilled wine. The morning sun had not yet climbed high enough to pour unchecked through the polished and age-purpled windows, yet the brass fittings on the barrels gleamed dully, the stacked mugs of pewter and china and glass glistened on their shelves, the blackened hearth shone dimly. The only spots of uncleanliness were two drunken farmers adorning opposite sides of a small table near the door, clad in dirty gray homespun, with greasy hair and smudged faces, who slouched forward muttering to one another. The innkeeper, though a plump middle-aged man wearing a well-stained apron, gave the impression not of disarray, but like his tavern, of well-worn comfort. The room’s only other occupant, sitting alone in the corner between chimneypiece and stair, seemed somehow beyond such mundane concerns as cleanliness.

  It was this lone figure that Garth and Saram were interested in. The innkeeper watched apprehensively as the pair entered and crossed the room, and twice opened his mouth to protest their presence, but each time lost his nerve and remained silent. When they had seated themselves across from the old man, he gradually relaxed and returned to his task of polishing mugs that already showed a flawless silken sheen; but he polished the same mug for a good fifteen minutes with short, nervous strokes, and cast frequent glances at the overman who had intruded upon the peace of his place of business.

  For a moment after they had settled in their chairs neither Garth nor Saram spoke; they considered the strange figure across from them, who sat motionlessly, seemingly oblivious of their presence.

  The old man whom Ordunin’s oracles had called the Forgotten King wore tattered yellow rags from head to foot, and despite the summer warmth he kept them wrapped tightly about him, his cloak closed and his hood up, so that its shadows hid much of his face. A long, scraggly white beard reached down across his sunken chest, and what could be seen of his hands and face was skin as dry and wrinkled as that of a mummy, with as little evidence of anything between skin and bone. His eyes were lost in darkness; in all their conversations with him neither Garth nor Saram had ever seen his eyes, and only on the rarest occasions had either so much as caught a glimmer of light from them. The shadows gave the illusion that he had no eyes, but only empty sockets; perhaps that, more than anything else, was why generations of taverngoers had seen fit to leave him sitting alone and unmolested.

  Garth studied him, but saw nothing he had not seen before. Garth was a typical member of his species in most respects, and as such he was not particularly good at recognizing human faces or reading emotion in them; still, there was something about the Forgotten King’s face that made him uneasy. He shifted in his chair, which creaked beneath his weight. He was out of proportion with his surroundings in a tavern designed for mere men; he towered above the others, his natural height of near seven feet augmented by a woolen trader’s hat that not only shaded his red-eyed, sunken-cheeked horror of a face, but hid a steel half-helmet. Peaceful mission or no, Garth was given to caution; despite his orders to his companions and hiding most of his armor and weaponry with his warbeast, his flowing brown cloak concealed a sturdy mail shirt, and a stiletto lurked in his right boot-top—the latter a precaution that was incidentally rather uncomfortable, as its hilt, though safely hidden by his leggings and the sparse black fur that adorned his leathery hide, chafed when he walked.

  He studied the old man, but said nothing.

  Beside him Saram glanced from the overman to the King and back again, his finger poking idly at a small circle of mismatched wood in the table-top—a circle that was the sawn-off shaft of a crossbow bolt Saram had fired at Garth, on the Baron’s orders, during Garth’s previous stay in Skelleth. The overman had used the table as a makeshift shield, and the barbed quarrel had proven impossible to remove, so that the innkeeper had cut it off and sanded it down to blend with the oak.

  After a moment, when it appeared that neither Garth nor the old man was willing to speak first, the ex-soldier cleared his throat and said, “I have brought Garth here, as you asked.”

  The old man nodded very slightly, but gave no other sign that he was aware of the presence of others at his table.

  There was another pause, this one briefer than the first. It was broken when the overman finally announced, “I am here at your request. Speak, then, and tell me what you want of me. I have business to attend to.”

  The old man spoke, in a voice like the rustling of long-dead leaves. “Garth, I would have you serve me further.”

  The overman suppressed the shudder that ran through him at the sound of that voice; he had heard it before, but it was something that one could not truly remember—or want to remember. He replied, “I have no desire to serve you, nor any person other than myself.”

  The Forgotten King raised his head slightly and spoke again. “There are very few in these waning years of the Thirteenth Age who are fit to serve me. I do not care to wait for another.”

  “That may be; I do not deny that you may have uses for me. But why should I serve you? You offer me nothing, and I have little cause to trust you after the outcome of my last venture in your service.”

  “What would you have?”

  “I would have nothing of you but to be left alone. When you promised me fame, my service yielded nothing but a dozen deaths and much trouble to no purpose.”

  “I did not slight you.”

  “Is my fame then so great? I see little evidence of it, old man.”

  “Did you then fulfill your service to me with a single trial?”

  “No. I saw my folly after the single trial and went home.”

  “Yet you have returned, upon my advice.”

  Garth paused. That much was true; it had been the Forgotten King who pointed out the possibility of trade through Skelleth and its potential benefits.

  “What of it? I did you a service, and you paid me with a simple suggestion I should have thought of for myself—but did not, I admit. We are even, then. I have no wish to serve you further. Hire Saram, here!”

  Saram was startled out of his silence. “I? Oh, no; I am no adventurer.”

  The Forgotten King ignored Saram and said, “Is there then nothing that you seek, Garth? Are you content with your lot?”

  There was a moment of silence; Garth contemplated the shadowed face while Saram looked back and forth, and neither could see where the old man’s gaze fell. Finally the overman admitted slowly, “No, I am not content. I still seek what in trut
h I sought before; I want to know that I am not insignificant, not merely a meaningless mote in an uncaring cosmos. I sought eternal fame because it seemed to me that that was as close as I could come to making a real difference, and my nearest approach to immortality. I see little point in wealth or power or glory that will last only so long as I live. What, then, can you offer me? I no longer feel that the promise of undying fame will suffice to comfort me; can you offer more?”

  “Under the proper circumstances I can give you whatever you want. If you fear death, I can promise you life to the end of time. If you seek to give your life a significance beyond the norm, then we are at one, for it is to work a fundamental change in the nature of our world that I seek your aid.”

  There was another moment of silence; then Garth asked, “What is this change you seek? You speak around your purpose. When I served you before you had me fetch you the basilisk and would not say why you wanted it; was it for this same mysterious goal?”

  “My goal is unchanged.” The harsh monotone of the old man’s voice was likewise unchanged, but his head sank slightly, deepening the shadows that hid his face.

  Garth sat back, considering. He had concluded, after much thought, that the Forgotten King’s use for the basilisk—a use for which it had proven inadequate—included the old man’s own death. He had no idea why the ancient would want to die; had he perhaps wearied of his long life? Nor had he any idea why a single old man should have difficulty in dying should he choose to do so, yet it was indisputable that he had survived whatever he had done with the basilisk. Perhaps, Garth thought, he had somehow misinterpreted previous events, for how could one lonely old man’s suicide have cosmic repercussions?

  That assumed, of course, that the old man spoke the truth. It was possible that he was indeed under some sort of curse of immortality which he hoped to break with Garth’s aid—and dead men are under no obligation to fulfill their promises, so that he would offer whatever the overman wanted, knowing that he would never have to pay.