He made his living a while as a wizard, though his weapons were never far from his side. The justiciars of Purpure knew him as a sellsword guard. They would not be looking for him amid eldritch smokes and a gallery of reptilian skulls. Props, of course, for the magic of his home hills had been much closer to stock and stone, water and wind, than to the mannered incantations of the great schoolmen. Still, no one in a place such as High Canton, built on drama and cocksure display, would place faith in a wizard whose spells were quietly crafted from roots and colored clays and dank tinctures of leaves and flowers.
Horn paid his dues to the local Collegium. He wore the expected robe of midnight blue embroidered with silver sigils. And he quietly, so quietly, sought out older wizards sunken into their square-walled dens like urban hermit crabs and truckled from them one by one the secrets of their craft. His stock in trade was the learnings he’d acquired at the far edges of the sea, or sometimes his hill-and-hedge magic disguised with the endorsement of distance. Even more quietly, he worked his body, running across the lava fields and among the boiling sulfur pits. No one from High Canton went to those places except the occasional slavemaster. There Horn could battle imaginary demons and past foes, stretching his sword arm and pushing his muscles past the burn.
The work of maintaining two such separate sets of skills sometimes made him feel like two men. The reward was that he yet lived when others around him had died.
Justice from Purpure finally did come seeking him. Horn set fire to the Tower of Bears and Swans, took up his fattened spellbook—still written on bark and leaves as he had first been taught—and sent himself far away in a blaze of magic that very nearly snuffed the flames around him as it drew in power.
He woke to the barmaid pouring water on his face. Horn blinked the stuff out of his eyes, glad at the least that she had not dunked him in scrumpy. Men had gone blind for less.
“Enough for you,” she said, her voice low and growling. “Three days at the bowl and you’re still alive. ’Tis a miracle no one should be forced to witness.”
Horn rolled away from her, pressing his face into the tabletop until splinters plucked at his lips. “I’ve witnessed too much,” he mumbled. In the corner of his vision the barmaid moved, but she was different. More graceful. More powerful.
With a sudden sense of panic, he slapped at his vest. The weight of fate still hung there. Its silk was clammy and close now.
“I ain’t taken it yet.”
He tilted his head to look at her more closely—how did she know?—but the barmaid was walking away.
And she had grown distinctly prettier. He certainly wasn’t any more drunk.
Magic, the blessed curse that gnaws at the soul and leaves a void in the mind into which too much that is alien and deadly can settle.
He’d known women beautiful enough to have launched entire navies for the sake of their faces. He’d known women who looked like the wrong end of an old sergeant after a hard day’s training. But there had been only one Manxinnaea.
Her nose was bulbous and slightly crooked. Her eyes were the brown of a good businesswoman, as was her hair. No one would have mistaken her for a courtesan, which she wasn’t; or royalty, which she was.
But she smelled like heaven, and she moved like a cat in a granary, and her attention focused as powerfully as any wizard’s could ever hope to. Manxinnaea had been Horn’s only love in life. When they had betrayed one another, something inside his heart had died.
Why was he thinking of her now? Fool, fool, fool. The barmaid had cast the oldest spell of all on him, a cantrip requiring only alcohol, sorrow, and time.
Wet and blinking, Horn stumbled away from the table to find the outhouse somewhere between the kitchen and the stables. The sun stabbed his eyes like a shining assassin. The air smelled odd, though after a moment he realized it was just fresh, or at least fresher than the fug within the tavern.
The world tugged at him like a child on its mother’s skirt. Horn did what he came for and ignored the rest. The reeking darkness of the tavern held room for his doubts and the slow banishment of his memory.
Milieu
The old man’s skin was the color of walnuts, and so wrinkled and scarred it very nearly could have served him as armor. Horn had no intention of testing that assumption. He was here on different errands.
He had reached the Temple of Winds near the peak of Mount Eponymous, on the Lost Island of Ee. Not so lost, in truth, for anyone could book passage out of half a dozen ports in the southern extents of the Starfall Sea. Assuming a captain was willing to brave contrary winds and little chance of profitable trade to carry a lubber into seething waters.
Sometimes the name was everything. Romance, danger, a hint of riches. Or perhaps just a gigantic angle-sided building with hundreds of windows very nearly on the edge of a smoking crater from which a sullen red glow could sometimes be seen at night.
He’d approached the temple by climbing the Path of Ten Thousand Steps. Being who he was, Horn had counted. There were only 4,238 steps. Again, the name was everything. The Temple of Winds could have held hundreds of acolytes, priests, worshipers, and servants, but in point of fact he’d wandered the worm-haunted wooden hallways and galleries with their peeling murals for the better part of a day before locating anyone.
“You’re not the chandler,” the old man had said on first spotting Horn. He’d spoken Kyrie, the common language of traders and slaves all along these waters, but with an accent reminiscent of the hieratical tongues of distant Khappas.
“No,” Horn replied. “I am a seeker of wisdom.”
The old man squinted, taking in Horn’s scars, motley head of fire-scarred hair, and ropy muscles. “Looks like you haven’t found it yet, or you’d have learned to stay out of trouble.” He wheezed with asthmatic laughter at his own wit.
Horn shrugged. His skin was less tortured than his host’s. “Trouble finds me. I end it, one way or another.”
Another snort from the old man. Then: “We have wisdom in great supply here. Libraries full of it, scrolls stacked a hundred high. Were you looking for any particular sort of wisdom?”
Ignoring the sneer in the old man’s voice, Horn carefully offered the answer he’d been working through for weeks, months even, since embarking on this particular journey. “I have gained power and lost purpose as I have traveled through my life. I come to you seeking direction, which is, of course, the cardinal characteristic of the wind.”
“Actually, the wind mostly just blows,” the old man muttered. “It cares not for direction.”
“Yet here is where you stand against the wind and watch the world,” Horn replied.
Something gleamed in the old man’s eyes. “Our secrets are not so secret, are they?”
“You are the rumor in a dozen ports, and the whisper in half a hundred more.” That was almost true.
“Come, then. I will show you our world-watching. Then you can decide if you really wish to ask for direction here.”
“The ship on which I hired passage will not be back for at least three weeks,” Horn said. “I may as well learn something in the meantime.”
“A practical man, I see.”
At nearly forty years of age, Horn hoped he’d learned something from life. He followed without comment.
The temple’s paucity of acolytes and servants showed in the dust and grime lining the hallways. Elaborate doorways carved from teak or mahogany punctuated their progress. Their friezes were cracked and split from a lack of polishing. Red pillars lining the corridors were fading to a dusky melon color, streaked with smoke. Most of the lamps were not only unlit, but also in obvious disrepair.
It was like seeing a great lady of some earlier generation reduced to face paint and ill-fitting dresses. Horn could appreciate what this temple had once been, and might someday be again if it found patrons and worshipers.
Eventually they arrived at an enormous open space that rose through all the nine stories of the temple. It was like a high, wo
oden cave. Each level had a railing carved and painted to represent old battles between gods and monsters, though these were now as cracked and faded as everything else. Five stories below, at the bottom, the floor was occupied by an enormous map.
Horn stared down at it. He realized he was seeing the Starfall Sea at the center of the map, but there were countries and waters beyond its borders that he’d never known of. It was magnificently detailed, as if he looked down upon the world itself.
That thought made him consider how the hairs on his neck prickled. Slowly, Horn realized he was looking down upon the world itself, at least in a sense.
“The wind sees everything, sooner or later,” the old man said softly beside him. “It carries word and deed across rivers and mountains and oceans.”
Breath stuttered in Horn’s throat. “Here, you listen to the songs it sings.”
“Listen and take note.”
He studied the map. “That is not a work of hand, is it?”
“Prayer and study and ancient miracles bound into place.” The old man grasped Horn’s arm with a grip of iron. “Far greater men than you have come to steal the secrets of how we do this thing.”
“I come to steal nothing. Only to ask.” Horn had the distinct impression that if he looked hard enough, he’d find the Lost Island, and the Temple of Winds, and a great gallery with two men looking down.
He could see every place he’d ever be able to reach in his lifetime. That thought made Horn feel very small indeed.
After a while, the old man spoke again. “Most don’t want to see what lies before them.”
“I have fought,” Horn said distantly. “Fought with sword and spell. I have been the red knight of slaughter. I have called down fire upon my enemies. I have killed half a hundred men, countless orcs and goblins, and dozens of stranger enemies. I can magic the fish from their shadowed realms alongside the riverbanks, and I can face down an army if I find it needful. I know what lies behind me. Seeing what lies before can guide my steps in new paths.”
“Or the oldest ones.” Another grip of the arm, this more of a friendly tug. “Come with me. It’s nearly time to eat. You stay here too long, you will lose yourself in the map.”
A dozen monks gathered in a corner of what had once been an enormous refectory. The kitchens beyond were dark and quiet, their great clay ovens with the dragon mouths long gone cold, or even cracked. Iron pots hung like the helmets of ogres in those old shadows.
These men had made a stew in a warming fireplace in the dining area itself. They gathered around the one surviving table from what must have once been scores of tables. All were as old or older than Horn’s guide, and all shared the man’s hard-used air. They seemed more like veteran warriors than elderly clerics.
His appearance caused no comment at all. Clearly they’d known he was here. Some signal passed silently between them? Or perhaps just the wisdom of anyone who knows his own house well.
Horn took a bowl, shallow and oblong with tiny feet beneath, then followed his old man’s example of scooping out a ladle or two of the stew, along with a piece of flatbread still steaming from its own little pot-oven in the fire. Each monk had brought his own spoon, so Horn just slurped from the bowl.
A minute or two later, he realized that all the bowls were the tops of skulls, carefully sealed and lacquered. No one else seemed to care, so Horn kept his own counsel. The dead did not worry him overmuch. Besides which, he had not killed the people whose heads these were. They would not haunt him.
They ate in silence, except for the occasional grunt or raised eyebrow. Horn got the impression of a conversation taking place. One that had long since transcended the need for words. He maintained his own silence out of politeness as well as a sense of caution.
As the bowls were set aside, one by one the monks came to sit before Horn. Each spent a few minutes studying his face from a close distance. A quiet staring, intense, strange. As if his future were being read from the bones beneath his skin.
After their study, the monks one by one nodded at him, then nodded at his guide, then drifted off into the dusty shadows of the Temple of Winds.
Finally only Horn and his monk remained together in the refectory. He felt a distinct sense of abandonment. Like a ship drawn up on a beach, left to woodworms and dry rot. Or, indeed, this building.
“Paths,” the old man finally said. Shrewd calculation crossed his face. Horn was certain that was a deliberate display.
Finally, Horn spoke up for himself. “I had purpose once.”
“You would do better to petition the Raven Queen”
Horn shrugged. “Where would I find Raven Queen? With her demense in Lethrna, she cannot be found ensconced within a temple, or in the mumbling prayers of priests.”
The monk nodded. “Fair enough. But neither does the wind care for your purpose and your future. As soon inquire of the tides, or seek wisdom among the rocks.”
“People do those things.”
“Are they any wiser for it?”
He had to laugh. “I have seen little so far in my life to lead me to believe that people are any wiser for anything.”
“Yet here you are, many weeks’ sailing from your home, wherever that may be.”
Horn thought of the distant hills of his birth with a small pang of regret. Most of his fellow sellswords had long since gone back, settled down with a village girl, and begun the serious business of breeding the next generation of boys. He was fairly sure that neither Feather nor any of the other Old Men had ever expected to see him again.
“Home is where my boots are,” Horn finally said.
“Some would name that a sad fate.”
“I have seen the world.”
Now the monk shrugged. “So have I.”
What was this scarred old man trying to tell him?
Horn tried again. “Given that I seem unable to petition the Raven Queen as you suggest, is there another path?”
“Some things change a man slowly. Journeys. The passage of years. The love of a good woman. Imprisonment.” The monk paused a moment. Horn sensed he was speaking from experience, looking back at his own paths. Then: “Some things change a man swiftly. War. Disease. Shipwrecks. The love of a bad woman.”
“Change is inevitable.”
“And that is what you crave. The inevitability of change.” The monk leaned close, as his fellows had. “Have you ever encountered a true artifact? From the First Cities, or the Old Gods, or out of the treasure houses of the greatest mages of history?”
Horn frowned. He was familiar with the concept of artifacts, mostly from his studies with the wizards of High Canton within darkened rooms among its square towers. “It is possible that an old master of mine handled such, but for my own part, no.”
“One way to think of such items is as change itself, distilled into the palm of your hand. Even something as simple as a wand can change the user. You have found this in your own experience, I am confident.”
Nodding, Horn agreed. He could remember certain spells, certain secrets, the learning of which had reshaped his view of the world. On occasion, abruptly so.
The monk tapped Horn’s chest. “Then to find your purpose, you might consider seeking out one of these artifacts. Not all of them are in strongrooms and locked boxes.”
“You have something in mind?”
“We know where many things in this world are to be found. The Map of Winds is an artifact in its own right. Many secrets whispered under the open sky find their way here.”
Horn was wary, on his guard at this. “Everything in this world comes with a price.”
“Of course.” The monk smiled, like evil dawning. “We have need of something wrongly taken from us long ago. Fetch this item back from where it is held today, and we will place fate in your hands.”
Knowing he was committing himself blindly, Horn let himself step forward. “What is this thing, and where do you need it fetched from?”
Melee
It took hi
m more than a year to fight his way back to the Temple of Winds. Along the journey, Horn took wounds of the body and soul. He slew a white dragon, losing the tips of two fingers and most of his hair from its icy breath. He bargained away the life of an entire village for passage through a high trail defended by ogres.
In a glacial cave far higher up a mountain than Horn had ever hoped to climb, he found the Rod of the Eight Winds embedded in a crystal sphere guarded by four enormous nagas. After dispatching them, he skinned them and traded their hides to the ogres before passing through the smoldering ruins of the white dragon’s village on his way back to the temple. The ship on which he bought passage was attacked by pirates, three of the waterfronts he visited were set ablaze in his time there, and near the end of his journey Horn came down with a hacking cough that threatened to carry away his life.
Seen another way, the Raven Queen had opposed him at every turn.
It was as if she knew everything he did was fighting toward an attempt to force her hand in granting Horn a purpose.
In the last port, the one from which he could take ship to the Lost Island of Ee, he took a room so he could rest and ride out the worst of his cough. The Rod of the Eight Winds was concealed in a ceramic globe he’d had fashioned not long after securing it, and covered with poorly crafted paste gems to discourage thieves from becoming too creative. It was well enscorcelled, too, of course, but Horn could handle those without endangering himself.
It was himself he was concerned about.
The room was a dusty, dormered section of attic on the third floor of a dockside tavern. He had a tiny round window through which he could see the tops of masts, smeary and bobbing through the grimed and spotted glass. Horn slept on a rope bed with a rag mattress, and was forced to spend some of his healing energy on cantrips to battle the bedbugs and beetles that contested possession. The only other furnishings were a miserly whale-oil lamp and a tiny chest that he’d avoided, preferring to keep his few belongings in the bed with him.
Untold Adventures: A Dungeons & Dragons Anthology Page 33
