by Tad Williams
Lixal had time only for a choked squeal, then the taloned hand closed on his neck.
“Oh, but you are soft, you humans,” the thing whispered, not from stealth it seemed but from pure pleasure in the moment, as if to speak loudly would be to induce a jarring note into an otherwise sublime melody. “My claws would pass through your throat like butter. I will certainly have to choose a slower and more satisfying method of dispatching you.”
“M-my b-b-bracelet,” stuttered Lixal. “What have you done to it?”
“I?” The deodand chortled. “I have done nothing. But as I recall, it was meant to protect you from untimely death. Apparently in whatever way these things are calculated your time of dying has arrived. Perhaps in a different state of affairs, a paralleled existence of some sort, this is the moment when you would have been struck lifeless by a falling slate from a roof or mowed down by an overladen horse cart whose driver had lost his grip on the reins. But fear not! In this plane of reality you shall not have to go searching for your death, Laqavee, since by convenience I am here to make certain that things proceed for you as just the Fates desire they should!”
“But why? Have I mistreated you so badly? We have traveled together for a full round of seasons.” Lixal raised a trembling hand with the intention of giving the deodand an encouraging, brotherly pat, but at the sight of the creature’s bared fangs he swiftly withdrew it again. “We are as close as any of our two kinds have ever been – we understand each other as well as our two species have ever managed. Surely it would be a shame to throw all that away!”
The deodand made a noise of sarcastic amusement. “What does that mean? Had you spent a year chained against your will to a standing rib roast, do you suggest that when the fetters were removed you would suddenly wish to preserve your friendship with it? You are my prey, Laqavee. Circumstances have pressed us together. Now circumstances have released me to destroy you.”
The grip on his neck was tightening now. “Hold, hold!” Lixal cried. “Do you not remember what you yourself suggested? That if I were to die you would be held to the spot where my bones fell?”
“I have considered just that during this long night, since I first realized your magical bracelet no longer dissuaded me. My solution is elegant: I shall devour you bones and all. Thus I will be confined only to the vicinity of my own stomach, something that is already the case.” The deodand laughed in pleasure. “After all, you spoke glowingly yourself of the closeness of our acquaintanceship, Laqavee — surely you could wish no greater proximity than within my gut!”
The foul stench of the thing’s breath was almost enough to snatch away what little remained of Lixal’s dizzied consciousness. He closed his eyes so that he would not have to see the deodand’s terrible gaze when it murdered him. “Very well, then,” he said with as much aplomb as he could muster, although every limb in his body trembled as though he had an ague. “At least I die with the satisfaction of knowing that a deodand has never beaten a human at King’s Compass and now never shall.”
He waited.
He continued to wait.
Lixal could not help remembering that the deodand had earlier spoken of a death both slower and more satisfying than simply having his throat torn out – satisfying to the murderous creature, Lixal had no doubt, rather than to himself. Was that why the thing hesitated?
At last he opened his eyes again. The fiery yellow orbs were asquint in anger and some other emotion, harder to discern.
“You have put your finger on a problem,” the deodand admitted. “By my account, you have beaten me thrice-three-hundred and forty-four times out of an equal number of contests. And yet I have felt for some time now that I was on the verge of mastering the game and defeating you. You yourself must admit that our matches have become more competitive.”
“In all fairness, I must agree with your assertion,” said Lixal. “You have improved both your hoarding and your double sentry maneuver.”
The deodand stood, keeping its claw wrapped around Lixal Laqavee’s neck and thus forcing him to stand as well. “Here is my solution,” the creature told him. “We will continue to play. As long as you can defeat me I will let you live, because I must know that when I win, as ultimately I feel sure I must, it will be by the sole fact of my own improving skill.”
Lixal felt a little relieved – his death was to be at least momentarily postponed – but the knowledge did not bring the quickening of hope that might have accompanied such a reprieve in other circumstances. The deodand did not sleep, while Lixal felt the need to do so for many hours of every day. The deodand was swift and powerful while he, Lixal, was a great deal less so. And no human with any wit at all would try to help him.
Still, perhaps something unforeseen might happen that would allow him to conquer the beast or escape. The events of Lixal’s life had taught him that circumstances were bound to change, and occasionally even for the better.
“You must also keep me well-fed and healthy,” he told the deodand. “If I am weakened by hunger or illness any victory of yours would be hollow.”
“Fair enough.” The creature transferred its iron grip to his arm, then without further conversation began to walk. It made a good speed through the patchy forest, forcing Lixal to hurry to keep up or risk having his limb pulled from its socket.
“Where are we going?” Lixal called breathlessly. “What was wrong with that particular camping spot? We had a fire, and could have started a game at our leisure once you had provided us with some dinner.”
“I am doing just that, but dinner of the kind I seek is not so easily obtained near our previous camping site.”
Sometime after this unsettling declaration, just as the morning sun began to bring light to the forest, the deodand dragged Lixel out of the thickest part of the trees and into an open grassy space dotted with lumps of worked stone, some standing upright but many others tumbled and broken, all of them much patched with moss.
“Why have we come here?” Lixal asked. “This is some ancient graveyard.”
“Just so,” said the deodand. “But not truly ancient — burials have taken place here within relatively recent years. You have long forbidden me the chance to dine as I please, on the meat that I most like. Now I shall no longer be bound by your absurd and cruel strictures. And yet I do not want the vigilante impulses of your kind to interfere with our contest, so instead of sallying forth for live human flesh we will encamp ourselves here, where suitably aged and cured specimens wait beneath only a shallow span of topsoil.” The creature grinned hugely. “I confess I have dreamed of such toothsome delicacies for the entire span of our annoying and undesired companionship.”
“But what about me?” said Lixal. “What shall I eat? Will you hunt game for me?”
“You seem to think you still hold the upper hand, Laqavee.” The deodand spoke as sternly as a disappointed father. “You are far away from the assistance of any of your fellows and in the passing of a single heartbeat I can tear your throat with my talons. Hunt game for you? Nonsense.” The deodand shook its head and shoved him down onto his knees. “You will eat what I do. You will learn thrift as the deodands practice it! Now set up the gaming board and prepare to defend the honor of your species, Lixal Laqavee! In the meantime, I will begin digging for breakfast.”
The Terrible Conflagration at The Quiller’s Mint
(From the diaries of Finn Teodoros, discovered and edited by Tad Williams)
WHEN I WAS BUT A YOUNG man newly come to this great city from my mother’s house near the ocean cliffs of Helmingsea, I had no friend or family here who could give me houseroom, so I paid a few copper pieces each week for a bed at the ancient inn known as The Quiller’s Mint. The place was owned in that time by a man named Arvald, although in this our present day it has a different owner. He was a dour and secretive fellow, as are many of the Vuttish who live in the March Kingdoms – he had been born in the islands but had traveled all over the world on merchant ships in his youth, much as had my ow
n father, born in Krace but buried on the foggy hills of Helmingsea. It was a strange thing to see, a Vuttish taverner — odd as an extravagant Settlander or a chaste Syannese — and he was as thrifty with words as you might guess. I think not many people who occasioned the inn favored Arvald much or would have chosen his establishment above any other, but that his prices were low.
I slept near the top of the building, three floors above Squeakstep Alley, in a room with a tiny window that looked out at a dark warehouse so close I could almost touch its timbered walls.. Several others shared the poorly-furnished room with me, most of them merchants staying only a few nights, and even the louse-ridden bed could not be called my own, for Arvald was not prey to the sort of foolish generosity that would let a bed go unused half the day. I slept my fitful sleep in it when the world was dark, and in the daylight hours a riverman who worked at the night-docks outside the walls would make it his. Many were the evenings I came home to find the sheets still dank with river water. Once I found a small fish in the blankets that I suspicion had come from out of his boot, for others who shared the room told me the riverman wore his sodden old pair even in bed.
Before I found my position in the royal tax office, I earned a bit of my lodging-fee back by helping Arvald serve his guests, and a strange, sad lot they were. Even today, when it has a slightly better name for hospitality, the folk lining the tavern benches of The Quiller’s Mint are a motley collection at best, rhymers and other less lawful blather-men, snitches, sharpers, and shave-pennies.
For those who have not visited the place, it stands inside the outer wall of the keep like a man who has been backing away from a brawl and run out of room, between Fitters Row and Tin Street, with Squeakstep Alley running past its front door like a narrow, muddy river. Its painted sign is a faceless woman veiled and dressed in black, for no reason anyone knows. The tavern sits just a short distance from Skimmer’s Lagoon on the Fitters Row side, and while the skimmers themselves do not visit the place — they have their own establishments into which the rest of us are not welcomed — the smell of the lagoon is always in the place, especially when the sun is high or the tide is low, and the cries of seabirds are its usual music, when they can be heard above the bellowing of drunkards and slatterns. It is an old building, and in fact at the rear it is built straightly into the city’s outwall, as though the wall were built around it rather than the other way round. No one claims to know when it was first put up, or even how far it extends. I could not tell you myself, despite having worked there for a year. There are several rooms down beneath the main tavern, pantries and other places I never explored. It troubled my heart to go down there by myself because it was quiet and dark and the corridors twisted most confusingly, and thus kept my visits short. When Nevin Hewney — perhaps Southmarch’s most famous playwright, and certainly its most frequently drunken playwright – is in his cups and claims another entire tavern lies deep beneath the one in current use, deserted but preserved, it will not be me who calls him a liar.
In any case, the Mint (as many called it then and still do) was not so much different in my youth than it is now. Most of the patrons, as is generally the case with poets and criminals, swung between extremes of morbid silence and loud bragging, often prodding each other to some dangerous bet or inflicting childish pranks. One that I remember is when a young poet with a demanding mistress was told that the pie-plant growing in the Mint’s kitchen yard was a sovereign prompter of the gallant reflex. This foolish versifier ate several uncooked stalks and grew so ill he nearly died, prompting amusement in all but the most charitable customers.
On the night of the conflagration, I recall little happening that was not of the ordinary. It was a chillsome late autumn, especially down by the lagoon where the winds blew unchecked, and a fire had been set in the fireplace. The air was thick with smoke and my eyes stung. Nevin Hewney, who was then still such a young man that he had no beard upon his face at all, but only a yellow fluff like dandelion, was bragging about having finished his first play, a piece of what we suspected must be dubious skill and even more doubtful virtue, which told the story of a famous Trigonarch’s mistress. To our surprise, a year later this play, The Eidolon of Devonis, was performed at the Firmament Theater and became quite popular, and Hewney received his first post with Earl Rorick’s players.
In another corner a trio of strangers, who despite the warmth of the room had not taken off their hooded cloaks, drank moderately and spoke quietly among themselves for most of the evening. I have heard it said in after days that these were the Lord Constable’s guardsmen, but what their purpose in the tavern should have been I do not know, and I doubt the story. There are places closer to the inner keep than the Quiller’s Mint where guardsmen can drink, and in fairer circumstances as well. I have even heard it claimed that one of these hooded men was young Prince in disguise — he is said to have liked to sit with ordinary men and women to learn something of their lives — but I suspicion this is a false claim. People will see the hands of princes and hierarchs in any fateful event, but there are fateful events enough in this world that princes and hierarchs would have to forego sleep entirely to have a hand in them all.
A few other of the tavern’s regular patrons were in the main room on that night, including a poet and occasional swindler named Thom Regin (although most who knew him would have said that it was the poetry that was occasional and the swindling his fulltime vocation) and a Jellonian woman named Doras, of whose virtues the most charitable thing that can be said is that she did not haggle much about prices. Doras, who from time to time kept a sort of company with big-bellied, booming-voiced Regin when he was sober, had on this night brought in a stranger, a dark-haired, pale man who she introduced as John Sommerle or Summerlea (I have seen the name spelled in diverse ways) who she said was a sailor. Sommerle himself did not speak much.
As I said, I remember little about the night that was odd or untoward. At one point Thom Regin — who I thought was not happy about Doras keeping company with another man, but had not said so straightly, recited a bit of poetry about a man who beds a fairy-princess and wakes up in the morning to find that the Twilight People have ensorceled him and that his companion is a sow. Sommerle for some reason took exception to this foolish rhyme and threatened Regin with a dagger, although the knife was never actually produced. Arvald the tavern-owner intervened, and only Doras’ tearful pleading kept him from ejecting John Sommerle from the Mint on the instant.
The three hooded men took little interest in this brawl, as far as I could see.
Later in the evening, while I was busy playing potboy and thus did not see what happened, Sommerle and the woman Doras fell into a disagreement for some reason and Sommerle left the Quiller’s Mint. He did not come back, at least while the tavern was open.
When the bell rang in the temple of the Trigon and closing hour came round, the Jellonian woman and Thom Regin seemed to have been reconciled. She was fondling his face and lovingly tweaking his beard while he recited her some bit of doggerel, this one a tale of women who give their hearts to fairy-princes. Since he seemed to be likening himself to such an immortal and magical lover, I thought he was overbuilding himself a bit — Regin was not the most presupposing of men. In any case, that was the last time I saw him. Arvald called for those who were present to empty their scoops. He had not locked the doors yet, and a few of the patrons were still in the tavern when he sent me to my bed. That was the first thing in the evening that felt odd to me, since Arvald generally kept me at my labors until every tankard was rinsed and every bench and table wiped.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by a woman’s voice raised in a scream. My nostrils were instantly full of the harsh scent of smoke. Tripping over the other inhabitants of my shared room, who were slower to wake than I, I made my way to the stairs and started downward. Between the ground floor and the first story I almost ran into a dark figure. It was the woman Doras, her hair and clothes in disarray, looking as though she had ju
st been pulled from bed, although whether also from sleep would have been another question.
“Where is my Riggin?” she said, her Jellonian accent making it hard for me to understand what she was saying. “My Rig, where has he gone?”
I shoved past her and made my way down to the tavern. A fire was burning, not in the fireplace, but in the straw floor on the opposite side of the main room. Lying beside this new blaze but not in the flames was a dark shape. I leaned over to see the poet Regin with his forehead caved in like a broken eggshell and blood running from his nose and mouth. He was lying near one of the room’s wooden ceiling-pillars. I suppose that if he had been running across the room, not looking where he was going, he might have hit the pillar hard enough to crack his poll that way. I am not certain I believe that, but I cannot say it is impossible.
In any case, I had no time to think about it then. The fire was already spreading across the straw and in a moment more I would be surrounded and hemmed in by the blaze. I tried to drag the poet’s corpse with me, although I knew he was already dead, but he was too heavy. It must be remembered that at the time I was only a stripling, and Regin must have carried almost twice my weight.
I ran out of the tavern then and through the inn, shouting for Arvald, calling out that there was fire in the house, fire! Soon the halls and stairwell were full of confused guests and tavern patrons — apparently Arvald had allowed a card game in his own chambers after the main room was closed. I saw Arvald trying to enlist the help of some of the scurrying cardplayers to go to the lagoon to fill buckets of water, but no one paid him any attention in the smoke and shouting and darkness lit only by flickering flames. One man was killed in the crush at the front door, trampled until his ribs cracked and pierced his heart, and several more had broken limbs and other injuries trying to get out. As the fire swiftly spread, some had to leap out of the upper stories into the ordure of Squeakstep Alley. It was only due to the mercy of Zoria, I believe, and of Honnos who watches over travelers, that more were not killed inside the tavern.
