by Victor Milán
“You’ve the entertainer’s gift. Why didn’t you learn to play better? I thought you were a man who, if he did a thing at all, would see he did it well.”
He expected a stinging rebuke for speaking like that to a noble. To a man who, no matter how reduced his current state, was accustomed to wielding such power as to frighten the very Empire. Part of Rob even felt he deserved a slapping down.
Instead he got a peevish complaint: “It’s not as if I had money to take lessons. Faugh. It’s truly said, the least reasonable of men are the Irlandés.”
“So you recognized the accent, did you?”
“Forgive my poor manners, please. I needed the music. I tried to provide it as best I could, and learn by doing.”
Rob almost stumbled. A lord apologizing to a commoner? It felt almost scandalous.
“What I’ve always insisted on from myself,” Karyl said, “is to do as well as I could, and keep doing better until I’m at least competent. Long ago I learned that to achieve anything, one must start where one stands. Or spend eternity waiting for the right moment. Which never comes.”
“Brother,” Rob said, with feeling, “I hear that.”
* * *
The hanging wooden sign showed a hand dipping orange lava from a volcano in a heavy earthenware mug as a miniature treetopper titan looked on apprehensively. Pot of Fire, it read.
“For a fact, the locals seem obsessed with this fire-mountain of theirs,” Rob said, standing with beard tipped up and arms akimbo.
“It’s by the volcano’s light we’re reading the sign,” Karyl said. “Its presence isn’t exactly subdued. One day it will destroy them. If not them, their children.”
Rob flipped his hand toward the open door, from which a yellower, more congenial radiance spilled, along with raucous voices and chinking crockery. “And yet the party goes on.”
“There’s a perfect metaphor for life on Paradise,” Karyl said.
“A sentiment worthy of myself,” said Rob. Feeling expansive, he went to clap his companion on the shoulder. Then he thought better of it. “You’ve a touch of the poet in you.”
“Perish the thought,” said Karyl.
* * *
Their host was a short, pasty man with a face like a bag of damp vegetables. He led them down a hall away from the common room, which was packed and roistering in a way that made Rob’s fingers itch to play, his jaws to sing, and mostly his tongue to plead for ale. Mirror-backed candles in niches chiseled in the walls lit their way.
The innkeeper knocked the hairy backs of his knuckles on a door. Though Rob heard no reply, the innkeeper turned the latch. He pushed open the door and gestured the two inside.
Rob in turn waved his companion forward. Karyl just looked at him. Rob shrugged and went in first. Their host shut the door behind them.
It was a small room. Crude raptor-feather hangings covered the walls, of the sort featuring peasants with bottle bodies and bubble heads outside cottages noticeably shorter than they.
The window was closed, shutters drawn. The room smelled of sea-monster oil lamps; cinnamon, cedar, and fern potpourri in pierced-brass vessels that hung from the lantern-holders; and, like everything in Pot de Feu, sulfur. The two lamps remained unlit, creating a shadow pool in which sat a hooded figure, head down, behind a table set with a ceramic wine pitcher and two glazed mugs. Two chairs waited on the table’s near side.
At the door-latch click, the hooded figure raised its head and stood. Karyl stiffened.
It swept back its cowl to reveal a short cap of curly hair, gold touched with fire, above a lovely female face. The woman regarded her guests with wide green eyes.
Karyl relaxed.
“Welcome back, Rob Korrigan,” the woman said in perfect La Fuerza Spañol. She put the fingertips of her right hand against her sternum and bowed. Her left hand held a grey wooden staff as tall as she was. She looked quite young, certainly not yet fifty. She turned and bowed again.
“Welcome, Voyvod Karyl Vladevich Bogomirskiy.”
“Karyl Bogomirskiy is dead,” the cloaked man said.
She smiled. “But you live.”
He smiled back without mirth. “Apparently.”
She said something Rob couldn’t understand. He gathered it was Slavo. He scowled, feeling slighted.
His companion frowned briefly too. Then he sighed.
“Muy bien,” he said. “I was at one time known as Karyl Bogomirskiy. How do you know me?”
At that admission Rob let out a long breath. And the Fae’s own long time coming that has been, he thought, mentally rubbing hands in satisfaction. That’s a reward coming to Ma Korrigan’s son, sure.
This had been far from the most arduous commission of his life, but it was definitely among the strangest.
The woman’s smile widened.
“All Nuevaropa knows the legends of Lord Karyl,” she said. “And I know many things most do not. Please forgive my manners: I am Aphrodite. I am a sorceress.”
Karyl laughed. Rob stared at him.
“There’s no such thing as sorcery,” Karyl said.
“If you’re wrong,” Rob said from the side of his mouth, “antagonizing the lady’s not the happiest way to find out.”
Karyl bowed his head. His hair fell forward to flank his ascetic’s face.
“I apologize, my lady. I meant no offense. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my lives, it’s that there’s no magic on this wretched little world of ours.”
Rob raised a brow at “my lives.” Aphrodite came around the table. She extended her staff.
“Hold out your left hand, Lord Karyl.”
His eyes and mouth hardened. “As you see, lady, I have no left hand.”
“Would you like it back?”
“Ah, and it’s ungracious to play with him, Lady Aphrodite,” Rob felt moved to say.
He found it hard to speak. He feared the woman’s powers. But … good gold hung in the balance. His employer baiting the once-feared grande and mercenary captain, however fallen, struck him as singularly unlikely to help tip it into his pocket.
“Please, Lord Karyl,” Aphrodite said. “I mean no mockery.”
If only so exquisite a woman would look that way at me, Rob allowed himself to think. If only this one weren’t a sorceress. And yes, if hook-horns only had wings, I could fly Little Nell to the Moon Invisible and claim a piss-pot filled with gold.
Karyl frowned. But he raised his left arm. Its end was smooth and rounded, without visible scarring, as if he had been born without a hand.
Aphrodite brought the tip of her staff almost into contact with the pink skin. Golden radiance sprang out to surround the staff’s end and Karyl’s stump. He raised a brow but didn’t flinch.
The light went out.
“Is that all?” Karyl demanded, voice ragged. He held the stump up under his nose as if to sniff it. “I don’t see a difference. The Irlandés was right. It’s unkind to toy with me, lady.”
“You need not call me ‘lady,’” she said. “What did you feel?”
“Heat,” he said reluctantly. “A prickling. Which persists.”
He frowned and scratched the stump. “Now it itches. What did you do to me?”
“I gave you back your hand.”
“If this is an attempt at stage magic, you’ve failed, woman. I am not duped into seeing an imaginary hand on the end of my own arm. Just the same lack I’ve seen for … weeks.”
“How long exactly, Lord Karyl?”
“I’m not sure.”
“No matter. You will see. The magic takes time. Your hand will grow back over the next few weeks. It will itch far worse, I fear, before the process is complete.”
He stared at her. Rob sought to read his thoughts in those intense dark eyes. He failed. He’d never had any success with that sort of thing, though his mother told him he was touched by the Fae. Then again, she’d told him plenty of lies. He never doubted that one, though.
“And the pains in my head
,” Karyl said. “Can your spells cure those as well?”
The woman had retreated behind her table. For a sorceress, she struck Rob as rather tentative. Perhaps she was wary of having two men alone in the room with her. Still, shouldn’t her magic protect her?
“For those, herbs will serve as well as anything I might do,” she said.
“I’ve some skill at herbs,” Rob said. For a dinosaur master it was necessary lore. Rob had observed that cures that worked on monsters often served as well with people, in somewhat smaller doses. “I can help with that.”
To his intense annoyance both ignored him. “But it’s not the physical pains that torment you worst, is it?” Aphrodite asked.
Karyl’s eyes narrowed to a killer’s glare. “How did you know that?”
“I’ve had you watched, Lord Karyl.”
“To what end?”
She smiled. “In part to assure myself that you were indeed the former Voyvod of the Misty March, and commander of the White River Legion.”
“There’s something you aren’t telling me.”
“Many things, señor. Will you sit and refresh yourselves?”
She indicated the pitcher and mugs. She made no move to pour. Rob stepped up to serve himself and Karyl. They sat.
Karyl’s eyes were fixed on the woman like a hunting horror’s. “Why me?”
“You can ask that in response to any answer I give. To any answer you’re ever given. Will it suffice you to know that I consider the Voyvod Karyl the foremost field captain of Nuevaropa?”
Rob sat down. Karyl sipped wine. Rob found it a little sweet, as the local vintages tended to be. Still, The Books of the Law tell us it’s a sin to waste, he reminded himself.
“And yet he lost,” Karyl said.
“Through treachery.”
He shrugged and set his mug down with exaggerated care.
“Treachery there was,” he said. “My people were murdered, my wonderful animals destroyed. But we were already defeated when the coward Jaume struck from behind.”
“Through the actions of the man who sits beside you.”
Horrified, Rob raised his hands to forestall the revelation. Too late. Karyl turned to look at him in surprise.
“That was a keen stroke, those mace-tails. You’re a dinosaur master, then?”
“I am,” Rob said proudly. If he was about to be struck dead with a bloody great hidden knife, he wouldn’t bow his neck to it.
“So,” Karyl said to the witch. “Perhaps the captain you want is the man you sent to fetch me instead.”
Aphrodite smiled radiantly. “I wish to hire you both. I pay well.”
Rob blinked, astonished.
Karyl sat back. “If you have need for a street performer, my services are available. My continued presence in this town appears no longer to be desired.”
The self-proclaimed sorceress peered at him in confusion.
“But I have no need for a performer. Although the people of Providence may appreciate your skills in that regard. I need a war captain.”
“For Providence, you say?” Rob said, reaming an ear with a pinky. “Isn’t that where the Garden of Beauty and Truth holds sway? I thought they were all pacifists, so.”
Karyl looked at him. He shrugged. “It’s all the talk now, what with the Church suspecting them of heresy and all.”
“It may be they will soon amend their doctrines,” Aphrodite said. “In any event I propose to engage you myself. And pay you.”
“What relationship do you have with this Garden?” Karyl asked.
“I am friend to their leader, Bogardus. Aggressive and brutal neighbors afflict them. I believe you will relieve their suffering.”
“How? If they’re pacifists, whom would I command?”
“Those you recruit.”
“So that’s what you want me to do? To raise and train an army from a province of peace-loving poets?”
“Exactly, Lord Karyl.”
He dropped chin to clavicle and sat silent for a time. Aphrodite gazed at him calmly. Rob tried not to fidget.
Karyl laughed softly.
“If you’re willing to pay good gold to a failed captain and a sacked dinosaur master to perform the impossible, who am I to argue?”
* * *
“What’s that you’re playing?” Karyl asked. “It isn’t very interesting.”
They sat in a little clearing in thick hardwood forest not far from Pot de Feu beside a discreet campfire.
“Scales,” Rob said. “Just exercises. So my fingers don’t forget their art. Not meant to entertain. And who’s a critic here, Montador Toots-the-Flute-like-a-Half-Wit-Child? If I’d known you were going to asperse my playing, I’d’ve let the Guild bravos have their way with you.”
“You did.”
“Details,” Rob grunted.
He switched to playing a melody lightly, with lost-kitten plaintiveness. Night insects sang accompaniment. The Firepot mountain drummed bass. The woods’ green smell and the brushwood-fire tang almost took the brimstone from the air. Overhead the clouds had gone to rags, baring stars.
A few meters away, Little Nell browsed contentedly at thick, low ferns at the little clearing’s edge, tethered by a hind foot to a stout tree trunk. Rob, with Karyl behind him, had ridden her to this secluded spot in Telar’s Wood a few kilometers outside Pot de Feu. A patient, placid, amiable beast, the hook-horn had faithfully carried Rob and his gear for years. She was perhaps the only friend who had remained true to him all that time. Perhaps because she was the only one he remained true to.
“I doubt the Entertainer’s Guild will pursue us,” said Karyl, who sat with his back against his pack and his stick held against his shoulder. “Though some of them moonlight as bravos, they don’t strike me as trackers.”
“I don’t think anybody saw us leave town, even mounted on a six-meter dinosaur,” Rob said. Still, he felt unease.
Karyl rubbed at the stump of his left hand. “It itches like mosquito bites,” he complained.
“Of course. It’s the witch-woman’s magic. You were there.”
Karyl stopped rubbing. “There’s no such thing as magic.”
“Suit yourself.”
For a span Karyl sat listening to Rob play his lute. In the firelight he looked mostly tired when Rob glanced at him.
“Is that a dirge?” Karyl asked.
“We’d call it a lament,” Rob said. “Are you a lover of music, then, for all your crimes against her?”
A corner of Karyl’s mouth quirked up. “My piping’s scarcely the worst of my crimes.”
“And what worse could you do, pray tell?”
“I banned music from the court of the Misty March, and discouraged it in the countryside. As I did the playing of games, and the wearing of bright colors, and anything else I deemed frivolous. Things I thought distracted the people from work.”
“Bella! How could you do something like that?”
“It seemed right. At this remove, it looks like the most frivolous thing of all.”
“So now you’ve the sack to sit here and justify such outrages?”
“No. I neither apologize for nor justify anything I did in my … prior lives.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘lives’?”
“I’ve died twice, by my count,” Karyl said. “Once at the Battle of Gunters Moll under Duke Falk’s axe. And again … soon after.”
Rob awaited further explanation. Karyl resumed silence.
Rob plucked his strings savagely with scarred, blunt fingers. They produced plangent, dissatisfied sounds.
“I hope you’ve not misplaced your skill for war there in the mists of your mind.”
Karyl set his sword-staff down beside him and stretched out on warm, moist grass. “We’ll see.”
“You’re going to sleep?” Rob exclaimed. “What about watches?”
“What about them?”
Rob waved a big broad hand around at the night. “This is wild land. Anyone could fall on us
here if we’re not keeping lookout.”
“Let them. I don’t carry anything worth staying awake to defend.”
“But what of your life—a ‘small and miserable thing,’ and I quote?” demanded Rob. “You fought for it in Pot de Feu!”
“If they steal it from me as I sleep,” said Karyl, rolling over, “my pride will never know.”
* * *
But hours later, in the belly of night, terrifying screams jerked Rob from deep slumber.
He scrambled from his bedroll to find Karyl sitting up in a jumble of his own bedding. His hair hung sodden to his shoulders. Sweat streamed between fingers covering his face.
He dropped both hand and stump to his lap like broken tools.
“The dreams,” he said without looking at Rob. “Every night, they come.”
“Mother Maia!” Rob exclaimed. “What happens in these dreams?”
Slowly Karyl shook his head. “I never remember. Just beauty. Terrible beauty. And fear beyond enduring.”
Chapter 9
Titán trueno, Thunder-titan—Apatosaurus louisae. Giant quadrupedal plant-eating dinosaur; 23 meters, 23 tonnes. Nuevaropan native. Placid and oblivious like all titans, Apatosaurus’s sheer size renders it a danger to life and property, especially in herds.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
With a decisive tunk the javelin struck the target-stand.
“Shit!” Princess Melodía said.
“Can you believe it?” Fina said. “Someone was actually murdered in His Majesty’s apartments. It’s so terrible.”
Melodía scowled. She’d missed the matador’s-eye by a full half meter. At twenty meters, she expected better of herself.
To one side of the exercise yard a nosehorn pulled a windlass arm, crunching away at a wheeled basket full of grain as it plodded endlessly around a circular track, pumping water from a stream deep beneath the Firefly Palace. She might have blamed the infernal off-kilter creaking for distracting her. She knew better.
“It’s not as if he was found in my father’s bedroom,” she said irritably.
“My maidservant, Mitzi, is friend to the chambermaid who found the body,” Lupe said, not without a certain ghoulish relish. “She said it was horrible. All black and bloated.”
“You make us so sorry we missed it,” Llurdis said. It got her a glare from Lupe.
