The Fire and the Fog

by David Alloggia

  ‘Just get below’ the Captain yelled as he dropped Dan’r’s shirt and turned. He started yelling for his bo’sun to get the idiot noble off his deck, and Dan’r wondered how he made himself heard over the roar of the storm as he started making his own way back down the stairs.

  He made it to the bottom of the stairs, and halfway back across the deck, when he looked up and saw Maeglin standing in the doorway to the cabin they shared. She was wearing a thin white dress, now soaked from the rain, and water ran down her hair in rivulets. The bedraggled look of her hair and dress, the way the water ran down the dress and made it see through, at once hiding and revealing everything, Dan’r had never seen her more beautiful in his life. He barely noticed Om’bh standing beside her.

  And then he was hit high in the chest by a huge wave that came crashing over the side of the ship. He saw her standing there, perfection personified. His wife, his love, his life, and he tried to raise his arm towards her as he was picked up and carried off the deck by the powerful sea.

  And then he was in the water, being carried wildly, swiftly, away from the ship. He struggled against the current, against the waves; struggled to keep his head above water, but it was in vain. His clothes weighed on him, and he could feel the undertow start to bear him down. Frantic, he cast out, eyes blind, coughing as his lungs choked on the brine. And then his arm hit something; wood. A barrel, washed overboard just like him. He grabbed it, held tight, and it helped keep him above water.

  He could hear shouts from the ship somehow, even as the waves and the thunder roared, and the ocean’s swells carried him further from safety. He saw Om’bh, his watcher, jump over the railing, falling in a smooth dive and splitting the ocean cleanly. He caught glimpses of Om’bh as he crested each ocean swell, glimpses of the dark man’s powerful strokes as his watcher tried to reach him, and then Om’bh was gone, pulled under by the same current that had nearly taken Dan’r.

  The last thing he saw before the ship was carried out of sight by the raging sea was a figure clad all in white, reaching over the rail towards him, only held back from the turbulent, dark blue waters by the hands of two sailors at her side.

  And then the water was between them, and all Dan’r saw, felt, or heard, was the raging of the storm.

  The Man

  I

  ‘The same dream. Always the same dream.’ Dan’r thought to himself as he woke slowly, groggily in the alleyway. ‘Why won’t it stop? When will it end?’ He lay there for a while, in the dark, cold alleyway, its walls made from bricks with peeling paint and garbage, its sky filled with the slate rooftops of buildings, its smells the smells of rot and discarded refuse.

  Out loud, he simply cursed and groaned.

  Every night he returned to the past in his sleep, and every morning he woke, trembling and sweating, and he remembered how he was washed ashore all those twenty odd years ago. And this morning was no different, although with no sun visible past the rooftops, it could have been anytime during the day. Despite all his attempts to forget, to escape the dreams, despite the alcohol and the fighting, he woke once again, shaking and sweating.

  As if the dream alone weren’t vivid enough, with the dream gone came the memories. Dan’r remembered waking on a new shoreline, alone and half dead, in a strange, foreign land, stranded and separated from everything he knew, everything he loved. It had taken him years, but Dan’r had slowly learned about the land he was now stuck in; learned their language, learned of their technologies, of their one god.

  It was a strange land he had found himself in. They had guns and cannons, engines and factories. They had trains, which he still failed to understand, and they could construct marvelous feats of engineering, bridges that spanned great distances. But they had no art, no magic.

  Not to say it was the same everywhere. Some of the outlying lands reminded him of home. The tree-choked Heyle reminded him of Wessen, both countries completely overwhelmed by forest. But the South, Rognia, the largest of the countries in this strange land, they were moving away from anything he found recognizable from his old home. They fought like one of the Hundred Kingdoms, bickering and warring with everyone around them, but they were as organized as the Char’Nath Empire, only much more hostile.

  But what scared him most, more than all the guns and trains and technologies, what still kept him drinking, night and day, for the past twenty years, was that there was no way back. There were constant storms just off the coast of Dohm, and they made it impossible to sail home. Even the fishermen of Dohm rarely sailed outside of the sight of land. No-one from Alta had ever been to Dohm, and no-one from Dohm had ever seen Alta. Dan’r was the first, the only. The last.

  Alta was home, but a home he would never see again. He would never escape from this prison called Dohm, never see Maeglin again. Never again would he visit the towered cities and tended forests of Sheith, he would never again stand in the Cities of Char’Nath.

  All this ran through his head as he tried to stand, as it did every morning. One hand planted on the wall behind him, its thin coat of paint flaking as he touched the worn, decaying bricks, he slowly pulled himself to a stand, his free hand grasping once more through his cloak, ruffling through the pockets sewn inside for the paper he knew was there.

  Pulling out a new, full wineskin, Dan’r unstoppered the skein and drank deeply of a nice, refreshing rosé. He was always partial to a rosé in the morning, he found it settled his head and stomach best, and tended to lend towards a better day as a whole. He started down the alleyway while he thought and drank, wondering where he should end up that afternoon.

  A city like Wraegn, a hub of commerce and industry, had many inns and taverns, but Dan’r had started becoming known, and unwelcome, at too many of them. After the fight the previous night,, he likely would not be allowed into the Rusty Nail again, and he would not again try the wrath of the Rivet’s owner. Her head was as red as her temper, and she could not take a joke.

  Not counting the nicer taverns of the city, the ones normally frequented by merchants and nobles, that left Dan’r with two main choices. The broken rudder was a nice, rowdy tavern, much like the Rusty Nail, although it had much more the air of a Sailors tavern, and kept trying to serve fish. At three days hard ride from the nearest sizeable source of water, fish were not a commodity that could be served well cheaply.

  On the other hand, the Hopper’s Grain was less rowdy, much nicer a place for a meal, and it had one serving girl that never seemed to complain when he groped her, and always let him hang on for longer than she should.

  His decision made, Dan’r stumbled slowly towards the Hoppers Grain. After his bad luck in the brawl the night before, a night spent with nice ale and some nice company was much more appetizing than another night in an alley.

  The alley Dan’r had spent the night in was a part of a large warren of connecting passages, created by a swiftly industrializing city. Rats, refuse, and other drunks littered the alleyways of Wraegn, or they littered the eastern edge of the city at least. There were thieves, beggars, cutpurses, men and women of the night; they all found their way to the eastern side of the town, where the factories were. The alleys were closer together, and the church patrols much less frequent.

  That was not to say that the church had no presence in the eastern edge of the city, or that it was inhabited only by criminals. There were taverns, legitimate businesses, and church patrols daily. Many regular people made their homes by the factories, forced there by rising rents on inner city houses, paid to the Church to support the wars against Riin and Heyle.

  But the alleyways, the alleyways were essentially off limits for regular people. Go into the alleys, and you got mugged, knifed, or worse.

  He didn’t like it. Dan’r never did. These smokestacks and tight alleyways, the guns and engines and mass-produced clothing and food; the colour was being bled out of the entire rotten continent of Dohm, and he was stuck here.

  Where were the hues from Alta, the brilliant greens and whites of
Sheith, the red and gold of Char’Nath? True, outside the cities there were still golden fields, brilliant blue lakes, and some of the largest mountains he had ever seen, their snow-capped peaks defying the suns rays by not melting in the summer heat. Sometimes, sometimes Dohm gave him the urge, the itch, to sit down and paint, not for money or wine, but just for the simple joy of painting. Some of the smaller villages, like Feyen or Drey, or up north in Heyle, some places still had beauty and spirit, were worth capturing on canvas. But the larger cities of Dohm were all dull, dead.

  Thinking of painting reminded him of why he started painting in the first place, reminded him of an image that would be captured forever in his mind. Maeglin, beautiful in a light blue dress, her hair flowing in the wind, stood atop Char’Atol’s crenulated red walls, and looked out over a sea of wheat just as the sun set above her. The sky and the wall were red, she was blue, the grain was gold, and it was perfect. He had painted her that night, and then the white towers of Sheith peeking out through its dark green forests the next morning. And then he had discovered his Art.

  But here, here in the dust and dirt and depression of the city, here there was nothing, nothing that could kindle his heart to paint like before. It was enough to lead a man to drink, Dan’r thought angrily as he drank deeply from his wineskin.

  So deep and involved was his musing, and his drinking, that he failed to notice the leg that shot out to trip him from a side alley until he was already falling, face first, towards the ground.

  He landed on his wineskin, hands outstretched to cushion his fall, and the skin ruptured under his weight, spraying his arms and face with wash of light pink wine. He cursed the loss of his wine, mopping his hands futilely over his face as he lay on his elbows. The wineskin saved his hands from any scrapes or bruises, but still, he had lost a decent wine.

  As he rolled over onto his back and looked up, he saw five men, all either laughing or grinning menacingly, step out of a side alley he had not noticed before.

  They were large; very large. Muscled and scarred, they were the kind of men who wouldn’t have looked out of place at the tavern the night before. And one of them had been. The first of the men to walk out, likely the one who tripped him, was the angry, balding man from the night before. The right side of his face was bruised and cut from where Dan’r had hit him with his mug, and he was most definitely still angry about it.

  The men behind him were less angry and more anticipatory as they stood behind the angry one, grinning or laughing at Dan’r. One right behind the balding man was cracking his knuckles forcefully, while two others were drawing knives from under their clothes, and the last was wrapping a short length of chain around his fist.

  Dan’r knew the men were out to kill, or at least seriously maim, as the balding one spoke.

  ‘You cost me a lota money las night, ass’ he spat as he reached down and grabbed Dan’r’s shirt in two large, worn and scarred hands. The spit was warm as it hit Dan’r in the face, just under his eye. ‘An I don’t like people what lose me money, even less than I don’t like people what hit me.’

  He tried to lift Dan’r to his feet, and Dan’r used the lift to stand, not fighting against the man. He would need to be mobile for what was going to come next anyway.

  ‘You ruined a perfectly good wineskin’ he said, looking pointedly at his arms, the cloth on them dark, clinging and dripping in the alleys half-light. He was lucky none of the wine had gotten inside his cloak.

  ‘What use does a dead man have for wine?’ the angry man asked as he let go of Dan’r with one hand, and reached behind his back. There he would have a knife, or a mace, or something else that would likely ruin Dan’r’s day, at the least.

  Dan’r had his hands inside his cloak, palming a piece of paper in each, as the other street toughs began to circle him. ‘What does a dead man care for money?’ he said calmly, quietly, as he brought one hand up, palm out, to the angry man’s chest.

  The angry one, his left eye still slightly swollen, his breath bad, looked up at Dan’r, and down at his stomach, quickly in confusion and surprise, and then Dan’r pushed. He pushed with his body, and his mind, and the paper in his palm pushed as well. And it pushed hard.

  There was no sound as Dan’r pushed, only the almost imperceptible afterimage of a gust of wind, but the man flew back a good ten paces through the air. He tumbled head over heels backwards when he landed, rolling and skidding till he crashed into a pile of boxes and refuse piled on the side of the alley. Between his landing and his companions’ loud, surprised curses, the alley was anything but quiet, even though Dan’r’s push had been. All of Dan’r’s Art was silent. You couldn’t make sound with a painting, just as you couldn’t make an image through sound.

  Dan’r flew backwards as well though. The effects of a push would affect the user as well as whatever it was used on, but he was prepared. He had braced himself before pushing, and although he skidded as he landed, he kept his feet set wide, and came to a stop a few paces back from where he started.

  He was no longer surrounded by the thugs, and he almost pitied their surprised, confused looks as they glanced from Dan’r to their leader and back. The angry one was groggily trying to escape from the pile he had landed in, muttering nonsensically as he lay thrashing in his bed of dung and rotting food.

  Dan’r almost pitied them. Almost. But they had attacked him, would have killed him, and they had likely done the same to others. It was unfortunate, it was something Dan’r hated to do, but he would not let them hurt anyone else, he thought as he dipped his right hand back into his cloak for another slip of paper and threw out his left towards the nearest thug.

  The large man, the one who had been cracking his knuckles and grinning stupidly, was struck high in the right side of his chest by a large ball of reddish-green fire. The fire bit into him, and his flesh popped and crackled as it burnt, but the flame itself made no noise as it sprayed outwards from where it hit. The thug screamed as he fell, writhing, to the floor, his left hand grasping futilely at the large portion of his upper chest that was now missing. His fingers scrabbled through charred flesh and blackened bone, and his screams of pain turned to rasps and gurgles as blood began to pool at his lips.

  Dan’r felt bad as he threw out his right hand again, this time towards the man who had been wrapping the chain around his fist. He was reaching back into his cloak with his left hand as he did so, but he still felt sorry for them. They were tiny and useless, powerless in their cruelty. He knew that they were cruel, and preyed on the weak, but he had already done more than he wanted to them. He had meant to hit the man further off to the side, in the shoulder. Enough to injure, but not kill him. But the alcohol got in the way. It usually did these days. He had to remember to drink less if he was going to fight, he thought, as the man with the chain’s left leg and lower torso covered over in frost. The man yelled as he grabbed his leg in both hands. ‘He shouldn’t have done that,’ Dan’r thought as he reached back into his cloak, and the man’s leg began to freeze. If he held on too long, the man’s fingers would freeze to his leg, and he would lose those as well.

  There was no middle ground, Dan’r thought as the man’s leg began to crack and fissure under the strain of his weight. If he went unarmed, or used a sword, he would lose. If he used his Art, he would win. Why couldn’t a fight be fair, Dan’r wondered as he threw out his left hand towards the remaining two men, who were both turning to run, and the frozen man’s leg shattered underneath him. Dan’r hoped the cold had at least dulled the man’s pain as energy sparked silently at his fingertips. The man was falling to the ground and screaming, clutching at the stump where his leg and lower pelvis used to be, as lightning arced through the air from Dan’r’s hands, the loud crack of thunder shattered through the tiny alley.

  The last two thugs fell to the ground, smoking and twitching as the lightning coursed through them. Dan’r had to blink several times before the slash of blue across his vision faded away. He always loved trying to paint ligh
tning. It was such a brilliant, startling blue.

  Dan’r casually flicked out his right hand one last time and a large, cruelly hooked knife appeared in his hand as he walked slowly towards the angry balding man. The man still lay gasping where Dan’r had Pushed him, and he was looking in shock at his dead and dying companions. He started to whimper, clearly trying to speak, but unable to do so in his fright as Dan’r walked slowly closer.

  ‘So, friend, what have we learned today?’ Dan’r asked, fingering one of the knives’ hooks as he stood over the man. Dan’r could smell the sharp tang of urine mixing with the rot of garbage as he reached the man and pushed the knife point against his stomach.

  ‘This is one of my favourite knives, friend. It won’t hurt much going in, but it’ll pull out all sorts of interesting things coming out. Don’t make me show you how to use it’ Dan’r said, slowly pushing it into the man’s belly. The man’s stomach distended under the knife, then popped back as the knife tip broke skin, and drew blood.

  The man shook and cried, babbling incoherently as Dan’r pulled out the knife tip and knelt, resting his knife-arm on his knee and waving it absently towards the prostrate thug.

  ‘You hurt anyone else, and I’ll have to come back after you’ he threatened, tilting his head to the side and opening his eyes wide, looking as crazed as he could as he stared into the man’s eyes.

  He was good at looking crazed, he had found. Between his sunken eyes, ringed from lack of sleep, his messy beard, and the look of pain and loss that constantly lived in his eyes, he could certainly manage crazy. Of course, being able to throw fire and lightning certainly helped the image.

  He stuck the knife into the pile beside the man, then stood as he caught the jingle and shouts of approaching church guards. There had been too much noise, between the screams and the thunder. Not that it was surprising, he frequently got carried away. One day he would learn to keep quiet, he swore absently. His cloak billowed as he turned and ran down the alley, deeper into the safety, the anonymity of its mazelike confines.