Masters of Fantasy

by Bill Fawcett

  The visions came on, too fierce to deny, their brilliance stark and unsettling: of the scouring mists that had invaded through Southgate, and swallowed the fall of clean sunlight. As though past events revisited in review, she watched the rising that unseated the High Kings erupt in slaughter and flames. Then the Mistwraith's dank fog masked the horrors in white. Drifting like flotsam in the coils of the future, Meiglin looked down on a scene by a riverbank, where a gray-haired man wearing the crown colors of Shand lay in gasping extremity. A young man rode up, and leaped off his horse, crying aloud in his anguish. The man, who was mentor, died in his arms. Consumed by fierce grief, the boy reached to take the jeweled circlet from the brow of the corpse.

  "Don't!" Meiglin cried.

  Though her protest was made in the fabric of dream, the boy started and glanced up. For a stopped second, their eyes met and held, joined in the half world of mystery. He was young: as unmarked by life as newly forged steel, but beautiful in the purity of his unwritten potential.

  "Don't." Meiglin whispered. Her beating heart seemed to freeze as she sensed the boy's determined fate. "You will meet your death."

  He smiled, brash youth. "I must. What hope can survive if the last of the sunlight is lost to the Mistwraith's conquest?"

  Time unfroze. His impetuous fingers closed over the circlet, and the dream narrowed in, vibrant as a shout that should have held power to rock the seat of the world.

  Like a stone, Meiglin plummeted. Her awareness swooped toward the stream bank, as though the trapped cry of her mind and will could sever the spun strand of tragedy.

  "Don't! You must not!"

  Yet the choice had been made. Though Meiglin wept, the doomed prince faded beyond reach.

  Fog closed, choking white. Tears of sorrow fell on a country swathed in lead. The boy would die, his brave sacrifice futile. The Mistwraith would seize its fell triumph. Meiglin cupped the drowned world between her two hands, her denial a silent shout wrenched from the dreaming core of her spirit.

  Then the vision that gripped her snapped into light. She beheld the face of another old man, this one no king, but a creature mantled in power, with eyes that pierced time with a falcon's intensity, and perception that flayed her worth down to a word.

  "S'Dieneval?"

  He added a phrase in the Paravian tongue that Meiglin lacked learning to translate. But the mysteries answered. The shackling weight that constricted her chest burst and hurled her back into herself. . . .

  * * *

  Meiglin opened her eyes, choking on hot milk. The round face of a farm wife hovered above, set against a beamed wooden ceiling. Off to her left, a man finished a rambling dialogue in the lazy drawl of the southcoast.

  " . . . don't know where along the route I picked her up," he ended, apologetic. "Found her huddled in the wagon under the tarps, shivering like a kit fox. If I'd left her, she'd have died of the cold, understand?"

  "She's a pretty poppet," murmured the farm wife. Bowl and spoon clutched in her beefy hands, she paused for a moment to admire. "Such beautiful, sad eyes."

  "Pretty enough to raise unwholesome trouble!" snapped a gruffer man, country bred, and likely the master of the croft. "And she's not sad enough to cry honest tears. Her sort know too well how to use winsome looks. It's her stock in trade to take advantage."

  "She's only a child!" the woman said, shocked.

  The crofter stayed adamant. "No child walks the streets clad in nothing but lace. Damn well, we can't harbor a sly, depraved creature. Not one with her habits. She'll have the boys fighting to try her shameless favors, and turn their minds for the worse."

  The drover retreated, hands raised in consternation. "My caravan can't keep her, not with the outriders bored enough to dally, and randy as a pack of spring bulls. Turn the tart out on the road as you will, but for pity, at least see her off with a blanket."

  Meiglin drew breath between chattering teeth. "I haven't, at least, there wasn't—" She colored, despite the chills that threatened to rattle her bones. "Not yet," she insisted lamely. "That's why I ran away."

  "Well, she isn't any stranger to hard work!" snapped the wife. "Did you see? Her poor hands are chapped! T'would take a heart of stone to send a mouse out in this weather, with the wind blowing in another stormfront!"

  "I can work," Meiglin whispered. "Sweep floors. Wash laundry. Even cook, a little. Send me on, if you must. Just, please, don't drag me back to Durn."

  The farm wife's face softened. "How old are you, child?"

  Meiglin told her.

  In the blistering explosion of argument that followed, she was granted the chance for employment at a cousin's remote, wayside inn.

  "It's honest work, child," the farm wife warned. "The tavern isn't fancy. It was built, with due permission, at the edge of the black desert, where it's hard to keep on decent help. The house draws from a well that's declared sacred ground. The tribefolk who tend the site won't tolerate wanton behavior. Not of any kind. The law of their goddess forbids the practice of whoring as unclean."

  The crofter just bludgeoned into submission added his own brutal caution. "Those desertfolk aren't to be trifled with, girl. They can skewer a rat at eighty paces with their darts. Tawbas' inn was raised on the ruined foundation left by the last fool, who thought to let the drovers toss his wenches. We'll send you south with a cloak and decent clothes. But don't beg for pity from my kinsman should you stray. Get yourself caught in the hayloft with the grooms, Tawbas will be quick to turn you out. Then it's the waterfront brothels at Innish, for such as you, and belike an early grave at the fist of some drunken galleyman."

  * * *

  Grateful for the upright chance of reprieve, Meiglin took work for a servant's upkeep in the tavern amid the rolling, dark sands of Sanpashir. She swept floors, made beds, boiled linen and did a drudge's chores in the kitchen through the tempestuous years that Tawbas, in his forthright, southland drawl, took to calling the trouble times.

  For the Mistwraith that smothered the lands to the west continued its inexorable invasion. The threat no longer seemed distant, or unreal, as inch by hard-fought inch, the northern kingdoms were lost. When the incursion rolled south and encroached on Melhalla, its creeping menace darkened even casual conversation. The looming possibility of a world lost to sunlight cast a pall of gloom over the future. The silk caravans moving from Atchaz to Innish brought news of the relentless defeats. In desperate increments, despite arcane help, the war-tattered remnants of Athera's defenders lost ground.

  "The line's broken at Silvermarsh," a south bound merchant announced, wetting his parched throat with ale. "If we're going to grow lean when the harvest is stunted, I say the mayors did right to expunge the old law. A man can't have a pack of murdering clansmen gainsay his right to hunt game inside the free wilds. The farmers will have to plow up new fields. How else can they feed a family?"

  "That's a slippery slope to tread," Tawbas said, arms folded over his polishing rag as he leaned on the edge of the bar. "Old law wasn't written for a Sorcerer's whimsy." Desertfolk insisted there was substance to the claim that the land's bounty increased with the unicorns. If their elders spoke truth, the charge given to the clans was not an arbitrary duty, born of high-handed arrogance. "A good deal worse than mist could blight our human fortune, if the ground the old law kept sacrosanct is given to the axe and the plow."

  "Perhaps." The mule drover shrugged. "But a cousin of mine herds sheep out in Vastmark. He's said no Paravians have migrated for years. Spring's come and gone, with no trace of a unicorn's track in the hills. Now, I've heard the uncanny creatures will vanish under the mist. Could be that's a fact, and the clanblood won't admit they've outlived their forefathers' purpose. I say the world's changed, and the mayors should be thanked. They'd do well to exterminate the whole stubborn breed, and open the land for prosperity."

  Meiglin filled emptied tankards, quiet as a cat, while the fierce debate swirled around her. The greater trials of town politics were none of her affair.
Sun still shone on the sands of Sanpashir. Her ancestry was not known to anyone. She lived each day as it came, unconcerned whether the scourge of the Mistwraith edged farther south, or the ancient magic waned from the countryside. Townborn, town raised, she had no incentive to pursue the arcane obligations of her ancestry. Nor was her parentage safe to disclose. Year after year, the new order waged its feud with ever more murderous ferocity.

  Tawbas weathered the turmoil with his usual stoic tolerance, serving all travelers with an even hand, and asking no prying questions. More than once, Meiglin found herself pouring beer for clan survivors who still patrolled the borders of the wilds. They came by night, mantled in dusty, rough clothes, and bearing war-sharpened steel in concealment. They drew water from the well and bartered pelts for supplies in hurried, brisk spoken transactions. As silently they left, hampered in their charge to keep the proscribed lands free of violation.

  Here, the blood price that hounded them was still a whispered threat. The tavern was bound under the desert tribes' law. Townsmen shunned the cruel sun and the desolate wastes. They also feared the dartmen, who were ever quick to anger, if a caravan strayed from the trade road.

  Anonymously hidden as each season turned, Meiglin grew into striking beauty. Her skin tanned under Sanpashir's harsh sun, rich contrast to her violet eyes and her glossy, seal-brown hair. Wisely, she kept such attributes masked. She wore shapeless clothes and a linen head cloth when she served beer in the taproom. Her vivid smile hidden, she worked honestly and well, slapping off the smitten groping of the drovers, and refusing the tipsy blandishments of the merchants who tried to bedazzle her with their flashy rings. She tended the hens and cracked corn for the mule teams, grateful to stay safely in obscurity.

  Yet as time passed, the fey talent born into her heritage refused to keep nondescript silence. Meiglin tossed, sleepless, through each windy spring, as if her blood knew when the centaur guardians escorted the dwindled herds of unicorns through the patterns of their seasonal migration. Her gifts stayed unschooled. No wise one lay at hand to guide the stirrings of her instinct. She had sighted dreams and visions, and not just during hallows, when the ancient rites were danced at the well to raise up the fire of the mysteries. Since she made no complaint, no one troubled to take notice when she arose, hollow-eyed in the morning. She drew water, dawn and dusk, from the mud-brick well, warned by a prickle of prescient gooseflesh when the secretive dartmen watched her out of the shadows.

  Their surveillance was so light, they left only tracks, swiftly erased by the winds. Meiglin held no fear of their furtive presence. She had always been diligent, heeding the sanctions that granted Tawbas his right to maintain the tavern. She was never tempted to venture outside after midnight, when the tribefolk gathered to honor their goddess under the change of the moon. Content in her place, she masked her unease when the old women appeared, arrived without sound at her back.

  Always, she bowed with her head turned, respectful. Their kind considered a stare rank impertinence. At first, Meiglin brashly offered them help, refilling their goatskin flasks. They smiled, veils lifted, their refusal soft spoken. "Anshlien'ya," they called her, the archaic word for dawn. The nuance of their dialect was lost upon Meiglin. She smiled back and never realized the idiom meant hope.

  Always, she presumed the phrase was a blessing, spoken in casual courtesy. A Sorcerer, perhaps, might have told her the truth, that Sanpashir's tribes revered silence. They never addressed anyone, unless their words were of vital importance.

  The tavern kept Meiglin too busy for curiosity. As the only respite within two days' ride, the taproom served all comers. Sacred ground demanded that none be turned away. Meiglin poured beer and baked waybread for the travelers. She listened, entranced, to more than one conversation held in the lilted cadence of the old Paravian language. Where such speakers went, and on what obscure business, she was too prudent to ask. She knew nothing of the tongue used for centuries by her forebears, which was a clear blessing. The next hour, like as not, she could be serving a rowdy band of headhunters, seeking trophy scalps for their saddle cloths. Such men rode through increasingly often, as the mayors grew fat from their conquest.

  Two trappers who boasted they had poached for game within the free wilds claimed the boldest of the killers had no mercy. "They'll ride down bearing women, even children." Armed parties now scoured deep into the hills to claim the reward for murdered clansmen.

  "Greedy fools, every one of them," snapped a merchant dining at the next trestle. "One encounter with the old races, they're sure to go mad."

  When the trappers scoffed, the fellow spoke of his grand-uncle. "He camped under a standing stone once, when the unicorns ran under moonlight. Turned him witless in a day. His wife had to spoon feed the wretch till he died, and change his breeches each time he pissed himself. You ask me, the world's mysteries are best left alone. Let the clanborn skulk as they will in the wilds. It's a miserable life their kind lead, anyway, with their witch blood bred to stand uncanny powers, and that curse on the seed of their children."

  "I don't fear madness," the trapper declared. His burly companion shrugged also. "The sunchildren are gone out of Selkwood, as well as the centaurs who warded the forest. What cause is left for the clans to gainsay our right to hunt as we wish? We'll pay tax for their head price until they back down, and leave us the run of the country."

  For as spring came round again, the rumors agreed. Under the Mistwraith's encroaching shadow, the ancient mysteries appeared to be fading. Paravian presence was increasingly scarce. Town bounties were taking their reiving toll, with the headhunters unafraid to ride out in force, and no centaur guardians to challenge their trespass.

  For the first time, in Sanpashir, clan presence was suppressed. The scouts ceased treating with the inn for provisions. They seldom ventured into the open, even to draw from the well. One star-strewn nightfall, on a trip to haul water, Meiglin encountered a red-haired scout wearing a traditional clan braid. The dusk bolstered her courage. For the first time, curiosity overcame her better sense. She ventured to ask after the name that was all her mother had left her.

  "He was a friend of my parents," she explained, stumbling over the lie as the scout turned a piercing glance upon her.

  "Egan Teir's'Dieneval, caithdein e'an?" the clan woman inquired with raised eyebrows. She continued, still speaking in fluent Paravian.

  Meiglin forced an awkward smile into a silence of hanging expectancy. "I never studied the ancient tongue," she confessed at self-conscious length.

  "No?" The scout shrugged, not offended. "Townborn were you, yes? Or of an outbred clan descent, but too timid to try initiation?" Disinclined to linger for a tiresome explanation, the woman capped her brimming flask. "Then the name and the history of s'Dieneval are no proper business for your ears, I should think."

  "Are there kinfolk?" Meiglin pressed.

  The scout paused. Her hands hovered forbiddingly close to her weapons, and her weathered features turned grim. "None alive," she admitted, impatient. "If your parents weren't told, the last child of that lineage was slaughtered by the mob that savaged Tirans."

  "I didn't know. I'm sorry." Meiglin bent to the task of filling her bucket yoke, then trudged the worn path to the tavern. No kin remained living. The knowledge reassured her. Surely no harm would come if the bloodline she carried was abandoned to nameless obscurity.

  "Girl, you're mistaken."

  Meiglin started in fierce surprise. An ancient desertman barred her way, his erect, scarecrow figure shrouded in layers of sun-faded robes. His eyes were obsidian, and his face, crinkled leather, and his approach had been eerily soundless. To further her upset, the yoke buckets swung at her jolted stop, and slopped water into the sand.

  "Forgive," she murmured, appalled and afraid. The way of the tribes held such waste as a desecration. "Old one, I meant no wrong in your eyes."

  "My eyes saw no wrong," the old man stated. The staccato emphasis of his native dialect came measured, and c
arefully dignified. "A wrong can be forgiven and righted. Yet the waste of a birth gift is not the same." His regard showed reproach. "Daughter," he chided, "Shroud a light in a blanket, it must start a fire. Your dreams will draw notice. Think carefully what you'll do when your talent fully awakens."

  Meiglin edged back in denial. "My dreams are just nightmares."

  "Ah. And are they, in fact?" The old man did not move aside. He bent down, scooped up the dollop of damp sand and cupped it between seamed brown fingers. "Water speaks truth, child. Here, perhaps, a thorn bush might sprout, that could not have grown but for carelessness. Yet for want of this moisture, somewhere else, another useful plant withers. A seed bears no harvest, and a child, perhaps, starves for the lack of its sustenance. That death in turn may become the one thing that brings on the ruin of a tribe. Worse than that, maybe, if the lost child's destiny was fated. The waste of that life might perhaps come to open the rift that unravels the world."

  "Riddles." Meiglin sighed with cautious respect. "I don't understand a word of them."

  "You will." The elder restored the damp earth with calm reverence. "Now, like spilled water, your bounty could fall anywhere. When what you are can no longer be masked, you will sprout the seed of its making. But then, heed me, daughter. The crop will be sown, and the choices you have will be few."

  * * *

  Meiglin returned to her duties, distressed. If her bloodline was fated, whom could she ask? Casual questions had become much too dangerous, with the least breath of gossip concerning the clans pursued by the mayors' informants.

  Nor could she ponder the desertman's warning. Already the taproom was packed to the rafters with three caravans southbound from Atchaz. Merchants jammed the upstairs, two to a bed, with their dusty assemblage of muleteers and armed outriders grown boisterous with strong beer and boredom. The press and the noise forced the late courier bound for Innish to snatch supper in the inn's kitchen.