Fire and Dust

by James Gardner

  A chorus of murmurs rustled through the assembly. Every bat-like wing trembled with dark shivers. «Copy?» several voices whispered. «Copy?»

  «Yes,» the boatman replied. «These faces are my personal insignia. I must have them painted on both sides of the bow so that I am recognized by my… clients.»

  «Copy?» the whispers continued. «Copy facesssss…»

  «Surely this is not a difficult assignment?» the boatman said. «I've brought the necessary paints, and even a few brushes.»

  «Not facessss,» said a nearby fiend. «Maybe nice mandala with sssstar motif?»

  «Yessss,» agreed another, «or Cosssmic Egg with wreath of ssstylized sssnakesss?»

  «Ssscythes,» chirped up a third, «I sssee ssstunning asssemblage of peach-toned ssscythes, sssuperimposed on mauve medicine wheelsss, sssurrounded by cressscent moonsss and dolphinsss.»

  «Dolphins?» the boatman shuddered.

  «Ssscarlet onesss. Very pudgy, with lightning boltsss coming out of tailsss.»

  The boatman made a strangled sound. «I do not want scarlet dolphins, whether or not they come equipped with anal lightning bolts…»

  «Isss sssymbol,» an umbral put in quickly. «Dolphinsss sssymbolize river Ssstyx.»

  «There are no dolphins in the Styx!» the boatman snapped. «There are only unpleasant creatures called hydroloths, and they would rip a sissy little dolphin to fillets just for the fun of hearing it squeak.»

  One fiend cocked its head to the side. «Hydrolothsss look good with lightning boltssss?»

  «A hydroloth wouldn't look good if you put a bag over its head, and one over yours while you're at it. I do not want hydroloths; I do not want stylized snakes; I do not want a nice mandala. I want an exact copy of the faces that are already on the other side of the boat, all right? Do you think you can handle that?»

  The umbrals bristled with artistic indignation and stormed away, stomping louder than you'd think shadows could manage.

  Yasmin stepped forward and tapped the boatman on the shoulder. «Sir,» she said above the noise of the fiends' departure, «you don't need an artist; you need a hack. Let me introduce the most unrepentant hack in the multiverse…»

  I tried my best to look modest.

  * * *

  In the next few minutes, I learned several things: that the skeletal boat people who ply the Styx call themselves marraenoloths; that marraenoloths are the only creatures who have learned the secret of navigating the river's black waters; and that this particular marraenoloth was a haughty berk named Garou, who refused to admit how lucky he was to find the one village in Carceri with a painter who would (a) take his commission and (b) not charge an arm and a soul for it.

  «There is no element of luck involved,» Garou insisted. «I simply concentrated on my need for a suitable artist, and the Styx carried me here. You could have been anywhere on the Lower Planes and the river would have brought me to you… or to someone else equally talented and perhaps less imbued with that foul-smelling dust.»

  I was going to snap back a caustic reply, but stopped myself before the words came out. Instead, I asked, «Can you really smell the dust on me?»

  «Most certainly,» Garou replied. «And let me add that in my day, I have inhaled the stench of rotting corpses, the reek of embalming chemicals, the odors of a thousand types of river pollution… but never have I smelled such a disgusting aroma as that which arises from the dust in your garments.» He leaned toward me, thrust his gaping nasal cavity against my jacket, and drew in a heady breath. «Ah yes,» he sighed with pleasure, «totally, putridly repugnant.»

  Yasmin's jaw tightened and she let out her breath slowly. «You're a Sensate, aren't you, Garou?»

  «I have the good judgment to belong to the Society of Sensation, yes. Is there something wrong with that?»

  «No, no,» she answered, a fatalistic tone in her voice. «Britlin, shouldn't you give him the secret handshake or something?»

  «Handshake?» I snorted. «The formal Sensate greeting is rather more tactile than a mere handshake.»

  «Indeed,» Garou said. «It requires a hundred and twenty-seven meticulously prepared props, takes a day and a half to perform, and may only be conducted under the auspices of a qualified chirurgeon.»

  «I've done it twice,» I told Yasmin. «Remember that scar I showed you last night? The sodding duck moved at precisely the wrong time.»

  «You too?» Garou asked with something close to sympathy in his voice. «I now make a point of ramming ducks with my skiff whenever they cross my path. Of course, all marraenoloths like to ram ducks – it's one of our little traditions. But for me, it has personal meaning.»

  «Yes? Then clobber one for me sometime,» I said.

  And if there is such a thing as friendship between humans and creatures of evil, that was the start between me and Garou.

  * * *

  We negotiated a simple deal: I'd paint Garou's boat, and he'd ship us out of the village before the umbrals had a chance to butcher us. The Styx flows through all the Lower Planes, offering access to every form of hell imaginable; but it also passes close to a number of portals, and Garou promised he could take us to gates that led to relative safety. Nothing so convenient as a route directly to Sigil, alas – the best Garou could offer were portals to the so-called gate-towns, outposts which serve as staging points between the Lower Planes and the neutral Outlands. From the stories my father told, I knew the gate-towns to the Lower Planes were vicious places in their own right, tainted by evil seeping up from below… but as long as they retained some vestige of neutrality, any gate-town would be less lethal than where we were now. In a gate-town, we could contact the local chapters of our factions and get help. After that, we could worry about our next move.

  Soon I had a paintbrush in hand, and was roughing out the sorrow-filled faces I would have to copy. There were sixteen of the portraits, a day's work at most: by the time the umbrals retired to their huts for the night, I'd be finished. Garou assured us he could slip our party out of town quietly while the fiends slept.

  «Can we trust him?» Yasmin whispered to me as I started to paint the grief-ravaged face of a high elf.

  «That's the question, isn't it?» I muttered. «He has nothing to gain by betraying us and we seem to get along passably well; but it still might amuse him to deposit us in some festering cesspit. On the other hand, he is a fellow Sensate… and I think he'll be impressed on with my work on his boat.»

  «Maybe you should leave one face unfinished until he takes us somewhere safe.»

  «Good idea,» I nodded. «It'll give Garou some incentive to live up to his half of the bargain.»

  Yasmin watched me paint a few strokes, then asked, «Which gate-town do we aim for?»

  «I don't know. Have you visited any of them?»

  «No.» She shrugged. «Maybe one of the others has.»

  «Why don't you check with them?» I suggested. «I'll be all right here.»

  She stared at me for a moment, clearly debating whether she could safely leave me by myself. «Very well,» she said at last. «I don't want to watch you work on these pictures anyway. Too depressing.»

  «Because the faces are so sad or because it's just a hack copy job?»

  She didn't answer. I watched her walk away.

  * * *

  Time passed. Garou watched long enough to see me finish the high elf's face, then wandered off into the village. I took that as a vote of confidence; he had accepted I possessed sufficient talent for the job, and could work without his supervision. The umbrals were not so quick to drop the issue – I could feel their hollow eyes peering at me from dark vantage points under the trees, and could hear their rustling voices whisper unrecognizable words – but in time they too faded away, vanishing on unknown errands.

  I was left alone with the grieving faces.

  Whoever painted the originals had done good work: nothing too difficult in the way of technique, yet with a sure touch in capturing the pathos of each subjec
t. It was easy to believe the faces had been taken from life; but I didn't want to pursue that line of thought. Sixteen people, heartsick people, herded together and forced to pose for the unknown artist… it didn't bear thinking about.

  But I couldn't keep my mind off the subject. Garou's previous artist had done that old trick with the eyes, aiming them out flat so they seemed to follow me wherever I moved; and it is hard to bear up under such sorrowful scrutiny for long periods of time. Sad, mad eyes, always watching.

  Among the faces was a human man, light-haired, full-bearded, nothing like my dark and well-trimmed father… yet the more the face stared at me, the more I felt this was Niles Cavendish: not dead, not lost these fifteen years, but still alive somewhere here in the Lower Planes and crushed by overwhelming grief. Time and again, I caught myself staring instead of painting. It was not my father, it was nothing like him – nothing like anything he could have become since I saw him last. And yet, when I was fleshing out other faces, I would repeatedly catch sight of the man from the corner of my eye and gasp. My father. Papa.

  «Magic,» I muttered under my breath. «Sodding magic.» It could have been in the paint, on the boat, or hanging in the very air around me. Every plane lays its fingers on your soul and toys with you, trying to seduce you into its dance. Carceri wanted to embrace me with its ripe despair, and why not use visions of Niles Cavendish as bait? The man in the picture was not my father… any more than I was.

  That was it: I was not my father. He had been a hero. I was a mere copyist; as Yasmin said, a hack. How long before she despised me for that? She knew I was the son of Niles Cavendish – we'd talked about it the night before, after… after we'd finished being inattentive sentries. Maybe my father was the only reason she cared a twig for me. Maybe she thought I was a savior with a sword, like him; and when she learned the truth, how I could scarcely bear thinking of him… would she walk away disappointed, longing for a real man, and a real life, and real emotion on the canvas…

  «Painting more pictures, huh?» said a nasal voice behind my shoulder. «You must be really dedicated – working every chance you get. Uncle Toby says artists are like that.»

  I turned and saw Hezekiah looming over me. For some reason, he didn't look like a gawky Clueless nuisance at this moment; he looked downright welcome. «I don't know sod about artists,» I told him. «I don't know sod about anything, except this piking place is playing tricks with my mind. Sit down on that stump and keep me sane.»

  «How do I do that?»

  «Grant me wisdom. Grant me truth. Grant me the secrets of life. Or failing that, tell me about your home town, the girls you left behind, and your piking Uncle Toby.»

  Which he did.

  * * *

  Like every home town, Hezekiah's birthplace of Templeford had the dewiest dawns, the slowest horses, and the tangiest cheese in the multiverse. The barber was missing a finger and knew more jokes than any man in history. The tailor who sold men's clothes held a «going out of business» sale at least once a year. There were two blacksmiths, one competent, one not… and the well-to-do patronized the fumble-fingered fellow because the other man's smithy was always full of commoners. Of course, no one locked their doors at night. Of course, everyone went skating on the creek in winter time. Of course, there was an old house suspected of being haunted, a young woman suspected of selling her nights for silver, and a butcher suspected of adding cat-meat to the ground pork.

  Born and bred in Sigil, I still knew Hezekiah's home. I'd never been there… perhaps no one had ever been there, including Hezekiah. In real towns, drunks are sad or intimidating, never innocently amusing; and the girl next door has a complicated life of her own, not centered on being your foil. In real towns, marriages are neither unending bliss or unmitigated disasters, but always somewhere in between; and the same goes for children, never purely angels or demons as the stories would have you believe. But none of us comes from a real town – we come from home towns, where everyone is a «character» and where our stories, smiling or angry, are all painted in primary colors.

  At that moment, I liked primary colors; they were a welcome change from the subdued browns on the palette in front of me. Thus I let Hezekiah prattle on about the dances in Pecksniffle's pack-barn, and the blizzard three years ago that buried houses up to their eaves. Was the creek full of trout in spring? Of course. Did the leaves turn crimson and gold at harvest time? Every tree in the forest. And every grandmother could cook better than the greatest chefs in Sigil, every grandfather could whittle better than the most famous sculptors, every hunting dog could sniff out a partridge ten miles away…

  What about Uncle Toby?

  «What do you want to know about Uncle Toby?» Hezekiah asked.

  «He raised you?»

  «Yes.»

  «And he taught you the tricks of mind over matter?»

  «Oh sure – he taught me lots of stuff. But…» Hezekiah's voice trailed off and he sighed a sigh of theatrical proportions.

  «What's wrong?» I asked.

  «Well,» the boy said, «I think Uncle Toby skimped on one part of my education.»

  «Yes?»

  «He never… well, Uncle Toby was a bachelor, see. He knew about the multiverse, and the gods, and the powers of the mind, but he never really talked about… you know.»

  Hezekiah looked at me with anxious brown eyes. I knew exactly what kind of guidance he wanted, and as a Sensate, I had plenty of experience to draw upon. The trick was not to unnerve the boy with excessively hydraulic details.

  «What do you want to know?» I asked.

  «Well… it's just that… ummm, well… I think Miriam likes me.» He lifted his eyes quickly, then lowered them again. «I could be all wrong about this, but…»

  «But you're probably right,» I finished for him. «That trick you did back in the Spider – making yourself look terrifying – I think that caught her attention.»

  «That? But that was… she liked that?»

  I held up my hands in a shrug. «All I said was, it caught her attention. By now, I'm sure she realizes you aren't the demonic horror we claimed you were. But she's still here, isn't she? What do you think of her?»

  «I don't know…»

  «Do you want her to go away, or do you want her to stick around?»

  «Oh, I don't want her to go away.»

  «That's all you have to know at this point,» I told him. «You want to spend time with her and see what happens. Right?»

  «Right.»

  «So don't start worrying about a million other things.» I gave him a quick smile. «You've known her less than two days. There may come a time when you should start thinking of the future, but right now, stick to the present.»

  «Thanks, Britlin,» Hezekiah answered earnestly, as if he believed I'd given him advice instead of platitudes. «I've been really confused about… oh, hi Eustace, what are you doing here?»

  «Eustace?» I repeated. The boy was looking at something behind my back. «Eustace?» I choked. And then I was diving out of the way as sharp wight claws sliced down through the position I'd occupied a split-second earlier.

  13. THREE MINUTES OF DEPARTURE

  One cannot paint while wearing a sword, so I had set mine down… only a few paces away, but the wight now stood between me and the weapon. While alive, this particular wight had been mostly human, but back a generation or two his family must have received an infusion of giant blood – the creature stood close to seven feet tall, with shoulders as wide as a wheelbarrow. He looked vaguely familiar; and in the split second before he lunged for another attack, I realized where I'd seen him before.

  This was one of the wights attending Rivi when she confronted us back in the Glass Spider.

  «She's found us!» I yelled to Hezekiah; then I was too busy rolling out of the way as two handfuls of talons tried to embed themselves in my chest.

  «That isn't Eustace, is it?» Hezekiah observed.

  The boy was still sitting blithely on his tree stump, wa
tching as the wight took another whack at me. This time, the monster dug his claws so deep into the muddy ground I had time to scramble to my feet before he could pull his hands free. With a snap of his wrist, the wight flicked the muck on his fingers into my face, spattering my cheeks and nearly blinding me in one eye. A moment later, he charged straight for me, hoping to run me through while I was distracted. He very nearly managed it too; but I dove over the skiff I'd been painting and scudded away along the slippery mud.

  «My sword!» I gasped to Hezekiah. «Get me my sword!»

  The wight didn't bother to jump the skiff after me; he simply bent down, planted his hands on the boat, then shoved it forward with all his strength, like a carpenter shoving a wood-plane over the flat of a board. The keel of the boat skimmed up a mound of mud as it skated over the ground, but the resistance wasn't enough to slow down the wight. In an instant, the skiff slammed into me and propelled my whole body forward, knocking me roughly down the beach. I could handle the bruises; but another five paces would drive me straight into the River Styx. From the blazing fury in the wight's eyes, I guessed that was precisely the plan.

  Digging my heels into the mud, I tried to resist the steady push forward; unluckily for me, the wight's toe-claws gripped the ground and gave him excellent traction, much better than the smooth leather soles of my boots. I slipped and slipped and slipped again, as the wight bent his back into one heave after another. There was no respite to let me stand up, no chance to scramble away around the front or back of the skiff. It might have been possible to clamber over the gunwale into the boat, but that would only put me within range of the wight's life-draining touch.

  «Hezekiah!» I yelled. And the lapping sound of the Styx was almost as loud in my ears as my own voice.