Mare Ultima

by Alex Irvine

  “For a man who hates magic, you seem to draw it,” commented a stranger one night in a pub called simply the Fish, where Paulus was sharing stories the way lonely men did when wine loosened their tongues.

  “True,” Paulus said.

  “You’ve killed a dragon and a seneschal, and here you are drinking the last of your coins and hoping that the morning will bring another chance to kill for a living,” the stranger said. “That’s uncommon.”

  Paulus took a closer look at the stranger. He was a young man, his face unscarred and a dove-gray leather glove on his right hand. He wore a ring over the glove on the middle finger of that hand. An apprentice of the Tower.

  The conversation took on a different meaning. The apprentice saw Paulus register the ring and the glove. “You need work, or so we have heard,” he said. “The Tower could use a man with your qualities.”

  “Qualities,” Paulus repeated.

  “You survived the ghost and its geas. That alone puts you in a very small company,” the apprentice said. “The geas itself would have left hoof marks all over the minds of most men. And then there’s your older story.”

  “Don’t,” Paulus said. He hadn’t told that story tonight, or ever in the Fish. “If you say the word dog there’s going to be blood.”

  Unruffled, the apprentice went on. “I hear you’ve been trying to sell some bits of dragon. What do you have left?”

  “Are you buying?” Paulus asked.

  “The Tower is buying. We’ll buy your dragon bits, and we’d like to make an offer on you as well.”

  Paulus had found it difficult to move the dragon’s teeth and scales because he could not prove their authenticity without resorting to revealing who he was and therefore possibly letting news of his whereabouts filter back to the Keep. The eyes and heart were trickier still, because they were rare enough to be worth enormous amounts of money, and few people rich enough to part with that much money were gullible enough to do it without being certain of what they were getting. The queen, in giving Paulus the trophies from the dragon, had made him rich in a currency that was nearly impossible to spend.

  “An offer on me,” Paulus said. “For what?”

  “To do the kind of thing you do,” the apprentice said. With a self-mocking conjuror’s flourish, he produced an inch-high column of gold coins from his sleeve. “Take this as a token of earnestness. We will see you tomorrow at midday if you wish to know more.”

  The apprentice left. The other patrons of the Fish eyed Paulus’ new wealth. He called out to the barkeep and circled his finger over his head. “One for the house,” he said.

  When he went to the Tower the next day, Paulus began to learn that its mysteries were both unyielding and uninteresting. The wizards did what they did according to protocols that were their protocols. He did not have to learn them and did not want to. The first day, they purchased from him the teeth and scales and the remainder of the heart. Paulus used the money to buy a good horse and take a room over a public house on a steep hill near the Jingle. At first he dealt with Eyler, the young apprentice who had come seeking him in the Fish. The wizards desire that you should travel to thus-and-such a place to bring back this or that article, Eyler would say, and Paulus would go and do it. He had in his possession, briefly, strange artifacts of vanished races and scrolls in languages that looked like mathematics. To gather them he rode to some of the cities he had previously seen as a soldier: Ie Fure, Averon, Muska. Most of these journeys were uneventful; on those occasions when he was called upon to fight, Paulus fought without relish, as a professional does.

  At other times he escorted one of the Tower’s wizards to a library or ruin, or a gathering of wizards from different cities where they disputed points of what they called the Law. Paulus gathered that this Law had something to do with the matter of the universe. He inquired no further and his waking hours were untroubled. When he awoke in the night, however, he realized that the atmosphere of the Agate Tower, the forces that gathered and swirled there, had permeated him somehow. Eyler had been right; he did draw magic. Its echoes sounded in the chambers of his heart. Paulus began to dream badly.

  A year and a half after Paulus entered the employ of the Tower, Eyler took off his glove and entered the society of wizards. Shortly after, Paulus found Eyler in the Tower’s library. “You were right,” he said. “I draw magic. Why?”

  “Not an easy question,” Eyler said.

  “If it was an easy question, I wouldn’t need a wizard to answer it.”

  “Think of how often magic has been worked on you,” Eyler said. “The ghost of the king. The geas. The transformation. Most men who are transformed into animals lose parts of their minds when their human form is restored. You did not. And you survived the ghost, and you have eaten of the heart of a dragon and felt a dragon’s blood on your skin. You are saturated in echoes and aftereffects and traces. Like draws like; how could the magic in this tower not find you?”

  Paulus imagined himself trailing wisps of magic wherever he went. He imagined magic creeping and battening upon his body and soul. For the first time he understood that magic was not always something that someone did; it simply was. He had made himself vulnerable to it.

  “I sleep badly,” he said to Eyler. “And my dreams are hard.”

  “Ah, dreams. When the mind and spirit move from sleeping to waking…that is a Journey and a Return, is it not? The journey is dangerous and the return is never to the place that was left. Magic inhabits and animates the same space where dreams occur,” Eyler said. “At least that is what we have learned so far. So a man like you, with the tracks of so much magic on you, will feel his dreams drawn to the memories of that magic. How could it be otherwise?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you,” Paulus said.

  The dreams went on: Paulus on the floor of the throne room, eyes closed, breathing in rhythm to the quiet snoring of the king. His brother turning handsprings and composing witty couplets about courtiers’ bedroom peccadilloes. The gentle touch of the queen, falling away as Paulus rose to walk on two legs again. The silence of the tomb, and the ghost burrowed away like a worm in his mind, its twisting track left behind even after the broker boiled it down to an essence that a desperate man could pour over a sword and use to kill a dragon. The stink of his fear and the dragon’s blood.

  Joy.

  He awoke in the hours before dawn, sometime in midsummer. All gone. All the matter of Paulus’ life, gone. Remaining only as something to mourn. Paulus rose and walked out into The Fells. There was one man living who would understand. He came to the stable gate in the shadow of the Keep’s walls. “Andrew,” he said to the stableboy who answered his knock. A short while later the hostler appeared. He looked over his shoulder, then back at Paulus. “If you’re going to risk your life, I hope you at least brought a bottle,” he said.

  Paulus followed him into the workshop. He had heard little of what went on inside the Keep since leaving it. Andrew caught him up and it became clear to Paulus that nothing had changed in three years. Mario Tremano was dead, but the falling of that tree let other treacherous saplings find sunlight. The queen was strong, Andrew said, but the court still struggled with the consequences of the king’s death and Tremano’s scheming. There was talk that a war might be necessary to paper over divisions among the nobility. Listening, Paulus was struck by how little any of it mattered. The queen was strong? Good. Enough. Let the rest of it happen how it would.

  “I thought once that I might be able to see her again,” he said.

  Andrew shook his head. “You’d be forcing her to make an example of you. As much as she loved you, that wouldn’t stop her. Things end, Paulus. You’ve got to let them end. Especially when you’re the one who ended them.”

  The bottle passed between them. Light began to show through the workshop’s shuttered windows. “You’d better go before it gets light,” Andrew said. “It was good to see you, old friend. Don’t come again.”

  Paulus went o
ut into the dawn. He had meant to ask Andrew a question but the time had never been quite right and now, coming down the Ridge of the Keep toward the river, he knew that the point of the visit had not been to ask the question but to learn that he would always have provided his own answer no matter what Andrew said. He had made a farewell.

  VI: THE PRICE OF FORGETTING

  Too many lives tangled his mind. Too many losses kept his heart broken. Paulus realized that he could not stand to be himself any more and there was only one thing he could think of to do. He walked all day through The Fells, calculating. Things should have been different, he thought. But they were as they were. In the afternoon he made a final decision and returned to the quayside block where the spell brokers mixed and tinctured their perilous wares. He stopped outside the shop where he had killed Jan Destrier before leaving on his errand to kill the dragon. Another broker had moved in, probably while Destrier’s body was still warm and Paulus’ horse had not yet broken a sweat. But that was in the past.

  I might have stayed with Joy, Paulus thought. I might have refused to be the queen’s instrument. I might have chosen a less foolish way to attempt to avenge my father.

  He could see that he had been fortunate in ways that most men had not. Still, his peculiar fortunes had brought him sadness. Luck was not always lucky. Loyalty had brought him no peace.

  He entered the broker’s shop. The man behind the table was not Jan Destrier, of course, but he might as well have been. Fashions among the spell brokers were oddly dictatorial. They all seemed to be fat men wearing too many rings and cut stones in their beards. “What do you seek?” the broker asked.

  “I want to forget,” Paulus said.

  “What do you want to forget?” The broker pared his nails. “Every man has something he wants to forget. If you purchase carelessly, you might forget more than you had wished.”

  “I want to forget the dragon. My brother Piero. And her.” Paulus stood, and waited. “No. Not Piero.”

  “Maybe you should make up your mind,” the broker said.

  “Maybe you should keep your mouth shut and your hands busy,” Paulus said. He did not look at the broker. He waited until a phial appeared on the tabletop in front of him.

  “There will be a cost,” the broker said.

  “I know.”

  “Specificity brings a greater cost.”

  “I will pay,” Paulus said. From the pouch at his belt he brought forth the dragon’s eyes. “There is more. I will pay. Tell me what.”

  VII: WIZARD’S SIX

  In the spring Paulus set out north from The Fells, hunting the apprentice Myros. He cannot be allowed to collect his six, the wizard had said. If you cannot find his track, you must kill whichever of the six he has already selected. It did Paulus’ conscience no good to kill people whose only fault was being collected by an aspiring wizard, but he would be only the first of many hunters. Without the guild’s protection, a wizard’s six were like baby turtles struggling toward the sea. Best to spare them a life of being hunted.

  The apprentice had spent enough time in the Agate Tower to know that there would be pursuit. He was moving fast and had four months’ head start; Paulus moved faster, riding through nights and spring storms, fording spring-swollen rivers, asking quiet questions over bottles in public houses along the only road over the mountains. He killed the first of the apprentice’s collection on a farm between a bend in the road and a ripple of foothills: a small boy with a dirty face and a stick in his hand.

  Yes, mister, a man passed by here in the winter.

  Yes, mister, he had a ring over his glove. I was feeding the pig, and he told me I was a likely boy. Are you looking for him?

  Can I see your sword?

  They weren’t supposed to choose children, Paulus was thinking as he rode on. Even apart from the cultural sanction, children’s magic was powerful but unpredictable, tricky to harness. No wonder the guild was after this one.

  In a public house that evening, the day’s chill slowly ebbing from his feet, Paulus said a prayer for the boy’s parents. He hoped they hadn’t sent anyone after him. It was bad enough to kill children; he had even less desire to take the lives of vengeful bumpkins. Best to keep moving. Already he had gained a month on the apprentice, who was moving fast for a normal man but not fast enough to stay ahead of Paulus, who had once been one of the king’s rangers. Upstairs in his room, Paulus watched a thin drift of snow appear on the windowsill, spilling onto the plank floor. His prayer beads worked through his fingers. Go, boy, he thought. Speed your way to heaven. He dreamed of turtles, and of great birds that flew at night.

  In the morning the snow had stopped, and Paulus cut a piece of cheese from a wheel left out in the kitchen. He stuck the knife in the remaining cheese and set a coin next to it, then left through the back door and saddled his horse without waking the stable boy. He rode hard, into the mountains and over the first of the passes where the road lay under drifted snow taller than a man on horseback. The horse picked out the track; like Paulus, it had been this way before. It was blowing hard by noon, when they had come to the bottom of a broad valley dotted with farms and a single manor house. Paulus rode to the gates of the manor and waited to be noticed.

  The gate creaked open, revealing a choleric elder in threadbare velvet, huddled under a bearskin cloak. “Who comes to the house of Baron Branchefort?”

  Paulus dismounted and let the seneschal see the sigil of the Agate Tower dangling from the horse’s bridle. “I ride on an errand from the wizards’ guild in The Fells,” he said. “Has an apprentice traveled through this valley?”

  “And how would I know an apprentice?”

  “He would wear a ring over the glove on his right hand. He is called Myros.”

  The elder nodded. “Aye, he was here. Visited the Baron asking permission to gather plant lore.”

  “Was this granted?”

  “It was. He was our guest for a week and a day, then rode to the head of the valley.”

  “Did he gather any herbs?”

  “I did not observe.”

  “You wouldn’t have. His errand has nothing to do with plants. He travels to collect children.”

  The elder held Paulus’ gaze for a long moment. “This is why you follow him.”

  “It is. Are there children in your house?”

  “No. The Baron nears his eightieth year. We have few servants, and no children.”

  Paulus offered up a prayer of thanks that he would not have to enter the manor. He had seen more than enough of noble houses fallen into somnolence. Standing at the gate of this one, his chest constricted and he thought of his brother.

  “Where,” he asked, “are the houses in this valley with children?”

  The elder looked up at the sky, then down at the ground between his feet. “Many children come into this world,” he said. “Few survive. Only one of the Baron’s vassals has children below marriageable age. He is called Philo, and his house is the last before the road rises into the mountains again.”

  Paulus nodded and mounted his horse again.

  “You will ease Philo’s mind, I pray,” the elder said.

  “What ease I can give, I will give,” Paulus said, and rode north.

  Philo’s house lay in the shadow of a double peak, across the saddle of which lay Paulus’ route over the mountains. As Paulus rode up, the sun rested between the peaks. A man about Paulus’ age, but with the caved-in chest and stooped neck of too much work and not enough food, was drawing water. A girl of seven or eight years stood waiting with an empty bucket.

  “Philo,” Paulus said.

  “That is my name,” Philo said, without looking up at Paulus, as he hauled a full bucket over the edge of the well. He emptied it into the bucket his daughter set on the ground at his feet. “And this is my daughter Sophia. Now you know what of us is worth knowing.”

  “A young man wearing a ring over his glove has been here,” Paulus said.

  Philo dropped the bucket back
into the well. “He has.”

  “He spoke to your daughter.”

  “That’s right, sir, he did. Told her she was a likely girl. She’s always seemed so to me, but if I was any judge of men or girls I wouldn’t be here.” Still Philo had not met Paulus’ gaze. Paulus began to wonder what had passed between him and Myros; or was his demeanor caused by the Brancheforts?

  No matter.

  “I come from The Fells,” Paulus said. “My instructions are to gather the girl he spoke to. For service at the Agate Tower.”

  At this, Philo looked up and Paulus and put a hand around his daughter’s thin shoulders. Now it was Paulus who wanted to look away. He forced himself to hold Philo’s eye. “She’s my only, sir,” Philo said. “And my wife, we’re too old to have another.”

  “Philo,” Paulus said. “I have no quarrel with you. My errand is my errand.”

  He watched the awful calculus of the peasant on Philo’s face. One fewer mouth to feed. Giving his daughter over to a life of service with the wizards of The Fells, where she would spend the rest of her days forgetting what it was like to go to bed hungry. And against that…

  “May we visit her, sir?”

  “When she has been gone a year,” Paulus said. He was a poor liar, but this provision he remembered from his own journey to The Fells as a boy, when he had been taken into the King’s Acrobats.

  His mother had never come. After a year he had stopped expecting her.

  “Before that,” he said, “she will still long for home. You may write as long as you do not ask her to return. Censors at the guild will destroy your letters if you do.”

  Philo was nodding slowly. “We do love her, sir,” he said. “She’s our only.”

  And through all this, the girl Sophia spoke not a word.

  “I will return in the morning,” Paulus said.