The Colors of Magic Anthology (magic: the gathering)

by Richard Lee Byers

  "Time to finish the sacrifice," Tayva gloated and stepped into the water.

  "Yes, " whispered the spirit, and the surface broke in front of her.

  It was Winton, and the water had not been kind. Withered eyes looked to her and flesh peeled off in great strips as he moved toward her. Tayva shrieked and turned to run. The water and mud gripped her legs, and her progress slowed as she moved to the shore, but she still had the strength and speed to outrun a dead man.

  Tayva raced past her dead cousin, but Winton cast his bolas as he had a thousand times in life, and she fell hard. The bolas wrapped her legs, and she dragged herself forward with her hands, tearing them on the stony ground. She couldn't catch her breath and curled up in pain. She glanced back and saw Winton bending over Loria, his rotting hands tangled in Loria's blue dress as he dragged her into the shallows.

  Even as she caught her breath she still crawled, moving toward the hut for a knife to free herself. By the time she reached the dovecot her legs were burning with such pain that she could only thrust her body into the dark interior in a futile attempt to hide.

  She lay alone with the plague-ridden bodies of birds. She had killed everything in the ceremony to corrupt the pigeons she fed to Loria. Tayva touched her legs and cried out as she felt the barbs and jagged edges on the bolas that tied her limbs. She could smell her legs putrefying as poison and disease from the slough devoured her. She would never escape now.

  Tayva wept. All the cousins had done and said was heard by something else. Their plans to leave were understood by what had escaped Ebnezzer's skull. The spirit of the water decided two sacrifices would serve it better.

  Tayva clasped her hands to her head and tried to shut out reality. But even through her moans of pain she could hear unsteady footsteps. Winton's possessed and rotting body wove up the path. She tried to remember the prayers against the dead, but prayers were lost to her. She cursed the spirit, Loria, and herself as the door creaked open. Tayva remembered all the pigeons she had drowned over the years and shuddered as Winton began to drag her to the slough.

  Blue

  Blue, sometimes called the color of distinction, is characterized by calm hands and a reflective mind. A natural sedative, blue is the color of deliberation and introspection, conservatism and acceptance. Blue has almost universal appeal and is considered to be the most aesthetically appealing color. Blue is the color of respect and wisdom. But, those who lean toward blue sometimes use reason for selfish and self-justified purposes. It is the color of control and passive aggression as well as the color of the sea and the sky. Blue is for those contemplative people who exercise caution in words and actions and for those who always weigh the options.

  Expeditions to the End of the World

  J. Robert King

  Red-faced and burly, Captain Crucias mingled among his noble passengers. Though he wore his best jacket-a black waistcoat with gold buttons and red Jamuraan appointments-he felt clumsy and common among these folk.

  They sat like porcelain dolls all around him, poised on the iron settees he had bolted to the ship's deck. Most were enduring the week-long sea journey with Argivian aplomb-which meant complaints about cabin size, food quality, chantey lyrics, salt spray, fish smells, strong winds, daytime glare, nighttime murk, and full-time nausea. On this particular voyage, the high priestess of dissatisfaction was Madame Gheiri, more implacable and discontent than the sea itself. She took up a whole settee, around her arrayed the accoutrements of her discomfort-book, bumbershoot, shawl, crackers, and tepid tea. Her white silk camise and gray cashmere gown were complemented by a pudgy face in light green.

  Crucias approached. "Are you feeling better today, my dear?"

  "Must the ship bounce and sway so much?" she asked testily, her eyes like twin red daggers in the morning sun.

  Crucias gave an apologetic smile and gestured expansively to the bright ocean all around. "The sea has waves, Madame Gheiri… "

  "I'm not talking about the sea, " she gasped, clutching an ill-used handkerchief to her lips before drawing the strength to continue. "I'm talking about the ship. Can't you control your own ship? You have all these ropes and sails and anchors and things. Surely you could use them to smooth the ride. "

  "We'll be reaching Argoth this afternoon, Madame. Then we'll anchor for the show, and your stomach will have a chance to settle, " Crucias said soothingly.

  "My niece Elgia is so ill, she couldn't get up from her bunk this morning. She was hoping to meet a husband on this-this displeasure excursion!" she snapped. "But no young men… seven days of monotony… seven nights of seasickness! I tell you, there had better be some impressive explosions and definite signs of death and mayhem on the island, or I'll make my own cataclysmic battle right here!"

  Crucias managed a rueful smile. "I assure you, Madame, when Mishra and Urza battle, there is plenty of death and mayhem for all." He took the better part of valor and moved on.

  Yes, they would reach Argoth soon, and would anchor opposite the plains where the two brothers fought- where the whole world fought. There, Crucias and his roster of rich, arrogant nobles would drink wine and eat steaks and watch young men and women die. "Expeditions to the End of the World," he had dubbed them. It was Crucias's fourth such journey, and he hated them- war profiteering at its worst. He made a living exploiting human bloodlust and misery.

  "Blast," Crucias muttered beneath his breath as he dutifully polished a dull patch of brass railing. "Privateering was better."

  He lamented most of all the abuse of his beautiful ship. For twelve restless months after his daughter's death, Crucias had designed the corsair. He had sketched her out all day long and in his sleep. For the next ten years, he and his crew had built her by hand. It was a kind of practical mourning, an apology in wood and pitch for the life he had been unable to give his daughter. He personally had carved the figurehead into her likeness, had even granted the ship her name-Nunieve-and had sailed her into the wide ocean. She proceeded him always, a sweet child gazing bravely over the dark billows to bright and unimagined shores. Nunieve was a dream made real, designed to discover new lands for Kroog.

  And then Kroog ceased to exist. Mishra's army swallowed it like a hunk of hardtack. No longer were there government commissions. No longer were there joint-stock companies. The winds of finance and politics died.

  Dead calm. Captain Crucias and his newly built Nunieve were adrift.

  He eventually took on Argivian cargoes, but Nunieve's hold was not designed to hold vast stores. She had been built for speed. The cargoes reached their ports, but Crucias lost coin with every crate unloaded, a monetary shipwreck. Desperate, he'd hired a crew of harpooners and laid in a store of hooks, lines, nets, and carving tools, hoping to pay for it all with spermaceti. They'd tracked and slain one whale, but the mess of dead meat hanging to port, the constant cloud of seagulls and sharks, the horrid inert bulk of something that had once moved with terrific and majestic grace through the water… Crucias would have sooner harpooned himself than another whale.

  But Argivian nobles? Indolent, wealthy, bloodthirsty nobles? He had no qualms about harpooning them. As repellent as they were, they paid well, and they stood in long lines for the chance to see the world-ending conflict of Argoth. Another trip, and Crucias's debts would be paid off. Two or three more, and he and Nunieve could sail away to distant shores, never again to see Terisiare. Until then, he only hoped the war lasted.

  "Let's pray there is enough mayhem and death for everybody."

  On the night he'd first seen Nunieve, there had been mayhem aplenty.

  Drunk, with blood on his knuckles and in his teeth,

  Captain Crucias staggered back through the cobbled streets of Sumifa. He made his way down dark canyons of shops and houses, their shutters bleeding golden illumination into the night. The light painted him tigerlike. He liked the connotation. Gold and blood and man-eating cats: it summed up his life.

  He'd wanted things to be different, had hoped to distinguis
h himself aboard a Yotian war galley, but a liaison with an admiral's daughter in this very city had ended any hopes of that. He still saw the girl every year or so, but for five years he hadn't seen the inside of any ship but a rover or a brigantine. In that time, he had risen to his own captaincy-as a privateer. Knuckles and teeth had won him his ship, Backstab, and persistent work with the cutlass had won him a small fortune in gold. Tonight's fight had been another battle in defense of that fortune. The thief who thought he ought to have some of Crucias's gold now lay bloodied and bruised in a tavern alley.

  Mayhem had not been the life he'd planned, but it was the one given to him, and it suited him well enough. At the very least, he would not get bored. He'd be fighting and drinking and wenching until the day one of his vices killed him. The life of a privateer was blessedly short.

  Captain Crucias neared Backstab, dark in its moorings. His head reeled from drink and fisticuffs, and from- "What is that hellish noise?" It was a high keen, like the wail of a cat being crushed in a vise. Crucias shook his head, wondering what poor sod was getting it from what other poor sod. He plodded up Backstab's, gangplank, and the sound grew only louder.

  "Blast."

  Crucias stepped onto the deck, gritty and in need of holystoning. Several figures slouched in rope coils or on folded sails along the dark rail, most of them drunk and sleeping. One was awake.

  "Oye, Biggs. What's that ruckus?" Crucias growled.

  The man shrugged. "Woman came by. Said she had something to give you. I let her in your cabin. She left. Half an hour later, there's this bellowing."

  Crucias reflexively raised hands to shield his ears. "How long has this been going on?"

  "Hour, maybe. Hard to say. No moon tonight."

  "Worthless-" Crucias hissed at Biggs.

  Clenching his bloody fists, Crucias stomped unsteadily toward his cabin. He flung back the door. The wails paused for only a moment and then continued with renewed vigor. He had known it would be a baby, known even who the mother must have been, but to enter his inner sanctum and find it violated by an-an invader! The child's screams raked across his drink-jangled nerves.

  "Blast it, child! Hush!"

  Grabbing a jackstraw, Crucias lit a hand lantern and stalked into the room. He cringed under the auditory assault and crouched as he walked, as though expecting attack. This was supposed to be his private cabin-heavy furnishings, padlocked trunks, blunderbusses, cutlasses, rum casks, cigars-a man-place. But all of its grim grandeur was despoiled by that delicately woven basket and its pink bundle of blankets and the tiny hands waving like tender anemones in the air.

  "Blast!"

  Crucias stalked to the basket, lifted the glaring lantern, and stared down at that shrieking face. He had expected to despise the child-a thing wet at both ends and smelling of sour milk-and to be sure, she was not a beauty in her screaming fury. But there was such loneliness and fear in her cry. Alone in this strange place, her screams unheeded for hours, her mother gone, and only growling, glaring seamen all about… Crucias saw something of himself in her, not just in the form of eyes and lips that were undoubtedly his, but also in the desperate anger of a creature forsaken.

  The child's spastic kicking dislodged a slip of paper folded beside her swaddled leg. Crucias gently lifted the note and unfolded it. The handwriting was that of the admiral's daughter who had cost him his sea career. He read:

  "She is yours. I cannot raise her. "

  Crucias's brow furrowed. "And I can? An outlaw? A privateer?" He scratched his head. "I'd have to start all over. I'd have to settle down. I'd have to stop fighting for nothing and start fighting for everything. "

  The baby let out a wail so forlorn that Crucias instinctively set down the lantern and note and gently raised her in his arms. His hands left trails of blood across the pink blankets. She clutched at his cloak, wet with sweat and spilled ale, and quieted.

  "There, there, Darling. There, there. "

  The baby tugged on his buttons, struggling to claw closer.

  "Blast. "

  Half the crew abandoned him that very hour-those sober enough to heed the yammering. A quarter more deserted in the deep of morning.

  A female on a ship was bad luck. A female baby on a ship was preposterous.

  Crucias agreed. It had seemed reasonable enough that first moment, as the poor, lost creature quieted to his touch. It seemed much less reasonable when she awakened, hungry and implacable, an hour later. She couldn't make headway on crackers or jerked beef, and ale was out of the question. She needed milk. She needed a mother. So, still bloodied and half-drunk, Crucias marched her back up the streets he had descended, in search of the admiral's daughter.

  A bloody privateer lugging a shrieking infant through downtown streets at three in the morning was not the sort of spectacle Sumifa allowed.

  Crucias was jumped by a patrol of armsmen. Half a dozen fists ended his objections. He and the baby were hauled to the constabulary. The soldiers charged him with kidnapping and threw him in a cage with a couple of drunks. One of them turned out to be the man Crucias had beaten bloody earlier that night. There was no repeat of the fight, though. The fellow saw him and pretended to be more drunk and beat up than he was. Crucias was glad-the armsmen had been none too gentle in bringing him in. They'd treated the child little better, letting her kick and scream in her basket in the corner while they went about their business. He shouted to them to find her some milk, to see if she had dirtied herself, to fetch the creature's mother, to do something to stop that blasted howling!

  Eventually, the constables did fetch the admiral's daughter. She entered, still young and defiant in her blue Jamuraan dressing gown, a cloak over her shoulders and an outraged father over the coat. The night Crucias had first met this woman, her skin seemed white as ivory. Tonight it seemed like a shade of ice.

  She took one look at Crucias, spat on the floor, and said, "The girl is not mine. She is not anyone's. I doubt this man is a kidnapper. I doubt he is anything at all."

  Crucias flung his hands out of the bars, imploring. "How can you say that? Can't you hear her crying?"

  White-mustached and red-faced, the admiral pulled his daughter back. "My daughter would not truck with cutthroats-"

  "She trucked me three times that night," Crucias interrupted.

  "— and I resent the implications that dragged us from our beds-

  "Come now, Admiral. You must have known of the pregnancy. How can you care so much for your daughter and so little for your daughter's daughter-?"

  "Forgive us," one of the armsmen was saying as he ushered the two away from Crucias. "And you-shut up. See if you can't get this brat to shut up, too."

  Crucias had never broken out of jail before. He'd been in dozens of them and had never reason to escape from any. But tonight, the child left him no choice. He couldn't bear her cries a moment longer. When the armsman returned to upbraid him, Crucias wrapped the man in a stranglehold, stole his keys, tried each until the lock opened, and departed.

  He had never broken out of jail before. Even if he had, he would never have snatched a screaming baby en route. But, once again, the child left him no choice. She was as alone as he. She was as desperate and terrified as he. They were more than father and daughter. They were soul-twins.

  Impossibly, stupidly, Crucias fled with her and the basket. He fled, armsmen hot on his tail, through the streets of Sumifa. At the wharf, he lost his pursuers long enough to wrangle one cow out of a herd on an adjacent ship. With curses and lashing fingers, he drove the noisome beast up the gangplank of Backstab.

  It was tough sailing the brigantine out of dock. His crew was reduced to only five seamen, five drunken and utterly reluctant sailors.

  After all, Backstab now hosted two females-a baby and a bovine.

  "Blast," Crucias noted to himself as he milked the one to feed the other. This baby was going to change everything. If she was going to survive, if he was going to survive, she would change everything.

 
; Soon, he found himself at sea with her-with her and a cow and no crew. In cowardly collusion, the five had taken one of Backstab's longboats and rowed back to Sumifa.

  It was impossible for a single man to sail the brigantine. It was impossible for Crucias to man sails and rudder and pumps all at once. It was even more impossible that he should do it while caring for this child, and caring for the cow that fed her. They were all doomed to drift and die, he was sure.

  And yet, somehow, looking at that beautiful, sad, abandoned face, he knew he would do it. He would do the impossible. He would stop fighting for nothing and start fighting for everything.

  It was quite a scene. The battlefield stretched out in the near distance, and a group of sapphire skinned mer-folk had gathered for the afternoon's entertainment in a cluster off the port side. The nobles on the boat had gotten up from their settees to stand along the rail and watch in awe.

  The island of Argoth was wide and gray in the afternoon light, reaching arms out to encompass the eastern horizon and threaten Nunieve. She lay in deep waters beyond the harbor where Mishra's war crafts crowded. Against the shoreline, their masts and spars formed a forbidding thicket. If man or machine had remained aboard any of those ships, Captain Crucias would have done well to prepare for a quick departure, but every ounce of muscle and mechanism was currently engaged inland.

  In front of Crucias's pestering passengers lay the Argoth plains-what had been immemorial forest only a year ago. There the titanic armies of Mishra and Urza clashed. Atop shorn tree trunks and shredded vines, soldiers swarmed like insects. Yotian warriors gleamed in the sunlight amid Mishra's defenders in black-ant armor. Among them moved clay automatons, maggots tearing into whatever flesh presented itself. Men charged and fought and fell and died.