by John Shirley
“Let’s get us a real meal at the Poisoned Chalice when we reach the Crossroads,” Legg said. “I’ll pay. Hang the cost! Couldn’t be worse than Mordint’s vittles.”
“Aye,” Bab said wearily. “I’ll be glad of a sit down. No more excitement.”
“No more,” Coran agreed.
“Shh!” Scorri said. “Do you hear that?”
Bab nodded. There was the sound of many feet on the road, not far away. They gathered up their packs and scrambled up the embankment and into what small cover was afforded by the scrawny brush and gathering twilight.
A torchlit procession of humans and halflings stalked by. Their clothes were dusty and worn, but each of them was armed to the teeth with sword, buckler, and enough daggers to make them clatter. On the shoulders of six of them was a litter draped with blood-red embroidered tapestries and cushions. On them reposed a figure that made Bab’s heart sink.
“Morgana!” Adda crowed, rising up from behind a bush. He held out his arms to the halfling woman. “Remember me? I love you!”
The parade turned as one being to stare. Screaming, Morgana sat up and jabbed a point-nailed forefinger toward the locksmith.
Bab grabbed Adda by the shoulder and hauled him up over the rise. Exhausted as he was, he found the strength somewhere to run into the gloom. The others fell into step behind him.
With any luck at all, they could lose the horde somewhere in the Crossroads.
Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” She lives northwest of Chicago with one of the above and her husband, author and packager Bill Fawcett. She has published more than forty books, including seven contemporary fantasies, five SF novels, four novels in collaboration with Anne McCaffrey, including Crisis on Doona and Treaty at Doona; edited a humorous anthology about mothers, Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear!; and produced over a hundred short stories. Her latest books are A Forthcoming Wizard (TOR Books), Myth-Fortunes, her seventh collaboration with Robert Asprin in the Myth-Adventures series, and Dragons Deal (Ace Books), the third in Asprin’s Dragons series.
THE DECAYING MANSIONS OF MEMORY
JAY LAKE
Character
The tavern bench creaked beneath Horn like a ship under sail. He swayed, listening to the wood pop and snap, knowing if he were afloat, he’d be leaking.
Leaking. Horn laughed at the thought. He’d leaked plenty in his day, and had the scars to prove it, by Set.
A pewter bowl of scrumpy sizzled before him. The truly rotten stuff, made from a ferment of windfall apples, brewer’s yeast, and an occasional unlucky wasp. The cheap stuff, too. Cheap was definitely his milieu these days.
There had been a villa once, overlooking the sea. Pounding surf, pliant servants, and fine wines from distant islands.
He remembered watching the weather move over the Bight of Winds, tall clouds purpling on the horizon as forked legs of lightning strode the ocean. Silks billowed around him, water quivered in the Khaliki crystal vases, and he’d laughed at the powers of the natural world.
Bad idea, that. With age came wisdom. Sometimes wisdom came with an ass kicking, too. And nothing could kick ass like the whole world.
Horn pulled himself away from the decaying mansions of memory. That was an escape offering small improvement on the present moment. A present moment which unfortunately still included scrumpy.
Now there was a beverage of the gods. Small, bitter gods that resented the world and everyone in it. He stared into the muddy amber depths before summoning what served for his courage these days and grasping the bowl to drink deep, his entire two coppers’ worth in as few goes as possible to get past the gag reflex.
Fate hung heavy in the silk pocket hidden inside Horn’s ogre-leather vest. Squared off, with corners sharp enough to slice up a life. He could almost hear its voice mocking him, unless he was drunk enough to drown it out.
More scrumpy.
Once Horn had been a young man—human, mind you, no blood or brood mixing in his tribe—a fine figure of a warrior with secret talents nurtured deep in the Sacred Caverns so that people who did not look beyond a curved sword and spiked buckler were in for a nasty surprise.
Not that he wasn’t a skilled fighter in his own right. He’d mastered finesse with point and sharp edge and bladed edge and even the butt end reversed in hand. He could wield the buckler as a second weapon with effectiveness that sometimes surprised even his teachers and the other young men of the tribe. Horn had hunted goblins, orcs, and ogrillons through the jagged hills west of the village since he’d been old enough to run alongside his older brothers and cousins with a stout stick in hand. He was used to cuts, bruises, even broken bones. Like all the young men of his tribe, he was toughened by life and custom and training until he was fit to be a sellsword among the coastal cities where sharp-edged young men with stamina and skill were always in high demand.
His tribe had fought their way out of the grinding poverty of the hills in the most literal sense possible.
But Horn knew he was something special. Feather, one of the oldest of the Old Men, had spent long nights under moons both brilliant and grave-dark showing him other paths. Wisdom, perhaps, but even more, what the casual observer might have called magic. Hill country wizard lore, in truth. And for all the shared, common bluster of his training at sword and fist, those times working with rare herbs and strange powders and the lights that danced in the seams of the world were never spoken of.
No ordinary sellsword, he. Horn had sworn a private oath on his fourteenth birthday that he would someday be master of a castle, a harem, and a legion of warriors. He’d sealed the rite with a solemn binding spell that made the very air crackle like winter ice on the rivers, followed by a bloody libation spilled from the palm of his own hand. Both sides of his nature, in other words.
The following month he’d gone down to Beggar’s Cairn with the other young men to meet the hiring agents who’d ridden up from the swordmarkets of distant Purpure, High Canton, and Grandport.
The scrumpy went down hard as watered armor polish, tasting somehow of tin and leather in the bargain. Not that anyone drank scrumpy for the taste. Least of all Horn.
The tavern was, like all worthwhile bars, quiet, grubby, and sour-smelling. Good beer was brewed and sold somewhere in these lands, but this was not the place for it. So far as he knew, the tavern never closed. Rough-hewn tables, mismatched chairs and benches, a niggardly fireplace that heated nothing, a surly barmaid with a face so rough and pinched that even an orc would think twice before catching her about the waist.
Exactly how he liked his drinking.
The sun was nooning outside as decent men followed their ploughs or worked their forges or whatever the hell it was decent men did. Only the crippled veterans, hopeless vagabonds, and truly dedicated drunks like Horn were in their cups this early. Indecent men in an indecent place.
When had his world grown to include the idea of decency? Horn could no longer recall. The scrumpy was doing his thinking for him already. Which was, of course, the point.
He had too much to forget but not enough to remember. Fate was a bitter mistress at the best of times. It was an unwise mage indeed who ever trusted in her, for all that she was the patron of warriors when they stepped into the forest of blades that was the world.
Laughing on a pitching deck as the sea boiled over the lower rail. Blood ran in the scuppers, fresh-bright as it was washed away into the heaving bosom of the ocean. Horn traced the masts with bright fire for the sheer joy of watching his own fingers burst into flame. The surviving crew screamed their terror as his leathers sparked with the stuff, shadowed by the cresting waves that threatened to drive them under.
The sullen barmaid wandered past his table, very nearly flicking him with a sodden rag. “You’re a sorry one,” she muttered.
Horn focused on her through the bleary eyes of scrumpy and memories. A dozen replies hung in his head, but his tongue was too thick to spit them out, and he had no sword t
o back them up. Instead he went back to his drinking. Cheating fate was serious business.
Still the silk pocket hung heavy beneath his vest. Taunting, always taunting.
Purpure had been a city founded by a mage of extraordinary ability, and it showed. The woman was long gone into death, transcendence, or whatever fate ultimately befell those paragons of power, but her influence remained in the breathtakingly graceful lavender towers that soared over the teeming streets. Down in the gutters, the city looked much like any other city in Horn’s then-limited experience, but all he had to do was raise his eyes to be reminded of the glory of power undimmed down the long ages.
His daily life was far more gutter than glory. Somehow in the two years since coming down out of the hills, Horn had found himself at swordspoint far more than his more eldritch talents had been called for. He looked like a strapping barbarian to the eyes of the city-bred. The Purpureides treated him like one.
Still, it was work of sword and knife. Horn had learned much in the employ of Saanreich the Fat, merchant-adventurer. Saanreich collected interesting enemies almost as fast as he collected strange art and stranger artifacts from distant shores. Not to mention the cellars of his own city. The ethics of such a trade were beyond Horn’s ken, but they were not his problem, either. His problem was to keep rude or troublesome strangers from bothering Saanreich the Fat.
That, he was good at. He grew more skilled, learning about city fighting, underground labyrinths, and their sorts of traps—stone, wood, blade, and bone. City lessons. The sort a boy in the hills might never learn. The sort that kept him alive.
But it was all fighting. And sneaking. Defending through offense, eliminating strangers as needful before they had a chance to become rude or troublesome.
All the while sampling the taverns and markets and bordellos of Purpure. He learned other lessons, was initiated into warmer secrets, lost the rough patina of the hills of his birth in favor of the slick, glossy hardness of the city-bred.
For a time, Horn had thought this made him tough. A better man.
Some lessons every boy has to learn for himself.
He belched. The air from his gut burned Horn’s mouth. Sour stomach was an inevitable result of drinking scrumpy. He wished he had a hot loaf of good bread. Or really, anything to dampen the rankling smell and caustic taste.
The barmaid skulked past him again, frowning. “Yer a foul man,” she muttered.
“Foul is as foul does.” He spat the words out.
She gave him a longer look. Something gleamed in her eye, some spark beyond the sullen resentments of a tavern slattern. Horn stared back. Wordless, they locked gazes as intently as any pair of wizards stepping into a final conflict.
“Do I know you?” he finally asked. By giving in and speaking first, he’d lost the initiative, but Horn no longer cared so much what he lost.
“Foul is as foul does,” she replied in a mockery of his voice and the hillman accent that scrumpy brought to the surface.
“Be off,” he growled.
“Until ye needs something, eh?” She swished away, her skirts swinging in a way that unlocked other memories Horn didn’t care for, either.
He’d spent two years among the orchards of the high valley of Taoimburra. The trees bore strange fruit—old men, of uncertain age and history, who did not so much teach as speak. Sometimes they spoke to the wind and the empty air. Sometimes they spoke to small groups of seekers who gathered around them. But they always spoke wisdom. Finally Horn had truly learned how to open the cracks in the universe and let in the light from beyond.
Light, that laid down a path for the greatest fools to follow.
Horn inspected his bowl of scrumpy. Nothing remained but apple pulp mixed with a few suspiciously chitinous bits. He traced a fingertip through the variegated sludge, but he wasn’t that desperate. Not that he hadn’t been so desperate at some times in his life, to be fair.
He looked up at the barmaid, who favored him with a knowing leer from behind the bar. Horn nodded, and with trembling hand laid two more coppers on the table. Something whined in his ear, but he could not tell if it was in memory or the present moment, so he ignored the sound just as he ignored the weight beneath his vest.
One night Saanreich the Fat became Saanreich the Exsanguinated. It was a terminal case of name change, brought on by Dark Reivers pursuing an ancient curse that had passed into the merchant-adventurer’s hands along with a particularly fetching ivory nude of some unknown goddess. Horn had assumed she was a goddess, at any rate, given the excess of both arms and breasts beyond the usual norm.
The enemy infiltrated Saanreich’s fortified villa in the Crowne Heights district of Purpure on a stream of sparkling smoke that only Horn’s wizardly vision had seen. When he tried to rally his fellow guards, he’d been greeted with puzzled somnolence. When the Dark Reivers materialized in their bony, bladed numbers, Horn had fought them with both sword and spell.
He was the only person to leave Saanreich’s burning villa alive. He used his recently acquired city fighting skills to escape the pointed attention of the Watch, who in that simple-minded way of policemen when confronted with a crime and a last man standing, put two and two together to get seventeen. Having killed two of the Watch on his way out in self defense, Horn knew he would not be returning to Purpure for the foreseeable future. A life of shipboard excitement urgently beckoned.
Within six months he was an officer aboard the armed trader Wet Blessing. Horn never did learn a mainstay from a jib sail, but he was a remarkably convincing negotiator ashore, whether serving as supercargo in a civilized port, trade negotiator on some forlorn beach, or temple raider in the odder corners of the Starfall Sea. Captain Arroxta had promoted him from hired muscle to fourth mate after Horn saved all their hides during the bloody, stupid business at Boiling Bay.
He never looked back, sailing with Wet Blessing four years, until Arroxta insisted on returning to Purpure. Horn jumped ship in mid ocean, preferring to maroon himself on an isolated archipelago than to leap into the teeth of city justice. His wealth he took with him in electrum chains strung with gems, small enough not to sink him and valuable enough to be worth the weight with which they encumbered him.
The wealth bought him nothing on a sand strip populated by coconuts and gulls, but in his time at sea, Horn had learned to look ahead.
The bar maid came back with another bowl of scrumpy, steaming fresh from the kettle, along with a calculating look in her eye. Horn stared back at her. He seemed to have forgotten how to blink. Once, that had been an accomplishment.
She laid the bowl down on the table with far more care than she spent on the ales that came in chipped or dented mugs. No one wanted scrumpy on wood, let alone the floor. It was too much trouble.
“You does know me,” she whispered close. For a moment he saw something in her face, in her eyes that flashed green as spring in the hills where he had been born. Like someone else behind a mask of a face.
Horn felt an unaccustomed surge of energy. His fingertips sparked against the scarred wood of the table until wisps of smoke curled up. Old magic going to ground, that was all. He’d sold his spellbook to a university library several cities past. No one had wanted his soul, regardless of the exchange rate.
By now, everything in life was either coming or going cheap for Horn.
“You should be watching that, big man.” She waved a damp towel at his fingers. The smoke whiffed away in the flap of the cloth. “Someone might notice.”
“No … nothing to notice.” The words stumbled out of his mouth like dwarves staggering from a collapsing mine—covered with dust and grimed with the darkness beneath.
“Of course.” She flicked him with the towel, right across the cheek. Another spark rose. He slapped his own face, trying to tamp down the burning sensation, and nearly spilled the scrumpy. The silk pocket under his vest shifted, and for a moment Horn slid deeper into memory’s snare.
Once he’d hired out to a goddess. Just
once. Temples had been broken and priests slain. The little divinity was vanishing from the world, and had craved a final vengeance against her enemies as a grave-gift. Horn had gained three great gifts as his recompense, for the gratitude of even a dying goddess is worth its weight in kings.
Still, the work had not been worth the wage. By the time he was finished with the geas the goddess had laid upon him, Horn was soul-deep in other people’s blood and a dozen villages lay burned to ash under a tropic sky.
“Fate,” he told the scrumpy, and took a deep, deep draught to further drown the memories before they stole him completely away.
The scrumpy had no answer except to strip his throat raw and send his gut into open rebellion, even as it calmed his thoughts to a befogged nothingness that spun round and round faster than an angry dervish.
High Canton was a wilder city than Purpure. More importantly, writs of law were not exchanged between the two rivals, who had been fighting a slow, quiet war of gold and ships down the centuries. Hot, bloody wars were not so profitable unless you were the weaponseller.
Which High Canton was, in other parts of the Starfall Sea. The city had been built along the edge of a basalt escarpment where fumaroles smoked and crevices burped yellow smokes that could bring a man to his knees on the first breath and to his tomb on the second. Caves below the city were so hot that forges were not needed for some manufactures. The imps and fire elementals of the uplands were alternately contracted or coerced into laboring alongside the great muscled slave-smiths who served the lords of the Cantons. They turned out blades and arrowheads and siege engines by the shipload for sale wherever war sent men to buying such.
Horn had grown wiser and more subtle in the years of the passing of his youth. He rented rooms with an impressive entrance in one of the squared, tapering towers that dotted the city—his particular being the Tower of Bears and Swans. Local wags called it the Tower of Booms and Slams for the sake of the alchemist who held the upper floors. The boards between her and Horn were reinforced with copper and iron plating, while the roof was laid lightly enough that an explosion would not trouble the neighborhood with too many splinters and broken spars.
