by John Shirley
Otherwise the room was rotted boards and cobwebs, not unlike the interior of the Temple of Winds. Except, of course, for the lack of carvings, and the paucity of red pillars.
For almost a fortnight he lay there, stripping rags from the bed to cough into until they were too blood-soaked to use any further. For them, he used the despised chest to dispose of. The tavernkeep’s boy brought him water and a slice of bread every day. On that, Horn’s life depended.
He would be cursed before he would send for a doctor, though. They were as crazed as alchemists, and less trustworthy than the maddest of priests. A decent cleric with healing prayers would have done him, but Horn had never followed a god any further than strictly necessary for self-preservation. Besides, no one in this port knew him well enough to stand and plead his case before any altar.
Finally one day someone new came into the room. At first he thought it was one of the girls who plied their own warm commerce a floor below, with shrieks and moans that kept Horn awake the nights his own coughing did not suffice. She was a thin woman, dark-skinned in the manner of these southernmost ports, with eyes the color of the inside of a lime. Her wrap was dyed in patterns, colored purple, dark blue, and black.
Horn gripped his dagger close. The sword was overmuch trouble, and he was far too sick to manage a decent spell—even the cantrips against the tiny, biting monsters of his terrible bed exhausted him.
If the woman was there to rob him, he was not sure he could stop her from her work.
“You seek what does not belong to you.” Despite her appearance, the woman spoke the hillman’s language of Horn’s birth, sounding just like one of the village girls he’d known in his youth.
“A sending,” Horn gasped. He wondered if there were any point in calling out for aid. His chest shook, another terrible cough building up.
“Not a sending.” Her voice was a gentle chiding. “Always present.”
Horn took a shuddering breath, fighting the cough to get the words out. “My life belongs to me.”
“Actually,” she said with a smile, “it does not.”
Her hands briefly caressed his chest, then the woman was gone, though Horn could not remember the door closing. When he awoke later, his breathing was clear for the first time in weeks.
It was time to return to the Temple of Winds. He adamantly refused to speculate on who had visited him, or why, though he burned a small offering of thanks on the dockside cobbles that next evening.
Horn found himself winded climbing the Path of Ten Thousand Steps. Or even four thousand, two hundred and thiry-eight steps.
He was ashamed.
Since leaving this place, he’d crossed mountains and oceans, slain a white dragon, faced down ogres. But even healed of his wretched, wracking cough, he was still weak. The week of sailing to reach the Lost Island of Ee had not improved his health. Too many rough seas. Too much bad food.
The old monk waited at the top this time. An unseemly glee seemed to have taken possession of his lined, scarred face. Horn felt suddenly impatient with the old man. Irritated, even.
Or was that just his own fear at being given the power to choose his path?
“I have come,” he announced. Utterly unnecessary, but it was the sort of thing one said in such moments.
“You have succeeded, I trust,” the old monk said. “Or you would not have returned so soon.”
“Soon? I have been gone for several seasons.”
“Some quests take years. Or lifetimes.”
Lifetimes, plural? thought Horn. When he was young, he’d considered reincarnation unlikely, as well as probably too much trouble, given the karmic debt one was said to accrue. As he grew older, the idea of coming back for another try seemed less foolish, but sadly no more practical. “My quest took thirteen moons.”
It occurred to Horn that standing on ceremony would be pointless. The monk wanted greed, he could have greed. Horn merely wished to sleep in a bed that was neither rolling under him nor filled with biting insects swimming in his sweat. He unslung the padded leather bag in which the ceramic globe was nestled. “Here. It is yours. I took some pains to disguise the rod. It’s embedded in a crystal shell. That’s how I found it.”
With that, Horn pushed past the monk and into the Temple of Winds. He quickly located the monk’s cell he’d used for the three weeks when last he was there. Bare wooden walls, a ceiling with a faded painting of a thousand-eyed demon, and scant furniture. He’d seen better prisons, though this room had no lock on the door or guards in the hallway. The same threadbare linens lay rumpled on the straw mattress, under months’ worth of the everpresent dust.
He took a few moments to shake them out, then remade the bed, slipped into it, and slept the sleep of the blessed.
The next morning, Horn went to the refectory on his own. Usually there was rice soup for breakfast. Sometimes even a few eggs harvested from nests in the abandoned upper stories of the temple, or from the cliffs outside if one of the monks had been particularly in need of exercise.
Three of them were eating when he arrived, including the old man who had been his guide. In his time there before, Horn had never been offered any names. Nor had he heard the monks use names in their rare, brief conversations. They were just old men in an old temple.
Unsure whether or how to push the question of his compensation for retrieving the Rod of Winds, he settled for a skull bowl of congee and a somewhat withered peach. Horn ate in silence until his monk spoke up.
“You have walked the world, and brought us what we asked.”
Horn nodded. His mouth was full of the pasty rice stew. He quickly swallowed.
“It is time for your reward.” The monk reached within his robes to lay a small ivory box in front of Horn.
He studied the offering carefully. It was not much larger than the palm of his hand, and a finger’s width in thickness. The outside was covered with shallow carvings that reminded him of the art sailors made on walrus ivory or whalebones. The patterns were difficult to comprehend, something between thorny roses and things with far too many teeth.
Looking slightly to one side of the box, Horn called upon his years of training in the magical arts. Eyes that had peered through smoke and spell and scattering learned to see what was truly present, rather than what only seemed to be. It was still a box, still strangely carved, but it practically vibrated with the energies it contained—human energies formed under a working hand. This did not have the slick sheen of divine apparition.
“Powerful magic here,” he observed quietly. Some spellcaster had spent a good portion of his lifetime constructing this thing.
“You seek a powerful reward,” said the monk.
Horn picked up a chopstick and passed it close to the ivory box. Nothing. No spark, no smoke, no vibration or light.
Very gingerly, he touched bamboo to ivory. Again, quiescent. Where he might have expected a bit of flash and drama, he was encountering only, well, ivory.
The monks smiled as they watched. Clearly they would be no help to Horn. He was the great swordsman and master spellwright—it was up to him to sort this out.
Which was, in truth, fair enough.
Another careful stab with the chopstick provoked no additional reaction. Horn laid the utensil aside and reached for the ivory box. The monk had handled it without incident, after all.
Something clicked slightly as he lifted it. The weight and balance of the box shifted. It was only a container, not a thing in itself.
Looking over it in his hand, Horn saw how an inner box could be made to slide out the end of the carved shell. It was no different from the card boxes that soldiers and sailors sometimes carried in their kits.
Card boxes …
“You people,” he breathed. “This is the Deck of Many Things.”
“Fate in your hand.” The monk was positively grinning now. “Your choices are your own. Everything lies before you. Every path is in your hands.”
“Bastards,” Horn said.
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br /> The old men laughed at him before wandering off into the dusty shadows of their temple home. He heard the fading echoes of their mirth for a while.
Consequences
Horn racked his brain for whatever he might have read or heard about the Deck of Many Things. The monks had never shown him a library—they were obsessed with their map, and with listening to the wind—so even if he found one, he doubted it would contain much to aid him in understanding such an item.
Everyone knew the general gist, of course. The Deck of Many Things was a campfire favorite, for storytelling and idle boasting. Most people wouldn’t know what to do with a magic wand or a flaming sword or a crystal ball or many of the other legendary magic items and artifacts that supposedly littered the world.
But cards? Everybody understood cards. A metaphor for life, how the king ruled all but the knave snuck in beneath the queen, and the ace at the bottom could trump the very top. Colors and numbers and a swift flick of the hand could turn the fate of your last piece of silver, or make you a rich man indeed on a hot, lucky night.
He had to admit it: cold fear blew through him. All magic was balance. Who needed reincarnation to believe in karmic debt? Unwise or unlucky wizards learned fast enough how much one paid for one’s mistakes. One sometimes paid more dearly for one’s successes.
What he could recall of the Deck of Many Things strongly suggested a balancing act between bright blessings and arrant curses. What would he draw if he opened the ivory box? The keys to a kingdom? Or just as likely his own ruination.
The other piece of lore that came bubbling upward was the idea that he must commit to a number of draws from the Deck before he began. Horn wasn’t certain that was a rigorous rule, or simply a sensible rumor.
He’d never been a great risk taker. Study and practice had always been his way. That and careful planning. But what had he expected from these monks? Mystical guidance?
One could not plan for this. The Deck was worse than that time when he’d sought vengeance on behalf of the dying goddess Karrehein. It was wild power in his hand.
If Horn had been a praying man, he would have prayed. If he’d thought for a moment that the monks might give him practical advice, he’d have gone begging for their words.
But this was for him.
A day later, his chest still weak, he went to the top of the Path of Ten Thousand Steps and looked out across the ocean. Bottle-bright and the color of polished glass, it heaved and sparkled as only a great mass of water can do. No ships were visible, just water to the horizon. Great, swale-bellied clouds passed slowly overhead.
Behind him the volcano stank and muttered. The winds of the world came here. He could find no better place to seize his fate in his hands.
Feeling both foolish and very much in danger of his life, Horn raised the ivory card box toward the sky.
“I shall draw down three cards,” he said in a firm voice before prising open the little ivory drawer.
They lay within. Pasteboard, like any card, but slick and firm and overwhelmingly solid in appearance. Freed of their ivory enclosure, the cards positively reeked of magic.
Horn picked at the deck, flicking out a card from the middle.
He turned it in his hand.
The world changed.
Throne
A villa, overlooking the Bight of Winds. Technically a castle, though without moat or curtain wall, and it would not stand up to much attack at all. At the foot of his patio was a drop to pounding surf. Horn was well supplied with pliant servants and fine wines from distant islands. He was happy there, and everyone loved him.
The only thing that gave him pause was the ivory box he always carried in a silk sling beneath his robes. What the Deck had given, the Deck could take away. Horn still had two more draws, though now he wished he’d stopped at one. Was he supposed to just hold onto the deck like this? Or should he have simply drawn the three cards in a fan?
No answers came to him, and life was good, so Horn tried not to worry overmuch. He lived at the villa for several years. The weather was kind. Ships called at his dock just often enough to bring news and goods. Horn sent for his wealth, stashed in banks and strongrooms scattered across a dozen ports, and from time to time considered either hiring himself out or going adventuring.
It should have been boring, but was not. Rather, the villa was pleasing to the eye and soul. He eventually grew accustomed to the well-earned rest from his labors.
One day a cockleshell boat with an ivory hull and a single lateen sail the color of a dead man’s eyes made his dock. Horn watched it a while from the patio, a slim stemware glass of wine in his hand. He did not recognize the ship but felt vaguely disturbed by its color and form. Eventually Moneo his majordomo approached him.
“Sir, you have a visitor.” After a pause, the man added, “A lady, sir.”
Horn knew his staff would have approved if he’d taken a wife and become a true lord of the estate. This stretch of coast along the Bight of Winds was a wild country, dotted with a few small fishing villages. No king or prince extended a writ along these particular waters or shores. The villa itself was safe largely in its isolation—there was not sufficient trade here to attract pirates or bandits. He could have raised a flag, bred some strong sons, and founded his own ruling line. Raiders might have been a problem for his grandsons.
So a woman caller was of interest to Moneo and the other servants. A woman caller was worrying to Horn, however.
“Show her in,” he said. “I will receive my guest here on the patio. And tell Cook to lay on a feast fit for a prodigal.” He had an uneasy notion just who was come to visit.
She came walking out, short and thick-bodied in the manner of the people of the coast here, but her eyes were the color of the inside of a lime, and her robes were dyed in patterns, colored purple, dark blue, and black.
Horn knew her immediately. “You came to me once, when I was sick unto dying in a distant port.”
“Yes.” She nodded, and he felt wind upon his back and buzzing in his ears. “You seek what does not belong to you.” Despite her appearance, the woman once more spoke the hillman’s language of Horn’s birth.
“Not a sending,” he said, remembering their conversation before. “Always present.”
“Always.” She cocked her head, and he had never seen a more beautiful woman, for all her common looks. “Yet you tempt me.” A blunt finger tapped at his chest, clicking against the ivory box beneath his own robes.
“It is time for me to draw another card, is it not?”
“Far past time.” She smiled, and he felt the stars shift in their courses. “With age comes wisdom. Or at least experience.”
Realizing he would not be a guest at his own feast that evening, Horn took out the ivory box. He tugged open the tiny drawer to turn another card from the center of the deck.
The world changed.
Ruin
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.
He realized he’d had that thought before. His memory was playing tricks. Or the scrumpy was.
Which was the point here.
He stared up at the barmaid as she swished past. Her skirt was made in dark, muted colors—had it been so earlier? The woman favored him with a sidelong glance, her expression somewhere between wise and malicious. He turned his head to watch her tend to a pair of tables by the fire.
Finally she made it back over to him. “Out of money yet?”
“I don’t know,” he answered with unfortunate honesty. “Out of scrumpy yet?”
Her laugh held a curious edge. “We’ll never run out of scrumpy when there’s the likes of you in the world.”
“I wanted … more.” He wasn’t sure if he meant more than scrumpy, or more than what life had given him in the world. The mansions of memory had grown crowded in his head, haunted by regrets.
“You seek what does not belong
to you.”
Those words, so familiar. And had she just spoken Kyrie, or another tongue from too long ago when he was young and the world was colored with hope?
Horn peered closer. Her eyes were green. The color of the inside of a lime. “It’s you,” he said. “You healed me once. You threatened me once.”
Now her smile bordered on joy. Around them, the reeking, smoky tavern seemed to recede into abstract distance. “And I have come for that which I have been cheated of.”
Horn slipped his hand inside his vest, touching the ivory card box in its silk sling. He drew that box out for the first time in … how long? There wasn’t any way to be sure. The path of his decay had been as gradual as it had been inexorable, since drawing the second card.
The ivory card box lay in his hand. Malevolent. Powerful. The old monk’s great joke played upon him.
Fate.
“This was always yours, was it not?”
With a nod, she said, “And you have held it far beyond your time.”
He extended his hand. “Here. Take it.”
“Three times you said you’d draw. Three cards to chart a path through life.” She leaned close, her eyes sparking. “Draw the third, little man, and return to your life.”
Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all.
The box came open easily enough. The cards slipped into his hand. The pasteboard again seemed slick and heavy. Horn considered simply tossing them into the air, as if they might fly away like little birds. Instead, vaguely aware of the clink of tankards and the murmur of voices, he thumbed a third card from the middle.
