The Fathomless Fire

by Thomas Wharton

  In the evening Will visited the Golden Goose, the inn on the bridge over the stream that ran in a stone canal through the city. Fable folk mingled here in the evenings with travellers from far-flung lands of the Realm, to hear and tell stories. There was a chance, he thought, that one of the inn’s guests might have met Pendrake and Rowen, or perhaps Shade, on their travels.

  When he slipped into the crowded, noisy common room, Will was glad to see that no one seemed to recognize him. It wasn’t surprising, since most of the folk gathered here this evening weren’t from the Bourne, let alone from Fable. They were Storyfolk from far-off lands, and many of them looked it. There were people here of every shape and size, and some whose strange and even alarming features made him wonder whether the word people applied to them.

  Will found a seat in one corner and listened while a succession of Storyfolk spun tales of their adventures, stories that were sometimes so wondrous or terrible that he had a hard time believing everything he heard, even after all that he himself had seen and done on his own journey. And too many of the tales, he thought with dismay, were about dark and wicked things encroaching on lands that had long been peaceful and safe. He listened carefully to every story, however, and even asked a few of the tellers afterwards if they had met a toymaker and his granddaughter, or a talking wolf, on their travels. He tried to be as unspecific as he could about who the loremaster and Rowen were, while still providing details that might jog someone’s memory, because he wasn’t sure it was wise to reveal too much about them to these strangers. But no one had seen any of his friends.

  Will returned to the toyshop late that night, restless and heartsick, wondering why the shadow had urged him to return, had told him he was needed, when he wasn’t accomplishing anything.

  Before sunrise the next day, Will hurried back to Appleyard to find out if the scouts had reported in. He was climbing the steps of the Gathering House when a huge hand fell on his shoulder. He turned to see Balor beaming down at him.

  “There you are,” the wildman boomed. “I thought I’d already lost my new apprentice. That would have been rather embarrassing.”

  “I’m not your apprentice,” Will said, trying to hide his annoyance. Balor’s face fell.

  “Well, yes, I imagine you’re angry about that…” he muttered, looking away. “Sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Will said. “The Marshal says what you did isn’t binding. I can leave Fable if I want to. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Well, I suppose you must,” Balor said with a shrug. “It’s just that if you were my apprentice, we could probably get permission to take a short ride out of Fable, just the two of us, for a few days, to teach you some of the basic scouting skills, and who knows, maybe along the way we can do a little searching for the loremaster and your wolf friend.”

  Will gaped at him.

  “You mean you’d come with me,” he said. “You’d help me look for them.”

  “For a while at least. But, since you’re not my apprentice…”

  “When can we leave?” Will asked eagerly. Going on horseback, and with Balor, seemed to him a much better way to travel than on foot and alone. They could cover much more ground that way, and Balor would know the roads and lands around the Bourne. And the dangers that lay beyond.

  “Like you, I’ll have to wait until the scouts report in,” Balor said. “But with luck we can set out tomorrow and—” He paused, as if another thought had just occurred to him. “You have ridden a horse before, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Will said, though he thought to himself that a ride on a pony at the fair when he was seven probably didn’t count.

  Balor eyed him dubiously, then grinned.

  “Well, that’s good. Very good.”

  His spirits lifted, Will reported to the quartermaster, as Balor suggested, to collect the travelling gear he would need. When he had everything ready – a cloak, boots that fit snugly, a rucksack and the supplies that went in it – he sought out the wildman again. They spent the rest of the day together. Balor took Will around Appleyard, and was clearly enjoying showing off his new apprentice, the famous Will Lightfoot, to everyone they met. Later they looked over some maps in the Gathering House library. Will traced the route he had taken on his journey, and pointed out the place, as near as he could, where they had met the Fair Folk and Will had parted from his friends. He and Balor agreed it would make sense to begin their own search in that direction, but it would mean facing the daunting vastness of the Deep Dark Forest. Finally Balor told Will to go home to the toyshop and get a good sleep.

  “By the book, you should be staying here in the dormitory with the other apprentices,” the wildman said. “But you’ll be pestered with questions half the night if you do that.”

  Will agreed and took his leave, promising to return at dawn. But he didn’t go straight back to the toyshop. Instead he returned once more to the Inn of the Golden Goose.

  He found a place on a bench along the back wall. There were several conversations going on around him all at once, and at first he wasn’t able to pick anything out of the noise. After a while, though, he noticed that one voice was louder than the rest. It was coming from the nook near the fireplace, where a very short, stocky, bearded man was holding forth to a small crowd. Then Will looked more closely at the speaker. He was certain he had seen him before, but couldn’t remember where.

  The bearded man was drinking heavily from a huge metal tankard. Between long gulps he would wipe the glistening foam from his moustache and go on with an involved, meandering tale about the silver mine he had once owned with his brothers. The story didn’t sound particularly interesting, but Will listened as well as he could over the hubbub, curious now about why this man looked so familiar.

  “…and so off she went, on the arm of that tall, ridiculously good-looking king’s son,” the man said in a low, gravelly voice. “Oh, she promised to return and visit us often, but we never did see her again. Well, I don’t blame her. So young and sweet she was. As fresh as a spring rain. Really now, what kind of life was it for her, cooking and cleaning for seven quarrelsome, untidy men, and all of us as handsome as tree stumps? No, I was glad for her, truly I was. But after she was gone, I found my heart just wasn’t in the mining any more, even though we were digging out more good ore than we ever had. To come home and see the house all dark and shut up, when you were expecting warm light and her sweet voice singing to greet you… No, it was never the same afterwards. So I sold my share to my brothers, and I set off to see the world. And I did see it. A great deal of it. More than I might’ve wished to…”

  As the man went on with his tale, Will remembered where he had seen him before. He was a dwarf, and he knew Rowen. The first time Will had met him, which was here at the Golden Goose, the dwarf had been arguing with someone who wanted him to join some sort of quest. Rowen had advised the dwarf to go, and to Will’s surprise, he had changed his mind and agreed immediately. It turned out, Will had learned then, that Rowen had a gift for helping Storyfolk, which was one of the signs that she was meant to be a loremaster.

  “Of course I remember you,” the dwarf bellowed after his tale had wrapped up and Will approached him with a cautious greeting. “My memory’s like a flawless crystal. Let me see … it was the last time I saw the lady Rowen of Blue Hill, wasn’t it? Yes, it was. You were there with her. What’s your name, lad?”

  “Will Lightfoot.”

  “Lightfoot, is it? I’ve got some distant cousins near Mount Moonfang named Flintfoot. And there’s a half-dwarven clan in the Forlorn Hills by the name of Shalefoot. You don’t have any Dwarf in your ancestry, do you, boy? Maybe a little Kobold?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “That’s a shame. But I won’t hold it against you. That’s not the dwarvish way. I am Mimling Hammersong, of the Hammersongs of Stonesthrow Mine. Take a seat, my boy. Did the lass tell you the tale of how we met?”

  “She didn’t,” Will said, pulling up a
chair.

  “Ah, well, when I first arrived in Fable I was down to my last few coins and looking for any work I could get. I came here to the Goose one night, hoping to get hired for some quest or other. Dwarves have always been in demand for quests. It’s a tradition, a good luck sort of thing. If you want a successful quest, get a dwarf. Well, sure enough there was a band of adventurers at the inn that night, looking for someone with tunnelling experience to help on a treasure-seeking expedition to a dragon’s lair. I didn’t like the look of this bunch, real shifty characters I thought, and the job sounded a little too … adventurous for my taste. I had been a miner up to that point, you see. I’d only ever swung my hammer at seams of ore, not goblin skulls. I was about to turn them down, when this little voice pipes up, ‘You should go, Mister Dwarf.’ It was Rowen, of course. She was there with her grandfather, who’d been telling some of his marvellous tales. Only a wee chip off the rock she was then, even nearer to the ground than me, but already so sure of herself. The toymaker tried to shush her, but she wouldn’t be shushed, not that one.”

  The dwarf gave a low chuckle. His iron-grey eyes glittered in the firelight.

  “I thought it was funny at first,” he went on, “but there’s a way of looking at you she has. I can’t explain it. Almost in spite of myself I agreed I would go on the expedition. It was a long, hard journey, and there was adventure sure enough, and blood and fire, but in the end we came away with treasure. Not a king’s ransom, but enough to pay the bills and then some. And I’d crushed a few goblin skulls along the way, and discovered I liked it. A lot. After that I was in demand as a professional quester, and I never looked back. I’d really found my calling. And I owe it all to Rowen.”

  Mimling smiled as if at fond memories, then he blinked and glanced around the room.

  “In fact, I was hoping I might see her here tonight. I just got back from the last quest she sent me on, and I wanted to thank her for convincing me to go. Do you happen to know if my lady is in town?”

  “Rowen’s not here,” Will said. “Neither is Master Pendrake.”

  “Ah, that’s a pity.”

  “That’s why I came to the inn, to find out if anyone’s seen them.”

  To Will’s surprise, the dwarf reached out and patted his shoulder.

  “I understand, lad. You love the girl.”

  To his consternation, Will felt himself blushing. He fumbled for words.

  “Of course you do,” the dwarf said thickly, wiping a tear from his eye. “And so do I. Everyone who meets my lady Rowen falls head over heels for her. She’s a treasure, that one. A gem. A spark of fire.”

  It occurred to Will that Mimling had probably had more than a few tankards of ale.

  “I guess … you haven’t seen Rowen, then?”

  “Not since I was last here. And that was a year ago now if it was a day.”

  Will’s spirits fell. He sat in silence while the dwarf slurped down the foamy dregs of his tankard and shouted for another one.

  “Did it work out for you,” Will finally asked, “the quest Rowen sent you on?”

  “What? Oh, that little jaunt to the Caverns of Nethergrim. Well, it’s a strange tale. We never actually made it to the caverns.”

  He paused, and his ruddy face knotted up with a look of perplexity.

  “I tell you, Will Lightfoot, the world is changing, for the worse. Folk aren’t as trusting or hopeful as they used to be. It’s like something is chipping away at them. Everywhere I go now there’s this foreboding, as if everyone feels that terrible things are coming. And the land itself is … not itself. The Realm has always been tricky, changeable, but it’s getting worse. There’s almost nothing you can place trust in any more. The rivers, hills, trees, even the stones…”

  The dwarf lifted the new tankard that had just been set before him, gazed past it with a puzzled, far-off look, and put it back down again.

  “One thing I knew was stone,” he said slowly. “Stone is reliable. It stays in one place and doesn’t wander off. Or it didn’t used to. But now the old landmarks, even entire mountains, they’re either somewhere they’re not supposed to be, or they’re just gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone. We were following a treasure map, one of those ancient traveller’s maps guaranteed by the Cartographers’ Guild, but we kept running into things that weren’t supposed to be there, or not running into things that were. I’d been in those lands before, and nothing was the way I remembered it. The map wasn’t wrong, the world was. And so we… Ah, I told the whole story before you came over to say hello. I won’t burden you with it. The point is, there was no Nethergrim to be found, but after wandering around looking for it we did stumble across treasure. Lots of it. A musty old dragon-hoard in the middle of a swamp, guarded by three bog trolls who fought hard to keep it.”

  The dwarf winced and slowly rubbed his thigh.

  “I didn’t come away from that battle unscathed,” he said, “but we did take the treasure from the trolls, in the end. I guess we wanted it more.”

  “So it turned out all right, then,” Will said. “Rowen’s advice was good.”

  Mimling stroked his long beard, in which droplets of ale glistened.

  “True enough, I suppose. But the strange thing was, when I looked at my share of the coins and jewels, I found I just didn’t care. That greedy old dragon had dried to bones sitting on this heap of … of stuff, the trolls had died defending it, and for what? And here I was, just like them. All the wandering about, the goblin-bashing… I knew right then that I’d had enough. I finally admitted to myself how much I missed the quiet life I’d had with my brothers, mining and minding our own affairs. I’d been missing it for a long time, really, but it took this trip, and all that treasure, to make me see it.”

  The dwarf had a faraway look in his eyes again, then he hoisted the tankard, took a long, long gulp, and slammed it back down on the table.

  “So I gave my companions most of my share, which they were quite happy to take, and I left. Just walked away. Since by then I was already quite far north I decided to seek out a dwarven tribe who dwelt in those parts, or so it was said. The Elders, or the Ironwise we call them, the greatest smiths and metalcrafters in the Realm. As a wee dwarfling I’d thrilled to the tales of the wondrous things they forged in ancient times, in their city of Adamant. Jewelled crowns, weapons of magic power, even flying ships… I’d always hoped to meet them one day, learn from them. It was time to revive that old dream. So I set out to find them, the Ironwise, if only to satisfy myself that they were more than just a legend. But I didn’t get far. The leg, you see. It’s rough country up there at the best of times, and this was the dead of winter. In the end I was forced to turn back without finding what I sought. I started on the long road home to Stonesthrow Mine, but I thought I’d stop at Fable on the way, to see my lady Rowen and thank her for sending me on this quest. And it was then, on my way here, that I had a very strange encounter.”

  The dwarf paused for another quaff. Will refrained from asking about this very strange encounter, not wanting the dwarf to launch into another long-winded tale. Now that he knew Mimling couldn’t help him, he was eager to question some of the other travellers in the common room. He was about to make an excuse and leave, when the dwarf nudged him with his tankard.

  “It was the oddest thing I’d met with on the entire trip. I was crossing the great trackless plains north of the Bourne. It’s the land of the Horse Folk. Do you know of them, Will? They live in tents of animal skins and ride swift steeds to hunt the wisent, the great horned beasts of the plain. Anyhow, they are not known to be terribly welcoming to strangers, so I was on my guard. One night a storm came up. There was a mighty ruckus of lightning and thunder, but oddly, no rain. Still, I thought I’d better find shelter, so I climbed down into a narrow gully. I found a shallow cave, but as I was crawling in, there was a growl and something told me to keep my distance. Then, in a flash of lightning I saw what was in the cave. A wolf. A wolf wh
o could talk.”

  Will stared at the dwarf. His heart started to pound.

  “A talking wolf?”

  “A big handsome fellow he was,” Mimling said with a nod, “and the sight of him nearly made me jump out of my boots. But he was in no condition to attack me, I saw right away. He was just lying there, panting, barely able to raise his head.”

  “Did the wolf say what his name was?”

  The dwarf shook his head.

  “He didn’t. But by the look on your face I’m thinking you might know this creature.”

  “It could be… I have a friend, a wolf named Shade. I haven’t seen him since I was here last.”

  “Coat all silver-grey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yellow-gold eyes that make you stop in your tracks?”

  “Yes. And a voice like—”

  “Like running water, and the wind…”

  “… in the trees, yes.”

  “It must be him, then,” the dwarf said, sitting back in his chair with a wide-eyed look of amazement.

  Will swallowed hard, holding back tears.

  “You said he was dying…?”

  “It looked that way to me, lad. He’d been badly burned, and he was feverish.” The dwarf’s eyes grew watery. “A terrible thing to see a fellow creature suffering so. And he was such a noble beast. He told me he was being hunted, and that I should get away from this place because those who were hunting him were close by. I asked him how he’d been burned, and he said he’d been struck by lightning, of all things.”

  Will stood up.

  “Where did you say this was? North of here? How long ago?”

  “Wait, lad, wait. There’s more I have to tell you.”

  Will sat back down. He gripped the edge of the table to keep his hands from shaking.