The Bard of Sorcery

by Gerard Houarner

  "Hey!" yelled a large, half-naked white-haired man sprawled across a fur-covered floor. "Close that flap, before I wrap it around your head and throw you to the kruushkas."

  Tralane accommodated the speaker, and threw his belongings on a pile of animal skins in a corner. His glance flitted over his new environment as he catalogued the wealth of the skins and furs strewn about, the exquisite craftsmanship—pre-Karthasian Empire by the looks of it—of the chest his host was leaning against, and the number of empty wine sacks flung into the corner of the tent. They were alone and there was no sign of anyone else sharing the tent, though there was enough space for four.

  Tralane came over to the giant and twisted into a cross-legged sitting position next to him.

  "You're the nearest thing I've seen to a human today," he said, peering with mock interest into his tent mate's face. "What's your name?"

  The man groaned and rolled away from Tralane, ignoring his overtures of friendship and sinking back into a loud sleep. The bard insisted by poking a finger in the fellow's back, noting that, though the man's hair was bleached with age, his muscles were still thick and firm. Finally the giant dragged himself up to a sitting position, opened his bleary eyes and looked down on Tralane.

  "You take your chances," the giant grumbled roughly. "Luckily for you, I'm too worn out to give you a poke in kind."

  "Come now," Tralane reproached him, "it's the middle of the day. How can you sleep so late?"

  "Oram is my name, and you would sleep late, too, if you'd been forced to march half the night."

  The man's size, strength, and general disposition gave him potential as a valuable ally in the strange camp, as well as a convenient source of information. Tralane gave his next words a veneer of comradeship.

  "So you've only just arrived in these parts? So have I." He paused. "Your Sorcerer King seems anxious to move, if he's marching through the country of the Tribe Nations at night."

  Oram looked at him and shook his shaggy head.

  "I don't understand what you're saying—it's too early. Who are you, and what are you doing here anyway?"

  "Tralane, and this is where I'll be sleeping," he said, and patted the fur-covered earth, raising the ashes of burned grass that escaped through a crack between two skins. "I was discovered by one of the King's men, who brought me to this camp. He was a strange fellow. And that servant who brought me to this tent—have the gods given him a vision? He doesn't hear anyone but his master."

  Oram grunted, then nodded. "Ah, the King's men," he said wearily. "They're all dead, mere shadows of souls." He slowly rose to his feet and lumbered behind the wooden chest. He picked up a large wine sack and handed it to Tralane, who took a long draught and immediately felt his head spin.

  "If you raise the visors on those armored men," Oram continued, "all you'll see is the inside of the helmet." He walked unsteadily to the tent's opening, surreptitiously peeking through a crack as if to satisfy himself that no one was near. "The Sorcerer King, whose name I've been told to avoid for fear of calling down a curse on my head, makes certain pacts with living men. They are granted a brief span of power and, after they've died, they are bound to his service." He looked out more boldly, squinted painfully at the light, and returned to his makeshift bed. "Spirits of the dead form his personal guard. He calls them Knights of Blackness." Oram's throat rumbled, and Tralane was not sure if the sound was meant to be laughter or a sigh of relief at being able to sit down again. "That's who brought you here, that's what you call a King's man. They're nothing more than ghosts—less, because even ghosts can dream of redemption, even ghosts can be released from their ties to mortal pasts by the merciful hand of a god, or the enticing lies of a demon. These are helpless without his will to guide them, just as he is powerless to move those suits of armor without the raw stuff of life men call souls. Magic is a curious little art." He sighed to himself.

  Oram glanced at Tralane. He was warming to his subject as much as to the act of speaking. His sour expression relaxed as he forgot about his lost sleep, and his more affable nature surfaced. To Tralane's surprise, the giant seemed on the border of joviality.

  "He is in constant contact with these knights, so I'd be thrifty with my words around them. As for the servant, well, his mind is a blank. He is like a hand or a finger to the Sorcerer King. I've heard that he once saw the Sorcerer King converse with certain unearthly beings, and the sight of it made his mind wither and die. But then these people blame everything on their King. Perhaps the man was just born simple. Here, give me a swig of that water."

  Tralane handed him the bag, rasping, "I'd hardly call it water."

  Then he stood, somewhat shakily, and poked his head through the tent's flap, following Oram's precautionary move.

  "It's a large army out there," Tralane said, retreating back into the tent. "Where did it come from? The people are not familiar to me, and I've never heard of Eiring-Cor. Have new kingdoms formed down here? Is there a war?"

  "Hasn't the King told you?"

  "I haven't had the chance to learn much from the Sorcerer King."

  Oram shook his head slowly. "And you won't get the chance. The only reason you still live is so he can learn the ways of this world."

  Tralane's head jerked to face Oram, fixing on the giant's pale blue eyes. The Sorcerer King's power, while impressive, did not seem capable of carrying such an armed force across dimensions and worlds. Even the proposition of an other-worldly visitation by a single being was rare enough to have caused consternation among the northern wizards, even during the time of the Wizard Kings. The mystery of Agathom and his people sharpened Tralane's curiosity.

  "This world?" Tralane queried nonchalantly, relaxing himself so that Oram received only a mildly quizzical look after the moment's surprise. "Now I'm the one who doesn't understand your words, my friend."

  Sighing heavily, Oram threw the wineskin behind the chest and drew out a dried side of meat wrapped in cloth. He offered Tralane a chunk, but the bard declined and unpacked his own provisions.

  "You've interrupted my sleep, and now you plague my morning meal with questions. I should have offered you a sword and a challenge instead of a drink and friendship."

  Oram spoke roughly, but seemed to wait with some eagerness for encouragement to continue. He glanced knowingly at Tralane.

  "I await your story," Tralane said implacably. He drowned the yeul meat, the tastiest of the rodents on the Ousho Plain, with water from the Plain's rivers, and looked with regret as Oram devoured his morning meal. He had become bored with his monotonous diet, yet he did not want to become too close to the man by sharing so casually his food as well as his tent and drink. He swallowed quickly, sacrificing pleasure for distance.

  "Impudence. You'd better curb that habit when you're around the Sorcerer King. He has a notable lack of humor." Oram lifted the edge of a skin and spat out a bone. Then he smiled at Tralane, the last vestige of surliness crumbling before the prospect of taking his guest into his confidence.

  "As for my story? My collection of skins and furs should tell you I'm a hunter by trade. I've been roaming these plains for ages. My family fled here—"

  As he listened to Oram recount his history with the same zeal and relish he devoted to his meal, Tralane's attention began to waver. It was a tale whose structure Tralane was already familiar with, a tale that started with the Karthasian Empire's civil wars and the Wizard Kings' attempt to carve up the Empire from within and break the power of the Lower Kingdoms. Tralane heard Mathi's voice from out of the past, droning in his cool, crypt-like tower library chamber, telling, as Oram was doing, the history of a period that had destroyed so many families.

  Oram's father had been a captain in the Empire's services, whose lord became another casualty in the Wizard Kings' games of succession. As Tralane had always assumed his lineage to be noble and tragic, he imagined the lord in Oram's story to be his own father. In those chaotic days, it would indeed have been wiser for the captain to flee with his wi
fe, his fifteen-year-old son, and his two younger daughters, as Oram went on to claim.

  But what of Tralane's supposed mother, the wife of the assassinated lord, the lady of the Empire, Tralane's pregnant mother? He doubted if he had been born yet; he was certain he would have remembered something had he been an infant in the midst of the wars. But he could never remember anything about his mother or father. His earliest memories were only of Mathi and the cold, damp tower.

  So this captain, who may very well have been Tralane's father's closest servant, abandoned his charges and left the Empire's territories. They were comfortable living in the foothills of the Rechochoake Mountains while Tralane's mother fled on her own or, perhaps, Tralane embellished, in the company of some handmaidens, a chaste man-at-arms—no, there were no such—or better yet, some warrior eunuchs. Surely, Tralane thought, there had been warrior eunuchs during the latter Karthasian Empire, or was that only a story from his repertoire of tales?

  Oram elaborated on the happiness of his youth at the edge of the Ousho Plains, learning to hunt, tracking the wild gersin and camutels, trading skins, tusks, and meats for the manufactured staples of civilized life that still managed to trickle down from the north despite the civil wars. Tralane pictured himself in the wizard's arms, shivering even then—did Mathi deliver him, watch his mother die?—as Oram broadened his personal history to include friendship with one of the Tribe nations, the Succacor.

  While Tralane had grown up lonely, with nothing more than the preoccupied wizard, his occasional and equally detached visitors, and the hostile, whining voices of captive demons and spirits for company, Oram had enjoyed a wealth of family and friends. One sister married a Clan Lord, while the other married a merchant—Tralane wondered if he had ever had an older sister, or sisters, and whether they, like his supposed father, had been sacrificed to the hunger of the Wizard Kings. Oram recited a litany of beasts hunted, friends met, and trials of manhood passed, as Tralane half-listened, skimming through those same years of his own life.

  He had suffered. Tralane had reminded himself of his own suffering frequently enough over the years, and Oram's speech drove him once more into the maelstrom of his past. He was an orphan, to start with. No one loved him, no one had ever extended to him the same kindnesses that Oram had experienced.

  There had been the Princess Amalkys, later, during his traveling days. A sweet young woman from—which kingdom had that been?--Corru. How could such a tender young woman have come from such a terror of a father, he had asked himself whenever he recalled that incident. He was known to have slain his first two wives, and the daughters they had from him, simply because he felt cheated out of a male heir.

  Amalkys had said she loved Tralane, who had been nothing more than a court bard in her father's castle. Tralane had not discouraged her displays of affection, for they had reflected well on his nature and had given him a measure of protection against her father's easily roused rages. But she had been far too innocent and could never understand Tralane's tormented soul.

  No, she had not loved him, she had stayed behind in Corru when the time had come for him to flee her father's ire. The matter of his quite accidental friendship with the leaders of the rebellion against the King had proved too much for the old volcano to bear. His friends dead, Tralane had bid the Princess Amalkys farewell. Had she tried to run away with him? No, foolish woman, she had tried instead to defend Tralane in the face of her father's anger. Tralane was certain that true love would have dictated she go with him. But no, Princess Amalkys had been false, like all the others. And it was just as well she never came with him, because then he never would have had as much fun with the witch of Jobkol Hill. Tralane had never known what had become of the Princess Amalkys, or the witch of Jobkol Hill, for that matter.

  But all that piece of history was irrelevant. They and the giant sitting in front of him at the moment spouting fond memories of a youthful golden age, knew nothing of suffering. And if they did not know suffering, they could not have known Tralane.

  The years with Mathi had been uniform in their boredom. People did not understand, Tralane had discovered over the years of telling his story, that a lifetime of being watched over sternly, with every freedom curtailed, without love or kindly attention, and without company and playmates, was itself a wound that cut deeply into the soul, a wound that never ceased to be painful.

  The wizard had, in the end, driven Tralane away with his coldness. And though Tralane at last tasted the richness of the world as he made his way from village to town, from one kingdom to the next, the pain had never left him. No, he was, he had long ago decided, forever the lost orphan, abandoned to the vagaries of powers greater than himself. Would he now be somewhere out on the Ousho Plains, he thought bitterly, listening to an overfed giant talk about an unbearably happy life, in the clutches of a mysterious sorcerer at the head of a huge host, if his noble heritage had ever been properly recognized, if indeed his parents had lived and raised him to be the prince and lord he felt himself secretly to be? No, he would have been in some palace, amusing himself with his servants, well-protected from Agathom's power by the best wizards and mercenaries his considerable fortunes could buy.

  Oram had lapsed into reciting political history once more, and Tralane's attention was drawn to his words.

  "The civil wars were over. The Emperor Tayth Halor had bound the princes and lords of the land to his banner. The Wizard Kings were broken, their ice palaces and sorcerous allies shattered by the cold steel and magical arts of the Empire's people. With his northern borders secure, Halor sent his armies through the middle kingdoms and won their allegiance. Then, as a final show of strength, his warriors came south to drive the Tribe Nations away from the lands claimed by rulers of men. The Nations were beaten back far out into the plains, and the Emperor earned the undying gratitude of the local petty kingdoms."

  Tralane nodded, but he could have fleshed out Oram's history with certain tales he had heard and learned of how the gods had formed a pact with some ambitious men to strengthen their hold on the world by overthrowing the Empire. If he had been in the mood, he could even have thrown in the tale of Suthra and the raped goddess, Gen-jimaGen-jima. However, he preferred to interject an ending to Oram's story that agreed with the fantasies he had been entertaining about the contrast in their lives.

  "So your father returned to the Empire," Tralane said, "taking his wife with him and leaving you here to enjoy your freedom. He was well received, since the Empire needed seasoned captains to guard its borders, regardless of their pasts. He's probably a garrison commander by now, or perhaps one of the Emperor's military advisors?"

  Oram gave him an odd look, as if the bard were speaking in an unknown tongue.

  "My parents were killed by Karthasian warriors. Our home was burned out, our small riches pillaged. Both my sisters are lost—I was never able to track down either of them."

  Oram shifted his weight and continued, ignoring Tralane's uneasy silence. The shattering of Tralane's illusions brought him back to the uncomfortable realities of his early youth. He could not remember a single detail about his parents and had been told by Mathi that they had been slain in an incident similar to the one Oram had just described. On the one hand, Tralane had felt abandoned by his parents and sought solace from the unresponsive Mathi, and on the other, he had nursed a secret suspicion that his tutor had taken him from his true parents, who would someday come and rescue him.

  Only frequent exposure to tales of death from that period during his travels had prepared Tralane to consider the verity of Mathi's brief but incisive words. Those who, like Mathi, sequestered themselves from the well-traveled paths of men to study magic and learn all the subtleties of the art, had no time for or interest in lies. They sought truths, the revelation of mysteries, the paths to transformation. Mathi claimed he rescued the infant Tralane from the ruins of his parents' home on his way to his retreat, and had thought the raising of the child would lead to a useful apprentice and assistant
in his future work. The time Tralane had spent away from Mathi had given him a new, bitter perspective on his upbringing, and little reason to doubt his adoptive parent's version of his origin.

  The bard continued to listen to Oram, though he was suddenly anxious to leave the giant and start exploring the camp. He wanted to run away from the memories and emotions evoked by Oram's history, memories that had haunted him in his nightmares and destroyed the fantastic edifices he preferred to construct over the basic frameworks of truth. But Tralane stayed, aware that Oram, for all his rambling, had not yet touched on the matter of Agathom's place in, or out, of this world. As this was the subject that had originally piqued his interest, Tralane hoped Oram would come back to it soon.

  For the moment, Oram showed no inclination to address his current situation. His easy manner and good spirits seemed to evaporate after Tralane's outburst, and he spoke slowly, sadly, about the years that followed the massacre of his family.

  Tralane listened with tepid interest as Oram traced the trails he took, trying to find survivors from the Succacor Tribe Nation for news of his sister, and his fruitless journey north to find his other sister, who reportedly had been evacuated to avoid contact with and retaliatory raids from the Tribe Nations. It was a solitary life Oram had led, avoiding towns and divorcing himself from the affairs of men, and it was the complement of Tralane's life at that time. For, if Tralane had the years figured correctly, it was about the time of the destruction of Oram's family that he had finally left Mathi.

  He had been twelve, and the Emperor Tayth Halor was finishing his war against the encroachment of the Tribe Nations. Tralane watched the Emperor's army returning to the restored Karthasian Empire in the north, but he dared not join their march. The faces of the warriors seemed far too hard, the speech of the nobles terse and ill-humored despite their triumphs. Perhaps the years of war and betrayal had soured their temper, or perhaps it was simply the character of northerners to be grim. Whichever was true, Tralane found the south more to his liking. The courts of the newly formed southern kingdoms, survivors of the Low Kingdoms disrupted by the civil wars, were as open to tale-tellers and adventurers then as they were now.