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 to 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.
