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.
He made his living a while as a wizard, though his weapons were never far from his side. The justiciars of Purpure knew him as a sellsword guard. They would not be looking for him amid eldritch smokes and a gallery of reptilian skulls. Props, of course, for the magic of his home hills had been much closer to stock and stone, water and wind, than to the mannered incantations of the great schoolmen. Still, no one in a place such as High Canton, built on drama and cocksure display, would place faith in a wizard whose spells were quietly crafted from roots and colored clays and dank tinctures of leaves and flowers.
Horn paid his dues to the local Collegium. He wore the expected robe of midnight blue embroidered with silver sigils. And he quietly, so quietly, sought out older wizards sunken into their square-walled dens like urban hermit crabs and truckled from them one by one the secrets of their craft. His stock in trade was the learnings he’d acquired at the far edges of the sea, or sometimes his hill-and-hedge magic disguised with the endorsement of distance. Even more quietly, he worked his body, running across the lava fields and among the boiling sulfur pits. No one from High Canton went to those places except the occasional slavemaster. There Horn could battle imaginary demons and past foes, stretching his sword arm and pushing his muscles past the burn.
The work of maintaining two such separate sets of skills sometimes made him feel like two men. The reward was that he yet lived when others around him had died.
Justice from Purpure finally did come seeking him. Horn set fire to the Tower of Bears and Swans, took up his fattened spellbook-still written on bark and leaves as he had first been taught-and sent himself far away in a blaze of magic that very nearly snuffed the flames around him as it drew in power.
He woke to the barmaid pouring water on his face. Horn blinked the stuff out of his eyes, glad at the least that she had not dunked him in scrumpy. Men had gone blind for less.
“Enough for you,” she said, her voice low and growling. “Three days at the bowl and you’re still alive. ’Tis a miracle no one should be forced to witness.”
Horn rolled away from her, pressing his face into the tabletop until splinters plucked at his lips. “I’ve witnessed too much,” he mumbled. In the corner of his vision the barmaid moved, but she was different. More graceful. More powerful.
With a sudden sense of panic, he slapped at his vest. The weight of fate still hung there. Its silk was clammy and close now.
“I ain’t taken it yet.”
He tilted his head to look at her more closely-how did she know?-but the barmaid was walking away.
And she had grown distinctly prettier. He certainly wasn’t any more drunk.
Magic, the blessed curse that gnaws at the soul and leaves a void in the mind into which too much that is alien and deadly can settle.
He’d known women beautiful enough to have launched entire navies for the sake of their faces. He’d known women who looked like the wrong end of an old sergeant after a hard day’s training. But there had been only one Manxinnaea.
Her nose was bulbous and slightly crooked. Her eyes were the brown of a good businesswoman, as was her hair. No one would have mistaken her for a courtesan, which she wasn’t; or royalty, which she was.
But she smelled like heaven, and she moved like a cat in a granary, and her attention focused as powerfully as any wizard’s could ever hope to. Manxinnaea had been Horn’s only love in life. When they had betrayed one another, something inside his heart had died.
Why was he thinking of her now? Fool, fool, fool. The barmaid had cast the oldest spell of all on him, a cantrip requiring only alcohol, sorrow, and time.
Wet and blinking, Horn stumbled away from the table to find the outhouse somewhere between the kitchen and the stables. The sun stabbed his eyes like a shining assassin. The air smelled odd, though after a moment he realized it was just fresh, or at least fresher than the fug within the tavern.
The world tugged at him like a child on its mother’s skirt. Horn did what he came for and ignored the rest. The reeking darkness of the tavern held room for his doubts and the slow banishment of his memory.
Milieu
The old man’s skin was the color of walnuts, and so wrinkled and scarred it very nearly could have served him as armor. Horn had no intention of testing that assumption. He was here on different errands.
He had reached the Temple of Winds near the peak of Mount Eponymous, on the Lost Island of Ee. Not so lost, in truth, for anyone could book passage out of half a dozen ports in the southern extents of the Starfall Sea. Assuming a captain was willing to brave contrary winds and little chance of profitable trade to carry a lubber into seething waters.
Sometimes the name was everything. Romance, danger, a hint of riches. Or perhaps just a gigantic angle- sided building with hundreds of windows very nearly on the edge of a smoking crater from which a sullen red glow could sometimes be seen at night.
He’d approached the temple by climbing the Path of Ten Thousand Steps. Being who he was, Horn had counted. There were only 4,238 steps. Again, the name was everything. The Temple of Winds could have held
