“Yet here you are, many weeks’ sailing from your home, wherever that may be.”
Horn thought of the distant hills of his birth with a small pang of regret. Most of his fellow sellswords had long since gone back, settled down with a village girl, and begun the serious business of breeding the next generation of boys. He was fairly sure that neither Feather nor any of the other Old Men had ever expected to see him again.
“Home is where my boots are,” Horn finally said.
“Some would name that a sad fate.”
“I have seen the world.”
Now the monk shrugged. “So have I.”
What was this scarred old man trying to tell him?
Horn tried again. “Given that I seem unable to petition the Raven Queen as you suggest, is there another path?”
“Some things change a man slowly. Journeys. The passage of years. The love of a good woman. Imprisonment.” The monk paused a moment. Horn sensed he was speaking from experience, looking back at his own paths. Then: “Some things change a man swiftly. War. Disease. Shipwrecks. The love of a bad woman.”
“Change is inevitable.”
“And that is what you crave. The inevitability of change.” The monk leaned close, as his fellows had. “Have you ever encountered a true artifact? From the First Cities, or the Old Gods, or out of the treasure houses of the greatest mages of history?”
Horn frowned. He was familiar with the concept of artifacts, mostly from his studies with the wizards of High Canton within darkened rooms among its square towers. “It is possible that an old master of mine handled such, but for my own part, no.”
“One way to think of such items is as change itself, distilled into the palm of your hand. Even something as simple as a wand can change the user. You have found this in your own experience, I am confident.”
Nodding, Horn agreed. He could remember certain spells, certain secrets, the learning of which had reshaped his view of the world. On occasion, abruptly so.
The monk tapped Horn’s chest. “Then to find your purpose, you might consider seeking out one of these artifacts. Not all of them are in strongrooms and locked boxes.”
“You have something in mind?”
“We know where many things in this world are to be found. The Map of Winds is an artifact in its own right. Many secrets whispered under the open sky find their way here.”
Horn was wary, on his guard at this. “Everything in this world comes with a price.”
“Of course.” The monk smiled, like evil dawning. “We have need of something wrongly taken from us long ago. Fetch this item back from where it is held today, and we will place fate in your hands.”
Knowing he was committing himself blindly, Horn let himself step forward. “What is this thing, and where do you need it fetched from?”
Melee
It took him more than a year to fight his way back to the Temple of Winds. Along the journey, Horn took wounds of the body and soul. He slew a white dragon, losing the tips of two fingers and most of his hair from its icy breath. He bargained away the life of an entire village for passage through a high trail defended by ogres.
In a glacial cave far higher up a mountain than Horn had ever hoped to climb, he found the Rod of the Eight Winds embedded in a crystal sphere guarded by four enormous nagas. After dispatching them, he skinned them and traded their hides to the ogres before passing through the smoldering ruins of the white dragon’s village on his way back to the temple. The ship on which he bought passage was attacked by pirates, three of the waterfronts he visited were set ablaze in his time there, and near the end of his journey Horn came down with a hacking cough that threatened to carry away his life.
Seen another way, the Raven Queen had opposed him at every turn.
It was as if she knew everything he did was fighting toward an attempt to force her hand in granting Horn a purpose.
In the last port, the one from which he could take ship to the Lost Island of Ee, he took a room so he could rest and ride out the worst of his cough. The Rod of the Eight Winds was concealed in a ceramic globe he’d had fashioned not long after securing it, and covered with poorly crafted paste gems to discourage thieves from becoming too creative. It was well enscorcelled, too, of course, but Horn could handle those without endangering himself.
It was himself he was concerned about.
The room was a dusty, dormered section of attic on the third floor of a dockside tavern. He had a tiny round window through which he could see the tops of masts, smeary and bobbing through the grimed and spotted glass. Horn slept on a rope bed with a rag mattress, and was forced to spend some of his healing energy on cantrips to battle the bedbugs and beetles that contested possession. The only other furnishings were a miserly whale-oil lamp and a tiny chest that he’d avoided, preferring to keep his few belongings in the bed with him.
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.”
