by Larry Niven
Aros’s full lips curled in a smile. “At least you’re honest,” he said.
“Squeal?” Neoloth said. “They actually squeal?”
Aros smiled at him. “I look forward to demonstrating, one fine day.”
“When our present business is concluded, of course.”
“Indeed,” Aros said. “When our present business is concluded.”
Aros removed a small leather bag from his waist pouch, scattered a pinch of dust over the body, then squatted and chanted.
“What are you doing?” Fandy asked.
“It’s a ritual my people use to pacify a soul. We use magic too, Neoloth. He was just a boy,” Aros said. “They used him like a token in some grand game. He was captured. We’ll never know what happened to him before he died. They buried him in an unmarked grave. Now we’re robbing his body … for what?”
A pause. Then, “For love,” Neoloth said.
Aros stared at the wizard, as if wanting to believe. “If you’re lying,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”
“Fair enough.”
As Aros studied the bones, Neoloth’s fingers twisted as if possessed by individual life. “Sigils … awaken!”
The tattoos on the leathery flesh twitched, but that was all.
Aros squinted. “Ummm … what’s wrong?”
Neoloth frowned. “There is resistance.”
“Resistance?” Aros asked.
Neoloth gritted his teeth. “Sometimes … the spirit of the dead can resist if the living being would have resisted.”
“I can’t imagine why a boy wouldn’t want an ancient wizard violating his corpse.”
“I suppose you’ve a better idea?” Neoloth asked.
“Let’s try honesty.”
Aros knelt at the side of the shallow grave and gathered the bones into his arms. “I never knew you, Elio,” he whispered. “You died alone … as I’ve been alone. I hope I’m wrong, that there was someone who cared for you. I don’t know. I need to borrow something of you, in order to save a woman. I will need your mother and father to believe I am you. We have no wish to hurt them, only to rescue an innocent. I will do all I can to be fair to them. I wish your spirit no disrespect and know that you love them still.”
Neoloth cleared his throat and then could think of nothing to say.
“If you will let me do this,” Aros continued, “I will return your bones to your land of birth. Or allow you to remain at rest here. Tell me which you wish.”
The wind stirred. And if he listened carefully, Neoloth would have sworn it moaned, “Hooome.”
“Home,” Aros said. “I have no home. I understand, and swear.”
Aros turned to Neoloth, another thought coming to him. “Could we take his bones with us? After we are done, we could arrange for them to be delivered to his parents.”
“That could be risky,” Neoloth said. “Too risky.”
“Then we can arrange for them to be told this location,” he said. “I wish to keep my promise.”
“That,” Neoloth replied, “we can do.”
The wind swirled and formed into a dust devil that hovered above the grave and then disappeared. The ink lines of the body wiggled.
Neoloth felt his own excitement building. “It’s happening! Get ready!”
Agathodaemon wrapped itself around Aros, who had stripped to the breechclout. He was muscled like a circus acrobat, skin inscribed with arcane symbols and images. The barbarian groaned as his flesh crawled and the tattoos began to flex and stretch.
“Wizard!” Aros called. “I should have told you! Those tattoos: I had the woman work them over old scars! They’re taking the scars with them!”
“Good. I knew,” Neoloth said.
The tattoos and the scars beneath were crawling onto the bulge in the snake’s belly. They sorted themselves, crescents and sea creatures and weird text, lumps and puckers and the long sword slash, crawling headward and tailward. Now they were lost in the patterning of Agathodaemon’s markings.
Aros gaped, then turned to Neoloth. “What did your snake swallow?” The bulge was half the size of Fandy.
“You don’t want to know,” Neoloth said. “Really. Wait…” The tattoos on the withered corpse began to crawl. “Touch him. Quickly.”
Aros set his hand on the corpse’s chest. Markings flowed up Aros’s arm and onto his body and then settled in appropriate locations. Chest: a sunburst in gold. Shoulder: a black star, like a flag Aros had seen once. Streaming up his arm, distorted into river lines, then crawling down his back: a young girl’s face.
The wind died down. And then there was stillness. Aros looked down at himself, blowing like a bellows.
“How does it feel?” the wizard asked.
“I have no words,” the warrior replied.
“That,” the wizard said, “would be a nice change.”
“Can we go now?” Fandy pled. “Please?”
“Yes,” Neoloth said, and gathered his coat’s collar more tightly around his throat. “I think it may be time.”
* * *
They had set out their camp, eaten, and bedded down. Aros had barely closed his eyes when he detected Neoloth rolling out of his blanket and creeping away from them. The barbarian rose and followed silently.
Aros found the wizard around the bend of a rock. He had a small square of blanket spread on the ground. A small cylindrical object lay in the middle of the square. It was surrounded by something like a heat shimmer. The wizard gestured and chanted.
Aros watched until curiosity overwhelmed him. “What are you doing?”
Neoloth’s head whipped around, and he snarled. “Go back! This is not for your eyes, Aztec.”
“To hell with that,” Aros growled. “Save your orders for Fandy. What are you doing? What is that?”
Neoloth looked as if he wanted to chew rocks and spit arrowheads. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said. “The magic really is dwindling.”
What kind of game was this? “I’ve seen magic.”
“Think of gold in the ground, everywhere,” Neoloth said. “As long as people only use a little of it, it lasts forever, or seems to. But build a huge city with artisans on every corner making gold jewelry and gold statues and gold ornaments and you deplete it rapidly.”
“That’s what magic is?” Aros asked. This was unexpected and fascinating. Oddly, he had never really wondered what magic was … only how it might help or harm him.
“Close enough,” Neoloth said. “But out here”—he gestured at the desert plain—“where people have not plundered, magic remains.”
“And because the great chief’s people don’t use as much of it as the cities…”
“I can borrow some, yes.”
Aros considered. “And this device enables you to do this?”
“If I understand it properly, yes.” Neoloth turned back to his work, while Aros watched.
After a time, the barbarian spoke again. “You know, when people say ‘borrow’ they generally mean something that they intend to return. Otherwise it is called ‘stealing.’”
“The sort of distinction I’d expect you to be familiar with.”
“Are you?”
“Very,” Neoloth said.
Aros grunted. He sat for a while and watched, then finally realized he was yawning restlessly and returned to his bedroll. He watched the play of lights, a bit like an electrical storm, just beyond their camp.
He examined his new tattoos with interest. Fandy watched him.
“This is a strange feeling.”
Fandy scrambled closer. “How is it strange, Aros?”
“I’ve traveled. And sometimes I had my flesh paint-pricked to remind myself of a port … or a woman … or even an enemy.”
“An enemy?” the elf asked.
Aros nodded. “Yes. I actually tattooed…”
He paused as Neoloth approached him, eyebrows arched in query.
Aros shrugged, changing his mind. “Never mind.”
“No,” Neoloth insi
sted. “Really.”
Aros’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
He stood in the moonlight, looking at the new empty space on his flesh. “You took my scars,” he said.
“Yes,” Neoloth agreed. “Yes. Some of them.”
Aros’s voice lowered until it was nearly gravel. “I want them back.”
“When we’re finished,” Neoloth replied. “But I have to ask … why?”
“Who am I without them?”
A thin thread of wind rustled the leaves. Neoloth sighed. “Who are any of us, without our memories?” He sat next to the fire, gazing into it.
“Aros,” Fandy said.
“Yes?”
The elf’s ears twitched, perhaps with the cold. “If you were not your history … who might you choose to be?”
That might have been the oddest question Aros had ever heard. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why would you even ask such a thing?”
“A prince?” Fandy offered.
Neoloth watched them both, silent.
“I don’t know,” he repeated.
“Then perhaps you know what you really want from all of this,” Fandy said.
“A man without history has no future,” Aros tried.
Now, at last, Neoloth spoke. “A man without history is not confined by it.”
They both turned to look at the wizard. Aros felt both irritated and curious. “What are you running from?”
“Let’s just say that I would like to stop running. And leave it at that.”
Suddenly, Aros had an inkling. “The princess is your plan?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” Neoloth said, and turned over onto his side. And was snoring in suspiciously short order.
ELEVEN
The Troll
Neoloth awoke so quickly that he heard his own last snore. Awoke realizing that some instinct had functioned where conscious awareness had failed.
Something hunkered above them, a massive, vaguely man-shaped moon shadow. Larger than twenty men. “Who you?” the shadow said. A round-faced mountain with tree-trunk legs.
Across the ashes of the dying fire from Neoloth, Aros stirred. “Oh, blood and steel,” he muttered. “I knew this would happen.”
“I hurt,” the ogre said.
“We haven’t done anything to it,” the barbarian whispered. “What is it talking about?”
“The beast is tied to the land,” Neoloth whispered back. “When I charged the talisman, I created a void. It feels that void like a gash.”
“It’s some kind of a watchdog?”
Before Neoloth could answer, the ogre swung at them. The arm was as massive as a log but thankfully slow enough that even the wizard could duck. Aros dodged even faster, drawing Macuahuitl. He darted in and slashed with the sawtooth edge, but the creature’s shins were covered with matted hair so thick Flaygod couldn’t reach flesh.
Aros screamed curses to his feathered god.
Neoloth grabbed the talisman, gripping it in both hands. “Death to the destroyer!”
Light boiled around the talisman, then lanced out at the ogre, who recoiled violently.
“Yes!” Aros screamed.
Then the talisman flickered, and the light died.
The ogre’s arms hung at his sides, as limp as half-filled sausage skins. The beast shrugged and danced about until his saucer-like eyes strained from his rounded boulder of a head. His limbs trembled but would not obey him. His roar of frustration was disturbingly human.
Aros’s head snapped around. “What in the hell is wrong with your damned magic?”
Neoloth looked at the talisman cylinder in dismay. “I guess it takes more time to charge than I thought.”
“You didn’t know?”
The ogre screamed and jumped up and down, flapping its arms around and around like a headless chicken. At last it seemed to grasp that its accustomed weapons had been rendered worthless and started trying to stomp his human targets. Horses and mule scattered, braying and neighing to wake the dead.
Aros avoided the huge feet at first. “The hell with this!” he screamed, and leapt to the attack.
The next minutes were a blur of jump and slash. Neoloth managed to generate flashes of light that dazzled without damaging. Dancing out of the way of the flapping arms in the bizarrely shadowed moonlight, Aros chopped away matted hair until Flaygod could slash the ogre’s left ankle tendon. The creature bawled and fell to its knees. As if chopping a log, Aros hacked his sword down into the ogre’s throat. Its roars died to screams. And then gurgles. And then it was silent.
Aros wiped blood from a bruised shoulder. “No wonder those desert dwellers believed the land would defend itself!”
“Oh, no…,” Neoloth said. The wizard’s voice was flat. Sad.
And even without turning around, Aros knew what he would see.
The wizard stood over Fandy’s crushed body, huddled next to the stone that had broken him.
“Is he?” The question felt stupid even before it left his lips.
“Yes,” Neoloth said. “Dead.”
“You’re a sorcerer. Can’t you?”
An odd menagerie of emotions crossed Neoloth’s face. “It’s what I’ve been trying to say. The magic is dying.”
Aros grunted and sheathed his sword. “That leaves the world for me, I think. What can I do to hurry this miracle along?”
“I could give you good manners,” Neoloth said. “That should eat the magic for miles around.”
Aros laughed. Neoloth was right, damn him. Fandy had been a bit irritating but harmless. He didn’t deserve squabbling at a time like this. The sight of the tiny crushed body sobered him.
“Let’s give him a proper burial,” he said. “And then…”
“What?”
“Let’s charge up your damned talisman. I suspect we might need it.”
“I think,” Neoloth said, “that the ogre’s death did that. I’ll check…”
There was a saying Aros had heard about clouds and silver linings. Another about ill winds.
Neither felt worth a damn at the moment.
TWELVE
Warfroot
The coastal town of Warfroot was a warren of twisted salt-cured docks, dark alleys, and patchwork buildings that looked as if the next stout wind would sweep them into the bay. Aros and Neoloth reached it seven days after burying Fandy, and they had spoken little along the path. But now that they were actually walking the narrow, plank-paneled dockside alleys, the wizard was growing downright chatty. “All right,” he said.
They’d left horses at a nearby stable, donned fashionably cowled tunics, and begun their search. After a quarter of an hour threading through darkened streets, Aros stopped them before a tavern called Sailor’s Rest. The smell of stale beer and unwashed bodies rolled out in a cloud.
Neoloth asked, “I hope you know what you’re doing. This is something of a dive.”
“I think,” Aros said, “that this place would need redecoration to qualify as a ‘dive.’”
Neoloth glared at him. “You speak strangely for a barbarian.”
“I’m foreign,” Aros said, “not stupid. Come on.”
The bar inside was noisy, raucous. The air shimmered with smoke and body heat. A swivel-hipped waitress approached them. She looked Aros up and down as if massaging him with her eyes. Neoloth, she barely noticed. “Roast lamb tonight, just got in new kegs. Table on the side.” She pointed. “Be right with you.”
Aros nodded at her, and the two men sat against the wall. Neoloth scanned the room, unimpressed. “Do you really think you can do this?”
The barbarian nodded. “I’m pretty sure. I don’t know who’s in harbor, but I’ll see someone I knew from the old days.” They drank their drinks slowly enough for him to inspect every face, but when nothing familiar presented itself, they went on their way.
They repeated the same behavior at two more taverns. Aros found no one that he knew. He changed approach and headed down to the docks. Early-morning
fog enveloped them, clung to their coats and clothing. For the first time on their journey, Aros seemed a happy man, as if the ocean sounds were washing away the memory of Quillia’s dungeons. Now, at last, the barbarian began to encounter a few old friends.
A pair of conversations led them to a slip at the northern end of the shipyard. “Who goes there?” a sailor called down from the deck of a triple-master.
“Ahoy, the Pelican,” Aros called up.
“Who’s asking?”
The barbarian seemed slightly reluctant to supply that information. “Kasha is the name. Is Golden Axe still the captain?”
The unseen sailor spit into the ocean. “He ain’t been cap’n since he lost the ship a moon ago.”
Aros’s brow wrinkled, but Neoloth saw that his companion retained the ghost of a smile. “And how did he do that?”
“Gambling, of course.”
What Neoloth had interpreted as a smile broadened. Aros said, “That sounds like the Gold I know. Who’s first mate?”
“Dorgan. He ain’t here neither.”
“Where can we find Captain Gold?” Neoloth called up.
Now the shadow of a sailor’s head appeared at the railing, peering down at them. “I think he’s drinking himself to death in the Shark’s Eye,” he said. “If he ain’t there, ask for Dorgan, the first mate. He’s around.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember this.”
“What now?” Neoloth asked.
Aros shrugged. “Let’s try the Shark’s Eye.”
* * *
The Shark’s Eye was a waterfront dive like those Neoloth and Aros had already investigated, a place it was wise to steer clear of, unless one was handy with fists and sword. As they entered, Aros looked around the bar, circling the room until he found a bear of a man sprawled sleeping across a table.
“And we have a winner,” he said.
“Not according to your sailor friend,” Neoloth sneered.
Aros pulled the sleeping man up. Rolls of fat jounced. “Ho! Goldie!”
The big man groaned. “Leave me alone. I got more money. Take it and le’me alone.” The man plopped back down on the table, thumping his head.
“This is just wonderful,” Neoloth said.
Aros snarled. “Girl! Bring water!”
When it arrived, they dunked Gold’s head in the bucket. He roared, sputtering as he came up, swinging. Aros ducked and caught his friend in a rear hug, avoiding flailing elbows. “What? What the hell? I’ll kill you—” The barbarian released and spun him.