They were nowhere near the top of the range, and had truly never been, as the pass they had used when he was still unconscious cut between two peaks rather than summiting one of them. This was just as well, as he’d read about the troubles men and animals had at that elevation, not just with heavy winds and deep snows, but also with things that should be taken for granted, like air thick enough for breathing.
Osraic was still higher and further north than he’d ever been before, seeing things he’d only ever read about or examined in etchings. The open sky was so vast and close that for the first time in his life he understood why some men wrote poetry. He’d seen cloud banks that were close enough to touch, and distant storms writing sigils in lightning.
Their descent was heading for a forest floor he couldn’t see due to a perpetual ground fog. He’d have thought they were lowering themselves into a cloud if not for the pine forest poking through.
And he saw dragons.
At first he didn’t even grasp what he was looking at. The problem with being so high up in such an open space was that he lost all understanding of distance and size. In the cities and mud towns he’d grown up in, how far he could see was limited by how many things were in the way—buildings, trees—and how bright and plentiful the evening torches were. He was unaccustomed to an unobstructed view that went for miles in all directions. So when he saw the dragons, they were so far away he initially mistook them for peculiar birds of the approximate size of actual birds, and not monstrous lizard beasts the size of houses. It wasn’t until one of them expelled fire—playfully, it appeared—that he realized his mistake.
Osraic must have gasped audibly at the sight, because he caught Cant’s attention. They were riding with Atha in the lead and Cant in the rear. Whether this was because they were concerned he might wander, or fall off his horse, he wasn’t sure.
“Don’t worry,” the large man said. “We shouldn’t expect to face a dragon until we’ve reached the gates of the Kingdom.”
“Right. What if one of them decides to show up early?”
“Well that would just be bad luck. Perhaps we should have taken one of your charms.”
He rode up beside Osraic.
“Here,” he said, “have a look.”
Cant pulled out a vial and handed it over.
“What’s this?” Osraic asked, holding it up. It was blue glass with a clear liquid inside. He might have thought Cant palmed one of his potions from the shop, but the container was unfamiliar.
“Tears of a raven, of course.”
Osraic handed back the vial.
“You’re both mad,” he said.
“So you say. When you see what we have seen, you might consider if madness is such a terrible recourse.”
“How do you mean to defeat one, when the time comes?”
“Have you ever met a dragon, sorcerer?”
“I haven’t, no.”
“When the time comes, we’ll probably just negotiate terms. They’re mostly quite reasonable.”
“I can never tell when you’re joking.”
Cant laughed. “That’s because I never am.”
They didn’t stop riding until the sun fell past the western edge of the mountain range. By then everyone was starved. Osraic felt a bone-deep soreness and general exhaustion he wished he could have attributed to the aftereffects of the drug, but which likely had more to do with the riding.
Before the sunlight disappeared he took a look back at the hills they had spent the day climbing out of, and was pretty sure he could spot the point where they emerged from the clearing that morning. It didn’t seem far at all. But, as with the dragons, distance and size expectations were confounded by the scale of the mountain range.
Atha helped Osraic off the horse, and then ignored him for several minutes while she spoke to his mount.
“She says you didn’t talk to her,” the elf said, after what sounded like an entirely one-sided conversation. “I told you to talk to her.”
“You can talk to animals?”
He couldn’t recall any lore on elves having the ability to communicate with animals. There was no lore on anyone having that innate ability, actually. There was a spell that could do it, but it was complicated, and Osraic was years away from even attempting such a thing. That was provided it even worked, which was doubtful. About three quarters of the volumes on spells were flim-flam.
“Anyone can talk to animals,” she said. “You should try.”
“I’ll rephrase. Do they talk back to you?”
“In their own way, yes.”
Cant clapped him on the shoulder. “I would not press this point, if I were you,” he said. “We have to make camp. Let her tend to the animals. They did do all the work today.”
Making camp didn’t involve a fire this time. For most of the day, a sharp wind had been cutting through the heavy furs, leaving Osraic raw and uncomfortable, if not actually cold. The undermost layer of his clothing was damp with his own sweat, though, and whenever the wind touched it he shivered.
But there was no firewood to be found in this terrain, and what they’d been carrying had been used up the night before. They were somewhat less likely to attract the attention of another greathawk without a fire, but probably more likely to freeze to death before morning.
The three of them spent the next hour chewing dried meat and drinking water, which only made them feel colder. Nobody spoke, but this could have been as much from exhaustion and the amount of energy involved in chewing dried food as from any residual belligerence.
“Can I see your bow?” Osraic asked, both to break the silence and because he’d been wanting to examine it closely since Atha first showed it to him in the tavern.
I was warm that day, he lamented.
Atha shrugged, and removed it from her hair.
“Alavas,” she whispered, and as before it jumped to a normal size in her hands. This time Osraic was watching carefully, and still didn’t see it happen. It was as if the bow had only two sizes, and jumped between them without pausing at any of the intermediate sizes first.
He took it from her.
“Is it specific to you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Alavas,” he said.
Nothing happened.
“As I said.”
“I believed you. I was just curious. This is the most powerful enchantment I think I’ve ever touched. Who did it for you?”
She and Cant shared a quick glance.
“I’d rather not say at this time,” she said, “if that’s all right.”
“Yes.”
Maybe he should have gone on this damn quest, he thought, instead of me.
Osraic would have said this aloud, but his reading of the enchantment on the bow was much more interesting than any answer they could have provided.
Magic was a craft, just like anything else.
Most people thought of it in the same way they thought of blacksmiths. That is, a smithy could forge a sword, and nobody who later held that sword would be able to discern the technique used to make it, beyond a general understanding of fire and hammered metal. But the truth was, magic was more like carpentry. To an untrained eye it might appear that a chair, or a table, or a house was assembled in a process as mysterious as that of the sword-maker. An experienced carpenter, though, could examine the joints and ascertain how the object was assembled, and in what order.
So it was with an enchanted thing. If one knew how to read magic, it was possible to see the joints and hinges and figure out how the enchantment did what it did.
“Are you going to give that back, or fondle it all night?” Atha asked.
“Sorry,” he said. He held it out for her to take back. When she touched it, he held on for an extra half-second, enough time to examine the part of the spell that made it particular to her. “It’s an amazing piece of work.”
“The bow, or the magics?”
“Both.”
He nearly understood the spell,
which was surprising enough on its own. He had plenty of experience reading other sorcerers’ enchantments—this was an essential element of apprenticeship—but never anything so complex. He had imagined it as something that would take hours to grasp. But the only part he couldn’t quite get had to do with the different materials that made up the bow. Mostly, he couldn’t figure out how the drawstring had never broken.
Osraic decided he wanted to know more about the sorcerer who had performed such a complex enchantment, but it was too dark and too cold for any further conversation. Atha returned the bow to her hair and the three of them huddled together for mutual warmth, and slept.
“All right, let’s stop here.”
The loose collection of individuals that constituted the Tenth Avenue Writers’ Underground was assembled in a haphazard fashion across the surprisingly spacious living room belonging to Wilson Knight. The room had several appropriate places to sit and lounge, including the floor, which was covered in a heavy pile carpet and was deemed by many to be quite comfortable in the event a short nap was needed.
The room was a part of a seventh floor condo, which was either owned by Wilson’s parents or by Wilson himself, depending on who asked and what kind of mood Wilson happened to be in at the time.
It was Wilson who told Oliver to stop reading. Under most circumstances this interjection would be considered rude, except: everyone expected rudeness from Wilson as a matter of course; and Oliver was glad to be stopped. The truth was, what followed was another two pages of description of a forest that just didn’t work, ending with the note MORE WORLD-BUILDING GOES HERE.
Oliver put down the pages and looked up expectantly, but for the moment, Wilson looked as surprised as everyone else in the room regarding his interruption.
“Do you have notes?” Oliver asked.
“I… yes. I mean, that seemed like a good place to stop. You don’t have a lot more, do you?”
“Not a lot more, no.”
“It’s quite a bit already,” Wilson said. “What you’ve done so far.”
“It’s a start.”
“For the purposes of the assignment, it’s more than enough. You didn’t write an entire epic in a week, I’m just assuming.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then let’s talk about what you’ve got here.”
If it seemed like Wilson was a little too professorial for someone who was, age-wise, a peer to the entire writer’s group, that was because the Tenth Avenue Writers’ Underground—which everyone called either TAWU or “the woo”—was his idea. More exactly, people involved in it got involved because Wilson Knight ran the thing.
There were two reasons for this. First, Wilson Knight had a MFA in creative writing from a university everyone had heard of. Second, and possibly more importantly, Wilson Knight had been published.
Neither of those facts meant nearly as much to the people who had accomplished both of those things as they did to the people who had not. The publication involved a short story in a literary magazine that was so obscure, if Wilson (or anyone else) announced one day that the magazine itself was a work of fiction, nobody would be all that surprised. But the value of having been published far outweighed the exposure from it, the money he might have made in selling it—if any—or even the quality of the piece itself. (In truth, hardly anybody had read the story either, for the same reason nobody had really heard of the magazine it was featured in.) The value came from the accolades that followed.
Wilson Knight was a certified Important Generational Voice. There had been more articles published on the significance of Wilson Knight, author, than things published by Wilson Knight, author, by a factor of at least ten.
This didn’t mean Wilson was not a good writer. By all accounts, he was very good indeed, it was only that the people who had first-hand experience with his prose were greatly outnumbered by the people who only knew of it by word-of-mouth. It was probably true that were Wilson to never write another word, he could still survive as an Important Generational Voice in literary circles for several years. Whether or not this theory was put to the test depended on when and if he actually finished his novel.
“Fantasy is a challenging first choice,” Wilson said, somewhat grandly. “Bold, I mean.”
“All right,” Oliver said, not sure whether or not he agreed with this but willing to take whatever ride his ostensible mentor was thinking of taking him on. “Why do you say it’s bold?”
“It’s a well-worn path, isn’t it? An entire genre built on mimicry of an early, original voice.”
“You mean Tolkien.”
“Of course I do. I don’t mean any disparagement when I say this, by the way. It’s generally a respected genre.”
Oliver thought everything Wilson just said was disparagement, and he doubted anybody in the room took it as anything less than precisely that.
“I think that’s an over-simplification,” he said.
“Sure, sure. A little reductionism to make a nuanced point.”
Wilson used more expensive words when challenged. If he ever got into a hot enough argument, he’d likely start speaking entirely in Latin.
“And what’s your nuanced point?”
“That you shouldn’t start a quest to find your own voice by imitating someone else’s.”
The writing assignments for the TAWU were given out weekly, and based on nothing more than whatever letter Wilson felt particularly close to that day. Since there were ten members, all in various states of skill and experience, there was no expectation that each week would result in a new bit of writing from all ten. In fact, the likelihood that any of the participants would have something corresponding to the letter handed out in the prior week was pretty low. Mostly, everyone brought in what they had to share when they were ready to share it, which made Wilson’s whole letter-assignment concept kind of silly.
Also, single letters as writing prompts was a pretty limited system.
Still, it tended to work more often than not. For the most part, the weekly discussions about the act of creating fiction proved sufficient to inspire two or three new pieces a week, and the letter was a decent jumping-off point.
Oliver had been coming to TAWU for a year. For six months of that year he wasn’t at all sure he even wanted to be a writer, but he very much enjoyed discussing other people’s attempts at it. Sometime around month seven Oliver decided everyone else in the group—possibly excepting Wilson, although it was difficult to tell since he never showed anything—was a worse writer than he was. But, since Oliver had never written anything he had no way to prove this.
It was another five months, give or take a week, before he actually gave it a try. That was the week the letter K was assigned.
Well, no, that wasn’t entirely true. Yes, the week in which he finally wrote something coincided with the letter K, but there had been other letters before K, letters that sat at the top of the blank word document on his computer screen, alone and abandoned, with no inspirational collection of additional letters used to form words and then sentences and paragraphs, adding up to things someone might call a story.
Then came K. Everything felt different with K, although Oliver couldn’t begin to explain why. For starters, as soon as he got the letter—while still in Wilson’s living room, even—he decided K stood for Kingdom. By the time he got home he had the first sentence: “I understand you are a sorcerer.” And then he was writing, and he didn’t stop until he was well past the TAWU minimum word-count and further, on his way to what he imagined was a full novel, written in under a week.
It didn’t end up being a novel—not yet—but he was pretty proud of what he’d accomplished.
All of which made Wilson’s reaction kind of disappointing.
“Hang on,” Tandy said.
Oliver thought Tandy was a pretty good writer. She liked to write about serious things using dangerously large compound sentences and making what seemed like decent observations about the human condition. The bigge
st problem she had was that very few people seemed willing to concentrate long enough to figure out the gist of those observations, because despite being a good writer, Tandy wasn’t an interesting writer.
“Don’t we all learn how to write by imitating others?” she asked.
“Do you mean fan fiction?” Gerald asked.
Gerald was not a good writer, but he was an excellent rabble-rouser. Saying fan-fiction in front of Wilson was a lot like waving a red cape in front of a bull while also blasting the bull in the ear with an air horn.
“I don’t mean fan-fic,” Tandy said quickly. “I mean we learn to write by reading, and if we assume we like what we’re reading, of course our first efforts are going to be imitative based on what we enjoyed, conscious or not.”
“Yes, yes, but that isn’t my point at all,” Wilson said. “My point is, this particular sub-genre is derivative when you’re doing everything right. That’s the goal. Whether one is performing an homage to the source text or writing something deliberately contrary to it, all versions of the sword-and-sandal epic are a conversation with Tolkien. And there’s nothing wrong with that! All I’m saying is that given this is Oliver’s first attempt at something he can call his own, that the challenge of finding himself in his writing is going to be that much harder when he’s attempting to occupy a space that’s already taken. And it has to be taken, if he’s doing it properly.”
This assertion broke the group up into a number of mini-conversations and debates that Oliver could barely keep track of and wasn’t sure whether or not he should even bother. The topic soon strayed from any direct critique of what he’d written into the concept of originality, the implicit challenge of writing something truly original, and the source of inspiration and creativity in the act of creation.
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