by Sean Wallace
The subaltern, perhaps. But why?
These horsemen rode to battle, not to terror like the night before. They pulled up in loose ranks, semi-circles of horses, lances couched, bows at the ready. The grinning shaman and the herald rode forward, their ponies dancing sideways beneath Alain’s hoardings.
“Go away, little magic,” said the shaman in his thick accent.
Holding his horsetail banner, the herald inclined his head slightly, and said in his very good Wentish, “We will not ask again. Great projects stride the ice, and you are as the winter hare before the hungry wolf.”
Alain waved his hand in a prearranged signal. The arm of the old derrick swung up, the Ducal insignia breaking free over the Century’s little encampment. His forty-two men lined the walls and stood ready by the lion-mouthed cannon, facing hundreds and hundreds of the Ice Tribesmen. “Our magic is the magic of our Duke. It is a small magic, but it wields a mighty fist. You shall not have our post unless you take it from us.”
The grinning shaman and the herald held a whispered conversation. The shaman’s grin was reduced somewhat, and the herald looked sour. “You must leave this place,” said the herald. “It is necessary. There has been a bargain.”
Aha, thought Alain. Magic strides the ice, indeed. As the captain had said, all great magic had a loophole, a condition of sorts. The Ice Tribes could not work their rite to summon the snow demons unless the Duke’s men peacefully surrendered the post.
It was so simple. All he had to do to defeat them was stand in place. “I have made no bargain but my oath to His Grace,” Alain called out as the men of the Century muttered to one another.
The herald stamped his horsetail banner into the ground. “Then we will make a new bargain now.”
Alain laughed, his heart soaring with the gulls overhead. “My oath’s little magic is stronger than your great one.” He dropped his hand in the next signal. “I care this for your magic and your demands.”
Nothing happened. The army of Ice Tribesmen stared expectantly, while somewhere on the hoardings, one of the Century began to giggle.
“The cannon is a failure,” Pietro whispered under his breath to Alain. The grinning shaman laughed, while the herald looked even more sour. Alain watched him heft his horsetail banner, ready to dip it and signal the charge, having no doubt the herald would be first against the hoardings. This was no herald, this was a chief, perhaps even the chief-of-chiefs.
“Aha!” said Michel distinctly nearby, and the lion roared. There was smoke, and fire, and horses screamed while men cursed and dirt flew and horsetail banner span from its shattered staff as Alain’s laugh returned to him and he thought, Captain, you are avenged, and he looked into the sky to see an eider-fletched arrow hanging there, riding the wind like a gull, only it became larger and larger, looming bigger than the harvest moon over the horizon until darkness struck him with sharp pain and all the thundering noise of battle.
Alain found himself in the subaltern’s cabin, wrapped in the Ducal standard, which was stiff with dried blood. His head hurt, a fierce pounding above and between his eyes. His face was crusted with dirt, and he coughed mud as he awoke. It took him quite some time to clear the dirt from his mouth. Groggy and slow, he rose from the little rope bed, discovered that he was fully booted and clothed, and stumbled out the splintered door.
The woods were quiet. Not the strange quiet of a thousand men holding still, but the normal quiet of marmots and badgers and hares and hawks and squirrels and half a hundred other birds and animals. The day was crisp and cold, but clear. He stumbled toward the encampment, wondering what had become of the Century. Many horses had passed through these woods recently.
The encampment was ravaged, hoardings peppered with arrows, but the derrick still stood behind the wooden walls. They did not burn the camp, Alain thought. We won.
The ruins of the lion-mouthed cannon were there, burst to shards, surrounded by six fresh graves. Alain saluted Michel, then carefully – for his body ached almost as much as his head – climbed on to the foundation course of the uncompleted tower to stand on the cold stone where he had slept away the summers. He still wore the Ducal standard like a cape, but the wind was so chill Alain was not tempted to hoist it once more on the derrick.
No one remained in camp. The last wagon was gone.
“What am I doing here?” he asked a brown gull hovering nearby.
The bird dipped, cut across the wind to circle him, and cried once. Inside the keening of the gull, Alain found a bubble of . . . memory? Imagination? A little wizard in shabby robes, his face aglow with a ball of wispy light in his hands, and a bitter young soldier marching forever down empty roads.
“I must have died easy,” Alain said to the gull, the captain’s last story in his mind, “if I am the one he was able to put back into the world.”
The little wizard’s voice slipped into Alain’s ears, so different from the braying rasp of the grinning shaman of the Ice Tribes, yet with the same uncanny echo. “For me to bring you back, it doesn’t matter how you died. It only matters how you lived. Their great magic broke upon the rock of your little oath.”
“But why?” Alain asked his memories.
There was no answer, except perhaps for the constancy of his loyalty. Small magic, the hardest kind, as the captain had said.
Wrapped in his Duke’s flag, Alain went out to pick the last few raddled turnips from the trampled fields. He would stand firm here in the camp, following the small magic of his oath, until someday he was relieved.
KING RAINJOY’S TEARS
Chris Willrich
A king of Swanisle delights in rue
And his name’s a smirking groan.
Laughgloom, Bloodgrin, Stormproud we knew
Before Rainjoy took the throne.
– Rainjoy’s Curse
It was sunset in Serpenttooth when Persimmon Gaunt hunted the man who put oceans in bottles.
The town crouched upon an islet off Swanisle’s west coast, and scarlet light lashed it from that distant (but not unreachable) place where the sunset boiled the sea. The light produced a striking effect, for the people of Serpenttooth were the desperate and outcast, and they built with what they found, and what they found were the bones of sea serpents. And at day’s end it seemed the gigantic, disassembled beasts struggled again toward life, for a pale, bloody sheen coated the town’s archways, balustrades, and rooftops. Come evening the illusion ceased, and the bones gave stark reflection to the moon.
But the abductor meant to be gone before moonrise.
From the main town she ascended a cliffside pathway of teeth sharp as arrowheads, large as stepping-stones. The teeth ended at a vast, collapsed skull, reinforced with earth, wood, and thatch, bedecked with potted plants. There was a door, a squarish fragment of cranium on hinges, with a jagged eyeslit testifying to some ancient trauma.
Shivering in the briny sea-wind, Gaunt looked over her shoulder at the ruddy sunset rooftops. She did not see the hoped-for figure of a friend, leaping among the gables. “Your last chance to help, Imago,” she murmured. She sighed, turned, and knocked.
Blue eyes, dimly glowing, peered through the eyeslit. “Eh?” wheezed a harsh voice. Gaunt imagined in it the complaints of seagulls, the slap of breakers.
“Persimmon Gaunt,” she answered. “A poet.”
“A bard?” The voice snorted. “The king exiled those witch-women, ten years gone.”
“I am not a bard! My tools are stylus and wax, paper and quill, not voice and memory. I have the distinction of being banished by the bards, before the king banished them.”
Gaunt could be charming, particularly in such a setting: her specialty in verse was morbidity, the frail railing of life against merciless time. Serpenttooth suited her. More, she suited Serpenttooth, her fluttering auburn hair a wild contrast to her pale, angular face, the right cheek tattooed with a rose ensnared by a spiderweb.
But these charms failed. “What do you want, poet?”
&
nbsp; “I am looking for the maker.”
“Maker of what?”
“Of this.”
She lifted a small, corked bottle. Within nestled an intricate, miniature sailing ship fashioned of bone. Its white sails curved in an imaginary wind; its banners were frozen in the midst of rippling. Yet the ship was not the extraordinary thing. There was water below it, not bone or glass, and the water moved: not the twitching of droplets but the roiling of a shrunken corner of the sea. It danced and flickered, and the ship heaved to and fro, riding the tiny surge.
Gaunt waved the bottle in various directions, but the ship cared nothing for gravity, forever hugging its tiny sea.
“Exquisite,” Gaunt murmured, and not for the first time.
“A trinket,” sniffed the other.
“Trinket? For four years these ‘trinkets’ have been the stuff of legend along the coast! And yet their fame does not travel further. Most who own such bottles – sailors, fishermen, pirates, and all their wives, lovers, and children – will not sell at any price. It’s said these folk have all lost something dear to the sea.”
“Nothing to do with me.”
“There is more.” Gaunt unstoppered the bottle. “Listen. Hear the sound of the sea. Hear the deep loneliness, and the deep romance. To know it is to know mischievous waves, and alluring shores. To brush raw fingertips against riches and fame. To wrap scarred arms around hunger and harm. To know the warm fantasy of a home long abandoned, and the cold acceptance of a five-fathom grave.”
And there was a susurrant murmur from the bottle which held all these things, and more, which Gaunt, too chill already, would not say. There came a long answering sigh from behind the door. It blended with the murmur, and Gaunt could not distinguish them.
Weakly, the voice said, “Nothing to do with me. Go.”
“I cannot. When an . . . associate of mine procured this item, he found the private memoirs of the owner. We know who you are, Master Salt.”
A pause. “You are base thieves.”
Gaunt smiled. “Imago would insist he is a refined thief, I’m sure. And our victim was a dying lord who had no further use for the bottle.”
“What do you want?”
“I bring you greetings,” Gaunt said, “from your own maker.”
There was silence. The door opened on creaking hinges. A figure stepped aside, and Gaunt entered.
The room resembled a captain’s cabin, though it filled a sea serpent’s skull, not a vessel’s stern. Two oval, bone-framed windows overlooked the ruddy sunset sea. Underneath, shutters covered twin ventilation passages to the skull’s nostrils. Nearby, a spyglass rested atop a bookcase of nautical texts. But the other dozen bookcases cradled dozens of ships-in-bottles, each bearing its own churning, miniature sea. Half-constructed vessels listed upon a vast table, pieces scattered like wreckage.
Gaunt plunked her bottle upon the table, ship sailing forever ceilingward.
Master Salt bent over it. “The Darkfast Dreamweaver. Fitting. Named for a great philosopher-thief of Ebontide.” A smile sliced his face.
He was built like a sea barrel, yet possessed delicately shimmering blue skin. His bald head resembled a robin’s egg gleaming with dew. “Her crew captured the hatchling of a Serpent of the Sunset. Quite a story. But they overfed the child, to keep it from thrashing. It outgrew its bonds, fed well indeed.”
He nodded at the shelves. “Lost ships, all of them. I see their profiles in my dreams. Hear their names on the morning wind.”
“They are astonishing. The king will be enthralled.”
“Him,” muttered Salt. “He neglected me, my sisters. Left us eight years in our tower, because we dared remind him he had a soul. We resolved to seek our own lives.”
Gaunt said, “Now your exile is ended.”
“Not exile. Escape.”
“Surely you cannot abandon him,” Gaunt persisted, “being what you are.”
“If you know what I am, poet, you should fear me. Inhuman myself, I read the sorrow behind human eyes.”
His gaze locked hers. Gaunt shivered as though a westerly wind scoured her face, but could not look away.
Salt squinted, then smirked. “You say I abandon? I see what you’ve left behind. You forsook the bards for the written word. And now you even neglect your art . . . for the love of a thief.”
Master Salt’s eyes changed. One moment they glowed a pale blue; then they resembled blue-sheened, mirrored glass. Yet the person reflected in them was not Gaunt, nor was the moment this one. Instead she beheld a scene from an hour ago.
A man leapt to and fro upon buildings of bone. There was a strange style to his movements. Though he chose his destinations in a boyish rush, his rooftop dance obeyed a strict economy, as though an old man carefully doled out a youth’s energy. When he paused, Gaunt could see the two scars of his lean, ferret-like face, one made by steel, one by fire. He gazed out from Master Salt’s eyes as if searching for her. Then he leapt to a new height.
“The thief Imago Bone, your lover and sometimes your mentor, prancing about on bone rooftops. Suppose he couldn’t resist.” Salt blinked his eyes back to their former, glowing state. “But you knew he might be gone for hours. Impatient, you continued alone.”
Gaunt’s breathing quickened. She found she could not evade Master Salt, nor lie. “Yes. For all Bone’s skill . . .”
“. . . he is a boy,” Master Salt said. “Yes, I see. I can taste sorrows, poet. Imago Bone’s life is an accident, is it not? Bizarre magics stretched his adolescence nearly a century. Only now is he aging normally. He is a great thief; but he is a child in many ways. You fear for him. You are as often his guardian as his student. An unlikely pair, following foolish quests.”
“They are not foolish.” Gaunt shivered, staring into the shimmering blue eyes. “Not all . . .”
“Quests are excuses, poet. You must live as you wish. As I have done. You do not need bards, or Imago Bone, or King Rainjoy to justify your wanderlust.”
Gaunt imagined she felt the tug of the trade winds. Or perhaps it was the clatter of a horse beneath her, the taste of bow-spray from a river canoe, the scent of a thousand fragile mountain wildflowers.
“A true wanderer,” Salt said, “needs no nation, no captain, no hope of gold to answer the siren lure.”
And Gaunt wondered, why had she tried to refashion Bone and herself as heroes, when they could simply travel, drink in the world?
But no, this quest was not foolish. She must resist Salt’s words. “There . . . will be war,” she stammered, “unless Rainjoy can learn compassion . . . And he never can, without you.”
“I see also,” Salt said unmoved, “why you help him.”
Gaunt lowered her eyes.
“Abandon that guilt, poet. Abandon all that imprisons you! Leave this quest; join Bone as a thief if it suits you, or shirk him as well – either way, seize your freedom, and do not abuse mine.” Salt lifted his hand to Gaunt’s mouth. “I did not ask to become a someone, any more than humans do. Yet here I am, and I will set my own course. I will hear the sea, and trap its cries.”
Now Master Salt scraped a thumbnail against the tip of an index finger, and a blue droplet fell against Gaunt’s lips. As the salty tang kissed her, she imagined the rocking of a deck underfoot, heard the songs of seamen raising sail, smelled the stinging brine upon the lines. Her heart skipped once and her eyelids drooped, as she slipped toward a dream of adventure in distant waters, not merely losing her existence, but casting it aside like soiled clothes.
But then from somewhere came Imago Bone’s easy voice. “You should listen to him, Gaunt,” Bone said. “He makes perfect sense.”
With a start, Gaunt opened her eyes. Bone crawled through the passage leading to the dragon-skull’s nostrils, face blue from the cliffside winds and sweaty from carrying his many pouches of esoteric tools: ironsilk lines, quicksap adhesive, a spectrum of camouflaging dyes.
As Master Salt turned, Bone sprang to the bottle sheltering the m
iniature Darkfast Dreamweaver. The thief shattered it against the table’s edge.
Salt cried out.
So did the broken bottle.
The miniature ocean within the glass spilled on to the dirt floor, foaming and dwindling like a tendril of surf dying upon shore. A chorus of drowning sailors arose, dimly, like an old memory. Then water and voices were gone.
“Curse you,” spat Master Salt, and the spittle boiled upon the table, and gave a sound like maddened seagulls as it vanished. He seized the thief, pressing pale-blue thumbs against Bone’s throat, thumbs that grew foam-white even as Bone went purple.
“Allow . . .” the thief gurgled, “allow me to introduce . . .”
“No,” said Master Salt.
“Rude . . .” Bone’s voice trailed off, and he flailed uselessly in Salt’s grip.
Bone had saved her. Bone was friend, lover, companion on the road. Nevertheless Gaunt hesitated one moment as he suffocated; so much poetry did the shelves of bottles hold, they might have cradled densely inked scrolls from ancient libraries.
But she knew what she must do. She shut her eyes and yanked.
The shelves toppled, shattering glass, breaking small ships, spilling the trapped substance of Master Salt. The room filled with the despairing cries of lost sailors.
Master Salt shrieked and released Bone, who crumpled, hacking saltwater. Salt knelt as well, trying to clutch the tiny oceans as they misted into nothingness. His knees crunched glass and crushed ships.
Gaunt trembled with the destruction she’d caused. But soon the sailors’ voices faded to dim wailing, and she regained her voice.
“Dead sailors move you?” she asked. “Expect more. War is brewing. To prevent it, King Rainjoy will need the compassion he lost. The compassion you bear.”
“You speak of compassion? You, who can do this?”
“These voices are of men already lost. But if war comes, they will seem just a drop in a surgeon’s pail.”