by Will Panzo
“A bunch of stinking horseshit, the lot of it.” The barkeep belched. “Heroes and monsters and maidens in distress. I’ve been alive a long time, and I’ve never known a hero. Or a maiden, come to think of it. Where have they all gone?”
“Do you want to hear the saying or not?” Cassius asked.
“What is the saying?”
Cassius lowered his head, and shadows covered his eyes. He began to recite.
“A man has only three reasons for being anywhere: to right a wrong, to earn a coin, or because he got lost.”
“I don’t believe that,” the barkeep said.
“You don’t?” Cassius smiled, amused by Lucian’s naked obtuseness. His teeth shone with reflected candlelight.
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.” The barkeep rubbed his eyes and looked at Cassius as though seeing him for the first time. “You aren’t lost, are you?”
It did not sound like a question to Cassius, and he did not answer but climbed the stairs to his room instead.
• • •
Cassius woke in the dark, his body slick with sweat. The fear of the dream still lingered. He recalled running without direction while the thing that gave chase gained on him. He might have been moving through a forest or through the streets of a city. He dared not turn to glimpse the monster behind him.
He sat up in bed, his face aching from the pressure behind his eyes. The room was hot, the air heavy with a moist, oppressive heat.
Thoughts of the dream faded quickly, replaced by an image of Junius’s burned corpse, the raging tears of the boy. Cassius’s hands trembled. He tried to ignore the trembling, but ignoring it was a kind of acknowledgment.
He rose from bed and felt his way to the window set in the far wall. He opened the shutters and leaned out. A waning smoke-white moon hung in the sky, and the city visible under its glow was mostly shadow, with here and there a section lit by pitch-fueled streetlamps. Beyond the roofline, the dark shape of the jungle grew steadily in all directions.
The air outside was charged with a rich, wet smell that hinted at the fecund jungle life beyond the city, an earth matted with things overripe and rotted, where nothing stayed buried.
He crossed the room to his bed and picked up his gauntlets and donned them, and, finally, the trembling stopped. He held up a cupped hand and pictured the rune for the Ghostfire spell. A small flame appeared in midair, as if balanced on his fingertips. The flame was cornflower blue and smokeless.
He thought about leaving this place. He thought about the distance he had traveled to be here and about the time it would take to return home; and then he realized he had no place from which to return.
He thought about the barkeep. He thought about sleep and about the nightmare. And when he pushed aside these thoughts, there was still the matter of the trembling hands and returning to somewhere. After a while, he decided to burn down the house.
It seemed the only choice. Burn the house, flee the island, and leave the nightmare behind. He was not safe here. He knew that now. For a while, he had thought the island would be a refuge. It accepted all those who washed up on its shores. But he was different. He was bringing fire and death with him.
The island knew this. It wanted him gone, and the nightmare had been its warning.
He gathered his large rucksack and turned to face the bed. He tilted his hand, and the blue flame slid toward the edge of his palm like mercury. Suddenly, he noticed a glint of light in his periphery.
He carried the flame to the edge of the nightstand, and there he saw a spider’s web stretched from the lip of the table to the wall, a spider the size of a grape perched in the upper corner.
The sight of the spider stunned him. There was a time he had been a spider. He was Cassius now, but he had not been Cassius for long. Spider. The name made his back ache. The scars there were healed, the ruined flesh nearly insensate, but the sight of the spider made them throb with fresh pain.
As a boy, he had nearly died. To survive, he had pretended to be a spider and had lived as a spider for years, until the day he decided to become a man.
Or maybe that was all wrong. Maybe he had never been a man pretending to be a spider. Maybe he had always just been a bug dreaming himself a man.
Then, in the dark, a memory came to him. A vision from years ago. Before spiders and before the scars and before even the dream. A place where he had been safe. Safe in the dark.
He extinguished the Ghostfire. He removed his gauntlets, and his hands began to tremble again. He moved to the end of the bed and lifted it by the wooden frame and dragged it to the middle of the room. With the bed clear, he returned to the corner and felt along the floor. He searched with shaking hands until his fingertips brushed against a hole the size of an acorn. He worked his finger into the hole and pulled. Something gave, and he peeled back a section of loose floorboards.
The hole in the floor was small. When he crawled inside, there was room enough for him to lie with his knees to his chest. He pulled the removable segment of floor into place above him.
Safe in the dark, he began to recite the first verse of the Attus epic.
He breathed the air from under the floor, and his hands were still again.
KNOW YOURSELF, KNOW VICTORY
On the Isle of Twelve, they called him Spider. He was one of four initiates in his class, one of eight classes on the Isle, and when the Masters of the Isle had need to distinguish one boy from another, a rare event, they referred to each as a creature. He was Spider, a young man of twenty-two.
The Masters gave many reasons for his name, but the Masters were unrivaled in mystery, as they were in cruelty, and he never believed their answers. They told him he had a methodical disposition on the battlefield. That he waited with unrelenting patience for his opponents to commit mistakes, spinning webs to trap them at every turn. That when he struck, he struck without mercy.
They said these words through smug half smiles, as the twelve-headed lashes with which they taught discipline dangled from their hips. He knew the truth, though.
They called him Spider because his name mattered nothing to them.
He had trained for eight years on the Isle, long enough to be considered a peer, to have left behind his initiate robes, his shaved pate, the sting of the lash. If he survived eight more years in service, he would become a master in his own right, and he would teach boys like himself, teach them humility at first, then discipline, teach them runes and the eight laws of victory, teach them to endure pain and to dispense it.
Every day spent on the Isle, he had studied these lessons. But it was only on his last day that he truly learned the first law.
He had met the red-haired man at the foot of the mountain that day. The red-haired man had ridden his spotted charger off the beach, riding through surf and spray to the appointed place at the bottom of the four thousand steps that led to the Temple of War. It was Spider’s job to escort this man but also Spider’s job to appraise him. The red-haired man was here to make a purchase, after all, and only those deemed worthy would be allowed to bid. In the eyes of the Masters, gold made any man worthy, and the red-haired man had such in plenty.
“What is your name, boy?” The red-haired man had offered his hand in greeting, and Spider saw his large fingers covered in jeweled rings. He smiled, and Spider saw his every tooth capped with gold. Gold rings bound up his great red mane, and heavy bands of gold circled each of his upper arms. Gold rings hung from his nose and from each ear, and the bit of his horse was gold and gold his spurs as well.
“I am Spider,” he replied. “A former initiate.”
“A former initiate but now a true weapon of the Twelve.” The red-haired man was huge, near to six and a half feet tall, and his hand swallowed Spider’s completely when they shook.
“A weapon of the Masters and of any they deem worthy.”
“
I have heard of you, boy.” The red-haired man stared down at Spider with eyes wide and unblinking.
Spider held his gaze for a time. As an initiate, he was forbidden to raise his eyes to a Master, an act punishable by five lashes, but he was no longer an initiate. He looked in the eyes of whomever he pleased now and in so doing had learned a strange truth. People hid their weakness in their eyes, plain enough for any man to see if he knew how to look. After eight years on the Isle, Spider knew how to look.
But the eyes of the red-haired man showed no weakness. They were the color of flint chips, as hard and as sharp. They met Spider’s stare openly, and a cold chill swept Spider’s body. He began to sweat, then he looked away.
“Are you all right, boy?”
“A queer sensation has come over me.” Spider suppressed a gag. He wiped at his damp brow and fixed his robes and straightened himself. “It seems you have me at a disadvantage. How have you heard of me?”
“The Masters speak highly of you. I wonder if you’ll live up to their praise.”
Pleasing the Masters sometimes spared an initiate from a beating, but rarely did it lead to praise. Spider was a peer now, though. His circumstance had changed. The Masters had a vested interest in praising him. As a peer, he would be contracted out to the highest bidders, to serve them in council and in war, to enhance their prestige and to cow their enemies. Buyers would pay the price of an entire mercenary company for his services alone. And it would be money well spent, for no spellcasters could rival those trained on the Isle of Twelve.
“There will be a demonstration of our skills tonight,” Spider said. “You can judge my worth then.”
After the mock battle and the sparring, after each peer had given a long discourse on military tactics and lectured on the use of spellcasters in historic campaigns, after demonstrations of their skill in language and their knowledge of the current political landscape, the peers commenced a grand feast. Thirty guests attended, men from every corner of the known world. The lords of Antiochi mercenary companies, Fathalan satraps, warlords from the foreboding Hulun Steppe, Sharrupuran magi, breathstealers from the witchlands in the dark heart of the Southern Kingdoms. There were others in attendance as well, men who served blasphemous gods, conspirators who sought to place deposed kings on contested thrones, researchers who toiled away at arcane studies long since outlawed in civilized lands.
After the feast, when the other guests had excused themselves and returned to their quarters to discuss what they had seen and to debate the prices of the contracts on offer from the Masters, the red-haired man alone remained at his table. He sat, eating hunks of seal meat with his bare hands and drinking honeyed wine from an ox horn, all the while calling for more music and more dancing from the women in veils and more opium for his ebon pipe. He called for more of everything, throwing back his head and laughing openmouthed, his maw so wide and dark it seemed capable of swallowing the known world.
The Masters, in their wisdom, denied him nothing. His personal revelry continued for hours and at the end, when he had exhausted the larder and the last of the dancers had collapsed from exhaustion, finally, he called for Spider.
The boy sat across from him at a table where only a single candle remained lit.
“Are you tired, boy?” the red-haired man asked.
“The hour is late,” Spider said, eyeing the man curiously. He had seen Northmen in his travels, red-haired savages who drank from horns, as this man did. But this was no Northman. He seemed unlike any man Spider had ever met, with a strange accent and honey-colored skin that could be a mix of any race of men or of no known race at all. Staring at him over the smoking light of the candle, Spider wondered if he were not a demon from beyond the veil, some trickster djinn from a fabled kingdom of fire and air.
“I did not ask the time. I asked if you were tired. Are you?”
“A bit,” Spider said.
“I never tire.” The red-haired man smiled over the rim of his horn. “I never sleep. Do you believe me?”
“I have no reason not to believe you.”
“Answer me true.”
“You are a guest in the house of my Masters,” Spider said. He lifted his eyes, tried to match the red-haired man’s gaze once again, but in the near dark, the man’s eyes seemed almost to glow, and Spider looked away. “I don’t wish to give offense.”
“Your pleasantries offend me,” the red-haired man said pointedly.
Spider hated pleasantries, too. It was one of many things on the Isle he had learned to tolerate and obey without fully accepting. All that stooping and scraping and kneeling. It turned his stomach. Had the red-haired man noticed this while observing Spider tonight? Or did he have some special insight?
“I can leave if you wish,” Spider said.
“Then I would have no one to talk with.” When the red-haired man spoke, he seemed to address his words not to the young man sitting before him but to the inner voice in Spider’s own head. It was at once unsettling but also cordial, inviting.
“There are other guests, others peers. The Masters themselves, even.”
“And yet you’re the only man I wish to speak with.” The red-haired man drank from his horn, all the while staring at Spider with a fierce, unblinking gaze.
Spider did not think the man drunk despite the wine he had consumed. Nor did he seem lost in an opium haze. He looked alert and focused, searching for something, although Spider knew not what. He feared what would happen if the red-haired man did not find the object of his search, feared also that he would find it here.
“What do you wish to speak of?” Spider asked.
“Dungeons.”
“I know little of dungeons.”
“What do you know of yourself?”
Spider held his tongue. The Masters had similar tactics, often asking enigmatic questions during training. Incorrect answers brought beatings, and Spider could not recall a time he had answered correctly. He knew enough of rhetoric to know the question itself had no true answer, only false answers that would serve to deepen the question. After eight years on the Isle, he had grown weary of such displays. Resentful, even.
“You do not wish to answer my question?” the red-haired man asked.
“How can I answer such a question?”
“What is the first law of victory?”
Spider shifted in his seat. If before the red-haired man had made him uneasy, now he was fearful.
The laws of victory were the sacred teachings of the Masters, the framework with which they taught the art of conquest. None but a peer or a Master himself knew all eight laws. Initiates studied one law a year for eight years, and only then did they learn the full scope of their art. To teach an outsider the laws was a transgression punishable by death.
Spider glanced around the room to see if anyone had taken notice of their conversation. Several of the Masters had convened on the high dais across the grand hall, too far away to overhear, but their every retainer, courtesan, and servant was an eye or an ear. You were never alone on the Isle.
“I cannot discuss with you the secrets of my Masters.”
“Know yourself, know victory,” the red-haired man said, leaning close. Even whispering, his voice sounded like stone grinding stone. “That is the first law. You know it, and I know it. Right now, you’re wondering how I know it, but that’s not important. What’s important is that we talk honestly with one another. So when I ask what you know of yourself, I am asking a young man who has spent the last eight years of his life investigating that very question. I would like to hear that man’s answer.”
“I know that I am well trained in the art of Rune magic. I will serve the man who buys my contract faithfully.”
“More empty words.” The red-haired man waved his hand dismissively. He leaned back in his seat, his face disappearing into shadow. “I don’t want to hear you hawk your wares like
some common merchant.”
No one had ever asked Spider how he felt about his circumstances. In truth, his feelings mattered little. The Masters had spent years training him to become a formidable Rune mage. They had gifted him with powerful spells at great personal expense. He had eaten their food, had drunk their wine, slept under a roof they provided. With his training finished, the time had come to repay the Masters’ generosity with his service, even if he had other plans.
“Why are you here if not to make a purchase?” Spider asked.
The candlelight glinted on gold teeth as the red-haired man smiled. “An honest reply for once. It deserves an honest answer in kind. I am here to make a purchase for my employers. They style themselves the Temple of the Undying Serpent, and that is how they wish me to know them. But in truth their order is older than that name and in antiquity they were known as the Cult of the Unseen Empire. You won’t find mention of them in the great histories of the West. In the East, their name is cataloged in The Thousand Blasphemies of the mad caliph Khalil Andoweyy. If you know where to look, you will find their snake-headed towers in every great city of the world. Glittering Moraq and its sister city Dabar, grand Pthylop in the Akhaian Islands. There is a tower standing guard over the Yellow City slums in Shaarmai, and another behind the Celestial Theater of the Unified People in Tai-jin. There is even a tower hidden in Antioch City. Every year, the Empire grows stronger, their reach ever wider.”
“So you came here to buy them a spellcaster?” Spider asked.
“I came here to buy them a weapon. They trust that I have a discerning eye, and because of that trust, I must perform my due diligence. If I were purchasing an expensive blade, I would ask questions of its smith. The nature of its materials, the manner in which it was constructed, its weight, its strength. If it were a truly unique blade, I might even inquire where the smith was trained. I might ask to see other such weapons he had forged, even to test the blade myself.”