Untold Adventures: A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

THE DECAYING MANSIONS OF MEMORY

Character

The tavern bench creaked beneath Horn like a ship under sail. He swayed, listening to the wood pop and snap, knowing if he were afloat, he’d be leaking.

Leaking. Horn laughed at the thought. He’d leaked plenty in his day, and had the scars to prove it, by Set.

A pewter bowl of scrumpy sizzled before him. The truly rotten stuff, made from a ferment of windfall apples, brewer’s yeast, and an occasional unlucky wasp. The cheap stuff, too. Cheap was definitely his milieu these days.

There had been a villa once, overlooking the sea. Pounding surf, pliant servants, and fine wines from distant islands.

He remembered watching the weather move over the Bight of Winds, tall clouds purpling on the horizon as forked legs of lightning strode the ocean. Silks billowed around him, water quivered in the Khaliki crystal vases, and he’d laughed at the powers of the natural world.

Bad idea, that. With age came wisdom. Sometimes wisdom came with an ass kicking, too. And nothing could kick ass like the whole world.

Horn pulled himself away from the decaying mansions of memory. That was an escape offering small improvement on the present moment. A present moment which unfortunately still included scrumpy.

Now there was a beverage of the gods. Small, bitter gods that resented the world and everyone in it. He stared into the muddy amber depths before summoning what served for his courage these days and grasping the bowl to drink deep, his entire two coppers’ worth in as few goes as possible to get past the gag reflex.

Fate hung heavy in the silk pocket hidden inside Horn’s ogre-leather vest. Squared off, with corners sharp enough to slice up a life. He could almost hear its voice mocking him, unless he was drunk enough to drown it out.

More scrumpy.

Once Horn had been a young man-human, mind you, no blood or brood mixing in his tribe-a fine figure of a warrior with secret talents nurtured deep in the Sacred Caverns so that people who did not look beyond a curved sword and spiked buckler were in for a nasty surprise.

Not that he wasn’t a skilled fighter in his own right. He’d mastered finesse with point and sharp edge and bladed edge and even the butt end reversed in hand. He could wield the buckler as a second weapon with effectiveness that sometimes surprised even his teachers and the other young men of the tribe. Horn had hunted goblins, orcs, and ogrillons through the jagged hills west of the village since he’d been old enough to run alongside his older brothers and cousins with a stout stick in hand. He was used to cuts, bruises, even broken bones. Like all the young men of his tribe, he was toughened by life and custom and training until he was fit to be a sellsword among the coastal cities where sharp-edged young men with stamina and skill were always in high demand.

His tribe had fought their way out of the grinding poverty of the hills in the most literal sense possible.

But Horn knew he was something special. Feather, one of the oldest of the Old Men, had spent long nights under moons both brilliant and grave-dark showing him other paths. Wisdom, perhaps, but even more, what the casual observer might have called magic. Hill country wizard lore, in truth. And for all the shared, common bluster of his training at sword and fist, those times working with rare herbs and strange powders and the lights that danced in the seams of the world were never spoken of.

No ordinary sellsword, he. Horn had sworn a private oath on his fourteenth birthday that he would someday be master of a castle, a harem, and a legion of warriors. He’d sealed the rite with a solemn binding spell that made the very air crackle like winter ice on the rivers, followed by a bloody libation spilled from the palm of his own hand. Both sides of his nature, in other words.

The following month he’d gone down to Beggar’s Cairn with the other young men to meet the hiring agents who’d ridden up from the swordmarkets of distant Purpure, High Canton, and Grandport.

The scrumpy went down hard as watered armor polish, tasting somehow of tin and leather in the bargain. Not that anyone drank scrumpy for the taste. Least of all Horn.

The tavern was, like all worthwhile bars, quiet, grubby, and sour-smelling. Good beer was brewed and sold somewhere in these lands, but this was not the place for it. So far as he knew, the tavern never closed. Rough-hewn tables, mismatched chairs and benches, a niggardly fireplace that heated nothing, a surly barmaid with a face so rough and pinched that even an orc would think twice before catching her about the waist.

Exactly how he liked his drinking.

The sun was nooning outside as decent men followed their ploughs or worked their forges or whatever the hell it was decent men did. Only the crippled veterans, hopeless vagabonds, and truly dedicated drunks like Horn were in their cups this early. Indecent men in an indecent place.

When had his world grown to include the idea of decency? Horn could no longer recall. The scrumpy was doing his thinking for him already. Which was, of course, the point.

He had too much to forget but not enough to remember. Fate was a bitter mistress at the best of times. It was an unwise mage indeed who ever trusted in her, for all that she was the patron of warriors when they stepped into the forest of blades that was the world.

Laughing on a pitching deck as the sea boiled over the lower rail. Blood ran in the scuppers, fresh-bright as it was washed away into the heaving bosom of the ocean. Horn traced the masts with bright fire for the sheer joy of watching his own fingers burst into flame. The surviving crew screamed their terror as his leathers sparked with the stuff, shadowed by the cresting waves that threatened to drive them under.

The sullen barmaid wandered past his table, very nearly flicking him with a sodden rag. “You’re a sorry one,” she muttered.

Horn focused on her through the bleary eyes of scrumpy and memories. A dozen replies hung in his head, but his tongue was too thick to spit them out, and he had no sword to back them up. Instead he went back to his drinking. Cheating fate was serious business.

Still the silk pocket hung heavy beneath his vest. Taunting, always taunting.

Purpure had been a city founded by a mage of extraordinary ability, and it showed. The woman was long gone into death, transcendence, or whatever fate ultimately befell those paragons of power, but her influence remained in the breathtakingly graceful lavender towers that soared over the teeming streets. Down in the gutters, the city looked much like any other city in Horn’s then-limited experience, but all he had to do was raise his eyes to be reminded of the glory of power undimmed down the long ages.

His daily life was far more gutter than glory. Somehow in the two years since coming down out of the hills, Horn had found himself at swordspoint far more than his more eldritch talents had been called for. He looked like a strapping barbarian to the eyes of the city-bred. The Purpureides treated him like one.

Still, it was work of sword and knife. Horn had learned much in the employ of Saanreich the Fat, merchant-adventurer. Saanreich collected interesting enemies almost as fast as he collected strange art and stranger artifacts from distant shores. Not to mention the cellars of his own city. The ethics of such a trade were beyond Horn’s ken, but they were not his problem, either. His problem was to keep rude or troublesome strangers from bothering Saanreich the Fat.

That, he was good at. He grew more skilled, learning about city fighting, underground labyrinths, and their sorts of traps-stone, wood, blade, and bone. City lessons. The sort a boy in the hills might never learn. The sort that kept him alive.

But it was all fighting. And sneaking. Defending through offense, eliminating strangers as needful before they had a chance to become rude or troublesome.

All the while sampling the taverns and markets and bordellos of Purpure. He learned other lessons, was initiated into warmer secrets, lost the rough patina of the hills of his birth in favor of the slick, glossy hardness of the city-bred.

For a time, Horn had thought this made him tough. A better man.

Some lessons every boy has to learn for himself.

He belched. The air from his gut burned Horn’s mouth. Sour stomach was an inevitable result of drinking scrumpy. He wished he had a hot loaf of good bread. Or really, anything to dampen the rankling smell and caustic taste.

The barmaid skulked past him again, frowning. “Yer a foul man,” she muttered.

“Foul is as foul does.” He spat the words out.

She gave him a longer look. Something gleamed in her eye, some spark beyond the sullen resentments of a tavern slattern. Horn stared back. Wordless, they locked gazes as intently as any pair of wizards stepping into a final conflict.

“Do I know you?” he finally asked. By giving in and speaking first, he’d lost the initiative, but Horn no longer cared so much what he lost.

“Foul is as foul does,” she replied in a mockery of his voice and the hillman accent that scrumpy brought to the surface.

“Be off,” he growled.

“Until ye needs something, eh?” She swished away, her skirts swinging in a way that unlocked other memories Horn didn’t care for, either.

He’d spent two years among the orchards of the high valley of Taoimburra. The trees bore strange fruit-old men, of uncertain age and history, who did not so much teach as speak. Sometimes they spoke to the wind and the empty air. Sometimes they spoke to small groups of seekers who gathered around them. But they always spoke wisdom. Finally Horn had truly learned how to open the cracks in the universe and let in the light from beyond.

Light, that laid down a path for the greatest fools to follow.

Horn inspected his bowl of scrumpy. Nothing remained but apple pulp mixed with a few suspiciously chitinous bits. He traced a fingertip through the variegated sludge, but he wasn’t that desperate. Not that he hadn’t been so desperate at some times in his life, to be fair.

He looked up at the barmaid, who favored him with a knowing leer from behind the bar. Horn nodded, and with trembling hand laid two more coppers on the table. Something whined in his ear, but he could not tell if it was in memory or the present moment, so he ignored the sound just as he ignored the weight beneath his vest.

One night Saanreich the Fat became Saanreich the Exsanguinated. It was a terminal case of name change, brought on by Dark Reivers pursuing an ancient curse that had passed into the merchant-adventurer’s hands along with a particularly fetching ivory nude of some unknown goddess. Horn had assumed she was a goddess, at any rate, given the excess of both arms and breasts beyond the usual norm.

The enemy infiltrated Saanreich’s fortified villa in the Crowne Heights district of Purpure on a stream of sparkling smoke that only Horn’s wizardly vision had seen. When he tried to rally his fellow guards, he’d been greeted with puzzled somnolence. When the Dark Reivers materialized in their bony, bladed numbers, Horn had fought them with both sword and spell.

He was the only person to leave Saanreich’s burning villa alive. He used his recently acquired city fighting skills to escape the pointed attention of the Watch, who in that simple-minded way of policemen when confronted with a crime and a last man standing, put two and two together to get seventeen. Having killed two of the Watch on his way out in self defense, Horn knew he would not be returning to Purpure for the foreseeable future. A life of shipboard excitement urgently beckoned.

Within six months he was an officer aboard the armed trader Wet Blessing. Horn never did learn a mainstay from a jib sail, but he was a remarkably convincing negotiator ashore, whether serving as supercargo in a civilized port, trade negotiator on some forlorn beach, or temple raider in the odder corners of the Starfall Sea. Captain Arroxta had promoted him from hired muscle to fourth mate after Horn saved all their hides during the bloody, stupid business at Boiling Bay.

He never looked back, sailing with Wet Blessing four years, until Arroxta insisted on returning to Purpure. Horn jumped ship in mid ocean, preferring to maroon himself on an isolated archipelago than to leap into the teeth of city justice. His wealth he took with him in electrum chains strung with gems, small enough not to sink him and valuable enough to be worth the weight with which they encumbered him.

The wealth bought him nothing on a sand strip populated by coconuts and gulls, but in his time at sea, Horn had learned to look ahead.

The bar maid came back with another bowl of scrumpy, steaming fresh from the kettle, along with a calculating look in her eye. Horn stared back at her. He seemed to have forgotten how to blink. Once, that had been an accomplishment.

She laid the bowl down on the table with far more care than she spent on the ales that came in chipped or dented mugs. No one wanted scrumpy on wood, let alone the floor. It was too much trouble.

“You does know me,” she whispered close. For a moment he saw something in her face, in her eyes that flashed green as spring in the hills where he had been born. Like someone else behind a mask of a face.

Horn felt an unaccustomed surge of energy. His fingertips sparked against the scarred wood of the table until wisps of smoke curled up. Old magic going to ground, that was all. He’d sold his spellbook to a university library several cities past. No one had wanted his soul, regardless of the exchange rate.

By now, everything in life was either coming or going cheap for Horn.

“You should be watching that, big man.” She waved a damp towel at his fingers. The smoke whiffed away in the flap of the cloth. “Someone might notice.”

“No… nothing to notice.” The words stumbled out of his mouth like dwarves staggering from a collapsing mine-covered with dust and grimed with the darkness beneath.

“Of course.” She flicked him with the towel, right across the cheek. Another spark rose. He slapped his own face, trying to tamp down the burning sensation, and nearly spilled the scrumpy. The silk pocket under his vest shifted, and for a moment Horn slid deeper into memory’s snare.

Once he’d hired out to a goddess. Just once. Temples had been broken and priests slain. The little divinity was vanishing from the world, and had craved a final vengeance against her enemies as a grave-gift. Horn had gained three great gifts as his recompense, for the gratitude of even a dying goddess is worth its weight in kings.

Still, the work had not been worth the wage. By the time he was finished with the geas the goddess had laid upon him, Horn was soul-deep in other people’s blood and a dozen villages lay burned to ash under a tropic sky.

“Fate,” he told the scrumpy, and took a deep, deep draught to further drown the memories before they stole him completely away.

The scrumpy had no answer except to strip his throat raw and send his gut into open rebellion, even as it calmed his thoughts to a befogged nothingness that spun round and round faster than an angry dervish.

High Canton was a wilder city than Purpure. More importantly, writs of law were not exchanged between the two rivals, who had been fighting a slow, quiet war of gold and ships down the centuries. Hot, bloody wars were not so profitable unless you were the weaponseller.

Which High Canton was, in other parts of the Starfall Sea. The city had been built along the edge of a basalt escarpment where fumaroles smoked and crevices burped yellow smokes that could bring a man to his knees on the first breath and to his tomb on the second. Caves below the city were so hot that forges were not needed for some manufactures. The imps and fire elementals of the uplands were alternately contracted or coerced into laboring alongside the great muscled slave-smiths who served the lords of the Cantons. They turned out blades and arrowheads and siege engines by the shipload for sale wherever war sent men to buying such.

Horn had grown wiser and more subtle in the years of the passing of his youth. He rented rooms with an impressive entrance in one of the squared, tapering towers that dotted the city-his particular being the Tower of Bears and Swans. Local wags called it the Tower of Booms and Slams for the sake of the alchemist who held the upper floors. The boards between her and Horn were reinforced with copper and iron plating, while the roof was laid lightly enough that an explosion would not trouble the neighborhood with too many splinters and broken spars.

He made his living a while as a wizard, though his weapons were never far from his side. The justiciars of Purpure knew him as a sellsword guard. They would not be looking for him amid eldritch smokes and a gallery of reptilian skulls. Props, of course, for the magic of his home hills had been much closer to stock and stone, water and wind, than to the mannered incantations of the great schoolmen. Still, no one in a place such as High Canton, built on drama and cocksure display, would place faith in a wizard whose spells were quietly crafted from roots and colored clays and dank tinctures of leaves and flowers.

Horn paid his dues to the local Collegium. He wore the expected robe of midnight blue embroidered with silver sigils. And he quietly, so quietly, sought out older wizards sunken into their square-walled dens like urban hermit crabs and truckled from them one by one the secrets of their craft. His stock in trade was the learnings he’d acquired at the far edges of the sea, or sometimes his hill-and-hedge magic disguised with the endorsement of distance. Even more quietly, he worked his body, running across the lava fields and among the boiling sulfur pits. No one from High Canton went to those places except the occasional slavemaster. There Horn could battle imaginary demons and past foes, stretching his sword arm and pushing his muscles past the burn.

The work of maintaining two such separate sets of skills sometimes made him feel like two men. The reward was that he yet lived when others around him had died.

Justice from Purpure finally did come seeking him. Horn set fire to the Tower of Bears and Swans, took up his fattened spellbook-still written on bark and leaves as he had first been taught-and sent himself far away in a blaze of magic that very nearly snuffed the flames around him as it drew in power.

He woke to the barmaid pouring water on his face. Horn blinked the stuff out of his eyes, glad at the least that she had not dunked him in scrumpy. Men had gone blind for less.

“Enough for you,” she said, her voice low and growling. “Three days at the bowl and you’re still alive. ’Tis a miracle no one should be forced to witness.”

Horn rolled away from her, pressing his face into the tabletop until splinters plucked at his lips. “I’ve witnessed too much,” he mumbled. In the corner of his vision the barmaid moved, but she was different. More graceful. More powerful.

With a sudden sense of panic, he slapped at his vest. The weight of fate still hung there. Its silk was clammy and close now.

“I ain’t taken it yet.”

He tilted his head to look at her more closely-how did she know?-but the barmaid was walking away.

And she had grown distinctly prettier. He certainly wasn’t any more drunk.

Magic, the blessed curse that gnaws at the soul and leaves a void in the mind into which too much that is alien and deadly can settle.

He’d known women beautiful enough to have launched entire navies for the sake of their faces. He’d known women who looked like the wrong end of an old sergeant after a hard day’s training. But there had been only one Manxinnaea.

Her nose was bulbous and slightly crooked. Her eyes were the brown of a good businesswoman, as was her hair. No one would have mistaken her for a courtesan, which she wasn’t; or royalty, which she was.

But she smelled like heaven, and she moved like a cat in a granary, and her attention focused as powerfully as any wizard’s could ever hope to. Manxinnaea had been Horn’s only love in life. When they had betrayed one another, something inside his heart had died.

Why was he thinking of her now? Fool, fool, fool. The barmaid had cast the oldest spell of all on him, a cantrip requiring only alcohol, sorrow, and time.

Wet and blinking, Horn stumbled away from the table to find the outhouse somewhere between the kitchen and the stables. The sun stabbed his eyes like a shining assassin. The air smelled odd, though after a moment he realized it was just fresh, or at least fresher than the fug within the tavern.

The world tugged at him like a child on its mother’s skirt. Horn did what he came for and ignored the rest. The reeking darkness of the tavern held room for his doubts and the slow banishment of his memory.

Milieu

The old man’s skin was the color of walnuts, and so wrinkled and scarred it very nearly could have served him as armor. Horn had no intention of testing that assumption. He was here on different errands.

He had reached the Temple of Winds near the peak of Mount Eponymous, on the Lost Island of Ee. Not so lost, in truth, for anyone could book passage out of half a dozen ports in the southern extents of the Starfall Sea. Assuming a captain was willing to brave contrary winds and little chance of profitable trade to carry a lubber into seething waters.

Sometimes the name was everything. Romance, danger, a hint of riches. Or perhaps just a gigantic angle-sided building with hundreds of windows very nearly on the edge of a smoking crater from which a sullen red glow could sometimes be seen at night.

He’d approached the temple by climbing the Path of Ten Thousand Steps. Being who he was, Horn had counted. There were only 4,238 steps. Again, the name was everything. The Temple of Winds could have held hundreds of acolytes, priests, worshipers, and servants, but in point of fact he’d wandered the worm-haunted wooden hallways and galleries with their peeling murals for the better part of a day before locating anyone.

“You’re not the chandler,” the old man had said on first spotting Horn. He’d spoken Kyrie, the common language of traders and slaves all along these waters, but with an accent reminiscent of the hieratical tongues of distant Khappas.

“No,” Horn replied. “I am a seeker of wisdom.”

The old man squinted, taking in Horn’s scars, motley head of fire-scarred hair, and ropy muscles. “Looks like you haven’t found it yet, or you’d have learned to stay out of trouble.” He wheezed with asthmatic laughter at his own wit.

Horn shrugged. His skin was less tortured than his host’s. “Trouble finds me. I end it, one way or another.”

Another snort from the old man. Then: “We have wisdom in great supply here. Libraries full of it, scrolls stacked a hundred high. Were you looking for any particular sort of wisdom?”

Ignoring the sneer in the old man’s voice, Horn carefully offered the answer he’d been working through for weeks, months even, since embarking on this particular journey. “I have gained power and lost purpose as I have traveled through my life. I come to you seeking direction, which is, of course, the cardinal characteristic of the wind.”

“Actually, the wind mostly just blows,” the old man muttered. “It cares not for direction.”

“Yet here is where you stand against the wind and watch the world,” Horn replied.

Something gleamed in the old man’s eyes. “Our secrets are not so secret, are they?”

“You are the rumor in a dozen ports, and the whisper in half a hundred more.” That was almost true.

“Come, then. I will show you our world-watching. Then you can decide if you really wish to ask for direction here.”

“The ship on which I hired passage will not be back for at least three weeks,” Horn said. “I may as well learn something in the meantime.”

“A practical man, I see.”

At nearly forty years of age, Horn hoped he’d learned something from life. He followed without comment.

The temple’s paucity of acolytes and servants showed in the dust and grime lining the hallways. Elaborate doorways carved from teak or mahogany punctuated their progress. Their friezes were cracked and split from a lack of polishing. Red pillars lining the corridors were fading to a dusky melon color, streaked with smoke. Most of the lamps were not only unlit, but also in obvious disrepair.

It was like seeing a great lady of some earlier generation reduced to face paint and ill-fitting dresses. Horn could appreciate what this temple had once been, and might someday be again if it found patrons and worshipers.

Eventually they arrived at an enormous open space that rose through all the nine stories of the temple. It was like a high, wooden cave. Each level had a railing carved and painted to represent old battles between gods and monsters, though these were now as cracked and faded as everything else. Five stories below, at the bottom, the floor was occupied by an enormous map.

Horn stared down at it. He realized he was seeing the Starfall Sea at the center of the map, but there were countries and waters beyond its borders that he’d never known of. It was magnificently detailed, as if he looked down upon the world itself.

That thought made him consider how the hairs on his neck prickled. Slowly, Horn realized he was looking down upon the world itself, at least in a sense.

“The wind sees everything, sooner or later,” the old man said softly beside him. “It carries word and deed across rivers and mountains and oceans.”

Breath stuttered in Horn’s throat. “Here, you listen to the songs it sings.”

“Listen and take note.”

He studied the map. “That is not a work of hand, is it?”

“Prayer and study and ancient miracles bound into place.” The old man grasped Horn’s arm with a grip of iron. “Far greater men than you have come to steal the secrets of how we do this thing.”

“I come to steal nothing. Only to ask.” Horn had the distinct impression that if he looked hard enough, he’d find the Lost Island, and the Temple of Winds, and a great gallery with two men looking down.

He could see every place he’d ever be able to reach in his lifetime. That thought made Horn feel very small indeed.

After a while, the old man spoke again. “Most don’t want to see what lies before them.”

“I have fought,” Horn said distantly. “Fought with sword and spell. I have been the red knight of slaughter. I have called down fire upon my enemies. I have killed half a hundred men, countless orcs and goblins, and dozens of stranger enemies. I can magic the fish from their shadowed realms alongside the riverbanks, and I can face down an army if I find it needful. I know what lies behind me. Seeing what lies before can guide my steps in new paths.”

“Or the oldest ones.” Another grip of the arm, this more of a friendly tug. “Come with me. It’s nearly time to eat. You stay here too long, you will lose yourself in the map.”

A dozen monks gathered in a corner of what had once been an enormous refectory. The kitchens beyond were dark and quiet, their great clay ovens with the dragon mouths long gone cold, or even cracked. Iron pots hung like the helmets of ogres in those old shadows.

These men had made a stew in a warming fireplace in the dining area itself. They gathered around the one surviving table from what must have once been scores of tables. All were as old or older than Horn’s guide, and all shared the man’s hard-used air. They seemed more like veteran warriors than elderly clerics.

His appearance caused no comment at all. Clearly they’d known he was here. Some signal passed silently between them? Or perhaps just the wisdom of anyone who knows his own house well.

Horn took a bowl, shallow and oblong with tiny feet beneath, then followed his old man’s example of scooping out a ladle or two of the stew, along with a piece of flatbread still steaming from its own little pot-oven in the fire. Each monk had brought his own spoon, so Horn just slurped from the bowl.

A minute or two later, he realized that all the bowls were the tops of skulls, carefully sealed and lacquered. No one else seemed to care, so Horn kept his own counsel. The dead did not worry him overmuch. Besides which, he had not killed the people whose heads these were. They would not haunt him.

They ate in silence, except for the occasional grunt or raised eyebrow. Horn got the impression of a conversation taking place. One that had long since transcended the need for words. He maintained his own silence out of politeness as well as a sense of caution.

As the bowls were set aside, one by one the monks came to sit before Horn. Each spent a few minutes studying his face from a close distance. A quiet staring, intense, strange. As if his future were being read from the bones beneath his skin.

After their study, the monks one by one nodded at him, then nodded at his guide, then drifted off into the dusty shadows of the Temple of Winds.

Finally only Horn and his monk remained together in the refectory. He felt a distinct sense of abandonment. Like a ship drawn up on a beach, left to woodworms and dry rot. Or, indeed, this building.

“Paths,” the old man finally said. Shrewd calculation crossed his face. Horn was certain that was a deliberate display.

Finally, Horn spoke up for himself. “I had purpose once.”

“You would do better to petition the Raven Queen”

Horn shrugged. “Where would I find Raven Queen? With her demense in Lethrna, she cannot be found ensconced within a temple, or in the mumbling prayers of priests.”

The monk nodded. “Fair enough. But neither does the wind care for your purpose and your future. As soon inquire of the tides, or seek wisdom among the rocks.”

“People do those things.”

“Are they any wiser for it?”

He had to laugh. “I have seen little so far in my life to lead me to believe that people are any wiser for anything.”

“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.”

“Soon? I have been gone for several seasons.”

“Some quests take years. Or lifetimes.”

Lifetimes, plural? thought Horn. When he was young, he’d considered reincarnation unlikely, as well as probably too much trouble, given the karmic debt one was said to accrue. As he grew older, the idea of coming back for another try seemed less foolish, but sadly no more practical. “My quest took thirteen moons.”

It occurred to Horn that standing on ceremony would be pointless. The monk wanted greed, he could have greed. Horn merely wished to sleep in a bed that was neither rolling under him nor filled with biting insects swimming in his sweat. He unslung the padded leather bag in which the ceramic globe was nestled. “Here. It is yours. I took some pains to disguise the rod. It’s embedded in a crystal shell. That’s how I found it.”

With that, Horn pushed past the monk and into the Temple of Winds. He quickly located the monk’s cell he’d used for the three weeks when last he was there. Bare wooden walls, a ceiling with a faded painting of a thousand-eyed demon, and scant furniture. He’d seen better prisons, though this room had no lock on the door or guards in the hallway. The same threadbare linens lay rumpled on the straw mattress, under months’ worth of the everpresent dust.

He took a few moments to shake them out, then remade the bed, slipped into it, and slept the sleep of the blessed.

The next morning, Horn went to the refectory on his own. Usually there was rice soup for breakfast. Sometimes even a few eggs harvested from nests in the abandoned upper stories of the temple, or from the cliffs outside if one of the monks had been particularly in need of exercise.

Three of them were eating when he arrived, including the old man who had been his guide. In his time there before, Horn had never been offered any names. Nor had he heard the monks use names in their rare, brief conversations. They were just old men in an old temple.

Unsure whether or how to push the question of his compensation for retrieving the Rod of Winds, he settled for a skull bowl of congee and a somewhat withered peach. Horn ate in silence until his monk spoke up.

“You have walked the world, and brought us what we asked.”

Horn nodded. His mouth was full of the pasty rice stew. He quickly swallowed.

“It is time for your reward.” The monk reached within his robes to lay a small ivory box in front of Horn.

He studied the offering carefully. It was not much larger than the palm of his hand, and a finger’s width in thickness. The outside was covered with shallow carvings that reminded him of the art sailors made on walrus ivory or whalebones. The patterns were difficult to comprehend, something between thorny roses and things with far too many teeth.

Looking slightly to one side of the box, Horn called upon his years of training in the magical arts. Eyes that had peered through smoke and spell and scattering learned to see what was truly present, rather than what only seemed to be. It was still a box, still strangely carved, but it practically vibrated with the energies it contained-human energies formed under a working hand. This did not have the slick sheen of divine apparition.

“Powerful magic here,” he observed quietly. Some spellcaster had spent a good portion of his lifetime constructing this thing.

“You seek a powerful reward,” said the monk.

Horn picked up a chopstick and passed it close to the ivory box. Nothing. No spark, no smoke, no vibration or light.

Very gingerly, he touched bamboo to ivory. Again, quiescent. Where he might have expected a bit of flash and drama, he was encountering only, well, ivory.

The monks smiled as they watched. Clearly they would be no help to Horn. He was the great swordsman and master spellwright-it was up to him to sort this out.

Which was, in truth, fair enough.

Another careful stab with the chopstick provoked no additional reaction. Horn laid the utensil aside and reached for the ivory box. The monk had handled it without incident, after all.

Something clicked slightly as he lifted it. The weight and balance of the box shifted. It was only a container, not a thing in itself.

Looking over it in his hand, Horn saw how an inner box could be made to slide out the end of the carved shell. It was no different from the card boxes that soldiers and sailors sometimes carried in their kits.

Card boxes…

“You people,” he breathed. “This is the Deck of Many Things.”

“Fate in your hand.” The monk was positively grinning now. “Your choices are your own. Everything lies before you. Every path is in your hands.”

“Bastards,” Horn said.

The old men laughed at him before wandering off into the dusty shadows of their temple home. He heard the fading echoes of their mirth for a while.

Consequences

Horn racked his brain for whatever he might have read or heard about the Deck of Many Things. The monks had never shown him a library-they were obsessed with their map, and with listening to the wind-so even if he found one, he doubted it would contain much to aid him in understanding such an item.

Everyone knew the general gist, of course. The Deck of Many Things was a campfire favorite, for storytelling and idle boasting. Most people wouldn’t know what to do with a magic wand or a flaming sword or a crystal ball or many of the other legendary magic items and artifacts that supposedly littered the world.

But cards? Everybody understood cards. A metaphor for life, how the king ruled all but the knave snuck in beneath the queen, and the ace at the bottom could trump the very top. Colors and numbers and a swift flick of the hand could turn the fate of your last piece of silver, or make you a rich man indeed on a hot, lucky night.

He had to admit it: cold fear blew through him. All magic was balance. Who needed reincarnation to believe in karmic debt? Unwise or unlucky wizards learned fast enough how much one paid for one’s mistakes. One sometimes paid more dearly for one’s successes.

What he could recall of the Deck of Many Things strongly suggested a balancing act between bright blessings and arrant curses. What would he draw if he opened the ivory box? The keys to a kingdom? Or just as likely his own ruination.

The other piece of lore that came bubbling upward was the idea that he must commit to a number of draws from the Deck before he began. Horn wasn’t certain that was a rigorous rule, or simply a sensible rumor.

He’d never been a great risk taker. Study and practice had always been his way. That and careful planning. But what had he expected from these monks? Mystical guidance?

One could not plan for this. The Deck was worse than that time when he’d sought vengeance on behalf of the dying goddess Karrehein. It was wild power in his hand.

If Horn had been a praying man, he would have prayed. If he’d thought for a moment that the monks might give him practical advice, he’d have gone begging for their words.

But this was for him.

A day later, his chest still weak, he went to the top of the Path of Ten Thousand Steps and looked out across the ocean. Bottle-bright and the color of polished glass, it heaved and sparkled as only a great mass of water can do. No ships were visible, just water to the horizon. Great, swale-bellied clouds passed slowly overhead.

Behind him the volcano stank and muttered. The winds of the world came here. He could find no better place to seize his fate in his hands.

Feeling both foolish and very much in danger of his life, Horn raised the ivory card box toward the sky.

“I shall draw down three cards,” he said in a firm voice before prising open the little ivory drawer.

They lay within. Pasteboard, like any card, but slick and firm and overwhelmingly solid in appearance. Freed of their ivory enclosure, the cards positively reeked of magic.

Horn picked at the deck, flicking out a card from the middle.

He turned it in his hand.

The world changed.

Throne

A villa, overlooking the Bight of Winds. Technically a castle, though without moat or curtain wall, and it would not stand up to much attack at all. At the foot of his patio was a drop to pounding surf. Horn was well supplied with pliant servants and fine wines from distant islands. He was happy there, and everyone loved him.

The only thing that gave him pause was the ivory box he always carried in a silk sling beneath his robes. What the Deck had given, the Deck could take away. Horn still had two more draws, though now he wished he’d stopped at one. Was he supposed to just hold onto the deck like this? Or should he have simply drawn the three cards in a fan?

No answers came to him, and life was good, so Horn tried not to worry overmuch. He lived at the villa for several years. The weather was kind. Ships called at his dock just often enough to bring news and goods. Horn sent for his wealth, stashed in banks and strongrooms scattered across a dozen ports, and from time to time considered either hiring himself out or going adventuring.

It should have been boring, but was not. Rather, the villa was pleasing to the eye and soul. He eventually grew accustomed to the well-earned rest from his labors.

One day a cockleshell boat with an ivory hull and a single lateen sail the color of a dead man’s eyes made his dock. Horn watched it a while from the patio, a slim stemware glass of wine in his hand. He did not recognize the ship but felt vaguely disturbed by its color and form. Eventually Moneo his majordomo approached him.

“Sir, you have a visitor.” After a pause, the man added, “A lady, sir.”

Horn knew his staff would have approved if he’d taken a wife and become a true lord of the estate. This stretch of coast along the Bight of Winds was a wild country, dotted with a few small fishing villages. No king or prince extended a writ along these particular waters or shores. The villa itself was safe largely in its isolation-there was not sufficient trade here to attract pirates or bandits. He could have raised a flag, bred some strong sons, and founded his own ruling line. Raiders might have been a problem for his grandsons.

So a woman caller was of interest to Moneo and the other servants. A woman caller was worrying to Horn, however.

“Show her in,” he said. “I will receive my guest here on the patio. And tell Cook to lay on a feast fit for a prodigal.” He had an uneasy notion just who was come to visit.

She came walking out, short and thick-bodied in the manner of the people of the coast here, but her eyes were the color of the inside of a lime, and her robes were dyed in patterns, colored purple, dark blue, and black.

Horn knew her immediately. “You came to me once, when I was sick unto dying in a distant port.”

“Yes.” She nodded, and he felt wind upon his back and buzzing in his ears. “You seek what does not belong to you.” Despite her appearance, the woman once more spoke the hillman’s language of Horn’s birth.

“Not a sending,” he said, remembering their conversation before. “Always present.”

“Always.” She cocked her head, and he had never seen a more beautiful woman, for all her common looks. “Yet you tempt me.” A blunt finger tapped at his chest, clicking against the ivory box beneath his own robes.

“It is time for me to draw another card, is it not?”

“Far past time.” She smiled, and he felt the stars shift in their courses. “With age comes wisdom. Or at least experience.”

Realizing he would not be a guest at his own feast that evening, Horn took out the ivory box. He tugged open the tiny drawer to turn another card from the center of the deck.

The world changed.

Ruin

The tavern bench creaked beneath Horn like a ship under sail. He swayed, listening to the wood pop and snap, knowing if he were afloat, he’d be leaking.

He realized he’d had that thought before. His memory was playing tricks. Or the scrumpy was.

Which was the point here.

He stared up at the barmaid as she swished past. Her skirt was made in dark, muted colors-had it been so earlier? The woman favored him with a sidelong glance, her expression somewhere between wise and malicious. He turned his head to watch her tend to a pair of tables by the fire.

Finally she made it back over to him. “Out of money yet?”

“I don’t know,” he answered with unfortunate honesty. “Out of scrumpy yet?”

Her laugh held a curious edge. “We’ll never run out of scrumpy when there’s the likes of you in the world.”

“I wanted… more.” He wasn’t sure if he meant more than scrumpy, or more than what life had given him in the world. The mansions of memory had grown crowded in his head, haunted by regrets.

“You seek what does not belong to you.”

Those words, so familiar. And had she just spoken Kyrie, or another tongue from too long ago when he was young and the world was colored with hope?

Horn peered closer. Her eyes were green. The color of the inside of a lime. “It’s you,” he said. “You healed me once. You threatened me once.”

Now her smile bordered on joy. Around them, the reeking, smoky tavern seemed to recede into abstract distance. “And I have come for that which I have been cheated of.”

Horn slipped his hand inside his vest, touching the ivory card box in its silk sling. He drew that box out for the first time in… how long? There wasn’t any way to be sure. The path of his decay had been as gradual as it had been inexorable, since drawing the second card.

The ivory card box lay in his hand. Malevolent. Powerful. The old monk’s great joke played upon him.

Fate.

“This was always yours, was it not?”

With a nod, she said, “And you have held it far beyond your time.”

He extended his hand. “Here. Take it.”

“Three times you said you’d draw. Three cards to chart a path through life.” She leaned close, her eyes sparking. “Draw the third, little man, and return to your life.”

Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all.

The box came open easily enough. The cards slipped into his hand. The pasteboard again seemed slick and heavy. Horn considered simply tossing them into the air, as if they might fly away like little birds. Instead, vaguely aware of the clink of tankards and the murmur of voices, he thumbed a third card from the middle.

Conclusions

Horn had grown into an old man of no little power and persuasion. The hills of his birth suited him fine these days. Like Feather had so long ago, he picked a boy every few years who showed a certain, special spark and took the child aside for training. The tribe traded in sellswords raised to the purpose, but their true power was in the quiet thread of wizards spawned down the generations.

Some nights he sat vigil in the high caverns. Some days he hunted alongside the young men with their tagalong brothers and cousins, for the sheer joy of the chase and the kill. Some evenings he found a high rock and looked down upon the plains that led toward the coast, and recalled Purpure, High Canton, the Lost Island of Ee, and so many other places his feet had touched.

But always he went back to his hut. There Margaine, his green-eyed foreign wife, awaited him after her own days of seeing to the sick or wounded, and teaching the little girls.

It was enough.

As for the card he’d never turned, it hung on the wall of his hut in a leather bag. Some nights it twitched, or even glowed-magic trying to escape. If he’d not been a wizard of some power in his own right, he would have been overwhelmed years before.

The barmaid had laughed when he’d palmed the card and slipped it into his vest. Then she’d left with him. The ivory card box remained behind, innocent trap for the next man. Nothing more had been said about cheating, or what belonged to whom. He was never sure if she retained the aspect of the Raven Queen, but Margaine’s eyes always sparkled that curious color.

Some day he would turn the card. Some day he would know what fate he had removed from the Deck of Many Things.

Just not today.

Today, his path was his own. Today, the mansions of his memory gleamed once more. Today, he would not flip the last card.