2018-01-08
469
It was the Year of the Bent-Wing Raven, and everything went sour for me right around the back side of autumn.
One week I was in funds, the next I was conspicuously otherwise. I’m still not sure what happened. Bad luck, worse judgment, enemy action, sorcery? Hardly matters. When you’re on the ground getting kicked in the face, one pair of boots looks very much like another.
I have long been candid about the nature of my previous employment. Those of you who find this frank exchange of purely historical details in any way disturbing are of course welcome to say a word or two to Galen on my behalf, and I shall thank you, as I doubt an old thief can really collect such a thing as too many prayers. In those days I would have laughed. Young thieves think luck and knee joints are meant to last forever.
I started the summer by lifting four ivory soul lanterns from the Temple of the Cloud Gardens in Port Raugen. Spent a few weeks carving decent wooden replicas and painting them with a white cream wash, first. I made the switch at night, walked out unnoticed, presented the genuine articles to my client, and set sail on the morning tide as a very rich man. I washed up in Hadrinsbirk a few weeks later with a pounding headache and a haunting memory of money. No matter. I made the acquaintance of an uncreatively guarded warehouse and appropriated a crate of the finest Sulagar steel padlocks. I sold the locks and their keys to a corner-cutting merchants’ guild, then sold wax impressions of the keys to their bitter rivals for twice that sum. So much for Hadrinsbirk. I cast off for the Crescent Cities.
There I guised myself as a gentleman of leisure, and wearing that mask, I investigated prospects and rumors, looking for easy marks. Alas, the easy marks must have migrated in a flock. I took the edge off my disappointment by indulging all the routine questionable habits, and that’s when the bad time crept up behind me. The gaming tables turned. Easy credit went extinct. All the people who owed me favors locked their doors, and all the people I needed to avoid were thick in the streets. Before I knew it I was sleeping in a stable.
I stretched a point of courtesy then and slipped an appeal to the local practitioners of my trade. My entreaty was coolly received. There was a sudden plague of honesty in the land, and schemes simply weren’t hatching, or so they claimed. Nobody needed to arrange a kidnapping, or a vault infiltration, or have a barrow desecrated.
This was a bind, and I confess that I partly deserved it. For all my hard-earned professional fame, I was still an outsider, and doubtless should have paid my respects to the thieves of the Crescent Cities a few weeks earlier. Now they were wise to me and watchful for the sorts of jobs I might pull on my own. The wind was sharpening, my belly was flat, and my belt was running out of notches. I needed money! Yet honest employment was out of the question too, as word of my presence spread. Who would make a caravan guard of Tarkaster Crale, bane of a dozen caravan runs? Who’d set Crale the Cracksman to stand guard over a money changer’s strongboxes? Awkward! I couldn’t beg for so much as an afternoon hauling wash buckets behind a tavern. A larcenist of my caliber and experience? Any sensible local thief would assume it had to be a cover for some grand scheme, which they would have to interrupt.
It’s hard to be poor at the best of times, but in my old line of work, to be poor and famous—gods have mercy.
I had no prospects. No friends. I could have won an empty-pockets contest against anyone within a hundred miles. All I had left was youth and a sense of pride that damn near glowed like banked coals.
These were the circumstances that led me to seriously consider, for the first time in my life, the words of the Helfalkyn Wormsong.
I can see some of you nodding, those of you without much hair left. You heard it, too. Nobody repeats it these days, the fortunes of Helfalkyn having diminished so profoundly. But in my youth there wasn’t a child in any land who didn’t know the Wormsong by heart. It was a message from the dragon itself, the last and greatest of them, the Shipbreaker, the Sky Tyrant. Glimraug.
It went like this:
High-reachers, bright-dreamers, bright-enders,
Match riddlesong, venom, and stone.
Carry ending and eyes up the Anvil,
Carry glorious gleanings back home.
Isn’t that a fine little thing?
Friends, that’s how a dragon says, “Why not climb up my impenetrable treasure mountain and let me kill you?”
From the first day Glimraug claimed the Anvil, it took pains to welcome and entice us. Don’t mistake that for a benevolent and universal hospitality, for of course Glimraug raided half the earth and spread dismay for centuries. No dragon ever deigned to smelt its own gold. But even as Glimraug fell on caravans and broke castles like eggs, it tolerated a small community of outcasts and lunatics in the shadow of its home. Once in a rare while it would even seize someone and haul them to the crest of the Anvil, to make a show of its growing treasure, then set them free to sing the Wormsong louder than ever.
Thousands of people accepted the dragon’s invitation over the years. None of them lived. Some very canny customers in that crowd, too, great heroes, names that still ring out, but none of them were ever quite a match for riddlesong, venom, and stone. Still, for every one who dreamed the impossible dream and cacked it hard, two more showed up. The Dragon’s Anvil was the last roll of the dice for those who’d played their lives out and bet poorly. It was equally attractive to the brilliant, the mad, and the desperate. I was at least two of those three, and by that simple majority the vote carried. I was on a ship that night, the Red Swan, and I scrubbed decks and greased ropes to pay for my passage to the end of the world.
That’s what Helfalkyn looked like when I finally saw it—like the last human habitation thrown down by the last human hands at the far end of some mad priest’s apocalypse. The sun was the color of bled-out entrails, edging the hulking mountain, and the bruised light showed me a gallimaufry of dark warrens, leaning houses, and crooked alleys down below. We sailed in through veils of warm breath from the mountain’s underwater vents, and the air was perfumed with sulfur.
Many of you must be thinking the same thing I was as I trod the creaking timbers of the Helfalkyn docks—how did such a place ever come to thrive? The answer lies at the intersection of greed and perversity. Here came the adventurers, the suicides, the mad ones intent on climbing the mountain and somehow stealing the treasure of ten thousand lifetimes. But were they eager to go all at once? Of course not. Some needed to lay their plans, or drink their brains out, or otherwise work themselves into fits of enthusiasm. Some waited days, or weeks, or months. Some never went at all, and clung to Helfalkyn forever, aging sourly in the shadows of failed ambition. After the adventurers came the provisioners, of inebriation and games and rooms and warm companionship, and the town became a sputtering, improvised machine for sifting the last scraps of currency from those who would surely never need them again. The captains of the few ships that made the Helfalkyn run had a cordial arrangement with the town. They would haul anyone there for the price of a few days’ labor, and charge a small fortune in real valuables for passage back to the world. Any newcomer trapped in Helfalkyn would thus be forced to try the mountain, or toil for years to the great advantage of the town’s masters if they ever wanted to escape.
Mountebanks swarmed as I and a few other neophytes examined the town warily. The junk-mongers outnumbered us three to one. “Don’t breathe the dragon air without taking a draught of Cleansing Miracle Water,” shouted a bearded man, waving a stone pitcher of what was clearly urine and mud. “Look around! The dragon air gives you clisters, morphew, wretched megrims, and the flux like a black molasses! Have the advantage when you challenge the Anvil! Protect yourself at a fair price!”
I did look around, and it seemed that none of the other natives were downing miracle mudpiss to keep their lungs supple, so I judged none of us likely to perish of the megrims. I moved on, and was offered enchanted blades, enchanted boots, enchanted cheese, and enchanted handfuls of mountain rock, all for a fair price. How fortunate I felt, to discover such simple generosity and potent magic in the meanest of all places! Even if I’d had money, I would have reciprocated this cordial selflessness by refusing to take advantage of it. Two gracious humanitarians of Helfalkyn then attempted to pick my pockets; the first I merely spurned with a scolding. The second mysteriously incurred a broken wrist and lost his own purse at the same time, for in those days my fingers were considerably faster than the contents of my skull. I worried then about constables, or at least mob-fellowship against outsiders, but I quickly realized that the only law in Helfalkyn was to win or stay out of the way. No more creeping fingers tried my pockets after that.
Cheered by the acquisition of a few coins, I hunted for a place to spend them and tame my tyrant stomach. Ale dens of varying foulness offered themselves as I strolled, and street hawkers made pitches even less appetizing than the prospect of Cleansing Miracle Water. Sooner rather than later, for while Helfalkyn was encysted with diversions it was not terribly vast, its twisted streets naturally funneled me to the steps of the grandest structure in town, Underwing Hall. Here would be food, though the smell wafting out past the cold-eyed guards beside the doors promised nothing delicate.
Outside it was morning, but inside lay a perpetual smoky twilight. The entrance hall was decorated with bloody teeth and the slumped bodies of those who’d recently had them knocked out of their mouths. Porters, working with the bored air of long practice, were levering these unfortunates one by one out a side entrance. I saw more fisticuffs under way at several tables and balconies in the cavernous space. Given the relaxation of the door guards, I wondered what it took to rouse their interference. The servers, stout men and women all, wore ill-fashioned armor as they heaved platters about, and the kitchen windows were barred with iron. Rough hands thrust forth tankards and wine bottles like castle defenders dispensing projectiles through murder-holes. Though I’d enjoyed some elevated company in my career, this crowd was still an intimately familiar sort, comprised of equal parts stupid, cruel, cunning, blasphemous, and greedy faces. Every corner of the known world had skimmed the scum of its scum to populate Helfalkyn. I resolved to step warily and attract no attention until I learned the order of things.
“CRALE!” bellowed someone from a balcony overhead.
Ah, the feeling of receiving unsought the attention of a great room full of brawlers and carousers. Heads turned, conversations quieted, and even some of the servers halted to stare at me.
“Tarkaster Crale?” came a disbelieving shout.
“Bullshit. Tarkaster Crale’s a tall handsome bastard,” muttered a woman.
I was about to say something that would have, in all candor, improved nobody’s situation, when I was seized from above and hauled into the air. The sheer power of my appropriator was startling, and I kicked helplessly as I was spun a disagreeable number of feet above the stones of the tavern floor. My assailant hung from a balcony rail by one arm and dandled me with the other. I prepared fresh unhelpful commentary and reached for the knives in my belt; and then I saw the man’s face.
“Your highness!” I whispered.
“Don’t give me the courtesies of cushion-sitters unless you want to get dropped, Crale.” Still, there was warmth in his voice as he heaved me over the railing and set me on a stool as easily as anyone here might hang a tunic on a drying line. Here was a man with shoulders as broad as a boat’s rowing-bench and arms harder than the oars. He was dark of skin and darker of hair, with gray setting some claim to his temples and beard, and all the lines in his face had been carved by either the sea-winds or the wild grin he wore when facing them. The other patrons of Underwing Hall rapidly lost interest in me, for I had been claimed for the table of none other than my old adventuring companion, Brandgar Never-Throned, King-on-the-Waves, Lord of the Ajja.
Like Helfalkyn, the King-on-the-Waves is little more than a story these days, though it’s a good one and an Ajja skald who’ll sing it for you is worth the asking price. All the Ajja clans had kings and queens, and keeps and lands and suchwise, but once a generation their mystics would read the signs and proclaim a King-on-the-Waves. This lucky bitch or bastard would be gifted a stout ship to crew with sworn companions, and set sail across the Ajja realms, calling upon cousin monarchs, receiving full courtesy and hospitality. Then they’d usually be asked to undertake some messy piece of questing that would end in unguessable amounts of death and glory. Thus charged was a King-on-the-Waves, to hold no lands, but to slay monsters, retrieve lost treasures, lift curses, and so forth, until they and all their companions had met some horrible, beautiful fate on behalf of the Ajja people. Brandgar was the last so-named, nor is there like to be another soon, for he and his companions were uncommonly good at the job and left few messes for others to clean up. I had fallen in with them on two occasions and done some reaving, all for the best of causes, I assure you, though I am sworn to utter no details. Even my sleeping sense of honor sometimes rolls over in bed and kicks. Onward!
“There’s fortune in this. We had not thought to see an old friend here.” Brandgar settled himself back on his own stool, over the half-eaten remains of some well-fatted animal I couldn’t identify, sauced with sharp-smelling mustard and brown moonberry preserves. “What say you, Mikah?”
I gave a start, for sitting there in the darkness at the rear of the balcony was a shape I hadn’t previously noticed. Yes, indeed, here was Mikah King-Shadow, rarely seen unless they chose the time and place. Mikah, my better in all the crafts of larceny, who could pass for man or woman in a hundred disguises, but in their own skin was simply Mikah, good friend and terrible enemy. They leaned into the light, and it seemed the years had not touched that lean angular face or the cool gray eyes that smiled though the lips below them never so much as twitched.
“Friend Crale has a hungry look, lord.”
“They’re in fashion hereabouts.” Brandgar waved casually to the remains of his morning fast-breaking, and I fell to with a grateful nod. “Have you been here long, Crale?”
“I’m fresh-landed as a fisherman’s catch,” I said between bites of rich greasy something. I did not scruple to avoid licking my fingers, for I knew the table manners of a King-on-the-Waves were shaped for the tossing deck of a longship. “And I thank you for the sharing. This latest chapter in the book of my life has been writ mostly on the subject of empty bellies.”
“And empty pockets?” said Mikah.
“I have offended some power unknown to me.” I took a bone and greedily sucked the marrow of some animal also unknown to me. “An ill fate has swept me here to play a desperate hand.”
“No,” said Brandgar, and there was that damned grin I mentioned, a follow-me-over-the-cliff grin. “A kind fate has joined friend to friends. Give us your skills. We mean to climb the Dragon’s Anvil and crown our lives with the glory of a treasure claimed. The Wormsong bids us to carry ending and eyes, eh? Ending we carry in our steel. Eyes we still need! You were ever a fine and cunning lookout.”
“When do you intend to go?”
“Tonight.”
I dropped my bone then and wiped my mouth with a scuffed jacket cuff. I’m not best pleased to shine a light on my hesitation, friends, but I vowed to give every truth of this tale as much illumination as it’s due. I had gone to Helfalkyn in a desperate fever, yes, and by happy fate found two of the few people alive whom I might have chosen if given my pick of fellows. Still, with the weight of satisfying meat in my belly for the first time in recent memory, I found myself less than eager to set the hour of my doom so close.
“I had thought to spend a few days preparing myself,” I began, “and learning whatever useful information might be—”
“You’re no craven,” rumbled Brandgar. “Yet any man might feel the sting of fear when he sits in comfort and thinks of peril. Come, I know you would never run from a duty bound in honest wager! Lay a simple bet with me. Should I win, join us tonight. Else we wait three days, and you may seek whatever ‘useful information’ you like before we climb.”
Now here was a salve to all my several consciences, gentle listeners, by which I could keep faith with useful companions and still have time to ease myself into a frightful enterprise. I asked the means of the wager.
“See the attic-skorms that cling high upon the wall there?”
Gazing across the wide tavern, squinting past smoke and flickering brazier-light, I did indeed see a pair of the dark-scaled lizards motionless below the ceiling. Arm length and even-tempered, attic-skorms creep down from the mountains in all the northern countries, and are either eaten as food or tolerated as rat-catchers.
“The wager is this. Long have those two sat unmoving; sooner or later one of them will doubtless creep down in search of food. If the dark one on your side moves soonest, we go in three days. If the red-rippled one on my side moves, we go tonight. Is it sealed?”
“My oath,” I said, and we sat at ease to watch this yawn-inducing spectacle unfold. This was not as odd as it might seem, for out upon the waves the Ajja will pass the time in friendly wagers on anything that catches the eye, from which way gulls will fly to which sailor on another ship will next use and empty a dung bucket over the side. I have eased fierce boredom with bets on some ludicrous trifles in my time.
Not five heartbeats after I spoke, the red-rippled skorm on the king’s side pulled in its legs. It didn’t so much climb down as fall directly off the wall like a grieving suicide in an old romantic tale.
I sputtered without dignity while Brandgar and Mikah laughed. Then there was a flash of silver light in the shadows where the king’s choice had plunged; a thin mist rose into the air, a mist I recognized.
“No!” I shouted. “That was no honest bet! That was a skin-shifting sorceress of low moral character who is—”
“Standing right behind you,” said Gudrun Sky-Daughter, appearing in silver light and mist. She ruffled my hair affectionately, for yes, I still had some in those days. Hers was seven braided spills of copper, now lined with the color of iron like her king’s, and her round, flushed face was all mischief and mirth.
“That was unworthy,” I scowled.
“That was fair as anything,” said Brandgar. “For if your eyes had been working as a fine and cunning lookout’s should, you’d have seen that there was only one beast upon the wall until a moment before my proposal. Come, Crale. We need you, and you won’t find better company if you wait here a hundred years! This is fate.”
I partly hated him for being right and was partly thrilled that he was. A warrior-king, a master thief, and a sorceress. Great gods, hope was a terrible and anxious thing! They were indeed allies who had as much chance on the Dragon’s Anvil as any mortal born. I pondered my recent poverty and pondered the treasure.
“I have never in my life behaved with any particular wisdom,” I said at last. “It would make little sense to start now.”
“Ha!” Brandgar pounded the table, stood, and leaned out over the balcony. His voice boomed out, echoing from the rafters and startling the raucous commotion below into instant attention. “HEAR ME! Hight Brandgar, son of Orthild and Erika, King-on-the-Waves! Tonight we go! Tonight we climb the Dragon’s Anvil! We, the Never-Throned, the King-Shadow, the Sky-Daughter, and the famous Tarkaster Crale! We go to claim a treasure, so take this pittance! Drink to us, and wait for the word! Tonight we break a legend!”
Brandgar opened a purse, and shook out a stream of silver into the crowds below, where drinkers cheered and convulsed and clutched at his largesse. Gods! If I’d had even that much money just a week before, I’d never have left the Crescent Cities. As the near riot for the coins subsided, a voice rose in ragged chant, and was joined by more and steadier voices, until nearly everyone in Underwing Hall was gleefully serenading us, a single verse over and over again:
Die rich, dragon’s dinner!
Play well the game that has no winner!
Climb the mountain, greedy sinner!
Die rich, dragon’s dinner!
The chant had the sound of a familiar ritual that had been much practiced. I liked it not a whit.
