Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

“You,” whispered the man.

“Down keep your voice,” hissed Haddo, feeling the cargo shift around him in resonant vibration with the subterranean rumble of the speech, “or avalanche cause could you. Around boat seen you have I. Svin are you. Dark corners liking are you now?”

“You,” Svin repeated, with a bit less rumble this time, but with the same hollow bang and boom. “I have seen you too. You have been avoiding me. You are Haddo.”

“Avoiding have I been not,” protested Haddo. “No reason would have I -”

“I have tracked the snow leopard. For three days have I followed him through the tundra, through the empty plains. When someone tries to hide from me, I know. You are Haddo. I know you.”

“Serve we both same masters,” Haddo said, his own voice a bit scratchier than usual. “Met did we in service together, recently, on boat.”

“No,” said Svin. “I know you. I am a barbarian from the frozen north, like my parents before me.”

Haddo stared him up and down. Even in the gloom of the hold, lit only by the stray beams of sunlight that had wormed their way through gaps between the planks of the deck above, it was apparent that this statement was out of date. “Barbarian were you,” Haddo stated. “Now wear you trousers and shirt, cut you your hair; abandoned have you loincloth, are gone your furs. Civilization have you entered.”

“You may be right,” Svin said reflectively. “Perhaps now I am something else. That is not the point. You will not change the subject, you with your games of language and your culture of deceit. Men are not born to -”

“If to something say have you,” said Haddo, “stop you can I not, but favor do me this - forget at least of noble savage the spiel. Old has it become.”

“Words are a trap,” Svin acknowledged. “I leave the snares of rhetoric; the truth is this. At the top of the world my people lived with the land; with the caribou, the ice hawk, the polar bear. We lived the way of the warrior. Man strove against beast, family against nature, tribe against tribe. Who would dare rule us? Chill wastes were our home. Even the hand of the gods was light. Then came Dortonn, Dortonn the sorcerer, Dortonn and his Kingdom of Ice.” Svin spat, as though to clear his throat of something vile.

What was vile to Svin was not merely the content of his speech, Haddo knew. Not that long ago Svin had been down with tuberculosis. Since then it had been hack and hack, cough and cough all over the ship. Svin got his throat back under control and continued. “With his power Dortonn forced my people to serve him, to build his castle. We called to our gods, but they were with Dortonn. They told us to submit. We would not submit, even at the word of our god. But we were not the only ones under Dortonn’s hand. There were others in the wastes. Those like you.”

“Many relatives have I -”

Svin squatted down in a smooth powerful motion and closed one hand over Haddo’s cloak next to the hood, where his shoulder probably was. “One among them served Dortonn as his chamberlain, as Fist of Dortonn. He too was a cunning sorcerer. He was called Haddo.”

“Among my people common of Haddo is name,” Haddo said quickly.

Svin’s hand tightened. “Under Haddo, Fist of Dortonn, life was hard, but before this time Dortonn himself was even worse. There was little difference; we hated both Dortonn and his Fist. Then one day there was lightning and fire in the castle. One tower fell. We fought Dortonn’s soldiers shoulder to shoulder with Haddo’s people, who seemed to come from the very walls. Some said this was Haddo’s doing, his plan to overcome Dortonn.

“Many fell. Many fled. Dortonn survived, though his strength was now weak. Haddo was not seen again.”

“Interesting perhaps this is,” allowed Haddo. “Happened what then? Events these must years ago have been.”

“Yes,” Svin said, his voice lost in memory, “years ago. I was a child. Yet it was I who saw Dortonn escape into the cliffs.”

“Do not understand I why to rule frozen wastes would want someone,” said Haddo. “Of better places are there plenty.”

“That is what I need to ask you. Why? Why did Dortonn come to us? What was the true story, and the story of Haddo?”

“Release you your hand,” Haddo instructed him. To his surprise, Svin realized that his fingers had obeyed almost before his mind had had a chance to process the demand. Still, rather than grab Haddo again he stood up and moved back a step. In Haddo’s voice, croaky though it was, Svin had suddenly heard the same tone of nonsense-is-over that he’d been trained to recognize across from him at the other end of a sword. The twin red embers beneath Haddo’s cloak looked hotter than usual, almost like the actual pit-of-hell flames Svin remembered from bedtime tales as a youngster, and seemed to circulate like whirlpools of fire as Haddo stared up at him and spoke. “If that Haddo were I, if there had I been, think would I that behind this story, really was there a god, that his tool Dortonn was. For gods games these are.”

“That is not enough. I must know more.”

“Your time bide you,” Haddo said after a moment. “If that Haddo were I, lightly not would take I this. Much means this to you... Against this Haddo swore you vengeance?”

“Of course I swore vengeance,” said Svin, taking another step back. “My people are always swearing vengeance for one thing or another.” The elders had told him to watch out for magicians, especially ones who weren’t human, but they’d never really explained how to rationalize the craftiness you needed around sorcery with the forthrightness expected from a warrior born. “But now I am older,” he went on, more thoughtfully, “and have seen too much for things to be that simple. Perhaps knowledge may be a kind of vengeance too.”

A sudden creaking at the far end of the cargo hold, and a new glow in the air, indicated that someone else was undogging the door across from them and coming in. “Perhaps talk will we again,” hissed Haddo. “One question pose will I for you. Name know you of god, master of Dortonn?”

“They said Dortonn’s allegiance was only to Death,” said Svin. “That’s all my people ever thought of him as, Death.”

“Many deaths there are. To tell them apart, names they have.”

“... I was only a child,” Svin said tentatively, “but perhaps I did hear something else, at night, when the elders were talking. Is it even a name? Pod Dall?”

“Is a name,” Haddo reassured him. It was quite an interesting one, especially under the circumstances. The god whose creatures had terrorized Svin’s people had kept an uncharacteristically low profile; this god had apparently not wanted his identity bandied idly about. Still, Svin’s information corroborated Haddo’s own suspicions.

Quite interesting. Especially under the circumstances. Did Svin know about the ring they had picked up in Roosing Oolvaya? Probably not. It would be just as well not to tell him. In particular, it might be better, at least for the moment, that Svin not know about the god trapped in the ring. The god by the name of Pod Dall.

There had to be land around here somewhere. I dug the oars in again, stroked against the swells for at least the ten-thousandth time since I’d left the ship, and felt the dinghy move another fathom further toward what I hoped was still the east. The water-hugging mist had enough of a pearly glow that I knew the big moon was up there someplace, even if by now it was surely declining toward dawn. The fog bank had gotten thicker as I rowed, though, and it was now useless to think about putting the moon squarely astern and rowing away from it, since I couldn’t see the disc of the moon to save my life. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. After all, I did have a compass. I was confident enough of my ability to row in a straight line that I couldn’t have been checking it more than once a minute. But how hard could a continent be to find when you were sitting just offshore?