Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

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.