Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

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.