Something massive moved through the ring of ghosts, and their bodies swirled and steadied as it passed. Jovan stood up to face a man of the King’s Guard.
Daryanree chose his guards partly for their appearance. The man was tall; he fitted his armor well. He carried a well-polished, well-honed sword in one hand and what might have been a large volcanic-glass arrowhead in the open palm of the other.
But he was alone. No horse would walk among ghosts and no companion had followed, and he must be half out of his mind with fear. Jovan could smell chilled fear-sweat. And Jovan cried piteously, “I can’t move! They’ve got me, but it’s not too late for you. Run!”
There was a tremor in the burly guard’s voice. “These specters are my own people, barbarian! I heard what you said. The King wants to talk to you. Will you come quietly?”
A king cannot afford to look the fool. Jovan knew too much to live.
He said, “Yes! Yes, if you can pull me loose from this.” He let his eyes roll; he stretched his arms toward the guard; he writhed on the headstone, then sagged in defeat.
“Liar!” the guard roared. He moved forward as if through glue. Jovan waited to see if the guard would break.
The mist surged up, and Zale the Tenth stood before the guard. The skin of his arm flapped as he moved. Massive, flayed and blind and tormented, the old king’s ghost was a horrid sight. “I know you,” it cried. “Samal! Usurper!” The war-axe rose and fell.
The guard tried to riposte. The axe wafted through his sword and smashed his naked shield-arm back across his chest. The guard reeled backward and smacked against the rough stone of a crypt.
Jovan shook his head.
The guard didn’t move. And the fog had clumped above him, nearly hiding him. Ghosts surrounded the man like jackals feeding. Jovan remembered other legends, of vampires—
He forced himself to move among them, through them, feeling resistance and chill. He unlaced the guard’s leather torso armor and pulled it off and placed his palm on the man’s chest.
“His heart’s still beating. I don’t understand,” the artist said, and sudden claustrophobic terror took him. He could see nothing; he was embedded in ghosts.
The finding-stone was shattered in the guard’s hand. The magic in it could have made Zale’s axe real enough to hurt, real enough to send a man flying backward. But there was no blood, no break in the armor or the tunic beneath or, when Jovan carefully pulled the tunic off, in the skin either. Not real enough to cut, then. A bruise was forming above the sternum, but Jovan found no broken ribs.
“Bumped his head,” Jovan mumbled. He found blood on the back of the man’s scalp, but no splintered softness beneath. “He’ll wake soon. I’ve got to get moving. They think the stone will find me. They won’t look for me at the docks—”
“They’ll look,” said the old Guard officer’s voice.
Jovan stripped hurriedly. The touch of the ghosts was cold, and they clustered close. He donned the guard’s clothing as rapidly as he could. The boots were roomy; he tore up his own shirt to pad them. His rings he took off and put in the toes. His cloak wouldn’t fit the look of the uniform. He spread it over the guard.
He strode out of the mist of ghosts. The fog ran away from him downhill, to form a pale carpet over the harbor and the sea. The lighthouse on Seaclaw Point showed above. Jovan took it as his target.
The dead general took shape, striding alongside him, clutching something. It said briskly, “They’ll look. I’ll follow you and point you out.”
Jovan stopped. He said, “You can’t leave Worm’s-Head Hill. You never could before and you can’t now.”
“Do you believe that?”
With the magic of the finding-stone to give them life, ghosts could harm him now. When the luck turns sour…but luck had saved him from the guard. Push it, then!
He snatched at the ghost’s clenched fist. The bones of his hand passed with a grating sensation through other bones, and tore away two shards of black glass, two pieces of the broken finding-stone. Jovan flung them far into the dark. The ghost ran after them. Jovan ran the other way, downhill toward the light.
• • •
• • •
THE WISHING GAME
For two survivors of the Warlock’s Era, a final tale.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Crunching and grinding sounds brought him half-awake. He was being pulled upward through gritty sand, in jerks. Then the stopper jerked free, sudden sunlight flamed into his refuge, and the highly compressed substance that was Kreezerast the Frightener exploded into the open air.
Kreezerast attempted to gather his senses and his thoughts. He had slept for a long time…
A long time. A human male, an older man not in the best of shape, was standing above the bottle. There was desert all about. Kreezerast, tall as the tallest of trees and still expanding, had a good view of scores of miles of yellow sand blazing with heat and light. Far south he saw a lone pond ringed by stunted trees, the only sign of life. And this had been forest when he entered his refuge!
What of the man? He was looking up at Kreezerast, doubtless perceiving him as a cloud of thinning smoke. His aura was that of a magic user, though much faded from disuse. At his feet, beside Kreezerast’s bottle, was a block of gold wrapped in ropes.
Gold?
Gold was wild magic. It would take no spells. It drove some creatures mad. Humans would collect the soft, useless metal, making themselves crazier yet. Was that why the man had carried this heavy thing into a desert? Or had its magic somehow pointed the way to Kreezerast’s refuge?
Humans’ wishes were often for gold. Once upon a time Kreezerast had given three men too much gold to carry or to hide, and watched them try to move it all, until bandits put the cap to his jest.
Loose white cloth covered most of the man’s body. Knobby hands showed, and part of a sun-darkened face. Deep wrinkles surrounded the eyes. The nose was prominent, curved and sharp-edged like an eagle’s beak, and sunburnt. The mouth was calm as he watched the cloud grow.
Kreezerast pulled himself together: the cloud congealed into a tremendous man. He shaped a face that was a cartoon of the other’s features, wide mouth, nose like a great axe, red-brown skin, disproportionately large eyes and ears. He bellowed genially, “Make yourself known to me, my rescuer!”
“I am Clubfoot,” the man said. “And you are an afrit, I think.”
“Indeed! I am Kreezerast the Frightener, but you need not fear me, my rescuer. How may I reward you?”
“What I—”
“Three wishes!” Kreezerast boomed. He had always enjoyed the wishing game. “You shall have three wishes if I have the power to grant them.”
“I want to be healthy,” Clubfoot said.
The answer had come quickly. This was no wandering yokel. Good: brighter minds made for better entertainment. “What disease do you suffer from?”
“Nothing too serious. Nothing you cannot see, Kreezerast, with your senses more powerful than human. I suffer from sunburn, from too little water, and from various symptoms of age. And there’s this.” The man sat; he took the slipper off his left foot. The foot was twisted inward. Callus was thick along the outer edge and side. “I was born this way.”
“You could have healed yourself. There is magic, and you are a magician.”
Clubfoot smiled. “There was magic.”
Kreezerast nodded. His own kind were creatures of magic. Over tens of thousands of years the world’s manna, the power that worked spells, had dwindled almost to nothing. The most powerful of magical creatures had gone mythical first. Afrits had outlived gods. They had watched dragons sickening, merpeople becoming handless creatures of the sea; and they had survived that. They had watched men spread across the land, and change.
“There was magic,” Kreezerast affirmed. “Why didn’t you heal your foot?”
“It would have cost me half my power. That mattered, whe
n I had power. Now I can’t heal myself.”
“But now you have me. So! What is your wish?”
“I wish to be healthy.”
Did this Clubfoot intend to be entirely healed from all the ills of mankind on the strength of one wish? The question answered itself: he did. Kreezerast said, “There are things I can’t do for you—”
“Don’t do them.”
Was there no way to force Clubfoot to make his wish more specific, more detailed? “Total health is impossible for your kind.”
“Fortunate it is, that I have not wished for total health.”
The wish was well chosen. It was comprehensive. It was unambiguous. The Frightener could not claim that he could not fulfill the conditions; they were too general.
Magic was still relatively strong in this place. Kreezerast knew that he had the power to search Clubfoot’s structure and heal every ill he found.
To lose the first wish was no disaster. One did like to play the game to the end. Still Kreezerast preferred that the first wish come out a bit wrong. To give the victim warning was only fair.
Pause a bit. Think. They stood in a barren waste. What was a man doing here? His magic must have led him to Kreezerast’s refuge, but—
Footprints led north: parallel lines of sandal-marks and shapeless splotches. They led to the corpse of a starved beast, not long dead, half a mile away. Here was more life: scavengers had set to work.
Saddlebags lay near the dead beast. They held (Kreezerast adjusted his eyes) only water skins. Three were quite dry; the fourth held five or six mouthfuls.
Hoofprints blurred as he followed them further. Dunes, more dunes…the prints faded, but Kreezerast’s gaze followed the pathless path…a fleck of scarlet at the peak of a crescent dune, twelve miles north…and beyond that his eyes still saw, but his other senses did not. The manna level dropped to nothing, as if cut by a sword. The desert continued for scores of miles.
It tickled Kreezerast’s fancy. Clubfoot would be obscenely healthy when he died of thirst. He would suffer no ill save for fatigue and water loss and sunstroke. Of course he still had two wishes—but such was the nature of the game.
“You shall be healthy,” Kreezerast roared jovially. “This will hurt.”
He looked deep within Clubfoot. Spells had eased some of the stresses that were the human lot, and other stresses due to a twisted walk, but those spells were long gone.
First: brain and nerves had lost some sensitivity. Inert matter had accumulated in the cells. Kreezerast removed that, carefully. The wrinkles deepened around Clubfoot’s eyes. The nerves of youth now sensed the aches and pains of an aged half-cripple.
Next: bones. Here were arthritis, swollen joints. Kreezerast reshaped them. He softened the cartilage. The bones of the left foot he straightened. The man howled and flailed aimlessly. He did not beg Kreezerast to stop.
The callus on that foot was now wrong. Kreezerast burned it away.
Age had dimmed the man’s eyes. Kreezerast took the opacity from the humor, tightened the irises. He was enjoying himself, for his task challenged his skills. Arteries and veins were half-clogged with goo, particularly around and through the heart. Kreezerast removed it. Digestive organs were losing their function; Kreezerast repaired them, grinning in anticipation.
In a few hours Clubfoot would be as hungry as an adolescent boy. He’d want a banquet and he’d want it now. It would be salty. There would be wine, no water.
Reproductive organs had lost function; the prostate gland was ready to clamp shut on the urethra. Kreezerast made repairs. Perhaps the man would ask for an houri too, when glandular juices commenced bubbling within his veins.
A few hours of pain, a few hours of pleasure. For Kreezerast to win the game, his three wishes must leave a man (or an afrit, for they played the game among themselves) with nothing he hadn’t started with. To leave him injured or dead was acceptable but inferior.
The man writhed with pain. His face was in the sand and he was choking. His lungs, for that matter, had collected sixty years of dust. Kreezerast swept them clean. He burned four skin tumors away in tiny flashes.
The sunburn would heal itself. Wrinkled skin was not ill health, nor were dead hair follicles.
Anything else?
Nothing that could be done by an afrit working with insufficient manna.
Clubfoot sat up gasping. His breathing eased. A slow smile spread across his face. “No pain. Wait—” The smile died.
“You have lost your sense of magic,” the afrit said. “Of course.”
“I expected that. Ugh. It’s like going deaf.” The man got up.
“Were you powerful?”
“I was in the Guild. I was part of the group that tried to restore magic to the world by bringing down the Moon.”
“The Moon!” Kreezerast guffawed; the sand danced to the sound. He had never heard the like. “It was well you didn’t succeed!”
“In the end some of us had to die to stop it. Yes, I was powerful. All things end and so will I, but you’ve given me a little more time, and I thank you.” The man picked up his golden cube by two leather straps and settled it on his back. “My next wish is that you take me to Xyloshan Village without leaving the ground.”
Kreezerast laughed a booming laugh. “Do you fear that I will drop you on Xyloshan Village from a height?” It would make a neat finale.
“Not anymore,” Clubfoot said.
Here the magic was relatively strong, perhaps because the desert would not support men. Men were not powerful in magic, but there were so many! Where men were, magic disappeared rapidly. That would explain the sharp dropoff to the north. Wars did that. Opposing spells burned the manna out locally in a few hours, and then it was down to blades and murder.
To east and west and south the level of power dwindled gradually. “Where is this Xyloshan Village?”
“Almost straight north.” Clubfoot pointed. “Rise a mile and you’ll see it easily. There are low hills around it, a big bell tower and two good roads—”
The man’s level of confidence was an irritant. Struck suddenly young again, free of the ever-present pains that came with age in men, he must be feeling like the king of the world. How pleasant it would be, to puncture the man’s balloon of conceit!
—Take me to Xyloshan Village without leaving the ground. Very well, Kreezerast would not leave the ground.
The Frightener didn’t rise into the air; he grew. At a mile tall he could scan everything to the north. Xyloshan was a village of fifteen or sixteen hundred with a tall, crude bell tower, two hundred miles distant. If he hurled Clubfoot through the air in a parabola…
He couldn’t. It was too far and he didn’t have sufficient magic. Just as well. It would have ended the game early.
He still had two choices.
Clubfoot had made the wrong wish. It could not be fulfilled. The afrit could simply say so. Or…mmm?
He laughed. He shrank to twenty feet or so. He picked up Clubfoot, tucked him under his arm and ran. He covered twelve miles in ten minutes (weak!) and stopped with a jolt. He set Clubfoot down in the sand. The man lay gasping. His hands had a deathgrip on the ropes that bound the gold cube.
“Here I must stop,” Kreezerast said, “I must not venture where there is no manna.”
The man’s breathing gradually eased. He rolled to his knees. In a moment he’d realize that his minuscule water supply lay twelve miles behind him.
Kreezerast needled him. “And your third wish, my rescuer?”
“Whoof! That was quite a ride. Are you sure rescuer is the word you want?” Clubfoot stood and looked about him. He spoke as if to himself. “All right, where’s the smoke? Mirandee!”
“Why should I not say rescuer?”
“Your kind can’t tolerate boredom. You built those little bottles as refuges. When you’re highly compressed and there’s no light or sound, you go to sleep. You sleep until something wakes you up.”
“You know us very well, do you?”
/>
“I’ve read a great deal.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Smoke. It isn’t here. Something must have happened to Mirandee. Mirandee!”
“You have a companion? I can find her, if such is your wish.” He had already found her. There was a patch of scarlet cloth at the top of a dune, and a small canopy pitched on the north side, two hundred paces west. Kreezerast was twice beaten.
Clubfoot played the game well. He had a companion waiting just this side of the border between magic and no magic, on a line between Xyloshan Village and Kreezerast’s refuge. The afrit had taken him almost straight to her. And to their camp, where waited two more load-beasts and their water supply.
A puff of wind could cover that scarlet blanket with sand…
An afrit would have gloated. The man merely picked up his gold and walked. In a moment he was jogging, then running flat out, testing his symmetrical feet and newly youthful legs. He bellowed, “Mirandee!” half in the joy of new youth, half in desperation. He ran straight up the side of a tall dune, spraying sand. At the top he looked about him, and favored Kreezerast with a poisonous glare. Then he was running again.
Kreezerast’s little whirlwind had buried the scarlet marker. But of course: the man had failed to find it, but he’d seen a dying whirlwind!
Kreezerast followed, taking his time.
The man was in the shade of the canopy, bending over a woman. Kreezerast stopped as his highly sensitive ears picked up Clubfoot’s near-whisper. “I came as quick as I could. Oh, Mirandee! Hang on, Mirandee, stay with me, we’re almost there.”
The Frightener could study her more thoroughly now: a very old woman, tall and still straight. An aura of magic, nearly gone. She was unconscious and days from death. The golden cube lay beside her, pushed up against her ribs. Wild magic might reinforce some old spell.
Once upon a time, a man had wished for a woman who didn’t want him. Kreezerast found her and brought her to him, but made no effort to hide where she had gone. He’d watched her relatives take their vengeance. Humans took their lusts seriously—but this woman did not seem a proper object for lust. She’d be thirty or forty years older than the man.