CHAPTER THREE
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?
As creative as I’d been at getting myself into trouble, I might find out.
I looked out at the haze and stroked. Maybe one reason the fog was so thick was that some of the murk that had been clouding my own mind was finally leaking out. Wishful thinking, maybe, but you could argue that was the same philosophy that had already carried me alive and intact over more than a few rapids in the last several weeks. Wishful thinking and luck.
Riding the rapids does take a toll, though. The end of the mess in Oolsmouth had left me in a daze; how much so was only becoming clear to me now that I was coming out of it. In my stupor, flowing along with the current, I’d taken some actions that didn’t seem entirely well-chosen now in retrospect. Drifting out to the Oolsmouth docks and linking up with Shaa and the Karlinis for the ride to Peridol was one of them.
It had seemed to make sense at the time. I’d felt like I needed reinforcements around, enough to provide me with a breather to rethink and regroup. I also hadn’t been looking forward to walking or hanging onto a horse all the way from Oolsmouth to Peridol. On the other hand, for anybody who might be watching me, I’d now reinforced my connection with the others and in effect dragged them even deeper into my own problems. I know, I know, “anybody who might be watching me” sounds paranoid to the extreme. Paranoid I may have been, but there was still the evidence of recent twists and turns to show that in the case paranoia was the most conservative of strategies; I was as sure of that as, well, as my own name. Of course, considering that I didn’t have the slightest idea of what my name actually was, that gives a pretty good outline of the state of affairs.
They’d been calling me the Creeping Sword. An alias like that is enough to send anyone with a modicum of taste back to bed with an icebag, I know, but unfortunately it was really my own fault. There’d been that case I’d just finished involving this Sword guy, see, and the name was so cheesy it stuck in the front of my mind. When I fell in with Max and Shaa and they wanted some handle to address me by it was the first thing I could think of. Like most first thoughts, it left endless possibilities for recrimination after the fact. It beat “hey you over there in the corner,” I guess, but both of them had about the same relationship to anything approaching the real me. At least, I hoped they did. None of us really knew, which was yet another way of popping the situation into a nutshell. Of course, a patronymic like the Creeping Sword was certainly the least of my worries.
Just because I had problems, though, didn’t mean they were all equally difficult to address. Even if joining the Not Unreasonable Profit had been a bad idea it still might not have been too late to escape the repercussions, which is why I found myself out alone in a rowboat in the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean. From my vantage point at the moment, this was not the first time one of my solutions looked less appealing than the problem it was supposed to solve. Nevertheless, if I could make it to shore it shouldn’t be more than a three- or four-day walk into Peridol along the coast road. That sounded like a good investment. A stout hike was probably the perfect prescription for draining the last dregs of goo from my mind. That’s what Shaa had said, anyway, and prescriptions were his business.
There wasn’t much question about the hike’s destination, either; Peridol was clearly the place to be heading. Whatever your question might be, Peridol was always the leading place to find answers. Of course, Peridol being what it was there were usually more answers than questions, and if you hadn’t thought to bring a question with you, Peridol was more than happy to provide you with more than enough of its own. That was Peridol during normal times. During the Knitting season, that should apply at least double; maybe even triple, who knew? Since Peridol was Peridol, someone probably had the multiplier posted somewhere, with a back room full of probabilists arguing over the odds.
There it was again, math. Things kept coming back to math. For me, math had always been a dark room and me without a match. I didn’t think I had any better grasp of mathematics now than I’d had before I’d run afoul of Max and his crew. Well, fine, I’d never wanted to be an accountant, and I’d certainly never wanted anything to do with the other major discipline that required a solid grasp of math, both abstract and applied. It was an axiom that you couldn’t do magic unless you could work the math, but that had always been just dandy with me.
Just look at me now, though. Whether I’d had anything deliberate to do with it or not, at the very least you had to admit a lot of magic had been working itself around me lately; not only around me but through me. “Through me” just about describes it, too. I wasn’t real happy about it; I didn’t like being the next thing to a conduit or a trade road, sitting there minding my own business while magic stampeded over my head like a herd of runaway buffalo, but then I wasn’t real fond of magic in any guise. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely complaining either - there had been a couple of situations where I’d have been in a terminally tight spot if I hadn’t succeeded in sucking something useful out of Gashanatantra through our metabolic link. At least that’s what I’d assumed was happening. Now I wasn’t so sure.
There was a lot I wasn’t sure about, and even more about which I absolutely knew I understood too little. Even something as simple as the cast of players, whether they were there by deliberate intention or had just been swept up by the swelling broom of events, was far from clear. There was Gashanatantra, who had had an important hand in getting this thing started in the first place. He’d hauled me in to be his front man back in Roosing Oolvaya, using the hook and gaff rig that bound his metabolism to mine. One of the worst things to do if you want to live to an advanced age is to surprise a god, but I’d surprised him, all right, when it turned out the metabolic link was more than a one-way street. Drawing fragments of his knowledge as well as his power through the link had helped me out in the short term, had helped me enough to save my life more than once. Whether the long-term situation was any more than the same fated death stretched out for the sake of excruciation remained to be seen. What didn’t seem open to question was the extent to which the events just past had focussed Gash’s attention on me. At best I was a tool he’d found unexpectedly useful; at worst I might have actually become a center of his serious interest.
As Shaa and Max had told me and I’d come to see for myself in Oolsmouth, Gash’s reputation for plots with more layers than a ripe onion was honestly earned. The mess in Roosing Oolvaya had been downright intimate by comparison. There, Gash had only sent me up against Oskin Yahlei, the necromancer and would-be god who’d taken charge of the ring holding the trapped Death, Pod Dall. The ring had swept Karlini into the situation, too, and with him Max, but if Gash cared about them or even knew they were there I hadn’t seen a sign. Of course, it now appeared that, whatever he had said at the time, Gash’s main interest then had been with the ring; after all, he’d been the one who’d trapped Pod Dall in it in the first place.
Throughout the Roosing Oolvaya and Oolsmouth side of things, though, Gash hadn’t seemed to necessarily want the ring in his own possession. Instead, it was lurking out there serving the same purpose as a fishing lure or a piece of flypaper or a nice ripe tarpit - to work as a catalyst and a decoy, both, pulling folks out of the woodwork and getting them enmeshed in a situation that appeared to be one thing on its face, but that in fact involved Gash behind the scenes pulling strings toward his own inscrutable goals. Every time I thought about it his hand only looked more subtle. He wasn’t one for brute force; instead, the core of his style as I’d seen it rested in giving players the opportunity to do things their inclination naturally disposed them toward anyway. Once the framework was in place, all Gash had to do was point them toward the right target and stand back while they took off after it like a hound after a plumped-up rabbit.
Of course, this kind of stuff was easier to talk about than to pull off. No matter how much you wanted to hide behind the screen, sometimes someone just had to be out on stage helping things along. The problem with that was that once you were out in public, you made yourself a target for people to come after later if and when they thought they’d figured out what had really been going on. In Oolsmouth there had indeed been such a front-line figure; Gashanatantra, right? Of course not.
No, they thought it was me.
Actually, if it had only been that, it would have been simple, or simpler, anyway. The players Gash was working with were ones he knew. They knew him, too, but more than that they were already out for his hide. Rather than dodging indefinitely he’d decided to face them, in a manner of speaking. Because of the metabolic link and the aura it projected, they thought I was him. I was more than a front man, I was a full-fledged surrogate. I was there not only to advance Gash’s plot but to take his heat.
Of course, no one actually bothered to tell me this or fill me in on my role; no, I’d had to figure it out as I muddled along. At least Gash hadn’t decided to rearrange my face, or my anatomy in general. Fortunately for me, in his circles no one seemed to raise much of an eyebrow over a new body here or there. Still, the first person who’d showed up believing I was him was his wife. At least Jill hated him; that I could deal with. I could sympathize with it too, since I wasn’t exactly fond of him myself, but given the circumstances sympathy didn’t seem like the most productive approach to take.
If Jill had succeeded in killing me straight off I didn’t think Gash would have been too unhappy either. After all, if Gash was supposed to be dead it would have given him even more freedom of action, as well as relief from Jill and anyone else on his trail. That I hadn’t obligingly caved in had only opened the door to an extended high-wire act. In the company of Jill and her partner, Zhardann (or Jardin), the Administrator of Curses, I had somehow succeeded in extending the masquerade for days; in fact, they might not realize it was over yet. I was sure that the way we’d parted company, though, had left them more than eager to renew our acquaintance at the next possible opportunity. The least they’d be looking for would be answers I either didn’t have, or couldn’t give them and expect to remain alive.
Would they be in Peridol? Hah! - that was a sucker bet. For a Knitting everyone who thought they were someone would be in Peridol. That didn’t mean I had to make things any easier for them than they already were. If they’d picked up my trail in Oolsmouth they could have learned I’d shipped out on a boat. With all the sea traffic converging on Peridol it’d been impossible to tell if the ship was being shadowed, but it wouldn’t have been surprising. Even if we weren’t under observation, it was only elementary to figure that showing up in Peridol on foot rather than on water might keep them off balance. Of course, knowing my traveling companions, a welcoming party might be waiting for any or all of the Not Unreasonable Profit’s passengers. That being said, any reception waiting for me would probably be the nastiest; these were gods I’d been fooling around with, after all. Even if someone was merely waiting for the boat to come in to pick up our trail I didn’t want to give them that much of a break.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only possibility to consider. They could be waiting for me to split off from the others before coming after me. They could -
But there was only so far you could go in trying to anticipate how someone would surprise you next. The more reactive you became, the more initiative you threw out. I was pretty damn tired of being tossed back and forth by the whims of fate, chance, and the plots of others. I wasn’t planning to wait for another god to show up on my doorstep and sling me into another maze of their own devising. It was time to assert myself, to become again an active participant in my own story rather than just getting bounced around the landscape by the events unfolding around me.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t perpetually looking over my shoulder, waiting for the next hand to reach out from the unknown and grab me around the neck. Just because I’d come to an ideological breakpoint didn’t mean I’d lost all sense of reason. I was still half-expecting someone to pop out of the water next to the boat and hoist themselves onto the gunwales. You could say a rowboat in the middle of a fog bank had to be one of the safer places to hide out. On the other hand, these were gods etcetera etcetera; you go over the same ground often enough and it gets less and less interesting, unless you have a particular appreciation for churned mud.
Mud or no, the situation hadn’t changed. Who knew what the gods could do? More to the point, I sure didn’t know what they were capable of, other than lots of nasty surprises. They had to have limitations, but other than the ones I’d observed, which centered primarily on a shortage of good sense, and on energy supplies and the recurring need to refuel, I didn’t yet know what they were. It didn’t go nearly far enough toward evening the scales to remember that my sparring partners apparently thought I was a god too. Aside from its dubious value as a deterrent that didn’t help me a whole lot. More than outweighing the deterrent value on the downside was the fact that it seemed to keep the scheming lot of them interested in me.
The thing that bothered me more than having them think I was a god was the chance they might be right.
Even though I’d been listening for it, it suddenly occurred to me that the sound I’d been waiting for had gradually snuck up unawares. More than the constant swish and gurgle of the swells, there was now the added crash and whoosh that implied the presence of breakers and a shore. It was behind me, too, exactly where I’d been hoping for it. There’s that old proverb, about watching out what you wish for because you might get it, but in this case I couldn’t see how it was going to bite me, unless the shoreline was actually one of jagged rocks and I was about to have the keel ripped off the rowboat. In the larger case the proverb was a different story. Even so, I didn’t see how that story would pick up again until I’d made it to Peridol, though, or at least before I’d gotten through the waves onto the beach.
Everything was in place, not that I’d brought much with me off the boat. A pack of supplies sat underneath my seat, and jammed through the top of the pack lengthwise was a stout walking stick just the right heft and length for a two-hand broadsword. I left off rowing for a moment and felt around for it to make sure it hadn’t wandered off - yeah, there it was, all right. “You got anything to contribute?” I asked the stick.
It didn’t say anything, which was no more than I’d expected, but it did vibrate quickly under my hand, sending a low tingle up my wrist and into my arm. Was that a message with real content, or was Monoch just letting me know it was still alive, or whatever it really was? I couldn’t say. I didn’t know its language, if it had a language, but I had come to know its moods. At the moment it was placid enough, for a change. I didn’t know its purpose, either, beyond the fact that it was at best a reluctant ally foisted on me by Gash. That meant that it had to be a spy, and quite possibly a homing beacon too. Unfortunately, things being what they were I just couldn’t toss Monoch in the sea and be done with it, if tossing it in the sea would let me be done with it, which was another question entirely.
The sound of breakers behind me was now distinct. After perusing a navigational chart, Shaa had assured me that given the currents and the topography of the coastline I’d be encountering beach rather than rocks. I didn’t exactly trust Shaa’s seamanship, but he’d assured me he knew this section of the countryside well, and anyway I didn’t have much choice. A predawn seagull cawed somewhere overhead. Off to the left I saw white-capped foam, then the rowboat creaked and lifted. I played with the oars, trying to keep the dinghy headed straight-on, and as the wave dropped beneath me the keel grated on sand.
I splashed and sloshed my way up the beach, dragging the rowboat by the painter in the bow, as the breakers rose to my knees and ebbed away. I was going to take this as a clearly good omen. It was anticlimactic, true, but I was hoping to find more anticlimactic episodes in my life in the days ahead.
I left the rowboat overturned on the beach under a bed of tangled kelp and headed inland up the sand. I sort of wished I could take the boat along; I never liked to waste a good piece of equipment, and who knew what I’d need for those same days ahead, but on the other hand clawing my way up a cliff and then hiking for days along a road carrying a rowboat on my back or hauling it behind me could easily attract just the kind of attention it was my intention to avoid. There was also the condition of my back and other assorted joints and muscles to consider. It was the sort of stunt you sometimes hear about in myths, and certainly had the mythical characteristic of being essentially pointless, but maybe that was just the kind of thing gods appreciated. Probably not the ones I’d met, though; they seemed to like to avoid anything that smacked of direct work.
I could have camped at the edge of the water until the day arrived or the fog lifted, but I didn’t want to push my luck; I had images of somebody sending giant lobsters out of the surf to snap pieces off my hands while I dozed. So I moved up the beach in the fog, the sparse light giving me a ten-foot circle of visibility before the mass of the fog won out over the glow of the moon, stumbling over piles of driftwood and popping the flotation bladders of tendrils of slimy kelp, until I discovered the cliff by the simple expedient of walking into it. That was good enough for me. No way was I going to try to climb an unknown cliff in the dark and the fog when there wasn’t even any need for it. I flopped down on the sand, rested my head on the pack, and closed my eyes.
If there was any particular subject one or another of the members of Max’s crew weren’t interested in I hadn’t discovered it yet. One of the topics they all had something to say about was dreams. In my case, afflicted as I was by the effects of the Spell of Namelessness, they thought my dreams should be a fertile area of study; mirror of the unconscious and all that. I hadn’t been much help. Max had a technique for monitoring the surface thoughts of someone he could physically lay his hands on, but it hadn’t picked up a thing from me. “If he’s got a mind in there at all I can’t find it,” was Max’s only comment on the question. Actually, that was okay with me. I’d been starting to have doubts about how far I could trust Max, especially if my original identity turned out to be someone he didn’t like. What if I really had been a god? If the Spell of Namelessness was a weapon mainly employed by gods against each other, as Zhardann’s use of it had seemed to imply, that was a possibility that couldn’t be ignored, not that I felt like a god, whatever a god was supposed to feel like. If I was or had been a god, though, regardless of what I felt like, the trick to survival might very well involve keeping out of Max’s sight.
Karlini with his hypnosis and Shaa with his bedside manner hadn’t had any better luck in prying hidden visions out of me either, though. As Shaa had pointed out, it was true that none of them had ever examined a victim of the Spell of Namelessness before, and such cases were also under-reported in the literature, so as far as any of them knew loss of dream content could be a standard effect. I had a slightly different slant on it. As far as I was concerned, dreams were even more of a myth than me and the rowboat, since I didn’t think I’d ever had one in my life.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Not the part about the dreams, that was accurate enough, but the slight exaggeration about my life. The fact was, I knew very little about my life. The Curse of Namelessness had taken more than my name, it had erased all memory of whoever I might have been and whatever I might have done prior to my arrival in Roosing Oolvaya. Physical evidence was lacking, too - I didn’t even have an evocative scar.
Which made it all the more unexpected, as I dozed off there on the sand next to the cliff, to discover I was having, in fact, a dream.
Not that it was much to talk about, I suppose. There was a landscape of mist. I knew it wasn’t a real landscape, though; it didn’t feel real, it felt too real, as though it was the mother lode ideal against which all mists in the real world were just cast shadows. It crackled with clarity, it sparkled, it shone, as though I was examining each wisp simultaneously with a microscope. By comparison, the genuine mist I’d just been rowing and slogging through was a cheap cast-off imitation let loose by someone who didn’t have a clue how a real mist was supposed to be put together. But all it was, for all its hyper-realism, was fog. Great, I remember thinking, all this time waiting for a dream and what I get is fog?
The fog and I contemplated each other. Maybe it was my metaphor about the conditions inside my head made concrete. It did hold my attention, in a way actual fog never had, but even so it wasn’t exactly an epiphany of meaning. Then I saw the face.
It had actually been condensing for awhile without my growing aware of it. When I did realize something else was there, it was already a rough head-and-shoulders bust, still the grayish-white of the mist surrounding it and without any discernible features, as though someone had cast a wizard spotlight on their sculpture garden after a season of extreme erosion. Even in that state it projected the same realer-than-real effect as the mist itself, but as it formed a thin nose and a straight-edged mustache, a close-shaved cap of silver-blond hair, and eyes of glacier-ice blue, I had the feeling that if I ever met this person (since I’d never seen him before in, well, my life) I would recognize him instantly, even if all I could glimpse was the tip of an ear around a door in the dark. The image looked too intense to be a person; if I didn’t know better, I’d have said someone that vivid must be something superhuman, like a god. I figured it must be an artifact of this dream business - the gods I’d encountered hadn’t seemed any more radiant than anyone else you’d meet on the street.
The face hung there for a bit, and after a vague interval I had the feeling I could put a name to it. No voice pronounced it, and I didn’t hear the name, per se, it just sort of seeped into the back of my awareness. For some reason I couldn’t actually pronounce it myself, either; instead it had sneakily bypassed the usual paths of speech and memory to plop down, latent, on the tip of my tongue.
How long the experience lasted or exactly when it ended I had no idea, but the next thing I knew I was staring down a length of rock and earth. Up a length, really, since I was lying on my back and the cliff was still stretching up over my head, although now into the retreating fog under the brighter glow of dawn. I got to my feet and set about putting myself together.
In reconnoitering the base of the cliff, I came across the one artifact I’d been most hoping for right at the moment - a trail. Shaa’s map had indicated villages scattered here and there along this stretch of coast, and a small fishing port slightly to the south, so it wasn’t like we were talking about unexplored wilderness; a prepared path up the cliff hadn’t seemed unreasonable. The path had its share of switchbacks and crumbly spots, but the patches of wildflowers clinging to cracks in the rock and spills of earth made the short hike surprisingly scenic. The fog had retreated enough so that the top of the cliff began to condense into view when I was barely halfway up. Emerging over the lip at the end of the climb brought me out of the fog entirely and onto a meadow of wild grasses waving gently in the morning light. Behind me, the cliff submerged into the fog as though it was the edge of the coastline and the sea was the gray of clouds, and the beach I’d crossed was off in another world beneath the waters.
I adjusted the pack and pushed off toward the road. It was further back from the cliff than I’d expected, but I still came upon it soon enough. The road was wide enough for a lane-and-a-half of traffic, but it was paved with stone; this deep in the heartland of empire you wouldn’t expect anything less. Still, it wasn’t being maintained as well as it might, especially with the Knitting coming up and all. The status of maintenance was driven home even further when I topped the ridge of a low hill and saw a canted-over barouche at the trough at the foot of the hill ahead of me. Two men were standing next to the carriage looking down at the right-front wheel. As I drew up to them it was plain to see what had happened. One of the paving stones had shifted and the wheel had wedged itself into the resulting gap. Fortunately for them the wheel hadn’t splintered and the axle was intact, but the carriage was plainly stuck tight. Both men were covered with road dust and breathing hard. Scattered around them on the road were several boxes, a large luncheon hamper, and a trunk.
The man in livery, his hands on his hips, called to me, “Give us a hand here, then, will you?” The driver wasn’t the one of interest to me, though. The other man, his black and silver traveling clothes now distinctly the worse for wear, had fixed me with his full attention and, I thought, a fleeting touch of surprise. “Well met,” he said, “and timely. You’re the first person along in the last hour.”
“And a pleasant morning it is too,” I said, indicating the roadside wildflowers glistening in the sun. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“It now shows signs of improvement,” agreed the man. “You’re a stout fellow; the three of us should have no trouble accomplishing what the two of us could not.”
Even if they’d been straining at the carriage and unloading its contents for the last hour, which looked perfectly plausible given their appearance, the guy still had a sword slung on his hip. He hadn’t reached for it to put it on as I’d approached, either; he’d been working with his sword easily at hand. It wasn’t only that sign that made me recognize him as a pro. I’d seen that aura of latent menace before, along with its subliminal aroma of congealed gore. He’d be a nasty one to cross. I didn’t want to cross him; I didn’t even want to get within his range. I’ve sized up enough swordsmen to know which ones are deadly and which ones only think they are.
But that wasn’t the real reason I was reluctant to approach. He –
“You’ve recently been to sea,” he stated.
“Actually, I spent the night down on the beach. Unfortunately I picked a part of beach that was a little close to the tide.” I wasn’t about to volunteer to anyone that I’d gotten drenched while landing a boat, especially not him. I didn’t trust the situation; it was a classic setup for all kinds of things. Of course, it could have also been an honest case of a random busted wheel, but there was more to my feeling than just the setup. It wasn’t merely the situation, and it wasn’t just the look of him with his sword. Was it just my paranoia acting up again? Was I just going to automatically distrust anyone I happened to meet? No, because - “I beg your pardon?”
“Together we will extract this wheel and then you will ride with me; I insist.”
“If it’s just the same to you, I’d just as soon walk. It’s a nice day for a stroll.”
“No, no, I won’t hear of it,” said the man. His hand seemed to drift, of its own accord, toward the pommel of his sword. “I insist. What is your name, so I may know in whose debt I find myself?”
“Okay,” I said slowly, “if that’s the way it’s going to be, that’s the way it’s going to be. My name’s Spilkas, and before you start in after my life’s history I’d just as soon tell you I’m a fellow of no particular account.” I’d resolved not to be caught short reaching for a moniker like the Creeping Sword again. I figured I was due a few free throwaway names to toss out at random, anyway, but I didn’t mind borrowing some from people I’d known. Spilkas was a jittery cutpurse back in Roosing Oolvaya. He was so fidgety, in fact, that he couldn’t do a job unless he was halfway soused. Spilkas existed along a fine line - too drunk and his coordination would go and he’d start to fall down, not pickled enough and he’d twitch himself straight into jail. I wasn’t one for getting sloshed myself, but the connection with his fine-line lifestyle still made the name a sure fit for me. “Who might you be?”
“I am Joatal Ballista,” he told me.
But he wasn’t. He was lying. I’d have known he was lying even if it hadn’t been for the dream, but the dream put the capper on it. The dream where I’d seen his face; had it scoured into my memory as though it was etched on the business end of a branding iron. And the name that went with it, the one that had perched itself on the tip of my tongue, was ... was ... Redley? Fredley? No, Fradgee. No, not that. Fradi. Fradjikan, that was it.