“THERE is the sign,” indicated Taril, raising a hand at the hanging wooden board with the skull, candle, and pestle-and-mortar painted on it. “This is the house of Doctor Istorius. Follow me.”
He walked up to the closed door in the shuttered house, and rapped loudly with his staff. Some moments later, shuffling footsteps and muttered curses were heard from within. A slot in the door shot open, and two rheumy, squinting eyes looked out.
“Your business?” a voice croaked. “At this hour, the Doctor is retired. Say quickly, your business with him.”
“I am Taril Cassumbar, and these are my companions. The Doctor knows my name; he sold me a certain amulet a month ago, with a needle set in its face.”
“I recall, Master. I shall let him know.” The slot slid home, and the sound of many bolts and locks rattled behind the door. It creaked open, to reveal a short, twisted boy, his hair dark and unkempt, with a wild white streak across it from one temple. He held aloft a candle and peered at the visitors. “Wait inside, if you please.”
The three travellers entered, and stood in the corridor in which light bloomed from another guttering candle the boy now lit from his. Within, a long, dark, cluttered shop in the flickering candle-light. Strange objects loomed on all sides. To the right, a steep staircase ascended into the gloom. The boy shut and locked the door behind them, and then limped his way up the stairs, mumbling to himself in Arrono. To one who understood, the words “hour of the night”, and “homely folk resting in their beds” could be made out.
They heard a murmured conversation at the top of the stairs, before a sharp, commanding voice called “Come up!”, and the boy beckoned to them. They took the stairs, Aradia cradling her hare closely in the cloak in which she’d wrapped him. The two birds had alit on top of the sign outside, and now stood eerie watch, remarked upon by late revellers in the street, who were, however, surprised by little that they saw around the Doctor’s shop.
At the top of the stairs, they were ushered past by the crippled boy, into a large room, its ceiling lost in shadows and cobwebs, lit at one end by an open fire, and dribbling stands of candles. There, in the shadow of a looming bookcase, sat a very thin man, wrapped in a large black coat, who put aside a great leather-bound book as they approached. His whiskers and his straggling hair were wild around his head, and his wizened face centred on a pair of deep black eyes under prominent dark brows.
“So you are returned, Master Taril. And were you successful in your seeking? Did you bring the Orb?” He sat forward, eager as a hound on a scent, straining at his leash. “Did you find it?”
“Reverend Doctor, I have found what was left of it. The Orb is shattered, and the pieces scattered. The most part still remains, embedded in the hand of this man. Here …” He gripped Rogrim’s wrist, and twisted his palm into view. The fragments were dark beneath the skin of his hand. “This is Rogrim Arngrimsson, a Northman we found in the forest beyond Mount Lazaré. The amulet led us right to him. He had been pursued. But I must tell you this in time.”
“Yes,” said the old man abruptly. “Forgive my lack of manners. Arnauld, fetch chairs, fetch drink, fetch food. We shall have much to speak of. Make our guests comfortable. And you …” He turned his twinkling black gaze on Rogrim. “The Northman. Long have I sought for you. You do not remember me then?”
“I confess, Doctor, I am at a loss. My memory is strange. I know not who I was. I have my name only from a lady of the forest, Mahault of the Hidden Valley.”
“Come sit by me. I shall tell you. Show me your hand.”
Arnauld, the Doctor’s servant, pushed a stocky chair into place beside the old man, and gestured to Rogrim to sit, while he busied himself fetching other chairs he placed opposite these two, on the other side of the fire, and then pushing near them a small table, which he proceeded to load with bread, wine, cheese, and olives. His shuffling, sideways gait made much noise, but he accomplished his tasks quickly nonetheless.
The Doctor took Rogrim’s hand in his own gnarled fingers and turned it over, running his index finger over the embedded shards. Rogrim winced as a jerk of pain shot through him, and then the Doctor clutched his wrist tighter, and pulled an iron medallion out from the fur-lined collar of his voluminous coat. It was carved with glyphs around the edges, and had a polished bloodstone set in its centre. As he pulled Rogrim’s hand towards him, he suspended this pendant over it, and immediately there was an answering pulse in the star-shape of glassy splinters and fragments. For a moment there seemed a throb of dark light in Rogrim’s palm, and then it was gone. The pain remained; it felt like the shards were straining to free themselves of his hand. The medallion started spinning, and the Doctor barked a short laugh of triumph.
“So this is it then. This is what is left. I told you that you should have sold the Orb to me. It would have saved you much pain, already, and much pain to come.”
Rogrim gasped, and wrenched his hand out of the old man’s grip, then cradled it against his chest, squeezing it with his other hand. It ached now with an ache that made his teeth seem to sweat, that made his spine tingle. Shivers ran all over his skin, from the nape of his neck to his hand, and back. “So I came to you with this to sell then? Taril told me as much. And you knew what it was?”
“All in good time, Rogrim of the Shadowblade. You must eat. You must be tired. Eat, drink, break of my bread, sup of my wine. Share my table, all of you. You too, slave-girl. You are invited to eat with us.”
“Thank you, Reverend Doctor.” Aradia bowed her head. She took some bread and broke it, steeping it in a cup of milk, then fed it to the hare in her lap, who nibbled it eagerly. The two men followed suit, and took the cups of wine tremblingly poured for them by the cripple-boy, took grapes and olives, broke bread and cheese. The Doctor watched them all, sitting hunched there like a crow upon a fence-post. Once they had eaten somewhat, and sat back and sipped their wine, the Doctor began.
“In the Spring of last year, you came to me, young man. With two men of your crew, you came; you had taken a haul of precious things from an island monastery off the coast of Ariú, a monastery of the Grey Brothers of Hallor, who hoard relics and precious things, of their own religion and of that of the Tíriani, for they search for knowledge above all. You are a sailor, did Lady Mahault tell you this? A sailor in a dragon-ship, like your Lochlannach ancestors, a freebooter in the lands all along the Fringe of the World, beside the Western Ocean, and in the Middle Sea from Aliano on its rock to Khoros in the East. They speak your name with fear, I was told, in the seas all round Ariú, on the Angathar coast, and ports all points in Harronia, and they know you for a pirate and a smuggler. They call you Rogrim the Shadowblade. Or they did before you died. Oho? You did not know you had died? Well, let me tell you how it happened. With this haul of loot, you thought to sell some of the more … ah … interesting objects to me. I had traded with you once before this, buying from you a strange idol that was won in a raid on the desert coast of Soreshka, in a village that guards ancient tombs. You knew it to be a thing of power, having had some schooling in these matters, back in the Isle of Mists, from whence you came. Yes, you are of the Lochlannach, but your family settled in Ariú, where your famous father swore allegiance to a petty king of the Tíriani. All this is new to you, I realise. I got much bold talk, and later melancholy reminiscence, from you when I plied you and your men with strong drink the night you came to sell me your trinkets. But you still would not part with the Orb! It had you fast, even then; and now it has you entire, and your mind has been clouded by it. They call it the Orb of Forgetting, and you are its creature now. There may be a cure for this … But I get ahead of myself.
“That night you and two of your desperate bravos bargained and drank, and boasted and cursed at the little I would offer you for any of it. The iron bell in its reliquary, the monstrance of Athelem, the fingerbones of Saint Eorwyn … Superstitious tat of the Church of the Triad! It was not these relics and altar-pieces of the Church of the invaders that interested me, it was the treasures that they in turn had plundered from the native Tíriani: the crane-bag of a Chosen of Marenus, the willow-wand of a druid of Odos, the ogham-stones, the ficheall pieces blessed by Bréga … these seemed to me to be of more interest to me than the gold-work reliquaries of the Triad. I suppose it is my predilection; I have always had a taste for Tíriani myth and magic. I have made somewhat of a study of it you might say. And when I saw the Orb, I saw something out of legend. The Orb … well, it already had you in its grasp. You could not part with it, you knew not why. I had tried to hide my desire to have it, though I recognised it for what it was, by bartering and contempt for the value of the gaudy rubbish you brought me. Most of it was such, though I cheated you out of the less ostentatious but more valuable Tíriani artefacts, truth be told. Your crewmates were angry at your holding out for a higher price for this glass bauble, but you told them that you had heard of a man who would pay far more for things such as these. You had heard right, in a sense. Count Azenarre in his mountain fastness has a collection of such objects that far outstrips mine. But he is even less honest in his ways of acquiring them. Half of your crew set off with you on the journey. I warned you, but you would not listen. For you, the price of the Orb was beyond imagining, and you told your shipmates that they would be covered in gold, if only they would take the Old Khorosi road North with you, and seek out this Count, in his castle on the rock, in the gorges of the great river Tarne. But this was not to be. The Count found you first, or his creature did: the Huntsman, Brindille, is the one who led the ambush that slaughtered your men. You were thought to have been taken, along with the others, and captured or killed; I heard all this from the survivor, one Arnulf, called the Legless. He played dead while all about him fell to the Hunt, and managed to creep away while they were feasting on the corpses of the slain. Oh yes, I see that you have met the Hunt again? Yes, they would have eaten your bodies, torn them with their teeth, unless the Count wished you whole, for his own foul purposes. So, you were dead, and the Orb lost. Arnulf could tell me no more, only snivelled like the coward he is, and begged me for money. I gave him a little, and continue to do so, in return for news from what’s left of the crew, when they return to port here, and any hint of your whereabouts, or that of the Orb. I suppose that he shall be drinking on my penny no longer, now.” The old man took a long sip of wine from his trembling hand, then coughed and spluttered, cackling slightly as he finally cleared his throat.
“You see, this Orb was a precious thing. It has a long strange history, that I had read about in learned tomes that tell the legends and the tales of the Tíriani gods and heroes, and of the kings down the ages. I have read of it in the Annals of the Four Masters, those Hallorite scholars of the last century who took it upon themselves to record the oral histories of the Tíriani that their people had conquered. Do you know aught of Ariú, and Tírannan, and its conquest by the Angathar?”
“I should, I suppose, but all is lost in the mists,” said Rogrim.
“I only know what I have read in the brief chapters of Tarha Bellic’s Sage’s Travels, in which he describes a sojourn among the Tíriani,” said Taril. “It was during the rein of Eremond the Wise, who was the second Angathar king in Ariú.” He turned to Rogrim and Aradia. “Bellic describes a barbaric people who have been brought some measure of civilisation and rule of law, by the barely less barbaric Angathar. Bellic is Khorosi, of course.”
“A hundred years ago the Harronan Angathar conquered the proud Tíriani. And now the Isle of Mists in the Western Ocean is under the yoke of the knightly orders and the Church of the Triad, and their native customs and religions are banned. The Order of the Crossed Keys ferrets out Druidry and belief in the Old Ways, and they confiscate all sacred and magical paraphernalia when it is found, and hand it over to the Hallorite Order for study. This is presumably how the Orb ended up in the monastery of the Grey Brothers on an island off the West coast. But they must have had no idea what it was they held in their hands, and perhaps it lay dormant, unresponsive. Or perhaps they used its powers, or feared them. The Orb of Forgetting, Cruinneóg Díchuimhne, the Tíriani call it, made from a piece of the Stone of Destiny when Marenus stole it from Dis in the Time of Legends. Marenus is their god of mists and seafarers, of crossroads and wanderers, of enchantment and illusion, and trickery and deception.”
Rogrim remembered the rune of three-in-one that he bore on his shoulder, a mark of this very Marenus.
“He stole the Stone of Destiny, the Lía Fáil, from Dis, one of their ancient, elemental father gods, he of the Stone Crown, Lord of the Mounds, Sleeper in the North. Marenus carried off the entire stone in his sea-going chariot, that is pulled by stallions of the sea-foam, and brought it out of the North, to another island. There he learned its secrets for a year and a day, until Dis found him, having searched the length and breadth of Ariú, and so he knew the secrets of destiny, and could read the future in the flashing of sunlight on the sea, or the whisper of the wind in the leaves. But he wished also to pass this gift down to his foster children, his favourites among his favoured tribe of the Everni. And so, when Dis found him, he meekly handed back the Stone, but all the while he had retained a piece of it, that afterwards through his arts he ground to dust, and burned to glass. He blew the glass into this Orb, and insufflated all his knowledge of things past, and passing, and to come. He blew into it his power over shadows and mist, and his knowledge of the sea-roads, the whispers of the sea-foam. All this he granted, the tales tell, to his foster-son Beórim, a king of the Everni, much later, in the Time of Heroes. And so it would remain, a legend, until it surfaces in nearer times. There is tell of it in the Cycle of the Warband of the Red Hand, and in the tales of Finnán and the Company of the Stag. Finnán himself once owned it, they say, and looked long into it, but seeing himself betrayed by his lover, he took the Orb and threw it in a lake in Galloia, and then for a time it is heard of no more. Then there are the histories of the lineages of kings, and of the endless wars among the hundred kingdoms of the Tíriani. In those, there are still mentions of charms and spells and magical objects, and here, I found a trace of the Orb again. It surfaces among the Uterna when a seeress cuts it from the belly of a fish, and uses it to foretell the doom of the king she serves. And he, Domhna of the Uterna, is betrayed by his kinsmen, and beaten in battle, and the rival petty-king, Fiachra of the Builga, takes the Orb and the seeress both as spoils. Then he, in turn, is murdered for the Orb, betrayed by the seeress. There are more such stories. An orb of glass is found in treasure hoards or tombs, and it grants visions and power, only to be the undoing of the one who had thought himself its master.”
“And you believe these legends? You believe that the Orb has power over mists and shadows, and can tell the future and the past? That I now have these powers?”
“Who can say? The legends of a people are a writing of history, seen through a glass darkly. Heroes and kings and queens of the founding of races become the gods of their descendants. And magic is real. You have only to ask Master Cassumbar here.”
Rogrim turned to the Master, on whose stern face firelight and shadow played.
“You are a magician then? And magic is more than stories for children? Things out of legend can come into the world? A part of me says that nothing is real but what the eye can see, and the hand can hold. That there are laws of Nature, and none may break them. But then, I have seen things with my eyes, in only the few days since I woke from the mists. I have seen you speak to a hawk, and fell a man with words. I have felt the eye of the Huntsman upon me. I have seen the visions of the Orb. And that same part of me screams that these things are against Nature, and yet they are so. They are not real, and yet they exist. So tell me, Master, how do you explain these things?”
“You have a rare and pragmatic soul then, Rogrim of the Shadowblade. It would be interesting to know if you were thus unsuperstitious before you lost your memory. For most people, Nature’s Laws run parallel to the Laws of the Unseen, the existence of gods and monsters, of spirits and demons, of what is vulgarly called magic. Their cosmos is a place in which much is caused by the workings of invisible forces, sinister or benign. In primitive cultures, each animal, each place, each object, has a double in the spirit world, and has wishes and desires even as a human has. In places like Harronia, most denounce the belief in spirits and magic as the workings of the Devil, but most too believe, in their heart of hearts, that these things exist. The Churches teach that only the gods can work miracles, and that all else is superstition and trickery; but call it the Devil or what you will, they cannot avoid the suspicion that there are dark miracles also, and that there are cursed creatures outcast from the light of the gods. Most never see these things. Most know charms against evil and to find lost sheep, and recite these formulae without believing themselves to be engaging in sorcery. As you will find out, the Harron churches, both that of the Lady and that of the Triad, Athelem, Sathar, and Hallor, at once claim that sorcery and demons don’t exist, and yet reserve the harshest penalties for any sinner found practicing said sorcery, or trafficking with said demons. It is a strange and double way of seeing the world. They say that when a man puts away childish things, he puts away his belief in magic, and in monsters. That only benighted sinners call on any gods but theirs, and that only their gods can work miracles, which seem to contradict the evidence of our senses, but must be part of Natural Law, as they come from the gods, and all that the gods will is natural.
“Things are different in Khoros. There, we know that there are many gods, and that the gods do indeed have power. We know that there are many magicks, and that many have power. But the philosophers know that most of what the populace sees as the workings of the gods or magic, is indeed superstition and trickery, and that the power it has is in only in the mind. But it is no less a power.”
“And what do you wield then? Is it mere trickery and superstition, or have you power that challenges the laws of Nature?” Rogrim sat forward, belligerent, feeling there was something vital at play. There was a sense of wrongness about the things that Taril had done, a sense that here was more than the eye could see, the ear could hear. And the evidence of the senses, that was Nature. He felt this in his bones, but could not say why. “It is both, my friend. The trick of the coin, the flower in the child’s mouth, even the fire that burns with no fuel … These are natural things, as you call them. But in Khoros, among the philosophers at least, we see the world as split in two. There is the world of matter, of the body, of the senses: what you call Nature; and then there is the world of the Spirit. Humans are spirits locked within a body. They are ensouled at birth, and their spirit goes from them at death. Most of them will never wander beyond the cage of the body, and all they ever know of the Spirit World will be their own tiny flickering light of consciousness in a sea of darkness. They will only know barely the thoughts of their own mind, guided mostly by instinct, habit, and tradition. They will never really develop their Will, nor venture further into the Unseen Realms than dream and memory allow. But the magician knows more; he ventures beyond the confines of the body, he quests in his dreams, he works his Will upon the world. He may harness the power of the spirit and make it act on the material world. He may summon and speak with spirits, elementals, souls of the dead. There are many petty sorcerers and witches who learn by rote old charms and spells, and they too may sometimes dabble in the things of the Spirit and the Will, but only the higher paths seek to perfect the spirit, and transcend the material prison of the body and the world. Khorosi High Magic is one such path. There are others. But I must not bore you with a lesson in metaphysics. Rather, I will show you the Unseen. You have had glimpses; now you will venture across the threshold. Doctor Istorius, I wish to test the limits of Rogrim’s loss of memory. A simple ritual will suffice, if you are agreeable? We must needs only arrange the candles, and the chairs.”
MARK DEVLIN
Born in Australia to Irish parents, Mark Devlin spent most of his childhood in Ireland, with occasional spells in the United States. As a child, he was obsessed with fantasy literature and roleplaying games, but kicked the habit in his mid-teens, when he realised that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and being a Dungeon Master, were mutually exclusive. He would still read The Earthsea Trilogy at least once a year, but he didn’t talk about it. After studying English and Philosophy at University College Cork, he became a secondary school teacher in an all-girls Catholic school and started a theatre company. When his nerves couldn’t take it anymore, he applied for a position as a lecteur in English literature at Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes. One thing led to another, and he ended up getting sucked in by academia again. Initial enthusiasm gave way to diffidence and procrastination, and he defended his very pedestrian thesis in 2015, after spending five years researching irrelevant and esoteric topics in the dark corners of the internet and furtively reading RPG forums, and one year desperately typing the thing that he ended up calling his dissertation.
Eventually, he gave up pretending and started writing a fantasy novel. He very much enjoys hiking and camping, and communing with Nature. He lives in Montmartre with his wife and two children. He works as a Passeur, a Guide and Translator, a Smuggler across borders of people, ideas, culture.
