A Wizard of the Old School

by Chris Willrich

Last time we saw Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, it was in “Penultima Thule” (Aug. 2006) as we read of their efforts to dispose of the cursed book, Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow.
After that story—in which the wizard Krumwheezle plays a small but important role—Mr. Willrich started thinking more about the old mage. And he found the wizard’s story was worth telling. We think you’ll enjoy reading it. (By the way, as an experiment, we’re reprinting one of the Gaunt and Bone stories on our Website this month. If you like it, tell your friends.)

* * * *

In a time when Fable passed its torch to History, when the old gods slept under hillsides or gravestones, and banking more than blades sealed countries’ fates, two well-mannered rogues called upon a wizard of the Old School.

This wizard had known ne’er-do-wells of many kinds: Spiral Sea corsairs, lastborn Swanisle nobles, pugilists from Amberhorn’s alleys. He nodded at their wants—eversharp cutlasses, say, or toxic caviar, or fingerbones of adamantine—and gave them what they needed: a book on meditation, or a trade map to the Spicelands, or a letter of introduction to a Blacksmiths’ Guild.

For his forbearance folk ceased calling him Krumwheezle of the Old School, and named him the petty-mage of Scuttlesand, after the dilapidated fishing village he’d guarded these sixty years. They said his power had dried like his wrinkled hide, frozen like his joints, and few rogues, adventurers, or kings called at his door. Mostly he served his villagers with a cup of tea and a respectful ear, or sometimes a small adjustment in the weather, or a cunningly contrived wooden toy.

Krumwheezle was not without pride, however. Sometimes he straightened himself before his magic mirror (without waking the poor cracked thing) and wondered where the lean wisp of an apprentice had gone, that rangy pale customer crowned with wild dark hair, graced with quick frosty eyes. Who was this pudgy master with the scraggly salt beard, the leathery face, the permanent stoop? He’d never been handsome, really, but always he’d envisioned his grayer self framed by a court wizard’s finery, marked by a gaze weighty with the dooms of empires. Instead he bore a fisherman’s sweater and laugh-lines from generations of children’s birthday parties. At times he missed the old visitors from the mighty cities and storied lands. And to anyone who still listened, he styled himself Krumwheezle of the Old School.

That was how he introduced himself to the wayfarers with the intriguingly sinister names Gaunt and Bone.

* * * *

They made a striking couple—for couple they surely were, though they made no mention of it, nor showed affection at first.

Persimmon Gaunt was not quite so grim as her surname implied; her frame was sturdy and a faint smile warmed a pale face beneath auburn hair. Imago Bone was better dubbed, a tall, wiry sort with hard eyes and fidgety, slender hands. They did not seem so disreputable as their introduction claimed—We are thieves, honored wizard, but mean no harm to you or your furnishings—though Krumwheezle noted that Gaunt was tattooed with a rose-and-spiderweb motif, and that Bone bore a pair of facial scars, one from blade, one from flame.

They walked politely enough behind Krumwheezle to the solarium, and were discreet in sizing up the Empress Nayne-era suits of armor, the Palmarian astrolabe-chandelier, and the Mirabad red carpet with the one less-than-obvious flaw. The wizard could warm to thieves who used the door knocker and wiped their feet before entering. But there was something about the pair that aroused his unease. He hoped he could place it.

They reached the solarium, and the gasps behind him were satisfying.

Krumwheezle affected no outward displays of power save one. His tower was an ordinary, moss-covered, three-story affair jutting from a lip of rock overhanging the foam of the Spiral Sea, and it boasted no golem doormen, no demonlocks, no omnidirectional lightning rods.

Its only magical conceit was that it extended downward from the bluff rather than upward, so that on stormy days the wavetops kissed its upper turrets, and saltwater speckled the glass dome of the solarium. Gaunt and Bone had entered through a tunnel in the coastal rock, one cunningly designed to loop about and ease visitors through the gravity reversal. The wizard smiled at the impact of the view. He’d built the sanctum in imitation of the Topless Tower of the Archmage, which hung in the great cavern of Ebontide. It had been too long since he’d had new visitors.

Krumwheezle served his guests Mirabad tea as the waves boomed and hissed overhead. While the three made halting chitchat, inverted seagulls bobbed against the blue like little clouds drifting before a stormbank.

“It is something of a disposal problem,” Persimmon Gaunt said at last. She focused on the waves overhead, as if uncomfortable with soft chairs and porcelain cups, but ever ready to appreciate wonders.

“Ah, hm,” Krumwheezle said, warming to Gaunt, but fearing what was coming. “Perhaps I am, well, guilty of false advertising. Though I style myself a wizard of the Old School, I am estranged from my colleagues and their noxious ways. To be blunt, I do not assassinate.”

“We know,” Imago Bone said. “It is not a person. It would be easier if it were.” By contrast with Gaunt, he lounged easily in his chair, having without visible result added five cups of tea and eight sweetcakes to his lanky frame. But he avoided looking up, as if magic disagreed with him. “It is an item of enchantment.”

Gaunt reached into the pack beside her, producing a tome. It was old, drab, and undecorated, yet when she placed it among the teacups, Krumwheezle’s neck tingled as if she’d unhooded a cobra.

Bone said, “We acquired it in a caper rife with supernatural acrimony. We wish to be rid of it.”

“In so many words,” Gaunt said, tapping a fingernail on the cover, “the book imposes fatal ill-fortune on anyone who reads it. So please don’t. Simply tell us how we might destroy it, and name your fee.”

Krumwheezle pulled out a rune-covered silver monocle upon a white gold chain.

He’d torn the crystal from the ocular socket of a cockatrice that had lost a staring contest with a Gorgon. He’d drenched it in the eye of a roc. Last, he’d ground it with stones from the darksome plains of the Man in the Moon’s stare.

A wizard peering through such a monocle could of course be just as deluded as one using ordinary vision. But there was far more information to be deluded by.

Krumwheezle could not help noticing, for example, that the man Bone had an ashen aura implying extreme age, despite his twentyish appearance. Flecks of bright passion stirred within the ash, like embers in a rekindled fire.

But Gaunt’s aura was something else again. It crackled with youth, as Krumwheezle would expect. But it too had its ashen quality, as if Gaunt’s spirit pined for the grave. Oddly, in her there seemed nothing unhealthy about this morbid streak, which merely enriched the generous glow of her being. Indeed, seen within her aura, Gaunt struck him with her profound beauty.

Where her aura neared the book, however, it dimmed. The book itself was shadowed, as though despite the ripples of sunlight that threaded the chamber, it were nighttime on that corner of Krumwheezle’s table. “Nasty aura you’ve got there,” he remarked, running his hand over the thing.

“Pray don’t open it,” Gaunt said quickly, before lifting her own hand.

Their fingers’ proximity and Gaunt’s concern gave Krumwheezle a guilty, giddy tingle. But he focused on the sensations rising from the book. It was as though hordes of invisibly tiny insects were gnawing new hives into his fingertips. He recalled a similar feeling once when he’d touched a flask full of noisome vitriol concocted by Sarcopia Vorre herself, long before she became Archmage. The memory had other associations, almost as dark. He frowned, looked the rogues over again. Yes, now that he was watching for it, he saw traces of the book’s aura spattered across Gaunt’s and Bone’s, like inkdrops in a kettle of tea. He put the monocle away. “A viral enchantment,” he muttered.

Then he leaned back in his wicker chair beneath the stuffed remains of his familiars, Graymilk, Croaksong, Squeakfellow, and Coalwing. He missed them; it had been long since any new ones had inquired at his door.

“It is a cacography, this book,” Krumwheezle said at last, unease and memory making him speak abruptly. “Forgive me—a term of Art.”

Gaunt was staring up through the solarium glass, as though avoiding sight of the book. “Cacography. I assume you don’t simply mean ‘badly written?’”

“That is the mundane meaning. But mundane ‘bad writing’ merely annoys. Magical cacographies corrupt and kill. They are full of tantalizing lore. Yet their ink is rife with contagion.” He thought of the books he’d studied under close supervision at the Old School, the Visible Sorcerer, made from an illusionist’s flesh ... or the Codex Marginalis, deranged notes scrawled by a necromancer across thirteen books of wholesome instruction ... or the Dictionary of Missing Magi, which somehow contained dread biographies of wizards who vanished while reading that selfsame work. “And,” he continued, “I have never seen one that dripped so with malice. Indeed, I suspect the creator exceeded expectations. Most authors of cacographies hope their work will be copied, to plague the world. But no one could survive the ordeal of transcribing this tome. How ever did you come by it?”

“The price of escaping a more immediate problem,” Gaunt said, and did not elaborate. “You say it’s growing in strength.”

“Over time the viral enchantment has evolved. It is learning how to damage its victims without killing them. You two, for instance.”

Imago Bone stirred at that. “Us?” he said.

“Your auras are tainted by the thing. You probably have been having your own sorts of ill luck.” He questioned them as to strange coincidences, the unexpected arrival of old enemies, the targeting of their inns by exotic horrors. He saw the look of recognition in their eyes. Then, not so gingerly, he asked about pregnancy.

Gaunt was annoyed, which pained Krumwheezle. But Bone answered frankly; Krumwheezle gave him that much. “No,” the thief said. “For many years my associates were angels of death. Long before I met Gaunt, it seemed such company had made me infertile.”

“Ah, that may be. But I suspect the book’s proximity would prevent children in any case. It’s begun to draw its noose around you.”

“So it’s trying to kill us?” Gaunt said. “Even though we’ve not read a word?”

Bone slapped his knee, startling Krumwheezle. The wizard lost track of what the thief was saying, preoccupied with the implications of the book. Oddly, his mind wandered back to his last night at the Old School, standing above poor trussed Gibberly with the sacrificial knife in hand ... and all at once teetering, not so much with the evil of what he’d intended, but the sheer pathetic waste.

“That’s what comes of charity!” the thief was saying.

Krumwheezle was vexed at his own lapse in focus, but annoyed with the thief’s babbling as well. “It is worse than that, Imago Bone,” Krumwheezle said, wanting to shock him into silence. “This book may kill us all.”

That stole their attention. He explained how the contagion of ill luck could spread far and wide, slowly destroying more and more of the world. And how this exposed the fragility in creation’s fabric.

“The more lives snuffed by the book, the more meaning dims. Indeed, our world—a flat Earth where the nearer stars are luminescent dragon eggs, the farther ones divine campfires—cannot exist without meaning and beauty.” He recalled discarding both dagger and career and stalking out of the Old School ... and how in his misery he still apprehended the thousands of brilliant pinpoints piercing the desert night. “Like as not we’ll vanish like a punctured soap bubble.”

“How long?” Bone asked.

“Centuries, perhaps. Or perhaps years. But that will be the ultimate result of your blasted book.”

He knew he was not up to the challenge of ending this threat. Indeed, all he knew who had both power and stamina—his colleagues of the Old School—he couldn’t trust. They would instead try to master the book, enslaving the world or hastening its doom. The dark, fierce eyes of Sarcopia blinked in his memory, unbidden.

You will have no legend, no songs, came her remembered voice. At the core of you lies nothing ... so any multiplication of your power will amount to the same. My consort must be a Something.

Gaunt was saying, “Master Krumwheezle? Is there a way to destroy it?”

He was jolted again from memory. This Gaunt, as fierce as Sarcopia, yet so different....

And here was the true bafflement about his visitors. This Gaunt was not really a rogue, but a kind and beautiful soul, seeking good for the world. A soul such as he’d tried to become since leaving the School.

And yet she orbited a conniving man, one with an undeserved span of days, older than Krumwheezle himself yet possessed of unnatural youth.

They looked at him expectantly. He rubbed his temple; such thoughts were unworthy.

“I fear this problem is beyond me. My training is classical, and the classical methods are out of reach. The subterranean candlewyrms ebb low in this age, and volcanoes burn cooler. The fires of the arkendrake Kindlekarn might suffice, but rumor puts him in the uttermost East, mating with the rain-aspected females of his kind. If two of the Levitating Lands collided, the book might be shredded between them; yet in these late days most are shattered, and who can predict the survivors’ motions? And if you can distill the Universal Solvent, you are better wizards than I ... or any now living.” He sighed. He might have added there were wizards they could consult, of greater skill. But he dared not. “You may consult my library if that will help.”

Gaunt bowed. “They say a wizard’s library is worth its weight in ambrosia.”

Krumwheezle smirked. “They do if they haven’t tasted any.”

Imago Bone was peering up at the waves. “What did you say about our world?”

The man’s slowness annoyed Krumwheezle. He sighed. “It is a world suffused in meaning, and thus vulnerable....”

“No. You said the Earth is flat. I always knew that. But I did not think.... Gaunt, can we not simply throw the book off the edge?”

She nodded. “Yes! Yes. It seems too obvious. But sometimes obvious solutions are best.”

Krumwheezle knew at once she was doomed, and that it was useless to dissuade her. How many other lovely young women had followed the wrong man off a cliff? Gaunt was only doing it more literally than most.

He thought this, but said only, “I will advise and equip you, but I will not accompany you. Forgive me.” He feared Gaunt detected too much pain in his voice, and it was suddenly important that she never guess his feelings. He summoned a tone more befitting a wizard. “But there is a price.”

“Oh?” Bone said.

“I would analyze your aura, Imago Bone. You are ... strangely prolonged.” Krumwheezle raised the monocle. “Hold still.”

Bone narrowed his eyes. “And what do you hope to gain from this?”

“What else?” Krumwheezle said. “Extension of my own life.”

But though they agreed, they did not perceive that the wizard of the Old School spent more time surreptitiously studying Gaunt than looking directly at Bone.

Whether reality unraveled or Krumwheezle’s body gave out, either way his world would end sooner than not. He meant to grasp a memory of beauty until that day.

* * * *

In a time when Myth passed its torch to Fable, when the sun rose in the south and set in the north, a band of wizards raised the New School. They were not like the wizards of Krumwheezle’s time, cloaked, bespectacled, surrounded by tomes. These were men in animal skins as fierce as warriors, who bound the souls of their enemies in fingerbones, who carried their power in song. Their chants split wind and stone, and screeching gales lofted three dozen natural pillars to a silent grotto in the desert. At the heart of their stone circle they raised a Headstone from the Earth’s secret depths. They drew lots and with their gnarled staves beat the brains of the loser into the massive rock. They did this for generations, and the Headstone became wise.

After the gods at the world’s either end vied for the sun and its course was changed, after mortal heroes supplanted demigods and Fable raised its torch high, the School was still there, though no longer New. Its place in the desert was still hot and quiet, and the sun still passed directly overhead, though by a different road. The Headstone still presided over students, now white-robed men with tall hats and crooked knives. They learned the lore of wind and ghosts and stars, and sacrificed but one human being a month, and believed themselves civilized.

When Krumwheezle came, brash and ambitious, to what was now the Old School, the pillars were worn and the Headstone retained a mere impression of eyes, nose, and grimace, and cloaks and codices were the equipment of the day. The students learned many mysteries, how to capture shadows and domesticate demons, how to snuff the bright fire behind a man’s eyes. They only sacrificed one person a year in secret conclave, and believed themselves refined.

And in the seventh year of his instruction, the first among the graduating class dropped the appointed knife unstained and fled the jeers of the woman he loved—she who was second among the class, she who raised the blade in Krumwheezle’s stead.

* * * *

Six months passed after Gaunt and Bone’s interview. These were months in which Krumwheezle took to energetic seaside walks and expeditions against certain monsters which might threaten Scuttlesand should they wander west a hundred miles. He studied various theoretical matters, including, it should be said, viral enchantments. On three separate occasions he believed he’d ceased obsessing over Persimmon Gaunt.

The day after the third such occasion she and Bone returned.

“We require your help,” Gaunt said.

“Come in, come in,” Krumwheezle said. He hadn’t believed he would see the rogues again. His struggle to forget the woman was forgotten in her aroma of sweat and sea-salt, in her flash of auburn hair.

Krumwheezle brought them to the solarium and tried to mask his impatience as he finished repairing a magical toy. Eight-year-old Molly Mucklecomb stood with sober intensity beside a table bearing a three-legged wooden horse. Krumwheezle had already reknit the basic enchantment. All that was left was replacing the fourth leg and incanting the sealing spell. He did so carefully, to all appearances an avuncular figure. No one could suspect he imagined tossing Molly and horse into the sea. The girl was a champion swimmer, after all.

“Be a good horse,” he whispered in the tongue of lost Nobeca, and the figurine reared and gave a reedy whinny.

“Thank you for fixing my toy,” said the girl in wonder.

“That’s fine, Molly. You and Thunderwidget know the way out.”

“You look well, Master Krumwheezle,” Gaunt said. She appeared kinder and shapelier than before.

“I go walking more.” Krumwheezle fetched tea and cakes.

Above the solarium, the salmon prepared for their journey upriver to spawn. Silver arcs descended and rose with a splash.

“I hope scanning my aura,” Bone said, “was helpful to you.” He seemed to Krumwheezle leaner and more cloying.

“Mm,” Krumwheezle said. “So. Were you successful?”

They nodded in silence, in their reticence more like monks than thieves.

“You have done,” he admitted, “what I thought impossible. It may be I owe you what years remain to me. How might an old man help you?”

“Of those magic-workers who haven’t sent us against improbable odds, smothered us with enchanted scrolls, or tried to harvest our skeletons,” Bone said, “you are the best. So we would have your advice on something.” Where Bone’s voice had been blunt, it now became skulking and circumspect. “We, ah, have considered a new direction in our lives, and....”

Gaunt squeezed Bone’s shoulder. “Master Krumwheezle,” she said, “you recall our last interview?”

“It was memorable.”

“The book does make an impression,” Gaunt said. “Or made, rather. Leaving aside the particulars, the thing’s passing was dramatic.”

“Magical effects were spendthrift at that moment,” Bone said. “We saw many strange things—including visions.”

There was a pause. Then their voices came in a rush, one overwashing the other, as if these rugged wanderers were both adolescents.

“I saw a boy with my face and Bone’s eyes,” Gaunt said, “in the role of cruel monarch.”

“I saw a girl with Gaunt’s eyes and my face,” Bone said, “riding beside the ocean like a happy maniac.”

“We do not understand the visions’ meaning, and fear to know,” Gaunt concluded. “But we must know.”

Krumwheezle let out a short, directed breath. He clasped together his hands.

“Since we last spoke, have you, ah, conceived?”

They shook their heads.

Krumwheezle offered more tea. He was proud of his outward composure, even as a petty part of him enjoyed the likelihood of Bone’s infertility.

Stupid, stupid old man, he thought.

“So,” Krumwheezle said, “though the book is gone, it is possible Bone remains tainted. But then how to explain the visions of children? Perhaps you both merely saw what you hoped.”

“Yet why,” Gaunt said, “would I hope for a child imperious and cruel?”

That did trouble Krumwheezle. The rogues’ visions had a mix of the bright and the dark, as life did. Mere hopes and fears did not as a rule have such texture. His daydreams about Gaunt, for example, held no shadows at all.

“I must think about this,” he said.

* * * *

Krumwheezle’s body curled like a question mark as the moon descended from the ocean and cast a silvery glaze over the rumpled sheets of his cot. He watched it drop into the night sky, obscuring the constellations and their portents. The stars hadn’t helped him anyway. Nor had tea leaves, nor consultation of the Book of Jagged Lines, nor the divinatory guts of his salmon dinner. Dreams had not come, but he expected no better from them.

A calm observer may divine a person’s best choice of action, they had taught him at the Old School. But a divided heart cannot divine for itself. He was simply too close to the problem to see clearly. For he was smitten.

Krumwheezle rose, and knowing it was a foolish act, lit his pipe.

It was not the smoke he feared, for all that younger wizards claimed it was bad for your health. Wizards were a hardy bunch, and besides, Krumwheezle had learned a few things from Bone’s aura. No, it was the pipe itself, cut from a dragon’s brainpan and the wood of the World Ash, that was perilous.

When the tobacco from Turtle Island filled Krumwheezle’s nostrils—making all physical objects seem mere shells concealing a deeper reality—he puffed and waved the pipe. The smoke took the shape of a wide circle touching floor and ceiling. The view through the circle ceased presenting the bureau and armoire and revealed an onyx, inverted tower in a blue-lit cavern beneath the earth.

Then the view clouded and reclarified, and Krumwheezle beheld another bedchamber, this one with a vast canopied bed of teak, its vertices carved into snarling beasts. There were three slaves standing at attention, human, delven, and goblin, below an iron chandelier studded with candles in humanoid shape. Each candle was lit, each shuddering a bit. Through the portal of smoke, Krumwheezle heard thin moaning.

He swallowed hard and said, “Archmage. I claim the right of audience.”

A tall, raven-haired, snow-skinned woman approached in a silken robe loosely donned. She remained young and shapely, for she practiced arts Krumwheezle would not. Her walk conveyed two messages: that the robe could easily slide off, and that it never would do so, so long as he watched.

“You,” came that bright voice, “you claim your rights? You who never graduated?”

“We’ve been over this. Your predecessor agreed my perquisites—”

“Prattle, prattle, prattle.”

“The ceremony was a formality,” Krumwheezle snapped.

“Then why did you flee?”

“I had a sudden urge to travel.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You spurned me, Krumwheezle. No woman tolerates that.”

“Most women want jewelry and kisses, Sarcopia. Not blood.”

“The blood of a rival, spilled in honor of the School. Oh, after all this time, Krumwheezle, cease the sanctimony! Surely you understood the whispers of the faculty, those six graduations prior. Why it was so important not to graduate last.”

“Believe it or not,” Krumwheezle said, “no. I was a conniving, ambitious snot, and capable of murder. But of sacrificing a trussed-up classmate, even Gibberly? No. I was naive enough to interpret certain references metaphorically, until it was too late.”

“A wizard must be careful of metaphor. For we make our own realities. We forget that sometimes a dagger is just a dagger, not a symbol of the cunning mind.” She smiled. “Or of lower organs.”

He smiled back. “Given the nature of our towers, Dark Lady of Ebontide, technically those organs are higher.”

She laughed. “It doesn’t really matter if you’ve the right of audience. It’s diverting to fence with you in your decrepitude. What do you want, old man?”

He bit his lip, said, “I’ve been drafted as something of a family counselor.” He outlined the problem, leaving out his compromised feelings.

“Rumors reach me of these rogues,” Sarcopia said. “They are linked with disturbances all along the Isles and Spiral Sea, as well as the eastern deserts and the frozen north. You have dangerous clients, Krumwheezle.”

“I get little news in Scuttlesand. But I am not surprised. They have formidable auras.”

The Archmage cocked an eyebrow. “You lust for the woman.”

Krumwheezle flushed. “A fancy of my ‘decrepitude.’ No harm to anyone.”

“This is free advice, one Schoolmate to another. Be rid of Gaunt and Bone.”

“Any other advice?”

Sarcopia sighed. “To break their malady, you will need the power of a god.”

“The gods are dead. Or sleeping.”

“Then they’ll be less angry when you steal their power. Wait.” Sarcopia crinkled her lip and the human slave departed, returning with a familiar dagger, its gray-green blade the wavy shape of a snake.

“What are you doing with that?” Krumwheezle said.

“My Scruplegore? My valedictorian prize? I thought I might loan it to an old friend.”

Without warning she tossed the blade toward his viewpoint, muttering a phrase of drowned Nobeca. The smoke shimmered, and the knife emerged from the scene within, nearly slicing Krumwheezle before piercing his bedsheets.

“Your lost honor,” Sarcopia said. “It can be yours again, and it amuses me to help you. You want this Persimmon Gaunt? Then take her. You are a wizard. It is your due. More, the Scruplegore responds to the appetites of the wielder. Honor your hungers, and it will make you strong, vital—young.”

The dagger lurked in Krumwheezle’s awareness like a viper, but he forced his eyes to stay on Sarcopia. “There is no honor in that.”

“Oh? Do this thing, and I’ll see to it you’re an honorary graduate of the Old School.”

“Gaunt loves this thief.”

“Then discredit him, tempt him, or kill him. That should be child’s play to a skilled wizard. And you are skilled, Krumwheezle. You might have been Archmage. I am not too proud to say that.”

“But you are proud. Why are you doing this?”

“You pretend to such ethics, Krumwheezle. You spurned me for your ideals. If I’d lost you to another woman, I would have seen her turned to a pig and fed to your wedding party. But since I lost you to your conscience, it is that I would see destroyed. This audience is ended.”

The vision faded and dispersed. Krumwheezle turned, meaning to throw the dagger into the sea. But he hesitated, remembering sitting cross-legged in the desert hearing the Masters’ droning lectures ... and feeling the cool night air above him and Sarcopia below, upon the still-warm sands. Though the air tasted of sea-spray, his mouth was dry with smoke and desire. He stared at the empty bed, the blade upon it.

“I can throw you away tomorrow,” he said.

* * * *

“I believe your bodies are working fine,” he told them next afternoon beside the fireplace, whose flue lanced out the towertop then bent skyward in a U shape, beyond the gravity reversal. Out one window they could watch the smoke coiling down and skyward.

“Bone’s fertility,” Krumwheezle said, “does seem slightly impaired by his strange longevity. But that is not your true difficulty.”

He took another long, sharp sip of tea (he’d removed the leaves for fear of seeing the future) and needlessly poked the embers. “I told you months ago of the viral enchantment.”

“We are still cursed?” Bone said, pacing and glowering. “Though the book was destroyed?”

“It is a subtle malady,” Krumwheezle shot back, “acquired only because you carried the thing so long. This residual ill-luck can trouble you only on the level of the very small. One day, for example, it may spawn harmful cells.”

“I don’t see what prisons have to do with it,” the thief snapped.

Krumwheezle tried to keep the condescension from his voice. He failed. “A term of Art, Imago Bone. Your stuff and sinew are composed of invisibly tiny living components we call cells. If they grow in the wrong manner they can harm your body. But your more immediate problem is that the ill-luck is weakening your reproductive cells. Your seed, in other words, is failing to reach Gaunt’s eggs.”

Gaunt nodded, and asked, “What of my vision? The cruel and powerful child?”

“I am not certain,” Krumwheezle told her gently. “There’s much we don’t know about the development of traits. Much may be decided at the level of the very small. Here again, ill fortune may have its day. Even should you and Bone conceive, your offspring may prove unlucky for the world. I am sorry.”

Bone stared into the crackling fire.

“Strange,” he said. “When we sought to destroy the book, I didn’t so much mind risking life and limb. Yet this little hurt depresses me.”

Without another word, he slipped through the window looking out at the chimney smoke, and began climbing toward the sea.

“What!” Krumwheezle sputtered. “What? Does he mean suicide?”

“No,” Gaunt said, rising and patting the wizard’s hand. “He is an acrophiliac. This is his way of unknotting a troubled brow. It took him great restraint not to scale your sanctum last time. I, for my part, would inscribe stormy thoughts upon a wax tablet. Only to melt them by the fire, so that only tablet and I would know.”

Krumwheezle looked up from his hand, transfixed.

Gaunt said, “You’ve given us a diagnosis. Have you a treatment?”

Words rose to just behind his lips. There’s nothing to be done. Unless you conceive with a man other than Bone, your child may be a monster, if you have one at all.

“I did think of a possibility,” he answered at last. “But it is perilous.”

Gaunt smiled dimly. “Go on.”

“When gods still walked the West, they shared mortal passions, meddled in mortal lives. Sometimes they contrived tests to prove that one mortal or another was worthy of this boon or that. Some tests concerned love, marriage, childbirth.”

“I know such legends.”

“Many have a basis in truth. And in scattered lonely places, some tests remain, retaining a modicum of the gods’ power. And even a fraction of divine power might undo your small curse.”

Gaunt nodded. “When we tell Bone, he’ll want to be about it by sunset. So let’s determine which legend we’re hunting.”

They consulted Krumwheezle’s library, which wrapped about a tall spiral staircase. Krumwheezle liked to see his whole collection at a glance, and only the shaft afforded such a view. The tight quarters necessitated grouping first by size, so that atlases shouldered against microscope sketchbooks, demonologies crouched beside hymnals, and agitators’ pamphlets concealed arcane codebooks. Gaunt proved surprisingly adept in following Krumwheezle’s research, so much that he was glad of his cryptic indexing system. For the warmth of her body as they passed each other on the steps, and the bright eagerness of her mind as their voices echoed through the shaft, made his heart want to flutter up from his chest and peck out the ethical portions of his brain.

And his hand passed by a volume titled Midsummer Idylls and settled on one labeled Dooms of Dark and Frost.

* * * *

“Tell me again where we are going,” Bone asked, ducking below the self-motivated boom of the sailboat.

“Ages past,” Gaunt said, saving Krumwheezle the pain of meeting the thief’s quick, darting eyes, “Arthane Stormeye, cold king of gods, favored an icy land of tall pines and hard people. And he laid many boons and dooms upon that folk. One such was a circle of fire about a castle called Nith. Arthane declared whatever man won through the fire to Nith was of the bravest heart, and would found a line generous and true:

Arthane decreed that as desire
Encircles love with hearts’ own fire,
That Castle Nith be warded same:
With ring of purifying flame
And only breeched by heart that burns
With lustier light. Such bravery earns:
Golden loot, storied song,
Betrothal bright, and children strong.”

She frowned a little. “That at least is the gist I got from the book. The text is fragmentary, and my command of Old Morken is shaky.”

“Yours is sounder than mine,” Krumwheezle lied, reclining. He sat with lit pipe by the rudder, and whenever he blew smoke in a new direction, the boat nosed to follow. The sail would flap like the wingbeats of angry birds, then swell full in the wizardly wind. “I trust your translation, and my divinations suggest Castle Nith still exists. Should this fire still burn, braving it will sear away the curse.”

“I am sorry,” Gaunt said, “we did not find a solution less inflammatory.”

Bone waved her off. “This is all commonplace enough—dooms, quests, the promising bit about loot.” He regarded the turquoise, white-frilled waves. “I simply want to know why we’ve sailed south to seek a legend of the cold lands.”

“This was indeed a long age ago,” Krumwheezle said, jabbing his pipe at the dazzling disc overhead. “In those days the sun rose in the south and set in the north. What we now call the torrid zone was only warm far east of here, where the sun crossed the inland desert.” He inhaled on the pipe-stem, smoke wreathing his weathered face. “Only in that place are old things unchanged.”

They threaded the three vast islands that defined the Spiral Sea, sailing down the Scythe, on past the Hook, out around the Claw. The water grew a richer blue, and shone like a noonday sky where it encircled land. Bird calls became numerous and strange. Rain was intermittent—but when it fell it was a deluge. The travelers dried quickly, and the scent of brine and sweat was faintly intoxicating. The poet and the thief seemed to find it so at any rate, and as the days grew warmer they shed more clothing, so as to better enjoy the dousing and drying—and laughing and touching. They were not so shy around Krumwheezle now.

He, a student of the Algebra of Atmospheres, was obliged to wear a Scuttlesand sweater and heavy pants, for a condition of weather modification was to be inappropriately dressed, and he needed to stoke the wind. He felt pickled in perspiration. He masked his discomfort (and the sight and smell of Persimmon Gaunt) with heavier shrouds of pipe-smoke.

These waters hid pirate havens, and twice they saw ships flying the Four Skulls—one for each of the sentient mortal-kind of the West, a big drake-skull at left and little skulls of human, goblin, and delvenfolk in a triangle to the right. But the travelers made a show of smiling and waving while their little ship steered itself; and these corsairs who boasted no fear of arkendrakes declined to follow a wizard.

Two hundred miles past the Claw, they found an uninhabited archipelago. Little mangrove-choked islands marked the watery graves of storm-crowned mountains. And one humid night, with the bright distant stars hanging over an encircling mist like the clouds of World’s Rim (though that was far away) they saw, like a little orange lamp in the western fog, the fires of Nith.

“I am prepared,” Bone said.

* * * *

And indeed, after they beached on the little key’s white sands next afternoon, Bone laid out an intriguing array of cables, pulleys, cloaks, ointments, and one extensible vaulting pole.

“And your heart?” Krumwheezle asked. “This sort of affair tests courage, not physics.”

“There is the courage to die,” Bone said. “If that kind is required, I will fail. I have slipped death for many a year.” He looked at Gaunt. “But there is also the courage to live. To be oneself, and free. If that is the measure of courage, none is braver.”

Krumwheezle looked away, and his cheeks burned beneath his beard. Almost he told Bone not to go. But he chanced to see the reflection of Persimmon Gaunt, blurry auburn crown and white shift clarifying down to warm shapely legs descending to the sea’s kiss. He felt the curving dagger at his side.

“I am sure you will succeed,” he said.

They saw no castle amid the palms and mangroves that jabbed green blades at a cloudless sky. But at dusk, orange flickers danced behind branches at the island’s crown, perhaps two hundred feet above the beach. It burned so bright it seemed strange the foliage had not been consumed long ago. They smelled no smoke, just the warm breath of the sea.

In the morning Bone had his bearings and wished them farewell.

Gaunt took his arm, then turned to Krumwheezle. “I’ve traveled many dark roads beside him. This concerns me as well. You’re certain he must go alone?”

The wizard nodded, glad he did not have to lie. “Such tests—sphinx riddles, labyrinth threads—they are for individuals, ever since one man stole the secret of fire. And the legend does specify a man. Bone must go alone.”

Bone touched her chin. “I spent most of my life alone. A day is not too long, to seal a future with you.”

“You needn’t do this for me.”

“You know that I do.”

Krumwheezle looked skyward. When he lowered his head, Bone was ascending into the brush, following a dry streambed, hacking now and then with a machete. Birds of bright white and cool black spilled upward at the crunching of boots, the whacking of the blade. The birds did not appear to be seeking Bone’s flesh, Krumwheezle thought with relief. The peril on this island was localized. Bone would meet his fate at its heart.

Gaunt turned to the wizard. Krumwheezle prepared his words of comfort.

“Show me his progress,” Gaunt said.

“Eh?”

“You are a wizard. You’ve spoken of divinatory gifts. You can show me his progress, can you not?” She patted a dagger, as if indifferently.

It seemed to Krumwheezle it would be risky to lie.

“I might,” he said.

* * * *

Through the circle of pipe-smoke they watched Imago Bone.

The thief did not reach the summit until late afternoon. Honed by second-story windows and trap-laden tombs, Bone’s body clearly rebelled at tropical bushwhacking. Once he tumbled into a natural well, and came up gasping, clutching a severed crustacean claw big as his forearm; he scrambled up almost as fast as he’d dropped. Another time he stopped to pant and noticed a ten-foot brown snake curling around his leg. He leapt to a tree branch, and yelped as the branch snapped. Fortunately, snake and man fled opposite ways.

At last Bone saw fire.

He entered a rocky clearing. Here a cracked stone wall about twenty feet high inscribed a twice-broken circle containing a gray tower shattered at the level of any second-story windows.

Bone (and his watchers) could not discern the ruin’s interior, spotting only some blue-fringed, finger-length lizards darting to and fro.

But the surprise was seeing the ruin in the first place. All had expected Arthane Stormeye’s wall of fire to billow higher than a stallion’s leap.

Yet the dead god’s inferno had crackled many an age. Despite its searing glare, it now rose no taller than Imago Bone’s knee.

Bone looked one way, then the other. He shrugged, and stepped over.

The flame nicked his boot, and he yelped, extinguishing it with rapid swats.

The circle of fire vanished. The ordeal was over.

* * * *

Beside Krumwheezle, Persimmon Gaunt watched Bone sigh and stretch as if shedding some unseen burden. And Gaunt in turn released her breath and reached one hand toward the sun, as if freed of a cage.

Krumwheezle’s mouth hung open, as if it yearned to disavow the wizard’s skull.

“Oh, Krumwheezle,” Gaunt said, in a tone he’d heard only in daydreams. “I feel as though a stone’s vanished from my belly. I feel I could soar to the hilltop. Thank you, thank you.”

“Well, ah, hm.”

“You are the first magic-worker who has really been kind to us. We will never forget you.”

She ran recklessly up the dry streambed.

“Wait!” he called. “You should not.... “But she was gone.

We will never forget you.

“Wicked, wicked Krumwheezle,” he muttered.

Bone had not perished in the flame, nor even been disfigured. But the flame was only half the trap Krumwheezle had set. If the ordeal didn’t defeat the thief, the reward would.

* * * *

Krumwheezle urged himself to ascend the hill, using the exotic arts that might vault him there in a few jumps. He’d want to be on hand to wield the Scruplegore....

Act now, wizard of the Old School. Don’t be the weakling Sarcopia thinks you.

But no, he needed to be there to abort his vile plan....

It’s not too late, old man, to be who Scuttlesand and little Molly Mucklecomb and lovely Persimmon Gaunt believe you to be. But in a few minutes it will.

The twin thoughts canceled, and he kept his feet firmly against the earth.

He watched through the circle of pipe-smoke as Bone ceased dancing and skipping and took a second look at the tower. There was no need to proceed ... but what thief could resist a quick reconnaissance?

Bone slipped through a gap in the perimeter wall, noted the yawning tower doorway, then climbed the exterior. He reached the shattered towertop and peered down.

Below lay a treasure beyond all coins and jewels.

A pale young woman with long golden hair slept upon a bed of roses. Rubble lay all about, yet none had crushed, cut, or nicked her. She looked utterly at peace, for all that she wore chainmail, with a polished sword at her side and a red-painted wooden roundshield upon her impressive chest.

Armor, roses, and woman should long ago have become rust, mulch, and bones. But the enchantment of old Arthane had remained strongest here, keeping the maiden preserved even as the warding fire dwindled.

This living alloy of strength and beauty stole the thief’s silence. “My,” he said.

The woman’s eyelids fluttered open. She looked upon Imago Bone.

He ducked.

Bone could not understand the words she cried then, but Krumwheezle, listening through his divination, knew his Old Morken.

“My love!”

Bone scrambled down the tower in a clatter of stone shards and dust. Sneezing, he hustled for the outer wall.

“My love, why do you flee?” The shield-maiden had risen and fled the tower the easy way. Though unsteady on her feet she strode on in rapt amazement. Gestures that might have seemed imploring in other circumstances became menacing, with sword and shield for emphasis.

“I wasn’t stealing your gear!” Bone cried over his shoulder in modern Roil. “I’m no warrior! Go back to sleep!”

“I do not understand you!” the woman shouted. “You broke my curse. You are the man of bold heart. Why do you run?” She stopped then. For she beheld the broken wall, the bright emerald foliage, the clear cerulean sky. So too, Krumwheezle thought, she must feel the tropical heat within her armor, hear the chatter of unfamiliar birds. “What place is this? What has happened? This is not my home.”

Bone paused at the clearing’s edge, not understanding but moved by her obvious pain.

He turned back, held up his hands. “Ah ... Arthane....”

“Yes! Arthane! His will put me here. Did the god send you?”

“Ah, Arthane, is, ah.... “Bone sighed, then mimed the motions of gasping, tottering in circles, and falling dead.

“My love!” The shield-maiden sprinted.

Bone squeaked and shot into the undergrowth, not noticing the tangle of cacti directly in his path. He stumbled and howled.

The woman yanked him off the spines, flung him to the ground, kissed him.

“That is for rescuing me,” she said, as Bone stared upward, short on speech and breath. “And this is for frightening me.” She backhanded him across the face.

Krumwheezle’s view, predicated upon Bone’s consciousness, became mere smoke.

“Wicked, wicked wizard of the Old School,” he muttered. He did not move, either to rescue Bone or to seal Bone’s fate. He lit his pipe. The flavor was bitter. He breathed out smoke, regarded Gaunt’s ascent.

* * * *

Gaunt moved fast as she could, and that cost her time. Once she lost Bone’s path. Once she brandished her machete at an outsized snake. Once she tumbled down a slope, coughing up dust and dry twigs. The missteps cooled her fervor. When she finally approached Castle Nith it was with deliberate pace and a composed if bloodied visage.

Bone was nowhere to be seen.

Gaunt crept to the broken wall. Suddenly a blonde woman in chainmail flashed into the sun. She waved a shining blade as though it were an integral extension of her powerful arm.

“Name yourself,” the warrior demanded.

Gaunt would recognize Old Morken, Krumwheezle knew, but be uncertain in speaking it.

“Answer!”

“Ah, Gaunt. Who are you?”

“I am Nith, Ah-Gaunt. This is my keep.”

Gaunt frowned.

“Why do you disturb us?” demanded Nith.

Gaunt mulled that over. “Us?” she wondered aloud. “Is Bone with her?” She shook her head, muttered, “I’m a fool. It was not ‘Castle Nith,’ but ‘Castle of Nith.... ‘“

“I do not understand your words,” Nith said. “But I do not like their sound. Begone, woman of these late days! I must care for my love.”

Gaunt brought her hands together, touched them to her nose, breathed out. She bit her lip. “His ... sister am I,” she said finally.

(The ruse might work, Krumwheezle thought. Although Gaunt was a thick-boned, pale daughter of Swanisle, and Bone a wiry, darker son of the Spiral Sea, the wizard had observed that Gaunt’s skin was pleasantly sun-browned. With less pleasure he had noted that Gaunt and Bone often mirrored each other’s expressions.)

After a moment, Nith lowered but did not sheathe her sword. “Come then, Ah-Gaunt. But if you prove false, or steal my love away, I will cut out your heart.”

Gaunt nodded and entered the dark ruin.

There Bone lay unconscious upon the slab of roses. A purple bruise filled half his face. The other half bled from dozens of tiny punctures. Gaunt knelt beside him, took out her flask, poured water over the welts. She gripped his arm. “Bone. Imago. You must wake.”

He groaned, and murmured, “Persimmon ... An astonishing dream I had. I was a barbarian’s love slave....”

“At last,” said Nith, and scooped him into an embrace.

“That would be the one,” Bone managed, before being smothered by Nith’s hard kiss.

“Enjoying yourself?” Gaunt asked.

“Only...” Bone said, coming up for air, “in an academic sort of way.” His tone was light and cheerful. Then he added, “Help.”

“Let me think,” Gaunt said. “By the way, I am your sister.”

“A fine time to tell me. So you can speak to this, ah, fair creature?”

“A little.”

Nith, clearly angry at being excluded, set Bone down gently and wheeled on Gaunt.

“You,” she said, “speak the tongue of free men.”

“A little.”

“Tell your brother that for mastering the flame, I am his.”

In Roil, Gaunt said, “Say something pleasant, but not too affectionate.”

“You have nice eyes,” Bone told Nith.

Gaunt said, “He says, how came you here?”

For a time Nith’s proud face looked shrunken. Her eyes peered through her tangled hair like those of a beast in a cave, waiting for the rain to stop.

“It was Arthane Stormeye who cursed me. I was a shield-maid, proud and powerful, heir to this land. I declared no man should have me, save he who loved best and bravest.” She smacked fist against stones. “Stormeye put my boast to the test. He cast me into endless sleep.” She stared out through a jagged crack. Sunlight seeped in like yolk through an eggshell. “Now all the world’s changed. How long have I slept? The folk of this age are strange.” She looked at Gaunt, then at Bone. “But it matters not. All my sorrow is repaid. Strange or not, the bravest heart is here.”

“I did not follow all that,” Gaunt said to Bone (though Krumwheezle, observing, understood all.) “It seems our wizard was not wholly astute. Nor I. The true threat was the keep’s inhabitant, not the surrounding flame.”

“You wouldn’t say that, had you seen the flame,” Bone said, still training his smile upon Nith.

She patted his shoulder. “I did see it, Bone.”

“What does he say,” demanded Nith.

“He thanks you for your tale, but now he must rest.” Gaunt added, “Look tired,” to Bone.

“That is not hard,” said Bone, yawning, stretching, and settling back.

Nith thumped the stone with her fist, stood, and stalked out of the tower. From time to time she could be glimpsed through the gaps in the walls, pacing the ruin.

“She does not seem so dangerous,” Bone said.

“That is because you are a man,” Gaunt said.

Nith stormed back into the tower, hand on her sword hilt. “Ah-Gaunt,” she snapped. “Come.”

Bone began to look alarmed, tried to rise. But Gaunt pushed him back down. “I will handle this.”

“Surely she’ll be reasonable,” Bone said, rubbing his bruised cheek.

Gaunt smiled. “When she discovers you are not her promised lover, she will take that oversized letter-opener and decapitate us both.”

Bone thought about that. “What if I am her promised lover?”

Gaunt stared at him, shook her head in disgust, walked away.

“No, I mean that in a technical sense! Having braved the flame. Gaunt!”

Gaunt waved him off and rejoined Nith. The two paced the black ribbon where the flame once billowed.

“Am I not fair?” Nith demanded.

“Excuse me?” Gaunt said in Roil. In Old Morken: “What?”

“He fled from me. Now he feigns sleep—I am a warrior, I know the look. Am I so foul? Men once called me beautiful and strong.” Nith’s gaze grew distant. “But the world has changed. Perhaps I have as well. Tell me, does a village yet stand below in the valley? Do the clanhouses rear bright with their dragon-carvings and do girls scatter alpine flowers through their hair? Do raiders launch from the sparkling fjord at left, and mountainfolk ski the shining slopes at right? Does the mead splash golden and sweet? Do skalds sing the sagas of beauty and woe? Or is all that is left ... a crumbled keep in a noxious wood ... and a rescuer who’ll have none of Nith?”

Gaunt could only shake her head.

(And whether in confusion or pity, the watching Krumwheezle could not know.)

But Nith had no patience left. The distant look went hot. “Answer!”

Gaunt struggled to find words. “Time ... ends ... all.”

“Is it my lot to die alone, last of all my kind? Answer!” Nith drew her sword with a smooth arm and a metallic ting. She let it catch the tropical sun. “How will he answer?”

“Krumwheezle,” Gaunt muttered. “We need you.”

“I do not understand you,” Nith said. “But I suspect now that you and he mock me. Whoever you are, I will not be mocked. He will be mine, or he will die. I have waited too long.”

* * * *

This was what you wanted, old wizard.

Krumwheezle let the pipe-smoke drift away on the ocean breeze, taking the vision with it. All was now tranquil.

One way or another Bone would be out of the picture. The wizard would offer comfort, and in time would claim Gaunt’s heart. Whether Bone perished or took Nith’s hand was Bone’s affair. Fair choices for a thief.

This was what you wanted.

Krumwheezle looked down at the warm surf soaking and relinquishing his old bare ankles. When the water hissed back out, the skein of light crisscrossing the submerged sand expanded and steadied. He could see little finger-sized shadows milling among the roiling grains, then pale ghostly fish swam into vision, like tiny glass speartips. The surf foamed back in, and all became a brilliant blur.

We will never forget you.

It seemed to him then that all magic’s bright lore was as transient as the darting of the fish, for a brief span sharp and meaningful, then lost in froth and glare.

Thank you for fixing my toy.

Snarling in a way that would have terrified the children of his village, the petty-mage of Scuttlesand flung his pipe high up the slope. And when it clattered onto a patch of bramble, he was there, cursing and coughing. And when he flung it again and it tumbled amid cacti, he was there, howling and shaking his fist. And when he flung it again, and it splashed into the water of the natural well, he was there, retching and weeping. For he was a wizard of the Old School who had never graduated. For he was, after all, a common and unworthy man, and for all his dark and secret Art, could not cut the ordinariness from his guts.

* * * *

When Krumwheezle reached the summit, scalded from steam, stained with the broiled meat of the Thing from the well, his pipe lay twisted in the charred circle, Imago Bone danced along the jagged wall, and Persimmon Gaunt crouched outside with drawn bow.

“Master Krumwheezle!” Gaunt said with relief. “Our translation was lacking. I somehow mistook the genitive for the accusative. Nith’s Castle, not Castle Nith.”

“The eighth declension,” he panted, “is irregular with proper names. Warned you I was rusty.”

A warrior woman with blonde tresses leaned through a gap in the wall. She snarled in red-faced rage, ducked back inside.

A rock clove the air and narrowly missed Bone’s head.

“That would be Nith,” Gaunt said.

“Mm.”

Gaunt studied him, narrowed her eyes. “Have you an explanation for this?”

“I cannot explain the heart.”

He stepped forward. There came a bellow from beyond the perimeter, and Bone stopped his dance. Slipping through a gap Krumwheezle found the shield-maid scaling the wall, mail and all. Mountain-bred, Nith would not concede Bone the high ground.

Bone waved at Krumwheezle, and began descending the other side.

Before Bone vanished, Nith removed her shield and threw.

It grazed Bone’s skull. The thief fell.

Krumwheezle heard Gaunt’s shout of anger.

“Nith!” the wizard cried in Old Morken. “Cease.”

Nith turned, scowled, leapt to the ground. The impact sounded jarring, yet Nith seemed indifferent. She snarled, “And who are you?”

“I am a wizard ... of the School called New when your people built this keep. I can capture shadows and domesticate demons. I know how to snuff the bright fire behind the eyes. Rarely have I done such things, but I know how.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I am here because I tried to be something other than what I was—a failure.” He tapped the Scruplegore at his belt, felt an icy prickle. Then he raised his hands. “Be at peace, brave Nith. Gods and wizards have played cruel games with you. Your people are gone. Your rescuer is a vagabond with no great battles to his name. I sent him hither ... not to help you, but to help myself to his lover, Gaunt. He is not for you. Accept life as it is. Let go of glory. Quench your fire.”

“I—was—promised!” Nith’s face was scarlet. “The great heart would be mine, the god said. Who are you to deny me?”

“I am Krumwheezle.”

Nith charged him then, so Krumwheezle added, “I am wind.” And he was conscious of motion only, and of flowing away from his clothes, spreading and shifting through a dozen different cracks in the wall.

And of leaving the Scruplegore behind.

He sprawled into being upon the pebbly earth, naked. He’d had no time for nuances. And already he heard Nith sprinting through a gap.

Options were limited. Though Krumwheezle boasted of demon-calling and soul-snuffing, in truth he’d little experience with the deadlier arts. Rising, he invoked the Algebra of Atmospheres (the temperature of the ground is a, O ground—could it not be z?) But naked as he was, the only weather he was inappropriately dressed for had to be cold, and therefore highly unlikely.

He iced over a small patch of ground.

He fled as Nith stormed into the open. He was rewarded with the sound of a gasp and a thud.

Rounding the wall, Krumwheezle came upon Gaunt kneeling over Bone. The thief’s left leg twisted at an unhealthy angle.

Gaunt pulled twin daggers at Krumwheezle’s approach.

“She comes—” Krumwheezle gasped.

“This one’s for you,” Gaunt said, and threw.

The dagger sank into Krumwheezle’s left leg. At first he was astonished at how much steel could hurt. Then he simply hurt.

He screeched and toppled, staring at the hilt jutting up from his calf.

“Yes,” Gaunt said, “I heard your speech to Nith. I understood enough. All the time, you knew she was here.”

Krumwheezle could only moan, looking upon Gaunt’s rage.

Then Nith ran around the bend.

“Now you,” Gaunt said, and threw again.

The warrior-maid dodged, and lost an earlobe, not an eye.

She howled and bore down upon Gaunt. The poet rolled, but Nith clipped her right foot, and the sword rose again, bloody.

Then Imago Bone, who’d seemed too agonized to act, kicked savagely with his good leg.

Nith stumbled. Then she knelt and punched Bone in the face. He slumped unconscious.

But now Gaunt limped back into the fight. She grabbed Nith’s arm. The warrior maid dropped her sword.

Nith seized the grabbing arm and threw Gaunt against the ruin’s wall. Before Gaunt could regain her feet, Nith was upon her, kicking for the stomach. Gaunt fell and didn’t rise.

Through his pain, Krumwheezle noted there was clearly a reason Arthane Stormeye once favored this warrior. The rogues could never prevail, save perhaps at night, in a blind alley. But Krumwheezle did not flee. He crawled to the fallen sword. He whispered an incantation. “Be a good horse.”

The sword shot on its own accord into the undergrowth.

Nith saw it too late. In one breath she grabbed Krumwheezle by the throat. She reached down to her belt, and held up the Scruplegore.

“I believe this is yours,” she said. “Let us see what a wizard blade can do.”

“Nith,” came a weak voice.

Still gripping wizard and dagger, Nith wheeled and confronted Bone.

The thief, wheezing, seeping blood from the mouth, crawled toward her. He stopped, mustered a shadow of dignity. He patted his chest, reached out his hand. “I—am—yours,” he said to Nith. “Tell her, Krumwheezle.”

“I ... cannot...” Krumwheezle managed to gasp. “You ... are Gaunt’s.”

“You must. You know you must.”

Krumwheezle sputtered in Old Morken, “Nith ... he accepts.”

Nith blinked at Krumwheezle. He wondered if the words had penetrated her fury. Then she tossed him aside. She dropped the Scruplegore as well. It dove point-first into the ground by Krumwheezle’s nose, as if he lay upon moist earth and not dry, pebbly ground.

The blade flickered with unearthly green light. He felt a chill upon his face.

Nith knelt and embraced Bone. “I knew you would prove true,” she said, sounding less the hellion, more the frightened young woman far from home. “I knew. So much is lost. I am so alone. The world could not be so dark. It could not be so dark.”

“She believes you,” was all Krumwheezle managed.

“Well,” Bone sighed, shutting his eyes. “Here we are. We shall live here like happy warriors, eating roast snake. You’ll take care of Gaunt?”

The Scruplegore’s green fire steadied and brightened. Krumwheezle felt a cold, raw vitality seep into his limbs. He could sense ten years sliding away like a tattered old coat.

“I....”

He looked at Gaunt’s unconscious form: she who hated him. “I will,” he said, and staggered to his feet, watching the glowing dagger.

“I will take care of her.” He turned away from the Scruplegore and knelt beside the preoccupied Nith. He pulled out the monocle ground with moonstone. He set it over her right eye.

“What ... , “ she began, then slowly grasped the monocle for herself, like a child clutching a new toy.

“See,” he hissed.

And Nith saw.

“You,” she said to Bone, eyes wide. “You are no warrior. You are strange, and like me you have lived under an enchantment. There is both youth and death about you. You are valorous in your own way. But it is your way to sneak behind life’s troubles, not engage them! And you are not for me.”

She turned to the unconscious Gaunt. “You ... are a beautiful soul. With your words you plant flowers at the very gates of doom. This man suits you. I am sorry we fought.”

She lowered the monocle and stared at Krumwheezle. “You spoke true, wizard. All the world is cruelty and pain. I am alone, and must accept that. This man is not a monster. But neither is he for me.”

“You must see the rest,” Krumwheezle said, shame goading him. “You must see the evil in me.” He reached out and raised the monocle again to her eye.

“You....” She sucked in her breath. “There is bright and dark within you, cool blue light and wild red flames. You are as fierce and proud as anyone alive, yet to claim your full power you must become wicked. And that you will not do.” She lowered the monocle. “You are not my perfect rescuer either. You are ... much like me.”

This Krumwheezle had not expected.

Nor the gentle touch of her calloused hand.

Nor the tinkle of the Scruplegore snapping in two.

* * * *

“It is a small village,” he told her when they sighted Scuttlesand. “Their concerns are fish, children, fish, the eccentricities of their neighbors, and fish.”

“I will defend it to my last breath,” she said, her strong arm about him.

The four travelers limped into the solarium, though less painfully than they might, for Krumwheezle knew some healing Art. It was coming to seem odd, that he’d despised himself for not being able to rain fire from the sky, say, when he could mold an upside-down castle, mend broken limbs, make children laugh.

“My companions,” he said beneath the sparkling net of the wavetops, “you are welcome to stay until you feel fit to travel.” He watched Nith out of the corner of his eye, for he still couldn’t believe how she felt about him. But Nith merely watched the rogues, as if he could only be referring to them. She had learned enough Roil on the sailboat to follow his meaning. Her expression said, I will be here much longer than that.

Poet and thief shared a look.

“Do you want to stay?” Gaunt said. “You were injured worst of all.”

Bone’s eyes met Krumwheezle’s, and for a moment the wizard saw the flash of anger in them. But the thief looked away, smirked, swatted his leg. “Say it nice and loud, will you? The tale of Imago Bone, Nith’s practice dummy. No, I think we will be leaving. We’ve much to discuss, and my favorite place to discuss is a little seaside tavern outside Palmary, where the spirits burn like sweet success, and the women,” he looked at Gaunt and checked himself, “the women are welcome.”

“We do have much to discuss,” Gaunt said. “Let’s consider all that has happened, good and bad, as writing upon a wax tablet. A new day’s dawned, and the wax has melted. We take leave not as friends, but not as enemies either, Wizard of the Old School.”

Krumwheezle bowed. “I will not use that name anymore. I am the petty-mage of Scuttlesand. Use that title when you speak of me.”

And Krumwheezle looked out the solarium glass, far away to where the shards of an ancient dagger lay drowned above an inverted sea.

Thanks to Phoebe Harris for the Old Morken poem and asides on translation.