Many Words

Human culture had developed in a land of long winters and little daylight, and even when it found itself transported to a land of mild winters and sufficient daylight during the long servitude to the elves, it had not changed much. And so the story had kept its place of honor—how better to spend an evening of bitter cold than in rapt attention to some tale of better and probably warmer times?

A whole etiquette had grown around the act of sharing stories, and the aspirants had invoked one of its rules in asking him to go first. He was bound by politeness to come up with a story they could match, or even outdo by a bit. It was not an easy task. He was a full mage, and by its very nature that title meant that interesting things happened to him on a regular basis. He was a long time in thinking.

“Ah,” he said at length. “I have it. I was younger, then; younger than you are now, in fact. I was still living with my father…”

For as long as he could remember, he saw things other people didn’t. For almost as long he’d been lying about it, starting as soon as he saw that it wasn’t normal. His mother had been relieved. He remembered her saying to his father that she had enough to worry about, and the last thing she needed was a mad son.

“I already have six of them,” she had said, brows knitted together in an expression Eirik was all too familiar with. Looking back, he could hardly blame her. The last decade had seen the death of Svein III without an heir, a brief but bloody war with the dwarves, the fall of the old capital at Medlwyrmirholm, and most critically the discovery of just how bad magic was for the world. The human army, sapped of its strength by the dwarves and robbed of its mages by their habit of spectacularly and sometimes literally exploding when called upon in sufficient numbers, was reduced to fighting desperate holding actions against the hiisi tide, and Eirik’s brothers insisted on being there, either on the front lines with their father’s men, or a few miles away, herding frightened refugees northward toward safety.

And so Eirik found himself confined to his father’s estate; if the unthinkable happened and all his brothers were lost, someone would need to carry on when his father died. There was one room on the third floor with a window that faced the fjord, and Eirik would occasionally amuse himself by watching the sea churn, stirred to a frenzy by the wind. It was on one such day he first saw it. One moment he was staring thoughtfully out the window, and the next there was a figure beside him.

It was something straight from a sailor’s nightmares. Once, long ago, it had been a man. Flesh hung from it in tatters, ragged as though it had been sliced to pieces by a thousand tiny blades. Something slightly too thick to be water alone dripped from it and pooled at its feet. A length of thick rope was draped over its shoulders and wrapped twice around its neck, and all at once the stench of rot and the scent of seawater reached Eirik’s nose.

Eirik took a step backward, eyes wide, and stared as the thing’s head began to turn. He heard the sound of bone grinding on bone, and saw no more: he had spun away, and ran as fast as he could in the other direction. The rest of the day he jumped at every shadow and every movement he caught out of the corner of his eye. His mother looked on, worried, but what could he tell her?

He passed the night tossing and turning. He couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the thing. Eventually, though, exhaustion overtook him, and he fell into an uneasy sleep.

The next morning, he awoke suddenly, and has he sat bolt upright a single thought echoed in his mind: go back. See it again. He waited for it to fade, but rather than oblige him it grew in intensity until he could no longer resist. Dreading every step he took, he climbed to the third floor and returned to the window.

He passed the time staring out the window as usual and glancing apprehensively over his shoulders every so often. This time it was the scent he noticed first, same as before. He turned to face the apparition, tensed to run but standing his ground. He forced himself to examine it more closely, and saw that he had perhaps let his fright cloud his sight the day before.

The man—for surely it was, even if his skin was peeling and mottled, and his face a bit swollen, and even if he still smelled unmistakeably of death—leaned forward with a hungry look in his remaining eye.

The man opened his mouth, and there was a rattle. It sounded almost like words. He watched Eirik for a response, and when he saw only confusion he tried again. Eirik heard, “Remember me.”

They’d been on the road for half a tenday before the aspirants began to tire of each others’ exclusive company. It was a gray, shadowless day, and rain fell in sheets to muddy the road. The horses were having a difficult time with their footing, and Eirik pulled the coach over to give them a break. He led them down to the south back of the river Hrimdal for a drink, and when he returned the aspirants were sitting in the driver’s box. Eirik climbed up, sat between them, and urged the horses onward. The rain beat on the windows of the driver’s box, and for a while it was the only sound to be heard.

Brynjar eventually broke the silence. “So where are we?”

Eirik thought for a moment. “We took the fork onto the north road the day before last. We’re not making quite the pace I’d hoped for.” He tallied on his fingers. “About a hundred and fifty miles from the city. We should be coming to Höjdheim a little while after noon. I’m thinking to stop there for the day, if this rain doesn’t let up.”

The aspirants looked out the windows at the sodden landscape. The cart rattled over a small bridge of mossy stone, crossing one of the streams which fed the Hrimdal. A bit further from the road there would be fields and farms, but it was impossible to see that far through the rain. To the right, it was just possible to see the lazy curve of the river about half a mile downhill. In a few months it would be frozen again. Ahead, the road curved between two hills, to the sides of which clung a handful of tall, straight conifers, the only trees stubborn enough to grow this far north. The sights were not able to hold their interest for long.

After a minute or so Nissa quietly asked, “What’s Höjdheim like?”

Eirik lifted his shoulders. “It’s on a hill, of course, and it was fortified during the war with the giants. I’ve never been there before, or even along this part of the road, but my father is friends with the lord of the town and the nearer farms.”

“Your father?” asked Brynjar.

Eirik blinked. He’d thought it was common knowledge at the Guild. The nobility tended to see becoming a mage as settling for second place, and those of them that did so were usually known for it. “Eskil Sigvardsson der Kjellskraj of Mikelsfjord,” he said. “That’s not important, though. At the most, making an issue of it might gain us a softer bet for the night and oblige me to a man I don’t know.”

The aspirants accepted that at face value, and to head off the descending silence, Eirik asked, “You’ve been studying under Master Alvarsson for two or three years now, then?”

“Only six months,” Brynjar said. “We were Master Karlsson’s students, but the hiisi killed him last winter.”

“That’s a poor bit of luck,” Eirik said. “I didn’t know that he had students. Teaching mages don’t normally go to the front.” Aware that he sounded rather unfeeling, he self-consciously added, “He was a good man.”

“Master Alvarsson told us that we live in dangerous times, and that people we care about are going to die.” At Eirik’s look, Brynjar shifted uncomfortably and recited, “Letting it bother us is ignorance of the end that awaits us all, and weakness we can’t afford if we want to survive ourselves.”

Eirik sensed that the silence off his other shoulder had become a stony one. “Do you disagree?” he asked Nissa.

She gave him a fiery look. “If it doesn’t bother us, did we ever care at all?”

“Alvarsson actually talks like that, then?” Eirik asked, filing away the knowledge. Baltasar would be as glad as he ever got to hear it; that degree of fatalism was unhealthy. A few years ago, there had been some issues with death cults, which the Chieftains and the Council might have ignored as a problem which would likely fix itself, had the cults been less eager to spread their message. Eirik had been only peripherally involved, but he remembered that the handful of cultists who’d been taken alive had couched their views in such language. “Far be it from me,” he went on, “to stand between a master and his aspirants, but all the same I don’t think you should listen too closely to Alvarsson on such matters.”

It seemed to him that he’d just added weight to one half of a long-running argument, or so he imagined from Nissa’s triumphant expression. Brynjar didn’t seem ready to let it go, and having no desire to hear children arguing philosophy they didn’t fully understand, Eirik interrupted. “I’ll trade you a story,” he said. “Both of you together, I mean.”

They leaned forward and exchanged a look around him. “Will you go first?”

The sun rose to find Eirik out of bed and already making preparations to leave. He had decided to leave most of the finery he preferred behind in favor of travelling clothes—brown shirts and trousers, mostly, with an overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat for the inevitable summer storms. Tucked beneath all that at the bottom of the chest, there was a set of formal robes, which Eirik would wear into Jötunberg. You only got one chance to make a good first impression, after all.

The matter of the coach had been a bit more difficult. He would have liked to hire one, along with a driver, but despite his status as a mage and a nobleman’s son he did not have much in the way of personal wealth, and he had forgotten just how much the care and feeding of a team of horses and a driver cost. He’d ended up signing out one of the Guild’s coaches. It would cost him nothing but the hours of attention he’d have to spend driving it. Perhaps the aspirants could bear some of the burden, he mused.

He hoped they wouldn’t mind his tardiness. Keeping a stable in the High Quarter would have been too showy a display of wealth for the Aendemancers’ Guild; Eirik had to walk to the Riverfronts before driving the coach back, and after getting lost along the way, asking Book for directions, and begging the Guild’s stablemaster for horses instead of reindeer, it was already an hour past sunrise when he returned to the Guild hall.

Of course, he had earned the title of Master, and the aspirants hadn’t. It was entirely his prerogative to keep them waiting, but that was bad form, and he figured the trip would be marginally more tolerable if he was on their good side. He left the coach with a servant just inside the front gate, and walked a few minutes to an open field hemmed in by two of the Guild’s outbuildings. In an hour or so it would be busier, filled with masters watching their students train their bodies so to better train their minds; the Assembly was over, and the Guild was falling back into its usual routine.

Now, though, it was empty but for Eirik’s charges. They sat side-by-side on a trunk, chatting to pass the time. Nissa held her arms out to the sides, outlining shoulders much broader than her own, then waved a finger in scolding. She wore an expression of mock gravity, and although Eirik couldn’t hear her words, her voice was deeper. He wondered who was getting aped.

He might have asked, if they hadn’t sprang to attention the moment they saw him coming. Pushing aside the thought that it might have been him, he told them to get their things and come along. They hefted the trunk between them and followed Eirik back to the cart, where servants tied their luggage down next to Eirik’s. The aspirants got in, and Eirik clambered up to the driver’s box. He took the reins, and last look over his shoulder toward the Guild’s main hall and decidedly mixed feelings, steered the coach out onto the road.

It was half an hour to the edge of the High Quarter, and well past midday by the time they made it through the tangled messes that served the Riverfronts for roads. The soldiers at the gate gave the coach a brief inspection and waved Eirik through to the Low Quarter.

Once upon a time it had been a pleasant collection of small towns and villages, and then the war had flooded it with refugees. The towns had grown together, and then the city reached out to overtake them, and now, after the criminals had moved in, it was no longer quite so pleasant a place.

Eventually the buildings grew more widely spaced, and then the Low Quarter faded into the countryside. Eirik was glad to wave to the soldiers at the last guard tower and leave the city behind. A few miles beyond the outskirts there was an inn which would never go out of business. When Eirik pulled the coach into the yard, it was packed as usual with the daily traffic in and out of the city. He handed the reins to a groom and opened the coach’s door to find the aspirants packing away a tafl set, one of the ingenious sets with a system of pegs and holes to permit the game to be played while in motion.

Eirik had them get their things, and went inside to see what he could afford on the Guild’s miserly budget. It turned out to be three beds in a common room.

Later, he laid down, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep through the noises of a dozen other people. He sighed. It was going to be a long trip.