Dalshire: returning to Rufus

 “For someone who can’t see, you came out of your house pretty sharpish,” said Melrose.  Rufus, wearing something like an armoured bath-robe, was standing just outside his front door, waiting for Melrose.

“I’m blind, not stupid,” said Rufus waspishly.  “I’ve been keeping an eye on you.  In a manner of speaking.”

“So what was that desert place?” asked Melrose, a hint of warning creeping into his voice.

“Come inside, come inside,” said Rufus.  “Who knows who might be listening out here?”

Melrose started to look around himself with exaggerated care, and Rufus flailed a hand in his general direction, stepping forwards with tiny, uncertain steps until he caught hold of him.

“Inside,” he hissed.  “Now!”

“So what was the desert then?”

“A trap,” said Rufus.  “As I think you surmised.  It wasn’t real, it was just what the defences in the godhouse made you think until you broke them.  You did break them, right?”  He sounded slightly worried.

“Godhouse?” said Melrose, showing an aptitude for finding exactly the word that Rufus wished he’d ignore.

“Workhouse.  Workshop!”

Melrose looked around the room; nothing had changed since he was last in there except that the fire had gone out and the fireplace needed sweeping and new logs setting down.  He sat down in the chair by the fire and put his feet up on the footstool.

“There’s a lot you’re not telling me, isn’t there, Rufus?  But we’re friends, we go back a long way—“ Rufus harrumphed unhappily — “and it’s probably time you started telling me a little bit more about what I’ve just… liberated from this godhouse across the way.  Especially since I was told that people make their own gods here in Dalshire.”

“A device,” said Rufus sounding sulky.  “For sharpening your sword.  Like you asked for.”

“And what else does it do?”

“How should I know?  I just know that it can sharpen that demon-inhabited lump of steel that you like swinging around!  I can’t even find out what the command word to activate is.”

Melrose stretched his legs, pushing the footstool slightly forwards.  It scraped across the floor.

“Don’t move things!”

“Rufus,” said Melrose.  He was comfortable in the chair even though his cuirass was digging into his hips.  “Rufus, Rufus.  I don’t have to give you this Device, you know?  I can take the book, and the Device and go talk to other people.  It seems to me that you wouldn’t want that.”

“The books are protected,” said Rufus.  He waved a hand in the direction of the bookshelves.  “Did you think I didn’t listen to you and your impotent little threats last time?”

Melrose ignored him.  “The sword is pretty good at dealing with magic,” he said.  “I’m sure I’ll figure something out after I’m done wiping your blood off it.”

“Hah!  Like I haven’t got my own protections!” said Rufus, but there was a note of worry creeping into his voice now.  “These threats are pointless, Melrose.  Give me the damn Device and we can get to work on getting your sword sharpened.  I think I have a lead on someone who might be able to help.”

“No,” said Melrose.  The footstool slipped a little further forward and his feet thudded on the floor.  “I will give you, as a token of trust, this ring that I took from a lizardkin in the godhouse—“ he stressed the word “— and I will keep the Device until we have the command word.  I’m sure you can see how a little insurance on both our sides is a good idea.”

“Ring?” Rufus appeared momentarily distracted, but then he frowned.  “No, you can’t take the Device out of Dalshire.  That would be cata— that would be… uh, theft.”

“This ring,” said Melrose, pulling it off his finger and throwing it at Rufus’s head.  He was amused, and only slightly surprised to see it ping off his forehead and land on the floor with a rattle.  He had been sure that Rufus was lying about being blind.  Rufus knelt and started patting the floor near to where the ring had landed, and found it after about thirty seconds.

“While you’re looking at that,” said Melrose, then sniggered.  “I mean, while you’re investigating that, you can also think up a better excuse.  I’m pretty sure that taking the Device from the godhouse counts as theft, so taking it out of Dalshire is no worse.”

“Stop saying godhouse like that,” said Rufus, turning the ring between his fingers.  “It’s not that important, it’s just a name.”

“Sure,” said Melrose.  He sat up, wincing as the cuirass dug deeper into his hips and dragged the footstool back into place and put his feet back up on it.  “I’m going to keep on sitting here until you’ve got some real answers for me.”

Dalshire: the way back home

 He rested, though it was a watchful, nervous rest, constantly turning this way and that to see if anymore lizardkin were somehow sneaking up on him through a flat, featureless plain of sand.  When he felt too nervous to stay sitting and his legs were only aching faintly he got back up, the hairs on his arms standing up as he anticipated another attack at any moment, and took the time to search the corpses.  There was little of any interest on them — pockets containing scraps of paper with lizardkin script on them, though to Melrose they were just squiggles — and clean clothes (save where blood had stained them) that seemed well looked after but old.  They were startlingly soft to the touch and Melrose, whose own undergarment chafed even in good weather, felt a little jealous.  He had just about given up hope of finding anything when he remembered that the lizardkin woman had appeared to have something in her hands, so he checked them.  Her palms were a greenish colour and looked like they’d been painted, and after a moment of staring at them he realised that the paint was obscuring a ring as well.  He pulled it off and wiped it as clean as he could on her clothes.

The ring looked to be made of silver or platinum and had been blackened at some point in places by something that wasn’t rubbing off.  When he ran a thumbnail over the inside of the ring it seemed to catch on things, and he thought there might be writing in there.  All in all, it was perhaps a clue, but more of a mystery.  He rolled around the palm of his hand, wondering if it was valuable enough to sell, and decided that maybe Rufus could appraise it when he got back.

If he was getting back.  He looked around again at the never-ending plain and held back a sigh of frustration.

“Safest place for you,” he said to the ring, just to hear a voice that wasn’t from a lizardkin, “is on a finger.”  He had to squeeze his littlest finger into it though, as it was too small for his others.

He looked up, resolving to continue West unless the sword guided him otherwise, and nearly jumped out of his own skin.  The featureless white sand had vanished, replaced by grey flagstones, and the bodies of the lizardkin were lying in pools of purplish blood that he was sure the sand had drunk.  He rubbed his forehead, wondering if he was hallucinating, and as his littlest finger passed across his eyes everything seemed to shimmer and evert, and suddenly he was standing back in the workshop again.  The dead lizardkin were still on the floor, and the machines around him were humming and buzzing likes bees on a summer afternoon.  The strange metallic contraption was close by overhead and it was sparkling with light and making the shadows in the room cavort frenetically.  There were bloody footprints on the floor, walking a wide circle around the edges of the workshop, and as he studied them he realised that they were his.  All of his trekking across the sandy plain had actually been walking in circles in this workshop!

“I guess you have a use after all,” he said to the ring, staring at again.  It looked innocuous.

He walked around, making sure to stay away from the loudest machines and the spider-thing, and reached the table without any further strangeness.  He ignored the neatly stacked papers and just thumped it until the jolting caused a drawer to slide slightly open.  Inside was a rectangular metal box with an eye incised in the top, and this was a close enough match to the Device that Rufus had described that he was happy to seize it and leave.

In the doorway he was stopped by a middle-aged man with a walrus moustache and a gnarled wooden walking-stick.

“Move,” said Melrose, drawing his sword.  He was no mood for any further magical tricks.

“Of course, Sir,” said the man stepping aside.  “I just wanted to ask you if you know what you’re doing.”

Melrose walked outside and then paused.  He looked at the stranger who looked back at him with quizzical eyes.

“Getting a Device,” he said.  “For a mage.  A trainee mage, he calls himself.”

“And why doesn’t this mage get it for himself?”

“You’ve got me there,” said Melrose.  He shrugged.  “Why do mages do so little for themselves?  I mean, they have all this magic and they always seem to have other people to fetch and carry for them.  Make their meals, make their beds, sweep their floors.  It’s never magic doing it, is it?”

“That’s not quite what I mea—“

“What good is all that magic anyway?” said Melrose, warming to his theme.  “What do they ever do with it that is useful?  I mean, if you want a portal opening to a strange world where monstrous creatures try and eat you, sure, they can do that.  They can summon elemental spirits and rain fiery death down on armies from a distance, which is kind of useful if they’re on your side, but can they divert a river so that there was no need for the war in the first place?  If they can, have they ever?  I mean, you’d have to think they’re either hiding how useless this magic is, or they’re the most self-centred, arrogant, narcissistic, pompous unlikeable bastards you could ever meet.”

“Not quite wha—“

“Royalty excepted, of course.”

“… of course,” said the man.  He waited a moment to see if Melrose would continue, and then opened his mouth, only to find Melrose cutting him off again.

“Or sharpen a sword even!  You’d think that’d be a piece of cake, really.  Just sharpen one bloody sword.”  He looked at his sword in his hand, and then at the middle-aged man.  “I mean, you wouldn’t want me to stab you with a blunt sword, would you?”

“Don’t stab me at all, please,” said the man quickly.  “I can see you have a lot on your mind.  Good day.”

Melrose watched him shuffle away, wondering briefly why the man had a walking stick he clearly wasn’t using, and then dismissed it from his mind.

“You’d think they could sharpen a bloody sword,” he muttered to himself, sheathing his sword again.  He set off across the non-streets of Dalshire to Rufus’s house.

Dalshire: the white plain

 Melrose scanned the horizons but there was nothing but plain, white sand to be seen in any direction.  He walked around the tower to be sure, wondering how it had been built, and picked the sand up, letting the fine, warm grains trickle from his fist like a broken hourglass.  He even walked out into the plain for ten minutes, checking behind him every half-minute to make sure that the tower hadn’t vanished, but still it was featureless and white beneath cornflower blue skies with no clouds in sight.  He trudged back to the tower, noticing that there was a faint breeze; barely strong enough for him to feel, but enough that his footprints were being gently erased.  He reckoned they’d be gone completely in half an hour.

Back at the tower he completed another circuit of it and still found nothing to explain where he was — it definitely wasn’t Dalshire — or why the tower was here.

“Well,” he said, the silence starting to get on his nerves, for all that it was better than the distressing wails of the horse-thing, “if there’s a way back then, it has to be upstairs.”  He pushed the tower-door open and then hesitated.  There was one more thing he could try….

He stepped away from the tower again and thought about the Device that Rufus had described, concentrating on the description of it, and then drew his sword from its scabbard.  The blade shimmered in the sunlight, though there were still spots of purple blood here and there, and Melrose felt a touch guilty for not having cleaned it properly.

“Show me,” he said, still concentrating on the Device.  For a moment there was just the near-silence and the barely perceptible rattle of grains of sand pushed by a whispering breeze, and then his arm felt itself pulled upwards as the sword located what he was looking for.  His heels ground against the sand, sinking slightly, as the sword pulled him round through nearly ninety degrees and then he stopped, with the sword pointing away from the tower and towards the empty horizon.

“Are you sure?” said Melrose, not expecting an answer from the sword.  He looked at the sky to gauge where the sun was and decided that the sword was pointing West.  “West it is then.”

He started, then stopped three paces later, wondering if he should try and lead the horse-thing out of the tower and ride it instead; it would certainly be quicker and easier than walking.  Then he remembered the half-sobbing noise it had made and his blood chilled in his veins and he decided that walking wasn’t that hard after all.

When the tower had half-vanished below the horizon behind him and the sun seemed to be fixed in place overhead he drew the sword again and commanded it “Show me”, wondering if perhaps it had broken.  The sword didn’t need to pull him round; his arm lifted and it indicated that straight on was the way to go.  Melrose tutted, shaded his eyes as he looked in all directions, hoping to see anything but flat white sand, and then pressed on.

What felt like hours later, when the tower had long since vanished from sight but the the sun had still refused to move, he sat down, his legs aching and his back starting to hurt.  He looked around, not expecting to see anything and being rewarded with exactly that, and then lay back, sprawling full length on the warm, fine sand and wondering how far he’d have to go to find what the sword had located.  He hadn’t used the sword as a compass much in the past, but when he had he’d always found what he was after quickly, and whatever this was, it wasn’t quick.

“Aha, aha, and who are you then?” said someone behind him.  He sat back up, his abdominal muscles complaining as the cuirass dug into them, and, cross-legged, swivelled around on his bum to see who was talking.

“Melrose,” he said, finding himself staring at another woman, one who looked a lot like the one from the tower except that she wasn’t split in two.  He got to his feet more quickly than he’d intended, remembering the attempt at a surprise attack from last time.

“Mr. Rose, is it?” said the woman.  Sure enough, Melrose saw a forked tongue flicker momentarily from her mouth, quivering as though tasting the air.  Memories of Archer’s Field jostled his thoughts, threatening to distract him.  “And what brings Mr. Rose here then?”

He considered drawing first and seeing if he could run her through — she was easily ten metres from him and he’d have to run at her and hope she froze in terror — but then he had no idea how she could have got behind him in the first place, so he held his ground and just rested his hand on the pommel of his sword.  Let her take it as a threat if she wanted.  Though last time the attack had seemed to come from not knowing what he was doing here.  How to answer…?

“I’ve come to see how the folk of Dalshire make their own gods,” he said, trying to remember what the beggar had said exactly.  “In case I want to make one of my own.”

There was a thoughtful moment while the lizardkin woman seemed to think about this.

“Blasphemy!” she hissed.  She did something with her hands that Melrose couldn’t properly make out, but he was already moving sideways by then, expecting her to throw something.  When a curved dagger landed in the sand where he’d been standing, only thrown from behind him, he turned his head to discovered a second lizardkin, this time male, who had apparently been trying to sneak up on him.  The male lizardkin snarled at him and lunged, and Melrose dodged backwards, twisting his body to face the lizardkin and pulling the sword free.

“Blasphemer!” screeched the lizardkin woman and Melrose felt grateful; that allowed him to judge that she hadn’t moved and was still far enough away to not be an immediate danger.  The sword gleamed its maggoty off-white colour and he was sure he could hear the sounds of a funeral dirge in the distance and then the sword twisted in his grip, pulling his arm painfully down and the male lizardkin’s lunge forced it to impale itself on the repositioned blade.  Melrose had just long enough to look into its eyes and see it die and then it fell forwards, sliding down the blade with an unpleasant squelching noise and collapsing on top of him.

He staggered, his feet slipping on the sand and his free hand reaching to try and push the lizardkin away and a knife swept past his face and caught on the lizardkin’s shoulder, tearing a jagged, red-purple gash open.  There was a hiss of frustration and Melrose thrust his hips sideways, turning and pushing and throwing the dead lizardkin at the lizardkin woman.  Purple blood rained lightly around him and the woman stabbed at the corpse with her dagger, muttering something that sounded like a cat cursing.  The corpse burst into white flames and the woman dodged to the side of it.

Melrose’s sword slammed into her hip and through her flesh, cutting her into two halves.  She looked up, staring at him in disbelief before the shock hit her and her eyes rolled up in her head and the two halves fell apart.  Blood splashed across the sand, which seemed to drink it thirstily, and thin grey smoke rose from the still-burning corpse of the male lizardkin.

“What. The. Hell.” said Melrose, sitting down on the sand again.

Dalshire: they make their own gods here

 Melrose blinked until his vision improved; now there was still a large black spot in the centre of his vision but his peripheral vision was working and, by turning his head from side to side, he determined that he was in a stone-walled room of some kind.  There was dirty straw on the floor and the miasma of stale urine started tickling his nostrils.  There was a horse-like creature off to his left, and to his right was a short, belligerent-seeming woman who was holding a kitchen knife like a dagger and glaring at him.  He assumed, for the moment, that the woman had addressed him, though he had encountered talking animals on several occasions.  Mages, it seemed, liked their animals to be able to talk.  Melrose thought that this was due to the lack of other company.

“I’m Melrose,” said Melrose, continuing to swing his head around, trying to get a better feel for the room.  The stone walls seemed to be curved and the windows were more like arrow slits than windows.

“And what are you doing here, Mr. Rose?”

It was definitely the woman talking.  Melrose noticed that there were stairs behind her leading down, and that there was a cot — a narrow wooden bed that looked intended for an infant — beneath a window.  He blinked again, and the black spot in his vision receded a little more.

“I don’t know,” said Melrose.  Honesty, he had found, was often the best policy as Mages tended to assume that everyone was lying.  “I thought I was in a workshop, looking for… something I dropped earlier.”  Sometimes honesty had to be tempered with caution though.

“You don’t know,” said the woman.  Something like a smile forced its way onto her face and for a moment a forked tongue flickered between her lips.  Melrose took a step backwards, bracing himself.

The woman flung herself forwards, the knife raised and arcing brightly downwards towards his chest.  He made himself wait; the knife would never get through the leather cuirass unless the woman was inhumanly strong, so it had to be a feint.  As the knife fell her other hand, which he realised had been behind her back, came up and out, clutching something and aiming for his eyes.  His sword came up in a classic parry-prime position and he felt it jar in his hands as it bit against her wrist bones.  A splash of purple blood hit his cuirass just before the knife bounced off it and clattered on the floor.

The woman hissed, drawing the corners of her mouth back — and back, and back until her face looked triangular and the sharp, piranha-like teeth lining her jaw were visible — and   tried to retreat.  Melrose stepped forwards again, pushing off from his back foot and driving the sword forwards and down and it struck the top of her head with his full weight behind it.  Again it bit into bone, but now the sword gleamed with corpse-light and Melrose could hear the griping moans of the imprisoned spirits and it plunged downwards, tearing bone and flesh apart and sending a gout of purple blood upwards and outwards in a thick, noisome splatter.

The two halves of the woman landed on the floor each with a dull thump and the horse, if that was what it was, shied and backed away.  Melrose wiped his eyes clear of gore and tried to breathe through his mouth.  The smell was revolting, coppery notes and sulphurous undertones mixed in a stench of rotting food and week-old corpses.  The horse shied again, and Melrose retreated to the stairs which seemed too narrow for the horse to descend, to avoid being kicked while the horse settled down.  From five steps down he surveyed the room and the mess he’d made of it while the horse tried to canter this way and that, clearly distressed.

The woman must have been lizardkin — the forked tongue and purple blood were pretty good indicators of that, and he’d fought and killed enough of them at the Battle of Archer’s Field to be confident.  They were strange people, prone to frenzy and beserking in his experience, and he was quite relieved that this woman had attacked him before she’d worked herself up.  The odd thing though, he thought, was that she almost seemed to have been expecting him.

The horse-thing cried, a half-whinny, half-sob that sounded wrong for a horse and slammed its front feet down on the floor.  It jerked them back, tearing up clumps of straw, and then reared up again.  Melrose decided to continue down the stairs and leave the horse-thing to its own devices.

He took the stairs slowly and cautiously though he thought it likely that the room below was empty as no-one had come up to see why the horse-thing was shrieking and sobbing.  The room below turned out to be the same size as the one above, making him think that he might be in a tower of some kind, but full of dead bodies.

He was still breathing through his mouth but seeing the stacked bodies and the corpses hanging from butcher’s hooks along the far wall, he took a very cautious sniff — and was startled to find that the room smelled of nothing at all.

“An illusion?” he asked himself, and poked a stack of four stiff corpses with the tip of his sword.  As the sword touched the grey flesh it stopped and light flared up around it, a pale blue nimbus that swirled as it surrounded the stack of corpses and then vanished.

“Or a preservation spell,” he murmured.  He had no idea if such things actually existed, but something was stopping the sword from touching the corpses, and was probably stopping the inevitable stench of decay from making the rooms uninhabitable.  He took a step forward and then hesitated.  He had no idea what lizardkin ate, and maybe… maybe this was a larder of some kind?

It was hard to look through the corpses; partly because they all seemed to be humans, much like himself, and partly because the spell protecting them stopped him touching them or moving them, but after twenty minutes he came to the rather grim conclusion that every one of the bodies here was a soldier or warrior of some kind.  Most, but not all, of them had burn marks across their eyes and all of them had stab wounds that looked like they’d been made by a small, sharp blade.  A knife-blade, perhaps.

“How many people have you sent after this Device, Rufus?” he muttered, feeling that the Mage-smith had somehow succeeded in tricking him again.

Behind what was nearly a wall of stacked bodies he found another narrow staircase leading down, and that led to an equally narrow corridor that was only a couple of metres long and a door that opened out onto a plain of white sand.  He stood in the doorway staring at it, wondering how the horse-thing had got into the tower — looking up above him he could see that it was indeed a tall, circular tower — and why it was there.

Then he looked around and remembered that the beggar had told him that they made their own gods in Dalshire.

Dalshire: a small request

 Melrose stood outside Rufus’s house.  Behind him the door slammed shut with enough force to rattle the glass in the windows next to it.  Melrose grinned; Rufus’s offers of payment had been entirely predictable — gold plate, precious gems, another sword — and entirely refusable.  It had taken the mage-smith nearly thirty minutes to realise that what Melrose wanted was an introduction to the Duke of Palehaven and a job with him, and then, seeing his political capital about to evaporate, Rufus had nearly exploded himself.  But he had acquiesced and, tucked inside Melrose’s leather cuirass was a letter of introduction to the Duke, cursed into illegibility.  When Melrose returned with this Device that Rufus wanted the curse would be broken and the letter usable.  Of course, he could just go and find another mage to break the curse, but working for Rufus was easier, for now, and seemed interesting.

The surprising thing about Rufus’s request was that the Device seemed to be so close at hand.  Melrose had been expecting some elaborate map drawn on the skin of some poor unfortunate soul — mages seemed to have an aversion to paper in his experience, preferring the days of effort it took to tattoo some victim with the details of the spell, or the map, or whatever, and then killing and skinning the victim (not necessarily in that order) and then preserving the skin without damaging the tattoo.  The whole process seemed ridiculous to him when you could take a pen and paper and write it down and then curse it, as Rufus had just done, so that only the right kind of people could read it.

Though a mage’s idea of the ‘right kind of people’ would put a racist to shame in most cases.

One and a half ‘streets’ across Dalshire was a low building that looked like a workshop.  At one end were a pair of wooden double doors that looked like they would let carts in, or at least unload outside them, and the windows were small and up under the eaves suggesting that they were for letting light in but not prying eyes to see.

“In there,” Rufus had said, his eyes aglitter with greed.  “That’s where they’re keeping it.  Just pop in, liberate it, and come back.  Once it’s here I can look after much better than they can.”

Just pop in….  Melrose shrugged as he thought about that instruction, and then sauntered up to the double doors and knocked.

Snow had mounded up in front of the doors, looking at though it had been blown by the wind into drifts and it was clear that the doors hadn’t been opened that morning.  The windows, despite being shadowed by the eaves, also had snow on their ledges that looked undisturbed.  No-one was in sight when Melrose looked around, and his knocking — more a pounding with the side of his fist — was loud in the winter air.  He doubted that anyone nearby had missed his polite request for entry, but when the doors didn’t move and no-one called out for a couple of minutes, he repeated the knocking and waited a couple more minutes out of politeness.  Then he tried to pull the doors open.

The left-hand door was bolted somehow and though the door shuddered as he put his strength into heaving on it, it stayed put.  The right-hand door moved though, hesitantly as the mounded snow tried to stop it, and with the occasional scrape over stone where the ground wasn’t level.  He forced it open enough for him to walk inside without having to squeeze through the gap, and then went in.

It was dark inside the workshop, and he stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust.  The light through the high windows was grey and muted and the light from the doorway behind him fell as a sharp, bright cone to his right, illuminating a splintery wooden wall and some stone flags on the floor, but little else.  As his eyes adjusted though he started to make out shapes, which resolved themselves into machines of varying heights and widths and lengths.  They were laid out according to some kind of plan, but Melrose could identify none of the machines or tell why they were positioned as they were relative to one another.  The floor was paved with large stones that made him think of a cathedral and was well swept.  In the middle of the room was a large square table with papers stacked neatly on it.  Melrose nodded: this was what Rufus has described to him.  He stayed perfectly still, looking around, trying to work out what Rufus had omitted when describing this place.

He found a couple of chairs positioned oddly by one machine and well away from the table, but they seemed innocuous enough.  At the far end he thought he could make out the large glass jars of trapped lightning that were used to power the machines, but there was no way to investigate them more carefully without going over there.  Hanging from the ceiling, above where the light from the windows fell, was a collection of metal rods that put him in mind of a spider and he made careful note of where to avoid on the floor below to avoid having it drop on him.  Then he decided that maybe Rufus had told him everything he needed to know about this place.

Naturally then, the third step he took, just bringing him alongside the nearest machine, was the one that caused a bright flash of light and a cold sensation like falling into ice-water.  He shuddered, fighting to breathe, flailing out with his arms.  For several seconds there was nothing, just the feeling of falling, and then he seemed to slow and stop.  He was still blinded by the flash, only the odd, vision-obscuring after-images dancing in front of him, and he still couldn’t breath.  He tried again to suck air into his lungs and again failed.  Something seemed to press against him from behind, and reflexively he reached for his sword and pulled it free from its scabbard.

Immediately he could breathe again and he panted, his chest tight and heaving.  Black spots that he hadn’t been aware of receded from his vision and he could see again.  The feeling of being surrounded and suffocated disappeared like frost evaporating under strong sunlight.

“Who the hell are you?” asked an annoyed-sounding voice somewhere in front of him.

Dalshire: a long conversation

 The book had no pictures but nearly a hundred pages of hand-written scrawl.  In the candlelight, which made shadows cavort across the walls like some two-dimensional circus, it looked ominous and demonic and Melrose found himself edging slightly away from it.  Rufus closed the book up after several seconds.

The main room of the house was messy, though Melrose supposed that when you were blind you either didn’t care about the mess or weren’t aware of it all.  Against the back wall were two bookcases, one full and the other half-full.  This struck him as odd since Rufus couldn’t see to read.  There was a single chair in the room, set near a fireplace that was cold and dark; snow had fallen down the chimney and settled on top of charred-looking logs.  There was a footstool near the chair that looked stained and dirty, and across the room was a door that led into other rooms in the house.  Judging by the size, from the outside, there must be several more rooms through that way.

There were two windows opposite the bookcases, both curtained for the night.  By the door leading deeper into the house was a waist-height wooden table on which sat a dirty plate and a half-full cup of water.  A fork had been dropped on the floor beneath the table.

“When did you go blind?” asked Melrose. He bent to retrieve the fork from the floor.

“About five years ago,” said Rufus.  “You’re going to ask how I read the book, aren’t you?”

“It’s a pretty obvious question,” said Melrose.  He put the fork on the plate with a clink and Rufus’s head turned sharply towards the source of the sound.

“Don’t move anything,” he said waspishly.  “If you move things I won’t know where they are.”

“Just picking up the food-weapon that you dropped,” said Melrose.  “Saves you finding it with your foot later.”

“Well… tell me first then,” said Rufus.  He shuffled across the bare wooden floor to the bookcase and ran his hand over the spines, deciding where to put the book back.  “Actually, make yourself useful and light the fire.  It’s freezing in here.”

Melrose agreed completely with that assessment of the room and knelt down by the fireplace to see what needed doing.  Though charred, the logs still had plenty of unburned wood on them so he turned them to bring the freshest wood to the bottom and then looked for kindling.

“I have a device,” said Rufus, “that can read the books to me.  It’s a decidedly clever little thing that was… well, brought to me, I suppose you’d say, shortly after I went blind.  It’s saved me a lot of trouble.  Finding a good amanuensis is a nightmare, you know?”

“No,” said Melrose scattering small twigs and wood shavings over the stones in the fireplace, mounding them and then setting them alight with the flint.  Rufus’s head turned again on hearing the snap of the metal against stone.

“Oh, there’s a device for lighting the fire as well,” he said.  “Didn’t I say?”

“No,” said Melrose, getting back to his feet.  “You seem to have a lot of devices.”

“Heh, yes,” said Rufus.  “Well, you see —“

“Sharpening this sword,” interrupted Melrose, “is going to involve finding you a device, isn’t it?”

“That’s quite the conclusion to jump to!”

“Isn’t it?”

The logs in the fire had caught light before Melrose managed to get Rufus to admit that this was the case.

“Right,” said Melrose.  He sat down in the chair, ignoring the look of annoyance of Rufus’s face.  “So, I’m going to have go and find this thing.  Who can sharpen the sword using it then?”

“Well, practically anyone,” said Rufus throwing his arms wide as though to encompass the whole world.  “Anyone at all.  So long as….”

“Go on.”

“Well, the device needs a command word,” said Rufus.  “It’s in the book.”

“So anyone who knows this word can sharpen the sword?”

“Yes.  Well, technically yes.”

Melrose sighed and stretched his legs out, resting his feet on the footstool.  A strange aroma like dried herbs rose up from it with a puff of dust.  “I’m not going anywhere tonight,” he said.  “I’m staying here, in the warm, in front of this fire.  So you can take as long as you like to tell me what the new problem is, but you are going to tell me.”

Rufus hummed, hawed, prevaricated and tutted his way through six excuses before giving in.

“The device I’ve got can’t pronounce the command word,” said Rufus.  “Someone needs to read the book and tell me, or you, or whoever, what the command word is.”

“Doesn’t sound so hard,” said Melrose sleepily.  The warmth of the fire was extremely welcome after the day he’d had, and while he was aware that the blood on his cuirass was probably smeared all over Rufus’s chair, he found it hard to care.  The grotty little man seemed to have an excuse for everything he was expected to do.

“I couldn’t read the word when I could still see,” said Rufus.  “The handwriting in the book is execrable.  The device has coped pretty well, but it stays silent at the command word, so either it can’t read it either, or it doesn’t know how to pronounce it.  So you probably need a wizard to read it.”

“What does execrable mean?” asked Melrose.  “And aren’t you a wizard?”

“Trainee!  Trainee!  And I don’t have a mentor either,” said Rufus, sounding excited.  “You’ll need an actual wizard from somewhere, and they don’t grow on trees.”

“Funny thing,” said Melrose, sounding reflective.  “Only when I first met you — and several times after that, when I think about it — I don’t recall you mentioning the trainee part before.”

“Well—“

“In fact, I’m sure I remember you calling yourself the mage-smith of Dalshire.”

“Once, maybe—“

“Lots of times, in fact.  I bet, if I go out and ask the people here, they’d probably not tell me about the trainee thing either.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“Hah.”  Melrose closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth of the fire.  “You’d like that.  But still, I don’t think you can get away with calling yourself a trainee, Rufus.”

“I am still blind though.”

Melrose thought about it.  “No devices to help you see again?”

“Not without your sword being sharpened first.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the crackling of the fire, and then a pop as some knot of wood exploded sending a plume of sparks up the chimney.

“I see,” said Melrose finally.  “So what am I getting paid for all this then?”

“I don’t—“

“Cut the bluster, Rufus.  I only ended up back here because you lied to me about the sword to begin with, and now it turns out that you want this device and that device and gods know what else… and all I want is my sword sharpened.”

“That is a form of payment!”

“Not when the reason it can’t be sharpened is your lies,” said Melrose.  “So, if I’m getting all this junk for you, then my sword gets sharpened and I get payment.  You’ve got till the morning to figure out what you’re going to offer me.  And if I don’t like it, I’m taking your stupid book and finding someone else who can read it.”

“That’s not a very sensible threat,” said Rufus, but he didn’t sound confident.

“I’ll burn the rest of them too,” said Melrose looking at the fire.  “I hope you get on well with your neighbours, as they might set fire to the whole house.  Who can tell what happens when a trainee mage’s book go up in flames?”

“Morning, you said?” asked Rufus after a significant pause.

“Yes.”

“Ah.  Well.  Goodnight then.”