The Way of the Owl

 The cave had proven larger than Samara had expected and they’d spent much of a third day tramping over wet rock, slipping on green-blue lichen and crawling through narrow tunnels from one room to the next.  Samara had been constantly checking her maps and grumbling about the cartographer; Garrett had tried very hard, and mostly successfully, to refrain from commenting about bad workmen and their tools, and Efimov had been largely silent.  They had finally reached the mouth of the cave and looked out across green countryside below them.  To their left was a large forest that stretched northwards and to their right there were fields and the bright line of a river.

“Blinton near river,” said Efimov, pointing.  There were tiny houses and a smudge of smoke where he was pointing, which Garrett realised meant they were much higher up the mountain than he’d expected.

“Does your map say how high up we are?” he asked Samara.  She snarled, once again reminding him of the cats that his full-ogre father used to keep for food.

“No!”  She edged towards the edge of the path outside the cave and leaned carefully forwards, looking down and over.  There were several seconds of silence.

“Air is cold and thin up here,” said Efimov casually, as though he were commenting on the weather.

Garrett noticed Samara’s hands clench into pale yellow fists and he was sure that her natural claws were trying to unsheathe.  She took a deep breath.

“It’s late afternoon,” she said, trying to match Efimov’s casualness.  “I think we’ll stay here, since we know there’s nothing in the cave behind us, and descend in the morning.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Garrett, swinging his pack from his lumpy, grey shoulders.  They were irregular heights and he’d had to have the backpack made especially to fit him.  “Got any wood out there for a fire, Sam?”

“Don’t call me that!  And no, it’s all rock and stone and sno— and more stone out here.  Get Efimov to make another fire; that seems to be all he’s good for.”

Efimov shrugged and started to move stones around into a circle.  “She seems angry,” he said to Garrett.  Unfortunately he didn’t keep his voice quiet enough.

“Of course I’m bloody angry!  This has taken days longer than I expected and we’re running short of food.  Not that you care, since you seem to just live off the moisture in the air, and Garrett thinks it’s just great that there’s more room to carry the looted possessions of the dead instead of food, but I care!  I bloody well care!  Why can’t you be a better mage?”

“What is better mage?” asked Efimov.  Garrett watched him closely, but he seemed genuinely curious.  He finished arranging the stones as he waited for an answer, which didn’t come until after Garrett glanced at Samara and realised she was embarrassed by what she’d said.

“She means one who went to the Bogbones Academy,” he said, knowing she was grimacing behind his back.  “She’s from Fellheim, remember?”

“That’s got nothing to do with it!”

Efimov murmured some words and waved his hands over the stones.  They cracked, glowing red, and gas hissed out.  Then they started to melt into a pool of lava and a heat haze formed above them.  Garrett backed off slightly; the heat was intense but he’d also learned the hard way that the fumes weren’t safe to breathe.

“There are three kinds of mage in this world,” said Efimov.  He crouched back on his heels, squatting in front the ‘fire’ and warming his hands.  “Those who go to Bogbones.  They are not all of mages, nor even most of them.  And they produce only about 2% of powerful mages in world.  Then there are mages who go to one of Atul Schools, which are found here and there, mostly in populations centres, across the Empire.  They produce about 80% of powerful mages in world.  And then there are those who attended the, hah, schools of hard knocks.”

“Bogbones produces lots of mages,” said Samara, drawn to the fire by the warmth.  She shivered. “Lots and lots.  Powerful ones too.”

“About 2%, globally,” said Efimov.  “Is matter of philosophy.”

“What philosophy?” asked Garrett.  He knew that Efimov has not attended any school, though any other information on his upbringing and learning had been difficult to come by.  He suspected that Efimov was from a school of hard knocks, whatever than meant.

“Bogbones believe that all children are born with inherent magic,” said Efimov staring in the fire.  Tiny spots of reflected red seemed to glow in his eyes.  “They encourage and nurture all children they find.  Everyone is praised for any little magical act, and much support is provided.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Samara.  “Before you start criticising it.”

“Maybe,” said Efimov.  “Bogbones has community sports, sociable atmosphere and social clubs.  Is way of learning.  There are four paths in Bogbones too; all children are assigned a path by hat.  There is: Path of the Dragon, Path of the Spider, Path of the Owl and Path of the Gelatinous Cube.  Children specialise early.”

“Wait, did you say hat?” asked Garrett.  “They’re assigned a course of study by a hat?  Or someone called Hat?”

“Actual hat,” said Efimov.  He shrugged and his third eye stared off out of the mouth of the cave where the sun was setting.  “Is strange idea but is hundreds of years old.  In Atul Schools they have mind-flayer instead.  Reads minds, reveals truths.”

“Mind-flayers eat minds!” Samara’s eyes were wide and Garrett noticed that they seemed to take up nearly half of her triangular face.  He couldn’t decide if it was attractive or not.  “You can’t put a mind-flayer in a school!”

“Is effective way of punishing lying,” said Efimov.  “False positive rate is acceptably low.”

Samara looked ready to argue so Garrett quickly intervened.  “Right, that’s a question of pedagogy,” he said, “which none of us is skilled enough to answer.  What was this path thing though?”

“Courses of study, ways of learning,” said Efimov.  “In Atul schools children are yelled at and punished for anything they do wrong.  In Bogbones, children study what they are already strong in; path names reflect that.”

“Atul schools sound horrible,” said Samara.  She sounded combative still and Garrett was waiting to jump in if she returned to the mind-flayers.  “Playing to your strengths is how you get strong mages.”

“2% globally,” said Efimov again.  He seemed to like the statistic.  “Problem is that mage strong in one area is often weak in another, and strong mages need be strong everywhere.”

“So kids who take the path of the dragon study dragons?” asked Garrett.  “And spiders, owls and… gelatinous cubes?”

“Hah!  No, Path of the Dragon is about courage,” said Efimov.  “Spider is subtlety, Owl is wisdom, and Gelatinous Cube is janitors.”

“Janitors?” Samara’s face twisted into a snarl and she sounded thunderous.  Garrett felt like he was standing before the onset of a sandstorm.

“Someone has to clean up after everyone else.”  Efimov shrugged again.  “Path of Owl produces strongest Bogbones mages.  They see the wisdom in studying what they do not know.”

“Who produces the most evil mages?” said Samara with a tight little smile that suggested she thought she knew the answer.

“Good question,” said Efimov closing all three eyes at once, which was unusual.  He opened them all again.  “Curiously statistic is very balance.  All three schools produce roughly 33%.”

Caryfell

 Garrett was sitting on a large mushroom despite the complaints of Samara who thought it was unsafe.  Around them the grey-orange walls of the cave rose up to a vaulted ceiling several metres overhead, and it felt like the heat from their campfire was rising up and away from them as well.  Water trickled down the cave walls in thin rivulets and pooled here and there in depressions in the cave floor; green-blue lichen and mould grew wherever it felt like it, and a cold breeze chilled them whenever they weren’t near the fire.  Light came from the fire itself, though before they’d lit it there had been a lessening of the darkness towards one end of the cave.

There were four mushrooms, growing in a cluster that shielded the campfire from the breeze.  Two of them were lumpy and semi-spherical; the other two, growing on thick stems that had found purchase on something below the rock floor of the cave, had flatter tops.  Garrett had claimed one and the other, rejected disdainfully by Samara, was being squatted on by Efimov.

“Tomorrow, we should reach the end of the cave,” said Samara.  Her blue hair, long enough to reach her waist and normally braided to keep it out of her way, was covering her head and the map she was staring at.  The map was drawn on terratta-parchment in fluorescent inks and was easier to see when protected from the light.  “We should come out on the side of the mountain, and then somewhere below us will be Blinton.  I think we should be able to see it from above.”

“More than they can do,” said Efimov.  He was dark-skinned and muscular and had three eyes; the third was set above the other two in his forehead and often looked in a different direction to what Garrett thought of as the ‘regular two’.  His hair was black and kept back from his head by a thin woven band in red and orange; there was a pattern to the weaving but it was hard to discern in the flickering light of the cave.  He sniggered to himself.

“You keep saying that,” said Samara sounding annoyed.  “Are you going to explain yourself before we get there?  I’d like to be prepared for whatever we’re going to find.”

Efimov sniggered again.

“Seriously,” said Garrett.  He was squat and grey-skinned with warts and bulbous tumour-like excretions on his visible skin.  He was half-ogre, though the size and strength of his father had eluded him, replaced instead by the cunning and mercantile drive of his (mostly-human) mother.  “This is a business trip, Efimov.  What gives?”

“Everything is business trip with you, Gar,” said Efimov easily.  His third eye stared off into the darkness, as though hunting for something to watch.  “Even this cave, you managed to find things to sell.”

“He’s got you there,” said Samara.  She tossed her hair back and lifted her head.  The glow of the maps inks persisted for a moment, squiggly lines floating in the darkness, before fading in the light of the campfire.  Her slightly-yellowish skin cast and triangular face made Garrett thing of the large cats that his ogre father had kept for food.

“We got lucky!” he protested.  “I had no idea that people had left things behind when they came through here before.”

“They died,” said Samara.  She’d objected to ‘looting the dead’ while Garrett had been going through the bags that he’d found when he’d bumped into a stalagmite, broken it off and discovered the first corpse.  There had been much that was rotten or water-logged, but in one split-open and disintegrating satchel he’d found a couple of handfuls of uncut gems and a long mahogany stick that Efimov thought was a magical staff.

“People do that,” said Garrett.  “All the time, in fact.  And they don’t have any use for what they leave behind and there’s no-one here to tell us who their inheritors might be.  So that means we get to inherit.”

Samara shook her head, her hair rippling in waves behind and around her.  “Corpse-robbing,” she said softly.

“Did you figure out what the staff does yet, Eff?” said Garrett.  He’d failed to convince Samara of the rule of finders-keepers already and wasn’t in the mood to try again.

Efimov shifted position so that he was sitting cross-legged.  “Is staff of way-finding,” he said.  “Out of charges, obviously.”

“Obviously,” said Garrett, nodding.  “And Blinton?  What’s so funny about that?”

Efimov tilted his head back so that all three eyes stared at the distant ceiling, which even to his magically-acute vision was still mostly shadowed.  “Was there once,” he said.  “They… didn’t like me.”

After the silence had drawn on for several seconds Samara said, “Is that it?  It’s a funny place because they didn’t like you?”

“They offered reward for my capture,” said Efimov.  Garrett shifted uneasily: Efimov’s past was a mystery to both him and Samara, and they’d both done some digging around as discretely as possible.  Having him on the team was undoubtedly a good idea — he was a skilled mage and his appraisal of magical artefacts had been spot-on so far — but knowing so little about him made them both just a little nervous.  “Wanted me dead or deader.”

“Dead or alive, usually,” said Samara who couldn’t accept that Efimov’s accent didn’t mean he didn’t speak Common as well as the rest of them.

“Dead or deader said poster,” said Efimov.  “I can read, Samara.”

“Yes, sorry.”

“Poster said I was to be reported to authorities on sight,” said Efimov.  “So I… arranged things a little so that that was no problem for them.”

Garrett’s eyes widened.  He might not know much about Efimov, but what he’d seen so far suggested that he had a very literal approach to the world.

“Clouds of darkness?” he asked, wondering what spell Efimov had chosen to cast.  “Some kind of permanent night?”

Efimov chuckled now, a deeper, more sincere sounding laughter.  “I had no idea how long I would need to stay,” he said.  “Plus at that time I had not learned much of magics of Bon Amba.  Was little more than sophisticated necromancer and vivimancer.  Skilled vivimancer, naturally, but my talents lay with life and death.  So I took tree pollen, since was Spring, and modified it a touch so that when it got in eyes, it took root and rotted eyes out of head.  Took maybe four weeks before entire town was blind.  Hence new name of town.  Used to be called Caryfell.”

Samara’s gasp was genuine shock and Garrett had to quickly stifle the laughter rising in his chest.  He coughed, and then again.  “That sounds effective,” he said, hoping not to offend Samara.

“You blinded a whole town of people?” She wasn’t shouting but she sounded like she wanted to be.  “A whole town!  So much that they changed the name of the town!”

“Was them or me,” said Efimov, shrugging.  “No-one died and we all along together living happily.  For six months or so, and then I left.”

“You turned them all blind!”

“He didn’t kill them,” said Garrett.  “I think that’s important too.  They wanted to kill him, after all.”

“That’s not the point,” said Samara and then stopped.  Garrett risked looking over at her.  She was staring at Efimov but her hands were braiding her hair; it looked like she wasn’t aware she was doing it.  “I mean, that’s sort of.  Well, that’s not quite.  Damn it, wasn’t there another way?”

“Maybe?” Efimov shrugged. “If we find ourselves in similar situation I’m happy to ask you for alternative solution.”

Samara dropped her hair and seemed to realise she’d been braiding it.  “Well.  That’s good,” she said. “Yes.  We can discuss it.”

Garrett started to relax.

“Can you unblind them now though?  Undo what you did?”

“Maybe,” said Efimov.  “Can probably grow new eyes if I think about it. But have they stopped wanting to kill me?”

Merchant adventurer

The small group of highly trained killers had stopped.  Again.

Agamemnal was stood in front of a heavy tapestry that reached from floor to ceiling, his torch playing over it.  He was peering at it so closely that his nose nearly touched the fabric, and now and then he would stroke the tapestry, or rub a particular spot.

“Will you hurry up?”  Lydia folded her arms.  She was tall and thin, graceful in an anorexic way, and wearing soft grey wraps that wound around her like bandages and left her with the slightly unfortunate appearance of an animate mummy.  Her eyes were the same grey as the wraps and they were staring at the back of Agamemnal’s head as though she wished she could make it explode.  “We are supposed to be locating the Duke and assassinating him.  Not valuing wall-hangings!”

Next to Lydia was Darleen.  She was built far more robustly and was wearing a black-and-grey padded jerkin and a blindfold that covered her eyes and nose.  Despite her apparent lack of vision she was leading the group through the echoing halls as though she’d lived there her entire life.  She lifted her head as though to stare at the ceiling, and a moment later she spoke.

“There’s no point Lydia, dear.  We need fifteen minutes for the Duke to reach his bedroom anyway; you might as well let him look at it.  The guard patrols won’t come in here for 22 minutes, and we’ll be gone by then anyway.”

Lydia snorted and turned away, her back pointedly to Agamemnal, and looked at the fourth member of the squad: an albino man who looked like a boy of fourteen. His eyes and nose were pink and wet, and his fingernails were black and sharp.  He was wearing a torn shirt and ragged pants tied loosely about his skinny waist with rope.  His bare feet were hairy.  “What say you, Ratty?”

Ratty shrugged, his shirt slipping from his shoulder and forcing him to pull it back up before it fell off completely.  “He’s got an eye for it,” he said.  “Those candlesticks he looted last tim–“

“When we were supposed to be setting fire to an information storage bay.”  Lydia interrupted with the arrogance of a natural leader.

“As I was saying,” said Ratty amicably.  “Those candlesticks fetched a nice sum.  We’d barely have broke even without them.”

Lydia turned her back on Ratty now.  “As if this is a for-profit enterprise,” she said to Darleen.

“It is for me,” said Darleen.  “You can’t negotiate, Lyds.  You should let Ratty do it, he’s got a silver tongue.”

“He’s got fleas.”  There was a viciousness in her tone that made Darleen flinch, but Ratty seemed unaffected by it.

“It’s genuine,” said Agamemnal as though the entire conversation around him hadn’t happened.  “Definitely fourteenth century.  Let’s take it down and pack it up.”

“Twelve minutes,” said Darleen, her head tilted up again.  “No change in patterns.”

“This is ridiculous!” Lydia spun to face her squad, her face contorted into something ugly; Ratty considered for a moment that this must be what a banshee looked like when it was screeching the death of its victim.  “We’re killers!  Assassins!  We have a job to do, we’re not picking up tawdry tat at the sodding flea-market!”

“George said usual rules apply,” said Agamemnal.  “That means I can loot and you can carry.”

“I. am. not. a. pack. mule.”

“Of course not,” said Agamemnal with a broad smile that showed his three remaining teeth.  “Pack mules have more meat on them.  But you are the only one who doesn’t need to be able to move quickly or keep everything free for when we meet the Duke.  So you do the carrying.”  He reached up, stretching to the top of tapestry to find the ties that suspended it from hooks in the wall.  “Brace, bitch.”