Palimpsest

by John Waterman 

I.

  Jerzy headed up the rocky path at an even pace. Even this close to his goal he moved without eagerness. The past nine months of travel and two previous years of hard toil had taught him patience if anything. This close to the Top of the World Entire even the long summer days hadn’t cleared all of the ice from the shady spots among the rocks in this mountainous land.

  He carried only that which he’d found absolutely necessary during his long journey hence and the even longer quest towards his goal. He wore a sturdy pair of made-stuff buskins over heavily-greased linen stockings, a heavy tunic and trousers, an insulated waterproof cloak, a cap of tough cheeky-leather, and well-made but worn harness holding his short shivver, a ceramic-headed hatchet, and a pouch with a little cash and a fire-lighter. The wallet slung across his back under a small targe held some extra clothes, a water bladder, bags of dried foodstuffs, basic tools, some line and a folded waterproof tarp.

  The man-length spear, with its sturdy shamboo shaft, steel point and brass butt-spike filled his left hand and served as a walking staff. His right forearm terminated in a cup bearing a large, sharp steel hook. It glimmered a little with the dunamos it held. His breath smoked in the cold air despite the sunshine on this clear day, coming from a Sun at an unfamiliar low angle even at the height of Summer.

  Low scrub huddled among the rocks. Few living things moved among it save for a scuttler or two and some buzzing insects. It all proved native life. No one had ever tried to establish Modern plants in this Arctic land. He could think of none that would thrive here. He could see the True Moon low on the horizon, in half-phase, not far from the tiny glittering point of the Hung Moon and a small segment of the Catena that connected it to the World.

  The structure finally came into sight around the last bend on the tortuous path up the mountain. It seemed less than what reports had led him to believe, a mere two-story building perhaps twenty man-lengths wide on the side he could see. Its lower floor seemed ancient poured stone with its upper works made of large barely-worked mortared blocks of the local granite.

  Its deep windows looked heavily shuttered and no smoke came from its roof. The area around it to a distance of a plethron remained cleared gravel with a border of flagstone pavement next to the walls. The building did not look abandoned, though he saw no signs of activity around it.

  Jerzy paused to catch his breath and consider. All he knew--all he had been told over the past two years--said that The Athneskon abided therein. That man, if mere mortal he proved, held the singular secret to life and death--and beyond--here on Perm . . . and also the one being who could save Melisande, his dear Sandy.

  The Sun moved a handspan along its curiously low course in the sky as he squatted on the path, left hand on his upright spear and the hook at the end of his right forearm braced on the stony ground. He then sighed, stood, and went down the path towards the cleared gravel yard before the structure.

  He hadn’t gone more than a few steps off the path into the yard when he heard a faint crunching foot-fall to his right. Jerzy swiveled to see a man-shaped and -sized apparition a few man-lengths away. He stopped without doing more than reflexively changing the grip of his left hand on the spear. The newcomer had come upon him un-noticed, and he saw no place where it could have hidden. It appeared as an articulated suit of solid plate maille, complete to helm, with a faceplate of featureless dull ebony.

  Jerzy stood stock still. He didn’t have any weapon that could affect this being, nor any real defense from what it could do to him. Even if he fled from it, he’d just die tired.

  ‘O Man, what business hast thou here,’ the Talos said. Its Leks sounded perfect if archaic, its voice neither masculine nor feminine. It faced him, arms hanging down at its sides.

  ‘I seek The Athneskon,’ Jerzy replied in a voice gone rusty with disuse. ‘I would have audience with him.’

  ‘About what wouldst thou speak with him, O Man?’

  ‘Life, and a bargain for same.’

  The Talos nodded its helm once, and then remained otherwise motionless.

II.

  ‘There is a cost for what you have done, naturally,’ Olykinthos said. His Ling came almost conversationally, as if he addressed someone not actually present.

  Jerzy held tightly to Melisande. Both stood frozen in the same place and position in which they’d gotten caught by the Vault’s wards.

  ‘Anything, Lord,’ Melisande said, the now inactive infantry shivver in her right hand still dripping with the ichor from the slain Sphinx laying at her feet. Jerzy had gotten frozen while pulling her aside, his right hand on her left wrist, away from the circle of wards he’d just then sensed too late. Then they’d both gotten locked into place from the neck down . . .

  ‘There’s nothing either of you wastrels have that would interest me,’ Olykinthos went on. ‘Not even how you got the passwords to enter herein, or halt and slay my Sphinx.’ He clucked his tongue as he saw the decapitated form of the huge snake-like guardian. ‘I’ll have to grow a new one, a smarter one this time, eh? I’ll feed it the corpse of this one. Fortunately I had other protections in place.’ The tall spindly man walked around the pair of paralyzed young thieves idly, examining them cursorily and then dismissing what he saw with a faint snort. ‘I’ve taken care of Mykosin already. He’d reached the extent of his usefulness to me anyway.’

  ‘Magister, we humbly apologize for trespassing,’ Jerzy said in his most respectful and polite Ling. ‘We’ll serve you in any fashion you desire if you but-’

  ‘Shh,’ the Thaumaturge said, putting up a hand to silence him. ‘Even turning you two into zombies would cost me more than you are actually worth- even as dead pieces of servile meat. I have more of those than I currently need.’ The man blew out his cheeks with mild aggravation. ‘But I cannot let it be known that just anyone- mere nobodies!- can trifle with me. So, an abject lesson for anyone else stupid enough to think that a few baseborn croodlers can creep into my fastness, hmm?

  ‘The female is fetching, and athletic, and skilled in a rather ordinary fashion,’ he went on, still to himself. ‘The lad, well. He has a little talent with the ‘dunamos’, if ill-trained . . . ‘hedge wizard’? No, I sense that he has some education from the Dread Lords, though he serves them not, since he does not bear their Mark. Dismissed from their Academy, I trow.’ Olykinthos didn’t wait for Jerzy’s response. ‘Not worth taking on as an Acolyte or a servant, even under a geas. The least of those I have currently in such service to me are far more talented. And I do NOT reward audacity, young sir and lady.’

  The Thaumaturge stood, tapping his raised forefinger on his lips for a few moments, then manipulated a large diamond-set ring on his left thumb. He proved far too skilled and adept to have to make passes with his hands or mutter arcane mnemonic phrases to marshal the ‘dunamos’. Jerzy could sense the immense amount of power contained within the 20-carat diamond set in the ring.

  ‘An object lesson, and a message to any others who would trifle with me or try to burgle my Vault.’ He turned to face Jerzy. ‘Listen closely, gutter-snipe. Let anyone who hears your sorry tale of woe know not to mess with Olykinthos or trespass upon his ground lest they suffer worse than you will here tonight, eh?’

  ‘Magister, I-’ Before he could finish speaking he saw a bright flash from an ovoid of silvery light surrounding Melisande. It encompassed all of her and terminated at a distance that included Jerzy’s right hand to a hand’s breadth up his forearm. The searing pain of it burned all throughout his body--and then the orb of light contracted, taking her and his hand with it. His awareness spun away into darkness . . .

  When he came back to consciousness he lay in an alley deep in the dockside slums of Seaside, with everything he’d had on his person--save his right hand. The stump, sealed over with a layer of carbonized skin fused like glass, remained senseless but aching. He could still feel his missing hand on Melisande’s wrist, though. If he concentrated, he could still feel the warmth of her skin and her pulse through his right hand.

III.

  The Sun crossed another handspan along its curiously long but low path before the Talos moved again. ‘Follow me,’ it intoned in its archaic Leks. It led him across the gravel and onto the flagstones, and then around the side of the building to a portal closed by a heavily reinforced lumber door.

  The large valve opened silently before the Talos. Jerzy saw no person or mechanism which opened it. The Talos stepped aside and walked back out into the yard without a word or gesture of farewell.

  Past the door the chamber lay dim, lit only by the light coming in from a few clerestory windows up by the meeting of the wall and ceiling. Jerzy saw some tables, chairs, and sideboards in the large chamber. The air inside felt cold and smelled a little musty. The door closed behind him, but neither person nor mechanism had closed it. He felt a subtle tug through the ‘dunamos’. 

  ‘Hello?’ he called out, first in Ling and then in Leks, and finally in Lish. The darkness lightened when he concentrated on the ‘dunamos’- it proved strong here- and his dark vision started. No dust covered the floor or furnishings but it still felt as if no one inhabited this place.

  ‘Up here,’ came a faint voice in Leks. He turned to see a stair leading upwards to his right. The treads looked ancient, where myriads of footsteps had worn away the centers of the granite flags.

   Above lay a smaller room lit only by a fireplace. It burned no wood or other solid fuel that he could see, but it proved real and not driven by the ‘dunamos’. The room, smaller than the one below and floored with planed timbers polished by long wear, held a few cupboards by the fireplace and a single deal table flanked by four chairs. A doorway in the far wall led into another chamber, itself lit by the far side of the same open fireplace.

  ‘Greetings, traveler,’ came the same voice, barely louder now. A crone leaning on a shamboo cane came through the doorway. Gnarled by age, she wore a simple white linen peplos with a heavy woven dun himation draped over her bent shoulders. Her slippered feet shuffled over the puncheon floor.

  ‘I seek The Athneskon, my good woman,’ Jerzy said politely. 

  ‘Do sit, young Sir.’ She gestured at the table. A platter with a steaming loaf and a pitcher and cups sat there now. It hadn’t when he’d first looked at it.

  He pulled a chair back from the table and leaned his spear against another chair as the old woman slowly crossed over to it. He offered his right forearm and she used it to lower herself into the seat. He poured her a cup of wine from the pitcher. He sat after he placed his wallet on the floor by his chair. Using his belt knife, he sliced off a piece of the loaf and offered it to her and then took it when she waved it away. He poured himself a cup of wine. It proved good, fresh, and fruity. The loaf tasted warm and sweet, too. He hadn’t had fresh loaf or wine in weeks.

  ‘So whom seekest thou, young Sir?’

  ‘The Athneskon, good woman. And thank you for this board.’

  ‘All are welcome.’ She did not touch her cup. ‘But there is none you seek of that title. Not here, and not anywhere.’

  ‘So how come you to be here, good woman? How would you know that such a one doth not exist?’

  ‘There is no such man. Why seekest thou him?’ 

  ‘The Athneskon has the power over life and death here on Perm, given unto him over all others who abide in The World Entire.’

  ‘You doth live. Who is dead, that you would bring his soul back into his body? You brought none such hence.’

  ‘The tale of that is long,’ Jerzy said, ‘and I would share it with none but The Athneskon. If you speak truth, then I shall share it not, since then it boots nothing.’ He sighed, less sad than he imagined he would feel. He had known his quest foolish long before coming here. ‘Thank you again for your guest-board. After I rest here I shall go back down the path on the morrow, and do what I would with the rest of mine life.’

  ‘O Man,’ the crone said in a voice which had suddenly gained strength and a timbre uncommon to a frail old woman, ‘your quest mayhap not be bootless.

  ‘Heard thee of The Athneskon, a necromancer renowned across The World Entire, and thus thought you to find a powerful man up an ensorcelled high tower in the very farthest place of this globe. So came thee hence, to where the stories and rumors and legends placed him. The tales hath misled thee not.’

  ‘But you say such a man exists not, good woman,’ Jerzy replied. He looked at the crone now, and still saw but an old woman--yet something else besides. A rush of fear--and hope--ran up his spine.

  ‘Not such a man, young Sir. ‘Athneskon’ there is not, but thought thee of The Athesknai?’ 

  Jerzy rocked back in his chair, surprised. 

  ‘Other names, and older ones, hight I. ‘Despotnia Tropos’ among them.’ The old woman’s eyes fairly blazed now. ‘There never was a man who held the threads of Life and Fate in his hands. No mere necromancer I; trow I that thou hast consulted many who can make fresh and hale a clammy corpse and return its soul, but found no end to thy quest with those sorts?’

  ‘I- I have, Lady.’ Jerzy stayed riveted to his seat, jaw agape.

  ‘Came you for The Athneskon, thinking a man would hold the power for that which you seek to have done?’

  ‘I d-did, Lady. My apologies, L-Lady!’

  ‘Your apologies matter not. Speak your desire, and I shall fulfill it if you wish. But I shall require mine ancient price, as is mine to exact.’

  ‘L-Lady,’ Jerzy said, ‘I hold in my right hand the hand of my, my love, Melisande.’ He spoke her true name. ‘I would have her back in the world and by my side, at a-any price! I have quested across The World Entire to bring her back into the land of the living from where the Thaumaturge Olykinthos has taken her from me!’

  ‘Thy right hand, eh? You neglected to bring that, young Sir.’ She laughed, a long, strong outburst instead of a crone’s cackle.

IV.

  Jerzy had never proved much of a fighter. Even after being drummed out of the Dread Lords’ Thaumaturgical Academy for his ‘inability to conform to discipline’ instead of a lack of talent, he’d not been much of a threat to any but the simplest or weakest person who wished to prey upon him physically. He did not possess much bodily strength, and the Instructors at the Academy had released him more for his idleness and feckless nature than any headstrong resistance to their harsh rules and relentless lessons.

  Born as the third son of Chiliarch Montokos, the Commander of The Crossing and Central Sea District of the Hegemony, he had grown up rather disregarded. He hadn’t even had to take the basic military training expected of any more elder son of a Senior Officer from among the Dread Lords. He did early in his life show some talent with the ‘dunamos’, able to light fires with the touch of his finger and dazzle the eyes of larger kids who teased him. So, when he turned sixteen, his father had him packed off to the Academy. 

  Upon his dismissal two years later he’d gotten disowned and literally tossed out onto the street, with just the clothes on his back and the few spits left in his pouch. He’d learned a little battle magic and a few tricks, mostly gambling dodges, in the Academy. That kept him barely alive until he’d met ‘Sandy’; Melisande. The big red-haired ‘tough’ girl with the cut nose (oh, she never talked about that!) but pretty smile and skill with a shivver had seen him as a ‘gem in the rough’ and ran him through a few grifts on the rough dock-side streets of Seaside. There he’d learned a little about ‘real life’ and also got her to take him into her bed. Unaccountably he’d fallen in love with her just as she’d fallen for his ‘potential’, though their partnership remained predicated on how he could help her make the next ‘big’ score.

  That ‘score’ involved getting the passwords to get into the Vault and answer there the guardian Sphinx of one Olykinthos, a Thaumaturge of great renown and a Master among the less law-abiding denizens of Seaside, and from thence take an item of great value to Mykosin, the Thaumaturge’s rival for control of the city’s underworld. Jerzy proved so much a fool that he’d never even asked or learned the nature of the item that Sandy had offered to steal, nor the price she’d asked of the one who’d contracted her to do so.

  Once Jerzy had lost Sandy and his right hand to Olykinthos, he then realized what an idiot he’d proven--but he still loved her. He signed on as a junior battle mage for a company of sell-spears fighting out among the Sea Isles for whichever bandit lordling would pay them to serve as muscle in whatever minor ratfuck skirmish went on at the time. Instead of pay he took arms training, hard for a soft lad who’d never proved very strong or tough and also lacked a hand. Jerzy never excelled with a shivver but he got proficient with a blasting rod, the one-handed thrusting spear, the sharpened steel hook he got for the stump of his right forearm and the targe he could clip onto it. He also never stopped practicing with the ‘dunamos’, and thus gained skill with rough and ready battle magic.

  As his body and mind toughened, so did his resolve to rescue Sandy from whatever fate into which Olykinthos had cast her. She wasn’t ‘dead’--not as long as his phantom right hand could feel her warm flesh and her pulse. He did favors for Thaumaturges experienced with necromancy, however demeaning and terrifying they proved, but they confirmed that she still ‘lived’ so long as his phantom hand grasped her wrist. They still could not divine just where she existed, but that she still did live. None of them could say just how to bring her forth from thence, and most told him that only ‘The Athneskon’ possessed that power and ability.

  Jerzy amassed a small fortune, and then spent it as wisely as he had learned how to in order to find the location of The Athneskon’s abode on Perm. Then he amassed another, larger fortune to pay his way there aboard a sailing ship to take him into the Far North to the land where the near-legendary Thaumaturge and Necromancer lived. Few captains would venture into the cold monster-haunted seas at the Top of the World Entire, and he had no faith that the one who had brought him hence would wait the two weeks for which he’d paid and instead just sail away the moment he walked out of sight.

  All this he told the crone over the course of eating the loaf and drinking the wine.

V.

  ‘What a tale, young Sir,’ the crone said in a voice stronger and deeper than any would expect from such an aged woman. ‘If thou hast heard of me, know I too have heard of thy travails. Word doth pass unto me from the rest of the World Entire, even hence.’

  ‘Would you help me?’ Jerzy met her eyes, and saw clear brown eyes looking back instead of a crone’s yellowed rheumy ones.

  ‘I would, but agree to my price thou must, young Jerzy, third son of Montokos.’

  ‘Anything you ask, L-Lady, if it lay within my compass to do, make or offer,’ he replied.

  ‘So be it. Stand, and give me your hand.’ She struggled to her feet on wobbly knees, waving away his immediate offer of assistance.

  ‘W-what?’

  ‘Stand, young Sir! Your right hand!’

  He stood. He slipped off the straps holding the leather sheath bearing the hook on the stump of his right forearm and let it fall to the floor with a muted clatter.

  The crone pointed her right index finger at the seared stump. The air filled first with the greasy feeling of massed ‘dunamos’, stronger than Jerzy had ever before felt. A whirling ring of lightning then appeared around the stump of his right forearm. It spat branching skeins of eldritch fire, and within the jagged ring appeared an image of the rest of his arm and hand, holding . . .

  ‘Pull! Pull NOW, or forever lose her,’ the crone said in a drill-master’s parade ground voice.

  Jerzy pulled. The spinning ring of crackling lightning expanded to admit first the left hand and arm, and then the head and upper body of a large young red-haired woman. He kept pulling, and the whole room filled with the whirling discharge. It popped and shot out fat burning sparks which scorched him and the floor and the table and chairs. The sound proved louder than anything he’d ever heard, a roar twinned with the intense ringing in his ears from more ‘dunamos’ than he’d ever thought possible.

  Melisande came arm and then head-first though the sizzling lightning-ringed hole in the fabric of reality. She fell onto the wooden floor in a limp heap, her inactive infantry shivver clattering beside her. The ring of lightning vanished abruptly.

  ‘Does she live?’

  ‘She doth, lad.’

  Jerzy looked at her. Her chest rose and fell, her eyelids fluttering as she drew a great breath.

  ‘Now mine price, young Sir,’ the crone said, locking eyes with him.

  ‘Whatever you will, Lady Tropos.’

VI.

  Sandy came to her feet in a roll, reflexively drawing a knife from her belt before she even came fully to her senses. Something clung to her left wrist and she shook it off to fall to the ground with a faint thud. The body of an old woman, a peplos and himation draped carelessly around her as if she’d just fallen, lay next to her shivver on the floor--as well as a prosthetic steel hook. She whirled in place, seeing no other foes but just Jerzy--was it Jerzy?--standing next to her by a table. His face looked older, harder, more careworn, and he wore different clothes. Of Olykinthos she saw no sign, and somehow they weren’t in the Thaumaturge’s Vault anymore but instead in some rustic sort of hostelry. It felt damned cold in the place.

  ‘Jerzy?’ 

  ‘Aye’, he replied. ‘A moment, dearest.’ He bent down to take something off of the floor with his left hand, and it met (?) his right hand. She heard a sizzle and Jerzy raised his right hand, flexing the fingers and regarding it oddly for a moment. It looked a slightly different color from the rest of his forearm. ‘How are you?’ He took a spear into that hand from where it leaned against a chair.

  She flipped the knife in her right hand into her left and bent to scoop her cubit-long infantry shivver off of the floor. ‘Better now, ‘dearest’.’ She said the last mockingly. Jerzy had never called her that, even in the throes of passion. The boy hadn’t the merest shred of romance in him . . . The shivver whined into life in her palm, shedding the last few drops of Sphinx’ ichor from its blade onto the wooden floor. ‘Where in Airless Tarteros are we, Jerzy?’

  ‘You’ve been in a strange place, Melisande.’ He turned towards her and smiled. His eyes gleamed. ‘But we’re back together again, and that’s all that matters.’ He looked older and tougher, somehow--and his voice didn’t sound quite the same either. ‘Let’s get you some things, and then we’ve got to go catch a ship.’

  She swallowed hard as she sheathed the shivver, looking from ‘Jerzy’ to the dead crone on the floor. He’d never called her ‘Melisande’ since the second day after they’d met. 

  ‘Fair enough, Jerzy. Lead on.’ She sighed and followed him.

FINIS