Part IX: The Sorcerer's Tale, Part I

I tried to protest—the notion of listening to this fiend for any length of time, much less hearing him relate a story, was both ridiculous and terrifying—but to no avail. Once again I was impelled by forces unseen, and threw myself rather severely into a nearby chair. Attempting to move or even to speak was impossible.

Hastrel then seated himself at the head of the table. He lowered his head, closed his eyes and steepled his hands as if deep in thought. When he looked up again he had assumed an entirely new aspect. His face changed before my eyes: his cheeks became gaunt, his forehead more deeply lined, his skin yellowed and dry, his lips cracked and chapped, his nose more craglike and disjointed. His previously shimmering hair now seemed drab, and a light, downy beard sprouted like weeds after a rainstorm on his chin. His eyes, however, changed the most. Where before his sickly green eyes, however snakelike, had flared with a cruel light, now they had donned the livery of the sepulcher—dull, filmed, cloudy with discharges and cataracts, like fetid swamp pools covered over with grime.

He appeared like a man near death, if not already a corpse. When he turned to me—for I could still tell that he held me in his eyes despite their listlessness—the aura of obscenity and abomination that hung over him like some dark eidolon was unbearable. I gagged, nearly vomiting in my mouth, and a feeling of overpowering dread dropped like a lodestone in my stomach. Cold sweat beaded on my brow and nipped at the nape of my neck. My heart was pierced as with a rod of ice. And the sorcerer's eyes, like the gaze of a basilisk, bored into my mind.

His voice however, unlike the body that produced it, was iron, immoveable, imperial, the same haughty tone he had assumed before.

"There is one immutable principle that rules all creation," he declared, pausing so that the grandeur of the statement was impressed upon me, "And that is hierarchy.

"Hierarchy, Sextus, that is the rub. Hierarchy. You know, I am sure, that ours is a striated universe, a universe of gradients, of substructures within the superstructure that is the Aurbis. Each of these steps upon the ladder lead to the higher truth; but there is something that is higher, a crown upon the pillar, a keystone in the arc of reality, unknowable as it may be. It existed before the first divisions of the cosmos, and it remains still, the great Wheel that girdles creation; and if the hub and the spokes fell away, the Wheel would abide. Do you understand? A ruling king is always a king, not by dint of his kingdom but by his bearing, his character, his aspect. Kingship has suffused him, the role has seized him. The true hierarch is ever the hierarch, and he will do what he must to retain his seat, and it shall seem as nothing to him, shall flow over him like cool spring water.

"The same is true for those who are subordinate to the hierarch. A slave is always a slave, until he is not. That is the unique quality of the slave: the capacity for changing his lot. A hierarch, once he has effected his ascension, cannot be unseated, even if reduced to a state of despondency. There are Kings that are slaves, and Slaves that are kings. The difference lies in circumstance. A King is not made by his crown, nor a Slave his fetters.

"Allow me to elaborate…"

—

I was born, as you have no doubt surmised, a Breton male, the son of a family of Northpoint merchants. In the beginning we were not a prosperous lot. Three hundred odd years ago we had been lords in Northpoint, the enterprising House of Montclair; but no longer. As families are wont to do, ours fell on hard times: a wine-sodden great-grandfather gambled away the storied Montclair silver mines; a promising heir was slain in some war or other; a freak accident set one of our warehouses aflame...These, along with other myriad incidents, had marinated the once great Montclair name in mediocrity. Not the least of our grand woes was the death of my father, the heir to the Montclair line, and mother. They had been in Daggerfall investigating a promising business prospect, one that might have reinvigorated our moribund house; but on the return voyage their ship foundered in a storm upon the crags of western Glenumbra, and they were lost to the waves. My brother, scarcely an infant, and I were then entrusted to the sole care of our grandparents.

But they simply had not the means to support us alone. Thus, when I was five years old, my grandfather announced that the imperious villa that had housed generations of Montclairs was to be auctioned off, for with our debts only the intervention of the Eight could have allowed us to remain there (at least, if we did not wish to live as paupers, supping on gruel and tears). One could almost hear the whole city gasp; but there was a resignation there too, an understanding that, finally, after two centuries of senescence, the old lion of Montclair had breathed its last. A whole throng of onlookers attended the auction, curious to see what it was like when an old oak tree is felled, and perhaps to collect some of its timbers for themselves. The silver, the porcelain, the ancient Akaviri tea sets, the brocaded silks, the fine damasks, the gold-chased arrases and dossers, the mile-long Rihadi carpets, the old oil landscapes, the Colovian wines, the sherries and brandies that had been luxuriating in the dark for centuries, the yellowed charts and sea maps, the brass spyglasses and astrolabes: all the accumulated silt of our history was dredged from the murk of the house, some having been so ensconced that they refused to be relinquished, as if the very walls would not cede their last scraps of territory, would not suffer the final humiliation of exposing to the eyes of the world the bare moldering beams that lay beneath their carapaces of dust and drapery.

I remember standing at my grandfather's side as he inaugurated the auction with a speech and a toast, looking out into the crowd of spectators, that gleeful horde of witnesses to our disgrace. Their eyes were dark, simian, gleaming dully like the glass oculi of dolls, their lips pink, plump, ripe, as if aroused. They whispered conspiratorially amongst themselves, and from time to time a ribald guffaw was flung anonymously with all the ferocity of a barbed arrow at my grandfather in his bulging maroon coat. And yet he stood there, my grandmother at his side, with his proud silver beard and his evergreen eyes, and laughed as he bartered away the Montclair fortune, smiled as he sold the home in which he and all his ancestors had been reared. How could he smile, I wondered? How could he laugh? Did he not hear the whispers and the jeers? Did he not feel the phantom gaze of the mob?

In the end the Villa Montclair was sold to an enterprising young buck by the name of Tycho Bracques, who made his fortune whaling off Solstheim, and for the moment we few remaining Montclairs relocated to a luxurious townhouse above Northpoint's square. Our neighbors were fabulously wealthy dilettantes wont to while away evenings ravenous with drink and song. My grandparents, not accustomed to such saturnalia, or at least alien to it for well over three decades, consequently filed a complaint to the landlord. He laughed in their faces.

It was fast becoming clear that our days in Northpoint were numbered. And yet still our grandparents smiled through the long nights punctuated with the pounding music of pipe and drum, broken wine bottles, and besotted singing. Still they smiled during the humiliation of going to market, returning home bristling with jeers and overlong looks like marksmen's dummies. Still they smiled as my grandmother taught herself how to cook and clean and keep house, tasks which she had never once in her life performed herself.

I think of all the people in my life I have met, they were the best. If things had gone differently, I wonder, might I have been like them? Strong, proud, unflinching, unyielding, dignified, kind, graceful, quick to laughter and quick to forgiveness? When I rifle the pages of my life, there are times that I wish that the story had ended here, wish that I could remain submerged in the golden age of my childhood, in those warm, velveteen apartments that seemed to me then to be endless in their mysteries and enticements. In the mornings before our lessons—for my grandfather too had assumed the role of schoolmaster—my brother and I played at knights, duelling atop the gilt sofas and loveseats, dashing after one other through the dark storage rooms and the unfurnished chambers which we, in our poverty, could not afford to populate. If we grew too rowdy, our grandmother would scold us, though not too harshly, promising freshly baked sweetrolls as a reward for good behavior—though we and our grandfather knew well that they were bought from the bakery on the other side of the square, and were not her own as she claimed. We would then occupy the rest of the day at our grandfather's side, rapt as he delivered long sermons on history, his favorite subject, which more often than not were interrupted by grandmother's call to dinner. And no matter how poor the pigeon pie was, no matter how overcooked the roast or how sickly sweet the poached pears, the look of pride on grandmother's face as she gazed upon her day's toil unfailingly elicited from us the same response:

"It's the most delicious thing I've ever tasted."

—

I did not remain there long. Soon my days would no longer be halcyon. The demarcation between that life, that life of wild days and gilded evenings, and the life that came after, lies at my leavetaking from Northpoint. One morning, at breakfast, my grandfather told me that there was a certain cousin in Wayrest who had offered to take me in. He was a professor, and grandfather swore that he would prove a far abler teacher than he could ever be. He was concerned greatly about my education.

"Educated men will be the last salvation of the Montclairs," he said, "And all true education begins with the young."

What I did not realize, naive as I was, was that I was being sent away. I had no real idea of what "being taken in" connoted. I imagined that all of us would go to Wayrest as a family. Naturally I was sorely mistaken.

And so the promised day arrived. My trunks were packed, and I was washed and dressed in my finest doublet. At midday the sound of hooves on cobbles announced the approach of a carriage, and all of us went down to meet it. It was cold and blustery, one of those late autumn days in which one can detect the iron presentiment of winter in the air. The sun was mercury, filtered through plumes of smoky cloud, lending the sky a kind of electricity. I did not think it peculiar that no one else had brought their trunks with them, imagining that they had already sent them ahead. But when I was the only one to approach the sideboard, I turned and saw that my grandparents had tears in their eyes. My brother stared without expression. "Are you not coming with me?" I asked, and they shook their heads. Tears began streaming down my cheeks. I started to go to them, but they said no, and waved me back. Why? I thought. Why? Why? Why? The coachman, pressed for time, came down from the box and gently, but sternly, pushed me into the carriage and closed the door behind me. I felt the phantom tug of motion, and watched helplessly as the sobbing figures of my grandparents and brother grew more and more distant, until they fell away behind jostling crowds, behind stout stone buildings, behind leagues of windswept moors and westering sky, until they were as far from me as the moons.

I never saw them again.

—

I was awakened by the clatter of wheels on cobbles. Cautiously, I parted the curtain and was nearly blinded by the intensity of the morning. It had snowed in the night, and a blanket of sparkling white spread as far as the eye could see. The Bjoulsae ran alongside the road, rushing swift and black towards Iliac Bay in the grey distance, the same course on whose currents I flowed now towards an obscure and unknowable destiny.

We had arrived at Wayrest.

The journey had been hard. I had been tormented by fitful dreams, and sleep had eluded me. But I could not but be curious about this vast and strange place that I had been brought to. We came into the city just as the hawkers began their morning rounds, and as we wended our way through the narrow streets a number of them jockeyed for the coachman's attention, profferring ruby red candied apples and toy soldiers and steaming mugs of hot mulled wine. But he paid them no heed. The morning market had begun in earnest in the city square, and already the stalls were enveloped by servants and housewives going about their shopping. One could smell the pleasing scents of woodsmoke and baking bread, and, less tangible but certainly evident, the tang of salt and rotting fish off the bay in concert with the cries of seagulls and cormorants. Atop the snow-clad chimneys and in the temple belfries, great white storks nested in their roosts of twigs. Faint silvery flakes, listlessly floating in the gustless air, glistened as they were lavished with golden light. I remember that scene as vividly as if it had been yesterday, that memory of smoke and cold and the scintillation of the snow, the bright vestments of the hawkers' stalls and the facades of the market square, the tolling of the bells. Never before and never after was there an autumn morning so beautiful in Wayrest.

By degrees we ascended into a tangled labyrinth of alleys and laneways, where the sharp odor of nightsoil became the dominant note. Finally the streets became too narrow for the passage of the carriage, and the rest would have to be traversed on foot. Luckily the coachman was not so cruel as to allow a young boy of six in a strange place to find the way on his own—or perhaps he had been paid handsomely enough. In any case, we walked together, lashed by the bitter autumn wind, through the dark, quiet streets, where the sunlight did not penetrate. The coachman occasionally muttered to himself, and occasionally we were forced by a dead end to turn around and venture another route, but at last, with a sigh of satisfaction, he placed a hand on my shoulder and pointed straight ahead.

"There," he said roughly, "The blue door."

In that abyss of brown and grey, a single brightly painted, light blue door radiated as brilliantly as a star. The coachman brought me before it, set down my trunk, and eyed me curiously. He mumbled and gurgled for a moment, then knelt down in front of me. He fumbled in the pockets of his cloak, grunting intermittently, and finally produced a small object wrapped in rough paper, which he pressed firmly into my hands.

"Open it."

Hesitantly, I unlaced the string tie and tore the brown wrapping.

It was a painted wooden imperial cavalryman, sword in hand and arm outstretched, as if ordering a charge. I fingered the thing, rolled it around in my hands. Tears formed in my eyes.

"Thank you," I said.

He rose and placed a gloved hand on my shoulder.

"Dry your tears boy," he grunted, gesturing to the blue door.

"The rest is up to you now."

Then he was gone.

I let my tears fall onto the rough stone until I could no longer stand the cold. My teeth chattered, and my fat cheeks were rouged with the bluster of the wind. Finally, I marshalled enough courage to approach the door. The blue was inviting, hypnotic. A large brass knocker in the shape of a lion's head reared up before me, its imperious eyes and snarling jaw regarding me with derision. Cautiously I stretched my small, ungloved hand out, grasped the cool metal of the ring, and quietly knocked.

The truth is, I never wanted that door to open.

Note: Wow, it's been two months without a chapter! Apologies for the long wait. I've started two new jobs and they've taken up a lot of my time, and writing this "Sorcerer's Tale" has been something that has required a good bit of planning and consideration. Originally I was going to post it as a single, long chapter, but I decided that, because it will be fairly long, that breaking it up would be best. I will do my upmost to keep a chapter coming out monthly from here on out. Thank you to all who have been following the story, and I hope that you're enjoying it so far!