by Jay Requard
in Issue 128, September 2022
Chapter I: Conditions
Galamzar dozed as dawn breached his tower’s windows, the city of Burq-Tinnin buzzing hundreds of feet below his spire. The smooth pillars holding up the dome, cut from the finest green marble veined in ocher, had lulled his attention away from the large book set on the desk before him. Old mutterings of long-lost places scrawled beside artist renderings had failed to keep his attention. He reached up and wiped the sweat from his straight nose and bearded cheeks, the dark hair wiry against to his calloused palm. Rubbing the crust of his eyes, he leaned back in the high wooden chair and rolled out his neck.
Glancing east, to his right, the horizon blushed orange behind the gray fog out at sea.
Galamzar set his feet against the ground to force life into his toes as he spied the horizon, the sun’s first quarter already cresting the world. He checked to the west, toward the city creeping up the arid coastline, and caught the outline of the thief in his window.
At the top of his tower.
Which had no balconies.
Outlined in the morning glow the tight, firm figure of a woman dressed in dark leathers gave him a casual wave, her golden gaze locked with his. Like a cat she pranced along the tower’s edge until she reached one of the open panes he had left ajar to let in the maritime breeze.
“Good morning,” she said in a bright, cheery voice as she leaned her head inside. Pulling back her stained leather hood, she shook out her long, red hair. “Mind if I come in?”
Galamzar shot up from his chair, his hand out to his side. From the overstuffed shelf set beside his cluttered desk, a dagger flew to his palm. Uttering a second spell, its curved steel extended with the hilt to form a longer blade in his hand. He raised the transformed sword, readied for the attack.
“Hold, Galamzar, hold!” Her wonderous face, as deep as the dunes at sunset, held her smile. “I did not come here to end up on that tip!”
“Hold yourself,” Galamzar rebutted. “How did you scale my tower? The sides are smoother than pearl-skin.”
“Anything can be held onto if you hold onto it the right way.” She beamed at him in a way that made her golden eyes gleam. “Taciturn and handsome. At least your references were right about that.”
The compliment caught Galamzar off-guard. Suddenly aware that he had lowered his weapon, he took a step back from his ornate desk. “How did you—?”
“I really don’t have time for repeat questions.” Without pause the thief hopped over the open pane and down from the window sill, her booted heels landing on the soft cream carpet with no sound. Petite but muscled through the middle and the legs, she let a gloved hand trail along the brass body of the great telescope mounted to a nearby tripod, already attenuated to a specified star he expected to study that night.
“Careful with that.” Galamzar laid the flat of his sword on the corner of his desk. “You’re still intruding, you know.”
“Not for too much longer.” The thief checked over her shoulder before settling that hungry, happy gaze upon the sorcerer once again. “I’m told you’re a man of adventure.”
“You climbed my tower to tell me what I am?”
“I climbed your tower to make a proposition,” she said.
“Which is still breaking into my home.”
She shook her head playfully at him. “You’re very sore about that.”
Breaking glass and a clatter of steel interrupted them. A pair of steel grappling hooks hung over the edge of the now-broken window she had entered. They zipped back, the barbs catching the marble still as the prongs dug into the green-brown panels along the sill. The ropes twanged taut.
“Alright, quickly,” she said in a musical tone. “Sorcerer, I have a proposition for you—I want to steal the Robin’s Egg.”
Leaning to the side to look past her, the sorcerer’s breath caught in his chest. “That’s the phylactery of Parsonous the Depraved.”
“Yes, ‘long lost lo these thousand years in Brynthia’s dead city’,” quoted the thief, surprising him further. “There will be conditions to our contract, however.”
The way she smirked, like she knew all was going to plan, stirred a curiosity in Galamzar. “Go on.”
“Taciturn and handsome, indeed,” the thief said under her breath, though not hiding it. “You wouldn’t happen to have a weapon nearby for me, would you?”
“Me arming you? Is that part of your proposal?” He searched the towering shelves lining the northwestern corner of his office-observatory. Failing to find anything in reach, he went back to the desk.
“No, but as I mentioned, there are conditions.”
“You’d set conditions at this moment?”
“Just a few,” she said as she joined him in front of his furniture, facing the oncoming assault. Both then attentions turned in time to view a hand, armored in layers of black-dyed leather, reach over the edge and grasped the shank of one of the grappling hooks.
“Such as?” said Galamzar, handing her his sword. He clapped his palms shut and muttered a quick evocation before whipping them open again. Electricity, red and sparking, crackled in his hands.
“I can guarantee at least three silvers after the job is done. That’s if we get nothing out of this and survive. When the job is finished, it is finished, and we go our ways. But you will be paid handsomely if all goes to plan.”
Three men climbed up the two lines, clad completely in black swaddling and bearing curved blades. They gazed in through the broken windows as they stepped up to stand together, the lone border between them, Galamzar, and the hypnotizing chaos that had brought them along.
“What do you say, sorcerer?” asked the red-headed thief, wheeling the sword with both hands into a ready position by her head.
Galamzar waited for the trio’s first move as they entered his home with less kindness than she had. “What’s your name?”
“Linettye.”
Chapter II: A Lunch Date
Seabirds cried high upon the blue sky, specks of foam on an endless sea of sightless waves, almost a mirror if not for the actual Eschan Ocean beneath it. Galamzar shut his eyes as he raised his face against the sun on the rocking boat, the warmth bathing his cheeks. The noiselessness of the day, the gentle roar of the wind on the edge of his hearing as it whipped the sails–
Things could have gone worse.
Linettye stood further up the schooner’s deck, her ruby mane caught by the sea breeze. Wrapped in translucent purple silk that left little to the imagination of a studious eye like his, she breathed deep and sighed.
“I’m bored,” she called aloud.
“You wanted to steal the Robin’s Egg,” Galamzar said, eyes still shut. “Should have thought about the five-week journey across the sea.”
“I’m sure we could fill our time with something. Do you think?”
Galamzar opened his eyes at her leading, sweet tone in the question.
Linettye came toward him along the portside rail, a lynx seeking her needs, her wants. The way the thick golden hoops in her brown ears glittered made the gentle angles of her face glow in fresh light, as if the sun had conspired that afternoon to heighten her glory.
The sorcerer swallowed and focused. “What do you have in mind?”
“Well, what can you do?”
“Oh, so I’m here simply to please you?”
“Can you do that, Galamzar?” Linettye asked, leaning forward until they were eye to. “Can you please me?”
The wind, as if knowing, died at the question.
Close enough he could see the sheen on her lips, they formed his name. “Galamzar?”
“The boat’s stopped in the water.”
“Well that’s not flirty at all,” she said, rolling her bright eyes.
“No, the boat is dead in the water,” he said. “You’re feeling the breeze against you.”
“How do you know?”
He shied away from an offending glance to her breasts and the light material over them. Linettye laughed nonetheless and turned saucily away from him before the boat jerked, throwing them off balance. Galamzar caught her in his arms as she fell backwards.
She lost her playful smile. “Dead in the water, you say?”
They ran from mid-deck to the stern, dodging past other passengers who tumbled out of the upper passenger cabins to investigate. Both slowed when Linettye noticed the tentacles, pink and pulsing, wrapped around the railings.
“I’ve got nothing, sorcerer,” the thief said, clad in her translucent silks.
“But she has something for you,” warbled a weird, gurgling voice.
Heralded by a grinding wave of seawater displaced by a hard force, the great shelled body of the cephalopod twisted itself against the port side of the stern. Iridescent eyes twitched in all directions as it hauled its gross head onto the rail, raised up on its mass of writhing appendages. It paused its bulk there, levering the creaking boat’s bow out of the water. Both Linettye and Galamzar clung to a pair of iron fixtures holding two mounted oil lamps, holding the other’s hand to make sure someone caught the other.
“It is sad,” the monster said in a watery, brassy voice. “So many different hopes. So many dreams. But I’m hungry, and as my mother once said, it never does to starve on a dream.” A bubbling sigh escaped the monster as the ship creaked. The weight it exerted on the stern continued to press the bow upward.
“Mollskr,” cried Galamzar. “Mollskr, hold your wobbling ways!”
“Don’t get its attention,” Linettye yelled at the sorcerer. “It will eat us first!”
One of Mollskr’s bulging eyes flicked over to where the pair struggled, fixing on Galamzar. “Oh,” it said in its drawn way. “You know me?”
“Now you’ve done it,” said Linettye.
“She wants you to do human sexual things to her,” said the monster. “Even now, she is thinking about human sexual things with you. Though, she wonders, what will happen after she robs you. It’s a conundrum.”
“Excuse me?” said Linettye incredulously, kicking her feet. “I thought no such thing!”
“Telepathy.” Galamzar sighed deeply as he gripped tighter to the lamp fixture, his feet growing heavier by the moment. “Just like in the book.”
“Those books were written by those who survived,” Mollskr piped in. “Which neither of you will.”
“Hold tight.” Galamzar let go of the fixture and plummeted. Withholding the need to scream in his chest, he thrust his open hands down and spoke the first words of a spell when one of Mollskr’s tentacles caught him mid-air.
“Valiant,” said the monster. “You are better at action than you are answering a woman’s summons. All you really had to do was ask her. Or you would have if I weren’t going to eat the both of you.”
The sorcerer wriggled in the wet, spongy limb, yanking a hand free of the sucking restraint. He shouted his spell through halted breath, the creature’s strength crushing his middle. A great flash of yellow sparked from his hand toward its eye.
Mollskr unleashed an ear-splitting cry, his shelled mass sliding off the edge of the boat with a thunderous splash. The tentacle loosened around the sorcerer, dropping him. Lucky to land on deck as the ship’s ballast righted the schooner, Galamzar rushed to the side and threw another strobing flash at Mollskr.
The blinded sea monster garbled curses before disappearing into the depths. “My lunch!” Mollskr shrieked before the water cut off the rest of its rant. “My lunch!”
Bent over the rail, Galamzar heaved to catch his breath before he looked to the sails of the schooner. He raised his right hand at the limp cloth and uttered another incantation. The wind gathered in its folds, tugging the ship forward.
Linettye’s hand fell on his back. “Well?”
“What?” asked Galamzar.
“Aren’t you going to ask me?” she inquired in that leading, sweet tone.
Chapter Three: In Full
Galamzar groaned as he pushed upward, the sucking mud pulling from the spaces between the grate’s edges with a wet sound. Shoving the hunk of ancient bronze onto the sidewalk, he crawled out of the sewer on all fours. His linen pants and shirt soaked to a dark color he did not stop to consider, he spun about on his stomach and reached into the sewer hole.
Linettye grabbed his wrists, and with the last of his strength, he hauled her onto the gutter beside him. Rain pelted them from a grumbling slate sky as rats watched from beneath a large stone bridge a few feet away, chattering their surprise at the sudden intrusion to their meal.
He saw her bright smile first before her hand slipped into the fold of his shirt.
“Do you have it?” she asked, breathless as she laid her hand on the lump he had stowed there.
He nodded, weak from their escape.
She huffed once before rising. Staggering beneath the bridge, she kept on, slowly gaining stride before falling into a limping jog. A cry echoed out of the darkened streets behind them, long and high as the maddened shriek echoed throughout the alleys of Brynthia’s necropolis. Galamzar rolled to his feet and looked down into the abandoned streets, unable to spot their hunter in the night. The sun had set a few hours before, leaving the last shadows to seep from their sources.
The necromancer’s screams grew closer.
The sorcerer chased after Linettye. The trail led him back to the mausoleum on the edge of Brynthia’s dead-city, a sprawling collection of urban graveyards that stretched for miles before it reached the jungled edges of the city’s farthest outskirts, teeming with dangerous wildlife, which surrounded the ancient sore.
He swung open the iron door, letting in her first.
She leapt on a sarcophagus by the back wall and squatted on the lid, lifting something by her knees. A scant light from a lamp to the side of it glinted off the tip of her crossbow, its flame still high after she had lit it almost twelve hours beforehand.
Galamzar reached into his shirt and extracted the Robin’s Egg. Its smooth, round shape glittered as the facets within sparked a red magic.
“The circle,” he whispered, dreaded to be heard. “Quickly!”
The sorcerer set the stone in the center of the bare dirt floor as Linettye put down her weapon and took up a small sack beside the lamp. She spread a thick ring of salt around where he placed their prize, closing it off with a smooth efficiency that left no bumps or warps in the perimeter. Galamzar summoned spirits of his ancient homeland in Arbikk, a faraway place of sand, sun, and serpents with teeth so large their venom was an ironic cruelty.
“Ready?” Linettye asked, taking her iron crossbow back up after she reascended to the sarcophagus-lid.
Galamzar nodded as he spoke the words of his evocation, focused on the Robin’s Egg. The jewel’s tiny red ember throbbed a scintillating crimson before issuing a high peel.
Parsonous the Depraved, dripping wet from wherever he had been marching in the mud and rain, materialized in a steaming heap before them. He rose quickly, his sickly eyes alert. Galamzar threw his hands at the consecrated salt-circle, his spell punctuated with a shout. The ring exploded in a column of green power trapped the half-fleshed necromancer. Set ablaze by the arcane fire, the fiend spun about in shock.
Linettye fired her crossbow. The bolt sprouted from Parsonous’ eye, who wailed as he dropped to both knees. Galamzar shouted his spell again at the salt ring, its emerald light flaring a second time. The screams of the undead creature became more human, more panicked.
The sorcerer winced at the sound, knowing their victory was at hand when, out of the left side of his vision, darted Linettye. She had left her crossbow, tasked for the killing shot, unloaded on the sarcophagus lid. Like a cat she bounded through the circle’s roaring boundary, the fire bearing no effect on her living flesh. She landed, somersaulted forward, snatched the Robin’s Egg from in front of its previous possessor, and bounded across the other side.
Without looking back at Galamzar the thief sprinted through the tomb’s exit.
At a loss for words, the sorcerer almost failed to notice the necromancer no longer groaned in agony. Blood flowed from his ruined head, but centuries of undying empowered him beyond mortal bounds. The lich met the sorcerer’s terrified expression with a defiant sneer.
Galamzar drew the curved dagger from behind his back and advanced on the dark foe.
Hours later, near midnight, he sat alone in the tavern on the border between Brynthia’s slums and the dead zone he had fled. The same tavern where they had made love in a large bed the morning before, whispered things to each other before they had headed off.
The same tavern they had both promised to return to.
Galamzar stared at his wine cup, its brown ceramic sides warmed by his hand.
Anger bound tight in his cheeks, setting his jaw in a hard line. The murk of the room, populated by him and a few locals kept to their corners, lay lit only by a few small lamps placed on barrels and benches that served as the tables.
The barkeep, no more than twenty, scuttled to the sorcerer’s piece of the counter. “You want anything?”
Galamzar checked the quarter-full bottle of wine he nursed beside his cup and shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“My pa will serve you until morning.”
The youth scuttled back into the dark.
The sorcerer sipped. And sipped. And sipped some more.
“More?”
“I said I’m fine—” Galamzar glanced up, expecting to see the youth. Instead, a frailer copy stood behind the expanse of board between them, offering a tense smile. Outside the nearest window, the daylight warmed the squalid streets, bringing oranges to purple the gray flagstones and dingy walls.
The sorcerer palmed his face, flushed by a wine headache. “Apologies.”
“No need, Mr. Galamzar,” said the owner as he placed a small, tucked square of paper on the counter. “I just wanted to give you this. It was left behind on the mail pile yesterday and my son isn’t very good at deliveries. It has your name on it.”
Galamzar gazed at the little note for long, lingering seconds before he opened it. Pulling the tucked edges, three silver coins fell out of its folds and struck the wood. He grimaced at their dull noise as he held the letter beneath a nearby lamp.
“Galamzar,
There is a ferry at the southwestern end of the docks which goes to a small fishing village east of the city the locals say is quite charming. I hear it is fun and full of more adventures. These three silvers, as guaranteed in our previous agreement, will cover your tab, the ferry, and the only tavern there if you are interested. I’ll be in that tavern.
I hope they’re enough to let me steal you away again.
-Linettye.”
The sorcerer left one of those coins behind.
©August 2022, Jay Requard
Jay Requard‘s credits include A Wave of Lions: Salt Songs of the Mirror Sea by Falstaff Books, and my previous accomplishments include the award-winning “Mask of the Kravyads” and “War Pigs”. He hosts the Pondering the Orb show on YouTube. His work has appeared previously in Swords & Sorcery.