The Seascape Tattoo (3 page)

“I am here, M'thrilli,” Neoloth said. “As always, you call, I come.”

“We have what you seek,” the merman said. “Do you have what we agreed to?”

“Yes.”

“Then … see,” M'thrilli said. As if he had made an invisible gesture, one of the other males swam forward and held out his hands. The object was no larger than an infant's forearm, a cylinder of brass sealed with threaded caps. It was covered with glyphs Neoloth had seen before on one of the great Mayan time wheels. He held his breath.

The fabled device was a reality … at least real in that it conformed to descriptions in whispered myth. It was a talisman,
the
talisman in fact, an object of fabulous value that had not, as feared, disappeared forever beneath the waves.

If the legends were true, it was a relic of Azteca, used to store mana from the bodies of the sacrificed. What was it doing here, half a world from its origins? Again, if the legends were true, then it was simply a matter of a wizard who had outstayed his welcome, seeking to flee north when his vessel was caught in a storm.

Or was it pirates? Or sudden illness? True, a mighty enough wizard should have been able to deal with any of those things … but perhaps not several at a time. Looking at it, Neoloth understood that he might have been grasping at straws, but in times like these, one grasped at whatever floated.

The merman saw the hunger in his eyes. “Your part,” he said.

Neoloth opened his pouch, presenting M'thrilli with a variety of tempered steel spearheads. Their eyes were now the ones burning with hunger. Craft the Merfolk possessed in plenty, and strength, and clever hands. But the workings of fire were known only to those on the land, and that was a good thing for those who spoke the Mer-tongue.

It gave such men something to trade. What did they want with spear points? Hunting? Protection? Fighting over territory? Now that the magic was dwindling, did the surviving Merfolk find themselves battling over good hunting currents?

“We fight not with each other,” M'thrilli said. And, again, Neoloth was not certain if his mind was being read or they simply anticipated his chain of thought. It was not the first time he'd had that impression.

“The magic wanes. Our numbers wane. There is fish for all,” he said.

“Then why?” Neoloth asked, sorry as soon as the words left his mouth.

“Our bones have power,” M'thrilli said solemnly. “We must protect ourselves from those who hunt us.”

The merman's eyes were sad. “Soon. Today, or in ten thousand years, we will be nothing but myth. But for now, we stay in the deeps, where the mana is still strong.”

The mermen to either side took the tools and deposited the talisman in its stead. Fearing even to breathe, Neoloth bent and gathered it into his hands. Even with the precious thing in his possession, he could barely believe it.

“Why?” he asked. “Why would you trade this to me?”

“We have no need for it,” M'thrilli said. “It requires spells our tongues have never shaped. We
are
magic. We do not wish to be a part of men's workings of it. Perversions of it. We could have lived for eons. It was your spells that used up the world's mana too rapidly.”

Neoloth-Pteor considered. “Then why don't you destroy it. Why sell it to me?”

M'thrilli's expression was not pleasant. “The sooner the mana is used up on the land, the sooner men will forget magic. And if you forget magic, you may leave us alone, in the depths. We know you of the old days, Neoloth. There are better men than you. But there are also worse.”

The slight, sad smile thinned. “Be well in the last days. We have served each other before. Likely, this is the final time.”

And with that, the Merfolk slipped back into the waves and were gone, leaving Neoloth on the shore, alone with the dancing light of the moon.

*   *   *

Neoloth-Pteor slipped back into the coach without looking back at the ocean, holding the oilcloth in both hands. He did not unwrap it again until he was safely behind the coach's wooden door. The coachman cracked his whip, and their conveyance was on its way.

“Master?” his elf asked. Neoloth gave Fandy a single look:
do not ask
. And then leaned back against the back wall and closed his eyes. Everything was working.

*   *   *

Two hours later they were still in the thick of the night but drawing near to the castle. Quillia's grandest dwelling perched on a low hill, surrounded by gardens and hedge mazes, smaller mansions, and an army barracks whose soldiers doubled as emergency bodyguards. The coach bounced up the final cobbles to a small castle—or a large stylized house—just east of the main dwelling. Neoloth's own personal lodgings.

A dwelling worthy of Quillia's chief wizard.

He felt a deep sense of satisfaction as the coach drew into a tunnel formed by sculpted hedges, into a shadowed arbor. “I will want you in the morning,” he said to Fandy.

Neoloth carried his package into his study, which was lined with scrolls and books and odd memorabilia, detritus of a life lived more in the shadows than in the light. He swept scrolls cluttering his desktop into a pile and laid down the oilskin. Peeled it away. Then for the second time, he beheld the talisman.

A little water had leaked out of the cracks in machining. The joining edges were so precise and delicate that they almost eluded the naked eye. Still, water had seeped into the works.

He wondered if that would damage the workings. If workings there were.

Neoloth turned the cylinder over and over again, until he saw something that looked like an entry point. He rummaged in his desk until he found a magnifying glass. He inspected the cylinder carefully. Could it be booby-trapped?

He had not been to Azteca, but in visions had seen the pyramids and sacrificial pyres, the lines of war captives and criminals, the rivers of blood running in the shadows of Quetzalquatl's titanic wings. Part of him hungered to witness that spectacle, while another part was glad that he never had, or would. There were ways that his soul was too close to a tipping point, and Neoloth knew that just as there were deeds that could not be undone, there were sights that could not be unseen, changes in the composition of the soul that could not be healed or reversed.

Yes. There was something daunting about the cylinder. The Merfolk had been wise to rid themselves of it.

Neoloth's nails were long, tapered and blackened by tarry substances beneath it, either extruded from or growing into the quick. He wiggled his fingers to get the stiffness out and then drew up his sleeves. Neoloth's arm was covered by tattoos, mostly in dark primary colors, many faded by time. With one fingernail, he drew a cut in his skin, just over a tattoo of a spider.

Blood welled and then … was absorbed into the spider. The inking swelled and shook itself to wakefulness and crawled off his arm. It seemed confused and sleepy but gained confidence and purpose as it crawled across the desk and to the cylinder.

For a minute the tattoo had been rounded and corporeal, but, as it crawled up on the cylinder, it lost dimension again, became flat, and slipped into a crack through which no earthly insect could have passed.

Neoloth pressed his ear against the cylinder. He heard soft scraping sounds, as if someone was drawing a pen against the inside, scratching it about. Then … something that might have been a gasp or cry of dismay, on the tiniest possible scale.

Then … a tiny click, and a door opened on the smooth part of the cylinder. The entire machine seemed to blossom.

The spider tattoo was waiting as patiently as a trained dog. It crawled out of the cylinder and back onto his arm, where it sank into his skin again, sinking into a well-deserved rest.

Neoloth peered into the workings. Yes, there had been a trap. The inside of the cylinder was covered with engravings, miniature hieroglyphs. One of them had peeled away, a brass equivalent of the tattoo. Something poisonous no doubt, and native to the jungles of Azteca. The battle between it, and the spider, must have been exciting, and he was sorry to have missed it.

But now he wanted to look at the workings. Other than a few small gears, the compartment was largely occupied by a scroll constructed of beaten gold, gold so fine it was almost translucent. Never had he seen gold beaten that finely. And like the interior of the talisman it was covered by minute, hand-graven glyphs. The result might have taken an army of miniature artisans months to produce. The scroll was wound onto a spindle. How long was the entire thing? A hundred feet, perhaps. And the thing was designed so that it wound from one spindle to another, perhaps at the movement of the tiny gears.

“Brilliant,” he whispered. A watchmaker's precision in service to a sorcerer's secrets. He bowed his head in respect to the unknown Aztec craftsman, and the wizard who must have paid dearly for the device.

Two important questions remained: Was there still power in it? And if not, could it be charged up once again?

Neoloth carefully folded the device back together again into its cylinder form and ran his fingers along the outside edge. Closed his eyes. Yes, a slight sensation of warmth.

He held his arm next to the device, slowing his breathing so that he contributed no mana to the process to come. Neoloth's right arm was inscribed with countless tattoos, symbolic of adventures, or memories, or simple magical designs … but hidden among them were patterns of greater significance. And two of them were small butterfly-like creatures the size of gnats, tattoos that could only have been created by the smallest of hands. Fairy tats, earned in a far-off land, performing favors to a dying kingdom of the little people.

He could withdraw his own mana, his own natural life force, but by placing his arm close, if there was anything left at all …

He held his breath.

There.

The slightest twitch of a wing. Oh, yes. The little creatures, sealed to his flesh, were stirring to life. Rousing from long slumber and death-like dream. They seemed to yawn, scratch themselves, and pull up away from his skin like little inchworms, thin as hairs, fragile as cobwebs.

He pulled his arm away. The butterflies sank back into his flesh and were still.

So. Even after decades beneath the waves, magic remained. Not much, but enough to convince him the device still worked …

A knock at his door.

Neoloth looked up at once. Sunlight streamed through his window. His contemplations had lasted hours longer than he had intended.

“Yes?” he asked, opening the door.

A red-bearded member of the royal guard stood there, head high, quite appropriately respectful of the court's grand vizier. The guard clicked his heels. “Her majesty the queen requests your presence.”

“Tell her that I will be there quickly,” Neoloth answered. Damnation! He had been up all night. His clothes would be ruffled, his hair a mess, his breath like something that had crawled out of a swamp and died.

“I will wait,” Redbeard replied.

Neoloth closed the door. Well. Magic might be in short supply, but a simple spell … another test of the talisman, he told himself.

Neoloth held the cylinder at arm's length and passed it over his body, chanting an incantation as he did. He felt the tingle as dirt and sand fell from his body and clothes. His hair straightened itself. Fatigue, collected in his joints like sand in a watch, just … dissolved.

Neoloth scrubbed his teeth with a scented mint stick. Once upon a time he had used spells for such things, but why waste even a smidgeon of power in these milk-and-water days?

He examined himself in the mirror. From elegantly forked beard to the fall of his clothes (and they had made small adjustments, were no longer as tight about the waist, where his recent weight gain was more noticeable than he wished), he looked … perfect.

Excellent. His investment in the cylinder had been a good one.

He opened the door and was privately pleased that the guard's eyes widened at his transformation. “Please,” Neoloth said. “Take me to the queen.”

 

THREE

The Princess Tahlia

Neoloth's private minipalace was connected to the main dwelling by both a public path and a hidden tunnel. They took the tunnel. Whatever purpose Queen Quilla had in mind must be something clandestine.

The air in the tunnel was pleasantly cool and dry, cooler than it would have been in the streets above. Quillia, wealthiest of the Eight Kingdoms, was built on a desert, and the incantations that had once brought water to her streets had been largely replaced with aqueducts and reservoirs.

A series of torches cast overlapping circles of yellow light along the way. Once, magical golden plates had illuminated the walls. Now, such excess was too wasteful by far. The tunnel ended in a set of stairs carved into the rock. Neoloth mounted them, climbing up into the castle. The stairs emptied out into the back of the throne room walled with marble and veined with gold.

Queen Quilla was present, all angularity and calm command. Just to her right was an unexpected surprise and pleasure … Princess Tahlia, her golden hair brighter than the golden throne on which she sat, its seat a hand width lower than the queen's.

He bowed again, relieved that he had spent a little magic to tidy himself up before making an appearance. The queen was reason enough … but this situation went beyond logic. Neoloth was older than he appeared, a testimony to the herbs and magics that sustained him in his seventh decade of life. There were times when, despite those spells, he felt old, a sensation like frost at the core of his spine.

But that feeling vanished when the princess was near.

Princess Tahlia combined the refined beauty of her queen mother and the strength and intelligence of her deceased father, a warrior and scholar who had inherited much but expanded his holdings with conquest and crafty negotiation. Tahlia moved with such grace she seemed almost to be suspended by strings from above.