... and every black hair on Esker’s body rose like a mad snake.

The man who had entered was little, by Esker’s standards, perhaps medium by most; he had thin arms and thin legs and a fat gut, all wrapped in a suit of some fine-grained white leather that moved strangely with his steps. By his lightness, he was a Rook, though there was some of Jaidar in his features; his hair was straight and sandy like a Rook’s, long but thinning, pulled back into a tiny tail where his neck joined his skull. Around his neck there was a silver-and-turquoise charm on a white leather thong, though Esker could catch the faint tracery of wires, straight and right-angled, over the veins of the turquoise—which stone was carved into the shape of a whorl and claw. “By the guts of the stars,” he uttered in a high voice, pungent with a Great Playa twang, “if it isn’t the Brothers Epseris, and their greedy fingers in my cookie jar again. Where’s your brother, Teos?”

Teos sang ush; the man in white held up a hand, its fingers contorted into a shape that made Esker’s stomach churn, and whatever would have transpired failed to do so.

“Teos don’t talk no more, Boss,” said Sethos Epseris. “Not since we lost Horos.”

“Oh, he talks,” said the man that Esker could only presume was Boss John Dream. “I can hear every word he gibbers in that poor addled head of his. Which one are you again? I always did mix up the lickspittle and the quiet one.”

“The lickspittle is Sethos,” said Epaphos. “I speak for the Epseris now, John Dream.”

“What an event,” said Boss John Dream in mock wonder, tapping his cheek with a forefinger in rhythm with the words. “And you think if you won’t call me ‘Boss,’ I won’t be boss?”

“Oh,” said Epaphos, “I know it.”

Boss John Dream examined Epaphos with a gimlet eye. “Will miracles never cease,” he said. “Evidence of intelligent life in the Epseris clan. Let this one bud off a couple more and I might commence needing to keep an eye on you. Well, I do enjoy a spell of badinage, but there’s killing to be done.” He turned his eye to Esker. “And what I need to know is, do I need to include you in the proceedings? Don’t play dumb with me, now, soldier; I see you standing like a damned weather-vane in the middle of this common room, which means you weren’t in the Epseris’ sights, and I think you know as well as I do that Epseris kill like dogs drool—that is to say, everydamnwhere, except where they’ve been trained they shouldn’t. What I’m getting at is that if you’re going to cause me trouble, I’m going to paint the remnants of this fine establishment with a thin film of what used to be your insides—but, if you’ll submit to a very small work of binding, just to assure your non-interference, then I’ll be happy to give you a ten-minute head start to fleeing my Souktown and getting back to whatever hick shithole burped you into a world that never wanted you.”

“I’m here on business,” said Esker. “I’ve got deed to a claim in south Jagaag.”

“This is your lucky day, then,” said Boss John Dream. “Instead of getting killed by a higher class of idiot, you get to saunter on back to [[Pigshit Village in scenic Incest Province]] and lament how the boss of Jagaag Souktown stole your claim-deed. With a tale like that, I bet you can have both your sisters in any hole you like. On three, soldier, am I getting shit from you or not? One…”

Through a window’s teeth, Esker saw a flash of motion—hand in a flat plane before a thick-bearded face, the forefinger tilted up—a sundial sign, the army signal for buy some time.

“You’ve called me ‘soldier’ twice now,” said Esker. “The man who had this staff found out what that meant, the hard way.” He twirled the staff once and poked its owner, trying to make the gesture look rougher than it was. “You’re a big sorcerer—all right, I respect that. You can handle a few runeslingers like a sackful of puppies—more than a little entertaining, I have to say, after taking shit from them day after day. But I’m a soldier of the Jaidari army, and I’ve been in charges through runic enfilades that would leave an Epseris brother nothing but ash and naked bones, ush staff or no ush staff. So, Boss John Dream,” and Esker dropped the staff and took a long step toward his swordspear, which lay on the ground in the middle of a puddle of strawberry brandy, “I think you’re bluffing.”

Boss John Dream smiled from ear to ear, every blindingly white tooth on display. “I love it when soldiers think I’m bluffing.”

Esker knew he wasn’t bluffing. But he knew the attack would come at his mind, not his body; and he knew that standard mental countermeasures could buy him seven seconds against a basic battle-sorcerer and three against a really good one—those figures without any knowledge of the adversary’s personality, which could add one, maybe two, even in the worst case. He filled his mind with one of the labyrinth visualizations, “cocky boss” personality variant, and hoped four seconds of blinding agony would buy Inber time for whatever he needed to do.

In the panoptic view of his mind’s maze, he saw a great white worm squeeze into the vestibule. It had a doughy face, half a snake’s, half Boss John Dream’s.

“Huh,” he heard Boss Dream say, as if from a distance. “Smart.” One second.

He never made it to two. There was a great juddering in the labyrinth of his mind, and when it was over, the walls had been reshaped into one long, straight corridor, nothing but air between him and the mind-worm that was Boss John Dream. 

The grinning creature lunged for him, covering the distance like a bullet, and he felt the white coils of muscle and mucus wrap his limbs, felt the rows of needle-teeth sink into his flesh, as though the worm were real. He saw two figures in the background, approaching, calm and leisurely: One drenched and bloated, one a skeleton below the neck, where her flesh ended in a sudden scrawl of ash.

Then in his head’s eye—not his mind’s—there was a flash of white and yellow, and in his head’s ear there was a roar, and instead of teeth and coils he felt a wall of heat crash into him and then dissipate, and Boss John Dream was hurtling into the tavern like a kicked kitten.

His mind was in pieces, but his body knew a deathtrap when it saw one, and he made for the char-edged hole where the tavern doors had been, dimly aware of the Epseris brothers hot on his heels. Then everyone was running, barreling away from the scarab-signed tavern as fast as their legs would move. He and Inber swiftly outpaced the Epseris brothers; like it knew a deathtrap, his body knew it should slow down, but it declined to do so. Not out of fear. For all they were fellow-travelers, these Epseris were not his brothers; not like Inber and Ozier were, not like Ras had been, not like anyone who had fought and died beside him on the high ice. 

Inber was shouting his name as they ran. Esker wanted him to stop, to say what he had to say already, but didn’t know how to form the words to tell him. Eventually they came to him, and he said “Spit it out, Inber!” thickly, with the wrong intonation, as though they were his first words in a just-learned language.

“Esker, look up at the viejo.”

He looked up over the low roofs of Souktown to the far-off towers of the ciudad viejo. With a corner of his mind, he noticed that some were decorated with the same patterns of lights in three or four colors: red, white, white. Blue, red, blue, green.

“See the one that looks like stacked blocks, with the two spikes on top?”

“Yellow, green, white,” Esker said, his mouth still uncertain around the words.

Inber paused a moment. “Right. That one. We go there first. Understand? Not south to your claim. To yellow, green, white.”

“Yellow, green, white.”

Inber clapped him on the back. “I’m telling the Epseris. Ozier and Kem are on their way. Be safe, brother.”

And Esker was alone.

He stopped, just for a moment, to fix the image of the building in his mind. Then he looked around Souktown, trying to fix in his mind the notion that its welter of color and language was now a menace, that he could not stay. It seemed wrong, shameful, that this should be; that he should not stay to wrangle with more wizards and runeslingers, to watch Kem dicker with freaks and deviants, to breathe in the fumes of more questionable alcohols from shattered bottles. He sensed, dimly, that the stress on flesh and mind would break both, or perhaps merely grind them into something simpler, less useful. But perhaps that would not be so bad either. It would be difficult, he knew, to find the Art he sought, to make it work, to take it home and present it to his wife. The complexity of the undertaking was unimaginable, in truth. To say nothing of the pain. 

Yellow, green, white.

This was how they had done it on the high ice: One maneuver at a time.

He stared at the swordspear in his hand. He had not remembered to pick it up. Was that one of its runes? Some subtle magic of reminding?

The night was too chilly to stay still. He saluted Souktown with his weapon, as he had been trained to salute a victorious enemy before surrender, then began loping with great ground-eating strides into the viejo.