Lyim could scarcely believe the luck of overhearing the whispered conversation of a sailor who had recently returned to Palanthas from the Minotaur Islands. The sailor spoke with horror of fleeing Mithas when a new and vile pestilence had sprung up among the smattering of humans there. "The medusa plague," they were calling it, a disease whose arrival and spread they were blaming on the unclean living habits of the bovinelike minotaurs who inhabited the isles.
Lyim had been struck by the plague's similarity to his own situation, however different some of the symptoms. He had never shed skin, and he'd lived with the affliction for many years. But the snakes… it was too coincidental to ignore, and so he decided to travel to the islands northeast of the Blood Sea to see this disease for himself.
En route, he had briefly entertained the hope that unlocking the secret of the minotaur plague might provide some clue to curing his own affliction, but that died when he saw the first victim. The man's limbs had changed to three-headed snakes, not the single head that was his hand. What was more, the victims all turned to stone within three days and died, so Lyim realized there was no link to his own condition to be found here.
But he was a mage with a bitter grudge to settle, and the random pestilence in Mithas gave him another idea. A more delicious idea, in that it would allow him to cure his hand and get the revenge that he had longed for in the handful of months since Guerrand had refused to grant him entrance to Bastion.
Lyim spent two months among the brutish minotaurs, living in the most squalid conditions he'd endured since leaving the Plains of Dust. Most of the buildings on Mithas were of either mud or rough planking, with nothing better than a dirt path between them, even in the capital city of Lacynos. Despite horrid living conditions, the minotaurs were among the most honor-bound creatures Lyim had met in all his travels. They thought he was examining the stone bodies to find a magical cure. If they had known he was actually collecting the pestilence from the dead bodies and storing it in a specially prepared magical gem, they might have killed him, or worse.
Lyim saw spreading the plague in Thonvil as the perfect, triple-edged sword to use against Guerrand DiThon. As if inflicting an epidemic upon Guerrand's people weren't revenge enough, Lyim had added a curse to the pestilence so that Guerrand himself would appear responsible for the magical sickness. But the most useful of all the repercussions of the plague was that the news of its spread in Thonvil might very likely draw Guerrand from Bastion. Lyim would then have the opportunity to breach the stronghold more easily, gam entrance, and seek to reverse the process that had mutated his hand.
It had been a simple matter, under cover of a dark night less than a fortnight ago, to add the collected pestilence in the magical gem to the water in the village well. While monitoring the plague's progress was enjoyable. Lyim had returned this day primarily to discover whether news of the sickness had reached Guerrand.
The mage left the gravediggers in the square and sought the one person who was the likeliest to know: Guerrand's younger sister, Kirah. If anyone here still communicated with Guerrand, it would be she.
Lyim hiked the quarter league through unplanted fields toward the black and imposing stone castle perched on the Strait of Ergoth. Not usually of a mind to notice that spring had truly arrived, even Lyim could see that all patches of snow had disappeared into the earth, and the pale beige of winter was slowly turning to olive-green. The progress of the plague had put Lyim in an uncommonly good mood, and he launched into the uplifting last refrain from 'The Lark, the Rave, and the Owl," singing in an aggressive and undisciplined base:
Through night the seasons ride into the dark, The years surrender in the changing lights, The breath turns vacant on the dusk or dawn Between the abstract days and nights. For there is always corpselight in the fields And corposants above the slaughterhouse, And at deep noon the shadowy vallenwoods Are bright at the topmost boughs.
Lyim hadn't found much to sing about in recent years, though singing had been a favorite pastime of his since his days at the feet of bards in the smokey, decadent inns of his youth.
The brown-shrouded mage came to the last green, gentle slope that led to the portcullis on Castle DiThon's northern curtain wall. Staring up at the castle, blatant symbol of elitism, Lyim was struck again by the inequity between Guerrand's upbringing and his own. Cormac and Rietta DiThon had served as Guerrand's parents. Though nobly born, he knew from his own brief encounter with them that they were of no more noble spirit than his own poor parents. It was difficult to say of which pair that was a greater indictment.
Ardem Rhistadt and Dinayda Valurin were considered trash by the worst trash of Rowley-on-Torath. Lyim's parents had never married, in fact had done no more than pass each other in the dark one night, as was common with Dinayda's profession. Lyim was the result. Ardem Rhistadt had done no more than allow the child to take his name. Dinayda always maintained that she did the best she could, which was to let Lyim run wild, with the understanding that he always had a place to rest his head if he wanted it. Lyim didn't want it after the age of six. When he was ten, Lyim heard that his mother had died of one of the unspecified diseases that commonly killed women of her occupation.
By that time, Lyim's father had long since moved away from Rowley. That as good as made Lyim an orphan, but practically speaking nothing had changed. He was earning a few coins and some scraps of food as a general errand and clean-up boy at the local inn. It was there, one night in Lyim's twelfth year, that he saw something that would forever change the direction of his life.
A traveling sleight-of-hand artist-a charlatan trickster, really-was passing through Rowley. The magician, a tall, lanky man with a dirty yellow cape and hair, was earning coin by doing tricks for the patrons, such as making coins appear in their ears or under their tankards. Lyim was mesmerized; he'd never seen anything like this magic before, nor seen the power it held over the viewer.
Staying to clean up the inn long after the patrons had left, Lyim had opportunity to watch the magician count the evening's take; it was more money than the youth expected to earn in a lifetime. For one night's work! By Lyim's standards the magician was wealthy, even after he gave Mowe the innkeeper his due. The young boy knew in that moment that he had earned his last turnips from sweeping floors.
Lyim begged the magician to take him along as an unpaid servant, in exchange for teaching all he knew about magic. He quickly learned that Fabulous Fendock saved all his charisma and good humor for his performances. Off stage, what lessons he offered Lyim were impromptu and enigmatic, and more often than not they left the young man disgruntled and frustrated. But sometimes, when ale softened Fendock's mood, he could change radically, becoming ebullient, almost (but not quite) genial, and he would bring precious gifts of insight to the information-starved boy.
Lyim learned two truly useful things from Fendock. First, he learned that the man was a prestidigitator who played at performing simple cantrips, because true magic was a far more complex and powerful thing and was well beyond Fabulous Fendock's ability. In many ways it was unfortunate that Lyim proved to be a quick study, for Fendock punished the young boy for outdoing him in subtle and obvious ways.
The harshest and most far-reaching punishment came as a result of the other thing of value Lyim learned from this odd "apprenticeship": the name of a true wizard both revered and resented by Fendock. That lauded wizard's name was Belize.