Cold obsidian

"Understood. Now wait. I will look for the answer." Za

It seemed like a very long wait to Kangassk though it could not have been longer than a minute before Za

"Go away, old man!" she demanded, her thin voice trembling with fury. "Are you deaf? Take your money and get out of here!"

Since Kangassk didn't move fast enough Za

That did the trick; for Kan had no desire to explain the situation to the local guards. He hobbled away as quick as his bad leg allowed him and headed straight to the i

Back in his room, Kan put the unlucky five coins back into his purse. He felt strange. He couldn't even decide whether he wanted to know what the girl had seen in his future. So many questions…

That night and half the day Kangassk slept as only a true Kuldaganian can. He would have slept even longer if it wasn't for a random whiff of wind that moved the edge of the curtain aside and let a ray of the bright sunlight in. With the light shining in his eyes, Kangassk had to wake up.

He noticed that his leg had got much better, the boot was no longer tight around it. The wound healed so well that if it weren’t for the ugly dark spots the burngrass treatment left on the skin no one would have noticed the bite marks. The burns still hurt even though the wound no longer did. What a vicious herb that burngrass is!

Still yawning and blinking at the merciless light, Kangassk walked up to the window. It was long past noon. The city, fully awake, buzzed like a busy beehive below. The merchants advertised their goods and haggled about the prices. Several diurnal soothsayers sat in the shade and offered people to read their fortunes by their palms. Kan recalled little Za

Local i

Kangassk didn’t find Vlada in the dining room. Her own room turned out to be empty as well. It looked so tidy that one might wonder whether she did spend the night there at all. The bed seemed untouched, the closet was locked, and the bed table was way too clean. Its identical twin in Kan’s room had all sorts of things on top of it: dry bread crumbs, withered apple cores, a greasy encyclopedia…

Kan sat on the bed and took a closer look at the table. There were two sad looking candles on it: one melted down to a waxy puddle, the other reduced to a little stump. Someone had obviously been reading all night. Was Vlada an avid reader? Kangassk had never seen her with a book before but he did see her poring over maps for hours. Indeed, there was a scroll on the little shelf under her bed table, a map, as Kan had found out when he unrolled it. And what a map! He had never seen anything like it before.

What do you usually see on a world map? Countries and cities, rivers and mountains, roads and forests. This map made all of the above seem unimportant. The names and places of Omnis, the world, were still here, printed in pale ink, but they served as a mere background for something else.

No Man’s Land, on the other hand, was a bright mosaic of colours, each Region outlined with a perfect red circle, each circle intersecting with several others. Mysterious numbers and symbols, notes and marks were everywhere. Kan had no idea what they meant. Also, he now wished to know why his homeland, Kuldagan, was marked as one of the No Man’s Land Regions. It had never been considered that. You could even use magic in most of its cities! Still a Region it was, a red pentagon inside the mountain ring, a weird bulge on the side of the neat border of No Man’s Land formed by two intersecting circles, golden and silver, so large that their centres were close to the map’s edges. The golden circle had its center in Yga, the southern capital by the sea. The silver circle was drawn around a little northern fortress named Grey Tower.

Omnis, the real world, so mundane and usual, had suddenly shown its true colours to the naive provincial guy Kangassk was. He frowned peering at the odd patchwork of Regions in the middle of the map, at the strange symbols, at the two intersecting circles, golden and silver…

“The stabilizers!” He slapped himself on the forehead as the realization hit him. “How could I forget! The golden one must be Hora Solaris, then the silver one is Hora Lunaris! I read about them recently. Yes! That’s it!”

It was the only lucky guess he had that day, though. The numbers, symbols, and notes still remained a mystery to Kangassk. What was Vlada’s secret? Why would a simple Wanderer need such a map? What he, Kan, got himself into? There were so many questions but not a single answer.

Finally, Kangassk gave up, carefully rolled up the map and put it back on the shelf. He needed to think.

He couldn’t think on an empty stomach, so he ate a breakfast in the dull dining room below. Alas, no fresh ideas visited him while he ate. He felt like a real life person suddenly thrown into a fairy-tale. It wasn’t like Kangassk didn’t enjoy fairy-tales. He did! He read all the fantasy stories from Aren-Castell library and even ordered some books from the passing traders. He did dream of being a hero, too, as a kid. Who didn’t? What was the problem now? The problem was him being an ordinary guy, not a great warrior, not a mage, not a Chosen One. What happens to ordinary guys in fairy-tales? They usually die to show the readers how the monsters work or just for drama’s sake.

“I am an ordinary guy,” Kan told himself back in Vlada’s room again and gently touched the parchment of the wonderful map. Was it even parchment at all?

The heat became so fierce that it made even the loudest merchants hush up. They still kept advertising their wares but in much weaker voices. The river of their customers got reduced to a trickle anyway. Most people preferred to hide from the heat in their homes and have some iced tea instead of shopping. The young lady selling ice seemed the only person who was happy with the weather.

The merciless heat, unusual for that Region, reminded Kangassk of Kuldagan in an unexpectedly nostalgic way. His home town, the place he hated with passion, looked quite nice from afar. Well wasn’t it magic! Kan made a firm decision to let it stay this way. Somehow being an ordinary guy in a fairy-tale still seemed better than returning to that backwards sand hole and being treated as a freak again.

Speaking of freaks… Since no one here saw him as one, there was no need to hide himself in daylight, so Kan decided to try something he had always wanted to. He left his jacket and shirt at the i

As Kangassk kept wandering around the town, his feet seemed to follow his thoughts. How else could he find himself in the same alley where he met Za

The girl was still there, seated on the same chair, but she had put her sign away and changed her soothsayer outfit to patched boyish shorts, an oversized shirt with its sleeves cut off, and a pair of leather sandals too big for her little bare feet. She held a frosted glass bottle of icy water in her hands, just like most of the citizens that day.