This week's story finds us in the company of a new friend, dear reader. Pikka, it seems, has found herself a new path to travel. One, that, among other things, appears to have also revealed another of Pikka's names. Come, let's you and me together discover...
What Paint Renders - A Story of Pikka the Wanderer by M. K. Dreysen
The wizard traveled incognito. No fanfare, no robes.
No fear; at least, none of the rising off the superstitious kind.
Loen Bu Onigen prided himself on the fact that he could travel without notice. He smiled when the carriage hacks simply accepted his coin without comment. At how the innkeepers gave him the third or, usually, fourth best rooms, just enough up from the common rooms to go along with the wizard's tailored cotton and wool.
He told himself how well he had made this accession to the realities of travel each night when Loen Bu Onigen sat down to his journal. Here, he wrote of his days, what imaginative ideas he'd been fortunate to weave from the ether while awaiting the miles.
And, of how well he played the part of a simple man of vague commerce. Perhaps a factor's second, sent along to maintain proper scheduling and contractual obligations.
The reasons for the charade didn't get much mention under Bu Onigen's pen. That sailors, even with their powder lockers cunningly wrought and spelled to prevent any wizardly access, carried suspicions, even superstitions of wizards and their propensity to sink ships passed beneath Bu Onigen's notice.
Not that he would not have preferred the notice he went without. Bu Onigen rather enjoyed the regalia and, dare he mention it, automatic wince of fear whenever a mundane visitor realized the presence they had entered.
And, Bu Onigen admitted, to his journal at least and only, that his employer, the Count Re Thekosila, might well have hired Bu Onigen with such effects in mind.
Court politics did consume some few hours of Bu Onigen's time. But Bu Onigen made his way from Thekosila, through the Old State, and thence to the Great Bay and the island principality of Univao, this trip at least, on his own time.
A vacation, he might have said. Though the Count had requested a quick trip north on the return trip. "Baroness Hekach intimated of possibilities, Loen. Under the circumstances, you'll be the perfect envoy. Commit me to no promises, carry back only information."
The Baroness being in possession of some few of the islands of the Archipelago of Ressina, home of white wines so dry your eyebrows threatened to merge, olives that produced oil so clear you could almost breathe it.
And, if she kept to her family's heritage, a fecundity of epic proportion. Assuming the Count were to be the one to provide whatever combination of virtues the Baroness found most appealing in a match.
The wizard carried doubts, along with his anonymity. He set aside his doubts some few days out into the Great Bay. In favor of a minor bout of seasickness, he assured his journal.
And, his preparations.
He'd received reports of the smoke plume; he'd only seen it with his flesh and blood eyes on the second day out from the shores of the Old State.
Loen Bu Onigen had spent years preparing for the volcano's eruption. He fought the urge to climb the mast, kick the lookout from her perch, and monopolize the daylight.
Fire, earth, and air met some few hundred miles away. The winds sped Bu Onigen to his study of the place where they merged.
But the white-grey plume reaching to the vault of blue varied little, boring enough at distance so that Bu Onigen set aside his desperation. The time drew close.
Each evening, after dinner amidst the swaying lanterns and the unpolished company, Bu Onigen repaired with the sunset to his cabin. There, he carefully opened his trunk. Sorted through paints, canvas, brushes and charcoal.
They all looked so mundane. But oh, the lengths he had gone to to manufacture these paints. Dragon's blood of course. Jewels, each more rare than the last. Precious metals.
Deeds, wicked and heroic. To capture the wail of a starving child had been difficult. The last gasp of Cheral, as the legendary knight succumbed to his final injuries, near impossible.
The shadow of the conqueror, the greed of the Mother of Beggars, the silence of the village gossip. Bu Onigen had worked for years to imbue his paints with these essences.
All to capture a moment.
Bu Onigen revealed to his journals some small sense of trepidation. When he opened the trunk each night, he expected the shadows to come in close.
He looked for the lantern's flicker. The last bit of sunlight's curiosity. A breath of wind, a shift of leather.
Some indication that he was watched.
He confessed in his pages that part of him felt that Bu Onigen should be acclaimed for what he sought. Enough of his old University colleagues had heard of his goals, his aims. They knew his ambition.
And yet, he wrote, none appeared to have followed the plume, as he had. They seemed to have, if they'd seen it at all, made no connection to their old classmate.
Bu Onigen confessed himself disappointed in the lack of attention. And completely unsurprised that the poor bastards had lived down to his opinion of them. The untalented wretches, raised up by the minor accident of lighting a candle, slamming a door with only their will, all the small tricks suitable to the presence of the University's examiners.
Unlike himself, he wrote blushingly, scion of bloodlines and well-documented familial tradition.
Soon enough the ship carried Bu Onigen to the isle of Univao; after a certain point, he spoke to his journals of only the trip. No hints of interest from those around him were given to ink and parchment.
And precious little description of the taverna, hostelry, and general store in which Bu Onigen took rooms at the foot of the mountain. Only the volcano appears with true detail in the wizard's journal.
A tall, near perfectly symmetrical cone. Bu Onigen watched the plume rise into the evening. He stepped into the hostel's capacious garden.
The matron had told him of the eruption. "The lava and flames spew from the southeast face," she said. "My cousin Emgala lived there, she came to us for safety. The lava will have taken her village by now."
The hostelry lay at the foot of the northwest face of the volcano. "How far is it, to walk to Emgala's village?" Bu Onigen asked the matron.
"Most of a day, if the track's still there."
If Bu Onigen asked of the matron's family, or of her concerns that the volcano might send lava and destruction to this side of the mountain, he didn't record it in his journals.
What he did record is the rental of a mule, to carry his paints, canvas, and a night's worth of supplies.
Bu Onigen found that, with some attention to the beast's knowledge of the path, the mule made shorter work of the travel between hostel and appropriate vantage point than the matron had warned him.
But then, he told himself, he had no need to come fully to Emgala's village. Only to a suitable viewing angle. Bu Onigen found himself a clear, flat outcropping, a promontory rising above the twisting traveler's path.
The mule, complaining but surefooted, negotiated the small faint track to the outlook. This tabletop vista allowed Bu Onigen room enough to tether the mule, unload his paint cases, and set up his easel.
And the stone setting gave him the epic view of the eruption he'd come so far to see.
As recorded in his journal, each trip, an hour or so after noon would find Bu Onigen sketching on canvas and parchment. Then, in the early evening Bu Onigen repaired himself to a bedroll for a nap.
After sunset, when only the fires of hell and stars above lit his work, Bu Onigen stepped again to his easel, now with paint and brush.
Time is my enemy, he recorded.
He tracked his painting in hours worked. No descriptions of the canvas, a few small acknowledgments of the violence of the continuing eruption.
Complaints of saddle sores, a troublesome backache, a brief mention of a shepherdess. Bu Onigen noted she appeared of an age to be perhaps bereft of daughter or son to take up the crook, or just possibly with children too young for the job. He passed her sitting on a smaller version of his viewing niche, the third night of his work.
And after that, as with other possible distractions, Bu Onigen's records dwindled to nothing.
The journals end with Bu Onigen celebrating what should likely have been his final trip. I am finished, he told himself. One final night beneath the fires of heaven and hell.
One more trip up the mountain, and I will have captured the Gates.
The journals of Loen Bu Onigen end there. The hostel matron, knowing little of her visitor's status, preserved the journals and a few of the wizard's personal items.
The Count's investigators found no evidence of the wizard, his paints, or the canvas to which Bu Onigen had addressed himself. The mule returned to the hostel, alone and unharmed, carrying only the wizard's bedroll.
The Count found himself forced to seek answers from source he would have preferred to avoid.
"If he captured the Gates as well as he attempted," said Yetimina Eb Zhedrin, a sorcerer of no mean talents employed by the Count's chief rival, and brother-in-law, the Duke of Wedde, "Then I suspect that Bu Onigen likely fell into the damned thing."
"And the painting?" the Count asked.
"Most likely, the painting was sucked into the same passage. In my experience, that's usually the way of such things. An accidental sacrifice to close the opening he'd created, but a sacrifice nonetheless."
The Count raised an eyebrow. "You seem so certain with precious little evidence."
"Trust me," Yetimina replied. "We would know damned well if the Gates remained open. The demons from the other side of the Gates would have destroyed Univao in hours. No, the Gates are closed. But," and now Yetimina did show her chief concern, "There is the possibility that the painting itself survives."
The Count frowned. "Meaning?"
"We'd best hope no-one of consequence ever discovers the existence of such a thing, my lord. If it has somehow survived, forget it. Let some bandit lord raise it above his mantle, let his grandchildren shake their heads in disgust every time they pass it, and then throw it into an attic to be forgotten as soon as death allows."
When Yetimina departed, Count Reynald Re Thekosila closed the book on his missing wizard. He'd expected his brother-in-law's sorcerer to allay his fears, to tell him that Bu Onigen had simply walked too close to the lava.
Not for the damnable woman to leave him fretting over the possible fate of an unknown and unknowable slapping of paint on canvas.
He laced the folder closed, and brooded over events that lay far from his control.
****
The wizard sat his easel amidst waves of heat pouring from a river of molten rock. His mind drifted between present and future, here and there.
I've wrought well, Bu Onigen told himself.
He'd feared that, after all his work, the Gates wouldn't manifest. Some writers took the view that all major phenomenon contained such gates. Storms opened the world of Water and Air. Earthquakes tore routes to planes filled with diamond and mud.
Other writers, Bu Onigen but the most recent among them, allowed that such gates could indeed open. But whether they did so in ways accessible to mere mortals was another question entirely.
No matter his talent and skills, Bu Onigen knew that he could not safely walk to the heart of the volcano. Nor could he travel in response to the distant news of an eruption occurring in far distant lands.
If the way were to open, this was the place and this was his time.
Through the worry and the fear, his artist's skills, poor as they might be reckoned by the standards of true artists, had more than risen to the task. Bu Onigen congratulated himself.
Though he'd used an awful lot of red. No matter, the subject demanded crimson hues.
The black stone threaded the image nicely, he thought. And the smoke and steam framed the lava.
And the Gates. They rose from the fires; the opening itself flickered within the canvas and the oils like a dragon fly with a hangover.
Hanging over the lava field, a world appeared. Creatures moved within it. Pillars of onyx and diamond framed this wavering glimpse; brass and steel wove arches between the columns.
The frame he'd drawn captured, and best of all held closed the passage between and through the Gates.
The laced steel of his framework swelled intermittently, but imagined barrier held true. Through the haze, Bu Onigen watched a shadow, human sized if not slightly smaller than that, push on the Gates.
And move two worlds in response. Bu Onigen shuddered; the being in the painting turned from that which bound it to regard the wizard.
And smiled. Even as he knew his mundane eyes couldn't possibly see the diabolical grin of the being, Bu Onigen's third eye lingered on the teeth.
And the skin peeled back from them.
The skin at the corner of the creature's mouth cracked, dripped blood, red as any human's but sparkling with power. The unknowable figure reached up, wiped the blood clean, and licked its fingertip clean.
Bu Onigen looked to his paintbrush, laid aside on the stone. The paint in the brush sparkled, a faint speckle trace, and then burst into flame. The wizard gasped, then turned back to his painting.
But he'd done his work. The creature appeared in the painting, though Bu Onigen knew his hands had captured only the Gates themselves.
He returned the creature's grin. He'd done his work. Loen Bu Onigen had bound the Gates in blood and whispers.
And thus Loen Bu Onigen controlled the Gates. "They will open when and as I determine, nameless one."
Bu Onigen watched through his mind's eye as the being became ever more human like. The wizard wondered if this were an effort to become more appealing, or whether the close distance between worlds had caused the creature's facade to meld more closely to his mortal expectations.
The being smiled, cracking its lips, freeing its blood again, and made ready to attempt some other spell.
Before it could accomplish the intention, Bu Onigen draped the painting in cloth and turned his mind away from the Gates. He banished all thought. Every intention.
Excepting only the need to break camp. The mule flicked its ears, but made no complaints as the wizard packed his bags once more.
The two wound their way through the early morning light. The wizard practiced emptying his mind, leaving himself to live only in the now of trail and mule and a route home.
And so it was that Loen Bu Onigen would have passed the shepherdess without notice. Except the sheep seemed to have other ideas.
The shepherdess's niche lay some few hundred yards down the trail from the overlook Bu Onigen had found for himself. Through and away from any view of the Gates or the lava that had formed them.
Here, even with the sparks and cinders of the eruption flaring above, the shepherdess had brought her flock to its summer pasture. A small vale hid in the mountain's skirts and extended downslope for most of a mile.
Bu Onigen had seen the open grass below, and assumed, rightly it seemed, that the shepherdess climbed up to this place so as to keep an eye on her flock. Here she could watch, safe in the assurance that the grey-woolen beasts entrusted to her care could go about the business of fattening themselves up with little chance of disturbance.
Until now, the wizard hadn't seen the woman's flock up close. Today, the day of his triumph, and the day Bu Onigen fled from the attention of the creature on the other side of the Gates whose notice he'd attracted, the sheep and their shepherd blocked his path to escape.
Their appearance, and that they stood in the middle of his path, shocked the wizard some way out of his mental defenses. "What in the hell is this?" Bu Onigen demanded.
The majority of the bleating animals ignored him. A ram, majestic curling horns shrouded in dangling wool, lifted his head to answer the challenge.
Bu Onigen felt unnerved by the ram's regard. The beast didn't fear him at all, Bu Onigen imagined.
In fact, the wizard suspected that the ram knew, somehow, that Bu Onigen fled from something. And, so fleeing, feared what the ram's flock might do if the wizard misstepped.
The path to the pasture land beckoned, just to the wizard's left. An easy trail for mountain sheep and shepherdess. A sheer fifty foot drop in the wizard's unpracticed eye.
Bu Onigen turned, first to the mule, which ignored him, and then to search for the shepherdess. She'd brought this flock here, she could open a way for him to pass.
"Careful, sir," the woman said. She sat at the top of her own small outcrop.
Bu Onigen lifted his head; he ignored the part of himself that complained of the peasant's lofty advantage over him. He didn't have time for this.
The demon's regard whispered at the back of his mind. Muted, by his training and the cloth woven from ogre fur and gold thread. "Clear the path, shepherd, quickly. I need to return to my hostel, before..."
"Before what?" the damnable woman asked. She made no move to climb down from her perch.
As though this mountain belonged to her. And not to the random stranger making demands of her. The chastising thought registered.
Bu Onigen ignored it. "Before the lava comes to claim us both."
The wizard would have preferred not to tell a modest lie. But, he told himself, if the demon did use the distraction and Bu Onigen's mind and talent to enter this world, the shepherdess would have preferred the lava.
And the results, to the local geography, would be similar enough. One does what one must when dealing with the unwashed, Bu Onigen told himself.
"Lava, coming this way? Truly?" The shepherdess threw her crook to the ground, and then jumped down to follow it.
Bu Onigen smiled, nervously, then turned to reset his mental defenses while the shepherdess took up her task.
He didn't notice how closely he'd stepped to the brink. Nor how little of the path down was available to the sheep he'd commanded be moved.
Until the ram stomped and snorted. "Mister, you need to step back. Slowly, and carefully."
Bu Onigen, lost in thinking of the nothing that protected him from the demon's infiltration, stepped aside.
Or, tried to. The wizard's foot caught the edge of the trail, enough to make him stumble. Bu Onigen wheeled his hands, his body reaching for balance.
Behind him, the ram snorted, and stomped his front hoof. "Mister, really, Pullo is losing his patience."
Adrenaline rushed into the wizard's system, and knocked him once again free of his defensive mind set. Dealing with the peasant is bad enough, Bu Onigen thought.
The beast is entirely too much. Bu Onigen wheeled around to confront the ram.
In the confines of his employer's court, on polished floors, doing this would have been, Bu Onigen thought, dramatic. And would have defeated any soul foolish enough to challenge his force of will and dominance.
Loen Bu Onigen did not tread the vaults of Thekosila in that moment. His heel caught gravel.
The ram took the wizard's stance as a challenge. "Mister, look out!" the shepherdess cried.
But it was far too late for that. The ram lowered his head and charged. He rushed, lifted his front legs from the ground, and brought his full weight, and his horns, into Bu Onigen's chest.
The wizard had time to measure himself before gravity and the granite at the bottom of the drop worked their most fundamental magics on his cranium. He had the time.
But not the opportunity. The demon's laugh drowned out all possible thought. Until the damage to the back of Loen Bu Onigen's skull removed even that.
****
Pikka, grateful that Bu Onigen had crafted the covering that so well masked the demon's perceptions, waited for some hours. For the energies released by Bu Onigen's death to fade.
And for the demon to retreat unsatisfied to somewhere beyond her perceptions. When she felt the demon's regard disappear at last, she withdrew a tubular case from where she had hidden it in the rocks.
She'd worked boiled leather and iron with no hint of magic. Only the most mundane of ingredients, with the most fundamental of tools and labor.
From human sweat and earthly materials Pikka had crafted a temporary prison for the painting. She eased up to Bu Onigen's mule, giving the creature small comforts and quiet words until he settled.
Then she took the canvas from his side. "Shh, hold still a few minutes more," she whispered to the mule.
Pikka turned the canvas face down on the trail, the woven and felted ogre fur drape cushioning and covering the painting's face, so that she could cut the bindings from the frame. When she'd freed the frame, Pikka rolled the canvas from behind, careful to let no glimpse of the image show.
When she'd safely stored the painting away in its new home, only then did Pikka unweave her illusionary flock. To reveal a second mule, carrying her baggage.
And a thrilled disposition. "Not often you get to misbehave and not be called on it?" she asked Pullo.
The former ram snorted and pawed the ground. "Calm down friend mule. We'll be home shortly."
Pikka rolled the fur drape and stowed it, as well as the painting's frame, in Pullo's baggage. She considered the paints and other remains of Bu Onigen's project.
Bu Onigen had sat upon this mountain of smoke and flame, and created an object of power. Such a performance had the tendency to linger. Pikka examined each jar of paint, each brush.
But, unlike the canvas and the frame, the easel and the paints spoke to her only of great effort. They had avoided being linked to the painting itself. Pikka nodded, then considered the other wizard's journals.
Bu Onigen had written here only of his travels. Pikka spit, but not in disgust. She'd appreciated Loen's craftsmanship. She acknowledged as well his care. She could use none of the journals on the mule's back to re-engineer Bu Onigen's work.
She shook her head, then gathered the mule's leads. "Let's go, gentlemen. We've a fair bit of work left in our day."
Pullo and Pikka led Bu Onigen's mule to the base of the trail, then turned him loose to find his way back home. Pikka considered mounting Pullo's saddle, but settled instead for another couple of miles walk, the relatively flat land something of a novelty after weeks on the mountain trails.
Pikka considered a plan very similar to that that Count Re Thesokila feared: loosing the painting within the pampered courts of the Old State had its chaotic entertainment value.
"If only the bastard had chosen a more relaxed subject," Pikka groused to Pullo.
After the time she'd spent with the mule, and on consideration of the likely result of his being turned loose to carry others after having some taste of magic, Pikka had bought the animal. Whether out of a sense of responsibility, or a fit of madness, Pikka wasn't entirely sure.
The mule whistled. Pikka took it as encouragement, Pullo having become accustomed to her conversation. "Loen always did aim high, I give him that."
But handing the Gates into the hands of the Old State, or really any of the rich and powerful... the thought of it ultimately left a bitter taste in Pikka's mouth.
Many days' travel later, Pikka sat Pullo's saddle in front of Re Thesokila's abode. The palace, a marble-sheathed confection settled in a park of trees and statuary, threw half a rainbow's worth of red-tinged sunset down to her vantage point.
"Do I need to tie you someplace secure?" she asked Pullo.
The mule snorted, disgusted. "Fine, I'll leave you unbound. But when I come running, you'd best not be out chasing a mare."
The mule turned his head, pretending the last of the comment had nothing to do with him. Or with what had happened the last time.
Pikka shook her head, but looped the mule's hackamore leads around the saddle horn and patted his shoulder. "See you in a couple hours."
The mule nodded as the wizard disappeared into the shadows.
****
Pikka poured through the full set of Bu Onigen's journals for most of those two hours.
Fruitlessly. She'd praised his craftsmanship and his sense of security. But when it came to usefully documenting his work, Pikka had to throw up her hands and admit the man had found his level of incompetence. "How in the hell did the silly son of a bitch manage to work anything out?" she asked the darkness of Bu Onigen's office.
"Arrogance, or more likely the urge to insure no one else could duplicate his masterpiece," the shadows answered.
Pikka wasn't really surprised when the sorcerer stepped out of the shadows. "I'm afraid I don't know you."
"Yetimina Eb Zhedrin," the other answered. "And you would be?"
"An old classmate of Loen's."
"So very careful. Of course you know I'll just follow your traces..."
"My name is Pikka."
"Hmm, never heard of you."
Pikka shrugged. In the Wedde courts, and the others of the Old State's orbit, Pikka knew that such would have been considered insulting. "Consider me... beneath your notice."
"Except here you are, rising to my attention. I wasn't aware of Loen having attachments."
Pikka smiled. "You wouldn't be the first to say that. The man had a way of infuriating most." She shrugged again. "But, that doesn't mean his disappearance isn't important." Pikka pushed the chair away from the desk, then sat back and laced her hands behind her head.
Yetimina stepped forward, and ran her fingers over the journals splayed across the desktop.
Pikka expected more verbal sparring.
But instead of speaking, Yetimina struck.
The two fought in stillness and in shadow, until Yetimina reached out a hand and grasped her opponent within a sphere of faint light.
She smiled when Pikka stopped her now-fruitless attacks. "Your University has failed you, little Pikka. Just as it failed Bu Onigen. If they spent half as much time training you as they did convincing you of the usefulness of natural philosophy, you both might actually have been dangerous."
Pikka said something, but the barrier that held her allowed no sound through. Nor, if Yetimina held it long enough, would it allow fresh air. The sorceror grinned. "Where's the painting?" she asked.
Having been the one to call the shield, her words echoed, loudly, within the sphere. Pikka pointed to the leather case where it lay on the desk.
Yetimina turned her senses to the tube. She concealed a frown as she was forced to open the case to sense its contents.
Pikka concealed her own grin as Yetimina's hand trembled when she struggled to tie the case closed again.
Yetimina Eb Zhedrin slung the leather painting case over her shoulder, then turned to consider her momentary captive. Whatever her bravado, the sphere held air sufficient for hours of survival.
The purpose of the original spell having been to provide its worker with a means of exploring underwater. If she wanted to eliminate this Pikka, it would take time she didn't have.
Pikka said something. Yetimina nodded, then said "No, Thesokila will not learn of this."
Pikka said something else. Yetimina smirked. "Nor Wedde. At least, not until it serves my purpose. Fare you well, then, little Pikka. Thank you for your service, but I really do think Bu Onigen's creation will find a much more appropriate home with me." Then Yetamina stepped back into the shadows and disappeared.
False dawn crept into the windows before the shield faded. When it did, finally, Pikka stepped into the shadows and returned to where Pullo waited.
"Don't say a word," she told the mule.
Pullo didn't. The mule wasn't yet completely comfortable with his new friend, but he knew enough to recognize when she'd had a hard night.
