“Exthcuthe me, thir. But theeth are the firtht friendth you’ve had vithit.”
“The first? Well I suppose they are, but …” He raised an admonishing finger to the face in the door. “Bad start, Steve. Bad start.”
The knocker managed a frown despite the ring in its mouth. “Ath you thay, thir.”
“Yes, well, never mind it. Come, come!” He beckoned his guests to follow him inside. As Clay had feared, there was a buttoned flap in the rear of the wizard’s garment. “You’ve come at the perfect time!”
Moog’s home was much as Clay imagined it would be. The majority of the tower floor was given over to counters crowded with glass alchemical globes and an assortment of dangerously unlabelled decanters. There were shelves along one wall crammed with books and a fairly typical collection of wizardly reagents—grinning skulls, bundled herbs, jars filled with everything from floating eyes to what was either a milky-white dragon embryo or a calcified yam.
Against the opposite wall were perhaps a dozen stacked cages of various size, each home to some creature or another. He recognized a few of them—there was a badger in one cage, a skunk in another—but some of the others, like the dog-sized elephant or what looked to Clay like an eight-legged weasel with heads on both ends of its sleek body, were unsettlingly new.
Also unsettling was the long wooden table basked in slanting light, upon which something vaguely humanoid was draped in a white shroud.
The wizard crossed to the table, motioning on his way toward a steaming cauldron hunkered below the fireplace mantle. “Are you two hungry?”
Clay thought of the blue-green smoke they’d seen from the road. Whatever was in the pot looked like soup but smelled like burning hair. “Just ate, thanks. For what?”
Moog looked back, frowning. “What?”
“The perfect time for what?” Clay prompted.
The wizard whirled and favoured them both with a rueful smile. “To witness a miracle,” he told them, taking hold of the shroud.
Don’t be a corpse, Clay prayed under his breath. Please, don’t be a corpse. Moog had been a staunch enemy of necromancy his entire life, but when you left lonely old wizards in ancient towers for too long, it stood to reason they’d start meddling with dark and unfathomable powers sooner or later.
Moog tore away the sheet with a dramatic flourish. What lay beneath was not, thankfully, a dead person. In fact, it wasn’t a person at all. It was a treant, like the one Clay had killed and carved up for the wood to make his shield, except that Blackheart had been a hoary old oak ten times the height of a man and strong enough to tear a bull in half. This creature was a small, scrawny-looking ash. And more to the point: It wasn’t dead.
It was, however, very angry. The moment it saw Moog the treant began thrashing against the cords binding it to the table. The branches too small to serve as limbs all strained toward the wizard, seeking to grasp hold of him. Though this creature looked far too frail to threaten a full-grown man, Clay was reminded again of Hollow Hill. The treants there had been huge and hale, capable of swallowing men whole or snapping them, ironically, like twigs.
There was something odd about this one, though. Its flesh, or bark, or whatever you called the skin of a tree that wasn’t really a tree, was dappled with dark lichen. The fungus was spread over much of its torso and face. A few of its limbs seemed affected as well; the leaves that clung to these were withered and grey-brown, like parchment rescued too late from a fire.
“Why do you—” Gabe began, but cut off abruptly when the tree snapped what passed for its face in his direction. It shrieked at him, a sound halfway between a gargle and a snore.
Moog laid a calming hand on the creature’s trunk, commanding its attention once again. Its gnarled boughs scrabbled weakly against his arm.
“Shhh. It’s okay, Turing. It’s okay. These are my friends. Gabriel and Clay. I’ve told you about them, remember? They’ve come to watch me cure you.”
Turing seemed decidedly uninterested. One of his blackened branches made a weak stab for Moog’s eye, but the wizard casually swatted it away.
“Cure him of what?” Gabriel asked, and Clay wondered briefly if Turing the treant had come to reap the “restorative” benefits of Magic Moog’s phylactery.
The wizard looked up. The mirth had drained from his bright blue eyes and left them as cold and hard as a shallow pond in winter. “The rot,” Moog said.
Wizards were obsessive by nature, and Moog was no exception. There were two things about which he’d been passionate for near as long as Clay had known him.
The first of these was the owlbear, a mythical creature that no one alive had ever seen but whose existence Moog (along with a pathetically small society of owlbear enthusiasts) staunchly asserted.
The second was the rot, which had claimed the lives of a great many fellow adventurers, including the man Moog had loved more than anyone in the world: his husband, Fredrick. Even before Fredrick found himself afflicted by the Heathen’s Touch, Moog had nursed an interest in curing the infamously incurable disease. Afterward he became increasingly (and understandably) preoccupied by it. When the bonds that bound Saga began to fray, the wizard fairly leapt at the chance to quit the band and devote himself entirely to fighting the illness.
Alas, the rot had proved too implacable a foe for both Moog and his husband alike. Fredrick succumbed within months of Saga’s breakup, but Moog, apparently, had not yet given up on overcoming their old nemesis, which had taken everything from the wizard and, as yet, given nothing but grief in return.
Turing was dead.
Night had fallen, and Clay could see stars peeping through the roof beyond the crumbling second storey. Gabriel hauled the cauldron out of the hearth and got a real fire going, and Clay, rummaging through the tower’s pantry, found a loaf of stale bread, a basket of overripe tomatoes, and a brick of hard cheese. So he made sandwiches.
Moog had, throughout the course of the afternoon, moved from sulking over the treant’s corpse to sulking amidst the clutter of laboratory equipment to sulking while sitting on the steps to the upper floor. Currently he was curled up and hugging his knees in a huge armchair, sulking.
“It’s hopeless,” he muttered, as he had done every few minutes over the past two hours. His bony fingers clutched at his long white beard, and his eyes darted frantically, like a man who’d poisoned his wife and was expecting her ghost to appear any minute and cuss him out.
“You did your best,” said Gabriel, though even he sounded unconvinced by the platitude.
Moog didn’t bother responding, except to mutter “Hopeless” again beneath his breath.
Clay spent a good while ruminating on his sandwich and chewing on what to say next. Direct consolation seemed a wasted effort, and it had never been one of Clay’s strengths anyway. He opted for a different tactic, one that he used now and again on Tally when she was being obstinate: distraction.
“Those creatures in the cages, they all have the rot?” He got a brooding nod in response. “Did you collect them yourself?”
The wizard stirred, glanced sullenly toward the stacked cages, and then nodded. “Most of them, yes.”
“Is that wise?” Clay prodded. “The Heartwyld’s a dangerous place.”
Moog rubbed at his eyes with the back of one hand. He really did look like a child in those ridiculous pyjamas. “I bought a few of them, like Turing, off of mercenaries. But not many mercs are brave enough to dare the Wyld anymore. The Renegades do. And I hear the Stormriders just wrapped up a successful tour. Which reminds me: They have a parade in Conthas tomorrow.”
“It was yesterday,” said Gabriel.
Moog only blinked. “Oh.”