Dust wandered down in the direction of the docks, signs filling the world around him. In the flight of birds, he saw that this was the route he had to take. In the bubbling of a stream, he saw that he would have to pass over the sea.
Then there were the images of Royce that stayed in front of him whenever he closed his eyes.
They had been there ever since he had inhaled so much of the priests’ smoke, seeing future after future. He had seen what would happen if nothing altered, had seen the violence and the pain and the death.
“And I chose,” Dust said to himself. The oddness of that took a moment to sink in. He was Angarthim, one of those who walked the world, setting the futures as the priests saw that they were supposed to run, giving those who needed to die over to the darkness that lay beyond life. Angarthim did not choose, did not seek to change fate.
“The priests did it first,” Dust whispered. He looked up to try to find confirmation that he was doing the right things, and found it in the way clouds shifted, forming patterns that seemed to mirror the designs of the sacred books.
The priests had tried to change things, had tried to alter things to avoid their own destruction in what was going to come. Things were no longer running on the course that the fates had set, and now someone had to choose, choose for everyone. That someone was Dust.
“I will stop this,” he said. “The devastation to come will be avoided. I will make the world better.”
Of course, to do that, he had to stop Royce. Dust had seen the futures, possibility after possibility lining up before him. He had seen a slender few where things turned out well, but the truth was that in too many, Royce’s actions brought about war and worse than war: they unleashed destruction on the land that had to be prevented.
Angarthim were not heroes; if anything, those who knew what they were seemed to think of them as monsters and murderers, not understanding that they were merely the well-trained hands of fate.
“I still listen to fate,” Dust said. It was just that now, instead of a single line given to him by the priests, all of the future was spread out in front of him to choose from. All of those possibilities seemed to point to the docks.
He walked down into the harbor town, and people stared, as people always stared. Children pointed, and some shrank back. A few men touched hands to weapons, and there was a time when Dust would have struck them down for doing it. The signs for death would have stood above them, and then…
“They didn’t stand above Royce,” Dust whispered to himself, trying to make sense of it all. They had been there together in a forest, him and the boy whose actions would simultaneously overthrow the old order and bring about destruction. They had been there, and nothing had told him to strike, to act.
He didn’t understand it.
“I will find him,” Dust said.
People continued to stare at him. It was inevitable that they would, given his gray skin and elaborate tattoos, each marking out runes and symbols of divination. There was no way he could ever hope to be something normal, but maybe he could be something better than normal.
Dust sat in the middle of the town’s main square, finding space there because no one wanted to be that close to him. He settled there, cross-legged, and drew out a small pouch of rune stones. He tried to relax in that spot, and his mind wouldn’t be still. This was so different from how things normally were when he started to look at the futures.
He cast and cast the runes, searching for patterns in them, searching for answers. If Dust had learned anything from the priests’ powder, it was that the signs themselves meant nothing; they merely gave a shape to something deeper, something inside of him.
Whatever it was inside of him though, it currently had nothing to say. Dust couldn’t make sense of the patterns. Runes for success and failure, doing and not doing, sat side by side so that Dust couldn’t pick out one from another, couldn’t decide, couldn’t choose. Was he supposed to go out over the sea in search of Royce, or was he supposed to act here and solve things in this land?
He’d already done one thing, with the curse he’d managed to pour into the ring Royce had given to the girl he claimed to love. Dust still wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to do it, with the power of the priests’ dust seeming to make it obvious. He knew he couldn’t do it now, but what could he do?
“What are you doing?”
Dust looked up to find a small girl standing over him, a doll clutched in her hands.
“I am looking into the future, or trying to,” Dust explained.
“It looks like you’re playing a game,” the girl said. “Can I play?”
She sat down without asking and started playing with the tiles.
“It’s not a game,” Dust said. “I am trying to find someone who has come here and gone. I need to seek him out. At least, I think I do.”
“Why?” the girl asked.
“Because he will do things that will unleash great violence, and I need to stop it.”
“So you’re a hero?” the girl asked, the echo of Dust’s thoughts far too close.
“I do not know if I’m a hero,” he said.
“But you’re going to stop a bad person?”
Dust shook his head. “He is not a bad person. He is probably a great person, but what he does will kill many, many people.”
“He sounds like a bad person,” the girl said. She nodded, as if it were decided. “I think you should stop him. My daddy’s a sailor. You should go ask him if he’ll help you.”
Was this his sign? Dust knew as well as anyone that signs were where you found them. Standing, he offered an Angarthim’s bow to the girl. He left the rune stones. He would find his signs in other ways in the future.
***
He made his way down to the docks, where fishing boats and small merchant ships huddled, apparently unmoving. Looking around, Dust saw a larger craft that looked promising when it came to passage. He walked down to it, pausing only when a man leaned over the side to stare at him.
“Who’re you, stranger?” the man demanded.
“My name is Dust,” he replied. “I am Angarthim, and I require passage.”
Dust half expected the man to turn away, or worse, to offer him violence. Dust scanned the carvings of the ship, searching them for symbols that might point to violence to come. There was nothing.
“I’ll take anyone to anywhere,” the man said. “If they have the money.”
“I have coin,” Dust said. He had no time for such things, but he understood that others did. “And I can read the signs for your ship to keep it safe on the water.”
“I’ve no time for that kind of thing,” the man said. “But I’ll carry you if you’ll pay. Where are you heading to?”
That was the hard part about all of this. Dust didn’t know where he was supposed to be going. He had seen Royce in his visions, and he had seen that he needed to come to this place, but beyond that, he didn’t know.
“Where is it that you are headed?” Dust asked.
“Us? I’ve no voyage planned. Why do you think I’m so eager for a paying passenger?”
Dust cursed to himself. The signs were being anything but helpful today. Worse, now that he looked closer, he could see the symbols for frustration and failure amid those dotting the ship. He looked around, hoping there would be another symbol somewhere, another hint from the fates that—
“I’m telling you,” a man further along the docks said. “There’s a fortune to be had there. Vertuli had all his coin aboard when the ship sank, and everything he’d taken from a dozen ships.”
Dust wandered over, caught by curiosity as much by any thought that this might help. He found himself walking toward a group of half a dozen men, two of whom looked utterly worn and bedraggled, as if they had just come from too long at sea alone. Looking down from the docks, Dust saw a small boat, large enough to fit a dozen men but that could be rowed by one, with a small sail to assist. It was little more than a lifeboat for some larger vessel, and as he looked, Dust could see a clutch of supplies that must have been grabbed from such a vessel in a hurry: fresh water and ship’s biscuits, food, and spare lengths of rope.
“But getting to any of it means going to the Seven Isles,” one of the men said, “and you’ve said yourself how dangerous it is.”
“It would have been fine if we hadn’t tried to betray the boy and his friends,” the man said. “We could have found a safe way through instead of him wrenching the wheel so that we hit the rocks.”
Now Dust understood why he had come here. The signs hadn’t deserted him after all.
“The boy you betrayed,” he said, stepping into the middle of the men’s conversation, “Was it Royce, the one who says that he is king?”
“This is none of your concern, freak,” one of the men said, giving Dust a hard look.
“I have no wish to kill you,” Dust said, spreading his hands.
“Kill us?” the man said. “There are six of us, idiot.”
“Yes,” Dust said, with a slight frown. What did this man intend by pointing out their numbers? “Was the boy you betrayed Royce?”
“So what if he was?” one of the sailors said. “You a friend of his?”
“I need to find him,” Dust said. “He is in the Seven Isles?”
One of the ones who had clearly come from the sea snorted. “He’s dead with all his friends. They went over the side near the islands.”
Dust wished he could believe it, but if it were true, he wouldn’t have seen all the things that he had when it came to Royce. No, he was still alive, and that meant that Dust had to find him.
“You will take me to the Seven Isles,” Dust said. He would have preferred the larger ship, but it was clear that he was being pointed at this one for a reason. “Are you ready to leave?”
“Leave?” one of the sailors demanded. “You really think we’re going to take you anywhere?”
“I have coin, if it helps,” Dust said, but now he could see the death signs forming in the patterns of the waves, spotted the outline of a skull in one of the knots of wood on the boat. Dust sighed. Did it always have to be like this for him?
“Then you can give us that coin for having to put up with you,” the first sailor said. He drew a knife.
Dust stepped forward, one hand slapping at the man’s wrist, the other at his elbow. He heard the man scream as his elbow snapped, but the scream was quickly cut short as Dust slammed his elbow into the sailor’s throat, crushing it.
“You do not have to die,” he said to the others, but even as he said it, Dust knew it was too late to change things for these men. Some fates could not be altered.
One lunged at him with another knife, and he was fast enough that it actually scraped along Dust’s ribs in a flowering of pain. Dust was already spinning away from the attack, gripping the man’s head at cranium and chin, holding it almost tenderly for a second before he wrenched it sharply. The snap echoed around the docks.
Dust kicked a man back, felt the thud of a club across his shoulders, and briefly went to his knees. He swept his legs around to kick his attacker’s from under him, and drew a needlelike blade in the same moment.
He rolled forward, jabbing it up under another man’s ribs so he stood there in surprise, a chopping blade half raised. Dust pulled clear of him and spun behind the falling corpse, using it as a shield to block a blow from the man he’d kicked back. He threw his needle, and it plunged into the man’s eye, deep enough that he toppled back.
There were two left now: the clubman and one with a long dagger that was almost a sword. Dust stood there, arms outstretched, letting them circle him. They could still walk away, but he knew they wouldn’t, knew the exact moment when they would try to strike at him…
They lunged together, and Dust stepped back, dragging the knifeman forward so that his blade plunged deep into his comrade’s chest. Dust kept turning, regarding the clubman levelly.
“On another day, I might have said that I have no choice now,” Dust said. “I might have said that killing you was what fate required, but I am not ruled by fate now. I learn from it, and I choose. I don’t have to kill you.”
He heard the rattle as the club hit the floor and the man raised his hands, backing away.
“The thing about choosing,” Dust said, “is that I have to try to make the right choices. If I kill a man, what will that killing do to the world? Will it rob the place of someone who will do good things, who will bring joy to people’s lives?”
“I… you’re not going to kill me?” the man said.
Dust walked forward. “The other side of this is that I am just as responsible if I let someone live. What would you do with that life? How many more people would you rob? How many lives would you end?”
He let a blade drop into his hand and stabbed the man quickly, repeatedly, until he fell. The man’s eyes looked up at Dust in a kind of betrayal, and now Dust didn’t have the excuse that it was only the will of the fates that he had done what he had. Dust had chosen this, and even though he was sure it was the right choice, the strangest thing still gnawed at him: a faint thread of guilt.
He felt no guilt at leaping down into the men’s boat though, or in pushing it away from the docks to set off in the direction of the Seven Isles. He needed to find Royce, and he needed to do all that was necessary to save the world, no matter how difficult the choices were.
Being a hero, it turned out, was considerably more difficult than being an Angarthim had been.