Tales From Earthsea Read Free Page B

Then they carried Otter away.
    Not a door opened in the narrow street. Nobody looked out to see what the noise was. Not till long after the men were gone did some neighbors creep out to comfort Otter’s people as best they could. “Oh, it’s a curse, a curse, this wizardry!” they said.
    ***
    H OUND TOLD HIS MASTER THAT they had the hexer in a safe place, and Losen said, “Who was he working for?”
    “He worked in your shipyard, your highness.” Losen liked to be called by kingly titles.
    “Who hired him to hex the ship, fool?”
    “It seems it was his own idea, your majesty.”
    “Why? What was he going to get out of it?”
    Hound shrugged. He didn’t choose to tell Losen that people hated him disinterestedly.
    “He’s crafty, you say. Can you use him?”
    “I can try, your highness.”
    “Tame him or bury him,” said Losen, and turned to more important matters.
     
    O TTER’S HUMBLE TEACHERS HAD TAUGHT him pride. They had trained into him a deep contempt for wizards who worked for such men as Losen, letting fear or greed pervert magic to evil ends. Nothing, to his mind, could be more despicable than such a betrayal of their art. So it troubled him that he couldn’t despise Hound.
    He had been stowed in a storeroom of one of the old palaces that Losen had appropriated. It had no window, its door was cross-grained oak barred with iron, and spells had been laid on that door that would have kept a far more experienced wizard captive. There were men of great skill and power in Losen’s pay.
    Hound did not consider himself to be one of them. “All I have is a nose,” he said. He came daily to see that Otter was recovering from his concussion and dislocated shoulder, and to talk with him. He was, as far as Otter could see, well-meaning and honest. “If you won’t work for us they’ll kill you,” he said. “Losen can’t have fellows like you on the loose. You’d better hire on while he’ll take you.”
    “I can’t.”
    Otter stated it as an unfortunate fact, not as a moral assertion. Hound looked at him with appreciation. Living with the pirate king, he was sick of boasts and threats, of boasters and threateners.
    “What are you strongest in?”
    Otter was reluctant to answer. He had to like Hound, but didn’t have to trust him. “Shape-changing,” he mumbled at last.
    “Shape-taking?”
    “No. Just tricks. Turn a leaf to a gold piece. Seemingly.”
    In those days they had no fixed names for the various kinds and arts of magic, nor were the connections among those arts clear. There was—as the wise men of Roke would say later—no science in what they knew. But Hound knew pretty surely that his prisoner was concealing his talents.
    “Can’t change your own form, even seemingly?”
    Otter shrugged.
    It was hard for him to lie. He thought he was awkward at it because he had no practice. Hound knew better. He knew that magic itself resists untruth. Conjuring, sleight of hand, and false commerce with the dead are counterfeits of magic, glass to the diamond, brass to the gold. They are fraud, and lies flourish in that soil. But the art of magic, though it may be used for false ends, deals with what is real, and the words it works with are the true words. So true wizards find it hard to lie about their art. In their heart they know that their lie, spoken, may change the world.
    Hound was sorry for him. “You know, if it was Gelluk questioning you, he’d have everything you know out of you just with a word or two, and your wits with it. I’ve seen what old Whiteface leaves behind when he asks questions. Listen, can you work with the wind at all?”
    Otter hesitated and said, “Yes.”
    “D’you have a bag?”
    Weatherworkers used to carry a leather sack in which they said they kept the winds, untying it to let a fair wind loose or to capture a contrary one. Maybe it was only for show, but every weatherworker had a bag, a great long sack or a little pouch.
    “At home,” Otter said. It