He kept walking at a slow pace to avoid disturbing his healing wounds. Unknown to him, his gait looked quite heroic because of that, as if he were an old, tired warrior on a stroll, not a hyena-bitten runaway smith thinking of a certain young lady in the nightgown.
"Hey, hero!" someone called in a thin voice. "Come, I'll tell your fortune!"
Kangassk turned his head to the speaker and smiled when he saw a little girl no more than ten years old. She wore a long frayed dress, a proper soothsayer attire, but along with her skinny figure and messy boyish haircut, it made her look like a funny little sparrow. The girl sat on a squeaky folding chair by the wall and looked very serious. An unlit sign beside her written in childishly crooked letters clearly stated her business here.
"So you are a soothsayer?" said Kan with a soft chuckle. He couldn't help feeling like a real, hardened warrior now, towering over the child.
"Of course! I'm an Illian. All women in my family have the gift." The girl sniffed at him meaningfully, her pride obviously hurt by the stranger's disbelief. "Let me tell your fortune and see for yourself!"
Kan approached the child.
“Why do you sit there alone at night?” he asked.
“No real soothsayer reads fortunes in daylight,” she explained, clearly being very proud of being the real one. “Day is for charlatans and the fools who believe them. The future can be properly seen only at night!”
“Sorry, I didn’t know.” Kan squatted down beside the kid. “So, how much?”
“Five coins,” said the little soothsayer in such a tone that clearly meant there could be no arguments about the price.
“Expensive…”
“You want your fortune told or not?”
Kangassk had never seen such a proud and confident child before. Beatings, starvation, cruelty? There was no doubt the girl had never known such treatment.
He dropped the argument and put the five coins on her little palm.
"Now you must say: I give Zanna permission to read my fortune."
Kan repeated the words.
Zanna closed her eyes and frowned, thinking. She was supposed to look mysterious, Kan thought, but instead she looked like a little schoolgirl solving a math problem. It was hard not to laugh.
"Your name is Kangassk, you are from Aren-Castell," the girl began to chant in a slow and quiet manner so unlike her usual speech. "You are twenty years old, a warrior. Now ask your question."
Laughter died on Kan's lips. The little girl was a real soothsayer after all. In a moment, he no longer felt curious about the future. What he really wanted was to get out of here immediately. Not that it would have been fair to the kid…
"Okay," he exhaled, then took a deep breath. "I'm travelling with a girl, Vlada. Will we… err… ever be together? Will she love me?"
"Understood. Now wait. I will look for the answer." Zanna nodded and closed her eyes again.
It seemed like a very long wait to Kangassk though it could not have been longer than a minute before Zanna had opened her eyes again. The young soothsayer's face went from quiet serenity to surprise mixed with anger and fear.
"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 Zanna threw his coins back at him and shrieked, "Get out!!!"
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 inn. He wanted no more "adventures" that day.
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 Zanna Iliann’s opinion of them and grinned knowingly. His joy was brief, though, for he quickly recalled her scared face and shrill voice as well. What could have scared her so?
Local inns were nothing like dlars Kangassk knew. Instead of a cosy common hall with a fireplace and a dancing floor there was a boring dining room downstairs with rows and rows of ancient tables, each sporting a wide collection of cuts and stains. Where were people supposed to dance? Did they even dance there at all? Sad…
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