The Daughters' War (Blacktongue, #0)

by Christopher Buehlman

Now once and long ago, there was a man who feared to die. This is quite commonplace. But this man was particular in that he was a wizard and had thus prolonged his years to keep him out of any grave, and unburned on the pyres of the dead. This Durgash, as they called him, had his home in northern Kesh where poppies multiply. And in the town he traveled to betimes, the essence of the poppy would be smoked in parlors where its subjects dreamed awake. To Durgash would the man, Marbaja, cry, who mongered both the poppy and the pipe, “Come, magicker, and taste a paradise no summoner aspires to surpass. I wonder, is today the hoped-for day you’ll bless yourself to tell Marbaja yes?” “That day will never come,” Durgash would say, “for you are full the tenth to beckon me to enter in that door your shadow haunts, for I have lived two hundred years and five, preserved by arcane regimens quite strict whose dictates I must follow to the dot; I may not taste the poppy, or I rot.” And on he walked, until he passed before the pleasure house where women and men are rented for an hour or a night. To Durgash would the fair Amala cry, for so was named the mistress of that place, “Why, Magicker, you walk your ways alone! Will you not try these stairs, and have a bath? And after this, some morsel haply choose between the legs of woman or of man? All you see is offered for your use. I wonder, is today the hoped-for day you bless yourself and tell Amala yes?” “That day will never come, and nor s...