Free Raven's Ladder by Jeffrey Overstreet

art improved with every telling. In this particular story, a stranger paid a gang of pickpocket brothers to rob a magician who ruled the Expanse. After the robbery’s success, the robbers fought one another, arguing over some foolishness such as the true and proper name of the one who had hired them. They forgot that they were brothers, calling each other “bushpig” and “snake in the weeds.” In the commotion the treasure they had stolen was smashed, and they raised jagged shards to attack one another. Lanterns fell sideways in the melee that ensued, and their hideaway caught fire.
    Walls burned away, revealing the magician, torch in hand. As the brothers called out for his help, he smiled, and his face changed. Lo, the man they had robbed was the man who had hired them, tricking them into exposing their wicked nature. Their crimes were undeniable now, and they would pay a terrible price. Laughing, the magician turned and walked away while the fiery house collapsed upon the thieves.
    The story had clearly shaken its teller, past crimes paining his conscience.
    But in Cal-raven’s dream, the scroll had unfurled to reveal a different ending. The Keeper had burned the house down on the thieves and then, with a sweeping thrust of its mighty wing, scattered the story’s characters and sent them off in flares like shooting stars.
    Cal-raven felt the dream slip away. But one element remained as clear as these sideways rays of daytime.
It’s not just a dream anymore. The Keeper is real
.
    The hammock swayed slightly among leafy fans. Birdsong spread. He pushed off the rainskin and hung it from a tree branch to dry in the sun.
    I know the truth at last. And it’s just what I always claimed. I call for the Keeper’s help, and it hears me. I must have won its favor somehow, searching for its tracks or sculpting its likeness
.
    Birdsong was not the only music rising from the Cragavar. The breeze spilled rainwater from the leafy boughs, from one broad green hand down to be caught by another, surrounding Cal-raven with a pitter-patter symphony. Far below, he heard the happy concert of humming vawns. Mouthless, the reptiles sang in short, dissonant hoots and snorts with no discernible pattern or rhythm. Between the notes they noisily sucked mud through their nostrils, chewed the worms and grubs with the teeth that lined their throats, then sneezed out the leftover soil.
    As if joining in with the vawns, Snyde was singing an old Abascar folk tune, “Up the River Throanscall.”
    Cal-raven closed his eyes and fought against thoughts of the coming confrontation, the ugly business he must carry out along the way to Mawrnash. Breathing deeply, he tried to remember childhood lessons in how to be still.
    We have far to go. I cannot afford any delays
.
    His worries were as aggressive as weeds. He could not forget his last sight of Say-ressa in bandages, her fists clenched as she battled against death’s ruthless agents.
    A strange gravity from the east tugged at his attention. Were he to give in to those beckoning phantoms, he would be drawn back across familiar ground to the desolation of his father’s house. He lifted a shield against that temptation. No hope could be found in those ruins.
    He turned westward, drawn by another sort of gravity. Bel Amica. The beastman who had warned him, saving Abascar’s remnant from a siege, hadsaid that only Cyndere, the heiress of House Bel Amica, could be trusted to help House Abascar. Cyndere would welcome them with shelter, sustenance, and a future. It would take only a few days’ ride to enter an opulent house.
    Memories of his last visit to those foggy, busy avenues taunted him. All that his people needed, all that he could not give them, could be found within Bel Amica. He’d come close to the queen, mapped much of her palace labyrinth, and learned just how intoxicating that house by the sea could be. He had wandered in mirror-lined marketplaces, watched triumphal ships return from