The Inn of the Black Door is so called because it has a door that is black. While the Inn does have other doors, patrons almost always enter through that one, as it is the only door that exists for the public.
There is only one black door, though its outer face can be found in many places. There are some magic doors that do not exist anywhere in particular. The black door is not one of them… that is to say, it does exist anywhere in particular. To be more specific, it exists anywhere that it needs to exist.
One would not say that it exists everywhere, because that would imply a profusion of universes made up entirely of black doors. It exists as needed, neither appearing nor disappearing but simply being where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.
There are some places in some worlds where the black door is always needed, and so it can always be found by those who know to look. There are other places where it exists only infrequently.
It does not come and go. When it is there, it has always been there. When it isn’t, it has never been there. All who have seen the black door and visited the inn that lies beyond it know when it exists because they remember its existence. When it is gone they remember it only as stories, if they remember it at all.
At this point in her story, the being known most recently as Jillian Callahan… a student of offense turned teacher of defense… had already passed through the black door many times in her comparatively lengthy existence. A mortal champion of a world could only climb so high facing mortal challenges belonging to her own world.
Callahan had first been led to the Inn of the Black Door by rumors she heard from long-lived elves who died soon after. In her days, she had already faced off against gods, dragons, and giants. She had slain eldritch abominations for whom death itself proved to be a fairly abstract inconvenience. The world in which she had been created had not yet run out of challenges for her, but she was drawn to novelty, and the Inn gave her access to that.
She’d never come to the Inn specifically to start a fight within its walls, but it had often happened that a fight broke out while she was there.
This time she had not come to the Inn to begin a hunt, and that galled her. Within the very essence of her soul, the natural mortal fear of eternity had been twisted and externalized into a revulsion for the eternal. She could sense the age and power of the drinkers in the taproom around her and longed to lash out and end a few things.
She looked around the taproom. It was the usual sort of crowd that the Inn attracted. There was a good mix of people of sorts that she recognized, the familiar elves and dwarves and ogres and such of her own frame, as well as some who resembled slight variations on those themes. Less familiar figures included such oddities as mechanical-looking men, semi-coherent clouds of dust and light, and beings stranger still.
A slight majority of the inhabitants of the Inn’s bar were human, or human-looking. A trio of young women… one stout, one quite fat, and one thin… seemed to wave at an indeterminate point somewhere behind her as her gaze moved past them. Callahan felt perturbed by this, as though in some distant world an invisible barrier had somehow been penetrated. The gesture felt gratuitous somehow, almost pandering.
She made eye contact with the bartender, a slight and smooth-cheeked man. He swore into his sleeve, then put on a smile and slipped out from behind his bar. He glided towards her, his loose trenchcoat fluttering behind him like a cape. A number of the bar’s more humanish patrons had actual capes on, a style choice that Callahan assumed reflected the fashions in worlds more closely connected to the Inn.
“Godslayer,” the barkeep said to her, more by way of acknowledgment than greeting.
“Dark,” she said.
“It has been a quiet night,” he said. “I would consider it an immense personal favor if it remainedso.”
“Really?” she replied with a lopsided grin. “How quiet do you want it?”
“Louder than the grave,” he said. “At or about the same volume as it is now, in fact.”
The bartender was immortal, not by nature but by dint of his own stubbornness and some impasse with his own god. She could feel that, and it both sickened and excited her. She refrained from killing him not out of politeness but because she’d done so on previous visits and it had never done any good.
“Relax, Johnny,” she said. “This is a social call… I’m actually here on a date.”
His eyes widened, but only by a bit and only for a moment.
“Ah,” he said. “That is unfortunate.”
“It is?”
“Yes, it means I owe the little trickster ten dollars.”
Callahan, having been to the Inn and traveled the planes in at least a shallow wading sort of way, understood this word to refer to a sort of money common in certain worlds… a fiat currency represented by paper or intangible numbers and backed by nothing but belief. It was a ridiculous and fantastic notion, but anyone who travels between worlds soon notes how what is pure fantasy in one frame may exist as fact in another.
“He’s here, then?” she asked. She’d been idly entertaining the hope that he’d intended all along to stand her up or do some mischief elsewhere while she was off-world.
“He awaits you in one of the back booths.”
“I wanted to get here before he did… has he been here long?”
“I could not say,” Johnny said. “I did not mark his arrival.”
Under normal circumstances, the Inn always had enough back booths. This was because like its door, the booths existed at need. Not only did their numbers match the needs of the Inn’s clientele, but their size and shape did, too. They were all the same size, and that size was the right one. Big and wide enough for an ogre, small enough for a party of pixies, able to intimately accommodate a pair of lovers meeting for a quiet drink or an entire harem that’s popped out for a pint.
Thus, when Callahan slid with some ill-grace into the bench opposite the one who styled himself as the gods of gnomes, she found herself looking the diminutive figure right in his soft, dark eyes. The table between them appeared perfectly level, and the benches on which they sat were the same size… but it was the right size, for him and for her both.
Resolving the visual paradoxes inherent in the Inn’s architecture and furnishings was not something that every mind in the multiverse could manage, which was among the reasons that not everyone could find the black door. Callahan could navigate the impossibilities, but doing so left her even more uncomfortable. Her date for the evening appeared perfectly at ease, with the surroundings, with himself, and with everything else.
“Owain,” she said.
“My dear Jillian,” he said. He gestured to the empty table. “I took the liberty of ordering drinks… and drinking them.”
“You make a habit of taking liberties,” she said.
“They’re medicinal,” he said. “I’ll summon the serving girl.”
He snapped his fingers, and a beautiful girl came hurrying up. There was something familiar about her, though what it was, Callahan couldn’t quite say. Her face, maybe. Or her hair. Possibly her eyes, or her outfit. She’d definitely seen her before. Callahan had never been big on aesthetics… or had any interest in other women… but the girl was definitely a real beauty. That much Callahan was sure of, and only that much.
“Hey, Coach!” the girl said.
“La Belle,” Callahan said. “I made you cry once, didn’t I?”
“Three times,” she said. “And I only showed up for your class once! The other two times I was just thinking about it. Can I get you something?”
“You work here?”
“It was the only place I could get a job after I dropped out,” she said. “And wandered into a dimensional vortex that dumped me here. And I got cursed with bad luck a few times… just once at first, but it turns out that getting cursed is something that happens to unlucky people. Also, I had really bad references.”
Callahan stared at her for a few moments, and then said, “Nothing for me, thank you.”
“Oh, okay! Just shout if you need anything… oh, only don’t actually shout or I might cry. It’s great to see you here, though!”
Owain sat smiling placidly until she had gone away, and then said, “Indescribable beauty.”
“What?”
“You’re trying to figure out what she looks like, except for beautiful. Don’t bother. It’s a faerie gift,” Owain said. “The whole family’s lousy with that sort of thing. Only they’ve gone back to the well so many times that most of the obviously good ones are taken.”
“Oh,” Callahan said. “That… that actually explains a lot.”
“Now, where were we?” Owain said. “Oh, yes. My habit of taking liberties. You may call it a habit, but in fact I can stop any time I want. Start, too. Or keep going, or turn and go off in a different direction… you see, this is the beautiful thing about living a life of liberty. It’s so wonderfully freeing. You can do whatever you want.”
“Right now, I want to see my eye,” she said.
“But your replacement has grown back in nicely,” he said. “Quite exciting, this mortal magic. One almost fears to guess at what they might manage next.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “The terms of our deal are still the same.”
“You only need two eyes,” he said. “What are you going to do with a third one?”
“It’s what you could do with it that worries me,” she said.
“Well, worry not… I’ve left it untouched, as per our deal,” he said.
“I don’t like to repeat myself.”
“Then going into education was perhaps the worst mistake of your life.”
“You may not be a real god, Owain, but I’ve killed things far older and less divine than you,” she said.
“And far younger, I should expect, but I don’t believe you’ve ever killed anything exactly my age before so I think I’m safe for the moment,” he said.
“Show me my eye,” she said.
“Oh, very well,” he said. “I hope you appreciate what a rare treat this is… this is a privilege few people have, without recourse to a mirror… and you get to do it in stereo, too.”
He reached into one of the many pouches that adorned his vest and pulled out a large jewelry box… larger still in his hand… and set it down on the table in front of him, facing her. He opened it.
“Are you satisfied that this is the item in question?” he asked.
Callahan nodded.
He nudged the box forwards across the table. “Go ahead, take it.”
“Now?” she said.
“Whensoever it best suits you,” he said.
She had not moved her hands at all since he had put the box down. It wasn’t so much that she feared a trick, or even that she expected one… she knew there was a trick, the same way she’d known where to find the black door the moment it once again existed in a place where it had always been.
The door was always there. There was always a trick.
“I find it odd that you’d give up your only hold over me so early in the evening,” Callahan said. “Are you actually trusting me to keep my word?”
“No, but I’d relish the sight of you fleeing me at the first opportunity, like all the hordes of all the hells are nipping at your heels,” he said. “Because no matter how casually you might try to saunter off, no matter how much you swagger, that’s what it would be… and more importantly, that’s how it would be told. I can’t say what that would do for your reputation, but it would advance mine considerably.”
“How did I even end up here?” she asked.
“Through the door, I would imagine.”
“I went to the picnic to terminate my primary target,” she said, “only to find you’d somehow known I was coming…”
“You’re always coming,” he said. “No indelicacy intended.”
“…and sent him away before I got there.”
“He left, I think you would find, of his own initiative.”
“And you had nothing to do with that?”
“Well… maybe I did, but I couldn’t let you kill my brother, could I?”
“He isn’t your brother,” Callahan said. “None of them are.”
“Except for the women, who aren’t my sisters instead,” Owain said. “Anyway, he doesn’t know that, and if he knew I had gone and let you kill him, he might start to get suspicious. Why do you want to kill old Carl, anyway? He’s not exactly a bad sort, once you get to know him, and even better if you don’t.”
“I don’t care about his morality or his politics.”
“In this line of work, it’s the same thing,” Owain said.
“It’s just what I was made to do,” she said. “Birds got to fly, fish got to swim.”
“Does it give you pleasure to serve your former masters’ will?”
“It scratches an itch,” she said. “I wouldn’t kill him just because they wanted me to, but that won’t keep him alive, either. When I do it, it’ll be because I want to.”
“And it bothers you not a whit that you only want to because they wanted you to?”
“Why should it? I have lots of desires and no idea where most of them came from. I trust this one because I know its source.”
“I wouldn’t have figured you for the philosophical sort,” Owain said.
“Give me a big enough blade and I can be downright poetic,” she said. “You know what bothers me the most about you, little man?
“I’m not a man, and I’m hardly little,” he said. “I’m just very, very far away.”
“I have fought things that would give nightmares to nightmares. I have killed things that could never die and things that were long dead when I got there. But somehow, nothing I’ve ever faced has ever given me the willies like you do.”
“It’s because you don’t know what I am, and that drives you bonkers.”
“That’s never stopped me from killing anything before.”
“What unnerves me is that you see through me at all,” he said. “Most people don’t. Most gods don’t.”
“Illusions are better against soldiers than they are against weapons,” Callahan said. “But you know what unnerves me? Even knowing that you’re working a con… the biggest con in the world, probably… I still fell for your schtick. I held off on attacking. I agreed to come here. Why? I don’t know. You said something, wrapped me up in your words somehow. And the next thing I know I’m plucking out my eye to leave you as collateral!”
“You drove a harder bargain than most would have, under the circumstances,” he said. “If you hadn’t insisted on some caveats then as you said, I could have done all sorts of interesting things with it in the intervening period… I know all sorts of fun games that are funny, to quote the bard.”
“No bard I’ve ever heard of.”
“You should travel more,” Owain said. “It’s wonderfully broadening. You should see me in my homeland. I’m huge there.”
“Where exactly are you from?”
“I’d rather show than tell.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to go on wondering.”
“So does that mean you won’t be going back to my place?” Owain asked.
“Don’t look so disappointed,” Callahan said. “There’s only one reason I agreed to this dump as a venue, and it’s not just because it’s neutral ground.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an inn,” she said. “It has rooms.”
“Ohhhhh.”
“Don’t feel too flattered… this is just a recon mission for me,” she said.
“Fair enough,” Owain said. “I like to think I leave most women I bed a little bit wiser for the experience.”
“And one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You’d better look a hell of a lot bigger up close.”
Just a note from your author: as a final push to close out the fall fundraiser, I will re-open the Tales of MU Formspring account for in-character Q&A if you folks push the total over $1,000 by Sunday night (or more specifically, by the time I get up Monday morning). There’s just a bit over $100 to go at this point. A bunch of $1 donations, a handful of $10 donations, a few people buying a newsletter subscription or sponsoring a chapter… doesn’t matter how we get there.
And again, for the people who’ve noticed that stories are coming out more regularly but haven’t noticed the link or figured out the rhythm to it all, the whole monthly schedule is up here. Next regular chapter is on the 16th, next Other Tales is on the 21st… right now I’m leaning towards another check-in with Laurel Anne.
The beginning of something indescribable.
Typo Report
Needs a space between “remained” and “so”.
I liked this Other Tales installment. Coach Callahan and the Black Door Inn (wasn’t it also called the Sands of Time?) make for quite an interesting combination. Tossing Owain into the mix was much fun too! Nice little cameo by the Binder sisters. Over all a nifty little treat. Finding out a little more about Callahan’s little weekend excursion from last year and why she was wearing the eye patch when she got back was a nice bonus. 🙂
Yes, the Sands of Time Club is what it’s called by the inhabitants of certain other worlds.
Love the Spider Robinson reference. 🙂
I am imagining Callahan as the stepmother to gnomekind and it makes me cry.
It sounds like it will be more of a one night stand. I am imagining Callahan yelling “I fucked your deity!” whenever she meets a burrow gnome, and it makes me laugh. “Godlayer” has almost the same spelling, but completely different implications. Though with Callahan, you can never be sure – she might end up playing Lorena to his John Owain Bobbitt (or should that be Hobbit?) >:=)>
I’m here all week, folks! And remember to tip your waitresses!
Actually, it could still be Godslayer – she just needs to find a few more deities.
heck of an orgy if some of the other Owains show up 😛 (said rather tongue in cheek)
So Fucking awesome.
“Why should it? I have lots of desires and no idea where most of them came from. I trust this one because I know its source.”
Is she semi-aware of the fourth wall? And distrusting of the Author? Not trusting her own desires because she can’t tell where they come from, while trusting the desires of others who use her as an assassin because she does know that their desires are simple political things and she gets to kill things.
That may be a valid reading, but no, it’s not my intention. Sorry to be the one to tell you, but if all your desires and wants have clear-cut causes and precise points of origin, you’re probably a fictional character yourself because real people are never that well-designed. We just sort of happen, and good luck sorting out how or why we happened in retrospect.
Semi-Freudian: “It’s about sex. If it’s not overtly about sex, it might be about food. If it’s not about food, it must be covertly about sex. If not THAT, then it’s about stopping someone ELSE from having your sex or your food. Failing ALL else, you’re insane and must be institutionalized.”
— Mankind Explained.
Ah, ok then insane it is. Nice to have that one cleared up.
You forgot that “If it’s about food it is also very likely about sex.”
And the odd corner cases of someone else having sex on or with your food.
Hmm… I was leaning more towards her either being a former slave or a golem who was given the will to kill (like Two’s will to do what she’s told).
The best way into
The Inn of the Black Door is
Via the back door
Really enjoyed this one.
Awesomely Awesome and Awesomeness!
Really good chapter, though now I have more questions then ever – most pressingly, where Owain is from, originally. I guess if you can always be somewhere before other people noticed you arrived, it should be within your power to convince the gods you came right along with them, and so must be a god yourself! He’s clearly powerful enough to pass, anyways.
Awesome interlude.
Always good to see more of Jillian.
Single favorite chapter I’ve read here, although took an AWFUL lot of buildup to make it that way.
I’m currently semi-studying cognitive science, and the notion of where our values and desires come from and whether we should be okay about modifying them, and Callahan’s statement about “at least I know where that desire comes from” was pretty relevant.
> He isn’t your brother
Of course not. His brother’s name is Owain. (Unless the whole Owain thing is a trick. Nah, if you can’t trust Owain…)
Very good, I love any chapter that says “fuck you” to how we see reality. It’s always fun to think about paradoxes, and impossible realities.
Certainly in the top 10 chapters.
Puddy’s strength = faery gift?
Or dragon blood.
or Giant and she did say she was part giant, but the dwarven blood balanced it out. The La Belle line is so mixed that they are about like wringing out the bartenders rag at the end of the night.
I’m holding to that theory. Something about being the strongest in any room, I think, given her insistence on Mack leaving during her fight and her reaction around the time Embries would have left.
That is really an interesting theory.
… Owain is totally a giant, isn’t he?
This was just great. I would love to see more of it.
That would be awesome. Though with the eye thing now Im thinking along the lines of Llokkii or Coyote in parallel.
That would be interesting. The combination of “You should see me in my homeland. I’m huge there.” and the recent discussion of giant worship, though, really makes me think Owain is, indeed, one of those powerful giants.
I do too, was just taking it a step further and probably overthinking things like I usually do.
Llokkii would touch on the Norse bent to the Thyleans and draw on the Trickster nickname. Funny, the more I think on it, this is a different strand that could lead to Twyla or Pala as well.
Loki is a giant, son of Odin and a giantess, with no evidence of being worshipped in some of the original norse tales. S/he is a shapeshifter who even can change gender, and can be considered both a (fire)god and a (frost or air giant)jötunn. Taken further, some see Loki(Llokkii or Lokki) as tri-form or hypostasis aspect of Odin.
Taken altogether, if this is the root idea of Owain, is Owain then a play on Odin and Woden for a name? I’m inclined to think so, personally.
I’m probably overthinking and stretching too far with this. (I mentioned Coyote because some theories hold that loki was originally a spider and many trickster tales in native american cultures have Coyote and Spider playing tricks on one another.)
That would be really interesting.
Don’t forget Anansi, either.
If thats the bar that I think it is…. Callahan is one of the notches on ole Ray’s bedpost isn’t she?
Really enjoyed this chapter.
So Callahan is X-23?
Oh crap. If the guy is Loki, then he is half Giant, half Aesir. Callahan is in for a night.
ps. Can we now make a dirty Harry joke about her, or are we going to end up chopped in pieces.
What I don’t get though is Callahan, she is like Batman WITH a green lantern ring teaching self defence to a high school class.
What? No, no, no, no… that comparison is way off.
It’s a college class.
hmmm i think maybe a bit more like when magneto was running professor x’s school for him, so like not actually a good guy, and not really a bad guy at the moment either.
No my point is that Callahan is this uber warrior who has slain gods, daemons and nameless things, yet she is content to take the time to teach a melee class, admittedly it is at the prestigious MU. But its not like she is teaching advanced godslaying techniques.
That’s the graduate course 😉
she is bored, looking for a challenge, and decided she’ll have to look instead for potential and give knowledge to temper potential to create a challenge for herself, else the boredom wins perhaps?
It is said to improve past a certain level in certain skills one needs to teach that skill to others. I am pretty sure godslaying is the best you can achieve in martial prowess on your own, therefore Callahan must teach others if she wishes to maintain her killing edge.
Callahan is a lot older than she at first seems, and has already lived (it appears) quite a few human lifetimes. She could be here as part of some sort of slow, carefully orchestrated “dance of death” – where at the end, possibly after decades or even centuries of maneuvering there’s a sudden climax and either she or Embries is dead.
I feel that such a game is something that both of them would find attractive – a contest with sufficient challenge and high enough stakes that it would keep them engaged over a protracted period of time. An anodyne for the boredom of a long life in which nothing much has happened recently. (recently could mean decades or millennia, depending….)
i even wonder, if perhaps she teaches because she is looking for a protege, a sort of heir. she doesn’t really seem to be the mothering type, so having her own child to leave her legacy to seems a bit out of the question. where better to find and begin training that person then at MU? on a broader sense she could also be looking for future recruits for whatever/whoever she used(?) to work for.
Are we possibly overlooking the ‘cute things i’m supposed to torture for a living’ factor, here?
Om nom nom. Is Owain Loki? Who knows, other than Owain, of course…
Really enjoyed this chapter, though sometimes I wish you’d just trash MU completely and write THE EPIC OF CALLAHAN or w/e you wanna call it. Also get the distinct impression there’s a bunch of references here I’m missing completely.
Thank you for the “Generic-Tavern-between-World-that-every-RP-Chat-has”-Chapter.. This was fantastic. 😀
Yeah okay, so the fairy gifts are turns of phrases.
Indescribable beauty.
Strongest person in the room.
Any man she kisses will never love another girl. (sounds awkward)
Divine laugh.
And… College scholarship despite being thick as shit?
“Any man she kisses will never love another girl.” Sounds like turning them gay, my solution: Kiss women instead.
“Divine laugh”…brilliant!
+1 for you.
Could I please have ‘would fall into a pile of manure & come up smelling of roses’? I could save so much on deodorant & shower gel.
Well, not sure what part to attach this to, but on the Owain thing, I just got the impression that he was Puck.
or Anansi
or Anansi – or Kyprioth. That would be so neat, because Tamora Pierce a) writes for teens, b) has kick-ass girl heroes, and c) let’s them have, and enjoy sex with chaps they won’t end up married to. And be friends with, like, gay people.
Kyprioth, Kyprioth, Kyprioth! FTW!
You make my head hurt, but it hurts so goooooood. Can’t wait to see where all the little implications and hints that I love so much are heading.
Feel powerful urge to point out Robinson’s Corollary…
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Off to sling some booze.
just wanted to say that callahans crosstime saloon was one of my favorite novels ever. glad to see you must have read it too.
mickey finn was one of my favorite characters out of the whole series.
just wanted to say that callahans crosstime saloon was one of my favorite novels ever. glad to see you must have read it too.
Ah, the Bar. Every internet oldtimer worth their salt knows that place.
Maybe you meant it that way and maybe you didn’t, but either way, the black door is a blank monitor screen, and the doorhandle is a winking prompt.
There is know condition of existence where the lack of reality could not be considered unrealistic.