"A more reluctant lot I've rarely seen," said Zhaana.
"Your husband's folk don't look too happy either."
"This is, they say, but a gesture. Maybe you'd like to talk to one of them, instead."
"Whom do you recommend?"
Zhaana bit her lip. "On second thought, never mind."
Silence hung between them.
Luma finally spoke. "You're right. My people found this a hard gesture to make."
"To inter a common criminal in the great Cenotaph." Zhaana dabbed her tears with a silk handkerchief.
"Gestures, however reluctant, matter. The next one might not be so hard-earned. And then from the one after that, understanding might flow."
"Neither my people nor his want your understanding."
"What you desire is of course up to you. Yet you are here."
"My husband completed his spirit journey. According to his shamans, he now dwells in Elysium. From there he has joined his ancestral moot, and will advise his people, just like the spirits of Shoanti heroes past."
Luma knew better than to ask which afterlife the Varisian thought she was headed for. Would a Varisian wife join a Shoanti husband in the celestial realms, or would they be eternally separated? The complexities of marriage between peoples continued, it would seem, even after death. A flush of compassion for this woman struck her, but she was no longer capable of expressing it. So she held herself erect and hoped the moment would pass. "In other words," Luma asked, "the shamans don't object to his burial here, because the body means nothing to them?"
"So I am told." Zhaana faced the great column of the Cenotaph. "You say that placing him here, among Magnimarian heroes, may start to heal the wounds of resentment between our peoples. For the sake of my children, I hope so."
"Fair enough," said Luma.
Grobaras waved to her.
"They're ready," Luma said, and walked with Zhaana as far as a cart decorated with Axe Clan sigils. She went on to join Grobaras and assorted other dignitaries by an empty bier. Conspicuous by their absence were leaders of the disgraced imperial faction.
An honor guard of armored Shoanti pulled the cart to the bier. Luma and two high officers of the city guard came to relieve certain of the barbarians. Together Shoanti and Chelaxians lifted a pallet, on which rested Priza's body, which had been preserved by forest magic. Apart from an absence about the face, he might be mistaken for a man deep in restful slumber.
Having performed her part, Luma withdrew to stand beside Noole, Thaubnis, and Hendregan, whom Luma had not seen since the day after the incident.
By prior negotiation, the ceremony mixed Chelish pomp with Shoanti rites. When the psalms were sung, Thaubnis added her own quiet prayer. Her god was a guardian between life and death, and although he typically concerned himself only with dwarves, she commended Priza to him just in case.
Finally, to the tolling of bells and the thumping of hand-drums, Priza was conveyed from the bier and into the catacombs below.
Zhaana and her people would not go past the catacomb door. When it closed, they turned as one and strode from the square. Their rude haste let the grandees make a show of shocked disapproval.
As the crowd broke up, Hendregan took Luma aside. The fire magician held himself with uncharacteristic composure, as he had done throughout the funeral. "Noole says you'll need a new team, to replace the one you were in with your brothers and sisters."
"Yes," said Luma.
He looked down at his toes. "I cannot join it."
"No?"
"Noole reminded me of my purpose in coming here. In the excitement, I had forgotten."
"And what was that, Hendregan?"
"I seek a volcano, who is also my brother."
"There are no volcanoes anywhere around here."
The fire magician shook his head regretfully. "I was misled. Or became confused, which happens sometimes. This is another reason why I cannot join your squad. I am mad. Too mad for this mad place."
"A man who says that is perhaps not as mad as he thinks."
Hendregan snorted gleefully. "I am mad and not mad. Or rather, there are two sides of me, human and not, both of them sane, except when they are combined in one body, as they are."
"So you are leaving Magnimar?"
"To find that volcano. This time I won't be deterred, no matter who I fall in with, or how much fun we are having. We did have fun, didn't we, Luma?"
"Is that what it was?"
Hendregan deflated. "Oh."
"Yes, Hendregan, it was fun that we had. Good luck finding that volcano."
"And the same to you, in finding Ontor." Then he turned and marched away, elbows swung high in the air beside him.
∗ ∗ ∗
The next morning, Luma and Thaubnis arrived before dawn at the Pediment Building. In its courtyard a crew of carpenters had completed their work and tested the set of wooden stairs leading up the gallows. A light wind blew sawdust and the smell of pine across the square.
A mayoral functionary, whom Luma recognized as one of the men serving Grobaras when he interrogated her, waited to meet her. He escorted the two visitors through the side entrance and down into the Hells. There the citysong screamed, commingling anguish and bloodlust—the conflicting moods of prisoners on an execution morn.
"The lord-mayor reminds you that brevity is a virtue," said the official, before taking them down a dank corridor.
"He needn't," said Luma.
The official took Luma and Thaubnis past a row of empty cells. Only the last one to the right was occupied, by Arrus and Eibadon. They'd been permitted fresh shirts and trousers, which Luma had sent over the day prior. Eibadon had taken on a grayish complexion. He slumped in the back of the cell, on a bench. Stubble dotted his scalp: he was growing out his clerical tonsure. His fellow priests of Abadar had defrocked him. His defense, that the coup would have brought stricter law to a chaotic city, earned him nothing but sneers. The fact that he wasn't bound and gagged indicated that divine favor must have been withdrawn from him, preventing him from calling on even the lowliest spell or blessing.
Arrus, for his part, radiated a defiant health. When he saw Luma, he approached the bars, setting his jaw and squaring his shoulders. He hid the stump of his amputated hand; she peered around him to see that it had healed into a bumpy mass.
Thaubnis hung discreetly back.
"You've come to gloat?" Arrus asked.
"To say goodbye," said Luma. "As is customary, in such circumstances."
"If you've come expecting crying and repentance, you'll get none from us," Arrus said.
"I expect nothing."
"And that's what you'll get," said Arrus.
"What of Mother?" said Eibadon, without stirring. "They won't tell us."
"I sent her away," said Luma.
"To where?"
"To a better place than she deserves, I'd guess. Was she in on it?"
Eibadon straightened up. "Of course not!"
"Then it is good that I exercised mercy," said Luma.
"You aren't fit to say her name," hissed Arrus.
"You'll note that I haven't," said Luma. "I take it you won't be making expressions of remorse on the gallows."
"Gallows? We are of noble blood! We demand beheading, as befits our rank."
"Spoken like a true Korvosan. Your mother will be proud."
"And what of it? Your beloved city, it is a place of lies. Its great families act like nobles yet lack true power. We are Chelish, yet say that we are something different. Had you died, as you were supposed to, Grobaras would be in the Cenotaph and the people would acclaim us. They yearn for a man of ambition to lead them. A warrior, a shaper of visions, not some gluttonous dissembler. Your fat lord-mayor may slay us today, but he will not kill the dream of empire."
"You think that's what the city wants?"
"Sheep love their shepherds, most of all when they must be hard."
"That's why you did it, then. For power, and to please your mother.
What boring reasons for such terrible deeds."
"In the end," Eibadon said, "all the goals of man are the same."
Luma made a scoffing sound. "You never regarded me, so it meant nothing to toss me in that grinder. Or to kill the Korvosan dupes, or Khonderian, or see the lives of so many soldiers and spectators snuffed. But patricide?"
"He was sick already," Arrus said.
"History is made by ruthless men," Eibadon added.
"Consider my sisterly duty performed," said Luma. "As to the means of execution, direct all grievances to the man you schemed to assassinate."
As she rejoined Thaubnis, Arrus shouted after her: "If you're counting on a shameful display, there will be none!"
Luma remained silent as they left the Hells and the Pediment Building. The crowd for the hanging trickled, then streamed, into the courtyard. Hawkers sold apples and meat pies. A musician clambered onto a box and tuned his lute. Filches wove through the press of spectators, in search of unprotected purses.
Thaubnis and Noole followed Luma as she headed for a distant vantage, her forbidding presence parting the crowd before her.
She watched as her brothers were transported to the foot of the gallows. "For as long as they could talk, I yearned for their acceptance."
"They were your family," said Thaubnis. "Your people."
"But that's the question, isn't it? If they'd given it to me—what monster might I have gladly become?"
As promised, Arrus and Eibadon confronted their nooses with stoic self-possession. Refusing the hoods they were proffered, they died facing the throng. The executioner dropped the lever, releasing the trapdoor. A prison healer checked their swinging bodies for signs of life. When he found none, they were cut down and loaded onto a cart. The crowd followed it, filling the Avenue of Honors, on its route to the city wall, where both corpses would be loaded into separate gibbets. There they would hang as an object lesson to traitors, until the last morsels from their bones had been stripped away by crows.
Chapter Thirty
Korvosa
Yandine, fine features concealed beneath a ragged kerchief, navigated the narrow streets of Korvosa's slum district, a sack hefted over her shoulder. A choking reek of ordure emanated from the gutters. Teetering tenements leaned out over the laneways. Weird, red-pawed rats leapt like squirrels between their roofs.
A blond, chubby-cheeked halfling observed her from behind a derelict food cart. When Yandine had passed, he ambled after her, following her until she doubled back on him. He tipped his floppy hat as she passed him and kept on going. The halfling ducked through an open tenement door and transformed into a Varisian urchin girl, who then darted into the street to catch up with Yandine.
At length she spied Yandine entering a ramshackle cottage. She hung back, sheltered by a mound of rubble.
It was Luma's first time outside Magnimar. Dissonant and thunderous, Korvosa's citysong differed from home, to be sure. But she could hear it, and despite her loathing for this place—its grim crags, its stink of the diabolic, and the crabbed cruelties of its collective soul—she could still draw magic from it.
She waited until her quarry came back out again, without the bag, and then a few minutes more. Then she circuited the block, coming at the cottage through a rodent-infested back alley.
Ontor hunched over a scuffed table, gobbling a salad of seabeets from a pewter bowl. He looked up as she came in, then kicked the table over and reached for a knife which rested on the mantle of a crumbled fireplace.
"You're barging in on the wrong person," he said.
"Not so," answered Luma, reverting to her true form. She pulled her sickle.
Ontor hung back, dagger outstretched. "Don't make me do this. You're no match for me in close quarters."
"Don't be so sure."
She came at him with the sickle. He tried his usual turn-and-grab move, the one she'd planned for. Luma tilted to the other side, slashing his elbow. While she had leather armor under her outfit, Ontor wore only street clothes. Gasping, he wheeled back.
"You're tougher," he said.
She dove for him. He caught a stool under his foot and kicked it at her. Its edge clipped her on the forehead, opening a wound at her hairline. "But I haven't turned into an idiot, either," Ontor breathed.
Wiping away blood, she picked up the stool and hurled at him. He ducked; it bounced off a wall and into a tile stove, breaking into pieces.
"Be merciful, Luma," said Ontor. "No one wanted this less than I did."
With her free hand, she punched him in the face.
"You want to smack me a bit?" Ontor said. "Go ahead."
She plucked loose the throwing darts strapped to her thigh and hurled them at him. Ontor dove low; they passed harmlessly overhead. She threw a final dart; it sailed into his shoulder, above the collarbone.
He winced. "I did my best, remember? I tried to warn you. It wasn't too late then. And all along I argued against it, even at the last minute."
"And Father?"
"I had no idea, I swear. Only after they'd given him the fatal dose did I put it together. Mother still won't believe that part of it."
"So you say."
"I swear. I swear on anything. Luma, of course you have every right to seek vengeance. I merely ask you to find pity, the pity for both of us, so that I don't have to—"
She bowled into him, throwing him off balance, and swiped the sickle into his ribs. He twisted aside, using the burst of momentum to yank her into the wall. As he did so, he seized the sickle, twisted it from her grip, and threw it across the room. It sailed into the far wall, sinking into the half-rotted timber. She saw that he was ready to go for her if she tried to recover it.
When she stayed where she was, he stepped closer. He reached down to the tear she'd cut into his shirt. She'd carved a long red wound across his ribs. "You can pummel me all you want, Luma, but let's keep weapons out of it."
He was leaving himself open. But it was a trick—when she swung at him, he caught her arm and twisted. "I don't expect forgiveness. But between that and killing, there's such a gulf. Why don't we each let the other go his own way? Walk out that door, Luma."
She wrenched herself free, elbowed him in the chest, and tripped him, sending him tumbling onto his back. Before he could wrench away, Luma landed on him, pressing thumbs into his throat. Bucking to the side, he threw her off; she recovered, rolling into a sitting position.
Ontor's face was red. A loop of drool hung from his lip. "You won't let up, will you? I can't let you go, because you'll never let up. I can leave here, and you'll follow me." He lunged at her, his dagger pointed at the hollow between her clavicles. Luma caught his wrist. Their arms trembled as he forced it slowly down, his strength overcoming hers.
"Swear to me that you'll relent," he said, "and I won't have to do this."
Luma put all of her power into her effort, but still the tip of the dagger dipped by increments toward her.
"Don't make me, Luma!" Ontor shouted.
Just as the blade was about to pierce her, the tension went from his arm. He dropped the blade, letting it clatter to the floor.
He fell onto her, sobbing. "Why won't you believe that I'm sorry?"
"I do believe it," said Luma. Her fingers found the hilt of his dagger.
"Then why are you doing this?" Ontor cried.
Luma plunged the dagger into his back. She felt his jolt of shock and pain and wrapped her free arm around him.
"Because," she said, "of all of them, you're the only one who loved me."
He tried to struggle free. She pulled the blade up, pinning him to her, holding him in place. Her tears now mirroring his, she twisted the blade.
"You loved me," she whispered. "And you killed me anyway."
About the Author
Robin D. Laws's previous Pathfinder Tales stories include the novel The Worldwound Gambit, the novellas "Plague of Light" and "The Treasure of Far Thallai," and the short story "The Ironroot Deception." His other fictio
n includes Pierced Heart, The Rough and the Smooth, and New Tales of the Yellow Sign. Robin designed such roleplaying games as Ashen Stars, The Esoterrorists, HeroQuest, and Feng Shui. You can find his blog, a cavalcade of hobby games, film, culture, narrative structure, and gun-toting avians, at robinlaws.com.
Glossary
All Pathfinder Tales novels are set in the rich and vibrant world of the Pathfinder campaign setting. Below are explanations of several key terms used in this book. For more information on the world of Golarion and the strange monsters, people, and deities that make it their home, see The Inner Sea World Guide, or dive into the game and begin playing your own adventures with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook or the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box, all available at paizo.com. In particular, fans of Magnimar may wish to check out the sourcebook Magnimar, City of Monuments and the upcoming Shattered Star Adventure Path, a whole campaign of Pathfinder RPG adventures that begins in the city of Magnimar.
Abadar: Master of the First Vault and the god of cities, wealth, merchants, and law.
Absalom: Largest city in the Inner Sea region.
Alabaster District: District housing Magnimar's wealthiest and most influential citizens.
Alcaydian Indros: Heroic founder of Magnimar.
Alchemists: Spellcasters whose magic takes the form of potions, explosives, and strange mutagens that modify their own physiology.
Arcane: Type of magic that does not come from a deity.
Arvensoar: Massive tower that defends Magnimar, manned by the city's military.
Asmodeus: Devil-god of tyranny, slavery, pride, and contracts; lord of Hell and current patron deity of Cheliax.
Battle of Charda: Monument commemorating a great battle against the neighboring city of Riddleport.
Bazaar of Sails: Mercantile district near Magnimar's docks.
Beacon's Point: District in Magnimar devoted to docks and shipping.
Bridgeward: Neighborhood in the Capital District; home to many artisans.
Capital District: District devoted to artisans and government.
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