Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes

by Dave Gross

  “How is it you can visit me?”

  “You always had so many questions. In death I have found no answers, but everywhere there are many little wonders.” She held out a hand. A butterfly alit upon her finger.

  “Then why do you visit me?” I suspected the answer: I was not destined for the place where her spirit resided.

  “In my last moments of life, I longed to speak with you one more time. Perhaps some emissary of the goddess has granted my wish.” She made the sign of Desna over her breast, but not the simple sketch that had become my adult custom. She linked her thumbs and spread her hands across her collarbones, fingers curled and with a gap in the middle to suggest two pairs of wings. When I was a child, she would flap those wings to cast a shadow upon the wall. When the butterfly landed on me, it brought tickles. When I had grown too old for such childish signs of affection, she would make the gesture from across a crowded room whenever she thought I needed reminding that I was not alone among my predatory peers.

  While my mother lived, I had never felt alone. After her death, it was all I ever felt for many years. The thought of her death reminded me of the unanswered questions at mine.

  “Why did you never tell me that our family descends from a runelord?”

  “Age did nothing to temper your curiosity,” she said. “Nor did death.” She looked at me, and I realized I once more had a body, or at least the illusion of one. Unadorned by Zutha’s rings, my hands appeared as they had weeks before I discovered the Kardosian Codex. Not as old as they had looked a few years earlier, but neither as youthful as they had been when my mother was the age she appeared.

  “Forgive me. In the weeks before I died, I had just begun to understand why you forbade me to practice necromancy. What I cannot understand is why you did not entrust me with the secret of our lineage.”

  “I meant only to protect you. In time I would have told you more. I always intended it. But then House Thrune usurped the throne, and I focused all my efforts on thwarting their machinations. And then they found me out. And then there was no more time.”

  The memory of that wicked day soured the pleasure of our reunion. In life, time had dulled the pain of her death, but it all came flooding back at the remembrance of her last words. “You made me swear again never to study necromancy,” I said. “And not to oppose the House of Thrune. You feared for my life and for the continuation of our family. That I can accept. Yet could you not have told me I was a sorcerer?”

  “A sorcerer?”

  “The difference between a wizard and a sorcerer—”

  “I know the difference.” She smiled to see my surprise at her interruption. “One need not be a practitioner of the arcane arts to read a book. I read many on magic when you first expressed a desire to study at the Acadamae. But why did the masters not detect your talent? They never admit sorcerers.”

  “I assumed you had bribed someone to ease my entry.”

  “Well, in fact I did. The masters might not have been inclined to admit a boy who fell ill every time he tried to cast a spell, regardless of his intellect. What use is wealth and power if you do not use it to make those you love happy?”

  “Why did you not simply tell me that we are descended of Runelord Zutha? You entrusted me with other family secrets. So did grandfather.”

  “Because of your insatiable desire to study everything, to know every reason, to master every talent you found within yourself. Can you honestly tell me you would not have studied necromancy if you knew your ancestor had ruled an empire with it?”

  “A fraction of an empire,” I said. “One-seventh of an empire.”

  “It is impertinent to correct your mother on a point of minutia.”

  My impulse was to argue that no aspect of the history of the runelords qualified as minutia, but her stern voice dispelled any thought of argument. “My apologies.”

  “You have not answered my question.”

  “I would have—” I meant to say I would have obeyed my promise, but before mother’s ghost I could not dissemble. “I would have been careful. You could have trusted me.”

  “I trusted your curiosity. Do you remember when I forbade you to read your grandfather’s diaries?”

  Whatever mechanism of the afterlife gave senses to our spirits, they included the warmth of a blush. While I was ashamed to have been caught in the disobedient act, I did not regret it. “They were quite educational.”

  She gave me a wry smile. “Those of us who knew the family secret wished to leave it buried. House Thrune destroyed other houses with far less scandalous intelligence. But you would have searched for whatever lay beneath the darkest root of our family tree. I feared that what you might uncover, others might use against us.”

  Twilight lay a hand upon the day’s shoulder. As we spoke, the sky—if it were a sky—grew dark. Stars smiled down at us.

  “Considering my eventual fate, I suppose you were right to be concerned. Zutha’s grimoire offered me great power. In the end, however briefly, I broke my vow and learned his dark magics. I intended to use them for noble purposes, but already their dark influence had begun corrupting me.”

  “If you are a sorcerer, how did you learn Zutha’s spells? Were the runelords sorcerers?”

  “No, they were indeed wizards. In some ways they were the wizards. Their specialties continue to define the schools of magic to this day.”

  “If they were wizards, why would their descendants become sorcerers?”

  “No one truly understands how a sorcerous bloodline is established,” I said. “Some sorcerers claim to be the descendants of dragons, angels, or other powerful creatures. It stands to reason that the runelords’ descendants might have inherited some shadow of their innate magic.”

  “But if they were not sorcerers, what innate power did they have?”

  As she had in life, my mother challenged me with the simplest questions—points so elementary that my colleagues never thought to pose them to me. “Well, they probably would not have had any in the beginning. It is conceivable that their wielding rune magic could imbue them—or their offspring, or their descendants several generations removed—with sorcerous abilities.”

  “If you say so,” she said. “Such theory is beyond me. You always excelled in intellectual pursuits. Your passion for magical theory is what persuaded me to smooth your way at the Acadamae.”

  “Did it never occur to you that the reason I struggled to cast spells was that I was never meant to be a wizard? If I had known I inherited a sorcerous bloodline, I might have avoided decades of frustration and humiliation.”

  “Does it not occur to you that even in the afterlife one must not take an accusatory tone with one’s mother?”

  “My apologies.”

  She cupped her elbows and hugged herself as if feeling a chill. A breeze passed through the meadow. Clouds occluded the stars, but their edges began to bleed at the first gaze of dawn.

  “It did occur to me. I am a Jeggare, after all, and while my interests do not include wizardry or sorcery, I bid you to remember who first instructed you in natural history, presented you with your first collection of the Chronicle of the Inner Sea Kingdoms, and sent you to the finest tutors in all of Cheliax.”

  “I remember, Mother. I beg your pardon.”

  “Also, I think I was the first to put a frog down your shirt. I hope I wasn’t the last.”

  Her reminiscence dispelled the chill. The clouds parted, and the morning sun warmed us. “Sadly,” I said, “you were not.”

  “I always thought you would benefit from a few more frogs down your shirt.” She moved close and reached for my hands. I offered them but could not feel her touch as I felt the ground beneath us or the breeze in my hair. “I want to know about your life, Varian. There’s no telling how long I can visit you here, before…”

  “Before whatever judgment befalls me.”

  “Did you keep the Tender of Dreams in your heart, even as the queen demanded obedience to Asmodeus?”


  “I did.”

  “Did you live a good life?” she said. “Did you strive to be a good man?”

  “Sometimes.” I wished I could have given her a more certain reply.

  Her eyes glistened. “Do you forgive me for your not becoming a wizard?”

  “But I did become a wizard,” I said. “Granted, it took me decades to learn how to circumvent my, ah, impediment, but I discovered a forgotten form of scroll-making that allowed me to cast spells as a wizard.”

  “And yet you now think you are a sorcerer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Well, a sorcerer.” I took her point. A blacksmith lays every problem on the anvil.

  “Hm. What do you think you are?”

  “I suppose I have been both a wizard and a sorcerer.”

  “And are others both wizards and sorcerers?”

  “It is rare, but yes. I have read of such instances.”

  “Then how can you blame me for not telling you about our presumably sorcerous bloodline?”

  “I—”

  “All I wished was to prevent you from following our ancestor’s path in necromancy. I never cared whether you were a wizard or a sorcerer, or both for that matter. I always encouraged you to pursue your interests.”

  “You did not trust me enough to tell the reason, even after I formally renounced the school of necromancy.”

  “Well, I confess that I enlisted help in guiding you away from that dark path.”

  “From the Acadamae masters?”

  “No, from your servant, the bottle-washer who studied necromancy. Benno something.”

  “You told Benigno Ygresta that the Jeggare family descends from Runelord Zutha?”

  “Of course not. I would never divulge such an odious secret, certainly not to a common fellow like him. Did you know his family picked grapes for House Drovenge? But when I heard you had struck up a camaraderie, I saw an opportunity to help you keep your promise.”

  “But Ygresta was an ardent proponent of necromancy.”

  “A little too ardent, perhaps?” She smiled. “Despite the limitations of his birth, he had the most natural guile I had ever encountered. It helped that he was sincere in his belief that necromancy is not inherently evil so that you would see him in a sympathetic light. It helped even more that he was never quite as clever as you. You would never have let an intellectual inferior win you over, even one with honest arguments. In these ways, he was the perfect agent of my will. It helped even more that this Ygresta could barely afford his first year’s tuition.”

  “You paid him to manipulate me.”

  “I offered him the means to complete his education in order to help you keep your promise.”

  While my mother’s interference rankled me even after all these years, my annoyance seemed trifling considering the circumstances of our conversation. Another question troubled me. “If you did not tell him, then how did Ygresta learn of my connection to Runelord Zutha?”

  “First of all, I am dead, not omniscient,” she said. “Second, what makes you think he did learn of our ancestry?”

  “Well…” Her simple question forced me to reevaluate my theory. I had assumed Ygresta selected me as his cat’s-paw because of my blood affinity for the Gluttonous Tome. What if instead he had chosen me for some other reason? Surely there were other capable Pathfinders—Eando Kline, for instance, who had already found the Bone Grimoire.

  There had to be another reason. It had to have something to do with necromantic spells … which Ygresta believed I could not cast.

  I had my answer.

  As far as Benigno Ygresta knew, I graduated the Acadamae a failed wizard. For his purposes, I was the one Pathfinder capable of finding and understanding the missing volumes but incapable of casting its spells. Ignorant of my latent sorcerous ability or my discovery of riffle scrolls, he was mistaken on the latter point.

  Armed with that knowledge, I could …

  Well, I could do nothing. I was dead.

  “Have I told you what you needed to know?”

  “Yes, Mother. Thank you.”

  “Now, please, tell me about your life.”

  Not knowing where to begin, I thought of the fact that my human mother had lived less than half as long as I had. Part of the reason was my half-elven heritage. “I found my father.”

  As the meadow changed twenty times from day to night and then to dawn, I told her the story. In the beginning she wept for lost love. By the end, she was laughing and telling me stories of their time in the elven court.

  She asked about my own loves, both those I concealed before her death and those that came after. She asked after our family, stopping me when the names of those born after her death became too numerous.

  The days and nights flew across the meadow.

  She asked which of my friends yet lived, and how the others had died. I told her I had died at the hand of a friend.

  “The hellspawn?”

  “You were the one who encouraged me always to hire halflings, never to buy them as slaves.”

  “I know, dear, but a hellspawn? And he stabbed you in the back.”

  “In the front, actually.” I touched the place where my wound had been. “Right through the heart.”

  “How can you joke about such a thing?”

  Perhaps I had left recriminations behind with my body. “In the tranquility of death, it is easier to see how I left him no choice. He always did prefer the dog to me.”

  “Is that another joke?”

  I smiled. Jokes had been part of the private language Radovan and I developed over the years, even when—or perhaps especially when—I let him believe his vulgarity annoyed more than it amused. “Yes, Mother.”

  “Have you kept the other promises you made to me?”

  “I have,” I said. “In war and diplomacy and espionage, I have always served the ruling house. And I have hated myself for it with every passing year.”

  “Yet our house endures,” she said. “You cannot anger the dragon and hope to live.”

  “Actually, I have found dragons to be considerably easier to treat with, compared with Queen Abrogail.”

  “Does Abrogail still rule?”

  “I speak of the second of that name, great-granddaughter to the one you knew. Four others reigned between them, but she is by far the most dangerous. She re-bound the empire to Asmodeus.”

  “And you serve her.”

  “So that the Jeggare family may thrive, and so that I keep my promise to you, I do. And yet not long ago I held weapons of such power that I dared to imagine overthrowing House Thrune and casting the infernal legions back to the pit.”

  “And was it your promise to me that prevented you?”

  “No,” I said. “It was death.” I mused on the irony of my situation. “The promises you demanded, they imprisoned me all my life. If I had studied necromancy, I might have been prepared to wield the weapons of our ancestor and avenge your death.”

  “Varian, I release you from your promises.”

  “To what end? That Pharasma might not judge me an oath-breaker among my other sins?”

  “Are you blaming me for that?”

  Perhaps I had blamed her, but no longer. “I might blame myself, but what is the point? My life is gone, and with it all the promises I made. Now I have only to face judgment for what I have done and what I have failed to do.”

  “Forgive,” she said.

  “You need no forgiveness.”

  “But you need to grant it.” A swallowtail alit on her hair. Another fluttered onto her shoulder. I heard a distant rumble. The cycle of day and night came faster.

  “Come back,” said a distant voice. I no longer recognized it.

  “No,” I said. “I am dead.”

  “Forgive,” said my mother. More swallowtails covered her. They flew away, leaving nothing but the empty meadow behind. The meadow dissolved, and I closed my eyes.

  16

  The Sh
adows of Xin-Gastash

  Radovan

  I didn’t realize how hard Arni was biting me at first. Eando dragged me out from under while Kazyah and Janneke pulled Arni away by his hind legs. He snapped at them, and they let him go. He stopped barking and set up a mournful howl.

  “Arni.” My voice got all clotted up.

  He ran out of the gallery. His howl carried through the passages of Svannostel’s lair. Amaranthine flew after him.

  “Wait!” called Lady Illyria. She had just dipped her finger into a jar of ointment to heal the drake. With her wrist, she wiped away a tear on her cheek.

  Somebody touched my arm and almost got a spur before I checked myself. Zora backed away. She looked down at her bloody hand. I hadn’t seen her get hurt in the fight, but I realized it wasn’t her blood. I looked down at my sleeves, which Arni had shredded. He’d broken the skin in a few places, but not that bad. It wasn’t my blood either. Then it hit me.

  It was the boss’s.

  Kazyah knelt to pick up his body. Even with the weight he’d put on, he looked no heavier than a child in her arms. The rest of us followed as she carried him to the library and lay him down on a stone table. Seeing him like that reminded me of a mortuary slab, or maybe Ygresta’s golem lab.

  The tail of the big knife stuck out of his chest. Kazyah took the grip. I had to look away, but I couldn’t stop hearing the sound it made coming out. I heard her set it on the table.

  Eando put a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then maybe you should shut the hell up.”

  He took his hand off.

  Janneke caught my eye from across the table. I stared back at her until she turned away.

  “Bring me some water,” Kazyah said.

  Janneke ran toward the river passage.

  Kazyah opened one of the bone cases hanging from her belt. She pulled out three scrolls with writing that glittered with diamond dust. She unfurled one and put away the others.

  “Help me,” she said to me. We pulled off the boss’s jacket and shirt.

  The wound was a dark red mess just left of his breastbone. I wanted to think it’d been quick. I just couldn’t remember the moment I decided to do it. I told myself if I’d let him kill Arni, he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself—but he wasn’t really the boss at that point. I don’t know who he was—a count of Cheliax, the Runelord Zutha, or something in between.