Light of a Distant Star

by Unknown

  Kostin chuckled. “Aevy did a great job getting these pitch yard boys to provoke the Clippers-the promise of gold and his insufferably overbearing nature really worked wonders.” Outside a wave of painfully vivid multicolored

  light swept over a part of Aeventius’s crew, blinding or stunning half of them. That would be Shess’s handiwork. Kostin and I both instinctively turned away from the flash, our faces very close now.

  “Of course… ” Kostin beamed like the kid I had known, the kid he still was in many ways. “Aevy and I were setting them up all along to be hammered by the Clippers as part of Shess’s full initiation.”

  Looking back at the chaos outside, I watched Shess roll under the legs of an adze-wielding assailant and spring up behind him, driving her short blade through the small of his back. He dropped in agony, revealing the delighted face of the gnome, her tricorne hat somehow still affixed to her head. The Char Street Clippers were outclassing Aeventius’s gang, most of whom I now noticed were armed with little more than tools and other makeshift weapons. A great many had already scattered for cover among the barrels and sheds of the caulking yard.

  The wizard stood archly among the mayhem, occasionally staggering an attacker with a flick of his finger. Then, with a gesture as elegant as a composer conducting a Chelish symphony, he cast a different sort of spell.

  Aeventius disappeared.

  In the very next instant he reappeared a few paces away, took a step, and winked out of sight once more.

  “A new one,” Kostin said. ” He seems to really like it.”

  The wizard was moving toward the bunkhouse, blinking in and out of the startled crowd. Once he came within inches of Shess, who feigned a thrust in his direction with convincing sincerity. Aeventius was running now, his progress difficult to follow.

  In fact he was running directly toward us where we stood watching him through the porthole, but there was no door on this side of the building.

  ” Uh, we need to move back now.”

  Fascinated by what I was seeing, I didn’t move.

  ” Tal…”

  Aeventius continued to appear and disappear in a manner almost hypnotic. One falchion-wielding thug almost hit him with a wild swing, and Aeventius promptly

  stepped into the man’s guard and dropped him with a precise uppercut. Few suspected a wizard of packing that much punch, but I knew he had once made a study of the art of boxing-part of a street hustle Kostin and he had perfected years ago. Aeventius blinked out of existence again before the man even hit the ground.

  And appeared right outside our window an instant later, running full speed toward the wall.

  “Tal!” Kostin took hold of my arm and tugged.

  Where there had been two of us, there were now three-the wizard hit us like a runaway carriage as he passed through the plank wall. There was a loud smack,

  as if someone had actually been thrown against the wall rather than run through it, and a yelp of pain. Kostin’s tug had got me out of the worst of it, but he had pulled me off balance as Aeventius plowed into us. I whirled, feeling Mordimor f ly free of my shoulder, and toppled into a bunk on the other side of the narrow room.

  Kostin, clinging to me, fell atop me in a sprawl, face to face.

  In the second of stillness that followed, I heard Aeventius’s muffled moan. I twisted my head to see the wizard lying on his back, no longer flashing in and out of reality. Mordimor, by some twist of badger luck, was wrapped belly-down around the nobleman’s head.

  “Arrgh!” Aeventius said, flailing himself into a sitting position as Mordimor hopped off him, bristling. Both were spitting, though for different reasons. Aeventius cast a baleful eye at the embarrassing tangle Kostin and I had made on the straw mattress.

  ” Glad to see you’re keeping yourself entertained, Kostin and what the hell is she doing here? ” Aeventius rose to his feet, rubbing his back as if it pained him. Walking through walls was apparently not without its consequences.

  “It worked just as we planned, Aevy.” Kostin settled into a comfortable spread atop me. “Real good job out-“

  I pushed him off of me and out of the bed, and he tumbled to the f loor with a grunt.

  “Save it!” I said, pointing to the window as I swung out of the bunk. ” What about Shess’s thugs? “

  But Aeventius was already up and scanning the yard through the window. ” She’s leading them away, toward the docks, though a few have stayed behind to take some trophies. They’ll round up the stragglers and kill them. No loss-they were a truly tedious bunch of dullards.”

  “Trophies? ” I asked, a queasy sensation in the pit of my stomach.

  “Ears.” Aeventius turned to smile at me. “Why did you think they were called the ‘Clippers?”’

  “Then it seems the pocket is half picked, my friends.” Kostin, regaining his feet, moved between Aeventius and me and threw an arm over our shoulders, squeezing us into an embrace. ” Let’s go get that scepter. You in, Tal? “

  I had been i n this position before, and had thought then that it wasn’t what I had wanted. I had just seen men die. Die because these two desired to steal something-a scepter?-for a Sczarni cutthroat and fence. I looked at Aeventius, scowling as he pushed Kostin’s arm away; the wizard was a callous and self-obsessed elitist. Kostin, next to me, was smiling, eyes alight with the prospect of pulling a job; my friend the thief, the cad, the con man. They were asking me to do what I swore to myself! would never do again, and asking as if they were bound for something no more odious than a picnic in the hills.

  I thought of the dying dwarf Gundsric, my real reason for being in Riddleport, no doubt furious I had missed our daily appointment. I thought too of Master Shaine, shaking his head in disappointment as I weighed the needs of the truth and the needs of the tale.

  I looked at Mordimor, head cocked in consideration, one clawed forepaw raised as if he were uncertain which way to run.

  “I’m in,” I said, almost without meaning to. Kostin hugged me in triumph as Aeventius sneered.

  They were both talking now, fast-about their plans, about the job-but I wasn’t listening. All I could do was wonder if! had really chosen this story for myself, or if it had in fact chosen me.

  Chapter 2

  New Professions

  The day after I fell back in with my Magnimarian friends, I found myself walking the same streets where I had first spied Shess. The same streets, the same destination, but now everything was different. Was I Taldara Meirlanel the Pathfinder, explorer, and chronicler? Or Tal the thief?

  Scratching Mordimor behind the ear as we walked through lanes that now seemed somehow les s hostile and foreign, I tried to dismis s the whole notion. My father would have said it was my human side-my “blind side” he called it, with no small measure of contempt-that cared so much for labels and absolutes. ” Scholar or thief? ” he would have said, dismissing the whole thing with a wave of his hand. “Why not both? And much more besides.”

  Why not both, indeed.

  I had sent word to my employer, the alchemist Gundsric, yesterday by courier as soon as I was able. His reply, a terse rescheduling, awaited me when I returned to my lodgings at the Sated Shark late that night. For the past six weeks, I had as sisted him in cataloging his massive collection of artifacts, and engaged in a great deal of translation and annotation of the rare scrolls and tomes he had accumulated. It was stimulating and rewarding work, and the dwarf’s library was perhap s the finest in the city outside of the archives of the Cyphermages . It also paid very well, for the wealthy dwarf had once held a high position at Riddleport’s famed Gas Works and, it was rumored, had further enriched himself through private expeditions into the poisonous underground world beneath the forges.

  Thus, my guilt at entering the dying dwarf’s service under false pretenses was acute. It had not been chance that had led me to Gundsric’s door, but rather a directive from Sheila Heidmarch, Venture-Captain of the Pathfinder Lodge of Magnimar and my immediate superior i
n the Society. The orders-which came in the form of a suggestion-were to verify the rumors that Gundsric had come into posses sion of the last journal of Jan Lortis, the Pathfinder who had famously discovered the trans-dimensional tomb of the Gepesh twins in Ustalav, and who had disappeared with no word while exploring the wilds of eastern Varisia two decades ago.

  Verify the rumors , or reclaim the j ournal if possible. Direct offers to buy the j ournals had failed, and subsequent attempts to arrange for a copy to be made were turned away by an irritable Gundsric, who denied any knowledge ofthe text. To describe the dwarf as possessive would be a gross understatement, and it was thought that any further queries about the journals would only alienate him further. Therefore, Gundsric did not know that I had any affiliation with the Society, and neither had I mentioned the j ournal. Instead, I worked in his home, staying alert to any signs of my true goal, or any mention of Lortis or his expedition.

  Scholar, thief… and spy?

  Gundsric’s house straddled the border between the Wharf District and the tangle of tenements, grog shops, and brothels disdainfully referred to by the locals as Rotgut. It was likely the most lawless district in Riddleport, and certainly the most rundown. A curious place for a dwarf who had retired rich from the Gas Works to make his home. Perhaps the rumors were true that Gundsric was as pleased to sell his potions to any street scum who met his price as he was to supply the city’s wealthier and more respected individuals. Or maybe it was that, suffering from fatal black lung contracted in the carbauxine mines below the city, coughing his life away bit by bit, Gundsric no longer feared the knives and clubs ofthe urban predators all around him.

  To see his home, however, was to get a different impression of Gundsric’s desire for security.

  Approaching it from the west through a narrow lane between leaning rows of strake-sided buildings , it seemed a t first a lichen-slick wall at the end of the street. As I drew closer, the wall revealed itself as a stone foundation making up half the height of a fortress like three-story dwelling. It was as architecturally alien to the city as a Shoanti felt tent would seem pitched inside the Black Dome of Sothis. The house’s few windows heavily shuttered with iron-shod marine oak-were situated asymmetrically around the upper story. Decades of weather had rusted the shutters, leaving streaks along the sides oft he house like the dried blood of some long neglected wounds. Overall the place was as squat, ugly, and guarded as the dwarf himself.

  I did not have long to wait after rapping with the heavy bronze knocker-a ring through the nose of a verdigris bull’s head-before I was greeted with the metallic clacking of locks and bolts from within. As always, Mordimor mumbled his displeasure at this. Gundsric’s front door was of steel-hard black wood, which I suspect had been alchemically treated. The only other access to his dwelling was a portcullis-fronted double door leading from his basement to a damp alley that ran some ten feet below street level around the back ofhis house.

  With the snicking of the last lock, the door swung inward. Gundsric stood filling the doorway like some stunted old tree. What strength had once been his was long dissipated by his illness, and his eyes bulged from a gaunt face that seemed to have had all the flesh sucked from it below his dry yellow skin. He wore a heavy leather apron over threadbare cloth, and was stained and soiled from head to foot. On a silver chain around his neck hung the battered pewter flask I had never seen him without. His right shoulder was higher than his left, resulting in a hump that lent him a leaning, unbalanced aspect. Most striking was his beardles s face, withered like an old fruit. Many of the dwarven carbauxine miners of the Gas Works trimmed or even shaved their beards to better accommodate the cumbersome breathing apparatuses they employed. Whether Gundsric had done so and kept the fashion, or whether his beard had fallen out as a side effect of black lung, I couldn’t guess. His beardlessness

  marked him as a dwarf apart, sick and alone.

  “Elven reliability,” he said, glowering at me beneath bushy eyebrows like a tangle of iron wire. “This is how you repay me for my generosity.”

  It was a conversation I had had with him many times before, and one it is needless to relate here. It was something of a formality, each of us reminding the other of our usefulness, of our lack of other options. Gundsric needed me because no scholar in the city would work with him due to his abrasivenes s and bad reputation. I, as a penniless academic denied access to the Cypher Lodge (or

  so my story went), had no other employment options that did not involve learning a new profession-most especially the world’s oldest, as Gundsric never failed to imply.

  In the end he assented to my entry, his black eyes scanning the street suspiciously as if seeing an assassin in every shadow. I moved into the dim interior, flinching slightly at the always-jarring-and always - different commingling of odors within. Today the eggy stink of sulfur had joined hands with the harsh chemical reek of ammonia to produce a bouquet of truly unwelcoming proportions. Beneath it all, hardly discernible, was the ever-present whiff of the noxious carbauxine the dwarf used to light and heat his home.

  “Don’t just stand there sniffing. Get to work. And don’t let that weasel of yours wander around again-this can be a dangerous place.” Gundsric finished his reproach with an explosive cough, lungs rattling like wet parchment. Before he stumped off to his basement workshop-one of many rooms I had never seen in his house-he fixed Mordimor and me with a wicked grin, his teeth flecked with fresh blood.

  I went upstairs through a dark, narrow stairway to the workroom, a small, wood-paneled chamber containing a single desk and weakly burning gas lamp. I busied myself with the familiar routine oftranslation while Mordimor slept curled up in my lap. The room was as spare as a cloister, and other than the corridor and stair I had just moved through and the foyer and rude privy at the

  entrance to the house, it was the only part of Gundsric’s home I was allowed acces s to without his supervision. What lay beyond the barred doors I passed almost every day was largely unknown to me.

  When the dwarf had new work for me, he would set out the items or texts in this workroom, along with terse instructions and a quantity of elixirs that aided in translation. My knowledge of languages is not inconsiderable, but Gundsric’s collection included many texts in obscure and antique dialects that were unreadable even to those fluent in the modern forms of those languages. Since my own minor magical skill is not equal to the task of more than a few minutes of such translation work, and Gundsric’s potions were far more potent than any spell I could ever employ, I had come to rely on the alchemist’s elixirs almost exclusively. Even, I am sad to say, to the point of shunning my own scholarship. Each draught did more than merely convey the meaning and nuance of unfamiliar scripts, but seemed to invigorate and even elevate all my efforts , extending m y awarenes s beyond what I had ever been capable of in the past.

  This had been, in many respects, the happiest period of my life, however brief it was , and however false so much that underlay it would one day turn out to be. In that tiny, dim room, I had worked as if possessed, seeing with better, brighter eyes into the rich lore of the untrammeled past. It was a kind of meditation, a trance, and often the hours would slip by without my noticing

  their pas sage.

  But that day was different. I was distracted, the twenty-sixth-century folio in the Taldan vulgate I was annotating lying neglected before me while my thoughts drifted to Kostin. He and Aeventius had not been idle in the past months, and both had regaled me with stories last night in the common room of the Gold Goblin. The old cons they had pulled together as teenagers had been

  dusted off anew as they lied and cheated their way around Riddleport’s seedier shoreside, all the while setting things up for their big score. Even the acerbic wizard had, after a few glasses of Chelish red, laughed and joked about their progress.

  What would they have done in my position? Here I was, virtually unproven to the Society, entrusted with a task by my venture-captain, and yet what progress had
I made? I caught myself toying with the faintly glowing elixirs then, fingers running over the cool glass vials, tracing the star-shaped symbols engraved on the corks. There were three left in the rack, which meant that I had consumed two already in the space of only a few hours. Naturally the effect should diminish somewhat, using them everyday as I had, but my rate of consumption had begun to worry me. I snatched my hand back, resisting the urge to have another potion. Mordimor stirred on my lap, fixing me with a quizzical look.

  I surveyed the nearly featureless room. The dim glow of a single gas lantern was adequate to my needs; in fact, my already keen vision seemed sharper than ever before. It was a side effect of the potions, of course. I placed my quill in its holder and pushed the folio aside, my thoughts trending in new directions . What would Kostin do in my position?

  Thoughts racing almost too fast to follow, I stood up, hardly noticing Mordimor’s grumbling protest as he plopped off of my lap. I was seeing Gundsric’s house now, seeing all of it in my mind’s eye, in much the same way my imagination had danced along the edges of the Cyphergate, or as it did when confronted with the various minor artifacts of the dwarf’s collection. The floor plan was unconventional, almost bizarre, but how much of what I was now imagining was truly gues swork? I knew a wide stairwell ran from the main floor up two flights; I had seen this when Gundsric led me down a normally locked corridor to a room containing his Keleshite ceramics . That stairway ran parallel to the one I climbed everyday-staring straight ahead I would be looking

  at those stairs right now, could I but see through the paneled wall. But with the stairs in such a position a dead spot was created, a wasted triangle of space, between the stairwell and the exterior wall.