by Dave Gross
The circle blazed silver.
A translucent wall of light rose up to surround me, the fire, and Dragos.
He lunged forward, shifting as he blurred across the circle. Before I could touch the handle of my knife, he knocked the legs out from under me. I hit the ground hard. He slid to a stop at the edge of the circle. Where his fur brushed the barrier, it wilted in a sizzle of holy power.
I feinted to one side but rolled the opposite direction, across the campfire. It wasn’t hot enough to give me another attack of the big and uglies, but the move tricked Dragos. He shot past me, snarling and trailing ribbons of saliva from his jaws. I caught a whiff of his rancid breath as he passed. Then I was on my feet, my big knife in hand.
He feigned a leap, but I anticipated it and retreated around the circle. I left a good couple of feet between me and the barrier. Having seen what it did to a werewolf, I had no desire to test its powers on hellspawn. Even if it didn’t hurt me, I wouldn’t want to be outside the circle, where all the pack could have a go, according to Azra. I think the werewolves knew that, even though I hadn’t translated that part of her message for them.
Dragos transformed again. One second he was a huge timber wolf. The next he was a man-wolf, six feet tall in a crouch, hands become razor-sharp claws. His arms had at least two feet of reach on my knife. I regretted never taking the boss up on his sword fighting lessons ...
The Pathfinder Tales Library
Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross
Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham
Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones
Prince of Wolves
Dave Gross
Seattle
Prince of Wolves © 2010 by Paizo Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
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Cover art by Dan Scott.
Cover design by Sarah Robinson.
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ISBN 978-1-60125-331-6
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)
Gross, Dave.
Pathfinder tales. Prince of wolves / Dave Gross.
p. ; cm.
Other title: Prince of wolves
Set in the world of the role-playing game, Pathfinder.
ISBN: 978-1-60125-287-6
1. Imaginary places--Fiction. 2. Magicians--Fiction. 3. Fantasy fiction. I. Title. II. Prince of wolves.
PS3607.R67 P75 2010
813/.54
First printing August 2010.
Printed in the United States of America.
For my friend Pierce Watters
Prologue
Radovan awakes in the dark. This is not a dream.
He lies on his belly, a garlicky mass filling his mouth. He gags as he pushes the nasty lump out with his tongue. He feels his arms pinned behind his back, thumbs bound tight by what feels like rough twine. He smells pine sap, and his right cheek is sticky where it presses against the floor. Deck?
Agony crackles to life all over his body, bangs on the back of his skull, thunders along his spine, pounds deep in both shoulders, and shrills in his knees and shins. A wave of nausea rolls through him, and he can’t distinguish the sickness from motion. How could he be back on a boat so soon? This is not a dream.
He slides to the right, his tender shoulder pressing against a wall. He arches his back, and his head touches another barrier a few inches away. He tries to raise his knees, but his buttocks hit the same low ceiling. Is he in a crawl space? He flops to the left, and the floor moves with him. A muffled voice outside the walls that surround him shouts something like, “The devil alive!” Radovan isn’t sure of the exact words. His Varisian is still shaky, but he realizes he is in a box.
A coffin.
“Alive!” he yells, but his tongue feels numb from the garlic that dissolved in his mouth for who-knows-how-long before he spat it out.
“Let me out!” he thinks he says.
The coffin shifts hard to one side and then wobbles before the men set him on the ground, still inverted. The voices rise in argument, and Radovan can make out only a few of the words: “dead alive,” “dead not-dead,” “devil,” and “curse” or something like it. He spends a second wondering why he is face down, another on why his thumbs are tied. Then he focuses his mind on what to do about it.
He raises his knees again, trying to ignore the sickening pain and push open the coffin lid. A coffin nail squeals, but it hardly budges. There isn’t enough room for leverage. He rocks side to side, hoping one of his elbow spurs can dig into the soft wood on either side. The band around his thumbs prevents him from striking with any force, but his weight lifts the coffin’s edges, thump, thump, thump.
“Alive here!” he shouts. “Not dead! Not dead!”
Footsteps retreat from the coffin, and the men outside lower their voices in conference. Radovan hopes they are fetching a crowbar, some hammers, an axe, whatever it takes to get him out of this coffin. He’s crawled through smaller apertures before, sometimes sewer drains, and once even through an exceptionally foul privy to gain access to a Chelish noble’s home vault, but he has never done it without the clammy fear that always accompanies him into such tight spots. It catches up to him now, settling in along his spine like a wet cat that has crawled out of a cold river.
He hears activity outside, but nothing near the coffin. Someone is stacking things nearby. Tools? Weapons? Radovan has an unpleasant thought. They are stacking wood.
His mind reaches for any useful Varisian phrases he can remember, but before he can grasp one, they evaporate and he resorts to the Varisian words he knows best. No one can mistake his meaning now. A harlot in Caliphas once told him that he curses like a true son of Ustalav.
The coffin rises again, unsteady in frightened hands. He imagines the men outside leaning away from the box, afraid to put their hearts too close to the devil inside. They rush toward where Radovan heard them stacking wood, and the coffin flies, giving Radovan half a second of weightless vertigo before it crashes onto what sounds like a pyre fit for a Linnorm king. The twigs are still snapping beneath his weight when he hears the whuffle of torches and the sound of men thrusting their brands into the wood.
Radovan thrashes and twists. The twine cuts into his thumbs and hot blood wells on his skin. He kicks straight down, but the sound of rising flames is louder than the impact of his bare foot.
The bastards took my boots, he thinks. For a mad second the thought of how much he paid the Egorian saddler for those fancy red kickers diverts the course of his anger. “Give me back my damned boots!” he screams. He doesn’t notice that he has reverted to Taldane, the common tongue.
He feels the heat of the fire beneath him. A little heat doesn’t bother him—he picks iron skillets off the stove without a mitt—but soon he feels his eyelashes wilting. The flames grow so bright he can see them through the fine seams of the coffin bottom. He knows what happens next, and for a second he considers whether it might have been better to let them bury him alive.
This is not a dream.
Chapter One
Princely Trappings
Forgive
me for transporting our correspondence from my customary letters to this journal. In the absence of reciprocal communication, however, I shall keep this record in hopes that I may deliver it personally into your hands. This medium might elicit more informality than you have come to expect, and I hope you shall receive it in the spirit of camaraderie. Yours have been among the most welcome of the reports I compile for the Society.
Naturally I grew concerned upon the return of my undelivered missives, all the more so upon receipt of the report from Doctor Trice, whose dearth of resources leaves him without a clue as to your current whereabouts. Of course I sent inquiries to my personal contacts in Caliphas, but upon discovering that the whispering lilies twinned to the bulbs you carry had all perished in my greenhouse, my concerns became fears. I pray it is a mishap only that has eliminated our last avenue of communication. I shall proceed in the hope and belief that you are awaiting my assistance.
I must admit that my anxiety is heightened by your tantalizing hints as to the object of your expedition. My researches in both the Egorian Lodge and my personal library have uncovered scant references to this Lacuna Codex. It seems to have played a part in the earliest conflicts between the last Kings of Ustalav and the agents of that dread lich known as the Whispering Tyrant. And yet if so, one would expect some mention of the Codex among the catalogues of spoils at Lastwall, but my correspondents there report no such reference.
The only additional information I gleaned before departing Greensteeples was a reference to a similarly named tome, roughly translated from the ancient Thassilonian. If these are two references to the same book, then the knowledge contained within is far older than you might anticipate. Worse, my information suggests it has its origin in the earliest known writings of the cult of Urgathoa, the Pallid Princess. My greatest fear is that you run afoul of a contemporary cell of that awful following, for the atrocities of their necromancers are exceeded only by the depravity of their disciples. It is difficult to know what you expect, of course, since it has been over eight months since your last report.
Such a long silence after such tantalizing hints about your expedition naturally piqued my concern. You can imagine my surprise, however, when the Decemvirate itself contacted me to inquire about your latest report, an inquiry that I was unfortunately unable to satisfy due to my lack of information. Admittedly, my initial reaction was to be cross that you had sent redundant reports that, however unintentionally, offered my superiors in the Society the impression that I have been less than supportive of your endeavors. Coupled with rumors of recent misfortunes in my home city of Egorian, such communications undermined the confidence in which the Decemvirate has held my performance these past sixty years.
It is not my intention to air my concerns outside of the personal rapport we have established in the time since your reports were assigned to my attention, and I assure you that my interest is primarily to assure myself of your safety and success.
Thus have I come to Caliphas, accompanied by only a valet and bodyguard. I shall employ additional servants locally and follow your trail, as I am certain you have marked it well and subtly. When I find you, I shall place this journal in your hands, and you will weigh it as proof of the great value of your work both to the Pathfinder Society and to me, your friend and colleague, Venture-Captain Varian Jeggare.
Despite lacking experience beyond the borders of Cheliax, my new valet has demonstrated a commendable aptitude for bureaucracy, so I left the tedious affairs of foreign passage largely in his hands. Unfortunately, certain key comforts of travel were lost during an incident about which I still harbor suspicions, and the remainder of the voyage to Caliphas was less than agreeable. I shall leave it at that, for now.
My hope is that time away from our native city will provide respite from the late unpleasantness, and not for myself alone. You may recall that my longtime bodyguard, Radovan, while orphaned, is principally of Ustalav heritage. One hopes that he will find some solace among his people, even if he was born and raised in Cheliax. I wish he could see my inclusion of him on this venture as a reward, as I intended. Let us hope that he does not cause me to regret retaining him in service.
It occurs to me now that the three of us—you, me, and Radovan—share the dubious blessing of mixed parentage. Except in his legacy of the red carriage, my elven father is unknown to me. Orphaned so young, Radovan remembers little of his parents, or so he has told me, and naturally he knows nothing of that infernal ancestor who forever cursed his line as hellspawn. I use the term “cursed” deliberately, for while many might apply it carelessly to you or me, the people of Cheliax, damned as they are for serving the Prince of Lies, reserve an acute disdain for those in whose veins runs the blood of Hell. For my part, I have never felt entirely welcome in human society, even as a child. Not since the death of my mother and the rise of the devil-worshiping House of Thrune, certainly. Perhaps you and I shall discuss the matter further. I doubt the subject would be of interest to Radovan, who often strives to pass for human.
Our ship arrived in Caliphas two days ago, and my first order of business was to interview Doctor Trice at that insane asylum he employs as a Pathfinder lodge. His demeanor suggested that he might be at risk of becoming one of his own residents one day, and I sense that the locals enjoy a certain black amusement in the fact that most of his patients are former Pathfinders. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved not to find you among those in his custodianship.
Trice could only confirm that you had consulted him upon your arrival; he could not tell me where you planned to search next. I shall not reprimand you for failing to share more information with him, for despite the code of our Society, not every member will aid you as I have. I do not know enough about Trice to say whether he can be relied upon, and so I must trust in your judgment in the matter.
After leaving Trice, I considered dispatching Radovan to cull what information he could from the markets and public houses while I reintroduced myself to the nobility of Ustalav. Sadly, Radovan has never exhibited the least interest in the Pathfinder Society, and has in fact come dangerously close to insolence in his jests about what he calls our “little club.” Perhaps I am still annoyed with him for the liberties he takes in fulfilling his duties. A bodyguard is not expected to protect one from oneself.
Letters had been dispatched by quick post before I invested the custodianship of Greensteeples to my cousin Leonzio, and I was fortunate enough to arrive just before a grand social occasion including representatives of most of the noble houses of Ustalav. Many were previously unknown to me, since during my past visit most of those human men and women who now rule were children. I had hoped that someone among them had heard report of your visit. Unfortunately, the current generation of Ustalav nobility was less welcoming than the former had been.
Perhaps I am unduly sensitive to the issue, but I could not help but suspect their questions about the rich holdings of Cheliax were veiled accusations directed toward my wholly inadequate gift to Prince Aduard. If not for Radovan’s mischief, instead of that ghastly samovar Nicola found in the Gold Quarter, I should have presented His Highness with six cases of the finest wine the family vineyards have yet produced. Certainly no fewer than five cases.
When the evening finally became eventful, I had escaped, however briefly, the relentless pursuit of the Ambassador from Westcrown. She had summoned me to the embassy upon my arrival in Caliphas, whereupon she subjected me to a gratuitous admonishment to avoid embarrassing the throne during my stay. She was a lovely, crass, uneducated thing. She did not even offer me a drink before patronizing me, who traveled abroad in the service of the throne before her grandfather was born.
Thankfully, I saw no sign of her in the portrait gallery on the south face of the Royal Palace, where I had escaped to enjoy a glass of a tolerable local vintage. Behind me, the sharp strains of the Prince’s musicians were muted as the servants closed the ballroom doors. I could still discern the melody of a common Varisian folk tune beneath th
e arrangement created for the occasion of the Prince’s sixty-fifth anniversary. Its name varies, but I have always thought of it as “Eyes at Dusk,” a song played in my native Cheliax from the long market to the gilt stage of Egorian’s Grand Opera, where I last heard it braided into the overture to The Water Nymph.
I relished the music and wine while gazing out over the Royal Square, whose central fountain was dedicated to the nation’s founder, Soividia Ustav. The retiring sun cast a halo around the onion-shaped spires of the Grand Cathedral of Pharasma, the most imposing structure in all of Caliphas. Its granite walls absorbed rather than reflected the light, and its narrow buttresses evoked the images of an ashen forest. At the foot of the edifice, a throng of black-robed worshipers lit candles and began the Procession of Unforgotten Souls. In the twilight, their candles blazed brighter than stars as they walked single file down ramps into the waters of the serpentine pool that wound its way beneath the pediment and into the foundations. For a time they seemed only to disappear, each candle winking out one after the other as their bearers entered deeper water. It was impossible to view this solemn parade and not think of the countless dead whose graves lay in the wake of my own life.
Before I could succumb to the melancholia that has ever been the principal fault of my character, the first of the worshipers emerged from the watery passage on the opposite side of the cathedral entrance. The waters had drenched the celebrants’ robes, revealing the colors of their festival clothes beneath the thin fabric, and one by one the candles miraculously winked back to flame. Thus in the weeks before the Harvest Feast do the faithful of Pharasma renew their prayers to the Lady of Graves: Let our souls be harvested a different year, not this one. Not this year. Not yet.
As if in answer to their prayers, a flock of whippoorwills rose from the cornices of the Cathedral and swept south, then north, and finally south again to resume their autumnal migration. Their song rained soft upon the square, audible even at a distance and through the leaded glass. How beautiful, I thought.
