by Dave Gross
As I took a portion of my stolen provender from the satchel, I spotted movement half a mile to the east. There was an animal running in my direction. Incredibly, it appeared to be the same hound that had stood vigil beneath the library window as I studied at Willowmourn. My eyes sought the fields behind him for any sign of additional pursuit, but he appeared to be as solitary as I.
It was incredible that an ordinary dog could have tracked me so far across the county of Amaans. My phantom steed left no prints, and upon its back I should have left virtually no scent trail. The speed at which I’d ridden the night before was sufficient to outdistance any mundane pursuers, and even with its huge stride, the hound could never match the pace of my steed. It would have had to run all the time my steed galloped, continuing as I slept and inscribed spells. All questions of finding me aside, the animal’s fortitude must have been supernal for it to have come so far.
The lack of other pursuers was puzzling. Surely if this animal had come so far, its elders and masters could do the same. I could not imagine what reason Casomir would have for releasing the hounds but not following, unless something had distracted him from his pursuit. Perhaps the Bishop of Kavapesta had reacted swiftly to the note Bogdan carried, forcing Casomir to flight. That possibility had some merit.
The hound barked at the sight of me. His tongue lolled as he marched forward, obviously exhausted. Whatever motivated his pursuit, he continued by sheer force of spirit. If he meant me harm, I did not doubt he posed a threat. More likely, however, he was sent to find me and alert others to my location, even if I could not yet see them. In either case, the wisest course was to kill him and continue my flight with greater vigilance.
The hound increased his pace as he came within scent distance. I drew Galdana’s sword, which produced neither sound nor light, and fetched a riffle scroll into my other hand. The spell would incapacitate the dog, but afterward I would still face the need to execute him.
Raising the sword as the dog came close enough to attack, I saw him lick his chops. And yet he did not attack. He came within three paces and sat, panting at me with an expression of weary expectation, heedless of the weapon I had poised to strike at him. I lowered the sword, and the dog scooted closer, still sitting.
It was his begging posture. The hound had come all this way merely to be fed.
There are times when the natural impulses of man and beast amaze me more than any magic spell. It seemed preposterous that a dog should follow me, hardly more than a stranger, all of a night and half a day to beg for food. It had to be a trick of Casomir’s, the dog under some geas to find me and alert other followers to my presence. Killing it was the only reasonable choice. It was the intelligent choice. The responsible one.
It was, alas, not the choice I made.
Tucking the riffle scroll into my belt, I fetched the dried meat from my satchel. The dog inched forward, and I showed him my palm and said, “Sit.” The hound obeyed, licking the spittle from his jowls and bobbing his big rectangular head.
I gave him the meat a morsel at a time, none larger than the pad of my thumb. Each time he rose or crowded me, I corrected him with a sign or a word, and he amended his behavior. It reminded me in some ways of the first days of a new servant’s employment, when my hours are filled with the constant intrusion of errors and misapprehension. Unlike most of the drivers, valets, cooks, and gardeners I had instructed over the decades, the hound was a quick study, obeying not only the simple commands to sit, come, and lie down, but also to stay, turn, and heel.
It occurred to me then that I might have known the hound longer than I remembered. Just as I had previously learned and forgotten the riddle of the riffle scrolls, perhaps I had also befriended and trained this animal before my memory was stolen. Unfortunately, I became so engrossed in my conjecture and our current training scenario that I realized too late that I had fed the voracious creature more than a day’s ration of the meat. I replaced the remainder in the satchel, wary of a rebellious growl. Instead, the hound lay down, head upon his paws, and slept at my feet.
I prepared my belongings to resume the journey, hoping that the sated beast would wake to find no one near and return home. Yet imagining his reaction to finding himself abandoned caused me to waver in my resolve. Cursing the unwelcome sympathy, I prayed I would not regret it later. I sat beside the hound, placed my hand upon his shoulder, and waited for him to awake.
Chapter Fourteen
The Old Village
Tudor climbed like a mountain goat. His huge stride took him easily over rocks I had to climb. I tried not to think about his baba’s boast that he knew the mountains better than anyone else because he had so often gotten lost in them, coming home half-starved days or weeks after the last time anyone had noticed him tending the flocks. Azra followed close behind me. In the beginning she had tried to persuade me not to go to the old village. The discussion turned into another quarrel until I said I’d go without her and she stomped away. Now I was glad she had come, because I was starting to worry about what we might find.
It was her fault I even wanted to see the place. The night before she had kept berating me throughout supper, throwing signs so fast she looked like a street fighter trying to intimidate an opponent. Not for the first time, I suspected she had a larger vocabulary of signs or had created many of her own. Unfortunately, she had also taught her full vocabulary to the local women, who felt the need to translate after I decided to ignore Azra.
At one point, everyone around the table stopped eating and stared at me. A few tittered or clutched their hands over their mouths.
“We made a bed for you upstairs,” said a motherly woman whose only visible deformity was one floppy ear. “But you would prefer to sleep in the barn?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“Azra says it is your custom to sleep with animals.”
“It is a mistake,” I said to the woman, whose name I thought I remembered as Gabi. “I confuse Azra with her donkey.”
Azra shot back a gesture that needed no translation. A few of the villagers laughed, but more looked on perplexed. You’d think they’d never seen a quarrel before.
Gabi tugged on my sleeve. “Who taught you finger-talk?”
I almost said, “my boss,” but I was on my own now, so I said, “A Pathfinder.” Despite the regret I felt thinking about him, I had to smile. In Varisian, the term “Pathfinder” also meant “trouble-maker” or “grave-robber.” Many folks back in Egorian saw the boss that way.
“A Pathfinder visited us last spring,” said Gabi.
That got my attention. If there was any chance this was the boss’s missing Pathfinder, then I owed it to him to figure out what had become of her. “Where did the Pathfinder go?”
She pointed out the window, into the black void where the Virlych Mountains blotted out the stars. “The old village,” she said, making the sign of the evil eye.
I asked more about the Pathfinder, but mention of the old village had killed the atmosphere. All the locals would tell me before retiring to their own homes was that a strong woman had appeared in the spring, asking the way to the old village. When I asked what she was looking for, the only answer was shrugs and more signs of the evil eye. If I wanted the answer, I’d have to look for myself.
In the morning, I sought out Tudor and asked him about the old village. Understanding him through his speech impediment was still a struggle, but I learned another couple of dozen words in Varisian by trial and error as he told me what he could.
Long ago, the villagers here had lived farther up the mountain. They had once been rich, he said, mining iron from the base of the nearest mountains. Their lord became a hero in the earliest days of the struggle against the Whispering Tyrant, and when he fell, as heroes do, the village was destroyed. That had to have been centuries ago, maybe longer, but history is the boss’s hobby, not mine. When I asked Tudor how long it had been, he stretched his arms as wide as he could.
Both of Tudor’s arms w
ere now straight as arrows, after Azra performed her healing dance under last night’s pregnant moon. The whole village had turned out to watch, and I welcomed the chance to see the ritual from a different perspective. Turns out it wasn’t just the delirium of my injuries that made Azra look beautiful as she healed me. Something changed in her when she drew down the power of her goddesses. Her features didn’t transform, exactly. She didn’t get taller, her hair didn’t suddenly become thick and smooth. Her nose was still a stubby little button. But there was something about the way the light moved on her, as if drawing your eye to tiny, common details of any woman that you suddenly realized couldn’t get any better than they already were. It was like the moonlight was coming from inside of her.
Yeah, I know. I should sell that line to a minstrel. Maybe I can get a copper.
Whatever her reason, once she got wind of our side trip, Azra demanded to come with us. Tudor loved the idea, so there was no persuading him to slip away with me while Azra doled out balm for warts and tea for menstrual cramps. I thought of a joke about selling love potions in the world’s ugliest village, but my sense of self-preservation kicked in before I could utter it. Azra finished her ministrations before noon, and the three of us set off to climb the eastern slope of the Virlych arm of the Hungry Mountains.
The hike took longer than I’d expected. Tudor said it would be only a couple of hours, and maybe it would have been had he traveled alone. There was nothing like a proper foot path, only occasional goat trails that crisscrossed the rough slope. By the time I was ready to abandon my curiosity, we’d committed so much effort to the trek that I kept it to myself until the sun was within a hand’s span of the western peaks. I would have turned back then, but Tudor whooped and ran toward a grassy crest.
Over the edge was a plateau that spread a mile north and south, and at least half a mile west toward the base of the next rise. There it ended in a box canyon with walls of red rock. At our feet, smothered in wild grass and wilting flowers, the shattered fragments of a road ran south to north. To the south, the husk of a covered bridge spanned a trickling mountain stream, while on the other side a barren red ridge provided shelter from the north wind. I counted three mine entrances along the base of the cliff, each with a few remaining boards hanging from their open mouths. The village founders had built it within good natural defenses, but none of them had saved it from destruction.
Where the village had stood was now a stony garden of overgrown foundations and the bases of tumbled walls. In the village center slumped a tiered fountain smothered in multicolored lichen and rippling shelves of bruise-colored fungus that seemed to throb in the afternoon light. When Tudor saw me staring, he clapped and honked with laughter. “Scared, huh?”
“How long until dark?” I asked.
He frowned at the sky and held his hands about a foot apart.
Whether that was a couple of hours or a couple of minutes, I decided we had better make it a brief visit. The sky was still bright, but the shadow of the mountain was moving toward us. “What was it this Pathfinder was looking for?”
Tudor beckoned us follow and galumphed off toward the west. Azra tugged at my sleeve and glanced behind us. There, standing at the edge of the road, stood a lone wolf. It looked like one of the Sczarni pack, and judging from its size, I guessed it was Milosh. I greeted him with a smile and a quick shot of the tines.
“They’re keeping an eye on us,” I said.
Azra signed her objection.
“I don’t trust them either,” I said. “But maybe they’re just looking out for their prince.”
She furrowed her brow at the sound of what I’d hoped was my self-deprecating sarcasm, but she said nothing else. When I looked back at the road, there was no sign of the wolf. We ran to catch up with Tudor.
In the shadow of the mountain lay the town’s cemetery. The grass was thinner here, much of it hardened into red and yellow swatches. The wind had blown weird shapes into the calcified fronds. In them I saw twisted mouths, bent arms, twined fingers, a tumorous ear, and a dozen other vague fragments of human pain. The wind had plucked up the dead vegetation and balled it up to roll across the ground, rattling like empty birdcages. Here and there were the wounded stumps of ancient trees, their skins long since turned to stone.
The wind brought with it a stench of sulfur. Very funny, I thought. Before I was five years old, I’d had my fill of brimstone jokes, and I sure didn’t appreciate receiving another one from an abandoned village. “What the hell is that smell?” I said.
Azra shook her head and waved away the stink. She looked cute as a ladybug, frowning with her freckled nose wrinkled.
“Rock farts!” Tudor cried. He leaped and pointed to the ground by the northern wall, not far from the nearest mine entrance. From one of the many regular scars upon the cliff face, a puff of red dust was visible for a second before it dissolved into the wind. A moment later, another dusty eruption belched forth, followed by the same stench.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s make this snappy. What was it that the Pathfinder wanted to see here?”
Tudor pointed to the other side of the cemetery where a lone mausoleum stood against the cliff wall.
I walked past the ruins of the cemetery gates. The stone columns had once been carved, but wind had scoured the images to indecipherable lumps and pits. On either side, red stains showed where an iron gate had once hung between them. Similar columns appeared to either side, forming a lonely picket line all the way to the canyon walls.
Tudor did not follow. Instead he pointed to a pile of stones that lay upon a stone column. He took another stone from his pocket and added it to the pile. “I go this far.”
Azra and I walked past the gates. She drew the wings of Desna over her heart, and I copied her gesture. Tudor murmured a prayer to Pharasma and clung to the edge of the column, refusing to budge another step.
“You wait here,” I told him. “Watch our backs.”
He grimaced and bobbed his big head, equal parts ashamed and grateful that I’d let him off the hook.
Only a few of the headstones remained standing. Most leaned toward the east or lay on their faces, half-buried in the earth. I sympathized.
Past the headstones lay weathered tombs, their legends long since erased by wind and rain. Beyond the tombs, built directly into the mountain wall, was a granite mausoleum.
Sheltered by the cliff, the mausoleum had suffered less than the other monuments. I could still make out the harvest images on either side: sheaves of wheat, scythes to harvest them, and scales on which to weigh them. If the boss were there, he might have bored us with a lecture on fertility symbolism of the Ustalav branch of Pharasmin worship. If it meant he were still alive, I would have liked to hear it.
Their shattered wings reduced to rubble beneath them, a pair of angels clung to pillars beside the mausoleum’s stone door. Each raised a hand to support the headstone, a hexagonal lozenge bearing a familiar graven face. I showed Azra the coin Malena had given me.
She looked at it with the same dubious expression she had shown before. She compared it to the face on the keystone and looked back at me. The skepticism melted away as she looked back at the coin, then at me again.
“Who is he?”
She shrugged and signed, Very old coin.
“Is he a count? A prince? He’s on a coin, so he must be a big deal.”
Copper, she signed with a dismissive shrug.
“Yeah,” I agreed. He must not have been that important to end up on the least valuable coin.
The mausoleum looked like the sort of monument Chelish nobles kept so their descendents could visit and weep over their sarcophagi on the anniversary of their deaths. It was a grim enough custom that I wouldn’t be surprised if we’d taken it from the Ustalavs.
What are you doing? signed Azra.
“Looking for a way in.”
No, she signed. Do not disturb dead.
“Come on,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate a
little sweeping up, a few prayers from a couple of maybe distant relatives.”
No, she repeated. Sealed. You cannot open.
She might be right about that, I thought to myself. There were no obvious mechanisms around the door, and even though I had all of my traveling gear, that was more the sort of stuff you use to break into a warehouse office, not a thousand-year-old tomb. Besides, I told myself, I came here to find out about the boss’s Pathfinder. If she had come here to investigate this tomb, she must have found a way inside.
Because I’m smarter than I look, I observed before I touched, but there were no indications of a counterweight trigger or even a handhold. I made a circuit of the little building and climbed onto its roof, but except for a trio of narrow window slits shielded by the eaves on either side, I found no portals.
The angel statues were just what they appeared to be, immobile to my prods and pulls. I spotted no signs of rust dripping out from concealed cogs or levers. Eventually I had to admit that nothing short of a wrecking crew wielding picks and hammers was likely to break through the stone door. I tried shoving with my shoulder, pressing hard in every direction against the door. For good measure, I gave the door a kick and immediately regretted it. It was solid as the mountain.
I sighed and leaned against the door, thinking of a way to give up while making it sound like my own idea rather than capitulation. At the first pressure of my hand, I felt a prickling on my palm and the stone door sank into the floor with a dry rasp.
I turned the long way around to face Azra, giving me time to don a confident mask. “You see, sister,” I said. “There’s nothing I can’t open.”
She stared into the tomb, eyes wide. I shaded my eyes from the remaining daylight and looked in too. Dust whirled up from every surface, and the floor was unmarked by any print. The interior looked like a little chapel with statues of saints and heroes lining the side walls, all turned to gaze at a stone casket in the altar’s position. Weak gray light angled down from hidden slits to fall upon the top of the upright sarcophagus, which was carved in the image of a man holding a golden scepter. The carving of a crown lay at his feet. I didn’t realize I was gaping until Azra tugged my arm.
