by Dave Gross
“Wouldn’t a king put his face on a gold coin? Or a platinum?”
“In modern-day Cheliax, that is so. But our empire is richer than other nations, and our mints produce far more gold and platinum coins. In ages past, however, and especially in an agrarian economy like Ustalav’s, few of a ruler’s subjects often handled a coin richer than a silver.”
Radovan said, “They put the king on a copper?”
“In the days of that kingdom, they did. Great lords stamp their images on the coins of the people. Rare coins bear the images of gods and saints, not because of their greater station but because material lords know the value of fixing their own countenances in the minds of their people. The modern counts of Ustalav and even their prince have forgotten the simple wisdom of that tradition, preferring in their vanity to see their countenances on more precious currency.”
“So this guy was a big deal after all,” said Radovan. “And you think it’s more than a coincidence he looks like me?”
“There is a certain ethnic similarity among the noble families of Ustalav.”
“You mean inbreeding,” said Radovan, not quite bristling at the suggestion.
“Not as such, but of course there are many instances of close marriages to maintain a family line. Obviously, inbreeding cannot be the principal anomaly of your family history.”
He raised a suspicious brow, but I showed him my palm as a peace gesture. He nodded acceptance that I had intended no disparagement, and I realized how little I had appreciated our ability to communicate in an abbreviated language of gestures and facial expressions.
“But obviously,” I explained, “if there is a familial connection, there must have been an infernal cross at some point. And from what I have read of this Lord Virholt, it is possible the hellspawn branch of your family tree began with him.”
Radovan considered the graven image of the ancient lord, frowning as he imagined the same distasteful scenarios that had already occurred to me. I wondered whether Virholt had summoned demonic concubines for his pleasure, or whether he had made a diabolic pact exchanging some service for the intrusion of infernal blood into his mortal lineage.
At the entrance, Arnisant growled a warning. Beyond him, Malena, the dark-haired Sczarni woman, hesitated at the entrance, a pair of goblets in one hand, a tankard in the other.
“Arnisant, down,” I commanded. He obeyed, but his hackles plumped his neck.
“Careful, Malena,” said Radovan as she slipped past our guardian. “I think that’s a wolf hound.”
If Malena found his remark humorous, she disguised it well. With one eye on the hound, she set a goblet on the floor and filled the other with dark wine. “You must be thirsty, my lord.”
“Indeed,” I said, raising a hand to receive a goblet. She flustered me by passing the drink to Radovan instead.
Radovan barely concealed a grin. “Sorry, boss. Princes before counts.”
It would have been more amusing had it happened to one of my peers, but considering none of them were present to witness my embarrassment, I let it pass with a forced smile. It was less amusing to observe Radovan’s concerned glance as I accepted the second goblet Malena filled. There was no question of my overindulgence while on a mission, and prince of wolves or elephants, he was in no position to pass judgment over a count of Cheliax.
“Whose bones are these?” asked Malena, trailing a finger through the dust on the sarcophagus’s surface.
“Don’t you recognize him?” said Radovan.
“It is the likeness of Prince of Wolves,” she nodded. “But it cannot be.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“His last command to my people was carry him to secret tomb, far from any village.”
“Where?”
“It was secret,” She shrugged. “Those who took him did not return to our people, so the knowledge could not be stolen.”
Radovan’s rapt expression told me that this was news to him as well. “What else can you tell us about this Prince of Wolves?”
“They say he was born here in mountains,” she said, “before the time of the lich, many generations ago. He was a son of the last king of Ustalav. His father and his father’s father had hunted us, but he made peace with our people.”
“With werewolves?”
“No,” she said. “Our people were only human then, wanderers like other Sczarni. It was this prince who gave us the gift of night that we may better fight against the Whispering Tyrant.”
“The prince was a werewolf?”
“No,” said Malena. “He was a great witch, very powerful.”
I was pleased to hear that the oral history supported the written chronicle I had read. “What happened to him?”
“It is not known exactly,” she said. “The Whispering Tyrant discovered prince was not loyal to him. He sent warlords into mountains to find him, but not before prince had buried the secrets he had stolen from the lich.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier?” said Radovan.
“You spend all your time with the witch Azra,” said Malena with an indignant lift of her chin. “I tell you many other things if you wish.”
A faint smile crossed Radovan’s face, but he brushed off Malena’s overture, setting a new precedent in my observations of his interactions with attractive women. Perhaps he was finally adopting a more perspicacious approach to calculated entanglements.
“The question remains,” I said, “if the prince is not in this tomb, then who or what is? Is it a lieutenant? A near relation?”
“Maybe he’s not here at all,” suggested Radovan. “Maybe it’s just a trap for the Whispering Tyrant?”
“Ghosts,” said Malena. “Better not to open.”
Their conjectures were as good as mine, but I could not simply leave the tomb unexamined, not after following the trail so far.
I drank the last of the wine and returned the goblet to Malena. “Thank you for the refreshment,” I said. “Now you must leave us to examine the sarcophagus.”
She looked to Radovan for permission, and he nodded and returned his goblet. She bowed to him, and after a moment’s uncertainty to me as well. She edged past a suspicious Arnisant as she departed.
I turned back to the coffin and saw that Radovan was grinning at me.
“What?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m still getting used to the fact that you’re here, and with some paladin’s magic sword. Boss, I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“The feeling is mutual, I assure you,” I said, uncomfortable with his maudlin display. “Now, I believe my associate thought she would find something more than a corpse inside this sarcophagus, some clue as to the arcane secrets Virholt concealed from the Whispering Tyrant.” I peered along the seam of the sarcophagus, noting it had been mortared shut. I was more concerned about magical barriers.
“Maybe he hid this stuff for a good reason,” suggested Radovan, kneeling for a closer look at the coffin. He had a keen eye, and occasionally he spotted something that I had overlooked.
I murmured agreement.
“Then maybe it’s a bad idea to dig it up, eh?”
I could not suppress a weary sigh. We Pathfinders must forever defend our activities against those who do not understand our mission. “It is not so simple,” I explained. “While those of my society pursue knowledge for a variety of motives, the majority believe that knowledge should never be lost. Knowledge is never in itself good nor evil, although of course it can be turned to either purpose. For instance, what if Lord Virholt had discovered a means of destroying the Whispering Tyrant, rather than merely containing him as the Crusaders did?”
“If that was the case, why didn’t he destroy the lich himself?”
“Perhaps he lacked the resources or the power,” I shrugged. “Lacking further evidence, we can only speculate. The point is that we cannot know his motives until we know what he hid. Only then can we decide whether, how, and with whom to share the knowledge. Doi
ng so could save the world great injury on that prophesied day when the Tyrant escapes his prison.”
Selecting the appropriate riffle scroll, I triggered it and saw the world as though through a frosted glass, perceiving the aura of every magic effect nearby. Galdana’s sword blazed with pale blue divine radiance. The statues and the vault walls were a wavering yellow, suggesting some mingling of weak abjuration and illusion magics. The base of the sarcophagus, however, roiled with dark red and purple currents, an active and powerful necromantic aura. The intensity of the magic was such that the Bishop of Kavapesta would have requested help from the paladins of Lastwall before disturbing it.
“Upon reflection,” I said, “an esteemed peer recently suggested that the secrets of Ustalav do not welcome premature awakening.” When Radovan raised his eyebrow, I explained what my cantrip had revealed.
“What about the lid?” he asked, reaching toward the golden scepter in the statue’s hand. “I think this is a separate piece.”
“Be careful,” I said, shooing his hand away, but then I succumbed to my own curiosity and lay a finger up on its surface. It was flanged like a Mendevian mace, but its ornate ridges were far too small to serve as the edges of a proper weapon. On a sudden impulse, I gripped the scepter and twisted. It did not budge.
“That would be worth a fat purse to the right fence,” said Radovan.
“Even more to a legitimate collector,” I added. “But its design is curious. It looks more like a key than a weapon.”
Radovan moved around the sarcophagus for a better angle and took hold of the scepter. Even as he leaned forward for leverage, it slipped easily out of the graven lord’s hand.
He looked at me with an apology on his face. “You must have loosened it for me, boss.”
“No,” I said, considering what he had told me of his earlier entrance. “The door to the tomb also opened at your touch, did it not?”
He nodded.
“And we have ample reason to suspect you may be descended from the same family as the man interred here. If so, then this key may open the secret vault, the one to which the Sczarni’s ancestors bore their dead prince. Between the key and the presence of an ancestor of the prince, the vault may now be opened.”
A spark of greed twinkled in Radovan’s eye. “You think there’s treasure in this vault?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But knowledge is the treasure we seek.”
“Treasure?” said a voice behind us. Dragos appeared in the doorway, naked to the waist, dirty and sweaty. He threw a dirty spade upon the floor and said, “It is done.”
Your grave was little more than a shallow ditch covered with a few feet of earth, not even enough to protect your body from the ravages of rain moisture. Only because of your uncommon physiognomy did I recognize your decayed corpse.
“It’s a half-orc,” said Radovan, with a premature sigh of relief. Then he saw my expression and realized the truth. “Boss, I’m sorry.”
The Sczarni had set lanterns around the grave while digging, and by their light I searched for some sign that I was mistaken about your identity. One look at the ring of Cayden Cailean that you were so proud to have won from your peers in Absalom dashed the faintest hope I might have held that some other explorer had met her end here.
Judging from the appearance of your body, I realized you had been dead since before my departure from Cheliax. Knowing my journey had been futile from the start was poor consolation for learning of your death. I still felt as though I had failed you.
The wound upon your throat suggested you had been taken by surprise, and not by the restless dead. Feebly, I hoped that the end had come quickly, since wishing it had never happened was useless. At least your murderer had the decency to bury you, if not well. I stepped into the grave.
“Boss,” said Radovan, “let me do that.”
“No,” I told him. “She was my agent.”
When I lifted you in my arms, your journal fell away. I passed your body to Radovan, who laid you gently on the ground. Retrieving your notes, I climbed out, wet and cold from the grave mud, and clutched them to my chest.
“Dig it deeper,” I told the surrounding Sczarni. “Six feet.”
Dragos snorted. “Dig it yourself, changeling.”
“Do it,” said Radovan, intervening before I could turn my own ire upon the belligerent Sczarni. “I want it finished before dawn.”
Dragos and Cezar stalked away muttering curses, but Malena picked up one of the spades and handed it to another Sczarni woman. Milosh ran to fetch the one Dragos had left in the tomb.
I felt unutterably weary, and Radovan grabbed my elbow to guide me back to the camp. There he helped me undress and covered me in blankets within the Sczarni tent. Arnisant entered, turned around a few times, and settled beside me.
Chapter Sixteen
The Prince of Wolves
I wheeled the phantom steed around the wagon, riding as close as I could to Luminita to see how she’d react. She only tossed her head, but Azra shook her fist at me. It was hard to tell whether she was truly angry, but I didn’t care. I was having too much fun. The day was turning out much better than it had begun.
Hours earlier, when I went to the boss just before dawn, he was already awake and dressed. He sat with his back against the tent pole, a span of which glowed brightly enough for him to read. In his lap was the dead Pathfinder’s journal. The boss trailed his finger beneath the lines, frowning in concentration as he considered a gap of several missing pages. I spied several such gaps throughout the book, but I let him continue until he raised his head and snapped the journal shut.
“The grave’s ready,” I told him.
“A moment,” he said. He tucked a number of odd little books into his pockets and beneath his belt. He carried the journal and his new sword with him to the graveside.
Azra, Tudor, and about half of the Sczarni awaited us there, while Dragos, Cezar, and two older women finished breaking camp. It was becoming obvious which of the Sczarni resented the oath I’d extracted from them and which hoped that I was, or could be used as, the return of their lost prince.
Still, I didn’t understand their motivation for following me, unless some were simply waiting for their chance to put me down. That didn’t completely make sense, since I was pretty sure they could have killed me at any time. Malena was the only one who seemed to believe in her Harrow reading, although Milosh and the two young men, Fane and Sandu, went along with her, probably hoping to get under her skirts. Tatiana, the other younger Sczarni woman, was also with them, but I sensed she hoped to snap up Fane or Sandu, whichever didn’t make it with Malena. I didn’t entirely believe what they’d said about honor and waiting until the next moon to challenge me. I figured it was Azra’s presence that ultimately kept them in line. That protection alone was almost worth putting up with the witch’s sour disposition.
Azra had covered the body in a makeshift shroud sewn of scraps she had taken from a basket in her wagon. I was glad to see it was not the same amalgamation of children’s shrouds she’d used in healing me. She inserted a few handfuls of aromatic herbs into the covering, for which we were all grateful, but the boss stopped her before she could add the final stitches. He lifted the thin fabric and placed his own Pathfinder journal in the dead woman’s arms and whispered something over her. Then he nodded to Azra, who sewed it shut.
Fane and Sandu lowered the corpse into the grave with a pair of ropes. They performed the action so smoothly that I could tell they had done it many times before. That tipped the scales away from the Sczarni’s eating their dead, but it did little to reassure me of their love and loyalty.
Azra blessed the grave with a series of gestures, and the boss recited a prayer to Pharasma, and then another to Cayden Cailean, the god of drunks, heroes, and happy accidents. I assumed that selection had more to do with the dead Pathfinder’s preference than with the boss’s propensity for excessive drink, but the thought did cross my mind. What surprised me, however, was
when the short ritual concluded, the boss picked up one of the spades and began to fill the grave. After a few throws, I expected him to hand it off for someone else to finish, but he kept going. The Sczarni looked at me for direction, and then Milosh reached for a spade almost as tall as he was. I took it first and helped the boss fill in the rest of the grave. It took us nearly an hour to finish, but then we slapped our hands clean, returned the spades to the Sczarni, and led the pack down the mountain.
After a long silence, the boss and I continued comparing notes about our respective adventures while separated. In a moment when no one else was close enough to overhear, I tried to explain that it was my fault that Vili and his boys had attacked us. The boss brushed it off. I got the feeling he was still too angry to hear about it. It was hard to blame him for that, especially since my bravado had cost the lives of all our hired guards and Nicola. I had never before made such a deadly mistake, and there wasn’t anything I could do that would make it any better. Still, I wanted to take my punishment sooner rather than later. The waiting was worse than anything I imagined the boss might do. Weirdly, the worst part was that I wanted to apologize to old bug-faced Nicola. But now I never could.
Seeing that the boss was in no mood to talk more about the past, I asked, “What next?”
He nodded as if he’d been waiting for the question. “I must review my Pathfinder’s journal in more detail to deduce what might have been on those missing pages, but the timeline suggests she did not come here directly from Willowmourn. Rather, she traveled south, into Ulcazar.”
“The Monastery of the Veil?”
“That seems her most likely destination, although the monks are famously protective of their archives,” he said. “Ulcazar has been the neutral ground for most of the civil conflicts since the fall of the Whispering Tyrant. Thus, its libraries have never been sacked. The chronicles it contains could date back to the very founding of Ustalav.”
