by Dave Gross
“Damned Chel,” muttered one of his soldiers, a woman who might have been handsome but for her broken nose and prominent jaw. Her abbreviated term for a citizen of my country was a pejorative becoming more and more common among the Chelish holdings in the west. Hearing it from a defender of Lastwall saddened me, for their credo had always seemed pure in its simplicity and focus: to defend all of Avistan, regardless of political differences, from the return of the Whispering Tyrant. Even when Cheliax separated from the Empire of Taldor, they had remained neutral. Time changes all things, however, especially those that were once good.
“Captain Menas Neverion,” said the captain, ignoring the discourtesy of his underling. The tracks on his face had taken at least fifty years to form, and some sage quality in his eyes made him seem even older. His Taldan name and curt demeanor dampened my hope that he would be of a lenient persuasion. “What are you doing in these haunted lands?”
There was little hope of misleading a man in the company of a paladin or priest of Iomedae, who had served as the herald of Aroden before that god’s cataclysmic death. If not for the absolute power of the Thrice-Damned House of Thrune, the temples of Iomedae would likely have replaced those of Aroden. Instead, the dark temples of Asmodeus now stood on ground once consecrated to Aroden. The obstacle before me was to tell as little of the truth as the captain was likely to accept.
“I came to Ustalav to locate a missing colleague,” I said. Calculating both his next likely question and his reaction to my obvious reticence, I added, “Regrettably, I have found only her corpse. Thus, I wish to retrace her steps in hopes of returning with a complete report of her last days.”
The captain did not look at his lieutenant, but I observed the worshiper of Iomedae nodding to herself. She did indeed have the means to detect a falsehood.
“And these natives?” he said, indicating the Varisians with the least turn of a finger.
“Guides and guardians,” I said.
He frowned dubiously at my brevity, but without a sign from his lieutenant, he let it pass. His expression soured as his gaze fell upon Radovan. “And this ...hellspawn?”
“My associate,” I said, hoping not to diminish Radovan’s authority in the eyes of the Sczarni. But I knew that answer alone would not suffice, so I added, “My bodyguard, Radovan.”
The captain shook his head. “This will not do, Count,” he said. “We do not welcome intruders into these lands.”
“I understand your concern, captain,” I told him. “But you will of course allow that these are not your lands. They remain a part of the Principality of Ustalav, and Prince Aduard himself received me in his palace upon my arrival.”
A disbelieving laugh escaped his lips before the captain turned to his lieutenant, who nodded to confirm the truth of my claim before leaning close to whisper to him. He turned a scowl back to me and demanded, “And you will of course allow that these people are not simple Varisians you have employed to guide you.”
I concede his point with a nod. “Young Tudor here is from a village near the mountains. He is our guide. Azra is a cleric of Desna, a healer, whose value to any venture in these regions I know you appreciate.” I placed my hand over my heart and bowed to his lieutenant.
The woman beside the captain nodded toward Desna, a gesture of respect among worshipers of different but sympathetic deities. The tenants of Desna, while far fewer and less onerous, were no less virtuous than those of Iomedae.
“And these rogues?” The captain glowered down at Cezar, who glared back up. I could almost see the hairs on his arms bristling, and I sent a silent prayer to Desna that the werewolf would not lose his temper.
“A Sczarni family,” I said. The captain reacted with obvious surprise that I had not dissembled, but if a thousand-mile foreigner could recognize the difference between an honest Varisian and one of their wandering thieves, it is foolish to assume he could not.
“Such company does not speak well of your character,” said the captain.
Barely restraining myself from bristling at the provocation, I said, “In fact, they are in service to my bodyguard.”
His lip curled. “The hellspawn.”
“Listen,” said Radovan, stepping forward. “I may have grown up on the streets of—”
“Silence,” said the woman beside the captain. “If you wish to keep that infernal tongue in your head, you will stand back and await the verdict of your betters.”
Radovan stopped himself just short of displaying his full smile, an expression that could only have resulted in outright conflict, one that I did not expect we could survive, much less win. Behind him, the Sczarni bristled, but he waved them back.
Before I could attempt another tack, Azra pushed past us both and signed angrily. The captain’s horse retreated a step, and the man himself flinched at the ferocity of her approach. He recovered his composure and demanded, “What did she say?”
I could not suppress a smile at the literal meaning of her gestures, but I said, “She begs to disagree with your characterization of Radovan.”
“Why does she not speak?” he asked.
Azra opened her mouth and pointed in the same vulgar manner she had shown me earlier. I sighed at the lost opportunity for a more graceful communication.
“I can translate,” I said, but the captain shook his head and signaled his wizard, who took a pinch of black and white powder from a pocket on his book and began to intone the words of a spell. I tensed, and I felt the others with me bracing for an attack, but I recognized the signs he traced upon the air. I signaled Radovan that we were not under attack.
“It’s all right,” he relayed to the Sczarni. For the first time I had noticed, his Varisian sounded perfect.
The wizard and his captain exchanged nods, and the captain looked once more at Azra. “With all due respect to the Song of the Spheres,” he said, invoking Desna’s formal title, “what is the nature of your association with this hellspawn?”
Not hellspawn, signed Azra, adding a rude nonverbal gesture to her response. He is a valuable man.
The wizard whispered the translation, but the captain scoffed. “Please, sister, I can see with my own eyes what he is.”
Your eyes are blind, she said. They see Sczarni, not Desna’s children. They see demon, not son of Ustalav.
The wizard flinched before relaying the translation, but I saw by the flint in his commander’s eyes that he reported it accurately. Radovan stood behind Azra, unable to see her gestures. He stepped around for a better look, but she stepped in front of him to block his view.
This man is descended of princes, she signed. If you try to stop him, Desna laughs at you. If you harm him, I will curse you all.
Chapter Twenty
The Hall of Weeping Consorts
I looked up the limestone cavern walls into the towering faces of six statues. If they had ever been painted, the pigment had long since dissolved. Still, centuries of cave water oozing through various minerals had streaked their features with color. Beneath a translucent veneer, their eyes wept purple tears, and traces of white and green ran down their polished faces.
Each statue depicted a woman of the sort of ancient beauty you find only in artwork from fallen empires, and don’t let anyone tell you the woman had nothing to do with the fall. Two of the faces smiled, one as though she kept a secret, the other as though she’d just revealed one. The others wore similar enigmas on their faces. Still, there were other clues as to their personalities.
One had a couple dozen rings piercing the flesh of her neck like a choker. Another statue had eyes of amber crystals bigger than my fist, although one had fallen to the floor so long ago that its cracked remains were cemented to the cavern floor by a mound of chalky runoff. The two on the far ends wielded ornate knives and turned slightly toward the center as if to menace each other or their intervening rivals. In the center were the two tallest figures, a bosomy matriarch whose lush lips spoke more of seduction than of motherhood, and a slender girl
who held a basket teeming with small furry creatures against her belly.
“All right,” I said to the silent statues. “Speak up now. Which one of you dirty little sluts is my Baba?”
The day after our encounter with the patrol from Lastwall, the boss still wouldn’t tell me what he saw Azra signing to them. The way the corner of his mouth quirked up when I asked, I knew it had to be something humiliating. During my convalescence after the scuffle with the torches and pitchforks gang, Azra had seen me at my most pathetic. The way the soldiers hurried off after her tirade, I wouldn’t be surprised if she told them I was plagued and contagious.
On the other hand, there was that business with the starknife. The boss was still being cute about that when I asked him what he thought was going on, and I was beginning to think he was the one who’d stolen the starknife from where I’d hidden it in the wagon.
Part of me wanted to think Azra just didn’t like seeing anyone else have a bit of fun. Even if she’d been serious about laying a claim on me, I’d offer fat odds she’d changed her mind when she saw me put Dragos down. There was no way I could explain why that was necessary, not to a healer.
Before I could work up the courage to confront her directly, the boss stopped us a couple of hours after we set out. The break was welcome after the tense night we’d had. I hadn’t slept a wink, and I think the same was true of the Sczarni. Fortunately, the mist had risen earlier than it had the past few days, and the sun winked down at us a few times. Consulting his journal and a handful of loose pages on which he’d drawn rough maps, the boss turned slowly to survey the territory.
We stood about halfway up one of the lower peaks, surrounded by endless stands of fir trees. To the southwest lay a tiny mountain lake fed by a meager stream. Its water was a teal I’d seen only in paintings, and the boss mentioned something boring about its mineral content causing the color. Sheltering us from the north was a crescent-shaped ridge of ruddy earth and exposed granite. There was no sign of habitation, human or otherwise. Even the vulture the boss had pointed out to me earlier had vanished. More likely it was feasting on whatever had been waiting to die.
“Would you be so kind as to scale that tree, Your Highness?” said the boss. He was becoming more of an ass all the time about the Prince of Wolves thing. I didn’t understand what had changed, but all I got when I shot him a warning look was this stupid little smile that made him look like a schoolboy. He was enjoying some private joke, and I had a feeling Azra was in on it. Sure, I could have asked her. When I thought about it, though, I knew I definitely preferred to go climb a tree.
The boss stood at the base while I shimmied up the trunk. The tree’s needles and cones were different from the pines of Cheliax. The boss probably could have told me its name in five or six old languages and described a dozen hedge remedies using its bark, but I saw no point in giving him the pleasure. I looked down at him from a height of maybe thirty feet and thought about dropping a cone on his head. As if reading my thoughts, Arnisant looked up and closed his panting jaws with a snap. I took his meaning, one bodyguard to another.
Fifteen feet more and I didn’t dare test the strength of the tree trunk further. I snapped off a few branches for a better view and had a gander. It always amazes me how different things look from such a small change in perspective, especially a vertical change. The rock face to the northwest looked completely different than it had from the ground. The vertical lines in the stone looked less like the effect of erosion and more like the marks of picks and saws disguised to look natural.
The boss called for me, but I ignored the distraction. I had the strong sense that I was missing something right in front of my nose. I closed my eyes and opened them again. For half a second, I thought I detected some pattern inscribed upon the cliff, but the harder I stared the less I could see.
“Radovan!” he called again. I shouted back, trying to describe the effect of what I had seen—or rather, what I hadn’t. Saying it aloud made it sound stupid, but the boss looked excited.
“Look at the sun,” he cried.
Years earlier, he’d given me the opposite advice during a case involving an escaped firepelt cougar and a stolen icon of Sarenrae. “You told me never to do that!”
“Just for a second,” he shouted. “Look at the sun, shut your eyes for a moment, and look back at the cliff.”
My heavy sigh threatened to shake me out of the tree. I closed my eyes, looked up into the sun for an instant, and closed them again. Turning toward the cliff, I opened them again. Yellow and green spots flashed before my eyes, but as they faded I saw, or thought I saw, a convergence of lines near the base of the ridge. They were visible for only a second. When I blinked, they were gone.
“All right,” I said, calling down to him. “There’s something there.” As I looked back at the ridge, again I glimpsed those lines that looked like a confluence of rivers, only so sharp and regular that they had to be crafted, not riven by nature.
“Find a bearing and come down,” said the boss. The first part was easier said than done outside of a city full of distinctive buildings and monuments. These mountains were much less reliable, especially when the mists rolled into the valleys. I chose a couple of prominent trees and a cluster of boulders as my landmarks, imagining how they’d look from the ground.
Back on the ground, I had to hustle to catch up with the others. The boss already had them marching toward the ridge. When we reached it about an hour later, I saw nothing of the lines I’d seen before.
“Are you certain this is the spot?” said the boss.
I double-checked my landmarks. They were right where they should be, and from where I was standing, I should have been looking directly at the point where the lines on the ridge converged. “It has to be, but it looks wrong from here.”
The boss put a hand on my arm. “Is it as if there were something missing?”
“That’s it,” I said. The sun had veiled itself with clouds, so I couldn’t use that trick again soon. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, but I saw nothing but bare rock face when I opened them. The others imitated my action, even the boss, with no better luck. After a few minutes, I felt foolish and turned away.
Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a vault door. For an instant I saw it plain as day, a tall stone hexagon similar to the mausoleum door back at the old village. When I turned to look directly at it, there was nothing. I turned away again, and there was an even more fleeting image in my peripheral vision.
“This is going to sound weird.” I explained the effect to the boss. The others listened intently, the Sczarni asking Malena to clarify with a translation now and then.
“The more you pursue it,” suggested Malena, “the more elusive it becomes.”
“Sounds like a woman,” I said. Malena smiled at the remark, then sobered up when she saw Azra glaring at her. But Malena had an interesting idea.
“Say, boss,” I said. “The way you’ve described spells sometimes, you make them sound like living things. Like they want things, get mad, or take revenge.”
He shrugged. “Practitioners of the arcane arts often describe spells that way, but it is usually more a figure of speech than a description of real sentient powers inherent in the spells. In the case of homunculi, golems, and other animated objects that take on a semi-sentience, however, it is perfectly valid to describe them as having motives, at least to execute the commands of their creators. In Thurmal’s Treatise on the Incarnations of Major Arcana—”
He went on like that for a while, but I’m pretty sure only Arnisant was listening after he started quoting sources. I was thinking about women, and how some of them tell you the opposite of what they really mean. Sometimes it feels like a trick, maybe a test you have to pass to earn the privilege of her company. But other times, maybe most of the time, I think it’s a defense mechanism. Like a door that doesn’t want to be found by anyone who wants to find it too badly, or for the wrong reasons.
I turned my back to the doo
r and thought about why I wanted to enter it. Sure, it was a big deal for the boss to find out what his Pathfinder had been seeking before she died. And yeah, I agreed it was a good idea to find whatever it was they were looking for before the bad guys did. But really, I hadn’t thought much about what was in it for me. If I was actually descended of this Lord Virholt, maybe I was the one who had the most to gain—or lose—by looking inside this hidden vault.
If there was proof I was descended from this Prince of Wolves, that could get me locked into a room full of more responsibility than I ever wanted to see. I still felt a queasy shudder of guilt every time I saw the way they looked at me since I killed Dragos. It would have been better if they’d been angry or frightened, but when the pack looked at me now I saw only a longing for direction. They wanted me to tell them what to do. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be the one to do that.
I had to admit there was another reason I was curious about the contents of that tomb. I’d been the unwanted child of a criminal and a whore. The first part of my life was spent in slavery, and the most I’d ever managed to improve my lot was to become a servant—no matter how much I liked to use other words for it—to a lord who wasn’t half as bad as his peers.
In the time I’d worked for the boss, we’d helped a few people who deserved it and hurt a few more who didn’t. More often all we managed to do was perpetuate the constant struggle between people of his class for a slightly better position under the queen. In their world, I was invisible if I was lucky, and I spent a lot of my time waiting in the rain while the butler opened doors for the boss. Except for a few lonely wives who called me back to discuss a matter they’d just remembered about that last case, none of them wanted to see me again.
Even on the street, the villains I used to run with were suspicious of my new career. Some of them would still deal with me, but even those who tipped me information for some of the boss’s coins still watched me close to see if I’d start putting on airs. My best friends on the street would still put a knife in my back if it meant a pay purse, and not necessarily a fat one.
