by Dave Gross
What it all amounted to was that those who didn’t hate me for being Hell-touched could hate me for working for this Pathfinder. And those who didn’t hate me, well, they were mostly no better than I was—thieves and harlots, servants, slaves, and now Sczarni. But this Lord Virholt, this prince who fought against the Whispering Tyrant, he might have been something else. Sure, he could have been a traitor. Maybe the popular histories were right, and he sold out his people and got caught with his hand in his master’s purse. But he might have been a great man. If what I’d learned about history was worth two coppers, chances were both stories were right. He was a traitor and a great man. If that were true, maybe there was hope for me, too.
I heard a scrape of stone that reminded me of the tomb opening in the forgotten village. I didn’t dare turn around, but I said, “Did you hear that?”
Azra shook her head, and the Sczarni looked at me curiously. The boss turned his head to listen, but I could see from his expression he saw nothing behind me. Arnisant whined and sat at the boss’s feet.
I took a step backward, and I felt cool air on my neck. I heard the sound of distant sighs and a tinkling of a spring. I smelled wet stone.
“See anything?” I whispered, still stepping back.
The others shook their heads, and when they moved to follow me, I held up a palm to stop them. “Wait.”
I walked backward, careful of each step. When I felt I was closing in on the ridge wall, I shut my eyes, but I kept moving. I changed direction slightly when I felt a puff of cool, damp air lift my hair. At any moment I expected my heel to strike a wall, but instead I walked into cool shadows and stepped on a faint depression in the ground. I looked down and opened my eyes.
I stood in a stone threshold. At my feet was the lip of a stone door easily twice the size of the one at Virholt’s false tomb but of the same design. Behind me was a dark cavernous space, and beyond the threshold I saw the others standing with expressions of wonder on their faces.
“Radovan!” called the boss. “Can you hear me?”
“I’m right here,” I said. “Close your eyes and follow my voice.”
The boss can be obtuse at times, but you don’t have to tell him twice when what you say makes sense. He was the first to arrive, and I kept talking as he reached out blindly. When he was close enough, I grabbed his arm and pulled him across the threshold. One by one the others followed, except for Arnisant, who sat and whimpered in frustration at hearing his master’s voice call to him from what looked like a wall of solid stone. Eventually the boss leaned out and pulled the dog in by his collar. After a brief struggle, Arnisant leaped up to greet his master, who corrected him with a curt gesture and, “Sit!”
It took another quarter-hour or so to retrieve our supplies from Luminita and guide everyone back to the cavern with a rope the Sczarni produced from the bottomless bag. We left the donkey to graze outside, lit our torches, and turned to explore the hidden cavern.
The first hour of exploration was what you might call exciting, if your idea of excitement is the constant fear that you’re about to brush against a trap or step through a false floor. It was also an exercise in patience. Every time one of us made a move, the boss hissed to stop us. He kept repeating anecdotes about careless Pathfinders who had ended up impaled on a rusty spike or ground to paste by a falling boulder. The problem was that he was making the Sczarni more nervous than cautious, so I distracted him with an innocent suggestion.
“Sure would be good to have a map of the tunnels we’ve passed.”
No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he ignited a pocket lamp and sat to sketch out the first few caverns we had explored. I beckoned to Cezar to accompany me, and together we scouted ahead with one of the torches. When we found the spot where tiles covered the cavern floor and the cavern walls gave way to buttressed passages, I had him hold the light while I crept forward to examine the floor. After twenty minutes of visual examination and a few prods here and there, I realized that my experience breaking into houses in Egorian didn’t translate well into exploring centuries-old vaults. It wasn’t that I got nervous, exactly, but suddenly the admonishments about cautious procedures didn’t seem so prim.
The boss lost all interest in his map the moment he heard what we had found. We returned to the man-made area and lit more torches before gradually entering the inner chambers. The tiled hall led north to a wide gallery that expanded to the east and west. There we found the six statues of Prince Virholt’s consorts, each of them three times my height. They were divided into two groups of three by a waterfall that splashed over a basin clogged by centuries of sediment. The fall had carved its own basin out of the nearest tiles, forming a little moat bordered by tilted and eroded tiles around the original vessel before the clear water drained into the earth below.
The rest of the gallery was tiled in icons of saints and heroes of Pharasma. I’d seen similar images for sale in the markets of Caliphas, their ornate borders distinctly Ustalavic. The boss was drawn to them like the proverbial moth. He paused only to warn us not to touch anything before he had a chance to look at it. The Sczarni needed no such warning, standing as far as possible from the walls and statues, until at last they relaxed enough to sit on the floor. Azra and Arnisant trailed the boss, while I had a good look at the ancient consorts. I had an idea who they represented, so I searched for hints of tails or hooves. Except for a few curious features, they all looked human enough. In the right light, so do I.
Eventually the boss joined me, and we worked together the way we’d done so often when examining an unfamiliar chamber. This time, he had the advantage of real spells to cast, so I waited for him to trip a scroll before getting too close.
“The entire place radiates lingering magic,” he said, “but none of the statues more than the others. It’s an antechamber, not the vault itself, but whatever its defenses, I suspect they are mechanical rather than magical.”
I moved in for a closer look. Sure enough, I spied seams on most of the statues indicating joints that might move to strike or pin careless trespassers. I aimed to be a careful trespasser, so when I’d seen all I could, I kept my touch light as I ran my fingers over the statues.
Even under a coat of hardened sediment, I felt the indentations where the mechanisms were set into the stone. The armed consorts on the ends seemed designed to eviscerate anyone who triggered them, although I found nothing on them or on the nearby floor that would set them loose. Likewise with the others, although I had a feeling the crystal eyes were once a part of a deathtrap. With any luck, the erosion that had removed one eye had also ruined its ability to kill, petrify, or otherwise mutilate me. When I signed to ask the boss whether the statues could suddenly come to life, he shook his head, but only after a moment’s hesitation.
No no? I signed. Or maybe no?
“Probably no,” he said, since there was no sign for his favorite equivocation. I don’t know why I felt the need for silent communication, except that I had a creepy feeling the consorts were listening to us.
“There’s something wrong with each of them,” I said. “Either they’re all traps, or else one of them hides a door that looks like a trap.”
“Nothing I have read provided a physical description of the king’s consort,” said the boss. “But I am certain if one of these statues conceals a passage, it is the one that looks like the Prince’s mother.”
“You sure there was only one consort?” I said. “He was the king, after all.”
“A good point,” he said. “But we don’t actually know he was king. The Sczarni see him that way, and his sons as princes, but most references I have read refer to him vaguely as a lord, not even a count or prince. We know that the mother of the third prince was a devil, but none of these statues features any indisputably fiendish features.”
“There’s the one with the crystal eyes,” I suggested.
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Do you have a feeling about that one in particular?”
&nbs
p; I shook my head. “They’re just statues.”
“Perhaps so,” he admitted. “But if the statues mask the entrance to the vault, they may be designed to offer a clue only to descendants of the Prince.”
“And I’m just supposed to know which one is my ancestor?”
“My conjecture is that Virholt left some secret to be passed down to his descendents, perhaps through the Sczarni werewolves. Over so many generations, however, the knowledge may have been lost.”
Maybe Dragos had known something he did not wish to share before I’d killed him. Probably not, but I still felt a little sick when I thought of what I’d done—not that I regretted it, exactly. It had been necessary. Or maybe the ones who knew something useful were from a different family. The way the werewolves talked about their kin, I got the impression they were scattered all over Ustalav. If we couldn’t figure out how to get past the ladies, maybe we’d have to search for them.
Or maybe the secret was with me after all. I thought of what had happened to me when the villagers put me on the fire. There was a lot I still didn’t know about myself. That thought reminded me of the scepter we’d taken from Virholt’s tomb. I’d been carrying the thing for so long that I’d gotten used to its weight in the side of my boot. It wasn’t nearly as heavy as it should have been if made of solid metal, so either it was hollow, or it was only plated in gold.
“Have you found anything that might conceal a keyhole on the statues?” said the boss.
I had no idea what to look for, so first I gave the ladies another look to decide which was the most likely to hide a door. It was not easy. Maybe I shared a resemblance with Prince Virholt, but assuming his consort was a devil, she’d come in disguise. Whatever she’d looked like, it had come down through—what?—thirty or forty generations. Maybe more, considering the short lifespan of most hellspawn in human society. Still, I gave it a try.
My first choice seemed too obvious, especially if this was meant as some sort of test. I don’t know anything about the fashions of Ustalav seven hundred years ago, but those neck piercings didn’t strike me as something that would catch on among the local nobility. Besides, if there were a clue, I figured it would be more subtle than that. The boss had already examined the statues up and down, so I didn’t waste my time looking for a hint of a tail or a hoof-like foot. Instead I looked at the faces.
The one with the crystal eyes was interesting. One of the few things I remembered about my mother’s face was her eyes. Except in the mirror, I’d never seen eyes of that same molten gold color. Still, there was something about the woman’s wide jaw and round cheeks that looked completely unfamiliar. More importantly, something in my gut told me that I still had not seen the mother of a line of hellspawn.
I went to the basin and splashed cool water on my neck. Behind the waterfall, a dark shape loomed above me. I flinched, but it hadn’t moved. Only my bending over the basin had made it appear so. I beckoned the boss over to take a look. We exchanged a nod and raised our hands to form a peak within the falling water. In the clear space between our arms, we looked up into the eroded face of a woman with a prominent horned brow. Beneath her pointed chin was a green bronze door set into an iron-reinforced archway. In the very center of the door was a large keyhole that looked a perfect fit for the key.
“Hello there, Baba,” I said.
After opening the secret door with Virholt’s scepter, I pried up a few of the loose floor tiles, and the boss helped me jam them beneath the chin of my ancestor to divert the waterfall. It was good to see him get his hands wet, if not dirty. He wasn’t above physical work, but he tended to leave it to me when we weren’t actively on a case. That’s how it felt now: we were on the case.
We joined the Sczarni, who’d had the good sense to check for a draft before starting a fire for warmth. The werewolves peered suspiciously at the hidden consort we’d uncovered, and I could tell that none of them relished the idea of going farther into the mountain, especially not under such a face.
“Why we doing this?” said Cezar. His Taldane was improving as fast as my Varisian had these past weeks. Sounded like we’d met in the middle.
“Knowledge,” said the boss. “Understanding.”
Cezar gave him a blank look, so I translated for him. “Gold,” I said. “Jewels. Riches beyond your imagining.”
“This I like,” said Cezar, repeating what I’d said in Varisian to Sandu and Tatiana, neither of whom was fluent in the common tongue.
The boss admonished me with a look, but he couldn’t dispute what I’d said. “While it is true that a Pathfinder often discovers material wealth, it must never be his principal goal.”
“That’s all right,” I told him. “You can have my share of the knowledge, and I’ll take your share of the treasure.”
He sighed, and I knew I’d pushed it too far. It was fun to gig him about the noble designs of the Pathfinder Society, but in his heart the boss believed in it. I think he considered our intrigues in Egorian his way of being an active Pathfinder without having to sleep out of doors. But most of the time he only read about the adventures of his active agents, who sent him reports of the things they had experienced and he could only enjoy vicariously. When I thought about it that way, he seemed sort of pitiful.
“Whether or not you choose to join the Society,” he said, “you all became ersatz Pathfinders the moment you set foot inside this tomb.”
“Sure,” I said, hoping he’d let it go at that. But of course he didn’t.
“While the Society prefers its members be introduced with a modicum of formality, the open secret of our organization is that our most prominent members were recognized as Pathfinders after the fact.”
I nodded to humor him—I’d heard this before—but when Malena and Cezar whispered translations to their comrades, a hush fell over the Sczarni.
“What does this mean?” asked Cezar, relaying the question they all shared.
“It means that, like it or not, you have accepted a solemn duty to share the knowledge that we discover here, but to share it wisely. It must not be given to those who would use it for destruction, or those who would hoard it for themselves. Knowledge withers in captivity.”
“You’re talking about knowledge the way wizards talk about spells,” I said.
“An apt metaphor,” said the boss. “In the wrong hands, both knowledge and magic can cause great misery. It falls to us to ensure that whatever we discover does not do so.”
Cezar frowned for a long moment, coming to a conclusion. “I agree with Prince,” he said. “You take my share of knowledge. I take gold.”
The Sczarni laughed, and I caught a hint of a smile before Azra turned away. The boss’s face colored slightly, but he shook his head in surrender. His argument was hopeless in this company. Still, I understood what he’d been trying to do. We needed the Sczarni committed to the task in case things got dangerous. The problem was that the things that mattered to the boss didn’t carry much weight with the Sczarni. I had an idea what would and I hoped I had learned enough Varisian to make it work without a translator.
“Listen,” I said, raising my voice just enough to make it echo through the gallery. The Sczarni quieted, and even Azra gave me her full attention. “The Count has his reasons to explore this place. But so do the sons and daughters of those who fought the Whispering Tyrant. Whatever it is that Prince Virholt left here, it was to be found by us, no one else. Deciding what to do with what we find is our duty to him. It is your duty to me.”
The Sczarni murmured grudging assent.
“And if there is some gold in there,” I said. “I think it is also our duty to take it.”
“Long life to the Prince of Wolves!” shouted Cezar. The others joined in with his cheer. Azra held her head in her hands, and I couldn’t see her face. The boss looked at me with a curious expression. I couldn’t tell whether he was irritated or confused. I’m sure he’d tell me later in words I would not misunderstand.
I realized the
re was one face missing.
“Where’s Tudor?”
Everyone looked at everyone else, as if to say not my fault. We heard footsteps at the end of the gallery entrance.
“Here,” said Tudor, lumbering forward. Behind him came a crowd of his fellow villagers, clubs and torches in their hands. Among them were a couple of faces I’d never expected to see again. Casomir came in right behind Tudor, his slim sword drawn. His other hand supported his cousin, who despite appearing delicate still had her pretty head on her shoulders.
“Tara,” said the boss. “Of course.” The color drained from his face as he stared her. His jaw locked in a determined expression I’d seen many times. He’d just realized something he had missed before. I hoped it wasn’t the kind of mistake that would cost us all more than we could pay.
“Here, mistress,” Tudor said, pointing at the boss. “Here they are.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The Vault of Secrets
How stupid of me.
My first thought was that, should I survive to tell the tale, I would always begin with the preamble that the spell that blotted out my memory had undoubtedly also impaired my reason. There was no other excuse for my hasty assumption that the decapitated body I had seen at Willowmourn was proof of Tara’s death, even if the body were indisputably hers. If my revised theory proved correct, I had seen her head that night as well.
Tara leaned heavily on Casomir’s unoccupied arm. Behind them, a small army of freaks from Tudor’s village shuffled into the Chamber of Consorts, as I had labeled it on my map. Most were men and boys with grotesque features but strong bodies. They must have been strong and hardy to have followed us so far into the mountains. I did not relish the thought of fighting such a mob, even with Radovan, Azra, and the werewolves beside me.
Casomir smiled. His belligerence gave me hope that I could entice him to parley. Many missing pieces fell into place once I realized Tara’s true nature, and I understood at least one thing that must have occurred during my forgotten days at Willowmourn. I brushed a finger across my unmarked cheek. “I neglected to compliment your new scars earlier,” I told him. “They lend you a most becoming symmetry.”
