The City of Ravens

by Baker, Richard

  Tharzon leaned forward, his thick arms planted on the bar. He actually stood on a short runner behind the counter, raising him to Jack’s height. “I hate guessing games, Jack. Just tell us.”

  “The thirty-seventh refers to a superior brandy, the Maidenfire Gold of the year 637 (Dale Reckoning) distilled by Cedrizarun. He was, of course, the master distiller of old Sarbreen. It is supposed to be the most noble spirit ever crafted east of the sea.”

  “That would be more than seven centuries old,” Anders rumbled. “I am sure it was very fine in its day, but none can possibly survive any longer.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Tharzon said. “A human lifetime burns brightly and gutters out in less than a hundred years, but my folk sometimes live to see their fourth century. We contemplate works requiring decades, even centuries, that humans would call impossible. I have seen dwarven spirits two or three centuries old; the Master Distiller might easily have crafted a spirit that might pass decades like a human-wrought brandy would pass years.” His eyes grew dark and thoughtful as the dwarf contemplated the notion. “But where would you find such a thing? And how much would it cost? A single bottle might bring a thousand gold crowns—two thousand gold crowns—in the heart of a dwarven kingdom. I cannot imagine where else you would find it.”

  “I know someone who has a bottle,” Jack said. “For the moment, let us assume that we can borrow it when we need it. Why would a seven hundred year old bottle of brandy be at the center of all? What can it mean to this riddle?”

  “Where was the inscription found?” Tharzon asked.

  “My acquaintance with the expensive taste in liquor took the whole design on this parchment as a rubbing from Cedrizarun’s tomb. No, I don’t know exactly where that lies yet; again, let’s assume that we will be able to gain that knowledge when we need it.”

  “That is twice now you have assumed that a very difficult obstacle to your plan will be easily overcome,” Anders pointed out. “I am not reassured.”

  “Friend Anders, the boldest plans and the loftiest designs demand a mind that is capable of spanning insuperable difficulties to apprehend the most fantastic rewards.” Jack indulged himself in another draught of the ale. “An impossibly rich prize is, by its nature, impossible to obtain, so therefore the prize that is almost impossibly rich is therefore almost impossibly difficult. And if something is almost impossible, well, that means that it is really possible but simply damned hard. Let us not turn away from a wondrous prize until we are certain that it is truly impossible to attain.”

  Tharzon laughed in a low voice. “No one doubts the excessive reach of your ambitions, Jack. It is the length of your grasp that is in question.” The dwarf paused to draw himself a mug of Old Smokey. “This riddle is inscribed on Cedrizarun’s tomb. The vault in which his funerary wealth is interred will be located somewhere near that spot, concealed by the most cunning secret entrance the master masons of old Sarbreen could devise. This riddle must tell you how to find and open the secret door.”

  “Are you certain that Cedrizarun did not intend a good jest at the expense of future tomb robbers?” Anders said. “How do you know that this has anything to do with a vault? For all we know, this is simply his favorite beer recipe, encoded for future brewmasters.”

  “I have spent almost fifty years learning all that I can about Sarbreen’s old wealth and the disposal thereof,” Tharzon said. “Trust me; the Guilder’s Vault exists, despite the fact that it has never been found. Cedrizarun could not be certain that his descendants would retain the secret of his vault’s entrance over the years, so he created the riddle as a clue in the event the knowledge was forgotten.”

  “Yes, but why leave any hints at all? Why leave an entrance to the vault, if it was simply designed to hold the wealth that Cedrizarun chose to take to the grave?” Anders wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Forgive me for saying so, Tharzon, but everyone knows that dwarves despise grave robbers. Why leave potential thieves any kind of a chance at all?”

  Tharzon’s eyes glittered—he’d made quite a handsome living by looting the crypts of his forefathers, even though he viewed it as restoring the glories of lost Sarbreen to their place in the light—but he held his temper. “Because Cedrizarun would want his sons, and their sons, and their sons after them to one day be buried at his side. His body doesn’t lie under the stone or slab this inscription was found on; it lies inside the vault itself, with other places prepared for those who would one day join him there. That is why they would leave a door, Anders Aricssen.”

  “Back to the riddle,” Jack said. “What of ‘these leaves of autumn’? Does that make any sense?”

  Tharzon shrugged. “No, not to me. I have been—”

  “What about these?” Anders reached over and pulled the parchment toward him. “The dwarf-runes are all carved here, in the center of the stone, but there’s a border around the inscription. Grape leaves, perhaps? Could the inscription refer to the border around the words?”

  Tharzon frowned and pulled the parchment back, looking at it more carefully. “I think you are right. Look, in the leaves—see how strangely the vines and the veins are worked? There are runes hidden in the border!” He studied them furiously for several minutes, ignorant of the fact that the Sembians in the other corner demanded more ale. The dwarf didn’t even object when Anders got up and threw out the two merchants, barring the door behind them. After a long time, the dwarf rubbed his eyes and looked up. “Damn it. They mean nothing. Pieces of letters and words, but nothing complete, all of it jumbled together.”

  “But it was deliberate?” Jack asked. “Not a coincidence of design?”

  “The carver worked hard to put them in and conceal them,” Tharzon admitted, “but they don’t make sense! It’s gibberish!”

  Jack put his chin in his hand and thought hard, staring at the riddle. “What if,” he said slowly, “these fractional runes align somehow when you encircle them around something? Say, a particular bottle of brandy?”

  “Hard to imagine wrapping a stone marker around a bottle,” Anders remarked.

  “Yes, it is,” Jack agreed. He picked up the rubbing parchment and looked at it. “But not so hard to imagine wrapping a piece of paper on which the design has copied around a bottle, is it?”

  Tharzon stared at him. Then he seized an empty mug from behind the bar and set it on the counter. “Go on,” he said. “Try it.”

  Jack took the parchment and wrapped it around the mug. He quickly discovered that the parchment simply covered itself up on multiple windings without revealing anything in the border marks. But if he angled the parchment, he created bands in which the border overlapped with the border of the layer underneath. And some of the marks might line up to make whole runes … if he knew just how big the bottle was supposed to be, and how sharply the border strip should incline on its circuit of the bottle.

  “I think,” he said, “that we need the bottle now.”

  Zandria’s home was a strong lodge of stone and timber nestled in a quiet alley of Swordspoint. Once the building had been a woodcarver’s shop, with a large workshop in the stone-walled lower floor and a set of small apartments for the craftsman’s family in the wooden floors above. Finding Zandria had been harder than Jack had expected. Raven’s Bluff was a city that teemed with adventurers, so asking after adventurers took some time. But persistence, silver, and a little luck brought him the address he sought.

  And so on the next morning he found himself in front of the old woodcarver’s house, now converted into a small fortress and stronghold for Zandria and the band of monster slayers, dungeon delvers, tyrant topplers, and peasant protectors who followed her.

  “Illyth would give her eyeteeth to listen to the tales you’d tell,” Jack said to the building. “Noble deeds, daring exploits, glorious battles, and grisly death. What more could a girl ask for?”

  He laughed aloud and bounced up to the door, guarded by a whitewashed shield and scarlet falcon emblem hung over the l
intel. It stood open to the old woodcarver’s workshop; Jack knocked once on the doorframe and stepped inside. “Hello?” he called. “Is Zandria here?”

  Two men worked inside, stoking a fire at the center of an improvised armorer’s shop. Several chain mail shirts rested on thick wooden mannequins along the wall, four suits of full plate armor stood mounted on the opposite wall, and dozens of helms, greaves, vambraces, pauldrons, epaulets, and all the other pieces that went into a fine suit of field armor lay scattered about. Both fellows turned as Jack walked in—tall, powerfully built fellows dressed in smiths’ aprons and marked here and there by various scars, tattoos, nicks, and scrapes. Freebooter swordsmen, Jack decided, now tending to their battered gear.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I am a messenger in the service of Ontrodes the sage.”

  The two swordsmen exchanged glances. One shrugged and wiped his hands on his apron. “Up the stairs. After you, of course.”

  Jack bowed and trotted up the stairs to the upper floor. He emerged in a large common room, dominated by a vast oak table with eight chairs. Trophies and banners decorated the walls—orc battle flags, old Sembian tapestries, Vaasan shields and swords. At one end of the table sat Zandria, surrounded by dozens of texts and manuscripts.

  “Brunn, I told you I was not to be disturbed!” she snapped without looking up. Then she did look up, and her face grew livid as her eyes fell on Jack. “Incredible. Your nerve simply defies belief. Do you want me to burn you to a husk of smoldering ash? Do you have some unnatural desire to meet your death this very instant?”

  “Against my better judgment, I have decided to give you the opportunity to contract my services as guide, advisor, and confidant,” Jack said. He pulled up a chair at the opposite end of the table and poured himself a goblet of watered wine from a silver ewer service. “I will now entertain your solicitations for my assistance.”

  “Zandria, should I throw him out?” the swordsman—Brunn—asked. He moved into a menacing position directly behind Jack.

  “No. Beat him within an inch of his life, and then throw him out.”

  Brunn’s hand came down on Jack’s shoulder, and the powerful fighter started to haul the rogue out of the chair. “Nothing personal,” he grunted. Pinning Jack with his iron grip, he drew back his other hand to begin the pummeling.

  “I’ve solved Cedrizarun’s riddle,” Jack said conversationally. He tried not to shrink from the impending blow. “And I know how to find the Guilder’s Tomb.”

  Brunn furrowed his brow. He had a heavy jaw and a flat, square face that might have looked dull-witted except for the keen alertness in his hard blue eyes. “Zandria, you’ve been trying to make heads or tails of Cedrizarun’s riddle for weeks now. He says he can help. What’s the harm of hearing him out?”

  “You don’t know him like I do,” she snapped.

  “So? Who is he, anyway?”

  Zandria just crossed her arms. Brunn shrugged and turned to Jack. “Fine. So who are you, anyway?”

  “I am Jack Ravenwild. I am an adventurer like yourself, although I am currently between companies. I have some learning, some skill at difficult places, and some magic.” He carefully extricated himself from Brunn’s grasp and fished out the copy of the tomb inscription from his belt. He held it up so that the swordsman could see it. “I’ll tell you how to read this if you consent to my presence on your upcoming expedition and agree to cut me in for a fair share of the Guilder’s loot.”

  “That’s it,” the mage growled. She stepped around the table and stalked up to Jack, murder in her eyes. “There is no arrangement, no employment, no consulting fees. We want nothing to do with you, do you understand me? Now get out of here before I flay the skin from your worthless carcass!”

  Jack flinched from her vitriol. He stood in silence for a good minute, weighing her words. Then he nodded slowly. “Very well. I shall not trouble you with my presence again, my lady.” He rolled up the parchment and stuck it through his belt. “If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with the mage Skellar the Unjust, of the Company of the Dead Troll. Perhaps he’ll be interested—”

  “Stop right there,” Zandria whispered in a deadly voice. “You will not show that parchment to anyone else.”

  “Then allow me to show it to you,” Jack replied. “Bring me your bottle of Maidenfire Gold.”

  “That brandy is worth a thousand gold crowns,” Zandria replied. “I am not going to let your larcenous hands get within ten feet of it.”

  “Then you might as well cut my throat right now!” Jack roared. “ ‘At the center of all the thirty-seventh!’ Do you want to know what that means or not?”

  The mage eyed him coldly. Thinking, then she spun on her heel and stormed out of the room, returning a moment later with the ancient bottle, almost black with age. She set it on the table in front of him without another word.

  Jack took the parchment and spread it flat beside the bottle. “See this exquisite border work? Leaves, vines, a curiously undwarven design? Why do you suppose it is there?”

  Behind him, the swordsman shrugged. “Cedrizarun was a distiller and vintner,” he said. “Not all dwarves work in stone and steel.”

  Jack took the sheet of paper on which he’d copied the rubbing and turned back to the bottle. “ ‘At the center of all the thirty-seventh, encircled by these leaves of autumn.’ ” He looked carefully at the bottle; it was spun glass that had been shaped while warm, pressed and sculpted with a relief showing dimly a field or farmland. The same design was repeated four times around the bottle’s circumference—the field under winter snow, spring plowing, summer with high waves of grain, and autumn reaping. The sun shone down over each scene. “ ’Mark carefully the summer staircase.”

  Using the sun over the summer scene as his starting point, Jack wrapped the parchment clockwise around the bottle. The distance that the sun stood over the field he used as the rise of the winding.

  The inscription fit exactly three times in circumference. And it inclined just enough that the bottom border overlapped itself, revealing a faint line of dwarf-runes concealed amid the leaf design. “Bring me some sealing wax,” Jack said softly, holding the parchment in his hands. Zandria stirred and retrieved a block of red wax from her work desk, muttering a small cantrip to soften it. “Now adhere the sheet to itself at just this position. I will hold it steady.” The mage did so, frowning in concentration as she worked around Jack’s hands.

  Gingerly, Jack released his grip and stepped back, leaving the bottle standing on the table in its parchment wrapping. He bent low to study the runes without touching or displacing them, Zandria’s face just beside his.

  “Another message,” she breathed in wonder. “Ten paces south. Speak ‘kharaz-urzu.’ Raise the sevenstone.”

  Jack stood up straight and grinned in delight. “Shall we discuss terms?” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They settled on two of eleven shares for Jack, which was better than he had expected. Zandria’s adventuring company included five other full partners, each entitled to a full share. She claimed three shares as the leader of the band. The remaining share was set aside to split between several men-at-arms and specialists retained by the Company of the Red Falcon in order to shore up its numbers for the recovery of a major hoard from the depths of lost Sarbreen. Zandria was willing to assign Jack one share for solving the puzzle, but refused to consider more than that until he promised to share in the company’s risks and labors by participating in the expedition.

  Even then, Jack thought that the mage agreed too quickly. Upon leaving the company’s headquarters, he went straightaway to Anders and Tharzon and began planning the operation by which Zandria’s band would be relieved of the burden of managing their newfound wealth. And he also set the Northman to watching Zandria’s band night and day, expecting that she would be tempted to use the knowledge he’d provided without actually observing every detail of their agreement. In Jack’s experience, a quick assent
in any negotiation of this sort meant that the other party had decided they could get what they wanted by more expedient means.

  That attended to, he returned to his apartment to prepare for the day’s more significant event—the exchange with Elana. He’d been thinking of her more and more frequently as this day approached, until he found himself almost shaking in nervous anticipation as sunset neared. He bathed and dressed with care, selecting clothes that marked him as a serious professional, a man confident in his own abilities, a man who got what he wanted by hard work and hard choices.

  Elana was a trained swordswoman, a woman versed in discipline and confidence; she had no patience for fops or dandies, but a fellow thief, daring but not boastful, businesslike but not mercenary … who knew what might happen?

  “After all,” Jack told himself in the mirror as he shaved, “it would be a matter of common sense to make it as easy as possible for the lady to uphold her end of our arrangement.”

  Jack dressed in plain black with a padded doublet of glossy leather and well-brushed boots that matched handsomely. He disdained any flamboyance, covering his head with a simple cap and sheathing both rapier and poignard on his left hip in the Vilhonese style. Then he disarmed the numerous traps he’d set over the Sarkonagael’s hiding place, wrapped the heavy tome in plain burlap, and stuffed the whole thing into a leather pouch secured to his shoulder.

  He sallied forth an hour after sunset, turning up his face to the fine mist that hung in the air. More spring rain—a sign of turbulent weather to come. Yellow lanternlight gleamed on the wet cobblestones, and Burnt Gables was quiet save for the occasional carriage clip-clopping by in the damp night.

  “How perfectly suited for clandestine meetings and secret doings,” he said with a laugh. “An auspicious start to the evening’s festivities!”