“That’s the guy you were patrolling against, back in Lastwall?” Zae asked. “The one who’s slumbering but not actually dead, even now?”
Keren nodded. “Even now. That tells you how powerful he is. Well, at the time of the Shining Crusade, they didn’t know he was that powerful, but they figured it out soon enough. Overwhelmed, the Knights of Ozem—”
“Led by mortal Iomedae?”
“Led by mortal Iomedae, the Knights of Ozem called Arazni to their aid. But the Tyrant was stronger than the Knights realized. He was not only stronger than the three combined forces, but he was stronger than Arazni, too. You’d think once a god, or even a demigod, joined the fight, it would be over fairly quickly. Maybe not in a few minutes, but certainly by the end of the day. No. For five years, she helped them fight. And eventually the Tyrant captured her.”
“He killed her?”
“Not at first.” Keren uncurled one hand from her cup and then the other, stretching her fingers to unclench them, as if she could calm herself with will alone. “He tortured her first. Accounts differ on how long he tortured her, or exactly what he did. Then he killed her.”
Zae looked up from her tea. “He killed a god.”
“Demigod, technically. But yes.”
“No wonder Vigil is so, well, vigilant about making sure he stays asleep.”
Keren had made that same statement more than once. “Exactly. But he wasn’t put down right away. The crusade went on. A few years later, at the Battle of Three Sorrows, the Tyrant threw her broken body out at her knights, to demoralize and distract them.”
Zae winced. “I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if someone took Brigh apart the way Apple took apart that construct.” She reached down and rubbed the dog’s head.
“I can’t imagine it either. It’s one of those things you learn about as a small child, and either it gives you nightmares for years and makes you vow to keep the Tyrant from ever getting that strong a foothold in the world again, or it makes you move and take up some other vocation entirely, very far away.”
“And as the daughter of someone who’d made that vow and wasn’t going anywhere…”
“Two someones who’d made that vow. Yes.” It was out before she could stop herself. Keren never spoke about her mother, not to Zae or anyone else. Avoidance of the topic was another thing she had inherited from her father.
“Keren—” Zae offered her hand, for comfort.
Keren shook her head. There would be time for comfort later, curled up together in the dark. She thought about her training session earlier, about how being on her back had made her vulnerable and open. Maybe that was part of why pillow talk felt so intimate.
This was not a story she could tell while vulnerable.
“Arazni’s knights laid her body to rest in state in Vigil, where their influence was strongest. Then they went on in their crusade against evil, in her name. Sixty-some years later, though, the Knights of Ozem again underestimated the strength of their enemy. By this time, they were fighting the evil necromancer Geb, who ruled over an undead country of the same name. Geb—the ruler, not the country—raised the Knights of Ozem he slew, called them graveknights, and ordered them to steal Arazni’s corpse from its resting place. They brought her back to Geb, who reanimated her as a lich to be his plaything. He called her his Harlot Queen.”
Zae’s eyes shone wetly. She brushed a sleeve across her face and shook her head. “Liquid empathy. Sorry. As if that poor woman hadn’t been through enough. Tortured by a creepy dead king, killed, stolen, brought back to be used by another creepy dead king. I’ve never been to Geb, partly because I’m small and tasty, but I’ve traveled through Nex…”
“And Nex has a long, bad history with its neighbor,” Keren finished for her.
“Right. That’s why I knew the name. Even now, Arazni rules Geb, while Geb himself—well, if stories are true, Geb-the-ruler spends all his eternal unlife obsessing about whether Nex will encroach on his borders again. But anyway. Arazni.”
Keren drank her tea, which had gone cool. Zae refreshed the cup for her. Its warmth felt like the heat of life, and she clung to it. “Arazni. Yes. Once upon a time there was a lich queen named Arazni, who retained nothing of her former self. Over centuries, Geb had stripped away her goodness and humanity, turned her against her former life, and brought her to accept her new station. But Arazni, as a lich, had a weakness. Her internal organs were no longer internal. They had been removed during the…” She fumbled for the word.
“The liching process?” Zae supplied.
“I think I was going for ‘ritual,’ but yes. They had been removed in the liching process and stored in canopic jars. The Bloodstones of Arazni, they’re called. One for each of her four vital organs. They say that the jars continually drip with her blood.”
“Well, that’s pleasant.”
“Very. Anyway, now the Knights of Ozem come back into the story.” Keren drank, wetting her throat, and took a moment to inhale the steam.
“Did they know Arazni was there? Did they try to rescue her?”
“Oh, yes. And yes. We’ve never given up, not really. But don’t forget, the first knights to invade Geb were raised as graveknights for their trouble—her own elite army of corrupted, undead servants, made from the bodies of knights of her former order. Their souls aren’t in their organs, like with Arazni, but in their armor. As long as the armor is intact, it will regenerate them again and again. They’re made from people like me, to destroy people like me.”
Zae stared. That liquid empathy she had mentioned was welling up again, and it threatened to spill down her cheeks. It touched Keren so much that she had to look away. “By the Bronze, Keren … And they teach this to you as children? How do they expect you to ever sleep?”
“When you grow up with these truths,” she said quietly, “you find them woven into the very fiber of who you are. They form your heart, making you loyal to your cause. They form your spine, making you brave for your cause. They form your hands and feet, making you an instrument of your cause. It’s so ingrained that, after a time, you stop thinking about the story because it’s in your bones. You don’t have to think about it for it to be with you in every moment.”
Zae squeezed her arm. “And you surround yourself with other people who also live it, so you don’t need you to explain it.”
“Yes. So. The horror is there, but it feeds the conviction. Someday, we’ll figure out how to get her back. We’ll rescue her and put her to rest. We just haven’t figured out how yet. Geb is too strong, and she’s stuck under his thrall, so she doesn’t want to go. Anyway, the point of all this is, the Knights of Ozem didn’t manage to save her, but they managed to retrieve her canopic jars—the Bloodstones of Arazni—and they keep them hidden for a time when they might be used to revive her.”
Zae stared. “Oh, I know where this is going, don’t I?”
“I suspect you do.”
“Someone’s stolen one of these things, and the opposing side that’s looking for them…”
“Answers to Arazni, yes.”
Zae sat back, putting thoughts together. “I don’t know what I find more strange: you knights of valor sneaking into the land of the undead to steal really old bodily organs, or someone wanting one enough to fight you for it. Do they do anything?”
“For you or me? Not very much. There’s a blessing, I think, different blessings depending on which organ. Because she served Aroden, they contain a trace of his divine magic as well as her own. But if Arazni got them back, people believe she’d be as powerful as she was before. Among other things, that means she would have the power to slaughter all the knights of her former order and raise them as undead under her control, desecrating them and giving herself a powerful undead army.” Keren reached out and ruffled Apple’s ears. “For obvious reasons, that can’t be allowed to happen.”
“You have my full support and aid. If you had to be a lich, it would probably strain our relationship.”
This was the sort of whimsical pragmatism that had attracted Keren to the gnome in the first place, and it had never worn off.
“Only probably?” She drew Zae into her arms and they spent the rest of the evening in cozy, vulnerable silence.
11
DRAFTED INTO DRAFTING
ZAE
Zae went about her usual morning routine, different only in that she poured two mugs of tea instead of preparing two and pouring one. Keren, who always rose later, had wanted the extra morning time to tell Zae about the pickpocket who’d gone to lengths to press a pouch upon her at the Starstone Cathedral the day before. It was alarming but, in light of the nature of the artifact and the complex relationship which Keren’s order had with it, not surprising. When Zae showed Keren her finger, even though it had been healed over and there wasn’t much to see, Keren sighed and declared them even.
“I’m glad Yenna trusted you, but what does this mean in terms of what we need to look out for? More undead people in alleys?”
“Most of Arazni’s people aren’t undead. Sometimes the living try to curry favor so that they can be well placed in Gebbite society when they die. Taking a mission like this, to secure one of her organs, would certainly be worth a lot of favor. Others are nationalists; regular people whose ancestors happened to have settled in Geb, and whose families have never moved.”
“Anything becomes normal if you live with it long enough,” Zae agreed. “Or if you’re born to it.”
They shared a moment of tender silence. Zae brushed brown hair back from Keren’s temple, drinking in the strong lines of her cheek and jaw.
“But you asked how we can help.” Keren leaned in to the touch for a moment before straightening. “Yenna said there are a lot of different rumors buzzing around, about where the Bloodstone is and what it’s been stolen for.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, that the necromancers of the Whispering Way want it, as leverage against Geb. There’s also talk of it being used to power some new construct in the Clockwork Cathedral.”
“Oh,” Zae said. “I did see one group that was more secretive than most of the others. In fact, I’ve already promised to go back for a medic shift tonight. I can peek around then. Are we sure, though, that one of Arazni’s people didn’t steal it?”
“We’re sure. They’d have taken it right back to her. They wouldn’t still be milling around town with it.”
“And there’s no divining for it, I imagine, or they’d have done that already?”
Keren nodded. “Yenna couldn’t say whether it’s Arazni who’s blocking our efforts, to keep us from finding the Bloodstone, or whether it’s a property that was imbued into them when they were created, or if it’s a protection Iomedae added later to help us keep them hidden. Even Arazni can only detect them when they’re used—which means that the thief must have some sort of shielded container that keeps her from feeling the stone. No one else can detect them by magical means at all.”
“Arazni … feels them?”
“They’re still her internal organs. If the jars are out of whatever protections keep them hidden, supposedly she can feel them twinge, then send a graveknight to retrieve them.”
“Wait. One of those nightmare things might be here?”
“Was here. Yes. I’m as pleased about that as you might expect. One showed up, which was how the order knew the Bloodstone was here. They drove it off, at great cost, but if the stone is uncovered again it’ll be back. And on that cheery note…” Keren scraped her chair back. “It looks like breakfast is about to boil over.”
Zae kissed her knight, they broke fast together—porridge with fruit and preserves stirred in—and Zae wandered off to pray to Brigh and prepare her spells for the day.
Yesterday, she had needed to heal herself and potentially others. Today, she added mending and other artifice spells, since she wasn’t sure what sort of work Renwick would have her doing. Considering Keren’s new information, she put a few others on the list as well.
Content with her choices, she closed her eyes and focused in prayer, thumb ticking the spells off on the teeth of her gear pendant, each in its turn. When she was finished, all was quiet. She peeked in on Keren, who seemed to be concentrating deeply, seated on the bed with her sword across her lap and something small held lightly in her hands.
Zae dressed quietly, kissed Appleslayer on the head, and left a hasty note on the table for Keren. Carefully, she eased open the front door, only to have her stealthy exit blocked by Apple, whining at being left behind.
“Aw, sweetie dog,” she whispered, cradling his face in her hands and rubbing behind his ears. His muzzle parted, pink tongue lolling out, and his tail started up a hesitant but happy wag. “You’ll go with Keren again today. You’ll learn all sorts of fun dog stuff. Okay?”
Appleslayer huffed, a particularly expressive canine sigh, and licked Zae’s nose. He sat back on his haunches and yawned, watching her leave. She still felt guilty, but she was certain that on some level the dog understood her. She knew he’d have fun playing with his trainer and learning tricks, so she didn’t feel that guilty; not for long.
Zae was among the first to arrive at the tea shop cellar. Renwick, already halfway through a chipped cup of steaming tea, gestured toward the samovar and then invited Zae to join him. He had a stack of gears on the table in front of him, but apparently these didn’t count as active work and could share a table with a couple of beverages. When she returned with a full mug, she saw that they were her gears from the previous day. At least, her initial was marked on them in grease pencil, and she hadn’t yet met anyone else with a Z name in the cognate.
“How’s your finger?” he asked her.
Zae’s trepidation at being judged had eclipsed her memory, even though she’d told Keren about her injury just this morning, so it took a moment to realize what he meant. “Oh—back to working order, thank you. Glivia’s looking forward to studying it. Are those my work?”
He lifted the topmost spur gear from the stack, turning it in the light. “And good work they are. You’re a natural at it. Ever done wooden gears?”
“Of course.”
“Cut whole or with inlaid teeth?”
“Both.”
“Let’s see some, then.”
Zae fumbled around in her satchel and pulled out a velvet pouch. These were her ceremonial gears, because they were her best work and too precious to put into a device and never see again. She spilled them out onto the table and sorted them flat.
Some were simple, some were ornate. She had spur gears, worm gear sets, and planetary gears. Some of them, wooden and metal alike, were filigreed or engraved, or had intricate inlays of other materials.
Renwick’s low whistle was better than praise. “You could make a living off these in some parts of the world.”
“I have, from time to time. Not a terribly successful living, since I never want to sell the pretty ones.”
The dwarf answered with a booming laugh. “I think you’re sufficiently advanced to join the main student body. It’s clear you don’t need remedial instruction. We’ll be over at the cathedral today, using some of the larger drills and presses. So, drink up, but don’t drink too much.”
Ruby was the next to arrive, her bird fluttering off her shoulder to fly a circuit of the room. It landed on her saw contraption from the day before, preening its pinfeathers and waiting for her to catch up. She spared a warm smile for Zae on her way to the samovar for tea.
The rest of the cognate gradually trickled in, arriving in the cellar and moving immediately toward the stack of cups and mugs on the sideboard. Zae listened for footfalls on the floorboards above, but heard none; each new arrival was a surprise, suggesting that the rickety cellar was at least as well reinforced as the cathedral workrooms themselves.
Rowan was one of the last to arrive, and he bounded down the stairs as if they were on fire. “Zae, Renwick, you’ll never guess what happened. I got offered a commissio
n from the city government. They want me to make them a device! Is it all right if I use cognate resources? It’s kind of a rush job, and—”
Renwick held up one thick hand. Rowan stopped talking, pressing his lips together tightly. The halfling vibrated with the effort to keep still.
“Slower this time,” Renwick requested, “and with breathing.”
Rowan took a couple of slow breaths, glancing at the cognate’s leader as if seeking his approval for them. Renwick nodded, and the halfling started again.
“I got a commission from the city government. This district councilor summoned me to a meeting and said they need a prototype for a weighted net that’s magic-resistant, and something to carry it with to make it manageable despite the weightedness. It’s so the city guard can detain wizards and sorcerers humanely, because it’s hard to capture a fleeing caster without harming them. I reminded the councilor that I’m a healer, and she said they want healers building it to make sure it’s humane and won’t hurt the targets. ‘The best way to heal someone is to not hurt them in the first place,’ she said. I think that might have to become my own personal motto now.”
Renwick tugged at his beard. “Interesting. Do you know how you’re going to do it?”
“Not exactly.”
“I know a smith who has a quantity of a noqual alloy on hand. He mentioned it to me last night over a pint. It’s expensive, but it’s got anti-magic properties. If your client is the city of Absalom…”
“Whoa,” Glivia breathed. “Noqual’s a skymetal. Do you want help? I’ve never worked with skymetal.”
“I’ve got an advance to buy supplies. I get another payment when I show them my plans, and the final once the work is done,” Rowan said. “What if I can hand in the plans after class? Where’s your friend? It would be great if we could start drawing wire tonight. Zae’s coming with me to do rounds. Who else wants to help? It’ll be faster as a group, and I’ll share the pay.”
Zae was touched to be automatically volunteered without having to ask. It increased her sense of belonging even more. Noqual was rare enough to be nearly mythical in most parts of the world, since it only appeared when it fell literally from the sky in meteoric form, and she was as eager to try working with it—even with metal that only contained a bit of it—as the rest of her peers.
Pathfinder Tales--Gears of Faith Page 10
