Jendara followed Tam's light, feeling the cave's blackness like velvet pressing against her skin, her nostrils. She wanted to run outside before the cave smothered her. But she couldn't stop thinking of that horrible wail. It wasn't Kran—he could make a few sounds, but none so loud or carrying. She reminded herself of that fact again and again.
It still made her skin crawl.
"Remember," Tam called over his shoulder. "Keep an eye on the person ahead of you. The floor of these places isn't always—"
His voice cut off in a scream and his light disappeared.
Jendara darted forward. "Tam!"
"Jendara, stop!" Vorrin shouted.
She froze. By the glow of her lantern, she could see the sudden drop Tam hadn't. The tunnel opened into great mouthing darkness that her lantern barely began to light. "Are you all right?"
"My arm's caught." Tam grunted. "Caught bad."
Vorrin knelt beside her. "I can wrap a rope around this bit of stalagmite, lower you down. Be some work getting the two of you up again, but I can manage it."
Jendara held her lantern over the cliff’s edge, getting a glimpse of Tam's red hair about seven feet below her, just above the floor of what must be a vast cavern. The cliff broke up into long fingers of rock at the bottom, and he hung from the crotch of the two tallest. Jendara shook her head. "Damn, that's ugly. Let's do this fast before he loses an arm."
Somewhere in the darkness, the wail sounded again. Jendara felt gooseflesh prickle as she passed her length of rope to Vorrin.
"Make a good knot when you join those."
He brushed his fingers down her cheek. "The best."
She didn't watch him tie the two ropes together or wrap the rope around the rock, just moved her lantern out of the way and rubbed dirt into the palms of her hands. She didn't need any sweat to make climbing harder.
Vorrin wrapped the rope around her waist and tied it tight. She clambered over the cliff edge, and after only a moment's climbing could hear Tam's pained breathing below her. He was too much the islander to groan or whimper—the raw rasp of his inhalations was as bad as a scream. But there was no way to climb faster. No light, no ladder, just her fingers and toes searching out purchase on the cracked rocks.
Suddenly Jendara's palms went sweat-slick. Her fingers slipped off the narrow handhold, and for a sickening second she swung from the end of the rope, her face scraping the cavern wall.
"Jendara!" Vorrin yelled.
Then her foot found a hold, a rock spur of some kind. "I'm okay!"
And wished she'd been quiet as a frenzied barking sounded out in the darkness.
"Gods," Tam groaned. Jendara could see what he saw, a brightening in the distance like flickering torchlight. She thought of the goblin dog scat on the boat and climbed faster.
The bottom of the cliff came as a surprise. Now that she was down, Vorrin's hands were free to hoist the lantern, lighting up Tam and the rocky ground.
The goblin dog's snarl echoed off the walls of the great cavern. Jendara loosened the rope from her waist and stretched on tiptoe to work it around Tam's. His breathing was just tiny gasps now. Every ounce of his body hung from the pinned arm.
Jendara locked her arms around his thighs, grunting as she lifted him up out of the vise. A horrible squeak choked in his throat, and the big man went limp. "Damn it," she whispered. She could only hope he'd regain consciousness soon. She couldn't get him back up that cliff on her own.
Pressing herself against the rock that had gripped him, she pushed off again, getting a little higher. Tam coughed and wriggled. Suddenly all his weight was on Jendara and she staggered.
"Vorrin, he's free!"
"Islander, pirate—but most of all, mother."
The light disappeared, and after a second some of the weight came off Jendara.
Behind the rocks, the goblin dog shrieked. Jendara stiffened as she heard a sound she knew only too well, the dry scrape of air moving in a throat that had never spoken. Kran's strange laugh.
"Kran!"
She pushed Tam back against the cliff face, propping him against the wall. She could smell the blood seeping from his scraped and mangled shoulder. "Be right back, friend."
Then she was off. She wished for her own lantern, but guttering torchlight guided her forward, as did a cacophony of sounds: the hollow wailing, a clatter of stones, the hideous sounds of goblin speech.
A goblin dog lay twitching on the cave floor, the end of a very familiar pocketknife jutting out of its eye socket. Its rider had rolled free, and swung a torch around its swollen gray head to block the volley of rocks Kran lobbed at its face. One goblin, alone. Jendara grinned to herself and felt for her belt axe. She could handle one goblin scout and a dead dog.
The belt axe soared through the air. The wet thud of it sinking into the goblin's skull was like music.
Kran dropped his rocks and ran to the dead dog. He jerked his knife free and began to cut at the black pack on the dog's back, which wailed and wriggled. Jendara reclaimed her axe and jogged to his side.
It was no pack, she realized. The glossy black hide belonged to a bear cub, a cut seeping blood along its side. She held its paws as Kran struggled to cut the last of its ties. The white blaze on its nose triggered prickles on the back of her neck.
A grizzly rampaging last night. An island under attack this afternoon.
A goblin scout here right now.
"We've got to get out of here." She tucked the bear cub under her arm and grabbed Kran by the hand, racing for Tam and the only way she knew out of the cave.
"Vorrin! Hurry up!" she bellowed. She didn't wait for him to begin pulling. She slapped Kran on the butt and urged him up the cliff, scurrying behind him. One-handed, weighed down by the bear, she still made it up before Vorrin finished hauling Tam.
They worked together to half-drag Tam out of the tunnel and down to the beach. By the time they hit the sand, they could see the goblin torches flickering at the mouth of the cave, brighter than the faint orange of sunset over the sea.
"How did you know there were more?" Vorrin asked.
"The bear," Jendara grunted, shifting Tam's weight against herself. "The goblins must have scared it last night when they took to the caves. The attack on Black Bay Island was a distraction."
Oric jerked awake from his post on a washed-up log. "Wha—"
But Jendara cut him off. "Run back to your village. If there's trouble, let us know."
His eyes were huge as he nodded and dashed away.
Jendara could already smell smoke. Her stomach sank as they rounded the headland. Flames stained the sky. Oric stood frozen, staring at his burning village.
Behind them, goblin riders whooped and cheered.
Jendara passed her son the injured bear cub. "Kran, run to the Milady and arm yourself. Help the crew protect the docks. And take Oric!"
The boy looked pale, but did as he was told. Jendara smiled up at Tam. "I sure hope you can fight left-handed."
He gave a weak laugh and took up a fighting stance. Jendara felt heat course through her veins, the ice that gripped her all day melting away. She rubbed the tattoos on the backs of her hands and chuckled to herself.
"Little bastards don't know what they're in for."
∗∗∗
Jendara stood beside the mound of goblin dead and waited for Vorrin to pass her the torch. Her arms ached with exhaustion, but she felt proud: proud of herself and the people she'd helped defend. A group of women stood close by, and at least one smiled at her. She'd forgotten that, whatever other duties the women of the islands might have, they could still fight. They weren't so different, she and them.
A great roar came up from the docks as the villagers cheered for their returning kin. But many minutes passed before Jendara made out the shapes of the returning war party, and even in the moonlight, she could see a grimness in their approach. The man in front led a shorter figure on a rope.
Oric jumped up from his seat beside Kran. "Father! You're home!" He dashed toward the men but stopped as the torchlight revealed the scowl on his father's face.
"What happened?" Morul growled. "Smoke fills the sky above the island. We found this filth looting the tavern on Black Bay. And all the village gathers here to make a bonfire?"
Vorrin handed the torch to Jendara, and she held it a moment above the goblins. "Not just any bonfire. While you fought the fires on Black Bay Island, the main goblin troop prepared to attack your village under the cover of darkness. They would have succeeded, too, if not for our sons and their furry friend here."
Kran hugged the bear cub, who made a sleepy grumble.
"Bears? Boys? I don't understand."
The wise woman stepped forward. "Know that we only lost one building—the meeting house—and have only two wounded. Jendara and her people helped greatly."
Morul tugged the rope lead hard enough to send the small, dirty man at its end sprawling. "And what of this trash?" Gorg groaned from the sand, but didn't move.
Jendara smiled. "I have an idea." She beckoned to Morul and, when he joined her beside the bonfire, murmured quietly for a moment.
He looked from the cowering Gorg to the villagers to the pile of dead goblins. And then to Jendara. "You truly are Erik Eriksson's daughter, aren't you?"
She laughed and lit the bonfire.
∗∗∗
Vorrin watched Jendara finish tucking the blankets around a sleeping Kran and a snoring baby bear. He waited for her to close the cabin door behind her and join him on the deck. The night was clear and the stars brilliant.
Jendara could tell he wanted to say something—something meaningful and true about the day, about helping the village women fight off the goblins, about finding Kran, about everything they had done. But he knew better. Instead, he settled for standing with her and grinning as they watched a small boat row out of the harbor. "Nice of Gorg to chip in like that. Glad he didn't have any hard feelings after that beating we gave him."
"You'd think he'd need his ship, but it was thoughtful of him to leave it to the village for rebuilding materials." Jendara laughed, then sobered.
She reached out to the grizzly fur, still sitting on the deck. "You know, it's funny how this bear saved so many people. If the goblins hadn't driven her out of the caves, she would never have lost her baby or attacked Yul's sheep. Kran wouldn't have followed his ears down into that cavern. Right now, we'd be sailing for the mainland, and a lot of people would be dead."
"That's some bear." Vorrin studied the moon a moment. "Are you disappointed that we missed the tide?"
She shook her head. "No. Not one bit. It felt nice tonight. Like being part of someplace. Like having a home."
He reached for his pipe and lit it, puffing until the coals glowed red. "You know, when we get done selling this load, maybe we should come back here. It'd make for a nice summer harbor."
Jendara looked sideways at him. "You saying we should tie up for summer?"
He puffed the pipe again. "There should be a place we can take the ship for repairs and supplies. A place to let Kran get his land legs. What do you think?"
She nodded, and felt herself begin to smile. Behind his pipe, Vorrin was doing the same.
Neither of them had used the word "home." But for two retired pirates, it was a pretty good first step.
Coming Next Week: Scaly adventures in the Sodden Lands in Ari Marmell's "Hell or High Water"
Wendy N. Wagner is the author of short stories in such anthologies and magazines as Armored, Way of the Wizard, Rigor Amortis, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. She is a regular contributor to inkpunks.com, and can be found online at winniewoohoo.com.
"Where's my son?" Jendara's voice rumbled like a great beast's growl. Vorrin gripped her elbow, hard.
The boys stared back at her for a second, then bolted.
"Come back!" Jendara yanked her arm, but Vorrin kept his grip.
"They won't talk to you," he snapped. "Hell, you scare me."
Yul chuckled. "You're right, mainlander. The boys will run home to hide. We'll go door to door. I know their fathers."
But as he led them deeper into the village, a hunting horn blew a long blast, then two short. Yul stiffened. "That's the call to town meeting. The emergency signal."
"We'll come," Vorrin said, and tightened his grip on Jendara's arm. She could feel her heart pick up its beat. An emergency, and Kran missing...
The narrow walkways filled with people, all chattering in high, tense tones. Everyone hurried toward the peak-roofed structure at the center of the village, the only building unclad by turf, and painted in dizzying shades of reds and blues. The church and meeting house. Jendara's family had practiced no faith, but town business was serious religion for anyone in a small town. She'd spent plenty of time in her own village's meeting hall. Just looking at it made her feel smaller and younger.
But her shoulders stiffened as she stepped inside. An elder in a wise woman's black kirtle and chemise stood beside a bandaged man, who alone sat on a wooden bench. The right side of his beard was blackened, in some places singed to the skin. The woman offered him a mug, and he sipped at it with a grimace.
Yul leaned to whisper at Jendara and her friends: "That's Birn, the chief's son from our neighbormost island. Their best fighter."
The cold prickling on Jendara's neck intensified. Instinct told her that whatever trouble had beset Birn somehow touched her son.
Another man stepped onto a podium. His red cloak proclaimed him a leader of some kind, and his craggy face bore more than a passing resemblance to Yul's. "Grave news, my friends. A goblin raiding party attacked our neighbors. Birn here rowed an hour to bring half a dozen wounded children to be treated by our wise woman."
Birn looked up, unflinching as the woman in question tightened a bandage around his right hand. "Most of our warriors are away, on a trading expedition. Our women and older children even now fight the fires the creatures have set. Our own wise woman was ripped apart by their dogs."
Jendara shook her head. This was bad news. With the benefit of surprise, a crew of goblins could wreck an entire village. Those people needed help. But she didn't have time to go on a rescue mission. She had a son to find. She began to turn away from the speakers, but paused as her eye caught movement at the front of the room. A towheaded boy hurried toward the man in the red cloak. She would have recognized him anywhere.
She tugged Yul's fur vest. "That's the one who stole my boy's tassel."
He frowned. "My nephew, Oric. We'll have to wait for the meeting to finish before we approach my brother."
Jendara shifted on impatient feet, listening as the warriors around her suggested and discarded course after course of action. Several of the women spoke quietly to the wise woman and then hurried off to their duties: preparing the warriors' fighting gear, gathering medicine, darting over to the wise woman's cottage to tend the injured children. Even if this was her home village, Jendara knew she wouldn't be joining them. She had taken on a warrior's life when she joined the pirate crew, closing the door on such domestic fellowship.
Yul caught her attention and they pushed forward through the crowd. His brother had neatly divided the group into parties, and now he clasped wrists with each of the men he'd commanded to lead. For a moment, Jendara pitied the goblins. These men knew battle, with their seamed faces and silvered scars. Most islanders practiced trade as the seasons turned, but in a land of quick tempers and fierce pride, everyone brought their shields and belt axes to the trading table.
"Yul." The leader clapped his brother on the shoulder. "I thought you'd stay with your wife. Her belly is fit to burst."
"Ayuh, her time is near." Yul leaned closer to his brother's ear. "I didn't come to volunteer, Morul. I came to ask you about your boy. I fear he brought harm to a visitor, the son of my new friend Jendara."
"Islanders give little credit to a mainlander like Vorrin."
The light-haired boy crept back into the shadows behind his father. Jendara narrowed her eyes at him.
Morul grunted. "There's a boatload of injured here to tend, and a second to follow. There are goblins on Black Bay Island and no idea how they got there. I've got a war party to lead and defenses ready. I've no time to talk about children."
"I'll help with your goblins if you help with my boy," Jendara interjected. "Just need a word with your son, that's all. Get my boy back safe."
Morul looked Jendara from head to toe. He could be Yul's twin, he looked so much like the craggy farmer, and a sharp intelligence flared behind his blue eyes. The islanders followed him not just for his brawn, but his brain. "Why are you so worried about your boy, woman?"
She set her jaw. "He's a mute. Plenty of folks reckon that's reason enough to give him trouble."
Morul nodded. "Ayuh, that's reason to worry." He glanced at her belt axe. "You any good with that thing?"
Vorrin spoke first. "I served beside her in many battles. She's faster and meaner than any man I've ever sailed with." Beside him, Tam nodded.
The leader of the islanders looked unimpressed.
Jendara tried not to shift impatiently. Her father would have never taken Vorrin's word, either. "My father led the men of his island in twenty-five battles and never lost a one. He trained me like I was his son, and kept me at his right hand for six trading parlays."
"And his name?"
"Erik Eriksson the White."
Both Yul and Morul looked pleased. It was not a great or famous name, but well traveled. Like her abilities with axe and sword, trade was in Jendara's blood naturally. Everyone knew Erik Eriksson the White.
"A fine man and long missed. I will accept your offer of help against the goblins." Morul turned to the boy. "Oric is a boy for pranks. Come here, lad."
The tow-headed boy slunk toward them, his hands twisted behind his back.
"Show me the tassel," Jendara snapped. Kran would have been familiar with the steely tone.
Oric put out his hand, the yellow tassel sitting on his palm. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
Morul cuffed the side of the boy's head. "An islander speaks with pride even if he fears his punishment."
"I'm sorry!" Oric barked, stiffening his spine.
Jendara took the tassel. "Do you know where the mute boy—my son—went?"
Oric nodded. He cleared his throat. "Some visitor men on the pier told us you were a pirate. So we told Kran he ought to visit the pirate caves at the end of the island. That's all."
Jendara glanced at the tassel and raised an eyebrow.
"Okay, we took his hat and we messed around with it. And we told him he was nothing but a chicken liver if he didn't go down to the caves and come back with gold to prove he'd been there. But that's it! He even took his hat back." He looked up at her, then added in a mumble, "He gave my cousin a black eye."
Jendara felt a moment's pride for her boy, quickly overrun by anxiety. "Caves?"
Morul's lips thinned. "I doubt he went too far in, but it's an extensive network. Oric, take the visitors to our home. Get lights and rope."
Jendara nodded. "We'll join you as soon as we can. Thank you for your help."
She followed Oric out of the meetinghouse, the others following behind. Yul tapped her shoulder, his face troubled.
"I must go home to my wife now, but I wish you luck in your mission."
She thanked him for his help, and clapped him on the arm before hurrying after the others. Oric moved swiftly, gathering supplies from the family storehouse and then leading the rescue party down the beach. The sun's rays cast long, pale fingers of light across the sea, their touch failing to ease the chill in Jendara's heart. Goblins to fight, her son exploring in the darkness—it all felt like bad omens.
They rounded the headland of the beach, and she could see the caves cut into the cliffs at its end. There were multiple openings at different points in the rock face, and for the first time, her own fear touched her, freezing her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She was a child of open farmland and open sea. She had never been in a cave before.
"Kran!"
Tam shook his head. "Spare your voice, lady. The way the waves echo in there, ain't no point shouting." He turned to Vorrin. "You mind if I lead? I grew up playing in caves like these."
Vorrin happily agreed.
Tam stopped a moment to light the lanterns Oric had brought for them. He smiled at the boy, who looked anxious. "Why don't you be our lookout, lad? If we need help, we'll shout for you, and you can run back to the village."
"I can do that, sir."
"Great. Then let's go into the first cave. It looks like it's right at the water line and the easiest to get into."
Jendara eyeballed the rocks flanking the cave's entrance. They looked rough and slick, the waves spitting up foam that clung to their dark flanks. One misstep, and a boy would tumble into the water. A boy or his mother, she reminded herself. She was glad she had a good sense of balance after working on ships all these years.
The yellow glow of Tam's lantern lit up the dark hollow of the cave, and as Jendara followed behind him, her own light redoubled the glow. It wasn't much of a cave, just ten or twelve feet gnawed into the cliff wall. A battered rowboat bobbed on the waves, as if sheltering peacefully while waiting for its owner.
"What's this?" Tam murmured, peering inside. He jumped back, nearly toppling off the rock he'd been balancing on.
"What is it?" Vorrin asked.
But Jendara could see for herself the still figure at the bottom of the boat, the long white hair and singed black cloak. The wise woman from Black Bay Island.
Tam leaned over again, his nose wrinkling as he pointed out a smear of dung on the gunwale. "I'm not sure, but this looks like goblin dog to me."
Jendara balled her hands into fists. The sliver of ice burning down the back of her neck had been a true warning, not the trite discomfort of an overprotective mother. There were goblins on this island, and given goblins' love for dark holes in the ground, the little bastards were probably exploring the same damn cave her son was.
"Well, whatever it is, one thing's for sure," Tam said slowly.
"What?" Jendara growled.
"No one's in this cave."
They picked their way out of the lowest sea cave and stared up at the other entrances. The cave mouths looked far above the beach, dark and unwelcoming. The sun sank another degree lower in the sky.
"Time to climb." Jendara slung her length of rope over her shoulder and reached for the first handhold in the cliff face.
Somewhere above, something wailed, its voice hollow and unbearably sad.
Coming Next Week: The stunning conclusion of Wendy Wagner's "Mother Bears."
Wendy N. Wagner is the author of short stories in such anthologies and magazines as Armored, Way of the Wizard, Rigor Amortis, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. She is a regular contributor to inkpunks.com, and can be found online at winniewoohoo.com.
Kran tapped his slate, louder this time, and Jendara gave in, looking up from her ledger. The boy's blue eyes gleamed as his chalk squeaked, underlining the word "please" a second time—his equivalent of begging. Jendara's lips moved as she read the note.
"You want to play marbles on the beach? With some village boys?"
He nodded his head, making the yellow tassels of his cap dance. The tip of his nose was pink from the cold sea air.
She grunted. "Just don't take too long. Captain Vorrin wants to catch the outgoing tide, and that means all packed up by sunset."
He swiped his slate with his sleeve, scribbled a thanks, and then darted down the gangplank. Jendara's eyes followed him along the pier until he cut over to the small strip of beach. She trusted Kran more than most mothers trusted their eight-year-olds, but she liked knowing where he was. He didn't get social invitations very often. There weren't many on the islands who could read, or who'd go near a god-touched boy with no speech.
She realized she was holding her quill too tightly, and put it down. Anyway, someone was approaching the ship-turned-market square: a big man with the dung-crusted boots of an island farmer. He reminded Jendara of her father, and she tried not to smile at him. Bad enough being a woman in this business; it wouldn't do to look soft.
"You got something real heavy in that pack of yours." She cleared the ledger and writing case off the table to make room for his wares. She'd been buying lots of ivory and whalebone this trip—always in high demand on the mainland—but whatever he carried in his pack looked soft. Furs, maybe.
"Ayuh. It's a load alright." The man dropped his bag with a thud that made the table creak. He undid the knotted ties and the sack slid open, revealing a pile of deep brown furs.
"What did you catch?" The fur felt sleek and oily beneath her fingers, the hairs coarse.
He didn't answer at first, working with the bag. Now Jendara could see that this great mass wasn't a stack of pelts, but one magnificent hide, and her heart quickened. This could be worth a lot of gold to the right buyer.
He began unfolding the hide. "It's big."
"Grizzly?"
"Ayuh." He shifted on his feet, frowning as he recollected. "It was in with the sheep, killing anything that moved. Had to protect my stock."
A paw hit the ship's deck, and she could see claws longer than her own hand. She couldn't imagine facing something so huge gone on a killing spree. "How'd you kill it?"
"Arrow through the eye. Then I jumped on its back and cut its throat." He'd uncovered the head, well cured and massive, but marred by a white patch of fur like a lightning bolt down the nose. "Woulda kept it, but the wife said it was probably unlucky, way it was acting. Figured you'd give me a fair price for it."
Jendara mentally calculated a few figures. It was a good pelt, and she knew a dealer in Magnimar looking for quality winter furs. She named her price, and the farmer grinned hugely. He spat on his palm and stuck it out, just as her father had done every deal he ever struck. She spat on her own and shook as fiercely as he did.
"We should drink. This deal is good for both of us."
"Yul is a typical islander—gruff and hard, but kind all the same."
She looked out at the docks. No one else approached, and the sun was already low in the sky. She doubted anyone further would be looking to trade with her. "All right."
Someone laid a hand on her shoulder. "You two mind a little company?"
Jendara shrugged. She hadn't heard Vorrin behind her, but wasn't surprised by his sudden appearance. Her husband, Ikran, had asked Vorrin to look after her and Kran as he'd lain bleeding out on the deck of a captured caravel. She couldn't hold it against either of them, much as she wanted to.
"You have a name, Bear Hunter?" Vorrin put out his hand. "I'm Vorrin, captain of this ship."
The farmer's lips thinned as he took Vorrin's measure. Vorrin's close-cropped black hair and thin mustache were a strike against him here on the archipelago. His accent, city-fine, didn't help. The farmer hooked his thumbs in his belt, a conspicuous rejection of the hand. "I am Yul."
"Lead us to the nearest ale, friend." Jendara stepped between the two men, hurrying Yul down the gangplank. She could feel Vorrin's eyes on her back, and could easily imagine the irritated expression. He abided the Ironbound Archipelago because she wanted to do business here, because he loved his nephew and believed in keeping his word. But he didn't like this cold, rough land.
The crunch of gravel beneath her boots made Jendara smile. It had been one thing to leave the islands for the man she loved, but she'd never felt right when she was away. Here the stone lay just beneath the tough heath, and the beaches were long stretches of gray rock and gravel. Even the land was hard here. It went without saying that the people worked hard, fought hard, and grew hard as frozen leather under the wind's cold buffeting.
But business had been brisk in this town, and the wind a constant reminder that she had a trade route to finish before the winter sea grew too rough for Vorrin's ship, the Milady. Jendara hadn't taken a moment to visit the village. It wasn't so different from the place where she'd grown up. The steep peaks of the house roofs stood out from the green turf climbing up the walls, the houses themselves snuggled down into the earth. They could withstand any storm, stay warm in any gale—little tough houses for big tough people.
A donkey huffed at her as they passed a lean-to where animals could wait out of the weather. Jendara patted its shaggy head and then hurried to catch up as Yul pushed opened the nearest door, releasing the pungent tang of peat smoke and spilled ale.
Jendara stepped inside and was struck by the realization that she had been here before. She could remember sitting at the little bar, rubbing oils into the backs of her still-itching hands, tossing back drinks that burned her throat but eased the fresh sting of the tattoos. She touched the back of her hand, the now-old ink covered by fingerless gloves. She could easily imagine the black jolly rogers beneath the wool, puffy and peeling as they had that night. So it must have been the end of her first pirate tour, pockets loaded and a lust to prove herself filling her heart.
Yul nodded at the barkeep, a shaven-headed man as broad as Yul and just as bearded. The man filled three tankards in quick succession, sliding them down the bar without a word. Jendara drank a long pull of the foaming stuff.
"Well, well, if it ain't the famous Jendara. I thought the rumors of you turning respectable were gullshit, but look at you out here, drinking with the farmers."
Jendara put down her tankard with deliberate softness. She turned to face the voice—one of those nasty, thin voices she'd come to associate with cowards. There was no point ignoring it: men like this only responded to intimidation. She folded her arms across her sheepskin vest and let her ice-blue eyes speak for her.
A short and dirty man stood in front of the nearest table, where a knot of men sat drinking. The little man sneered. He wasn't a native—the brown hair and narrow jaw, far too small for all his yellow teeth, proved that. From the waves of fish stench wafting off his layered sweaters, she imagined him a very minor pirate who made ends meet by fishing.
The worst kind of pirate. The jolly rogers on the back of her hands felt suddenly hot, as if Besmara, chief bitch and goddess of all pirates, agreed with Jendara's pronouncement.
She peeled off her gloves slowly, letting everyone in the bar see the tattoos.
"Jenny, Jenny, Jenny." The weasely man took a swig of beer and grinned down at her. She remembered him now. He'd once asked Ikran for a position on their boat, and she'd had to throw him overboard when he didn't like Ikran's answer. Gorg. That was his name.
Gorg's grin grew wider as he leaned toward her. "You still watching over that mute brat of yours?"
The jolly roger seemed to laugh as her knuckles connected with Gorg's face, splitting the skin over his cheekbone with the force of the blow. He screamed and dropped to his knees—not incapacitated, but going for his boot knife. Jendara lashed out with her heel, launching the man backward across the room.
She hadn't paid attention to other men at the table, but they must have been Gorg's friends, because they exploded up from their seats, snarling. Men screamed. Knives hissed free of their scabbards. Jendara laughed and slipped her axe free of her belt.
The weapon's haft shook with its own mirth as she brought the blunt end down on a man's skull, then jerked her arm backward, slamming the handle's butt into another man's solar plexus. Both sailors dropped. Jendara looked around for more, but Grog was already draped senseless across a chair, and the last of his companions was currently dangling from Vorrin's fist, toes not quite touching the floor.
The tavern door flew open, the low light of afternoon like a lighthouse beam cutting through the thick air. A man stood framed in the doorway. Jendara recognized him as Vorrin's first mate. Silence filled the room.
Vorrin released the man he'd been holding up by the sweater-front. The sailor crumpled to the ground. "Tam? Something the matter?"
"Ayuh." The word reminded Jendara that Tam was a fellow islander. He hesitated in the doorway.
"Well what, man?"
"It's the boy." Tam stepped inside, bobbing his head uncomfortably. "I saw a whole group of lads come racing up from the beach, laughing like loons. But Kran weren't with 'em."
Jendara felt her knees go soft, and she put her hand down on the bar to steady herself.
"Looked down the beach, but there weren't no sign of the boy. Figured we ought to go look for him."
Jendara sheathed her axe and moved toward the door. Vorrin clapped his hand on her shoulder. "Don't go off half-cocked."
She shook his hand loose. "I've got to find my son."
"No purpose going by yourself," Yul warned. "Folks don't tolerate strangers around here."
Jendara's lips thinned. She knew it was true—knew the close-knittedness of islanders—but resented it anyway. "He isn't like other boys. There's been trouble other places."
Yul didn't ask for details, but opened the door. "I'll help you look for him."
Jendara nodded curtly, rage boiling her veins, some of it residual, some of it the goddess's, and most of it for anyone who might hurt her child. Beyond Yul's shoulder, a knot of sniggering boys huddled under the lean-to where the donkey had waited. A growl bubbled up in Jendara's throat.
But she did, just from their wicked laughter, their covert glances. She did know, from the hush that fell over the little group as they saw the strangers coming their way. A shiver of cold warning ran down her spine.
One of the boys held a yellow tassel between his fingers. A yellow tassel just like the ones she'd sewn onto Kran's hat.
Coming Next Week: A mother's fury in Chapter Two of Wendy Wagner's "Mother Bears."
Wendy N. Wagner is the author of short stories in such anthologies and magazines as Armored, Way of the Wizard, Rigor Amortis, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. She is a regular contributor to inkpunks.com, and can be found online at winniewoohoo.com.
"Hurt a little?" Krunzle began. "Then perhaps we could—" He was unable to continue because his senses were now reporting that his insides and outsides had apparently changed places, and that his entire carcass had subsequently been consumed by a raging firestorm wrapped in a freezing blizzard, then crushed to the size of an ant—and not a very big ant, at that.
He was next conscious of screaming hoarsely, and then vision returned, along with the rest of his sensorium, which advised him that all his systems were now running normally—except for his fear-measuring capacity, which was strained to its limit. He closed his mouth and took in a long, shaky breath through his nostrils. "Please," he said, "don't do that again."
"Typical," said the woman. "I free you from a serious enchantment—a service, I want to point out, that I perform at no charge. And do I see gratitude? Do I hear so much as a murmur of thanks?"
"Thank you," Krunzle murmured.
"Too late now," she said, picking up the knucklebones and rolling them expertly between her palms. "Now let's see what you can do for me in return."
"I thought you said there was no charge."
"Typical," she said again, shaking her blonde locks. She threw the bones onto the tabletop, regarded them for a long moment, then said, "Apparently, the answer is: nothing. You're not part of my future at all."
Krunzle heaved a sigh of relief, until the thought occurred that the bones might be saying he was not part of anybody's future. The demon worshipers next door could likely use a spare body. And he knew that some of the uses to which the bodies were put rendered them useless for any future employment.
She had picked up the amulet again. "So he sends in a thief to steal this piece of gimcrack, which the idiot Didmus gave to the equal idiotic Galathea as some sort of mawkish love-token."
Krunzle dared to interrupt. "Who," he said, "are Didmus and Galathea?"
Again, that look that his teachers used to give him, then she shook her head as one does who accepts that some shortcomings must be borne with. She said, "Galathea is the girl from whom you took the apprentice's eye. She is my daughter. And Baalariot's, for that matter. Didmus is a half-grown half-wit of a sorcerer's apprentice. They think they are in love."
"You and Baalariot are married?" he said.
Again, the look of disbelief. "Men and women do not have to be married to produce children," she said. "Baalariot wants to wed her to one of Hedvand's courtiers. I have a better plan: she will train to become a priestess of Nocticula, cementing my relationship with the cult."
"And Didmus," the thief said, his mind beginning to form the picture into whose frame he had been pressed, "what does he want?"
She assumed an exasperated look. "What does any young man want?"
"He doesn't happen," Krunzle said, "to play the zither?"
"I wouldn't put it past him."
For all its academic shortfalls, Krunzle's intellect was adept at plans and schemes, his own and others'. The pieces now fell into place. He debated for a moment as to whether he should voice his conclusions—but only for a moment. If he was right, events would shortly reveal the facts for themselves, and he would gain nothing by too late a revelation.
"I believe," he said, "that I am here as a diversion."
Hortenza's brows consulted each other, then her eyes widened. She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment a heavy concussion sounded from downstairs. The building shook, and shards of plaster sifted down from the hole in the corner of the ceiling.
The priestess recovered quickly. "The bastard!" she said, reaching for the ebony rod and striding to the door. She slammed it behind her and he heard the click of the lock. He gave her a moment to clear the corridor outside then went to kneel at the keyhole, reaching for his picks.
But, even in her hurry, Hortenza had been thinking a step ahead of him. The pick would not engage the tumblers. He went to the table, where she had left the apprentice's eye, and brought it to bear on the door. The lock made the stone glow bright red.
Krunzle said a short and pungent word, then turned to the hole in the ceiling. He pushed a small table underneath, then leapt atop it. When he stood upright, his head and shoulder poked through the opening, so that his eyes rose just above the level of the packed-earth roof.
The open space was in darkness and silence, except for the sound of a zither being inexpertly tuned. Then the thief heard a noise like sand rushing through a giant hourglass, as the great blind snake slithered across the roof toward him. He ducked down and, after a moment, the sound ceased.
The lock clicked. The door opened. In the moment between the two events, Krunzle put the table back where he had found it and himself where Hortenza had left him. The witch stepped through the doorway, panting from the stairs and presumably from the effort of dragging an unwilling young woman all the way up from the sub-basement.
"A good thief knows when to make himself scarce, and Krunzle is better than most."
She flung Galathea into the room. "You stay here, or so help me..." She left the threat implied as she turned to the thief and said, with a meaningful glance at the hole in the ceiling, "Keep her here, and I will make it worth your while. Let her go, and...” She pointed a tapered fingernail at him and left the rest to Krunzle's imagination.
Then she was gone, the door slammed. The girl tried the opener, found it locked, and stamped her foot, saying under her breath a word that was not supposed to be available to gently reared maidens. She looked at Krunzle, and the thief recognized the parents in the child.
"You're thinking," he told her, just to get the process rolling, "what it will cost you to secure my assistance."
She folded her arms. "Well?"
"What have you got?"
She showed her fingers, unringed, her wrists unbraceleted, her neck unlaced. "I had only one thing, an amulet with a green stone."
He patted a bulge in his upper garment. "I already have that."
She stared at him for a moment, then sighed and slipped one arm out of her shift, followed by the other. A loud detonation from outside in the street caused her to pause, then she continued, slipping the garment down to her waist.
"This is scarcely the time," Krunzle said.
She had been about to wriggle the shift down over her hips. "Then what?"
"How well do you know the snake?"
"Hothet? He used to guard me in the cradle."
"Will he obey you?"
She casually signaled an affirmative, as if serpent-commanding was a universal skill.
"Then get dressed and get up on the table."
She looked up at the hole. "The roof is too low, the walls to either side sheer."
"Leave that," he said, "to me."
He boosted her through the gap, then fluidly followed. He crouched next to the hole, ready to duck back down, but then he saw the great reptile coiled at her feet, its spade-sized head rubbing against one thigh.
From the side of building that faced the street came another crump! accompanied by a brief yellow glare. Almost immediately, there followed a metallic rattling sound, like iron hail striking cobblestones. The thief crept to the parapet and looked over. Below in the street, Baalariot stood, legs spread, a nimbus of red light about his head like a halo, one hand holding a carved staff whose upper tip ended in an amorphous cloud of stygian darkness which kept spitting out little zig-zags of white lightning. He raised the implement and pointed it at where the front door would be—with Hortenza presumably in it.
From the blackness at the end of the staff rushed a torrent of colorless force, flecked with sparks of gold and black. The angle of his view prevented Krunzle from seeing where it struck, but he knew the effect must be less than overwhelming when he heard a hiss of rage from directly below him, followed by a rumbling, trundling sound, as of iron-shod wheels on stone. Now a shimmering wall, blue and almost transparent, moved outward from the shrine toward the wizard, rolling back his rush of energy until Baalariot gestured with his staff and the outflow ceased.
The wall moved on, however, even picking up speed, and its outer edges began to curve inward so that soon it would form a tube around the wizard. He made a downward chopping gesture with one hand, while speaking a stream of syllables, and the center of the approaching barrier began to melt and dissolve. A moment later it winked out of existence.
Krunzle heard another hissed curse from below him, and a snarling sound from her opponent. He thought it best to withdraw before either parent became aware of him. Something was now snarling and bellowing in the street below, accompanied by the stamp of heavy, hoofed feet on the cobbles. The animal roars were soon met by a chittering sound, as if ten thousand maddened insects were clashing their mandibles. The tramp of iron-shod hooves was overlaid by a skittering, whispering noise. Krunzle imagined a horde of chitinous scorpions, their pincers clicking, flooding across the street to swarm up some rough beast.
Then he decided there was no profit in imagining such unpleasantness. He crept back across the roof to Galathea, finding the snake asleep in a coil and the girl indulging in some impatient toe-tapping. He felt a brief twinge of compassion for poor, love-sick Didmus, who must eventually learn that the girl's parent's temperaments had bred true in their offspring.
But that was not his concern. "This way," he said, and led her to where his grapnel and knotted rope still hung from the neighboring roof. As she took hold of the cord, the love song from above began again. She went up quickly, and the thief after her. They followed their ears to a corner of the tenement roof sheltered by movable walls of plaited bamboo.
A tender moment ensued, then Krunzle intervened to say, "It would be wise to leave here before the battle below ends and the winner—assuming there is one—comes looking for the prize."
Didmus, a gawky youth with ears almost large enough to serve as wings, said, "I have a carriage. We'll go to my uncle's manse. A priest of Erastil lives next door. We'll be married before midnight."
Galathea looked down at her shift, its hem soiled from the unswept roof. "Married?" she said. "In this?"
Krunzle felt another brief spasm of sympathy for the apprentice wizard, but said, "In what quarter of the city is your uncle's manse?"
The youth's cracked voice said, "By the night market, near the Druma Road Gate."
"Then let us go."
And so, with eldritch lights and harsh sounds fading behind them, they fled the lower city. Didmus, a generous sort for a budding wizard, pressed into Krunzle's hand a small purse of gratitude when they dropped him off at the market. The thief used the funds to buy a change of clothing and a broad-brimmed hat that would obscure and shadow his face.
He pinned the apprentice's eye to his new headgear, then settled himself beside an untenanted booth at the edge of the market. When the gate opened in the morning, he would be first out of it and on the road to Druma and its capital, Kerse, where the streets were literally paved with gold and the walls of the houses inset with gems.
Krunzle had long had a hankering to see Druma. He sat with arms resting on his knees, and head resting on arms, and dreamed of easy locks and unlatched windows.
Follow the rest of Krunzle's adventures in the new Pathfinder Tales novel Song of the Serpent!
Coming Next Week: Piracy and parenthood in the Ironbound Archipelago in Chapter One of Wendy Wagner's "Mother Bears."
Hugh Matthews is a pseudonym of critically acclaimed science-fantasy author Matthew Hughes, who is responsible for more than a dozen novels and is often called the "heir apparent" to the legacy of Jack Vance, particularly for his Archonate series. His novel Template was republished by Planet Stories, and his first Pathfinder Tales novel, Song of the Serpent, also features intrepid thief and confidence man Krunzle the Quick.
His first awareness was of the ache in his ribs, that swelled every time he took a breath. He cursed the pain, then thought, No, wait, I'm still breathing. That has to go on the positive side of the ledger. He took a deeper breath and groaned, his emotions mixed.
"Get up," said a voice from somewhere above him: female, but without the girlish tone of the amulet-wearer. This was a mature contralto, with strong overtones of I am used to being obeyed. Krunzle opened his eyes and discovered he was lying on a thick carpet. He recognized the hole in the ceiling.
A toe nudged his sore ribs—bruised, not broken, he deduced—and the voice said, "Up."
From this vantage, she seemed extraordinarily tall, an impression that did not diminish when he struggled painfully to his feet and found that she still overtopped him so that he had to crane his neck to meet her eyes. In doing so he discovered that his neck was joining his ribs in registering a complaint of maltreatment. "Ow," he said, rubbing it.
She looked to be of middle years, except for a face as smooth and ageless as magic could make it. She wore a complex headpiece of entwined snakes fashioned from some pale metal, inset with eyes of polished opal. Hair the same shade as that of the girl in the cell cascaded down onto a robe of pale silk, marked in red and black arcane symbols.
"I am Hortenza, and this is my house," she said. "Name yourself."
He did so, without resorting to sleights or subterfuges. She did not look the type to enjoy a frivolous puzzle.
She studied the thief. Krunzle had seen much the same expression on the faces of farmwives deciding which chicken would have its neck wrung for the stewpot. As if interested in the decor, he looked about him. The room was still windowless; there was one exit, besides the one he had made.
"Meddling in the affairs of spellcasters is rarely advisable."
As if she could read his thoughts—and perhaps she could—she said, "The door is locked and the snake is on the roof. He likes to take sleeping birds. But he'd rather have you."
Krunzle thought of several things he could say, but none of them seemed likely to profit him. He remained silent while she studied him some more. Meanwhile, the geas was urging him to escape, and to do so loudly. He focused mentally on the impossibility of doing so, and the urge quieted. Thanks to Cardimion for making it discriminating, he thought.
By now, his new captor seemed to have seen all there was to see. She said, "Baalariot sent you."
Again, the thief saw nothing to be gained by speaking. After a moment, she said, "Answer."
"I did not hear a question."
Her hard face hardened further. She raised a finger whose nail tapered to a black lacquered point and pointed it at him. The air around him crackled and he smelled a whiff of sulfur, then he became aware that every bone in his body had suddenly become hot enough to scald the flesh that touched it. The pain lasted only moments, but the memory of it lingered after she lowered the digit.
"Oh, yes," he said, "that question. Indeed, Baalariot sent me."
"To steal Galathea."
His eyebrows knitted themselves in confusion. "He called it something else."
That brought him a quizzical look. She studied him again, then said, "What, exactly, did he call her?"
Krunzle blinked. Her? But he was in no position to offer a correction. "He called it an apprentice's eye."
As a young student, the thief had never risen to the top of any class in literature, history, or philosophy. His was a practical intelligence, best expressed through his hands, whose remarkable deftness at eye-bamboozling speed had won him his nickname. But his inability to recite even the best-known dates and precedents used to win him a certain look from the preceptors at the day school, a look that said, Can this oaf really be that much of a thimble-wit?
He was seeing that look again, on the face of the witch. Now she looked down at the carpet, where the amulet with the color-changing cabochon lay, the polished, uncut stone now green again. The snake's coiled embrace must have pressed it to him. Indeed, he suspected the hard stone was responsible for one of the bruises on his ribs. The moment he noticed it, he involuntarily stooped and picked it up.
"That?" she said. "You want me to believe he sent you for that?"
The darkening expression on her face told Krunzle that he needed her to believe it, because it was the only explanation for his conduct that he was able to offer.
She was studying him even more closely now. "You're not one of his coterie."
"I have never been a joiner," Krunzle said.
"A hireling?"
"Not as such."
She picked up the amulet and held it to him. The green stone turned red. "Ah," she said.
"Why does it do that?" he said.
"It is an apprentice wizard's tool," she said. "It perceives the energies involved in magic, and mostly serves to prevent the inexperienced from touching that which might do them harm. Right now, it tells me that you have been ensorcelled."
She tilted her head in thought then added, "Which might make you dangerous. Don't move."
She went to a cupboard that stood against the wall, opened a door, and selected an object from several that were stored there. She brought it back and he saw that it was a tube carved from black crystal. She put it to her eye and inspected him through it.
"Ah, Baalariot," she said. "Always the obvious. Of course it would be Cardimion's Discriminating Geas." She went back to the cupboard, chose other items from its contents and brought them to a table. Then she moved a brazier to the same part of the room and, with a mere motion of one hand, ignited its charcoal. She inspected the things she had arranged on the table—Krunzle saw scrimshawed ivory, an ebony rod, some old, time-worn knuckle bones, a scrap of pale hide tattooed with blue runes, a diminutive, oddly shaped skull—then she began to perform actions beyond his comprehension.
"If we were out in the street," she said, touching this and elevating that, "I could scarcely make a dent. But I have an arrangement with Our Lady's sanctuary next door, and that gives me access to a power that..." She broke off, concentrating while she tapped the black rod a precise three times on the top of the skull, then covered the bone with the tattooed skin. The air inside the room was suddenly charged with energy. Kunzle felt a crackling in his ears. Then she looked over at him and aimed the rod in his direction, saying, "This will probably hurt a little."
Coming Next Week: The final chapter of Hugh Matthews's "Krunzle the Quick."
Hugh Matthews is a pseudonym of critically acclaimed science-fantasy author Matthew Hughes, who is responsible for more than a dozen novels and is often called the "heir apparent" to the legacy of Jack Vance, particularly for his Archonate series. His novel Template was republished by Planet Stories, and his first Pathfinder Tales novel, Song of the Serpent, also features intrepid thief and confidence man Krunzle the Quick.
He descended several flights of steps, took a number of turns along torch-lit corridors, and came at last to the threshold of a windowless cell deep below ground. The glowing orb entered and Krunzle did likewise. Once within, the light blinked out, and he had a momentary glimpse of a small, winged man fluttering out through the open doorway and disappearing along the corridor.
Krunzle made to put his head through the opening to see the creature more clearly, but the air that filled the exit now demonstrated the ability to become a clear, springy substance that flung him back into the room. By the light from the corridor, he looked around and found an ill-smelling pallet, a rough stool, and a terra cotta oil lamp with a wick of greasy wool. He was able to just reach this last item around the edge of the door to meet the torch ensconced in the passageway and, with the lamp's feeble light, sat down on the stool and took out the scroll.
It was written in a script that he could read, and he quickly took in what it had to tell him. He was to wait until the pixie returned to lead him out of his cell. Then he must go to a house in the lower town—a map to find the place, an image of its exterior, and a second, multi-leveled map of its interior were provided. He was to find his best way in, locate something called an "apprentice's eye"; the note said that the geas he was under would ensure that he recognized the object when he saw it.
You may use whatever means and procedures you deem appropriate, said the note, but if you offer violence against any persons within the house, the hand you raise will instead strike you where you have already felt a blow.
Once he had achieved the goal of the mission he was to bring the apprentice's eye back to Baalariot. The note said that while exiting the target area he was encouraged to make as much noise and commotion as possible.
"Why would I do that?" he asked the walls of his cell. He received no answer.
Krunzle turned over the single sheet of parchment, but there was nothing on the other side. He reread the note again and, when he realized that the letters were steadily fading away, applied himself to memorizing the map before it disappeared.
A few moments later, he was left with two things: a blank piece of scraped sheepskin and a question. The question was: what was an apprentice's eye?
Then came a third: an overwhelming urge to sleep.
∗∗∗
He awoke to find that his various pains had faded. He was also hungry, and was glad to find that while he slept someone had brought him a platter of bread and cheese, as well as a stoneware jug that proved to contain an almost drinkable wine. He refreshed himself, then sat on the stool and contemplated his predicament. He failed to see any immediate advantage to being the slave of a spied-upon wizard. Nor did he envision that his situation would much improve: as he understood these things, spellslingers tended to rely on conjured assistants, like the pixie, for their domestic needs. They generally kept no slaves—which meant that upon successful completion of his mission, he would become surplus to Baalariot's requirements. The wizard would cast around for some useful purpose that a superfluous thief-slave could serve. Several images came to Krunzle's mind, none of them encouraging.
His early education at a rather prestigious rogue’s academy had taught him the cardinal rule of the thief's life: always have a plan. He quickly devised a scheme that had two parts. Part one: break the enchantment that bound him to Baalariot's will. Part two: depart Elidir at maximum speed.
He was sure he could execute part two with energy and dispatch. Part one, however, remained a problem. His mind failed to gain traction, and soon he lacked the leisure to pursue the matter, because now the winged manlet returned, hovering in the corridor at the center of his globe of light.
Krunzle stood and the light moved away. He was able to exit the cell as if the air in the doorway was nothing but air. He strode after the guide, and noticed that he was not retracing the route that had brought him down from Baalariot's chamber. Instead, he and the winged fairy-man proceeded deeper into the warren of dark rooms and barely lit corridors beneath the wizard's manse, until he came to a narrow space which contained a spiral iron staircase leading up and a rough table on which were spread several items Krunzle recognized.
They had all be taken from his person after he had been delivered to the Gyve, and they constituted the tools of his trade: picks and slips; grapples and cords; a double-bent tube with mirrors inside that bent light and allowed him to peek around corners, under doors, and through windows without being seen; and a handful of other objects.
Krunzle was glad to recover them. Not only were they useful, but as part of his first tasks as a journeyman, he had personally made each one of them. Thieves could not usually afford much sentimentality, but an exception was made for the toolkit. He disposed of them in the various concealed pockets and loops that abounded in his garments, and felt slightly better about the course of events.
He was given little time for satisfaction, however. No sooner had he stowed the last implement, than the pixie flew up the staircase, illuminating the darkness above. Krunzle experienced a strong desire to follow and began to climb. He noted, with faint gratitude, that his groin no longer pained him with every lift of a foot.
No sooner had he risen out of the small room—it turned out to have been the bottom of a shaft—than the globe of light disappeared. In complete blackness, Krunzle felt the flying creature flutter past him as it went back to wherever it perched when not on duty. He was unable to do likewise and continued to ascend until he arrived at a confined space that offered not the slightest glimmer of light. He felt in front of him and found a wooden surface which, when he explored further and discovered a simple latch, turned out to be a door.
But thieves' caution prevented him from opening the portal until his searching fingers discovered what he expected to find: another moving part at eye level that, when he slid it aside, uncovered a peephole. He peered out and saw a darkened Elidiran alley, lit only by a few gleams leaking through the closed shutters of houses that turned blank walls to the narrow passage.
He opened the door and stepped out, then looked up at the evening stars to orient himself. The map appeared on the screen in his mind—no magic there, but the mental discipline learned in the academy and practiced ever since—and he set off for the lower town. His route avoided the city's major thoroughfares and plazas, leading him instead along narrow, twisting alleys and down flights of stone steps that reeked of urine and rotting vegetables. Clearly, he thought, whoever occupied the house to which he was headed did not enjoy the elevated social status of the wizard who was sending him.
The building, when he came to it, was not imposing. Mud brick rather than stone, it stood two stories high, with a flat roof; he knew from the map, though, that its foundations had been dug down three levels, creating sub-basements and even a bottomless pit. Baalariot hadn't said anything, but Krunzle knew enough about magic-wielders to have reasoned out that anyone who could steal from a wizard was likely to be another practitioner of the arcane arts. Wizardry and subterranean chambers seemed to be an infallible combination. Maybe it was a matter of containing unruly powers; or maybe it was just that depth muffled the screams.
His urge to get to the target eased when he came to the mouth of an unlit passageway that met the sloping street on which the house stood. His vantage point was several doors down from the entrance, which featured a sturdy-looking front door between tapered pillars, all carved with some complex design he was too far away to see clearly, flanked by two torches that burned with a green flame. There was something about the arrangement of the portal that argued less for decor than for defense.
He would not be going through that door. Some thieves preferred the direct and obvious approach—get in, grab it, and get out while they're still blinking—but Krunzle was an old-fashioned practitioner of the full art.
He wondered how much leeway Cardimion's Discriminatory Geas would grant him. Experimentation revealed that he could move a certain distance from the target structure, but only enough to circumnavigate it. If he tried to go farther, he experienced shaking limbs, nausea, and a sense of impending dread. When he struggled to overcome the resistance, his fist swung up and struck him sharply in an eye whose surrounding flesh was still tender from the wart-nosed torturer's attentions.
Trial and error over, the thief turned his attention to the house that contained the apprentice's eye. The memorized map had highlighted an area in a lower, though not lowest, level of the building. There was probably a concealed entrance much like the one through which he had made his exit from Baalariot's manse, but it would be a waste of time to look for it. He worked his way around the building and its neighbors again, seeking the opportunity that would make the task easier.
The house had not been constructed as a detached structure; its sides abutted directly against the neighboring buildings; its front was two stories of sheer, unbroken mud brick; its rear was separated from the alley behind by a walled courtyard, also lit by green flames.
The courtyard presented easier access but too much light, the thief decided; besides, the rear wall was as unwindowed as the front.
He examined the buildings to either side: one was of stone, tall and solid as a bank, but a half-hidden glyph near the door identified it in the language of thieves and street people as a temple of the demon Nocticula, which meant that its main use was as a brothel, and not a particularly safe one. The other building was a rickety, three-story tenement, with a wooden staircase running up the rear wall to give the residents false hope that they'd be able to escape in the event of a fire.
A lifetime of professional experience told Krunzle that a mud-brick building's greatest weakness was in its roof. He went up the fire steps with practiced quiet, slipping past the noises of clattering pots, squalling babies, and arguing couples, all overlaid by what sounded like a semi-skilled musician singing a maudlin love song while endeavoring to accompany his cracked voice on an out-of-tune zither. At the top of the stairs, a wooden ladder led to the tenement's flat roof. He scaled it and rolled silently onto a surface of dried mud overlying matted reeds.
The zither player was up there, somewhere. But the shadows were thick enough. Krunzle rose to a crouch and made his way to the lip of the roof where it overlooked the mud-brick house, paused to listen for any sounds that indicated someone might be enjoying the upper air—though he was fairly sure the zither-player's amelodic strains would have driven indoors all but the profoundly deaf. He slowly raised his head above the low parapet until he could see down. The flat space was empty and unlit. Krunzle readied a grapnel and its knotted cord.
Moments later, he was crouched in darkness. He had chosen one of the corners of the roof above the front wall. He knew that rooms at the rear of a building were more likely to contain servants busy at their tasks; front rooms were for the quality, who more frequently left them empty while they sashayed out to enjoy privileges denied their underlings.
He took a small, sharp blade from his toolkit and applied its point to the roof's packed-earth surface. The desiccated soil broke into powdery flakes, and soon he had exposed a layer of dried reeds laid over a network of thin laths of wood. He removed a patch of reeds and beneath it saw the pale gleam of plaster.
New tools came to his hands. He drilled a tiny hole through the plaster, inserted a thin tube fitted with an eyepiece, and a moment later he was seeing a fly's eye-view of a sitting room illuminated by brass lamps whose wicks were turned low. The decor tended toward erotically curved furnishings and draped swathes of faux-soie. The room was otherwise empty.
Busy seconds passed, then the thief was standing on the thick-pile carpet beneath a Krunzle-sized hole in the ceiling.
He padded silently to the closed door, opened it, and saw a corridor ending in a downward-leading staircase lit from below. He crept to the top of the stairs and listened, hearing a faint bustle of kitchen noises and beneath it a female voice half-raised in a monotonous chant.
He went down to the ground floor. The clatter of pots and pans grew louder; it came from somewhere to the rear of the building and down another level. The chanting also increased in volume; it originated from behind a pair of large, ornate doors that must lead into a room that took up all of the ground floor's front. A wizard would have his study there, he thought. Or perhaps a witch.
Krunzle looked about. So far he had seen nothing worth stealing, even if this had been a burglary of his own devising. It was possible the apprentice's eye, whatever it was, was in the front chamber, being chanted over right this minute. If not, it would be somewhere it could be kept safe and perhaps guarded. Again, experience told him that somewhere would probably be below ground, behind layers of defense.
He searched his memory for the image of the map Baalariot had provided. He recalled the symbols for more downward-leading steps and soon found them, through they were behind a double-locked door, strongly made, itself concealed behind a wall hanging that depicted a decidedly female person making an intimate though unlikely connection with a snake at least twice her length. Krunzle swiftly picked the locks, opened the door, and stepped through to a small landing above a set of narrow stone steps that circled down into darkness.
"So this is the apprentice's eye."
A rank smell wafted up from the stairwell. Krunzle didn’t recognize the odor, but some part of him decided that it was the kind of reek that ought to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. Cautiously, ears straining the silent darkness, he began to descend.
He counted fifty steps before his outstretched hand encountered a barrier: another door, also well locked. He again deployed his picks and with small effort soon had the way clear. Beyond was yet more darkness, but here the acrid stench was far stronger.
Krunzle put his head through the doorway and looked to either side. There was a dim glow, enough to show him that the door opened onto a vaulted subterranean passage. The source of the illumination was a thin bar of yellow light that he took to be a leak of lamplight from under a door at one end of the corridor. The other end was unlit and ended in a blank wall with what seemed to be a pool of stygian black at its foot. The pit, Krunzle thought. The stench came from there.
Krunzle went on silent feet to the source of the light. It was definitely another door, but there were no locks, only a thick iron bar that slid into a slot in the stone wall. And, his fingers told him, another peephole.
The thief peeped, and saw a windowless cell not much bigger than the one in which he had spent part of the day, but with a good carpet on the floor, a three-wick oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, a narrow cot (though with pillow and quilt), and a table and chair.
Seated on the chair, back turned to the door, was a small figure in a plain white shift—by the narrowness of the shoulders and the fineness of the golden, collar-length hair, either a young woman or an older child. She (or he) was concentrating on something in her (or his) lap.
Krunzle studied the scene, angling to look through the peephole into the corners of the room. He saw no intimations of danger. After one last visual sweep, he slid the latch and eased open the door.
The figure in the chair turned and looked up at him over one shoulder—a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman, startled in the act of reading poetry from the small book now visible in her grasp. Then surprise turned to excitement tinged with pleasure. "Did he send you," she said, "to rescue me?"
Krunzle ignored the girl's question. You will recognize it when you see it, Baalariot's note had said. And now, as the thief looked at the slim, young figure, and especially at the chain around her neck, and most especially at the amulet that hung from it, he knew.
He stepped into the cell, reaching for the apprentice's eye. It looked like nothing all that special. It was a palm-sized circle of some shiny metal, in the center of which was set a large green cabochon. Around the rim ran a legend carved in a script he could not read.
The young woman stood, her face showing alarm. "Wait!" she said.
"I can't," he said, and took hold of the gaudy thing, giving it a yank that expertly parted the chain. As he did so, two events occurred: the unfaceted green gem in the center turned red; and something cold and strong curled itself around one of his ankles and rapidly rose up his leg. The stench that had been so powerful in the corridor was overwhelming now.
Krunzle held tightly to the amulet—the geas made sure of that—at the same time as he tried to shake his leg free of whatever had seized it. He looked down and saw a broad, triangular head, clad in leprous white scales, its eyes filmed and blind but its forked tongue aflickering. The head connected to a thigh-thick, limbless body that continued to slither toward him along the floor of the corridor, even as it slid upward and addressed its huge strength to the task of squeezing air and life from his torso.
He toppled headlong onto the carpet as the great snake opened its fanged maw and hissed into his face.
"Oh dear," said the girl in white.
Coming Next Week: The perils of working for wizards in Chapter Four of Hugh Matthews's "Krunzle the Quick."
Hugh Matthews is a pseudonym of critically acclaimed science-fantasy author Matthew Hughes, who is responsible for more than a dozen novels and is often called the "heir apparent" to the legacy of Jack Vance, particularly for his Archonate series. His novel Template was republished by Planet Stories, and his first Pathfinder Tales novel, Song of the Serpent, also features intrepid thief and confidence man Krunzle the Quick.
Turn and run they did, the leader of the three knife men just missing having his collar caught by the guard captain. With admirable agility, they sped toward the caravanserai gate, dodging around—or under—mules and camels, leaping over bales and chests, weaving between startled drivers and merchants.
"Stop them!" Idrix bellowed, and his guards leaped to obey. But horse-archers were at their best in the saddle and with their weapons strung. On foot, their recurved bows still in their cases, they were no more agile than anybody else in the crowded compound, and certainly less direly motivated than the three now become fugitives.
Still, the guards at the gate were quick enough to swing the portals closed. Their quarry immediately veered toward the nearest wall, which had an elevated walkway behind its crenellations, reached by sets of wooden steps. Two of them chose separate stairs, took them three at a time and vaulted over the top, without pausing to ascertain what they might land on.
The third, he of the low brow and unsettled gaze, had found no steps within easy reach and had instead opted for several heaped bales of velvet, from which he hoped to spring across a narrow distance to the walkway. But the bales were too loosely stacked to offer firm footing, and he missed his leap, tumbling back to the hard-packed earth at the feet of a hurrying archer. The guard used one of those feet to kick the smaller man sprawling, then used it again to hold him fast to the ground until one of his fellows, with practiced skill, arrived to truss the captive's wrists and ankles securely with bowstrings.
They hauled the prisoner before Idrix and the caravan's headmen, who ordered him taken to where the three dysenteric guards lay in the hospice. Fingers were angrily pointed and curses bitterly flung, then the captive was taken to the city gate and handed over to the provost, whose bailiffs hauled him off to the Gyve.
In a dank, foul-smelling chamber deep below ground, the prisoner declared himself an innocent pearlmonger from Merab, a victim of conspirators and mistaken identity. But the steward's torturers knew their craft well, and soon it was established that the man's true name was Krunzle, sometimes known as Krunzle the Quick, a self-proclaimed master thief. He named his confederates, a pair of locals he had hired on in Elidir.
The plan had been to join the caravan as replacements for the guards they had dosed with loose-leaf, a powerful diarrhetic. Then, while ostensibly standing night guard, they would appropriate as much as they could carry in the way of light but valuable goods, and disappear into the landscape until the caravan had moved on.
"Have you anything more to add?" the interrogator said.
Krunzle could think of several things he wanted to say to the hulking, wart-nosed torturer, but none of them would have served him well. He shook his bruised head, spraying a few last drops of blood.
They manacled and fettered him, then took him to a lightless cell and left him there, groaning on damp straw that stank of black mold and worse. The night passed, and then the morning, though the semi-conscious prisoner had lost his inner sense of time's passage, and neither breakfast nor lunch arrived to mark the hinges of the day.
At some point, a bailiff came and collected him. As Krunzle limped, clanking, up the stone stairs, he said, "Am I being taken before the magistrates?"
His escort laughed gently. "We are an impoverished land, grimly overtaxed by our Chelish overlords. We cannot afford to waste the court's time."
"But I wish to plead my case!"
The bailiff spoke as if to a not-very-bright child. "Your 'case' evaporated when you confessed."
"But the confession was extracted by torture!"
"Most are. We are, as I say, efficient."
They had arrived at the top of the stairs. The bailiff unlocked a sturdy door and led the shackled thief, blinking in the noonday glare, out into a courtyard. At one side was a wooden hustings, with a set of stairs leading up. At the top of the steps were gathered some bored, official-looking personages, while at the bottom stood a line of about a dozen wan-faced men and women who all wore the same heavy wrist-and-ankle jewelry as Krunzle's.
"What is it to be?" the thief said. "Axe? Noose? Garrote?" He shuddered. "Not the half-strangle followed by disemboweling?"
The escort chuckled indulgently. "I have said, we are a poor country. We don't waste good flesh and sinew." He delivered Krunzle to the rear of the line. "Now stand there until it's your turn to go up."
A horn blew and the courtyard's outer gate opened. In came a motley crowd of Elidiran citizens who bustled over to the line of prisoners and began to poke and prod their persons. Krunzle noted that great attention was being paid to the thickness of arm and leg muscles, and struggled to recall if cannibalism featured in the city's reputation.
Few of the newcomers gave the thief more than a passing glance. A plump Elidiran in a merchant's robe and a floppy hat squeezed his lean bicep. The man's mouth twisted in a disparaging moue, and he made a backhanded gesture as if Krunzle was a fly to be shooed away.
"Baalariot gets straight to the point."
The inspection of the goods completed, the first prisoner in line was called up and bidding began. Krunzle was no expert in slave-market economics, but it seemed to him that the bidding was neither enthusiastic nor competitive: most of the items went for a few pieces of silver.
Then it was his turn. He laboriously mounted the hustings and looked out over the diminishing throng. Purchasers were leading their new acquisitions away, and only two faces looked up at him. One, the merchant who had prodded him, gave his head a shake, turned and walked off. The other was the gaunt, blade-nosed man from the tavern and the caravanserai. He regarded Krunzle with a dispassionate aspect and said, "One copper."
There being no other bidders, the official in charge of the auction banged the butt of his staff of authority on the boards and said, "Sold."
Krunzle was hustled down the steps and into the care of the man in the figured robe, who scarcely cast a glance in his direction as he paid over the single coin and signed a document held out to him on a scribe's copy board. Then he signaled to the bailiff that the manacles and fetters should be struck off.
A few moments later, lighter by several pounds of iron, Krunzle regarded his purchaser from the corner of his eye as he assessed his own condition. Being unfed for a whole day had sapped some of his vigor, and the torture had taken even more out of him, but once out the gate and into the warren of streets and alleys around the Gyve, he thought, there might come an opportunity or two...
His thoughts were interrupted by the tall man's action. He placed a round metal object against Krunzle's forehead and voiced an obscure word. The thief felt a coldness that penetrated through to the inner reaches of his skull, and for a moment his eyes bulged of their own accord. Then the medallion was withdrawn and the sensations ebbed.
"Strike yourself smartly," said the man who had bought him, "in the groin."
Krunzle was framing a derisory reply when a bolt of agony shot from his crotch to every other part of his torso, and the breath left his body. He found himself in an involuntary, knock-kneed crouch, a posture which gave him a good view of his own fist still wedged into the softness at the apex of his legs. The strangled sound he made was as much from surprise as pain.
"Good," said the man who had bought him. "Now come with me."
∗∗∗
"You have inadvertently done me a service," said Krunzle's purchaser when they were settled in the sumptuous room to which the thief had been led. They had reached it by traversing half the city, climbing to the elevated district where large public buildings and major temples predominated. Then they had ducked down an alley—by then Krunzle was walking almost normally—and through an unobtrusive gate in a blank wall, across a small courtyard and through a heavy ironbound door that opened when the robed man said a quiet word.
"I am Baalariot," he said, seating himself on a backless chair made of polished wood and curved aurochs horns. "My profession should be obvious to a discerning thief. You are now in my service."
From the man's portentous tone, Krunzle deduced that he was expected to express a respectful gratitude. Somehow the sentiment eluded him, but he judged that the circumstances—especially the residual ache between his legs—called for a measure of dissembling. "I look forward to—" he began, and was interrupted.
"Spare me the soft-soaping," Baalariot said. "I would rather trust to my skills than to your feigned goodwill."
Krunzle was not pleased at having been bought for small change and introduced to a novel form of self-abuse, but he smiled and agreed that his owner was a gentleman of rare insight.
Baalariot raised an eyebrow. "You are a canny one," he said. "I believe you will not only succeed in your mission, you may even survive."
The implied possibility that he might not survive whatever the wizard contemplated immediately focused the thief's attention. "What mission?" he said.
The other man preened the lay of his robe and said, off-handedly, "One that requires an able member of the thieving profession."
"Ah," said Krunzle, "I see where the error lies. I am but a traveling pearlmonger from—"
"Shh," said Baalariot, and Krunzle found that his lips and tongue would no longer obey his brain. "I've seen your transcript from the Gyve," he said. "More to the point, I know how you inveigled your way into the caravan's guards troop. You even fixed it so poor Idrix had to talk you into taking the job."
Speechless, Krunzle replied with a confessional lift and settle of eyebrows and shoulders.
"You showed intelligence and resource," said the man in the chair, "and, as I say, you've done me a service. I was on my way to Kerse to purchase someone like you from the Kalistocracy's prisons—they catch some of the cunningest specimens there, you know—but now you've saved me many days travel, there and back. Plus, you were a bargain."
Krunzle's face and hands now expressed a desire to communicate. "You may speak," said his owner, "so long as you do not waste my time. And,"—he glanced around at the walls of the chamber—"so long as you do not use... blunt language."
The slave found that his vocal apparatus was his own again. He thought he understood the admonition against blunt speech, and said, "You have bought me to 'acquire' something for you?"
"Technically, to 'acquire' something back from the one who 'acquired' it from me."
"And my reward?"
Baalariot moved a finger in a circular gesture. Krunzle felt a sudden intrusion, like a whirlwind of red-hot sand, in an intimate orifice. After a moment, it ceased, and so did his hopping about. "I see," he said.
"Good," said the wizard. "Best not to labor under any misapprehensions."
Krunzle gave over fanning the seat of his breeches. "So what is this object?"
"I cannot say."
"You don't know?"
"I know," said the wizard. "But I cannot say." He gestured toward the walls of the chamber. "Some of the spiders and cockroaches are in thrall to the... opposition. If I speak the name of the... object, it will be reported."
Krunzle wrinkled his brow. "And I'll wager you can't tell me who the opposition is, either."
"I said you were canny. The small eavesdroppers do not understand much," he tilted his head toward one wall, "but they are empowered to notice certain key words and report their utterance to the one who commands them. Then that person listens in. Sometimes, also, the listener tunes in at random intervals."
"Why don't you just kill the vermin?"
"Because they would be replaced by something else, and that something might be more difficult to circumvent."
"So how do I–"
"I will instruct you in your duties," Baalariot said, loudly, with a meaningful flick of his eyes toward the walls. "The floors must be swept morning and evening, the censers and braziers continually refilled..." He went on listing domestic requirements, but meanwhile, his hand slipped inside his robe and emerged with a small scroll, tightly rolled and tied with a horsehair. This he proffered to Krunzle, who took it and secreted it within his own upper garment.
"Your quarters are in the lower basement," the spellcaster finished. "You will remain there when not on duty. You will take your meals—two a day—in the servants' refectory, and—"
The wizard broke off, and Krunzle presumed that whatever force informed him of the surveillance had also signaled its end. He pointed at Krunzle and made a few incomprehensible sounds, then said, "There. I have placed you under the influence of Cardimion's Discriminating Geas. You will go to your quarters and study the scroll. When a chime sounds, you will set off on the mission detailed there."
"But," said the thief, "I don't know what I'm—" There was no point finishing the complaint because he found that he was suddenly possessed by an overwhelming desire to find the lower basement and read the scroll. He exited the room and found a corridor. For a moment he did not know which way to go, but then a small globe of light appeared in the air some distance away. When he turned toward it, it moved off at a walking pace. He followed it.
Coming Next Week: The perils of secret missions in Chapter Three of Hugh Matthews's "Krunzle the Quick."
Hugh Matthews is a pseudonym of critically acclaimed science-fantasy author Matthew Hughes, who is responsible for more than a dozen novels and is often called the "heir apparent" to the legacy of Jack Vance, particularly for his Archonate series. His novel Template was republished by Planet Stories, and his first Pathfinder Tales novel, Song of the Serpent, also features intrepid thief and confidence man Krunzle the Quick.
It was a good plan, cunningly simple. It just didn't go the way the planner had meant it to.
A caravan from Egorian arrived in the late afternoon at the heavily fortified caravanserai just outside the walls of Elidir. The merchants who had pooled their resources—and defenses—into the cavalcade of fifty mule-drawn wagons and forty pack animals intended to remain at the way station until the following midday so that they could pick over the best offerings of Elidir's purveyors of precious goods. Those exquisitries would be added to the caravan's panniers and coffers that already bulged with fine wares from half a dozen lands around the Inner Sea. Then at noon the next day, the caravan would move on, bound for the luxury markets of Kerse in Druma.
While the hauling and carrying beasts rested and the traders chaffered, safe within the caravanserai's crenellated walls, half of the sixteen-strong complement of horse-archers were granted leave to visit the city's taverns and brothels, while the half who had lost the coin toss stayed behind and remained vigilant.
Three of the liberty contingent went no farther than a raucous and crowded establishment just inside the city gates, where they called for a keg of strong ale. While they were waiting for the drink to be fetched, they bellied up to the board stretched along one wall and filled wooden plates with bread and meats spiced with the fiery local sauces. They looked around for seats and saw no empty tables, only one long trestle that had half its bench-seats unfilled.
A trio of travelers were already seated at the table, by their style of dress identifiable as a small-scale merchant and his assistants. The former good-naturedly waved the guards to take the empty places. A lean, saturnine figure seated at the head of the table, wearing a robe marked with obscure symbols, gave no indication that he was aware of any of them. His blade-like nose was buried in an antique libram bound in red leather and marked with strange devices, and he sipped something green from a tall, slim glass without removing his hooded eyes from the page.
The guards accepted the travelers' invitation. They sat, and names and origins were politely exchanged, then the ale arrived and some time was spent washing away the throat-dust accumulated between Egorian and Elidir. The merchant then leaned forward and raised a finger as if to begin a conversation, but was forestalled by the man in wizard's garb, who put down his book and directed a question to the guards.
"Your caravan leaves when?"
"Midday tomorrow," the senior of the archers answered.
"Will it take on passengers?"
"We usually do. You'll have to ask the head men at the caravanserai in the morning."
The spellslinger nodded and, without thanking the guard, returned to his reading. A moment later, the first course of his meal was brought by the serving girl, and he addressed himself to the food without removing his gaze from the book.
Meanwhile, the leader of the trio of merchants, who said he was a pearlmonger from Merab across the Inner Sea, and now bound for Kerse, asked about road conditions ahead. Because the guards had accompanied similar caravans along this route, they were able to offer expert advice.
The self-described pearl merchant, a small and wiry fellow with a narrow brow and eyes that seldom settled in one position, said, "It is good that honest travelers share their intelligence. The roads are full of highwaymen and ditch-haunters, desperadoes all of them, who will slit a throat for a half-polished button."
The senior man of the archers agreed that it was a sad world, yet not altogether so. "Were it not for bandits and brigands, I would still be pushing a plow and swallowing horse farts in the hill country below the Menadors, instead of seeing other lands and drinking good ale in amiable company."
Hearing such an ably argued view, the pearlmonger declared himself forced to agree. He proposed a toast, and when the guards hoisted their wooden mugs, he insisted that they let him top up their ale with good arrack from the big black bottle he had been sharing with his assistants.
The caravan guards gladly accepted, and offered a toast of their own. It was soon decided that more of the strong-flavored arrack was needed, and the narrow-browed fellow raised an imperious finger to summon the serving maid. Events then settled into a repetitive pattern: more healths were drunk, songs were sung, anecdotes and spicy stories told, and lasting friendships boozily sworn. Somewhere early on in this process, the reader irritably snapped his book shut and left the tavern.
He also left, barely touched, a spiced apple dipped in plum sauce. The alleged pearlmonger scooped the desert toward him and devoured it with two quick bites. Soon after, he and his companions declared themselves spent. They retired to their rooms, while the archers continued to fill and empty their cups from the bottles of arrack the Merabite had kindly left behind.
As the first gray light of day glimmered over the mountains that separated Isger from Druma, the three guards rose, albeit unsteadily, to return to the caravanserai. They knew themselves to be well under the spell of strong drink, but that was nothing new. They could spend the morning sleeping off the effects of the carousal, while their employers chaffered with the merchants of Elidir. By the time the caravan set off again, the archers would be able to sit a saddle. And their ability to put a gray-fletched arrow into a hand-sized target at a hundred paces would be unimpaired.
"Never trust a knifeman."
Halfway between the gate and the caravanserai, the first of the guards experienced a sudden shifting of his innards, as if a large and liquid weight had decided to fling itself from one side of him to the other. He stopped abruptly, and his face assumed an unusual aspect that paradoxically combined deep uncertainty with a dread conviction. He then walked with a rapid, spraddle-legged gait to a stand of low bushes beside the road, his fingers fumbling at the ties and points of his breeches.
The other two archers stopped to make rude noises and offer tactless comments at their companion's expense. But after a moment, their smiles collapsed as their own faces assumed the same haunted expression they had been mocking. Now each of them hurried to find his own bush.
Some time later, three pale and groaning figures presented themselves at the caravanserai's gates. Idrix, the captain of the archers, was called. He examined the men and declared them unfit for service.
"A belly flux," he said, and ordered them to report to the caravanserai's hospice, to be collected when the caravan returned on its way out of Druma. Their pay would be docked.
"I will go into the city," he told his second in command, "and see what I can find in the way of replacements. I don’t want to go up into the mountains under strength."
He was not happy about having to choose from what Elidir had to offer. It was common knowledge among fighting men of many nations that the Goblinblood Wars had robbed Isger of every warrior who knew which end of a sword to hold, and those who were left were either untested youths or haunted-eyed old veterans long since lost to drink. As he rode toward the city gate, the captain was thinking that he might be best advised to visit the slave market and see if there were any well set-up foreigners with military experience for sale.
Just outside the gate, he reined in as three men in leather and buckram came out. They paused to adjust their packs and touch the tips of their staffs together, as travelers often did for luck at the beginning of a journey. They were none of them large, but each had a hard and wiry look to him, and Idrix could see, even at a casual glance, at least eight daggers and throwing knives distributed about their persons.
"Gentlemen," he said, "would you be Druma-bound, by any chance?"
The apparent leader of the trio, a low-browed fellow with restless eyes, looked up at him with suspicion. "What business is that of yours?" he said. "If you're thinking we three are easy meat for a highwayman on a tall horse, here's an opportunity to change your opinion."
There was a vertical post set in the ground near the road outside the gate. Hedvend VI's judges sometimes sentenced certain classes of malefactors to be bound there, exposed to the caprices of passersby until they thoroughly repented of their offenses or expired—whichever came first. The post was untenanted this morning, but within moments of the wiry man's words, and after a brief flurry of motions, the wood was suddenly pierced by a half-dozen blades, their hilts aquiver from the impacts.
"Impressive," said the guard captain.
The three travelers were already working their weapons free of the wood and returning them to scabbards and sheaths. "It means so much to us to have won your high regard," said the low-browed one. He tucked away a short but wide-bladed throwing knife and turned to face the high country to the east.
"Wait," said Idrix.
The other man turned an irritated gaze his way. "We have a long, uphill walk ahead of us and the sun is already above those peaks."
"How would you to like to ride instead of walk?"
The knife-thrower's look of suspicion only deepened.
"And be paid for it," the captain added.
"We are busy men. If you have something to say, stop poncing about and say it."
Idrix was not used to being talked to in such a manner, but he swallowed his irritation and told them he was three guards short of a full complement and wished to offer them employment.
The three looked at him with suspicion, then gave each other questioning glances. A brief negotiation followed, during which Idrix was driven far off from his offering price. Detailed terms of service were also haggled over, the leader of the three initially expressing horror at the thought that when the caravan laagered for the night, they would have to stand watch on the perimeter.
"Well," said Idrix, pushing back his helmet and scratching his head, "where would you spend your nights when you're on the road alone?"
"We make a fire," said the smaller man, "then move out into the darkness and dig shallow trenches, where we lie under a layer of bushes and bracken. We watch in turns, and should any night-lurker creeps up to the fire, we silently leap up, our finely balanced knives in hand, and"—he made a whispery sound: whit, whit, whit—"soon he has gained a new and unsought knowledge of life's capacity to play cruel tricks."
Idrix contemplated making a comment, then decided not to. Instead he said, "Night sentry duty is a necessary part of your duties."
The three regarded him without enthusiasm. Then the leader said, "Can we at least stand watch together? We are used to supporting each other."
The guard captain found that a reasonable condition, and after a few more details were worked out, an agreement was struck and he led them back to the caravanserai to sign them onto the rolls. Within the fortified compound, the traders and their drivers were efficiently repacking wagons and saddlebags, preparing to set off at noon. Idrix and his three reluctant recruits wove their way through an organized chaos of stamping hooves, swearing men, tangles of harness, and side-stepping beasts to the spot where the merchants who had commissioned the whole enterprise stood in conversation with some persons from Elidir.
A half-dozen individuals were gathered around the caravan's owners, seeking to purchase the right to join the cavalcade, it being the safest means of crossing the wild lands between Isger and Druma, where goblinoids of various sorts still occasionally ambushed travelers. As the archer captain and the three new guards came up, one of the passage-seekers, a sinewy, grim-featured specimen in an ankle-length robe marked with strange runes, turned his head and noticed the trio.
"You!" he said. "Do you know you spoiled my dinner and gave me indigestion that kept me up half the night? You and those damned archers!"
The low-browed one looked anywhere but at the wizard, saying, "You mistake me, sir, for another..."
"No, I don't —" began the accuser, but then he broke off and his hooded gaze went from the three newcomers to the guard captain, whose brows were now knitting up a skein of suspicion.
"Aha!" the gaunt man said, "I've smoked it! You nobbled the guards so you could take their—"
As he'd been speaking, the pearlmonger's face had been showing growing alarm, and his hand had been moving smoothly and slowly toward the haft of one of the knives strapped to his chest. The man in the figured robe saw the way things were going and moved his own hand in a particular motion that ended with the fingers configured in precise arrangements. He spoke two syllables.
The accused man's hand now attained its goal, but when he sought to draw the throwing knife—and as his companions made similar attempts—they all found that the blades were fixed permanently in their scabbards.
A moment of silence and suspension occurred. Then the low-browed man said, in a whisper all could hear, "Run!"
Coming Next Week: Thieves and wizards in Chapter Two of Hugh Matthews’s "Krunzle the Quick."
Hugh Matthews is a pseudonym of critically acclaimed science-fantasy author Matthew Hughes, who is responsible for more than a dozen novels and is often called the "heir apparent" to the legacy of Jack Vance, particularly for his Archonate series. His novel Template was republished by Planet Stories, and his first Pathfinder Tales novel, Song of the Serpent, also features intrepid thief and confidence man Krunzle the Quick.
The hag or ogre wife or whatever she was stepped into the room, still looking like a sweet grandmother with her knitting bag and little spectacles. Then she saw the dead spider lying on the hearthrug.
She screamed in horror, rushing over. “You fiendish little pig! What have you done?” She picked up the corpse. “My baby! My poor precious one! Speak to me!”
Her knitting bag fell to the floor, Norret’s glove on top. While I was frozen with fear, my spirit wasn’t. It grabbed the glove and pulled it on.
The unicorn’s jewel shone on the back, glowing with ruby light.
But I wasn’t the only one using more hands than he rightfully should. “Oh no, none of that,” snapped Madame Eglantine. Just like she sometimes seemed to have more eyes, she now definitely had more arms. While two were cradling the dead spider, two more appeared and wove a magic pattern in the air. Then I was looking at not one Madame Eglantine but five, each as monstrous as the last.
I swung the poker at the nearest one and she shattered like a soap bubble. The rest laughed mockingly like a chorus of schoolgirls. My spirit swung at another. The glove’s jewel blazed with light as that illusion vanished as well.
“What are you, you horrid brat?” snarled the three remaining Eglantines. “A sorcerer? An oracle? Some halfling wizard masquerading as a child?”
I swung again, but missed. “I’m the one who’s going to stop you, you cannibal witch!”
A ghostly wind began to blow. The cobwebs fluttered and another bell jar toppled from the mantel, its head bowling across the floor.
“Oh, I’m not the cannibal,” laughed Madame Eglantine. “I have never eaten my own kind. All my husbands were human, and while I ate every last one after he violated my private sanctum, the only true cannibal here is you...”
As she said this, she became fatter and squatter, her body becoming more hunched and spidery, until all that was left was a garden spider the size of a woman, a cross-shaped marking on her back big enough to protect a wedding cake from a whole troop of dancing pixies. It was the mother of the horrible little spider I’d killed, mirrored three times, moving around one another like walnut shells shuffled by a charlatan hiding a pea.
I screamed and ran at them, hitting one with the poker while my spirit swung at another. The illusion before me popped on contact with the iron bar, but my spirit felt the glove slap the spider’s flesh, burning it, antitoxin meeting toxin.
Madame Eglantine hissed and reared. Then the sound of ladylike laughter issued from her horrible spidery maw and webbing shot from her abdomen, a great net like you’d throw to snare songbirds for a pie, thick and sticky as bird lime.
It covered me and I was stuck fast, both me and the fireplace poker, her web pulling taut against the walls as it dried. But my spirit’s hand was still free and I slapped at her again with the glove.
The last illusion vanished with a flare of ruby light. Then the spider shifted back to the form of the spider-armed woman. She reached into her bag and drew forth one of her knitting needles, ebony capped with silver. She waved it about like a wand, weaving magical patterns in the air and clicking her tongue like a Mwangi witch out of a story. A gray ray shot from the tip, hitting the glove.
The light of the unicorn’s jewel died, the spider woman smothering its good Galtan magic with her evil foreign spell. I felt my soul’s hand slapped back as the glove fell to the floor.
She picked the glove up with the tip of her knitting needle as if it were a dead rat. “Just what are you?” She flipped the glove into her knitting bag, stuffing it down to the bottom with the wand. “I’m curious to find out...”
She shifted back to the form of the giant spider. Then she crawled over me, her huge bloated mass avoiding the sticky strands the web. She leaned close, her horrible fangs dripping venom, and bit me.
I felt pain, and then nothing, the poison numbing, putting my limbs to sleep and freezing them, like when you wake from a nightmare but still can’t move.
But the nightmare was not over. The spider woman tenderly, carefully, bit through the strands holding me on the left and the right. She freed the fireplace poker and threw it to the floor. Then she put her claws on me and began to spin me, like a woman twirls a drop spindle. Webbing flew from her abdomen, smooth and soft as silk, wrapping around me, cocooning me as she had Norret.
At last she stopped spinning me. I was terribly dizzy, but my eyes focused as she turned back into a woman. But not all the way. She still had eight eyes and six arms. Then the most horrible thing—her bottommost pair of arms reached into her bag, pulled out a half-finished stocking, and began to knit as if nothing were odd at all.
“Now what are we going to do with you, Orlin?” she mused. “You’re a bit young for husband material, though your brother’s comely enough, if a trifle thin.” She poked Norret’s middle with one long-fingered hand. “Yes, too thin for my tastes. But I’ll plump him up once I have the right charms brewed...”
She picked up the two heads tumbled on the floor, placing them back on the mantel. Norret moaned. Madame Eglantine paid no mind. She looked into her bag and selected a different knitting needle. She mumbled a charm and waved it over a pile of broken glass. Half the pieces flew up and reformed into a bell jar. She repeated the charm and the other was restored as well.
Norret opened his eyes halfway and saw me. “Orlin...” he whispered. “Her bag... bottle... spiderbane...”
He was delirious, but my body was paralyzed by poison, and my spirit as well. A fine time for it to be properly tethered to my body.
But I was not the only spirit about. While I couldn’t feel my jaw, I could sense it opening. “Rhodel...” I croaked.
"Galt’s people don’t take kindly to monsters in their midst."
Madame Eglantine fussed with her dead husbands’ hair and so didn’t see the knitting bag behind her tip on its side. One by one the balls of yarn rolled out, as if an invisible kitten were investigating them. She replaced one of the jars as Norret’s glove appeared, the unicorn’s jewel still dead from the spell. Then as the second jar was being replaced, a crystal flask rolled free. Pretty and faceted, it was a treasure that once belonged to the duchess of Dabril. It was filled with a golden liquid.
“There, much better.” Madame Eglantine looked at her husbands’ heads, now back in their places. Then she looked mournfully at the dead spider. “Poor little dear. I’ll have to put her in the garden and plant a fruit tree. Maybe a sour cherry.” She turned. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
Then she saw the bottle floating up.
She dropped both the dead spider and the half-finished sock as she sprang forward, grabbing the flask with all her hands before Rhodel could work the stopper free.
“Oh, tricky,” she said admiringly. “Very tricky. But not tricky enough. Your brother said this held my doom, but he talks too much. I got the jump on him, and the same with you, Orlin. But I do wonder what it is. A poison for spiders, perhaps? Maybe some grand mithridate like the glove, or an antivenin to sour my venom in its sacks? I suppose I—”
A girl appeared next to her, a beautiful young woman dressed in the livery of a page of House Devore.
“Who are you?” asked Madame Eglantine, shocked.
“Death,” replied Rhodel. She ripped the bottle from the spider woman’s hands with the strength only the dead could possess and pulled the stopper free. “Never trouble a child of Dabril!” She threw the contents into the witch’s face.
Rhodel disappeared, the empty bottle and stopper clattering to the floor as Madame Eglantine screamed, clawing her eight eyes with all six hands. Then she stopped screaming as the room became filled with the overwhelming scent of honeysuckle.
“Perfume?” Madame Eglantine gasped. “Perfume? That’s all you have?” She exploded into gales of laughter. “Oh, that’s rich! That’s the cream of the jest! Two riddles solved for the price of one! You, my child, are nothing more than a baby bone oracle! And your brother? Not even an alchemist! A mere puffer who thought to bluff me with a bottle of perfume!”
With that, the windows began to spring open, one by one, the cobwebs ripping free as Rhodel let in the fresh air of the garden outside.
The fresh air—and the wasps and bees from the garlands of eglantine that hung about the house.
Madame Eglantine screamed as the insects swarmed her, stinging her as she shifted into her monstrous spider form. She sprayed webbing as quickly as a magician conjures scarves, but still more came, drawn by the pure scent of honeysuckle absolute.
Then came a droning buzz loud enough to be a roar. Bumblebees the size of lapdogs and wasps the size of small ponies came through the windows, the pets of Calistria, goddess of trickery and vengeance.
The spider woman played her own tricks, multiplying her form with one illusion, turning herself invisible with another. But the swarm was too great for the decoys to last, and the scent of Norret’s perfume unerringly guided the wasps to their prey. Madame Eglantine was stung again and again, until at last she was as paralyzed as Norret and I, trapped as a bloated spider with a woman’s head.
It was then that the wasps did as they always do when they win a battle: They returned to their nest with their prey, as well as the bodies of their fallen comrades—for to a wasp, meat is meat—and any other meat they can find.
The corpse on the table was carried off. The heads of Madame Eglantine’s husbands as well. Even the slab of half-smoked man-bacon from the hook at the back of the hob.
Lastly, the wasps looked at Norret and myself, still paralyzed and caught in the spider’s webs. They bit us free, picked us up in their claws, and carried us back to the nest as well.
Meat is meat, after all.
∗∗∗
Fortunately for us, their nest was the temple of Calistria, and Mistress Philomela knew us.
We were cut free from the webs with Calistrian daggers, had the poison neutralized with one spell and our wounds healed with another.
There was no balm for the horrors I’d seen save holding my brother’s hand. I knew he must have seen worse during the wars, and I understood why he had to bring me back.
Family is worth more than any gold, even if you come back wrong.
“Gingerbread?” offered Mistress Philomela. We were back on her balcony, sitting beside each other on the yellow divan. She held out a plate. On it were three gilded figures: a wasp, a dagger, and a beautiful elven woman.
I took the dagger. I didn’t want to have anything to do with cannibalism, even in the form of gingerbread.
Norret must have felt the same, since he took the wasp.
Mistress Philomela took the one in the shape of her goddess and delicately nibbled her ear. “The only thing sweeter than the cakes of Calistria is the taste of revenge.”
A great cry of exultation came up from the crowd. Rather than a load of fresh prisoners being delivered by tumbrel cart, there was only one late arrival, but arriving in style: a gilded, magical chariot borne by giant wasps hove into view, driven by one of the priests of Calistria, dressed in a golden loincloth that left little to the imagination, especially when it flapped aside. But hanging from the back of the chariot was what truly captured the interest of the crowd: a horrible monster, half woman, half spider, paralyzed by wasp venom, a look of terror on her eight-eyed face because she knew what her fate would be.
The priest did three laps of the street, to greater cries of bloodlust each time, until at last the Gray Gardener on the guillotine’s platform signaled for him to land. He did.
There was then the usual dry speech about the values of Liberty and the enemies of the people, as well as the thanks of the people for those who’d apprehended the enemies of the Revolution, especially fiends and monsters. It was then that I realized I was supposed to stand.
Norret squeezed my hand and I stood next to him. Mistress Philomela stepped aside and applauded us and the rest of the crowd below followed suit. I also realized I was still holding the barely nibbled gingerbread dagger. I raised it over my head. “Victory!” I cried.
“Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” responded the crowd.
“Vengeance,” added Mistress Philomela with an amused smile.
The execution of Madame Eglantine was very much like any other. Madame Margaery’s blade was hoisted up. Madame Margaery’s blade came down. A woman’s head bounced into the basket. A giant spider’s body lay on the stage. The crowd cheered, all except a group of women in the front row who for once stopped their knitting, looking at the head in the basket, then at each other with expressions of mute horror. The Gray Gardener standing on the stage looked down at them with his gray mask.
You know he was thinking exactly what they were thinking.
There would be questions for Madame Eglantine’s head. Questions for the heads of her husbands. Questions for myself and Norret.
I already knew my answers. We had rehearsed them before.
We were two brothers from Dabril. My brother was a veteran who had returned from the war. My father and brother had died, so my mother remarried, and my brother had taken me with him to be his apprentice when he returned to the capital. Any peculiarities about me were likely just a bit of sorcery unlocked when I was ill. Nothing more.
Norret squeezed my hand. I looked at him. He smiled and bit off the wings of his gingerbread wasp. I smiled back.
Mistress Philomela was wrong. Revenge was sweet, but the sweetest thing was fraternity—having a brother there for you.
Coming Next Week: A sample chapter from Hugh Matthews’ upcoming Pathfinder Tales novel, Song of the Serpent, plus a fantastic new illustration from Eric Belisle!
Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" (also starring Norret) and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.
The innwife woke me at dawn. I’d spent the night beside the fire. Someone had picked my pocket during the night, so the gold Norret had given me was gone. All I had left was the little horn spoon.
The innwife made it clear that if I bought breakfast or even ale, I could stay, but if not, I should go. I left, stepping out into the cold morning.
Cries of “Gardyloo!” came from up and down the street. Maids and goodwives threw open windows, emptying chamber pots. Piss and night soil spattered the cobbles, running down to the grate that led to the sewers below. Horrible stories were told about those sewers, but nothing could be more awful than the stench. I wished I had one of the paper nosegays Norret and I had spent hours making, but had to make do with the woodsmoke on my clothes.
A moment later, I realized I was crying.
I bit my lip and forced the tears back. Life in Galt was harsh, and I had no illusions. Madame Eglantine was a witch, and she’d warned us not to pry into her business. What that business was, I could only guess. Summoning devils like the vile Chelaxians? Worshiping nightmares from beyond the stars? Smuggling nobles out of Galt?
Whatever it was, it was awful enough that my brother had decided to do something about it. But the witch had won.
How she had won was the question. My brother could be injured, dead, drugged, or even turned into a toad for the witch to feed flies and taunt.
Given Madame Eglantine’s ties with the Revolutionary Council, the cruelest possibility was that he would join the next cart of condemned to feed the guillotine.
The window of the uppermost gable of the house at the top of the street popped open and a familiar female voice cried out a warning. The night soil flew down and the window snapped shut, the little diamond panes frosted from the inside to ensure the old woman’s privacy.
She was unusually late. Normally Madame Eglantine would have done this before dawn, giving her time to go down to the kitchen and fix breakfast for the guests.
I steeled my courage and made my way back to the familiar house. I slipped in as one of the other boarders stepped out—the old wizard Norret had got the manuscript from, off to take his morning constitutional before returning for breakfast.
The rooms Norret and I had shared were bare as when we moved in. The only change was a pile of ashes in the grate. The air smelled strongly of irises and alchemist’s fire.
I made my way to the dining room. The other boarders greeted me kindly, inquiring as to when Norret would be by and how his research was going. I shrugged. The old wizard returned shortly, reeking of cherry tobacco and snuff.
A half-hour late, Madame Eglantine came in, bearing a tray heavy with pork pies and mirabelle plums. “My pardon, gentlemen. There will be no croissants this morning. I missed the baker’s boy when—”
“Where’s my brother?”
The old witch looked at me, shocked, but quickly regained her composure. “My dear child, you’re still here? I thought you left with him last night. Your brother gave notice and cleaned out all his things.”
“I waited at the tavern. He never came.”
A look passed among the guests, a sad one, and the old wizard turned to me and said, “Did he leave you no money?”
“A little. My pocket was picked.”
There were more sad looks and tut-tutting. The old wizard produced a few silver coins and pressed them into my hand. “You must take care of yourself now, Orlin.”
Madame agreed. “I’m not in the business of charity. You’re welcome to stay for breakfast, but you’re almost a grown man. Inquire at the workhouse, or perhaps with the army.”
“My brother would not abandon me.”
She looked very sad, but it was an actress’s look from a melodrama, a practiced expression of grief that had nothing to do with the cold glittering little black eyes behind the half-moon spectacles. “I’m sorry, but you are not the first child in Isarn to believe that, nor will you be the last.”
“People are only human,” the old wizard agreed sadly.
I did not mention that my brother had given up a fortune to bring me back to life. I only burst into tears and ran from that house, unable to think how to save Norret.
I had no way of knowing that he was not already dead. But if you’re from Galt, you know that the only truly final death comes from one of the Final Blades.
No one knows that better than myself. Even coming back wrong is better than not coming back at all.
My handkerchief fluttered out of my pocket, drying my tears without me touching it.
“Th-thank you, Rhodel,” I snuffled, retrieving it. I blew my nose and put it away.
I still had hope. The witch had gone with the lie that Norret had abandoned me, not that he’d pried into whatever awful thing went on in her attic. That meant that she’d have trouble having him arrested and sent off to meet Madame Margaery.
The Gray Gardeners always asked questions, sometimes even after people died.
I thought about what I knew of Madame Eglantine. The only way into her apartment was the door at the end of the upstairs hall, set with many locks and charms. Once I’d glimpsed a spiral stair beyond it, thick with cobwebs. I could only guess that there would be another door with far more dangerous locks at the top of the stair. All the windows locked from the inside. To get up to the gables would mean scaling three stories and a slate roof. The boarding house also had a climbing rose—an eglantine, like its owner. The vine was heavy with little white blossoms, thick with thorns, and infested with famished bees, the fat little garden spiders that preyed upon them, and the wasps that preyed upon them in turn.
Madame only left her attic to fix breakfast and supper, meet with tradesmen, and tend her beloved garden. The only time she left the house was to attend an execution, which was a general holiday. That was also the only time the cook fires were banked.
I saw a halfling walking down the street. He was wearing a short cap and a pair of heavy gloves, and had a wire brush over his shoulder. The only parts of him that weren’t covered with soot were the gilded buttons on his coat.
I stepped into his path. “Teach me your trade.”
The halfling looked up at me and laughed. “Not that I ain’t always lookin’ fer apprentices, but ye’re too tall, lad, and y’look like ye’re gonna get a dem site bigger before ye’re done.” He then turned more serious. “Parents tossed ye out? Tell y’wot. Y’can touch me buttons fer luck fer free and be on yer way with me best wishes. Sound right?”
“How about I buy you a glass of wine and you tell me about your trade?”
“Halfling size or human size?”
“Your choice.”
He grinned. “That’d be halfling size. It’s bigger.”
I ended up buying the whole bottle with a couple of the wizard’s silver pieces, but found I what I needed to know. Most of what I needed I already had—a cap and a pair of stout gloves. What I didn’t have, I didn’t need either. I had no interest in cleaning Madame Eglantine’s chimney, with or without a wire brush.
The halfling did an excellent impression of the mistress of the boarding house: “‘Yes, citizen, I am quite aware of the perils of chimney fires. Be that as it may, I have spells to clean my chimney, and I’m more limber than I appear. Indeed, I think you’d be quite surprised at how small a space I can fit into...’” He snorted. “Nasty old harridan. Lost a few snakesmen to her back in the day. Steer clear of that one if’n y’know what’s good.”
“Snakesmen?”
“Burglars,” the halfling confessed drunkenly. “Second-story men. Never seen hide nor hair of ’em ag’in. Bet she turned ’em inta mice an’ fed ’em to the cat.”
Feeding someone to a familiar was awful magic, but Madame Eglantine did not have a cat that I knew of. The only pets Madame appeared to have were garden spiders.
There were a great many of them in the garlands of eglantine that twined around the boarding house. I climbed the rose the next day, after watching Madame and half her boarders leave for the executions. I couldn’t believe my luck—the windows of Norret’s and my old rooms had been left open to air. They still smelled very strongly of iris.
I brushed the little spiders from my clothes, then went to the fireplace. It was still warm. The hearth fire had been banked in the kitchen. But not for long.
I took the wine bottle from the inn, reached up the flue, and dropped it down the chimney.
There was dim tinkle and the sound of a small explosion. Norret had taught me the formula for extinguisher grenades. It had taken the last of the wizard’s silver at the apothecary, but was worth it.
I waited for the fumes to clear, then stuck my head up the flue. It was dark, and soot drifted down over my face. I did as the chimneysweep had told me. I tied my scarf over my face and pulled my cap low over my eyes, then worked my way up slowly.
There were handholds in the brick, but the safest way up was bracing my back against the back of the chimney and my feet against the front. I wormed my way upward, higher and higher, until I found the next flue, the one that led to Madame Eglantine’s attic apartment.
I came down carefully, expecting that I might step directly into a cauldron, but her fireplace only had an iron hook at the back. It held a slab of Madame’s delicious bacon smoking over the hob. Another hook held a kettle for Madame’s tea. The fire was out save for a few banked coals, but the ashes smelled of applewood.
"Madame Eglantine is more than she appears."
I moved the fire screen aside and ducked out into the apartment, shaking the soot off onto the hearthrug. The apartment was the most cobwebbed place I’d ever seen. Madame might want her guests to tidy up after themselves, but had clearly never seen fit to clean her own rooms. What I had taken for frosted glass was a thick film of cobwebs on the inside of all the windows. It made the light far dimmer than day, but still brighter than it had been in the chimney.
There were cases of books and bric-a-brac, shelves containing the oddments and curios of a lifetime. Then I turned and saw the mantel. My heart stopped cold.
Where a scholar might keep the bust of a great philosopher, or an artist might place a single skull for still lifes, Madame Eglantine had done them one better. On the mantel was a row of bell jars like you’d use for growing vegetables or protecting mantel clocks. But under each jar was a severed head, preserved by magic or alchemy, fresh as they day they were chopped. Their eyes were wide and staring, their mouths half open. I expected them to start speaking any moment.
They did not, but as I stumbled away, I wished they had, for they could have warned me not to look at what I saw next.
Stretched out on a table was a corpse—without its head, without its hands, without a great many parts. At first I thought Madame Eglantine must be an anatomy student or necromancer, but then I saw the chart, like a doctor might use, but marked like a butcher’s with notes like brisket and good for paté. I realized that Madame Eglantine must be some horrible hag or ogre wife like in the stories. Suddenly the bacon hanging on the hob didn’t seem so appealing.
Then I saw Norret.
He was poisoned. I sensed it immediately. He was hanging in a great spiderweb strung in one corner. I rushed to him, but before I touched him, I stopped, remembering the terrible stickiness of such webs from the bard’s stories. I ran and got the fireplace poker and used it to rip the webs away.
He was still alive, but paralyzed and poisoned. And it was then that I sensed poison again. But this poison was moving.
It was a spider. A garden spider like the little ones in the roses outside, squat and brown and marked with a cross like a festival cake frosted to keep pixies from dancing on it. But this spider was the size of a crab.
It scuttled toward me. I smashed it with the fireplace poker, hitting it with the hook. It hissed like a pastry dropped into hot fat and scuttled away. I stepped back. Then the hearth broom levitated, swatting at it—Rhodel trying to help, but only swatting it on the backside.
It leapt at me.
I swung the poker, but it went wild. I lost my grip, the iron bar striking one of the bell jars.
It shattered. The head bowled across the floor, eyes blinking.
I caught the spider. It bit at me, drooling poison, but my gloves were stout. I shoved it against the mantel with one hand. With the other, I reached for my belt knife, hoping to stab it. My hand closed around something smaller than expected, and I realized that I had grabbed the little horn spoon instead.
It didn’t matter. The handle was ivory and pointed, and had come from a unicorn. I jammed it in, point first, again and again, stabbing it over and over until the horrible monster vomited blancmange. It died with a shudder.
I was crying again. I went and got the poker and used it to rip the webs away from Norret. Somewhere in his gear he had a jewel that had once belonged to Dabril’s duke, a magic ruby set in a glove that could neutralize poison. If I could just find it, I might heal him, and we could both escape this chamber of horrors.
“I believe,” said a voice behind me, “you are looking for this.”
I turned. Madame Eglantine stood framed in the doorway, taking Norret’s jeweled glove out of her knitting bag.
Coming Next Week: Further horrors in the final chapter of Kevin Andrew Murphy’s “The Perfumer’s Apprentice.”
Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" (also starring Norret) and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.
Norret had theories, but then my brother always had theories. It’s part of an alchemist’s job. He’d heard some story about assassins wanting to kill an ancient king, and rather than do something obvious like stab him, they got a girl and slowly fed her poison until she was immune but it oozed out her pores. The plan was that once the king made love to this girl, he’d die.
It seemed rather unlikely to me, since it hinged on the king actually wanting this one girl, but the assassins in bards' stories were never the ones who came up with practical plans. In any case, Norret wondered what happened to the “poison maiden” after that. It might also explain how Madame Eglantine’s husbands died.
He also mentioned something called an upas tree, a poisonous mulberry travelers said grew in Tian Xia. The perfume from its branches was supposedly so deadly that it would kill everything in fourteen miles. Were such a tree to have a dryad, that fey woman would undoubtedly be just as toxic.
This was a rather frightening thought, but as I remarked, if there were an upas tree growing somewhere in Isarn, someone would have noticed by now.
Norret’s third theory was that maybe Madame Eglantine was a toad witch like the legendary Crapaudine, mother of Coco the cockatrice, who everyone sang dirty songs about back in Dabril. If she’d used witchcraft to turn herself human, she still might detect as poison to my unicorn-horn senses.
I didn’t think Madame Eglantine had enough warts to be a toad. I also couldn’t picture a toad knitting. But being a witch and brewing so many poisons that some of them stuck to her? That seemed likely.
In any case, her food wasn’t poisoned and she was quite a good cook. It was hard to get food in Isarn, especially meat, but evidently proximity to the Revolutionary Council had its benefits. For our first supper there, there was a beautiful pork roast with gravy, fresh bread to sop it up, and baked apples. After months eating at second-rate inns or choking down my brother’s cooking, it was the sweetest meal I’d ever tasted.
My brother is a very good man and a good alchemist, but not a good cook. It’s a horrible thing to say about a Galtan, but it’s true. If you gave Norret a chicken, he’d be more likely to blow it up or bring it back to life than turn it into anything decent to eat.
The other boarders were mostly scholars, and while they were also appreciative of Madame’s cooking, they told us to get used to pork. There was occasionally goose for holidays, but meat mainly consisted of pork roasts, stews, dumplings, sausages, and even wonderful things like smoked ham and bacon and pork-liver paté, all accompanied by bread from the baker and fresh produce from the garden. The working theory was that Madame Eglantine had a longstanding affair with a high-ranking member of the hog butcher’s guild. There were also jokes about sympathetic magic and Madame using witchcraft to turn men into pigs, but the resident wizards all agreed there was no more magic in the meat than good Galtan cooking, and the only way anyone was going to turn into a pig was through gluttony.
Norret was a bit more worried because the elixir that brought me back from the dead was philosophic mercury, the same magic quicksilver that had gotten into his eye when he cracked the philosopher’s stone hidden in the duchess’s basement. “It’s an amalgam,” Norret explained. “The philosophic mercury mixes with natural magic and enhances it. I used eyebright to heal my eye, so the mercury fumes bonded with the residue. The unicorn’s horn is suffused with healing magic, so it brought you back to life and also let you detect poison. If the mercury were to alloy with other substances...”
I was horrified. “You mean if I eat enough pork I’m going to turn into a pig?”
Norret looked thoughtful. We were back in our chambers with the door locked, so he had his eye patch flipped up. The iris of his left eye was shimmering and silver like a mirror. “Probably not all at once,” he said at last. “You’d probably just grow orc tusks first. They’d actually be boar tusks, but everyone would think you were a half-orc, so it would still come to much the same thing.” I was even more horrified until he tousled my hair and I realized he was making fun of me. “Relax. I’ve got a present for you. I know you’ve been complaining about my cooking, and there was trouble getting food before, so I made this...”
He reached into his pocket and took out a silver nutmeg grater. He flipped the catch and inside it were little ivory nuts. They were part of the unicorn horn that had resurrected me. There was also a longer bit, the tip of a spiraled horn. Norret had shaved it down even further. As he took it out, I realized that he’d carved it into a horn spoon like you’d use to eat eggs.
“Watch.” Norret took one of his alchemist’s bowls and placed the spoon inside. All at once it began to leak white fluid. It rose up, higher and higher, thick and pasty until it threatened to overflow the sides, at which point Norret removed the spoon and pushed the bowl toward me. “Here, taste it.” He handed me the spoon.
I half expected it to crawl out of the bowl, some horrible animate pudding or jelly like they told nightmare stories about late at night in the taverns, but while it quivered, it stayed where it was. At last I put the spoon in and took a taste of the white pudding. It tasted... like paper maché, with maybe a bit of goat’s milk.
“Do you like it?” my brother asked proudly. “It’s blancmange. Your favorite!”
I remembered. Our mother used to make blancmange for Crystalhue. It was a pudding of rice and almonds with maybe a bit of shredded white chicken breast if we were lucky, flavored with rosewater and once a pinch of cinnamon smuggled in from Katapesh. “It could maybe use a little rosewater...”
Norret gave a wry smile. “I tried to add that, but it wouldn’t take. But at least we do have plenty of rose oil on hand.”
While my brother couldn’t cook, he could make rosewater. It made the pudding taste better, if not much.
That said, the ivory spoon was a very thoughtful gift, and amazing magic besides. “How does it work?”
“Spontaneous generation.” Norret said this as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “The same way that barnacles drop into the sea to become geese, the alicorn produces unicorn milk and bone porridge.” He grinned proudly. “It should be very nourishing. My friend Melzec once told me about a dwarf whose son was suckled by a unicorn and grew to become a giant.”
I stopped eating. “So if I eat this I’m going to turn into a giant?”
“Well, probably not all at once.” My brother looked thoughtful. “I’m tall so you’ll probably be tall anyway, and you could always stoop. And it’s better than boar’s tusks.”
All at once the bowl levitated into the air and the spoon flew out of my hand. Norret opened his mouth to say something more, but the spoon flew in, feeding him a spoonful of bland blancmange like he was a very large baby.
Sometimes being haunted by a dead strumpet isn’t that bad.
“Maybe you could find a way for us to see Rhodel,” I suggested.
Norret opened his mouth again, but every time he did, he got another spoonful of pudding. Eventually he just nodded.
Another thing you should know about my brother is that when he’s given a task or a puzzle, he sets to it with a single-minded passion. He’d already talked to enough necromancers about my condition, so he knew about folk who could see into Pharasma’s realm. Finding an alchemical formula to do that, however, was the trick.
As much as I love my country, I also have to admit that many of Galt’s best wizards died or fled during the Revolution and took their books with them. What’s left are fragments, but fortunately Madame Eglantine’s boarding house had a number of residents with some of these fragments, and Norret was able to trade secrets. One wizard sold him a formula for a costly ointment that was supposed to allow one to see through illusions and deceptions. A bard told a story about another salve that allowed a midwife to peer into the First World of the fey.
There was no recipe for that second salve, but while inquiring about it, Norret was able to bargain for a copy of a manuscript the wizard claimed had come all the way from the Library of Leng.
I’d never heard of Leng, but Norret was certainly excited about it, so I guessed Leng was some dead noble.
In any case, the manuscript was partially burned and written in strange runes, but Norret was able to translate the most important bit: a method to see through the doors of reality into the chambers beyond.
There were pages of complicated illustrations showing rays coming out of eyes like Calistria’s daggers, pictures of all sorts of undead—horrible things like glowing skeletons and men flayed alive—and requirements for everything from alchemically purified pitchblende to the perfume of “the flower of the messengers.” There were even partial instructions for forging a magic ring.
Norret thought that wizards were always overcomplicating things with rings, which he thought they used for status more than anything else. Beyond that, the iris of the eye was a ring already. The “flower of the messengers,” it turned out, was another iris, as “a message” is what an iris meant in the language of flowers.
The iris was also the flower of Isarn, the ancient crest of the city. Set into the curve of the river, Isarn had a huge number of the flowers fluttering along her banks like yellow flags. Before the Revolution, the royal irises could only be picked with the king’s permission, on penalty of death. After the Revolution, there was no king, but the penalty was the same.
It was a deed that could have cost us our heads many times over, so Norret and I gathered the armloads we needed in the dead of night. Dodging the city watch and patrols of the Gray Gardeners, we took the flowers back to the boarding house. We wrapped them in greased cloths so they would breathe their perfume into the fat as they died, then cleaned ourselves up and went and ate the leftovers from Madame Eglantine’s excellent supper.
Three days later, the iris pomade was washed with alcohol, then evaporated down to a golden perfume absolute. Norret mixed this with the yellow powder he’d extracted from the pitchblende. “All right,” my brother said, holding up the few precious golden drops, “let’s see if the librarians of Leng had their manuscripts in order...”
"Orlin is no ordinary child."
He tilted his head back and dripped the drops into his left eye, blinked a few times, then looked at me. His left eye changed from quicksilver to gold and began to glow. “Orlin, are you all right?” He took a step back, a shocked expression on his face.
“I’m fine, Norret.”
He continued to look disturbed, then looked at the door. He stepped toward it, then bumped into it. “Is there a door here?”
“Uh, yes...”
He began to look at his hand then, clearly fascinated, looking at it as if he’d never seen it before. “I’m... not undead now, am I, Orlin?”
“I hope not.” Honestly, my brother’s left eye was glowing like they say the eyes of liches do in all the stories.
He stepped back toward the worktable, bumping into it. “Fetch me the lead foil. It’s right there.” He pointed at his backpack, but I had to sort through several inner pouches before I found the one he wanted. Norret took it from me quickly and held it up, covering his eye, then breathed a sigh of relief. “There, that’s better...”
“What’s better?” I asked.
“Those old wizards, they weren’t as foolish as I thought. This phenomenon would be much better with a ring you could take off...” He took the lead sheet away from his glowing eye and looked at me, then moved it back. “Hand me the tin snips, would you?”
I found them, and the metal punch too, and Norret quickly fashioned an eye patch from the lead, which he placed over his regular eye patch.
“So you’re not seeing Rhodel?”
Norret chuckled darkly. “No. Very much not so. I’m so used to looking at alchemical allegories and metaphors that I failed to read the literal meaning. The wizard’s method for looking through doors into the chambers beyond? It’s not for looking into Pharasma’s realm, or the First World either. It’s for looking through actual doors into literal chambers beyond. It also lets you see bones through flesh, or even look through walls.”
He paused then, glancing at the ceiling. Our rooms were on the uppermost story of the boarding house, and on the other side of the ceiling was Madame Eglantine’s attic apartment.
Norret flipped his lead eye patch up, then went pale. He stepped about, looking, then looked back at me. “We can’t stay here, Orlin. We have to go.” He covered his eye back up, almost as an afterthought.
“What?” I said. “And miss supper? Madame said she was serving croque-monsieur with ham!”
Norret looked like he might never want supper again. “No. We won’t be having supper here. Gather your things and go wait for me at the tavern at the bottom of the street. There is something I must do here first.”
“What’s going on? What did you see?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“What? I’m not a child. I’m almost twelve! I’ve even been dead!”
“Yes,” Norret said, “but I’ve been to war and you have not.” He took me by the shoulders and looked me squarely in the eyes. “Trust me, there are some things you see that can never be unseen, and will haunt you worse than any spirit.” He glanced apologetically to the air. “Present company excepted.”
The last time I had seen my older brother this serious was when I asked what had become of our father and our brother Ceron. I knew he was trying to protect me. I trusted that he’d give me an answer in his own time, so I went to the tavern at the bottom of the street and waited.
He never came.
Coming Next Week: Mysterious disappearances in Chapter Three of Kevin Andrew Murphy’s “The Perfumer’s Apprentice.”
Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" (also starring Norret) and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.
They say the wickedest thing about the old nobles was that they were always coming back from the dead, 'cause folk never came back quite right.
They don't know the half of it.
I swore.
"None of that, Orlin," my brother corrected. "We're in Isarn now. Remember your manners."
"But Norret!" I pointed. "Look! She's at it again!"
Indeed she was. One of the little bouquets from my tray had floated in the air, high over the crowd waiting for the executions, and up to one of the windows of the House of Joy.
That's what they call the temple of Calistria in Isarn. Back in Dabril, Calistria's temple was just the beekeeper's house, and no one besides him did much in the way of worship. In Isarn it was one of the old palaces. But instead of nobles, each window had a beautiful woman or a half-dressed man.
Each also had a window box of carrots instead of flowers, since the Revolutionary Council had recently declared that everyone, even the temple of Calistria, had to grow vegetables, and use horse manure besides.
It made the city stink even worse than usual. That's why we were selling nosegays.
Norret swore too, an expression I'd never heard before. I guessed he'd picked it up soldiering. He followed it with a growl: "Rhodel..."
That was the name of the old strumpet back in our town before I died. Before she died, too, and went off to serve Dabril's patron goddess, Shelyn.
I should probably have mentioned the dying bit.
I died, I guess. All I know is I had a fever and I had this dream. There was a beautiful lady who wanted me to come with her, and a grave lady who said that I couldn't because there was someone else coming for me. Then the beautiful lady made me a bed of roses, told me to sleep, and I did.
I swear they were Shelyn and Pharasma, the actual goddesses. I mean, who else could they be?
The next thing I knew, I was being woken up by a pretty girl a little older than me, maybe sixteen summers, and she definitely wasn't Shelyn or Pharasma. She said she was Rhodel, and she looked sort of like the old Dabril prostitute, only young and pretty. Rhodel told me she was a friend of my brother's, and I should come because he was waiting for me.
So Rhodel took my hand, and next thing I'm standing in the town graveyard, it's winter, and Norret's there, but he's all grown up. Last I saw him, he was barely older than I am.
He used to be fun, too, but now he's all learned and trained in alchemy, which is what he used to bring me back. Of course my brother doesn't know everything, since he didn't expect he'd get Rhodel in the bargain.
He spent what coin we had to talk to some necromancers, and they told him stuff about "psychopomps" and "spirit guides." Even Norret was confused by all of it, which is saying something. Me? All I know is that I came back from the dead and now I'm being haunted by a dead harlot.
A dead harlot, I should add, who was currently taking one of our boquets to a living one. Not that you're supposed to call the priestesses of Calistria that, since they're "sacred prostitutes," and when they're not turning tricks or playing them, they're getting revenge, and they ride around on wasps the size of ponies. This one was tarted up in a gown of yellow-and-black oiled silk, and even had a fuzzy black-and-gold-striped muff to match. Except that it wasn't. It took wing, and I realized the muff was a bumblebee the size of a lapdog.
The bumblebee bumbled around the nosegay, caught it with its claws, then brought it back to its mistress. She took a whiff, smiled, then looked down from her balcony and gestured for Norret and me to come up.
The guards let us use the outside stair, and next thing the sacred dollymop was rising from her divan. Excepting my dream-Shelyn, she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, with honey-blonde hair done up in patriotic Galtan braids and three patches shaped like daggers rayed around her right eye. She was dressed a lot sluttier, too.
"What a delightful tussie-mussie." She smelled the flowers again. "These blossoms are mere tissue paper, but their scent is fair enough to fool a bee." Hers sat on her shoulder, eyeing the bouquet with eyes like perfume-bottle stoppers. "How can this be?"
I half expected Norret to explain how he'd found the secrets of the perfumers' guild hidden in the diary of the Duke of Dabril, and how we'd been using them to make fake flowers, but all he said was, "Ah, fair lady, the flowers are false but the scents are true. Floral essences from the fields of Dabril..."
She laughed lightly. "I've heard tell of the legendary artisans of some Mwangi queen, able to craft false blossoms so lifelike that they fooled all but Calistria's bees. You, it seems, have done them one better. But I wonder... can your false flowers be used to encode a message like a true tussie-mussie?" She looked at the bouquet, inspecting the blossoms. "Ah yes, here's honeysuckle, for ‘the bonds of love'... And vervain—that's ‘sorcery,' yes?" She looked at Norret and then at me. Rhodel had picked up another of the nosegays, and it was floating. I reached out and grabbed it back. "Ah yes, definitely ‘sorcery.' Your assistant is far too young to be a wizard, but definitely has the mage's hand."
She was wrong on both counts, but not by much as I realized both of my actual hands were still steadying the tray, while my spirit's hand was on the tussie-mussie and was playing tug-of-war for it with Rhodel. It must have looked like two invisible bridesmaids wrestling for the right to be the next one married.
Like I said, people never come back from the dead quite right. The overpriced necromancers told Norret stuff about spectral hands and phantom limbs. All I know is that my soul isn't tied to my body as tightly as it should be and that's not good.
The Calistrian dollymop sniffed her bouquet. "And lavender... That's either ‘devotion' or ‘distrust'... I forget which. I'd have to check my floral dictionary." She looked closer. "Or is this sea lavender? And what is that?"
"‘Sympathy,'" Norret supplied quickly. "And you are correct. It is sea lavender."
"The ‘sympathy' that's used by sorcerers or the type that goes with tea?"
"Does it matter?"
She dimpled. "Always." She tucked the nosegay into the front of her bodice, between breasts each bigger than her giant bee. "A worshiper of Blackfingers, I take it?"
"What makes you say that?"
She winked and gestured to Norret's face. "It's not a mask, but a patched eyed gives an air of mystery..."
"Just a war wound," my brother explained self-consciously, leaving important bits out, like the fact that he'd since used alchemy to heal it, or that he'd also got some magic mercury in it, making it look a bit odd. And in Galt, odd was not good unless you were looking for a place in one of the tumbrel carts headed for the guillotine.
One of those was finally headed through the crowd now, and a cheer went up.
"Oh come, join me," the woman said. "Only the tricoteuses have a better seat..."
"The knitters," Norret explained to my baffled expression. "The market women there."
I looked. Right in front of the Monolith, Isarn's prison and Hall of Justice, was the guillotine with its famous Final Blade known as Madame Margaery. And right there before Margaery's basket with the very best front-row seats was a group of women like you'd see at any market, with aprons and white caps fitted with ribbons. Every last one of them was knitting.
"How might we address our hostess, O beauteous demimondaine?"
Norret liked big words and flowery talk, but from the way she laughed and smiled, I guessed that this was a really nice word for ‘dollymop.' "You may call me ‘Mistress Philomela.' And this," she said gesturing to her giant bumblebee, "is Honeybun."
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mistress Philomela. I am Norret Gantier and this is my brother and apprentice, Orlin."
"A Calistrian priestess can be a good friend to have, but you don't want to get on her bad side."
I tugged my forelock. "Pleased to meet you."
She made space for us on the divan, which was feathery soft and upholstered in yellow silk, the brocade done with a pattern of vines and blossoms and what looked like skulls. "The fell and fabled creeper," Mistress Philomela explained, seeing Norret's interest in the floral theme. "The pollen produces the most fabulous yellow dye and is of great use in charms of passion and fascination."
"Truly?" asked Norret, touching the silk.
"So I've been told," the dollymondaine admitted. "It's from before the Revolution. It might be saffron from Jalmeray or just common dyer's weld." She smiled conspiratorially. "I've also been told that if you can obtain honey from that particular vine, you can make a mead that acts as a love philtre." She reached for a decanter filled with a pale golden liquid and poured each of us a crystal flute full, as well as a shallow dish for Honeybun. The bee crawled off her shoulder and began to lap it up. "This hydromel comes from the flowers of Calistria, the honeysuckle that we... used to grow here," she finished lamely, looking at the window boxes filled with carrots and horse apples.
Her look continued beyond. Ever heard the expression "to look daggers" at someone? Well, these weren't just normal daggers, but Calistria's, tipped with all of the revenge goddess's wasp venom, and they were aimed straight at the line of knitting women in front of the guillotine. I half expected the three little patches on Mistress Philomela's face to go flying after them.
"A toast," she said, raising her glass, "to the wisdom of the market wives who convinced the Revolutionary Council that every citizen, regardless of station or vows, should grow a victory garden of vegetables, to feed themselves and the hungry folk of Isarn..."
"To victory," said Norret, raising his glass.
"And horse apples," I said, raising mine.
Mistress Philomela nearly choked, then added smoothly, "Yes, and to the wisdom to use the effluence of the streets to fertilize our gardens..."
She and Norret both drank, and I did too, after checking for poison.
I don't quite understand it, but Norret said he used unicorn horn in the potion to bring me back to life, so some of the unicorn's magic must have stuck to me. Which means I can tell if there's poison in something.
There wasn't any poison in the hydromel beyond a bit of alcohol, so I drank it. Then I drank some more. And a little more after that. It was good. I was only able to watch a couple beheadings before my own head hit the pillow at the top of the divan and I fell sound asleep.
I awoke in a room that was definitely not the balcony of the temple of Calistria. Instead of soft silk and swansdown, my pillow was linen over bedstraw, and the room was plain and a little cobwebbed. My brother was there as well, talking to one of the market women. She had her knitting put away, but the bag was by her feet, and she looked very old—at least fifty.
"So who told you I had a room for let?" the woman asked.
"Someone in the crowd," Norret lied. I know when my brother lies—the corners of his eyes go all crinkly. "I gave them a nosegay and they gave me some advice. Said you ran a boarding house with good food and weren't averse to alchemy or magic since you had some skill yourself."
The woman clicked her front teeth together. "Well, that much is true, but—" She paused, and then her small black eyes met mine, magnified and multiplied by little half-moon spectacles that made her look like she had four or more eyes. "Ah, he's awake."
She turned to me and I became acutely aware that my bed was in the corner of the room. "Young citizen, your brother informs me you're called ‘Orlin.' You may address me as ‘Madame Eglantine' or ‘Grandmother Eglantine,' as you prefer, or just as ‘Madame' or ‘Grandmother.' I will not answer to ‘Eglantine' by itself, for only my husbands addressed me as such, and they are all now dead." She smoothed her skirts. "Aside from that, a few other rules: I serve breakfast a half hour after sunrise and supper an hour before sundown. If you arrive at other times, you must make do with what's on the sideboard. The only exception is on days when there is an execution, when I shall be joining my fellow ladies for our knitting circle. On execution days, I set out a cold buffet. Take what you need but leave the rest for the other guests. Don't be greedy but don't expect there will be anything left by suppertime either."
She placed her hands on her hips, her long fingers digging into the fabric of her apron. "As you're from Dabril, I also expect you to be of great help to me in the garden." She fixed me with a steely glare. "Beyond that, both I and my guests value our privacy. That means that locked doors are to be respected and keyholes are not to be peeped through. This goes especially true for my private apartments in the attic. If you pry, you may get what you deserve. That said, if someone breaks into your chambers and blows themselves up with, say, an exploding book, you are responsible for both the damage and the cleaning."
She paused then, placing a finger to her lips, then added, "As for cleaning, I expect you to tidy up after yourselves. The only thing I forbid is harming the spiders, both in the garden and in the house. They are here to catch the dirty flies and those nasty wasps. Leave their webs alone and let the little darlings do their work. Any questions?"
I could only shake my head dumbly.
"Good," she said. "Welcome to my house. I expect to see you tomorrow at breakfast."
With that, she left, and the door latch clicked shut behind her.
Norret turned to me and I said one word. "Poison."
"What?" said Norret.
"Poison," I repeated. "I'm detecting poison."
Norret didn't normally question the new sense I'd picked up, but he glanced to the door and then back. "The old lady? She has poison, or she's been poisoned?"
"Neither," I said. "She is poison."
Coming Next Week: Magical investigations gone awry in Chapter Two of Kevin Andrew Murphy's "The Perfumer's Apprentice."
Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" (also starring Norret) and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.
"We let them out!" Fife said, his voice edged with panic. They dashed through the tall grass, Fife following in Darvin's wake.
"You can't be sure of that," Darvin said, though he suspected the truth of it.
"We've as good as killed that village!"
"Fife," Darvin said, spinning around to grab his brother by the shoulders, but the halfling ran a good dozen paces behind the longer-legged human. Darvin dropped his hands. "By the Gods, your voice carries."
"Darvin!" Fife protested.
"Fife," Darvin warned, and kept pace with the halfling as he whipped by. "As you said, the creatures had already venturing out to slit the throats of farmers. They could leave the manse."
"Then why not kill everyone?" Fife said, "I'll tell you why. Because they only murdered those who stole from their master. But once you broke the seal on the door..."
"So it's my fault?" Darvin demanded.
"You just had to kick down the door."
"It was in the way!"
"It had a handle!"
"Oh." Darvin slowed down a touch. "That part won't be in the tales, will it?"
"Come on, you egomaniacal yak!"
The pair had reached the stables on the edge of the village, the Andoren draft horses within snorting and tramping the ground in their anxiety. All around them, shouts and cries of terror sounded from villagers driven out of their homes by the things that crawled through their windows. Villagers gripped pitchforks and sickles tightly, a few hefting rusting blades of a more martial nature.
Too much, Darvin thought. He slowed and stopped, the horror of it driving stakes through his feet. He watched numbly as Fife ran to people, trying to get them to move, to act, to do something to pierce the same fear that poisoned Darvin. Nobody heard the halfling, however; to them all he was a child to be set aside with both hands, even when he kicked and pulled the crawling thing off a terrified farmer who rolled around in the dirt.
Fife looked to Darvin for help, but Darvin backed away—one step, then two before he forced himself to stop. Only one thing mattered, he forced his fear-addled brain to concede. Only one person.
Darvin grabbed Fife by the shoulder.
"We have to go," Darvin whispered, and began pulling Fife along as the halfling bucked and screamed...
∗∗∗
"No, Darv!" Fife said, trying to free himself from his brother's iron grip.
"Come on," Darvin said, hoarsely, pulling the struggling halfling against his will.
"No! Stop!"
"We have to go!" Darvin shouted, dragging Fife off his feet, but the halfling managed to jerk away, ripping his shirt in the process.
"We have to save them," Fife said, staring up into his brother's eyes.
"We can't!" Darvin said, looking around.
Fife hesitated a moment. "Darvin, the hero of the Mad Necromancer's Wars, pulled his trusted blade from its sheath."
"What?" Darvin said, blinking.
"He set his eyes upon the imperiled village, ready to leap into—"
"What are you doing?" Darvin said.
"In—into the fray," Fife continued staring all around him as cries shot from the shadows like arrows.
"Stop it! That's just make-believe," Darvin shouted. "This isn't one of your blasted stories!"
"Everything's a story!" Fife shouted back with a voice that felt ready to tear itself apart. "Who says my stories aren't the ones we haven't lived yet?"
Darvin stared down at the halfling as though studying an alien, unfathomable thing. Then suddenly, he shook his head, his eyes focusing. "By the gods, you are mad."
"Only a little," Fife said, smiling sadly. Then he continued. "Darvin, hero of the Mad Necromancer's Wars and champion of plump maidens, princesses, and swordswomen everywhere, unsheathed his trusted blade and leapt into the fray...."
A small smile flickered on Darvin's lips. He inhaled sharply. "Right. Hero. Just make sure it's a suitably epic recounting." Then he darted into the crowd, forcibly pulling the men and women into fighting circles around the children.
Fife nodded gratefully and then set to kicking and stabbing at the hands that scrabbled after them. A handful of villagers fought to remove a hand about the throat of another man—the merchant Cullins, Fife realized. Harvander was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was already dead, or fled.
The halfling gripped his small dirk tighter and ran toward the men. He jostled for place and edged the blade for the hand about Cullins' throat. The bladed fingers were squirming for the merchant's jugular.
"No, you'll hurt him!" someone yelled, but Fife ignored him. He deftly sliced the first dorsal tendon between the thumb and forefinger, and the hand came loose easily. The men stamped it into the ground as Cullins coughed for breath. He rose to his feet with a heavy hand on Fife's shoulder and checked his neck with the other. It bled, but not so fiercely that he'd die.
Fife looked around, desperate for a solution as they ran for the nearest circle of armed farmers. The hands darted in and out of the shadows of the buildings, nicking and slicing with their blades before vanishing again. Several bodies lay where they had fallen, still and no longer bleeding. Others crawled or were dragged to safety, and yet the hands galloped fearlessly on the tips of their sometimes broken digits, eager for mayhem, unfeeling of pain.
The realization thundered inside Fife like a storm overtaking the plains. He grabbed Cullins' arm just as they reached the circle of men and women.
"Is the temple sanctified?" Fife asked.
"Well, the priest diddled Farmer Hoskin's daughter there," one of the men added helpfully.
"Once!" a slender, bearded farmer (who Fife could only assume was Hoskins) replied.
Cullins ignored the other. "It should be," he said.
"Get everyone there. Go! It should protect you!"
Cullins nodded and shouted at the others to join him as they ran for the simple stone building at the crest of a small hill. Fife let them go and turned back into the town to find his brother.
∗∗∗
Darvin knew he was no hero, but argue that with the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He noticed the villagers running for the hill, the cry carrying through the crowd to "Fight your way to the temple!" Though instinct screamed at him to run, Darvin helped with the retreating stragglers, fending off the hands that leapt and flew at them.
He heard a cry from a nearby house—a woman's voice, or perhaps a child's. Two men glanced at the home, but continued retreating. Darvin wanted to join them, but forced himself to remember Fife's words.
"Darvin, hero of the Mad Necromancer's Wars..." he muttered. The phrase was oddly comforting. He ran for the doorway, crushing a hand that scampered near—far too near—under a hard boot.
The unlit, one-room, wood-and-mud home lay disheveled. Straw bedding was scattered underfoot, the stone hearth gasping out its last ember warmth. Backed into the far corner, a young woman grabbed whatever lay in reach—wood figurines, serving plates, clay cups—and lobbed them at the three hands that advanced on her like a pack of jackals.
Darvin acted before he could talk himself out of it, stabbing the closest hand perched on the small table through with his blade. The impaled hand wriggled and jerked on the end of his dagger, and the other pair turned on him instantly.
Furiously trying to whip the dying hand off his dagger, Darvion grabbed the table and flipped it over between him and the advancing monstrosities. It barely slowed the pair down as they sprang over the wood.
One hand leapt for Darvin's shin, nicking it as he tried to sidestep. Hot pain flared up his body and his pant leg grew wet; he fell backward as the other hand tried to run between his splayed legs.
Darvin slammed his foot down again and again on the nearest hand, trying to crush it, then settled for pressing it down into the floor with his heel. The impaled hand continued to jerk at the end of his blade, and Darvin slammed the dagger into the ground, pinning the monster to the irregular slats of the wooden floor. But he'd lost track of the third hand that had drawn blood while the one under heel struggled to free itself.
Darvin couldn't move. He heard something behind him and craned his head around as a shadow moved in the corner of his eye. Fife materialized into view like a ghost, stabbing the third hand through with his dagger, continuing to slam his tiny blade home until it stopped moving.
"Help me," Darvin said as he struggled to kick the trapped hand under heel with his other boot, pain shooting along his wounded leg. Fife set about helping Darvin dispatch the two pinned creatures before both men had a chance to stop, breathe, and finally stare at the wide-shouldered, wide-hipped woman huddling in the corner.
"A plump maiden," Fife whispered to him. "I told you my stories just hadn't happened yet."
"Indeed," Darvin said, grinning at the woman and straightening his clothing.
∗∗∗
"Perhaps Darvin might one day prove a hero after all."
As Fife suspected, the hands couldn't cross the temple's threshold. And slowly, the men and women of the village dispatched the single-minded hands, with rocks, pitchforks, and scythes.
When Darvin and Fife approached the temple gate with the woman, however, Cullins stepped in the way and whispered, "You two best be going."
Fife, full of heroic charge and heart thundering with nervous excitement, said, "But we just saved you!"
Cullins studied the halfling, his eyes hard. "You brought those creatures here, did you not?"
Fife and Darvin exchanged quick glances. "Not deliberately," Fife said. "And they were already escaping before, weren't they? Because the townsfolk looted the manor."
"You sent us there," Darvin said quietly, a dangerous new note in his voice. "You have equal guilt in this."
Cullins nodded. "Perhaps," he said, looking at the bewildered villagers. "But you're outsiders here. This is the only courtesy I can give you. Go, before they regain their senses enough to blame you for this mess. Frightened people do that."
Fife wanted to argue more, but he felt Darvin's hand on his shoulder. "Let's go," Darvin said.
∗∗∗
Dawn touched the horizon, a passing glimpse of what the day could be, and Darvin watched his brother carefully. The halfling had a tendency to brood, weighed down by his thoughts and crushed by self-criticism. Unlike most people with his disposition, however, Fife had turned that brooding into a fine art, and Darvin could see the parables of disappointment in his brother's stories, the roads of regret for paths not taken except, perhaps, in longing dreams and sidelong glances. The business of the village weighed even heavier on him for that.
Darvin nudged Fife.
"What?" the halfling demanded sourly.
"Are you getting shorter?" Darvin said.
"What?"
"Isn't that how it works with halflings? The older you are, the shorter you get?"
"Are you mad, you self-involved moose?"
Darvin shrugged. "Then maybe it's just you," he said cheerfully, and continued onward despite the pain in his bandaged leg.
∗∗∗
They walked in silence a bit further, Fife glaring up at Darvin. The human's chirpy attitude and perpetual grin suggested that all trouble was destined to flow off his back. But Fife knew better. His brother needed anchors in this world, an emotional connection to guide his feet along the path. Darvin tended to hurdle obstacles, attracted by bright shiny things, almost entirely self-involved. The number of times Darvin nearly got himself killed staggered and frightened Fife. If Fife hadn't been there, to give Darvin pause, to remind his brother that they shared in the repercussions of Darvin's actions, then Darvin would have suffered for his enthusiasms. For that alone, Fife was glad to be a burden that only brothers shared.
Still, it didn't mean that his brother didn't get on his nerves occasionally.
A wicked thought occurred to him.
"Say, Darvin," Fife asked casually, "do you know what the word ‘incontinent' means?"
"Sure," Darvin replied. "It means spanning multiple continents, right?"
"Absolutely. I was thinking that my next story of your adventures might involve some jungle exploration in Garund."
Darvin grinned broadly and gripped the halfling about the shoulders. "See, that's why you're the writer!"
Fife nodded. "And you the hero," he said. "Oops—I meant the incontinent hero."
Darvin accepted the title with a bow and a flourish, and the pair continued on toward the next town, the rehearsing of another tall tale under way.
Coming Next Week: The return of Norret the Galtan alchemist in Kevin Andrew Murphy's "The Perfumer's Apprentice."
Lucien Soulban is an accomplished fantasy and science fiction author who's written shared world fiction for White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, Black Library, and more, including the novels Blood In, Blood Out and The Alien Sea. For more information, visit his website at www.luciensoulban.com.
It's an exciting day over here in the Pathfinder Tales department! Not only does today introduce the final chapter in Erik Mona's "Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver" (which you can read right here for free), but it's also the release date of two things that folks have been anxiously awaiting for a while now.
Illustration by Daren Bader
The first is Robin Laws' The Worldwound Gambit, a rollicking heist novel set in the demonic madness of the Worldwound. Hitch a ride with veteran con man Gad as he gathers the perfect team of scoundrels and thieves to infiltrate a cult's living tower deep in demon-held territory. Together they'll attempt to pull off the biggest job of their lives, saving their home from destruction and keeping business booming. Along the way, they'll have to deal with insufferable paladins, a dangerously seductive priestess, their own quirks and faults—and of course, plenty of demons. By turns hilarious and disturbing, Robin's new book is a dark, witty romp that will show you Mendev and the Worldwound like you've never seen them before.
Illustration by Jason Engle
The second thing we're proud to unveil is the latest batch of Pathfinder Tales ePubs, which includes not just several of the web fiction stories, but the first three Pathfinder's Journals from Pathfinder Adventure Path, available now in compiled electronic form, complete with all their original illustrations! For years, people have been asking for compiled versions of the journals for ease of reading and transportation—in fact, before he worked here, Mark Moreland compiled all the Eando Kline stories into a self-printed chapbook to read on his commute—and we're glad to finally be able to oblige. Appearing in this first batch are "Hell's Pawns" by Dave Gross, which marks the first appearance of Varian Jeggare and Radovan; "Dark Tapestry" by Elaine Cunningham, which follows the adventures of half-elven Pathfinder and desert druid Channa Ti; and "The Compass Stone: The Collected Journals of Eando Kline," which presents the entire epic journey of Pathfinder Eando Kline from his first appearance in Pathfinder Adventure Path #1 to the stunning conclusion in #18. Much longer than a typical web fiction story, both "Hell's Pawns" and "Dark Tapestry" are full-length novellas, while Eando's story is roughly as long as a Pathfinder Tales novel! "The Compass Stone" also comes complete with a new foreword by yours truly, discussing the evolution of the Pathfinder's Journal, and of Eando's story in particular. Joining these journals are the compiled web fiction tales "Lord of Penance" by Richard Lee Byers and "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" by Kevin Andrew Murphy.
And this is just the beginning! We hope to unveil the next novel in the Pathfinder Tales line fairly soon, and you can look forward to seeing further batches of web fiction stories and Pathfinder's Journals compiled for your electronic reading enjoyment at regular intervals. Because when it comes to Pathfinder fiction, more is better!
Way back in the editorial of Dragon #353, in March, 2007, I gave the first hint about a major gaming project I'd already been working on for months. While recounting a fun convention appearance at North Carolina's Mid-Atlantic Convention Expo (M.A.C.E.) I mentioned that I ran two marathon sessions of my Age of Worms kick-off adventure, "The Whispering Cairn," as well as another super-secret event, "The Refuge of Nex," which I called "a cunning dungeon you might be seeing more of soon."
Although the public did not yet know about the end of the print version of the magazine, I had received the terminal diagnosis months earlier. While my hectic days at that time were focused on giving the magazines the best possible send-offs I could, my nights were filled with scheming about what Paizo would do next. We'd already launched the GameMastery Modules, but that line was still in its infancy in 2007. Most of the plans for it were scribbled in my notebooks, and had not yet been published.
You may recall that the early GameMastery adventures featured an alphanumeric code to hearken back to the classics of the 80s and to help us keep track of which adventures focused on which topics. The "U" series, for example, featured urban adventures, while modules that started with a "J" usually involved a journey to some exotic locale. It's one of those ideas that work better in theory than in practice, which is why we eventually abandoned it, but in 2007 we were all still pretty excited bout it.
I was most excited about a specific alpha-numeric designation found in the planning pages of my notebook: The "M" series.
In a fit of hubris only a publisher could love, I decided that the "M" series stood for "Mona," and that it would provide an outlet for my personal adventure designs. "The Refuge of Nex," which I playtested at M.A.C.E., was to be the first installment in the "M" series, the beginning of a multi-adventure exploration of an extraplanar dungeon composed of several "stacked" demiplanes created by a long-missing archmage. It would be a huge multi-year, multi-product mega-dungeon in the tradition of Greyhawk or Undermountain, with plenty of intrigue and weird-world exploration mixed in with killer traps and insidious combats.
It was also WAY too much work for a publisher. Back then, I had enough capacity to balance editor-in-chief duties along with those of the publisher, but once the Pathfinder Adventure Path (and later the RPG) started rolling, all dreams that I would have the free time to polish off even "The Refuge of Nex" evaporated, to say nothing of my unrealistic hope of helming an entire ongoing module series while managing the most important business transition the company has ever endured. To make matters even more complicated, it was at about this time that I took on the challenge of weaving material from myself, James Jacobs, Jason Bulmahn, and other members of the Paizo staff into the Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer, the first real look at the wider world of Golarion.
"The Refuge of Nex," at this point, entered a long period of stillbirth from which it has not yet emerged. But I never forgot about it. Indeed, in the time between M.A.C.E. and the Gazetteer, I'd built up a whole story around the elusive archmage Nex, giving him his own nation to rule on the southern continent of the Inner Sea region and tying his background into other exotic places such as Jalmeray and Absalom.
At this point I decided that Nex had been among the would-be tyrants who tried unsuccessfully to conquer Absalom, leaving behind an infamous Siege Castle known as the Spire of Nex. The Spire of Nex was, essentially, the old Refuge idea transplanted to a more robust location closer to the City at the Center of the World. I still wanted to keep the old Refuge under the palace in Nex's capital city, though, so I decided that both the Spire and the Refuge were different entrances to the same otherworldly place. The fact that I had Nex himself withdraw there after a treacherous attack from his archenemy, Geb, made the whole thing even more interesting to me.
So I started work on the Spire of Nex, writing about 10 hours of adventure material to use at my various convention appearances. That version of the dungeon has appeared at PaizoCon (twice), Neoncon in Las Vegas, Dragonmeet, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Dozens of players have ventured into the Spire, and given that it's more difficult to get out than it is to get in (just ask Nex himself), most of them are still marooned there.
Illustration by John Stanko
Players really seemed to enjoy the opening levels of the Spire of Nex, and I quite enjoyed thinking about the place and detailing its many marvels. Over time I'd written so much material about it that I began to imagine my own adventures in the place. I realized I'd created a great setting for original fiction.
Fiction writing and editing defined my college experience, but since joining the workforce I'd hardly had time to write a poem, let alone a genuine piece of narrative fiction. I'd written dozens of game books, adventures, and editorials, of course, but I knew my fiction talents had atrophied, and the Spire of Nex seemed like a fun way to get back into it. Eventually, I hoped Paizo might even publish a line of novels to go with the increasingly popular Pathfinder gaming products, so I thought there might be a chance that, one day, I could even get it published—if I could convince the editor it was any good, of course.
So I wrote a 20,000-word outline for my Spire of Nex novel, and even wrote the first few chapters in draft form. Sure, I didn't really have the third act figured out, and once the heroes got into the weird worlds within the Spire the story sort of ballooned out of control, but that was ok, because I was having fun.
Then we launched our Pathfinder Tales novel line, and I read finished manuscripts from professional authors like Dave Gross and Elaine Cunningham. And I realized that my Spire of Nex outline was way too complex. Like, stupidly complex. I came to appreciate that I'd spent all my time working on a story that might work as the end of a much longer saga, but that all of the characters in the story had earlier stories that were much more accessible, and much less burdened by being tied down to a bunch of background I'd created for RPG sessions.
Fiction and RPGs are different things, of course, and I needed to write a story that worked on its own without all of the complicated background I'd invented to challenge my players. So I set the Spire of Nex aside and began working on that simpler story, which I called "Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver." The story introduces my old Spire of Nex protagonists, the cunning swordsman Korm Calladan and his cyclops companion, Aebos. It also ties in other bits of continuity minutia I slipped into my Pathfinder work as early as Pathfinder Adventure Path #1. And, of course, Nex himself is also involved, just to bring everything full circle.
This week, we're posting the second of five chapters of "Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver," and the first to involve hints of the grand Nex plan I hope to explore through future Pathfinder fiction and gaming writing.
Eventually, I hope that grand plan will involve a full novel called The Spire of Nex and perhaps even that original "Refuge of Nex" adventure I created way back in 2007.
I hope you enjoy reading the exploits of Korm and Aebos as much as I've enjoyed writing them.
One of the questions I get asked most often about Pathfinder Tales is: "When are we going to see some fiction from the Paizo staffers?" While there can be no question that our other Pathfinder Tales authors have done a bang-up job so far, many folks are eager to see stories that come directly from the source, the products of the same vibrant (and sometimes twisted) imaginations that gave the campaign setting life in the first place.
It's a curiosity we understand quite well—after all, we published four of Gary Gygax's novels for the exact same reason. Yet the sad truth about working at a game company is that you don't have nearly as much time to write as some of the freelancers you hire. The job is already more than a normal nine-to-five, and even those few hours you scrape out to write aren't always yours to write what you please. Maybe a freelancer crashes and burns, and suddenly you need to come up with half a book. Maybe there's a product on the schedule that only you can write, because only you know the subject matter in enough detail (a frequent occurrence, when your world is as new as ours). There are a million reasons why a staff member might not have the capacity to write fiction.
Illustration by John Stanko
Erik Mona knows this better than anyone. Since we launched Pathfinder Tales, Erik has had a couple of characters knocking around in his head, begging to become the heroes of a short story. Yet no matter how often he described them to me, or how much loving detail he put into his outline, it seemed that something always came up to keep him from writing the story. Maybe there was even a touch of stage fright there, too—despite having written or worked on enough game books to build a fort in his office, he hadn't written fiction in a decade. As the editor of the line, I was confident he could turn over something great, but it seemed that one emergency after another kept delaying his story. So after about a year of waiting, I did the only thing I could.
I made an emergency.
True to form, when Erik heard that there was a hole in my web fiction schedule that no one else could possibly fill in time, he stepped right up and wrote that story he'd been thinking about for so long. The result is "Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver," a new five-part story that begins this week, and I couldn't be happier. It's got sword fights. It's got cannibalism. It's got a cyclops. It's got a wisecracking swordsman with a Lemmy-style trucker mustache.
Most importantly, it's got Golarion, in a way only Erik could write. There are dealings with Nex—a nation Erik invented. There's information regarding Durvin Gest—from the only person who knows his secret history. There's—well, I don't want to spoil any more. But this is a Pathfinder story from start to finish, and we're proud to have it.
Of course, Erik doesn't have time to read this blog post, as he's been locked in his usual slew of meetings all day, and probably will be until late into the night. But I'm sure that, through the conference room door, he can sense our approval.
What's this? Another new story already in the free Pathfinder Tales web fiction? As we discussed in the blog last week, this month brings us two short pieces from Pathfinder Tales superstars Elaine Cunningham and Dave Gross, both of which were recently previewed in Wayfinder #4. This week is "The Illusionist," a totally self-contained one-shot story from Elaine featuring a young Mwangi wizard from the Magaambya who travels to the Acadamae in Korvosa on a sort of study-abroad program, only to discover that the northerners are far less cultured than they pretend...
If you've read Winter Witch, you may notice a few familiar faces in this story. One of the main comments I've heard regarding the novel is that people are really curious about Declan's brother Asmonde, and the backstory with him and the Acadamae—I know I found Declan's relationship with his not-quite-sister-in-law and tiefling niece one of the more compelling aspects of his character. Thus it should come as no surprise that when Elaine contacted me about writing more about that bit of history, I jumped at the chance. And of course, seeing our old friend Jamang in his natural habitat lends that much more life and breadth to the underhanded world of Korvosa.
Click here to read Elaine's new story, and don't forget to come back next week for a rollicking new yarn by Paizo publisher Erik Mona himself!
With all the excitement of last week's Meet the Iconics post for Hayato, our new iconic samurai—who we unveiled ahead of schedule as part of our auction to help tsunami relief efforts—we unfortunately didn't have a chance to talk about the new web fiction story that started that Wednesday. Which is really too bad, because the new story is awesome on several fronts!
Illustration by J. P. Targete
In "A Lesson in Taxonomy," Dave Gross brings us a glimpse of Pathfinder Varian Jeggare, the longstanding co-hero of Pathfinder Tales novels, journals, and webfiction stories, as he was in his early days as a Pathfinder, well before he became a venture-captain or met up with his bodyguard Radovan. Just two episodes long, this story takes us through historical Sargava and into the heart of the Mwangi Expanse, where Dave sheds some light on the not-always-amicable practices of competing Pathfinders.
If you're a fan of Wayfinder—and how can you not love free, high-quality, fan-created Pathfinder material?—then this story might look a little familiar. When the Wayfinder folks originally told us that both Dave Gross and Elaine Cunningham had agreed to write new short stories for the zine's Mwangi-themed issue, we were all excited, yet the deal raised some sticky issues regarding continuity and the community use agreement. The solution? We bought Dave and Elaine's stories and let them run first in Wayfinder as a preview before bringing them here to the website for the world to see, thereby making them official Pathfinder Tales content. Everybody wins!
This week represents the final chapter in Dave's safari adventure, and next week we'll have Elaine's fabulous one-shot story "The Illusionist." And after that, we'll be starting a story by one of our very own Paizo staffers. Who could it be, you ask? For the answer, stay tuned...
It's time to begin another story on Paizo's free web fiction Wednesday, and this time we have something new and different for you! In celebration of the release of Plague of Shadows, the new Pathfinder Tales novel, we've brought you a brand-new prequel story from Plague of Shadows author Howard Andrew Jones, featuring a number of the same characters but taking place well before the novel. Once again (or rather, once before) the Forlorn elf Elyana and her friends will encounter the evil of the Gray Gardeners in Galt—but this time there are the dark depths of the Verduran Forest to contend with as well. It's a pleasure to get to see characters from the novels in the web fiction, and we hope to do so each time a new novel releases—as well as sometimes just for fun.
As an author, Howard has knocked it out of the park. Early comments on Plague of Shadows have been extremely positive, and it's easy to see why. Perhaps it's the smooth speed with which he handles the fight scenes (and there are plenty), or the fast-paced sword and sorcery flavor (which is hardly surprising, given his status as Managing Editor of modern pulp magazine Black Gate). Yet even more than that, I think it's the classic feel of his stories that draw people in. Of all the novels we've published so far, Plague of Shadows is the one that most closely hews to the time-tested adventuring party dynamic. There's Elyana, the Forlorn elven ranger who knows her love for any human can never last; Drelm the honorable half-orc, struggling against his heritage; Vallyn the bard; Kellius the wizard—these are characters that feel familiar, even as they feel new.
And that's just the main party. Set many years earlier than the novel, this new story, "The Walkers from the Crypt," introduces us to the party that came before, and to the tensions that laid the novel's groundwork. But I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll stop there, and just say that it's a lot of fun.
I would also be remiss if I didn't note artist Eric Belisle's amazing illustration of Elyana, who also features on the cover of Plague of Shadows. Eric's perfectly captured the look and feel of an elven ranger from Golarion, and I hope you'll agree that the character in both the story and the novel are every bit as compelling as the illustration.
For some of us, Valentine's Day is just another day. We go to work, come home, maybe hang out with our significant others a bit or send the kids off to the sitter for a rare night out. For other people, however, Valentine's Day carries more significance, and flat-out demands acknowledgement. They see it as an excuse to truly cut loose, to go all-out with the romance and treat it like a real holiday.
And then, apparently, there's a third type of person: the type for whom Valentine's Day means a chance to go totally insane. Such appears to be the case with Pathfinder Tales author Kevin Andrew Murphy. How else can you explain the fact that he chose the occasion to, without any prompting or warning, write us an entire heroic crown of sonnets immortalizing the iconic characters' backgrounds in prose. (For those of you who've forgotten your 400-level literature classes, a "heroic crown of sonnets" is a specialized form of poetry in which you have 14 sonnets, each linked by their first and last lines, plus a fifteenth which is made up exclusively of the previous sonnets' linking lines, in order. Needless to say, it's incredibly difficult to do well.)
I'd say more, but I'm still processing the whole thing, so I think it's better to just post the sonnets in their entirety. Happy Valentine's Day!
The Fifteen Loves of Golarion
A Heroic Crown of Sonnets for Valentine's Day 2011
by Kevin Andrew Murphy
1. Alain, the Cavalier, "For Love of Glory" I am the one who lives to tell the tale.
The victor is the braggart of his fame,
The first to know the glory of his name
But not the last. The bards now all regale
The common folk with ballads of my deeds,
The battles won by force of my prowess,
The ransomed kings who've bowed to my duress,
And Donahan, the noblest of steeds.
Sometimes I think he is my only friend.
The men I ride with? Those I can replace.
The maids I bed? Each just a pretty face.
Yet Donahan is mine till journey's end.
If he falls first, then part of me is dead.
I've said the words that needed to be said.
2. Alahazra, the Oracle, "For Love of Truth" I've said the words that needed to be said,
For Truth is blind, and I am blind in truth.
My clouded eyes see little but forsooth
My inner eye sees clearly. I have read
The fates of men with but the barest glance.
I know the future as I know the past,
Which seeds will sprout and which of them will last,
For Destiny leaves nothing up to Chance.
It was not Chance that burned me with its fire.
The simoom's breath is but the Wind of Fate
That claimed me with its Flame. I now relate
The Fate of Love, if that is your desire:
All present loves become in days ahead
Mementos kept in memory of the dead.
3. Seelah, the Paladin, "For Love of Those Now Gone" Mementos kept in memory of the dead,
Reminders of what nothing can restore.
The wingéd helm that dead Acemi wore
Now hides my face and my unworthy head.
I feel its weight: part guilt, part gift, part theft.
Part love. She saw and yet forgave her thief,
The child who stole her helm. Ergo, my grief.
Acemi is still dead and I am left.
I have no words to say in my defense.
I know my deeds. I must have faith in grace
So now I wear her helm and take her place.
What Iomedae learned: Inheritance,
A gift of trust from those you must not fail
Now silent in the realm beyond the pale.
4. Harsk, the Ranger, "For Love of Solitude" Now silent in the realm beyond the pale,
My brother lies–and those who took his life.
I ended theirs with crossbow quarrel and knife.
The giants dead, now I alone prevail.
My kin who dwell below with bended backs
To toil at the forge or in the mines,
Or worshiping our gods at dwarven shrines,
Have my regard, and yet my brother's axe
Is all I bear away from whence I hail.
A hunter's life is love of solitude.
A Spartan camp, a pot of tea fresh-brewed
Will keep him more alert than mugs of ale.
My quarry's tracks are runes left for the sage.
I know the letters written on this page.
5. Ezren, the Wizard, "For Love of Scholarship" I know the letters written on this page,
My father charged with some impiety
Against our god, some awful blasphemy
Too dire for words, and nothing can assuage
The gossips' tongues, for rumor needs no proof.
And Abadar? The merchant god cares not
Who prospers or who fails nor what is bought.
The Golden One stays in his Vault, aloof.
I spent my youth to clear my father's name,
In quest to save the business that he built,
But in the end I only proved his guilt.
Now scholarship's the only love I claim.
Yet law for arcane law can be exchanged.
Old orders sometimes must be rearranged.
6. Sajan, the Monk, "For Love of a Sister" "Old orders sometimes must be rearranged."
So said the monks when taking twin from twin.
My sister Sajni's gone. I should begin
Describing how we came to be estranged.
We were conceived. Our lives were intertwined
Like threads of web and woof strung on a loom,
So were our limbs locked in our mother's womb.
Though born as two, we're more when we're combined.
We trained with temple swords and so time passed
Till at twelve years we each were sent away
And battle woes lost her to Jalmeray.
I left, deserting all I knew, my caste,
To seek my sister. Far too far I've ranged.
I've changed some facts which never should be changed.
7. Damiel, the Alchemist, "For Love of Change" I've changed some facts which never should be changed
And yet that is the goal of alchemy:
Quicksilver shifting, mutability.
The philosophic art just seems deranged
To those too dull to grasp aetheric heights
Or dream of fixing one's perfected form,
Not living with the dull and banal norm.
You reach out when the stars are in your sights,
Yet what you grasp may be the fulgent dark
For nightmares ride as well between the stars.
Like Shelyn's smile can hide Zon-Kuthon's scars,
The bright quicksilver sea conceals a shark,
And from the left the villain steps onstage
To let men feel the battle fury's rage.
8. Amiri, the Barbarian, "For Love of Oneself" To let men feel the battle fury's rage,
The Six Bears tribesmen donned the skins of bears
They'd taken from our totems in their lairs.
Each boy was sent to do it at an age.
We girls were told to sit inside and spin,
Awaiting a barbarian's return.
This never was a name that women earn.
I brought a she-bear's hide back to my kin.
The time came that a warband of my clan
All dared me to bring back a giant's blade.
When I returned, they mocked me as a maid.
The blood rage came. I slew them to a man.
That bastard blade I bear with me. Beware
To taste the kiss of malice and despair.
9. Seltyiel, the Magus, "For Lack of Love" To taste the kiss of malice and despair,
One needn't know the touch of love or hope–
At very least, not of an equal scope–
And pain is seldom more than one can bear,
And when it is? Well, there is always death.
My mother died the moment I was born.
My sister's cries, those spared my life that morn.
I often think she should have saved her breath.
Sioria, oh how could you divine
The babe you saved would still be here alive
Or on a feast of wormwood one could thrive.
I'll kill your father once I first kill mine.
Foul Lairsaph was a fool to teach his spawn
To walk the road with weapons sheathed or drawn....
10. Valeros, the Fighter, "For Love of Adventure" To walk the road with weapons sheathed or drawn
Is how a sellsword passes most his days.
That much at least is truthful in bards' lays.
The rest? Well yes, there is a need for brawn–
The same goes for an ox that pulls a plow–
But when your sword-arm makes some villain yield,
That's better than some plowshare in a field.
At least it's more exciting anyhow.
One day I may retire to a farm,
Grow beans and beets or brew a bit of beer,
But now I love my freedom and I hear
A distant village sounding the alarm.
If there's adventure calling, I'll be gone
To greet the hope that rises with the dawn.
11. Kyra, the Cleric, "For Love of Hope" To greet the hope that rises with the dawn,
The Crown of Our Beloved Sarenrae
Who cast the Beast below to Asmodae,
Is how a priestess prays for I'm Her pawn.
Whate'er the Dawnflower wishes I will do.
When bandits burned my village and Her shrine,
That's when I saw the face of the divine.
Through streaming tears the sun shone and I knew
The Everlight had filled me with Her power
To heal the sick and ailing with Her light
And cleanse those past redemption of their blight
By scimitar, like Dawn's Eternal Flower.
One day I'll join my goddess in the air
To live a life of joy and forswear care.
12. Merisiel, the Rogue, "For Love of Freedom" To live a life of joy and forswear care
Is what I always felt the world should be.
See something that you like? Then take it. Free!
If you don't like your lot, then folk should share.
They call it thievery, who gives a fig?
My knives can teach their tongues to be polite,
And while some think I could be more contrite
It's not like they're not working the same gig.
This knife I got from some Azlanti queen.
This one? From Galt. Belonged to some coquette
And these? From Geb. But most I just forget.
I only care if I can keep them keen.
You make life up like some bard's folderol.
I sing the songs that rise up from my soul.
13. Seoni, the Sorcerer, "For Love of Magic" I sing the songs that rise up from my soul
And write the runes appearing in my dreams.
The ones I walk with talk about my "schemes,"
If schemes they are, or just an unknown goal.
I'd like to say I like just who I am,
Yet who can say just who they are? Not I.
Or what I am, or how I am, or why.
That statement just might be my epigram.
I only know when spells wish to be wrought,
The way they say that love pulls at the heart.
Just so I feel the call of arcane art.
It springs to mind like any other thought.
I'd work alone, but I lack that control
For love and friendship are what make one whole.
14. Lini, the Druid, "For Love of a True Companion" "For love and friendship are what make one whole."
So spake the norn who whispered in the wood.
She vanished but her fey advice is good
And with it I can talk to mouse or mole.
The purest love is love you get from beasts.
My friend Droogami taught me this is true.
It's something though that I already knew.
I never bought the nonsense from the priests
About the love of gods as the most pure.
Who can believe a love you never see?
My love is for the leopard next to me
And she for me and that's what shall endure.
She's great and strong where I am small and frail.
I am the one who lives to tell the tale.
15. Lem, the Bard, "For Love of Happy Endings" I am the one who lives to tell the tale.
I've said the words that needed to be said,
Mementos kept in memory of the dead
Now silent in the realm beyond the pale.
I know the letters written on this page.
Old orders sometimes must be rearranged.
I've changed some facts which never should be changed
To let men feel the battle fury's rage,
To taste the kiss of malice and despair,
To walk the road with weapons sheathed or drawn,
To greet the hope that rises with the dawn,
To live a life of joy and forswear care.
I sing the songs that rise up from my soul
For love and friendship are what make one whole.
If you've been following the free weekly web fiction, then you've probably already noticed that today brings you the fourth installment of Ed Greenwood's "Guns of Alkenstar," a mystery set deep in the steaming, clanging depths of Alkenstar's legendary Gunworks. The fourth installment—but not the final one.
That's right—while web fiction stories are normally broken into no more than four parts, in this case we couldn't help ourselves. In addition to being written by master world-builder and storyteller Ed Greenwood (who you may remember as the creator of the Forgotten Realms), this story was just too big an adventure for its original run of four weeks. Rather than cut it down, we thought it best to relax our guidelines and give it room to breathe, using the extra space to continue its cascade of corruption and gun smoke in a so-far-relatively-unexplored nation.
"Guns of Alkenstar" will continue for two more episodes, reaching its conclusion two weeks from now. And lest you think that we can't possibly keep up the barrage of awesome, it's my pleasure to officially announce that this story will be followed by a sneak preview of Plague of Shadows and a new four-part story by no less than Monte Cook, one of the other masters of modern gaming. (What can I say? We aim to please.)
So check out the latest episode of Ed's Alkenstar odyssey, and as always, hit us up on the comments thread and let us know what you think!
One of the great things about being an editor at Paizo is not just working with some of the best new folks in the gaming industry, but also having the opportunity to approach some of the best old-school folks, those writers and designers who influenced you as a young gamer, or whose imagination set a stage that now feels too large and organic to have ever been created from whole cloth.
Ed Greenwood is one of the latter. While still very much a public figure in the fantasy world, continuing to publish novels in a variety of worlds, Ed will forever be known as the man who created the Forgotten Realms. It was from the depths of his brain that the world got one of the longest-lived and most vibrant settings ever to come to gaming (not to mention the highly recognizable character of Elminster, who looks suspiciously like Ed himself). For decades, Ed's creations have inspired novels, video games, comic books—and, of course, RPG products.
And now that same creativity has been trained on Golarion. While we've worked with Ed in the past, particularly on the Kingmaker Adventure Path, I was particularly pleased to invite him on board to do some web fiction for us—in this case, an extra-long tale of murder and intrigue that starts today and is set to run for the next six weeks. Knowing Ed's particular talent for breathing life into a region, we were also happy to temporarily turn over the keys to one of our most frequently asked-about nations: the Grand Duchy of Alkenstar, that tenuous holding deep in the Mana Wastes where magic is shaky at best, and a relatively new invention called gunpowder attempts to usher in a whole new era in warfare, even as its inventors cling tightly to the secret of its manufacture.
Click here to follow Ed on his journey down into the strange and dangerous world of Alkenstar's Gunworks, trailing along in the shadows of those elite investigators who maintain the region's delicate balance...
As you may have already noticed if you're a regular follower of the free weekly Pathfinder Tales web fiction—and if you're not, you should be—this week's offering is a little bit different. Normally, each Wednesday brings you a serialized chapter in a brand-new Pathfinder Tales short story by a promising new author or established fan favorite.
This week, however, we're trying something new. We realized recently that while the web fiction stories have hopefully been rousing some enthusiasm for Pathfinder fiction as a whole, we've ironically shown off very little of our flagship novels. To that end, from now on, each time a new novel releases, we'll choose one of the book's chapters and reprint it here in its entirety as a free sample (usually with additional art—we didn't come up with the idea quite in time to order new art for this round). After that, we'll make the sample chapter available in perpetuity both here and as a free downloadable PDF from the product page.
First up in this new plan is the just-released Winter Witch, for which we've selected the prologue as a perfect example of the kind of barbaric fun this book has to offer. Back when Elaine was first pitching the story to us, this chapter was the first thing she wrote and sent to us as an example of where she was headed. Once you've read it for yourself, I think you'll understand why we immediately knew we had to publish this book.
Normal web fiction will return next week with Ed Greenwood's explorations into the corrupt and combustible politics of Alkenstar, but for now, head over to the web fiction and get a first glimpse at Winter Witch! And as always, don't be afraid to comment on this blog or head over to the Pathfinder Tales messageboards to tell us exactly what you think.
Perhaps you've been saying to yourself, "Gosh, I think I'd really love Pathfinder Tales novels, but I just can't bring myself to buy a paper novel when my e-reader is so much more convenient!" Maybe you're desperately curious about the further adventures of Radovan and Jeggare following the Pathfinder's Journal in Council of Thieves, but your eco-friendly ideology can't justify buying the story when it's printed on dead trees.
Never fear! As part of Paizo's continuing efforts to bring you the future in a timely and convenient fashion, Pathfinder Tales novels are now available in ePub and PDF format, as well as on Apple's iBookstore! Whether you want to download them from iBooks or purchase the files directly from us on paizo.com, each new Pathfinder Tales novel that comes out will be available in a variety of formats. (At the moment, we don't yet support the Kindle, but we're looking into it.) What's more, subscribers to the print Pathfinder Tales line will also receive electronic copies of their books absolutely free.
But that's not all—starting with Dave Gross's "The Lost Pathfinder," completed web fiction stories are also going to be available in all the same formats, downloadable for a nominal fee. (Of course, for those who want to read them in a web browser, all the stories will continue to be both free and archived in perpetuity—this just offers one more way to read them.)
The future: it's here, and it's all about carrying your bookshelf in your pocket. So bust out those comlogs and tricorders and check out Prince of Wolves and "The Lost Pathfinder."
It's that time again! Now that Liane Merciel has wrapped up her superb Worldwound adventure, "Certainty," it's time to pull up our stakes and move somewhere else with the free Wednesday web fiction. In this case, that's down south to the forests of Nirmathas—or, more accurately, the dark waters of a nondescript little fen, where something strange has been stirring.
This week's offering is different in another way as well. For this story, long-time Paizo author Amber Scott has brought us a tale that is—if not exactly sweet—significantly shorter than previous entries, broken over two weeks rather than four, the better to keep the action moving and the lineup shifting. If you have an opinion about the change of pace, mixing shorter stories with longer ones, let us know in the comments section below!
In "The Swamp Warden," Amber brings us the story of Rhyn, an experienced swamper with a troubled past, liked well enough by the little town of fishermen and marsh-folk that he's chosen to defend, but never quite a part of things. He's good at his job, and if that isn't quite enough to erase the memory of his lost love, it's at least something. But when a new threat starts hunting the tree-shrouded waters of the fen, it's up to Rhyn to row out to meet it. And what he finds there may change him—and the swamp—forever...
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