Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Four: The Burdens of History

They left the midnight mirror without speaking.

Once on the other side, safely back in the Cathedral of Bones, Isiem snatched up the fallen shroud of silk and swept it back over the glass. Then he sat heavily on the bed, shuddering, as Ascaros sank to the floor beside him.

"You can't go back," Isiem said.

Ascaros did not reply. He laid his staff across his lap, thumbing its silver adornments over and over in repetitive circles.

"You can't," Isiem repeated, more urgently. "Silence is a trap."

"Is he?" Ascaros asked, as if the answer were of no great concern.

"Everything he said was meant to bait you. His false candor, the sly promises of power, the allusions to your predecessors' failures, even the mention that two others had refused his offer, so that you wouldn't be tempted by pride to be the first to say no... it is all calculated to bring you into his grasp."

"My ancestor's gifts are all curses," Ascaros replied. He raised his bad arm in its sling, plucking at the linen bandages that concealed the dead gray flesh. "He left hundreds of children, the shae said... and of those hundreds, I am the last. What an honor. How proud he must be." He shook his head bitterly. "The sorcery in my blood is killing me already. What does it matter, then, if Silence wants to do the same?"

"Is that what you want? A quicker end?"

"No. What I want is a way out. From all of this." Ascaros gestured to the cathedral's walls, to all the decades upon decades of human bones that hemmed them in. "Perhaps the shae can give me that. One way or another. Failing that, I'll take a better chance of surviving the Dusk Hall."

"You don't need him for that."

"You don't need him for that." Ascaros's smile was brief and weary. "We've discussed this before, Isiem. You truly have no idea what the Dusk Hall is like for someone without your gifts. It'll only get worse now that we're working individually with the masters. You can't help me anymore. But Silence can."

"Even if that help is not freely given?" Isiem pressed. "You would be the same as our masters, then. Forcing another to do your will with no regard for its own."

Ascaros's lips thinned. He looked away, feigning an intense interest in the arrangement of the bones upon their door. "I could offer him a limited term. Ten years, then a guarantee of freedom. After millennia in the mirror, that would be nothing to him. But for me... it might be enough to find a way out of Mesandroth's curse. By embracing undeath, maybe. Finishing the transformation that began before I was born." He shook his head in frustration. "I don't know if that's the right path, or if it would work. But the shae might."

"What about Voraic?"

The punishment for betrayal in Nidal is far worse than death.

"We should talk to him again." Ascaros stood, leaning on his staff. "In here. I want to see him face the mirror."

Isiem inclined his head. He left his friend in their room and went to find one of the Over-Diocesan's lackeys. "Bring us the apprentice, Voraic," he said when he found one. He took a seat on a bench of bones in the hallway until the acolyte returned with the man.

Voraic looked worse than he had the last time Isiem had seen him. His skin was almost as gray as his clothing. His fingers trembled visibly with exhaustion; weariness had scored deep lines across his face. And yet even through his bone-deep tiredness and guarded caution, the fear in him was plain.

"My time is precious," Voraic said as soon as Isiem rose to greet him. "I have work."

"We won't keep you from it for long," Isiem said, ushering him smoothly into the room. He locked the door behind their guest with a quiet click.

"What are you doing?" Voraic asked, turning back in alarm as Isiem turned the key. There were many locks on their door, and Isiem turned them all.

"Asking questions," Ascaros answered coolly. He pointed the silver-capped head of his staff at the mirror behind its veil. "What do you know about that?"

"Nothing," Voraic stammered. He knotted his hands together, wringing them in unconscious circles.

Ascaros gave him a thin, humorless smile. He wound the spiked chain of his holy symbol through his fingers and folded his hands in prayer, squeezing the barbs between his palms until both hands were studded with crimson droplets. A pulse of magic emanated from his maimed hands, filling the room with a flare of muddy red light and then receding. Isiem could still feel the enchantment in the air, however, and he knew the other two could as well.

"Try it again," Ascaros said, unbinding his hand. The wounds had faded to small pink dots. "What do you know about the mirror?"

Voraic's tongue flicked out nervously to wet his lips. His hands moved faster, over and over each other, strangling his fingers in fear. Silently his mouth moved, forming a protest that Ascaros's spell quashed—

—no, Isiem realized in a flash of sudden terror, that's not a lie. That's a spell.

Fire exploded at Voraic's feet. Isiem flung himself away to escape it. In the corner of his eye, he saw Ascaros do the same, taking cover behind the midnight mirror. It fell to the floor with a resounding crash, although the sight was obscured behind a rush of scarlet flames. The fireball Voraic had summoned was a sickly crimson thing, its colors murky and uncertain.

There was nothing uncertain about its heat. The mirror's shroud burst into flames and, almost as quickly, into ash. The bed shielded Isiem from the worst of the explosion, but he still felt the blaze through his clothes and the incongruously gentle drift of his own burning hair against his cheek.

Through it all, Voraic stood still in a pillar of torment, engulfed in clinging fire and screaming wildly as he burned. His spell had not been directed at the shadowcallers, not really; it was meant for himself. The agony of burning alive was nothing compared to what the Kuthite inquisitors would do to him if he were taken alive. This was his escape.

Ascaros stopped it. He tore one of the heavy black drapes from the walls and knocked the burning wizard to the ground. The shadowcaller tossed the drape over Voraic and held it down to smother the flames, adding a few kicks for good measure.

"Misery take the fool," he snarled, shoving a hand in through the drapes to pull Voraic back from death's brink. Sweat and soot blackened his brow, but Ascaros's concentration was untouched. "Help me," he snapped at Isiem. "Hurry. The Over-Diocesan's minions will be here soon. The idiot's attempt was hardly subtle."

Isiem nodded and fumbled through the drapes, ignoring his own pain. He caught hold of the man's hands: a sticky, sloughed mess of raw flesh and bubbled skin. Several of the fingers were gone; he couldn't tell how many. He closed his hands over Voraic's, pressing each ruined mass into a ball, and prayed for Zon-Kuthon's cruel mercy.

The Midnight Lord answered, and Voraic's mangled hand healed. Isiem continued to press down, fusing the man's remaining fingers—dead or alive—into the pulp of his palms. The flesh healed over itself, trapping the fingers like flies in amber. It was an effective, if grisly, safeguard against spellcasting. There would be no further surprises.

Slowly Voraic came back to consciousness as the healing magic flowed through him. The flames had ruined him. One of his eyes was gone, its socket a molten pit. His nose was a scab of charred meat pocked by two holes. The silver hoops in his ears had been blasted into globs of bubbled metal that dripped onto his shoulders. If he lived, he would be a monster... but there was no one in this room, Isiem thought, who intended for him to live long.

Ascaros dug his fingers savagely into the apprentice's cheek, yanking his face up so that their gazes met. "What do you know about the mirror?"

Voraic's mouth twitched. His shoulders sank under the weight of the drapes that still covered his body. "I have been inside," he admitted in a feeble croak. "I have spoken to the shae."

Ascaros jerked his fingers, flopping Voraic's head as though he were a fish on a hook. "You killed my aunt at his instigation."

"No. Not at the shae's instigation." The wizard rolled his good eye at the toppled mirror, staring at it without seeming to really see it. "Silence offered to help. He gave me the tools and the opportunity. But I would have done it on my own eventually, with or without him."

"Why?" Ascaros released his grip and stepped back. He sounded genuinely curious. "Misanthe saved you. She plucked you from the Hovels and gave you not just survival, but a chance at greatness."

"Should I be grateful for that? She took me from one hell to another. A worse one, I think." Voraic's burned lip curled, cracking at the edges. "And she murdered my mother."

"How did you do it?" Isiem asked.

"Silence taught me the spell. It was Misanthe's secret sorcery; no one knew that magic but her. Her refusal to teach it to anyone else—even her apprentice—was famous. It was a traceless weapon, or as near to one as I could manage." Voraic grimaced, shifting under the drapes in a futile attempt to find a less painful position. "But I would have done it even if I'd known I would be caught."

"Did he teach you anything else?" Ascaros demanded.

"Yes." Voraic's remaining eye squinted at the shadowcaller for a moment. Then he wheezed a strangled, mirthless sound that might have been a laugh. "Why, did he promise to share those secrets with you? It's tempting, isn't it? Centuries of lore at your beck and call. He isn't lying. He has the knowledge. But if you’re asking whether it's worth dealing with the shae..."

"Is it?"

Voraic closed his eye and let his head loll back. The ribboned flesh of his cheek blew in and out with each breath he took. "Look what became of your aunt. Look what became of me. All Silence says is true: he invites you to destruction."

Isiem glanced at his friend, but Ascaros did not return his look. "How did you get into the mirror?" Ascaros pressed, still intent on the apprentice. "It only admits those of my blood."

"The blood doesn't have to be in you." Weakly, Voraic reached for a blackened chain around his neck. The links had become stuck to the man's melted flesh, but Ascaros plucked it away with callous ease. Attached to the chain was a small vial, its glass shattered by the dying apprentice’s convulsions. A charred rime clung to the inner surfaces of the few fragments that remained. "I wore hers, and it was enough."

Ascaros's face hardened. He jerked the broken vial off Voraic's neck, snapping the damaged chain. "Does anyone else know this?"

"No. Misanthe might have suspected... but it was a routine task for me to clean her tools after her prayers, so unless Silence told her, she would not have known that I kept the blood, or why." Voraic coughed out another miserable laugh. "Kill me and the secret dies too. But you will have to hurry. The Over-Diocesan's servants are coming. Give me a quick death, and I won't shout your secret loudly enough for them to hear."

"Consider it done." Ascaros drew the dagger at his belt and plunged it into the empty socket of Voraic's missing eye. The apprentice thrashed under the heavy drape, kicking spasmodically for several seconds and then stopping.

Ascaros withdrew the dagger and wiped it off on the thick black cloth. Before he could sheathe it, a sharp knock sounded at their door.

"Open," a woman's voice ordered, "or suffer."

"Of course," Ascaros called back, standing. He turned toward the door, but before he could take two steps, Isiem caught his arm.

"What will you tell them?" Isiem whispered. He canted his head meaningfully toward the overturned mirror. Resting lopsided on its halo of chains, the mirror seemed almost ordinary, by the standards of Nidalese decor. Yet one needed only a glance at its response to Ascaros's reflection to see that it was anything but.

"The truth," Ascaros whispered back. "Voraic murdered my aunt as revenge for his mother's death. She allowed him to learn the spell that he used to kill her. He attacked us when we confronted him, and we killed him in self-defense. The mirror is useless to anyone not of its creator's line, so there is nothing for them to gain by taking it."

"That isn't the truth," Isiem protested.

Another knock struck their door. This one sounded like it had been delivered by a mailed fist, not a bare hand. "Open."

"It is," Ascaros hissed back. He yanked his arm free and hurried to the door, making a noisy show of struggling with the locks. Several had been damaged by the fiery blast, so his efforts were not entirely feigned. "It is true enough to pass the clerics' spells, and true enough to keep us safe. What greater truth could you want?"

Unable to find an answer quickly, Isiem changed tacks. "What of the mirror? Silence? Do you still intend to offer him a term of ten years?"

Ascaros hesitated. He turned back halfway, his expression caught somewhere between desperate hope and desperate terror. He gripped the misshapen knob of the bottom lock as tightly as a drowning man clinging to a final frayed strand of rope.

Then the practiced mask of stoicism slid back over his face, and he forced the last lock free.

"It's not your burden, Isiem," he said, standing aside for the Over-Diocesan's agents to open their door. "Silence is mine."

Coming Next Week: A quick trip inside an ancient tomb with veteran Pathfinder author Mike Kortes in "The Twelve-Hour Statue."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Andrew Ryan.

Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Three: Silence

"What would spur someone to kill her?" Isiem wondered aloud as they left the dead shadowcaller on her bier. "Not rebellion, surely. In Westcrown, perhaps, but not Nisroch."

"The mirror," Ascaros answered. He swept up the stairs from the chamber of the dead to their temporary quarters, where the Over-Diocesan's lackeys were to have delivered Misanthe's belongings. Blue-flamed candles in sconces of bone flickered as he went past. "Of course it's the mirror. It could be nothing else."

Isiem hurried after his friend. "You don't even know what the mirror is."

"True." Ascaros paused on the stairs, waiting until a black-robed Kuthite acolyte passed out of earshot. "But I know the Dusk Hall wants it badly enough to send us all the way from Pangolais to fetch it. If they would do that, others would do more."

They had reached the door to their room. It, too, was built of bone, arranged in ornate patterns that drew the eye in and did not easily let go. The same patterns repeated within the room, crawling over its walls and ceiling. Black drapes muffled some of the walls, softening sounds that would otherwise have reverberated harshly against the bones, but otherwise they were surrounded by the leavings of the dead. Even the desk and chairs were built of bone. The bedframe was an embrace of dead arms crowned with an arch of skulls.

On that gray-blanketed bed, illumined by a flickering host of blue-flamed tapers, Misanthe's belongings waited for them: A silver necklace holding a clear, many-faceted stone within which ghostly snowflakes swirled. A staff of smooth, glassy white wood that seemed almost ethereal in the cathedral's gloom.

And the mirror, hulking and ominous, its edge just peeping out from under a shroud of night-blue silk. The mirror towered higher than either of the shadowcallers' heads. A tangled hoop of chains served as its frame; the links of the chain had been bent and battered until they resembled curved hooks gouging the air.

"It's an ugly piece of work," Ascaros said, pulling aside the silken cover. The hooks caught the fine cloth and tore it; judging from the tatters that fringed the shroud, that was not the first time the mirror had ripped its veil.

A chill seemed to come over the room as the torn silk fell away, revealing the milky, impenetrable grayness of the mirror's glass. Voices seemed to whisper softly from its depths—not addressing the shadowcallers, but talking to each other or themselves, unaware of those who listened from outside. Their accents were archaic, their desire clear. One and all, they pleaded for freedom.

"It's not a nightglass," Isiem said. "That's a midnight mirror. A prison."

"Yes." Ascaros's face was unreadable. Isiem couldn't tell whether his friend was relieved or dismayed that he recognized the midnight mirror for what it was, but he was sure that Ascaros was not surprised. "It's an heirloom of my line."

"You knew this was what the Dusk Hall wanted."

"I suspected that it might be." Ascaros's grip tightened on his silver-capped staff. His knuckles went white under the candles' blue glow. "But I wasn't sure, because if the lore of my family is true, it wouldn't do them any good. It only functions for my kin."

"Explain."

"That mirror has been passed down from father to daughter, aunt to nephew, through the generations of my family since time immemorial. It goes to the magically gifted scions of the line... to sorcerers, always and only." Ascaros gazed into the mirror as if he could read his own future—or his ancestors' past—within the rippling fog. "Misanthe was the last of those, except for myself. She told me that much of its history, but not what it does or why we keep it. All she ever said was that it was part of our curse." He touched his linen-wrapped arm, grimacing faintly. "As if the rest of it weren't enough."

Isiem nodded minutely. He knew the curse that ran through Ascaros's blood. It gave him magic, but it also sapped his life, killing him slowly with every spell he cast. His family's curse had already claimed his arm. In time, unchecked, it would take the rest too.

But none of that answered the immediate question. A midnight mirror was a planar prison, sacred to the followers of the Prince of Pain. There was no clear reason that a Kuthite artifact should be bound to one particular bloodline, much less a sorcerous family that had no special ties to the faith. Nor was there any reason the Dusk Hall should want such a thing. "What's in the mirror?"

"I don't know."

"You should find out."

"Yes." Ascaros made a small, miserable huff of a laugh. "I suppose I should. That's what this is about, isn't it? Misanthe's death, the Dusk Hall sending us out here... probably the Over-Diocesan's hospitality, too. It's all about whatever is in that mirror."

"Whoever." Isiem walked toward it and held his right hand up facing the glass. The whispering voices went silent as he approached, and the ghostly mist within the mirror swirled away, leaving a blank opacity facing him. "You don't have any idea?"

"None."

"Then you must go in. Or let whoever is in there out... but anyone powerful enough to be of interest to the Dusk Hall will not be easily controlled or contained."

"We'll go in." Leaning on his staff, Ascaros straightened and stepped toward the mirror. He brushed a palm over the pockets containing his spell components, as if reassuring himself that they were all there. "Not because of that. Because I don't want the Over-Diocesan seeing who waits inside."

The mists swirled before Ascaros. Instead of the flat, empty space that faced Isiem, a spectral staircase appeared opposite the sorcerer. Built of ghostly, translucent bones that recalled the construction of the cathedral, it spiraled up into an infinity of gray.

"It knows you," Isiem murmured, troubled and awed. "Your blood is the key."

Even under the best circumstances, a shae is a dangerous ally.

"Let's hope it works as easily from the other side." Leading with the head of his staff, Ascaros stepped in. The mirror's glass scarcely shivered as he passed through, and it offered no more resistance than mist.

On the other side, Ascaros's figure receded rapidly up the stairs. He was ascending far faster than he could ever have climbed a real staircase, as though the mirror itself were pulling him in. At the top, a speck of blackness had appeared and was swiftly expanding. It opened like the yawning, shadowy mouth of some enormous lamprey, hovering hungrily in the air.

The sight of it spurred Isiem out of his distracted trance. He plunged through the mirror, hurrying to catch his friend.

Entering the midnight mirror was curiously simple. The weight of Isiem's body seemed to lift from his feet. Walking felt like floating, although he could see no change in the outward appearance of his gait. A deep hush settled over him, and a gentle but profound chill, as if he had walked into one of the Uskwood's sacred glens.

Zon-Kuthon's power was strong here. Bowing his head in silent submission to his god's presence, Isiem began walking up the staircase.

As he reached the halfway point, he saw Ascaros vanish through the portal at its top. The toothy fringes of the portal quavered and spiraled inward, as if the lamprey mouth were swallowing its prey. An instant later, it pulsed and then steadied, open again.

Ready for another meal. The thought brought a quick flicker of fear, but Isiem damped it down and continued his climb. Under him stretched an infinite gray abyss. There seemed to be no solid ground in this netherworld, or at least none that he could see. Only the stairs... and wherever they led.

Far faster than he would have believed possible, Isiem reached the apex. Just ahead, the portal waited, its ragged edges weeping blackness around the central void. He had expected to feel some pull into its depths, but there was none.

He went in. Electricity prickled along the small hairs of his body; a soundless gust flattened his clothes against him. Then the darkness parted, and Isiem found himself standing on a field of stars.

All around him, black grass swayed under a black dome of sky. The seed heads of the grass were white as snow, echoing the frosty stars high above. The pale bones of horse and man, half-buried by the grass, gleamed like pearls amidst the ebon stalks.

The vastness of the nighttime plain was broken only by a single hut of felted horsehair, a hundred yards before him. In front of the hut, a campfire burned, its flames oddly colorless in this strange gray world.

Two figures sat beside the fire. One of them was Ascaros. The other Isiem did not know. It wore a black horsehide cape in the style of the ancient Nidalese horselords, and a featureless mask of white porcelain covered its face. Countless silver pins studded the cape, glittering in yet another echo of the starry sky.

"What is this place?" Isiem asked, walking toward the tiny fire. As he got closer, he could see that Ascaros's face was white and frozen, as if his friend had received some devastating news and was still struggling to understand.

It was the other who answered. Up close, it was apparent that their host—if host he was—was not human. Wisps of shadow trailed around his form, constantly merging with and breaking from his body. The mask and cape seemed to be the only points anchoring his body; other than those form-granting garments, he was as ill-defined as a cloud of smoke.

A shae. One of the true children of the Plane of Shadow. Isiem had read of their kind, but never seen one before—the shadow-people had few dealings with the Dusk Hall.

"An illusion," the shae said in a voice accented with the melodically guttural inflections of old Nidalese. "Some is of my making. Some is the mirror's. But none of it, since you set foot on the stairs, has been real."

"I thought this was a prison," Isiem said. He sat on a horsehide-covered log near the fire, next to Ascaros. His friend shifted slightly to make space for him, but did not look up. He continued to stare blankly into the smoke-gray flames.

"It is." The masked creature raised a hand and tilted it to and fro, as if to undercut his own words. "It was. Its nature has... changed, somewhat, over the years. I am hardly the rebel I once was, and the mirror has, accordingly, granted me a certain degree of comfort. Eternal torment has not proven to be my lot after all. But the place is still unkind to look upon, in its natural state, and so I have chosen to render it more appealing. A prison of infinity, not walls."

"Who are you?" Isiem asked.

"Call me Silence." The porcelain mask was incapable of showing expression, but the voice behind it was rich with amusement. "My captor was fond of shouting that word at me, so I took it as a name."

"Your captor?"

Ascaros stirred. "Mesandroth," he said. "My ancestor. Founder of my line."

"A wizard of enormous power. One obsessed with immortality." The shae shrugged. The silver pins threaded into his black cape gleamed in the cool gray firelight. "Whether he found it, I could not say. His offspring proved to be sorcerers, imbued with the magic and death in his blood. He himself was not. He had no insight into their magic and no interest in their lesser gifts. So he captured a sorcerer—me—and tasked me with teaching his children. He imprisoned me in here, because although the shaes are long-lived, we do die eventually. Mesandroth intended that I should live forever, serving his line. So he told me. Then he left."

"And you've been in here ever since, teaching every sorcerer in the line," Ascaros said.

"Not every one," Silence corrected him. "In the early days, there were too many. Mesandroth had hopes that one of his sons or daughters might become a worthy apprentice. Not an heir—he had no intention of dying—but someone who might stand at his side. He had many, many children. Far too many for me to tutor.

"For centuries, I was a... prize." A wry note crept into the shae's voice, and under it a hint of age-old pain and anger. "They fought over me, his children. Dozens killed each other. The victors sought to learn my secrets. Some of them were kind, others cruel, but all wanted the same thing. Magic. I gave it to them, for I had no choice. And when each one died, I rejoiced, and added a pin to my cape."

"I'm the last of them," Ascaros said softly. He looked at Isiem. "The last with any gift for sorcery, anyway. My death wins his freedom. Silence has been engineering the destruction of Mesandroth's descendants for thousands of years... and I'm the last one."

"Yes." The shae laughed quietly. "It troubles him, knowing that. As well it should. When he is dead, the terms of my bondage will be complete, and I will finally be free."

"You just told him that?" Isiem asked.

"I always tell them. I give them all the same choice." Silence stood, turning his back on them. He raised his hands to the illusory sky. "I am bound to serve, but I do not do so gladly. Walk away—release me from your part in your forefather's sin—and I will have no opportunity to hurt you. But take this poisoned gift, and I will do my utmost to destroy you."

The shae let his hands fall, but kept his back to the shadowcallers. "Every time a new would-be master enters the mirror, I repeat the same offer. I have done this hundreds of times over the centuries. In all that time, two have refused Mesandroth's gift. Two. The others have all tried to evade their doom while using me. The master's children do not give up their ambitions easily, and my knowledge is vast. The temptation is too great.

"Some try to beat me into submission. Some try to bribe me. Some try to seduce. I have seen all their stratagems over the years. But I am a creature captured and kept in a midnight mirror of Zon-Kuthon; pain holds no fear and no surprises. There is nothing I desire more than an end to my bondage, and bribes are meaningless in this place. The seductions I always accept. I lie with them, and enthrall them, and ensure they will leave no mortal children who might perpetuate my suffering."

"You killed Misanthe?" Isiem asked.

The shae looked back at them. The eyeholes of his mask appeared to be blank black spaces, yet Isiem had the fleeting impression that laughter twinkled in those hollow gaps. "I did not. I am not permitted to cause harm to Mesandroth's blood."

"But you know who did." That was Ascaros.

"Of course." Now the laughter was clearly visible, a roiling in the shae's smoky form. "It was her apprentice, puffed with ambition. An old story."

"But you did the puffing," Isiem said.

"And taught him the shadow garrote." Ascaros's voice was brittle ice.

Silence held his hands out in wordless acknowledgement. "And when the apprentice comes back to claim me as his reward, he will die, because nothing prevents me from slaughtering him. It's an absurdly simple plan. Utterly predictable. Yet it rarely fails."

"We could stop you," Isiem said.

"You could," Silence agreed, "but you won't. Or rather, he won't." The shae pointed at Ascaros, who was once more staring into the fire. "No, he will do as his kind always does. Even knowing that it will doom him, even knowing that he will die, your friend will claim his inheritance."

Coming Next Week: Accusations and decisions in the final chapter of Liane Merciel's "Misery's Mirror."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Andrew Ryan.

Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Two: Hovels

The Hovels lived up to their name.

The poorest and most wretched of Nisroch's people did not live in the city. They huddled outside its walls, clustered in a miserable, mud-drenched shantytown by the Leper's Gate. There was little stable ground to support them, so the denizens of the Hovels built high and dense, creating a teetering warren of sticks that seemed a sneeze away from collapse at any moment.

Swaths of sucking mud surrounded the Hovels, filling the entire tangled labyrinth with the stench of rotting fish and worse. Isiem saw paupers picking through the filth in search of food or usable refuse. They wore stilts and masks of wadded rags in a futile attempt to protect themselves from disease as they poked through the city's garbage.

Other paupers bore the sigil of the Morbidium—three links of heavy chain run through by a scalpel—scarred or branded on their skin. The mark signified that they had sold their bodies to the scholars of the Morbidium for experimentation. It allowed them temporary safe passage through Nisroch's walls... until the scholars were done with them.

For a handful of gold, they sold their flesh, their bones, their sanity. Then, stripped of everything that interested the scholars, they were discarded. They drifted to the Hovels and stayed there for whatever days or weeks were left to them. The unlucky ones, Isiem had heard, could persist for years.

"Why would anyone choose to live here?" Ascaros muttered through the sleeve pressed over his face. He lagged behind as Voraic led them through the Leper's Gate, eyeing the damaged souls who wandered the slums.

"Because they want to live, and there is nowhere else for them to do it," Voraic said. There was an odd note of sympathy in his voice. Behind his back, Ascaros and Isiem exchanged a look. Proper Nidalese did not express pity for their inferiors.

"I'd sooner die than live like this," Isiem said. He meant it. The Kuthite church taught that beggars and paupers were parasites on society; the only reason they were not purged immediately was because their sufferings pleased Zon-Kuthon. It was not a doctrine that lent itself to charity.

"The rest of them should too," Ascaros said. "Have some shred of dignity. There's none in living in the Hovels, and there's no way out."

"There is," Voraic said, pushing open the creaking gate. He stepped through the gap in Nisroch's great black walls, passing from rainy gloom into midnight and back into rain.

Again the shadowcallers exchanged a glance as they followed him. Then Ascaros said, carefully neutral: "You speak from experience?"

"I do."

For a time it seemed that he would not elaborate. The gate closed behind them. Isiem watched a knot of small children, some thirty feet away, fight one another for the corpse of a starved orange tomcat. Their struggle was as grimly silent as it was vicious. Beggars' get they might be, but these children were still Nidalese.

A scrawny boy, bleeding from the temple, ran off with the dead cat. The others scattered from the shadowcallers' approach. Clearly they had learned to be wary of visitors coming from the city.

"I was like him, once," Voraic said softly, lifting a sleeved hand toward the boy with the cat. "Desperate. Starving. Willing to fight—to kill—for a meal like that. Most days, I didn't have the chance. I lived in the mud with my mother and four siblings. By the time I was ten, two of those four were dead, and my mother had had two more. I don't remember any of our fathers."

"A terribly sad story," Ascaros said aridly.

"How did you get out?" Isiem asked.

"Misanthe lifted me from the Hovels," Voraic said. His robes quivered and he hunched a little further down, keeping his back toward his companions. "It was during one of the burnings. Ten... fifteen burnings ago. I don't remember. They happen every year, twice a year sometimes. It's hard to keep count. I was ten. It was summertime, and the smell was bad. The Over-Diocesan sent her faithful to cleanse the Hovels. Their poisoned fires tore through the buildings, and they marched through the streets, killing anyone who managed to survive the smoke.

"My mother pushed me through the flames toward them. I knew what she was doing; she wasn't the only one to try it. Children who are stoic enough—Nidalese enough—to endure extraordinary pain without crying sometimes find acceptance among the ranks of the faithful. My siblings were too weak to have a chance. But I endured the fire without flinching, and when I stumbled back to my feet in front of the masters, I saw a glimmering of respect.

"Misanthe stopped the others from killing me. She said I had promise. She tested that promise before she took me, but I passed. And so I became her apprentice."

"Tested it how?" Isiem asked.

Ascaros would do well to guard his emotions.

A small shrug rippled Voraic's rain-soaked robes. His voice was steady but toneless. "She found my mother. She killed her. Then and there, in the smoke. There were screams all around us from others burning in the Hovels. My friends, some of them. My brothers and sisters. But Misanthe told me not to take my eyes off what she was doing, no matter what went on around us. I obeyed. And I did not cry. At the end of it, she said I had proven myself well enough to be worthy of magic... eventually. She did not want a useless child. So I trained in Nisroch, first, and in time she came back for me."

A path of broken planks sunk into the mud served as stepping stones to the Hovels. Ascaros lifted the hem of his charcoal-gray shadowcaller's robes away from the filth, grimacing as his boots squelched in the sodden earth. Ramshackle buildings closed around them, funneling the rainwater into tumbling rivers that slid from warped roof boards and splashed into the mud. "Were you with her in Westcrown?"

Voraic shook his head. "Only in Nisroch. I did not have permission to enter Cheliax." He paused, pointing to a crooked black spar that thrust up from the teetering buildings ahead. "That is where it happened. The burning always starts on the outer perimeter and pushes in toward the city, so that those fleeing the flames run into the archers on the walls."

"Wait here," Ascaros said. "See that we are not disturbed."

"'See that we are not disturbed'?" Isiem echoed as they strode deeper into the Hovels. Fearful eyes peered at them from the darkness within the shacks, but neither of the shadowcallers paid them any mind. Most of the Hovels' denizens fled or hid from their approach. A few were too damaged to do either, but even those would never dare confront them. Voraic was right: these people wanted to live. And confronting shadowcallers was no way to do that.

Ascaros shrugged. "Let him see the excuse for what it is. What difference does it make?"

"None, I suppose." Isiem watched a muttering idiot go by. The sigil of the Morbidium was branded on his brow, although it had been partly cut away. A row of large, careless stitches ran up the side of the man's neck and across his stubbly head. The wound they'd once closed had healed long ago, but the stitches remained, red and inflamed with infection. The man stumbled into a doorless shack and vanished from view, although Isiem could still hear him mumbling deliriously to his invisible friends or foes. "Does his tale ring true?"

"That he was plucked from the Hovels by my aunt? Perhaps. It isn't a story I'd brag about, but perhaps he wanted to deflect our suspicions."

"Do you suspect him?" Isiem asked.

"Maybe." Scowling, Ascaros stepped over an insensible woman lying sprawled across the alley. A cracked board served as her bed, or bier—Isiem wasn't sure which. She had no legs. The empty cloth of her skirts had been trampled into the mud so deeply that the garments were barely more than ripples in the puddled filth. The stench of wine-sweat fogged the air around her.

Forty yards past the legless woman, the Hovels opened to the sky. Spell-driven firestorms had blasted away the buildings. The mud around them was black and gritty with the coarser leavings of the flames: chunks of charred wood, a knot of melted pins embedded in a clump of burned hair, a few fragments of scorched bone. Nothing larger survived.

At the edges of the ruins, the Hovels were beginning to creep back, like vines stretching out after a forest fire. A mound of garbage here, a tangle of laundry lines there. Some of the rooms that had been cracked in half like gourds were patched up again. But no people.

"So this is where my aunt died," Ascaros said, surveying the desolation. "Useless. There's nothing here to examine."

"Witnesses don't seem likely either," Isiem said, "although I suppose we could knock on doors and see who answers. If they answer."

"They'll answer," Ascaros said grimly. Raising his silver-capped staff, he started for the nearest shack.

The fourth door they tried yielded a person with functional eyes and a mouth. He was another of the Morbidium's cast-offs; his fingers were reduced to three on each hand, and those three were unnaturally extended with stitched-in joints from the missing digits. Craters the size of cherries pocked his skull, collecting rain in little pools.

But he could see, and he could talk to them, and that made him better than the other creatures they'd found.

"What did you see when the fires came?" Ascaros demanded.

The wretch blinked at them from his doorway. Rain trickled down his dented scalp and ran down the sides of his nose, dripping into his slack toothless mouth. Behind him, a handful of children huddled in the dark. Isiem wondered if it was for their sake that this man had sold himself to the Morbidium—and what they must think if he had. What was a father like this worth?

"Fires," he managed at last.

"Yes," Ascaros said impatiently. "Fires. What happened? Who was here?"

"Many. Many in robes. With the fires."

"Was there a woman? One who looked like me?" Ascaros lifted his bad arm in its sling. "With an arm like this?"

The broken man nodded slowly. His fingers twitched strangely, as if the movement originated somehow in the sewn-on middle joints. "She was here."

"What happened to her?"

"The fires came down, and she walked into a house. Struggling. The fires ate her."

"Struggling?" Isiem repeated. He wondered if the man was confused. Those dents in his skull were very deep. "Against what?"

"Death." The broken man nodded emphatically. He drew his fingers across his throat. They wriggled spastically, like the convulsing legs of a crushed ant. "Fighting against death. She walked into the fires and they ate her."

"Thank you," Isiem said. He took Ascaros's sleeve gently and pulled his friend away from the door. The other shadowcaller's face had twisted into a scowl that suggested he was about to explode with rage, and Isiem didn’t think that would help them here.

"Worthless," Ascaros fumed, stabbing his staff into the stinking ground. He seemed angrier—and more afraid, Isiem thought—than the broken man's story warranted. "That idiot was worthless."

"Of course he was," Isiem said. "The Morbidium took everything of worth in him." He sighed, casting a glance up at the dull gray sky. The storm showed no signs of dissipating. "Do you want to try the other doors, or shall we pursue another lead?"

"There's no use talking to any of these lackwits. The ones that have tongues don't have eyes, and the ones that have eyes don't have brains." With one last snarl at the patched-up dwellings around the burned site, Ascaros turned back the way they'd come. This time he did not step over the legless woman in the mud; he jabbed his staff into her empty skirts and kicked her savagely in the side. The woman spluttered in the filth, struggling feebly.

"Control yourself," Isiem cautioned him quietly. "Voraic may see. Or some other Nisrochi. It would not do to damage our dignity."

Ascaros stiffened, breathing heavily, but after a moment he nodded and stepped over the sobbing, still-drunk cripple. He brushed a fleck of mud from his robes. "Yes."

"Do we have another lead?"

"The apprentice. He might owe her everything, but when has that stopped treachery? And my aunt's remains. They are being kept at the cathedral."

"We have to collect them anyway," Isiem said. "Let's begin there. No need to let Voraic know we suspect him until we must—and if we glean anything from Misanthe's remains, it will let us question him more carefully."

"To the cathedral, then," Ascaros said.

∗ ∗ ∗

Misanthe's corpse was laid on a table alongside several others in a small room under the Cathedral of Bones. Isiem had seen similar rooms, and similar tables, beneath the Dusk Hall. They served alternately as torture beds, dissection tables, and biers—sometimes all three in quick succession.

Copper pieces rested atop each of Misanthe's eyes, signifying that a spell had been used to delay the decomposition of her body. Not that there was much to preserve. The flames had not been gentle; Ascaros's aunt was barely recognizable as human. She had suffered from the same family curse as her nephew, and the peculiar decay it inflicted left her corpse even harder to study. Much of her body had been dead and withered even while she was living, and the curse-desiccated flesh had burned like kindling in the fire.

But there was enough left to look at. Isiem pushed up his sleeves and began his examination. Ascaros hovered by his shoulder, following his work.

Most of the injuries were straightforward, but one...

"Do you see this?" Isiem asked, pointing to a dark ring that encircled Misanthe's throat. Burns obscured some of it, but nevertheless it was clear that the mark made a perfect circle around her neck. It looked like a bruise, almost, but the evenness of the color and its peculiar grayish hue spoke to an unnatural origin. No human hand could produce such perfect uniformity.

"Yes." Ascaros looked paler than usual. The tension that had been in him since their conversation with the dented man in the Hovels seemed to have snapped, as if the sight of the corpse confirmed some suspicion he'd been nursing since then.

"What is it?"

"The mark of a spell. She called it the shadow garrote." Ascaros paused, fiddling with the wrappings on his bad arm. His mouth twisted slightly. "That was one of her most powerful spells, and the most secret. She wouldn't have taught it to anyone. She refused to teach it to me—and I wouldn't have had the strength to cast it if she had. Not many people even know it exists."

"What are you saying?"

"That Misanthe was the only one in the world who had that spell. Unless she used it for a suicide, that means someone else reflected her own magic against her. And that means..."

"...that she wasn't killed by an apprentice," Isiem finished for him. Turning a spell against its creator was a feat of extraordinary magic. It was far beyond either of them; it was likely beyond their masters at the Dusk Hall. "That's an archmage."

Coming Next Week: Deepening shadows—and their residents—in Chapter Three of "Misery's Mirror."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Andrew Ryan.

Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter One: A Death in Nisroch

"I need a favor," Ascaros whispered, stopping before Isiem's library table.

"Of course you do," Isiem murmured back, unsurprised. He did not lift his head from the scroll he was copying.

Once, he and Ascaros had been friends. As children in the village of Crosspine, they had been almost brothers. That friendship had survived the early years of their tutelage in the Dusk Hall of Pangolais... but only the early years. The isolating influence of Zon-Kuthon's faith and the weight of their respective sins of survival had pushed them apart. Now, as they neared the end of their time as students, that childhood friendship seemed nearly as distant as childhood itself.

The last time they had spoken seriously, almost two years ago, it had been Isiem who asked a favor of Ascaros. His friend had refused him then, Isiem reflected. It was tempting to do the same in turn.

But there was real fear in Ascaros's voice, under his Nidalese reserve, and Isiem had never been one to abandon his friends—even old friends, even strained ones—in times of need.

Besides, he was curious. What could be so important that it would drive Ascaros to this desperate attempt at reconciliation?

Isiem put his pen aside and looked up. Ascaros was still standing before his table, unmoving. His left arm, wrapped from fingers to elbow in white linen, rested useless in a sling, as it had for years; his right hand gripped the incense-filled Osirian staff he used to mask the odor from that ruined arm. The dim silver magelights of the Dusk Hall's library made it difficult to read Ascaros's expression, but Isiem would not have expected to see much anyway. No Nidalese worth his name let pain show on his face.

"What do you need?" he asked.

Ascaros ran his good hand through his dark, curly hair. In Crosspine that hair had been a rich russet, but years of living under the shadow of Pangolais had drained the ruddy warmth from the boy's locks. Now his hair was almost black, with only the barest hint of red remaining. Compared to some of the other changes the Dusk Hall had wrought in them, Ascaros's hair was a small thing, but Isiem's eye was often drawn back to it. They were not who they had been, either of them.

"Not here," Ascaros said after a long hesitation. He glanced down the hushed rows of shelves. "Can we talk in your room?"

"If you like," Isiem said. He was due to begin an apprenticeship with a Chelish wizard soon, but his new mistress had not yet come to claim him, so he still had student's quarters in the Dusk Hall. Although small and spare, they offered more privacy than the library did.

He stood, closed his scroll case, and led the way back to his room.

With the door locked behind them, Ascaros relaxed. He leaned the silver staff against Isiem's wall and sank into a black iron chair, leaning into its spike-filigreed back as if the thorny metal were a silk cushion. Eyes closed, he said: "I'm going to Nisroch."

"Nisroch?" Isiem echoed. "Why?"

"Misanthe. My aunt. The one who served in the Midnight Guard. She... died." Ascaros rubbed his dead arm through its wrappings. "I don't have many details, but it happened in Nisroch, two days past. The Dusk Hall wants me to investigate."

"Why you?" Isiem asked quietly.

"Because she was my aunt, I suppose." Ascaros shrugged. "And because I am a student here, and they have some measure of control over me. Misanthe had several objects of value, and I imagine the Dusk Hall intends to claim them. I am her last living relative—or the last with any standing, which amounts to the same—so if I do not object..."

"Will you object?"

Isiem no longer puts much stock in friendship.

"I don't even know what she had." Ascaros pursed his lips unhappily. "An enchanted staff, a silver necklace. I remember a black mirror, too. It might have been a nightglass."

"Yes, that could cause trouble," Isiem murmured. Nightglasses were powerful tools, and dangerous ones. An apprentice with a nightglass could summon shadowbeasts that would strike fear into a master wizard's heart. The Dusk Hall held the largest collection of nightglasses in Nidal, and it coveted more. It was not difficult to believe that their superiors would send a student to retrieve one—even from that student's dead kin.

Whether the Dusk Hall had any legitimate claim to the glass almost didn't matter. The Hall wanted it. Ascaros would therefore have to retrieve it, or risk facing their masters' wrath. After years of seeing the scars that their teachers inflicted for far lesser transgressions, Isiem doubted his friend would be eager to disobey.

"When do you leave?" he asked.

Ascaros raised his head and looked at him. "Tomorrow. I am allowed one companion. One of the masters offered, but... I would feel better if I had a friend. Will you come?"

"Of course," Isiem said.

∗∗∗

Black and swollen and slow, the Usk River poured from the hinterlands of Nidal into the sea. It carried the shadowcallers' vessel from the Uskwood to the coast, and it bore them past the massive, rust-streaked Rivergate that filtered incoming traffic. At the Rivergate their documents were checked three times, their identities questioned, every parcel in their belongings opened and examined—but all of it was done in under twenty minutes. Nisroch saw more merchants and travelers than any other city in Nidal, and its sternly efficient officials kept its traffic moving.

Isiem's first impression of the city, as their boat passed through the rain-swept walls, was of towering gloom. Nisroch was known as the Maw of Shadow, and while it did not have Pangolais's black trees to cast its inhabitants into an eternal twilight, its dense gray storm clouds had much the same effect. He wondered whether the hand of Zon-Kuthon kept those massed clouds hanging over the city; surely no natural storm would linger so long.

Spires and mausoleums crowded the banks of the city's wealthy northern quarters, throwing jagged shadows across the river. To the south, the city's laborers and commoners lived in smaller homes of basalt and dark wood. Two immense bridges, their wet black stone carved into lovingly detailed depictions of tormented petitioners, connected the halves of the city. Rainwater cascaded down the bridges' sides in shivering cascades, drenching the boats that passed below.

High above the Nisrochi nobles' silver-edged towers and iron-gated mansions, the Cathedral of Bone loomed. Sixty feet high and raised even higher on an artificial hill of stepped stone, the cathedral was a gleaming white pearl in a grim black city. It was built entirely of human bone—and the building, legend claimed, was never done. Squinting through the rain, Isiem thought he could make out a lattice of scaffolding clinging to the west side. Somewhere nearby, he knew, Kuthite torturers would be stripping more bones from victims' bodies and washing them in acid to cleanse them for the faith.

"We'll go there first," Ascaros said. "We must report to the Over-Diocesan and be formally welcomed into the city."

"And if we don't?"

"It isn't a choice."

Ascaros's prediction proved correct. No sooner had their boat docked than five Nisrochi officials approached them on the pier. Three wore the harbormaster's silver pin over their plain black robes. Two wore the spiked chain of Zon-Kuthon.

"We welcome you to Nisroch," one of the Kuthites said. She was a short, round woman, her fingernails gnawed to uneven stubs. Her eyebrows were plucked completely bald, an affectation that Isiem had noticed among several of the harbor officials as well.

The other Kuthite was a man. He seemed younger than his companion, or perhaps merely subservient to her. His eyebrows, too, were plucked bare, and his head was shaved clean—a look that did not flatter his bumpy scalp or pallid gray complexion. Although he was not fat, the skin of his jowls hung around his chin in loose, sagging folds. He carried himself hunched inward, as if perpetually cringing away from the unseen blows of fate.

Isiem disliked him instantly. But the shadowcaller kept his manner neutral as he replied: "We are grateful for your welcome."

"The Over-Diocesan invites you to pay your respects at the Cathedral," the woman said.

"We are honored to accept," Ascaros said.

"I'll have your belongings brought up shortly," the boat's captain called behind them as his passengers departed. Neither the shadowcallers nor the Kuthite clerics acknowledged his words as they crossed the rain-slick pier. All knew the captain would have been badly beaten if he had failed to observe the proper courtesies. Impoliteness was not tolerated in Nidal, least of all impoliteness to one's betters.

It was a thought that loomed large in Isiem's mind as they approached the Cathedral of Bone. A single steep, narrow staircase led to the cathedral, slicing through the immense stone steps that supported the macabre edifice.

Small shrines flanked the stairs, each attended by one to three black-clad Kuthite dedicants and an equal number of petitioners offering themselves up for a show of piety in pain. The oldest of the shrines were built entirely of human bone; the newer and poorer ones still had animal bones woven into their walls.

The suffering that took place within those shrines was voluntary—mostly—but the screams and whimpers echoed in Isiem's ears as he walked past, keeping his gaze fixed on the church's doors so he would not have to see. Iron pincers, liars' masks, thumbscrews, salt knives, branding by frost and fire... and those were the tortures people chose to undergo. There were worse things in the dungeons under the Dusk Hall, and Isiem did not doubt that there were worse yet in the depths of the cathedral. The ascent was a pointed reminder of what a breach of etiquette could cost.

It was not the Over-Diocesan who met them at the cathedral's ornate bone doors, however, but a younger priestess wrapped in a clanking mantle of chains. Deep red scratches covered every inch of her skin except for her face, creating the impression of a flayed undead creature wearing a perfect porcelain mask.

"You will be Ascaros of the Dusk Hall," she said. "Your companion?"

"Isiem, also of the Dusk Hall." Ascaros inclined his head slightly over his folded hands. Beside him, Isiem did the same. "We thank you for your welcome, but we are eager to begin our work."

"Yes. Of course. The death of Misanthe." The cleric raised her bald eyebrows. "A member of the Midnight Guard, was she not? Remind me, please: what is the Dusk Hall's interest in that?"

"She was a Midnight Guard," Ascaros said. "But she was also one of our masters. Assignment to the Midnight Guard is temporary; membership in the Dusk Hall is not. She had finished her assignment in Cheliax and was on her way back to us when she died. And," he added, as though it were an afterthought, "she was my aunt."

The priestess dismissed that bit of information with a grunt. "I suppose the Dusk Hall does have some stake in it, then. Very well. She died while clearing the Hovels. The vermin were fighting back this time, so we asked if she would assist our own efforts. She kindly agreed to assist us. Unfortunately, it seems the vermin had a nastier bite than she realized."

"My aunt was slain by... paupers?" Ascaros sounded strangled.

"Calling them paupers would be kinder than they deserve. They are wretches. Human filth. They cling to our city like barnacles to a ship, and like barnacles, they must be scraped off." The priestess shrugged. "In any case, you are welcome to go to the Hovels if you like, although no guard can be spared for you. You may also collect her belongings. They are being held in storage at the cathedral. Voraic will show you the way." She gestured to the bald, stooped man who had accompanied them from the pier. "There may be more he can tell you. He was her apprentice, and the last to see her alive."

"Were you," Ascaros said flatly, turning to the man. By his tone, he liked Voraic even less than Isiem did.

The bald Kuthite bowed his head. The silver hoops threaded through his ears clinked against one another. "Yes."

"How did she die?"

"Bravely." Voraic kept his gaze fixed downward, looking at none of them, but Isiem still caught the grimace that wracked the gray man's face as he spoke. "But badly." He hesitated. "I can take you there, if you would like to see the place."

"Show us," Ascaros said.

Coming Next Week: Further glimpses of life in one of Golarion's most horrifying cities in Chapter Two of "Misery's Mirror."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Eric Belisle.

Nightglass Sample Chapter

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

by Liane Merciel

In Nightglass, a young boy in the shadowy nation of Nidal is taken from his home and trained by the sadistic magical academy known as the Dusk Hall, transformed into a living weapon in the service of the dark god Zon-Kuthon. Many years later, now grown to manhood, Isiem is sent to Cheliax to help put down a rebellion by the winged, inhuman strix. Yet as he conducts his grisly work, Isiem begins to question his life under the shadow of the Midnight Lord, and wonder who the real monsters are...

Chapter Thirteen: Reprisals

The whooping woke him.

It had been the better part of a week since Isiem had talked to Orwyn and the others around the timber wagons. Both he and Oreseis had spent the intervening days asking questions under a succession of guises. Mostly Isiem chose illusionary identities whose mysterious disappearances, like the Pezzacki half-orc's, could easily be laid at the Hellknights' door; when such people vanished, it burnished their knights' reputation for ruthlessness and raised few questions about where they had gone. Sometimes, so that people would not wonder why the Nidalese never showed their faces, he went undisguised.

But whatever face he chose, and whomever he approached, Isiem learned little about the strix. Wild rumors and speculation abounded, but accurate observations seemed scarcer than waterfalls in the desert.

Some said the strix were winged devils in more than name—that the diabolists of House Thrune had deliberately summoned them from Hell and set them loose on the people of western Cheliax so that they could offer protection from the threat they themselves had created. Some said the mine overseers had struck a secret bargain with the strix, allowing them to feast on lazy and unruly workers in exchange for leaving the others unmolested. A few claimed—never when they knew Isiem was listening—that the strix were not living creatures at all, but rather Nidalese thralls who had escaped from the shadowcallers' control and hid in the deep recesses of Devil's Perch because no light could reach them there.

The only sure thing anyone knew was that the strix had murdered Chastain, her daughter, and everyone accompanying them—and that the outrage demanded retribution.

That thought leaped to the fore of Isiem's mind when he heard the whoops that morning. Pushing off his blankets, he went to the window and pulled the curtain to the side.

The street below was crowded with cheering men gathered around four sweat-stained riders on lathered horses. A dark-winged figure staggered on foot between the riders, and two more broken, winged forms dragged in the dust behind them. The ropes that bound the corpses were not tied around their ankles, but threaded through gashes in their calves.

Fastening his shadowcaller's robe as he went, Isiem hurried down the stairs.

Every citizen in Crackspike seemed to have mobbed the street. He glimpsed the Hellknights pushing forward through the fray, Posie's girls leaning bare-shouldered on their balcony, and miners and laborers who had come fresh from their work, wearing clothes sweated through and caked with dust so many times that the men seemed made of mud.

The creature who had attracted all their notice seemed oblivious to the crowd. The strix hobbled between the riders with his head lowered between his enormous, bedraggled black wings, unresponsive to the curses hurled his way or the occasional gob spat on him by a spectator. The riders and their horses, spattered with similar missiles, were less restrained; they answered with imprecations fiery enough to burn a Hellknight's ears, or—if the spitter was foolish enough to be identifiable, and in reach—vicious blows from their quirts.

Isiem ignored them, along with the occasional shrieks from the bystanders they struck. It was the strix that interested him.

This one was a juvenile, he guessed, and male. Head to toe, it was the color of coal. Its eyes were enormous and eerily luminous, reflecting a green-violet iridescence in the bright hot sun. There were no whites or pupils that Isiem could see, although it was difficult to be sure with the creature's head bowed. Its ears were thin and sharp, lying flat against its skull. It went barefoot, its toes and fingers alike tipped with short translucent talons, and its clumsy pigeon-like gait suggested that it did not often find reason to walk upon the ground.

Above all, however, it was the strix's wings that commanded attention. Bent and broken, they still towered over the men on horseback. The feathers were a glossy, oily black, touched with a peacock shimmer like the plumage on a loon's throat. There was an undeniable grandeur to those wings, even as the creature who bore them tottered crippled and diminished on the earth.

"How did you catch him?" one of the whores called down.

"Hunting," the lead rider shouted back. "This one"—he jerked the strix's rope as if the creature were a balky dog on a leash"—thought he'd catch a few of our mules for dinner. That was his mistake. The other two came to free him. That was theirs. They didn't care to be taken alive, so I thought it only right to oblige them."

"Are there any others?" Paralictor Erevullo asked.

The rider hesitated, winding and unwinding the reins around his hand several times before answering. "I can't be sure," he admitted, "but I don't think so. These two rushed in blind, they were so upset we'd caught their friend. Any others would've done the same, if they were out there. Anyway, we didn't see no more."

Erevullo nodded curtly. He gestured with a gauntleted hand to the battered strix. "We will take that one. In the name of Her Imperial Majestrix Abrogail II."

The rider opened his mouth to protest, then closed it, returning the Hellknight's nod even more brusquely. "What about the others?"

"Sell them to your tavern to stuff as a showpiece. Cut them apart and sell the pieces as keepsakes. Or just throw them by the roadside and let dogs feast on the corpses." Erevullo shrugged. "They are of no use to us. Do as you will." The paralictor turned his flinty eyes on Isiem. "It is said that the Kuthites of Nidal are unrivaled in extracting information from their charges. I trust this reputation is well founded."

"It is," Isiem answered.

"They don't speak no civilized tongue," the rider interjected. "Just screeches and devil squawks. We couldn't get nothing sensible out of none of them."

"Language is no obstacle," Isiem said. He turned to Erevullo. "Is there somewhere we might work without interruption?"

The paralictor waited for the rider to untie the strix's rope from his saddle horn. Upon receiving it, Erevullo tossed the mudstained hemp to Isiem. "One of the alehouses has a cellar. They were using it as a dungeon of sorts. It's yours." He motioned to one of the other Hellknights, a signifer whose clean-shaven scalp was tattooed with spiked swirls of red and black. "Odarro. Show the shadowcallers where they will work."

"This way." The bald signifer turned on his heel, leaving the riders and the crowd to look on in confusion that soon turned to abuse of the two remaining strix. Whether their victims were alive or not, the people of Crackspike seemed all too happy to beat them and spit on their feathered remains.

Tugging his captive along behind him, Isiem left them to their sport.

The cellar Erevullo had spoken of was beneath the Long-Bottomed Lady, the largest of Crackspike's three ramshackle taverns. It was a cramped and dingy space, illumined by wobbly shafts of light that spilled through the tavern's floorboards. Barrels of beer and jars of white whisky crowded every available inch. A coating of sandy grit clouded the vessels, although the tavern always drank through its stock within days.

It was only on account of the liquor that the owners of the place had undertaken the trouble of digging a cellar and laying in a wooden floor. Spirits were unconscionably expensive in Crackspike, which had to import all its necessities across miles of hard road. The owners of the Long-Bottomed Lady wanted to protect their investment, and the easiest way to keep thirsty miners from stealing their beer was to sit on it.

Isiem wondered whether his work would dent their appetites. He doubted it. If anything, strix blood seemed to whet thirsts in Crackspike. And there would likely be a great deal of blood before he was done.

He wanted to begin gently, though. Confidences won through trust were worth more than secrets extracted through torture; the latter were often fragmentary and peppered with lies. Many Kuthites chose to rely on torture anyway, but Isiem valued effectiveness above piety.

The strix are proud warriors—for all the good that does them...

The cellar had no chairs. He rolled two of the smaller barrels from their nooks, arranging them so that they faced one another across a short space. Touching the small clay talisman of a ziggurat in his pocket, Isiem murmured the words that would grant him the gift of tongues. He'd prepared the spell with the intention of questioning some of the miners whose Taldane was shaky, but it would serve as well with the strix.

"Speak to me," he said. The words had an odd, doubled echo as they left his lips. Isiem heard his own voice clearly, but just as clear were the stretched, shrill vowels and harsh plosives of the strix's tongue. He was never sure what the listener heard—but it hardly mattered, as long as he was understood. "What is your name?"

The strix gave him a hostile, unblinking stare. It did not sit on the barrel as Isiem did, but perched on top, its clawed toes grasping the wooden edge. In this light its eyes showed no iridescence; they were yellow as a hawk's. Faint striations of darker gold, converging in the center of each eye, expanded and contracted as it breathed.

"You should answer me." Isiem drew the holy symbol of Zon-Kuthon out from under his shirt and let it rest pointedly upon his chest. "Sooner or later, you must. And ‘later' will come at a cost."

"I am not afraid. Pain is nothing." The strix's voice had the same odd echo as his own: familiar human words twinned to piercing shrills and whistles only barely recognizable as speech. Its true voice seemed extraordinarily hoarse; judging from the chapped skin around the strix's lipless mouth and the sunken, bruised-looking circles around its eyes, that was a symptom of its recent hard use rather than the creature's natural tone.

It made the creature's bravado even more wearying. The strix would break. Under the ministrations of a Pangolais-trained torturer, all men broke. And all dwarves, and all orcs. A strix would be no different, however alien its appearance.

Isiem had had his fill of breaking brave rebels in Westcrown. It was tedious, the progression from braggadocio to stoicism to abject begging. Such men clung to loyalty and principle as though it were a raft that could save them. It never did, but the Nidalese wizard had long lost his taste for snapping their fingers to make them let go.

"I could show you otherwise very quickly," Isiem said, "but I will give you the chance to help yourself first. Again: what is your name?"

"Kirraak," the strix cried. Whether it was a name or a curse, the spell didn't translate it.

Isiem decided to accept it as a name. "Kirraak," he repeated, altering the sound to fit on a human tongue. "How were you captured?"

For a long time the strix did not answer. Its chest heaved with silent, desperate breaths. Then it cocked its head downward and veiled its eyes with semitransparent membranes that slid across them from the side, instead of lowering vertically like its true eyelids. "Stupidity. They left a hurt mule behind. I wanted it. Some of their dogs wanted it too. I was butchering the dead mule when the dogs came upon me from behind. They kept me from flying." The strix motioned toward one of the black wings hanging broken from its back. Up close, it smelled of dust and wild oily feathers and a rank undercurrent of infection. "I could not escape when the men came back to see what their dogs were quarreling over."

"And your companions?"

"Untie me." The strix lifted its head and held its arms out, showing him its rope-chafed wrists. The coarse hemp was spotted with blood, red as Isiem's own. "Untie me, and I will say."

Kirraak tensed as Isiem drew a small knife to cut its bonds. The muscles at the bases of its wings flexed, and it crouched slightly, gathering its strength. Isiem noted its tension but continued sawing at the rope.

He wasn't surprised when the strix attacked. He was surprised at how fast it was. Isiem was already ducking away when Kirraak snapped the last few strands between its wrists, but he barely had time to put a barrel between them before the strix seized a nearby bottle of brandy and hurled it at his head. The bottle shattered on the wall inches away, raining liquor and glass shards. One splinter nicked Isiem's chin, another his cheek.

"Krevaar!" the strix screamed. "I tell you nothing!"

Isiem didn't waste his breath on a reply. He shielded his eyes and dodged behind a second barrel. Another bottle hurtled past, clipping the side of his head, but the strix itself did not come. Glancing back, Isiem realized that the strix's wings gave him the advantage in this confined space; Kirraak flinched every time the wounded appendages struck anything, and the creature could hardly move without smacking its massive wings into a wall or keg.

It had fashioned a crude sort of knife from the remains of a broken bottle, though, and Isiem guessed that might prove more lethal than its ineptly thrown missiles. If the strix got close enough to use it.

He kicked a wine rack toward his adversary, sending bottles tumbling everywhere. Two of them slammed into Kirraak's infected wounds, eliciting an ear-splitting shriek and causing the strix to drop its improvised blade.

Isiem seized the chance. Thrusting a hand in the strix's direction, he chanted quickly, nearly tripping over the familiar words in his haste. Magic gathered in him like lightning and lanced out, surrounding the strix in a crackling black halo. Needles of dark energy stabbed into Kirraak.

The strix collapsed, keening in agony. Its makeshift knife cracked under its body, cutting into the creature's arm and chest, but it hardly seemed to notice this insult compared to the wracking pain of Isiem's spell. As the strix's shrieks gave way to whimpers, and then into insensible sobs, Isiem straightened and brushed the glass flinders from his hair.

"You should have answered my questions," he told the strix without rancor. He had not, of course, really expected that Kirraak would. The rebels in Westcrown seldom did; why would a strix be any different? This was just another step in their dance, predictable and inevitable.

Kirraak made no answer. Isiem hadn't expected one. He picked through the shattered glass and liquor pooled around the semiconscious strix, selecting several of the longest, smoothest fragments and laying them atop a nearby barrel. He was careful to arrange them where the shafts of wintry sunlight made them glint in the cellar's gloom.

When he had all the shards he needed, Isiem retied the crippled strix's arms and tossed the rope over a rafter, hoisting Kirraak up onto its clawed toes. Standing in that partly suspended position wouldn't hurt immediately, but in a few minutes it would start to ache, and in an hour or so it would become unbearable.

As an afterthought, and as a courtesy to the Long-Bottomed Lady's guests, Isiem gagged the strix with the wine-sodden remnants of a burlap sack. Then he started another, simpler incantation, and passed a pale hand over the stained rips in his robe. The torn threads knitted back together; the stains faded from the cloth. In moments there was no evidence of his prisoner's defiance.

The illusion of infallibility was crucial to the fear a skillful torturer inspired. Nothing his victims did could be seen to hurt him, or even interrupt his plans. Everything that happened in his domain had to serve his purpose. The strix's struggles, the shattered bottles, the wasted brandy—all of it, as far as the world would ever know, was part of Isiem's designs.

Isiem picked up a sliver of glass and drove it through the joint of the strix's infected wing. Pus and dark blood spurted out. Kirraak screamed again, weakly; its head jerked up once and fell back down, limp.

Coldly Isiem took a second sliver of glass from the barrel and held it poised, waiting for the strix's eyes to flutter open again.

Everything had its purpose.

∗ ∗ ∗

"Why did you let it fight back?" Oreseis asked.

Isiem shrugged, spooning pork-flecked oat mush from the pot the Hellknights had brought up for them. To preserve their air of inhumanity, the Nidalese did not eat where anyone might see them; instead they requisitioned food from the Hellknights and sent their waste back the same way. The subterfuge worked well enough, but he could wish the Hellknights indulged in better fare. The Chelaxians subsisted on iron rations boiled in conjured water: oat mush, barley porridge, wheat gruel dotted with shreds of dried apples or rock-hard sausage. Practical, and perhaps good for discipline, but even by the standards of a Nidalese ascetic, a Hellknight's trail dinner was a sorry meal.

Still, he'd choked down worse. Isiem thrust his spoon into the gruel and sat on the side of his bed. "I always give them the chance to fight."

Oreseis had already finished his own meal. He sat with his spellbook propped up on bent knees, making a half-hearted pretense of studying the next day's magic. "But why?"

"So I can be justified in what comes after." Seeing that the other shadowcaller did not understand, Isiem sighed and set his spoon down. "By giving my captives a choice, I give them responsibility for what follows. If they choose to answer readily, they escape pain. If they choose defiance, they suffer for it ...but they know that it was their choice."

"How virtuous," Oreseis said, smirking.

"Maybe." Isiem swallowed a mouthful of gruel, trying not to taste it. The pork, somehow soggy and tough at the same time, actually made it worse. "But it is useful. Men who feel culpable for their own suffering are conflicted. Guilty, angry, distracted. Easier to break." He took another bite, wondering if Oreseis would believe the lie.

It was easier to break a man who felt he'd brought his own woes upon himself. But not precisely for the reasons he'd given.

The true reason Isiem gave them the chance to fight was because putting the choice on the victim—putting the fault on the victim—removed it from his own conscience. Framing the torture as the consequence of the victim's decision, rather than his own, absolved the torturer of guilt. And after Westcrown, Isiem could not work without that absolution.

Oreseis closed his book and stretched his legs. "Erevullo wants one of us to help his signifers enchant their devilstongue relay." Seeing Isiem's puzzlement, he added: "It's how they intend to communicate with Citadel Enferac while the passes are snowed in. Evidently their usual methods tend to get intercepted by strix spears."

"So I've been told. What's this relay?"

The younger shadowcaller shrugged. "I didn't see the thing clearly when they were unloading it, and of course its magic is unfinished, but it appears to be a brazier of gold and iron, set with rubies and black stones. Obsidian, maybe. I couldn't see clearly. Erevullo told me that they burn the tongues of devils in its flames, and thus carry their messages through Hell back to Citadel Enferac, where other braziers exist to receive the infernal words."

"Can anyone use it, or just diabolists? Does every relay communicate with every other? How much of a delay is there between sending a message and receiving one?"

Oreseis gave him an incredulous look. "How would I know? I've never used it. I haven't even seen it in any meaningful way. But obviously we should learn more."

"Yes." Isiem considered it for a moment. "Offer to assist the Hellknights with their relay. Learn what you can. The Umbral Court will be grateful for your report."

Oreseis tilted his head slightly, studying him. "You're the better wizard."

"Making you the less obvious spy."

"And the less adept one." The younger wizard's mouth twisted into an expression that was not quite grimace and not quite smile. "Don't mistake me. I'm honored that you offer me the opportunity. But should I miss some detail that you would have caught, the Umbral Court will be displeased with us both. I cannot imagine the relay is that simple, or Erevullo would not have asked us to help with it—nor would he be so cavalier about giving us the chance to study it."

"Or he wants us to take note of Citadel Enferac's efficiency," Isiem said pointedly, "so that we understand how valuable they are as allies and how dangerous as enemies. We could second-guess his motives for hours and it wouldn't matter. What matters is that we have the opportunity to learn more about this device, and you have the skill to study it without arousing suspicion." He softened his tone slightly. "You do have the skill, you know. The Umbral Court would not have tasked you with this assignment if you were lacking."

"Why won't you do it?"

Because I don't want to go back to Nidal. Knowing a secret valuable to either the Hellknights or the Umbral Court would give them a reason to hunt him down, and Isiem intended to offer them none. But what he said was: "Because I have a strix to break."

"Ah." Oreseis nodded. "That need not delay you long. There is a quicker way. Quicker, and holier."

"Oh?"

The younger shadowcaller stood, put his spellbook away, and retrieved something else from his pack: a round object, about the size of his hand, muffled in black velvet.

He held the nightglass up, still veiled. "Send one to the shadow, and he will give us all his kin. Another nation under Zon-Kuthon."

Purchase the whole novel here.

Coming Next Week: A brand new, standalone story from Isiem's training at the Dusk Hall!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the independent fantasy novels The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle, both set in her world of Ithelas, as well as the Pathfinder Tales short story "Certainty,". She is a practicing lawyer and lives in Philadelphia with her husband Peter, resident mutts Pongu and Crookytail, and a rotating cast of foster furballs. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Eric Belisle.

Certainty

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Four: The Stone

"Jelani, Adrun, with me," I said. "The rest of you, keep going." Whatever the scout had found had terrified the man, and I didn't want his panic spreading to the others.

"Found tracks," the scout said when we were out of the others' earshot. "Followed them." He thrust a hand forward, jerkily, as if to hurl the memory away.

I was about to ask how he had spotted tracks on the tundra when I saw them myself: a line of booted prints sunk deep into the ground, as though it were summer's soggy marshland instead of the rock-hard terrain of late fall. The earth was slimy and discolored in those prints; the very dirt and ice seemed to have rotted at the touch of whoever had passed there.

"Seen that kind of thing around the Worldwound," the scout said. "Never on this side."

The bootprints tattooed a dark line back to the wardstone. Nearer us, they went over a low, rocky rise and into a shallow cleft. I followed, uneasy. Adrun and Jelani were watchful at my sides; the scout lagged fearful behind.

In the cleft we found the man who had made those prints. He'd died badly. Deep gouges tore through the back of his sheepskin coat. Green-black rivulets leaked from the wounds; the stench of sickness pervaded the area despite the wind and chill. I could see brown bone under the flapping tatters of the man's coat; the skin and muscle was rotted away entirely.

He'd survived his poisoned wounds long enough to get this far, though, and I didn't think they'd killed him. Blisters covered his mouth in a frozen pink froth. His throat had collapsed, eaten away from the inside; its long red track vanished into his sternum. The soft part of his jaw was gone, too, and a shaggy beard of red ice spilled across his chest.

An empty waterskin lay near his hand. It bore the same mark as the ones we'd received in Kenabres.

"Holy water," Jelani said, reaching the same realization that I had. "He was already dead—or rather, undead. He killed himself by drinking holy water."

"Maybe he thought it could flush out the poison from whatever got him in the back," Adrun said. "Maybe it would have, if the poison hadn't spread."

I left them to their speculations and rummaged through the dead man's kit. He didn't have much. A few blankets, some lamp oil, a good sheepskin hat. Most of it was standard-issue, like ours. He'd been a soldier, or stolen from one—and, like many crusaders, he had a sizable collection of warding amulets. I picked them up as an afterthought. They didn't take much space, and he might have a sweetheart or an orphan back in Kenabres who'd want them.

We returned to the company in silence. The others watched us apprehensively, aware that something had gone wrong without knowing what. A gloomy mood fell over the camp, and it deepened when the other scout failed to come back. No one mentioned it, but I knew no one expected to see him again.

That night, as the others talked or slept, Jelani scratched furrows in the frozen ground and filled them from one of our blessed waterskins.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Making spears," she said.

"Of ice? They'll shatter."

She only smiled. In the firelight, that smile was a mystery. "I have seen storms that sent twigs through solid walls. My spears will have their use."

She would tell me no more than that, and I went to my bedroll puzzled.

Morning did nothing to lift our spirits. The tundra stretched on, frozen and lifeless; the wardstone waited, leaning against a stricken sky. Soon after we broke camp, the wind turned, bringing a charnel house stench that defied the cold.

"It's not from the Worldwound," Jelani said, prying sticks of ice up from her furrows. "Wind's blowing the wrong way."

"Weapons ready," I ordered, drawing my own sword. I could hear bones popping and teeth gnashing on the wind. It might have been miles away; I wasn't used to judging how the tundra played with noise. But if it wasn't, I wanted to be armed.

I was right to be cautious. As we crested the next rise, we saw our foes.

They were eating our scout. Eight of them crouched around his corpse, hissing and snapping at one another over the meat. They wore the tatters of soldiers' clothes, but they weren't human anymore.

"Ghouls," Adrun whispered.

"Not quite," I said. They were ghouls—I recognized their quick, jerky movements, the high-pitched feral snarling, the carrion reek of guts rotting in their bloated bellies—but something else blighted them too. Their veins bulged with the same greenish-black filth that had corrupted the dead soldier's wounds. Oozing sores covered their tongues and spotted their backs, dripping the same putrescence.

"Close enough," the priest said. "I'll keep them from noticing us immediately. You've a few minutes before my spell fails."

"Let me," Jelani said, touching her quiver of dirty icicles.

	"Even outside of the desert, Jelani is a formidable ally."

I saw nothing but calm confidence on her bronze face. I nodded, stepping aside.

Jelani laid her ice spears on the barren crest, angling them toward the ghouls. They never looked up. She stripped off her mittens and began a chant, her fingers dancing through the spell's gestures.

A gust of wind circled around the woman, gathering intensity until it whipped her black hair free of its scarf and forced Jelani to squeeze her eyes shut in the cyclone. Then, abruptly, it howled away, hurling the icy lances into the ghouls with spell-driven force.

The spears shattered as they plunged into undead flesh, but the wind-whipped shards were just as deadly. Ice ripped the ghouls' hides apart and pinned their limbs to their bodies. The stink from their ruptured stomachs was overwhelming; two of my men doubled over, vomiting.

Some of the ghouls fell. The survivors' heads snapped up. One's left eye was gone, replaced by a thick splinter of ice; another had two feet of ice through its gut. But the attack had broken Adrun's spell, and the ghouls had seen Jelani. Howling, they rushed at her.

She didn't flinch. Holding her hands out, Jelani called another invocation. Sunlight twinkled on her gold and bronze rings, then ignited in her cupped palms. She threw it, and the spark swelled into a fireball as it flew. It exploded over the ghouls in a rush of translucent, blue-edged flame. They shrieked as they burned—and then they collapsed, spasming, as the ice lances melted in the fireball's heat and spilled holy water through their innards like lye.

"Finish them," I shouted, leading my soldiers into the fray.

Even dying, the ghouls fought viciously. They writhed on the ground, covering it with their own deliquescing corruption, and pulled down soldiers who slipped on the slime. Those who fell were doomed. The Kellid woman lost her footing when she swung too vigorously at a fallen ghoul; she crushed her victim's skull, but went to a knee as she did. Instantly two of them were on her, and by the time we battered them away, nothing was left but the bear claws of her necklace, scattered among red rags of skin and bone.

Another crippled ghoul bit its own arm, filling its mouth with poison, then sank its teeth into Adrun's calf when he ventured into the melee to heal a wounded soldier. The priest screamed, hitting it with his holy symbol in a fist. White light flared, consuming the creature; its skull dropped lifeless onto a bed of ash. But the damage was done. Adrun staggered away, clutching his leg as sickly discoloration seeped through his skin. Two steps from the battle, he fell.

We destroyed the rest.

I took stock of the casualties as Jelani cauterized the survivors' wounds with enchanted flame. The Kellid was dead, as was one of the Mendevians. Adrun was badly injured, but if we could get him to a healer before the ghoul's poison took hold, he might live. I wasn't optimistic, but I was willing to take the chance. If it came to the worst, I'd give him mercy myself.

I touched Jelani's shoulder. "These ghouls carried crusaders' tokens. I think they were the last company of soldiers sent to Valas's Gift. If the wardstone has failed that badly, I don't want to risk the others—but you and I should examine it."

She paled, but she put her mittens back on. "As you will."

I hadn't realized how huge the wardstone was until we reached its foot. Even with its wind-pushed lean, it towered thirty feet above us and measured ten feet across its base.

Chunks of the lichen-stained stone were missing, rupturing the wardstone's rings of runes and leaving a gap large enough for a man to walk through. Peering into the breach, I saw that the wardstone was hollow at its core. Hard-packed silvery dust filled it, or had. The dust had been scraped out as far as a tall man could reach. Where the wardstone had been hollowed, its runes were black and oozing, weeping like cuts in a pine tree's trunk. The ground was spongy with decay where that ichor trickled, as it had been in the dying soldier's bootprints.

"They took the nexavar," Jelani breathed, tracing the ruined sigils. She was careful to avoid their dripping ink. "That's why the wardstone's failing, and why those soldiers turned to ghouls. They were mining out the nexavar. They took too much, though, and they couldn't have known what these runes said, or they wouldn't have broken through this section. They ruptured the ward, and the backlash killed them."

"Why would they take nexavar from a wardstone?" I asked.

She gave me a skeptical look, then laughed. "I forgot. You don't have time for superstitions like the rest of us. You've seen those warding amulets people wear to fend off demons."

"Yes."

"The ones that work use nexavar. It's weak magic, but real. People around the Worldwound will pay a lot of money for that—even, or especially, the crusaders themselves. If you care more about lining your own pockets than protecting the border, a wardstone's better than a diamond mine."

I scowled. If Jelani was right, the dead men had paid for their selfishness, but their deaths didn't end the danger. "Can you fix it?"

Jelani paced around the wardstone, examining its broken runes and hollow core. At length she stepped back, shaking her head. "I'd need enough nexavar to replace what was taken. Without it, my spells would fade in hours, if I even had the strength to hold them that long."

My heart sank. It could take months to requisition that much nexavar and bring it back to the wardstone... or longer, with winter hard upon us. I'd heard the nexavar trade depended on river traffic. If that was true, and the supply was locked on frozen boats, we might have to wait until spring. All the while, the Worldwound's poison would seep through the crack in the wards. I hadn't felt so hopeless since Iomedae turned from me.

And yet that desolation might hold the answer to this one.

I knelt by the ruined wardstone, just beyond the reach of its spoiled earth. I'd come to Mendev expecting a clear-cut war of good men against evil demons. I'd found selfishness, greed, fanaticism, and bitter grief. And grace, sometimes, though it was fragile and fleeting.

But no certainty, not until now. Only now, as I clasped my sword between both hands to hold it up as Iomedae's symbol, did I know with absolute, soul-deep clarity that I was acting on behalf of something right. Healing the wardstone was an absolute good. The people of Mendev weren't saints; neither were the unwilling exiles who had joined their war. But they had the potential for virtue amidst their flaws, and sheltering that potential was an unalloyed good. Valas had seen the same before me, and his gift was proof that the gods agreed.

Iomedae, I prayed, hear me. Grant your unworthy servant this boon. Hold the wardstone's magic a little longer. Protect the people of Mendev from the Worldwound. I ask this for them, not for myself. I will give my life for this, if you ask. I will give my soul. But shield them, I beg you.

I waited, kneeling, for some sign. Light, song, agony. Anything.

Nothing came. The wind wailed on. My knees ached. I heard Jelani pacing back and forth behind me, trying to keep warm as she waited.

Finally, despairing, I opened my eyes.

The ground before me was laced with frost—bright, clean frost, with no sign of the previous decay. The rift in the wardstone's side remained, but a shimmering lattice filled the gap, like a tapestry of starlight stretched over black night. The runes at the base had stopped dripping; the poisoned ichor might have been an ugly dream.

"You did it," Jelani said in wonder. "I don't know what you did, but you did it."

"How long will the magic last?" I asked.

"I don't know. It's... not the magic I know. This is holy work." She raised her eyebrows. "I thought you weren't a paladin."

"I'm not." I'd had so little faith that I hadn't believed Iomedae heard me without a sign.

"Then what—"

"We have a reprieve. The chance to do good. But only a chance."

"Ah." She smiled wearily. "Well, a chance is more than we had before."

"It is," I agreed, and we walked back to our war.

Coming Next Week: Death in the bog in the first chapter of Amber Scott's "Swamp Warden."

Liane Merciel is the author of The River Kings' Road: A Novel of Ithelas, available now from Gallery. For more information on her writing, visit lianemerciel.com.

Art by KyuShik Shin.

Certainty

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Three: Justice

The first of the Burner's prisoners was a pregnant woman, though I would have thought her long past her childbearing years. She wasn't a day under fifty, and might easily have been ten years older.

Those years were heavy on her, and the short, dirty shift she wore did nothing to conceal them. Her shoulders were soft and spotted brown; her legs were puffed and lumpy as badly kneaded dough. The weight of a lifetime's grief dragged down her mouth. I couldn't imagine her as a young woman, or a smiling one.

She hardly looked like a threat, but that only made me warier. Fiends loved to prey on the vulnerable. Children and dotards were easily deceived, and strong men often hesitated before striking such helpless-seeming foes—a fatal mistake against the possessed.

This woman didn't seem possessed, but without Iomedae's magic I couldn't be sure. The Burner regarded her as if she was, or worse. Naked hatred contorted his face; his lips skinned back in an unconscious snarl.

"A fortnight ago," he said, "this woman ran from the village. We found her lying by the wardstone, naked and covered in blood. There was a dead boar with her, painted with sigils in ash. She'd rutted with it and cut its throat, sacrificing to the demon lords so they'd give her a child. A fortnight ago she was a barren widow. Now she's fat with hellspawn. For the sake of us all, you must give her to the flames."

"Do you have a name?" I asked her.

She looked up slowly. The emptiness in her face receded, and a semblance of life returned—but it was a halting, blasted kind of life. I no longer doubted that she'd seen demons; the question now was why.

"Ledsa," she croaked.

"Ledsa. Why were you out by the wardstone?"

"Have you children?"

"No."

"Then you cannot understand." Pain gave her voice a ragged edge. "Demons took my Yulin. She was six. They took my husbands, too, one by one over the years, but no man's death ever grieved me like my daughter's. I was old when I had her, and too old to bear another when she died. Too old to do anything but mourn.

"I prayed to Iomedae for a crusader to bring her back. When that failed I prayed to Pharasma to show me that her soul was at peace. The gods wouldn't answer. I knew they didn't care. I knew my daughter was in torment.

"I went to the wardstone." A flash of defiance crossed her face under the disheveled gray hair. "Yes, I went. I heard the demons singing. They crooned to me. They said they had her soul... but they could give it back. Bear a child for them, they said, and it would be my daughter clothed in new flesh. Yulin, alive again."

"She admits her guilt!" the Burner said triumphantly. "Put her to the stake."

"Is that necessary?" Adrun asked. "She has admitted to a grievous wrong, and the fiend-blooded are bent toward evil. But I have known some who rose above their blood, and if this woman acted out of love... might she not be able to guide her own child toward goodness? I'm sure the demons' promises were lies; if they had the power to rebirth a human soul, which I doubt, it would have been as a twisted and broken thing. Still... that only proves she was blinded by love. Can we not show mercy?"

The Burner bristled at Adrun. "You're a traitor to your Queen and cause."

"Speak out of turn again and I'll have you whipped," I said. The Burner subsided, and I turned back to Ledsa. "You wanted a child, and you were too old to bear one, that I understand. But why not take in an orphan?" Kenabres had few children, but many of those had lost their parents to the Worldwound's war. Valas's Gift likely had orphans too. Even if it didn't, Kenabres was only a few days away. A woman determined enough to sacrifice to demons could surely have made that journey for a child.

She recoiled as if I'd suggested taking a serpent to her breast. "Why would I want them?"

A short silence fell. Then Adrun sighed. "Why, indeed."

"Hang her," I told the soldiers. "Burn the body."

"I should have known better than to think someone who would risk all Mendev for her grief could be saved," Adrun murmured after the soldiers had gone. "There was no love left in that woman's heart. Only poison. I'm sorry I asked."

"Never be sorry you asked," I said. "If the gods grant you the luxury of time to make sure, take it. Always take it. The grave is in no hurry."

Adrun looked at me strangely, but before he could say whatever was on his mind, the soldiers returned with the next prisoner.

He was mad. Every prisoner brought in after that was mad; Ledsa was the only one who still had her wits. The others giggled, or warbled nonsense songs, or shrieked at monsters only they could see. The village headman, a gaunt-cheeked and humorless old man, patted and cooed to our boots as if they were kittens. His wife plucked the hairs from her head one by one, put them to her lips, and puffed them at each of us with a cackle of delight.

They were all peaceful, even merry. That surprised me until the Burner explained that the prisoners we saw were only a fraction of those afflicted. He'd already burned the violent ones.

"They had succumbed to demons," he said. "It had to be done."

	"There are no easy answers. I know this better than most."

I would have burned him too for that, but I didn't know if he was wrong. None of the afflicted souls could tell us what had befallen them. Adrun and Jelani examined them, and I did the same, but we found no answers. Several were feverish, and some trembled with palsy, but others were cool and steady. The only unifying sign was that all were pained by light. They cringed from the smoky torches indoors; the weak daylight outside made them cover their heads and weep in agony.

"It's the wrong season for accidental poisoning," Adrun said after the last prisoner had been examined. "In spring people might pick devilweed or mitepurse by accident; the plants can be easy to mistake when they're young. But never this late in the year. Anyway, if that were the cause, I'd expect to see people struck down after eating from the same pot. These victims came from all across the village. Some were afflicted in houses where other people were spared."

"I won't say it wasn't demons' work," Jelani said, "but it isn't a spell. There's no enchantment on any of these people."

The mystery was not to be solved that night. I posted a guard to ensure the prisoners didn't hurt themselves or each other, then went out to stand first watch. I walked the walls of Valas's Gift, but other than Jelani, who shared my watch, I saw no one abroad.

The aurora was gone with summer from the Crown of the World, but there was no tranquility in Mendev's night. Past the wardstones, the sky flickered red; lightning stabbed up from the Worldwound into the clouds, as if it meant to attack the heavens as well as us earthbound mortals.

Perhaps it did. I watched it, thinking about human frailty and human folly, until the midnight bell ended my shift. I found no answers in my thoughts.

In the morning, however, we learned the cause.

"It's the grain," Persil told us, red-cheeked from the cold. He'd gone out early to requisition some of the village's wheat for our porridge, hoping to save our own stores for later. While picking through the grain to get rid of loose stones, he saw that several of the kernels were bloated and split, with purplish fungus inside.

He held them out in a trembling palm. "It's gone rotten. Same as the ones I brewed up by accident—the ones that killed all those people back home. I'll never forget it."

"Did those victims show the same symptoms?" Adrun asked.

Persil shrugged uncomfortably. "Might've. I thought they were just silly drunk. Then they started dying, and I got hauled off to the dungeon. Never saw what became of the others."

"There shouldn't be any blight here." Adrun frowned. "Valas's Gift prevents it."

"Maybe not, if the wardstone is failing," I said.

"This village has been blessed since the Second Crusade."

"Blessed or not, its granary has been blighted. Can you purify the grain?"

"Some," Adrun admitted. "I'd have to spend a fortnight to do it all. My prayers are limited, and there's a lot of grain."

"We can't spare you that long." Nor could I leave the granaries to be purified upon our return, since I didn't know if we would return. If we all died out by the Worldwound, the villagers might decide madness was preferable to starvation and eat the rotten grain—or sell it to unsuspecting travelers and use the money to buy themselves safe food. Men, even good men, could easily do such things rather than watch their families starve.

"What about you?" I asked the Burner.

He cast his eyes down uncomfortably. "I have not the privilege of... of magic."

I grunted, unsurprised. There had been a true priest in Valas's Gift, but the other villagers told me that she was among the first victims sent to the Burner's stake. She'd been violently deranged by the poisoned grain, they all agreed, but I wondered whether the Burner hadn't also wanted, in some small corner of his soul, to get rid of the only voice that might have countered his fanaticism. Men's motives were often shaded by such thoughts.

That didn't answer the problem of the grain, though. If neither Adrun nor the Burner could cleanse it, I saw only one solution.

"Burn it," I said. "Adrun, cleanse what you can. We'll fire the rest when we go."

"My lord, are you sure?"

"Yes," I lied.

It was an ugly choice. Valas's Gift was a breadbasket for Kenabres and other settlements, which needed its blessed fertility to make up their own shortfalls. Without it, all those towns would depend entirely on what Queen Galfrey could spare—and, after a hundred years of war with no victory in sight, that wasn't much.

Burning the grain would force the people of Valas's Gift to winter as paupers in Kenabres, where they'd likely be resented for causing the hunger they couldn't help. Still, I saw no better choice. The villagers would have a hard winter, but life by the Worldwound was always hard. They would survive, and in the spring the fields and the blessed font would be waiting for their return.

So I hoped. But I was only human, and fallible. My doubts stayed with me as we marched from the village, a pillar of smoke at our backs.

We traveled without a guide. Past the tree line, northern Mendev was a vast and featureless land, deceptive in its emptiness; a man could easily wander a hundred miles wide of his mark and never realize it until he was dying on the tundra, days from the nearest living person.

But the wardstone of Valas's Gift was its own landmark, and from the moment we left the taiga we could see it stark on the horizon. It slanted slightly; despite the magics that anchored it and its own considerable weight, the constant wind on the tundra had pushed it to one side. In another hundred years, if the war for the Worldwound still wore on, it might topple on its own.

Ten miles from the wardstone, I sent out scouts. Whatever had damaged the wardstone might have left some clues behind, and I wanted to find them before we stumbled blind into danger. Jelani enspelled the scouts to resist the chill, laughing into her scarf as she did.

"I learned this spell for the desert," she said. "Never thought to use it in the cold."

"I don't think any of us ever thought to be here," one of the scouts replied. He shouldered a lighter pack, leaving the bulk of his equipment with us, and trotted off to the west. A moment later, the other split east. The rest of us continued toward the wardstone.

We had scarcely gone two miles before the first scout returned. His eyes were wild with terror above his scarf.

"Come," he said. "I've found something."

Coming Next Week: First steps on the long road to faith in the final chapter of Liane Merciel's "Certainty."

Liane Merciel is the author of The River Kings' Road: A Novel of Ithelas, available now from Gallery. For more information on her writing, visit lianemerciel.com.

Art by KyuShik Shin.

Certainty

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Two: Valas’s Gift

A grim silence settled over the recruits after that welcome. When another soldier came to lead them to the armory, they followed quietly, their heads lowered like those of condemned men marching to the gallows.

I rose to go with them, but the scarred soldier waved me down. After the others had gone, and the banners on the walls had stopped flapping in their wake, he leaned back, watching me. "Do you know why they have me greet the new ones?"

"I presume because you can read but can't fight," I said, looking pointedly at the empty sleeve pinned over his shoulder.

The soldier nodded, unoffended by my bluntness. "That's part. The other part's that I look so pretty." He traced his thumb along one ruined cheek, following its acid-eaten sag. His empty eye socket stared at me, a wet red pit. "Shocks 'em. Terrifies 'em. That's good. They need to know what'll happen if they get lazy or drop their guard.

"Every now and then, though... every now and then, we get one who doesn't flinch. One who's seen worse. Dealt worse, maybe." He fixed his good eye on me again. "Like you. Who were you before?"

"No one," I said. My throat felt tight and raspy.

He snorted. "I lost an eye and an arm, not my brain. Don't want to tell me, fine. But you're no novice to command, any idiot can see that. That bedraggled bunch of cast-offs you brought me was already yours, even though you didn't know half their names. Men want to follow you. That's good. We'll use it."

That I could bear. I hadn't come to be questioned, but I had come to serve. "What would you have of me?"

"You'll lead a company up to Valas's Gift tomorrow. I'll give you some new recruits, but most will be Mendevians. They know the lay of the land."

"They'll follow me?"

The soldier's scars twitched as he tried to raise a long-gone eyebrow. The other side of his face stayed immobile, a mask of dead flesh. "They're used to following new blood. Sudden changes of command aren't exactly a novelty around the Worldwound."

"Fair enough. What's in Valas's Gift?"

"That's what you'll be finding out. We don't know. The wardstone nearest the village has been damaged, according to our scryers, but we don't know exactly how. It's bad enough that the Worldwound's taint is interfering with their spells, though, and that means it's bad enough for us to send a scouting party."

I smiled sourly. It was just like every assignment I'd ever been given back in Cheliax: uncertain troops, scant information, and the blithe certainty of my commanding officers that I'd solve the problem or die trying.

Except Iomedae was no longer with me, and that changed everything.

"Who are you?" I asked the scarred man, to distract myself from the fatigue of failure. "You're no simple soldier yourself. Not if you're giving orders so easily."

"We're all soldiers here," he said. "But, as it happens, my name is Colum Norsellen. First Adjutant to General Dyre. Now, it's getting late and you don't want to be a stranger abroad in Kenabres after dark. Best rejoin the others. Unless, of course, you'd care to tell me about that winged shield you're carrying."

"No," I said.

∗ ∗ ∗

Ten of us went to Valas's Gift: six Mendevians, the Kellid woman from the previous night, Jelani, Persil, and myself. I was surprised that Colum assigned Persil to the scouting company, since the youth scarcely knew how to set up a tent, but the adjutant insisted it was no mistake.

"He'll learn by doing," Colum said. "You're going out to scout, not fight. You can keep him safe."

I thought it more likely that the boy would end up as deadweight, if not simply dead, but he was so bright-eyed at the prospect of adventure that I hadn't the heart to say so.

We traveled on foot; the weather was too harsh for horses, and Kenabres had none to spare. Our only beast of burden was the shaggy brown mule carrying our supplies. We said a last prayer with the priest from the walls, swearing our crusaders' oaths and accepting Iomedae's blessing from his palsied hands. Then the gates closed.

That morning was beautiful. There was no snow in the air, only the glassy brightness of new winter. The sun spilled gold over the wardstones, lighting the poisoned sky so that, for a while, I could almost believe that the red clouds were stained only by the sunrise.

But as the day wore on, the illusory promise of dawn faded back into the churning gloom of the storm over the Worldwound. It seemed all the crueler for the change. After that I turned my eyes from the sky and only watched the road.

Three days later we reached Valas's Gift. Fields of frost-kissed stubble ringed its walls, indicating a richer harvest than I would have thought this frigid land could give. I even saw small orchards—stunted by the wind, and bare-branched on winter's eve, but orchards nonetheless.

One of the Mendevians, a cheerful young priest named Adrun, caught me marveling and laughed. "It's blessed soil."

"What?"

He swept a mittened hand out. "It's Valas's blessing that lets anything worth harvesting grow here. Surprised you don't know the story. With that shield, I had you figured for a paladin myself."

"I'm not a paladin." It sounded less bitter than it felt.

"Suppose that's no surprise. We're dreadful short on holiness here. Valas was one of the old breed, and one of the last. He fought in the Second Crusade, the heroes who beat back the Worldwound's demons long enough for casters to build the wardstones that shield us now. They hurt him viciously, but Valas didn't fall until the wardstones were safe. By then he was dying. His squire pulled him back to this little village, where some kind soul gave him water to ease his last moments. In gratitude, Valas blessed the village spring as he died.

"That spring runs red as blood now. It looks frightful, but it keeps this village alive. Fields watered from it are more fertile than they've any right to be. Wounds washed in it don't sicken. The water loses its magic if you try to carry it off, but even so it's precious. Valas's Gift helps put bread on every table in Kenabres."

I nodded, squinting at the village through the lowering dusk.

Valas's Gift looked strangely sunken behind its hard-packed walls. As we drew nearer, I understood why. Most of its sod-roofed homes and granaries slanted into the earth, burying themselves for warmth and to escape the wind. A pall of peat smoke lingered in the dips between them, mingling with the same white incense that flowed from the walls of Kenabres.

Sheep wandered among the buildings, cropping at the withered grass that clung to the rooftop sod. Slatted pens held woolly, dark-faced pigs twice the size of any I'd seen before. We saw no people, however, until we were almost to the gates. Then a lone man scurried out to greet us, his breath puffing white around his shaved head.

He was not an impressive figure, despite the wooden symbol of Iomedae that bounced on his chest. His eyes bulged, and his nose and mouth drooped downward, accentuating the weakness of his chin. Although he wore an ascetic's tonsure, he had not kept it clean; stubble flecked his scalp. Blinking at us, he resembled a surprised and irresolute tadpole.

I thought he looked harmless, if foolish. My companions did not. The Mendevians drew back as if confronted by a spitting cobra; the Kellid woman growled.

"What's wrong?" I asked Adrun.

"He's one of Hulrun's," came the muttered answer. "Look at his symbol."

It was Iomedae's radiant sword... but different from the one I'd worn as her champion. Painted flames licked at the blade's tip, evoking a fresh-lit pyre around a stake.

The village priest's chasuble was unusual as well. Instead of a golden border about the edges, as most of Iomedae's faithful preferred, his was trimmed in fiery orange.

He's a Burner, I thought, so startled that I nearly blurted it aloud. I had heard of the Burners, of course—all Iomedaeans had, usually in tones of stark disapproval—but I had never expected to meet one, even though I knew full well that Kenabres was the center of their heresy.

	"The Burners are a heresy, but understandably popular in a land at war with the Abyss itself."

Following the teachings of Elder Prelate Hulrun, the Burners made it their mission to extirpate any hint of demonic taint, usually by burning the accused at the stake. (Should the victim turn out to actually be a demon, as evidenced by its resistance to flame, additional methods were employed.) I envied their certainty at times, even as I wondered whether such fanaticism could ever truly serve Iomedae's principles. Rumor had it that they were none too scrupulous about verifying accusations of demon-worship, nor about using torture to wrest the truths they wanted to hear from the mouths of the condemned.

They called themselves Inquisitors. Everyone else knew them as Burners. In Cheliax, they were considered heretics and a disgrace to the Inheritor's name. Here, however, they held considerable power. It was because of the Burners that Kenabres had no cats and was filled with rat-traps. The people weren't starving, as I had first assumed. The Burners, claiming demons would spy on them through the eyes of verminous familiars, had killed all the animals they could catch.

They'd kill people just as readily, given provocation.

"What—who are you?" The priest glanced from each of us to the next, rubbing his holy symbol. "What brings you here?"

"My name is Ederras," I said. "I have come on General Dyre's orders to investigate your wardstone. We heard it might be failing."

The priest nodded vigorously. "It is so. The Worldwound's chaos has crept into Valas's Gift. Many of our people have already given in to the demons' lies. They must be purified by flame."

"Naturally," Jelani muttered. "It's always about the burning, isn't it?" The priest, thankfully, didn't hear.

"I will pass judgment on them, not you," I said, drawing on all my Chelish hauteur. If I had still been in Iomedae's graces, I would have outranked this village priest; as it was, I had no real authority over him. I didn't know whether General Dyre held rank over Hulrun, either. If not, I had no right to interfere with the Burner's justice.

But the bluff, and the nine well-armed soldiers behind me, seemed to work. The priest stepped back, clutching at his symbol. "Of course, my lord. I would never stand in the way of the law. Never. But you will see, they are tainted. They have lain with demons and given up their souls, and there is no question what must be done with them. They must go to the flames."

Coming Next Week: Hard choices and cold comfort in Chapter Three of Liane Merciel's "Certainty."

Liane Merciel is the author of The River Kings' Road: A Novel of Ithelas, available now from Gallery. For more information on her writing, visit lianemerciel.com.

Art by KyuShik Shin.

New Pathfinder Web Fiction!

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

If you're reading this blog on paizo.com, rather than aggregating through some sort of high-tech feed to your personal mobile command unit, or beaming it directly to your personal communications satellite—as one of the last Paizonians without a smart phone, I really have no idea what such things are capable of these days—it's likely you've already seen the little tab just above this that says "Web Fiction." And if you're a fan of freebies, you've probably even checked it out, and already read through the excellent free Pathfinder Tales stories by folks like Dave Gross, Rich Ford, and J. C. Hay.

Yet while the fiction itself is easy to find, it's come to my attention that people might not know that new installments in our free fiction series go live every single Wednesday, with several thousand words of new free content each week! Perhaps even more importantly, I've realized that while we've been slaving away bringing you the stories, we've been totally bereft of a forum in which to tell you about them.

All of which stops today! Going forward, I'm going to make it my mission to announce each new story on this blog as it launches, the better to preview things for you and let you know what's coming down the line. And as it turns out, I couldn't have picked a better time to start. (Well, except for the very beginning, but that's beside the point.)

This week sees the first installment of "Certainty," a new story from up-and-coming fantasy novelist Liane Merciel. The author of The River Kings' Road and its forthcoming sequel, Liane really understands how to bring some grit and realism to a fantasy world. Fortunately for us, she's also a fan of Pathfinder, with a grasp of the history and feel of the setting that's simply astounding. In the new story, Liane follows Ederras, a former paladin of Iomedae who's lost his faith (or at least, his self-righteous conviction), on his journey to the Worldwound to reclaim a sense of right and wrong—or die trying. But it turns out that even in Mendev, light and dark aren't always clear, and the hand that smites the demon might be just as corrupt, in its own fashion, as the demon itself...

Click here to read the first chapter in this new free short story, and don't forget to check back every Wednesday for more adventures on Golarion!

James Sutter
Fiction Editor

Certainty

by Liane Merciel

Chapter One: The Crusade

There aren't many old paladins.

Mostly we die. Spend year after year fighting everything from boggards to balors, and sooner or later one of them will take off your head. Or you succumb to rice-water fever while wandering in the bowels of a festering swamp. Or that smiling innkeeper with the dirty jokes turns out to be a secret cultist of Norgorber and slits your throat while you snore.

Few of us last ten years.

We don't all die on the battlefield, though. Sometimes it's quieter than that. Sometimes it's as simple as a loss of certainty.

Live in the world long enough, and you lose sight of the lines between good and evil. There aren't many true innocents out there. Maybe none. The maiden you save from a dragon grows into a mean old drunk who harangues her neighbors and kicks her dogs. The merchant you rescue from bandits turns out to be a cheat who's abandoned a dozen bastards around the Inner Sea.

And evil? Evil is no easier. Most criminals are only men, and stupid and frightened ones at that. But they're the easiest to punish; they've done wrong, and know it, and will pay the price.

The great evils trouble me more. Devils are evil. Diabolists, worse: they enable the fiends in our world. But I look at Cheliax—my poor, cursed homeland—and wonder whether grim peace is not, truly, better for the commoners than the civil war they had before, or the perpetually churning bloodshed in Galt. I hear of the Gray Corsairs' raids, and wonder whether it was worth the drowning of three galleys to strike a blow against slavers. The galley rowers were slaves too. Might they not have preferred to live, even if in chains?

I don't know. I haven't known for a long time.

I am not the first of my brethren to succumb to doubt. Ours is a high and narrow road. It's easy to falter, easy to fall. Almost impossible to climb back up.

Most never try.

Some surrender to the emptiness, living out their days in a slow gray mire. Some rebel, blaming the gods for their failures instead of themselves, and seek out new, malevolent masters.

A few join grand crusades, dying in a blaze of glory that might—might—be bright enough to blot out the stain of sin. That's always struck me as the best way. Find the easy choices, the clear lines. Die a hero. Let no one see the doubt.

I joined the grandest crusade of them all.

I went to the Worldwound.

∗ ∗ ∗

It was a snowy, bitter morn when I came to the gates of Kenabres. For the past ten days I had been studying the wardstones in the distance. They shadowed the lines of the road like an endless march of tombstones, commemorating the thousands who had died in Sarkoris and the thousands more that would die trying to save the rest of Avistan from that fate. Commemorating me, maybe.

Behind the wardstones the sky was smudged soot-black, stained by a fire that would roar unsated until it devoured the world. I never saw anything stirring in that poisoned air, but the red-bellied clouds were warning enough. Here lay the end of the world.

I did not come to Kenabres alone. On the road I had fallen in with other desperate, damned souls. Some wanted to confront death on their own terms; others wanted to live, at least for one more day, and had nowhere to do it but here.

During the journey I learned some of their names and some of their reasons. Jelani was a Thuvian sand-dancer who said she was dying of a wasting disease, though I saw no mark of it on her. Her parents lived in poverty on the far side of the Inner Sea, and even after she learned she was ill, she sent her earnings to them rather than paying a healer's fee. She had heard that Queen Galfrey offered free healing to anyone who joined the crusade, and had come in hopes that the rumor was true. Even if it wasn't, she said, better to die for an honorable cause than rot in a sickbed.

Most of my companions were less noble. Robbers, blasphemers, cattle thieves. The best of the lot was a mere debtor, cast in with the others when he borrowed to fuel his gambling and found the dice fickle as ever. All of them had been offered a choice between the gallows and the Worldwound. All had chosen to go north, though few had any training in arms and none had been properly schooled in sword or lance. Not one of them expected to leave Mendev alive.

These were my new comrades-in-arms. They made me glad I had already forsaken my oaths, and bitter that I had fallen so low. In my old life I would have sent them to the hangman or lopped their heads off myself. Now I could only hope they'd prove less dangerous at my back than the demons would be to my face.

The people of Mendev seemed nearly as suspicious of their saviors as I was. We spotted sentries ranging ahead of us a day's walk from the fortress town, and at the gates were greeted by bearded men in hard-used mail. Pots of acrid incense burned in the hollow merlons, draping the walls in curtains of ghostly white smoke. I smelled cedar and clove, and something else, unfamiliar, that tickled my nose and left me light-headed. Magic? If so, it was none I had seen before.

While archers kept arrows trained on us from the walls, a priest wearing Iomedae's radiant sword ordered us to doff our hoods, baring our faces to the cold. I turned my eyes away from the symbol of my old goddess, gritting my teeth at the touch of her magic outside me—always and forever, outside—but the priest didn't seem to notice. He chanted over us, beseeching Iomedae to show the truth of our natures, and only when he was satisfied that we were not demon-touched did the gates open at last.

"You must forgive us," he said. "We have hard troubles here."

No one answered him. What was there to say? We all knew of his nation's troubles. They were why we had come, willingly or not.

Inside the walls I saw more scars from Kenabres' long struggle. It would have been impossible to tell from walking through it that this town held the attackers, not the besieged. There were no cats in its streets, and the alleys held more rat-traps than rodents: the people had eaten their pets and were reduced to snaring vermin for food.

Peddlers crowded every corner, doing a brisk business in amulets and potions that promised protection from demons. I saw few women, and most of those were either painted bawds or Kellid giant-hunters, as wild and dangerous as their men. Mendev's wives and children had been sent to safety long ago. I wondered how many had become widows and orphans since then.

The gate guards shepherded us to a long, low building that served as a barracks. Banners and pennons from a hundred nations, city-states, and petty lordlings hung from its walls in a riot of dusty color. Among them hung stranger, grimmer trophies: weapons and battle-flags taken from vanquished foes in the Worldwound. I spotted a few skeletal claws and carapaces mounted in the corners. No skulls, though. Even dead—even taken as a prize of war—no one wanted those eyes on them as they slept.

A one-armed soldier seated at a battered desk took down our names and skills. His face had been dissolved by acid, perhaps in the same attack that took his arm; his cheeks hung down to his collar in ripples of shiny pink slag, and he looked half demon himself. Only one eye had been spared, but that eye narrowed sharply when I gave my name for his book.

"Ederras." He flicked a glance at my shield, then looked back at me, coolly appraising. "No title? No talents?"

I wondered if he recognized the golden wings painted on the oak, or if it was something else that had betrayed me. Perhaps I should have discarded the shield along with my blessed sword and the helm I was no longer worthy to wear... but the shield held one of the few enchantments that still worked for me, and I was loath to face the Worldwound with no magic.

"No title," I said. "No talents."

He didn't press me, moving on to the next man—Persil, a brewer exiled after his beer sickened and killed a dozen revelers at a Merrymead celebration. He swore it was an accident, and I believed him, but that hadn't saved the stammering youth from the local swordlord's justice.

None of the others admitted to much until the scarred soldier came to Jelani. She gave her name, acknowledged her lack of title, and smiled when he asked for her talents.

"Fire and sand," she said, lifting a hand. A tiny whirlwind spun, sparkling, over her palm. It seemed to be made up of gold motes rather than ordinary dust. Each speck glowed with its own fiery light. That light shone strangely on her face; at that moment she seemed inhuman, her pupils replaced by dark flame, her skin the glossy bronze of a Vudrani idol. She was not speaking loudly, yet her voice filled the barracks and quelled all other sound. "The heat of the desert wind. The blaze of the unfailing sun. Those are the powers I command, Mendevian. Will they do?"

The soldier shrugged with his good arm, drawing a stylized flame next to Jelani's name. "If not, you'll soon find out. Battle magic or builder's?"

Jelani closed her hand. The fire died; that strange light passed. She seemed a harmless girl again. "Battle."

The soldier smiled for the first time since he'd seen us. "Good." He fanned his quill over the ink to dry it, then closed his book. "You'll get your weapons now."

"I have weapons," one of the cattle-thieves protested. He was a shaggy, slope-browed brute of a man, and he carried an axe to match.

The one-armed soldier was unimpressed. "Are they blessed? Cold-forged? No? Not likely to give a demon any trouble, then. You can swing that axe until your beard goes gray, but if you're not wielding cold iron you won't leave a scratch on any of the beasts you're like to face here. The weapons we'll give you aren't fancy. No engravings, no gilt, no pretty little master's mark. But they can make those bastards bleed."

"You'll want holy water, too," said a Kellid woman. Triangles and knotted circles in red ochre covered her shoulders and collarbones, vanishing into the deerskin tunic she wore. "Not little vials like you carry in the south. Skins of it. Some of the demons have acid or stinking slime. Use the water to wash it off. Use the water to kill them, too, if you lose your sword. But don't waste it. Might need to drink it. Other water turns to poison near the Worldwound sometimes. Holy water's safer—as long as it lasts."

"We won't throw you out there like raw meat to wolves," the one-armed soldier said, reading the fear on the faces around him. "I won't lie: our need is desperate, and we're not training Andoren knights here. We don't have time to drill you for ten years in the training field. But we won't be sending you out against balors before you've learned to hold a sword, either. If you've never fought, we'll teach you. Until then, you'll tend animals, help the healers, brew whitesmoke for the pots. The work we do in town is as important as anything that happens on the wardstones.

"If you do know how to fight, however, we'll be sending you out once you're armed." He looked directly at me as he said it. I returned his gaze, impassive. "Our battle never ends. This is like no war you've ever fought."

"I've never fought in any war," Persil mumbled.

"You're in one now." The soldier grinned. "Welcome to the Worldwound."

Coming Next Week: Proof that the only thing more dangerous than a demon is a righteous man, in Chapter Two of "Certainty."

Liane Merciel is the author of The River Kings' Road: A Novel of Ithelas, available now from Gallery. For more information on her writing, visit lianemerciel.com.