Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes (27 page)

“Death stands beside each of you,” I said, “awaiting only another treacherous act to fall upon your head.”

The shaman stared at me, eyes wide in apprehension. He commanded his followers, “Still your hands.”

“You will tell me what you have found in these passages. When I am satisfied with your answers, you may depart forever.”

The leader’s hand trembled near a bone wand hanging from his hip. I saw the conflict in his mind reflected on his face. Submission would cost him loyalty from his followers. Seeing only me and Kazyah, he weighed the cost of resistance.

“Coward!” the devil’s head shrieked into the shaman’s ear. “I bring you the gift of hellfire, and you cringe before this half-breed elf? Burn him! Burn them both to cinders!”

I raised the riffle scroll, ready to thumb its pages and activate the spell. “Defy me and die. No further warning.”

The caster glanced at the devil’s head, then at his counselors. In the craggy lines of his face, I saw the resolve forming. Before he could turn it to action, I unleashed a volley of arcane bolts at his infernal familiar. The head exploded in shards of bone and chunks of preserved flesh.

Janneke fired a cylinder at a pair of orcs rising from their nests. A glass vial shattered and splashed them with gray fluid. The orcs howled as the acid burned through their hide armor.

Illyria flicked a white feather as the orcs around the fire rose. As she finished pronouncing her spell, they too wailed—not in pain, but in terror. They cowered before the necromancer as Amaranthine flew toward them, lashing her barbed tail at their faces.

Kazyah called out a Shoanti chant, and the ceiling appeared to fall upon another orc. In an instant, the rubble rose in the form of a whirling earth spirit, lumpy limbs pounding the orc to gore.

Radovan, Kline, and I moved forward to attack with our blades. Radovan killed two before Kline and I reached our foes.

“Count!” cried Zora. I turned to see one of the leader’s counselor’s gripping the empty air, his spell evoking a red blaze.

I began a counterspell, but I could see it would be too slow. Zora whirled her flag, the banner rippling in the air as it crossed between the orc and me. His infernal bolt flared behind the flag but vanished as it struck the cloth. With a flourish, Zora continued the arc of her sweep and snapped the cloth around the orc’s ankle, pulling him to the ground. A moment later, Kline and I were upon him, our blades finishing the job.

The rest was a brief succession of clamors and flashes. In the end, we stood over the broken bodies of the orcs, the only sound our panting and the grinding growl of Kazyah’s earth spirit. I regretted only a little the lack of intelligence we might have gleaned from a survivor. The fact that they had set camp suggested they had not penetrated much farther into the complex.

Beyond the orcs, we moved cautiously through trapped passages whose mechanisms Zora and Radovan disarmed. When we came to seeming dead ends, Kazyah opened the walls with a chant.

In a catacomb, a pair of wights stalked us until Arnisant barked a warning. Lady Illyria paralyzed them with a spell while Kazyah and Janneke smashed their undead bodies to pulp.

Soon after, Kline threw a handful of glittering dust over a seemingly empty expanse, revealing an invisible stairway. At the bottom, I incinerated a nest of albino arthropods with a spray of flame.

Together, we drove off a pack of hulking brutes with three-fingered claws, doglike legs, and hideous maws. The rumbling of their bellies was audible even over the fight, and ribbons of drool hung from their slavering jaws. Despite their disgusting appearance, I felt a pang of sympathy for their hunger. We stopped to fortify ourselves with a handful of rations. Or two.

Consulting with Kline and Lady Illyria, I identified discrepancies in my map to reveal hidden passages and access to undisturbed chambers. We descended ever deeper.

In time, we came to a series of slanting rooms lined with painted tiles. In the detritus, Radovan discovered a drain on a wall, suggesting that the now-vertical surface had once been the floor. Kazyah traced her fingers across a span of hard-packed earth until she found a softer spot.

She concentrated, listening to voices the rest of us could not hear. She thrust a finger into the rubble. The dirt parted as easily as if it were water.

“Don’t try to follow,” she said. “Wait for me here.”

Humming a deep note, she thrust her entire hand and then her arm into the earth.

“Is she going to—?” Before Radovan could finish, Kazyah disappeared into the wall.

We stared after her, watching as the disturbed dirt settled. As the minutes passed, uncertainty weighed upon us. Our gazes shifted from the wall to each other, yet no one dared speak.

Without warning, a nearby section of wall collapsed. Kazyah stumbled out, gasping for breath. Wet mud caked her lower legs, and dry dirt sifted down from her bear’s helm and cloak.

“What did you find?” I asked.

“A river,” she said. “I should have brought a light. But it’s close enough that I can make a path, if you wish it.”

“Do the spirits tell you it leads to a larger area? To Xin-Gastash?”

She nodded.

“Make a path.”

She set aside her earth breaker and produced a small steel blade from her belt. From a pouch she removed a crumb of loam, a bit of clay, and a pinch of sand. Mingling them in her palm, she thrust the blade forth and uttered a deep tone. An inhuman harmony joined her, just within the lower range of my hearing. It vibrated in my bones and raised the hairs on the nape of my neck. Pebbles leaped and scattered across our toes.

The floor parted like the trough of a cresting wave, creating a descending passage perhaps seven feet wide. As we watched, the channel penetrated deeper into the earth until a sudden gust of moist air blew dust in our faces.

Radovan moved forward.

“Wait,” said Kazyah. “Not yet.”

The shaman went ahead, pausing twice to mold a piece of clay. In sympathy with her spell, stones flowed and reformed in the shape of a crude brace to support the channel walls. She did the same at two farther points before beckoning for us to follow.

We emerged from the trench in cold water up to our calves. The opposite bank lay nearly thirty feet away. Downstream, the river gurgled through a rapid decline. Upstream, the passage widened.

“Be careful,” said Kazyah. “It is much deeper in the center, and the current is strong.”

Radovan and I took the lead, wading near the river’s edge with Janneke close behind. Illyria illuminated the head of Kazyah’s earth breaker, and the shaman covered the rear.

We followed the shallow river for perhaps seventy yards before the ceiling rose and the passage opened into a large, glittering cavern.

Upon its shore lay a treasure trove.

Gold, silver, and copper coins formed hillocks on the shore. Among them lay goblets, plates, tapestries, wooden carvings, suits of armor, swords, shields, spears with crusader pennants, chests and coffers (some open to spill out their jewels), a wagon-wheel with gold inlaid in its spokes, and even a canopy bed.

Eando Kline and Lady Illyria simultaneously cast divinations. I did the same rather than rely on their reports.

“Is this what I think it is?” said Janneke.

“That depends.” Radovan brushed away some coins at the water’s edge, revealing the furrow of an enormous claw. “Do you think it’s a dragon’s lair?”

“We should have brought more wagons,” said Zora. “Look at all this treasure!”

“Take nothing,” I said. “We are not here to steal.”

“Except for your book,” said Radovan.

“Except for that.” I disliked thinking of acquiring the
Black Book
in terms of theft, but Radovan made a valid point. “We must find it and depart before the, ah, resident returns.”

“We shouldn’t be here.” Janneke cranked her crossbow.

“Look here,” said Eando. He stood atop an enormous marble head of a fleshy woman crowned with a ring of Azlanti stones. He pointed. Ten feet above the statue’s brow, a half-collapsed stairway rose to a higher chamber.

I looked to Eando and Lady Illyria. “Can either of you levitate someone up there?”

Kline shook his head. Illyria said, “If we rest a while, I can prepare a spell.”

“If somebody can find me a spider, I can climb up there,” said Zora. “Not too big, though. And not a hairy one.”

“What are we doing?” said Radovan. He waved Eando down from the statue’s head and took his place. “We don’t need magic for every little thing. Boss, can I get the mallet, spikes, and rope ladder?”

I opened the satchel and removed the
Gluttonous Tome
to reach the gear. Just as I set it aside, a mound of treasure shifted. Coins streamed down its sides, the sound of the disturbance rising to a loud ringing.

Something deep beneath the surface burrowed toward us.

On Illyria’s shoulder, Amaranthine spread her wings and hissed. Arnisant jumped in front of me, barking.

The rest of us braced for attack, but only a familiar green radiance seeped out from beneath the coins.

As one, Kline and I said, “Oh no.”

A black shape burst out from the treasure, scattering coins in all directions. I writhed in wracking pains. Covers like leathery wings beat against my body as the book’s spine, like bony claws, scrabbled to clutch its pages. A distant fraction of my will wished to let it go, but with the panic of a drowning man, I held on as the
Black Book
rejoined its accursed siblings, the
Bone Grimoire
and
Kardosian Codex
.

At last, the book and I fell exhausted to the cavern floor. The Shadowless Sword clattered beside me. I heaved up the contents of my stomach. All around me, the others suffered their own agonies, caught up in the nauseating aura of the books’ reunion.

Some indeterminable time later, Radovan and the shaman lifted me by the arms. I snapped at them, clutching the
Tome
to my chest with both hands lest someone take it from me. The combined book fluttered open as though flaunting its final secrets.

The
Black Book
consisted of a scorched back cover and another hundred pages of smoke-darkened parchment. The inscriptions were in the same elegant hand as in the previous volumes. Only when Radovan spoke did I realize I had skimmed the pages before me and turned to read the next.

“You feel all right?”

My hands trembled. “I have it. It is all here before me. It is mine.”

“Now we must destroy it,” said the Pathfinder.

“By fueling a fire to cook for a fasting king?” I said. “You will forgive me if I first study these new pages for a less preposterous suggestion.”

“The more you read, the tighter the curse grips you.”

“Then it is a race,” I said, rising to the challenge. “I must discover the means to destroy the
Tome
before it can destroy me.”

“
We
,” said the necromancer woman. “
We
must discover it together.”

I turned, irritated to be corrected.

Whatever the woman saw in my face caused her to flinch.

For the briefest instant, I regretted my reaction, but the instant was fleeting. She needed to learn how to treat me with respect. Fear was a comparatively crude rod, but it would serve. Tending to the feelings of my subordinates would only distract me from my true purpose, which I was beginning to understand was also my destiny: to comprehend and master the secrets of the
Tome
. Only then would I destroy it.

Or perhaps I would not.

It belonged to me, after all. The Pathfinder had tried to wrest it from me, and he had failed. If the necromancer intended to take it from me by subtler methods, she would be disappointed.

A premonition tickled my mind. I sensed a nearby presence, strange yet familiar. Beneath these mounds of coins lay something else, something powerful.

Something that belonged to me.

“Search the hoard,” I ordered them. “There is something else hidden here, something I require.”

“What are you talking about, boss?”

“Do not question me. Just do as I say.”

“Count Jeggare,” said the necromancer. “Varian, listen to me, you don’t—”

“Enough!” I shouted, but my voice came out as a rasp. “You are wasting valuable time.
My
time. I will not tolerate another—”

The air pressure in the cavern suddenly increased. The river surged backward, its waters spilling over the banks and flooding treasures on the shore. The dog barked a frantic warning, but it came far too late.

In our panicked motions, our bodies occluded our lights. Fragmented shadows leaped upon the walls: a hand, a partial profile, a staff or handle, a writhing flag, a crooked arm and running leg. The drake cried in terror.

A dark mass rose out of the river. Water rushed down a wall of scales, each the size of a target shield. Along with the river spray, I felt a wave of terror radiating from the creature—the dragon. The magical compulsion chilled my veins and set my hands to trembling, but soon it washed over me and I stood fast. Among the screams of the weaker beings, I alone stood calm beneath the wyrm’s eye.

In the shifting light, the dragon appeared black and dark blue, yet I saw a glimmer of bronze upon its scales. Holding the
Gluttonous Tome
under one arm, I retrieved the Shadowless Sword. Its magic revealed no illusion. A bronze dragon stood before us.

It turned its incandescent gaze upon me, and I knew only diplomacy would serve. Sheathing my sword, I said, “Forgive our necessary trespass, great wyrm.”

“And shall I forgive your unnecessary theft?” The force of the dragon’s voice bruised my eyes.

I raised the recombined
Gluttonous Tome
above my head. “I have simply retrieved the missing portion of my book.”

“Your book?” said the dragon. “You fool! You have no idea what you’ve done.”

“I know exactly what I have done,” I said. “And I am no fool. My name is Count Varian Jeggare. You would do well to remember it.”

“Boss,” whispered Radovan. “Is that really the way you want—?”