Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes (3 page)

Ygresta’s desk stood across from the tables, before the little fireplace. Beside it hung a birdcage, empty but for a dry water dish and a carpet of hardened fecal matter. At my approach, a brass lamp flared to life, spilling light on the desktop.

There in the center of the desk, upon a discolored paper blotter, rested a teak box beneath a calling card inscribed with my name.

Without disturbing the card, I scanned the box for magic. Detecting none, I scanned the room. The lamp above the desk and the lights on the stair radiated steady magic. On a few of the shelved books I discerned traces of metamorphosis spells. The latter were likely the residue of simple preservative spells, but their presence suggested more valuable tomes. Those I set aside for further study.

“The professor left his entire library to you?” said Illyria.

“His will names me his executor but indicates no beneficiaries, so in effect he did. After gathering the collection into lots, I will circulate an inventory to the Acadamae librarians and entertain their requests.”

“You won’t keep it for yourself? I thought you liked books.”

“Perhaps one or two volumes.” My library surely already contained any interesting volumes I might find here, but I did not say so. One does not wish to boast.

“In that case, may I be the first to lodge a request?”

“On behalf of the Hall of Whispers?”

“On behalf of myself.”

So, I thought, Illyria was not merely smoothing over her uncle’s sour greeting. She had her own agenda as well. “Name it.”

She indicated a shelf of chapbooks. “Professor Ygresta’s collection of the Pathfinder Chronicles.”

My own collection was the most comprehensive I had ever seen. It included volumes dating from the very founding of the Pathfinder Society, with many annotated duplicates. In the unlikely event I should find one I lacked on Ygresta’s meager shelf, I would claim it. But I saw no harm in giving Illyria the rest. “Is that all?”

She averted her eyes. “If you aren’t taking them, perhaps also your letters?”

“My letters?”

“Please.”

Her blush appeared genuine, but a sincere appearance is the goal of every ruse. “My letters to Professor Ygresta?”

“Exactly.” She withdrew a pasteboard box from a shelf and lay it before me. I opened the drawer and saw it was full of letters, all addressed to Professor Benigno Ygresta in my handwriting.

Out of a sense of collegial obligation, I had always responded to his letters about current affairs at the Acadamae with some account of my latest excursion. The letters contained nothing not also reported to the Society. Naturally, I never mentioned military, political, or personal matters to someone beneath the aristocracy. I could not fathom what interest they might hold for Lady Illyria.

The foremost letter was my most recent message, a request for Ygresta to speak on my behalf to Headmaster Toff Ornelos, for whom I had so many questions about my admission and education at the Acadamae.

“I’m sorry.” Lady Illyria winced. “I knew it was too much to ask.”

For a moment I considered whether she was flirting with me. Long before I reached the age of maturity, my mother armored me against the attentions of women attracted more to my wealth than to myself. Yet Illyria did not strike me as the type. An Acadamae graduate would be far too intelligent to expect me to succumb to such manipulation.

Whatever her agenda, I could think of no harm that could come from giving her the letters. Moreover, a favor to her was a favor to the headmaster. I still required answers to my questions.

“You will understand that I must review the letters before deciding.”

She brightened. “Naturally.”

“Then let us revisit the matter after I have finished cataloging the library.”

She rubbed her palms together. “In that case, let me help.”

Before I could protest, she drew a wooden disk from her pouch. She wound a string around a slot in its circumference and flicked the disk away. As she uttered the spell, the whirling disk reached the end of the string and vanished. In its place, a whirlwind stirred the loose pages on the nearest shelves.

“Start in there.” She directed her invisible servant toward the storeroom. “Dust every surface, but move nothing.”

While I appreciated her careful instructions, I preferred to discharge my duty in solitude. “Lady Illyria, I assure you I require no assistance.”

“You’ll choke to death on these cobwebs before we can have you to dinner.” She fanned away the cloud already emerging from the storeroom. “There must be a window in one of these rooms.”

She cast a light on the palm of her hand and entered the storeroom.

With a resigned sigh, I sat before Ygresta’s desk. The chair felt too large, but so did my coat. Radovan was not the only one who had lost weight during our journey. Arnisant sat at my foot, sniffing to confirm I had no food to share. I admonished him with a look, and he laid his head on his crossed paws, the guilty beggar. During the worst of our privations on our journey from the Worldwound, I had succumbed to pity and secretly fed the hound a portion of my ration. He learned to linger whenever I ate. Now I had to be strict with him lest he learn to beg whenever I sat before a table.

The box on Ygresta’s desk appeared to be of recent construction, no more than a year or so old. The golden teak was of a type commonly imported to Varisia from eastern Garund, but in the carving I spied the iconography of ancient Thassilon.

I lifted the card bearing my name. Engraved on the box’s lid was the sihedron, a star with each of its seven points notched like one of Radovan’s throwing blades. I had seen the symbol etched on artifacts recovered from the demesnes of the long-lost runelords and their predecessor, the great King Xin, Emperor of Thassilon.

Illyria emerged from the storeroom with a bottle of wine. “Was 4690 a good year?” She presented the bottle like a sommelier.

The label had begun curling at the edges. The bottle was from one of my best vineyards, but an early frost had bruised the grapes that year. “That vintage has not aged as well as others.”

“There’s plenty more where that came from. What’s a good year?”

“Is there any ’84?”

“I see bottles dated back to the Age of Enthronement. You could open a shop with all of these.”

Since I left Korvosa upon my graduation from the Acadamae, it had become my custom to send a gift of each year’s wine to friends and associates in the city. Benigno received only one bottle annually, so I was surprised so much remained. “Did Ygresta stop drinking wine?”

“We didn’t exactly run in the same social circles.”

“No, of course not.” Despite his academic accomplishments, modest though they were, Benigno Ygresta remained a vintner’s son.

“What have you found there, a sihedron?” Illyria sat on the corner of the desk and peered at the box. “You see all sorts of adventurers with those lately.”

“Do you?”

She nodded. “Fortune-hunters have been dredging up Thassilonian artifacts all across Varisia. So many Pathfinders have been exploring the region that they opened a new lodge in Magnimar. Oh, but of course as a venture-captain you already knew that.”

In fact, I did not know of a new lodge, but I had no desire to discuss my estrangement from the Society and its ten anonymous leaders whose motives I no longer trusted.

I opened the box. Inside I found a thick stack of unmarked parchment. The pages fit perfectly inside the box’s velvet lining, suggesting the container had been made to size. I retrieved a magnifying glass and a pair of clean white gloves from the satchel. A cursory inspection offered no clue as to the parchment’s age or origin. Even with the aid of my glass, I could not identify what animal’s skin constituted the material. Removing the parchment, I felt its substantial weight. Its outermost pages, only slightly thicker than the rest, formed its only binding.

“It’s a book,” said Illyria. “A codex, to be precise.”

The study of ancient manuscripts remained one of my abiding interests, so I appreciated her specificity. “You must have earned full marks in Paleography.”

“One of my best subjects.” She made no attempt to disguise her pride.

I flipped through the pages. The interior was as blank as the covers.

“A gift of stationery?” said Illyria. “The professor often said how much he enjoyed reading accounts of your travels. Maybe he intended you to use it as your next journal.”

“Perhaps. But if it was a gift, why not send it to me?”

“Maybe he wanted to give it to you in person.”

“Then why leave a calling card with my name upon it? Except for a recent message I sent him, we had not corresponded in several years. He never told me I was to execute his will. He left me no instructions.”

She picked up the calling card I had set aside. “Perhaps he had just begun making arrangements.”

That was as reasonable a suggestion as any, but it hardly satisfied the questions of the carved box and the blank pages. Setting aside the box, I began to lay down the codex but paused when I noticed the stains on the blotter. Among the usual ink spots and food stains lay a dark spatter surrounding a rectangular void.

“Let me tear that away for you.” Lady Illyria reached for the blotter page.

“No, leave it.” I laid the codex in the blank space within the spatter. Its corners fit one side of the blank. I opened the pages to lie flat, and it fit perfectly within the unblemished space.

“He must have spilled wine,” said Lady Illyria. “Later he cleaned the pages with a spell.”

That was possible, but I did not like the color. I rubbed a gloved finger across the stain. Faint granular residue remained on the white cloth. “Not wine. Blood.”

“How interesting.”

I raised an eyebrow.

She wrinkled her nose. “I mean, how gruesome.”

The stain was beyond interesting. Ygresta had left me far more than a codex of blank pages. He had left me that which I love best: a mystery.

2

Old Korvosa

Radovan

There were way too many witnesses, so I moved along.

Weaving through the late afternoon crowd, I headed west down the street. Whenever a horse or donkey got too close, I slid into the nearest alley to avoid a commotion. I wasn’t looking for trouble. All I wanted was an intersection without so many people around.

By the time I’d made it halfway across Endrin Island, I was ready to give up. For the crime I had in mind, the streets of Old Korvosa were just too busy—especially this one. I’d have to wait until after sunset to snag myself a sign that read JEGGARE STREET.

Down the street, a gang of dwarves led pony-drawn carts out of a noisy ironworks. With the sun sinking behind them, I couldn’t get a good look at the pinched little faces under their beards. Probably they were locals, nothing to do with the lords of Janderhoff. Still, better safe than stabbed, I always say. Besides, those ponies didn’t want me anywhere near them.

On my right rose a high hill dotted with old manor houses and watchtowers. A crumbling wall encircled all that was left of the fort that started the city of Korvosa. There was nothing I wanted up there, so I cut left, back toward the narrows.

Across from the foundry, brick tenements huddled in groups. Shacks and lean-tos made another ragged city on the rooftops, complete with a highway of planks connecting them.

Up on the third floor, women pulled in their clotheslines. Old men leaned out of windows to smoke their pipes. They traded gossip from window to window. I couldn’t make out the words over the clang of the ironworks.

A pair of drakes swooped down between the buildings, their long tails whipping out at each other. For a second it looked like they were scrapping. It turned out the little green one was just trying to get a grip on his orange sweetheart. Their tails linked, and he clung to her as she kept flying. One of the old geezers leaning out his window used the bit of his pipe to draw the wings of Desna over his heart. I did the same with my thumb and kissed my fingertips as the drakes flew into the sunset. Lady Luck smiles on those randy little reptiles. I figured that for a good omen on my night off, even if I had lost the seamstress before crossing the bridge onto Endrin Isle. There were plenty of fish in the sea, plenty of drakes in the sky, and plenty of—

Three dwarves came barreling up the lane.

“Desna weeps!” I barely stopped myself from pulling the big knife. Instead I jumped out of the way and watched the burly little guys run past. Behind me, up on Jeggare Street, one of the ponies had slipped his harness. The teamsters scrambled to keep the cart upright until their reinforcements arrived.

I cut through a tenement alley to get away from the dwarves. They soured my good mood so much that my gums started throbbing again.

The barber had wanted four times the going rate to scrape my teeth. They always raise their price once they get a look at my choppers. Since I’d already spent too much on a disappointing bath—the elves spoiled me for what should happen during a bath—I tried talking him down. I pointed out how much worse my teeth would’ve been if I hadn’t been brushing. When he asked what I meant by that, I produced the toothbrush from one of my jacket’s secret pockets.

The man’s eyes went wide. He jabbered something about the devil’s spoon stealing soup from his bowl. In the end, he demanded six times his price and made me break my toothbrush in front of him. I did it because I had four more stashed in the Red Carriage.

Any other time, I wouldn’t have minded the money. Despite all we’d been through since leaving home, the boss and I raked in plenty of loot. The trouble was, the boss is what you call “prudent.” All the treasures he’d had shipped back home under heavy guard. The cash he’d had locked in the vaults of Abadar, where the banker-priests would smite would-be thieves—with interest. So our riches were secure, but on account of we were keeping a low profile, the boss didn’t want to go to the bank. Instead, he’d sent messages to a couple friends on the down low. We’d be flush again in a day or two.

Until then, I had just enough jingle to get started. I shook off the shudder the dwarves had given me and let the breeze blow me back toward the narrows. I’d heard about these five ships lashed together, each selling a different sin. I wasn’t interested in the shiver den, but there was a gambling hall. If Desna smiled, in a few hours I’d be spending their gold in the boat of frisky women.