Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes (31 page)

He dropped his sword. I held him up until he dropped the book. His blood poured over us both. I held him until the stones circling his head clattered on the stone floor. His head fell back. I lay him down on the floor, and then I lay myself down beside him.

15

The River of Souls

Varian

After sight left my eyes, I could still hear Arnisant barking and Radovan shouting useless apologies. After sound faded, I could still smell the sour odor of my body, soon to become the stench of corruption. Scent dwindled to nothing, but I could still taste the flatbread of my recent meal—my last meal—until all that remained was the tang of blood in my mouth. Taste dissipated, and all I could feel was the blood overflowing my lips. As that final sensation trailed away, some intangible miasma released me from its grip, and I knew I had escaped the gluttonous curse.

I had died.

Several times before I had lain close to death before medicine or magic revived me. Once I had even stood on death’s threshold before a miracle repaired my cloven heart.

While I could not see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, my consciousness endured. I could think. I could wonder.

Perhaps, I prayed, I could dream.

In bleaker moments I had imagined death as a blank oblivion, despite my hope that the Tender of Dreams would clasp me to her bosom in the afterlife. I wondered whether Desna would preserve the fancies that had buoyed me through the darkest years of my long life. I prayed she could forgive my fealty to House Thrune and, by extension, Asmodeus, the Prince of Law. I feared damnation because I knew I deserved it.

Bereft of dimension and time, my thoughts drifted upon a void. Some indeterminate later, a sensation returned not to my body but to my soul. I experienced a buoyancy without temperature. Motion carried me, but by what vehicle or toward what destination I could not fathom. A thought of cold tickled at my consciousness. It collapsed into an abstraction of smell, of many absent bodies huddled against a formidable expanse. My soul passed among a host of others.

A silent panic disrupted the unseen herd. I felt a cacophonous terror. Soon after, countless gray vagaries appeared all around me. Sensing them without benefit of eyes, I “saw” that I was one of them, a speck among a vast throng.

The motion I had previously sensed became apparent. We spirits were like schools of fish swept up in a current. No mark indicated our trajectory, much less our destination, only a blank immensity in all directions. Gradually I perceived disturbances at the boundaries of our swarm.

Shapes, by turns black and blinding, moved to intercept predators diving into the stream. I yearned to see the intruders more clearly. By my yearning my perception honed in on the site.

A white-winged devil thrust a spear through the breast of an ashen-skinned hag. Her black claws snapped just short of a translucent blot before she flew away, screeching in frustration.

Intuition told me her prey was an untethered spirit, a dead soul—one such as I. We passed from the material world through the Astral Plane. Eventually, we would arrive at our deserved reward, but not before Pharasma judged us.

With that thought, my perception broadened further. Behind us I sensed innumerable tributaries feeding our stream, souls escaping a multitude of worlds. Before us, the channel of spirits terminated at the tip of a distant pinnacle. Slender as a needle, it rose from a distant city of golden walls surrounding streets and edifices of perfect arrangement. The tower could only be Pharasma’s Spire rising up from Axis. Upon its infinite height rested the Boneyard, where the goddess of death held court.

Another disturbance broke into the torrent of souls. Focusing on the intruder, I saw an attenuated figure, human in frame but with tendrils flowing from its shoulders like a cape, and a long tail waving behind its path. Its piscine jaws snapped at a brown-skinned angel wielding a sunlight sword. It snatched up a soul and flew away. The angel pursued, leaving its place unguarded for a moment.

Something else had been waiting for that moment.

A serpent-woman dove into the stream. Her many-colored feathers stirred souls as she passed. She made no move to steal them. Instead, she flew directly toward me, her glabrous hands reaching for my—not my face, for I remained bodiless. For
me
. She gathered me to her face and brushed me with her lips.

Her fleeting kiss felt as delightful as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. Her reptilian eyes stared through me while her semi-human face remained a mask of indifference.

A thunderclap shook me. Like startled minnows, the nearest souls fled from me. Only the snake-woman remained. She twisted to either side, looking for the source of the disturbance.

“Return, Count Varian Jeggare,” said an aching voice, like the yawn of a distant landslide. “Take up your bones, resume your mantle of flesh, and walk your mortal path again.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I recognized the distorted voice as that of the earth-shaman Kazyah, called the Night Bear. We had spoken seldom since the oracle’s death. In matters arcane, I had been content to consult Kline and Lady Illyria, leaving Kazyah to act as guide and guardian on our journey to the Sleeper. Radovan knew her better, I suspected.

Radovan. Ironic that I should meet my demise by his hand. In the earliest days of our acquaintance, I remained ever on guard against treachery. In the end, his was the only soul I entrusted with my life.

Kazyah’s voice echoed across the Astral Plane. She meant to guide me back to the material world, no doubt by casting a spell the oracle had inscribed for her. I paused to consider whether I wished to obey her summons. In the passage of souls I felt no suffering. My sensations were purely metaphysical. The uncertainty of my destination planted no vexation in my thoughts, only a mild and abstract curiosity.

“Varian.” The snake-woman’s lips did not move, but as her eyes gazed at me, I heard a voice far more familiar than the shaman’s. Although I had not heard it in three-quarters of a century, there was no mistaking it.

The snake-woman flew away. I heard—or perhaps
felt
—the voice call again.
“Varian, come to me.”

The snake-woman vanished into the astral expanse. None but my fellow astral travelers remained near. I thought of closing eyes I no longer had. Then I saw:

Sunlight on a green meadow dappled in the shadows of summer leaves.

Fireflies dancing in the twilight above a blue meadow.

Midnight stars sifting silver through bare branches, a dead bird moldering in the snow.

Dawn dispelling the murk with rosy light glistening on the dew.

The meadow green again and filled with fluttering blue swallowtails.

“Varian.”

Cool grass tickled my bare feet. Songbirds called from the boughs, and a scent of wildflowers dizzied my head. Pollen sweetened my lips. The morning sun blinded me as I turned, and then I saw my mother.

She appeared as I best remembered her, barefoot and grass-stained, the way we returned from our excursions at the summer house. She wore her ambling dress and the denim apron filled with pockets for our discoveries. A sprig of wild rosemary peeked out of one pocket. Another pouch bulged, overfilled with almonds.

Countess Pontia Jeggare appeared far younger than she had on the day of her death. With her black hair pinned loose behind her neck, she looked exactly as she had in my youth, when she was not only my mother but my teacher, my mentor, and my best friend.

“Begone, figment.” My skepticism demanded proof, or at least evidence.

“Varian,” she said. It was the voice I had known for the first few decades of my life. In life, magic can falsify such things. But after life? Only a god’s power would suffice. All at once I abandoned skepticism for faith and believed: before me stood the true image of my departed mother, delivered to me by Desna, the Tender of Dreams.

I went to her. She stood still yet somehow remained just out of reach.

“We are in different places,” she said. The morning light gave way to the vertical rays of noon. “This
here
exists only to let us speak.”

“Is it a dream?”

She nodded. “Everywhere Desna’s reach extends is at least part dream. You were full of dreams when I lived. I pray you remained so all of your life.”

“Tell me you are somewhere…” I sought a word to describe what I wished for her. “You are happy?”

She nodded. Her violet eyes glistened, but not with sorrow. “Happier still to see you.”

“How is it you can visit me?”

“You always had so many questions. In death I have found no answers, but everywhere there are many little wonders.” She held out a hand. A butterfly alit upon her finger.

“Then why do you visit me?” I suspected the answer: I was not destined for the place where her spirit resided.

“In my last moments of life, I longed to speak with you one more time. Perhaps some emissary of the goddess has granted my wish.” She made the sign of Desna over her breast, but not the simple sketch that had become my adult custom. She linked her thumbs and spread her hands across her collarbones, fingers curled and with a gap in the middle to suggest two pairs of wings. When I was a child, she would flap those wings to cast a shadow upon the wall. When the butterfly landed on me, it brought tickles. When I had grown too old for such childish signs of affection, she would make the gesture from across a crowded room whenever she thought I needed reminding that I was not alone among my predatory peers.

While my mother lived, I had never felt alone. After her death, it was all I ever felt for many years. The thought of her death reminded me of the unanswered questions at mine.

“Why did you never tell me that our family descends from a runelord?”

“Age did nothing to temper your curiosity,” she said. “Nor did death.” She looked at me, and I realized I once more had a body, or at least the illusion of one. Unadorned by Zutha’s rings, my hands appeared as they had weeks before I discovered the
Kardosian Codex
. Not as old as they had looked a few years earlier, but neither as youthful as they had been when my mother was the age she appeared.

“Forgive me. In the weeks before I died, I had just begun to understand why you forbade me to practice necromancy. What I cannot understand is why you did not entrust me with the secret of our lineage.”

“I meant only to protect you. In time I would have told you more. I always intended it. But then House Thrune usurped the throne, and I focused all my efforts on thwarting their machinations. And then they found me out. And then there was no more time.”

The memory of that wicked day soured the pleasure of our reunion. In life, time had dulled the pain of her death, but it all came flooding back at the remembrance of her last words. “You made me swear again never to study necromancy,” I said. “And not to oppose the House of Thrune. You feared for my life and for the continuation of our family. That I can accept. Yet could you not have told me I was a sorcerer?”

“A sorcerer?”

“The difference between a wizard and a sorcerer—”

“I know the difference.” She smiled to see my surprise at her interruption. “One need not be a practitioner of the arcane arts to read a book. I read many on magic when you first expressed a desire to study at the Acadamae. But why did the masters not detect your talent? They never admit sorcerers.”

“I assumed you had bribed someone to ease my entry.”

“Well, in fact I did. The masters might not have been inclined to admit a boy who fell ill every time he tried to cast a spell, regardless of his intellect. What use is wealth and power if you do not use it to make those you love happy?”

“Why did you not simply tell me that we are descended of Runelord Zutha? You entrusted me with other family secrets. So did grandfather.”

“Because of your insatiable desire to study everything, to know every reason, to master every talent you found within yourself. Can you honestly tell me you would not have studied necromancy if you knew your ancestor had ruled an empire with it?”

“A fraction of an empire,” I said. “One-seventh of an empire.”

“It is impertinent to correct your mother on a point of minutia.”

My impulse was to argue that no aspect of the history of the runelords qualified as minutia, but her stern voice dispelled any thought of argument. “My apologies.”

“You have not answered my question.”

“I would have—” I meant to say I would have obeyed my promise, but before mother’s ghost I could not dissemble. “I would have been careful. You could have trusted me.”

“I trusted your curiosity. Do you remember when I forbade you to read your grandfather’s diaries?”

Whatever mechanism of the afterlife gave senses to our spirits, they included the warmth of a blush. While I was ashamed to have been caught in the disobedient act, I did not regret it. “They were quite educational.”

She gave me a wry smile. “Those of us who knew the family secret wished to leave it buried. House Thrune destroyed other houses with far less scandalous intelligence. But you would have searched for whatever lay beneath the darkest root of our family tree. I feared that what you might uncover, others might use against us.”

Twilight lay a hand upon the day’s shoulder. As we spoke, the sky—if it were a sky—grew dark. Stars smiled down at us.

“Considering my eventual fate, I suppose you were right to be concerned. Zutha’s grimoire offered me great power. In the end, however briefly, I broke my vow and learned his dark magics. I intended to use them for noble purposes, but already their dark influence had begun corrupting me.”

“If you are a sorcerer, how did you learn Zutha’s spells? Were the runelords sorcerers?”

“No, they were indeed wizards. In some ways they were
the
wizards. Their specialties continue to define the schools of magic to this day.”

“If they were wizards, why would their descendants become sorcerers?”

“No one truly understands how a sorcerous bloodline is established,” I said. “Some sorcerers claim to be the descendants of dragons, angels, or other powerful creatures. It stands to reason that the runelords’ descendants might have inherited some shadow of their innate magic.”