Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes (32 page)

“But if they were not sorcerers, what innate power did they have?”

As she had in life, my mother challenged me with the simplest questions—points so elementary that my colleagues never thought to pose them to me. “Well, they probably would not have had any in the beginning. It is conceivable that their wielding rune magic could imbue them—or their offspring, or their descendants several generations removed—with sorcerous abilities.”

“If you say so,” she said. “Such theory is beyond me. You always excelled in intellectual pursuits. Your passion for magical theory is what persuaded me to smooth your way at the Acadamae.”

“Did it never occur to you that the reason I struggled to cast spells was that I was never meant to be a wizard? If I had known I inherited a sorcerous bloodline, I might have avoided decades of frustration and humiliation.”

“Does it not occur to you that even in the afterlife one must not take an accusatory tone with one’s mother?”

“My apologies.”

She cupped her elbows and hugged herself as if feeling a chill. A breeze passed through the meadow. Clouds occluded the stars, but their edges began to bleed at the first gaze of dawn.

“It did occur to me. I am a Jeggare, after all, and while my interests do not include wizardry or sorcery, I bid you to remember who first instructed you in natural history, presented you with your first collection of the
Chronicle of the Inner Sea Kingdoms
, and sent you to the finest tutors in all of Cheliax.”

“I remember, Mother. I beg your pardon.”

“Also, I think I was the first to put a frog down your shirt. I hope I wasn’t the last.”

Her reminiscence dispelled the chill. The clouds parted, and the morning sun warmed us. “Sadly,” I said, “you were not.”

“I always thought you would benefit from a few more frogs down your shirt.” She moved close and reached for my hands. I offered them but could not feel her touch as I felt the ground beneath us or the breeze in my hair. “I want to know about your life, Varian. There’s no telling how long I can visit you here, before…”

“Before whatever judgment befalls me.”

“Did you keep the Tender of Dreams in your heart, even as the queen demanded obedience to Asmodeus?”

“I did.”

“Did you live a good life?” she said. “Did you strive to be a good man?”

“Sometimes.” I wished I could have given her a more certain reply.

Her eyes glistened. “Do you forgive me for your not becoming a wizard?”

“But I did become a wizard,” I said. “Granted, it took me decades to learn how to circumvent my, ah, impediment, but I discovered a forgotten form of scroll-making that allowed me to cast spells as a wizard.”

“And yet you now think you are a sorcerer?”

“Yes.”

“Who told you that?”

“Well, a sorcerer.” I took her point. A blacksmith lays every problem on the anvil.

“Hm. What do you think you are?”

“I suppose I have been both a wizard and a sorcerer.”

“And are others both wizards and sorcerers?”

“It is rare, but yes. I have read of such instances.”

“Then how can you blame me for not telling you about our presumably sorcerous bloodline?”

“I—”

“All I wished was to prevent you from following our ancestor’s path in necromancy. I never cared whether you were a wizard or a sorcerer, or both for that matter. I always encouraged you to pursue your interests.”

“You did not trust me enough to tell the reason, even after I formally renounced the school of necromancy.”

“Well, I confess that I enlisted help in guiding you away from that dark path.”

“From the Acadamae masters?”

“No, from your servant, the bottle-washer who studied necromancy. Benno something.”

“You told Benigno Ygresta that the Jeggare family descends from Runelord Zutha?”

“Of course not. I would never divulge such an odious secret, certainly not to a common fellow like him. Did you know his family picked grapes for House Drovenge? But when I heard you had struck up a camaraderie, I saw an opportunity to help you keep your promise.”

“But Ygresta was an ardent proponent of necromancy.”

“A little too ardent, perhaps?” She smiled. “Despite the limitations of his birth, he had the most natural guile I had ever encountered. It helped that he was sincere in his belief that necromancy is not inherently evil so that you would see him in a sympathetic light. It helped even more that he was never quite as clever as you. You would never have let an intellectual inferior win you over, even one with honest arguments. In these ways, he was the perfect agent of my will. It helped even more that this Ygresta could barely afford his first year’s tuition.”

“You paid him to manipulate me.”

“I offered him the means to complete his education in order to help you keep your promise.”

While my mother’s interference rankled me even after all these years, my annoyance seemed trifling considering the circumstances of our conversation. Another question troubled me. “If you did not tell him, then how did Ygresta learn of my connection to Runelord Zutha?”

“First of all, I am dead, not omniscient,” she said. “Second, what makes you think he did learn of our ancestry?”

“Well…” Her simple question forced me to reevaluate my theory. I had assumed Ygresta selected me as his cat’s-paw because of my blood affinity for the
Gluttonous Tome
. What if instead he had chosen me for some other reason? Surely there were other capable Pathfinders—Eando Kline, for instance, who had already found the
Bone Grimoire
.

There had to be another reason. It had to have something to do with necromantic spells … which Ygresta believed I could not cast.

I had my answer.

As far as Benigno Ygresta knew, I graduated the Acadamae a failed wizard. For his purposes, I was the one Pathfinder capable of finding and understanding the missing volumes but
incapable
of casting its spells. Ignorant of my latent sorcerous ability or my discovery of riffle scrolls, he was mistaken on the latter point.

Armed with that knowledge, I could …

Well, I could do nothing. I was dead.

“Have I told you what you needed to know?”

“Yes, Mother. Thank you.”

“Now, please, tell me about your life.”

Not knowing where to begin, I thought of the fact that my human mother had lived less than half as long as I had. Part of the reason was my half-elven heritage. “I found my father.”

As the meadow changed twenty times from day to night and then to dawn, I told her the story. In the beginning she wept for lost love. By the end, she was laughing and telling me stories of their time in the elven court.

She asked about my own loves, both those I concealed before her death and those that came after. She asked after our family, stopping me when the names of those born after her death became too numerous.

The days and nights flew across the meadow.

She asked which of my friends yet lived, and how the others had died. I told her I had died at the hand of a friend.

“The hellspawn?”

“You were the one who encouraged me always to
hire
halflings, never to buy them as slaves.”

“I know, dear, but a hellspawn? And he stabbed you in the back.”

“In the front, actually.” I touched the place where my wound had been. “Right through the heart.”

“How can you joke about such a thing?”

Perhaps I had left recriminations behind with my body. “In the tranquility of death, it is easier to see how I left him no choice. He always did prefer the dog to me.”

“Is that another joke?”

I smiled. Jokes had been part of the private language Radovan and I developed over the years, even when—or perhaps especially when—I let him believe his vulgarity annoyed more than it amused. “Yes, Mother.”

“Have you kept the other promises you made to me?”

“I have,” I said. “In war and diplomacy and espionage, I have always served the ruling house. And I have hated myself for it with every passing year.”

“Yet our house endures,” she said. “You cannot anger the dragon and hope to live.”

“Actually, I have found dragons to be considerably easier to treat with, compared with Queen Abrogail.”

“Does Abrogail still rule?”

“I speak of the second of that name, great-granddaughter to the one you knew. Four others reigned between them, but she is by far the most dangerous. She re-bound the empire to Asmodeus.”

“And you serve her.”

“So that the Jeggare family may thrive, and so that I keep my promise to you, I do. And yet not long ago I held weapons of such power that I dared to imagine overthrowing House Thrune and casting the infernal legions back to the pit.”

“And was it your promise to me that prevented you?”

“No,” I said. “It was death.” I mused on the irony of my situation. “The promises you demanded, they imprisoned me all my life. If I had studied necromancy, I might have been prepared to wield the weapons of our ancestor and avenge your death.”

“Varian, I release you from your promises.”

“To what end? That Pharasma might not judge me an oath-breaker among my other sins?”

“Are you blaming me for that?”

Perhaps I had blamed her, but no longer. “I might blame myself, but what is the point? My life is gone, and with it all the promises I made. Now I have only to face judgment for what I have done and what I have failed to do.”

“Forgive,” she said.

“You need no forgiveness.”

“But you need to grant it.” A swallowtail alit on her hair. Another fluttered onto her shoulder. I heard a distant rumble. The cycle of day and night came faster.

“Come back,” said a distant voice. I no longer recognized it.

“No,” I said. “I am dead.”

“Forgive,” said my mother. More swallowtails covered her. They flew away, leaving nothing but the empty meadow behind. The meadow dissolved, and I closed my eyes.

16

The Shadows of Xin-Gastash

Radovan

I didn’t realize how hard Arni was biting me at first. Eando dragged me out from under while Kazyah and Janneke pulled Arni away by his hind legs. He snapped at them, and they let him go. He stopped barking and set up a mournful howl.

“Arni.” My voice got all clotted up.

He ran out of the gallery. His howl carried through the passages of Svannostel’s lair. Amaranthine flew after him.

“Wait!” called Lady Illyria. She had just dipped her finger into a jar of ointment to heal the drake. With her wrist, she wiped away a tear on her cheek.

Somebody touched my arm and almost got a spur before I checked myself. Zora backed away. She looked down at her bloody hand. I hadn’t seen her get hurt in the fight, but I realized it wasn’t her blood. I looked down at my sleeves, which Arni had shredded. He’d broken the skin in a few places, but not that bad. It wasn’t my blood either. Then it hit me.

It was the boss’s.

Kazyah knelt to pick up his body. Even with the weight he’d put on, he looked no heavier than a child in her arms. The rest of us followed as she carried him to the library and lay him down on a stone table. Seeing him like that reminded me of a mortuary slab, or maybe Ygresta’s golem lab.

The tail of the big knife stuck out of his chest. Kazyah took the grip. I had to look away, but I couldn’t stop hearing the sound it made coming out. I heard her set it on the table.

Eando put a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Then maybe you should shut the hell up.”

He took his hand off.

Janneke caught my eye from across the table. I stared back at her until she turned away.

“Bring me some water,” Kazyah said.

Janneke ran toward the river passage.

Kazyah opened one of the bone cases hanging from her belt. She pulled out three scrolls with writing that glittered with diamond dust. She unfurled one and put away the others.

“Help me,” she said to me. We pulled off the boss’s jacket and shirt.

The wound was a dark red mess just left of his breastbone. I wanted to think it’d been quick. I just couldn’t remember the moment I decided to do it. I told myself if I’d let him kill Arni, he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself—but he wasn’t really the boss at that point. I don’t know who he was—a count of Cheliax, the Runelord Zutha, or something in between.

All I knew was one second I was his bodyguard and the next I was his killer.

Janneke came back with her helmet full of water. Kazyah had her tip it over the boss’s chest. The water washed away the gore and left a dark purple line. The wound looked like a small thing to end a hundred-year life.

The thought of his age gave me a shiver. I counted back to the last day I knew the date. I did the arithmetic again. It was right, and I choked on it. That turned into a sob, or a laugh, or something. I sat down and held my arms, shaking like that jerk who can’t stop laughing at his own mother’s funeral.

“What is it?” said Svannostel. The dragon’s voice still sounded big, but she stayed back to give us room around the table.

“Hell of a birthday present I gave him.”

I felt everybody looking at me. After a few seconds, I felt them looking away.

Kazyah finished blotting the blood from the boss’s body. She straightened his arms and legs and lay the scroll on his stomach. She gave us a look that told us to be quiet. She started to read.

The words were different from the ones she chanted to call her ancestors and the earth spirits. Reading them made the writing go soft on the page. Flecks of diamond finer than sand glittered in the ink. The magic words floated on the parchment like rotting leaves on a pond. As Kazyah finished her spell, the parchment crumbled away to nothing.

The boss’s body lay still.

Kazyah looked down at him. She slapped her hand onto his chest. “Return, Count Varian Jeggare. Don your bones, resume your mantle of flesh, and walk your mortal path again.”

“Come on, boss.”

Eando went to the
Gluttonous Tome
. It lay on the cavern floor beside the Shadowless Sword. It looked the same as it had when the boss held it to his chest. Eando reached down but stopped himself before touching the book.