Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes (35 page)

“It must be the Cenotaph,” said Svannostel.

“I’ve heard of the place,” said Kline. “Wasn’t it a fortress for the legions of Tar-Baphon?”

“It is the site where the Whispering Tyrant left his undead reserves before his defeat at Gallowspire,” said Svannostel.

“What does that have to do with Runelord Zutha?” I asked.

“Zutha’s crypt lies beneath the Cenotaph,” said Svannostel. “I thought you knew that.”

“Lady Illyria tells me that Tar-Baphon stole some measure of the runelord’s power.”

“It’s true,” said Illyria. “That is, it’s true that I read it.”

“That is also correct,” the dragon said.

“Where is this Cenotaph?” I asked.

“At the southern edge of the Tusk Mountains, due north of Vigil.”

“How far?”

“Perhaps half again one hundred miles.”

“How long was I … gone?”

“Less than half an hour,” said Kazyah.

I considered that fact along with the likelihood that Ygresta had projected a shadow of himself to infiltrate Svannostel’s lair while his corporeal form lay many miles distant. Furthermore, the
Kardosian Codex
contained a spell allowing a wizard to walk through the realm of shadow, traversing hundreds of miles in a single night. For all my theoretical knowledge, casting the spell remained beyond my capabilities—but, based on his defeat of a dragon, not beyond Ygresta’s.

“Boss?” said Radovan. “You want to sit down? Have a bite? You’re looking a little thin.”

“Death has freed me from the gluttonous curse.” I patted my newly flattened belly and noticed how pale my hand had become. Something more than death and resurrection had happened to me. Was it connected to the curse? Had my previous healing by a celestial dragon’s heart influenced the shaman’s spell? The phenomenon bore further investigation, but later.

“This is exactly what we’d hoped would happen,” said Kline. He offered a tentative smile. “We wanted to free you from the curse knowing Kazyah could restore your life.”

“And losing the completed
Tome
to the Master of Shadows was an unexpected bonus?”

“You can’t think any of us intended for that to happen,” said Illyria.

“No, no, of course not. Your plan was logical, if rather punishing. I must apologize again. The experience of death—” I had no desire to share the details of my mother’s visitation. “It has clarified my thoughts. Ever since reading the
Codex
, I have been afflicted by shadows of the mind. I underestimated Ygresta’s manipulations. For whatever he may once have lacked in intellect, he has had years of planning to compensate. He learned powerful spells from the
Kardosian Codex
. The entire
Tome
is now in his hands, not by any treachery from you but by his own design. He has, in short, outsmarted me.”

No one replied to that admission, perhaps because they realized how much it pained me. Radovan rubbed the back of his neck and suppressed a grin.

“It happens to the best of us,” said Kline.

“But less often to you, we understand.” Illyria placed a consoling hand on my arm to soften her mockery.

“Consult Svannostel’s library for any further information you can find on the Cenotaph,” I told her. “I shall retire to the gallery to meditate in solitude.”

“What should the rest of us do?” said Radovan.

“See that I am not disturbed.”

In Svannostel’s gallery, I made a desk of one of the benches. While the dragon’s library was comparatively comfortable, I associated it with my study of the
Tome
. No longer subject to its curse, I wanted a fresh start.

In my grimoire, I perused the spells I had collected over the past few years. As a sorcerer, I could command a relative few of them—but I did so at will and without preparation. As a wizard, I could inscribe any spell I understood onto a riffle scroll, so long as I was willing to endure the sickening side effect. That had been my relationship with magic these past several years. What my mother’s shade told me made me wonder whether it was time to try something different—something I had not attempted since graduating from the Acadamae.

I reviewed the formula of a simple battle spell, setting each phrase in memory like a snare awaiting a trigger of words and gestures. I used none of the shortcuts I normally employed when creating riffle scrolls, inscribing fractions of arcane phrases on each page. I prepared the spell as any wizard might. Like any wizard, I felt its power nestle into my mind as easily as one of Janneke’s bolts fit into her crossbow. When done, I braced myself for the nausea.

It did not come.

Emboldened, I chose a more complex spell. Yet while I had previously inscribed it on a riffle scroll, I found I could not fix it in memory. I understood it on an intellectual level, but somehow I could no longer master it.

Some power—whether death, the dragon’s heart, or my subjugation to the
Tome,
I could not say—had removed my magical impediment, but like the victim of an injury to the head, I needed to rehabilitate my arcane skills.

While seeming closer to the truth, the analogy felt incomplete. My mind had not been injured but catalyzed, galvanized, impelled to become something else. I was not the victim of an accident but a pupa, no longer a caterpillar but not yet a butterfly.

Death had not changed me. It had allowed me to change. My transformation had been made possible, but it had yet to begin.

All of my former questions about whether I was a wizard or sorcerer washed away. I could not blame my mother’s insistence that I renounce necromancy, thus causing my impediment, for she acted out of love. As her agent, Ygresta was equally guilty, but he was ignorant of my bloodline. I could not even blame the Acadamae masters, who accepted my mother’s bribes out of greed, not malice.

Whether by misfortune or fate, I had come to a transformative moment.

I caused my own disability by rejecting necromancy. Now I could change that choice. Upon my fingers and brow rested the Crest and Crown of Zutha. And in my mind, as often as I cared to set them there, I could now hold any sort of spell.

I prepared all the spells I could manage, investing a few in riffle scrolls. By doing the same each day, I could expand my arsenal over time—although I feared I would not have much more time before I must face Ygresta or, if I were too slow, Zutha himself.

The thought of the runelord reborn reminded me of the goddess whose worship the runelords corrupted from an exaltation of virtues to an embrace of sins. I went to the shrine of Lissala that Svannostel had installed in her gallery. There I sat in lotus fashion and contemplated the icon of the goddess.

The snake-woman resembled my mother’s astral messenger but for her six wings and the sihedron star where her head should be. I thought upon the conundrum of a deity whose teachings degenerated from seven virtues to seven sins. If Lissala could not sustain her own virtues, what hope was there for mortals? What hope was there for me?

Seven virtues. Seven sins.

Among the wealthiest families in an empire of wealth, House Jeggare funded artistic and charitable endeavors, from the grand opera to orphanages—but we hoarded more wealth for ourselves. Many pointed to House Jeggare as a bastion of greed.

Childless, I had long before arranged contingencies of succession. My cousins reveled in the knowledge that my holdings would one day fall to their offspring and sustain the lineage, yet they spied upon my every assignation for fear that I would beget an heir in a moment of lust.

Although some think me oblivious to my pride, it is but one side of a noble’s sword; the other is honor. If sometimes I had turned the blade to the wrong side, one must consider on how many occasions the coarse or provocative tested a man of my station.

While I enjoyed great abundance, in no way could I be accused of common gluttony—not before falling into Ygresta’s trap. One might, I suppose, tally the quantity of drink I had enjoyed as a related fault.

And if I often took my leisure abroad, such sojourns were often married to an embassy for the court or an excursion for the Pathfinder Society. Perhaps sometimes I lingered for too many weeks alone in my house. But was it sloth? I did not like to think so.

So many times I had been angry, usually with just cause. On the battlefield or in the face of violence or cruelty, I too had been violent and cruel. Surely it is not a sin to be so when circumstances require it.

My competitive spirit seldom manifested as envy. A few Pathfinders—Eando Kline among them—had reported discoveries I wished I had made. But could Pharasma judge me jealous?

She could, I feared. She could condemn me for every one of the seven sins.

Looking back over a century-old life, I could spy my sins like road markers. Much as I might strive toward virtue, like the later worshipers of Lissala I fell inevitably to sin. Perhaps that was the lesson of the goddess: there is no virtue without sin.

I thought of my mother’s obscure martyr’s death. Had she earned a place in Desna’s realm only through sacrifice? I could never go back to a time in my first life when I was as innocent as she. What use then was a second life? Had I no path to redemption?

Unjust! The Shadowless Sword was in my hand. A wrathful impulse propelled my arm. I stabbed the statue of Lissala. The blade sank to the hilt, screaming in a shower of red and white sparks.

“Trickster goddess! Deceiver! Seducer!”

My fury evaporated as quickly as it had formed, replaced by shock at my profane act. Fearful that someone would witness my sacrilege, I pulled at the sword, but it would not budge.

What use were my apologies upon waking if I were only to sin again so soon?

Setting my foot on the statue’s hip, I pulled with both hands. The sword budged, first with a squeal, and then with a blaze of forge-hot light. Blinded, I held the sword at arm’s length.

“Sweet Tender of Dreams.” My relief drained away as the light faded. The blade’s once-fair surface had been stained and scarred by the heart of Lissala. Thassilonian runes glowed on either side of the blackened blade. On one side they spelled the Thassilonian word for FEAR. On the other, HOPE.

I stared at the blade, my horror that I had spoiled the gift from a princess gradually turning to awe that a goddess—or some servitor spirit invested in her likeness—had answered my profanation of her shrine.

But was it with a blessing or a curse? And did it come from Lissala? When one stands before the icon of one goddess and prays to another, the answer might come from either—or neither. I gazed at the runes on the blade, HOPE and FEAR, trying to remember whether those terms meant something slightly different to the Thassilonians.

“Which do you choose?”

I froze, for an instant fearing the statue had spoken. Yet the voice came not from a goddess but from the dragon Svannostel, who crouched behind me. Her gravest injuries had been healed, no doubt by the last of the shaman’s spells.

“Does one choose?” I said. “Or are fear and hope inseparable?”

Svannostel nodded with an expression of approval. “So you do have some wisdom. Did you gain it in the afterlife? Or was it muted by the curse?”

“I will not guess your age,” I began.

“More wisdom.”

“Yet likely you have seen more years than I, and I have seen more than most of my countrymen. Benigno Ygresta is one of a scant few cohorts I have remaining.” I knew only two other humans who had lived a century, both granddames of Chelish houses. I had not seen them in over four years, so I did not know whether they survived. “Perhaps Ygresta is the last.”

“Are you building to a point or obscuring the fact that you have avoided my question?”

Her natural assumption of command reminded me of myself. I smiled, feeling a moment’s kinship with the wyrm. “If I have learned nothing else in my hundred years, it is that things—and people—are never one thing or its opposite. Good and evil, civilized and savage, kind and cruel, dignified or arrogant … these are extremes, not naturally occurring conditions. Am I a human or an elf? Yes. Am I a wizard or a sorcerer? Yes. Do I hope to stop Ygresta from gaining the powers of Zutha, or do I fear that I will fail?”

Svannostel nodded. “Yes.”

“Are the people in your library my servants or my friends?”

“They will do whatever it takes to help you. So will I.”

“Ygresta’s powers were already enough to defeat you and Kazyah, two of the most formidable beings I have met. The others cannot hope to survive another battle, even before he unlocks the powers of the
Tome
.” I held up my hands and looked up to see my halo of Azlanti stones. “I have the only weapons capable of defeating Ygresta.”

“I swore to prevent the return of the runelords,” she said. “Even if it costs my life.”

“I swear to do the same—but not at the cost of my friends’ lives. You and I are bound by oath. Will you take me to the Cenotaph? And will you fight beside me there until we or Ygresta are dead?”

“Without telling the others?”

“Yes.”

“They will loot my hoard.”

“I fear we are likely to die at the Cenotaph. Will your hoard matter then?”

“You don’t understand anything about dragons.”

“You said you would know if even a coin was missing.”

“I might have exaggerated to awe your friends.”

“They believed you.”

She nodded. “Very well. As you said, we’ll probably die.”

“Let us go now. Once we are well away, I will cast a spell to instruct Radovan to await us in Korvosa.”

“So you still hope we might live?”

“So I hope,” I said, saluting her with the Shadowless Sword. “And so I fear.”

18

Seraph’s Ladder

Radovan

Miles behind us, I saw the dust plume again. I couldn’t tell which way it was moving, closer or farther off. I hoped it was Kaid coming back to say she’d changed her mind, but that wasn’t likely. She’d had two days to catch up.

As soon as her mercs saw the boss flying off on the dragon, they started having second thoughts about the whole business. By the time the rest of us came out of the dragon’s lair, they were ready to ride home.