Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes
Read Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes Online
Authors: Dave Gross
Tags: #Fantasy, #Epic, #Media Tie-In
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Contents
16: The Shadows of Xin-Gastash
For Jen Laface, first reader, ringleader, and friend.
Varian
Radovan had placed seven pebbles on the sundial between the shadow and the next hour. As darkness covered the next tiny stone, he flicked it away. It skittered across the plaza, narrowly missing the toes of a woman hurrying east. By her well-made dress of common cloth, the basket trailing a few errant threads, and the distinctive callus on her finger, I took her for a seamstress. She frowned at Radovan. He offered her a wink and the smirk he refers to as “the little smile.” She turned away an instant too late to conceal her own smile.
“A servant will bring me the keys at any moment,” I said. “Go.”
Radovan stretched, pointing his wicked elbow spurs at the sky. His red leather jacket hung loose on his broad shoulders. The tongue of his belt lolled out from the tighter cinch. In the months it had taken us to reach Korvosa, I estimated he had lost seventeen pounds. He nodded toward the gate. “I don’t like the way those guys are looking at you.”
I turned to see a trio of students emerging from the Acadamae, the girls laughing at the boy’s quip. I could only presume that Radovan referred to the hellspawn guarding the gate. The devil-blooded sentries were notorious throughout Korvosa for abusing students and visitors alike.
One of the guards snarled as the students emerged. “What’s so damned funny?”
Unlike Radovan, who boasted he could pass in dim light so long as he avoided the “big smile,” these hellspawn would never be mistaken for human. One had vestigial gills and an eel’s snout; the other could barely see out from beneath a pair of coiling horns.
The students lowered their heads and hastened past. The horned hellspawn whistled after them. The other turned toward me. His piscine eyes lingered on the sword on my hip and the Ustalavic wolfhound at my heel. He weighed the danger and looked away.
Suppressing a smug smile, I turned to Radovan. “As you can see, ‘those guys’ know better than to menace a count of Cheliax.”
“Not those guys,” said Radovan. He plucked another pebble from the sundial and made a catapult of his thumb and middle finger. He aimed at the top of the gate. “Those guys.”
A spotted raven, a chimera cat, and a potbellied imp peered down at us.
“Radovan, it would be prudent not to—”
Radovan flicked the stone. The half-black, half-orange cat shrieked and fled along the wall. The raven flew into the safety of the Acadamae grounds, but the devil flew toward us, cursing in the guttural tongue of Hell. It demonstrated an impressive vocabulary and a flair for simile.
“That cat might have been a professor’s familiar,” I said. I drew the Shadowless Sword and plucked a riffle scroll from my pocket. “Or, worse, a master’s.”
Radovan shrugged, but I saw by his posture he was prepared to produce a razor-sharp throwing dart or star from one of the many secret pockets in his jacket sleeves. “I was aiming for the imp.”
Hovering just beyond reach of my blade, the devil hissed, revealing a mouth full of needle-sharp fangs. Radovan hissed back through his big smile, revealing a jumble of teeth a Mendevian general once compared to a demon’s armory.
The imp peeped and flew after its cohorts.
Radovan popped his jaw back into joint. He turned to see where the seamstress had gone.
“Go.”
“You don’t mind if I take the night?”
“Look for me at Upslope House tomorrow. I will return there after I finish cataloging Ygresta’s library.”
“You got too many books already.”
“One can never have too many books. Still, I doubt I shall find any worth keeping. Just strive to remain inconspicuous. Stay out of Thief Camp and Old Korvosa.”
“Old Korvosa, huh?”
I should have known better than to present Radovan with a forbiddance. By naming the two districts I most wished him to avoid, I practically ensured he would visit them. “The important thing is to avoid Chelish attention. The moment I receive the queen’s summons, I am duty-bound to return home.”
Thanks to warnings from military friends in Sarkoris, I had thus far avoided the heralds of Her Infernal Majestrix. I knew what message they must carry: Queen Abrogail would demand to know why I sent her a copy of the Lexicon of Paradox rather than the original. I had prepared several excuses, but none would withstand a rigorous interrogation by the inquisitors of Asmodeus. How could I admit that I trusted the crusader queen of Mendev to use the book for the good of all Avistan? How could I conceal my fervent belief that the queen of Cheliax would use it only to further her own power? One sharp question was all it would take to condemn me to impalement upon the tines.
Self-preservation was not my only motive for remaining abroad. What began as a self-imposed exile to escape scandal had become an adventure. Radovan and I had faced many horrors, and wonders too. Some came not from the fabled lands we visited but from within ourselves. One of the wonders—or horrors—within myself remained an unsolved mystery.
And I hoped to find the answer to that mystery soon, here at the Acadamae in Korvosa. Yet as Queen Abrogail’s impatience grew, it was only a matter of time before she instructed one of her sorcerers to contact me with a spell. There were ways to avoid such communication, but none I could safely explain to her inquisitors. When I received the summons, by writ or dream, I would answer.
“You’d think she’d cut you some slack now the war’s over,” Radovan said.
Despite the sun warming my shoulders, I felt a gloom. “The war is never over.”
“Come on, boss, lighten up. Take a picnic over to Jeggare Island. Go for a stroll around Jeggare Square. There’s a Jeggare Museum, isn’t there? You like museums. You like stuff named after you.”
“How many times must I tell you—?”
“Yeah, I know. They named those places for your uncle Monte.”
“Montlarion Jeggare the explorer, one of the esteemed founders of Korvosa, my accomplished great-great—”
Arnisant pricked up his ears at the sound of irritation in my voice. I patted his shoulder. A sly smile grew at the corner of Radovan’s mouth. He was trying to be amusing. As usual, he succeeded more at being trying than at being amusing.
“I just wish you could relax is all,” he said. “Ever since we hit town, you’ve been tense.”
“Tense” was too small a word for the vexation I felt since meeting with Toff Ornelos. What I sought from the headmaster was an explanation of why the Acadamae had failed to detect my magical bloodline, which I had discovered only recently. For reasons of their own, the proctors allowed me to engage in a futile struggle to master the science of wizardry when they should have turned me away to develop my innate talents under the tutelage of a sorcerer.
Instead of answers, what the headmaster gave me was news that one of my oldest friends had died having named me executor of his meager estate. Headmaster Ornelos would hear none of my complaints until I had dispensed with what he deemed the more urgent matter.
Yet none of that was Radovan’s fault. I looked him in the eye and said, “There is a park.”
“Huh?”
“Jeggare Green. It is a modest size, but Queen Domina dedicated it to me, not my ancestor.”
“‘Jeggare Green,’” Radovan mused. “I’ll look for it. If you’re all right, then I’m going to—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the vanished seamstress.
“Go!”
Radovan departed at a jog.
I turned back to the hellspawn gatekeepers. They glowered but kept their tongues still. I wondered whether their caution had more to do with my sword or my hound. The Shadowless Sword was swift and Arnisant fearless, but the guards had more to fear from my spells—both those inscribed on the riffle scrolls concealed throughout my coat and those I could summon by force of will, now that I understood that I was a sorcerer rather than a wizard.
The guards turned at the approach of another student from inside the Acadamae grounds. Rather than taunt the woman, they bowed as she passed.
The hem of her skirt swirled about her ankles as she strode toward me with swift grace. Upon each hand she wore a jeweled ring, and around her throat a cameo on a black ribbon. Across her hips hung a plaited belt holding a pair of holstered wands and a tooled-leather pouch, to which she had pinned the silver Acadamae badge that granted her access to the campus. To my surprise, I could not estimate her age more precisely than mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Ordinarily I could make a guess accurate to within two years.