King of Chaos Page 5

  The prince wrote that Telandia too desired the Lexicon, although his subtler message was that the elf queen should be satisfied with a mere facsimile of the book. Copying the Lexicon was a greater favor than the queen might have realized, since it was believed that even perusing the dread tome's contents could shatter a reader's sanity. I wondered whether Amarandlon had taken the liberty of adding that suggestion himself.

  Despite my indeterminate status in the Pathfinder Society, the Decemvirate had also sent me a message, this one sealed with a black ribbon. The letter's arrival in Tymon suggested that the Ten chose to contact me after learning that I had already been dispatched by Queens Abrogail and Telandia. My anonymous correspondent even went so far as to address me as "venture-captain," although the tone of the "request" left no doubt that the title was an enticement rather than an assurance of reinstatement.

  The most curious of the missives was the fourth letter, inscribed with silver ink on black paper, sealed with the ankh of the Silver Crusade. Venture-Captain Ollysta Zadrian had withdrawn from the Pathfinders to create a faction embracing the essential ideals of the Society with the addition of Zadrian's zealous worship of Sarenrae. Her letter was the most unexpected.

  My Esteemed Colleague, Venture-Captain Count Varian Jeggare,

  You shall, I pray, forgive the brevity and directness of my appeal. With the rupture of the wards surrounding the Worldwound, time is more precious than ever.

  Whilst we have seldom found ourselves in a position to cooperate, I sense that you and I share a desire that our efforts should benefit not only our former Society but all the people of Avistan.

  By now you have received various requests for assistance in recovering a particular lost tome. If you should locate this Lexicon of Paradox, I implore you to deliver it to Crusader Queen Galfrey of Mendev. Her conjurers are best poised to employ the powers of this depraved tome against the forces of chaos.

  By the light of the Dawnflower,

  Ollystra Zadrian

  As I closed the letter, Whalt returned. He set before me a silver chalice that appeared recently polished. From beneath his injured arm he plucked a bottle of wine and displayed it as if presenting a great treasure. In truth, while its faded label designated a good Taldan house, the year had been a rather poor one, the grapes suffering from blight.

  While Whalt steadied the bottle with his injured arm and drew the cork, a startlingly pretty barmaid brought the meat, along with a platter of fresh bread, cheese, and berries. Her clothes were worn but far too fine for a servant, and fit her lithe figure so perfectly that there could be no question that they had been tailored. I discerned in her curtsey, and by the simple but elegant diadem upon her brow, that she had been raised among nobility, not beneath them.

  As the barmaid withdrew to the kitchen, Whalt anticipated my unspoken question.

  "Shal's new," said Whalt. "A little shy. Near as I can figure, demons caught her group. She took shelter in the Riversoar ruins. Eventually she got hungry enough to come begging. As you can see, I needed an extra hand."

  He looked to me for a laugh, but Shal had aroused my curiosity. "Riversoar was the Clanliege before Martolls Clefthorn, yes?"

  "That's right." Whalt's cheer vanished, and he withdrew with a bow. "Enjoy the wine, Your Excellency."

  Clearly he wished to avoid discussing the history of the Riversoars, whose razed clanhold we had spied in rain-dimmed silhouette upon our arrival.

  I dropped a thick slice of pork to the floor. Arnisant looked to me for permission even as drool began streaming from his jaws. After a moment, I gave Arnisant the signal to eat and heard the savage sounds of his devouring the meat.

  I closed my eyes to search my memory library for references to the Riversoar clan.

  All I found were passing references to its fall, presumably at the hands of demons. Yet those demons had allowed Gundrun to survive. How had the Riversoars attracted their ire and not the town?

  While he had received us hospitably enough, Clanliege Martolls Clefthorn had promised us nothing in return for our gifts of Druma steel and Cullerton wool. Radovan and I had spent hours within his gloomy wooden fortress, the icons of a dozen gods glowering from the walls, while Martolls recited a litany of past glories of which even his liegemen appeared skeptical. When he finally allowed me to make my request for aid, he barely pretended to entertain the notion before directing us to seek our meals at the Splinter.

  Without Clefthorn's aid, we would need to recruit our own warriors. Perhaps the best we could hope was that Clefthorn would allow us to use Gundrun as a base of operations.

  Arnisant made a querulous sound. Even with his haunches on the floor, his head rose higher than my shoulder. He looked up.

  Above us, the ceiling that once provided a floor for the second story had been torn away. Burns and claw marks were still visible on the remaining planks. Crude repairs provided a new roof less than five feet above the naked beams. On one of those beams crouched a young woman.

  She might have been fifteen or twenty-five, for the blue stripe painted across her eyes shrouded her age even more than the shadows. Her shaggy black mane blended into the wolf pelt over her shoulders, its fur still glistening from the rain.

  Annoyed at the intrusion, I turned to signal Whalt. He was nowhere in sight, nor was the winsome Shal.

  Arnisant woofed a warning, but I too had sensed the movement from above. No sooner had my hand touched the Shadowless Sword than the strange woman dropped from her perch into the seat before me. Radovan would have admired her nimble maneuver.

  "You sent your man to the Looter's Market for a guide." The young woman's voice was girlish, but she spoke with the confidence of experience. "He won't find one there."

  "But you know of one."

  "You're talking to her. Alase Brinz-Widowknife. You haven't heard of me because you went to the Clefthorns. Ask anyone else in Gundrun. You'll like what you hear."

  "Have you been to Storasta?"

  She whistled low and drank directly from my wine bottle. I drew a deep breath to calm my irritation as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her fingers were rough and calloused. "No one has ever asked to go there."

  "So you cannot do it?"

  "I didn't say that. I've slipped in once or twice. The place is full of demons. And worse."

  "Worse than demons?"

  She peered into the empty bottle as if it were a spyglass. "Maybe you ought to get another one of these, and we'll talk about my fee."

  While her insolence annoyed me, something about her jutting chin reminded me of my first encounters with Radovan. Intuition told me they would either get on well or else hate each other on sight. I wanted to see which.

  "First, tell me what you know of the demon lord Deskari and the Abyssal horde."

  "All there is to know."

  "How?"

  "Me, I'm the last of the Widowknife god callers. My uncle passed down all the stories. He had them from his mother, she from her aunt, and so on all the way back before the time of Deskari—the first time of Deskari. My ancestors fought beside Aroden when he was still a man."

  I knew the self-proclaimed "god callers" of Sarkoris were actually summoners, specialists in the arcane art of drawing beings from other planes into our own world. With one particular being, known as an eidolon, a summoner formed a special bond similar to that between wizard and familiar. As the summoner grew in knowledge, so did her eidolon grow more powerful. Thus I could well imagine how a primitive culture like the Sarkorians' might mistake eidolons for gods.

  It remained to be seen whether Alase Brinz-Widowknife was a knowledgeable summoner.

  "One of the Three was also a god caller. What was his name?"

  "Opon, but before the end he figured his mistake." She glanced at the open mouth of my satchel and saw the arcane runes on the spine of my grimoire. "Another of the Three was a wizard."

  "He tried with Opon to close the gate. His name was Wivver Noclan." I replied before the impe
rtinence of her turning the questions back on me struck home.

  "That's right, Wivver had no clan before or after they opened up the first little pinprick into the Rasping Rifts. Deskari whispered through that little spot, but the men knew they'd done a mighty wrong. They tried to close the hole. They might have done it too, if not for the witch."

  "Areelu Vorlesh," I said.

  "I seen her, you know. Not close, but across the red river at Undarin."

  "What drew you there?"

  "I went to see the Widowknife Clanhold. All my life I've wanted to take it back from the demons and their cults. Now that they're spilling out into the wide world, I'm thinking they'll take new nests down south."

  "An astute observation, except for one point."

  "Oh?" Her tone was challenging.

  "Demons are creatures of chaos. It is nigh impossible to predict their actions."

  The words echoed another problem I'd been musing on. Though he was no fiend, my description was equally applicable to my self-professed nemesis, Kasiya.

  In life the Osirian prince had been an indolent dullard who used his station to take from others what he could not earn himself. His unholy resurrection had granted him terrible powers, but enhanced intellect was apparently not among them. If revenge were his sole motive, then he had proven himself as inept as a sorcerous vampire as he ever did as a dilettante Pathfinder.

  However, it would be folly to assume that Kasiya, however petty, harbored only revenge in his dead heart. I had to consider the likelihood that he followed me because I sought the Lexicon of Paradox. His recent attacks had come from what he believed to be a safe distance—it required a certain effort to suppress my own impulse to gloat in proving him wrong on that count—so it seemed likely his intention was not to kill me but rather to goad me to quicker pursuit of the Lexicon. It would not be the first time Kasiya had attempted to steal the fruit of my efforts.

  The vampire had already obtained the Lacuna Codex, the compilation of fell arcana gathered to oppose the Whispering Tyrant before the martyrdom of General Arnisant imprisoned the lich beneath the foot of Gallowspire. My own brief study of the book had unlocked none of its great secrets, but I was certain of one fact: its most enigmatic rituals were capable of stripping a great being of its powers—or, I inferred, of bestowing them upon another.

  The tavern door opened as it had a dozen times since my arrival. This time it was Radovan who stepped inside. His dark leathers glistened with rain. I noticed with some satisfaction that his boots were only slightly muddied. I prayed that indicated he had successfully cast the riffle scroll.

  The waitress Shal brought him a rag. He winked at her as she put it in his hands, but then their fingers touched. Shal recoiled as if stung.

  "It's all right, sweetheart." He smiled and reached out to reassure her, but at the touch of his hand on her hip, she yelped. His smile shrank. "Honest, I don't bite. Not right away, anyway."

  She fled behind the bar, pausing briefly to look back at him. He offered her his little smile. Wide-eyed, she fled into the kitchen.

  Some of the local men laughed and made jokes in Hallit. Radovan must have picked up a few words of the local tongue, for he rankled at the phrase "short southerner" and threw the tines at his abusers. The unfamiliar gesture only made the men laugh more.

  "Radovan." I beckoned him over.

  He eyed Alase skeptically. "Who's the kid?"

  "Our new guide. Allow me to introduce Alase Brinz-Widowknife."

  Alase stood to face Radovan. Even on her feet, she was closer to Arnisant's height than to Radovan's. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm bigger than I look."

  "Hey! That's my—well, I used to say it."

  "Did you find suitable guards?" I asked.

  "Only four good ones. Guy in charge of the market says a lot of gangs are trying their luck during the—what do you call it? All the demons spilling out of the Worldwound."

  The news was disappointing but not entirely unexpected. "Assuming we receive no word from Clanliege Martolls—"

  "You won't," said Alase. "But hire me as your guide, and others will join us."

  "You don't want to interrupt," said Radovan. "Makes him grumpy."

  "As I was saying," I continued, "in the absence of aid from the clanliege, we shall set off for Storasta in the morning. Alase says she knows the place."

  "You're telling me this bitty little thing snuck in there all by herself?"

  "You can ask me yourself," said Alase. "And I never said I went by myself."

  "Oh?" I said. "Who accompanied you?"

  "Tonbarse," she said. "My god."

  Chapter Four

  The Ruined City

  Oparal

  As the river mist receded and Trathen's Gate appeared to the west, a lone horseman awaited us atop a barrow mound. At its base lay the pallid corpses of the defeated.

  Among the tangled bodies lay the faded white and gold of Iomedae, the red and blue of Mendev, and the various hues of foreign banners. When I saw the gonfalon of House Celverian mud-pasted to a skeletal corpse, I wondered whether Ederras knew his kinsmen had fallen here.

  Like me, the Chelish paladin had dedicated his life to the Children of Westcrown, a resistance movement opposing the diabolical House of Thrune that had seized control of Cheliax after Aroden's death. Despite our long camaraderie—we had been friends for years before the incident that he deemed my betrayal—I could not name a single member of his family.

  I nodded at Sergeant Aprian. Over the weeks of our fruitless search of what had been western Sarkoris, he and I had developed a shorthand of gestures. He sent Naia and Erastus to scout our flanks while the rest of us advanced with a cautious eye toward the piled bodies. Porfirio and Aprian moved away from me, the better to spread the Inheritor's light should the dead stir.

  The rider's face was white as frost, his hair and beard knotted with ice. He held a long lance from which hung the gray scrap of an ancient banner. Curtains of rotting flesh sagged from his steed's flanks, parting to reveal glistening organs inside the cage of ribs.

  "Who dares approach Storasta?" The wight's voice crackled like ice on a spring pond.

  "Oparal, knight of the Order of Saint Lymirin, in service to Queen Galfrey of Mendev." I felt Aprian's eyes upon me and knew that later, beyond the others' hearing, he would admonish me with great deference and courtesy. He had been at war against fiends for so long that he no longer embraced the protocols of honorable combat.

  "What fool's errand brings you to lost Storasta, Oparal of Lymirin?"

  "Why should I answer one who fears to reveal his name and allegiance?"

  When the cold man spoke, no cloud of breath appeared before his withered lips. "Khistian Yadranko, Herald of Lalizarzadah, unrivaled potentate of Storasta."

  Jelani moved her horse close and whispered, "Carrock rules Storasta."

  I remembered the scouts' report, but I liked the sorcerer's implied suggestion.

  "Has your mistress Carrock's leave to make such a claim?" I said.

  A sound like rattling dice echoed up from Yadranko's dry throat. "The tree-lord abides in his hollow. Lalizarzadah looks down from her high tower. She is the superior."

  "Stormont Isle," Jelani said, nodding toward the West Sellen River. There in the morning mist loomed the silhouette of a walled fortress high atop a rock.

  The ruin of Stormont was one of the sites most likely to contain the book we sought. It was also, along with Carrock's How, one of the most dangerous locations in Storasta. I could not have taken it with ten times as many troops supported by battle wizards, inquisitors, and clerics.

  Yet I had my orders.

  "Khistian Yadranko, does your mistress keep a library?"

  Again the hollow laugh. He tipped his lance toward me. "You must win your answer."

  "Accepted." I restrained the urge to look at Aprian, who undoubtedly disapproved.

  "You realize it's a trap," said Jelani.

  "Stay back until I've sprung it."
/>
  "Yes, Captain. Stay warm." She drew a snowflake upon the air. Magic tingled on my skin.

  I raised my hand for a lance. Tollivel tossed me his. Securing it beneath my arm, I raised my shield. It was made for melee rather than jousting, but with a thousand prayers to Lymirin invested in its steel, it would protect me from all but the direst blows.

  "Now," I said.

  Bastiel leaped forward, galloping by his second stride.

  Yadranko waited until we had closed half the distance to the barrow. He lowered his lance and charged down the hill. My eyes remained locked on him, even as I saw the bodies of the defeated begin to stir.

  "Iomedae, grant them rest." As I murmured the words, the radiance filled my heart and spread throughout my limbs. Holy warmth suffused and surrounded us.

  From the ground, clammy hands reached for us and shriveled. Between hoofbeats, I heard their sighs as the radiance severed the chains of the world from their accursed souls.

  Unmoved by the destruction of his minions, Yadranko met my charge. His spear shattered against my shield with a golden flash and an eagle's cry. My lance pierced his rotten shield and skewered him just beneath the breastplate, lifting him from his horrid steed.

  Bastiel charged on, stopping only at the top of the mound. I lowered the wight to the ground and dismounted. Bastiel snorted, dancing and circling us, waiting for the undead who survived the Inheritor's radiance to follow.

  Jelani hurled a ball of fire to engulf the plague steed and the nearest undead knights. An instant later, Aprian and Porfirio rode in to cleanse the field with holy radiance. By the time Naia and Erastus closed the flanks, none of Yadranko's fallen foes remained.

  A foot upon his chest, I pulled the lance from Yadranko's body. He fell back with a sigh.

  "My answer, Khistian Yadranko."

  He raised a frosty hand toward my face. I slapped it away. Even through the blessed steel of my gauntlet, I felt the cold prickling at my flesh. "Honorably defeated," he rasped. "You shall have my answer. And then shall I have yours?"