Son of a Liche

by J. Zachary Pike

  Thus, our path to the wizard’s virtues is also the path to common good. In serving others, we advance ourselves. In serving ourselves, we better the world for others. We are not selfish, nor selfless, for either way would lead us to the same destination. The omnimancer’s path is always clear.

  Jynn set the book down. His path was clear.

  Patches wagged his tail and danced in circles as the wizard tucked the Ordo Diluculum and the translation glass into his satchel.

  “Yes, Patches. We’re going out,” Jynn murmured as he closed the book’s case and rewove the protective enchantments over it. Then he left the library, collected his possessions from the Fane Amada’s sleeping quarters, and hurried out the door of the keep.

  The dog ran at his heels as he trotted down the steps. The sun was setting over the forest, but if he could ride through the night, he could still catch them. It might take some scrying to locate the Dwarf, but those spells were available to Jynn for the first time. A smile spread over the wizard’s face as he hurried toward the stables, already planning spells of divination to locate his friends.

  “Where ye goin’?” said Gorm.

  Jynn skidded to a halt in the loose earth of the courtyard. Gorm and Kaitha were sitting on a pair of crates, sharing a platter of meat.

  “You’re still here,” said the wizard.

  “We figured it’d take ye a while. Besides, there was free chicken for dinner,” said Gorm.

  “Of a sort,” added Kaitha, brushing a scale from her drumstick.

  “It’s good enough,” said Gorm, feeding a scrap to Patches. “Sit and have a bite with us. We’ve a long ride ahead of us tonight if we’re to make good time.”

  “Uh, yeah. Sure. I just…” Jynn shook his head as he pulled up a crate. “I was getting ready to follow you. I assumed you’d have given up and left without me.”

  “I guess we knew you better than that,” said Kaitha.

  “I suppose you did,” said the omnimancer with a smile.

  Chapter 23

  Laruna’s face contorted into a warped frown as the punch slammed into her jaw; it hit with enough force to turn her around in a spiral of flames. As she spun through the air, she glimpsed a familiar figure standing in the crowd. Confusion and pain washed over her, sending her reeling toward the line. By the time she stopped herself, she had nearly stumbled over the glowing, azure boundary.

  “Kaitha?” she said, wiping blood and sweat from her eye.

  The Elf waved and said something, but Laruna couldn’t hear her over the roar of the crowd.

  “Hang on,” Laruna slurred, wiping the blood from her face. “I’ve got to finish a thing.”

  She took a deep breath and turned back to the fight. Across the illuminated ring, a meaty-looking barbarian encased in iron and furs glowered at her from the other side of the enchanted flag. He tossed a glowing hunk of metal toward her. It hissed and sputtered as it landed in the dirt.

  “You melted it!” bellowed the barbarian.

  Laruna nodded absently, checking her teeth with her tongue. She’d assumed that reducing his blade to molten slag would end the duel, but Hogarth the Wolf had proved remarkably tenacious. Her lips ached as they broke into a bloody smile.

  “You know how much that sword cost me?” Hogarth shouted.

  “About half my purse, I’d wager,” Laruna retorted.

  The barbarian bellowed and charged across the ring. Laruna sent out a blast of flame that forced him to dodge, and followed it with a pillar of fire that erupted from the earth beneath the startled warrior. Hogarth soared through the air with a despairing wail and landed on the far side of the ring once more, rolling about in the dirt to extinguish the flames. A sudden hush fell over the crowd.

  Laruna gave a short nod and turned back to Kaitha. “What are you doing here?”

  “Recruiting you,” said Kaitha.

  “You’ve got a gig with a new party?” asked Laruna, working out a cramp in her neck. Hogarth punched harder than she would have thought.

  “No,” said Kaitha.

  “Not interested,” said Laruna.

  “Hey! Get back to the fight!” called a spectator.

  Laruna leveled a glare in the direction of the comment, and the crowd shrank back from her in terrified silence.

  “You’re interested,” said the ranger.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Kaitha nodded at the dueling flag. “You’re in for the same reason that you’re pit-dueling in a shanty town along the Tarapin.”

  “Because I can make a lot of gold where the bannermen won’t bother me?” said Laruna.

  “Because you’re looking for a fight.” The Elf smirked at the smoking barbarian.

  Laruna spat and shook her head. “I’ve found plenty of them.”

  “Not the kind that can prove what sort of mage you are. Not the kind that shows the world you’re one of the best of our age. Not a fight as big as Detarr Ur’Mayan. It’s the job of the century, Laruna. Maybe the age. Heroes lined up for days for a chance to take him on.”

  “And they’re all dead now,” said Laruna.

  “But you and I both know we’re stronger than they were,” said Kaitha. “Nobody else has faced him and lived. You’ve done it twice.”

  “We still lost,” said Laruna.

  “Maybe. But I’d bet you’ve been thinking about what you would have done differently,” Kaitha said. “About whether or not we could have won.”

  “We could have!” exclaimed Laruna before she caught herself. “But the point is that we didn’t.”

  “No, the point is that we still can,” Kaitha said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “You know I didn’t agree to that,” growled the solamancer.

  The Elf shrugged. “What I know is that you’d never hold back for the sake of a man.”

  Laruna’s eyes narrowed to bloodshot slits. “What?”

  “Because we both know there’s only one thing that would hold you back from this.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” snarled Laruna.

  “Good. Let’s go,” said Kaitha.

  “That’s not… Look, it’s really complicated.” Laruna struggled to find the right words. “Jynn saved my life, and he gave up a lot to do it. I’ll always, you know, have feelings for him. About him. In his vicinity. But he was never honest, and you don’t lie about being an… you know, an omnimancer. What if we had stayed together and had kids? I mean, think about the children—”

  “Let me stop you there,” said Kaitha. “It’s not complicated. You want to fight the liche again. It would be good for your career, and you know we can do this. Everything else is irrelevant.”

  “I just think it’d be hard to work with… I mean, it’s not just because… Rrrgh!” In her frustration, Laruna sent a streak of flame burning across the ring. Regrettably for Hogarth, the barbarian’s efforts to right himself put him directly in the line of fire, as it were. He screamed as the spell blasted him back to the ground.

  Kaitha leaned forward. “We’re taking on the job you want, doing the quest you want, and if we pull it off, we’ll get the glory you want. It’s exactly what you’re looking for, and you’re not the type to give that up because you might encounter one man or another.”

  Laruna grit her teeth. “Don’t think I can’t see how you’re trying to manipulate me.”

  “I assumed you’d see right through it.” Kaitha grinned. “And I knew it wouldn’t matter. Let’s go.”

  The solamancer grinned and shook her head. “Fine. Give me a few minutes to finish up here,” said Laruna. She turned back to the ring, where a charred barbarian was desperately crawling for the safety of the glowing boundary.

  “Oh, come on Hogarth,” the solamancer shouted across the ring, cracking her knuckles. “Try to make this last a little while! I’ve got some anger to work through!”

  “This is going to be painful,” said Jynn.

  “Ye think so?” Gorm leaned against the side of an all-night soup shack on t
he edge of the Tarapin River, nursing a bowl of fish and noodle soup. The people bustling about the surrounding docks reminded Gorm of river crabs; nocturnal, prickly, and usually sideways.

  “Finding a doppelganger on the streets of Andarun?” The omnimancer stared at the towering shape of Mount Wynspar silhouetted against the starry sky. Innumerable lanterns illuminated Andarun’s streets, a glowing amber waterfall running down the southern slopes of the mountain. “Yes, I’d say that’s going to be about as fun as doing dental work on a Flame Drake.”

  “I’ve tracked doppelgangers before—” Gorm was cut off by the roar of the crowd from the fighting pits. He took the chance to slurp a mouthful of noodles.

  “Yes, but those doppelgangers talked to people. We can safely say nobody in the city has heard anything from Gaist. Although, that assumes he’s even in the city. And that Gaist is even what he calls himself now.” Jynn groaned and clutched his forehead. “It’s too bad we don’t have the mechanical gazer anymore,” he added pointedly.

  Gorm shrugged. “Why? The blasted thing wasn’t working any more. I don’t know if all your protective spells and wards were scrambling the sprites, or if Barty just gave us a defective one, but either way it wasn’t doing us any good.”

  The mechanical gazer’s descent into malfunction had begun shortly after Gorm and his companions left the lair of the Fane Amada. It started out with nonsensical directions, but by the second day on the road the construct had begun to move erratically and ask existential questions whenever it was addressed. By the time they camped on the third night, the gazer could only fly in small circles, and it responded to any question by saying, “It looks like this item doesn't work here.”

  “You still didn’t have to smash it,” said Jynn. “It might have started working again.”

  Gorm smiled at the memory. “Worth it.”

  “Was it? Now we don’t have any idea where Gaist is, what he’s doing, or even who he looks like.”

  “My gold says he still looks like Gaist, er, Iheen the Red.”

  “Even after he’s been exposed?” asked Jynn, taking a bite from his own bowl.

  “If he wanted to look like anyone else, he could have done so long ago,” said Gorm, gesturing at his face with his spoon. “No, I’m thinkin’ back to the days when I ran with Iheen. He and I went on more than a few quests together, ran in the same circles, even had to… well, we knew the same people. But even I always wondered how he got so many jobs done. We used to say it was like he could be in two places at once.”

  Jynn nodded. “It seems he was.”

  “Aye,” grunted Gorm. “Iheen must have partnered with a doppelganger, and together they made quite a name for… well, for both of them, I suppose. But then the original Iheen died in the dungeon of Az’Anon.”

  “And so the doppelganger took the name of an Orcish mask,” said Jynn.

  “The face ye wear when you’re about to die.” Gorm nodded as he poked around his wooden bowl with a spoon. “The face that you want to be remembered by. That’s what Zurthraka said a gaist is. And then Gaist starts tryin’ to commit suicide by foe, get a noble death and all. But his problem was that he’s too good at fightin’.”

  “The theory makes sense, I suppose.”

  For a few moments they ate their soup in thoughtful silence, watching the city in the distance.

  “I still don’t understand why he never speaks,” Jynn said after a while.

  “Mmph.” Gorm waggled his spoon at the wizard as he finished off a mouthful of noodles. “I been thinkin’ about that one. See, it’s been so many years, I can’t remember what Iheen sounded like. Could picture his face like he was sitting there, but the memory of a voice? That fades away. I’d imagine somewhere along the line, Gaist lost track of Iheen’s voice and decided he’d rather stop speaking than get it wrong.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jynn.

  “Or maybe not,” said Gorm with a shrug. “Not like he’s going to tell us.”

  “Hey!”

  Jynn and Gorm turned, noodles dangling from their mouths, to see Laruna storming up the gravel street toward them. Behind the mage, Kaitha waved.

  “Listen,” the solamancer snarled at Jynn. “I want you know that you aren’t the reason I’m here. But I’m not going to let you be the reason I’m not here. I go where I want, even if that means traveling with you. But I’m not traveling with you. You’re not the reason I travel, or that I don’t. Am I clear?”

  “I feel I can safely say ‘no,’” said Jynn.

  The solamancer jabbed a finger at the omnimancer. “Just remember that my business decisions don’t take you into account.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m sure we can keep things professional.”

  “Good.” Laruna nodded with a snort.

  “Glad to have ye back on board,” said Gorm.

  Laruna rubbed her jaw as she pulled up a stool. “Well, Kaitha says you’ve a thrice-cursed impressive plan, and I’m not about to miss out on it.”

  “Aye,” said Gorm. “If it works, we’ll be on the other side of this mess soon enough. And if it doesn’t, well, we’ll be able to say we didn’t go down without one sire of a fight.”

  Laruna grinned. “Where do we start?”

  “We were just discussing how to find Gaist,” said Jynn.

  “It won’t be easy.” Kaitha shook her head. “We’ve never heard the man speak, let alone talk about his plans. Who knows what he was thinking when he left?”

  Gorm turned to look up at the city of Andarun. “I’ve a feelin’ we know who might.”

  Heraldin Strummons nursed a lukewarm grog in the back corner of a moldering tavern. The Missing Serpent was a miserable hovel masquerading as a bar in the shadows of the Underdim, but it was also the third establishment that the bard had visited in as many hours, and he was too drunk to care about the accommodations. He was too drunk to care about much of anything, which meant that it was the ideal time to find a diversion for the night.

  There were three barmaids working the commons. The first had introduced herself by threatening to stab Heraldin if he looked at her cross-eyed, and given that he was too inebriated to look at anything any other way, he ruled her out. The second server was an Ogress, and Heraldin was still a couple of grogs short of sinking that low, or perhaps climbing that high, as it were.

  That left the third barmaid, a Human who looked like she must have been pretty before the years carved weary furrows beneath her eyes and above her brows. She was the best he’d do in this bar, and as he couldn’t walk in a straight line long enough to find another, Heraldin drained his grog and beckoned her over.

  He flashed a winning grin at the barmaid as she approached. “What are you serving tonight, my lovely?”

  “Smitty’s Grog and Mondo’s Legal Ale,” the barmaid said automatically.

  Heraldin’s brow furrowed. “Why’s it called a legal ale?”

  “They couldn’t prove it wasn’t ale in court,” she replied.

  “Well, that gives it a leg up on Smitty’s, then.” The bard made a face as he pushed his tankard away. “I’ll take a pint of Mondo’s. And what have you got for dessert?” he added, looking her up and down.

  The barmaid started to scowl, but then recognition flashed in her eyes. “That’s how I remember you! You used to come into the tavern I worked at back when I lived up in Dunningham Hollows.”

  “Did I?” asked Heraldin, thinking back. There were a lot of taverns and even more barmaids in his past.

  “Oh, yeah!” The server nodded. “You’d pretend to be the young Duke of Waerth, sneaking away from his royal life.”

  “Ah!” That narrowed her identity to one of a half-dozen or so young women from a decade ago. Heraldin leaned closer and waggled his eyebrows in his most alluring manner. “And how do you know I’m not really the Duke of Waerth?”

  The barmaid brought her face in close to Heraldin’s and breathily whispered, “Because the Duke of Waerth was assassinated over a trade dispute ba
ck in sixty-eight.”

  “Aha, yes,” said Heraldin.

  “So, one Mondo’s Legal, then?” The barmaid straightened up and stared down her nose at Heraldin.

  “Well…”

  “Cantrelle.”

  “Well, Cantrelle, as you guessed, I am no duke. I am Locuerdo, a humble troubadour.” Heraldin gave a new false name to conceal the current one.

  “Fine, Locuerdo. Just the drink?”

  “I’d take two if you’d join me,” said the bard, patting the stool next to him.

  “Pfft. I’ve better things to do than watch an old liar try to convince himself that he’s still got a knack with the gals,” said Cantrelle. “The only fun I get these days is dumping a mug of swill on handsy patrons. So unless you’re up for that…”

  “Just the ale, please.” Heraldin grimaced as he watched another missed opportunity stalk off.

  With a new name, a fresh outfit, and a recent dearth of known associates around him, the bard was making a fresh start in Andarun. He hadn’t intended to; originally, he’d planned to busk enough gold for a ferry down the Tarapin, and start fresh in Embleden or Chrate. But he’d earned enough on his first day that he could spare enough giltin to enjoy a pint. The pint became a half-gallon or so, which led to a night of pleasant adventures with a barmaid, which left him so broke he had to head back out with his lute the next morning.

  For well over a month, the bard had been pursuing lost liberties around a circular track. He busked in the city square under the name of Sanderson by day, and spent his nights drinking away his take and looking for someone to warm his bed. Nobody knew his name, or his past, or ever spared him a thought after the pillows were cool. It was the sort of carefree existence he’d been longing for since the day the Al’Matrans recruited him.

  It was inexplicably miserable.

  As it turned out, a life could be free of cares and yet also devoid of fun. Busking earned a pittance, barely enough to buy cheap beer. Cheap beer didn’t taste as good as it used to, especially on an empty stomach. The women were nowhere near as agreeable as Heraldin remembered, nor were tavern keepers as patient for payment. He never slept in the same bed twice, and not in the good way.