by Ed Greenwood
"Voyvik!" Tantaerra exclaimed. "Where does he come into this?"
"Karm hired him to hunt me down," The Masked replied. "Or so Voyvik hinted."
"Voyvik told you that? When?"
"Hinted, I said. Gloatingly, over crossed swords, as we fought in an alley a year or so back, long before I met you. He said someone I'd stolen from had hired him to see that I went to where I was supposed to. He's been shadowing me across Molthune—but could have trapped me long ago, and hasn't. There's more to him than a wizard's hireling. Even a crazed hireling—and he's definitely that. Wanting us to trust him, yet attacking us whenever he thinks he has a good chance. He delights in acting mysterious—cold and calculating one moment, then manic the next. I doubt he's entirely sane." He shook his head. "Wizards' meddling, perhaps ...yet I feel there's something more to him, too."
"So his patriotism," Tantaerra asked. "It's an act?"
The Masked shook his head again. "No, I believe that's genuine enough. If the rumors are true, then he certainly did much for Nirmathas, before he ever came after me. Perhaps his goals are tied into this whole business somehow. But if so, I haven't unraveled yet."
"And if you don't unravel it before we get to the Shattered Tomb?"
He shrugged. "We'll most probably die."
"Well, that's cheerful." Tantaerra frowned. "So all this time, you've known who he is, and you were heading for this Shattered Tomb eventually, anyway. And you said not a word about either to me."
"I didn't want to scare you off accompanying me."
Tantaerra's eyes widened. "Scare? Scare?"
"Dissuade, if you prefer. Adventures are better shared ...and I've discovered I like sharing them with you. Sharp tongue and ten silver weights and all."
Tantaerra's expression didn't change. "So you thought you'd lie to me. That's how you treat those you like."
The Masked sat up sharply, as if struck. "It's not like that."
"Oh? Isn't it?" She stood. "I trusted you, Tarram. I should have known better. You're no different than your friend Voyvik." She began to make her way down to the woods.
"Tantaerra! Princess!" The Masked rose hurriedly to his own feet. "Where are you going?"
"To the Shattered Tomb," she spat. "You said we needed to move after your story, so I'm moving. Let's get this over with."
Sighing, The Masked slid down off the rock and followed her into the trees.
The gods take women, he thought. Of all sizes.
∗ ∗ ∗
He'd lied to her.
After all they'd been through, all the trust they'd built, he'd turned out just the same as every other human—too wrapped up in his own affairs to think about anybody else. How could she possibly have been so stupid as to think that he was different?
Tantaerra stormed through the bushes in silence, purposefully choosing a route that led her under low branch after low branch, forcing The Masked to scramble over or under them to keep up. He'd quit trying to talk to her, which was a plus, and now saved his breath for grunts and quiet curses as he thrashed his way through brambles and dense thickets that were only mild inconveniences for someone her size.
It wasn't that he had secrets—everyone had secrets. It was that he'd deliberately misled her. She'd thought them both prisoners of circumstance, caught up together out of coincidence and doing the best they could to muddle through. And now she discovered that he'd been working toward this the whole time. He wasn't her partner—he was using her.
And yet...
Even as she reminded herself of these things, fanning the flames of her anger ever hotter, she found herself remembering the river. The way he'd put himself between her and the charging Nirmathi. That couldn't have been part of his plan—in fact, it was counterintuitive. Why risk himself like that for a companion of convenience? In fact, why help her in the first place? It wasn't for the ten silver weights, that was sure. And if he'd wanted someone to help him break into this tomb, surely he could have hired or conscripted someone more capable than an undersized halfling. And one who had something of a temper, at that.
She looked back at him again. He had to be as tired as she was of this whole stupid quest, yet he wasn't complaining. Instead, he was tearing his cloak and applying a fresh coat of mud to his knees in order to follow her wherever she went.
Follow her.
The fire in Tantaerra's chest cooled.
Yes, he'd lied to her. He'd misled her. But what had his options really been? If he'd told her he was being hunted by this Voyvik, and maybe a mad wizard in the bargain, would she have gone along with him? Probably not, she admitted. By waiting, he'd given himself time to get past first impressions and prove himself. To her.
So had he?
Tantaerra reached up and grabbed the branch she was walking underneath, then stepped to the side, pulling it out of the way.
The Masked looked up in surprise. He turned to gaze at her warily, as if expecting her to let the bough spring back to whip him as he passed. She waved him through.
"Thank you," he said, when he was safely past her.
"Don't mention it," she replied, letting go of the branch and falling back into step beside him. "After all, it's not your fault you're big and awkward."
∗ ∗ ∗
Their journey was unusually peaceful. This stretch of Nirmathas seemed to be far more forest than people. Yet the woods were studded with clearings enough—places where huge old dead trees had, when their time was done, crashed down and taken smaller trees to the ground with them. From these, The Masked could catch sight of the landmarks he'd spotted up on that height, and so keep heading for Hurlandrun.
Tantaerra—who'd spontaneously decided to start speaking to him again, just as suddenly as she'd stopped—told him they needed to concoct a fictitious past for her to share with any Nirmathi who wanted to talk before loosing arrows, thanks to certain less fictitious things she'd done in the past.
So they walked, talked, and settled on both of them being Nirmathi. Tantaerra would be a slave escaped from longtime Molthuni captivity in Canorate seeking to find kin she'd long been sundered from, and who'd just days ago found them gone from their farm near the border, their stead burned and abandoned, but was told by surviving neighbors that they'd fled deeper into Nirmathas. The Masked would purport to be a Nirmathi whose family fled the country when he was but a child, and who'd wandered Golarion trying his hand at many a living before freeing Tantaerra in Molthune and was helping her to find her kin. The mask they'd explain as covering a terrible burn suffered in childhood, when Molthuni soldiers burned down his parents homestead.
These tales were accepted with sympathy by the few Nirmathi who gave the travelers a chance to share it. More often, they received arrows instead.
The Masked couldn't really blame them, but took some comfort in the fact that most of the real aid he and Tantaerra received was from the Molthuni armies, who'd mounted an unexpectedly bold foray deep into this backcountry. Their attacks and movements time and again interrupted and distracted Nirmathi from the business of eliminating small and unlooked-for travelers, including a masked man and a halfling.
One Nirmathi wanted to know if The Masked was a slaver, snatching small children like the one with him.
Tantaerra had eyed the man balefully. "I'm a halfling, man. We're born small, and we die small. I'm not a little girl, and I'm neither younger than you nor less experienced. I'm probably older than your mother. I certainly possess better judgment than she obviously did, and I've hired this masked man as my guide and bodyguard. So keep your distance from my body, or it'll go ill for you."
Muttering, the Nirmathi had gone for his bow, so The Masked and Tantaerra had taken their nearest escape route—but not before relieving the man's untended smokehouse of a large and well-smoked goat carcass they both knew they were going to get tired of before they saw the Shattered Tomb.
If they ever saw the Shattered Tomb.
There came a time when the trees thinned and they were looking o
ut across a broad, shallow river valley that flooded often enough to drown large trees. The reeds were many and tall, but real cover was scant. The watercourse looped in muddy bends, and the open valley stretched for miles. They were going to have to cross it in the open, and all that water and the likelihood of sucking bogs or great stretches of quicksand meant that doing it in darkness would be far more rash than crossing when the sun was high.
The Masked looked at Tantaerra, and she looked back at him. They sighed, shrugged, took good note of a leaning tree they could use as a landmark on the far side, and clambered down into the valley to start across.
Any Nirmathi within miles would see them, and they couldn't outrun arrows. They also knew that Voyvik was likely lurking somewhere near, but there wasn't much of anything either of them could do about that, either. So they started their crossing, keeping low and not talking so they might have some slender chance of hearing the hiss of approaching arrows before they felt any actual arrowheads.
They'd made it along one loop of the river and were trying to decide on the best place to swim across it when the first arrows tore past them. They flung themselves flat, noses to the nearby water, and twisted to try to see where the archers might be.
They turned just in time to see uniformed soldiers of Molthune burst out of the trees to hack at the Nirmathi bowmen, who were clustered atop a knoll where they could look down on several riverbends.
"Now might be a good time," Tantaerra murmured. "Both sides look a little busy for feathering us with arrows, just now."
The Masked nodded and waded into the water, keeping to a crouch. "Climb up my back," he ordered.
"So I can play pincushion for arrows?"
"So you won't have to swim, and we can be across and into cover faster, O Princess of Thieves." There was no time for debate or hesitation. Those Nirmathi back there would either have fled or be dead very soon now.
Tantaerra evidently reached that same conclusion, for she turned and hurriedly climbed his back without another word, and he launched himself into the river.
It was far shallower and slower than the Inkwater, but not much warmer. Tarram clenched his teeth and swam hard, trying to get to where his feet could find bottom again before he was entirely numb and his strength started to go, at which point the current would start winning the battle for where he was headed.
The cold wormed its way up his arms and legs, and he snarled and fought the water harder, trying—
His knee banged an unseen rock, and then he was crawling in foul-smelling mud, up the far bank and stumbling toward the all-gods-blessed trees.
With a sudden hail of plashings right behind him in the water: Molthuni crossbow bolts hitting the river as they reached the end of their range. It seemed the soldiers back on that side of the river didn't want anyone alive in Nirmathas right now who didn't wear the blood red of Molthune. Or just the red of their own spilling blood.
The Masked crashed through a tangle of branches and into a thicket of saplings and tall grass, mud wallows, and untidy clumps of bright wildflowers. He was halfway across when Tantaerra's weight suddenly vanished from his back, overbalancing him into a near fall. He heard grass rustling behind him, heading back, and whirled around.
The waving grass started to calm, then stirred anew, dancing and swaying as it disgorged Tantaerra.
"They're crossing the river," she told him glumly. "Let's move."
They moved, The Masked taking the running, branch-snapping lead and the halfling scuttling after him. Around this tree, under the boughs of the next, across a little hollow of tallgrass, up a little bank, and on ...
"Still coming after us," Tantaerra informed him tersely, landing with a crash. She'd climbed up one of the trees in his wake, to look back.
"My," he told her, between pants, "this is like...having my very own ...bard. Commenting, as the...adventure unfolds. There'll be a ...dragon, next."
"Bite your tongue, masked man!"
Tarram found he had wind enough left to chuckle. Then he ducked under a leaning tree that was fairly armored in shelf fungus, and found himself facing a steep uphill climb, into darker, denser trees. They had crossed the valley.
They were in too much of a hurry to go looking for landmarks, with these Molthuni after them. Just when would the soldiers start to think plunging into thick forest in a land of foes was too foolhardy to continue with?
An arrow whined out of the trees like an angry hornet, heading not at The Masked, but back whence he'd come.
Suddenly the air was full of a whistling, singing volley.
Well, that answered that question.
Which didn't mean these unseen Nirmathi archers wouldn't decide to take care of a running man in a mask and a halfling. Tarram kept right on sprinting, Tantaerra at his heels and sometimes beside him.
They raced over a gentle wooded ridge, and into older, deeper trees whose leaves hid the sun, where bushes were few but toadstools more numerous, and tiny pairs of eyes stared at the running intruders and then scattered. And on, down a slope where the trees thinned and The Masked had a good glimpse of distant mountains that probably weren't all in Nirmathas, ere the trees closed in again and—
The ground suddenly gave way under his hurrying boots, and he was falling, landing heels-first with a jolt on rocks, then sliding on his back on loose stones and rolling dirt, a high voice spewing curses above him that he recognized was Tantaerra about the time he came to a stop, amid dust and a sporadic but painful hail of small stones.
She landed on his head and bounced off again, head over heels forward and down, to land with a yowl in a clump of dark maroon thorns.
The Masked shook his head to clear it, then rolled onto his side and peered up and behind him.
A small stream of dirt and stones were still tumbling over the lip where he'd run off the edge of this gulley and brought some of that edge down with him, four or five times his height down this slope. Into what looked to be a small forest of thornbushes. A thicket, at least. Almost absentmindedly he plucked a groaning Tantaerra off her painful perch among them, then ducked down below them and peered around. It was like looking across a vast but low-ceilinged warehouse, dark thorns above but emptiness studded with thornbush trunks below.
He'd never seen this sort of shrub before, but it looked to be home to nothing but birds. Gnarled, stunted trunks rose out of a drift of brown dead thorns where seemingly nothing grew or lived, a painful, spiky carpet of dried, brittle thorns and old guano. He swept some aside with his hand and beheld bare dirt.
"Come," he told Tantaerra, and started crawling and raking, using his forearms and a dagger. "We'll hide here. Hide, so stop talking."
"Yes, sir," she snarled back, but thereafter said not a word. They crawled along under the dark, dense thornbushes, thrusting aside shed thorns until they reached a little ridge, then a hollow beyond.
The hollow ended in another drop-off, a rocky cliff that looked down on treetops. The Masked decided not to run over that edge.
"So, now," he whispered to Tantaerra. "We rest and wait. Hopefully the Molthuni will weary of the chase."
"Hopefully we'll be made monarchs and showered with gems and coins until we roll around on gleaming hills of them," she whispered back. "Hope is powerful but usually futile, Tarram."
He shrugged. "You have a better plan?"
She gave him a sour look, then settled down on her back, seeking to get comfortable.
And almost instantly fell asleep.
The Masked regarded her with some amusement. Cats and halflings; both could nap just like that.
Well, when it came to it, so could humans—if they were sufficiently exhausted. He yawned. Only his wet, clinging clothing was keeping him from drifting off ...
He froze abruptly, and listened hard.
There it was again: a faint rustle, well back behind him, in—there, again—that direction. He got two daggers ready, turned to face the sound, and shifted gently sideways to where the hollow was a little dee
per, giving him more room to move in his crouch beneath the thorns.
There. He could see something now, a dark bulk, moving. A human, or at least a four-limbed creature, crawling nearer.
Then the crawler came over a little rise in the ground amid the thornbush trunks, and he knew who it was.
Orivin Voyvik.
The man must have a way of tracking them, some magic or other. The mask?
Or he'd been trailing them all day, skulking along just out of sight, tracking them like a hunter.
Neither alternative was all that reassuring.
The Masked nudged Tantaerra awake with his foot, not letting his gaze leave the approaching man.
The moment he was aware of her bleary-eyed glare, he asked Voyvik grimly, "And what do you want?"
"To recruit you, friend Armistrade. To ask you again to join me, to work toward the dream." Voyvik crawled nearer. "Isn't this a beautiful country?"
"I've not had much leisure to admire or judge its beauties, since last we spoke," The Masked told him. "Too many people have been trying to kill me. Are you going to be one more of them?"
"Now would I be crawling up to your ready daggers if I was?" Voyvik asked, sounding almost petulant. "When I could just take a bow from someone and loose two arrows from back yonder, without all of this hard-on-the-knees travel?"
"Our answer," Tantaerra piped up, "is still no. For now, at least. Are you fleeing those Molthuni too?"
Voyvik shook his head. "More Nirmathi archers persuaded them to prudence. When I saw them last, those few still alive were running back east faster than you were heading in this direction. Giving you some leisure to entertain my offer."