Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes

by Dave Gross

“He was a mighty wizard.”

  “And I am not so mighty.”

  “I intended no offense.”

  “I have taken none. What I lack in power, however…” An impulse came to me, not from intuition’s whim but—somehow, I knew—from my blackened sword. I drew a shallow cut along my palm and pressed my bloody hand to the doors. They opened.

  “The blood of Zutha.” Svannostel peered down at me in a troubling manner. I had not forgotten that she and her brother were guardians against the return of the runelord. If Desna smiled and we managed to dispatch Ygresta, would she feel the need to end Zutha’s bloodline by slaying me?

  We entered the Cenotaph.

  The morning light seemed reluctant to join us. It oozed in acute shafts across a cluttered field of indistinguishable objects. Motes of dust glowed and dimmed by turns as they floated across the vast expanse.

  As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that a grand hall lay before us. Around a vast circular pit stood ranks of countless undead soldiers.

  They groaned and stirred at our approach.

  Svannostel invoked a light at the tip of her wing. The undead shuffled toward her, heedless of the danger posed by a dragon.

  I cast a light at the tip of the Shadowless Sword. The spell elicited a reaction from the blade’s runes, which glowed a brilliant FEAR and HOPE on opposite sides. As the light touched them, the undead shrank away with a clatter of bones in rusted armor.

  “Stand back,” I said. “Before you stands the heir to Runelord Zutha.”

  A skull-faced commander called out, “With a bronze dragon at your side? You are no blood of Zutha.”

  “Who but the heir of Zutha is mighty enough to tame a bronze dragon as his slave?” The apology I would need to offer Svannostel for that remark diminished my fear of our likely deaths by comparison.

  The dragon surprised me by adding, “I serve the master. He commands me to destroy those who defy him.”

  Her words cowed the rank-and-file soldiers, but another officer rose above them. He floated toward me and descended to hover a foot off the floor. By his bloody eyes and fangs, I knew him for a vampire. He hissed, “Prove your claim.”

  Hopeful that my resurrection had not removed the blessings of the celestial dragon’s heart, I offered the vampire my empty hand. “Draw out my life, if you can.”

  The vampire’s pale lips twisted in disbelief. He grasped my hand. I felt the beast’s enervating touch gentled, muted, powerless to harm me.

  The vampire realized my immunity. His eyes widened, then narrowed. He tensed to perform a more violent test. Before he could bite my wrist, I thrust the Shadowless Sword through his chest.

  As the blade pierced his undead heart, a bolt of lightning blasted through him. His gelid gore showered the nearest soldiers. Removing the blade, I pushed his weightless body to the floor until the final death surrendered it to gravity.

  “Forgive us, Master.” An armored wight knelt before me. “An imposter came before you. He had your Tome.”

  “Find this imposter. Dispatch all of your troops. Bring him to me.”

  “It shall be done, Master. But it may take some time. He has gone below.”

  Svannostel lowered her head close to mine and whispered, “My brother might come.”

  “Leave the doors open. Do not interfere with anyone but the imposter. Leave anyone else to me.”

  “As you wish, Master,” said the wight.

  “Show me where he went.”

  The army parted. The wight pointed along the path to the yawning pit.

  “Shall we?” The dragon lowered her shoulder. I climbed up between her wings. She beat them hard enough to flatten the nearest undead, then circled the hall twice before descending in a narrow spiral down the pit.

  Along the pit walls we saw iron gates confining snarling ghouls. They wailed and strained their rotting arms toward us as we passed, aching for a taste of flesh. The stink of them made my skin crawl.

  Landing at the bottom of the shaft, I felt the scabrous grasp of a ghoul upon my leg. With a swift stroke of my sword, I severed the limb and stepped away from the cell embedded in the floor. There were dozens all around us, and dozens more in the walls.

  “Stay back,” I commanded them. “Obey me, for I am the heir of Zutha.”

  The ghouls continued their savage attempts to devour us. Several more attempts to communicate with them went unheeded.

  “They are mindless,” said Svannostel.

  “No,” I said, recognizing the agony drawn in their faces. I had felt the same only recently. “They are mad with hunger.”

  “At least they’re caged. Perhaps Zutha himself could not stop them from devouring his other minions.”

  Her suggestion sounded reasonable. “There may be a mechanism to release them all at once,” I said. “If we had time, I would suggest we destroy them all.”

  “The ‘imposter’ is ahead of us. We have no time.”

  We found the golem’s tracks and followed them past the Cenotaph’s subterranean inhabitants. Some, recognizing the Crest and Crown of their master, slunk away. Others challenged us. The weak we destroyed with blade and claw. Whatever spell mastery I had surrendered at the shrine of Lissala, I had gained in empathy with the Shadowless Sword. Always incredibly swift, it now anticipated my thoughts and empowered my spells, directing them with flawless precision.

  I incinerated a trio of mummified priests with a fiery spell. Svannostel tore a coven of ghostly hags to shreds of ectoplasm.

  An honor guard of haunted armor barred our way, unleashing their armory of possessed blades. Channeling a spell through my black blade, I summoned my own battalion of flying swords. As the weapons clashed around us, I ruptured the guardians’ armor with bolts of acid. Svannostel tore open the weakened hulls to spill the ruined souls upon the dungeon floor.

  We paused to recoup our strength but dared not rest long enough to replenish our spells. Somewhere beneath us, Ygresta was delivering the Gluttonous Tome to the body of its creator. If he revived the runelord before we could stop him, all our hopes would become futile.

  We came to a giant portcullis guarded by a pair of clockwork dragons. In design they resembled the great art of ancient Thassilon. In construction they exceeded the finest craft of gnomes or dwarves. Electrical arcs whirled within their glass eyes, and each motion of their joints crackled with blue sparks. Their mechanical heads swiveled toward us in an owlish gesture.

  Raising a fist, I showed them the Crest of Zutha.

  “You are too late,” said one.

  “The Tome has returned to the crypt,” said the other.

  “The blood of Zutha runs in my veins.” Once more I cut my hand. “Taste my blood and open the gate.”

  “No,” said the first guardian. “Zutha wakes.”

  “I wear the Crest and Crown.”

  “It does not matter. He who bore the Tome closed the way behind him,” said the second guardian.

  Running out of options and time, I resorted to the basest phrase of diplomacy. “I will destroy you if you do not obey me.”

  “Nothing in the Cenotaph can harm us,” said the first guardian. It snaked its steel tail across the floor and scraped sparks from the stone. “Here we were born, and we have never left our station.”

  Admiring their construction, I frantically sought a flaw in their design: diamond-tipped claws, hammered bronze wings, copper conduits, ceramic ports, gemstone lenses … and electrical junctures. I recalled the paradoxical immunity of Ygresta’s golem to lightning. Its mechanical parts should have been vulnerable to electricity, but its union with flesh channeled the energy into biological power.

  These clockwork creations were purely mechanical. I doubted they enjoyed such immunity.

  “Born here, never having left your station, you have never seen the sky,” I said.

  “What of it?” said the first guardian.

  “Mechanical beings must fear the storm,” I said.

  “There is no sky here,�
� said the second guardian. Even through its clockwork voice, I detected a note of uncertainty. “There is no storm.”

  “But there is,” I said. “We bring it with us.”

  Once more anticipating my intent, Svannostel unleashed her lightning at the same moment as I hurled a bolt at the foot of the first clockwork dragon. The mechanical wyrm hopped back, shaking its mangled limb.

  “It can hurt us!” Its cry was a shriek of gears.

  “It can destroy you. Let me pass.”

  The guardians exchanged a glance through glass eyes. The second looked at me and said, “None but the creator could harm us.” It bowed its long, articulated neck. “You may pass.”

  Once we were well beyond the gate, I said to Svannostel, “Remember that will not work on the golem.”

  “I remember.” The dragon raised her leg in memory of her recent injury.

  Beyond the gate, we found a ring of catacombs surrounding the central crypt. A stone seal inscribed with Zutha’s personal rune lay broken in the passage. The crypt entrance was far too small for a dragon. Svannostel transformed into her elf form, and we fortified ourselves with wards. She held a finger to her lips and disappeared. Trusting that she followed, I entered the runelord’s tomb, seemingly alone.

  Twenty walls arched far upward to form a pointed dome of yellow marble veined in black. The ceiling reached so high I estimated it must come near the floor of the great pit, where the ghouls resided in their balcony prisons. Seven tiers of rusted sconces on each wall danced with continual flames. Their shadows writhed among the pillars below.

  Ten alcoves ringed a central dais. Within their recesses gleamed precious gems and metals, racks of scrolls and rods, sculptures and time-ravaged tapestries, ancient armors and weapons forged of rare skymetal—a runelord’s burial treasures.

  Upon the dais, the Gluttonous Tome lay open on a marble sarcophagus. To either side, a seven-fingered candelabrum shed light across its pages.

  At the head of the sarcophagus stood a monstrous golem, a patchwork of preserved flesh and bone with mechanical supports and joints. The monster held a huge scythe. I had seen the weapon’s queer angles before, in drawings of Runelord Zutha and on a statue in Svannostel’s gallery.

  At the sarcophagus’s foot stood a silent hound of utter black. Nearby, two human-shaped shadows crouched at the edge of the sarcophagus.

  On the far side of the sarcophagus, Benigno Ygresta leaned upon his canes. Though it did not resemble the man I once knew, I recognized this corpulent figure from his shadow at the goblin attack. Now here he stood in the flesh.

  His skin had taken on the gray-green sheen common to those who sup on the life-energy of their victims. White-headed red blisters dotted the fat folds of his eyelids and cheeks. Sweat pasted a few remaining strands of hair to his head. His blubbery lips glistened as he muttered over the book. He appeared oblivious to my arrival, so I introduced myself.

  “After all these years, you still move your lips while reading.”

  Ygresta looked up, blinking. When his bloodshot eyes focused on me, he gave a wan smile. “I suppose it is poetic, if not actually inevitable, that you should be here. Ada suggested I return to scatter your dust to the winds. Perhaps I should have heeded that advice.”

  The two shadows shrank away from him, slipping across the floor like minnows in a dark current. Except for turning its gaze toward me, the golem remained motionless. The black hound moved slowly toward me, hackles rising as it growled.

  “Surely you hated me enough to prevent my resurrection,” I said.

  “Hated you?” He scratched his chin, leaving a pair of purplish wounds where the skin sloughed off. “At times, I suppose I did. Your haughty manner, your condescension, and your trifling gifts—a single bottle of wine, when you sent cases to peers you barely knew. Hah! How could I not take it as an insult?”

  “If you had wanted more, you had only to mention it.”

  “Mention it? Beg, you mean. Petition, crave, curry favor … the only interaction you welcomed from those born beneath you. You never knew what it was like to struggle. You were born high and wealthy. Pharasma’s bones! Your illegitimate blood didn’t even diminish you as it should. You kept the gift of your elven father’s longevity even as your human grandfather absolved you of your bastardy.”

  Resentment toward the noble class was as common as the men who felt it. I was not entirely unsympathetic to their plight, but neither did I apologize for my blessings.

  “So you pretended friendship because my mother paid your tuition.”

  “No, you insufferable snob! Don’t you see that only made it worse? I accepted her money because I needed it. Without it, we might have been friends despite your imperious manner. I genuinely admired the way you grasped arcane theory so easily. I appreciated your help in my studies, despite the occasional snide remark about moving my lips or copying your work to help remember it. Even after you left the Acadamae, I looked forward to your letters. But you offered such redacted, cautious anecdotes that I could never forget, even for a moment, where it was I stood.”

  “And where was that?”

  “In your shadow.”

  “So you decided to spend my life in the pursuit of your own immortality.”

  “Why not? You were the perfect tool—yes, tool! See how it feels to suffer offense from a careless word? But in this case you were no longer the master but the servant. And an unwitting servant, at that.”

  “How much of the Tome have you read?” I noticed that the book lay upon the sarcophagus, not hovering beside him as it had with me. His bond was imperfect, or perhaps he simply lacked the blood tie that gave me such a rapid connection to the book. “Or perhaps I should ask, how much have you understood?”

  He grimaced at my barb. “Enough to know that I was right to bring it here, close to the remains of Zutha. The book feels his presence. Soon it will transfer his immortality to me.”

  I shook my head. “You always were an idealist first and a scholar second, Benigno. In your hope that the Tome contained the secret to lichdom, you saw only what you wished to see. The book does not grant you immortality. It is Zutha’s phylactery. The key component of his soul resides within its pages. By bringing it here, you have only offered up yourself as his vessel. You are not becoming a lich. You are sacrificing your body to the runelord’s soul.”

  Ygresta’s lips trembled. Pink tears ran down his quivering cheeks. “I have been conducting this ritual for hours. Don’t you think I understand that now?”

  “That need not be your fate. I can spare you, Benigno.” I drew the Shadowless Sword. “You must prefer a clean death to the doom that awaits you.”

  He stared in disbelief. He gasped or choked, and then the laughter came tumbling out of him. “Oh, Your Excellency, you have developed a sense of humor in your old age. No, I would rather endure as Zutha’s vessel than bend my neck to your judgment.”

  “Very well, in that case—”

  “Now, Durante!” Ygresta dropped his canes and snatched up the Tome.

  The golem dropped the scythe and grabbed the sarcophagus lid. In the periphery of my vision, I saw a shadow and the black hound rush toward me. Anticipating their attack, I stepped to meet them, slashing.

  The shadow cried out and withdrew the stumps of four thin fingers. The hound charged past me, vanishing once more into the darkness. A hellish baying filled the room, emanating from every shadow. The sound tickled at the back of my neck. It caused my palms to sweat and my hands to tremble. By force of will, I stifled the urge to flee.

  Dust and bone particles rose from the open sarcophagus. For an instant it appeared as a swarm of buzzing insects. It soon coalesced into the figure of a man so corpulent as to make Ygresta appear merely chubby by comparison.

  An ornate pike flew from one of the alcoves toward Ygresta. Despite his girth, the necromancer stepped back with great alacrity. Nevertheless, the spear’s point impaled his foot. He howled in pain as Svannostel appeared, still in her strange
elven form. Releasing the pike, she stepped back, already growing into her dragon shape.

  “That one! Kill that one, Durante!” cried Ygresta. Still clutching the Tome, he snatched up one of his canes and wagged it at Svannostel.

  With a mighty heave, the golem lifted the sarcophagus lid and hurled it at Svannostel. It struck her mid-transformation, crushing the elf-dragon beneath half a ton of marble.

  Durante dropped the scythe and lurched toward me. The rotten amalgamation of murdered men creaked and squealed with every motion. I darted out of the way and slashed the ham of its half-mechanical leg. The sword cut deep, but the golem seemed oblivious to the wound.

  Shoving off the sarcophagus lid, Svannostel rose to her full height. In an instant, six bronze dragons crowded the chamber. I knew five were illusions, and no doubt so did Ygresta, but the shadow minions threw themselves upon a figment. At their dead touch, the image vanished.

  The miasma above Zutha’s sarcophagus crackled like flameless embers. An aura of purple near to black surrounded the tiny motes of grave dust. They surged and flowed down onto Ygresta, pouring into his mouth and nostrils, under his clothes, forcing their way through every entrance.

  “Svannostel,” I cried. “The golem!”

  Five dragon heads dipped down, one biting the golem by the shoulder and shaking him as a terrier breaks a rat.

  With the golem out of the way, I raised a hand to blast Ygresta with a ring. The fiery ray spilled over him, burning his clothes and the last few wisps of his hair. Ygresta closed his eyes and screamed. The sound filled the crypt, changing tenor as it transformed from a scream of pain to one of apotheosis.

  Ygresta opened his eyes. His irises, formerly brown, now gleamed Azlanti purple. As the crypt dust vanished, so did my old classmate. Only Zutha remained.

  Sniffing and licking its bulging lips, the transformed body floated above the floor. Rolls of fat swelled and puckered with new sores as the spirit of the runelord began to claim his new fleshy vessel.

  Zutha reached toward the Gluttonous Tome. After a moment’s balk, it rose to levitate by his side. He reached for his scythe. It too shuddered with uncertainty before flying into his hand.