Prince of Wolves

by Dave Gross

  I shouted threats and curses after them. My voice was hoarse beyond recognition, and the words that emerged were strange. The language sounded familiar, but I didn’t recognize my own words, even though somehow I understood them. It wasn’t Varisian, and it sure as hell wasn’t Taldane. Then I realized I was speaking infernal, the language of devils.

  Unlike the boss, I don’t speak more than a couple dozen words in any foreign language. Maybe I had more than a hundred words in Varisian by now, after help from the guards—poor bastards. I couldn’t actually speak anything fluently other than Taldane, the common tongue of the Empire and many lands it had once conquered and lost. Still, you pick up the sound of lots of languages in a cosmopolitan town like Egorian, so I could tell the difference between the elf and dwarf tongues, for instance. And considering the nature of the Chelish underground, it had been useful to learn the difference between infernal and abyssal when the trail of our latest job led to cultists of either camp.

  That must have been one hell of a bang on the head, I thought. Then I became keenly aware of the burning pain all over my body, especially on my face and chest. I rubbed my eyes, and the lashes came away in gummy lumps. I blinked hard, but only my right eye opened. I tried pulling on my left eyelid, but it was swollen shut. I gave up, distracted by how long my fingers and nails had grown. My vision was still cloudy, but that was not enough to account for the transformation of my body.

  The villagers were out of sight now, no doubt hiding in their root cellars. Up ahead, black and red chickens darted through the muddy avenues between their homes, agitated by the commotion. Pigs snuffled and nosed the mud of their pens, which I noted were built between the houses. Filthy peasants.

  Beyond the village lay a wide, lazy river. On the far side, wooded hills rose gradually to the right, which I guessed to be the south judging from the position of the veiled sun. That put me on the west, probably not where I wanted to be. The boss—or the boss’s remains, I realized with a sickening feeling in my belly—had to be farther up in the mountains and on the other side of the river. From this dirty little village I could see no bridges, and no mountains either.

  An itching sensation on my right buttock alerted me that my remaining clothes were still smoldering. I slapped at the fabric and tore away most of it when I saw how much smoke and flame still licked at me. Those ignorant pig farmers had ruined my new clothes! The jacket alone cost more than one of these mucking peasants earned in a year.

  I’d have that out of their hides. I strode into the village with blood on my mind.

  The cottage doors and windows were shut tight. I noticed that all the doors were painted red, probably to ward off evil spirits, though I doubted they’d stop me. Beneath the shuttered windows were flower boxes containing the year’s last drooping blossoms. I smashed a few as I came. Maybe that would get their attention.

  Immediately I felt foolish, like some drunken vandal. The moment I paused to think, I wasn’t sure what to do any more. I’d never been so angry, and that was a curious thing. I’d suffered more than my share of outrages, but I learned to wait for my revenge by the time I was four years old. Since then I’d always met insult with a cool head. If it wouldn’t kill me today, I could sneak up on it tomorrow. If only these peasants spoke Taldane, then I could at least beat an explanation out of one of them. Maybe I had enough Varisian to make it work. The trick was to get my hands on one without killing him.

  That was good enough for a plan, and the idea of action calmed my beating heart. The nearest house would do. I reached for the door handle, and then I saw the ugly little girl.

  She sat bareback upon a mottled white donkey at the other end of what passed for a main street. Under a film of road dust, her clothes were more colorful than those the villagers wore. Her vaguely brown hair formed a tangled hood that revealed only the freckled tip of her nose and the half-hidden glimmer of light blue or gray eyes. She stared at me with a calm expression that I found damned irritating.

  “What are you looking at?” I said, but something else still had my voice and my words. I wanted to look around for the ventriloquist who was having one over on me.

  The girl frowned when she heard me. She kicked the donkey’s flanks, but the beast lowered its long, black-tipped ears and refused to budge. Its eyes were ringed in white at the sight of me. With a sigh, the girl dismounted and ran toward me, just like that. She didn’t hesitate. She was barefoot, the soles of her feet black and tough. She carried no weapon, but as she came within ten yards of me, she dipped a hand into a pouch at her waist—there were at least a dozen little bags hanging from the wide leather kirtle—and spread a line of fine white ash on the ground. She stepped back, beckoning me to come toward her, to cross the line.

  Right, I thought. How stupid do you think I am? I walked around the line and smiled a little when I saw the consternation on her face. Not a girl, I realized, but a woman. Her tiny stature and general lack of grooming gave her the look of a street orphan.

  “Azra,” cried a woman from the shelter of her cottage. “Beware the devil!”

  At last, a whole sentence of Varisian I could understand. I snarled my thanks at the hidden speaker before turning back toward this Azra. What was she? The village witch? The local madwoman? She didn’t know what she was in for.

  I stepped forward, just to give her a little scare, but she was too quick. She whirled away in a gesture that briefly reminded me of Malena’s dance in the Caliphas market. These Varisian women sure know how to dance. So do I.

  As I reached for her arm, I followed so close that I didn’t see she had spread an arc of dust around her as she moved away. I’d not only crossed the line but planted my foot right on the ashen barrier. I winced, expecting a wall of magical energy to freeze me solid or make me do the lightning dance, but nothing happened except that Azra danced away and stood with one fist on her hip. She frowned at me like a gardener discovering a gopher hole among the cabbages.

  Behind me, I heard the slow creak of a hinge. I turned to see the nose of a crossbow emerging from a window.

  “Shoot that thing at me,” I said, “and I will shove it so far...” There was no use threatening anyone, I figured. No one understood a word I was saying.

  I debated a second between charging the window and simply running out of its field of vision, but then Azra shouted a series of short hoots that were definitely not Varisian, maybe not any language. I spared her a glance to see her shoo the man back inside and shake her head “no.” The archer lowered the crossbow and pulled the shutters back, leaving just enough space to peer out at the confrontation.

  Now what? I watched as Azra dipped a knuckle into a tiny jar she took from another belt pouch. She rubbed the stuff into her eyes, blinked, and stared at me.

  I did not like that stare. It made me feel as though my jewels were hanging out. It occurred to me that such might actually be the case, but I checked and saw enough of my pants remained intact that I still had a little modesty left. Still, something about the way this ragged hedge witch looked at me made me feel she saw something inside, maybe something I couldn’t see. It was beyond annoying—it was downright infuriating.

  I bent down to put my face close to hers and opened my mouth to speak, but before I could utter a syllable, she reached up and smacked me on the forehead with the palm of her hand.

  The blow was much harder than I expected, but the surprise, not the impact, made me step back. Her hand came away with a lump of green-gray goop on the palm. I felt something pasty stuck to my brow and reached up to touch it. There was something like a scrap of parchment there, but my fingers couldn’t grip it. They felt thick and numb, and in a second the feeling had spread up my arms.

  I took another step away and wobbled like a drunk. Overcompensating, I stumbled forward. I was going down. I could feel it, and I needed to get away from this woman—this Azra—before I was at her mercy.

  I ran past her, covering yards with every step, faster than I’d ever been before. At t
he other end of the muddy lane I saw a small covered wagon, its side panels carved and painted with images of deer running beneath a starry sky, the moon smiling down at them as wolves crept from the shadows of the trees. I had to laugh. Not for the first time, I sympathized with the deer.

  Behind me, the villagers shouted out of their windows, and Azra answered them with hoots and grunts. If I could just make it to the woods, the worst that would happen is that I’d die and be eaten by wolves. That had to be the lesser evil.

  I ran around the wagon, mindful that the archer might not obey Azra’s command to hold his fire. There I ran straight into the white donkey, which screamed and brayed. It bucked, turning itself completely around in two awkward hops that would have looked hilarious from a distance. I tried to leap aside, but the donkey was quicker. Its hind hooves came up and smashed me.

  For the second time in recent memory, the blow felt as hard as the end of the world.

  Chapter Seven

  The Secret Hand

  Before locating the clues you left to guide me, I uncovered two entirely unanticipated mysteries. The first delighted me so much that I briefly forgot my recent misfortune. The second deepened my suspicion that someone at Willowmourn was deceiving me, or possibly even manipulating my actions.

  A few hours after my second breakfast, Tara found me as I gazed down at Count Galdana’s topiary maze from his second-floor trophy room. My only companions before her arrival were the heads of prey ranging from stags to firepelt cougars to an enormous bugbear, all of which stared from the walls in mute testimony to the skill of the men who had slain them.

  The added height of the second floor allowed me to see more of the topiary figures, which seemed to consist of equal numbers of game animals and monsters, but not the complete maze, which might have given me a few moments’ solace as I unraveled the puzzle of its passages.

  Earlier I had hoped to observe the maze from the vantage of the fourth floor, but a footman stationed at the stairway informed me apologetically but firmly that the upper chambers were unavailable to guests. Despite my obligations to the hospitality of an absent lord, this unexpected barrier only increased my desire to explore those forbidden passages, as did the pungent odor of wine vinegar that I detected from them. I wondered what mishap had caused the servants to use such a noisome cleaning agent, but chances were the answer was both distasteful and uninteresting.

  Coincidentally or not, Tara’s reason for approaching me was quite the opposite of restriction. She found me upon my return to the trophy room, where I had noticed a weapon frame above the hearth was absent its swords.

  “Does Count Galdana carry his entire armory while on the hunt?” I asked.

  “Perhaps he does,” she said with a smile. “We are acquainted only by correspondence. I have scarcely more knowledge of him than you must have. ”

  “And I have none at all,” I said, discounting the gossip of Caliphas. “I hope he shall not mind my presumption of his hospitality while he is away.”

  “Surely he will be grateful that you conducted me safely home,” she said.

  I wanted to ask her more about the events at the bridge, but I knew Casomir would take exception to my questioning Tara rather than asking him directly. Much as I disliked him, there was a protocol to observe. Before I could frame an indirect query, Tara continued.

  “Casomir left instructions that you are to have full access to his uncle’s library,” she said. When I did not immediately respond, she added, “That is why you came, is it not?”

  “Indeed,” I said. “I am grateful for the favor.”

  “I shall tell the servants you are not to be disturbed until supper,” she said. She touched a bell pull beside the mounted head of an enormous stag and indicated the butler, who stood almost invisibly behind her. “If you require anything, feel free to summon Felix.”

  “Thank you.” I noticed shadows beneath her eyes. “Are you well, my lady?”

  She smiled a wan apology. “Our recent misfortunes have troubled my sleep,” she said.

  “No doubt that is it,” I said. “But to be certain of your health, perhaps we should summon a cleric from the city.”

  “Thank you for your concern, Excellency,” she said.

  “Varian, please.”

  “Varian,” she said. “I feel only weary and unsettled, not ill. I promise that the moment I suspect otherwise, I will ask Casomir to summon aid. Until then, it is best that we leave the priests to minister to those most in need.”

  “You are generous, lady.”

  “And you grow more courtly as you recover from our ordeal,” she curtsied. “If you will excuse me, I shall retire until Casomir returns.”

  In her absence, and unable to examine the topiary maze from a better height, I followed Felix to the library. He unlocked the door with a key on a ribbon about his neck. I noted that he kept a ring of keys in the pocket of his coat, suggesting that the library was a chamber of especial privacy. Indeed, he did not follow me inside but begged leave after indicating the location of the bell pull.

  Unlike the absent count’s trophy room, which offered the uncomfortable sensation of being surrounded by predators, Galdana’s library felt instantly comfortable, almost familiar. While it was but a fraction of the size of my holdings at Greensteeples, the room was practically constructed of bookshelves. The walls above the shelves were lined with the crests of various noble houses of Amaans, as well as the occasional bronze statue or marble bust my mother called “dust-catchers.” And yet the library surrendered no horizontal space to anything but bookshelves, and those were crammed with books, scrolls, maps, and folios. Four banks of freestanding shelves stood among the leather chairs and divan, as did a large map table and three podiums. There was barely room left for a modest fireplace before which stood a pair of comfortable-looking chairs, a table laden with books between them. Galdana even had a credible globe, although it appeared to have been constructed generations earlier, and I immediately spied several obvious errors.

  But you know all this already, for the next thing I spied was your ingenious mark. It might have taken me longer to spot it, but the late morning sun slanted directly onto the shelves you had rearranged. Recognizing the “discovery” sigil formed by the spines of green bindings moved from their former organization was a joyous moment that briefly shook the sorrow from my brow.

  From that point, it was a simple matter to select only those volumes whose top edges lacked the thicker layer of dust on the remainder of Galdana’s collection. Here I am tempted to admonish you for trusting that the housekeeping staff did not include a more conscientious chambermaid, but perhaps you had ample opportunity to observe the staff and weigh their deficiencies against the likelihood that one might obliterate your trail.

  A brief inventory of the more recently disturbed tomes provided me with four categories and one anomaly. No doubt the histories of the region were your principal object, and it was no surprise to find religious texts similarly disturbed. Also expected was the discovery that you had removed a number of blank, bound manuscripts. I trust that you received Count Galdana’s permission to use these materials in expanding your Pathfinder journal, or, failing that, that your liberation of them went unnoticed. Discretion is a great shield in the pursuit of knowledge.

  As for the fourth category, I was naturally troubled not only by the presence of several treatises on the cults of Norgorber and Urgathoa but also by evidence that they had been among the most frequently perused volumes. The discovery of such books by his peers would raise difficult questions for Count Galdana, who at best would be labeled a degenerate, at worst condemned as a worshiper of those forbidden deities.

  Apart from the historical, religious, blank, and occult volumes, I also noticed a cheap romance among the recently handled books. Its principal contents were of no obvious importance, but I noted with some bemusement the addition of extremely risqué caricatures drawn upon the margins.

  I had seen such diversions before, hid
den in plain sight among the libraries of the lords of Cheliax. Upon retiring from dinner, the ladies would gather in their parlors while the men withdrew to the library. There, after a few brandies and the distribution of those ghastly Taldan cigars, the host would pretend to show his fellows the latest composition from some wretched “author” of adventure stories. No one of breeding reads such drivel, but the true object was to display the picture drama on the margins. One holds the pages between thumb and finger and riffles the pages. The resulting motion causes the illusion of motion as the drawings—each of the same subjects but in slightly different positions—appear to come to life.

  It would be a fine amusement for children, except for the pornographic nature of the illustrations, which include such quotidian dramas as the lord and the courtesan, the lord and the milkmaid, the milk maid and the courtesan, and so on. Needless to say, it never ceases to amuse visitors, or at least those who find such diversions distasteful are politic enough to feign delight. I count myself among the latter.

  Enough of that. You need no description of something you have already examined. Or have you? I wonder whether you have been the only visitor to Galdana’s library this year, for I have not yet deduced what interest this book could have been to you.

  I would have set aside the romance with its vulgar illustration except that, upon riffling the page, I heard the most unspeakable sounds of the very activities depicted in the illustrations. Even in the event that you have not seen them, I shall spare you the embarrassment of describing either the actions or the sounds. I saw that on the back of each illustration was inscribed a rune, or rather a fragment of one.

  To be certain of what I suspected, I riffled the pages again. Again the bawdy sound emanated from the book. There could be no mistaking the source. I fanned the pages as a gambler might fan cards, arranging the symbols side by side until their relationship became clear. Each was a fragment of an arcane character, three or four together combining to form the letters that compose the words of wizardry. In an enchanted scroll, such characters would have been written whole as parts of the syllables of magic. Moreover, the ink that formed the words would have been invested with the materials required for a wizard to prepare that spell in his mind, like a trap set to await only a catalyst to unleash its power.