Prince of Wolves

by Dave Gross

  It was a fascinating discovery, but unless I could be certain that it was you who lately investigated this book, it was not a lead worth pursuing. Perhaps one of the servants, or Casomir in his uncle’s absence, had amused himself with this tawdry diversion. Lacking more compelling evidence that it had been among the volumes you had studied, I set it aside for later examination of its magical effect.

  I first put aside the religious volumes because I have long been familiar with the worship of both Desna and Pharasma. My mother introduced me to the splendors of the Song of the Spheres in my earliest days, and together we worshiped her until the rise of the House of Thrune and the national obligation to venerate Asmodeus, the Prince of Law. While I have never been a devotee of the Lady of Graves, all who live must one day face her judgment, and so it behooves us all to learn what to expect when Pharasma lifts the material veil from our faces. Unlike those who find her prominent standing in Ustalav a grim obsession, I see it as a sign of strength in the national character that the people of this land embrace the ultimate moment of their lives rather than subjugate themselves to the fear of it.

  Despite my dedication to knowledge of all subjects, I was loath to open those books concerning the cults of Norgorber and Urgathoa. As a Pathfinder, I have always despised the Reaper of Reputation and his various cults. To those who esteem learning, there can be no more senseless following than that which employs intrigue and murder to suppress knowledge. The most terrible tyranny is the tyranny of ignorance. As for Urgathoa, the Pallid Princess, I knew of course that she had her followers among Varisians who rejected the notion that their lives were subject to the judgment of Pharasma and, like their awful goddess, desired to extend their mortal lives beyond their natural terms. I can think of nothing more hideous than the transformation of one’s self into an abomination of life.

  Thus, I devoted the rest of the afternoon to studying the histories of Amaans and Virlych, the pages of which displayed the most handling. You must have been anxious to continue pursuit of your goal, for I am certain at leisure you would have shown more care.

  While I have a good grounding in the history of Ustalav and the surrounding territories, I am no expert in the minutia. Perhaps that is the wrong term, for even the tiniest detail can be of great importance under the right circumstances. I followed those points you deemed most relevant by looking for the imprint of your thumbnail in the margin. In the beginning, it proved little more than a refresher of commonly known history, but gradually an untold story began to take shape.

  The history of Ustalav is in many ways one of the footnotes of the history of Tar-Baphon. It was over a thousand years after the death of the wizard-king’s mortal incarnation that Soividia Ustav unified the Varisian clans and gave a name to the resulting country. Even during this golden age, the fractious Varisians would not be ruled by a lone monarch. To avoid disintegration of the country, one of Soividia’s descendents elected to share his power, dividing responsibility for its government among sixteen counties and thus calming the most ambitious powerful clan leaders.

  For five centuries afterward, Ustalav flourished among the other nations encircling Lake Encarthan, each of its long succession of monarchs believing that Tar-Baphon had met his fate at the hands of the now-dead god Aroden on the Isle of Terror. None realized that the immortal warlord merely slept, awaiting the completion of the rituals he had set in motion centuries earlier. When he rose as the lich known as the Whispering Tyrant, Ustalav was the first human land he held in thrall.

  He culled those who would not serve, raising their lifeless bodies to form his first legions. By the time he combined these with forces from the orc nation of Belkzen, the neighboring lands were unprepared for his assault. It took over five hundred years for the nations of Avistan to mount a unified defense. They might never have done so except for the rallying cry of the Taldan empire’s Shining Crusade combined with the dwarves of Kraggodan and the Knights of Ozem. Armies of dwarves and men struggled against the seemingly inexhaustible might of the Whispering Tyrant for more than seventy years before the Taldan general Arnisant broke the Shield of Aroden upon the staff of the Whispering Tyrant, sacrificing his own life in the act. That fraction of the god’s power contained within the artifact washed over Tar-Baphon, weakening him sufficiently for the abjurers and priests of Taldor to imprison him beneath the roots of his own seat of power, the dread Gallowspire.

  Ustalav rose from its ashes not as a phoenix but as a frail shadow of its former self. The counties once known as Virholt and Grolych had been reduced to a blasted range of desolate mountains pocked with the ruins of the Tyrant’s monuments. The lords of Ustalav have been content to leave that land to the restless dead, and they call it Virlych. The Shining Crusade claimed another portion of Ustalav as a bastion against the awakening of Tar-Baphon, and today that is the nation of Lastwall. Even among the central counties of Ustalav, three have overthrown their feudal lords to declare themselves the Palatinates, and the Prince has neither the will nor the power to defy them. Rather, he must concern himself with the ambitions of rivals for his seat, now in Caliphas, far from Soividia Ustav’s home of Ardis.

  So much of the country’s history I might have recited from memory, but a comparison of the minor chronicles you consulted beside them leads me to some intriguing additions. I had not known, for instance, of this rebel lord of Virholt who surrendered his county and offered his service to the Whispering Tyrant. It is tempting to embrace the scholar’s proposition that he did so to spare his people the horror of undead existence among the Tyrant’s legions. Such romantic notions are seldom historically accurate, especially those forwarded by servants of the prevailing force.

  Did you note the references to Virholt’s conjurations and compacts? The implications are troubling in their lack of detail. Answering the question of whether this Lord Virholt bargained with infernal powers before or after entering the service of Tar-Baphon could radically alter our understanding of the fall of Ustalav.

  More imminently, if you are in search of some remnant of Virholt, I hope you are prepared to face the darkest magics. It does not take an immortal like Tar-Baphon to leave deadly traps behind. Too many of our colleagues have discovered this truth in the moment of their last living error.

  After this first light review of the materials you assembled, I was anxious to learn more, but I found myself weary and desirous of a celebratory tonic. I rose to summon Felix, but as I placed my hand upon the bell pull, I noticed something out of place. Behind the nearest shelf I detected an unusual shadow thrown by the late afternoon night. Something rested behind the books on the top shelf. I rolled the ladder quietly over and stepped up to peer down behind the obscuring books

  Behind them were several sheaves of fine vellum. Each had been cut horizontally to form sixteen miniature books, secured on one side by a strip of brass bent over to form a crude binding. They rested atop three unbound folios, a small velvet pouch, and an inkpot.

  Some preternatural warning tingled at the base of my skull. I descended the ladder as quietly as possible and crept toward the door. Listening, I heard no sign of a presence. I turned the doorknob and was surprised to find it locked from the other side. Peering through the keyhole, I saw no one in the corridor.

  Now all my skin crawled with anticipation and suspicion. I strolled with feigned casualness past the windows. Apart from the young hound I had seen earlier, who gazed up through the window as if keeping watch on me, I detected no spies peering in. Compelled by that numinous feeling, I completed a circuit of the room as if exercising muscles grown stiff with inactivity. I saw no peep holes and suspected none of the various knickknacks of serving as a scrying device. Assured that I was unseen, at least by means obvious or mundane, I returned to the high shelf and removed the hidden papers. Beneath them I discovered a further treasure: a long sword sheathed in a scabbard of white leather and gold frame, held against the wall by the weight of the bookshelf. I left it there as I descended to examine the strange l
ittle books.

  They were not proper books but strips of bound pages devoted entirely to the flipbook characters I had previously encountered. The contents were spells with which I was once intimately familiar, spells I had studied in hopes that they would serve to protect me from the dangers of a Pathfinder expedition, before I regretfully abandoned them in the face of my peculiar frailty to holding magic within my mind. Yet there was something far more familiar about these “riffle scrolls,” as it immediately occurred to me to call them. The realization settled upon me like a mantle of ice at the same time as I heard the sound of Casomir’s carriage returning from the ferry crossing.

  The writing on the strange scrolls was indisputably my own.

  Chapter Eight

  The Black Bird

  For months after my initiation to the Goatherds, I had nightmares about that day, and how I beat a merchant’s son to within an inch of his life as the rest of the gang looked on as witnesses. After a while, even when I was asleep in the pen beside the other boys, I realized the recurring visions were only dreams. Still, they held me tight until I woke myself kicking to sit up sweating in the cold dark, knowing even as a child that on the day I died there’d be another stone weighing down Pharasma’s scales on the side of Hell.

  This dream was a lot like those.

  The boss had told me stories of the gigantic birds called rocs, bigger than caravels. He said they nested in the mountains of Qadira, blotting out the sky as they swooped down on caravans to pluck up camels two at a time, their riders still in their saddles.

  I’d never seen one, of course, but in my dream—it had to be a dream—one of those rocs chased me across a broken desert. Because it was a dream, I knew what my pursuer was, even though the only way I could see it was by looking for the black void where the stars had been, or when one of its monstrous wings passed before the fat lozenge of the moon. The beats of its wings were thunder, and each one threw down an earthquake. I ran from cover to cover, squatting beside a withered tree or lying flat in a shallow ditch as it swooped past. The ground was so hot that I couldn’t stand still for more than a few seconds, but each time I peered over the edge of a ragged gully looking for the next shelter, the wind frosted my cheeks.

  I heard a shriek behind me. Before I could roll away, talons raked my neck and a beak pecked hard into my cheek. Bright pain blossomed over my neck and shoulder, and I flailed my arms to drive it away, falling to the side and lolling like a stunned beast.

  Miraculously, I escaped, if only for a moment. I smelled the musty scent of feathers and heard the great roc scratching furrows into the cracked mud. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t stand up. I rolled helplessly from side to side, caught in a dry ditch barely wider than my shoulders. I kicked out, and though my foot did not move far, it struck a sharp edge.

  My shout half-woke me from the nightmare, but I felt a weight on my chest, and the feather smell filled my nose. I was lying on a carpet upon a wooden floor, not the ground, and I was moving up or backward. The space was not so small, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was back in a coffin. I tried to open my eyes, but only the right lids parted.

  Through a gauzy veil the light stabbed my brain. The instant I shut my eye tight, something stabbed my chin. I reached for it, but my arms were bound tight around my body. Rocking to the side, I struck another hard edge, a box or a piece of furniture. Behind me, above my head, I heard the nickering of a beast and a popping sound, like someone smacking his lips. The jolting motion slowed and stopped.

  A sudden lurch startled my stomach and shoved me upward, my skull cracking against a barrier above my head. Tiny yellow stars danced in my brain, and hot bile rushed into my mouth. I tried to spit, but something covered my face, and my own sick ran over my chin and back up into my nose.

  Choking, I struggled to raise my hands to my face. Too weak to tear the fabric that held my arms down, all I achieved was the bastard whelp of a sob and a gag. I tried to sit up, but I could barely lift my feet a few inches. Even that much effort made my guts ache. If I were on the way to Hell today, this is not the way I’d have chosen to travel there.

  An opening door creaked somewhere past my feet, followed by the jabber of a startled chicken whose feet I felt scratch through the fabric over my legs. Someone hissed and shooed away the creature. Its wings stirred a cloud of dust and dander. A hand touched my knee. I felt the pressure of splints on both of my legs.

  The hand traveled upward, joined by another as they caught my struggling wrists. I sputtered through the vomit, unable to speak. At last the hands came to my mouth and tore open the fabric. I turned to spit, and one of the hands lifted my head to let the vomit drain out of my nose. I could breathe freely again.

  “Thanks,” I said in a voice frailer than a whisper. On the bright side, it was my voice, and I recognized my words as Taldane.

  “Oh,” said a female voice. Those hands pushed me down as I tried to sit up again. She said something unintelligible.

  “Come again?”

  More sounds, mostly vowels, were the only reply as the woman moved away. It wasn’t Varisian, and it damned sure wasn’t Taldane.

  “I can’t move,” I said. “I want to get up.” Even pushing those few words out exhausted me. I lay still, trying to gather strength but finding none.

  The woman returned, this time with water that I could hear sloshing in a jug. I was thirstier than I’d ever been, but she wet a cloth and wiped my chin before giving me any to drink. She took it away before I was done. When I lifted my head in protest, she pushed me back firmly. Her hand was warm and calloused.

  Next she tore open the fabric on my face and pressed her wet cloth onto my eyes. The water was blessedly cool. She wiped away thick particles, the last remnants of my burned lashes, I imagined, without much hope that I was going to see a pretty face in the next mirror. She wet the cloth again and wrung it over my brow before wiping away more of the detritus. My closed eye was tender, as was most of the left side of my face. Tiny fingers pressed against the lids and carefully pulled them open.

  “Ah!” I cried. I saw a smear of blood as my left eye opened, but I could see. The vision in my right eye was normal, and after a few more moments of her ministrations, I saw where I was.

  Kneeling beside me was Azra, the witch who’d knocked me out in the village. She was not as small as I’d previously thought, but it was hard to tell while lying on the floor of her covered wagon. Maybe she just seemed bigger up close.

  She shifted the hinge of the table on which I’d cracked my skull and secured it to the wagon wall. She helped me sit up and left me propped against the front wall while she unfolded panels on either side of the wagon to let in the fresh air.

  From the concave ceiling hung bags, stained-glass globes, bundles of dried meat, and bunches of flowers and roots. As Azra opened windows, the scent of autumn leaves blew in to mingle with the pungent aroma of the herbs. On the floor of the wagon, formed approximately in an outline of my body, lay baskets, chests, sacks of grain, clay jugs, bags of potatoes, an open box of tinker’s tools, a tiny iron stove, a coil of rope, and a hundred smaller things tucked in between. Above my head was a box fastened to the wagon’s front wall, and its looming there made me feel claustrophobic. I slid down, but even that slight motion triggered a new bout of vertigo.

  Outside, the chicken that had tormented me chanted balk balk balk while marching the perimeter. Beside the rear door I saw an iron loop with a piece of twine that moved back and forth in time with the sound of the bird.

  Looking down, I saw I was covered in some patchwork garment of thin gray cotton. It had been stitched together from five or six smaller pieces to form a sort of bag around me. Because of the fatigue or sickness or just plain stupidity, it took me a long time to realize what it was.

  “Son of a bitch!” I tried to shout, but it came out more like a sneeze. I struggled as hard as I could—which was still weaker than a newborn kitten—to rip the thing off. One of my spurs tore through the side.
I raised my arm to widen the tear, and that gave me room enough to push my hands through. My thumbs were swaddled in thick stained cloth, bloody little mummies.

  Azra returned, her hands raised to calm me. I wasn’t interested in calm just then.

  “What the hell is wrong with you people?” I said. “You worship Pharasma, I got it, but that gives you no right to box me, bury me, or sew me into a goddamned shroud!”

  She stepped back, cleared a spot on a box, and sat down to watch as I raged. As tantrums go, it was pretty feeble. I listed only a few curses in either of our languages, all of which she seemed to understand, but none of which seemed to bother her. I gave up, disappointed I hadn’t shocked or at least annoyed her.

  She pointed at me and placed her hands together beside her check, then turned her head to mime sleeping.

  “I’m not tired,” I said. That was a lie, but I wasn’t ready to start agreeing with anyone at that point.

  She cradled her arms and rocked them as though she held a baby.

  “I am not acting like a child.”

  She laughed, but it came out a strange huh-huh-huh sound. Something was wrong inside her mouth, but I couldn’t see what it was. She shook her head and frowned, thinking for a second. She repeated the baby gesture and touched the fabric of the shroud.

  “These are shrouds of children?”

  She nodded.

  “Desna weeps.” I shuddered. Wearing the shrouds of dead children had to come with some nasty big curse, the wickedest evil eye a witch could give you.