Prince of Wolves

by Dave Gross

  The adults we encountered saw that the children had commandeered me and nodded, as if that were the custom when strange hellspawn entered the village. All of them smiled or waved a greeting. Despite their frightening appearances, not a one of them tried to bury me alive or set me on fire. That made them my favorite villagers in all of Ustalav, so far.

  Shortly before the children had exhausted me, one of the village men came to summon me. He bade the children return to their homes, and they reluctantly obeyed. Then he took me to the barn, where I saw six of the strongest men of the village had managed to pin Tudor to a table.

  The big shepherd looked at me with terror in his eyes. “Nuh, nuh!”

  Azra signed to me. Help.

  It took me a moment to work up the nerve to break Tudor’s crooked arm, but I knew it would be worse if I failed to break it on the first strike. Every second I hesitated would only increase his terror, so I didn’t have a choice.

  After it was all done but for the screaming, I held his arm out straight, Azra adjusted my grip, made me hold it there, and affixed a splint to Tudor’s arm. He had fractured it months ago, shortly after her last visit, but he had been far from home with his flock. Without help to splint it, he had let it heal crooked. Azra could repair it with magic, but only after it had been re-broken and set straight. No one else in the village would dare to break the giant’s arm. The big idiot was more than twice my size, and I wouldn’t be sticking around to risk his revenge. The way he blubbered like a baby, however, I had a feeling he’d forget about it before his next meal.

  As Azra finished tying a sling around Tudor’s neck, she signed to an old woman who translated. She spoke as to a slow child, so both Tudor and I could understand. “Do not move that arm,” she said. “Do not take it out of the sling. Do not disturb the splint, or Azra will hex you with blisters.”

  Azra stepped away to wash her hands in a tin basin.

  I gave Tudor a light punch on his good shoulder. “She’ll do it, too, kid,” I said to Tudor in Chelish. In Varisian I added, “Listen to her.” Tudor gave me a rueful look. His unbound hand absently returned to pick his nose.

  The old woman who had translated for Tudor pointed him home with a promise of supper. “Yes, and pie,” she said. That incentive made him break into a gallop.

  As Azra dried her hands, I reached for the basin, but the village woman grabbed my hand and stepped close enough to set my eyes watering with the garlic reek of her breath.

  “My lord,” she said in the same simple cadence she had used to lecture Tudor. “We are poor. Other villages do not trade with us. We have no money to buy things we cannot grow.”

  The way she gripped my hand, I expected her to beg, but she stood tall, staring up into my face with one good and one cataract-blanked eye.

  “Listen,” I said, but she grasped the coin I wore around my neck and kissed it.

  I looked to Azra for advice, but she had walked away. Gently, I removed the woman’s hands and tugged open my purse. Maybe a few coins would help. Or maybe half of my money, and I could make up the rest when I got back to Caliphas and the Towers games. Still, I had been living off Azra’s charity for days. What the hell, I figured. I cinched the purse shut and put it into her hands.

  The old woman went down on her hands and knees. I barely stepped back in time to avoid her kissing my feet.

  “You are good lord,” she said, clutching my trousers. “Long time you have been gone. Now you help your people again. Pharasma spare you. Desna smile upon you.”

  “Come on, now,” I said, reaching down to lift her back to her feet. I tried a little Varisian, remembering that the locals call all old women “grandmother” as a sign of respect. “Please stand, Baba.”

  “Prince Virholt,” she said. She pointed up the side of the mountain, which had grown dark purple in the twilight. “Tomorrow, Tudor will take you to your village. There, your ancestors will bless you.”

  She scurried off, clutching the purse. I washed up, chuckling to myself. If these Ustalavs kept putting me in charge of their families and villages, I’d be running the country by spring.

  As I emerged from the barn, Azra waited for me beside a lantern on a fencepost. She crossed her arms across her breasts, and I saw a world of disapproval on her face.

  “How do you like that?” I asked. “First I’m Prince of Wolves, now I’m Lord of the Freaks.” Still smiling, I walked right into her slap. The blow stung worse than her spells.

  “What was that for?”

  They are people, not freaks.

  “It’s just a joke. I’ve been called worse plenty of times.”

  She lifted the coin from my neck and took a closer look. She snorted and flung it back to strike my chest. Prince of fools. She flicked four fingers off her thumb at me. I didn’t know it as a Pathfinder sign, but the meaning was unmistakable. She scowled and turned as if to leave. Instead, she turned back and signed slowly at me to make sure I understood every word. Rich men, she signed, they praise. Give money, call lord.

  “Well, of course,” I said. “You didn’t think I took that seriously, did you?”

  The truth was I had sort of hoped there was something to what the old woman had said. All my life I’d worked for someone else, first a small-time crime lord, later a bored and overeducated aristocrat. It would have been something, just for once, to be my own boss. All it took was a little hand-licking and foot-kissing to give me delusions of grandeur. The realization made me see myself in a humiliating new light.

  Azra spun on her heel and walked into one of the larger huts. I stood there alone, feeling like an imbecile.

  “Desna wept,” I complained to no one in particular.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Haunted Vales

  After the terror of my last hour at Willowmourn subsided, I surrendered to the thrill of riding my phantom steed across the farmland of northern Amaans. Where we encountered fences, the horse leaped effortlessly to gallop across the stubble of harvested fields. When I leaned forward, the beast’s smoky mane floated up to touch my face, soft and fine as silken threads. The steed’s silent gait left no mark upon the ground, and it uttered no sound of exertion, although I felt its cool chest expand and fall with respiration. I sat so easily in its conjured saddle that I felt as though I were flying rather than riding. During my studies in the arcane so many years ago, I had never enjoyed this exhilaration without the accompanying misery of the nausea.

  I spied fewer farmsteads as I traveled farther from Kavapesta. Against the starry horizon, the silhouette of the Hungry Mountains loomed ever higher to the southwest. To the south were the infamous Hundred Haunted Vales of Amaans, home to the most wretched of the county’s denizens. Travelers were warned, rightly or not, that those who dwelt in the shadow of the mountains in Virlych were slowly driven mad, even their bodies corrupted over generations of stubborn but doomed settlement. I could only speculate whether Count Galdana’s annual progression through shunned territory was a sign of his own madness or an obligation to his subjects.

  More importantly, I wondered whether he was a party to the events occurring at his home. If the late Anneke’s child was Galdana’s bastard, his absence could be his alibi during her murder. Immediately I discarded that theory. It was foolish to assume anyone, even an eccentric like Galdana, would go to such lengths for a murder that could have been handled with far less ritual and more discretion. Whatever had been happening in Willowmourn, I did not think its purpose included the death of Anneke. Far more likely, her death was an indulgence of one or more cultists of Urgathoa.

  The question of why Casomir had turned on Tara remained. Once I’d seen Anneke alive, the warm, golden skin tone of the corpse had been unmistakable. It was hideous to imagine lust alone had caused Casomir to murder and rape his cousin, but no less horrible are the degenerate rituals of Urgathoa. I preferred to speculate on what he could hope to gain by such an act. Perhaps it was a sacrifice intended to elicit a gift of power from Urgathoa. It was pos
sible he craved infernal power to overthrow his uncle’s seat. The monster he sent after Anneke was evidence that he already commanded considerable strength.

  Whatever the answer was, with my note I had passed the problem into the hands of the divine authorities in Kavapesta. Perhaps it appeared cowardly to flee rather than join forces with them, but my priority remained to find you. I am still not satisfied that the cult manuscript I found in Galdana’s library is unrelated to your search. If there is a connection, then I feel ever more keenly the need to find you sooner rather than later.

  My imagination whirled until my phantom steed slowed its pace, a sign that it was soon to vanish. I estimated by the course of the constellations that the time was well after midnight but still hours before dawn, long after I had expected the spell to elapse. I mused upon the possibility that my arcane ability had increased over the years, despite my focus on theory rather than application. It was a logical conjecture, but one I could not properly test without access to spells I had not yet inscribed in my own book.

  Before the steed vanished, I directed it toward a low dell and dismounted. There the horse walked a short distance away and turned to gaze back at me as its semi-substantial body gradually faded from this material world. As it vanished, I raised a hand to bid it farewell. A cool autumn breeze lifted my hair, and the cold hand of loneliness fell upon my shoulder.

  I gathered what deadfall I could find as the ground mist gathered for the morning fog. Without a flint and steel—the necessities in my travel bag included no camping gear—I weighed expedience against the hope that I could duplicate the riffle scrolls. Ultimately I expended another cantrip to start a campfire. Huddling in my coat, I lay beside the fire a long while, struggling to escape the tangled net of questions gripping my imagination until finally slipping under the surface of sleep to sink down toward dreams.

  The mists were thick enough to extinguish my fire before I awoke. For the first time since awaking at Willowmourn, I remembered my dreams. Only this morning I wished otherwise.

  I shuddered to recall images of Tara’s decapitated body rising from its bloody bed to point an accusing finger at me. Even if I could not protect her, once I assumed Count Galdana’s hospitality in his absence, I had a duty to avenge her. I should have had the courage to remain and face Casomir and his familiar, or whatever abomination it was that had slain Anneke.

  Without so much as the campfire, the enveloping mists smothered the daylight too much for reading. Unsheathing Galdana’s sword, I saw that it no longer emitted radiance as it had the previous night. That effect must have been a reaction to the monster I had faced. The question was what quality of the creature evoked the sword’s power. I supposed for now that the horror was of undead or infernal origin, but proof would require further study.

  The more urgent matter at hand was determining whether I could reproduce the effect of the riffle scrolls. Despite the morning gloom, I made a crude podium of my bag and arrayed the necessary materials upon my lap desk. Hunger pangs distracted me, but if what I suspected were true, I would be better served by waiting before eating.

  My caution proved wise. After drawing only a few of the broken runes upon the riffle pages, my stomach gurgled. As I continued, my discomfort grew more and more noxious, rising from my gorge to tickle at the base of my throat. Briefly I considered pausing to force myself to expunge the contents of my stomach, but I pushed on, hoping that I could complete such an elementary spell before the act became involuntary. I held my handkerchief ready as I inscribed the final rune.

  My nausea vanished like a burst soap bubble. It did not merely subside; rather, I felt as hale as though the infirmity had never touched me.

  At last I could wield the powers I had once toiled miserably to master. Of course, the need to inscribe the spells on these unorthodox scrolls entailed some disadvantages—unlike other wizards, I could be more effectively disarmed—but there were obvious advantages as well: triggering a scroll was quicker than casting many spells, and all of its verbal and somatic components were performed in advance. Like an orthodox wizard, however, I still needed to carry the appropriate material components and spell foci on my person. I felt a certain measure of pride in my earlier, forgotten deduction of this process. Moreover, I felt pride in my rediscovery. What I had accomplished before, I could do again.

  By the time I had re-inscribed the cantrip as a riffle-scroll, the mists had almost completely evaporated. I blinked as I rose from a cramped writing posture—an unfortunate habit developed in my academically oriented youth—and surveyed my surroundings. The dell at day was utterly different from the location I had seen at night. From the bottom of a shallow depression, I gazed up at a sparse ring of trees standing sentinel around me. The spot where I had lit my fire in the dark could not have been better shielded from the eyes of any who might have pursued me from Willowmourn. Unfortunately, it also offered me no vantage from which to calculate my location relative to the mountains. A limbering stroll would be my third order of business after testing my first new riffle scroll and breaking my fast.

  I squeezed the last of the deadfall in my coat to dry it and lay the wood atop the dead fire. Resentful of the waste of writing material, I tore a page from one of the blank folios, crushed it into a ball, and set it under the branches as tinder. I held my breath as I riffled the cantrip. As the last of the strips snapped out from beneath my thumb, the paper alit with orange flames. When I had recovered from a spontaneous cheer, I foolishly looked about to ensure no one had observed me behaving like a child one-tenth my age. The confirmation of my solitude dampened my spirits, even as the fire took hold of the wood.

  The warmth was a comfort, although the fire offered little illumination in the mist. I re-inscribed the scrolls I had cast earlier, pausing to consider whether I should replace any with different spells. Unable to anticipate the nature of the threats I might face on the rest of my journey, I trusted to the selection my unremembered self had made. Some intuition suggested he might have known more than I had rediscovered since my second awakening.

  The unexpectedly long duration of my phantom steed encouraged me to attempt to create an addition to my existing repertoire. Using another blank sheaf, I copied the steal book spell from the existing riffle scroll. Once satisfied that it was as accurate as I could make it under present conditions, I directed the scroll to this journal and let the strips flip off my thumb. I felt the tingling sensation of magic on my fingers, but I detected no visible effect on the open pages. However, upon the riffle scroll itself, the characters glimmered as though the ink had been mixed with diamond dust. That was interesting, for theoretically the characters should have vanished with the discharge of the magic they contained, but seeing that they did not gave me an insight into the operation of the spell.

  I removed another of the blank folios from my satchel and opened its pages. Before riffling the scroll again, a sudden misgiving made me stay my hand. I counted the pages and was assured there were more in the blank volume than I had covered with my writing in the journal. Holding my breath, I directed the scroll at the folio and let it slip. As the leaves riffled free, the glimmering characters flashed and vanished. Instantly, the very same passages I had written in my journal appeared on the fresh book, leaving the original blank.

  This time I celebrated my triumph in a more seemly fashion, by eating sparingly of the food I had stolen from Galdana’s kitchen. I had taken only a few pounds of cured meat and a bag of shelled nuts, knowing I could forage or even capture game with magic, but it was prudent to ration from the start rather than to find myself wanting later. I expected to find few if any inhabitants nearby. Judging from the rumors I’d heard of the Hungry Mountains within Virlych, it was even possible the area was devoid of edible flora and fauna.

  When I finished eating, I gathered my belongings and smothered the fire. There was no convenient way to secure Galdana’s sword at my hip, so I wedged it in the mouth of my satchel, where it resembled the walking stick of s
ome business clerk. My vanity frowned at the image I must have presented, but I countered by reminding myself that there was no one to observe me.

  I walked up the nearest rise and surveyed my surroundings. The mists had retreated to the southeast, gathering their force at the foot of the mountains. It was neither fear nor curiosity alone, but both together, that reignited the thrill of discovery. With the new riffle scroll, I summoned my phantom steed and rode into the Hungry Mountains.

  By noon I debated whether to stop for a rest. Terror and confusion had compelled me to remain all night on horseback, with the added benefit of using the full duration of my conjuration to escape the horrors at Willowmourn. Today, however, I faced a choice between tending to my health and gaining a few extra miles toward my goal. Both options were attractive, but at last my hunger, coupled with my inability to eat while riding, persuaded me to stop.

  I chose a sunny hill that commanded the surrounding land for miles around. The Hungry Mountains encircled me now, although in the far south I knew they parted at the southernmost point of the Gorcha Pass. The mists had all but vanished, crawling back into the narrow valleys of Virlych, where purple and green lightning flashed within the gloom. Somewhere in that obscure territory lay the tomb of the man who hid his wicked knowledge from the Whispering Tyrant and perished for the offense.