The City of Ravens

by Baker, Richard

  “I know that you were looking forward to tonight’s Game, Illyth, but do you think it would be wise to attend? If we fail to appear tonight, Tiger and Mantis might guess that their ploy has succeeded, and we might finally have them at a disadvantage. Perhaps they’ll make a mistake.”

  Illyth looked down at her dress. “Solving the riddle of the Seven Faceless Lords doesn’t seem as intriguing as it did an hour ago,” she said. “I don’t share your certainty that Tiger and Mantis are responsible, but I agree that attending the Game isn’t a good idea at the moment. That person escaped, and who knows where he’s going to strike next?”

  “I intend to confront him at my earliest convenience and settle this issue,” Jack replied. “The Green Lord’s banquet is in four days, correct? By then I will have certainly apprehended the miscreant who borrowed my appearance, thus ending the threat.” He offered Illyth his cloak and draped it over her shoulders, then helped her to his coach. “I’ll stay with you awhile and keep watch, in case he returns, and we’ll pass the time by comparing clues, as we’d planned.”

  “That’s right,” Illyth said, narrowing her eyes. “Jack, you were late by nearly an hour!”

  “Punctuality is a virtue I never claimed to possess in abundance, dear Illyth,” Jack said. He climbed into the coach behind her and signaled to the driver. “Back to Woodenhall, good man. We will be staying in this evening.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jack passed the night comfortably stationed in the parlor of Woodenhall, ostensibly watching for any return of the doppelganger or shadow that had attacked Illyth earlier. But well before dawn he rose and slipped away, anxious to get back to the city in time to meet Anders and Tharzon. He left word with the staff that Illyth was to be guarded carefully and made his preparations for an expedition into Sarbreen’s depths. He should have been trembling with anticipation, given the situation; if all went well, he might take possession of a prize so valuable that Elana’s commission and the Game of Masks would pale in comparison. But Jack still couldn’t help but feel that Zandria had excruciatingly poor timing. He had too many other things to think about, so, with a mind full of dark suspicions and an uneasy heart, he met Anders and Tharzon near the house rented out by the Company of the Red Falcon and followed Zandria into Sarbreen.

  The Guilder’s Tomb proved to be a surprisingly accessible place. From the sewers beneath Tentowers, an old vertical shaft led to a deep drain tunnel far beneath the city. Deeper tunnels and complexes intersected the shaft at various intervals, like floors of a building connected indirectly by a laundry chute or dumbwaiter. About sixty feet below the city sewers, a long, vaulted passage slanted across the vertical drop, leading to a broad chamber guarded by fierce-looking stone statues of grim dwarves. Zandria’s company splashed through the sewers for a time, then rappelled down to the intersecting passage and marched only a hundred yards to reach the place. Jack, Anders, and Tharzon followed at a discreet distance.

  Dwarves were hewers of rock and carvers of stone; Sarbreen, their ancient city, was bored through the rocky prominence of Raven’s Bluff, in some cases hundreds of feet below the surface. The place was a maze in three dimensions, an endless labyrinth of shafts and passages, halls and chambers. In over a century and a half of human habitation on the hillside above, no one had ever mapped more than a tiny portion of Sarbreen’s lost halls, but no part of Sarbreen was more than an hour’s walk from the city above—if one knew the way.

  If one didn’t, the dwarven ruin might as well have been a wilderness the size of a kingdom. Most expeditions returned empty-handed after wandering aimlessly for hours or days through the same chambers. A few encountered old dwarven traps, hidden pits, and deadly blades that scythed out of dark alcoves, and some ran into dangerous and deadly monsters—undead things that hungered for the blood of the living, ferocious scavengers that fed from the city’s effluvia drifting down from above, and horrifying aberrations that crept up into Sarbreen’s halls from even more mysterious and remote depths far below the light. Jack had abandoned dungeoneering as a pastime after one such encounter. Hours of tedium punctuated by rare moments of utter terror hardly seemed like a heroic pursuit to him. Besides, the few expeditions that were successful brought their loot back to the surface, where rogues like Jack could easily help themselves to someone else’s good fortune.

  Following the brilliant magical lights of Zandria’s company, Jack and his companions carefully tailed the band to the broad chamber at the end of the passageway. They carried no lights of their own; Tharzon’s dwarven eyes were more than capable of piercing the darkness, and Jack worked a spell he knew that sharpened his own sight. Anders they led carefully along until they were close enough to see by the distant light of Zandria’s expedition. The three rogues found a spot to wait about a hundred feet down the hall and settled in to watch.

  “What do we do next?” whispered Tharzon.

  Jack replied, “Let’s see if Sarbreen’s legendary perils do that work for us. Zandria is not a mage to be trifled with. She has at least two capable swordsmen with her—I met them when I visited their stronghold in the city. See, there they are.” In the yellow light flooding the end of the hall, Zandria’s companions spread out to search the chamber, while the Red Wizard consulted papers and notes before a gleaming slab of stone in the center of the far wall.

  “Those other two in armor are probably priests,” Tharzon added. He pointed to a short, stocky man and a young, athletic woman with a shaved head. “See the emblems of Tyr, there, and Tempus? Best to figure that they are both trained warriors, too, as well as potential spellcasters.” The dwarf shifted slightly to change his view. “There’s another fellow in dark clothes, probably a lockpick or burglar.”

  “That makes six to our three,” Anders observed. “We should have brought a couple more stout lads to even the odds. Jankizen from Shadystreets would be useful.”

  “Jankizen can’t add two and two twice and come up with the same result,” Jack snorted. “Besides, more help means more shares.” He peered down the hallway at the small pool of light.

  Zandria and her allies were busy readying for a fight, checking weapons and arranging potions and scrolls so that they could be easily found in a hurry.

  “They’re getting ready to open the tomb. Wait here, lads. I’ll creep a little closer to see what unfolds.”

  “Don’t get caught,” Tharzon muttered.

  Jack winked at the dwarf and wove his spell of invisibility, vanishing from sight. He stepped out from behind the broken columns they’d chosen for cover and advanced toward Zandria’s company, picking his steps carefully. Invisibility did not make him inaudible as well, and the crunch of a thoughtless footstep on rubble or a carelessly kicked stone would alert Zandria. Mages had spells to reveal things invisible, and Jack had no wish to put the Company of the Red Falcon on its guard.

  At the moment, the adventurers stood in a loose half circle surrounding Zandria as she faced the wall opposite the entrance—except for the swordsman Brunn and the Tyrian priest, who deliberately watched the hallway outside for the approach of any enemy from that quarter. Jack nodded in appreciation; these were professionals, as he’d suspected. He stopped about ten feet short of the two sentries and studied the scene.

  Now choked in rubble and ruin, the chamber had once been grand indeed. Two twenty-foot pillars had been carved into the likeness of grim dwarven sentries, guarding the entrance to the room. The chamber itself was a high rotunda, its walls lined with tall columns. A great carving in relief circled the entire chamber, a pastoral scene of grain fields and vineyards. In the center, directly opposite the entrance, stood a smooth glossy stone with a smaller, more intricate carving.

  “Zandria’s inscription,” Jack whispered to himself. “Excellent!”

  The red-haired mage stood with her back to him, facing the wall. She carried a long staff of dark, rune-engraved wood and wore a short sword of strange black metal at her side. Holding the staff in the crook of her elbow, she
studied a parchment scroll.

  “Now, ten paces south from here,” she said. “South is toward the entrance, correct?”

  “Aye,” said the priest of Tyr, speaking over his shoulder. “The hall outside runs straight north and south.”

  Zandria turned and began pacing straight toward Jack, her expression fixed in concentration. She counted ten paces and then halted, very near the entrance to the chamber. She referred to her notes again.

  “Now, I speak the words kharaz-urzu.”

  As soon as the dwarven words left her lips, a bright silver light softly grew in the chamber. High above, shining orbs hidden among stone carved to resemble the boughs of trees began to glow magically, overpowering the adventurers’ own spells of light. The swordsmen shifted nervously, vigilant for any sign of impending attack, but instead of heralding the arrival of some ancient guardian, the light simply cast a glimmering field of slanting silver beams throughout the room as each ray bounced and rebounded from hidden, polished surfaces.

  “What’s happening?” called out the priestess of Tempus. She whirled from side to side, her battle-axe poised to strike. “Zandria?”

  “Hold a moment. Nothing threatens us,” the wizardess replied.

  She turned slowly, studying the patterns formed by the argent beams. Six rays gleamed in the chamber from six silver apples hidden in the stony leaves at the apex of the room; each reflected four times from smooth, glossy spaces cunningly hidden in the carving that surrounded the room, creating a cage of light that spiraled down to meet at one common point in the center of the chamber—a large seven-sided stone that stood perhaps an inch higher than the rest of the floor.

  “The seven stone,” Zandria breathed. “Brunn! Kale! Crowbars, quickly! Raise the stone in the center!”

  The swordsman, Brunn, abandoned his post at the entrance to the rotunda and shrugged off his pack. The slender half-elf in gray joined him. Both men rummaged through their backpacks and came up with short iron crowbars. Then, silhouetted by the silver light, they worked the tools under one edge of the stone and slowly levered it up. The stone was about six or seven inches thick, and almost four feet in diameter.

  “There’s a staircase hidden under here!” called the half-elf.

  “The Guilder’s Tomb,” Zandria whispered. She glanced around. “Thieron and Durevin, stay up here and guard our exit. Kale, you take the lead. Be wary of traps; Sarbreen’s full of them. Brunn, you follow Kale, and I will follow you. Maressa, you bring up the rear. Any questions?”

  “It’s dangerous to split up,” said the priest of Tyr. “What if you have need of Durevin and me when you get to the other end of the passageway below?”

  “We’ll call for you to join us if it looks like we might lose contact, Thieron,” Zandria said. “All right, then, let’s get to it.”

  The scout—Kale—nodded once and dropped quickly into the stairwell, alert and cautious. Brunn, the big swordsman, came after the thief, jingling in a mail shirt that hung to his knees. Zandria followed and then the priestess of Tempus. Jack debated returning to where his friends hid and then decided that the opportunity was simply too good. He glided forward between the Tyr priest and the other swordsman, who stood watching warily in all directions, and followed Maressa down into the staircase.

  The stairwell opened out into a long, low hall, leading into darkness. They advanced a long way, passing entirely beneath the rotunda by Jack’s reckoning, and then began to climb back up another flight of stairs.

  “We’re right behind that damned memorial stone,” observed Kale from the front of the party. “All this time wasted solving the riddle, when we could have tunneled or blasted our way through with magic!”

  “I am not certain that would have been the case, Kale,” said Zandria. “The master stonewrights of Sarbreen had secret ways of strengthening stone, reinforcing against magical attack. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had guarded the vaults behind the rotunda with these techniques.”

  “Door ahead,” the thief said by way of reply. A great valve of shining silver stood at the top of the stairs at the end of the secret passage, only six feet in height but almost as wide. The likeness of a dignified elder dwarf was embossed in the center of the portal.

  “Cedrizarun himself, I believe,” Zandria said. “Search for a means to open it, Kale, but be careful. There may be a trap.”

  The lockpick nodded and moved closer to inspect the door. The rest of the group fell silent as they allowed Kale to do his work. “Ah,” said the thief. “Avoid the handle, here. It triggers some kind of mechanism—a pit trap beneath this staircase, I believe. Instead, all we need to do is simply slide the door aside. It’s on a very well concealed track.”

  “You mean it doesn’t open? You just shove it aside like a decorative screen?” Brunn laughed. “Not very secure, is it?”

  “That’s not all. Some magical force prevents the door from moving. I suspect that we need a password of some kind, as we did above.”

  Zandria nodded. “Kharaz-urzu!” she stated. Nothing happened. The others waited, shifting nervously, but no silver light appeared, and the door remained immovable. “Damn, I’d hoped it was the same word. Very well, then. Stand back, I’ll work a spell of opening.”

  The other retreated back down the stairs a few steps as Zandria raised her staff and struck once on the silver barrier, muttering old magical words. The silver surface glimmered and then began to roll aside. As it opened, an arc of darkness appeared at one corner and then twisted up and around, replacing the silver wall—the door was wheel-shaped, rolling aside in its seamless stone groove. Zandria waited for the door to move aside and then thrust her staff into the space revealed, conjuring a brilliant burst of magical light to illuminate the space beyond.

  Gold glittered and sparkled in the darkness. Jack blinked in amazement; the vault was full! Dwarven arms and weapons gleamed in the light, tall banners from a dozen battles lined the walls, and everywhere he looked great painted vessels and gilt coffers bulged with gold and jewels. A single share of this loot might be worth thousands upon thousands of gold crowns!

  “Oh, my,” said Kale. The lockpick took one tentative step toward the waiting riches and licked his lips. “Oh, my.”

  Zandria barred his way with her staff. “We will examine the treasure carefully and completely before we begin to remove it from the vault. Remember, the first thing we want is the Orb. Anything after that is merely a pleasant bonus, and for Azuth’s sake, exercise caution! Who knows what traps the Sarbreen dwarves might have planted within the vault itself?”

  The Orb? Jack thought to himself. What in Faerûn is Zandria looking for that all this wealth barely impresses her? He carefully trailed the adventurers into the vault, noting with some appreciation that Brunn and Maressa were engaged in wedging an iron spike under the rim of the door-wheel so that the heavy silver circle would not roll back into place and trap them all inside. The vault was arranged in a simple cross shape, with a small round room at the intersection of three short arms; the entrance was at the base of a somewhat longer arm. In the center of the round room stood a great stone sarcophagus.

  Zandria and Kale split up, wandering through the vault without disturbing anything large, although Kale quietly pocketed a few interesting baubles when Zandria was not looking. Jack smiled and indulged his own larcenous impulses when neither the mage nor the lockpick was looking his way, filling his pockets as quickly as he could. He filched a fine-looking dagger of strange dark steel, a ring evidently carved from a single piece of onyx, and a dusty bottle that might or might not have sloshed with some small amount of Cedrizarun’s legendary brandy.

  “Ontrodes will bless me until his dying day.” Jack smiled. Now for the real trick, he wondered: How do we separate this much wealth from the Company of the Red Falcon without a fight?

  There was a vertical lift of over sixty feet on the way back to the surface, he recalled. Jack could post himself in the middle of the shaft, armed with a knife, then, when Z
andria’s companions hoisted up bags of loot, Jack could cut the line and drop the loot to the bottom of the shaft, where Anders and Tharzon waited to make off with the booty.

  “That would fetch us only a fraction of the take,” he muttered. “One or two bags at the most before they became suspicious.”

  Maybe he could substitute bags full of rocks for the gold, quietly switching the treasure one sack at a time as they hauled it past him, but he’d have to count on no one opening a sack at the top until all the sacks were up, and Jack couldn’t imagine how he could encourage Zandria’s friends to leave the sacks alone that long. Unless … unless there was someone up there when the sacks arrived, a passer-by who innocently engaged Zandria and her allies in conversation. Of course the Red Falcons wouldn’t inspect their sacks if Tharzon and Anders happened by, engaged in a routine exploration of Sarbreen’s upper levels. Zandria might order the two killed in order to protect their secrecy, but Jack doubted that she was made of such ruthless stuff. She’d probably chase them off after a few minutes. In the meantime, Jack would keep hauling up loot as if there were nothing wrong up above. He grinned widely. There was a plan worth putting into action!

  “Come here!” Zandria stood by the sarcophagus, gazing at the stone carving on the lid. The top of the sarcophagus was worked into a likeness of Cedizarun, reposed on his back, a noble bottle clasped to his breast. “Brunn, Maressa—the sarcophagus holds a secret compartment!”

  Jack looked over at the adventurers, now clustered around the dwarven tomb. Zandria carefully removed the stone bottle from the statue’s grasp, a perfect piece of stonework that no doubt had taken years to carve. The stone grated coldly as the mage carefully pulled the stone bottle apart into two pieces. Inside, a brilliant white orb of pearly luminescence glimmered.