The City of Ravens

by Baker, Richard

  “Wait! Stop—unh! Who—agh! Stop!”

  “Well, well, well. If it isn’t—”

  “Jack Ravenwild. Where’s the ruby, Ravenwild?”

  “You know, dear sir, we’ve been quartering the city looking for you. We’ve discovered that the ruby stolen from House Kuldath was sold in Tantras a few days ago. Perhaps now you may be inclined to—”

  “Tell us where the money is, or we’ll slit your throat.”

  Twisting in agony, Jack managed to wriggle out of his cloak. He rolled over on the cold cobblestone and found himself staring up at Morgath and Saerk. The two thieves stood over him, short truncheons in their hands.

  “Your persistence astonishes me, gentlemen,” he gasped. “I thought we understood that I had nothing to do with your employer’s unfortunate loss.”

  “You were seen taking money from a big, blonde-haired Northman—” Morgath began.

  “—who was observed selling a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg to a dealer in Tantras for the sum of thirteen hundred Ravenaar crowns,” finished Saerk. “The Northman fenced it for you. Now how do you think we can satisfy our employer’s demands for justice and the gem’s return?”

  “Clearly, we cannot return the gem, so we should discuss the issue of reparations,” Morgath said. “Now, let’s start with what’s in this satchel.”

  Thirteen hundred crowns? Why, Anders cheated me of almost two hundred pieces of gold! Jack thought first of all. Then the rest of the thief’s statement reached him regarding the disposition of Jack’s satchel. Jack shook his head, trying to clear it of intoxication and pain, and looked up. Morgath was holding the pouch in which he’d stashed the pick of his pickings from the Guilder’s Vault! Slowly he levered himself up off the street and carefully brushed off his clothes.

  “That,” he said slowly, “has nothing whatsoever to do with you.”

  “Oh? If it’s valuable and it is yours, then it might very well have something to do with us—”

  “We’ll just keep it until you produce the ruby.” Saerk laughed. The thin thief was really an unpleasant fellow, gaunt and bony, and his laugh sounded like the shrill whinny of a skeletal horse. He dropped the truncheon and pulled out a wicked knife. “I think we’ll keep a couple of your fingers, too, by way of thanking you for the trouble at the Tankard last week.”

  Jack was not about to let these two filchers walk off with his hard-won loot. He drew himself up and looked at the two men, then glowered, then scowled. “I believe,” he said clearly, “that I have had all that I care to stand.” He muttered a spell, the spell of seeming, and slowly began to alter his appearance. “You see, gentlemen, I am not as I appear. Until now, it has suited my purposes to disguise my true form, but you, you have given me cause to forget my restraint and resort to more direct measures.” He grew taller, heavier, more gaunt. His skin darkened to an infernal coal black as his ears assumed wicked points and long, sharp tusks thrust their way out from his lower jaw.

  The two thieves took a half-step back, fumbling for their weapons. “Stop that,” squeaked Morgath. “You can’t fool us with a simple trick like that!”

  Jack grew taller still, now towering over both men. Wisps of steam escaped from his mouth when he talked, as his voice deepened into a low, menacing rumble. “I am a visitor from a far land,” he continued. “I had hoped to pass peacefully among your kind, perhaps observe human customs, learn human ways, but I refuse to be assaulted with impunity, and I refuse to be hectored and badgered and threatened, and I refuse to have the two of you pawing through my personal effects. Despite my best efforts to avoid this, you have forced my hand, and so now I must rend the two of you limb from limb and feast on your steaming organs before your dying eyes!”

  He finished by throwing back his head and bellowing in sheer ogrish rage, rolling his eyes and raising his huge taloned hands over his head as if to conjure down upon the two terrified thieves the very instrument of their doom with no further delay.

  Morgath and Saerk stood petrified for one awful instant, gazing up like sheep standing under the butcher’s knife, and then they broke and ran, abandoning the satchel and their truncheons in their haste to depart the vicinity. Jack roared after them as they fled pell-mell down the alleyway and bolted out in the street. Morgath turned left and Saerk turned right, a prudent tactic had they been in the correct position to execute the maneuver, which they weren’t. As it so happened, they collided, the short one upending the taller, and the taller knocking down the shorter. Jack took two steps and roared again, at which point the two thieves yammered in terror, picked themselves up, and ran off screaming into the night.

  Jack used the spell to assume the appearance of a uniformed city watchman and picked up his belongings. He could hear the screams of the two thieves, now fading into the cool distance. Sooner or later, the authorities would come running to investigate reports of a berserk ogre mage rampaging through the Anvil, and it wouldn’t be wise to wait for that to happen. He changed his appearance back to normal and departed the scene, congratulating himself on his own cleverness. The night was cool and fresh, the air was sweet with rain, and even if he ached in the ribs and shoulders and arms from the drubbing the two thieves had given him, in the end he’d run them off.

  He was only a block from his apartment when someone else threw a cloak over his head and pummeled him mercilessly to the cobblestones. Flailing wildly to tear the cloak from his face, Jack’s arms were pinned, and then his assailant threw him face first into a hard brick wall, hammering a big fist into his kidneys two, then three times. Jack cried out and fell, only to be savagely kicked several times before he heard a voice through the red haze of pain.

  “That’s enough, Marcus. We’re supposed to arrest him, which implies bringing him in alive.”

  A heavy boot kicked him once more in the stomach, doubling him up like a broken doll. Then the cloak was pulled away. A large pair of leather-booted feet stared him in the eye, and a little farther back a somewhat smaller pair of leather-booted feet of a more feminine slenderness waited their turn.

  “This defies all probability,” Jack coughed. “Two beatings in one night, commenced in the exact same fashion. I shall henceforward trust no man wearing a cloak.”

  “Hello, Jack,” purred Ashwillow. The Hawk Knight knelt so that she was able to meet his eyes. “You’ve been quite a busy burglar of late, haven’t you? Dueling wizards in the streets, socializing with the privileged classes, crawling around in Sarbreen doing who knows what … honestly, I don’t see how you find the time.”

  “I know of several black-hearted scoundrels who bear me a striking resemblance,” Jack wheezed. His guts ached as if red-hot skewers had been stuck through him. “I would love to help you, dear lady, but I am afraid I cannot be held answerable to their misdeeds.”

  “What did you steal for Elana?” demanded Marcus. “Where did you meet her? Time’s running short, and I am not going to play games with you.” To emphasize his point he dragged Jack to his feet and threw him against the wall with great disregard for both rogue and building.

  Jack tried to straighten up but couldn’t; his stomach hurt too much. He panted for a long moment, trying to master the pain. Someday, he promised himself, I am going to find out where Marcus lives, and then when he is on his way home from a late night at a tavern, I am going to jump out of the shadows and beat him with a board.

  He considered whether or not he should tell them the truth about Elana. After all, he hardly owed her any loyalty. Three things stopped him: first, telling the truth was foreign to his nature; second, admitting that he’d unwittingly aided the Warlord Myrkyssa Jelan didn’t seem like it would make the Hawk Knights leave him alone; third, and most significantly, Iphegor the Black appeared in a sulfurous belch of smoke and screamed at Marcus, “There you are! Oh, now shall I have my vengeance upon you, wretched thief and craven mouse murderer!”

  “I beg your pardon?” Marcus said, blank bafflement in his face.

  “Remarkable
,” Jack managed.

  Obviously, Iphegor had used some spell to transport him to the vicinity of the man who’d pillaged his tower and wrought the end of his familiar, because here he stood. But Iphegor did not know, could not know, that Jack was Jack and not Marcus, since the thief had used the seeming spell to take on the Hawk Knight’s appearance during the unpleasant affair in the necromancer’s tower.

  Jack looked at Marcus and Ashwillow and straightened a little bit. “Oh, are you in for it now.”

  Iphegor, already in the process of casting some dire spell, hesitated half a heartbeat as he glanced sideways at Jack. The two knights goggled in amazement, still trying to grasp the implications of the sorcerer’s spectacular appearance. Then Iphegor dismissed the small, well-pummeled popinjay before him as insignificant to his mission, stepped back, and raised his voice, conjuring a horrible doom down upon the unfortunate Hawk Knights. Marcus sprang toward the necromancer to halt his spell, while Ashwillow dove for cover.

  Jack worked a simple spell and jumped straight up with all his might, carried aloft by dancing emerald energy. He gained the rooftop of Eldritch, Lightfoot, Findrol, & Company with one bound just as Iphegor’s spell detonated under him, filling the narrow alleyway with black, searing flames that washed out into the street and erupted into the sky overhead. Jack risked one glance below, just enough to see a very singed-looking Marcus seize hold of Iphegor’s throat while the wizard raised a very deadly looking wand to smite him again. Sorcerous black flames engulfed both the trading house and the building across the alleyway, burning weirdly without light but igniting the buildings nonetheless.

  Ashwillow rose up from behind a high stone curb, only partially singed. She aimed a wicked crossbow in Jack’s general direction, but before she could let fly with the bolt, Jack conjured a solid sheet of billowing vaporous fog in the alleyway, obscuring all vision. The knight’s quarrel flew off over his shoulder.

  “The roof! He’s on the roof!” Ashwillow cried.

  “Bugger the spy! Help me!” Marcus replied, striving to keep Iphegor’s deadly wand from his face.

  Jack turned and ran for his life. Behind him, spells thundered and steel rang in the fog and confusion as Iphegor and the Knights blundered and fought in the mists.

  “You will not escape me so easily, thief!” shrieked Iphegor once, distantly, and then Jack abandoned the scene altogether.

  Since it was clear that his apartments were under the surveillance of various parties that wished him ill, Jack elected to avoid going home. “The hour is late, drink has fogged my wits, and I desperately require sleep,” Jack mused, perched on a rooftop several blocks away. A roaring fire filled with golden sparks marked the place where Jack and Iphegor had recently parted ways, and he saw no reason to return to the scene. “My various bolt-holes and haunts throughout the city may be watched tonight, so I need to find a place of comparative safety and seclusion.”

  He thought hard for a moment, considering and discarding various plans, until he struck upon one that seemed workable. “Ontrodes has plenty of room in his tower. I am sure that a gold crown will purchase a night’s stay and cheerful hospitality in an atmosphere of rustic scholarship and charming antiquity.” At once Jack alighted from the rooftops and set off toward Shadystreets, splashing through the rain-soaked streets and whistling merrily to ward off cutpurses and murderers lurking in the dark alleyways of the poorer neighborhoods.

  He reached Ontrodes’s street and picked up his pace, anxious to be inside. Few streetlights burned in this part of the city, and the evening here had a restless, watchful feel to it, as if unseen eyes studied his every move in breathless patience. Jack hurried about halfway down the street and then stopped in confusion.

  “Evidently, I am more intoxicated than I thought,” he muttered. “Ontrodes’s tower is not on this street, which begs the question, which street am I on?”

  He halted and looked about to get his bearings. On his right hand stood the Dyddow Barrelworks, exactly where it was supposed to be at the end of Riverview Road, and he’d just passed the Red Ravens firefighters’ hall on his left not fifty yards back. This was the right spot, but Ontrodes’s tower was not here. Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, Jack turned in a slow circle, studying his surroundings carefully on the off chance that some incredibly ambitious trickster had moved the sage’s tower in order to have a hard-earned laugh at his expense. A dilapidated house joined to a shapeless mound of rubble caught his eye.

  “Wrack and ruin!” Jack cried. “Ontrodes’s tower has finally collapsed entirely!” And indeed, the precarious angle at which the sage’s small round tower had leaned for years evidently proved too much for mere stone and mortar to bear. The small house still stood, although it leaned drastically in the other direction now that it had been freed of the tower’s pull. The stone archway joining house to tower remained more or less intact and was now covered loosely by a ragged piece of canvas that hung damply in the rain. Books and fragments of books lay crushed beneath the rubble or strewn here and there across the muddy streets.

  Jack shook himself out of his amazement and bounded up to the cottage door. He cast one more glance at the stones piled up beside him, and then hammered on the door to the sage’s dilapidated demesnes.

  “Ontrodes, Ontrodes! Open up! I have urgent business with you!”

  There was no immediate response, so Jack decided simply to hammer continuously on the door until he provoked one. Certainly the sage’s neighbors began to express their dissatisfaction after a few minutes of Jack’s attention, screeching obscenities out of open windows and threatening him with horrible violence if he didn’t cease and desist.

  After two or three minutes of incessant hammering, the door was suddenly thrown open from within. Ontrodes, dressed in a wine-stained robe, stood there, rubbing his eyes blearily as he stared at Jack. “What harm have I ever done to you, you impudent whelp? Have you not done enough? What is it to be now?”

  Jack paused and rubbed the heel of his hand, somewhat sore from pounding on the sage’s lintel. Ontrodes stared at him with undisguised contempt, even anger, but that of course was to be expected when waking the old codger in the middle of the night.

  “Wise Ontrodes, what has become of your domicile? What catastrophe befell your noble residence?”

  The sage’s face darkened into a drunken, bitter anger so vehement that Jack took a step back. “You ask me what became of my tower? You ask me? By Gond’s wondrous brass balls, Jack, do you think that I find anything amusing about this? I am a peaceable man, a man of wit and learning, but I swear by Cyric’s black heart that if I ever catch sight of you again, I will pull off your head and defecate down your throat!”

  With that the sage slammed his door so thunderously loudly that two more stones jutting out from the maimed wall of his home clattered down onto the rubble, and the door-latch flew from its place to land in the mud at Jack’s feet.

  “That,” thought Jack, “was not the expected result of this conversation.”

  He walked in a small circle, thinking hard. Ontrodes was clearly incensed—no, enraged—at him, but he still needed shelter and he did earnestly desire to understand exactly what he had done, other than waking the man in the middle of the night, that could possibly have earned him such vitriol. He wrapped his arms around his torso and stamped, growing chilled in the damp night air. The old dwarven bottle was round and warm in his coat pocket.

  Gingerly, Jack stepped up and rapped his knuckle on the door. “Ontrodes!” he called softly. “I do not know how I have caused you such anger, but I would dearly like the opportunity to make amends. I have brought you a distillation concocted by old Cedrizarun himself, seized just yesterday from the jaws of a dragon in the Guilder’s Vault! Please, allow me to make a gift of it to you!”

  The sage snuffled and grunted in his cottage, but remained silent for a long time. Jack began to fear that he might not reply at all, but finally the door creaked open again.

  “I do not believe you
,” the sage said through an inch-wide gap, “and there is no liquor on the face of the world that could possibly atone for the wrong you have done, but, just for the sake of curiosity—show me.”

  Jack withdrew the dark bottle from his coat and held it up for the sage to see. “I found it in Cedrizarun’s tomb,” he said quietly. “Look at the bottle. It matches precisely the bottle Zandria showed you, does it not?”

  “You probably stole it from her, poured out the contents in ignorance, and filled it with swill,” Ontrodes said, “but the bottle itself may be valuable. Give it to me!”

  “First, wise Ontrodes, noble Ontrodes, I wish to know: Why are you angry with me?”

  The sage’s face reddened, but with the prize suspended before his eyes, he managed to retain a deadly calm. He waved one hand at the wreckage of his tower. “Is it not obvious?”

  “You believe that I caused the collapse of your tower?” Jack snorted in amazement. “Ontrodes, the tower was decrepit. It might have fallen for any number of reasons. I certainly had nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh? I thought that the magical blasts you used to destroy the beams holding up the second floor hastened my tower’s demise considerably!” Ontrodes snapped. “How can you stand there pretending innocence, when not six hours past you were dancing around my crumbling home, singing those inane, insulting limericks and hurling blast after fiery blast into my very home! Why, if I hadn’t thrown myself out the window of the study, I would have been killed!”

  “I have no memory—” Jack began, and then he halted. Of course he didn’t have any memory of wrecking the sage’s tower, because he did not do it. But was it not possible, perhaps even likely, that his shadow had been here instead? “Ontrodes, believe this or not, but it is the truth: Two days past I discovered that I have a sinister and malicious copy at large in the city, a spiteful fellow who wears my likeness and apparently delights in tormenting my friends and acquaintances. My doppelganger wrought the ruin of your tower.”