by Ed Greenwood
Tantaerra-who'd spontaneously decided to start speaking to him again, just as suddenly as she'd stopped-told him they needed to concoct a fictitious past for her to share with any Nirmathi who wanted to talk before loosing arrows, thanks to certain less fictitious things she'd done in the past.
So they walked, talked, and settled on both of them being Nirmathi. Tantaerra would be a slave escaped from longtime Molthuni captivity in Canorate seeking to find kin she'd long been sundered from, and who'd just days ago found them gone from their farm near the border, their stead burned and abandoned, but was told by surviving neighbors that they'd fled deeper into Nirmathas. The Masked would purport to be a Nirmathi whose family fled the country when he was but a child, and who'd wandered Golarion trying his hand at many a living before freeing Tantaerra in Molthune and was helping her to find her kin. The mask they'd explain as covering a terrible burn suffered in childhood, when Molthuni soldiers burned down his parents homestead.
These tales were accepted with sympathy by the few Nirmathi who gave the travelers a chance to share it. More often, they received arrows instead.
The Masked couldn't really blame them, but took some comfort in the fact that most of the real aid he and Tantaerra received was from the Molthuni armies, who'd mounted an unexpectedly bold foray deep into this backcountry. Their attacks and movements time and again interrupted and distracted Nirmathi from the business of eliminating small and unlooked-for travelers, including a masked man and a halfling.
One Nirmathi wanted to know if The Masked was a slaver, snatching small children like the one with him.
Tantaerra had eyed the man balefully. "I'm a halfling, man. We're born small, and we die small. I'm not a little girl, and I'm neither younger than you nor less experienced. I'm probably older than your mother. I certainly possess better judgment than she obviously did, and I've hired this masked man as my guide and bodyguard. So keep your distance from my body, or it'll go ill for you."
Muttering, the Nirmathi had gone for his bow, so The Masked and Tantaerra had taken their nearest escape route-but not before relieving the man's untended smokehouse of a large and well-smoked goat carcass they both knew they were going to get tired of before they saw the Shattered Tomb.
If they ever saw the Shattered Tomb.
There came a time when the trees thinned and they were looking out across a broad, shallow river valley that flooded often enough to drown large trees. The reeds were many and tall, but real cover was scant. The watercourse looped in muddy bends, and the open valley stretched for miles. They were going to have to cross it in the open, and all that water and the likelihood of sucking bogs or great stretches of quicksand meant that doing it in darkness would be far more rash than crossing when the sun was high.
The Masked looked at Tantaerra, and she looked back at him. They sighed, shrugged, took good note of a leaning tree they could use as a landmark on the far side, and clambered down into the valley to start across.
Any Nirmathi within miles would see them, and they couldn't outrun arrows. They also knew that Voyvik was likely lurking somewhere near, but there wasn't much of anything either of them could do about that, either. So they started their crossing, keeping low and not talking so they might have some slender chance of hearing the hiss of approaching arrows before they felt any actual arrowheads.
They'd made it along one loop of the river and were trying to decide on the best place to swim across it when the first arrows tore past them. They flung themselves flat, noses to the nearby water, and twisted to try to see where the archers might be.
They turned just in time to see uniformed soldiers of Molthune burst out of the trees to hack at the Nirmathi bowmen, who were clustered atop a knoll where they could look down on several riverbends.
"Now might be a good time," Tantaerra murmured. "Both sides look a little busy for feathering us with arrows, just now."
The Masked nodded and waded into the water, keeping to a crouch. "Climb up my back," he ordered.
"So I can play pincushion for arrows?"
"So you won't have to swim, and we can be across and into cover faster, O Princess of Thieves." There was no time for debate or hesitation. Those Nirmathi back there would either have fled or be dead very soon now.
Tantaerra evidently reached that same conclusion, for she turned and hurriedly climbed his back without another word, and he launched himself into the river.
It was far shallower and slower than the Inkwater, but not much warmer. Tarram clenched his teeth and swam hard, trying to get to where his feet could find bottom again before he was entirely numb and his strength started to go, at which point the current would start winning the battle for where he was headed.
The cold wormed its way up his arms and legs, and he snarled and fought the water harder, trying-
His knee banged an unseen rock, and then he was crawling in foul-smelling mud, up the far bank and stumbling toward the all-gods-blessed trees.
With a sudden hail of plashings right behind him in the water: Molthuni crossbow bolts hitting the river as they reached the end of their range. It seemed the soldiers back on that side of the river didn't want anyone alive in Nirmathas right now who didn't wear the blood red of Molthune. Or just the red of their own spilling blood.
The Masked crashed through a tangle of branches and into a thicket of saplings and tall grass, mud wallows, and untidy clumps of bright wildflowers. He was halfway across when Tantaerra's weight suddenly vanished from his back, overbalancing him into a near fall. He heard grass rustling behind him, heading back, and whirled around.
The waving grass started to calm, then stirred anew, dancing and swaying as it disgorged Tantaerra.
"They're crossing the river," she told him glumly. "Let's move."
They moved, The Masked taking the running, branch-snapping lead and the halfling scuttling after him. Around this tree, under the boughs of the next, across a little hollow of tallgrass, up a little bank, and on …
"Still coming after us," Tantaerra informed him tersely, landing with a crash. She'd climbed up one of the trees in his wake, to look back.
"My," he told her, between pants, "this is like…having my very own …bard. Commenting, as the…adventure unfolds. There'll be a …dragon, next."
"Bite your tongue, masked man!"
Tarram found he had wind enough left to chuckle. Then he ducked under a leaning tree that was fairly armored in shelf fungus, and found himself facing a steep uphill climb, into darker, denser trees. They had crossed the valley.
They were in too much of a hurry to go looking for landmarks, with these Molthuni after them. Just when would the soldiers start to think plunging into thick forest in a land of foes was too foolhardy to continue with?
An arrow whined out of the trees like an angry hornet, heading not at The Masked, but back whence he'd come.
Suddenly the air was full of a whistling, singing volley.
Well, that answered that question.
Which didn't mean these unseen Nirmathi archers wouldn't decide to take care of a running man in a mask and a halfling. Tarram kept right on sprinting, Tantaerra at his heels and sometimes beside him.
They raced over a gentle wooded ridge, and into older, deeper trees whose leaves hid the sun, where bushes were few but toadstools more numerous, and tiny pairs of eyes stared at the running intruders and then scattered. And on, down a slope where the trees thinned and The Masked had a good glimpse of distant mountains that probably weren't all in Nirmathas, ere the trees closed in again and-
The ground suddenly gave way under his hurrying boots, and he was falling, landing heels-first with a jolt on rocks, then sliding on his back on loose stones and rolling dirt, a high voice spewing curses above him that he recognized was Tantaerra about the time he came to a stop, amid dust and a sporadic but painful hail of small stones.
She landed on his head and bounced off again, head over heels forward and down, to land with a yowl in a clump of dark maroon thorns.
/>
The Masked shook his head to clear it, then rolled onto his side and peered up and behind him.
A small stream of dirt and stones were still tumbling over the lip where he'd run off the edge of this gulley and brought some of that edge down with him, four or five times his height down this slope. Into what looked to be a small forest of thornbushes. A thicket, at least. Almost absentmindedly he plucked a groaning Tantaerra off her painful perch among them, then ducked down below them and peered around. It was like looking across a vast but low-ceilinged warehouse, dark thorns above but emptiness studded with thornbush trunks below.
He'd never seen this sort of shrub before, but it looked to be home to nothing but birds. Gnarled, stunted trunks rose out of a drift of brown dead thorns where seemingly nothing grew or lived, a painful, spiky carpet of dried, brittle thorns and old guano. He swept some aside with his hand and beheld bare dirt.
"Come," he told Tantaerra, and started crawling and raking, using his forearms and a dagger. "We'll hide here. Hide, so stop talking."
"Yes, sir," she snarled back, but thereafter said not a word. They crawled along under the dark, dense thornbushes, thrusting aside shed thorns until they reached a little ridge, then a hollow beyond.
The hollow ended in another drop-off, a rocky cliff that looked down on treetops. The Masked decided not to run over that edge.
"So, now," he whispered to Tantaerra. "We rest and wait. Hopefully the Molthuni will weary of the chase."
"Hopefully we'll be made monarchs and showered with gems and coins until we roll around on gleaming hills of them," she whispered back. "Hope is powerful but usually futile, Tarram."
He shrugged. "You have a better plan?"
She gave him a sour look, then settled down on her back, seeking to get comfortable.
And almost instantly fell asleep.
The Masked regarded her with some amusement. Cats and halflings; both could nap just like that.
Well, when it came to it, so could humans-if they were sufficiently exhausted. He yawned. Only his wet, clinging clothing was keeping him from drifting off …
He froze abruptly, and listened hard.
There it was again: a faint rustle, well back behind him, in-there, again-that direction. He got two daggers ready, turned to face the sound, and shifted gently sideways to where the hollow was a little deeper, giving him more room to move in his crouch beneath the thorns.
There. He could see something now, a dark bulk, moving. A human, or at least a four-limbed creature, crawling nearer.
Then the crawler came over a little rise in the ground amid the thornbush trunks, and he knew who it was.
Orivin Voyvik.
The man must have a way of tracking them, some magic or other. The mask?
Or he'd been trailing them all day, skulking along just out of sight, tracking them like a hunter.
Neither alternative was all that reassuring.
The Masked nudged Tantaerra awake with his foot, not letting his gaze leave the approaching man.
The moment he was aware of her bleary-eyed glare, he asked Voyvik grimly, "And what do you want?"
"To recruit you, friend Armistrade. To ask you again to join me, to work toward the dream." Voyvik crawled nearer. "Isn't this a beautiful country?"
"I've not had much leisure to admire or judge its beauties, since last we spoke," The Masked told him. "Too many people have been trying to kill me. Are you going to be one more of them?"
"Now would I be crawling up to your ready daggers if I was?" Voyvik asked, sounding almost petulant. "When I could just take a bow from someone and loose two arrows from back yonder, without all of this hard-on-the-knees travel?"
"Our answer," Tantaerra piped up, "is still no. For now, at least. Are you fleeing those Molthuni too?"
Voyvik shook his head. "More Nirmathi archers persuaded them to prudence. When I saw them last, those few still alive were running back east faster than you were heading in this direction. Giving you some leisure to entertain my offer."
"We want to sleep on it, and ponder. Find us late on the morrow, and ask again," Tantaerra told him crisply. "Now go away."
"But-"
"Go away, or you'll be leaning me into another refusal."
Voyvik shot an entreating look at The Masked, but Tarram curtly pointed him back the way he'd come. "You heard her."
The man with a dream for Nirmathas spread his hands, bowed his head to them, and turned away.
Tantaerra rolled to where she could whisper into The Masked's ear.
"Block his view of me, if he looks back. Stay here."
Before he could reply she was gone, scampering back along the way they'd cleared as swiftly as a bounding rabbit.
The Masked watched her go, and permitted himself a slow smile.
Voyvik just might be in for a surprise.
Luraumadar, the mask commented.
Of course. The Masked quelled a bitter laugh. Luraumadar, indeed.
∗ ∗ ∗
Tantaerra was beyond tired of feeling hounded. Shining dream for Nirmathas or not, she didn't like this Voyvik. He was one of those grinning dungpiles one couldn't trust in the slightest, about anything at all, ever. Infuriatingly cocky, as if the world always bent to his will and he knew it would.
Bastard.
This time, she would skulk and spy and pounce on any small ways she could harass him. She didn't know how, yet, but it was high time for Orivin Voyvik to be unsettled. Perhaps subtly …say, with a sledgehammer.
Tantaerra scuttled to the edge of the thorns, where the eroded cliff side rose like a wall, and slowed to creep onward as stealthily as she knew how, one fat little spider moving along the base of the cliff, listening hard.
Voyvik didn't make much noise at all, but she heard enough to know when he got out from under the thorns and straightened up. Then he turned away from her, took three or four swift steps-probably into cover, between trees-and froze.
She froze, too, listening in silence and waiting patiently for him to move again.
There. Time to scuttle and close the distance between, to lessen his chances of being able to slip away.
She almost ran into his heels as he stopped to listen again, yet managed to sidestep behind a tree trunk just in time.
Thereafter, they moved in unison, Tantaerra matching her movements-and the little noises she inevitably made-to his.
Voyvik cut through a small wood that filled a hollow, then climbed a rocky ridge beyond those trees. From a broad belt of tumbled stones and bushes, it rose to end in a high, sloping rock like the fin of a gigantic shark.
Tantaerra ducked down into a bush, then tucked her feet up. The one good thing about being her size was that you could hide where no human had even the slenderest hope of-
Voyvik stopped, spun around and down into a crouch, then slowly surveyed Nirmathas all around him, in every direction, looking and listening.
There was nothing to hear but the wind stirring leaves, and after a long and rather suspicious listen to them, he rose out of his crouch, turned, and slowly strode up that topmost rock, peering here and there.
He was obviously looking for someone, so Tantaerra stayed right where she was. After all, that someone could be lurking anywhere.
Satisfied at last, Voyvik sat down on the edge of the rock and sighed.
Whereupon the empty air right behind him erupted in a momentary flash of silent swirling sparks, and an old man stood where there'd been nothing at all a moment earlier, wearing robes and dusty black boots.
The face was new to Tantaerra, yet reminded her of someone she couldn't recall.
He was shortish, wiry, and vigorous, thin on top but not yet balding, with a short gray-white fringe of a beard beneath a sharp-pointed nose and dark, glittering eyes.
That mouth shaped a sneering smile as Voyvik whirled, dagger flashing out.
"Don't do that!" he snarled, seeing who it was. He sheathed his dagger. "This is a land at war! I might've killed you!"
/> The old man shrugged. "You might have tried. Well?"
Voyvik sighed. "It's no use. They'll have nothing to do with me."
The man nodded. "So stop trying to recruit them. Kill them."
"But the halfling is Nirmathi! Was a Molthuni slave! Surely she should see the sense-"
The old man shrugged. "Do with her what you wish; she's nothing to me. The important one is the man who calls himself The Masked. You've brought him within my reach. Now kill him. And be sure to carry the gem I gave you when you do it."
Voyvik's hand went reflexively to his pouch. "Why?" he asked suspiciously. "What does it do?"
"It lets me see what happens, right after whenever you draw blood. Every time. The rest of the time it does nothing-I cannot trace it or spy through it. Worry not; I can't speak to you through it, or harm you, or send spells through it, or make it explode."
"How do I know you're telling the truth?"
"Trust, Orivin Voyvik, trust. You must trust someone-and Araungras Karm does not lie, or cheat, or indulge in deceit among those who enter his trust. Not every wizard is evil, or lacks all principles and scruples. The man you are to slay stole a mask from me, and has it yet. He must pay."
"Then why not blast him with your spells?"
"That would risk the mask. I need not gloat over his passing, nor slay him myself. I'll do it if I must, but I'd much rather have you do it, bring me the mask, and accept your rich reward."
"How do I know you won't suddenly learn deceit right then, and trick me out of my pay?"
"Trust, Orivin," the old wizard sighed. "Trust."
∗ ∗ ∗
"So if we see him again, he's been told to kill us." The halfling sounded bitter, as if she'd really been hoping Voyvik had been telling them the truth. "No matter what he says about recruiting us to help him pursue his dream."
Tarram nodded. "I find myself less than surprised."