Chapter 1

Old Friends

As soon as I saw the gnome, I knew trouble couldn’t be far behind. It was only the merest glimpse of her, a flash of green somewhere out there in the lawless, jostling crowds of Riddleport’s Wharf District, but that one glance was all I needed.

I had most definitely not been looking for an adventure, not in this place. In the few months since my arrival, I had adopted the habit of keeping my head down and my hood up, covering the elven ears and blonde braid that attracted too much of the wrong kind of attention. Even Mordimor clinging with a badger’s tenacity to my shoulder seemed to elicit fewer stares than the sight of an unaccompanied woman, clearly neither pirate nor whore, walking these seedy streets. Life in Riddleport, most anarchic ofVarisia’s cities, had taught me to keep my head down, my clothes baggy, my stride masculine, and my dagger close at hand.

But upon sighting that familiar, unmistakable green hair, I didn’t hesitate to push through the hot spaces of the crowd to verify what I already knew instinctively. I had not seen Shess, nor any of my Magnimarian friends, since we parted soon after docking in Riddleport’s silty common harbor. The excited knot in my gut and the recklessness with which I made my way toward her-one knife-armed fishmonger threatened to gut me for treading on his bootless toe, and only a warning hiss from Mordimor backed him off-had undermined the lie I told myself whenever thoughts of my friends should intrude upon my work. I had missed them. It was that simple, and that honest realization felt like the first salve of comfort in a long summer of exile.

I also felt trouble in my bones, and the sight of Shess confirmed it.

She was marching with girlish enthusiasm at the head of a gang of some of the worst-looking wharf dogs I had ever laid eyes on. Even in a city that, in places, is little more than extended shore leave for the most nefarious, notorious, and downright depraved seamen in all of Varisia, Shess and her pack stood out.

” Out the way, bilge drinkers!” Shess wailed. She had changed one set of outlandish finery for another since the last time I had seen her, clamping along in heavy hobnailed boots beneath the rough-cut hem of billowy silk pantaloons dyed a vibrant crimson. In contrast, a suit of corseted leather armor snugged and shaped her torso to exaggerated effect, calling to mind the sort of thing you might pay extra to see in the back room of a Calistrian temple. In her tiny fist she brandished a battered tricorne hat, and at her waist she wore the same short sword I had seen her use to such deadly effect when last we were in Magnimar. Her face was red from shouting. ” Make way for the Char Street Clippers, you bunyip-lovin’ sons of seacows!”

The crowd parted, but not without first cursing and yelling imprecations at Shess and her bunch of thugs. Like Shess, her gang wore a motley of styles and mismatched bits of armor and gear, as if they had made a random sampling of all the lands north of the Arch. But what was endearing in Shess seemed a symptom of derangement in her followers. The incongruity of the childlike gnome leading a band of cutthroats and sea dogs seemed at least as intimidating to onlookers as the notched blades and well-used cudgels each of the thugs brandished openly as they loped along with the aggressive assurance of natural predators.

As soon as I had taken in the scene I moved back further into the crowd, ducking behind a trio of colorfully dressed Garundi traders and trying to maneuver out of the line of sight of Shess and her gutter sharps. For a moment I doubted that it had actually been her, and not some other green-haired gnome. A dozen speculations as to the meaning of what I had seen began to swarm within me. How well did I know her, really?

I paused for a tense moment as Shess and her coterie moved by, fighting the urge to just go back to my real business in Riddleport and my already overdue appointment with my employer, Gundsric. I should just do what the Lodge expected me to do, my duty as a member of the Pathfinder Society, and forget about this mad piece of happenstance. I thought of Master Shaine,

and his ironic, often cryptic warnings to us about the dangers of storytelling. “Seek truth, not tales,” he would say. ” If you look first for a story, you’ll always find one.”

Well, I had found my story, and I couldn’t help but follow it.

As the locals say, summer is the worst time to visit Riddleport-except for all the other seasons. The air is stifling, dense with heat and salt-tanged humidity and the radiant warmth of ten thousand unwashed bodies. Thumbnail-sized black flies buzz around the chaotic middens and trash heaps left by an ungovernable populace. In places, the open sewers create an air so fetid that you have to hold your breath to keep your stomach down. Riddleport rests between two great insulating spurs of rugged rock, and the winding, narrow streets and leaning buildings found across much of the shoreside sections of the city trap the hot summer air in stagnant pockets. At night there is some relief when the ocean air blows strong toward the land, but holdouts can always be found, seemingly unreachable bubbles of heat and foul air that refuse to relinquish their dominion over the muddy streets and overflowing gutters.

All of which affects the mood of the pirates, smugglers, thieves, and mercenary scum that are the lifeblood of the city’s erratically beating heart. Moving swiftly in the wake of the gnome and her wolf pack, I wove through the mob, heading southwest toward the deepwater docks and the caulking yards. The aroma of hot pitch and sawdust crept in among the pervading odor of sewer, sweat, and rotting shellfish. I slowed my progress as, ahead of me, one of Shess’s thugs clubbed a brawny dockworker out of the way and the crowd, teetering on the edge of riot, roared and spat curses in half a dozen languages.

“Filth like that keeps this town down,” a gap-toothed, skinny young man in rough-spun cloth said on my right, clearly trying to engage my attention. Immediately suspicious, I tensed, and felt a faint contact on my left. I whirled and smacked away a boy’s hand as he fumbled at my belt pouch clasp. Mordimor bristled on my shoulder, emitting a rasping hiss that chilled even my blood. The would-be pickpocket-a boy of no more than ten years-dodged away into the crowd, and I turned back to face his accomplice. The man simply smirked and held his hands up in a helpless gesture, and I noted his red-rimmed, squinting eyes, one of the telltale signs of gleam addiction. He backed away, slipping into the crowd until he became just another part of the evermoving tide of humanity.

I noticed then that my dagger was in my hand. I didn’t remember drawing it. Two months in Riddleport had honed a certain feral instinct within me, more so even than the years I had spent traveling the wilds of Avistan with my father.

Something about Riddleport breaks down the civilizing barriers that those of us possessing a healthy moral compass erect against our inner savage. The city is a knife-edge of instinct and aggression, and few are immune to its inf luence for long. And to think I had once been excited to come here.

Shess and her gang were moving again, and I followed, trying to do so with minimal disruption. Keep the head down, use the peripheral vision, never make eye contact. The armed sea-killers of a dozen pirate crews swarmed these streets in various states of drunken belligerence and with little censure from the local gendarmes of Overlord Cromarcky-himself the chief crime lord in a city of crime. You took your life into your own hands in Riddleport, and the biggest surprise of all was that more people weren’t killed or maimed or robbed at knifepoint on any given day.

Halfway across a square in which armed guards collected tolls for the use of a hand-pumped well, Shess and some of her thugs turned in my direction, shouting. For a tense moment I knew I had been seen, that they would come after me, and that the Shess I had so briefly known had slid down into some strange abyss of violent criminality that would make murdering me seem perfectly sensible to her gnome mind. But it was something else they barked about, someone else they had seen, and the pack moved on. I followed, heartbeat gradually slowing back to something approaching normal, Mordimor chattering on my shoulder in an attempt to soothe me.

The narrow maze of streets necessitated that I stay closer to my quarry than I would have preferred, so scares like that were inevitable. The principles oftracking a game animal through woodland and tailing a person around town share much in common, perhaps more than those who have only ever attempted one and not the other could ever realize. Having lived in both worlds, I would say that creatures of the two legged variety are generally easier to track, at least if you have some passing familiarity with their environment. Unlike the predictable behavior of elk or deer, however, most people have a nasty tendency to do something unexpected should they spot a tail, such as sound an alarm, lay an ambush, or start flinging spells. While the fundamental truth of remaining undetected applies to both situations, the results of failure are radically different.

Emerging from a switchback alley in which I had been forced to drop ever farther behind Shess and her gang lest they see me, I came upon a broad, gas-lamp-lined street slanting seaward, one of the main thoroughfares of the Wharf District. I caught the briefest glimpse of one of Shess’s trailing thugs rounding a corner to my left, which placed them in a section of bunkhouses and pitch sheds that served the wharves. The street here was wider and better cared for, with most of its cobbles still intact, unlike the patchy, ankle-rolling mud ruts I had just passed through. But what really caught the eye was a sight I never tired of, a reminder not only of my true purpose in Riddleport, but of my life’s goal, and my reason for returning toVarisia after a decade’s travel across Avistan.

The Cyphergate.

Neither the largest nor the most spectacular of Thassilonian monuments, the ‘Gate nevertheless stands out as unique. No doubt this is partly due to the way most visitors first encounter it. Coming out of the Varisian Gulf, edging slowly into Riddleport’s harbor, all travelers pass under that massive, rune-inscribed arch. Its dimensions are unusual, however, as the Cyphergate is not an architecturally sound arch at all, but rather a true section of a circle, one that many scholars believe continues underground to form a perfect ring of stone. Thus we pass not under it, but through it-a distinction that is no mere semantic argument for anyone who has done so. When last I had seen Shess, she had taken a little girl’s delight in imitating the many sailor’s rituals and wards that the seamen enacted whenever their ships passed through the ‘Gate. Now it seemed she may have crossed the line from imitating pirates to becoming one.

Even with the Cyphergate looming in the middle distance, it is easy to scoff at such superstition. But aboard ship, sliding slowly beneath the ancient, inscrutable stone, all scholarly detachment vanishes, and one is left instead with an imagination laid bare, raw right down to the bone. It is not fear that causes the crews to cover their heads, flash the tines, or recite a few lines of crude verse in Varisian. Rather, it is awe-awe in the awareness that the age and mystery of the great arch eclipses the entirety of their experience with an utter and nearly annihilating sense of timelessness. It is a thing perhaps only ever felt, and never truly articulated, though we Pathfinders might find ourselves without vocation should we ever stop trying.

I picked up my pace. As always, I longed to linger and marvel at the great monument. Despite my hard-won familiarity with Thassilonian script-the language of the empire that once ruled these lands-the runes of the Cyphergate remained a prevailing mystery. Some have suggested that they are mere decoration, which to me seems about as sensible as stenciling a pretty flower on the Starstone. No, to dismiss what we do not know with such a banal explanation undermines the very fabric of our motivations as scholars and explorers. It is to suggest that these relics are only truly significant because of their pedigree, and not their inherent power. As much as I may disagree with the Cyphermages in their obsessive approach to studying the ‘ Gate, they have at least never been guilty of the sin of too little imagination.

Drawing my hood close, I slipped around the corner, catching sight of green-haired Shess in the distance as I lost the Cyphergate behind a long row of three-story bunkhouses. But the ‘ Gate lingered with me, like the afterimage of some bright star, and I felt as if I could close my eyes and redraw the entire monument from memory-not just what I had seen, but all of it, even those portions hidden from mortal view for millennia. It was an exhilarating sensation, this heightened intuition, and one that had become familiar during my stay in Riddleport. Testament, I thought, to some newly achieved level of visceral understanding, a finely realized integration of my scholarly and imaginative impulses.

I stayed along the line of the bunkhouses, ignoring the looks or occasional comments from the dockhands, mates, carpenters, and tar-spattered caulkers I passed. The crowd here had thinned out, and Shess’s gang made better time. Again they slipped around a corner farther ahead, moving toward the harbor, and I quickened my pace.

It was quieter here, as if the summer heat had muffled all sound in a damp blanket. The air was thick with the almost overwhelming smell of pine tar and charcoal fires. I flattened myself against the final bunkhouse’s wall-clinker-built like the hull of some northman’s linnorm-prowed raider-and peered around the corner.

Shess and her gang had stopped a stone’s throw away in the lot of a vacant pitch yard immediately behind the bunkhouse. Half concealed by barrels of tar and stacked bundles of oakum, another armed gang of thugs was rapidly forming up to bar Shess’s passage. The two forces squared off, spitting and shouting, waving their weapons in the air.

With a shock, I realized that the tall, regal-looking man leading the other gang, Shess’s opposite number in this drama, was also known to me from my time in Magnimar.

Just then, Mordimor chirped a warning.

” Tazza, Explorer-Queen of Arcadia, makes an important discovery,” whispered

a well-known voice from behind me.

“And Kalashar the Unvanquishable, Deadliest Blade in All Casmaron,” I said, smiling despite myself as the old names of childhood came back to me, “has a whole hell of a lot of explaining to do.” Mordimor let out a quiet bark of agreement as we turned toward this third familiar face of the afternoon.

” That I do, Taldara-but not here.” Kostin Dalackz, my oldest friend and the man I had been avoiding since we both set foot in Riddleport two months ago, flashed his lopsided, rakish smile and gestured that I should follow. I did, feeling at once relieved and apprehensive.

” How long were you tailing Shess? Did she see you?” Kostin led us into the same bunkhouse I had been hiding behind. I lowered my hood. The place seemed empty save for a few rats that scampered away as we entered, though obviously it was still in use by a couple of dozen workers. Seeing my scrutiny of the rows of straw bunks spanning each wall, and perhaps sensing my anxiety, Kostin gave my non-badger-bearing shoulder a gentle pat. “Relax, I bought off everybody in this place for the day. We’re finally doing the job.”

The job. I had been there for Kostin’s last ‘job,” a bit of skullduggery that had apparently irritated certain parties in the Night Scales, one of Magnimar’s nastiest thieves’ guilds, to the point that it was suggested we leave town. Suggested, that is, by a certain Sczarni crime boss of Kostin’s acquaintance, who happily provided us passage on an outgoing crayer at no charge-so long as Kostin took care of a little job for him once in Riddle port.

Kostin must have seen my frown. He dropped his hand from my shoulder and stepped back, taking me in from boots to braid, really looking at me for the first time.

“You look tired,” he said.

He, on the other hand, looked good-” purposed with life” as my father would say, though the phrase sounds better in Elven. Riddleport seemed to agree with him, confirming what little I had heard about his antics over the last few months. His dark hair was shorter than it had been since we were kids running through the streets of Magnimar brandishing broomstick swords; Kalashar and Tazza killing giants and mapping distant, uncharted lands. I had seen a bit of this change in him aboard ship as Kostin’sVarisian blood stirred at the prospect of travel to other lands. After a lifetime, albeit an eventful one, cooped up in Magnimar, Kostin was finally on the road, as was everyVarisian’s birthright. He positively glowed, and his brown eyes danced as if he were privy to some private joke between himself and the universe.

“You don’t know how tired, Kostin. But do you care to explain why Shess and Aeventius seem about to start a gang war out there?” It came out as somewhat petulant, and I winced. I was too on-edge. Our last days on the ship had been awkward, and our parting perfunctory. I was irritated at having run into him like this, and at having not expected it. Most of all, I was angry with myself for being angry in the first place, to put so much stock in this moment with Kostin in a squalid little bunkhouse while outside I could hear a score or more people readying to shed each other’s blood.

“Think of it as a play, a bit of opera.” Kostin broke eye contact to move over to a south-facing window, little more than a ship-style porthole. I followed. We peered out, both of us stooping slightly, our heads close. He smelled of oil and leather and smoke. ” Shess needs to get in good with the Clippers. She’s been doing this and that for them-you know, Shess-style jobs. Now she has to do something big.”

Outside, the two gangs faced each other, fanning out to fill the tight confines of the yard. I couldn’t see Shess at all, as the cluster of thugs standing behind her completely blocked the tiny gnome from view. I could, however, see Aeventius quite clearly, dressed as ever in expensive clothing more suited to a nobleman’s ball than a tussle in a pitch yard. The wizard was standing with icy arrogance while one ofhis lieutenants ranted and spat at the intruders.

“This is ‘the something big,”’ Kostin said, just as Aeventius, seemingly tired of the exchange, made a casual gesture that knocked one of Shess’s Clipper

boys-a man standing some twenty feet away from the wizard-sprawling into the dirt of the yard as if he had been felled by a mallet to the skull. The two sides immediately converged upon one another like packs of starved wolfhounds, and Mordimor and I both flinched at the suddenness and ferocity of the fight.

Kostin chuckled. “Aevy did a great job getting these pitch yard boys to provoke the Clippers-the promise of gold and his insufferably overbearing nature really worked wonders.” Outside a wave of painfully vivid multicolored

light swept over a part of Aeventius’s crew, blinding or stunning half of them. That would be Shess’s handiwork. Kostin and I both instinctively turned away from the flash, our faces very close now.

“Of course… ” Kostin beamed like the kid I had known, the kid he still was in many ways. “Aevy and I were setting them up all along to be hammered by the Clippers as part of Shess’s full initiation.”

Looking back at the chaos outside, I watched Shess roll under the legs of an adze-wielding assailant and spring up behind him, driving her short blade through the small of his back. He dropped in agony, revealing the delighted face of the gnome, her tricorne hat somehow still affixed to her head. The Char Street Clippers were outclassing Aeventius’s gang, most of whom I now noticed were armed with little more than tools and other makeshift weapons. A great many had already scattered for cover among the barrels and sheds of the caulking yard.

The wizard stood archly among the mayhem, occasionally staggering an attacker with a flick of his finger. Then, with a gesture as elegant as a composer conducting a Chelish symphony, he cast a different sort of spell.

Aeventius disappeared.

In the very next instant he reappeared a few paces away, took a step, and winked out of sight once more.

“A new one,” Kostin said. ” He seems to really like it.”

The wizard was moving toward the bunkhouse, blinking in and out of the startled crowd. Once he came within inches of Shess, who feigned a thrust in his direction with convincing sincerity. Aeventius was running now, his progress difficult to follow.

In fact he was running directly toward us where we stood watching him through the porthole, but there was no door on this side of the building.

” Uh, we need to move back now.”

Fascinated by what I was seeing, I didn’t move.

” Tal…”

Aeventius continued to appear and disappear in a manner almost hypnotic. One falchion-wielding thug almost hit him with a wild swing, and Aeventius promptly

stepped into the man’s guard and dropped him with a precise uppercut. Few suspected a wizard of packing that much punch, but I knew he had once made a study of the art of boxing-part of a street hustle Kostin and he had perfected years ago. Aeventius blinked out of existence again before the man even hit the ground.

And appeared right outside our window an instant later, running full speed toward the wall.

“Tal!” Kostin took hold of my arm and tugged.

Where there had been two of us, there were now three-the wizard hit us like a runaway carriage as he passed through the plank wall. There was a loud smack,

as if someone had actually been thrown against the wall rather than run through it, and a yelp of pain. Kostin’s tug had got me out of the worst of it, but he had pulled me off balance as Aeventius plowed into us. I whirled, feeling Mordimor f ly free of my shoulder, and toppled into a bunk on the other side of the narrow room.

Kostin, clinging to me, fell atop me in a sprawl, face to face.

In the second of stillness that followed, I heard Aeventius’s muffled moan. I twisted my head to see the wizard lying on his back, no longer flashing in and out of reality. Mordimor, by some twist of badger luck, was wrapped belly-down around the nobleman’s head.

“Arrgh!” Aeventius said, flailing himself into a sitting position as Mordimor hopped off him, bristling. Both were spitting, though for different reasons. Aeventius cast a baleful eye at the embarrassing tangle Kostin and I had made on the straw mattress.

” Glad to see you’re keeping yourself entertained, Kostin and what the hell is she doing here? ” Aeventius rose to his feet, rubbing his back as if it pained him. Walking through walls was apparently not without its consequences.

“It worked just as we planned, Aevy.” Kostin settled into a comfortable spread atop me. “Real good job out-“

I pushed him off of me and out of the bed, and he tumbled to the f loor with a grunt.

“Save it!” I said, pointing to the window as I swung out of the bunk. ” What about Shess’s thugs? “

But Aeventius was already up and scanning the yard through the window. ” She’s leading them away, toward the docks, though a few have stayed behind to take some trophies. They’ll round up the stragglers and kill them. No loss-they were a truly tedious bunch of dullards.”

“Trophies? ” I asked, a queasy sensation in the pit of my stomach.

“Ears.” Aeventius turned to smile at me. “Why did you think they were called the ‘Clippers?”’

“Then it seems the pocket is half picked, my friends.” Kostin, regaining his feet, moved between Aeventius and me and threw an arm over our shoulders, squeezing us into an embrace. ” Let’s go get that scepter. You in, Tal? “

I had been i n this position before, and had thought then that it wasn’t what I had wanted. I had just seen men die. Die because these two desired to steal something-a scepter?-for a Sczarni cutthroat and fence. I looked at Aeventius, scowling as he pushed Kostin’s arm away; the wizard was a callous and self-obsessed elitist. Kostin, next to me, was smiling, eyes alight with the prospect of pulling a job; my friend the thief, the cad, the con man. They were asking me to do what I swore to myself! would never do again, and asking as if they were bound for something no more odious than a picnic in the hills.

I thought of the dying dwarf Gundsric, my real reason for being in Riddleport, no doubt furious I had missed our daily appointment. I thought too of Master Shaine, shaking his head in disappointment as I weighed the needs of the truth and the needs of the tale.

I looked at Mordimor, head cocked in consideration, one clawed forepaw raised as if he were uncertain which way to run.

“I’m in,” I said, almost without meaning to. Kostin hugged me in triumph as Aeventius sneered.

They were both talking now, fast-about their plans, about the job-but I wasn’t listening. All I could do was wonder if! had really chosen this story for myself, or if it had in fact chosen me.

Chapter 2

New Professions

The day after I fell back in with my Magnimarian friends, I found myself walking the same streets where I had first spied Shess. The same streets, the same destination, but now everything was different. Was I Taldara Meirlanel the Pathfinder, explorer, and chronicler? Or Tal the thief?

Scratching Mordimor behind the ear as we walked through lanes that now seemed somehow les s hostile and foreign, I tried to dismis s the whole notion. My father would have said it was my human side-my “blind side” he called it, with no small measure of contempt-that cared so much for labels and absolutes. ” Scholar or thief? ” he would have said, dismissing the whole thing with a wave of his hand. “Why not both? And much more besides.”

Why not both, indeed.

I had sent word to my employer, the alchemist Gundsric, yesterday by courier as soon as I was able. His reply, a terse rescheduling, awaited me when I returned to my lodgings at the Sated Shark late that night. For the past six weeks, I had as sisted him in cataloging his massive collection of artifacts, and engaged in a great deal of translation and annotation of the rare scrolls and tomes he had accumulated. It was stimulating and rewarding work, and the dwarf’s library was perhap s the finest in the city outside of the archives of the Cyphermages . It also paid very well, for the wealthy dwarf had once held a high position at Riddleport’s famed Gas Works and, it was rumored, had further enriched himself through private expeditions into the poisonous underground world beneath the forges.

Thus, my guilt at entering the dying dwarf’s service under false pretenses was acute. It had not been chance that had led me to Gundsric’s door, but rather a directive from Sheila Heidmarch, Venture-Captain of the Pathfinder Lodge of Magnimar and my immediate superior in the Society. The orders-which came in the form of a suggestion-were to verify the rumors that Gundsric had come into posses sion of the last journal of Jan Lortis, the Pathfinder who had famously discovered the trans-dimensional tomb of the Gepesh twins in Ustalav, and who had disappeared with no word while exploring the wilds of eastern Varisia two decades ago.

Verify the rumors , or reclaim the j ournal if possible. Direct offers to buy the j ournals had failed, and subsequent attempts to arrange for a copy to be made were turned away by an irritable Gundsric, who denied any knowledge ofthe text. To describe the dwarf as possessive would be a gross understatement, and it was thought that any further queries about the journals would only alienate him further. Therefore, Gundsric did not know that I had any affiliation with the Society, and neither had I mentioned the j ournal. Instead, I worked in his home, staying alert to any signs of my true goal, or any mention of Lortis or his expedition.

Scholar, thief… and spy?

Gundsric’s house straddled the border between the Wharf District and the tangle of tenements, grog shops, and brothels disdainfully referred to by the locals as Rotgut. It was likely the most lawless district in Riddleport, and certainly the most rundown. A curious place for a dwarf who had retired rich from the Gas Works to make his home. Perhaps the rumors were true that Gundsric was as pleased to sell his potions to any street scum who met his price as he was to supply the city’s wealthier and more respected individuals. Or maybe it was that, suffering from fatal black lung contracted in the carbauxine mines below the city, coughing his life away bit by bit, Gundsric no longer feared the knives and clubs ofthe urban predators all around him.

To see his home, however, was to get a different impression of Gundsric’s desire for security.

Approaching it from the west through a narrow lane between leaning rows of strake-sided buildings , it seemed a t first a lichen-slick wall at the end of the street. As I drew closer, the wall revealed itself as a stone foundation making up half the height of a fortress like three-story dwelling. It was as architecturally alien to the city as a Shoanti felt tent would seem pitched inside the Black Dome of Sothis. The house’s few windows heavily shuttered with iron-shod marine oak-were situated asymmetrically around the upper story. Decades of weather had rusted the shutters, leaving streaks along the sides oft he house like the dried blood of some long neglected wounds. Overall the place was as squat, ugly, and guarded as the dwarf himself.

I did not have long to wait after rapping with the heavy bronze knocker-a ring through the nose of a verdigris bull’s head-before I was greeted with the metallic clacking of locks and bolts from within. As always, Mordimor mumbled his displeasure at this. Gundsric’s front door was of steel-hard black wood, which I suspect had been alchemically treated. The only other access to his dwelling was a portcullis-fronted double door leading from his basement to a damp alley that ran some ten feet below street level around the back ofhis house.

With the snicking of the last lock, the door swung inward. Gundsric stood filling the doorway like some stunted old tree. What strength had once been his was long dissipated by his illness, and his eyes bulged from a gaunt face that seemed to have had all the flesh sucked from it below his dry yellow skin. He wore a heavy leather apron over threadbare cloth, and was stained and soiled from head to foot. On a silver chain around his neck hung the battered pewter flask I had never seen him without. His right shoulder was higher than his left, resulting in a hump that lent him a leaning, unbalanced aspect. Most striking was his beardles s face, withered like an old fruit. Many of the dwarven carbauxine miners of the Gas Works trimmed or even shaved their beards to better accommodate the cumbersome breathing apparatuses they employed. Whether Gundsric had done so and kept the fashion, or whether his beard had fallen out as a side effect of black lung, I couldn’t guess. His beardlessness

marked him as a dwarf apart, sick and alone.

“Elven reliability,” he said, glowering at me beneath bushy eyebrows like a tangle of iron wire. “This is how you repay me for my generosity.”

It was a conversation I had had with him many times before, and one it is needless to relate here. It was something of a formality, each of us reminding the other of our usefulness, of our lack of other options. Gundsric needed me because no scholar in the city would work with him due to his abrasivenes s and bad reputation. I, as a penniless academic denied access to the Cypher Lodge (or

so my story went), had no other employment options that did not involve learning a new profession-most especially the world’s oldest, as Gundsric never failed to imply.

In the end he assented to my entry, his black eyes scanning the street suspiciously as if seeing an assassin in every shadow. I moved into the dim interior, flinching slightly at the always-jarring-and always - different commingling of odors within. Today the eggy stink of sulfur had joined hands with the harsh chemical reek of ammonia to produce a bouquet of truly unwelcoming proportions. Beneath it all, hardly discernible, was the ever-present whiff of the noxious carbauxine the dwarf used to light and heat his home.

“Don’t just stand there sniffing. Get to work. And don’t let that weasel of yours wander around again-this can be a dangerous place.” Gundsric finished his reproach with an explosive cough, lungs rattling like wet parchment. Before he stumped off to his basement workshop-one of many rooms I had never seen in his house-he fixed Mordimor and me with a wicked grin, his teeth flecked with fresh blood.

I went upstairs through a dark, narrow stairway to the workroom, a small, wood-paneled chamber containing a single desk and weakly burning gas lamp. I busied myself with the familiar routine oftranslation while Mordimor slept curled up in my lap. The room was as spare as a cloister, and other than the corridor and stair I had just moved through and the foyer and rude privy at the

entrance to the house, it was the only part of Gundsric’s home I was allowed acces s to without his supervision. What lay beyond the barred doors I passed almost every day was largely unknown to me.

When the dwarf had new work for me, he would set out the items or texts in this workroom, along with terse instructions and a quantity of elixirs that aided in translation. My knowledge of languages is not inconsiderable, but Gundsric’s collection included many texts in obscure and antique dialects that were unreadable even to those fluent in the modern forms of those languages. Since my own minor magical skill is not equal to the task of more than a few minutes of such translation work, and Gundsric’s potions were far more potent than any spell I could ever employ, I had come to rely on the alchemist’s elixirs almost exclusively. Even, I am sad to say, to the point of shunning my own scholarship. Each draught did more than merely convey the meaning and nuance of unfamiliar scripts, but seemed to invigorate and even elevate all my efforts , extending m y awarenes s beyond what I had ever been capable of in the past.

This had been, in many respects, the happiest period of my life, however brief it was , and however false so much that underlay it would one day turn out to be. In that tiny, dim room, I had worked as if possessed, seeing with better, brighter eyes into the rich lore of the untrammeled past. It was a kind of meditation, a trance, and often the hours would slip by without my noticing

their pas sage.

But that day was different. I was distracted, the twenty-sixth-century folio in the Taldan vulgate I was annotating lying neglected before me while my thoughts drifted to Kostin. He and Aeventius had not been idle in the past months, and both had regaled me with stories last night in the common room of the Gold Goblin. The old cons they had pulled together as teenagers had been

dusted off anew as they lied and cheated their way around Riddleport’s seedier shoreside, all the while setting things up for their big score. Even the acerbic wizard had, after a few glasses of Chelish red, laughed and joked about their progress.

What would they have done in my position? Here I was, virtually unproven to the Society, entrusted with a task by my venture-captain, and yet what progress had I made? I caught myself toying with the faintly glowing elixirs then, fingers running over the cool glass vials, tracing the star-shaped symbols engraved on the corks. There were three left in the rack, which meant that I had consumed two already in the space of only a few hours. Naturally the effect should diminish somewhat, using them everyday as I had, but my rate of consumption had begun to worry me. I snatched my hand back, resisting the urge to have another potion. Mordimor stirred on my lap, fixing me with a quizzical look.

I surveyed the nearly featureless room. The dim glow of a single gas lantern was adequate to my needs; in fact, my already keen vision seemed sharper than ever before. It was a side effect of the potions, of course. I placed my quill in its holder and pushed the folio aside, my thoughts trending in new directions . What would Kostin do in my position?

Thoughts racing almost too fast to follow, I stood up, hardly noticing Mordimor’s grumbling protest as he plopped off of my lap. I was seeing Gundsric’s house now, seeing all of it in my mind’s eye, in much the same way my imagination had danced along the edges of the Cyphergate, or as it did when confronted with the various minor artifacts of the dwarf’s collection. The floor plan was unconventional, almost bizarre, but how much of what I was now imagining was truly gues swork? I knew a wide stairwell ran from the main floor up two flights; I had seen this when Gundsric led me down a normally locked corridor to a room containing his Keleshite ceramics . That stairway ran parallel to the one I climbed everyday-staring straight ahead I would be looking

at those stairs right now, could I but see through the paneled wall. But with the stairs in such a position a dead spot was created, a wasted triangle of space, between the stairwell and the exterior wall.

It was then that I noticed the door.

I rushed to the spot, running my hands over the smooth walnut paneling. How could I have failed to see this, day after day? Sliding my fingernails in the cracks between panels I gave a light tug, to no avail. I tried another panel, while Mordimor sniffed along the crease where wall met floor. There was no give at all in the wood, and I stepped back, exasperated.

And then, as certain as my vision of the door had been, the logic ofits opening came to me.

It was a dark burl of wood, low down along the wall but not uncomfortably so for someone of the dwarf’s stature. A hard push was all it took. With a click, the panel before me popped away from the wall and swung gently outward. Pulling it open all the way, I could see a dark, slant-ceilinged hall running deeper into the house.

Mordimor chuffed in surprise.

“I know, Mord. I can’t see how we could have missed it, either.” I stooped to scratch his head, and a glint of light on the back of the door drew my attention. There, a little below chest-height for me-but eye-level for a dwarf

was affixed a kind of prism. Leaning down, peering into the thick, green glass, I could see almost perfectly through the thin door, despite it being smooth and solid on the other side.

So, I had been watched. The spy had herself been spied upon.

Since I had come to rely on Gundsric’s potions entirely, I had stopped even bothering to cast my own translation spells. Thus I had fallen back into the daily habit of preparing the simple magic I used to speak with Mordimor, something we both looked forward to for a few minutes every day. Conversing with an animal in such a way is never as straightforward or precise as people imagine, but after years of mutual experience Mordimor and I have come to understand one another quite well.

I cast the spell now, the words spilling out of me in an old familiar rhythm, the gestures nearly automatic. A successful casting is always recognizable, and I immediately felt the power flood through me, a comforting yet invigorating wash of energy. I told Mordimor to wait in the shadow at the base of the narrow stair and call a warning to me should the dwarf emerge from his basement laboratory. Not for the first time, I envied wizards and their uncanny bond with their familiars . But perhaps this lack of true integration, this reliance on a spell to bridge the gulf of incomprehension between two beings so inherently different, is the price Mordimor and I pay for retaining our individual selves.

My badger friend grumbled in mild consternation, told me to be careful, and rubbed his whiskered snout against my hand in a gesture that needed no spell to translate. He then bounded off down the stair, a black-and-white ripple of fur. With one last look over my shoulder, I entered the secret hall.

It was long and low, and faced on one side with a shelf littered with artifacts. Here and there I recognized objects and texts that I had worked with in my little room. This, then, was the path Gundsric took to carry materials in

and out of the workroom. The path he used to creep up to the door to spy on me, for whatever suspicious reasons of his own. I could hardly resent the fact or hold it against him, given my own intentions.

The first room I came to was the mirror ofmy workroom, though cluttered with a disarray of manuscripts and tomes on leaning shelves . My impression of Gundsric as an organized, orderly dwarf suddenly needed revision, for this place was clearly the product of a chaotic, almost careles s mind. Or, perhaps , one preoccupied with other matters. Dark as it was-the carbauxine lanterns here maintaining but the merest flicker-! could still make out the steep stairs leading up to the third floor in the black portal at the far end of the room. Pausing briefly to listen for any telltale warning from Mordimor, I stifled the apprehension that had been threatening to overtake me since I first opened the secret door. Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm my racing heart. This was what I had come for, I reminded myself Not the research. Not

the translation. This.

I moved to the stairs , and upward. For all I knew, the journal of Jan Lortis was lodged in one of the leaning piles in the room I had just passed through, along with a dozen other unguessed rarities. But I did not have time to check every spine and catalog. Already a plan was formulating in my mind, one I thought worthy of my new profes sion, and one I hoped would allow me to return to these rooms at my leisure in the near future.

Just ahead, the light increased, though the air grew yet more oppressive with heat and dust. The first room on the third floor was a jumble of old armor and antique weapons, objects once cared for and now given over to neglect. A silver-chased breastplate of Cheliax’s old empire lay dusty in a corner where it had fallen from an armor stand. An Aldori dueling sword, its hilt encrusted

with emeralds and pearls, hung dingy and forgotten from pegs on the far wall, the blade’s once-fine steel freckled with rust. A dozen other such treasures languished here, as if imprisoned for the crime of daring to approach perfection. It was an armory that would make any prince envious, but it seemed more the hoarding of some kleptomania cal goblin chieftain than the collection of a wealthy dwarf, a race that prized metalcraft above almost any other art.

The next room told a similar tale of disregard in iron, bronze, and polished stone, containing as it did an extraordinary array of Ulfen ritual vessels engraved with Skald runes. I fought the urge to linger, moving quickly, hoping to find what I was looking for before my nerve gave out or Mordimor signaled me. Two more rooms , two more neglected treasure-troves, and I finally came upon

what I sought. A window.

I slipped over to it, remaining alert to the room’s contents. Here for the first time I was seeing evidence of Gundsric’s profession. The room was laden with glassware in a myriad of esoteric shapes, as well as racks of carefully labeled solutions in every color imaginable. One whole wall was dominated by a system of small drawers, and the pungent odors of a thousand reagents danced in the thick air. Another wall was pinned with dozens of curling parchment maps, yellow and brittle with age, each bearing heavy notations around the irregular shapes of an underground tunnel system. In front of the room’s only window, a small table held a gas burner beneath an armature designed to hold containers above the flame. Here, at least, was some semblance of the careful mind I had always ascribed to the dwarf, and it seemed the disregard with which he treated his collection did not extend to the alchemical tools of his craft.

At the window, I tugged hard at the shutter’s bolt. It was stuck fast, no doubt having remained locked for years. Straining, with both hands wrapped around the rust-furred toggle, I wrenched at it. Once, twice, three times-I may as well have been trying to pry a stone lose from the house’s foundations . I had to make this work, had to open it now , as I knew I would never have the bravado to attempt this again. Whatever chance I-or more to the point, Kostin or Shess-had to break into this house later and search it more thoroughly depended on opening this bolt. Opening it right now.

Almost without noticing, I caught a sound barely louder than the pounding of my own heart. It was Mordimor’s warning bark, far below.

With a savage jerk I flung myself at the bolt, forcing it open and crashing to the floor. In an attempt to arrest my fall, or at least minimize the noise I was making, I had grabbed unsuccessfully for the nearest handhold, knocking a small box off the table. I stood up quickly, pulse racing, hardly feeling my scraped palms, and scooped the rectangular box-about as large as a loaf of bread-off the floor and replaced it on the table.

Something about the box stole my attention. It bore the same star-shaped rune as the translation elixirs, and I noticed for the first time the similarity it held to a Thassilonian sihedron, though Gundsric’s star was composed of ten arms of disproportionate and unequal length. Something about it twisted at my gut, and even as I yanked my eyes away, I felt it calling them back, dragging my attention toward it. Sweat broke out on my forehead as I forced myselfto look elsewhere.

More of the translation potions stood on a rack next to the gas burner. Without thinking, I grabbed one of the vials and slipped it into my pouch.

But I had no time to spare on exploring this further. Still feeling the box’s siren call, I turned and raced back the way I had come. Again Mordimor’s warning bleat reached me, and my fear at being caught, at ruining my chances of ever finding the journal ofJan Lortis, paled in comparison to my concern for Mordimor’s safety. In only a few minutes my evaluation of Gundsric had changed,

and now I saw the bitter, angry dwarf as something other than pitiable. Whether it was my fear that suggested this to my already hyper-stimulated mind, or perhaps my own intuitive understanding of his character brought on by the glimpse at Gundsric’s private rooms, I could not say. What I did know with a sudden, undeniable certainty was that I had been underestimating the alchemist-perhaps dangerously so.

I sped through the dust and the jumble of the third floor rooms, and down the stair as fast as I was able. I was hot, dizzy, all my fears given a sickening, vivid edge by the potion. Once again, I heard Mordimor’s cry as I entered the secret corridor, though this time it was punctuated by Gundsric’s own shouts. Dashing down the hall, I experienced one of those moments when time seems to slow, when even the simplest things seem fraught with difficulty, and in that short corridor I endured an eternity’s worth of dread.

Emerging from the passage after what was in reality but a few seconds, I was relieved to see the workroom empty. But the noise of Gundsric’s cursing and Mordimor’s bleating had grown louder. I spun, slamming the secret door in my haste to get it closed. Wincing at the thud, I lunged toward the stair, just as Mordimor shot up and out of the darkness of the stairwell and into my arms. He was trembling but unhurt.

“Torag take you, vermin! ” Gundsric clambered up into the room, eyes red and bulging. His lips and chin were smeared with bright blood. Seeing me, he roared and shook his fist. “Your damnable skunk bit me! ” he ranted, his words transitioning into a bloody, hacking cough that robbed him of all speech.

Still clutching Mordimor, I squeezed past the coughing dwarf and took the stairs two at a time. I could not stay in this house another minute-! was shaking as badly as poor Mord. Over my shoulder I said something about having to leave early, making some sort of inarticulate apology. I do not truly remember what I said, but I still recall the tremulousness of my own voice and my fear that the dwarf should notice it.

He stumped after me, slant-shouldered, moving like some poorly made, clumsy-limbed golem. His hacking cough boomed off the walls and filled the close spaces

of the house-a metronome tracking the rhythm of his dying.

I fumbled at his front door, Mordimor clinging to my shoulder. The sensible thing would be to talk, ease the dwarf’s suspicions . He was angry at my badger’s unlawful wandering, at being bitten, but Gundsric knew nothing of my own explorations. The rational part of me screamed to slow down, to smooth things over as I had done so often before. But I could not-my perception of the dwarf had altered, and without being able to say why, I now regarded the thing that hacked and gurgled in the corridor behind me as a monster.

As I worked the last bolt in a panic, his bloody hand closed over mine.

My flesh rebelled at his touch. He gave off heat like a forge fire. So close, I could smell the brimstone stink of him, the riotous mingling of odors both sour and sweet that surrounded him like an aura. Paralyzed, my body screamed silently to push him away, to draw my knife. To kill him if I could.

With a snarl, he threw open the last bolt and flung the door wide.

“Get out,” he said, voice husky and crackling with mucus .

I slipped around him, not daring to look. The humid street air that greeted me was like a breath of spring after my ordeal. I hastened to be on my way, body aching and tense, tendons like the snare-strings of some sprung trap.

At the end of his street I paused, daring to look behind me, still cradling Mordimor. Gundsric stood in his door, a dark silhouette, crooked and still as any broken thing. The sun was barely past noon, and the air was as rank and stifling as any other mid-Erastus day in Riddleport. But standing there, looking at Gundsric, I felt a chill as cutting as the windward shadow of the Winterwall steal over me. Shivering, and with the black shape of the dwarf still watching me, I turned and lost myself in the comforting anonymity of the crowd.

Chapter 3

The Char Street Clippers

To think that lurking in the shadows of some moldering old casks with a con man, a wizard, and an Ulfen mercenary would feel like familiar, safe territory to me is a strange and, perhaps, wonderful thing. But after my fright with Gundsric that afternoon, this was exactly where I wanted to be.

Even Mordimor, generally on record as disapproving of these kinds of things, seemed eager to take part in the culmination of Kostin’s big heist. Granted, all that the plan entailed was to wait for an invisible Shess to slip out of the

Char Street Clippers’ headquarters with the scepter, and then for all of us to steal away into the dark. Our presence, Kostin assured me, was merely a form of insurance.

But, as I well knew, these things never go according to plan. The logic of our story demanded it, and as Master Shaine would say, even our simplest choices have the power of prophecy. I had chosen to live an adventure, and I knew somewhere deep in my bones that I was going to have one that night.

We were hunkered down between a sagging, tin-roofed shed and the upturned hull of an old skiff, positioned nicely in the dark space behind the aforementioned casks. The reek of tar was in the air, as was the ever-present salty stink of Riddleport’s harbor. We were in the eastern section of the Wharf District, south of Rotgut and not very far from Gundsric’s fortress of a house, almost up against the jagged hills that marked the city limits, smack in the center of a cluster of rundown buildings that had been abandoned once this little neck of the harbor had silted up. The shallow, almost stagnant water that still filled the channel was hardly enough to buoy a rowboat at high tide, and thus the docks and piers that lined the inlet had fallen into disuse and ill repair.

Of course, no building remains unoccupied for long, and the Char Street Clippers were only too happy to make a home in the derelict warehouse that bordered the northern tip of the inlet. The gas lamps that lined the more traveled byways of the city were but a distant glow this deep into the slums, and the moon was the merest sliver. But the stars were bright and clear, and Castrovel glittered like a faraway emerald directly above us. A single bat flapped in zigzag circles about the reeking inlet, no doubt having found a rich source of insect life. Mercifully, the night was a cool one, the wind blowing in from the gulf having banished the swelter of summer for the time being.

“I can wait no longer,” Aeventius said, squatting uncomfortably along the edge of the shed rather than risk soiling his fine clothes by sitting on the street itself “As it is, I will already be late for this evening’s performance at the Sable Flag.”

Kostin shot back with a choice Varisian curse. “You’re seeing this through. Your ‘play’ can wait.”

“Scaerelli is performing Vestments Unseen. I hear it is quite critical of House Thrune, and do not wish to miss it.”

I looked at the fourth member of our group, the disheveled Ulfen warrior Gyrd, whom I had fought alongside in Magnimar. His bloodshot gaze met mine and I rolled my eyes at Kostin and Aeventius. Gyrd, expressionless as always, turned back to survey the dockhouse.

“You forget who you’re talking to, Aevy.” Kostin, voice rising in irritation, turned around and wagged a finger at the wizard. He was dressed in the black leather I had seen him in the day before, though with the addition of a fine matching set of longsword and dagger at his waist. “I know all the bookmakers in the Wharf I know where the money goes, and you’ve got more than a few crowns going on Dashak in tonight’s games. So don’t try to tell me you’re going to some theater instead of slinking off to Zincher’s Arena.”

Aeventius’s eyes narrowed. “A man can have money on the games and still attend some other engagement. Where I go is none of your concern anyway, you trumped-up guttersnipe.”

Kostin grinned. It was a smile I’d seen before, whenever he was about to fight. “I do have to wonder how obvious it is to all the bluebloods up on the Summit why the Reates family doesn’t have two coppers to pinch together. Maybe

the heir has a gambling problem?”

“Abadar blast you!” Aeventius snarled, voice rising beyond all levels of caution.

“Not holding my breath on that one,“Kostin said, smirking.

“This from a man whose devotionals sway between a drunken lout and a moth-winged wanton.”

“You’re just mad that Desna never smiles on your wagers.”

I was about to say something to stop their bickering, but a warning bark from Mordimor drew our attention back to the Clippers’ warehouse.

Six figures had approached the warehouse and hailed the guards. They moved with a lanky shuffle, hunched men and women hooded in black. Two of them bore a heavy sack between them, nearly dragging it along the street, each man holding a rope-end that bound the bag closed. In the weak light of the guard’s lantern it was difficult to get an impression of the new arrivals, save that each had a

lean and hungry aspect associated with criminals of the most dangerous sort.

“Shess never said anything about this,“Kostin whispered.

Many of the Clippers were gone this evening, engaged in some work for one of the minor Rotgut bosses that didn’t want to get his hands dirty or risk offending the real powers of the city. The strange thing about the Char Street Clippers, Kostin had explained to me, was that they had so far been able to flout the authority of Overlord Cromarcky and the other crime lords of the city. They had gotten away with overstepping their bounds again and again, their

own power increasing at an unprecedented rate as a result.

“They’re going in,” Aeventius said, exhibiting no trace of his earlier petulance. “This may make things difficult for the gnome. We should observe more closely.”

We agreed. Watching the last of the visitors enter the double doors of the warehouse, Kostin suggested we sneak in closer to the building and try to peer through one of the filthy, alley-side windows that were visible from our position. Backing away from the casks and making our way around the tangle of sheds that lined the approach to the warehouse, we moved as quietly as we were able, staying out of the single guard’s line of sight.

My pulse quickened, and I was reminded of my escapade in Gundsric’s house earlier in the day. But there I had felt an overwhelming anxiety and inexplicable sense of dread, whereas now I was enjoying a feeling of exhilaration. Almost of anticipation. At that moment, stalking quietly through the shadows, wincing at every creak and tinkle of Gyrd’s chainmail or admiring the way Kostin placed his feet with such deliberateness, I had no trouble reconciling all the pieces of my life. Scholar and spy, explorer and chronicler, Pathfinder and thief Perhaps it had been the banishment of the guilt I had felt over lying to Gundsric that had finally freed me to feel this way, to feel as if my life was a natural whole and not some play in which I merely portrayed all the parts.

Or perhaps it had been Gundsric’s potion. For the hundredth time my thoughts went to the stolen vial in my pouch, every fiber of my being tingling with the desire to snatch it up and drink it down. It was an unwelcome feeling, and one I had prayed to Sarenrae to rid me of, though rarely do I feel the need to invoke the divine. In that respect, I suppose I truly am my father’s daughter.

The first window we came to was dark, blocked by a wall of detritus on the other side. We slipped farther along the building’s flank, Mordimor leading the way with his nose to the ground. The next window was glassless, being a thin piece of hide stretched and pegged into place, and the small room beyond was a blur. Kostin informed us that this was the likeliest route Shess would take to escape the warehouse once she had the scepter-a quick slash with a dagger would

silently open a portal to the outside. We briefly discussed doing the same when we discovered the third window on this side of the building was completely boarded up.

“We now know less than we would have if we had remained in place,” Aeventius said.

Gyrd grumbled in agreement. The taciturn northman had been growing more anxious by the minute, his concern for Shess palpable. The two had long been friends, having both served on the crew of a longship raider many years ago and worked as a team ever since. The big man’s knuckles were white on the hilt of his blade.

“We have to keep going around, or we go up,“Kostin said, frowning. “We can split up, try both. Or we can just trust Shess to get thejob done and go back to waiting by the sheds.”

I was about to suggest we continue our circuit of the building when a muffled shout from within the warehouse intruded on our conversation. For an instant we froze, looking at one another as if to confirm what we had just heard.

Then we heard it again: mixed in with the cries of deeper voices was an almost childlike voice raised in fear or anger.

Shess.

Growling, Gyrd drew his sword and barreled past us, back toward the front of the warehouse. I hissed his name and tried to catch hold of him.

“You won’t stop him. Aevy, follow him in. Tal and I will try this window.”

Aeventius nodded with an exasperated sigh and cracked his knuckles. “They’re probably just about to start the prologue to Vestments,” he said, before turning to run after Gyrd.

“Starting the first bout, more like.” Kostin dashed to the hide-covered window, Mordimor and I close behind. Drawing his long parrying dagger, he slashed the skin along two of the hide’s edges before vaulting through the window. Mordimor went next, with my help, and then I slipped inside, the dry skin rattling as I passed through.

The commotion had grown louder, Gyrd’s frontal assault no doubt having added to the mayhem. The room we were in was small and dim, illuminated by a single forgotten candle stub guttering in a wall sconce. It was clearly the living quarters for four or five people, as bedding and filthy blankets covered much of the floor. We wasted no time, moving immediately for the door. Fitting a bolt to my crossbow, I nodded to Kostin that I was ready, and he threw the door wide.

A corridor ran straight, brightly lit at the far end. The noise of combat reached us and we raced down the hall toward it, all sensible caution lost in the need for swiftness. About the only thing we could count on now was the effectiveness of our surprise attack, and our own skill at arms.

A shape darkened the way in front of us. I stopped, raised the crossbow to my shoulder, and tried to line up a shot. But Kostin was in the way, and did not slow his approach. In the split second it took him to close on the figure, I saw more clearly that the man in front of us one of the Clippers-had his back to the corridor and a bow trained on something in the large space ahead. Kostin

never hesitated as he drove his dagger low into the man’s back, then flung him aside as he charged into the room.

I followed, eyes locked on the dying archer. He was a small man, dirty, clothed in a ragged Varisian patchwork vest. I could see so much of him so clearly in the almost insignificant moment between entering the room behind Kostin and raising my weapon to shoot an approaching axeman. Insignificant, save that it was the small, dirty man’s last. There was little blood left by Kostin’s precise attack, but nevertheless there lay the broken man, crumpled like an insect, his limbs twitching in shock. He wore a simple silver ring on the third finger of his right hand, and his unkempt beard was flecked with gray. His short bow protruded from beneath him, and I saw that it had once been a fine weapon. He could have passed for Kostin’s cousin, for in both men the Varisian features were strong. Had he been given a kapenia when he came of age? Did he swear to Desna in a million different ways, and had he traveled the wilds

in a covered wagon? Had he seen this exact, final moment in a hand of harrow cards, the empty eye sockets of a skull staring back at him above a perfect smile?

His dark eyes met with mine for the briefest moment before I tore my gaze away. A man with a woodaxe was bearing down on Kostin’s right-hand side, while Kostin himself was locked in combat with a swordsman wielding a combination of curved blade and buckler. Such a small interval of time: One second a man lives, the whole of his years stretching back like a winding and not-always-clear path through the forest of the past. The next he dies, his path to be traveled no more, blotted out and shrouded in a darkness that can never be seen through, save only by the gods themselves.

One second Taldara Meirlanel feels sorrow and regret at a thing fairly called murder; the next she raises her crossbow, sights along its length, and looses a bolt into the eye of man who dies before his body even hits the ground.

She does it to protect her friend; she does it because that is why she is here; she does it because the story she has chosen for herself demands it.

The room was large; we had come upon the warehouse proper. Where once crates and casks and the goods of a dozen port towns must have been stacked almost to the ceiling, now there was an enormous empty space, its far corners concealed by darkness, its walls reverberating with the sounds of killing. The Clippers were fighting the black-clad visitors, the combat thickest around the large sack the newcomers had brought with them, which now lay on the floor. A flash of light drew my attention toward the front of the building-Aeventius firing bolts from his fingertips with a practiced elegance. Beside him, Gyrd hacked his way through a knot of fighters with grim efficiency, a smile like the bared teeth of some flame haired predator showing through his unruly beard.

I hooked the draw winch on my crossbow and tugged it back in one smooth motion, pulling from the shoulder. A click told me that the string was locked in a perfect V of tension. My father was a marksman of formidable ability, admired even among his people, where skill with the bow was a widespread art and one often excelled at. He had taught me the use of the elven longbow, but I had never taken to it, preferring instead the intuitive shooting of the crossbow, a weapon prevalent among the rangers of Nirmathas where I had apprenticed in woodcraft. “The machine,” my father had called it, sneering at a weapon even a stupid human peasant with no training could wield with some effect. Fitting a heavy, lacquered bolt into the crossbow’s channel, I raised the weapon in one fluid motion and felled another Clipper as she tried to skirt

around Kostin’s flank. I hooked the draw again, repeating the motion with a speed that I knew would leave most archers fumbling to keep up. With silent thanks to the father whose disapproval had motivated me to perfect my skill, I loaded and loosed another bolt. My vision had never been keener, my mind never more focused.

“You need to teach me to do that!” said a familiar voice to my left. Materializing out of the shadows was the green and girlish shape of Shess, the chance sighting of whom had set me upon this whole adventure. Before I could respond, she raced past me, taking Kostin’s assailant from behind with her keen-edged short sword. The two exchanged a cheery greeting over the dead man, then turned to face separate attackers. Clearly she had not obtained the scepter that was the whole object of this heist, and what exactly had transpired to tum a simple bit of burglary into a three-way battle was not yet clear.

The ranks of the Clippers and the black-clad strangers were growing thin, and it seemed our intervention had turned the tables on both. Gyrd and Aeventius had won through to the center of the room, leaving a trail of dead and dying behind them. Kostin and Shess each fought black-cowled swordsmen, and it was only then that I noticed the change that had come over the second gang. Hunched as they were, garbed and hooded in black, it had been difficult to spot at first. But beneath each cowl the pointed snout of a rat now chittered, yellow wedge-teeth gnashing together like pairs of dull-edged chisels.

“Wererats!” I cried out, rushing to close the distance with Kostin. Mordimor bounded along at my heels, barking and snarling, weighing his need to protect me with his deep instincts to fight. “Don’t let them bite you!”

“No shit!” Kostin shot back, turning aside a sword thrust from one of the shape-changers. The creature grew more ratlike by the second, even as it fought: its posture hunching, hands melding into claws, and a worm-skin tail snaking out from beneath its tunic. With a wild lunge, it fastened ontoKostin and bore him down, raking him with its back legs and snapping at his face.

I raised my crossbow and sighted along its length just as a voice like a clap of thunder echoed across the chamber.

“Cease this warring and obey your lord and master!”

It was as if every impulse, every instinct of mine toward obedience, had been pulled taut by the hand of a master puppeteer. My arms trembled and my aim wavered. A voice deep inside of me demanded that I stop, that I obey. To disregard the command would be to fly in the face of everything I held sacred, everything I loved or cared about, to throw away whatever scrap of honor or shred of self respect I possessed. To disobey would be a worse sin than that of a daughter who shirked her father’s expectations, a scholar who lied to gain access to the home of a dying dwarf, or a Pathfinder who spent more time consorting with thieves and cheats than doing her duty. It was an imperative I could not, must not, ignore.

But ignore it I did.

I loosed the bolt, hitting the wererat in the shoulder. It rolled off ofKostin, hissing and spitting. Kostin regained his feet, his leather armor hanging in rents from the wererat’s clawing attack.

“Seize those two!” The commanding voice belonged to a big man in rusty half-plate. He was dark-skinned and weathered like most of the pirate crews around Riddleport, as if he had spent a lifetime exposed to wind and sun. Around his neck hung a gruesome necklace of humanoid ears. All across the chamber the fighting had stopped, and only my friends and I and a handful of the Clippers and wererats remained. The pirate strode over the bodies of the fallen toward the center of the room, a scepter raised high in his left hand. It was magnificent, its mere possession seeming proof of the man’s authority, and even though I had resisted his command, I still felt compelled by the artifact’s inherent force. Here was the thing we had come to steal from the boss of the Clippers no mere royal bauble but an artifact of enormous power.

“Yes, master,” rasped the wererat to my left as she locked her claws around my upper arm. I tried to pull away, clumsily striking at her with my crossbow. Her fur was black as night, and a crescent scar left a hairless patch of red flesh beneath one eye. The scepter had turned her into a servant of the Clipper boss as surely as if she been born into his service. She slapped my weapon from my grasp and it clattered to the ground.

“Sorry, Tal,” Kostin said, grabbing me by the other arm as I struggled. I stared at him in disbelief, my desire to resist draining away. He seemed hollow somehow, numbed with shock, but I could still see the pain in his eyes, the revulsion at his own behavior.

“Gotta do what the man says,” he whispered.

“Silence that wizard,” the Clipper boss roared, dim light refracting from the jewel-encrusted rod he brandished. Aeventius must have resisted the commands of the scepter as well, and I could hear him forming the harsh syllables of a spell over to my left. I strained in the grasp of the wererat and my friend, and turned to see the wizard.

Before Aeventius could finish his utterance, Gyrd who already had a restraining arm locked around him-smashed a fist into Aeventius’s mouth. One hammer blow was enough to drop the spellcaster in a heap at the northman’s feet.

I cried out then, and renewed my struggle, pulling Kostin and the wererat with me. From the corner of my eye I saw Mordimor raise his head above the corpse of a Clipper and take in the scene, before he ducked back down again. The sight of him gave me hope, though the wererat I had just wounded with my bolt swiveled his head suspiciously in Mordimor’s direction.

The Clipper boss was laughing, as were his underlings, all of them wholly absorbed in the spectacle of the warrior and the wizard. “Oh, and he was a friend of yours, yes? You two fought well together, really thinned out my herd. But that just means the cut from all this gleam will be that much bigger for the rest of us.” At that, his men cheered and roared his name: “Garso, Garso, Garso!”

“Yeah, yeah. Enough!” Garso strode over to Gyrd. The Clippers quieted, and their boss looked the big Ulfen up and down as if pricing a horse. “You know, I wonder if i even need the rod for the likes of you. Bet a pouch full of silver would be enough to get you to knife everyone in the room.

“Shess,” the gang boss continued, wheeling on the gnome and pointing the scepter at her like a liege lord commanding a knight. “If that is your real name. Drop that sword and come over here.”

Shess obeyed, walking toward him with an unnatural, jerky gait.

“I don’t have time to figure every damn thing that went on here tonight, but if you hadn’t tried to steal this”-Garso shook the scepter at her as his eyes bulged in rage-“we would have never had this fight with Ziphras’s rats in the

first place. I don’t know if l can ever patch this up again, or where I’m gonna get more gleam. You’ve ruined us.

The leering boss turned back to Gyrd. “You,” he said, and tapped Gyrd’s mailed chest with the scepter. “Bring me the head of this little thief-and the rest of you stay where you are!”

Kostin’s hand clenched tighter around my arm, and I could feel his body tense as if straining against fetters of steel. I fought to get myself free, and my wererat captor dealt me a smack to the back of the head that sent me to my knees.

Gyrd, his wide-bladed Ulfen sword in his hand, looked at the Clipper boss through eyes like slits. He took a step toward Shess, close enough now to strike. The gnome stood passively, gazing up at her friend, looking so small and vulnerable in the shadow of that mountain of iron and muscle. On her cheek I could see the glint of tears, even through the blur of my own.

Raising the chipped, bloody sword, Gyrd stood frozen, his face as red as his blade, his mouth a rictus of pain.

“It’s n-not your f-fault, Gyrd,” Shess said.

“Do it!” Garso screamed, but not so loudly that all in the room did not hear the feral snarl of Mordimor as he launched himself against the boss’s upraised arm.

The scepter was knocked from Garso’s hand, and clattered to the floorboards.

At once all was chaos. Gyrd, bellowing in rage, wheeled upon Garso and buried his blade halfway into the man’s skull. As the boss went down I saw Mordimor dart away, eager to avoid the murderous onslaught of the viking, who struck the Clipper again and again.

The wererats were quick to recover. Next to me, Kostin was bowled over by the charge of the wounded wererat, while the female who had hold of my arm wrenched me to my feet. I put out a hand to fend off her attack, but instead she drew me close, her vermin snout an inch from my face. Her hot breath smelled of sewer trash and raw meat.

She inhaled, taking my scent, inspecting me as if I were an intended meal. “The smell is strong on you. When the time comes, I’ll pluck your pretty eyes myself” I pulled back just as she released me of her own accord, and I toppled backward. With a final hiss, she darted off, running down the hallway from which Kostin and I had entered, seeming to grow smaller and more ratlike as she

vanished into the dark.

As I regained my feet I could see that the Clippers and wererats had all fled. Kostin was at my side, his arm red to the elbow with the blood of the wererat he had just slain. In the center of the room, Gyrd helped a groaning Aeventius to his feet. The wizard’s face was already swelling, and he tore his arm away from the Ulfen and tottered over to lean against the large sack that seemed to have been the object of the fight. Shess sat not far away, dejected.

A gentle pressure against my leg announced Mordimor’s presence. I bent down and scooped him into my arms.

“So that’s why this thing is so important.” Kostin, having walked over to where the scepter had fallen after Mordimor’s attack, held the artifact up reverently. “Just think what the kapteo could do with this. Hell, just think what we could do with it.”

Aeventius snarled, kicking over the heavy sack and spinning to shake a fist at Kostin. “I will not spend the rest of my life on the run from some pig-stinking Sczarni boss because you couldn’t refrain from playing with that toy. Leave it alone.”

They began to argue, but I didn’t hear it. Instead, my eyes were fixed on the contents of the sack, the dozens of flat, rectangular boxes that had spilled out when the wizard had kicked the bag over. I had seen this exact sort of box before. This very afternoon, in fact.

I had seen it on a table in Gundsric’s house, its lopsided, ten-pointed star the same as on the potions I drank daily potions that now stared back at me from each opened box of gleam.

Chapter 4

A Gleaming in the Dark

After an afternoon spent sneaking through the home of my former employer and a night fraught with blood and magic, my only desire was to return to my room at the Sated Shark and get some long-overdue sleep. Or if not sleep, then at least some quiet time reflecting on the ramifications of what I had learned in the rundown warehouse of the Char Street Clippers. Wererats? Gleam? What did either have to do with Gundsric? And more importantly, what did they have to do with me?

But Kostin would have none of it. This was the culmination of his grand heist, and even if things had not gone according to plan, in the end they had worked out just fine. After I turned Mordimor loose to forage for insects and rodents, I joined my Magnimarian friends in their rather unenthusiastic celebration. The night, of course, belonged to Kostin. From the Watercress where he threw dice and played a dozen hands of Hobgoblin, to the Stolen Rudder which saw him quaff jack after jack of strong Ulfen mead, Kostin managed to retain our company for several hours, all the while seemingly oblivious to our mood while enjoying himself to no end.

Gyrd was the first to leave. Having rapidly achieved a state of drunkenness on Kostin’s silver, he suddenly kicked back his chair, snatched the bottle of Korvosan brandy we had been sharing from the center of the table, and stomped off, muttering in Skald. Shess explained he was off to look for a fight or a place to sleep, whichever he happened upon first. I believe part of her wanted to go with him, to make sure the big northerner didn’t get into too much trouble, but the trauma of having her closest friend nearly murder her earlier that night had put a barrier between them, and subdued the normally unflappable gnome.

“He wouldn’t have done it,” Kostin said to her at one point later in the evening, trying to brighten her mood. “You know that. Aevy says it can’t make people do things that they would never do.” He tapped the potent scepter for emphasis. He had wrapped it in an old cloak, but on several occasions I had seen him unravel the cloth for a peek at the magnificent artifact. It was worth a king’s ransom for its craftsmanship and material alone, but when one considered its power to coerce and command, the scepter’s value became almost incalculable.

It was this power that Kostin alluded to with unchecked enthusiasm throughout the evening, playfully suggesting we use the item on various card dealers, money changers, wait staff, or guards for reasons that ranged from the absurd to the near-diabolical. But Kostin had had a good night, and been lucky enough already, so he took his losses at the gaming table in stride and limited his musings about the scepter to jokes and speculation. For the time being, it stayed wrapped up in its old cloak.

“Just think what we can do with it, Aevy. Talk about smoothing the rough edges-this thing is a long con gold mine. I say we delay our return to Magnimar for a few more weeks at least.”

“Don’t be a damned fool,” Aeventius snapped. His face and lip were painfully swollen where Gyrd had struck him, the skin bruised a livid purple. He had sipped his wine carefully all evening from one side of his mouth, and said very little as we followed Kostin from venue to venue. But this last remark had rekindled his earlier anger. He slammed his hand on the table and stood up, knocking over his half-full glass in a crimson cascade. “Put it in a lock box until we’re gone from this wretched town, which can be none too soon.” The wizard ignored Kostin’s parting remark as he strode away and out the door.

I had not been good company that evening, either, preoccupied as I was with my own problems. I had told Shess about finding the gleam at Gundsric’s, and once or twice I had asked her about the drug-after all, her association with the Clippers must have given her some insight into its effects and possible origins. But she said very little, and spent the evening tying and untying knots in a length of sisal twine. I had never seen her like that before. She seemed somehow less vibrant, her bright palette diluted by lesser pigments.

“Dja want to hold it, Tal?”

I had been lost in my own thoughts, my hand on the vial of Gundsric’s potion in my pouch, not daring to let myself believe my latest suspicions about its contents. It was very late, and other than Shess, Kostin, and I, only a

handful of other patrons sat around the common room of the Stolen Rudder. At his slurred statement, I looked up to see Kostin, drunk, with his feet on the table and the unwrapped scepter in his lap. He leered at me, bleary eyed and suggestive.

“I’d sooner hold a dead rat,” I said.

“Tha’sh not how you felt on th’ boat.” His drunken grin grew wider.

I gaped at him, cheeks growing hot. Here was the whole reason I had been avoiding him since we made landing at Riddleport, and he threw it back in my face as if it were some kind of joke. As if our night together had meant nothing more to him than one of his serving wenches or barroom trollops. I stood up, furious but somehow also afraid, not trusting myself to say anything. I pushed in my chair and began walking away, hoping I looked more composed than I felt-not that either of my companions were in any state to notice.

“I’m sh-sorry, Tazza!” I turned back and saw him waving the scepter uncoordinatedly in my direction. “Return t’ me, my Exthplorer-Queen!”

I left and did not look back.

The night was a cool breath on my hot skin, and a welcome relief from the beery confines of the alehouse. Raising my hood and loosening my dagger in its sheath, I prepared to take Wharf Street south to my lodgings, where Mordimor would no doubt be waiting for me to let him in. I did not want to think about what had just happened.

“Wait!” piped a child’s voice behind me.

Shess trotted up as I turned around. “Can I stay with you?” she asked, looking up at me with her green eyes shimmering in the reflected light of the gas lamps.

I put out my hand. She took it, and together we walked away. The next day, to my relief, my gnomish friend seemed her old self again. In fact, she was nearly overflowing with information about the Char Street Clippers, their deals with Boss Ziphras’s wererat gang, and the various places they had been selling gleam.

“Gleam is real new stuff, and that fat ol’ Croat has nothing to do with it.” Shess wolfed down her third pickled herring that morning. The herring had followed a sticky bun, a clump of stewed radishes, and half a blood sausage in strange succession on Shess’s plate. Not exactly what I would have chosen to break the fast, but Shess attacked her dishes with evident relish. I limited myself to a few stale bread rolls as she rambled on about the drug trade in the Wharf District.

“It wasn’t really my thing, you know,” she continued, her meal finished. Leaning back in her chair, she blew on a mug of black Chelish tea and smiled. “I don’t think Garso really trusted me yet with that kind of information.Plus,

he said people don’t like to buy from gnomes-you never know what you’re getting. Which is probably true, as I remember this one fella Wallowclip out of Gastleburrow, real tall for a gnome, who claimed he had an ointment that could get rid of any kind of rash, any at all, except for the kind that necromancers sometimes get around their-“

“Yes,” I interrupted quickly, “that’s interesting, Shess, but what about the gleam?”

“Well… I know a few places we could check, where maybe we could find out who the rats get it from. But I’m not sure if Garso ever knew himself, so what those guys can tell us might just be rumors. You’re worried it’s this dwarf you were working for?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know if he just buys it himself or if… well, he is an alchemist. And completely unscrupulous, as near as I can tell. What I’m really worried about,” and here I removed the potion from my pouch and held it up to Shess, not liking the thrill I got at the feeling of the cool glass on my skin, “is that he’s been giving it to me in this.”

Shess’s eyes widened as she saw the faintly glowing solution, and I proceeded to tell her about my time with Gundsric, about the secret door and his undoubted observation of me, and of my discovery of the box of gleam in proximity to the translation potions I had consumed on a daily basis. I told her too of the effects I had experienced under the inf luence of the potions, and of the difficulty I was having simply refraining from downing the elixir as we spoke. I put the vial away again in the bottom of my pouch, not wanting it to be within easy reach.

“It sounds a bit like gleam, but maybe not. Seeing in the dark, sure, but then again you can see just as good as me when it’s dark. The other stuff, like guessing the layout of a place or spotting a secret door-never heard anything like that.”

Shess stopped as a yawning Mordimor bumbled down the stairs to join us. The two had bonded last night after a brief conversation in which Shess had effortlessly cast the spell that I myself used to speak with him. As with all of her magic, Shess had no real idea how or why she did this. Her earliest memory of her talent, she told me, had been of speaking with the creatures of the countryside as she played and explored in the wilderness around Whistledown. Mordimor gave me an affectionate nip before bounding awkwardly up into Shess’s lap. She giggled, again seeming a young girl despite being nearly twice my age, hugging the badger while the innkeeper looked on in unconcealed disapproval.

“Have you been drawing?” she asked, taking me aback somewhat. I told her I didn’t know what she meant.

“Gleamers are always scribbling,” she said, scratching Mordimor behind the ears, turning his eyes into slits of contentment. “Go to one of their dens and there’s stuff all over the walls, patterns and spirals and things. You see it on buildings too, sometimes. It’s how you know they’re around.”

I told her I hadn’t done anything like that and she seemed to relax. Leaving some silvers on the table, we readied ourselves to leave, Shess having promised to take me to a few likely spots to get some information. While my own possible exposure to gleam was still uppermost on my mind, my desire for information about its source was not entirely due to health concerns. The idea occurred to me that, if Gundsric was indeed the origin of the drug and his fortune was due to its sale rather than some fabled underground wealth he was rumored to have unearthed, such information could be used as leverage against him. Leverage enough to obtain the journals of Jan Lortis, or whatever information the dwarf might be hiding as to their whereabouts. Ifi were to ever look the Heidmarchs in the eyes again, I would have to at least make the attempt.

Unscrupulous as it was to deal with a drug peddler, it was still a more elegant plan than trying to break into Gundsric’s house through an unlocked window. And maybe-just maybe-once I had what I wanted, I could double-cross him. Wouldn’t he do the same to me if he could?

Shess, having more to say, interrupted my train of thought. “Well, glad you weren’t doing those drawings then, because that’s the worst thing. They say once the gleamers start that, it isn’t long before they go blind.”

“Blind?” A lump of ice suddenly formed in the pit of my stomach. “You mean I could lose my eyesight?”

Shess looked at me in surprise. “You mean you didn’t know? Gleamers don’t go nearsighted or anything. They go dead. Dead with their eyes scooped out of their faces. Happens to all of them eventually, though they sure don’t tell you that when they’re trying to sell you the stuff.”

We walked out of there and into the morning heat. All I could think about was the threat the wererat bitch had made the night before. She had promised to take my eyes when the time came.

And she had seemed certain it was to come soon. We spent the morning bouncing from place to place, not really finding anything of value. Many of the people Shess had expected to see at various dives, dens, and hangouts around the Wharf District were gone without a trace, and more than a few of the ones we could find were understandably distrustful or downright hostile. At one point we came upon a runner for the Clippers getting a beating from a trio of thugs from a rival gang. We were investigating a brothel the Clippers used as a staging area for gleam distribution when the sounds of the thrashing prompted us to look in the dingy alley running behind it. Shess didn’t hesitate, and after whispering a few words in what sounded more like Gnome than the arcane tongue of magic, called into being a convincingly real-and convincingly menacing-illusion of one of the Overlord’s gendarmes. The assailants took one look at the brawny fighter walking slowly in their direction, a spiked mace in his fist, and ran off down the alley. Shess laughed as the gendarme winked out of existence, though not before the illusory enforcer aimed a rude gesture at the backs of the departing gang.

The runner knew nothing of gleam, though his gratitude was genuine enough. He had been sent by one of the Clippers’ minor lieutenants in an effort to secure the continued loyalty of the brothel madam-a septuagenarian halfling who had apparently gotten wind of Garso’s death last night and f led with her girls and everything else of value in the place. The runner’s eyes widened when Shess outlined the events of the prior evening for him, leaving out a few of the more

incriminating details.

“Forget all this Clipper stuff and go get on the first ship outta here,” Shess said. “You know, being a pirate is actually pretty fun if you have the right hat.” She flipped the startled boy-he could hardly be older than fifteen her Gahan tricorne.

“You should probably take that ear off first,” I said to him as he turned to go. He looked down, embarrassed, at the single ear that hung from a thong around his neck. Tugging it off and dropping it in the street, he thanked us again before darting off.

The Clippers, it seemed, were going the way of an ant colony that had lost its queen. If we were to find anyone with useful information, we would have to find them soon.

It was while poking around in a rundown bunkhouse on Gill Street that we finally did. The place was badly kept. From the outside, the flaking away of the graying shingled walls made the bunkhouse look like a dead fish shedding its scales. It had once been a lodging for workers at a nearby sailmaker, before the money dried up and the business folded under pressure from one boss or another.

“Couple of street-level dealers stay here. I thought one or the other of them might still be around.” Shess inspected the mess. The place wasn’t just empty; it had been tossed, the meager possessions of the inhabitants strewn around the f loor in a broken array. On the walls the telltale scribblings of the gleam-addicted caught my attention. Here, in charcoal, chalk, and what I suspected was blood, was a whole panoply of strange symbols. There were whirls and abstract shapes that seemed to follow no known schema, and runes and ciphers unlike anything I had ever seen-with one exception.

Here and there, peeking from the mass of mad art, were the ten-pointed runes that topped every box of gleam, shining forth like a constellation of sooty stars. Without noticing, my fingers had crept to Gundsric’s potion where it lay buried in my pouch. I snatched my hand away.

A few clipped barks from Mordimor drew my attention. With a start, I turned to see Shess, sword in hand, prying up a f loorboard against the far wall while Mordimor alternately sniffed and snarled at the f loor beneath her.

Shess revealed the handle of a secret hatch while Mordimor danced around its edges in excitement. She took hold and hauled it open, exposing a dark recess under the house. As the light hit the figure below the floor, it let out a pitiful wail.

“Idrek!” Shess said, seemingly familiar with the man who huddled in the space under the floor.

“Ah, it’s you!” the man shrieked. “Don’t kill me!” He stared at Shess with luminous, red-rimmed eyes, peering through tangles of unkempt black hair. I noticed that he had elven blood, same as I did.

“Idrek, why would I kill you? Look how dirty your fingernails are.”

Idrek cocked his head to one side, much as I had seen Mordimor do, and looked at Shess in confusion.

“How about you answer some questions for my friend and me?” she said.

“I didn’t tell them nothing!” he pleaded, eyes shifting furtively in the dark. He flinched as I drew nearer, and I put my hands up so he could see I bore no weapons.

Shess made a tskin.9 sound and rummaged through her belt pouch. She produced a parchment envelope, which she then waved in Idrek’s face.

It was gleam. I hadn’t seen her take it last night, and perhaps she hadn’t. We had debated what to do with the drug, finally opting to dump it in the shallow waters of the bay outside the Clippers’ headquarters. Not even Kostin had wanted to risk trying to sell it after Shess had explained that possession of that much of the stuff would be a death sentence from both Cromarcky and Croat, whoever caught you first. Assuming, of course, that every other two-copper thug, cutpurse, pirate, and thief in Riddleport somehow missed us in the meantime.

Idrek reached a trembling hand out for the drug, and Shess pulled it back with a giggle. She could be cruel sometimes.

“Flowers need water, Idrek, same as fish. First you gotta tell me who was here. What did you tell them?” She shook the packet for emphasis.

Idrek, eyes fixed on the envelope of gleam with such intensity that I almost expected it to burst into flame, choked back a sob before answering. “Hrushgak… I think. And a bunch more.”

“Croat’s boys? They messed this place up good. And what did you tell the big, bad half-orcs?”

“Nothing! They didn’t find me.” Idrek glanced at Mordimor, who had kept the addict in his steely gaze the whole time. “But maybe they’ll come back?”

“Don’t worry!” Shess beamed, patting Idrek on the head with the flat of her sword. He f linched, crouching half upright in the crawl space, clad pathetically in clothes that were little more than rags. “Bet you’re confused, though,” she said, and proceeded to tell Idrek an abbreviated version of the fall of the Char Street Clippers. In this new version, however, it seemed that Aeventius described by Shess as “Aroden’s Tall, Dark, and Chosen One”-had destroyed the gang single-handedly. Shess’s own involvement was left out.

“So,” she finished, “you need to tell us where we can find some answers about gleam. And just maybe we’re the only ones that can keep it on the street now that Garso is gone. Besides, you know what they say about gnomes, Idrek.”

Idrek looked blankly at Shess, his eyes straying to the packet in her hand.

“They say that we’re only as tall as we need to be but that’s really only half true. So where’s the place that Garso never talked about? I know every den, front, and f lophouse the Clippers ever ran gleam out of, but there’s something else that was a big secret. I know you know what it is.”

Idrek’s eyes darted around the room as if he sought a way out of a trap. But always they returned to the gleam. Shess started humming a popular pirate shanty, swaying and dipping the envelope in her hand to match the rhythm of her song.

“Garso is gone, Idrek,” I said as gently as I could, “and the Clippers with him. Why keep their secrets?”

He swallowed once, hard, and nodded his head. “The Forty Fathoms.”

Idrek reached an arm out for the envelope and Shess smacked it away.

“A cheap alehouse in Rotgut? It’s not even Clippers’ territory.”

“Shows what you know!” Idrek, angry now, straightened up out of his hiding spot and shook a knobby finger at Shess. “That’s where they take them. Would have taken me ifi didn’t have the right friends on the street. That’s where Gleamers go to die blind and screaming, the light of the universe burning out their eyes!”

He advanced on Shess, fingers hooked into claws, madness in his bright eyes. I could see his withered chest clearly, the rags barely covering it. Carved there in the pale skin, weeping blood where the scabs had cracked open, was the ubiquitous ten-pointed star.

Mordimor snarled. Shess raised her sword and took a quick hop backward, f linging the packet of gleam at Idrek as she did so.

He stopped, all menace in him gone. Slumping to the f loor, he clutched the envelope in bony hands and sobbed. Idrek’s head hung low, his hair drooping down like the filthy seaweed that roped the pylons of the dockyards. The tips of his ears, so like mine, could clearly be seen protruding from the black snarl.

“Thank you, Idrek,” I said softly, placing a restraining hand on Shess’s shoulder. “I wish we had more for you. I suspect you’re heading for a tough time, so try to make that last.”

As we walked out of the bunkhouse, Idrek’s hollow laughter spilled out after us, running up my spine like an arctic wind. I looked back and saw the twin lamps of his eyes glowing in the dark. He nodded at me as if in formal farewell-or was it recognition?-and I wondered what it was he saw in my own eyes.

Shess knew every shortcut and alleyway in Riddleport’s seedy shoreside, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves on the verges of the Rotgut district, mere blocks from Gundsric’s home. Could the location be simple

coincidence? If the alchemist were somehow connected to the gleam trade, it would explain why he might desire to live in such a squalid section of town. I thought then of my last encounter with him: Had I really stumbled upon some hidden, ugly truth, or just panicked over my own transgressions? And even if the dwarf was connected to gleam, even if he had been giving it to me for whatever twisted purpose, was digging through every Clipper hideout and drug den in the city really going to get me any closer to the journal of Jan Lortis? Shouldn’t I have just kept to my appointments in his home, waiting for another chance to search for it undetected?

No, I decided. This was the story I had chosen for myself, and its irresistible pull was all the evidence I needed to know I was on the right track.

The Forty Fathoms alehouse leaned drunkenly at the end of a row of rundown, three-story buildings, all faintly out of square. This was fairly typical of construction in the poorer sections of town. It was said that, on a windy day, parts of Riddleport creaked as much as any pirate brig under full sail. As we drew closer, we could see light flickering through the thick, cheap glass of the windows. We slowed, moving against the walls of the neighboring buildings, not wanting to be seen by anyone inside the Forty Fathoms.

But the place was empty.

We waited, peering through the windows, staying low. Passersby seemed unfazed by this-perhaps such clandestine behavior was a common sight in Rotgut. The common room of the Forty Fathoms was a jumble of rude benches and tables presided over by a single flickering lantern, but details were difficult to discern through the distortion of the glass.

“Someone had to light that lantern,” I said to Shess, and she nodded. After a time we grew tired of waiting for some hint of movement within, and decided to go inside.

The door was unlocked, but I didn’t stop to wonder why an unlocked alehouse should be empty at this time of day. It opened outward, and I stepped inside ahead of Mordimor and Shess, my eyes scanning the far sides of the room. It was dark and still, the single lantern just enough to reveal the tomb-thick coating of dust that clung to the furniture and battered bar top.

But the dust on the floor told a different story, one of multiple footprints and a maelstrom of drag marks. I started forward, intent on the tale written in dust and grime there on the planks, curious about the bare section of floor immediately in front of me.

I heard Shess’s warning shout just as I took the step that triggered the device. With a click like the snap of bone, the floor gave way beneath me, pivoting upward on the far side of a fulcrum as it dropped under my feet. I flailed futilely for the lip of the hole and fell into darkness.

Chapter 5

An Overdue Appointment

You,” was all he said, stomping toward me with bloody hands.

The wererats had seized me before I even knew what had happened. One to either side, they dragged me from the foul-smelling straw that had broken my fall. My left hand and wrist throbbed painfully where I had landed on my hand, having extended my arms in a foolish attempt to arrest my descent. Fortunately, the trapdoor was only some ten feet above the moldering straw pile. Whoever had set the trap obviously wanted those who fell into it alive and in good condition.

Looking into the Gundsric’s wild eyes, I had to wonder how long that would last.

He lumbered over to me, the heavy pewter flask he wore around his neck swaying like a pendulum, his hunchback giving him a strangely lopsided appearance. The basement was lit by a few sputtering candles, but even in such low light I could see nearly the entirety of the room with uncommon clarity, no doubt the continued effects of the gleam in my system. Beyond the small alcove into which I had fallen-which could be locked up like a prison cell with the closing of a barred gate at one end-the basement was long and rectangular, its dirty plaster walls flaking away in patches to reveal ill-fitting stone blocks. The scribblings of gleam addicts filled every section of plaster that had not yet crumbled to the ground, stretching from floor to ceiling like a detailed

map of an insane mind.

But it was the bodies that were the core of the place dozens of men and women, nearly all of them human, stacked in piles or lying in the few cots scattered around the room. The thick smell of blood and rot in the air seemed only magnified by the underlying mustiness of the basement, andI choked back the rising bile in my throat. The dingy cots gave the impression of long use, like those in the common room of some cheap flophouse. But there were far more bodies than beds, and many of the oldest corpses were stacked against the wall opposite the alcove, heaped up like swollen sandbags bracing a levee.

I screamed then, shouting for Shess or Mordimor or some other deliverance. The rats to either side of me hauled me farther into that gallery of death, and I could see that there were more hunched shape-shifters in the basement all around me.

Riding on instinct, not caring at all about the futility of my struggle, I drove my heel into the bare foot of the one on my right, then tried to pull him off balance. He staggered, but his center of balance was lower than mine, and his tail kept him from tipping.Snarling, he slammed a blow into my stomach, and I dropped to my knees. He clamped a hand over my throat and jerked my head close, chittered threats or promises in my ear. His garbage-foul breath washed over me, and I retched.

The rat to my left was running his paws over my body, taking his time. Upon finding the long knife under my jacket, he snatched the weapon from its sheath and threw it into the corner. There was another such blade in my boot that he didn’t find, and I hoped I’d have a chance to use it.

Gundsric loomed over me, a misshapen, palpable malignance. He smiled, teeth filmed with fresh blood, his beardless face wrinkling up like crumpled paper.

“I don’t remember making an appointment with you today, elf.” His laughter bubbled thickly up from blood filled lungs. The harsh chemical reek he exuded was almost a welcome respite from the sickly sweet stench of decay that filled my nostrils.

I didn’t reply, doubting the claw-tipped hand around my neck would allow any speech.

“Check upstairs,” Gundsric barked. “This spy has friends.” Dark shapes in the corner moved out of my line of sight, andI heard the faint sounds of feet scraping up stairs.

It was then, while trying to follow the movement of the second group of wererats, that I noticed the final detail about the corpses that lined the basement.

They were gleamers, of course-that much was obvious from the markings on the wall. But these bodies told a further tale. Shess hadn’t seemed to know how or

why gleam users disappeared eventually, but they always turned up dead, if they turned up at all. Dead and blind. And here they were: each face devoid of eyes, the sockets yawning a deeper black in the dark.

“Go with them, my sweet.” Gundsric’s murmur had taken on an oddly affectionate tone. “See all.”

I turned back to him, wondering whom he was speaking to, only to find him shrugging as if in a seizure. Beneath his clothing, his malformed shoulder twitched and jerked, the hunch shuddering as if it had a life of its own.

And it did. Emerging from beneath his jerkin was a lopsided mass of flesh like a lesion, a cancerous growth made animate. It chirped once through a pore-like orifice, unfurled membranous wings the color of burned skin, and took flight after the departing wererats. Riding above a sudden heaving nausea, my thoughts tracked back to the persistently circling batI had seen the night before, the one that had hunted the skies as the wererats arrived at the Clippers’ hideout.

Gundsric chuckled. “So, you’ve seen dear Carchima around, perhaps? He gave a most specific report about you. Though neither of us has yet deduced who it is you work for.”

I started to speak, gurgling out a response as the wererat tightened his grip on my throat. Gundsric stepped forward and backhanded me across the face.

“One or the other of them,” he growled. “I don’t care! Cromarcky would be most likely, yes? Croat and his boys would have a better use for the likes of you. Right now the both of them are at a stalemate, pacing around outside my home like gulls waiting for the tide to bring in the trash. After tonight it won’t matter. I’ll tread on their charred corpses and watch this whole damn town burn.”

The hand that had slapped me came back around to cup my chin. “And it’s because of you,” he crooned. “I had been complacent. Me, complacent! But you made me step things up, made me round up as many of these insects”-he waved a bloody hand in the direction of a pile of corpses-” as I could get hold of last night. Made me come out here and do it myself, take the rest of them all in one go.”

Gundsric scooped a gnarled hand into the sealskin bag he wore at his side and produced a palmful of glistening eyeballs, each glowing with its own light.

“No one upstairs, not even that vicious little badger of hers,” hissed a voice I faintly recognized. I tore my eyes away fromGundsric’s palm, his handful of luminous orbs like bloody organic pearls. Carchima fluttered clumsily

back toGundsric’s shoulder and landed with a wet smack. The wererats had returned from their exploration, and in their lead was the scarred, black-furred female I had fought at the Clippers’ wharfside hideout. She fixed beady eyes upon me and licked her lips. ”I’ll take that elf’s eyes now.”

“No,” Gundsric said flatly. Carchima squirmed its way back under his clothing with nauseating intimacy. “I can better use her, I think. She wasn’t given that street garbage, she’s as pure as I am. And… she showed me the way.” He leaned in close to me, and it was then that I noticed for the first time that his own black eyes shone as intensely asIdrek’s had.Gundsric nodded at the recognition, and I wondered if my own eyes were filled with such light.

“Is the fire behind your eyes, elf?“Gundsric was nearly whispering now. The stink of sulfur and dizzying reek of carbauxine poured out of him as if he were some poisonous fissure in the earth. ” Do you hear the radiant choir, as I first did all those years ago? The others said I was mad, wanted no part of my search, butI kept digging. Digging toward the voice-the burning voice like a pyre for all the world! ” He smiled his bloody smile at me, his eyes luminous and searching.

“Ziphras didn’t send us out to be dog-slaves to a mad dwarf,” the female wererat interrupted. She spat on a corpse, and hissed something at the wererats to either side of her. There were half a dozen of them in the basement, all wearing their in-between forms, standing on their hind legs as hideous, man-sized rats. “I owe this elf a debt of blood. Her gang killed my kin, ruined our

trade. Ziphras will mark me for this failure.” The livid scar beneath her eye twitched. “You owe me her life, blood-debt to be paid.”

Gundsric only growled, then began to cough.The other rats in the basement chattered among themselves, and I could sense the anxiety of the two that flanked me, their uncertainty as to which way this challenge to Gundsric would go.It seemed all was not well in the dwarf’s employ.

The black-furred female was padding closer to Gundsric’s back, and I saw the glint of a hooked blade in her hand. “No trade now, and no Clippers. No more buyers-all dead or fled. I wonder… how much longer will Ziphras make deals with you for a drug he can’t sell?”

The alchemist’s coughing had subsided to a rhythmic hitch, like a second heartbeat. Gundsric didn’t speak, didn’t turn, but I saw his hand stray to the belt he wore beneath his stained and scarred leather apron.

“Take your hand off the potion, dwarf,” the wererat hissed, creeping yet closer to the alchemist’s back.

Gundsric spat a gob of black mucous onto the floor. Keeping his eyes on me, he pulled his hand away in a flash, withdrawing a coin pouch from beneath his apron. The nervous rats next to me tensed as if an electric jolt had pulsed through them, then relaxed just as quickly when they saw what the dwarf had been reaching for.

Gundsric raised the coin pouch high, tipped it, and spilled out a small fortune in gold sails that rang upon the stones of the floor. Every rat in the room watched them fall, the gold reflected in their beady eyes.

Then he spun and threw something with his other hand, straight at the black-furred wererat. With uncanny accuracy it struck her face, exploding in a blast of white and blue fire.

I flinched, feeling the blast even from half a room away. The wererat shrieked as alchemical flame engulfed first her face, then the entirety of her body. Rats darted away from her, a few suffering minor burns themselves. But the female blazed like a torch, stumbling blind before toppling over one of the corpse-filled cots and crashing to the ground.The other rats stood stunned for a moment as the female writhed on the ground, her body roiling in sulfurous white flame that clung to her like tar.

Gundsric raved then, shouting threats at the rats, telling them their choice was between the gold on the floor and the burning body on the ground. The stink of scorched fur and flesh filled the room, and smoke stung my eyes and brought tears. But even through my blurred visionI noticed the silent figure that had just entered the room from the far corner, whereI knew the stairs to be.

It was Gyrd, but not as I had ever before seen him. His mail glistened silver, polished and well maintained in contrast to the dirty and rent hauberk the fighter routinely slept in. He stood taller, straighter, like a noble warrior out of some Ulfen saga. His beard was trimmed close and clean, and his long hair was gathered neatly into thick plaits.There was no gray in the fiery red mane, no flush of drunkenness on his fair skin, and no shadows under the clear, proud eyes.

He drew a mirror-bright sword and opened his mouth in a silent roar.

The wererats saw him. They crashed around the room in surprise, some heading for the shadows, one even managing to fall over the smoldering form of the dead female on the floor. Some let fly a few knives and darts, which sliced through the dark with no effect. Gyrd advanced, rolling his wrist so that his blade danced deadly circles in the air.

I could hear Gundsric’s shouts over the din and squeal of the panicking rats. He had noticed the same thing I had: That this bright image of Gyrd, standing tall like a hero of legend, wasn’t real.It was an illusion.

But the blade that ripped through the wererat next to me was real enough.

The image of Gyrd vanished.The rat let out a piercing wail and crumpled to the floor, limbs twitching in his death throes, and then Shess was next to me, sword in hand.

I spared no time marveling at the gnome’s skill in sneaking undetected into and around a basement full of wererats. Whipping my newly freed right arm around in an arc, I drove my palm into the face of my remaining captor, smashing the soft nose at the end his snout. He chattered in anger, jerking me forward and raking his claws against my shoulder and chest. Warm blood flowed from the stinging wound.

Ignore it, Taldara. Push it aside. My father’s words rang in my mind. Everything is won or lost in the head, not the body. Without focus, you’re no better than your human blood. I had always challenged him when he said such things about humanity, but he would laugh and make a joke of it, claiming he only said them to rile me, to challenge and push me. He was right about focus, though, and a great deal more, even when he was so infuriatingly wrong. I sometimes suspect my rebellion against him was his object all along-my final graduation from his academy of life.

I kept my focus. The pain, the panic, the fear-these were like old memories. Ducking the wererat’s next strike, I turned my momentum into a forward roll, drawing my boot knife in the same motion. I came up in a crouch next to my attacker, well inside his guard, and drove my blade into his guts. Black blood spurted from the wound as he f lailed at me, and I struck again. He jerked back, collapsing in a twitching heap, his rat screams mingling with the chaotic din of the basement.

I sprang to my feet in time to see Gundsric raise the pewter flask he wore around his neck to his lips.

More rats converged on Shess and me, blocking my view of the alchemist. The gnome spun and darted among them, a maddeningly nimble and unpredictable opponent. I fought defensively, with knife and fist, my back to the wall.The rats were enraged now and, in their half-human forms, they seemed disinclined to draw their weapons, fighting instead with claws and teeth.

“Keep them off me! ” Shess yelled.I turned my head in time to see her repel her attacker with a quick chop to the thigh. In almost the same movement she tossed her sword to me.I barely caught it in my off-hand, then threw my own dagger over her head, at the wererat nearest her. Taking her short sword in my newly freed right hand, I stepped forward to cover the gnome.

Shess’s sword was as light as my boot knife, and keen as a razor.I slashed, backing the rats off, ignoring a glancing blow to my arm. There were three wererats left, though the one Shess had wounded was keeping his distance, hobbling along the edge of the combat and looking for an opening to throw a knife. I kept slashing, more to create space around us than to do damage. And in that moment, I noticed the change that had come overGundsric.

He was broader and taller, the muscles bulging beneath his dirty clothes like those of some Shoanti barbarian fresh down from the Storval Plateau.The remnants of a potion stained his lips, mingling with the bloody sputum of his black lung that ran down his chin.The insane light of his eyes was as bright as a lamp now. As bright as a bonfire. As bright as-The basement exploded in multicolored light, a rainbow of blinding force. I had been ready for it, but even stillI found myself temporarily blind. Shess’s child hand closed over my wrist and dragged me to the right, while the snarls and shouts of our enemies reverberated in our ears.

“Come on! ” Shess shouted asI tripped over the first of the stairs. “Straight up this way.”

I ran blindly up the stairs, the world black as night after the blast of blinding color from Shess’s spell. We came to a landing, and then a small room whose walls I could see as faint blotches of gray in the dark. Shess guided me to the door, taking her sword out of my hand as she did so, andI squinted to bring the world back into focus. The afterimage of the spell was wearing off quickly, but even still it was as ifl had been staring at the sun before plunging into a dark cave.

There was light in the short hall we entered, and I realized it was from the lantern in the common room of the Forty Fathoms. We darted down the hall quickly, arriving in the alehouse’s dusty front room, and I vaguely recognized the furnishings through my blurred vision. Behind us someone was clambering up the stair.

“Stick to the left wall,” Shess told me.

We were almost at the door when it burst open, slamming against the wall and rattling the thick glass in the alehouse windows.

“Hrushgak! ” Shess said cheerily. “And I see you brought Idrek.”

The half-ore wasn’t the first thing I would have wanted to see with my restored vision. Almost as big as Gyrd, he was leaner, sharper-featured, but no less muscled than the Ulfen warrior. He wore a scarred black leather vest with rings sown on to it, but his thick arms were bare save for vambraces of silver-chased steel and pale scars like worms tracking over his greenish skin. Protruding from his piggish face was an asymmetric jumble of dirty fangs.

He clutched a dripping axe in his right hand. In his left, held up by his black hair, was the head of the gleam addict Idrek.

“He said you would be here, little thief.” Hrushgak flung Idrek’s head contemptuously into the room, where it struck the floorboards with a sound like dropped sack of meal. More thugs were pushing into the room behind him, all tough-looking half-orcs-Boss Croat’s drug trade enforcers. “I never liked you, gnome.”

Shess began to protest, her feelings clearly-and strangely-hurt. And then Gundsric stomped into the room behind us.

He looked more a monster than a dwarf. Grotesquely muscled, his body now sprouted mottled thorns like the spikes of some shelled sea creature. At his shoulder Carchima spread his wings of skin and shrieked. The alchemist’s eyes burned like Riddleport’s beacon tower.

“I will kill every one of you,” Gundsric said, his voice flat and emotionless.

Hrushgak smiled, baring his jumble of wicked yellow teeth. “I was just about to say the same thing.”

Both sides moved at once, with Shess and me caught in the middle. Hrushgak

feigned a strike at me and I leapt back as he barreled past, intent on Gundsric. One of the half-orcs went after Shess with a spiked club, but she deftly maneuvered him over to the trapdoor. He dropped through with a yelp, smacking his head on the lip of the f loor as he did so.

An explosion tore through the room, knocking me forward in a wave of heat and force. Another alchemical bomb. I caught myself on the wall, one of Hrushgak’s thugs inches away. He thrust a knife at me and I slipped to the side, but he caught me across the forearm with a wild backswing. I was unarmed now, and the knife wielding half-ore probably weighed twice what I did. Shess had her own problems in the shape of a nearly naked maniac with a short-hafted axe in each hand.

I kept my arms out, hoping to catch my attacker’s wrist or else turn aside his thrust. I was close to the door-a well-timed roll could take me past him and out into the street.

The half-ore chuckled, noting the direction of my gaze. Weaving the serrated blade in an intricate pattern between us, he licked his lips. “Ain’t no one gonna save you now, sweet meat.”

A streak of black and white burst through the open door and proved him wrong. Mordimor, snarling and yipping, launched himself at the half-ore’s legs. Blood flew and the half-ore screamed and staggered. I lunged forward, catching his knife hand in both of mine, and drove the weapon through his eye. He collapsed heavily to the floor, the bone-handled weapon lodged in his face to the hilt.

“I was worried about you, Mord,” I said. Mordimor looked at me in the way he does, adorable despite the bloody froth that ringed his muzzle.

Shess had finished with her own attacker and the way was clear, the rest of the thugs having converged on Gundsric and one of his remaining henchrats. We darted out of there-Shess handing me one of the axes she had taken from the berserker-just as another explosion shook the place.The windows of the Forty Fathoms blew out into the street.

“Let me go in first next time, Tal,” Shess said breathlessly next to me as we turned back to watch the alehouse from the cover of a nearby alleyway. The

muddy street was littered with glass, glistening in the afternoon light like ice. Inside the Forty Fathoms, flames blossomed.

Mordimor looked up from his cleaning and chuffed agreement, wiping his bloody face with a moistened paw.

“I’ll insist on it, Shess. In fact, I think you’ll get the chance within the hour.” She looked at me in surprise, one green eyebrow quirked upward.

Was I really thinking about doing this? With Gundsric busy fighting Croat’s thugs-or, even better, dead at their hands-now seemed like the opportunity I had been waiting for. I was exhausted, wounded, frayed to my last nerve. All this sneaking and fighting, the gangs and their squabbles, Gundsric’s own hideous plot in supplying drugs to the city for whatever strange destructive revenge this would grant him-it was all secondary to my purpose.To the story as it had to be told. I could almost see Master Shaine shaking his head; in amusement or disappointment, who could say?

“We’re going to break into that crazy dwarf’s house and finish this for good.” It felt good to say it-more, it felt ri,ght somehow. Shess added her own enthusiastic agreement. We spent some time tending our wounds, my own minor healing magic knitting the slash on my shoulder closed and hopefully rendering it free of the bad humors associated with wererats. I told Shess of my real purpose in finding employment with Gundsric, finally telling her the whole truth. She relished every detail, excited not only at the prospect of stealing

treasure, but at rediscovering the lost adventures of a famous Pathfinder.

Gundsric’s house was close, only a few squalid blocks from the tavern, but Shess and I made the journey with deliberate caution, wary of encountering another group of half-orcs, or survivingClippers, or Desna knows what else. We made a brief detour when Shess spied an odd jobs man pushing his tool cart through the street. For a ridiculous sum I bought a length of rope from him, frayed and tarred, and Shess picked up a few stout nails she said would help her climb. With a wink he unrolled a square of oilcloth to expose a worn set of thieves’ picks, but Shess declined. Clearly the man catered to all sorts of clientele.

Part of our caution was also due to Gundsric’s ravings about his home being surrounded by the forces of Croat and Cromarcky. I didn’t want to be seen approaching by any suspicious guards. HowShess andI would manage to get around a patrol and somehow climb to a third floor window-a window that was hopefully still unlocked was somethingI was not prepared to worry about just yet. If the last few days had taught me anything, it was to take things one step at a time.

The place was indeed surrounded, and more thoroughly than I had imagined. Black-clad half-orcs with an array of brutal weapons shared the space around the heavy stone walls of the house with Cromarcky’s uniformed gendarmes. Together they shouted off bystanders and smacked around the occasional too-curious passerby. They glared uneasily at one another, hands always upon their weapons. Their truce was an uneasy one, and no doubt whoever was to eventually win the right to Gundsric’s home would be something decided at the highest levels. So until the bosses made their decision, the guards would continue to pace belligerently back and forth outside, spoiling for a fight. Shess was already proposing we distract them before climbing up-either with an illusion, or a fire, or a barrage of fish. Her suggestions grew steadily more absurd, but

I wasn’t paying attention. Instead, I stared in disbelief at the figure moving easily among the guards. I could only shake my head, not even daring to guess what his presence meant.

Kostin Dalackz strutted and joked with gendarmes and half-orcs alike, a ready smile on his face and the scepter bundled in an old cloak at his side.

Chapter 6

Child of a Distant Star

The sounds ofrioting outside had grown louder. The crowd-a collection of wastrels, afternoon drunks, pirates, and the unemployable-was growing larger. I had thrown another bolt on one of Gundsric’s windows, this time at the front ofhis house, and by opening it just a crack I could see the tumult outside slipping further into pandemonium.

“I have to wonder ifKostin knows what he’s doing,” I said.

“Well, it did get us inside,” Shess said, stuffing a platinum-inlaid Ustalavic icon into her already bulging pouches. The room was rich with neglected treasures, like the ten or so others we had made cursory inspection of

since clambering through the window I had left unlocked yesterday-a yesterday that seemed a thousand years ago.

“But will we ever get out again?” I asked, just as I caught site of Kostin again in the crowd, this time with Gyrd next to him-the warrior must have somehow gotten word that Shess was here. Kostin had been alone when he responded to Shess’s whistle, a code the two ofthem had used in the past, after our arrival at Gundsric’s house an hour ago. Slipping away from the combined guard forces of the half-ore drug dealer Boss Croat and the official police force of the corrupt but unassailable Overlord Cromarcky, Kostin greeted us with a warm smile and a quip about my appearance.

To be sure, my filthy clothing, rent and bloody shirt, and bruised face certainly hinted at a story, but Kostin was not going to get it from me. Not yet. Irritated by the joke-a jape incongruous with the look of concern in his eyes, which only irritated me all the more-I clamped a hand over Shess’s mouth as she started to excitedly relate our adventures. “What the hell are you doing here, Kostin?”

He laughed. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to ask you? Well, I’ve been enjoying the fruits ofour labors, putting the scepter to good use.” He patted the bundle at his side, the lines of the artifact visible in the old cloak that wrapped it. He had tied a rope to the ends ofthe bundle, and wore it over one shoulder. “Once I was done bilking dicers, securing loans, selling bargain ships and titles of nobility, and … well, after all that I remembered what you said about the alchemist.”

“What did I say about the alchemist?”

He recounted my conversation with Shess the night before-he had been paying more attention to it that she had, it seemed. Gundsric was a drug manufacturer,

the man behind gleam, and I was going to have nothing more to do with him-all ofwhich sounded emphatic and certain with Kostin relating it back to me. When I had first said it, though, a little drunk and completely exhausted, scared for my health and confused about what I had learned, it had all seemed more like thinking aloud and not some recitation of cold, hard truth.

Well, Kostin had gone ahead and acted on my cold, hard truth, selling the information to both Croat and Cromarcky in les s time than it took for Shess to finish a plate of pickled herring.

He could see the annoyance in my eyes. “Look, the money is ours. I looked for you this morning, and you weren’t at the Shark. I couldn’t ask you anything and … and I was worried. A bit. You said you were done with the bastard, and these guys all want his head. After what he did to you, I’d happily sell his head at a discount.”

“Kostin, I need to get in that house.” I told him about the unlocked window around the back, and about my real purpose in Gundsric’s employ.

His smile vanished. “Ah. I see. In that case … we could always use the scepter to make them let us in, but then we’d have to hold them with it for as long as we were inside.” He paced the alley, tapping the scepter in its cloth wrapping. Behind him I could see Gundsric’s house looming up like a great slab of weathered stone. “Alright, I think I could distract them, pull them away from the back long enough for you and Green to get inside. She climbs faster than anyone I’ve seen, and that looks like enough rope to do the trick.”

It had been enough rope, but barely. Kostin hadn’t been wrong about Shess’s skill at climbing, and once the guards had been lured away by Kostin’s disturbance “just a little tus sle” he had said-we quickly made our way up the wall and to the third-floor window that had, luckily, remained unlocked.

But with me and Shess no closer to finding the journal of Jan Lortis, Kostin’s “tussle” in the street outside was teetering on the edge of a full-scale riot. I could see him now edging along the margins of the crowd, a worried look on his face that would have been comical ifl could laugh at the situation.

He had had the same look when we agreed on the plan and parted ways, Mordimor reluctantly going with him, Kostin trying to mumble out some apology for his stupid comments the night before. He stood there, sheepishly fumbling for words.

“Don’t,” I said, wanting him to stop talking, wanting him to understand that if he owed me an apology, then I owed him one in return for shutting him out these last few weeks. He met my eyes, and suddenly it was that night on the ship all over again, with the others still asleep belowdecks. Kostin and I had shared a bottle of Chelish red he had rescued from Gyrd’s drunken predation. Riddleport was in our future, as was all ofGolarion to hear Kostin speak of it. The moon had turned the sea to silver, and we talked of our childhood together, almost as two strangers comparing parallel lives. Then we had spoken a different language, one that needed no words.

“Kalashar the Unvanquishable, Deadliest Blade in All Casmaron, apologizes to no one,” I said, placing a hand on his chest and pushing him gently away. “Go on already before I lose my nerve.”

Kostin grinned, nodding his head. “Kalashar does, however, make the occasional exception for Great Tazza of Arcadia, explorer of sea and land.” Mordimor padded over to him, his face a mirror ofKostin’s own concern. “Be safe,” Kostin said before trotting off, the scepter already in his hand.

“Tal, you know you have a lot ofroom in that pouch still.”

Shess’s voice brought me back to the present, and I turned to see Shess, her every purse and pocket already bulging with stolen objects, trying to squeeze a disk shaped Mwangi sky calendar down the front of her tight leather armor. “Maybe we could come back later?”

The banging on the door downstairs was all the answer we needed to that question, and together Shess and I hurried through more rooms, racing past yet more forgotten glories. How many years and how much coin had the dwarf spent on this collection, only to let it fall into ruin? We came back to the room on the second floor that contained Gundsric’s library, a room full ofbooks and scrolls tossed negligently into shelves and boxes.

There was so much more ofthe house to inspect, but here was a room too ripe with promise to ignore a second time. I began to scan the volumes, ignoring bound ones as best I could. The journals would be a loose collection, the pages

tied or pinned together, the cover more a waterproof purse than proper boards. This much at least I knew from the Heidmarchs’ description. I told Shess what to look for and we searched the shelves.

There was so much to go through, so much that had value. I could only hope that whoever ended up with this collection treated it with more respect than the mad dwarf. Many times I came upon volumes I myselfhad worked on, and they felt like old friends in my hand. The many hours I had spent in the room just across the secret hall from here had been rewarding, stimulating. For once I had felt like the scholar I had set out to be, someone making a real contribution. Someone privy to secret knowledge.

“Um, Tai, you should see this,” Shess said.

I glanced at what she held and knew it instantly, a folio edition ofan old Taldan prayer book I had myselftranslated and annotated just a few days ago. “Keep looking, Shess,” I said, turning back to a jumble of scrolls in an urn at the foot of one of the shelves. “That was one of mine.”

“In that case, Tai, you really need to see this.”

Something in the tone of her voice chilled my blood. I walked over to her and took the volume in my hands. But when I saw what was written there, not only seeing it but rememberin9 it, the book slipped through my fingers and smacked facedown onto the dusty floorboards.

The leaves scattered. A few were pentameter verse in Taldane. The rest, done in a hand I recognized as my own, was the scribbled madnes s of a gleam addict. Whirls and lines like a Minkai sand garden ran alongside cryptic runes in no language I knew, as incomprehensible as those on the Cyphergate. And through it all, repeated again and again, was the asymmetric ten-pointed star that was the

symbol of gleam.

“We must try to be innocent of the future when telling our tales. By shaping our story according to the dictates of the moment, we make writing into a second

act of discovery.” Master Shaine had said that, always maintaining that storytelling was an art as difficult and as powerful as magic, something with which it had much in common. He warned of the dangers of confusing life with art, and art with truth, and truth with power. So many subtleties lost on us initiates, and probably outside the consideration ofmany confirmed Pathfinders as well.

But how can we retell a moment when it is lost to us as soon as it happens? How can we truly make it a second act of discovery, when so much of our past is colored by all of the layers of time, all of the subsequent moments, that have come since? I have written almost the entirety of this account in an effort to discover what it was I felt, saw, knew, feared, and loved in the exact moment that I looked down upon that jumble of parchment. Looked down on it while removing Gundsric’s potion from my pouch, uncorking it with a faint pop, and downing the luminous substance in one quick swallow.

“Taldara! ” Shess said, concerned and puzzled.

I smiled at her, trying to convey a confidence that I was uncertain I felt. “We need to follow this through, Shess. Finish it. I had thought you were the one who set this stone rolling downhill,” I touched a strand of her emerald hair

impossibly bright, impossibly green when seen through gleaming eyes-as she looked at me in confusion. I held up the empty vial, faintly glowing from the residue of the potion. “But it was this. The moment I first had gleam, the whole story was set in motion. Time to end it.”

I bade her follow me, and we moved through the house, going downward. I led the way as ifit were my own home, for I knew it intimately now. It was as if every room, corridor, door, and secret were outline in glowing bands of fire. I had a map ofthe place in my mind, and I had to fight to keep it in focus-for I knew my map was much larger than Gundsric’s home. IfI gave in to the temptation to explore, to fly along the fiery pathways the map laid out for me, I might have seen all of Riddleport, from the creaking tenements and crowded harbor bristling with a hundred masts, to the great buildings at its heart-the octagonal pyramid ofCalistria’s brothel-temple; the drowning bowl of Besmara teeming with ever-hungry life; the arena, throbbing with the pulse of death; Cromarcky’s fortress isle warded and guarded; and the dingy Gas Forges crouching over the secrets of the earth, converting poison into power. Everything was there, all of the city, all of Varisia, and all of Golarion too-so much that I feared that to relax my concentration for even a moment would send my mind skittering out into the world, never to return.

The sounds of the rioting grew louder as we reached the first floor, then vanished completely once we entered the alchemist’s basement laboratory. The door was triple locked, and Shess snapped a pair of picks as she worked the tumblers. She remarked that she wished Aeventius was there with one of his lock-opening spells, and Gyrd and Kostin, too. I agreed, though my apprehension was of a different source than hers. For I was hearing voices-voices oflight.

They began as a whisper, seemingly the hint of a stray thought or half-remembered phrase. As we moved downstairs, they grew louder. When Shess finally clicked the last of the locks on Gundsric’s laboratory open, the chatter of voices rose in a tumult, a cacophony of pleas, shouts, prayers, and confessions. A thousand lost voices calling out in the dark, unable even to hear one another, alone and anonymous in the midst oftheir own multitude.

“What is it?” Shess asked when I almost staggered from the weight of voices.

I didn’t answer; what could I say? I merely collected myself and led the way down. It was bright now, painfully so, the carbauxine torches on the stairwell blazing at full strength, their radiance increased by back-reflecting mirrors. A dozen smells assaulted us, sour and sweet, chemical and earthy, fertile and rotten, and Shess pinched her nose at the unpleasant commingling of odors. At the landing we turned and entered the lab proper, its interior as bright as a star and hotter than the summer air outside.

The place was large enough and well equipped enough for a dozen alchemists. Stone slabs spanned the hexagonal outer walls of dressed limestone, and heaped upon them was a dizzying array of equipment, the purpose of which I could only guess at. Everywhere was glass-spun glass tubes through which dark fluids dripped, specialized glass containers with scorched bottoms, heavy glass jars stoppered tight, containing solutions ranging over all the colors ofthe rainbow. As arresting as the sight ofGundsric’s alchemical array was, however, it was the horror at the center of the laboratory that drew our attention.

Tables had been pushed aside, fine glassware smashed in haste. On the floor was a kind of summoning circle, the familiar whirls and lines ofthe gleam vision, the ubiquitous asymmetric star rune at the center. At four points within the circle, enormous glass containers filled with a luminous solution stood bright as columns of sunlight. These lines on the floor were no mere charcoal scribblings, however. They glowed with an almost painful radiance, white as the hottest part of a fire. They pulled at me, and I could feel the pressure in my eyes building as I stared. It was gleam itself, but not the debased powder that had been in one of Shess’s envelopes. Not even the potion-diluted substance I had just ingested. This was pure, and it was alien.

And then the pattern itself snapped into focus. These things were not random, at least not in their higher form. All the frenzied scratchings on the walls of Riddleport’s gleam dens were but a pale reflection ofthis, like a misremembered face. This was a map. A map and a road, one leading through uncharted spaces, to the farthest reaches of the universe. I knew because I was seeing though gleaming eyes. I knew because the pattern on the floor was one that I had discovered and recorded as I worked diligently in Gundsric’s upstairs

room, lost in the fog ofa trance.

“What does it mean?” Shess asked, her voice low and reverent.

“It means he’s coming,” I said, without thought.

It was then that I noticed that the point oflight at each intersection of the gleam lines was a brightly glowing eyeball. The large glass containers themselves contained hundreds of such orbs, suspended in a glowing solution.

At the center of the circle was a beaker of fine green glass. I stepped into the circle to better see it.

“I’m not sure I like this,” Shess said. “Who did you say was coming, again?”

“The Bright One,” a ghostly voice answered. I turned toward it and saw a thick vapor coalescing just inside the doorway. At first it seemed a mere parody ofhumanoid form, but then the gray mist solidified into the form of Gundsric, bloody and scorched from head to foot from his recent fight.

“The Child of Light comes this day,” he coughed through bloody lips. On his shoulder, Carchima chirped agreement and flexed his tattered wings. “You thought

you could shut me out with guards and that riotous crowd? No.” He pulled the sealskin bag from his hip and flung it to the ground, where its grotesque contents spilled over the floor. “And we don’t even need them, now. Not with you

here. I thank you, elf. Your arrival was perfectly timed.”

I knew instinctively it was true. Gundsric had needed a certain amount ofsaturation, a certain amount ofreflected light from all of those who had seen with these gleaming eyes-seen things illuminated by the light of a distant star. It was all around me, now, the chorus loud enough to reach the far ends of space and time. The Shining Child was coming, and i f I listened closely, I could almost hear my own voice crying out for his arrival.

Then I heard a different sound: that of the upstairs door crashing open in a splintering boom, followed by a tumult of angry shouts filling the hall.

Shess lunged at Gundsric, bright blade in her tiny fist, but the dwarf’s mis shapen familiar intercepted her, flapping into her face. Gundsric hesitated, torn between defending his home from the rioters and confronting me in the center of the summoning circle. I locked eyes with him, eyes bright as his, and snatched the green glass potion from the center of the floor.

“Give that to me,” he roared, bloody spittle exploding from his mouth. He lumbered forward into the circle, and the world grew brighter. In truth I was uncertain what to do with the potion-smash it or drink it? Either course could spell disaster.

He locked his hands around my wrist, his earlier, mutagen-infused strength gone but replaced by the power of desperation. We crashed to the ground, the gleam feeling like hot ash where it touched my skin. We rolled once and he drove his thick skull against my jaw, raving manically, bloody drool falling into my face and leaving a black splatter in the white lines on the floor.

And then a commanding, irresistible voice broke through the chaos.

“Step away from her, you beardless freak.” Kostin’s magic rod was brilliant in his hand. Gyrd stood next to him, sword drawn, and I could see a grim Aeventius behind them both. Rioters flanked the trio like an honor guard. At Kostin’s feet, Mordimor bounced eagerly, bristling for a fight.

Gundsric moved to obey, a hysterical keening somewhere in the back ofhis throat. I stood, inching away, green-glass potion still in my hand. A wounded Carchima had flapped away from Shess, to shelter behind a tangle ofretorts and

glassware at the far corner of the room.

“We’ll have to figure out what to do with you, dwarf. Maybe an auction, with Croat and Cromarcky in attendance.” Behind Kostin the rioters snickered. Then he turned to me, voice softening. “Are you hurt, Tal?”

Before I could answer, something changed. The scepter, one second a flawless length of gemstone-encrusted platinum and steel, turned dull, then black, then crumbled to dust in the hands of an astonished Kostin.

Gundsric was quick to react, snatching the potion from my grasp in the same instant he brought another to his lips. I lunged at him, and saw Shess doing the same from the other side of the circle. Gundsric finished the potion in one swift gulp, wiped his lips with the back ofhis hand, and smiled.

And then the dwarf vomited a gout of hornets in a black and angry swarm.

It was as if a sandstorm raged over us. I could see nothing through the horde of insects. They stung me again and again, a thousand hot pinpricks of pain, and flowed down my shirt, caught in my hair, clogged my nose and mouth. I flailed at them, smashing them by the hundreds as they lanced my hands with their envenomed stingers.

But even the droning ofthe swarm could not drown out the radiant choir screaming in my mind, and the sudden change in its chorus was proof enough that Gundsric had drunk the potion that had rested at the center ofthe circle. He had called the Burning One, the Shining Child, and it was coming.

Somewhere in the deep universe, a voice answered the call.

My body burned to a cinder and disintegrated, blown away on furnace-hot winds. The world was white, whiter than white, the white of the heart of a star. The Child was there, probing, playing with pieces of my memories.

Gundsric was with us, laughing in triumph. I saw him then, saw his past as vividly as if it were my own. The moment long ago when he had first found it, the fallen stone that contained within it a potent piece of star stuff. Gundsric, breathing laboriously though the bellows-mask he wore, deep in the poison dark of the tunnels beneath the Gas Forges. Gundsric making it his obses sion, killing the fellow miner who learned ofit, making the death look like an accident.

The alchemist had removed the stone under cover of night, taking it home, cracking open its secrets and growing strong on the knowledge. He searched for more, charting the hidden depths of the mines, but never finding another such bright and terrible stone. But the gleam had kept him alive despite the black lung, and it could do so much more. The star stuffitselfwas alive, part ofa being that yearned to rejoin it, yearned to be whole again after a impossible gulf oftime.

And Gundsric yearned for something too-yearned to destroy. To burn his enemies, burn the whole world to a dead ball of ash and spit his last bloody breath on its corpse.

The Child answered the call, and I could feel us moving back the way we had come. Somewhere I felt the painful throbbing of my body, heard the swarm, the chaos of fighting. We were drifting back to our world, and Gundsric sang with joy. I could see it through his eyes, his anticipation of Riddleport in flames, all of Varisia consumed in the blaze of a hundred raging fires. The Child would do it, without care or thought-it sought only to reunite with the star stuff, the gleam.

You don’t have to do it, I thought, and the Child swept its pitiles s gaze over me. You c an refuse.

I offered my mind up to it, and it took it. All of it. The scholar who was a thief. The daughter who said no to the father, again and again, always doing the opposite of what he had planned for her. The disobedient initiate who won the respect of her Masters when she followed her own conscience. The little girl who snuck out of her mother’s home to play at swords and spells with the willful Varisian boy, her bad influence and greatest friend.

But there were forces at work, rules that could not be broken. The Child rode a tide offire, and it would come. I could see the planned arrival now from Gundsric’s perspective, see one of the eyes in the glass containers exploding outward in a portal of light as the Shining Child stepped through. Once in our world it would be bound, stuck there under Gundsric’s command for as long as the dwarf could hold it.

We were so close now. I could feel my body lying on the circle of gleam, my flesh hot from the star stuff, hot from the stings of the insects that wandered over me in a mass. I understood everything at that last moment, and through

aching blaze of my mind showed the Child the choice it could make. Its first and last in my world.

Somewhere in the bright space our minds shared, the Child showed me it understood.

My eyes snapped open. Kostin was there, swatting the wasps off of me, saying something I couldn’t hear. I looked across the circle at Gundsric, his glowing eyes darting from container to container, wondering which of the gleam-saturated orbs would suddenly blossom into a portal of fire and give birth to his revenge. Gundsric, smiling his bloody smile.

And then his head exploded.

It was over in a flash. A pinpoint of heat and light, the slightest hint of fear on the alchemist’s face, and then an expanding halo of white-hot flame that collapsed back in on itself. In that brief instant I could see the Child, see its sun-bright eyes peering into our world with curiosity and incomprehension. I wonder if the Child saw me, and what that meant to it; if the choice I had shone it-that of manifesting in the eye of Gundsric himself, and thus freeing the Child of any obligations to its summoner was something it could feel any gratitude for. Or did it just as sume that everything was a part ofits own story?

The logic of my own tale demands that it end here, with the burning headless body ofGundsric on the center of the bare floor of his lab, the scorched wasps falling from the air like black snow all around us. The gleam had vanished, sucked back through space in an instant, and even the grotesque collection of eyes had lost the luster of their inner glow. The choir was silent, its conductor dead.

We pushed our way out of the place, Kostin trying to warn the looters of the danger they faced while Gyrd Shess cradled in the crook of one thick arm-cleared

a path for us with the flat of his blade. Without the rod, however, the mob cared nothing for Kostin’s word, and so some two score or more of them were left in the house as we made our escape.

Left in the house when the raging fires in the lab finally touched the carbauxine stores and the air in the place detonated in a firestorm. The upper story of Gundsric’s home blew up and out, throwing stone and wood and a king’s fortune in valuables far into the sky. In my delirium I fancied it looked quiet a bit like Gundsric’s head.

“Did you guys see that thing?!” a breathless Shess asked as Gyrd set her gently to her feet. “It sucked up all the gleam! Was that a star through the portal? I mean through the dwarf’s, er, head? Maybe you didn’t see that. Were you talking to it, Tal? What did it say? Can I maybe talk to it too sometime, or is it gone for good?” She started rummaging in her overstuffed pouches as an excited Mordimor bounced by her side, but every packet of gleam Shess found was empty.

Aeventius, a frown on his bruised face, toed a smoldering book across the cobbles. “Well, this is depressing. Please tell me you grabbed a few volumes before blowing that alchemist’s house to pieces.”

I felt sick, unsteady, the ordeal with the Shining Child having sapped my strength more thoroughly than even the hornet swarm. Hopeful looters still filled the streets, though they had moved well back of the burning house. I wobbled over to Kostin where he stood with his head down, gazing hopelessly at the lump ofhard ash in his hand-all that was left ofthe scepter he had been sent to steal.

“Let’s go,” I said to him, slipping a hand into his. “Tomorrow is another story.”

The street was littered with scorched treasures as we made our way out of Rot Gut, but not one of us bothered to pick them up.