Light of a Distant Star Read online

  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 ha
lo 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.