Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [41]
The next time Chant saw his son, it was in the Den of Games, working as a bouncer in the front room. Seeing Jaul there, just seventeen years old, preening in Raneger’s colors as he watched the door, was too much.
It was a betrayal. Lost in the fumes of blueleaf and a river of gold ale, Chant determined to show Raneger a run on the house like he’d never seen. He fished the ebony dice from their pouch and blew on them. He retreated to the back room, where only high rollers were allowed. There, he proceeded to bankrupt himself.
In the aching light of the following afternoon, a politely worded message arrived by courier. In thin letters drawn out with soulless efficiency, the message indicated the obscene sum he owed Raneger.
He turned the message over and saw the likeness of his son sketched on the back. Sharp terror tugged at his stomach. He knew immediately what the portrait implied. He realized only then how bullheadedly he’d pursued his own destruction.
Despite their estrangement, or perhaps because of it, Jaul would serve Raneger as the perfect, if unwitting, hostage.
“Damn it all.”
The sleeping man snorted and turned in his sleep.
Sorry, Demascus, he thought, and moved farther from his guest’s cot.
With such a run of bad luck, it was oddly fortuitous he hadn’t sold off Demascus’s scarf. He’d almost done it a few times, after the tall stranger failed to return to claim it in the time specified. Without it—
Exhaustion crashed down on him like a barrow of stones. An image of his bed wafted before him, soft and warm in the loft. But not yet. His mind was gummy from lack of sleep, but he had one more thing to check before he allowed himself a nap.
Fable appeared from nowhere, her green eyes luminous in the light trickling through the shutters.
“You scared me, you little devil,” he whispered. The cat twitched an ear, then padded across the floor to an empty crate. Fable liked to sit in the short-sided crate like it was some kind of cat throne. Funny little creature. He smiled.
Chant wound around a display of silvered dishes and formal napkins, and paused before a rusted ship anchor. He pulled it out of the way, shoved a wooden box of pewter mugs with his foot, and paused to regard the cabinet he’d uncovered. Books and scrolls were visible through the cabinet’s narrow glass doors. He scanned the titles. He’d accumulated a collection of tomes and librams over twenty years of buying oddments. Some were from the libraries of down-on-their-luck genasi, but the core of the collection was from a single source: a group of ragged salvagers had brought him a chest filled to bursting with moldy tomes. They’d told him they’d pulled the chest from a Chessentan ruin they found on an earthmote south of Airspur.
Chant had paid good coin for the books, thinking he could turn around and sell them at a fair markup.
But there they still moldered. Apparently not as many book collectors wandered through pawnshops as he’d hoped, and he’d never taken the time to set up an external sale.
Maybe that was good. The things Chevesh had mentioned reminded him of something he’d seen scrawled across one of the pages.
He pulled a thick volume from the shelf that smelled of mushrooms and was titled Cults of Tyranny. He opened it on the counter.
The book could have used an index. Or even a table of contents. Chant paged through, searching for the image that had caught in his memory when he’d first shelved the book so many years ago.
And suddenly there it was on the page: the image of an eye, superimposed on a jagged spiral design. The caption read, “The Cult of the Elder Elemental Eye was the heart of a religious sect that terrorized locals when it sprang up in west Chessenta in 1340 DR. The cult hired bandits, consorted with demons and evil powers, and caused much destruction before it drew so much attention to itself that it was finally destroyed by an alliance of forces. The cult never managed to gain a foothold in Faerûn, which some attribute to Mystra’s direct intervention.”
That was all.
Chant frowned, and paged through the rest of