"Friend Anders, the boldest plans and the loftiest designs demand a mind that is capable of spanning insuperable difficulties to apprehend the most fantastic rewards." Jack indulged himself in another draught of the ale. "An impossibly rich prize is, by its nature, impossible to obtain, so therefore the prize that is almost impossibly rich is therefore almost impossibly difficult. And if something is almost impossible, well, that means that it is really possible but simply damned hard. Let us not turn away from a wondrous prize until we are certain that it is truly impossible to attain."
Tharzon laughed in a low voice. "No one doubts the excessive reach of your ambitions, Jack. It is the length of your grasp that is in question." The dwarf paused to draw himself a mug of Old Smokey. "This riddle is inscribed on Cedrizarun's tomb. The vault in which his funerary wealth is interred will be located somewhere near that spot, concealed by the most cunning secret entrance the master masons of old Sarbreen could devise. This riddle must tell you how to find and open the secret door."
"Are you certain that Cedrizarun did not intend a good jest at the expense of future tomb robbers?" Anders said. "How do you know that this has anything to do with a vault? For all we know, this is simply his favorite beer recipe, encoded for future brewmasters."
"I have spent almost fifty years learning all that I can about Sarbreen's old wealth and the disposal thereof," Tharzon said. "Trust me; the Guilder's Vault exists, despite the fact that it has never been found. Cedrizarun could not be certain that his descendants would retain the secret of his vault's entrance over the years, so he created the riddle as a clue in the event the knowledge was forgotten."
"Yes, but why leave any hints at all? Why leave an entrance to the vault, if it was simply designed to hold the wealth that Cedrizarun chose to take to the grave?" Anders wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Forgive me for saying so, Tharzon, but everyone knows that dwarves despise grave robbers. Why leave potential thieves any kind of a chance at all?"
Tharzon's eyes glittered-he'd made quite a handsome living by looting the crypts of his forefathers, even though he viewed it as restoring the glories of lost Sarbreen to their place in the light-but he held his temper. "Because Cedrizarun would want his sons, and their sons, and their sons after them to one day be buried at his side. His body doesn't lie under the stone or slab this inscription was found on; it lies inside the vault itself, with other places prepared for those who would one day join him there. That is why they would leave a door, Anders Aricssen."
"Back to the riddle," Jack said. "What of these leaves of autumn? Does that make any sense?"
Tharzon shrugged. "No, not to me. I have been-"
"What about these?" Anders reached over and pulled the parchment toward him. "The dwarf-runes are all carved here, in the center of the stone, but there's a border around the inscription. Grape leaves, perhaps? Could the inscription refer to the border around the words?"
Tharzon frowned and pulled the parchment back, looking at it more carefully. "I think you are right. Look, in the leaves-see how strangely the vines and the veins are worked? There are runes hidden in the border!" He studied them furiously for several minutes, ignorant of the fact that the Sembians in the other corner demanded more ale. The dwarf didn't even object when Anders got up and threw out the two merchants, barring the door behind them. After a long time, the dwarf rubbed his eyes and looked up. "Damn it. They mean nothing. Pieces of letters and words, but nothing complete, all of it jumbled together."
"But it was deliberate?" Jack asked. "Not a coincidence of design?"
"The carver worked hard to put them in and conceal them," Tharzon admitted, "but they don't make sense! It's gibberish!"
Jack put his chin in his hand and thought hard, staring at the riddle. "What if," he said slowly, "these fractional runes align somehow when you encircle them around something? Say, a particular bottle of brandy?"
"Hard to imagine wrapping a stone marker around a bottle," Anders remarked.
"Yes, it is," Jack agreed. He picked up the rubbing parchment and looked at it. "But not so hard to imagine wrapping a piece of paper on which the design has copied around a bottle, is it?"
Tharzon stared at him. Then he seized an empty mug from behind the bar and set it on the counter. "Go on," he said. "Try it."
Jack took the parchment and wrapped it around the mug. He quickly discovered that the parchment simply covered itself up on multiple windings without revealing anything in the border marks. But if he angled the parchment, he created bands in which the border overlapped with the border of the layer underneath. And some of the marks might line up to make whole runes… if he knew just how big the bottle was supposed to be, and how sharply the border strip should incline on its circuit of the bottle.
"I think," he said, "that we need the bottle now."
Zandria's home was a strong lodge of stone and timber nestled in a quiet alley of Swordspoint. Once the building had been a woodcarver's shop, with a large workshop in the stone-walled lower floor and a set of small apartments for the craftsman's family in the wooden floors above. Finding Zandria had been harder than Jack had expected. Raven's Bluff was a city that teemed with adventurers, so asking after adventurers took some time. But persistence, silver, and a little luck brought him the address he sought.
And so on the next morning he found himself in front of the old woodcarver's house, now converted into a small fortress and stronghold for Zandria and the band of monster slayers, dungeon delvers, tyrant topplers, and peasant protectors who followed her.
"Illyth would give her eyeteeth to listen to the tales you'd tell," Jack said to the building. "Noble deeds, daring exploits, glorious battles, and grisly death. What more could a girl ask for?"
He laughed aloud and bounced up to the door, guarded by a whitewashed shield and scarlet falcon emblem hung over the lintel. It stood open to the old woodcarver's workshop; Jack knocked once on the doorframe and stepped inside. "Hello?" he called. "Is Zandria here?"
Two men worked inside, stoking a fire at the center of an improvised armorer's shop. Several chain mail shirts rested on thick wooden mannequins along the wall, four suits of full plate armor stood mounted on the opposite wall, and dozens of helms, greaves, vambraces, pauldrons, epaulets, and all the other pieces that went into a fine suit of field armor lay scattered about. Both fellows turned as Jack walked in-tall, powerfully built fellows dressed in smiths' aprons and marked here and there by various scars, tattoos, nicks, and scrapes. Freebooter swordsmen, Jack decided, now tending to their battered gear.
"Who wants to know?"
"I am a messenger in the service of Ontrodes the sage."
The two swordsmen exchanged glances. One shrugged and wiped his hands on his apron. "Up the stairs. After you, of course."
Jack bowed and trotted up the stairs to the upper floor. He emerged in a large common room, dominated by a vast oak table with eight chairs. Trophies and banners decorated the walls-orc battle flags, old Sembian tapestries, Vaasan shields and swords. At one end of the table sat Zandria, surrounded by dozens of texts and manuscripts.
"Brunn, I told you I was not to be disturbed!" she snapped without looking up. Then she did look up, and her face grew livid as her eyes fell on Jack. "Incredible. Your nerve simply defies belief. Do you want me to burn you to a husk of smoldering ash? Do you have some unnatural desire to meet your death this very instant?"
"Against my better judgment, I have decided to give you the opportunity to contract my services as guide, advisor, and confidant," Jack said. He pulled up a chair at the opposite end of the table and poured himself a goblet of watered wine from a silver ewer service. "I will now entertain your solicitations for my assistance."