HONEST JACK AND THE DIADEM OF RAFIC
CHAPTER ONE - JACK

"What's this, Mr. Jack?"

"I'd been thinking that myself," answered Jack to his hireling. The former was living up to his ironic prefix for once; he had no notion of what lay behind this false wall in the catacombs. Had it not been for the death throes of one of the giant stone worms, they might never have discovered it. Nonetheless, the fact was on the table: there was a secret passage that the worm's tail had completely demolished, and no one in Spinesreach but two men knew about it; Jack, and Stephen.

Jack was a slim man of no great height with a certain, debonair appearance and a thoroughly wiry impression. He wore a pencil moustache and no beard, and favored a many-pocketed leather overcoat. Beneath that, he wore his favored pinstriped suit, within which was concealed a truly worrisome amount of weaponry.

Stephen, by contrast, was somewhat overweight and much taller, though in spite of his size he was not quite so dangerous as Jack. He wore farmer's clothing, for that was what he had been before Jack had offered him the generous wage of a hundred sovereigns a day: a farmer's boy, with no prospects and future. He was often given to wonder whether or not the endeavor had truly been worth it, especially at times like this.

"Stephen," said Jack, snapping his fingers impatiently. "Hand me the torch." Stephen, through no real compulsion of his own, proceeded to do so, and Jack took it, peering through the opening.

"You din't have to snap me, Mr. Jack!" protested the hireling, who by now expected this sort of treatment from his on-again, off-again employer.

"If you're not anticipating my commands," Jack answered, pursing his lips, "You're not being fast enough. Now let's at this."

Stephen shuffled forward obediently, clambering over the ledge that separated the old sewer tunnels from what looked to be even older, prototypical construction. The walls were scrawled with the old Kalsu tongue, the sinuous words flickering like snakes as the torchlight danced. A long tunnel stretched away, and Jack knew no caution; while a good Syssin Defender, as any man in Spinesreach might have agreed, common sense had never been his strong suit. He began walking forward.

"What's that on the walls, Mr. Jack?" asked the hireling. He, in his turn, hung back.

"Ankyrean writing," Jack answered. "Can't make heads nor tails of it myself, but this is an old place."

"I'm not going in there!"

"What a shame. I am."

"Mr. Jack!" yelled Stephen. "It might be trapped! There might be, be darts or, or boulders or some kind of acid! You don't know!"

The young Syssin tried and failed to contain a disparaging smile. "Stephen? That's stupid. Shut up." Without waiting for an answer, he pressed on ahead. It wasn't long before Stephen caught up to him, just as he always did in similar circumstances. Wordlessly, they went on.

The tunnel bent sharply into a corner, and they turned with it, following the Kalsu-inscribed tunnel until it gave way to a chamber. Low-ceilinged and dim, it contained only a pedestal. Upon it lay but one thing; a tablet of dark stone, carved with an eclectic mixture of Kalsu and numbers. Crossing the chamber in long strides, Jack went to it and looked upon it with fervent curiosity.

"It's a map, Stephen," he decided, at last.

His hireling was skeptical: "How can you tell, Mr. Jack?"

"Look here," Jack pointed, indicating a passage of ancient text. "They're using the old words for the Citadel and for the directions. I'm no great expert, but it's saying to go somewhere."

"Can you read where?"

"No one reads Kalsu anymore, you idiot!" Jack scoffed, shooting a scornful glance over at his hireling. "But we could try going to Kentorakro with this. The temple of Mystery." He paused. "Oh. And do please try not to tell the Syssin. That's the last thing we need. This," he indicated the tablet, "Could be our big break."

Dramatically, to prove his point, he snatched the tablet up.

A loud click echoed through the room and the ceiling opened up. clear, sizzling liquid began to pour into the room, splashing down on the pedestal. Like sand beneath a tide, it melted, and several flying droplets singed unsightly holes into Jack's overcoat. The Syssin began to run, and Stephen, with a certain commoner's instinct for trouble, followed him rapidly.

As the acid filled the room and began pouring after them, projectiles and bits of metal flew like angry insects around them, catapulted violently from the tunnel walls, from porous indents they had mistaken for erosian. Jack, with his own Defender's training, ducked and weaved expertly through them, with only one or two brushing him that were easily enough cured. However, Stephen was not quite so lucky. Several darts landed in his side, and he began to squawk and flail like an infant as he tumbled along clumsily. Jack reached back, grabbed him, and pulled him through as the hireling pulled vast mouthfuls of herbs from his cache and stuffed them all down his throat in a great blob of harvested flora.

The hole back to the sewers neared as Jack rounded the corner, Stephen bouncing like a bale of hay behind him. He redoubled his efforts, darts threatening them both with their high-pitched hum. He leapt forward, grabbed Stephen with both hands, and fell bodily into the sewage of the old canal, his head propped up on the corpse of the gigantic stone worm he'd killed not five minutes before. Had it not been for the great beast's death throes, the layer of ice covering the filth would not have been broken, Jack was given to morosely reflect. Stephen landed beside him, frozen in a state of venom-induced paralysis.

A few moments later, with a loud crash, a boulder fell inside the tunnel and rolled down it with an ominous rumble. Striking the hole in the wall, it inched forward and then stuck there, protruding into the canal like an unsightly granite boil. Silence fell.

The Syssin produced some bloodroot from his cache and stuffed it into Stephen's mouth. Scarcely had the man's mouth unlocked than he began to squawk again, and so Jack was forced, across the next few minutes, to help cure his hireling of the numerous ailments the darts had inflicted upon him. At last, seemingly cured, Stephen drew in a deep breath and glanced at the boulder:

"Mr. Jack," he hesitated, for effect: "I did tell you there might be darts or--"

"Not. A. Word."

---

CHAPTER TWO - THE DEFENDERS

They had barely made it out of the sewers, stinking and wretched, when Jack froze in his tracks and mumbled an obscene oath. "Stephen. We can't go," he said.

"What? Why not?"

"The Champion of the Spires has just called a meeting," said Jack in reply. "Wait in the Wintersbreeze, buy yourself a drink. I'll be back." With that, he dashed off.

When he arrived in the caves within which the Syssin Defenders made their lairs, he found only a few of his compatriots there, in addition to the Champion; he, a swarthy troll by the name of Griswol Deepstone, had risen rapidly through the ranks only a decade before, advancing from the unassuming rank of Runner all the way to his current position. Under his leadership, the Defenders had become an efficient, well-oiled machine, but in Jack's eyes this came with its own problems.

"We discovered a disturbance in the lower tunnels," said Griswol. Even now, among people who knew it was false, he had adopted his usual thick troll accent. Those who took it at face value and thought him stupid often paid for it, as the sheer number of vanished individuals in the last ten years could easily prove. "A boulder. Clogging a tunnel. When we shifted it we found that tunnel. We also found a room. There was Kalsu on the walls. Pools of acid on the floor. Darts on the ground. Traps. A melted pedestal. It was a secret Ankyrean chamber and someone broke into it."

Jack did his best to look innocent. So, he noted, did his compatriots. There was Jameson, staring straight ahead, his chiseled Mhun features unreadable as stone. There was Reub, a youth with dashing good looks and long hair, whirling his dirk in his hand. There was Eleise, the Atavian girl, quiet but deadly. And there at last was Fahren, a Xorani from the Mhojave, thickly wrapped up to keep what little heat she could gather in the north.

"You all," Griswol continued, "You were in Spinesreach. Notice anything unusual? Someone was inside. Who?"

Jack's fist tightened around a gem in his pocket, and it pulsed back at him as though it had a tiny heartbeat. He loved the way it kept him hidden. The touch of echinacea could not discover him, and few bothered seeking him out by intention. He was safe, he judged, as silence reigned through the room.

Griswol's voice rang out again. "Jack?"

The man snapped to attention. "Yes, Champion?"

"You've always been an elusive sort ever since you stole that gem of yours. Tell us. Where were you?"

"I was with a woman."

The troll could not help but grimace, for he could believe it. The other Defenders suppressed smiles. Honest Jack had a reputation.

"Instead of doing your job down in the sewers. Like usual for you," Griswol pointed out. "I told you to be on watch. Duiran keeps sending in spies. They keep getting in. One of them got into that chamber. Probably took whatever was inside."

"Something was inside?" Jack tried his best to sound like he was in earnest.

"Oh, yes," replied Griswol. Jack noted, amused, that Griswol had let the accent slip away. He was all business now. "There was a half-melted pedestal. Traces of acid. There were traps in that room. Made by the Ankyreans. Obvious, really. Ankyreans guarded their secrets. Yrtez magicked her Conclave's rooms to do that. This chamber guarded something too. Not the writing. Writing does not need its own chamber. It was holding something else."

"Oh." Jack bowed his head. The troll's eyes were boring into him. He felt like he was being opened and read like a stolen journal.

"You're going to find out what. You're going to go get it back. It was in the City. It belongs to the City. You will leave at once. You will not come back until it is found. You will use any means necessary. If you are caught, if you die, you are dead to us. We have learned it is not worth it to stick our necks out for you. This is your chance to prove you are worth it. Do not screw this up. You understand?"

The other Defenders glanced over to Jack, suddenly sympathetic. For his part, the man raised his head, his pencil moustache twitching, and gave a small nod.

"Go."

When Jack got baCk to the Wintersbreeze and found Stephen, the man had not only had one drink; he had had several, and was engaged in conversation with the farmers, most of whom he knew by name. The Syssin was feeling impatient, though, so he simply grabbed Stephen by the scruff of the neck, pulled him from his chair, and dragged him outside, his ragged breath frosting the air.

"Stephen. We're going south."

"Why's that, Mr. Jack?"

"First to Kentorakro, to find out what this tablet means, and then to find a man to give it to."

"What for?"

"Stephen, do me a favor and stop asking so many damn questions. Did you tell those farmers anything?"

"No, Mr. Jack."

"Good. Keep it that way. Here's fifty sovereigns extra. Expect that as a permanent per-day raise for not telling anyone anything important. Go get our steeds. We're riding now."

---

CHAPTER 3 - KENTORAKRO

"There are, of course, no beings in existence excepts the Gods Themselves that are fully fluent in Kalsu," the lich Sekhtet explained. Despite her state of death, and the glazed appearance of her eyes, she still spared a scornful expression for the two mountebanks in her library. Honest Jack was in a disheveled state of disarray after riding the whole night long, and Stephen was swaying on his feet. Things might have been otherwise had it not been for the former's insistence on putting distance between them and Spinesreach.

They were in the central library in the Lady Ultraist's temple, filled with tables, chairs, and shelves. Candelabras blazed, illuminating the space, and a marble staircase rose upward from below, unsupported by anything so bold as architecture. It had taken Stephen a few minutes to trust the floating stone panels enough to ascend.

"While I understand that," Jack answered, stifling a yawn behind his hand, "I was still hoping for the general gist of things. You serve the Lady--" he sought for words that would not gain the attention of the Lady in question, "--of Secrets, do you not? She knew Kalsu."

"She never shared much of it with Her following," answered the priestess, though she spared a glance for the tablet Jack had placed on the table before her. "She preferred us to discover Mysteries for ourselves. However, I can tell you that your initial instinct was correct: it is a map, and it is directions for what appears to be... a system of caves deep under the Tarean mountains. I can tell you more, if you will give me a while. Also?"

She pointed, with one bony finger.

"Dismount your horses and get them out of my library."

Contrite, Jack and Stephen dismounted and led their horses back down the great marble staircase. This time, not quite so nervous about the steps, Stephen took his chance to look around the temple. They passed down through a quiet study, and past that a roomful of prisms, with a seven-sided glass pillar at the center. Even Honest Jack had to confess himself impressed by the architecture, but all the same he was still nervous. What if the Defenders decided to check on him? He brushed his bell tattoo.

The immediate response jolted him from his uneasy exhaustion, though he did his best to hide it. He snatched an eye sigil from his pocket, held it high, and cast it to the ground. The horses reared up in fright, and Stephen raised a hand to his eyes as the bright light flared.

It revealed nothing.

Jack allowed only the barest moment to pass before he crammed some echinacea into his mouth, closed his eyes, and searched. People everywhere, altogether too many, and yet...

...there.

"Stephen. Follow me!"

He absconded the rest of the way down the stairs and leapt to a halt at their bottom, in the glass-walled courtyard that served as the temple's base. Sure enough, there she was, the psychic energy so thick around her it was almost crackling. Of course she was weaponless - any Sentaari would be. What surprised Jack, however, was her relative youth.

She was a Tsol'aa, but even so could not have been more than her early twenties, dressed in the plain robes of a Sentaari monk and barefoot. They were dirtied, of course, the hem ragged and the sleeves tattered, and her black hair had leaves and twigs tangled in it. Her skin was a honey color, eyes little more than narrow green slants.

The echinacea blazed a name into his mind: Sister Lotus Cartwright.

"You." Jack drew his dirk and whip, moving around quickly to block the way from the temple. "You were spying on me."

Lotus smiled, dipping into a low courtly bow. Despite her silence, Jack knew sarcasm when he saw it, being a well-practiced master of the art. Then she dashed away up the stairs, kicking Stephen aside with a graceful thrust of her leg. The farmer's boy fell aside, cracking his head against one of the glass walls, and passed out, blood streaming from his forehead. Jack pursued the monk as quickly as he could, dashing up the stairs, but was frozen in his tracks by a sudden telepathic blast. Paralysed in mid-run, unable to reach his cache fast enough, he tilted sideways on the stairs and rolled back down. Spinning like a top, he landed badly on his arm and leg, and pain seared through him as he crashed back into the courtyard.

As he lay there, struggling for his bloodroot, the Sentaari returned, dashing down the stairs in a quick, fleet run. She made a point of landing atop him, much to his agonized consternation, and he could see from his limited position that she held the tablet under one arm. She met his stare, blinking slowly, her green eyes fixed on his gray. For a moment, her face was utterly earnest and serious as she considered him, and Jack felt her mind sifting through his own, searching.

Lotus reached into his pocket and tugged out the gem of cloaking that had been his. Eyeing it with a decisive nod, she took it for her own, drew back her fist, and turned his nose into a pancake. Before the stars faded from his vision, he heard approaching footsteps, and then the voice of Sequa, the temple's procurator:

"Lovely to see you again, Lotus. As always, I'm happy to help you however I can while you're here... Wait, what's all this?!"

Then he heard Lotus running away, the tablet in her arm, and his echinacea could not find her.

<Sorry!> chimed a voice in his head that was rapidly growing more distant. <But you can't have the Diadem of Rafic!> The mind lock broke as the Tsol'aa fled from the village.

He found, to his resigned dismay, that he was out of bloodroot.

---TO BE CONTINUED---