Adv Log Session 49: Aftermath of the Catacomb Fight

Colding 20, 879 AFE

  The fight was over, and the wounded healed via magic. The shards from the scary zombie thing had been harvested out of the body by Almë and his knife, the gruesome remains looking like the results of a crazed butcher or incompetent surgeon. They had found a half dozen undead things, so they were pretty sure that there was a necromancer around somewhere. It was the first proof that they had gotten that their quarry might be nearby somewhere.

  They surveyed the corpses. Five of them lay in a group, with a sixth down the side corridor where Taid had pushed it. Beyond the now-still zombie bodies, beneath the large, ragged holes in the sarcophagi that sat in the niches, were more bones, and what appeared to be pottery shards. The once pristine marble-lined halls of the dead were covered in debris, bones, and blood. It was no longer the serene, peaceful place to commune with dead loved ones; it was the disheveled, messy, chaotic remains of a battlefield.

  “Those zombies had been placed with the dead in those sarcophagi,” Almë said. “As a trap.” The strange, new kind of shard zombie hadn’t had anything else on it besides the shards themselves. “Damn, I had been hoping for a sigil or sign that might tell us which House the fear-creature was affiliated with.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think Kallia would have been that careless,” Taid said. “I wouldn’t have been, and I don’t think you would have either.”

  “True. But we can always hope.” Almë stood up from the side of the fear-zombie, dusting himself off. When the zombies had broken out of their stone hiding places, it has caused chunks of them to shatter and spread debris everywhere. He looked at the pile of dead bodies lying on the catacomb floor. “First of all, is there anyone we want to talk to about this? Like, ‘Okay, we just found some zombies in your graveyard?”

  Taid had gone to peer into the niches where the now-damaged sarcophagi lay. “Hey!” he exclaimed, there’s a space behind the niches!” Not only was the front side of the sarcophagus broken, but the back side was as well, and the walls of the stone vessels were very thin, less than a centimeter in thickness. They had been “sabotaged”; made weak in order to allow the zombies to break out of them. And they had gotten into them from behind the niches.

    “I think they just crawled into the crypts and laid the trap for us,” Almë said. “So my assumption is that they probably spotted us at some point, and baited this as a trap. If they were hiding here scaring people, but not killing anyone, Kallia would likely assume that whomever was searching for her would be the ones to investigate zombies and strange stuff in graveyards. This looks like an orchestrated trap. They pretty much waited here for us, which means she knows that we are in the city.”

  “Makes sense,” Taid said. “They set the trap from behind.” He grabbed Maggie, and used the halberd to probe the extent of the space. He didn’t learn much more from tapping around with the halberd than he did with his eyes, besides the fact that it seemed empty. He listened for any noises, but didn’t hear anything. Then he hopped up, gripping the edges of the busted tombs and pulling himself through the opening to get a look behind them. There was not only a space back there, but a tunnel. He stuck the tip of his short sword, the tip still emitting bright light from the Spell of Continual Light, through the hole. The spell wouldn’t end for several days.

    The passageway was a narrow tunnel a meter wide by about two meters tall, with smooth sides. Taid noticed almost immediately that there were no tool marks on the walls; the tunnel hadn’t been excavated. It was more likely carved out of the rock using magic. He also noticed the proportions of the tunnel. Tall, and somewhat narrow. It looked like a tunnel made by a Human, rather than a Dwarf. So it was likely one of Kallia’s henchmen, rather than Kallia herself. Possibly Lennerd, if he was even in Dwarfchat.

  The passageway extended between where the niches would be, stretching into the darkness. The mages could manage to get their staves through the destroyed sarcophagus and into the passage. But Maggie wouldn’t fit. And Taid wasn’t willing to leave her behind.

  “Alme,” Taid asked, “would you be able to carve out a section so I could get Maggie in there?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Almë replied. “I just need to remove some of the remaining material of the sarcophagus. Which would need to be replaced anyway.”   “Do it.”

  Almë went through the hole and into the passage. Taid stuffed Maggie through, testing the fit so Almë would know where to remove material. It turned out that he wouldn’t need to remove very much, which was good. The Spell of Earth Shaping wasn’t hard when moving natural earth, but it was a bit more difficult when manipulating natural stone. Worked stone, like the sarcophagus, was even harder and more taxing. Thaumatologically, the ritualistic “equation” of the spell had extra variables when stone was involved, and a few more when worked stone, carved with intent, was the subject of the spell. More mana was required to power the spell. [1]

  Taid was about to go in next, but realized that if he did, they’d need to leave the animals behind. He was the only one truly able to manhandle the mastiff into the hole, and even then, he might require some assistance. Mister Wiggles was easy enough and small enough for Elitheris to lift him into the hole. But Norolind was 90 kg of squirming dog, who wasn’t really interested in trying to squirm through a small hole. He wasn’t a ratter, used to going into small holes. The look he gave Ruby was, “Why are you doing this to me, mama?”

  But Taid, with Ruby’s help, managed to get the reluctant dog into the niche and thus into the passage way beyond. Taid followed the dogs, then scooched past the dogs as Eykit and Ruby entered through the niche. Elitheris brought up the rear. [2]

    Almë moved ahead to find out what was up ahead, followed by Taid and Mister Wiggles. Taid had to walk sideways through the passageway; it was too narrow for his wide, squat frame to fit through going straight. He grumbled a bit at the inconvenience. The passageway branched. The rightward branch curved off to the right. The leftward branch went straight ahead for a while, then curved to the left.

  Almë went down the rightward pathway, along with Taid. It went straight, but sloped upward, getting shorter and shorter until it ended. It was a dead end, and Almë made his way forward. Soon he was crawling up the slope, then squirming. There was a spot of light that he could see at the end.

  The light was coming through a peephole. Looking through it, Almë could see down the entire corridor. Almë, his curiosity satisfied, scrambled back out of the tight spot. It seemed easier squirming out than it was squirming in, likely due to the slope. “There is a spy hole at the end there,” he said to the rest of them. “You can see the whole corridor.” [3] [4]

  Almë moved up the more straight, leftward branch. It curved to the left, then branched again. The straight branch eventually dumped onto a T-intersection. The rightward branch sloped up and ended, with another peephole at the end. It looked out on one of the previous catacomb tunnels, one of the ones that led to where the ambush had been set.

  They moved to the T-intersection. The leftward pathway sloped up. The rightward one ended at an open niche, where a single zombie had gotten out. They went up the sloping path.

    Taid moved to the front, followed by Ruby and Almë, then the dogs, Eykit, and Elitheris. The passageway narrowed a bit, but they were still able to get through. It was narrow enough that Elitheris and Almë had to squirm sideways through it. Eykit and Ruby, with their smaller Goblin and Hobbit statures, were able to fit just fine through the opening. It started sloping down again, and there was almost a hole going down to a pair of broken crypts on one side. The passageway continued forward, extending for a fair distance, but ended in a globular mass that sloped upwards. It looked like someone had filled the end of the tunnel, then turned it to stone.

  “This is why we don’t explore,” Taid complained, as he saw the sealed dead end. “Kallia, or more likely, her minions, came down here, set the trap, then escaped and plugged up the end.”

  “Can Almë get through it?” Elitheris asked.

  “Of course,” Almë said confidently. He squirmed past Ruby and Taid to take a look at the plugged end.

  “Almë, you’ve got the knowledge of the Spell of Earth Shaping,” Taid said. “Can you tell how long ago that was formed?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Almë examined the lumpy mass of stone, running his hands over it. “Crudely formed, on this side, at least. But from what I can tell, I think that the plug here is more recent than the walls of this passage. And the walls of this passage seem fairly recently formed. Can’t be more than a few days for the walls. The end of the passage here…I’d say sometime today, and I’d bet within the last half hour.”

  “Okay,” Taid said. “Let’s open it up.”

  “On the one hand, I don’t want to go through it because it could be the next trap. On the other hand, there is no other clue. So I guess we just take the risk and go for it, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Worked stone,” Almë muttered. “It’s going to be expensive.” He had to tap the powerstone on his staff to help provide the energy for the spell, but in a few moments, the stone shifted to each side like thick, heavy curtains, revealing an opening they could squeeze through. [5]

  It opened up onto the mushroom groves. The cavern they were in was large, and filled with a couple of different varieties of mushrooms, ranging in size from small toadstools to towering giants over two meters tall. They glowed with a faint, phosphorescent greenish light. It was enough light to allow for basic navigation, although it was still very dim. The species were familiar; they’d actually been in this cavern before, on their earlier trip to the catacombs.

  There was a trail of fairly obvious footprints—damaged mushrooms, mainly—that lead from the spot where they had emerged to the fairly well-trodden footpath that denoted where the grove workers walked on their rounds. Whomever had made the trail hadn’t cared too much about hiding their tracks. Elitheris said as much, and Almë figured it was Lennerd, running away again.

  Elitheris moved to the front, in order to follow the trail. It was obvious, until it got to the worker trail, at which point it disappeared. Except to Elitheris’s trained eye, the trail was still detectable. It went to their left, in the direction of the entrance that the workers and the public used. No one else could see the track she was following, but they trusted her. And she was absolutely sure that it was there, and that the person they were following was running, and Human. [6]

  The trail led them through two large caverns, mainly denoted by the change in mushroom variety. The caverns usually had two or three different kinds of mushrooms growing in them, in large clusters like fields on a farm. The air was laden with spores, but they could see that there was the slightest bit of air movement.

  The running footprints suddenly stopped, as if the person who had made them came to a standstill. There were no prints past that point. The trail had disappeared.

  “Damn,” Elitheris said. “Well, we are obviously dealing with a mage.”

  “What? What do you see?” Eykit said.

  “The trail stops. Right here. It doesn’t fade away, or trail off into the existing tracks, it just abruptly stops.”

  “But we’re in the middle of a cave.” Eykit looked around. All he saw was mushrooms, the rocky ceiling about eight meters above his head, and the ground that had been liberally covered in organic material, likely waste from the local lumber industry, and, judging by the smell, the sewers. “Where could she have gone?”

  “Maybe a she, but not Kallia,” Taid said. “Kallia’s a Dwarf, and the trail Elitheris was following was made by a Human, yes?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t have a clue where the person went,” Elitheris said, looking around and trying to find something that might give a spark of inspiration. She didn’t find any. “She must have levitated, or teleported.”

  “I don’t think Lennerd teleported,” Almë said, remembering what Nathan Verges had said about Gate Magic and how rare it seemed to be. “I never got the impression that Nathan ever taught him how to do that.”

  “You think it was Lennerd?” Eykit asked.

  “Yeah. Human, running away from us. It makes sense.”

  “He, then,” Elitheris corrected.

  They were about two largish caverns away from where they had emerged from the passageway. If they wanted, they could run back to where they had been in about thirty seconds or so.

  “Well, fuck. Now what do we do?” Taid grumped. “I’m getting really tired of this nonsense.”

  “Why run for a while?” Elitheris asked.

  “And why to here?” Taid added. “Was he meeting someone?”

    Elitheris looked at the area where the footprints had stopped, but didn’t see any telltale signs of someone meeting the runner. She shrugged and shook her head.

  The mushrooms around them ranged in size from toadstools to fungus monoliths taller than their heads. There were areas where they had been harvested, leaving rough bases just above floor level.

  Taid started poking Maggie into the stalks around him, just in case the runner was hiding in one of them.

  Elitheris looked up, trying to find a rope ladder or dangling rope. She didn’t find one. But she did see something on the top surface of one of the larger mushrooms. It looked like a boot scuff. She couldn’t see it very well, so she reached up to the edge of the mushroom to pull herself up a bit and get a better view. The mushroom couldn’t support her weight, and bent down when she pulled on it, and she could feel the material of the fungus crush a bit under her fingertips. There was no way it would support any weight. [7]

  Ruby, meanwhile, gave her staff to Almë and cast the Spell of the Falcon Shape.

  Taid cast Continual Light onto a coin, then tied it to a piece of twine to act as a necklace. He put it over around her neck. She took off, flying around the group once. She was able to spot the scuff mark on the mushroom. It was the only mark she could see, implying that the escaping runner hadn’t jumped from mushroom to mushroom.

  And that was when they noticed that the usual sounds that should have been echoing through the caverns weren’t there. There were no shouts or songs from workers, no excited exclamations from people on a tour of the Groves. Nothing. It was silent, except for their own noises.

  Flying around wasn’t just to get an overhead view of the mushrooms, although that was the primary goal. It was also to get a feel for the air itself. She was in a cavern complex, not the outside; there was no weather underground. And while she was a Hobbit, at ground level, surrounded by a fungal forest, the air felt still, and the spores in the air demonstrated it.

  However, once she was up in the air as a falcon, her wings outstretched and catching the air, she was able to feel the slightest breeze in the caves. Somewhere, there was a draft. She actively disliked flying in caves; the last one she’d been in had been full of nasty guano. Flying in caves was simply just a lot more work. She had to actively beat her wings to hold altitude, there were no updrafts to allow her to simply soar. If she wanted to fly, she had to work for it, constantly.

    She followed the breeze, detectable only as a slight ruffling the tips of her primary flight feathers. She flew through another four chambers, mainly marked by the change in mushroom types, although the caverns did neck down a bit to form short passageways that acted more or less like doorways. In each chamber, she had to fly around in a circle, sometimes repeatedly, in order to detect the breeze and its direction. But soon enough she came to a low opening at one end of a chamber that had had most of the mature mushrooms harvested. Beyond the doorway she could see what appeared to be natural light, reflecting off of the natural stone walls.

  She landed at the edge of the doorway; she wasn’t about to just fly through like a target. She peered around the corner, hopping forward to give herself a better view, but staying even lower than her falcon form would normally be to minimize her chance of being seen by someone in there. She hadn’t heard anyone in there, and it had been just as quiet as the other caverns, but there was no need to take chances. She didn’t get to where she was now by taking unnecessary risks.

  She saw a gallery; it was a fairly straight corridor, with benches along one side, and a series of large glass windows on the other. The windows overlooked the lake, and were situated between the two waterfalls. The view was spectacular, and she could see several boats in the lake and moving up and down the river. She could even see, only partially obscured by riparian trees, the main road along the riverbank. A caravan, several hundreds of meters long, was strung out along its length as it made its way to Dwarfchat. There was another opening at the far end of the gallery, leading back into the Mushroom Grove cave complex. She could hear the roar of the waterfalls, and feel the water in the air.

    Next to one of the benches, Ruby could see a half-eaten meat pie, apparently discarded. A stream of filling spilled out of it, as if it had been tossed down in a hurry.

  A couple of the windows had moveable panes, which were open to ventilate the space. It was where the slight breeze was coming from. She put the glowing coin down under a cluster of mushrooms just outside of the gallery, hiding it as best she could by shoving the coin edge-on into the stalk of a mushroom to hide the light it was emitting.

  She hopped up onto the sill where one of the open casement windows was, looking out over the lake. When she’d done her reconnaissance flight all those many days ago, she’d seen some glinting from the cliff space, but had assumed that they were just someone’s residence. Most Dwarves had their residences underground, and given the prime spot this one had been in, she’d also assumed it had been one of the ruling family’s residences. As it happened, however, it was just one of the high points of the Mushroom Grove tours, and a place for the mushroom farmers to take a break.

  Seeing the hand pie on the ground made her realize that while she’d been flying around the other caverns, she’d seen several woven baskets with mushrooms spilling out of them on the ground as well, as if discarded in a hurry. There was a pattern there, one that she wasn’t sure she liked. Did the zombies kill them, she thought, or did they just flee?

  The window was open far enough that she could squeeze through the opening and get outside. She wanted to get her bearings, and lock the location of the gallery in her mind. As soon as she was through, she spread her wings, cupping the air, her airspeed now sufficient to allow her to soar. She could hear bells ringing now that she was outside, and she climbed in altitude, getting above the cliff’s edge. Upper Dwarfchat became visible as she rose in height.

  The bells, an almost constant din, rather than the hourly bells that chimed on the hour and half hour, seemed almost frantic. She rose up farther, and she was able to see down into the nearer streets. Over in the Walled City district, she could see people running. It was some kind of alarm, but she didn’t know what it was alerting people about.

  She looked around for a convenient place to land outside of easy view. She saw a courtyard, with a tunnel leading to the street. It was decorated with lots of plants, both up against the walls and in the center area, forming a nice, decorative garden. It was easy enough to land and shapeshift back into her normal, Hobbit form without anyone seeing her do it.

  She hurried out to the edge of the “alley” opening, looking around the corner of the building out onto the street. Some people were running, but most were clustered in small groups, talking with each other. Some were embracing, and many were crying. A pair of Civil Patrollers ran by down the middle of the street, heading to her right, towards the northern part of the city. Whatever had happened, was mostly over, it seemed. There didn’t seem to be an active source of panic, just the aftereffects of one.

  She saw an old Dwarf standing in his doorway nearby. “Hey,” she said, “why is everyone running around? What’s going on?”

  He looked over at her, shrugging. “I don’t know, really. It started about a half hour ago. I just saw several groups of Civil Patrollers running off in that direction.” He gestured with an arm. “I don’t know what’s going on. They haven’t told us yet. I don’t think they know yet either.”

  “And the bells? What do they mean?”

  “Those are the general alarm bells. They basically summon the Civil Patrol to the area where the bells are ringing from.”

  And, as he said it, she could tell now that the bells did come from the northern part of the Walled City section of town. Near the City Hall, and the House of Repose, which was ominous. “Thank you,” she said, and she turned back into the alley. She found a nice secluded looking spot nestled in between some bushes, and cast her shapeshifting spell again, once again becoming a falcon.

  She took off, flying up and over the rooftops, heading towards the area that the Civil Patrollers were headed, and from where the bells were ringing. She rose to several hundred meters above the town, the streets laid out beneath her like a map. She could see, in a general sort of way, people moving around in an area several blocks in size. It was indeed near the area of City Hall. She dove, arcing down in that direction.

  Her wings snapped out, and she flew over the rooftops, banking in a wide circle in the area where the activity seemed the most frantic. She could see a pair of Civil Patrollers come out of a building, a stretcher with someone on it between them. She dipped a wing, spiraling downward, and she could see that the person on the stretcher was bloody. Someone had been wounded.

  She could also see, now that she was lower, skimming just over the roofs, that there were lots of people huddled in small groups, crying, holding onto one another for comfort or solace.

  She gained altitude again, heading towards the House of Repose. There didn’t seem to be any Civil Patrollers doing anything at the doors to that building. She did see another pair of Patrollers with a stretcher with someone on it, coming out of an alleyway. The person on the stretcher was completely covered with a sheet.

  There didn’t seem to be any buildings on fire, no bucket brigades, or any collapsed buildings. The town itself seemed fine. Whatever had happened, had happened to the people, not the buildings. [8]

  She found another secluded space to transform again back to a Hobbit. She then walked over to a Civil Patrolman, who was standing and looking over the street, probably to just keep an eye on things.

  “Hey, ser,” she asked, “what’s going on?”

  He looked down at her. He was a Dwarf, so Ruby wasn’t all that much shorter than he was. He shrugged. “Ma’am, I honestly have no idea what’s been happening. The whole last half hour or so has been absolute chaos. We’ve had people jumping off of buildings. We’ve had domestic disputes, we’ve had domestic abuse and violence, we’ve had people committing suicide. It’s just been crazy! We are still trying to capture some of the maniacs that started running around screaming, and possibly endangering other people. It’s been insane.”

  “By the gods! That sounds very dangerous. So is the whole city going crazy? I’m a visitor, and I’m wondering if I have to leave right now!”

  The Patroller shook his head. “No, not the whole city, thank the gods! All this stuff has been happening in a two or three block area. It’s weird. This whole neighborhood has gone nuts.” He gestured around at the local area with his arms.

  “Yeah, that sounds insane. It sounds like I should go. Thanks, and good luck.”

  The Patroller nodded. “Be careful! Try to stay out of the way of our emergency teams.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Ruby went back to the cluster of bushes she had landed in and transformed. Once she was hidden again, she shapeshifted back into a falcon. [9]

  Ruby flew back to the gallery windows, landing on the sill of the open window. She retrieved the coin, then flew back to the group. Transforming back into a Hobbit, she told them about what she had seen. She’d been gone about a half hour or so.

  “That was about the time when we were fighting the zombies,” Taid mentioned. He went on, “So we can assume that this is Kallia, and she sets her trap, the trap goes off, they escape through that tunnel, go through the Mushroom Groves, go up into the air, and bounce off a mushroom for whatever reason. Maybe they find that breeze, fly out, and then went into town and started all that mayhem. That’s the data we have right now.”

  Elitheris said, “There was another time when this particular tactic had been used before.”

  “What?” Eykit said. “Starting mayhem?”

  “No. When I was following tracks, and they simply disappeared as if the person making them had been snatched away by something.”

  Taid was still working through the rest of it. “What do you think about this? She sets the trap. She isn’t expecting us to find the alternate way out, because it’s an alternate way out. Then she takes off, and fills the hole. She gets out somehow, whether this path or not.” He gestured around at the cavern. “And then she casts a spell that causes all this crazy mayhem. So, after we finish the fight and we leave the catacombs the normal way, we’re right around the corner.”

  Almë nodded. “Yes, that makes some sense.”

  “Having blood on us and everything from the fight, we get blamed. And then taken into custody by the Civil Patrollers, because they would logically think that we caused it. We’re strangers here, I’m known for being a bad ass who can fight manticores, and we look like trouble.”

  Almë, however, wasn’t fully convinced. “No, I think…my theory is….The first part is true, she escapes. But then, workers spot her because there were those dropped baskets of mushrooms. People spot her, whatever. There is some ruckus going on, and then maybe she cast some mass hysteria spell or something. And then she escapes in the chaos.”

  “I don’t know…” Taid started to say.

  “But the whole area was empty, which is unusual. Last time we were here, we got caught by people immediately, because the cave was full of workers all the time. It’s not like they only have day shifts down here in the dark. They had been working down here all the time, and now it’s empty?”

  “Okay, you have a point.”

  “That’s where I thought, okay, she runs into them on accident, or didn’t plan on running into them, whatever. Then she creates the chaos while she was escaping. Maybe some kind of mass fear spell. If you were working on some roof and suddenly got hit by a mass fear spell, you might fall off. Or jump off.”

  Elitheris spoke up. “The tracks were made by a Human, not a Dwarf. It couldn’t have been Kallia herself.” She’d made the point before, but it was too easy to ascribe everything to the necromancer.

  Ruby shook her head. “The hysteria up there started at about the same time as our fight. And as we know, it takes a while to get from the fight location to this mushroom cave. It’ll take more time to get out, and more time to go from the Grove entrance to the location of the hysteria. It took me a quarter hour to do it by flying. If I’d had to go up stairs and follow the roads, it would have taken me longer.”

  “So they couldn’t have fled the combat,” Elitheris said, “run all the way to that section of town, and cast a mass hysteria spell.”

  “Right. It’s something else, I think,” Ruby stated.

  “It could be a coincidence,” Taid said. “Just another red herring?”

  “Yeah, but to rule out a red herring you have to follow it up,” Elitheris replied. “Otherwise, how would you know?”

  “Oh, shit,” Eykit said, “I think I might know what caused it. When that eye-zombie showed up—no, before! Before it showed up, I felt this horrible sense of foreboding.”

  “Oh yeah,” Taid agreed. “I think we all did. The dogs whined and whimpered.”

  There were nods all around.

  “We could feel that thing before we saw it,” Eykit said. “And when it looked at me,” he swallowed, his eyes wide, “directly at me, I think it saw into my soul. I could almost literally see what it had in store for me when it got to me. It was going to make me into one of them. By eating my face.” Actually, the imagery was closer to a kiss, but Eykit didn’t want to mention that part.

  Taid’s eyes got dark. “Yeah, I had a similar feeling. Almost felt like I was going to wet myself. It was intense.”

  “And you cast that ice spell on the skeleton, the one in front of the eye-zombie. Then you pushed it over onto the eye-zombie, and because both were in the glue area, the eye-zombie fell backwards. His eye-beams-of-doom then tracked upwards!”

  Taid looked up. “Shit. It went through all that rock?”

  Eykit nodded. “And hit the neighborhood above us.”

  “So, in a sense, it’s our fault.” Taid leaned against one of the larger mushroom stalks. It gave a little under his weight, shifting slightly, but held. Taid didn’t react to this; he was confident that it would hold under his weight. He was very familiar with several Dwarven varieties of cultivated mushrooms.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Elitheris stated. “I also wouldn’t mention that to anyone.”

  Eykit nodded. “Besides, how were we to know? We stopped that thing from doing something worse! If we hadn’t stopped it, it would go around terrorizing whole neighborhoods. We did Dwarfchat a favor. Can you imagine what it could have done wandering around in the streets?”

  Taid nodded in agreement. “I like that version better.”

  “Ah!” Elitheris exclaimed. “Now I remember!”

  “What?” Ruby asked.

  “The tracks, and how they just disappeared. It was in Donnington!”

  “Lennerd!” Almë said. At Ruby’s questioning look, he said, “He was the second of the necromancers that we went after, but he got away after almost killing Elitheris with a death spell.”

  “We think he ran off, then levitated or flew away,” Elitheris elaborated. “His tracks simply disappeared, just like these. And we know that these tracks were made by a Human, not a Dwarf, so we know it’s not Kallia.”

  “Assuming Kallia is a Dwarf,” Eykit mentioned. “We are pretty sure she is, but have we come across any actual proof of it?”

  Everyone looked at each other, with surprised looks on their faces. They’d all assumed that because the trail pointed to Dwarfchat, that the necromancer they were hunting was a Dwarf. But as they’d seen, there were other races living in Dwarfchat.

  “Eykit, don’t make it harder than it has to be,” Taid admonished. “It’s hard enough tracking her down as it is. Don’t make it harder.”

  Eykit shrugged. “Just sayin’,” he said.

  “It being Lennerd makes sense now,” Almë said. “Because he knows us. If he’s also fled to Kallia, he’s in the city and he spotted us, and that’s why we got the trap.”

  “So he’s up there, somewhere,” Taid said. “And Ruby didn’t see him.”

  “I’ve never seen him,” Ruby replied, “and I wouldn’t recognize him if I had.”

  “Yeah, but if you saw some guy levitating, we could assume it was him.”

  Ruby shook her head. “I didn’t see any levitating people. Besides, if it were me, I’d only levitate far enough to throw people off my trail. It’s a spell that needs to be maintained. It’s not cheap and easy to just levitate all day. It’s much cheaper to be a bird.”

  “Okay, you didn’t see him. But it’s been a while, and he could have levitated to the exit, wherever that is, and simply walked out.”

  “So,” Almë said, “in summary, we know that Lennerd is here. He’s super mad at us. He’s done the same shit to us, with his zombies, as last time. He’s here with Kallia because he’s scared shitless of us, and apparently Kallia send him to figure out if we are coming or not. I assume that he talks to Kallia, and hangs around at her place. So she knows we’re coming. Probably. I suppose it’s possible that she told him to fuck right off, but I doubt it. Do we have any clue regarding their hideout?”

  “Well, we know what he looks like,” Taid said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We don’t know anything about Kallia.”

  The others nodded.

  “But now we have something to go on about trying to find him. We know he’s here. And maybe track him to Kallia.”

  “But the only thing we know about him is that he loves graveyards and zombies,” Almë said.

  “But we know what he looks like, right?”

  “Yeah, but this is a pretty big town. Should we be putting up wanted posters? With ‘Have you seen this guy?’ on them?”

  “Would he show up at a Shardmeet or something? He’s used Shards in the past, and he probably hasn’t stopped.”

  “But we would have seen him at the last Shardmeet. Everyone was there.”

  Eykit added, “I have to admit, I’d bet a lot of the town was there.”

  “And none of us saw him,” Elitheris said. “Although I have to admit, I didn’t get a good look at him before he hit me with whatever that spell was.”

  “And we don’t know when he showed up here,” Taid stated. “He may have just gotten here.”

  Almë shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. He’s had plenty of time to get here. We fucked up his day in Donnington, then we went to Isleton for some fun with Nathan, then we traveled back and had some fun with assassins. More stuff happened, and I spend some time in prison, then we did some Ruby shenanigans. So he’s had quite the head start. The chances of him arriving before us are pretty high.”

  It was a reasonable assumption. But Taid wasn’t done. “Or, Kallia got notice of us being here, wrote him, and said that there is a group that’s kind of like the one you described. Get up here and take care of them.”

  Almë still wasn’t convinced, and his face showed it. He knew he was right; he usually was. “But why? She’s like, way, way more powerful than him, right? So why would she call for him?”

  “Besides,” Elitheris added, “if she called for him after we got here, he’d likely still be on his way. It took us over two eightdays to get here, and we took the short route.”

  “If you can get your lackey to take the risk for you,” Taid said, “you have your lackey do it. Every time.” He glanced at Elitheris, and his look admitted that she was right. If Lennerd had just arrived, it wasn’t because Kallia had summoned him because of them.

  “I don’t think he’s her lackey. I don’t even think they are friends, just co-investigators into the mysteries of the Shards. I think that if he is here, he’s doing it because he needs protection.”

  “They could be romantically involved….” But even Taid didn’t think so. But Almë hadn’t stopped speaking, and likely missed what he said.

  “I think he’s coming here for protection, and then she sent him to set up the trap. He didn’t fight, or even cast a spell at us through those peepholes. He just immediately escaped. He’s a coward, just like the last time. It’s not like he’s her underling, necessarily. He’s inferior to her, and she might have some control over him, but he’s not her guard or employee or whatever.”

  Elitheris remembered the incident in Donnington. It was very unpleasant. She didn’t know exactly what spell he’d cast on her; Almë had called it a ‘death spell’, and she wasn’t going to argue. It’s exactly what that spell had felt like. So, she thought, why didn’t he cast it on some us, protected by being hidden within the walls? It would have been a perfect time, and would likely have killed several of us before we’d have a chance to do anything about it. When it hit me, I couldn’t do a damned thing. I could barely keep to my feet, let alone deal with attacking zombies.

  Taid tried again. “They could be romantically involved.”

  Almë sputtered, “Why? Why would you go there?” His tone of voice indicated that this was hardly credible.

  “Why? Because they are both into the Shards.” Even Taid knew that this was stretching things.

  “No,” Almë said, almost as if he was a teacher with a particularly dim student. “She’s a Dwarf, and she probably has Dwarven husbands. And you Dwarves are polyandrous. The many husbands of the Dwarf girlies.”

  Taid smirked. “Polyandry. Yep.” Interracial marriages did happen in the Empire, although they were primarily political in nature. And he knew that brothels were often the site of multiracial couplings, although without some rare magics, children weren’t possible. He shuddered to think what kind of monstrosity a half Dwarven hybrid would be. Probably wouldn’t even be able to grow a proper beard! he thought.

  “How did the zombies get in here?” Ruby interjected. “When they attacked, they pushed out the previous occupants of the crypts as well. The dead of the catacombs weren’t turned into any of the zombies.”

  “Then that means that there has to be a separate entranceway into the Mushroom Groves,” Almë said. “They couldn’t have just walked down here past all the workers and tour groups. I don’t think they’d sell tickets to them.”

  “They could kill the workers,” Taid said. “Do you see any down here?”

  “No. Ruby, when you were flying around, did you see any signs of any fights?”

  “No, unless you mean the discarded baskets of shrooms,” Ruby replied. “But nothing obvious like damaged mushrooms or blood. Nothing like that. It’s like the workers just up and left.”

  “I was assuming that they got some of the workers from the Mushroom Groves,” Elitheris said.

  “Yeah,” Taid said, “that’s why the whole area is empty.” Looking back on the fight, he could tell that the zombies they had fought had been pretty skilled, and had used maneuvers similar to the ones he’d been taught in the army.

  Ruby didn’t know much about necromancy, but the few references to necromantic thaumatological theories implied that the raw material mattered. Creating an undead farmer was a very different thing from an undead soldier. And these things had fought like soldiers.

  “I suppose a soldier might decide to become a farmer in the Groves,” Taid finally admitted. “So I still think it’s possible that Lennerd killed some farmers, and raised them as zombies. Maybe he had done some research on who was employed here, and found out which ones had been in a local militia.”

  “We know that Kallia tried to get people that were strong, right?” Almë said. “She wanted to get a big Orc and stuff. So she’s tried to recruit fighters. And maybe that’s why the Groves are empty. The workers weren’t afraid of Lennerd; they were afraid of the zombies he had with him. So they dropped their baskets and ran away. It makes more sense. So he brought the zombies in from somewhere else.”

  Almë paused a moment, then continued. “So he gets there, sets up the zombies in their crypts, sets off the trap, and escapes. And that also makes sense with the boot print on the mushroom. If he can levitate, why would he put a footprint on the mushroom? It makes no sense. Maybe he put it there on purpose, so we would follow him. If we survived the trap, he’d have to know we’d find the passageways, and come after him. So he leaves the boot print--“

  “Scuff, really,” Elitheris said. “Not really a boot print, but it was obviously made by a boot.”

  Almë gave her a look. “Yeah. Right. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. He leaves the scuff in order to lure us away from the real entrance somewhere in these caves.”

  “You had me until that last sentence,” Elitheris said.

  “He said that he pushed off the mushroom in a specific direction to mislead us,” Taid said, helpfully.

  “Yeah, I understand that. But what is he misleading us from?”

  “Some other secret entrance into these caves. There must be another entrance somewhere. He didn’t levitate those zombies through the windows in that gallery. Ruby mentioned that even as a falcon, she had to squeeze through the gap.”

  “Ah, I see what you are saying,” Elitheris said. “He brought them with him, but he couldn’t have just walked through town with them.”

  Taid quipped, “He’s not going to go to the guard at the front door and say ‘these aren’t the zombies you’re looking for’.”

  “Exactly,” Almë said.

  Elitheris nodded. “So basically, we are still looking for some other entrance.”

  “Yes.”

  “From the Mushroom Grove to some place else. Right. That makes sense.”

  “So we still need to search these caves,” Almë reminded them. They knew that there was a tunnel that lead to the Market Square, which is where the public and many of the workers likely entered the cavern complex. They thought they had heard that there was at least one other exit somewhere as well, probably near some warehouse they used to store the harvested fungus. [10]

  “Elitheris,” Almë said. “I’m going to cast the Spell of Plant Sense on you. It should make things easier to find.” He cast the spell, the subliminal magenta motes coalescing around Elitheris’s head before apparently sinking into her skull.

  The cavern opened up to Elitheris. She didn’t see any more than she usually did, but she seemed to know more about her surroundings. She got the impression that the new sensations weren’t from the mushrooms; there was just enough light from the phosphorescent fungi to allow for some pale, scrawny weeds that were effectively feeding her the information of an area some ten meters or so in radius. It was like she could feel things, like a small insect walking on your arm, unseen but noticed. She could feel the area around her in a way that transcended touch. And it wasn’t really about touch, either. It was more like simply knowing where your hand was in the dark. It was something the brain simply understood.

  She started moving down the cavern, staying close enough to the wall of the cavern on her right to have her new senses encompass it. As she moved, she could sense the weak light, and the richness of the loam that was piled around the room. She could feel her roots leeching the nutrients from the soil, and the defenses of the weeds when they were broken or damaged. She figured that a secret entrance would stay more secret if hidden by the bulk of a bunch of mushrooms. Somewhere in the town above them was a building with a cellar entrance to these mushroom caverns, that Lennerd used to get his minions down to the ambush location.

  They had gone maybe two hundred meters when Elitheris got a sense that a lot of the scrawny weeds had rallied their defenses. Her alertness sharpened, and she saw a spot that not only had been harvested, but the stubs of the mushrooms had been stomped on. It wasn’t that other places were pristine; the workers had to get to where they needed to be to harvest what they needed to harvest. But this area seemed different, as if several people had milled about at this spot, rather than just moving in to harvest and then leaving again.

  Elitheris glanced upwards, and she saw an area of the upward curving section of wall as it became ceiling that didn’t quite look right. It was hard to tell in the dim, soft light of what fungi remained nearby, but it seemed discolored. It was barely noticeable, and her eye almost went right past it. [11]

    “Something dropped from up there,” Elitheris said. “The question becomes, what’s above us?”

  The discolored section was a rough circle, maybe two meters in diameter. It was about six meters above them.

  Ruby pulled out the glowing coin, and set it on a nearby mushroom. Then she shapeshifted into her falcon form, grabbed the coin in her talons, and flapped up to the discolored spot. With the better lighting provided by the coin, she could see that the discolored section wasn’t stone. It was wood, painted to look like the stone. The paint didn’t reflect the light in the same way that the stone did, and the texture was different. Up close, Ruby could tell that it was something of a rush job. She could see paint streaks and some drip marks. But from a distance, in the dim, weird light of the glowing mushrooms, it was fairly well-hidden. [12]

  Without knowing about the trampled section, they would have walked right by it, never noticing it.

  Taid cast Apportation on the “wooden trapdoor”, stretching his halberd, enchanted with the staff spell, up as far as he could reach. The door moved up, and it traveled up a short shaft, bumping along the sides, which then opened up into a larger space. He shoved the door to the side. It had a decent amount of weight to it.

  Ruby flew up into the space, her glowing coin illuminating some kind of cellar, with shelves along the sides of the room, and several crates stacked in the center. The whole room was maybe six meters on a side, with a ceiling height of maybe two meters. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all of mortared, flat stone.

  The hole in the floor was rough-edged, and it looked like whomever had dug the pit down to the caverns below had broken through the stone flooring before excavating through the stone and dirt below. The edges of the two meter deep shaft were rough hewn, with chisel marks. Whoever did this dug down the hard way, unlike the magical excavation of the passages behind the burial niches.

  At one end of the room was a set of stairs leading to a door. Ruby looked around for a rope. She shifted back to her Hobbit form. “Throw my rope up here!” she called down through the hole. “I’ll tie it off up here and you can climb up.”

  Almë tossed up a coil of rope, which Ruby caught. She then checked the shelving to see if it would hold weight. The support posts were connected at both the floor and the ceiling, which implied that they were designed to support something heavy. Those shelves weren’t going anywhere. She tied one end around a support post, then tossed the coil back down through the hole.

  Eykit climbed up the rope, emerging up through the hole and into the cellar. As he climbed up out of the hole, he looked around, seeing that most of the stuff on the shelves seemed to be merchandise, rather than root vegetables. It was mostly ceramic housewares: bowls, cups, mugs, plates, oil lamps. There were several different designs, and multiple sets of each.

  From what he could tell, it was pretty decent stuff. Heavy, and probably not worth the weight, so he didn’t take any of it. High quality, but to get much of a profit off of it he’d have to lug quite a bit of it around. Plus, he didn’t know anyone in town he could fence any of it to.

  He checked the boxes, opening the lids of a few of them. More sets of crockery. It was likely that the building above was a ceramic housewares shop.

  “Should we still try to look behind the door?” Ruby asked Eykit.

  “Yeah,” Eykit replied. “I’ll go take a look.” With that, he put the lid back on the box he’d been looking in, and crept up the stairs. He tested the door handle; it was unlocked. He listened, his ear up against the door, but didn’t hear anything. He cracked the door open with a soft squeaking of hinges.

  He saw a dim room with shelves, many of which had objects displayed on them. Eykit knew that there was daylight outside, so it was surprising that it was so dim in the shop. Not hearing anything besides his own breathing and muted conversations from the caverns below the pit, he popped his head out.

  The room was indeed some kind of housewares shop. The windows were boarded up, which explained the lack of light. He didn’t recognize the shop, but it didn’t look like the shop was open for business. Once Ruby followed with the glowing coin, they both could see that the floor and shelves were covered with dust. This place had been closed for a while. Footprints in the dust, made by several people, could be seen leading from the front door to the cellar door.

  Eykit listened; from what he remembered, shops in Dwarfchat had flats above them, but whomever was in the flat above the shop was being very quiet. “I don’t hear anyone above us,” he whispered to Ruby, “but we should keep our voices down just in case there is someone up there.”

  Ruby nodded. Eykit went over to the front door. He noticed that the glass in the windows wasn’t broken, just boarded up. Likely to prevent breakage, he thought. Glass is expensive. The door was locked with a deadbolt, but there was no door bar. The rest of the shop’s floor seemed undisturbed.

  Eykit cracked the door open to get a look at the outside. He saw a sign, but it was hanging directly above the door. The scurrying around that Ruby had reported seemed to have calmed down; the street looked normal, with standard traffic. Mostly people walking, although there were a couple of people on horseback, and a man pushing a cart full of textiles. Across the street were more shops, with residences above them. In most cases, the upper stories overhung the first floor. He recognized the street though; it looked familiar, and he was sure he’d walked down it during one of his perambulations.

  He shut the door. No need to draw any attention; the last thing they wanted was to be found inside the shop. Somewhere, he thought, there should be something that can tell me the name of this shop. He saw a counter or desk off to one side, near a wall. It had a few drawers, and he opened one. Inside was a ledger; opening that, he could see columns of numbers, along with prices. It looked like some kind of merchandise tabulation. He wasn’t versed in accounting, so he couldn’t fathom the details. The desk was covered in dust, just like the floors, the shelves, and any merchandise on them.

  He checked the last page. It seemed like the last transaction was about six months ago. It had been closed for quite some time. The cover was blank, with no title, but written on the inside, on the first page, was “Onyxgleam Ceramics”.

  Ruby had gone towards the back of the shop, looking for access to the upper floors, and leaving a trail of footprints in the dust. There didn’t seem to be any. This wasn’t surprising, the flats usually had a stairway that was adjacent to the shop, but not directly connected. What she did find at the rear of the shop was a privy, and a closet with mops, brooms, and obviously unused dust rags.

  She came back to find Eykit still puzzling over the ledger. He looked up when she walked up to him. “I don’t suppose your wizard master taught you any accounting?” His uncertain smile indicated that he wasn’t expecting a positive answer.

  “No, but I do know a bit about administration. I was a member of the diplomatic corps for a while.”

  Eykit handed the ledger over to her. “Take a look. Tell me what you think.”

  She looked over the ledger, turning the pages slowly as she scanned the columns. All of the numbers looked right, as far as she could tell. There didn’t seem to be any funny business going on in them. No secret, mysterious shipments. No numbers that seemed out of the norm. It all seemed legit. She also noticed that the shop had been idle for over half a year. That seemed like a long time to have a closed business.

  Elitheris stood under the hole in the mushroom cavern, looking up at it. “So the question is, how long ago did they do this? And why?”

  Taid nodded. “And was it just for us? They went to a lot of work, considering how quickly we killed off their zombies.” Taid climbed up the rope, looking at the walls of the shaft. “This is recent,” he called down to his companions. “I’d say less than a week.”

  Almë nodded. His Elven vision allowed him to zoom in a bit, and his opinion matched Taid’s.

  “I think we’ve got them nervous,” Taid said, sliding back down the rope.

  “And is Lennerd a recent arrival,” Elitheris asked, “or has he been here a while? And, has he noticed us nosing around?”

  Almë frowned, thinking. “He’s probably been here a while, but he only noticed us a week or something ago. And then they started to plan.”

  “Right,” Elitheris and Taid said, simultaneously.

  “Maybe he saw us in the city, or at the Shardmeet or something,” Almë went on. “Question is, what can we deduce from this? Either someone they know owns the shop above, or they just picked an abandoned shop to use.”

  “Exactly,” Taid said, agreeing with the logic.

  “Maybe they are somehow associated with the owner. Maybe it was one of the people they snagged and abducted or something. That’s why they know that this shop was vacant. And if you close down a shop, usually you close it down because business is bad and then you need money. And then you sell it, right? You don’t just let it sit there. But nobody else moved in, which doesn’t make sense. Surely there is rent to pay on this space? Maybe the shop owner got killed by the manticore. But, then again, someone would take over, like a spouse or sibling, or their offspring. So there is no reason for the shop being empty unless they either abducted the person, or it belongs to Kallia.”

  Taid got a look of concentration. “I think Lennerd found out about us when I turned in the manticore’s head and made a big to-do about it in the Town Square.”

  Almë nodded, “Probably. So maybe he only knows that you are here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t even know the rest of us are here. I assume that the only clue we have is a potential connection with whomever owns that shop up there.” Almë paced back and forth, thinking. “We can also just camp here and wait, but I don’t think he’ll come back. He likely knows we survived, so why would he come back?”

  “Well, we were chasing him.”

  “The zombies are dead, and he likely knows that as well. Or assumes it. But if he wants to check, all he needs to do is pay attention to any rumors about the House of Repose. The staff will either find dead zombies, or live ones. Either way, it’ll give him an idea of what happened. I think we should all go up there and hide or something and as soon as he comes in we jump him. He’d want to check soon, right? Why would he wait?”

  Taid eyed the rope. “Right now, it’s only Eykit and Ruby up there. The rest of us have to go the long way, or up this rope.”

  “Yeah, let’s all go up. And hide for a few hours just to make sure that if he’s coming back we trap him.”

  “How are we going to get the dogs up there? Apportate them?”

  “We carry them.”

  Taid looked at Norolind and shook his head. “I’m not sure I can get through that hole with a mastiff on my back.”

  “Then we’ll rig up a harness and rope them up, like when we went after the manticore.”

  “Nope. I’ll cast the spell of Apportation. It’s easier.” And Taid cast the spell. Norolind got a startled look when he started floating upward, his legs windmilling in the air, his eyes wide. He whimpered. He didn’t like what was happening. But it only took a few seconds to move him up to the hole, through it, and over onto the floor.

  Taid, Elitheris, and Almë could hear his feet hit the flagstones, skitter a bit, then run up the stairs to go to Ruby. Taid did the same to Mister Wiggles, who didn’t seem to like it any more than Norolind did, but at least he’d seen Norolind float up through the hole, so he was slightly calmer.

  The three of them then went up the rope, climbing up out of the hole and into the cellar.

  Taid and Elitheris moved the plug back into the hole. There was a rope attached to the back of the plug, to help with putting it back in place. There was no reason to make it obvious they had been there. They went up the stairs to the store.

  Taid took one look at the dusty floor of the shop and wondered how he was going to get to a hiding spot without making it obvious that he was there. He could see Eykit’s and Ruby’s footprints all over the floor, from the cellar door to the front door, across the room to the counter on the far side, and there was a set of footprints that led from the front of the shop to the rear, likely Ruby’s. He sighed, and cast the spell of Apportation on himself in order to float over the dusty floors to the spot behind the counter. He could crouch there, and not be seen from the front door. He’d have to hope that in the dimness, they didn’t see his halberd lying alongside the shelf unit nearby.

  Alme and Elitheris simply walked to spots where they could find a comfortable hiding spot. There was nothing that they could do about their own footprints. The plan, such as it was, was to hide until Lennerd came back, then ambush him. Ruby was planning on casting the spell of Glue, to lock them down and give them all a chance to get close enough to nab the bastard. Levitation wouldn’t get him out of that.

  The dogs wanted to go and sniff some things, but Ruby and Elitheris grabbed their collars to keep them from roaming. They were told to “stay”, and for the most part, they did. For about the first hour. After that, they started getting antsy, and Ruby and Elitheris had to pay a bit more attention to them to keep them quiet.

  Elitheris was getting a bit antsy as well, and would have preferred watching the building from the rooftop across the street. There wasn’t much talking; they didn’t want to risk being heard by someone at the door.

  Night fell. It got very dark in the shop. They kept their light sources covered, unless it was necessary to move around. It was dark enough in there that even those with good night vision were blind without some light. Even Taid was blind in the pitch blackness of the shop, and he had the best night vision of them all. They waited for some more time. No one showed up, Lennerd or otherwise.

  “We can take turns keeping an eye on the place,” Elitheris said.

  “We can watch the place from outside the shop,” Ruby added. “We can just leave, go out the front door, and just go back to our inn. They have nice beds there, and breakfast!”

  “I can watch the place from over there,” Elitheris said, pointing in the direction of the opposite side of the street.

  “I can take turns as a falcon.”

  “The other thing we could do,” Taid said, “is that if we assume that Lennerd doesn’t know what happened, then maybe we stash some of you guys in this shop and bring in some supplies. Then I can go to the tavern or whatever and say, ‘Oh yeah, I was looking at the catacombs the other day, and we ran into some stuff or whatever. And, in fact, I didn’t get anywhere near a chance of figuring out what was really going on. So I’m going back this evening.’ You know, lay a trap for the trapper. I just don’t know how I can get the message to Lennerd that I’m doing that.”

  Almë said, “Yeah. And what I also don’t like is that he apparently knows we’re here. So if we are splitting up, that’s adding more danger. The only person he doesn’t know is Ruby. So she can move completely free through the city without the chance of being noticed. Although I’m not completely sure since I don’t know if he knows what the zombies saw or did. Kallia may not be aware of Ruby. There was a burnt corpse that we left, but that could have been lit oil, or a torch. If we assume that he didn’t watch the fight, because he’s a coward, he probably ditched like the second we started the fight.”

  “It didn’t take us too long to kill those zombies,” Taid pointed out.

  “Yes, and he was far enough ahead of us to get out, plug the hole, and escape.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It takes a bit of time to move all that earth and stone, so I assume that he immediately bolted when we started the whole thing.”

  Taid nodded.

  “That means that while he may have seen Ruby, he probably doesn’t know her capabilities. I mean, we can monitor this place, but if he has no relation to the store owner, then it’s just an empty store. There’s no reason for him to come back.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Taid said. “The only reason he’d come back is if he thought that we were going back. His trap didn’t work the first time.”

  “There’s like five different ways to get into the catacombs. And if he’s not bringing in any zombies, he doesn’t need to take this way, through the store.”

  “Agreed. But at the very least, if we are going to leave this place, we need to figure out who lives above it. All we know is this shop, Onyxgleam Ceramics. So we should find out who actually lives in the rest of the building.”

  “We should see if they know anything,” Elitheris said.

  “Maybe they are linked somehow to Lennerd,” Taid suggested. “Maybe he’s dumb enough to be living right above this place.”

  “Dawn will be soon, and traffic on the street will be increasing with it. This would be a good time to exit without anyone noticing.”

  Taid nodded, as did Almë.

  “We can get a couple hours sleep in a comfy bed and then come back and investigate in the morning,” Elitheris said.

  “I’ve got a spell that will tell us if anyone comes through that door,” Taid said. “Everyone out.” He waited while his four companions and the two dogs exited the building. He then spent the next ten seconds or so making gestures and mumbling arcane syllables, feeding power into the spell as he walked in a tiny circle just inside the door. He was casting the Spell of the Watchdog. It didn’t actually have any dog involved; the spell simply laid down a perimeter that alerted him when it was crossed. The dog was purely metaphorical, and the spell would last for hours. Once he was done, he exited the shop and closed the door.

  He gestured for Eykit to lock it up. It didn’t take Eykit long to mix up the tumblers. [13][14][15][16][17]

  Colding 21, 879 AFE

  They were staying at the Silver Blossom Inn; none of them had felt comfortable staying at the Mountainstream Inn after Malram had resisted the Mind Control attempt by Ruby. He had been, rather justifiably, upset about that. But Ruby had felt it had been necessary, and none of her superiors would have questioned it. For some things, it was better to be certain. Sometimes, people had to suffer some indignities for the protection of the Empire.

  “So,” Taid said, “anyone remember what Lennerd looked like?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at him,” Elitheris said ruefully. “All I know is that he’s human, and bearded.”

  “Older gentleman,” Eykit said, “with brown hair, full beard and mustache. Hat, and a staff, trench coat.”

  “So, regular clothes, then,” Almë said. “I didn’t get a good look at him either due to the spell he trapped us in, but what Eykit said sounds about right.”

  “All right,” Taid said. “We know who we’re looking for. You know, I’m half tempted to go back to the catacombs to see if anything has changed. But no. Not right now. You guys go on ahead to the Silver Blossom caravanserai. I’m going to go the Mountainstream Inn, and see Malram. If he sees me and tells me to get the fuck out, then I’ll leave. But if he’s forgiven us, or forgotten, and is amicable, then I’d like to ask him some questions. He’s been a good source of information.”

  They went to the Mountainstream Inn. They split up, the rest of them heading towards the courtyard to wait for Taid. Eykit saw that old, disheveled Dwarf that he’d seen several times before, the guy with the leaves and twigs in his beard. He was sleeping, stretched out along the side of the courtyard, mostly hidden by bushes. He was snoring, and Eykit could almost smell him from ten meters away. At least, it seemed that way. Eykit had seen him here three times so far, likely because he was adept at getting the patrons here to give him some kind of handout or the occasional drink. He was also the guy Eykit had discovered sleeping on the wharf, hidden beneath the fisherman’s netting, flaunting the curfew.

  Taid opened the heavy wooden door, and walked inside. Being dawn, the place was busy, with people quickly eating their breakfasts before heading out to continue traveling. There were two people waiting tables, as opposed to the usual one. It took a while for the busy Malram to notice Taid standing near the doorway, and he nodded in his direction.

  A barmaid came out to the courtyard. “Good morning!” she said cheerily. “Did you want food or drink?”

  There was a chorus of yeses. They ordered.

  Taid sat at the bar. It didn’t take long to get Malram’s attention. “About the other day,” Taid said, somewhat sheepishly, “it’s probably a rock that shouldn’t have been overturned. I would like to make amends.” [18]

  “Okay,” Malram said, a little uncertainly.

  “I’ll buy you a drink for a time, for yourself.”

  “Any drink?” Malram said, with a sly grin.

  Taid knew what was going to happen. He could see it, looming in his future, and his purse was going to be quite a bit lighter on the other side of it. But he was in it up to his beard. “Sure. Any drink.”

  Malram pulled out a bottle from beneath the counter. It wasn’t one of the many bottles arranged on the back of the bar. No, this one seemed to be for people who knew it existed, not the usual customers. Malram poured himself a glass of amber liquid. Taid could smell it, and it made his mouth water. He could tell it was a very fine whiskey.

  “Twenty five marks,” Malram said.

  Taid wordlessly got out the coinage, and slid it across the bar to Malram. The bartender picked them up, and put them in the till. Then he took a sip of the whiskey, and smiled. “Not often I take a drink this early in the morning.”

  Taid put another twenty five marks on the bar top. “Mind if I drink with you?”

  Malram grinned, and pulled out the bottle again, pouring Taid a tumbler full. He put those coins in the till as well, and replaced the bottle in its place under the bar. Taid took a sip. It was as good as anything he’d ever had before.

  Taid started off with basic, everyday chitchat, trying to smooth over the earlier breach in etiquette. Then he mentioned the manticore, and how the story of that seems to be getting around. “Any word on when the curfew will be lifted?”

  Malram shook his head. “Not yet. But it’s got to break soon. They just don’t have a real reason for a town-wide curfew any more.”

  “Good, good. Judging from what I saw at the Shardmeet, people are practically screaming to have the town get back to whatever normal is around here.”

  Malram laughed. “Normal. Yeah, normal around here is unlikely to feel normal to anyone else, I’m sure!”

  “I’ve seen some new people in town. One I think I know, actually. Mage, wide brimmed hat, staff. Human guy. Met him in Donnington a while back. I was wondering if you’d seen anyone like that. I’ve got no idea where he’s staying, but I figured he might choose this fine establishment.”

  “Got a better description than a mage with a hat and staff? That matches just about every mage I’ve ever seen. Plus, this town thrives on new people coming into it. It’s kind of our thing.”

  Taid laughed. “Good point. Sorry. Let’s see…Human, older but not old, full beard and mustache, brown hair, wide brimmed hat and a duster jacket. Might have seemed sort of shifty. When I knew him, he always seemed sort of anxious. He never told me why, I guess it was just how he was.”

  Malram closed his eyes, trying to remember. Finally, he shook his head. “He doesn’t ring any bells. I don’t think he’s come to this place. But, caravans come in daily, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been hired as a guard or something.”

  “Mm hmm.”

  “Most of the new people are, of course, in Lower Dwarfchat. But some of them filter their way up here.”

  “Right. I was wondering if more people were coming back because of the manticore issue being dealt with.”

  Malram shrugged. “It’s probably too soon for the word to have gotten very far yet. So if caravans were staying away because of it, then I don’t think that they would be showing up anytime soon.”

  “Well, I hope business picks up.”

  Malram smiled. “Oh, it has, in a sense—”

  “Especially the night business.”

  Malram laughed, saying, “Yeah, that would be useful. Hopefully the Civil Patrol gets on the frickin’ ball and pulls the curfew. I get the impression though that they’re probably going to be relaxing that pretty soon. Hopefully sooner, rather than later.”

  Taid nodded.

  “So, how have you been, the last day or two?” Malram asked.

  “Been busy, actually.”

  “Oh? So what have you been up to?”

  “We did a tour of the catacombs a couple of days ago.”

  “Oh yeah. Yeah, You mentioned wanting to get out there.”

  “So we did that. It was cool and all, but we saw this weird arrow, drawn in blood, pointing down one of the hallways. So we went back in there yesterday, and by my beard, there was quite the welcoming party down there.”

  “Welcoming party?” Malram frowned.

  “Yeah, we went down there and we actually ran into, believe it or not, some zombies. It’s the reason I’m looking for mages and stuff.”

  “Wait!” Malram lowered his voice. “Like actual undead zombies? Actual undead?”

  “Yeah. The walking dead. We don’t know where they came from, or why they were there.”

  Malram muttered something in Khuzdûl under his breath. Taid didn’t catch it, but it sounded like some kind of oath.

  “There were a few zombies, and some kind of head zombie. Like a stronger, stranger one. And so we defeated them.”

  “You guys killed all the zombies? How many of you are there?”

  “Oh, it’s just the five of us, and Maggie.”

  “Yeah, she pinned one down, and I had to wrestle it and stuff, you know, just this whole thing. Real pain in the ass.”

  “Now you’ve got my attention. Tell me the story.” Malram took another sip of the very fine whiskey.

  Taid told him about the fight, what he could piece together, anyway. He’d been pretty busy with that first zombie, and so didn’t really see what had happened with the others until the end. “…So I froze one in place, and then that scary one came up behind it, the one with the Shards in its eyes? And Ruby cast a spell that glued them all to the floor, so they couldn’t advance on us. And then I shove the frozen one, toppling it onto the shard zombie, and they both slammed into the ground. And because the floor was all sticky with magical glue, they stuck like bugs on flypaper! They were easy enough to dispatch at that point.”

  Malram looked both impressed and frightened.

  “So, is this the typical necromancy stuff here in Dwarfchat? We’ve been here for a few eightdays, but this is the first necromancy we’ve seen so far. So I have to wonder, are there any new people in town, or is this kind of stuff normal around here?”

  Malram got a weird look on his face. “Wait. This was yesterday?” He took a big drink of his expensive whiskey.

  “Yeah.”

  “When the whole…weirdness happened?”

  “Yeah.” Taid was starting to think that Malram might think that he had something to do with the “weirdness”. He assumed it was the suicides, screaming, and violence that had happened, and he didn’t want his favorite bartender to think ill of him. “Well, we were down in the catacombs fighting these zombies, and yeah, it was weird.”

  “It was weird, because yesterday, around midday, a whole city block or two just went absolutely crazy.”

  “I thought we were in deep doodoo with all these zombies and stuff. But it sounds like we escaped the worst of it! That sounds worse than what we had to deal with.”

  “A lot of people went crazy yesterday.”

  “That’s interesting.” Taid, master of understatement. “I don’t know if they are related, but….”

  “There’s dozens of people that were taken to jail overnight, or at least overnight. I don’t know, they might still be in cells. About a half dozen people died. Actually, I think a lot of the wounded people who fortunately didn’t die were attacked by people who they thought were loved ones. Ones who went crazy.”

  “By Aheru-Mazda!”

  “Some people jumped off of roofs.”

  “So, yeah. That is crazy! From our standpoint, it’s like something is going on. We don’t know what the heck it is, and I’m curious if there is any new people in town. This is some serious magic, and I don’t know how we happened to stumble upon it.”

  “Very serious.”

  “So I’ll ask around some more, but I was just thinking, since you are the eyes and ears of the city, I’d be curious to see if you run across anybody you know. I’d appreciate getting a heads up about them. We really don’t want to run into them again, for obvious reasons. But if we do, we want to know what’s going on.”

  Malram nodded.

  “Okay, cool. Thank you. We’re going to go do some more asking around and stuff. Try to see if we can figure out who is behind this, because it’s just not cool, dude.”

  “No, it certainly is not. I don’t know what kind of alchemy or magic or whatever that caused the insanity, but it was awful. We can’t have that kind of stuff happening!”

  Taid nodded in agreement. “No, I want the curfew to go away, not be extended. So we’ve got to nip this in the bud.”

  “All right. Well, if I see this guy, I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  Taid left, and rejoined the others in the courtyard. They had a softly spoken discussion. Where to take the next steps? Talk the Civil Patrol? Maybe, although they might be under Kallia’s thumb. Could they trust the Civil Patrol? They needed to find a way to let Kallia and her minions know that they were still around, without getting killed doing it.

  They weren’t even sure if Malram was talking about them. Which brought up the question of, did they actually want him talking about them? Taid hadn’t told him to spread the tale, but also hadn’t told him to keep it quiet. Taid actually thought that because Malram wanted the curfew to go away at least as much as he did, he wouldn’t be spreading any rumors of undead roaming around. That would likely just be another excuse to prolong the curfew.

  “Yeah,” Almë said, “it’s likely he’ll not really tell anyone. But you know, Ruby could go to the city watch, and just report suspicious behavior. Something along the lines of there was this levitating guy right before or after the crazy shit happened. Since Kallia and Lennerd don’t know her, if the Civil Patrol are in the pocket of Kallia, they would just say that a citizen reported something. They’d have no reason to arrest Ruby. Unlike if the rest of us tried it. The point being that they likely wouldn’t do anything about it.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Ruby mused, trying to think about the pros and cons, and coming up mostly with pros.

  “But if they aren’t in Kallia’s pocket, then they would likely act on the information, and investigate it. And then they might find something, putting pressure on Kallia.”

  “That is a good idea,” Elitheris said, agreeing with Ruby, “because what we are trying to do is force them into action, right? So we need to kind of push that.”

  “Yes!” Almë said. “Put pressure on them.”

  “I’m on board with that,” Elitheris said.

  “Then I am off,” Ruby said. She gave Nori some attention, scratching his ears and muzzle, then gave him a treat from her bag. “See you, big guy.” And with that, she left the courtyard, heading towards the Walled City and the Civil Patrol headquarters.

  On the way, she found a secluded alleyway, and slipped the ring off her finger. The illusory mask faded, leaving her plainer, actual appearance. She walked back out onto the street, again heading towards the Civil Patrol office.

  The inside of the Civil Patrol head quarters was bustling. There were quite a few civil patrollers in there, many of them seated at desks, filling out reports. Ruby assumed that they were still documenting all of the incidents that had happened the day before, during the “crazy time”. On the left side of the room, on a raised dias, was another desk, with a desk sergeant seated behind it, overlooking the bullpen. Ruby made her way over to the desk on the dias, having to step aside twice as burly Dwarves strode past her fulfilling their duties, whatever they were.

  Ruby had some experience in places like this. Not a lot, but some. And she knew to stay out of the way when necessary. Here, now, in the persona of a hapless traveler, it was in her best interest to fade into the background unless necessary. The busy Dwarves who interrupted her walk to the desk sergeant probably didn’t even notice her. A quick smile crossed her face, before she got back into character.

  Her tiny form stood in front of the desk. She stood on tiptoes so the desk sergeant could see her. He frowned, and raised himself from his chair, peering down over the edge of his desk. He saw a nondescript Hobbit woman, who looked a little overwhelmed by something, and obviously anxious.

  “Oh, hello,” the Dwarf said in his deep, sonorous voice. There was a sign on his desk that said “Sur-Coeus Nybok Ironarm”. “How can I help you?”

  “I, uh, think I saw something suspicious, or weird, and I thought I should tell someone.”

  That got the sergeant’s attention. “Oh? What did you see?” The Civil Patrol had been getting a lot of people like that since the troubles.

  “I saw this guy levitating over the rooftops. At first, I just assumed he was some mage. But a little later, I felt really scared, and all the people went crazy!”

  “Okay, ma’am, what did this guy look like?”

  “He was a Human, wearing a duster jacket and a hat. He had a beard and mustache, and carried a staff. He was floating over the rooftops, so I didn’t get the best look at him. Sorry. It just seemed odd that I saw him not too long before all the hells broke loose.”

  The sergeant scratched his beard. “Huh. That is interesting timing. You said you saw this guy levitating just before, or during the troubles?”

  “Just before. And then he kind of looked around and just, I don’t know, looked all over the chaos. And after that, I think he disappeared. But I also just sort of ran away, because I got scared. I didn’t know what was really happening. There was a lot of people yelling.” Ruby made sure to add a bit of quaver in her voice.

  “Yeah, I get it. A lot of people got scared out there. The most common theme from everyone we’ve talked to is that everyone felt afraid.”

  “Yeah. I just ran away. The last thing I saw was him just looking over the chaos. He didn’t seem scared at all!”

  The Dwarf was writing down some notes. “Okay, where did you see this guy?”

  Ruby described the area where she had first talked to the civil patroller who had been overseeing the extraction of the wounded and dead out of the buildings on stretchers. While she didn’t give a street name, the sergeant seemed to know approximately where it was that she was describing.

  The sergeant finished noting down the information Ruby was giving him. “Okay,” he said, “if we see this guy, we’ll definitely be asking him some questions. We’ll also talk to some of the folks at the mage guilds and see what they know. They might have heard of this guy.”

  “Yeah, that would be great. I just want to make sure you have everything. Do you know anything yet? About what happened out there? I’ve asked some patrollers, but they didn’t seem to know anything at the time. And I haven’t heard anything concrete. Just rumors. So if you could tell me what really happened, it would really settle my nerves.”

  The patroller sat back on his chair with a sigh. “Ma’am, we don’t know what caused it.” His tone of voice indicated that the one thing he’d sell his mother for would be to know what had caused the troubles. “Could be this mage of yours. We don’t know yet. But apparently the entire, multiple block section of town all went crazy at the same time. Not everyone, just most of them. Hundreds of people have reported being affected by something. Some more than others.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. I was there too.”

  The man rubbed his face. “Sorry, it’s been a long day. Okay. There were three suicides we are currently aware of. One was a dagger to the heart, two people jumped off of buildings. A mother strangled her child and is nearly catatonic and keeps saying that it was better that she did it, not the thing that was going to get her. Several children were found hiding in closets, crying, catatonic, or mumbling to themselves. They were saying something along the lines of ‘don’t let it get me’, repeated over and over. There were several instances of domestic violence, although fortunately, none of those actually resulted in any murders with the exception of the mother strangling her child. Most of them are still in custody, and they are all saying they don’t know what came over them. Most of them seem to be utterly distraught at what they did, and we’ve had plenty of character witnesses tell us that it just isn’t like them to do that kind of thing. It all seemed to happen all at once. It was suddenly there, lasted for a while, then simply faded away, leaving all kinds of damage behind. We are still trying to sort it all out.”

  He shook his head. “It’s almost like a fear spell of some kind. Biggest fear spell I’ve ever heard of. From what little I understand of magic, this would have taken a large number of mages doing some kind of ritualistic casting. We are talking an area that was several city blocks!” He seemed almost incredulous, as if he didn’t believe it even now. It was hard for him to believe. “Either a mage circle, or some crazy mage has a powerstone the size of his head.”

  Ruby’s eyes had gotten wide at the patroller’s list of what had happened. And those had been only the most noticeable of effects. She suspected that there were a lot more people mentally damaged by the events of the day. “That’s so horrible. I hope you find the person who did that to all those poor people and I hope they will get better soon!” [19]

  The patroller shrugged. “Most of the victims who survived the initial event are fairly okay now. There are few that are still in a state of catatonia. A bunch of them still jump at loud noises and things of that sort. One has an adverse reaction to kittens, of all things. But for the most part, most people have calmed down and seem relatively normal. But it’s only been a day. I’ve seen soldiers see horrible things on the battlefield, and seem fine, but break down months or years later. Something just catches up with them. So I suspect there will be a lot of people having to deal with whatever happened to them sometime in the future.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Ruby said empathetically. “I mean, about people seeming normal. Not that they will be having problems in the future.” She smiled sheepishly, embarrassed. “So, do you need any more information from me?”

  “Just where you are staying so we can get in contact with you if we have further questions.”

  “Oh, no. No. Sorry, I’ll be leaving the town soon. I will not stay here. That scared me too much. I’m just a visitor and will be leaving on the next ship out of here. I just wanted to report what I had seen before I leave. I don’t know if it’s useful or not, but I really don’t want to stay here.”

  The sur-coeus seemed frustrated, but he said, “I would prefer it if you would stick around for a little while, but if you have to leave, you have to leave.”

  “This is a crazy city. When I came here to Dwarfchat, I just wanted to do some trading and get some good food and stuff like that. But when I got here, the city was shut down at night because people kept disappearing, and I thought, okay, maybe if I stay inside at night it would be fine. And now people have gone crazy! I don’t know, but I’m also hearing something about zombies. So I’m done here. I’m over it. I really just want to go.”

  This also made the patroller sit up and listen. “What’s this about zombies?”

  “It’s probably just a rumor. But I don’t want anything to do with them!”

  “We haven’t heard those rumors yet!” Nybok was scribbling more notes.

  “I overheard some people talking on the street, after the scary stuff happened. Something about zombies in the catacombs. Probably just people trying to rationalize what had happened, maybe? But you should probably ask people about that, if it’s something that also happened, along with all the rest of it.”

  The Dwarf tilted his head, thinking, his eyes narrowed as he looked down at the diminutive Hobbit lady. Ruby got the impression that he knew something he hadn’t told her.

  “All the people are crazy here,” Ruby said, then caught herself, saying, “no, not you, for sure. But I don’t know what’s going on here, so I am leaving. I need to make sure I’m on a boat tonight.”

  “All right,” Sur-Coeus Nybok said, “I, and Dwarfchat, appreciate you coming in here with your report.”

  And with that, she left the patroller station. She walked down the street, and found an alleyway. It was deserted, so she slipped the ring back on her finger. Her face changed back to her prettier “everyday face”.

  From there, she walked back to the Mountainstream inn courtyard. Even before sitting down, she ordered some food. It was past time for second breakfast, and well into the time for elevenses. She sat, and told the rest of the crew what had happened with the sur-coeus.

  “So there is something that the Civil Patrol knows when you mentioned that there were zombies in the catacombs.” Taid said.

  “I figured,” Ruby said, “that since Taid started the rumor, I would spread it a bit further and just see what happened. And yeah, he definitely knew something. I couldn’t ask at the time, but they know something. That was obvious.”

  “Very suspicious,” Taid mused. “I don’t trust those civil patrollers. I don’t trust them one bit.”

  “I wonder if the Civil Patrol already found the zombies?” Almë asked. “I mean, if I was going to bribe somebody in the civil patrol, it would definitely be one of the higher officers, right? Like that desk sergeant. If I were Kallia, I would bribe one of the higher officers to like, stay away from this, route your patrols away from this street so I can smuggle in some zombies through this shop. Something like this, anyway. But I don’t know, because he reacted to the zombies, but not to the stuff about Lennerd.”

  “But at least he’s a person of interest,” Ruby said. “But he did have that reaction to the rumor about zombies in the catacombs. So I don’t think that they think it’s only a rumor.” [20]

    “And if I did bribe him,” Almë continued, “I wouldn’t necessarily tell him what was going on. He wouldn’t need to know.”

  Eykit nodded. That was obvious. The less your patsies know, the less they can get you in trouble. Of course you keep them in the dark.

  “But the first thing I want to do,” Taid said, “is go to the mages.”

  “I’m wondering why are we ignoring the guy reacting to the news of the zombies?” Almë asked.

  Ruby shrugged. “What do you want to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s figure something out. But it’s a good clue.”

  “Absolutely, but I’m not sure what we should do about it.”

  “Follow him home and kidnap him.” Typical Almë. But then, he was absolutely sure it would work. It was a flawless plan!

  “If you want to follow up on that, go ahead,” Taid said. “And while you are doing that, I kind of want to poke around the mage guilds. Maybe I’ll bump into him if he’s palling around with other mages.”

  Almë pooh poohed that. “No, he a secret guy with secret zombie research. Why would he go to a mage college? He’s in a city far from home. And he lived in a very small town with no mage guilds at all, so it’s not like he’s part of a big guild or something.” The others were silent, perhaps thinking. Almë looked from one to the other, and back again. Finally, he said, “I know my answers are always kidnap and torture, but maybe that’s the right answer in this case.” He grinned. “Any better ideas than kidnap and torture? Going once…going twice?”

  Ruby spoke up. “I’m all for following and not torturing him. I have some skills that will likely make him talk.”

  “Eykit has some skills as well,” Almë said.

  Eykit just stared at him, questioningly. “Yeah, I’m sneaky. I’m not an interrogator.”

  Taid wasn’t done with the mage guild idea. There were four of them in town. There was the Delver’s Guild, which was focused mainly on elemental magics, making and breaking magics, and a bit of enchantment. They also handled quite a few city contracts for masonry and carpentry works, and could be considered a guild of engineers. There was Artem, Tennant, and Tricola, which, as they knew, specialized in knowledge and communication magics. They were currently suffering from a scandal involving their guildmaster and state secrets that they were trying to recover from. There was Blue Sapphire, and Iron Mountain, which both dabbled in all kinds of magics. Iron Mountain also did a bit of enchantment.

  “Well, we can go follow the patroller tonight,” Almë said. “But it’s early afternoon, so you’ve got plenty of time to go visit the mage guilds if you want.”

  “Well, thank you, Almë,” Taid said, “for giving me permission to go wandering around.”

  “You’re welcome.” The tall Elf grinned.

  Taid made his way into the Walled City, where the mage guilds had their offices. He strode into Iron Mountain’s lobby, which was a nice, tall ceilinged area filled with potted plants and comfortable looking couches. There was a finely made curved desk, up against one wall, with a Dwarf sitting behind it. He wore glasses, and his hair was a golden blonde. He’d dyed his beard with spirals of yellow on a maroon background.

  Taid could tell he had several enchanted items on his person. And he was sure that the clerk at the desk could see he had several enchanted items of his own as well. He could see the Dwarf’s eyes looking at Maggie. He set her in the corner, leaning up against the wall. Then he went towards the desk.

  “Good day, ser,” Taid said, standing in front of the desk.

  “Hello to you, too,” the clerk replied. “What kind of services do you need from us?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Got a menu?”

  The clerk gave him a look that said, “why are you wasting my time?”, but he just said, “Ser, we aren’t a restaurant.”

  Taid got more serious. “Actually, I’m looking for several things. Do you have any skills related to enchanting, jewel crafting, things like that. I’m working on my jewel crafting and my skills in adornments. And I’m looking to see how I can become better in those things, hopefully utilizing some skills that others don’t easily have, or can get.”

  “Ah, we do have a mage in the guild that makes jewelry. We keep him pretty busy, too. A lot of the cheaper and easier enchantments require jewelry as the base item to work the enchantment on.”

  “Oh, excellent! What is their name?”

  “His name is Armis Silvergrip.”

  “I’ll be in touch with him. Thank you. I’m also looking for someone I ran into, sort of. I saw him from across the street, but I had known him from elsewhere. He’s a mage. His name is Lennerd.” Taid gave him a description of the necromancer. “When I saw him, I was in the middle of negotiating a price for some beard beads, and when I got a chance to go say hi to him, I couldn’t find him.”

  The clerk frowned; it looked like he didn’t remember seeing anyone of that description.

  Taid continued, “So I was just wondering if he’s been in here, or maybe in the shops in this part of town.”

  “Sorry, I haven’t seen him. He’s not a local, right? He’s a visitor?”

  “Yes, like me, he’s a visitor to the city. I’m trying to reconnect with him.”

  “Okay. Human, though? Not a Dwarf?”

  “Yeah, Human. No one’s perfect.” Taid grinned through his beard.

  The clerk laughed, then asked, “Do you know how long he’s been in town?”

  “No, I do not.”

  The clerk glanced at Taid’s beard, dyed with red and black stripes, leaving a skull in the center in Taid’s natural white color. He seemed a bit impressed. Taid made a bold statement with that beard design. It was very memorable, and its complexity said good things about the stylist.

  “So, this friend of yours? Did he visit the barber that you visited?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe?” Taid hadn’t thought of that. If Lennerd had come to Dwarfchat with his “mundane” brown beard, he might have gotten it dyed to blend in.

  “If he is only here for a short time, he may not bother. But if he was going to be here for a while, he might want to experiment a little, and take advantage of Dwarfchat’s renowned barbers.” The clerk’s own beard was a deep maroon color, with bright yellow spirals that gave the impression of impressive curls.

  Taid shrugged. “Yeah, I really don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to catch up to him to see what his plans are here. So I don’t know, myself.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen him. But then, I may have seen him, but he didn’t stand out at the time.”

  “All right. Well, thanks.”

  “So, I should tell Armis that you’ll be dropping in on him?”

  “Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

  The clerk made a note, listing Taid’s name and wishes. “You are a jewelcrafter yourself? You make jewelry and such?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. I’ll let Armas know.”

  “Thanks.”

  Taid picked up Maggie and left, heading towards the nearest barber shop.

  The nearest shop was actually right around the corner, a fact that Taid discovered by the simple expedient of asking the first Dwarven passerby. “Right over there,” the lady said, pointing just up the street. “It’s actually where I get mine done.” Her beard was relatively short, but silky looking and luxuriant. It was well taken care of, not dyed, but beaded in glass, silver, and gold jewelry. She was sexy, and Taid longed to run his fingers through her beard. He let none of that thought show on his face.

  “Uh, thanks,” Taid said, a little uncomfortably; the lady was cute, but the two male Dwarves with her seemed like her husbands, and Taid wasn’t really looking for a tryst—or a wife. She walked off, but she looked back over her shoulder and winked at him.

  He closed his eyes, letting the fantasy run through his head for a moment, then got back on task. He strode quickly over to the barbershop. It was called “The Corner Chop Shop”, and had three barbers working. He entered, and was greeted by three versions of “Hi, we’ll be right with you.”

  “No problem. Actually, I’m here just asking questions. I don’t need to take up too much of your time.”

  The barber on the right, who seemed to be the shop’s manager or owner, said, “All right, ask.” He kept snipping away at his client’s hair.

  Taid launched into his schpiel about looking for his friend, and described Lennerd’s appearance. Did they recognize him? Had he been a client?

  The answer was no, from all three of the barbers. They hadn’t seen anyone who matched that description.

  Taid thanked them for their time, and left, heading to the next barbershop. There were three in the Walled City district, two in West Upper Dwarfchat, two in South Upper Dwarfchat, and three in Lower Dwarfchat. He hit up all of the ones in Upper Dwarfchat, with no luck. But, in a way, he thought, it made more sense for a Human to visit a barber in Lower Dwarfchat anyway, since that’s where most of the caravans are, and he wouldn’t stand out so much.

  He swung by the Mountainstream Inn, and most of his companions were still there, drowsing mostly, but enjoying the day, waiting for night to fall so they could follow the civil patroller. He picked up Elitheris, wanting her to accompany him down into Lower Dwarfchat. He filled her in on what had happened with the mage guild, and the barbers while they walked down the Switchback Road to Lower Dwarfchat.

  “We should have thought of that earlier,” Elitheris said. “Beards grow quickly, and it’s likely he’s had some work done on it.”

  “Maybe. Maybe he likes it scruffy and tattered. He’s not a Dwarf; Humans don’t have the same sense of beard-honor.”

  “That’s a thing? ‘Beard-honor’?”

  “Imperial doesn’t really have a word for it. In Khuzdûl, it’s ‘Akrâgutarg’. But beards are pretty important for us Dwarves.”

  The first barbershop in Lower Dwarfchat they saw wasn’t too far from the Switchback Road. There were two barbers in there, working on clients. Both barbers were Dwarves, and both clients were Dwarves as well. Even from the doorway, Taid and Elitheris could smell a fishy smell. Obviously, the two clients were dockworkers or fishermen.

  “Be with you in a minute!” one of the barbers called out. “I’m just finishing up here.” He made the last few snips to properly shape the lower edges of the man’s beard, then stepped back to take a look at his work. Satisfied he handed the client a mirror. The client nodded, then gave the barber his payment.

  “Right over here, good ser!” the barber said to Taid. Then he focused his gaze on Elitheris. “Unless it is you that needs a haircut, miss?”

  Elitheris shook her head. “Not today. I’m fine.” Although the interchange did make her examine the tips of her hair. She could see split ends, and her hair was longer than she liked. Normally she’d just cut it off with her knife. But looking around the shop, she felt rather embarrassed about what must have been a rather bad hatchet job on her hair. She hadn’t had her hair styled since the day before the Investiture Ceremony, and even then it had been a quick hairdo that hid the problems of her self-inflicted haircuts, rather than solve them.

  Taid hesitated, but then shrugged and sat down in the chair.

  “What is the plan here?” the barber said, gesturing at Taid’s head.

  “Actually, I have some questions first,” Taid said. He launched into his story about being friends with Lennerd and trying to track him down to reconnect with him.

  This got the barber thinking. “Well,” he said, frowning, “there was this guy that walked in with a staff who did have a brown beard, and he asked me to shave it off and dye his hair blonde.” The Dwarf barber shuddered. Shaving off a beard was something that he had a negative visceral reaction to. It just wasn’t done!

  “Shave off his beard?” Taid asked, appalled. “What kind of Dwarf was he?”

  “He wasn’t a Dwarf. He was a Human.”

  “That’s the joke, my friend.” He winked at the barber.

  “Yeah, no Dwarf would shave off his beard. Bintarg?” Seeing Elitheris’s confused expression made him translate. “Beardless. Naked-faced. That’s not a thing with Dwarves.” He shuddered again. “I don’t know if this is the guy you are talking about, but he kind of fits your description. And this was about four eightdays ago.”

  “Did he mention his name or anything?”

  “No, I don’t remember. He might have given his name, but I don’t recall what it was. And if it was a Human name, it’s not something that would stick in my memory very well.”

  “His staff had a hawk’s head carved into it,” Taid said.

  “Sorry, I didn’t pay much attention to his stick. I was more interested in his beard and hair. For a human, he had a nice full beard. Shame he wanted to get rid of it.”

  “All right, thanks. Okay, I’m ready for you to touch up my beard. It’s been a while, and I’m thinking the skull is getting a little lost in the growth. Can you improve the clarity of the skull at all? And a bit of beard pampering couldn’t hurt, either. It hasn’t been properly conditioned in way too long.”

  The barber smiled, and said, “Let’s see what we have to work with!” And he got to work with a comb and brush, getting a baseline on how much the design had grown out in the last couple of eightdays. Then he got to work cleaning Taid up.

  Taid needed the touch-up, but that wasn’t the only reason he had the guy work on his beard and hair. He wanted to have the barber remember him, in case Lennerd showed up for a shave or something. And if Lennerd learned that Taid was still hunting him, well, so much the better. It would hopefully make him nervous, and prone to making mistakes. Taid wanted to get in his head.

  “Hey,” Taid asked the barber, “could you put an M and a Z right here, under the skull? Black M on the red, and a white Z on the black?”

  The barber looked at him funny, but said, “Uh, sure? It’s your beard.” He turned to get out the dying pots, and started mixing up small batches of dye.

  During Taid’s pampering, the other barber finished with his client. “Um,” Elitheris asked uncertainly, “could I get a bit of a trim? Fix this up?” She held up the ends of her hair, unevenly cut and ragged.

  The barber nodded. “Sure,” he said, “have a seat.” He brushed off the loose hairs with a hand broom, and Elitheris sat.

  “Don’t cut off too much,” the Elf said, just clean it up so it’s not so…amateurish.”

  “If I may ask, how did it come to this?” The barber was behind her, looking at the state of her hair.

  “Many years living on my own in the jungle.”

  The barber whistled, then chuckled. “You know, it’s not too bad, considering.” She knew he was saying it to make her feel better, but she knew her hair was a mess. She soon heard the snipping of shears, and felt the comb slide through her locks. When the barber had finished and had held up a mirror she’d almost teared up. It had been a long time since she’d looked that good. She normally didn’t care about such things, because her appearance really wasn’t that important, but for the first time in a very long time she could actually see her beauty. The barber had styled her hair, trimming bits here and there, allowing it to frame her face and emphasizing her hair’s natural waviness.

  “Thank you,” she told him with a grateful smile.

  With the time taken to redye Taid’s beard, he finished at about the same time that Elitheris did. They paid, and Taid gave a pretty hefty tip. He wanted to be remembered. It cost him twelve marks. Elitheris’s haircut only cost four.

      They left the barbershop, and went to the remaining three barbers in Lower Dwarfchat. They didn’t expect to find out any new information, but they did it to be complete, and not leave anything unturned. As expected, none of the barbers knew anything about any “Lennerd”-like person. But it was reassuring to be sure that they had covered all the flanks.

  They joined back up with their companions, and shared the news. They now knew that Lennerd had been here for the past four eightdays. He had arrived before they had, and had likely changed his appearance soon after he had gotten to Dwarfchat. And using a barber in Lower Dwarfchat should have been more anonymous. Unfortunately for Lennerd, it hadn’t quite worked out that way.

  “My guess,” Almë said, “is that we fucked him up, and he left town. He knew we had killed Herbert. He could have gone to Nathan, but Nathan was right around the corner, right? We just took a boat ride, puked in the river, and then fucked him up. Kallia was farther away. Lennerd was a coward, from my perspective, so he came here and immediately changed his whole style. He was probably feeling like we were close on his tail.”

  “Could be,” Elitheris said.

  “We got really close to getting him.”

  “I don’t think he could have taken us all on,” Taid said, “not in a fair fight.”

  “Yeah, so I assume he arrived here earlier. Now he’s just hanging out in the city because Kallia doesn’t want him to hang around at her place.”

“Probably not,” Elitheris said.

“Yeah, she doesn’t seem that friendly.”

“But now we have a better idea about who we are looking for. Someone who’s not necessarily clean shaven, unless he kept shaving off the stubble. But someone without that full beard he used to have. But he might have up to four weeks of growth. And he’s blonde now. [21]

It was nearing evening, and Taid and Elitheris went off to the caravanserai to get a meal and some sleep. She took Mister Wiggles with her.

The other three and Norolind moved into the Walled City. They wanted to follow the Sur-Coeus Nybok Ironarm home and interrogate him.

“I’ll shadow him,” Eykit was telling the others. “Alme, stay back, with Nori and Ruby. Don’t get anywhere near me. Stay way behind me so he doesn’t notice you.”

“I’ll go as a falcon,” Ruby told him.

“Good. I’ve gotten used to having backup from the rooftops, and this’ll be just like that. Besides, the curfew is still in effect, so I can’t just be ‘one of the crowd’, since there won’t be a crowd. I’m going to have to do it the hard way.” And by hard way, he meant being sneaky, which if he were caught, would be an obvious red flag. He would have much preferred blending into a crowd, and being non-obvious. But one played the hand one was dealt.

“Alme, you can stay at the inn with Nori,” Ruby said. “Eykit and I will find where Nybok lives, and I will fly back and get you.”

  “Sure, I’ll just chill here with Nori,” Almë said. “Besides, that makes sense because then he has time to eat and then go to sleep. So we will arrive when he’s already sleeping. So it makes sense from a timing perspective.”

  Eykit and Ruby found comfortable spots to watch the Civil Patrol Headquarters, waiting for the sur-coeus to leave and go home. It took about another half hour or so, but the sur-coeus finally walked out of the building, talking to a companion. They spoke for a few moments, then split up, each going their own way.

  It was past curfew, so Eykit had to make sure he kept out of everyone’s sight, not just the patrolman’s. Fortunately, there weren’t too many people on the streets; he was able to keep track of most of them fairly easily. The sur-coeus went about a block, then stopped at the door to a closed tavern. He knocked on it, and a moment later was let in.

Ruby landed on the rooftop, above the front door. She waited.

Eykit hid in the shadow of a cart, crouched down by one of the wheels, his small Goblin body fading into the darkness. He also waited.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, the civil patroller walked out of the tavern, a half eaten loaf of bread in one hand, and a chunk of cheese in the other. He walked down the street, alternating bites.

Many people didn’t have much of a kitchen in their homes. Since ovens took several hours to warm up, and near constant supervision to keep them hot, many people simply forewent them and just ate out. As in most cities, there were places to get food all over, from corner eateries to public kitchens to food vendors with carts.

So it was likely that either the civil patroller didn’t have a kitchen, or simply didn’t want to cook this evening. After all, it had likely been a long day, what with the whole neighborhood having a bout with insanity.

After a few more turns down some streets, he left the Walled City district and entered West Upper Dwarfchat. A couple of streets later, he got to a series of row houses. They were four stories tall, with residences top to bottom. There were similar row houses on the other side of the street, but these had various shops along the ground floor, with residences above them.

The patroller walked up the first flight of stairs, then disappeared inside the flat. Eykit stared at the second floor landing from across the street, but couldn’t see anything through the front windows. His angle was bad.

Ruby, circling above, swooped down and flew past the windows on the second floor; she saw a shadow moving in the rooms. Her quick flight didn’t let her get much detail, but she could see that someone was in there. The shutters were open, but the drapes were closed. She’d been able to see the movement through the small gap between the drapes.

She landed on the windowsill, and peered through the gap. It seemed to be a living room, lit by the light of a single oil lamp in the middle of a table. But she could only see a small part of the room. She waited. Ruby was patient; a trait honed over several years working as a courtier in the service of nobility, and thus subject to their whims. A little while later, she saw the sur-coeus pass by the table in one direction, then the other, going back to wherever he had been. She couldn’t hear any talking, and she saw no one else in the residence. He seemed to live alone.

She flew back down, near to where Eykit was hiding, and shifted back into her Hobbit form. She scurried into the shadow provided by the cart Eykit was hiding near, where she told him what she saw.

Ruby scanned the facade of the building. There were two windows per floor, none of which were open. Some had the shutters closed, others had closed drapes. No way in, at least through any of the windows on the front. Not that open windows on other floors would have been useful; judging from the architecture, each floor was its own flat.

She cast the shapeshifting spell again, changed back into a falcon, and flew up and over the rooftop of the row houses. She wanted to see if there was a window open on the back side of the residences. There was an open window on the third floor. She landed on the windowsill, peering in through the open window.

She saw a bedroom, with a double bed, a dresser, and an armoire. A door led to the front part of the flat. Sitting on the edge of the bed was a Dwarf, reading a book. The angle was bad, so she was unable to see what the book was about. But it was a different person than the civil patroller. Her suspicion was confirmed that each floor was its own flat; this was borne out by the fact that the stairway the man had used kept going up, reaching all three of the upper floors.

She went back to Eykit, released the spell, changing back into a Hobbit, and told him what she’d seen. “From what I can tell, he’s alone in his flat. There is some other guy living above him.”

“How do you want to do this?” Eykit whispered.

  “We should wait until it’s really late and he’s gone to bed. And then we can sneak in and I can try a trick or two.”

  “That’s fine, but we’ll need someplace more hidden than this cart.” He looked around, both for a better spot to hide, and to see if any patrols were coming. There weren’t any patrols…at the moment. But it was only a matter of time before a patrol came along. They had to be hidden well before that.

  The row houses didn’t offer many alleys, and there wasn’t a lot of greenery on the street either, so camping out in a bush wasn’t feasible. He was able to find a wagon, open in the back, with a few crates sitting in it. But what was more important was the tarp that was wadded up in the bed of the wagon.

  “We can hide under this,” Eykit said. “We’ll duck under it if anyone comes down the street.” He hopped up onto the wagon bed, the leaf springs creaking. He helped Ruby up into the wagon, and they got under the tarp. It would be a simple matter to flip the edge over their heads when, or if, the time came.

  They waited two hours, as marked by the ringing of the town’s bells. They’d had to hide under the tarp only once, when a pair of Civil Patrollers made their rounds and walked past the wagon.

  “All right, let’s go see what this guy is all about,” Eykit said, sliding out of the wagon. He helped Ruby down, and they scurried across the street to the stairwell that led up to the sergeant’s door. Eykit went up without her; she’d stayed down at street level, just inside the stairwell.

  In the dim light of the stairwell, it was hard even for Eykit to see much. But lock picking was done mostly by feel anyway. His lockpicks appeared in his hands, and he went to work. Ruby had no idea how or when he’d gotten them out. It was just like if he summoned them out of nowhere.

  The lock must have been a good one. It took Eykit a couple of minutes to unlock it. Elend would be ashamed of him, were he to ever find out. The lock wasn’t that complicated; he should have had it open in a few seconds. Eykit finally nodded, and his lock picks disappeared into wherever he kept them.

He waved to Ruby to join him. She crept up the stairs almost as quietly as he had. He’d noticed that in general, Hobbits tended to move very quietly. Eykit put his ear to the door, listening. He couldn’t hear anything, even snoring. He carefully opened the door. No movement, no noises. He snuck into the living room. It took up the majority of the space in the flat. Ruby followed him in, softly closing the door behind her.

  There were two windows that looked out onto the street. On the opposite wall were two closed doors. There was a short couch up against the back wall, an armchair not too far from the front door, facing into the room. In the far corner was a table, along with three chairs. Eykit crept up to the first door, testing the latch to see if it’s locked. Ruby hung back, by the front door, giving Eykit some space to work.

  The door was unlocked. Eykit looked back at Ruby, gesticulating with a flapping arms gesture. It would probably be better if she was in her bird form. If she was seen, it would be less like a break in, and more like a bird somehow got into the building.

  Ruby handed Eykit the glowing coin, which he pocketed. She laid her staff on the floor along the wall by the front door, cast the spell, and transformed into a falcon. She took a couple of hops and took up a position behind the chair. She peeked around it, watching Eykit turn the latch and give the door the slightest of pushes. He quickly but quietly shifted his position to be on the other side of the couch, which was positioned between the two doors on that wall.

  Nothing seemed to happen. Eykit sneaked back to the door, looking into the room. He saw a table with a washbasin on it, along with a pitcher. It wasn’t a large room. He pulled out some oil, and put a small amount on the hinges to quiet them. He pushed on the door again, to open up a bit further. It was the privy. He could smell it as well.

  Eykit moved over to the second door, then listened. He heard rhythmic breathing. Someone was in the room, likely asleep. He turned the handle, then gave the door the slightest of pushes. The hinges had a bit of a creak, but not much. There was no apparent change in the breathing, except that he could hear it better, now that the door was open a bit. Ruby could hear the breathing now too. Not because it was loud, but because everything else was so quiet.

  Eykit pushed the door open a bit further, about halfway. All he had to do was get it open enough for Ruby to slip in, and his job was done for the moment. He didn’t have any special tricks, no magic.

  The Dwarf on the bed rustled a bit, rolling over. His breathing pattern didn’t change much. Eykit waved Ruby over to the door.

  Ruby hopped over there. She didn’t fly; the flapping of her wings would be noisier than just hopping across the throw rug that covered most of the wooden plank floor.

  Eykit whispered, his voice almost inaudible. “Do you want to go in there and do what you want to do, or do you want me to go in there first and clock him?”

  The bird shook its head. Eykit nodded, and sat back on his haunches at the side of the door. He gestured for her to do her thing.

  She went into the room. The room went back farther than the privy did, and there was a window on the rear wall. A Dwarf lay sleeping on the bed. It was definitely the sergeant. Even in the dim light she could see the colorful patterning of his beard.

  She shifted back to Hobbit form with a slight rustling noise, just inside the door. Eykit handed Ruby her staff. She drew power from it, replenishing her power. She made a note to spend some time charging it back up. It was likely very drained, given all of the shapeshifting she’d been doing. That spell used up about half of the mana in her body every time she cast it.

  She cast the spell of Weak Will. The sleeping figure didn’t move. Satisfied, she then cast the spell of Charm.

  The Dwarf in the bed rolled over onto his back, blearily opening up an eye. Ruby wasn’t yet in his angle of vision. He then appeared to try to go back to sleep.

  “Eykit,” she said aloud, “take out the coin and make some light.”

  “Who’s that?” the sur-coeus said, as Eykit pulled out the coin, tossed it into the room, and light flooded the space. “Aghh.” He put his hand in front of his face, trying to block out the bright light.

  “I am your master,” Ruby said, in the voice of one accustomed to keeping slaves. One of her specialties was Mind Magic, and part of the training for that was developing the proper attitude about manipulation and the violation of privacy. She didn’t own any slaves, but she knew how to act like a slave owner.

  “Who are you?” the Civil Patrol officer asked.

  “You are my slave now. Hi, I’m Ruby.” Eykit smothered a snicker, but the implications of what he just witnessed chilled him. He remembered something similar, when they had been after the guildmaster for Artem, Tennant, and Tricola. The Orc doorman had seemed to change his mind and let them in, when before he had been putting up some resistance.

  That answer seemed to calm him. “Hi Ruby,” he replied.

  “So, I have some questions.”

  “What do you want me to do?” He was still blinking in the brightness shed by the glowing coin.

    “Please tell me everything that you know about the crazy things going on in the last few days. What do you know about it?”

  Sur-Coeus Nybok Ironarm gave her a much longer version of the same story he told her in the Civil Patrol Headquarters, with more detail, including some of the names of the victims and perpetrators of the violent acts, and the people that got arrested. He also mentioned several of the addresses of some of the buildings where the problems took place. He didn’t remember all of them, but the ones he remembered he told her. “I’ve got the rest written down in the reports,” he said.

  “What about the catacombs and the zombies? What do you know about that?”

  “At the end of the day after the…event…happened, some of the staff of the House of Repose went down into the catacombs. They found a couple of interesting things. One is that five graves had been defiled. Bones scattered on the floor, damaged sarcophagi, damaged nooks. And there were a few extra dead bodies there, six of them, and signs of a fight. One of the dead bodies had been carved up, apparently after it had died, mostly around the eyes. The eyes were missing, trophies, perhaps. Some killers collect those. And grave goods had been stolen.”

  “What sort of things had been stolen?” She had a feeling she knew who had been responsible for that, and she glanced at Eykit, who returned an innocent look.

  “Some bracelets, jewelry, weapons maybe. They are still cataloguing what’s missing. They haven’t gotten back to us with a full list of missing items yet. Whenever anyone is interred there, they make a list of everything that was buried with them. It’s why the door to the catacombs looks like a bank vault. It actually is a bank vault, in many respects.”

  Eykit had something of an a-ha moment. It explained the really tough locks on even the back door that led out to the Mushroom Groves. He knew at once that he’d not be able to sell any of the stolen items from the catacombs here in Dwarfchat. He’d either have to stash them somewhere, and get them later, or somehow manage to hold onto them until they left the area.

  The Civil Patroller went on. “So, yeah, they found some dead bodies down there, and they are wondering what is going on. Extra dead bodies; they hadn’t been the inhabitants of the catacombs; those were the extra bones that had been carelessly scattered on the floor. Those extra bodies, armored and covered in fresh gore, looked like they’d been in combat, and the splashes and trails of blood and piss indicate some kind of fight. Some of the dead bodies had bite marks on them, from two different animals. And whoever they were fighting, seems to be gone. No one came up out of the catacombs, so they must have used a different egress, likely the passages they found behind the niches. The House of Repose haven’t told us who it may have been yet. We’ll likely know in the morning, after they get a chance to look at the register. They did mention some names of people that are currently missing. If I remember correctly, one was Tait, another was Elithebeth, um, and a Ruby, and a few others I don’t remember right now. But anyway, they are people we want to find and question.”

  “That’s interesting,” Ruby said. She knew their lives were going to get very interesting in the next day or so. “They found passages?”

  “Yes. Tunnels, behind the niches. A little network of them, connecting all of the damaged niches. The staff at the House of Repose are filling them in.” Despite his emotions being damped down by the charm spell, the civil patroller seemed disturbed about what the people at the catacombs found in them. Even more so than the outbreak of insanity.

  “What can you tell me about someone named Lennerd Fountainsmith?”

  The Dwarf got a confused look on his face. “Who? I don’t know anything about him.”

  “He’s Human, a mage, clean shaven, probably, with blonde hair. Middle aged. Carries a staff with a hawk head on it.”

  “I’ve seen lots of blonde, naked-faced Humans. They are everywhere.”

  “What about the name Kallia? Does that ring any bells?”

  “Nope.”

  “Now I want to ask you about corruption in the Civil Patrol. Are you corrupt? Who of your colleagues are corrupt? Are you doing stuff for money?”

  He looked confused. “I work for money.”

  “Shady things for money. Do you break laws if you are paid to do it? Do you do people favors in exchange for money?”

  “I do people favors all the time.”

  “What kind of favors?”

  “When people do stuff, when people need paperwork sped up, or, you know, things of that sort. Make the administration go a little bit faster and for the bureaucracy to get out of the way.”

  “Would you do stuff like if someone murdered someone else, could they pay you to keep quiet about it?”

  “I haven’t done that as far as I know, but I have taken money from nobles before. I do not know what they did, nor did I inquire.”

  “What do you know about Onyxgleam Ceramics? Why is the store closed?”

  “It’s owned by Hannar Onyxgleam, and for whatever reason, she hasn’t opened it up again.”

  “Is this Hannar Onyxgleam a missing person?”

  “Not as far as I know. As far as I know, she’s still doing whatever her business is.”

  “Where can we find her?”

  He shrugged. “She comes into town every now and again, usually for business, or to donate to local charities. She does a lot with the food bank and the orphanage. But I don’t know why she hasn’t reopened the ceramic shop. She’s an investor in it, but she doesn’t actually work there.”

  “Who is working there?”

  “Nobody is working there, at the moment. It’s closed.”

  “Who was working there, before it closed?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a member of her company, and none of the employees have broken any laws I’m aware of.”

  “Who is the most corruptible officer in the Civil Patrol? The one most likely to accept a bribe to ‘look the other way’?”

  He gave a total of seven names. The one at the top of the list was Bren Beryleye.

  “Is there an investigation into the necromancy that seems to be happening?”

  “Yes. Necromancy is illegal. And raising the dead is unnatural.” Even through the Charm spell, his tone of voice registered deep disapproval of messing with the dead.

  “And who is running that investigation?”

  “I am.”

  “Go to sleep. Don’t wake up until tomorrow.”

  He laid back down on the bed and closed his eyes.

  Ruby cast the spell of False Memories. She made him think that he hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night, but had a nice dream about him and some friends out on a terrace overlooking the forested valley, having some good ale.

  She picked up the coin, and she and Eykit left. Eykit locked the door after they had exited, hopefully removing any traces of them being there.