Adventure Log, Session 22 Investigating the Letters
General Summary
Taid and Eykit had gone back to the inn, to retrieve Wilbur and all of their stuff. Eykit used the time to report in to the New Square Skulls, and let them know that there was a whole estate that was now vacant.
Elend Rabbitfoot, the Robbery crew master, was impressed. “Did you steal it, or just kill the owners?” It was a rhetorical question, but that was Elend’s weird sense of humor.
Eykit rolled with it. “I would have stolen it, but it wouldn’t fit in my pockets. We had to simply kill the owner, and his freaky-ass minions.” He shuddered. “You could watch their flesh move around. Gross. But yeah, we are thinking we might be able to use the place. The alchemy lab is top notch. Never seen anything like it.”
“How often have you managed to get into the lab portion of any alchemist’s place?”
“Oh, never. But I know quality when I see it. And the laboratory where he made his creatures is also equipped with the best stuff. At first, I wasn’t sure if those tables were for torture or surgery, but I think the guy was a healer of some kind, based on all of his books on medicine. That place could be a gold mine, once it’s fixed up.”
Elend cocked his head, thinking. “I’ll let Iceman know. If it’s worth our time, he’ll know, and kick it up to the Guildmaster.”
Taid had gathered all of their gear from the inn, and loaded it onto Wilbur. He guided Wilbur out of the stables, flipping the young stablehand a few extra coins for his good treatment of his horse. “Here you go, kid,” he told him, “Thanks.”
The boy bobbed his head in deference. “Thank you, sir.” The coins disappeared quickly into a hidden purse.
On the way back to the manor house, they stopped by the shop of a weapon smith. Taid went to his pack, which was on the horse, and retrieved a tarnished silver mace head.
“You picked that up in that old Orc temple, right?” Eykit asked. “You still have that old thing?”
“Not for much longer,’ Taid replied. “I don’t plan on using a mace, and there no reason to keep holding onto it. Money’s lighter anyway. Ready to work your magic?”
Eykit grinned. “Sure.” He took it from Taid’s fingers, examining it. He buffed one of the flanges of the mace head, revealing a shiny silver surface. “Yeah. We can work with this.” They both strode into the shop.
A few minutes later, an only slightly embellished story about where it was found, and Eykit had managed to sell it for quite a bit of coin. Taid took the pouch of money, then gave Eykit one quarter of the proceeds. He pocketed another quarter, leaving the rest in the pouch for Elitheris and Almë. Neither commented about the fact that when they had picked up the old mace they hadn’t even known gardener Elf.
Eykit only sighed, resigned. Taid sometimes got confused about what fairness meant.
They headed back to the manor they planned to squat in for the next few weeks. It would take a few days for the Guildmaster to look into the details of the estate.
Meanwhile, while Almë looked into the gardens (and had an unpleasant encounter with Boots the Cat-thing), Elitheris was looking more closely at the labs and the study. She found several letters from Vesten’s colleagues in his desk drawers.
Reading them, she realized that there were a lot of necromancers—and alchemists—that were doing what Herbert Vesten was doing. And she wasn’t sure if they should be allowed to continue.
One seemed to be worried that the Shards were demonic. He might turn out to be an ally; they’d have to see. The others, however, seemed to be very excited about using living people as test subjects, and that made her uneasy. She didn’t really think the world needed more of those Hoskins-things running around.
She flipped through Vesten’s research notes. It seemed to indicate that implanting the Shards into living subjects also conveyed some magical abilities to the creatures. Hoskins hadn’t really done anything magical that she could tell, although she wasn’t the one who had fought it, so maybe she just missed it. According to the notes, however, it had the spell abilities of Levitation, Hinder, Concussion, and Haste.
There had been nowhere to levitate, given the ceiling height, and Concussion would have destroyed the lab. It also hadn’t had to move much, so she guessed it wasn’t surprising that it’s more esoteric abilities hadn’t really come into play. She felt a great sense of gratefulness that it hadn’t. She and her friends got lucky.
Also in the research notes, found both in the notebook, and in the desk drawers, were enough notes and scribblings to put together some of Vesten’s background.
Herbert Vesten had been a necromancer from way back, although he got obsessed when he noticed the effects the Shards had on things. He spent years experimenting, but didn’t have the breakthroughs he needed until recently, when he made Boots, Lerial, Patricia, and Hoskins. During this time, he didn’t have time to run his lands, so those went by the wayside. In order to pay for things, he sold off the things he felt he no longer needed, practically emptying the house of everything of value.
This was corroborated by a series of tax payments that were late, and in some cases, made in installments. There were some loans taken out, that he wasn’t able to pay back yet (and now that he was dead, the loans would likely get transferred along with the land, to the tune of $72 000). There were no notes about who he owed the money to; she suspected it was banks. But it was also possible, given his background and proclivities, that he might have used criminal sources of funds. He also had several estate sales, and sold furniture and artwork via a series of dealers all over the city. He even resorted to getting a job, at a pub, as a bartender.
Elitheris frowned at this. Vesten seemed like a guy who could have had a higher paying job.
He was born into wealth, and had always dreamt of being a doctor. He trained with some very good teachers. He also trained with mages, one of which was a necromancer in secret. He and Herbert got on well together, and Herbert was always trying to find a way to cheat death. But soon he got more interested in what happened after death instead of keeping people from dying. His medical studies started slipping, as he lost interest in healing people. He was a little too focused on the necromancy instead of economics, and he started having money problems. He then resorted to getting a job in a pub as a bartender, since he wasn’t interested in getting a job as a healer. He would have made a lot more money as a healer, but he just didn’t like doing that; he didn’t like people enough, as it turned out, and had no interest in keeping people healthy, or having that responsibility in the first place. And if he had become a healer, it’s likely his “other activities” would be discovered. He had to remain anonymous. And who looked at a pub employee?
Then he started putting together the info on the Shards, and experimenting with them. The tricky part was figuring out the rituals required to properly insert them into their vessels. It was not technically necromancy, as it required a living vessel, not a dead one. The victims were strapped to the surgery tables, and they were surgically prepared, the properly prepared Shard inserted into the newly formed socket carved into the vessel’s living flesh. Doing it to the dead didn’t work as well; the vessel’s flesh had to be alive. Using corpses worked to a certain extent, but he was never able to confer the special magical abilities to them, unlike living subjects.
Herbert Vesten’s lab research notebook detailed all of this, including how the rituals were to be performed. There were actually several different ones, as it took him some time to get it right. But he explained in detail what he did, and the results, so the last few rituals listed are the ones that worked the best.
The Shards were prepared using a mix of alchemical substances, rituals, and spells (specifically, the Spells of Loyalty, Sense Spirit, and Zombie). The Shards had to soak baths of alchemical fluids (a series of them, in sequence, the first of which was an acid, the second was a mineralized reagent, the third was a biological catalyst, and the last was basically a collagen scaffolding solution and growth medium). This allowed the Shards to grow the nervous system tissues that allowed them to interact and control the Shardzombies.
Elitheris paid close attention to the last few rituals. If they were going after the other necromancers, she wanted to be able to know and recognize the rituals, if she saw them performed. And they were complicated enough that knowing how they worked might give some insights on how to disrupt them, if they got the chance.
For example, it was likely that adding some random alchemical reagents to any of the crystal baths would likely disrupt the Shard in a way that would render it useless, or at least less viable, for implantation. Distracting the mage while doing the ritual used during implantation might also cause some problems. Swapping out the human fat candles with wax ones might also be a useful tactic, as would using goat hair instead of human hair. She wasn’t sure, but her experience with the numerous Elven rituals she’d been a part of indicated that specific things like that were important.
She went upstairs, to talk with Almë about it. She found him holding a wad of cloth to his neck, blood dripping from between his fingers.
“What happened?” Elitheris asked, alarmed.
“You know that cat-like thing that Eykit mentioned?”
Elitheris nodded. “Boots, apparently, if Vesten’s notes are any indication.”
“Well, it’s still out there. It pounced on me, and didn’t want to let go when I pulled it off of my back.” He looked at the blood on his fingers. “Ack. Still bleeding.” He pressed the reddened cloth back up against the cuts on the side of his neck.
Elitheris got her bag of medical supplies out of her pack, and went to work on Almë’s neck and shoulders.
His face brightened. “But hey, the upside is that at least the fields to the north of the manor house are Essential! We’ll be able to get some good harvests, I suspect!”
Neither of them knew it, but the Port Karn Agricultural Council had been sending mages out for centuries, turning as much land around the city Essential as it could. Essential Earth made plants grow three times as big, tripling yields. All the better to prevent famine in the area, and ultimately require less land to be under the plow. As it turned out, the expansion of farmlands went a lot faster than the mages could improve the land. The net result was that Port Karn often exported a lot of food to places less fortunate. And brought in tidy sums.
Taid and Eykit were only gone several hours. They came back to the manor before dark, Taid leading Wilbur.
They were met in the front courtyard by Elitheris and Almë. Almë was sporting a bandage on his neck.
“What happened to you?” Taid asked.
“That damn cat happened to me,” Almë replied. He looked around the yard. “And it’s still out there, somewhere, ready to pounce. Again.”
“I heard his scream from the basement,” Elitheris added, with the hint of a grin.
Taid spoke some syllables and contorted his fingers, forming the glyphs that would access the mana energies in the form of a spell of healing. The energies collected over Almë’s body, then flowed and condensed in the area around his shoulders, back, and neck. The scratches and cuts filled in with new tissue, forming a scab, then a scar, then even the scar disappeared.
Almë said, “Thanks!” as he rubbed his neck and removed the bandage.
They went into the manor.
“While Almë was finding the cat,” Elitheris said, “I found some things in Vesten’s desk.” She held up her hand, filled with a small stack of folded letters. “He kept some of the correspondence with his circle of like-minded chums.” She proceeded to read them, one by one.
Elitheris shot him a glare. “We haven’t decided what we’re going to do with this place, yet.”
“Jakkit said the guild would look into the administrative details of what this estate contains,” Eykit said. “They know some people in the records departments. Before we can do anything, we will need to know how big the manor actually is, what it contains, and whatnot.”
Taid had been looking around the room. “And what repairs might need to be made. What furniture needs to be purchased, who needs to be hired, and who will work the fields? Not me. I’m no farmer.”
Almë said, “Those fields would be too much for us, even if we worked them full time without sleep. Judging from what I’ve been seeing since I got to this area of the Empire, it would take dozens of people to work the fields. And that’s not even including the little fact that the lands out there,” he gestured out towards the front of the house, “are Essential earth.”
Eykit squinted up at the Elf. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“Essential earth is like…how to describe it…concentrated earth. The magical essence of earth. Things grow three times as large, with three times the productivity.”
“I’ll take your word for it. So does that mean that we will need three times as many workers?”
“Likely not. Grain would just grow more densely, with more grains on each stalk. The scythe will still cut all that down just about as fast if it weren’t more productive. But with three times the harvest, there will likely be three times the post harvest preparation, if there is any. And milling three times as much grain will take—“
“Three times as long,” Eykit finished. “I get it.” He addressed the rest of them. “In any case, we should get word shortly about how much trouble it will be to get this manor in fief through the Baroness. I think that means that we will be renting it from her or something. And there was something about an oath of fealty to her. But we can stay here for now.”
“I’m not sleeping in any of the beds until we get new linens,” Elitheris said.
Taid looked around the room. “That spot over by the wall looks fine. I’ll lay my bedroll out there.”
They ate, then spent the evening talking about the letters. There was a circle of mages, animating the dead, and the living. They were able to piece together some information, teasing out clues from the missives.
Herbert was using magic and alchemy together to make these Shard abominations.
Nigel implied that there are levitation shards, and that information is corroborated by Elitheris, when she mentions that Herbert had noted in his lab journal that Hoskins had the ability to levitate.
“Levitate? Really?” Taid said. “Considering the room we killed it in, I guess there was no where for it to float off to.”
Nigel also lived by a lake, and kept his creation, “Jelly” in an underwater cave.
Kallia was working on embedding crystals, and had modified Vesten’s original alchemical formulae to make it work better. There are several elixirs required to prepare the crystals. She has an Orc she called Modok ready for implantation, who she had drugged when he was staying at the Mountainstream Inn. She was apparently in the mountains somewhere.
Someone with the initials “LF” was still only using dead subjects, but was planning on finding a live subject soon. He lived in a small town at a major crossroads, and that seemed to indicate a farming town called Donnington.
Someone with the initials “JC” was looking at the Shards as if they might be demonic. His working theory was that they were. He or she also mentioned that the crystals were only found in “our brane”. He hadn’t found any in any other brane. He lived in a small town, on an island, and had to row to other, more private islands to do his work.
Someone with the initials “MB” seemed to be an alchemist, rather than a mage. He mentioned not being able to replicate the others’ experiments, lacking the magical ability. He or she was going down a different path, using solely alchemy, and had managed to get a dead rat to live again for almost a full minute. Although as he refined his serum, it was turning more and more green. He seemed unsure as to what this meant, but he seemed fascinated by that little detail. He was going to start working on sentient subjects soon, as the animals were not good conversationalists. There were indications that MB might be an Orc.
Elitheris mentioned that the guy on the island seemed worried that the Shards were demonic in origin. “The other guys are doing…things…to people. So far as we know, this guy isn’t.”
Taid said, “True. And getting there would take us through Donnington, so we could find out about this LF character on the way.”
Almë brought up another point. “We’ve got those two unsent letters, and we’ve killed one of their friends. We should probably send off the two letters, if only to make it take longer for them to realize that Herbert is gone.”
“Good point,” Taid said.
“We might want to think about writing more letters, to continue the charade.”
“That would be tricky,” Eykit brought up, being the only person in the room with any experience at all at forgeries, and even then only second hand. “We could, with work, duplicate his handwriting, at least enough to maybe fool them. Maybe. But we don’t know enough about his techniques to make it believable. Even if we went through his journal, and recreated his experiments—“
“We’re not doing any experiments!” Elitheris blurted out.
Eykit eyed her, continuing with hardly a pause, “—we would never have his understanding of the matter. These folk seem to be experts in their field.”
“Experts in necromancy,” Taid added.
“Sending those letters will at least buy us some time,” Almë said.
“Do we even know where to send them?” Elitheris asked.
Eykit thought about it, remembering his experience with couriers. He grimaced. “It’ll be expensive, but we will still be able to get the letters to their recipients—Nigel and Kallia—by letting the couriers find them. We’ll need to give them as much information as we can about them, of course, and there is no guarantee that they will be able to be found, but we can try.”
Taid scratched his beard. “We know this Nigel fellow lives by a lake, near some cliffs. And the town has something he called ‘Bridge Races’ involving the sky folk. That can’t be too hard to find, with a little digging. And Kallia specifically mentioned the Mountainstream Inn, and mountains. So that should be findable as well.”
“If I were them, I would have used a code,” Eykit said, shaking his head in disappointment. “These guys seemed to hope that if their letters had fallen into the wrong hands, that there wouldn’t be enough to track them down.”
“I would assume that when the couriers are told to deliver the letters, they are given a location to deliver them to. So they at least were trusting the couriers not to give them to the wrong people.”
Couriers were usually discreet. Indiscreet couriers weren’t used, and quickly went out of business. Their reputation for discretion was what got them customers. So letters weren’t opened, and packages were black boxes. It also gave the couriers deniability in case they were transporting illegal goods. If they didn’t know that the goods were illegal, they couldn’t be held responsible for committing any crimes. So ignorance of their packages was in their best interest as well as their customers’.
Eykit nodded. “We’ll just tell the couriers what we can, saying that we can’t give them more information for their own safety. Or something like that. We’ll have to think about the wording we’ll use. We should be able to send them when we get to Hearavgizan. It’s not as big as Port Karn, but I think they will have courier services there, unlike the smaller farming towns.”
“Kallia and Nigel seem to be the farthest away,” Taid said. “LF is in Donnington, we think, and JC is in the river delta north of Hearavgizan. And this MB guy can’t be too far away from LF, as LF seems to know him, if Mokrah is MB.”
Eykit shook his head, picked the letter up from the pile of papers between them, and skimmed MB’s letter, then LF’s. “We really don’t have any idea where MB is. The two of them could have just exchanged earlier letters, and not been anywhere near each other.”
Taid made a face as if he had just sucked a lemon. “Crap,” he admitted, “you’re right. Damn.”
“We’ll just have to ask some alchemists if they know anyone named Mokrah,” Almë said.
He got nods of agreement from the others, and Taid said, “There aren’t that many alchemists, and they are likely in contact with each other to a certain extent.”
So it was decided. Come the morning, they would head out towards Hearavgizan, to hire a boat to get them to Isleton, in the river delta. On the way, they would check out the doings in Donnington.
Morning came, the sun rising up into a clear, blue sky. They packed their traveling gear onto Wilbur, and started down the southern road, which soon turned west towards Meke Larnis. It was only a few miles, and they got there by midmorning. They planned to ask the old alchemist they had met there if he knew any alchemists in Donnington.
Arriving at his alchemy shop (he lived above it in the living quarters on the second floor), they saw that it was closed. Then they remembered that he was an Orc, and worked nocturnally; the last time they were there it had been early evening. He wouldn’t be open for business for something like another six hours or so.
“Well, crap,” Eykit said.
“We could relax at a public house,” Taid offered.
That was met with agreement, and they went to one of the two pubs, where they had some drinks and listened to some gossip. As the clientele was minimal at this hour, with most of the population of the town either sleeping or out in the fields, there wasn’t much to listen to that was actually interesting.
There had been a farming accident that resulted in a severe injury due to a mis-timed scythe stroke. A local girl was fending off the advances of two brothers competing for her affection, and she didn’t seem interested in either one. A farmer complained that being so far from the “big city” that they had trouble getting farm mages down to help with growing, and they didn’t have a bat-cave like Rhades that could supply easily accessed fertilizer. Rhades was much farther away from Port Karn than Meke Larnis was, so they got even less attention from the agricultural council than Meke Larnis did, so it was good they had at least something to help with the crops. But the old farmer, while acknowledging that the fertilizer was good for Rhades, still wished that Meke Larnis had something to help it, too.
The only other vaguely interesting gossip was a mention of a pair of hunting griffins supposedly seen to the south. The gossiper’s companion only chuckled and said, “What, you heard that from old man Perkins, didn’t you? He probably just saw some of the sky folk. His eyes aren’t what they used to be, and Aarakocra flying high look very much like griffins.”
At mid afternoon, Taid, Elitheris, Eykit, and Almë, antsy after spending most of the day listening to some very mundane farmer gossip, got up and left the establishment, leaving a few extra coins on the table. It never hurt to build rapport with the locals; it might come in handy later.
The shop simply labeled “Bokrug the Chemist” was open. They went inside.
Bokrug was arranging some items on the counter, preparing for customers. He had only opened the shop for business moments before. The old Orc looked up, saying, “Hello, how may I help you?” He squinted at them. “I know you,” he said after a moment.
“Yup,” Eykit said. “We were here not too long ago, on a quest to find an antidote to hydra poison.”
“I remember you. Looks like the Elf survived,” he said, peering at Almë. “So, what do you need this time?”
“Just information. We haven’t stumbled into any hydra dens or anything!” Eykit grinned. “Actually, we are looking for a good alchemist in Donnington. Know anyone?”
Bokrug rubbed his scalp. “Donnington’s a small town. The only alchemist there is George. Seems like a decent man, good at his job. His shop is just off the market square. All of the shops are, actually.”
“Thanks, Bokrug,” the Goblin said cheerfully. “Oh, one other thing,” he said, as if it were an afterthought. “Do you know an alchemist named Mokrah?”
“Maybe. I’ve met quite a few alchemists in my time. What’s he look like?”
“I don’t know, I never met him. Came across his name in a letter found in a noble’s house. I figure he was important.”
“The name sounds vaguely familiar. I know most of the alchemists in the farming towns, and there aren’t many Orcish alchemists there. So I’d check Hearavgizan, Port Karn, and maybe some of the more Orcish towns on the north bank.”
“Thanks, Bokrug! Have a good day, er, evening!” The four of them left.
There were still a few hours of daylight, and Donnington was only about eight kilometers from Meke Larnis on a hard packed dirt road. Even with the light summer rains, the road was still in good shape. They would get to Donnington before nightfall, with daylight to spare.
Donnington was a small town, only slightly larger than Meke Larnis or Avondale. However, five of the major roads in that made up the network of byways in the Port Karn agricultural area emerged from it. It definitely fit the description of a “crossroads”. On the way there, dozens of laden wagons passed them, headed towards Port Karn. Some would be for the residents, some for trade.
In the center of town was a square, surrounded by the various shops and services that small towns needed. In the square were several merchants, in tents and under awnings to keep the sun off of their goods. Most were farmers, usually groups of them, selling portions of their harvests to the residents of the town. But others were selling threads and yarns, or knitted goods, or pottery.
But it was the alchemist’s shop that got their attention. It was a small shop simply called “George’s”, if the hanging wooden sign was any indication. No other indicator that it was the alchemist, or that it was even a shop.
“Huh,” Taid commented, “I guess everyone just knows that George is the alchemist here.”
“Good thing Bokrug gave us his name,” said Eykit, “otherwise I would have thought it the barbershop or some such.”
They entered. Behind the counter was a dark skinned man with greying hair and a well manicured, short beard. He had bright blue eyes, and he smiled as the two Elves, the Dwarf, and the Goblin entered his shop.
“Hello, my friends!” he said cheerily. “What can I do for you?”
Eykit smiled. “We were told that you might be in the market for some Shards. We know that small towns like this don’t get access to Shards like city-folk do. We wanted to remedy that, at least a bit.”
George looked confused. “I have no real interest in them, not having ever had any. But I’m sure others in town might be interested.”
Eykit had the wherewithal to look abashed. “Oh,” he said, in a disappointed tone. “I guess we were misinformed.” He paused, appearing to think. “Maybe you can help out with something else, then.”
George nodded. “If I can.”
“Are there any other alchemists in town?”
“No, I’m the one and only.”
Eykit nodded. “Okay. We were also told that there was a second potential buyer, but all we have are the initials ‘LF’. He was to be our secondary buyer. Our supplier told us that first dibs went to ‘the Alchemist’. You sure you aren’t the buyer we were told of?”
“Look,” George said, raising his hands as if to ward off something, “I’ve got no interest in those things. I’ve seen what they can do to people. Not everyone, sure, but enough to show a pattern. And I don’t want anything to do with them. Besides, farmers don’t pay much, so I don’t make a large profit on my wares, so I likely wouldn’t be able to afford your Shards in any case.”
“Any idea who this ‘LF’ might be?”
“Not really. There are likely several people with those initials in town. You might want to check with the shrine. They keep all kinds of records there. Sort of acts like a town hall. If this town was bigger, we might actually have a town hall, but the shrine works, for now.”
Taking George’s advice, they went to the shrine, which was on the other side of the market square. In Port Karn, the shrines were small, and for a single deity. But then, the city had room for a hundred or so shrines, which at least would cover most of the gods people might want to give offerings to. Here in Donnington, however, space was limited, as were the number of gods people felt like beseeching.
The shrine was a largish building, and as they entered, they could see alcoves up and down along both sides of the building, each with a statue, symbol, or even just an illustration of various gods. The town didn’t have the space for separate shrines, they all had to share the same structure. From what they had seen, there were also shrines located out in the farmlands, scattered here and there.
Most of those were related to farming or weather, the gods of which were the ones most called upon by the people in town. There were a few more in the shrine; gods of the various elements, life, death, and even war. Taid, having seen plenty of war already, hoped that one didn’t need to be called on very often.
Although from the rumors he’d been hearing over the past year or so, it might get some traffic sooner rather than later. Mostly scuffles between barons, counts, and other lesser nobility, usually over some slight to someone’s pride. But there was also talk about the Emperor hinting at expanding the reach of the Empire. The Empire had plenty of room for more people, there were vast tracts of wilderness and uninhabited lands. There was no good reason to need more space. But who was to say what the Emperor needed besides the Emperor himself?
In the shrine there were four people, one of which had a larger hat than the rest of them. “Must be the head priest,” Eykit said under his breath to no one in particular. The three under priests looked like they were cleaning, or redecorating. Hard to tell in what amounted to a one room building with niches filled with knickknacks. But it wasn’t long before the head priest noticed them, and walked over to them.
“Welcome, citizens,” he said. “Is there a particular deity I can direct you to?”
“No,” Taid said, looking around, seeking Aheru-Mazda’s sunburst symbol. He didn’t find it; instead, he found an alcove with a fired clay bull. Which made sense, he supposed, for a farming community to focus on that aspect of the god. He spent some time praying to his patron deity, keeping half an ear out listening to the conversations around him.
Eykit, always the group’s face man, spoke up. “We were told by our buddy George,” he indicated the general direction of the alchemist’s shop, “that the shrine here also plays the part of hall of records.”
“Well, yes. They aren’t much. Births, deaths, marriages…occasionally birthdays. We are a small town.”
“We are looking for a buyer for some merchandise, but were only given his town, Donnington, here, and their initials, ‘LF’. We were thinking that you might know who and where our contact is.”
“The only ‘LF’ I know of is little Lucia Fountainsmith. But she died four months ago.”
“Lucia? Dead? What did she die of?”
“Childhood illness. Sad, really. She was only six. Poor thing had a bad cough, the coughing up blood kind, and nothing that George could whip up helped. Not that her parents could have afforded a real cure.” He seemed both disappointed and disgusted that the system had let little Lucia down. “There aren’t enough healers, it seems.”
“Where is Lucia now?”
The priest looked confused. “In the cemetery. Her grave, fortunately, is still untouched.”
That got their attention. “What do you mean,” Elitheris asked.
“Grave robbers, looking for easy loot. Two graves were defiled. They took the bodies.”
“And where is the cemetery?”
“South side of town. The mortuary isn’t far from it. In fact, maybe you have the initials backward. The mortician is Fandral Lambert…’FL’.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Eykit replied. “Thanks for your help.”
The priest bowed his head in acknowledgement. “If you need the aid of the gods, come on by.”
It didn’t take long to find the mortuary, beyond which was the cemetery. The ground sloped up to a low hill, beyond which lay most of the graveyard. But skylined across the top of the rise were several headstones, silhouetted against the gloaming.
It was nearing twilight, and the first stars were visible, but there was still enough light to see by, and maybe he would talk with them. When they got to the funeral home, the door was open, so they went inside. There was a bell on the door that jingled when it opened. The front room was largish, tastefully decorated, and filled with coffins of various types on display. Most were wood, and of simple but sturdy construction. There were a few that were upscale, and looked like they cost more than most families in town would make in a year.
“Just a moment,” they heard from the room to the rear of the building. “I’ll be done here in a few minutes.” The door was closed, but not completely, so while they couldn’t see what was going on, they could hear someone in the back room doing something.
A few minutes later, Fandral Lambert came out, dressed in work clothes and an apron. While there was some blood on the apron, most of the smudges of color looked more like makeup and skin powders, in various flesh tone colors ranging from tan to dark brown, with a few shades of green mixed in as well.
“Sorry, I had to finish up my latest patient.” He smiled uncertainly. “Looking for a coffin?” He waved his hand at the various coffins, most of which were leaning up against the walls to save space. “They are easier to purchase before you die, you know.” He grinned at his old joke.
“Nope, don’t need any coffins, yet,” Taid said, with a grin of his own. But we might be putting some other people in them, he thought.
As usual, Eykit became the front man. “We heard about little Lucia, and wanted to know how she died.”
Fandral got a sorrowful expression on his face. “Lucia was a dear. She didn’t deserve her fate. It was some kind of respiratory disease, I reckon. Persistent cough, and eventually she was coughing up blood. Nothing her folks could do helped.” He shook his head. “I hate it, having to build small coffins. Just doesn’t seem right.”
“We’d like to pay our respects to her parents, if we may.”
“Well, that’s kind of you. Daryl and Renora live a couple of blocks down that way. Third house on the left.”
Taid spoke up. “The priest at the shrine mentioned that there was some trouble with some grave robbers.”
Fandral nodded. “Yeah. Jasper Michaels and Bogruk Uglah both had their graves despoiled. Their bodies were taken. No one has seen the bodies since. I suspect the grave robbers dug them up to rob them, but got interrupted and just ran off with them. I don’t know. Once they are in the ground, my job is over. Well, until I see them again, I guess.” He sighed. “Then I’ll have to bury them again.”
“Thank you,” Taid said, “It’s never good to disturb the dead. It’s disrespectful.”
The mortician nodded.
They took their leave, walking down the dark streets in the early evening. Most of the houses and buildings still had some lights on, visible through the oiled paper windows. Some windows, they noticed, were actually glass, although not very many.
“We should check the Rural Watch station here,” Elitheris said. It was in the center of town; they had passed it when they were looking for the alchemist’s shop. It took only a few minutes to walk there.
Like most of the Rural Watch stations they had been in, it was rather small, with a front area for visitors, complete with a bounty board, and a workspace beyond for the Watch officers. A rack of polearms stood against a side wall, ready for the on duty officers to grab if necessary. Two were standard military issue hooked spears, one a halberd, and the last was a pollaxe.
Also along that wall were two buckets, one of which held some eight foot tall bamboo torches, the other held eight foot long poles with red triangular flags on them. They were signaling devices, and each field had at least one of each ready at hand. They were used to call the Aarakocra Rural Watch Officers that flew high above, wary for trouble. The long whippy poles had a distinct movement that was readily visible from a distance, and helped reduce false positives. The brightly colored flags were used during the day, the torches at night.
To the sharp eyes of the Sky Folk, either was visible from quite a ways off. Once alerted, they could either get help or assist themselves, depending upon need and the location of other Rural Watch teams. Their great flying speed, often in excess of 80 kph, allowed them to travel far in a short time.
There was only a single Watch officer on duty in the station. That seemed to be the main problem with the Rural Watch…never enough officers to cover the vast area they had to patrol.
The man looked up from the maintenance he was doing on what must have been his gambeson armor, sewing up a series of parallel rents in the layered fabric. “Yes?” he asked. The “can I help you” was implied by his open expression that showed curiosity more than any annoyance in being interrupted.
Taid asked, “We were wondering if you had any information about the grave robberies. We heard about them from the priest and mortician.”
“We looked into it, but we didn’t really find anything. It seemed to be an isolated case. No one in any of the neighboring areas has had any problem with graves being robbed, and no graves have been robbed since.”
“Any other rumors about strange goings ons?”
“Rumors? Not much. There is some sort of creature in Rhades called the Breathstealer that is sucking the life out of newborns and turning them blue before killing them. Seems to take days for it to do it. The babies just start turning blue, have trouble breathing, and die. So far, no one knows what the creature is. Lots of possibilities, though, it seems, ranging from crazy wizard to mournful ghost to vengeful wraith. Some even think it’s the parrots.” He shrugged, a frustrated expression on his face. “And we haven’t a clue as to what it is.”
The Rural Watch not having much information, the group left the offices, deciding to head towards Lucia’s parents’ house.
The houses near the center of town tended to be wood framed, with wooden siding. The ones out towards the edges of town tended to be wattle and daub, with thatch roofs. Cheaper materials, and with less endurance, but it was likely all that the inhabitants would afford, or what their landlords would pay for.
Daryl and Renora’s home was of the latter variety, single story, and not large. Maybe two to three rooms at the most, like most family farm homes. Taid knocked on the door.
It opened a crack, just enough for a man to peer out at his visitors. “What do you want?” he asked.
Eykit, of course, spoke up, his voice figuratively dripping with sympathy. “We just wanted to say how sorry we are for your loss. We heard from the priest that you lost your daughter, Lucia recently.”
The door opened a bit more, and more of the man, and the room behind him, became visible. Eykit could see a woman standing in the room, looking at the door and the visitors beyond. He thought that she was likely Renora.
Eykit engaged them in some small talk about Lucia, the funeral, and the town in general, gaining enough good will that Renora came forward to engage in conversation. Daryl let the door open a bit farther, to allow her room. She answered questions as readily as her husband, and tears could be seen on her face when the subject turned towards her daughter.
“Herbert told us about you and Lucia,” Eykit said.
“Who?” Daryl asked.
“Herbert. Herbert Vesten.”
A look of confusion suffused the man’s face. “Never heard of him. Who is he?”
“Friend of ours. He mentioned you, so we assumed he was a friend of yours.”
Daryl looked at his wife, her expression of confusion matching his.
Almë didn’t believe them, and had had enough: he wanted answers. The two of them were certainly in on the grave robbing. And even if they weren’t, they likely knew who was, given the small size of the town. He suddenly moved past Taid and Eykit, who had been in front of the taller Elves, and in one quick, elegant motion, had Renora pinned up against the door with his forearm at her throat.
“You know something about those graves! Tell me what you know!” he said gruffly and angrily.
Renora, taken by surprise and under assault, started sobbing in fear; she was also having trouble breathing with the Elf’s arm at her throat, closing off her windpipe. Her arms came up, trying to push Almë’s arm away, but she had no leverage, and fear was sapping her strength. She tried to answer, but little came out besides some stuttering grunts and whimpers.
“Ease up, Almë!” Eykit said, his work to ingratiate himself with these people in jeopardy. He worried that Almë’s actions eliminated any goodwill he might have been able to build. He swore, annoyed at the impulsive Elf. The last thing anyone needed right now was Almë going into a mindless berserk state.
Taid was on the ball, though, and grabbed Almë by the back of his gambeson’s collar, wrenching him away from the terrified woman. “Enough,” he said quietly to the sputtering Elf. “You’ve done enough intimidating.”
Eykit attempted to recover. “I’m so sorry about my companion,” he soothed. “He can get out of hand sometimes, and unfortunately this was one of them. He has a thing about kids dying, like he takes it personally or something, and I’m afraid he just lost it. I apologize for him attacking you, ma’am.”
Almë opened his jar of pickles, offering one to Renora. “I’m sorry. Would you like a pickle?”
The woman looked at the Elf with incredulity, amazed at the non sequitur. She shook her head, coughing.
Eykit’s words seemed to have some effect, although judging from Daryl’s expression, it was Taid forcefully pulling Almë off of his wife that did it more than Eykit’s smooth tongue or the Elf’s pickled offering. Renora coughed again, getting her breath back. It was time to leave; Eykit was sure they had overstayed any welcome they might have had. “Thank you for your time,” he said, motioning the others to leave.
“That,” he said to Almë, “was uncool.” Sometimes Almé is a bigger oaf than Taid, he thought. And a pickle? Really, Almë? That has cemented your oafishness in my mind. Seriously, El has lived out in the wilderness for ages and she’s more civilized.
Almë, at least, had the sense to look abashed.
“We should at least check out the cemetery,” Almë said.
“I agree,” Elitheris said.
In the darkness of the evening they headed out to the cemetery, their night vision allowing them to see fairly well in the moonlight. The town was primarily Human, with the second most populous race being Orcs. As they headed to the cemetery, they could see workers in the fields, gathering the harvest. As it was dark, they were likely Orcs, although there were some torches lit supplying at least a minimal amount of light for any non-Orcs that might be working with them.
The cemetery was rather plain, as befit a farming town. There weren’t any impressive mausoleums, or lavish grave-houses, or even any large statuary perched over the graves of important people. Just modest stone grave markers, and wooden grave signs with the buried person’s name carved into them. Most people were at least partially literate, even out in the farming towns, and they could at least read and understand their names.
Jasper’s and Bogruk’s graves were obvious. They weren’t even filled in completely, and wooden pieces of their coffins lay strewn about, some half buried. The graves themselves were half filled in, and the remains of their coffins were partially visible, the lids broken and the bodies removed. What dirt could be scraped back into the hole had been, the rest lay scattered about the graves in the grass.
Eykit jumped into one of the holes, digging around in the coffins. He didn’t find anything except dirt, and the torn fabric that had lined the coffins in a poor man’s version of luxury. He climbed out. “Nothing there,” he told his companions.
They paid their respects to Lucia’s grave. It was the freshest of the graves, and still looked fairly pristine, the dirt nicely smoothed out in an even mound, a granite headstone sitting at one end. Grass, the bright light green of young grass, sprouted from it in sparse clumps. It read “Lucia Fountainsmith, taken too soon. Age 6. 873-879 AFE”.
Elitheris cocked her head, a frown on her face. “How long ago did Lucia die?”
“I think the priest said four months ago,” Taid replied.
“That’s almost a half year. I would have expected there to be more grass growing on the grave by now.”
Almë nodded. “Right. This area has good soil. Grass should have been growing in an eightday. It should look like a lawn by now.”
“We’ve got a couple of those Darkness Strips, so we should be able to hide our actions from anyone from town,” Taid added. “Should we want to, ah, dig her up.”
“And I can dig up the earth fairly quickly, if necessary,” Almë mentioned. He was referring to his Spell of Earth Shaping. He could dig up a grave in seconds. And put the dirt back just as quickly.
They laid the strips at an angle, maximizing their coverage around the grave. As the cemetery was at the south end of town, they laid them on the northeast and northwest sides, so only from the south were they exposed. And there were no workers to the south at the moment.
The Darkness Strips made anything on the other side of them harder to see. In effect, this made the night even darker to those trying to look through them, almost completely black. It was very unlikely that anyone looking through the fields of extra darkness would be able to make out what they were doing.
And what they were doing was standing there. Except for Almë, who stood and chanted softly, casting the Spell of Earth Shaping. The magic flowed down his arms, to his fingers, and flowed thence to the dirt of the grave. The dirt shook for a moment, then started shifting up and out of the grave into a tall pile on one side that looked as if it would topple back into the hole at any moment.
“I can hold it here for a little while, if someone wants to check that coffin,” he said.
Eykit jumped into the hole, opening the lid.
“Shit,” he said. “She’s not here.” He glanced into the empty coffin, and noted that there was a doll there. He grabbed it, closed the coffin lid, and jumped out of the hole with some help from Taid and Maggie.
At Eykit’s nod, Almë let the dirt fall back into the grave, then magically smoothed the grave back to its former shape as best he could.
“Lookie what I found,” Eykit said, holding up the doll, making it dance in the air, its jointed limbs flopping around as he shook it.
Upon examination, they saw that it was dressed in clothes that had been made specially for it, fitting over the jointed wooden body in a well-tailored fashion. Whoever had made the clothes for it was a skilled tailor, and it must have been a well-loved doll to have clothes that had taken that much effort to make.
“I bet that if we checked out Lucia’s toy box it would have more outfits for this doll,” Eykit said.
“You realize we will have to go back to the Fountainsmiths and tell them about Lucia not being in her grave,” Elitheris said.
Taid sighed. “But not tonight. Almë’s little assault is too fresh, and it’s late.” He rolled up one of the Darkness Strips while Eykit did the other. “See? Half the lights in the windows are out already.”
“We’ll need to stay at the inn,” Eykit said. “It’s better than sleeping out in a field. But on the way back, I want to spy on that mortician. See if he’s acting suspiciously.”
The mortician’s house and funeral home was within sight of the cemetery, and there were several convenient trees for Eykit to climb into in order to see through the upper story’s windows. He climbed up, getting comfortable on a branch, using the bulk of the trunk to hide his small frame.
Fandral and his wife were spending the evening talking as they straightened up the house before going to bed. Even with his acute Goblin hearing, nothing of which they said was anything out of the ordinary. Just the usual banter of a long-married couple. He was somewhat disappointed. It would have been easier had the mortician been the bad guy.
He slid down the tree, hopping down the last six feet or so with an athletic grace. Apparently, he had been watching Elitheris and her acrobatic antics. But it was getting late, and they needed to get to the inn.
Like the alchemist’s shop and the Rural Watch station, the inn was located in the center of town, one of the buildings surrounding the market square. Conveniently, its neighbor was one of the two public houses in town. The other pub was on the far side of the square.
There was a room with two beds available, and they got that for the night. Elitheris had to sleep with the men, but there was nothing she could do about that, despite the odd look from the innkeeper, who grudgingly accepted that mixing the genders in this case was inevitable. Elitheris shared a bed with Eykit, who, being small, kept the bed from overheating in the summer night. Taid and Almë were both larger, and did their best not to let the heat bother them. Mr. Wiggles slept at the foot of the bed.
The next morning, Almë stated that he was going to go help the farmers, and left at dawn. This was both because he wanted to balance his reputation due to his actions the night before, and because it had been a while since he got his hands dirty growing plants. He was a gardener, and when he set off on his journey of revenge, he hadn’t realized how much he would miss tending plants.
The other three went back to the Fountainsmith residence, to give the grieving parents the bad news.
Eykit knocked on their door. Again, it opened a crack, Daryl peering out at the three of them. “Oh,” he said, disappointment thick in his voice. “What do you guys want?” He bit out the words, obviously displeased to see them. “Here to assault my wife again?”
Eykit raised his hands, as if to ward off the verbal attack. “Oh, no, don’t worry about that. Our prickly friend isn’t here this morning. We thought it better that he not be here while we talk with you again.”
That news seemed to make Daryl relax a little, although not too much. “Fine. Speak your piece.”
Eykit mustered all of the sorrow that he could as he said, “We have some bad news for you. It’s about Lucia. She wasn’t in her grave.”
Rage flooded the man’s face. “You dug up my daughter?!”
Eykit waved his hands. “No! Well, yes, but she wasn’t in the coffin! So no, we didn’t dig her up!”
“There were some inconsistencies in the grave site,” Elitheris added, helpfully. “So we investigated.”
Eykit glanced at Elitheris, then back to Daryl. “The point is, sir, is that someone dug her up.”
“You’re lying! She has to be there! We’ve gone to the grave many times! It wasn’t dug up!”
“Someone dug it up, then put the gravesite back the way it was, but with an empty coffin. We’ve got proof.” He pulled out the doll, holding it out to the shocked and grieving man. “This was hers, was it not?”
“Y-yes.” Tears started to run down his cheeks and into his beard. He took the doll from Eykit’s fingers, holding it in front of his face, gazing at it, or at memories of his child with it.
“Mr. Fountainsmith, what can you tell us about your daughter?” Eykit’s voice was soft, soothing, and comforting. It sounded like he actually cared. He was good at acting, and at lying.
“She was a good child, well-behaved and sweet. Always did her chores, which were minimal, given her age. When she started coughing, we thought it was just that, a cough. Everyone gets them, and they aren’t usually a problem. But she just didn’t get better, and nothing that we could do could help her. The medicines we gave her would work for a while, then the cough would return.
Daryl wiped his eyes. “Then she died. We were devastated. My brother was distraught as well. She was his favorite niece.”
“Your brother?” Eykit asked.
“Yeah. Lennerd cried more than my wife, it seemed. It practically killed him.”
Eykit shot a glance at his companions. They had caught it too. Lennerd Fountainsmith. ‘LF’.
“What does your brother do?” he asked.
“He a farming commodities trader. Works in a warehouse.”
“Does Lennerd live nearby?”
“Yeah,” Daryl sniffled, wiped his nose, and continued, “he lives on Hillview Road in the west side of town.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fountainsmith. Sorry, again, to have brought bad news to you. But we are trying to get to the bottom of it, if that helps at all.”
They turned, and walked down the road. They were headed for Lennerd’s house, but had to make a detour to gather up Almë from whatever field he was getting his hands dirty in. They thought about going to the warehouse where he worked, but figured that breaking into his house while he wasn’t there was the better option. Besides, Eykit’s fingers itched, and the only way to scratch that itch was to pick a lock or two.
It wasn’t difficult to find Lennerd’s house. All it took was a simple question to a neighbor that was working in their yard.
The house itself was whitewashed wattle and daub, with a thatched roof and oiled paper windows. From the pattern seen through them, it appeared that the shutters on the insides of the windows were closed. No smoke came out of the chimney. A pair of hedges, one on each side of the house, formed a small, semi-private area in front of the house. From the front door, no one was visible on the street.
They went around the house to the rear, looking to see if there were any storm cellar openings. There were none, and no back door, either. The backyard had a small raised bed, dense with herbs and what looked to be onions.
It was the work of moments for Eykit to pop the lock on the front door open. All four of them hurried inside.
The cottage was comprised of three rooms: the main living area, which included the kitchen, a small bedroom with barely enough room for a bed and chest, and an even smaller room used as the privy.
The floor was dirt, covered in layers of rush mats. A throw rug, spread out over the mats, made the house a bit cheerier, being striped in warm reds, oranges, and yellows. There was a table and four chairs, along with an upholstered chair, a side table, and a stool. An unlit oil lamp sat in the center of the table, and a second one on the side table. It was dim, as the shutters were closed and cut out much of the light that would normally come through the translucent paper windows.
“There has got to be something hidden in here somewhere,” Almë said. He started looking under the rush mats.
At first, they found only hard packed dirt, thick with clay and almost as hard as stone. But under the table they noticed the edges of something wooden. They shifted the table over, and found that the wood was a trap door a bit over a meter on a side.
Eykit put his ear to the door, but heard nothing. Taid grabbed the inset ring and pulled, the door creaking open on hinges that could use a bit of oil.
Looking into the uncovered hole, they saw a dirt floor some three meters down, reachable by a wooden ladder. The room below had a two meter tall ceiling, which meant that there was a shaft that led down to it that was a meter long. They couldn’t see much of the room below due to narrow field of view offered by the access shaft.
Eykit listened again, this time hearing a faint creak of leather on leather. “There’s something down there,” he whispered. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go down there.”
“Ah, it’ll be fine!” Almë stated confidently, as he started down the ladder. He dropped the last meter or so, his staff at the ready.
Which was fortunate, because out of the gloomy shadows a large Dane axe swung at his head. He parried it easily, deflecting the sharp blade off to one side. He grinned, then got slammed from behind by a heavy object.
From up top, the other three looked down, seeing Almë parry the axe, then saw a large form tackle him from behind, propelling him out of sight into the room. They heard his “Oof!” as they felt a faint shudder through the floor as his body was slammed into the wall somewhere below.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” Eykit said, trying to control his fear reaction.
“Fuck!” Taid said, and he started chanting, his hands moving into the glyph forms in order to focus his magical energies. He was casting the Spell of Light Continual, and in a moment a spot on his shoulder glowed brightly.
Almë was face first up against a dirt wall, and it tasted like old clay and old organic material. A part of his brain registered it as onion and rancid liver, but his main focus was trying to turn himself around somehow. His legs pushed against the wall, as whatever had gotten him in this position had lifted him up off the ground in the process. He managed to squirm around within the enclosing arms of an Orc. A dead Orc, given the gauntness of its face.
No, that wasn’t completely right. Gaunt it was, but not just from decay. Some of the flesh had moved away from some of the facial features, but he couldn’t tell where because the Orc wore a chain hauberk over gambeson armor, and an open faced helmet. It was like the Lerial-thing and the Hoskins-thing. It was one of those Shard enhanced dead things.
Above the hole, Eykit drew one of his knives, then resheathed it. He really didn’t want to go down there, into that mysterious hole with monsters in it. Monsters much bigger than he was.
Taid was carrying the staff that they had gotten off of Jakora Tonguebiter, and he tapped into its store of mana to refill his own. If he went down there, he didn’t want to take the staff down there as well. He was going to leave it up here with his halberd. “Damn it, Aheru-Mazda,” he said to his patron deity, “I hate small spaces where I can’t bring Maggie! Why do you keep sending me into them?” He got no answer, which was normal. He learned long ago to not expect answers, at least ones given in a timely, obvious manner.
Elitheris readied several arrows. When she dropped down there, she wanted to be able to loose several arrows very quickly.
Eykit steeled himself, then slid down the ladder, his feet on the outside of the poles. The faster he was down there, the better. Elitheris readied herself to leap down once the Goblin was out of the way.
Bogruk the Orc tried to knee Almë in the groin, but it wasn’t a good angle, and it did no damage.
Almë was in an awkward position. The Orc’s arms pinned his at his sides, and his staff was pressed up against his chest, trapped as well. He tried to pivot it and use it like a lever, but Bogruk was just too strong. His staff unusable, he went for his dagger, fumbling for it at his waist.
Eykit landed, his knives out, and he could see two large figures, one against the far wall some three meters away, a second much closer. Almë was trapped between the wall and the far figure, and Eykit chose the Orc as his target. His knife attacks as he leapt onto the Orc’s back did minimal damage.
Bogruk pulled one arm out from behind Almë, and grabbed onto Almë’s head. Almë could feel the fingers start to squeeze. He had the distinct impression that Bogruk planned to pull his head clean off.
Elitheris eschewed the ladder completely, jumping straight down the hole, her folding legs acting like shock absorbers. Her bow was ready, an arrow nocked, and she saw the Orc grabbing Almë’s face. As she flexed her knees to come back to a standing position, she drew and loosed, the arrow flying into Bogruk’s right bicep, piercing entirely through it and into the forearm near the wrist, temporarily pinning his arm to itself.
The axe-wielding zombie attacked Eykit, but Eykit’s quickness and chainmail forced the axe into a glancing blow. Eykit felt it, but it didn’t penetrate his armor.
Taid took the ladder two rungs at a time, practically falling down the hole, his short sword out and making it difficult to hold onto the ladder with that hand. The light emanating from his shoulder illuminating the room.
He saw Almë, pinned up against the wall by a large Orc wearing chainmail over gambeson. The Orc looked like he was trying to twist off Almë’s head, but his arm was pinned by an arrow. Eykit was stabbing at Bogruk, trying to get his knives through the layered armor.
A second combatant, a Human, was armed with a large, two handed axe, and was using it on Eykit. He was wearing brigandine armor over gambeson.
Bogruk had been forced to let go of Almë’s head, and took a moment and straightened his arm with a sudden jerk, the point pulling out of his wrist and freeing his arm for use. Jasper, the axe wielder, swiped it again at Eykit, hitting him but failing to penetrate. The blow was enough to knock Eykit away from Bogruk, however, and he stumbled back a few steps, reeling from the blow.
Elend Rabbitfoot, the Robbery crew master, was impressed. “Did you steal it, or just kill the owners?” It was a rhetorical question, but that was Elend’s weird sense of humor.
Eykit rolled with it. “I would have stolen it, but it wouldn’t fit in my pockets. We had to simply kill the owner, and his freaky-ass minions.” He shuddered. “You could watch their flesh move around. Gross. But yeah, we are thinking we might be able to use the place. The alchemy lab is top notch. Never seen anything like it.”
“How often have you managed to get into the lab portion of any alchemist’s place?”
“Oh, never. But I know quality when I see it. And the laboratory where he made his creatures is also equipped with the best stuff. At first, I wasn’t sure if those tables were for torture or surgery, but I think the guy was a healer of some kind, based on all of his books on medicine. That place could be a gold mine, once it’s fixed up.”
Elend cocked his head, thinking. “I’ll let Iceman know. If it’s worth our time, he’ll know, and kick it up to the Guildmaster.”
Taid had gathered all of their gear from the inn, and loaded it onto Wilbur. He guided Wilbur out of the stables, flipping the young stablehand a few extra coins for his good treatment of his horse. “Here you go, kid,” he told him, “Thanks.”
The boy bobbed his head in deference. “Thank you, sir.” The coins disappeared quickly into a hidden purse.
On the way back to the manor house, they stopped by the shop of a weapon smith. Taid went to his pack, which was on the horse, and retrieved a tarnished silver mace head.
“You picked that up in that old Orc temple, right?” Eykit asked. “You still have that old thing?”
“Not for much longer,’ Taid replied. “I don’t plan on using a mace, and there no reason to keep holding onto it. Money’s lighter anyway. Ready to work your magic?”
Eykit grinned. “Sure.” He took it from Taid’s fingers, examining it. He buffed one of the flanges of the mace head, revealing a shiny silver surface. “Yeah. We can work with this.” They both strode into the shop.
A few minutes later, an only slightly embellished story about where it was found, and Eykit had managed to sell it for quite a bit of coin. Taid took the pouch of money, then gave Eykit one quarter of the proceeds. He pocketed another quarter, leaving the rest in the pouch for Elitheris and Almë. Neither commented about the fact that when they had picked up the old mace they hadn’t even known gardener Elf.
Eykit only sighed, resigned. Taid sometimes got confused about what fairness meant.
They headed back to the manor they planned to squat in for the next few weeks. It would take a few days for the Guildmaster to look into the details of the estate.
Meanwhile, while Almë looked into the gardens (and had an unpleasant encounter with Boots the Cat-thing), Elitheris was looking more closely at the labs and the study. She found several letters from Vesten’s colleagues in his desk drawers.
One seemed to be worried that the Shards were demonic. He might turn out to be an ally; they’d have to see. The others, however, seemed to be very excited about using living people as test subjects, and that made her uneasy. She didn’t really think the world needed more of those Hoskins-things running around.
She flipped through Vesten’s research notes. It seemed to indicate that implanting the Shards into living subjects also conveyed some magical abilities to the creatures. Hoskins hadn’t really done anything magical that she could tell, although she wasn’t the one who had fought it, so maybe she just missed it. According to the notes, however, it had the spell abilities of Levitation, Hinder, Concussion, and Haste.
There had been nowhere to levitate, given the ceiling height, and Concussion would have destroyed the lab. It also hadn’t had to move much, so she guessed it wasn’t surprising that it’s more esoteric abilities hadn’t really come into play. She felt a great sense of gratefulness that it hadn’t. She and her friends got lucky.
Also in the research notes, found both in the notebook, and in the desk drawers, were enough notes and scribblings to put together some of Vesten’s background.
Herbert Vesten had been a necromancer from way back, although he got obsessed when he noticed the effects the Shards had on things. He spent years experimenting, but didn’t have the breakthroughs he needed until recently, when he made Boots, Lerial, Patricia, and Hoskins. During this time, he didn’t have time to run his lands, so those went by the wayside. In order to pay for things, he sold off the things he felt he no longer needed, practically emptying the house of everything of value.
This was corroborated by a series of tax payments that were late, and in some cases, made in installments. There were some loans taken out, that he wasn’t able to pay back yet (and now that he was dead, the loans would likely get transferred along with the land, to the tune of $72 000). There were no notes about who he owed the money to; she suspected it was banks. But it was also possible, given his background and proclivities, that he might have used criminal sources of funds. He also had several estate sales, and sold furniture and artwork via a series of dealers all over the city. He even resorted to getting a job, at a pub, as a bartender.
Elitheris frowned at this. Vesten seemed like a guy who could have had a higher paying job.
He was born into wealth, and had always dreamt of being a doctor. He trained with some very good teachers. He also trained with mages, one of which was a necromancer in secret. He and Herbert got on well together, and Herbert was always trying to find a way to cheat death. But soon he got more interested in what happened after death instead of keeping people from dying. His medical studies started slipping, as he lost interest in healing people. He was a little too focused on the necromancy instead of economics, and he started having money problems. He then resorted to getting a job in a pub as a bartender, since he wasn’t interested in getting a job as a healer. He would have made a lot more money as a healer, but he just didn’t like doing that; he didn’t like people enough, as it turned out, and had no interest in keeping people healthy, or having that responsibility in the first place. And if he had become a healer, it’s likely his “other activities” would be discovered. He had to remain anonymous. And who looked at a pub employee?
Then he started putting together the info on the Shards, and experimenting with them. The tricky part was figuring out the rituals required to properly insert them into their vessels. It was not technically necromancy, as it required a living vessel, not a dead one. The victims were strapped to the surgery tables, and they were surgically prepared, the properly prepared Shard inserted into the newly formed socket carved into the vessel’s living flesh. Doing it to the dead didn’t work as well; the vessel’s flesh had to be alive. Using corpses worked to a certain extent, but he was never able to confer the special magical abilities to them, unlike living subjects.
Herbert Vesten’s lab research notebook detailed all of this, including how the rituals were to be performed. There were actually several different ones, as it took him some time to get it right. But he explained in detail what he did, and the results, so the last few rituals listed are the ones that worked the best.
The Shards were prepared using a mix of alchemical substances, rituals, and spells (specifically, the Spells of Loyalty, Sense Spirit, and Zombie). The Shards had to soak baths of alchemical fluids (a series of them, in sequence, the first of which was an acid, the second was a mineralized reagent, the third was a biological catalyst, and the last was basically a collagen scaffolding solution and growth medium). This allowed the Shards to grow the nervous system tissues that allowed them to interact and control the Shardzombies.
Elitheris paid close attention to the last few rituals. If they were going after the other necromancers, she wanted to be able to know and recognize the rituals, if she saw them performed. And they were complicated enough that knowing how they worked might give some insights on how to disrupt them, if they got the chance.
For example, it was likely that adding some random alchemical reagents to any of the crystal baths would likely disrupt the Shard in a way that would render it useless, or at least less viable, for implantation. Distracting the mage while doing the ritual used during implantation might also cause some problems. Swapping out the human fat candles with wax ones might also be a useful tactic, as would using goat hair instead of human hair. She wasn’t sure, but her experience with the numerous Elven rituals she’d been a part of indicated that specific things like that were important.
She went upstairs, to talk with Almë about it. She found him holding a wad of cloth to his neck, blood dripping from between his fingers.
“What happened?” Elitheris asked, alarmed.
“You know that cat-like thing that Eykit mentioned?”
Elitheris nodded. “Boots, apparently, if Vesten’s notes are any indication.”
“Well, it’s still out there. It pounced on me, and didn’t want to let go when I pulled it off of my back.” He looked at the blood on his fingers. “Ack. Still bleeding.” He pressed the reddened cloth back up against the cuts on the side of his neck.
Elitheris got her bag of medical supplies out of her pack, and went to work on Almë’s neck and shoulders.
His face brightened. “But hey, the upside is that at least the fields to the north of the manor house are Essential! We’ll be able to get some good harvests, I suspect!”
Neither of them knew it, but the Port Karn Agricultural Council had been sending mages out for centuries, turning as much land around the city Essential as it could. Essential Earth made plants grow three times as big, tripling yields. All the better to prevent famine in the area, and ultimately require less land to be under the plow. As it turned out, the expansion of farmlands went a lot faster than the mages could improve the land. The net result was that Port Karn often exported a lot of food to places less fortunate. And brought in tidy sums.
Taid and Eykit were only gone several hours. They came back to the manor before dark, Taid leading Wilbur.
They were met in the front courtyard by Elitheris and Almë. Almë was sporting a bandage on his neck.
“What happened to you?” Taid asked.
“That damn cat happened to me,” Almë replied. He looked around the yard. “And it’s still out there, somewhere, ready to pounce. Again.”
“I heard his scream from the basement,” Elitheris added, with the hint of a grin.
Taid spoke some syllables and contorted his fingers, forming the glyphs that would access the mana energies in the form of a spell of healing. The energies collected over Almë’s body, then flowed and condensed in the area around his shoulders, back, and neck. The scratches and cuts filled in with new tissue, forming a scab, then a scar, then even the scar disappeared.
Almë said, “Thanks!” as he rubbed his neck and removed the bandage.
They went into the manor.
“While Almë was finding the cat,” Elitheris said, “I found some things in Vesten’s desk.” She held up her hand, filled with a small stack of folded letters. “He kept some of the correspondence with his circle of like-minded chums.” She proceeded to read them, one by one.
Heatdaze 26
Greetings, Herbert!
I want to thank you again for sending me your initial findings. It completely changed my focus. The traditional methodology no longer holds any of my interest. The work with the Shards does, though! Who wants to use the old style, when the new is so much better? I’ve gotten it to work after a series of failed attempts. Fortunately, I have access to an incinerator to get rid of the failures. Having a father who is a potter and glassblower helps tremendously!
Oh, you want to know another convenient little tidbit? Water doesn’t hurt them. At all. I’ve got my success stashed in an underwater cave. It’s not deep, but it could fit a second one, when I make one, and it’s well hidden by lake plants. I am so glad my family owns a house on the shore. It’s kind of ironic, really. When I was growing up, I always complained that we didn’t have access to a beach, only cliffs. I was never much of a diver, so jumping into the lake never really appealed to me. And going up and down the stairs to get to the boat dock was a pain in the ass. But the cliffs have that crevice, so it’s super convenient. And Jelly (that’s what I call him) doesn’t seem to mind the stairs, or the submerged cave. I’ve noticed the way the flesh moves. Fascinating! I can’t wait to see its final form!
I was going to head into town, maybe watch the bridge races that the sky folk seem to enjoy so much. Crazy, but exciting. Ever seen one of the birds fly through a wooden trestle bridge? It’s impressive. Makes me wonder what it would be like getting my hands on one of them for experimentation purposes. I’ll have to think about trying to get one. Perhaps trying to focus the crystal into giving it Levitation, so it can fly me around! I don’t think it could carry me otherwise, but who knows? Maybe after it rearranged a bit, it could fly more effectively. Oh gods, I have to get one now!
But enough about me. How are you doing, way out there on the coast? How’s the weather? It gets really hot out this way, although the lake effect mitigates that pretty well most of the time. How is Lerial doing? I figure by the time you get this letter he’ll have had plenty of time to settle down into whatever form he will end up in.
Sincerely,
Nigel
Heatdaze 17 Hello, my friend, First of all, let me tell you how impressed I am with your research. It’s truly cutting edge stuff. My own researches were more from a geological standpoint, until you enlightened me. Now I have focused more in the same direction as your own experiments. I tried your elixirs. They worked, but I was able to make some improvements. I hope you don’t mind! In the Dissolution elixir, don’t use toad sinews. Use frog. It seems to make the muscle fibers a bit more elastic. And for the Activation elixir, add some Mantrap digestive juices. Oh, and use sulphuric acid instead of hydrochloric. It will prepare the crystal surfaces for implantation better, improving fiber infiltration time by 23%. You know, for when you are in a hurry! Keep up the good work, and good luck on your future experiments. Keep me informed of your progress. I’m about to start on Modok. He’s a big guy, and currently sleeping. Being an alchemist comes in handy when your subject is twice your size and routinely picks up wagons with one hand to repair the wheel with the other! We don’t get many Orcs up here in the mountains. I consider myself lucky that I was able to grab him when he stayed at the Mountainstream Inn. Took two of my servants to carry him out to my wagon. Herbert, he’s the biggest Orc I’ve ever seen! He’ll make a great subject. At the very least, I can see how the Orcish magic resistance modifies the results, or if it affects it at all. Regards, Kallia
Heatdaze 29 Hi Herbert! I just got a letter from Kallia. Apparently, she is going to use an Orc. Good, I’m curious to see what will happen. Foul beasts, they deserve what they get. Don’t tell Mokrah I said that, though! I’m on my second dead subject. I know you told me that living bodies work better, but I’m something of a traditionalist, you know. There is just something pure in death. Blank slates, and all. Who am I kidding? I know I need to get a hold of a living subject, I just haven’t gotten the nerve to grab someone off the street yet. Soon, though. Soon. I have to be careful, though. Living in town makes things a bit more difficult, even if it’s a small town. I still have to work my day job. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve had to do the same to keep a low profile. Especially since the town is at what amounts to THE crossroads. Lots of traffic in and out. I guess I should also admit that my surgical skills are rudimentary at best, so I suppose I am afraid I’ll do that part wrong and kill my subject before the crystals can be implanted. I’ll just have to get over that. Although any tips on controlling blood loss and shock would be appreciated. I’m having some trouble getting my hands on Shards. It’s not like the big city, where you have all sorts of folks out there and Shardmeets every other day. There are just a bunch of farmers here, really. They don’t have a lot of extra cash to buy Shards, so things are moving a bit more slowly for me. But I’ll get there. Let me know how things go out your way. Until later, LF
Heatdaze 10 Hi H, Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the Shards. Your theories are interesting, and I will have do some experimenting myself. But I am not fully convinced that they aren’t demonic in origin. I know my views aren’t shared by, well, anybody, really, but I can’t help but see the similarities between the Shards and demonic energies. Problem is, none of my “contacts” will give me a straight answer. Par for the course, really, which is what makes dealing with denizens from other branes so difficult (and dangerous). Even once you get past the language differences, the context differences, and the sheer amount of maliciousness they all seem to contain. Frustrating. But I am glad you are having success. It bodes well that we may finally figure these things out. Even if I am wrong, it will be a good thing to have the answer. But I don’t think I’m wrong. Call me pigheaded, if you wish. You won’t be the first. But every time I do an analysis on the Shards I keep getting similar (but never the same, damn it) answers and readings. There is something otherworldly to them. Problem is, I can’t tell what. Divination readings are all over the map. So much so that I can’t trust any of those answers. I’ll keep trying, maybe I just need to ask better questions. One thing keeps troubling me, and I hate to bring it up, since it undercuts my case. I haven’t found Shards in any other brane but ours. They seem to be local to the HERE. I can’t explain it, and will be the piece of evidence that finally convinces me that I am wrong. But an absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence! I’ve had to be careful with my own experiments. Small town, on an island, you know. Everyone knows everyone, or at least it feels that way. I’ve had to row to other islands to get enough privacy to do the needful. Oh well, the trials of those who do what others call “questionable things”! Cheers, JC
Heatdaze 20 Hail, HV! I read with interest your last letter. Your findings are spectacular! Good job on getting your second subject functioning. My studies haven’t progressed much since my last letter. Although I’ve started working with the Shards, as you suggested. Thanks for including the formulae for the Shard-subject interactions. I got a note from Kallia with some suggestions for improvement; I assume she must have sent it to you too. I tried them, and they do seem to work a bit better than your original instructions. Sorry! But better is better, my friend. My latest mixtures have gotten more effective. I got a dead rat to reanimate for a full 48 seconds last night! I think my main problem is that they just aren’t fresh enough. I need to inject the serum in a newly dead subject for it to work properly. Heh. Reminds me of my alchemy master: “Make sure they’re properly dead before you start all ripping!” One thing I’ve noticed about my series of serums…they seem to be getting more and more green, in a glow in the dark sort of way. I have no idea why, unless it is some mana interaction with dead light being kept alive or something like that. Sympathetic magic, perhaps. My next few experiments will involve sentient subjects. If I can’t get them to live again for any length of time, I can at least try to ask them questions. Can’t do that with dead animals. They just aren’t good conversationalists. I am hopeful that my reanimation serum and the Shards will interact in similar ways to your rituals and magic do. If not, I’ll just have to muddle along using alchemy alone. Sincerely MBShe also read the letter from the Port Karn Agricultural Council. Apparently, it hadn’t been the only one they had sent to Mr. Herbert Vesten.
From the Desk of Magister Vespen Frankle, Cardinal of Farming Practices, Resource Management, and Field Coordination: Icewind 09, 878 AFE Attn Ser Herbert Vesten, Esq. We have sent several missives, all with no reply. This will be the last one we will bother to send. You have ignored this office for months, and, frankly, we cannot wait any more. You must either tend your orchard (peach, if I remember correctly) or we will let your neighbor, Ser Keigan Arundel, harvest what he can of your peaches for his own profit. Alas, we cannot just let him work your neglected orchard; we would love to be able to do that, but that would require Baroness Walter’s authorization, and she has been too busy to answer our queries. Yes, we have asked her for a special dispensation to acquire your fields, since you are unwilling to work them yourself. So far, we haven’t heard back from her offices. In the meantime, we have given Ser Arundel permission to take whatever peaches he is able to get. That power, we do indeed have. But make no mistake: things are in motion, and you had better start paying attention, or you will lose your lands to your neighbors who are more capable of using them effectively. Please respond to this letter, Ser Vesten, before more drastic measures are taken. Yours Truly, Magister Vespen Frankle, Port Karn Agricultural Council“So, we apparently have a peach orchard,” Almë said. “I like peaches. Almost as good as pickles.”
Elitheris shot him a glare. “We haven’t decided what we’re going to do with this place, yet.”
“Jakkit said the guild would look into the administrative details of what this estate contains,” Eykit said. “They know some people in the records departments. Before we can do anything, we will need to know how big the manor actually is, what it contains, and whatnot.”
Taid had been looking around the room. “And what repairs might need to be made. What furniture needs to be purchased, who needs to be hired, and who will work the fields? Not me. I’m no farmer.”
Almë said, “Those fields would be too much for us, even if we worked them full time without sleep. Judging from what I’ve been seeing since I got to this area of the Empire, it would take dozens of people to work the fields. And that’s not even including the little fact that the lands out there,” he gestured out towards the front of the house, “are Essential earth.”
Eykit squinted up at the Elf. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“Essential earth is like…how to describe it…concentrated earth. The magical essence of earth. Things grow three times as large, with three times the productivity.”
“I’ll take your word for it. So does that mean that we will need three times as many workers?”
“Likely not. Grain would just grow more densely, with more grains on each stalk. The scythe will still cut all that down just about as fast if it weren’t more productive. But with three times the harvest, there will likely be three times the post harvest preparation, if there is any. And milling three times as much grain will take—“
“Three times as long,” Eykit finished. “I get it.” He addressed the rest of them. “In any case, we should get word shortly about how much trouble it will be to get this manor in fief through the Baroness. I think that means that we will be renting it from her or something. And there was something about an oath of fealty to her. But we can stay here for now.”
“I’m not sleeping in any of the beds until we get new linens,” Elitheris said.
Taid looked around the room. “That spot over by the wall looks fine. I’ll lay my bedroll out there.”
They ate, then spent the evening talking about the letters. There was a circle of mages, animating the dead, and the living. They were able to piece together some information, teasing out clues from the missives.
Herbert was using magic and alchemy together to make these Shard abominations.
Nigel implied that there are levitation shards, and that information is corroborated by Elitheris, when she mentions that Herbert had noted in his lab journal that Hoskins had the ability to levitate.
“Levitate? Really?” Taid said. “Considering the room we killed it in, I guess there was no where for it to float off to.”
Nigel also lived by a lake, and kept his creation, “Jelly” in an underwater cave.
Kallia was working on embedding crystals, and had modified Vesten’s original alchemical formulae to make it work better. There are several elixirs required to prepare the crystals. She has an Orc she called Modok ready for implantation, who she had drugged when he was staying at the Mountainstream Inn. She was apparently in the mountains somewhere.
Someone with the initials “LF” was still only using dead subjects, but was planning on finding a live subject soon. He lived in a small town at a major crossroads, and that seemed to indicate a farming town called Donnington.
Someone with the initials “JC” was looking at the Shards as if they might be demonic. His working theory was that they were. He or she also mentioned that the crystals were only found in “our brane”. He hadn’t found any in any other brane. He lived in a small town, on an island, and had to row to other, more private islands to do his work.
Someone with the initials “MB” seemed to be an alchemist, rather than a mage. He mentioned not being able to replicate the others’ experiments, lacking the magical ability. He or she was going down a different path, using solely alchemy, and had managed to get a dead rat to live again for almost a full minute. Although as he refined his serum, it was turning more and more green. He seemed unsure as to what this meant, but he seemed fascinated by that little detail. He was going to start working on sentient subjects soon, as the animals were not good conversationalists. There were indications that MB might be an Orc.
Elitheris mentioned that the guy on the island seemed worried that the Shards were demonic in origin. “The other guys are doing…things…to people. So far as we know, this guy isn’t.”
Taid said, “True. And getting there would take us through Donnington, so we could find out about this LF character on the way.”
Almë brought up another point. “We’ve got those two unsent letters, and we’ve killed one of their friends. We should probably send off the two letters, if only to make it take longer for them to realize that Herbert is gone.”
“Good point,” Taid said.
“We might want to think about writing more letters, to continue the charade.”
“That would be tricky,” Eykit brought up, being the only person in the room with any experience at all at forgeries, and even then only second hand. “We could, with work, duplicate his handwriting, at least enough to maybe fool them. Maybe. But we don’t know enough about his techniques to make it believable. Even if we went through his journal, and recreated his experiments—“
“We’re not doing any experiments!” Elitheris blurted out.
Eykit eyed her, continuing with hardly a pause, “—we would never have his understanding of the matter. These folk seem to be experts in their field.”
“Experts in necromancy,” Taid added.
“Sending those letters will at least buy us some time,” Almë said.
“Do we even know where to send them?” Elitheris asked.
Eykit thought about it, remembering his experience with couriers. He grimaced. “It’ll be expensive, but we will still be able to get the letters to their recipients—Nigel and Kallia—by letting the couriers find them. We’ll need to give them as much information as we can about them, of course, and there is no guarantee that they will be able to be found, but we can try.”
Taid scratched his beard. “We know this Nigel fellow lives by a lake, near some cliffs. And the town has something he called ‘Bridge Races’ involving the sky folk. That can’t be too hard to find, with a little digging. And Kallia specifically mentioned the Mountainstream Inn, and mountains. So that should be findable as well.”
“If I were them, I would have used a code,” Eykit said, shaking his head in disappointment. “These guys seemed to hope that if their letters had fallen into the wrong hands, that there wouldn’t be enough to track them down.”
“I would assume that when the couriers are told to deliver the letters, they are given a location to deliver them to. So they at least were trusting the couriers not to give them to the wrong people.”
Couriers were usually discreet. Indiscreet couriers weren’t used, and quickly went out of business. Their reputation for discretion was what got them customers. So letters weren’t opened, and packages were black boxes. It also gave the couriers deniability in case they were transporting illegal goods. If they didn’t know that the goods were illegal, they couldn’t be held responsible for committing any crimes. So ignorance of their packages was in their best interest as well as their customers’.
Eykit nodded. “We’ll just tell the couriers what we can, saying that we can’t give them more information for their own safety. Or something like that. We’ll have to think about the wording we’ll use. We should be able to send them when we get to Hearavgizan. It’s not as big as Port Karn, but I think they will have courier services there, unlike the smaller farming towns.”
“Kallia and Nigel seem to be the farthest away,” Taid said. “LF is in Donnington, we think, and JC is in the river delta north of Hearavgizan. And this MB guy can’t be too far away from LF, as LF seems to know him, if Mokrah is MB.”
Eykit shook his head, picked the letter up from the pile of papers between them, and skimmed MB’s letter, then LF’s. “We really don’t have any idea where MB is. The two of them could have just exchanged earlier letters, and not been anywhere near each other.”
Taid made a face as if he had just sucked a lemon. “Crap,” he admitted, “you’re right. Damn.”
“We’ll just have to ask some alchemists if they know anyone named Mokrah,” Almë said.
He got nods of agreement from the others, and Taid said, “There aren’t that many alchemists, and they are likely in contact with each other to a certain extent.”
So it was decided. Come the morning, they would head out towards Hearavgizan, to hire a boat to get them to Isleton, in the river delta. On the way, they would check out the doings in Donnington.
Morning came, the sun rising up into a clear, blue sky. They packed their traveling gear onto Wilbur, and started down the southern road, which soon turned west towards Meke Larnis. It was only a few miles, and they got there by midmorning. They planned to ask the old alchemist they had met there if he knew any alchemists in Donnington.
“Well, crap,” Eykit said.
“We could relax at a public house,” Taid offered.
That was met with agreement, and they went to one of the two pubs, where they had some drinks and listened to some gossip. As the clientele was minimal at this hour, with most of the population of the town either sleeping or out in the fields, there wasn’t much to listen to that was actually interesting.
There had been a farming accident that resulted in a severe injury due to a mis-timed scythe stroke. A local girl was fending off the advances of two brothers competing for her affection, and she didn’t seem interested in either one. A farmer complained that being so far from the “big city” that they had trouble getting farm mages down to help with growing, and they didn’t have a bat-cave like Rhades that could supply easily accessed fertilizer. Rhades was much farther away from Port Karn than Meke Larnis was, so they got even less attention from the agricultural council than Meke Larnis did, so it was good they had at least something to help with the crops. But the old farmer, while acknowledging that the fertilizer was good for Rhades, still wished that Meke Larnis had something to help it, too.
The only other vaguely interesting gossip was a mention of a pair of hunting griffins supposedly seen to the south. The gossiper’s companion only chuckled and said, “What, you heard that from old man Perkins, didn’t you? He probably just saw some of the sky folk. His eyes aren’t what they used to be, and Aarakocra flying high look very much like griffins.”
At mid afternoon, Taid, Elitheris, Eykit, and Almë, antsy after spending most of the day listening to some very mundane farmer gossip, got up and left the establishment, leaving a few extra coins on the table. It never hurt to build rapport with the locals; it might come in handy later.
The shop simply labeled “Bokrug the Chemist” was open. They went inside.
Bokrug was arranging some items on the counter, preparing for customers. He had only opened the shop for business moments before. The old Orc looked up, saying, “Hello, how may I help you?” He squinted at them. “I know you,” he said after a moment.
“Yup,” Eykit said. “We were here not too long ago, on a quest to find an antidote to hydra poison.”
“I remember you. Looks like the Elf survived,” he said, peering at Almë. “So, what do you need this time?”
“Just information. We haven’t stumbled into any hydra dens or anything!” Eykit grinned. “Actually, we are looking for a good alchemist in Donnington. Know anyone?”
Bokrug rubbed his scalp. “Donnington’s a small town. The only alchemist there is George. Seems like a decent man, good at his job. His shop is just off the market square. All of the shops are, actually.”
“Thanks, Bokrug,” the Goblin said cheerfully. “Oh, one other thing,” he said, as if it were an afterthought. “Do you know an alchemist named Mokrah?”
“Maybe. I’ve met quite a few alchemists in my time. What’s he look like?”
“I don’t know, I never met him. Came across his name in a letter found in a noble’s house. I figure he was important.”
“The name sounds vaguely familiar. I know most of the alchemists in the farming towns, and there aren’t many Orcish alchemists there. So I’d check Hearavgizan, Port Karn, and maybe some of the more Orcish towns on the north bank.”
“Thanks, Bokrug! Have a good day, er, evening!” The four of them left.
There were still a few hours of daylight, and Donnington was only about eight kilometers from Meke Larnis on a hard packed dirt road. Even with the light summer rains, the road was still in good shape. They would get to Donnington before nightfall, with daylight to spare.
In the center of town was a square, surrounded by the various shops and services that small towns needed. In the square were several merchants, in tents and under awnings to keep the sun off of their goods. Most were farmers, usually groups of them, selling portions of their harvests to the residents of the town. But others were selling threads and yarns, or knitted goods, or pottery.
But it was the alchemist’s shop that got their attention. It was a small shop simply called “George’s”, if the hanging wooden sign was any indication. No other indicator that it was the alchemist, or that it was even a shop.
“Huh,” Taid commented, “I guess everyone just knows that George is the alchemist here.”
“Good thing Bokrug gave us his name,” said Eykit, “otherwise I would have thought it the barbershop or some such.”
They entered. Behind the counter was a dark skinned man with greying hair and a well manicured, short beard. He had bright blue eyes, and he smiled as the two Elves, the Dwarf, and the Goblin entered his shop.
“Hello, my friends!” he said cheerily. “What can I do for you?”
Eykit smiled. “We were told that you might be in the market for some Shards. We know that small towns like this don’t get access to Shards like city-folk do. We wanted to remedy that, at least a bit.”
George looked confused. “I have no real interest in them, not having ever had any. But I’m sure others in town might be interested.”
Eykit had the wherewithal to look abashed. “Oh,” he said, in a disappointed tone. “I guess we were misinformed.” He paused, appearing to think. “Maybe you can help out with something else, then.”
George nodded. “If I can.”
“Are there any other alchemists in town?”
“No, I’m the one and only.”
Eykit nodded. “Okay. We were also told that there was a second potential buyer, but all we have are the initials ‘LF’. He was to be our secondary buyer. Our supplier told us that first dibs went to ‘the Alchemist’. You sure you aren’t the buyer we were told of?”
“Look,” George said, raising his hands as if to ward off something, “I’ve got no interest in those things. I’ve seen what they can do to people. Not everyone, sure, but enough to show a pattern. And I don’t want anything to do with them. Besides, farmers don’t pay much, so I don’t make a large profit on my wares, so I likely wouldn’t be able to afford your Shards in any case.”
“Any idea who this ‘LF’ might be?”
“Not really. There are likely several people with those initials in town. You might want to check with the shrine. They keep all kinds of records there. Sort of acts like a town hall. If this town was bigger, we might actually have a town hall, but the shrine works, for now.”
Taking George’s advice, they went to the shrine, which was on the other side of the market square. In Port Karn, the shrines were small, and for a single deity. But then, the city had room for a hundred or so shrines, which at least would cover most of the gods people might want to give offerings to. Here in Donnington, however, space was limited, as were the number of gods people felt like beseeching.
The shrine was a largish building, and as they entered, they could see alcoves up and down along both sides of the building, each with a statue, symbol, or even just an illustration of various gods. The town didn’t have the space for separate shrines, they all had to share the same structure. From what they had seen, there were also shrines located out in the farmlands, scattered here and there.
Most of those were related to farming or weather, the gods of which were the ones most called upon by the people in town. There were a few more in the shrine; gods of the various elements, life, death, and even war. Taid, having seen plenty of war already, hoped that one didn’t need to be called on very often.
Although from the rumors he’d been hearing over the past year or so, it might get some traffic sooner rather than later. Mostly scuffles between barons, counts, and other lesser nobility, usually over some slight to someone’s pride. But there was also talk about the Emperor hinting at expanding the reach of the Empire. The Empire had plenty of room for more people, there were vast tracts of wilderness and uninhabited lands. There was no good reason to need more space. But who was to say what the Emperor needed besides the Emperor himself?
In the shrine there were four people, one of which had a larger hat than the rest of them. “Must be the head priest,” Eykit said under his breath to no one in particular. The three under priests looked like they were cleaning, or redecorating. Hard to tell in what amounted to a one room building with niches filled with knickknacks. But it wasn’t long before the head priest noticed them, and walked over to them.
“Welcome, citizens,” he said. “Is there a particular deity I can direct you to?”
“No,” Taid said, looking around, seeking Aheru-Mazda’s sunburst symbol. He didn’t find it; instead, he found an alcove with a fired clay bull. Which made sense, he supposed, for a farming community to focus on that aspect of the god. He spent some time praying to his patron deity, keeping half an ear out listening to the conversations around him.
Eykit, always the group’s face man, spoke up. “We were told by our buddy George,” he indicated the general direction of the alchemist’s shop, “that the shrine here also plays the part of hall of records.”
“Well, yes. They aren’t much. Births, deaths, marriages…occasionally birthdays. We are a small town.”
“We are looking for a buyer for some merchandise, but were only given his town, Donnington, here, and their initials, ‘LF’. We were thinking that you might know who and where our contact is.”
“The only ‘LF’ I know of is little Lucia Fountainsmith. But she died four months ago.”
“Lucia? Dead? What did she die of?”
“Childhood illness. Sad, really. She was only six. Poor thing had a bad cough, the coughing up blood kind, and nothing that George could whip up helped. Not that her parents could have afforded a real cure.” He seemed both disappointed and disgusted that the system had let little Lucia down. “There aren’t enough healers, it seems.”
“Where is Lucia now?”
The priest looked confused. “In the cemetery. Her grave, fortunately, is still untouched.”
That got their attention. “What do you mean,” Elitheris asked.
“Grave robbers, looking for easy loot. Two graves were defiled. They took the bodies.”
“And where is the cemetery?”
“South side of town. The mortuary isn’t far from it. In fact, maybe you have the initials backward. The mortician is Fandral Lambert…’FL’.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Eykit replied. “Thanks for your help.”
The priest bowed his head in acknowledgement. “If you need the aid of the gods, come on by.”
It didn’t take long to find the mortuary, beyond which was the cemetery. The ground sloped up to a low hill, beyond which lay most of the graveyard. But skylined across the top of the rise were several headstones, silhouetted against the gloaming.
It was nearing twilight, and the first stars were visible, but there was still enough light to see by, and maybe he would talk with them. When they got to the funeral home, the door was open, so they went inside. There was a bell on the door that jingled when it opened. The front room was largish, tastefully decorated, and filled with coffins of various types on display. Most were wood, and of simple but sturdy construction. There were a few that were upscale, and looked like they cost more than most families in town would make in a year.
“Just a moment,” they heard from the room to the rear of the building. “I’ll be done here in a few minutes.” The door was closed, but not completely, so while they couldn’t see what was going on, they could hear someone in the back room doing something.
A few minutes later, Fandral Lambert came out, dressed in work clothes and an apron. While there was some blood on the apron, most of the smudges of color looked more like makeup and skin powders, in various flesh tone colors ranging from tan to dark brown, with a few shades of green mixed in as well.
“Sorry, I had to finish up my latest patient.” He smiled uncertainly. “Looking for a coffin?” He waved his hand at the various coffins, most of which were leaning up against the walls to save space. “They are easier to purchase before you die, you know.” He grinned at his old joke.
“Nope, don’t need any coffins, yet,” Taid said, with a grin of his own. But we might be putting some other people in them, he thought.
As usual, Eykit became the front man. “We heard about little Lucia, and wanted to know how she died.”
Fandral got a sorrowful expression on his face. “Lucia was a dear. She didn’t deserve her fate. It was some kind of respiratory disease, I reckon. Persistent cough, and eventually she was coughing up blood. Nothing her folks could do helped.” He shook his head. “I hate it, having to build small coffins. Just doesn’t seem right.”
“We’d like to pay our respects to her parents, if we may.”
“Well, that’s kind of you. Daryl and Renora live a couple of blocks down that way. Third house on the left.”
Taid spoke up. “The priest at the shrine mentioned that there was some trouble with some grave robbers.”
Fandral nodded. “Yeah. Jasper Michaels and Bogruk Uglah both had their graves despoiled. Their bodies were taken. No one has seen the bodies since. I suspect the grave robbers dug them up to rob them, but got interrupted and just ran off with them. I don’t know. Once they are in the ground, my job is over. Well, until I see them again, I guess.” He sighed. “Then I’ll have to bury them again.”
“Thank you,” Taid said, “It’s never good to disturb the dead. It’s disrespectful.”
The mortician nodded.
They took their leave, walking down the dark streets in the early evening. Most of the houses and buildings still had some lights on, visible through the oiled paper windows. Some windows, they noticed, were actually glass, although not very many.
“We should check the Rural Watch station here,” Elitheris said. It was in the center of town; they had passed it when they were looking for the alchemist’s shop. It took only a few minutes to walk there.
Like most of the Rural Watch stations they had been in, it was rather small, with a front area for visitors, complete with a bounty board, and a workspace beyond for the Watch officers. A rack of polearms stood against a side wall, ready for the on duty officers to grab if necessary. Two were standard military issue hooked spears, one a halberd, and the last was a pollaxe.
Also along that wall were two buckets, one of which held some eight foot tall bamboo torches, the other held eight foot long poles with red triangular flags on them. They were signaling devices, and each field had at least one of each ready at hand. They were used to call the Aarakocra Rural Watch Officers that flew high above, wary for trouble. The long whippy poles had a distinct movement that was readily visible from a distance, and helped reduce false positives. The brightly colored flags were used during the day, the torches at night.
To the sharp eyes of the Sky Folk, either was visible from quite a ways off. Once alerted, they could either get help or assist themselves, depending upon need and the location of other Rural Watch teams. Their great flying speed, often in excess of 80 kph, allowed them to travel far in a short time.
There was only a single Watch officer on duty in the station. That seemed to be the main problem with the Rural Watch…never enough officers to cover the vast area they had to patrol.
The man looked up from the maintenance he was doing on what must have been his gambeson armor, sewing up a series of parallel rents in the layered fabric. “Yes?” he asked. The “can I help you” was implied by his open expression that showed curiosity more than any annoyance in being interrupted.
Taid asked, “We were wondering if you had any information about the grave robberies. We heard about them from the priest and mortician.”
“We looked into it, but we didn’t really find anything. It seemed to be an isolated case. No one in any of the neighboring areas has had any problem with graves being robbed, and no graves have been robbed since.”
“Any other rumors about strange goings ons?”
“Rumors? Not much. There is some sort of creature in Rhades called the Breathstealer that is sucking the life out of newborns and turning them blue before killing them. Seems to take days for it to do it. The babies just start turning blue, have trouble breathing, and die. So far, no one knows what the creature is. Lots of possibilities, though, it seems, ranging from crazy wizard to mournful ghost to vengeful wraith. Some even think it’s the parrots.” He shrugged, a frustrated expression on his face. “And we haven’t a clue as to what it is.”
The Rural Watch not having much information, the group left the offices, deciding to head towards Lucia’s parents’ house.
The houses near the center of town tended to be wood framed, with wooden siding. The ones out towards the edges of town tended to be wattle and daub, with thatch roofs. Cheaper materials, and with less endurance, but it was likely all that the inhabitants would afford, or what their landlords would pay for.
Daryl and Renora’s home was of the latter variety, single story, and not large. Maybe two to three rooms at the most, like most family farm homes. Taid knocked on the door.
It opened a crack, just enough for a man to peer out at his visitors. “What do you want?” he asked.
Eykit, of course, spoke up, his voice figuratively dripping with sympathy. “We just wanted to say how sorry we are for your loss. We heard from the priest that you lost your daughter, Lucia recently.”
The door opened a bit more, and more of the man, and the room behind him, became visible. Eykit could see a woman standing in the room, looking at the door and the visitors beyond. He thought that she was likely Renora.
Eykit engaged them in some small talk about Lucia, the funeral, and the town in general, gaining enough good will that Renora came forward to engage in conversation. Daryl let the door open a bit farther, to allow her room. She answered questions as readily as her husband, and tears could be seen on her face when the subject turned towards her daughter.
“Herbert told us about you and Lucia,” Eykit said.
“Who?” Daryl asked.
“Herbert. Herbert Vesten.”
A look of confusion suffused the man’s face. “Never heard of him. Who is he?”
“Friend of ours. He mentioned you, so we assumed he was a friend of yours.”
Daryl looked at his wife, her expression of confusion matching his.
Almë didn’t believe them, and had had enough: he wanted answers. The two of them were certainly in on the grave robbing. And even if they weren’t, they likely knew who was, given the small size of the town. He suddenly moved past Taid and Eykit, who had been in front of the taller Elves, and in one quick, elegant motion, had Renora pinned up against the door with his forearm at her throat.
“You know something about those graves! Tell me what you know!” he said gruffly and angrily.
Renora, taken by surprise and under assault, started sobbing in fear; she was also having trouble breathing with the Elf’s arm at her throat, closing off her windpipe. Her arms came up, trying to push Almë’s arm away, but she had no leverage, and fear was sapping her strength. She tried to answer, but little came out besides some stuttering grunts and whimpers.
“Ease up, Almë!” Eykit said, his work to ingratiate himself with these people in jeopardy. He worried that Almë’s actions eliminated any goodwill he might have been able to build. He swore, annoyed at the impulsive Elf. The last thing anyone needed right now was Almë going into a mindless berserk state.
Taid was on the ball, though, and grabbed Almë by the back of his gambeson’s collar, wrenching him away from the terrified woman. “Enough,” he said quietly to the sputtering Elf. “You’ve done enough intimidating.”
Eykit attempted to recover. “I’m so sorry about my companion,” he soothed. “He can get out of hand sometimes, and unfortunately this was one of them. He has a thing about kids dying, like he takes it personally or something, and I’m afraid he just lost it. I apologize for him attacking you, ma’am.”
Almë opened his jar of pickles, offering one to Renora. “I’m sorry. Would you like a pickle?”
The woman looked at the Elf with incredulity, amazed at the non sequitur. She shook her head, coughing.
Eykit’s words seemed to have some effect, although judging from Daryl’s expression, it was Taid forcefully pulling Almë off of his wife that did it more than Eykit’s smooth tongue or the Elf’s pickled offering. Renora coughed again, getting her breath back. It was time to leave; Eykit was sure they had overstayed any welcome they might have had. “Thank you for your time,” he said, motioning the others to leave.
“That,” he said to Almë, “was uncool.” Sometimes Almé is a bigger oaf than Taid, he thought. And a pickle? Really, Almë? That has cemented your oafishness in my mind. Seriously, El has lived out in the wilderness for ages and she’s more civilized.
Almë, at least, had the sense to look abashed.
“We should at least check out the cemetery,” Almë said.
“I agree,” Elitheris said.
In the darkness of the evening they headed out to the cemetery, their night vision allowing them to see fairly well in the moonlight. The town was primarily Human, with the second most populous race being Orcs. As they headed to the cemetery, they could see workers in the fields, gathering the harvest. As it was dark, they were likely Orcs, although there were some torches lit supplying at least a minimal amount of light for any non-Orcs that might be working with them.
Jasper’s and Bogruk’s graves were obvious. They weren’t even filled in completely, and wooden pieces of their coffins lay strewn about, some half buried. The graves themselves were half filled in, and the remains of their coffins were partially visible, the lids broken and the bodies removed. What dirt could be scraped back into the hole had been, the rest lay scattered about the graves in the grass.
Eykit jumped into one of the holes, digging around in the coffins. He didn’t find anything except dirt, and the torn fabric that had lined the coffins in a poor man’s version of luxury. He climbed out. “Nothing there,” he told his companions.
They paid their respects to Lucia’s grave. It was the freshest of the graves, and still looked fairly pristine, the dirt nicely smoothed out in an even mound, a granite headstone sitting at one end. Grass, the bright light green of young grass, sprouted from it in sparse clumps. It read “Lucia Fountainsmith, taken too soon. Age 6. 873-879 AFE”.
Elitheris cocked her head, a frown on her face. “How long ago did Lucia die?”
“I think the priest said four months ago,” Taid replied.
“That’s almost a half year. I would have expected there to be more grass growing on the grave by now.”
Almë nodded. “Right. This area has good soil. Grass should have been growing in an eightday. It should look like a lawn by now.”
“We’ve got a couple of those Darkness Strips, so we should be able to hide our actions from anyone from town,” Taid added. “Should we want to, ah, dig her up.”
“And I can dig up the earth fairly quickly, if necessary,” Almë mentioned. He was referring to his Spell of Earth Shaping. He could dig up a grave in seconds. And put the dirt back just as quickly.
They laid the strips at an angle, maximizing their coverage around the grave. As the cemetery was at the south end of town, they laid them on the northeast and northwest sides, so only from the south were they exposed. And there were no workers to the south at the moment.
The Darkness Strips made anything on the other side of them harder to see. In effect, this made the night even darker to those trying to look through them, almost completely black. It was very unlikely that anyone looking through the fields of extra darkness would be able to make out what they were doing.
And what they were doing was standing there. Except for Almë, who stood and chanted softly, casting the Spell of Earth Shaping. The magic flowed down his arms, to his fingers, and flowed thence to the dirt of the grave. The dirt shook for a moment, then started shifting up and out of the grave into a tall pile on one side that looked as if it would topple back into the hole at any moment.
“I can hold it here for a little while, if someone wants to check that coffin,” he said.
Eykit jumped into the hole, opening the lid.
“Shit,” he said. “She’s not here.” He glanced into the empty coffin, and noted that there was a doll there. He grabbed it, closed the coffin lid, and jumped out of the hole with some help from Taid and Maggie.
At Eykit’s nod, Almë let the dirt fall back into the grave, then magically smoothed the grave back to its former shape as best he could.
“Lookie what I found,” Eykit said, holding up the doll, making it dance in the air, its jointed limbs flopping around as he shook it.
Upon examination, they saw that it was dressed in clothes that had been made specially for it, fitting over the jointed wooden body in a well-tailored fashion. Whoever had made the clothes for it was a skilled tailor, and it must have been a well-loved doll to have clothes that had taken that much effort to make.
“I bet that if we checked out Lucia’s toy box it would have more outfits for this doll,” Eykit said.
“You realize we will have to go back to the Fountainsmiths and tell them about Lucia not being in her grave,” Elitheris said.
Taid sighed. “But not tonight. Almë’s little assault is too fresh, and it’s late.” He rolled up one of the Darkness Strips while Eykit did the other. “See? Half the lights in the windows are out already.”
“We’ll need to stay at the inn,” Eykit said. “It’s better than sleeping out in a field. But on the way back, I want to spy on that mortician. See if he’s acting suspiciously.”
The mortician’s house and funeral home was within sight of the cemetery, and there were several convenient trees for Eykit to climb into in order to see through the upper story’s windows. He climbed up, getting comfortable on a branch, using the bulk of the trunk to hide his small frame.
Fandral and his wife were spending the evening talking as they straightened up the house before going to bed. Even with his acute Goblin hearing, nothing of which they said was anything out of the ordinary. Just the usual banter of a long-married couple. He was somewhat disappointed. It would have been easier had the mortician been the bad guy.
He slid down the tree, hopping down the last six feet or so with an athletic grace. Apparently, he had been watching Elitheris and her acrobatic antics. But it was getting late, and they needed to get to the inn.
Like the alchemist’s shop and the Rural Watch station, the inn was located in the center of town, one of the buildings surrounding the market square. Conveniently, its neighbor was one of the two public houses in town. The other pub was on the far side of the square.
There was a room with two beds available, and they got that for the night. Elitheris had to sleep with the men, but there was nothing she could do about that, despite the odd look from the innkeeper, who grudgingly accepted that mixing the genders in this case was inevitable. Elitheris shared a bed with Eykit, who, being small, kept the bed from overheating in the summer night. Taid and Almë were both larger, and did their best not to let the heat bother them. Mr. Wiggles slept at the foot of the bed.
The next morning, Almë stated that he was going to go help the farmers, and left at dawn. This was both because he wanted to balance his reputation due to his actions the night before, and because it had been a while since he got his hands dirty growing plants. He was a gardener, and when he set off on his journey of revenge, he hadn’t realized how much he would miss tending plants.
The other three went back to the Fountainsmith residence, to give the grieving parents the bad news.
Eykit knocked on their door. Again, it opened a crack, Daryl peering out at the three of them. “Oh,” he said, disappointment thick in his voice. “What do you guys want?” He bit out the words, obviously displeased to see them. “Here to assault my wife again?”
Eykit raised his hands, as if to ward off the verbal attack. “Oh, no, don’t worry about that. Our prickly friend isn’t here this morning. We thought it better that he not be here while we talk with you again.”
That news seemed to make Daryl relax a little, although not too much. “Fine. Speak your piece.”
Eykit mustered all of the sorrow that he could as he said, “We have some bad news for you. It’s about Lucia. She wasn’t in her grave.”
Rage flooded the man’s face. “You dug up my daughter?!”
Eykit waved his hands. “No! Well, yes, but she wasn’t in the coffin! So no, we didn’t dig her up!”
“There were some inconsistencies in the grave site,” Elitheris added, helpfully. “So we investigated.”
Eykit glanced at Elitheris, then back to Daryl. “The point is, sir, is that someone dug her up.”
“You’re lying! She has to be there! We’ve gone to the grave many times! It wasn’t dug up!”
“Someone dug it up, then put the gravesite back the way it was, but with an empty coffin. We’ve got proof.” He pulled out the doll, holding it out to the shocked and grieving man. “This was hers, was it not?”
“Y-yes.” Tears started to run down his cheeks and into his beard. He took the doll from Eykit’s fingers, holding it in front of his face, gazing at it, or at memories of his child with it.
“Mr. Fountainsmith, what can you tell us about your daughter?” Eykit’s voice was soft, soothing, and comforting. It sounded like he actually cared. He was good at acting, and at lying.
“She was a good child, well-behaved and sweet. Always did her chores, which were minimal, given her age. When she started coughing, we thought it was just that, a cough. Everyone gets them, and they aren’t usually a problem. But she just didn’t get better, and nothing that we could do could help her. The medicines we gave her would work for a while, then the cough would return.
Daryl wiped his eyes. “Then she died. We were devastated. My brother was distraught as well. She was his favorite niece.”
“Your brother?” Eykit asked.
“Yeah. Lennerd cried more than my wife, it seemed. It practically killed him.”
Eykit shot a glance at his companions. They had caught it too. Lennerd Fountainsmith. ‘LF’.
“What does your brother do?” he asked.
“He a farming commodities trader. Works in a warehouse.”
“Does Lennerd live nearby?”
“Yeah,” Daryl sniffled, wiped his nose, and continued, “he lives on Hillview Road in the west side of town.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fountainsmith. Sorry, again, to have brought bad news to you. But we are trying to get to the bottom of it, if that helps at all.”
They turned, and walked down the road. They were headed for Lennerd’s house, but had to make a detour to gather up Almë from whatever field he was getting his hands dirty in. They thought about going to the warehouse where he worked, but figured that breaking into his house while he wasn’t there was the better option. Besides, Eykit’s fingers itched, and the only way to scratch that itch was to pick a lock or two.
It wasn’t difficult to find Lennerd’s house. All it took was a simple question to a neighbor that was working in their yard.
The house itself was whitewashed wattle and daub, with a thatched roof and oiled paper windows. From the pattern seen through them, it appeared that the shutters on the insides of the windows were closed. No smoke came out of the chimney. A pair of hedges, one on each side of the house, formed a small, semi-private area in front of the house. From the front door, no one was visible on the street.
They went around the house to the rear, looking to see if there were any storm cellar openings. There were none, and no back door, either. The backyard had a small raised bed, dense with herbs and what looked to be onions.
It was the work of moments for Eykit to pop the lock on the front door open. All four of them hurried inside.
The cottage was comprised of three rooms: the main living area, which included the kitchen, a small bedroom with barely enough room for a bed and chest, and an even smaller room used as the privy.
The floor was dirt, covered in layers of rush mats. A throw rug, spread out over the mats, made the house a bit cheerier, being striped in warm reds, oranges, and yellows. There was a table and four chairs, along with an upholstered chair, a side table, and a stool. An unlit oil lamp sat in the center of the table, and a second one on the side table. It was dim, as the shutters were closed and cut out much of the light that would normally come through the translucent paper windows.
“There has got to be something hidden in here somewhere,” Almë said. He started looking under the rush mats.
At first, they found only hard packed dirt, thick with clay and almost as hard as stone. But under the table they noticed the edges of something wooden. They shifted the table over, and found that the wood was a trap door a bit over a meter on a side.
Eykit put his ear to the door, but heard nothing. Taid grabbed the inset ring and pulled, the door creaking open on hinges that could use a bit of oil.
Looking into the uncovered hole, they saw a dirt floor some three meters down, reachable by a wooden ladder. The room below had a two meter tall ceiling, which meant that there was a shaft that led down to it that was a meter long. They couldn’t see much of the room below due to narrow field of view offered by the access shaft.
Eykit listened again, this time hearing a faint creak of leather on leather. “There’s something down there,” he whispered. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go down there.”
“Ah, it’ll be fine!” Almë stated confidently, as he started down the ladder. He dropped the last meter or so, his staff at the ready.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” Eykit said, trying to control his fear reaction.
“Fuck!” Taid said, and he started chanting, his hands moving into the glyph forms in order to focus his magical energies. He was casting the Spell of Light Continual, and in a moment a spot on his shoulder glowed brightly.
Almë was face first up against a dirt wall, and it tasted like old clay and old organic material. A part of his brain registered it as onion and rancid liver, but his main focus was trying to turn himself around somehow. His legs pushed against the wall, as whatever had gotten him in this position had lifted him up off the ground in the process. He managed to squirm around within the enclosing arms of an Orc. A dead Orc, given the gauntness of its face.
No, that wasn’t completely right. Gaunt it was, but not just from decay. Some of the flesh had moved away from some of the facial features, but he couldn’t tell where because the Orc wore a chain hauberk over gambeson armor, and an open faced helmet. It was like the Lerial-thing and the Hoskins-thing. It was one of those Shard enhanced dead things.
Above the hole, Eykit drew one of his knives, then resheathed it. He really didn’t want to go down there, into that mysterious hole with monsters in it. Monsters much bigger than he was.
Taid was carrying the staff that they had gotten off of Jakora Tonguebiter, and he tapped into its store of mana to refill his own. If he went down there, he didn’t want to take the staff down there as well. He was going to leave it up here with his halberd. “Damn it, Aheru-Mazda,” he said to his patron deity, “I hate small spaces where I can’t bring Maggie! Why do you keep sending me into them?” He got no answer, which was normal. He learned long ago to not expect answers, at least ones given in a timely, obvious manner.
Elitheris readied several arrows. When she dropped down there, she wanted to be able to loose several arrows very quickly.
Eykit steeled himself, then slid down the ladder, his feet on the outside of the poles. The faster he was down there, the better. Elitheris readied herself to leap down once the Goblin was out of the way.
Bogruk the Orc tried to knee Almë in the groin, but it wasn’t a good angle, and it did no damage.
Almë was in an awkward position. The Orc’s arms pinned his at his sides, and his staff was pressed up against his chest, trapped as well. He tried to pivot it and use it like a lever, but Bogruk was just too strong. His staff unusable, he went for his dagger, fumbling for it at his waist.
Eykit landed, his knives out, and he could see two large figures, one against the far wall some three meters away, a second much closer. Almë was trapped between the wall and the far figure, and Eykit chose the Orc as his target. His knife attacks as he leapt onto the Orc’s back did minimal damage.
Bogruk pulled one arm out from behind Almë, and grabbed onto Almë’s head. Almë could feel the fingers start to squeeze. He had the distinct impression that Bogruk planned to pull his head clean off.
Elitheris eschewed the ladder completely, jumping straight down the hole, her folding legs acting like shock absorbers. Her bow was ready, an arrow nocked, and she saw the Orc grabbing Almë’s face. As she flexed her knees to come back to a standing position, she drew and loosed, the arrow flying into Bogruk’s right bicep, piercing entirely through it and into the forearm near the wrist, temporarily pinning his arm to itself.
The axe-wielding zombie attacked Eykit, but Eykit’s quickness and chainmail forced the axe into a glancing blow. Eykit felt it, but it didn’t penetrate his armor.
Taid took the ladder two rungs at a time, practically falling down the hole, his short sword out and making it difficult to hold onto the ladder with that hand. The light emanating from his shoulder illuminating the room.
He saw Almë, pinned up against the wall by a large Orc wearing chainmail over gambeson. The Orc looked like he was trying to twist off Almë’s head, but his arm was pinned by an arrow. Eykit was stabbing at Bogruk, trying to get his knives through the layered armor.
A second combatant, a Human, was armed with a large, two handed axe, and was using it on Eykit. He was wearing brigandine armor over gambeson.
Bogruk had been forced to let go of Almë’s head, and took a moment and straightened his arm with a sudden jerk, the point pulling out of his wrist and freeing his arm for use. Jasper, the axe wielder, swiped it again at Eykit, hitting him but failing to penetrate. The blow was enough to knock Eykit away from Bogruk, however, and he stumbled back a few steps, reeling from the blow.
Rewards Granted
3 CPs
$1000 for selling the old silver mace head
$1000 for selling the old silver mace head
Character(s) interacted with
Elend Rabbitfoot (New Square Skulls, Port Karn)
Bokrug the Alchemist (in Meke Larnis)
George the Alchemist (in Donnington)
Head Priest at the shrine in Donnington
Fandral Lambert, mortician (Donnington)
Daryl and Renora Fountainsmith (Donnington)
Jasper Michaels and Bogruk Uglah (Donnington)
Bokrug the Alchemist (in Meke Larnis)
George the Alchemist (in Donnington)
Head Priest at the shrine in Donnington
Fandral Lambert, mortician (Donnington)
Daryl and Renora Fountainsmith (Donnington)
Jasper Michaels and Bogruk Uglah (Donnington)
Report Date
14 Jan 2023
Primary Location
Secondary Location
Related Characters
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