Circle of Skulls

SIX

NIGHTAL 20, THE YEAR OF DEEP WATER DRIFTING (1480 DR)

Roaring flames rolled over Jinn's back as he jumped out of their path and tumbled into an awkward crouch, his swiftly drawn sword at odds with his instinct to retreat. He wasn't sure if he was even able to harm the skulls, much less battle them all at once. And though he had discovered the source of Sea Ward's sudden rise in mortality rate, he did not yet know the reason, and, most importantly, he did not know how Sathariel was involved.

As the circle devolved into chaos, arguing with one another over his fate, he fell back, observing them from a safer distance and wincing as their ghostly voices pierced his skull. Pressing a palm to his forehead, he noticed that the stain of Allek's blood had been burned away during the skulls' manifestation.

"Be still!" One voice rose above the others with a note of authority, silencing the circle's bickering. The speaker drifted to the circle's edge to face the deva as it addressed the others. "He doesn't care about us. He wants the angel, correct?"

Jinn remained silent as the other skulls turned toward him, hissing in impatience, their green flames diminished as they regarded him. He returned their cold scrutiny, the pits of their glowing eyes mirroring the emptiness he felt in his gut as he considered the accusation. Yet he could not deny the statement.

"Yes," he answered at length, tucking his quiet shame away for more peaceful times when he could look back and afford the luxury of regret.

A sibilant sigh passed through the skulls as he took a tentative step into their flickering, emerald light. They arranged themselves into the even circle they'd appeared in, their flames barely more than candlelight in the dark alley.

"Know this, deva," the skulls' apparent leader continued, "you have earned Sathariel's attention of late."

"The fall of the Vigilant Order," Jinn muttered, though he wondered how true that fall had been. The soulless ahimazzi were bound to the pleasure of Asmodeus, seeking redemption in suffering and service. Their numbers in Sea Ward suggested that his work-and theirs-was not yet complete.

"The angel's time here in Waterdeep is ending, and his purpose becomes more fragile with each day that passes," the skull added. "You shall soon have your reckoning."

"And what does this have to do with you?" Jinn asked, his jaw clenching as he fought the celestial blood in his veins, urging him to attack, to mete out justice and have done with questions and mysteries. "What does the blood you spill mean to him?"

"That is our business, deva," the skull growled. "Take care to bend the crusading mercy of your morals upon Sathariel, and we shall both have what we desire."

"And you take care not to presume what I desire,"

Jinn said threateningly, gold eyes flashing and stolen blade rising in hatred at the skull's condescending tone. The circle chuckled in unison, the sound of it rattling in his head like boulders.

"Agreed, deva," the lead skull said finally. "We wish you happy hunting."

The green flames flickered and began to fade as the circle spun slowly in an emerald fog that stank of dry rot and decay.

"No!" Jinn cried, slashing his sword through the dissipating mist. "Why is he here? What does he want? Tell me or I'll-!"

But the skulls were gone, only the lingering scent of their passing, of char and rot, hanging on the air. Jinn swore, slashing his sword across the ground with a shower of sparks before sheathing the weapon and calming himself. He paced in a circle where the skulls had appeared, staring at the cobbles and willing the undead things to reappear. One night had brought him closer to his desires than he'd ever been, and despite the slow-burning fires of his patience, another day of waiting, so close to his quarry, seemed more than he could suffer.

He stared into the middle distance, slowing his racing heart and breathing deeply for long moments before setting off toward North Ward and Mara's shop. Mysteries raced through his thoughts, but he felt certain that the key to finding Sathariel lay within the secrets of the circle of skulls.

The scent of smoke fit well on the breeze of winter's first night. Mingling with that of grand fireplaces throughout Sea Ward, the smell of charred flesh was obscured but did not go unnoticed. Tallus skulked in the shadows across the street from the dying fire, glowering at the blackened, smoldering remains of the Storm's Front. He spun his gnarled wooden staff slowly, grinding it between the cobbles absently as Rorden Dregg swaggered and handed out orders as if they were gold. Dregg disgusted him but Tallus knew it had been time for a change in the local Watch's leadership. Dregg's connections, however ill gotten, had proven a timely convenience.

Allek Marson's time had gone on for far too long, and there was no ward rotation scheduled for another month or two. Tallus's days were numbered, with too much to do and too little time, and his work could not go unnoticed for much longer.

Better that it be Dregg, he thought, fool that the man is.

James P. Davis

Circle of Skulls

Tallus fumed, having watched the deva easily escape, assisted by the meddling Quessahn and another woman whom he had not recognized. That there would likely be a bounty on their heads did not comfort the archmage in the least. He needed Jinnaoth dead, needed anyone with a chance of uncovering his secrets removed as quickly as possible. Marson's Watch, ironically, might have been well suited to the task of tracking down the deva, while Dregg would be lucky to find a decent place to drink while his men did all the work.

A section of the tavern's roof collapsed, sending showers of sparks dancing over the heads of those left to witness the destruction as if it were the evening's entertainment. Tallus scowled. Rumors would spread more quickly, prompting some, those wealthy enough, to move on to secondary homes within the city. Still others would remain as they were, willing pawns to his devices, their hidden altars burning nightly with offered sacrifices. Even to the wealthy and powerful, perhaps especially, promises of yet more wealth and power had driven many to debase themselves before dark and hidden lords. Many of those even reveled in the bloodletting, an extravagance beyond common parties and social status.

Tallus grinned at the thought. Though fallen, his order's reach had not been completely lost.

"I warned you, wizard," Sathariel's voice wrapped around him like a shroud, holding him in a sudden grip of terror, the trembling shadows of the angel's presence fluttering at the peripherals of his sight. His heart jumped wildly, and he coughed, fighting for breath as the fit overcame him. He found specks of blood on his hand when it had passed. "The deva is a trifle, a minor inconvenience unless you antagonize him."

"I… was trying to kill him!" Tallus replied, his throat sore between ragged, bone-chilling breaths.

"Then I expect he is sufficiently antagonized," Sathariel growled close to the archmage's ear. "Tell me, what have you gained for your efforts?"

"For one, another Marson is dead, the last of them," Tallus answered, regaining his composure and taking pride in the one small victory of the evening. "One step closer to the end of this business."

"There is that, I suppose," the angel said. "But you have also introduced Jinnaoth to the circle of skulls."

"Nonsense," the wizard retorted, searching for Sathariel's dark eyes in disbelief. "Impossible."

"He has already spoken with them." The words pressed upon Tallus's chest like a load of rocks. The familiar tickle itched in the back of his throat, but he breathed deeply, fighting the urge to cough. "I'm beginning to suspect the deva may be a more suitable ally to my purposes than you. His agenda is pure, if a bit distasteful, and his betrayals are more direct and predictable."

Tallus turned away from Sathariel's ebon visage, ignoring the angel's goading and already devising how to sever the deva's presence from his work. The Art was stable enough after the Spellplague, more so with the assistance of older magic, yet his task was not easy and, thanks to the mysterious skulls, not yet fully understood to him. Claiming his prize would be that much more difficult with the deva to contend with. As he pondered the problem, his gaze lingered over the dispersing crowd in front of the tavern, drawn easily to the sight of crimson lips and fair locks in a night blue dress as Rilyana Saerfynn followed some distance behind her drunkard brother. The soft, undulating curve between her breast and hip derailed his thoughts for a moment; the thought of her flirting with the deva derailed them further.

"Jinnaoth also knows how to place duty before lust." The angel chuckled, a hellish sound that conveyed an insatiable hunger for mortal failings.

"Fear not," Tallus replied, collecting himself though he could not help but keep a possessive eye upon Rilyana until she had strolled out of sight. "I will not fail you."

"As you wish, Archmage, but I truly do not have the capacity for fear or worry," Sathariel said. "Should you fail, your soul is forfeit, your order is dead, and my master shall have the prize I was sent for in the first place. You are merely a means to an end, but you are not the only means by any stretch of the imagination."

"An end," Tallus repeated wistfully. "The First Flensing."

"Do your work. Give to the skulls the power they need for all the bloodletting they require." The angel's oppressive voice grew fainter as the shadows receded. "And perhaps you and yours shall be forgiven."

A light snow began to fall as the angel departed, leaving Tallus both momentarily relieved and full of dread as he turned back toward the House of Wonder under a cloud of dark thoughts. Some distance away he could make out faint shouts and at least two signal horns echoing through the ward. He cursed Dregg and shook his head, already lamenting the regrettable loss of Rorden Marson's subtle yet effective leadership of the Watch.

"Dregg will wake all Waterdeep with his floundering," he muttered, turning in to a darkened block of narrow streets and widely spaced lanterns. Here and there among the shadows and short alleys, he could see them, blank eyes staring back, too dull to even carry a glitter of hope at his passing. Their stench stung his nose, and he covered it with a perfumed sleeve, trying not to imagine himself wandering among their pitiful numbers.

He sighed in frustration, contemplating more direct means of eliminating the deva without disturbing the delicate details of his work. He no longer required the stealth of the past month, but secrecy was paramount lest he fail as famously as those who had gone before him-or worse. Mere thought of the circle of skulls sickened him, their desperate hunger and practical impotence a fate worse than death, though he suspected his own fate, should he falter, would be legendary, delivered not by a prince among devils, but by a god.

"Mere days," he whispered hoarsely, banishing the imagined terrors. "Then I shall breathe easier, should I require breath at all."

Quessahn sat in the dark, keeping silent as Mara made her way from one arched window of Pages Curious to the next, tracing the edge of each drawn curtain with whispered incantations. Gold needlework in the cloth flared at the woman's touch then faded as she passed, warding the interior of the shop against intruders or eavesdroppers. From the front of the shop to the back, Quessahn marveled at the collection of old magic, pre-Spellplague items of effortless function, the nearness of their energy feeling like the presence of an old friend.

Her circuit completed, Mara settled over a wide table of books and scrolls in the back corner and blew to life an enchanted candle. Quessahn edged close to the table, her eyes drawn to the candlelight and in particular the ornate candleholder it sat in. She narrowed her eyes at the worked silver, noting the alarmingly familiar design of a sword within an archway, encircled by a stylized shield.

"You are a thief as well?" she asked, gesturing to the candleholder and crossing her arms, recognizing the mark of one of the House of Wonder's masters. "Where did you get that?"

Mara looked up from the scrolls, her eyes flashing with anger as she slid the candle closer to herself and out of the eladrin's reach.

"It was a gift," Mara answered sharply. "One of very few that-" She stopped, sighed angrily, and turned back to her work upon the table. "I am no thief. Well, no common thief at least."

Even in the candle's light, it seemed that shadows deepened in Mara's presence, the effect lingering in places where she had been for long moments. The strange woman appeared and acted human, but there was a timeless spark in Mara's gaze that gave Quessahn pause. She kept her guard up, ritual dagger at hand and spells on the tip of her tongue, as they waited in silence for Jinn's arrival.

A click at the back door sent a cold chill down Quessahn's spine. She spun around, a spell on her lips, before finding the deva's gold eyes in the dark. She relaxed as he closed and locked the door, sliding a kissed finger over the bolt that caused it to snap tight with a flash of light.

"Any trouble?" Mara asked.

"No more than usual," he replied, throwing his greatcoat over a cushioned chair. "Any news?"

"A little more than usual," Mara answered. She pulled a large tome close to the candle's glow. "It seems these murders have happened before."

Quessahn's frustration at being ignored by the pair faded as interest in the book took over. She edged closer to the table, trying to read as Jinn perused the page, a look of confusion crossing his smooth features. He glanced at her once, as if noticing her for the first time, then returned to the book.

"How is this possible?" he asked. "The broadsheets would have been selling out toes to heels at news like this."

"And they might well have been," Mara said and flipped the book closed, pointing to the cover. "Around three hundred years ago."

"Toes to heels?" Quessahn muttered as she leaned close, the book's leather cover showing the date The Year of Sinking Sails, 1180 Dale Reckoning.

"From the poor to the rich," Jinn answered absently, running his fingers over the date as his golden eyes darkened. "When did the circle of skulls first appear?"

"Sometime thereabouts," Quessahn said, "if I'm not mistaken."

Jinn and Mara looked at her in unison, still bearing the same expression of having been interrupted, as if she'd disrupted a well-practiced routine. She saw in that look the years they had worked together, both committed to some task that seemed to have consumed them, isolating them from the normal lives of others. The look concerned her and made her fear for the possible victims they might find in the coming days. She wondered if Jinn still had the capacity to care for the lives of others in the midst of the war he fought.

"What about the sigils?" Jinn asked, breaking her troubled line of thought.

"Difficult, but the signs are striking," she answered, laying her sketches on the table beside Jinn's chapbook. "These are a kind of spell, a ritual, but they're incomplete. However, the patterns, the

… context of their proximity makes some sense."

"I see," Mara said, turning the sketches around and tracing them lightly with a painted fingernail. "Almost like a cipher."

"What's the connection?" Jinn asked.

"It is a spell of a sort, only it's still being cast," Quessahn said. "These are just random sets of runes, from one body to the next, sort of like reading a book, but only reading every tenth word at a time."

"But the Watch has destroyed many of the bodies," Jinn said thoughtfully. "Would that not break the spell?"

"The sigils have already been cast," Mara answered. "Their place in the overall pattern is taken and they"-she twirled her hand as if searching for the right word- "exist, until the spell is completed or until it fails."

Jinnaoth stood perfectly still, head bowed, as though frozen in thought. Quessahn fought the urge to place a hand on his arm, shocked by the impulse and stepping away from the deva lest she forget herself.

Her gaze lingered on the way he kept one finger on the middle of his chin, just at the terminus of a swirling design that rose from beneath his collar. She smiled, but stopped when she caught Mara staring at her.

"So I suppose all that remains is the question of the day," Jinn said at length, leaning on the table. "What kind of spell?"

"Impossible to say," Quessahn said, pulling her eyes away from the knowing gaze of Mara. "Though, considering the method of casting, I'm not sure I'd want to find out."

"We must find out." Jinn turned to Mara, once again seeming to lock Quessahn out of some private understanding. He tapped a finger on the sketched sigils. "This is what we were looking for; this is what will lead us."

Quessahn was troubled by the strange light in Jinn's eyes, the cruel smile on Mara's lips. They turned to the books, ignoring her as she observed them, fuming with disbelief and feeling betrayed by the dim hope that Jinn had truly changed since she'd last seen him.

She recalled the face of a murdered child, the body she'd last seen being taken away by the Watch, and rounded on the pair.

"Why didn't you mention the fingers?" she asked, stealing Jinn's attention though Mara only glanced at her with a knowing smile before returning to her study. "What does it mean?"

"The left hand is a symbol," Jinn said after some consideration. "Many religions hold some significance for it, primarily because most people are dominantly right-handed. In this case it is a symbol of divine will, the hand bound to the purpose of a god's law… the law of Asmodeus."

"Asmodeus?" Quessahn uttered the name in a whisper, a hundred different depictions of Hells and devils rising to the forefront of her mind, classical images of both speculation and arcane fact.

"The left hand of Asmodeus represents the forceful nature of domination, fierce loyalty, and wrath," he continued, holding up his hand and bending the ring finger forward. "The ring finger symbolizes the covenant made and the bound soul." "And when severed?" she asked.

"The soul is claimed, and the body is forfeit, either abandoned or controlled," Mara said, not looking up from her book. "Not that the how of the matter is truly important, but the symbolism of the act-"

"Suggests followers of Asmodeus," Quessahn finished quietly, staring off into the shadows and seeing the murders in a new and frightening light.

"And that is why we agreed to help Rorden Marson," Jinn said.

"What do you mean?" she asked, searching the seriousness in his gold eyes and fearing his answer even as she allowed herself to reluctantly accept the inevitability of what he would say.

"Asmodeus has some stake in these killings," he answered. "One of his servants, an angel known as Sathariel, has been drawn to Sea Ward because of them-"

"And you've come to stop the murders," she said. "To stop whatever this cult is up to and-"

"No," Jinn said and her hope faded, seeing in him what she had not wanted to see, what she had always seen and tried to deny. "We've come for the angel."

"I should have known," she replied. Fury filled her as she pulled her cloak tight and stormed toward the door, shaking her head and cursing herself for a fool. She glanced back, her hand on the door, and saw a familiar glimmer in his gaze that pained her. There was hope, she decided, somewhere between his celestial sense of duty and the mortal heart that had been forced upon him, but she couldn't rely on it to do the right thing when it mattered. "I'll be back," she said. "There's something I need to do."

Then she charged out into the winter night before she could change her mind. She didn't need another chance to search him for what was no longer there, the ghost hiding in every gesture and stare. Snow swirled between the buildings as she walked the circle of crowded buildings around Pages Curious, the cold bracing her and keeping her alert.

The stars were caught behind a net of white clouds, and she let herself be further drawn into the darker places of her magic, letting the stark truths of half-formed, chaotic realms direct her thoughts.

"Better that it be the dark now," she whispered bitterly, a scent of smoke still clinging to her cloak, specks of dried blood caught in the creases of her hands. "Better that I be more prepared."

"I can see it, you know." Mara's voice stopped her cold, and she spun to find the dark-haired woman walking out of the shadows. Quessahn slid a suspicious hand toward her dagger, magic tingling at her fingertips as Mara approached, the same knowing smile upon her face as before. "You love him, don't you?"

The statement pierced her like a knife, sharp and direct, flaying any attempt she might have made to deny the accusation and leaving the truth laid bare on her startled face. Wide eyed, she looked away, shaking her head in disbelief at being caught so unawares. She forgot her prepared spell and released her dagger.

"Not exactly," she replied, anger warming her. Mara spoke as though Quessahn's privacy were a mere puzzle for someone to figure out. But in that moment, her senses still freshly heightened by her magic, she caught another glimpse of the dark aura that hung around Mara, a shroud that squirmed with a life of its own. "You're not human."

"Not remotely," Mara said, still smiling.

They stood facing each other down for long moments. Quessahn's thoughts raced, wondering if Mara would tell Jinn, wondering if the next day would bring questions she didn't want to answer. Again she cursed herself for getting involved. For all of her indignant posturing with Jinn, she'd agreed to help for selfish reasons no less questionable than his.

"Well," she said at length and turned away. "We both have secrets, then."

"No," Mara said, a scratching tone in her voice that lifted gooseflesh on Quessahn's arms. She turned to find a tall, dark figure standing where Mara had been. Tattered, black robes hung thick across sharp shoulders, the cloth fluttering as shadows crept from crevices toward Mara. Thin wisps of stringy, black hair escaped the darkened hood where two pinpoints of coal red light glittered to life above a lionlike smile of sharp teeth. Skin the color of a dark bruise covered the hand that rose from Mara's robes, pointing at Quessahn almost teasingly as she said, "You are the one with a secret."

Quessahn backed away slowly and readied spells upon her tongue, dagger once again comfortable in her grip. But Mara merely turned away, her form melting bit by bit back into the illusion of a dark-haired woman, leaving Quessahn alone in the snow. She shivered as the shadows returned to their places. The hag returned to her shop and her strange alliance with the deva.

Finding her feet, Quessahn turned them back toward the House of Wonder, walking in a daze as she pondered what affect the years had had upon Jinnaoth-and the man she'd once known.