Circle of Skulls

EIGHT

NIGHTAL 21, THE YEAR OF DEEP WATER DRIFTING (1480 DR)

Jinn kicked out, sending another of the undead creatures tumbling down the stairs as he slashed at hands grasping from the walls. Wood and plaster popped and split as the things pressed in upon him. Severed hands and shadowy limbs thumped around his boots, melting into stinking clouds of mist as they made slow progress down the stairs.

Shafts of screeching light splashed against the ceiling from Quessahn's hands, burning all that they touched and briefly illuminating simple faces set in silent screams. Her voice chanted unceasingly, deep with the harsh language of magic. The ebony hands raised against her burning light he cut away, the bodies they protected he cut down. Their flesh split like soggy, rotted wood beneath the edge of his blade. He spun at the sound of raspy moans close to his ear, his sword slicing through a stomach made of naught but ghostly hate, bleeding only a stink of death.

At the bottom of the stairway, a hand caught his left arm, black fingers digging coldly through his skin, burning his soul. Memories flashed through his mind as he struggled to free himself, stabbing the tip of his blade into the wall, causing the thing within to thrash and club at the corporeal barrier. He knew their crude faces. The hand melted away from his arm, and he reversed his stab into yet another of the things. He had seen them once before somewhere. An eager hand closed on his ankle and pulled, dropping him to one leg, off balance.

The memory lost strength as he struggled to stand, hacking at the sinewy wrist near his leg, kicking at the wide-open maw of the thing's groaning face. He fell back as the wrist gave way, his arm and leg numb from the contact as he hit the wall. A silhouette manifested in the dark, tall and thin among the scattered broadsheets near Allek's chair. The pitlike eyes caught him in a bone-chilling embrace, and the memory crawled sluggishly from the thick mire of his ancient soul, whispering a single word.

"Bodak," he gasped as the dark eyes seemed to grow, curving wide like horrible mouths and drawing him further into their depths, though he could feel his body weaken. The void he found in the bodak's gaze howled in his mind, a familiar sound that caused him to shiver as he fought to resist its pull. "This is death," he whispered and felt his pulse grow faint, thumping slower and slower in his ears as he looked into the limitless dark as if visiting an old, abandoned home. "I died there once."

The realization sent a surge of strength into his limbs, and he shoved himself from the wall, charging at the bodak and closing his eyes. He knew blindness could not protect him from the undead thing's gaze, but instinct guided his sword in the dark far better than his ill-equipped eyes. He slashed at the cold and smiled when he found resistance. He stabbed into the nearing groans, feeling their hate and letting it fuel his renewed pulse. The sword play of several millennia spun his feet and flowed through his quick hands as the undead came for him.

But for all his skill, their claws still found him, their eyes still bit at his cold flesh, and their undead bodies refused to fall until only their indomitable will had been extinguished. He imagined himself like the feeble lantern upstairs, diminished and guttering until little but dying sparks remained.

"Too many," he muttered, opening his eyes and trying to regain feeling in his hands, his footing less sure with each feint and charge.

The room shook as Quessahn thundered down the stairs, her litany of arcane rhymes unending, light dancing in waves around her as she spun with spell and dagger, cutting a path through the undead. Jinn used the light, his steel flashing like fire, trailing a misty edge of black flesh just beyond the circle of magic that Quessahn wove with horrible words. For a moment he caught sight of her blackened eyes and pale skin and felt a twinge of regret that he could not place, as if he had somehow driven her to such dark rites.

"To me!" she shouted amid the chanting, holding out her hand.

A bodak materialized between them, and he raised his blade in a powerful stroke, slicing through its torso and letting the stinking chill of its body fall apart around him as he took the eladrin's hand. Energy surged through his arm painfully as she shouted, a circle of undead forming around them, hesitantly reaching through the glow of her ritual dagger.

The circle closed, their black eyes flickering as the air rippled. Quessahn's arm shook violently, and Jinn squeezed her hand, feeling light-headed, the bodaks and the house becoming blurry and indistinct. A collective wail rose among the bodaks as their drooping faces distended further in exaggerated sorrow. Then Jinn lost sight of them all.

Reality blinked out. His gut turned. Arcane phrases slithered like smooth fingers over his body, lifting him into a tenuous, unstable space. It pressed the breath from his lungs, holding him in a brief freefall before letting him go, falling into a green-hued glow.

The night grew colder as Lucian Dregg ambled through Sea Ward, a stench of wine in each steaming breath and a particular delight in the nervous fear he caused in passersby. Maranyuss was unbothered by the cold, keeping within sight of the ward's new and seemingly unwanted rorden, her step quiet and sure as she puzzled at his importance in the seemingly random murders. She eyed the lit windows of grand mansions as she slipped by them unnoticed. Each lilting bit of laughter she heard within could be cut off, silenced forever as far as she was concerned, so long as at the end of it all, she and Jinn found Sathariel.

She smiled at the thought, and it kept her going, though her interest in Dregg waned until evening turned lengthening shadows into pervading dark, a gloom that hid her well from the alert eyes of Dregg's fellow Watchmen. As the lamplighters made their rounds, the rorden's swaggering step seemed to find more purpose, a sudden shrewd sobriety infecting his mannerisms as he turned his boots south in confidence. She wondered at her initial impression of the man as he began to show a certain skill at directing his earlier pleasure toward the cold edge of something approximating duty. He saluted passing patrols, leaving them on their courses without stopping to dress them down and exercise his newfound authority.

His route was direct and sure, and Mara shook her head as he slowed at roughly halfway down Flint Street, stopping to glare at the high walls and lofty towers of the House of Wonder. Mara slid into the shadow of a shade tree north of the house, watching as Dregg paced, his eyes never leaving the wizards' school as if his vision alone might burn the walls to ash. Only the sharp tapping of a walking stick turned him away as a robed figure leaning on a gnarled staff approached from the south. Mara's keen eyes could make out the dark beard and bushy brow beneath the hood, the piercing, glittering eyes of a wizard descending on the waiting Dregg, who swiftly shouted orders to his men, sending them around the block as he awaited the mage.

"Archmage Tallus, I presume?" she whispered softly as the men met, their hushed conversation buzzing incoherently, though she did not expect to glean much. Dregg was a tool to be led along, used, and discarded as the wizard saw fit. Mara doubted Tallus would impart any details. As she waited for their meeting to end, a strange scent crossed her path, faint and enticing.

Sucking in a shuddering breath, she found herself transfixed on the alley at Dregg's back, the darkness calling to her fey blood with a smell as ancient as all of creation.

With a quiet glare, Dregg and Tallus parted, neither seeming pleased with the other. The archmage continued his path north as the rorden turned south, quickly meeting with yet another patrol of the Watch, a group of figures that caught Mara's eye despite her desire to reach the alley. The men did not salute as Dregg approached, their uniforms were ill fitting and unwashed, their weapons less than standard, and their wineskins unheard of among the city's officers.

"Thugs," she muttered quietly, sinking further into the garden's shadows and narrowing her eyes at Dregg's hired men. She suspected whatever was to occur would be coming soon, for even with Dregg in charge, such irregular Watchmen would be easily ousted if not jailed within a day or two. Tallus she eyed more carefully as he passed within several strides of her, his staff digging at the cobbles, his knuckles white on the gnarled wood as he made his hasty way toward Ivory Street. "No," she whispered. "The scheme is not yours either, dear Archmage. This smells of something far older than a limping, nervous wizard and his cruel, half-drunk blade-for-hire."

After both men had gone, she slipped from the shadows, prowling toward Pharra's Alley like a predator sensing prey hiding in the brush. She kept a wary, glancing eye on the House of Wonder as she neared, its wizards and their students toiling within without sense or care of the business going on at their gate. She smirked at their high-minded oblivion, quietly reciting a line from an ancient poem as she eyed the darkness within the alley.

Look down! Look down!

Your towers are much too high!

Ware the fall from your tower wall.

The sky will not protect you.

Turn your eye to the world below,

Else the ground will come up to claim you!

In the dark she studied the cold cobbles, sniffing the air and noting the unlit lantern, creaking on its hook in the winter wind. The ground seemed to hum with power, the area filled with an unmistakable scent though she could not pinpoint its exact source. She turned a wide circle before the house's gates, smiling curiously at the place wizards had dubbed a spellhaunt, a play of tenacious magic that had resisted all attempts to explain or dispel it.

"They dismissed you as an interesting trifle, didn't they?" she said to the ground, almost willing the skulls to appear. "What are you up to, I wonder? And how did you do it?"

The scent was intoxicating, overtaking her with a greed she hadn't felt in decades, an avarice that any night hag worth her own word in the Feywild would gladly betray powerful archfey to satisfy. She breathed deeply, tasting that which she could not yet lay her hands upon.

Souls.

They were a treasure she suspected that all the pitiful creatures shambling in the City of the Dead could only dryly wish for. She studied the haunted ground a moment longer then made swift progress in the path of Archmage Tallus. As she passed homes, towers, taverns, and celebrants, Mara wondered how many might survive the conflict to come, eager to see what end Sea Ward might earn for itself. And though she desired to foil whatever plot Asmodeus had in mind…

The scent of unclaimed souls whetted her appetite for the endgame.

"Naught for now but to listen for the screams," she said under her breath, grinning and wondering if the screams would stop at all.

Jinn blinked, his eyes still adjusting to the half light he found himself in. Damp stone pressed against his cheek, the air stinking of urine, vermin, mold, and things he didn't wish to consider. A soft glow nearby illuminated a wide, stone tunnel, manmade though time and neglect had held reign far longer than any man. Arched and caked with a thick layer of brown and green sludge, the walls glistened. Thin light from distant cracks in the ceiling danced as it reflected off the surface of a thick, rippling mat of steaming liquid too discolored to be called water.

A hand shook Jinn's shoulder as he stirred and sat up, finding Quessahn at his side, the shining ritual dagger in her hand. Her eyes had returned to the pale sky blue he was accustomed to, the ones in which he saw some long-forgotten sense of regret reflecting back at him.

"Are you all right?" she asked, and he nodded in response, the spinning in his head still slowing down from her spell.

"No need to ask where we are, I take it," he said.

"I took a chance in getting us down here," she replied. "But if the house is sealed as tight as I expect, we won't be followed any time soon."

"Better to take a chance on the sewers than be dead," he muttered, rubbing feeling back into his arms where the bodaks had struck him, their claw marks angry, red lines on his near-white skin. After a moment he noticed Quessahn staring, her eyes fixed on the swirling black symbols that decorated his arms from wrist to elbow. He quickly pulled his sleeves down, covering the markings and startling the eladrin.

"W-we'll rest here for a bit," she stammered and stood, raising her dagger and peering into the dark in both directions. "I just need to get our bearings."

Jinn was about to reply when he recalled the bundle of letters in his coat. Leaving Quessahn to her nervous pacing, he pulled the letters out and unfolded the first of them, narrowing his eyes at the precise yet flowing script of Rilyana Saerfynn.

My dearest Allek,

It has been some time since we last spoke, and I regret each day that passes that I do not call upon you, but it seems I am forced to break that silence and humbly ask for your help. Callak grows more protective of me and more violent every day, as though the bottle he drowns his life in replaces that life with something else, something sinister that frightens me. I fear angering him at home, yet in public it is the attentions of your swordcaptain, Lucian Dregg, that I must fend away lest Callak become enraged…

Jinn finished the letter swiftly and turned to the next, scanning their contents and shaking his head in disbelief as the secret tryst between Allek Marson and Rilyana Saerfynn unfolded before his eyes. He couldn't understand why Allek had never mentioned the young woman or her troubles with her brother or Lucian Dregg. Passages concerning Callak Saerfynn he began to study more closely.

Callak disappears without explanation almost every night. Though he returns home smelling of ale and wine, or worse, there is something in his eyes, the way he dismisses his behavior, that disturbs me. More and more he is visited by Archmage Tallus and that simpering toad of an apprentice, Gorrick. I am kept away from their secret meetings, however each time Tallus looks at me I feel the need to scour his lust from my skin with boiling water…

Jinn noted the date of the last letter as being within the previous month. Folding the letters again and tucking them back in his coat, he leaned back, the names and events described tumbling through his thoughts as he wondered at the game he had been drawn into.

"This is madness," he whispered, though his words were amplified by the acoustics of the sewer tunnel.

"Pardon?" Quessahn asked.

"What do you know of the Saerfynn family?" he said, standing and eager to be on the move again.

"I suppose it depends on the day and the rumor," she answered, nervously glancing to the northwest passage as she spoke. "The siblings are alone on their estate, sole heirs to their family's fortune. Callak is an arrogant drunk, and Rilyana seems to have a different man-or woman-on her arm at every outing, though many seem to think this is only to anger her jealous brother."

"Jealous?" Jinn pressed.

"It is rumored that she and Callak are far more than just brother and sister," she replied quietly, as if the statement alone might conjure an image of the implied perversity. "Why do you ask?"

"Most peculiar," Jinn muttered, ignoring her question. "Come. We still have another house to visit before dawn."

"No, not yet," she said, stopping him. "There is someone we should speak to first."

"We have no time. Tallus is already-"

"Under the impression that we are dead," she said, sharply finishing his words and fixing him with an almost accusing stare. "And we still have no idea what he is planning."

"And you know someone who might?"

"Perhaps," she said, turning away. "But we'll need to go deeper."

Jinn stood still, watching her navigate the narrow ledge alongside the dark green muck that flowed through the sewer. The letters weighed heavily in his pocket, another name added to his list of possible conspirators, and he wondered if any of the names would matter at all in the end. He had not come to chase murdered bodies of the upper classes and the more he learned of those who might be involved the more he felt drawn away from his true task. He eyed the bobbing light of Quessahn's dagger suspiciously as she pressed deeper into the sewers beneath Sea Ward.

"This 'someone,'" he called out to her. "They live in a sewer?"

She paused and turned, approaching close enough that he could see the determination on her face, her earlier nervousness, the hesitation he sensed, gone.

"I have seen Mara's true form," she said coldly. "How is it a night hag comes to an alliance with a deva?"

He matched her cold stare for several breaths, crossing his arms defensively as the spark of an old shame flared to life. He had made his peace with the decision long past, justifying any means he felt were necessary to hunt Sathariel, but in Quessahn's eyes he briefly recalled his view of the world as it had been before he had made such a dark pact. It was both encouraging and saddening that there were still those who might judge his choice.

"We share a common enemy," he finally answered.

"Sathariel? The angel?" she asked.

"Asmodeus," he replied, a grim silence falling between them at the uttering of the devil-god's name, but he broke it easily, holding no reverence or superstition for the names of even the darkest of gods and needing no unspoken secret to protect him from Quessahn's judgment. "Maranyuss hurt him somehow, and he cursed her, took from her all she had earned, and forced her to live among mortals, cut off and abandoned by her kind."

Quessahn stepped closer, nodding quietly in understanding, though a hard look remained in her eyes.

"I'm not judging you-not entirely-but do not think you are the only one with less-than-scrupulous allies," she said and turned back on her path, her dagger growing brighter. "Tallus can wait, as can your angel, but I need to know more about the murders and how to stop them if I am to be of any help to you."

"And how do you propose to find this out?" he asked, reluctantly following her, the stench of the sewer fading with every breath he took.

"By speaking to someone who was here three hundred years ago when the murders first started," she answered as their footsteps echoed through the winding tunnels.

Gorrick stood in the shadows of a well-tended garden, fantastical topiaries populating the inner walls of the estate as he watched silhouettes dance and laugh within tall, decorative windows. Casually he straightened his robes and fixed his short, golden hair, smiling as he pictured the effect his presence would have on the lady of the house, his arrival meaning nothing less than a direct order from Archmage Tallus.

He strode along the garden path confidently, nodding knowingly at nervous guards as he approached the grand double doors. Few of the older families had survived the Spellplague, but the one that resided there was one, old name and wealth stretching back centuries, waiting upon his call. It was a bloodline prepared at his word to lay down gold and status to answer the summons he bore.

The doors opened without a sound, a doorman averting his gaze as Gorrick entered the front hallway lined with ancient paintings of ancestors above a white marble floor. The house seneschal arrived to conduct the affairs of the family and see to the initial needs and comfort of their expected guests. At sight of Gorrick, the tall, thin man sneered, stopping in his tracks and folding his white-gloved hands before turning to summon the lady of the house.

Gorrick returned the sneer, though only to the arrogant seneschal's back. He had no time for rebuking the staff; Tallus's business took precedent over such petty concerns. A side door opened, and a burst of music and conversation rushed into the entrance hall. Lady Lhaerra Loethe swept through the door, her voluptuous curves wrapped in crimson, lace, and jewels, a Winterfirst mask dangling casually from her hand as she turned, smiling, to meet her guest.

The door closed behind her, and her smile faded, her jubilant demeanor and self-importance slipping away at the sight of the apprentice wizard. Gorrick smiled at her discomfort.

"It is too early," she said sharply, regarding him with a half-lidded gaze.

Gorrick scowled in disappointment. "Things are moving swiftly, Lhaerra," he said, eyeing her finery in disgust. "The archmage has little time to spare for your… festivities."

Lhaerra drew closer, the powerful scent of her perfume burning his nose as she gracefully crossed her arms, gesturing to the secret door that hid behind a large painting on the southern wall. Gorrick imagined he could smell the blood and sweat emanating from the secret chamber if not for Lhaerra's overzealous attempt to smell like an entire rose garden.

"Tell your master that all is prepared for the rite," she said, "and that we shall be ready within a bell."

"I shall," Gorrick replied. He turned to leave. "Make sure to have the entire family present for the ritual."

"Truly?" Lhaerra asked, a sudden lilt of hope in her voice.

"As I said, things are moving swiftly."

"And the other families?" she pressed, laying a soft-gloved hand on his shoulder.

"The other families have their parts to play as well," he replied, glancing sidelong at her and enjoying the desperate excitement in her eyes. "And at least one shall have their final rewards."

He removed her hand and left her speechless on the doorstep, striding confidently through the garden on his way back to Tallus's tower. His errands finished, he quietly wished good hunting to the circle of skulls and looked forward to a long and bloody night.