by Ari Marmell
They followed, some few steps behind, as Thomas led them around one of the massive stone columns and into a tiny side passage that might well have gone completely unnoticed without his guidance. Torches in sconces burned cheerfully, shedding more than sufficient light to brighten the windowless corridor. They passed several younger priests on their way out, greeting each with a simple nod. Fortunately, as it was afternoon, the sleeping chambers were unlikely to be occupied.
“So, my brothers,” Thomas said conversationally as they walked, “what order do you hail from?”
Gork's expression grew momentarily alarmed beneath his hood and bandages. “My brethren and I serve, ah, the Church of Saint Ignatius,” he said, pulling from his memory the first religious figure that captive priest had mentioned.
“Indeed,” the Father said. “Truly a steadfast brotherhood, yours.”
Unsure how to respond, the kobold kept his mouth shut. He noticed, between the sounds of footsteps, that Gimmol was mumbling to himself. He wanted to reach back and smack the gremlin—monks, Gork was fairly certain, didn't mumble unless they were praying—but doing so would probably be an even more obvious infraction than the gremlin's idiocy. Gork gritted his teeth and stayed silent.
Father Thomas finally led them to a line of doors, simple and unadorned. Given the narrow expanse of stone between each, the rooms must have been tiny indeed.
Thomas opened the nearest, then stepped back. “Does this meet with your approval, Brothers?”
Gork made a show of looking the minuscule cell over. “It does indeed, Father. I…” He stopped, curiosity slowly giving way to a sinking feeling of dread, as a gentle tickling wafted across his nostrils and he smelled the faint scent of herbs. He spun and saw the priest's hand extended and the last traces of dried and powdered leaves settling through the air.
Oh, Stars, what's he done? He was already moving toward the old human, several of the others falling in beside and behind.
“All-Seeing Divine,” Thomas prayed, backpedaling before their advance, “gods of my ancestors, gods of my children, gods of my soul, I beseech thee now to shield thy servant from danger, from those who would corrupt thy house, those measured as both his enemies and thine.”
Okay, the man wasn't retreating that quickly, had even slowed down as his prayer reached its end, so why couldn't they seem to catch him? Why did everything seem to be…slowing…
Oh, dragonshit.
Gork's limbs simply went away. He could see them, and he wasn't feeling particularly dizzy or sleepy or anything; he just had no feeling anywhere in his body. He teetered, frozen, keeping his feet through exquisite balance and sheer luck. He heard some of the others toppling behind him, but couldn't even look to see who'd fallen.
“Foolish creatures,” Father Thomas announced. “Did you think I couldn't see through so transparent a charade?” His robes swishing around his boots, the priest stepped forward and placed his hands on Cræosh's hood. “I know already what you are not. I would know what you are.” And with that, he yanked cloth and bandages back, revealing a swamp-green face and squinting red eyes.
“Orc!” the priest hissed, again retreating a pace. He sneered in growing comprehension at the other “monks” arrayed before him. “The Dark Lord has far more gall than even I gave him credit for. To send goblins into Brenald, into my temple!” He smiled, then, and it was not the kindly smile of an elderly priest. “Well, if you don't mind waiting here a few moments, I'll be back with the King's Watch. I'm sure they're going to have all sorts of interesting questions for you to answer.” With a dramatic flourish, Father Thomas moved to depart.
The instant the man's back was turned, Gimmol advanced, as casual as a summer stroll, and plunged his short sword into Father Thomas's back. The pristine white of the old man's robe became a deep, rich red. He gasped once, staggered, and toppled.
“Well,” Gimmol said, practically sauntering back toward his companions, “that should about settle that.” He knelt beside Cræosh and Belrotha and cast his spells. Flexing fingers and twitching feet were evidence enough that they would recover within seconds.
He'd just risen, in fact, to move toward the next of the fallen goblins, when a shadow flickered across Gork's face. Thankfully, Gork wasn't the only one to see it, since he couldn't even move to shout a warning.
“Down!” Cræosh shouted, wobbling unsteadily to his feet, far too late to do any good.
Father Thomas, his teeth clenched so tightly against the pain that his jaw creaked, had arrested his fall, bracing one hand against the wall. With the other, shaking but strong, he yanked a hand-axe from within his robe and swung at Gimmol's unprotected head.
And then Belrotha was there. With a banshee howl, standing tall against the drug that hadn't yet faded entirely from her body, she hurled the gremlin clear of harm's way—not to mention a good twenty feet up the corridor—and took across her ribs the blow meant for Gimmol's head.
Had Thomas himself been uninjured, the blow might have penetrated both her leather jerkin and her thick hide—but he wasn't, and it didn't. Belrotha staggered, grunting once at the pain. Then she exhaled a single hot, pungent breath into Thomas's face and crushed his skull against the wall.
“What were you saying?” Cræosh asked casually as he helped the battered gremlin back to his feet.
“That…should about settle it,” the gremlin repeated painfully. “Sorry about that.”
“Sorry?” the orc asked, amazed. “We'd all be fucked if you—how did you do that, anyway?”
“Magic,” Gimmol said cryptically, kneeling so he could attend to the others.
“Well, no shit, magic. But we were frozen. I thought you had to move and talk and all that to cast a spell.”
“That's true. Actually, I had a protective spell going before the old man paralyzed you.”
“That's what you were doing!” Gork burst out as the gremlin's magics sent feeling coursing back through his muscles. “I thought you were just talking to yourself.”
Gimmol shrugged. “I try not to talk to myself. There are so many more interesting conversationalists about.”
“But how did you know he was going to do that?” the kobold insisted.
“Well, I didn't know, exactly. But you saw what Havarren's list said about him. ‘Herbalist and alchemist.’ Some of us know to take that stuff seriously.”
Cræosh and Katim both stared at their feet, seeing as how they'd laughed and scoffed at that when first studying the scroll they'd been given. “So he's a healer,” the orc had snickered. “That should take about half a minute.”
“So,” Gimmol continued, “I cast a spell to cleanse the body of poisons. It's not all that potent, really—I normally use it for sobering up—but I figured that anything he could throw at us would either be pretty weak, or at least take a while to fully work its way—”
“I think,” Katim said before Gork could explode, “that he meant…to ask how you knew that Thomas…had seen through our…disguises.”
“I'm kind of curious about that myself,” Cræosh added.
“Oh.” He sounded a little crestfallen. “Well, it was sort of Gork's fault, actually. Don't get me wrong,” he added quickly, sensing the coming diatribe. “I mean, obviously you had no way of knowing. But I've read up on a lot of this, of course, so I knew—”
“Knew what?” Cræosh demanded.
Gimmol smiled ruefully. “Ignatius is the patron saint of health and beauty. There's no way they'd ever accept a colony of lepers, or the deformed, into their order. The instant you used Ignatius's name, Father Thomas only had to look at us to know you were lying.”
“Oh,” Gork said after a moment's pause.
“Yeah,” Gimmol agreed.
“Well,” Cræosh said, glancing around, “it's done. This corridor's pretty well abandoned at the moment, but it ain't gonna be too long until someone finds him. We want to be out of here before that happens. And we still have work to do here.” He shrugged philosophically at the others
' puzzled expressions. “We're supposed to ‘display' the bodies, remember? This is messy, but it's just a start. Let's get to it.”
Nobody paid much attention to a procession of monks wandering through the temple; or rather, they were noticed as newcomers, but otherwise went unremarked. And thus unremarked, the Demon Squad remained also unmolested as they proceeded from the tiny hallway, through the chapel, and on toward the front doors. It took every iota of control to maintain that steady, plodding pace when every instinct screamed at them to run, to be well and truly gone before their handiwork could be discovered.
But when the huge temple doors boomed shut behind them and the midday sun prodded ardently at the heavy fabric of their robes, they still heard neither hue nor cry from behind, no alarm of any type. They were clear.
“What now?” Gimmol asked.
“There.” Cræosh pointed. A small crowd was gathered alongside the temple's side, and not a few clerical robes—both the white of priests and the brown of monks—bustled within. The various clergymen handed out small bundles of dried meats and loaves of a hard bread to the assembled citizens. “See if you all can't find a loaf of something to hand out.”
“Growing charitable in your old age, Cræosh?” Gork asked sourly.
The orc snorted. “It's a place to hide. And I'd rather stay near the temple.”
“Gloating over your handiwork?” For some reason, the kobold seemed more bound and determined than ever to pick a fight.
“Okay, oh genius, you tell me how the fuck you were planning to find Brookwhisper, Lirimas, or Bekay.”
“Well, I was…That is, I thought we, umm…”
“Uh-huh.” Cræosh shook his head. “Such planning. Such forethought. Tell me something, are you this meticulous when planning your thefts, too, or do you prefer to trust those to luck?”
“Your point?” Gork asked, his voice sullen.
“My point is that once word of what happened to Father Thomas gets—” The point, then, was made far more eloquently than Cræosh could have managed by the sudden scream from within the temple. Some peculiar property of the hall's acoustics magnified it until it burst in a torrent from the doors and windows, flooding over the crowd. Voices petered out; hands froze in awkward poses; even the noisy chewing of tough, cheap viands ceased midbite.
The crowd—a living, amoebic thing—drifted a single step toward that holiest of structures, only to flinch away as a second scream, even louder and more distorted than the first, escaped the edifice. Several of the throng's more excitable citizens began babbling about ghosts and demons, and some few actually turned tail and bolted.
“The watch is gonna be here in seconds,” Cræosh hissed, already drifting toward the shifting crowds, staring as though he, too, was focused morbidly on the source of the screams. “Get the fuck over there, and spread out!”
They sifted into the crowd, subtly, deliberately—not that it mattered overmuch. Cræosh and Katim could have stripped naked and waltzed through the streets, and no one would have noticed, so fixated was the crowd on the temple.
Gork, though he followed, seemed oddly reluctant, his feet dragging stubbornly beneath the hem of his robe. He glanced up only when Belrotha brushed past him.
“What Gork's problem, anyway?” she snapped quietly at him.
“It's just…I think I'm allergic to charity.”
“Me understand,” the ogre said sympathetically. “Me allergic to honey. Me get hives wherever me touch it. Lucky that honey not common in Itho.”
“Ouch,” Gork said, commiserating despite himself. “I can't imagine what getting hives on your mouth and tongue must feel like.”
“Mouth? Tongue?” Belrotha stared as though he'd just sprouted a tuber of some sort from his forehead. “What you do with honey?”
“Uhh…” Gork couldn't help but feel that now wasn't really the time for this. “We eat it, same as anyone else.”
“Eat?!” Belrotha's voice touched registers that the kobold would never have believed she could reach. Several people in the crowd glanced momentarily her way before returning to the drama being played out—or rather, sounded out—before them.
“Well, yes. What do you do with it?” His mouth formed the words, even as his face tightened in obvious horror of whatever answer he might receive.
“Not eat,” she avowed. Gork had never heard her so revolted. “In Itho, we—”
“Hey!” Cræosh interrupted with a hiss, reappearing before them. “Keep the fuck up, will you?”
Belrotha offered Gork a single shrug and moved to follow the orc. Gork trailed behind, shaking his head and keeping rather more distance from the ogre than was strictly necessary.
And not, as it happened, a moment too soon. Barely had the squad insinuated themselves throughout the crowd when a small contingent of the city watch—perhaps half a dozen, hands clasped tightly on the hilts of their swords—dashed around a nearby corner. Even as they pounded up the steps, their boots clacking dully against the stone, the doors burst open, unleashing a small tide of parishioners. Rather than try to fight their way through, the guardsmen leapt aside at the last minute, allowing the sudden flow of humanity to play itself out. Only then did they proceed through the towering double doors.
A handful reappeared only a short while later, their faces bloodless, one or two wiping vomit from the corners of their lips. (Katim had been particularly proud of her idea to tack Thomas's entrails to the wall in the starburst pattern of his temple's holy symbol, and later insisted on taking full credit for the humans' obvious discomfort.) The soldiers took up post at the base of the stairs, presumably to keep any curious bystanders from barging in. A few of the more belligerent tried anyway, spouting off about the temple being “the people's property,” but when a particularly irritable watchman clubbed one of said belligerents over the head with the pommel of his sword, the others decided the guards had made their case and backed off.
People shifted, voices muttered, feet scuffed, soldiers scowled, minutes passed with all the alacrity of an insomniac sloth. Cræosh began to worry; the longer this took, the more likely someone would pick one of the “new monks” out of the crowd and associate them with what had happened….
A deafening bellow from behind dug into the crowd, a nigh physical presence parting them down the center to allow a singularly imposing figure to approach the doors.
“See?” Cræosh whispered to his nearest companion—Katim, as it happened. “I knew if we waited long enough…” He paused as the figure passed him by, the ground seeming to shake beneath the newcomer's sandaled feet. “He's a big one, ain't he?” the orc noted.
The man in question was actually only about Cræosh's height, but his chest, his arms, his legs, even his neck bulged with flesh-wrapped boulders masquerading as muscles. His dark-toned skin—largely exposed to the air, for in addition to his sandals, he wore only leather leggings and an X-shaped baldric on which hung a mighty axe—bulged with every step, every movement, seemingly every thought. His goatee, the only hair on his head, bristled ahead of him as though it, and not his voice, were carving his path through the assembly.
This, then, unless Havarren's description was dramatically flawed, would be Kuren Bekay. Titan among men, ally to the enigmatic Ananias duMark, one of the great heroes who'd thwarted King Morthûl's previous efforts, and, of most immediate importance, longtime friend to one Father Thomas. The guards, after exchanging a terror-filled glance, fled his path as swiftly as the crowd had, allowing him unfettered access to the temple. No one protested the inequity; no one dared.
“How long, do you think?” Cræosh asked casually, his voice still low.
Katim shrugged, a gesture he was aware of only due to the rustling of her robe. “Two minutes or so to…reach the room in which we…left Thomas. Almost a full minute…of shock and grief. I'll say three…for him to rail against fate…and the gods, and to threaten…the watch if they do not…quickly find the killers. One more…to get back out here.”
“You gave him two to get in,” Gork reminded her.
“But he'll be enraged and…he'll be running on his…way out.” She played the numbers back in her head. “Seven minutes.”
Cræosh shook his head. “Nah, don't think so. I know his type; he's gonna skip the shock and grief and go straight to the shouting. Six minutes, tops.”
“Eight,” Gork said, appearing briefly at Cræosh's other side before vanishing once more into the crowd, lest they be too easily spotted together. “Just for variety.”
It was, in fact, six minutes and forty-three seconds before the large man reappeared in the temple doorway. His fists were clenched so tightly that Cræosh swore he heard the knuckles creaking over the crowd. One of the watchmen appeared behind Bekay and whispered something, only to vanish back into the chapel's shadows—completely off his feet—with a single shove from the mountainous fellow. Then, staring straight ahead, the warrior descended the shallow steps and, knocking aside anyone who didn't clear the path fast enough, made for a nearby thoroughfare and disappeared.
“Gork,” Cræosh whispered as loudly as he dared. “Gork!”
The kobold again materialized from nowhere, crinkled the hood of his robe in what must have been a nod, and slipped away after Bekay.
The traffic on this, one of Brenald's major streets, was less tightly packed than the temple's surroundings, but heavy enough in its own right. People still scattered from Bekay's path; even those who hadn't yet heard rumors of the horror at the temple recognized his expression as an indicator that this was a man better left unimpeded and undisturbed. Gork, however, was finding it difficult to keep up, for while there were fewer legs for him to scramble over, around, or between, those legs were in constant motion. Worse, the farther he got from the temple, the less his robe served as adequate camouflage.
