by Edward Bolme
She sat on the stool, dropping her shoulder bag next to it. She waited, legs drawn up and back hunched in uncomfortable self-consciousness. She heard the hearth fire popping and hissing as it wound its way down to coals. The light grew dimmer and the air cooler, yet she dared not leave the building for fear of missing the courier. Neither could she bring herself to rebuild the fire or light lamps, for, as the darkness grew, so did the chance of stumbling over a dismembered body, and that was a possibility she wished to avoid.
As she waited, she found her thoughts drifting to her parents. She was surrounded by death, conscious of the lives that had ended so abruptly that cold winter’s day. She knew that some of these men and women had left behind families, a legacy of pain and want that they could not ease. Just like her father.
She had never known her mother’s husband. He had been killed by Ekur, one of the powerful priests of Gilgeam and ruler of Kehrsyn’s hometown of Shussel. Ekur had ruled with a hand that was incompetent in action and potent in reaction, and he had lusted after Kehrsyn’s mother Sarae. Loving and devoted, Sarae refused Ekur’s obscene propositions, turning down even a wealth of livestock and spices for the dalliance of a single evening. In the end, Sarae’s loyalty turned and bit her as does a trained asp, for Ekur’s soldiers brought the hapless woman to him, killing her husband in the process. Ekur didn’t take the widow in. He simply took her.
As a child, Kehrsyn had wished that she could have known her father, had someone to love her and protect her in all the ways her mother, desperate just to find enough food, could not. Ever since the pivotal spring day by the plum tree, when she passed out of childhood and into adulthood, Kehrsyn had since wished that her father could have known her, to have had the opportunity to hold his child even once before he’d died. She found it unquenchably sad that the man had died for Sarae’s faithfulness without ever getting the chance to see the fruit of their union, and the grief was made all the worse that she, that child, had been an extra mouth to feed, an extra burden on one who unwillingly sacrificed her mate on the altar of love and devotion.
By the time Kehrsyn shook herself from her melancholy, it was entirely dark outside, and she heard a light winter rain falling, droplets tinkling on the shutters and trickling down the walls. She could see a faint red glow in the kitchen from the dying embers of the hearth, but no other light remained. Assailed by the chill from without and her longing from within, Kehrsyn moved to the corner of the room, gathered a few cushions and pillows by touch, and arranged some of them on top of her to keep her warm and some beneath her for comfort. Her bag did its usual double duty as her pillow. She intended merely to rest, or maybe to catch a catnap, while she waited for the courier.
The pillows soon began to warm to her body. Brooding over memories that never were and lulled by the weeping sky, Kehrsyn let herself slide into a slight doze.
At first, Kehrsyn didn’t resister the significance of the fact that she’d heard the floor creak, but then she heard the whispered, bubbly voices of the dead, maddeningly just beyond understanding, like a string of familiar syllables jumbled in a nonsensical pattern.
She heard the corpses rising to their feet, whispering of blood and dark magic. They moved quietly, but in the dead of night every sliding footstep rang like a tolling bell. Their murmuring voices drew closer. Their eyes, glowing like lanterns, scanned the darkness looking for the living. The nearest zombie’s neck was broken, and his head lolled around, casting irregular patterns of light and darkness as he looked for her, calling in the gurgling tongue of the deceased.
She heard the door close and latch, sealing her in with the shuffling, hungry dead. She reached for her rapier but found herself naked …
Kehrsyn awoke with a start. She glanced around, eyes wide, pupils dilated in fear. She saw that one of the corpses was indeed not where she’d last seen it. Dread gripped her heart, and bile rose in her throat, impelled by her empty stomach. She saw a flicker of light in the kitchen, a dim splash moving in the darkness. It vanished. She heard the sliding sound again, and the feet of a body in the kitchen began to slide out of sight.
Confused, Kehrsyn shrank back into the cushions. She pulled one of the pillows out from behind her and placed it in front. She panned her head back and forth, looking for movement, ears tuned for any noise, mouth open to aid the sharpness of her hearing.
In the kitchen, she saw a silhouette step into her line of sight. It held a bull’s-eye lantern in one hand, easily recognized by the telltale red glow of the light behind its slatted louvers. Whoever-it-was opened the slats the tiniest amount and shone the light on the body on the floor.
“Nah,” a male voice said, adding some explanation Kehrsyn couldn’t quite hear.
He moved on, and two others followed him, passing through Kehrsyn’s line of sight one by one. She heard the leader mutter under his breath, and a few moments later the other two passed by again, heading to the door, carrying one of the dead bodies between them, grunting quietly with the dead weight.
Hoping to evade detection, for it seemed they were seeking out the corpses that littered the building, Kehrsyn moved more of the pillows until she lay against the wall, concealed by soft cushions. As far as she knew, only her head was exposed, and that she kept hidden behind a large bolster with her hair veiling her face so that her eyes might not reflect the lantern light.
There she lay as the intruders moved around their grisly task, quietly moving corpse after corpse out of the building. Kehrsyn watched their progress carefully. They cleared her room, they cleared the kitchen, and they began to move deeper within the house.
Knowing they expected no one in the building to move voluntarily, Kehrsyn decided to discover more about the body snatchers. It might shed some light on the events surrounding the troublesome wand. She wriggled out from behind the pillows and worked her way across the room, against the wall where the floorboards were less likely to creak. She avoided the kitchen, in case the group chose to meet—or, worse yet, eat—there when they were finished. Instead, by dint of careful timing, she sidled across the hall and sneaked to the front room, where she hid among the camping baggage.
She watched as shadowy figures shuffled in and out, bearing their dead burdens. She heard the cold rain outside, and, hidden among the sounds of droplets splashing in the darkened streets, the distinctive drumming sound of rain on oiled tarpaulins.
As the activity wound down, the leader of the expedition stood near the front door, sipping brandy from a hip flask. Kehrsyn could smell the potent aroma spreading through the chill air.
One of the workers came in, dripping with rainwater. He wiped his face with a rag, then blew his nose loudly.
“They’s all loaded up, sir. It’s rather more harder than loading cordwood, if you take my meanin’.”
The leader took another swig, recorked his flask with a satisfied sigh, and asked, “How many do we have?”
“I sure’n lost count, sir,” came the reply. “But we got ’em all, and we can’t do none better nor that, if you take my meanin’.”
“Fair enough,” said the leader, shrugging.
“So where to, sir?”
“We’ll load them aboard Bow Before Me.”
“What’s that, sir?”
The leader waved a hand with some irritation and explained, “The merchant ship that came in the day before yesterday.”
“But that’s Zhentarim, sir,” said the henchman with grave concern. “I don’t think we want to be doin’ that, if you take my meanin’.”
Kehrsyn picked up the slightest pause before the leader answered, “Let’s take a look at this carefully now, right? It’s clear as a bell why this will be no problem.”
He’s stalling, thought Kehrsyn.
“What reasons would those be, sir?” asked the concerned lackey.
Another brief pause, then, “First of all, if these bodies get discovered in our possession, we’re in serious trouble. Let’s let the Zhentarim take the risk of stashing them unti
l we’re ready, even if they don’t know they’re helping. Second, it’s a merchant ship. Anyone who sees us loading things up won’t think it’s out of the ordinary. People load and unload things from merchant ships all the time, day and night. Merchant ships have tight schedules, you know. But if we took them back to the temple, neighbors might see. They might talk.”
The lackey scratched the back of his head through the hood of his cloak and asked, “You sure we’ll be able to do this without them catching us?”
“The ship’s guards don’t know any more about what gets loaded than anyone else. They’ll be happy to stay inside by the fire on a night like tonight. And if they don’t, well, I can talk my way past them, no trouble. Trust me.”
“Yes, sir.” The lackey took a few steps down the ladder, then stopped to look one last time at the leader. “Glory to Tiamat,” he said.
The leader nodded and said, “All glory.”
Kehrsyn was unsure whether someone might still be guarding the building, watching for any stragglers who might return, so she spent the rest of the night inside. She was, at least, comfortable with the assumption that no one else would enter, there being truly nothing left of interest in the building, so she rearranged the pillows on the floor, scrounged several blankets from downstairs, and settled into a light sleep, fitful with dreams of the dead. Throughout the night, she listened to the rain, which gradually increased from a drizzle to a steady drumming, broken only occasionally by the faint grumble of thunder.
A brisk triple rap at the door roused her from her slumber. She sat up, blinking. A tinge of light told her that morning had finally come. The door rattled with another three raps, and Kehrsyn stood up a little too quickly, lurching to the side as the blood struggled to keep her brain functioning. She staggered over to the door and opened it, to see a stranger wrapped in an oiled overcoat, shifting from one foot to the other, his breath condensing in the air.
Great, thought Kehrsyn. Another cold, wet day. I don’t want to face this. Not yet.
“Olaré,” said the stranger with forced cheerfulness. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Wh—what do you want?” asked Kehrsyn.
“Delivery from the wizard Eileph, miss,” he replied. “With his compliments.”
He fumbled with his coat, eventually producing a small bundle carefully wrapped in waxed paper and bound with twine.
“Oh,” said Kehrsyn as she took the bundle. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
She moved to close the door.
“Miserable weather, eh miss?” he asked, just a bit too loudly, bouncing on his heels and blowing on his hands.
“Hmm? Yeah … miserable.”
“That’s right, a right miserable day,” he echoed, forcing a smile.
Understanding wedged its unwelcome way into Kehrsyn’s mind. She said something unintelligible (and, truth be told, probably incoherent) as she fished around in her coin pouch. She pulled forth a copper and was about to give it to the messenger, when she reconsidered and gave him a silver instead.
“Thank you, miss,” he said with honest cheer, touched one finger to his eyebrow, and made his hunch-shouldered way down the ladder again.
Kehrsyn stared at the rain falling in the streets, her view intermittently obscured by the steam of her breath. At least, she thought, the rain has washed away the last of the grimy snow.
She closed the door, blinked, and stretched out the tightness in her back. Noticing that the inside of the building was no warmer than the outside, Kehrsyn wrapped herself up in her cloak and investigated the kitchen. She found a few cold, half-eaten sausages and some stale bread to break her fast, while thinking morosely about the wonderful meal she’d had at Wing’s Reach. There was nothing to drink except various alcohol, the very thought of which turned her stomach. Instead, she found a large, clean bowl and placed it on the front stoop to catch some rainwater.
While she waited for it to fill, she unwrapped the bundle to look at the reconstructed wand. It was a beautiful piece and a remarkable forgery. It felt good and solid. The only mark was a crack running around its middle, slightly rough around the edges. It reminded Kehrsyn of a cracked paving stone. She rewrapped the false staff and placed it in her bag, secreting her bag behind some other gear in the front room.
She opened the door, picked up the bowl, and drank her fill of the chill, clean water, then looked at the dark stains of dried blood on the floor. The midnight body snatchers had taken all but three of the residents. Two were the most grotesquely hacked outlaw corpses. The third was the old dog. The others, including all of the Tiamatans who had died during the fight, were gone. The intruders had left behind weapons, gear, and all the rest—everything but what the people had been wearing.
She thought better of leaving the false staff there. She pulled it out and thrust it through her sash at the small of her back, giving her sash an extra twist and using the tension to lock the staff in place. She left her bag. It would be a hindrance where she intended to go, and it wouldn’t get wet inside the house.
Her stomach growling as it wrestled with the mean breakfast, Kehrsyn decided to exercise some practicality. While she could no longer get vengeance on the Furifaxians for using her, branding her, and stealing a magic item from the cultured and rather dashing Massedar, at least she could extract some payment for services rendered.
She performed a cursory search for coins and valuables through the building, checking the shelves and occasional footlocker in the bedrooms on the bottom floor. She tried to ignore the personal effects she encountered as they reminded her of the lives that had ended and gave her the uncomfortable feeling that she might, technically, be robbing the grave.
In the end, she found a small collection of silvers and coppers, and one gold piece. She left the building, huddled beneath her cloak against the rain. The small trove weighed heavily in one white-knuckled fist. She could almost feel the blood dripping from her fingers.
She ended up giving it all away to destitute refugees before she’d walked twenty blocks.
Tiglath sat in her study, her quill pen held unheeded in her fingers, the ink long since dry. She’d put the last words down around dawn and hadn’t moved much since. She stared blankly out her window at the unending rain. The downpour seemed a gray and misty veil drawn between her cult and the rest of the world, a barrier of mistrust, misunderstanding, and misinformation. The walls of her study were also barriers, which seemed as the walls of a prison cell, dividing her from the rest of her flock.
She had never felt so isolated, so alone. Even when she’d been suffering in the harem of the vain and cruel god-king Gilgeam, the others of the harem had borne the horrors alongside her, and that shared torment had forged them into a self-supporting sorority of suffering.
She had broken those bonds, escaped, and found not only her freedom but a position of power serving a deity of strength and purpose. She had sworn vengeance upon Gilgeam for the pain he had caused her (and others), and Tiamat had given her the ability to see that vengeance through.
In the fifteen years since Gilgeam’s death, the gap between what she had set out to do and what she was doing had grown, until it seemed that her people were on one side of the gap and she was on the other.
She felt as if she were captaining a ship and someone belowdecks had cut the connection between the ship’s wheel and its rudder. Were these thoughts simply a reflection of her own self-doubt, or were her survival instincts giving her fair warning? And if she was right, how much longer before the crew mutinied?
She’d spent the night attempting to make some sense of it, to find an underlying order that proved that shadows moved behind her. She’d made a list of all the abnormalities, all the strange little events and unusual reactions that had piqued her curiosity throughout the past few years. The result was maddeningly incomplete. Anomalies, yes—even some events that could be construed as evidence of insubordination—but not enough.
In fairness and hope, she’d also made a list of thi
ngs that had gone better than expected. Neither did that list provide her with an answer. All it left her with, in fact, was a study table even more cluttered with papers of incomplete stories.
The thief—Kehrsyn, she reminded herself, looking at the heading on one of her papers—had said that members of the cult of Tiamat had attacked Furifax’s rebels in their base. Was she right? Had the Tiamatans deliberately slaughtered the rebels or merely defended themselves when the rebels attacked them? The rebels were groomed in underhanded methods of war, and could have invited her followers to a council and deliberately left her out of it. Perhaps the Furifaxians even suggested to the others the possibility of overthrowing Tiglath. They could then have ambushed the Tiamatans and killed many of her followers without having to confront her, the high priestess.
Being double-crossed in a treasonous meeting with the Furifaxians—that would explain why her followers had withheld all mention of the incident. But for a chance observation by her dragonet familiar, Tiglath herself might not know of it at all.
Yet even that theory had several problems. It assumed the Tiamatans were ready to plot an overthrow, and it did not explain why Furifax’s people were slaughtered utterly.
No, it was clear that the little thief was right. Her story had the unwelcome ring of truth. Certainly Kehrsyn’s narration of events did not paint herself in a good light. She admitted that she had hidden in fear and thus escaped all notice.
Tiglath frowned. So her people had attacked their allies—her allies, truth be told, for the others looked upon them merely as convenient tools—without her knowledge, let alone consent. They did so to seize an item that had just been stolen. Therefore they knew beforehand that the item existed, they knew the item had been stolen, and they knew who had stolen it. Therefore her congregation had already had plans that centered on that item. Plans about which she, the high priestess, knew nothing.
She had to find out, so she would find out straightaway. She would take a roll call, see who was missing, and see who covered for their absence. Once they’d exposed themselves, she would find out what they had intended to take and how they’d known it had been stolen.
