Circle of Skulls w-6

by James P. Davis

  "They cut your arm up pretty good," he said, resting the heavy sword against his shoulder.

  "That they did," Jinn replied, narrowing his gold eyes and clasping the wound tightly. "It appears I already knew how to bleed. Is there to be a second lesson?"

  The large man raised a thoughtful eyebrow and looked once again at the others. "Second lesson… is know when to quit," he answered and turned away, pulling the Watch tabard over his head and throwing it aside.

  Jinn knelt to wipe the blood from his blade and paused, listening as screams echoed from the direction of the seaward wall. Annoyed, he stared down the avenue then glanced east, just a short run from the tower of Archmage Tallus.

  The screams grew louder.

  Cursing quietly, he followed the direction of his instincts, a slave to the celestial blood of his forced immortality. Despite himself and all argument to the contrary, he headed west, toward the screams.

  The wailing screams had died down as Jinn arrived. He hid across the street from a modestly large mansion as servants and guests crowded outside an open iron gate. They huddled together for warmth, a few openly weeping as Watchmen entered and exited the home, speaking to one another in hushed voices and reporting each in turn to Lucian Dregg. The rorden seemed neither surprised nor concerned, pacing angrily outside the gates and glaring at those gathered before them. He crossed his arms as the first body was removed, covered by a stained sheet, and loaded onto an open cart. Eight more quickly joined the first, the crimson marks on each sheet suggesting a similar pattern of wounds suffered.

  Jinn shook his head, troubled. There was no detailed observation of the scene, no interest in concealing the bodies or questioning anyone who might have witnessed the killings. He expected no better from

  Dregg. He did, however, think there might have been a show of some kind, an act to keep at least an air of professionalism. The scene was surreal, unfolding within the wealthiest ward of the city without care or procedure.

  "And parading it all in front of the servants," he whispered, "from whom word will spread house to house like wildfire."

  "I thought I might find you here."

  Jinn turned slowly at the sound of Mara's voice as he bound a tight strip of cloth over the cut on his arm.

  "Did you?" he replied. "Because I was wondering where you were about six dead men ago."

  Mara slinked through the shadows, looking over his injured shoulder and shrugging. He eyed her suspiciously, curious as to what had pulled her away from following Rorden Dregg; the night hag was not prone to whimsy.

  "Dregg is the little man in all this. When do we visit the archmage?" she said, smirking, a barely imperceptible note of hunger in her voice that only increased Jinn's suspicion.

  "You sound eager enough," he said flatly, catching her eye.

  "I found a familiar scent earlier. I'm looking forward to tracking it down," she answered. "That's strange."

  She nodded toward the mansion gate, and Jinn tore his gaze away from the hag, searching through the crowd until he caught sight of Dregg again. A woman stood at his side, her arm around his waist, her face buried in his shoulder as if in sorrow. When she lifted her eyes, turning to rest her head on the rorden's chest, Jinn's breath caught in his throat.

  "Rilyana Saerfynn?" he muttered, absently placing a hand over the letters in his coat, written in her hand and full of her alleged dislike of Lucian Dregg. He leaned back against the wall, staring at the ground, puzzled once again.

  "Are we going?" Mara asked, apparently having gotten her fill of the crime scene. Jinn stared at her a moment in a daze then blinked, seeing in the night hag the focus he was on the edge of losing. Too many mysteries, little details threatened to overcome his sense of duty to the bigger picture. He shook free of his bewilderment, glancing back only once as Dregg shouted orders to his men, who began ushering the crowd away from the mansion.

  "Let's be quick and unseen," he said, heading east again. "Dregg is enforcing a curfew, and I expect there will be chaos tomorrow morning."

  Pushing away from a desk overladen with reports, inventories, and old broadsheets, Commander Tavian yawned, stretching his lean frame in a plain, wooden chair made less for comfort than function. Less than a year ago, he'd not needed a chair of any kind save those offered to him occasionally by his superiors. Offices in the East Wall of Waterdeep's North Ward were places he had dreaded visiting, and he'd had his boots repaired or replaced more often than many of his own officers. Tavian glared at the little room, at the nearly bare shelves, the cobwebs swaying gently in a corner, and rued the days when he'd worked so hard for promotion.

  He stood away from the parchment-crowded desk and took his heavy cloak, needing no window to time the end of shift, feeling in his gut the late evening slip toward very early morning. A long sword jangled at his hip, its blade clean and unblemished by wear or rust as he rounded the desk, satisfied with a good day's work, but less so than if he'd walked a patrol.

  Reaching for the door, he paused at the sound of booted feet approaching down the hallway-four men, he reckoned, two of them restrained judging by the whispered curses echoing off the smooth, stone walls. A knock at his door swiftly followed, and he shook his head, whispering his own curse as he took the handle and faced what appeared to be four officers, two of them familiar and two of them in restraints.

  "Commander," the officer on the left, known as Aeril, spoke first and gestured to the men in restraints. "A pair of unusual officers here to see you, sir."

  "So you say?" Tavian replied, eyeing their dirty, ill-fitting tabards, worn dock boots, and matching black eyes, courtesy, no doubt, of the officers flanking them. "I don't believe I've had the dishonor of meeting these recruits on any of the regular patrols."

  "Sir, we caught these two putting some quick heels to the cobbles just outside of Sea Ward on Shield Street," the officer on the right, called Naaris, explained. "We tried to question them, but they seemed more interested in resisting."

  "No surprises there," Tavian replied, smiling and crossing his arms. "I imagine Rorden Allek didn't take kindly to impersonators of the Watch on his shift, eh?"

  "They say they were hired on by Rorden Dregg last night," Aeril said, a strange seriousness in his gaze that caused Tavian's smile to falter, sensing something far graver than mere stolen uniforms.

  "Rorden Dregg? Lucian Dregg?" he asked, incredulous.

  "Aye, sir," Naaris answered.

  "Dregg couldn't find his arse with both hands, and I doubt he'd have the work ethic to carry out the task in the first place," Tavian said and stepped back toward his desk, motioning for the officers and their charges to enter. "I'll never understand how he became swordcaptain, much less rorden. Who in their right mind would promote him?"

  "Someone discreet, I'd wager, and quick," Aeril said, lowering his gaze and adding. "It seems Rorden Allek was killed in the line of duty last evening, during a fire at the Storm's Front."

  "What?" Tavian said. It had to be a mistake. Allek Marson had sponsored his training, had put him in charge of his first patrol. "How do we know this?"

  "A friend of mine patrols in Sea Ward, sir," Aeril answered. "He said things have been strange for some time now, but he was loyal to Rorden Allek, keeping things quiet to avoid a panic. When Dregg stepped into Marson's position…"

  "He spoke up," Tavian finished, nodding absently as he stared at the floor and leaned against the desk, trying to absorb what he'd been told and formulate a suitable course of action. "A good man knows a bad officer."

  "Aye, sir."

  Tavian drummed his fingers thoughtfully, his eyes glancing over the scattered, mundane reports cluttering his office. He glared at the two men in stolen tabards.

  "So Dregg steps up, a swift promotion under unusual circumstances, no doubt somehow funded by favors or coin. It'll ride for a day or so," he said at length. "If Allek wanted secrecy, we'll respect that until we know why. Keep in touch with your friend, Aeril. Put together a small patrol, and meet
me here at midmorn tomorrow. Throw these two in a cell until further notice. Understood?"

  "Yes, sir," both men replied and saluted before turning to go.

  "And practice not doing that," Tavian said, stopping the men in midstride. "No salutes and no tabards tomorrow, this will be a quiet patrol. Eyes and ears only."

  The men nodded and dragged the impersonators out, closing the door behind them and leaving Tavian alone. He sat still for a long time, trying to convince himself that Allek would turn up alive and well. As several broadsheets slipped to the floor, bearing stories of murder, conspiracy, and danger across the city, he had a fair idea of what he could truly expect to find.

  "More of the same," he muttered, though he was eager to get his boots on real streets and deal with the situation on terms that felt more natural than sitting behind a desk.

  ELEVEN

  NIGHTAL 22, THE YEAR OF DEEP WATER DRIFTING (1480 DR)

  Jinn crouched in the shadows of a small park just outside the squat, modest tower of Archmage Tallus. Situated in the center of a large block of businesses and servant homes, the tower sat in darkness, an iron fence around its perimeter, a rusted gate left open and creaking in the winter breeze. Black windows at its base revealed naught but the reflections of weak streetlamps and the bare branches of thin trees. Decorative crenellations at its top were worn and cracked with age and exposure. Water stains crept down the sides like the tracks of tears down an old man's face collected at the bottom by dried-out vines of ivy clinging to the stone.

  Had Quessahn's directions been any less accurate,

  Jinn would have thought the tower abandoned for years.

  "No guards, no lights," he whispered. "Perhaps he's not in."

  Maranyuss stepped closer to the park's edge, leaning on the bark of a winter-shorn tree as she lifted her nose to the air and closed her eyes.

  "I smell blood," she said. "He's in there… and we are not alone."

  She turned as a figure approached them, cloak and hood pulled tight against the cold. Jinn relaxed as the hood fell away, revealing the troubled stare of Quessahn. She met his gaze only briefly as she neared, averting her eyes to look upon the archmage's unkempt tower.

  "Tallus is not in there," she said. "Technically Tallus does not exist."

  "What did you and Briarbones discover?" Jinn asked, more eager to confront the wizard than argue with Quessahn over whether or not he should.

  "Before he came to the House of Wonder, Tallus was known as Ashmidai," she said. "An aspiring, ambitious, and secretive wizard for the Vigilant Order of Asmodeus. This alone would not have barred him from becoming a master at the House of Wonder, but he kept it hidden anyway."

  "Well," Jinn replied, "that's one puzzle piece that fits."

  Shadows shifted near the encircling buildings, hunched figures drawing nearer. They were not close enough for Jinn to accurately identify them as ahimazzi, but instinct told him what his eyes could not. They were only a few, but their numbers could quickly swell. Mara hissed quietly at the sight of them. Her senses being far greater than Jinn's, she could smell their hollowed presence, their empty husks bearing no value to one dealing in souls.

  "Let's get inside," she said, exiting the sparse tree line of the park. "I grow tired of pretending stealth will hide us from the wizard."

  "Wait!" Quessahn said, glancing at Jinn in disbelief as she chased after the hag. "You can't just walk in through the front-"

  "The door is open," Mara said sharply, staring down the eladrin and pointing at the tower, its wide double doors a dark hole beyond the iron gate. "If we're not going in now, we might as well abandon this little hunt altogether."

  "Agreed," Jinn replied, already on his feet and following Mara through the gate. He paused briefly to glance at Quessahn, feeling as though some unknown confession were hanging between them, but he could not find the words to express the strange idea. She said nothing, appearing indecisive at the gate, her blue eyes glittering as they finally turned to him, something in their depths causing him a momentary pang of inexplicable sorrow. "We could use your help," he said at last. "Perhaps we'll find more about how to stop the killings."

  "That's not what you're looking for," she said.

  "I can think of few instances in the past tenday when I've ever found what I was looking for," he replied with a grin. "Perhaps this time we'll be lucky."

  "I don't believe in luck," she said and passed through the gate to stand on the tower's doorstep a moment before entering the dark beyond.

  "Me neither," he muttered, eyeing her suspiciously, certain that she knew far more than she'd been letting on.

  The tower's interior stood in stark contrast to its humble exterior. A tall, circular chamber dominated the entrance, the ceiling lost in the shadows above. The floor was of a highly polished, dark marble and a wide set of fine, wood stairs spiraled up toward a second-level loft, the bases of several shelves just visible through the chamber's gloom. The whole of the room bore little decoration, all of it centered dramatically upon a massive statue set before the circle of windows.

  Light filtering in through the windows seemed magnified, illuminating the tower and gleaming on the smooth contours of the statue's perfectly sculpted musculature. Carved from black stone, it stood three times as tall as Jinn surrounded by a circular pool of clear water. Jinn approached slowly, glaring into the blank eyes of the statue, its visage shaped into the likeness of a handsome young man, smiling with its head lowered, small horns curving gracefully from its brow. It held one hand, its left, palm up in a frozen gesture of dubious welcome.

  "Asmodeus," he whispered.

  "I'm guessing Tallus doesn't entertain much," Mara said as she explored the perimeter of the room, gently feeling her way along the walls. She added quietly as she neared the stairs, "The scent of blood is strongest here."

  "We should search his books before he finds us," Quessahn said and took the first step, but Mara swiftly caught her arm.

  "Not those," the hag said, crimson eyes smoldering through her illusory disguise as she scanned the stairway. "Anything in plain view is, at best, very plain. There is power here. Step back."

  Quessahn backed away from the stairs as Jinn tore his gaze away from the statue of Asmodeus, half expecting the devil-god's likeness to awaken somehow. He left it feeling almost disappointed it had not moved to address or attack him. Unlike most, Jinn wanted the god's attention. Vague memories of having walked and battled alongside gods stirred strongly within him, but among all of his emotions he bore no fear of divinity. He had seen gods bleed, cry out in pain, and die on the field of battle, their dissipating essences wafting through the dissolving order of armies left in chaos. His pulse quickened at the thought of it, holding the memory of the act itself as an affront to the seeming power of Asmodeus.

  Mara waved her hands slowly over the bottom steps of the stairway, her form wavering as she abandoned the illusions that disguised her true appearance. Bruise-colored skin spread across her arms and face as small, gnarled horns curved back from her brow. She spit harsh words through her lionlike fangs, wisps of gathering energy trailing from her black claws. Eventually her chanting ceased and the stairway rippled, several steps disappearing to reveal a second stairway leading down.

  Led by flickering lights, they descended into the shadows beneath the tower, Mara hungrily taking the lead. Jinn drew his sword, nerves on edge, wondering if they might find Tallus and hoping they would encounter Sathariel. Sight of the statue above had excited his bloodlust, and he prayed that his hunt would soon be over.

  A second circular chamber greeted them below, ringed on all sides by arcane torches that gave off no heat or smoke. Indeed, there were several old books lining shelves along the walls, some sat open upon pedestals, but it was the rune-covered circle in the center of the chamber that drew their full attention. Stinking of blood and fear, wide splatters of crimson radiated outward from the mangled corpse on the floor, its form only vaguely resembling something once human. S
hredded bits of dark robes still clung to the severed and broken limbs, the body's torso barely clothed and still attached to a crushed lump that Jinn suspected had once been the wizard's head. Nearby a gnarled, wooden staff had been shattered into splintered stumps.

  "I think Tallus has already had visitors," Quessahn said, keeping her boots at the edge of the mutilation but seeming unable to look away from the grim scene. Jinn stared as well, his eyes narrowed, seeing less the body than the questions it raised.

  "But his books," Mara said. "By all the souls in suffering…"

  Her deep voice was full of awe as she approached the first pedestal, heedless of the ruined flesh and blood beneath her, swearing quietly as she gently caressed the old tome's yellowed pages.

  "What is it?" Jinn asked.

  "Notes," Mara muttered, perusing the handwritten text. "Bits of an ancient spell, old magic, and here… the nine families… nine bloodlines…"

  "Nine," Jinn whispered as Quessahn tore her eyes away from the body and strode through the blood to see what Maranyuss had found. They conferred in hushed whispers over the book, pointing at and debating the archmage's notes. Jinn didn't listen, his attention taken by a strange vibration in the floor. The walls shook, sending dust raining down from the ceiling. Cracks spread quietly out from the corners of the room, as if the tower itself were awakening and stirring into life. He backed toward the stairs, watching the ceiling closely as the cracks grew larger. "Let's be swift, ladies…"

  "The Loethes!" Quessahn proclaimed, turning wide eyed as Mara took the book from the pedestal. "Their family is next!"

  "The spell must not be completed, Jinn," Mara said, eyeing the walls as more dust drifted down in clouds. "Or we may never catch up to Sathariel."

  A sound like stone grinding against stone groaned menacingly from upstairs, cracking and grating like the birth pangs of a mountain. A section of the ceiling buckled violently, covering the wizard's mangled body in dust and plaster. Chunks of masonry crashed from above as they dashed to the stairway, narrowly dodging being crushed. Mara and Quessahn fell into the wall behind the deva, panting and cursing, their robes and boots stained by the wizard's blood.