Chapter 86
Two days after the cake, the kitchen archway at the Sanctum has a new ring of sigils cut into it. No one has explained them to Mordenkainen, and no one has needed to.
Riding the head of Mond’s staff, Landro reports on it twice a day. “He is protesting. The sigils cannot hear him and neither can the kitchen, so I have concluded that he is protesting to the house. The house is also not listening. I would like the arrangement to continue.”
On the second night, Dolor dreams.
The piece he carries has been warm against his ribs since the Mournland, and he knows at once that the rod is doing this. Mist comes first, and for a moment he thinks he’s back in Cyre, in the fog that tastes of metal, until the feel of it corrects him. The Mournland’s mist was sad; this one is dark, and it isn’t evil, and the difference matters to him in a way he can’t hold onto afterwards.
The mist parts. Beyond it a city stands in silhouette against a harsh red sky, and he moves through its streets without walking. They’re crowded, and no one in them is going anywhere they want to go, shoulders hunched, heads down, and no laughter anywhere in the dark press of them. Somewhere ahead a child is crying, and as he moves the crying grows louder instead of nearer.
Then comes the manor, large and old with its portcullis down, the windows behind the iron gate burn a fiery gold from lights within, and thunder rolling somewhere behind the house. The child cries out once more, and a second voice answers, but it doesn’t belong to a child.
Waking in Sigil with sunlight coming through the window, Dolor knows three things he had no way of knowing when he lay down. The village is called Barovia, its lord is a vampire named Strahd von Zarovich, and the manor with the gold in its windows is called the Death House. The fourth piece of the rod is inside it.
The archmages are in the main parlor. Dolor tells them the dream, plainly and in order, and leaves the crying as plain as it was. Setting her glass down without looking at the table, Tasha sits up. “Barovia. Getting you there is not the problem, darling. Getting you back has never once been the easy part of anything you have asked us for.”
“Is it a city, or a plane?”
“Both, and that is precisely the sort of thing that gets people killed. Barovia is a village. Barovia is also a domain, and the domain is one of what we call the domains of dread.”
Bilwin sets his stein down. “Has anyone ever named one of these a domain of rainbows and sunshine?”
“Not as sweetly scented as the places you frequent, I grant you.”
“Doesn’t matter if they sparkle. They still stink.”
Holding up one hand, Tasha turns it slowly until he stops. “The Plane of Shadow is not one place at all. It is subdivided into demiplanes, every one walled off from every other by mist. We have studied a great many things in our time and these are ones we still do not understand.”
Dolor sets down his cup, “We’ve been to the Shadowfell. Evernight.”
“You have been to a city inside it, and you got out because someone had left a door open. These are not doors. When the mists take you, you do not come back out. The mists answer to nothing we understand except the Dark Powers, and beneath the Dark Powers are the Dark Lords, one to each domain, each ruling his own absolutely.”
Bilwin doesn’t look up from his stein, “Another lovely name. Never a sparkle among them.”
Tipping his head, Dolor runs a thumbnail along the base of one horn and comes away with a curl of dried batter. The tiefling flicks it into the fire, and no one comments.
Across the room Mordenkainen drifts towards the kitchen archway, and the stones above it light a cold blue and hold there. He looks up at them. “Really?”
Tasha doesn’t turn her head. “Yes. Really.”
Rubbing at his beard, Bilwin gets there ahead of her. “And this Strahd is one of the Dark Lords.”
“He is the Dark Lord of Barovia and he is a vampire, and before any of you says something clever, I am not exaggerating for effect.”
The room goes quiet, and Gven is the reason. The last vampire the companions met was a dwarf in a sarcophagus chamber under White Plume Mountain. It bit her, it charmed her, and the barbarian stood in the middle of that fight pleading with it not to go while her friends worked to keep her alive. They only walked out when the thing got bored and turned itself into mist.
The half-orc straightens off the wall, “We fought one of those.”
“You survived one of those. It left.” Tasha inclines her head an inch. “Do not imagine you could take Strahd. That does not make the piece lost to you, because he does not work as you are picturing. He lets people into his domain when it suits some design he has never explained to anyone living, and he lets the folk who live there run their own affairs while he owns every one of them. He is not patient. He is not all-knowing. Stay low enough on the threat level and he may never learn you were there.”
“And if he does notice us?”
“Then you had better be amusing.”
Standing in the doorway, the sorcerer speaks up. “So we go in unseen, or we go in to negotiate.”
“Neither. You will be noticed. You are five strangers and a talking crystal in a village.” Tasha waves the objection away with two fingers. “There is noticed, and there is worthy of attention, and the gap between them is where your whole visit lives. The rod wants to be assembled, so it will put you down somewhere you have a chance. Be quick.”
Standing in the corner of the room, Mordenkainen adds a note. “He is very good at snuffing out threats. Be a small one.”
The silver-haired mage has said nothing through any of it. She sets her wine down, and the room reorganizes itself around her.
“One more thing, and it is the thing I want you to carry in. It is a dark domain and a terrible one, and people live there. Not by any choice of their own. The mists keep them from ever leaving, and they are getting through their lives in the only place they have ever been allowed to have. Do not judge them by where they live. You will want to. It is quicker.”
The tiefling meets her eyes and holds them, “We’ll remember.”
“You will forget inside the hour,” says Tasha. “Everyone does.”
Bilwin waits exactly as long as courtesy requires. “Right. Can we make breakfast first?”
Alustriel doesn’t look up from the wine. “No. No one in this room is making anything. You may eat breakfast.”
Breakfast, when it arrives, turns out to be an affair. Fruit salad first, strawberries and pineapple in a small ramekin set inside a much larger plate, the pineapple gone faintly pink where the juice reached it. Then eggs, carried out by someone none of them can see and made any way each of them wants, which in three years of hard travel none of the companions has once been asked. Bilwin takes his scrambled, Mond sunny side up, Dolor poached, Grindlefoot fried over easy, and Gven discovers four hard-boiled in front of her. There’s sourdough toast warmed over elm wood, buttered spinach, roasted potatoes, and coffee for everyone but Mond, who takes tea. The juice comes in two jugs, orange and cranberry, and the sorcerer pours himself half of each into the same goblet.
Then there’s a choice of pancakes or waffles, and the group loses forty minutes to Bilwin’s Belgian waffle and the question of what Belgian means. Three theories later the table settles on the djinn who invented it, and Dolor, whose own patron is an efreeti, eats his pancakes with blueberry compote and declines to comment.
From the head of the staff, Landro delivers his verdict. “That is food. There is a great deal of it and more is arriving, which suggests either that the kitchen does not know when to stop or that you do not.”
The halfling answers around a mouthful of potato, “We’re taking second breakfast with us.”
“That is not an answer to what I said.”
Second breakfast gets packed rather than eaten: croissants, pastries, bacon, sausages, and a basket of bagels that began the morning as plain and cinnamon raisin and everything and have all become everything bagels. Wrapping the bacon is what starts a long conversation about pigs and how clever they are said to be, and no one stops packing the bacon for a second of it.
Turning the third piece over in his hands, Dolor asks the question he’s been carrying since the Mournland. “Has anyone ever put the pieces together? Two, three. Do they do anything as a set?”
Mordenkainen holds up a finger to make his point, “They do not. Bilwin’s will let him put a question to something larger than himself once a day and get an answer he will not enjoy. Mond’s opens a gate. Yours turns gravity upside down, which I encourage you to remember before you need it rather than a moment afterwards. Assembled, they are the Rod of Seven Parts. Partially assembled, they are three sticks that know where the fourth one is.”
“So no lasers.”
For the first time, Mordenkainen looks more amused than irritated. “No.”
Taking the front of the portal with the third piece out in his hand, Dolor can feel the pull of it, a direction the parlor doesn’t otherwise have. Grindlefoot squints up at the obsidian, “Do we come back through this one?”
Alustriel answers from the doorway, “You come back through the gate, wherever the gate is standing. Once you hold the fourth piece it will want the fifth, and the gate goes where the gate goes.”
Checking the crystal in its nest of grown wood, the sorcerer takes his place at Dolor’s shoulder, and Tasha watches him do it.
“You needn’t take the construct, you know. It would be perfectly safe on a shelf here, and the trip would be a good deal quieter.”
The sorcerer doesn’t look at her. “He’s my friend.”
Tasha tips her glass an inch in his direction, “How lovely.”
Dolor steps through first.
The alleyway is the one from the dream, down to the angle of the light. The mist at their backs doesn’t do what mist does. Instead of drawing off it reaches for them, thin pale tendrils across their ankles, and every one of the companions understands without being told that two steps backwards would turn that grip into something else.
“Be mindful,” says Tasha’s voice, already dwindling, from a doorway that isn’t there. “Good luck.”
Looking out of the mouth of the alley, the companions find Barovia smaller than the dream made it look. The city is really a village that got above itself, the houses well made and cheerless, the cobblestones dark and slick with rain. There’s a sun up there somewhere, deep red and dull behind the smoke, giving out no more light than a banked fire.
Not one of the people on the street is smiling.
Landro announces it into all five of their heads at once, “This is delightful. I have never been on an adventure. I would like to note that I did not have breakfast, and that this is the second occasion in two days on which everyone else has eaten and I have not. I would also like to ask a question that has troubled me since the pastries. How does the jam get inside them?”
“What?”
“The pastry is whole. They cannot bake it in, the sugar would boil. Therefore it goes in afterwards, through a hole, and the hole is concealed. Someone thought about this a great deal and no one will ever know who.”
Closing his hand around the rod piece, Dolor lets it point. It pulls north and a little upwards, towards the high ground at the top of the village, and the dream lays itself over the streets and fits. He starts walking and the others fall in behind.
Walking on, the companions draw a murmur out of the villagers on both sides, heads turning to follow the group down the street.
Gven asks, “Landro. You hear thoughts. What are they saying?”
“I cannot tell you, and it is not for want of trying. Their minds are closed. Not guarded. Closed. I do not know how they are doing it and I do not believe they know either.”
Looking around at the wet street and the shut faces, Grindlefoot has had enough of being at ground level among strangers. “I bet a spider would like this.” Where the halfling was standing there’s an ordinary spider, no bigger than a copper piece, a red crystal at its throat in a plain bronze collet. It runs up Bilwin’s leg and settles on the dwarf’s shoulder.
Bilwin doesn’t break stride, “Hello. Good choice.”
The dwarf’s curiosity lasts another thirty feet. “They’re all so miserable,” he says, at a volume that is the entire problem, and turns to ask the nearest villager about it. The man is a farmer of middling years with a pitchfork over one shoulder, and he stops walking.
“We don’t need interlopers like you here. Get out.”
Villagers come out of doorways and off the sides of the street, and inside a minute the companions are ringed by twenty of them holding kindling axes and stones. The ring closes off every direction but the alley they came out of, and the mist has crept a good way up that.
Stepping in front of Bilwin and turning the signet ring of Wyrmkind Favor once with his thumb, Dolor takes the front of it. “Ignore my less than bright friend. We want to get up to the house on the hill, we’ll take care of our business, and none of you will see us again.”
“You want to go up to the house.”
“We do.”
“Why?”
Underneath the shouting, they hear it. It comes down off the hill thin and unmistakable, and the tiefling knows it before he’s finished turning his head, because he heard it two nights ago in a bed in Sigil. A child, crying, inside the house with the gold in its windows.
Dolor lifts his voice over the crowd. “That. Listen to that. Every one of you can hear it and not one of you will look at it.”
It doesn’t land.
Reading the street rather than the argument, Gven has been looking for the cross-lane, the gap between two houses, the doubling-back route she’d want if this went badly. Every way out of the little square has mist standing in it, closer than it was a minute ago.
Raising a hand without consulting anyone, the dwarf reaches the end of his patience. “I’ve had enough of this. We’ll go around them.”
Invisibility drops over all five of them at once, and for about two seconds it’s a very good plan.
Lifting off the cobblestones, Dolor clears the heads of the villagers and drifts out towards the house with nothing under him but air. For the others, walking it means threading amongst twenty bodies packed shoulder to shoulder without brushing one, and the half-orc makes four feet before an elbow finds her and the crowd closes like a fist and shoves her back. Then a woman at the back of the press upends a bucket, and a cloud of ash and street dust comes down over all of it.
It settles onto four outlines, the dwarf and the half-orc and the sorcerer and one very small spider on a shoulder, all of them gray.
“Sneaking!” someone shouts. “Get out of our town!”
Gven has never argued with a crowd in her life and doesn’t start now. Walking straight towards the farmer, she watches him bring the pitchfork down level and put it between them. The half-orc moves it aside like a gate latch and gets close enough to see the grain of his skin.
“Where’s your medicine person? Your healer. Whatever it is you call them here.” He doesn’t answer, and the pitchfork doesn’t move. “I’m only asking so I know where to take you when I’m done with you.”
That’s as far as she gets before the first stone comes in from her left, and then all of it comes at once, stones and old potatoes and a turnip, thrown hard and thrown badly from every side. It hurts about as much as a hailstorm and it’s a good deal more insulting.
Wrapping a small flourish of magic around his voice, the tiefling lets it go.
“STOP.”
It comes down out of an empty red sky three times louder than any throat in the village could manage, and the square stops with it. Twenty people stand still with their arms half raised.
Taking the moment, Dolor looks hard at the crowd. It’s in the grip on the tools, and in how every pair of eyes goes to the mist at the end of the street and comes back. These people aren’t angry, they’re frightened half out of their lives, and the anger is what they have instead.
Gven doesn’t see any of it, having never been able to read a face for anything subtler than a wind-up. Looking at the man on the other end of the pitchfork, she finds he isn’t the brute the shouting suggested. He’s an older man, worn through, someone’s grandfather, afraid all the way to the bottom of himself, and he still hasn’t let go of the handle.
Looking up at her, he finds his voice. “Of the things that are frightening in this land, you are the least of them.”
“No.”
The word comes from behind them, quiet and unhurried. Standing in the mouth of the lane is a woman in loose-fitting trousers and boots, a tunic and matching cloak of a blue so dark it reads as black, and a wide-brimmed hat. There’s a sword at her hip and she isn’t holding it.
She addresses the villagers first, “Despite their behavior, I do not believe these are the people you are looking for.” Then she looks at the four dust-covered figures in the middle of the crowd, and then, without any apparent difficulty, at a patch of empty air fifteen feet above them. “Whatever you are doing to make yourselves invisible, stop. If you truly have no ill intent, you have no need of tricks. Turn it off. Now.”
Glancing towards the place Dolor’s voice came from, the dwarf shrugs and drops the spell. The tiefling comes down and lands in the muck of the square, and the companions stand there filthy and visible while the woman takes them in.
Studying her as though she were an unfamiliar lock, Dolor comes up with very little and finds the little interesting. She isn’t a commoner, nothing standing in this square frightens her, himself included, and her whole intent is to stop these people doing a thing they won’t be able to undo.
Gven lets go of the farmer’s pitchfork and turns to the woman, “Can you stop this? We’re only trying to walk through.”
Turning to the crowd, she lets her voice carry without once being raised. “I know what has been said about strangers. I have said a share of it myself. But if these five came here to do us harm, then they are either grossly incompetent or exceptionally stupid and quite possibly both. These are not the ones.”
“You’ll vouch for them, then.” The farmer still hasn’t lowered the pitchfork.
“Of course not. I will speak with them. If I do not care for what I hear, I will kill whichever of them is in charge, and you may all take as long as you like deciding which that is. Stand down.”
The crowd stands down. It takes the better part of a minute and a good deal of muttering, and then the square is a square again with a great deal of thrown vegetable matter in it. Having correctly read the change in the weather, Dolor steps up with his hands spread. “I’d like to apologize for my friend’s behavior. They got impatient. Also everyone’s still alive, which I think we can all agree is a bonus.”
The half-orc folds her arms, “I didn’t even draw a weapon. I’d have carried him to the healer myself. Why do you think I asked?”
Dolor tips his head at the pair of them, “They got impatient, which is my point. We were told before we came here that not everyone in this land is a threat, and it did not last us the hour.”
Gven repeats, “They’re still alive.”
“Had she not come, that may not be the case.”
The half-orc thinks about it. “That’s fair.”
The woman’s gaze travels over the group. It isn’t hostile and it isn’t friendly.
The tiefling wipes a palm down his coat and puts it out, “My name is Dolor. May I have yours?”
“Sarusanda.” She’s already turning away. “Let’s have a drink.”
The tavern is less than a block off the square, the sign with red drops falling from the leaves into a goblet hangs alongside ivy climbing the wall. Bilwin reads the name off the board, The Blood of the Vine, and observes that he’s had worse in better towns. The common room is nearly empty, most of it having been out in the square a few minutes ago. Taking a table near the back, Sarusanda gets wine in front of everyone without asking what they want, and somewhere around the third step through the door the spider drops off Bilwin’s shoulder and becomes a halfling in a bowler hat.
Sarusanda drinks before any of them do, “I have no reason to lie to you. I expect no truth from you. I am a member of the Ulmist Inquisition, an order dedicated to rooting out evil wherever we find it, on any plane and in any domain, and I will not pretend it makes us pleasant company. You told the square you were going up to the keep.”
“Is it a keep?”
“No. It is a house, and the village calls it the Death House.”
“Why do they call it that?”
Turning her cup a quarter turn on the table, Sarusanda lays it out. “It belongs to Gustav and Elisabeth Durst, people of standing here, and it is an open secret that they use the place to host a cult that venerates the Darklord of Barovia. A minor cult, never worth my order’s attention until now. What changed is that they have come into a fragment of an artifact. They call it a piece of the Rod of Seven Parts, and I see from your faces that I need not explain what that is.”
The dwarf’s beard twitches, and no one at the table says anything.
“They have got it into their heads that it can draw Strahd’s attention onto them. To them that is the prize. To everyone within a day’s walk of that house it is the catastrophe.” Looking round the table, she gets to the part she brought them here for. “They are also no longer the only ones who want it. A second party, unaffiliated with the cult, called the Priests of Osybus. Necromancers, who take souls and burn them to extend their own lives. They want the fragment for their rituals, and they walked into that house this morning.”
Gven puts her cup down, “Both of them. In the same house, at the same time.”
“Yes.”
“Good. That saves us a walk.”
Sarusanda lets that go by. “Now. Why do you want it?”
Dolor tells her, and keeps it short because short is what she’ll believe. A god of secrets called Vecna who means to take every plane in creation and remake all of them in his own image, three archmages with a plan to put him somewhere he can be watched, and seven pieces of rod, three of them at this table and a fourth in the house on the hill.
She sits with it a while, and the tiefling lets the silence run as long as she wants it.
Gven tires of the silence, “Would you rather work together, or work around each other? We’re going up there either way.”
Sarusanda thinks about it for longer than is comfortable, then nods once and stands. “No time like the present.”
The house is exactly what Dolor saw in his dream. Three stories of dark stone and darker timber behind an iron fence, the portcullis down, the upper windows lit from within with that same fiery gold.
There are two children outside the gate. The girl is eight or nine and the boy four or five. He’s crying with his whole body and holding her sleeve with both hands while she works at getting him to stop, and she isn’t much good at it. Going down on one knee in the wet street, Sarusanda drops her voice into a register none of the companions have heard from her yet. “What are your names?”
The girl is Rosavalda, called Rose, the boy is Thornboldt, called Thorn, and their surname is Durst. Rose tells it in the order it happened, because that’s the only order she has. Their mother and father sent them outside to play and told them to stay out, and the monster came just after, and no one has told her what the monster is. Then there were screams, and after the screams came howls out of the basement that went on a long time. Then, not an hour ago, a group of grown-ups in robes walked up this street and went in through the front doors without a word to either child.
Taking a better grip on her brother’s hand, Rose says, “Brigetta’s still in there. She’s our nursemaid. She’s always been kind to us, even when we’re bad.”
No one looks at anyone else. The crying they heard down in the square was not coming from either of these two.
While Sarusanda talks to Rose, Dolor crouches in front of Thorn and goes through his jacket for two small glass baubles, one in each hand, carried in there for years. The tiefling turns them so they catch what light the sky is willing to give.
“Here. One each. They’re better if you hold them up to a window.”
Thorn stops crying long enough to look at them, which is all anyone was asking. Coming down the street towards them, a village woman recognizes the children and takes in the situation with one glance at the house above. Gathering the two of them up without being asked, she promises to keep them at her own hearth and goes. Rose looks back twice.
The portcullis is down, but the gate beside it isn’t locked. Sarusanda gets a hand on it and it opens with a shriek of rust that goes all the way up the street and comes back off the hillside.
Nothing happens.
Crossing a courtyard gone over to weed and moss, past a dry fountain and a stone bench no one has sat on in years, the companions walk on towards the front doors. Sarusanda doesn’t knock, but puts a shoulder to the right-hand door and pushes it open into a broad antechamber paneled in dark wood, a staircase running up into shadow and a long hall running back into more of it. There’s dust on the floor and a great many footprints in the dust, and not a living soul anywhere in it.
Stopping just inside, she waits for the companions to gather at her back and turns to face them. “We separate here. There is something in this house I have to take care of, and I am the only one who can do it.”
No one gets the chance to ask what. She’s already moving, down the long hall and around the corner into the dark of her own business.
Then the five of them are alone in the antechamber of the Death House, looking at a shut door.
Gven rolls her shoulders once and rests her hand on Tempest Edge.
“Well,” she says. “Time for some fun.”