Chapter 87
Running a hand along the paneling, Dolor finds no seam in it. He lifts the corner of a shield mounted beside the door they came in through, a stylized golden windmill on a red field, and comes away with dust and one dead spider. There’s the shut double door in front of them and no other way out of the antechamber. Whatever this house keeps, it isn’t keeping it here.
Bilwin looks at the shut door, “Vampire. Dark Lord. In here he’s near enough a god that the difference won’t help us.”
Gven keeps her hand where it is, on Tempest Edge. “And he doesn’t know we’re here.”
“That’s the whole of the plan, aye.”
Riding the dwarf’s shoulder since the square, Grindlefoot has a thought. Reaching for Pass Without Trace, the halfling finds out what the spell wants from him, and what it wants is concentration. A spider can’t hold concentration on a dwarf’s shoulder.
He comes back all at once, three feet of druid where a copper piece used to be, and Bilwin goes down under him like a dropped ladder. Lying across the dwarf’s chest, Grindlefoot retrieves the bowler hat first and apologizes second.
“Sorry. I was comfortable.”
Bilwin waves it off and the spell settles over the companions a moment later.
“I can make us hard to follow. It won’t stop anyone seeing us, but inside thirty feet of me the house won’t be able to track where we’ve been.”
Mond tips his head towards the door, “Tasha said don’t be noticed, and if you are, be interesting.”
The halfling nods, “I can only help with the first part.”
Brushing down his overalls, the druid says, “One more thing while we’re all still friends. If this turns into a fight, I’m going to disengage and hide. Every time.”
Gven doesn’t look round, “Shocking.”
“I don’t usually hide.”
“You do.”
The druid shrugs, “I don’t usually say so first.”
Pushing the double door open with both hands, Dolor lets the group into a hall built to impress whoever walks into it. Fifteen feet across, thirty deep, and the ceiling only ten feet up, high for a house and low for what the room’s attempting.
A staircase in red marble winds up the east wall. The fireplace opposite is black marble, swept, laid with wood that has never been lit. The sconces carry more scrollwork than a sconce needs, oil paintings hang between them, and everything that will take gilding has been gilded.
Set into alcoves around the walls, upright and empty and facing the room, stand four suits of armor.
“Those are people-shaped and they are not people,” Landro reports from the head of Mond’s staff, into all five heads at once. “I have counted them twice in case I was wrong. I was not.”
Closing his hand around the third piece of the rod, Dolor asks it for a direction and gets an opinion. Up, and north, and closer, and nothing more exact than that.
Bilwin and Mond hold still and listen, and the house has nothing to say to either of them. No footsteps above. No voices behind any of the doors. Rose told them at the gate about screams, and howls out of the basement that went on a long time, and robed strangers walking in through here this morning, yet the hall’s as quiet as the paintings in it.
The half-orc is finished with standing around. “I don’t care for this room. Too much floor, too many doors, and the five of us in the center of it like we were expected. Pick one.”
As the companions start moving, all four suits of armor step down out of their alcoves.
Gven’s rage arrives before the closest of them has both feet on the floor. Going at the second suit with Tempest Edge coming up out of the longcoat, she opens the breastplate across its full width. The backswing rings off a pauldron. Beside her Mond’s hands gesture and three of the four find themselves moving slower. The fourth shrugs it off and keeps coming.
Standing in the middle of the floor because it’s a small room and he doesn’t have to choose, Bilwin looks the four of them over. “They look like they’d come apart. Plug your ears!” He casts Shatter, and the hall fills with a ringing every one of the companions feels in their teeth.
The four suits of empty armor take the worst of it and keep walking.
Moving in beside the half-orc to use the opening she’s made, Dolor runs Gleaming Blade up under the second suit’s arm and finds something in there that objects, then puts the shortsword into the same gap. The first suit comes at him with a sword that isn’t ordinary steel, catching the tiefling across the ribs and then again with something that arrives after the blade and does worse.
Its second swing goes wide. Turning his hand over without turning his head, Dolor answers with Hellish Rebuke, and flame runs up the inside of the armor where a person would be.
The fourth suit swings twice at Mond and hits air.
Grindlefoot doesn’t reach for anything. He stands at the foot of the stairs working at why a house would do this, and the first look tells him nothing. Halflings attract luck, so he gets a second look at things. What comes back is one flat sentence with no god—or vampiric deity—behind it and nothing in it to argue with.
“That’s all it is,” the halfling says. “We’re not welcome.” Then, with a hand on the red marble bannister and no hurry in him anywhere, he walks up the stairs and out of the fight.
Crossing the hall to Mond, the third suit puts a sword through the sorcerer’s guard twice, the second worse than the first, and he comes away bleeding and short of breath. The one Gven’s working on swings at her twice and misses twice, and both of the barbarian’s swings miss, and she takes that personally.
Having been hit more often than the rest of the companions together, Mond stops being careful. A bolt leaves his hand and the chain of it jumps from the second suit to the third to the fourth, lighting all three from the inside.
The second comes apart at the joints and goes down in a pile that was never alive to begin with. The third stays standing, and nothing about that makes sense.
Swinging his battle axe at the third suit, the dwarf misses, and his spiritual beer stein appears at his shoulder, throws a blow of force at the same target, missing as well.
Coming back at the first suit with the blade that cut him, Dolor opens it from the collar down and takes the head off on the follow-through. Two down and two to go. The fourth turns on the dwarf, finds the gap over the Ironbound Wardchain, and Bilwin takes the slash, staying on his feet.
From halfway up the staircase, Grindlefoot offers his support. “Good job, everyone.” No one answers him.
He stands there with his bare feet on cold marble, no use to anyone, and then feels bad enough about it to come down two steps, cast Shillelagh on the silvered garden hoe he uses for a staff, and swing it at the fourth suit. He misses by a good margin. Leaving Mond where it found him, the third suit crosses the hall, climbs two stairs, and hits the halfling twice.
Grindlefoot works out, a little late, that he should have stayed where he was.
Reaching the third suit before it can swing again, Gven puts Tempest Edge through it at the waist and it stops being a thing that stands up. She turns on the last one, tusks showing, and misses it clean. Mond lays a hand on it to draw the life out, except a suit of armor hasn’t any life in it and the hand doesn’t land.
Taking the biggest swing of the afternoon, the dwarf buckles the armor with a smash, yet doesn’t stop it. Behind him, the floating beer stein blasts through empty air, missing its target.
Stepping into the corner, Dolor throws three crackling beams of energy across the room, and two of them hit. The last suit comes apart in the middle and goes down as scrap.
“I said knock it off!”
Standing over the wreckage and nudging a gauntlet with his boot, Bilwin asks, “Is that how they greet everyone, or was that put on for us?”
“Standard greeting,” says Mond. “Hello. Welcome. Please die.”
Gven’s still watching the ceiling. “If Strahd hears about this.”
Wiping Gleaming Blade down, Dolor sets her straight. “It isn’t his house. He’s lord of the domain, not the landlord, and the reason these people have a piece of the rod is that they want his attention and they haven’t got it yet. The noise matters. There are necromancers somewhere in here and a cult somewhere else in it, and every one of them can count to four. It just isn’t him we’re making it for.”
Wiping his beard with two fingers and surveying four piles of perfectly good armor, Bilwin gets philosophical, which is always a warning. “Robed idiots walked in through these doors this morning and nothing came out of the wall for them, so either there’s a password or those four know a guest from us. And it’s the same everywhere we go. We walk into a temple, the whole place tries to kill us, and we call that an adventure. Does anyone ever spare a thought for the folk who only came to worship?”
Coming down the last of the stairs and closing the worst of Mond’s wounds on his way past, Grindlefoot has a theory of his own. “We didn’t wipe our feet. We came in without being asked and we walked across the rug.” Settling the bowler hat back on his head, he leaves it there. “I’ve been told off in a shop for less.”
The door to the south stands ajar and reveals the room before anyone touches it. Oak paneled, twenty feet square, more of a hunter’s den than a room for sitting in. A stag’s head is mounted over the fireplace at the far end, and the fireplace is lit, which is more than anything else in this house has managed. Three stuffed wolves stand about the outskirts of the carpet in poses no wolf ever held while it was alive.
The companions look at the wolves. The wolves look at the middle distance. Dolor says it for all of them. “There’s no piece of the rod in there.”
Not one of them turns their back on that doorway until it’s shut.
Working along the north wall from the western end, Mond opens the first door on a dining room laid for an occasion. A long table down the middle, twelve chairs around it, silver and crystal the length of it that someone keeps polished. Four windows look out over the grounds behind the house.
There’s another fireplace behind the head of the table, cold and swept like the one in the hall, and a small door in the east wall that none of them opens. Twelve places, undisturbed, not one chair pushed back.
Gven opens the second door along the northern wall of the main hall, revealing a cloakroom. Black cloaks hang on hooks and hangers from one end to the other, and every one of them is damp. Dolor goes through the pockets and comes out with nothing.
Standing in the doorway counting, Mond gets to the end of the row and puts it together out loud. “Twelve cloaks. Twelve chairs at that table. And they’re wet. The rain stopped before we came up the hill, so these came in this morning, hung up the same as any guest’s coat, and then everyone wearing one walked off into this house without it. Nothing has been eaten and no one has left.”
Bilwin takes the third door, because his curiosity has never once waited its turn, and it opens on a kitchen, the first room in the house that looks used. It’s tiny, and it’s clean, and someone has been keeping it that way on purpose; on the board beside the basin there’s a bowl with cake batter dried around the inside.
Grindlefoot comes in looking for somewhere to warm their second breakfast and stops in the doorway when he sees it. “Someone made a cake. This morning. In an empty house.” Then, before any of the others has to be the one who says it, “For who?”
Working through the cool store and the shelves, the dwarf turns up cooking wine and no beer, and says what he thinks of a house that keeps the one and not the other. There’s a small door on the far side, two feet high, and behind it a stone shaft with a wooden platform on a rope. A dumbwaiter, and it goes up.
The halfling looks at it slightly too long. “I could go up as a spider and have a look.”
“A spider wouldn’t need the dumbwaiter.”
“A spider wouldn’t fit in it either, not at the size I do it. The stairs are probably safer.”
The kitchen’s other door is an ordinary one, and behind it a pantry, and on the pantry shelf behind a row of jars stands a growler.
“Civilization at last!”
Holding it up to what light the room has, Bilwin works the stopper out, sniffs at it, and tips it to check the color before he’ll put it near his mouth. “Not blood.”
“Were you expecting blood?”
“In this house I’d be a fool not to look.” He drinks. “Can’t be all bad.”
Searching the pantry from end to end while the dwarf’s busy, Dolor goes over the shelves and the floor and the back wall for a hollow, a seam, a way down to whatever made the noise the children heard. There isn’t one. On the whole ground floor of the Death House there’s no way down, and two children told the adventurers the howls came from the basement.
The light is going by the time the group takes the red marble staircase, and the house has no intention of helping. Gven leads, her darkvision taking the stairs ahead of her, and Grindlefoot slides his enchanted goggles down. The others come up behind them and make do.
The hall on the second floor mirrors that of the first, same size, same shape, an unlit fireplace on the western wall, and oil lamps along the paneling, none of them lit. Double doors stand on the north and south walls, a smaller door sits near the head of the stairs, and the staircase carries on up to a third floor.
Over the mantelpiece hangs a portrait of a family: a man, a woman, and two children, and the four of them are painted smiling.
Dolor stands in front of it longer than the others do. An hour and a half ago in the wet street below he crouched down and put a small glass bauble into each of those two children’s hands, and neither of them had anything like that face on.
The half-orc rolls her shoulders and counts what the floor offers. “Two doors that way, two doors this way, a small one by the stairs, and it keeps going up. Pick a floor.”
“I would like to note something before you do,” says Landro, into the five of them at once. “The children in that painting are smiling. The children in the street were not. I do not know what to do with that information, and so I have decided to give it to you instead.”