Chapter 88
No one picks a floor. Bilwin picks the oil lamps instead, snapping his fingers along the wall with a little Prestidigitation until three of them catch and the paneling turns from black to a deep, polished brown. It doesn’t make the hall any friendlier. The air up here is colder than downstairs and strangely still, as though the house is holding its breath.
Peering down the length of the hall, the dwarf counts off what isn’t there. “No armor. No stuffed wolves. Nothing standing in an alcove waiting for us to turn our backs. Everything’s been safe so far, apart from the bits that weren’t, so why don’t we just start opening doors?”
Mond leans on his staff and doesn’t take his eyes off the family portrait, “The last time we stood in a hall deciding on a door, the hall tried to kill us.”
“Duly noted!” Walking up to the single door near the head of the stairs, Bilwin knocks on it with his fist, three times, loud enough to carry to the third floor. No one answers, and he takes that as an invitation.
It’s a bedroom, ten feet by fifteen, and a poor one. Two beds stand against the far wall with mattresses of stuffed straw, and at the foot of each sits a wooden locker, open and completely empty. A smaller door on the right opens on a closet, where a few servants’ uniforms hang on hooks, pressed and waiting for someone to put them on. Running a finger through the dust on one of the lockers, Dolor takes in the bare room, “Looks like this is one of the servants’ rooms. No one’s slept here in a good while.”
Back in the hall, Dolor makes his way to the double doors in the south wall and eases one open, slowly and cautiously, reminding everyone that he did say he was going to hide. Gven follows close on his heels, while Grindlefoot stops at the threshold and settles his bowler hat. “I’ll stay out here. I have a feeling it’s going to get crowded in there soon.”
It’s a library, and a large one. A mahogany desk stands in the middle of the room, and none of them could say how they know it’s mahogany; they just do. There’s another unlit fireplace along one wall, an overstuffed chair in each corner, and the whole south wall is bookshelves, high enough to need the rolling wooden ladder leaning against them. It takes a moment for the companions’ eyes to adjust to the dark beyond the reach of the lamplight, and then they see that someone has fought in here. Books have come down off the shelves and lie splayed where they fell, an ordinary wooden chair is on its side by the desk, and on the floor, prone and still, are two bodies in dark robes.
Kneeling in the southeast corner is Sarusanda, her wide-brimmed hat on the floor beside her and her dark blue cloak thrown back, wrapping a linen bandage around her leg. She tenses as the door opens, one hand going to her sword, then sees who it is and lets out a breath.
Bilwin heads straight for her. “How did you get in here?” Getting closer, he sees the blood soaking through the linen and the color of her face. “Are you all right?” That’s when his boot catches one of the robed bodies and he stumbles, going down on one knee beside it. “Oh. Sorry about that.” He reaches out for the man’s shoulder.
Sarusanda’s voice cracks across the library, “Stop! No, don’t!”
He does it anyway. Under the dwarf’s hand, both robed figures draw a breath and rise off the floor.
Still on one knee, Bilwin throws up a hand and shouts, “Wait!” It’s his version of Banishment, and it works on both of them. One moment there are two priests getting to their feet in the middle of the library, and the next there’s only carpet. He turns to Sarusanda. “What’s going on?”
Breathing hard, the inquisitor keeps it short. “I came round the back of the house and in through a window. These are Priests of Osybus, the second party I told you of, and they caught me off guard. I thought I had killed them. It appears they were only mostly dead.” She pulls the bandage tight and ties it off. “They trap souls and keep them for their own use, and each of them carries a tattoo that brings him back. I had not finished with them when you came in.”
With a soft pop, and then another, the two priests are back.
Having drawn Tempest Edge from her longcoat at the word wait, Gven has moved to stand where the closer one was lying. She bares her tusks and swings the moment there’s something to swing at, opening the priest from shoulder to hip and catching it again across the ribs on the backswing.
From the hallway, the halfling sends a few soothing words across the room to Sarusanda. “Feel better.”
“I am not sick.”
Taking that as the thanks it is, Grindlefoot casts Shillelagh on the silvered garden hoe he uses for a staff and stays exactly where he is.
Turning to face Gven, the priest she has just carved sloughs off its skin. Robe, body and face fall away from the bone all at once and heap on the carpet, until all that’s left is a skull floating at the height of a man’s head. Green flame bursts up around it and bright red flames burn in both eye sockets, lighting the library better than Bilwin’s lamps ever did.
From the top of Mond’s staff, Landro observes into all five of their heads, “I have also been a head without a body. I did not set anything on fire.”
The flameskull tilts forward, which a skull shouldn’t be able to do, and a streak of fire leaves one eye for the doorway where Grindlefoot is standing. Every one of the companions knows what it’s about to become, and a fireball that size would fill the whole library. Mond is faster. Calling up a Counterspell, the sorcerer reaches out as the fire begins to swell and pinches it out between his finger and thumb, like the flame of a match. “No more fireball.”
Running green fire along Gleaming Blade’s edge, Dolor goes for the priest who still looks like a priest and lays it open. The flames leap to the skull, which is already burning and doesn’t notice. Then the tiefling does exactly what he promised a floor ago: he disengages, slides in behind the mahogany desk, and hides.
Mond sends a beam of frigid light at the skull. It hits, though most of it simply turns to steam.
The second priest doesn’t bother looking around for him. It stares straight through the desk with dead eyes, and a black beam of necrotic energy takes Dolor square in the chest. Twisting with the blow, he dodges half of what it meant to do, and a second beam scorches the paneling beside his head. Then the priest reaches up and touches a tattoo on its neck. The ink vanishes from the skin, and a small, shadowy shape stands up beside it out of nothing. In her corner, Sarusanda is still trying to get her feet under her.
Quicker than anything else in the room, the shadow goes for Dolor, its dark hand passing through the air where his head was a moment before. Dolor mutters from behind the desk, “So much for hiding.”
Having seen the black bolt, Bilwin has had enough of things that are mostly dead. He stands, faces all three of them, and waves a hand as he would at a drunk who’s overstayed his welcome. “Just go away! If you’re not going to sit down and have a drink with us, you should leave. I’ve got a song I’d like to sing you, and you’ll be sorry you missed it.” It’s his version of Turn Undead. The shadow stays where it is. The skull and the priest both turn and try to get as far from the dwarf as they can, which isn’t very far with him standing between them and the window.
Still within reach of the skull, Gven swings Tempest Edge at it twice, and both blows ring off the bone.
Grindlefoot raises his staff from the doorway and a silvery beam of light shines down from the ceiling in the middle of the room, wide enough to take in the three enemies.
The skull feels it first. The moonlight wages war on its flames and the flames lose, going out all at once, and the skull drops to the carpet with a clunk.
Coming back out from behind the desk with nothing left to hide from, Dolor drives Gleaming Blade into the fleeing priest with everything he has, the best blow he’s landed in a week, and green fire jumps from the blade to the shadow beside it. The shadow shudders and holds. The tiefling shrugs and concedes the point, “Disengaging and hiding doesn’t do me any good. They know I’m here.”
Seeing both of them lined up from where he stands, Mond sends a crackling bolt of lightning down the length of the library. The priest twists partly clear of it. The shadow doesn’t, and comes apart like smoke in a draft.
All the priest has left to do is get out of the moonbeam. It manages a single step before the light sears it, and it falls to the floor and stays down.
Walking over to the skull, Gven stamps on it with her whole weight. It doesn’t break. She stamps again, harder, and it sits under her boot like a cobblestone. “Stubborn.”
Kneeling beside it, Bilwin squints at the skull, and his years as a cleric finally earn their keep. “It’ll come back unless it’s dosed in holy water.” He digs through his Bag of Holding, past a great many things he does remember packing, and comes up with a small flask he doesn’t. Shrugging, he sprinkles the skull. The bone goes gray and soft, and when the half-orc brings her boot down a third time it crumbles into pieces.
Suddenly Sarusanda is on her feet. She lurches over to the second priest, kneels on her bad leg without seeming to notice, and rips the robe open. The man is covered in tattoos, chest and arms and belly, and she goes through them muttering, “Where is it?” until she finds the one she wants: a shadowy face, blurred at the edges, with two empty spots for eyes. She takes a knife from her belt and carves it apart.
Wiping the blade on the dead man’s robe, she looks up at the companions. “That is what I did not have time to do. They do not come back after that. Whatever else you do to one of them, you have to destroy the tattoo, or you will be fighting him again in a minute.”
Dolor takes a healing potion from his jacket and drinks it standing over the body, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
Sarusanda looks around the library at the companions, “Are you going up, or down?”
Bilwin tells her, “We’ve cleared the main floor. All of it, except the room with the wolves.”
She looks at the dwarf for a long moment. “So you left the hard one for me.”
Gven shrugs, “They were stuffed.”
Mond reminds her, “The armor in the hall wasn’t moving either, when we walked in.”
Sarusanda doesn’t argue the point. “I came to this house for this room. There is something in it I need, and before I go any further I want to know what they were reading.”
Dolor searches the desk and finds a carafe of water, an unlit lamp, and drawers with nothing in them, and in this house even that’s information. So the tiefling turns to the bookcases, his tail swaying slowly behind him as he reads. He can read any language ever written, and he reads the spines. Some of the titles are dark and disturbing enough that he stops halfway through them, and they’re shelved right alongside books of cookie recipes, with no order to any of it that he can find. Near the end of the south wall he tips one spine out further than the rest and hears a click, and a section of shelving swings inward.
The room beyond is small, ten feet on a side and lined with more books. These are all on a single subject, and the subject is summoning demons.
Bilwin peers in past him and strokes his beard. “Ah! The mature section.”
Against the far wall sits a chest. Getting down on his knees in front of it, Dolor looks it over carefully without touching it and finds a spring under the lid with a nest of small darts waiting behind the lock plate for someone in a hurry. He disarms the trap, then gets out his lockpicks.
Inside are three books bound in black leather, every page of them blank, and three spell scrolls. Reading over the tiefling’s shoulder, the dwarf names them: Bless, Protection from Poison, and Spiritual Weapon. He taps the last one. “Oh, that one’s familiar. Reminds me of my beer stein!”
Running a finger along the shelves of the little room, Sarusanda pulls down three volumes and turns to the companions. For the first time since the village square there’s something close to warmth in her voice. “These are the books I was looking for. Thank you.”
Having just taken the blank books out of Dolor’s hands, Bilwin holds them up and starts laughing before he’s finished. “You mean these? Are you an author as well? I’d hang on to them if I were you, they might be written in invisible ink.”
She looks at the empty black covers. “They are not my genre.”
She keeps the books she came for and looks over the rest of the shelves as she looked over the crowd in the square. “I am going to destroy some of these. Go on ahead and I will catch up.”
That leaves the double doors across the hall. Grindlefoot rejoins the group in front of them, and Bilwin makes a proposal. “Kick it. Announce yourself with some authority. We’ve been opening doors gently all afternoon, and every one of them has had something nasty behind it.”
Dolor frowns at the dwarf, “We’re trying not to be noticed.”
Gven shrugs. “The vampire isn’t here. If he does turn up, I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
She boots the door, and it bangs open on a conservatory. The dark paneling runs on around the walls, tall windows along the far side hold the last of the red daylight, and there’s a harpsichord at one end of the room and a great gilded harp at the other.
Eyeing the harp, the dwarf has a thought. “You know, a hurdy-gurdy is only a harp with a wheel on it.”
Mond warns him, “Don’t play it. We don’t want the harp attacking us too.”
Standing amongst the instruments in dark robes are three figures, and all three of them turn around.