Chapter 89
The one at the harp has their hands raised over the strings, ready to begin. All three figures are robed and hooded, and all three have turned to face the door. Lowering their hands without playing a note, the one at the harp shakes their hooded head in plain annoyance, as anyone would at a latecomer to a recital, and slowly gets to their feet.
The conservatory is a long room, sixty feet by twenty, with the harpsichord off to one side, the great gilded harp on the other, and a row of chairs set out along the heavy curtains facing the instrument. Two of the chairs have been pushed back and the rest haven’t been touched. Having just kicked the door in, Gven is standing at the front of the companions, where she likes to be, and the priests take her for an invitation.
The first priest raises a hand and two dark beams of energy leave their fingers, with a honking sound off in the distance, as though a goose somewhere has been badly startled. Both of them take Gven, one in the chest and one in the arm. The half-orc grunts and keeps her feet, but she can feel the beams pulling at something deeper than the wounds, and she knows they won’t knit back together any time soon.
The second priest sends the same beams at Dolor. One catches him in the side and the other goes past his ear and scorches the curtain behind him. Turning his hand over, the tiefling answers with Hellish Rebuke, and fire wraps the priest from hem to hood.
Narrowing his eyes at the first priest, Mond reaches into their mind with a spell of domination, and there’s nothing in there strong enough to push him back out. “Stop attacking,” he sends, and the priest lowers their hands and stands where they are. The sorcerer catches Gven’s eye across the room and tips his head, very slightly, at the one he now owns. She understands.
From the top of Mond’s staff, Landro observes into all five of them at once, “You are inside his head now, and I am inside yours. It is crowded in here. Why are the chairs lined up facing the harp?”
Leaving the charmed priest to Mond, Gven calls up her rage and goes for the second one, Tempest Edge sweeping up out of her longcoat. The first cut opens the priest across the ribs where Dolor’s fire has already blackened the robe, and the backswing takes them deep across the shoulder.
Grindlefoot doesn’t come through the door as a halfling. He’s a giant spider before he reaches the threshold, the change costing him no more than a thought these days, and he crawls in through the doorway, up the paneling and out across the ceiling, with his bowler hat still sitting squarely on his head. None of the companions remarks on it. Some small part of each of them wonders what kind of life they’ve arrived at where that’s normal.
Drawing Gleaming Blade as he runs, Dolor crosses to the third priest, the one who hasn’t lifted a hand yet, runs green fire along the edge, and lays them open across the chest. Then he plants his feet, measures the room with a glance, and sends a wave of thunderous force rolling out from himself, angled to catch the second and third priests and miss Gven altogether. The third, standing alone beside their harp, takes all of it. The second braces and takes the lesser share of it; it’s enough to drop them to the carpet. The tiefling kneels over them and tears the front of their robe open, looking for the tattoo Sarusanda carved apart in the library.
The harp has had Bilwin’s full attention since the door came open. It’s taller than he is and gilded from the column to the feet, and it reminds the dwarf of an instrument he used to know, a cousin with fewer strings and a wheel. Having seen the black beams fly, he decides what to do about it and does it at a run: a tumble across the carpet, a cartwheel, and up onto his feet at the harp, where he strikes a chord on his way past, mostly in tune. An aura radiates out from him across the whole conservatory, warm and golden, and each of the companions feels the cold in their wounds back off a little. The dwarf stands with his arms spread wide, head held high, and he’s glowing. He’s very pleased about the light emanating from his dwarven body.
“Behold!”
The third priest is standing right beside him. Whatever else they might be, they’re a musician, and someone has just played their harp without asking. A blade of dark soul-stuff slides out of their sleeve and stabs the dwarf twice. The second wound goes cold all the way through, until Bilwin finds he can’t move. He stays exactly where he is, arms flung wide and chin raised, a monument to himself, and then the golden glow flickers once and goes out.
Under Mond’s orders, the first priest isn’t allowed to attack anyone, so they don’t. They touch a tattoo on their forearm instead. The ink lifts off the skin and stands up beside them as a shadow, thin and dark, hovering at the priest’s shoulder.
On the floor, the second priest’s skin begins to bead. Drops of something dark bubble out of the tattoo on their neck, faster and faster, until the whole body bursts in a wet explosion of otherworldly slime that covers every one of the companions within ten feet of them. The slime drags at the companions’ boots and then fades, leaving a greenish stain on the carpet. Where the priest was lying, a tiefling woman stands up.
Dolor knows the face, the horns, the set of her shoulders and how she holds her hands, and the word is out before he can stop it.
“Mom?”
Mond has finished being polite with the first priest. “Attack the one at the harp,” he sends, and so they don’t have to manage alone, he follows the order with a crackling bolt of lightning down the full length of the conservatory. It takes the harpist square in the chest. Whatever the third priest came to this house for, they had clearly planned to spend the evening playing the harp, and they aren’t going to. The lightning burns them to a crisp where they stand, and they drop beside the instrument with smoke curling up out of their hood.
The sorcerer lowers his hand. “Encore.”
Looking from the woman to Dolor and back, Gven shrugs. “Not your mom. Sorry.” Then she swings, and Tempest Edge comes down in a perfect stroke. A deafening thunderclap rolls through the conservatory and rattles the windows in their frames. For a moment the tiefling watches his mother torn open from collarbone to hip. The half-orc’s second swing goes wide of where she meant it to yet still lands, and the woman falls; on the carpet she’s a priest again.
Up on the ceiling, a gob of butt yarn fires at the shadow from Grindlefoot’s underside. The web passes straight through and sticks to the far wall. The spider considers that, then scuttles off to the other side of the room upside down, hat and all.
Sliding across the carpet, the shadow goes for Gven. It presses up against her and takes hold. She feels the strength drain out of her arms, as though someone has pulled a plug at the bottom of her. She knows straight away what she’s lost. It won’t come back to her quickly. She’ll have to sleep it off.
Standing right beside her, Dolor takes two steps backwards.
Gven glances down at him, “You’re backing away.”
“There’s a reason. It’s harder to hit from up close, and I’m not standing there while it drinks you dry.” Three crackling beams of energy leave his hand, one after another, and the tiefling shouts at the shadow with every one of them. “You! Need! To stop!” The third beam takes it apart, and it thins out into nothing.
Bilwin is still paralyzed, arms wide, chin up, in a position of great power and with none at all.
The harpist isn’t finished either, not by a long way. A deep, fiery rage burns up through what’s left of them, and their skull bursts out of their head in a gout of green flame and lifts into the air on its own. Drifting into the far corner, it turns its blazing eye sockets on the room, and the fireball it sends back fills the whole conservatory, all of it except the little space around the harp, where the dwarf is still standing frozen. Gven, Mond and Grindlefoot are scorched; Dolor’s tiefling blood shrugs off the worst of it. Hovering in its corner, the flameskull cackles at them.
“Well, I can’t fucking play the harp now, can I?”
Following Mond’s orders, the first priest walks over and puts their soul blade into the skull, twice. Mond adds a beam of frigid light, and the skull turns most of it into a hiss of steam, exactly as it did in the library.
Keeping one eye on the skull, Gven looks over at the sorcerer, “Didn’t you try that last time?”
“I did. It’s magic fire. I keep expecting it to behave like the ordinary kind, and it keeps refusing.”
Kneeling over the second priest, the half-orc finds the revival tattoo easily enough, a blurred face with two empty spots for eyes, and carves it off with her knife. She was told once already, in the library, and she doesn’t need telling twice.
Grindlefoot scuttles across the ceiling to the skull, regards it for a moment, and says to no one in particular, “Probably spicy.” Then he bites it. Poison runs into the bone, which isn’t something bone usually has to worry about, and the flames gutter.
From across the room Dolor sends three more beams of energy into it, and the flameskull drops to the carpet, its fire out, still very much in the shape of a skull.
With the harpist down, the cold lets go of Bilwin all at once. He lowers his arms, works his jaw, and remembers. “Holy water! It needs holy water, or it’ll be back up and singing before supper. Sarusanda said as much. Or I did. One of us did.” He grabs his stein, the magic one that’s never empty and always pours whatever its drinker wants most, and without stopping to think about what’s in it, he douses the skull. Beer runs off the bone and soaks into the carpet. The skull doesn’t crumble, doesn’t go gray, doesn’t do anything at all.
The dwarf looks at it for a long moment. Then he picks it up, hefts it once, and hurls it through the closest window. The glass shatters, and the skull sails out into the dusk.
From the head of Mond’s staff, Landro offers an observation, “That window was closed. I mention it only because no one else has.”
The companions don’t see what happens next. A few minutes later, out in the courtyard, a stray dog comes nosing along the ground and finds a skull amongst the weeds. It gives the skull a few sniffs, picks it up in its mouth, and trots over to Elisabeth Durst’s prize rose garden, where it digs a nice little hole, drops the skull in, and covers it over. Saving it for later.
Roughly an hour later, the little hole in the rose garden erupts in a burst of green flame and hellfire. The roses don’t seem to mind. From then until the end of time, Elisabeth Durst’s prize roses will have a flaming skull to help tend them.
Mond gives his priest one last order, “Remove your tattoo,” and without any apparent understanding of what they’re being asked to do, the priest takes a dagger from their belt and cuts the tattoo out of their own skin. Dolor looks away. Bilwin doesn’t, and wishes he had.
Gven doesn’t wait for them to finish bleeding. Tempest Edge comes around and the thunderclap comes with it, and before the echo is gone from the room she swings again, a stroke so perfectly placed that the thunder answers a second time. The priest is alive, or at least moving, but barely.
From the harp, Bilwin applauds. “Now that’s what I call percussion!”
Still a spider and still upside down, Grindlefoot drops from the ceiling onto the priest, bites, and they go still. The spider stays crouched over the body a little longer than it needs to. Then the halfling remembers he’s a halfling and decides the body isn’t a tasty snack.
When the room is quiet, Dolor goes over it, along the curtains, under the chairs and inside the harpsichord, and finds nothing that a conservatory wouldn’t have in it.
Bilwin takes a different approach to searching a room. He sits down on the stool at the harp, rests his hands in his lap, and lets the room come to him, trying to notice anything that feels or looks different from how it should. Nothing does. On the stand in front of him there’s a single sheet of music, much handled, with practice marks penciled down the margin, seven weeks of them. It’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
He reaches up, finds the first string, and plays the opening line, slowly, getting most of it right.
Without looking up from the strings, the dwarf says, “Seven weeks. You can see where they kept losing their place, right there after the fleece. They’d have nailed it.”