Sleepless Streets: His Divine Stripes

[aithne]

For the first time in what seemed like years, the day dawned not fiercely sunny but dark and gloomy. The air was so thick with moisture that my water breathing, gift of Istishia that none of his priests would ever drown, kept on kicking on and off without warning. Not comfortable in the least, and it was leaving my lungs sore and my throat raw.

But at least it wasn't so blamed hot. And it felt like it was going to thunderstorm, maybe this afternoon. It might not break the heat, but at least it might wash down the streets some. Iola was frisking beside me as she and I and Poi walked to the human quarter, Poi riding on my shoulder. He'd taken to doing that lately when we were out and about, taking more of an interest in our surroundings than he had for years. He was definitely lighter than he used to be as well, and I thought part of it might be the feather he wore in his headband, the one that would keep him alive for as long as he cared to stay so.

Funny how I almost forgot about that feather; I wore mine in my satchel, which I'd done some investigation and found that it was close enough. I would still age, since I didn't keep it with me all the time, but I'd age more slowly. We met at our usual place for breakfast. The halfling who usually served us came over with tea for me and grape juice for Iola, and we told her what we wanted. We were the first there this morning, an amazing occurrence since getting out of bed that morning had been difficult. The night before had been late and the day that preceded it difficult.

Evidently, everyone else had the same problem, and over the next half hour or so the rest of our motley crew straggled in. Electra showed up complete with a pixie zombie flying at her shoulder, which she'd embedded the strength gem we'd gotten from Halcyon in. I didn't ask where she'd gotten a pixie corpse. I really seriously did not want to know. Once we were all there and our food had come (Basil as usual tucking into a large plate of eggs, muttering something about needing to keep his strength up; evidently he was working his way through the population of available women in the halfling district at a pretty good rate), Gaetana called in.

"I need to see you guys," she said without preamble, her image appearing on the table between a salt cellar and Iola's juice. "Come down to the station--no, wait, not a good idea. Come to the gate between the halfling section and the druid section. I'll meet you there. I've got something a bit touchy for you."

Was there ever going to be a breakfast that wasn't interrupted by our supervisor? Well, she paid the bills, I guess she chose the hours. We told her we'd be there soon and finished our breakfasts. Poi requested half a piece of eggy bread with sugar syrup, and I ordered that for him.

We were met at the gate by Gaetana and Silas, the druid we'd talked to a lot while we had been trying to track down Dada. Seeing him reminded me that Joab was still somewhere out there, and I reminded myself to track him down and see where he was working these days. "I'm going to bow out of this one," Gaetana said. "This isn't an official assignment. It's not even an unofficial one. The elves probably don't want you working this one, so I'm going to let you guys use your own discretion. If you get in trouble, well, good luck. Got it?" We all nodded. "Good. See you later, I have a meeting to get to." She strolled away as much as someone with such a military bearing could stroll, leaving us alone with our favorite person, Silas.

"Hi, Biff," I said to him.

He shot me a glare. "It's Silas. We have a problem that people of your...talents are well-equipped to solve. You've heard of the sinkholes opening up in parts of the elven section?" We nodded; that was on our list to investigate. "They've been making them themselves. They're looking for something, digging down, but we think we found it first. It's a deep dragon, sleeping, surrounded by eggs." We blinked at him. "Deep dragon. You know, big, scaly, wingless, intelligent? They have a die-off every once in a while, and the last of the race finds someplace deep and dark to hibernate for a thousand or so years. This time, the elves went and built a city on top of her while she was sleeping."

"And you expect us to...?"

"We're moving the dragon and her eggs," he said. "But we need someone to go into her treasure hoard, which we assume is nearby, and figure out what's in there and what can be used and what is too dangerous and should be destroyed. We didn't bother looking for it. Too busy trying to figure out how to get her out of there."

Electra asked, "So why were the elves looking for the dragon in the first place?"

"Who knows?" Silas said in a disgusted voice. "They're elves, taking advantage of critically endangered intelligent species is what they do. Anyway, we have a dwarf named Abner who can take you down. Good luck." He turned and walked away.

I hate working with druids.

Abner showed up shortly afterwards. He was short for a dwarf, and surly as the ones who live in the deep places alone tend to get. He showed us down, into tunnels and down ladders, until we came from built tunnels into natural caverns. "Check this," Abner said as he led us into a large cavern. "Tell me you guys have anything like this up top."

Well, I had to say that we had something like it on the surface. However, I liked our version of forests better, even though ours were usually infested with druids. This was a mushroom forest, gilled umbrellas spread above our heads.

Basil whooped and swung up into the mushrooms, using those bracers of his to climb into the fungus canopy. Abner called, "Watch out for the--"

"Whee!"

"--purple ones," the dwarf finished. "Too late.".

Basil landed on the loam in front of us, giggling. "I love you guys!" he declared, holding his arms as wide as they would go. "Love you! But not in a naked kind of way." He was covered with a fine purple dust, spores of some sort. And he kept giggling and declaring that he loved various things, including us, his boots, a particularly big mushroom, honey cakes, bridges, kittens, and some girl named Rilla.

Electra, for her part, was pondering the floor. "What are these all growing out of? Where does loam come from down here, anyway?" She scuffed at the ground with one boot. "I wonder..."

She dug down a little bit. About a foot down, we struck rotted wood. Curious, we cleared forward a bit to find what looked like the rotted but still somewhat sound boards of a ship deck. And a little bit farther forward, we found the hatch, hinges rusted away and the wood of the door like to fall apart in our hands. When we opened the hatch, there came a whiff of foul, stale air. Whatever this was, and however a ship had gotten down here, it hadn't been disturbed in a long, long time.

It looked almost like a mastless galleon, once I started finding the edges of the ship under the mushroom undergrowth. After the air of the inside cleared out a bit, we stuck a lantern down into the hole, and then lowered ourselves down to investigate. The ladder down had long since rotted into uselessness, so we tie a rope to a big mushroom so we could get up again.

There were piles of dust on the floor in oblong shapes that suggested that corpses had once lain here, and a box made out of mithril that case a long shadow that blocked me being able to see magic on whatever was behind it. Everything around, the carvings that hadn't rotted away, suggested that this had been an elven vessel, but maybe elves with actual sense of humor, if some of those carvings depicted what I thought they did.

In that shadow was what appeared to be a coffin. We got Basil sober enough to heck and open the box for us; once he'd stopped giggling long enough to do so, we found what one often finds in coffins. A corpse.

Only this one, unlike its fellows, was still sort of juicy. Rotted, yes, but not dust.

This had probably been an elf. "Female," Electra declared. "Look at the pelvis." The body part mentioned was somewhat obscured by the chainmail that covered it, but I conceded that she was probably right. The fatal blow was likely caused by the spear that was still sticking out of her abdomen, right under and to one side of the breastplate, the head broken off. "Not a vampire probably," Electra said. "I don't think this is an undead. Just regular dead."

That breastplate had some designs on it--Corellon, looked like, though the designs were a bit antique and it was hard to tell for sure. This was a paladin's armor. But the strangest thing was that there was an amulet around the corpse's neck--a holy symbol of Bane, the god of evil, one of the biggest enemies of Corellon. (Who is one of the gods of the elves and an all-around fun guy, which you'd never know from his worshipers.)

We couldn't make heads or tails of this corpse, and turned to the mithril box beside it. Inside was the other half of that spear, the head made of mithril and too big for combat against humanoid foes. Basil went through the corpse's pockets, coming up with time-pitted coinage, and a pocket full of seeds. Looked like bird food, oddly enough.

I went and poked around the rest of the ship, feeling something odd under the rotted boards of the ship. I bent down and put my head against the floor, and heard water, rushing by. An underground river of some sort ran right underneath the boat, about five feet down. Well, that explained how this boat had gotten here in the first place. "Drow ship, I think," I said aloud. "There's always those rumors that they at least used to sail on the rivers down here."

From ahead of me, Electra called out, "Does anyone know how to read Old Elven? I think that's what this is, anyway." Argos did, though he had some difficulty with the translation. Electra had found a brass plaque in the captain's room that, when polished up a bit and translated, read something like:

The Huntress
Commissioned 4302
Here die the dragons

"4302? That was...about 1200 or so years ago," I said. "I think. It's been a long time since I learned the old calendar. So this one was a deep dragon hunter."

"Likely," Electra said."

There didn't seem to be much else we could do here--we didn't want to mess with the corpse any more, so up we went, collecting Abner and having him lead us on our way. The cavern narrowed into a tunnel that ended at the top of a waterfall, as that underground river dropped down about forty feet and then continued on its way.

The way down was wet, cold, and very slippery, but we all made it down in one piece, not without a few close calls, though. I wasn't looking forward to climbing back up, that was for sure. We walked by the river for a bit then, the rushing sound of the water loud in this closed space. It was definitely a different river than the one I was used to, noisier and colder. I thought about the ship above us, and about navigating this river. What an adventure that would be, sailing the cold enclosing dark, never knowing what waited around the next bend in the river. I felt like this river and I might get to be friends, one day, if I visited it enough.

Our path veered off and we left the river behind. "There it is," Abner said, gesturing at the first real evidence of builder's hands we'd seen since the boat, a worked stone archway. "This is as far as I go."

I lifted my lamp and saw, carved in the language the elves usually use, Here lies the last. The space beyond the archway was dark, and the light from our lanterns was swallowed in it. "Some sort of field over the door," Electra reported. She picked up a rock and chucked it through; when it hit the field, it went to dust. "Thought so," she muttered. "Disintegration field."

Basil worked on it for a little bit and got it powered down. Iola walked circles around the rest of us; she didn't really like being underground, and her nervousness was showing. Beyond the archway there was a large room, one curving wall made of glass. The glass had to be at least two feet thick, maybe three, and there were lights down there. We could make out a black shape that looked distinctly like a dragon, and piles of round things that might have been eggs.

On the other wall there was a pair of double doors, and detect magic shows us that the doors, the walls, and the glass were all glowing. "In my opinion, those doors aren't going to go where you want them to go," Basil said, giving the doors a dirty look. "Might look like doors to a treasure vault, but they're not. Maybe this trap door."

"What trap door?"

"The one I'm standing on, of course."

There was indeed a camouflaged run set in the floor. The door was too heavy for any of us to open, but Electra had the pixie zombie pull the door up. Turned out that it was about four feet of solid stone block--easy for a transformed dragon to pull up, hard for anyone else.

And, yes, it led to the treasure room we wanted to find. It was a large space, crammed full. There wasn't as much coinage as one's led to believe is usually in dragon hoards, and a lot more...stuff. It all looked sort of like drow stuff, weapons and furniture and rotting fabric and armor, all jumbled together. If I had a guess to make, I'd say that the wealth of several drow matron mothers was in here.

There were a number of magic things, and my job was to figure out what was evil. I had a little pot of ink with me, and I wandered around painting dots on everything that radiated evil so nobody would accidentally pick up a worldbreaker or something of that nature.

The most evil thing in the place was a sword, a hand and a half bastard sword that I barely needed my spell to figure out was evil. "What do you do?" Electra asked it, ignoring my warning to stay away from it.

The voice of the sword was a raspy tenor, nothing of humanity behind it. "I am Darkness. I bring the blood."

"When you cut people?"

The sword chuckled. "I call the blood, whether cut or not. See?" Electra made a muffled noise and fumbled for her handkerchief; her nose had started bleeding. The sword was very upfront about what it wanted--a bearer so it could go out into the world and create rivers of blood. At least the thing wasn't a deceiver, I thought to myself, after trying and failing to get Electra to stop talking to it.

Argos had zeroed in on one of the non-evil magical items, an altar in the shape of a spider, with buttons for the eyes and levers where fangs and spinnerets should be. He had managed to make it produce a clear shield of sorts, stuck to his fist, and was playing with it, fascinated.

"What else does it do?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, and reached out and pushed the third button before I could stop him.

The pool of water in the altar moved, rippled, leapt upward. The water formed itself into a figure of a drow. "What would you know?" she asked in a small but clear voice.

"What do the buttons do?" Argos asked.

"First button: polymorph into a female drow. Second button: polymorph into a male drow. Third: show the instruction manual, which is me. Fourth button: make the pool show present events. Fourth: make the pool show past events. Fifth: make food and water for an army. Sixth: answer any question put to Lloth. Seventh: create an impermeable shield. Eighth: start a self-destruct sequence that will destroy everything organic in a hundred-mile radius."

I blinked. "Has the self-destruct sequence ever been activated?"

"Activated twenty-three minutes ago by the opening of the door to this room. Thirty-five hours and thirty-seven minutes remain."

"Is there any way to turn it off?" asked Argos.

"Not without the assistance of a god."

"I've got a god!" Basil piped up. "Wait, just a second, I'll call him and see if he's in the mood to answer."

"What god?" I asked, suspiciously.

"His name is Grrrbek, he's a kender god. O great Grrrbek who makes the ground soft when you fall on it, hallowed be your stripes, hear me!" Basil went on in that vein for a bit, loudly. I let him; I wasn't giving good odds on Istishia showing up if I tried to call on him, so why not let Basil have a shot?

In front of Basil, the stone of the cavern...shifted.

A god rose up out of the ground, looking cranky. And short. And furry.

Grrrbek was...a badger. Complete with stripes, and fur, and attitude. "Whaddya want?" he asked Basil.

Basil looked about as surprised as the rest of us felt to see his god. "The altar. It, um..."

The god looked at the altar, sniffed. "Self-destruct. Nice. Want me just to stop it, or break it?"

"Break it? Just the self-destruct. Er. Your Godship."

"What are you going to give me? As a sacrifice?" Grrrbek asked.

Basil blinked. "I...could give you something from my pockets?"

"That will do."

The kender rummaged around the twenty or so pockets in his pants and came up with a human-fist-sized glass ball. It had a tag attached to it. "Orb of Dragon Control," Basil read. "How about this?"

Grrrbek chuckled. "That'll do." He took the orb from Basil, leaving the rest of us agape at the fact that Basil had been carrying around an orb of dragon control in his pants, and trundled over to the altar. He spent a moment studying it, and reached out and pushed that eighth button. The button crunched quietly. "There. done. Anything else?" He peered around at us. "You have very tall friends."

"No, no, that's good, thank you!" Basil said, having gotten over his shock and now literally bouncing with happiness.

"Welcome." The god thumped over to Electra, a grin spreading across his furry face. "Ha. I bless you!" He waved in Electra's direction and sank back into the stone, laughing.

"What? What did he do?" Electra asked, panicked. "Am I pregnant?"

Basil was giggling. "No, no, his blessing on females usually makes their cycles start. Well, it sometimes makes them more fertile, but not usually."

Electra glared. "Well, there goes my plans for tonight," she declared, throwing her arms wide.

"Still seeing the angel?" I asked her. She grinned in response, and I decided not to ask any more.

Now that the altar was safe, Argos started playing with it. He set the past reflecting pool to see the death of the paladin whose body we'd found upstairs. We watched as the drow wearing Corellon armor had that spear shoved through her by the claw of a deep dragon. The Bane amulet was nowhere in evidence.

When we investigated further, we saw a Bane cleric with the sword Darkness, using the sword to pull the blood out of a shipful of people--a funeral ship, it looked like from the decorations--and the water out of the river. He dropped the sword in a hole, then climbed onto the boat and dropped his medallion around the dead paladin's neck and gingerly put the head of the spear into the mithril box, and disappeared.

We finally untangled the story with that. Darkness had been trying to increase its power, and to do so it had taken a Bane cleric as a bearer. The cleric had found enough self-will to end his life, and had done so by storing his soul in his amulet. Pulling out the spear would bring both of them to life--probably much to the surprise of the person who pulled the spear out.

The deep dragon had been severely wounded by the fight with the paladin, and had dragged itself into its cave, sealed it with a glass pebble that had grown into that thick glass wall, and fallen asleep, to heal.

We needed a break from untangling events a thousand years gone, and so we returned to looking at the contents of the room. There was a nine-headed whip that was not just not evil, but actively friendly. Each of its heads would heal or cure a different sort of affliction, and used all together it would bring someone back from the dead, no matter how long they had been gone. More or less, it returned things to their natural state.

"Do you remember a paladin, a drow?"

"Leora," the whip responded. "Yes. Nice girl. The deep dragon killed her parents, and she wanted revenge."

"What about the deep dragon?"

"She is a dragon. They have their own reasons for doing things."

It was at this point that the sword Darkness chose to speak up. "Not that you'll be able to talk to her. She's made out of papier mache."

What?

Turned out that the elves had been and gone an entire year ago, and had built a replica out of paper that would look real through the thick glass wall. We did some investigation with the altar, and found out that the deep dragon was in the elven mage tower, her blood being drained and injected into elves. Her eggs were being turned into dragon-people.

So then it was time for some thinking. The elves shouldn’t have the deep dragon or her eggs--dragon blood would make those who survived having it introduced into their bodies stronger, tougher, and completely immune to poison. Really, the deep dragon was in such bad shape that she was unlikely to survive, and if we could somehow get the eggs out and away, the race would survive.

So, we needed someone who could go up against the elven mage tower, someone who wasn't allied with one of the many contentious political groups in the city, and someone preferably who might survive long enough to kill the dragon and destroy the corrupted eggs.

Eventually, we lit on the solution. The paladin, and the cleric. We could use the altar to change him to a drow, and with him backing her up (we hoped) the two of them would probably do a decent job of it.

In the meantime, I saw Electra eyeing the altar, pondering whether being a drow for a bit would be a good fashion choice. In the end, after discussion of the fact that her wardrobe would have to be revamped (drow don't look very good in black clothing), what really made her mind not to was that she would become drow--not just Electra in a drow suit, but Electra as she would have been if she'd been born a drow, who would be a very different person than the Electra we know and occasionally love. And I'm afraid I betrayed my background a little bit during that discussion. When I was young, it was considered fashionable for young men of a certain social status to care about their clothing.

So it was off to haul the altar, the whip, and the sword up and out of the treasure chamber. Most of us laid our hands on a few pretty things before we left, as well. I was sure that most of these things were priceless antiques, so I figured I'd sell a few things to whatever museums cared to buy them.

Getting the altar up the waterfall got interesting, but we managed it. We got everything set up in the foul-smelling interior of the ship. We pulled the spear, waited until the cleric's body appeared, and then used the altar to change him into a drow male.

The really interesting thing was that the altar asked us a bunch of questions, and we more or less made this guy from the ground up. The altar was as good as it claimed it was, and soon enough we had a pair of drow, sitting up and scratching their heads.

Leora, the paladin, spent a while asking us what had been happening for the last thousand years, and we finally got around to why we'd brought her back. She laughed quietly when we told her that the elves were draining a deep dragon for its blood. "Short memories for a race that's so long-lived," she said. "Deep dragons were hunted for their blood in the first place. Then, when their children were born, they were born drow. That's how drow came into being. We were all born dark-adapted, and when it became obvious that the elves weren't happy about our existence, we retreated." She shook her head. "Guilt, I think. They couldn't stand seeing what they'd done to their children."

"So, will you do it?" I asked.

"Depends. You looking for the tower to be standing when we're done?"

We all looked at each other, and we gave a collective shrug. "Not really."

"Then sure. Give us a day to recover, help us get the harpoon fixed, we're good." She turned to her male companion. "What's your name, by the way? Were you on the crew?"

He looked a bit dazed. "My name is Hunt. I think. I don't know, I don't really remember anything, except for voices. I'll go with you, though."

We didn't enlighten the two of them. No need to tell Hunt that he'd been a cleric of Bane, and human, until just recently.

We took the drow to the druids (through a rainstorm that seemed like to drown us all), who helped them get the harpoon fixed and gave them enough protective stuff to weigh down an army. Basil, after Poi gave him a few bags of holding, went in that day and stole several hundred eggs, which the druids promised to take good care of and get to where they could hatch in safety.

The sword Darkness we took to Electra's angel boyfriend (thing-friend? Extraplanar being-friend? I had no idea if angels limited themselves to only two genders) and he spun the thing more or less out of existence, telling us that it would make its way back some day, but not for a very long time.

The next day, well, there was all sorts of fuss and bother. Few of the elven mages survived it. Malgorzeta, leader of the elven mage tower and from all reports not the nicest person ever, was not among them. Leora and Hunt came back with Malgorzeta's body. On questioning, her shade told us that they'd been working on some druid-killers, growing them sixty miles north, in an old drow city.

And that was just about that. Gaetana was pleased, and we took the rest of the day off. It was a little cooler than it had been, owing to the storm yesterday, and it looked like we might be in for a series of storms. Tomorrow, I figured, we might go out to the old drow city, and see what there was to be seen.

Right now, though, there was a play I was interested in seeing and had convinced Iola that she might like as well. It was a little higher in society than I usually got these days, but I was pretty sure that most of the people who might see me there and recognize me would be attending the later, more expensive shows.

It was time, long past time, to stop letting who I had been keep me from enjoying things I liked, and this particular acting company had been one that I'd enjoyed immensely when I was younger. I convinced Iola to put on a few more clothes than she usually wore, and the two of us went out. It all felt staggeringly...domestic. Except for the fact that Iola was a werewolf, I was carrying a superintelligent rat in a pocket dimension in a pouch, and we were paying for our tickets with money earned from investigating supernatural mysteries.

Still. How had I gotten here from being a bargeman with about ten silver to my name a month ago? I suppose, with my life, I ought to be used to reversals of fortune. And I had a feeling this one wasn't done with me yet.

For the moment, though, the weather was nicer than it had been for a while, and we were going to go out and enjoy ourselves...



Quotes:

"Dooooooooooood."
--Basil, stoned

"Dr. E, Zombie Examiner!"
--Electra

"A lich? In a paladin's armor?"
"It might be a joke."
--Martin, Electra

"In my professional opinion, it's better to leave sleeping liches lie."
--Electra.

[discussing the possibility of Electra changing to drow] "The black wouldn't go real well, but you'd have to go to purples and red...why am I discussing this with Electra?"
--Martin

"Martin is secretly metrosexual."
--Kris

"That's why we call the sword Menstrualis, it draws your blood out monthly."
--Laura

"Maybe using the altar to turn yourself into a drow isn't such a great idea."
"Do drow like the nightlife?"
"They like to boogie!"
--Martin, Electra, Basil