![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithne[This is actually the recap for two sessions rolled into one, due to me being too busy on Black Angel Crossroads to write Sleepless Streets.]
For the first time in ages, we managed to get through an entire breakfast without Gaetana calling in to give us something to do. We discussed our list, the things we're meant to get to when we have time, and decided to deal with a strange smell in the troll section. (We get all the best assignments.) It smelled like roses, and it made some trolls euphoric and some very angry.
We were trying to decide where to start when the druid Silas wandered up. He opened up a bag he was carrying and wordlessly handed Electra what seemed to be a snake. It woke, wriggling and hissing indignantly. "Um, thanks?" I said. "Why are you giving Electra a snake?"
"It's not a snake," Silas said. "It's a deep dragon hatchling."
Electra was staring at the baby dragon, holding it at arm's length. It stared back, and its hiss had gone inquiring. Its tail was swishing rapidly. "Why are you giving it to me, though?" she asked.
"It's...not normal. It prefers to eat carrion, preferably charged with negative energy. It was trying to starve itself to death, so we thought who would be better to take care of it than our favorite necromancer?" His smile made it clear that even if he meant that favorite, it wasn't by much. "It's not developing like the rest. Its siblings are all twice its size, and it's not developing the vestigial limbs they have. We think that being fed what it wants to eat on a regular basis will help. We think it's female, by the way. Hard to tell for sure, but that's our best guess."
"How long do they take to grow up?" Electra asked.
He shrugged. "Fifty years before it gets to be too smart, a century before it gets too big to be kept inside. We think, anyway. Good luck." I thought that the expression that crossed his face might have been a smile, but it was so quick that I couldn't be sure. Then he turned and walked into the trunk of the big tree that was right next to the open-air patio we always ate on at this place.
The weird thing was what he left behind in the tree. Usually, with the tree walks that druids do, a portal opens and closes so quickly it can barely be seen. This time, though, the portal remained open. We blinked and waited for a moment, thinking the portal would close, but it persisted. Electra convinced the baby dragon to wrap around her wrist, and promised it a snack later.
We looked at the portal, and Argos finally went and stuck his head in. (I'm not sure how that man has managed to live to the age he has. His wife must be a saint.) He pulled his head back out and reported that there was a pedestal with a basin on the top of it, in a stone room. The basin was flashing with colored lights.
Basil inspected it and declared that it wasn't trapped and there wasn't another exit out, so we trooped in. Iola was sticking close by me, in human form today. She'd enjoyed the play we'd gone to see once I explained that the people on the stage weren't actually in distress, they were just pretending.
We dipped some things into it. A healing potion turned black, a sandwich turned moldy. A rat skeleton grew horns. A bottle of grape juice turned to blood. Argos stuck his now-moldy sandwich back into the basin..and it turned into a very nice ham and cheese sandwich. Inspired, Electra dipped her horned rat skeleton into the basin, and it turned into a real horned rat, which roared squeakily that it was hungry. Argos gave it the cheese from his sandwich.
Poi was busy identifying things that we'd dipped. The healing potion had turned into a vampire maker, and when it was dipped again, it was turned into a vampire cure. A poisoned apple that Electra had with her turned golden, and Poi said taking a bite of it would grant immortality of a sort. Electra took it from him and dipped it again, and it turned black. She hid it somewhere on her, looking crafty.
I really didn't trust the look in her eyes, but I had won the battle on the vampire making potion, so I didn't say anything. In the meantime, she'd called one of her drow skeletons, and it stepped into the small stone room with us. Electra told the skeleton to dip its hand into the fountain...
...and it turned into a real live drow woman, entirely naked and looking very confused. "Can we find her some clothes?" I asked as she squeaked and covered her breasts with one arm and her private bits with her other hand. I did see enough to settle a bet that I'd had with some of the guys on the barge that I used to work on--the carpet matched the drapes, so to speak. (Drow don't work in brothels, and the ones who do work as ladies of the evening are of the kind that are very well-paid and very choosy about their clients.)
Basil dug in his pockets and came up with a garter belt. It was frilly and pink. He looked at it, looked at the woman, then stuck it back in his pocket. "Poi keeps my clothes in his pouch," Iola said. She reached over and opened the pouch, peering inside. "I think that bikini, the black one. Could you get it for me?"
She reached in and retrieved her bikini, and casually pulled off her shirt and skirt and tossed them at the drow. She pulled them on as Iola put her bikini on. Argos, bored, had decided to take off and go track us from outside, so he took off while we learned that the drow was named Dagmar, and the last she remembered it had been 667 and she'd been fighting a bunch of elves. We found some more of Iola's clothes for her and gave her some money and sent her off with directions on how to get to Leora and Hunt, the drow we'd met yesterday.
Meanwhile, Argos had found us, calling in and reporting that the stone room we were in had been built in the middle of what looked to be a derelict flophouse. "There are some strange footprints out here," the little image of him muttered. "Looks like a hand, but it's two feet across."
Basil volunteered to go help track whatever made the footprints while we worked on figuring out what the altar did. Poi came out, looked at it, and said, "Did you even try to ask it what it is? Most things like this have an instruction manual built in, you know."
I shrugged. "I didn't. Remember, I've never dealt with much magic stuff much. So, magic basin. What are you?"
It's hard to describe the voice that responded, other than saying it sounded like pebbles rattling together combined with a woman's scream. "I am the pool of an incomprehensible noise."
"A what?"
"An incomprehensible noise. Also known in your language as an assassin demon. I enchant the weapons of the incomprehensible noise."
"And just what is this assassin demon doing here?"
"Killing all of the servants of the trees in the city."
I gave the pool a disconcerted look. "The druids. So why is there a portal from a tree into here?"
"The incomprehensible noise finds that the servants of the trees are vulnerable when they think they are most safe, stepping from one tree to the next."
"Is there a way to change where the portal opens to?"
"Just say it."
I turned to the rest and we swiftly discussed it. I called Basil and Argos and told them to meet us over in the druid district and Electra, curious, asked the fountain how it enchanted weapons. The answer was that we could think of what we wanted and dip our weapons, and they would change.
I decided to try it and dipped the stick I carry into the pool, concentrating on protection. It was a light wood, but when I dipped it, it turned dark and light arcane carvings appeared all over it. Electra dipped a dagger she carries, and it came out...purple. With a hilt wrapped in mauve leather, and the pommel encrusted with gems. She studied it briefly, then lit up. "Martin, look!" she crowed, and pressed one of the gems. Music began to fill the room, as if there were suddenly a raucous six-piece band with a growly male singer right in the room with us. Electra started dancing, and the dragon that was wrapped around her arm waved its head in the air with every evidence of enjoyment.
At that point, Argos and Basil arrived. Coming after Basil was what I initially took for a tentacle, questing around right inside the door. I followed the tentacle back to the source. "Basil? Is that an elephant?" I'd never seen one before outside of pictures, but I reviewed the pertinent details--gray, sparse hair, wrinkly skin, long mobile nose, big friendly eyes, not quite as rock-wall-looking as a troll--and decided it was the closest I was going to get to a positive identification.
Basil grinned. "Yep!"
"Dare I ask where you got an elephant in the last half hour?" The elephant blinked at me.
"Found a wand in my pocket. It made me him. I think I'll keep him. Neat dagger, Electra, where did you get that?"
The amazing thing is that a wand making an elephant for Basil wasn't really all that strange, considering the other things we'd seen in the last few weeks. Basil dipped that strange weapon of his that he carries all the time, which turned purple, and Argos got a dagger with a spinning blade.
Argos was also busy, when he wasn't playing with his new toy, with making a drawing of Silas. He's got this uncanny talent, stemming from that case that I can't talk about much, where he can sometimes draw things as they're happening. It comes in handy sometimes. Anyway, in this case Silas had his arms tied up behind his back and was hanging head-down in what looked to be a cavern of some sort. around him were shadowy forms that suggested other hanging people. "Definitely alive," Argos pronounced, studying the picture he'd drawn.
I had kind of a bad feeling. "You know where that sort of looks like? Remember that drow graveyard, under the poison apple trees?"
Electra leaned over, fiddling with her dagger and making the growly music stop. "It looks sort of like there. We could go check. We know how to get there."
So we did, asking the people at the museum if we could borrow their exhibit for a little bit and sliding down the tunnel. Without the ice gelatinous cube to ice the thing, it was a slower trip, but it still worked. The tunnel ended in the cavern, and as I lit up a light spell and sent it upward, we could see druids hanging from chains like weird fruit, swinging slightly.
"How do we get them down without killing them?" Electra asked. "That's a fall of..." She looked up, studied. "Sixty feet. Maybe more."
"Lots of pillows?" Argos suggested.
The small hairs on the back of my neck started to stand on end, and I cast a spell to detect invisibility. Ah--there. "We're not alone--"
"I got him," Basil said confidently, and went swinging up towards the ceiling, and began firing bullets from the sling end of his hoopak. Those bullets were something else entirely, coming from his newly-enhanced weapon. His first bullet went through some of the chains the druids were hanging from, dropping men and women like stones, hitting the demon and separating it from one of its arms. It came visible and it was a thing made out of spare parts, four limbs with huge hands at the ends and a face like a wound, mouth ragged raw meat with thousands of teeth.
I heard Electra snap out two spells in quick succession, first a featherfall and then a spell that called a huge spiderweb into existence. Things got rather confusing around then, after Basil relieved it of another limb and it fell screaming into the web, thrashing and still dangerous. I tried hitting it with my stick and discovered to my dismay that it made a shield that enclosed me, and when a stray bullet of Basil's hit it, it got bigger. Argos had borrowed the wand that Basil had used to make his elephant and used it, perhaps hoping to drop an elephant on it. Unfortunately, it only turned the demon purple and, from the scream, made it mad.
Soon enough, though, it went down, and we let the rest of the druids down in a more controlled fashion. They thanked us, as politely as a druid has ever thanked us, and agreed to house Basil's elephant for him. "I hate to say this, guys, but we did have something we were going to do today. Basil, how are you feeling?" I'd dropped some healing into him earlier--the demon had ripped into him a bit.
"I'm fine. Lunch first?"
Well, kender are a kind of halfling, after all. I nodded and we cleared on out of there, heading for the food stands that are just over the bridge from the druid district.
Lunch was cheese rolls and sausages, both of which Poi demanded some of. Then it was off to the troll district to track down a smell.
Yesterday's rain was only a distant memory now as the city had returned to baking in the sun and marinating in its own juices. The streets were marginally cleaner than they had been, but the air was still a hot blanket pressing down on us as we walked.
It took us a couple of hours to get a whiff of the described smell, like walking into the center of a giant rose for just a split second, overwhelming and mercifully brief. Next to us, a troll that looked like granite shot through with veins of quartz stiffened and fell over with a sound like a house collapsing.
"Iola, can you track that smell?" I asked. She nodded, stripped, and changed to full wolf form, pressing her shoulder against my thigh briefly and glancing up with her yellow eyes. Then she lowered her nose to the ground and began to track.
She led us right to what appeared to be an old perfume distillery. We took invisibility potions and snuck in, and discovered that gnomes were making perfume out of rose petals, distilling them down. Basil found a trap door in the floor and waved us over. "Look!" he whispered, excited.
Down the trap door there was...a blob. It had a bellybutton in the middle. It seemed to be exuding droplets of oil that smelled chokingly of roses, and there were tubes running into it that seemed to be dripping a glowing liquid into it--it looked like glowfly dust in liquid form. We withdrew and put our heads together, and between all of us we figured out that it was a kind of scent demon. Scent demons are slow and limbless, but they're dangerous when roused because the smells they put out can render almost anyone susceptible to mental control. And if the demon itself were being controlled...
I didn't like where this was going.
We slipped back into the factory and went to find the (thankfully empty) office. We took a look at the books, which looked on the surface like the factory was being operated by the gnomes. "Cooked," I said, a little disgusted. "The real books should be hidden nearby, they'd need to update them regularly."
Basil found them, and we sat down and looked them over. Never thought my education would come in handy in policework, but it did. The real plan appeared to be bankrolled by Nielsen the vampire, the one who'd had the larder of blondes outside of what was now my front door. (Speaking of, I only had one sleeping blonde left--the elf. I hadn't decided what to do with her quite yet.) Poi had requested some samples of the products that were made with the oil, and them popped up, clambering up my shirt and smearing a big dollop of sweet-smelling face cream on my face. "Hey! What are you--"
"Rub it in," Poi told me. I rolled my eyes and complied.
"Whoa, Martin, that makes you look about ten years younger," Basil said, grinning.
I glared at Poi. "Thanks. Makes me more likely to be spotted by someone I used to know."
The rat laughed and clambered down my shirt. I saw a thoughtful look cross Basil's face, but ignored it. If anyone wants to know stuff about me, all they have to do is ask. "The oil makes people who use it able to be controlled after a while, and it'll fade after a bit," Poi said from the opening to the pouch.
This was probably a job for the cops, but we wanted to make sure the scent demon wasn't going to be a problem, so we headed down to it. Pulling out the tube that had the glowfly solution in it did a pretty good job of waking it up. It talked to us out of the orifice that I had originally taken for a bellybutton, and it was a surprisingly articulate conversationalist...with a sense of humor. It squirted Electra with a little bit of oil that had the effect of making every male gaze in the room, including mine and Argos', glue itself to Electra's butt.
Iola, growling, shoved herself against my legs, and the scent demon laughed. It didn't really want to be working for Nielsen, and in gratitude for its freedom it made us all perfumes that it claimed would attract whichever sex or persuasion we liked to us. We called the regular cops in, they did a raid, and everything was resolved to the happiness of all except Nielsen, whose happiness I don't really care for much.
Congratulating ourselves on a job well done, we split up for the evening. Iola, the moment we got home, changed back to human form and knocked me down right in the doorway. Jealousy makes her randy, it seems, but I didn't mind one bit.
The next morning, it was once again Friday, and we met for what we thought was going to be just a little bit of work. We needed to hunt down some strange music that was coming from the sewer grates in the dwarven section. The cops there figured that there had to be illegal mining going on.
It took us until almost noon to figure out where the music was strongest. It really sounded as if there were a woman singing and walking around in the sewers that ran right below the street, but when we looked we saw nobody there.
Basil, Electra, and Iola went down into the sewers, and almost immediately there were signs of trouble. "Hey!" I heard Basil say, his voice floating up through the open grate. "Iola, where are you going?"
"She just started looking all glazed and started walking," Electra explained after they hauled Iola back up to the street. Iola was shaking her head as if she were coming out of a dream.
When I asked her what happened, Iola said, "Something was calling me. It wanted me to come." We consulted with each other, and ended up tying a rope to Iola's wrist and climbing back down, following Iola as we wended our way through what felt like miles of twisting, stinking sewer passages. Eventually, she led us to a rougher passage that didn't seem to be a part of the sewers (at least, it smelled better), and to a crowd of people standing on the stony shore of an underground lake. They were all werewolves, it looked like, and all of them were standing with glazed looks and intent ears, clustered around what looked like a time-stained statue of a goddess, a tipped urn on one hip, water spilling endlessly into the lake.
We could almost hear the sound they were hearing. Argos, who as always had come with a gadget to use, discovered with yet another of his funny boxes that the sound was coming from the statue that was standing on the shore. I gently plugged Iola's ears with some wax that we'd brought with us, and she blinked again, turning to me, looking confused. "She wants us to kill mages," she said, looking confused. "I didn't hear very much."
Well, some of the people here looked like they'd been standing here a while. I hit the statue with a silence spell, and the crowd of werewolves as one blinked, swayed, and made softly inquiring whines, even the ones in human form.
Asking around, the one who had been here the longest turned out to be a dark-haired and magnificently rounded werewolf who told us that they had been told specifically to kill necromancers, I started to get a weird feeling. Necromancers, and this crowd had been here some time...
Basil, in the meantime, was messing with the statue. He pulled out a fist-sized crystal and a glass vial filled with a green liquid, and motioned for me to cut the spell. I dropped the Silence, and he dashed both to the ground.
Good news: both shattered.
Bad news: where he had hit the ground with the vial, another statue seemed to grow up out of the ground, a male version of the woman with the urn. The first statue was still making noise, from the looks on the faces of the werewolves around us, and Argus with his little box told us that the second statue was making noise too. "The crystal's regrowing," Basil said, looking concerned.
Electra was busy with a potion she had, an acid substance that ate right through the crystal and its mooring, effectively silencing it. The werewolves shook their heads and wandered off. So the second statue wasn't calling them.
What was it calling?
When Iola unplugged her ears, she shook her head, irritated. "I can't understand it. It sounds like bats. Or one of those places in the demon district where all the bloodsuckers gather..."
Bats. Vampires.
Damnit.
Well, to find out what we needed to know, we'd need to let some come and listen, so while we were waiting, we went poking around. Argos had found another rough corridor leading away, and holding a light spell aloft I followed him down. "There's a smell like someone really old through here," Iola reported.
No more than thirty feet down the tunnel, the bodies began.
They were mostly human, dressed richly, stiff as boards and leaned up against the walls like umbrellas in a foyer. Iola was at my shoulder, her breath hot on my neck, and I realized I was looking for a familiar face, a crown of silver hair.
I found it about twenty feet on. Remy was here, dead eyes staring, her body the most torn of all of her immediate neighbors. Iola's tail was wagging furiously, and she was making pleased sounds. I shot her a look, and she gave me a toothy wolf grin.
Basil had come up behind us, and sucked in his breath when he saw Remy. "Did you kill her?" he asked Iola.
The werewolf's voice was a rough growl, like it always was when she was in that form. "I'll never tell."
I stalked away, trying not to hold this against Iola. I had liked Remy, damnit. I didn't think she'd really had anything to do with it, but her positive glee at seeing Remy's torn body turned my stomach. To distract myself, I started inspecting bodies. There was some sort of slow transformation being worked on the older bodies, and I would swear they were being turned into liches.
Liches that had once been necromancers were bad news. Well, any lich is not someone you'd invite to a dinner party, but the necromancers and the evokers tended to be the worst. But these looked like they were going to be liches under someone's control. They're bad enough on their own.
And, most horribly, it looked like there had been three here that were no longer, their transformations complete. The ones that were near the patches of floor where the dust had been disturbed were well on their way to becoming liches, and I prevailed on Argos to help me cut off their heads.
After that was done, I was listening to the others talk down the corridor, and heard ahead of us the first flutter of wings. "Time to head back, Argos," I said.
"I'm going to follow the liches, see where they went," he said.
"You're what? Argos, there's a bunch of vampires heading this way, and we don't want to run into those liches."
He shrugged and took off. I thought seriously about grabbing him and hauling him back--in physical contest between a bargeman and a watchmaker, the guy who poles for a living wins--but thought better of it and skedaddled myself back, abandoning Argos to his self-inflicted fate.
The bats were close on my heels. I saw a couple of skeletons hauling Remy's body away, evidently called by Electra to take Remy to her house. The fluttering crowd circled the statue and then settled on the ground, transforming into their humanoid forms. We let them listen for a bit; I'd seen a glow of magic underwater and wanted to investigate.
I waded into the water and started swimming down, feeling my water breathing kick on with the briefest of sore threats. There were structures down here, what looked like a flooded temple. The glow of magic was coming from an altar at the exact center of the temple.
I swam around it, contemplating the symbols and statues. This was a water temple, but it wasn't for Istishia or Eldath, but Azul. Azul's not well known, and I'd never seen as much as a priest of his, but I recognized the symbols from my studies.
I surfaced and went to tell the others what I'd found. "Want me to silence the statue for a bit so we can talk to the vampires?" I asked. There was agreement all round, and I cast the spell.
Talking to the vampires, one in particular stepped forward to talk to us. Her name was Zsa, it appeared, from how she was dressed it appeared that we'd interrupted her in the middle of something. She slunk up to Electra, making eyes at her. "The funny thing about that statue," the vampire said, "is that it was telling us to kill ourselves."
Killing necromancers. Suggesting vampires suicide. Someone had an interesting sense of humor, if humor it was. At this point, I pointed out to the rest that we needed to either melt the crystal like we had the other or stop all of the vampires' ears, because my spell wasn't going to last much longer.
"I have earmuffs!" Basil declared, and started digging in his pockets. What he pulled out at first looked like it might be earmuffs. What it turned out to be was...a dog. A tiny, buggy-eyed, hideously ugly dog that immediately started yapping. Basil blinked at it. "I don't think that used to be a dog," he muttered, then set it down.
Iola inspected it carefully. "Lunch?" she asked, hopefully. I shook my head; we'd had some discussions about her not eating domesticated dogs, but the difference between pets and the feral dogs that are a problem in some parts of town was difficult for her. Iola sighed grumpily.
"I think I can melt it," Electra said, and set about doing so. The dog looked confused, and the dragon wrapped around Electra's arm hissed at it. We were getting to be a regular zoo around here.
We left the vampires there, and Zsa requested earplugs and followed us. She had evidently decided we looked like fun. Iola growled deep in her throat when Zsa tried to sidle up to me, then the growl turned a bit confused when Zsa tried to cuddle up to Iola.
I let Iola fend for herself and turned back to the rest. At that point, Argos called in and said that he'd found the end of the tunnel and a trap door that led up into someone's house, it looked like. Electra dropped a pair of mage eyes where Argos was, and we went to find the house the tunnel led to from the top side.
The house we were looking for was in a comfortable and quiet dwarven neighborhood, rows of nearly-identical houses and kids playing between the houses. The house looked pretty normal, except for the fact that there were half-hidden sigils painted on the door and shutters, and that when I detected undead I could see the presence of three very powerful undead inside the house.
A neighbor was home, tending the roses in his front yard. When asked, the neighbor told us that a person named Yaakov lived in that house, an elderly dwarf who had been a deep miner. He hadn't seen Yaakov in some time, but told us that he'd had a wife and two children, all three of whom were dead. Yaakov had been seeing his neighbor across the way, Stina, for a number of years, starting from after his wife had died.
Fortunately, when we went to knock on the door, Stina was home. She was tiny for a dwarf, a face like a dried apple and a brilliant smile. "Yaakov? Haven't seen him for five months or so," she said. "He was going off on a trip to see something he'd discovered when he was younger, said he was getting too old not to go back and look. He brought me back something, and then he disappeared again."
"What was it?"
Stina disappeared into the house and came back with a large jar, made of a strange, blue-tinged glass. "Isn't it pretty?" she said, handing it to Basil. "Ew, why does he have a rat?"
I looked down and saw that Poi had made an appearance. "He's a friend," I said to her. To Poi, I said, "What do you think?"
Poi beckoned the jar closer with tiny, clawed paws. Reluctantly, Stina held it out, and I took it from her. Poi sniffed and ran his paws along the edge of the jar, ears quivering. "Soul vessel," he said. "Until recently, it held something very, very old."
It wasn't good news, but it was about what I was expecting. I handed the jar back to Stina. "Thanks," I said. "We may come back for it later."
Away from her, for lack of anything better to do we started walking back to where we'd found the temple. Ignoring the crowd of vampires for the moment, we pondered what on earth one could do about three liches. "That temple might have some clues," Electra suggested, and we went down to look, those of us who needed them taking water breathing potions.
Basil, after looking around, found a door I had overlooked, and after he unlocked and untrapped it we went into a room that had, strapped to shelves, what looked like hundreds of the same soul jars. And yes, there was a space where the one that Stina had should have been, and three open ones.
There was writing on the walls, characters that nobody recognized, but that Electra could read with the aid of a spell. "They were dying," she reported. "All of their females were dead. They put themselves into storage so that their culture might be preserved."
I looked down rows and rows of jars. I'm not sure who suggested it, but we decided to put a random soul into the dog that was still hanging out on the shore of the little lake, looking confused. It had been following Basil around like a tiny, ugly shadow. I picked a jar and we carried it out to the surface, then Basil tucked the canine under one arm and opened the jar right in its face.
It coughed once and then stared around it. Then it frantically looked at itself, making distressed whining noises. I cast a spell to let me talk to it. It turned out that the soul that was now in the ugly little dog was named Page, and he was from a race of humans that had lived about fifty thousand years ago. At least, as far as I could tell, they were humans. Our ancestors had still been swinging in the trees when Page had last been alive, the dog told me testily. He didn't seem particularly happy about being saved.
They had been a race of necromancers, and had created, so he claimed, the first vampires. Werewolves had been created to be their servants. It all had spiraled out of control when the vampires had decided to attack the female humans preferentially, making them vampires, until there were none left unturned.
So there was why the male statute had commanded the deaths of the vampires. That the werewolves were sent after the necromancers was also no real surprise--whoever had been freed first had decided to do away with the competition. And Page also said that he could change the vampire caller to call liches--but we'd need to change him into a human first.
After long discussion, we decided to give Page the benefit of the doubt. Electra polymorphed him into a human and Page was as good as his word, changing the crystal to call liches. The three liches came obediently, and obligingly stood there while we cut off their heads.
We obtained an anti-possession potion from the police department, the soul jar from Stina, and settled in to wait. A day later, Yaakob came by to check on his liches...and we popped the soul that had possessed him back into the jar, all neat and tidy. We labeled that jar and the three others as troublemakers and set them aside to take to a temple and have banished to another plane for good. The bodies of the necromancers were given over to the custody of the police, to try to locate next of kin or at least someone who would be willing to pay to have them raised.
Page, we left alive and with no professed desire to return the others of his kind to life just yet. We picked up some things from the temple, some very nice weapons and potions, and then we were done and shut of ancient vampire-makers for the moment.
Me, I still had some work to do.
Remy had been laid in state in the front parlor of her house, her zombie servants slumped and useless in the halls. I stepped over them on my way to find her. I'd left Iola at home, forbidding her to leave the house, though I hated to do so. I still didn't know if she had participated in Remy's death or not, but to be safe I wanted her nowhere near my necromancer friend.
Repairing the damage to her body was easy enough. Raising her from the dead was a little harder. Necromancers are hard to raise, much harder than people who don't revel in death are. Their souls go much farther, it seems, and are much harder to recall. But finally, after much chanting, Remy opened her blue eyes and looked up at me.
"Didn't know you still cared," she said, her voice a croak. I helped her sit up and poured her a cup of water, which she drank greedily.
"Still do," I told her. "How are you feeling?"
"Hung over. How long was I dead?"
I thought back. "Three days or so. Do you remember--"
"Dying?" There was a dry chuckle in her voice and a warm quirk to her mouth. "A bunch of wolves attacked me. It was almost dark, I couldn't see them, but I fought."
My mouth went dry. Iola. Had she gotten a pack together to go after Remy? When had she found the time? "Nothing else, no markings?"
"Nothing." She shook her head, then chuckled. "Oh, Martin, don't give me such a look. If your girl was with them, I didn't see her. And wasn't I right about her?"
I had to laugh. "Yes, you were. I kept on meaning to come by and apologize."
Remy gave me a canny look. "I knew exactly what was going to happen. You didn't, but then again you're blind to a lot of things you'd think a priest would be able to see." Her voice had gone gentle. "Kiss me and say goodbye, Martin. I need to sleep, I have a lot of work to do tomorrow."
I bent down, intending to kiss her cheek, but at the last moment Remy turned and kissed me full on the mouth. "There," she said when she'd had her fill. "Never worth coming back from the dead if there isn't a kiss afterward. Off with you, Martin." I fled, stopping on the way home to wash my mouth at one of the fountains. I'd thought Remy and I were done with each other, and maybe we were.
There was always going to be something there, though, I realized on the walk home that night. I liked Iola, loved her if you cornered me and asked, though I wasn't entirely sure how she felt about me. Iola was mostly uncomplicated. Remy was--not.
On the whole, I thought I preferred simple, and I told myself that it was probably a bad idea for me to be alone in a room with Remy any time soon. There was a beautiful werewolf waiting at home for me, and if I judged her temper right, I could probably forestall the fight that I figured was coming with a bit of judicious flattery and kissing her until she forgot that she was mad at me.
It was, after all, time for a weekend...
Quotes:
"We sexed it, we're pretty sure it's female."
"You druids will do anything."
--Silas, Basil
"It's stylish if nothing else."
--Basil, speaking of the elephant
"Electra is so goth, she has a baby deep dragon as an accessory."
--Kris
"...Holy shit."
"That was a few blocks back, thankfully."
--Martin, Basil, about the elephant.
"Hey, do you have a really big paddock somewhere?"
"Yes...why?"
"I have a friend who needs a place to live. And some hay. I'll come by and take him out and play with him."
--Basil, Biff
"The smell of roses is overwhelming."
"Oh god, my grandmother's here."
--Storm, Basil
"Is there a perfume distillery around here?"
"In the troll section?"
"Trolls might like to smell pretty, I don't know!"
--Martin, Basil
"Oh my god, it's Jabba the Rose! It is my grandmother!"
--Basil
"Anyone got some coffee?"
"...I have some elephant poo..."
--Electra, Martin
"It puts the sound in the range of bats."
"Calling vampires!"
"...great."
--Storm, Martin, Basil
"I wonder what the beef against necromancers is. Someone take it personally?"
--Electra
"The ever-so-wise cleric is going off after the lich."
"I'm going to have to rescue his ass."
"Define 'have to'."
----Basil, Martin
"I'm in your sewer, killing your liches."
--Laura
"People who sleep with angels--"
"Shouldn't live in glass houses!
"--have no room to talk about my werewolf girlfriend."
--Martin, Basil
"Yo quiero licho bell!"
--Laura
"How do we know the liches aren't friendly?"
"They killed Remy. Shredded her. Not. Friendly."
"Well, when you put it that way..."
--Argos, Basil
For the first time in ages, we managed to get through an entire breakfast without Gaetana calling in to give us something to do. We discussed our list, the things we're meant to get to when we have time, and decided to deal with a strange smell in the troll section. (We get all the best assignments.) It smelled like roses, and it made some trolls euphoric and some very angry.
We were trying to decide where to start when the druid Silas wandered up. He opened up a bag he was carrying and wordlessly handed Electra what seemed to be a snake. It woke, wriggling and hissing indignantly. "Um, thanks?" I said. "Why are you giving Electra a snake?"
"It's not a snake," Silas said. "It's a deep dragon hatchling."
Electra was staring at the baby dragon, holding it at arm's length. It stared back, and its hiss had gone inquiring. Its tail was swishing rapidly. "Why are you giving it to me, though?" she asked.
"It's...not normal. It prefers to eat carrion, preferably charged with negative energy. It was trying to starve itself to death, so we thought who would be better to take care of it than our favorite necromancer?" His smile made it clear that even if he meant that favorite, it wasn't by much. "It's not developing like the rest. Its siblings are all twice its size, and it's not developing the vestigial limbs they have. We think that being fed what it wants to eat on a regular basis will help. We think it's female, by the way. Hard to tell for sure, but that's our best guess."
"How long do they take to grow up?" Electra asked.
He shrugged. "Fifty years before it gets to be too smart, a century before it gets too big to be kept inside. We think, anyway. Good luck." I thought that the expression that crossed his face might have been a smile, but it was so quick that I couldn't be sure. Then he turned and walked into the trunk of the big tree that was right next to the open-air patio we always ate on at this place.
The weird thing was what he left behind in the tree. Usually, with the tree walks that druids do, a portal opens and closes so quickly it can barely be seen. This time, though, the portal remained open. We blinked and waited for a moment, thinking the portal would close, but it persisted. Electra convinced the baby dragon to wrap around her wrist, and promised it a snack later.
We looked at the portal, and Argos finally went and stuck his head in. (I'm not sure how that man has managed to live to the age he has. His wife must be a saint.) He pulled his head back out and reported that there was a pedestal with a basin on the top of it, in a stone room. The basin was flashing with colored lights.
Basil inspected it and declared that it wasn't trapped and there wasn't another exit out, so we trooped in. Iola was sticking close by me, in human form today. She'd enjoyed the play we'd gone to see once I explained that the people on the stage weren't actually in distress, they were just pretending.
We dipped some things into it. A healing potion turned black, a sandwich turned moldy. A rat skeleton grew horns. A bottle of grape juice turned to blood. Argos stuck his now-moldy sandwich back into the basin..and it turned into a very nice ham and cheese sandwich. Inspired, Electra dipped her horned rat skeleton into the basin, and it turned into a real horned rat, which roared squeakily that it was hungry. Argos gave it the cheese from his sandwich.
Poi was busy identifying things that we'd dipped. The healing potion had turned into a vampire maker, and when it was dipped again, it was turned into a vampire cure. A poisoned apple that Electra had with her turned golden, and Poi said taking a bite of it would grant immortality of a sort. Electra took it from him and dipped it again, and it turned black. She hid it somewhere on her, looking crafty.
I really didn't trust the look in her eyes, but I had won the battle on the vampire making potion, so I didn't say anything. In the meantime, she'd called one of her drow skeletons, and it stepped into the small stone room with us. Electra told the skeleton to dip its hand into the fountain...
...and it turned into a real live drow woman, entirely naked and looking very confused. "Can we find her some clothes?" I asked as she squeaked and covered her breasts with one arm and her private bits with her other hand. I did see enough to settle a bet that I'd had with some of the guys on the barge that I used to work on--the carpet matched the drapes, so to speak. (Drow don't work in brothels, and the ones who do work as ladies of the evening are of the kind that are very well-paid and very choosy about their clients.)
Basil dug in his pockets and came up with a garter belt. It was frilly and pink. He looked at it, looked at the woman, then stuck it back in his pocket. "Poi keeps my clothes in his pouch," Iola said. She reached over and opened the pouch, peering inside. "I think that bikini, the black one. Could you get it for me?"
She reached in and retrieved her bikini, and casually pulled off her shirt and skirt and tossed them at the drow. She pulled them on as Iola put her bikini on. Argos, bored, had decided to take off and go track us from outside, so he took off while we learned that the drow was named Dagmar, and the last she remembered it had been 667 and she'd been fighting a bunch of elves. We found some more of Iola's clothes for her and gave her some money and sent her off with directions on how to get to Leora and Hunt, the drow we'd met yesterday.
Meanwhile, Argos had found us, calling in and reporting that the stone room we were in had been built in the middle of what looked to be a derelict flophouse. "There are some strange footprints out here," the little image of him muttered. "Looks like a hand, but it's two feet across."
Basil volunteered to go help track whatever made the footprints while we worked on figuring out what the altar did. Poi came out, looked at it, and said, "Did you even try to ask it what it is? Most things like this have an instruction manual built in, you know."
I shrugged. "I didn't. Remember, I've never dealt with much magic stuff much. So, magic basin. What are you?"
It's hard to describe the voice that responded, other than saying it sounded like pebbles rattling together combined with a woman's scream. "I am the pool of an incomprehensible noise."
"A what?"
"An incomprehensible noise. Also known in your language as an assassin demon. I enchant the weapons of the incomprehensible noise."
"And just what is this assassin demon doing here?"
"Killing all of the servants of the trees in the city."
I gave the pool a disconcerted look. "The druids. So why is there a portal from a tree into here?"
"The incomprehensible noise finds that the servants of the trees are vulnerable when they think they are most safe, stepping from one tree to the next."
"Is there a way to change where the portal opens to?"
"Just say it."
I turned to the rest and we swiftly discussed it. I called Basil and Argos and told them to meet us over in the druid district and Electra, curious, asked the fountain how it enchanted weapons. The answer was that we could think of what we wanted and dip our weapons, and they would change.
I decided to try it and dipped the stick I carry into the pool, concentrating on protection. It was a light wood, but when I dipped it, it turned dark and light arcane carvings appeared all over it. Electra dipped a dagger she carries, and it came out...purple. With a hilt wrapped in mauve leather, and the pommel encrusted with gems. She studied it briefly, then lit up. "Martin, look!" she crowed, and pressed one of the gems. Music began to fill the room, as if there were suddenly a raucous six-piece band with a growly male singer right in the room with us. Electra started dancing, and the dragon that was wrapped around her arm waved its head in the air with every evidence of enjoyment.
At that point, Argos and Basil arrived. Coming after Basil was what I initially took for a tentacle, questing around right inside the door. I followed the tentacle back to the source. "Basil? Is that an elephant?" I'd never seen one before outside of pictures, but I reviewed the pertinent details--gray, sparse hair, wrinkly skin, long mobile nose, big friendly eyes, not quite as rock-wall-looking as a troll--and decided it was the closest I was going to get to a positive identification.
Basil grinned. "Yep!"
"Dare I ask where you got an elephant in the last half hour?" The elephant blinked at me.
"Found a wand in my pocket. It made me him. I think I'll keep him. Neat dagger, Electra, where did you get that?"
The amazing thing is that a wand making an elephant for Basil wasn't really all that strange, considering the other things we'd seen in the last few weeks. Basil dipped that strange weapon of his that he carries all the time, which turned purple, and Argos got a dagger with a spinning blade.
Argos was also busy, when he wasn't playing with his new toy, with making a drawing of Silas. He's got this uncanny talent, stemming from that case that I can't talk about much, where he can sometimes draw things as they're happening. It comes in handy sometimes. Anyway, in this case Silas had his arms tied up behind his back and was hanging head-down in what looked to be a cavern of some sort. around him were shadowy forms that suggested other hanging people. "Definitely alive," Argos pronounced, studying the picture he'd drawn.
I had kind of a bad feeling. "You know where that sort of looks like? Remember that drow graveyard, under the poison apple trees?"
Electra leaned over, fiddling with her dagger and making the growly music stop. "It looks sort of like there. We could go check. We know how to get there."
So we did, asking the people at the museum if we could borrow their exhibit for a little bit and sliding down the tunnel. Without the ice gelatinous cube to ice the thing, it was a slower trip, but it still worked. The tunnel ended in the cavern, and as I lit up a light spell and sent it upward, we could see druids hanging from chains like weird fruit, swinging slightly.
"How do we get them down without killing them?" Electra asked. "That's a fall of..." She looked up, studied. "Sixty feet. Maybe more."
"Lots of pillows?" Argos suggested.
The small hairs on the back of my neck started to stand on end, and I cast a spell to detect invisibility. Ah--there. "We're not alone--"
"I got him," Basil said confidently, and went swinging up towards the ceiling, and began firing bullets from the sling end of his hoopak. Those bullets were something else entirely, coming from his newly-enhanced weapon. His first bullet went through some of the chains the druids were hanging from, dropping men and women like stones, hitting the demon and separating it from one of its arms. It came visible and it was a thing made out of spare parts, four limbs with huge hands at the ends and a face like a wound, mouth ragged raw meat with thousands of teeth.
I heard Electra snap out two spells in quick succession, first a featherfall and then a spell that called a huge spiderweb into existence. Things got rather confusing around then, after Basil relieved it of another limb and it fell screaming into the web, thrashing and still dangerous. I tried hitting it with my stick and discovered to my dismay that it made a shield that enclosed me, and when a stray bullet of Basil's hit it, it got bigger. Argos had borrowed the wand that Basil had used to make his elephant and used it, perhaps hoping to drop an elephant on it. Unfortunately, it only turned the demon purple and, from the scream, made it mad.
Soon enough, though, it went down, and we let the rest of the druids down in a more controlled fashion. They thanked us, as politely as a druid has ever thanked us, and agreed to house Basil's elephant for him. "I hate to say this, guys, but we did have something we were going to do today. Basil, how are you feeling?" I'd dropped some healing into him earlier--the demon had ripped into him a bit.
"I'm fine. Lunch first?"
Well, kender are a kind of halfling, after all. I nodded and we cleared on out of there, heading for the food stands that are just over the bridge from the druid district.
Lunch was cheese rolls and sausages, both of which Poi demanded some of. Then it was off to the troll district to track down a smell.
Yesterday's rain was only a distant memory now as the city had returned to baking in the sun and marinating in its own juices. The streets were marginally cleaner than they had been, but the air was still a hot blanket pressing down on us as we walked.
It took us a couple of hours to get a whiff of the described smell, like walking into the center of a giant rose for just a split second, overwhelming and mercifully brief. Next to us, a troll that looked like granite shot through with veins of quartz stiffened and fell over with a sound like a house collapsing.
"Iola, can you track that smell?" I asked. She nodded, stripped, and changed to full wolf form, pressing her shoulder against my thigh briefly and glancing up with her yellow eyes. Then she lowered her nose to the ground and began to track.
She led us right to what appeared to be an old perfume distillery. We took invisibility potions and snuck in, and discovered that gnomes were making perfume out of rose petals, distilling them down. Basil found a trap door in the floor and waved us over. "Look!" he whispered, excited.
Down the trap door there was...a blob. It had a bellybutton in the middle. It seemed to be exuding droplets of oil that smelled chokingly of roses, and there were tubes running into it that seemed to be dripping a glowing liquid into it--it looked like glowfly dust in liquid form. We withdrew and put our heads together, and between all of us we figured out that it was a kind of scent demon. Scent demons are slow and limbless, but they're dangerous when roused because the smells they put out can render almost anyone susceptible to mental control. And if the demon itself were being controlled...
I didn't like where this was going.
We slipped back into the factory and went to find the (thankfully empty) office. We took a look at the books, which looked on the surface like the factory was being operated by the gnomes. "Cooked," I said, a little disgusted. "The real books should be hidden nearby, they'd need to update them regularly."
Basil found them, and we sat down and looked them over. Never thought my education would come in handy in policework, but it did. The real plan appeared to be bankrolled by Nielsen the vampire, the one who'd had the larder of blondes outside of what was now my front door. (Speaking of, I only had one sleeping blonde left--the elf. I hadn't decided what to do with her quite yet.) Poi had requested some samples of the products that were made with the oil, and them popped up, clambering up my shirt and smearing a big dollop of sweet-smelling face cream on my face. "Hey! What are you--"
"Rub it in," Poi told me. I rolled my eyes and complied.
"Whoa, Martin, that makes you look about ten years younger," Basil said, grinning.
I glared at Poi. "Thanks. Makes me more likely to be spotted by someone I used to know."
The rat laughed and clambered down my shirt. I saw a thoughtful look cross Basil's face, but ignored it. If anyone wants to know stuff about me, all they have to do is ask. "The oil makes people who use it able to be controlled after a while, and it'll fade after a bit," Poi said from the opening to the pouch.
This was probably a job for the cops, but we wanted to make sure the scent demon wasn't going to be a problem, so we headed down to it. Pulling out the tube that had the glowfly solution in it did a pretty good job of waking it up. It talked to us out of the orifice that I had originally taken for a bellybutton, and it was a surprisingly articulate conversationalist...with a sense of humor. It squirted Electra with a little bit of oil that had the effect of making every male gaze in the room, including mine and Argos', glue itself to Electra's butt.
Iola, growling, shoved herself against my legs, and the scent demon laughed. It didn't really want to be working for Nielsen, and in gratitude for its freedom it made us all perfumes that it claimed would attract whichever sex or persuasion we liked to us. We called the regular cops in, they did a raid, and everything was resolved to the happiness of all except Nielsen, whose happiness I don't really care for much.
Congratulating ourselves on a job well done, we split up for the evening. Iola, the moment we got home, changed back to human form and knocked me down right in the doorway. Jealousy makes her randy, it seems, but I didn't mind one bit.
The next morning, it was once again Friday, and we met for what we thought was going to be just a little bit of work. We needed to hunt down some strange music that was coming from the sewer grates in the dwarven section. The cops there figured that there had to be illegal mining going on.
It took us until almost noon to figure out where the music was strongest. It really sounded as if there were a woman singing and walking around in the sewers that ran right below the street, but when we looked we saw nobody there.
Basil, Electra, and Iola went down into the sewers, and almost immediately there were signs of trouble. "Hey!" I heard Basil say, his voice floating up through the open grate. "Iola, where are you going?"
"She just started looking all glazed and started walking," Electra explained after they hauled Iola back up to the street. Iola was shaking her head as if she were coming out of a dream.
When I asked her what happened, Iola said, "Something was calling me. It wanted me to come." We consulted with each other, and ended up tying a rope to Iola's wrist and climbing back down, following Iola as we wended our way through what felt like miles of twisting, stinking sewer passages. Eventually, she led us to a rougher passage that didn't seem to be a part of the sewers (at least, it smelled better), and to a crowd of people standing on the stony shore of an underground lake. They were all werewolves, it looked like, and all of them were standing with glazed looks and intent ears, clustered around what looked like a time-stained statue of a goddess, a tipped urn on one hip, water spilling endlessly into the lake.
We could almost hear the sound they were hearing. Argos, who as always had come with a gadget to use, discovered with yet another of his funny boxes that the sound was coming from the statue that was standing on the shore. I gently plugged Iola's ears with some wax that we'd brought with us, and she blinked again, turning to me, looking confused. "She wants us to kill mages," she said, looking confused. "I didn't hear very much."
Well, some of the people here looked like they'd been standing here a while. I hit the statue with a silence spell, and the crowd of werewolves as one blinked, swayed, and made softly inquiring whines, even the ones in human form.
Asking around, the one who had been here the longest turned out to be a dark-haired and magnificently rounded werewolf who told us that they had been told specifically to kill necromancers, I started to get a weird feeling. Necromancers, and this crowd had been here some time...
Basil, in the meantime, was messing with the statue. He pulled out a fist-sized crystal and a glass vial filled with a green liquid, and motioned for me to cut the spell. I dropped the Silence, and he dashed both to the ground.
Good news: both shattered.
Bad news: where he had hit the ground with the vial, another statue seemed to grow up out of the ground, a male version of the woman with the urn. The first statue was still making noise, from the looks on the faces of the werewolves around us, and Argus with his little box told us that the second statue was making noise too. "The crystal's regrowing," Basil said, looking concerned.
Electra was busy with a potion she had, an acid substance that ate right through the crystal and its mooring, effectively silencing it. The werewolves shook their heads and wandered off. So the second statue wasn't calling them.
What was it calling?
When Iola unplugged her ears, she shook her head, irritated. "I can't understand it. It sounds like bats. Or one of those places in the demon district where all the bloodsuckers gather..."
Bats. Vampires.
Damnit.
Well, to find out what we needed to know, we'd need to let some come and listen, so while we were waiting, we went poking around. Argos had found another rough corridor leading away, and holding a light spell aloft I followed him down. "There's a smell like someone really old through here," Iola reported.
No more than thirty feet down the tunnel, the bodies began.
They were mostly human, dressed richly, stiff as boards and leaned up against the walls like umbrellas in a foyer. Iola was at my shoulder, her breath hot on my neck, and I realized I was looking for a familiar face, a crown of silver hair.
I found it about twenty feet on. Remy was here, dead eyes staring, her body the most torn of all of her immediate neighbors. Iola's tail was wagging furiously, and she was making pleased sounds. I shot her a look, and she gave me a toothy wolf grin.
Basil had come up behind us, and sucked in his breath when he saw Remy. "Did you kill her?" he asked Iola.
The werewolf's voice was a rough growl, like it always was when she was in that form. "I'll never tell."
I stalked away, trying not to hold this against Iola. I had liked Remy, damnit. I didn't think she'd really had anything to do with it, but her positive glee at seeing Remy's torn body turned my stomach. To distract myself, I started inspecting bodies. There was some sort of slow transformation being worked on the older bodies, and I would swear they were being turned into liches.
Liches that had once been necromancers were bad news. Well, any lich is not someone you'd invite to a dinner party, but the necromancers and the evokers tended to be the worst. But these looked like they were going to be liches under someone's control. They're bad enough on their own.
And, most horribly, it looked like there had been three here that were no longer, their transformations complete. The ones that were near the patches of floor where the dust had been disturbed were well on their way to becoming liches, and I prevailed on Argos to help me cut off their heads.
After that was done, I was listening to the others talk down the corridor, and heard ahead of us the first flutter of wings. "Time to head back, Argos," I said.
"I'm going to follow the liches, see where they went," he said.
"You're what? Argos, there's a bunch of vampires heading this way, and we don't want to run into those liches."
He shrugged and took off. I thought seriously about grabbing him and hauling him back--in physical contest between a bargeman and a watchmaker, the guy who poles for a living wins--but thought better of it and skedaddled myself back, abandoning Argos to his self-inflicted fate.
The bats were close on my heels. I saw a couple of skeletons hauling Remy's body away, evidently called by Electra to take Remy to her house. The fluttering crowd circled the statue and then settled on the ground, transforming into their humanoid forms. We let them listen for a bit; I'd seen a glow of magic underwater and wanted to investigate.
I waded into the water and started swimming down, feeling my water breathing kick on with the briefest of sore threats. There were structures down here, what looked like a flooded temple. The glow of magic was coming from an altar at the exact center of the temple.
I swam around it, contemplating the symbols and statues. This was a water temple, but it wasn't for Istishia or Eldath, but Azul. Azul's not well known, and I'd never seen as much as a priest of his, but I recognized the symbols from my studies.
I surfaced and went to tell the others what I'd found. "Want me to silence the statue for a bit so we can talk to the vampires?" I asked. There was agreement all round, and I cast the spell.
Talking to the vampires, one in particular stepped forward to talk to us. Her name was Zsa, it appeared, from how she was dressed it appeared that we'd interrupted her in the middle of something. She slunk up to Electra, making eyes at her. "The funny thing about that statue," the vampire said, "is that it was telling us to kill ourselves."
Killing necromancers. Suggesting vampires suicide. Someone had an interesting sense of humor, if humor it was. At this point, I pointed out to the rest that we needed to either melt the crystal like we had the other or stop all of the vampires' ears, because my spell wasn't going to last much longer.
"I have earmuffs!" Basil declared, and started digging in his pockets. What he pulled out at first looked like it might be earmuffs. What it turned out to be was...a dog. A tiny, buggy-eyed, hideously ugly dog that immediately started yapping. Basil blinked at it. "I don't think that used to be a dog," he muttered, then set it down.
Iola inspected it carefully. "Lunch?" she asked, hopefully. I shook my head; we'd had some discussions about her not eating domesticated dogs, but the difference between pets and the feral dogs that are a problem in some parts of town was difficult for her. Iola sighed grumpily.
"I think I can melt it," Electra said, and set about doing so. The dog looked confused, and the dragon wrapped around Electra's arm hissed at it. We were getting to be a regular zoo around here.
We left the vampires there, and Zsa requested earplugs and followed us. She had evidently decided we looked like fun. Iola growled deep in her throat when Zsa tried to sidle up to me, then the growl turned a bit confused when Zsa tried to cuddle up to Iola.
I let Iola fend for herself and turned back to the rest. At that point, Argos called in and said that he'd found the end of the tunnel and a trap door that led up into someone's house, it looked like. Electra dropped a pair of mage eyes where Argos was, and we went to find the house the tunnel led to from the top side.
The house we were looking for was in a comfortable and quiet dwarven neighborhood, rows of nearly-identical houses and kids playing between the houses. The house looked pretty normal, except for the fact that there were half-hidden sigils painted on the door and shutters, and that when I detected undead I could see the presence of three very powerful undead inside the house.
A neighbor was home, tending the roses in his front yard. When asked, the neighbor told us that a person named Yaakov lived in that house, an elderly dwarf who had been a deep miner. He hadn't seen Yaakov in some time, but told us that he'd had a wife and two children, all three of whom were dead. Yaakov had been seeing his neighbor across the way, Stina, for a number of years, starting from after his wife had died.
Fortunately, when we went to knock on the door, Stina was home. She was tiny for a dwarf, a face like a dried apple and a brilliant smile. "Yaakov? Haven't seen him for five months or so," she said. "He was going off on a trip to see something he'd discovered when he was younger, said he was getting too old not to go back and look. He brought me back something, and then he disappeared again."
"What was it?"
Stina disappeared into the house and came back with a large jar, made of a strange, blue-tinged glass. "Isn't it pretty?" she said, handing it to Basil. "Ew, why does he have a rat?"
I looked down and saw that Poi had made an appearance. "He's a friend," I said to her. To Poi, I said, "What do you think?"
Poi beckoned the jar closer with tiny, clawed paws. Reluctantly, Stina held it out, and I took it from her. Poi sniffed and ran his paws along the edge of the jar, ears quivering. "Soul vessel," he said. "Until recently, it held something very, very old."
It wasn't good news, but it was about what I was expecting. I handed the jar back to Stina. "Thanks," I said. "We may come back for it later."
Away from her, for lack of anything better to do we started walking back to where we'd found the temple. Ignoring the crowd of vampires for the moment, we pondered what on earth one could do about three liches. "That temple might have some clues," Electra suggested, and we went down to look, those of us who needed them taking water breathing potions.
Basil, after looking around, found a door I had overlooked, and after he unlocked and untrapped it we went into a room that had, strapped to shelves, what looked like hundreds of the same soul jars. And yes, there was a space where the one that Stina had should have been, and three open ones.
There was writing on the walls, characters that nobody recognized, but that Electra could read with the aid of a spell. "They were dying," she reported. "All of their females were dead. They put themselves into storage so that their culture might be preserved."
I looked down rows and rows of jars. I'm not sure who suggested it, but we decided to put a random soul into the dog that was still hanging out on the shore of the little lake, looking confused. It had been following Basil around like a tiny, ugly shadow. I picked a jar and we carried it out to the surface, then Basil tucked the canine under one arm and opened the jar right in its face.
It coughed once and then stared around it. Then it frantically looked at itself, making distressed whining noises. I cast a spell to let me talk to it. It turned out that the soul that was now in the ugly little dog was named Page, and he was from a race of humans that had lived about fifty thousand years ago. At least, as far as I could tell, they were humans. Our ancestors had still been swinging in the trees when Page had last been alive, the dog told me testily. He didn't seem particularly happy about being saved.
They had been a race of necromancers, and had created, so he claimed, the first vampires. Werewolves had been created to be their servants. It all had spiraled out of control when the vampires had decided to attack the female humans preferentially, making them vampires, until there were none left unturned.
So there was why the male statute had commanded the deaths of the vampires. That the werewolves were sent after the necromancers was also no real surprise--whoever had been freed first had decided to do away with the competition. And Page also said that he could change the vampire caller to call liches--but we'd need to change him into a human first.
After long discussion, we decided to give Page the benefit of the doubt. Electra polymorphed him into a human and Page was as good as his word, changing the crystal to call liches. The three liches came obediently, and obligingly stood there while we cut off their heads.
We obtained an anti-possession potion from the police department, the soul jar from Stina, and settled in to wait. A day later, Yaakob came by to check on his liches...and we popped the soul that had possessed him back into the jar, all neat and tidy. We labeled that jar and the three others as troublemakers and set them aside to take to a temple and have banished to another plane for good. The bodies of the necromancers were given over to the custody of the police, to try to locate next of kin or at least someone who would be willing to pay to have them raised.
Page, we left alive and with no professed desire to return the others of his kind to life just yet. We picked up some things from the temple, some very nice weapons and potions, and then we were done and shut of ancient vampire-makers for the moment.
Me, I still had some work to do.
Remy had been laid in state in the front parlor of her house, her zombie servants slumped and useless in the halls. I stepped over them on my way to find her. I'd left Iola at home, forbidding her to leave the house, though I hated to do so. I still didn't know if she had participated in Remy's death or not, but to be safe I wanted her nowhere near my necromancer friend.
Repairing the damage to her body was easy enough. Raising her from the dead was a little harder. Necromancers are hard to raise, much harder than people who don't revel in death are. Their souls go much farther, it seems, and are much harder to recall. But finally, after much chanting, Remy opened her blue eyes and looked up at me.
"Didn't know you still cared," she said, her voice a croak. I helped her sit up and poured her a cup of water, which she drank greedily.
"Still do," I told her. "How are you feeling?"
"Hung over. How long was I dead?"
I thought back. "Three days or so. Do you remember--"
"Dying?" There was a dry chuckle in her voice and a warm quirk to her mouth. "A bunch of wolves attacked me. It was almost dark, I couldn't see them, but I fought."
My mouth went dry. Iola. Had she gotten a pack together to go after Remy? When had she found the time? "Nothing else, no markings?"
"Nothing." She shook her head, then chuckled. "Oh, Martin, don't give me such a look. If your girl was with them, I didn't see her. And wasn't I right about her?"
I had to laugh. "Yes, you were. I kept on meaning to come by and apologize."
Remy gave me a canny look. "I knew exactly what was going to happen. You didn't, but then again you're blind to a lot of things you'd think a priest would be able to see." Her voice had gone gentle. "Kiss me and say goodbye, Martin. I need to sleep, I have a lot of work to do tomorrow."
I bent down, intending to kiss her cheek, but at the last moment Remy turned and kissed me full on the mouth. "There," she said when she'd had her fill. "Never worth coming back from the dead if there isn't a kiss afterward. Off with you, Martin." I fled, stopping on the way home to wash my mouth at one of the fountains. I'd thought Remy and I were done with each other, and maybe we were.
There was always going to be something there, though, I realized on the walk home that night. I liked Iola, loved her if you cornered me and asked, though I wasn't entirely sure how she felt about me. Iola was mostly uncomplicated. Remy was--not.
On the whole, I thought I preferred simple, and I told myself that it was probably a bad idea for me to be alone in a room with Remy any time soon. There was a beautiful werewolf waiting at home for me, and if I judged her temper right, I could probably forestall the fight that I figured was coming with a bit of judicious flattery and kissing her until she forgot that she was mad at me.
It was, after all, time for a weekend...
Quotes:
"We sexed it, we're pretty sure it's female."
"You druids will do anything."
--Silas, Basil
"It's stylish if nothing else."
--Basil, speaking of the elephant
"Electra is so goth, she has a baby deep dragon as an accessory."
--Kris
"...Holy shit."
"That was a few blocks back, thankfully."
--Martin, Basil, about the elephant.
"Hey, do you have a really big paddock somewhere?"
"Yes...why?"
"I have a friend who needs a place to live. And some hay. I'll come by and take him out and play with him."
--Basil, Biff
"The smell of roses is overwhelming."
"Oh god, my grandmother's here."
--Storm, Basil
"Is there a perfume distillery around here?"
"In the troll section?"
"Trolls might like to smell pretty, I don't know!"
--Martin, Basil
"Oh my god, it's Jabba the Rose! It is my grandmother!"
--Basil
"Anyone got some coffee?"
"...I have some elephant poo..."
--Electra, Martin
"It puts the sound in the range of bats."
"Calling vampires!"
"...great."
--Storm, Martin, Basil
"I wonder what the beef against necromancers is. Someone take it personally?"
--Electra
"The ever-so-wise cleric is going off after the lich."
"I'm going to have to rescue his ass."
"Define 'have to'."
----Basil, Martin
"I'm in your sewer, killing your liches."
--Laura
"People who sleep with angels--"
"Shouldn't live in glass houses!
"--have no room to talk about my werewolf girlfriend."
--Martin, Basil
"Yo quiero licho bell!"
--Laura
"How do we know the liches aren't friendly?"
"They killed Remy. Shredded her. Not. Friendly."
"Well, when you put it that way..."
--Argos, Basil
