The Inquisitives [4] The Darkwood Mask (40 page)

Aegis’s blue crystal eyes glowed faintly in the darkness. She slipped into the alley between the closed shop and the adjacent building. Buckled around the warforged’s metal-plated waist was the Rekkenmark blade that Jotrem—then Gan—had carried. In his hands, Aegis carried the long sword Haedrun had wielded. Moonlight seemed to collect along its blade, so the warforged tried to hold it out of plain sight.

Soneste wondered where the
real
Jotrem was. Despite her dislike of the man, she hoped he was all right. At least it was the false Jotrem, Gan, who’d be thrashed by Tallis in Wollvern Park.

The Karrn stood waiting in the shadows behind Aegis, back against the wall. He had discarded his Windwrights garb entirely, wearing the black clothes he favored with their pseudo-military
design. A pair of green vambraces girded his wrists. Over his shoulders was a bulging backpack. Most remarkable was the sword strapped in a fine leather scabbard across his back. Its hilt glistened with an emerald light from the jewels encrusted there. A magewrought weapon, for sure.

“Never touch this sword,” Tallis said by way of greeting, his eyes fixed on the manor across the way.

With a start, Soneste noticed a man lying against the alley wall with an empty bottle tucked in his arms. She squinted and saw that his head was twisted in a disturbing angle.

“A sentry,” Tallis explained. “Our ’forged friend here has the stealth of a herd of gorgons, but it’s—
he’s
—more observant than I took him for. Know any drunks that carry these around?” The Karrn held up a stiletto, the kind used to slip through the greaves of a warrior’s armor.

“Is it common for nobles of Karrnath to place exterior guards?” Aegis asked.

“No,” Tallis answered. “Charoth’s caution is apparent.”

“We were right. Someone
has
gone missing.” Soneste kept her voice quiet, though the dark street appeared to be empty. She thought of the nimblewright and Lady Erice’s words:
It can wear the illusion of any other person, so it can walk among regular people
.

“But I hope we’re wrong,” she said.

They turned their eyes upon Charoth’s manor, the Murder House. Soneste described her previous visit, the “yowler” outside, and what little she’d seen of the house’s interior, while Tallis recounted his reconnaissance around the estate. Five other sentries had been posted in various places outside the gate, but Tallis had dealt with them before her arrival.

“They are no shifts tonight. Our dead friend there said every man had been ordered to guard all night.” He turned to Soneste. “This watchdog of his, just how thick was the chain?”

“Strong enough to hold the yowler, it seemed,” Soneste answered, “but it
was
uncomfortably long.”

The Karrn looked back at the gate. “All right. Just stay behind
me. I’ll get us in, but your job will be to locate the captives. No lights until we’re inside. Understood?”

“Yes,” Soneste and Aegis said at once. Weapons in hand, the trio moved across the street, guided only by Tallis, the moons, and the faint light of distant lanterns.

When Soneste had visited the estate the first time, the gates had opened for her. Now the black iron bars formed an impassible stockade. Tallis peered between the tall spikes, searching for any sign of motion beyond. He led them slowly alongside the gate on one side, seemingly counting the individual bars. At last he paused, reaching out with a gloved hand and grasping the black iron. She expected to see a flare of defensive energy, but there was nothing.

“Soul descending,” he said with an odd inflection. The bar vanished beneath his fingers, along with several around him. “Inside, now!”

Soneste and Aegis followed, passing through that section of gate before it disappeared again. “How did you …?” she asked.

Tallis stared into the darkness of the estate before them with an appraising eye. With elf blood in his veins, the Karrn could see much better than she in the dark, but the landscaping was obviously not enough cover for his liking.

Finally, he looked back. “I coerced one of the sentries into telling me the watchword,” he whispered, offering no details. He withdrew from his pack the ivory dispelling wand and held it out to Soneste. “Take this. Verdax said there are only three charges left, so use it sparingly.”

She tucked the wand away, then pointed. “Look, there. The chain.”

Squinting in the gloom, Tallis saw a length of heavy chain on the ground, snaking out from a line of bushes. At the end of the chain, an empty collar. “So where is—?”

A ghastly cry,
almost
human, rose up from the night itself, sending a painful chill through his spine. Tallis grit his teeth and forced himself to turn, looking for the source. Soneste stood behind him, eyes searching left and right, her expression panicked. Tallis didn’t want to hear that wail again. It made him feel like a child hiding from the dark.

“I see it,” Aegis said, and Tallis turned in time to see a lion-sized animal with motley skin and fur crash into the warforged from a low-hanging eave of the house.

The weight of the beast bore the construct to the ground. Tallis lashed out with the mithral pick of his weapon, but it passed harmlessly through the creature. He remembered Soneste had warned him of this, a displacement glamer that made the yowler appear a short distance from its actual location. He swung again, guessing, and felt the mithral bite into the creature’s hide.

A yelp of pain that sounded too much like a screaming child turned its glowing, catlike eyes upon him. It raked one hideous paw across Aegis’s chest, and the warforged lay perfect still. Tallis wondered if Aegis was dead.

The yowler evidently thought so and padded off the construct to prowl around Tallis. Aegis rolled to his feet and smacked the buckler of his hand against the beast’s rump. It turned, snarling, and Tallis buried the pick’s head into its hide a second time.

Man and warforged continued this barrage as Soneste backed away, evidently frightened by the preternatural yowl that gave the creature its name. Tallis noted that the creature seemed weakened by their blows only marginally. It was going to take a lot more to bring it down.

Soneste managed to load her hand crossbow and aimed it with shaking fingers at the creature. A dart-sized bolt struck the beast on the head, leaving a welt that Tallis swore vanished only seconds later. It was time for a new tactic. He reached for one of his metal rods. The beast finally gave up trying to fight each of its opponents and focused exclusively on one: him.

Tallis had no time to raise a defense as the thing launched itself in the air. Teeth clamped down on his arm, and its body weight—more than twice his own, easily—threw him to the ground. His sleeve ripped apart under its jaws, and Tallis could feel the sharp edges of its slavering, unwholesome teeth worrying at his flesh. The magic vambraces he’d borrowed from Verdax did their job, preventing the yowler from snapping through to the bone.

Beyond the thing’s body, Tallis glimpsed both Aegis and Soneste swiping at it with their blades, but it was still taking too long. The yowler’s jaw was strong, and those teeth were bound to get through eventually.

He heard Soneste call out in a quavering voice,
“Audsh! Nerzhaat hak irezh!”

The yowler paused for only a second, its stubby, hairless ears perking up at the sound of her voice and the peculiar words she’d used.

Tallis used the moment to wriggle his left hand up to its head, where he put all of his strength into maneuvering the magic rod into its mouth. He felt his hand gummed by the creature’s saliva as it slid along the length of its tongue, but he pushed again, harder and harder. The yowler made a gagging sound, and Tallis pressed the activating button, locking it in space.

The beast attempted to let out its cry again, but it was impeded by the metal wedged in its throat that
would not move
. The wheeze was painful to hear but not half as frightening. In a panic, it tried to jerk its head this way and that, hoping to break loose, hoping to vomit the offending object. Freed from its attention, Tallis slid himself away. He rose and joined Soneste and Aegis as they pushed their weapons again and again into its body.

Blood spurted from empty space while the perceived body of the creature puckered into wounds too fast for it to mend in full. When the yowler’s muscles started to slacken, Aegis stepped over to its head and drove Haedrun’s blade into its neck repeatedly until it cut through it completely.

“You speak—what was that, Orc?” Tallis retrieved his magic rod from the yowler’s head, which allowed the beast’s head drop to the ground.

“No.” Soneste smiled and tapped her forehead. “I just have a good memory.” In truth, she was embarrassed at the fear that had taken hold of her when the creature had loosed its wail.

The Karrn shrugged. “Disgusting,” he said, trying to scrape the beast’s vile saliva off his arm even as he returned the magic rod to his belt. He had his share of the yowler’s blood caked onto his body as well. “If I live through today, I think I’m going to be very sick later.”

The trio approached the porch. Soneste looked up at the statue perched atop the dry fountain in front of it. The vulture-headed demon had not moved—in her imagination, it was a golem, ready to spring to life—but Soneste felt naked under its glass-eyed gaze. They still glowed with a soft, hellish red.

“We need to hurry,” she said softly, following Tallis to the front door.

The Karrn examined the entrance for signs of a trap. He didn’t bother picking at the lock. He lifted his hammer and brought down the head against the doorknob. Whether the weapon was magical or the metal it was forged from was something uncannily strong, the lock broke apart on the first swing.

Aegis gazed out at the street. “It’s snowing,” he said.

Soneste looked out into the darkness. She caught the tiny specks glistening in the air. Under other circumstances, she might have appreciated it. It never snowed in Sharn.

Charoth was not bothered by the young woman’s screams. He’d worked under more clamorous conditions. Master Rhazan was strong enough to hold her still until the table did its work. Her
strength would ebb soon enough. Not for the first time, he wondered if he should have insisted on choosing the other subject—one male’s life energy for another’s—but Mova had made her choice already and they’d come to an agreement. Today was not a day for changing plans. They’d been too long set into motion. The girl would do.

It didn’t really matter. Both had the blood of Galifar flowing through their veins, a lineage that reached farther back in human history than any he’d researched. Mova had explained that the purer the blood, the stronger its memory, the more conducive it was to both arcane and divine magic. His initial experiments supported this claim.

He was counting on it.

Charoth continued his work until a galvanic pulse in his mind halted him again. A moment’s concentration revealed the sensory information that awaited him. He saw three figures rendered in the gray shades of darkvision pass below in the courtyard of his estate.

Tallis, blood-stained and flushed from a fight, was the first.