Session 06 — Vessel That Was Asleep

There is a kind of house that keeps its history behind glass. You walk its halls and you think you are stealing an object, and then you turn a corner and find that the man who lives here has arranged the worst night of your life into a display, labelled it neatly, and comes here on quiet evenings to remember it fondly. Valdren Zau'tar went into the Crail estate to steal a rock. He came out of that room carrying his sister's hair pin.

I. Half Past Ten

The landing. The runner rug. The long second-floor hallway of a house that did not belong to them, going away into lamplight.

Behind and below, boots on the staircase — unhurried, uncertain, the pace of men who saw something round a corner and have not yet decided it was worth being afraid of. That was the whole margin the party had left: the two guards at the bottom of the stairs still believed, mostly, that they were chasing a servant.

Half past ten at night. Three ticks of heat on a counter that ended at six. And the silence on their feet — Jorath's spell, the one thing that had gone right all evening — already half burned away.

Doors lined the hallway, most of them bright with lamplight behind the frames. And at the far end, to the left, one door stood closed with light flickering underneath it in a way that was different from the others. That was the room. They had picked it out from the street, hours ago, when a servant opened a window to the evening air and the glow behind the curtains had thrown the silhouettes of glass cases against the fabric.

Fifty feet of corridor. It might as well have been the width of the city.

They went sideways instead, and as they moved they passed an open door and got, at last, the one piece of intelligence they had been missing all night.

A bedroom. Fine bedding, an armoire, an oil lamp burning on a bedside table. And a woman with her dark hair pulled back tight and flat against her skull, in a plain dark dress with no ornament on it anywhere, making up a bed with her back to the doorway. She never turned. She never knew.

That, Vivienne thought, is what the help looks like in this house.

They slipped into the dark room opposite.

II. The Bottle

It was a library, or a den, or the thing a rich man builds when he wants both — books to the ceiling on every wall, a dry bar in one corner, couches drawn up around a hearth that had gone cold hours ago, a little writing desk meant for notes and not for work. Valdren went through the drawers on reflex and found nothing worth taking.

There was exactly one portrait in the room, and it was Lord Oswin Crail in his best clothes.

No pets. No children. No wife on the wall, no dogs by the fire, nothing soft anywhere in it. A man had furnished this room entirely with himself.

They agreed to wait. It was the correct decision and it cost them everything. Spend a slice of the clock, sit still in the dark, let the household's nerves settle, let the number come down from three — that was the trade the night was offering, and they took it.

Rookk went to fold himself down behind the dry bar. He is a large man in heavy plate, and the space was not large, and his shoulder caught the edge of the bar as he dropped.

A bottle began to rock. He saw it going and had no hand free and no time.

It fell.

They were lucky in the only way left to them: it was a thick bottle, and it hit the rug and did not shatter. Not glass exploding across a hardwood floor — just a flat, dull, deliberate thud, the sound of something being put down wrong in a house where nothing should be moving at all.

Out in the hallway, the pacing stopped.

Then it started again, coming toward the door.

III. The Old Woman and the Cigar

There was no time to plan and they planned anyway, in whispers, in the two seconds available.

Valdren pressed himself flat against the wall behind the door, on the hinge side, where the leaf of it would hide him when it swung. The others went to ground behind bookshelves and furniture in a room that, they had already been told, would survive a glance from the doorway and nothing more. If the man came in and looked, they were finished.

And Vivienne, because nobody else was making the decision, made it.

The others watched her shrink. Watched her back curve and her shoulders draw in and her fine bones go brittle, watched the illusion settle over her like dust — a small, haggard old woman in a plain dark dress, exactly like the one they had seen thirty seconds ago through an open door.

The knob turned.

He filled the doorway with a lamp behind him, and Vivienne knew him before he spoke, because there was an unlit cigar bitten down between his teeth and because she had spent that morning bleeding from the place where his halberd had met her skull.

He tilted his head. He took a step into the dark. And as he passed the door, Valdren — motionless, six inches away, breathing as shallowly as a man can breathe — caught the smell of tobacco coming off his coat.

I don't think I recognize you, the guard began. Are you—

She did not let him finish. She went at him the way old women go at men who have interrupted their work, brisk and dismissive and faintly insulted.

What, are you going to tattle on me now, too? I just needed a minute. I'll get back to my routine — I've got the house to close up for the night.

It was good. It was very good; she had the cadence exactly, the particular impatience of a servant who has been doing this longer than the guard has been employed, and he stammered under it the way men do when they have been politely told to go away by someone's grandmother.

And then he stopped stammering.

He had not moved on. He was still looking at her. Not in suspicion of her, precisely — in the slow, unhurried way of a man who has all night and a curious itch — and he looked her over from her hem to her hairline and back again, and something in him went perfectly still.

Because a good disguise fools the eye. But there was magic on this woman, and he could see it.

His eyes narrowed. His hand drifted toward his weapon.

Behind him, very quietly, Valdren pushed the door shut.

Gotcha, bitch.

IV. Ten Seconds

Vivienne flicked a cantrip at the cigar in his teeth and it went up like a flare an inch from his face — a hard white bloom of light that took his night vision and his balance in the same instant, and he staggered backward into the room with his hands coming up.

Jorath's guiding bolt hit him next. It did not knock him down so much as cook him; the light went into his chest and the skin around it blistered and blackened and he went over backwards with his mouth open.

Rookk's longsword opened him from shoulder to hip.

And EMBR came in without raging.

That was the strange part, the part he would think about later. No red in the eye. No second voice with its hands on the wheel. Just EMBR, moving at his own speed on his own authority, and it turned out that was more than enough. The warhammer took the man off his feet and sent him over the arm of a chair to sprawl on the floor. EMBR crossed the room faster than a thing that size should be able to move and brought the hammer down on his chest, and they all heard it: first the metallic bark of the breastplate refusing, then the long crumpling whine of steel folding inward, then the wet crack underneath it as the ribs went.

He coughed blood onto his own face and lay there, still alive, on the very last edge of the possible.

Valdren walked over. He flipped the war pick in his hand, a small unhurried flourish, and put the spike through the man's eye.

Ten seconds, start to finish. Maybe less.

Then came the part nobody tells stories about. Jorath drew the blood up off the floorboards into a floating orb of shaped water and dumped it out the window into the dark. Valdren wedged the corpse behind a blanket trunk, and when the leg kept lolling back out into the open he took hold of it and snapped it at the knee and folded it down like a bundle of kindling until the lid would close.

The clock ticked. But the killing had been so quick and so quiet that the house learned nothing from it.

Three. Still three.

V. The Spider

Jorath went down to nothing.

They watched him do it — the druid folding inward until what remained was a spider small enough to sit on a coin, with constellations glittering across its back, and then it was gone under the door and into the room they had come to rob.

He came back with a report and the worst semaphore in the history of espionage. Legs curled on one side, straight on the other; a web sign spun out in the hallway with words in it. The party stood in the dark arguing about whether they were being told to advance or to run, and eventually settled on advance, which was correct, more or less, by accident.

What the spider had actually seen was this: a room far bigger than any of them had imagined. Not a parlor with a few cases in it — a gallery, with a staircase climbing to an elevated catwalk ten feet above the floor, rolling bookshelves and glass running along it, and the second gate guard walking his slow circuit between them, checking the gaps, doing his job.

They waited for his back to turn. Jorath signalled. Valdren reached for the door.

And then his foot came down on something that gave with a wet crunch, and for one white instant he was certain he had just killed the druid.

He was still checking his boot when his balance went. He fell forward into the door.

It flew open and slammed against the wall behind it.

The guard whipped around and saw a drow paladin standing in the doorway with blood on his weapon, and behind him, filling the corridor, the rest of them.

VI. The Whistle

There was no ambush this time. There was only the arithmetic of a scream.

Every guard in that house wore a whistle on a cord at the throat. One breath into it and the whole estate came awake at once, and the six on the counter would not matter because the counter would already be finished. The man did not need to fight them. He needed one hand free and one lungful of air.

So they did not go for damage. They went for his mouth.

Rookk charged up the stairs and grabbed at him twice and got nothing both times — the guard was terrified, and terror makes men slippery, and he ducked and shoved and kept his footing on the catwalk with five armed strangers coming up at him.

And EMBR, who had held Lefty out of two rooms and one killing, let go of the rope.

The eye went red. He grew — hugely, wrongly, the room barely permitting it — and covered the distance in a single surge, and his hand closed over the guard's entire face. Palm across the mouth, fingers around the skull, and he lifted, and the man's boots came off the catwalk and kicked at nothing.

He tried to break free. He was not strong enough. He was never going to be strong enough.

After that it was butchery. EMBR pulled a hand axe from his back and, holding the man up in one fist, began to chop at his chest the way a woodsman works a trunk — blood and viscera coming apart and falling down the stairs onto Rookk below, who stood in it and kept swinging. Jorath vaulted to the banister and put another lance of celestial light through him. Valdren hit him in the liver with the blunt end of the pick, saving the spike for someone who needed it.

Rookk finished it. A cut across the midsection, and as the man's eyes lost their focus, the longsword came up and dragged across his throat, and the artery let go in a way that painted the catwalk.

EMBR felt the weight go slack in his hand. He let it drop.

Another tick of the clock. And silence again — the wrong kind, the kind that is only the absence of screaming.

VII. The Collection

Now, finally, they looked at the room.

It was enormous, and it was a life. A garrison standard from Crail's first command, hung with care. A ceremonial sword, decommissioned, mounted. Prints of battles; cases of medals arranged by campaign. Relics from beyond the walls, including a claw the length of a man's arm behind glass — from something Ruined, though from the smaller end of Ruined, because it was not even the centerpiece.

The centerpiece stood alone in its own case, and it stopped Vivienne where she stood.

A carved rectangular block, dark grey, shot through with mineral striations like something quarried. About the size of a very large book. Not a tool. Not a weapon. Too austere to be decorative. Three of its faces were covered edge to edge in a dense, precise, patient script, and Vivienne Ashworth — who has read more languages than most scholars in this city will ever hear named — had never seen anything remotely like it.

She reached for Detect Magic, and the spell came back empty. Nothing. No aura, no school, no signature at all.

And the thing was glowing.

Not brightly. Not enough to light the case. Just glowing, quietly, while the spell that exists to find exactly that insisted there was nothing there.

She cast Comprehend Languages on it, and the meaning arrived in her head the way meaning does under that spell — instantly, completely, without translation — and it brought something with it that she did not like. A wrongness. The sense of a language that should not be spoken with a mouth. Like Latin, she thought, and immediately knew that was a lie she was telling herself to make it smaller. Like Latin, amplified, and sharpened, and older.

Three phrases. Each repeated across its face until the carver ran out of room, the way you write a thing when writing it once is not enough.

Vessel that was asleep. Vessel that was asleep. Vessel that was asleep.

Account seven — three. Account seven — three.

The first working knows its own.

VIII. Age Seven

Valdren was not looking at the artifact. He had drifted deeper into the gallery, past the medals and the standard, brushing along a row of cases with half his attention, and something snagged at the corner of his eye and made him stop and go back.

The case in front of him held household objects.

That was all. Mugs. Quills. A pair of socks. The small, worthless, particular things that accumulate in a home and mean nothing to anybody but the family that owns them. Each one mounted on its stand. Each one with a small metal plaque beside it, the way a museum labels a fossil.

He bent to read the plaques.

CIVILIAN RELOCATION OPERATIONS.

And then the names. He did not recognize any of them. And beside each name, an age.

Age 25. Age 50.

Age 7.

Something in him went very cold and very quiet as he understood what he was looking at. These were not artifacts. These were souvenirs. The Inquisition kicked in doors in the middle of the night and took people out of their beds, and the men who did it were permitted to take something home from the house afterward, and this man had kept his, and mounted them, and labelled them, and built a room around them where he could come and look at them and feel proud.

He kept reading. He did not know why he kept reading. And then he stopped, because among the mugs and the quills was something that was not mundane at all to him.

A hair pin. Fine — as fine as the Zau'tars could ever have afforded, which was not very, and which had therefore been the finest thing his sister owned.

A wooden soldier, carved by his father's hands. He would know that carving anywhere; he had watched it being made.

A piece of his mother's clothing.

And the plaques beside them, plain as daylight, in a neat official hand.

Ilivarra. Phaerun. Zibrisa.

And their ages. Their ages on that night. Twelve years ago, on Millbrook Lane, when he was a boy who threw one good punch and woke up on a cold floor in an empty house.

He was carrying Zibrisa's rag doll on his person as he read it. He had carried it every day since.

His vision went red at the edges. His hands closed. He stood in front of that case in a dead man's gallery with two corpses cooling behind him and could not, for a long moment, do anything at all.

Then he opened the case and took them. The pin, the soldier, the cloth, and the plaques with their names on them — he took the plaques too, because the plaques were evidence, and because he was never going to allow this house to keep his family's names in its handwriting.

When he turned around, he was still shaking, and his voice was almost level.

This cruel fucker might know where my family is, he said. If we run across him, I need to ask him some questions.

And then, before anyone could answer, because he had already had the argument with himself and won it:

But I won't put what we're doing in jeopardy to do it.

He asked them, if they found any books or papers about the Civilian Relocation Program, to bring them to him. Then he tried to search the shelves himself and found that he could not — it is hard to read when everything you look at has red across it.

Rookk searched for him. And Rookk found them: not plaques, but records — scrolls and bound tomes with the look of actual documentation, the kind that says who and where and when. He gathered them up.

Jorath, casting around the room with a druid's eye for how a place is used, understood something none of them wanted to hear. This gallery was not an archive. It was a shrine. Crail came here to look back on the parts of his life that pleased him. The real material — the operational documents, the ledgers, the answers — would be kept somewhere closer to the chest. An office. Somewhere else in the house they had just spent six ticks of the clock crossing.

IX. Lefty Reaches

While all of that was happening, EMBR had walked toward the artifact.

He did not decide to. That was the first thing he noticed. He was moving toward the case and his left arm was drifting up ahead of him, out and forward, the way a compass needle turns — no pain in it, no violence, just a slow, unmistakable inclination.

He knew he should stop. He put his lights on red and smashed the case and reached in and took the tablet in his left hand.

The grip closed and would not open.

Underneath his plating he felt them move. The tendrils that live in him, that root his stolen arm into his shoulder and his stolen eye into his temple — they woke up and began to travel, warm at first, wriggling along the inside of his frame, and then not warm at all as their points found bone and dug in. If he lifted the plate he would see it happening. He knew exactly where they were going. They were climbing toward his collarbone, and they were closer to it than they had been an hour ago.

And what he felt from Lefty was not rage. He had expected rage; rage he understood, rage he had spent a year learning to survive. This was worse than rage.

It was yearning.

The arm wanted to consume the artifact, or wanted the artifact to consume it, and EMBR could not tell which and suspected the distinction did not matter to whatever was doing the wanting. It wanted to be made one with the thing. It had been asleep and something had called it.

He tried to open his hand.

His hand did not belong to him.

His right arm came across and grabbed his own left wrist and hauled, and nothing happened, and the red in his left eye went from a glow to a furnace, and for the first time in the campaign EMBR was not fighting an enemy. He was standing in a room full of his friends, losing.

Jorath saw it. And Jorath, who is neither large nor strong, did the arithmetic in about a second — he could never win a contest of strength against that arm, not with every muscle he had — and so he did not try.

He cast Calm Emotions.

And here is the thing that will matter later, the thing they all noticed and nobody had time to think about: the spell did not touch EMBR. It went past him entirely, because EMBR was already the calm one. It found the other thing living in his body and settled over that, and when the save came up short — Jorath spending an omen of woe out of the stars to drag it under — it was Lefty whose grip relaxed.

They are two, and magic can tell them apart.

EMBR passed the tablet to his right hand and then out of his hands entirely, and Jorath took it and stowed it, and EMBR retreated to a corner of the room and stood there feeling under his own plating with his fingers, looking for how far it had climbed.

The artifact was about fifty pounds and roughly the size of three or four pizza boxes stacked, and it was much, much too light for that. Up close, it was not stone. It was not anything. Neither was it, when they compared, obviously the same material as the chitin in EMBR's arm.

Only that they knew each other.

X. The Front Gate

The smashed case had made more noise than any of them wanted to admit.

The counter went to four. Not uneasy any more. Alarmed — the number at which men stop wondering and start carrying lamps into dark rooms and calling to each other across floors.

And the search — Valdren at his family's case, Rookk on the shelves, Vivienne bent over the script, EMBR in his corner — had run out the last of the time. The sixth segment closed.

Out in the night, below the open window, the front gate creaked.

The ones nearest the front of the house went to look, because there was nothing else to do.

A carriage stood on the gravel. A butler came down the steps with his hands out. And Lord Oswin Crail stepped down onto his own grounds, shrugged out of his coat and handed it over without looking at the man taking it, and walked in through his own front door with the unhurried authority of someone who has never once in his life had to wonder whether a house was safe.

Above him, on the second floor of his home: one guard folded behind a blanket trunk with his leg broken to make him fit. One guard emptied out across the stairs of his gallery. A shattered case, a bloodstained catwalk, and five people standing in the middle of it holding a stolen tablet that glows without being magic, a bundle of stolen Inquisition records, and a dead girl's hair pin.

The clock was empty. The heat was at four. The window was open and the drop was two floors.

And Lord Crail was already inside.

End of Session 06.

Next: [Session 07 — ???]