Ashes on Snow

As soon as Brianna set foot into Ember, she wanted to turn around and march right back to where she'd come from.

The place reeked of death. The crisp wind carried with it the stench of decay and a hint of smoldering wood, so even if the burnt-out ruins of what had once been an idyllic village hadn't been right in front of her eyes, and even if she hadn't heard the gruesome reports of what had happened here, the smell of the place would have told the tale all by itself.

She'd never seen such a complete absence of life anywhere. Even the few trees that had lined Ember had been reduced to stumps of charcoal, covered with snow as though the white blanket could hide the evidence of the tragedy.

Flashes of color shone through the ice covering the ground – a patch of brown just there, a spot of red some distance away. It gave Brianna pause for a moment before she realized the nature of the peculiarity.

These were the residents of Ember, cut down where they had stood, their cold bodies still waiting for burial.

It caused her stomach to drop and her mind to plead with her not to approach. She had dealt with an abundance of death before, back in the orc caves near Old Owl Well, when she had killed until her mind had shut down on her. But back then it had been her survival instincts driving her out of sheer necessity.

This was different. This was more than she could handle.

Sand was the first one to take a tentative step forward from where they had stopped. Jaral, curled around his shoulders, yowled in protest.

Brianna thought she would have liked to do the same.

Nevertheless, she forced herself to set one foot in front of the other, entering what had once been Ember.

"Look at this."

She had never heard Khelgar's voice trembling before. The dwarf was surveying the scene, his eyes somehow looking years older than they had just minutes ago. "They were cut down like dogs. Didn't even have weapons."

The smile that was usually etched onto Grobnar's face had vanished. The scene appeared to be more than the little bard could take. He turned away, covering his face. Even though Brianna could have sworn that Neeshka wouldn't have cared in any other situation, the tiefling sidled over to the gnome and awkwardly patted his shoulder with her uninjured left hand. They both stayed back as everyone else walked on, none of them really wanting to.

"That's… that was Alaine's house." Shandra pointed. Her voice was breaking. "And the quartermaster's, there. I… I remember, I traveled through here only last season…"

Brianna couldn't take it. She had enough trouble handling her own feelings in the matter, and no desire to listen to everyone else who was processing the very same thing. The more they talked about how horrible this place was, the more the feeling would seep through her carefully constructed mental walls and affect her on a personal level. She had no desire to be a sobbing, trembling mess in the snow.

She gravitated towards the one person who was the most detached from it all, surveying with cold, analytic eyes.

Bishop turned his head when she stepped towards him. He was standing near a body that had fallen close to what Shandra had named the quartermaster's house. A frozen solid lump wrapped in tan linens, the corpse looked to be that of a young girl.

"It was efficient," he said, and she wasn't sure whether he was talking to her, or to himself. "They secured the perimeter first, before moving in. You can tell by the way the bodies fell." He kicked the lump lightly with the tip of his boot, indicating the head. "She was running to the center of town, not away. Cut down from the back."

She forced herself to look and saw that he was right. Villagers had been running toward Ember's center, all of them panicking, not realizing they were surrounded. Each body another terrified scream, another slash of a two-handed sword, another note in the stench that the wind carried.

She breathed in deeply, forcing herself to be just as cold about the facts of the slaughter as Bishop. "Is there anything about this that looks distinctly like Luskan work to you?" she asked.

He hesitated before he answered.

"Maybe," he said then.

She waited.

"They don't usually bother trying to place blame elsewhere. This time they did, so their execution changed. Might have made a few mistakes along the way, not worked as cleanly as they ought to have. But the ruthlessness, the efficiency… yeah. That's Luskan."

For a moment, she saw a flash of something in his eyes, an emotion, or a memory. She couldn't identify it, and then he frowned, and it was gone, leaving her with the unsettling feeling that she had just witnessed something indecent and private. Still, she stared at the ranger's unshaven face as though hoping the ghost of it might flit across his features.

Malin's voice rung in her ear, even though she hadn't consciously recalled the half-elven woman in her mind.

What about your single-minded obsession that landed us in hot water more than once?

She hadn't thought to ask back then, but now, she found herself curious about what it was Malin felt Bishop was obsessed with.

"Is there anything else you can tell me?" she wanted to know, her voice subdued.

He stepped over the body and walked towards the center of the village, where Sand was kneeling near another corpse. Brianna followed.

"No magic," he said then without turning back towards her. "It was all just brute force, swords, and the fire laid with oil and torches."

She thought she understood what he was telling her. "Not the Hosttower then."

"Maybe not, but they have an astonishing number of resources to delegate the non-magical dirty work." That was Sand, who had sat back on his heels in the snow. "It would not surprise me if this here was the work of a Luskan assassin's guild."

"Supplied by the Hosttower with the ability to make it look like it was me, somehow." She frowned, considering this. "Sand, how does that work? Wouldn't they need… I don't know, a piece of me or something?"

"And they have had plenty of opportunity to get one," Sand replied. "A single dried fleck of your blood on a blade is enough to work such a spell, though the spell itself is not so easily accomplished."

There was a short barking sound. Bishop's wolf, who was probably the only living thing in the ruins of Ember currently enjoying itself, came running towards them. The animal's grey-marbled fur was glittering with frost. Still panting, he promptly started sniffing the headless body next to which they had congregated.

Sand frowned, but did not comment.

"Was this the quartermaster?" Brianna's attention had turned to the corpse, and she recalled Alaine's report. "The one I supposedly beheaded?"

"I believe so, yes." Sand, still frowning, tried to shoo away the wolf half-heartedly. "And if you look closely, you can see he fell on top of something, a ledger. I believe he was expecting the arrival of one of the missing shipments when he heard a commotion outside, and he held his logbook when he encountered whoever pretended to be you. We will need to get this log."

"Ah." Brianna stared at the lump covered in a thick layer of ice. "And how do you propose we accomplish this? Waiting for spring?"

Sand's features tensed as the wolf pawed experimentally at the ice. "Unpleasant as it sounds, we may have to let the dwarf's axe do the work."

The process of reaching the quartermaster's log was not a pleasant one. The body had frozen solid on top of the book, and Khelgar ended up not having a choice but to remove the corpse, piece by gruesome piece. Shandra turned away and ran to join Grobnar and Neeshka at the edge of town halfway through, her face pale with a greenish tinge.

The morbid task of cleaving apart a frozen corpse limb by limb was not made any more pleasant by the uncharacteristic pup-like playfulness Bishop's wolf displayed. While they all watched Khelgar do his work, their faces expressionless, the greypelt darted into their midst, snapping at Sand's robes and growling at Khelgar and Brianna in turn before running off again, tongue lolling as he dashed through the snow.

Brianna thought it was not entirely unlikely that the animal had picked up on its master's sudden good mood and was sharing it, but she knew better than to voice that theory. Instead, she arched an eyebrow at the ranger.

"What is his deal?"

Bishop shrugged. "What, Karnwyr? He's just having fun."

She frowned, silently mouthing the unfamiliar word. "Is that his name?"

The ranger nodded.

"Fun, indeed. What a lovely time for that," Sand muttered through clenched teeth.

Bishop snorted.

"It's a corpse, elf. Just as dead as the cold cuts of meat we all ate this morning. At least animals don't put up some pretense. They don't care, and neither should we."

The wolf proved the point for him. While Khelgar scraped at the bottom of the torso, trying to see what he was cutting, Karnwyr returned and stretched out between Bishop and Sand as though tired of playing. The next time Brianna looked, he was already gnawing on something.

Oddly enough, her stomach did not turn at the sight. Maybe the ranger's callous attitude had helped to numb her, as well.

"Bishop, your wolf is eating the quartermaster's arm," she pointed out calmly.

The ranger barely looked up.

"Yeah, guess he is."

A deep grove appeared on Sand's forehead. "That is disturbing," the moon elf opined.

"It's natural, wizard." Bishop, from the looks of it, didn't care to hide his smirk.

"Bit rude for my taste, though, messin' with the dead like that." Khelgar paused, resting on the handle of his axe for a moment and giving the ranger an expectant look. "Tell'em ter stop."

The ranger's mouth tightened. "He isn't a pet, dwarf, and I don't order him about."

"Not a pet? Ye named the ruddy thing!"

"He named himself," Bishop snarled. "But fine. Try it. Chances are it'll be your arm he gnaws on next."

"We'll see 'bout that," Khelgar rumbled, taking the ranger up on his challenge. He grasped the frozen limb by its hand and pulled, and the wolf dug his teeth in, growled, and joined in the tug-of-war. Karnwyr struggled to keep from losing his footing as they quarreled, but eventually it was the dwarf who slipped and toppled backwards, and next they knew the wolf was kicking snow and running far and fast, trophy firmly held between his bared teeth, while Khelgar cursed and commenced brushing shards of ice from his beard.

Brianna couldn't help it. Amidst all the dreariness, in the middle of the morbid scene, she sat down in the snow, threw back her head, and laughed. Her voice echoed through the ruined village, loud and inappropriate.

Even after they succeeded in recovering the quartermaster's log and Sand carefully wrapped up the frozen bit of evidence and placed it in his pack, they were not nearly finished in their task. The wizard insisted on stopping at every corner of every burnt-out building in order to search for clues, and even Brianna, whose life, after all, was the one at stake, did not manage to stay focused throughout all of it.

She turned instead to check on her companions.

Neeshka, Grobnar and Shandra were still waiting outside the village proper, which Brianna was not impressed by, but at the same time she had to admit that she would have joined the three of them if not for the fact hat she had Luskan breathing down her neck.

They looked to be freezing just as miserably as she was. The cold had long ago made its way through her layers of clothes, and despite her effort to keep moving, she was beginning to feel stiff and sluggish.

Some distance away, Bishop had apparently chosen to combat the cold by playing with the wolf. Brianna watched as the ranger tossed the animal's newest prize, and Karnwyr rushed to retrieve it every time. She'd never seen, or even imagined, the two of them playing games before.

Especially not with a human forearm.

Shaking her head, she turned to look for her last companion. Khelgar had sat down on a pile of rubble near the well in the center of the village and was busying himself with sharpening his axe. After all the work cutting through layers of ice, bone, and frozen flesh, it wasn't a wonder that the weapon had gone blunt. The dwarf went about his task with his forehead wrinkled in concentration as he handled the whetstone.

"Not very telling, all in all," Sand finally commented when he returned from inspecting the last of the charred foundations. "The attackers made no glaring mistakes in leaving something behind, no arrows or bolts, or indeed anything physical that may help us in determining their true identity. Not that I expected them to be entirely incompetent, but it would have been a convenient break."

"Yeah," Brianna agreed, trying not to feel downtrodden. "It would have been."

"No need to sulk, dear girl, as this log we found could turn out to be a rather critical piece of…"

Sand was interrupted by the dwarf's rather insistent clearing of the throat. Looking to be near the end of his patience, he turned.

"The sooner I finish, the sooner we can all get back to civilization and warmth, so I suggest…"

"There's somethin' in the well," Khelgar announced. "Or someone."

"Well, with your luck I would not be surprised if we are being spied upon." Sand tilted his head meaningfully at Brianna.

She turned away and eyed the crumbling ring of stone topped by an old winch. "In there?" She didn't bother to hide her skepticism. It was a ridiculous place to hide, especially in the middle of winter.

"Heard it," Khelgar confirmed, however.

She resolutely walked up to the well and placed her hands on both sides of the crumbling structure, leaning forward, ducking her head beneath the winch and staring down into the darkness.

"Hello?" she called.

If it was a spy, they would have alerted him – or her – already, so there was no need to be sneaky about it either way. Just when she started to suspect that Khelgar had likely hallucinated the noises, she heard a distinctive splash, followed by a scraping sound of what she guessed to be metal on stone.

"There's someone in there," she confirmed as she drew back and straightened up. "Now what?"

"If they won't come up, we'll send someone down," opined the dwarf, scratching his beard. "Who's goin', though?"

"Just toss the gnome down, he's worthless anyway," Bishop proposed. He had, from the looks of it, abandoned an exhilarating game of tossing and fetching in order to find out what they were all debating, and was now standing several feet away with his arms crossed before him.

"And what would he do, sing the spy to death?" Brianna made a face when the only possible outcome occurred to her. "It's got to be me. Sand's not dexterous enough to climb down a well and cast spells at the same time if that should become necessary – no offense, Sand – and Neeshka's injured. Everyone else is too heavy."

"None taken," the moon elf quipped belatedly. His face spelled out his relief at not having been asked to explore a dark well.

Khelgar did not appear to like the situation.

"Hope ye know what yer doing, lass," he said, taking a good look at the winch and the rope dangling from it. "This here's thin rope."

Bishop rudely pulled the strands of hemp away from the dwarf's grasp and examined them as well.

"Thin, but sturdy enough. This well was in use until just before the attack, and water's heavy. Chances are she'll make it down."

"Yeah, that makes me feel tons better about descending into a dark, bottomless pit," Brianna replied while dropping her pack into the snow. "Fine. Lower me down."

She checked her weapons before climbing up onto the well's uneven edge. As she did so, several pebbles came loose and tumbled down the well shaft, their echoes in the depth an unnerving sound.

"Blast it," she muttered, placing her feet in the bucket and reaching for the rope as she contemplated how she had managed to get herself signed up for this. "If you lot drop me or leave me down there, I swear I'll find my way back up here and murder you all."

Bishop, getting ready along with Khelgar to do the lowering, smirked.

"Have fun, swamp wench," he wished her.

Then her heart started to sink along with her body as the winch squeaked, delivering her to the darkness with agonizing slowness.