They arrived back at the Veil theater as Magda and the rest of the actors were removing the bodies of red wizards and stacking them in the street.
"Are you just going to leave those there?" Adahni asked, looking down at the bodies. Flies were buzzing around their mouths and they gave off a certain stench that reminded her of Luskan in high summer.
"The corpse collectors will be 'round in moment, no need to worry," the dwarf said cheerily, "It's all arranged. Now… are you going to bring that in here?" She pointed past Gann and Adahni to Okku, who was bringing up the rear, "Though I suppose he could take care of the body problem…"
"That's disgusting," Okku replied, looking down at the corpses and covering his nose with one massive paw.
"We need to know about Lienna," Adahni said, waving a fly out of her face.
"She's barely cold," Magda said, "Or what's left of her. That's a fresh wound you're poking your finger into. We were all very fond of the White Lady here, and her death grieves us sorely." She looked more angry than aggrieved, in Adahni's opinion. The dwarf woman had been friendly – or as friendly as one might be when one's place of business was under attack – but now she was downright stand-offish. She crossed her arms over her chest.
"It would be a fine world where the exigencies of the moment waited until our sadnesses had faded," Adahni said, trying to be tactful, "Unfortunately, the one in which we live has no time to wait for us to mourn."
"Aye, you speak the truth. But, first things first," Magda said, wiping two rusty streaks of gore on her pants and walking purposefully up to Adahni. She was tall for a dwarf, and Adahni was short for a human, and so they could look each other in the eye without too much trouble. Adahni looked blankly into Magda's intense dark gaze for a moment, wondering what on earth she was up to.
"Can I help you with something?" Adahni asked, averting her eyes first.
"You're Adahni Farishta, aren't you," Magda said, "You're that Neverese hero that Atrun Hadge is directing the play about down at the…" the dwarf took a moment and sniffed her disdain. The sniff was accompanied by a nose full of rotting flesh, and she made a face. Composing herself, she continued, "Sloop. Yes, word's all over town about you. And your story. If you are, indeed, who you say you are."
"I don't feel the need to prove myself to you or anyone else," she said, "For all you know I could be any seabound twat with a Neverese accent blown in off the lake and nobody would know the difference, would they."
"Well you'll need to prove something to me," Magda said, "Or I'll tell you exactly nothing about the rooms beyond the rooms. They say Adahni Farishta perished underneath the Mere of Dead Men. Oh yes, I watch their rehearsals and I know the tale. Rashemen is awash in people claiming that they are some lost princess from a kingdom fallen to revolution or some deposed nobleman whom everyone knows was executed. But all the stir you're causing is taking attention away from our production and turning it towards those talentless hacks at the Sloop. So tell, if you are who you say you are, how did you survive?"
"You say you know the story?" Adahni asked, "Then you know of the traitor Bishop."
"Yes, yes. The play is entitled the Betrayal of the Knight, after all."
"He saved me," she said, feeling no need to play the bard to this woman. This woman who ran a theater would have none of her tricks anyway.
"And I'm supposed to believe that?" Magda asked, "And I suppose next you'll tell me that a band of animated gargoyles made off with you and dumped you in the vicinity of Mulsantir?"
"Now that's just silly," Safiya remarked, "Please, we need your help, Magda."
"While this impostor is taking attention away from my spectacle and drawing it to the low-born, ill-educated rabble at the Sloop?" Magda countered.
Adahni was sweaty, and despite being full from her feast upon the spirits, in dreadfully low spirits herself, as one might imagine someone who had just found out about a rather life-threatening curse that had been cast upon her.
"Well then, if you know the story, then you know of the Shard of the Silver Sword?" Adahni asked.
"Yes. Coincidentally, it also figures quite heavily into the play that my eminently more talented troupe is putting on," Magda said.
"And how the fragment of sword was embedded in her – in my – chest?" Adahni said.
"Yes…"
"I have it on good authority that someone in those rooms beyond rooms has tried to remove it," she said.
"From your chest?"
Adahni had been fiddling idly with the clasps on her vest. Unable to resist the urge to be dramatic, she pulled it apart, revealing her bare chest, and the barely healing wounds between her breasts, the deliberate, deep, knife wounds, stitched together with ugly black stitches. Magda, completely unfazed, approached her even closer and examined it. Thankfully, she refrained from poking at it, though Adahni was sure that it was not tact that made her do so.
She heard Kaelyn gasp to one side, and Gannayev murmur, "Oh my…" to the other.
"Oh, Gods," Safiya groaned, and hid her face in her hands in chagrin, "I cannot believe you just did that."
"So if you are satisfied," Adahni said, ignoring the red wizard and speaking to Magda, putting her hands on her hips while her open blouse and vest fluttered in the breeze, "I would dearly love to have any information you might have with regards to who in the hells did this to me!"
"For the Gods' sake, Addie, put your shirt on!" Safiya hissed.
"Oh shut up, it's not like you've never seen tits before," Adahni said, turning sharply.
"I'm not sure that Gann has," the red wizard whispered in response.
"Don't get used to it, hagspawn," Adahni said, and took the wizard's advice, re-clasping the front of her vest and buttoning her blouse on top of it.
"Interesting," Magda said. She fished into the pocket of her pants and produced a key, "Lienna… she had been acting strange of late. Distracted, always rushing between the planes. And once… once she showed up, her white robes all spattered with red, like she'd just butchered a pig. A woman was with her, she looked like she might have been her sister, all bald like an old man and wearing red, like these poor bastards here," she kicked one of the dead red wizards contemptuously. The body let loose a pocket of gas. "Yes," she said, looking at Adahni, but not in the eye, "Like she'd butchered a pig. Or cut into the breast of a living person…" The dwarf fell silent, "Either way, you'll need this." She dug into her pocket and produced a brass key, "It opens the closet in her studio. That's the only thing that's locked back there, as far as I know. I admit, I've been too scared to go in there myself."
Adahni took the key, warm from the dwarf's pocket, and went into the Veil, where the actors were scrubbing blood from the boards of the stage. They were making some progress, you had to give them credit, considering how disgustingly filthy the place had been. They picked their way through them and back into Lienna's chamber. This time, paying proper attention, Adahni saw that the floor was covered in tiny specks of blood. She stood there, staring at them.
"Thinking that might be yours, my lemming?" Gann asked, appearing at her elbow.
"Nah," she said, "I'm thinking about the lovely chicken stew I'm going to eat this evening." She brushed past him. She seized his hand, and he seized, Safiya's, who took Kaelyn's, who grabbed Okku by the scruff of the neck, and through the portal the five of them went. The smell of blood was palpable this time. Adahni went to the closet door, and inserted the key. It swung open under her touch, and she half expected some sort of monster to jump out at her. Rather, it opened onto a corridor.
"Some closet," murmured Safiya, and followed her through.
At the end of the hall was a stone room that did not appear to be a part of the wooden Veil theater, or indeed, a part of the same world. The four corners of the room house runic circles, though Adahni did not recognize the runes. She did, however, recognize the odd, shimmering anomalies in the middle of them.
"They look like Illefarne song portals," she said, remembering the portal high on the hill in the ruins of Arvahn. The memory of it, and how it shimmered under the sunny skies, gave her a sudden pang of homesickness. Even among the death and destruction that had haunted her footsteps there, there had been moments of such pure beauty.
"They're Imaskari portals," Safiya corrected, "Same concept, different triggers. The Illefarne used song. The Imaskar created guardians, who could open and close the portals at will."
"You sure know a lot about this," Adahni muttered.
"They're not Imaskari," Kaelyn corrected her. She had walked up to one of the portals. Adahni could smell the unmistakable scent of the sea, ever so slightly, around it, "These were created recently, perhaps using the same type of spell. But these are new." She put her hand up to the sea portal, and Adahni saw a slight glow as she made contact with it, "It's been cut off. It's dead."
"Do you suppose whoever made this would have made a guardian as well?" Safiya asked the celestial.
"Well if not, what is this?" Okku rumbled from the corner, where stood, half concealed in the shadows, a golem, still and silent.
Safiya and Kaelyn, each eager to prove their superior knowledge, rushed up to it.
"It's clay, and it's been dead for awhile," Kaelyn said.
"It may work on the power of spirits," Safiya suggested, "Adahni, come here."
"What do you want me to do…?" Adahni asked, approaching suspiciously.
"You're a spirit eater," Safiya said, "Can't you like… give him some spirit?"
"You mean…" Adahni asked.
"I'm not sure that that's how it works…" Gann said, "Though I suppose it's worth a try."
"It wouldn't be the first undignified thing you've done today," Kaelyn said.
Safiya reached into the golem's hollow torso and took out a small, black sphere, that glowed dully. She handed it to Adahni.
"I don't know what you want me to…" she looked at her companions, "Oh Gods, you can't be serious."
"You're a spirit eater," Safiya said, "You eat spirits. Can't you, you know, un-eat one or two?"
"All of you turn around," Adahni said, "If this doesn't work the way I think it will, then we're going to have a mess on our hands and I'm not going to be the one to clean it up."
She sat down in the corner, the small sphere in her hand.
Rotting corpses. She thought. Dead fish with their eyes all glazed over. Karnwyr's farts. Entrails spilling from opened wounds. She felt her stomach lurch and reel. In the old days, she would have just stuck her finger down her throat and just been done with it, but she had the feeling that the spirits she had consumed with her spirit-eating mouth didn't go down to the same place as her normal breakfast had. Then again, the logic of trying to nauseate herself into giving up some of the essence made little sense if you thought about it too carefully. Grobnar having sex, she thought.
That did it. She felt a heave within her, though not her corporeal stomach, and she spat out the shimmering essence of a spirit she had sucked down earlier.
Torio Claven naked. She did it again, letting the essence pour from her mouth and pool on the dark sphere, which gradually began to light up. She picked it up, and found that it had absorbed the disgorged essence fully and was not slimy and disgusting as it would have been. She handed it to Safiya, who replaced it in the golem's thoracic cavity.
The golem creaked slowly, and woke up. It opened two glowing eyes and cast about, taking in the strange group before it.
"First door. Incoming," it groaned, "Second door. Containment. Third door. Disposal. Fourth door. Outgoing."
"Outgoing where?" Adahni asked.
"Incoming," the golem said.
"No, outgoing where?" Adahni asked.
"Incoming," the golem replied.
"Damn thing's broken."
"No, not quite…" Kaelyn said, pointing.
Adahni followed her finger to the portal that had smelled of the sea. It was open now, and through it, Adahni could see the waves of the Sea of Fallen Stars. That is, she would have been able to, if it had not been blocked by the dark figures of four gargoyles. They were breathing, though seemingly made of stone. She remembered similar creatures guarding the valley that housed Ammon Jerro's haven.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"You live," the leader said, "Impressive. You were hard to find. Took us nearly two years, it did… and here you were, in our own back yard."
"Too bad she didn't have what Mistress was looking for," the second gargoyle said.
"Indeed she didn't," the leader said, "Which is why she told us to leave her to die, didn't she."
"Who is your mistress?" asked Adahni, "Why was she after the shard?"
"We are not privy to such things," the gargoyle leader said.
"It's not with me," Adahni said, "I carved it from my own chest, threw it over the falls somewhere in Neverwinter. Good luck finding it."
"Oh, we tracked it down," the gargoyles said, "All buried in silt at the bottom of a river. Such a waste. Too bad you had to be brought here before we realized where it was."
"How did they know where it was?" Adahni asked.
"You told them," the gargoyle said, "Or… your dreams did. While you slept – or were kept sleeping here – the red and the white twins went to the Slumbering Coven. It is there that they were told all they needed to know. It is there that they walked through your dreams to the cliff in Neverwinter, where they saw you open yourself and cast it forth. It is there that they learned the secrets…"
"What secrets?"
The gargoyles looked at each other furtively, "You have been cursed, as have we," they said, "To walk the world wearing a mask that does not resemble your face. The curse is one of these secrets that they learned there, in the Slumbering Coven. And that is all we know."
"All you know, hm?" Adahni asked.
"Outgoing," the golem announced. To her right a portal opened, and the gargoyles scampered through. The portal shut soundly behind them but just before it did, Adahni caught a glimpse of a cliff, high above Neverwinter town. The remnants of a camp stood there, a crumbling hut made of pine boughs, a pit where a fire once had been lit. I lived there for more than a month, she thought, It was our first home.
"What in the hells just happened?" she muttered.
"Well, the mystery of how you got here has been somewhat clarified, wouldn't you say?" Safiya said.
She walked up to the incoming portal, which remained open. Through it, she saw the banks of the Lapendrar river, the sea grasses where she had layed her wounded head on the night of the typhoon. She walked up to it, and tried to reach through, but was rebuked by a sharp pain to her hand.
"That is an incoming door," the golem said, "Please refrain."
Adahni rolled her eyes and stuck her hand in her mouth to nurse the slight burn that appeared there, "Fucking technicalities," she muttered.