Chapter 22

Getting ahead of Jekserah

We stopped by the house, just to have a place to do some magic in peace and so Malachite could study the map. We wanted to leave as soon as possible just in case the divination had somehow alerted Jekserah and she was currently packing to leave her current hideout for another.

"Seems to be the other side of the Corpsewood," Malachite remarked. "She hardly went anywhere."

"As she knew the incompetence of the guard, it was her main complaint after all, perhaps she felt she didn't need to travel further out of her way," Hanz suggested. "She knew they would not pursue her outside of the city gates."

"Arm," I told them, handing Malachite his sword back, having put the spell symbol back on it. They lifted their arm and I got to work.

"That makes sense," he agreed. "Why is it named Corpsewood anyway? I mean what kind of people were the founders of this town?"

"I can only guess at their motivation," they admitted. "Is there any preparation we should do before leaving?"

"We're doing it?" He gestured to me.

"Any other preparation, I should clarify."

"I've got my sword, I'm ready to go."

"Let us wait a moment to allow Orchid to finish and see if she has any suggestions."

When I was done I shook my head. "It's not enough information for me to scry on the area," I mused, looking at the map. "Knowing a lair of some kind is there is a bit different from knowing exactly where to look."

"Ah, for the days of the GPS to return," Hanz lamented. "And satellite imagery. And electricity. And planes."

"Uh huh, sure," Malachite humored them, knowing they were just making words up at this point. "Any divination you want to do?"

"Unless you want to attack when she's asleep? I could ask when that was. Gives her time to get away though, if we delay because my magic says she's still sleeping after sundown like a normal person."

"No, let's leave now," he decided. "We've waited to corner her long enough, now that we have a lead let's not let her get away. For all we know she has a dozen safe houses in the area and rotates between them every night."

"Agreed."

We wound up flying for part of the journey, then landing and making our way into the forest on foot. I had of course gotten out my two new allies, which I knew were invisibly following us, one by land and one by air. We decided to forego going into the astral for now, the trees were pretty thick and there was a specific set of directions included with the map we needed to follow. Missing a step would have us doubling back again and again so we just kept an eye out. I had my detect enemies spell going every few minutes, just to "ping" the area as Hanz described it, in case we were being watched. I needn't have bothered, as the map led us right to an old mausoleum that had a tree trunk fallen across the entrance and the area was still silent as the grave.

"This must be it," Malachite announced, looking up from the map. "They actually came through, or at least led us to someplace in the area that's plausible."

"Is there another entrance?" Hanz wondered. "She's not moving that tree trunk every time."

"I don't know, I could probably manage it," I bragged (just a little). "She could just be teleporting inside I guess."

"Can you do it quietly?"

I looked it over. "Not sure. She never knew we were spying on her from the astral plane, so I doubt she's got any protections in place against that. I say we just head in there, in the astral, and see what we come up with."

"Alternatively, I can go alone," Malachite suggested. "We'll need to see if the place is dark or not, and if she's even there. If they can see us there, one person sneaking around is easier to manage than all of us."

"I won't be able to watch you," I cautioned. "You'll be on your own."

"I can handle it."

"All right." I stepped us all over to the astral, and Malachite disappeared down the stairs, becoming lost in the haze that permeated the whole place. We waited a tense few minutes before he returned.

"Didn't spot me," he announced, popping back up out of the door. "There's a lot of them down there."

"What's the layout like?" Hanz asked.

"The first room is complete darkness, there's three skeletons in there. The next room has some weird shadow like creatures in it, knowing what we know now about elemental demons I would call them elemental shadow demons. There's a torch there, as three cult members are standing around there at the entrance to that room."

"Oh great," I moaned, "she's involved with the- of course she is. Why am I not surprised?" I should have asked when I realized she was interested in raising the dead. Not that it would have changed anything if I asked after she left town. Right, my magic said I wouldn't think she was evil, so I didn't even think to associate her with the Gloom. Was she a high ranking member? Must have been. I guess we did more good than I thought with this. Huh, she totally lied to our face when we asked her about cults too, jerk.

"In the middle of the hall is a door, and down the hall is another door again guarded by three cult members. That room has two zombies in it. It's also dark. I saw some piles of stuff in that room, but didn't want to get too close to the zombies just in case. There's only one more room, a large one, Jekserah is there. That's lit by several torches. She's guarded by two skeletons and two zombies."

"A difficult approach," Hanz decided. "I assume the chambers are fairly small?"

"Only a few meters across," he agreed. "Lots of burial spots, but the corpses there are really, really old. This place really was forgotten."

"So any noise will bring the others running," they mused. "Even with the choke point of the door the light will announce our presence, and I hesitate to speculate on what abilities an elemental shadow creature would have. We would soon be facing multiple opponents and if they can travel as shadows, from multiple directions."

"I've got a good sense of the layout. We could simply drop in behind her, chop her head off, and hold off her forces long enough to grab the head and be stepped back up to the astral again."

"A sensible plan. The only downside I can see is..." They turned to look at me.

"There are still a lot of things that can go wrong with that plan," I told them. "For one thing she could have the room trapped. We step on the floor and suddenly we're teleported kilometers away. Snarly knows what I'm talking about."

"I 'ure do!" he announced happily.

"And there's magic to make a spell go off when something happens. Maybe we get the drop on her and chop her head off. Oops, she's got a spell trigger that immolates the entire room. With ice!" I hastily added, as Malachite raised a claw. He put it down again.

"What I actually meant was would you be willing to participate in such a plan?" Hanz clarified. "I calculate an 87% chance you would rather capture her."

I sighed. "That would be ideal. But without knowing what she's capable of, it's tricky. Heck, we all know about how difficult it would be to keep me imprisoned. Or a friend of mine?" I winked at Malachite who grinned back. "Could this town hold me for more than a few minutes? Probably not, if I wanted to escape and wasn't unconscious. There's no dead magic cell around here I know of. And that's what it would take. They could never take me out of it, lest I simply snap my fingers and escape. Plus trying to actually fight her? I don't want to fight myself, given my two new invisible guardians. Who knows what's really in that room? We could learn a lot from questioning her, I'm sure. But the risk..." I trailed off. She's a wanted person. She brought undead into the city, I make sure to clean mine up when I'm done with them. Wonder if a zombie could keep the house clean for me? Shoot, zombie wolves! I'm so stupid! That would have been perfect. Or a huge zombie bear? Oh, now we're talking but how would I- Anyway, not the time. She hangs out with undead, and cult members. But did she contact them or did they force her into something? No, if she's as powerful as we fear there's no way she did any of this under duress. She could have any number of dangerous spells I can't counter, or traps as I said. I can't see any trial going her way and they would have the same problem trying to lock her up. It's simply impossible to keep a decent mage anywhere they don't want to be. They would have to kill her. But I fear for Malachite's soul if he does this. That angel did say it would be all right if it was justice. "She's backed us into a corner. We can't take any risk she'll get away again, she's clearly still planning on attacking the town somehow otherwise she would have just gone to another town they didn't know her at. Or stopped hanging out in places like this at the very least. But she didn't. We really don't have many options."

"The instant kill plan it is!" Malachite agreed.

"Let's go over it in a little more detail though," Hanz suggested. "For example, could we bar the door in some way so we are not rushed after doing the deed?"

Several minutes and a few hastily sculpted rocks later, we followed Malachite down into the dark, and around the edges of the room into the main chamber. As he said, it was some kind of lab with several torches burning, and Jekserah was there at a table doing something to a corpse. Nothing reacted to us getting into position, and Malachite took careful aim. Snarly was ready with the wedge shaped rocks at the door, Hanz was covering them. My guardians and I were off to the side, ready to lend what aid we could.

"Ready?" I whispered.

"Ready!" everyone said back.

"On three. One. Two. Three." I dropped the spell, and Malachite's sword whistled through the air. She didn't stand a chance, her head being cleaved off her shoulders in one strike and blood going everywhere. Her head flew off into the corner of the room. I braced myself but no explosion of magic came. Huh, how surprising.

"Yeah, take that!" he shouted. "Sword beats mage!"

"Did you hear something?" came from the other side of the door.

"Oops!" he whispered, as the skeletons and zombies shuffled into action. Snarly slammed the two wedges into the cracks around the door, wedging it closed while Hanz shot one of the zombies, hitting it in the arm.

Do they not know how to aim? To show them up (and how it was done) I hit the other one in the head with an elemental needle. Wait, does that even matter for zombies? Maybe I should have done the leg.

Malachite smashed the skeleton that lunged for him, bones scattering every which way.

"Just get the head!" I reminded him.

"Oh, right, we don't need to re-unalive these guys." He looked around for where it went.

The other skeleton went for me, and here I slightly regretted my choice of non-lethal damage for Besom. It would do nothing against a skeleton magically with only knockout. So it simply took a swipe at the thing, it had sharp claws after all, which staggered it and made it visible. Boline followed up with thrust, just as intended, becoming visible as well and throwing the thing back. Ah, they work! Not that there was any doubt as they worked in the vision I had but still. Nice to know, and I didn't have to do anything.

Something hit the door on the other side and it shook a bit, but it was a heavy stone so it would take more than that. Still, perhaps it was time to go? Snarly was bouncing around keeping ahead of the zombies and trying to knock them over, so I figured it was time for me to get us out of there. I had my defense and offense to look after me, after all. I started casting dimension step as Malachite scooped up the head of Jekserah, shaking out her pillowcase to stuff it into. The door took another hit, and started to crack. Hanz stepped away from it, covering it in case something came through but was working their way over to me. I held the spell, and Malachite grabbed up Snarly and raced over to me so I simply had to release it when I was sure everyone was touching me. A second later the door burst apart and the cultists and shadow figures poured into the room, looking around for what was going on. My two allies were left behind, with a silent thought of give 'em Hell, girls! we turned and got out of there before those shadow creatures figured out where we were and decided to do something about it.

"This way," Malachite insisted, pulling me away from the direction of the exit. "That storage room, let's see if there's treasure!"

"You and your treasure," I muttered. The real treasure is the friends we made along the- who am I kidding, the real treasure would have been any books on that table. I may have to check this place in a day or two to see if they leave. I doubt they would leave the books though. I so wanted her spellbooks! Aarg!

But I let myself be dragged along and we saw the zombies pounding on the door or at least Malachite did. The room was still in darkness.

"Sacks," he announced, looking around. "Sacks of gold I shouldn't wonder."

"One second." I didn't want to be vulnerable for even the length of time it took to cast the spell, so this time I cast a second dimension step spell, held onto it, and dropped the first. Everyone but me grabbed up the sacks in record time, and Hanz picked up an ax, everyone being able to see as my magical, glowing circles were enough to light up the room enough to see by. "Okay time to go!" he announced, and with everyone holding onto me I let it go as the zombies turned to look at us. We were away. We headed back out the door, noticing with some amusement the undead were turning on their 'masters' and attacking them.

Sure, Jekserah animated them, I thought. With her death they're not under control anymore. So they'll just lash out. Serves them right, I suppose. They'll probably be fine though.

We looked through the sacks on the way back, basically just a change of clothes and some loose change in the bottom of each one. Nothing too great. The ax looked pretty neat though, I had to admit that, and Hanz was swinging it around to get a feel for it. Once out of the forest we flew back to town, and headed for the guard building while the head was still "fresh."

We didn't have too long to wait, a bloody, dripping pillowcase will get you bumped up in the queue pretty quickly in any town, and the captain of the guard and another man came to meet us.

"That's her," he agreed, taking a quick peek in the makeshift sack. "Hope it wasn't too much trouble for you."

"Honestly it could have been worse," Malachite admitted, closing it up. "We bypassed most of the place and took her out directly. She was a member of the Gloom cult, and there were several other cult members there as well as some strange looking creatures we didn't tangle with. Sorry. We felt it best to take her out as she was the main instigator."

"Yes, that cult is becoming a real nuisance," he agreed. "But what can we do? It's outside our jurisdiction."

"So you don't want the map of her location to make sure the place stays cult free?"

"Nothing we can do about it!"

"Uh huh… I guess we'll be on our way..."

"Don't you want the bounty?"

"Bounty? I didn't think there was one!"

"Ah some cat girl has been bugging me to put one out so I did."

Huh, she came through for us after all. I'll have to thank her.

"Of course!" He gestured to the man next to him to counted out twenty moons apiece for us. Hey, that's not bad. Still not back to where I was before buying the spell but it's a start. When that was taken care of he held up two more rolled up pieces of parchment.

"As you've proven capable, if you're looking for work I'll give you first crack at these. I was going to put them on the bounty board out front."

"I'll take a look," Hanz told him, taking them. They started looking them over.

"I can give you a summary. There's been a large creature flying around town lately we'd like investigated. People are claiming it's a dragon, and there shouldn't be any dragons around here. We'd like you to investigate that."

"Er, around town?" Malachite asked, as innocently as a babe.

"No, thank goodness. The Northern Pass, specifically."

"Ah, interesting!"

So it's not him, we have been careful apart from that one time.

"The other job is closer to home. Under it, to be precise. The Sinking Market district's wells have been much dirtier as of late, and those that go into the sewers have reported some kind of infestation of slime creatures of some kind. I don't really have a good description as people that go into sewers generally run away from anything they see down there pretty quickly. But as it seems," and here he sniffed a bit, "you may be at home there, you could check it out for us?"

Two of us, the ones that could smell things, glanced at Snarly, who was oblivious of course. I keep casting the cleaning spell but the smell just doesn't go away. What do I have to do to make it stop?

"We'll see what we can do," Malachite promised.

"Excellent. Good luck, and good day."

"Good day."

We headed out back home, our purses heavier and our steps lighter. (In a certain sense.) The town was safer and my new spells had proven themselves. We had more work, and the rest of the day to take it easy. I would look over the ax, see if it was magical in any way, and maybe head over to sell my spell tokens in the afternoon. The cult was still active, but we really hadn't been seen by anyone so we were probably not in danger of any reprisal. Things were looking up!