24th Day of Searing, 124th Year of the Age of Steel
The cavern was eerily still when Masagh stepped out of Slipspace inside it. Ghoulblade, cold iron shimmering with haunted faces, flipped end over end through the air. Indira appeared as she strode out from inside his own form, like an animate white shadow. She drifted into the open with a faint look of disgust as Masagh fumbled with the lantern they had brought.
The portal into Slipspace closed with a flickering of reality itself. There was a brief moment of absolute darkness before Masagh got the lantern lit. He held it up and looked around the cavern. The dried blood was invisible in the dark except where it contrasted some lighter patch of mud or stone, but it remained. The bodies remained too, or what was left of them. The Creth ghouls had made short work of most of the organs of the vampyre corpses.
“Time to get to work.” Masagh muttered, setting the lantern high to cascade light across the broken cavern. Yesterday he and his sister, along with Riah and a pair of goblin mages, had endured a Kinvaren Ambush. The six now cold vampyre corpses had been the result. Sabrione had been right to suspect they needed him along. The vampyres had been hoping to ambush Sabrione and Riah alone. Somehow they had found out that he was no longer amongst the knights.
Tonight he intended to find out how.
Masagh approached the grisly remains of one of the vampyres. It was being gnawed at by a couple thin sewer dogs. They growled territorially at his approach, but he just shooed them away. They could eat their fill after he was finished. The dogs growled at first, but then caught his scent. The cold corpse moving scared them and they moved off whining.
Masagh bent and examined the corpse. The eyes were gone, as well as other bits below the neck and above the knees. The hands were intact though. Dancing Ghoulblade in the air, Masagh unceremoniously had the weapon fall on them. It cut through both wrists with two precise lunges.
Indira made a gagging noise and floated away quickly. Masagh lifted both severed hands into a canvas sack. It was grisly work there in the dank ruins of a sewer, but it was not unfamiliar work. The ghoulmoved from corpse to corpse, collecting the hands that had remained intact through the night. The entire time Indira studiously looked the other way.
When he was done in the cavern Masagh had a sack full of Kinvaren hands and a dully glowing lantern in hand. Indira emanated a faint pearlescent glow next to him as he glanced around the cavern once more. He wondered if the Kinvaren would bother to come get their dead, or if they assumed the ghouls had taken the corpses. It was in character for the Creth to take the fallen as spoils of war, but they had already consumed the hearts. He himself still bore a distinct flush to his cheeks he hadn’t had in a long time. But he knew that neither the Creth nor the goblins would come here again for a while. There was a war on.
He tossed the sack over his shoulder and the Ghoulblade shimmered and disappeared with a jolt of mild pain in his body. Masagh lifted the lantern and watched the dogs slink back towards their meals. At least someone had found some good fortune in this place. He turned towards the portal rending its way into reality behind him. The inky blackness of the Slipspace erupting and then giving way to the tunnel towards his own Cell in the Creth compound in the distance. When the Railway was stable and the line through Slipspace firm, he stepped out of the Material Realm and into the black between realms.
Two hours later he and Indira were back in his cell. He had briefly entertained the idea of conducting his necromantic working in the laboratory, but if anyone saw his sack of hands they would ask questions. Specifically if his mother or any of her tag alongs saw them they would ask where he had gotten them. Under house arrest he had limited answers, all of them bullshit and all of them unable to stand up to her scrutiny.
So he and Indira had made it work in his cell. The cot had been tipped up on its side and rested against the stone wall. He had lit a few candles and kept the lantern dangling above his head as he worked. Indira perched atop the head of the bed where it rested halfway up the wall. A mortal would tumble down, but Indira’s etherealness floated weightless.
Masagh poured the Sorcerer’s Sand very carefully over the stones of his cold cell floor. He had spent the past few hours taking the finger bones from the hands as carefully as he could. He wore neither armor nor tunic and was halfway up to his elbows in dark bloody smears. It had been grisly work. Indira hadn’t even looked down for most of it.
But now he had salvaged the bones of ten index fingers. The sand fell from his blackened hands in a practiced and controlled manner. It was a bit more difficult squatting over the circle rather than the comfort of the more open lab but he was managing fine. He interspersed the circle of runes with glyphs of memory. This was the core working of an entire branch of necromancy. The Way of Remembering was his only hope in finding the answers he sought from the Kinvaren. While the dead could have been forced to speak, Masagh could not trust his mastery of necromancy enough to trust the answers he could wring from their souls.
Instead he had another plan.
He was careful not to step on his own fine sand lines and runes as he crouched and shuffled over the working. The circle of remembering came together one line and curve at a time. The white grains stood out against the blood caked blackness of his hands. When the circle was done, Masagh stepped out of it and carefully retrieved the first of the finger bones.
With it he reentered the circle of remembering. His intent seemed to pulse through the air of the circle, weighing upon the latent aether. Masagh carefully sat in the center of the circle with the tiny finger bone. He began to carve into it with his finest needle of memories chisel. At the base of the flattest side he could find he began with a vortex rune. As he carved he pulled from his mind the idea of the Kinvaren location. Either a hideout, a safe house, a hidden base. Anything that could get him a trail. He filled the intent and the idea with aether in his mind and chiseled away at the bone.
He would create this tiny necromantic artifact with one purpose. To point his way. With that idea he etched the continuum around the vortex in a tiny knotwork of runes. It was a simple design, with rudimentary and singular use. Luckily, that was all the ghoul needed.
For such a small piece, it certainly took long enough to finished. Almost an hour later he was barely reaching the thinner end of the bone where he would make the seeking glyph. At the heart of the glyph was the mirror. The trick here was fitting in enough runes to keep the artifact from spending itself immediately. Mirrors always needed at least some form of triggering protection. Masagh wove an etching of paths and convergences around the seeking glyph and connected to the vortex which would both infuse the aether with the vampire’s memories and keep the aether from escaping the minute pictograph runes.
When he was finally done Masagh straightened his pale back and heard it snap and crack. He growled in satisfaction as he stretched his arms out and watched the final bits of Sorcerer’s Sand dissipate into nothing, spent on the working. Looping the finger bone into the shred of leather he had brought he examined it in his hand. It had probably been a bit too pessimistic to assume he would need ten fingers to get the job done, but it could become faulty at any moment or else crumble to pieces. Worst of all, it could have an unbearable penalty. The Gravecurse, his mother called it. Her necrotic workings always either had almost no Gravecurse, or a complex array of deadly effects that required the use of various other items to negate.
Her Skull of the Forsworn King was one he had only seen her use ten times in his long two huddled years, and each time she had stood at the center of a trifecta of Scrivening circles holding two dragon shards of rare quality. By the end of the use both were shattered and she was reverted to a state of enraged hunger. Necrotic artifacts were not to be used lightly.
All that being said, he thought this finger bone charm would not have such a lofty cost. After all, it did very little. He looked at Indira and said, “It’s ready to use.”
He held the bone charm up flat on his palm. Bending slightly he murmured onto the charm.
“Point my way, Vampyre.” The charm spun in his hand, the glyph pointing through the wall to the north. At the same time his vision blurred and his ears roared with a rush as though he was underwater. Masagh spun slowly to face the direction the charm pointed.
As he turned the roaring dimmed and his vision cleared. So the charm would show him the direction, but at the cost of his sight and hearing in any other direction. A steep price for the use, but perhaps he could only use it strategically. Finally he felt they weren’t on the back foot anymore.
He would find his answers.
Remembered Artifact
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Ledger
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