D& D - Greyhawk - Night Watch (17 page)

He stared ahead into the darkness that closed around him as he led Blossom and the two remaining watchmen in his group up the original tunnel. Despite their four sputtering torches, the gloom had a suffocating quality. More than ever, he was aware of the weight of stone and brick and earth over his head, of the closeness of the damp walls on either side.

There was little water on the tunnel floor now, just puddles and a thin stream of fetid sludge. A pair of rats looked up hesitantly from a meal they were making on the corpse of a poor drowned cat, and scampered quickly out of their path. Garett stared at the cat as he passed it. It was pretty chewed, but what riveted his attention were the dark, moist sockets where the animal’s eyes had been.

Why the seers? a part of his brain asked suddenly. Just as suddenly, the answer came to him. Because there’s something someone doesn’t want them to see.

A scream reverberated with frightening intensity through the tunnel. Garett spun about as one of his men dropped a torch from fear-numbed fingers. The flame popped and sizzled in a puddle and went out. Shamed, the soldier recovered himself. “Sorry, Captain,” he muttered apologetically, one hand still clenched tightly on the hilt of his sword.

“Understandable,” Garett responded even as he drew his own sword and started back down the tunnel at a run. In truth, he’d nearly dropped his own torch. The hair was still standing on the back of his neck.

“It came from that last fork,” Blossom shouted, running alongside her captain. “Burge’s party!”

They splashed noisily back through the tunnel as the sewage deepened, found the fork, and raced up it. The torches crackled and smoked in the wind of their passage. Behind Garett, one of his watchmen slipped and fell with a sharp scream of his own, and another light went out.

Then, out of the blackness came a terrible screech. For the briefest instant, Garett had the impression of something huge, a winged form with monstrous talons rushing at them out of the dark. A wind blew upon his face. With a shout, he threw himself against Blossom, knocking her aside. His torch sizzled in the water and went out as another human scream, from the watchman behind him, ripped through the tunnel and ceased with a horrifying finality.

Garett rose on his elbows out of the putrescent water and stared the way the creature had gone. His heart thundered in his chest as he pulled himself to his feet. Amazingly, Blossom had managed to save her torch. Though she was drenched, as he was, she was unharmed. He left her and hurried back to the fallen watchman. The man was dead, his neck broken as if by a powerful blow from the monster’s outspread wing.

A splashing alerted Garett, and the remaining watchman, the one who had slipped, came rushing up, his weapon in hand. “What in the hells was that?” he shouted. The look on his face was the result of both anger and fear, as it so often was on men at the edge of hysteria. “It passed right over me before I could get up!”

“Who knows what it was?” Garett snapped too loudly. He drew a deep breath. There was still the first scream to investigate. That had to have come from Burge’s party. “Take care of him,” Garett ordered, indicating the fallen watchman. He turned to rejoin Blossom, who was on her feet.

“You’re not leaving me here in the dark!” the soldier cried desperately. He slammed his naked blade against the stone wall, striking sparks, and Garett saw that he had, indeed, crossed the delicate edge. The man would fight rather than lose the light of Blossom’s torch.

“Then pick him up and bring him, gods damn it!” Garett turned his back as the soldier hurried eagerly to obey. Once the burden was shouldered, they all splashed ahead.

A new side tunnel intersected at a right angle, and someone shouted out even before Garett and Blossom reached it, alerted, no doubt, by the torch’s light. “Down here!” they called. “Help!”

The side tunnel was a dead end. A wide drainpipe near the ceiling gave a steady trickle from the upper world, and a green mossy stain trailed down the far wall. Two watchmen from Burge’s team rose unsteadily from where they were crouched. A third floated face down in the foot or so of water that filled the tunnel. Burge himself sat propped against one wall. His head lolled to one side, and his eyes were closed. Blossom’s torch revealed three sharply defined streaks of crimson that began on the side of his neck and ended just above his left nipple. The front of his tunic was entirely ripped away.

Garett went to him at once and felt for a heartbeat. “He’s alive!” he declared.

“I thought I was never gonna see light again in my life! ” one of the watchmen exclaimed.

“It was a bird, Captain! ” the other watchman hissed excitedly. “I mean, sort of! I mean, it was a man first when we came upon him. But then he changed. I mean, just changed! Right in front of us! The lieutenant there tried to grab ’im, but you see what that got!” He pointed to Burge’s wounds. “The thing just swiped at him and knocked him aside like he was a doll. Then it rushed at us. Me and Henget here—” He indicated his partner. “We ducked. But all of us, everyone, lost our damn torches!”

“What happened to the other one?” Blossom asked, moving toward the floating corpse, taking the light with her.

“Damned if I know,” the one called Henget answered. “He went down, too. Then it was dark. We didn’t move.”

Blossom turned the floater over and winced. The man’s throat was ripped away. As she let him go and rose again, the light of her torch fell fully on the far end of the tunnel, and she let out a short exclamation.

Garett heard her and turned to see what her light had revealed. Together they approached the low, stone altar while the other watchmen hung back silently. It was fashioned from large, unmortared blocks, recently assembled, and the cracks between the blocks were stained red where blood, and lots of it, had flowed down into them.

At one end of the altar, Garett found several strands of blond hair caught in those cracks. The little girl from Old Town whose body had been found yesterday—her hair had been blond. He put the palm of his hand down where her small head must have lain, and a tremor of anger went through him.

“Look,” Blossom said, touching his shoulder as she raised her torch a bit higher.

On both walls, at either end of the makeshift altar, was a sign, crudely painted in red, that Garett knew. It could not be coincidence that he had seen it most recently carved in the wall of the apartment belonging to the old seer called the Cat.

It was the horned skull above two coupling serpents, the symbol of the Horned Society, the most despised of all Greyhawk’s enemies. For years, the sorcerous Hierarchs that ruled the society had glared enviously across the Nyr Dyv, coveting Greyhawk’s power and wealth. But their own conquests and expansions had overextended their military strength. The Hierarchs lacked the navy to reach across the lake. And thanks to the political machinations of Greyhawk’s wiliest politicians, a precarious series of alliances with other nations around the Nyr Dyv ensured they would never develop one.

Then, suddenly, Garett took a closer look at the symbol. He grabbed the torch from Blossom to see better and held it right under the paintings, which were not done in paint at all, but in the life fluid of some victim, and it was still wet, still fresh.

Garett repressed a shudder and forced himself to study it closely. They were not horns that adorned the skull this time. They were slender wings.

“Let’s get out of here,” he announced abruptly. “Tomorrow, I want this thing taken apart stone by stone and the pieces thrown into the Selintan River. And have the sewer sweepers scrub these walls.”

He gave the torch back to Blossom. “One of you carry that man,” he ordered, pointing to the floater. “None of my men get left down here.” Then he bent and picked up Burge and cradled the half-elf s head on his shoulder.

Not another word was said until they found the other teams, located the nearest grate, and reached the upper world.

Garett watched the sun rise from a window in the

barracks infirmary. It proved no more than a

pale white ball in the overcast sky. The fog lingered. Tendrils of mist wafted eerily through the air. The wind, when it blew, carried a chill that was completely out of character with Greyhawk summers.

With Blossom and Rudi worriedly looking on, he watched the physician take the final stitch in Burge’s wounds. A small spell of healer’s magic kept his friend unconscious during the process, and there was an expression of peace on the half-elf’s face that seemed completely at odds with the rest of the world.

Despite that, Garett worried. As ugly as they were, the cuts on Burge’s neck and chest were simple matters. It was the wound on the back of his friend’s head that was the true cause for alarm. Apparently he had struck the sewer wall with considerable force, and Garett knew how dangerous such head injuries could be. The physician, however, could do no more than stitch the cut on

the scalp, smear some salve upon it, and apply a bandage. Sometimes that was enough. But Garett once had seen a man awaken blind from such an injury.

The physician, Dav Govaker, worked for the garrison on permanent retainer and enjoyed a considerable reputation among many of the watchmen. He set aside his needle and thread, rose from the cot where Burge lay sleeping, and stretched. Govaker was a tall, thin fellow with a nose as sharp as his instruments and a wit to match. His fatigue, however, was plain to see as he rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger.

“He’ll sleep the day away,” Dav reported in a strained voice. “I suggest the three of you do the same. And I might mention I intend to charge twice my usual fee for this night’s work. It’s rude enough to be called from a sound sleep and a warm bed, but to have to perform careful work with the four of you smelling like a Nyrondian outhouse is simply too much for a man of my delicacy and breeding.” He wrinkled his nose and made a face as he waved a hand to clear the air. “In fact,” he added, “I may charge triple.” “Delicacy and breeding?” Rudi mumbled from where he leaned by the doorway. There was a gleam in his eye that had nothing to do with the glare from the oil lamps as he regarded the lanky physician. “The way I hear it, you got your start castrating reindeer in the Northlands and worked your way up from there.”

Dav Govaker’s eyebrows shot up disdainfully as he looked down the length of his nose. “They were not reindeer,” he answered with an exaggerated sneer, “but gerbils. And I still like to keep in practice, so I may call on you sometime.” He ran his gaze up and down Rudi.

“He must have seen you at the baths,” Blossom interjected with a wink and a grin, never able to resist hurling a barb.

Rudi turned his own nose up at that in a mawkish imitation of Govaker. “He probably peeks through the knotholes,” he said.

Dav Govaker gave an exasperated sigh and swept all his bandages and needles and instruments into a large, embroidered bag. Half the bandages were from the infirmary’s own supply, and Govaker had no claim on them, but Garett said nothing. The man took too good care of his watchmen.

“Well, it’s been fun, Captain Starlen,” Govaker said, coming over to shake Garett’s hand. “Always nice to see you, and this fine lady, too.” He nodded courteously toward Blossom. “Next time, though,” he continued, casting a spare glance toward Rudi, “perhaps you can find a sitter and leave the little one at home.”

“They can be such a bother, can’t they?” Garett agreed as he steered the physician toward the door.

Dav Govaker gave each of them a final nod and passed wordlessly out the door.

Blossom yawned and headed for her quarters in the barracks. Garett left, too, but, though he longed for his bed back on Moonshadow Lane, there was still business to finish in his office. One of the men who had died in the sewers had a wife-—a widow now—and the city paid a special bereavement bonus to the families of watchmen killed in the performance of their duties. Some other officers had taken it upon themselves to inform the woman of her loss, but it was up to Garett to push through that extra payment, and he didn’t intend to wait.

It surprised him when he exited the barracks to find a crowd milling about the High Market Square. Then a furious racket drew his attention to the dais under construction in the square’s center, where a squad of bronzed and barechested workmen wielded heavy hammers.

A minstrel appeared suddenly in Garett’s path. Wearing a plaintive and soulful expression, he sang and played on his stringed instrument, but the hammering nearly drowned him out. Garett ignored the man and walked on toward the Citadel.

“What’s going on?” he asked the guards at the main entrance, though he already had a pretty good idea.

All four guards snapped to formal attention and executed proper salutes. Their crimson uniforms were clean and neatly worn, their cloaks draped perfectly over the shoulders, their boots polished. “It’s official, sir,” one of the four reported crisply without meeting Garett’s eyes. “Magister Kentellen Mar will enter the city through the Duke’s Gate at exactly noon today, sir.”

Garett had to give Korbian Arthuran credit. His daytime watchmen certainly looked and sounded elegant. The captain wondered what they thought of his fouled uniform and the rank smell he exuded. If they gave it any notice at all—and how could they not?—they kept it carefully hidden behind perfectly straight faces.

He bid them good morning and entered the gloomy depths of the Citadel. No matter what time of day, the corridors of the mammoth structure were always dark and lit with lamps and lanterns. He made his way straight to the Office of the Paymaster and there gave the sergeant in charge the name of the dead watchman and the widow’s name and address, with instructions that the bereavement bonus be sent at once by a special watchmen’s representative.

After that, he headed for Korbian’s office three levels higher. The upper halls were full of people he didn’t know—low-ranking bureaucrats, minor dignitaries, and secretaries. A steady stream of these functionaries flowed in and out of the Directorate chambers. When Garett failed to find Korbian in his offices, he also headed there.