Shroud of Four Silences - Chapter 4: Gambler's Curse

Two days later, they went to Lisli’s boarding house, a windowless shack downstream from the fishery that reeked of rotting fish and abandoned garbage. Wendlyn hadn’t expected that Osgrath would be living in the lap of luxury, but she was still shocked to find the place as bad as it was. She hadn’t even realized that Otari held such dismal accommodations.

Osgrath was waiting for them inside, not much soberer than he’d been at their first meeting. His room was one of only two in the shack; the other appeared to be vacant. The only furniture in sight was a heap of dirty clothes that seemed to serve as the man’s bedding.

Wendlyn skirted around the clothes pile and leaned against the safest-looking patch of wall she could find. “Why don’t you tell us a little more about this ghost?”

“Right. Right.” Osgrath fished a dirty ceramic bottle from his pocket and took a swig. Even though it was Wendlyn who had asked him the question, he directed his answer toward Lisavet.

Wendlyn wasn’t surprised. Since they were children, people had shown her younger sister a deference and respect that they seldom granted her. At first, Wendlyn had assumed that it was because Lisavet, being human, had appeared older and more respectable from a younger age. Later she’d realized that that wasn’t it; Lisavet just radiated an innate authority that people sensed, and responded to. She didn’t even seem to realize she did it.

For Wendlyn, who had always struggled to be taken seriously, it rankled. Then she got annoyed with herself for letting it get to her. Eventually she’d mostly given up, and had just accepted that she was going to be the family ne’er-do-well, so she might as well get good at it. She’d learned to float at the periphery of Otari’s underworld, picking up tips and tricks, learning the skills of the con artist and cutpurse and gray-market locksmith, and while she’d always been careful to stay away from anything too heavy, she didn’t expect Lisavet to understand the difference. Most people didn’t.

It still irritated her, though, seeing Osgrath turn toward her sister first. She had to make an effort to push past that reaction and listen to the man.

“It started with gambling debts,” he was saying. “You might not think it to look at me now, but in my younger days, I was an adventurer. Gold, glory, wild excitement. There was a song about us. I had my own verse.” He smiled wistfully, remembering, and then the smile soured and he took another drink. “I won’t bore you with the story of how our party fell apart. Enough to say it did, and I got to gambling, trying to recapture some of the old thrill. Figured I had enough money that I could afford the vice.

“Well, like everybody else who thinks that, I was wrong. Pretty soon I ran through the money and was taking on other work to survive. Dirty work, some of it. Again, the details aren’t so important. What you need to know is that one of those jobs went wrong, and I—I killed a man I wasn’t meaning to kill. A man who didn’t deserve it.” Osgrath squeezed his eyes shut and emptied the bottle down his throat. “I murdered him. Let’s say it plain. It was a murder.

“I skipped town. Changed my name, took a night boat to Absalom. Took another boat from there. Spent a long time running. When I thought I’d run long enough, I came here. Quiet little logging town, nice people, decent work. Figured I could make a new life. For a while, I did.

“Then the ghost found me. The man I’d murdered. He just walked through the wall like it wasn’t there. First night, he didn’t say anything, just sat there and stared at me while I prayed and begged him to go away. I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. In the morning he vanished. I still didn’t sleep. The next night he was back again. This time, he told me I was cursed. That on nights of the new moon, when the world was darkest, he would come to me and lift away my gambling debts, the debts that had led to his murder—but only if I gave him my axe, the murder weapon, and let him keep it for three nights.

“He told me, too, that if I could stay debt-free for three turns of the moon, the curse would be broken and he’d leave me alone. I thought that was a mercy, at first. Now I understand it’s the cruelest joke of all.” Osgrath stared at each of them in turn with haunted, red-rimmed eyes. His voice cracked with the memory of his torments. “I can’t stop. The dice, the cards—I keep thinking, if only my luck could change. I keep going to the tables, looking for a portent, like a sinner waiting for some sign his god will take him back. But the sinner doesn’t change—I don’t change—so nothing does. It’s the tables and then the bottle, the bottle and then the tables. And on nights of the new moon, the ghost.”

“He takes your axe?” Wendlyn asked, fixing on the main point of Osgrath’s story, and casting a significant look at Eleukas. This explained the distinctiveness of the wounds on the corpse by Giant’s Wheel: obviously, it was meant to cast suspicion on Osgrath as an already disreputable character, and to shake off anyone who might be on the real culprit’s trail. Probably that was why the gambling chit had been left behind, too.

If Captain Longsaddle had found those things, instead of her and Eleukas, the drunkard would already be in a cell. It was too easy. He had no alibi, he was desperately in debt, and he was as disreputable as anyone came in Otari. Who would believe his denials, his ludicrous story about a ghost?

Even Eleukas looked like he thought Osgrath was guilty. He was leaning forward on his haunches with that tense narrow-eyed look that he got when he was trying to work out whether he should arrest someone in a training exercise.

Wendlyn wanted to shake him. Can’t you see what’s obvious? But it wasn’t just him. Most people couldn’t, she’d found. They saw what they wanted to see, and believed what they wanted to believe, and went through the world without actually watching or listening.

“Have you ever noticed anything different about your axe when the ghost returns it?” she asked, hoping this might prompt some other useful information.

But Osgrath only shook his head moodily. “It’s been with a ghost for three nights,” he muttered, his words already beginning to slur. He dug around in the pile of filthy clothes, pulling out other bottles and shaking them until he found one that still had something inside. “’Course it’s different. But it’s my axe.”

“Right,” Wendlyn sighed. Hopeless as it was, she had to try to keep Osgrath sober until the ghost arrived. “Well, would you care for a game of cards while we wait?”

He was, to her surprise, a good player, and knew several cheater’s tricks she hadn’t seen before. After a few rounds, Eleukas joined them, and even Lisavet took a hand. They only played for snapped bits of twigs, but Osgrath gambled as intently as if each broken stick were pure gold. His concentration drew them all in, and before Wendlyn knew it, night had fallen and the shack was illumined only by the oily glow of Eleukas’s lantern.

And then the ghost came.

The wall glowed pale blue, and then the ghost walked through, just as Osgrath had said. Its face was gaunt and distorted, bathed in a spectral azure light that brought out the hollows in its skull-like head and washed its other features into an unrecognizable haze. Though the ghost’s face was indistinct, its clothes were sharply recognizable: a city bookkeper’s hat, a good but patched coat, and under it all a tattered, cobwebbed white robe that trailed across the ground.

As soon as the ghost’s empty-eyed head swept toward them, it froze. Then it let out a shrill whistle, and part of the wall it had just walked through swung open. This time, there wasn’t any blue glow to disguise the gap.

“It’s not a real ghost!” Wendlyn shouted, even as four small, shambling figures came through the newly revealed gap. As they came into the light of Eleukas’s lantern, she saw that they were undead goblins: glassy-eyed, mindless, their bellies puffed out with decay. Maybe that ghost was a fraud, but the zombies were real enough.

Wendlyn drew her short sword, dropping into a fighting crouch. Eleukas was already beside her, axe out, and then he was swinging at the nearest goblin. He hit the zombie solidly, knocking its head to the side with a violent crack of bone.

It kept coming, though, claws extended mindlessly, head bouncing against its shoulder. Its empty stare didn’t change at all.

Lisavet chanted a prayer behind them, although Wendlyn couldn’t tell whether the words were actually magical or just meant to hide her sister’s terror. Osgrath was just cowering on his clothes pile, his magical axe clutched in trembling hands. Wendlyn bit off a curse at the man’s uselessness and scanned the fight again.

The ghost—or whatever it actually was beneath its tricks and illusions—was looking at Eleukas, who continued to hack at the goblin zombies. He’d finished off the damaged one, taking its head off altogether, and had started hewing at the next. Wendlyn took advantage of the ghost’s distraction, darting to the left and partially behind it, then stabbing deep into the hooded figure’s unguarded side.

Her short sword bit into solid flesh. Blood spurted from the wound: warm, red, living blood. The ghost let out a shriek and slashed at her with a hooked dagger that seemed to have materialized out of its sleeve. Wendlyn ducked, and the blade clipped through her red hair. She caught a whiff of something acrid on the metal, and the snippets of hair that fell to the floor were curled and discolored at the ends.

She tried to ignore it. The ghost was bleeding. That was what mattered. It wasn’t just a spirit; she could kill it. Lunging forward, Wendlyn stabbed again. This time, it was ready, and pivoted away, but not quite fast enough. She ripped another gash through the patched coat, and this one bled too.

Hissing, the ghost retreated through the gap in Osgrath’s wall, slashing the curved dagger through the air to hold them off. The two remaining zombies shambled forward in a protective screen, using their bodies to block Wendlyn and her friends from following.

Lisavet blasted one of them with a burst of golden light that left it crumpled and smoldering. Eleukas chopped into its companion’s torso, rupturing its swollen abdomen in a grisly explosion of splintering bone and foul gases—and something else, too.

Thick smoke poured from the goblin’s eviscerated belly. There must have been some alchemical trick stuffed inside, disguised by the natural bloat of decomposition. It filled the shack, stinging their eyes and clogging their nostrils. Coughing and gagging, Wendlyn shoved through the falling corpses and stumbled through the gap into open air.

She found only empty night outside. The ghost had escaped.

Wendlyn’s skin prickled, only partly from the sea winds’ chill. Where could it have gone? There weren’t any buildings nearby, and no trees or other natural cover. Yet the moonlight showed her only empty mud, curling wisps of smoke from the shack behind her, and the distant hulk of the fishery ahead.

She wiped her tear-filled eyes, but nothing changed. Somehow, the false spirit had disappeared as surely as a real one.

Cursing, Wendlyn turned back.

Eleukas was dragging the dead goblins through the hole in the wall to the clear air outside. By lanternlight, Lisavet was studying their tattoos and the beaded feather bracelets on their skinny wrists. “These zombies were Gullcrackers,” she told them, sounding surprised.

“Gullcrackers?” Wendlyn didn’t recognize the name.

Apparently Eleukas did. He stopped after dragging the last goblin out, wiping his hands clean of zombie gore on a handkerchief. “They were a local goblin tribe, back in my grandfather’s day. Bit of a nuisance, I’m told. They were always stealing odds and ends from the docks, and setting things on fire when they shouldn’t. Especially seagulls, which they viewed as good luck—and extremely funny—to explode in midair. Anyway, it wasn’t good for business, and people were worried that the goblins might manage to burn down valuable lumber.”

“They did.” Lisavet nodded, coming to study the dead goblins alongside Eleukas. “But they resolved the problem amicably. The town elders persuaded the Gullcrackers to relocate to the western cliffs, where the gulls liked to nest, and planted some redpitch pines nearby for them to burn. We study it at the temple as an example of cross-cultural diplomacy.”

“Looks like that wasn’t actually the end of the story, though.” Wendlyn peered at the dead goblins. She felt a pang of unexpected pity for the scrawny, big-headed creatures, who looked so helpless and pathetic now that they were sprawled in the mud outside Osgrath’s filthy shack. It seemed profoundly unfair that these Gullcrackers, who had likely had a wretched lot in life, should have to suffer the indignity of undeath after all the world’s other humiliations.

She looked from Lisavet to Eleukas. “Do you think you’d be able to find their… village?” Wendlyn wasn’t actually sure that goblins lived in villages, but she couldn’t imagine what the alternative might be.

“Yes, I think so. If I could go back to the library and study some maps,” Lisavet said.

“Perfect. That’ll give me time to rustle up some gifts they might like.” If these goblins were fond of blowing up seagulls, Wendlyn had some ideas for presents that might make them more favorably disposed to help the investigation. Maybe the promise of getting revenge on whoever had turned their fellow goblins into zombies would be enough, but… maybe not.

Did goblins care about such things? She had no idea. And who was to say that these dead Gullcrackers hadn’t been deliberately sold into that fate by their fellows? Humans could be that cruel to one another; goblins might not be any better.

“All right. Let’s meet at the library tomorrow morning?” Lisavet asked.

“Early,” Wendlyn agreed. “It might be a long walk to reach these Gullcrackers.”

“Wait.” Osgrath pushed himself up from the heap of clothes in which he’d sat out the fight. Clumsily, he got to his feet, pulling his spiked axe from the makeshift bed. He came through the gap in the wall, holding the weapon out to Eleukas. “I want you to have this.”

Eleukas stared at the axe, his face unreadable in the flickering lantern light. “Why?”

“It’s been a long time since this axe brought me anything but bad luck. I should have gotten rid of it as soon as… as soon as that murder happened, but I just couldn’t. Maybe I was carrying it around to remind myself that I used to be someone better, or maybe I just carried it out of guilt, but— either way, it’s time to let it go.” Osgrath pushed the weapon at Eleukas again. “You proved that ghost wasn’t a ghost. I don’t know what it was, or why it tormented me, or whether it’ll be back, but I know it wasn’t a ghost.

“There’s a lot I still don’t understand about all of this, but I know that much is true. I’m not cursed. I wasn’t being punished for my sin. I was being exploited for my cowardice. So take the axe. Please. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of my past.”

Wendlyn could see that Eleukas still didn’t understand, but he nodded gravely and accepted the axe. “Thank you. It’s a magnificent weapon.”

“It was,” Osgrath agreed. He sounded relieved to have the weapon’s weight out of his hands. “In your hands, it might become so again. Its name is Visperath. I trust you will wield it with honor, as I no longer can.”

Outside, when they were well away from the boarding house, Eleukas drew Wendlyn aside. His face was cloaked by the night, but she could hear the concern in his voice. “Wendlyn, what’s happening here? What we saw by Giant’s Wheel was bad enough, but… this? Goblin zombies and a false ghost? If it was false. It did disappear into thin air after we fought it.”

Wendlyn shook her head. “Probably it just ran off in the smoke, or maybe had some kind of invisibility spell. It hid the gap in Osgrath’s wall, and it used illusions to disguise itself. I think we’re dealing with a spellcaster, not a spirit.”

“Even so.” Eleukas grimaced deeply enough for her to see it through the gloom. “To think of such things in Otari…”

“I know,” Wendlyn sighed. She hadn’t wanted to dwell on it, but the thought had occurred to her, too. “Someone who can turn goblins into zombies could do it to people just as easily. Our friends, our neighbors. We have to get to the bottom of this, Eleukas. We have to stop it. We can’t let these monsters run loose in Otari.”