Shroud of Four Silences - Chapter 12: Inkboil Spring

In the room beyond the secret door, the stolen books lay dissected.

Eleukas could think of no other word to describe what he saw. The missing books—or, at least, selected pages from the missing books—had been cut loose as neatly as if by a vivisectionist’s scalpel, and were laid out on a long wooden table in a curiously anatomical design. They weren’t arranged side by side, but at odds and ends, some positioned diagonally to the main body like limbs, others tilted slightly out of parallel or perpendicular.

Next to that table, another held sketches of the broken tablets that the kobolds had been unearthing in the green-lit cavern above. Each sheet duplicated the angular, alien script that had been on one particular tablet, and their configuration precisely mirrored that of the pages cut from Vandy Banderdash’s stolen books.

Other notes and scribblings were tacked up around the room’s walls. A small shelf held blank sheets, uncut quills, and ink. There was nothing else in the chamber. This cavern was as crudely dug as the rest of the Fangsparks’ excavations, but here the walls and rough dirt floor had been washed with a clear shellac to keep the dust controlled. A sourceless white glow illumined the room and its contents, same as the light in the shrine chamber.

The shadowless light set Eleukas’s teeth on edge. He paced around the room, trying to make sense of the diagrams on the walls and the duplicated arrangement of the pages on the table, but their meaning eluded him.

He hated that he was always the last one to see things that seemed so simple to the others. But, once again, Eleukas felt he had no choice but to surrender to his incomprehension. “I don’t understand. Why’d they cut up the books they stole, and why are they arranged all funny? What are these copies for?”

“Book is not for reading,” Gristleburst told him, sounding mildly impressed, as if the goblins hadn’t thought the Norgorberites capable of such good sense. “Book is for understanding.”

“I still don’t get it,” Eleukas said.

“What was important about the stolen books wasn’t the text,” Wendlyn explained. “It was that those pages showed them how to set up this arrangement, like a kind of diagram. Then they would know how to sequence and orient the writing on the tablets so that they could make sense of those. Vandy’s book was just like a… a code key. The buried tablets held the actual message they were meant to decipher.”

“Well, what does it say?”

Lisavet shook her head slowly, the ornaments chiming in her hair, as she studied a diagram on the wall. “Nothing good. Worliwynn was right. They’re trying to reach something under Inkboil Spring. Something that will bring them Norgorber’s blessing for the Shroud of Four Silences, and enable them ‘to walk in the Masked God’s shadow, and carry his blessing with each touch.’ Something that can only emerge ‘in the dark of the new moon.’

“Something,” she added, grimly, “that they’ve been working toward for years. There’s a reference here to ‘deaths without number, to braid the skins and blood the skinsaw and fill the spiral with souls.’ It sounds like they killed an awful lot of people in sacrifices to make that ugly coat we saw in the shrine room.”

“The Shroud of Four Silences,” Eleukas echoed. The name hung in the air. He thought of the garment they’d seen between the shrines, with its ugly razor-tipped fingers and stitched scraps of human skin and the black spiral gag over the mouth. “Does anything explain what it actually is?”

“Not that I can see,” Lisavet replied, still examining the pages on the walls. “But whatever it is, this whole cult has been bent on finishing it for years. Devotees of each one of Norgorber’s aspects gathered together, in rare cooperation, to create this thing. Now they’re nearly done, it seems. All they have to do to complete it is take it to a ‘font of shadows beneath the font of ink’ and do… I don’t know what, exactly. But something there. At Inkboil Spring.”

“What if we destroy the ugly coat?” Wendlyn asked, glancing back up toward the shrine room. “If we burn it, or hack it into little pieces, their ritual is ruined. Problem solved.”

“It would be ruined for now,” Lisavet agreed, turning away from the wall scribblings, “but if we just stopped there, nothing would prevent them from re-creating it and trying again. They’d just murder another hundred sacrifices, or however many it takes, and wait for another night of the new moon, and who’s to say that anyone would find out about it in time to stop that attempt? We barely got lucky enough to stumble on this one before it was over. Think of how many times we nearly died out there, and how close we came to being too late.”

“The night of the new moon’s tomorrow,” Eleukas realized, alarmed. “That doesn’t give us much time to decide.”

“What would we need to do to stop them forever?” Wendlyn asked.

Lisavet shrugged. “Somehow they didn’t think to write that one down.”

“Shroud holds the key.” Gristleburst pulled a page down from the wall. The goblin had squinted and scowled at all the written words, Eleukas had noticed, but he’d studied the sketches and diagrams more carefully. Now he carried one of those drawings to the others, holding it out in the flat, white light.

The sketch depicted a faceless cultist wearing the patchwork garment and reaching into a font of black liquid with one blade-fingered hand. A ghostly key hovered between the razored fingers. Its teeth dipped into the dark waters as if it were somehow unlocking the spring.

“But then what?” Eleukas stared at the picture as if he could force it to give up the answer. “Let’s say we bring the shroud to Inkboil Spring—even though it seems like that’s exactly what the cultists want—and we use it to unlock whatever’s in there, which is also exactly what they want. What happens next? Have we just completed the ritual for them?”

“No.” Gristleburst’s blast goggles reflected the cavern’s strange white light, hiding the goblin’s eyes and expression behind a blank sheen. “Then is a choice, or a test, by cursed water. Foul ones very worried about picking wrong answer, upsetting their nasty god. So is not guaranteed success, even for them. For us—we go find this unholy place, throw lots of bombs at it. Blow it up forever. Shroud too. Then problem solved forever.”

Eleukas looked long and hard at the goblin. It seemed awfully convenient that Gristleburst had led them down this tunnel, after cutting off all their other options, and had then just happened to stumble upon a course of action that might stop the Norgorberites’ plan forever, but might just as easily do the very thing that they wanted.

Gristleburst didn’t have to be intentionally lying to them. Maybe the cultists had just manipulated him somehow. Maybe they’d planted that slip of paper as a deliberate ruse, knowing that a goblin wouldn’t want to read any words, but would seize on the first thing that conveyed its message through pictures.

True, Lisavet had said that seeding paranoia was how the Reaper of Reputation would try to turn them against each other, but that didn’t mean Eleukas was wrong.

And he didn’t like that he couldn’t see Gristleburst’s eyes.

Eleukas ran a hand through his curls, grimacing at how dirty and matted they’d gotten. It felt like there wasn’t any option that didn’t leave him soiled here. “Wendlyn? What do you think?”

Wendlyn didn’t answer for a long while. Finally she shrugged, sounding at once determined and defeated. “I think we should put an end to this. If we can only do that by using the shroud to unlock whatever secret lies beneath Inkboil Spring, then that’s what we’ll have to do.”

“All right.” Eleukas tried not to let his disappointment show. He really didn’t think this was the wisest course of action.

But even if he didn’t trust Gristleburst, he did trust Wendlyn and Lisavet, and if they both believed that going to Inkboil Spring was what they needed to do, then Eleukas aimed to see that they got there.

If that was the wrong choice, at least they would make it together.

###

The cultists were waiting for them at Inkboil Spring.

Wendlyn exhaled softly as she peered through the trees. She counted four hooded Norgorberites, three of the big rats that she and Eleukas had fought near Giant’s Wheel, four or five goblin and kobold zombies – it was hard to be sure; she didn’t have a clear view of those – and about a dozen surviving Fangsparks.

She hadn’t found any traps or fortifications, which was something, but the fact remained that they were badly outnumbered. And, probably, the cultists knew they were coming.

Not ideal. Wendlyn sneaked back through the forest to the others, summarizing what she’d seen. “It won’t be easy,” she warned them.

“Well, they wouldn’t call it heroism if it were easy,” Lisavet said wryly.

“Are we calling ourselves heroes now? Seems a bit premature.” Wendlyn plucked at the knot holding the bundled-up Shroud of Four Silences. They’d wrapped the ghastly thing in a cloak and tied it up with rope, as if it were a living creature that had to be imprisoned. She couldn’t see a thread of it, but still she imagined she could feel its evil seeping out. “We’re all still agreed that I should carry this thing?”

Eleukas stared awkwardly at his toes. No one spoke up. Wendlyn sighed inwardly, unsurprised.

Well, she only had herself to blame. Lisavet was a holy cleric of Sarenrae whose magic might interact unpredictably with the shroud’s, and Gristleburst was too small to carry its bulk easily. Eleukas might have taken the burden, but Wendlyn didn’t think it was prudent to risk having their best fighter taken out by some Norgorberite trick, so she’d practically ordered him not to touch it.

He hadn’t been happy about it, but he’d listened. Which left only Wendlyn to carry it.

Suppressing another sigh, she slung the bundle over her back, trying to ignore how it made her skin crawl. She couldn’t shake the memory of those black-razored fingers dangling from limp sleeves, the patchwork of human skin and gray cloth across its back, the awful crusted stains on the velvet spiral that gagged its hood.

So much suffering. So many deaths. They couldn’t allow any more.

“Is everyone ready?” Wendlyn waited for their murmurs of assent. She wanted them unified, and committed. “All right. Let’s go.”

Without further ado, she slipped back into the trees, moving toward Inkboil Spring. It was still early evening, not quite dark, and the cultists hadn’t begun whatever ritual they had planned for the night of the new moon. One of them was consulting a book by lanternlight, while two others set out ritual implements on a ragged brown sheet, and the fourth ordered the kobolds to stack firewood in a high pyre.

Just as the pyre-overseeing cultist was emptying a skin of dark liquid over the piled firewood, the quiet twilight exploded into flame.

Two of the kobolds and the pyre lit up with angry orange tongues. The cultist hastily retreated, dribbling more liquid from the open skin. Reeling and screeching, the kobolds threw up their burning arms in panicked pinwheels. Behind them, the pyre erupted into a fountain of sparks and then began spewing thick white smoke, swirled with plumes of fine brown dust.

The wind spun the smoke briefly toward Wendlyn. It made her nose tingle violently at the first breath.

“Sivanah’s slippers!” Gristleburst yelled. “Foul ones are burning Sivanah’s slippers! Don’t breathe! Make you see and hear what is not there!”

“Great,” Wendlyn muttered. A hallucinogen was just what they needed. She pulled a scarf around her nose and mouth, hoping the others had heard Gristleburst’s warning. Eyeing the smoke plume, and trying to stay upwind, she circled into the fray.

Smoke flooded the trees and the small clearing around Inkboil Spring, drifting over the spring’s black waters and offering Wendlyn near-perfect concealment. Silent as a wraith, Wendlyn drifted with it, stabbing at victims who never saw her coming. Kobolds dropped in her wake, their corpses hidden by the deepening smoke.

She saw flashes of the others fighting. Lisavet seared the zombies with blasts of holy light, which flared in the smoke like eerie, soundless lightning. Garish red and green fireworks exploded low under the trees as Gristleburst unleashed his remaining bombs, now down to the prankster’s playthings Wendlyn had given him. Eleukas was hacking at all three giant rats at once, surrounded but undaunted by their lashing tails and long gray teeth. With Viserath in his hands, he was faring much better than he had by Giant’s Wheel. Arcs of acidic vapor and sizzling blood hung surreally in the false fog around him.

Then the cultists joined the fight, and the nightmare rose to a higher pitch.

One crept behind Eleukas, relying on the rats for distraction. Wendlyn caught a fevered glimpse of a hooded figure emerging from the white smoke, and something ghastly and squirming under its cowl. Before she could decide whether it was real or a hallucination, the cultist’s knife flashed and Eleukas cried out, faltering as blood ran dark from his side.

Wendlyn shook her head, tightening the scarf around the lower half of her face. For an instant she’d fancied that she could see black fingers spilling out from Eleukas’s wound along with his blood, stretching out across his body. She must have inhaled more of the hallucinatory smoke than she’d realized.

Forcing herself to breathe shallowly, Wendlyn crept closer. She passed an unsuspecting Fangspark but held back her blade, not wanting to give away her position.

The cultist was almost within reach now. The weapon in his hands blurred and shifted before her eyes, from long dagger to skinsaw razor and back. Smoke blew into Wendlyn’s eyes, filling them with painful tears, and when she blinked them away, she couldn’t tell which way the cultist was facing. His head sat backward on his body, staring straight at her, and then it reversed and he was looking at Eleukas, and then he didn’t have a face at all, just a hood that covered his entire head like a sack.

I can’t kill him if I can’t even see him. And Eleukas was in dire straits, weakening fast, unable to hit hard enough to finish off the two rats that were still biting at him. They were quicker than he was, now, and their renewed aggressiveness showed that they understood their advantage. Even without the cultist, Eleukas would have been in trouble. With the additional attacker –

I can help you. The whispered words froze Wendlyn’s blood. They’d come from the bundle on her back. Soft and sibilant, they slid through her mind like an oiled snake, leaving a trail of intangible grease behind. Put me on, and you will see true again. No secret will be hidden from you. No foe will be able to stand. You can save your friends. You can do anything. Knowledge is power, and you will have it all. Put me on. Put me on…

No, Wendlyn thought back furiously, but she had no sense that the shroud heard her. Was it even real? Probably not. Probably she was just imagining that, too, as she breathed in too much of Sivanah’s slippers –

A wet, horrible scream tore through the falling night. It sounded like Gristleburst. For an instant Wendlyn hoped that she had imagined that too, but then she saw Eleukas’s head jerk up and a terrible recognition cross his face, and she knew that the goblin really had fallen.

Your friends are dying, the shroud whispered. Put me on. I am your only chance.

Wendlyn closed her eyes. Hot tears ran down her cheeks in the blinding, maddening smoke. Had this been the Norgorberites’ plan all along? Bring us here, poison us with this smoke, leave only one way out…

But it was the only way out.

Cursing under her breath, Wendlyn threw down the bundle, cut through its ropes, and pulled out the hideous shroud. Its razor-clawed fingers dangled before her, curling up in mocking invitation. The matted black velvet spiral over the hood’s mouth seemed to curve into a smile.

She hated it. She hated it viciously. And she put it on.