Shroud of Four Silences - Chapter 11: Four Faces of Evil

Anyone dead?” Wendlyn coughed into the dust of the tunnel’s collapse.

“Not me,” Lisavet croaked, although that was at least half a lie. Her body felt like one massive, throbbing ache, with more intense flares of pain along her left arm and ankle, both of which might be broken. The ogre had done the first part, and she’d been lucky it wasn’t worse. A bad twist on a loose rock while running from Gristleburst’s explosions had done in her ankle.

But, strictly speaking, she wasn’t dead.

“Still alive,” Eleukas wheezed, pushing himself up from the ground. Dust caked his face and paled his curly black hair, but his wounds were already cutting wet streaks through it. “What about Gristleburst?”

“He’s still alive too,” Wendlyn said, grimly. “I thought I’d give him a chance to explain why he led us down this way before I strangled him.”

The little goblin had trotted well ahead of them, toward the light that glowed faint and white in the deeper depths, but he came back at the sound of their voices. “Foul ones wanted to run this way,” he explained, unperturbed by Wendlyn’s threat. “Must be a reason. Treasure, or safety. Best way to go.”

“You’d better be right, since you’ve collapsed all the other options behind us.” Wendlyn winced, bracing a hand against her hip as she straightened. “‘Safety’ for the foul ones might mean the opposite for us, so I think now’s the time to use those potions Worliwynn gave us. If none of them got smashed in the fighting, we should have five. That’s one for each of the three of us—Gristleburst’s the only one who didn’t get hurt by the Fangsparks, so he doesn’t need one—and two in reserve. Any objections?”

No one voiced any. Lisavet drank her potion gratefully. It tasted of mint and cool spring water, and it washed the weariness from her mind as surely as it soothed the wounds of her body. The blinding pain in her ankle dulled, then vanished. The agony in her arm loosened its red-clenched teeth. She exhaled, only then realizing how much tension she’d been holding in.

“That’s better,” Eleukas sighed, stuffing his own empty bottle back into his pack. He rolled his shoulders, putting his axe away and bringing his long knife out again. “I’m ready.”

Wendlyn tightened her ponytail and took the lead. She moved with catlike ease, somehow melting into the tunnel’s shadows even though there was nothing but bare. rough earth to hide her.

Lisavet clasped her holy symbol to renew Sarenrae’s light as she followed. She didn’t really need the spell to see, but the cold white glow ahead had a sinister cast, and she felt better with her goddess’s radiance around her.

Eleukas must have felt the same way, because he fell in close beside her, his jaw tense and eyes darting. “I don’t like this tunnel,” he muttered. “Feels wrong. Like the faceless thing in the woods, or the letters on those stone tablets the Fangsparks were digging up. There’s something in the air here, and it’s smart and it’s evil.”

“I know,” Lisavet said. “I feel it too.”

“Then why’s the goblin leading us down this way?”

“He told us why. This was where the foul ones wanted to go.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s where we should want to go.” Eleukas’s jaw knotted even tighter, and his hand flexed around the hilt of his knife. “And now we’ve got no choice. We’re trapped. That’s convenient.”

“You sound paranoid.” Lisavet tried to make it sound like a joke, but she was genuinely worried. Eleukas did sound paranoid. Worse, she could feel the same impulse toward suspicion creeping through her own mind, as if someone were whispering terrible thoughts over her shoulder. Poisonous doubts about her companions filtered through her mind, and though she didn’t think they were her own, she felt them all the same.

“I think,” she said, carefully, “that the wrongness in this place is trying to turn us against each other. I don’t think Gristleburst is going to betray us, Eleukas. But I do think the foul ones, or whatever power they serve, want us to believe that. And I think there’s a perverse magic in this place that’s pushing us to think it.”

“Maybe.” Eleukas shook his head as if trying to dislodge a persistent gnat. “Could be. But then—what do we do?”

“Just… try to recognize that influence, so that we can counter it in our own minds.” Lisavet realized how feeble that sounded, even as she said it, but she also knew it was true. “We have to trust each other. We’re all we have here.”

Eleukas nodded, and they went on, tense but together.

The pallid white light at the tunnel’s end grew closer, but no brighter. It was a chilly and withdrawn light, diffuse and shadowless, as if it refused to betray its source by offering any direction. There was nothing natural about it, and Lisavet’s trepidation grew with every step.

Wendlyn crept back to them, her voice low. “Well, I know who the foul ones serve. And I know why they wanted to come down this way. Best you see this for yourselves.”

There was no door or lantern at the tunnel’s end, only a hanging curtain of tanned human and kobold arms strung with shards of smoked glass and dirty, knotted cloth. Hazy white light, like winter sun filtered through cloudy glass, spilled through the curtain.

“It isn’t trapped,” Wendlyn told them as she ducked through the grisly hanging, “but it is unpleasant.”

When Lisavet followed her through, she found out what her sister meant. The dead hands animated as she passed beneath the curtain, wriggling through her hair and caressing her scalp with hideously soft, wilted fingers. They rubbed over her eyelids and curled bonelessly across her cheeks, and she had the skin-crawling sense that they were trying to grope through her secrets and memories even as they slid over her flesh.

She came through shuddering, her teeth gritted in revulsion. “Norgorber.” It all made sense now. The god of murderers and malign secrets, of plotters and poisoners—that was who had spun this conspiracy beneath Otari.

“Norgorber,” Wendlyn echoed in agreement, as the others pushed through the macabre curtain to join them. “Look at the rest of this.”

They stood in a four-sided cavern, large enough to hold a dozen people comfortably and illumined by a cool, sourceless white light that floated in the air like mist. Each wall had been dug out into a large alcove, and each alcove held a shrine to one of Norgorber’s four aspects.

Blackfingers, the poisoners’ patron, had a shrine of bones and pickled scorpions in smoked glass bottles. Papery-skinned bulbs and gnarled roots dangled alongside spiders’ husks and tiny vials of alchemical compounds. Half-hidden behind this dense, obscuring display was Norgorber’s faceless mask, its single eye a fragile bubble of venom-filled glass.

The next alcove was comparatively bare, holding only tattered rags of gray and black cloth stitched into a monochrome mosaic that suggested, but did not show, the same one-eyed mask, this time rendered with the sinister subtlety of the Gray Master, patron of profiting from others’ losses.

Third was a gruesome patchwork of tanned skins, mostly human, along with a few scaled kobold hides and greenish goblin leathers. Each piece bore some identifying scar, whether cut from the victim’s body or imposed by the harvester’s weapons or technique, as if each piece was meant to be a signed work of art. These, too, were worked into the contours of a face, but this one was more contorted and nightmarish than the last. A grasping hand, each finger made from the blade of a straight razor, reached out from the alcove toward the viewer.

It was a layered nightmare, and Lisavet shuddered as she looked away. Father Skinsaw, who inspired serial killers and murderous raveners, was the most grotesque and violent of Norgorber’s aspects. She was glad to move away from his alcove.

The last shrine held a gleaming pattern of gray and black tiles laid in a harlequin pattern. At the center was another half-hidden mask of Norgorber, this one with an inky spiral laid into the tiles covering its mouth. That was for the Reaper of Reputation, gatherer of secrets and forbidden lore.

In the center of the room, equidistant from the four shrines, stood a dressmaker’s mannequin upholstered in another patchwork of macabre leathers, its face a welter of scars with a single gray glass eye. The mannequin wore a hooded cloak of frayed cloth stitched into a diamond pattern with alternating sections of human skin. The garment’s arms ended in long, clawed gloves, each finger tipped with a black-stained straight razor. A spiral of black velvet covered the lower half of the hood, and the fabric was stiff with what Lisavet guessed might be dried blood, or maybe some alchemical concoction, or both.

“What is that?” Eleukas asked, aghast.

“Something unholy,” Lisavet breathed. She could feel the malign power emanating from the garment like heat radiating from a sunbaked stone. “Something that calls upon all four of Norgorber’s aspects and binds them together into… into…” She faltered, unsure.

“Into something we probably don’t want to touch,” Wendlyn finished for her. “Come on. There’s one more thing I found in here that you’ll want to see.”

“Is it the way out?” Eleukas asked hopefully. Lisavet blinked, belatedly realizing that she hadn’t seen an exit from the alcoved room.

“Maybe.” After tugging on a glove, Wendlyn carefully grasped the razored hand in Father Skinsaw’s shrine, giving it a friendly handshake, and then pulled it to the side. The tiled floor in the Reaper of Reputation’s shrine slid away, revealing a secret passage that led down into the earth. “It’s the only way forward, anyhow.”

“Then we go,” Gristleburst said.

“Then we go,” Wendlyn agreed, dropping into the new passage.

The minutes trickled by in a slow eternity while she was gone. No one spoke. Lisavet struggled not to look at the shrines around her, but even if she refused to see them, she could feel their malevolence pressing in from all sides.

Then, at last, blessedly, Wendlyn called up: “You can come down. It’s safe. Well, safe enough.” There was a pause, and then she added, “I found the stolen books. And maybe the reason they were stolen. You’d better get down here. Quickly.”