Letter 27: Hunting Keesha, While Keesha Hunts Us

General Summary

Dear Mother,
Again I write to you, knowing you are imprisoned. When might you see this letter? Will you ever? Why do I wait? How did I let Alyona convince me to kill Keesha instead of rescue you?
Do I even need the team to rescue you?
I thought I did.
Their world is so different from ours, their people so...
They are not People.
But you are not in their world. You are in my world.
You are home.
I do not need help in that world.
And if I do, I have allies now.
I am...mother...I just...
When I got back to our base Alyona had discovered a way to cure our lycanthropy, so she did. I no longer have that disease. That lingering issue resolved, we decided to try and find Keesha. But how?
Alyona had an excellent idea: try and locate her ring. Keesha has the ring and is likely wearing it, so finding the ring finds Keesha. When she explained this to Vessyr she seemed to look at me…in a weird way. I’m not sure why, but she seemed…I don’t know. She looked at me funny.
But the finding didn’t work.
We could not find the ring.
Perhaps GG might have some idea how to find her? Or how we might find her? We headed to his office.
As we approached we saw a large crowd of Light Keepers around, and they all turned to watch us. We slowed down as we approached…except for Alyona and her grandfather. So I followed right behind.
Three Light Keepers blocked the entrance, and we stopped. They were extremely tense. Would absolutely not let us in. We tried to figure out what was going on, but they told us it was an active crime scene.
An active crime scene!
We asked if GG was okay.
“Yes.”
But they would not let us see him.
They wouldn’t even tell us what had happened until Alyona began to get aggressive.
GG’s boss, Silaar, had been murdered.
We stopped.
Offered our services.
They said the best thing we could do would be to retire to our apartments and wait for them to contact us. So we retired.
They followed us, to be sure.
When we got there I looked around and found the oddest thing. It took a minute to realize that it was even something of interest. I saw, but moved past, paused, and came back. On the bathroom mirror was the faint hint of lipstick, as if somebody had kissed it.
As I stared I could see, in my peripheral vision, Ingoria watching me. But the kiss, it was…
“Alyona. Alyona! You should probably come see this.”
She had been sending to GG, which I interrupted. She finished her sending, then walked over.
I pointed to the kiss, and as she leaned in to see it she froze. Her face went flat, and seemed to change color; it became even more pale. She rose a hand, as if to touch the kiss, then clenched it.
The response from GG broke her reverie. He was surprised that Silaar was dead, was arrested for the murder, but wasn’t sure he was innocent. It made no sense.
But what was clear was that we were compromised. Baermak wanted to leave immediately. He was convinced that Keesha had orchestrated the murder and framed GG in order to remove our key ally, then left her calling card so that we knew she had done it.
Which meant that they had access to our apartments.
And they knew that we were in them.
They knew we would return to them.
They knew we were here.
Baermak insisted we leave. Immediately.
He was right. Absolutely right.
We left.
We were shadowed by Light Keepers all the way to the docks.
Our best destination was Bloodwater. Vessyr had smuggling contacts there, so would find us a safehouse. We found a warehouse that would suffice till Vessyr found something better. Ingoria looked around for thief’s markings, which I have also learned to recognize! We found some, which was really neat!
It’s like a secret language of markings that people leave, so you know where to stay, where to find good … it tells you how to conduct your business. If that’s what you do.
I don’t do that, but it helps to know what’s going on. I learned to recognize them from Ingoria. Anyway, all of the signs are from the Unseen. Meaning Keesha. Keesha controls this area.
Vessyr went to find his contacts, and I flew above to keep an eye on him. It felt so good! I was worried that we would be stuck in hiding, sneaking about, but no!
I did see people paying attention to Vessyr, but only as somebody new, interesting. Not as somebody to pay attention to. He disappeared into a bar and I loitered above, keeping watch.
He stayed for a while, then finally left.
Even as he returned to the hideout, I stayed above.
Which turned out to be a good thing! There was a group of people gathered around a man who seemed to be riling them up. He stood on a cart. Not shouting, but certainly with a raised voice. I worried that they might be a threat, so I got closer. To listen.
And it was not a threat; just some guy trying to convince them of his religion. I swept back up into the sky.
As I felt the wind through my feathers the group left the warehouse hideout, I assumed towards our new safe spot. I stayed above them, keeping watch.
That’s when the crossbow bolt hit Vessyr. He stumbled, missing a step, and began to look around ...as the second bolt hit him. Somebody shot at Baermak, but didn’t seem to do much damage. Somebody else shot at Alyona; all of this seemed to happen simultaneously. Baermak quickly stepped closer to her, putting his shield in front of her and deflecting a bolt. The second bolt flew wide, the shooter probably startled by Baermak’s swift movements.
Boris jumped up, putting itself between Vessyr and the assassin who ran at him from the building. The assassin attacked four (four!) times, but missed all.
Vessyr is so very, very old that it defies easy comprehension. I often cannot quite imagine being that old. But somehow he can still move fast enough to evade attacks.
Another assassin ran in from behind, pushing Baermak into the water and smacking Alyona, who stood stone still.
The first assassin, the one with the crossbow, appeared quite suddenly behind Ingoria, stabbing her. Then they were all enveloped in an aura of darkness. It was like somebody had set a giant black bowl upside-down on them, completely obscuring everybody.
Vessyr stepped out of the darkness, cast a spell on two of the assassins, freezing them in their tracks, then stepped back into the darkness. He began singing! A very interesting song, clearly martial. The assassin to the North, in a window, as well as the assassin to the West, behind some barrels, were both frozen. The other three, who had closed with our group, were with them inside the darkness.
Baermak’s echo appeared below me, but not Baermak.
I concentrated on the assassin behind the barrels, because from my position the barrels provided no cover. I hit him twice. Of course.
But he didn’t fall.
I could hear combat within the darkness, but could not remotely tell what was going on. Boris appeared from the darkness, standing guard to the North. A body hit the ground, but I could not tell who. I could only hear the telltale soft thump of a big weight hitting the ground, a weapon clattering.
Baermak appeared in place of his echo and ran to close on the assassin I had savaged. Ingoria had scored a nice magical whip for him while I was on my mission to check on the portal, and he used that to rip into the assassin. I followed with an arrow through his neck.
I switched my focus to the one in the window and shot him–but he caught the arrow and threw it back at me! Like Alyonna’s old trick!
He missed, but he jumped from the window, ran toward me, disappeared in a puff of smoke, reappeared behind me, and stabbed me. He missed his next attack, but there was something on his blade…the wound burned, it was distracting.
Before I turned to face him I saw both Vessyr and Alyona run from the darkness. But not Ingoria.
Was she on the ground?
I was beginning to think that the other assassins might remain inside the darkness, hopefully due to a lack of well-being, when one of them charged out and began punching me. Being to the South of the darkness, I could hear but not see combat to the North, on the other side. I could hear Boris’ mechanisms, Vessyr’s exertions, and Baermak’s whip, but could not really tell what was happening. All that I knew was that I was alone, surrounded, and badly hurt. I needed to get to the other side of this darkness and the protection of my friends.
So I did. I leaped into the air, just high enough to fly above anybody standing inside the darkness (because I cannot see anything inside), and flew to the other side, next to Boris. Boris, Vessyr, and Baermak were crowded around one of the assassins, just thrashing him.
Then the darkness disappeared and the other assassin reappeared behind me. That’s all I remember.
I woke up with Vessyr standing above me. He sprinted away shouting “One to the North, one to the South! North is held!”
The one to the North was on the other side of a warehouse, so I couldn’t see him, but I assumed he would be in range if I could. Otherwise Vessyr wouldn’t have mentioned him. Leaping into the air as I got back to my feet I quickly flew around the warehouse. And indeed saw him.
He was the assassin who had stabbed me. Twice. Felling me with the second.
Standing as still as a statue in the moonlight.
I shot him.
Twice.
He did nothing, because he was held.
I heard the scraping of Ingoria’s claws on the wood of the dock, chasing the other one down, and I heard a body hit the planks.
I knew it was the assassin, as I then heard Ingoria’s claws again as she ran back somewhere else. I couldn’t look, as I was completely focused on the assassin in front of me, in case he broke free of his hold and ran.
Turned out I didn’t need to. Alyona cast a spell on him and he seized up, closing his eyes tightly, then relaxed and fell to the ground.
Ingoria had not killed her quarry, instead simply incapacitating him. We bound and hooded (so he couldn’t teleport) the assassin and headed with haste to the safe house. There we rested for about an hour, regaining our wits. We were fairly sure nobody had seen us.
Then we began our interrogation. As usual, that means Alyonna began our interrogation. But it didn’t start nearly how I thought it would: she convinced him that she was his friend! We had, after all, spared him while slaughtering all of his actual friends.
He happily told her that he and his friends had been sent by Keesha to capture Alyona and Vessyr (killing the rest of us if necessary). Keesha had apparently been talking about Alyona and her desire to kill Alyona. Again.
So Keesha had killed Alyona. Very interesting.
This kind of interrogation was better than her previous style.
She asked what the plan was after she and her grandfather were captured (and our bodies were thrown in the lake), and he gleefully told her about the boat waiting for them. To take them to their secret base!
And he described the location of the secret base!
This kind of interrogation was far better than her previous style.
He said there was no secret way to get in to the secret base, and that it was guarded very well, with ballistas easily putting holes in any ship that approached.
Alyonna then asked if Keesha often wore a very nice ring…and he said yes, she did. She wore the ring!
(The secret base is far outside of the city, which is why Vessyr didn’t find it with his spell.)
Baermak asked how they had found us. The guy was very proud of their method! Their mole in the Light Keepers (and we have his name now: Isidore) had seen us arrive and alerted them. Then they had planted a special coin on Vessyr, located the coin (as we were doing with the ring) and set up the ambush. It was honestly pretty good. Vessyr checked, and sure enough he had a random coin in a random pocket.
We immediately put it in the bag. The secret spaces in that bag are extra-dimensional, so a location spell would not work to find it.
Alyona asked him about GG and the assassination, which somehow snapped him out of his friendship reverie. He stopped answering questions. Vessyr then took over, but his extensive torture yielded nothing more.
When Vessyr was done, spent, Alyona came over and whispered to the man. I could not (nor did I want to) hear their conversation, but Alyona was sweet and dripping with treacle, the man spat venom with every syllable.
Alyona killed him. She did something that...she did a dark thing. She made him rapidly decompose. His corpse just decayed right before us, dessicating, collapsing in on itself, falling apart, disarticulating, becoming dust.
She turned him into dust.
What to do now?
We didn't know how to find Keesha. But Keesha knows how to find us. We know where she is, but we can't get in. She has the cards. Are we wasting our time? Am I wasting my time?
Should I be home?
Should I come for you, mother?
I think I should.

Report Date

20 Oct 2023