by IGMS
Cayce
Dear Mom and Dad,
Sorry about that gnomish amulet; you must have had kittens when you realized it wasn't working anymore, and it's been a while since my last letter. No need to worry, though; I'm out of Wayyir and into a civilized land, with both mail service and an abundant supply of paper, and while the royal bodyguards did cut the amulet out of my hip, they brought a priest to heal me afterward. We're not only being well taken care of, we're being pampered, and let me tell you, it is so very nice after everything we've been through. Contrary to what you told me during those less-than-adequate geography lessons, Dad, Ahuatepec is not actually a bad place.
It's changed since you chased Fellshadow's mist-assassin here. They tell me there was a palace coup about ten years ago, and the priests don't run the show anymore. The new queen is very nice, and they get so few visitors from outside that we're being treated as if we were royal ambassadors. It's kind of like being on vacation, except for the hummingbird-sized mosquitoes.
I seem to be the only person who's not sure what to do with my vacation, either. Urgoth's trying to eat his body weight at least once a day -- which is not as much as you might think; we've been on short rations for way too long now, and I don't blame him for making up the difference while he can. Bjartald is alternating between sleeping and sampling the local corn beer with a couple of fellow priests. Shariel, who appears to have misunderstood the concept of "relaxation," is attempting to pack five years' worth of magical education into her head, courtesy of this smoking young sorceress who's figured out that arcana's the quickest route to Shariel's affections -- if she can get her to put the books down for ten minutes. Maggie . . . best not to talk about how Maggie's been keeping herself amused.
Hopefully this convinces you that, despite me being in Ahuatepec, I'm not in dire peril, at least not at the moment. With that out of the way, then, let me get back to the dimensional storm.
I can't remember where you guys ended up after Asterrhion, but it seems that for once we were luckier than you. Call the residents of Dibirvedne barbarians if you like -- which they are; raw reindeer meat, ugh -- but their shamans know all about dealing with astral creatures. They were a bit surprised when we showed up out of nowhere, but it only took them about three days to figure out how to reverse the storm's effects and convert our bodies back into something physical. (Though Bjartald complains that he still doesn't feel entirely solid.) We therefore got to skip the stage where everyone goes batshit crazy -- except maybe Maggie, but really, with her, who can tell?
I won't bother writing up what happened after that, since Jass presumably passed along a summary after we showed up at his thieves' guild in Les Leyasulas. (The ice giant was pretty cool, though. Even if it was kind of a piddling giant, compared to the one you killed outside Irix Fellshadow's glacier-citadel.) Jass did give me the requested earful from you two about the lack of letters -- but hey, how was I supposed to know Shariel's messages home were expurgated to the point of uselessness? I thought Liraiel was telling you everything. (Don't listen to a word Jass said about what we went on during our visit, though. I ask you, who's the bigger idiot: the supposedly responsible elder brother who left the watch commander in the town square wearing nothing but a few parrot feathers and impersonating a chicken, or his sister who is totally not at fault for some random were-rat thief falling in love with her?)
Anyway, in Les Leyasulas we decided it was time to start acting like grown-up adventurers. You and Helga and Martin and Liraiel gave us epic tomes full of advice on how to start our adventuring careers, but we were kind of past our bandit-and-goblin days. And we were tired of being flung all over the map for no reason other than a frantic attempt not to die. (Though I finally understand your favorite proverb, Dad, about how real rangers don't bother with maps. It isn't because we have flawless direction sense; it's because you never end up where you planned to go.) We wanted a mission, and found what sounded like a good one: some kind of warlord troubling the dwarves in the Cwrelyn Isles. It was a chance to save something other than our own hides for once, so off we went.
Remember back in my first letter, when I told you the whole people-dying thing wasn't Bjartald's fault? Please keep that in mind through the next bit.
When we got to the islands, we came across a name I think will be familiar to you. Does Saskarezoen ring a bell? Yeah. Whatever you guys did to banish him after you killed Fellshadow, it didn't stick, and he's found a new follower. Or should I say, lots of followers. About two thousand when we landed on Cwrele Syg, and more by now. Which, if we were smart, would have meant we ran the other way, even if we had to walk on water to do it. But Bjartald rescued this dwarf-girl right after we got there, and she begged him to rescue her father, who'd been kidnapped by Saskarezoen's chief minion -- that warlord Jass told us about -- who was trying to use him to force all the dwarves to convert. They didn't like the idea of worshipping a demon (can't imagine why), so we ended up in the middle of a war, and those are hard to walk away from. Especially since you didn't raise me to let my friends go splat the first time they do something dumb -- or the second time, or the seventeenth.
But we actually had a plan; I swear we did. Maybe the dwarves liked the idea of pitting three hundred of themselves against two thousand crazed demon-worshippers, but I'd prefer not to go out in a blaze of glory when I'm nineteen -- or, more likely, wake up in the temple back home with you two sighing and forking over vast amounts of gold to Father Feordin. It's embarrassing, not to mention painful. Plus my brothers would laugh themselves sick. So we decided to strike a deal with
MOM DAD AMULET RETRIEVED SEND LOCKPICKS OR DIMENSIONAL PORTAL ASAP ALSO HOW DO YOU UNPETRIFY A DWARF
Dear Mom and Dad,
You're lifesavers -- almost as much as if you had resurrected us. From Bjartald's point of view, being turned to stone is as good as being dead, even if it's cheaper to fix. Also, we got out of the dungeon just in time to snatch Shariel away from the queen of Ahuatepec, so you get credit for the assist on that one. We're still not entirely sure if the plan was to sacrifice Shariel or to turn her into a man and then marry her to the queen -- Urgoth thinks they were going to kill her so she could be a vessel for the dead guy the queen wanted to marry, and then turn her body male, but Shariel starts gibbering any time we ask, and really, it doesn't matter, because we're fleeing Ahuatepec just as fast as we can go. But Six Flower, the sorceress helping us flee, promises she'll get this letter to you. Apparently she also sent along my earlier attempt, the one that petered out mid-sentence when the drugs they'd slipped into my corn beer kicked in. I don't know if that got to you before or after me yowling for help -- which Maggie gets the credit for, although where exactly she kept that wind-whisper charm I don't want to know, since the guards stripped us all before throwing us in the dungeon. Either way, the lockpicks and de-petrification ointment were exactly what we needed, so THANK YOU.
That whole "fleeing" thing means I don't have much time to write -- I'm scribbling this while huddled inside a hollow tree, hiding from the seriously giant eagles they have in this part of the world -- so I'll just get to the point. I'm leaving Ahuatepec, and headed to worse places, because of that damned business back in the Cwrelyn Isles. The rest of what happened between there and Wayyir would take too long to tell, so I'm just going to hit the key points:
1) It wasn't Bjartald's fault, it was Helga's, for telling her favorite story so damned often -- the one where she killed the wyvern by hammering out a pillar so the ceiling fell in on it.
2) It's doubly Helga's fault for not giving Bjartald enough architecture lessons for him to know which pillar to hit to kill Saskarezoen, instead of everybody else.
3) You guys, however, get hugs and kisses for telling me to make friends with any wandering monk of Osmaitlik I came across. Having buddies in the order helps a lot when it comes time to resurrect four-fifths of your adventuring party.
4) Get one of your crazy gnome friends to invent a convenient way of hauling around four
corpses while trying to contact the Osmaitliks. Also a way to keep them from stinking.
5) I'm trying to invent more key points because I don't want to tell you the last one. Ever since I started writing that first letter I've been looking forward to yelling at you, but now that I finally get my chance I don't want to put the words down on the page. You have to promise me you won't teleport after us, and you won't let Helga do it either, or Liraiel, or Martin, or anybody else, because if you do I won't just be dead, I'll be the kind of dead you don't come back from even if your parents have saved a lock of your hair and enough gold to pay Father Feordin, the kind of dead that doesn't lead to fun stories over beers when you're retired and hanging out with your pals down at the tavern, the kind of dead that even an epic quest to the heavenly dimensions or selling your true name to a forgotten god might not save your daughter from. I mean it. Stay away. We'll fix this on our own.
6) Having said that: YOU DIDN'T KILL IRIX FELLSHADOW DEAD ENOUGH.
Everybody else got flattened to paste in that temple on Cwrele Syg. I? Got my soul stolen. We're heading south from Ahuatepec into Sheshab (which is not quite a completely uninhabited wasteland since Fellshadow came back from the dead, bound Saskarezoen into his service, and made it build a city there for his new followers) because the demon told me to come fetch my soul if I could. Which is obviously a trap. I'm not dumb enough to miss that. But what else can I do? Fellshadow knows who we are, and he definitely remembers how you guys killed him, and if you show up he won't give you a second crack at finishing him off. He'll obliterate my soul and vanish, and then he'll hunt Shariel and Bjartald and Urgoth down one by one and do the same thing to them, and maybe Maggie too just for the fun of it, and I don't want to see who's quicker on the draw, you or him.
It's all okay, though. Yeah, we're walking straight into the bad guy's lair, and yeah, he knows we're coming, and yeah, I'm pretty sure he's a match even for you guys (at least in your mildly paunchy retired state -- don't glare at me, Dad, it's true), which means we don't stand a chance.
But don't worry. We Have a Plan.
Totally not going to die,
Cayce
Dear Mom and Dad,
Greetings from sunny Shadyvale! By now you'll have heard whatever mangled version of the story Shariel gave her mother via the mirror-chat they had, so let me clear up a few things. To begin with: yes, the Plan did in fact involve dressing Urgoth in drag.
No, this wasn't Maggie's idea of a joke. Urgoth swears blind it's some incredibly sacred orcish tradition; you'll have to get independent confirmation of that. It got him past Fellshadow's sentries, though, because they were looking for a big guy trying his best to look human, not an orc woman come to join the Wacky Cult o' Demon-Worshipping Fun. As for the eagle, that was my idea, even if Shariel's the one who seduced Six Flower into teaching her the spell for controlling them. But I am not to be blamed for the whole "death from above" part of the Plan, and whatever Bjartald claims, him breaking his fall on the weird sculpture in the courtyard was pure blind luck. We didn't even know until later it was the framework for a spell Fellshadow was perfecting, that let him drain souls to fuel his own power. I hear Liraiel aged a century when Shariel told her that: apparently one of the first things they teach you in Wizarding 101 is never to dispel a major enchantment by smashing it with a free-falling dwarf.
Which is a warning I generally endorse. Having a score of shrieking souls suddenly whizzing around the courtyard, playing slalom with random bolts of arcane lightning, isn't a situation most sane people want to be in. But chaos is a great way to level the playing field, and it took us from "almost certain doom" to "fifty-fifty chance whether you live or die," and we won the coin toss. Urgoth had found the statue Fellshadow bound Saskarezoen to, and I managed to knock it down a staircase (even if I did dislocate my shoulder in the process), which according to Wizarding 102 is the recommended way of freeing a demon. Then it was all up to Maggie and her incredibly fast-talking silver tongue. (You always make getting a demon to drag its master off to hell sound as easy as picking off goblin villages, but -- well, okay, given our experience with goblin villages, maybe the two are comparable, just not in the way I thought.)
And yes, we got my soul back. Fellshadow had been waiting on feeding it to his spell-machine until I got there: the benefit of having a sadistic enemy. Though I must say, his taste in jewelry was atrocious. The ring he stuck my soul in is one of the tackiest things I've seen in my life.
So we're back in Shadyvale now, enjoying a well-earned rest while Maggie tells a version of our adventures that bears only a passing resemblance to the truth. Did you know she single-handedly slew a slate dragon back in our brief mountain interlude? Or that she's now personal friends with the Premier Satrap of Lunggar? I sure didn't.
But the vacation won't last long. For one thing, we need to find a priest who can get my soul out of this travesty of a ring and back into my body. For another, it turns out that you have to be a lot closer friends with the monks of Osmaitlik than I am to get four resurrections for free, so we're in debt up to our eyeballs, and sadly, there wasn't much loot to be had in Sheshab. In fact, we've seen a terrible lack of shiny things in general, and those few we've had, we've mostly spent and/or lost. Were you always this poor when you were adventuring? I'm beginning to suspect you retired after Fellshadow because you had pots of money to your name, and wanted to quit before some resurrection fee or dimensional fluctuation or pocket-picking leprechaun made it all vanish again.
(I don't suppose you could spare a bit out of one of those pots of money to pay off the monks? No, I can hear Mom now: "If you're enough of a Mighty Adventurer to go to Lunggar even after your father told you not to, you're mighty enough to pay your own bills." I guess I'd better start calculating the hoard-to-effort ratio of the nearest dragon.)
But mainly we need to start preparing for a little trip. You see, Saskarezoen had a price for prying the ring off Fellshadow's finger before dragging him down to hell. Prior to our attack on the fortress, it seems the demon formed a bit of an attachment to Sexy Lady Urgoth.
He's engaged to be married at the end of the year, and we're all in the wedding party.
So we're off to hell in a little bit, where we'll have to figure out some way to jilt a demon without getting ourselves killed. It's possible Fellshadow's soul will be there, too, and that bastard isn't dead enough for my peace of mind.
Wish me luck. I'll send you Fellshadow's head when we're done -- or wedding pictures, depending on how things go.
Still miffed about the ugly ring,
Cayce
We Who Steal Faces
by Tony Pi
Artwork by Jin Han
January 4, 1588
Mafeo Premarin, my eyes and ears in the shadows of Venice, was dying of poison.
I knelt by Mafeo's bedside and took his trembling hand. His flesh felt cold, patches of red mottled his skin. He tried to speak but fell into a fit of coughs instead. I looked for blood in the sputum on his beard. None yet, a small relief.
The assassin had left a trail of bodies: intelligencers in Amsterdam, Paris, and Lisbon. They were good men, all, loyal to England. Whoever killed them was blinding us to the intrigues abroad. In these times when Spain sought to overthrow Elizabeth's reign, we needed the vigilance of every spy. I refused to let the killer take any more of my operatives, least of all my top man.
"Who did this to you, old friend?"
The point of a stiletto grazed the side of my throat.
"The poison's robbed him of his voice," Luca said in his father's stead. "If you are Flea, you know how to earn my trust. Show me his face."
His caution was wise. In these times of looming war, spies like us had to take every precaution to know friend from foe.
"I'll need that mirror in the restello frame."
Luca allowed me to stand. I took the mirror and slid open a secret compartment along its top. Inside lay the handkerchief Mafeo had hidden there when I first taught him h
ow to thieve. I felt the prickle of Lightning magic dancing within the silk threads. Mafeo, last to touch the kerchief decades ago, had left an impression of his younger self trapped in the silk like a fly in a spider's web.
I willed the Lightning to enter my flesh, letting the magic shape my body into the exact image of my apprentice as he had been in his prime. My brawny physique thinned and shortened, and my skin darkened to a sun-bronze. Pain blossomed in my left hand. Teethmarks from a mastiff's bite, still scabbing over, reminded me of our first burglary together as master and pupil.
Luca gasped at my transformation, but Mafeo managed a faint smile.
"Proof enough?" I asked with Mafeo's voice as it had been.
Luca sheathed his stiletto. "Forgive me, Master Flea. I had to be sure. Father prepared me for this moment with many tales of your magic, but I never believed him till now!"
"Tell me what happened."
"Two days ago, at the height of Carnivale, Father met with a Spaniard who claimed to know Álvaro de Bazán's plans for the Armada. I waited for him in a gondola, watching the costumed revelers go by. On his way back, a man in a white Volto mask pushed past him. In the space of a few steps Father had stumbled to the ground in a seizure. The masked man was long gone by the time Father's fits had calmed." He pulled up his father's sleeve and showed me a sickly red scratch.
I had seen poisonings like this before, administered by a needle hidden in a ring. "What of the Spaniard?"
Luca sighed. "I don't know how to find him. He would only meet with Father."
Mafeo wheezed, his breath stinking of rotten eggs.
"Rest, Mafeo. Your only task is to live." I held a cup of water to his lips. "I will find the antidote."
Mafeo closed his eyes.
"Come, let my sister tend to him," Luca whispered.
I hooded myself and donned my Harlequin mask as we left. Luca called to his sister and whispered instructions in her ear. Thereafter, we descended the stairs to the water door. I still wore Mafeo's face, and would for the remainder of the evening.