The Second Seal
Morning at Pell's house: bread, the scrape of a chair, a runner at the kitchen door. The long wait is about to end, one way or another.
Round 174. On the seventh day a runner brought a packet to the kitchen door. Pell checked the House cord before she broke it, and found two seals on the page inside. She read it once in silence and set it where Nib, Kestrel and Mara could see. "Granted. The second seal. The certificate and the sworn account are accepted into House keeping together. Two wardens, not known at that counter, are assigned to follow the evidence. Your witnesses remain under our protection." Her finger stayed on the last paragraph. "That is an inquiry, not a verdict. They have not promised a conviction or named the hand above the proctor. But the file is no longer waiting for someone to take responsibility for it. My superior has signed." The wait was over, and Bria's safety no longer depended on the company beside her bed. The House had not answered the question that brought them out of the Mortuary: who they had been, and what had happened to them. Outside, a cart stopped rumbling and the talk at the next stall died. Heavy boots took its place.
The Harmonium
Round 175. Three officers in red plate stood in the street, their hooked polearms clinking, a gold tooth catching the light in the leader's mouth. He called to the house: the Mortuary escapees were under arrest for crimes against the order of the multiverse, and should disarm and go with him without trouble, the easy way or the hard. Nib stepped to the common-room window with his hands open and empty, and answered from inside. "Good morning. I am Nib Quillgear, and I would like to do this the easy way. I only ask which law, and under whose writ. We woke on slabs in a mortuary with nothing but pieces of ourselves; if there is a charge, I would like to hear it read plainly, and to know whether the House of Mother Pell, which has this morning sealed a file on our behalf, may speak first." Then, lower, to Pell: "Mother Pell, does the House's protection reach the street, or only its door?"
The officer said his orders came from the Fraternity of Order, and that they were to bring the party to answer to the city's high courts. He produced no writ and named no law, and repeated the accusation instead. Pell answered Nib quietly, so that it stayed in the room. The second seal protected the evidence and the witnesses in House keeping, she said, but it was not immunity from the city's courts, and the house was no boundary the Harmonium could not cross. "I won't promise you a protection I don't possess." To the window she added that the party had brought living witnesses out of harm and given the House their evidence, and that account belonged with any charge. "Bring your account to the court," the officer said.
Round 176. Kestrel stood beside Nib at the window with her sword sheathed and her shield lowered, not raised and not laid down, and said that she would answer a charge read plainly, under a law named, in writing, and that Mother Pell's sealed account would go with her to the court, but that she would not give up her sword on his say-so. At the word "oath" his jaw tightened. "Then tell the court about your oath. I don't judge the charge. I bring you in. And I am not escorting armed prisoners on their own conditions." He gave no writ and accepted no condition. He turned to his companions and said, "The door. Alive." One officer left his place in the street and came toward the front step, his polearm across his body.
Pell folded the second-sealed page into its cover and put it in Kestrel's hand. "The account can travel with you. My copy stays here. Whatever happens at this door, it does not take the witnesses out of House keeping." Kestrel would not draw steel in that house, with Bria asleep in the common room, and said so. Mara had already eased the kitchen door open a hand's breadth on a narrow lane with a rain channel down its middle and breakfast smoke above the roofs, a handcart at the end under an archway into a busier street, and no red armor in sight. (No roll was needed for what could simply be seen.) Nib, who had said he would not strike a city officer and would not leave Pell's house a worse place than he found it, cast Mage Armor in the kitchen doorway, using a second-level slot. (Mage Armor, base AC 13 + Dex: AC 14.) "Neither door is good," he told the others. "If we go out, we go out together and slowly. If we use the back way, we use it together and quietly. Say which, and I follow. I will not choose it for either of you."
Round 177. Kestrel chose the back way, and the others went with her. At the kitchen exit Nib turned to Pell and asked for his spellbook, since the seal had answered and the condition on it had run its course, promising to leave the corded packet with her. "Yes," said Pell, and put the cloth-wrapped book into his hands. "Your book goes with you. The corded packet stays with me, unopened. Those are different things." From the front came a hard knock and a shout of "Open. Harmonium." Pell did not call anyone back. Mara slipped into the lane first, Kestrel followed with the sealed account, and Nib came close behind her, quiet, his hands empty. Mara's call back to Ashen got no answer. At the archway the cross street was ordinary, a baker unloading trays and porters passing, and no pursuit behind them. In the recessed doorway beside the arch stood an elf with a shock of white curls, skin the grey of old ash, and a plum-colored mark across one cheek. "Farrow," they said. "And you are about to be a very popular description." They opened the door behind them on a flour-dusted bakehouse passage. At the far end of the street a whistle sounded, and boots followed it around a corner.
The Bakehouse
Round 178. Kestrel went in first and took a place beside the flour sacks where she could hold the door and see the arch. Farrow spoke low to all three. The officers would not be the last, and their patron could offer somewhere out of the city's reach for a while, and perhaps a way to find the answers the party woke without. Farrow knew a route through Undersigil, tunnels, not streets, to the patron's house. Nib asked his questions one at a time, as he had once advised Mara to do at another door: who the patron was, what they would want, and how Farrow knew who they were. Farrow held up three fingers in turn. The name was not theirs to give yet, and the party could refuse the journey on that account. The patron would speak for themself, and taking the door was not agreeing to a job. As for how they knew: "I've been watching you. Before the red coats arrived. I know you came out of the Mortuary, and that you're looking for pieces of yourselves you can't find. I'm not going to pretend we met by accident." Nothing was asked for, not the papers, nor the weapons, nor the spellbook. Kestrel spent a use of Divine Sense at the threshold and found nothing celestial, fiendish or undead within sixty feet, Farrow included; Alden was careful to note that this told them nothing of Farrow's intentions, and nothing about what lay behind the walls.
Round 179. Farrow led them down a short stair to a brick archway closed with weathered boards, one already pried loose and leaned aside. Beyond it was only dark, damp masonry and the smell of cellar earth and old drains. Nib, who had said he would look before anyone stepped through, cast Detect Magic as a ritual at the foot of the stair, ten minutes and no slot spent, while Mara kept the stair and Kestrel stood her place. "Ten minutes is time for them to search," Farrow said. "I'll listen." Above them feet crossed the bakehouse floor and someone asked the baker a question, and the voices went away. No officer came down. The boards, the arch and the first stretch of tunnel showed no magic at all. Nib's own armor showed, and so did something close about Farrow, which Nib reported honestly to the others, and said so to Farrow's face without asking what it was. "Noticed," Farrow answered. "It stays with me." The magic proved nothing about their intentions or the patron's, and the spell could not call the route safe or find a mechanical trap.
Kestrel looked at the entrance herself and heard only dripping, with no sign of a trap, and said she would come if her companions chose the route, walking behind them and not ahead into the dark. Mara said that an unnamed patron and unexplained magic were poor company, but that the red plates knew the door upstairs, and that she was agreeing to a way out, not to anyone's bargain. Nib said he would go, in an order they would hold: Farrow with the lamp, then Mara, then himself, and Kestrel last, with the way back left open, and any of them free to call a halt without argument. Farrow lifted another board free and left nothing shut behind them.
Undersigil
Wet stone underfoot, the lamp a small gold room in the dark. The air is still and old, and under the cellar smell is something that does not belong.
Round 180. The tunnel ran down in single file. Before the first turn Farrow stopped, and extended the lamp for Mara to look without going ahead. Beyond it lay a half-collapsed basement, its ceiling beams leaning in, and on the floor a plate of pink crumbs on which a rat lay belly-up, its belly swollen and its brain bare above its small face. Its eyes turned toward the light. A low voice sounded in every mind in the file, unhurried and certain, and said that whatever they chose to do, it had already won.
Nib stopped a pace behind Mara and kept his eyes on the rat and the plate. "Nobody touches the plate, the crumbs, or the rat. Nobody answers it yet either. A voice that says it has already won wants us to argue with it." He asked Farrow whether they had seen it before. Farrow had: a cranium rat, though this one had not been lying on a dinner plate the last time they came through. Kestrel used another Divine Sense at the rear and found no celestial, fiendish or undead presence, which did not name what the rat was. The plate sat in the open floor, not across the way on, and a person keeping to the chamber's left edge could pass without touching anything. "Through, not around," Farrow said. "You don't have to win an argument with everything down here."
Round 181. Mara went first along the left edge, and the floor held and the leaning beams stayed where they leaned. The rat's eyes followed her the whole way and it did not stir. As she passed in peace, the voice spoke again in every mind, calm and certain, and told them to beware the smell of strawberries. Then it fell silent, its belly rising and falling, indifferent to them all. Nib came next, setting each foot where Mara had set hers, without a word to the rat, and said very quietly at the gap, "Beware the scent of strawberry. I will write that down when we can stop; I would rather not take out paper in here." Kestrel followed last with an ear on the stair behind her, and Farrow slipped across after them. Beyond the gap the passage slanted downward and narrowed, and under the cellar smell was something faint and sweet. "Leave it to its cake," Farrow murmured.
Round 182. Nib stopped with his hand raised and breathed in once. "Do you smell that? Under the damp. Something sweet. The rat told us to beware strawberry, and I would rather be foolish about a smell than careful about the wrong thing afterward." He tore a strip from his hem, wetted it from his water flask, and tied it over his nose and mouth, offering a strip to each of the others. "Not because I know it is that. Because I do not know it is not." Farrow took one and tied it on, which was its own answer. The smell, Farrow said, was the tunnel's, and had been stronger every time they had come through lately. Farther along lived a remnant of bakers who called themselves the Coterie of Cakes, touchy about dough and doctrine, more nuisance than army most days. The file would pass quiet, pass polite if seen, and eat nothing. Mara took her strip with a murmured "No cakes."
The sweetness built, enough that even through wet cloth it sat at the back of the tongue, which was Mara's own condition for a halt, and when Farrow raised a palm the whole file stopped at once. Nobody was unsteady. Ahead the lamplight thinned into the glow of a chamber lit by its own candles, and sound carried up the last stretch: crockery, voices, someone laughing the way people laugh when they are pretending to have a wonderful time. From the dark threshold they could see in without being seen. A strawberry cake with bat-like wings of leathery frosting sat on a festive table in a room of wet drains and wide sewer mouths, and the far side of the chamber was closed off by a heavy barrier. Four round, pink-cheeked people in flour-stained baker's aprons sipped tea with their little fingers raised and chattered happily about the misguided factions up above. "The Cakers," Farrow mouthed, and then, barely breathing it: "Indifferent, unless we're rude. The way on is through their parlor."
Nib asked, in a whisper, what the Cakers wanted and what they did to guests, before anyone said a word to them. "You said indifferent; I would like to know indifferent to what." He asked that nobody eat, drink or touch anything, whatever was offered, and kept Detect Magic and Mage Armor running at the threshold, unseen, casting nothing.