The Black Dagger was still warm on the floor when one of the moon guards keeled over from the dust he’d inhaled. Beiydark revived him without ceremony, poked the assassin’s corpse a couple times with her staff, and declared the whole thing too easy. I was inclined to agree but didn’t say so out loud.
Momen and Spesof were already quietly running through options. The body was still carrying runes for Aemmin’s horcrux ritual - active and apparently ticking. One idea: Speak with Dead on the Black Dagger. Problem was the corpse might recognize Momen and Spesof as enemies and lie. I’d been out in the hall for most of the confrontation, so there was a reasonable case that the Dagger wouldn’t know who I was. We tabled it and moved on.
What I had found on the tile before all the excitement was thieves’ cant scratched underneath where the carpet had been - markings indicating the assassin’s hiding spot had been pre-designated. Someone had planned this route in advance and left instructions for him. Which meant there was likely more of it.
I pitched the obvious next step: roll up every carpet in the temple.
Beiydark sighed, waved her arms, and a small army of moon guardians materialized and got to work. A few minutes later, every rug in the building was gone and I had the run of the bare stone floors. Whatever else you can say about her, she moves fast when she wants to.
I spent the next stretch working through the halls systematically. The moon guardians were technically helping, but they don’t have eyes, which puts a ceiling on their usefulness here. I found the first message tucked near a door: this is the man with the book. The hymn book. The one that had been bouncing around everyone’s hands. A second message showed up outside the kitchen: hide it here.
The kitchen was a mostly-abandoned space staffed by one human cook. The tables and most of the equipment were dusty and rusted from years of disuse, but a couple of surfaces and the oven were clearly in active use. I told her I was looking for a lost item that might have been left here. Her eyes lit up. She described a bag that had appeared beneath a hidden shelf under one of the tables that morning - she’d gone to report it to Lady Drusilia, come back, and it was gone.
I looked at the floor under the shelf. Fresh blood, not yet dried. Whatever had been in that bag had dripped on the way out.
I told the moon guardian to hold the room and not let anyone in or out, specifically instructed them not to kill the cook, and went to find the others. The hive mind aspect of the moon guardians then created a minor logistical crisis when they all interpreted this as their new assignment, but I got it sorted eventually.
I circled back to looking for more thieves’ cant while Momen and Spesof investigated the kitchen. The next place I checked was the orphanage - ten malnourished kids, clearly not being looked after as well as they should be. I gave them fifty platinum to split between them, told them to keep it quiet, and Spesof’s rations came out too. Practical donations.
While I was there I found the bag. Hidden under one of the beds. No thieves’ cant marking its location - apparently that phase of the operation had already been completed and whoever moved it from the kitchen had just tucked it somewhere convenient. I used sleight of hand to walk it out from under the bed without alarming anyone, then stood in the hall and thought about whether opening a bloodstained bag of unknown origin in a children’s room was wise. It wasn’t. I didn’t open it.
I flagged Momen and Spesof through the bond and we moved the discussion to Lady Drusilia’s room. It took some convincing on the door - she raised an eyebrow and made us wait while she cleared out the guards and maids. Once everyone was gone, she immediately cast Silence on me and pointed at the remaining moon guardian. Right. The silent room for sensitive conversations.
We gave her the rundown - the Black Dagger, the runes on the body, the thieves’ cant network pointing to at least one more accomplice, and then Momen asked me for the bag. I plopped it on the table. It squelched. Momen grimaced. He cast Identify on it - ritually, so it took eleven minutes - and came back with: soul bag.
A bag for containing souls. With what felt, through the cloth, like a human head inside.
Before we’d finished processing that, Drusilia reached into her back pocket, produced a two-inch-tall teddy bear, rubbed it on the bag, set it on the floor, and sat back down. The teddy bear stood up, looked around, and immediately began panicking in the way that someone does when they wake up in an unfamiliar body with no memory of getting there.
Momen leaned down and asked if it was Vision Seeker Narivaris.
The teddy bear nodded.
So. The bag contained Narivaris’s head and his soul, which had been trapped before it could move on. One of the two heads accounted for. The horcrux ritual on the body in the washroom was presumably drawing on him. Beiydark’s explanation of how she’d transferred the soul was apparently a technical masterpiece - Momen followed about half of it before losing the thread, and Spesof nodded along until he could mention he’d used Soul Jar once. She seemed genuinely pleased.
With the soul bag situation handled, the next problem was the book. We still needed the Transcendence of Death - the volume Aemmin had been trying to get his hands on. Lady Drusilia cast Locate Object and the indicator arrow pointed straight at Skyseer Onus, who was standing right there in the room holding his worn personal collection of folk hymns from his hometown.
He handed it over without hesitation. He had no idea.
Spesof cast Dispel Magic on it and the tattered loose-leaf pages of a small hymnal became a large hardcover tome. Onus stared at it. Genuinely stared. Clearly had no idea that the book he’d been carrying around and lending to people was under a permanent illusion. The best place to hide something, apparently, is in the hands of someone who believes completely that they’re holding something else.
We were moving toward figuring out what to do with it when Beiydark arrived with the Tyrannosaurus Rex. She immediately declared that the book was dangerous, heretical, and under no circumstances to be handed to outsiders - and then looked directly at me and suggested, calmly, that a thief who happened to know exactly where all the thieves’ cant was and somehow found every piece of evidence before anyone else might conceivably be the person who had planted it in the first place.
I laid out everything I’d actually done that day. The carpets, the blood in the kitchen, the bag in the orphanage, the orphans. Especially the orphans. I fed her orphans.
Spesof pointed out that the temple’s security was so bad that anyone could walk in and do whatever they wanted with it. Beiydark conceded the point about staffing but held firm on the book. She wanted a formal meeting - herself, Lady Drusilia, and Transcendentalist Eladir - to decide what happened to it before anyone touched it further. Lady Drusilia agreed it was the sensible call.
She reached out to Eladir through whatever communication method they use here. We got back: We’ve got zombies everywhere. I need backup. Send the moon guardians out. We are outnumbered and outmanned.
We discussed briefly whether it was a ploy to empty the temple. Probably not. Beiydark began redistributing the guardian positions and gestured for us to follow.
I was already on my carpet when we came outside.
The street was silver.