Masquerades - Kate Novak [15]
"Um-We just happened to be passing by when we saw the Night Masks run out of the building and toss a torch back in," Alias explained.
"And then you followed me here just to return my slipper?" Jamal asked suspiciously.
"Well, no. We have business with Mintassan," Alias said defensively.
"What business?" Jamal insisted.
"Grypht's business," the sage replied with a theatrical grimness. "And for such dark work we should retire to the back room." Mintassan strode off behind the shop's counter and through a doorway hung with a curtain of glass beads. "You might as well join us, Jamal," the sage called back over his shoulder. "I'll make tea. You can be mother and pour. You can serve as a witness to our transaction, too."
Jamal rose slowly and motioned for Alias and Dragonbait to go before her. Alias suspected she did so more out of caution than courtesy. Jamal did not want them at her back.
Alias moved cautiously through the curtain, into an extraplanar graveyard. While the trophies in the front of the shop had an air of respectability by virtue of their mounted settings, the remains of the dead in the back room gave the place a grisly appearance.
Fur and hide pelts of every color hung from the ceiling. Work tables all along one long wall were covered with boxes of bones and skeletons in various stages of being pieced together with pins and wires. Pickled internal organs filled jars on the shelves over the work tables. The ceiling was covered with strange insects stuck there with pins in their thoraxes. A box at Alias's elbow contained red eggshells and the remains of three baby birds. Snake skins and feathers lay out on the writing table beside a sketchbook. There were piles of boxes and crates beneath all the tables and all around the perimeters of the room. Alias did not want to know what was inside any of them.
"Wonderful what he's done with the place, isn't it?" Jamal said with sarcasm as she noted Alias's discomfort. "Early Abattoir-a Sembian style you don't see displayed much in the finer homes of Westgate."
"Grypht gave us to understand that your specialty was transmutation, which, if I recall, excludes the necromantic arts," Alias said, treading as politely as she could into what Mintassan's business was with so many dead things.
The sage looked back at the swordswoman with a gleam of curiosity in his eye. "My, my. Heroism, sword skill, beauty, and brains all in one. Where, I wonder, did you learn about the art?"
Alias flushed, but did not reply. Finder had filled his creation with everything he'd known, and she could forget none of it. It wasn't the first time she'd embarrassed herself with a demonstration of more knowledge than she ought to have.
"Yes," Mintassan replied to the swordswoman's comment when he realized she wasn't going to reply to his query, "you're quite right. Specializing in transmutation does exclude necromantic studies. But while other transmuters choose to study the more mundane and commercially lucrative transmutations, straw to gold, salt water to fresh, sow's ears to silk purses, and so on, I prefer investigating the mutation of nature itself-or herself, as your rebgion requires."
Mintassan stood beside a massive table, which dominated the center of the room. The table, some castoff from a Westgate festhall, judging by its thick legs and velvet-covered sides, was littered with various scholarly debris: maps of the inner and outer planes, tomes with mildewing leather covers, diagrams and sketches of creatures, calipers, rulers, magnifying lenses. The sage picked up a hunk of amber larger than his fist and held it out for Alias to see.
"I am seeking the secret," Mintassan said, "of how the descendants of a creature like this-"
Alias peered into the amber and could see an animal that resembled a bat embedded within.
"-become a creature like this." With a flourish the sage yanked a black cloth cover off a second specimen- the mounted, mummified head of a tanar'ri, a powerful denizen of the Abyss.
Alias and Dragonbait drew back, startled. The next moment, though, Alias's eyes squinted