The Fading Dream_ Thorn of Breland - Keith Baker [73]
While she’d never been to that enclave, it was a place of business, and teleportation, a service offered. Signs on the walls pointed the way to different parts of the outpost, and it took only a moment to find the path to the teleportation circle.
“I’m the first around every corner,” she whispered to Drix. “You peer around and don’t follow until you see my signal. Do you understand?”
He shrugged. “I suppose. What are you worried about? Everyone’s dead and they wouldn’t have wards on the main chamber, would they?”
“We’re not taking any chances.” The fact of the matter was that the bodies had her on edge. They were too pristine, too clean; she couldn’t help but wait for one of them to stand up or for a hand to tighten around her ankle. She’d fought undead in the past; she still remembered the Koralat case in Karrnath, the madman’s manor filled with the walking corpses of his servants and kin, her own partner reaching for her throat with no sign of recognition in his glazed eyes. Perhaps the people of Ascalin were truly dead. And perhaps they weren’t.
She held Steel to the edge of the passage, tracing a cross on his hilt.
More bodies, he told her. I’m not sensing any wards. It appears to be safe.
“We’ll see.” She slipped around the corner. Something crunched under her foot, and she knelt down to examine it. It was a shard of glass, as long as her finger, loose on the floor. The looters must have brought it in with them, she thought. There were a few other chips scattered around. The air was still, the hall was silent. There was something … a smell, faint but unmistakable: blood.
The source of the scent was up and around the next corner. She moved cautiously, avoiding the scattered shards of glass and making no sound as she slipped across the hallway. The scent grew stronger as she drew closer to the corner. Drix ventured into the hallway behind her, his little crossbow in his hand. Thorn indicated that he should hold his position and slid Steel around the edge of the wall.
Four bodies, Steel told her. Messy business … blood on the walls and the floor. No one living. I can sense a few enchanted weapons, other minor magical auras … animated rope, pack of holding, Irian tears.
“Orien colors?” she whispered.
No uniforms. Dark clothing, painted armor, but no obvious insignia.
Sounds more like looters than guards, she thought. So what killed them?
The other bodies they’d found had been perfectly pristine. The victims might have simply fallen asleep. As such, the carnage Thorn found in the hallway was a shock.
“Messy business indeed,” she murmured.
Blood was spattered all over the walls and pooled around each of the corpses. There was an elf woman in dark chain mail, a short bow still clutched in her hand; a muscular half-orc; a human with a wand in his hand and two more tucked into his belt, and a vest covered with pockets that likely held components for spells and rituals. The last body, a dwarf in a long, leather coat, his beard soaked with blood, caught Thorn’s eye. She noticed the dragonmark on his forehead and the scarring around it. It was the Mark of Warding, and the branding was something she’d heard of but never actually seen. A dragonmark heir expelled from a house was called an excoriate; in the distant past, the houses had actually cut the mark from the flesh of the victim. That practice had been abandoned before the rise of Galifar, but she’d heard that