Shemeska
Adventurer
The sky above the Lower Ward hung low and heavy above the rooftops like a worn, greasy blanket. Occasionally a faint drizzle of stinging rain trickled free of its embrace, forcing street traffic to hastily seek out shelter. Not so for one particular pair of travelers however, one of whom seemed ever so used to the period shower of near-vinegar courtesy of the Ward’s smokestacks, and the other who simply conjured a hemispherical shell of force above his head a moment before his vulpine ears caught a single drop.
“So why are you out here again?” Nisha chirped over at Tristol as the two of them walked down an alleyway between the Foundry and a tenement building adjacent.
Walking wasn’t precisely what they were doing, at least not for the Xaositect. Nisha was skipping along and occasionally whistling as she did so.
“Enjoying a walk with you,” Tristol smiled as his tail swished side to side happily, “And also taking some advice from Toras while we’re here in the Lower Ward.”
Nisha quirked an eyebrow and glanced over at her boyfriend, “Advice from Toras seems to begin and end with punching fiends and giving jink to orphan children. Mind you, I don’t particularly have a problem with the latter, having been an orphan in the Hive myself at one point in time, and I don’t have any problem at all with the former… even if I go about it a bit differently and more roundabout of a way than he does.”
Abruptly Nisha paused and clip-clopped backwards a foot, turning with a sly grin towards a wall plastered over with advertisements and papers of all sort accumulated over the past few months time. The most recent additions to the wall were almost entirely of the political variety.
“Ah yes, the Council is having elections soon aren’t they.” Tristol stated, rather than questioned, rolling his eyes at the predominant face that adorned the wall: Shemeska the Marauder.
The Marauder’s posters were clearly produced with a budget far and above any of her rivals’, and unlike her rivals’ posters, she hadn’t so much as bothered with any slogan beyond her name and the weight (and threat) that it carried on its own. The ‘loth’s smirking, haughty muzzle positively oozed an aura of callous arrogance.
“Smug little thing isn’t she?” Nisha said, opening the basket that she’d been carrying the whole way, brandishing a wet paintbrush retrieved from within. “Now she’s a smug little thing with a mustache.”
Tristol chuckled as Nisha went poster to poster, gleefully defacing each of them.
“A van dyke here, a full-on barbazu beard here… eyepatch… missing a tooth here… black eye…”
“Wait a minute.” Tristol glanced down at Nisha’s satchel and the large bucket of paint it contained. “You came out here with a bucket of paint and a paintbrush?”
“Yes, I did.” Nisha stuck out her tongue as she added a speech bubble with ‘Vote for me, I’m a giant c*nt!’ on yet another of the ‘loth’s posters. “You never know when inspiration for graffiti or mural painting will strike; also I knew that she’d have posters all over the place so I wanted to get to at least a decent number of them today. That wasn’t my primary reason for being out here though, just an opportune tangent.”
Tristol tilted his head to the side, “If that wasn’t your primary reason for being out here, what else besides a bucket of paint do you have in your bag?”
“A ten pound sack of birdseed.” Nisha said, matter-of-factly, widely grinning as she continued to paint.
“Birdseed?”
“We’ll be passing the Styx Oarsman. They’ll be having an outdoor beer thing tomorrow, and well, the neighboring roofs are easily accessible.” Nisha made a quick motion of sowing the seeds and then a pantomime of a hungry bird. “One day between now and then.”
Tristol’s eyes went wide as he realized the implications of her actions. He laughed and shook his head as Nisha continued her joyous vandalism.
“Roses on her razorvine… nose piercing… facial tattoos… wait, what the hell?!” Nisha dropped her paintbrush and stared up at two other posters that adored the wall.
Juxtaposed between multiple copies of the Marauder’s campaign posters, two other and oh so distinctly different canid outsider faces smiled, hawking themselves for one of the open council seats: Fyrehowl and A’kin.
‘Actions Rather Than Words – Vote Fyrehowl for Sigil Advisory Council’: The silvery-blue lupinal smiled out from her poster with a clenched fist, drawn to suggest strength and a certain sureness for the candidate rather than menace. It was all well done and quite tastefully so, though it was clear that the cipher’s posters had been repeatedly torn down or pasted over by the Marauder’s own in recent days. The professional vandalism that Fyrehowl’s posters had suffered however paled in comparison to A’kin’s: a pile of his posters lay on the ground, having been torn down and set alight.
‘Put A Friendly Face On The Council – Vote A’kin the ‘Friendly Fiend’’ A’kin seemed to have produced the posters himself, and a minor glamer he’d applied to each of them caused his face to periodically glance towards the Marauder’s posters and chuckle.
“She’s going to murder him in the street if he wins and she doesn’t.” Nisha shook her head and grimaced, flicking her tail side to side in worried agitation. Looking down at her, one of the A’kin posters raised a finger and pointed towards one of the Marauder’s that the tiefling had skipped during her painting. “Oh! I missed one! Thank you!” A puckish smile returned to her face as she added a monocle and top hat to that one.
“Uhh…” Tristol walked over and put a hand on Nisha’s shoulder, “No offense, but to heck with him, I’m worried that she’ll murder Fyrehowl in the street if the same thing happens!”
“Fyrehowl has you and me,” Nisha shrugged, “Nothing’s going to happen to her.”
“Tell that to Florian.” Tristol said, remembering with far too much clarity the look on the cleric’s face when she’d nearly been sucked through a portal to the negative energy plane. “Do you want random portals opening underneath you?”
Nisha paused, thinking about it. “With the word random you put there, that’s almost tempting. But it needs something more… like candy! Random candy portals! Demiplanes full of yummy taffy or something, rather than the Hive’s ooze portals or stuff that tried to eat Florian. No?”
Tristol chuckled, appreciating her humor at any given moment, but the entire situation terrified him in ways that he couldn’t entirely verbalize; not that Nisha would have remained seriously about it anyway. The fact remained that someone, presumably the Marauder, had somehow against all rational reason, managed to forcibly open portals in Sigil against the Lady’s Will. The very concept horrified him.
“I’ll buy you some candy once we’re back in the Clerk’s Ward.” Tristol smiled, Nisha’s rattling bell at the end of her tail momentarily drawing him out of any more moribund thoughts. “Or if you wanted to go back around the other way, we can snag something nicer somewhere in the Market & Guildhall Ward.”
Before Nisha could respond however, Tristol’s ears swiveled back at a sound several blocks away: shouting, screaming, and blades crashing against armor.
“Do you hear that?” Tristol looked at Nisha and tilted his head towards the source of the sound.
“I’m not you or Fyrehowl.” She shrugged, “My ears are pointy, but not nearly as big as yours. So no.”
The sounds grew louder, more frequent, and then nearby windows rattled from the concussive blast of a detonating fireball. At the last one, Nisha flinched instinctively.
“Ok, now I hear the sounds of magical explosions and people screaming in terror and pain.” She stuck out her tongue and glanced at Tristol. “This is when we predictably run –towards- the horrific event rather than away like rational people, yes?”
Tristol nodded and the two of them ran as quickly as they could, realizing with each block where it was coming from: The Shattered Temple.
Largely abandoned since the Faction Wars years earlier, the one-time Faction hall of the Athar looked much the same as it had when they’d collectively departed for the base of the Spire, there to presumably wait out the Lady’s ban on their faction’s presence in Sigil, and there avoid the Powers’ wrath. One thing stood out as different however, that being the massive banners of Hades that hung from the highest point of the former temple of Aoskar like a giant expression of contempt by the faithful for the Faithless.
In recent weeks the location had been claimed and fortified by the forces of Muriov Garianis: his family members and those in the employ of himself as a priest of Hades and the criminal organization that his clan headed. With the open antagonism between Garianis and the Athar, culminating most recently in near public bloodshed before the Sigil Advisory Council, Garianis had gone one step further and both hired close to a hundred professional mercenaries and prepared the future location of his grand temple to Hades for a siege.
Garianis had prepared as well as he could have. The man was no fool. But the forces arrayed against him were simply beyond his or anyone else’s comprehension.
“Aaand Toras was right about that tip.” Tristol stood at the outskirts of the Shattered Temple grounds
“Huh?” Nisha shook her head as she glanced from her boyfriend to the battle raging fifty yard away. “What tip was that?”
“He heard that there was going to be a showdown between the Athar and the Garianis clan in the Lower Ward today. Somewhere, but he didn’t know where, so he was going to be out here walking around to see if anything went down.”
“What the heck kind of tip is that?” Nisha rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a fun tip like ‘this bar is offering half-price specials to tieflings after anti-peak’ or ‘there’s this romantic spot where you can toss things at people below or make out, whichever suits your mood’. No, I don’t like this kind of tip at all. Who gave it to him? The same people that got us dragged into Baator the other week?”
“He didn’t say!” Tristol shrugged, taking measure of the conflict. “He just said he trusted who said it. Whatever that means.”
Soldiers baring the faction symbol of the Athar streamed out of an open portal were they were met within moment’s by Garianis’ forces. With as many as now stood on the field of battle, it seemed as if the Athar were quite literally throwing the entirety of their faction into the attempt to retake their former citadel. They and Garianis’ forces however were not the only ones there on the battlefield. Clustered together atop the high ramparts, dozens of ghouls and other lesser undead dressed in the colors –if no longer the faction symbology- of the Dustmen, and there amongst them stood the pale, corpse-like figure of their once and now all-but-in-name Factol, Oridi Malefin.
The three eyed tiefling whispered a prayer to her ‘god’ the Abstract Concept of Death, and with breathtaking force snatched up one of the Athar faithful into the air and imploded them into a crumpled sphere of ragged meat and bone before gesturing again and repeating the lethal measure like clockwork, still wearing the same dour, emotionless expression upon her face.
“Who are the good guys here?!” Nisha shouted at Tristol as she watched a dozen different uniforms and banners taking part in the conflict.
“We are!” Toras shrugged, “Though technically since the Marauder is backing the Athar, uhh… the Garianis people are by default the one’s I plan to help.”
“You can be the good guy, and I’ll be the quirky if annoyingly ultra chaotic tiefling sidekick!” Nisha fished a hand into her satchel, pulling out a paintbrush, frowning, and then fishing within a second time to finally retrieve a wand.
“That’s fine with me!” Tristol began to cast, but abruptly paused at what he saw next.
Oridi’s ghouls poured over the walls in the dozens and took the Athar by surprise, tearing men and women limb from limb and pausing only to gorge themselves one bite at a time. Their surprise however was momentary and fleeting, as a second portal opened within one of the temple’s archways, one that looked out upon the endless bleak expanse of the Waste and a screaming torrent of hordelings that came pouring through in a wave of screaming, mismatched horrors incarnate.
“Well
!” Tristol spat out the words to a spell and the outflow of hordelings ceased, blocked from entering Sigil by the placement of a wall of force flush with the open portal. As if sensing its failure, the portal to Hades immediately closed.
“Tristol, you’re awesome.” Nisha cackled and released a crackling bolt of blue-white lightning from the tip of her wand. The bolt streaked across the field and nearly incinerated a trio of hordelings, lancing back and forth between their hodgepodge bodies before the current finally grounded out.
Tristol smiled and took a half-bow, only to watch in horror as another portal opened only a few feet away, again to Hades, and again disgorging a raging stream of hordelings onto the battlefield. Athar soldiers still continued to pour forth, and the combination of them and the fiends, all of which specifically avoided the Faithless, began to drive the Garianis forces back.
“Tristol!” Nisha shouted as she loosed another bolt of lightning. “You’ve got to seal those portals shut!”
Pushing back his terror, Tristol repeated his previous spell, slamming a wall of force atop first the portal to Hades, and then a second wall to seal off the portal disgorging the Athar soldiers from whatever plane they’d marshaled from. For a moment the solution seemed to work and the Garianis and allied forces rallied, pushing back against the intruders, but that lasted only moments.
“Nisha I can’t keep sealing off portals if more of them just open!” Tristol shouted to her with a panicked tone to his voice as he waved his arm and hurled a ball of flame into the midst of a pack of hordelings as they tore a bariaur mercenary to shreds. “I only have a few more of those left before I…”
Tristol’s voice trailed off as another portal opened, this one directly below dozens of Garianis troops, sending them screaming to their deaths into a raging inferno either in one of the Hells or the Plane of Fire itself. Having swallowed them, the portal snapped shut and the process repeated itself a second and then a third time, swallowing up dozens of doomed souls each time.
“Tristol! What do we do?!” Nisha cried out, tossing herd spent wand to the side and diving for cover behind a ruined wall.
Tristol watched in horror as men and women were slain by swords, skewered by spears or arrows, or devoured by packs of ravenous hordelings, all while yet more portals opened to consume those seeking to flee the field of battle. The fight was lost, and Tristol panicked as he felt the earth shudder with the dull rumble of a Cage quake. Was the Lady furious about the opening of portals, or voicing her rage instead at him for attempting to seal them off?
“Nisha!” Tristol dashed over to her side and took her hand. “The Athar won. We’re getting out of here. Hold on.”
The two of them vanished in the bright flash of a teleportation spell moments before a pack of hordelings overran their position.
As the portals finally sealed shut, the battlefield lay strewn with the dead and dying, hundreds of them. Athar soldiers moved about, tending to their own wounded and rounding up those few survivors from the opposing side. The Garianis wounded were killed on the spot and the corpses of their dead were preemptively stabbed through to be certain of their fate.
“No!” A distinctly well-dressed tiefling pointed a finger at a pair of the Athar soldiers as they stood above a wounded women wearing the Garianis clan seal across her tabard. “Not that one.”
The tiefling, one of the Marauder’s ubiquitous groomer-guards, had stood watching the battle, observing not the flow of the fighting itself, but the position and location of specific individuals. He’d been provided a list by his razorvine-crowned employer, and one of the names on that list lay on the ground with Athar steel at her neck. That wouldn’t do at all.
One of the Athar soldiers, a blue-skinned air genasi, stared daggers up at the tiefling, “I don’t care who you are, this b*tch is Delphinia Garianis. She’s more responsible for the desecration of our faction’s headquarters than anyone else here and I’ll be damned by all the false gods if you or anyone else says that I can’t wash away her father’s sins by slitting her throat here and now!”
The tiefling didn’t respond in words. He simply nodded, not to the Athar, but to someone behind them.
“I appreciate your fiendish master’s help but…” The genasi’s eyes went wide as a hand grasped his sword arm with the force of a vice and a blade touched his exposed throat.
Standing behind the Athar soldiers, having seemingly appeared from out of thin air, stood Adamok Ebon, the Marauder’s personal assassin. Dressed in a mixture of silk and almost gossamer chainmail, the bladeling’s own natural skin, where exposed, seemed more like armor plating than most of the soldiers on the battlefield.
“My apologies sir, my humble apologies.” The genasi stuttered as he struggled in vain to escape Adamok’s grip on his arm.
“Go.” The tiefling nodded, the bladeling released her grip, and the Athar soldiers bolted, leaving the daughter of Muriov Garianis on the ground, pleading for her life.
Both the bladeling and the tiefling ignored Delphinia’s pleas for the moment. The assassin carried a second captive, this one a younger man, unconscious and bound in magical iron bands, slung effortlessly over her shoulder like a game animal.
“This is extra.” Adamon’s voice was like well-oiled steel slipping against a grindstone.
The tiefling smiled with genuine appreciation and admiration. “The funds have already been deposited into your account, with the additional fee as contractually stipulated, and a bonus that the Marauder saw fit to add due to the short notice of this business.”
The bladeling nodded and dropped her captive at his feet.
The tiefling smiled and looked down, noting that the second name on his list lay there bound and unharmed. He wasn’t at all surprised to find that when he glanced back up, the bladeling was gone, vanished back into thin air without a single word of obvious magic.
“As always, a pleasure doing business with you.”
Around him the slaughter continued on like clockwork, with every Garianis agent and hired proxy casually and systematically executed, though the ghouls and remaining Dustmen were allowed to scamper off back to whatever tomb they’d crawled out of. Oridi Malefin and her closest followers had teleported to safety once the battle had clearly been lost, and the fallout with her would be purely political in nature rather than any future direct conflict. The Dead would have to find the true death in some other manner than the injured or captured men and women being put to the sword. That same fate was not however in the cards for the two captives slumped and moaning at his feet.
“My father will pay you for my safe return.” Delphinia spoke as politely as she could as her cousin Cyril lay bound at her side. “You’ve proven your claim on the Shattered Temple. We will not dispute it.”
“I’m sure that he will, but that’s not for me to decide.” The tiefling smiled down at her with an expression of polite, professional indifference as he waited for further orders from his mistress who’d been scrying the entirety of the battle from afar.
“Do you have them both?” The Marauder’s voice echoed within her servitor’s mind as a sending spell graced his ears.
“Yes your fiendish majesty, both of them.” He tilted his head ever so slightly as the magic provided a tingling sensation on his right ear. “What shall you have us do with them?”
“Bring them to me at the empty warehouse at the corner of Blackfoot and Silver Pike. I don’t wish to be disturbed, and that district is dead for foot traffic at this hour.”
“Is there anything else that I should bring?”
Even in service to her as many years as he had been, and even as he remained aloof and unconcerned with the screams of men being put to the sword or the sounds of hordelings noisily devouring the dead and dying, the mental impression of Shemeska’s smile and the bubbling drool inherent in her next statement sent a chill up his spine.
“A blade, a box, and a sensory stone.”
“So why are you out here again?” Nisha chirped over at Tristol as the two of them walked down an alleyway between the Foundry and a tenement building adjacent.
Walking wasn’t precisely what they were doing, at least not for the Xaositect. Nisha was skipping along and occasionally whistling as she did so.
“Enjoying a walk with you,” Tristol smiled as his tail swished side to side happily, “And also taking some advice from Toras while we’re here in the Lower Ward.”
Nisha quirked an eyebrow and glanced over at her boyfriend, “Advice from Toras seems to begin and end with punching fiends and giving jink to orphan children. Mind you, I don’t particularly have a problem with the latter, having been an orphan in the Hive myself at one point in time, and I don’t have any problem at all with the former… even if I go about it a bit differently and more roundabout of a way than he does.”
Abruptly Nisha paused and clip-clopped backwards a foot, turning with a sly grin towards a wall plastered over with advertisements and papers of all sort accumulated over the past few months time. The most recent additions to the wall were almost entirely of the political variety.
“Ah yes, the Council is having elections soon aren’t they.” Tristol stated, rather than questioned, rolling his eyes at the predominant face that adorned the wall: Shemeska the Marauder.
The Marauder’s posters were clearly produced with a budget far and above any of her rivals’, and unlike her rivals’ posters, she hadn’t so much as bothered with any slogan beyond her name and the weight (and threat) that it carried on its own. The ‘loth’s smirking, haughty muzzle positively oozed an aura of callous arrogance.
“Smug little thing isn’t she?” Nisha said, opening the basket that she’d been carrying the whole way, brandishing a wet paintbrush retrieved from within. “Now she’s a smug little thing with a mustache.”
Tristol chuckled as Nisha went poster to poster, gleefully defacing each of them.
“A van dyke here, a full-on barbazu beard here… eyepatch… missing a tooth here… black eye…”
“Wait a minute.” Tristol glanced down at Nisha’s satchel and the large bucket of paint it contained. “You came out here with a bucket of paint and a paintbrush?”
“Yes, I did.” Nisha stuck out her tongue as she added a speech bubble with ‘Vote for me, I’m a giant c*nt!’ on yet another of the ‘loth’s posters. “You never know when inspiration for graffiti or mural painting will strike; also I knew that she’d have posters all over the place so I wanted to get to at least a decent number of them today. That wasn’t my primary reason for being out here though, just an opportune tangent.”
Tristol tilted his head to the side, “If that wasn’t your primary reason for being out here, what else besides a bucket of paint do you have in your bag?”
“A ten pound sack of birdseed.” Nisha said, matter-of-factly, widely grinning as she continued to paint.
“Birdseed?”
“We’ll be passing the Styx Oarsman. They’ll be having an outdoor beer thing tomorrow, and well, the neighboring roofs are easily accessible.” Nisha made a quick motion of sowing the seeds and then a pantomime of a hungry bird. “One day between now and then.”
Tristol’s eyes went wide as he realized the implications of her actions. He laughed and shook his head as Nisha continued her joyous vandalism.
“Roses on her razorvine… nose piercing… facial tattoos… wait, what the hell?!” Nisha dropped her paintbrush and stared up at two other posters that adored the wall.
Juxtaposed between multiple copies of the Marauder’s campaign posters, two other and oh so distinctly different canid outsider faces smiled, hawking themselves for one of the open council seats: Fyrehowl and A’kin.
‘Actions Rather Than Words – Vote Fyrehowl for Sigil Advisory Council’: The silvery-blue lupinal smiled out from her poster with a clenched fist, drawn to suggest strength and a certain sureness for the candidate rather than menace. It was all well done and quite tastefully so, though it was clear that the cipher’s posters had been repeatedly torn down or pasted over by the Marauder’s own in recent days. The professional vandalism that Fyrehowl’s posters had suffered however paled in comparison to A’kin’s: a pile of his posters lay on the ground, having been torn down and set alight.
‘Put A Friendly Face On The Council – Vote A’kin the ‘Friendly Fiend’’ A’kin seemed to have produced the posters himself, and a minor glamer he’d applied to each of them caused his face to periodically glance towards the Marauder’s posters and chuckle.
“She’s going to murder him in the street if he wins and she doesn’t.” Nisha shook her head and grimaced, flicking her tail side to side in worried agitation. Looking down at her, one of the A’kin posters raised a finger and pointed towards one of the Marauder’s that the tiefling had skipped during her painting. “Oh! I missed one! Thank you!” A puckish smile returned to her face as she added a monocle and top hat to that one.
“Uhh…” Tristol walked over and put a hand on Nisha’s shoulder, “No offense, but to heck with him, I’m worried that she’ll murder Fyrehowl in the street if the same thing happens!”
“Fyrehowl has you and me,” Nisha shrugged, “Nothing’s going to happen to her.”
“Tell that to Florian.” Tristol said, remembering with far too much clarity the look on the cleric’s face when she’d nearly been sucked through a portal to the negative energy plane. “Do you want random portals opening underneath you?”
Nisha paused, thinking about it. “With the word random you put there, that’s almost tempting. But it needs something more… like candy! Random candy portals! Demiplanes full of yummy taffy or something, rather than the Hive’s ooze portals or stuff that tried to eat Florian. No?”
Tristol chuckled, appreciating her humor at any given moment, but the entire situation terrified him in ways that he couldn’t entirely verbalize; not that Nisha would have remained seriously about it anyway. The fact remained that someone, presumably the Marauder, had somehow against all rational reason, managed to forcibly open portals in Sigil against the Lady’s Will. The very concept horrified him.
“I’ll buy you some candy once we’re back in the Clerk’s Ward.” Tristol smiled, Nisha’s rattling bell at the end of her tail momentarily drawing him out of any more moribund thoughts. “Or if you wanted to go back around the other way, we can snag something nicer somewhere in the Market & Guildhall Ward.”
Before Nisha could respond however, Tristol’s ears swiveled back at a sound several blocks away: shouting, screaming, and blades crashing against armor.
“Do you hear that?” Tristol looked at Nisha and tilted his head towards the source of the sound.
“I’m not you or Fyrehowl.” She shrugged, “My ears are pointy, but not nearly as big as yours. So no.”
The sounds grew louder, more frequent, and then nearby windows rattled from the concussive blast of a detonating fireball. At the last one, Nisha flinched instinctively.
“Ok, now I hear the sounds of magical explosions and people screaming in terror and pain.” She stuck out her tongue and glanced at Tristol. “This is when we predictably run –towards- the horrific event rather than away like rational people, yes?”
Tristol nodded and the two of them ran as quickly as they could, realizing with each block where it was coming from: The Shattered Temple.
****
Largely abandoned since the Faction Wars years earlier, the one-time Faction hall of the Athar looked much the same as it had when they’d collectively departed for the base of the Spire, there to presumably wait out the Lady’s ban on their faction’s presence in Sigil, and there avoid the Powers’ wrath. One thing stood out as different however, that being the massive banners of Hades that hung from the highest point of the former temple of Aoskar like a giant expression of contempt by the faithful for the Faithless.
In recent weeks the location had been claimed and fortified by the forces of Muriov Garianis: his family members and those in the employ of himself as a priest of Hades and the criminal organization that his clan headed. With the open antagonism between Garianis and the Athar, culminating most recently in near public bloodshed before the Sigil Advisory Council, Garianis had gone one step further and both hired close to a hundred professional mercenaries and prepared the future location of his grand temple to Hades for a siege.
Garianis had prepared as well as he could have. The man was no fool. But the forces arrayed against him were simply beyond his or anyone else’s comprehension.
“Aaand Toras was right about that tip.” Tristol stood at the outskirts of the Shattered Temple grounds
“Huh?” Nisha shook her head as she glanced from her boyfriend to the battle raging fifty yard away. “What tip was that?”
“He heard that there was going to be a showdown between the Athar and the Garianis clan in the Lower Ward today. Somewhere, but he didn’t know where, so he was going to be out here walking around to see if anything went down.”
“What the heck kind of tip is that?” Nisha rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a fun tip like ‘this bar is offering half-price specials to tieflings after anti-peak’ or ‘there’s this romantic spot where you can toss things at people below or make out, whichever suits your mood’. No, I don’t like this kind of tip at all. Who gave it to him? The same people that got us dragged into Baator the other week?”
“He didn’t say!” Tristol shrugged, taking measure of the conflict. “He just said he trusted who said it. Whatever that means.”
Soldiers baring the faction symbol of the Athar streamed out of an open portal were they were met within moment’s by Garianis’ forces. With as many as now stood on the field of battle, it seemed as if the Athar were quite literally throwing the entirety of their faction into the attempt to retake their former citadel. They and Garianis’ forces however were not the only ones there on the battlefield. Clustered together atop the high ramparts, dozens of ghouls and other lesser undead dressed in the colors –if no longer the faction symbology- of the Dustmen, and there amongst them stood the pale, corpse-like figure of their once and now all-but-in-name Factol, Oridi Malefin.
The three eyed tiefling whispered a prayer to her ‘god’ the Abstract Concept of Death, and with breathtaking force snatched up one of the Athar faithful into the air and imploded them into a crumpled sphere of ragged meat and bone before gesturing again and repeating the lethal measure like clockwork, still wearing the same dour, emotionless expression upon her face.
“Who are the good guys here?!” Nisha shouted at Tristol as she watched a dozen different uniforms and banners taking part in the conflict.
“We are!” Toras shrugged, “Though technically since the Marauder is backing the Athar, uhh… the Garianis people are by default the one’s I plan to help.”
“You can be the good guy, and I’ll be the quirky if annoyingly ultra chaotic tiefling sidekick!” Nisha fished a hand into her satchel, pulling out a paintbrush, frowning, and then fishing within a second time to finally retrieve a wand.
“That’s fine with me!” Tristol began to cast, but abruptly paused at what he saw next.
Oridi’s ghouls poured over the walls in the dozens and took the Athar by surprise, tearing men and women limb from limb and pausing only to gorge themselves one bite at a time. Their surprise however was momentary and fleeting, as a second portal opened within one of the temple’s archways, one that looked out upon the endless bleak expanse of the Waste and a screaming torrent of hordelings that came pouring through in a wave of screaming, mismatched horrors incarnate.
“Well
!” Tristol spat out the words to a spell and the outflow of hordelings ceased, blocked from entering Sigil by the placement of a wall of force flush with the open portal. As if sensing its failure, the portal to Hades immediately closed.“Tristol, you’re awesome.” Nisha cackled and released a crackling bolt of blue-white lightning from the tip of her wand. The bolt streaked across the field and nearly incinerated a trio of hordelings, lancing back and forth between their hodgepodge bodies before the current finally grounded out.
Tristol smiled and took a half-bow, only to watch in horror as another portal opened only a few feet away, again to Hades, and again disgorging a raging stream of hordelings onto the battlefield. Athar soldiers still continued to pour forth, and the combination of them and the fiends, all of which specifically avoided the Faithless, began to drive the Garianis forces back.
“Tristol!” Nisha shouted as she loosed another bolt of lightning. “You’ve got to seal those portals shut!”
Pushing back his terror, Tristol repeated his previous spell, slamming a wall of force atop first the portal to Hades, and then a second wall to seal off the portal disgorging the Athar soldiers from whatever plane they’d marshaled from. For a moment the solution seemed to work and the Garianis and allied forces rallied, pushing back against the intruders, but that lasted only moments.
“Nisha I can’t keep sealing off portals if more of them just open!” Tristol shouted to her with a panicked tone to his voice as he waved his arm and hurled a ball of flame into the midst of a pack of hordelings as they tore a bariaur mercenary to shreds. “I only have a few more of those left before I…”
Tristol’s voice trailed off as another portal opened, this one directly below dozens of Garianis troops, sending them screaming to their deaths into a raging inferno either in one of the Hells or the Plane of Fire itself. Having swallowed them, the portal snapped shut and the process repeated itself a second and then a third time, swallowing up dozens of doomed souls each time.
“Tristol! What do we do?!” Nisha cried out, tossing herd spent wand to the side and diving for cover behind a ruined wall.
Tristol watched in horror as men and women were slain by swords, skewered by spears or arrows, or devoured by packs of ravenous hordelings, all while yet more portals opened to consume those seeking to flee the field of battle. The fight was lost, and Tristol panicked as he felt the earth shudder with the dull rumble of a Cage quake. Was the Lady furious about the opening of portals, or voicing her rage instead at him for attempting to seal them off?
“Nisha!” Tristol dashed over to her side and took her hand. “The Athar won. We’re getting out of here. Hold on.”
The two of them vanished in the bright flash of a teleportation spell moments before a pack of hordelings overran their position.
*****
As the portals finally sealed shut, the battlefield lay strewn with the dead and dying, hundreds of them. Athar soldiers moved about, tending to their own wounded and rounding up those few survivors from the opposing side. The Garianis wounded were killed on the spot and the corpses of their dead were preemptively stabbed through to be certain of their fate.
“No!” A distinctly well-dressed tiefling pointed a finger at a pair of the Athar soldiers as they stood above a wounded women wearing the Garianis clan seal across her tabard. “Not that one.”
The tiefling, one of the Marauder’s ubiquitous groomer-guards, had stood watching the battle, observing not the flow of the fighting itself, but the position and location of specific individuals. He’d been provided a list by his razorvine-crowned employer, and one of the names on that list lay on the ground with Athar steel at her neck. That wouldn’t do at all.
One of the Athar soldiers, a blue-skinned air genasi, stared daggers up at the tiefling, “I don’t care who you are, this b*tch is Delphinia Garianis. She’s more responsible for the desecration of our faction’s headquarters than anyone else here and I’ll be damned by all the false gods if you or anyone else says that I can’t wash away her father’s sins by slitting her throat here and now!”
The tiefling didn’t respond in words. He simply nodded, not to the Athar, but to someone behind them.
“I appreciate your fiendish master’s help but…” The genasi’s eyes went wide as a hand grasped his sword arm with the force of a vice and a blade touched his exposed throat.
Standing behind the Athar soldiers, having seemingly appeared from out of thin air, stood Adamok Ebon, the Marauder’s personal assassin. Dressed in a mixture of silk and almost gossamer chainmail, the bladeling’s own natural skin, where exposed, seemed more like armor plating than most of the soldiers on the battlefield.
“My apologies sir, my humble apologies.” The genasi stuttered as he struggled in vain to escape Adamok’s grip on his arm.
“Go.” The tiefling nodded, the bladeling released her grip, and the Athar soldiers bolted, leaving the daughter of Muriov Garianis on the ground, pleading for her life.
Both the bladeling and the tiefling ignored Delphinia’s pleas for the moment. The assassin carried a second captive, this one a younger man, unconscious and bound in magical iron bands, slung effortlessly over her shoulder like a game animal.
“This is extra.” Adamon’s voice was like well-oiled steel slipping against a grindstone.
The tiefling smiled with genuine appreciation and admiration. “The funds have already been deposited into your account, with the additional fee as contractually stipulated, and a bonus that the Marauder saw fit to add due to the short notice of this business.”
The bladeling nodded and dropped her captive at his feet.
The tiefling smiled and looked down, noting that the second name on his list lay there bound and unharmed. He wasn’t at all surprised to find that when he glanced back up, the bladeling was gone, vanished back into thin air without a single word of obvious magic.
“As always, a pleasure doing business with you.”
Around him the slaughter continued on like clockwork, with every Garianis agent and hired proxy casually and systematically executed, though the ghouls and remaining Dustmen were allowed to scamper off back to whatever tomb they’d crawled out of. Oridi Malefin and her closest followers had teleported to safety once the battle had clearly been lost, and the fallout with her would be purely political in nature rather than any future direct conflict. The Dead would have to find the true death in some other manner than the injured or captured men and women being put to the sword. That same fate was not however in the cards for the two captives slumped and moaning at his feet.
“My father will pay you for my safe return.” Delphinia spoke as politely as she could as her cousin Cyril lay bound at her side. “You’ve proven your claim on the Shattered Temple. We will not dispute it.”
“I’m sure that he will, but that’s not for me to decide.” The tiefling smiled down at her with an expression of polite, professional indifference as he waited for further orders from his mistress who’d been scrying the entirety of the battle from afar.
“Do you have them both?” The Marauder’s voice echoed within her servitor’s mind as a sending spell graced his ears.
“Yes your fiendish majesty, both of them.” He tilted his head ever so slightly as the magic provided a tingling sensation on his right ear. “What shall you have us do with them?”
“Bring them to me at the empty warehouse at the corner of Blackfoot and Silver Pike. I don’t wish to be disturbed, and that district is dead for foot traffic at this hour.”
“Is there anything else that I should bring?”
Even in service to her as many years as he had been, and even as he remained aloof and unconcerned with the screams of men being put to the sword or the sounds of hordelings noisily devouring the dead and dying, the mental impression of Shemeska’s smile and the bubbling drool inherent in her next statement sent a chill up his spine.
“A blade, a box, and a sensory stone.”
*****
