The Ghost's Crusade

Chapter IV: Akkali

... Lady Red Tavern, Baedorn

"So you all pack in here at night?"

"Anywhere there's a heavy door and we can barricade the windows, really." The man beside Akkali scratched at his hairless chin. "It's getting pretty bad. The only one's that got any business these days are the coffinmakers and the undertakers-they're pleased as pigs in shit."

Grinning, Akkali swirled what was left of her drink in her mug, then made it disappear down her throat. She had been chatting with the tavern's barback Imarin for the last half hour, ever since she had come upon him unloading the last of that day's bread from a cart in the side alleyway. Giving the Enkiri a hand, she found he was actually very good company with a glib sense of humor that would have gotten him flogged to death were he born in the Empire. He had a wife who worked as a seamstress and a daughter who was fond of keeping pigeons in a coop at the back of their tiny home near Cheapside. Like most others she had crossed paths with since arriving, he was wary about the things going on at night in the city but unlike the rest of the gibbering fools he actually had a rational take on the entire thing. It was the only reason she had stuck around for so long speaking with the man.

The dozens of people packed into the tavern on the other side of the wall barely made enough noise to pass through the crack beneath the door of the dim storage room where they sat atop kegs of unopened lager. The mood was grim and penitent, as if everyone felt they had done something wrong and were now getting their comeuppance. There were terse, short conversations and a lot of drinking judging by the clanking mugs and tankards, but not much else. Even the minstrels refrained from playing anything too upbeat lest they be accused of trying to make light of the situation. With the depressing conversations and lack of frivolity she was surprised no one was belting out funeral dirges and carving their wills into the bar tables in preparation for their impending demise.

"So they roam about the streets and snatch people up?"

Imarin gave her a shrug. "Nobody's claimed any any of the bodies, and some were on display for a few days before they were burned. But they have to come from somewhere, don't they?" He topped off her glass from one of the half-full pitchers he had been wiping down to keep his hands busy. "You see any raiders outside the city?"

"Not a damn one," replied the Enkiri with a frown. "I was hoping they were taking an autumn holiday."

Stuffing his polishing cloth in the pocket of his apron he chuckled and scratched at the bridge of his nose. "I don't know much else than the fact that they aren't raiding. I'm just the barback after all-haven't actually been outside the city in years. But if I had any coin I'd put it on them's being the stock for all the corpses. Wouldn't be such a bad thing if people'd just keep their bloody shops open. It's been a generation since anything came through the Grand Gate without having paid the raider's tariff."

Thinking quietly for a bit, she upended her mug and drained what was left. She set it aside and considered what she had gathered so far from the four taverns where she had found people willing to talk while Imarin turned his attention back to tallying the barrels of alcohol left in the tavern's stores. She noticed he couldn't write, as was the case with most of the poor in the Oribian, but he kept track of everything with hatch marks and symbols that looked almost exactly like the stamps the breweries burned into their kegs. The man could have lead a profitable life as a forger judging by the details he drew on his small sheets of paper.

City-wide the story went that a little over a month ago dead people began popping up in the streets overnight. Dead, disfigured people, in twos and threes all in places that one wouldn't normally use to dump a body. And while the city coroner had confirmed that they were human-apparently there had been a mob that had demanded a public autopsy, of all things, where all the internal organs had been removed and matched up to a recently and naturally deceased fool murdered in a bar fight-the bodies on the surface resembled twisted monsters. Every one of them was misshapen and gnarled as though they had been charred by "flames of the Inferno."