The Nameless Assassins

Arcane Nonsense

While we were waiting for Ash's mother to analyze the Ascendent blood sample, more arcane shenanigans popped up. The last time we saw Nyryx, she'd told Ash that his fragment of the Gates of Death had reached the city already and just needed to be smuggled through the lightning barrier. Now she sent a follow-up message alerting him that it had arrived, and Ash invited Faith and me to go retrieve it with him.

Since I would have gone regardless – with or without his knowledge – I gave a noncommittal grunt, but Faith cried, "I can't be left behind when we're talking to my dearest friend!" and flung on her pinkest cloak.

At least she looked like someone who might frequent Catcrawl Alley.

As we walked north to the Docks, Faith hummed to herself and ignored the two of us, and Ash finally officially presented his pet project to me. He prefaced it with, "One big problem is that when ghosts possess a Hollow, they can still be detected via attunement. Obviously, the Church is wary of this, so they search for it specifically. I've been learning a ritual to hide the possessing ghost, which will be extremely useful for us, but there is a cost...."

Much of this exposition I'd already inferred from bits and pieces of conversations I'd overheard, but I played along. "Hmmm, that does seem helpful," I agreed. "What is the cost?"

"Well, obviously, the ritual itself is very stressful, but it also has to be performed near a spirit well."

That piece of jargon was new. "A 'spirit well'?"

"A location with an unusually high concentration of spectral activity," Ash explained, which I translated as "somewhere with even more ghosts than usual for Doskvol." Which was really saying something. Switching into the didactic mode that I recognized from his classes, he lectured, "No one is sure why spirit wells occur. They just do, frequently at the intersections of canals, so one of the Gondoliers' primary missions is to find and destroy them."

That, I hadn't known. Sifting through my memories of the city's canals, I couldn't identify any specific incident that hinted at the boat operators' Whisper-y extracurriculars.

I didn't like that.

Having imparted his Useful Life Lesson of the Day, Ash returned to his customary stream-of-consciousness patter. "In any case, that person we killed, I don't remember the name – "

"Which one?" I inquired, very drily.

Faith's tuneless humming cut out, suggesting that we'd piqued her interest at last.

"The Church person." Ash waved his hand up and down his front, conveying the impression of clerical robes (or possibly nudity?). "That high-ranking one. The one who was our precursor to disrupting the Ascension ritual?"

At that, Faith and I stopped short with matching incredulous stares.

"You mean Kender Morland?" I asked for both of us.

If the curate of Charhallow counted as high ranking, then Preceptor Dunvil might as well be perched on the moon at its apex, and we should give up any designs against him right this instant, because they were doomed to fall very, very short.

Ash rolled his eyes, dismissing reality (or maybe the shabbiness of Charhallow's church). "Yes, anyway." He started walking again, and after a half-beat, Faith and I followed suit. "There are many people through whom we could learn an awful lot if we replaced them." He indulged in a brief fantasy: "Who knows? Maybe we could replace the entire Church hierarchy with Hollows...." Shaking his head to get himself back on track, he pronounced, "In any case, we need the fragment, and then we need a target."