Letter Eighteen

Dear Sneffles,
The night seemed to last forever in that stinking pen where we rested and the spirits came to talk with me...Little Willie, Mackerel Snapper, and Chemical Bob—they’d first appeared in my rooms at Korvosa soon after Redcullin arrived. (You know you’ve hit bottom when you have to rent a room to a Barbarian lad, wet behind the ears, and horny as a sea owl.) But you know something? He was good fun. I wonder what’s happened to that big lunk since then? Eating the brains of a four-day-dead mule in the great outback, I imagine. “Staff of life,” they call it in the Cinterlands.

What good is all this loot if we die in the morning? I could not sleep in the stuffy room and slipped out into the courtyard of our afternoon battle. I cut a big strip of dragonhide from the flank of the great beast we’d killed. I’ll have it made into boots for you, my love.

I crossed over to the well where I had cowered like a new sailor during his first storm at sea as the dragon squeezed the life from little Finarfin. Good times. From there I crossed to the passage beneath the balcony where I should have been lurking with my bow during our encounter with Bellkazar. Live and learn, I guess.

Then, a sudden movement in the shadow.

There Laori Vauss waited like a hungry cuttlefish. I approached her gingerly. She’s all fishhook, that girl. You would think that someone who loves the taste of blood as much as she does would be a vampire, but, no, it’s part of her religion, apparently, and when a female adherent of Zon-Kuthon mates, it’s said, she murders the male and then bears his child.

She’s hot! I know.

My challenge is how to get her to bear my child without me dying in the process. “Easy,” says the spider to the fly.

In the shadows she stayed mostly hidden, except for that wicked smile. “I won’t bite,” she mocked. “Maybe....”

“Who cares?” I reached for her, grasping her forearm. She had an adamantine blade stashed there. As I bent to kiss her hand I caught the scent of almonds from the poison she’d applied to its edge. I exposed the back of my neck to her killing blow.

But none came.

Instead we kissed in the wan moonlight, my left hand upon her breast, where a short-ranged magic missile aimed right between my eyes. She did not release it. She tasted sweet, which surprised me—I guess I was expecting carrion. Her garrote was finely crafted, caressing as it strangled, but she’s a bit slow, so I put her on the ground and held her there.

“Seriously, Laori,” I said as she struggled beneath me, angry now, instead of her earlier smiles. “Can’t you love a man you can’t kill?”

“I haven’t met that man yet,” she cooed, a venomous rasp.

At that moment we heard a cock crow in some forgotten corner of the castle’s keep and knew that playtime was over. I bid her farewell, ducking just before her blade whipped past my eyes. I watched her smile fading into the darkness.

I slipped back into our redoubt before anyone noticed although I caught Finarfin eyeing me speculatively later. He still insists he “made sweet love” with Trinia Sabor even though half a village and yours truly saw her somewhere else at the exact same moment she was supposedly walking the dog with him. Whatever. I guess a man’s gotta dream.

By this time the boys were stirring and working out the kinks in their joints. Szechuan let off a fart that knocked over a bench and turned Driar as green as Andoran wine. We choked down a cold breakfast, barely talking, as we each prepared for the ordeal we would soon be facing. Then Finarfin recited the infernal poem that brought us here and we went out into the gray dawn.

“Fate of steel…Serithtial Her cage for years sustained Four enthralled in lost Scarwall; Undead to keep her chained. A spirit first, red war his thirst Still stands at post of old; A second foe, infernal soul Waits high in tower cold. In kennel’s grime, third bides his time Then vents his killing breath. And on a stone ‘mid ash and bone, The final dreams of death. The spirits worn and battletorn And locked in their damnation, The chained one’s hold at last grows old And ushers in salvation. Yet hope remains amid the chains When blade’s stone cage has crumbled, Friends to dread and the death of the dead, Keys to Kazavon humbled”.

PJ thought we should pursue the “infernal soul” in the nearby tower but there was no way in. Maybe it was underground. Szechuan solved the problem by headbutting a hole in the wall. The boy was jacked to the gills, but I think it was his stones talking, not spell nor herb. We entered cautiously, me lurking in the background like a circus pickpocket.

Finarfin, still smarting from the whupping he’d taken from the dragon, demanded the point, hurrying up a dark staircase where several hellhounds mischievously waited for him. They burned his hair off, giving him his second thrashing in two days. It was hard not to laugh at his surprised yelp, although, to be honest, it wasn’t funny. I tried to cut the legs out from under one of them as it came down the stairs but was shouldered aside by PJ excitedly joining the fray.

A loud gooey splat came from upstairs where Driar had popped a ripe Zombie like a week old boil. We found the rest of the tower empty and were soon contemplating the awesome awfulness of Scarwall from the roof. The bulky shapes of Gargoyles lumbering across the sky reminded me of crows circling the docks in Old Korvosa. Above all a large star-shaped tower loomed and I wondered with a shiver whose eyes were watching us from there. A second tower, much like the one we’d just climbed, anchored the far side of the castle.

We had gotten some nice loot but overall the tower had been a waste of time and we returned to ground floor arguing about our next step, deciding to try our luck in the dungeons next. We descended a short set of stairs into a wide corridor. It was empty and dull. PJ counted his steps as we carefully looked for any entrance into Scarwall’s inner depths. Finally, we found ourselves standing before a large stone door, permanently sealed from the outside. Who—or what—could possible be so dangerous that they would have to be locked away here? And why would we wake such a creature?

Szechuan didn’t care, he made short work of the door using his warhammer this time instead of his head, which had turned black and green and begun to swell ominously.

Inside was a large chamber, on one end of which was an altar and on the other a pool of water that reminded me uncomfortably of the well holding the tentacled creature in the Acropolis. I hung back as the others struggled to get inside, restrained by some sort of spell that spat Finarfin out like a pumpkin seed across the hard, broken tile.

Like sudden Death, Laori Vauss stepped from the shadows, a pixie grin on her face. She helped Finarfin up, saying, “What the fuck?” She ignored me but gave Finarfin the attention an old grandma gives a plump rabbit right before she breaks its neck.

We led her over to the hole in the wall where she gave a squeal of delight upon seeing the altar, which turned out to be a holy place of her deity, Zon-Kuthon. Yeah, he’s a nasty piece of work, but she was able to neutralize his spell for us and also got to ritually slice herself and bleed a little for the greater glory of her god—win-win for everybody.

The entrance to the dungeon was sealed but it wasn’t too hard to pop its lock. I’ve come a long way since Burns’s tutelage, I wonder where the old boy is now and if he’s as rich as I?

In any case, we started with the loot for a change, literally mounds of diamond dust. Maybe I’ll make a cake of them for you when I return. That’s when four ravaged specters appeared, late as always, and said some pretty rude things to us before the Holy Joes took them out. Finarfin basically called me a pussy for not joining in the fight but I don’t see how my blades would have helped with spirits. Maybe he’s right, though, maybe I am a pussy—a pussy who intends to survive these shenanigans of ours and one day cover you with chocolate and diamond dust.

All my love,
Cordobles

Next is Finarfin's Nineteenth Report