“I remember that. Detarr Ur’Mayan and the rest, back before they got branded as foes. Lot of henchmen ran a lot of contraband for them. What were they doing again?” asked Benny.

“It was not entirely clear,” Flinn replied. “Something about making guild heroes stronger. Or more cost effective. Or both. I suspect they would have known what they were looking for had they found it, but as best I can tell, all of their efforts ended in failure.”

“Yeah, getting beheaded by Johan doesn’t seem like much of a success.”

“A timely observation,” muttered the Tinderkin. “But who can say what the mages accomplished before they were disbanded? All records of the project are kept locked in the Great Vault, as are most of the artifacts used by the rogue noctomancers.”

“Until now,” said Benny, tapping the box with the tip of his hook.

“Until now,” agreed Flinn.

“So what’s in the box?”

“The last experiment of Teldir of Umbrax,” said Flinn, opening the package. Several loose sheets of paper covered its contents. The top page showed a drawing of three malformed skulls clustered together, each with a third eye staring from its forehead. Arcane diagrams and a long verse were scrawled in the margins around the grim sketch. “The Stone Skulls of Az’Herad the Mad.”

Beneath the paper, a red lacquered box contained a trio of carved stones. They were a perfect match for the drawing, with bloodred gemstones set in the eye sockets of each grim face. Despite the dry satin they lay on, the stones glistened as though perpetually moist, and smelled faintly of rot. Flinn glanced over subsequent pages of notes. “Teldir discovered the ritual to activate them.”

“But you said the experiments all failed,” said Benny.

“With spectacular violence in this case, it seems,” said Flinn, flipping to a guild audit. “But some failures are more useful than others.”

Benny tapped their nose knowingly. “Ah, we like to call that sort of thing a happy accident.”

“I doubt that Teldir of Umbrax would use that term, were he still alive.”

Benny twisted his lips into a frustrated scowl. “One thing, though. How do we know all this stuff?”

“It’s in the king’s instructions.”

“Yeah, fine, but how does the king know all this stuff?” Benny gestured impatiently with himself. “I mean, this was all before Handor, before Johan was ‘the Mighty,’ right? Back when he was some farmboy dreaming of slaying gnurgs. How’d he figure out which secret wizard uncovered which forgotten relic?”

“I… uh…” Flinn frowned at the unpleasant sensation of finding himself momentarily speechless. “Well, the king has access to all of the Royal Archives and learnings. The Leviathan Project must have the letters, memos, reports, invoices… the sort of detritus that piles up around any project, secret or not. Surely he could find the information.”

Benny shrugged Flinn’s shoulders. “Could, maybe. But would he? Johan strike you as the kind of person to do a lot of late-night scribe work?”

“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to welcome such lines of inquiry,” said Flinn, checking over the letter again. “Nor as the patient sort. Now that we have the stones and the rites, all we need is a few corpses. And I happen to know where the king left a few.”

“What about what happened to that wizard?” said Benny. “You think it’s safe to use the stones?”

“Safer than angering Johan,” said Flinn, placing the stones back in the box. “Besides, just because we’ll perform Teldir’s incantation doesn’t mean we’ll repeat Teldir’s mistake.”

“And what was that?”

“Sticking around to observe the results,” said Flinn.

“Ha! So we head down, set the stones up around the stiffs, read some magic words, then bolt like a Gnome on fire,” said Benny.

“We’ll also need to draw some diagrams in salt and blood, set a trigger spell, that sort of thing.” The Tinderkin slipped the parcel into a rucksack. “Still, you’ve captured the essence of the plan.”

Benny nodded Flinn’s head. “Seems easy enough.”

“Seems like trouble,” said the bannerman. She wore the red and blue heraldry of a member of the Fourth Tier’s regiment of the city guard, though it was stained with the viscera of a midnight ten-cent beef roll.

“Very suspicious,” said her partner, a Sun Gnome in pristine but otherwise identical livery. He studied the scene before him with dark eyes set in a brick-brown face. He must not have liked what he saw, because the silver mustache beneath his long nose drooped into an extended frown.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Duine Poldo. “Is there a problem with his paperwork?”

The Troll snored loudly behind him.

“The paperwork looks all right,” the Human officer reluctantly offered, but her scowl said she wasn’t one to trust appearances.

“NPC papers don’t mean you can sleep in a public street,” said the Sun Gnome.

“He’s sleeping on private property,” Mrs. Hrurk said, loudly enough to be heard from her perch on the stoop. “Those are my steps.”

“So he was trespassing then?” A note of hope sounded in the taller bannerman’s voice, but her face drooped when she saw the expressions Mr. Poldo and Mrs. Hrurk’s wore.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” the Scribkin repeated.

The bannermen scowled and glanced at each other. Poldo suspected they were used to getting their way through a combination of quickly spoken jargon and implicit threats. Yet Poldo was more than familiar enough with the law to see through their jargon, and nobody out-threatens a Troll. He almost pitied the poor guards. It was clear they were looking for the sort of patrol that ended in a mug of coffee and an egg pastry, and instead they were stuck here with only unpleasant options. If they backed down, they’d lose face. If they tried to arrest Thane in this state, they might lose limbs instead.

The Sun Gnome snorted. “Still, we should interview the Troll.”

“Of course,” said Poldo, stepping aside.

The bannermen stared at the recumbent behemoth. Arth didn’t have a proverb about letting sleeping Trolls lie, but the two guards clearly felt such an axiom should exist.

“Someone should take down his name and a statement,” said the Human.

“Someone is welcome to,” said Mrs. Hrurk.

The two bannermen stared at each other expectantly. An awkward silence stretched and twisted in the cold wind.

Eventually the Sun Gnome relented and, with no small amount of trepidation, approached the sleeping Troll. “Sir?” he whispered, nudging the tip of Thane’s finger with the butt of his spear.

Thane’s awakening was a tectonic event, forecast only when his bloodshot eyes snapped open. Arms like tree-trunks slammed the pavers and pushed him upward, and he rose with the force and roar of a mountain growing from colliding continents. “What time is… how long did I sleep?”

Poldo raised his hands in supplication. “Just a few hours,” he said. “But I⁠—”

That was as far as he got. The Gnome may as well have tried to placate an avalanche. With a roar like a rockslide, Thane barreled onto the street and sprinted Ridgeward.

“Someone should go after him,” said the taller bannerman.

“Someone should,” agreed her partner.

“I will,” Poldo harrumphed as he adjusted his coat. “Though I doubt I’ll catch up with him.”