“When we can escape notice. When we can stay underneath the scrying spell.” Flinn shook his head. “Do you think King Johan will ignore such an offense?”
“You don’t know.”
“We both do. He said he needed somebody reliable.”
“That’s more threat than compliment in our line of work.”
“Exactly my point.”
From the outside, it might appear to a proverbial onlooker that the Gnome was having an argument with himself as he slouched by his dimly lit desk. On the inside, the Tinderkin was locked in a vigorous debate with the other consciousness currently residing in his skull.
“He wouldn’t dare move against us,” said the Hookhand.
“Oh? And have your sources turned up anything on the fate of Weaver Ortson? Or is his disappearance just as mysterious as the vacant palace staff?”
“Well, I…”
Benny trailed off, giving Flinn the opportunity to seize control again. “Even Goldson and Baggs have fled the city on the pretenses of a business trip. The king is best avoided, but failing that, we must act swiftly.”
“I still don’t like it,” Benny grumbled. He nodded at the black box on the desk. “Feels like old magic. Really old. The dangerous stuff.”
Flinn felt it too. He suspected the king’s courier had experienced a similar sensation, given the speed with which the man had dropped the package and unceremoniously scuttled away. “I think we will have need of as much danger as we can get, given our task.”
“What is in the box, anyway?”
“I know you read the king’s letter.” Flinn glanced over the missive that Johan had sent alongside the parcel. “I was there.”
“I don’t do paperwork, and I don’t read orders,” said Benny Hookhand. “That’s what lackeys are for.”
“Sadly, we find ourselves bereft of lackeys.”
“Speak for yourself. I have you,” smirked Benny.
Flinn sighed inwardly as Benny laughed outwardly. “The king has provided us an artifact from the Leviathan Project.”
“The what?”
“An old experiment funded by King Felik the Fourth and King Lojern of Ruskan. Its participants dabbled in forbidden magics, as I understand, so it was kept secret. And just as well; Felik and Lojern wound up feuding with the wizards they had hired.”
“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?”
