Nekropolis

TWENTY

The bar was still busy as hell, and there were a few new suspicious-looking stains on the floor since the last time I’d been here, but the atmosphere seemed calm enough now. But considering why Devona and I had come back, I doubted it was going to stay that way for long.

The juke box was singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” when Devona and I walked in, but as soon as the trio of heads caught sight of me, they stopped. The middle one said, “Not you again!” and all three shut their mouths tight and closed their eyes, as if they were little children who thought they could make me vanish by pretending I didn’t exist. I noticed none of the patrons complained about the performance being interrupted.

Devona and I walked over to the bar and took a pair of stools suddenly vacated by a couple lykes in human form who wrinkled their noses in disgust as they left.

“What did you expect, roses?” I muttered as they walked off.

Skully was busy at the other end of the bar filling a mug of beer for the pierced warlock I’d seen the last time I was in here. The Arcane man still seemed somewhat familiar to me, and while he waited for his beer, I studied his face, but I still couldn’t place him. When Skully handed him his beer, the warlock noticed my scrutiny, but instead of looking upset, he merely gave me a nod and walked over to sit at the same table he’d been at when I’d fought Honani earlier. I wondered if he’d been sitting there alone drinking the entire time I’d been gone. Maybe he was just a solitary type who wanted a relatively quiet place to hide out from the Descension Day madness. Still, there was something about the man that bothered me…

My thoughts were interrupted as Skully came down to our end of the bar.

“Hey, Matt! I’m surprised to see you back so soon-and with your arm reattached, I see. Business?” He nodded to Devona, and from the tone in his voice he would have smiled if he’d possessed the lips and facial muscles to do so. “Or pleasure? Wait, let me guess. Has to be business, as bad as you look. You shouldn’t be in here: you should be over at Papa Chatha’s getting some more work done.”

“This is my new friend Devona. Her father lost something-something very important-and I’m helping her look for it.”

“Oh?”

“Her father’s name is Galm, and the object is called the Dawnstone. Sound familiar?”

Skully shook his fleshless head. “No, should it?”

“Yes, because according to my source”-who was at that very moment most likely expending a great deal of fluid, as he’d put it-“you’re responsible for its disappearance from the Cathedral. Or at least your bosses the Dominari are.”

Then something happened which I’d never seen before. Tiny pinpricks of crimson light began to blaze deep in the cold darkness of Skully’s eye sockets. “I think maybe you’d better leave, Matt, and take your new friend with you.”

He started to turn away, but I grabbed his pudgy, hairy wrist and stopped him. “I know there’s a Dominari-run lab upstairs, Skully. A lab that’s been awfully busy lately cranking out veinburn.”

Skully yanked his arm away. “Your mind has finally rotted through, Matt, you know that? All that’s upstairs are my quarters and some extra storage space.”

Skully and I looked over the bar at each other for a moment. I knew his silver broadaxe wasn’t far from his reach.

“If that’s true, then you won’t have objection to my taking a look, now will you?” And before Skully could respond, I jumped off my stool and ran-limped as fast as I could toward the iron door located the right of the bar.

Head aside, Skully has a fully fleshed body. A little too fully fleshed, and I thought given my current state, we’d be evenly matched with it came to speed. But even with his bulk, Skully was able to grab his axe from behind the counter and leap over the bar and come after me before I made it halfway to the stairs.

He shouted my name, and I turned in time to see him raise his axe over his head, the silver glinting even in the bar’s dim light. “Don’t make me hurt you, Matt. Please.”

Everyone in the bar watched us play out our little drama, not only to see what would happen next but also to help them decide if they should bother taking cover. But no one observed us more intensely than the pierced warlock.

Where the hell do I know that sonofabitch from? I thought.

“If you really don’t want to hurt me, Skully I have a suggestion: put the axe down.”

“I can’t do that, Matt,” he said sadly.

The irony inherent in the situation was so thick you could cut it with Skully’s axe. It was like a replay of earlier in the day, only instead of a murdering lyke, I now faced a friend. A friend who was about to bring a very large, very sharp weapon down on my head, but a friend nonetheless.

“I can’t let this one go,” I said. “It’s too important.”

“And I can’t let you reach those stairs.”

Stalemate. I had little in the way of surprises left in my pockets, and nothing that would take care of Skully. Hell, I wasn’t even exactly sure what sort of creature he was, and I didn’t have the first clue as to what sort of weaknesses he might possess.

“So what do we do now, Matt?” he asked.

“I figure you can just stand there, and I’ll watch as Devona cracks you over your bony noggin with a chair.”

“Come off it, I’m not going to fall for-” The chair connected with his skull with a sharp crack! and a shower of splintered wood. Skully dropped his axe, which hit the concrete floor with a loud clang, and a second later, Skully himself crashed down beside it.

I quickly examined him. He had a tiny jagged fissure in his skull, and the lights in his socket had been extinguished.

Devona held only a pair of chair legs in her hands now, and she let them clatter to the floor. “Is he unconscious?”

“Who can tell? But he’s not moving right now and that’s good enough. Let’s go.” I continued toward the stairs, this time with Devona at my side.

Skully’s patrons didn’t know what to do at first. They merely sat and stared. Then one particular Einstein among them shouted, “Hey, free drinks!” and a stampede for the bar commenced. I hoped Skully wouldn’t get stepped on too badly, even if he had been prepared to turn me into filet-o-zombie.

The iron door that led to the bar’s upper level was locked and-as Devona had figured it would be-it was protected by some seriously powerful wardspells. But Shrike had managed to borrow some magical lockpicks for us from a thief he knew, and using the knowledge Devona had gained from years serving as guardian of Galm’s Collection, she was able to bypass the wardspells and open the door in surprisingly short order.

“I’m impressed,” I said. “If you decide to stop working for your father, you can always take up a career as a cat burglar-or maybe I should say bat burglar.”

She grinned, and we hurried up the stairs as fast as my bum leg would allow and exited onto the second floor. The short hall had only three wooden doors, all closed. I turned to Devona and touched the side of my nose. She nodded and inhaled.

“That one.” She pointed to door number two.

“That one it is, then.” I took out my 9mm, which was now loaded with purely ordinary bullets, stepped to the door, and was about to try the knob when Devona stopped.

“Let me see if it’s warded.” She waved her hands over the door’s surface, careful not to touch it. “It’s clean. I guess the Dominari figured the wardspells on the door downstairs were enough protection. Idiots.” She tried the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. “At least they weren’t too stupid to lock it.”

“As a macho type, I’d ordinarily kick the door in myself,” I said, “but seeing as how you’re somewhat stronger than I am…”

She smiled, leaned back and executed a swift, powerful kick to the middle of the door, which exploded off its hinges and flew into the room.

Devona stepped back and I moved past her into the room, fighting the urge to shout, “Police!” Instead I said, “Nobody move!” Hardly as satisfying, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. At least it fulfilled my quota of tough-guy talk for the day.

There was no one in the room. I kept my gun out, though, just in case. Inside sat a table filled with chemical apparatus: copper tubing, black rubber hoses, beakers, vials, the whole junior chemistry lab bit. Next to that lay a stone altar upon which rested various flowers and herbs, along with the sliced-up body of a dead lamb and the rune-engraved obsidian knife which had done it in. Science and magic, working together to create a better world, or at least a more profitable one-for the Dominari, that is.

“So Morfran was telling the truth,” I said. Even with the motivation we’d provided him with, I still hadn’t quite believed what he’d told us. You can never trust drug-pushing scum, regardless of species or home dimension.

“And I’ll make damn sure the bug pays for it, too.”

I recognized the voice coming from behind us, and though I was dead, it sent a chill through my roomtemperature blood. We turned to see the voice belonged to the shaven-headed punk warlock from downstairs. His piercings-multiple rings in the outer curves of his ears, across his bottom lip, in both nostrils, along his eyebrows, down both sides of his forearms, and who knew where else beneath his ratty jeans and A is for Anarchy T-shirt-pulsed with a silvery energy that wreathed his body in a shimmering argent aura.

I might have been a zombie, but right then I felt a fury inside me as strong as any emotion I’d ever experienced as a living man. I fought to keep my voice calm as I said, “Hello, Yberio.”

The warlock smiled, displaying metal-encased teeth. “Surprised to see me back from the dead, Richter?”

“Are you kidding? This is Nekropolis. Half the people you meet here are one kind of dead or another. You’ve changed a bit from when we last met.” I looked him up and down. “The new look suits you. What does Talaith think about it?”

Devona’s jaw dropped. “Wait, this warlock is the one who created the Overmind for Talaith, the one who-”

“Killed Richter’s partner,” Yberio finished. “Indeed.”

At that moment, I was painfully aware that I still held my 9mm in my right hand. It was down at my side, and I calculated my chances of raising the weapon and getting a shot off before Yberio could do anything to stop me. My reflexes would’ve been slow even if my undead body had been in its peak condition, but as beat-up and decayed as I was right then, I wasn’t in danger of being crowned fastest gun in the Sprawl anytime soon. Yberio must’ve guessed what I was thinking-or perhaps he literally read my mind-and he evidently thought more of my threat potential than I did, because he made a small gesture with his hand and tendrils of silver energy flowed forth from his aura, snatch the gun out of my hand, and tossed it into the corner of the room with contemptuous ease.

“Not that I couldn’t stop a bullet if I wanted to,” Yberio said, “but I’m more conservative in my use of power these days, seeing as how I don’t wield quite so much as I used to. But then again, what’s the point of possessing power if you don’t enjoy it from time to time?”

The warlock stretched his hands toward us and before we could react, two gouts of silver energy blasted forth, slamming us backward into the table holding the chemical and mystical apparatus used for creating veinburn. Vials and beakers shattered, noxious chemicals spilled, the dead goat went flying, and the table broke from the force of the impact. Since I couldn’t feel pain, I wasn’t stunned, and I immediately tried to sit up. But before I could manage to do so, Yberio gestured again, and two more tendrils extended from his aura, the tips shaping themselves into large silvery hands as they came at us. The energy hands smashed into our chests and pressed down like iron weights, pinning us where we lay.

Yberio laughed softly. He sounded pleased, but also a bit sad. “You know, there was a time when I could’ve destroyed both of you far more elegantly than this. I was a Demilord once…but that was before you came to town, Richter.”

I managed to wriggle my right arm free enough to reach up and attempt to clutch the wrist of the silvery hand holding me down. It remained attached to Yberio by an umbilicus of energy, but while it felt solid enough on my chest, when I tried to grab hold of it, my hand merely passed through as if it wasn’t there. I felt a distant tingling sensation, as if I’d come in contact with a strong electrical field.

“Don’t you mean before you decided to start killing people in my jurisdiction back on Earth?” I countered.

“Details, details,” Yberio said.

I turned my head to check on Devona. She appeared unharmed, and while she too struggled to free herself from the grasp of Yberio’s argent energy, she met with no more success than I had.

“Matt checked your pulse after the Overmind was destroyed,” she said. “You didn’t have one.”

“I did,” Yberio said. “It was just hard for him to feel it-especially since he’d become a zombie and wasn’t used to his newly deadened sense of touch. I wasn’t dead, merely in a deep coma as it turned out, and I spent a number of months in that state as my mind and body worked desperately to heal themselves. Talaith helped as much as she could, but she’d suffered her own injuries from the Overmind’s demise and needed the bulk of her magic to heal herself. And when I finally awoke, I found myself…diminished. I still had my knowledge of magic, but I was only capable of accessing and channeling a fraction of the mystic energy I once could. It seemed the psychic backlash caused by the destruction of the Overmind had burned out a portion of my own mind, and I was no longer a Demilord, but merely an ordinary warlock.” He paused, and his tone grew bitter, “And not a particularly strong one at that.”

I couldn’t reach any of my pockets, and even if I could, I didn’t have anything that I could use against Yberio. I looked around at the wreckage of the lab table that I was lying amidst, hoping to find something, anything, I could use as a weapon. My gaze fell upon a half-broken beaker that still contained several ounces of a yellow-green chemical. Not veinburn itself, but one of its ingredients. The beaker lay just outside of my reach, but if I could manage to stretch a bit…

“That’s why you wear all those rings,” Devona said. “They augment your natural magical abilities.”

“Very good,” Yberio gave Devona an appraising look. “You’re half vampire, right? Perhaps you have a bit of Arcane blood in you on your human side. But you’re correct. My rings help me absorb, store, and channel the mystic energy, all of which I can no longer do on my own. In human terms, it’s the equivalent of replacing a lost limb with a prosthesis or using a wheelchair if one can no longer walk.”

I saw Devona give me a quick glance. She understood what I was trying to do, and she looked back to Yberio and tried to keep him talking.

“I bet Talaith wasn’t happy about that,” she said,” considering how she feels about technology.”

“My rings aren’t technology in the strictest sense, but you’re right. Talaith considered them to be the same thing. At the very least, she thought them…unnatural.” Yberio let out a dark, bitter laugh. “As if there could be anything more unnatural than the likes of us! But she was angry with me for talking her into creating the Overmind, and she blamed me for the injuries that resulted in her loss of power. Darklords aren’t known for their forgiving nature, but one thing they can never forgive is anyone who causes them to lose strength or, even worse, face.”

I stretched my fingers toward the broken beaker. I was almost there. Just another inch…

Yberio continued his one-man pity party. “Talaith felt that I had made her a laughing stock in the eyes of her fellow Lords.” He sneered. “As if that mattered. Arrogant fools, every one of them. They think they’re better than we Demilords, simply because Dis chose them to help create Nekropolis. But did you know that Dis spent an entire year traveling the length and breadth of Earth, searching for the most powerful Darkfolk to help him turn his dream of Nekropolis into reality? And once he found them, he tested them in combat to determine just how strong they were. I was one of the Arcane Dis tested during the Wanderyear, and I acquitted myself admirably. I might well have been chosen to be a Darklord instead of Talaith-and I should’ve been! Dis might fancy himself a god, but in the end he’s just another damned monster like the rest of us. He’s not perfect; he’s fully capable of making errors of judgment.”

A half-inch now…

“But Dis didn’t choose you, he chose Talaith,” Devona said. “And Talaith banished you for failing her and turning to artificial means of enhancing your power, didn’t she?”

From the face Yberio made, you’d have thought he was having trouble swallowing a crap-covered turdball rolled in shit sprinkles. “Yes-and that’s when I realized I’d been a fool standing by her side all those centuries, helping her fight for one meaningless cause or another, all so she could increase her own power. First in the Blood Wars, and then in her endless pissing contests with the other so-called Lords. When I left Woodhome, I decided that from then on, I was going to work to increase my power and no one else’s!”

The tips of my fingers brushed the beaker’s glass surface. I thought I felt something snap in my shoulder, as if a tendon had torn loose, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting my hand on that beaker.

“But power costs money,” Devona said. “You needed a way to make darkgems, so you began freelancing for the Dominari, helping them make new drugs like veinburn.”

Yberio gave her a smug little smile. “Well. I do still retain my knowledge of magic, you know.”

At last, I managed to wrap my fingers around the beaker.

“Tell me something, Yberio,” I said. “Do you still know how to catch?”

Before he could react, I hurled the beaker toward him. As I’d hoped, he wasn’t prepared for the attack and the half-broken glass container sailed through his silver energy aura without resistance. I got lucky and the jagged edge of the beaker hit him in the face, and the greenish-yellow liquid inside sloshed into his eyes. Yberio screamed and staggered backward, and as his concentration shattered, the silver hands holding Devona and I down vanished, along with the energy aura surrounding him. Crimson blood mixed with yellow-green chemicals as Yberio desperately wiped at his eyes, trying to clear them.

I sat up, intending to rise to my feet and confront the warlock who had killed my partner, but before I could stand, Devona leapt to her feet and closed on Yberio with the savage speed and grace of a jungle cat. She grabbed hold his shoulder with one hand, grabbed the top of his bald scalp with the other, and yanked his head to the side. Then she bared her fangs with a snarl and plunged her teeth into the warlock’s exposed neck. Yberio shrieked as Devona tore out a chuck of his flesh and blood gushed from the wound.

Devona stepped back, her mouth and chest covered with the warlock’s blood. She spat out the hunk of meat she’d bitten off and it hit the floor with a wet plap. Now Yberio pressed his hand to his throat, trying to keep his lifeblood from spilling out.

“A few hours ago, I was joined to Matt soul-to-soul,” Devona said. “I experienced his thoughts, his emotions…and his memories. I know what you did to his partner, and more, I know what that loss did to him. You should’ve died the day the Overmind was destroyed, you bastard. But you didn’t, and so I’m glad to finish the job. For Matt.” She paused. “For my love.”

I was so overwhelmed by what Devona had done-and even more by what she’d just said-that for a moment all I could do was sit there gaping like an undead moron. Her fangs were distended, her eyes were wild, and her mouth was smeared with gore…and I’d never seen any woman more beautiful.

But then Yberio’s free arm flared with silver energy and he backhanded Devona, sending her sailing through the air to collide with the far wall. She bounced off and fell onto her side, moaning.

Silver power flickered to life around the hand Yberio held pressed to his neck wound, and I knew he was attempting to heal it. I slowly rose to my feet and started toward him.

“You know, Richter, as long as you and your little bloodcunt didn’t find out about this lab, I was going to leave you alone. Sure, your destruction of the Overmind ruined my life, but I like to think I’ve risen above such petty things as revenge. If you don’t stand in the way of my acquisition of power, why should I bother with you? But things have gone way too far now, and I’m-”

By this time I’d reached Yberio. I calmly took his head in my heads and gave it a single vicious twist. There was a loud crack, Yberio’s eyes went wide, and his silver aura winked out. When I released his head, his dead body slumped to the floor. “You shouldn’t have called her that,” I whispered. Then I turned and went over to see how Devona was.

She managed to rise to a kneeling position, and I took her hand and helped her to stand.

“You all right?”

She drew the back of her hand across her mouth to wipe away Yberio’s blood. “I’ve been better, but I think I’ll live.”

I intended to take her into my arms and give her the hug of her life, when I saw Skully standing in the doorway, axe held at his side. I searched for pinpricks of anger in his sockets and found none. He looked down at Yberio’s dead body, his boneface expressionless as always.

“I never did like that dick,” he said.

“I’ve known you ever since I first came to Nekropolis, Skully. Hell, I was still alive when we met. I knew you worked for the Dominari, but I never figured you’d associate with a scumbag like that .” I gestured toward Yberio’s corpse.

“I had my orders.” Skully said. “And given who my bosses are, it’s a good idea to do what they want, regardless of what I might think about it.”

“Yberio was Arcane-not to mention Talaith’s former consort,” I said. “Was she in on this operation?” I asked.

“Not to my knowledge. The bosses don’t like messing around with Darklords. Far as I know, Yberio worked here only for the money.”

Did that mean Gregor-as impossible as it sounded-had been wrong about Talaith’s involvement? Or was Skully not telling me the truth?

“What do you know about the theft of the Dawnstone, Skully? And what do the Dominari plan to do with it?”

“The bosses had nothing to do with stealing the Dawnstone. They were working with someone else, someone whose identity I don’t know. I wasn’t particularly chummy with Yberio, but we talked a few times. From what I gathered, someone approached the bosses with the formula for veinburn, but needed some capital and the technical know-how to produce it. For providing both, and giving a relatively small quantity of the finished product to their silent partner, the Dominari got to keep the formula.”

“So the Dominari are probably setting up other veinburn labs around the city even as we speak. Great. Tell me, Skully, didn’t it bother you what they were doing up here?”

“Sure it did.” He gazed down at Yberio’s body. “I may have to take orders, but that doesn’t mean I always like it.”

It was impossible to gauge his emotional state from his face (or lack thereof), but he sounded sincere. “And you have no idea who your Dominari’s mystery partner might be?”

“No, and I don’t think Yberio knew, either.”

“How does Morfran fit into this?”

“He’s one of the bosses’ regular dealers, a small timer who usually sells mind dust. The bosses wanted him to try veinburn out on the market, see how people took to it.”

“Which they undoubtedly did, given how addictive it is.” I thought for a moment. “You said Morfran’s a small timer. Why would the Dominari choose him for such an important project?”

“I wondered about that myself, but like I said, it’s best not to ask questions.”

“Perhaps because the Dominari’s new partner asked them to,” Devona said. “Because one of his regular customers was Varma.”

“Who, fun-loving guy that he was, was probably first in line to try Morfran’s newest product,” I said. “Which got him hooked-”

“And after that, he’d do anything for more,” Devona finished for me. “Including risk Father’s wrath by stealing the Dawnstone.”

“This unknown ‘partner’ probably made his or her own arrangements with Varma. The theft of an object of power from a Darklord is far too difficult an undertaking to involve a sleazy little bug like Morfran. And then, once we started nosing around, Mr. or Ms. Unknown decided to have Varma killed, in case we found him and got him to talk.”

“And if Varma wouldn’t have told us what happened to the Dawnstone, I would’ve had no choice but to tell Father everything myself, and he most definitely would’ve gotten Varma to talk. So Varma had to die.”

I didn’t want to think about what sort of persuasive techniques Lord Galm might have used on his bloodson. Varma’s death by veinburn, ugly as it had been, might well have been kinder than leaving him to Galm’s less-than-tender mercies.

Devona frowned. “What I don’t understand is why wait to kill Varma? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to kill him as soon as he delivered the Dawnstone?”

“Murdering Varma then would’ve drawn too much attention too early. Mr. Unknown wasn’t worried about Varma spontaneously confessing. Varma would’ve been too afraid of Galm-and the punishment he would deliver-to admit his crime. It wasn’t until we got too close that Varma became a liability and needed to be dealt with.”

Devona’s already pale skin grew paler. “Then…we’re responsible for his death. No, I am, because I was afraid to go to Father, afraid of his anger, his disappointment. If I had spoken to Father instead of hiring you…Varma might still be alive.”

I took her hand. “The only ones responsible for killing Varma are the Red Tide vampires, and whoever was pulling their strings-or in their case, wires. Okay?”

Devona didn’t look completely convinced, but she nodded anyway. I figured it was the best I was going to get just then. I turned to Skully, who had been standing silently by while Devona and I tried to piece this mess together. “Do the Dominari have any connection with the Red Tide?”

“No, those tech-psychos are too unstable.”

“So they worked directly for Mr. Unknown. I thought as much.” There was something important about that particular tidbit of information, but I couldn’t quite put my rapidly decomposing finger on it. Not yet.

“So where does that leave us?” Devona asked.

“Not much farther along than we were before,” I admitted. “It appears Talaith doesn’t have the Dawnstone and neither do the Dominari. It looks like Skully’s bosses are the only ones who know who does have it, but I doubt they’d agree to share that information, assuming we could even locate them.” I sighed. “I think it’s safe to say that our investigation has run into a very large and very dead end.”

“Uh, Matt?” Skully said. “There’s something else.”

“What? You know something you haven’t told us?” I said hopefully.

“Not exactly. Remember when I told you it was a good idea to follow the bosses’ orders? Well, they gave me some instructions about what I should do if you discovered the lab.”

He lifted his axe.

“You don’t want to do this,” I said.

“No, but I have my orders.” He took a step forward.

“If you really wanted to kill us, it would have been much easier to lead us up here in the first place, get us off our guard, and then let Yberio catch us unaware. But you didn’t do that. You tried to send us away, and then you tried to stop us from coming up here.”

Skully’s grip on his axe tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened, as if were trying to decide his next move.

“So?”

“So I think you were disobeying orders, not following them, when you asked us to leave. And I think it’s because you didn’t want to have to kill a friend.”

Skully gave forth a hollow laugh. “The Dominari and their servants have no friends.”

“Then prove me wrong. Go ahead, make like Lizzie Borden. I won’t stop you.”

I heard Devona draw in a nervous gasp of air, but otherwise she did nothing.

Skully stood silently for several moments before finally lowering his axe. “You’re right, Matt; I don’t want to kill you. You’re the closest thing to a friend I have. But when the bosses find out I couldn’t go through with it…” His shoulders slumped. “Maybe I should just go ahead and turn myself in to the Adjudicators. Spending the rest of eternity locked away in Tenebrus would be a far gentler fate than what the Dominari will do to me when they learn I’ve failed.”

Tenebrus was Nekropolis’s prison, located deep beneath the Nightspire. Run by the ancient Egyptian sorceress Keket and her jackal-headed Warders, even in a city built from terror and darkness, it was among the most feared of places.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We can make it look like you tried to kill us. Yberio is dead, and the lab’s already trashed from our fight with him. We’ll clonk you on the head again, this time with your own axe. We’ll take off and you can just lie here unconscious until someone comes looking for you-or your customers downstairs steal all your booze, whichever comes first. With any luck, when the Dominari investigate, they’ll believe you when you say you tried, but how could be you expected to stop of pair of dangerous characters like us who killed a former Demilord? ”

“Won’t they punish Skully anyway?” Devona asked.

“I doubt it. Skully’s place has been a fixture in the Sprawl for years, and I bet the Dominari get too much use out of it-and its owner-to get rid of either.” I turned to Skully. “If your bosses ask why I didn’t turn you in to the Adjudicators, tell them you bribed me to keep my mouth shut.”

“You’d do all that for me?” Skully asked.

I smiled. “Hey, what are friends for?”

Just then a solemn, sonorous tone sounded off in the distance. Several seconds later another sounded, and then another. They kept coming every ten seconds, soft and low, reminding me a bit of the lonely, mournful sound a foghorn makes.

“What’s that noise?” I asked.

“Father Dis!” Devona swore. “It’s the Deathknell summoning the Darklords to the Nightspire-the Renewal Ceremony will start soon!”

It was my turn to swear. We were too late. I was certain whoever had the Dawnstone planned to use it during the ceremony to kill Lord Galm, or maybe even Dis himself, if such a thing were possible. And there was nothing we could do about it. Unless…

I grabbed Devona’s hand and pulled her toward the door. “I’m afraid you’ll have to hit yourself over the head, Skully. Devona and I have to go.” I shoved past him, and Devona and I stepped over the late and very much unlamented Yberio. We hurried down the stairs, taking them as fast as my bum leg would allow.

“Where are you going?” Skully called after us.

I shouted over my shoulder. “To crash a party!”