Good stuff Goonalan. A genuine pleasure to read.
Why thank you, much appreciated- and good to have you over here.
And now...
The Friday Knights in Sellswords of Fallcrest
Part 17: Madame Zeb.
The chamber ahead is deserted, or so it seems... there are a staggering number of bedrolls here, all... what's the phrase,
- certainly not the kind of place the discerning adventurers would lay their head to rest. A dozen or more half-burnt candles are wedged here and there, offering up globes of weak sickly yellow light. The air is thick with the stink of sweat, filth, death, and worst of all desperation.
A noise...
“Shhh!” Kullervo whispers harshly, which brings the ragged trail of adventurers to a halt.
“What is...” Cathal, first in-line whispers back, but is signalled into silence. The warrior of Kord chews at his beard, swallows bile, and tries to order his emotions.
Kullervo creeps forward, every now and then the floorboards protest his passing, but the sound, while cacophonous to his ears, carries but a few feet; and besides no-one is listening.
The young Rogue creeps on- at the far side of the chamber, to the left, a set of stairs lead down and into darkness, to the right an archway- light, and the odd noise that earlier arrested their motion.
Kullervo gestures, one hand up for the others to wait, and presses on and into the brief shadow of the arch- he looks through and into Madame Zeb'oltha's lair- the chamber ahead is littered with remnants of eldritch wizardry. Shattered vials, broken canoptic jars, shards of bone and glowing glass globes half full of slowly bubbling demon-slime [1].
The walls of the chamber are covered in all manner of manic scrawls, mixed in with which are bizarre diagrams fashioned from chalk, and more often- blood. One of the diagrams purports to show the correct formula for the completion of the fabled Gnome Rubix Cube [2].
The chamber isn't empty, the noises are the ticks, whirrs and general babblings of an enormously thick-set female Tiefling, the aforementioned, Madame Zeb. The Tiefling wears some circus tent size robe-come-smock, adorned with all manner of bloody splatters and chemical burns. Her hat, pointed like a wizard's, is held in place by a thick rubber cord. She clatters about the laboratory in a pair of ill-fitting clogs, seemingly made from the shaped thigh bones of some recently oppressed, and perhaps even extinct, species.
At the belt at her side is a gleaming, razor-sharp, sickle; and clutched in her fat sweaty hand is a short black rod, topped with a small white skull.
“I hate almonds!” Madame Zeb croaks suddenly, then in a whispered hiss, “Blessings be to my Demon Lord- there shall be no almonds!” The second half of the sentence is delivered with gusto, her face upturned- towards the heavens - actually the blood-splattered ceiling. She cackles a while and gets back to her cake mix.
Creeeak
A floorboard, Kullervo swiftly rocks back further, onto the balls of his feet- ready to race, he's spotted something else, or rather something... else's. Two of them, big fat something else's.
Either side of the shadowed arch in which he stands are mountains of men, scratch that- hillocks of men; great bald headed corpulent barrels of flesh, their shivering and yet sweating folds are etched and scarred. The formulations of Madame Zeb are cut into their skin. A riot of bloody tattoos that in a myriad languages, mostly dark and garbled, proclaim all manner of foul and arcane pledges, oaths and curses [3]. The fearsome pair are, Kullervo notes, wearing nappies.
The young Rogue gulps and tip-toes back to his companions to tell all.
[1] All products shown were previously available to purchase from “Incantata & Implementia”, proprietor Alan Shuttlecock, Gnome Magikinator; a mixture of the Basic Wizard-Kit (Magic Hat Not Included), the So-You-Want-To-Be-An-Alchemist Kit, and the Beginners Home Diabolist Pack (Family Edition). That is, before the fire. As an aside Demon-Slime, a much sought after commodity for the would-be diabolist, is actually made from rendered animal fat and Day-Glo Fungus, but it looks good.
[2] Rubix Cube, a fabled device- basically a manipulable cube of coloured squares- which, in order to unlock and lay bare the treasures held within, must be manoeuvred so that all sides show a single colour. The difficulty lies in the fact that the cube has six sides, of course, and yet there are seven colours. Archimedes Rubix, the Gnome inventor of the device, was famous for two things, the first- his cube, the second his absolute, total and all-encompassing madness.
[3] For instance, written in Deep Speech on Pinky's right arm, the Eunuch to the left of the shadowy archway, is written, “Orcus is Lord!”; while on Perky's left buttock, in Supernal, it states, “need fresh spleen”, which is crossed through and written beneath, “pay milkman- no yoghurt!”