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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 3089211" data-attributes="member: 3448">Ilsbet immediately gestured, casting a trivial magic to snuff the candles and disrupt whatever ritual was in progress.Moments later the guards surrounded the Privy Secretary and pummeled her unconscious, carefully keeping her alive for questioning per Dame Brionna’s orders.  Jacques and Dame Brionna both worked with the guards binding and searching Lady Deborah; she might be unconscious, but best not to take any chances once she awoke.Ilsbet looked up from the sigil, which she had been staring at intently.  “Are there teleportation wards in place here?”Dame Brionna nodded.  “Throughout the Palace grounds.  Why?”“It explains what she was doing.  She was in the process of creating a gate, primarily I think as an escape route, although if she had succeeded, she might well have left a nasty surprise behind.”Jacques smiled and nodded to Dame Brionna.  “I think it’s just as well that we hurried here as quickly as we did.  She probably expected a longer delay between the first arrests and tracking it back to her.”“And a longer delay dealing with the rune,” said Dame Brionna with satisfaction.  “If we had waited to dispel it, she probably would have escaped.  Good work, sergeant.  After you take her to the dungeon, please ask the Lord Chamberlain to prepare a list for me of everyone within the palace related to the Duke of Brightspan.  I don’t want any more surprises like this one.”While the guards carried Lady Deborah away to the dungeon for interrogation, the trio began searching her office.  The desk contained copies of all of the correspondence to and from the monarch, including some letters, such as the one from the Abbess, that had never been delivered to their intended recipient.  They also found some less legitimate records; among other things, there were two lists, one with the names of the coven member (including the missing two members) and the other with a list of close personal allies of Amelia, including her personal chaplain, the Abbess, and several other recently murdered people.  The murder victims each had a mark next to their names.There were also unsigned letters, some with instructions for Lady Deborah.  Dame Brionna looked at one of these in puzzlement.  It stated simply, “Kill your uncle.”  Flipping through the correspondence, Dame Brionna found no indications that Lady Deborah had ever communicated much with her uncle, the Duke of Brightspan.  But there were many letters from and to her mother, Lady Yvonne Caldra.While Dame Brionna finished going through the papers, Jacques and Ilsbet searched the rest of the desk.  Jacques lifted the desk slightly and removed the cap from the bottom of one of the legs.  Dozens of old coins of many different types and nationalities poured out onto the floor, although a few made it directly into Jacques’s pockets.  The trio looked at the coins for a pattern, and noticed that while they came from many different realms, they had all been minted in the same year, some two centuries ago.“Why would they care about that year?” asked Jacques.“Because that was the date of the unification of the Confederacy of the South Kingdoms,” replied Dame Brionna, who had had that date drilled into her in history lessons in her old homeland.  “They probably remember that date because the Confederacy’s unification frustrated the last effort of the Abomination of Shurr to ascend.  The City of Shurr in the Sunken Lands was ruined in the course of that struggle, and the Abomination was thought destroyed, although we now know better.”Ilsbet frowned.  “I wonder if that has something to do with ‘the project.’  In the Seachen lands,  many slaves are used to excavate an ancient city.  It has something with the dead gods that they worship.”“They worship dead gods and are excavating a ruin in the Sunken Lands?”Ilsbet nodded.  “But if you ask me, worshipping dead gods is even more foolish than worshipping living gods.”Dame Brionna was too concerned about the possibility that the Seachen were somehow assisting the Abomination of Shurr to worry about Ilsbet’s petty sacrilege.  She thought about the excavation and decided that it was simply one more matter to look into, and went back to flipping through Lady Deborah’s papers.  “Here’s another one of the unsigned letters.  It says that twenty were hired from the Dark Guild of Enclaves and have been sent to Canberry City.”Jacques whistled in a low voice.  “The Dark Guild is the guild of assassins.”“I know what the Dark Guild is,” replied Dame Brionna testily.“But twenty assassins… that’s a huge number for one task.”</blockquote>

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