Underland - Chapter 17: The Shopkeeper is your friend

“Are you certain… it was her?” Hermann asked. The disguised troglodyte attracted many curious gazes with his plague doctor outfit, with people stepping out of his way. “It could have been… a trick of the mind.”

“I know what I saw,” Valdemar insisted. “My True Sight protects me from illusions. I can even see Iren’s real eye color now.”

Iren put a finger on his lips, as he guided the trio through La Dorada’s narrow alleys. “Shush,” he said. “The ladies prefer me with purple eyes.”

Speaking of eyes, Valdemar had had his fill of them. The globulous orbs were less common in the suburbs, but the necromancer couldn’t find an alley without at least one of them gazing at him. Attracting the entity’s attention had proven to be a mistake, as it refused to let Valdemar go out of its sight.

No wonder most of the people who had consumed an Elixir of True Sight went insane. The feeling of being watched all the time was maddening and fueled Valdemar’s paranoia. Though he valued his life enough to bear this burden in silence, he understood how some magicians might have considered death a release from the constant surveillance.

Valdemar would have been happier sailing the Lightless Ocean, but fate got in the way. The group should have taken a flesh ferry towards a half-savage island to find samples of the Colophryar plant, the last ingredient needed for the Painted Door project. Unfortunately, the ship had apparently suffered from a technical mishap, delaying their departure.

Iren had then suggested going to the Midnight Market’s local chapter and buying the plant from smugglers; Hermann had reluctantly agreed to it for a lack of a better option. Since Lady Mathilde’s own errands were more legal in nature, the group had split in half with orders to meet again at the dokkar embassy afterward.

Iren had led them to the dirtiest parts of the city. Far from the splendor of the main square and bazaar, the distant suburbs of La Dorada were a hive of shacks, houses in squalor, and crumbling buildings. The alleys formed a maze without rhyme or reason, though Iren seemed to know the area like the back of his hand. Beggars asked for money at every crossroad, and even the Knights of the Mind were less present in the district.

This was the lair of Astaphanos’ underclass. The pox-ridden whores unable to afford a biomancy treatment, the servants, the waiters and carriage drivers. Valdemar suspected a few of them were miners and farmers put out of the job by the ever-increasing use of undead labor, with no choice but to migrate to the larger cities to find work.

Was his mother hiding among them? Valdemar knew he had seen her, deep within his bones; even if he couldn’t explain it himself.

Hermann noticed his unease. “Maybe it was… a lookalike?”

“Maybe,” Valdemar admitted. “But… I can’t explain why, but I know it was her.”

“It could have been her ghost paying you a visit,” Iren said. “Is your mother entombed in this Domain?”

“No.” His mother was buried in Horaios, and ghosts didn’t rise from the dead years after their demise. “A specter can look almost real, but their true nature is easy to discern for those with the right knowledge. She was made of flesh and blood.”

“An hallucination then,” Iren suggested while shrugging his shoulders. “You don’t sleep enough and you suffer from a lot of stress. Both combined can drive a man mad.”

Maybe. Valdemar hated to think himself as mentally unwell, but he had barely started treating his insomnia; even his sessions with Frigga left him tired, as dreaming exhausted him mentally.

Hermann scratched his mask’s beak. “What if… it was the eyes’ doing? You said she appeared after… after you addressed them. The two events might be… related. A telepathic projection… an attempt to communicate. We should… test it out.”

“I would rather not,” Valdemar admitted. “Not now at least.”

The watchers’ gaze weighed on him enough already.

Iren finally led them to their destination, some kind of lost pawnshop inside a dead-end alley. It did not inspire confidence from the outside. Time and dust had degraded the storefront’s paint job, while the entrance sign ‘Elias Emporium’ was clearly missing a few letters. The metal door’s hinges were rusted, while the cracked window showed an odd assortment of items including jewelry, figurines, musical instruments, and even a pistol. The alley was empty, as if the locals feared approaching it.

“This is the place,” Iren said.

“Looks a bit too small for a Midnight Market haunt,” Valdemar pointed out. “The smugglers prefer larger places such as hidden tunnels to do their business.”

“This is just the entrance, my friend.” Iren knocked on the door three times in quick succession, then two more times after a short wait. Valdemar guessed that it was a signal. “I’ll lead you there and you’ll be free to ask out for your flower while I solve my business.”

“Why did you… come here?” Hermann asked with curiosity.

“A pal of mine found an item I’ve been looking for,” Iren explained. “A rare coin from before the Descent. I’m wary of forgeries, so I’ll check it myself before making the purchase. I’m something of a specialist.”

Valdemar chuckled. He had expected Iren’s business to involve blood money or worse. “You collect coins, of all things?”

“Everyone’s got a hobby, friend. I’ll show you my collection when we return home. I’ve got stuff that goes back to the Pleromians.”

Valdemar sensed someone approaching the door from the other side with his psychic sight, even before he heard the lock turn. The gate opened to reveal a spry old man in his seventies, with pale skin and a balding head. His clothes were simple and inexpensive, his eyes whitened by age.

And yet, Valdemar immediately sensed something unusual about this shopkeeper. A sense of wrongness exuded from his gaze, as if his eyeballs didn’t fit the wrinkled eyelids. He wasn’t a sorcerer and released no magical aura, but… Valdemar couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about this man struck him as unusual.

Unaware of Valdemar’s thoughts, Iren greeted the shopkeeper with a pat on the shoulder. “Elias, my old friend, how’s the family?”

“Fine, fine,” the shopkeeper answered with a smile missing half its teeth. He invited the group inside his shop and closed the door behind them.

The place was larger than it looked from the outside, dustier than a tomb, and a complete bric-à-brac. The sheer number of items piled up in every corner astonished Valdemar, as he wondered how the shopkeeper managed his inventory. Besides the usual assortment of pawn shop goods, the emporium had gathered quite the collection of odd goods as well: a drum made from a cave leopard’s skin, a pre-imperial era curved sword, a broken soulstone… and even a tattooed dokkar’s mummified hand. Candles provided a modicum of light, though some shelves remained obscured.

Valdemar and Hermann took a moment to scan the shop for anything interesting, while Iren made small talk with the shopkeeper. The troglodyte immediately focused on a collection of carved stone masks representing reptilian creatures. Some took inspiration from snakes, others from cave lizards, and a few were completely fantastical. Hermann grabbed a mask with six eye openings and a fanged, open mouth. His hand brushed against the surface with nostalgia.

“These are troglodyte masks?” Valdemar guessed.

“They represent the Coiled Ones… that my kind worship. Priests wear them to take… the persona of the god.” his reptilian friend whispered too low for the shopkeeper to hear. “This is Ashgar K’ris… the Hunter of Souls… god of the dead. I wonder how… it ended here.”

Valdemar guessed that some tomb robber found the mask and sold it without understanding its significance. Neither did the Knights, or they would have fed these troglodyte artifacts to the flames even if none of them carried magical properties.

The shop had collected thirteen masks in total, though one of them stood from the rest. This particular artifact wasn’t made of stone, but some kind of black substance that reminded Valdemar of wood. It lacked openings for the mouth, the nose, or even eyeholes. A chalky white symbol expanded from the forehead, before ending in tentacles as it reached the mask’s borders.

“Which god does it represent?” Valdemar asked, as he peered into the spiral. His gaze lost itself in its center, in this neverending white abyss. “A god of knowledge?”

To his surprise, Hermann shook his head. “This is not… one of ours.”

Truly? Valdemar touched the mask, and shuddered. The ‘wood’, if it was truly wood, felt cold as ice. Definitely not normal, the sorcerer thought, but I don’t sense any Blood magic coming from it either. The back part of the artifact was as black as the purest darkness.

Pushed by curiosity, Valdemar put the mask on. The wood felt unbearably cold against his skin, though it didn’t hurt either. Even stranger, the mask seemed to adapt itself to the wearer’s face, latching to his mouth and nose like a second layer of skin. Valdemar breathed, and chilly fresh air filled his lungs.

Though the mask lacked any opening, the sorcerer started to see through the wood… and not with his eyes. This vision was sharper, focused at the center; the unlit parts of the shop became clearer, as if the mask had lifted the veil of darkness. Valdemar glanced at Iren and the shopkeeper, and while the former found the scene amusing, the latter frowned in confusion.

“Now you look like a real cultist,” Iren said with a smile.

“We must bring Frigga to the sacrificial altar!” Valdemar joked back. The mask made his voice reverberate like an echo. “The dark gods will have their due!”

Even Hermann joined in. “I can hold the knife… while you restrain her.”

“Aw, you’re cruel,” Iren replied with a chuckle. “Trust me, she’s a paragon of virtue by dokkar standards.”

“She is vulgar… arrogant…” Hermann looked fit to gag. “Tasteless!”

Clearly, the troglodyte hadn’t digested Frigga’s contempt for his art style.

“Anyway, Valdemar, what’s up with that mask?” Iren asked. “You sound like some bad novel’s villain.”

“Besides the voice change and feeling cold to the touch, it improves my ability to see in the dark.” Valdemar removed the mask seamlessly, as it detached itself from his skin. “Pretty underwhelming for a magical item, but practical. How did you guys manage to hide it from the Knights?”

“The Knight-captain in charge of the district loves money and whores more than he fears his superiors,” Elias replied while crossing his arms. “We pay him and his men a generous sum each week to look the other way. Sometimes, we also give them a few items to confiscate or traitors to arrest. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me.”

Why couldn’t the Knights of the Chain have been so accommodating?

Valdemar examined the mask, trying to understand the enchantments woven into it. To his surprise, he didn’t notice any. His True Sight had identified the lines of bloody energies fueling Och’s fortress, but this mask only oozed cold and darkness.

“Where did you get it?” Valdemar asked the shopkeeper. The longer he examined this artifact, the more fascinated he became.

“I do not remember, but I can look in the registry,” Elias replied gruffly. “Do you want to buy it?”

“I will,” Valdemar replied as he put the mask back on. He was curious about how this item worked, and why his True Sight couldn’t identify the enchantments used to create it.

“I will take… the others,” Hermann declared while grabbing all the troglodyte masks.

“All of them?” Iren asked with a raised eyebrow. “Are you a collector too?”

“They belong… to an ancient and proud people,” Hermann replied with cold anger. “Not to… tourists. This is cultural appropriation!”

Valdemar could read between the lines. Hermann worked tirelessly to find a new homeland for his people, and considered these artifacts troglodyte property. He would have paid any price to get them back to his kind.

Thankfully, the purchase didn’t amount to much. A few hundred silver coins for Hermann, and a handful of gold for Valdemar.

“Are you well, Elias?” The rogue asked their host as he put the troglodyte masks in a cloth bag. “It’s not like you to underprice your wares. You didn’t even argue.”

“I don’t care about those,” the shopkeeper replied as he handed the bag of masks to Hermann. “The good merchandise lies below.”

Something in his tone made Valdemar suspicious. Elias sounded a bit too unenthusiastic for a pawnbroker. Maybe it’s just the eyes getting to me, the sorcerer thought. Now I’m starting to see shadows in every corner.

Their business done, the shopkeeper moved behind his shop’s counter and lifted a carpet. He touched the floor, and Valdemar heard the sound of a lock opening. “The others are already downstairs,” the shopkeeper said while opening a trapdoor in the floor and revealing a narrow corridor. “If you want to see the real stuff.”

“Where does this lead?” Hermann asked.

“To a smuggler cavern,” Iren explained as he confidently walked down the stairs. In all likelihood, he had done so countless times before. “That’s where the market gathers at this hour.”

“I’m still not… convinced that they will have quality Colophryar,” Hermann said as he climbed down after the rogue. “This is a… very rare plant.”

Valdemar followed the march, but stopped at the trapdoor’s threshold. “You’re not coming with us?” he asked the shopkeeper.

“Someone has to keep the counter,” the man replied as if he were an idiot.

It made perfect sense, and yet… a lifetime of evading inquisitors kicked in, raising all kinds of alarm bells.

Valdemar trusted his gut, and something didn’t feel right here. The shopkeeper, a pawnbroker, hadn’t even argued about the price of his wares; nor did he seem to remember their real value or origins. And though he did his best to appear aloof, Valdemar sensed an undercurrent of nervousness coming from him.

“Valdemar?” Hermann asked inside from the stairs. Iren had long since vanished from sight, delving into the darkness below the shop.

Elias the shopkeeper was growing impatient. “You’re going in or what? I ain’t leaving it open forever.”

Something felt wrong about this man, though Valdemar couldn’t explain why. The sorcerer locked ‘eyes’ with the shopkeeper, and finally realized what bothered him about the eyelids.

“You don’t blink,” Valdemar said while Hermann emerged from the stairs in confusion.

They had been in the shop for minutes, and Elias hadn’t blinked once.

Valdemar swiftly raised his hand while the shopkeeper flinched in surprise, his gloved fingers grabbing Elias’ eyelids and lifting them.

There was another patch of skin below the first, white as chalk.

A Derroan steel dagger sprung from the man’s sleeve and aimed straight for Valdemar’s stomach.

The sorcerer reacted faster and hardened his chest into steel. The dagger’s blade cut through his reinforced clothes like butter, but grazed against the impenetrable shield Valdemar’s skin had turned into.

Hermann let out a roar and rushed at the shopkeeper, but the man swiftly leapt to safety with inhuman dexterity.

He never landed, as Valdemar telekinetically grabbed him in midair and tossed him against the counter with enough force to break it. Splinters flew all around the shop in a catastrophic crash, and blood flowed from the shopkeeper’s nose. He tried to struggle, but Valdemar held him firmly with the power of his mind. The man’s blood bent to his will.

And as he established firm control over the shopkeeper’s flesh, Valdemar began to notice many unusual things. A substance in the eyes, to change their coloration; an abnormality in the vocal cords, as if they were made of different muscles than the throat; iron bars in the limbs, neck, and spine to extend them; more livers than a man should have; a metal device inside the brain; and an alchemical powder grafting a second layer of skin over the first.

“He’s some sort of mutant,” Valdemar warned Hermann while keeping the shopkeeper restrained. His captive tried to scream, but his mouth refused to open. “Do you smell anything?”

Hermann briefly removed his plague doctor mask and revealed his true troglodyte visage. “It’s strange,” the pictomancer said as he sniffed the horrified captive’s face. “There are two people’s smells… and the second is… not human.”

The troglodyte removed his gloves, grabbed the shopkeeper’s forehead with his hands, and started peeling the skin away with a claw. Hermann’s incision was as precise as a scalpel as it cut through the man’s visage and revealed a second face beneath the first.

Ghoulish cheeks and chalky skin, strands of a white beard, hateful lidless eyes… The creature was humanoid and yet inhuman. Yet both sorcerers in the room quickly recognized Azlant’s ancestral enemy.

“A derro,” Hermann said with astonishment. “How did he…”

“How did they,” Valdemar interrupted him. No way he acted alone.

…

And Iren hadn’t come out of the stairs.

Shit.

“Hermann, bring this spy to the Knights and sound the alarm,” Valdemar said, as he knocked the derro into unconsciousness by slamming his head against the counter. The summoner loathed the inquisitors from the bottom of his heart, but the situation was too terrible to be picky. “I’m going after Iren before he gets himself killed.”

“Alone?” His troglodyte friend was aghast. “This is madness.”

“That derro’s false skin came from a living human,” Valdemar replied grimly. It wasn’t hard to guess what this monster’s compatriots would do to Iren if they caught him, and the rogue didn’t deserve it. Nobody did.

The necromancer continued his descent while Hermann reluctantly obeyed his command and exited the shop to call for help.

The stairway went down for at least ten meters below the shop, the stepstones creaking below Valdemar’s feet. His mask allowed him to see perfectly in the dark, to notice the magical symbols etched into the walls. They had been used to shield the basement from supernatural scrutiny, but had degraded from lack of maintenance. The derros couldn’t use the Blood, after all.

They must have been here for days, Valdemar realized, as he reached an archway at the bottom. He was starting to hear voices in the derro language; though the sorcerer wasn’t particularly good at it, he understood that the speakers were having an argument of some kind.

As Iren had warned, the stairway indeed led to a natural cavern hidden deep below the city, one large enough to accommodate an underground bazaar. The derros had turned the marketplace into what Valdemar could only describe as a twisted laboratory.

Tall pylons machines reached as high in the ceiling and crackled with electricity, their light powerful enough to illuminate most of the cavern. Unlike the bric-a-brac above, the nightmarish factory was a model of cruel organization. A row of six operation tables was lined up against the left wall, though only two were occupied. The first housed an unconscious derro with elongated legs, the second a shackled human male. A masked derro surgeon two heads smaller than Valdemar was opening his fully conscious victim’s forehead with a saw, the man’s gagged to muffle his screams.

The right side of the cavern looked even ghastlier. Six human brains floated inside a glass container hooked to a strange machine-maze of steamy pipes and pumps, while flayed human skins dried on a vast cupboard. Each had been treated with alchemical substances, and marked with a three-digit number.

A dozen undead workers toiled among the pylons and operation tables, but a closer look informed Valdemar of their true, ghastlier nature. Their skin had been cleanly removed, leaving their raw bloody flesh exposed; and their skulls had been scooped open above the eyes, their brains replaced with metal antennae pulsating with flashes of lightning.

Two of these workers were carrying an unconscious Iren to an operating table. The rogue profusely bled from the chest and head, his clothes tainted red. Valdemar’s eyes widened in horror and fury behind his mask, his heart turning cold as ice.

Two derros with daggers argued not far from him over the corpses of a third and fourth; the cruel dwarves both wore leather armor and carried daggers, perhaps because firearms would make too much noise. One of their dead brethren had Iren’s shortsword impaling him through the chest, and the other’s head had rolled a few meters away from the neck.

The first derro was admonishing his compatriot, and Valdemar distinctly heard the words for ‘idiot,’ ‘need alive for surgery,’ and ‘brainless lobotomite’ among the litany of insults. They were so busy arguing that they didn’t notice the sorcerer entering the room.

Valdemar did not hesitate.

The warlock raised both his index fingers at the cruel dwarves, and fired two blood bullets. He winced in pain as the projectiles erupted through his skin, but they both hit their target in the head and killed them on the spot.

He had killed beasts and summoned monsters before, but never sentient humanoids. No, Valdemar thought as he glanced at the brainless corpses of his kindred. They’re beasts who can speak, nothing more.

The derro surgeon among the operation tables let out a screech of surprise and rushed at Valdemar with his saw, but the warlock telekinetically squashed him against the ceiling. While the dead doctor crashed on the ground, the magician rushed to the wounded Iren’s side. The undead workers didn’t stop him, too mindless to act without direct orders.

Valdemar applied a hand to Iren’s chest and head as the lobotomized undead put him on an empty operation table. The derros had stabbed him eight times, broken his ribs, and savagely beaten him into unconsciousness. The rogue was losing blood, and risked permanent brain damage if not treated quickly.

Valdemar used magic to treat Iren’s wounds the best he could, knitting flesh together and redirecting his blood to prevent a stroke. The other human victim, strapped to a bed, looked at the sorcerer with pleading eyes. Blood flowed from his forehead where the derro surgeon had cut him.

“I’m sorry!” Valdemar replied while focusing on saving Iren’s life. He had stabilized the rogue for now, but needed more time to help him fully recover. “One at a time!”

Yet a thought couldn’t escape Valdemar’s mind, as he remembered the numbers on the flayed skins.

How many?

How many?

Heavy steps echoed in the cavern, alongside the clinking of steel. Having closed Iren’s wounds, Valdemar raised his eyes to see a golem emerge from a deeper area of the cavern.

The steel machine was twice as tall as a human, and the glass tank serving as its head almost reached the ceiling; a disembodied, cadaverous derro skull with a cable spine floated inside green liquid. The golem’s chest was a furnace, its shoulders steel pipes. Its left hand was large enough to crush a man’s skull, and its right ended in a cannon.

The machine raised its weapon at Valdemar without a word, and opened fire.