TIME July 9th, 9:45pm (continuing) LOCATION Griffiths’ family mansion, Paraisopolis
BACKGROUND:
The map from Valka had led straight into gang territory and a mansion crawling with both the living and the dead – three gang members and a torch, catching Raven, Krusha and Ash flat out in the dark.
WHAT HAPPENED
Krusha moved to meet whoever came first, Raven slashed into the nearest gang member, and Ash threw up a mirror image as the fighting spread into the mansion’s foyer, where a second knot of gang members was already clubbing down two more zombies.
Twitch-fuelled bravado wasn’t enough – Raven’s blade, Krusha’s mace, and a spray of acid from Ash between them dropped both gang members in short order, while Raven tore an arm clean off one of the fallen zombies for good measure.
“One elder, one crawny fish, one wacko with a limp. Look wid they done to Tiny, sick man!”
Selok, one of the gang
Raven danced through their leader’s guard without landing the killing blow; Ash’s missiles found their mark instead, and Krusha, forcing his way into the thick of it, put the leader down with a clean critical hit.
The last gang member broke for the door, made it, and had it slammed shut on him by Raven – pinned to the wood by her blade before he could get it open again.
In the cleanup, Raven noticed a note tacked to one of the zombie’s dresses. Curiosity, or possibly some of the Twitch she’d lifted off the gang, got the better of her.
“Should have left me alone.”
note found on a zombie’s corpse
It detonated the moment she read it, catching all three Agents in the blast and obliterating the zombie’s corpse outright.
Krusha threw everything he had into healing Ash and Raven both. The other two zombies carried what looked like identical notes.
Nobody volunteered to read them.
The mansion’s search turned up exactly the squalor its exterior promised – broken bottles, fire damage, the reek of long use as a toilet, dead rats and birds rotting in corners.
Only one room, on the second floor past the zombies, showed any sign of recent use:
booted footprints in the debris, alongside something that dragged one foot; food scraps fresh enough to draw flies; two empty bottles; lanterns burned dry; blankets stained with what looked like the aftermath of an ‘interview’ with a Vessentaag prisoner; and the remains of a recent fire – cut quills, an emptied ink bottle, the remains of a wig, and the burnt carcass of what had once been a dog.
Digging further into the family, they turned up an institutionalised aunt – committed twenty years earlier for poisoning her own son and daughter, a crime she’d described afterward in unnerving detail and never once expressed remorse for.
What little she offered about her nephew was its own kind of unsettling: Griffiths, she said, had “never been the same” after a fever took him as a young man – touched, in her words, by something darker that never quite let go.
The family home, it turned out, had burned down some years back.
A partly burnt scrap of paper occupied them for a while, working out how to reconstruct what had been written on it – old-fashioned substitution, by the look of it, whole words swallowed by scorch holes and only fragments of each line left standing.
The night passed uncomfortably in the wrecked mansion, and they made for the barbican and the Section House at first light to clean up. Krusha had a flash of inspiration on the way – something in the burnt note matched the name of a play.
A quick check confirmed it: the Regent Theatre was running a limited show called An Absence of Light.
Jouvaine Jongleurs, at the Regent Playhouse Theatre, presenting An Absence of Light – the flyer matched the burnt fragments word for word.
Reasoning that Griffiths had something planned for that afternoon’s performance, they headed for the theatre with Sanchez in tow.
The doors were already closing for the current showing when they arrived – the next performance later that afternoon, and again the following day. A sign behind the front desk gave them pause.
“Please note, due to the nature of the performance, it is advised that those with elven lineage attend the ‘Natural’ edition. Jouvaine Jongleurs cannot be held responsible for disappointing experiences during the ‘Art’ version of this play for elven bloods.”
sign, Regent Theatre box office
Raven talked and intimidated her way past the closed doors into the main hall just as the drums began, leaving the others in the foyer as the door between them sealed shut behind her.
The attendant insisted the show couldn’t be stopped, only interrupted at the intermission.
Raven took a seat at the back to wait it out.
On stage, the voice of the performer billed as TeeCruise was already, unnervingly, enthralling.