The orc took a deep breath. "I'll answer."
"Good. Where in the city do the slaves end up?"
The prisoner sucked in another breath. Bareris realized the orc was panting with fear. "They-"
A single word was all it took. The orc's back arched, and surprised, Bareris failed to yank his sword back in time to avoid piercing the orc's neck. But the point didn't go in deep, and he doubted the orc even noticed the wound. The orc was suffering far more grievous hurts.
The orc's back continued to bend like a bow, and his extremities flailed up and down, pounding the floor. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and bloody froth foamed from his mouth. Hoping the creature might survive if he could only keep him from swallowing his tongue, Bareris cast about for an implement he could wedge in his mouth, but before he could find one, the orc thrashed a final time and lay still. A foul smell suffused the air. The warrior had soiled himself in his death throes.
"Well," said Wesk, "it wasn't lying about the geas."
"No," Bareris answered.
He felt a twinge of shame for compelling the orc to such a death, and scowling, he tried to quash the feeling. He'd had no choice but to force the creature to speak.
"So what do all of us 'soldiers' do now?" Thovarr asked. "Just wander around and look for the slave? Delhumide's big, and it's got a spook hiding in every shadow."
Bareris prayed it hadn't come to that. "We search this place," he said. "Maybe we'll find something useful."
They began by searching the orcs' bodies then moved on to ransacking their possessions. Wesk dumped out the contents of a haversack, picked up a parchment, unfolded it, and then brought it to Bareris.
"Isthis anything?" asked the gnoll.
Bareris studied the scrawled diagram. It didn't have any words written on it, just lines, circles, rectangles, and dots, and for a moment, he couldn't decipher it. Then he noticed certain correspondences, or at least he hoped he did. He rotated the paper a quarter turn, and the proper orientation made the similitude unmistakable.
"It's a map of this part of the city."
Wesk eyed it dubiously. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. It's difficult to tell because it's crudely drawn and the orc left so much off, but this is the breach in the wall we came through, here are the laughing shadows, and here the towers that squirm of their own accord. The mapmaker used the black dots to indicate areas best avoided. This is the building we're in now, and this box near the top must be the place where the Red Wizards themselves have taken up residence. Why else would anyone take the trouble to indicate the best path from here to there?"
The gnoll chieftain leered like a wolf spying a lost lamb. "Nice of the pig-faces to go to so much trouble just to help us out."
With the map to guide them, they skulked nearly to the center of Delhumide without running afoul of any more malevolent spirits or mortal foes, but as Bareris peered expectantly, waiting for the structure indicated on the sketch to come into view, he felt a sudden difference and froze. The gnolls sensed something as well, and growling, they peered around.
It took Bareris a breath or two to puzzle out precisely what they'd all registered. Probably because it was the last thing he would have expected. "It's… more pleasant here. The feeling of evil has lifted."
"Why?" asked Wesk.
Bareris shook his head. "I don't know. Just enjoy the relief while you can. I doubt it will last."
It did, though, and when they finally beheld their goal, he knew why. It was a square-built, flat-roofed hall notable for high columns covered in carvings and towering statues of a manlike figure with the crowned head of a hawk. Thayans no longer worshiped Horus-Re, but bards picked up a miscellany of lore in the course of acquiring new songs and stories, and Bareris had no difficulty identifying the Mulhorandi god. The structure was a temple, built on hallowed ground and still exerting a benign influence on the immediate area centuries after.
Bareris shook his head. "I don't understand. I'm sure it's the right place, but why would the Red Wizards set up shop in a shrine like that?"
"The god's power keeps the bogeys away," suggested Wesk. "The bogeys the warlocks didn't whistle up themselves, I mean."
"Maybe, but wouldn't the influence also make it more difficult to practice necromancy? It's inherently-"
"What's the difference?" Thovarr snapped.
Bareris blinked, then smiled. "Good point. We don't care what they're doing, how, or why. We just want to rescue Tammith and disappear into the night. We'll keep our minds on that."
Employing buildings, shadows, and piles of rubble for cover, they crept partway around the temple to look for sentries. It didn't take Wesk long to spot a pair of gaunt figures with gleaming yellow eyes crouched atop the roof.
"Undead," he said. "Ican hit them, but zombies and the like are hard to kill. I don't know if I can put them down before they sound the alarm."
"Give me one of the arrows you mean to shoot," Bareris said.
The gnoll handed it over, and Bareris crooned to it, the charm a steady diminuendo from the first note to the last. At its end, the whisper of the wind, the skritch-skritch-skritch of one of the gnolls scratching his mane, and indeed, the entire world fell silent.
Bareris handed the arrow back and waved his arm, signaling for Wesk to shoot when he was ready. The gnoll chieftain laid it on the string, jumped up from behind the remains of a broken wall, and sent it streaking upward. Sound popped back into the world as soon as the shaft carried its invisible bubble of quietude away.
Wesk's followers shot their own arrows, and at least half found their mark, but as the gnoll had warned, the undead proved difficult to slay. Shafts jutting from their bodies like porcupine quills, they picked up bells from the rooftop and flailed them up and down. Fortunately, though, the sphere of silence now enshrouded them. The bells refused to clang, and after another moment, the amber-eyed creatures collapsed, first one and then the other.
Wesk balled up his fist and gave Bareris a stinging punch to the shoulder. "For a human," said the gnoll, "you have your uses."
"I like to think so," Bareris replied. "Let's go."
Keeping low, they ran toward the temple. Their path carried them near a weathered statue of Horus-Re. In its youth, the figure had brandished an ankh to the heavens, but its upraised arm had broken off in the millennia since and now lay in fragments at its feet.
The temple proved to consist primarily of long, open, high-ceilinged galleries, with a relative scarcity of interior walls to separate one section from the next and no doors to seal any of the entrances and exits. To Bareris's war-trained sensibilities, that made it a poor choice for a stronghold, but perhaps in Delhumide, the site's aura of sanctity seemed a more important defense than any barrier of wood or stone.
In any case, he was far more concerned about something else. The temple was occupied. From time to time, they slipped past chambers where folk lay sleeping. But there were fewer than Bareris had expected, nor did he observe any indication that Red Wizards were practicing their arts here on a regular basis.