[coronatiger]

The others returned with Neriel half an hour later. Ilzo put Neriel where Herbert directed. Ilzo’s task would be to hold Neriel still during the interrogation. My knots and handcuffs held the demon as well now as they had when I saw him last, but he could still thrash about.

Herbert asked for a healing salve and made Va’lyndra check Neriel’s vital signs before and after he applied it. She didn’t notice much of a difference, she said, so Herbert gave Neriel another salve. Va’lyndra thought the Seral seemed healthier after the second one.

Herbert put the flat of the Chaos knife on Neriel’s arm, and a cloud of purple Chaos energy streamed into the creature of Order, who was clearly pained. Va’lyndra reported that the treatment physically harmed Neriel as well as giving pain, and Herbert gave him another salve before reapplying the knife. He scratched his head and repeated the treatment. Salve, then knife. To nobody in particular, he asked if it was time to remove the gag. Neriel glared at him but didn’t speak. Herbert threatened with the knife, and Neriel nodded agreement to speak.

Leopold asked who Neriel’s god was. “Adan,” Neriel replied. That name didn’t mean anything to me, so I looked at the others. They didn’t seem to recognize it either. Leopold asked if Adan was known by other names. “The Fist of Law,” Neriel answered. I didn’t recognize that name either, but Va’lyndra reminded me that in the vision that we had shared with Lady Karita and Kine, that was the god of the people we saved from the fire demons and who gave Lady Karita a sword in gratitude. Those people were going to perform a ritual to that god.

Our next question was whether all the Serals belonged to Neriel’s god. Neriel’s goodwill, if that was what it was, had run out, and he refused to answer. Herbert gave him another treatment, five rounds of knife and salve. Leopold repeated his question and got an affirmative answer.

What was the Serals’ end goal, we wanted to know. Neriel’s answer was dystopic: A world where nobody breaks the law, where everything is under control. Simply a world where nobody can do anything. Leopold asked who would exist in this world, and Neriel said only the Serals, and they’d only watch over the world. Ilzo commented that this world sounded boring. I couldn’t agree more.

Next, we asked for and received the identities of the thirty other Serals that Neriel knew, both here and across the sea, in the Old World. There were none here in Virendia, but there was one in the new nation to the north, Free Tamburin. That one was “recently hired” to put it in human terms.

Leopold asked Neriel which laws the Serals were responsible for and what new ones were in the making. He didn’t get any replies. Neriel had paled visibly and his feathers had begun to loosen from his wings and fall to the ground. Ilzo proposed more healing salves, but Herbert doubted it would help much. Still, he put the knife back on Neriel’s arm, applied four salves and then the knife again. The Seral trembled and more feathers hit the ground.

Leopold repeated the question of what the Serals had done recently. The last thing they orchestrated was the conference in Fort Glory, intended to stabilize the situation here. They formalized debt slavery and took control over Tamburin’s military forces. They next planned to raise a large army and invade the spider people. I had never heard of them, but there were rumors of the undead to the south, that they included spiders in their numbers. After this invasion, the “Elendus cult” was to be destroyed, as their god could put a spanner in the works of the Serals’ machinations. Tamburin was to be used for this purpose.

Since the Serals favored order over anything, Leopold asked about their hierarchy. Who called the shots among them? Neriel explained that two of his ilk were known as Arch Serals, and he answered to them. They could communicate by magic, but that was difficult, for some reason I didn’t even try to understand. Therefore, they usually communicated by letter, writing in a language that only the Serals knew. Leopold was trying to decipher that language, having taken possession of a book from Neriel’s study.

We asked how can we identify a Seral in disguise. Neriel explained that we could detect the divine magic used for the disguise, or we could observe that they neither ate, drank, slept nor drew breath. Asking about the Serals’ strengths and weaknesses, we learned that they are resistant to physical injury, but not immune. That was obvious, as I had been able to knock Neriel out with a fist to the skull, even without brass knuckles. Magic could harm the Serals, as could poison, although many of the normal poisoning vectors were impossible to use, since they didn’t eat, drink or breathe.

Leopold returned to the Serals’ actions. We learned that before staging the conference, they had been behind the alliance with the undead, allowing all the nations to join Virendia in the war against the Tamburin invaders. One point of interest was that the Serals apparently had some measure of control over the undead realm for quite some time already. The Serals thought of the undead as a means to an end.

Before the war against Tamburin, the Serals had been behind the Church’s rounding up of divine artifacts, with the intention of destroying them to severe the link between other gods and this world. I recalled the checkpoint that was set up at the exit from the mines at Garuk. At the time, I had been opposed to the others’ plan of smuggling stuff out, but now I was glad I had gone along.

The Serals had minimized their own presence near the ancient night elf empire in the caves under Garuk’s mountains. That was because they were afraid of “waking Chaos”. Apparently, the Serals didn’t want to rip up in the wounds they made the last time they tried (and failed) to subjugate the world. They wanted to progress carefully this time.

Leopold asked if the ritual sites we had found in the mines had anything to do with that. Neriel was about to answer, but then he clammed up again. He just glared contemptuously at Leopold. Leopold tried to ask if their failure had anything to do with the night elves turning into the elves of today, but he got no reply. Herbert gave Neriel another dose before Leopold repeated the question. Neriel sneered and hissed at him. Herbert slapped three healing salves on the weakening Seral before touching the knife to his arm again. He thought we had come to the end of the road, but still tried one more round of healing and hurting.

We got out of Neriel that the ritual in the mines was meant to wake Chaos. “We fear that the gods will counter-attack,” he sputtered, and began shaking violently. Va’lyndra said this was it. Leopold tried to jam in another few questions, but Neriel was too busy dying to reply.

I asked Leopold if he was going to write all this in a letter to Karl Morgenstern, but he ignored me for the moment. Instead of answering me, he asked Herbert if it was possible to learn this ritual of protection. Herbert replied, asking if Leopold knew anything about the “school of gates”. Leopold confessed he knew nothing about that. Then it would be difficult to teach him, Herbert said, for it required a lifetime of study to even begin to comprehend the ritual.

Herbert recommended that we destroyed the corpse, in case Adan looked this way after the obscuring ritual wore off. I offered to run back to the compound to get some oil. Olivia and I still had several sacks of lamp oil that we hadn’t had use for since acquiring Surkalpi. I took one of those, stole a kiss from my wife, and returned to the woods. The others had prepared a pyre in the meantime. I dumped the oil unceremoniously on the carcass, and Va’lyndra set fire to it.

We watched the fire burn down. Leopold said he was going to write out his report. A copy of it would go to Lord Karl. When that was done, we needed to figure out what to do next. I mentioned bandits and trolls. Leopold said we might want to warn the elves of the Elendus cult about the Serals’ plans. Without thinking, I asked if there were elves in the Old World, too. Va’lyndra just glared at me. I hoped we didn’t have to travel far to warn the elves. Maybe we could do it by letter? Olivia wouldn’t appreciate a lengthy journey at this time.

Herbert and Va’lyndra remained in the forest to talk while the rest of us walked back. Va’lyndra came and interrupted my prayer to Sulla to inform Olivia and me that she was going to tell the guild management here about what we’d done and learned; she had already spoken to Ilzo and Leopold. I said that was fine, looking meaningfully at the door behind her. She also wanted us to know that the Church knew we were the ones to raid the vault in Landfall. I said that was fine, too. I didn’t care, not at the moment. I was about to have sex.