A New Star Chapter 121 (Patreon)

My bombshell that the mayor was helping the cult went over better than I expected, but it still caused some unpleasant reactions. The kids were the worst off, though I really should stop calling them kids, considering they were legal adults now and tending to their own business. Anyway, the kids were equal parts shocked and outraged, the two counts were surprised and upset, and Milton’s retainer just looked pissed. There was some immediate discussion of going and confronting the man, but I shut that down rather quickly. I needed the man where he was and doing what he was because it was a good way to trace what was happening.

“So, then, what do you need from us?” Milton asked as his retainer examined the room.

“First, for you to understand what is happening,” I said. “Then, so we can start working on a strategy to undermine their efforts. Hopefully, we can capture or kill the ones responsible, but I think just working to prevent another capital city outbreak scenario and protect the city should be the objective.”

Milton sighed before looking around quickly. “This is not something I needed dumped in my lap right now, but it’s something we have to confront. I’ll put together a small team to work on this immediately. Please make yourself available to them as soon as we get back to brief them on the current situation and what you’ve found so far. I hope that you have some more information than just one room and a few suppositions?”

“I have rather a lot, but I need to continue my own investigation,” I responded calmly. “I’ll brief your team, then return to my own work. There’s still much I need to check into, and I have had trouble finding their main base of operations.”

“I might be able to help you there,” Gorge’s father interjected. “I didn’t really think it would be necessary, but I have a man with me who is quite adept at tracking all kinds of magical…oddities, shall we say. I’m sure he could greatly aid in these efforts, and I am willing to lend my support, as well. This damnable cult has been a bane these last few years, especially after the attack on the capital, and it’s time we started to root them out and dispose of them.”

“Well said, Joseph, well said!” Milton exclaimed, nodding enthusiastically.

“I’m glad there’s such unity of purpose,” I said, rolling my eyes a bit.

Milton’s retainer then insisted on taking everything in the room as evidence, which I wasn’t thrilled with, but she seemed to have it in her mind to really dig in here, so I let her and Milton figure out the logistics. It wouldn’t do to have too many people involved, operational security being pretty key here, and having dozens of guards and retainers suddenly running around off their normal routines would be pretty obvious. I left them to it, collecting Fran and Cain and leaving with them, giving Gorge and Miriam a nod on the way out. The kids were just following along at this point, overwhelmed by all the goings on, but I knew they’d shape up eventually. Handling a weird doomsday end times death cult wasn’t exactly standard procedure for anyone, let alone the still rather young scions of a wealthy family, but they’d do fine.

I took Fran and Cain back to our temporary housing, quickly going over what they had been working on before contacting Angela. I left her where she was to continue observing reactions, just getting a quick status update from her, before sending Cain and Fran back out. I then made my way to Milton’s estate, where the Count had returned after leaving the underground room to his retainer, and met with his security detail. They wanted all the details on the cult, and I shared most of what I knew; I wasn’t trying to be difficult, but there were certain things that would either implicate me or that they just didn’t need to know right now. I gave them enough that they could easily work the problem and track the cult, though I did caution them to be discrete about it. The whole thing we were running against here was not alerting them and having them set off an attack the same as at the capital, though I personally thought they weren’t as prepared. Still, I wasn’t going to jeopardize a highly populated city based on some suppositions or sloppy work.

I went back down to the sewers next, scouting the tunnels, but much quicker now. With us having found solid evidence of the cult and their activities, I needed to be a little less cautious and a little more information. I still wasn’t going to just go charging around blindly, but I did need to move faster and look through more possibilities and investigate more of what was happening, as well as try to find more of the rooms and locations they were using. Caution was good at first, but with so many people brought in, informational security was going to go to hell in a hand basket within a couple days, at most. I didn’t regret bringing Milton and his people in; it was his city, after all, and his help would be invaluable for a number of reasons, not least of which was his ability to circumvent the mayor on many issues, including commanding the city guard.

I knew there were more secrets down in the sewers and the tunnels below them, but I didn’t have time for anything not having to do with the cult, so anything else I found I just made a mental of and shelved for now. I did find several strange rooms and odd passages that had traps and were disguised, but none of it screamed of being of the cult to me, and I was starting to get quite familiar with their work and methodologies, so I just left all the strangeness. I did find another room almost an exact copy of the one Fran had found, making a note of what was within and sending the location to Fran to relay to the Count in a discrete manner, but I moved on. These weren’t the big prize, after all, and a few rooms where they were slowly converting a handful of people into basic zombies or ghouls wasn’t exactly the biggest threat, even though it was still a serious threat.

I eventually struck gold, or maybe silver, when I found a massive room at the south end of the city, or massive by the standards of what I had been finding and was usually in these old tunnels. It was a coupled hundred feet long and a hundred wide and close to three stories tall for its whole length, making it a very sizable area, especially for these old tunnels under Cambria. I thought it was probably the second best find as, while it didn’t appear to be False Death’s central hub or headquarters within the city, it was a massive operation to create more advanced undead, including abominations and high level ghouls, though I didn’t see anything indicating they were producing death knights or similar. Such creations usually required a single being of immense power to pull off, which meant having at least a lich if not something greater.

I didn’t do anything about the facility yet, not even report it to anyone. This was just too juicy a target for anyone else to leave alone, and I really didn’t want to set the cult off early, though just letting them continue to set up was certainly a danger as well. Still, by my best estimate, they would need at least a few weeks to finish their initial setup for whatever they were planning, likely longer if they wanted to pull of a more serious attack in the manner that they had attacked the capital. I wasn’t confident that I could single-handedly deal with the entire operation; not the room creating abominations, but the whole of their operations within Cambria, but I could easily destroy this room and all its foul products.

That was one good find, but I really needed to at least have some idea of where their headquarters were. I had a thought that I might be going about the whole thing wrong, or not even wrong, just not using what I already knew as efficiently as I could, so I stopped and recalculated. I left the sewers, finding the sun was already setting, and then moved to the east of the city. Here, there was a large graveyard, though many people chose cremation after they died based on long-standing tradition and their desires. Still, many people had either ashes or bones or even their full remains stored here, and it was certainly a place that would be of great interest to the cult. There were, in fact, six such cemeteries in and around the city, and I intended to give each of them a quick check.

The first yielded nothing, or nothing of great interest. There were signs somebody other than the caretakers had been about and disturbed the place mildly, but there weren’t any secret passages leading to some great lair or anything. There also weren’t any signs that anyone had robbed the place blind, though I meant in specific regard to the corpses and bones; even corpse ash could be valuable to necromancer and such, but there hadn’t been any great robbing of the place. The earthly goods were all still there, which did surprise me a bit, but cults were usually like that; anything they were interested in became their sole focus while anything that wasn’t part of that ideology they left by the wayside. Of course, the way False Death operated, they would need funds and resources, but they weren’t doing any grave robbing for the funds, or weren’t doing that here, not yet.

I moved to the next graveyard, finding much the same, with no secret passages, though it was clear people had been here beyond just the caretakers and simple visitors coming to pay respects to fallen family and friends. That was the story for graveyard three and four as well, with some bodies or bones or ash missing, more than should be for the daily and yearly operations of the cemeteries and city, but nothing else of note. Graveyard five, however, was not like the others, and I had to shake my head when I started investigating what was there. I though it might be a trap at first, it was so obvious, but then I just decided the cult wasn’t quite as smart or knowledgeable, in some matters, as they wanted to appear to be or thought they were. If it were laid out as a false trail or bait, I could understand, but this was just sloppy work to a high degree.

The fifth graveyard, which was part of an old church’s grounds in the northern part of the city, wasn’t disturbed at all. That made me very suspicious, as did finding a cleverly concealed passage below a small mausoleum in the eastern part of the grounds, but I thought it might just be a trap, and a simple one. I couldn’t believe that they had small but obvious signs of their activities in every other graveyard, but then the one that was more important they left entirely untouched. That slowed me down as I spent some time ghosting about in The Dark, checking graves and ceremonial niches and the like, looking at bodies and bones and ashes. It didn’t look like any of them were fake or dupes, which I thought might be a bit cleverer of a ploy, but they were all just as they should be. I couldn’t help scratching my head, at least metaphorically, as they had gone to such great lengths to cover their tracks everywhere and hide, but they had sort of missed the forest for the trees. If this wasn’t a trap meant to catch someone like me who was tailing them closely, then it was very poorly done.

I investigated the mausoleum from The Dark, looking through everything surrounding it, seeing that there were a few minor defenses, but all just to help it blend in and to stop people from looking at the place too closely. It was somewhere that wasn’t really taken care of, in terms of it was likely the family itself was no longer around, so whenever the staff thought to look into it was when the place got cleaned, and it got little besides that. Putting some glamors on the place to force people to turn away or have less interest in what was there or what the place was wasn’t a terrible way to do things, but someone seriously searching for the cult would find the place more suspicious. Again, I thought it was a bluff, but I carefully peeled back the layers of enchantments and defenses, at least mentally, going through them to make sure I had everything right. My biggest concern was if they had anything to specifically counter me, though with the way I had crushed, battered, destroyed, and killed everyone and everything in the last hideout I had invaded, I had a pretty good idea that they didn’t really know who I was or what I could do.

There wasn’t anything that specifically blocked The Dark or would send out an alert if someone was using it, but I still proceeded with caution. There was nothing blocking my powers even in general, but there could still be mechanisms or enchantments that I was unfamiliar with embedded in the walls or floors and I didn’t want to do something foolish. I moved through the tunnel and passageway down that I had found, going slowly and keeping my eyes open, but nothing jumped out at me, literally or metaphorically, and I made my way through several twists and turns to a small room.

The place was laid out different than the last stronghold of the cult’s I had invaded, and they were clearly being both more cautious and better prepared here, with a guard post that led into a controlled, single hall. That hall looked like it led to another guard post and then more individuals areas that were strictly maintained; it looked like only certain people were allowed through to certain areas, and people weren’t allowed to move in groups or freely within this set of rooms and tunnels. I could sensed immense death energies from further down, stronger even than the lich I had killed in the capital, though it was hard to tell if it was from just one being, or even if it was from ‘living’ beings at all. It could be a huge stockpile of death-related goods and reagents, such as much of what the cult had been smuggling into the city, but only investigating would show me, and I wasn’t ready to slip into their headquarters quite yet.

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