Chapter 172: Meanwhile, Two Weeks Ago in Greenstone…

Thalia Mercer was ill at ease. Most of the city’s iron-rankers had left a few days earlier and would be gone for weeks. She had hoped, in the quiet that settled over Greenstone in their absence, to start getting through to her son. She and her husband both had made so many mistakes with him, which had almost cost them their son. The mysterious cultists and the horrific thing they implanted into Thadwick had brought home just how disastrous things had gotten and they resolved to put Thadwick onto a better path.

In their private parlour, Thalia was on a lounger with her husband, Beaufort, leaning into him.

“I’m not sure I should have let him go,” she said, showing an uncertainty she would reveal to very few. Hours ago, Thadwick had left the estate for the first time since the star seed was purged from him.

“Keeping him here only would have driven him further from us,” Beaufort said. “He has two bronze-rankers with him.”

Thalia nodded.

“I chose Kyle and Geoffrey carefully,” she said. “They’re the most reliable people in our household guard. Still registered adventurers, although they are no longer active.”

“They normally work the spirit coin farm, right?” Beaufort asked.

“Yes. I pulled them off it to give Thadwick the most reliable protection I could. Including from himself.”

“There you are, then,” Beaufort said. “They won’t let him do anything too self-destructive. Do you know where he went?”

“One of his Old City brothels,” Thalia said. “I had a tracker placed on him with ritual magic while he was still recovering. He doesn’t know it’s there.”

There was a hammering on the door.

“Lord Mercer! Lady Mercer!”

It was the voice of their family butler, Crivens, in an uncharacteristic panic. Thalia and Beaufort got up and went to the door together.

“What is it?” Beaufort asked.

“My lord, my lady. A representative of the Adventure Society just arrived. She claims to have important and time-sensitive news but refuses to speak with anyone but you directly.”

“Where have you put her?” Beaufort asked.

“She approached the manor discreetly, my lord, even bypassing our alarms and protections. I thought it best, then to place her in the black parlour.”

“Well considered, as always, Crivens,” Beaufort said.

“Thank you, my lord.”

The black parlour was underground, a clandestine meeting place for the family’s most private meetings. The only access was from a heavily protected elevating platform that only a few family and the most trusted and requisite staff could access. Thalia and Beaufort took the platform down and found that the Adventure Society representative was no lesser personage than the Deputy Director, Genevieve Picot. The Elderly elf looked perfectly comfortable amongst the black cushions and dark wood of the black parlour, getting up to greet the pair.

“Deputy Director,” Thalia greeted as they all took seats. “I was told your business was urgent.”

“Quite so,” Genevieve said. “I won’t waste time on niceties. You are, I take it, familiar with the office of monitoring at the Adventure Society.”

“Yes,” Thalia said. “Their primary task is to monitor the tracking stones of the adventurers, in case any of them die.”

“Yes,” Genevieve said. “Roughly an hour ago, the office brought to my attention an issue with two of the stones. The adventurers linked to them weren’t dead, but the stones were no longer able to track them. Something we have seen before.”

“The five who were implanted with star seeds,” Thalia said.

“Yes,” Genevieve said. “As best we can tell, their auras have changed sufficiently that the aura imprint we have for them is no longer effective. I was distressed to discover that the two adventurers in question are no longer active, but now work for your household.”

Thalia and Beaufort shared a dread-filled glance.

“Kyle and Geoffrey,” Beaufort said.

“Yes,” Genevieve said. “Why did you guess them?”

“Because they are out with our son right now,” Thalia said.

“What about Thadwick?” Beaufort asked.

“He was never attuned to a new badge after the expedition,” Thalia said. “They aren’t tracking him, but I am.”

She took a stone from her pocket and tapped it twice. Shortly thereafter, Crivens arrived on the elevating platform.

“Crivens, get the team I have tracking Thadwick. The whole team; bring them here as quickly and as quietly as you can.”

Thalia and Beaufort probed Genevieve for more details but there was little she could tell them, beyond that it was being handled with as much discretion as possible. Both the Adventure Society Director and the interim director from the inquiry team had made very clear to the monitoring office how to handle this kind of situation.

The people who were tracking Thadwick appeared with unfortunate haste.

“We were already looking for you my lady, my lord. Several minutes ago, the tracker on Young Master Thadwick stopped working.”

Thadwick returned to the Mercer estate with his two guardians in tow. They had barely made it through the gate before Thadwick’s mother teleported to greet them. The two guards bowed their heads respectfully while a disgruntled expression crossed Thadwick’s face.

“Thadwick, dear. I do hope you found your time out relaxing.”

“It was fine. I’m going back to my room.”

“Of course,” Thalia said. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“I know how servants work, Mother.”

“I meant me, dear. I thought maybe we could spend some more time together. Your father, as well. As a family.”

“Whatever,” Thadwick said, walking around her.

“You go ahead, dear,” Thalia said. “I’d just like a word with your boys, here.”

Thadwick stopped and turned around.

“You want them to tell you everything I did,” he accused. “Let me save you the trouble. I went to Old City and I had some women. One, then a pair, then one again to round out the afternoon. Are you happy?”

“As long as you enjoyed it, dear. I’ll have someone from the church of the Healer swing by and deal with anything you might have picked up.”

“No,” Thadwick said. “I already paid someone.”

“I think it would be best if I got someone in, dear.”

“I don’t care what you think would be best! I told you it’s fine. Why won’t you ever trust the things I say.”

“I’m sorry, dear. If you say it’s alright, then I’ll say no more.”

“Good,” Thadwick said, then turned and stormed off. Thalia watched him go, then turned to the two bodyguards.

“So?” she asked.

“As he said, my lady. He was quite aggressive, but the owner knows to keep their mouth shut and was paid to see they remember that.”

“Very good,” Thalia said. “If anything else comes up I want to know immediately, however minor it seems.”

“Of course, milady.”

“Back to your posts, then. I want my son taken care of.”

Thalia arrived in the black parlour, where Genevieve and Beaufort were still present.

“Well?” Beaufort asked.

“That is not our son,” Thalia said.

“You think he’s been seeded again?” Beaufort asked.

“This is something else,” Thalia said. “The personality is right on but I know his aura, both with and without the seed. It was off, at a fundamental level. What came home is some kind of double he is projecting into from some other location.”

“Is that even possible?” Beaufort asked.

“It is,” Thalia said. “We can use whatever that thing is upstairs to track back to our son, but whoever is on the other end will know right away and get on the move. They can only be so far away, though, so if we have people ready to act in the city, we have a good chance of catching them.”

“If that really isn’t our son.”

“It’s not,” Thalia said with certainty. “Our son is out there somewhere and he needs us.”

“Then we have to act now and we have to do it right,” Beaufort said. “We’re not losing him again.”

Thalia nodded, her face wracked with guilt and pain. “He hadn’t even recovered from what they did to him before and they’re victimising him again. Why do they want him so much?”

“Hopefully, we can answer that when we get him back,” Genevieve said. “What about the bodyguards?”

“Their auras are definitely off but it’s subtle,” Thalia said. “My guess is they’re seeded and have something to mask their auras to appear normal. I could only tell because I know their auras and have strong enough aura senses to see through it.”

“We need to get moving on this,” Beaufort said. “With Kyle and Geoffrey compromised we can’t mobilise our own people without giving the game away. The Kettering’s have people in Old City, I’ll talk to them about getting people ready to move once we trace Thad’s location.”

“I’ll prep the people I had tracking Thadwick,” Thalia said. “They have the expertise to backtrack from whatever or whoever this double is to our boy.”

“I’ll return to the Adventure Society,” Genevieve said. “I’ll update the Director and Interim Director and marshal what forces I can put together quietly. I’ll coordinate with the Kettering family.”

“We don’t want these people realising that we’re going to move on them,” Beaufort said. “Thalia, as soon as our people are confident they have a way to trace Thad, we strike.”

Kyle and Geoffrey were stationed outside Thadwick’s room. Located in the main family section, on the top floor of one of the towers, the hallway was large and flooded with light from a ceiling largely made of glass.

The two guards seemed to sense something was wrong. Although Thalia was walking casually toward her son’s room, something about the way she was carrying herself tipped them off. The result, for Kyle and Geoffrey, was horrifying.

Their bodies split apart, segmenting at the joints. Knees and elbows, wrists, ankles, shoulders; all tearing audibly apart. Both men died instantly, rictuses of pain and terror frozen on their dead faces. Their bodies were now strung together by wires, like poorly made puppets, complete with jerky movements. The guards had gone from people to monstrosities of flesh and metal.

What concerned Thalia the most was the aura coming off the two corpse puppets. Moments ago they had been living bronze rankers. Now they were horrifying abominations giving off silver-rank auras. Thalia flashed back to the expedition, with its construct monsters and bizarre cultists. That was the moment everything started falling apart with her son and the magic surged up inside her.

Thalia Mercer was a silver-rank adventurer, and far from a weak one. She might not be the equal of her friend and team mate, Danielle Geller, but she was still a powerhouse in her own right. With the might, potent, swift and onslaught essences, in terms of pure explosive power she was a match for any adventurer alive. It was certainly too much for the two gangly, awkward creatures that had moments ago been people. Under the barrage of a furious Thalia, they were soon ripped apart, their metal components just as torn to pieces as their flesh.

Thalia didn’t bother to open Thadwick’s door. She blasted it to splinters with a special attack and moved in, finding the facsimile of her son in what looked like a state of melting, clay that had seemed like flesh oozing off an iron skeleton. Thalia immediately called in the ritualists, yelling at them to focus as their attention was arrested by the dead flesh puppets and the iron-clay doppelganger degrading in front of them.

Thadwick had been in the ritual circle for hours, connected to his mystical double. Now he had been pulled out of it as a pair of ritualists methodically eradicated any element that could be used to track their location. All around them, other people were packing up supplies into dimensional bags, stripping the building of anything that could be used against them.

“What was that?” Timos yelled at Thadwick.

Timos had quickly come to regret going along with Thadwick’s aggressive self-recruitment. Rather than a useful pawn within the aristocracy, he was a one-man disaster. Timos had been operating in Greenstone for years without so much as a sniff of detection, yet within hours Thadwick was bringing everything down on their heads. From openly approaching him to failing to immediately giving the game away, Timos was mentally berating himself for not just killing Thadwick and his bodyguards, then dumping them in a canal. If he had been thinking straight, he assured himself, he would never have risked so much on a petulant teenager.

Timos was a man who valued methodical patience, but their allies in the church of Purity were ruining everything with their haste. Despite the cult’s warnings that they should wait until the monster surge, the church were insistently impatient, forced them to move forward before everything was fully in place.

Their precipitous actions left them with little margin for error, where every mistake threatened to snowball into disaster. The degree to which their activities had been uncovered even in such a provincial area as Greenstone spoke volumes. Timos was, for once,  grateful he wasn’t assigned to one of the more crucial regions. The troubles they would face in a city full of top-shelf adventurers made him shudder. Even then, he would happily trade a dangerous enemy for an ally like Thadwick.

“Our people have been working in plain sight for years,” Timos admonished Thadwick. “Years! You can’t manage more than a few hours?”

“I warned you that my mother had strong aura senses,” Thadwick spat back. “You’re the one who was so certain this fake would work.”

“What was the last thing you saw before the connection was cut?” Timos asked.

“People coming into the room after my mother. Two of her ritualists, I think.”

Timos snarled like an animal.

“We have to move quickly,” he said. “They’ll be all over this place soon.”

“Aren’t your people eliminating the link?” Thadwick asked.

“You don’t stay hidden in this city for as long as we have by assuming our people are better than Thalia Mercer’s people.”

“My mother isn’t that impressive.”

“Yes, Thadwick, she is,” Timos said. “How you turned out this way is a complete mystery.”

“If you knew how great she was, then why did you try and deceive her?”

Timos flinched, not happy to have his own contribution to the current disaster pointed out.

“Because our methods weren’t devised by locals but bestowed on us from above,” Timos said. “Unfortunately, your pathetic little city didn’t warrant the best tools.”

Once the building had been divested of any trace of the cult and its activities, Timos led his people, including Thadwick, through an illegally-made and well-concealed hole in the floor, down to the water utility tunnels running under Old City. The tunnels had stone walkways on either side, elevated above the water channels running through the middle.

They hurried along, Timos consulting a map as they went. The dank tunnels echoed, Timos signalling a stop as they heard something. It was a sound of footsteps and whistling, coming from a person who emerged from a side tunnel and not far in front of them.. He was of middle years, with loose overalls and a laden tool belt.

“Well, hello,” he said. “You folks must be pretty lost to all wind up here, but old Frank will see you…”

Frank never got to finish his sentence, his corpse falling as Timos’ conjured spear vanished, leaving a ragged hole in Frank’s throat. Timos kicked the body off the walkway  and into the water channel before hurrying on once more.

Days passed and after the initial, covert search, the city’s resources were brought fully to bear. The Adventure Society and Magic Society, along with all the noble families were recruited into the effort. The revelation about the nature of their enemy went from restricted to common knowledge, sending waves of concern through the populace. The information was released to make it clear that anyone harbouring the enemy would face the harshest retribution.

The search threw the city into chaos. The cult had been much more careful about their activities than the likes of local criminals, whose clandestine operations were less thoroughly hidden. These were the one flushed out by the search as the cult slipped quietly into the dark.

The search was not helped by lack of competent iron-rankers. Usually the rank and file of the Adventure Society, their absence due to Emir’s expedition left only the dregs. They were called into action regardless, many of whom hadn’t taken a contract in years. Thugs, criminals, arena fighters, most of which had been malingering at iron rank for years. They were pulled in, nonetheless.

Not every hidden cultist escaped. Adric Dorgan was not only effective in determining when the search was wasting its time on ordinary criminals, but had at least some sense of the cultist supply network. From his direction, a number of raids turned up cultists, although to little effect. When captured, the crystal stars exploded from inside them, leaving behind only uninformative scraps of shredded flesh.

As the city was scoured, a series of bandit raids took place out in the delta, killing and plundering supplies. They were made against the holdings of numerous families, mostly soft targets who relied on the threat of retribution for security. The attacks against more secure locations made it clear who the primary target of the attacks was.

Almost every raid that employed greater coordination on more difficult targets was made against Mercer family holdings. It was also plain that they had insider information, hitting weak points in security, quickly and efficiently taking only the most valuable goods.

The Mercers swiftly realised that Thadwick’s knowledge of their operations, schooled into him by his father, were being used against them. They made rapid changes and, with the support of Adventure Society personnel, set a series of ambushed that ravaged the attackers. The fallen and the captured exploding into crystal stars confirmed that the cult were behind the attacks, but again there were no prisoners to interrogate.

In a small village on the outskirts of the delta, Timos and Thadwick were in the common room of an inn. Like the rest of village’s inhabitants, the tavern owners were dead.

“First you were useless as an infiltrator,” Timos berated Thadwick. “Now your usefulness as an expert on Mercer family security is at an end because they’ve used what you know to turn the tables and set up traps. We’ve lost people any one of which are worth ten of you. So, what I need from you right now is a reason not to kill you and leave you to your family to find.”

“You wouldn’t,” Thadwick said.

“No?” Timos asked. “I’m pretty sure that if they at least found your body, the pressure on us would lessen, if only a little.

“What do you even need to raid supplies for?” Thadwick asked. “What about those supply ships you’ve been using?”

“Are you an idiot? Look at who I’m asking. Adric Dorgan has been relentless in digging out our supply lines,” Timos said. “If it wasn’t for our local support we would be completely hamstrung, and I’m starting to suspect he knows who they are.”

“Who are they?” Thadwick asked.

“Do you seriously think I would tell you anything that could compromise us? I had you brought here in a closed carriage to make sure you didn’t find some way to reveal our location!”

“If Dorgan is the one pressuring your supplies, then kill him,” Thadwick suggested. “What do you care about some crime lord?”

“That crime lord’s daughter is the Director of the Adventure Society, you idiot. You think things are bad now? We have every silver ranker who they can motivate searching for us. You kill the Director’s father and you can be damn sure she’ll motivate the rest. So, for now, we need to supply from elsewhere. Which was your family stores because we had you. Now, you’re worthless.”

“I’ll show you worthless…”

Timos’ backhand slap across Thadwick’s face was punishingly loud.

“You’ll shut your damn mouth,” Timos said. “Like it or not, you’re one of us, now. That means you do what you’re told until we figure out if you’re even worth keeping alive. I cannot wait until your worthless city and everyone in it are dead.”

“What?” Thadwick asked.

“Oh, didn’t I mention?” Timos said with a gleeful grin. “Our astral expert, before he was stupidly killed off, determined that the next astral space we claim will be a little unusual, due to some specifics of its connection to your world.”

As he spoke, Timos moved toward Thadwick, slow and intimidating as Thadwick backed away.

“The astral space is anchored too far away to reduce your city to astral dust, sadly. The good news is the secondary wave of destruction that will scour this horrid delta, with it’s wet heat and awful insects, right along with the city and the even worse vermin that infest it.”

“My family…” Thadwick said weakly.

“Have you not been paying attention?” Timos asked. He was standing right up close to Thadwick, who had backed into the tavern bar. “You betrayed your family, Thadwick. Making you one of us instead of a wet corpse was a mistake but it’s made, now.”

“My father,” Thadwick said. “We could bring him into the fold.”

“That wouldn’t work, Thadwick. He’s not an entitled child, willing to grasp at whoever offers him the power he thinks he deserves. He will never serve the Builder, but you do, and one way or another, I’m going to get some use out of you.”