Friday, November 22nd
Indirk snarled, “You’d better have a damned good reason for this, Nymir.”
“I do,” Nymir said, scratching at his beard. The man stank to flaming heavens, but he’d probably come straight from a pile of dead fish or something, so could one hold it against him? He paced unhappily on the quay, looking around like he expected to be caught, “I’ve got a lead on the weapons.”
“I’m supposed to be at work right now,” Indirk huffed. She’d taken an early lunch to chase the man away from the building when she’d spotted him.
“I wanted you to be the first to know.”
“Why?” Hands in fists, Indirk resisted the urge to push Nymir off the quay and onto the beach below. She was slowly realizing that Amo had never told Nymir about her betrayal. Amo had probably explained her absence away somehow. She didn’t understand what that made her so angry, made her grind her blunt knuckles together, but she didn’t resist the anger.
“Because I can’t tell Amo,” Nymir said, “They might be in on it.”
“You think Amo is in on it? On, what, hiding Gray Watch’s magic?” That made Indirk shake her head like she’d gotten something in her eyes. “That’s fucking dumb.”
“My lead on the weapons. It’s the crone. The bird woman. She’s the lead.”
“The…” Indirk rubbed at her temples. He could not be talking about… “You do not mean Amo’s mom, right?”
“I’ve been watching the Lighthouse.” Nymir pointed across the bay with one grimy hand. “No light during the day, only on at night, obviously. But you watch it close enough at dawn, when it’s going out, and the light doesn’t extinguish. It moves down, inside the Lighthouse. It descends.”
“That’s normal. You idiot, that’s normal.” Indirk grumbled. “The lamp is a mirror assembly. It’s on a lift.”
“And it comes down into the room behind that nest of balconies just under the apex.”
“Which is where the lighthouse keepers extinguish it.”
“And then sometimes the glowing woman comes out.”
“The… what?” Indirk eyed Nymir as though the man had just started talking about flying narwhals and pixie dusk.
Nymir held up a spyglass. “I’m not making this up out of whole cloth, Indirk. She’s there. The magic sticks to her like dew in the mornings, fading. She’s three times taller than any anthral I’ve ever seen and skinny as hell, and her face is concealed by these bands across that damn beak on the front of her head. She’s dressed fancy here, not in rags, but it’s the same person. The creepy goddamned crone of the Boneblessed Cathedral is in that Lighthouse. I promise you.”
Indirk wrinkled her nose in disgust. The building that Amo’s mother used as an orphanage had been built by Redfall cultists. They had named it Boneblessed, but nobody had called it that since all the cultists had been killed off. Nobody except Nymir, apparently. Indirk huffed at him, “I don’t believe you. If you were sure of that, you’d tell Amo and they’d explain it.”
“I’m not wrong. I know what I saw.”
“If anything, you saw a person who’s just the same kind of thing that Sgathaich is.”
“Same kind of thing? There are no other things like the crone.”
“Nobody’s the only thing like them. There’s millions of anthrals. There’s got to be at least two of whatever Sgathaich is. Just tell Amo what you saw. Better yet, send a message back to Pharaul and have someone ask Sgathaich about it. She’d probably know something.”
“No. Never.” Nymir shook his head, gesturing firmly with both hands. “Don’t trust the crone. She’s not just creepy. She’s menacing. She’s up to something, I always thought, and now I see this? And I know you and Amo go back, however far back doesn’t matter, but do you really think Amo would take it well if I asked them about this? You think they’d be honest?”
“Yes.” Indirk crossed her arms. “I do.”
“You think Amo would choose you over the crone, if they had to choose?”
Indirk frowned at that, narrowing her eyes at Nymir. “That is not a fair question.”
“Take it.” Nymir tossed the spyglass at Indirk and she caught it on instinct. “Get up at dawn and look for yourself. If you’re so sure it’s not the crone, then you tell Amo and see how it goes. Damn your deep cover. We’ve got a mission.” He turned his back on her.
Indirk snarled and lifted the spyglass like she was going to throw it at the back of Nymir’s head, but she kept it. She frowned toward the Lighthouse. Memories she’d put behind her surfaced, things she’d seen in files that she hadn’t been cleared to read, strange expenses directed toward the Lighthouse and the Embassy, information that had led her into a flaming dungeon and a rattling trauma. Putting the spyglass in one of her green coat’s big pockets, Indirk muttered, “No,” to herself as she walked back to work. “No, no, no.”
