'No,' Sophraea started emphatically, and then she hesitated. 'Well, Volponia. She came back from a voyage, very ill, and settled into her room. But that was long before I was born. Long before my parents even married.'
'Does she have any scars? Blue marks?' Gustin asked.
'How I would know? She's my great-great aunt,' said Sophraea. 'She has always been there, wrapped up in her bed, quite covered from head to toe. Besides, nobody in the family has any magic. You've met them all except Volponia. They're not magic-users, spellscarred or otherwise.'
'Not consciously. But you do have talents, very specific talents connected to the City of the Dead, like always knowing where you are inside the graveyard. And your eyes do glow blue, especially when you are inside the graveyard walls. I've seen it.'
'Some people learn magic, some people are magic, doesn't necessarily take a plague,' Briarsting observed. 'Look at elves, look at dwarves. Look at my people. There are some who say that we weren't always green.' He glanced down at his dark emerald hands. 'Although it's hard to imagine being pink. Such an odd and useless color for skin.'
'Exactly, and better put than my ramblings. Magic soaks into people, changes them, makes certain things happen,' the wizard said. 'So, even before the Spellplague, when Carvers needed a gate, they built a gate, and it only worked for them. Makes sense, at least in a place like Waterdeep.'
'But you have gone in and out the gate,' argued Sophraea. 'And you're not family.'
'But I was with you the first time that I went through the gate,' recalled Gustin. 'At least, 1 was following you pretty closely. I didn't even realize we'd gone through the wall until I was well within the City of the Dead. And I've always been with you or just behind you every time that we've used that gate.'
'And he's living in Dead End House,' pointed out Briarsting. 'Which makes Gustin as much a part of the house as that pack of cats you harbor. I've never noticed any of your slinky black mousers having any trouble slipping through the gate bars.'
'Cats can always go where they like,' Sophraea said. Then she thought of another argument. 'Lord Adarbrent uses our gate,' she pointed out.
'Often?'
'Well, no, he usually enters through the public gate. But I've seen him leave through the Dead End gate, going into the cemetery, more than once,' she said.
'What did you say about the basement door?' Gustin continued. 'There's no problem going out from Dead End House. The door's guardian knows you're a friend of the house. Maybe the gate works the same way. If you're a friend of the house or have permission of the family, you can see it. More importantly, you can use it, at least to leave Dead End House.'
Sophraea sprang off the bench and took to pacing herself, unconsciously following the trail beaten in the wet grass by Gustin's earlier perambulations around the Markarl tomb.
'So if you have to be a Carver? Or invited by a Carver? Then how do the noble dead know where to go? We certainly didn't ask them to use our gate to go gallivanting through Waterdeep.' Her skirts swished through the wet grass, rocking in angry time to her agitated movements.
'Maybe the same rules don't apply to the dead?' suggested Briarsting. When the other two shook their heads at him, he added, 'I just live with them. I don't necessarily understand them.'
'No,' said Gustin, 'I think Sophraea is right. It took a Carver to lead the dead through. Maybe it only needed to be done symbolically because the dead can see more clearly than the living, at least where magic is concerned. That sounds like a ritual, something anyone with the right spellbooks could construct. Once that's done, the gate could be opened by the dead whenever they needed it or as the spellcaster commanded.'
'So you think one of the family is under a spell? That one of my relatives walked into the City of the Dead and led a parade of noble dead out? Do you think that's what Leaplow did?' Sophraea mused, remembering how they had discovered her brother in the courtyard.
'No, your brother just ended up with the dead on that first night by accident,' said Gustin, who had questioned Sophtaea's brother as closely as he dared. Leaplow still tended to react badly to realization that the prettiest girl that he'd ever danced with spent her daylight hours in a grave. 'And Leaplow was never in the City of the Dead that day. He's very adamant that he worked at Dead End House all day carving my statue, left through the public gate to go drinking, and came back to Dead End House through the same gate.'
How would Rampage Stunk react to such a suggestion that a Carver had started the curse, Sophraea wondered. She shuddered. The fat man's threats against anyone who had helped bring about his current haunting grew more grisly every day according to the Unicorn.
'So who do you think opened the gate and suggested these ghosts and wandering corpses use our courtyard as their shortcut to Rampage Stunk?' Sophraea asked.
'It doesn't have to be quite that literal.' Gustin chewed his lower lip, having run out of seedcakes. 'As I said before, it was probably a symbolic action, something that the person might not even been aware of. That's how many curses are done, by tricking people into helping the caster. Symbols carry a lot of weight in such rituals. A token that symbolizes permission for the dead to enter.'
'So you are saying someone, probably a Carver, carried something through the gate that unlocked it for the dead,' Briarsting said. 'Makes sense. I've seen a lot of odd mementos used as keys for various tombs around here. A hair ribbon, a dried flower, a twist of wire.'
'The shoe!' exclaimed Gustin and Sophraea together.
'What shoe?' asked Briarsting.
'The one we found in the tunnels. A little gold brocade shoe. Volponia said that it had probably been buried with someone,' Sophraea explained. 'But that doesn't work. I took it through the basement door. And nothing happened that night.'
'Wrong door,' said Gustin automatically. 'The ritual needed the gate.'
'What?'
'And my old master said that I never paid attention to my lessons.' Gustin looked almost smug. He rapped his knuckles smartly against the bench. 'The shoe and the gate were linked together in a ritual. So, until you carried it from the City of the Dead through your family's gate, the dead couldn't follow. That makes sense. At least from a wizard's point of view.'
'But 1 didn't,' she began and then stopped. 'Oh. On the way home from Lord Adarbrent s house, after the fight. We cut back through the Andamaar gate and along the inside of the wall to go home through our gate. Because I said it would be faster.'
Sophraea sank onto the bench in despair. The topiary dragon dropped its whiskery nose into her lap. She patted the brittle late autumn leaves gently, appreciating the dragon's gesture of support, but there really was no comfort. She had done this to het family, placed them directly in the middle of a feud between the noble dead and Rampage Stunk.
She had put them all in mortal danger.
FIFTEEN
Gustin kept patting her shoulder. Briarsting offered her a thin papery leaf and advised 'Blow hard.'
As for the topiary dragon, it collapsed in a sympathetic heap of quivering foliage at her feet.
Sophraea did not know what they were all so upset about. As she informed them repeatedly, she was hot crying. She was not.
'I am going to solve this,' she stated for the third time, pleased that she managed the entire sentence without her voice breaking, cracking, or doing any of the other distressing modulations that had plagued the first two pronouncements.
'Well, of course,' said Gustin just as briskly with one more pat. 'And we are going to help you.'
'Absolutely,' said Briarsting, still tucking the leaf into her hand. 'But what should we do next?'
'End the curse,' said Sophraea with a decisive nod. 'Obviously. If the dead stop haunting Stunk, then Stunk will stop hunting for revenge. At least, I hope so.' She turned abruptly on the bench and poked Gustin in the chest. 'You're the wizard. How do I end this spell?'
