[Story] Echoes Part the Second

[Solivar]

Finding Keldris and Talia proved to be considerably more difficult than he had hoped for.

Shadowglen, even under present circumstances, was not a large village, covering only a few dozen acres of the Tirisfalen hills and forest at the very edge of the vast, dark expanse of Silverpine, its homes and roads and businesses clinging to the sides and floor of the valley. Most of the town's hundred-odd souls had made their living in its major enterprise -- the mines they worked under royal charter, from which they extracted the metals that fed the capital's treasuries and minting-house -- and its associated tasks, the smelting-house, the smithy, the charcoal yards. A handful of sharecrofters helped work the local farmsteads and orchards, a handful of foresters helped keep the royal game lands clear of poachers, and a pair of well-known and highly sought after artisans, who preferred to live close to the source of their favored materials and who served as the village's headmen, were the only other permanent residents. Then the Plague had come, and the dead had risen, and the refugees from the East had begun pouring in, first as a trickle, then as a flood. Shadowglen, with its steep, narrow road and equally narrow entrance into the valley, its back to the wall of the mountains, became something other than a simple, sleepy hill town: it became a defensible strong-point, a place to send the overflow of exhausted, terrified easterners encamped in the shadow of the City's walls. And so, one fine early autumn morning, the weary, frightened folk of Shadowglen had woken to find a detachment of the King's soldiers and an equal-sized detachment of Church-trained knights marching into town with a squad of siege engineers and three hundred refugees in their train. The engineers had built a swiftly constructed but strong wooden palisade across the mouth of the valley, reopened and reinforced the played-out mine shafts, and then returned to the City; the soldiers and the knights had remained, to settle the refugees, to establish the field hospital, to help maintain the cordon that stretched from Brill to Silverlaine Keep to Fenris Isle to the City, to soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, whose thoughts on the project had not been solicited prior to its execution.

Solivar himself spent the majority of the time either in the field hospital or assisting with the refugees, most of whom had arrived on the other side of the Bulwark in various states of exhausted, injured, and sick with both illness and fear, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and what little they had managed to scavenge along the way to aid their survival. Necessities -- food, clothing, blankets -- had been distributed to them at the City, but there were some ills and deprivations that no material gift could address: most of the refugees had lost someone, either to the Plague or to the dead, some had lost all, and many were the parents bereft of children, the children lacking anything other than compassionate strangers to see to their care. He went among them, tending injuries not severe enough to require a Light-blessed healer's hands, making certain illnesses that were not the Plague did not lead to a general panic, coaxing the despairing to eat and move and care for themselves as best they could. The children, in particular, required gentle handling, especially the youngest ones who had no family left to protect or advocate for them. Of the knights, he was among the best with the children -- an artifact of the years he had spent in service to the Sanctum of the Moon and its orphan's asylum in Quel'Thalas -- who found him a mythy as a dragon, his ears and hair a source of constant fascination, and the stories he could tell of heroes and wizards of whom they had never heard were a source of comfort far out of proportion to their actual entertainment value. Many of them needed that simple comfort of a warm cup of milk and a bedtime story, the lamp left burning to chase away the shadows, someone to hold them when they woke frightened in the night. He had been alone and frightened enough as a child himself to wish it on no one else, especially when the cause was so terrible.

The situation was substantially complicated by the attitude of the locals which, even a month on, tended to be standoffish at best, actively quarrelsome at the worst, and at nearly no time at all inclined toward helpful or neighborly. He supposed he could understand the tension but, at the same time, had little sympathy for it: had Shadowglen fallen to the dead and its people were forced to flee, he wondered how they would feel as refugees in their own homeland, treated as poor and unwelcome relations likely to steal the silver once they found a place of safety? He principally left liaising with the headmen to Aretegos, who possessed the authority lent not only by his knighthood but the noble Lordaeran title he would inherit on his next birthday, held his tongue as best he was able, reminded himself that patience and compassion were the higher virtues and that it was not very knightly to shout "What is WRONG with you people?!" while administering a sound beating no matter how obdurate others were in their unpleasantness. He had cause to remind himself of those very salient facts at least six times that morning, searching through the town, being greeted by villagers inclined to pretend his accent was totally impenetrable and harassed civilian support officials who were entirely too busy to answer simple questions. It was the best part of an hour before he found one of the objects of his search, as she rode in through the palisade gate at the head of her patrol.

"Talia!"

She reined her mount off to the side, turned in the saddle and spoke quietly to her lieutenant, offering a final salute and sending the soldiers under her command on their way. She did not object when he reached up and took the reins from her, and even accepted his hand down, so obviously stiff and tired from the hours she'd spent in the saddle that she actually leaned heavily on him for a long moment after her feet touched the ground. Together they walked her horse to the makeshift tent-stable without a word passing between them and from there to the mess, where he required her to sit and eat something before he would tell her the source of his errand.

"Now. Tell me, already." Her vivid green eyes were still heavily underlaid by weary circles, dark even against the warm brown of her skin, but she no longer looked as though she could fall asleep on her feet.

"The master is here. He wishes you to attend him in the chapel as soon as you can." He knew he was grinning like an idiot but could not help it.

Talia's eyes widened slightly. "Then I probably should. Had you been looking long? Oh, he'll be vexed."

"Not long, no. And I suspect he'll forgive me the liberty of making certain you're awake for what he wants to tell you." They rose together, and he gathered up her plate and mug. "Have you seen Keldris anywhere?"

"Our paths crossed just above Brill late last night -- his patrol was on its way in at the time." She snatched back her mug and finished off the last swallow of her tea. "I believe his long-term plan was to get something to eat and sleep for a few hours."

Keldris and Talia had both been riding back-to-back patrol shifts for whole days at a stretch, and so this plan was not surprising. Unfortunately, there was not a drop of mornbrew left in the mess, and so he settled for making a mug of the blackest tea possible, unadulterated by milk or honey, and set off to the pavilion that served their detachment as sleeping quarters. Also unfortunately, Keldris was not there, though his bedroll had obviously seen recent use. The officer of the watch grumped that it wasn't her job to keep track of wayward knights but confirmed that Keldris wasn't actually scheduled for a duty rotation until some time after midday. The mug of tea was stone cold and half empty despite the tongue-curling bitterness of it by the time his travels brought him to the refugee camp, tucked back hard against the hill and clustered around the unused mine shafts that had been reinforced for their use as shelters, a somewhat warmer and drier supplement to the multitude of tents both small and large that filled the far end of the valley.

Keldris normally claimed a violent allergy to small children brought on by being the eldest of six and having been sorely distressed by his younger siblings until he ran away screaming to Lordaeron. The affliction did not appear to be bothering him too greatly that morning as he crawled about on his hands and knees, three children under the age of five winters clinging to his back uttering savage war-cries as they slew imaginary ghouls right and left, another half-dozen cheering in a wide circle around them and demanding their turns to ride the horsie. He absolutely could not help the laugh that emerged from him at the sight, and Keldris got to his feet grinning his easiest grin, promising the children he'd come back to play more with them later.

"I wanted to bring you some mornbrew, but I'm afraid I got there a bit too late." He handed Keldris the half-empty mug. "And I wanted to give you a full cup, but I'm afraid it took me forever to find you and nature took its course."

"Excuses, excuses." Keldris, nonetheless, drank down the mug's contents in three swallows. "For what it's worth, I thought I'd find you over here when I came looking and instead discovered that your absence from your bedroll was not entirely the fault of adorable moppets."

"Not entirely, no. The master came in from the City late last night. He wants to see you in the chapel as soon as you can get there."

Keldris handed back the mug and automatically ran a hand through his disorderly mess of short-cropped auburn hair, rendering it even more messy than it was before. "Really? I'm astonished he found the time what with everything else that's going on. Did he say what it was about?"

"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised." He replied and turned back down the path, Keldris stretching his long legs to keep up.

"I other words, 'yes, but I'm not supposed to say.'" Keldris gave him a sidelong look. "Are you...feeling well? Your eyes are glowing more than normal this morning. You haven't taken a fever from one of your ankle-biting companions, have you?"

He laughed again, the sound catching the attention of passersby and earning glares in response. "No, no, I don't have a fever. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I felt this well. You'll understand in a few minutes, I suspect."

"Very well, preserve your air of exotic Quel'dorei mystery if you must." Keldris replied airily. "I'll find out soon enough."

He absolutely could not stop smiling. "Yes, yes you will."

Mistress Renee was, Solivar discovered quickly, not like most of the Forsaken whose acquaintance he had made thus far. For one thing, she did not seem to look back at life -- at living -- with the poisonous anger and bitterness that soured the souls of so many others who had suffered the same fate. There was more of sorrow than rage in her, and a preference for the touchstones of life -- warm fires, soft beds, a kettle singing in the coals and the scent of something good cooking on the stove -- that made the Gallows' End a welcoming place to both the living and those undead who shared her views. Which were, he realized within a day, the majority of the populace of Brill where, despite the constant danger of the Scarlet Crusade and the feral Scourge, the locals chose not to wallow in either hatred or self-pity, but go about their existence as best they were able. It made the people of Brill in general, and the proprietor of the Gallows' End in specific, far more pleasant to deal with than the vast majority of their fellows. He often wondered about the Forsaken: if they loathed the Lich King and all that he had done to them, all that he had forced them to do, why did they cling so to the trappings of his reign, the symbols by which he marked the kingdom he claimed, the souls he had enslaved? Such things had power, and he doubted the Forsaken could be ignorant of that; he sometimes suspected that the vast majority of them had simply transferred ownership of themselves, preferring the hand of their Dark Lady on the chains that bound them.

Renee, it seemed, opted for neither Arthas nor Sylvanas and so her doors were open to all, as was her advice and her help. When he asked her if she knew where he could find a map of Lordaeron dating from before the war, she had looked at him steadily for a moment and then gestured for him to follow her. In her office, a small room beneath the main staircase, she had one pinned to the wall, heavily annotated in different colors of ink. Patrol routes were marked in blue, as were safe-points along the cordon that began at the Bulkwark and stretched out to encompass the scattered farmsteads and market towns in both the East and the West, looping around Hearthglen and Silverlaine Keep. Heavy concentrations of the dead were bordered in red, wide swaths of carmine in the East, tightly isolated blots in the West, places that had fallen bordered in black. He traced the long black line that began in Andorhal and encompassed dozens of farms and villages, some named, some nameless, and ended in Stratholme, where many roads came together.

"There's naught but death and the dead beyond this point, Sir Eventide. If you must take this way..."

"I must."

"Then I pray the Light walks with you."

The hour candle Renee had lit was a quarter-mark lower when he opened his eyes again, words still ringing in his ears, familiar darkness swimming in his mind. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and why he had wanted to see the map at all, and a longer moment to discipline his shaking hands. Shadowglen, he found, lay where his unreliable memories insisted it was: west of Brill, high in the hills bordering the vast expanse of Silverpine Forest. It took him some time to find it, for the name had been neatly lined out and replaced, its new designation printed beneath it in Renee's crisp handwriting: Deathknell. The older notes, written in blue, marked it as a safe-point along the western patrol route, a refugee camp.

Renee was at the taproom bar when he emerged from her office, assiduously dusting fine cut crystal goblets that few, even among the tavern's living patrons, were actually inclined to use. He seated himself and, without so much glancing in his direction, Renee set down a glass, filled it from an earthenware jug she bought from beneath the bar, and slid it down to him, returning to her work without missing a beat. The contents of the glass were dark, nearly impenetrable by the light of the lamps, and thick as honey, the scent muted but strangely familiar. He sipped carefully, half-expecting cloying sweetness, only to find a familiar taste following the familiar smell: rich, refreshing bitterness, the tongue-curling hint of salt, cold that burned all the way down. He finished the drink in three swallows and Renee wordlessly poured him another.

"I was not aware," He finally observed, "that the Plaguebringer shared that particular recipe."

"The Plaguebringer did not," The mistress of the house replied, a little smile lurking around the corners of her mouth, "But one of your comrades in arms gave me a flask in payment for services rendered, and I reverse-engineered it as best I could. We do not lack for the primary ingredients, after all. I take it the results please?"

"Entirely." They sat in companionable silence for a long moment, while she cleaned the already quite spotless bar-top and he considered how to phrase what he wanted to say.

"Whatever you're thinking, just spit it out. I promise I won't fault you for want of eloquence." She took his cup from him and washed it at once, before the glass could begin to pit.

"You were a soldier," He finally managed, not quite making it a genuine question.

Renee responded as though it had been one anyway. "Toward the end, we were all soldiers. My little brother and I were the only ones in our village who survived the last outbreak." She shrugged slightly. "In the end, I did not survive all that came after. You?"

"I...am not entirely certain. My memories of that time are not all that they could be." He admitted, suddenly finding it difficult to meet her eyes. "But I think that I might have been."

"Mmm." She eyed him up and down. "Hard to say. You carry yourself like one now, for all that means."

He found it extraordinarily irritating that, of all the remnants of life that could afflict him, a nervously dry throat had to be one of them. "I have been enjoined to seek someone. Two, actually. I believe they were my former comrades -- kindred in arms."

Renee quirked what was left of her eyebrow upward in a silent question.

"Their names were Keldris and Talia." For some reason, he found it difficult to say their names to another, and he could not understand why.

"Were?" The corners of Renee's mouth quirked slightly. "No kin to claim them?"

"I do not remember those names." Solivar admitted, with difficulty. "Keldris...I believe he came from the south. He had the accent for it. I do not know where Talia came from."

Renee nodded, businesslike, and he felt oddly comforted by the briskness to it, the lack of judgment. "If you wish, I will ask about, see if any of the townsfolk know anyone who once went by those names. They might tell me more than they would a stranger, even one as charming as you." She smiled a genuine smile at his expression. "That's why I like you, Sir Eventide -- I can say such things to you and not think you'll split me in half in retaliation. Otherwise? Your best bet is likely the Undercity Census and the Royal Overseers. They keep the library and all the old records that could be salvaged. Who knows? Perhaps they'll be willing to part with one of their old maps."

Somehow hearing what he had already decided must be done coming from another's mouth made finally putting his plans into motion somewhat easier to manage. He had known that, eventually, he would have to descend into the Undercity, though he had thus far refrained from doing so, preferring to skitter about the margins of the Dark Lady's domain, the place to which he was most intensely drawn and by which most strongly repelled, the place he had returned when his will was first free enough to know choice again.

He knew that he could request a place there if he wished it -- the Forsaken claimed all the dead of free will as their own, one need only descend into the darkness beneath the fallen capital of Lordaeron, speak to the Royal Overseers, sign the name by which one wished to be known, swear allegience to the Banshee Queen. He knew that many of his sword-kin among the Ebon Blade had already done so, no matter where their loyalties had lain in the life before, and they had been accepted, some more grudgingly than others, but accepted nonetheless. He knew that many of the Quel'dorei who had fallen to the Scourge and who had risen from their deaths enslaved had come there for sanctuary. And the desire to join them was almost unbearably strong: to take back some small part of all that he had lost, to have a place that was unassailably his own, to belong to a place and have it belong to him, as well. Oh, he could not blame the Forsaken for turning to their Dark Lady for guidance and succor; some days it was all he could do not to go and kneel before her and beg her to lift the burdens of choice and freedom and memory off his shoulders and simply let her guide him into whatever purpose she wished him to serve. If the ease of doing so had not felt like betrayal -- of himself, of something beyond himself -- he would have. He would have, and he knew it as surely as he knew his own name again. It was that knowledge, more than anything else, that had kept him away from Lordaeron's ruined palace, from the tunnels and lifts that linked into it. And he could not bring himself to walk boldly across the main entrance, the throne room where Arthas Menethil, not yet the Lich King, had begun the slaughter of his nation, of his people, with the murder of his father, whose blood yet stained the floor where he had fallen. He crept around the edge and through the room beyond, where the shrine to Terenas Menethil stood, softly illuminated. It seemed sacrilegious almost, and most definitely improper, for one such as himself to offer that altar anything and so he kept his distance from it, and from the Forsaken woman tending to it. It felt entirely too natural, entirely too comfortable, to descend into the city below, where everything was horribly like home: the dark stone, curves of the walls, the shallow canals containing nothing resembling water, the pervasive chill and the tang of embalming fluid, the sweet perfume of rot barely held at bay.

The public offices of the Royal Overseers, the keepers of the official Undercity Census, lay in the city's central quarter, in a little-visited nook beneath one of the vast arches supporting the titanic weight of the palace above. The clerk manning the desk closest to the entrance looked up as he approached and rose as he came inside, wringing his -- her? it was difficult to tell given the state of mummification and the dim light -- fleshless hands almost nervously. "How may we be of service," Palely glowing eyes flickered over him, "sir...?"

He executed a precise, polite bow from the shoulders. "Mercy. I am called Mercy." It was the name that the Lord of Naxxramas had given him as he'd knelt before a dark altar and sworn to be a faithful vessel of annihilation and here, in a place just as dark, it fell more naturally than he liked off his tongue. "I wish to make an inquiry, if I may."

"An inquiry?" He received the distinct impression that, had the clerk any eyelids left, it would have been blinking in befuddlement; he somehow suspected that the Royal Overseers did not actually get that much business, despite their residence in the Trade Quarter. "What sort of inquiry?"

"It is my understanding that the Royal Overseers are the keepers of the library and the archive of the kingdom's documents." The clerk nodded quickly in confirmation of that not-question, and he continued. "I wish to request access to both. In particular, I am seeking any documents that might have been recovered from the refugee camp in what was once in the precincts of Shadowglen."

"Shadow -- " The clerk was on the verge of wringing its digits entirely off. "Your pardon, my lord. If you'll have a seat for just a moment, I must consult with the High Overseer before I can grant your request."

The clerk scurried away in a state oddly reminiscent of high dudgeon and scurried back a handful of moments later, a taller, straighter being he took to be the High Overseer gliding along with it in its wake, and again he offered a respectful bow. The High Overseer was, in addition to being unbowed by the dessication of his muscles, a good two and a half hands taller than either the clerk or himself and used that height to his advantage, gazing with hollowed-out pits for eyes down the length of his hatchet nose in a manner no doubt deeply intimidating to both the living and the freshly undead. "Sir...Mercy. May I know why you wish to see the records pertaining to Shadowglen?"

Not for the first time, Solivar wondered how it was that a being who had no eyes could stare with such palpable force. "It is my belief that, prior to the War, I spent a considerable amount of time there." It was, after all, the truth and he could think of no good reason to conceal that under the circumstances. "I am in particular interested in the records of the refugee camp. I am...searching for someone, and I suspect that I might find pertinent information among those documents."

The High Overseer met his eyes unwaveringly and held his gaze for an utterly unsettling length of time after he finished speaking. The hairs on the back of his neck stirred, and a familiar scent filled his nostrils, touched his tongue as he took an experimental half-breath: cool, crisp, sweet, like the first bite of the first autumn apple, like a hard, deep gulp of well-water on a hot summer day, the unmistakable flavor of arcane forces being woven to a purpose. A spell, immensely swift and subtle, though he sensed he was not its object, arcane communion of some sort passing between the High Overseer and someone deeper inside the Undercity.

Finally, the High Overseer nodded once, briskly, and looked away. "You have been granted limited access to the restricted section of the Royal Archive." He held up one long-fingered, nearly skeletal hand. "For the next three hours only, and only from the section of the Archive pertaining to the Shadowglen refugee camp. A page will assist you and you will be...supervised...at all times. Do you agree to these terms?"

"I do."

"Very well. Follow me, and remain close." The High Overseer glided briskly away and Solivar had to stretch his legs to keep up, following at a close but respectful distance as they left the city's commerce center and entered the highly vaulted, heavily shadowed corridors beyond. As they walked, he caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye, a half-seen shadow detaching itself from the greater darkness that pooled between the Undercity's flickering, scattered sources of light, and realized that the 'supervision' had likely joined them, as well.

The Royal Library and the archive it contained lay far from the life, such as it was, of the Undercity, in the catacombs beyond the concentric rings of the perpetually occupied Quarters. Before the War, those catacombs had been where the high nobles of Lordaeron had buried their dead in opulent tombs and mausoleums, the deeds of their forebears carved in bas-relief on the marble-sheathed walls, laid out on the floors in exquisite mosaic. The Scourge had not spared those resting-places, and now little remained to show that they had ever existed: bits of colored tile clinging here and there to the corners, the disembodied marble head of some ancient Arathi-born warrior-lord used as a door-prop, human bones hollowed and capped in brass to serve as candlesticks. The corpses themselves were all long since gone, raised to serve in the shambling, rotting ranks of the mindless shock-troops, the necromantic sigils used in their defilement still burnt layers-deep into the stone floor, dormant in the absence of the unwalking dead. In place of carven marble tombs and gilt sarcophagi there now stood rank upon rank of stone shelves cut from the remnants, bearing the thousands of volumes of the Library itself, scavenged from the universities that had once drawn scholars to Lordaeron's capital and to equally ruined Dalaran, pillaged by the Scourge during the War. The remaining mausolea, most of which lined the far walls, had been long-since stripped of their contents and converted into small rooms for reading and study, equipped with the sort of indifferent furnishings common to the Undercity, though there were at least tables and occasionally a chair or two. The Archive turned out to be located in the least reconstructed portion of the catacombs, and likely the oldest, where the graves were little more than long, deep horizontal alcoves cut into the bedrock beneath the city, barely large enough to hold a shrouded corpse and an urn or two of grave-goods, covered over in a granite plaque bolted in place with rough-forged iron fittings. The Forsaken had, with admirable thrift, remade those plaques as section markers, chiseling away the old writing; the High Overseer gathered a page idling near the entrance with a curt gesture and bid her to lead him to the Shadowglen section and help him carry the refugee camp records to a work room in the Library proper.

The Archive showed the distinct signs of being the project of someone with two much time on their hands, and whom that time had obviously driven quite mad. It was not that the whole edifice of grave-shelves and wooden crates and waxed-paper file folders was disorganized -- quite the opposite. It was too organized, not only by location and subject matter but alphabetically and by size, as well, and he silently pitied the page he'd been assigned the task of putting it all back precisely the way it had been once he was done with it. Fortunately, for her, there were only two small crates of documents from the refugee camp, neatly bundled together between sheets of heavy parchment laminated in wax, tied shut with strands of twine he went to pains to unknot and set neatly aside. The page set a fresh hour candle in a human ivory candlestick and lit it, dropping a quick, nervous curtsy when he gave her her leave and scurrying away to attend to duties that did not require her to keep close company in a small tomb/study room with a death knight. The first bundle of documents was an assortment of letters both from and to the headmen of Shadowglen and its environs and every conceivable official civilian and military involved in the provincial governance of Tirisfal and Silverpine, indicating in no uncertain terms how wroth they were with their valley being turned into a squatter's camp for refugees of doubtful health and even less certain temperament, spanning a period of some three months in the late summer and autumn of King's Year 617. He perused them briefly and laid them aside, his feelings comprised of equal parts despair and irritation -- despair for such petty foolishness in the face of unimaginable calamity, irritation because there was not one damned useful word in the lot. The rest of the documents in that box all dealt with matters of civilian government and the needs of the camp and its hospital, the minutiae of supply orders, death notices, birth records. The second box was more rewarding: it contained the records of the military forces stationed in the area, both the citizen levies and the knights of the Church and the Crown. The top layer were all reports: after-action and tactical analyses, each neatly scribed in several different cathedral-trained hands and, most importantly, signed. He went and begged a few scraps of foolscap and a spare pen from his page, and took down every name he could find: A. Maugrisaine, F. Steelheart, K. Pellegrin, T. Delaine. Beneath that was an even greater reward for his patience: duty-rosters. Some of the handwriting was atrocious and they were heavily covered in mornbrew rings and the remnants of more than a few meals, but they were for the most part legible.

He realized, a few moments into his examination of them, that if he were it still possible, his heart would have been racing and as it was he was having difficulty holding his hands steady. K. Pellegrin was, in fact, Keldris Pellegrin, attached to the Silver Hand's mission to Shadowglen, a knight in service to the Church, as were Talia Delaine, Aretegos Maugrisaine, and Floramelia Steelheart.

He stepped out of the study room and looked about. "I know you are there. Make yourself seen."

A papery chuckle emerged from the room behind him, disturbingly close, and he could not help but feel the flesh between his shoulderblades crawl in response. "I think not."

"Very well," He shrugged slightly, to rid himself of the sensation, and resisted the urge to look over his shoulder. "The Census records -- may anyone examine them?"

"They're no tightly held secret of the state, if that's what you're asking." The papery voice sounded deeply amused by that question. "They're off in their own section -- the red ledgers the size of map-books." A cool breeze fanned his cheek as something unseen passed swiftly by on the left. "Right over there."

"I am going to look for something there, if that is acceptable?" Now he did glance over his shoulder, and found the room as empty as before -- though now a shadow other than his own lounged against the far wall.

"You've a half-hour left on your time," His unseen companion whispered, still dryly amused. "But I'd hurry if I were you."

Each volume of the Undercity census was massive, a tall man's armspan across and half again that tall, containing as they did not only a simple citizenship listing but also a considerable amount of documentation concerning the disposition of those citizens, their property claims, and present affiliations. To his mingled relief and disappointment, he found no Pellegrins, Steelhearts, or Maugrisaines in the Census -- though there was, he noted, a map of Eastern Lordaeron appended in several volumes, marking those noble houses for whom no survivors were known, no claimants to any remaining property -- and only one Delaine. Who was not Talia, but Lythandros Delaine, lately of Dalaran, member in good standing of the Royal Apothecary Society, attached to the Hand of Vengeance and presently deployed in Northrend.

The tip of something quite sharp tapped him neatly between the shoulderblades far, far before he was ready to close those books. "Time, Sir Mercy. Do come again soon."

"Very well." He closed the Census volume he was bent over, and gathered his papers, careful not to smudge the still-wet ink of his last notes. "I thank you for the assistance, and your forbearance, sir...?"

The candle sconces to his right all bowed slightly in that same direction, toward the Library entrance, as something unseen passed close by them. He sensed, rather than saw, that unseen, unheard thing come to a halt, felt the weight of someone's gaze on him. "Morholt. Only Morholt. Niceties only complicate matters, don't you think?"

The sensation of eyes on him vanished, the sense of someone with him receded rapidly away.

And yet he could still feel the skin between his shoulderblades prickling, waiting for a blade. Irritated, he shook it off again and went to find his page.

Lythandros Delaine might not be Talia, but at least it was a place to start.