Sometimes I write things

Behind closed doors in the Compleat Orthodoxy: a conference room with rickety furniture and pinstriped wallpaper and a painting of a religious martyr (a missionary stoned on a tropical beach by hostile natives). At the table, Duke Stands-On-The-Mountain, Eileen the Knife, Lady Tall, Sesh, John Toad, Al-ashandorilash, Xalek, Anders, and Lucky Willie. Everyone who wants one has a drink and a cigarillo.

Duke Stands-On-The-Mountain returned less than an hour ago from some distant, wintry planar clime. His massive fur coat hangs on a rack in the corner, and steam rises from it as a fire mephit gently blows warmth into it. Despite his weathering the Duke remains immaculate, and wears a cherry-red dressing gown.

“I’ve done the rounds,” he says. “Vanya was no help. Woldo neither, though she offered her support at very reasonable rates. The Secretary, apparently, has problems of its own, and when I contacted, bid me not to attempt a meeting for a fortnight at least. The twisted god beneath the world hibernates this time of year.”

“I, whose meanest intellectual particles dwarf toad-sucking ingrates such Fancypants Catman, could have told you that, Duke Leaded-Pipes –” Lady Tall starts in on another of her rants, but thankfully the Duke silences her with a wave of his hand.

“Our man in Xaos, Gerr Flim Bak, was murdered six days ago, apparently immediately after he sent his weekly report.”

He tosses a wet sack onto the table. It lands with the sort of noise a burlap sack containing a severed human head makes when it lands on a table. You’ve heard that noise before, more than once; you’re in the Business.

“Apparently he was ambushed by a swarm of mysteriously augmented stirges, which sucked him dry in less than thirty seconds. His house was ransacked, and under observation by a trio of neraphim not unlike the ones in the basement. I do not think I will be taking any more of these trips unaccompanied.

“While in Xaos I noticed a distressing number of these neraphim on the streets, and signs of construction underway. It’s clear that the Yellow Bells have either taken the town over completely or are preparing to do so. Xaos is practically on our doorstep — we need to shut down their operations there before they spread into Sigil itself.

“Now: what have you learned in my absence?”

Eileen speaks first. She’s dusty from time spent in the cellar, and there’s a thin splatter of dried ichor on her right sleeve which she doesn’t seem to have noticed. “I got all I could from the frogs. The first two weren’t very communicative, so I did them. That got the other four talking. Eventually they said everything they could think of. Two are still alive, and one of them is pretty well broken, if you want it. The other’s broken, too, but it doesn’t walk so well any more.”

She takes a sip of Arcadian brandy. “So first of, yeah, I said it. The frogs don’t have the plumbing for sex, which strikes me as an unfortunate trait in a species. Seems they were grown in big bubbles in some fortress in Limbo. They were maybe two weeks old when they attacked the club.

“But yeah, they were born from big bubbles, popped out full-grown after I-don’t-know-how-long. There’s a dozen bubbles in a crèche, and they seemed pretty sure there were at least five crèches in the fortress, maybe more. After birth their bosses set them to training, then as soon as they could swing an axe without falling over sent them out. Our six all came from the same crop — all in the same crèche, all decanted simultaneously — but the other six in their crop were joined up with others and sent somewhere else. They didn’t know where else, and I asked them a bunch of different ways, so I don’t think they were hiding anything. Fortress had a bigass armory full of those cheap axes and shit they came in with.

“I asked about the bosses, and eventually they told me elves. Not drow, and not assimar, and not avorals. Could be high elves, gray elves, wood elves, or some lame subspecies, but definitely they’re elf. The frogs got a good sense of smell, and once I knew they wouldn’t lie to me I gave them some samples. They never saw an elf in armor, but they did seem some with pikes and bows. Mostly the elves were wearing robes, like priests or monks, with a yellow bell design. It sounds like the sort of henchman uniform a five-year-old half-orc would design.

“When an elf gave them a command, the frogs snapped to — some kind of compulsion or enchantment or telepathy or other lame magic wicky shiv. I got Redder, you know, the elf doorman? to come down and give the frogs some instructions, and sure enough the frogs did what Redder told them.

“Specifically, I told one of them that if it moved, I would cut its legs off, and to make sure it believed me I broke its hands. Then I had Redder tell it to jump up and down in place. That’s why one of them doesn’t walk any more…

“So funny thing is, the frogs speak Gehenn, right? The language we’re all speaking now, the cross-plane trade pidgin. But they don’t remember learning it; they came out of their bubbles speaking it. And the elves gave them commands in Gehenn, but the elves talked among themselves in some other language. I tried to figure out what, but nothing doing — the frogs just aren’t much for repeating words they overheard in foreign languages…

“Anyway, they’re decanted, bosses teach them how to swing an axe, then one day a boss comes in and says get your kit and follow, leads them out to a courtyard with more frogs, and the other frogs — about a hundred, maybe more — and a dozen of the elves go through a gate to somewhere. Our six instead are taken to a little Limbo rowboat with a pair of elf handlers, and head through the chaos for about four days, ’til they get to Fort Needful — they didn’t say it was Fort Needful, but they described it and it was Fort Needful — then they head through the big gate to that temple on the Street of Small Gods, one boss goes one way, the other takes them and goes to the club in a taxi, tells the frogs to get out, go in the club, and kill everyone they can. You got to feel sorry for the bastards.

“The two elves were both wearing casual clothing, no armor, no obvious weapons. The one that split off once they were in Sigil had a briefcase, lightweight, they didn’t see what was in it. The one that dropped them off here had three little crates, two that smelled like meat and one that smelled like something else and made — and they were sure about this — buzzing noises.

“Last thing is, the elves, their bosses, the actual Yellow Bells? Apparently they’ve all got big red splotches on their skin. I almost missed out on this one; the frogs mentioned it after they saw Redder, and found out not all elves have big red splotches. The splotches get bigger over time, the frogs said, and when they reach a certain size, the elf goes away. I don’t know what that is, some shiv or some disease they’ve all got or both.

“Pains me to admit it, but I pity these frogs. They didn’t have much of a shot — just taken from a bubble, handed an axe, and compelled to run headlong into danger. Once we’re sure we can’t get anything more from the living ones, I’d like to have their memories blanked and them set up on some pastoral Upper Plane somewhere, Dothion or Arcadia or Arborea. I’m willing to pay for it out of my pocket.”

After a spirited Q&A, Lady Tall speaks. She occasionally digresses into vicious personal attacks aimed at everyone from the Lady of Pain down, so the following has been edited to remove the worst of the asides.

“He’s a filthy degenerate who gets his jollies doing unspeakable things to his hideous troll of a wife, but Uff the Dour, sage and Athar, is the city’s leading expert on Limbo outside the Xaositects, who give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘not worth talking to.’ Also the phrase ‘offal-eating pig whores.’ But anyway. He doesn’t like me, for some reason, so I took some filthy money from fucking petty cash and threw it in his bitter wormeaten face until he agreed to answer my questions.

“First I asked him about neraphim, the foul-odored frogs in our cellar, and he confirmed that they usually exhibit a wide array of unimaginative secondary characteristics: different colors, the occasional vestigial limb or fangs or whatever dumb thing. And yeah, they do generally have sex and sexes both. So we must have factory rejects.

“Then I asked him about the Yellow Bells, and the coward got huffy and said he’d already answered one set of questions and I should leave his stinking office before he called his guards and hid behind their
skirts. So I left.

“I was going to ask Fragile Anders the Load or Al-ashandorilash with the skanky outfit and whorestongue to sweet talk the bastard, but everyone was busy on account of they’d had their blood replaced, so I just went back myself the next day with another fistful of banknotes.

“The vicious little man was ready for me, and after deigning to accept my money (probably to wipe his fat ass with it) he told me the history of the Yellow Bells, probably most of which is an ill-conceived lie.

“On some dreary ashen Prime world with a lot of mud and too many elves, there was a long and dreary and ashen civil war. One pile of fey idiots thought their craven god’s priests should be in charge, and the other thought their craven god’s priests should be in charge, and eventually the conflict mutated into a magic versus peasants-with-torches kind of conflict. I asked Uff the Dour whether he thought I was paying him by the word, and he got to the point. When the war ended, this particular cabal of useless wizards and their load followers were exiled from their dreary ashen Prime world and ended up in Limbo.

“Given the harshness of the cesspool that is Limbo, and given the infantile weakness of these stupid Prime elf wizards, they had to band together for mutual survival, and adopted the terribly pointless and unevocative name the Yellow Bells for themselves, probably while drunk. This was millennia ago.

“These proto-Yellow-Bells, with their doomed cause and their miserable outlook, encountered the violent, self-absorbed, and unhelpful githzerai, who’d already colonized Limbo and didn’t want to share, and the hostile, crazy, manipulative slaadi, who were Limbo’s fucking natives, and didn’t want to share either, and so they were driven
further and further from the relatively tame parts of Limbo, the nasty parts that bleed into Ysgard and Pandemonium and the Outlands at pathetic Xaos. They were pushed back, this foppish and corrupt little enclave, into the furthest realms of unwholesome Chaos, where they’ve practically vanished.

“Is that all you have? I said to Uff, when he finished this tale and was sitting in his low little chair with his stained hands folded across his gross belly. I want my damn money back then.

“Uff, lazy though he is, when pressed, added that about twelve hundred years ago a cabal of espers launched a series of expeditions to explore the deepest reaches of Limbo, and encountered (among many other dull and disinterested things) a citadel-island suspended in deep chaos, inhabited by planar elves who subsisted off the raw chaos, raised silkworms, goddamn silkworms, and called themselves the inhabitants of the Citadel of the Yellow Bell.

“Another similar expedition three hundred years ago fails to mention the Citadel of the Yellow Bell, but in the last hundred and fifty years the githzerai have begun to encounter Yellow Bell trading parties out in deep Limbo. In the last decade they’ve built enclaves in the prominent Limbo trade-towns, wretched places all: Fort Needful, the black pit called Gith, and Starclaw, where filth was invented, and trade silk for manufactured goods. They’re extremely closed-mouthed and insular, especially for elves.

“So there you go, we’re up against a bunch of fucking anarchic elven silk merchants. I fucking hate them already.”

Once Lady Tall winds down, it’s the Mob’s turn to describe the Yellow Bells’ opium den in the middle of the Hive, and the Summon Ooze, and (incidentally) the murderous spriggan they’d dealt with. This is interrupted partway through, however, by a knock at the door. Kettle Bill shows in Artur the Maker, cousin of Duke Stands-On-The-Mountain and fletcher to the Mob. With him is a reedy human, balding and wearing dark glasses and an overcoat — he’s clearly just arrived at the club.

“This my very old friend Lord Owen Danwick, of Charn,” Artur says. “My very good, very old friend.”

The Duke gestures for them to take a seat, and Kettle Bill pours them each a glass of Thoy merlot.

“They took my daughter,” Danwick says.