11 - The Temple of Lady Horsehair
“Old marble cellars trim the front, “That Temple to the goddess dead, “Into those vaults I’d never tread, “Though treasures one might hunt. “Called also House of Emerald, “In Middlemoss there wealth abounds, “The Temple’s built on secret grounds, “But high, their price, I’m told.”
Your Blue Lady’s cloak flicks in the low wind as she steps across a schist bridge. Her step is unsure, and even the small gust sways her to one side of the uneven, dank cobbles, which have no rail. Middlemoss’s long chasm opens its throat to accept any that would fall.
Your Lady places her hand around your vambrace. She lets you guide her across the span. The other dwellers crossing at that hour, in the chasm town at the heart of The Road of Graves - they pay her little mind.
Except for one. As your step nears the opposite wall of the chasm, your Lady’s cloak flutters against a man going in the opposite direction. She draws it back. The man is hairless of scalp, with only a little mouth, almost invisible in a black circle of tattooed skin. He is one of The Monks of the Lidless. He gives your Lady a withering look, before passing on.
Your Lady’s eyes are fixed on the cliff wall across the bridge. On a painted marble vault.
You hope that The Temple will give your Blue Lady the lost son she seeks. Few are the avenues she hasn’t explored in this city. Even so, you know that the priestesses of the necromancer-goddess will take more than they give. Greed lives in that Emerald House. *Its painted edifice seems almost soft beside the other mausoleums. Like a growth of ivy on the surface of the cliff. * Your Steel must be ready to cut its way out - but you should hope for some other outcome.
Just inside the crack of the silent stone door stands a woman. Her robes are ivory muslin, with yawning, gold-trimmed cuffs, and two padded shoulder-shelves that catch her hair like coils of rope. When she speaks her voice is deep and strange.
“Polgroms, mournors, debtors, addocts? “Thou need not answor. “Evory body has a painting somewhore in its post. “The House has paints for evory color. “Evory soul.”
You pass through a convoluted vestibule of dim lamps and shadowed marble, the walls crooked, and heavy with portrait paintings. Your passage is heralded by song. The music is of human voices, rising from behind the portraits, but not human words. Each voice seems to mimic some instrument.
| Walrus Painting A man with a pointed steel cap and a long grey mustache. It produces a brassy, squeaky blowing, like a rusty hunting horn. | Madam Painting This tall woman with a goose’s neck and tight black hair trembles like the string of a violin. | Wind Painting Sun-scarred and rain-worn, this olive elder produces only a halfhearted whisper. Like a tremulous flute, talking to itself, but right beside your ear. |
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The priestess will stop beside a flight of broad, shallow stone steps that slope gently downward. She will wait there for you, seemingly forever, and does not seem to mind if you wander again through the gallery you have just passed. You may thus choose to explore a little before you leave the vestibule of The Emerald House.
You may glean something from looking back over the portraits. There are dozens. If you stop for a bit before one portrait of an apple-cheeked, full-flushed young woman, you may notice that the paint is shiny and new. There is a stone bench beside the portrait, and if you look in the dust beneath you will find an empty paint bottle. There is a paper tag tied to the blue-drooling lip of the bottle, with a name: Squide. This will come in handy later.
The Easel
The sanctorium of this temple to Lady Horsehair is a tall cylinder, with a floor like a stepped bowl. At the bottom of this bowl is hexagon of emerald tiles. A few statuettes, and a huge wax golem, stand upon these tiles.
There is also a semicircle balcony halfway up the cylindrical wall. Two tunnels like black eyes burrow into the wall at either end, and six priestesses in white-and-gold robes with padded shoulders stand upon the overlook.
As you step inside, another procession enters from a door on your right. Two new priestesses carry something tall and heavy between them, under a velvet tarp with tassels that drag loudly on the floor. They set their burden in the middle of the tiled emerald bowl. They pull the velvet tarp away.
An easel. A canvas. Paint.
Your Blue Lady looks down on the easel, then at the balcony, then turns her face to the priestess who led you in.
“I would know to what far curve of the road my lost stepson’s foot has walked. “Does he breathe? “He was younger than the eldest housecats, born to my lord’s first wife. “Before my nights at my lord’s bedside. “Long before the adobe of our castle wept with red. “Younger than the cats, fair haired, and with perhaps this pinecone broach I wear, upon his chest.”
On the balcony, the six priestesses speak in turns. Each of their voices is differently strange.
“Sonsssss and girlssssss - otherssssss sssssought.” “Ne. Ver. A. Step. Son.” “WE RECOGNIZE THIS BOY.” “He he. We have traded for deeper-buried secrets than your yearning, sad Lady. He he he. Secrets whispered into cups. He he. Secrets written on paper and hidden under rocks. He.” “Butshehastopaintforit.” “Climb down, small spider. “Reflect in the emeralds. Paint the face you see.”
You notice then that the priestess who led you into the chamber must have slipped off. She now reappears. She carries a robe that is the color and texture of decaying hedgeapples. She bids your Lady put it on.
Lady Horsehair - The Porcelain Girl Doll
Emerald House is not some mere Middlemoss moneylender. Ostensibly, the temple is an art gallery. A visitor might ask any favor of the priestesses. Their only price? A self-portrait.
The reality is more-befitting the mancer-goddess of greed. The priestesses of Lady Horsehair truck in souls. Under the direction of their Grand Daughter, the temple gathers the souls of their supplicants. They store these souls in phylacteries, a tool more common among mancers it is true, scraping each soul for the knowledge it had in life. Once scraped, they serve the soul to their goddess.
How do the priestesses acquire these souls? A contract, binding on death.
They make the visitor paint their own face.
Your Lady’s first strokes leave delicate, wet, midnight trails over the upper quarter of the canvas; the trails dribble some, before fabric swallows the paint. She paints over these with indigo. Then, below, a circle of wet eggshell.
In your Lady’s hand the brush moves delicately and with care. Hers is a noble, practiced hand at the arts. The features of face take shape. Her mouth, her downcast eyes, and the shading.
You notice, from your seat on the emerald steps, that beads of sweat have started to form on your Lady’s brow. The portrait is acquiring all her sorrowful vitality, but her own face looks wan.
When you rise, preparing to stop your Lady’s hand, the six priestesses on the balcony raise a chorus.
“Ssssstop.” “Sac. Re. Lig. Ous. Knight.” “THE NECROMANCER GODDESS WOULD LAY A CURSE ON YOUR SPINE FOREVER.” “He he. This is no light art. He he. This is a right rite. He.” “Holdtovowsyoustupidmale.” “Let your Lady paint, “The longhaired brush, caressing, “Like dewy grass blades.”
Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong.
A gong crashes from some remote deepness of The Emerald House. You hear two feet tap on the stone simultaneously, and turn your visor to the door.
Two priestesses descend. They take measured steps, together, each stepping first with her left foot, then bringing the right to the same step. Between them they carry a fresh palate. The paint splotches gleam, like a tray of differently-colored eyes.
You must intervene, sacrilege or not. If you don’t stop the ceremony your Lady’s soul will be forfeit.
Draw your sword and cleave through the palate.
Six shrieking voices will fall from the balcony. Your Lady’s stroking brush will falter - she’ll look around with a vague expression. Meanwhile the two palate-bearers will leap back from you and clap their hands together. Resist the urge to cut. They are too quick, and trying will mark you as a target of their avenging ghosts.
You’ll see a flash in the corner of your visor, a shiny surface. If you’re quick enough with your shield you can avoid some broken ribs as the wax golem wallops you.
The golem bears you to the tile. Your Steel clangs down the ledges. The two priestesses grab your Lady. They pull her through a doorway, and you are dragged away by the stomping monster of wax.
The Exhibition of Wasted Paint
By the time you touch the floor again your cracked body is bruised and rattled. Your armor is sticky with wax. After depositing you the golem trots away, returning to a circular door of concentric rings stoned in emeralds, and shutting this aperture with a scrape.
You find yourself in a large room, with a low, low ceiling, and hexagon pillars. On each face of each pillar hangs a faded self-portrait.
A skeleton leans against a near pillar. As you rise so does it. It is The Late Poet.
“I thought to find my star, within the temple deep. “The priestesses saw through me, and left me here to steep. “The paintings are phylacteries, where dead souls shall return, “Your cracked soul they must think is cheap; your Lady’s, they would earn. “She’s struck her bargain already? Her painting’s sealed her fate, “Her soul will go to them in death. In death it allocates, “Into this shrine, “Where no thought mine, “Can free her from the state.”
One of the first things you noticed when you entered is the two additional wax golem guards. After observing them for a few minutes, you see that they patrol in a complicated but set pattern between the pillars. Each carries a huge iron key to the ring door of this exhibition, but you haven’t a hope of besting a golem without your Steel.
You’ll want to start examining the space. Take care - one of the golems is berserk. If you get too close, it will kill you. To look at the paintings and search the room, keep an ear out for their footsteps. Avoid standing in the path of their patrol pattern.
If you promised in The Ghost Factory that you would bury A Brother’s Skull, you should retrieve it while you are here. It is behind a bookshelf, next to the painting of the clown paled by moonlight.
Each painting has glowing stone below its frame. All the paintings are peeling and faded. The souls are gone. Some of the pictures appear almost to have reverted to blank canvas. A few catch your eye.
| Man with Sheep’s Wool A coarse beard of curly white wool cover’s half of this cursed man’s face. | The Broom Woman She holds one. If you touch the fading handle, some of the flaking paint will slip into your skin. | Time-Eyes The paint of his eyes alone has fallen away, leaving two pupils like the hands of clocks. No matter how long you stare, the hands refuse to move. |
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The heavy, dusted, slightly-sweet air of The Exhibition invites torpid ruminations.
How can you take the keys from the golem? If you had your Polished Steel- Wishing will not free Her. The Living Bones is garrulous, perhaps a curious ally. You could ask him for his leg bone. A club, though it would not be sturdy. No substitute for a cutter against wax. Will those priestesses let you starve? You MUST save Her. What is that which your eyes just saw moving in that painting, on that face of the pillar? That was no shadow. You know that men left to brood in ill-lit places will fall prey to ill-lit imaginings. But no, that young man you see on that painting is younger of paint too. Something is alive about that one. Your old weapon master once spoke of a monster he cut low, a wearer of object disguises. Your old master… There was one of deadly skill. He, without sword, was a match for all comers. There. You know you saw the painted face move again. Will you wait for hunger?
As you rise, resolving to try this moving painting, a voice from an adjacent pillar catches your ear. It is not the poet’s.
Squide
From a recessed shelf in the pillar, a human slips. His face has both the vitality of a young man, and the wasting Time’s coarse-grained wrinkles. He looks at once twenty and a hundred, with a head full of stark white, sweeping hair. He has to look up at you when he stands - his spine is bent like a letter C. His shirt is covered in paint stains.
“I- I- I hh-h-heard what the b-b-bones ssssaid. “you’re in a f- f-. A f- f-. Hahaha. A quandary. “T-t- too late n-now. If your L- L- L- Lady painted, they h-h-have h-h-her. “I was the chemist. I know. “But I made one s-s-special p-p-… Acid. The Unhue. “That could b-b-break the bond.”
The chemist Squide will say no more, and look no more at you. He crawls back into his shelf.
Armed with his knowledge (and scant else) you turn toward the moving painting. As you approach, its wooden frame bends subtly.
Eleven Strokes with The Old Man Below
As you round the six-faced stone the mimic strikes. The painting swathes you like a leaden tarp. Dense, crushing, tight - the monster squeezes.
Let it squeeze, but keep your arms high. Raise your pinecone escutcheon. As your breastplate crimps, strike. Pound your aegis down. The art will hiss. Pound again. It shrieks. Pound.
Like a cloak loosened at the clasp the false painting slides from your shoulders. It forms a puddle at your feet.
You see what you expected to see, a tunnel in the pillar which had been concealed by the mimic. Taking the glowing stone from the shelf beneath the black hole, raising it inside, you light a curving, narrow, ascending stair, murked with spidersilk.
After many steps you emerge from the narrow tunnel, and drop from a short stone ledge. Your feet thud softly onto grass.
A garden. The ceiling is open to the sky, open to the high heath above Middlemoss. Night songs float down to your ear. The mixed silver of moon and star limn a hundred bulbs of chrysanthemums. There is a trellis against one wall, covered in sturdy wisteria branches, climbing all the way to the heath.
But your mind has not for a moment slacked in the thought of your Blue Lady. You see a cracked door behind one bush. It returns back down.
Your objectives are three. First, retrieve the Unhue acid. Second, free your Lady from her binding to the phylactery. Finally, escape with your Lady from The Emerald House. You may accomplish the first of these in one of two ways: openly, or by stealth.
If your goal is to sneak through the temple without raising the alarm, you’ll need a way to silence your armor. Fortunately there is a Monkshood Potion here in the garden. The potion will make your step silent for sixty-three minutes. It is concealed in the cupped hands of the decorative glass statue. To open the hands, search the garden for the objects mentioned in the riddle carved on the statue pedestal: “My feather, my saddle, my shield, my noose; retrieve these for me, and my hold I shall loose.”
From there you’ll just have to take it slow. Check each corner before you round it. The upper halls are largely devoted to the private quarters of the priestesses. Most rooms, if you peek inside, are closed, windowless chambers, well-furnished but small. The high priestess’s room is locked behind a door gilt in purple and gold. There is a key on a shelf in a room beneath the easel room, where only yellow light may shine. If you take the key and use it to get inside the high priestess’s room, you will find that it is empty but for a single tripod, on which sits a spherical mirror. It is called the Left Eye of an Old Ent. Its function is yet unclear to you.
If you choose instead to fight, you’ll find the priestesses and their servants no soft foes. Aside from the wax golems, which can crack your bones through your armor if you don’t block their fists with your Pinecone Crest Shield, the priestesses each has one of a certain set of violence talents.
| Wailing Priestess Her rituals of grief can fill even a stout heart with despair, and stop a weak one. | Tonguebinder Priestess Not especially effective against you. Her prayers to the goddess can stymie the mind of a mancer. |
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| Gargoyle Priestess This kind have covered their skin in grey, painted, leering, fanged faces. Their flesh is stone. They fight with quick knives. | Living Hair Priestess Keep your Steel swinging with this kind. |
By stealth or slaying you’ll find the chamber of paints on the third layer, between a doll-statue and the temple loomery. The Unhue is in a small, plain clay jar, bottom shelf, third row on your left.
The easel, your Blue Lady, and her completed portrait await you in the sanctorium. The easel remains on the hexagon of emerald. Your Lady’s portrait leans against it, full of life. Your Lady herself sits slumped, motionless, head-hung, on the stool. Her face is a drift of pure white snow.
You have hardly taken your first step down when onto the balcony file the same six priestesses.
“Godlesssss sssswine.” “You . Have. Bought. Your. Mur. Der.” “THE PROCELAIN DOLL WILL SUCK YOUR MARROW.” “He he. We’ll give your Lady what she wants. He he.” “Shegaveuswhatwewantafterall.” “But your heresy, “Purchases a roadless grave, “Worm food, unmarkered.”
The Painted Twins
Two Wax Golems. Thundering kaleidoscopes of paint. One has a bat-face. The other is featureless and yellow. Both are nine feet tall, a thousand pounds apiece, and execute with no pathos the wrath of their masters.
The paint covering these two golems makes their wax as hard as stone. It’s not a full coat, but it makes anything other than precise cuts and stabs useless.
The Painted Twins will ignore your Lady. The moment they enter they make a beeline towards you over the circling, bowl-like steps of the tall chamber. You’re in for a bone-rattling, no mistake.
The key to this fight is keeping distance. Fortunately, the six priestesses will stay on the balcony. Their varied screams ring in your ears throughout the battle, but do no immediate harm.
Start by going straight for the golem which entered through the nearest door, the one with the bat-face. Attack with your Steel. Use your Shield to block. Once the other one closes in, run. You can’t fight both at once.
The way to split them up is by clanking down and up the bow-steps, through a diagonal of the room. One or both of the golems will frequently stumble and fall when they follow you. This is the only way to make space between them.
There’s no secret to destroying The Painted Twins. It’s a battle of division and attrition. Block their blows. Keep whittling at the wax. Once one crumbles, you’re at least half-finished.
The six screamers on the balcony pitch over the rail, one at a time, as the second waxen figure pitches down the emerald stairs. Six priestesses land with six cracks on the unmerciful stone.
You walk to the easel. You pour the Unhue over your Lady’s portrait. The face on the canvas fades, and her own cheeks flower with their eggshell color. Her hair glows blue and black.
You raise her on your shoulder, carry her to the temple garden, climb the wisteria, and leave.
And you pray. Pray that Lady Horsehair never saw your face. Pray she forgets your name.