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"Hunting is barbaric," Mireza informs him. "I'll play no part in hunting down and killing anything that is happy enough to leave me alone. Unlike some, I don't go looking for trouble."
"You cad," Mireza turns and slaps Valiard across the face while giving him a sly smile. "You told me you were of noble blood."
"Indeed! Are you calling His Lordship a liar?" Mireza jumps in. "Is this the kind of treatment people of quality can expect from the staff here? To be publicly questioned and insulted?" She glares at the paunchy porter.
Mireza stays as bid.
"If he's seen him before," Mireza points out, "you don't think he'll notice the Apothecary isn't the same man when he meets him again? Or will he only look at the clothing?" Trying mentally to undecompose and rehydrate the mummified corpse from which they took the clothing, she stares into Valiard's face appraisingly.
"Is this our destination?" Mireza wonders, looking up at the wall curiously. "Are you going to play the dead man, Apothecary? Are the rest of us your retinue?"
"Were there any identifying marks on the body?"
"He was already dead before they put him up here. If this was a trap," she indicates the wires, "then he was the bait, like a piece of meat soaked in poison and left out for the rats to gnaw on," she opines. "The wolves eat the body and get the flowers with it, and then the crossbows go off.... Someone went to a great deal of trouble and expense."
"Could he have died from the flowers then, if they're so poisonous?" she asks Valiard curiously. "Maybe the knife was just for show." Now that the tripwire is out of the way, she approaches the body and looks it over more clinically, especially the wound from which the silver knife was removed.
"I don't know," she answers. "Just something ... odd about the blade. We'd have to pull it out of him to see. The knife is expensive too, like the sword the Crow took out of the Church man's back in Carrion Hill, and yet someone left it behind rather than taking it with them. I have seen none of you leave your blades in what you have killed and purchase a replacement. Why walk away from so many pounds of cloves?" she smiles slyly at Valiard.
"There's something odd about that knife," Mireza murmurs but makes no move toward the body while Grigor is still following the wire. "Perhaps this man was traveling with the man who had the letter and was eaten by the spider-woman? Odd that the body's been here several days and hasn't been gnawed by scavengers. Are there no ordinary animals in this forest?"
"All flowers feed on death," Mireza replies idly. "They bloom in profusion on battlefields and graveyards." She eyes the bruising where the corpse is bound and the knife wound to gauge how long the man has been dead.
While Grigor and Valiard do the hard work of packing up the camp and tending to the horses, Mireza lies in the wagon watching her spider spin a morning web.
"Is it the cooking that's evil and not the eating then?"
"I don't think so," Mireza replies thoughtfully. "But they do eat people, like wolves and ghouls do. Only I think they cook them first. Does that make a difference?"
Windle is not so easily dissuaded. "The Lady's inexorable justice awaits us all, it's true, but the only reason your hypothetical pack of ghouls exists in the first place is because Someone chose to defy Her." "So it's good to destroy all the ghouls but bad to destroy all the wolves?" she asks a little skeptically. "What about hags? Are they natural or unnatural?"
"There are all kinds of things in this world that aren't 'natural,'" Mireza shrugs. "I don't see that it makes much difference if a person is killed and eaten by a pack of wolves or a pack of ghouls."
"Books are dead things," Mireza remarks to Iozef, as if their conversation hadn't been interrupted by the arrival of the corpse. "When they were alive, they were trees. Coins and armor and weapons are dead things, too," she hands the emerald studded dagger to Valiard. "Dug out of their graves beneath the earth and pressed into service to men, no less than the Middenstone Baron's workers. What do you suppose they did with them? Found a way to wrest command of them and put them to work for the Mayor, just like we're taking this dead husk's possessions for ourselves?" She tucks the wand away among her scarves.
Mireza places two fingers in a V on her face, one pointing to each mismatched eye. "One eye sees what is there; the other, what is not," she intones in a mystical voice, then ruins the effect with a pixie-ish smile.
"He was a wealthy man," Mireza murmurs, removing the magical items from his person, "and a gifted one." She turns the wand over in her hands and frowns. "A foreigner? This is inscribed in Varisian, but he was no caravaner, dressed in such fine fashion. Your gold would not have bought your freedom, Crow, not with the treasures she left on this gnat in her web. What sort of wealthy man travels alone through the forest? Ought not he to have had a retinue, a bodyguard, a driver at least?"
Mireza turns her mismatched eyes on the priest calmly. "He smells nice, like living things rather than dead ones," she muses. "And he smiles. Not many in Carrion Hill do; certainly not you or the Crow. And he tells pretty lies; it makes every girl want to be the one he says such things to and means them." When Grigor pulls the cocooned corpse free of the tower, she approaches it with interest. "What a fancy prize she caught; look at the velvet and lace." She casts an eye over the dead man, trying to gauge how long he might have been entrapped and then passes her fingers in front of her eyes, saying "Hud."
"Stupid of all of you," Mireza states coldly. "What did you expect to find in there? It couldn't have been a more obvious trap if it was a box propped up with a stick and a string leading into the bushes. Music from an abandoned tower, really!"
Seeing the large shape moving toward her through the tunnel of fire, Mireza commands "dallineb," then scampers quickly out of the way.
Mireza has just been peering at the plug in the entrance to the tunnel when it suddenly erupts into flame. She falls back in surprise and self-preservation.
Presuming the spider communicates to her that the party aren't in immediate physical danger, Mireza will wait and eavesdrop to see if she's needed.
The meeting sounds cordial enough, with no noise of drawn steel, so Mireza is loath to reveal herself and perhaps change the tenor of the conversation. She is curious, though, as to who or what Valiard is talking to, so she sends her spider just far enough down the corridor to get a glimpse of the group and then calls it back again via her empathic link.
Mireza perks up her ears at the sudden silence. "Something's happened," she tells her spider. "Should we go and see?" She hooks the reins around the seat of the wagon, climbs down, approaches the heads of the horses, and tells them very firmly, "Stay," before setting off in the direction the rest of the party had gone.
DM: Mireza hums an idle counterpoint to the melody played by the harp and listens for the tune to stop or change.
"Perhaps you'd catch the Young Priest after all," she murmurs to her spider as she watches him go after the others, "if you caught enough of his companions first."
DM & Iozef:
DM & Iozef: Mireza waits, not leaving the wagon.
"I know," Mireza coos to her spider soothingly as she watches the rest of the party creep nearer the obvious trap. "It doesn't seem fair, does it? To catch insects requires near-invisible strands of unnatural strength and adhesion strung directly across their paths, and yet to catch people requires only a tower and a harp. If only you were large enough to eat humans, you'd have a much easier life. But look! You wouldn't catch the Young Priest!" She offers Iozef an encouraging smile without making a move to leave the wagon.
"Fine; don't come crying to me when some undead horror is eating your brains," she waves her hand dismissively.
"Yes, I think you might have relatives in there, too," Mireza murmurs to her spider as they both gaze at the ruined tower. "Why should we investigate?" she asks the inquisitor. "If it's a harmless old harp-playing hermit, he'll be happier if we leave him alone, and if it's something trying to lure us in, we'll be happier if we don't go in. Whoever it is, they don't seem to be in distress, or they'd be making moans instead of music."
Mireza looks up in the treetops whence they fled with renewed interest. "Spider-people? Who do you suppose their mother was? I'll bet my spider would have liked to have met them." The arachnid in question crawls out of a pocket in her scarf and waves its front legs affirmingly.
The young priest wants to know what's in the tree, Apothecary, she passes on in a sing-song manner.
The apothecary says it's a trap, Mireza passes on dutifully via her spell, looking up into the treetops. He says there's something in a tree making the sound. Apothecary, they're not stealing our wagon while we're out here playing rescue, are they?
"Mireza, I think I should follow behind the rest of you...and keep my eyes open for surprises, I am not much use in a fight anyways...Mireza, do you want to do that talking spell?" "No one ever seems to remember to use it," she says dubiously but casts message while everyone is within her line of sight. She then follows the two priests and the Crow. If anyone sees anything, whisper, she reminds them via message. She has a crossbow in hand but unloaded.
Okay, spells and character sheet updated. I went with the cloak, which I might regret (we're more likely to run across a +2 cloak in treasure than a metamagic rod), but it seems like a more useful item to someone with a more offensive spell list.
"Especially if it rains again," Mireza sighs. "I'm not sure I've all dried out yet. And my spider likes her web better than my pocket."
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