Fireday, Sarenith 11 (small hours)

My memories on how this all started are fragmented and there are gaps. I’m writing this down now before I forget the rest of it. Unsurprisingly, you can’t take notes when you are chained to a wall.

The last clear memory I have is of Zhog asking to visit the Pantheon of Many in South Shore, because he saw tabards and thought we might want one. I had just finished up at the University of Korvosa’s library doing some genealogical research on my family line—it’s a private library, but with some polite requests I was able to get access for the day—and a bit of a walk and a change of scenery sounded good to me, so I said yes.

At the time, it did seem odd that Zhog was asking about tabards since it didn’t seem very Zhog-like, but at the same time Zhog has kind of been like a kid in a confectionary since we’ve been here, and I’ve given up on predicting what will or will not grab his attention. I mean, aside from the obvious in Old Korvosa, Midland, and West Dock. So when Zhog comes to me looking like a kid (not a stretch) who is so excited he’s having trouble containing himself and asks to go look at tabards, I just figure it’s another impulsive Zhog moment and play along. Besides, there are probably times as a paladin when you need to look the part, and nothing looks the part quite like a holy symbol on a surcoat. And, like I said, I needed to stretch my legs after a day of sitting and a change in scenery was in order. So why not?

And we’re there looking at tabards, and then I have these huge gaps and small fragments for what happens next. I remember not being able to move. I remember Zhog running away, shouting back at the people around me. I don’t remember who they were, just that there were too many of them. And that’s it.

When I woke up I was stripped of everything but my clothing, and bound, gagged, and manacled in a prison cell. I could hear and smell water nearby, but it didn’t smell salty so I remember thinking it was the river. I looked around once my head stopped pounding so bad, and saw multiple cells down one end of a hallway. The ones I could see into each held other prisoners.

A voice from the other end of the hall said to me, “Don’t get too comfortable here.”

Yeah. Fat chance of that.

They continued. “We’ll be sending you downstairs for the special treatment soon enough.”

Which, obviously didn’t sound so good. In my limited life experience, there’s only two kinds of special treatment, and the good kind doesn’t usually start with you being knocked out and tied up in a cell.

A couple of dull hours later—there’s not much to do when it’s just you and a 5×5 space—a pair of guards came in. They very roughly hoisted me up to my feet and escorted me out. I had heavy ankle shackles that gave me just enough movement to shuffle slowly without falling on my face (not that they seemed too concerned about that).

I got a better look at the building as they led me around. It was an old warehouse of some sort and it must have overhung the river because part of the floor in one room had collapsed exposing the water below. They took me through several chambers, then set me in a barrel in a flooded shaft. As the water level lowered I descended to an underground complex where I was escorted by even more guards to a large, octagonal room designed to hold multiple prisoners.

They affixed my ankle and wrist shackles to a chain that was attached to the wall, giving me enough room to reach some buckets for waste and straw for cleaning and sleeping. “Any funny business”, one of my captors said, “will be answered with violent retributions to both of you.”

Only then did I realize I was chained up in the room with Zhog.

It occurred to me then that maybe there were two Zhogs, and that one of them wasn’t real. I mostly remembered seeing Zhog get away when I was abducted, but…did he get away? If so, then this wasn’t Zhog. Or maybe the Zhog that was with me in South Shore was not the real Zhog, and this one was.

I’d heard of shapeshifters, of course. Supposedly they can read minds and duplicate anyone within certain limits. How do you prove someone is who they say they are, if there are beings who can also become them, and in some sense, know what they know? That’s what I had to figure out.

I said to him, “Sorry. I wanted to tell you to run, but I couldn’t even speak.”

He stirred slightly at my voice, and I could see that, unlike me, the chains on his arms and legs left almost no room to move around.

“Bel? Is that you?” he asked. He switched to Draconic and said, “Damn. So they got you too. I’d a hoped you’d sense ‘em coming.

“They don’t ask me anything, just beat me and give me food. Not even decent orc rations, neither…. But… told me to run? From what?”

“Never mind that,” I said. Something about that answer suggested that this really was Zhog, and the one I was with in South Shore was not. “I couldn’t sense the ones that grabbed me because there was nothing to sense. Our captors must have hired some thugs to do it. You can fool magic, but not a holy strike in Abadar’s name. And the latter did nothing.

“When and where did they get you? …Maybe that’s a dumb question. I don’t even know when ‘now’ is.”

I didn’t. I had no idea how long I’d been out, or how much time had passed. Even up above, there were no windows in sight, and I couldn’t tell if it was light or dark outside.

Before he could answer, the door opened and a human woman wearing underclothes came in. She stared at me for a bit, tore my clothes in a few places, then swapped them for her own. As she did that, her features changed to look like me.

“Much better,” she said. “That’s a mistake I’ll not make again.” As she walked to the exit, she casually said over her shoulder, “I’ll say ‘hello’ to your friends when I see them. Again. Nighty night!” Then the door slammed shut.

I don’t know how long we were down there, just that there were long hours of nothing happening. We talked a lot, and I grew more and more convinced that this was really Zhog. With all this time to think, it came to me that there were generally two ways to establish someone’s identity.

The first is to spend lots of time with them, as Zhog and I were doing. Even if you had perfect access to someone’s memories, you are still missing their mannerisms and feelings. With this much time spent with Zhog, it was clear that it was…well…Zhog. The problem with this approach, however, is that it takes intimacy and time, and a duplicate would, of course, attempt to avoid both. Zhog, I learned, had been taken the very first night we got here. He was out at a bar, because of course he was, and someone slipped something into his drink. We’d been with the imposter Zhog for several days and still hadn’t managed to spend enough personal time with him in close company to notice something was wrong. It wasn’t until the day I got captured that I started to notice something odd—his fascination with those tabards—but that was too easily explained away. So, this method has limits.

That leaves the other approach, which is their abilities. There are things we can do, at least in our group, that help identify us, and some of those are not easily faked or replicated. Zhog, Shangsby, Viore, and I can call upon divine power to heal. Viktor and Varin know and use certain spells. It would take a concerted effort to maintain such a ruse for a long time. Again, it’s not perfect. Sera’s skills are not tied to a divine power, wizards can study to learn new spells, and so on. But we, as a group, roughly know our collective talents and we could find something sufficiently unique for each of us.

I was motivated to puzzle this out. I figured there would come a point where Zhog and I would be confronted by our friends, with our duplicates among them, and we’d need to convince them that the imposters were, in fact, imposters.

My best shot at that, I thought at the time, would be to call upon the power of Abadar in a manner that was so clear and so obvious that they could not help but recognize me for me.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite how it worked out.

After those long hours of just nothing, more of what we now know to be dopplegangers came in. Five took on the forms of the rest of our friends and Zhog and I looked on as they were “chained” up to the walls. They used some sort of breakaway manacles—we got to watch as they tested them out—and it’s pretty obvious what the plan was: wait for our friends to arrive and then cause confusion.

It was a brazenly dumb plan. I mean, why bother with this sort of indulgence? If you’re able to stealthily replace people without their friends knowing, why not just get on with it? This huge confrontation seemed so unnecessary, like they were in it for the show more than the result. And I guess they really thought they could take us all head-on.

It worked at first. When that door opened and Viktor and Sera stepped in, there was obvious confusion as the dopples all called out, trying to convince the others that they had been captured, and were the real person. So I tried to seize the moment, praying to Abadar that I be granted a spell that I could not normally cast all bound like this. And he answered. I created a space around us where those within were compelled to speak the truth. I even put some verbal panache behind it, “In the name of the Keeper of the First Vault,” etc.

And no one believed me. Even Viktor, who I could tell had succumbed to it, didn’t understand. I mean, the point wasn’t to actually force people to tell the truth, but rather to establish that it was me. “Zhog over there and I are the only real ones in here!” I said.

Ultimately, it was Sera who believed me. She entered behind Viktor and I could see it in her face. She was re-evaluating something, and had come to a decision. She walked over to me, and asked why I came to see her that night. She didn’t say which night, but I knew what she was referring to. It was when I first learned I could see in the dark. Knowing what someone knows and being that person are two different things.

“Because I didn’t understand what was happening to me,” I said quietly. “I was scared, Sera. Not because I could see, but because I didn’t know who…I didn’t know what I was.” I’ve never really been scared of anything in my life. Not since those days out in the dark. But this? It terrified me.

“Guys, this is the real Bel,” she said.

And then the imposter Zhog came in behind her, grinned evilly, and slammed the door shut as the imposters threw off their chains.

It was a good ambush, but a bad plan. The the thing about ambushes, of course, is that you have to be able to follow through. I am sure they thought we were trapped in the room with them, but it was really the other way around. They all looked like us, but they weren’t us. Sera got me unshackled after a couple of attempts, I drew one of her scimitars, and as the imposter Zhog bolted, Sera, Viktor and I slaughtered the lot. Then we got Zhog free and went after his dopple. Mine was already dead—Viore, Varin, and Snagsby had seen to that.

“It was fun watching them take you down,” it said to me as we converged on it.

“But you couldn’t do it yourselves, could you? You had to sub it out.” And that was their  fundamental problem. Hand-to-hand combat just wasn’t their thing. If they couldn’t even take me down when I was alone, what made them think they could take on all of us? How did they ever think this confrontation could work?

When we had the Zhog imposter surrounded and beaten, he went out on his own terms. He pulled a concealed blade and stabbed himself in the leg, and rapidly bled out in front of us.

The real Zhog look shaken. “That was my hopeknife,” he said. “Where I’m from, we are each given one as children and taught to use them to take our own lives if we are ever caught by the orc hordes that surround our territory. We don’t speak of it outside our people, and yet he knew exactly how to use it, just like one of us.”

(slightly larger small hours)

Zhog and I got the executive summary of events since I was captured. Imitation Bel returned to the Crooked House yesterday evening and put on a show of a verbal altercation with Fake Zhog (for our friends’ benefit, apparently), accusing him of abandoning her. She said had managed to “escape” after he ran off, said something like “I need a drink”, and then stabbed Tarquin when he served it to her.

Obviously, our friends found this behavior alarming, and they captured her and stripped her of her armor and gear. That’s when they discovered that her clothing didn’t match anything I have every worn, which explains that incident with the doppleganger swapping clothes with me (though how you can be a creature that does this for their entire existence, and then mess up on something that fundamental is a mystery). She was wearing a magical ring that shielded her thoughts, and with that off of her they were able to use mind reading as a part of the interrogation. She also had a strange key that they later learned fit the entrance to this warehouse.

They were set to call the city guard, but the city guard showed up before they could even send a message to them, which was mightily suspicious. The “guards” took Bel away, but Snagsby followed them under invisibility and learned that the guards, too, were dopplegangers. So they intervened, and then the real city guard showed up. Korvosa’s guard, being generally competent, knew at once that they were dealing with imposters, quickly deduced they were shapeshifters, and called in the Order of the Nail. If you have never heard of the Order of the Nail, they are kind of like paladins but without our sunny disposition. Or a sense of humor. Or, really, any warm fuzzies whatsoever. When they see a problem, they just smite it.

The imposter guards clashed with the Nail and they lost. Badly.

Our friends then tracked the key down to this building and raided it. Inside they found dossiers on the entire party, and communications from the Zhog imposter. Turns out they took Marzena, too, but only because she kept trying to make advances to who she thought was the real Zhog. Which is another mental image I did not need.

From reading the dossiers, it’s clear that someone has been looking into us long before we got here, starting right after we took down the Ebon Triad cult in Diamond Lake. Their research was pretty thorough given the short timeline. They even had my full name. Their summary of me said:

Belessandralina Lahovanu

Paladin of Abadar. Skilled with pole arms and threatening a large area in battle. Obsesses with laws and procedures. May be able to exploit this to our advantage if needed. High-risk target, priority to take out. Resident of Diamond Lake. Has family she cares about in town. In trouble with local mine owners Smenk and Dourstone. May be the ringleader. Implicated with disruption of an operation in that town that the boss has an interest in.

May have gnomish ancestry ties.

I admit I found that last bit kind of funny.

Deeper inside the warehouse, my friends found the prison cells and freed the captives, which included Marzena. However, two of those were dopples posing as prisoners just in case someone staged a rescue. Again, good plan, but poor execution. They were hopelessly outmatched.

Our friends found my imposter in another room, and thinking it was really me this time because she was wearing my clothes because obviously that’s enough evidence, gave them my equipment.

I kind feel like we need to have a talk about that.

The rest you know.

The big question everyone had was, how did imposter Zhog convince us all he was the real Zhog for several days? The answer turned out to be a gem on his person, which Viktor and Varin analyzed and determined was a sort of mental copy of Zhog’s memories. Focus on it with mind reading, and you could recall memories from the individual it was made from. Which was admittedly pretty creepy.

We turned our attention next to three doors in this hallway, whose mechanisms Sera had thoroughly damaged to prevent them from opening. Each room beyond had, according to Viktor, two Dopplegangers in it. We figured the best approach would be to give one of them to chance to survive this interrogation, and as soon as we made that decision there was a knock on one of the doors.

Zhog and I bashed that door open and confronted the creatures inside.

“Who are you and what do you want?” one of them asked.

I was not in the mood for games. “We want to know who your boss is and where to find them. You can read our thoughts and you know exactly who we are, so if you want to play games with us, we’ll pick a very different game which you won’t enjoy. What’ll it be?”

“Not that it will do you any good, but our boss is Telakin. If you go through those double doors out there and south you’ll find him. Good luck at that point. He has plans for you.”

“OK,” I said. “You get to live.” I pointed the the other one. “You don’t.”

I walked out of the room and said to the others, “This one gets to live, and that one dies.” Though I may have failed to clarify which was which. “That one”, however, resolved the ambiguity by rushing out to attack us, and was quickly put down.

“This one” refused to take us up on our offer of freedom, so we locked him back in. Sorry, “this one”, but it was a limited-time offer.

As for the other four here? We had no use for them.