H130, day 119, 7 AP (Wraith)

[Stix]

Two weeks have passed since Wraith closed the door on her former home. A fortnight since her adopted son, one of her anchors to true hope, disappeared. Fourteen days and appended sleepless nights spent in flophouses near the Mortuary.

She had gone to the Gatehouse that night to ask a favor of a friend. A tiefling Bleaker woman by the name Ahinabura -- not so different from Wraith, it could be supposed, if she had been willing to forfeit her mind to the pointlessness of everything -- was an acquaintance there, and worked there still in the orphans' wing. Wraith had asked her to keep eyes open for the young boy, providing her with a name and description, all the details she could. The Cabalist had made careful note of everything, repeating it all aloud several times to be sure she wouldn't forget.

To occupy her flesh (if not her mind) in the meantime, Uathach has given herself over to embalming the deaders who come through the Mortuary doors. Her songs have fallen silent, and there is little solace in her work, only the sudden emptiness of renewed understanding, and the harrowing nausea and dull, distant panic that first comes with understanding how dead one really is. She has stopped checking the receiving logs altogether, no longer concerning herself with how the corpses came to be corpses, only with stitching them up and sending them back out.

It is on one evening, two weeks after her fateful night, that Wraith sits in the second embalming chamber alone. From down the hall, she hears the next slab being pushed her way by an obedient corpse. She finishes the last bite of a roast pork sandwich, the first thing she's eaten in recent memory, and stares at the far wall, absently selecting her supplies from the nearby cabinet. Neither the taste of the rich meat, nor the feel of needle, thread, and bandages, nor the smell of the embalming fluid or any other sensation is sufficient to rouse her from her empty stupor.

The slab is set in place, its zombie attendant hunkered over it, looking like it might tip over for inability to keep its own balance. The Dustman rises, needle and thread in hand, and sets down a roll of bandages -- next to the face of her nursemaid, her post-rigor body draped in a sheet.

[Uathach Blackmantle]

Wraith stares at the oddly familiar deader sprawled across the slab, blinks once, slowly, and shuffles closer in her numb torpor. Again she studies the blank, stiff features of the young nursemaid, in the same listless manner as the zombie swaying beside her.

Only then as she reaches out to pull the sheet back, does the crushing weight of the woman's identity crash down upon her. For the first time in weeks, feeling floods back through her body, only it isn't hope or joy.

It is fear - crushing fear - threatening to drag her down into madness and despair... If the nursemaid was written into the dead-book, then where was Aerin?

Needle and thread falls and clatters to the floor from lip, numb fingers. Wraith lurches back from the slab with a strangled cry of denial, bumping carelessly into the cabinet, scattering the surgical tools splayed in a neat array against the cold metal, and slips in a small puddle of blood to land flat on her derriere.

She doesn't feel the shock, nor the jarring pain of her fall, and still she stares, transfixed by morbid horror, at the deader on the slab... Aerin's former nursemaid.

Powers, no! No! She gasps in panic, clutching at her chest where a tight phantasmal fist of terror squeezes her heart. " N-no! This can't be happening. This can't be. No! Apollo have mercy on me... Aerin." She wails, this time clutching her stomach, as a wave of nausea, both from the knot of fear and the ever-present gnawing pain of hunger, sweeps over her. She sobs again, this time feeling the mordant sting of tears - the first thing she's felt in weeks - and doesn't bother trying to stave them off.

Wraith weeps in anguish, bowing her head to the cold, black flagstones, and buries her face in her hands...

[Stix]

It is some time before curiosity suppresses her emotion... how long, exactly, is hard to tell. She rises, slowly, pulling back the sheet... her vision blurs for a moment in light of the shock of her findings.

The incisions that turn her body into a latticework of shallow cuts are all surgical in nature, suggesting that she was bled out by someone with real expertise in this sort of thing. The body is completely nude, and was very obviously mutilated in a pseudosexual manner as well, one hole bored near each hip joint, the ovaries messily removed.

On second glance, the longest incision over the stomach goes deeper than it looks... the flap of flesh can be lifted up, and underneath, the organs -- digestive tract, respiratory system, all of them -- have been replaced with straw.

[Uathach Blackmantle]

Wraith stared at the nursemaid's mutilated corpse in shock for a moment, breathing harshly through her mouth and nostrils, muttering under her breath to stave off the sudden wave of nausea. After all, this woman had cared for her child in her absence. Wraith couldn't help but feel partially responsible and certainly sympathised with the woman's hideously gruesome demise.

But she knew that she couldn't perform a thorough necropsy without first shoving aside her own personal feelings for the woman, and settle into a more analytical mindset. She would likely go barmy if, halfway through the examination, her overactive, traumatized imagination suddenly visualised Aerin's face superimposed over the nursemaid's slack features. If she was to find Aerin alive again, she had to do this, and tumble to the dark of his abduction soon.

Taking a deep breath, and whispering a prayer to Apollo for strength and guidance, Wraith shoved her emotions aside like a snake shedding its skin, and stripped the sheet off the slab, tossing it over another nearby.

Signalling to the tottering zombie, she ordered in a brusque tone; Face mask, apron, scalpel, bonesaw and gloves. Third shelf, on the wall. Fetch them.

While she waited for the Zombie, Wraith gave the deader another, more thorough external examination, paying particular attention to the numerous, precise surgical incisions. The first thoughts to run through her head at that moment was this had to be the work of that sick sadist, Ridnir Tetch...

Her blood ran cold, and unbidden images of little Aerin trapped in that horrid, squallid place flashed before her mind's eye. Wraith roughly shoved the image aside. No. She would not be distracted. She needed her mind clear and focused to find her answers.

Absently, she took the mask and apron the zombie passed to her, deftly tying them in place, and wriggled her fingers into the tight surgical gloves, as her mind spiralled back to her years as an assistant to Ridnir Tetch. As much as the memories might horrify her, she forced herself to face her fears, and tried to recall how he cut his patients. After all, every skilled surgeon had their own signature incisions, performed almost without fail, and left or right handedness had some bearing on how the scalpel was held, and the incision executed.

But she hit a dead end. Her memories were hazy and fragmented, no doubt forced into the depths of her mind and locked away by the horror of it all. Not surprising. She'd probably go barmy just trying to recall it all, anyway.

Taking the scalpel from the walking corpse, Wraith lift the flap of skin up with the tip of the steel blade, and poked at the holes where the ovaries should've been. Wraith concluded thgen that this probably wasn't the work of Ridnir Tetch after all. As barmy as he might've been, he wasn't known for mutilating bodies in a sexual manner, nor for stuffing deaders with straw. In fact, as Wraith completed the incision, stretching the skin and intervening tissues back, and cracked the sternum open with the bonesaw, to get a closer look at the stuffed cavities, she realised that the disturbing proceedure resembled the first stage of an older mummification process: It was possible that the murder had religious significance... and it was possible that the internal organs we're removed until post-mortem.

Wraith frowned thoughtfully, idly poking through the bloodied straw with the scalpel blade. Mummification was often practised by a few scattered "rebirth" cults, yet bloodletting was the signature of the clergy of Kali, or Faerunian Loviatar and Cyric, all Powers of pain and murder. No cult she knew of practised both, ever. There must be some new underground, sinister religious following in the Cage...

The stiffness in the limbs and uneven necrosis of the flesh and internal tissues further suggested religious significance through bleeding out slowly on her stomach over a period of time. Abruptly, the image of being stretched on some odd device designed to catch and funnel blood for religious purposes, flashed through Wraith's mind.

Driven by renewed purpose and morbid curiosity to discover the dark of this unravelling mystery, Wraith wired the ribcage shut, and sutured the deep incision with practised efficiency, taking another closer look at the body and the incisions. So many questions ran through her mind: how did she die, when was the body mutilated, did she suffer for long, had she been sapped or poisoned?

There was no signs of head-trauma, and with no internal organs, she couldn't test for toxins in the bloodstream, and judging by the state of the corpse - still quite fresh compared to some of the rotted deaders dragged in out of the Slags or the Ditch this past week alone - she'd been dead for no more than a day. The only signs of where the body might've been found were small amounts of grit in the hair and on the skin, and lodged in the abdominal cavity.

With the aid of the zombie, Wraith flipped the corpse over, and stretched the limbs out, going through the motions of how such a bleeding proceedure might've been performed. Only then she noticed the red marks around the wrists and angles, cut deep into the flesh. The sudden revelation slapped into tiefling dustman with startling finality, and some of the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place; the nursemaid had been strung up horizontally, face down, by her wrists and ankles to bleed dry, and left to hang there for some time post-mortem. The image in her mind was so clear, Wraith pictured the sacrificial altar or hideous effigy the offering of the nursemaid's lifeblood had spilled over.

Wraith stepped back from the corpse, untying face mask and apron, and tugging off the gloves. She'd learned everything she could from the corpse. There was no sense in mutilating her further.
I'll have to check the receiving logs and the library. Maybe either will shed some further light on where she was found, and what cults practise mummification and bleeding. She muttered to herself.

You, cover the body. She signalled to the obedient zombie, and climbed up onto another steel slab, taking out sheets of papyrus, quill, ink, and began to accurately record all of the evidence, as she discovered it, right down to the last detail. If she took this murder case to the Harmonium, they'd want a detailed report, not vague descriptions.

It was some time before she finally finished her report, gently blowing on the black ink to dry it, and carefully rolled and tucked the sheets into a scrollcase. Securing the buckles and lacings on her backpack, she hoised the weighty load onto her thin shoulders, and shuffled out of the Embalming Chamber with a purposeful step in her stride...

[Stix]

The tiefling makes her way to the faction records room downstairs. After only a few moments of paging through the receiving logs, she finds the entry she's looking for, the tight scribblings still bearing much of the dust used to dry them.

19671: Human Woman -- Cause of Death: Bleeding-out through numerous precision chest and stomach wounds* -- Collector: Pharod -- 3 Commons Paid -- No possessions -- Shell will be raised for assignment as a contract worker.
*Abdominal cavity filled with tightly-bound bales of straw.

After countless exhaustive hours spent searching in the neighboring library, Wraith does finally come across a short reference that may provide her with some clues.

In a manual referencing embalming and burial procedures of the Lower Planes, there is a haphazardly-drawn diagram with captions suggesting that, in sacrificial rituals venerating the Abyssal Lord Graz'zt, the victim is drawn out with chains as if on a rack at some height above the presider's head. The ritualist beneath performs a weaving dance, holding a sharpened blade overhead and making cuts as shallow as possible, showering himself in the blood of the sacrifice. The body is given twelve hours to fully bleed out, ritual attendants opening fresh cuts as necessary, before being taken down. It is then stuffed with straw through a deep incision made below the belly, and propped up to sit at a table-like altar, where the stomach and entrails are burned away to ash for Graz'zt's appeasement, while the other organs are roasted and eaten by all present. Despite this ceremonial treatment, the body is discarded and left to scavengers in the end.