"But you, my friend, lived to tell the tale, to sing the saga of your friends and their deaths," said Gullik, smiling wanly. "And their lives well spent."
Dougal shook his head. "Don't romanticize it. There wasn't anything good about their deaths. We were stupid and we paid a price."
"What happened?" Riona's voice was soft but insistent. "We should know."
Dougal pondered this for a moment and looked at the others. Ember nodded in agreement with Riona. Gullik was looking at him blankly, waiting. Even Kranxx had stopped chewing and sat there expectantly.
He'd put this off as long as he could. Dougal took a deep breath. "I have not spoken of this before. The 'legend' of my surviving Ascalon City grew up over time, and while I've done nothing to stop it and even have profited from it, I've never told anyone what happened there. So please bear with me, because this is one story that I cannot make myself the hero of."
Gullik opened his mouth to say something, but Ember silenced him with a jabbed elbow to the rib. Dougal continued.
"You know Riona and I were in the same unit at Ebonhawke. One of our friends, Dak, had found the old map in some library in Ebonhawke. It showed the old city itself, where the towers and reception chambers were and, most importantly, the royal treasury. We all memorized that map, in case it was lost."
"You think the Claw is in the royal treasury?" said Ember.
"I do," said Dougal, and stopped there, not elaborating. He was thinking of what had happened next, and at last decided to skip over the part where they chose to desert and left Riona behind to take the blame. Finally he said, "Dak and I and some others thought we would become treasure hunters, and left Ebonhawke for Lion's Arch." He looked at Riona and she nodded: she was not going to bring up the matter here, in front of everyone.
"We collected as much information as we could find on Ascalon City and then set off from Lion's Arch. Dak, Jervis, Marga, Vala, and myself. We were all close friends, and hired a group of locals for added support. The adventurers from Lion's Arch thought we were just going to see what we could pick up in Ascalon City. We didn't mention the royal treasury. We left Lion's Arch, crossed over the Shiverpeaks, and came down into Ascalon, where we spent most of our time trying to dodge charr patrols. They were very effective, and we lost most of our associates before we even reached Ascalon City…" He let his voice trail off, the images of the past rushing up to meet him.
"What happened then?" asked Riona.
Dougal tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. He pulled out a waterskin and took a quick swig from it. The water didn't seem to help.
"What happened, Dougal?"
He looked at Riona. If anyone deserved to hear about this, it was her. She had the right to know what had happened to their lost friends. He had to be honest with her. He forgot the others were there, and spoke solely to her.
"It was… awful. By the time we reached the city's walls, only one of the Lion's Arch group was left, a woman named Cautive, an elementalist. We should have turned back, but we decided that we hadn't come that far to go home, so we pressed on into Ascalon City. That's when it all went indescribably bad.
"We hadn't been inside the walls for more than fifteen minutes when Cautive lost her mind. She had been a fragile thing to start with, and after seeing so many of her friends die on the way to Ascalon City, knowing that we were in a place infested with ghosts pushed her over the edge. When she saw the remains of all the bodies littering the streets, she started wailing, and no one could get her to stop. We all stood there, in a square in a haunted city, yelling at her to stop and squabbling with each other.
"Dak finally hit her, just once. She toppled over and smacked her head on the cobblestones. We tried to get her to wake up, but she never did.
"Any of us might have done it. There we were, racing into a city filled with angry ghosts, and she was honestly loud enough to wake the dead."
"You didn't have any potions?" asked Kranxx. "No magic to heal her?"
Dougal shook his head. "Maybe if we'd had more time. But the trouble wasn't that Dak had killed Cautive: it was that he'd silenced her too late.
"As Vala knelt down to try to help Cautive, the first ghosts appeared. There were probably a dozen of them. They-they looked much like they must have in life. They wore the old Ascalonian uniforms, and they carried swords. But they were colorless, so much so that you could see right through them.
"When they saw us, they froze, stunned. They just couldn't believe we were there. Then they attacked.
"As they came at us, they wailed even worse than Cautive had. They were mad in every sense of the word. They had no words for their anger, but they expressed it in noise and steel.
"You remember the ghosts of the shepherd and his apprentice. When you see a ghost, how insubstantial it looks, you wonder how such a thing could hurt you. Can a mist harm you? It seems ridiculous.
"But when the first ghost struck, he ran Dak straight through, and that sword of his was solid enough to bring blood up into Dak's mouth. Jervis started casting spells, but there were just too many of them. They actually picked him up, and Marga as well, and carried them away.
"I'll never forget their screams. They went on forever."
Dougal felt his throat tighten. After a moment, he continued.
"Vala gave up on trying to help Cautive and turned her attention to Dak. I left her with him while I tried to rescue Jervis and Marga.
"I followed their screams. By the time I caught up with Jervis and Marga, the ghosts had taken them to the main square. The place was filled with scores of ghosts, an entire army of them. And there, up on the battlements of the palace, loomed the ghost of King Adelbern, shouting at his dead soldiers.
"I climbed up the side of a building so I could get a better look. Marga was already dead, her body pulled apart and being tossed about like a rag doll by the spirits. The ghosts were pulling pieces off of Jervis a joint at a time. I had a bow with me, and my first arrow caught him in the chest, which only hurt him more and alerted the ghosts that I was there. I fired the second while they turned to charge at me. The third finally caught Jervis in the throat and put an end to him."
"You killed Jervis?" Riona spoke so softly that Dougal could barely hear her. He thought about pretending that he hadn't but then nodded.
"It was the best thing-the only thing-I could do for him." He closed his eyes and tried to banish the look on Jervis's face when the final arrow hit home. It had been a look of gratitude.
"Bear's blood!" said Gullik, solemn but insistent. "Don't stop there, man! What happened to the others?"
"I raced back to where I'd left Dak and Vala, but when I got there, all I found was Dak, dead in a pool of blood."
"What about the woman?" asked Ember. Dougal hadn't even been sure the charr was listening.
"I-I never found her. I looked, but… I heard her screaming for me once, screaming for me to run. But it was cut off. I tried to keep looking, but the ghosts found me and the pursuit began."
Kranxx shook his head in disbelief. "So there you were, alone and caught between a legion of charr and an army of angry ghosts. What did you do?"
"I did what I had to. I left. I fled. Like a dog in the night, I ran from Ascalon City and made my way back to Lion's Arch. We had told some people where we were going, and when I turned up alone, the stories started and a lot of people wanted to hire me, since I had survived the City of Ghosts. But they never realized I had failed, and those I cared about had paid for that failure."
Dougal put his head in his hands and discovered that his face was wet with tears. He had no idea how long they had been there.
Riona put a hand on Dougal's arm, and he did not have it in him to brush it away. "I know," she said. "I'm sorry they're gone as well. They were our companions, our patrol, our teammates."