Mizfat Bel’Jun Bas’Tard

The Hangwoman’s Apprentice

“It was a good scheme while it lasted,” mused the young drow as he noted the odd angle at which his pursuer held his head, cocked to one side as if his neck were broken. Which it couldn’t be because the drow it belonged to was clearly still alive despite Mizfat’s best efforts not 24 hours earlier. “I already gave you your money back! Now leave me alone!” he yelled knowing he could easily evade the larger, pain-maddened drow. “Perhaps he is deaf on account of his injury,” Mizfat thought as the words drew no reaction and so he ducked down a side alley and made good his escape once again.

“How does he keep finding me? I’m going to have to find a new place, a new source.” It was going to be hard finding another situation with such ready access to recently dead bodies. "I suppose it was too good to last." Mizfat and his brother Po’lok had been living in the streets of Sshamath since they had been kicked out of the mage academy and this meant the end of a profitable scheme. They had spent a brief time as a member of a rogue outfit run by a drow male by the name of Laz’lo that ended quickly when Laz’lo was ended by the Hangwoman’s noose.

The Hangwoman of Sshamath (nobody remembered her real name), had a scheme of her own going. Each of the steady stream of drow legal system losers that ended up on her gallows knew she or he could buy a quick and painless death at the end of a long drop with a healthy bribe. The ones who could not afford it would find themselves choking at the end of a short rope, sometimes for hours.

When Mizfat had visited Laz’lo in gaol the day before his execution, Laz’lo had pleaded with him for him and his brother to jump onto his legs as he dropped from the gallows adding sufficient weight to assure him of the quick death of a broken neck. He promised that he would have in his boot a map to the location of his secret cache. “Fool”, Polock had called him when he heard. “If that were true he would have bribed the Hangwoman himself”. But, when the time came, the boys did as their soon-to-be-ex-boss wished anyway figuring they had nothing to lose. The eerie, exhilarating sensation of dangling over the street in front of a crowd of jeering drow hugging a dying man’s legs while his soul escaped it was one the Mizfat would never forget.

There was no map and no cache as Po had predicted. However, the sister of a female drow who was to be executed the next day had witnessed the boys feat and offered them 500 gold to do the same for her sibling. From then on, the boys found steady profit in sealing the dooms of Sshamath’s condemned. All they had to do was charge less than the Hangwoman did. They took to visiting the gaols on nights before executions and soliciting for their unique services. They would even perform a little theatre they had worked out where Po’lok would play a dead drow soul who due the unbearable agony of a long slow death had cursed the name of Lloth and for that sin was turned into a drider.

Mizfat had lost count of the number of drow souls he had felt depart this world as he embraced their spasming bodies. But, they were starting to eat into the Hangwoman’s profits and had to make a deal with her to cut her in for a percentage. As part of the deal they were also given the job of taking the dead bodies for disposal which Mizfat found much to his liking. Experimenting on dead bodies had become his favorite pastime. He had even managed to reanimate one or two. It was better even than live bodies who tended to “resist” the experimentation. Mizfat glanced over his shoulder at six, his current bat familiar who fluttered nervously just out of reach. (He had stopped naming them after the 4th)

Everything had been going fine until one of Mizfat’s clients, Durdi’ Lyr, a particulary strong and thick-necked drow criminal had come to lodge a complaint against the boys for failing to live up to their end of the contract. The complaint came in the form of an axe and was lodged into the anterior cranial portion of Po’lok’s skull. Mizfat and Po’lok had done their best to kill the man after their first attempt at jumping on his legs failed to do more than dislocate their client’s neck despite repeated bouncing up and down on the drow’s legs. The Hangwoman found it humorous to cut the still-living condemned drow down saying that he had survived Lloth’s judgement. Durdi, maddened by the constant pain of tangled nerves, now hunts Mizfat in the singleminded pursuit of revenge.

Mizfat would miss the steady income more than he would miss his brother, but it was time to get out of town before the “hanged” drow caught up with him. Also, the Hangwoman was displeased with him as she had been implicated in the investigation into the missing bodies from Mizfsat’s new-found hobby. It was unsafe to show his face near the gallows anymore and so Mizfat plotted to leave Sshamath and seek his fortune elsewhere. Perhaps the surface, that should certainly be far enough away.

Eventually, this trouble would blow over and Mizfat Bel’Jun Bas’Tard would return to Sshamath at a time of his own choosing. That time and the time when Sshamath would need a new executioner would be coincidentally close together.

“gah, no the surface world was NOT far enough enough away”. Durdi had found him again somehow. Mizfat rubs his damaged larynx remembering waking up with a rope tightening around his neck on the other end of which was the vengeful drow with a dislocated neck seeking to inflict the same fate upon him. Mizfat had nearly suffocated and had suffered permanent damage to his throat making speech painful and difficult. He had been saved at the last moment by his most recent experiment, a freshly exhumed ghoul who attacked distracted Durdi long enough for Mizfat to escape.

“gah, I will volunteer for the mission to scout the alternate plane of Argentum Regio. He’ll never find me there, gah” Mizfat says with difficulty to Nine, his newest familiar.