Mazen Al Salib hears the screaming and grabs a stick and climbs the stairs. If his tenant Hatem is screaming for good reason, Mazen needs to know why; if he's screaming for bad reason, Mazen will need to collect rent and evict him. At first it seems to him like there is no good reason, but then Hatem's shadow moves, strangely, and Mazen realizes that something is very wrong. He drops the club and and tells himself that he's running to get help and not just to get to safety.

Temples to Abadar are common, in Sothis, and even though he lives far from the city center, Mazen does not need to run for very long before he finds one.

The food is good and the place is good, though the goodness of the place probably will not last. When it is done eating it examines the place with something resembling wistfulness for the one good place that lasted. 

And then there is another thing like it. It doesn't look like food, but it tries to eat it all the same. Fails.

I hate you, it says to the thing like it. 

I hate you, the thing like it says back.

Like most temples of Abadar it has a young man raised in the care of the church at the front directing traffic. It is not very rare for people to come running in in a bit of a panic but it is sufficient to get a polite "who do you seek" rather than the usual "Well?"

"There is a monster in my house!"

"Bad luck," he says sympathetically. "Did it bite you? This way, please -"

"No, it stangled my tenant - I think he is dead - " he follows.

To a priest (not a very senior priest). "Monster in his house."

"Are you injured? What kind of monster was it?"

"I'm fine - my tenant - his shadow strangled him."

"My condolences," she says, mostly automatically. "How is your house found? We'll send someone for an assessment. Did you know your tenant to be involved in any sort of witchcraft or dealings with deadly creatures?"

"No? He is - was - an honest man - ah, my house is three blocks that way and then left, it has two floors and a good roof." His neighbor Barika has two floors also, but Barika's roof is broken.

It is at this moment that the front of a small crowd of people, also at a run, reaches the temple. "There are monsters attacking people." one of them volunteers to the attendant at the door.

" - right this way," and he'll bring them towards the priest and gesture meaningfully. 

- she nods, and stands. That's suggestive of a much bigger problem than the original man was. "Ring the bell," she says to the attendant, and to everyone else, "anyone need healing?" This is important to know because with lycanthropy and so on people sometimes won't volunteer that they've been bitten, but they'll usually admit they need healing. 

It wandered a little from the first snack, after another thing like it arrived, and found a second snack, but that one started running and screaming and abruptly all the food was running away and screaming.

It has not previously encountered food in such large flocks. It seems like it ought to be a good thing, but it isn't. They're gone quickly and it as hungry as it started. 

 It gets one of them who stayed to scream at it instead of running off, and snacks on it, unsatisfyingly.

"My son," volunteers one woman. "It was some black thing, it came through the wall - Ishaq tried to chase it away - " The son, probably not ten years old, does not have a scratch on him.

- which is suggestive, but still not conclusive. There are a lot of things in the world, and it's easy to think you understand what's going on when you don't. 

The thing to do now is obvious, though.

"All of you stay here, where you're safe," says the priest. "Ena, check the boy and see if he's weakened or cursed or anything. I'm going to go with a guard to manage all the people who are probably now fleeing, not all here. - and we'll waive the curfews, for public safety reasons, and as it's a public menace no one will have to pay for removal. Gods keep you all." 

The people are quite happy to crowd into the temple where there are no monsters.

I hate you, it greets the newest thing-like-it. Things-like-it are not food and are not good, and so there's not much point to them. There are too many new things here to figure out if there is some use for things-like-it after all. 

I hate you, the newest thing-like-it says back. But it is the best one, the oldest; it can make the others obey. Though it can't think of much to tell them. The food has fled. It is wandering around looking for more but finding only pigs.

The newest thing-like-it starts eating pigs because the newest thing-like-it is stupid and doesn't know that real food is better. You're stupid, it tells the newest thing-like-it. Stop eating the pigs.

The newest thing-like-it stops.

That means it can eat the pigs itself. They are not satisfying. It is miserable. 

The northern third of Sothis contains the High Temple of Pharasma. Because Pharasma is the goddess of birth, it contains midwives, who spend their days delivering babies throughout the northern and central areas of the city. Because Pharasma is the goddess of death, it contains undertakers, who collect the dead and oversee their burial in the Necropolis of the Faithful. And because Pharasma abhors the undead, and wishes that all souls pass on to the afterlife, it contains the headquarters of the Order of the Nightjar, whose sole purpose is hunting and destroying undead within Sothis.

All of its members are already present and awake, preparing for their nightly patrol through the necropolis, when the bells sound.

     "That's close," says Brother Jalala.

"Mm," agrees Sister Enheruket, pointed ears twitching slightly. "North end of the city, I think, across the river. We'll all go, and sort it out quickly."

          "I hunt only undead," says Ta-Hepu, expressionless behind her bronze owl mask. Enheruket nods, and the Nightjars leave without their psychopomp.

It's a minute or so to get the horses from the undertakers' stables, and three more to ride to the north end of town, approaching the temple where the bells are ringing. Six pairs of eyes scan the dark streets for any sign of what this particular trouble is.

The trouble is not obvious. There are people in the streets, some families headed towards temples to shelter, some men forming an impromptu militia, and some more unattached, mostly younger men, who seem mostly out to satisfy their own curiosity. None of them seem informed about what's going on beyond "the temple bells are ringing."

The priest leaves the temple with three of her guards. She's not, herself, going to be able to singlehandedly fight an infestation of illusionspiders or wraiths or shadows or whatever this is, but she'll be able to get the even less qualified people out of the way.

"Clear out, please, clear out, until we know what we're dealing with! Report anything you've seen!"

The impromptu militia disbands and gets out of the way. The families mill about in confusion, since "clear out" is not unambiguously an order to return to their homes but it also sounds like they are maybe not welcome to shelter in the temple? What if they look desperate and have babies with them?

They can go to the temple! They just need to not be in a crowd in the street impeding emergency response!!

They will be in a crowd in the temple then, where monsters cannot get to them.

Less true than they probably think, still wildly more true than of anywhere else. Anyone else have a sighting or a description of the problem? Any sign of emergency response??

The Nightjars arrive at the temple five minutes after the alarm is sounded. An elven woman in obviously Pharasmin and obviously quite expensive armor rides at the front. She'll check whether there's anyone visibly associated with the temple outside, and not bother to dismount if there is.

"Pharasmins here," says Enheruket, in case it's too dark for human eyes to see her symbol. "What's the trouble?"

"The reports are of shadows eating people. Quite swiftly; they have time to scream, and some to run away, but not much more. Those touched but not killed seem uninjured. I was given a location, and can take you there." She hopes it's undead; if it is, the Pharasmins will handle it entirely and all she'll have to do is work out the payments to the families of the dead.

Enheruket nods. "Take us there. Only close enough to point it out."

She'll jog. It's probably going to be dozens of people dead, by this point, if it's something nasty.

Most of the food has cleared out. Not all of it. Some food, it transpires, cannot walk, and is right there to eat, and gets eaten.

Enheruket and another Pharasmin cleric have detect undead up by the time the Nightjars reach the house. The horses are useless for combat, and will spook if too close to undead, so the Nightjars dismount.

"Fareeda, Yusuf, and Habib around the back," says Enheruket, meaning the Nightjars' other cleric and two men who wield silver weapons. Then she'll sweep the front of the building for undead, with Jalala and Kabir close behind her. She isn't certain it's shadows, but shadows are the thing she's looking for.

There are shadows here, two of them, wandering in random directions except when they spot chickens in the courtyard. (There are a dozen more in other houses, at this point.)

It is still good around here, and won't start getting bad for some time, but there's no food nearby - oh, no, wait, that's food coming right in! How polite of it!

Enheruket further enhances her undead bane blade, then stabs one of the shadows. Shadows are, annoyingly, incorporeal, so she'll have to stab it twice to destroy it. Jalala fires his repeating crossbow on the other, the ghost touch bolt shrieking through the air for a moment before magically embedding itself in the shadow. Kabir manages to stab it only once after, so the second shadow will live for about five more seconds. The bolt should keep it from getting away to cause more trouble, though.

That is an ENTIRELY NEW WAY THINGS CAN BE BAD -

There are totally twenty more of them spread out across the other buildings in the area by now, though.

That's the problem with shadows. Individually, they're not very powerful, at least for someone who is at all prepared to fight incorporeal undead. Off in a mostly unpopulated area, they're not much of a problem, because they tend not to move very far from where they started, unless they're driven off from where they spawned by some means. But undead contagion in a densely populated city, like Sothis, becomes a significant problem quite quickly, because the shadows don't have to move very far to run into more people. Most people will have the good sense and mobility necessary to evacuate, but this can hardly be relied on. To head the problem off, you have to find the edges of the affected area, and then work inward, so the problem doesn't expand faster than you're able to control it. And you want to be very sure that you control it early, because the problem can become a truly nasty one if you don't.

Enheruket finishes off the remaining shadow. "Help the Abadaran and the other responders create a perimeter on the next road south of here," she tells Kabir, and then pulls out a wand and sends the High Priest of Fate, who is in fact a sixth-circle wizard. "Shadow infestation north of Aru-Da neighborhood. Request the high priests and Ta-Hepu. Form a perimeter on the eastern and southern sides."

Jalala is casting a summon as she says this. A pair of Nosoi psychopomps resolve into something solid, and Jalala directs them to fly over the houses and identify the edges of the area where the undead are hiding. Walls are not enough to hide undead from a psychopomp, and the creatures should detect them easily. When they find the undead at the edges of the area, they are to sing or scream, alerting the Nightjars to their location (and hopefully disabling the shadows for a moment). Enheruket yells for the team around back to head west, and then she and Jalala head west as well, towards the area that the Nosoi identify as the western edge of the problem.

"You'll want to direct the other responders to form a perimeter at the next street south of this one," says Kabir, to the Abadaran cleric. "Clerics of third or greater circle, and others equipped to fight incorporeal undead. Everyone else needs to leave the area."

She'll get started on directing the other responders, then, and on shouting 'clear out, monsters, clear out, monsters' to anyone who hasn't already heard.

The shadows are interrupted in their misery by singing and screaming. Screaming is BAD. The singing is not, in fact, bad. The singing is very interesting. Shadows stop about their eating to listen to the strange compelling sounds. They are - like the absence of any bad things, that's what they're like.

Eheruket and the other Nightjars begin breaking into houses at the western end of the problem and killing any shadows they find inside. They are far enough out that there isn't exactly an obvious street to use as a barrier on this end, but that's not much of a problem as long as they can create a line of houses that don't have any people and don't have any shadows.

It takes half a minute for the High Priest Mehomnet to arrive in the general vicinity of the problem, along with the other two high priests, another Pharasmin cleric, and Ta-Hepu. Once on site, they move to secure the eastern edge of the area and direct the defenses to the south.

There is a block in one of the nicer neighborhoods in downtown Sothis where nearly everyone is a retired adventurer. When the bells start ringing north of Aru-Da, they start ringing here too; when Mehomnet gets the more detailed report, she sends a runner along. In addition to their usual tax-exemption, the adventurers here are paid a retainer to be available for first response if the city should face some emergency; The wizards don't have that many spells left over at this hour of the night, and are grumpy besides, but two minutes after the word goes out, a band of veterans armed with magic weapons are galloping north on hasted horses, and five minutes after that they're on the scene to help secure the perimeter.