After Dali's animated assertion that the whole thing had been made up, the Ophidian spat insults upon the hothead wizard; Saoirse immediately backed up to the edge of the road and away from the inevitable, explosive backlash. Shouts and hisses -- and the distant roar of an offended Grumbler that, in an outline of shifting moonlight, headed straight for them -- echoed among the moving, towering stone of the mysterious city.

She watched the wizard's flashing blades and the manifesting army-of-Dalis for a few annoyed seconds before the flagstone-disc under their feet caught her eye -- [i]eye[/i] being a word of distinct relevance. The image shifted in and out of view between the battlers' skidding feet, but a similarly shaped flagstone lay not far away, outside the reach of the pub windows' glow.

Saoirse craned her neck, fingers curled around the palmed coin, not quite ready to accept that the story was just some crazy coincidence. After a quick rummage in her backpack, she'd struck a match and lit an oil lamp; with her backpack slung over one shoulder and the oil lamp held out in front of her, she skirted around the wizard's spinning scythes and squatted beside the second round flagstone in the road in the night. The Watchful Eye, as Dali had named it, stared flickering in the lamplight. The same image gleamed in her palm.

Standing, she held the light higher and caught another flagstone further on, and another -- at the end, hauntingly illuminated by gaslights, a deep recess in the stone, within it the dim shape of a staircase. That was the Mourning Quarter, she knew without reading it.

The eyes, the coins and the dead. This was an invitation -- and a morbid promise -- that Saoirse couldn't refuse.

She turned back, noting immediately that the angry Grumbler was getting close, and the red wizard was still busy raging against Dali's doppelgangers.

[color=yellow]"Hey!"[/color] she yelled along the street at the storm of blades and scales. [color=yellow]"HEY!"[/color] When her efforts went ignored, Saoirse pressed two fingers to her mouth and blew a loud, piercing whistle that reverberated on the high stone walls.

As soon as eyes turned her way, she held her lamp over the watchful flagstone at her feet. [color=yellow]"Look down!"[/color] She swung the lamp to point it toward the Mourning Quarter, and waited for the others to see what she was seeing -- if only to be sure that she wasn't still hallucinating. [color=yellow]"If you guys are done measuring dicks, how 'bout you come figure out what the hell's going on."[/color] She took a slow breath and grinned. [color=yellow]"Apparently the dead are waiting for us, hah?"[/color]