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.