The first phase of Yirith: Age of Low Adventure
Sessions 0-6
Session 0: “City of Thieves, Indeed … These Merchants…”
The Famed Weapons of Yirith
The Hunter’s Spear of Bursting Light has spent centuries in the wilderness, its metal jagged and rusted, its mettle determined by the stamina of its wielder.
The Decaying Sword of Winter was forged with a bronze hilt and a cold iron blade. It is said to drain its victims of their last essence and feed the wielder, provided they have a strong enough persona.
Astrid was born on the field of battle amongst her Pretani clan, doused in blood other than her mother’s. She was trained by the runwif in the arts of the herb and the language of the spirits. When she came of age, she chose jinn of hunger and the plague. She left her homeland to go among those that defile the land, the Imperials, perhaps to learn their twisted arts, perhaps to sow chaos to lead to their destruction, but probably both. She holds a spear with a smoking pot atop its shaft and carries an eerie music box whose designs resemble the tattoos around her eyes.
Cedric was a bastard birthed in the alcove of a castle–in the shadow of His Dread Majesty’s Palace Massive–the child of a baron and a common girl. Surmounting, for the moment, his low birth, he grew to be a civilized soldier, cognizant of danger of both his fellow and himself. Despite his scrawny form he sports a heavy metal breastplate, an iron broadsword, and a shield. He is none too smart, so Cedric has come to the City of Thieves to make a name for himself. Lately he has found himself performing the sacraments of the Cult of the Crab.
Saartu was not born of woman, but in a vat in a laboratory in the Immortal City. He called the alchemist who decanted him “Father.” Saartu’s origins left him weak, and perhaps he wields a scythe knowing that death will come for him soon. Father trained him in the forbidden knowledge of the sorcerous arts and taught him to truck with demons of fear and isolation. Saartu was kidnapped by one who had hoped to tap his power, yet the disgust engendered by his form led the enslaver to abandon him like a beast. He has washed up on the docks of the City of Thieves.
Folseph was born on the dilapidated estate called Withergate, on the northern frontier of the Ilcarian Empire, at the edge of civilization, to a father running from creditors and a mother busy with a half-dozen daughters. His upbringing was overseen by the estate agent and his father’s fixer, Glikt, who insisted he understood the skills of reading and homicide, even though the boy took to the streets. But what has brought him to the City of Thieves?
Later Joiners
Session 5: Ovid’s parents left him in a cemetery outside the walls of Zul-Bazzir, where ghosts somehow kept him alive long enough for Al-Murmur the Belethian to seize the child, and begin fiendish experiments that transformed the orphan’s skin. Being rejected by most due to his scaly albinism, Ovid grew up to be vicious and wary. He escaped his “home” with what he could take from his captor’s supplies, and earned passage to the City of Thieves…
Session 14: Marasmius’ mother was bitten by a snake during her pregnancy, so the Frog God shamans declared his arrival a dark omen and denounced him. They still used him, though, for raiding villages behind on their tribute, along the border between the Gulk and Belukar. He departed the wet wastes and found himself the City of a Thousand Gates, Punjar. Urban life did not suit him, so legends of the Decaying Sword of Winter impelled him to voyage forth onto the Inner Sea. His ship was attacked by a monster in the night, and he washed up on Fos Imeras with but his scimitar in scabbard, and his purple swamphen. The return of the Inklings to the Golden Aesclepeion allowed his escape from the Milk of Oblivion and joining of their misadventures.
Session 1: “Egged On, or, ‘The Gurgadon’”
It was the year of the Fish, the Moon of the Frog. The caravan had left Dozdghar, the City of Thieves, three days earlier, to drag itself through the jangal called Belukar, during the rainy season. The stated destination was Balk-Sarough, the City of Mud, home to Yirith’s most extensive papyrus libraries. The road had veered away from the Python, the fat, lazy river that disgorged into the Inner Sea where the City sat like an unperturbed toad.
Four mule-skinners directed the eight mules pulling the two wagons along the sloppy track. Three merchants sat inside the lead cart, while their three servants shuffled outside. Nahar-Nahar, the Jamadar, commanded the fourteen who guarded the transit, four of whom who were riding atop the vehicles, serving their “rest-watch.”
Saartu stared ahead into the monotonous riot of green. His eyes were as hollow as his very being, and it was suspected that he hoped this journey would fill that void. The sorcerous arts and the traffic with demons had not yet done so. Few on Yirith were born without mothers, but this one had been decanted by an alchemist “Father,” back in the Immortal City.
Cedric, riding atop the same carriage, was misborn and from the Ilcarian capital as well. But he had a mother, a common girl, a pretty scullery maid, his father a baron. His nose had been broken many times during his lifetime’s journey, his fingers, too, crooked appendages jutting from his scrawny frame encased in a battered cuirass. He had taken many beatings and survived, and he saw this caravan as a means to make a name for himself.
A seasoned senior, Folseph, rested on the roof of the other wagon. He pretended his hair was still in the salt-and-pepper phase. He, like Cedric, was of dissolute Ilcarian noble birth, from a dilapidated estate on the frontier that no longer drew revenue. He kept looking back over his shoulder, the direction from which the caravan had come.
Next to the old man was a younger woman with the face tattoos of the barbaric Pretani: Astrid. She looked forward, hoping to expand her knowledge of the machinery of civilization at Balk-Sarough, for she had, unlike many of her kind, learned to read from the clan’s runwif. A staff with a smoking pot on one end was near at hand.
These travelers observed a constrictor snake hugging a tree, waved midges from their faces, and saw a flight of mock-birds cross their path. Monkeys taunted them from the canopy, dropping nuts and perhaps worse things on their heads. An intense buzz of flies rose up over the normal insect cacophony that filled their ears. From their vantage point, these caravan guardians saw a body in the undergrowth to their right.
The carts moved slowly through the mud, so the observers atop had several moments of scrutiny before they called a halt to the procession. All were on their guard for an ambush, Folseph especially checking the quadrant behind. The ground had been disturbed between the road and the body, or rather bodies, as a second form was spotted underneath. They appeared to have been dragged into the foliage from the path. There were large circular tracks in the scuffed area, and what appeared to be thrusts of a sword or something into the soil. One of the corpses was missing an arm, and both were slashed. They appeared to be in dress typical of caravan guards. Neither body was overly decayed and no large animals had yet begun to dine on the meat.
A small plant seemed to be budding from one of the dead men’s wounds. A sweet scent hung in the air amidst the odor of rot. The cadaver did not react when Astrid rapped it on the knee, or when Folseph rifled its pockets, finding a few coin. A dagger was still on the belt. When the corpse was rolled over, its eyes stared out from the caked mud, fixed on a distant point even in death. More alarmingly, several globulous ovules slid from a gap in the torso. Reactively, Cedric chopped off the head in one stroke.
It was at this point that Ursib, the head merchant, the organizer of this expedition, opened the cart door and demanded some expediency. Although they were weeks from the City of Mud, he obviously did not want to get behind schedule. The investigators climbed back up on their carts, their “relaxed” watch not yet over.
Saartu vacantly stared into the distance, not quite brooding, as the caravan again lumbered slowly along. Astrid tried to look at the passing plants, to see if she could see any of utility to her creation of pomanders and pomades; she was still new to this part of the word and its flora. When Cedric observed what she was doing, he offered some of his fresh herbs (they looked pretty wilted at this juncture), and although she thanked him, she did not want mere condiments. Folseph did, however, and asked for a pinch for his “tea” (ambient temperature water) so that he might “meditate” (snooze). Those who were awake tried not to be bothered by how much their clothes or armor made them sweat, while the knight cleaned his sword of the gore.
“Discomfort is the … uh … human condition,” Folseph announced as he startled awake. Talk turned to the stories that had been gleaned back in the City of Thieves. It was known that the ruins of the Dust Empire, which had quite long ago occupied the desert to the north and collected riches beyond compare, had not all been looted yet. Saartu was skeptical that the dunes were actually endless (and Astrid had come from the other side). Zul-Bazzir, the sister city to Cedric and Saartu’s Ilcar, was said to have begun manufacturing its own drugs, as the Medicament Navy was emptied of wares by the point of its disembarkation from Dozdghar, merely halfway around its circuit of the Inner Sea. This comported with the word on the street in the City of Thieves, as the cults were believed to hook their recruits with pharmack: opium, lotus, mung, bhang, mumia. The pigs of the City–which the newcomers had seen devouring trash in Dozdghar’s streets–allegedly enjoyed the “long pig,” an idiom that none were yet familiar with.
Interrupting the conversation, something large crashed through the rainforest onto the road in front of the lead detachment of guards. The mule-skinners brought the wagons to a halt and Nahar-Nahar rallied the soldiers forward, although it must be admitted that the subjects of our narrative, with the exception of Cedric, were conservative in their approach to the threat.
What had emerged from the leaves looked something like the legendary rhino in size and structure, although it seemed to be an ambulatory turnip. A riot of gorgeous flowers grew along its “spine,” a pair of “antennae” whirled where a head might have been, a pointed tail whipped about on its backside, and its forelimbs were more jagged blades than legs.
As the first wave of guards arrived to challenge this behemoth, a pair of them just stopped and gawked, their spears slack in their hands. A couple got jabs in as the creature counter-struck with its own “blades,” cutting them lightly. Cedric was heady with the sweet odor in the atmosphere, and swung clumsily. Astrid put away her firelance, as she did not want to scorch those in front of her. Saartu flanked in the foliage, while Folseph took on the role of “sub- jamadar.”
Perhaps he actually did some good, as the rearguard’s volley of spears struck the body of the beast. Astrid was dizzied for a moment, but pressed on. Cedric was scraped by the stinger on the tail, and fell rigid into the ferns beside the trail, remembering that he had forgotten some of his training as he fell. Although two of the other guards were ripped open by the forelimbs, their spearwork brought the monster to its “knees.” Folseph finally got close, but was dazzled by the blooms. Saartu closed, too, a gloomy lullaby on his lips, but the creature did not fall asleep. Rather it stung him, and he fell hard on the soft mud road.
Luckily, the platoon did not break. Astrid began grabbing javelins from the incapacitated and hurling them at the antennae. When those went still, the tail and blade arm lashed out wildly and inaccurately. The creature had landed on its side, and this exposed a tube on the underbelly, which stretched toward one of the fallen. Astrid rammed a spear into this organ, and the creature shuddered and ceased to move.
After the effects of the paralytic and pheremones had worn off and the bodies had been dragged to the side (Ursib was impatient again), the survivors harvested some of the vegetable-brute’s parts. Astrid gathered the flowers from the back while Cedric chopped off the tail. Inside were many stingers, as was the “belly” crowded with “eggs.” The knight put several in the pouches close to his body. Spears of the fallen were collected and loaded aboard the carts, and the men reallocated into three squads.
* * *
At a fork in the trail, the caravan took the lesser one, moving into a terrain marked additionally by boulders and hills. When a driver spotted an ape-man (dead for weeks) spiked to a tree, he pulled the mules to a halt. Ursib was out of his carriage again, demanding the servants grab the ropes, torches, picks, and spikes that were stored in the other cart.
“Come Khatu, Nihal, for we will be rich!”
“I thought we were trading at the City of Mud.”
“Would you radder sbend weeks more in de mud, or harvest gold here? You will have twice your wage for a mere week’s work!”
“How do we know there’s gold?”
“Dis was found on an abe-man.” Ursib showed off a gold bracelet fashioned in the shape of a snake biting itself. “Dey cannot manufacture dese.”
“And what about the ape-men?”
“Dey are not’ing.” He gestured at the hairy corpse pinned to the tree.
Half the surviving guard remained with the wagons and Nahar-Nahar, while Saartu, Astrid, Cedric, and Folseph climbed the steep bank. A boulder had come down the slope some time ago, ripping chunks of ground where it had bounced, the scars in the earth now softened by the recent dousing by the rains. The rise evened out for a moment, a path through the trees leading to a dark hole in the rising mountain face. Huge mounds of dirt had been piled outside.
Saartu noticed movement to his left and shouted to the others, but he wasn’t agile enough with his weapon to pin down the charging ape-man holding a crude spear. It mattered not, for Cedric wrecked the beast with his broadsword in a single swipe. The frenzied attacker that sprang from the other side fared no better, and Folseph finished it in one strike. The two killers acknowledged each other’s prowess. The second attacker’s mouth was stained a fairly bright red. Ursib, from behind, urged the fighters forward.
A boulder came bouncing down the rocky slope above the cave, the hoots of ape-men accompanying it. Cedric shoved Folseph out of the way, but the rock caught both Astrid and Saartu. The whole ran for the cover of the cavemouth.
“Smarter than you’d think.”
“Bah, I told you dey are not’ing.”
The cave smelled of rot and smoke, and sounded of ape-man hoots and shrieks deeper in. Ursib’s impatience was stayed with the argument that if the wounded were to fall, then the merchant and the servants would be next. In that case, there would be no gold mined. The party took a breather and luckily the beast-men in the tunnels did not emerge.
Astrid put some wax in her ears, Saartu held a torch, Folseph considered his arthritis, and Cedric hefted his shield and moved forward at the front of the column. The passageway was low, carved from dirt, and partly shored up. Some rocks had come down and the tunnel had been re-dug around them.
When the knight emerged into a large room, he could see the embers of an extinguished fire and shapes moving about. Out of the darkness hurtled spears, which he deflected with his shield. The hurlers fled and Cedric could see their dugs bouncing as they ran–these were ape-women. Others flung their javelins, too, and the man came on steadfast, without chasing or attacking. In time, the second rank was harried as well, but before long all the ape-people had vanished down two tunnels. It was unclear whether they could see in the dark, or just knew their surroundings well. A rock rolled down the steps that some of the apes had retreated up, smacking hard against the dirt wall.
A few simple woven baskets and a large dead sow lay near the entrance of the large room. Closer inspection revealed that the forest-pig had been cut open and several fetuses lay, unmoving, in her belly, no doubt curing for an ape-man feast that might never happen now. Small mats and rocks surrounded the extinguished campfire, and bones of animals, maybe humans, and snakes littered the floor of an exit. The thing that caught the party’s eyes was the tower of skulls, however. They seemed to be pressed into a column along the wall, although some crania had fallen to the floor. In the torch’s flicker, Cedric saw the sparkle of what had to be an emerald inside one of the eyesockets.
The gem was stuck with some gum or cement inside the skull, so Cedric placed the object on the floor, and smashed it with his hilt. For the second time this day, the knight’s muscles locked into rigidity as some shriek was released upon his action of breaking the skull. The ape-folk hooted and screamed in the distance.
Ursib ordered that the downed man be left, and got a servant and guard to escort him to the final passage leading from the chamber. The man started laughing with a sinister-sounding glee, and the three sets of boots clattered up hard stone steps. The others followed, Saartu and Folseph lifting their paralyzed companion, and struggling up the stair.
The wide, obsidian steps led to another unearthed chamber. A few heavy sticks (longer than the ceiling was tall) lay on the floor amidst a pile of boulders. Ursib was standing on the edge of a walled pit, declaring that they needed to get below for the gold. When it was offered to rope down, the merchant scoffed, pointing out that the obsidian bricks had sharp edges. Surely climbing would be too risky. He returned down the stairs to the feast room, and the party followed, again.
Ursib demanded that the servants remove the bones from the entrance to the last passage (no one wanted to chase the ape-people into their hiding spaces, not yet, anyway), and uttered an expression of disgust at the eaten snakes. Soon he was pressing on, laughing when he found another descending stair. The party followed, barely keeping up, seeing the torchlight disappear into what looked like a buried building, the doorway made by a wide stone slab resting atop two squat, vertical ones.
Deeper they went, chasing the servant’s torch, through buried buildings, occasionally slowed by collapsed earth or rubble. In the interior of one, faded frescoes still remained. Astrid looked closer, seeing large ziggurats and tiny human-like figures. Robe-wearing bipeds whipped hairy humans, or ape-men, as they hefted the blocks to build the structures. A carved stone cobra emerged from the rubble as if to strike, and there were other chunks of alien carvings, the fragmentary pieces of which did not make sense to the onlookers. Cedric had grown very heavy to his bearers by this point.
Finally, the torch ahead ceased moving, and Ursib’s excitement reached a new pitch. “Yes, we will have our treasure!” The final room–for here any further forward movement was impeded by rubble, although one side of the circular room was still intact, a huge, tapered tube of stone marked with diamond-shaped relief curved out of sight. In front of the party lay a shattered stone plinth, the illustration of a splayed human form still visibly etched into the top. Dominating the room, however, was the immense, fanged pit in the floor. Cold seemed to radiate from it. The merchant (if he really was one) knelt and inserted something into the flagstones. His laughter was almost uncontrolled now.
A deep moan issued from below.
Astrid, with the torch, began to edge back out of the chamber.
“Do you not want to see the triumph, the treasure, you apes?!” Ursib bellowed.
“I wonder if I wouldn’t live to see the triumph,” Saartu answered.
When the monumental snake emerged from the hole, the party ran, awkwardly supporting Cedric. Nihal fled with them. The monster ingested the servant with the light and the area behind them fell dark. The feelings in the knight’s limbs began returning as the others dragged him up the stairs. The ape-men were hooting, but stayed out of the way. Horrible sounds came from behind, and then above, through the first pit they had located. Cedric grabbed the gem that had pained him so, and Saartu grabbed a whole skull which housed another emerald.
As the deserters emerged from the cavemouth, Saartu coughed and gagged a little. What he did not see yet, but the others soon would, was the black ichor issuing from his lips. At the bottom of the incline it did not take the party long to convince Nahar-Nahar to turn the wagons around. All others were assumed lost. They were unsure if the monster serpent would chase them out of the pit, so they traveled down the trail into the darkness, until they arrived but a few hours before dawn at the village they had encamped near the night before.
Saartu lay, useless, debilitated, coughing black slime for the remainder of the venture. He tossed the skull into the weeds for some other unfortunate to discover. The trade goods that the second wagon had seemed to have carried turned out to be nearly valueless items wrapped in an expensive veneer, hardly worth much for the survivors to split. A small bit of fortune interrupted the return journey, however. A slain jangal boar, male, lay on the path, its ivory tusks as yet unharvested. In the meanwhile, Cedric had kept the eggs close to his body, warming them, until their rooty tendrils started pricking his flesh.
The caravan arrived in the City of Thieves by the river gate, its means of motion returned to their lenders, its meager prizes distributed evenly. Saartu recovered from his Black Retch, lucky that Astrid had not brought her plague jinn out for an attempted fix. Flush with coin, the barbarian began a drinking campaign which ended with her painting copies of her facial tattoos on the painted women in an advertising fresco for a clothier in the Bazaar. The gods might not pay attention to her too closely for a while, but some guildsmen might. Folseph, being of advanced age, recused himself from any such festivities. Cedric, presumably tired of his muscles locking up, invented a new mixed drink, the “gurgadon,” which included a few squeezes of the turnip-rhino’s egg’s juice. It was most horrid, but luckily no one remembered the experiment except the inventor. He hoped that everyone would recall their planned tavern meeting in the following week.
Session 2: “Puffing Pharmack and Supping Sewage”
The Cult of the Wastes offered meaning in nothingness to Saartu’s emotionally bereft soul. Suroga, whose name meant “No-One-At-All” in the tongue of the Iron Horde, desired unbeing for different reasons, his lifelong flight from the hags’ reach. But he had gravitated toward the familiar, being a child of the wastelands himself, and worshipped, too, at the cult’s shrine about midway along the Street of Saints. Saartu brought Suroga into the fold to meet Cedric at Barking Dog’s, a tavern by the Piazza of the Frogs, upwind in Downwind, to try and track Ursib, or perhaps find an angle in the City of Thieves’ drug trade. Anyway, with One-Eye at the Rampant Cockatrice said to be the angry sort, maybe this was the place to start with pharmack.
It was sweltering inside the former pit-fighter’s establishment (itself a former fighting pit), but at least they weren’t still being rained on. The Moon of the Frog was always wet. It was late morning, but the place was crowded with sailors, which reminded the party that they’d heard mariners out of Punjar had claimed to have seen a golden building on an island south of Iribos. Cedric saw a fortune-teller, ignored the shipmen, beelined across the room, and thrust a coin into her hand. A decrepit voice came out the veils, asking, “Blood and sex, or, the god-kings of war, or, the unquiet past, or the nest of vipers?”
“Oh, nest of vipers, please,” Cedric said.
“The unwitting husband of a serpent-demoness,” the medium hissed, and stopped.
Cedric waited.
Perhaps she felt a little guilty for such a slender fortune. “Yirith succumbs … a new-made world is a-borning,” she cackled, “Monstronsities spring from the womb!”
“Well, you’re not wrong about that.”
Saartu had already ordered an ale from the barkeep in an affectless voice. He intoned, “Thank you Barking Dog I will enjoy the liquid,” which, honestly, was not all that enjoyable. Although the sorcerer’s stare seemed blank, he was absorbing the fact that a trap door behind the bar led below, and that Barking Dog kept dogs down there (who barked). Suroga’s offer to provide music for the tavern with his saz was roundly refused, the old pit-fighter looking with some prejudice at the Jurka instrument.
The seamen were vigorously discussing something in low tones, about getting someone out of somewhere. Wishing to hear more of their conversation, Cedric bought the men drinks so that they might speak with less caution. One of the sailors claimed that the Nizam maintained a small building underground in this neighborhood, where he took problematic guildmasters and aristocrats for little “chats.” Another said that he’d heard that the frog statues on the fountain came alive at night, and dragged people down into the well.
Saartu calmly asked Barking Dog where he might acquire some narcotics to tickle his throat.
“You aren’t from the Watch, one of the Nizam’s Dogs, the Ministry of Pravity, the Order of Apothecaries and Physickers, or the Leech-Crafters’ Guild, are you?”
Saartu recounted his recent adventure with the caravan, offering that as evidence that he was none of those presumably anti-pharmack authorities. This distracted him however, from his initial ask.
“Do you know anyone who smells of cucumbers, Barking Dog?”
This odd question was shared with the sailors, who alleged that once they had met a liar, a confusing man, in Punjar, who had had the odor of that vegetable. Barking Dog could not provide any new information about Ursib.
The barman mentioned a woman in the piazza, a noble widow whose son was missing, and then returned to the subject of narcotics. The Cult of Fragrance might be a good bet, around midway on the Street of Saints. Suroga thought that he remembered seeing–or, rather, smelling–that shrine not too far from the Cult of the Wastes. Or, if Saartu was in the market for lesser product–and he was here in Downwind, wasn’t he?--then the charcoliers smoked on the stairs just on the other side of the square. This became the Company’s target, for surely it would not take long to cross a small plaza.
A curious parade was crossing the square as the Company emerged from the tavern and into the downpour. A line of women with dresses that bulged at their bellies moaned and groaned, and squat-walked across the cobblestones. They held fruits and vegetables in their hands, some partly eaten. The wet cloth revealed that most of the large stomachs were ersatz stuffing, not flesh. The procession seemed to have been halted.
A man dressed as a Minister of the Thanes was gesticulating at the leader of the column. She waved her arms in the same direction, and disputed whatever he was saying. He replied with more exaggerated gestures in the same direction. A woman near the Company squatted, groaned, and dropped a gourd between her legs on the stones. Then she lifted the fruit and took a bite. Saartu indicated that he would like a sample, and she shared. This would not be the last time a member of the Company would consume filth in our tale.
“Hey, can I join your celebration?”
“I dunno, do you have a cunt?” she replied.
In the awkwardness that followed, Saartu asked for a cucumber from a different marcher, and she gladly turned the vegetable over to him. The minister and his guards had given up by this time, so the women carried on with their odd parade.
“This city’s officials, they do not have much power,” Suroga noted.
“This cucumber is the only reliable lead we have for Ursib,” Saartu claimed.
“Reliable?”
The well of the frogs was too interesting to just pass by without a brief inspection. The marble batrachians at each corner were weathered, but otherwise unmarked. The stones on the rim of the well showed the wear of a thousand buckets’ ropes and the nicks and marks of more solid tools. Saartu leaned over and saw strange markings etched in one of the stones about fifteen or twenty feet down. This unnerved him a little, as it looked not unlike the handiwork of those he’d served for his childhood.
“All writing is witchcraft,” the barbarian declared.
Cedric had scooped up a stone to estimate the depth of the well, and released the pebble at the wellmouth. When the rock passed the glyphs, however, the well was rocked by a thunderous ball of flame. Suroga smirked as he dove backwards.
A leathery old man came out on a balcony, and yelled at the party to quit lingering, and stop making such a racket. A woman’s (made-up) and a man’s (helmeted) face, peered over the top of a dilapidated stone fence. A couple urchin boys stepped out of an alley to check out the excitement. The apparent spendthrift Cedric offered them some coin, and the boys told him that they had never heard of this happening before. A second stone triggered no detonation, and a >ploop< of water sounded far below. The party certainly was not going to descend this shaft without precautions.
The charcoal smokers lay sprawled on the stairs nearby, the half-lids covering the grey cast of their eyeballs as the sun stood mid-sky.
“Black Lotus,” said Suroga.
“How would you all feel about working for a drug lord?”
The local distributor sat at the top of the stairs, wearing a mask with a bird’s beak. He offered a hit for three coin for “visions galore.’ The pipe was free. The barbarian, being impoverished, declined. Saartu and Cedric made their purchase and took a spot on the steps a bit distant. The man with the empty soul tried to fill his interior with smoke. Cedric just pretended to partake.
The other two watched wetly as Saartu stretched out supine, listening a bit to a hubbub not-too-distant down a nearby alley, audible over the steady smattering of the rain. The decanted one would later tell them what he had experienced. He felt … safe … bathed in the radiant light of yellow, mammalian eyes … watching, forevermore. There was peace, solace in the strength of those fangs beneath. It was as though he was flying across the savanna to … comfort?
“I’ve had better,” the warlock said, when he came to, “that was cut with too much charcoal. I’ve learned that fangs are not always bad things.”
Before the day was done, Suroga suggested speaking with the aristocratic lady. As was the norm in neighborhoods like this, where the Downwind had overtaken old wealth, her crumbling tower had its street-side windows bricked up. Whereas working people put bars or boards over theirs, the faded elite no longer wanted to look out at what surrounded them. A conversation with the outdoor guards brought the Lady into the courtyard. Poor Suroga couldn’t help but notice the jewelry that sparkled from her ears and neck. He counted the guardsmen (six, at least).
The widow told them that Orlando had been playing repeatedly with those “horrid low-born urchins” and one night he had taken his father’s sword and vanished. An investigation of the boy’s room found a luxurious chamber that none save Cedric had even seen before. Nothing seemed to have been stolen, nor had the boy taken extra clothes or his paints, as though meaning to be away for a while. Lord Danarosa’s memorial room gave no further clues, but hung a portrait suggesting he had married a lady decades his junior. Although warned that “her men” had been unable to corral any of the “little miscreants,” the Company set forth to try to contact the street boys again, as a two hundred coin reward would be in the offing.
Urchin alley was flanked by horribly decayed buildings, some even four stories high. When Suroga strummed his saz and began reciting the lyrics to “The Ogre and the Donkey,” heads peeped out from behind rubble and over rickety balustrades.
“Them’s the ones that made the boom!”
“Why‘r they playin’ out in the rain?”
With some escalating bribes, the boys eventually opened up. There were disappearances from their number, from time to time. Some of it was the usual sort of kidnapping that took street kids from the city, but something here lately … was worse. The Splinter, red-eyed and hunched, not quite as big as a man, came at night, from below. Orlando had tried to kill it with the sword, but hadn’t returned.
The party learned that there were at least two more entrances “below” nearby. Beneath Barking Dog’s establishment was a stairwell that he charged 50 coin to descend, but there was also the open sewage hole right around the corner, watched over by the Goddess of the Sewers.
“Fifty! That’s a steep price! How can he charge that?”
“There’s a fancy lady in a fancy room underground.”
“Ah, a brothel.”
“No, that’s right over there.” (The boy pointed.)
“Well, fellows, do we fancy some sewer spelunking?”
“The Splinter will kill you.”
As the party was undeterred, torches and ropes were purchased in a nearby neighborhood, and when the Company returned to the square a bald, deep-hued man was inspecting the frog well. He didn’t look Lukari, for he had a finely sewn but drab green robe over metal armor, and had the mien of civilization about him. Before he left the piazza, the party observed him almost lovingly caress one of the marble frogs.
The party found a ruined building where they could spy upon the well from the second floor. Little surprising activity took place during the daylight hours, and when the sun set, Suroga noted that perhaps they should’ve napped during the day so that they needn’t rotate watches during the night.
Cedric, on first watch, saw little unordinary at first, rats scuttling and cats stalking, a few urchins scampering, and workmen. Later on, however, a man with a recorder entered, and played a charming tune outside the place the boy had called the brothel. A young woman came out and followed the man into the dark alley. Cedric hurried down the steps of his hideout and across the square, catching a glimpse of the two taking a corner. It was actually noisy beyond, and the knight came upon at least a dozen men sleeping on the cobblestones, with several others still awake and praying. The object of their veneration was a calf of gilt or gold, illuminated by burning candles and incense. Some were scourging their own backs as they paced about, tearfully whimpering “Accept our blood! We beseech you!” The couple Cedric had been chasing were on the far side of this scene, and he let them go, and returned to his sleeping mates.
The latter watches saw nothing peculiar, but the rain lifted and a muggy mist rolled in. After consuming some of their chow, the Company made their way to the cloaca. The crumbling arches supported an oval chamber below the street level, which had runnels that allowed water and sewage to run down a drain in the middle. The statue of the Goddess of the Sewers stood amidst several burning candles and joss sticks, which produced a nauseating reek.
The ropes were tied together and secured, and Cedric began lowering himself down the long descent. Sewer pipes opened in the walls of the shaft from time to time, and the stink only got worse as he descended. At the bottom the torch in his teeth revealed a circular room with another grate, partly broken, pools of effluent, and a skeleton on the floor, with a silver cup tucked underneath it. Two passages led from either side. At least it was a little bit cooler down here.
Cedric gave the okay for the others to descend, but as he dropped to the floor, a mist in the shape of a woman emerged from the wall and began hissing at him to drink from the chalice on the floor. The fact that it was soiled with sewage and the ghost’s intentions were unknown meant that Cedric did not obey her prompt. When the other two slowly made their way down, the phantasm repeated her request. When none complied her form raced around the edge of the room, obviously distraught.
“What is our goal down here?”
“To retrieve the boy, and …”
“Let’s orient ourselves by finding the well.”
One passage led to silence, while the distant squeaks of rats issued forth from the other, and the Company chose that one, because it would likely lead to the well. As the adventurers proceeded, the stone walls got more and more fragmented, and honeycombed with holes, and the noise of rats got louder. A stone door to the right was unopened, and suddenly the sound of many feet came rushing across the debris and filth, as a half-dozen alarmingly large rats rushed into the torchlight.
Cedric stepped to the front, and most of the bites did not get through his armor, but one of the animals managed to fasten onto Saartu’s boot. Unused to combatting such small foes, perhaps, scythe and sword and knife had trouble fending off the rats at first, but then a few were felled. Yet they were vicious creatures that seemed to have no fear of death.
The Company fled before the second wave arrived. Suroga was first to the rope … but his hand reached instead for the shit-smeared chalice, Cedric’s kick of a pursuing rat giving the barbarian time to pour the sewage down his throat. A more sensible (and more bleeding) Saartu grasped the hemp and started ascending, out of reach of the rodents.
Suroga looked at the apparition and his heart thumped in his chest. She was so beautiful … no, she was hideous, her visage split to reveal a monster. He dropped the goblet to the stone floor, drew his bow, and promptly broke an arrow. The gods had seen his greed. He wiped sludge from his lips.
While Saartu dithered, Cedric stomped one rat, breaking its back, and clove another with his blade. At last, the vermin showed fear, and scattered. Bitten and besmirched, the Company retreated up the rope to the piazza, one filthy prize in hand, but no child rescued.
Session 3: “Of Porridge and Pottage”
The Company realized they should’ve washed the cursed silver chalice before they tried to sell it, the raw sewage coating probably taking at least a hundred coin off its exchange value. Suroga had begged off, he was feeling a little sick, and perhaps a bit fearful of re-encountering dog-sized rats if the action to save the boy continued. In the barbarian’s stead, Folseph had returned to work with the party again, himself recovering from the Black Flux, a different tale of sewage.
“Ah do buh-leave I’ve lost three stone,” the old man bragged. He did not look any thinner in the eyes of Saartu and Cedric.
“In mah period uh indisposition, ah have huhrd of a Nine of Swords that might slay all who ahr in its vicinity, mm-hmm.”
“Sounds dangerous to use.”
In the short sojourn to allow Saartu recuperate from the sewer delve, Cedric had spent freely on ales for others at Barking Dog’s, and had heard that a prophet strode the alleys of Dozdghar, claiming that the Spider God’s egg sac was here, now, in the City of Thieves. It was true that the muggy fog left them feeling they lived inside a womb. It was still the Moon of the Frog in the Year of the Fish.
“We should poison the (dog-sized) rats,” Saartu suggested.
Cedric told the compelling oddball about the straight-laced apothecary that he had met while selling the turnip-beast’s seed-eggs. This muscular Lakmed demanded that the poison be fed only to rats, and noted that the dregs of Downwind were actually breeding the rodents, since the Nizam was said to be promising a bounty for each tail. The druggist thought that trash would be a perfectly suitable vehicle to deliver the toxin, and charged them forty coin for the purchase.
The party began to worry that they’d run afoul of the Swine-Herders’ Guild if they took the juiciest trash from the streets, so they cooked up some gruel instead. As they scurried to and fro on their errands, the Company encountered a busker who sang a tale of a doomed adventurer while bowing his rubab’s nineteen strings.
Ral, a thief in shadows deep,
Beneath a city, where secrets sleep.
Splendors gleamed, a mocking light,
He danced the dance throughout the night.
Ral sought the dust of ancient kings,
And other old and hidden things.
The mummies' powder, dark and deep,
While all the world above did sleep.
The Sword of Sirr, his pillagers’ prize,
Reflected greed within his eyes.
Ral laughed, a hollow, echoing sound,
Where ancient curses could be found.
But a child black, a child white,
A child of grace, enspelled the night.
Her obsidian gaze, so strong, so whetted,
The blood of Ral was drained and letted.
The musician’s name was Basileo, and he was well-pleased that Folseph dropped a coin into his tin cup.
“You are-a adventurers, a-yes?”
“Well, uh, you have uh pegged my personage correctluh.”
“If you-a die in a horrible way, I will a-compose a bea-u-ti-ful song of your-a passing!”
“Well, ah will send you word of mah demise … should ah go. Now this uh heah mummy dust …”
The singer immediately glanced around nervously. Sotto voce he explained that if the Ministry of Pravity or certain guildmembers were to hear the conversation–for different reasons–discussing mumia might be a problem.
“Well, uh, puhaps ah am only intendin’ to use it upon mahself,” Folseph whispered back.
Now that they were properly rested, more informed, and equipped with poisoned porridge, Cedric wanted to return to the sewer and try to rescue the kidnapped boy. The knight-to-be also desired to remove and mount the head of the alleged rat-man.
Folseph’s joints protested as they lowered themselves down the cloaca shaft. The lantern light showed the crumpled skeleton who had once held the shit goblet, the damaged drain with the child-sized hole, the two exit-passages, and the bodies of a few dog-sized rats. Some of Saartu’s blood was spattered on the floor. The ghost had not returned. The rat corpses were undisturbed.
Cedric proposed they resume their mission to locate the well, and led the Company past more killed rats, the stone door, the cracked and honeycombed walls, and the detritus of bone and shit. A slightly swollen door with rusty metal bands and an old lock blocked their passage, but Folseph was handy and soon swung open the portal.
A grim frog, carved in one of the stones of this walled shaft, stared back at the old man. A hint of sunlight and fresh air could be sensed above. They had reached the well of frogs somewhere in the middle of its descent. Looking down, it was clear that someone had etched some words in a stone about twenty feet below, near the edge of their light. Cedric dropped a chunk of masonry to make sure the bore didn’t detonate again, spun back around behind the wall, and was rewarded with a >ploop< and no other sounds.
Since Folseph had been thoughtful enough to bring his own supply of rope, Saartu was lowered by the others to try and read the message. The warlock could feel below that there were many feet to plunge if this endeavor failed. “Mind the door,” someone had seen fit to scratch in the Tongue of Coin, here, dozens of feet below the surface.
Cedric sensed something moving behind him … maybe the scrape of a stone door. The two men on the rope hoisted Saartu quickly to their level; he sprawled on the filthy floor just as the long, flat lizard dragged itself into their light.
Cedric struck a resounding blow to the crocodile, but it soon clamped its jaws around Folseph’s leg. “If ah die in this heah shitty cesspit … it will uh, be expected of mah life.” Although Saartu’s grim lullaby did not seem to faze the monster, the blows of the Company were swift and sharp, and the beast turned tail and tried to scramble away. Its last indignity was Saartu’s scythe hooking and ripping open its cheek. A just-eaten oversized rodent spilled from its gullet.
“Ah have lost mah vital essence. Ah shoulda hidden in tha corner, not had thoughts of being uh hero…”
“Every hero I know of is dead.”
The Gurgadon had killed a gurgadon. They rested before investigating further. Crocodiles were known predators in the tributaries of the Python, but near the city, the Guild of Dredgers was supposed to keep the river clear of the reptiles. By the trail, it was clear that it had come through the door and down one of the stairways beyond. Its point of origin appeared to be a mucky break in the wall, a sewer tunnel most certainly beyond.
“To be honest, I don’t want to get on my belly and go through there.”
It was agreed that standing exploration would be pursued instead, and the party could hear muttering from the bottom of the next set of steps, though see no light above. Folseph and Saartu crept up quietly, backlit by Cedric waiting with the lantern. A bit of light began to show, as a man was huddled next to a dim candle, reciting a litany. The assassin and the warlock peeked around the corner and he did not seem to even notice them.
The man wore only a dhoti, was filthy, with a long ragged beard and splayed hair and curling nails. He occasionally broke his recitation to pluck a few mushrooms from the wall, hastily chew, and swallow. He droned in Coinish:
The eternal hyena will give birth to a child in the ancient city of the lighthouse; his seed will be conceived at the altar of the Nameless One, and a star will rise in the south, whose appearance will frighten the blind but attract the wise to sing of the birth.
Zul-Bazzir, the City of Splendors, had a lighthouse; this they knew. The candle did not illuminate the entire room, but it seemed as though this was a dead end. The two retreated back to Cedric, and told him what they had seen.
“If only the crocodile had come this way, instead.”
The other stairs led to another apparent cul-de-sac. This room was dusty and undisturbed. Someone had carefully etched several poems about loss and longing, written in Alashan, the tongue that each of the Company had learned as a child.
When love's sweet cup is slowly drained away,
A silent loss begins to take its hold,
No gentle hand to fill it, day by day,
A precious warmth that quickly turns to cold.
So too an empire, built of pride and show,
Becomes a fragile castle made of sand,
Where once great towers did majestically grow,
Now only dust remains across the land.
The Ilcarian realm, that soared so high and fast,
Forgot the sun that melts ambition's wings,
Its fleeting glory, never meant to last,
A hollow echo that the wild wind brings.
For love neglected, or a reign too bold,
Leaves only scattered dust, a story told.
“These are uh particularleh old-fangled, are they not?”
“This place seems to draw a particular kind of person.”
Another sonnet was perhaps not quite so venerable:
A chalice drunk, desire awoke inside,
A burning want, a longing, new and strong.
A love it forged, that death could not divide,
Forever true, where it will still belong.
Though flesh may fade, and shadows softly creep,
This bond of hearts, it never can be done.
Through endless time, its promises will keep,
Beneath the dark, or by the sunken frog.
From The Dread King's court, this draught’s magic flew,
His dark-robed mages, with their ancient lore,
Had stirred its power, making old things new,
To bind a soul forever, and before.
Yet Ilcarian might, ev'ry spell they cast,
Could not hold back the Caliph's might, so vast.
As this wing of the underground complex seemed to have no captive children, the Company returned to the location of their initial descent, and took the unexplored path. The sewage-wetness soon dried out and a dusty patina lay across the stone floor. Tracks, some like a deformed human’s bare feet, the others booted, led down one side of the hall, and stayed close to the wall as they descended a stair. A single step was filled with debris.
After inspecting and prodding the trash, Cedric stepped carefully over it, and right onto a pressure plate. He was quick, but not quite quick enough, and blades came up through the floor and out of the wall, bruising him through his greaves. He could see now a body, at the edge of the torchlight and the bottom of the flight. Its legs looked mangled. Cedric stepped on the second trap, too, but after that no further damage was incurred, and the others’ legs were spared.
The cadaver lay in a landing with poorly sculpted rat heads ringing the walls. The footprints led to the mouth of a giant crude relief of a rat face. The corpse was old enough that it no longer stank. A dagger was recovered from the floor, as well as a curious illustration on a folded up piece of parchment in a cloak pocket. A square was marked by eight ellipses, a pair on each side, and one ellipse had a line through it.
“I think we found our rat king lair–you guys feeling brave?”
The stiff corpse was used as a ram to open the back of the large relief-rat’smouth. A wet stink filled their nostrils, and the sound of dripping landed on their eardrums. Another stair dropped into the darkness. The party cautiously descended, finding a mostly defunct fountain in an oval room with an arched ceiling. The fountain was a square with an arched frog on each side (rather than the corners, like the well above) all blankly staring upward and trickling water from their stony mouths. The basin where the water dribbled was filled with deep brown slurry, a little slopped onto the floor.
Cedric sensed a stirring in the goop and was ready. Four froggy fishmen surfaced, holding waterlogged weapons. They seemed to be hungry. The knight split open the first he swung at, and soon a second one was dropped back into the muck. The two survivors darted away, and this was when the party’s senses picked out a weirdly pleasant odor in the air, a whiff, and began to hear children shouting for help. The troop chased after the fleeing creatures, ending a third’s life, sending it tumbling down the steps.
The fourth slapped its wet feet down the stairs into an open room that felt immense, even without light. Coals could be seen glowing in the distance, stew was the likely scent, and pillars rose to a ceiling at the edge of the lantern light. A silvery sword was propped against one of the pillars near a number of cages that imprisoned wailing children. Saartu went for the sword, Cedric rushed toward the pens, and Folseph–it was past his naptime in this afternoon–gingerly made his way down the steps holding the lantern.
A hunched shadow lunged from behind the sword’s pillar, but Saartu dodged the strike … and ran smack into the column. He was able to grab the fine sword, and although he briefly pondered whether the rat-man could be tricked into eating the toxic gruel, used the weapon to hack open its torso. Cedric arrived, using his shield to ward away a blow that would’ve struck the warlock, then notched his broadsword on the column. Folseph ducked behind the pillar and placed the lantern on the floor, drawing his rapier.
All the boys were screaming to be let free, while the Splinter chattered out something in its own tongue. Cedric’s blade bit into the monster’s shoulder, squirting blood, but it only smiled at him. The knight felt that the gods had shifted against him. A dog-sized rat rushed from the shadows to harry Cedric. Folseph suddenly appeared from nowhere, and impaled the rodent. The rat-man whirled to strike at the old man, while Cedric slipped and fell on his backside (the slurry from the pool was still on his boots).
Saartu uttered a gutteral word, maybe something like “Gakki,” and vanished. Although the odds had been reconfigured to two-to-one, Cedric did not like their chances. How could the warlock abandon them like this?
Suddenly, the silvery blade flashed again, out of nowhere, harming the Splinter. The rat-man swung wildly at the unseen attacker, hitting the pillar. His blade skittered across the floor. Folseph, whose weapon seemed useless, tried to pin the creature after it attempted to bite him, and Saartu’s filigreed blade again connected, with both Folseph’s cheek and the monster, bringing it down, but luckily not killing the old fellow.
There was little time to breathe as the wet-slap steps of the frog-man came out of the darkness. Cedric failed to interdict its escape, but a dagger materialized in its back, and it collapsed on the stone, sliding to a stop.
Wounded and gasping, the survivors looked around the room. Elaborate abstract frog symbology covered all the walls above head height. The base had been smeared with dirt or scraped away, and crude charcoaling of rats or maybe rat-men had been illustrated atop the older artwork. A cauldron containing bubbling stew sat over the coals in the firepit, next to a bed-nest of shredded cloth.
The caged children continued shrieking to be freed, and the removal of the rat-man’s head spilled his two-key necklace to the floor. The small key fit the locks on the childrens’ hutches and the other the door on the far side of the chamber.
“Are you a real knoight?" a child asked.
“I’m trying to get there,” Cedric responded, “Let’s get you home.”
“I don’t ‘ave a ‘ome, mister.”
“Well, then we’ll get you back on the streets, at least. Are any of you Orlando?”
The boys pointed to the stew.
“Orlando pottage,” Cedric muttered under his breath. Saartu still had not returned. The knight-to-be told the boys of the escape route, just remembering to alert them to the stair trap. He wanted to venture further, even without the Warlock and with Folseph in a fugue state.
The locked door revealed a stairway headed up. Ominous squeaking issued from above. The poisoned gruel materialized next to the man.
“You think we oughta poison the rats with the gruel, Folseph?”
“Well, the repast of the rodentary creachur often includes grains of many sorts…”
The torch in Cedric’s hand was lifted away, and the bowl dematerialized. Invisible Saartu laid it out at the top of the steps, in a room with familiar holes and cracks. After a wait and some screeching, then silence, Cedric marched up the stairs.
“Saartu, if you can hear this, I am proceeding.”
Saartu was there, but neither Folseph nor Cedric could see or hear him, the demon had assured that.
Rats were still lurking in the walls, but at least two dog-sized ones had expired upon eating the poisoned porridge. A door with a rusted chain holding it shut and two open passages led out. The floor had a path cleared through the debris. One passage was dusty, one far less so, and both eventually led to stairs going up. The “clean” one also led to a room piled with skulls. Small, human, probably, like those of children. Some of the bones were quite yellowed and others were a stark white, as though they had just been flensed. The dusty path arrived in a chamber filled with rubble, evidently the remains of six statues. A stone sandal could be seen here, half a youthful face with an old-fashioned hairstyle there. The door was etched with Alashan letters that didn’t make Alashan words. Phonetically, the passage read “am ear al ahsh eem.”
The dusty stairwell, a number of flights up, ended at a clean landing with a locked door, which led Cedric to turn back. The dirty stairwell ended at a concealed trapdoor, which opened into the basement of a crumbling, weed-overgrown manse, just around the corner from the charcoal-smokers’ stair. Cedric and Folseph waited until Saartu became visible again, the elderly man filling the time with interminable stories that had no point.
The party decided to tell Lady Danarosa that Orlando had perished without sharing the details of his cooking, or even that a rat-man had murdered the boy, even though Cedric carried the decapitated head in his pack. The widow broke down on hearing the news, but insisted that the party keep her husband’s sword, as the Danarosa line had ended. She thanked Cedric and his servants for their service and paid the promised coin.
Folseph started a long nap.
Saartu spent some of his reward trying to get a translation of the symbols on the scrap of parchment in the dead man’s pocket, but drinks and bribes failed him there. The vatborn began, however, a legendary drinking binge. He was weird as shit, for sure, in fact oddly charismatic in a way that charmed each and everyone he met during this revelry.
Cedric hunted the city for the least expensive taxidermist he could find, and was rewarded for his efforts. For a mere ten coins, the rat-man’s face was stuffed and mounted. The trophy was hideous, but then again, the Splinter had never been a handsome creature. As he carried the prize back home, Cedric felt a tickle in his throat, then coughed hoarsely. Maybe some gruel would set that right…
Session 4: “Black Bath”
As the calendar turned to the Moon of the Rat-Fish, Cedric’s throat irritation got worse: it went from scratchiness to a thickness and a clogged feeling, and eventually to a slimy cough that just wouldn’t stop. He had the urge to drink the gutter water in Downwind. Folseph apparently had decided to spend his score relaxing, and no one had heard from Astrid in a while, but Suroga showed back up at Barking Dog’s, and learned of the pending “excavations” planned for underneath the Frog Plaza. (He had been tearing plants out of the ground for the Lord of the Wastes.) Since that hit of lotus-charcoal, Saartu had been pursuing pharmack–especially the hallucinatory variety, like the prophet’s thistle. It was, however, at the moment expensive. Lakmed said he could do nothing about the price, but suggested that the cult of the Fragrance Goddess had access to mung, a cheaper medicament with a similar effect. Her temple had been climbing the Street of Saints recently. All of the Company had drunk quite a bit of ale during their recuperation, trying to loosen lips and learn, but no fresh news crossed their ears, and coin had been squandered.
With a fresh crowbar and a new set of lockpicks, the adventurers made their way down from the basement of the ruined manse. The climb was six well-traveled descending flights. Suroga marveled at the pile of children’s skulls at the bottom.
“Perhaps we should have brought a fresh skull back to the boy’s mother.”
Cedric laughed, awkwardly.
“Why do you laugh, is this not customary for you?” the barbarian asked.
The poisoned gruel bowl in the rat’s nest had been licked clean. Four dog-sized rodent corpses lay around it now. The chains on the door indicated something good had to be beyond, Cedric thought. Suroga cracked his knuckles, grabbed the prybar, and loudly broke the rusty shackles. They waited for a moment in quietness, but nothing seemed to have heard. There were not even any rat noises, back in the walls, only the sound of Cedric coughing.
The door opened to a room that only rats had seen for decades, if not centuries. The walls had once been fine frescos, but time, rats, and probably most importantly, someone with a hammer, had ruined every square inch of artwork. Rubble and dust lay along every baseboard. The otherwise emptiness of the sealed room made the party suspicious, and a search of the far wall located a secret door, slightly exposed by all the damage.
No one had ruined the next chamber’s artistry–or perhaps, atrocity. The room was dusty with no tracks. The walls left and right had been carved into reliefs of swarms of frogs, huge amphibians, if the scale in the sculptures on the left was an accurate depiction. That façade had a panorama of monstrous batrachians overruning human, and on further inspection, beast-men and snake-men settlements. The creatures appeared to be eating, crushing, and perhaps even sexually assaulting their victims. The illustration opposite just had hundreds of the frogs, filling the entire surface. The scene must have taken years, if not decades to produce.
The far wall put the throngs of frogs in the background. The foreground depicted a truly monstrous frog, the size of a small ship, mounted by a single rider, a human. This man, wearing ancient armor, held aloft a bundle of rods, and clutched the reins controlling the beast. Beneath this display was a wide opening in the floor, a pair of stairs leading down to a landing, and further depths.
At the bottom of another set of steps, a colorful glow shone from the side: purple, red, blue, and yellow, mixing into various shades on the walls, depending on the angle. A very low roar emanated from the opening that disgorged the lights. The sources of the sound and light were four colored flames, magically burning without fuel inside four undecorated stone bowls. The colored light illuminated four bulging, grotesque frogheads on the far wall, arranged around a solid stone arched gate. Saartu pulled the folded parchment from his pocket: a square with eight ovals, two on each side, and compared. He put it away. The pupils of the sculpted frogs mostly stared straight ahead, but one was wall-eyed.
The gate was solid, unbudgeable. The flames were warm when close. The party was stumped on how to open the portico. They chose to retreat to more clearcut options. Instead of investigating the bottom of the well of frogs, or slithering through the crocodile’s flat hole, the Company decided to tackle the locked door on the clean landing, four flights of dusty stair (now with three sets of tracks) above the room with the broken statues and the foreign inscription. They argued for a bit over who was the worst lockpicker.
“My hands shake horribly when I hold a cup of ale.”
“I, too, am a little shaky, and have been told my mind is a dull thing. Plus, I can’t stop coughing.”
Eventually, Saartu of the vat relented, and put the picks to work on the well-maintained door. It was a cinch, as would be his next half-dozen attempts, but that is getting ahead of our story. The room beyond was dusty on either side, including atop the crates, but obvious foot traffic had run down the middle to the door on the far side. One of the crates, notably less dusty, was placed in the middle of the floor.
Cedric went to work, prying off the tops of the wooden boxes, which had been softened by time. The central box held a layer of rusted tools. The others included packed books (moldering), unused parchment (disintegrating), folded cloth (mildewed, but maybe salvageable), and glass shards (soaked in blackness).
Saartu knelt to the second lock, but could hear men shouting, in the distance on the other side. Most of the yelling was indistinguishable, but “Not here!” and “Where is he?!” rang out. Suroga was already pushing the heavy box of books against this door, which opened into this chamber. Saartu put away his tools. Cedric coughed loudly enough that if the searching men came close they would hear him. A bit of black flecked the knight’s hand.
The party moved the rusted tool box, too, and found a maintained, unlocked trapdoor. Cedric opened it, and went first down the stairs, the other two following. The hallway at the base had a curious floor made of tiles. Diagonals of red, black, and white ran at the feet of six statues. Three of these figures held open books in front of them, and the other three had been sculpted to hold a pen to parchment. There was no actual writing etched into the surfaces. A door was at the end of the corridor.
“This certainly makes me uncomfortable,” Cedric said.
“Why did I not bring a pole?” Suroga groaned.
“If someone shoves that crate onto the trapdoor, we’re stuck here,” Saartu noted.
The knight stepped gingerly onto a black square. He breathed a sigh of relief. Red. Nothing. Black. Red. He heard a noise above him and jumped back, but there was no space to truly escape. A boiling bath of black liquid poured down from the ceiling, drenching his armor. The wave caught Suroga before he made it to the stairs, blackening his boots and burning his skin. Saartu had been quicker on his feet.
“Nothing like a nice bath.”
The liquid wasn’t flammable. It stank like the crate with the broken glass above had. Eventually it cooled enough that Cedric was willing to try again. He followed a similar path up to his prior dousing, and tried another square. Nothing. He stepped further, and threw himself against the wall between the second and third statues, as another shower of scalding black poured everywhere. The others were waiting on the steps, unburnt.
“I think the lock’s ready for you Saartu. Just follow my path–it’s probably safe now.”
“Is there anything strange about the statues you’re between?”
“Who built this place?” Suroga asked, but whether in awe or anger was unclear because of his foreign upbringing.
The vatborn warlock had no trouble unlatching the door, but some of the black liquid flooded into the formerly clean chamber beyond. The party’s footprints sullied the room even further. Six locked chests tightened their hearts in anticipation. They were marked with the stamp of the Literati, the bookmaker’s (and organized crime) guild. They closed the door on the stained statue corridor. Cedric sat and began resting against it.
Saartu had a bit of trouble with the first lock, upsetting the chest, and breaking one of the half-dozen bottles inside, the smell of fine, sweet alcohol filling the room. Another success brought the odor of spices to their nostrils, followed by a crate of foreign wines, and then a bale of printed cotton. The man’s chisel went up under his fingernail when he opened the box with the pair of ivory tusks. The party was already mentally configuring how they might carry all this out.
A small puff accompanied the tampering with the last chest’s lock, and the warlock fell hard to the stone floor, his head making an audible crack. The others waited for a moment as the vapor dissipated, and then dragged their fallen comrade toward the exit. His heartbeat was weak, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing. Cedric put his mouth onto Saartu’s weird lips, to try to draw the poison out, and had a coughing fit. A wriggling, black leech was expelled into the dying man’s throat, and this horrifying experience woke the vatborn from his torpor. Suroga’s people mashed stomachs in cases like this, and he crushed Saartu’s midsection until he puked.
The barbarian scooped up the limp warlock and the knight grabbed the spice sachets and the tusks. They splashed through the black and decided to return the old crate room to its former state, with the addition of a whole host of black footprints on the floor. Cedric and Suroga jogged up and down the small stair to clear their boots of the dye. They moved down the dusty stair as quickly as was safe with their respective heavy loads.
“Do we want to go back and get more from the chests?”
“We didn’t try extinguishing the fires deeper, too.”
“We may not have another chance at this…”
Saartu was laid among the children’s skulls, the spices and ivory tucked hastily beneath the bones, although even a cursory search would discover the odor of the cardamom. Cedric dumped his grappling hook, prybar, and rope in the middle of the floor. The two returned to climb the dusty stairs, leaving poor Saartu in the dark and to his fate, perhaps.
On the last flight, the duo saw light above, and heard voices, shouting, “I see their light!” Cedric and Suroga locked hands and double-timed it back down the steps. They could hear pursuit, but almost certainly a chase delayed by a man tumbling down a stair above. Suroga lifted Saartu and Cedric scattered skulls to claim the valuables, abandoning his tools of exploration.
The party made it up the six flights without being caught but Suroga was getting winded. They scrambled through the trapdoor and into the weedy, ruined building without being caught. They skipped over the addicts sprawled on the steps, tried to get the charcoal-smokers to participate in a ruse, but by the time they had crossed the square of frogs, their pursuers had closed the gap. Suroga dumped Saartu and drew his skinning dagger, reaching into the wellspring of rage his childhood had nurtured. He charged the four armed men.
The barbarian slashed one open, but did not bring him down, and the disappointment here made the battle fury drain away, even when the three cut into his skin with their weapons. Cedric moved to take down the wounded man, but the others kept fighting the adventurers, now back-to-back near the well.
After the death of the first enforcer, it seemed that no one was willing to get in close, because of the risk of getting harmed. A crowd was beginning to gather. Cedric blocked some blows with his shield and swung back hard and recklessly, coughing and spraying black from his mouth onto his foes. Suroga finally cut another man, and Saartu came to on the steps, woozily sang his gloomy lullaby, and then passed out again.
When the second thug was cut down, his blood slopping out of his neck, and the third collapsed onto the cobblestones due to Saartu’s charm, the last standing ran. Suroga pulled his bow from his shoulder and loosed an arrow, but it went wide as the guy scrambled into an alley. He was out of practice, here in this … civilization. Someone screamed, “Call the watch!” Cedric scooped up the sleeping man, intending to chuck him down the well, and hopefully create some sort of spectacular distraction, then thought twice and dropped the man to the pavement.
There were a few options. The lotus-dopes were the worst choice, surely. They could try to scramble down the cloaca, but now they were short of rope. There was the house of urchins, but the kids didn’t offer much protection. Lady Danarosa’s loyalties were uncertain, because they hadn’t saved her son. They might could try to disappear into the city. They chose Barking Dog’s, leaving the three bodies behind in the square, and hefting Saartu once more.
The tavern was crowded with rowdy sailors again, here in the afternoon. To their cheers praising the blackened knight, Cedric tossed around some coin for a round of drinks. For a hiding place, he bribed the barkeep, who was reluctant until the pot was sweetened.
Barking Dog walked the party down into the old pit that was the cellar of his establishment. The three hounds in the cages snapped and growled. Cedric and Suroga could see the locked and barred heavy trapdoor in the floor nearby. The barman led them into a wine storage room. “One thing, Barking Dog, we killed a couple of Literati…” The old pit-fighter’s face stiffened as he shut the door.
Cedric coughed uncontrollably and another leech plopped onto the packed dirt, and squirmed. His armor, at least aesthetically, was ruined, stained with a black splashes. It would certainly mark him, as long as he wore this cuirass, his family heirloom. The blisters on his hands and chest still stung.
Saartu coughed weakly. “I appreciate you trying to suck the poison out of me…” He could feel the burning in his stomach, an unquenchable pain. He thought of “Father.” The warlock was dying, and it wouldn’t be long yet. Was there an antidote that could be reached in time?
Suroga cleared his throat. He ran his hands along the pouch that contained more coins than he had ever owned before in his existence. Had naming himself “No-One-At-All” done anything to earn this? Had straying from his people lost him the ability to fight without reservation, to bring down a bird in flight with an arrow? Why had he allowed himself into this hole with no alternate escape route, trapped with near-strangers, whose lives he had saved?
“Sure hope no one comes in this one exit…”
Session 5: “Saving Saartu”
A disfigured albino with scaly skin, the paleness punctuated by tattoos, entered the piazza of the frogs. He thought he glimpsed a man hustling a corpse into one of the alleyways on the far side of the well, but this did not trouble him much, for he had decorated himself with skulls and bits of bone. Nor did the shouts of “the Watch is coming!” for he had already gleaned that the constabulary of the City of Thieves weren’t exactly feared, as might be expected of a place with such a moniker. The man had recently landed in Dozdghar, and had heard a tale of the rescue of orphans from a cannibal beneath the city. He sought the heroes of that tale, for he, Ovid, was an orphan himself, with no attachments in this city whatsoever. They were alleged to be in this square in Downwind, frequenters of a tavern called “Barking Dog’s.”
A steppelander, a Jurka, whose name Ovid would learn later was “No-One-At-All,” shoved open the doors of the taproom past the albino, for he had panicked at the thought of hiding in a room with no exit rather than being in the relative openness of the slum streets. Ovid let the man go, having no inkling that this was one of the rescuers, and entered a drinking room with a fairly raucous atmosphere, considering that this was still a morning hour. About a dozen sailors traded drunken jibes, while a grouchy-looking, scar-pocked fellow manned the bar. Behind him was a large circular pit, what had to have once been a tiny fighting arena.
Ovid slid a coin across the bar and croaked, “I’ve heard of a company that rescued orphans, said to drink here, and I’d very much like to meet them.”
Barking Dog, for that was the barkeep’s name, looked over his shoulder, down into the pit. Ovid could see three cages with what sounded like ravenous hounds inside, as well as a trap door in the pit’s floor. “Why?”
“I’d like to make their acquaintance … I’m not an assassin,” the beskulled man said, a little suspiciously.
Barking Dog muttered something like, “Well, obviously not Red Guild.”
A woman, almost certainly a harlot, entered the tavern at this moment, sharing unprompted that she’d been chased away from work, couldn’t go back for a few hours.
“A drink for the lady, please,” Ovid rasped.
“Oh, I’m no lady,” the woman answered, but gladly took his coin for her wine, and said that her enforcers were cleaning out the whorehouse after a streetfight took out two of their men. She was going to miss Alcino and Bastian. She had heard it was a “Black-Ink Knight” who had slain the cut-throats she worked for.
“Oh, the ‘Black-Ink Knight,’ I seen him,” one of the eavesdropping sailors piped up, pointing to the pit, “He’s right down in there.”
Barking Dog sighed and groaned, and made a motion of allowance that encouraged Ovid to descend the steps into the pit. The albino glanced at the locked trapdoor and the three dogs, who barked viciously when he came near, even though he offered one of his outfit bones to the animal. He opened the door to a storage room.
The newcomer might have heard the sound of a candle being blown out. He definitely heard some moans coming from behind a set of barrels, and a cough near a pile of sacks. A northern face, swollen, with a bit of black staining the corners of his mouth, appeared in the light. He wore an old cuirass, also blotched darkly. Curled in a fetal position on the floor, was a man with weirdly lengthy limbs, wearing a leather jerkin crusty with blood and boots with starkly blackened souls. These were the heroes he was seeking out?
“We … need to get … out of here … quickly, … … or you’re dragging a … corpse,” Saartu said through the stomach pain.
Cedric, although he was wondering if he should trust a guy covered with skulls, introduced himself as the ‘Black-Ink Knight,’ since he had decided on running with that. A name for himself, indeed.
“The watch is coming,” Ovid grunted.
“Do you know anywhere safe?”
Ovid had no base of operations, no notion of where fugitives might hide, although the Downwind itself was a ramshackle maze of hollowed out buildings.
“Unfortunately, our enemies know what I look like, and–” Cedric paused and started unbuckling his chestplate, “--and we need to get Saartu here to a medicker.” As he doffed his armor, the knight explained their current circumstances: the street fight resulting from their burglary of the Literati guild, but also their heroic actions in saving the urchin boys from being turned to stew.
The trio left the storeroom, the two original members of the Company recalling that Barking Dog charged fifty coin to go into the undercity via his trapdoor. A quick query about potential antidote-sellers suggested a neighborhood man by the name of Batros who sold all manner of physick, while the prostitute volunteered that a hag beneath her House of Cheap Delights might could do the trick. There was also Lakmed in the Bazaar, who hadn’t had any of the necessary treatments when Saartu had visited him recently, and Stulwig, whose specific curative wares were completely unknown. The latter two were a ways away. Saartu clutched his stomach as if to remind his mates of the urgency.
Since the brothel was run by the Literati, with whom they were not on the best terms at the moment, the party decided to see if the urchins could find Batros. Ovid and Cedric supported Saartu between them as they moved through the square, hoping that they would not be recognized. They were. The man who had been caressing the well frogs was in the plaza, and he intercepted the party, saying he had heard they had returned safely from a descent into the undercity.
“Walk and talk.”
From his hiding spot–the shell of a building where the company had spied on the square–Suroga saw this dark, bald man in an olive cloak speaking animatedly with Cedric. The barbarian took in the chain shirt beneath the outerwear, a cudge at the man’s side, and the coil of rope strung from his belt. He saw them disappear into the urchins’ alley and made haste to get there.
“Did you see the warlord amidst all the frog allies!” The Lukari priest, Mmuglavu, was almost frothing at the mouth upon hearing a description of the artwork underground.
The urchins asked if the man who played ‘the donkey song’ was coming back. Suroga arrived and obliged, although his performance was cut short by people in the square hissing, “The Watch! The Watch!” The Company concealed themselves in the boys’ hideout, and discussed their options. The urchins sent six of their number looking for Batros. Suroga blanched when he heard that a hag was a potential source of an antidote. They agreed to hunker down until the children returned, hopefully with the drug smuggler. Ovid and Suroga exchanged personal histories. Mmuglavu pressed for details about the flames and the frog sculptures, and seemed to pine for a time when frogs and toads overran the earth. Saartu, maybe distracted by his own mortality, maybe because of circumspection, did not share his charcoal sketches with the man.
The hubbub generated by the Watch’s presence persisted. A boy came back with Batros, who sadly had no tear salt, the antidote Saartu likely needed to live. He did, however, have thistle tea and bee powder, the latter purchased by Cedric to treat his throat leeches. (The instructions were elaborate, involving water of a certain temperature, precise serving in a particular vessel, and so on. The brew did not cure his throat leeches.) Batros revealed he had previously purchased tear salt from the docks, so the Company, Ink (without the ink-stained armor) set off across the city to save their warlock. Mmuglavu stayed behind, to remain close to his intended prize.
Following Batros’ instructions, the party was able to procure the expensive elixir, and Ovid offered to pay the hefty fee. Although it tasted wretched, the solution immediately resolved the major pains. To celebrate, or perhaps recoup their losses so far, the Company decided to try to sell what they’d pilfered from the Literati chests. They walked away nine hundred coins richer, some ivory and spices poorer, and refunded Ovid his contribution twice over.
A shopping spree was called for, after a bit of hassling by a limping slave trader who promised an inexpensive woman. The party refused his overtures. Apparently, Lukari crafters had just sold a passel of their bark armor in the city, and the low price was too much for the flush adventurers to resist. Cedric found the apothecary Stulwig, who offered a tea to treat his throat leeches (which later proved to be efficacious), and the knight also purchased several vials of ink from a calligrapher, to finish the dyeing job. The party conversed as they strolled back toward the Downwind.
“I am concerned about Mmuglavu’s danger to us–remember what the snake cultist did.”
“How much do we want to tell him?”
“As little as possible, although maybe he can get us beyond those flames.”
“We should keep him in the middle of us at all times, strike him down if need be.”
“So you don’t like hags, huh, Suroga?”
The Jurka told them of his cruel childhood.
“That reminds me of my own,” Ovid said, “an alchemist experimented on me. That is why I have these scales.”
“So many readily trade in the flesh and souls of others for power.”
“Agreed.”
“But at least you are free now.”
“No man is truly free.”
“I disagree. The open steppe, with three hundred gold coins in your pocket, that is freedom.”
Because of the late hour, the Company retired to their flops, a short walk away from the square of frogs. Ovid had spent some of his life in a graveyard, so he wasn’t troubled by the modest accommodations. They would return the following morning.
The following morning was muggy, but clear. Barking Dog’s back door was barred, so half the party went through the front. A sparse crowd of solitaries was drinking breakfast, but one of them notably was a member of the Watch. He pulled a piece of parchment from his trousers and his lips moved a little as he scanned it.
“I’m arresting you in the name of the Nizam!” the guardsman shouted at the two heavily armed men. They backed away, and he ran into the street to call for support. Cedric went inside to claim his hidden armor, walking past a hideous, squinting man who smelled like rotting chicken, and the Company gathered behind the tavern. Suroga commented on the Watch’s weakness. The party swept around, all of them seeing the flagellants of the golden calf cult, and found Mmuglavu before they descended into the broken mansion with the increasingly less secret stairs to the underground.
The children’s skulls had been scattered a bit, and Cedric’s tools he’d left behind were gone. He could buy many prybars with all his coin, the knight thought. The door that had been chained was open. When the party got through to the room with the frog swarm reliefs. Mmuglavu wept with joy. The priest marveled at the man with the fasces riding atop the behemoth frog. He was queried on why a Yirith swarming with frogs was a good thing, and he spoke of the glorious freedom, the lack of stifling tyrannies, and a surplus of slime.
“Why exactly is slime good?”
“Slime is life itself! We are almost here, we can have it!” the priest shouted.
The room with the colored flames below had had visitors since the last the adventurers had visited. Two charred corpses, one with a burnt waterskin, lay between the fires, the area blackened with soot. One had been near the blue flame, the other the red. Ovid said a prayer for the dead. Mmuglavu had no understanding of what the key was, called fire a filthy element, and it was suggested again that extinguishing the flames in a particular order might open the gate.
The trip to the brown fountain evoked more excitement and sorrow from Mmuglavu. No one had touched the bodies of the rat-man or the frog-people, whom the priest pawed at and lamented. The desecration of the frog frescoes angered him. The boy stewpot stank horribly.
“Do you know what smells like cucumbers, Mmuglavu?”
“Snakes! Most evil creatures.”
At the fountain with the two frog-man corpses floating in it, Mmuglavu drank the sludge. On the party’s recommendation, the foreigner cleaned the lips of the frog statues, but the water flow only increased marginally. The sculptures’ eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling, and it was noted that they didn’t quite match the frogs on the gate. Cedric filled the rat-killing bowl with the stinking liquid.
When Cedric poured the water into the purple bowl, the flames were extinguished, and nothing changed but the glow reflecting from the walls, no indigo or fuschia shadows. When Cedric poured the rest of the liquid onto the blue fire, the room exploded. The ink knight staggered from the conflagration, his skin now blackened like his armor. None were willing to try other combinations at the moment. Was it putting out all four fires simultaneously? No clues seemed to exist in the room of reliefs above.
The party retreated, but their deliberation on next moves was interrupted by voices echoing from up the dusty stairwell. The party hid in a hallway, except for Cedric, who stood out in the open with the lantern by the chain door. The five Literati thugs that saw the light charged at the knight, but Ovid took down two with arrows in the back, and Suroga screamed and slew the other three in a single whirling maneuver. The others were impressed with both the new companion and the berserker’s efficiency. The party was now set on trying to retrieve the rest of the treasure.
“Could they have set a trap?”
“I can’t imagine they’d think we were so stupid as to come back.”
At the top of the dusty stairs, the clean landing was no longer pristine. Dozens of inky footprints moved from the junk storage room to dead end at a wall. The secret door was quickly found, and the passage led to a reinforced, locked door, which had the faint sound of snoring issuing through the keyhole.
“If they’ve got a hag in there …” Suroga whispered.
Saartu popped the lock with the picks, after inspecting it for anything hinky, and the door was opened to reveal a lumpy, small form on a straw bed, a table of unguents, powders, and alembics nearby, each illuminated by a candle burning. As the party whispered about their options, the sleeper awoke, and what sounded like an old woman’s voice complained, “Again? I thought you were done.” When her eyes focused on the intruders, she began incanting strange words, and Ovid loosed an arrow that struck her in the throat. By the time Cedric hacked her head off, she was already dead. Suroga sighed in relief.
“Did we just kill an old woman?”
They began loading the containers on the table into their packs, when again the hallway beyond echoed with voices and boots. The first enforcer to open the door went down, but the hall turned into a scrum, and one started to escape. When Saartu tried to put the runner to sleep he screamed and sat down hard on the floor, blood gushing from his nose. He had a headache that might never recede. The Company fled, taking the hag’s head, and the key that had been around her neck.
Cedric intended on tossing the head down the frog well, but that was a task for another time.
Session 6: “Freelancing for Fasces”
Ovid felt comfort where most of the living did not: in places where people were buried. The City of Thieves’ poorest were eaten by pigs where they fell, but those whose survivors had a modicum of wealth buried their dead outside the city, beyond the clove and sugar plantations. The richest of Dozdghar were, of course, buried in small plots in Hightown.
Ovid chose a parcel of several fresh graves to attempt to commune with those who hovered between the underworld of Pataätala and the overworld. As he lay there in the night, visible spirits formed, wearing the exaggerated costume of mummers. They performed a weird production within a production it seemed, when one drew a sword, and “slew” one of the fellow actor-ghosts. The swordsman unsheathed a second, strange blade and “killed” another, and then a weird third weapon, and so on, repeating the “massacre” until all the other players were “dead.” Oddly, Ovid felt safe for the first time in the City of Thieves. His solitary claps echoed off the mausoleums and gravestones.
Through the almost non-stop rain, Cedric and Saartu surveiled the temple, well shrine, really, of the Frog God on the lowest quarter of the Street of the Saints. It was not a popular religion. The men and women operating the altar seemed to have come from various places around the rim of the Inner Sea, with Gadaran dress predominating. No matter which fashion was followed, they all wore the color olive, robes the same shade as Mmuglavu’s. Few of these cultists wore the expensive chain shirt that the bald man wore under his own cloak, however.
Notable in the downpour was the number of flies that swarmed the worshippers on the avenue of the gods. The logic of the Frog God’s cultists was that the insects were birthing to become fodder, a sign that their Lord’s arrival was imminent. The faithful of the Lord of the Flies maintained a different explanation, of course, arguing that these minions were spreading sickness to prepare the ground for the arrival of their deity. During his watch, Cedric overheard that two sewer guildsmen had disappeared, the speaker insisting that the culprit was crocodiles. Thinking of sewage made the Ink Knight appreciate that the thickness in his throat had almost vanished.
During this time, the Ink Knight and his Odd Companions learned that a major brawl had broken out in the Frog Square, between the Barbers’ Guild and Literati. It was made known that one of the Barber lieutenants wanted to thank the Company in person at Barking Dog’s on Soulsday. The party agreed to this opportunity, as they felt they had unfinished business in the undercity there. They trudged through the rain, Saartu carrying a contraption: a pole with a perpendicular bucket on the end.
The tavern was empty save for three people and three dogs (below in the pit), and Barking Dog almost snarled at the Company’s entry. Cedric slid five coin to the barkeep for the lost business. Saartu tried to look weirdly menacing as he crossed the floor. Ovid always looked weirdly menacing. A man in a mask with a weirdly jagged sword and stained leathers sat in one seat. A shaven-headed dark man with feminine features and a scar across his throat was obviously the leader, and he stood in greeting.
“Ink Knight, who are these?” the man whispered.
Names were exchanged, the party meeting Bael Jhoss, who only spoke in a rasp, “Sauce,” whose face remained covered, and “Sticks” who was actually standing right behind Saartu. They somehow hadn’t seen or heard this also masked man with three cylindrical wooden clubs dangling from his belt.
“Let me extend our guild’s gratitude, you’ve made this neighborhood safer for everyone, well, except for the Literati, … and a harmless old woman. Say, do you kill old men, too?”
“We will slay anyone who gets in our way.” Cedric thought guiltily of the woman’s head that he’d chucked in the Frog Well a few nights earlier.
“And are the rest of you as bold as the Ink Knight?” Bael Jhoss hissed?
“I am happy to put in the ground anyone who crosses me.” Saartu unsheathed the Danarosa sword a few inches.
Ovid merely nodded, his skulls rattling a little.
“Have you seen the old man whose balcony overlooks the well, the old corsair? His removal might be of value to the neighborhood–if discreet. But let us talk generalities, rather than particulars for the moment.
The Guild, the Barbers’ and Flesh-Tailors’, has taken this territory, a task made much simpler by your actions. To show our appreciation, we have … steered the Watch away from your persons. Perhaps you noticed. What you may not have seen were our interventions with the Ministry of Hellcraft. Now the Nizam’s bureaucrats are not all-powerful, but they can … interfere … with one’s efforts at times.
Now here is our offer. We continue to provide our services, and anything you acquire in our territory requires a quarter of the spoils, payable to Barking Dog there. We may direct you to support some of our … efforts in the city.”
“What is your territory?”
“Here, the Frog Piazza, of course. To the west, Barber’s Alley, they call it, but it is a nest of streets. Wax hill to the south–it used to belong to the Chandlers. We aim to expand as well … something your company may be instrumental in, if our arrangement … proves amenable.”
“This seems like a beneficial relationship,” Cedric stated, almost forgetting his voice for a moment. Ovid continued his quiet assent. On the inside, Saartu was as elated as he got, but he only grudgingly nodded.
“Do you have any information that would be useful to us,” the vat-born queried.
“After your first payment, I will share more.”
“That seems fair,” the sorcerer said, “I’m a man looking for certain things.”
“So are we. The Literati’s whorehouse is now our operation, and we’ve cleaned the riff-raff off the smokers’ stair. Now that I mention that, I’d like to ask you about what I hope is just a filthy rumor about you. Did you partake of the charcoal lotus?”
Cedric dug into his pocket. “I purchased this, trying to figure out what was going on, but I did not smoke it.” He showed Bael Jhoss the dark nugget. “It’s of no use to me.” Saartu stared straight ahead into space, which, honestly, wasn’t a change from his normal demeanor.
“How would your company feel about clearing out a drug den?”
“What about cutting it off at the source?”
“Stop the flow of pharmack?!” the Barber spat. “You’d have to attack the flower-growers in the jangal and the whole medicament fleet! Anyway, we’d like to remove a nearby mung house and opium den.”
“I’m okay with getting rid of dealers. My strange companions?”
“I don’t mind … if they cross our path. Yes, we can undertake a war … on drugs.”
“We have been dealing with sewage, already.”
“Ah, that reminds me,” Bael Jhoss added, “We are in alliance with the Guild of Sewermen. Do not interfere with their operations.”
“Do you have any other allies or enemies we should know about?”
“The Literati you know. The Chandlers, the waxmen, are sworn against us as well.”
“Before we go, I have two questions. Do you know what the phrase ‘Mind the door’ might mean?”
“I would hazard to guess that the door in question is dangerous.”
“And are we okay to delve in the undercity here?”
“Ah. Our men cleaned up some of the … unsightliness that your last venture had left behind. They left well enough alone some colored flames.”
With this blessing, Company, Ink departed Barking Dog’s. Sticks nodded even more slightly than Ovid. Cedric offered the same courtesy to Sauce. The party moved into the square.
“I’m sure they’d turn on us if they felt they needed to, but we can work with this, for now.”
“Mmuglavu! We were just going to start looking for you. Have you any news of the colored flames?”
“I was busy with my priestly duties, I did not have the time.”
The stoner’s stair, as promised, was vacated. The newest Barber freelancers descended the now-familiar steps beneath the ruined home. The air was hazy and stank of rotted, smokey meat. The bodies of the Literati and giant rats had been dragged away down the stairs toward the rat-man’s room.
Mmuglavu wept again at the frog-rider, and Saartu used his new contraption to extinguish first the purple flame, and then the red. The shadows of light turned green, and the stone gate lowered itself into the floor. A dead air rolled out of the arch between the frog grotesques.
The lantern revealed the same relief, mirrored on each side wall. Rough forms of dead bodies trailed to the giant frog, now dismounted. The man with the fasces knelt before an even larger batrachian, its maw open as if to receive his form. Mmuglavu began sobbing anew.
The frog priest crossed the dusty room to the standing sarcophagus on the other side, another terrifying amphibian head sculpted atop the coffin. Six urns, sparkling with all manner of coin, sat in the corners. Mmuglavu was digging his fingers into the lid.
Cedric couldn’t help but think back to Ursib and the giant serpent. The knight bashed Mmuglavu into the sarcophagus, crushing the priest’s fingers in the door. Ovid, taken by surprise, fumbled at his own weapon. Mmuglavu gurgled in his throat, erupted with noises like a whole pond screeching, and grabbed at something around his neck.
Slime clogged everyone’s eyes, save Ovid’s right one. Saartu mumbled something satanic, and Mmuglavu shrieked. Ovid could not see anything, and felt the frog priest try and paralyze him, but he maintained his footing. Cedric did not, falling to the floor, the gods beginning to tire of his bravado.
In moments, the frog priest and the albino were battling in the room of flames, as the priest realized he had no lit lamp to make it through the darkness. Mmuglavu struck Ovid, who shoved the priest into the bowl of the blue burning flame. The man’s bald head blistered and the orphan ran him through with the smallsword. The priest ribbited a few times, and fell to the floor by the charred Literati corpse. The slime receded from all eyes that it had occluded. Ovid yanked the cord from the dead man’s neck. A tiny ceramic fat frog hung from the necklace. The albino put the charm around his neck. After all, why shouldn’t I keep it?
The group rested for a while after searching the rest of the man’s belongings. He held sixty-six coin, the chain shirt, a lamp and oil, and a scroll with the sort of writing that only Saartu could decipher. It was a minor curse that would torture someone with relentless sounds, as he understood it. One of the urns in the tomb held one hundred and eleven coins, old ones. It was presumed that the other five held the same count. Cedric began dutifully loading them into his backpack.
They opened the coffin.
A corpse, wrapped tightly in rotted cloth bandages clutched the expected fasces in its arms. The bundle of sticks was unrotted and glistened with a bit of slime. It looked human except for the scarily long claws.
“I do have the fear that it will come alive if we take the sticks.”
“My fear was that Mmuglavu would get the sticks and raise the giant frog creature.”
“In my experience, it is best to let the dead rest.”
“It seems he wanted to ride the frog.”
“I kind of wanted to ride the frog as well.”
“How about this … you make ready to close the sarcophagus … while I use my ability to remove the fasces without touching him,” Saartu offered.
“How about we tie a rope between the flame pots and it will trip him if he tries to chase us.”
“We’ve got the money, do we need to mess with the sticks?”
“Do you think we could sell the sarcophagus?”
“I think we just killed the only potential buyer.”
The nervous japery ended. Ovid was ready to slam the coffin shut. Saartu began his chant, and suddenly the sticks were in his hands, slick and smelling of swamp. The mummy screeched awake, freezing Cedric in his tracks, the sight was so terrifying. Ovid was unable to close the lid as it clawed at him.
The creature ripped into each of the adventurers in turn. Their wounds blackened, mortifying instantly. Ovid panicked and hucked his alchemical fire, the monster batting it into the corner. Saartu threw the fasces into the flames, where they sizzled and popped, and tried to drag the now-very-weighty Cedric away. He regained his composure just in time to be tripped by the very rope trap he’d laid. The only saving grace was that the undead was stiff and only staggered after them slowly.
Out of breath at the surface, the party met a Barber thug, who could hear them jingling as they jogged.
“There’s a bad, bad creature in the sewers now.”
“Maybe wall it off, right away.”
“Yeah, let your people know. Someone let it out, and it ambushed us.”
As they hurried past the frog well in the square, a very distant moan could be heard echoing in the depths, even over the patter of the rain. One hundred and sixty-six coins were turned over to Barking Dog’s care; Cedric had made an honest mistake in the under-calculation.
The first Barber job had been remunerative, a success of sorts. But it had also had its failures. They could smell their wounds. The festering rot made their nostrils pucker.
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