Turn 102
    

Emmett glances down at the body, taking a more thorough look for Gondish holy symbols, then up to the half elf. "Thanks for distracting him. He walked right into that." He glances around "Anyone care to explain this?" No one jumps forward immediately to do so. Still no Gondish symbols.
    Bendek comes charging around the building, puffing with the exertion, and thumps down next to Tesfaye. "Marek ward us all!" He does a quick physical check and looks up at Lynden. "Jomei poison, looks like. You arrested the spread? Good." He begins a muttered prayer of his own.
    Wicked stuff, Lynden knows, from a certain fish found only in the deepest parts of the sea. First paralyzing, it moves rapidly through the body; had the front door not been broken down, the lord might have been dead by the time they got him outside, and it's unlikely anyone would have looked for such a cause.
    The visitors can chalk up another potential trade good, if so inclined--a fast-working poison of such deadliness would certainly be of interest to many, particularly if its origins (and hence proper treatment) were unknown.
    Immensely relieved by the venerable cleric's intervention, but still trying to make sense of the situation, Lynden willingly gives way to his greater authority.
    Realizing that few of them would have escaped the fire, let alone been able to prevent the subsequent assassination attempt, without the outsider's assistance he directs his thanks to ibn Fadil and Emmett. "I'm grateful for your help. We," he gestures back towards Tesfaye, "are in your debt."
    "Hello," Alais says, rounding the corner and blinking in surprise at the carnage. "The fire is out, we found some of the most interesting things in the--"
    Pham looks at the dying man in their midst. "Who is that?"
    "Head of the artificers guild. Went nuts, tried to poison Tesfaye. When that didn't work, he started trying to kill him with clerical magics." Emmett gives Pham a quizzical look. "Why, you planning to bring him back for questioning?"
    "Indeed, there will be questions," Bendek promises grimly before Pham can reply. "You men there, find something on which we may move his lordship." A piece of the broken door is pressed into service as a stretcher. "And bring that, as well," he adds, looking at Cenon's body.
    Ibn Fadil glances around for Nyala; she is gone, but very soon comes back, pushing the man before her with one arm twisted up behind his back and her knife prodding him gently in the kidney region.
    Emmett laughs at the man's predicament, a short harsh chuckle.
    "What--" one of the locals starts to ask in astonishment.
    "He was running away," she shrugs. "I thought you'd like to speak to him."
    "This--creature--is obviously mad," her captive states through gritted teeth.
    "Madness aplenty here tonight, but we shall see." The priest frowns. "Treachery and worse.... " He turns to one of the guards who was organizing the bucket chain. "See that all of those here present are brought to the castle, and mark well any who are missing. Lynden, go with these strangers and check the building, see that there are no others trapped or lurking therein.
    "And locate Lord Dorek," he adds to the assembled generally.
    Nodding his acquiescence Lynden turns to lead the way back to the badly damaged guild hall wondering whether further horrors awaited discovery.
    Pleased that Nyala has the situation well in hand, ibn Fadil trades a glance with Emmett, shrugs to indicate his lack of strong opinion, and follows the local priest.
    The Half-man give a little bow and gesture with his hook, indicating that Ibn Fadil and the others should take the lead.
    Everyone seems to be out of the building. Below, the footing is treacherous due to the thick coating of ice on most surfaces. Their hastily lit torches provide wavering glimpses into the partially destroyed rooms, and at the end finally the narrow passage the explorers glimpsed before.
    The dark, dank rooms filled Lynden with a sense of foreboding. Somewhere down here was evidence pointing to the fate of the young lord and the concubine he was so fond of. "Perhaps, they escaped," he muttered aloud, "I hope so."
    He looks around for signs of what might have started the fire -- it does appear to have begun at this end of the building, at least. There is a lot of half-melted equipment, containers that might have stored anything. There is a heavy chemical scent in the air along with the smoke. Perhaps one of the other artificers will be able to identify these things--if they can be trusted?
    Ibn Fadil looks about for corpses, obvious starting points of the fire, and any sign of Hextorian activities. No corpses or symbols meet the half-elf's inquisitive eyes. These were small, private workrooms for the most part, most of their contents destroyed or so badly damaged it's hard to guess what they were.
    He walks to the end of the building and peers down the narrow passage. Judging by the thick wooden barrier that has been partially eaten away by the fire, it was intended to be hidden. It leads away into darkness, in the direction of the harbor.
    Mindful of the quality of the front-door lock, ibn Fadil rather carefully checks this once-hidden door for any nasty surprises before slipping past the scorched wood into the passageway; there is a mechanism there, down near the floor--more poison, if he had to wager a guess--but the action of fire and ice have rendered it quite inoperable. Glancing back to whoever is closest, he says, "Would you bring that torch a little closer, please?" By the improved light he cautiously proceeds a little farther along.
    It is barely large enough to accommodate one of the natives, with their relatively heavy build, but he has no difficulty. The walls are of rough stone for a few yards, after which they become smooth except for one area where it appears another adit has been carefully bricked up.
    Emmett cranes his head a little past Alais and mutters a single word - brilliant red light erupts from his eye, illuminating the passageway. Now that he'd done it he expects the half elf to complain about the amount of light, the color, or something else, but at least now they can clearly see down it's Stygian depths. Smoke swirls like fog in the hellish beam.
    "Three will get you five there's another spelljammer down there - or at least the docks for one."
    No one takes him up on it, and they advance cautiously down the narrow passage, necessarily in single file. It runs straight and level--dwarf-work, perhaps, hewn who knows how long ago in the course of the conflict between the two peoples, and now put to other use.
    It ends at last in a round chamber, perhaps fifteen feet across and with a slightly domed ceiling. On the far side the tunnel becomes a stair leading steeply upward, but no one is looking at that just yet, their attention taken by the thing in the center of the room, atop a square stone block perhaps three feet on a side.
    It seems at first glance to be a clockwork device, but of no kind of any of them has ever seen or even imagined before, a many-limbed ball incorporating dozens of materials, all of them precious to some degree, and every limb bearing some edge, point, or pincer. Each is stained with blood. Inlaid into the central body are the red arrows of Hextor.
    It is exquisitely crafted, weirdly beautiful, and entirely evil; to gaze at it for long is to be caught in uneasy admiration. It seems... pure, in a way that defies explanation, a cold and perfect execution of power, and it tempts the thoughts down passages better not walked in the waking world.
    Some time passes before any of them can shake off their unwilling fascination enough to realize that the thing is not finished; there are a number of holes in the central mass that look as if they must yet have their pieces fitted in. The curse is not quite complete; more would have been doomed to die in this buried room had any number of events above chanced differently.
    And Emmett grasps--perhaps Gond touches him then--that it is not an actual, working clockwork. It is too simple, too small for what must be a bewildering number of mechanisms required to make each of those legs move. It is a sort of model, what might be built if one had seen a painting of a thing, but not the schematic. Terrible though it appears, it is not real.
    Not yet.
    The stair turns out to lead up to a locked trapdoor. Ibn Fadil, knowing by now what to expect, locates and disables the trap very carefully.
    [the lock itself can be picked -- you have plenty of time, nothing on fire now after all -- or the door broken as suits the party's mood]
    It lets up into a basement, which in turns lets into a building near the harbor; this ground floor appears to be used entirely for storage, and there is no one about.
    * * *
    There are drums, however. The alarm is being sounded throughout the town; the dead guard at the ship has been discovered, and what lies within.
    As men rush to their posts on the walls, one happens to catch a glimpse into a narrow street and stops with a shout; his comrades gather quickly around him, torches held high. The strangest of the ones from the sky is there, and two dead men. The snow is black with blood.
    "Is it dead?" someone asks. But giff are tough--far tougher than anyone on this planet has reason to realize, fortunately for the young officer--and they quickly ascertain that he does still live. With no little effort the unconscious Yestin is moved to the castle in search of aid.
    And so, in the early hours of that cold morning, it seems that half the town is crammed into the great hall at the castle, and many of them are asking questions. Inez is there, having remained with the crowd during the recent activity. A far smaller number are in the council chamber, where Lord Tesfaye remains grievously weakened but very much alive, and from a comfortable couch listens and directs the priests and guards in their questions.
    The crew of the _Distraction_ is of course permitted entry, given their vital role in events and the new information they are bringing.
    [I assume that once you find out what else is going on, at least some of you are going to want to go to the ship and see what can be seen? Oh, and by the way, no one knows where Val is.]
    Lord Dorek has indeed been located--alone. Under truth spell he insists that he has absolutely no idea what is going on. Yes, he had left the hall in hopes of a few moments with Mela, and it seems he would not have been particularly distressed by his father's death, but he knows nothing of the cause of the fire, or about any poisoning attempt. Neither does he know where she is; he never did find her. Everyone remains suspicious, but it does appear that he has merely been masterfully set up. And he does have two younger brothers....
    The journeyman Nyala caught trying to sneak away is far more helpful, albeit unwillingly. Yes, there was a cult to this new god called Hextor. Cenon had been its head, and had recruited him; he didn't know who the others were, they had always been masked when they gathered. He had been aware of the planned fire, and had helped to create the simple clockwork that set off the collection of flammable chemicals without human agency, but had not known of the attempt on His Lordship. He thought the fire had been intended both to better conceal the secret chamber, now that they were almost done, and to weed out the weaklings from the guild; had the fire spread further, so much the better. (As it happened, a few of the older members did succumb to the smoke before the priests could aid them, but thanks to the quick action of the visitors it was far from the apparently hoped-for death toll.) It seemed that Cenon had wanted chaos in the city, the better to temper it for what was to come.
    At that point he goes off in a long, rambling and barely coherent tirade about how society is falling into decadence and a terrible danger, the weak rule and the strong are dragged down into servitude, the gods themselves are failing, and how the coming war and the winter that would last a hundred years demand strength. On and on he babbles -- about castles falling into the sea, fire raining down from heaven, great waves washing away all all the dross of a thousand years.
    Pham hears in this an echo of his own visions, and those of the madman on Janik; it begins to appear that this is a universal phenomenon.
    Around then, Yestin regains consciousness, and adds what he can to the story of the eventful night.
    Questioning of Nikodem's spirit is put off until that evening, until what is already known can be sorted out, and to prepare for the effort of coercing one such as he was.
    In the meantime, it's fairly clear that anyone who acts the least bit suspiciously is liable to be lynched--the townsfolk of Myrr are to a man wound to the snapping point after the night's events. The vilest sort of treachery from the highest ranks of town society--not surprisingly for a strong and warlike people, they generally abhor the use of poison--the prospect of further danger within, strange magics--the story of what happened at the guildhall is quickly repeated and grows until Alais is putting out fires by breathing on them, ibn Fadil is walking through walls, and Emmett bursting strong doors with a touch (Lynden they more or less expect miracles of, so he gets less exaggeration)--and people still missing....
    With the dawn, a ship arrives, blissfully innocent of all of this. It is the expected reply from the capital, with the summons of the High King to the outworlders.
    

| Top |