THE BLOODY ORRERY

The next morning, at breakfast, Cardalian came over to their table. She received a rather frosty reception from all of them as she introduced herself to “their new friend”, Tor. She invited them to attend the funeral of Devaral Unissa at the Cathedral of Athor on the 1^st of Kadal and then headed back to her own table.

They shrugged her off and headed back up towards the North Market and Greyson House.

There was still one mystery left in the outer area of the complex: The room with the orrery. Something in that room – or adjacent to that room – was inflicting them with the bloodsheen.

Ranthir had specifically prepared spells to get to the root of this mystery. Working his incantations he carefully circled through the room, trying to ignore the thin sheen of blood springing up across his body. “I am certain,” he said at last, “That one of bloodwights lies within the orrery. I think—“

At that moment, the glistening pink form of a fully regenerated bloodwight smashed its way through the wooden panels around the base of the orrery. Ranthir’s momentary outrage at seeing the ancient orrery damaged was quickly replaced by concern as he realized that the creature had effectively cut him off from the room’s exit… and the blood was pouring ever faster from his pores.

Tor and Agnarr rushed into the room, gladly braving the bloodsheen in order to come to their companion’s aid. Tee kept her distance, but drew her dragon pistol, carefully choosing her shots to blast hunks from the bloodwight’s undead flesh.

It was short and bloody work, but at last it was done. Agnarr grinned. “Well, I think that’s finally the last of them. So…”

Ranthir was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood.

“Dominic!”

The priest came rushing in from the outer room. Fortunately, Ranthir – although faint from the shocking loss of blood – was not physically harmed. With the strength of Athor flowing into his flesh, the wizard and scholar was soon back on his feet.

His attention turned almost immediately to the orrery, which he had not previously been able to devote proper attention to. After years of neglect it was in very poor condition and utterly inoperable, but after careful study and the taking of many notes, Ranthir was able to reconstruct its basic principles.

He was intrigued to discover that the motions of the heavenly bodies it tracked were not accurate to a modern understanding – there were several minor inconsistencies reflective of a much older cosmological theory. But, even more fascinating, the orrery featured no less than seventeen heavenly bodies which were completely unknown to modern observation. What had the makers of the orrery been thinking? What did those bodies represent? Had they, in fact, existed at some point in the distant past?

Tee, meanwhile, was inspecting the orrery with a more practical eye. She confirmed that the bloodwight had, in fact, been resting within a secret compartment of sorts within the base of the orrery – it had probably once been used for maintenance. But she also discovered that the seventeen spheres representing the unknown heavenly bodies were not made of brass like the other spheres in the orrery, but were instead forged form pure silver and worth a small fortune (at least 425 gp).

Tee began looking for ways to break off these silver spheres, but then Ranthir raised the possibility that they might find a way of transporting the entire orrery to the surface and selling it intact. This seemed a daunting task – the orrery must have weighed at least 14,000 pounds – but Ranthir suspected it could be worth as much as 12,000 gp.

After much debate, it was decided that they would leave the orrery for now. Tee was skeptical that they could move it (even if they followed Ranthir’s suggestion of hiring workers to perform the necessary excavations) – there was, after all, the pit of chaos in the way. But there was also the possibility that Lord Zavere of Castle Shard would be interested in it – perhaps they could sell the mere knowledge of the orrery and allow the buyer to extract it for themselves.

With these thoughts in mind they moved through the deserted corridors that had been expurgated of the bloodwight plague and passed through the doors of bluesteel…

THE FUNGAL PITS

They worked their way back to the room where they had defeated the chaos beast. As far as they could tell, the chambers they passed through had remained undisturbed during their absence.

The black pool which was all that remained of the chaos beast was no longer bubbling, but Tee nonetheless avoided it as she carefully picked through the rubble looking for anything of interest or value. All that she discovered was that the floor of this room had once been of white tile, with a mosaic of black tile in the center of it depicting the same skull sigil as the bas relief in the hallway outside. She also determined that two large stone tables had stood in the room, and it was most likely these which comprised much of the shattered stone rubbling the room.

From there the group carefully worked their way through several smaller chambers. These had not been smashed to pieces in the manner of the first room, but their contents had all been hopelessly ruined from immense age. Many of these rooms, however, shared the floor of white tile and the black mosaic of the skull sigil.

In one of the rooms the remains of several bunkbeds lay in ruins upon the floor. Within the long-decayed remnants of a mattress, Tee found an incredibly brittle scrap of parchment. The language was unknown to them, but Ranthir was able to identify several archaic alchemical symbols before carefully placing the parchment in the box of cherry wood and inlaid jade (believing that this box would preserve the parchment just as it had preserved the alchemical text they had found within it).

At the end of a small hallway, Agnarr opened the door and found – instead of the ruined bedchambers they had been exploring – a dome-shaped chamber with its walls completely covered with skulls.

All of the skulls appeared to belong to wolf-like creatures, but none of them seemed to have a relationship to any living creatures they were familiar with. Some seemed almost normal, but even those seemed curiously (or horrifically) warped.

Tee began searching the room, but when she reached out to carefully lift one of the skulls away from the wall and look behind it, the skull suddenly began to howl… and the howling spread, passing through the room like a cacophonous wave as each skull took up the cry in turn.

Deeply uneased by the sound and sight, they all hurried quickly from the room and shut the door behind them. As they moved back down the hall and into the main corridor, the sound gradually died down behind them. They vowed to leave that chamber undisturbed forevermore.

The group moved over to the bluesteel door that Tee had seen earlier. There was no indication of how this door might be opened and, again, their first rough attempts at guessing passwords completely failed.

However, Tee did notice that the floor in front of the door was scarred with innumerable scratches. These scratches, in turn, led to a large set of double doors. Opening these revealed the remains of a laboratory of some sort. A harsh, metallic odor filled a chamber lined with tables and littered with alchemical equipment: Broken beakers, flasks, tubes, and syringes lay in a haphazard chaos. The walls and floors of the chamber were coated with some sort of greasy film and Agnarr, who was the first to dare stepping across the threshold of the room, quickly concluded that the slippery floor would prove inimical to any rapid movement.

It was clear, as they moved into the room, that whoever had worked in this laboratory had been slightly larger than normal humans – the tables were just slightly too high and the equipment just slightly too large. “Orcs?” suggested Elestra, and the others nodded.

Tee quickly found a set of crudely-forged iron keys hanging from a nail on the wall and several potions. Many of these potions were, disturbingly, contained in unbroken syringes.

When they opened the far door in the laboratory, they were almost overwhelmed by a thick smell of vomit and rot. In the center of the large room beyond the door four large ten-foot by ten-foot pits had been driven into the floor. The pits were all partially filled with thick, noxious chemicals, and one of them appeared to have been filmed over with a thick, fungal growth. Above the pits the remnants of some sort of mechanical contraption hung in shattered, rusting ruins from the ceiling. They could make out some sort of large hook dangling down and what may have been tracks for moving the hook back and forth, but the purpose of it all was unclear.

Covering her mouth and nose, Tee moved into the room and began searching several cluttered stone shelves which lined one of the walls of the room.

Perhaps her experience with the chaos beast had made her more keenly aware of the dangers around her – or perhaps it was simply that Agnarr wasn’t actively distracting her – but only moments after she had turned her backs to the open pits of chemicals, Tee became urgently aware of a strange burbling, roiling sound coming from behind her.

Without a second thought she turned and raced back towards the door. Glancing over her shoulder she saw the fungal film that had covered one of the pits burbling and roiling like a living carpet. It was coming straight for her.

Tee dove through the door, rolling between Agnarr’s legs. The barbarian had stepped forward and was now blocking the entire doorway. But his effort seemed in vain as the carpet of living fungus rolled through the door and threatened to literally engulf the barbarian in its fetid mass.

But at that moment Dominic darted forward, laid his hand upon the barbarian’s as-yet unmolested back, and murmured a brief prayer. The divine strength of Itor flowed into Agnarr’s body and swelled his already mighty girth until he stood nearly twice his normal height.

With the new found strength of his oversized muscles, Agnarr easily repelled the fetid fungus. Again and again his flaming greatsword rose and fell into the mass (although, horrifically, his blows launched cascading fountains of acid which burned at his body). Tee, too, did her part – firing again and again and again at the fungus between Agnarr’s legs.

At last it was done, and the immobile remains of the fungus lay pulverized upon the floor – its seeping acid staining the stone.

Feeling relatively safe, most of the group moved into the room of pits. (Ranthir was still back in the laboratory sampling the potions and trying to identify their properties.) Agnarr kept a wary eye with his sword drawn while Tee continued her aborted search.

Elestra was bouncing back and forth between the two rooms, querying Ranthir on what potions he had found and Tee on what secrets she had uncovered. Tor, meanwhile, had gone over to take a closer look at the pits… only to be overwhelmed by their noxious fumes. He began vomiting, and even after moving away from the pits felt horribly nauseous.

On the wall between the two stone shelves in the room, Tee found the outlines of a secret door. She also found a small keyhole in the center of the door, clearly indicating the means of access. But none of the keys she had found fit this keyhole, and – despite her best efforts – the lock eluded her efforts.

Ranthir, meanwhile, had done all he could to identify the potions they had found. He came into the room, as well, and moved towards the pits hoping to identify their contents, as well. Before Tor (or anyone else) could shout a warning, Ranthir, too, had been overwhelmed by their noxious fumes.

Tee was utterly frustrated at her inability to get through the secret door, but was at last forced to conclude that it was impossible (at least for the time being).

Agnarr, meanwhile, had noticed more of the scratch marks on the floor in this room. These either led to or from (Agnarr couldn’t tell which) the other set of doors in the room.

Once Tee was satisfied (or unsatisfied as the case may be) with her inability to get past the locking mechanism on the secret door, she carefully inspected this second set of doors and then beckoned Agnarr forward to open them.

Doing so revealed a large room filed with cages of wrought iron. Each was a cube at least five feet to the side, with a large hook atop them. They were stacked three deep in several rows.

On the far side of the room were several cages of a much larger size. Moving towards those, Tee saw that there were age-yellowed skeletons lying in dusty heaps within several of the cages.

The larger cages on the far side of the room were filled with armored plating – apparently the remains of incredibly large creatures. No one could identify, or even speculate, about what monstrous creatures might have left behind such enormous remains, but a careful inspection of the skeletal remains in the other cages suggested that these had come from various-wolf like creatures.

One of the skeletons, however, was particularly strange: The head been smashed beyond recognition, but spiky protrusions of bone seemed to extrude from every limb and down the creature’s spine.

Another debate broke out when the discussion turned to the value of these remains: Elestra argued that the remains, particularly those of the enormous armored creatures, could be quite valuable if sold to the proper collectors. But most of the rest of the party was daunted by the size and weight of these remains. Once again the decision was reached that, for now, the remains would remain – but plans would be laid to retrieve them if at all possible.

LOOKING DOWN AND TURNING BACK

With the exception of the secret door in the room of alchemical pits and the impassable bluesteel door, they had apparently finished exploring this little laboratory complex. Moving back into the main hall leading off from the room with the skull-shaped sigil, they continued their exploration.

The next turnoff led to a staircase leading down. Flanking the staircase to either side were two small antechambers. Dangling from the wall of each of these otherwise empty rooms were long, thick cables made out of some sort of black, pliable material. Their purpose (if any) was a mystery, although the suggestion was made that perhaps they had once been joined to each other with a section of cable now lost.

Looking down the stairs, they saw a hallway and a door. After a brief discussion, the decision was made to leave the stairs alone for now. Ranthir, in particular, was quite happy with how his map was progressing, and he preferred to finish their exploration of the upper level before descending further.

The hallway they’d been following, after taking a turn, seemed to dead end after passing through two small and dusty rooms. Tee carefully searched them, however, and discovered another of the concealed keyholes in the wall where the hallway came to an end. This door, too, resisted her attempts to pick the lock, deepening her frustration.

FAR SIDE OF THE SKULL

The group backtracked through the room with the skull sigil and went out through the far hallway.

A little further on they found two matching rooms. In one of these rooms, another bluesteel door seemed to mock them from a far wall. The other room appeared to be quite empty, but Tee’s careful persistence in searching for potential hazards paid off: She detected the presence of a pressure plate in the floor at the center of the room.

Ranthir suggested that they grab a piece of rubble from the room that had held the chaos beast, tie a rope to it, and pull it onto the pressure plate from a safe distance. This they did, with Angarr jogging down the hall and lugging back the largest piece of rubble he could carry.

They took cover in the hallway, and Agnarr pulled on the rope. As the piece of rubble tumbled onto the pressure plate, the room exploded in a flurry of arrows – dozens of them shot out from every angle, peppering the room and the first ten feet of hallway leading to it.

But Tee, peeking around the corner, had noticed something: The arrows shooting through the air would have struck everything in the room except for someone standing directly on the pressure plate.

This didn’t make any sense… unless, Tee realized, the target of the trap wasn’t the person triggering it. She suddenly imagined someone running into the room with pursuers close behind them. They stepped on the pressure plate and then… Yes, that made sense. Tee quickly explained her theory to the others.

When she tried to test it by triggering the pressure plate again, however, nothing happened.

“Perhaps it needs some minimal amount of time to reset?” Ranthir suggested.

Tee shrugged and idly picked up one of the arrows from the floor. They seemed to be in remarkably good condition considering their extreme age. She quickly gathered up the rest of them and stashed them in her bag of holding for later use.

They continued their explorations. The hallway came to an end in another door of glass and bronze. This one had been shattered, and the group immediately became uneasy – the last door they had seen smashed like that had led into the section of the labyrinth inhabited by the dreaded bloodwights.

But as they drew near the door their attention was drawn to one of the two large chambers which flanked the door to either side: Two badly burnt and mutilated corpses lay stretched out upon the floor.

(“But were they burnt and then mutilated or mutilated and then burnt?” Dominic wondered aloud.)

When they approached the corpses they discovered that they were just two among many: Rounding the corner into the larger room they saw more than a dozen humanoid corpses strewn around the room. In the center of these corpses a massive, wolf-like corpse lay – it, too, had been horribly burned until its remains were nothing more than charcoal which had endured the ages.

Investigating the other chamber flanking the door of glass and bronze revealed an even stranger sight: Shards of iron had been driven with seemingly random abandon into the walls of the room. They recognized this iron: It was of the same type used in the cages they had seen before.

“Did something cause one of the cages to explode?” Elestra said.

“Or explode out of it?” Ranthir hypothesized.

“Like that creature in the other room?” Elestra said.

MIND THE GAP

Stepping gingerly through the broken door of glass and bronze, the party found themselves in another immense chamber. They were standing on a ten-foot wide walkway of stone around an immense, thirty-foot deep pit. A cross-shaped walkway of iron went out over the pit, and they could see a ladder at the center of this walkway (although it appeared to go up towards a featureless ceiling rather than down towards the pit).

Looking into the pit they were disquieted to see that the lower walls and floor of the pit were completely covered by the ancient but unmistakable russet-stains of blood. At some point, this pit had literally been bathed with blood.

There were more than a dozen doors in this chamber – some on the upper walkway and some leading out from the bottom of the pit. Tee shrugged and headed to the nearest one.

Behind the iron door the contents had rotted away to shapeless mounds of black grime. As Tee stepped forward to search through the mess, Agnarr stepped forward to watch diligently from the door.

This almost proved to be the barbarian’s undoing, because as Tee stepped out into the room the entire floor suddenly gave way. She plummeted more than thirty feet, but managed to roll with the fall and came to her feet with only a dull ache in her thigh. But the floor by the door also gave way, slanting down into what was the now gaping pit where the room had once been. Agnarr lurched forward, striking his head forcefully against the stone frame of the door. In his daze he landed awkwardly and hit his head again on a sharp outcropping of rocky debris.

The rest of the party spun around to see a thick cloud of rocky dust bursting out of the door. Rushing over they quickly took in the situation: Tee and Agnarr had fallen down into another room. There were two doors leading out of this room (one of them obviously going out into the pit), but these had been completely blocked by the falling debris. On the opposite side of the room, however, a gaping fissure led down at a steep angle.

Apparently, at some point in the past, an earthquake had opened this fissure and undermined the structure of the surrounding rooms – triggering the eventual collapse that had caught Tee and Agnarr.

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