IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 14B: MALKEEN DAWNING

January 5th, 2008
The 4th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

It was still the dark of night when Tee woke up to find Malkeen Balacazar in her room.

The crime lord was sitting on the chair in the corner, the light of the bedside lamp that he must have lit casting shadows that turned the star-tattoo across his eye into a pit of darkness. “Good morning, Tee.”

Tee’s heart was trying to pound its way out of her chest. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought we had an arrangement, Mistress Tee.” Malkeen’s voice was hard and cold. “I would let you and your friends live, and you would never interfere in my business again.”

Tee glared. “And we haven’t.”

“Then explain this.” Malkeen flicked his wrist, throwing a piece of paper onto Tee’s bedcovers. It had been crumpled, burned around the edges, and badly water damaged – but Tee recognized her own handwriting. It was the note that she had written and left for Dullin at the Cloud Theater.

“Dullin was connected to you?”

“My nephew. You didn’t know?”

Tee shook he head.

“Then why were you trying to contact him?”

“We thought his life was in danger.” Tee took a deep breath, and then spilled out the story of finding the note in Helmut’s house. (Although she was deliberately vague on the details of exactly why they were in the house.)

“Do you still have this note?”

“No, but I made a copy.”

“And do you have the copy?”

She did, and was able to produce it from her bag of holding. Malkeen inspected it closely, then folded it and slipped it into a pouch on his belt. “I’ll take this with me and investigate thoroughly. And I’ll be keeping an eye on you. I hope, for your sake, that we will have no more misunderstandings.”

“So do I,” Tee said. And meant it with all her heart.

Malkeen smiled coldly and then disappeared into thin air.

A PLAN FOR THE DAWN

(09/05/790)

Tee very carefully stopped herself from screaming. Then vaulted out of bed, quickly dressed, and went around to knock on everyone else’s door.

They gathered around the table in Elestra’s room, and Tee quickly filled in the others on what had just happened.

“The only good thing about this,” Tor said, “Is that you may have just turned the Balacazars against Helmut.”

“But is that a good thing?” Tee asked. “I don’t know.”

They all agreed that there was nothing that could really be done about any of this. But since the sky beyond Elestra’s window was already turning ruddy with the dawn, they decided that they might as well start planning for the new day. With Morbion slain, they had a relatively clean slate to work with and a number of possible threads hanging loose before them.

The most obvious plan was to return to the depths beneath Greyson House. Ranthir reminded them that, with the boots of levitation, they should be able to reach the cindershard outcropping. Tee liked the sound of that: They desperately needed to resupply their diminished funds, and the cindershard crystals would almost certainly allow them to do that. And while they were down there, they could renew their exploration of the complex they had found in Ghul’s Labyrinth.

But Agnarr also brought up the job that Jevicca had offered them to investigate and shut down Demassac’s fencing operations.

Elestra seemed excited by that. From her own investigations she knew exactly where Demassac’s house and storefront were located.

Tee, on the other hand, was vehement: “After what’s just happened, there’s no way that we can go after Demassac.”

“Why not?” Elestra frowned.

“Don’t you remember how we first found out about Demassac? It was the note I found in Linech’s office!” She pulled it out and read it to them. “’We can’t trust Demassac. He’s in close with the Balacazars.’” She put the note back in her bag. “There’s no way I’m getting involved with the Balacazars.”

“But he’s not actually a Balacazar, right?” Elestra said. “We wouldn’t really be getting involved with them.”

“I’m not going anywhere near them.” Tee was adamant. “He was in my room. No. It’s not happening.”

Agnarr nodded. “I’ll let Jevicca know that we’re not taking the job.”

CINDERSHARD EXPEDITION

And so the decision was made: They would harvest the cindershard outcropping and then return to their explorations of Ghul’s Labyrinth.

Returning to the cindershard outcropping was a long but now familiar journey: The goblins greeted them cheerfully and escorted them through their caverns, although none of them would journey with them beyond the stone bridge and into the ooze-filled caverns.

The strange fumes which drifted across the surface of the multi-hued lake that lay between them and the cindershard outcropping gave them some difficulties despite the boots of levitation. First Agnarr and then Ranthir began behaving in unusual and unpredictable ways.

Eventually, however, Tee was able to use the boots to reach the high cavern and confirm that there was, indeed, a cindershard outcropping there. Tee threw a rope and grappling hook down to her companions below, allowing Agnarr and Tor to climb up and join her in harvesting the crystals.

When their work was completed, they had recovered 80 harvestable crystals. These, valued at 2,000 gold marks, were carefully placed in Tee’s bag of holding. Safely tucked into that interplanar space, the crystals were protected from the emanations of the sickstone caverns as they made their way back to the stone bridge.

ABOVE THE BEAST PIT

Returning back through the goblin caverns, they emerged into the room that had collapsed beneath Tee and Agnarr and climbed up onto the stone walkway surrounding the blood-stained pit. There were nearly twenty doors surrounding both the upper and lower level of the pit, and they decided there was no better place to continue their exploration of Ghul’s Labyrinth than right here.

Opening the nearest door, they found a large room filled with raw beef and mutton. The entire chamber was slightly chilled, and the meat was shockingly fresh: Huge slabs of it hung from hooks on the ceiling, dripping blood onto the floors.

Elestra was worried that the fresh meat could mean that someone was still occupying the complex, but Ranthir – using a few magical incantations – quickly confirmed that the entire chamber was under a minor enchantment of preservation. The meat could have been left here for decades or even centuries.

Beyond the next door they found a complete jumble. A cursory investigation revealed that several dozen crates in this room had been carelessly smashed open and their contents either looted or scattered.

Ranthir, however, was intrigued when he spotted several pieces of alchemical equipment scattered around the room. A more careful sorting of the debris revealed that there were still dozens of similar instruments and chemicals and the like. Considering that these were clearly only a fraction of the equipment that had once been stored here, Ranthir concluded that the supplies would have been sufficient for dozens of alchemists working for years.

The next room contained a prodigious amount of chains, ropes, and other miscellaneous supplies. And the room after that was filled with brands, bridles, feedbags, saddles, and various tack. There were also several whips, many of them viciously barbed. Many of the feedbags were stained with blood, suggesting that they had been used to feed raw meat. There was also one finely-crafted saddle designed for a horse mixed in with the rest of it, and Tor claimed that for Blue.

The next room was particularly disturbing: Several large racks of polished steel had been positioned throughout the room. Above them, large contraptions of sawblades, syringes, and similar devices were suspended from fully-articulated metallic arms. The equipment was caked with old blood, and here and there fresh pools of blood were glistening on the floor.

Tee took the time to examine the machinery (while being careful not to actually touch any of it). She noticed that none of the contraptions suspended from the ceiling had any visible controls, but there was a plug-like device at the end of a long cord attached to each of them. These cords were similar to those they had found broken and dangling from the walls in the antechambers at the top of the staircase leading to the lower level of the complex.

Ranthir, meanwhile, detected several magical auras in the room: A large rack of potions stored in syringes hung in a rack along one wall (although not all of them were magical). And another magical aura clung to a large iron collar hanging on the wall. Ranthir pointed out the former to Tee (who collected them) and, after examining the latter, declared that it possessed an enchantment to preserve the bodies of the dead from the degenerate impulses (i.e., decay).

Agnarr, hearing this, promptly grabbed the iron collar and snapped it around his neck. “Better safe than sorry.”

Dominic meanwhile had been poking around in a cabinet against the far wall. This contained a variety of herbs and the like, which Dominic’s training quickly recognized as being medicinal in nature. He collected together the most useful of them and took them with.

This entire room had left them vaguely unsettled, but the next several doors they opened left them severely disturbed: The walls of each room were covered with shelves and every shelf was crammed full of glass jars containing fresh blood. Two of the rooms had red blood; another black blood; a fifth green ichor; and the last blue blood. (“I’m not even sure what creature possesses blue blood,” Ranthir said.)

These rooms, disturbing as they were, seemed familiar to Ranthir. And after pondering the question for a bit, he realized that he had, in fact, heard of storage facilities like this before. Before the development of the modern clone spell – a powerful magical rite that would allow a spellcrafter to duplicate his own body – the archaic version of the spell was dangerous to both subject and spellcaster. However, the now largely forgotten blood clone spell was safer, although it was not as useful (the subject would awaken an amnesiac). Most modern practitioners of the craft now considered blood clone to be only one step removed from raising the dead, since one was essentially capturing a soul which would then lose its own identity.

If Ranthir was right, then this storage facility was essentially a vault from which creatures could be quickly recreated with magic. Perhaps even bred or recombined.

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