IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 23B: BINDING FOUL AND FAIR

June 7th, 2008
The 10th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

CLEARING THE KEEP

They headed across the bridge and into the Cobbledman’s tower. Climbing down, Tee found herself in a chamber littered from broken bones and filth. On a dirty pallet of grey straw, the Cobbledman lay sleeping.

Tee approached him and gently shook him by the shoulder. He stirred, and then the eyes on his second head – the one that hadn’t spoken before – shot open. His hand shot out and grasped Tee by the throat, choking the life out of her. The second head let out a low growl of rage.

Tee panicked for a moment, but then thought quickly. She slapped the other head soundly across the cheek. It woke up, bleary-eyed. It took in Tee. It took in the other head. “No! Don’t!”

The Cobbledman’s other arm darted out and punched the Cobbledman’s second head.

The hand on Tee’s throat dropped away and she fell to the floor (realizing only then that she had been lifted up into the air).

“Are you all right?” the Cobbledman asked. The second head was glaring and sulking.

“I think so,” Tee said, rubbing her throbbing throat. “I’m sorry I woke you up. But you said we might be able to borrow the spiral key that Maquent gave you. Do you think we could do that?”

The Cobbledman grasped at his shirt front. “…I don’t know.”

“We have the other piece,” Tee said., holding it up. “We’d only need it for a little while. And once we were done, you could have both parts.”

“Really?” the Cobbledman’s right face split into a wide grin. “All right.” From under his shirt he pulled out the other half of the spiraled disc.

With a sharp tug, he broke the leather strap it was hanging from and handed it over to Tee. She smiled, thanked him, and gave him some more food. Then she climbed back up to where the others were waiting.

“Got it.”

“What do we do with it?” Elestra asked.

“I don’t know,” Tee said.

“Could this be the key you were looking for?” Tor asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Tee said. “I think the key we’re looking for is below the statue. I think this is something the cultists made.”

“How will we get the two pieces back together again?”

Tee shrugged and pressed the two pieces together. There was a bright flash of light, and the pieces were seamlessly joined.

 

“I thought that might work.”

Even with the key in hand, they still wanted to make sure that the rest of the keep had been cleared out before doing anything else. Leaving enemies at their back while they journeyed down into whatever waited beneath the house didn’t seem like a good idea.

Fortunately, they had already explored most of the keep. They started by climbing the stairs that led from the roof of the house up to the central tower. There they found a chamber filled with a weblike nest of bits of old cloth and other rubbish, held together with a hardened, glistening excretion of some kind.

“Disgusting,” Tee said, and then stepped aside to let Agnarr chop his way through it. She could see that there was a ladder on the far side leading up to the tower’s parapet. But a few moments later she was holding up her hand: “Stop!”

Agnarr stepped back and Tee stepped forward: She had been right. There were two more of the red robes which had apparently belonged to the Crimson Coil cult stuck in the nest. “These might come in useful,” she said, carefully prying them out. One of them was in fairly shabby condition (“I can fix that!” Elestra said.), but the other was in good condition (albeit filthy).

Agnarr went back to work, and within a few minutes Tee was pushing open the trapdoor leading to the parapet. Poking her head through, her gaze was immediately arrested by a crown sitting in the center of the parapet.

With a closer look, she quickly realized that the crown itself was nothing but cheap wood painted gold. But her interest was piqued by the eight large blue garnets: To her trained eyes, these appeared real… and, if they were, they would easily be worth 200 gold crowns each.

BINDING FOUL AND FAIR

That left only one nook left to explore: The lower levels of the Cobbledman’s tower. These couldn’t be accessed from above, however, so they circled back down through the keep and then climbed back up.

This brought them to a small, poorly furnished room. In the center of the room there was a rickety wooden table. On the top of the table a pentagram had been inscribed in charcoal. Three objects stood within the pentagram, positioned at points of power within the diagram: A jar of yellowish liquid; a short, fat candle half-expended; and, on a copper plate, a book.

Tor, looking at the jar, grimaced. “We’ve found somebody’s chamberpot.”

Tee turned back to the ladder. “Ranthir! Get up here!”

Ranthir was quickly able to identify the ritual as an exploitation of sympathetic magic. “It’s a binding ritual,” he explained. “The jar is either formed of diamond crystal or a polymorphed diamond – I can’t tell which. But you can see that the purity of the crystal has been corrupted. The pattern of the pentagram also suggests that it was, in fact, a dual-binding ritual: One spirit was bound here, to this jar. But this minor ritual was used, through the laws of sympathetic magic, to trigger a much larger binding somewhere else. And the spirits would have been opposed – one evil or chaotic; the other lawful or good. The burning of the candle would have triggered the sympathetic connections of the ritual and… Yes, here on the candle we can see inscribed the name Segginal in arcane runes.”

“Who’s Segginal?” Tor asked.

“I don’t know,” Ranthir said.

“The Cobbledman,” Tee suggested. “One bad head; one good head. A spirit bound to each.”

“Perhaps,” Ranthir said. “But the nature of the ritual suggests that one of the spirits is still bound here, in the jar. Or rather to the jar.”

“Then which one was bound in the jar? The good one or the bad one?”

“It could be the spirit that haunts the castle,” Tor said. “The ritual could have been what bound it here.”

“Well, the book should tell us more,” Ranthir said, and picked it up. He flipped it open… and the pages seemed to blur before his eyes, forming a black maw that seemed to open inside his very mind… threatening to overwhelm him… to swallow his very mind…

Ranthir jerked the book away, slamming it shut and throwing it onto the table.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Ranthir rubbed his forehead. His thoughts seemed blurred. The edge of his intellect dulled. “The book… the book betrayed me!”

Ranthir remained in a rather foul mood as they discussed their options. He’d heard of the foul corruptions which could turn a book into an inversion of itself – a consumer of knowledge instead of a giver of knowledge – but he still felt personally violated by the experience. It was a betrayal that struck at the heart of everything he held dear.

After weighing their options, Tee decided that they should break the jar. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Death,” Tor said.

Agnarr, hearing this as they came back down the ladder, grinned. “Sounds like my kind of plan.”

They went down to the courtyard.

“Are we sure we want to do this?” Dominic asked.

Tee shrugged and threw the jar against the stone wall. It shattered into shards and, where the shards fell, a whirlwind sprang up. It grew suddenly in strength, whipping their hair and causing some to fall back a step. Elestra cursed. Tor tightened his grip on his sword.

And then the whirlwind gave way and disappeared. In its place, a tall figure with pale blue skin and white-feathered wings hovered in the air. He looked down at them with eyes of pure light.

“My name is Edlari. I thank you for freeing me from my foul imprisonment. I owe you a debt that cannot easily be repaid.” He turned his gaze to the sky and frowned. “What year is it?”

“790.”

“Has it been so long?” He shook his head sadly. “I can sense a great evil in this place, but it lies beneath us where I cannot reach it. Will you accept my aid, meager though it may be?”

“Of course,” Tee said.

He flew to each of them in turn, his heavy wings beating softly at the air, and laid his hand upon their brows. They felt their wounds and aches fade from their bones and blood. Ranthir could feel the fog left by the evil tome fade from his thoughts. Tee, with great joy, could feel the rigors of the taint fading from her soul… although, in the same moment, she felt the weight of the dark items which lay in the bag at her side.

“And now,” Edlari said, “I must return to the Pale Tower. Seek for me there if you would speak with me again.”

With that, he was gone – his wings carrying him up and over the walls of the keep.

NEXT:
Running the Campaign: Dungeon Clues – Campaign Journal: Session 23C
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index