session #43 (part one)
Session #43
Part One: Deeper into the dark…
“The last shadow has been destroyed,” Ratchis said, when he got back to the top of the shaft. “Everyone can come down and we can deal with the, …uh, dead things at the bottom.”
As the rest of the company of men and dwarves made their way down the shaft, Kazrack spent his time searching the lower level for secret doors. Derek made a half-hearted attempt to search as well, but the near-constant rustling and crying of the undead babies below made it hard for the young warrior to concentrate. He was sweating and feeling queasy. Beorth stood guard, vigilant for the arrival of some other undead menace.
In time they were all on the lowest level of the shaft, where they could look down by the light Beorth’s helmet (or using their darkvision) and see the writhing undead infants crawling over each other like mindless insects. On this level (from whence the skeletal warriors had emerged) were more square stone sarcophagi and no masks, but there was a wooden and painted statue of a gaunt man with a ram’s head.
Across from it was another statue, of a tall blue-headed gnoll with a morning star. It snarled with carved wood for teeth. It leaned over the low wall and its head stuck out into the shaft. Some sort of gray flesh was gooped on the top side, and dripped down into the babies.
There was a stark contrast between these primitive statues and the decor of the rest of this tomb.
Kazrack covered his mouth with the back of his hand as he looked down at the writhing infants.
“Perhaps we should call on out gods’ powers to end the suffering of these… infants, as it would be more merciful then plowing through them with weapons,” Kazrack suggested softly.
“I agree,” Ratchis replied.
Beorth’s helm blinked out, and the humans groaned. In a moment, Martin lit one of the party’s last remaining torches, and when it caught there was a sharp blue flare of the flame, with swirls of pink.
“Whoa!” Martin cried, flinching.
“Eh? That’s gas!” Kazrack was alarmed, and the dwarves all turned their heads to look at them.
“Is it dangerous? Should I put it out,” Martin looked even more bleached white than usual, the lack of sleep, the lack of desire for food; the circumstances of his first appointment by the Academy, it wearing heavily on him.
“If we enter a place with less ventilation you must be alert to the color of the flame changing,” Kazrack said.
“Feh. By then it’d be too late,” Helrahd croaked.
“If we know we are going to enter such an area we’ll put it out ahead of time and rely on the blessings of our gods,” said Kazrack.
“Hmph,” Helrahd spit. “And since we are going to the realm of sunshine and flowers we should expect to not have to worry about it.”
Kazrack’s jaw dropped. He was unused to being treated that way by a fellow dwarf. Helrahd walked away, passing Kirla, who twisted her beard-draped mouth and shrugged her shoulders, as if by way of apology for her brother. She was actually quite handsome by dwarven standards, but Kazrack turned back to the matter at hand.
“Too bad we don’t have a canary,” Kazrack said.
“What?” Martin was confused.
“A canary.”
“A what?” Now it was Beorth’s turn.
“If it drops dead you know there is poison gas, since it is smaller and its lungs are smaller,” Kazrack said. “Like when Thomas was paralyzed by the poison incense first when we were attacked by Mozek.”
Martin’s head drooped when the incident was mentioned. Beorth squinted and scratched his head and tried to remember what Jana has said about that encounter. (1)
“What we always said was, ‘bring a human in’,” Blodnath said, with a chuckle. “’Oops! The human died! We’d better get out of here in 3 or 4 hours it’ll effect us!’”
“I wonder how many dwarves died before you figured that out?” Jeremy said with ill humor.
“Eh? What is that supposed to mean?” Blodnath sneered at his sometime student.
“I say that if we had time,” Martin stepped between them and addressed everyone. “We should go back to town and get a few barrels of oil and burn this whole place down.”
“We don’t have time,” Ratchis said.
“Did anyone recognize the deities depicted in those statues above?” Beorth suddenly asked.
“One of them is obviously the gnoll god, Kesh,’ Martin said. “Or at least, I’d assume."
“The other is some meaningless human god,” Kazrack waved the question off.
“It seemed familiar,” Martin said, scratching his chin.
“A Ram! Duh!” Jeremy made a knocking motion at Martin’s head and pointed at Beorth.
“I think it is a good idea that we did not touch them,” Derek said nervously.
“Perhaps it is a gnoll good, too,” Kazrack combed his beard with his fingers, reconsidering his hypothesis. “I could see how they could worship a ram – some kind of god of prey.”
“It is Rahkefet,” Ratchis said. “Or at least, I think it is. He is supposed to be the son of Set, but I know little of him, as he was said to have passed during
The Time Before.”
“The time before what?” Kazrack asked.
“Long ago, when the world was all a sea of sand,’ Ratchis replied.
“Oh, that’s an interesting story,” Kazrack said. “I remember something about that during that holiday we celebrated with you.” (2)
“Every race has its own story about what came before the known ages of history, but none can agree on what it was like,” Belear added.
“We are getting distracted from the gruesome task at hand,” Beorth said, waking over to the edge and looking down at the babies. They began to cry and cough again when they saw him.
Ratchis walked over to the edge and swung his holy symbol chain around, “Nephthys, I call on you to get rid of these horrid creatures that were put here to test our dedication to the cause of good by our enemies.”
There was horrible hissing sound and a burning smell that wafted up suddenly in the form of a wispy smoke. The babies were lit up and then they began to burn away as if they were paper dipped in oil and cast into a fire. The stench was terrible, but the sound was worse. The hissing filled all their ears, and then suddenly stopped. There was hardly a second of silence before the baby crying began again like a constant wail of pain and confusion.
Ratchis had succeeded in burning off a top layer of zombie baby with the divine might of his goddess, but there were still dozens left, crawling around and now screaming like frightened children. Everyone in the company cringed as their eyes revealed a horror, but their ears plucked at their heart’s strings, for what good-hearted person can stand to hear a child cry in that way?
“Oh gods!” Jeremy covered his ears. “ Somebody shut that up!” He was near tears.
“Lords and Lady, please end the suffering of these blighted creatures!” Kazrack intoned, as he walked over to the edge. Again, more of the zombie infants crumbled into dust with inhuman shrieks. Again, there were a few left crawling around at the bottom of the pit (another twelve feet deep) and crying out.
Ratchis hopped onto a rope and slid down halfway and called to his goddess again, “Nephthys, end these creatures’ suffering so we may move one and cleanse this den of evil.”
The sound of shrieking echoed up the shaft for a few more moments, and then died away.
Now that the zombie infants were gone, they all looked down to see the twisted remains of whatever apparatus once stood at the surface to raise things up and down. It looked as if it had once been a metal wheel, and a thick rope and a hook and bar of some kind. It was badly rusted and broken in pieces in many places. There were also a few rotten strands of straw of what might have been a basket things were lowered in.
They also noticed that the pit itself seemed to open into some kind of ramp that faced the front of the monolith above.
The ropes attached above reached all the way to the very bottom of the shaft, so Kazrack, Ratchis and Beorth grabbed ropes and made their way down. Once they were safely down, Blodnath, Derek and followed.
The smell was growing increasingly worse. Large waterbugs crawled in and out of cracks where the shining red eyes of rats could be seen cowering from the light. The ramp did not go far. It was a gentle slope that only went down about ten feet to a strange metal door with no visible hinges. It had two horizontal handles about six inches long on either side of it close to floor. The door was 10 feet high and ten feet wide.
Kazrack walked towards the doors.
“No! Wait! Don’t touch it!” Blodnath’s voices echoed up and down the shaft, and everyone was startled.
Kazrack stopped arm’s length from the door.
“Nephthys, grant me a portion of your all-seeing vision so I may see what might block our way in this awful place,” Ratchis intoned. In a second, he could see Jeremy’s short sword glowing faintly blue. Beorth’s shawl was iridescent and brighter. He looked at the door. There was a blazing sea-blue rune visible on the door at about five feet high.
“There is a rune on the door,” Ratchis said, and kneeling he traced it in the dust. (3)
“I don’t recognize it,’ Blodnath said, walking backward towards one of the ropes. “I’m not touching it.”
“I will open the door,” Kazrack said, turning to face the others. “My dwarven hardiness will allow me to shake off whatever ill-effect some foul and weak wizard might seek to cast upon me.”
“Whoa! Whoa, there!” Derek’s eyes narrowed, and his young face grew creased as if he aged twenty years in a moment, and then it was soft again. “Let’s not do anything hasty.”
Martin was called, and he examined the rune and began to think back to his classes at the Academy. The rune seemed to be based on the triangular warding runes of dwarven make, but the circles were all wrong. He scratched his head.
Kazrack tapped his foot.
Martin called for his bag to be lowered to him and rummaged in it for the black leather bound book that Richard the Red had given him as a gift for the Festival of Isis. (4) The mage flipped through the book for some time, eventually sitting down in the muck cross-legged, flipping through the pages and humming to himself. At times, he stopped looked at one page for a long time, but would inevitable flip the page with a snap and keep browsing.
Finally, he hopped up to his feet with an “A-ha!”
“You found something?” Kazrack’s face was hopeful.
“It is a glyph of a protective ward,” Martin announced proudly.
Ratchis’ shoulders dropped and he let out a big sigh.
“Uh, didn’t we know that already?” Blodnath snorted.
Derek and Jeremy began to laugh.
“It’s good to know that at the bottom of a shaft of some evil tomb, in a pit once filled with crawling zombie babies, facing a magically trapped door that could fry us all, you can all still make me laugh,” Jeremy coughed out and slapped his knee.
Derek seemed to have caught the giggles, too and placed a hand on the wall to support himself as he doubled over and grabbed his gut.
Everyone else just stared at them. Beorth imagined how satisfying it would be to grab the two young men by the scruff of the neck and bang their heads together. The image made the tickle of laughter nip at his threat – but he suppressed it.
“Well, there is more,” Martin finally said. “It is a sonic attack of some kind. It will likely deafen, perhaps even burst the eardrums with sounds. Of course, if Ratchis traced it wrong it could be a fear spell of some kind, but I don’t thing the triangles would be upside down then, and they’d have a pronounced flare to the left if following what is called the Abyssal school of Third Age Thricia, or curved like talons if of the eastern school of tribal rune-form.”
Silence.
Kazrack turned back to the doors. “Okay, so sound. That’s good, Martin. Thanks. That’s helpful, really. I could plug up my ears, or something.”
Jeremy and Derek giggled again, and Ratchis shot them a withering look. They were silent.
“I will open the door,” Kazrack said. “We have no other choice. I am most likely to resist some attack, and no other means of circumventing this ward.
“Belear could try to dispel it,” Martin offered with a shrug.
But the elder dwarf was called down, and cast his spell and it did not break the magic.
“I will open the door,” Kazrack repeated. “The rest of you should climb back up to the previous ledge in case it is an area effect.”
The others grudgingly agreed, and those that had climbed down, began to climb back up one by one. Beorth was to be last.
“Kazrack, are you sure you have the strength to do the job?” the ghost-hunter asked the dwarf.
“Of course,” Kazrack was grim faced.
Kazrack stood over by the left handle and realized that poor leverage would likely not allow him to open the door alone.
“This door is too wide for one,” Kazrack called.
Beorth let go of the rope, as he was about to climb. “I will come help.”
The two of them got back in their rope harnesses after Blodnath looped the ropes around supports for easier leverage, in case they needed to be pulled back up quickly.
The paladin grabbed the handle on the right. Above everyone looked over the side, with their hands over their ears and eyes wide open.
They counted to three and pulled up evenly and slowly. Inch by inch it crept up with the sound of twining chain and nothing had happened.
Kazrack looked over to Beorth and smiled, as the door was just about three feet open, and there was a sudden high-pitched sound that blasted from the door and echoed painfully up the shaft. The door rolled open the rest of the way as if caught by some counterweight. The hooded lantern that was still at the bottom of the shaft shattered and the place was plunged into darkness. Those above reflexively turned away from the shaft and doubled over in pain.
But in less than a second it was past.
There was no sound from below.
“What’s happening?” Martin asked aloud in the dark.
Ratchis shushed him and crawled over the wall and looked over and down.
At the bottom, Kazrack was lying on his side, with his arms around his head and his knees to his chest. Beorth was doubled over, and stumbled forward a few steps and then leaned on the wall.
Blood trickled from their ears.
“I’m alright,” Kazrack said overly loudly.
“We have no lantern, Beorth croaked, and then cried out. He felt the familiar pain of those bolts of cold black light strike him from the direction of the now open door on his left.
“We are under attack!” Beorth said. “We need light!”
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Notes:
(1) After Beorth lost his memory to the Pixie Curse (See Session #33), he gained most of his information about the party, its members and their adventures from Jana, the young witch of questionable background that once belonged to the party.
(2) Ratchis and the rest of the Fearless Manticore Killers shared a meal for one of the “
Malar Days” (a nine day holiday commemorating the nine day ordeal of first priest of Nephthys (in her role as goddess of freedom) as he fled the Minions of Set) in session #15
(3) The rune was:
(4) The book was
Runes, Sigils & Wards: Their Roots and Variations by Master of Wards Methuselal of the Academy of Wizardry (see session #38). It is a handy, but rare tome.
