"Well, it's not Aoskar's corpse." Clueless said. "But damn did they arm this place to heck."
They noted the towers and the half dozen cannons that each of them sported. While the bulk of the building looked cold and dark, the outermost defenses still seemed potent by any measure, though probably more suited to larger attackers like Astral Dreadnaughts or fully manned githyanki carracks, not small groups of invisible raiders.
"I'd say we just fly over the walls and open a window or a trapdoor on the roof," Nisha mused. "But they're githyanki, they assume you're flying and they plan for that. Bah."
"Front door then?" Florian asked.
Fyrehowl raised an eyebrow, "That's right in line of two of those towers and their guns. Plus the door's heavy and probably locked, with who knows how many defenders inside. Bad idea."
"But she's a cipher," Nisha said. "She has bad feelings about our reckless and foolishly brave plans. Again, bah I say."
Clueless glanced up at the towers, noting the arrow slits built into each of them in about eight places around their circumference, plus the slight openings around each of the cannon muzzles.
The bladesinger grinned, "Need a distraction?"
Skalliska looked up at him skeptically. "You're willing to stay out here and draw fire?"
He shrugged, "Let them try."
There was a sly look on his face though, and it was getting a slew of suspicious looks from the others.
Tristol turned to the bladesinger, "You're grinning like Nisha."
"Exactly!" The tiefling said, at first beaming with glee before narrowing her eyes conspiratorially. "What mischief’s afoot?"
Tristol chuckled and the others prompted the bladesinger to elaborate on whatever he had planned.
Clueless held up a slim length of reddish crystal, "I have a wand of fireballs."
***
Three githyanki and a pair of goblinoid petitioners sat at their positions inside the tower, overlooking the interior of their artificial bubble that encompassed the godisle. Two of the githyanki were in the midst of priming a number of the cannons, checking the seals and the integrity of the hollow, explosive filled metallic spheres used as ammunition.
Behind them, a single githyanki warlock ignored them as he gazed intently into a psionic version of a crystal ball, watching the interior of the bubble for any signs of intrusion. In the past week they'd seen an errant elsewhale drift into the space, purely by accident of course since the creature was badly confused and disoriented by the storm by the time it reached them, but the intrusion had raised the ire of their commander Dzukash, and through him the Rakshasas had probably been informed.
Yes, it was utterly monotonous drudge work, but the warlock felt secure that he'd prefer being bored for a few hours rather than being at the mercy of his half-blooded commander, a powerful and menacing sorcerer, who as far as he knew, was some manner of duth'ka'gith.
"How are the cannons?" The warlock asked his subordinates without looking up.
"So far they're in good condition." The first of the engineers said. "But we'd be further along if the goblins hadn't taken an hour longer than expected to drag the black powder up here."
"They're slow." The second guard-engineer frowned and set his coal-black eyes towards a stack of twelve barrels and the pair of goblinoid petitioners who were presently stacking another into position.
The petitioners were still several barrels behind, and it was taking them in upwards of a half hour to just bring a single container up from the armory and into the summit of the tower.
The warlock, Fesz'ri'kal, rolled his eyes in agreement. The physical spirits that the Rakshasas had brought in as slaves weren't ideally suited to the Astral, at least not anywhere near the base competency that was inborn to githyanki. But at least they were there to handle the physical labor so it didn't fall to him or his subordinates, though on the other hand it left them with nothing much to do at times.
Oh there were the interrogations of some of the prisoners, but that didn't interest him in the slightest. Those sessions, they were just recreational torture on the part of his commander and
his superior who'd visited on several occasions, an absurdly tall githyanki with a curious abnormality, one of his arms was either grossly overdeveloped or doubled in size from some magical accident.
Fesz'ri'kal shrugged and took his attention back to his crystal ball, half hoping on some level, just to break the tedium, that something interesting might happen.
***
"So how long before we're finally done with the whole pissant lot of them?"
Dzukash Ibn Gariseth paused in his writing and glanced up at his familiar. The nalg was perched at the edge of the desk curled around an ornate, smoky quartz crystal ball. A bit of a mixed blessing, the imp-like creature had originally been a gift to the half-fiend githyanki by the nycaloth who'd birthed him after coupling with his father, a githyanki warlock in Vlaakith's service.
"Hmm?" The nalg prompted its master.
The familiar was certainly an odd looking thing, something like a sickly imp with the head of a hairless fox. Its hairless, violet skin was stretched tight over its nearly skeletal frame, and a scorpion-like tail twitched behind it, a trace bit of pearly venom slowly evaporating on the end of the barb.
Looking down at him, Dzukash's fiendish blood was blatant. The normally jaundiced skin of the githyanki race had taken a greenish tinge, and his facial features were ever so slightly elongated, like the blunt muzzle of his nycaloth mother. But those were the subtle features his blood had granted, with the wings and multiple arms mirroring his parent’s being as blatant as possible.
"Sooner rather than later." Dzukash replied, putting his pen down and folding his lower set of hands before resting his chin on the palm of one upper hand and reaching out to rub the chin of his familiar with the other.
"Good." The nalg said, gnawing impotently on its master's clawed index finger.
"You seem to like them even less than I do." The half-yugoloth said. "I don't particularly care much one way or the other, but you're just bloodthirsty this week."
The nalg shrugged and nuzzled his master's hand. More a yugoloth construct than a true child of the Waste, the creature was the embodiment of a particularly petty, cowardly and selfish evil more so than true depravity, but he had his uses both to his master and his master's masters. The part-githyanki sorcerer, warden and overseer of the prison and its local godisle, knew that "gifts" such as his familiar were most often given out by powerful yugoloths in order to corrupt mortal wizards. The familiars would steer their so-called masters towards actions that would benefit the 'loths in general, or the specific 'loth who'd presented their mortal tool with the familiar in the first place.
Imps and quasits were interested primarily in souls; they were working as much for themselves in the hopes of becoming true fiends as they were for any other purpose, but nalgs operated under slightly different precepts. Yugoloths had no interest in mortal souls, not in the same way as the other fiends, and so they wanted their mortals to have a direct benefit in their actions, and the general spread of their alignment across reality, not just cherry picking of specific souls like choice, low-hanging fruit. The nalgs were the puppet strings they'd first manipulate and then finally hang those mortals with.
The nalg of course could never become a true yugoloth, and so it obeyed by virtue of what it had been programmed on some base level to do.
Dzukash of course was fully aware of all of this. He knew the nalg was as much his familiar, his tool, as it was a method by which his full-blooded parent race would loosely monitor him. He'd also noticed something about the tiny pseudo-fiend: while it reflected his moods, and he shared its thoughts and emotions, the nalg also appeared to soak up and reflect the nascent mood of any powerful yugoloths in the areas.
The violet-skinned little bottle of hate had been particularly irritable and anxious of late, apprehensive more so than usual, and its master strongly suspected that it was unconsciously, unknowingly playing ambulatory drain to the actual mood of their mutual mistress lairing near the heart of the storm.
"You're thinking of something." The nalg said, tapping its claws against the crystal ball. "You've got that look on your face again."
Dzugash shrugged. "Things are winding down here, and I'm simply curious how long before we'll be moving on to something else. We've less than fifty prisoners at this point, and only the factor is left as anything resembling a valued one."
The familiar gave a cackling hiss, its canid sneer being blown up and distorted by the reflection in the crystal ball.
Blood and viscera and blood and screams and blood and mortals being put upon the slabanddissectedforthesoulstuff...
"Yes, I suppose some of them will." Dzukash replied back as the little fiend's mind rambled with a dozen concepts it cherished but was largely incapable of ever doing on its own.
It was true however, that they'd already divested themselves of most of the valued prisoners, and those that remained would likely be fed to the Astraloths, or shipped off like so many individually wrapped souls to clients in Gehenna or Carceri. One could only speculate on the factor's fate, but it wasn't likely to be pleasant, given how much he and some of his men had already been tortured for sport.
The nalg made a face and stretched its tail, “At least we’re rid of Vast.”
The sorcerer snarled at the mention of the madman. He'd only kept the crazed inventor for a week after he'd been dismissed by The Manged, but after those few days, he'd been happy to have shipped the man away to Pitiless. He supposed that he might see Vast again if his mistress ever required it, but the thought wasn't a pleasant one.
"I doubt it." The nalg commented, sharing the thought. "I think the mistress will have us just wash our hands of everything here. Including the githyanki."
Half-'yanki himself, Dzukash neither doubted the statement nor did he resent it on the grounds of any racial loyalty. After all, he had no loyalty to them or his late father. His bloodline was more fiendish than githyanki, his father's contribution had been momentary and fleeting, after which his mother had feasted on the man.
Loyalty to the githyanki that worked for him on the bizarre assumption that they were all working on some level against the lich queen along with a pair of sorcerous Rakshasas? Loyalty? He’d never been loyal to anyone but himself, and his current work for the fiends provided him with opportunities he would never have had under Vlaakith, or under the cosmic liability that opposing the lich-queen while a part of githyanki society would have gained him.
"I fully expect it." He said. "On some level I almost think it likely that they'll be the first to go, even before some of the prisoners. We'll see I suppose..."
The nalg smiled and snarled gleefully as his master batted at his tail with a claw.
"But once I've finished this ledger and sent my report to Alsikelius, we can go back to our fun with the godless cleric..."
He never finished the sentence though, cut off by a sudden explosion that rocked the chamber, flickering the magical illumination and deafening him momentarily while it sent his crystal ball flying off the table to shatter on the floor, spilled wine across his papers, and launched his familiar into a scrambling, screeching paroxysm.
***
The githyanki warlock gazed up from his scrying crystal just in time to scream before the fireball blossomed.
Jets of sorcerous flame shot from the arrow slits and the cannon slots, forced by pressure to expand out of the confined space of the turret chamber. The flame would have gutted the interior as it was, consuming the defenders entirely or leaving them to die of suffocation from lungs too badly seared to breath, but that was hardly the result, something far too mundane for the combination of such a superbly lucky shot, and the unfortunate presence of the explosive powder.
"I think you got their attention." Fyrehowl said, moments before the barrels went off.
With a deliciously symbolic delay as the vacuum literally inhaled, sucking in air to feed itself, the top twenty feet of the tower exploded with a deafening roar into a massive fireball.
Toras reflexively winced, "Holy sh*t!"
Scorched rubble and spherical gobbets of burning, imperfectly combusted explosive powder expanded out from the ruined tower, peppering the battlements of the fortress and the godisle it sat upon like a bloated tick.
"Shave my head and call me a thayan, that's one hell of a distraction!" Florian said, eyes wide at the results of a single spell.
"Yes!" Clueless cackled with glee as he looked at the tower and then at his wand.
Within seconds there was a flurry of movement as the few guards posted at ground level alternately ran for cover from the burning hailstorm of rubble, searched the sky for attackers, or ran to aid any survivors trapped in the standing portions of the tower.
"If you're going for the door, I suggest you go now!" Clueless shouted as a magical alarm bell began to peal across the void and the cannons on the other towers began to swivel into activity.
"And leave you out here alone?" Fyrehowl asked, incredulously. "Are you nuts?"
There was a sharp crack and then a trio more from atop one of the towers as musket fire erupted and whizzed past the bladesinger, all of them striking close but deflecting ever so slightly against his protective spells.
"Let 'em try and hit me." Clueless said, raising the wand again as he turned towards the source of the gunfire. "Assuming they can see me."
The bladesinger faded from sight once again as he whispered the words to another spell of invisibility, and darted across the void like a spell-hurling firefly dancing about a silvery night. Shouts echoed out as githyanki launched up from the ground
"Alright, do what the crazy man says." Nisha said, prompting the others to move as she started to descend down towards the godisle.
The others followed, still cloaked with invisibility as they watched a group of githyanki burst from the main entrance of the keep and another smaller group emerge from the carrack tethered at the other end of the island. Meanwhile, still invisible himself, and cackling with glee, Clueless flitted about above the fray, hurling spell after spell at whatever targets presented themselves.
Time and time again, a fireball erupted against the side of the keep or atop some of the githyanki vainly hunting for their source. Each and every time there was an explosion, a cackle of laughter, and the sudden flickering image of a gossamer winged caster darting across the sky before he vanished once again with a recasting of the spell.
But with one last glance out towards where their companion was gleefully drawing fire and returning more than that, the rest of the group dashed through the main entrance of the prison-fortress.
***
"No welcoming party." Toras said as they approached a wide-open portcullis at the end of a defensive narrowing in the hallway.
Florian grinned, "No love for you."
Still invisible and somewhat perplexed by the utter lack of resistance, they peered into the chamber past the archway as from outside they continued to hear the partially muffled din of spells and explosions. Past the portcullis the chamber was wide, a meeting point of two main side-wings of the structure, and two doors, one of them open and leading into what appeared to be a barracks.
"Looks like Clueless cleaned out the barracks." Florian speculated, noting the lack of occupants.
"Cleaned them out?" Skalliska asked. "I saw maybe a dozen people out there. I’d expect them to have more guards than that.”
Kiro peered into the open chamber, noting that most of the bunks appeared unused, and the armory was largely cleaned out of any usable weapons and armor.
"This place is desolate." The cleric said, motioning to the state of the barracks before deftly popped the lock on the other door.
"Nice." Nisha said, lightly kicking the heavy iron lock where it had fallen. "Sutekh seems like a pretty cool guy sometimes."
Kiro smiled and shrugged, gently pushing the door inwards and drawing his swords.
“Our brave and intrepid explorer has discovered a storeroom.” Florian said as they looked into the chamber, expecting… something other than boxes of mundane odds and ends.
“Bravo brave hero. Bravo.” Toras added.
Kiro raised an eyebrow and smiled. “For my sake, we’ll just close the door and assume we avoided an ambush by a room full of mimics.”
Fyrehowl grinned and moved away to peer down one of the corridors that branched off from the room. She listened for the footsteps of any guards, and hearing none, she motioned the others over to follow.
They passed an unmanned guard post, and found themselves walking down a long corridor lined with empty prison cells. Twenty yards later they turned around after curiously finding nothing of note, and made their way down the opposite corridor on the other side of the keep’s central chamber.
“Another batch of cells.” Kiro said as they entered the other wing, nearly identical to the previous one.
As they entered the second cellblock, the keep’s structure regularly rattled with the retort of cannon fire high above, and shuddered at uneven interval from Clueless's fireball bombardment, but the stone was well built and there was never any risk of collapse. But as they wandered through the empty hallway, that it had been solidly built was no surprise, given that had indeed been a prison.
"No prisoners though." Toras said, looking at pair upon pair of empty cells.
"So I've noticed." Fyrehowl said, tapping her nose briefly as she looked into one empty cell. "They haven't been gone for more than a week. And there were a lot of them."
"So where'd they go?" The fighter questioned.
"Nowhere pleasant I'm sure." Kiro said, tapping the tip of his sword on a large, dried bloodstain on the floor of one of the cells.
Fyrehowl nodded grimly, "The whole place smells like blood, most of it human, but some other types of mortals tossed in there as well."
"Torture?" Florian speculated, looking at the pattern of the stains. "It looks like less than if they'd been executed in their cells."
The lupinal sniffed at the air some more and nodded. "Torture probably. And there were fiends here."
Toras grimaced. "What kind?"
"Not many, and they weren't here populating the place." Fyrehowl said, doing her best to sort out the lingering scents. "It's mostly githyanki, some petitioners, and a dull trace of something that sort of smells like a nycaloth, but not quite, and something that was definitely a yagnaloth."
Florian nodded, "We should get moving and maybe try to take out one of those towers before they blow Clueless out of the sky."
And then, as if on cue, the entire structure shook with the force of a godquake as another lucky shot detonated the gunpowder in another one of the prison's towers.
Tristol cringed at the sudden shudder and there was a soft giggle as Nisha laughed at how his tail involuntarily fluffed itself.
“Clueless is having way too much fun out there.” The mage said with a chuckle, self conscious of the fact that his ears were likewise bristled from the surprise like a chimney sweep’s tools of trade.
“Fyrehowl just hides it better.” Nisha whispered to him, “Plus, I think she’s older than you.”
The cipher chuckled and rolled her eyes in good humor as she stepped away from the open cell. But as she did so, she paused and tasted the air.
"And one other thing." Fyrehowl said, a confused look on her face. "There's something else on the air. Fiendish, yugoloth, but I can't place it. It's not something I've ever smelled."
“I doubt the ‘loths would be so obsessive about hiding themselves here.” Tristol said. “Inside an astral storm, shielded by magic, they’re probably not too concerned about anyone knowing, so we should expect at least a few of them.”
Florian nodded. “And that said, we have some of them to kill, but not here in this corridor.”
Nisha spun around on one hoof, “We go up!”
Swiftly moving back towards the barracks, they stumbled upon and just as quickly disposed of a pair of githyanki swordsmen. Between Kiro’s blades and a lightning bolt from Tristol’s fingers, the astral natives never had a chance despite being on their home ground.
“Bad timing boys.” Florian said as she reached down and picked up a set of keys from one of them.
Nisha looked at the cleric like she had a hole in her head. “You have me and Kiro. Me, Nisha, and Kiro the discoverer of horrid ambushes of fiendish mimics and you need a set of keys?”
“Backup is good.” The cleric said. “In case something happens to you!”
That seemed to mollify the tiefling and so, after carefully making sure there were no further guards waiting for them in ambush above, they ascended up to the keep's second floor through a hole in the ceiling, a uniquely githyanki bit of architecture made to replace staircases in the absence of gravity. One level up, they then emerged into a second barracks, virtually identical to the one below.
Like it had been below, a pair of hallways branched off into opposite prison wings, but a cloud of smoke was rapidly billowing out of one of them, presumably from the explosions that they’d been hearing out of Clueless and his little ‘distraction’. A moment later, a pair of goblins came stumbling out of the smoke, looking harried and distracted, struggling to move a badly singed barrel of gunpowder away from the source of the flames.
Unfortunately for the petitioners though, they never noticed the danger before both of them were frozen nearly solid by a blistering cone of frost from Fyrehowl’s outstretched hand. The slaves crumpled to the ground with the dry crunch of frozen flesh, and suddenly removed from all heat, the barrel of powder was suddenly the most stable it had been in the past hour.
“Everyone watch out now.” Florian said as she tightened her grip on her axe. “It’s not entirely empty, we might run into more githyanki, and this next time they might not be caught off balance.”
They didn’t see any guards, but with Clueless outside somewhere, kicking the metaphorical hornets’ nest, it was probably only a matter of time before some from the other side of the keep came rushing through the area. But in the meantime, the smoke from the direction of the burning watchtowers was growing thicker and thicker, and from the smoke itself, and the risk of further explosions if the githyanki had a battery somewhere near to the flames, that direction was effectively blocked off.
“Ok,” Toras said, glancing down the smoke-filled corridor. “We’re not going that way.”
“Prisoners?” Nisha asked with some concern.
Fyrehowl shook her head, “I don’t hear anyone calling out, so I think we’re safe passing on that side.”
As the lupinal’s ears were perked and listening down the one hallway, Kiro was quickly scouting down the other. A minute later he returned and shook his head as well as his sword, cleaning a bit of obvious githyanki blood from the tip of one of them.
“The other side’s empty too.” He said, “Empty of prisoners at least, and now it’s also down a guard who wandered down from one of those towers on the other side.”
“Nice catch.” Florian said, “Anything else?”
Fyrehowl motioned them all into a quick silence as her ears suddenly perked. Something was coming down the burning hallway. “Someone’s coming, be ready.”
A moment later, screaming and brandishing his blade like he’d been intending to ambush a barracks full of githyanki, Clueless burst from the smoke and into the room. His scream and his expression, intended as menacing to any githyanki, died stillborn as he all but stumbled in mid-air, beating his wings backwards to stop himself as he realized he’d found his friends.
“Not a bad show out there…” Kiro said. “Considering you burst in here on the attack, and not running from a gang of githyanki.”
Clueless grinned and touched down on the floor. “You’ve got your distraction, and they’re down a pair of towers and a half dozen guards.”
“A half dozen?” Nisha asked, counting on her fingers with a perplexed look.
Clueless waved his hand. “I know. There were more than that chasing me. And they still are. They’re just all still outside, flying around without a clue I’m in here.”
“That’s a hell of a distraction.” Toras said, “And I think Tristol agrees. Or his tail did at least.”
Tristol’s ears lay back and he gave a face to both the fighter and bladesinger.
“Sorry about the noise.” Clueless said, apologizing. “But anyways, what’s in this place?”
Florian shrugged. “Not a whole hell of a lot. It
was a prison, but we can’t find any prisoners, and the place seems to be in the middle of cleaning itself out. It’s mostly empty, and not too many guards either.”
Clueless nodded. “Well there’s one more level to this place so far as I could see from the outside.”
Nisha poked him in the ribs, “When you weren’t zipping around dodging certain doom at least.”
“I came out of that pretty well.” The bladesinger said, looking down at a few burns and a single shallow sword cut on one arm. “They got lucky once or twice, and believe me, look down that hallway and tell me they didn’t come out of that worse off than me.”
There was no argument from anyone on the issue, and so with one quick glance down the burning hallway, they drifted up from the ground and passed through to the third level of the prison.
“Another barracks.” Florian said. “What a surprise.”
“This one was actually used though.” Kiro said, noting the state of the beds and the spare weapons and trophies scattered about each of the bunks.
The chamber was somewhat larger than the others, probably to contain more troops closer to the top of the building where attack was more likely to take place in the three dimensional space of the Astral. There was also a large cage or pen that took up the back half of the room.
Fyrehowl walked over to the cage. No prisoners, but the smell of unwashed bodies and greasy metal made it almost a given that it was a virtual stockyard for the Acheron petitioners the ‘yanki, or their fiendish employers, utilized as slaves.
“And no welcoming party up here either.” Toras mock grumbled. “Though I suppose you don’t need lots of people to defend… nothing.”
Kiro nodded. “True, this place looks like it used to have a large number of prisoners, and guards for them, but they were all moved elsewhere. If there’s a commander’s office in this place, we might be able to find out what they did with them.”
“The layout is a bit different up here it looks like.” Fyrehowl said as she glanced at the reinforced door on side of the room, and a short connecting hallway opposite. The previous floors had each had two prison wings, but the third level seemed different.
“I’d possibly suggest we split up and check both directions while the githyanki are still occupied outside and with that fire,” Skalliska mused. “But something really tells me that Fyrehowl, to say nothing of common sense, might suggest otherwise.”
Clueless grinned, “It’s tempting. But anyways, let’s check the hallway, then we hit the door.”
Without objection they followed Clueless down the hallway, eventually turning into a relatively large torture chamber. The rust-brown stains and ferric odor that liberally filled the room attested to recent use, and there was a heavy undercurrent of githyanki and fiend. But what was most disturbing was that there were no actual implements of torture.
“Big room, lots of use, and no tools.” Toras said. “What? Packed up their favorite toys first?”
Kiro shrugged. “No, I’m not so sure they needed the tools.”
“Fiends…” Fyrehowl said. “If there’s a nycaloth here, it has claws enough to not need anything else.”
The prisoners, if any remained, had been brutalized if the chamber was any indication. In fact, they might have been kept as amusement and practice, but if so that wouldn’t entirely explain why the place was still occupied without any other purpose. Something had been kept here, or someone, and it was likely that behind the fortified door they might find out what.
***
Back in the main chamber, they found the door disturbingly untrapped, unwarded, and not even locked. If the place was still serving as a prison, the prisoners were either locked away to the point where they didn’t need even the least security, or else they’d simply been broken to the point of not seeking freedom.
The actual truth of it was, unfortunately, more disturbing: even if they did escape, they had nowhere to go where they wouldn’t be found. Obedience ensured a temporary respite from anything but the random torture, but it left open the chance of eventual discovery and release from an outside source. The chance was virtually nonexistent, but flight was certain death given what the prisoners at least knew of what flitted about on the winds of the storm.
