The Weavers
Antobury proved to be quite the eccentric. His mansion, on the border between Drac’s End and the Eastern District was decorated in a spider motif, from the wrought iron gates to the elaborate stained glass windows. Nearly the entire interior was filled with a combination zoo and museum dedicated to all things arachnid. The party took particular note of the display where a swarm of spiders crawled about a terrarium containing a scale model of Freeport. They were disturbed by the Chwidencha, a large creature which appeared to consist of a multitude of spider legs coming together at a central point, with no discernable body where they met. They were merely bemused by the massive camel-eating spider. The desiccated carcasses of several horses and camels lay strewn about the huge arachnid’s cage. “How did you get that in here?” Sully asked.
“When I purchased that specimen it was the size of a large dog, I merely kept feeding it,” Antobury explained cheerfully.
When the party reached Antobury’s study, he became grim. He showed them the body of a red and black spider the size of a dinner plate, its abdomen cut open to reveal curious hollow within. Antobury quickly explained that the hastendeath spider represented a particularly dangerous underdark menace. The creatures were born pregnant, prepared to reproduce almost immediately after birth. They poisoned their victim, and while the poor soul was unconscious crawled down his throat and laid their eggs in his stomach.
Antobury explained that hastendeaths lived deep underground, sometimes cultivated by spider-like humanoids known as chitins. The were completely unheard of on the surface. However, this one had turned up somehow, and Antobury’s examination revealed that it had died only hours before, but only after laying its eggs. “My friends,” Antobury exclaimed,” Freeport will soon face a terrible scourge. Generations of hastendeaths will be born and lay their eggs within the plentiful and unsuspecting hosts available to them with days. The city would be overrun within weeks.”
The party accepted the task of tracking down the hastendeath’s victim. They would begin their search with Bleary Grimlet, the fence who sold Cobb the dead Hastendeath. Cobb agreed to lead them to Grimlet’s home in the section of Scurvytown known as the Merry Tangle.
* * * * *
When no one responded to Sully’s knocks, she merely knocked down the door. Grimlet’s home was a stinking hole, the dim light from the smoking fireplace revealing broken furniture, plaster peeling from the walls, and two large quadrapeds with lupine builds, large draconic jaws, stunted wings, and long, thin tails. The pair of drakes moved to attack the intruders, breathing a cloud of gas, the effects of which all combatants were able to resist.
Sully charged to the attack, her heavy blows met with vicious bites. She was dismayed to discover that the drakes’ fangs were poisoned, slowing her reflexes and making her more vulnerable to their attacks. Nate tumbled to her side and Queg skewered the closest drake with his harpoon. The drakes gave as good as they got, and the battle may have proved a stalemate if not for Bronson and Miranda, whose magic drove the drakes back under a barrage of fireballs, magic missiles, and flame strikes.
The battle seemed nearly won when a figure appeared on the stairs leading to the second floor and began peppering the combatants with a hail of crossbow fire. Bleary Grimlet was a shockingly ugly man, hairy, stoop shouldered and club footed. As Nate ran after him, cutlass held high, Grimlet retreated up the stairs. Nate reached the landing at a run, and barely felt the tripwire brush his ankles, but he definitely felt it when a cauldron of acid dumped out of a hidden hollow in the ceiling above, burning away clothes and skin and leaving his body horribly burned. As the rest of the party finished off the drakes Bronson rushed to Nate’s side. After the cleric healed the worst of Nate’s wounds, they to the second floor.
The pair found a cluttered workshop. There was no sign of Grimlet, but no obvious route of escape. They paused and Bronson explained to the empty room their quest to find where the source of the spider. Grimlet, invisible and furious, pressed a knife into the cleric’s back, threatening to kill him in revenge for the death of his pets. The pair, exasperated that Grimlet had chosen to fight rather than talk in the first place explained their situation and inquired if Grimlet felt sick. After much negotiation Grimlet offered that he felt fine, he was fencing the spider for a local crimelord named Hamfist. The spider had died in his care, leaving Grimlet unable to acquire the price Hamfist expected. Grimlet was terrified for his life, seeing assassins sent by his employer in every shadow and whispering that Hamfist was a cannibal.
Hamfist was a chirurgerist and physician operating in the Tangle, and the party had little trouble finding his small shop. They were mistrustful of the somewhat frail, wild eyed old man with the air of power and authority. They respectfully explained their quest and requested the old man’s assistance. Once it became clear that they were not seeking a refund, Hamfist relaxed and, expertly sizing them up, admitted that he had acquired the spider from K’Karsh, the sorcerous leader of the band of kenku bird-men known as the Collectors. When questioned whether the spider might have bitten him, Hamfist replied disdainfully that he had little to fear from such threats.
Unable to fully explain the source of their disquiet, but seeing no reason to disbelieve the old man, the party followed his directions to The Rigg, an old tower at the far eastern end of Scurvytown that housed the Kenku Collectors. The Rigg, once a lighthouse, but now an abandoned tower slowly sinking into the mud of the shoreline had no windows and thick wooden walls. The party climbed the stairs circling the tower, entered the cupola at its head, and examined the trapdoor leading into the interior of the tower. The interior of the cupola was filthy with bird droppings and foul graffiti warning away intruders.
Sully pounded on the trapdoor and was met with birdlike squawking and harsh voices instructing them to go away. She threw open the door and peered down into the tower by the light from Bronson’s holy symbol. The tower was entirely hollow, with only a series of platforms, bridges, to stop a fall from the trapdoor all the way to the water filled base eighty feet below. She could make out several bird faced feathered humanoids, kenku, within. The kenku responded to her intrusion with a hail of crossbow fire.
The party advanced, Sully and Nate swinging and balancing from bridge to platform to draw closer to their attackers, Miranda and Bronson
flying, and Queg remaining at the trapdoor, firing flaming arrows down into the darkness. The kenku defended their home fiercely, scampering along ropes strung from one platform to the next, even leaping out over open air to gain better position to fire volley after volley of crossbow bolts against the intruders. However, the outcome was never in doubt. The party had to kill a few of the kenku before the others grudgingly surrendered.
One of the kenku grudgingly answered their question. Yes, their leader, K’Karsh had recently acquired a strange spider in the underdark. Yes, he had subsequently sold it to a fence. Soon thereafter K’Karsh had began to feel ill and had
teleported back to where he had found the spider in the hopes of discovering the cause. The kenku further explained that the tunnels K’Karsh had been exploring were beneath the Standing Tombs.
The party quickly left The Rigg and made their way to the docks. Nate had heard of The Standing Tombs. Early in Freeport’s history, before they began cremating their dead, they had buried them in a long tunnel dug into a cliff face a few miles up the coast from the city. In order to save space the bodies had been placed standing up in shallow alcoves. The tombs had been the responsibility of the temple of Mormekar, until a great earthquake had collapsed part of the tunnel and forced the site to be abandoned. After that the clerics of Mormekar had relocated, building a crematorium on an atoll in Freeport harbor.
It was quite late by the time the
Albers reached The Standing Tombs. The party slept until morning then took the ship’s boat ashore, landing at an old but still sturdy dock. Cobb only accompanied the party as far as the entrance to the Tombs, a great stone door in the cliff face. They found the door slightly ajar, and Queg found tracks, both leading into the tombs and back out again. Those leading out again headed back toward Freeport.
The party advanced down the long tunnel, in the light from Bronson’s holy symbol they saw cracked walls and floors, and bodies thrown from their alcoves by that long ago earthquake. Bronson pragmatically animated several of the fallen bodies, gathering a force of skeletal minions to accompany the party deeper into the tombs.
They had not advanced far before they came to a great natural cavern formed when a great rift had opened in the earth, completely severing one side of the tunnel from the other. The walls and floors of the chamber were covered in great ropy webs and a funnel shaped web spiraled down into the rift beyond the edge of the light. On the floor of the tunnel on the other side of the rift they saw several human sized web bundles.
The had no time to examine the chamber further a dreadful buzzing began to echo off the chamber walls. It came from all about them, as much the babbling of tongueless madmen as the product of any terrestrial insect. Previously unseen shapes began to move amongst the webs hidely the cavern walls. Queg spotted one of the demons first, a vaguely ant shaped creature the size of a small wolf, yet its numerous spindly legs spread nearly six feet across. Its head is a horrible mash of skull-like shapes melted together in one shapeless blob and studded with more than a dozen black eyes. Vertical mandibles gnash in this face and three pairs of membranous wings sprout from its thorax. Its body trails off into a mass of writhing tails, each tipped with an upward-curving stinger protruding from a distended bulge. The undead ranger barely had time to yell a warning before they leapt into the air, nine insectile demons hovering and lunging, plunging their stingers into their victims and then darting away before returning again from another direction.
Miranda began to shriek, batting at bugs in her hair and clothes that only she could see. Queg fired his bow at one of the darting creatures while the others drew their blades and attempted to defend themselves against their unnatural foes. Each time a stinger struck, moments later the demons victim was retching in nausea and pain as implanted eggs hatched under their skin and ravenous grubs gnawed their way out of their victims flesh, squirming free to land on the stone floor of the cavern.
Queg proved largely immune to the creature’s attacks, but his blows and the blows of his companions had little effect. The warped demon insects proved largely resistant to blade and flame, and any wounds they did sustain quickly healed. One of Bronson’s new skeletal followers did manage to grapple one of the demons, and while still clutching its wildly squirming captive stepped off the ledge and fell down out of sight. And as if the falling figures had been a signal something huge shifted in the darkness of the crevice just beyond the light of Bronson’s holy symbol. It was a great demonic spider, its legs clattering against the stone as it crawled out of the crevice and into the light, its mandibles dripping poison.
“Bebilith! A big one!” called Miranda still trying to cast spells while slapping at unseen insects.
Sully sprang into action, lifting her blade high as she charged the spider even as it climbed over the edge and into the chamber. Her blade bit deep, but she received a vicious bight in return, the Bebilith’s poison pumping into her veins. She felt her muscles weaken, and dodged aside as the demon’s claws attempted to gain purchase on her armor to rip it asunder.
The smaller demons continued their attack, buzzing in amongst the combatants and away again, always staying out of the Bebilith’s reach. Sully and the spider continued to trade blows. Bronson yelled prayers in a strong confident voice calling down columns of divine flame to char his enemies. Nate’s cutlass flashed, and burning arrows streaked from Queg’s bow. Miranda called forth
scorching rays and
magic missiles. Soon the Bebilith fell, cracking the stones beneath its immense bulk. At that moment, as one, the remaining insect demons came together in a swarm in the center of the cavern and streaked down into the darkness from which the Bebilith had come.
