After a few minutes spent scrutinising the wall with the concealed door in it, Flynne managed to trace his way back to a trigger set into the throne, which he activated. Grating slightly, the stone door swung open to reveal a luxuriously appointed bedchamber, lit gently with a number of small spells, and richly set with garments, superb furniture, a full-length mirror and a shifting, ever-colourful rug.
Squinting through my self-made new magical item, “Evan’s Clair de Lunettes”, I immediately picked out that the rug was enchanted with a slight decorative layer of illusion magic, whilst the mirror positively glared with the strength of divinatory magic. I hummed to myself a few bars from a song I had heard a few months previously, which spoke of the slaying of a cunning and evil witch. In the song, the heroic knight had used a mirror much like this to see when the witch was disguised as his fiancée.
I frowned, and activated my Hat of Disguise, taking the form of an elderly witch-woman before stepping in front of the mirror. Glinting in the enchanted lights, the mirror’s magic activated, and my normal form was reflected back at me, stripped not only of the hat’s illusory magics but also of the small false beard which I was sporting to amuse myself.
In the mirror behind me, I could see Flynne checking the desk, and once again pulling out his lockpicks. There was a short cracking sound, followed by a lengthy hiss, and Flynne was shrouded in a black gas. Coughing, he nevertheless managed to finish picking the lock, and a number of pieces of paper and a pouch of money were revealed.
.oOo.
We examined the papers in depth, and learned that they showed a series of dealings in all the many spectrums of the city’s business. Religious affairs, financial transactions, even political machinations – all of these and more had been thoroughly infiltrated by the doppelgangers and what was clearly a huge number of their agents.
One sheet of parchment in particular called for attention, written as it was in a dialect of undercommon which I was able to decipher:
“I have a task for you, thrall. Meet me at the sewer junction beneath the Cold Forge, and I will give you the details. There are some troublesome small minds which need dealing with.”
The page was signed with a curious tentacular squiggly stamp.
.oOo.
Malachite stripped the bed and wrapped the mirror carefully, whilst the rest of us took any items which might prove valuable and scooped the lot into the magic bag which I held open, before we backtracked our way through to the main corridor, with double doors at either end.
Over the course of a few minutes, Flynne managed to defeat the locks at either end of the passage, as well as disarming a pit trap at the eastern end. Having wedged this shut, he pulled at the door handle, and then swore.
“Damn it! All that time, and it’s another false door. Built straight onto the plaster!”
He stomped back to the western end, and pushed the double doors wide open.
They swung open onto the scene of a large room, lined with shelves and with 2 chair-ringed wooden tables.
Over the course of the next hour, we searched through the books and maps we found in this library-room. Intricate plans; circles within complex circles of the doppelganger’s strategies lay open to us. Though the documents were careful not to name any of their agents, they set out in considerable detail what the shape-changers had done to infiltrate, influence and corrupt the significant agencies within the town.
.oOo.
Having satisfied ourselves that we had learned as much as we could, and having placed these books on top of the seized parchments from the bedchamber, we moved towards the room with the deep pool of water in it. My comrades assured me that there would be no danger, as they had killed the giant octopus in its depths.
Flynne swung the door open, closely followed by Igmut and with the rest of us following on behind. We were immediately met with the vision of two dark-skinned lithe elves standing on the central pillar. High up in the wall to our left was a new opening which had not been there on the one time I had been into this room. Standing in the opening was a six foot tall dark-robed figure. Although it was shrouded in shadows and an almost palpable aura of menace, I could see a group of writhing purple/blue tentacles dangling down where the lower half of its face should have been.
The front-most drow’s hand crossbow clicked twice, firing small darts in Flynne’s direction. The second mumbled something before gesturing in our direction. An instant later, an area of shadowy darkness sprung up around myself and my friends.
I started to play a tune of bravery and encouragement on my lute (backing out of the dark area as I did so). Once I had gone far enough backwards, I shouted to my fellow adventurers that the darkness cleared out in the main corridor near Sheba.
.oOo.
Back in the narrow passageway leading to the drow, I could hear a faint burbling noise from Flynne, as he succumbed to some other sinister power, then I saw Igmut storming out of the dark sphere dragging an apparently insensible Flynne by the collar of his chainmail shirt.
Just as Igmut was hurling Flynne towards me, a small bead of bright light hurtled out of the dark corridor, and my comrades and I were enveloped in a mighty explosion. I was unable to shield Flynne’s body from the blast, but did manage to use his prone form as a rudimentary form of cover. I then dragged his scorched and still stunned form into one of the nearby bedrooms, healing him with a wand in my possession, whilst Malachite and Igmut both started a series of spells.
The door into the water-room slammed shut, closed by some creature Malachite had summoned. There was no assault at this stage, and so as I braced myself by the door with a wand pointed at the passage the drow would inevitably attack from, Malachite used a restorative wand on Sheba, and Igmut cast another spell of self-improvement.
Briefly, there was the screech of a monkey from near the door, followed by the crash of wood on stone and then the sound of steel on flesh. The screeching abruptly stopped.
Malachite began to summon another animal totem, and Igmut cast yet another of Kord’s spells of power. Positively glowing with righteous power, he hefted his longspear in one hand, and raised it towards the passageway.
At this point, the first of the dark-skinned elves dashed out of the passageway, and the magic missiles from my wand simply fizzled out as they closed on their target. Foolishly, I had forgotten about the natural magical resistance of the drow.
Sheba the tiger lashed out and gouged deep furrows into the first drow-elf to come down the corridor, and it responded by flinging a bag at Igmut, which burst and glued him fast to the floor of the tunnel. The second drow stepped in behind it and slashed with a rapier at Sheba.
Unwilling to waste a second spell on the drow, I instead turned and cast at Flynne, turning him invisible in the hope that the drow might miss him if the rest of us were forced to flee. Back in the corridor, Malachite’s spell was concluded with the appearance of a 6 foot tall lizardlike creature with fearsome teeth and claws, which bit and tore at the first attacker.
Igmut swing his heavy spear in a single precise move. It hurtled up and through the first drow, slaying it in an instant before slashing narrowly past the second advancing drow, who simply stepped over the body of his dead comrade and thrust his rapier deeply into Sheba’s side.
.oOo.
I stepped forwards, fumbling at my belt and pulling out an expensive glass pot of salve, which I rubbed over the glue sticking to Igmut. He was immediately able to step free of the tanglefoot bag’s effects, dropping the spear (which was still thrust through the chest of the first drow), and unslinging the massive frost-enchanted greataxe from his back. As Sheba and the summoned velociraptor hacked and clawed at the drow, Igmut’s magical axe scythed through the air, and tore a pair of vicious holes in the dark chainmail, killing the dark-elf in two massive hits.
Igmut continued by dashing into the fading darkness, and then we heard his voice yelling “clear! Creature gone and gap closed!”
.oOo.
We worked our way back out through the complex, taking turns to ride a floating barrel up a narrow tunnel which filled with rapidly flooding water, then along a terribly slippery complex of narrow wooden planks. We paused to collect the broken shell of a madman that the others had left locked in a cell, and to notice the broken body of second captive, an elf woman at the bottom of a pit trap within a large and dusty warehouse.
Despite the fact that I’d never been there, my comrades were very reluctant to go ‘back’ to the ‘Crooked House’ inn. Of course, they only said they didn’t want to go there after singing the praises of its food, hospitality and the comfort of its rooms. Instead, we reached a much smaller and foul-looking inn just as the equally foul-looking innkeeper woman was closing her door for the night.
I was swift to put my foot in the door, and beamed a smile at her.
“Surely, mistress, you would not close your door on 5 paying guests, who ask little but a beer and a room for the night?”
She appeared unimpressed, so I smiled all the wider, and discussed matters with her. Ultimately, after a depressingly small handful of silver had changed hands, she relented and let us stay in a single boring bunk room, its walls still spattered with the blood of a previous tenant.
.oOo.
The following day, we left the squalid in with a sense of relief. Across town, we entered the home of a man the others introduced as ‘Eligos’, who stormed angrily into the room demanding to know why we had interrupted his important meeting. He noticed that we weren’t looking at him, but were all gazing intently at his reflection in the full-length mirror which Malachite had carefully set up in one corner of the room.
“Why have you brought divination magics into my home?” he demanded after strolling across to stand in front of the mirror. His reflection showed that he wasn’t a doppelganger, and also that he dyed his greying hair.
After an awkward series of apologies and explanations followed, and Eligos was swift to appreciate the seriousness of our claims. He offered to host a series of dinners, receiving the great and the good of the city in his house so that he could look at them. He would, of course, need to borrow the divinatory mirror to accomplish this, and might need to call upon us if he were to discover anything. He was proud to announce that receiving so many important and influential guests would not be a problem, as he was due to act as one of the sponsors of the Free City Games, which were due to start in a week.
Having handed over all of the doppelgangers’ papers, we also produced the two enchanted emeralds, and asked him if he knew what they might be. Holding one at arm’s length, he cast a spell, and then left the room muttering. 5 minutes later, he returned clutching a heavy book, and cast a second spell on the emerald.
“I believe that these are mind clones,” he pronounced. “A person’s entire personality, knowledge, skills and abilities could be copied onto a crystal such as this – however I do not know how to activate the crystal or what it might contain.”
He dropped the emerald back into its chest and the chest was placed carefully back into the magic bag before we discussed what we should do next. Once again, Eligos made a suggestion.
“One of these pieces of paper,” he interjected whilst fishing through the captured parchments. “It made mention of a meeting place under the… here it is. Under the Cold Forge. I can give you directions to the Forge if it would assist, although I would try to stay on the good side of its owner, Crusty Patton, if I were you.”
Thanking him, we left his house, assuring him that we would return when he needed us.
