Saturn Day, Virgo 14th, 576 CÆ, Year of the Tiger
Players: Iodas (Ixian, Barbarian), Frakki (Viking, Shaman of the Musk Ox totem), Aeltrin (Viking, Assassin of Rel), Wulfweard the Sly (Anglo-Saxon, Legerdemainist of Rel)
(Rathar the Brash and Xararxar Rhaan were elsewhere this day; they will be on the shore of the pool when the others turn around.)
The note came before the city was awake.
It was still that hour when Port Zangerios keeps its half-dark behind shuttered windows, the sun's red light leaking in through the cracks, when a single soft knock found Wulfweard's door—unhurried, pitched to reach one man and not the hall. He opened it a few inches onto a boy of perhaps twelve, already turning to go. The boy put a folded paper into his hand and was down the corridor before a question could form. Plain, unsealed, written in a careful hand: The square between Cinzel Yard and the Bazaar. The Great Oak. When the market opens. No name beneath it, because the woman who sent it needed none.
Wulfweard left word for the others—a note stuck to the door of the room he'd shared with Rathar—and went out alone into the stirring port, past the first fishmongers hauling their catch, over Hangman's Crossing and up to Plaza Velanidés, where the Great Oak shoulders the cobbles up around its roots into something between bench and barricade. He took a stone seat with a clean view and waited while the bazaar coughed itself awake around him. Behind the plaza, the Fane of Xathoqqua sat in its perpetual brooding silence, watching.
The rest of the morning assembled itself slowly at the Golden Lamprey. Frakki came down into the taproom already deep in the thirst that meets him every dawn, and the bartender—who has come to expect the shaman's pilgrimages to the water-jug—poured without being asked and remarked that he looked like a man who had not seen sleep in a long while. When Frakki rubbed his eye, his fingers came away gritted with small white flakes, like dried salt. He turned them in the lamplight a moment and said nothing about it. Aeltrin woke to find a note pinned to the door of Wulfweard and Rathar's room; he found the room empty both beds thrown back, no sign of struggle. Aeltrin then made for the taproom, note in hand. Iodas followed suit. Maybe they went to the market. We'd best go look. They gathered their gear.
Three voices in the city
They were four steps out the Lamprey's door when the street gave them Valeria.
Five of the city watch, spears held lazily, and at their head a short, thick-built, Roman woman who owned the space without effort. The party's compatriots had done work for her before, under terms best left unexamined. She crossed to them quickly and did not slow.
"Five dead men in the Southport," she said. "Dead men point, if you know how to ask—and I always know how to ask. What I don't like is having to. Nothing happens in this city without me finding out first. This did."
She rapped the butt of her spear on the stones, looked each of them in the eye in turn, unhurried and exact, and then she turned and her men folded into lockstep behind her and the moment was simply over. The party took the long way around the bay. Perhaps, someone said, it was not the worst week to be leaving town.
At the Oak, Wulfweard watched a woman come out from between two buildings and knew Kersésuchis at once by the way she crossed the square—no hurry in her, only certainty. She posted against the great trunk; he drifted over and stood with his back half to her, and heard before taking a seat on one of the oak's gnarled roots.
"You look like a man who slept poorly. Sit."
She let a cart pass out of earshot. There was a scholar, she told him—a Greek named Photios, upper floor of the old cartographers' hall on Harbormaster's Row, who read the old Hyperborean texts; not fluently, but better than anyone in the city who would take their coin for it. Seventy-five for a consultation. He would not negotiate and Wulfweard should not try. "Tell him Kersésuchis sent you. He will see you the same day." Then she rose and was gone into the market, and the rest of the party found Wulfweard alone and unharmed at the foot of the Oak a few minutes later, with a name and an errand.
Photios
They split the morning. First, the transactional stop—the Calcine, where the air outside already stank of sulfur and the lock was off the door. Venkoll set out the six vials of antitoxin and four necrosis salves they had bargained for the day before, swept the counted coin from the counter without a word of conversation, and noted that the voucher had bought seven days and five remained. Aeltrin placed a standing order for a full load of silvered crossbow bolts, twenty of them, to be collected later.
The cartographers' hall sits above a warren of map-sellers and ink-merchants, reached by an outside stair, and at the end of its long upper hall stands a heavy door with a peep-port and four locks. Wulfweard knocked. A pair of rheumy eyes that had once been bright blue regarded him from under heavy brows. "I don't recognize any of you."—"Kersésuchis sent me." The locks went back one at a time and the oak swung open on a small, stooped Greek in a skullcap and a colorful vest, his desk lit by a tallow candle wedged between the antlers of an antelope skull, the room walled floor to ceiling in shelves stuffed with tomes, documents, and stacks of scrolls held from avalanche by candles and the odd skull.
They laid the work before him: a journey to Kós Athar, the retrieval of a gem somewhere between a baboon's head and a regent's in size. He took it down with evident relish—I like precision in my notes—accepted his seventy-five gold, and sent them away for three hours. The party would not waste the wait; there was a guide to hire before any of them set foot in the wood.
The Guttered Lamp
For the road, Frakki wanted a guide, and the asking led them to the Guttered Lamp out near the West Gate—a known silky haunt, already doing its quiet work at that hour, five or six men nursing drinks alone in their own thoughts, a single lamp burning steady over the bar, and a barkeep named Xallvorr with great white mutton chops who allowed that silky or not, their coin was good.
Two men came forward. Dunmarr was the older—perhaps forty, which is itself a kind of miracle in that trade, for the forest does not let silkies grow old—and he knew eight miles of the wood cold: the widow glades, the bad ground, the lines a man walks and the lines he does not. Past eight he would not go. His furthest, once, years ago, had been thirteen miles, on a doomed venture after a Cord who chased a legend of golden silk; Dunmarr had walked out of that one alone, and had never gone past eight since. The younger, Ren, offered ten a day and to go further—five trips in, the first ten miles known to him, and once, terrifyingly, as far as twelve. Neither would say yes to fifteen until they knew more.
Both spoke of the weight—that legendary melancholy which thickens the deeper a man goes, until it gets into his decisions and, past a certain mile, begins to win the argument it has been making all along. Lotus pushes it back. You do not run out of lotus. The party hired both men, thirty gold a day between them, with Ren throwing in enough lotus that they need make no second supply run.
Dunmarr would not commit until he knew the work, so they carried it up to a low meeting loft that reeked of old tallow and stale beer, its table scarred with the names of men who had promised to return and a date beside each. They named the Vault of Kós Athar and the pool, and he had heard of the pool—long dismissed among the silkies as the raving of madmen. The story he carried was this: three men had once reached its edge, where thousands of crows perched silent in the branches above the black water; one of them sat down and would not rise, one waded out into the pool and after a moment simply vanished, and the third—still steadied on lotus, not yet crushed under the weight—turned and ran the whole way out of the wood and came back raving. Most had laughed it off. Something in the telling had rung true to Dunmarr. It squared, too, with the instruction the party already carried from Golnai—give the water everything; the dark does not take the unwilling—and with the harder truth that no one knew the way back out. The bargain was struck. The guides would lead them to the pool and no step further, and would not wait.
Photios's answer
The three hours spent and the guides hired, the party climbed back to the cartographers' hall, and Photios let them in without ceremony and read from his own hand. Kós Athar had been significant, he said—late Hyperborean period, one of a small number of scholars who held that certain pre-human artifacts ought to be sealed rather than studied or used. Her contemporaries thought her eccentric; some thought her dangerous. "She was right and they were wrong, which is usually how that goes." Her school had been small and deliberate about leaving almost nothing behind—not from modesty, he judged, but from intention: whatever they had been working on, they had not wanted it followed. She surfaced in two texts in connection with the Serpent Men: not as one who used their works, but as one who understood what they had been built for and chose not to say so plainly. "She looked at what the Scaled Ones left behind and made a decision about it that she also didn't document. The rest of her recorded life is the decision acted on."
And the pool: a pre-Atlantean survey fragment, not widely circulated, described a Hyperborean outpost in the Forest of Crows as set apart from use. Not abandoned. Not dangerous. Set apart. A precise phrase, he said, and it implied intent. Of the gem he had no record—only that whatever it was, she had considered it worth a lifetime—but asked whether such a thing might be one of the pre-human devices, he allowed he would not be surprised in the slightest. Of the three rumored methods of entry, only submersion seemed to him plausible; the other two, unnecessary. They paid him a little over his fee, which pleased him, and left with the right to call on him again. "You are not the typical scallywags one deals with in a place like this."
The toll, and the wood
They came back to the Guttered Lamp before dawn for one last custom. No silky leaves on a job through the front door—always the back. By the rear door stood an old stump, its roots dried to iron, a long crack down its face glittering dully with copper and silver pressed deep into the wood. We pay the toll. Dunmarr and Ren each wedged a silver piece into the crack and slapped the stump, and the party did the same, and they slipped out through the western gate into the grey.
Past the rough farmsteads behind their crooked palisades the forest began with a margin of hacked stumps, the ring of axes and a distant shouting somewhere off west, and then the conifer dark closed over them—hilly, choked with deadfall, the trails such as they were winding around boulders, every footfall swallowed into deep beds of dead pine needles. The two guides walked it like a garden path.
A few hours in came the first old webs, and Ren passed out the lotus—tuck it between gum and lip, suck on it, it works better that way. By five miles the wood had changed entirely: enormous sheets of silk strung thirty feet up between the trees, sparkling where the daylight caught them, remarkably strong to the touch and faintly luminous within, a thing that might have been beautiful to a man not already carrying the first of the weight. For it came down on them there, at five miles, a heaviness that stole the enthusiasm out of speech and made the smallest decision feel enormous. It settled on all of them but Iodas, who walked on untouched.
What the forest keeps
At six miles Dunmarr stopped at the sign of blood and a drag-trail leaving the path, and Aeltrin went with Ren to look. The trail widened into a web-choked hollow hung with cocooned shapes—forest animals long since drained, and one man, set upright against a trunk at the back, dead perhaps a season, desiccated, dressed like a wanderer or a hedge-priest. Aeltrin cut him down enough to search: a leather purse heavy with sixty gold, a cheap holy symbol of Xathoqqua at his throat, and against his chest an oiled-hide roll holding a small kit of religious oddments and a case of two scrolls—both magical, both ecclesiastical, which meant the shaman could put them to use—and two stoppered vials of a light amber liquid that was no poison Aeltrin knew and nothing like their antivenom. They came back to Iodas's impatience—we have a pool to find—and Wulfweard, walking, made the scrolls out to be Cure Light Wounds and Speak with Dead. He's been dead a while, someone observed of the priest. No current news there.
Following Golnai's star-chart bearing, Dunmarr cut east of the silkies' usual route and brought them down into a dell that smelled old and organic, not quite rot. Dozens of nooses hung from the branches, swaying on a wind no one could feel, and beneath them no bodies at all—and around them an abandoned camp: three moss-grown lean-tos, a fire-ring gone green and cold, personal effects half-swallowed by the forest floor. Four or five men by the gear, Dunmarr judged, low and quiet, and not one of them had walked out. The weight does terrible things this deep, he said; some men find their way out from under it, and it happens more often than the city would believe. They stopped there to eat and dose lotus, over Iodas's objection—even the barbarian's impatience giving way at last to the shaman's good sense.
It was Ren who found the pack on a hook inside one of the lean-tos, hung there as if it were meant to be found: forty feet of good silk rope, a whetstone, an unfinished letter whose hand degraded across its pages to a single last legible line—the weight doesn't leave when you stop walking—a generous cache of dried lotus, eight more doses' worth, and a small charm, a knuckle of bone scrimshawed with a spiral and worn smooth by long handling. Frakki knew it at once for a folk-sorcery fetish, the kind a hedge-witch crafts as a keep-safe against the dark, and pocketed it, and said a quiet word over whatever souls had left such a gift behind them.
At ten miles, up a switchbacked ridge that Dunmarr believed marked the furthest any man had gone, the weight broke over them a second time, and with only the lotus to lean on they all went under it. For Frakki and Aeltrin it was a second failure, and the thing turned personal: intrusive thoughts of specific losses, weeping held barely in check, a visible and grinding distress that would cost them in any fight until the trees were behind them. Wulfweard had buckled only the once. Iodas, alone of them, still walked clean.
Madmen and a widow
Near eleven miles a crack of wood and a sudden eruption of angry shouting carried through the trees, fifty yards ahead and to the left. Dunmarr would not split the group; he pushed them all forward, the shaman and the barbarian to the rear, and they came out at a clearing lit by a single shaft of daylight where a great pine had fallen long ago. Four silkies were in the act of killing one another. Two lay already dead in the needles. Two more were locked in a murderous, feral struggle. And a third sat against a tree with his hands clamped over his ears, rocking, saying no, no, no.
Dunmarr broke from cover shouting the man's name—Breck—and the names of the two fighters, and they stopped, and turned, and came straight for him with their weapons up and a madness in their eyes past any description. Aeltrin opened from the treeline and the party cut them down in a brief, ugly flurry of bolts and arrows before either reached the guide—a shaft through the throat dropping one at Dunmarr's very feet, Wulfweard's and Frakki's finding the other where he fell. Dunmarr forced lotus into Breck's mouth and the panic drained slowly out of him into the depths of a lotus trip, and in pieces he told it: a run gone wrong, a man taken by a widow after a hard chase, the second lotus-carrier's bag torn open in the running and the supply lost—and then the weight closing over the four of them with nothing left to hold it off, until they turned on each other. Frakki let the man hold the spiral bone charm and told him to trace it for calm, and for what luck it might carry him out of the wood.
The rustle came from overhead—a dark shape dropping fast on a line of silk—and both guides shouted it at once. Widow. Iodas' wariness kept the party from being caught flat, but the fight ran sour with bad luck, arrow after arrow skating off the giant black widow's chitinous hide and ricocheting up into the dark of the canopy; even Dunmarr's bowshot fumbled wide and shamed him. It was Iodas who ended it—a clean strike and then the kill, his bastard sword buried half to the hilt through the thing's face, the blade shuddering in his hands as the spider collapsed kicking and dead. In the chaos Breck had bolted, crashing off through the wood and gone—going the right way, at least, though Dunmarr would not chase a man making that much noise with every widow in a half-mile listening for it. Aeltrin worked two doses of venom from the dead spider into his vials, an unnatural luminous green, most of the rest ruined by the killing stroke.
The pool
With the last of the daylight Dunmarr pressed harder than he had all day, stopping only to read the chart and the trees. They descended a final dell; where monstrous webs had once blanketed the branches, now they sagged under the weight of ravens and crows, as if the forest had traded one infestation for another. Every black head turned as one to follow their passing, and the silence they kept had a pressure to it, like something listening back through them. Dunmarr shuddered visibly and walked on. At the bottom the treeline simply ended. A pool, perhaps thirty feet across, lay inky and tar-still—nothing reflected from its surface though light fell through the gap in the canopy—ringed by thousands of silent birds. It was as Golnai and Photios had both described it.
"I believe this is what you came for." The party counted out the guides' day-wage, fifteen each from the recovered coin, and Dunmarr and Ren turned and were gone back through the treeline the instant the gold touched their palms. The party stood alone with the crows and the black water.
The weight, by then, was past bearing, and at the pool's edge it made its last argument. This time only Frakki went under it, gripped by a compulsion to stay, to sit, to do nothing at all, even as he stood already ankle-deep in the water. The others waded in beside him. For a long minute nothing happened. Then a brief sensation of falling.
They came to standing in shallow water, in a pool identical to the one they had left—but the sky above was not night. It was absent: a flat, lightless black with no stars, no moon, no horizon, no source anywhere. The air hung warm and dead-still, without sound or smell. Cracked volcanic rock ran out in every direction, strewn with twisted leafless trees no taller than a man and a dry thorn-brush that crumbled at the touch. Nothing had lived in this place for a very long time. And the moment they arrived, the weight was simply gone—every man returned to himself.
Rising from the water's edge beside them stood a desiccated vine as thick as a ship's mainmast, bone-dry, climbing some eighty feet and more to a shimmering oval of dim light far overhead—the underside of the pool, seen from below—with iron brackets driven into the dead wood in a tight corkscrew, a stair. Someone built it. Someone needed to leave. And out across the dead ground, a hundred yards off atop a low hillock, stood a short squat building with a single low red glow bleeding from its entrance.
The vault. They had found their way in. The way out, they suspected already, would cost more than the way in had.
Next: the party crosses the dead ground, and learns what Kós Athar set apart from use.
