The Cracked Wooden Mask, Act III

Sea Day, Cancer 10th, 576 CÆ, Year of the Tiger

Back in the pump house, Cormac heard voices from the courtyard. Wulfweard looked through the door gap: a buccaneer named Goss stood over two dead men in black. The dead men had mirror-polished masks and hands tattooed solid black from wrist to fingertip — Ebon Hands, out of Fazzuum. Goss had killed them opportunistically for their equipment. He recognized Cormac from prior guild associations. Goss confirmed the dead men were Ebon Hands, advised the party to drop whatever had brought them here, kept the masks, and let them go. Cormac said he hadn't known Old Kethros had attracted attention from that far away.

Cormac led the party through the slums south of the Bullworks to a tenement. Courtyard gate, dead well, a creaking staircase. At the top, a door with a seashell nailed to it. Cormac knocked three times and spoke at the gap. The door opened.

The man inside was tall and stooped, a Cimmerian — long-faced, spare. He looked at the party without warmth and at Cormac with something past betrayal. He asked: "Has my time come?" Cormac told him to hear the party out. His name, as Cormac eventually supplied, was Drakon. Whatever Old Kethros had been, Drakon was what remained.

Drakon listened without interrupting. When Wulfweard named the Ebon Hands and Fazzuum, Drakon confirmed: Kopharnos, his former student. Ixian, ambitious. Dismissed eleven years prior for taking what hadn't been offered. Long enough to hire outside killers and import them from the far end of the known world.

Drakon explained the situation. A Vrethan was sealed beneath the cistern by Atlantean stonework that was already failing when he found it. His ritual, performed each new moon, maintained the seal through the mechanism of his continued survival. Tonight was the new moon. He needed to perform it and could not survive the night without help.

He gave Wulfweard a smooth gray stone. Two charges. Command word: Keph — the name he had used for Kopharnos when the boy was young enough to be corrected. Effect: a radius of complete silence, dropping all sound in the area, including incantations. He had always disliked the thing. He gave it without ceremony. In exchange he offered to identify whatever items the party recovered, and told them, unprompted, that Kopharnos would be at Ortolo's building — the only structure in the area with Atlantean foundations, which Kopharnos would have sought out.

The Casting was starting as they returned to the Bullworks — Saturnalia's third night, when Port Zangerios opens the animal cages in earnest. Cormac noted it was safer to be inside a building. They were standing in front of Ortolo's.

Ortolo was locking up. He recognized Wulfweard. When asked who was renting his upper rooms, his face went pale. He produced a key to the back entrance, said he had never seen the party, instructed them not to burn the building down, and left at near-running speed into the festival crowds.

Wulfweard climbed the exterior to the upper balcony and cast fog across the terrace. The others went in through the back. At the upper landing, the stone was invoked: Keph. All sound in the area stopped. In the silence, a hand axe thrown across the room hit the guard in the chest. Liturga knocked him unconscious with a punch.

Kopharnos was on the floor above, writing at his desk in Ixian script. He sensed the party by peripheral awareness, turned, raised his hands to cast — nothing happened. Rathar's lasso took his arms. He went face-first onto the floor, was gagged, bound, and propped against the wall. When the silence expired he could produce only muffled sounds. Wulfweard examined the writing on his desk — dense Ixian script, unreadable to anyone present.

When pressed about the upper chamber and warned not to call out, Kopharnos called out anyway. A name, short. From above: stone moving on stone, then something large on the stairs. He began to laugh. Ligotorix's mace ended it.

With Kopharnos dead the binding on whatever was above broke. The creature came to the stairwell, then opted for the wall instead — punched through and dropped into the street below. The sounds it made were immediately absorbed into the noise of the Casting.

The locked cabinet took Wulfweard twenty minutes and an Alarm enchantment. Inside: Kopharnos's spellbook, two unread scrolls, a letter of credit for 200 gp at the dockmaster's exchange, rubies, carved jade, a ring taken from a dead man. The alchemical equipment downstairs was worth carrying.

They found Cormac on the street. Kopharnos was dead. His creature was loose in the city. Drakon was already heading to the cistern. Valeria had not yet been told anything.