The Auction and the Name
The morning came up grey on the Toke Inn. The carriage was at the door.
Perfinerf was on the box.
Inside the carriage, the Mephisto Twins no longer looked like themselves. High-elf Waterdhavian nobles, clean and composed, dressed for the floor.
Sir Gertz sat across from them, dressed in finery, giddy as a child. He was not piloting Sir Gertz. None of you said so out loud.
KeYs left on foot with Falkor above her, planning to come in around the side.
The road took the rest of you south.
The rain came down in sheets.
Lightning showed you a clearing once, then twice. In the second clearing — a chain devil. Ten or twelve feet, steaming, chains hanging like the gutters of a house in a storm. Patrolling.
Oriana said the Shadowvar had hired the Society of the Veil to keep the peace tonight. AC knew the order. He'd worked alongside them once, in another country.
Two more chain devils were posted at the gates.
They nodded the carriage through.
"You may pass."
Inside the palisade was a shimmering wall of force that swallowed the rain in waves of rainbow. You walked through it and came out the other side dry, brushed, as if you'd never been outside. Moist came through and went grape-raisin for a long moment before catching himself.
The courtyard was lit by five great copper braziers. Goblins fed them with deadfall.
At the side of the courtyard, on a heap of cushions and crushed grass, sat the Heiress.
Massive. Sleeping with her eyes half-open. Festering. A glowing blue medallion hung at her throat.
A goblin had got too close to her bulk. He was dead under her arm. She had not noticed.
You worked the room.
King Grol the bugbear stood in the open with his lackeys, here for the weapons.
A drow in a wide-brimmed hat with a feather in it and an eyepatch sauntered up, bowed low, exchanged courtesies with the bugbear king. Backup-bidder.
A peal of thunder dropped a lightning bolt in the courtyard that resolved into an ancient blue Dragon coming down on the ruined Castle's roof.
The man who climbed off the Dragon was helmeted, armored, elven. He wave-cast himself down through the globe and dried in the air, and the murmur went around: Alondriel. Alondriel. Alondriel of the Dessarin.
Moist looked at the floor.
A Shadowvar in red-and-grey robes stepped between Alondriel and the goblin he'd grabbed by the scruff. "My Lord — remember the pact."
Alondriel let the goblin go. He handed the long-sword over instead.
The Shadowvar held it up. It caught the brazier-light too bright.
Adamantium.
King Grol weighed it in his hand and you could see him decide yes.
A vulture-headed figure in robes crossed the courtyard.
Ubys's heart fell out of his chest.
"That's a Nagpa," he said. "Lessie — please don't bump into him."
The Nagpa walked over to a man in fine clothes — moustache, three-piece suit — and you all recognized him.
The Engineer. From the road outside Lodestone, the night you killed his zombies and he came out of the dark to ask you, with great courtesy, what you intended to do about his property.
He and the Nagpa walked off into the ruins to talk.
Two rooms of broken stone away, you could just hear them.
The Whispering Reed — yes, the Engineer had brought it. Yes, the Nagpa would take it.
The Sepulchral Lexicon — yes, that too was for sale. The Engineer wanted that one.
Ubys thought back. The Whispering Reed was sermons to a Great Old One. A crocodile in a far black river that ate stranded souls. The kind of book whose name you do not say.
You filed back into the courtyard.
Lessie watched the Twins watching the Heiress.
The Twins were not watching the auction.
The Twins were watching the medallion.
The auction began.
The Whispering Reed.
The Shadowvar bid hard. They had wanted the Dragon Egg (which had not come; you knew why, you didn't say so). They pivoted to the Reed.
Mythrades outbid them. Past 150,000. And then past again. And then — not loudly — he made it clear that he was not to be outbid further.
The Shadowvar let the Reed go.
The Adamantium contract.
King Grol bid. The drow bid. The two of them spoke quietly. The drow withdrew, smiling.
King Grol won the contract. Alondriel's blue Dragon came down to the roof, scooped him up, and flew.
Sir Gertz was led up next. Still smiling. Still vacant.
The Heiress bid for him.
The Shadowvar pushed her up to 220,000 gold.
The Heiress paid.
She wanted Sir Gertz because Sir Gertz, deep under his charm, knew the way to the Tomb of Orcus.
While the Heiress was bidding, KeYs was at the back of the room with one of the Shadowvar.
He gave a name, eventually. "You can call me Greyden."
He looked at the medallion at the Heiress's throat.
"That," he said, "is a key. The kind of key that opens bindings. The kind of bindings, if you believe the old stories, that hold Ser Vindictus in the Tomb of Orcus. Maybe she wears the key. Maybe that is why she wants the directions to the Tomb so very badly."
KeYs asked what he wanted. What the Shadowvar wanted.
Greyden said: "How a whole culture, a whole world, was destroyed — and not one of its souls passed through your mistress."
He named the place. Bedegar Keep. The Fortress of Memories. Blighted in its last days. Gone now.
He said he would pay very well for an answer.
KeYs said she would think about it.
The last lot was the Sepulchral Lexicon.
It was not the scroll. It was a map to the scroll's last known place.
The Engineer paid for it without looking up from the bidding sheet. He took it to a flat stone at the edge of the courtyard, sat down with a candle, and started reading like a man whose hair was on fire.
The Society of the Veil began to pack their chains for the road.
One of them, on the way past, looked at AC and nodded.
He nodded back.
The auction was over.
Sir Gertz was about to be taken into the back of the castle to be opened up for what he knew.
You moved.
AC cast Disguise Self and became Sir Gertz. Ubys's Sprite carried an Invisibility-by-touch from forty feet up. The two of you pulled the real Sir Gertz out of the chair and into the Twins' carriage in less than a heartbeat. The Twins, being paid, were already leaving.
Twin-AC walked toward the Heiress.
She and the Nagpa called him over.
"Draw the map," the Heiress said in a wet voice. "Here in the dirt. Show us the Tomb."
AC took the stick and started drawing a keep. Buildings around it. Something blue at the heart of it. Riffing off something Greyden had said in the back of the room about a Fortress of Memories, AC half-remembered a silhouette he'd seen in a previous life and put it on the ground.
Across the courtyard, the Engineer's head came up off his book.
"Glory be — yes — I have figured it out — we are this close." He stood up. He came over.
He looked down at the map AC was drawing.
He cocked his head.
He said: *"This isn't right. This is where it all began."*
He looked up at Sir Gertz holding the stick, and his eyes squeezed small.
"How do you know this location?"
The Nagpa looked at AC. The Nagpa raised a hand.
Anti-magic shell.
AC's disguise dropped.
The Engineer stared at AC for a long beat.
He said: "You're that well-boy from that little village. Crowley. Bakersfield. You'd know better than me."
And in AC's head — everything came back.
The Engineer was looking at the holy symbol around AC's neck.
"We're missing the godspark of the egg," he said, looking sidelong at the Heiress. "But we have a godspark — around his neck."
Initiative.
The Engineer was the first to move. Anti-magic shell, then gone. He did not stay for the fight.
The Heiress did stay. From where she sat, she raised four Spawns of Orcus out of the dirt — bloated, worm-skinned, dirt-caked. One on AC. One on Lessie. One on KeYs. One on Moist. She spewed necrotic in a wide circle, and where her spew touched skin, the worms went in.
The Nagpa Cone-of-Cold-ed the open courtyard.
Lessie went down. Crowley went down. Moist went down.
Three death-saves, three holds.
KeYs and Falkor went in on the Heiress and did not stop.
The Heiress took two hundred points of bite-and-spell-and-claw and fell.
The Spawns died after her.
The Nagpa Misty-Stepped out of melee, halfway across the courtyard.
He did not see Ubys's Sprite sitting forty feet above his head.
The Sprite shot him with a tiny longbow for one point of damage.
The Sprite's tiny arrows have a tiny shortbow's trick.
The Nagpa failed his save and fell asleep.
In the rain, in the smoke, with three of you on the floor and the Heiress face-down across her own cushions, Mythrades the Nagpa lay unconscious in the dirt.
AC walked over. He stripped the Nagpa of every ring, every chain, every loose thread that could be a focus. He gagged him. He bound his hands.
"This ain't my first magic rodeo."
You stabilized everyone who'd gone down. Everyone came back.
You took the hoard.
The Heiress had twelve thousand six hundred gold pieces' worth of magic stacked up against her cushions, and you went around the table six times, one per person, until everything was gone.
Moist took Pipes of Haunting and a +2 Great Sword and Hunger of Hadar on a scroll. KeYs took a Bag of Holding, the Staff of Python, an Orb of Chaotic Assault. Ubys took an Elemental Gem and Armor of Resistance and a +2 Scimitar. AC took the Iron Bands of Binding (for the Nagpa), the Cape of the Mountebank, and a sixth-level Wind Walk scroll he handed to one of you. Dhuxtyn took the Cloak of Protection and a +2 Mace and a Pumpkin Bomb. Lessie took the Sea Witch's Amulet (for the Nagpa, also).
You stood under the brazier-light and looked at the unconscious vulture in the mud.
The carriage was outside the gate. Sir Gertz was in it, still smiling, still wrong.
The road home would be long.
You sat down to talk about what to do next.
Sir Titus would want the Nagpa for trial. AC wanted him for himself. Ubys wanted his memories. Moist wanted his parents, first, in Alondriel's dungeon. Lessie wanted the Blight off her village.
Ubys cast Divination. He asked how to get back to the Shadowfell.
The answer was for tomorrow.
Next session: what the gods say back, and what to do with a Nagpa in a sack.