Chapter 20 - Part 9

Orphan ducked his head back around the corner. “It seems as if there are thousands of demons out there,” he said. “They are dancing, talking, feasting, but there is no sound. Then they disappear.”

“Illusions,” Ois said, working on the lock over the grate. “The fiends remind themselves of their glories. According to a manuscript I studied, the illusion gets more powerful the closer we get to the center of the city. At some point our clothing will pick up on the spell and begin to assume the look of demonic fashions of millennia ago.”

“Where did you find a manuscript about this place?” Delegado asked. His arrow was at the ready and his feet were braced for possible attack, but his tone towards the changeling paladin was soft.

“The Argentum,” she said. “I assume that you’ve heard of them. They’ve hired agents from your House enough times.”

“I’ve heard of them,” he said. “I’ve refused to work for them, and my House wanted me for other things anyway. I am surprised to find you working for them, they aren’t exactly...” The half-orc considered his words carefully. “They don’t seem concerned with the law as much as a paladin would be.”

“I don’t work for them,” she said, finally getting the lock open. She began to poke the wire around the grate edges, checking for mechanical traps. “I don’t think very much of them, either. They are too free with justifications. The only political group I belong to is the Chalice of Blood, a group that you might have thought of joining.”

“It sounds like a Karrnath group rather than a Thrane one,” Orphan observed. He felt tense, like a tight spring. Too much needed to go right for there to be a prayer of success, and too many things could go wrong.

“It is a group of nonhuman Silver Flame worshippers that uses peaceful, political, nonviolent means to advance nonhumans in the church ranks,” Ois explained, running the wire on the other edge of the grate. “The prevalence of humans within the church is only due to history and geography, not a flaw in church doctrine.”

“How did a manuscript on this city exist?” Delegado asked.

“Coutal bards sung down the walls millennia ago, before the demons rebuilt them,” Ois said. “In the long wars between dragon and fiend, the coutals had the greatest magical power, and thus delivered and took the greatest casualties. According to the author of the document, which has been translated many times over, copied many more times than that, and damaged extensively by erosion, a coutal bard had a familiar who survived long enough to tell another animal of its kind. That animal became the familiar for another coutal wizard, who wrote down a scrap of parchment that survived long enough to make its way to Xen’drik, before that land was shattered. An explorer found a rubbing of the parchment on a wall of tiles in a submerged cave. Morgrave University acquired the tile for its collection, and an agent of Phiarlan stole the tile from them for the Argentum.” She finished poking the wire and then put it away. “I need help getting this up,” she said.

Orphan and Delegado picked up the heavy grate, trying to keep it from scraping too loudly. From the dust and grit that fell, the grate had not been moved in centuries. Orphan held the grate on its edge, ready to drop it back into place.

Delegado was the first to jump into the sewer, and his boots landed in thick dust. He scanned both ways down the pipe. “Clear,” he called up softly.

“Go,” Orphan said to Ois. “Make sure that you have a sunrod activated since unlike bugbears neither you nor I have darkvision.”

“Delegado wants to let it go, but you don’t,” she said. “Interesting.” She dropped down into the sewer and activated a sunrod.

Orphan shook his head and lowered himself into a sitting position. Delegado grabbed his legs so that Orphan could drop the grate back into place as he entered the sewers.

“Alright,” Orphan said, once they were in the sewer line together. “What’s you mark telling you?”

“The sewer hasn’t been used for centuries if not millennia,” Delegado said. “So it’s had little if any maintenance. The line connects with another that leads to a plaza beneath the central tower. There the sewer line has been collapsed, so we’ll have to surface and enter through a hidden door.”

“You can tell that there’s a hidden door from here?” Orphan asked.

“Yeah, but my sense of things goes dead beyond that,” Delegado said. “That tower has plenty of magical shields still in place left over from who knows how long ago. In any event the mark’s effect will elapse by then.”

“And there’s no traps or obstacles between here and there?” Orphan asked.

“Not as of five seconds ago when I used the mark,” Delegado said. “There’s an open shaft we can jump across and two tight spots, but other than that we have a clear run.”

“Can your greater dragonmark find guards?” Ois asked.

Delegado shook his head. “Only static things, obstacles and traps and the like. But given how deserted the place is, I suspect we’ll find scavengers, not guards.”

“How long is the walk?” Orphan asked.

“An hour if we move at a normal pace, double that if we move carefully and quietly,” Delegado answered. “And the dragonmark’s effect ends in a little over an hour and a-half from now.”

“We split the difference,” Orphan said. “That way we keep the dragonmark’s effects as much as possible while minimizing detection. Lead the way, Delegado.”