The mood in the room was serious as the party began to gear up. They were going to make their first foray into Castle Korvosa, and who knew what they would find there. Erin tightened the straps on her breastplate as Wren quietly called upon Pharasma to Bless their efforts. But Nat was fairly bouncing on his toes. “Oh man! We’re going to clobber that stupid Bloatmage! He’ll never know what hit him!” Nat’s was still pumped from his encounter with the dragon the day before. “I’ll bet we kill him with one shot, right? Don’t you think? Wham, bam, bye-bye man!” Erin gave an exasperated sigh and refused to make eye contact. Jax grumbled something under his breath. Finally Tomas turned to Nat. “You ever wonder what it was that forced that dragon to submit to the Queen? Maybe it was this guy.” Nat’s enthusiasm flagged just a little, and he began to add his own protective spells to the party’s mix.
By the time everyone was done, Nat’s Arcane Sight was getting dizzy from all
the magical auras. Stoneskin and Greater Invisibility on Erin. Bull’s Strength on Tomas and Invisibility on Wren. Haste and Bless on everyone. Mind Blank
and Nondetection on Nat. Everyone
pulled on their Red Mantis masks and activated their See Invisibility (as much to keep track of each other as to spot
any invisible enemies). When everyone was ready, Wren cast Silence on Erin. Then Nat cast one more glance down at Neolandus’s
sketches of the Castle, and used his Silent
Spell metamagic ability to Teleport them
all into the Bloatmage’s room.
Or not. “Shit! This can’t be right!” Nat thought in panic as he looked
around at the unfamiliar surroundings. He’d scryed the Bloatmage’s room earlier,
and knew they should be popping into a messy bedroom. Instead, they were in a
small square room, devoid of furnishings. Everyone was looking around in
confusion, totally bewildered about where they were or what had just happened,
but the Silence spell prevented them
from communicating. Nat looked around frantically, trying to get his bearings.
He thought he’d studied those sketches so carefully! Where had he gone wrong?
He scanned his surroundings: a flight of stairs leading down, and beside them a
short hall ending in another flight leading up. A closed door to his right,
another behind him, and a hall that looked like it led to another small room to
his left. He scrunched his eyes closed and tried to recall the seneschal’s
maps. When he opened them, everyone was staring at him. “OK – I think I know where we are,” he said (although no one could
hear him, and they weren’t all that adept at reading lips). He grabbed Erin by
the arm and led her down the hall to their left. As he’d hoped, it led to an
even smaller area, a parlor of sorts with a couple of chairs and a cupboard
full of candles. There was a closed door to their right (the northeast, if he
had his bearings right), and another short hall looked like it opened into a
much larger room (the mess hall for the Castle’s guards, he hoped). He pointed
Erin at the closed door, then pointed at it. “He’s in there!” he mouthed to the others, gesturing emphatically.
He prayed he was right.
The party once again arrayed themselves
in attack positions. Nat moved to the side, and waited for Erin to kick down
the door. Instead, she opened it very cautiously, hoping to catch whoever was inside
by surprise. Unfortunately, as soon as the door opened, the magical Silence flooded into the room. This was
indeed the room they were targeting: a well-appointed bedroom now cluttered
with discarded and rotting scraps of food. The stink of spoiled food and body
odor filled the air. A hugely obese man sat at a desk near the center of the
room, just as Nat had last seen him, and he spun to stare at the door as the
ear-popping Silence descended, and
struggled to his feet.
Tomas, standing behind Erin, sent a
stream of arrows into the room, sinking them deep into the Bloatmage’s rolls of
fat. Togomor let out a silent scream, and staggered backwards … out of the
range of the Silence. They saw him
snap his fingers, then cast a spell. And suddenly, it wasn’t Silent anymore. They weren’t invisible,
They were moving more slowly. All of their carefully prepared magical
protections vanished and the Mage’s
Disjunction nullified them. Nat even saw some of their magical weapons and
wands lose their auras, and began to frantically inventory his own collection.
But before he could get very far, the Bloatmage cast another spell, and everyone cried out in agony as a Horrid Wilting sucked all the moisture
out of their bodies, causing their flesh to wither and crack.
Jax slipped past Erin, into the room,
and blasted Togomor with a Lightning Bolt.
Nat followed him in, still checking his bundle of rods and wands. Thankfully,
his Maximized metamagic rod was still
glowing, so he cast a Maximized,
Empowered Orb of Light and flung it at the Bloatmage. As he blinked away
the afterimage, he saw the corpulent caster crumble to the floor. “One shot
kill!” he cried out (overlooking the five shots from Tomas and the hefty
electrical damage from Jax), but then something slashed at his neck. He spun
and saw an imp that had suddenly appeared beside him, waving its stinger at
him. Like his master, this imp was hugely fat, and its tiny wings looked like
they should be incapable of keeping it aloft. Erin and Jax charged at the
newcomer, but it flitted this way and that, avoiding their swings. Wren cast Destruction on the devilish creature,
provoking a squeak of agony, then Nat hammered it with a volley of Intensified Magic Missiles. The imp literally
exploded, spraying everyone in the vicinity with globs of yellowish fat.
Back in the hallway, Tomas had his bow
drawn and pointed at the hall that led (they thought) to the mess hall. As the Silence spell had ended, he’d heard
raucous singing coming from that direction, along with other strange sounds:
deep bubbling noises, crackling flames, and distant howls of agony. Shadow
heard it, too, and decided that whatever was in there, he didn’t want it coming
out here. He cast a Wall of Force to
block the hallway, and the sounds were cut off. He glanced at Tomas, to make
sure he knew what he’d done, but the ranger seemed to be lost in thought,
staring off into space. “You OK?” Shadow asked. Tomas seemed to come back to
himself; he shook his head as if to clear it, then gave Shadow a curt nod.
In the Bloatmage’s room, the party began
to strip off his magical items and search the room. “Is our stuff ruined for
good?” Wren asked worriedly; her mace seemed much more unwieldy than it had
been before. But Nat shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said (and Wren didn’t
like hearing the word ‘think’ in that
sentence). “All our spells should come back after a few minutes.” He didn’t say
how many ‘a few’ might be.
The room was paneled in rich walnut, and
Nat now pointed to a panel above the bed. “There's magic behind there,” he said.
Sure enough, Jax found a hidden catch that caused the panel to swing open.
Inside were several thick books, a number of magical scrolls, and folios full
of loose parchment notes and maps. Nat’s eyes lit up as he saw the books, and
he thumbed through them to confirm that they were Togomor’s spellbooks. But
almost every page – of the spellbooks as well as the other notes – were covered
with drawings. Some were crude scrawls or doodles while others were careful
studies, but all depicted the same subject: a leech-like creature with three
heads on one end. “What do you think this
is?” asked Shadow, holding up a treatise on hemotheurgy that was covered with a
picture of the creature.
Nat shuddered. “I’m not sure, but I’ve
heard of something that looks kind of like that. A Belier Devil.”
“Oh great – another devil,” Jax groaned,
but Nat shook his head.
“No … this isn’t just ‘another devil’.
They’re really nasty, and pretty far up the chain of command. You know – down there.”
Tomas interrupted their discussion as he
poked his head back into the room. “We’ve got company out here, and we need to
get a move on before they realize we’re here. Which way to the Throne Room?” Now
that they knew where they were, they were able to use Neolandus’s memorized
maps to navigate. They retraced their steps to the room where they’d mistakenly
teleported into, then took the stairs up, to the Castle’s scriptorium. Nat
verified there was no magic laying around unattended, and they continued up again.
They came out in a storage room full of chairs, then found their way out into
the Castle’s art gallery. The walls were decorated with stucco frescoes, lined
with portraits of former monarchs, but all the portraits had been magically
defaced: warts, oversized noses, missing teeth, and other childish doodles. One
particularly fine painting of King Eodred II (signed, they noted, by Trinia
Sabor) had been slashed to ribbons.
Exiting the art gallery, they found
themselves in a narrow hall. Tomas pointed to their right: “That leads to the
entrance hall from the outside stair. I can’t believe it’s not guarded. We need
to circle around.” Heading left, they found a small cloakroom, with a door
leading into the vast interior of the Epochal Tower. Broad stairs circled up
and down around its perimeter, but that wasn’t where they wanted to go. Jax
cautiously peered around the corner from the opening into the Tower. As
expected, he was looking into the Ballroom. A raised stage was to one side,
flanked by halls leading farther into the tower. The ceiling was open to the
floor above, surrounded by a marble balustrade. Beyond it was a room he
remembered: the antechamber they’d passed through on their way to return the
stolen brooch to Queen Ileosa so many months ago.
There was no sign of danger, and he gave
everyone a thumbs-up. As if on cue, their magical enhancements (well, at least
a few of them) returned as the Mage’s
Disjunction finally expired. They wasted no time renewing many that had
worn off: Haste, several Greater Invisibilities, and Wren cast a Prayer.
Tomas and Jax, protected by
invisibility, led the way into the ballroom. As they entered the anteroom, they
could see one of the Nessian Warhounds Nat had seen in his scrying standing
watch at the entrance to the Throne Room. They crept stealthily forward, but as
they did, the beast dropped into a predatory crouch, a growl like the sound of a
rolling boulder rumbling from its chest, echoed by another growl from
farther inside the room; apparently they could not mask their scent.
Tomas loosened his grip on his bow,
ready to throw it to the ground. Leaving Korvosa seemed the only viable option.
If he left now, he’d save himself, the others be damned. But then his brother’s
face seemed to appear before him, his expression angry. ‘You could not save me,’ Jarent seemed to be saying, ‘but you can save my city!’ With a howl
of fury and grief, Tomas raised his bow and arrows filled the air. The first
seemed like a sure hit, but somehow struck the wall several feet to the Queen’s
left. None of the others missed. One by one, arrow after arrow sank to the
fletching in Queen Ileosa’s soft flesh. Her face showed no sign of pain, but as
the last arrow struck, she suddenly froze, motionless as a statue. She held
like that for a moment, and then her features turned red as she began to
swiftly melt away, into a spreading pool of blood.
There had been one other person in the
room. From where he stood, Jax had seen a woman standing in the far corner of
the Throne Room, opposite Ileosa. She wore a Vudrani sari, and there was
something oddly familiar about her features. She’d been just beginning to cast a
spell when the green fog of the Stinking
Cloud hid her from view. Jax wasn’t sure if she’d been caught in the spell
or not, but he couldn’t waste time worrying about it. He stabbed the Gray
Maiden in front of him, and she fell with a whimper, then he spun and slashed
the other one confronting Erin.
From somewhere inside the Stinking Cloud there was a sudden
crackle of electricity, as Shadow unleashed an electrical Fireball into the mix. It was immediately followed by a blast of
flame coming out of the cloud. The Gray Maiden in front of Erin fell, and Erin
was singed, but Jax managed to Evade the
fire. A moment later, one of the Warhounds emerged from the Cloud, smoke still
rising from its jaws. Two of its mates struggled out of the Stinking Cloud, hacking up whatever they’d
eaten for breakfast.
Tomas fired at the latest targets; the
Warhound charging Erin skidded to a stop at her feet, dead, and Tomas sent the
last of his arrows into one of the sickened ones. Erin leaped over the hound’s
body and charged its helpless companion, hacking at it. Nat had moved to the
entrance to the Throne Room, but the roiling vapors of his magical cloud hid
all possible targets from view.
Wren wanted to stay out of reach if
possible, so she activated the new Winged
Boots she’d liberated from Sabina Merrin, and began to Air Walk, coming to a stop above the doors leading into the
anteroom from outside. No sooner had she done so than they flew open, and
another pair of palace guards rushed in to join the fracas. They dashed beneath
her, unawares, and assaulted Tomas. As they did, another cloud of magical
vapors appeared, this one in the anteroom. The mist was thin, and did nothing
to obscure vision, but its effect on the mind was another thing. Most of them
shook it off with no ill effects, but Tomas found his head spinning, unable to
think clearly. “Shit! Mind Fog!” Nat
thought as he saw the befuddled-looking archer, but there was nothing he could
do about it now.
Jax figured his friends could handle a
couple of Gray Maidens, so he headed into the Throne Room, skirting the Stinking Cloud to make sure there was no
threat from the opposite side. He came into a reception room, with a long
dining table. There was a closed door to one side, but still no sign of the
spellcaster he’d first seen. He had a bad feeling about this.
The PCs earned 12,800 XP, putting them
at 457,102 XP with 600,000 required for Level 16.
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