The Silver Pyramid

Chapter 11, Episode 1

Part One: The Marsh

A month is a long time to spend in a swamp.

The Ring Islands sit where the Twilight Marsh empties into the Moon Sea, a labyrinth of fog and reed and still dark water. The mist never quite lifts. The lizardfolk keep to their end of the estuary, and the refugees of Phlan keep to theirs, and a mutual, wordless agreement hangs between them like the damp in the air. The Bondclaw had offered what the city-states of the Moon Sea would not: a place to set down and breathe, and the reasonable expectation that no one would come to move them on.

It was not, by any measure, comfortable. But it was safe, and in the weeks since the fall of Phlan, safe had become the only currency that mattered.

Lord Hector had organised the camp the way Lord Hector organised everything: with efficiency, with discipline, and with a bluntness that inspired compliance rather than loyalty. The same qualities that had made him a divisive ruler from the Cinnabar Throne served him well enough in a military camp on a misty island. The fires were tended. The watches were kept. The stores were rationed and tracked. And the mood, which had burned so fiercely in the first days after the escape, had cooled over those weeks into something harder to name. Not despair. Not quite. More like the particular exhaustion of people who have been waiting long enough to begin wondering whether waiting is all there is.

Three voices inside Phlan gave them reason to believe otherwise. Captain Giselle Greycastle was keeping what remained of the Blackfist alive in the city's shadows. Gleveth had turned the Welcomers into an underground network, moving information and people through the occupied streets. And the Lord Sage of Mantor's Library had not, as the dragon and its cult would have preferred, gone quietly to ground. Communication with all three was difficult, and dangerous, and fragile in the way that all clandestine things are fragile. But it existed. And that was enough, for now.

The adventuring companies came and went, drawn by the notion of dragon-slaying and put off by the reality of the odds. The mercenary attachés kept their presence in camp and kept their ears open for any sign of Hector's intentions. In total, across the island and the occupied city both, there were fewer than sixty fighters who could be counted on for anything. It was not nearly enough to take back Phlan. Not yet.

It was into this stalled and waiting camp that Kastra Brandywine arrived.

Part Two: Mountain Laurel

She was exactly as they remembered her: small, cheerful, ink-stained in the way of someone who had spent a great deal of time around Mantor's Library and very little time worrying about her clothing. Pug's direct supervisor. Alive, somehow, against all sensible probability.

Lord Hector's war tent was sober in every sense. No alcohol. No ornamentation beyond the crests of Phlan and the Blackfist above the entrance. A round table. A map. Water and juice in plain pitchers, because Hector did not believe in loosening one's thinking before important conversations.

Kastra got straight to it. The Lord Sage had learned something, she said, about the cult's activities beyond Phlan's walls. The dragon's occupation had placed the library under a kind of magical curfew, and the Lord Sage could not risk sending anything through the ether. But there were ways. There were always ways, if you were willing to spend the social capital of the Welcomers and the allied soldiers still loyal enough to man certain walls on certain nights. The Lord Sage wanted to meet with them. Tonight. Midnight. Denlor's Tower.

She placed a crystal shard on the table. There was a door in the outer face of the tower, where it extended beyond the city wall. The shard would reveal it. The password would open it. Mountain Laurel.

Hector offered what the camp could spare, which was not much: healing potions, a pair of antidotes against the marsh's habit of delivering snakebite to anyone who forgot to look where they were walking, torches, rations. Jaag, on a stroke of instinct, took himself to the equipment stores and ran his eye over what was on offer. In a basket of ordinary arrows, stuck in among shafts that had clearly seen better days, he found two that had not. Perfectly fletched. Perfectly sharp. Glinting as though they'd been made that morning. He picked them up, turned them over in his hands, and called Kei across to look. They were magical, clearly, though what school of magic and what they actually did was a matter for later. Kei took the enchantment arrow, blunt-tipped and cylindrical. Jaag took the transmutation one. A nominal payment of ten gold changed hands in a transaction that both parties privately regarded as more gesture than economics.

They waited for dark, and then they went.

The rocky berm between Phlan's walls was gloomy and overgrown, the scrub brush and trailing ivy muffling their footsteps in the thin light. The guards on the Lyceum's battlements either didn't see them or chose not to. A diversion somewhere on the city side of the wall — the Welcomers earning their name — kept that stretch clear and quiet.

The crystal shard bloomed white and pale blue in Tiz's hand as they approached the tower's outer face. The light spread, tracing the outline of a door in the stone: ornate, precise, completely invisible until the shard showed you where to look. The stone inside the outline faded. A heavy wooden door, iron-banded, brass-knockered, waited at the top of three steps.

Mountain Laurel.

The door swung open. A young man in dark grey blinked at them from the threshold and ushered them in with the urgency of someone who had been told to expect them an hour ago and was quietly pleased they had arrived. His name was Kral. He offered tea, or ale, and led them into a warm kitchen heated by stones that gave off no smoke.

They didn't have to wait long. The Lord Sage joined them from a back door: an old man, fine-boned and tired-looking, with a cough that had clearly become a permanent feature rather than an ailment to be cured. His eyes were sharp in the way that only accumulated knowledge produces. Behind him, reclining against the wall of the room with the ease of someone utterly accustomed to owning whatever space she occupied, was a second figure in a dark cloak, face hidden, a glass of wine in one hand.

None of them looked at her too closely.

The Lord Sage did not stand on ceremony. He thanked them for coming, settled into his chair, and began to speak about an island on the northern Moon Sea.

Part Three: The Man Who Talked to Fish

Yarish, the Lord Sage explained, was a transmutation archmage who had been part of Phlan's history for longer than most people realised. He had built a pyramid on the island to the north, along the Storgenau, and devoted himself to experimentation with the living things that surrounded him. Flora. Fauna. Water. The wild and patient mechanics of natural life. Some of what he created had been extraordinary. Much of it had been reckless. For years, the waters around Sorcerer's Isle had run corrupted, poisonous to anything that swam through them, and the creatures that lived nearby had changed in ways that made them dangerous to the expanding population of Phlan. Trees grew wrong. Animals behaved badly.

Wren O'The Blade had led a company to the pyramid to ask Yarish to stop. They had not been able to ask. They had been forced to kill him instead.

Most of the damage had been repaired or contained, the Lord Sage said. Most. Some things proved permanent. The library had kept a watch on the site in the years since, maintaining the kind of quiet vigilance that is the business of institutions that understand what it means to let something go unwatched.

Then the dragon had taken Phlan. And the magic had been silenced. And no one had been to the island in months.

The corruption was spreading again.

He paused to let that settle. Trees growing upside down, roots in the air, branches in the earth. Fish swimming through open air as though the sky were a sea of their own. The alterations were stranger than anything in Yarish's time, faster, more severe. And the cult, which appeared to have learned about the pyramid from sources the Lord Sage was still trying to identify, had dispatched a party to investigate it.

He looked around the table.

He needed them to go to Yarish's Pyramid, prevent the cult from succeeding, and retrieve whatever research they could before it fell into enemy hands. A straightforward mission, he said, in the way that people say things are straightforward when they know perfectly well they aren't.

He mentioned, almost as a postscript, that the pyramid's interior was known to be a large and confusing maze, one that appeared to reconfigure itself as you moved through it. He mentioned, rather more quietly, that every group known to have explored it since Wren's time had never returned.

It was at this point that the cloaked figure at the back of the room stood up.

She moved the way some people move when they have learned, over a very long time, exactly how much space they occupy in other people's attention. Her cloak came down. Her name came with it.

Welsea Parenthe. Viper of the Zhentarim.

Her voice was low. Unhurried. Each word placed where it would do the most work. She moved around the table as she spoke, and the room changed in the subtle way that rooms change when someone walking through them is exerting a quality of attention so concentrated it functions like physical pressure.

Petra didn't feel it. Jaag didn't feel it. The others did.

Kei caught a glimpse of fangs when she smiled. Jaag noticed the mirror on the far wall, which showed the Lord Sage at his table and the empty room beyond, and no reflection of the woman walking through it.

He said the word out loud.

Vampire.

Welsea smiled at him. She asked, pleasantly, whether something as simple as what she was would really stand between them and the obstruction of the cult's consolidation of power.

Jaag conceded the point, in principle, while also noting that she had his companions under some kind of influence, and he would like to know why a vampire was asking them to walk into a corrupted magical pyramid. She told him she had lost contact with her agent. That she could use their skills. That it was, as she put it, killing two birds with one stone.

Tiz, from somewhere inside a state of warm and uncritical regard for Welsea Parenthe, cast Calm Emotions on the room.

The charm broke. Lavinia went from swooning to reaching for her sword in approximately one heartbeat. Kei went from entranced to the particular expression of someone who is furious at themselves for having been susceptible at all. The Lord Sage placed his hand on the table and said, firmly, that they did not have time for this.

Petra asked him, quietly, whether he was acting of his own volition.

He was. His eyes were clear. He had, as far as she could read, the quality of a man who had made a considered decision rather than one who had been pressed into service.

They let Welsea continue.

Part Four: The Ring

The Zhentarim, she explained, had an agent already embedded in the cult's expedition to the pyramid. His name was Thylren Saj. He was one of her best. He was also, she admitted with what might have been fondness or might have been professional resignation, a risk-taker.

He had been sending intelligence through a one-way sending ring, which meant the Zhentarim could receive his messages but could not reply. He had gone quiet.

What she needed from them, on top of what the Lord Sage needed:

Find the cult's party. Rendezvous with Thylren. If he had been exposed or killed, retrieve his ring before the cult worked out what it was. If the source of the new aberrations could be identified, the Black Network wanted it stopped. And if any specimens of the altered creatures could be brought back, her organisation would value them.

She reached into a pouch at her belt and threw a solid lump of platinum onto the table. A base of one thousand gold on their return, she said, rising depending on what they brought back.

Jaag pointed out that one thousand gold was not worth their lives at this particular stage of proceedings, and asked about half up front. Welsea looked at him the way you look at something mildly interesting that has just made a noise. The Lord Sage put his head in his hands. Welsea said, in a tone that closed the matter entirely, that the offer was to be accepted or not.

Jaag looked back at the party. They were no help. He turned around and accepted the platinum.

The Lord Sage unrolled a map and described two routes to Sorcerer's Isle. The western farmstead route: four days by horse, then river transport from a farmer who had made, he said dryly, a good living ferrying doomed adventurers to the island. The eastern route through Kabel'ss Hill: faster, more dangerous. Cult forces and their orc garrisons had occupied every significant hub village along the river. Kabel'ss Hill among them. But the Zhentarim had agents there who could arrange passage upriver.

The cult's party had already left, the Lord Sage added, taking the overland route.

They chose Kabel'ss Hill.

Lavinia left her spider familiar invisible in the kitchen as they were ushered toward the tunnels. She recalled it ten minutes later, as they moved through the underground corridors beneath Phlan with Cassit guiding the way. The spider reported that the Lord Sage had addressed it directly. He had said, apparently to a spider he could somehow sense crouching invisible in his kitchen, that he hoped Lavinia's master and their friends would take things somewhat more seriously than they had taken the briefing.

The party rode through the remainder of the night and all the next day, staying under the eaves of the forest and clear of the road. The road was not empty. In the darkness, the sounds of armoured movement carried through the trees: hooves, wheels, the metallic ring of soldiers moving south toward Phlan. Jaag, on first watch, sat still and heard Draconic carried on the night air. Words he couldn't make out. A language he recognised. He thought about moving closer to the road, to listen. But that would mean leaving the camp unwatched, and so he sat, and listened to what he could, and noted it.

He rolled a four on his perception check.

A very large owl descended through the branches toward the end of his watch and turned, in the way that owls very seldom do, into Serenola the Whisperer. She settled on the branch above the sleeping Petra and waited until Petra's eyes opened.

She told them what was ahead: the village occupied, the Burning Banner orc company keeping order with the kind of discipline that Verthak, their half-dragon commander, enforced through means that went beyond the polite implications of the word questioned. A keelboat captain named Cel, a friend to Phlan, would take them upriver. His nephew would meet them at the northern gate, just after sundown.

Then she was an owl again, and remained so until dawn.

Part Five: The Arbitus

Kabel'ss Hill at dusk. The Burning Banner shields at the gate, the same insignia they had encountered before. Two of the orcs assigned to keep watch had drunk themselves unconscious and lay beside their overturned jugs with an air of professional commitment to their unconsciousness. Through the palisade, chimney smoke and firelight and the muffled roar of a tavern in full swing. The Leaky Bucket was apparently untroubled by occupation.

A small boy in a red cloak appeared at the northern sally port at the appointed time, holding his cloak up on a staff and waving it until he was sure they had seen him. Riek. He moved quickly and quietly, keeping to the inside of the palisade wall, past the snoring gate guards, down through the shadows toward the river.

The Arbitus was a keelboat, longer than most river craft, shallow-drafted, built for cargo. The ribbed netting along her side gave easy purchase to anyone willing to wade through cold water in the dark. They climbed aboard one by one, mostly silently, in the way of people who have learned what silence costs when you're out of it.

James Cel met them on deck. Weathered, practical, the kind of riverman who has spent a lifetime learning which risks are worth taking and which aren't. He moved them below quickly. The hold smelled comprehensively of fish. You get used to it, he said, without conviction.

He briefed them while they found spots among the barrels and nets and hooks. Verthak commanded the Burning Banner, the river's orc garrison, and everything that moved on the water. Every vessel logged its voyages. Every deviation was questioned. He would return before dawn and they would depart on the early light. He disappeared back into the village, and they settled in for the night.

Lavinia put death wards on the people who needed them. Tiz cast Aid before they had left the village, adding five hit points to several members of the party in the manner of someone who had learned to do this proactively. Watches were assigned. Jaag took the deck for the first hours of darkness, while the others slept in shifts in the cramped hammock room.

Around the middle of the night, there was a changing of the guard on the dock platform. Jaag watched it from the rail without incident. The Leaky Bucket was still audible until well past the point where anyone with good sense would have gone to bed.

Cel returned just before dawn and went quietly to work on deck. Below, they heard him moving, heard the sounds of the boat preparing to depart. And then they heard another voice.

Part Six: Search the Boat

Kei understood Orcish. He caught enough of it through the planking above their heads: a challenge about an unauthorised shortfall, a brief exchange in Common between Cel and whoever commanded the boarding party, and then, in Orcish, the order that made them all very still.

Search the boat.

Boots on the stair. Two orcs descending, methodical and unhurried, the confident movement of soldiers who have done this before.

Lavinia cast Minor Illusion. The entrance to the hammock room became a wall. Five people pressed themselves into the bow's narrow dark and breathed as quietly as possible while the orcs worked through the hold, kicking barrels, stabbing tarps, poking their blades into rolled nets. One barrel was knocked loose. It rolled across the planking, passed directly through the illusion as though the wall didn't exist, and collided with the party.

The spell broke. Both orcs snarled.

Jaag's rapier took the first one in the belly as he came down the stairs, thirty-one points of damage, cold threading through the wound. Kei put an arrow into the same orc's chest from the shadows, leaving him barely standing and bleeding hard. Above deck, they could hear Cel's longsword ring against something larger. A voice called down from above: I knew you were a traitor.

Lavinia ran up the stairs. She knocked the orc at the top of the stair unconscious with Soul Ripper, choosing not to kill because an unconscious orc might still be useful. Then she looked up and saw, at the far end of the deck, a half-dragon in brown and forest green scale armour, each plate catching the thin dawn light with a sharp metallic glint. She hit him twice, twenty-one to hit, nineteen points of damage. Nice armour, she said.

Petra came up the stairs into her rage and drove a Stasis Strike into Verthak, twenty-five to hit, sixteen damage on contact. The wisdom save to restrain him didn't hold, but two further strikes landed across his guard for another thirteen points of damage. He absorbed it the way heavy things absorb heavy things.

Tiz moved up the stairs and attempted to drive a Guiding Bolt through the melee at the half-dragon. The first fizzled. The second went exactly where she aimed, which was unfortunately not at Verthak but into Lavinia's back, the combatants above obscuring her line. Seventeen points of divine light detonated between Lavinia's shoulder blades. The banishment held. Lavinia turned, took in Tiz's expression of absolute horror, and offered her a brief smile before turning back to the fight. A glowing aura clung to her now, guidance that would give the next attacker to strike her an advantage they very much did not deserve.

Cel went in with his longsword. Verthak caught his wrist and twisted, and the sword came loose and clattered away across the deck.

Jaag came up the last of the stairs. He placed himself at Verthak's flank, applied his rapier to the half-dragon's side for twenty-eight points of damage plus cold, and then used Fancy Footwork to disengage before Verthak could bring his reach weapon around. No opportunity attack. Verthak grunted out his question about how many vermin were hiding in the hold. Jaag gave him his answer: a raised middle finger.

The session closed with Verthak bloodied but standing, Cel disarmed, the party distributed between the hold and the deck, one unconscious orc below, one dead, and the dawn light still thin on the river.

Loose Ends

The unconscious orc may still be useful. A face-down body below deck is one thing; a living orc, properly managed, might yet open a door or two.

Thylren Saj has not sent word. Whether that means he is deep under cover or something worse, there is no way to know until they reach the pyramid.

The Lord Sage addressed Lavinia's invisible spider directly, in a room he had no reason to think was being observed. He is not simply a scholar.

Welsea Parenthe wants specimens. She wants the ring. She wants the source of the aberrations contained. Lavinia is certain these objectives serve some end of her own that she has not disclosed. She is probably right.

The cult's party is on the overland route. The river is faster. They may yet arrive at Sorcerer's Isle first.

And somewhere to the north, on an island that has spent centuries slowly returning to something like normal, fish are swimming through the air, and trees are putting their roots where their branches used to be.