Monday 27th December 356 AC - continued

Leaving the foul, disease-ridden rooms behind we made our way back to the side passage we had passed by earlier. The tunnel led gradually down and a soft light could be seen ever more clearly as we moved along. Given the likelihood that light could mean a present enemy, left behind perhaps to guard an item of import but difficult to move, we shuttered our lanterns and continued with due caution, led by those in our party gifted with better-than-human sight. Nedlog took position at the head of the line and while she was unable to expose any mundane traps, the lady Ulani did sense and disarm a magical one.

After what felt like an age of fumbling quietly through the dark corridor we came at last to the cavern at its end. There are more vats of strange liquid here along with a great many treasures including a spell book – noted by an excited Ulani. In the centre of the hall, near the high ceiling, hung a large glowing orb – the source of the light. It hung there unmoving without the aid of ropes or cables, almost seeming to 'bob' slightly as if it were floating on a gentle sea. Sir Dominic tossed a pebble at the orb and it simply bounced off with a glassy 'clink' sound and sent its glowing mass drifting slightly away. Nedlog, her curiosity too great, set about trying to catch the orb under a blanket.

While we pondered the nature of the radiant ball the Qualinesti elf, Azshauna, gathered up the trinkets scattered about and attempted to use her magicks to identify any that might be of special interest. Sadly magic proved to be as reliable as most of my brother knights believe it to be and we turned at Azshauna's rather unladylike to see a small cloud of purple smoke. The cloud 'fizzed' slightly before whizzing randomly around the room and finishing its flight by crashing into poor Starsong's face. The Plainswoman seemed to be unharmed if somewhat bewildered, indeed she promptly sat down in a puddle of unknown liquid and began eating one of her pouches, but the mages assured assured us the effect was temporary.

Suddenly two of the vats were thrown aside, spraying their contents all about, and from behind them leapt six oversized, skeletal men. When I say skeletal I do not mean to give the impression that they had been underfed or malnourished – no, these were indeed men who had been reduced to mere bones and then reanimated by heinous rites. Each stood at least seven feet tall and brandished a wicked looking weapon, I am certain that had they possessed lips, they would have been curled in a snarl.

Undaunted, Sir Dominic stepped forward boldly and shone the Light of Paladine upon them, sending them fleeing back to whatever hole they had appeared from. The Kender scampered after them to find all six cowering in a small, previously hidden room filled with arms and armour.

As Nedlog 'helpfully' pushed her recently captured orb at us, we moved forward to slay the abominations. The first kills went to the Silvan mage as to missiles of white-hot energy flew by our heads, exploding in the chest cavities of two of the foes. Brother Ithariel succeeded in slaying another two with blows of his mace while Sir Dominic and I failed to land a single useful hit. Ulani eventually saved us from our shameful encounter and slew the final two horrors. This was the first time I had fought the unliving and indeed, a sword is a poor weapon to choose when your foe has no flesh to pierce. It is, however, a sad day when two Knights of the Sword are outdone on the battlefield by a priest and a wizard only recently rescued from imprisonment. Remembering the words of my old tutor, Sir Hallam, I searched the collected weapons for a good mace, lest we face another skeletal foe and we prepared to leave.

Nedlog, of course, refused to leave her new orb behind and Starsong was still seated lazily in a pool of the milky, fishy 'soup' that had been spilled out of the vats. We gathered her up and proceeded back to the lift.

The enemy complex fully explored we were ready to leave but Sir Dominic insisted that one task remained. While the rest of us returned to the surface he made his way to the lowest level to put an end to the troll's miserable existence. We were all quite curious to know how he would escape the lift shaft once he had slain and burned its power source so he instructed us to take a length of rope and secure one end to a heavy weight, casting the other end over a beam and down to him. Sir Dominic is a brave and noble warrior but his strategies do have a habit of turning against him. We did as he asked, finding a pile of logs to use as a counterweight and once he had tied the rope about his waist we heaved the heap into the shaft.

And so the story of Sir Dominic di Caela; defender of the defenceless; slayer of ogre, troll and undead beast, was very nearly brought to an end as he crashed into the stack of logs halfway up the shaft. Mercifully he had tied the rope quite securely about him and he arrived at the top, battered and bruised but alive.

We left our friend to tend to his wounds and nurse his bruised ego and went to the grizzly task of burning the bodies on the upper level before moving out of the tunnel to make camp for the night.

A long day behind us, we set a watch and slept around Nedlog's orb – enjoying its soothing warmth.

Into the depths

Monday 27^th December 356 AC

At the advice of our priest and mages we moved away from the ominous door once we had expressed our Yuletide thanks to the Gods, in case the environment was inhibiting their recovery of magical energies. We returned to our camp at the head of the pass and rested there for a day and two nights.

Upon returning to the tunnel and the iron door we resumed our attempts to gain entry. Sir Dominic attacked it physically with youthful exuberance (despite repeated warnings) and was rewarded with a chipped sword and jarred joints. The lady Azshauna, seeing that he is not to be reasoned with, muttered some unintelligible words and clapped her hands soundly together – a moment later we found ourselves the other side of the steel entrance.

The cavern we appeared in was utterly silent and had the stench of death about it.

Apparently the magical barrier was dispelled by our entry so we lifted the bar and opened the gate to encourage some fresher air through this fetid place. The design of the doors, opening in rather than out, immediately suggests that they were put in place to prevent exit rather than entry. This is curious on many levels but particularly as the locking bar and mounts would have had to be deliberately moved to the inside for their current configuration. Evidently this complex was not being used as its original purpose intended, perhaps the magical barrier was a necessary addition to the defences reflecting this fact. Sir Eurig may be able to shed more light on the mysterious design of the fortifications here as that is something of a hobby of his, I must remember to ask him when next we meet.

Around the small cavern we found a dozen or so corpses, heaped unceremoniously about. Bodies of men, goblins, draconians and other races lay about – all dressed in the livery of the Dragon Armies. The most conspicuous similarity in their appearance was in fact the omission of the Green. Red, Black, Blue and White were all represented among the dead but minions of the Green Dragon Armies were nowhere to be found. The presence of so many different regiments was indeed quizzical, also unnerving, as the agents of the Dark Gods rarely like to work together and thus far found casualties have tended to be of the same hue.

Since transporting us there Azshauna had been scouring the area for evidence of our enemies and had found tracks in the dirt (those that Sir Dominic and I had not trampled in investigating the entrance). According to her trained elven eyes a great many individuals had recently moved through this passage. There were traces of human, goblin, draconian and even a few ogre feet making their way out of this tunnel. It suggested an exodus but perhaps a 'redeployment of troops' would be the more appropriate term, as this was most likely the staging area for the recent assaults on the local populace.

Quiet until that point, Ulani suddenly announced that she knew this place, that she had been brought here daily during her internment. Somewhere within this rabbit warren of tunnels we would find the great metallic pillar she had been forced to energise and perhaps we might even find a clue as to its purpose.

Following the most obvious tunnel to its limit we discovered a cage, not unlike those found at the loading areas of Hargoth's docks. To one side there were four levers – marked 'one', 'two', 'three' and the uppermost marked with a red dot. We boarded the cage at Nedlog's insistence, barely having time to discuss our course of action before the mischievous rogue pulled the third lever and slammed the gate shut. It is fortunate that my kender companion also had the foresight to tie a tether to the 'return' lever (at least, what we presumed to be so) as we could have otherwise been required to endure a long and difficult climb to ensure our escape. Nedlog is a singularly intelligent kender, often thinking ahead and in ways that others would struggle to comprehend – I do, however, wish that she would sometimes take a moment to explain her plans before she acts on them. To this day I cannot even fathom where she found nearly a hundred feet of coarse yarn.

With a low groan the cage slowly made its way to the bottom of the shaft, where we were greeted by a sorry sight indeed. The groans we had heard were not the sounds of old ropes and pulleys under tension but were, in fact, the tortured moans of a large troll, bound up in ropes and chains to provide the 'engine' for the lift system. The dock engineers of Hargoth are known to use strong horses and oxen to power their cargo lifts but if I found a work animal in a state such as this I would have the Harbour Master's head. The pitiful wretch was bruised and cut, even missing a leg, and it simply stared blankly ahead – the light of even primitive intelligence long since gone from its eyes. Trolls are known to the knights for their regenerative capabilities, so I cannot imagine what torturous magicks were employed to keep the beast in its broken state. Evidently the enemy that resided here saw no further use for their broken troll once they had fled, content to leave it here to die. It says something, does it not, about the nature of our enemy when their deeds can cause a good knight to feel compassion for a creature of such base evil as a troll.

Heart-breaking as it was, we were forced to leave the beast in place until we discerned the purpose of this complex.

Ulani was unfamiliar with the cells and cages on this level so we made our way back to the lift and pulled the lever marked 'two'.

This level was instantly recognisable to the Silvan mage so we investigated it thoroughly. There were a great many rooms of differing size, almost all containing altars pledged to the Skull-faced God and most holding broken shelves and scattered debris. Indeed, the entire level appeared to have been hit by a tornado, it seems that the dragon army forces decided to leave in a great hurry and tried to destroy whatever they could not carry out. Eventually we found the room with the metal pillar. It was a massive thing, smoothed to perfection and reaching from floor to ceiling as if it ran from the very base of the mountain all the way to its peak.

Brother Ithariel suggested that we spend some time gathering what paperwork lay about in the hope that something crucial had been left intact. There was evidence that the foul clerics had been experimenting here and we soon pieced together the focus of their research. They had been experimenting on Paladins.

What the end goal was we could not be certain of but the suggestion was made that these agents of the Dark Queen could have been trying to create Her own unholy warriors, Certainly since the Gods turned their gaze back to the mortals of Krynn Paladine's Chosen Warriors have been a beacon of light in the darkness for honest folk, not to mention a constant thorn in Her wretched side. I can see why the forces of the enemy would want to replicate the power they bring to the battlefield. Full details of our discoveries have been included in my report to my superiors for if we are right – a great threat could be on the horizon.

Among the scraps we also found notes from the foul Scranti. An ogre war-band had been sent to Starsong's village (for what purpose we could not discover) but they failed to return. When a second band was dispatched they could find no sign of either the original invaders or even the village itself. If the young Plainswoman hoped to find clues to the fate of her people here she hid her disappointment well, for all she found were more questions.

We continued exploring, finding in one room two large vats of acid with steel ropes running to the metal pillar. They look like what the gnomes of Nevermind call 'batteries', though I cannot recall their purpose. In another room I noticed a large glass case with a Plainsman inside, he had been cut in half down his centre line and preserved in some kind of clear jelly. Starsong recognised him as a resident of a neighbouring village.

With apparently nothing left to discover here we set about breaking the altars and consecrating the area.

By this time we were in need of a break, both physically and emotionally, so we returned to the surface to eat and rest a while. After a short lunch duty called us back inside the mountain.

We decided to clear the bodies in the entranceway before venturing back into the underground layers of the complex and made a rough count as we piled them ready for burning. There were almost one hundred corpses there of many different races. Only the humans and goblins among them wore any armour and even that was rare, what emblems we found marked them as troops of the dragon armies. It instils a certain uneasiness to think that our enemy can wantonly slaughter so many of their own men – what secret do they possess to make them so certain of victory.

Even the servants of evil deserve a chance at redemption, in the next life if not this one, so prayers were said over them before we made our way back to the one remaining unexplored level.

Here we found ourselves in a corridor of many cells, though comfortable ones. The air was dry and the straw in them seemed fresh. We continued past them to find a passage leading downhill with one tunnel leading off it and a Y junction after around five hundred yards.

Down one branch of the junction we could barely perceive a low, indefinable 'hum' while the other was marked by a distinct odour. We chose the second path and after sixty or so yards we greeted by a large collection of rat trappers' cages, with dozens, if not hundreds, of rat tracks in the dust. Not much further along there was an open cavern and a bridge seemingly leading to a blank wall on the other side. Far below the bridge was a living sea of rats, swarming over each other like maggots and stirring up the stench of rotting flesh. We retreated in disgust and investigated the other passage, which terminated in a sealed metal door. The hum we had heard was much louder here and obviously the source lay the other side of the door so Nedlog produced a set of tools and set to work on the lock. Mere moments later the door lay open, revealing a second door and a curious security measure. With a “hmm” and an “uh huh” and a bit of stroking her non-existent beard Nedlog finally announced that the second door could be opened only when the first door was closed. Sir Dominic immediately volunteered to investigate and Nedlog's curiosity would not permit her to remain behind so they stepped inside and closed the outer door.

Within the 'hum' proved in fact to be the buzz of thousands of fleas, which directly set about biting and nipping my companions' exposed flesh. Through the swarm Sir Dominic could see a net and also the bones of human children – picked clean by the insects. Cursing our foe, Sir Dominic set the room ablaze with a flask of Ergothan Fire and escaped the vile place.