The rain started in the night and it was still going in the morning, the kind that doesn’t mean to stop. Bancroft heard it on the shutters before he was properly awake. He lay there a while and listened to it and thought, without any heat in the thought, that they were going to go down into the ground anyway, and the ground did not care what the sky was doing.
Down in the common room of the Strumpet the day was already going sideways. Clarice sat near the fire in a torn outfit, and a bald man with a listing eye was leaning in close over the rip, telling her he could fix it for her if she liked. He did not mean the mending. You could hear which part of the offer he cared about in the way he said it, and see it in the way he kept his eye on the tear and not on her face. He had the manner of a lout who’d worked out that let me fix that for you got him nearer a woman than asking plainly ever would, and who thought himself clever for the trick, and was wrong about that the way he was wrong about most things. Bolo came out from behind the bar and shooed him off. “Alister! Go on, get. You don’t even pay money here.” The man shuffled away in no hurry, grinning back over his shoulder the whole way. “Sorry, miss,” Bolo said. “That’s the village idiot.” Bancroft said nothing. Every town he had lived in had the one – the man at the fence offering the women help they hadn’t asked for and didn’t want, sure to his bones he was the only one who could see what he was really after, and always the last to know that everyone could.
Anister was at a table with a pile of linen scraps and a sack of charcoal he had bought off the general store, building himself a mask. They were going back to the room that took your breath away – the choking room, the one full of bad air – and Anister had it in his head that a few layers of cloth with charcoal packed between them would let him breathe in there. Bancroft thought it was a fool’s errand and also thought, watching him fold and pack and tie, that Anister was the kind of fool who was usually right.
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“If anyone’s going to make it in smells, it’s going to be him,” Anister said, which was true. He worked at it most of the evening before and a while that morning, layering the linen over the charcoal and binding it at the edges, and when he was done he had a thing that looked like a bandit’s bandana and smelled like a cold hearth. He called it an air filter. Clarice called it a face diaper. The name stuck.
Anister Intelligence check to craft the filter mask, herbalism/bushcraft advantage: 19. ~5 silver in materials, half a day's work.
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He paid for it in sleep. He’d sat up past a sensible hour to get it finished, and in the morning he was yawning into his hand and slow to find his feet.
Anister Constitution check the next morning: 8. Up too late at the workbench -- sleepy, but the mask got made.
Clarice, for her part, had decided to mend the rip herself rather than pay the general store for needle and thread and then pay someone who knew how to use them. She was a noble, before Helix, and noblewomen spent their time in needlework as often as not. Everyone needs clothes, Bancroft figured; some just have more embroidery than others. So he’d have bet on her closing a torn seam without much trouble. He’d have lost the bet.
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She took it up to her room so as not to make a fool of herself in the common room, which Bancroft thought was the sensible part of a plan that had no other sensible parts. When she came back down the rip was bigger than it had started, ringed with a little crown of holes where she’d driven the needle through too many times. She kept tugging the hem straight and finding it no straighter, holding the cloth up to the firelight and turning it and frowning, picking at the thread as if she could shame it into lying flat. Nobody else could see a thing wrong with the shirt. He let her have the sulk anyway. People are entitled to be upset by the small ruin of a thing they tried to fix themselves.
Clarice Dexterity check to mend the tear, disadvantage: 8. Failure -- the hole closes and tears wider, ringed now with too many needle-holes.
When the matter of the day’s hire came up, Willow came in dripping. He was a spearman they’d taken on before, a steady enough fellow, and the rain had soaked him to the bone before he was through the door. Two gold for the day. They paid him. Then it came to who would lead, which they decided every morning now the only way that ever seemed fair to them: by luck, and the favor of whatever god happened to be looking that way.
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They settled it the way they always settled it, which is the one openly daft custom Bancroft has given up fighting: they rolled for it. Real dice, cast on the common-room table, the high number giving the orders until sundown. This morning the high number came up Anister. “Well, sir,” Willow said to him, “what should we do? You’re clearly the leader of this group” – and so he was, until tomorrow’s roll, when it might as easily fall to Clarice, or to Bancroft, or to nobody a sane man would follow into a hole. Anister took the job the way you take whatever the dice deal you, without arguing. There is no arguing with dice.
Day-leader initiative -- Anister 21, Clarice 19, Bancroft 13, Irulan 7. Anister takes the lead for the day.
The walk out was wet and the sky was the color of a wet slate. There was talk, as there always is, of going somewhere they had no business going – a shrine off in the corner of the place with a skull mask over the door and a warning carved plain enough that even Bancroft’s reading could make it out: do not go back. Clarice wanted to look at it. Clarice always wants to look at the thing with the warning on it. Anister talked her down, and they kept to the part of the barrows they knew, and dropped the rope ladder down into the dark.
Willow took a torch. Bancroft told him to. He knew well enough what it means to hand the torch to the man at the front – the torch is the first thing a thing in the dark goes for – and he liked Willow and gave him the torch anyway, because someone had to carry it and Willow was the hired man. Bancroft has thought about that since.
They went down past the broken doors and the gnawed dead, the zombies lying where they had fallen with the small toothmarks all over them, as if something with a child’s mouth had been at them in the dark. Down to a little crypt that Anister knew the way to. Four pedestals in a tight stone room, and on each pedestal a black box of velvet, moldy and webbed, shut up for longer than anyone had been alive.
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Clarice went over the room for traps and found none. Anister, who has read more about monsters than is good for a man, was sure they were mimics – the kind of beast that pretends to be a box until you reach into it – and told them all to hold their breath and listen for it breathing. Bancroft held his breath and listened.
Clarice trap-search, 10 minutes: no traps, no secret doors. Anister: 'mimics breathe -- hold your breath and listen.'
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What he heard was one of the boxes burp. Just the one, the nearest. A wet little sound out of a thing that had no business making any sound at all. “Oh, dear,” Bancroft said, which was all he had.
Bancroft listen check: 2. Hears one of the boxes -- the nearest -- give a low burp.
It was not a mimic. Clarice grabbed the burping box and ran round the corner with it, giggling like a girl half her age, and when she had it open there was no monster inside. There was a glove. A right-handed glove, black, sitting up in the box with a form to it, as if a hand were already in it – and over the two far knuckles, the first finger and the last, two eyes had been stitched into the leather. Demon’s eyes, neat little things, looking up out of the back of the hand.
“That looks fucking dope,” Clarice said. “Can I have it?”
In a cramped stone crypt lit by a single torch, Clarice -- a dark-haired noblewoman in travel-worn finery -- crouches over an open black velvet box on the floor. Inside lies a right-handed black glove standing upright as if worn by an invisible hand, with two stitched demonic eyes over the far knuckles. Her face is delighted; behind her Bancroft in plate and Anister with a longbow look on warily.
Bancroft did not like it. He has a farmer’s distrust of pretty things found in the dark in boxes that breathe. But Clarice had her heart set, and Anister settled the argument his own way.
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He drew his bow – not at her, he was careful to say, at her hand, the one creeping toward the box – and made the slow creak of the string drawing back. “Don’t even think about it.” Then, more plainly: “If you open it and that thing possesses you, we’re cutting you to pieces and leaving you in the woods.” Clarice allowed that this was very quick and very dark, but she left the box alone. They took all four. Irulan carried three, Anister the fourth, and they argued about which of them was the least likely to put the glove on.
Anister draws his bow on Clarice's hand to stop her keeping it loose: 'if that demon-eyed hand possesses you, we're cutting you to pieces and leaving you in the woods.'
That was when the dead came.
Bancroft never saw where they came from. One moment Clarice was sweet-talking a velvet box and the next there were skeletons in the room, five of them, swords already swinging, and everyone was a half-step behind where they should have been. They had been so taken with the boxes that nobody had been watching the dark, and the dark had been watching them.
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The things did not care who was who. Two of them went for Clarice and two for Willow, and not one of them so much as looked at Bancroft, which he has decided not to take personally.
Skeletons surprise the party (init 17). They ignore Bancroft entirely and converge on Clarice and Willow.
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Clarice has no armor to speak of and a noble’s gift for not being where the blade is. Both swords went wide of her.
Two skeletons attack Clarice (AC 11): both miss.
Then Willow went down. They cut the hired man down where he stood, and the torch went out of his hand and rolled and died on the stone, and the room went black.
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It is a bad thing, to lose the light in the middle of a fight, and a worse thing to lose it because the man you handed it to is dead. Bancroft had known, handing Willow the torch that morning, exactly how this could go. Knowing did not help.
Willow killed; the torch drops and gutters out. Light source lost mid-fight.
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Anister did the thing that needed doing. He put his bow down on the stone in the dark, found his flint by feel, found a torch by feel, and tried to make fire with the dead breathing all around him. The first try failed. He dug deeper – there is no other way to say it – and the second try caught, and there was light again.
Anister drops his bow, fails the relight check (needed 12), burns a luck point to succeed -- a torch flares back to life.
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Clarice stabbed at the nearest of them and her dagger skidded off old bone. She is not a fighter. She has never claimed to be.
Clarice stabs the nearest skeleton ('blue'): 7, miss.
And then it was Bancroft’s turn, and Bancroft did the one thing he is for.
He is a plain cleric of a plain god. Sylvanus is the green under the snow and the root under the stone, not a god you’d think had much to say to the walking dead. But the dead are an offense to growing things, and the green god hates them the way a gardener hates rot, and when Bancroft raises the symbol and calls, the god answers.
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He raised his hand and called on the old oak’s roots, and the light that came was not the torch’s. Three of them – four – came apart where they stood, the bone going to powder and the powder going to nothing, dissolving the way frost dissolves when the sun finds it. Only the one out in the dark, where the call didn’t reach, kept its feet. Bancroft stood there with his arm up and his ears ringing and watched the dead unmake themselves, and felt, the way he always feels it, that the power had gone through him and not from him. He is only the pipe the water runs through.
Bancroft Turn Undead: 22. Most of the skeletons -- the ones in the light -- crumble; only the one in the dark resists.
A human cleric in plate armor, Bancroft, stands with one arm raised holding aloft a holy symbol that blazes with green light in a dark stone barrow chamber. All around him skeletons are crumbling to powder and motes, their bones dissolving into nothing. A relit torch burns to one side. His face is set and plain, not triumphant -- a workman doing the work he is for.
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The last one Anister took with an arrow out of the dark, a clean shot for everything the bow had in it, and it dropped in pieces. Two more that had hung back turned and ran, and he let them run.
Anister one-shots the last skeleton (in the dark, NW) with his longbow: max damage. Two survivors flee.
Then it was quiet, and Willow was dead on the floor.
They looted him, because that is what you do, and it is not as cold as it sounds – the dead don’t need a crowbar and the living might. A spear, a dagger, a crowbar. His pay he’d already spent the night before, carousing, which Bancroft was almost glad of. Better the man had a good night with it than that it sat in his purse for someone to count. They couldn’t carry the body up and couldn’t carry much else either. Anister hid a crowbar behind the pedestals against some later need. Then they went up out of the ground into the rain, leaving Willow where he lay, and Bancroft said the few words he knew for a man he had not known well.
Back in Helix the rain had turned to sheets. They came in jingling and furtive with four black boxes and tried to look like they weren’t, and made a worse job of it than the skeletons had made of killing them.
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Everyone walked out calm as you please except Clarice, who leaned over the bar on her way past and told Bolo, in the carrying voice of a woman who has never once had to be quiet, “we have four demon gloves.” Bolo cocked his head, looked at her, looked back down at the glass he was wiping, and decided with his whole body that he was not getting in the middle of that.
Whole party Charisma checks to leave the inn unsuspiciously (needed 9): Clarice rolls 2. She loudly tells Bolo the barkeep, 'we have four demon gloves.'
They took the boxes to Maza. Maza is the closest thing the town has to a man who knows things, a reclusive sort with a sign on his door that says go away and a way of opening it in his bathrobe to tell you the same in person. Anister did the talking, which is best, and offered to pay for the magic, which is what got them through the door at all.
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The old man’s eyes lit purple and he looked the gloves over and told them, flatly, that there was no magic in them. None in the boxes either. They were just gloves – well-made, strange, formed to a hand, with eyes on them, but nothing more than thread and leather. His guess was that the eyes were a sign of belonging. A token you’d show to be known by your own kind. He did not say whose kind, and Bancroft did not love that he didn’t. Then he told them to come back with a book or a scroll next time, something worth a learned man’s afternoon, and shut the door, and grumbled away back up his stairs.
Maza casts Detect Magic on the gloves and boxes (Anister paying): no magic on any of them. His read: the demon-eyes are 'recognition of a membership' -- a faction token.
There was more in what Maza let slip than in what he meant to say. There is a faction down in the barrows that answers to a necromancer. There are the mongrel-folk, the small misshapen things with tentacles where a man has arms, who are mostly the necromancer’s creatures but not all of them. And there was, somewhere in all of it, the girl who had run off with a tablet and never come back, who Maza said was missing and the others half-thought was dead. Bancroft kept the names in his head as best he could. He is no scholar, but he knows that the things a careful man says by accident are usually the truest things he says.
Outside, Clarice could not leave the glove alone. She got a real look at one at last, and found that inside it, holding its shape, was the bones of a hand – somebody’s right hand, cut off and left in the leather. She tipped the bones out onto the ground without a flicker and pulled the glove on. In the palm of it, where you’d never see until you turned the hand over, was a mouth: a fanged maw stitched in silver thread, open and hungry-looking. The eyes on the back, the maw in the palm.
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Nothing happened. She flexed her fingers and waited to be possessed and was not, and pronounced the thing wonderfully soft, and that was that. Each of them took one of the four to carry, against the day they found a door that wanted four right hands to open it. Anister rolled his up tight and tied it round with string, the mouth turned in on itself, so the cursed thing couldn’t lie in his pack all night eating the rest of his gear. It was, Bancroft thought, the first sensible thing any of them had done with the gloves.
Clarice removes the severed skeleton hand, dons the glove: nothing happens. Each PC takes one demon glove.
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And then, just as they were settling, Clarice went still and said one of the eyes had winked at her. Nobody else saw it. Of course nobody else saw it. Bancroft has learned that the things only one person sees are sometimes the truest of all, and sometimes only a tired mind in the dark, and you cannot tell which until much later, if ever.
Everyone Wisdom check: Clarice rolls 2. She swears one of the eyes on her glove winked at her.
She fixed her torn shirt that evening, finally – pulled out the clumsy first try and worked a proper little design over the tear instead, the kind of thing her hands turned out to remember after all – and came down to the common room pleased with herself. Some woman by the fire told her she liked the style. It was a good thing for her to have at the end of a day that had a dead man in it. Small mended things. Bancroft understood the wanting of them.
The next morning was dry, or dry enough, and they had new hands to hire. Three of them, and Bancroft looked them over the way you look over men you might get killed: Gilmox and Bulmox, two torchbearers who would not fight and did not pretend they would, and Rathadune, a man-at-arms with a hand-axe and a shirt of chainmail and the same nervous over-the-shoulder look the other two had. They came as a set. You took all of them or you wondered why. They bought the men torches and a little gear and went back to the hole.
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The ladder was gone – not cut, clawed, hanging in shreds from the lip of the pit. Anister read the marks. Something with claws two inches thick had come up it from below, scraping the stone, and the rope had not survived the climbing. They had gone up and out and north into the rain, where the trail washed away. Whatever they were, they were not down there anymore. Bancroft took what comfort he could from that, which was some.
Anister tracks the shredded rope ladder (advantage): 16. Something with two-inch claws climbed UP and out, then north into the rain.
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Irulan is the strong one. She tied off and lowered them down one at a time, the hired men whining the whole way, and then came down last on the rope herself, swaying and cursing and arriving in one piece. The pillar-rope had held where the ladder hadn’t. Small mercies.
Irulan Strength to rig and lower the party, then climb down last (Dex advantage): all down safe. The remaining pillar-rope held.
Willow was not where they’d left him. Where Willow had been there was a spread of dried blood and some bits and pieces, and Bancroft understood that whatever had come up the ladder, or something like it, had eaten the man they’d left behind. He had said the words over Willow yesterday and he did not have new ones. He kept walking.
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There was a door someone had jammed shut from the far side with a heap of stacked rock. Irulan put her shoulder to it and it gave all at once, the stones spilling and clattering. Beyond it the dark growled like a wolf, and then, off to the north, came the thin sound of a baby crying.
Irulan Strength check forces a jammed door (rocks stacked behind it): 22, it gives in one shove.
It was the mongrel-folk. Bancroft was nearly sure of it. The growl and the crying both – noises made to turn a man around and send him home, made by something that wanted to be left alone more than it wanted a fight. He told the hired men not to worry about it. Small creatures, he said, that live down here and use such tricks to scare folk off. He believed it about three-quarters of the way.
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Two skeletons came up out of the dark toward the torchlight. Clarice had slipped off into the black somewhere ahead, out past the reach of the torches, and Bancroft never saw what came next. He only heard it – the snap of a bowstring he hadn’t known was drawn, and then a hard dry shatter of bone, close by, the sound of a thing coming apart all at once. One of the skeletons was simply gone, scattered across stone he couldn’t see. Out in the dark Clarice started to call something back to them and Anister hissed at her to keep still, and whatever it was she’d meant to say, no one heard it. When she wants to, she is very good at the one thing she is good at.
Clarice (stealthed, surprise round) sneak-attacks a skeleton with her bow out in the dark: 15, shatters it to pieces with one arrow -- the rest of the party hears it but never sees it.
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Anister put an arrow into the second and Clarice put another in after it, and it dropped. That was the whole fight. Two arrows and a sneak in the dark. Bancroft did not have to call on anyone for it, which suited him fine. A fight you win with two arrows and a quiet thief is the best kind there is, and the rarest.
Anister bow vs the second skeleton (green): 9 damage. Clarice finishes it: 3 damage, killed.
Then they came to the room of webs.
It was the one they’d been circling for weeks – the coffin room, the one with the dust full of tentacle-tracks. From the doorway it was a solid grey weight of spider silk, floor to ceiling, so thick you couldn’t see the far wall. Out at the back of it, dim through the webbing, there was a stone slab, and on the slab or near it a shape that might have been a body wrapped in silk.
They argued about how to get in for the better part of an hour, and Bancroft will own that some of the argument was his fault for being so set against the one quick way. You could throw rocks at the webs and clear nothing. You could swing a sack of rocks on a rope and clear it in an hour or two. You could hack it with a blade, which was faster, and Anister tried that.
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He went in swinging and was caught before he’d gone three steps, the webs taking the sword and the shield and the man all together. He took his stimulant, which did nothing. Anister hacked and the hacking only gathered more web onto the blade, and the more he fought the more of him the room had.
Anister wades in sword-and-shield to hack the webs and is immediately tangled. Stimulant ('does nothing'), Foe Bane = 14; Dex to free himself = 11, still stuck.
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Bancroft did not like the ceiling of a room like that. There were spiders in fresh webs, and a man thrashing around blind in them was exactly the kind of noise that brought them down out of the dark onto the back of your neck. He reached for a Shield of Faith to put around himself before it came – and the words went out of him and nothing answered. The prayer guttered like a wet wick. He stood there unwarded, neck prickling, with no shield but the one on his arm. He took it for bad luck at the time. He understands it differently now. The god had not gone quiet on him. The god was telling him there was nothing in that room a shield would save him from – nothing past those webs that meant him any harm at all. It was the truest answer to a prayer he got all day. He only wishes he had heard it as one.
Bancroft tries to cast Shield of Faith on himself, anticipating a spider attack: the spell fails.
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Rathadune grabbed for him and got nowhere. It was Irulan who waded in to the edge of it and hauled them both out by main strength, Anister first and the hired man after, leaving two man-shaped holes in the grey and a great deal of web stuck to everyone. After all that, the room had not given an inch.
Rathadune tries to haul Anister out: rolls 3, fails. Irulan Strength: 22, drags both Anister and Rathadune clear.
It was while they were untangling Anister that the door near Clarice opened, and a thing looked out – red eyes, a tentacle, low to the ground. It rolled something across the floor to her and shut the door. A little ball of human teeth, yellowed, stuck together with something that smelled like a privy.
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Clarice looked at the teeth and the rest of them held their breath, because there is a friend of theirs who went missing down here, a small one, a halfling, and a ball of teeth in the dark is the kind of thing you don’t want the wrong answer to. But these were full-sized teeth. Human. Not hers. Bancroft let his breath out.
A mongrel rolls Clarice a ball of human teeth. The teeth are NOT halfling -- so not Riyou, the missing one.
It was a gift, or a game. The mongrel-folk had helped them once before, in their crooked way, and this was the crooked way again. Clarice – gloved now, the demon-hand on her right – picked the teeth up so she wouldn’t have to touch them, and rolled the ball back through the gap.
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She made an utter hash of it – spiked the thing straight into the ground, caught herself, and curved it into a roll that bounced off one wall and then another and went through the door, where a tentacle reached out and scooped it up like a squid taking a fish. Then a sound came out of the dark that Bancroft can only call the coo of a parrot, and that was the whole of the conversation. He has had stranger talks. Not many.
Clarice rolls the teeth-ball back: Dex fumble, luck roll = two 1s. She spikes it into the floor, recovers, banks it off two walls and through the door; a tentacle scoops it up. A parrot's coo from beyond.
And then Clarice, who had had enough of webs and tentacles and waiting, did the thing Bancroft had been arguing against the whole hour.
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She dipped an arrow in oil and lit it and put it into the webs, and the whole room went up at once – not a fire so much as a single great flash, the way dry web does, a sheet of flame from floor to ceiling and gone almost as fast as it came. Bancroft was around the corner by then. The fire did not touch him. Something else did.
Clarice burns the spider room: lights an oil arrow, Dex = 7 ('good enough'). The whole room flashpapers up in fire.
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He felt it the moment the room caught – a cold drop through the middle of him, a thing gone wrong that had nothing to do with the heat. Like a hand he loved had turned away from him. He didn’t know why. He stood there in the smoke with his skin prickling and the sure feeling that he had just done, or let be done, something his god would not forgive easily.
As the room burns, Bancroft alone feels his soul go cold -- 'Sylvanus goes tsk-tsk-tsk.' He doesn't yet know why.
When the fire had burned itself out the webs were gone, and the room was black and smoking, and Clarice went in and checked it for traps and found none, and they could finally see the back of it.
There was a body on the slab. Burned now, near to bone, in robes that had gone to char – but Bancroft could see what the robes had been, and what the man had held, and the cold in him got colder.
A small smoke-blackened stone burial chamber, webs burned away, walls scorched. On a stone slab lies a charred, near-skeletonized body in the burned remains of clerical robes, both hands clutching a wooden cudgel carved with the face of the Green Man. Above the slab, soot wiped away, a name is cut into the stone. Bancroft, a human cleric in plate, stands at the foot of the slab with his head bowed, stricken. Smoke hangs in the torchlight.
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Anister wiped the soot from the stone above the slab and read out the name. Hildrys Forest Green. And the thing the dead man clutched in both hands was a cudgel, a fine one, with the face of the Green Man cut into it – the green god’s own face, Bancroft’s god, on a weapon laid in the hands of a man who had served him. The body in the burned robes was a cleric of Sylvanus. They had not robbed a tomb. They had burned a priest of the green god in his own grave, and Bancroft had stood by and let it happen, and his god had felt it.
The slab's name, cleared of soot: HILDRYS FOREST GREEN. The cudgel he clutches bears the Green Man -- a holy weapon of Sylvanus.
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The voice came the way it always comes, not in words exactly, more in the way the ground tells you a frost is coming. Do not abuse my gifts, mortal. His hands would be slow to the work now – everything he called for would come harder – until he had knelt and prayed a good while, and until he had paid out twenty gold in the town to people who needed it, doing the kind of plain good a priest is supposed to do without being made to. He went to his knees there in the smoke and the smell of burned silk and began.
Sylvanus exacts penance (d4): 'Do not abuse my gifts, mortal.' -1 to all spell checks until Bancroft prays 10 minutes AND tithes 20 gold to good works in town.
The others wanted the cudgel. He understood it – it was treasure, it was clearly meant to be used, and a man does not get rich in this trade by leaving green-faced clubs on altars. They even allowed that it would suit Bancroft, a Green Man’s cudgel for a Green Man’s priest. But not one of them would put a hand on it while Bancroft knelt praying not ten feet away, knowing what he knew now, and so they stood about and schemed in low voices about waiting him out, about having Clarice slip back for it once he’d gone round the corner.
That is where the night ended. The cudgel on the slab, unclaimed. Hildrys Forest Green in his ashes. Bancroft on his knees with a debt to pay and a penalty riding him until he paid it, and the rest of them muttering about experience and treasure and what counts as taking a thing.
He is no paladin. He never claimed to be. A paladin could have looked the other way and called it not knowing. Bancroft knew. And he is going to have, as the saying goes, some explaining to do.
