Into the Den of Thieves

Winter money gone and Beltran gone east with his army, the party finally walks into the thieves' ruin, and out the far side of it, into a sealed room nobody has stood in for centuries

TL;DR

The winter money was spent and Beltran Grayeras had marched east with the men he trained through it. With him gone, the Valiant Few finally ran the heist they had been putting off: through the thieves’ front door in Aldo’s disguises, down into the old Mól sewers, and along a channel of glowing green sludge to the crack it had leaked from. That crack lay behind Mól stone with no way to it, so they went in through the cellar of the house next door instead, and the staircase they came down by screwed itself into the walls behind them.

First seen

The Mól sewers: ledges over old water, with something green running on the surface
The green sludge: alkaline, luminous, and it feeds any spell laid on it
The octagonal chamber: a sealed Mól room under a noble’s cellar, ringed with runes
The thieves in the ruin: token-gated, incurious, and firm about the door upstairs

What changed

Beltran is out of Haudh-Gwenn, marching east with his winter army.
The party holds a token into the ruin and the run of its lower floor.
The house beside the ruin is proved to stand on Mól foundations, with a passage down.
All three are shut inside the well-chamber; the stair they used has retracted into stone.

Left open

What the sludge is, and whether letting it out would ruin the city or free it.
The three loose rune-stones, and which way it is safe to turn them.
The upstairs door the thieves say is not a door.
Where Beltran’s column is going, and what its absence opens.

Synopsis

Winter ended with the party briefly rich and then not. The opal went to a buyer, the money went to armor and potions, and what they had left at the end of it was worth more than the gem had been: Beltran Grayeras had marched east out of Haudh-Gwenn, and the hundred and twenty men he had spent the season training had gone with him.

Before the work there was a drink. Jaden came out of the Chantry hospital gentler than anyone remembered her and said she was going down to the Crack with Edrick; letting go of the place was part of the treatment. She also gave Mikhail the only useful thing anyone had offered on his healing research all winter: a company healer had once told her that a body cannot be made to knit faster, and that what a healer really does is open it to something.

There were two ways into the ruin: the thieves’ front door, which Aldo had spent months buying his way toward, and the secret passage in the noble’s house beside it. They took the front, in disguises Aldo had built without telling anybody. The token was bite-tested, a knock-code given, and a very large half-orc let them into a building with seven-foot ceilings, which is the height the Mól built to. They went down through stairwell traps that age had taken the venom out of, and at the bottom the token dropped into a hidden depression in a reinforced door and unlatched it. Beyond lay Mól sewer: narrow ledges over standing water, and running bright on the surface of it, a green sludge that glowed.

Nobody would touch it. Mikhail lifted a measure into a vial with an unseen hand and felt the working tugged at as it passed through. The hand came back stronger than he had made it. Whatever else the stuff was, it fed magic. They followed the flow upstream, Koa bridging a broken ledge with pitons and rope, to the crack it had come out of. That had sealed itself decades or centuries ago, and the grime scraped off the seam showed Mól stone all round it: the source lay behind a wall with no door in it, and the sewer only ran past. Downstream ended at a grate too rusted to open, which at least let Koa fix their position. The crack sat directly under the ruin.

The lower floor gave up an armory holding poor weapons enough for two dozen men, a bunkroom where Aldo sat in at cards and cleaned two guildsmen out, and a battered volume of the Mól Encyclopædia off a shelf. Koa floated a larger idea: that men with a hideout, sewer access and a bolt-hole inside the walls would make useful allies against Beltran. The question that got them moved along was the door at the top of the crumbling stairs, which the guards would not discuss and did not admit existed.

Koa’s compass work put the sealed crack squarely beneath the house next door, and the geometry was too neat to leave alone. That night they timed a patrol and came in through the cellar window among the wine, and Aldo found the door: an eight-bottle rack of Darkwood with a Mól filigree catch, which meant the house stood on foundations older than the city above it. Behind it ran a dust-thick hall and a tall double-helix stair down into an octagon of metal-veined stone, thirty feet to a side, with an ornate well of the same green sludge at its center. The instant the last of them stepped off it, the staircase turned on itself and screwed away: one flight into the ceiling, one into the floor.

Mikhail read the well’s rim while the others looked for hinges. The script was tall Mól laid over with the dialect the Mól kept for writing magic into an object, and it spelled a circle of the protective kind, scaled up, keyed to an elemental thing rather than to any alignment, and turned inside out so that it held rather than warded. Protect that which is without from what is within, and that which is within from what is without. The circle was intact and the floor unnaturally free of dust. And three of the stones set into the rim would move.