Secrets in the Sludge III
A crystal pried out of a brazier stands up as a fire elemental, and back in town a draft brewed from the sludge changes Mikhail permanently, while Gwenivere learns what she has been dispensing
TL;DR
Prying a crystal out of a lit brazier cracked it, and what came out of the crack was the fire that had been bound inside, put down only when Koa saw the glint at its heart and broke it. With the keep giving up nothing else, they went back to town, where Ashanti had a draft ready that she had brewed out of the sludge. Mikhail drank it, and his smallest workings stopped running out. Then he told Gwenivere what the sludge in her medicine chest is made of.
First seen
- Greg the Tanner: refuses the job as a swindle, then takes it for a cut
- Ashanti’s draft: the sludge brewed down, drunk once, and permanent
What changed
- The fire crystal is broken and its elemental gone; a fleck of dust was all that was left.
- Mikhail’s smallest workings no longer run dry. The draft changed him for good.
- Gwenivere knows what she has been dispensing, and who it was.
- The dead pit is with a tanner, one to three months from being useful.
- Haudh-Gwenn’s garrison has marched east on Ostrad, leaving the city thin.
Left open
- How to be rid of the sludge without poisoning whatever it is put into.
- Ashanti’s plan of larger and larger doses.
- What crystal will open the mountain’s sealed doors, and where one is to be had.
- The rotted book on binding, and what it would take to make it readable.
Synopsis
They wanted a crystal, and there were three of them in the keep. The one in the brazier looked easiest. Koa worked at the recessed stone with tongs while Aldo steadied the thing, and it came loose the wrong way: a crack opened, ran, and the flame above it stood up and lunged. Mikhail got out into the hallway and hit it with a scream that took the edge off it; it charged and put him into a wall. Koa’s blade went through the fire without finding anything to cut until he saw a glint suspended in the middle of it, and brought the flat of his cutlass down on that. The elemental came apart. So did the crystal: they searched the floor afterwards and recovered a single fleck of dust.
The Elder answered the question they should have asked first. For the mountain’s doors the element bound inside probably does not matter, but the stone has to be large, of good quality and well cut, or it will not hold the keep’s magic. The books in his own room would have taught them the rest, and they are rotted past anything a mending will fix. So they left the wind-crystal where it hung, tried one of their own small stones in the empty brazier and got nothing, and decided to go looking for books and for keeps instead of taking another crystal apart.
They went out by the dead pit in the sewer, which was decaying unevenly now and would not last. Mikhail, looking at it, realized what it actually was: a flat thing, more hide than beast, and hide can be tanned.
The next morning at Gwenivere’s shop Ashanti had a concoction waiting, brewed out of the sludge. Mikhail drank it. His gut turned over, his eyes blew wide and the daylight became unbearable, and a tingling stayed in him for hours. By the afternoon the effect was plain enough to test: the small things (a mending, a light, a hand of unseen force) no longer ran out. Tiring, but bottomless. Koa promptly appointed himself his trainer.
The harder conversation followed. Mikhail told the two women what the sludge is and where it comes from: the minds and bodies and souls of the people who lived above the keep. Gwenivere has been putting it in medicines for months and has given it to patients by the dose. She wept, and Mikhail, who had swallowed a cup of it that morning, told her that nobody can act on knowledge they do not have, and that all anyone can do is go on from what they know now. Ashanti took it differently. Later, to Koa, she laid out her own plan: larger doses, and larger, until something in the curse-work gives. Koa counseled patience and was not sure it landed.
Between the two came the tanner. Aldo, who wanted no part of the errand, botched the pitch so thoroughly that he upended a bucket of piss and invented a citywide ban on the stuff and a mafia to enforce it, coming away with nothing but boiled urea and Koa’s growing suspicion that he had done it on purpose. They went back with the corpse on a borrowed cart. Cornered, Aldo produced a masterpiece (a jealous tanner in his home town who had ruined his family) and the party found themselves half believing a story they had watched him invent. What actually settled it was the creature itself, an impossible hole lying in a cart, and the name attached to it. Greg recognized the Valiant Few, stopped calling them confidence men, and agreed to do the work for nothing so long as he could keep a share of the finished piece. One to three months.
The last of the news came from Leon over a board game in the hospital. Haudh-Gwenn’s garrison has gone east to Ostrad to force the trade prices down, and the men who trained those soldiers were Peren adventurers brought in from Peredhel for the purpose. A couple of days after that, the party would be going down to the Crack.