Fire Desnus 13 (night)

We’re spending the night down here. Everyone agrees that it’s too much of a risk to keep coming and going from the mine, and this wing of the…whatever this is seems safe now that we’ve cleared it out. The odds of being interrupted are low since there does not seem to be much inter-faith traffic.

We did more exploring and learned two important pieces of information.

The first is that “the beast” is just a wild boar. I don’t mean to imply that wild boars aren’t dangerous—they certainly are—but rather that it ended up being significantly more mundane than we were expecting. It was chained up in a room, like you do I suppose, and seemed hungry and not particularly discriminating about its meal. Zhog endeared himself to it by feeding it parts of its former captors and now he’s making noise about having another pet. And that’s all you need to know about that.

The second is just how deeply Smenk is in this mess. We found a storage room filled with crates that have his trademark rooster and coin painted on them, and they were filled with food and water. The story this told was pretty clear: Smenk entered into some deal with Dourstone to supply these fools with provisions, and Smenk being Smenk, he managed to irritate them to the point where it was less trouble for them to just knock him off the board. If that doesn’t sound like Smenk, I don’t know what does.

Also, how dumb do you have to be to do this? He essentially hired us to investigate himself, and even without that letter to Theldrick there’s mountains of evidence establishing that he is a co-conspirator in all of this.

Since he all but blackmailed us, I am not feeling particularly charitable about what to do with it, either.

Starday, Desnus 14 (morning)

The night passed without incident.

We found a stone key with Lamashtu’s symbol on it in Theldrick’s quarters, so we opted for that wing next. Unsurprisingly, the door opened up to a complex of naturally occurring caves. The tunnel leading away from the door was worked a bit into steps as it descended, and it emptied into a large chamber filled with stalagmites and stalactites.

We were admiring the beauty of this natural formation when something threw a javelin at me.

Viktor identified our attackers as grimlocks: humanoids that have adapted to living deep underground. The skin on their faces had grown over their eyes, presumably because eyes aren’t much good in the dark (for most people, anyway) so why bother having them at all.

This theme has repeated itself over and over: tunnel leading to cave, cave filled with stalactites and stalagmites, attacked by grimlocks. Sometimes there are chasms, sometimes there are ledges, sometimes there are pets, and this last one had a rope bridge, but that’s pretty much been it for variety. We’re taking a moment to rest up before moving on to—you guessed it—a cave with grimlocks in it.

Fireday, Desnus 13 (afternoon)

When I learned there was a temple deep under Dourstone’s mine, I was picturing a small space, roughly hewn out of rock and packed earth. Maybe three or four chambers, at most. Instead, what we found was a massive, sprawling complex. The antechamber was exquisitely carved from stone, with black marble tiles lining the floor and marble pillars and arches. And did I say this was just the antechamber?

There is no way this was done recently. How long has this been here?

The welcoming committee was a small squad of tiefling guards. They looked bored when the first three of us came down in the elevator, as if random people visit the place all the time. Which they must, because one of them casually asked, “Delivery?” Which would have been a great cover story for us, except that this was followed closely by, “Password?” And then we had a fight on our hands. A very short fight, fortunately. Varin put three of them to sleep with a spell, and that tilted the odds significantly in our favor.

I guess it makes sense that there are frequent deliveries. No one talks about this stuff in stories, but even cultists need to eat (well, some of Urgathoa’s followers may not, though some may eat more than their share) and there’s probably not much in the way of fresh food down here. Not the kind that doesn’t fight back, anyway. All that has to come from somewhere, and conveniently there’s a whole town overhead.

Three doorways—again, carved in marble—led out of the hall. Two bore symbols: one for Zon-Kuthon, and one for Urgathoa. The third doorway had no such adornment. I guess Lamashtu’s followers couldn’t find the time.

There was also a curious pool of black liquid filling the southern half of the chamber. It had a foul aura to match its foul appearance, and it seemed to suck the heat from the air. Zhog experimented with it a bit using…never mind, it’s not important what he used. The experiment was a let-down. The items he dipped in there just got really cold.

Sera wasn’t able to open Urgathoa’s door so we went for Zon-Kuthon. It was shaping up to be a pleasant Fireday afternoon of torture, murder, and self-mutilation. And skeletons. For some reason, the first resistance we encountered was skeletons in suits of armor. I didn’t think this sort of thing was in Zon-Kuthon’s dogma, but maybe his followers and Urgathoa’s have been comparing notes.

I guess we made a little too much noise in that skirmish—hitting suits of armor with metal weapons tends to do that—because we found ourselves rushed by more tiefling guards from three sides. One of them called out “I’ll unleash the beast!” which sounded like it might be bad for us, so Sera, who was next to him at the time, cut him down on the spot. This felt like what mom calls a “teachable moment”. If you’re going to announce your plan to run off and unleash the beast, maybe get some distance first.

We pushed our way through more guards and then found ourselves outside a huge chamber, surrounded by balconies 10′ above on three sides. We divided up into two groups, with half of us going to the upper level and the other half coming in on the main floor. And that’s how we ended up confronting Theldrick, the Triad’s priest of Zon-Kuthon. We knew that was his name because the tieflings we cut through had called to him for help. Help, which I feel compelled to add even though it surprises no one, never arrived.

Zhog’s entrance down below was blunt. “So. Are you that Thel-dick guy that someone was calling to while we were killing them?”

Theldrick responded by shutting the doors behind them. He probably thought this was a trap, but it didn’t really work out that way. Sera and I were on the balcony crew and had to work our way forward, one troglodyte zombie (what is it with those, anyway?) and cultist at a time. Our friends down below, however, were archers and spell casters and had their choice of targets, especially with us drawing away the bulk of his defensive line.

I am not saying it was easy. It was not. But once I got close enough to knock him to the ground, it was over.

We turned up some interesting documents. One was a letter to Theldrick and appeared to be written in an unfamiliar tongue. On closer examination, it was a code and not a language. “Based on how these patterns repeat,” I said, “it’s probably a letter substitution code. Give me some time with this, and I’ll work it out.”

It’s a common technique used by commanders to pass messages during wartime. The idea is, you have several tables and if you know which one was used you can do this quickly. If a message is intercepted by the enemy, by the time they solve it the information is probably stale. When used to send a letter in this manner, it’s just a way of saying “contents are private”, and preventing it from being read by the wandering eye.

Training with soldiers has its advantages.

It took Viktor and I about half an hour but we got it. And our dear friend Balaber Smenk is up to his eyeballs in this place. “The author believes that Smek is no longer useful, and must be killed,” I said, showing them the decoded message. “Smenk is using us to clean up after whatever mess he helped create.”

I don’t like being used.

There was more, though, and it was fairly ominous. It also spoke of someone named Kyuss. “Mighty Kyuss is the herald of the Overgod”, it read, and that undead bearing his worms were the key to the Triad’s research. “…send agents to the Mushfens, across the hills to the southwest. I believe that we will find what we are looking for there, among the lizardfolk”

This problem, it seems, is much larger than just Diamond Lake.