Fireday, Desnus 20 (dawn)

We followed Gathok over 15 miles into the Mushfens overnight, stopping in the pre-dawn light just a couple of miles outside his village’s patrol perimeter.

It’s been a long time since I have done this sort of thing. In my days (and nights) with the Night Walkers, we would be out a couple of nights per week, occasionally well into the early morning. The only rule was that we would always be back before what Sergiu called “civil twilight” because that was when you could no longer navigate by the stars, and the point of the Night Walkers was, obviously, to be out there in the dark. Supposedly this term comes from sailors, though how he got to know sailors in a land-locked mining town in the middle of the Fenwall Mountains is beyond me.

We made camp while Gathok continued ahead, and waited for his return.

We didn’t have to wait long. Just as the sun was rising above the horizon, we saw Gathok walking up the path towards our campsite. His expression was grim, which told us what we ultimately needed to know. The rest was just details.

“I have good news and bad news,” he began. “Our worst nightmares are confirmed. This batch of eggs are full of corruption. However, our alliance with Ilthane is not ill-informed. Her own egg is deeply infected as well, so she’s but a victim of the same ill fortune as our tribe.”

I hate being the one to deliver bad news. Really. I do. Gathok was holding on to a spark of hope, that there would be something salvageable in this mess, and I was about to smother it.

“Gathok…when we spoke with Hishka yesterday, she said to us quite clearly and directly that Ilthane was protecting your eggs, and leaving one of hers with you as a show of faith. That she was your ally, protecting you from this corruption.

“Either she hasn’t protected your tribe as she promised, or she is the source of this corruption and has been lying to you. Regardless of which of those statements you believe, your alliance with her has ultimately failed.”

However bad I felt about doing this to him—and I felt plenty bad, you try it sometime—he was feeling far worse. Losing another generation of eggs like this would be disastrous. Ilthane was their one great hope, that she had the power to stop it. With her alliance revealed as a fraud, and no understanding of why and how this was happening (much less how to stop it), they were facing the extinction of their whole tribe. And that thought was terrifying.

It took some gentle cajoling to get Hiska’s actual message from him, and not just his interpretation of it. She said she snuck into the egg chamber long enough to use the wand without being seen and saw that both Ilthan’e eggs and the ones closest to her were corrupted. “We are in over our heads,” she told him. “let the soft skins know!”

So here we are.

There were three problems to be solved: separate the good eggs from the bad ones to save as many of the new generation of hatchlings as possible, remove chief Shukak from power, and free the prisoners. Just the first one, alone, required that we meet with Hishka: we needed to get a better understanding of the egg chamber, and what could and couldn’t be done with the eggs. So we needed a place to meet.

Gathok said that their current lair is underground, next to their old village (now abandoned since their numbers have dwindled). He suggested that we sneak into one of the huts of the old village after dark, and meet with Hishka there. We’d have to hide everything about our presence, including our scent, but it would put us in a position to meet quickly and do so face-to-face without raising suspicion from their tribe. As I’ve said, time was not on our side, and multiple, long treks through the swamp would compound the problem. We agreed to the “abandoned village” plan, and sent Gathok back to deliver the message.

Hiding our scent would be a challenge, of course. Varin has a cantrip that is good for cleaning, and certainly a clean animal smells a lot less than a dirty one, but that can only take us so far. We could, however, use natural scents to mask our odor, and make the natural smell of the Mushfen on our bodies stronger than that of our own. This was another throwback to Sera’s and my time with the Night Walkers. She’s kept her skills sharper than mine, so I deferred to her.

We’re resting here for the day. We’ve been up nearly 24 hours with no sleep and we’re starting to feel it. And, the spell casters need to refresh their spells for what comes next.

(late night)

Gathok said that Ilthane has stationed kobolds in the egg chamber (ostensibly to guard the eggs, but we suspect their real purpose is to prevent interference with Ilthan’s plans, no matter the source), and they are loyal only to her. As soon as we enter, there will be a fight. That told us right away that dealing with the eggs would have to come last, lest we find ourselves trapped inside with angry kobolds in front of us and angrier lizardfolk behind us.

That meant dealing with Shukak first.

As an added complication, we cannot put Hishka or Gathok in danger from their tribe, or the lizardfolk tribe in danger from Ilthane. Which means they need what’s known as “plausible deniability”. Everything we do has to have the appearance of us acting alone.

As such, we formed our plan around a prisoner rescue, using a lightning raid. Zhog actually had the best idea on how to do that.

“Why don’t we just run straight through?” he said.

It sounded crazy at first, but…we have a map, courtesy of Gathok, and we know exactly where to go. With cover provided by invisibility and magical silence, we could get quite a ways before we were detected by other means, and even then it would take time for them to figure out what was happening. That would be enough for us to get into position and block off key passages, so we could limit the scope of the engagement by making it more difficult and time-consuming for the rest of the tribe to enter the fray. If we take Shukak down quickly enough, Hishka can assume the role of acting chief before we put other members of the tribe at risk.

At that point, we can legitimately negotiate a cessation of hostilities with Hishka. From the lizardfolk tribe’s perspective, humans will have staged a raid into their lair to rescue their prisoners, and Hishka will have acted in the best interest of her people since, after all, it was Shukak that led them to attack the human lands.

Then, Hishka arranges for us to enter the egg chamber and deal with the corruption in the eggs. Once again, plausible deniability would come into play here: no lizardfolk would enter the egg chamber with us, just in case one of the kobolds escaped. It had to look as though we were raiding the lizardfolk lair on our own, and specifically going after Ilthane’s egg. We wanted Ilthane retaliating against us, not the lizardfolk. (Actually, we don’t want Ilthane coming after us, either, but she may not give us that option.)

The biggest unknown was the safety of the prisoners. What would stop Shukak from simply executing them once he learned we were inside? Fortunately, Hishka had a solution for this. “I will have them brought to my chamber. Shukak’s lieutenant knows I’ve been healing them, and tending to their wounds. I’ll simply find another excuse to do that.”

Good enough, and probably as good as we were going to get.

We launch the raid at midnight.