19 - The Alsoburg Siege
The rattle of chains moving around a gear fades slowly higher and higher. Presently, you can hear once more your Blue Lady’s wood thrush voice.
“Fortune, Setback, or only Mortal Lot. “What is the name by which we must call that chance meeting with the stranger under the cowl on The Long Road? “He said to me, ‘I have seen a face like the face of the lord in this locket you present, melancholy Lady. Much time ago, and far below, in Alsoburg which lies in Spring-Under-Fjall.’ “My heart seems to twirl behind my breast. “Yet as we separated from that strange man under the cowl, my heart stopped twirling, and gave a small misgiving shudder. “And the deathless, skeletal horse which that man led on a rope, it rattled and nickered at once as it went; sounding-”
An explosive hiss beside your descending cage cuts short your Lady’s concern. A gas vent. The noise rises and shrinks overhead, like some great python sliding up a tree. This time when your hearing returns, your Lady’s voice has been replaced by the lift operator’s. He talks at length, though he too is often disrupted.
“-here for eight seasons of easy wintering, myself. One perk of cave-dwelling; it never snows. “Not all is sunshine though, har har har. “There issues from the deepest vault, sometimes, a-”
HISSSSSSSsssssssssssssssssss…
“-time in Spring-Under-Fjall? “A troubadour discovered the cave. A fiddler; a Living Bones who wanted a deep, dark, quiet place to make his songs. “But he played too well, and too loudly. Living men heard his music. “All sorts followed him down: tailors, mancers, engineers.”
HISSSSSSSsssss…
“-ever did trust-”
hiiiiiIIIIIIIISSSSSSSssssssss…
“-mancy always stronger underground. Closer to the-”
HIIIIISSSSSSS.
The lift rattles. Your knuckles tighten on the handle of your shield. Your mind summons reflections; advice from a chryptsacker. He spoke of sounds one hears in the caves under the hills and mountains.
| Herdybey It makes two-tone howls. AHHHH-woooo. In cool caves, good blades’ll keep you out of its jaws. But watch for mating bulls in humid holes. | Leatherworm Try to hear the tumbling of boulders down the side of a gorge, heard distantly, echoing. Speed it up, make it deeper. That is the leatherworm, which guises itself as a bas-relief, and is the bane of us sackers. | Golems Marching, heavy steps. Ubiquitous underground. They cannot be molded under sun or stars. |
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Your cage plunges through the last four feet of its descent. With a bang of metal on stone, you and your Lady and the man conducting are thrown from the lift. You land upon a ledge of worked slabs, skirting a huge rectangular chamber of basalt and iron architecture. You land, in the middle of a fight.
The Battle for Station Archer
The engineer-knights of the station are locked in a pitched battle. Their foes - golems. Along every gantry, all across the basalt floor, climbing the grated metal stairs that run from level to level; the automatons of wax and bone throw their fists against the defenders.
When you arrive you’ll find the knights of the station having the worst of things. The knights are capable fighters, but not one of them has an arm to match yours. Their heraldic aprons make poor defense against golem haymakers.
Your actions directly determine the number of engineer-knights that will survive the battle. Start by attacking the two golems on the ledge to your right. One of the golems is already walking lopsided, with a portion of its flank carved out. You can hack it in two with a blow or three. The pair of knights who you save in this way will immediately follow your lead.
From there, your best bet is to clear a path to the round stone door, on the ledge one level higher than your own, on the opposite side of the chamber. Rescue as many knights as possible. Understand that, no matter your skill or luck, the station will be lost.
Among the engineer-knights there are a few idiosyncratic persons.. You may wish to spot and rescue these men especially.
| Damon the Pilferer A skinny but tall man. Has a good eye. Carries the station’s only crossbow. | Old Soldier He must be strong to carry that heavy broadsword and pack on that armor. Good with his shield too. |
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| Forester One of the forest cats, giant and tame, guards his shadow. | Former Mance No combat specialty. Has none of necromancy’s necessary reagents. Does offer insights on your foes. |
Cave wind whistles through your visor as you emerge onto a studded metal causeway, between fifteen station towers. The court of stone lies heavily rooted with humming pipes of bronze, fifteen feet below.
Spreading the distance, across fifteen miles, the cavern of Spring-Under-Fjall meanders and crawls.
A stonescape roils far, far away, like the surface of an ocean frozen under a black hurricane. A small grove of giant mushrooms grows just a few yards from Station Archer’s metal gates. Even as you scan the scene another score of golems stamp through the sundered gate. Other shadows, maybe golems, maybe not, climb along the darkest ravines of the cavern, where light does not land.
Yet light plays over many of the tumbling stones, and the crashing crystal waterfall, and the lake. A giant yellow disk, an off-colored, subterranean sun, sways from the ceiling over a raised rocky bluff. Atop that bluff, you can just spy the undercity of Alsoburg.
Station Archer is one of four stations in Spring-Under-Fjall. The station warms the cavern by drawing water from deeper hot springs.
One of the station knights slams the round stone door shut - although in the last inch or so it slows and shuts with a quiet hydraulic hiss - and locks the barrier with a spoked wheel on the nearby wall. The metallic reverberations of the golems on the catwalks are instantly curtailed. The ensuing silence is deafening, inside the galleried cylinder of the pressure tower.
The knights begin to speak at once.
“Death averting, your arrival, sir knight.” “Spared are we, though not Archer I fear.” “Stations Carringgore and Queen-Lace-” “-already succumbed to the golems of The Crawling Silk. Now three are fallen.” “We’ll freeze! Spring-Under-Fjall will be as the coldest winter-” “We must look to ourselves for now. We must crawl through one of Archer’s hot pipes, I think, and come out well-cooked.”
The Crawling Silk. Have you ever swung against any foe so named? Has any warrior you ever met spoken of battle with a thing? It rings with necromancy. Necromancy, that thrives beneath the ground where it is closest to its most necessary material. But what do you know that can overmind the workings of so many golems at once? There was the grot. Mool. A master of the unliving. That one, you could not face. Yet that one’s servants were mechanical dead. Not golems. Why do you waste your thoughts? Your duty is to your Lady. The cause of these men is theirs, not yours. You do not serve your ego; you need not parade your valor with skillful display of Steel. How then will you spirit your Lady from this danger?
Your Blue Lady sees the eye behind your visor.
“That wanderer on the road; did he lead us here with purpose? I wonder. “I may be wrong to ask openly about my stepson. “When one’s hope is known it may be exploited. “We are trapped with these engineers now. I know the peril, knight, but I would ask that you succor them with your skill. “You have destroyed masters of other golems. Does this grant you any intuition?”
A gonging reverberates from the thick stone door. A young knight standing nearby leaps to the wheel lock. But, the drumming is not repeated. The reverberations peter out.
Another knight, a hairy one with a ragged apron, and a cut on his brow, recalls the sewers below the station. Each tower has a small drain to the sewer; he points this tower’s drain out to you. It is only a small pipe, too small for a person, but the sewer main is wide enough to walk in, and bears no heated water.
The knights agree: it will take ten minutes to carve a hole around the drain down to the sewer.
Slowly, then gaining speed, a steel plate spins like a flashing diamond, down the central space of the pressure tower, reflecting lamps, humming, before it impacts the flat basalt tiles like a doom-tone shot from The Scratcher’s organ lyre.
The Tower Assault
The golems slam against the walls and ceiling of your tower. Already they scrape through one ruptured rivet.
You’ll have to defend both the engineer-knights at the drain, and the tower’s pressure control panel. The panel is beside the third landing, embedded in a wall of solid lead. (It’s the one that starts with two wheels turned to three-o-clock). If you fail to protect the panel the golems, driven by a greater intelligence, will use it to over-pressurize the tower pipes. The pipes running along the walls will rupture. You and the other survivors will be boiled in hot-spring rain.
You can, potentially, turn the control panel to your advantage. Selectively burst any pipe near where the golems breach the tower; the hot water will melt their waxen frames. You’ll also have between six and fourteen knights available to help defend.
“Well fought, sir knight! We’re almost through. “I can see the sewer by my lamp. Not too grimy. It’s not for greywater, after all. “Hehehe, I see this wax and bone trickling by my foot. Not as fright- “Oh, old god below, look!”
The puddles of spring water cease to steam. The air clears. The pipes bloom with a sudden lichen of white, fuzzy frost.
Through a broken wall of rent metal and brickwork chunks, you spy a thing low on the ground. Not a golem. You cannot see it clearly between the thudding wax-and-bone feet. It looks man-shaped, crawling on hands and knees, dragging a white beard like the trail of a comet.
Amidst the thuds, a toneless deadspeech chant: harag* naj, gonosz naj; égos at haruvá halj.*
Your wool shirt hugs your skin like winter moonlight under your armor. The molten wax thickens over your Sabatons.
Shiver if you must, pry your feet free, and act.
You only have a few minutes before The Crawling Silk penetrates the tower. There is no point defending the control panel now. Get to the exit.
But retrieve your Lady first. She is under the guard of two engineer knights, who are holding off a rib-bone spiked golem. Your only option is to carve a path through the waxen foes. Fortunately the encroaching cold stiffens the golems. You can let your guard fall lax, and focus on heavy blows with your Steel.
Once you’ve collected your Lady and reached the drain, you need only defend until the crack of falling stones tells you that the way is open.
Help your Lady and the knights down the hole, then drop in after. There is a rotary seal a few yards along the black tunnel. The tower knights will use this to check your pursuers when they give chase.
You are safe, but the station has fallen.
The stained leather boot of a knight kicks loose a vertical bar of rusty iron. It flies from the opening of the sewer, splashes on the still water of the lake, summons glimmering ripples. The distant disk of the underworld sun is golden and cold. You might, as you emerge from the sewer, almost take it as a scene of midnight on the surface, under a yellow Harridan’s Moon. Almost; but for the absence of a bullfrog’s drone, or a chorus of chirring crickets, of the weird songs of nightbirds. The underworld lake is silent.
You help your Blue Lady off the ledge of the sewer tunnel. Her boots and the base of her cloak are flecked with mud, but her face is untroubled.
One of the surviving knights has lost his ear in the battle; a thick gauze wraps his skull. He speaks at a shout, before a knock on his shoulder persuades him to whisper.
“Ten years I shined those pipes and cogs and levers. “Ten years, my brother and I swept the dust from Archer’s flags and walks. “With our mounted Fire Bassoons, and our hammers, and arbalests - we lads sent off chimerae, men-of-scale, clouds of drinking bats. “This Crawling Silk is an agony we’ve never known. To lose everything in a stroke… “Once, I remember now, a mancer stopped in Alsoburg. He had a golem, just one. And that was flesh, and docile.”
The Crawling Silk
In the Time before this Time of Dying, a heptad of mancers set aside their differences, uniting their power of deadspeech in a common desire to find the fabled Sickened Cradle. Certain sensitive scholars had, for decade upon decade upon decade, shared dreams. Dreams that come from The Thin Man; that god-necromancer who found the gift of eternal youth united to eternal slumber. In slumber, in The Cradle, he sends to his seekers dream upon dream, nightmare succeeding nightmare.
This new heptad of mancers plumbed the darkest caves and deepest graves that wind below That Road Familiar and Strange. In their seeking they accidentally stepped across the threshold of the Chrypt of the Fermented Princess, which was sacred to another god-necromancer, The Mother of worms. As punishment that goddess destroyed six of the seven. She left one mancer alive, a man with a beard long and painted white. As he groveled, listening at the stone for the Thin Man’s dreams, she blessed him with that eternal life which the seven had sought – and at the same instant, cursed him to forever grovel, forever listen, driven to ascendent madness by voices underneath.
You know this enemy. It comes from the old song cycle: The Harmonies of Avda. The Harmony of False Seven. Much force is in the deadspeech that issues from a throat which is hoary and flecked with grey. You must find some route which climbs up and out of Spring-Under-Fjall. You have escorted Her into a cavern where the atmosphere is humid with death-threat. Bring Her out of it. That is your sole duty.
You see a trio of sleek, luminous freshwater eels plying up the current of a narrow but deep cave river. Your group marches along the bank soft with algae. The eels dart into hiding, as one of the station knights, a man with a crown of thin, long, curling black hair, speaks.
“Friends, I’ve considered. “From where Archer stood on the lower southmost bluff, The Silk must lead its army along one fixed path to reach the last heat towers at Station Glaznyst. “A narrow track, above a rough gorge which is sawtoothed of floor, beneath a long scree of unstable, loose rocks. “Why do we not march hard for Alsoburg, and thence take the straight road to Glaznyst? “We might warn them; with them, dig at that loose rock; together, let tumble the landslide over this one who crawls and all his golems.”
The knights will choose one of three routes from the exit of the sewers to Alsoburg. The route is chosen at random.
| The Narrow Lake Strand The ripples from the broken sewer grate have vanished. As you stare out over the bestilled lake, you will witness the slow, crystallizing transformation of the water. Your breath mists before your helmet. | Ruins of Station Babyfray If you duck inside the ruined tower with the blasted door, you can retrieve a small pouch of twelve Onyx Sunflower seeds, tucked under a splintered reedwood bench. | Mushroom Forest In the gossamer frills of these giant mushrooms, you will hear small shuffling and chittering noises. Bats. Proceed to the end without looking up, and you will be rewarded with a Flawless Summonable Squeaking Icon. |
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As you march to Alsoburg you are gradually enveloped in the warm honey of the sun disk.
You eventually come onto the shadow of a long hill of craggy stone. Bits of maidenhair moss grow over the sawn stumps of giant split-gills.
Your sense of danger piques.
One of the surviving knights is humming a marching tune. Too loudly. Another is suggesting that your group might corner and harness a wild Mildew Beetle from the marsh nearby on the surface, and turn it against The Crawling Silk.
Before you are able to hint at silence you reach the top of the hill. As you do, you stumble into another marching band; they, silent.
Hides.
Skin-clad servants of The Crawling Silk.
Eleven Strokes with The Old Man Below
The Hides (seven) and two golems attack first. One close hide lashes with a spine-sewn flail. You parry, sever the whip, cut high. His head thuds and bounces downhill.
The station knights meet the crash. Hammer, spear, daggers cleave. One Hide lifts his arms. Chops a war pick. Femur spiked. Smiting.
Thump.
The knight who receives this blow drops forward, as the hide servant of The Crawling Silk rips the femur-spike through his clavicle. Before you may redress the killing another Hide and a golem will step into your field-of-view.
This fight will be short. The surviving knights can last mere minutes against the remaining golem and six Hides. You’ll have to beat your immediate foes, then lend aid. And, defend your Lady.
To achieve those ends, act thus: block the golem’s heavy fist slantingly, step back, lash right to distract the Hide, block the second punch, cut down to sever the golem’s leg, let it topple downhill, parry the Hide again, then brain him with your shield.
After, rescue the station knights.
“Such a battle! Such foes!” “Sir knight, you have seen more of the world than we. What kind of a backworldsman flays and wears our skins as clothes? Sharpens our bones for weapons?” “Look, brothers. Alsoburg ahead. The gate is asunder. Has the town capitulated already?” “Day of sorrow.” “Please join us, sir knight. Your Lady may rest at-” “Too late. More coming. Quick; guise ourselves. Disgusting, but let’s take the skins of our fellows from these Hides. Let’s slip in with The Crawling Silk’s man-slaves.”
One iron-barred door of the Alsoburg gatehouse lies flat on the grassless grey dirt within the shadow cast by the sun-disk. The long golem-and-slave train of The Crawling silk presses the thin bars deeper into the soil as they march over the broken barrier.
You take care to step between the bars. The clink of your sabatons might reveal you under your skin-robe disguise.
The cavern town is small, but packed densely with steamwork architecture.
| Card Houses Each home is made of two titanic stone slabs leaning against each other, with mudbrick fronts. The citizens have shut their doors and windows, sheltering in false shelters. | The Tower of Invisible Fire Silence. The steel drum in the heart of Alsoburg sheds no warmth. |
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| The Door of Xyn The Door of Xyn, in the Temple of Xyn, has been thrown open. In Alsoburg, this symbolizes an end of peace. | The Mayor’s Keep Two ladies, dressed in silver-and-sapphire silk robes which seem to glow in the sun disk’s yellow beams, weep upon the third floor balcony of the Mayor’s Keep. |
From under the flayed hoods of the real Hides surrounding you, that same deadspeech hymn issues, a united hiss.
“Harag naj, gonosz naj; égos at Haruvá halj.”
Day of wrath, evil sky; shall all the Road in blackness lie.
“Ahoz Hjetes az élérn mondj.”
As Seven bid men’s souls to die.
“Malyan borznak kell megszáll mét; amizor a közalsa Bíry talát,”
What horror must o’ercome the heart; when Mancer Silk shall start,
“Es rastáld átgész ember csontjat.”
And bids the bones by blackened art.
Abased Ontogeny
Once The Crawling Silk may have walked as a human being. Now, as you look on from a few yard’s distance, you know that dooming Time has altered this creature’s biology. Its protuberant spine has far too many vertebrae, in far too many lines. The elbows and knees on which it walks have become like the hooves of a cow, while its forearms and lower legs rise like withered branches from each hoof. Its silky white beard forms the carpet on which it crawls.
The abased body swells. Doubles, triples in size. The three-stranded spine rises like a white, forked limb on a barkless tree. The Crawling Silk never raises its own shaggy head. But from under its mane, that deadspeech hymn swells.
You have been separated from the other disguised knights. A quick glance from under your hood - they have taken up a place by one of their ‘Fire Bassoons’, over the gatehouse.
The throng presses close. You are only a few feet from the swollen, Crawling Silk.
You hear the excited gurgle of flames surging through a pipe.
As flames blast down from the Fire bassoon, hidden militia within the stone card-homes of Alsoburg, and the disguised knights of Station Archer, will launch their unexpectedly coordinated assault upon the host of The Crawling Silk.
You should hold still for just a moment. The golems and Hides will open up a space for you. Once they do, throw off your disgusting disguise. Attack.
Hack The Crawling Silk with a few solid strokes. Ignore the chill spreading down your arm. Step back only when this monster gives you its bald-headed regard. You may feel your body stop on you for the span of a brief few seconds; an unconquerable hesitation. Think of your Lady and overcome it.
You can also strike down one or two of the nearest hides. Or, fell a golem. Your personal fight will begin in earnest when The Crawling Silk finally captures you in its perception.
Dream of the Winter Storm
With a nod of scalp The Crawling Silk shall draw you into one of its frozen dreams. Your breath mists through your visor. Your heart pushes blood like lard. Howling snowfall isolates you and the weird horror.
On the bright side, golems and hides cannot enter the Dream of the Winter Storm. On the black side, your own movement is slower within the storm - always the case with movement in a dream.
Your goal in the dream is to get close and inflict a wound. Fast. If you remain trapped in the dream for five minutes it will freeze your mind to ice. Long serpents of white hair will continuously slither through the snow, entangling your feet. You’ll have to chop and hack them off. The entire time The Silk will be Crawling backward from you.
If you can get in close and cut The Crawling Silk upon its scalp, a brazen gong will sound the end of the vision. You instantly return to town square, surrounded by fire and madness. Your Lady, at least, seems safe behind the militia.
The Crawling Silk, bleeding, now calls on its remaining resources. Four golems turn on you. Additionally, The Silk’s white hair surrounds its body in an oval cocoon. The cocoon is hard as marble; your sword can’t cut it. The only way to break through this defense is to goad the four golems into accidentally smashing it with their fists. Three blows will do for the shell; one will do for you.
Once the cocoon breaks, waste no time. Dispatch this crawler by lopping its head.
The golems melt. The Hides are burnt or beaten or hewn. Your Lady is safe.
A cobbler in red sandals approaches you.
“Not bad. Not as good as the six gasps I once felled in a single blow, you know. “That Blue Lady told me a bit about you, you know. “About why you’re here. About that stepson you’re looking for. “I did see him pass through here, you know, long ago. But he left. “Going east, you know. “To Hornwater town.”