Belial's Children

Scribe Notes

Were kicking the game off on the week of the 20th. Add your name below if you're interested

Summary

Adventure: Belial's Children

GM: Jim Arona
Season: Winter 826 WK
Night: Wednesday, 22/07/26, 7:30 pm Auckland time.
Online: Discord
Level: Low/Medium

Party

• Slaydar loyal orc-servant of Artephious- played by Terry Spencer
• Artephious - A non-Frog prince and E&E - played by Ed Douglas[[
• Renae - Earth mage halfling
• Ombra - TBA - played by Paul

Time on adventure

1 Frost 826 WK to ??? 826 WK

Employer

Just this guy

Mission

"the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city"

In theory, a short engagement, featuring the passage of a moon, wickedness and Astrologick certainty.

This will be a short game of, perhaps, as few as four sessions, and will be played over Discord, etc..

Go ye unto the realm of Nualis and the land of Nabatea, and take ye the measure of they who abide in the wilderness. Those that are wise in the ways of sandy wastes, those that know the paths of river and sea, and those who have understanding of high courts and can drink of a cup of tea without breaking wind in sulphurous eructation, will receive a weekly stipend of fifty silver pence per Rank per week.Those proficient in the unnamed skill double the emolument.

Pay

The lettera di cambio is in the mail.

Scribe Notes

Party (in alphabetical order)

Artephious

Renae

Slaydar

Scribe Notes

Artephius, Greater Noble of Alusia — in service to the Seagate Adventurers' Guild — writes.

Chapter 1: The Long Road to Nabatieh

Three Left to Hold the Hall

The guild hall had been all but empty for a month, the rest of our fellows long since scattered to their own ventures, and only three of us remained when the work came to find us. I will set us down as we stood that day. I present myself as I am: a man of perhaps seven-and-twenty, handsome enough by my own reckoning, though I will concede I am slight of build and no one's idea of a bodyguard, with my small companion Furze — a manticore-like creature scarcely larger than a cat, still very young and content to ride in my pack. Slaydar I need hardly describe to myself, having kept his company long enough; he introduces himself, with his customary theatre, as my manservant, the fellow who carries things for so important a person as myself, which is precisely the fiction he enjoys maintaining and which I have long since stopped correcting. He stands a little over five feet, an orc in scrupulously clean holy robes, wreathed as ever in an odour that no cleanliness of cloth can touch, his right hand a prosthetic of orange crystal.

The third of us was the newest to me: Renae, a halfling earth-mage whom the others had already taken to calling Terra, sporting a white beard so magnificently false that only a very charitable observer would credit it. He is still finding the shape of his own abilities, but he contributes ideas readily, and I have learned to value that more than polish. Three of us, then, remained to hold the hall when the work walked in.

A Man Who Would Not Be Named

And walk in it did, in the person of a man who sauntered. I use the word deliberately: he arrived with the studied casualness of someone who wished very much to be taken for no one in particular, and who was therefore certainly someone. He wanted, he said, a matter investigated, and he wanted above all to be able to deny ever having been present to ask for it. That sort of preamble tells you a great deal before a single detail of the work is spoken.

I asked the man his name, as one does. He declined it, and reasonably so, since to name himself would undo the entire purpose of his visit; he would leave us a place to meet rather than any means of being contacted. I knew him regardless. I have chosen to keep that knowledge to myself, and I see no reason to commit it to these pages either. There are advantages in being the only member of a party who understands precisely whom he is dealing with.

The task, once he came to it, was this: somewhere within a great desert, something was stirring, forcing out of the land an unusual quantity of fantastical activity, spiritual disturbance welling up where it had no business to. He wished to know the cause. He would carry us to a city called Nabatieh and leave us there to find it. He warned us, too, of the road: a narrow shore giving onto a far vaster desert, cold at this season, particularly by night. It snows in the desert, he told us, which I noted as the sort of fact that sounds like poetry until you are the one shivering in it.

Terms, and the Emptying of Purses

He produced a scroll for Slaydar with the air of a man offering a gift, and Slaydar, never one to wait upon ceremony, simply grabbed for it. There followed a brief and undignified tussle from which Slaydar emerged the clear victor, being a great deal stronger than our anonymous friend, and muscled the thing free. It proved a blueprint for the construction of a house of bone, an intricate working well beyond the reach of most, though I have no doubt Slaydar will find a use for it, morbid and grand as all his ambitions tend to be.

We came then to the matter of money, which I confess interests me rather more than desert mysteries. It was Slaydar who named the figure — fifty thousand silver for the party, twelve and a half thousand apiece across four of us, though only three had presented ourselves that day — and the patron who accepted it without a murmur. He spoke throughout of our four, as though the missing member were merely elsewhere and expected, which as it happens he was. The whole sum was to be paid after the work, for roughly a month's labour, with any equipment bought from him charged separately. I said fifty thousand was fine. There is no sense talking a party down from a figure a companion has already set and the patron has already swallowed.

The equipment proved worth the separate reckoning. We each took a Circle of Protection, which Terra delightedly insisted on calling a green hula hoop and which I confess the description does not entirely misrepresent, at seven and a half thousand apiece. I bought myrrh besides, the medium I require for the greater enchantments, apportioned across three of us. And I indulged in a small collection of amulets from his stock, paying from my own purse: one of Luck, a Hypericum, a Carbuncle, and one of Elder Flowers. Slaydar armed himself similarly with a Hypericum, an Aquilegius, a Betony, and his own Elder Flowers. One equips oneself well when the road ahead is described in terms of snow, spirits, and things best not investigated.

Then the man opened a purse and tipped out what appeared to be a dozen mice bound onto a leather pad. They were not mice, or not originally: cattle, he explained, transformed down to that convenient size and held under a sleep meant to last a century. We took six as provisions, which is the sort of practical marvel that reminds me why I keep company with people who deal in such things at all. We laid in the rest of what a desert demands, too, cold gear and hot, water skins and barrels of it, mundane food against the day the transformed cattle proved unappetising. Terra offered his Bag of Holding, some eight cubic feet of it, for water storage, and Slaydar his stout backpack for the skins. Our patron, unexpectedly, gave us a small lecture on desert survival that had the ring of genuine experience: how much water a body needs in a day, the use of salt, the reading of one's own condition by the colour of one's water. I wrote it down. Sound advice does not care where it comes from.

Two smaller matters settled the arrangement. Terra asked whether he might repay me after the adventure for what I had covered on his behalf, and I agreed readily. A companion who owes you money is a companion you have every reason to see kept alive, at least until the debt is settled, and in a party as thin as ours that is no trivial consideration. And when the question of a leader arose, I declined it at once. Slaydar was nominated in my stead and accepted with evident pleasure. Let him carry the burden of command along with everything else; it suits the fiction, and it suits me better still to be led than blamed.

Novodom, and an Impossible Ravine

The man opened a rune-portal, and we stepped through. Such crossings exact their toll on all but the one who works them, and we came out the far side wrung utterly dry, every reserve of strength stripped from us in the passage, to find ourselves at Novodom in the early afternoon. We stopped to eat, and Terra brewed a tea from his herbalist's stores that put a measure of that lost vigour back into all of us. We passed the night at an inn our patron knew, while he went off about his own business until well after dark. Before I slept I set a warding upon myself, the old habit against ill dreams and worse intrusions, and it took cleanly. We all woke alive, which Slaydar pronounced another successful night, and which I have come to regard as no small achievement given the company I keep.

In the morning our host offered fresh warnings: fell beasts trouble the country near Novodom, and worse than beasts abroad in it — the hooded riders who serve the Dark Lord, whose true name I will not set down on any page of mine. He would not name them, and he was right not to. I know what they are. I did not say the name either, for naming such things can be an act with consequences of its own, and I would sooner be thought ignorant than be proven reckless. He studied the three of us then with a long, deliberate attention that may have been more than ordinary looking; I could not be certain. Slaydar returned the scrutiny through his third eye, that developing sense of his for what lies beneath a surface, and the two regarded one another for a moment like duellists deciding whether to draw.

We left through the west postern gate and stepped out into a ravine that had no right to exist. There had been no mountains there before, and yet here was rock rising sheer on either hand, and our guide walking into it as though he had done so a hundred times. Slaydar paused to summon Min from within his cloak. She and our patron fell into a long and evidently productive conversation, and I came away with the distinct impression, not for the first time, that Min is considerably cleverer than Slaydar credits.

Walking the Pattern

A steady breeze blew into our faces the length of the defile. Terra crouched over a set of tracks left by some dainty-footed creature that had passed the same way, though he could tell us little of what had made them. And then we came to the thing I had half-expected from the moment the mountains appeared where no mountains should be. Slaydar saw it first, but I knew it on sight: a Pattern, worked into the ground, of the very kind I have walked once before. I recognised the danger and the shortcut in the same instant. We could go the long way around, or we could walk it. We chose to walk.

Our guide went first, and the preparation he made before setting foot on it told me a good deal about what we were in for. He drank a potion, wove several spells, brought out his own Circle of Protection, and pressed something to his forehead before stepping into the first great curve and through the first veil. Then he saw to us. He gave each of us a potion that lent a formidable steadiness of will for some hours, and Slaydar, drawing on his training as a military scientist, rallied us with a few inspiring words that firmed our resolve further still. I have learned not to sneer at his encouragements; whatever one thinks of the man, the effect is real.

The first veil was the worst of them. I passed it with room to spare, my will being one of the few things about me that has never been called feeble. Slaydar very nearly did not. I watched him falter at the threshold and then find some deep reserve within himself, muttering that he could not fail his lord, and push through by main force of stubbornness. It was at the second veil that matters turned genuinely alarming. Slaydar lost himself entirely, his composure and something more besides breaking apart, the stench about him worsening until even our unflappable guide asked, not unreasonably, whether he was Chaos-touched. I offered that he was merely lubricating himself to move faster, which satisfied no one and amused me privately. There was nothing for it but to haul him the rest of the way. I have not the strength to lift so much as a full pack, let alone an orc, so I dragged him bodily along the ground through the remaining veils, at no small cost to my own concentration, which is precisely the sort of indignity I entered this profession specifically to avoid.

Terra, meanwhile, was very nearly lost. Something in the Logros reached for him at the second veil and all but drew him in, and for a moment I thought we would lose our newest companion before I had properly learned his measure. He gathered himself, resisted, and pulled free. Somehow all three of us reached the centre of the Pattern, Slaydar unconscious and reeking, Terra shaken, and myself considerably the worse for having spent the crossing as a beast of burden.

At the centre our guide concentrated, and the world dissolved into colour. The Pattern whirled about us and tendrils rose from the ground, and then we were elsewhere: a gloomy place of very dark grey stone beneath a sky that gave almost no light, a road climbing away from us toward what might have been sun. Slaydar, recovering himself, promptly lost the contents of his stomach across the stone. Our guide told us to fix the place in memory, for we might have need of it again, and offered the observation that we had likely passed through the underworld to reach it. I fixed it in memory. One does not decline that kind of advice twice in as many days.

Four Days Aloft

We spent the remainder of the day climbing the road, and came out toward five in the afternoon into a broad rift valley on Nualis: bright, dry, the ground a vivid orange clay, and not a drop of water within reach. Clouds came racing in far faster than clouds have any business moving. Our guide walked uphill, and one of them descended to meet him; he stepped onto it as onto a floor, and we clambered aboard after him. The flight to Nabatieh, he then admitted with the sheepishness of a man confessing a small dishonesty, would take four days rather than the shorter span he had implied. He had got the date wrong. Slaydar discovered that anything dropped upon the cloud fell straight through it, and was so delighted by the possibilities this suggested for the relief of his own person that I shall record no more of that particular conversation than necessary.

Four days aloft is a great deal of idleness, and idleness is the enemy of a mind like mine, but the others found employments. Terra spent three of those days training at a healing spell until he had it well in hand, which struck me as an eminently sensible use of the time given where we were bound. Slaydar, on the second day, took it into his head to ask our guide to halt his aging, and displayed his hands as evidence of some worthiness, those twisted, deformed things he is so oddly proud of. Our guide pronounced them a genuine work of art, marvelled that anyone could reduce a hand to such a state, and declined absolutely to touch them. Slaydar assured him it was a family trait; his father, apparently, had hands just the same. I have decided not to inquire further into the Slaydar lineage.

On the third day we passed a great port city in the distance and then crossed a narrow sea, some thirty miles across but running seven hundred long, bearing north and east. To the north the marshland rose into farmland of an extraordinary sophistication, worked with techniques far beyond anything a realm like Nualis should be able to produce. I examined it as closely as the distance and my own knowledge of husbandry allowed, and could find no ordinary explanation. Terra suggested witches, and I am not inclined to dismiss him. Our guide, notably, ordered us all to the cloud's left side, whereupon it tipped, gathered speed, and pulled sharply away over open water. If ever we had cause to flee this place, he warned, we must not flee toward that farmland. I underline the instruction here for whoever reads this after me. He also pointed out where, the following day, we would make our own entry into the desert, and bid us take careful notes.

The Black Castle, and Our Patron's Leave

The fourth morning found us perhaps a hundred miles from a defile in the mountain range that walls the desert's western edge, a gap some hundred metres wide through which a feeble, shallow, stagnant watercourse still leaked toward the sea down what had plainly once been a river. A mile or so inland stood a black castle upon a hill, dead in the centre of the two ranges that frame the desert's mouth. Slaydar asked who lived there. Our guide answered only that it was for our four, which I take to mean it is our destination whether we like the sound of it or not. I set myself to mapping the approach: three miles of sea, three of marsh, a mile of rocky defile, and then the hill. Terra tried to help, though he owns freely that his hand for charts and navigation is poor; I am the surer of us at fixing a position by the stars, and so I took that duty upon myself and produced at least a serviceable sketch of the ground.

We came down under cover of darkness about a mile and a half outside Nabatieh, and there our anonymous patron took his leave. He is not summonable, he told us plainly, so there would be no calling him back. Should we need him, we were to make for Axiom, a heavily populated trading city on the west bank well to the south, a station on the silk route, unexpectedly rich in alluvial gold, where luxuries and novelties fetch good prices. Then he was gone, and we were three foreigners on the edge of a desert with a month's work ahead of us and no way to say his name aloud.

Traders at the Desert's Edge

We turned at once to the question of cover. Traders, we decided; it is the one disguise that explains a stranger going anywhere and asking after anything. I proposed we manufacture and sell crystals of vision as novelties, little scenes sealed in glass after the fashion of snow-globes, houses and storms and perhaps the likeness of whatever local lord holds sway, since flattery sells as readily as glass. Nabatieh, we learned, trades in frankincense and myrrh, gum arabic, perfumes, purple cloth and glassware out of Tyre and Sidon, white sandalwood, even the tails of camels. We settled at last on two thousand silver's worth of empty glass perfume bottles and a single ounce of white sandalwood at a considerable price. Slaydar and I paid for the cargo out of our own pockets, on the understanding that the party will repay us from the proceeds before any profit is divided; I have found it wise to keep such arrangements explicit before the money starts moving.

Maps, we discovered, are hard to come by here, the sort of people who keep them being rare. No matter. The castle stands upon a hill in the centre of the plain, and as our guide observed, one could hardly miss it. Our route, then, is down the coast, past or around the swamp, and on to the black castle. We discussed hiring on as caravan guards for the safety of numbers, which appeals to my instincts far more than crossing a haunted desert as three lone eccentrics with a bag of bottles. Terra explained the way of desert travel, that caravans move by night and rest by day, on camels rather than horses, and that the trick of surviving the heat is a covered trench dug below the surface of the sand with a spire raised above it to draw air through like a chimney. He proposed, more simply, that we strip away the top foot of sand and pitch our tent in the hollow, where the ground beneath runs cooler. It is a good notion, and I have marked it as our first line of defence against the sun.

We ended the day taking stock of Slaydar's own peculiar inventory, a survey I undertake with a mixture of professional interest and settled unease: his few remaining mummies, the great Antediluvian Tortoise, and a supply of flesh-devouring beetles capable of stripping a body to clean bone within the hour. Reassuring, in its way, to know precisely what my manservant carries. Less reassuring to contemplate the circumstances under which he expects to need it. Our fourth companion has yet to join us; the man is expected shortly, and our guide's persistent talk of our four suggests he, at least, considers the roster already complete. For now we are three at the desert's edge, a feeble noble, a malodorous necromancer, and a bearded halfling of uncertain whiskers, and I find I would not presently trade the arrangement for a warmer one.

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OOC Details Items Acquired Slaydar: Bone Construction blueprint scroll (unpriced) White sandalwood — 12500 sp Glass perfume bottles — 2000 sp Hypericum amulet — 800 sp Aquilegius amulet — 2400 sp Betony amulet — 2200 sp Elder Flowers amulet — 400 sp Circle of Protection — 7500 sp Myrrh for Greater Enchantment — 6600 sp Potion of willpower (unpriced) Party (shared resources): Cattle transformed into sleeping mice (unpriced) Artephius: White sandalwood — 12500 sp Glass perfume bottles — 2000 sp Amulet of Luck — 2400 sp Hypericum amulet — 800 sp Carbuncle amulet — 9600 sp Elder Flowers amulet — 400 sp Circle of Protection — 7500 sp Myrrh for Greater Enchantment — 6600 sp Potion of willpower (unpriced) Renae: Circle of Protection — 7500 sp Myrrh for Greater Enchantment — 6600 sp Potion of willpower (unpriced) Session Summary Reduced to three while the rest of the Guild is away on other ventures and a fourth member has yet to arrive, the party is hired by an anonymous patron to investigate a spiritual disturbance welling out of a distant desert, for fifty thousand silver payable after roughly a month's work, and equips itself with Circles of Protection, amulets and desert provisions. They travel by rune-portal to Novodom, then walk a perilous Pattern that nearly claims Slaydar and Renae, passing through what is likely the underworld to emerge on Nualis. A four-day flight aboard a summoned cloud carries them across a narrow sea to the desert's western edge, where a black castle on a hill is named their destination and the patron takes his leave near Nabatieh. They adopt a trader's cover, laying in glass perfume bottles and white sandalwood before planning their route down the coast toward the castle. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 1 (1 Vintage) Anonymous patron hires the party to investigate the desert — fifty thousand silver, payable after a month; Circles of Protection, amulets, myrrh and desert provisions bought; Slaydar named leader; rune-portal to Novodom; night at the inn. Day 2 (2 Vintage) Depart Novodom into an impossible ravine; Min summoned; the party walks a Pattern that nearly claims Slaydar and Renae; through the underworld to emerge on Nualis about five, and boards a summoned flying cloud. Day 3 (3 Vintage) The four-day cloud flight to Nabatieh begins; Renae sets to training a healing spell. Day 4 (4 Vintage) Aboard the cloud; Slaydar asks the patron to halt his aging and is admiringly refused. Day 5 (5 Vintage) A great port city passed and a narrow sea crossed; anomalous farmland sighted to the north and deliberately avoided. Day 6 (6 Vintage) The black castle sighted on its hill and named the party's destination; landing near Nabatieh, the patron departs naming Axiom as the rendezvous; a trader's cover adopted, perfume bottles and white sandalwood bought.

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Chapter 2: A new Hombre

Our fourth arrived at last, which makes us the party of four that the man who hired us always insisted we were, and which raises the question of how long he had known where to find the missing member. I have decided not to ask. One does not interrogate an employer about the details of his own foresight while his money is still unpaid.

The Fourth of Our Number

He sauntered in. That is the word, and I use it deliberately, because it is the same word I used of our employer in these pages not two weeks ago, and the pair of them came through the door of the inn at Nabatieh with an identical air of having arrived nowhere in particular. The man who hired us said only that this was Ombra, that he was looking for work, and that he looked as though he might be useful. Then, having deposited him, our employer became once more a person of no fixed identity, and I said nothing on that subject, as is now my settled habit.

The story of how he was found I had from Ombra himself over the evening, and I set it down as he told it. He had been in Jerusalem arranging imports of wine, that being his trade, and a narrow trade it is in this country: the only substantial community anywhere near which is not Islamic — and therefore the only one producing wine in any quantity — lies in Palestine. A small, frail man in his fifties, no more than five and a half feet and slight even for that, fell into step beside him and wondered whether he was at a loose end. The work would be lethally dangerous. Ombra asked whether it paid well. It paid appallingly. Ombra looked over his shoulder to satisfy himself that he had successfully avoided his previous employer, and took the job on the spot, which tells me a good deal about the previous employer.

Then, he says, the man asked whether he could fly, worked something to make the pair of them less noticeable, and turned himself into a great flying creature without further preamble. Ombra unfurled wings of shadow some thirty feet across and went after him, holding him in view by that witch-sight of his, which is as well, since a thing that has just made itself unnoticeable is otherwise difficult to follow. A hundred miles, and two and a half hours of it, and then Nabatieh and the inn and the rest of us.

Introductions were conducted in Slaydar's usual style. He presented himself, and then presented me as his lord, the noble Artephius, who is very important. Ombra replied that it was a pleasure and that I might carry his bags. Slaydar, who has an instinct for these things sharper than any perception I possess, asked whether Ombra was himself a noble. "Yes," said Ombra. "Regularly." That was quite sufficient. Slaydar has addressed him as "my lord" ever since, and later asked whether Ombra would consent to administer him a daily beating as I do, since it helps keep him in check and is how he learns. Ombra allowed that it seemed fair, and asked how else one becomes an experienced adventurer. Terra, for his part, had asked only whether the new man looked strong. He does not, particularly, but then neither do I, and I have found that to be a poor measure of a companion.

He brought a little news of the wider country with him: Axiom active and trading briskly, and Judith, an immigrant out of Israel, sitting as queen. I noted it. Axiom is where we are to go if we need our employer, and I would rather know the shape of the place before I need it than after.

A Stone Made Out of Night

Before he left us, the man who hired us handed Terra a rough-looking black stone and said that he wanted her back, and that if she died there would be trouble. Terra, reasonably enough, asked what it meant for a stone to die, and then looked at the thing more carefully. If you stare at it for any great length of time it stops looking like stone at all and begins to look as though it were made out of night. Slaydar pronounced that creepy. I am inclined to agree with him rather more often than I let on.

Terra tested it for an aura and found one: living, sentient, and common. Ombra took a deeper reading of his own and came away satisfied that there was a great deal more there than rock. Terra then said hello and admitted he was not entirely sure what he was talking to, and received the reply that rocks usually give. It was our employer who explained the trick of it — she is summoned simply by desiring it, and returns to stone at will — and so we met Bell, who is a hound, and sentient, and by all accounts of Nimrod's line. She eats what hounds eat, and Terra went off to lay in a supply of the food she likes, which we agreed was a matter for the accounts rather than the evening.

It was Bell's ancestry that prompted Ombra's claim about tongues. Nimrod, he pointed out, founded Babel; and he himself descends from the line of Noah's grandson, being post-diluvian and, as he put it, flood-worthy. From which it follows that he understands any spoken language of this part of the world, and cannot write down a syllable of any of it. I suggested that he might simply have been overlooked at the time rather than saved on merit. Slaydar suggested he had hidden well. Ombra accepted both readings cheerfully and pointed out that he was covering himself either way.

Four Hundred and Seventy Miles, or a Few Hours

The plan, such as we had one, was to head south along the coast and turn inland at any break in the ranges from Aqaba onward. The gap we saw on our way in lies somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred miles south of Nabatieh, though nobody could swear which gap it was; there are two candidates, Yanbu and Jeddah, and they lead into entirely separate valley systems, so the choice is not a small one. Slaydar asked which of them his lords recommended. I do not know this country at all. Ombra does — he knows the ground around Aqaba and Petra well, and says he knows the black castle itself, which is more than any of us could claim yesterday. I asked only which was nearer, and being told Yanbu, chose Yanbu. Ombra named the route the King's Road, and then took some pains to explain that it is no highway: the country between settlements out here is empty, semi-arid, poorly inhabited, and what people it has are wandering Bedouin.

Overland the journey is four hundred and seventy miles. Weeks of it, on camels, in this heat. Our notion of joining a caravan for the safety of numbers, which I had thought rather a good one, died quietly at that point and I did not mourn it long; I am a poor rider at the best of times. I proposed we fly instead. Slaydar worked the arithmetic aloud and made it something over a hundred and fifty miles in the four hours a working of flight will hold. Ombra's shadow wings carry him at the same rate; my own is a shade faster, but not enough to matter, so we took the lower figure and planned two spans a day. Terra cannot fly and does not pretend otherwise. Slaydar, who is strong and finds Terra small, offered to carry him, and I confirmed that I would not be doing it, having no hands at all in that shape. Bell would travel as a stone, which spares us any question of losing her in the air.

We were warned about the weather, and it is worth recording. The temperature in this region has been unusually high all year and has only just come down to thirty degrees; twenty-five or so at Aqaba, thirty or higher along the coast, and quite chilly at night, with snow lying on the plateaus down to about three hundred metres. We were also reminded of the instruction never to flee toward Yemen. I remembered why, or at least I remembered the reason I was given: there are witches there.

Two further matters before we left. I would not have the new man go without, so I bought a few ounces of myrrh from the party's funds — Slaydar agreed at once and with some enthusiasm that a lord as important as Ombra ought to have something — and set a greater enchantment upon him. It is a small courtesy and it costs me nothing but the working, and a man newly hired into a party of strangers should be given some reason to think well of them.

And Slaydar asked, as he has asked before, why I glow when I fly. I do not glow. I shine, which is a different thing entirely: in flight I am a reflective orb some thirty centimetres across, and I throw back whatever light falls on me. In daylight that makes me noticeable, though at a distance nobody can make out what I am. At night, there being little light to throw back, it is barely a difficulty at all. Ombra offered to spray paint me dark grey. I asked what spray paint was and was told it is something one obtains from artists who have lost their commissions and gone mad, and who throw things at you. I let the matter rest. I have the working that keeps me unseen, if it ever comes to that.

Thirteen Bedouin and a Scraggy Camel

We flew south past Aqaba with the coast on our west and the ranges on our east, so as not to arrive somewhere entirely wrong, and after some four and a half hours in the air came down in the middle of an empty wilderness among low hills. They are hills and not mountains: dusty, dry, a little grass here and there, and almost nothing to run into, which suited the landing well enough.

Ombra and I both saw them at the same moment, down in the dry wadi between two foothills: a small group moving west to east, thirteen of them, with one rather scraggy camel and the rest of their beasts donkeys they were leading rather than riding. Slaydar asked whether we should speak to them or avoid them, and then protested that so simple an orc could not possibly make such a decision and had best leave it with the wise nobles. I declined the honour. Ombra proposed we let the orc talk to them, which is how Slaydar came to hail thirteen desert travellers as his great lords who wished to meet them and trade with them.

They were robed in white against the heat, heads covered, very dark of skin or else possessed of an incredible tan. They turned and stared at us as we came on. There was a good deal of muttering, and then one of the smaller figures was thrust forward and made his hesitant way toward us and spoke at some length. Ombra could follow it — a greeting, and how might we help, and what does it want from us — and answered him in his own halting pidgin, which was a great deal more than the rest of us could offer.

Tea was proposed, and then the question arose of who among us could make it. Terra is a herbalist. I am an alchemist, and I observed as much, whereupon the whole party discovered they were not thirsty after all. Slaydar looked thoughtfully at his twisted hands, and then at the teapot, and offered to try, and Ombra explained gravely to our hosts that the orc had taken an oath to make only good tea, which is a rare and powerful condition. The tea idea was abandoned entirely. We sat instead in the shade and they passed dates around, which suited everybody better.

The Goats Upon the Stone

The shade came from a great flat slab of sandstone leaning up against the hillside, and the slab was covered in markings. Seven figures at a casual glance, with a few smaller shapes among them that might have been lambs or might have been nothing but the impressions of the rock itself. Sheep or dogs, one would have said, though it was hard to be certain.

Slaydar, on the theory that the Bedouin had failed to understand him earlier because they were deaf, instructed Ombra to ask them very loudly what the markings were. Sheep, said the smaller Bedouin. Who carved them? Not us, he said, and was committed to the line: they had come across the rock while wandering in the desert, decided to have a look at it, and had done nothing whatever to it since.

Terra then asked Bell what she made of it. Aloud. In front of all thirteen of them. They stared at the talking dog and they ran. I gave Terra a look, which was as much correction as I trusted myself to deliver in company, and reflected that these people do not know about magic here. Bell lay down and put her paws over her muzzle. Ombra proposed, and I heartily endorsed, that we agree among ourselves not to talk to the animals in front of other people.

Ombra then suggested taking a rubbing of the carving, and was told it was not the sort of surface that would come up in one. Undeterred, and I believe entirely in jest, he instructed Slaydar to remove his clothes and roll himself over the stone while the rest of us sprinkled charcoal upon him. Slaydar said "of course, my lord," and did it. Whatever fragment of nerve the Bedouin had left after the talking dog departed with them over the ridge, and I cannot fault their judgement. They will be telling the story of the strange altar and the things that were done to it for the rest of their lives.

Ombra thereupon told him to remove his residue from the cracks in the rock, and Slaydar observed mildly that his lord had only just asked him to put it there. He has a cleaning working, and used it, and in cleaning the stone took off a good deal of lichen with the charcoal and uncovered what the lichen had been hiding. The horns are wrong for sheep. They are goats. And moving among the goats are people, drawn as stick figures: one carrying a bow, too large for a short bow and not large enough for a longbow; one sitting inside a tent; one simply wandering, perhaps with a staff; and one who is either preying upon a goat or milking it, the figures being too flat to say which. The residue Slaydar left behind is like chalk to look at, except that it is permanent, which I imagine will puzzle somebody in a century or two.

Slaydar Recruits a Spirit

Slaydar then opened his third eye and stared at the rock. I have watched him do this several times now and I have not grown used to it; the eye simply appears in his forehead, and he looks through it, and reports. There was no magical aura on the carving at all. There was, however, something present. Not a totem, he was told, but a spirit of some kind, and shaped as a humanoid figure with the head of a goat. Ombra asked whether it might be witches, daughters of Belial, which was not a comforting suggestion and which nobody was able to rule out.

What Slaydar did next was to invite it to join his tribe, announcing himself very powerful, and to expend one of Toothgrinder's services in order to back the boast with something visible. Toothgrinder came suddenly enough that Bell began to growl. The goat-headed figure turned, slowly, toward Slaydar. At which point Slaydar announced that he had changed his mind. I observed that it had been a good conversation but that we really had to be off; Ombra recalled an appointment in Aqaba at about this hour; and we all consulted our diaries and agreed there were better things to be doing elsewhere. The figure did not go into the stone. It faded into the surroundings, which is a considerably worse thing for it to have done, since a spirit in a rock at least stays in the rock.

Slaydar was heard swearing in orcish under his breath and reports that he kept his bowels intact, which he considers a first. Tollfeather then congratulated him on having defeated another opponent, and was very proud of him. I did not have the heart to examine that claim too closely. We moved off a good deal quicker than we had arrived.

Slaydar guessed afterwards that the carving belongs to the story of the golden calf, and that we were near what some hold to be Mount Sinai, which I record without endorsing; his guesses have a habit of being right in a way that does not bear much scrutiny. Terra asked Bell what the thing had been. She had seen it. She had not liked it. She declined to be drawn any further, and I thought rather better of her for it.

Duba, and a Road With No One On It

We took to the air again and headed south. There was no fresh water anywhere near where we had landed and nowhere to walk to that would ever bring us to people, so the choice was simple. The only inhabited place within reach is Duba, a fishing town on the coast road with perhaps three and a half miles of coastline and something like twelve to fifteen thousand people in it, a great deal of farming on the eastern side, and cedars covering the lower feet of the hills.

The road was almost empty, and that is wrong. This is the travelling season here, and runs so until the end of spring, after which the summer is simply intolerable; the road should have been thick with people bringing their wares along it. There was virtually nothing on it. It has been diabolically hot — in that stretch of country they speak of highs of fifty degrees, which is the sort of figure one hears and hopes has grown in the telling.

We put up at the caravanserai on the edge of town. It was entirely empty, and consequently they were charging two dinar a person for the night, which is far below what they would ordinarily ask and which tells its own story about the road. There are stock pens attached, and a little farm of its own: camels chiefly, and horses, and a few sheep and goats brought in for the market. The sheep are far less woolly than anything I have seen in Alusia or around Seagate. They raise no dogs there at all — dogs are kept outside as guards here, being reckoned unclean, and are not kept as pets in a stock pen.

The food was better than the price suggested. Spicy, though not poisonously so, and heavy with sultanas and raisins even in the meat stews, where one would ordinarily expect dates. I said I liked raisins in a stew, which is true, and Slaydar declared it good food and got stuck into all of it. The fig crop is enormous and they cannot get rid of it; the drought that ruined the grapevines and the fig trees for water has been very good indeed for the cedars, and the figs that have come are more than the market can absorb at any decent price.

Slaydar raised the matter that has been sitting with all of us: our employer told us the spiritual balance was out here, and if this weather is merely weather then perhaps it is not related at all. The heat, so far as anyone could tell us, is extreme but natural — at the very edge of what is possible, but inside it. I said as much, that it is not outside the bounds of normalcy, and then added the thing that has been nagging at me since: something may still be pressing the natural world toward its higher end without ever stepping outside it. Ombra objected at length to my use of the word normalcy. I stand by the word.

We slept, and in the morning nobody was dead, which Slaydar again counted as a success. He took the water skins he carries for all of us and refilled them from Duba's artesian well; there is plenty of water, though it is a little brackish, and an alchemist with patience and time could distil the minerals out of it. I did not volunteer. Terra saw to it that Bell was well fed before we left.

Wings That Cannot Be Hidden

Duba presents a particular difficulty for people who travel as we do. The country around it is flat, and there is nowhere within about six miles — which is to say, nowhere short of the horizon — where a man may quietly raise wings of shadow twenty-five feet across without every farmer in the district seeing it happen. They might not be able to say who had done it. They would be in no doubt at all that it had been done. We walked a couple of miles out of town and did it anyway, and resolved to ignore the farmers.

The morning light and a thin cloud made the working harder than it ought to have been. Ombra managed it regardless, and set wings on Slaydar and on Terra; I fly under my own power and needed nothing from him. We flung ourselves into the air and hit nothing, which I have learned not to take for granted.

At about a thousand feet the ground laid itself out for us very obligingly. There is a ridgeline running south, and a road that comes in over the top of it from the desert and then simply fades away into the sand and dust on the coastal side. On the far side of the crest a second road runs from the northwest to the southeast, hooks north, intersects the first, and drives into the centre of the peninsula. These are hills rather than mountains — a thousand feet at the most — and having roads to steer by makes the navigation immeasurably easier, which is a relief to everyone and to me in particular.

I asked whether we should cross the ranges here and was told that we need not: at Yanbu the two ranges leave a natural gap between them, and a large one, so we could pass inland without going over anything at all. So we carried on down the coast. Two hundred and seventy-four miles, which is two spans of flight, and we came to Yanbu around the middle of the day.

A Town Laid Out as a Clock

Yanbu is ancient and very populous. The stream that used to come down out of the hills to serve it has dried up entirely — Ombra could see that from the air — and the place survives now on its artesian wells, but survive it does.

We looked hard at it on our approach and saw nothing whatever. Between the four of us we cannot have made a worse job of it: Slaydar reported that he had stared at the sun and that it hurt, and then pronounced Yanbu completely safe, and I agreed with him on precisely as much evidence as he had, which was none. It was put to us that we might land in the middle of the town square and be perfectly fine. We are not that stupid, and I said so.

What we did see, Terra and I, being the only two among us with any astrology at all, is that Yanbu has been laid out as the face of a clock. The sections are trapezoidal, save for the outer edge which is a curve, and they alternate: one tilled for crops, the next built up with houses, then tilled again. Half the dial, were it completed, would fall in the sea. I asked whether a clock face carries any particular significance in the discipline and was pleased to find that it does. There is a constellation called the Horologion, which means simply the clock. I explained this to the others with rather more assurance than the knowledge strictly warranted, and offered my own suspicion: that a town built so serves for telling the time, and further, that it lets a man read his star signs by day without troubling to look up at a sky that has none of them in it. Terra said it was more than he knew, and listened. Slaydar said I was very wise. He says that regardless.

The black castle, we were able to establish, stands near the entrance to the port of Medina, some six miles in; and the swamp we crossed on our way to this country lies further south than we are. So Yanbu is where we turn inland, and the gap in the hills here is what we turn inland through.

Low Over the Hills

The question was height. Fly high and we would be seen by everything for miles; fly low and we would be seen, and possibly identified, by whichever locals we happened to pass over. Slaydar was for flying low. I agreed with him, and said why: better to be seen by a few people close at hand, whom we can deal with, than to have everyone in the country watching us come from miles off. He proposed five hundred feet, which keeps us under the silhouette of the hills. I had been on the point of suggesting forty or fifty, and thought better of saying so aloud; five hundred sounds a great deal better and involves considerably less collision. Terra admitted he is no good at skimming the ground. Slaydar can fly a foot or two above it and has no anxieties on the subject at all. Ombra declared himself quite prepared to fly just above the orc.

We went in from Yanbu, north and then hooking west, climbed to clear a circular plateau some thirty kilometres across, and came down the far side to a junction where three valleys open — one north, one south, one east. We had come about eighty miles inland by then. Slaydar, being our ranger, pointed south with enormous confidence, and we followed the ranger's directions, because neither Terra nor I has the least head for this. Terra says so freely. I say it too: I have a go, and then I muck it up and get us lost, which at least has the virtue of variety.

We looked about us as we went and saw nothing again. Every one of us tried, and not one of us saw a thing worth the trouble of looking. It made no difference. What the ground had to say, it said plainly enough for anybody. There were no trees. There were no date palms. Everything was scoured. Slaydar knew the marks at once, and named the working: Scarring Terrain, which kills vegetation outright. It is a working he knows himself, and he assured me solemnly that he uses it only for good reasons, such as killing evil trees. It also, as he acknowledged, strips an enemy of every scrap of cover he might have hidden behind. A powerful necromancer has been here, he said, and I could think of no better reading.

The Village That Was Alive Last Week

Slaydar thought it worth landing to look, and the others went down. I stayed up as an orb, having no particular need to come down and no great wish to, and watched from a hundred feet or so.

Within the last week there had been a community living here. Fifteen small houses, the largest of them perhaps forty feet by twenty. A small grist mill, maybe sixty feet across and thirty high, nothing like the great mills of the north but big enough to be the largest thing standing. A temple on a narrow lane running east off the main road. Another lane crossing it. And a mile and a half to the south, the remains of a mosque or a temple. All of it there, and all of it silent.

Slaydar cast about for the dead and found a great many sites of them. He then put his questions to the dead directly, which is a thing I have stopped flinching at. They do not know who killed them. They do not know what killed them. What they remember is an enormous quantity of terror and pain, and then their strength going out of them very quickly indeed. They had no treasure, either, which Slaydar established with the air of a man completing a checklist.

His tracking found sheep and goats in some quantity and nothing stranger — no army, no horsemen, nothing that did not belong. The strange thing, he was told, is that the animals are dead and were left where they fell. Nobody carried them off. That detail sat worse with me than any of the rest of it.

Terra offered his healer's training on the bodies, which struck me as far better than my own guesswork about the size of the claws that had made the wounds. Most of the injuries are necrosis. Most of the remainder are the work of skeletal undead — claws, and whatever weapons they happened to be holding. The attacks were unskilled and poorly formed; they were also relentless, from things that do not tire and cannot be stunned. Slaydar asked whether any of the dead looked like soldiers or fighting men. The largest group among them were children, from about four years old to sixteen, with adults among them. That is what a community is, of course. It is still not a thing one wishes to have established.

I asked what a necromancer gains from slaughtering a whole population, beyond ingredients. Ordinarily, Slaydar said, one kills people in order to animate them and replenish the army — but this one has not animated the bodies, which is unusual. Which leaves only the plainer reading, and I put it to the others: the local populations are being removed. Somebody is clearing people out. And we came to this country to investigate exactly such goings-on, so I do not think we need look far for the connection. Slaydar named it the spiritual imbalance we were hired to find and observed, accurately enough, that slaughtering everyone would certainly produce one.

Slaydar's conclusion was that we should not fly high at all from here — if there is a necromancer about, we would come out of the sky very fast. I went further and suggested we might be better off on foot now that we are close.

Fifty in the Temple

We set off toward the mill, and on the way the small temple on its lane drew us aside. Closer to, at about fifty feet, it is plainly not a mosque. It is not a well-appointed building either, but the path to it is thoroughly worn, which says it was well attended, and a well-attended temple in a village where everyone is dead is a thing worth a few minutes of anybody's attention.

Slaydar thought at that moment that he had better check for undead, and reached out some three hundred and fifty feet.

There were about fifty of them ahead of us. Lesser undead, and in the temple.

He gave the signal, which consisted of the words "back up" delivered three times at increasing volume, and we backed up. A couple of hundred feet, to where we had been standing before. I record with some satisfaction that not one person argued, debated, or proposed a closer look. There are parties in which such a suggestion would have been made. I am glad not to be in one.

There is another lane that runs off the temple road and crosses the path back to the main road, also well beaten. It leads to the graveyard, which I take to be very much to do with the temple, whatever else may be true here. Slaydar reached out again from there, and this time found a very small trace of undeath in the graveyard itself — nothing remotely like the density in the temple, and lesser only. No greater undead that he could detect anywhere. We all gave thanks for that, and then Terra pointed out that a greater undead might simply be hidden from Slaydar's detection, which would make everything considerably worse, and we agreed as a body that we would not think about it.

I asked whether there was anything to be got from the undead at all, since one cannot question a skeleton. Slaydar was more interested in the graveyard than in the temple: the trace there is separate from the others, and he wondered whether it might be a spirit, or something natural, or in any case something he could recruit. He is still building his tribe, and I have observed that no encounter is so alarming that he will not attempt to enlist it. So he walked into the graveyard and called out that we knew it was there and it had better come out, and warned it not to make him summon it.

There was no response at all. Not a stirring, not a sound, nothing whatever, which is odder than a response would have been. And there we stopped, with fifty of them in the temple at our backs and one unaccountable silence in the ground in front of us, and I put it on record here that stopping to think before poking anything was, on this occasion, entirely my preference.

---

OOC Details Items Acquired Renae: Bell (unpriced) Ombra: Myrrh for Greater Enchantment — 6600 sp Session Summary The party's fourth member joined them at the inn in Nabatieh, brought there by the man who hired them, and the same visit left Terra holding a black stone that is also a sentient hound. Rather than spend weeks crossing four hundred and seventy miles of desert on camels, they chose to fly south and turn inland at Yanbu. The first day's flight ended in empty hill country, where they met thirteen Bedouin travellers sheltering in the shade of a carved sandstone slab; cleaning the lichen off it revealed goats rather than sheep, with stick figures moving among them, and Slaydar's attempt to recruit the spirit attached to the rock went badly enough that the party left in a hurry. They flew on to Duba, a fishing town on a travelling road with almost nobody on it, where extreme but apparently natural heat has emptied the trading season, and left the next morning by raising wings in open country where every farmer could see it happen. At Yanbu, which is laid out as the face of a clock, they fixed the black castle's position near the port of Medina and turned inland through the gap in the ranges, flying low rather than be seen from miles off. Eighty miles in they found a village whose whole population had been killed within the last week — scoured land, unanimated dead, most of them children — which they take to be the clearing of the local populations they were hired to investigate. The session ended with roughly fifty lesser undead in the village temple at their backs and an unanswered silence in the graveyard ahead. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 7 (7 Vintage) Ombra joins the party at the Nabatieh inn, brought there by the employer; Terra is given Bell, a sentient hound who travels as a black stone; Yanbu chosen over Jeddah and the party resolves to fly rather than ride; myrrh bought and a greater enchantment set on Ombra; flight south past Aqaba; thirteen Bedouin met at a carved sandstone slab, the carving cleaned to reveal goats and stick figures, and Slaydar's offer of a place in his tribe refused by a goat-headed spirit; night at the Duba caravanserai on an unnaturally empty road. Day 8 (8 Vintage) Water skins refilled from Duba's artesian well and wings raised two miles out of town; flight down the coast to Yanbu, whose clock-face layout is identified and the black castle placed near the port of Medina; low flight inland through the gap in the ranges, the scoured terrain recognised as a necromancer's work; a village found whose whole population was slaughtered within the last week, the dead questioned and the wounds examined; fifty lesser undead detected in the temple, the party retreats, and the graveyard gives no response.

Buffs & Mil Sci

Buffs

Long Term (assumed always on)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA)

Self Only

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA	Rk
TBA
TBA	Rk
TBA

Short Term (cast when needed)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA)
TBA(TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)

Cast by minions and retainers

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	Location	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )

Senses and other stuff

TBA	Rk	Effects	Dur	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (%)
Detect Ambush (%)		Ranger (-5/rank of opposition)
TBA
See Invis (Rk)		Effective rank for seeing invisible
Stealth (%)		Standard / Ranger Outdoors

Misc

Greater Enchantment

(TBA ) rank ??

Enhance Enchantment

(TBA ) rank ??:, ?? seconds

Remove Curse

(TBA ) MA ??

Herbalist Lunch/Broth

?? rk ?, Meal ? FT or Broth ? FT

Watch Order

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
1		2		3		4		5		6

Marching Order

Skirmish Formations (Front)
Default	Double File	Single File ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???

Loot

Consumables

Potion of Circle of Protection x 4

This vial weighs 4 oz. Whoever drinks it is surrounded by a protective circle of green and gold for 10 ½ hours. If an attack is made against them, 5 is added to the result of the die roll and the circle  will absorb the first 20 points of damage each Pulse..It does not work against the damage from a Restorative potion, poison or the action of a disease.

Potion of Cure Endurance x 8

This vial weighs 8 oz. Whoever drinks it is cured of D10+4 Endurance lost to damage.

Draught of Enhanced Willpower x 4

This vial weighs 4 oz. Whoever drinks it increases their WP value by 10 for 5 hours. The draught loses all potency by the 13th day of Frost 826 WK

Mice

These cows have been cursed with Century Long Sleep and then turned into mice by means of a Skin Change spell.

6

5

4

3

2

1

Inscribed Carnelian Pebble

Description: Small, smooth, translucent reddish-orange chalcedony pebble polished by coastal merchants.
It is micro-engraved with apotropaic prayers, quotations from holy texts, or names in an unknown, ancient script. Believed to bring good fortune to wandering merchants.

Civet Cat Musk Pod

Description: The dried perineal scent glands or scraped skin pouches of the civet, a small nocturnal mammal.<
An incredibly valuable raw fixative in the perfume industry. In coastal towns, it was stored in small leather pouches or soft-stone vessels. Beyond high-end perfumery, alchemists used the raw, pungent grease medicinally to treat headaches, ward off airborne plagues (miasma), and cleanse ritual items.

Black Magnetite Sand

Description: A handful of heavily concentrated dark, heavy, magnetic iron-bearing sand often found along volcanic beaches and wadi deltas.
Alchemists, metalworkers, and occultists value it for its magnetic draw. It was used in Ilm-al-Raml (The Art of Sand), where diviners cast sand onto smooth boards to read patterns in the grains. Also used as an ingredient in iron-rich poultices or carried in small vials as a sympathetic charm to "pull" negative humours or toxic spirits out of a sick person.
Carrying even this much prevents he Casting of anything except Racial Magic.

A Tablespoon of Seeds of Syrian Rue

Description: These small, triangular, brownish-black seeds of the wild rue plant grow abundantly in the arid, sandy soils of the coast. They contain such virtue that makes them psychoactive when consumed in high doses.
Primarily used as a sacred fumigant by tossing them onto hot coals in homes, shops, and caravanserais, the seeds crackle, pop, and release a thick, aromatic smoke. This ritual cleansing smoke is considered essential for purifying the air, driving away malevolent djinn, and protecting newborn children.

Dried Henna Leaf

Description: The small, brittle, pale green dried leaf comes from a shrub that grows in lowland oases and is traded extensively in coastal markets. Ground into a fine powder and mixed with water or lemon juice, henna leaves are a part of daily and ritual life. Women used the paste to draw intricate protective patterns on their hands and feet for weddings and religious festivals. If applied to the soles of feet, it will toughen the skin against the hot coastal sands and can, soothe sunburn or dye hair.

Jewellery

Amulet of Hypericum x 2

Increases the wearer’s Magical Resistance by 10 to any magical act performed by a Demon or Daemonic being
Cost: 800sp

Amulet of Aquilegius

The wearer subtracts 10 from all rolls on the Fear Table.
Cost: 2400 SP

Amulet of Betony

Betony Decreases the Base Chance of infection by 15. Cost:
2200 SP.

Amulet of Elder Flowerrs x 2

Elder Flowers Makes the wearer proof against the Evil Eye.
Cost: 400 SP.

Amulet of Carbuncle

Decreases damage done by poison by 2 points of damage per pulse or day.
Cost: 9600 SP.

Calendar

Autumn
	Moonday		Duesday		W'ansday		Th'rsday		Frysday		Reapsday		Sunday
	Lugnasad
Harvest (5)
							1		2		3		4
	5		6		7		8		9		10		11
	12		13		14		15	Equinox	16		17	Seagate Autumn Fair	18	Seagate Autumn Fair
	19	Harvest Moon	20		21		22		23		24		25
	26		27		28		29	Michaelmas	30
Vintage (6)
											1	Patron hires party; portal to Novodom	2	Walk the Pattern; reach Nualis
	3	Cloud flight begins; Renae trains healing	4	Cloud flight; Slaydar's aging request refused	5	Port city, sea crossing, farmland avoided	6	Castle sighted; land near Nabatieh; trader cover	7	Ombra joins; goat-spirit; reach Duba	8	Yanbu; slaughtered village; fifty undead	9