Café de Nuit

"My lightning seems to works better against whatever is this. Well, no time like the present. Should we go ladies and gentlemen?"

Kat gazes at the tunnel with an expression of extreme reluctance.

"leaving aside how this thing opened, what's to stop it closing again?"

She stares into it for a moment, then with a slightly taut tone of someone who believes she will regret saying this adds

"should I scout it?"

"Let's put something hard on the opening first so that it doesn't closes that easily behind you. Remain within shouting distance please."

KATRIN
goes creeping into the mouth of the Hand.

She uses her tools to jimmy the interior grate, and then slowly shoves the corroded iron loose. The metal gives way, scraping stone with a rasping noise that echoes in the tunnel.
With the grating removed, Katrin steps down into a masonry-walled gallery with a sluggish stream of foul water running left to right before her in a shallow channel.
It not only looks like the sewers of Pont-a-Mouseau down here, it smells like them.

Investigating light and noise from the left, Katrin finds a rusty iron ladder set in a square-walled vertical shaft. The light leaks around the warped edge of a hinged wooden panel across the top, within easy reach of the uppermost rungs. Climbing up and listening, she hears footfalls, indistinct voices, hoofbeats, wagon wheels on cobblestones.

Daring to lift the dank, slimy wooden cover, Kat peeks out into suddenly bright light. The sun shines down on a city street. The trapdoor is set in a short dead end alley facing the street.
Kat smells fried meat, ale, vinegar, charcoal-smoke, bodies in need of bathing, and horse-dung—a pungent mix of odors in the cool air but more pleasant than the stagnant, fumy atmosphere of the sewers. A couple of roughly-garbed pedestrians walk past going right. Stone and pine-log buildings rising on either side of the alley and more across the street all show a crude, scavenged-and-rebuilt style quite unlike what she saw in Harrowdale.

Popping back down before anyone seems to notice her, Kat listens again. She ignores the gurgling of dirty waters below and skittering of rats or other things, concentrating on human voices topside.
Strange guttural accents make eavesdropping difficult.
Still, the burglar catches a few stray words she does recognize: wine, no, look.

Returning to the broken grate and the passage, she checks and sees that the passage remains open, her companions waiting on the other side.

Kat follows the flow of dirty water a short distance to the right, far enough to find two smaller side tunnels with streams spilling into the main flow. She doesn’t venture beyond shouting distance.

Back at the grate a second time, she finds the way still open. Maybe the furniture one of her companions has shoved into the gap after she went through just makes it look tighter, but she can’t shake the feeling that the passage has shrunk just a bit.

Katrin steps back through the portal and reports what she has seen from the same side as her companions.

"Its a sewer. There's a city above, looks pretty normal. Its not home though... much rougher buildings, kind of barbaric looking. Its nowhere near here, though, I'll tell you that."

kintire wrote:Katrin steps back through the portal and reports what she has seen from the same side as her companions.

"Its a sewer. There's a city above, looks pretty normal. Its not home though... much rougher buildings, kind of barbaric looking. Its nowhere near here, though, I'll tell you that."

Perielle says,
''A city sewer? Oh! It must be one of the fabled magic portals ! I'd never have guessed that one was buried here. I'm even more surprised it opened into a sewer under some city, though, because the words Benn and Klokulf translated"
--she points at the chalk-dusted words above the alcove where the mouth-portal gapes--
"said something about opening into the Darkbringer's Holy Hill, didn't they? I expected a dark and terrible temple. And that strange boy, he said his mistress served the Darkbringer. That was it, right? Darkbringer. I've been thinking, trying to recall where I've read about that name or title. Now I'm sure I've seen it in one of the old books at our temple. The fire, though...I wonder if anything made of paper or even vellum survived?"

"Well lead the way Kat, since you have seen in person what is a head of us ."Alain says after Perielle's outburst . Thinking to himself-no time to hestistate now on finding and defeating our adversary .

"I would urge caution," interjects Klokulf. "We don't know if we can open it from the other side. If not, someone ought to wait here in case it must be reopened."

He observes the portal for a bit, measures its edge and diameter, then says, "I estimate we have about ten minutes before it seals again. I have no faith in the resilience of the chair."

The party splits, some of its members going through and others remaining behind the watch the portal and be ready to reopen it if it closes before the explorers return…


END OF PART SEVEN