Below the Full Moon's Light
Campton, it turned out, had a considerable number of opinions about how to spend the days before the full moon.
The city ran on festivals the way other cities ran on trade — which is to say that the festivals were, in fact, trade, just conducted in a different register. The full moon carnival was the city's largest: a parade that wound through all three circles, markets that appeared overnight like they'd always been there, and a general permission to be louder and less sensible than usual. The wine yards on the outer edge of the High district sent casks in through the gates on a flatbed. It was a good city if you liked a celebration, and an exhausting one if you didn't.
The party used the days before it in varying ways.
Mage You Look was a tavern that had named itself correctly. It had the specific character of a place that looked like nothing in particular until you noticed that the people inside it paid very careful attention to the door. Arya noticed this. Arya noticed most things. She ordered a drink and watched the room.
Angie worked the bar with the confident efficiency of someone who had been doing it long enough that it required no effort. She was funny, in the way of people who dispensed dry observations at regular intervals and kept moving. She and Cylia, by the end of the first night, had an understanding.
There was a bard at the corner table — Ernesto Xilouris, who played with the assured looseness of someone who had been very good for a long time and had come out the other side of caring about proving it. Cylia sat down next to him and picked up the spare strings that he kept on the table the way musicians keep things available in case someone useful shows up. They played together for an hour. Ernesto bought the next round and called it even.
On the second day, walking the market streets, Cylia stopped at the sound of her own name.
Habos was broad-shouldered and looked like a man who had been employed as a bodyguard for long enough to have developed the physical presence of the job. They'd served in the same company, once, in a period of Cylia's life that the current version of her carried without always referring to. He was working now for a wealthy man named Adonopoulos — escorting, managing access, the work of keeping someone important from being too accessible.
They caught up. He seemed well. He would probably be useful later, the way people you know in cities where you don't know many people tend to be useful later.
Elaazar spent an afternoon among the high-society ladies of the Inner Circle, which was not where he would have placed himself voluntarily, and which produced exactly the kind of acquaintances he had not been looking for and immediately found practical. Lady Helen had connections to the Double Rose vineyard — the winery whose label the poem had been printed on. She was amenable to the idea of a visit. She was also very enthusiastic about a cleric in temple vestments, which Elaazar received with the graceful neutrality of a man who had long since learned when the appropriate response to attention was simply to accept the invitation.
At the same gathering, later: Sir Goffan, Helen's husband, who was rich and comfortable and had the specific kind of dismissiveness that comes from never needing to want anything from the people in front of you. He looked past Elaazar with the efficiency of a man who had not found what he was looking for and had already moved on. Elaazar returned the courtesy.
He also met — through Harry and Katya, who moved through the city's academic circles with the ease of people who had been doing it for years — Dr. Julian Jones. An archaeologist, currently conducting research into Voss and his tomb. He was interested in everything the party had to offer on the subject and offered in return: context, historical record, and the specific useful-mindedness of a scholar who had turned a question into a career.
Dr. Jones was working on the key reconstruction. He would be in touch.
The road to the Double Rose was quiet until it wasn't.
They brought Angie as a sommelier — this had been Cylia's idea, offered with the certainty of someone who had already decided it was going to happen. Angie wore a borrowed coat and carried a tasting notebook and looked like exactly what she was: a bartender who'd accepted a strange offer from a table she'd noticed looking interesting.
The bandits appeared in the mid-road stretch between the inner walls and the vine country, which was where bandits typically appeared because it was where the road was long enough to be predictable and far enough from the walls to be comfortable. They had the confidence of people who had been doing this successfully for a while.
The party had been in considerably worse fights recently. The bandits were managed efficiently and the road continued.
At the Double Rose: the vines, the casks, the specific golden light that wine country produces in the late afternoon. Lady Helen's invitation got them a tour, a tasting, a lunch, and nothing. The winery was exactly what it appeared to be. The label was a label. Whatever the poem referred to, it was not a place — it was a time.
The full moon was tomorrow.
The carnival arrived the way carnivals do: immediately and everywhere, like weather.
The parade moved through all three circles of Campton with the confidence of a tradition that had been running long enough to remember who used to live in the buildings it passed. Music from six directions. Food from carts that had been in the same spots for generations. The wine yard at the Double Rose, now strung with lanterns and open to the public, was running six casks simultaneously and had very few concerns about tomorrow.
Elaazar met Sir Goffan again at a gathering near the Inner Circle — briefly, unremarkably, the way you meet someone twice and confirm they are exactly what they first appeared to be. He circulated. He spoke where speaking seemed useful. The insignia of Tyr, he had noticed, had not appeared again, which he was choosing to interpret as approval rather than silence.
In the parade: Cylia found Anduin, or he found her — difficult to say which, in a crowd. The parade was loud and close and provided excellent cover for a kiss, which Cylia took at speed and with the efficiency of someone who had been planning it since the river.
Anduin's response was technically successful in the sense that he did not fall over.
At the Double Rose, after midnight, under the full moon's light:
The vine fields were silver and still. The lanterns had mostly burned down. The casks were empty. Deborah had had a meeting scheduled here tonight — the gang, the information exchange, the full moon as agreed. Nobody came.
The party had, in their raid on the Brickborn city hideout, been thorough. There was nobody left to receive the information. There was no meeting. There was just a quiet vineyard and the specific anticlimactic feeling of having done the job too well in the wrong order.
Haldrig emerged from somewhere near the third row of vines and looked at Cylia with the cheerful recognition of a man who had last seen her at Wolf Among Heldrick and had not, it seemed, changed much.
He was glad to see things were going well.
Cylia got drunk. She got naked. She danced in the vine fields in the moonlight in honor of the dwarf goddess of wine, whose name she knew and felt rather than spoke, which is perhaps the most appropriate kind of worship. It was genuine and undignified and completely sincere.
Haldrig joined her.
Together, at some point in the late hours, they constructed a sculpture: vine-wood sticks, bent and woven and pressed into the earth between two rows, shaped into two figures with arms out, mid-turn, clearly dancing. It was not technically accomplished. It was exactly what it was supposed to be.
They left it standing in the field.
The road east took two days through country that flattened and then broke open into the dry gorge terrain that gave the canyon its name. Rock walls, sparse vegetation, the specific silence of somewhere that wasn't visited casually. A lion pack on the second day — eight of them, organized, which is the worst kind — turned what should have been an uneventful stretch into a sustained negotiation between the party's damage output and the lions' collective opinion of whether the meal was worth the effort. The lions eventually decided it wasn't. Not a clean win, but a win.
Somewhere on the first afternoon, when the terrain had gone quiet and the road had become the kind of straight that gives your thoughts too much room, Nihion left the necklace.
It was not dramatic. There was a shift of warmth at Elaazar's collar — familiar, the usual register of Nihion communicating — and then more warmth than usual, and then a small copper-scaled form dropped onto the road beside him and walked. Not flew. Walked, with the particular dignity of a dragonling who had decided that the world deserved to see him properly for a while.
He was not large — he fit in the crook of an arm with room to spare — but he was clearly himself, which is different from the impression of himself that the necklace conveyed. He looked at the road ahead with the interested attention of someone seeing it for the first time in a body that could look at things. He looked at the rest of the party. He looked at Cylia for a moment longer than the others, which she received with equanimity.
Anduin, to his considerable credit, took a copper dragonling appearing from his mentor's necklace and walking beside them on a road as an ordinary thing. He did not comment. He matched pace. After a while, he offered Nihion the back of his hand, the way you offer a hand to an animal you want to let decide whether it trusts you.
Nihion considered it. Then he stepped onto it.
They walked like that for the better part of an hour before Nihion stepped back to the road and eventually found his way back to Elaazar's collar as evening came. The warmth when he settled said something that did not have a word for it.
Near the gorge entrance: a hat. A low structure by the road, more lookout post than shelter. An older orc sat in front of it with a rifle across his knees and the settled patience of someone who had been sitting there a long time and found it adequate.
He looked at them.
They were new recruits, they said. They'd been sent.
He looked at them for a moment longer — the specific look of a man who has seen enough new recruits to know when the explanation is slightly too smooth — and then reached for the flare on his belt and sent up a blue streak of light over the gorge. Someone's coming. The signal, not an alarm. They watched the smoke clear.
"Go on in," he said.
The headquarters was built into the rock: a compound carved and extended from what had once been natural caves, now occupied by the Brickborn's field operation with the casual permanence of a gang that expected to be there for a while. The leader received them with the particular hostility of a person who expresses dominance through low-grade cruelty to new arrivals. Questions that were actually tests. Comments designed to make you feel small. The kind of welcome that's really a performance of authority for the benefit of the people watching.
They managed it. They kept their expressions appropriate and their answers careful and declined to escalate anything. Cylia exercised considerable restraint.
During the tour, the door.
It was carved into the rock at the far end of a deep chamber: geometric marks, old and deliberate, the kind that pre-dated the gang by centuries. The Brickborn had been using the compound for years and hadn't opened it once. They'd tried. The marks didn't respond to force or leverage or any obvious mechanism.
The marks responded to knowledge.
The riddle was about the heirs of Voss — which of the three, the verse asked, had carried the key in stone. Arya and Elaazar worked through it between them while the gang watched with the skeptical attention of people who had tried this themselves and expected to watch it fail again.
The door opened.
The gang leader sent them in immediately, with the confidence of a man who had just decided these particular assets were expendable.
The passage was narrow — one person at a time, the rock close on both sides, going down. They went in. The passage went down further than the carved chambers above had suggested, and then the floor changed, and then it wasn't a floor anymore.
The slide was fast and total. Rock smoothed by centuries of exactly this, sloping at an angle precisely calculated to produce momentum. They went down in a tangle of arms and equipment and arrived in a sand pit that was already moving — slow, like breathing, pulling down.
Arya was the first to stop moving. Her slippers found purchase on the wall before her mind had fully processed what was happening — the enchantment doing its job, walking up the face of the passage as naturally as a flat surface. From the wall, she reached. One by one, with the efficiency of someone who had done difficult spatial problems before, she helped them back.
They kept going.
The room at the bottom was ancient in the way that makes you lower your voice without deciding to.
Four altars in a square arrangement, their carvings worn smooth but still readable as religious. In the center of the square: a sarcophagus, carved from a single stone, sealed with the finality of something that had been designed to stay closed.
They opened it.
The mummy inside was not the dust of age and neglect. It was deliberate — preserved by something that was not preservation in the ordinary sense, still containing whatever it had been when it went in. It rose with the specific unhurried motion of something that had been waiting and was not surprised to be disturbed. Its hands moved. The chamber darkened at its edges.
Four spectral forms gathered from nothing around it and did not speak.
Elaazar stepped forward and failed his Wisdom save at the worst possible moment — the mummy's glare connecting with something deep and structural, leaving him standing and breathing but unable to act, a body without direction. The party worked around him.
The mummy used Rotting Feast.
Arya caught it full.
She hit the ground and stayed down and when she got up she was not entirely right — something in her was now wrong in a way that the end of the fight didn't fix. The curse sat in her like sediment, patient, waiting to see what it would become. She noted it. She kept fighting.
They killed the mummy. They killed the spectral forms. They stood in the ancient room after, in the quiet, covered in the specific aftermath of a fight that had cost something.
The sarcophagus was open. The key piece was real — they could feel it in the air, in the silence, in the shape of the room — even before they found it.
Arya's curse was also real.
Whatever it would do to her, it would take its time doing it.
Next episode: what the sarcophagus was guarding, what Arya's curse means, and what Harry says when the party comes back with the last piece of the key.