Session 9 Recap

When last we left our heroes, they had crossed at dawn to the Isle of Pines and gone in painted and costumed behind Varjalikan to meet the genius of the dead city. The pines opened all at once, and Kyron Karr lay before them under the afternoon light — still beautiful, its pale walls and pillars and broken domes weathered to the colour of old cream, its streets paved not in stone but in bones. Cormorants roosted black on every ledge and lintel, watching with eyes like wet stones, and Varjalikan touched the amber bird at his throat and said only, "There she is."

He told them the river had never drowned Kyron Karr at all — the Cheyth had merely cut it off and starved it slowly to death over many months, and that nothing which had ever come to the city had been permitted to leave. A prison, then, that they had broken into; the question was whether the Cheyth would let them cross home again. Moving inward toward the public square, the party found a recent camp in a roofless house — bedrolls and crates for four or five people, dried nightshade and blind-man's-kiss and heather, charcoal sigils in no language they knew, and scattered everywhere pieces of carved red amber in the shape of vultures. When Varjalikan began pocketing the amber and denying it, and then amber began appearing in the party's own pockets though his hands came out empty, they understood witchcraft was afoot, hauled him bodily out of the house, and threw every cursed piece back through the window before pressing on.

The cormorants followed at a hundred yards, drawing closer with every step, until the party reached the great square — sixty feet across, the ruined inn at its centre where merchants once ate bread and salt, hundreds of birds gathering silent on the broken walls. While Varjalikan and Herek cleared bone and set the ring of torches for the stage, the others searched the marketplace and the old tavern. They turned up little of worth — ancient coins stamped with a long-dead king, common across the kingdom and proof of nothing — but the tavern held stranger things: a message scrawled large across the most intact wall, *"It's about time,"* and a row of broken pottery shards that, gathered one by one, spelled out a sentence — *pay better attention to the amber* — and behind a sealed clay jar in a wall-cabinet, the single charcoal word *two*. Someone was watching them, and trying to tell them something. They carried the great jar back to the square as a souvenir, and at sundown Varjalikan staged them all and the play began. He danced into the torchlight reciting the prologue; Herek as the merchant broke bread and begged peace; Ineia rose as the city in all her pride; the dark citizens mimed the murder and cast the bodies into the river; Inayin gave voice to the Cheyth's cold judgement; and Ineia, as the city, wept for her starved children and her ruin and yet stood at the last unbroken — proud, yet unbound. The cormorants froze. The stones groaned and shed dust. The sound of running water rose and then fell to absolute silence, and for the first time in two thousand years Kyron Karr was simply a ruin and nothing more. "I think we did it," they said. "I think we did it."

And then their smiling friend was standing in the north-eastern corner of the square, weather-stained and implausibly clean-shaven. "Hello again, Fjalenar of the House Karjalkarr. I see you received my letter." But it was not the smiling sorcerer he turned to name — it was Varjalikan. "Is it still four boats at the steading upriver," he asked, "or have you brought in more since last week?" 

— and Varjalikan answered, unflinching, "Five, actually. I was expecting complications."

Inayin alone had marked it: through the whole play the scholar had clutched the amber bird at his throat and muttered under his breath, and that bird, he saw now, was a vulture. The party lunged for the amulet and Varjalikan struck their hands away with shocking speed, and at last he set down the mask entirely. He was, he said, a scholar and a high priest both; every word he had told them of the city and the rite was true; and the charming little play they had just performed was the final act of a far greater working. They had rung the bell of time to save a thousand souls — he meant to save far more. With the genius's sight now opened and willing, he would turn her gaze not on the city's sin but on the deep past, on the founding wound of the Black Hills, and reach back to kill the heir of Sencan in his cradle before ever he forged the sword — to undo the ancient wrong at its root. The party named it for what it was, dark magic to mend dark magic, and refused him; and as they refused, figures stepped out of the grey ruins all around them — armed, armoured, powdered bone-white to vanish against the ash of the city, each one marked on chest or cheek with the red sign of the vulture. "Pay better attention to the amber," their smiling friend said.