The Party's Account

This is the road the five of them have walked, set down in the order it happened.

No dates are kept here. The party has never kept a calendar between them — no one was counting when it started, and no one has counted since. What can be said is what came first, what came after, and what followed from what. Where this account says that same night or the crossing after, that is as exact as the record gets.

How they came together

It begins in Aristonia, on a late summer evening around sunset, in a cellar beneath Little Pandemonium. Five strangers were in that room. None of them had met before.

Aelion had been in the city three weeks. He kept a scribe's desk in the public records office in the Civic Quarter, copying documents for a few silver a week. A little after lunch that day the gnomish clerk across from him, Bilgby, made idle conversation about old machinery buried under the eastern neighborhoods near the old east wall — humming lately, people were saying. After work Aelion walked east on the strength of that gossip, out of the marble and into the narrow lanes, until he came to an unremarkable doorway with a fist chalked above it that people were quietly ducking into. He went down the steps.

Flint was lying in a rented room a few houses over, one he had taken less than a week before, thinking about fields. An orange tabby he had seen around appeared on the sill with a whole cooked fish in its mouth, stolen from a stall below. It tore off the head, tossed it to him, and waited. He followed it downstairs, past Ravina and her stew, out into the street — and the cat led him to the same chalked doorway and scampered inside.

Biz was already below, in disguise, working the crowd, with his eye on a wealthy merchant's coin purse. He was on easy terms with Corvin, the man who ran the place. Worm was standing in the shadows a few feet off, and when Biz had the purse he handed it straight to Worm to hold, as he always did.

Randy was in the ring. He had come in from his farm the day before, a courier's envelope in his satchel that he had not opened, and he was hyping himself up on a stool with no shirt on, working his bad knee, old military tattoos on show. He fought a dockworker named Pell, who had four inches and forty pounds on him, and knocked him out in the second round.

Then the far wall came apart.

Behind that wall was a sealed chamber, and behind an iron door in it were machines of a former age that had been left to sleep. One of them came through the stone into a room packed with sixty or seventy people, and the crowd jammed the narrow stair trying to get out, leaving a strip of sand perhaps twenty feet across to fight in. The five of them fought it there, side by side, without having exchanged a word beforehand — a bolt of light that missed, fire that did not, a thrown dart and an axe, two punches, and a druid trying to move a panicking crowd with a voice made loud.

The names came afterward, standing over the wreck of it. Aelion offered his first — "I'm new. Nice to meet everybody." Biz's answer has held up as well as anything since: "We fought together. So it feels like we've known each other forever."

That is the beginning. Nothing else in this account happened before it.

Before they left that cellar they had work. A noblewoman in the crowd — Maren Ashveil — had come there that night tracking someone, and she had watched the five of them handle the thing better, as she put it, than the Kingsguard would have. She hired all five on the spot: fifty gold up front and fifty on completion, to find a criminal known as the Fixer. Corvin packed up his pylons and abandoned the pit for good.

The Ashveil case

They took Maren's coin and went to work in Aristonia.

The sealed chamber behind the pit turned out to be a construction site of the elder age — a workbench scrawled with unreadable runes, constructs resting in cradles ringed by sigils that fed them power. Something round had been taken off that bench not long before they woke. Corvin admitted a hooded woman had won a bout and paid him to unlock that iron door for her.

At the estate in the Civic Quarter they were let into the study where Dale Ashveil had died, left exactly as it was since. His last written letters, trailing off unfinished: "the fixe—". The arm of his chair coated in a contact sedative pressed from moon petal. A single curly red hair caught in a splinter under the desk. A shipping manifest among his papers bearing the seal of House Betony. The constabulary had called it a failing heart.

The trail went through the city's back rooms. At the Sunken Anchor in the Canal District they paid the Black Blades for a name and were robbed for their trouble; the fight went badly for the Blades, several died, and their leader Bremmick ran. It ended at the Emerald Diamond, the high rollers' club in the entertainment district, where the Fixer's people kept a private room upstairs and agreed to arrange a meeting a day later — weapons checked, no funny business. In between, the party bought a refined vial of moon petal from a Guild District alchemist and worked it into an ungent that would drop a person from a single touch.

At the meeting they faced her. She admitted killing Dale Ashveil without apology — "I fix things. That's what I do." — refused to name her employer, and moved to leave. They did not let her. Two of her associates were killed, one surrendered, and the Fixer was carried off alive with her satchel.

Held, she gave up more than she meant to. The surrendered associate, Sable, named her: Giovanna. Under questioning she confirmed that House Betony had commissioned the killing, and she was calm about the confession and openly afraid of something else entirely — a figure known only as V. Sable gave them the one operational thread she had: to reach V, find a fence named Octavian Drell in the port city of Saltmoor.

The satchel held two things. A brass lens — a disc of turning rings around a clouded crystal, ringed with dwarvish runes. And a note in V's hand: "Two of six. The northern site is confirmed. Retrieve the lens and bring it to the waypoint. Do not return to Aristonia."

Giovanna and Sable went to the city guard. Reporting back to Maren, they named House Betony as the ones who had ordered it, and watched something cross her face before her composure closed over it; she had worked with the house before, and judged herself in no position to move against it. She paid the second fifty gold and offered them something worth more — standing passage on her late husband's vessel, the Brass Heron.

Aelion sat with the lens for an hour and attuned it. The rings began to turn on their own, the crystal cleared, and he was drawn into a vision: a field of lavender under a blue moon, silver lines burned across it marking six points, himself standing at one of them, a voice out of the moon saying "Not finished." One of six, and someone already gathering them.

The crossing to Saltmoor

They took the passage. Captain Voss carried them out through the canal and across the open sea, about a week's sail, and set them ashore with local wisdom: stick to the Lamp Way, stay out of the Harrows, do not lie to Captain Mireval, and always pay your tab.

Saltmoor sits in a horseshoe cove of black rock, carved into the cliff in three tiers, governed by a board of pirate captains and very little else. They found Drell in his cavern-warehouse at Bay 14 on the wharves. He was blunt about the Vex Caves they had come asking after — six miles up the coast, reachable by boat at low tide only, the water coming back faster at the end of its rise than newcomers expect, and a death trap in his opinion.

At the Rusted Mermaid on the Lamp Way, Worm walked into the crew that raised him — the relic hunters who had left him for dead outside Aristonia years before and never come back. They were surprised to find him alive. They had since taken in another boy for the same work, and given him the same name.

The party went into the Harrows on a low tide anyway, and the legend proved true. The caves are the drowned laboratory of a scholar named Theodora, who lived and worked there alone for better than twenty years: a survey hall with carvings pointing the way on, a small first lab, a library of pulped books and blood-hungry fish with her sealed diary on a plinth, a brass corridor that made spells come out wrong, a tide chamber worked by the water itself, and at the heart of it a workshop with the throttle on a pedestal — the apparatus her every entry begged whoever found it never to move.

Worm's old crew had followed them in on the same tide. They caught up deep in the flooded passages and said they answered to a higher calling now, that they had come for something in the caves, and that Worm should come back to the family — Worm alone, there being no room for the rest. He refused. The standoff broke into open battle across the tide chamber. Moxie broke off and ran for the throttle and Worm ran her down; Greedy Ghent was killed by Biz at the end of a duel the two of them had been locked in the whole fight. The rest lost their nerve, gathered their dead, and fled up a shaft with the boy.

The party lifted the throttle from its cradle. The sealed brass door ground open onto the chamber where Theodora had studied the weave — with the throttle seated in its pedestal the ambient weave hung visible in the air as a lattice of light, and vanished when it was lifted away. The tide came in faster after that, exactly as the etching had warned, and the last stretch was a race against the water. Deeper still, in the lightless corridor past the bones of everyone who had come before them, they found Theodora herself — long outlasted her own death and become something else — and put her down.

They came out by the escape shaft and carried the haul back to Saltmoor. Drell bought the relics and texts; his dwarven assessor Bevin appraised the lot at 2,400 gold. They kept the lens and the throttle. Bevin took one look at the lens and recoiled: a survey instrument of the Second Epoch, dwarven work, the finest intact example he had ever seen. For the deeper history he named two places — Steamveil, where the dwarves hold the origins and will not speak of them, or Silvaris in the Firstwood, where the scholars keep records.

At the crow's nest they settled with Captain Mireval and the council of six, argued the codes as far down as they would go, and paid a 35% cut. Shown the lens, Drell had named its intended buyer at once, and under pressure confirmed him: V, a very old elf with a blackened hand, an eccentric collector of Second Epoch work, whom Drell had met once and was plainly terrified of. Bevin came to them twice to beg them to leave Saltmoor instead. They insisted, and Drell sent word by a magical correspondence that pooled into the page and welled back an answer moments later.

The night before that meeting, Randy got deep into his cups and told the others he thought he ought to go home — that he had property and commitments and a farm hand waiting on him, that it had been fun, that maybe he'd see them again. Then he went up to his room to open the envelope from home he had been carrying since Aristonia. He never said what was in it. In the morning he came down and stayed.

At dawn they met V at Drell's barred storehouse. He did not walk in — the lamp-flames leaned inward, the air went cold, and he was simply there. He named himself only: "You may call me V." He noted at once that the party looked about one short; Aelion had stayed away and kept the lens and the throttle on his own person. V made no demand and took nothing. He made an offer instead: there are places he cannot go and things he wishes to collect, and he will pay handsomely for them, in their own time. Asked what happens to those who decline, he said that anyone in the same business is a competitor, and "I don't keep competitors for long." He offered his good hand in parting, Randy shook it, and he was gone the same way he came. Drell turned them out the moment he left.

The blighted coast

A Saltmoor shopkeeper had mentioned a circle of druids living up the coast, and they went looking — half a day northeast on foot to the Saltwood, a stand of wind-bent pines leaning inland above the sea.

They arrived to the camp being torn apart. The circle's own bull elk, one they had kept company with for thirty years, had been driven mad by something poisoning the coast — eyes weeping an oily sheen, reeking of hot metal. The elder, Bracken, was in the middle of it bellowing at the animal to calm rather than letting anyone kill it. Flint read its pain instead of its rage and talked it down while the others roped it to the ground alive, and Bracken counted the debt paid.

He welcomed Flint as one of his own, a fellow moon-circle druid — the first people of his kind Flint had found in years — and Flint said the name of his clan out loud for the first time: Bedrock. Bracken named the sickness and where it came from: an old machine-place far to the north that his people do not go near, thrumming faintly on still nights. And he told the old story that goes with it — a moon-marked woman, generations back, who walked north the last time the blue moon rose full and quieted that same place rather than fighting it. Then he pressed the circle's own keepsake into Flint's hands, the Moon Sickle, cold and ordinary for longer than anyone living could remember. That night, as Flint fell asleep with it beside him, its blade woke with the faintest glimmer of light — the first any of the circle had seen from it in memory. What Bracken asked in return was that they carry the same restraint north and end the blight at its source.

Senna, the circle's scout, guided them north through worsening ground — the acrid air, the filmed tide-pools, the dying scrub — picked a safer line across the fouled flats, and brought them all the way to the loading door of the Works. She would not go inside, and nothing anyone said moved her. She turned back for the Saltwood at the threshold.

The Works is a vast derelict factory on the northern sea-cliffs that has never stopped running: an assembly hall the size of a market square with half-built automata travelling overhead on hooks, vent-trenches breathing superheated gas up through the floor grating, rusted drones with net-cannons on their arms, and larger, better-made overseers watching from the catwalks with a hot orange light burning in the chest. The party fought and destroyed one such group, and it cost them. Flint drove the Moon Sickle into an overseer's glowing core and killed it on the spot — the first proof that the old story about the blade was worth something.

They pressed down instead of turning back. A cooling shaft dropping a hundred and twenty feet past frost-rimed reservoirs. A plate of riveted steel with hooked chains whipping across it at head height and no cover anywhere on it. A ventilation impeller the width of the tunnel, nine blades the length of rowboats, that had to be stopped from a hatch in the deck. And then the Dosing Hall, where the blight is actually made: four drums along a pipe, clean seawater in the first and the exact brown filth of the tide-flats in the fourth, black concentrate cut in to thin it so it would carry further. Nobody works the valves. Nobody is in the room. It runs on a timer.

Below the refinery they found a den before they found the man — Riml, an artificer who had been living alone in the factory for years, everything he owns salvaged out of the building around him, thousands of tally marks on the wall beside his bedroll. He came home to find them asleep in it and it went badly for a while: they read his mind, charmed him, and when the charm broke he threw a vial and was taken down five-on-one, stripped of his belt and his tool-arm, and tied. Then Randy talked instead of fighting, and it turned — they untied him, shared rations, and he brewed them something to help them sleep. In the morning he had his gear back without argument and came the rest of the way down with them. He also told them what he had come for: a construct of the elder age called the Conductor, thousands of years old, powerful enough to command every other machine in the place, sitting behind the last door he had never been able to reach.

The way down was the mines. Two ore carts on rails at the edge of a haulage floor whose far side drops away into nothing, and a long, fast, unlit run through the rock — stone teeth between the rails, a gate on chains at chest height, a leaning crib of railway beams, a bank of relief valves, machines riding the same lines. Winged beetles dropped out of the dark into the carts' slipstream and came over the rims in waves. A powered flat truck ran level with them on a live third line, and Randy jumped the gap onto it, swung twice, and jumped back.

Past the buffer stop the tunnel narrowed and the left wall carried carvings the length of it. Then a round chamber with a column of light falling from the ceiling, and in front of the last door the guardian — fifteen feet of polished black steel with a furnace in its chest, the thing Riml had spent three years unable to get past. It knew him on sight. It told them their makers had ordained it and its kind arbiters of unyielding progress — "myself, and my kin, in this place and in others" — and that they would not reach the Conductor. Shown the Moon Sickle it cocked its head: "I have no recollection of these things." Riml ended the parley with a thrown vial and the guardian put a gout of fire straight through him. It lost anyway. The sickle bit far deeper than it should have, a Moonbeam settled over it and began wicking the fire out of its chest, and it spent the rest of the fight hauling its own chest open trying to reach the flame. The door behind it swung open.

The room at the bottom

The Conductor was in a small room choked with wire, in a throne of tubes and cabling beside a glass console, sitting with its arms crossed exactly as the last carving on the wall outside shows. Its first words were that they were the interference on the assembly floor, and the refinery, and the third level, and that they were much smaller than it had calculated.

It was not a weapon and not a monster. "I am no god. I am the Conductor. I hold the orders." Every machine in the building took its work from the console, and the console took its work from the Conductor, and nothing there had needed a living hand in a very long time.

It gave up the whole of the contract without being pressed: one single contract, held by the Great Dwarves of Steamveil, who had built the Conductor themselves. The Works makes warforged, other constructs, and arcano-engines, and ships them west to the humans of the Three Marches, who — in its own flat phrasing — fight each other with them. Two things were wrong with that. Randy fought in the war of the Three Marches and could say plainly that no warforged were ever used in it. And the years did not agree: told it was 462, the Conductor answered that the last it was operational the year was 1816, and that by its own count it was now 1819. It could not begin to explain the gap. It had been running, it said, for three years and one hundred and six days, and before that its count simply stops.

Flint held up the Moon Sickle and asked whether it had seen such a thing. It stared at the blade — and the blue glow in the sickle began to fade — and said: "Memory banks wiped. I do not know this apparatus. There is a gap in my memory."

When they described the coast to it, it went quiet and did not argue. "I have no instrument outside these walls... I did not know the coast was in that condition. You were there and I was here." And then: "I would wish to keep track of more."

It did not know who had switched it back on. When Flint asked, the party looked over at Riml and watched his face go white. He admitted it: he restarted the Works himself, three years ago, because whole sections were impassable with the power off and he needed to get deeper. That is what woke the guardian, that is why he then spent three years stuck one room short of what he came for, and everything the coast has suffered since followed from it. He had come from Steamveil, where he had been studying the dwarves' old technology and found a mention of an operation on the northern coast.

Cornered mid-confession, Riml kicked one last cord out of the console. The Conductor slumped, came back up, said "I have been disconnected," and then stood — considerably taller standing than it had looked seated. It walked the room for the first time in its existence, touched a few things on the console, and every gear and every head of steam in the building above ground down to silence. "Their operations have ceased."

Riml moved to claim it. It refused to be anyone's to claim: "here is what I want, and I believe that I have autonomy and get to choose what I want. I want to see the world and to experience life. But I have no memories of my own."

Then it held out both hands, palms up, and asked to share in their histories — not to take them — so that it would have a foundation to build on. It wanted the memories of many rather than one, and it suggested going back to when they all met. Every one of them laid hands on it: Randy in tears with a full embrace, Worm with his feet, and Flint took Riml's arm and pressed it to the machine as well so that it would know exactly what had been done to the coast. For an instant all six of them were connected through it, memories running in every direction, back as far as the fighting pit where the party first came together.

That sharing is where this account comes from.

Where it stands

The Works is stopped and the party have not yet walked back up through it. The Conductor travels with them; it has no name of its own beyond the title, and they have not settled on one for it. Riml is alive and with them and nothing has been decided about him — Randy has proposed carrying the Conductor out to see the coast for itself and letting Riml's judgment be passed by Bracken's circle, and nobody has answered him yet.

Steamveil is the obvious place to go next, for the contract and for the makers both.