Date: October 7, 2026
Attendance: Sandy, Lucia, Korath, Varys, Elunia
The alley stank of blood and of whatever the darkness had left behind. Before anyone else moved, Elunia crouched in the red mess and picked up the medallion of Gruumsh, the one her imp had cut from the orc priest’s neck and she had thrown back at him. Spoils of war. Korath remarked that nothing ever goes wrong for people who steal other people’s idols. Elunia was alive and thriving, she pointed out, so her own god was clearly looking after her.
Lucia wanted to know who they had just killed: hired muscle, or the church. Most of the remains were plainly acolytes of Gruumsh, their emblems a scowling face and a bloody fist. Two were different. One of them had worn his hair tied in a long run of small knots, and Varys recognised the pattern before he had finished looking at it. It belonged to the Nameless Ledger, the people who had caught him as a boy, trained him, and used him, until he ran. The second had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist: two short lines under a curved arc. The party argued over whether it was a smile or a frown. Nobody knew what it meant. Between them the dead men carried twenty gold.
Nox, Elunia’s imp, came back empty-handed. He had chased the goblin boy through the market while the boy ducked between legs and tipped over fruit carts, and lost him the moment a second child in identical clothes stepped out of an alley. The implication was obvious enough: the goblin had sold their route to the orc and been paid for it.
Ouroboros Airways
There was still a flight to catch. They bought a general antivenom, since everyone knows the desert is full of things that bite, and goggles against the sand, and then looked properly at the tickets the Baronet had given them. Each was stamped with a snake eating its own tail, and under it the words We get you there and back again. The address was not the tower where they had landed. It said to go to the airship tower, turn northwest, and keep walking until they saw the big flashing sign.
The crowds thinned as they walked. Most of the day’s ships had already come in, and the priests who had worked the stair that morning had gone to sleep through the heat. Past the tower the sand hardened into salt flat, and a light blinked far out on it. As they came closer it turned into a pillar topped with a glowing snake, endlessly circling and swallowing its own tail, above the words Ouroboros Airways. Beside it stood a long curved hangar and a strip of salt polished smooth as a runway.
Two dwarves sat outside the hangar in lawn chairs, drinking ale, with thirty or forty empty bottles in the sand around them. They did not acknowledge anyone’s existence. Out on the strip a lone gnome was pottering around a huge aircraft: three stacked wings of wood and canvas, two propellers beside the hull, runners underneath for landing on sand, and a wide open hold fitted with racks for water casks.
Lucia walked past the dwarves and held out a hand low for a fist bump. Sup, homie. They stopped drinking long enough to check how much was left in their bottles. Aren’t you a little tall to be a dwarf? said one. Your beard, though. Fantastic. I like a woman with a good beard. Something to hold on to. When she told him they were bound for Bitter End, he turned to his friend. Hey, Wingnut. Do we have a flight today? I don’t know, Ramrod. Do we? They looked around, sighed, and heaved themselves out of their chairs. Well, get in, then.
The camels stopped them dead. Nobody had said anything about livestock. Elunia stepped forward and pointed out that they were all alive, so technically they were all livestock, and if the pilots were taking any of them they might as well take the camels. Ramrod agreed with her in principle. He was still not cleaning up after them. He fetched a shovel from the hangar and put it in her hands. As long as somebody dealt with the animals, the animals could fly. Don’t worry, said Elunia. I’ve got it.
The seats were benches bolted to the inside of the hull, each with a five-point harness. Near the front stood two empty cylinders. The gnome shouted Loading up chaos crystals! from somewhere under the fuselage, and a big red crystal rose into each cylinder and locked in place, with little bolts of energy crawling from it to the casing. Then he climbed in and asked, hopefully, whether he could fly today. Both dwarves answered no at the same moment without turning round. He grumbled, went back to his crystals, and told everyone to strap in.
The engines caught, the propellers spun up, and the whole aircraft shook with a vibration they felt in their bowels. It ran down the salt and lifted into the evening sky. The pilots were not good and were probably not sober. Six hours out, the dwarf at the stick shoved it forward with a cheerful hold on, everyone, the floor dropped, and Lucia threw up directly into Varys’s face. Elunia expressed great reluctance to help clean him up, mostly by laughing.
Bitter End
They came down on another flat of hard-packed sand outside what could only generously be called a town. There was one building that was obviously an inn and a great many warehouses, with caravans coming and going between them. Thank you for flying Ouroboros Airways, said the pilots. Don’t forget to tip your pilots. We’ll see you in, oh, a few weeks. If you’re not here, we’ll assume you’re dead. They came every week, they said. The town needed the water. There was a small oasis of its own, enough for the people who lived there, but nowhere near enough for the trade.
The Baronet’s directions began here: northwest into the desert, to the edge of the Valley of Lost Bearings. Lucia had the verse written down and read it out again. Three to the dawn and two to the star, three to the dusk from where you are. Dawn was east, surely, and the star the North Star. They counted in watches of a day’s travel, six hours each, four to a day. Sandy suggested that before marching off into a riddle they might go to the inn and talk to somebody. Elunia asked why she was being so reasonable.
Bitter End felt like a mining camp, full of rough people there to make quick money in a place nobody would choose to live. The inn was built of mesquite wood and limestone. There was enough water here for a few mesquite and palm trees. The sign said The Stewpot, and the place smelled surprisingly good. Behind the bar a huge-bellied, bald man with lamb-chop whiskers was cleaning glasses by spitting in them and wiping them out. What can I do you for?
When they said they were going into the Valley of Lost Bearings, he asked whether they had come for their last meal. He was honoured, but they could have chosen better. People went into the valley and never came back. Directions didn’t work there, and neither did compasses. Of the ones who did come back, one had come back younger than when he left. Others wandered out who must have been in there a hundred years. Time didn’t follow sensible rules there. It’s like the land has been wounded. The edge of the valley was one watch northwest of town.
Sandy asked what filled the warehouses. Whatever came out of the Bitter Market, he said: poisons, toxins, chemicals for industry, some of them medicines too, because the dose makes the cure. The priests of Zehir, god of poison and assassins, came to town often for supplies. When Lucia asked whether they took any interest in the valley, he said that was strange, actually. A few weeks ago he’d seen a group in green cloaks walk out that way, and nobody had seen them since.
Did he know the Baronet Sorrel? Not personally. Bit of an ass, if you ask me. But don’t you feel that way about most nobles? He knew nothing about a daughter; he didn’t keep up with the gossip of the great houses. But when Lucia asked about a giant, hulking, stinking bodyguard, he remembered at once. She had stood in the corner stinking up the room until he asked her to leave. That had been about a month ago, when the Baronet had come out trying to buy trading rights in Bitter End. They all belonged to other noble families, and he had got nowhere. He thought the Baronet had gone inside the Bitter Market, though.
The innkeeper had no rooms, only a common room, and charged a silver a head to sleep on the floor by the hearth. The menu was stew and ale. The ale was surprisingly good.
Korath went out among the caravan animals to find the cleverest one, and settled on a horse. Not many of you two-legs can talk to me, it said. That’s pretty cool. Got any oats? It knew the caravan road well. They brought water out and took crates of poison vials and reagents back. And it warned him about trapdoor spiders, which were terrifying. Lately, though, the caravans had also been carrying crates from Godshome into the Bitter Market, sealed tight, and they smelled strange. The caravans went between Godshome and Bitter End, and once to the village of the lizard-folk, and they kept away from the valley. Caravans that strayed in tended never to come out.
In a tree above the yard Korath found a vulture. It had flown over the valley, it said, but every time it came near the place it got sick. Normally it always knew where north was. Over the valley it felt nauseous, so it turned back. Most wild animals avoid the place, and the valley had been there as long as the vulture had been alive. Lucia drew the obvious conclusion. Inside the valley, nobody should follow the birds, and any birds they did see in there deserved suspicion.
The warehouse
Those crates were worth a look. The public warehouse was a two-storey barn with big sliding doors and a couple of ordinary side doors, guarded by one badly paid man-at-arms with a beer in one hand and a candle in the other.
Sandy went over to talk to him, guard to guard. He looked up, and up, and said Gods, you’re tall. The last person he’d seen that tall had been in the tavern a month ago. Was she related? Sandy said that might have been her sister. They were not friends. The sister had been loud and drunk, the guard said, had beaten everyone at arm-wrestling and taken all their money, and then gone into the Bitter Market.
While they talked, Varys reached a side door. The lock barely counted as one. Elunia handed her bag of holding to Nox, who followed him in, invisible. Inside were barrels of water and crates of what came out of the market: salts of every kind, and row upon row of poison vials and medicines. And there were three crates from Godshome, nailed shut so tightly that Varys needed the crowbar Nox fished out of the bag for him.
The first was full of straw. Varys reached into it and touched something warm, and maybe hair. He took his hand out and cleared the straw away instead. A young man in his early twenties lay curled up inside, dressed like a farmhand, healthy-looking, breathing slow and shallow. Elunia watched through Nox’s eyes and threw a little illusion of what she saw to Korath outside, who sent his owl in and studied the sleeper through its eyes, with a god’s guidance on top. Something was holding the man in an unnatural sleep. Drugs, or poison. He wasn’t bound. The other two crates held a young woman of about the same age and a man in his thirties in better clothes, a merchant perhaps. Shaking them did nothing. Burned into the side of one crate, in thieves’ cant, was the Nameless Ledger’s mark and a line that read, more or less, precious cargo.
Outside, Sandy needed to keep the guard busy, so she challenged him to an arm-wrestle, since her sister had done it. He put down five gold, his whole month’s pay. It was close. He won. Too bad you aren’t as strong as your sister. He was still singing about it when another guard came down the street, and he told him the whole story of how he had beaten the giant orc. There had been dust in her eye, Sandy maintained. And she’d been cramped up in an airship seat for six hours without a chance to stretch.
In the warehouse the party talked it through. The crates were going into the market, which never takes anything in. Somebody was moving people. It might be what had happened to Sandy’s sister. Korath said it plainly: they could chase down a criminal organisation, or they could do the job they had come for. It was worth knowing, and probably worth coming back to, but it was not today’s problem. Lucia wondered whether this was a reason not to hand the Baronet his relic at all. But the warehouse was public, not his. They left the sleepers where they lay, and slipped back out.
Into the valley
In the morning they took up their marching order. Korath navigated, because nobody else knew the desert as he did. Varys ranged ahead as scout. Lucia and Sandy rode the camels with the water. Elunia kept count of the food and water. Somewhere to the south, a sandstorm was building on the horizon. Nobody could tell yet which way it would go.
The going was clear. As they came nearer the valley the sky took on a purple-blue tinge, and far off over the desert there were flashes that looked like lightning. Then they came to a signpost driven into the sand: BEWARE. Do not travel beyond this point. Unnavigable terrain. Avoid at all costs. It was signed by the Order of the Priests of Avandra, goddess of luck, travel and travellers, and beside it stood a small shrine with a cup half full of silver coins. Lucia dropped a coin in. Elunia had been about to take one out.
Beyond the sign the land looked as though something apocalyptic had happened there. The air felt thin. In the distance, rocks floated in midair.
Korath laid the verse over the compass. Three east, two north, three west, two south: a loop back to the start, the edge of the door. Nobody pretended that made sense. Varys observed that it was a magical fantasy world and made exactly as much sense as no sense would. They would walk it and find out.
On the first leg east the desert went strange: seams opened in the sand and glowed an angry blue, and pebbles drifted lazily off the ground. Ahead of the group, Varys saw figures trudging slowly across the sand on a line that would cross the party’s. Six of them, in ragged black robes, hooded so deeply that he couldn’t make out faces. He ran back to warn the others. Nobody wanted to give them water, and nobody quite wanted to kill them either, so the party went to ground behind a dune and let them go by. Two tall figures walked in front, and the ones behind them were children. Elunia and Korath noticed what the others missed: they left no tracks. Elunia thought about sending Nox, invisible, to get closer, but Korath warned that some kinds of dead can see what is invisible, and that out here nobody wanted to meet something that drains life. The procession passed behind a dune and never came out the other side.
By evening Elunia had found a campsite: a hollow between dunes with a great rock bedded in it, invisible from above, with a little water and something to hunt. Korath foraged and came back with a stand of prickly pear crusted with cochineal. Lucia fished in the seep and came up with a clutch of frogs. Varys strung tins and old bottles on wire across every approach, so that nothing could reach them unheard. They roasted the catch on sticks over the fire and ate it straight off them.
Rain
The temperature fell in the night, and thunder rolled in the distance. In the morning the clouds were overhead and the first drops were falling, extremely cold. Something else was wrong as well. Korath was sure east had been that way last night, but the sun was coming up somewhere else.
They could keep the old east, or follow the new one. Lucia, who claimed no wisdom whatsoever, pointed out that the verse said three to the dawn. It did not say three to the east. Dawn was wherever the sun came up. Elunia disagreed on principle, because Lucia had admitted that Elunia frightened her a little. Korath was the navigator, and he decided to trust the barbarian. They walked toward the sunrise.
It rained as if it had not rained there for a long time. They passed a valley where the dry gullies and wadis were filling with running water, the memory of a river, and every kind of small life was digging its way up out of the mud. They walked on through freezing rain. Lucia nearly gave out, then drew on her nerve and kept going.
That was when someone tripped on a stake. A whole line of them ran across the sand, joined by rope. Someone had been trying to hold a bearing. One line simply stopped, and where it stopped a journal lay in the sand. Copied into it was the verse they were following, word for word, between grocery lists and a note that the kids had to be picked up at nine and handed back to the ex-wife. Beside it lay a bleached skull, and when Varys looked closer there were scraps of plain brown-and-white travelling clothes, and pinned to them the badge of the Adventurers’ Guild. Korath searched the ground for trapdoors and spider burrows and found none. He found an empty canteen, unstoppered and bone dry, and a satchel with two dried beef rations still inside. No predator had killed this man. He had run out of water. He’s not picking up those kids, someone said. Lucia took the canteen to refill.
The rain turned to hail. Elunia had been working spells all morning to keep herself going, and the cold got into her anyway. By evening, three legs east were done, and they needed shelter. They never really found it. Pitching camp in a downpour, everything went wrong that could, and they settled for tents with no cover. Korath found tsamma melons under an overhang where algae had taken hold, food and water both. Lucia tried to cook. She grilled the melons and rehydrated some of the dried rations, and the result was soggy, but it was dinner. Varys strung his can line again. During the night the rain eased and then stopped. In the morning, everywhere the rain had fallen, frogs had come up out of the ground. The desert was briefly alive, and everyone knew it would not last.
Lost things
The North Star had been in the southwest that night, if anyone still trusted the old directions. So they walked toward it.
On that leg the strangeness changed. Among the floating rocks and the angry blue cracks, the sand was littered with things: a woman’s hand mirror, an old pocket watch, a child’s toy, a button from a dress. It was as if someone had emptied a beggar’s pack into the wind across the dunes. The things were real. Elunia picked up the pocket watch. Lucia bent over a piece of metal and recognised a tool from her own workshop, one she had sworn she had lost and had never been able to find again. Sandy found a little toy horse. Her sister had stolen it from her when they were children, and broken it. This one was in perfect condition, as though it had been sitting there waiting for her.
The next morning the star hung in the daytime sky, and now it was to the west. They followed it, and the dunes gave way to salt flat: the hard white bed of a sea or lake that had dried up long ago, under a clear sky and a beating sun. Two legs to the star were done.
There was nowhere to hide on the salt. Elunia searched for a sheltered place for a long time, gave up, and pitched camp in the open where the crust had cracked and water seeped up from below. Something was moving under the salt. It was the best they could do.
Sandy made it better. She sang about the camp they had built, with its dampness and its sadness, walking circles around Elunia while she worked, and by the end of it Elunia was grinning in spite of herself. Korath went out across the pan and came back with a barrel that had fallen from some caravan, half buried in the salt, with three days of water still inside. On its side was the mark of the Nameless Ledger. Lucia went looking for food and came back with a dead vulture full of maggots, enough to feed everyone, if nobody asked questions. Varys wired the camp with alarms. Nobody wanted to cook, so they ate the maggots raw. They were still squirming.
The night passed without trouble. In the morning they turned to face the dusk. Three legs remained in that direction, and then two to the south.