Date: October 7, 2026
Attendance: Sandy, Lucia, Korath, Varys, Elunia
In the alley, Elunia took back the medallion of Gruumsh she had hurled at the dead orc priest. Most of what was left of the attackers were acolytes of Gruumsh, but two were something else. One wore his hair in a run of knots that Varys knew at once: the mark of the Nameless Ledger, the people he had run from. The other had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist, two short lines under an arc. The bodies gave up twenty gold. Elunia’s imp, Nox, reported that the goblin boy had lost him in the crowd, ducking through legs and trading places with another child dressed exactly like him.
The Baronet’s tickets sent them past the airship tower and out onto a salt flat, where a glowing sign of a snake swallowing its own tail read Ouroboros Airways — we get you there and back again. Two dwarf pilots, Wingnut and Ramrod, sat in lawn chairs among forty empty bottles, while a gnome loaded red chaos crystals into the engines of a three-winged water freighter. Lucia’s greeting, and her beard, got the dwarves out of their chairs. They refused to carry the camels until Elunia talked them round, on condition that she shovel up after them. The six-hour flight was rough, and Lucia was sick all over Varys.
Bitter End turned out to be one inn and a great many warehouses: a boom town that lives on what comes out of the Bitter Market and on the water the weekly flight brings in. At the inn, the Stewpot, the innkeeper told them that people who go into the Valley of Lost Bearings seldom come back. Some come back younger. Some wander out after a hundred years. Compasses fail there, and “it’s like the land has been wounded.” Priests of Zehir, god of poison and assassins, come to Bitter End for supplies, and a few weeks ago a group in green cloaks walked out toward the valley and hasn’t returned. The Baronet had been through a month earlier with his bodyguard, trying and failing to buy trading rights, and had gone inside the Bitter Market. The valley’s edge lay one watch to the northwest.
Korath spoke with a caravan horse and with a vulture. The horse warned of trapdoor spiders and said the caravans had lately been hauling sealed crates from Godshome into the Bitter Market, crates that smelled strange. The vulture said that flying over the valley made it sick and scrambled its sense of north.
That night Sandy kept the warehouse guard busy. He told her a woman her size had come through a month ago, drunk the place dry, beaten everyone at arm-wrestling, and gone into the Bitter Market. Then he beat Sandy at arm-wrestling too. Meanwhile Varys slipped into the public warehouse. Among the salts and the poison vials were three crates from Godshome, nailed shut. Each held a person curled in straw: a young farmhand, a young woman, and a merchant in his thirties, all drugged into a sleep they could not be shaken out of. Burned into one crate, in thieves’ cant, were the Nameless Ledger’s mark and the words precious cargo. The party decided their job came first, and left them there.
At dawn they set out northwest. Korath navigated, Varys scouted ahead, and Lucia and Sandy rode with the camels, while a sandstorm gathered on the southern horizon. At the valley’s edge a sign put up by the priests of Avandra warned travellers to turn back, and Lucia dropped a silver coin into the cup at its little shrine. Beyond it the sky turned purple-blue, rocks hung in the air, and cracks in the ground glowed blue.
Korath read the verse as a walk around the compass: east, north, west, south. On the first leg east they hid from a procession crossing their path, two tall figures in ragged black hoods leading a line of children. Elunia and Korath saw that they left no tracks. The procession passed behind a dune and never came out the other side. The party camped in a sheltered hollow by a little water, where Korath found a stand of prickly pear crusted with cochineal and Lucia caught frogs, and Varys strung a line of cans around the camp.
In the morning east was no longer where it had been. Lucia pointed out that the verse said dawn, not east, and they walked toward the rising sun. Cold rain came, filling the dry wadis and bringing life up out of the sand. They found a line of stakes and rope that someone had used to hold a bearing. It ended at a journal with the same verse copied into it, among grocery lists and a note about collecting his children, next to a bleached skull, a Guild pin, an empty canteen and two rations. He had run out of water. Hail followed, and Elunia was chilled to the bone. They camped without shelter, ate tsamma melons that Lucia grilled badly, and the storm blew out in the night, leaving frogs everywhere.
With the dawn legs walked, they turned toward the star, which now stood in the southwest and by the next day hung in the daytime sky to the west. On the way they crossed sand strewn with lost things: a mirror, a pocket watch, a child’s toy, a button. Lucia found a tool from her own workshop that she had lost years ago. Sandy found a little toy horse that her sister had stolen and broken when they were children, whole and new. Elunia kept the watch. Then the dunes gave way to salt flat. They camped by a seep where something moved under the crust. Sandy sang the camp into better spirits, Korath dug up a water barrel fallen from a caravan and stamped with the Nameless Ledger’s mark, and Lucia found enough maggots in a dead vulture to feed everyone. They ate them. In the morning, three legs to the dusk remained.