In The Cards

Sewers. The bane of the adventurer’s existence. No matter where you go, be it in the farthest reaches of Icewind Dale, the steaming jungles of Chult or even the Abyss itself, somehow, somewhere, you will always eventually find yourself tromping around in some stinking sewers. It’s a dirty job, and somebody’s gotta do it. I just wish that ‘somebody’ didn’t always seem to be me.

Excerpt from ‘Ruminations Of A Master Bard’

“This,” Zaerini said, “stinks. And I mean really stinks.”

“Well, sewers tend to do that,” Jaheira remarked, sounding annoyingly calm and unaffected. “The smell will not kill you.”

“There are plenty of things that won’t kill me. Having my nails pulled out won’t kill me. Getting flogged with nettles won’t kill me. Being forced to listen to Ulraunt’s preaching won’t kill me, much as I would wish for death. That doesn’t mean I want to experience any of them.” The bard sighed and raised her hands defensively. “I know, I know. It was my idea to come down here in the first place. You don’t have to say it.”

“At least you’re relatively clean,” Edwin said. “Look at the state of my robes!”

“Whoa! It’s not my fault you fell in. That was because you were trying to prove that you could walk along that ledge.”

The Red Wizard looked extremely sulky. “I could have done it too, if somebody hadn’t been deliberately sabotaging me. (She did it on purpose because I was about to outshine her, I know it.)”

“For the tenth time, I didn’t do anything,” Imoen protested. “You fell in all on your own.”

“Yes you did! You hummed. Hummed maliciously, continuously and with the intent to break my concentration. (And in case you didn’t know it, you’re about as musical as a rusty door hinge.)”

Rini sighed again. She supposed it was no wonder that everybody was feeling on edge. The sewers beneath Baldur’s Gate weren’t a pleasant place to be. Dark, dank tunnels that twisted and turned and constantly split off into new directions like a spider web, they were unfortunately fully functional. That meant that lots of unpleasant…stuff…floated along in the stinking water and that even if you kept to the sides and tried to stay out of the water the smell still got into your clothes.

Edwin’s unfortunate experience had made his robes cling to his body in a manner that Rini normally would have found fascinating, but as it was his stench was able to penetrate even that from the sewer, and she had to keep her distance in order not to start gagging. The reasons why they had come down here were two-fold. First, there was the matter of Scar’s mission of trying to find out just what was dragging off and eating the citizens of Baldur’s Gate. Zaerini decided that whatever it was it had to be something really disgusting if it liked to have its dinners down here.

The second reason was more complicated. A wealthy wizard by the name of Degrodel had employed the party to seek for the helm of the legendary seafarer Balduran, the founder of Baldur’s Gate. Supposedly the location of this helm was known by a certain group of adventurers, who had had the misfortune to be turned to stone some time ago, by none other than the wizard Ramazith. Currently they graced the living room of a local merchant, as ornaments.

Once the strange adventurers had been returned to normal their leader had been reluctant to part with the famous helm, and had instead offered Balduran’s equally famous cloak. This item was kept by his mistress, a girl working in the legendary Undercellar brothel, somewhere in the middle of these stinking sewers. Not particularly eager to get into a fight, Zaerini had accepted, but she had also managed to swipe the man’s purse as compensation for her troubles, and it had held a note that hinted at the location of the helm. So, she thought. All we have to do is find and kill the sewer-monster, find the courtesan and get her cloak, and then mosey over to the Helm and Cloak inn to fetch the helm. All in a day’s work.

And return the helm to the mage? Softpaws asked, sounding rather amused.

Are you kidding me? The pay he offered was insultingly low considering all this bother. I’ll settle for the helm and cloak, assuming we can find them.

After some more wet and stinking wandering the adventurers could see light ahead, and once they came close enough they found an open doorway, guarded by to very large and surly men. “You can come in if you want,” one of them said. “But mind your own business. No fighting with the other customers, and no roughing up of the girls, you hear?”

“W-w-we would n-n-never!” Khalid indignantly exclaimed.

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. If that’s the sort o’ thing you want, then take your business elsewhere.”

The voices of the courtesans and their clients echoed strangely beneath the high vaults that made up the main chamber of the Uncercellar and the smells of a hundred different cloying perfumes actually managed to drench the stench of the sewers, not that they were much of an improvement. Imoen started coughing loudly as soon as she entered and all three half-elves sneezed more or less simultaneously as their more sensitive nostrils were violently assaulted. “By Silvanus!” Jaheira said. “I never get used to this.”

Edwin raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been here before? Business or pleasure?”

“Harper business!” the druid snapped. “In the service of good we sometimes must go where we would prefer not to – not that I would expect you to understand.” She then returned to coaxing Yeslick along, as the dwarf was blushing brightly at the sight of all the exposed female flesh surrounding him and looked about ready to faint. “Come on, Yeslick. They will not make you do anything you do not pay them for.”

“I might be willing to try,” said a passing brunette. “I’ve never done a dwarf before, I could do with the experience to help improve my skills. And that beard is really attractive. Tell me, dwarf. Are you that hairy…everywhere?”

CLANG!

Jaheira sighed with exasperation. “Khalid,” she said. “Help me carry him, would you? And you too, Edwin, do not try to weasel out of this.”

Zaerini grinned slightly at the sight of a protesting Edwin and a resigned Khalid hauling an armful of dwarf along the narrow passages of the brothel. Then she giggled as she tried to imagine just what the other customers would think they were up to. Though come to think of it, judging from what she could see and hear around her she thought it would take a lot to make them react.

For obvious reasons Rini had never been inside a brothel before, and she looked about her with great interest. An aspiring bard needed to know about all aspects of society after all. There were scantily clad women everywhere, most of them human, though she could glimpse the odd half-elf…and was that a gnome in a negligee? The customers seemed mostly wealthy from their clothes, and she noticed that more than one of them sported a little black cloth mask that was apparently meant to mask their appearance. She didn’t think it seemed a very reliable method.

“Excuse me,” she asked one of the courtesans. “I’m looking for somebody.” She then described the petrified adventurer’s mistress.

“I know her,” the woman said. “She rents a stall in that aisle over there. Ninth one on the left.” Then she gave the half-elf a closer look. “Are you in the market, dear?”

“Um…no. Not really.”

“Pity. You’re not bad-looking, especially with those eyes of yours, and redheads are popular. Well, if you should change your mind, this is the place to come. It’s safe with the guards, even if you have to pay for the protection. Picking up clients in the street…it’s too dangerous.” She shuddered. “There are some bad people out there. The kind that likes to hurt you for fun.”

Imoen stared at the courtesan. “That’s horrible!”

“Aye, it is. Just take care, girls, that’s all I say.” She spat on the ground. “Men. I used to think they only wanted one thing, but with some of them that one thing is your blood on their fist. Still, it’s a living.”

The woman they were looking for was helpful enough once they described her lover and the password he had given them. The cloak turned out to be a fairly short black number, but inside it shimmered like silver and starlight. Rini stuffed it in her pack after giving it one final longing look. She didn’t want to wear it on top of her smelly clothes after all.

Having asked directions for the closest sewer grate that could take them back to the surface the six adventurers set out again. Or rather, five set out, with Yeslick still being carried like a sack of flours. Occasionally he’d open his eyes, catch sight of all the semi-naked women, groan and faint again. “Dwarves are very modest,” Jaheira explained. She didn’t sound very pleased about it. “Normally I would approve, but it can be taken too far.”

“We could always toss him into the sewer-water,” Edwin suggested. “Why should I be the only one to suffer? (And besides, my back is about to snap in two.)”

“But he’s wearing plate-mail!” Imoen protested. “He would sink!”

“Yesss…” the Red Wizard said in a dreamy voice. “I know…”

However, Edwin never got the chance to try, because at that moment a horrible chuckle echoed through the tunnel. If the stinking sewer-sludge had been able to laugh this was probably what it would have sounded like. “MUAHAHAHA!” it said. Then there was a brief pause. “No, that be wrong. It be ‘MUAHAHAHAHAHA!’ Much better.” Clomping footsteps sounded around the next corner ahead and a large ogre mage with greenish-yellow warty skin came into sight, accompanied by six corpse-white carrion crawlers that slithered along in the dirty water, grubbing for food. “So, some puny surface dwellers have come to their death,” the ogre said once he spotted the party. “It'll just be extra treasure for my collection. My pets have been causing much anguish in your surface realms, haven't they? They have been so useful at collecting the surface pinklings. My pets use the flesh for food and I get the pretty treasure!”

“Um…” Rini said. “What exactly do you do with the ‘pretty treasure’? I mean, you live down a sewer, right? It’s not as if you can buy…anything…” Then she faltered as she noticed the diamond studded earrings in the ogre’s ears, the thick pearl collier around its neck, bracelets being used as rings, and especially the hideous gold nose ring. “Never mind. Forget that I asked.”

“What? You not think I look pretty?”

“Well…yes. Very flattering.”

“Pretty?” Edwin said. “You look like somebody coughed and the resultant phlegm got splattered all over a jewelry shop. (Now I, on the other hand, would look devastatingly handsome and dashing in that ring…even more so than usual.) ”

It took the ogre mage a few seconds to work its way through this, but once it did it roared with rage. “You insult my perfect complexion? Now you DIE! Pets, kill these intruders!”

“You know, Eddie,” Zaerini snarled as she launched a flame arrow at the nearest carrion crawler, “one of these days we really must see about setting you up for some diplomacy lessons.” Then she was forced to narrowly dodge a swipe from the mandibles of the carrion crawler, tripped and fell into the nauseating sewer water, managed to trip Jaheira in after her and decided that the conversation would have to wait until later. Softpaws, wet and hissing, clawed herself out of her mistress’ pack where she had been enjoying a nap, spitting out words that would have made a sailor blanch. To her right Rini saw Khalid freeze in one place, affected by the disgusting carrion crawlers’ paralyzing touch, but she wasn’t close enough to reach him easily. Fortunately all the noise had awakened Yeslick, and now the dwarf charged into battle, his hammer scattering mandibles and many-jointed pale legs everywhere. One of them struck Imoen in the face, but the human girl barely flinched and just kept on firing arrows at the ogre mage. Under the combined onslaught of magic and missiles the ogre finally went down, and the warriors finished off the last of the carrion crawlers.

“Well,” Edwin said, rubbing his hands as he bent over the dead ogre mage. Somehow he had managed to come through the encounter without a single wound and even without getting more spattered with filth than he already was. “This was a very productive encounter. Scar will be pleased that we have discovered what kept dragging off those hapless monkeys they call townspeople around here as well as put a stop to it. (And there seem to be quite a few interesting spell scrolls stacked inside this scroll case…) Yes, once again my snappy repartee and masterful command of magic has brought us triumph and victory.” Then he turned around to face the group of stinking, slimy, filthy, bleeding and glowering people and one cat behind him and gave them a very surprised look. “What?”