The Butcher of Gadobhra

Jenny was in the middle of flossing and sharpening her teeth when she felt the feeling. When your teeth are made of iron and razor-sharp, they need a lot of care. Jenny held a lot of disdain for Green Hags that let their teeth get rusty. She finished quickly and then went around the house, peering out windows to see who was nearby because she could feel someone looking for her, and they were getting close.

"Granny! Vivian! Somethings up. Someone is looking for me, and they have a good eye. Might be time to take off."

Granny Gorpunkle looked at her huge iron ovens and rolling pins with sadness. Finding a place where she could make cookies and find her nightly meals was so hard. This little village was so full of strange dreams that the locals considered having a Night Hag around a blessing. She would hate to leave. "If it's just one paladin, can I just bake him in a cake instead of moving?"

Vivian came from behind the couch where she kept her bag, dragging it with her. Bag Hags were very attached to whatever bag was currently home. "Don't make a cake. Cakes turn out nasty. Chop him fine for a nice mincemeat pie. I've got a great recipe for one."

"Quiet you two, I can feel them coming! Crap...it's a powerful one, and I'm feeling both fire and storm in his blood. And something else...". She sniffed the air. "Horse?"

Granny ran to open the door. "Benjamin! Come in, dear. Any bad dreams lately? You know to come to me if you get any more of those. Old Granny is always happy to help out." Ben had been cursed with nightmares after dealing with the Star Spawn. Granny had rooted them out from his head but always hoped for more. Some dreams just tasted better to her.

The courier smiled and kissed her on the cheek. "You'll be the first person I come to with them. Having you and your little bakery here in our town is a blessing. And not just you, but your entire family of lovely women as well."

Vivian flopped onto the couch, scowling. "He's complimenting us, so he wants something. No one ever compliments me."

Jenny looked at the rebellious teen with her mohawk hair and piercings and had to agree but for different reasons. "Word gets around. Twice now, a player has asked you out on a date, and you beat them up for saying something nice. But I do get the feeling Ben was looking for us for some specific reason. My teeth were tingling."

Ben had seen Jenny bite through a three-inch thick hambone from a Hellpig without effort and had a healthy respect for her teeth. "Your tingling teeth are correct. I came to ask if you three lovely ladies would like to go out tonight for some entertainment. Some of us are planning a midnight cruise, and it was suggested that I stop by and extend the invitation."

Jenny looked at him hard. Ben was tough to read. Some part of her wanted to trust him implicitly, which made her teeth nervous. Hags didn't trust easily, and sometimes never. But this town had some very odd and interesting people in it. The workers were oddly unbothered when their true nature was uncovered and many of them were leaving humanity behind and becoming something else. You never knew what they were up to. "A cruise? Like on a boat?"

The Courier tipped his hat to her. "Indeed. You have the gist of it. But please refer to Splinter as a ship. Captains get oddly upset over which word is used. This will be a small cruise on a ship. Several people are going. The Butcher, for one." Ben knew that Jenny had a soft spot somewhere for Ozzy, and only the threat of Suzette reducing her to ashes made her behave—most of the time. Green Hags liked raw power, and Ozzy was a tempting package of power and destruction in a handsome form.

"Oh, Ozzy, you say? Well, it might be I have the night off. What would we be doing?"

Ben looked at Jenny and smiled, "Causing some chaos by breaking into a prison."

He turned to Granny Gorpunkle, "A prison filled with crazed mages who have been mentally tortured for years as they scream and beg for release."

Turning to Vivian, "Oh, and Ozzy mentioned you'd asked about getting into his sack? Now's your chance."

Vivian blushed and stammered, then looked at Jenny. "Can we go, please? You have no idea how much I want to jump his bag."

Jenny sighed, "Oh, I know. You've only mentioned it a dozen times. Sure, kid, let's go. I want to see the Butcher flex his muscles some. Granny?"

"Oh, I was in as soon as Ben mentioned crazed mages. Just let me get a big bag of cookies, and I'm ready to go."

Woodrat had returned to his ship in a depressed mood, only to find the sails hot, the ship full of cargo, and the crew excited to take off. The Butcher was also there, dressed in his Captain's uniform, with his bag over his shoulder and several people crowding the deck behind him.

"Oh, ho! Can't resist the pirate life, and you want to bring your friends and ladylove? You should have told me earlier."

Ozzy lit a new cigar from the box Billy had brought along and puffed great bouts of grey smoke at the sails. "Not quite. I can't make another trip to the smoke, but I've been told that the Baron needs to hire Splinter for a night of piracy and adventure."

"Well, the crew and I love adventure, you know that. But I'm curious: What is the Baron paying to hire us?"

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Billy came forward, and behind him was Rolly packing a heavy chest. "I have ten bags of gold from bored Fae Lordlings in this chest. Each bag has 1000 shiny gold coins. I think that's a good price for a few hours of voyaging around. My people will handle the hard stuff. And I also have a nearly full box of cigars for you."

Woodrat considered the deal. "Winter is setting in fast. Have you considered that my ship might not be up to a long trip with the dreaded white stuff swirling around?"

Ozzy puffed out more smoke, and the sails began to turn darker. "I considered that and brought along someone to help." He pointed to Myrna, happily sitting on a yardarm and soaking up the warmth from the sails, happy as only a warm kobold can be. "I've got a hundred pounds of Mage's Delight with me, which gives her heartburn. Stay out of the way when she needs to breathe fire; it's a sight to behold. And, I've hooked up a small, magical furnace to the hull, and it's got a hot coal fire burning in it. Plenty of heat to go around."

Woodrat jumped to the Captain's deck and stood behind the wheel. "It's a deal then. Let's cast off and get moving. Mr. Benjamin, take the wheel, please, and work whatever magic you have that speeds us along. Captain Ozzy, point us in the direction you want to go. I'm curious about this little bit of adventure you have planned."

With Ben acting as navigator to give the ship a boost in speed, it was a two-hour flight to their destination, in the middle of the Empire. At Ozzy's urging, Woodrat took them high into the air, where it would be next to impossible to be seen. Sitting atop the smokehouse had put a thick layer of soot on the shiny auric hull, and Ozzy continued to breathe out large gouts of smoke to cover the normally bright white sales in a thick layer of smoke. On a moonless night, the ship was running dark and undetectable from the ground in the middle of a light snowstorm. Far below them were the shining tops of two tall towers.

Ben pointed to one of the towers, a massive affair of stone and glass that reached high into the air and was surrounded by a swarm of smaller buildings near its base. "The tower on the right is a collegium, The College of Arcane Runecasters. Graduates specialize in working with teleportation stones and crafting magical items. The first-year students are used as slave labor to make cheap magic items while learning basic skills. We don't want to disturb the nice people down there or give them a reason to point hundreds of magic wands in our direction."

Turning to the other tower, he pointed out the defenses around it. "That is the Crystalthorn Sanitarium, not a nice place to live or even to visit. People go in but don't come out. It sits on top of a mana vent that pushes pure mana from somewhere deep in the earth. It's sort of like Gadobhra, except we get the dark-flavored stuff. Some very smart people learned how to control the mana flow and tap into it using a mana siphon. The collegium uses some, but most is sold to the Mages Guild to fuel the teleportation system. The name comes from a type of needle-sharp crystal formation that forms below. Very useful to people dabbling in magi-tech, or so I'm told. The mana pulses up from the ground, enters the tower, and spirals around it to the top, then back down to the bottom, where it is dispersed into the network.

"A side effect of the mana spiral pulls in any ambient mana in the area. Notice that stone wall around the base? If you're inside that area, you'll lose mana each pulse until you drop, exhausted. And it gets worse the closer you get. Inside the tower, it's horrible. Each pulse pulls a huge amount of mana from any creature, leaving them with no energy and suffering from mana sickness. Over and over, hundreds of times a day, the pulse hits them, first draining their mana and then their stamina. Very unpleasant, and if they aren't crazy when they go in, it won't be long before they are. The only people who go inside are specially trained halflings who take the food to the prisoners once a day. A mechanical lift system takes them up, and they survive by eating constantly while they take away the slop buckets and leave food for the prisoners. By the time they finish their hour-long shift, they're on 17th breakfasts and still hungry when they get back down. Unless a new prisoner is locked up, no one else enters the place.

"No one ever escapes from The Sanitarium. The last attempt was two hundred years ago and went badly. Breaking in at the bottom, you have to climb a hundred flights of stairs to get to the prisoners at the top. You won't make it before a couple of pulses leave you exhausted, and the guards around the ring can cast spells into the center area while you can't cast out. The mechanical system only operates for an hour daily when the halflings go up. Escaping from the top is suicide. Over a 1000-foot drop to the floor. No magic will work, and flying creatures discover the hard way about physics when they have no mana to keep them in the air. That includes Splinter if she gets too close."

Ben paused to let all that sink in.

"So, all we have to do is drop someone from high enough that they won't be seen, they land on the tower, break the people we need out of their cells, then leave with them from the top before they become incapacitated by the pulse from the mana siphon. Any questions?"

Everyone raised a hand. Ben sighed theatrically. "Oh, ye of little faith. Let me go over the plan with a few more details."

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