The Estimate — the reconstruction begins
Gwynda Hammerstone pushed through the taproom door with a folded paper and the expression of someone who had done this enough times to skip the preamble.
"Full structural work, materials and labour — six hundred and fifty gold. You've paid two-fifty up front, so four hundred on completion. Interior's yours to handle after; I won't touch that until the structural list is clear."
Water damage in the back storeroom. Roof tiles above the third floor. The kitchen hearth, the main staircase — two treads. Cellar drainage. She went through it the way a soldier gives a field report: one item at a time, no editorialising. The party agreed. She could start.
She nodded once and left to get her crew. Trollskull Manor would smell of sawdust and plaster by morning.
Into the Hatch — Fillet Lane entry
The Fillet Lane maintenance hatch was exactly what Yagra had described: iron, set flush into the street, ring handle green with age, the seam thick with grime from disuse. No lock. No markings. Someone had been using it, but not casually. Corrin went in first, dropping onto iron rungs, ten feet down into a low tunnel with a slow-moving channel and a narrow catwalk running both directions.
He moved left, quiet enough to hear his own breath and nothing else. Forty feet ahead, torchlight. Two voices, speaking Goblin. A Xanathar Guild eye symbol painted on the wall below the hatch pointed the same direction. Lylnyler dropped in behind him and spotted, through the dark, a door set into the right tunnel wall about fifty feet ahead.
Then Caelith came down and closed the hatch, and his boot caught the edge of the catwalk with a sound that rang off the tunnel walls like a struck bell. The Goblin voices stopped. A short, sharp word. Another voice answered. The torchlight moved — someone had picked it up and was bringing it toward them.
Caelith tried to buy them a moment with a roar. The kind designed to freeze smaller creatures in their tracks.
The goblins laughed. High, chittering Goblin laughter. One called something back that required no translation. The torchlight bobbed forward.
Lylnyler ended the problem before it could develop.
The blast of force caught the lead goblin square in the chest and drove the body back into the second. Both went down in a tangle of limbs and dropped torch. From behind them in the dark, a third shape stepped forward into the recovered light: grey-skinned, stocky, with a war pick and eyes that had gone absolutely flat.
A duergar. He looked at the three of them without expression, and combat began.
Guard Post — duergar on the catwalk
The duergar's name was Zemk. He spent his first breath enlarging himself to nearly twice his height, filling the tunnel in a way that made the catwalk feel smaller than it was, and brought the war pick down on Caelith hard enough to drive him backward. Then Lylnyler's blast caught Zemk full in the chest and shoved him ten feet back down the tunnel, and the force of the impact left him reeling at the edge of the channel. Corrin's arrow — loosed from the dark where he'd been invisible since the drop — took him in the throat. He crashed to the catwalk and the war pick rang against the iron below.
Caelith pressed his hands against the wound where the pick had connected — the bleeding stopped — and then searched the bodies while Corrin took a torch from the wall sconce. The duergar had eight gold and fourteen silver, and a key on a leather cord around his neck. The key fit the locked iron box in a small storage room Lylnyler had spotted earlier — and the box held a healing potion. Corrin pocketed it.
They moved through the waterway and into the tunnels beyond. The passages split, turned, doubled back. A low side chamber off the main waterway held two goblins sleeping on a straw-covered floor, one snoring. Caelith moved up front, chain mail and all, and the links rang against each other once in the silence, and one goblin's eyes snapped open and saw a paladin looming over it and shrieked.
The combat that followed was brief and ugly. Lylnyler's blast vaporised the first goblin mid-shriek. Caelith drove his longsword through the second before it could do more than scramble upright. Done fast, with nothing to loot and a noise that had rolled down every tunnel in earshot.
The second side chamber was waiting for them. The goblins there had heard the shriek.
The party stepped into the doorway and both came out with scimitars raised — no hesitation, no warning. A blade connected with Caelith in the first instant, a hit that landed before the rest of the party could move, the ambush reversed on them before they'd processed it. Then Corrin's rapier took the first goblin with a strike that left nothing to finish. Lylnyler's blast vaporised the second. Another short hall of dead goblins with nothing in their pockets.
They moved west through the dark, routing around the main chamber they'd heard voices from, and went deeper still.
Beyond the side chambers lay a small room — clean by sewer standards, empty by any standard. In the middle stood a stone pillar carved with a symbol: a perfect circle, ten spokes radiating outward from its circumference, and in the centre a smaller circular indentation shaped like a lidless eye staring upward. The south wall was solid stone. The room had nothing else in it.
Corrin examined the pillar carefully, his fingers tracing the indentation at its centre. The receptacle was deliberate — the right size and shape for something specific, roughly the size of a large marble or a small carved stone. The pillar itself was older than the sewer. Whatever this was, it had been here before the Xanathar Guild moved in.
Lylnyler recognised the magic but couldn't read the symbols. Something activated this mechanism. Something they didn't have.
Beyond the curtain to the east, voices. Wet and rhythmic underneath the conversation — not Goblin, not Common, something that moved differently in the air. Caelith listened at the wall. Lylnyler listened. Neither could make out words through the stone. Just the rhythm of something speaking, and underneath it, another sound that might have been breathing and might not.
Then the voice arrived inside all three of their skulls simultaneously, flat and cold and sourceless:
"You have come far for two-legged things. What do you want?"
The curtain tore aside and something stepped through that didn't move like anything they had seen before. It glided — seven feet tall, purple-skinned, robes trailing. Its face was wrong. Where a mouth should be, four thick tentacles hung and writhed slowly. Two vast white eyes fixed on each of them in turn with complete, cold intelligence. In one hand it held a smooth stone orb carved like an eyeball.
It looked at each of them. It did not stop moving toward the pillar.
The Mind Flayer — sleight of hand
Corrin moved while it was still looking at the others.
The stone eye left Nihiloor's hand before it registered the loss — palmed cleanly, the oldest trick in a sixty-year career, executed against a mind flayer in a sewer. Nihiloor stopped. The white eyes dropped to its empty hand. Then they rose slowly to Corrin.
Corrin passed the stone to Caelith in the same motion, keeping the transfer small, keeping his body between it and the creature's eyeline. But Nihiloor's gaze tracked it anyway.
The mind flayer looked at Corrin for a long moment. Then it spoke inside all three of their skulls at once.
"The stone. Return it, and I will leave you alive. Keep it, and I will take it from whichever of you I leave standing."
It was not delivered in anger. It was a statement of contingency.
Corrin thought a question at it, and the answer came immediately, directly into his mind alone:
"A door. One that leads somewhere you do not want to go."
Then:
"You are clever, small one. Clever enough to take what was mine. Are you clever enough to know when to give it back?"
Lylnyler told the other two what it was, quietly, without taking his eyes off it:
"Mind flayer. It feeds on intellect. Controls minds. Do not let it touch you."
Nihiloor listened to this without any reaction. Then Caelith raised his longsword and charged.
The fight that followed was the worst five minutes any of them had ever had together.
Nihiloor's companion — a muscular half-orc in dingy robes they now saw on the other side of the curtain — opened with a Sleep spell that rolled over the party and accomplished nothing. Caelith and Lylnyler didn't sleep; magic couldn't put their blood to sleep, and Corrin had too much life in him for the spell to reach. The half-orc looked significantly less confident after that.
The Mind Flayer — Caelith dominated
Nihiloor did not waste its opening. It reached into Caelith's mind and held on.
The domination was complete. Nihiloor issued its order in the same cold telepathic register it used for everything, and Caelith's body began moving before his mind could argue. He turned on Lylnyler and swung twice — both times wide, his hand fighting the command as it executed it, his aim sliding off-target as though some part of him refused to connect. He missed. Both times. The strikes went wide by margins too consistent to be coincidence.
Lylnyler did not retreat from him. He fired through the dominated paladin at Nihiloor behind him, Eldritch Blast twice in quick succession, each impact shoving the mind flayer back toward the curtain with a crack of force. The second blast broke Nihiloor's concentration. The hold released.
Caelith snapped back to himself the way a man wakes from a nightmare — present, furious, with a sword already in hand. The half-orc was still standing. He would not be standing for long.
He hit the half-orc hard enough to trigger Relentless Endurance, the last defence of something that refused to die on a single blow — and then Corrin's dagger came in from the side and finished the argument. Grum'shar crumpled. Done.
The Mind Flayer — the killing blow
Nihiloor tried to flee.
Moving away from Caelith was a mistake. The opportunity attack landed with a force Caelith had been holding back since the fight started — sword and holy light, a natural twenty with everything behind it, Divine Smite flaring radiant into the creature's side. The blow drove Nihiloor into the wall. It was still alive, barely, still moving toward the door on the far side of the chamber.
The second opportunity attack landed in the doorway. Caelith's blade found Nihiloor as it tried to pass through, and this time there was no recovery. The mind flayer dropped. The white eyes went dark.
The intellect devourer — a creature that looked like nothing so much as a brain that had grown four stubby legs — took several more seconds to put down. Nihiloor's Mind Blast had stunned its own pet briefly, which had been the most confused moment in an already confused fight. Lylnyler's blast finished it, and then it was quiet except for the sound of the channel and their own breathing.
Corrin drank the healing potion from the duergar's iron box and said nothing. Caelith looked at his hands.
The loot from the chamber was methodical. Grum'shar's satchel held a spellbook — a useful object even for people who couldn't use it, worth something to someone who could. Behind the stone chair where Nihiloor had been sitting: two more healing potions, gold and silver and copper in a chest. The intellect devourer had nothing on it, for obvious reasons.
The stone eye remained with Caelith.
They waded back the way they'd come — through the channel, past the bodies in the side chambers, past the catwalk where Zemk still lay. Up the iron rungs. The hatch pushed open, and fresh air hit them — Dock Ward air, which was not exactly clean, but it was above ground and that counted. They pulled themselves out into the lane. The street was busy. Nobody looked at them twice.
What They Carried Out — back at the manor
They walked back through the Dock Ward in silence, trailing sewer smell and enough experience to need several hours and a long rest before it would begin to settle into something they could speak about. Back at Trollskull Manor, with Gwynda's crew having apparently already begun work — the smell of fresh timber faint in the walls — they sat down.
Three fighters walked in. Three different people walked out of those sewers. Something had burned through that night — the day's work settling into them, reshaping what they reached for without their quite deciding it. Corrin moved in the dark like he'd been born to it in a new way. Caelith felt his Oath sit differently against his chest than it had that morning, the weight of it familiar now in a way it hadn't been before. Lylnyler had a book — just a book, nothing visible about it, nothing that announced what he was to anyone watching.
Trollskull Manor held them while they rested. Lif was somewhere in the walls.