The Gears of Hate was the fifth level of the Tomb of the Nine Gods, a machine of turning cogs that stood inside an underground lake.12 On it the party took the last of the five Skeleton Keys, Glade turned the Bloodwell Vial into the Heartwell Vial in the river of souls, and a voice from the lake gave the true name of the Tomb’s custodian Withers.13 The party came down to the level late on the night of the fifteenth of Eleasis, 1492 DR, and left it before dawn on the sixteenth, with Savriel Tirinath alone at its controls.14
Description
The level was a machine, and the party stood inside it. Its rooms lay within cogs. The sound of stone the size of houses turning against stone surrounded the party from the moment it landed, and each revolution came up through the floor.1 The cogs turned perpetually, to power the machine, too slowly and smoothly to be felt from inside. A change of configuration was a separate movement and could be felt. The configurations were set at a panel in a control room, and each one rearranged the rooms outside, opening some and sealing others.3
The whole level stood under water, and the machine turned inside a lake. The iron of its walls sweated, and sound moved through the walls rather than past them.2
Gray slime dripped from pipes in the wall of the control room and lay on the floor of one of the cogs. It was not organic matter, and it hurt those it touched. What it was is not recorded.3
Geography
The level lay below the fourth level and above the sixth, the Mothers’ Lair.14 A chute ran up from it to the gargoyle room of the fourth level. The party came down the chute and landed in the garden of the Cog of Rot.12
In the iron wall of the garden was a seam. When the cogs turned, the gap opened, and through it could be seen a vertical river of light, full of thousands of faces, streaming down to feed something below.1
The way on was through the Cog of Blood. An adamantine portcullis in its north wall closed the Hall of Decay, a corridor that ended in stairs down to the sixth level.4 The route down was open in the second configuration of the cogs.4 The control room lay four hundred feet above the first chamber of the sixth level.5
The lake itself lay below. The party was invited down to it and no visit is recorded.3
Inhabitants
The Gardener was a skeleton whose skull was fused into a block of black iron shaped like the head of an enormous key. It knelt in the garden of the Cog of Rot and tended it, and its knees had worn the floor smooth.1 Three shambling mounds lay in the compost of the same garden.3
The Voice in the Lake answered when the red dial of the control panel was turned. It was vast, curious and gleeful, and spoke as a child. Nangnang, one of the Trickster Gods, did not recognize it and judged it older than the Trickster Gods.3
A stone juggernaut was kept in a hidden vault off the hall of the black sun. It was the construct that bore the name of Napaka, a dead queen of Omu whose crypt lay on the fourth level.62
Four will-o’-wisps came out of one of the wardrobes in the Cog of Blood.4
Lord Brixton of Cormyr, the leader of The Company of the Yellow Banner, had died on the level before the party came.3
Savriel Tirinath, a Watcher of the Spire who traveled with the party, remained alone on the level after the party left it.4
Notable locations
- The Cog of Rot, a five-sided iron room that held a wild, sick garden of compost heaps and pale vines, with a rusted sprinkler jutting from its center. Every root in the garden bent toward the seam in its wall.1
- The sealed wing, behind a doorway that the cogs kept shut. It did not open unless the cogs were rotated. Whether the party ever entered it is not recorded.2
- The hall of the black sun, a sloped hall reached by a crawlway that the jade crocodile key opened. Six candles that never burned down lit reliefs of kneeling figures revering a black sun. It held a statue that asked a riddle, and the hidden vault of the juggernaut lay off it.2
- The acid-scarred cog, with a pocked floor, a stink, gray slime, and five black dragons frozen in a frieze below the ceiling.3
- The control room, which held the panel: a gold lever, a red button, a red dial and other dials. Pipes in its walls dripped slime. A stone slab could drop to seal its east door.3
- A room of poison gas, open in the second configuration, in which Lord Brixton lay.3
- The Cog of Blood, where five teak wardrobes stood against iron walls and five red drop-shaped crystals hung above an adamantine portcullis to the north. Each wardrobe was carved, and each leaked the plane it opened on. The carving on the wardrobe of Gehenna was a grinning night hag cradling a swaddled infant, the mark of the Sewn Sisters, whose lair lay on the level below.4
- The Hall of Decay, a corridor glittering with tarnished coins and rotted gear, with rotting corpses carved into its walls. An ivory ring hung in an iron bull’s skull at its west arch.4
- The stairs to the sixth level, at the end of the Hall of Decay. An ivory mask without a face or a mouth was fixed there at head height, facing up the corridor. The stairs descended twenty-five feet behind it to another mask, and to another past that.4
History
Before the party
The Company of the Yellow Banner entered the Tomb before the party did.7 Its leader, Lord Brixton of Cormyr, reached the fifth level and died in the room of poison gas, with his hands at his own throat.3 The company’s wizard, Devlin Bashir, who died on the second level, wrote in the last entry of his journal, “Brixton, you fool. You led us into a machine.”7
The garden and the Gardener
The party had heard the rumbling of the level for a day before it came down. Late on the night of the fifteenth of Eleasis, 1492 DR, Taenae, Vogal, Vonara, Glade, Inete, the Goliath monk Raiketsu and Savriel lowered themselves into the dark and landed on the soft ground of the garden.1 They had been in the Tomb for about forty hours.6 Vogal and Raiketsu kept watch.1
The party inspected the dirt of the garden with mage hand before touching anything. Taenae identified the ambient magic as normal. Glade read soul magic underneath it, and Savriel confirmed his reading.1
The Gardener looked at the party for a long moment, then raised one arm and pointed past them at the seam in the wall. It then lifted its own head free and held it out to Glade, keeping eye contact throughout. Glade took it. The headless body went back to its gardening. The head was the fifth and last of the Skeleton Keys, and the party now held all five.1
The river of souls
A knock came from inside Glade’s pack, heavy and wet. It came from the Bloodwell Vial, which had lain forgotten in the bag since Omu. The note of Tyde Caller was still folded around it: “It needs to drink from death that flows… You’ll know the place when the heart knocks.”1
At the seam the cogs turned, the gap opened, and the party saw the river of souls. Glade held the vial in the current for a full minute. His right hand came back cold to the wrist and stayed so permanently, and plants leaned away from it afterward.18 Savriel stood witness throughout, as a Watcher who recognized a necessary working, and spoke quietly of the Spire’s sealed breaches and of the questions the Watchers were trained never to ask.1 Earlier that day she had found the soul of Ersklan Ghostfang, called Fang, caught in a current that pulled it down toward the bottom of the Tomb.9
The vial seated with a click and became the Heartwell Vial, attuned to Glade. Its heartbeat tracked how near it was to the Soulmonger, the device at the bottom of the Tomb, and was never wrong. Glade had not asked for this and could not turn it off. As he drew his hand back, the current rippled once. Nothing followed.1
The party explored little else that night and held its position in the Cog of Rot. About two hours had passed since the descent.1
The lake and the twin scepter
In the small hours of the sixteenth, Taenae spent time exploring and reading the level: the draw of the sprinkler, the sweat on the iron and the way the sound moved through the walls. She concluded that the entire level sat under water, and she was right. She had not seen the lake.2
The party found the sealed wing and could not open it, since no one had yet touched the control room.2
Vonara then flew back up the chute to the gargoyle room of the fourth level and on to its throne room, where she and Raiketsu took the twin scepter from Acererak’s throne. Acererak’s fourth warning had told the party to find the iron scepter’s twin.92 Back on the fifth level, Inete cast identify on the two scepters the party now carried. The one taken from Napaka’s crypt was the real one. It was light and hummed with transmutation magic, and its sole purpose was the destruction of a construct named after Napaka. The one from the throne was cold, dead iron with an adamantine head, a decoy. The party kept it.2
The party also recalled from the history of Omu that the city had never had kings, only queens. Notable men ran through its history, celebrated and sung of, and none was crowned. The party theorized that Omu had had a martial office, filled mainly by men, beside a crown held by women.2
The hall of the black sun
The party used the jade crocodile key from Napaka’s crypt to open a crawlway, and spent most of the following hours in the wing beyond it. They kept the key.2
In the sloped hall, the kneeling figures in the reliefs wore the party’s own faces. Inete remembered that her grandfather Zitembe had once told her, “Beware the Black Sun.” She connected the black sun with the Sphere of Annihilation. A second memory came to her with it, of a rainbow of color, from her audience with Zitembe after his ascension.2
In the quiet of the hall Raiketsu told the others that he had been trapped in the maze of the fourth level for a long time, long enough that he did not know what had become of his previous party.2
The statue asked for tribute, “three I need, then three more, three more still.” The party gave it nine crushed gems, and the Eye of Zaltec appeared in its broken fist. At the instant the Eye left the stone hand, sleeping gas bloomed and the west wall rolled open. Inete was the first to move clear of the cloud. Savriel fell asleep for an hour.2
The juggernaut then rolled down the hall, filling it. Glade caught it with telekinesis and held the rolling mass until it gave up and withdrew into its hidden vault. The juggernaut was the construct named after Napaka, and a touch of the real scepter, which the party was carrying, could have destroyed it.2
The Eye of Zaltec went to Glade. It was a flawless ruby the size of a fist that had once been the pommel of a sacrificial dagger of Zaltec, the Maztican god of war and blood. It was valued at 5,000 gold pieces, and at up to five times that at auction, and rumors of resurrection were attached to it.2 Starfallen, the spirit in the Ghost Lantern, had told the party on the second level that the Eye could resurrect the ancient dead.10
Word reached the party that another company of adventurers had entered the Tomb behind them and had been slaughtered before clearing the first level. How the word came is not recorded.2
Savriel’s letter
The party pulled back to the Cog of Rot for a short rest. There Savriel asked Taenae aside. She asked about a missing feeling in the party, an absence that she had been reading in them for days, and Taenae told her about Takhesis Calva: who he was, how he had gone, and the confusion and loss the party still carried.2
Savriel then told Taenae that she did not believe she was leaving the Tomb alive. She asked Taenae to carry a letter to her parents in Evereska, wrote the letter then and there on paper from Taenae’s alchemist’s kit, and handed it over. She blessed the paper with a prayer as she wrote, quietly.24 Taenae asked whether she wanted her parents told about her condition. Savriel answered, “Absolutely not.” She wanted to be remembered as she had been, and not as the monster she perceived herself to be. She said that she had been made as she was, that it was tied to the Yuan-ti, and that she had come to Chult hunting the Cult of Dendar. She gave no specifics of how she had been transformed.2
By the end of the rest the party had been in the Tomb for about forty-six hours.2
The acid-scarred cog
Before dawn Vonara led the party into the acid-scarred cog and told the others to “remain ready.” Savriel asked how, and Vonara answered that they should watch for traps.3
The party took the cog for the lair of a black dragon. Glade recalled what he knew of dragons: every dragon was different, all defended their homes to the death, and acid was the mark of the black dragon. The party suspected that the gray slime was the acid-dissolved remains of the dead. Taenae examined it and showed that it was not organic matter at all, which ended the theory. Inete took a sample of the slime in a glass container of Taenae’s, for later study.3
The rumble around the party never varied. Taenae marked the wall with chalk and waited, and the mark moved. This showed that the walls were turning constantly.3
The control room and the voice
Vonara led the way into the control room, where Taenae at once noticed the slime dripping from the pipes. Unkh, the Trickster God who inhabited Vogal, offered to decipher the controls if given time, and Vogal consented. After an hour of study Unkh found that the controls were a mystery and should be left alone. The party rested through the hour.3
Taenae then pulled the gold lever. Slime poured from the pipes. The lever locked down and she could not force it back, so she pressed the red button. A stone slab dropped and sealed the party in with the rising slime. Inete alone was outside, having left by the doorway the moment the slime touched her feet. The slime hurt everyone it touched. Vogal hung from his immovable rod above the flow, Vonara perched on her broom, and Savriel slipped and fell trying to lift the slab.3
With the slime rising, Taenae turned the red dial. A voice answered, vast and delighted: “What now, Gorra?” It was the Voice in the Lake. Asked how to fix the room, it offered only that they undo the past. It asked Taenae who her favorite was. She avoided the question and asked for its own, and it answered, “Gorra.” Asked where Withers was, it said, “around.” Taenae at last named Glade as her favorite. The voice grew bored, and before it left it invited the party down to the lake to visit.3
Savriel knew the name. Gorra was a fellow Watcher of the Spire who was known to have gone missing in the region, and Gorra was Withers. She said of him, “He chose to be here, by sordid deals with dangerous creatures. He has lived long past his due,” and that he was “not withering as we are intended to do.” Taenae defended him, as she had before.3
Inete began to cast knock on the slab from outside. Before she finished, Raiketsu punched a hole through the stone, and his fist passed over her head. The east door of the control room was permanently broken. The slime drained. Vonara picked the mechanism that had locked the gold lever and helped Taenae walk the dials back in reverse order.3
Taenae asked Nangnang, who inhabited her, about the voice, and received the god’s judgment of its age. Savriel said that the voice might be a child. She was not certain, and she refused to gamble on a child being alone below. Taenae came away doubting whether Nangnang’s word could be trusted without fail.3
Mapping the machine
Further work at the panel taught the party that the configurations rearranged the rooms outside. They divided to map the change: Raiketsu and Taenae in the garden, Glade, Savriel and Vogal in the acid-scarred cog, and Inete and Vonara at the controls, for one hour in the second configuration.3
The second configuration sealed the acid-scarred cog entirely. Glade, Savriel and Vogal spent the hour locked in, resting and arm wrestling. Savriel beat Vogal, the Champion of Nyanzaru, who protested that he was “the Champion” and should be respected.3
In the garden the second configuration released gas, and the three shambling mounds rose out of the compost. Taenae took the form of a fire elemental and Raiketsu fought with his hands. The compost was soaked by the sprinkler and barely burned, and the two of them destroyed all three mounds regardless.3
The same configuration opened the room of poison gas. Taenae went in alone, was poisoned by the gas, and found the body of Lord Brixton, with a yellow band faded to gray on one arm. She took from it his longsword, which had a hilt in the shape of a dragon, a dungeoneer’s pack, and six carnelians worth 50 gold pieces each. The sword was magical and had not been identified.34 Taenae raised the Ghost Lantern over the body. Starfallen, who had been of the same company,10 had nothing kind to say. She blamed Brixton for leading the Company of the Yellow Banner to its death in the Tomb, and had never spoken of him before.3
When the hour was up the party reset the cogs to the third configuration, came together in the garden and took a short rest. They had been in the Tomb for about forty-nine hours.3
The Cog of Blood
After the rest Vonara turned her mind on the geas that bound her to Valindra Shadowmantle, and on the half of its command that she had never been able to see: the Soulmonger, and something else. The geas answered with a hazy image of a jar, which no one else in the party received. It was the first definite shape the compulsion had given her. The jar was Valindra’s phylactery.411
The party divided again for an hour in the second configuration. Vogal assigned Savriel and Glade to the control room to “protect” Inete and Vonara while they worked the panel, and stayed there with them. Taenae and Raiketsu went out as a pair.4
On the way Taenae called Raiketsu “Takhesis” by a slip of the tongue. She explained that this had been a companion who came before him and was lost in the Tomb before Raiketsu was pulled out of the maze, and that the party was still looking for him.4
The two came to the Cog of Blood. Mist crawled out from under the wardrobe of the Shadowfell, and a heavy mechanical ticking came from that of Mechanus. They opened the Shadowfell door. The four will-o’-wisps came out invisible, and Taenae was struck down almost at once, drained of life. Raiketsu carried her body out of the wisps’ reach, stood over her with his own body between her and the lights, and held them off until he could act. He then gave her his only potion, a potion of greater healing taken from the vault of the beholder on the third level, and revived her. Without him she would have died in that room. The two finished the wisps together, both badly hurt, and Taenae afterward cast healing spirit to tend them both.4
With the wisps dead the wardrobe went inert, and one of the five crystals cracked and dropped to the floor by the portcullis. Taenae concluded at once that the crystals anchored the wardrobes to the planes beyond them, and that breaking the crystals made it unnecessary to open the other four doors. She cast wrath of nature on the crystals, and Raiketsu cracked the rest with his fists. The portcullis rose. The four unopened wardrobes stood inert against the walls with their doors shut. Taenae muttered, “Thank Chakuna.” Chakuna was her patron.4
Through the raised portcullis the two looked into the Hall of Decay. They did not enter, and waited for the rest of the party.4
In the control room Savriel and Glade talked alone for the length of the hour. She told him, as she had told Taenae, that she did not believe she was leaving the Tomb alive, and added that she was already struggling to keep up. She said, “I’m trying to make do with what I have left.” Glade comforted her with forest puns. She had no idea what he was talking about, and understood what he meant.4
The handover
When the hour ran out Vonara turned the cogs back to the third configuration and the party came together again. They agreed to go into the Hall of Decay as a full group. Savriel volunteered to stay behind and work the panel so that they could. She took the control room, and Vonara set the second configuration, which opened the route down, and left her at the panel.4
The Hall of Decay
The corridor took its toll from everyone who walked it, without violence. Cloth and leather aged decades in a few steps. Vonara’s hat and trousers decayed where she wore them, and her cigarettes with them. Zitembe’s robes, which Inete had worn since her grandfather’s ascension and kept as a relic of him, decayed to scraps. Taenae’s herbalism kit was destroyed, and the magical ingredients stowed inside it survived. Snib’s Ledger, which Inete carried, was nonmagical paper and did not survive.4
Savriel’s letter survived, because of the blessing on its paper. The party’s magical items all came through, among them Inete’s Seer’s Shroud and Brixton’s longsword. No one pulled the ivory ring in the bull’s skull.4
The party was in the corridor for about five minutes. At its end they saw the stairs and the first of the ivory masks, and went down to the sixth level. They had been in the Tomb for about fifty hours.4
Savriel and Withers
Savriel remained alone on the level, at the panel, with the cogs held in the second configuration and a doorway that no longer closed.45 On the sixth level the party tried to take the Boy out by the stair that led back up toward the fifth. He tried to put one foot on it and could not.5
Later on the sixteenth, Withers walked into the control room through the broken east door, even and unhurried, with his ledger under one arm and his fist folded at his heart, a stance that Savriel knew. He said, “I am here to settle the accounts,” and asked that word be sent that he had died at his post. He added, “And then I will do something for you.” Savriel’s answer is not recorded. He then took her from the level, with no gesture and no light, and did not look away. The panel was left unattended, with the cogs still in the second configuration. The party knew nothing of the meeting.12
That afternoon Savriel came to the party in the Cradle and said that Withers had sent her.11
Destruction
No later visit to the level is recorded. It was destroyed with the rest of the Tomb before dawn on the seventeenth of Eleasis, when Omu sank and became a caldera.138
Appendix
Appearances
Session 83 to Session 86 · Session 88
Mentioned in Session 79 to Session 82 and Session 87.
References
Footnotes
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Session 83 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18
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Session 84 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18 ↩19 ↩20 ↩21 ↩22
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Session 85 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18 ↩19 ↩20 ↩21 ↩22 ↩23 ↩24 ↩25 ↩26
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Session 86 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18 ↩19 ↩20 ↩21 ↩22 ↩23