22: Dredging up the Past

Wellentag 15^th Sigmarzeit

While you had been at the opera, Dietrich had been sound asleep in bed, still under the influence of the dark wine. When you all woke up in the morning, you told him about the your night at the opera, but he seemed to know a lot about it, having sort of dreamt it, too. But in his dream all the people in the opera house had been dragged off through the gate by the daemons.

Berta was still in a bad way with her ear injury and didn’t want to get up, and so the rest of you made your way to the Hangman to see if Rotter had anything for you.

He told you about the opera house thing, but his version was that the opera was so bad that everyone rioted, demanding their money back and a few people had been killed in the stampede, and there was nothing strange about it.

Max decided he could go back to the Marienburg Engineers’ Guild to see if they had any work for him, as he had been promised a chance to earn his membership.

On the way to Hightower you passed the Grand Opera House and saw that it was boarded up with a good number of the windows smashed and it looked like it wouldn’t be hosting an event for some time.

At the MEG Max was directed to one of their officials, Willi van der Willi, and warned not to make fun of his name. And after Max had given him a guilder to help him give the matter some thought, Willi mentioned that their dredging project on the Smaalkanaal in Doodkanaal was behind schedule, as the engineer, Wout de Clerk, was ill, and if he could sort that out they would look on his application for membership favourably.

So you went down to Doodkanaal and found the Smaalkanaal in a pretty rough and rundown area surrounded by rundown warehouses, and it smelled terrible. And it was pretty obvious that opening up the canal again would help the businesses in the area. The area was so dodgy you decided to go back to Frau Koester’s and get the handgun.

And you saw the Brass Serpent, which was a steam powered dredger that looked a bit like a dragon, maybe, and Max inspected it. You were being watched by a couple of locals who didn’t look that pleased about you being there, and over the course of the day more locals turned up to stare at you.

Max opened up the hatch to the cockpit and saw that some of the controls and mechanisms were broken, but he got a decent idea of how it should work. And also noticed that a couple of bits of machinery were missing.

He went to work on repairing the damaged bits and got the impression that it had been deliberately, but crudely, vandalised. By the end of the day, Max was happy that all the bits were repaired but couldn’t do anything about the missing bits. And as you left for the evening Dietrich told the locals that he had put a curse on the Brass Serpent that would affect anyone who touched it.

Aubentag 16^th Sigmarzeit

The next day, Berta still had ear issues, so the rest of you went off to the MEG so Max could have a look at the plans for the Brass Serpent. He managed to find them and got a decent idea of what the missing pieces might look like, and how he might manufacture them. And he also got de Clerk’s address. And he bought a lock and chain to make the serpent more secure.

De Clerk lived in Winkelmarkt, not too far from Smaalkanaal. A harassed woman with kids around her answered the door and thought you might be from the MEG to pay her husband his sick pay. Max promised that he would take the matter up with the guild and gave her a couple of guilders of his own money to tide her over.

You went up to de Clerk’s room, and he was obviously very ill. Heinrich refused to go in, but Dietrich saw that his body was surrounded by purple magic, but no more than you would expect around someone who was near death.

Max reassured Wout about his sick pay and Wout told him that he had taken a few of the bits of the serpent home with him to stop anyone from working the machine, and told him where they were. And so you headed back to Smaalkanaal with the bits.

When you got there you discovered that the local kids had invented a new game called Cursey Cursey which involved one of them approaching the Brass Serpent and then touching it, and then running away again while everyone shouted ‘cursey cursey.’

Max spent the day repairing the serpent and by evening he fired it up and, kind of surprisingly, it started working. So you sent word to the guild that it was working and that you would require some labourers in the morning.

One of the locals approached you and told you you didn’t want to be digging in the canal. And at first you thought it was a threat, but then you kind of realised it was more of a warning. You didn’t want to leave the serpent unguarded and so you spent the whole night watching it, taking it in turns to sleep in the cockpit.

In the small hours you noticed a couple of figures approaching the serpent, and Max fired at one, with his handgun and hit him, and Heinrich ran him through, and the other figure ran off. Examining your victim, you noticed that he had sort of greenish tinged skin.

At first light, four labourers turned up, and Max fired up the serpent, and began dredging the canal. He threw the mud up to the side of the canal, and the labourers carted it off and dumped it in the Doodkanaal. It was hard work but by evening you had made a decent dent in the entire job. But you were concerned that the more mud you scooped out, the more precarious the wall of mud holding back the Doodkanaal became.

And you noticed that your dredging had exposed the top of an arched tunnel which may have once been the entrance to an underground canal, or something. You cleared more of the mud around the tunnel and were able to clamber into it.

It was extremely smelly in there, and Heinrich was retching and nauseous with the stench. You noticed the tunnels were made with better engineering than is usual around that part of Doodkanaal and Max thought it might have been made by dwarfs. You followed the tunnel for about thirty yards and you came to a crossroads. Dietrich went into a bit of a trance to survey the area and he could see that all four tunnels leading from the crossroads were covered with a sort of sickly green magical scum.

You decided that this might be a job for another day, so you sent to the MEG for some guards, for the serpent. When they arrived you locked the cockpit and told the guards not to go down the tunnel, and then you went home to bed.