Chapter 1: The Knaves Visit the Spudfields

Lifting up a bit of the cloth on the end of his pole, Clomm could see -- and smell -- that the fabric was old, and rotten. It seemed damp, and like it would stain anything it came into contact with. It was in strips, long and narrow, reminiscent of a wrap or bandage.

Leaving the candles burning with their strange green light, the group briefly investigates the two passages. To the east, right, a wide passage appears to end after twenty feet or so, perhaps continuing on to the left. To the west, where Endrei gestures with his hammer, the passage is narrower -- only five feet across. After only five or six paces, it appears to connect with another chamber, a square, stone-lined room about the same size as the space housing the candelabras and the painting. It does not take Audree long with her torch to light up that room after carefully treading down the connecting passage.

What she -- and anyone else accompanying her -- sees, is startling and unsettling.

A statue stands against the far wall, in an alcove. It has been carved from smooth, green-black stone, and is a blasphemous representation of a naked, horned man. He has three eyes and two mouths, and seems to hold a metal staff or rod of some kind in his open, upturned hands. Muscular, over seven feet tall and simply evil-looking, the thing is disturbing. Is it breathing? No. Surely not -- the thing is just cold stone, given slight movement by the flicking flame.

On the floor in front of it lies a withered, red and black carpet with an intricate, curving, scrolling pattern woven through it. In the north, a wooden door reinforced with iron stands closed.

What will our brave Knaves do?

No one can place the pattern in the rug, and indeed it's so old and moldering and stained that one may no longer exist in it. Audree gets closest to the thing, and sees what she thought was a dark stain... move. Puzzled by what she's seeing, she's still trying to understand it when Endrei gently thumps his hammer on the fabric -- and suddenly that half of the rug is alive with a movement that shimmers in the torch light, with tiny insects swarming and crawling out of the matted nap.

Wax is trying to use his senses to understand more about this ancient place they have found, but it's to no avail. The pungent smell of death drifts faintly in the air, mostly covered by the now slightly stronger smell of herbs, and no sound or source of heat or cold reaches him.

Left alone, the swarming bugs appear to settle. But Endrei, closest to them, sees a number of the pale-bodied little things -- about the size of a pepper seed -- suddenly vanish into thin air. Wait, no -- not vanish, but leap, so fast the eye can't follow them in this light. They are fleas or some other hopping vermin and a handful of the things land on the big man's boots and lower trouser legs as he presses against the southern wall.

Endrei moves past the infested rug along the southern wall, swatting and brushing at the tiny creatures that are now slipping into the folds of his clothing, beginning to bite his legs even as Elius wax goes the other way -- and successfully slips past the moldering floor covering, finding himself at the door in the northern wall. Made of gray-brown wood and furnished with wrought iron, it stands shut, concealing whatever lies beyond it.