Melech walks along the northern hallway, skipping the stairs for now. He moves slowly, checking for traps, then checks the double doors to the east.
Ulysses walks alongside Melech and assists.
+3 traps
+3 traps
Thankfully, there appear to be no more traps in the hallway and the party reaches the east doors without incident. As Melech listens carefully and Ulysses scans the knob, hinges, and keyholes for danger, silence greets the slayer's ears and no traps seem to be present. However, a plaque above the door reads in middle Osiriani: HALL OF IMMORTAL BEASTS.
The title seems dreadfully ominous, but you cautiously swing the doors open anyway. Inside, sarcophagi and mummified beasts of every shape and size fill the chamber. Detailed murals along the walls depict a wide variety of beasts from the area and far beyond.
While many are of Large or smaller size and readily identifiable just by description even if you've never seen one before--a timber wolf, for example, and a white rabbit--the northern end of the hall is dominated by a massive creature that you have likely only heard rough descriptions of from far Qadira and Katapesh, but Danu recognizes it immediately. It is roughly ten feet tall, over twenty feet in length, and looks like it probaby weighed almost 9,000 pounds in life. Its leathery gray skin is wrinkled and thick, and a long, snaking trunk rises permanently into the air as if trumpeting for eternity.
Danu stares, slack-jawed, in disbelief at the massive stuffed monstrosity in front of her.
"Nine Hells, this guy has a stuffed freaking elephant in his tomb?? He really was a big deal."
Remembering herself finally, she washes her magical senses over the room to make sure none of this crap is going to get off its stand and come to life.
Especially the gods-damned elephant.
Danu detects no magic anywhere in the room. The taxidermized creatures remain on their stands.
The bodies in here, while not currently animated, could theoretically be used as vessels for a targeted necromantic spell. The elephant would be especially disturbing as an undead.
Ulysses looks up at the elephant. "How did they get it in here? I guess a powerful wizard could have teleported it?" He shakes his head in disbelief. "Good thing whoever is making the undead hasn't been in this room yet."
Melech looks at the animals with awe. "These belong in a museum. Well. Let's keep going."
He takes a quick look around this room before checking out the door across the hall.
Danu's detect magic and Melech's keen eyes come up with the same conclusion: the most interesting thing in this room is the stuffed elephant--nothing else of value can be found. Certainly if you could find a way to transport it whole out of the tomb, it would be exceedingly valuable to a collector, but you simply do not have the means to do so at this time.
The door across the hall appears to be free of dangers, and Melech hears no sound from within. A plaque above the door announces in Middle Osiriani: CATALOGUE OF NIGHTS.
A quick check of the door finds it unlocked. Inside, dark-stained wooden cabinets and shelves, as well as a prominent mahogany table, fill this room. The shelves are covered in dusty tomes, scrolls, and logbooks, neatly ordered and arrayed, and look to be in surprisingly fine shape.
Scanning through the tomes with a light touch, you realize these are death dates. These tomes log the deaths of every citizen of Wati since Nefru Shepses' arrival in AR 2953, all the way up to 3317 where the records trail off.
You realize, based on the name of the room, that this is meant to mimic the Catalogue of Last Days, the archives in Pharasma's Boneyard that inscribe the death of every living thing on Golarion. Its existence might be of great interest to the Church, though it's hard to put a price tag on just how valuable.
The mahogany table is a mirror to the one in the opposite room, and looks to be of roughly the same value (2000gp). It also has a leather-bound book sitting on it that appears to be much newer than the tomes and scrolls of the rest of the room.
Melech takes a look around the room, paying particular attention to the items on the shelves (looking for anything that looks interesting and/or valuable).
Ulysses helps.
Aside from the very expensive table, Melech doesn't see anything of particular value in this room aside from old books, for which there's usually someone willing to pay.
The only other item of interest is the book on the table that appears to be much newer than any of the musty old tomes on the shelves--as in, it appears to have only entered this place recently, perhaps in the last week or two. There is a fine layer of dust in this room (and in the tomb as a whole) but there is no dust on the book, and time has yet to yellow its pages.
No one has any idea what this book is, but the fact that it is different makes it significant to Melech. He grabs it, almost as an afterthought, and stows it in his pack. Then he returns to the stairs and pauses to listen.
Danu holds up a hand to stop Melech. "Hold on there! That could be important! Shouldn't we at least look at it? It might tell us something about this place, or at least who the culprit is."
Melech sighs. He wants to get moving, but he supposes Danu is probably right. He pulls the book back out and hands it to Ulysses.
Ulysses opens the book and reads the first page. If it doesn't seem too evil, he continues to flip through it, looking for anything that
looks interesting or relevant.
Ulysses scans the journal, and thanks to his keen eye and a sharp mind, he manages to glean some important details fairly quickly.
The journal's owner, a woman named Neferekhu, was the matriarch of an old family from Tephu who had long boasted a magical talent for speaking with the dead. Their fortunes turned when Khemet I overthrew the Keleshite regents and tossed out any of the noble families who had sided with them--Neferekhu's among them. Neferekhu grew up on stories of her family's lost power, and she writes poetic lamentations on this fact often.
Both her son and her grandson lacked the family's hereditary power to speak with the dead, a fact on which Neferekhu harps often in her early entries. To shore up his perceived weakness, her grandson, Nebta-Khufre, began delving into the distasteful art of Necromancy. The fact that he had to derive his powers from study rather than gods-given gifts only heightened Neferekhu's disgust for him.
Over the last year, Neferekhu complains of strange dreams, seeing an incredibly ornate golden funerary mask, waking up feeling exhausted with a pounding headache and a sense of dread.
Immediately curious, Nebta-Khufre began hounding his grandmother for details about her dreams. Tired and irritated, she rebuffed him over and over. She mocked him incessantly for his "pathetic" attempts to mimic her gifts, and the aristocratic sycophants who participated in his dark hobby.
At this point, the tone changes drastically, from the cramped, concise script of earlier to jagged, almost-illegible scribblings in a mad stream of consciousness form.
It's harder to glean information from this point on, but Ulysses still manages to learn some more points.
After her death six weeks ago, Nebta-Khufre broke into her tomb and stole her head, transforming it into a mad undead conduit for divine knowledge. A few passage stand out to the alchemist:
... golden eyes in the deep golden eyes sunken in a dark pit in the ground where the first pharaoh used to glut on the worship of sick peasants...
... he makes me talk to it i dont want to talk to it but he makes me it hurts when i talk to it it rips at my brain my ka it wants to eat my ka it wants to eat my ka...
... nothing left nothing left of that little s~$~ he is dead and what walks is empty but not empty he sees through my s+$# grandsons dead eyes he eats and breathes and sleeps but the vessel is empty you f!+@ing fool it ate you too...
It's hard to parse through the gibberish but it seems that Nebta-Khufre found the location of a powerful artifact using his grandmother's insane, divinely-tainted ramblings: a funerary mask thousands of years old. He put together a ritual to create a ka pulse, animating the dead over a wide area, in hopes of mustering an undead army and bringing glory back to his dying house.
What he didn't realize, however, was that such heinous magic would have a dire price: the ritual destroyed Nebta-Khufre's ka, his vital spark. Despite being a living, breathing human being, he is nonetheless as dead as the rotting monsters he has animated through his foul magic.
Ulysses shares what he learned. "Well. Now we know who is behind the pulses. It seems he accidentally killed himself in the process." His facial scars begin to itch at this realization; Nebta-Khufre did (is doing?) an undeniably evil thing, but Ulysses can at least relate with the drive to push things further and further to one's own detriment. He resists the insistent urge to raise his hand to touch the scars.
"Danu, close the door. I wish to pray for another spell." He places his cloak on the ground, kneels on it, and spends some time beseeching Bes for another casting of searing light. He suspects he is going to need it. Once done, he gathers his friends into a circle. "Bes, conceal us from the senses of the dead." A holy white light erupts from his holy symbol and covers the party.
Melech listens at the top of the stairs, and leads the party down if all seems safe.
Obadiah follows Melech, reaching out in front of them looking for evil auras.
Danu's stomach turns as Ulysses reads from the journal. "He... He's... He basically destroyed his own soul. Gods, that's--" She closes her eyes and swallows down bile. So glad I told him to stop and read the book, she thinks sourly.
She wordlessly follows the party out of the room and to the stairwell, sweeping the walls, floors, and ceiling with detect magic as they go.
The stairwell spirals down past where you can see, and the air below is stale and rancid with countless years. Melech sees nothing out of the ordinary in the stairwell, and neither Obadiah nor his adopted daughter catch anything in the landing's immediate vicinity with their combined detection spells. The party is as reasonably certain of the stairwell's safety as they can be, so they slowly descend into greater depths. At least the magical light that permeates this level seems to continue below.
The stairs wind down a significant way. Melech guesses they probably descend at least twenty feet below the first floor. Ancient dust puffs up from the steps as they walk, but Melech sees that they are not the first people to come down here. A single pair of bare feet have traversed these stairs multiple times.
He recognizes the shape of the left pinky toe, distinctive becuase it juts out at a slight angle. This is the same set of footprints he saw in the Sanctum of the Erudite Eye. The same person who walked into that building--possibly under the noses of the Scorched Hand adventuring party--has been here. Whether he is here now is hard to say, but he definitely traverses this stairwell regularly.
Finally, the spiral stairs open onto a small landing before straightening out and continuing down. The stairs finally open into an immaculate chamber tiled in blue ceramic. Large bronze double doors lie to the south.
Obadiah detects no evil in the room, but Danu immediately senses magic in the air beyond the subtle evocation energies marking the light that permeates the walls, though what it is for, she cannot say.
Melech studies the floor before stepping on it, looking for traps.
Once all clear, he approaches the door and checks it.
He raises an eyebrow to Obadiah and Danu, asking silently whether they detect anything on the other side.
Ulysses helps!
+3 traps
+3 traps
Before Melech can move any farther into the room, he spots a pair of tiles shaking on the floor, slowly rising into the air. He gets the distinct impression that if nothing is done immediately, the room is going to launch a fairly deadly tirade at the party. A small, hard-to-notice series of glyphs are etched into the wall at the foot of the stairs.
Melech turns and pushes the others back up the stairs until they have cover from the flying tiles.
"Fall back! I'll take care of it!" Ulysses pushes his way past the others' legs as he tries to figure out how to disable this thing.
The gnome hustles forward and does his thing. His fingers slip a couple times, but he manages to disable the final glyph just as a tile rises up off the floor and launches at him--but it loses momentum almost immediately and crashes to the floor at his feet instead of striking him. The three other tiles that were hovering in the air, about to fly at the others, clatter to the floor and lie still.
Melech may have noticed the trap, but Ulysses' eyes had spotted a discrepancy in the west wall, just before the floor attacked. Investigating, it appears to be a hidden door.
Ulysses nods in satisfaction, then waves the others back into the room. "Safe now!" Then he walks up to the seam in the wall and inspects it.
+3 traps
"What are you looking at?"
Ulysses and Melech see no further dangers. The doorway slides over to reveal a small niche, less than ten feet by ten, with stacks of what appear to have once been cleaning equipment. There are also stacks of extra tiles for the floor of this room, presumably to reset the trap. Under one of the stacks, wedged between a spare tile and a crack in the wall, Melech finds a strange coin. Danu detects magic wafting off it, and identifies it as a coin of the untrodden road.
The double doors are, to the best of their knowledge, untrapped, and nothing can be heard from the other side. Opening the doors reveals a short corridor, about eight feet wide, leading to another set of heavy brass double doors. Like the upper floor, a soft light radiates from seemingly nowhere, perfectly illuminating the room.
Melech checks the floor for traps, then checks the doors at the end of the hallway.
Ulysses helps!
+3 traps
+3 traps
The Eyballin' Duo find no sign of traps on the floor or doors. The heavy brass doors are unlocked. Melech and Obadiah push them open with a grunt and a heaving shove. The room beyond features a fifteen-foot-tall statue of a matronly woman with long, flowing hair at its center, standing between two large stone tables. The decagonal walls each bear a heavy curtain across an alcove. A second set of enormous bronze doors stand to the south.
Despite the thickness of the curtains, it is immediately obvious to you that three of them lead not to alcoves, but hallways.
Ulysses helps!
Well, this is a nightmare of a room.
Multiple points of ingress, all of which are obscured visually. A perfect spot for an ambush; they would be surrounded in seconds. He holds a fist up to prevent anyone from entering the room, then carefully studies the floor, looking for traps.
If all seems clear, he turns to Obadiah and Danu. "Follow me around the room and look for auras through the curtains." Then he leads the party clockwise around the room, not touching any curtains, and watching for trouble as the magical types do their thing.
If they don't detect anything that prompts them to stop, he looks over the statue last.
Ulysses helps!
Obadiah follows the big scary man and reaches his senses out beyond each curtain, looking for sources of evil.
Neither Ulysses nor Melech find any traps nor anything sinister about the curtains.
The statue is a rendition of Pharasma, goddess of death and ruler of the Boneyard. In one hand she holds a dagger, her sacred weapon, usable both for cutting the throat of an enemy and cutting the umbilical cord of a newborn child--a suitable weapon for the Lady of Death and Rebirth. In her other hand is a sprig of kheper-wer, a medicinal herb commonly used in childbirth. This room appears to be a place where supplicants once came to spend several days in communion with the Lady of Graves, probably in preparation to mummify an important family member.
Seven of the alcoves hold small chapels to Pharasma, but three lead to other chambers.
To the west, an alcove leads into a straight stairwell leading down, down, down, before banking south and out of sight.
To the northwest, the alcove leads through a short hallway into a vaguely hexagonal room with various crates and tables, though it's hard to see what it's for without venturing further in. A dizzying array of odors waft out of this room, including cedar, onions, and myyrh.
Finally, to the northeast, another short hallway leads into a large room with two tables, one round, one long, as well as wooden partitions sectioning off part of the room. It appears to continue southward.
Obadiah senses no evil from any of the three directions--at least not within the 60-foot range of the spell--and Danu can sense no magic in range, either.
Melech looks at the others and indicates the myriad directions available to them. "Any preference?" When the others just shrug, he says "okay" and leads them to the northeast (after checking for traps!).
Once in the other room, he takes a look around.
Ulysses helps!
+3 traps
+3 traps
Half-walls and heavy curtains divide this room into a network of small apartments and common spaces. Colorful linens, faded with age, lie neatly folded at the foot of each bare bed, save for the far end of the room, where rich silks and pillows cover a bed surrounded by a mess of discarded books and notes.
On the next two beds to the north of the bedecked sleeping arrangements lie two corpses, both female, with cracked, weathered skin and pock marks.
These corpses appear to have died from exposure to the elements out in the desert. However, based on the lack of decomposition of any sort, it must be assumed they are being treated with magic to repel rot or a transformation to undeath.
Each woman's body is adorned with fine Taldan silks and burial trinkets of considerable value. The burial accoutrements are probably worth 2,400gp each. However, that would most certainly be a violation of Sebti's rules for the necropolis. All the books are in Middle osiriani or older, and seem to be about various esoteric necromancy rituals involving ka as an energy source.
The notes piled around the southern bed are practically gibberish. A great deal of talk about "unlimited power" and "the might of the pharaohs" and "undead army." Rantings about restoration of glory and immortality round out the mad ramblings.
Danu passes the bodies, being of little help there; Obie is better with the physician stuff anyway. She heads to the messy bed and picks up a few of the crumpled pieces of parchment. She reads the notes and shudders. "This man, this 'Nebta-Khufre.' What he has done..." She closes her eyes and swallows down bile. "He sacrificed his own vital spark to power this heinous ritual. He's soulless now. There are certain Outsiders who can do this, devour souls for strength. But for a mortal to perform this on himself is beyond insane. Why would anyone do this...?"
Obadiah barely hears Danu, instead enthralled in studying the bodies. "These women died of exposure. Why are they here?"
Ulysses picks through the linens. They're probably worth something, but his interests have always tended towards shinier things.
Obadiah completes his medical inspection of the women with an almost matter-of-fact realization that their adornments are probably worth a ton. Not unusual, though; these women must have held a place of high honor to ... someone.
Satisfied that there is nothing here of immediate interest (though he'd have to have a chat with Shepses about his ancestor's insane underground temple of death), Melech leads the others to the northwest chamber, following his usual ritual of checking for traps, then looking around.
Ulysses helps!
+3 traps
+3 traps