The Scarabs considered Ptemenib's plea, concerned for the safety of their adopted home when they had only recently saved the town from rising undead. But after they discussed what the best plan would be, the group decided to continue with their original plan to seek the Slave Trenches, in the hope that they could force the flying pyramid to come to them and leave Wati safe. Uto sent a message back to Ptemenib to tell him an abbreviated version of this. Ptemenib responded that he felt the town would be able to survive for a time while the Scarabs carried out their mission.
Once the communication was done, the Scarabs used the map that Chisisek had provided for them to allow Hutt to teleport them to the Slave Trenches. Hutt decided to take them to the bank of the river that the Slave Pits lay near. But because he had never been there and had only a map and not his own memory of the place or a description from someone else who had visited it, Hutt wasn't able to make the journey as accurate as they had hoped. As they materialized, they all suddenly realized they were standing on a slope covered in scattered scree. The loose rocks caused Kaa to lose his balance and slide downhill.
They didn't know where they were, so Sula transformed into a dire eagle and flew up to get a view of the surrounding terrain. Hutt cast a spell on himself to allow him to fly with her. Sula quickly caught sight of the river Hutt had been aiming for, but it was a considerable distance away. She also spied some regular lines on the opposite side of the river that seemed likely to be the Slave Trenches. Having seen the river made it possible for Hutt to cast a second teleportation spell after he and Sula returned to the rest of the party, and this time the magic carried them to their intended destination.
The air around the river felt more damp than what they had been accustomed to in the desert around the Sightless Sphinx. Rough scrub grew along the river channel. Ahead where the probably Slave Trenches lay they saw something glowing in the bright sunlight, a faint light like a campfire seen at dusk, but the time of their arrival was morning.
As they climbed over the crest of the raised river bank they saw spread out before them a vast earthworks, narrow trenches dug in straight lines going north, south, east, and west. They estimated the works to cover many square miles of the desert. Off to their left, on the east side, they saw a semi-circular structure. The glow they had seen appeared to be emanating from the center of it.
When they approached this mass of trenches they saw that the walls of the trenches were lined with thousands of statues, some of them larger than others, many of them heavily weathered and crumbling. The larger statues appeared less worn than the smaller ones, and the Scarabs speculated on whether those statues might have been protected from the ravages of time by magic, or perhaps they had been created more recently. The arrangement of the statues reminded Uto and Azzaria of a monument to the eleven gods that they were meant to seek here. Chisisek had given them directions to this monument, but his description was vague.
The Scarabs knew that they had to activate all the trenches and then the monument to take control of the pyramid. They needed to identify certain statues to determine which ones should be activated to engage the magic. As they began to explore the massive structure, they heard a faint continuous hum coming from all around them. They passed by many cracked and broken statues before coming to a larger statue of the old Osiriani goddess Isis. Uto and Hutt both took flight to get a better look at the tall statue and found a hieroglyphic inscription that could be interpreted in two ways dependent on the direction from which it was read. There were also numerous obelisks in the trenches, and it seemed that perhaps half of them were somehow contributing to the humming sound. These obelisks seemed to represent the four elements and it was likely that there were elemental creatures bound within them, something that Chisisek had described. Uto felt a strong aura of magic from these obelisks.
Eventually as the Scarabs worked their way along the trenches they came to a monument to the god Horus. At the end of the trench beyond this monument they detected something glowing. There was an opening there. The trenches were quite deep, ten times the height of an average man or elf, but the opening didn't extend all the way to the floor of the trench. Runes surrounded the dark gap but nothing could be seen within, as though a magical darkness blocked the light. One of the runes glowed and Hutt realized the glowing rune meant 'light'. Uto flew up to the opening while the others used ropes to climb up the ten feet between the trench floor and the bottom of the doorway. On the ground below the opening they saw human bones and remains of plant materials.
Uto spoke the word "Light" in the ancient language of Osirion, but it had no effect on the darkness. Sula then cast a spell to bring the light of day into the space. The Ruby Scarabs stood within a space twenty feet high, ten feet wide, and at least ten times that long. Runes of light glowed every twenty feet along the ceiling. Twenty feet along the wall to their left another opening led into a narrow hallway. Kaa moved forward first, examining the walls, floor, and ceiling for signs of traps and snares. He quickly realized that the light runes were a trap meant to flood the long passage with blinding glare. When the tengu monk turned to look back toward the rest of the group he saw an inscription on the inside of the entrance that read, "Only in the embrace of Set can Ra's light be stilled." He and Uto realized that this implied that one could only be rid of the blinding radiance by death, but this didn't prevent Kaa from disabling the light trap.
The room at the end of the narrow hall had been rounded off at the corners to form a kind of circular chamber with a dais at its center. The top of the dais bore an 'ankh' symbol in the center. The sides of the dais were covered in more hierroglyphic inscriptions that spoke about an alignment of energy between earth and sky. Another passageway led off of this chamber, but it was a cylindrical tube lined with copper. Kaa realized that the dais could be raised and would slide into this tunnel. Hutt told the others that the dais radiated faint magic, and that it seemed to be a key or a means of conveying energy. He then tried jumping on top of it, but the dais didn't shift. The Scarabs all suspected that this strange arrangement had something to do with energizing the trenches, but when they were unable to discover anything else about the dais room or the copper-clad tunnel, they went back out into the long corridor and continued down it.
The hallway was lined with cartouches bearing the name of the Forgotten Pharaoh, Hakotep. This hallway turned to the left, to the east, leading the Scarabs toward another chamber. At the end of that chamber could be seen a short passage leading into yet another room. The first and larger room had a floor covered in complex designs. Four large statues of Set occupied this area, two at the far end of the larger chamber and two beyond it in the smaller room. Kaa realized that the floor of the large room was partly an illusion concealing four pits. Just as he warned his friends of this, the two closest statues turned toward him and raised the spears they held.
Inside the bronze sentinel, Uto drew out a scroll and then moved the sentinel toward Kaa. The other two statues rapidly entered the larger chamber. Hutt realized they were constructs rather than animated statues. Azzaria was very disappointed that they were not golems, as she had an enchanted amulet that could help to protect her from golems. Hutt cast a spell on all of the Scarabs to increase their speed and dexterity. Sula stepped just inside the doorway and began to summon a lightning storm. Kaa called out to the others that the constructs were a kind of such creation that they had met before, designed to fight to the death to defend a certain location and dedicated to Set, the god of death. His fists flew as he repeatedly struck the construct nearest to him, deftly avoiding the edge of one pit. The two constructs at the rear of the room began to gesture and Hutt recognized that they had cast the same spell on themselves that he had cast on the party.
Uto cast a spell of his own, dispelling the magic that hastened the constructs nearest the sentinel and Kaa. This unfortunately meant that Kaa, too, lost the advantage of Hutt's magic. The statue closest to the bronze sentinel opened its mouth as though shouting and stabbed its spear into the sentinel. The other construct struck out at Kaa and he was unable to avoid its blows. Azzaria charged into the room toward the construct attacking the sentinel and slammed her adamantine weapon into it. She seemed to flow like water, rising up from the floor to carve into it with both of her blades.
Uto's spell had also eliminated the illusions masking two of the pits, and it was not possible to see that the pits in the floor led down to a natural cavern some fifty feet below. While Hutt drew out a wand and moved to hasten Kaa, Sula brought a blast of fierce lightning down on the construct in the far corner. Kaa's fists flew again and the construct facing him broke into pieces. He then leaped across the pits to attack the figure Sula had just blasted. Both of the constructs at the back of the chamber stabbed their spears at him but the tengu was moving too quickly for them to strike him. Kaa hit the construct with a well-placed kick. The construct struck back at him with a spear wreathed in electricity. The second construct at the rear moved forward to throw its spear at Azzaria but missed her. The spear hit the wall behind her and then crumbled, while a new spear began forming in the construct's hands.
Uto emerged from within the bronze sentinel wielding a wand, which he used to make a slope in the stone of the floor at the edge of one of the pits. He had hoped to cause the construct to lose its footing and fall into the pit, but the construct adjusted its stance and didn't fall. It turned on Azzaria, but her swift blades sliced it to fragments. Only one of the two remaining constructs was still engaged in fighting the Ruby Scarabs. Sula directed her lightning at the other construct as it was now armed again and turning on Azzaria. It shattered, and one of its arms tumbled over the edge into the pit beside it. Kaa meanwhile had left his opponent scarred and dented, and Azzaria now ran behind it and as it twisted to strike her she smashed it to dust.
Kaa had taken many wounds from the constructs and Uto now went to him to heal him. While he did this the others looked down into the pits, where they could see stalactites in the cavern that lay beneath the chamber. Azzaria also went to look into the smaller chamber. She saw an alcove at each end of it, and a side passage leading away. Hutt was looking down into one of the pits and noticed a greenish glow that likely came from phosphorescent lichen. He was excited to spy a bone on the floor of the cavern, though he couldn't tell what sort of creature it had come from.
After Uto drank several potions to heal himself of the injuries he had absorbed from the others, the group decided to descend into the cavern to see if anything of interest could be found there. Sula took the form of an earth elemental to make the descent and made ledges in the sides of the pit to allow Nyema to descend with her, while Kaa leaped back and forth from one pit wall to the other to make his descent. The rest flew or climbed down with rope.
The bones Hutt had seen proved to be the remains of humanoid creatures, though they were very old. The glowing lichen were identified by Sula as greenfire lichen, which could cause madness if consumed. Ahead of them the Scarabs saw a natural tunnel only five feet wide. Sula had to meld herself into the stone walls to pass her huge earthen form through this tunnel. This tunnel went forward to the northeast for eighty or ninety feet, then doubled back on itself and looped to the west. After the loop it split into two passages, but these rejoined after a short distance. Up ahead they observed that there was more green glow, and the light flickered as if something was moving about. Kaa sent a line of lightning shooting toward this glow. Uto called out a greeting, and they heard a dry cough. The green light clung to Kaa, Azzaria, and Sula, making them all feel strangely hungry and a compulsion to eat the lichen, but all of them were able to resist this desire.
Hutt recognized this green glow as a strange form of a spell he was familiar with. Uto realized that it came from spirits who had died in this place, left to starve and driven mad by eating the lichen that was the only source of food. These people had been among the slaves who had dug the pits, abandoned there once their work was done. The shaman experienced a vision of their long-ago suffering after the heartless Hakotep left them to their terrible fate, but he wasn't sure how to release their spirits from captivity in the cave. Azzaria and Kaa moved out of the glowing area, while Sula receded into the wall leaving only her stony face visible. Uto then channeled positive energy into the area occupied by the spirits and commanded his ever-present invisible spirit servant to gather up the bones for burial. When this was done he used a hex of healing on the area as well. The green light faded and he hoped that the suffering spirits had been able to pass on to their designated afterlives.
Next: part 40, Caverns of Death
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