The Seven's Sawmill, Part 2 (Sunday, Neth (XI) 17, 4707 AR)
Log Splitters. The floor of this room had a thick carpet of sawdust, penetrated by two large log splitters and saws set up over openings in the floor. Another pair of openings was fitted with winches and ropes to raise and lower uncut lumber from below.
These log splitters and saws thundered away at stacks of lumber. The cacophony made hearing difficult in this room. Each splitter consisted of a chute in the floor with blades that split logs as they were fed in.
The closet in the northeast corner of this floor contained two dozen robes. A barrel at the southern end of this closet contained a fair amount of loot. The barrel contained three bags of 100 gp; three potions of barkskin +3; a beautiful crystal decanter set with an obsidian stopper, worth 300 gp; and a tiny wooden box containing three poorly cut diamonds, worth 200 gp each.
Workshop. A thick layer of sawdust covered the floor, mounded nearly a foot deep in places. Workbenches sat here and there in the room, their surfaces cluttered with saws, hand drills, planers, and other woodworking tools.
The heroes found numerous places where blood stained sawdust-covered floorboards, or bits of gristle remained caught in tools. The two smaller side rooms in this area were both unused storerooms.
Office. The trap door in the ceiling of this room was locked. The key was carried by Ironbriar.
The walls of this room bore macabre decorations - human faces stretched flat over wooden frames by strips of leather or black twine. Each face grimaced in a slightly different expression of pain, looking down on a cramped room that contained a desk, a high-backed rocking chair, and a low-slung cot heaped with scratchy-looking blankets. A ladder in the southeast corner of the room led up to a trap door in the ceiling.
Ironbriar let his cultists handle intruders, but once they started fleeing up to the workshop, he put on his reaper's mask and sought them out personally. He was not interested in speaking to the heroes, but when they engaged him in a few rounds of conversation after the battle was over, the heroes realized that Ironbriar was affected by a charm effect.
Irobriar prepared for combat by turning invisible. He let his cultists fight in melee, himself hanging back to use his spells at range. Irobriar fought until he was rendered unconscious.
The faces of the cult's victims were ghoulish but worth little. The large footlocker, however, was filled with oddments. A fair number were of a historical nature, including books, sea charts, etchings of vast rock formations and dolmens accompanied by maps, several pamphlets discussing a "forgotten" school of magic known as the Alchymyc (which the heroes identified as complete drivel), and a fine painting depicting a city carved form a vast frozen waterfall with towering ice cathedrals and domes (this painting was worth 200 gp).
Near the bottom were several books. The first of these was a wizard's spellbook emblazoned with two entwined snakes (one red, one green) that contained the following spells: blink, cat's grace, chill touch, enlarge person, fox's cunning, grease, haste, lightning bolt, mage armor, magic missile, scorching ray, shocking grasp, shrink item, spider climb, and web. The second book was an old and beautifully filigreed tome containing numerous hand-drawn illustrations and titled The Syrpents Tane: Fairy Tales of the Eldest. The book presented tales of the Tane - the most feared of a group of notorious fey known as the Twisted, goliaths of war and madness dreamt and stitched into being by the Eldest. The Tane were said to be terrible to behold, and the stories spoke of them stumbling into mortal lands, where they ravaged kingdoms by creating firestorms, crushing keeps with their feet, and eating dragons. Specific Tane described included monstrous creatures like the Jabberwock (a thing of scales and fire and crushing fury), the Thrasfyr (also known as the Dreaming Hill of the Dark, a chimeric monster wrapped in chains that the book claimed took part in the Three-Thousand-Year War of the Eldest) and the Sard (the Storm of Insanities, a thing of boughs and briars and misery, an ancient Wychwood Elm given life and hate by the Eldest). This fine and rare tome was worth 500 gp.
Finally, a slim volume near the bottom of the chest was recorded in a cipher using a mix of characters from Draconic, Elven, and at least one more language.
Rookery. A timber cabinet sat against the northern wall here, its doors made of iron mesh. Inside perched three strangely silent ravens. A table nearby held a tall narrow bucket of bird feed, a quill, and a vial of ink, as well as several thin parchments weighted down by a polished rock. These were messenger ravens, as the heroes knew.
Ironbriar Exposed
The revelation that one of the city justices was in fact the leader of a notorious murder cult certainly made a big splash. In large part, the size of that splash depended on the heroes. The heroes were linked to his arrest, exposed his true nature and avoided imprisonment in Magnimar's notorious prison, the Hells.
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