The Seer sits in the dark, where an owl, a bat, and a toad also crouch. Shrouded from head to foot in tattered robes that prevent you from seeing what sort of body it might possess, the only defining traits of the Seer are its iron claws and the masks that float in a circle around its hooded face. They pass before it in a slow dance, first one and then another, now the snarling face of a devil, now the leering expression of a lecherous old man, now the innocent visage of a child. When you tell the Seer what you seek, a voice speaks to you from the mouth of the owl. “You should return to Lankhende,” the voice says. Then another voice speaks from the lips of the toad, “No good will come of what you seek.”
But neither you nor Samanda can be dissuaded, and the Seer seems to know this immediately, this time speaking from the mouth of the bat. “If you insist upon pursuing your quest, then you will need a way to survive the ocean floor. Take these two stones,” it says, and one of the iron claws reaches out, presenting two unremarkable-looking pebbles, “and hold them in your mouth. So long as you have them, you will have no need to breathe at all. But I warn you, lose them for even a moment, and you will be lost.”
Before you step into the ocean, you each pop one of the pebbles into your mouth and try to hold your breath, but realize immediately that, just as the Seer promised, you no longer feel the need to breathe at all. Your lungs no longer inflate and deflate, you no longer feel any tightness or pressure in your chest. You simply are.
It also doesn’t take you long to realize that you can’t speak well with the stones in your mouth, so you go over the plan then and there. Samanda tells you that the Shining Trapezohedron is guarded by an entity known as the Yellow King. “Maybe a man, maybe a monster, possibly a god, but certainly something that we can rob.”
As you step into the sea, the water feels cold and briny around you until you are completely submerged, and then, suddenly, it is as if the water isn’t there at all. The temperature turns normal, your movements are no longer sluggish, and you silently thank the Seer with Many Faces for its intervention on your behalf, though past experience has taught you that such intervention seldom comes without a price.
The bottom of the ocean is a remarkably beautiful place, more verdant and strange than any non-aquatic garden. You pass coral reefs as vibrant as any flower, tenanted by fish and eels and squid in every color of the rainbow. As the ocean floor drops away from the land, translucent serpents and fish that glow with their own inner light swim by you in the depths.
Finally, at the bottom of the sea, you come to a sunken city. It is a nameless place, built before men, and its massive carvings show cephalopods and crustaceans and things with the heads of dolphins. The steps you ascend to its shattered columns are larger than any steps humans would ever have carved.
At the top you find yourselves in broad and strangely angled avenues, now covered over by barnacles and other sea growths. Ahead of you, what looked to be paving stones suddenly rise up and skitter forward on spindly legs. Enormous blue crabs with eyes that glow in the dimness of the sea bottom, their pincers poised for destruction. One of them rises up near Samanda, reaching out toward her with its gargantuan claw, and you have to make a decision.
III
The Doll Mage spends the night in Lankhende before leaving the city alone the next morning, without contracting any mercenaries or bodyguards to assist in her journey.
You trail her for most of the next day, and it is only as night begins to fall that you suddenly feel the strange sensation, the invisible tugging that seems to come from within your muscles. Once, you had a wound stitched up by a barber after a particularly fierce battle, and though pain and booze had numbed your senses, you still had been able to feel the tugging as the thread was pulled tight. This feels like that, and you realize that you can no longer move. Then you do move, but not at all in the way that you had intended.
Your motions jerky, you stand up, step out of your hiding place, and walk out to where the Doll Mage has made her camp. She sits, smiling up at you pleasantly. “I know you’ve been following me since the Jeweled Remora,” she says, “but you seemed capable enough at it, and I thought you might prove useful.”
You see that she is holding a doll, a tiny effigy of cloth and wax, and you notice with a start that it looks like you. “I’ll give you leave to talk,” she says, “so that you can tell me whether you’d like to assist me by choice, or if we’ll do this the other way.”
She pulls out a black stitch from across the doll’s mouth, and suddenly you find your voice. You tell her that you’ll happily help her of your own volition, especially now that you know the alternative.
She tells you that her name is Ivrian, and that she has the first part of a riddle that is supposed to help guide her to the Shining Trapezohedron: “A destination that few men seek.” You take her to cave of the Seer of Many Faces, the only person you know of — if person it can indeed be called — who may know the rest. The cave is long and damp, and at the back of it the Seer waits in a chair that seems to have grown up from the stone of the cave itself. The Seer appears to have been formed from shadow or tar. Only its face is visible, and that is a mirror, in which each supplicant sees only herself.
“A destination that few men seek,” the Seer says, “but that all men find. That is your riddle, and the answer is death, for death is what awaits you if you persist in your folly — but only for the lucky among you, for the riddle is itself a lie, and in the lie is the answer you desire. For some unlucky few, death is a destination that is never found, and they persist forever in something worse than death. If you go to where those unfortunate souls languish, you will find your prize, but I warn you against it, for the pursuit will cost you dearly, and success more dearly still.”
But neither of you can be dissuaded, and from the Seer’s cryptic remarks Ivrian discerns where you must head: the Forbidden Plateau.
The journey is long, and on the way she explains to you the nature of her magic, teaching you how to make the effigies of wax and cloth. “We are all just puppets, really,” she tells you, “dancing on something’s strings. Our passions, our desires, the burdens that we carry. A doll mage simply learns how to pluck those strings.”
The Forbidden Plateau waits at the top of three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine steps; a place that grows thick with fungus and mushrooms the like of which you have never seen. Huge beds of fungus, in purples and blues and greens, mushrooms that stretch up taller than trees, raining down glittering spores from the gills on their undersides. At first it is beautiful, until you notice the bodies, dozens upon dozens of corpses lying amid the fungus, with fungus grown up around and through them, mushrooms sprouting from their eyes, their mouths. The bodies of all those who have visited the Plateau before you.
Before you arrived, Ivrian warned you that you must not eat even a bite. “Once you eat of the fungus,” she told you, “you do not die, but you also no longer live. The fungus becomes your body, and only your bones remain.”
As you pick your way carefully among the fruiting bodies, toward the far end of the Plateau where a distant temple waits, you find your stomach growling. The fungus looks so delicious, and in spite of the evidence of your eyes, you can’t quite believe Ivrian’s story. One bite, after all, could never do so much harm.