Camped opposite the oasis that they had been warned against, the group thought about how they might even start to begin to look for a tomb in a ruined city.
Juan José and Utana looked for tracks, and whilst Jose found some leading one way but in the other Utana spotted an outcrop of rock upon which the ruins of a tower stood that might provide a vantage point to see more signs of life or even just some sense of the shape of the city.
Leaving their employer, friends, hireling and camel behind, the four went to the ruined tower.
The climb was managed with cooperation, though the stone of the outcrop had been worked at one point, it had been roughened by time, making it easier, and they found themselves on a stone flagged floor though with a hole in the centre. The walls were ruined, and they could see signs of passage outside the city from this vantage point.
However the hole in the floor as instead them. Utana established that the floor seemed solid, and Farshad lowered a torch down, seeing a seemingly solid floor with detritus and the remnants of the store of a guard tower. Next Farshad himself was lowered sand, although there was rubbish he noted, around the edge of the store, some well preserved spears in a rack, armour of and ancient design and storage vessels, some still sealed. He spotted a flagstone the floor that seemed a little raised, and when he got close, he smelled a horrible smell of rot.
The rest secured a rope and came down, though they should have little trouble helping each other back up. Jose, with his healer skill, thought that this smell, though it seemed at first like rot, was unlikely to be that in this dry climate, and he suspected something recently dead.
The group ruined and abused priceless historical artefacts, or the bronze spear heads of the spears in the rack, their shafts brittle and useless, to lever the flag up. Once it had been counterweighted, but that mechanism had been broken, possibly as a way to seal the flag behind someone.
At the bottom of the hole under the store was a dead man, not a human, an Ulauva, known to themselves as Kurrim, to the Ishtiri as Ulush Kauva, to some as orcs, to the reader as Neanderthals. He was simply dressed, with a gaping slash in his belly, a trail of blood led down a passage that he seemed to have crawled along to die under the ruined tower, sometime in the last day or two. Near the body was a hand axe or Ulauva design.
Under Dhran and Jose’s guidance, they cautiously followed this passage, spiralling down at first, then a sloped down before a climb back up, only at one point seemingly joined by another passage, but that was blocked by an old fall of rubble.
Eventually though they saw daylight, as the passage rose up into a cutting with a stone wall above them on one side, and a square of some sort raised on the other. Farshad climbed up, and spotted signs of recent excavation ahead, the group moved on and found simply made steps cut into the compacted mud and rubble leading to a hole that connected into a stone clad passageway.
This passageway was decorated with figures that seemed to be gods, demons or Demi-gods and a man raised almost to a status of a god amongst lesser men , repeated across various scenes. Farshad’ s torch led them on, heading north until they came to a place where the passage widened into a badly drawn room made more confusing with Roll20 not being properly understood.
Unseen by them, a rope was across the east-west access, and, as they stepped into the space, announced by their flickering light, the rope was pulled west, hauling a barricade clean across the room, from the space revealed staggered five desiccated copses in antique armour carrying bronze weapons.
On the opposite side of the room were more Ulush Kauva the mountain people, behind another barrier, pointing bows out at the group and\/or the corpses.\n\nA combat ensued where the group’s archery was not as effective as the flashing sword and dagger of Farshad, slicing those that should have been dead back to that state. Utana and Dhran did acquit themselves well, doing workman live service. Jose, acting as a bulwark protecting Farshad, Dhran and Utana was not so fortunate, he was meting out damage, but one of the dead, having flanked hum, smashed his jaw with an axe blow.
After the combat was over, and Jose bandaged his jaw shut, they turned to the Ulauva. Their bowstrings slack, Jose offered them the axe they had taken from the body of the dead Ulauva. It seemed for a moment as if violence would erupt again, as the Ulauva argued amongst themselves, with those who wanted to kill the group restrained by those who urged patience.
The talkers won, pointing out that their missing comrade had been injured days ago. They explained that they were here, seeking a source of water and the chance to renew this land and make a home, away from the warring empires. The news that the group were here on behalf of one of those empires, seeking powerful items for one, was not well received.
But there we left it