08 · The Cistern Beneath

The hook

The bishop's deacon, Niketas, finds the players in the wineshop where they are spending the second of three days' wages. He has been told they are people who can be discreet. He needs them to be discreet about a theft.

Three nights ago, the iron grille over the Cistern of Saint Mamas — the second-largest in the kastron, half-full at this time of year — was forced. The grille has been replaced. The cistern has not been drained. The deacon does not want it drained, because if it is drained the city will know it has been drained, and the city is already nervous. He wants the players to go down and find out what was taken, what was left, and whether the cistern is still safe to draw from. He will pay them four nomismata each, plus a fifth on completion, plus three more if they bring back proof of who did it.

What is actually down there

A body. A young man in the dress of a junior clerk of the tax-farmer Theodosios, dead perhaps four nights, weighted with a sack of building stone tied to his ankles, lying face-down in eighteen inches of water at the cistern's lowest point. His name is Stephanos. He had been writing letters to a cousin in Tarsos, on the wrong side of the frontier, about the schedule of the watch and the names of the gate-captains. Three of these letters are in the lining of his cloak, untouched by the water, which the players will find if they search the body with any care.

The fourth letter, which is the one that mattered, is not on him. It was carried south two weeks ago by a man who is now in the camp of the Caliph al-Mu'tasim near Tarsos, where it has been read by the right people, who have paid the right people, and who will arrive at the walls of Amorium in approximately seventy days.

Stephanos did not write his letters for money. He wrote them because his sister, Eirene, who is fourteen, was promised in marriage to a Cappadocian merchant who beat his last wife to death, and her dowry was being withheld by the tax-farmer pending an assessment that was never going to come. Stephanos was trying to buy her out. He was killed, almost certainly, by the tax-farmer's bodyguard, a Bulgar called Kosmas, who found the third letter on his desk and dragged him to the cistern with one hand over his mouth.

Three ways this can go

If the players take the letters to the deacon: he weeps, briefly, and then goes to the bishop. The bishop goes to the tourmarchēs Babutzikos, who arrests Kosmas, hangs him quietly at dawn on the second day, and pays the players their full fee plus a discretion bonus of ten nomismata. The city does not know. The tax-farmer's books are quietly audited. Stephanos is buried in the cathedral cemetery as a clerk who died of a fall. The information about the watch is not retrieved, because the deacon does not understand its weight, and the relief that would have been sent does not arrive in time.

If the players take the letters to the tax-farmer instead, to sell them: Theodosios reads them, pays them twenty nomismata, has them followed for two days, and at the end of the second day has them invited to dinner. They are not poisoned. He is a businessman. He offers them ongoing work. From this point the players are inside the conspiracy that has already doomed the city, and the GM should let them feel it gradually.

If the players take the letters to the tourmarchēs directly, bypassing the deacon and the bishop: Babutzikos is the only person in this story who understands what has happened. He reads the letters in silence, asks the players one question — who else knows? — and pays them sixty nomismata on the spot for their silence, plus a written commission as informal agents of the strategos's office. He begins quietly rebuilding the watch on the south road. He does not have enough time. He almost has enough time.

What this is really about

The adventure is small. The choice is not whether the city is saved — by the time the players arrive in the cistern, it cannot be — but who the players become as they decide whom to tell. The GM should not punish any of the three paths. The merchant path is not evil. The deacon path is not naive. The tourmarchēs path does not save Amorium. The players should feel, at the end of the session, that they made a real choice and that it had weight, and that they do not yet know how much weight, because the army is still ten weeks away.

Eirene

She is fourteen. She does not yet know her brother is dead. If the players seek her out — and they should — she is in service in the house of a widow on the north side of the kastron. She can read, slowly, and she will read the letters herself if shown them. She is the one moment in this adventure where the GM should slow down and let the players sit with what they have brought into a room. Whatever they do for her or do not do for her will be the thing they remember from this session, ten years from now, when they are old players in another game in another city, telling the story.