The Syndicate route, which the party calls the Tarnar Hole, is the way through the tunnels beneath Argentum given in a coded note of the Tarnar Syndicate. It runs from a storeroom behind the dwarven kitchen in Vault 19 of the sealed Underforge Vaults to the Fardrimm Gate, miles below the city.12
Description
A tunnel cut by hand runs from behind a cupboard in the kitchen to the storeroom, where the Syndicate left a cache.1 The storeroom’s door out is a sturdy but mundane dwarven stone door with an iron lock for a big two-pronged key.2 Beyond it the route leads into a narrow dwarven maintenance tunnel, collapsed at one end, then along a hand-chiseled tunnel into the back of a collapsed apartment, through a barely concealed trapdoor, and on into a long-abandoned mineshaft.2 The directions zigzag across most of the Lantern Wards without passing under the moat, and at the mineshaft they wrap back near the foundry vaults, where the air is warmer.2 The mineshaft is narrow and claustrophobic, held up by old wooden beams that look shoddy.2
Past the mineshaft another dwarven maintenance tunnel runs with boards and pallets strewn along its length, then winding tunnels, and a chiseled crawlway that curves into the cavern of the gate.2 The note’s directions end with the line “The locks don’t turn, but stone does.”2
Traps
The door out of the storeroom is rigged. A nearly invisible filament across its keyhole runs to a brass whistle inside the door, set over a vial of chemicals. Set off, the chemicals release a gas that blows the whistle up a copper pipe inside the wall, to wherever the Syndicate is listening.2 The door probably has no key, and Syndicate members pick it knowing where the filament is.2
In the mineshaft a thin dark wire runs across the passage three inches off the ground, between two support beams filed down to bring the ceiling down on whoever trips it.2 In the tunnel beyond, boards cover a thirty-foot pit into a natural cavern, and chisel marks show the floor was made to collapse.2 Apart from the whistle, every trap on the route is basic.2
The Pressure
In the mineshaft, directly beneath the center of the Lantern Wards and about a mile down by Hazel’s count, lies a stretch about forty feet long where the walls seem to close in.2 Everyone in it feels pressure behind the eyes, a metallic taste and the feeling of being watched, and hears their own words as if from far away.2 The feeling builds over about twenty feet, holds steady, and fades at once on the far side.2 It felt like nothing any of the party had met before, the Sorrow included, and Luma’s identify found no magic on her inside it.2 The mineshaft runs straight through it, with no way round.2
Directly above it, by Hazel’s reckoning, stands the Chapel of the Silver Flame.2 None of the party had heard of the Silver Flame causing anything like it, and the party had been much closer to the Silver Flame in the Silver Archives.2
History
Session 12
The party found the note in the Syndicate’s storeroom on the Vigil of Remembrance, 1714 PSF, and made a copy.12 Luma decoded it.1
Session 13
The party followed the route the same day.2 Luma disarmed the whistle by cutting its filament, and the party stepped over the tripwire rather than disarm it, so that the Syndicate would not know anyone had passed.2 At the pressure they turned back once, tested it, and went on through.2 At the end of the route, before the gate, they found the shards of a spent Tarnar Turnstone and fought four phase spiders.2
Trivia
- The party took to calling the route the Tarnar Hole. Hazel offered “Tarnar Corridor” and “Tarnar tunnel” in its place, and the name stuck anyway.2