The captain grunts. "We should search the rooms to the left. The other formation can handle the cultists and weak undead but nothing like that daemon."

"Sounds good! Just tell me if you want illusions as we go." She knows there's nobody else, but the captain doesn't.

Time passes. The guard finds no more hostiles within the facility, and soon enough dozens and dozens of guardsmen have descended the elevator into the temple. They've captured eight cultists of Urgathoa alive, as well as the unidentified shouting man. The prisoners are bound and manacled and gagged.

No stone is left unturned, no door unopened, no cabinet unsearched. They free seven people strapped into strange devices. They're barely alive and need a channel to even stand upright. They find a secret door in an unassuming wall. It opens into a living space and contains a full size alchemist's lab. Another room contains a glass display full of animate undead bones. A channel destroys it. Many rooms contain books and notes. All is collected.

Magic items are identified and placed in a pile. They recover seven magic breastplates, twenty-eight potions of cure light wounds, two potions of barkskin, a major breastplate, a major vicious scythe, a belt of mighty constitution, a headband of inspired wisdom, a major cloak of resistance, a block of incense of meditation, a robe of bones, a wand of cure serious wounds with 27 charges, and a wand of remove disease with 8 charges.

They also recover a variety of mundane items, including two grim candelabras made from human hands encased in silver, several sticks of exotic incense, twelve bottles of Nidalese midnight wine, a rune-etched onyx sculpture of a skull, twenty-three black onyx gems, a crate of rare Vudrani silks, diamond dust for restoration, a diamond for raise dead, and a little over five thousand silver shields in coinage.

The mundane items are worth an estimated 100,512 silver shields. The magic items are worth an estimated 686,797 silver shields. In total, the guard recovers 787,309 silver shields worth of loot from the hidden temple of Urgathoa.

And this time they're not funding two Raises out of the proceeds. This amount of money is part of why she thinks the conspiracy can afford the Wishes; they were not planning for this additional money, and it's at least one Wish diamond's worth if she remembers prices correctly. Will the money filter up to Ileosa, once she's on the throne? Probably at least some of it will, and if she's not spending it on researching a cure...

The guard brings down an alchemist, who is currently poring over a huge stack of books and notes the guardsmen have collected. He delivers grave news. The Urgathoans have created a terrible fungal disease called blood veil. Physical contact spreads the disease. It is impossible to recover from without magic once contracted. A typical human dies within seven days. There is some form of immunity, manifested rarely by Varisians, but the Urgathoans still have not figured out what causes it. The fungal spores have already been infused into part of Old Korvosa's water supply. They also used magical coffers in the room with the statue to bind the disease to coins, which they made purchases with.

"Oh... oh no." She stays quiet for a few minutes, trembling a little.

"Should we all get Remove Diseases before we leave, in case we also have it? We've been touching things in here..."

The captain grimaces. "We probably should. Prices will spike soon after the news reaches the public. Getting ahead of it now is a good idea."

"They will. That's going to be expensive." She sags slightly.

"Well at least they're not spreading it more... if I need to afford a Remove I'm going to be busy for the next few weeks." Look at her, not hinting the guard should pay for this out of the large amount of money they just got. What a completely naïve and entirely helpful half-drow.

He thinks for some time. "I don't actually know if we want to remove disease everyone. We would have to use up a wand, and those are very expensive. This plague is unnatural so it might not work reliably. We'll probably check the area for spores and then check some of our guardsmen. Unfortunately we don't own a set of physician's spectacles. I think the church of Sarenrae might. I'll have a runner sent back to the Citadel to ask around."

"Oh, that makes sense. I should stay here and wait for that, then?"

The church of Sarenrae in Korvosa owns one set of physician's spectacles. They send down another cleric and check everyone involved in the operation for poison and disease. Only a small few have been infected with blood veil—those who touched the silver shields. The disease is indeed bound to the coins, as the Urgathoan notes claimed.

Tencednil does not have blood veil... but she does have filth fever. She's free to leave, but the Sarenite recommends she get a remove if her illness worsens.

"Oh. Well, thank you for telling me. I will."

And back home. She picks up an appropriate set of dubiously useful medications on the way back, and does a bit to treat the wound. Hopefully that will suffice, and she can fight off the infection.

He visits Arkminos early in the morning. It's not like the man has any sleep to lose.

So. One in twenty Varisians are immune to the disease and Arkminos doesn't know why. Wonderful. At least he can decipher the second letter now, using Varisia as the phrase.

With the public support of Togomor, you can pay him extra to construct a cure, which will allow redirecting money away from the alchemists you would otherwise have needed to hire. The basic structure of the cure is as follows:

Following is a description of the basic structure of the cure. It isn't itself complete, but it has enough of the necessary steps to allow a wizard to work out the rest without much difficulty, and quite quickly.

Announce it as a highly successful first step, but allow the public to assume it is perfect. The critical ingredient which is necessary and missing from this is a factor in the blood of those immune to the Blood Veil. This implants that factor in its recipients, ending the Veil. You can therefore harvest blood on a large scale to determine the factor. With increased support for Togomor, this will be difficult but not impossible to convince the Korvosan population to agree to.

At this point, I have saved your plans in multiple ways, and saved you substantial amounts of money. This did come at a price. As I give you information, my price is in words. Felandriel Morgethai may or may not have some contracts to Wish for ability enhancements for anyone who tells her certain phrases, under some sensible restrictions. Your price is to hire her to do the same, for one three-Wish enhancement, on the following phrase. You will not use it. As you have seen, I know many things; you will in the end pay my price, because if you don't, the Bank of Abadar will release certain information to many sources which will doom Ileosa's rule and your collective plans. Act promptly.

—Your Patron

The phrase in question follows.

After the first letter, the conspiracy should be able to get Togomor in a much stronger public position. With Ileosa hiring him to kill the 'Urgathoan leader', he has a chance to work closely with the guard and the marines, both of whom are trusted by the population at least somewhat. He won't 'be hired' to complete the final step of actually killing the leader — he may well be the one doing the possessing, so he can't be — but he can buff them in advance. If he pilots the leader well, these buffs will be critical, and the strongest squad of the Marines will remember him as the person whose buffs saved their life. After they witness an undead spontaneously appearing from the corpse, and survive again with Togomor's aid, they will have strong reason to believe him both well-intentioned towards Korvosa and a true enemy of the Urgathoan cult.

They will spread that news in taverns, it will be whispered on the streets, and when Ileosa announces the death of Eodred's killer and the appointment of Togomor, the wizard who found his killer, to seneschal, it will be accepted by the population. When he says he sees a way to cure the disease, it will make perfect sense to the common Korvosan. When he asks for blood... well, it might be a stretch, but it should be no more of one than the alchemists she remembers. Alchemists are no more trusted than wizards, and those ones didn't even have a demonstrated victory to rely upon. He can produce the cure quickly, with the assistance from the shadow's memory, and it will be entirely within the conspiracy, so they can release it whenever they feel they have enough harvested blood. They'll be better off than relying on actual alchemists, Togomor will be in a much better position for whatever later goals they might have, and, of course, they can siphon off large quantities of money by paying Togomor instead of alchemists. That money buys them the Wishes she wants, they get their plans coming together more smoothly, and Korvosa has a cure produced efficiently and promptly with much less risk of failure. A win, for everyone.

When Togomor decodes the remaining letter with Varisia, he again finds a heading which is intelligible, and a remainder which is still encrypted. This one begins:

This letter describes the optimizing of the blood sacrifice ritual. Decode it with the name of the common male ancestor of the immune population.

Saved us a lot of work, have you? By ruining our perfectly good dragon attack. They still haven't explained why they warned Eodred about it, giving excuses about hidden capabilities Ornelos and Tuttle supposedly possess. Well, the seer is quite the extortionist. They know that curing the disease wasn't part of the original plan and they want it cured. Perhaps it serves their interests, somehow. Will public opinion prove more of a problem than they were expecting? That's a little worrying. The seer's idea for swaying it in his favor seems pretty good. Becoming well-liked might blunt the backlash to Neolandus's death. Alchemists can charge a lot but they have nothing on the price of a wish. Either way, this costs them more money than they would've spent with the original plan.

The immune population has a common male ancestor. Arkminos didn't know that. It seems like the seer is inclined to send him on a fetch quest.

KORVOSAN CARRIER
FIREDAY, SARENITH 5th, 4708

URGATHOAN CULT DESTROYED, PLAGUE STRIKES OLD KORVOSA

The papers print tales of the heroics of the guardsmen and marines, and dire warnings about the blood veil. Instructions on how to tell infected coins from clean ones without touch can be found in every paper. Many of the wells in Old Korvosa have been closed under the watchful eye of the Guard. Unrest begins to grow. A public execution for the captured Urgathoans has been announced, scheduled for tomorrow. The weather is partially cloudy with lots of sun.