[Notes for the run of July 19, 2000.]

Jarvon picks up where he left off, answering "Arbuckle's" question about the
stone orcs.  He tells Anton there are two kinds of animated stone.  One kind
needs direct orders, and the magician controls them, sort of like hand
puppets.  They're very strong, and there are a couple different forms.  Then
there are golems, created by infusing a soul into the rock; their emotions
are very simple, it's hard to motivate rock to do anything.  Oh, and of
course there are the earth sprites, but only the uninitiated would confuse
them with animated statues.

The change in the mage's color was the armor spell going down.  The stone
mage was a case of infusing his soul into the stone.  Such beings move to a
greater or lesser degree depending on how much soul you infuse.  The ones in
Firenzi kept all their thoughts and emotions, but didn't try to move very
often; the ones in Cologne....  (Jarvon's lesson is interrupted for a time
as we investigate the cave, but this thread picks up again later.)

We go into the cave.  There's a small chamber beyond the one where the
statues were.  It is quite warm, and Paris, in the lead, finds her heart
races briefly as she sees two more statues, but she soon realises they are
not moving.

There's a pit, with a ladder of red hot rocks going down into it, and a
pentacle of white quartz at the bottom.  Stuck on the end of a stalactite,
directly over the pit, is a shiny shard of mirror.  There's a pedestal next
to the pit, with a large book on it.  There are various odds and ends that
look like spare orc weapons and camping gear.

The room is a fairly normal cavern except for one shelf, six feet wide and
three feet deep, that looks like it was chiseled out.  We figure it might be
the mage's sleeping ledge.  There are 14 cards lying amongst the orc stuff.

Anton (or perhaps Arbuckle) checks for magic.  The place has some earth
magic; the pentacle is not magic but is a focus, or a focus being prepared.
The rocks are being heated by some magical process.  The mirror shard is
much like the one in Calais's pack.

The righthand pages in the book are neatly lettered, and look like powerful
earth spells.  The lefthand sides, which have been blank in every other
spellbook Anton has seen, have a different scrawl, and look sort of like
Pyotr-speak translated to written.  It rambles, though, worse than Pyotr.
"Now that pigfaces released have me, I shall have revenge, crushing him one
joint at a time."  We get the feeling that whoever wrote this, all the time
he was imprisoned, one thought kept him going: revenge.  "He has hidden it.
I will find it.  I will be an army."  Eventually we find a name, Mortimer,
who appears to be the object of his revenge.  Anton asks Jarvon about that
name.

About this time, Anton senses something magical happening, and an orc falls
out of the shard into the pit.  It squeals as it runs around the bottom of
the pit; the rocks are too hot for it to climb out.  Rhori starts chipping
at the two statues lest one of them be animated by the orc, but Anton notes
that those look more like spares for the mage, not orcs.  We ignore the orc
for a bit as Jarvon tells about Mortimer.

"I met him, and his master, Onyx.  Dubious Onyx.  There were four
apprentices at the time; he had had five."  He asks the color of the mage we
just killed.  Was it basalt?  Yes.  "Ah, Illya, Orya, Arya?  When I was
studying immortality at Cologne, for some reason, the mages there liked to
adopt other names.  You'd think that people who study magic would be free of
the superstition that names affect mages.  Onyx, everyone knew him as Onyx,
was head of this school at Cologne.  Illya, Enya, ...  he was the first to
try infusing his soul into a rock.  That's when they discovered that it's
very difficult to make stone move.  Basalt's stone form was animated and
active, was animated only by his strongest emotions.  They fought him, and
managed to imprison him somewhere.  Onyx was sure he would stay buried.

"But that wasn't the worst of his mistakes.  When I went back, Mortimer was
the only one still alive.  When they realised how hard it is to put their
souls into rock, they tried to duplicate flesh instead.  But it takes more
soul to animate flesh, and there's only so much soul to go around, and it
wouldn't fill the flesh bodies, so they would go mad.  Mortimer, the
youngest, was the last to try it.  He only had to kill one of himself to
survive.  And then he had to hunt down his master and the other apprentices
and kill them, because they made soulless monsters.

"They manufactured a sphere, the Stone of Cologne, to create more flesh
bodies for themselves.  So you see that's why I chose a single object to put
my soul into."

Anton wonders who is Dubious now, and asks Jarvon how new guardians are
selected.  It has to be someone of the proper temperament.  In Jarvon's time
it was always the Ace, but people can change which Minor Arcana they are as
they grow over time, so to become the new Dubious someone would have had to
become the new Ace.  (Now, of course, a Major -- and a god to boot -- is the
guardian of fire.)  Anton asks if it's possible to be a minor and major at
the same time.  Jarvon doesn't see how, but he was never all that interested
in that sort of immortality.  He remarks that the church has some form of
immortality, too, but you have to go through too much mumbo jumbo to get to
it.

Last he knew, Mortimer had possession of the Stone of Cologne, and was going
to hide it where it would never be found.  But the Stone is not essential to
being Dubious.

Jarvon thinks the extra statues we found indicate that Basalt was going to
try to copy himself to multiple stone copies, driving himself madder than he
was already.

Anton describes the pit, and Jarvon deduces that it's a focus for turning
orcs to stone.  Once stone, they can ignore the heat and climb out of the
pit.

Calais tries questioning the orc.  We let him climb partway up a rope so
he's away from the heat of the pit, and that calms him enough to talk
coherently.  But he can't describe how or why he came here.  He says he came
from "home."  We learn nothing useful and eventually give up and slice him
to ribbons.

Rhori is concerned that we disable the focus before trying to take the
shard.  Paris points out that it's just a focus; there's no spellcaster
using it at the moment.  Rhori points out in frustration that the spell is
for turning live things into stone, and jumps down into the pit and hacks at
it until it is ruined as a focus.  We hope it wasn't useful for good things
as well.  Paris hauls Rhori out.  Hobbes jumps down and curls up next to
some hot rocks.  Calais maneuvers over to the stalactite and retrieves the
shard.

There's some discussion about the book.  Mostly we agree we should bring it
back to Westmore, though making it publicly available could be dangerous
given it presumably includes the spell for creating a stone army.  Paris
points out, amid many interruptions, that an earth mage, such as Pierre,
might be able to use the book to figure out how to _stop_ a stone army.

Calais examines the sleeping platform, but criminology tells him that it
wasn't a sleeping platform after all.  There are bits of fallen rock with
writing on them.  Apparently the orcs showed up here and chipped away at the
stone to get at what they perceived was a powerful magical item.  Obviously,
it turned out to be the mage.

We exit.  As Rhori steps out, there's a clattering, and he looks up to see a
cloaked figure atop the slope.  "Greetings, Ranger.  Are you in difficulty?
Do you need any of those pursuing you..."  Rhori declines to have us killed.
He adds, "We could've used you a while ago, though."  Rhori introduces
himself.  The elf answers, "I am Timor of Sarik."  This is an older elf
than we're used to seeing.  Tanned and weathered.  "I sensed something odd
happening here, and came looking."  "From far away?"  "Yes, I've been up in
these hills for a while.  There is much magic here, because of that place
across the valley."  He greets the rest of us as we exit.

Rhori asks where Timor's people live.  "The queen is far to south from here,
near the sea, atop a lone mountain? hill? mountain.  I have been trapped up
here a long time."  "How trapped?"  I was walking along the peaks of the
mountains; this is one of the areas that we look at, because of (he motions
toward Dungeon).  When the Mirror broke, I fell off into the ice, and was
trapped in the ice."  "So Dungeon was important even before the Mirror
broke?"  "Yes."  Rhori remarks that there was no shard in Dungeon.  Timor
mentions that he caught a shard as the Mirror went flying.  He offers it to
Pyotr, who is a bit concerned about accepting it, but eventually does.
Timor says he thinks the shard is what kept him alive when the Mirror broke
and the Minors were ripped from their bodies.  (Most of us are surprised to
hear that the Minors were ripped from their bodies, but Paris acts as if she
knew that all the time, or at least that it should be obvious.  Sigh.)

Timor thinks his people might be asleep.  He has not heard a call from the
queen.

Rhori apologises for being rude but says it is important we find the Moon
tonight.  (Yes, says Timor, she is bright in the sky.)  We ask if Timor
knows how we might meet the Moon.  "The queen would know the human route to
the Moon."

Timor has to stay here because there are no others of his clan patrolling
here.  The gods are a human thing, but the various clans of elves apparently
assist the gods.  We finally twig to the fact that the elven clans are named
after the gods.  He doesn't know what we call the god named Sarik, but we
try asking what their clan's service is.  Timor has trouble finding the
right word, but Pyotr nails it: "Observing."  Timor agrees; they watch over
places of power to make sure they're used right.  That does sound like the
Moon: the goddess of "doing magic."

He points out a place where twice a year a crack appears, where powerful
magic could be done.  He tells about a pool that is sometimes perfectly
round, and is also a place of power.

Anton asks him about the destruction of the Mirror.  He describes the event,
but it's rather metaphysical.  The mountains reared up, the sky turned
rainbow colors, etc.  The Minors were ripped from their bodies and turned
into cards, which went into the Font of Chaos.  The fountain is at the base
of the Tower.  He can't go there.  Not won't; elves just can't.

Calais asks about the earth mage.  Timor recalls a battle here between earth
mages, but that was well before the Mirror broke.  The land here is at a
different height now.

Pyotr gives him a blessing, and is surprised to see a blue glow appear
around him.  Timor thanks him.

We try to recall the other elven clans.  Illiakin, near Tarn, are certainly
associated with the god of learning.  The Jatala were near Gilliamtown.
There's the Kelli, near Jouet.  We try to figure out which gods those might
be associated with.  Pyotr thinks the elves are the 111 helpers we heard
existed for each god, but realises that the helpers don't have to be elves.
The helpers for Nature and Death could be the two Orders.  We conclude that
Kelli (better pronounced Kali?) serve the god of dying, since they were the
only elves willing to leave their forest to kill orcs.  That leaves Jatala
to be the goddess of birth.

We leave Timor to his watching, and go try to find some wolves near a
stream.  We chase around a while, and eventually, around midnight, having
disturbed the hunting patterns of wolves for miles around, we straggle into
camp, having found no sign of the Moon other than the one overhead.  Sounds
like we'll have to find the queen of the Sarik elves.  Paris thinks about
what she knows of the southern coastline, and can't think of any islands
near the exit of the river into the Gulf of Lions.

We fill in the escort from Dungeon as to what we found, and show them where
the cave is.  But we decide to go back to Dungeon ourselves to reprovision
(including replacing broken weapons), and to see if the library there has
any information about Cologne, or the Sarik mountain.

Rhori and Calais go to see the Emerald Baron.  Mia goes along so she can
talk to the rainbow mages in the camp.  Paris takes her letter of
introduction to get Anton into the library; Alessandro goes with them.
Pyotr naps.

We wend our way through the bureaucracy and get a semi-private audience with
the Baron.  He thanks us for our help.  Rhori explains that it would help us
expedite some of our missions for the Prince if we knew when Pierre's
vehicle might next be here.  The Baron has no idea.  Mia starts to ask
something, and Rhori thinks he knows what she's bringing up, and explains
that she thinks it's important to get the mage's book into Pierre's hands as
soon as possible.  Paris, even though not present (maybe picking up on it
from Calais), cringes as this is brought up in a merely "semi-private"
audience, after all our discussion about trying to keep it secret.  The
Baron asks if we have the book, and of course Calais has it.  He calls for
his senior earth mage to have a look.

Mia goes to talk to the rainbow mages.  Rhori tags along to keep her safe,
since Calais wants to stick with the book.  It's pretty boring.  They do
seem to get along with the white priests, who tend to be the younger ones,
including some monks; they have a friendly rivalry playing soccer.

In the library, the maps don't depict anything north of the wall.  There's
no information about Cologne.  The maps also confirm Paris's recollection
that there's no mountainous island off the coast.  As for solitary mountains
mostly south of here, the one that stands out is Pelier.  That could indeed
be where the Sarik elves hang out; if there's only 111 of them at most, and
they're asleep somehow, who'd notice?

In the evening, we discuss Pelier.  We figure if we can hop a ride on the
LTV, we can leave Cordelia with Pierre -- and leave Jarvon with the boat so
the spell doesn't drop -- while we check for elves.

We stop in Lions and try the library there.  Cologne is on a river north and
east of Dungeon, on the way toward Calais town.  It was the very edge of old
Tara; nothing but barbarians beyond it.  Anton makes a note of how to find
it in case we ever want to go there.  There is a mountain shown where Pelier
is now, and a town near the base.

Anton is startled by a cuckoo clock.  Apparently the librarian is a
Know-man.  Rhori asks the local priest (who hangs out at the library playing
checkers with the librarian) about the excommunication order, but the priest
hasn't heard of it.

We get to Martin's camp.  The Princess and Cordelia aren't there; Cordelia
hopped the LTV to Westmore (in case we didn't get back); Carline is with
some Baron up the valley.  Martin isn't here either.  He went with the army
and took Nice Place and is moving southwest down the coast.  There's also a
lot of pirate activity causing Louis some trouble.  (The "captured" navy at
Nice Place is hassling Louis as well.)

Anton starts enchanting the boat, but after just one day, the LTV arrives.
Claire's not there.  Neither is Cordelia.  We show Pierre the spellbook, and
he holes up with it while Martin's men spend the day loading up the LTV for
a trip to Westmore.  He says that the nodal points in the current are
moving; that's what he and Claire have been researching.

We discuss logistics.  We eventually conclude that we don't have time to
deliver Cordelia and find the Sarik elves by the next full moon, but we have
more time than that.  We'll take the LTV to Westmore, bringing our boat, and
spend a week there enchanting the boat.  Then we can use it to deliver
Cordelia to her father, and go from there to Pelier (so we don't retrace our
route and possibly run into some alerted border troops).  That should get
Cordelia to her father well before midsummer, and still leave us plenty of
time to find the Sarik elves and thus the route to the Moon, not at the next
full moon (two weeks from now) but the one after, which is still nearly a
month before Mia's due date.

We discuss how we might search for the Sarik elves at Pelier.  The town that
was shown on the old maps was what is now called Eastgate.  We realise that
Cordelia's father is the Earl of Eastgate, and Paris adds that he's
something of a history buff, so when we drop off Cordelia we might be able
to get some pointers from him that will help us find the elves.  Wow, sounds
almost like a plan.