Bancroft#
Four people walked into the Brazen Strumpet the night before. A human, a dwarf, a half-orc, and a halfling — new to town, down on their luck, the kind of people who end up in Helix when the road runs out somewhere else. They arrived separately and ended up at the same table, which might have been luck or might have been that people with empty pockets recognize each other without having to ask.
The halfling ordered first. “Something that’ll remind me I’m alive,” she told the barkeep.
The barkeep looked at all four of them in turn. Then he poured four of whatever the halfling was having.
The human paid for the round without being asked.
Bancroft watched from across the room and didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Sometimes that was the whole joke.
Bancroft’s party was on the road back from the barrows when nine bandits stepped out of the tree line with slings already raised.
“Looks like you’re wounded and full of treasure,” one of them said. “Five gold apiece. Nobody wants to die.”
Bancroft reached for his coin purse without hurrying. He counted out five gold, looked at the man who’d spoken, and said: “You may know me from the tavern, actually.” He flexed his hands, the same ones that had put a caravan guard’s arm through a table last week. “I’d suggest you take this and have a pleasant evening.”
Behind him, Riyou said something that wasn’t five gold. The slings moved toward her. Two stones hit before anyone could reach her. She went down with a welt across her head and didn’t get back up.
The rest of the party paid. The tomb robbers stepped back into the trees.
Bancroft picked Riyou up. As he passed Irulan, he said quietly: “Later.”
Irulan did not respond, because she was doing the thing she did when she was furious — walking very steadily, facing straight ahead, not looking at anything she might have to stop herself from killing.
About an hour down the road, Riyou stirred in Bancroft’s arms and said, “Did we win?”
“Going home,” he said, “is just as good as winning.”
She thought about that. “It isn’t, though.”
“No,” he agreed. “But it’s what we’ve got.”
Morning came gray and wet. The rain had started overnight and was still going when they woke.
Riyou wanted to talk. Not in the inn — the walls were thin enough to hear snoring in the adjacent rooms — and not anywhere Mazzah might be watching. She led them ten minutes into the woods, into the kind of dripping quiet that meant no one else was nearby.
She stood with her back against a tree and her arms at her sides, the cherry blossoms over her forearms dotted with rainwater.
“I know I’ve given off hints,” she said. “The cult I ran away from was the Necrolytes of Nergal.” She said it flat, the way you say something you’ve been carrying for a long time. “They’re still after me. And in order to stop them, I may have to go back in. Into the group itself. Which would be unfortunate. But a thing.” She looked at each of them in turn. “I need to know if you’re with me.”
Bancroft said, “I am already on a mission from God.” He paused. “We were going to find a Nergulite priest near the dungeon entrance anyway. Starting with that one seems reasonable.”
SeaCrock attempted to check the gems they’d recovered for enchantment, standing in the rain with his enormous hat beginning to sag at the brim. The spell fizzled and put out a smell of brimstone. He stared at his hands.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
They hired two men from the Gray Company before heading out. Ertz — man-at-arms, chainmail and shield, a handaxe on his belt and a dagger he never touched. He communicated entirely in nods. When Bancroft handed him a sling, he held up two fingers and pointed at the coin purse, then bowed in the way men who follow St. Ygg bow — low and brief and sincere. He had a prayer book in his kit with passages marked in it, which Bancroft noticed and did not comment on.
Solix was the torchbearer. Heavy-set, carrying a short bow he almost certainly did not know how to use. Young enough that Bancroft spent part of the walk out wondering whether he had parents who knew where he was.
The path to the barrows was familiar. That was almost worse than not knowing it.
The entrance was a pit in the earth with a block and tackle rigged above it on a tripod — the kind of setup that suggested someone had gone to the trouble of making this descent repeatable, which was not a comforting thought. SeaCrock had rigged himself a rope harness before they left town. Bancroft went down hand over hand and landed clean.
Ertz did not land clean. He lost his grip partway down and hit the bottom wrong — hard enough that Bancroft could hear it, hard enough that anyone else would have made a noise. Ertz sat up, took stock of himself, and shook his head when Bancroft moved toward him with his holy symbol out. He looked at the symbol the way a man looks at something that belongs to a different religion than his. Which it did.
Bancroft tried to pray over him anyway. The words came out and went nowhere. Sylvanus had no particular interest in healing a man who had just declined the offer.
Ertz nodded — apparently this outcome was acceptable — and got to his feet and picked up his sling.
Deeper in. The passages were familiar enough now that Bancroft no longer had to think about where to step. That was almost worse — familiar was how places got into your head, how they stopped feeling dangerous when they should.
The air in that section had a quality to it — heavy, wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the dark. Old Nergulite workings. The priest had been here. The poison in the stone was his.
The skeleton was in a side chamber, propped against the far wall. Hunched, fingers still curled around things they had not wanted to let go of. Old leather, rot-black. There was a small bag in the skeletal hand — still there, still closed.
Bancroft went in to search it. That was the job. The chamber was small and he went alone and he went carefully, the way the barrows had taught him to go carefully.
He didn’t see the spider.
Neither did Riyou, watching from the doorway.
Bancroft’s hands moved before he had finished being afraid. He pivoted, got the longsword up, and the blade found the seam between the spider’s carapace and its foreleg — the soft place where chitin gives way, where a blade that knows what it’s doing can go. The spider flinched back. Black ichor ran down the sword.
“Red in tooth and claw!” he shouted. He didn’t plan it. It came out.
SeaCrock aimed a Magic Missile into the dark at the space where the spider should be and hit nothing. Twice. In the dark he could hear it moving — the scrape of chitin on stone, the wet sound of a bite that found someone and held. Ertz made a sound like air going out of something that had been holding it too long, and then he went quiet. A sling stone came out of the dark and hit Bancroft in the shoulder — Ertz, still throwing at where he thought the spider was, before the paralysis finished taking him.
He was barely breathing. He did not get back up.
The spider bit him somewhere above the armor line. It didn’t hurt much — he’d been stung by bees in his father’s orchard that hurt more. What happened in the thirty seconds after was the part he hadn’t been ready for.
His hands stopped. His legs stopped. Everything stopped, except his eyes and his lungs and the slow rotation as the web wrapped him and the spider took him up.
The floor dropped away.
He was hanging from the ceiling of a barrow chamber, looking down at the room below, and he could not move any part of himself.
The skeleton’s bag was directly beneath him. Maybe six feet down. He had an excellent view of it.
Now, he thought, staring at the top of the skeleton’s skull. I know what you’re thinking.
How did Bancroft end up on the ceiling?
He considered it. He’d come to Helix looking for a Nergulite priest, same as last week. There had been four strangers at the Strumpet who needed work. There had been a road, and bandits on it, and a pit with a rope, and Ertz, who he really should have made take the healing when he had the chance. There had been a locked door with something moving behind it.
He started to rotate.
Bancroft suspended upside-down from the ceiling in spider webs, his shield glowing green, Irulan looking up from below
Below him, the fight went on without him. Solix found the flint and steel on Irulan in the dark, and the torch caught. SeaCrock’s Magic Missile pulsed — a crack of purple light, brief as a blink, enough to see the spider and Ertz and everyone’s feet. Riyou’s arrow went into the dark above the spider and found stone.
He was facing the back of the room now.
Sorry, he thought. I’ll be back around shortly.
SeaCrock fires two simultaneous crackling bolts of arcane magic into the giant spider, both striking true
SeaCrock’s Magic Missiles had a sound Bancroft had learned to recognize — the crack of the first, then the second. These two were different. Sharper. The sound lightning makes when it’s very close. The spider made a noise no spider should make, and then the room went quiet.
He was facing the skeleton again. He had things he wanted to say to Irulan — several things, in order — but his mouth wasn’t working and he was fairly high up.
He tried anyway. What came out was air.
He was still breathing. The paralysis hadn’t stopped that.
Sylvanus, he thought, without much hope. Any time.
Nothing. The green glow on his shield held, but that was all.
Irulan found a dagger in Ertz’s belt. She looked at it a moment before using it — long enough that Bancroft noticed. It was engraved on the blade. He couldn’t read it from up here.
She cut him down.
He landed badly and stayed where he was, face-down on the stone with the green light from his shield illuminating the underside of the floor and the ankles of the people standing around him. Paralyzed. The bag was about two feet from his outstretched hand.
He heard Riyou before he understood what was happening.
Not a sound of surprise — Riyou didn’t surprise easily. The sound a person makes when something they have been braced against for a long time finally arrives.
From behind the far door, in the dark, a whispered voice: Slouch Ribs. Get back here. Now.
Then the door eased open — not from the room they were in but from the passage beyond — and something slipped through into the corridor, moving fast. Two legs, tattered cloak, exposed ribs on the outside of matted fur, misshapen eyes catching the torchlight for half a second before it was gone. The spider’s name. The spider’s owner.
Riyou went very still.
She slipped through the door and closed it quietly behind her. Bancroft heard her say something in a low voice — measured, careful. And then a different voice, older, patient the way patience covers contempt: Ryu. Is that you? What are you doing here, child?
Bancroft recognized the tone. Teacher. Commander. Someone who expected to be obeyed and had been, for years.
She tried. Whatever she said to him, she tried twice, and both times it came back wrong — her voice going small in a way Bancroft had never heard from her before. He had seen Riyou get knocked unconscious by nine slingers without making a sound like that.
Everyone knows what you did to the master, the voice said.
“The master wants to kill everyone,” Riyou said.
Then silence, and then a thump — not a fall, something gentler. The sound of someone set down.
The Necrolyte of Nergal faces Riyou in a dark barrow passage, his certainty absolute, her dread recognition complete
SeaCrock grabbed the torch from Solix’s hand — Solix made a sound of professional distress — and went around the corner alone, which was either brave or foolish and probably both. He found the necrolyte in the corridor with Riyou over his shoulder: gaunt man, gray skin, white goatee, silver and black robes with a skull wreathed in ivy where a holy symbol should hang. His dagger glowed.
He was handing Riyou to the Mongrelman. Be careful with her head, he said, as if that were a reasonable thing to say.
SeaCrock said, “I don’t know your plans for our friend, but perhaps we could negotiate.”
The necrolyte looked at him. “Who are you again?”
“The great Huffer Pants.”
A pause. “I see.”
SeaCrock tried for Mage Armor while the necrolyte absorbed this information, and failed, and tried again, and failed again. The necrolyte watched both attempts with the expression of a man who had expected better of his evening. He cast Magic Missile at SeaCrock in return. It fizzled. He cast it again. It fizzled again. He looked at his hands.
Follow us at your own peril, he said, and limped around the corner with Slouch Ribs carrying Riyou ahead of him. The barrow maze is full of secrets that only we know about.
SeaCrock watched them go. “Could you leave some light?” he called after them. “It’s quite dark.”
No one answered. The torch went out.
He heard SeaCrock and Irulan’s boots, receding. Then distance took the sound.
Solix stood in the dark with his arms at his sides.
“Miss Irulan,” he said, quietly, to no one. “He took my torch.”
Bancroft lay on the floor of the barrow chamber. Green light from his shield, steady as it had been in the fly fight, as it had been every time Sylvanus had chosen to answer. The bag was still there, about two feet from his hand, and it would stay there until he could move his fingers, which he could not. Not yet.
Red in tooth and claw. He turned it over. He didn’t know exactly where it had come from. It had come out the moment he saw the spider drop, the moment his hands moved before his mind caught up. It felt right. Sylvanus’s world was not gentle. The god of the natural world was not gentle. The green wood and the root and the hunt — none of it was gentle. Prey was not a permanent condition. Prey could get a sword in before going down.
He had gotten one good hit in. The spider was dead. Ertz was dead. Riyou was somewhere in the dark passages, being brought back toward something she had been running from since before any of them knew her name. The man Sylvanus had sent him here to kill had walked past him, taken her, and walked away, and Bancroft had been on the ceiling the whole time.
He tried to wiggle toward the bag.
He could not move.
He thought about that. Kept breathing. Waited to feel his hands.
This session report was written with the help of AI. For details on the process, see Transcribing D&D Sessions with WhisperX and Speaker Diarization.