I gently lift the trapdoor, peering down. Wooden stairs lead down to a small chamber, which is unoccupied. I descend the stairs, lowering the trapdoor gently closed behind me.

The room appears to be a storage room, the walls lined with shelves on which sit piles of dusty old linen scrolls, most likely old accountings and contractual records. Barrels of cheap ale, of obviously more recent vintage, line one wall. In one corner is an old table and chair, set next to a damp fireplace filled with damp ashes. The oil lamp is on the table, next to a half-empty cup of ale.

I smirk. Not bad, as decoy rooms go. But not good enough. I walk slowly around the room, fingers in the air, til I find the faint touch of the sea breeze I felt coming through the trapdoor cracks. I follow it to the wall next to the fireplace, where a careful inspection reveals the lines of a hidden door. There is a small hole in the seam between the wall and the fireplace. The breeze is coming from the hole. I put my finger in and pull.

The door opens easily, silently.

Behind the door is a tunnel, sandy and wet, reinforced by old dock pilings and tarred timbers, narrow as a tenement hallway. The left side of the tunnel is a solid stone wall - the harbor wall. Some distance down the tunnel is a faint yellow light - another lamp or candle. Closer, there is an area that is both somehow darker than the rest of the tunnel, and yet glowing faintly, phosphorescently. 

That makes me nervous and I grasp the hafts of my weapons tighter. What is it? A magic ward? What is going on down here? What's at the other end of the tunnel? Another ritual room? A necromancer's lab? A secret complex, maybe even the headquarters of Rien, the local ward boss, guarded by the dead? Questions as numerous as trees in a forest pop into my mind. Not that I've ever seen a forest. 

But I won't get answers standing here open-mouthed like a bloody fool.

I pull the door closed behind me and begin to move.

The darkness I see ahead is not magic, but a hole in the harbor wall to my left. There is another opening in the inland earthen wall opposite, and that is where the faint glow is coming from. As I approach, it takes on the indigo hue of the scuttler auras. Sure enough, the hole on the right leads to a small cavern with a pool in it. A dozen or so scuttlers are in the room. The glow surrounding them is much fainter than when I saw them before, but still present. They freeze as one when I look through the opening in the wall to their lair, and then a few of them turn their eyestalks to look at me and click their claws together.

Creepy little things. I want to kill them. But I know the ones I saw earlier had some sort of mental bond or tracking connection with an elven necromancer. If I kill these ones, that could bring some unwanted attention down into the tunnel. I can put an end to them on the way out. 

Creepy or not, I'm fairly happy to see them here. Definitely a sign that I'm on the right track. 

But right now, I am more interested in the hole in the sea wall. The wall is thick, and must have a space between the outer and inner stones. That must be what is in there. I examine the hole. It looks like entire stones were removed from the wall. But why?

 

Tentatively, I sheathe my cutting sword and feel my way forward into the space within the sea wall. A couple of paces ahead, my fingers brush against the damp stone of the outer wall. A cool, salty breeze whispers down from above me. There must be a ventilation hole somewhere above, invisible in the darkness of night. I reach out to my right. I feel big stone blocks. Dirt and stones on top of them. Ah, this is a storage chamber for the dirt removed from the tunnel and the stones taken out of the wall. I reach to the left, expecting to feel more detritus.

Instead, I feel bones.

Old bones, covered in bits of decaying cloth. Skulls, with dry bits of hair hanging off them. 

Although it's hard to tell in the dark, they feel like full skeletons, stacked on top of each other from the floor to as high as I can reach. The bones are so old they have no smell - or rather, they have the same salt and fish stink of the sea as the air down here.  Elven skeletons, judging by their size. It's like some sick mockery of a human crypt. Or the realization of a curse on the elves interred here. It's hard to think of a more disrespectful and un-elven way to dispose of our dead. Is this what the humans have been doing with our bodies? Dropping them into the walls like rubble?

These remnants of the dead have no answers for me. Time to move on.

I back out of the sea wall and slip down the passageway, my movements followed by the scuttlers' eyes, rotating on their stalks.