The Slag Bell

A heavy foundry barge sits dead in the flight lane with her sails hanging limp. Lashed to her deck is a massive gray-green bell cast from raw sky-crystal slag. Every few minutes the bell hums on its own, killing every breath of wind around it. Barge master Idris Coe hails you across the gap: "I've been stranded here in dead air for three days! Tow me to port and you can have my share of this cursed bell!"

Half a day into the tow, the slag bell lets out a deep hum that kills the wind in your own sails too, making the barge drag behind you like a sea anchor. Idris shouts across the cable: "It gets worse at dusk! Wrapping wet canvas over the bell's mouth muffles the resonance—I have the heavy canvas, but no crew left able to climb the rig!"

Once docked, Idris wipes his brow and explains the job: "That slag bell was cast for the keepers on Bell Rock in the next region, where fierce gales wreck three ships a year. They paid half upfront, and they'll pay the rest on delivery—or you can sell the bell right here to the Guild foundry for its raw crystal slag. Either way, the contract is yours now; I'm done with it."

Bell Rock rises from a storm-swept lane with an empty iron bell-gallows on its summit. As your ship approaches with the slag bell aboard, the howling gale drops to a dead calm—and an oar-driven wrecker galley rows out from behind the rock to intercept you! Hanging the bell here will calm the gales and ruin their ship-wrecking trade forever.

The foundry master circles the massive bell twice and raps it with a knuckle; it hums once, making every furnace flame in the shed lean sideways. "A full ton of high-grade sky-crystal slag! I'll pay you eighty silver and six crystal shards to break it up today." From the back of the shed, an old founder speaks up: "Or let us melt it down into ship-sized hand bells, captain—any captain would pay for a bell that calms a storm in battle."

Two elderly brothers—the rock's keepers—help your crew winch the massive slag bell onto its iron gallows. It rings out a single deep note, and the turbulent air over Bell Rock settles into a permanent calm. "We owe you the second half of the bell's price, captain," the elder brother says, "but we have no silver—only the weather instruments our father used to chart this sky for forty years."

The galley's captain is a gray-eared lupine woman with a pilot's whistle on a cord around her neck. "We were pilots on this rock until the Guild cut the pilot's fee to nothing. Then we became wreckers. Hang your bell and we starve. Sell it to us and it goes over the side, and we carry on as we are. Or hang it, and tell the keepers this rock needs its pilots back, at a fair fee."