The Darkened Beacons

A thick fog rolls across the sky-lanes, and through the gloom shines a light where your chart shows only empty rock: an ancient stone beacon tower burning without a keeper. Your lookout swears the tower was dark an hour ago. Bolted to the door is an Old Kingdom brass plaque, with a crude wooden plank nailed right across it: KEEP OFF. WRECKERS' LAW.

As you descend the stone steps, a skiff ties up at the base of the crag carrying two men with a bucket of hot pitch and a long-handled brush—come to black out the lantern glass. Spotting your armed crew, the older man hides the brush behind his back like a boy caught stealing apples. "Wreckers' law," he mutters without much conviction. "Says so right on the door."

Beacon Four stands dark and blind, its lantern panes smeared thick with black pitch. Directly below the tower, on the jagged crags the light was built to warn against, lie the shattered ribs of three merchant hulls. A wrecker's sloop rides at anchor in the lee of the rock, and her captain rows over in person. "Leave the glass blacked out and there's a full share of tonight's wreck in it for you. Heavy fog is due by sundown."

True to the plaque in the fourth tower, the beacon line terminates at the seventh crag, where the ancient keepers maintained their central depot. It is the largest tower of the chain, built over a spiral stone stair descending deep into the rock. The air rising from the shaft smells of damp tin, and far below something drips steadily onto metal.

By daybreak, an eleven-ship Guild convoy has threaded safely past the crags by the light of your restored beacon. The convoy commodore sends a gig across with a purse of thirty silver and a proposal: "The Guild will pay handsomely to keep this beacon line lit for the season. Or you can follow the bearings to the seventh and final tower first, and see what the ancient keepers left behind."

The wrecker captain introduces himself as Hask, a man who appreciates a crew that keeps its mouth shut. He pours you a cup of brandy in his cabin, surrounded by salvaged furniture from a dozen dead ships. "There's a sealed vault beneath the seventh beacon at the end of the line. The rock stair is crumbling, and my lads aren't keen on dark holes. Break it open for us, and half of whatever you haul up is yours."

The ancient keepers left their depot in immaculate order. Stacked on the stone shelves sit spare fog lenses packed in straw, a long brass Starglass telescope, and a heavy copper kettle fitted with a horn-shaped spout. According to the keepers' logbook, the kettle was used whenever raiders approached: fed with charged crystal, it boiled up a dense bank of artificial fog to hide the harbor while the self-lighting beacons guided home ships safely through the mist.

Beneath the third tower on your maintenance round, you find no tar pots and no wreckers—only their hidden storehouse. A dry rock cavern is stacked high with plundered cargo crates, sorted and labeled as neatly as a supply merchant's shelves. Several crates still bear the shipping stamps of captains you know. The Guild pays a flat finder's fee for reporting a wrecker cache—and their agents don't count the crates before you report it.