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The King-In-Irons engages in his professional specialty.
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Feliu Mas, Court Mage and Chief of Security for High Priestess Demicardinal Carme Scarpo’s private estate, is not an idiot. This is, to be sure, a rare and precious trait in Cheliax, as Mas is well aware, but it is also one he - a fifth-circle wizard possessed of considerable experience at the Woundworld - possesses. Since, however, his subordinates are fools, rogues and incompetents, he does an invisible survey of the estate three times a day an hour or so after every guard change, catching up on all of the guardposts and making sure the soldiers of His Infernal Majesty’s deputy are properly obedient. After all, how will they quail properly in fear of Asmodeus if they are not properly punished for their every failure in his eyes, even those no man could possibly have seen?

Since Mas is not an idiot, each guardpost carefully overlooks each adjacent guardpost, and there are three soldiers in each of them at all times (two warriors and a wizard, ideally, not that the wizards are up to his standards), all of them ready to trip the permanent Alarm spells keyed to himself alone in case of attack. He does this even though Demicardinal Scarpo’s private estate is surrounded by her rich ecclesiastical domain, in which the slaves and peasants are far too cowed to present any active resistance, she has no rivals worthy of the name, and not once since Scarpo became Demicardinal has she faced any resistance more serious than urban bread riots.

And so it is this night that, invisible, his Permanent Arcane Sight and Extended Detect Thoughts scanning the light ornamental glades (that the Demicardinal planted so she could hang corpses from them) whenever they are within 120 feet from him, Feliu Mas continues patrolling his excellently well-prepared estate. The Demicardinal’s estate is more of a palace than a fortress, true, but does it really need to be a fortress?

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Two hundred feet away in one of the aforementioned glades, there is an invisible rope (beneath the invisibility, painted camouflage colors) behind a tree, and in the Rope Trick above (but looking down), the King-In-Irons speaks a spell.

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And, beneath him, the equally invisible Pedra Casal Lachanessa releases her first Phantom Human Bane arrow from her Anarchic bow, breaking invisibility, which would mean much more if she hadn’t spent most of an hour selecting her hiding place for maximum concealment.

The arrow is, of course, invisible. It is also coated in poison. Since it severs Feliu Mas’s spinal cord when it goes through his throat, the poison is totally unnecessary, as are arrows #2 and #3. When his body hits the ground, the wound closes and the arrows disappear, leaving the “thump” as the only evidence that anything ever occurred.

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There are, of course, still a concentric ring of guardposts, each of them staffed with three guards including a wizard, all of them aware that any failure to perform according to custom will get them tortured. And the wizards do have See Invisibility spells.

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Have, yes; reliably use, no, not when there are three eight-hour shifts, the spell has a duration of forty minutes to an hour, and they need to save some second-circle spells for Detect Thoughts and combat spells. Even silenced and invisible it takes some stealth for Pedra to recover Mas’s body to feed into her bag of holding, but once that’s complete and the minute-duration spells are cast, the King-In-Irons can use Detect Thoughts to check which guards have which spells active, and then it is not all that difficult for him to find a pair of guardposts guarding an entrance in which coincidentally neither wizard has See Invisibility or Detect Thoughts active.

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Every entrance has a regularly-recast Alarm spell that will alert whichever wizard cast it today.

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Authorization is given by a passphrase; passphrases of the sort that are known to everyone who works there, including the house slaves with no reason to care for their mistress and the guards who sometimes think the wrong thing while drinking in the village tavern. The passphrase does need to be spoken, true, but no volume that might alert the guards can be specified in the spell.

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And what, pray tell, is the lowest Stealth in the group now entering?

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Sufficient, since everyone there is invisible and the three people present in the heaviest armor are also carrying rocks with Silence cast on them whenever they don't need to speak.

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Someone is going to notice eventually. 

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Oh yes, certainly. The problem would be that the first person to notice is a halfling with a mop who notices dirty footprints appearing on her nice, clean floor. She’s clonked on the head with a rock of Silence and her unconscious body is stuffed in a closet.

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The intruders will need to let someone know eventually, and doing so will alert the two imps manning the estate's two busiest torture chambers (at opposite ends of the estate, of course) who are bound by Lesser Planar Ally to serve as teleport-messengers in the event of a crisis.

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Who can, yes, collect a devilish hit squad from Egorian with four or five times the military power of the entire Court of Exiles within two rounds, possibly including Gorthoklek if he happens to be free.

Which is why the Court of Exiles pauses when they reach a hiding place, cleans the mud off of the boots of Carlos Bosch and Aspex Oriol, and then splits, still invisible. One force to the western dungeons, one to the eastern.

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The door to the western dungeon entrance is usually closed. There’s a guard next to it because it's the sort of thing that people looking for places to post guards on do leave someone on.

(The same is true of the east.)

 

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If the western guard gets three Human Bane arrows to the chest from point-blank range, does he live long enough to think about it?

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He does not.

And the eastern?

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Jaume Vilaro and his Anarchic rapier are an excellent substitute for Pedra’s Human Bane arrows.

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The devils themselves? 

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The King-In-Irons can handle one Dimensional Anchor.

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And the other is the business of Mira Mayapple, who really doesn’t look at all like a fifth-circle cleric of Norgorber should, which is how you get to be a fifth-circle cleric of Norgorber, really.

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And then there are people -

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- Who can handle the rest.

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If they think they can get both imps before either can manage a telepathic scream...

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They do not think that at all, no. Just how fast does Demicardinal Scarpo react?

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Demicardinal Scarpo (in bed, formerly asleep) will send a quick Message to her security chief alerting him that there’s a break-in, a second to the imp asking for more information, and it isn’t until the third that she gets in touch with his deputy, who can respond.

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The King-In-Irons, on a time limit, now completely visible, is running through the halls with supernatural speed, casting his last buffs as he does.

He’s almost six feet in the boots he wears and broad-shouldered, and has a Disguise Self under the invisibility to create the image of an even larger man in imposing steel plate. Under the disguise he’s wearing deep red robes with black and golden trim, and his face and headband are completely covered by a steel mask with an flaming red eye on the forehead and a broken shackle engraved on each cheek, worn under the tight-fitting hood of the cape sweeping behind him. The talismans he wears on a string ‘round his neck are tucked under his shirt, and his rings are concealed under his neat black (totally nonmagical) gloves.

He’s got more magic items than most of the members of the team running with him, but not by much.

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