Such oversights are easily made by adventurers who have never actually had to fight skeletons before. Descending once more through the well, the company found another entrance into the sewers and, not far beyond, the cave-in they had been searching for. The collapsed passage had breached the ancient catacombs of the Necropolis, providing a hidden route beneath the city. They followed it for several hundred feet through the darkness until a ladder brought them up beneath a statue in the cemetery above. One thing was now certain: this breach would need to be reported to the Church and, somehow, sealed.
The Necropolis greeted them beneath a fine veil of mist, the vapour curling between tombstones and ancient monuments. With Torvax's newly acquired owl familiar, Hoot Hoot, keeping watch from above, the company emerged from beneath the cemetery just in time to see a black carriage departing through the fog. Upon its side was the unmistakable insignia of House Vladaam. Several figures sat within, but the darkness concealed their identities.
Before the adventurers could investigate, another sight drew their attention. A strange necromantic light burned amongst the graves, and from it spectral shapes seemed to pour forth into the mist. They drifted among the tombstones before sinking into the earth. Moments later the graves began to stir.
Skeletons clawed their way from the ground and advanced upon the living. They were an ill-equipped army of the dead, armed with spades, broken swords, hoes and whatever other implements their former lives (or their grave robbers) had left behind. Yet they were relentless, dragging their bony feet across the broken ground and somehow always aware of where the adventurers stood within the fog.
The battle was hard fought, and Bragman (freshly returned from culinary forays in search of rare spices) took a beating severe enough to require one of the party's precious healing resources. Then, in the midst of the chaos, inspiration struck. Rather than continue trading blows with an army of animated corpses, Bragman stepped back, drew his crossbow and took aim at the source of the evil: the unholy lantern. His bolt struck true. The lantern exploded in a shower of sparks, and with its destruction the magic sustaining the undead vanished. Skeletons collapsed into the mist, their stolen lives extinguished once more. It was, by any reasonable definition, heroic...
The investigation of the cemetery revealed another clue. Footprints around the remains of the destroyed lantern led to a small tomb, where a staircase descended into darkness. The company followed, and before long distant sounds reached them from below: the unmistakable crack of a whip and the muffled screams of someone being subjected to its attentions.
The Curators pressed on and soon encountered two armed thugs guarding a set of doors. Their attempt at stealth ended rather abruptly when Bragman failed to remain unnoticed, despite apparently making a last-minute effort involving a change of armour. Steel was drawn, and one of the guards was quickly overwhelmed. The other fled into the darkness to warn whoever waited beyond.
What followed was another brief and brutal struggle. A cultist attempted to summon a skeleton from an urn using some foul alchemical dust, but Bragman once again demonstrated that a crossbow in his hands was a thing to be feared. His bolt struck the cultist squarely in the heart and dropped him where he stood.
The fleeing thug, meanwhile, reached his master...or rather, the 'unfortunate' nobleman currently being 'entertained' in the crypt by a ghoul. The scene that greeted the adventurers was every bit as depraved as the sounds from below had suggested.
Torvax, displaying the practical problem-solving for which he was becoming renowned, set fire to the curtain surrounding the ghoul and its wealthy client. The uncontrolled skeleton turned upon the thug who had summoned it, while the ghoul itself attacked the adventurers. It attempted to paralyse Lúthien, only to discover that its powers had little effect upon the elf. The remaining battle was quickly settled, and the company took the surviving nobleman and Lothian priest, Reverend Tebbitus, into custody.
Among the remains they found a fragment that offered their first real lead into the wider conspiracy. Research would later identify the symbol and references upon it as belonging to something called the Crimson Lotus. Torvax carefully collected samples of the ash used by the cultist to raise the skeletons, along with some of the strange incense found at the scene. Whether these materials were valuable evidence, dangerous magical components or merely something that might fetch a respectable price from a collector was the subject of considerable debate.
The party had already begun to consider the possibility of establishing their own museum of adventuring spoils. Lúthien, however, was less interested in preserving one particular item. Finding an icon of Baphomet, he decided that whatever its value to scholars or collectors, it was evil and should therefore be destroyed. The matter was settled with considerably less debate than the question of the museum.
By the end of the night, the Curators had uncovered far more than the undead threat Brother Fabien had warned them about. Beneath the Necropolis lay a hidden route into the sewers, a gang engaged in the desecration of graves, evidence of necromantic experiments, a mysterious connection to House Vladaam and, somewhere behind it all, the shadowy figure of Eli Darkmantle. Yet for all these discoveries, the company had only one tangible lead...the Crimson Lotus.
Their investigation would now take them away from the graves and crypts of the Necropolis and into the Guildsman District of Ptolus, where the Crimson Lotus operated as a house of pleasure. For the Lay Curators of the Ossuary, the hunt was beginning to take an increasingly strange turn...
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