Anders’s solo
Anders, meanwhile, was lounging about in the Compleat Orthodoxy. Dropped cask of wine: big mess. Anders investigated, then saw what the fuss was about and went back, but during this brief step through the hallways passed through a transient gate.
Sigil, the City of Doors, is full of gates — they pop up, come, go. Most of these fleeting gates are never even noticed by the inhabitants; no one passes through them while bearing the appropriate gate key. Anders, therefore, suffered some serious bad luck; something he was carrying was the gate key.
More bad luck: the other side of the transient gate was about a hundred feet up in the air. Anders falls through hot desert air, landing with a thud that would kill a normal man but leaves him undamaged. He stands up, looks around: he is in, apparently, the middle of a desert. Sand everywhere, as far as he could see. No water, no plant life, no birds in the sky, nothing but sand and heat and three suns, two big red ones and a little bright yellow one. All three are on the horizon, and while Anders can’t be sure, they appear to be rising.
The most unsettling feature of this unnatural landscape: the shifting sands. The sand ripples, as if people were buried in it a foot or two down, and faint moans waft up, again as if people were buried in it a foot or two down. Anders reaches out with his mind, but catches only the faint psychic imprints of petitioners, sad and penitent ones. Which means, at least, that he is somewhere in the Outer Planes, probably one of the Hells. Anders curses his lack of knowledge of planar geography and inability to narrow it down.
Faced with the increasing temperatures, Anders quickly pulls his armor off, so as to not bake, and strips to underclothes. He fashions his armor and outer clothing into a very crude tent, crawls inside it, and tries not to die of heatstroke. His hope is that the suns willrise, then set, and the temperature will cool off and he can travel. His unnatural resilience will, hopefully, keep him alive.
In a normal desert, perhaps, he’d have made it. If sunrise to sunset were only eight hours long, he could have endured the heat, staved it off with his psychic powers. Unluckily due to the action of the three suns, day in the Hell of Endless Shifting Sands (for such was his location) lasts thirty-six hours. Slowly Anders succumbs to heatstroke.
He is rescued, unexpectedly, by an enormous shadow. The shadow is attached to an enormous man, seven feet tall with shoulders four feet across, wearing white cotton. The giant jabbers at Anders, prods him with a stick, and Anders feebly gestures. Seeing the stranger is still alive, the giant hefts Anders up and shakes him, jabbering all the while.
Anders reaches into the giant’s mind telepathically, establishing a mental link. The giant asks Anders if he had faith, or if he wanted water — he seems to think that these are mutually exclusive conditions. Anders, baffled by this, asks the giant where they are, and the giant explains that they were dead and in Hell.
Which hell?
There’s only one, the giant says. He carries Anders to his steed — a giant beetle the size of a cottage — and takes him across the desert to the Plaza of Memory.
The giant’s name is Op-Rendo, and he was by his own description a tax collector for the Only City, the round white city at the center of the world. What a strange little man you are, to have never heard of the Only City!
Anders tells Op-Rendo his name was Li, and asked where they were. He had fallen through a door, and then found himself here. Op-Rendo explained that they had died — Op-Rendo was stabbed in the dark, and Li apparently fell and broke his neck. Because they were wicked ones, they went to the Hell of Endless Shifting Sands, like those poor bastards who have given up and lie piteously under the desert. Op-Rendo has not let himself go like that. He’s met other travelers — the inhabitants of the Plaza of Memory.
Anders disputes his death, pointing out that falling through a magic door in Sigil isn’t so unusual, but Op-Rendo is unfamiliar with Sigil.
The Plaza is a picaresque ruins: wide sandstone flagstones three feet across form a yard the size of a football field. A low, wrecked wall, now only three or four feet high in most places, but probably once higher, runs along the perimeter, broken by two fallen arches at opposite ends. A half-dozen tents stud the Plaza, and single, larger tent to one side appears to be a makeshift stables for several more giant beetles like the one Op-Rendo rides. In the center is an artesian well, which smells faintly of brimstone.
Op-Rendo disappears into one of the tents, saying something about telling Grandmother Scaly about Li, and Anders is left alone for a few moments. He inspects the fountain, and eventually sips a bit of the water. It doesn’t seem poisonous.
“That water isn’t free.” A withered female voice behind him, speaking Gehen, the trade-tongue of the Lower Planes. Anders turns, and Op-Rendo is standing next to a large anthropomorphic crocodile wearing diaphanous robes.
Anders asks what and how much she wants, and Grandmother Scaly says that what she wants is turquoise. Anders doesn’t have turqoise; how about cash? Grandmother Scaly accepts the cash.
Grandmother Scaly is the head of a clan of almost a dozen anthropomorphic crocodiles, scaly-men. They have come here, to the 544th layer of the Abyss, to mine turquoise and sell it in the City of the Saved. Their cargo-barrels are nearly full; soon they will caravan to Acheron. From there, Anders can get back to Sigil.
To make a long story short, Anders joins Op-Rendo and the scaly-men mining turquoise in the desert for a period of about a week, subjective time, which is interrupted only by a scorpion attack on the morning of the sixth day. The scaly-men scatter when the monstrous scorpion (the size of a compact car) wanders into the turquoise quarry, but Op-Rendo goes after it with some sharp sticks. Anders’s formidable mental powers are useless against the scorpion — the thing just doesn’t have enough of a mind to be affected — but he feels he owes Op-Rendo, and assists with stick-jabbing as best he can. They plunge several of the makeshift spears into the body and head of the monster, but it doesn’t stop moving until after it’s picked up Op-Rendo in its mighty slicing claws and stung him twice with its massive stinger-tail; the big man goes down.
Anders, who feels now he owes the giant life-debt twice over, drags Op-Rendo back to the Plaza and learns that neither he nor Grandmother Bright nor any of the scaly-men have healing magic or medical training. Anders has a vague idea of sucking out the poison, but when he cuts open the big swollen wounds on Op-Rendo’s forearm and neck, he succeeds only in relieving Op-Rendo of some blood.
Still, Op-Rendo is a tough cookie, and after a few days of bed rest pulls through well enough to walk around, though he still isn’t at 100% when Grandmother Scaly announces the turquoise-barrels are full and the time to leave has come.
The group packs up and leads pack-beetles across the endless shifting sands, coming at last to a high sandstone cliff, and under the cliff, a small fortified village of demons. For this is a front in the Blood War, albeit a remote one; a gate between the demonic Abyss and the nominally devilish Acheron. The tanar’ri demons who man the gate in this nameless village haggle back and forth with Grandmother Scaly, who eventually gives up half her turquoise as “excise tax.” Too, they claim half of Anders’s pocket change, and his bauble dorje. They try to take his armor for the cause, but Anders plays the Queen-Abby’s-Mob card and lays into them with psi, and they relent.
The caravan, now half as heavy, passes through the gate to the City of the Saved in Acheron. Wet black stone replaces dry sandstone; hobgoblins replace tanar’ri. High overhead it’s raining acid, but tarpaulins stretched between the buildings keep it from burning Anders et al.
As the jarring sensation of planar travel fades, Anders discovers he has been betrayed. Two of the scaly-men have pulled out blowguns, and shoot them at him — one lodges in a chink in his armor, scratching him, but his unnatural physiology shrugs off the poison. Op-Rendo isn’t so lucky; he’s still weakened from the scorpion venom, and collapses with three darts sticking out of his face.
Anders flees into the city, shouting Duke Vanya’s name. Grandmother Scaly shouts that Anders is an escaping slave; guards! stop him!
The guards chase Anders down easily, since Anders’s armor slows him down so much. They whap at his head with saps to subdue him, and Anders counters by breaking their minds. There’s many of them and only one of him, however; eventually they overpower him.
Anders awakens in prison, and immediately begins screaming Duke Vanya’s name again. Eventually word of the strange outlander reaches the Duke, and he dispatches one of his enforcers, a goblin named Dmitri, to investigate. Dmitri confirms that Anders is part of Duke Stands-on-the-Mountain’s crew, and arranges for him to be freed. Anders seeks out Op-Rendo and finds him for sale — a steal at 200 gp, because he is so unruly — and buys his freedom. Together they head through a gate to Sigil, and get back to the Compleat Orthodoxy just in time to join the rest of the Mob for Jadis’s cotillion. Op-Rendo still doesn’t speak the language (Grandmother Scaly had a gift of tongues, and Anders breathes directly into his brain), but he has figured out he isn’t dead.