Willow house

Willow house is the walled house among the warehouses of Explorer Port in Aquila that the mage Albus Rodarius Willow used, in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"). Willow did not build it: the place was enchanted before him, and he made use of it. Looked at for long, it brings on nausea and passes for a warehouse; Travis said that the effect rose from the ground beneath it, not from the building or its owner's spells.^{1 2 3}

Reported defences

Travis, who had studied the house for months, told the band what was said of it: wards that kept sound from leaving the garden, which might have weakened with the mage gone; a maze of poisonous thorns; a three-headed hound at the door that regrew its own flesh; rooms that changed places as doors were passed; a vault behind a gnome-made door that had to be solved rather than unlocked; a lamp of gas that fell when the vault opened; and a year of life lost for every minute spent in the vault.^{4 5 6 7 8 9}

The weakening of spells is the matter of the Galevan Law, which Professor Maverick Galevan set out in his book Temporal Deteriorations of Spells.¹⁰

Finli searched the guild archive and found the contract by which a mage had a gnome build a door, with records of brass, stainless steel and pure iron and more than forty moving gears, and of some two months' work.^{11 12 13}

The way in

Travis's key opened a hidden gate that appeared in the outer wall. Beyond it grew a maze of thorn bushes taller than a man, which settled when Fauna asked them to be calm. Around the house circled a huge three-headed hound, scarred, collarless and white-eyed, its body swaying with the wind; its round did not pass close by the band when they drew back into the maze.^{14 15 16 17 18}

The metal front door bore fourteen locks set in an arch. Locks that had been opened closed again whenever the band had to retreat from the hound, until Finli's tools held them open; with every lock undone, the metal-seeming door drew inward like a stretched skin.^{19 20 21 22}

The rooms

The entry hall is a windowless half-circle with high wooden walls, lit by a faint blue light from no visible source, with a shoe rack, coat hooks and three doors of different woods and designs. Behind the left door came the sound of an axe on wood and of a horse running overhead, behind the right the sound of waves on a shore; the middle one was silent, with a small dried spot of mud before it.^{23 24 25 26 27}

All three knobs carried transformation magic. When Bruno touched the right one, the other doors locked and the ocean behind it became the sound of a small pool. Finli worked out that a living touch on a knob fixes one choice and closes the others, a gnome-made device working on time and reality; how the whole of it runs he did not learn.^{28 29 30}

Among the rooms the band crossed were these:

• A dark stone corridor of about a hundred and fifty feet, its water deeper than a man and its floor some forty feet down, the walls sealed above the waterline and scored with nail marks, as if someone had once thrashed there as the water rose. Touching the far knob shut the way back and flooded the room under arcs of lightning, which stopped when the far door opened.^{31 32 33 34 35 36}
• A room of torture instruments from many lands, chains, vices, wheels and a bronze bull, with the body of a boy of fourteen or fifteen on the rack and a stone lion bearing necromancy and a stronger ward. About a minute after the band entered, screams began and the door slammed, and the screams went on echoing in their minds.^{37 38 39 40 41}
• A narrow spiral stair that led back to where it began, and a twin stair rising from the other door; when Sticks watched both at once, with his own eyes and his bird's, the house shook and the two doors became one.^{42 43 44}
• At the heart of the shifting rooms, a great metal column wrapped in energy that tore metal from those near it. Its ore, fit for strong natural magnets, was shipped to the Empire in quantity when Aquila was first settled. Finli's lightning stilled it long enough to recover what it held, and a few minutes later it hummed into life again.^{45 46 47 48}

The vault

At the foot of a stair stood a vault door of countless tiny gears in a vast hall. Finli matched its gear count to the guild records and found it wholly mechanical; the secret was to turn not the door but the house. When a star-shaped piece was turned, the door stayed still and the rest of the house wheeled about it, revealing the treasure chamber behind.^{49 50 51 52 53}

The chamber had mostly been emptied, but a great deal of silver coin remained, with magical boots, a carved wand, a collar and a silver rod among it, and under the silver the Painting of Avlor Aten. The ampoule of the Green Death dropped as it opened and was caught unbroken. Each who entered aged a year, though they stayed less than a minute; Bruno, who went in twice, aged two.^{54 55 56 57 58}

After the vault

Since the vault was opened, the arcane energy of the house had been slowly changing its polarity. On the way out it helped the band: stairs melted into ramps for Finli's loaded sled, and Willow's decorations were fading away. The front door now stood unlocked and opened at a push. In the yard they found a doberman puppy, and the tall grass had shrunk to shoots, as if the place had been reset.^{59 60 61 62}