After the remainder of the daylight is spent shopping and unloaded wares, the group returns to the al Ustadh home just after dusk for the invited dinner. Zetath answers the door, garbed in fine blue and green robes, and jolly as ever. He beckons you to enter. “Make yourselves comfortable! Our home is as yours for the evening, my friends.”

Immediately, you are bombarded by enticing aromas of spices and meats, as he leads you from a small foyer into a dining area. Sofh, dressed in riding leathers under blue robes alongside a brass amulet beset with a large cut amethyst, interrupts her setting of the table to smile broadly at your entrance. She seems to have regained her vigor after the ordeal, and her dark brown hair is guided by an ornate silver circlet. “Welcome to our home! I hope the food is to your liking. And welcome friend of friends, I am Sofh al Ustadh, and that is my husband Zetath, please enjoy our hospitality,” she adds the last to Kheti, although her keen gaze clearly notes his unique nature, after the initial moment of study, she treats him as she would any guest. In a brave move, they even allow Zen a bowl next to the table.

Zetath returns from the kitchen with a large tagine and sets it in the center of the table with a large serving spoon. The low table has many cushions arranged about it with eight places set. Ample bread and a spread of half a dozen dips, most delicious and all quite different. Mint tea is served along with the fare. The large tagine contains a mix of cubed goat, eggplant, rutabagas, carrots, apricots, and turnips stewed with aromatic herbs and spices. Another dish reveals puff pastries coated in cinnamon and filled with a savory chicken stew. Your two hosts make a point to wait on you and predict your needs, never letting anything get quite empty.

After you and they are well fed, Sofh and Zetath look to each other before the woman decides to speak, “I have been struggling to come up with some way to repay you. I owe you an immense debt, and I wish to give you something. You may always have my counsel, or that of my husband, whenever you think it may aid you. As for something more tangible, while we have some curios, nothing is terribly valuable aside from novelty. I have recently uncovered some information that is potentially immensely valuable, and I wish to gift it to you.”

“When I was captured by the gnolls, I had been returning from Solku. A few weeks ago, I had been doing research in the great library there when I stumbled upon some lore in an unexpected place. I was attempting to identify a toy that belonged to some Pharoah’ child, and I was reading through an obscure toy maker’s journal. While almost everything in it concerned children’s toys and puzzles, one of the last entries discussed a puzzle he was contracted to create in a tomb.”

“The puzzle described was quite intricate and rather incredible in scope, it used boats and markings on columns that can be rotated, but as I was reading through this, I became certain I had been to that tomb almost ten years ago. We cracked open the tomb of some Archvizier. At the time I remembered being struck by two things: how modest the tomb was given the presumed importance of the man, and how strange it was that the tomb had an immense and long dried up cistern within it. We thought the man may have done something instrumental in Osirian aqueducts or something, but otherwise left stumped. This cistern is the toy maker’s puzzle. As a gift to you, I can give you the location and the knowledge to solve the puzzle, which according to the toy maker will grant you access to the lower levels of the tomb and whatever wonders await there. Usually, exhuming of a new tomb involves an expedition and some organization taking possession of almost artifacts found there. This would not require that overhead, as it has already been dug up and broken into ten years ago, and since this is Katapesh, anything you find you may sell or keep.”