They watched the colossal crystalline construct disappear into the distance, wings clashing as it flew.
“Now what?” said Milo. “The dragon’s buggered off!”
Iledove set her jaw. Evil was on its murderous way to the Ten Towns of Icewind Dale. And even if the Ten Towns were a bunch of shit-holes full of inbred, mouth-breathing bigots and cretins, by Helm, Iledove wasn’t going to let Evil just… get away with it. “Wine-dude?” she snapped. “How fast can you and your friends travel over the snow?”
“We ski,” said the goliath proudly. “We are fast.”
“Faster than we are,” said Iledove. “You and your friends – you must return to the Ten Towns as fast as you possibly can. Warn them about the dragon.”
“But… we were going to help you fight the evil Xardorok Sunblight,” said Wine-dude. His beard quivered. “That was our promise! We do not break our promises!”
“You still get to fight,” Iledove said. “You’ll have to help the townspeople hold the dragon at bay until we finish here. We’ll destroy its master and its lair, and if that doesn’t stop it, then we’ll come back to the Ten Towns and fight alongside you.”
Wine-dude turned to his big companions. They muttered together for a moment, then Wine-dude nodded solemnly. “We will do this,” he said. “But I do not know if we can kill a dragon, even with the people of Ten Towns.”
“Well, we don’t know if we can kill Sunblight,” Iledove said.
“We have killed two already,” said Testikles. He held up his creepy necklace with the tiny duergar skull. “I am ready to kill another.”
“Right,” said Iledove. It was also inconveniently accurate, and did not help her argument. She stepped in front of the little barbarian and tried to look inspiring. “Go, Wine-Dude. May Helm speed your way!”
“Fight well, small people,” said Wine-Dude. “Hurry to meet us!” The goliaths turned away, and sailed across the snowscape in pursuit of the winged dread.
“I thought they were our expendables,” Milo said. “What’s all this shit about saving Icewind Dale anyway?”
“We’re fighting against evil,” said Iledove, and resolutely turned to face the icy fortress. “And there’s evil in that… that place. There. Sunblight’s evil must be destroyed!” She lifted her chin and strode boldly up the icy stairs that were the only visible path.
Narrow, icy, completely unprotected path. With arrowslits and honking big stone doors at the top. Mmm. She peeked around the edge of the precipitous landing at the doors. The others joined her, one by one.
“I suppose we just… knock?” said Alea at last. The wind swirled, spraying them with chips of ice.
“The alternative is getting Jeoff to do the spider-climb thing, and then going straight up to the big doors at the top where the dragon came out. And there are more arrowslits up there.” Ildedove shivered. “So… maybe knock?”
At that moment, the doors swung inwards revealing a dark corridor beyond. Everyone pulled back around the corner of the landing.
“That was weird,” said Alea.
“I like this not,” Testikles said.
“Yeah… fuck this shit,” Milo said, and for once he spoke for them all.
They sent Jack Rabbitt down to the sled-wagon with instructions to go get help if they didn’t come back in a reasonable time. He was happy enough about that, and by Helm, as an ex-innkeeper and fake bard, he wasn’t even decent axe-fodder. Who could tell? Perhaps he would be able to find help. If not, he could at least make up a tragic death song commemorating their valiant failure.
Testikles insisted on taking the last barrel of whale oil with them. It would be heavy going but… That whale oil had saved a great deal of trouble in the Incident of the Exploding Mammoth. It had also produced a very fine back door through solid stone walls in the Adventure of the Hapless Duergar of Caer Koenig. Given that they weren’t likely to get out of this place alive, having the last barrel of the astonishingly flammable stuff available for extravagant gestures seemed like a good idea.
“It makes sense,” Iledove said. “Let’s bring it.”
“Goody!” said Jeoff, clapping his hands.
Even with the help of Jeoff’s magic, reaching the top of the fortress was a challenge. The brutal, icy winds threw ice and snow in their faces, and bid fair to sweep Jeoff from the wall. But they made the climb, and found themselves on a narrow ledge that went all the way around the fort, to the stone of the mountain from which it had been carved. (And what did the duergar do with all the carved-away stone, Iledove wondered. Looked like half a mountainside had been hacked away. You just couldn’t trust any kind of dwarf around a natural landscape, could you?)
Arrowslits on one side. Arrowslits on the other. Enormous stone doors in the middle, and of course, they were closed.
“That’s where the dragon came out,” Iledove said. “It must lead to the dragon’s heart forge. I reckon that’s where Sunblight will be.”
“So we open the doors,” Milo said. He forced his gloved fingers into the crack between the two huge slabs, and heaved. His face turned purple, and he trembled. A squeaky little fart escaped his butt, and he gasped, and let go. “All right,” he said. “Don’t just stand there staring!”
They all wedged their hands into the door, and on a count of three, they hauled mightily. Somewhere inside the fortress, something rumbled and clanked. The doors groaned open, allowing a rush of hot, stinking air to escape.
“I’ll hold it!” Milo shouted, and he pivoted around the door edge, wedging himself in the opening like a big, furry starfish. “Make it quick,” he said. “These things are heavy!”
Testikles looked over the edge. There was nothing but a black shaft. If there was any light at the bottom, it was too far away to see. But.. “I smell smoke,” said the barbarian. “The air is hot. Like a forge.”
“Looks like this shaft goes to the bottomost level,” Alea said. “Deeper than the door that opened by itself. Dwarves like digging deep.”
“Let’s give them a present,” said Jeoff. “Testikles: balance that barrel of oil up here.” As the halfling hauled the barrel into place, Jeoff rummaged through his pack. “Aha! Here we are,” he said, bringing out a round thing and a number of glass phials. “One grenade!” He tied the round thing to the barrel with a strip of cloth. “Numerous samples of vicious brown mould spores.” He tied them to the barrel as well, and grinned. “Spores which, as we know, go absolutely crazy when exposed to… what?”
“Fire!” said Alea, clapping her hands gleefully. “We’re raining fire and vile poison on their beardy little heads! I love it!”
Iledove remembered the horror of the brown mould, which had nearly killed Jeoff and had even made Testikles lie down and rest for a couple days. She recalled the Exploding Mammoth – the huge pulse of flame, and the rain of flaming, hairy chunks that followed. She shuddered, then steeled herself. Sunblight was evil! Poisoning him, burning him and blowing him up all at once was the right thing to do!
Jeoff yanked the igniter on the grenadoe. Testikles pushed the barrel over the edge, and waved sadly as it plummeted out of view. Alea groaned, and grabbed both Milo and Testikles away from the pit. Before they could protest, a gout of filthy smoke and flame licked up with a roar through the gap in the doors, exactly where the two halflings had been only seconds before.
The doors slowly swung shut.
“Think that did anything?” said Iledove.
“I wouldn’t want to be down there when that thing hit,” Jeoff said. “It will be interesting to see if there’s anyone left on that level.
After a few minutes, it became clear nobody from inside the fortress intended to come out and search for the source of the destruction rained on them. Milo shrugged, and slipped in through the arrow slits, clinging to the walls and ceilings with no more noise than a comatose mouse. A while later, he reported back.
“Fuck all up here,” he announced, sitting with the others on the icy ledge, his feet dangling idly over the sheer cliff. “It’s badly lit, but I guess they’re fucking dwarves, aren’t they? They’ve got a lot of braziers burning so it’s almost warm, and you can see a bit, but it’s mostly just… stone. Like a big, empty prison. I found gears to control those big doors. I found a sort of elevator shaft, with platforms constantly coming up, flipping over, and going down the other side. And that’s it. Far as I could tell, anyhow.”
“Fuck,” said Alea. She looked at Iledove.
Iledove’s heart sank. “The door?”
Alea nodded.
“Ugh,” said Iledove. It was one thing to go looking for Evil so you could kick it’s arse. It was entirely another thing to have Evil open its front door and invite you in…
***
Up, down. Up, down. They climbed up and down uselessly, and it never got any warmer. Testikles patted Skrote reassuringly as the group entered the small chamber behind the mysteriously opened doors. It was empty, except for some braziers. At the far end, a pair of simple doorways opened onto a corridor, left and right. Milo quietly went to the left, ignoring the rightside path in favour of a pair of doors. Milo kicked the doors open. He loved kicking doors.
Testikles had devised a new plan. He had a rope tied to Skrote’s saddle, and he held the other end. The duergar dwarves liked to be tricky. They could grow big, but he and Skrote could tear their guts out. They could grow small, but then he could pull their heads off. What he really didn’t like was when they turned invisible. If he and Skrote stretched out the rope between them and ran very fast, maybe they could trip and tangle the tricky invisible dwarfs?
Behind the doors was another chamber, a bit larger. There were four duergar dwarfs in it. “With me, Scrote,” shouted Testikles, charging into the chamber. “For Thrund! For Thrund!”
Testikles ran around one side of the dwarves. Skrote ran around the other, because he was a Good Pig. Three of the dwarfs got knocked down by the rope. The fourth – well, when Testikles and Skrote ran out of room to run, the fourth dwarf was right between them. Testikles chopped him with the Axe of Ashrem, and the dwarf staggered, squealing and bleeding, and Testikles felt good. His new plan had worked very well. He and Skrote had knocked down most of the dwarves and hit the only one still standing. Now the others would see he wasn’t just a dumb barbarian. They would see how good his plan worked, and they would know he was a cunning warrior. And he still had all his clothes on, and he didn’t even have a boner. That word Jack Rabbitt had taught him about the way Alea patted him on the head all the time – ‘pat-row something’ – she would stop doing that and she would admire his clever ways of battle and all of them would stop laughing when he spoke of Hidden Valley and maybe they would help him find his home, and that would be good.
Jeoff darted into the room, into a corner away from the duergar dwarves. He shot a firebolt at the one standing between Skrote and Testikles, but the duergar ducked under the firebolt.
And then everything started to be bad.
First, an invisible dwarf appeared behind Jeoff and hit him with a pick, and there was blood, and Jeoff screamed. Then Milo shot at the new dwarf with his crossbow but he missed. Milo began to sob and cry. Alea shot the dwarf in front of Testikles with her bow and the dwarf fell down dead, but then doors opened all over the room and many dwarves with weapons jumped out. The doors led to bedrooms. They were in a dwarf barracks, and one of the dwarfs stabbed Skrote!
Testikles sighed, and threw off his clothes, feeling the comforting, familiar rage filling him. Without even looking down, he could tell the Purple War Horn had risen to the occasion. The red mist filled his vision, and he screamed like a war-pig.
It had been a nice idea while it lasted.
Jeoff magicked a cloud of spinning daggers around himself because now he was surrounded by evil dwarfs and that was bad. Two other dwarfs at the other end of the room made themselves very big. Milo tore the spine out of a dwarf who was attacking Jeoff, but then Milo got stabbed.
Mister Bear growled. He grabbed a biggified dwarf in his jaws and shook him back and forth like a dog shakes a rat. Testikles howled, and hit the other biggified dwarf in the knee so his leg came off. The biggified dwarf fell, but Testikles spun all the way round, kept the axe going, and ripped the biggified dwarf’s jaw off his head so he was dead.
Then there was slashing and smashing and screaming, except for Milo and a dwarf who giggled at each other and licked their weapons until Milo knifed the dwarf a lot, and Iledove cut the head off a dwarf so fast that his beard stayed frozen to his chest, and his head rolled away.
The other dwarfs got scared and turned invisible, but Testikles screamed and squealed and snatched up the dwarf head and swung it round and round by the hair so blood went everywhere. Everyone was sprayed with dwarf blood, and even the invisible dwarfs couldn’t hide and Alea dropped down from the roof and stabbed one with an arrow and Milo held the smiling dwarf with the knife in him and told him it was all over, and they smiled at each other.
There was blood everywhere.
Testikles quickly washed Skrote’s wound and put a bandage on it, but Skrote was hurt and Testikles was angry. He ran to the end of the room and there were two more little rooms, but there was nothing in them to be killed. All the other little rooms were empty too.
“Over here,” said Jeoff, from a corner of the room where he stood with Milo. The two of them had found a false wall panel and when Milo kicked it, there was a narrow, dark stone corridor behind it. Even though there had been all kinds of screaming and murdering, there was still nobody coming to find out what was wrong, so everybody quickly ducked into the little corridor.
At the end of the little corridor was a small room, made out of stone. It had a table and some more braziers. The table had a map of Icewind Dale and the Ten Towns. There was a little chardalyn dragon on a stick coming out of the table. Jeoff saw a lever by the table and pulled it. The chardalyn dragon moved around the map, going from town to town, until it came back to the place it started.
“That must be the planned route for the dragon,” Alea said. “Maybe this controls it?”
“I don’t think so,” Jeoff said. “No magic. And… well, I guess I don’t hear the dragon coming back yet either.”
“Look!” Milo pointed. He was still badly wounded, with a big hole where a dwarf had hit him with a pick. “The first town on the dragon’s path is Dougan’s Hole. That’s… that’s MY town. I’m a hero there! I have to save them!” He turned to go, but Alea grabbed him.
“Can you fly?” she said.
Milo shook his head.
“How are you gonna get there before the dragon fucks up the whole place?”
Milo’s bottom lip stuck out. He started to cry again. “I’m a hero there! Don’t you understand? They’re my people?”
“Avenge them,” said Alea. “It’s all we can do.”
Milo blinked, and perked up. “Oh, yeah. Cool!”
Jeoff snatched up the little chardalyn dragon figurine. At the other end of the room there was another door. Milo kicked it down.
“A bedroom!” Milo said. “And look! A big iron chest!”
“Hooray!” said Jeoff. He ran in and stood behind Milo as the little thief picked the padlock on the chest. Testikles and Skrote crossed the room to look in another door, but it was just a closet. The iron chest was more interesting.There was a carving of a dwarf head on the wall. And there were braziers. There were always braziers in this place.
Milo opened the chest. He brought out some stupid dwarf sandals made of obsidian. Testikles thought stone shoes would be uncomfortable, but Jeoff said they were valuable. There was also a quilted jacket sewn with gems, and it was valuable too. Milo liked it. There was a garnet beard comb set and Milo wanted that too, but Testikles pointed out that Milo didn’t grow a beard.
Then Milo cried. “I do too! I told all of you I’m the only halfling with a beard!” But he had no beard, and everyone looked at Testikles who had nearly three weeks of beard growing back after wrestling in the fireplace with the undead weird man in Dougan’s Hole.
Testikles pointed at his chin. “That is why I had to be on top when you and I pretended to be Axebeard the Dwarf,” he said to Milo. “Because I have a proper beard, and you do not.”
Milo cried even more at that. Truly, Testikles had begun to worry about Milo. He cried a lot these days, but when he wasn’t crying he was usually doing something violent or weird.
The next thing in the chest was a big hookah-pipe, made of platinum and decorated with sapphires that had stars in them. Jeoff said it was very valuable, but Testikles looked into the iron chest and saw there was nothing to smoke. What good was a pipe without weed to smoke?
In the very bottom of the chest was a leather scroll case. Jeoff got very excited. “I will take this scroll,” he said, and he grabbed the scroll case but there was a tiny little hook thing and it made a big click and then the room filled with horrible poison gas. Testikles felt sick and Skrote did too, but Milo and Jeoff looked even sicker.
When the gas cleared, Jeoff read the scroll but it was only a bunch of numbers. That was sad, so Testikles opened the closet. “Look,” he said. “There are weird things in here!”
“Hmm,” said Jeoff, between coughing and vomiting. “The seven skulls are from Illithids – what you call ‘Mind Flayers’. And the faceless naked female dwarf statue is Deep Duerra, a goddess of the Duergar.”
“Mine!” screamed Milo, grabbing up the statue which was nearly two-thirds of his height. “She will be my waifu!” He clutched the statue as if it was his girlfriend, but then he screamed again. “Noo! My brain is being eaten by an Illithid!” He staggered about the room holding the ugly statue, and fell over.
Everyone looked around.
“I don’t see any Illithids,” Testikles said.
“It’s the statue,” Jeoff said. “It’s not meant for unbelievers like Milo.”
Alea pried Milo loose from the statue very carefully. The statue sat in the middle of the bedroom floor. Alea dragged Milo away and slapped him until he sat up.
“My waifu!” Milo said, reaching for the statue.
Alea slapped his wrist. “You can have her later,” she said. “Right now we need your brain inside your skull, where it belongs.
Milo cried some more. “I can’t even go fishing here,” he said. “I’m so lonely!”
Truly, Testikles had begun to fear for Milo’s sanity.
***
Milo had lost it, and at the worst possible time. They were deep in the lair of Sunblight himself, and the little idiot was sitting on the floor, covered in blood, coughing, puking, rocking himself and crying because he couldn’t have sex with an astonishingly ugly statue that tried to kill his brain when he touched it.
Insane.
Alea watched as Iledove knelt by the little thief. “You’re all kinds of wounded,” said the paladin. “Why don’t you let me help you?”
“No!” snapped Milo, pushing at her. “Go way! Don’t wanna!”
Jeoff sighed. Alea pulled him aside, and spoke quietly. “Do you think this is… some kind of halfling thing?” she said.
The mage frowned, and scratched his chin. He was covered in blood too. Some of it was his own, but just like everyone else he wore a generous spray of dwarf-blood courtesy of Testikles’ solution to the ‘invisible dwarf’ problem. “What do you mean by that?” he said at last.
The battlemaster looked at Milo, rocking and sobbing and slapping Iledove’s hands away. Then she turned and looked at Testikles, singing gently to his enormous pig which was every bit as blood-coated as everyone else. “A halfling thing,” she said. She pointed at Milo. “That one shits everywhere, cries about everything, and if we left him alone he’d probably murder half the Ten Towns.” She pointed at Testikles. “That one is blood-brother to a pig, fights buck-naked with a raging gods-damned boner, and can’t even fucking well find his own way home!” Alea put her hands on her hips. “Are all halflings this fucked up? Or are we just exceptionally fucking lucky?”
The look of alarm on Jeoff’s blood-bedewed face brought Alea back to herself. She sighed.
“Right,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just… this is so very much the wrong time for Milo to go off the rails. What are we going to do?”
Jeoff shrugged. “Find someone else he can kill,” he said. “It makes him happy, and after all, that’s why we’re in this filthy place.”
Yes. Of course. Find someone else for the little psychopath to kill. Sometimes Alea woke up late at night, alone in the dark, unable to sleep for wondering what would happen if they ran out of people for Milo to kill.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s see what’s through the less secret entrance to this miserable excuse for a bedroom. “And seriously? Why the fuck did Sunblight want a secret corridor between his private bedroom and the barracks? It’s obviously not an escape hatch!”
“Maybe he was shagging one of his soldiers and wanted to keep it on the low-down,” Jeoff mused. “Maybe he was shagging all of them, and none of them knew about the others!”
“Eeyeww,” said Alea. “How can it be possible that I feel even dirtier now?”
Somehow, Iledove cajoled Milo into moving again, on the promise that the ‘waifu’ would be left on the bedroom floor so he could come back for it later. And really, if they killed Sunblight and survived, would losing Milo to a brain-eating sex statue be that much of a loss? Alea knew she shouldn’t think that way, but covered in dwarf blood, stuck in a smoke-stinking stone hell-hole lit only by crappy, stinking braziers, she found it hard to be as charitable as perhaps she should.
The less secret entrance to Sunblight’s bedroom led south until it crossed the corridor Milo had rejected earlier. And why not reject it again, since that had worked out so well last time? They moved on until they came to yet another chamber, clanking with machinery, badly lit by the inevitable braziers. Oh, and arrowslits. The arrowslits looked out over the valley, but there was one that observed the entrance where the doors had mysteriously swung wide. A heavy iron lever and a winch were mounted nearby.
Alea examined the winch and the lever. “Someone here must have opened the doors in front of us,” she said.
“Yes, that’s right,” came a rough voice from a far corner of the room. A dwarf appeared in the shadowy corner, hands outstretched.
Milo shot at him. The dwarf ducked, and the crossbow bolt shattered on the stone walls.
“No, wait!” said the dwarf. “I don’t work for – ” His words vanished in magical fire as Jeoff’s bolt of flame engulfed him. He was simultaneously barbecued and exploded, and dwarf limbs rained down around the room.
“Great,” said Alea. “Just great. What do you think he might have been trying to tell us?”
Jeoff blew across the tip of his shooting finger, and shrugged.
“There is another person-lifting-device here,” Testikles said, standing by a chunk of machinery in the middle of the room. “It goes deeper into the fortress. I will use the Axe of Ashrem to destroy the chains. That way whoever is below will not sneak up this way behind us when we move on.”
“You do that,” Alea said. “I’m going to search what’s left of that dwarf Jeoff incinerated. Maybe I can find some sort of clue.”
“It hardly matters,” Iledove said. “He was evil. They’re all evil. There is only one way to deal with them in the end.”
Testikles set to work immediately, making a ferocious noise. It took a few minutes, but he chopped through the iron chains and destroyed the elevator workings. Unfortunately, Alea was less successful. She tracked down all of the dwarf’s annihilated body parts and went through what was left of his clothes and gear, but there was no clue to be found. Another room which came off the elevator chamber was even less helpful: arrowslits, empty stone slab desk, chair, long-extinguished brazier.
“Somebody’s making money on these braziers,” Jeoff remarked, poking the cold ash in the bottom of the iron-bellied thing with his staff. “That would be a nice contract to get.” He wandered back out into the elevator room, stood over the shaft of the smashed-up elevator, and fumbled with his robes.
“What are you doing?”said Alea.
“What’s it look like?” Jeoff arched his back, pushed his hips forward, and a yellow stream arced from his crotch into the elevator shaft. He waggled his hips back and forth happily to make sure he sprayed the greatest area possible down below – whatever that was. “Cop that, Sunblight,” he said, tucking his wang back into the folds of the robe.
Nice.
Annoyed, still covered in blood, still stinking of smoke and filth and barbecued dwarf, Alea stalked back up to the crossing, and took the right-hand turn this time. Some distance along, she came to another cross-corridor of sorts. The door to the south simply opened onto the shaft that they’d firebombed and poisoned at the outset, judging from the smell. The north doors, though… She crept closer, hoping to hear something of what might be on the other side.
Naturally, Milo screamed and kicked the doors wide open.
***
Jeoff looked over Alea’s shoulder into what was surely a kitchen and a dining area, for he saw three duergar against the far wall, messing around with stoves. And not far from the end of the room was a table where a single, older duergar female sat, gobbling down a mass of roasted meats and mushrooms and other less identifiable things. As the echoes of Milo’s scream died away, the cooks dropped their equipment and dived for weapons, but the old woman said something Jeoff didn’t quite catch in what was probably Undercommon. The cooks stood, watching the door uncertainly. The old duergar, bundled up in a mass of tatty furs, wiped her mouth and smiled.
“You took your time,” she said, in passable Common. “Did you want something to eat?”
“Creature of evil!” cried Iledove from somewhere behind. “Your doom is nigh!”
“That is possible,” conceded the old duergar. “But hear me out, for I feel that we have more in common than you might imagine.”
Seated on a chair next to her was a remarkable construct. At first, Jeoff had thought it was a chardalyn sculpture of a dragon, but then it moved restlessly, lifting its reptilian head to gaze at Jeoff and the others. Its wings rose and flapped, and it rocked back onto its hind legs.
“That is a wonderful thing,” Jeoff said. “How did you come by such a marvel?”
“Don’t trust her! She’s eeeevil!” squeaked Iledove, jumping up and down to try and see past Jeoff and Alea. Mister Bear rumbled an anxious counterpoint.
“I prefer to think we’re just differently motivated,” said the ancient mass of stringy grey hair and wrinkles. “But where are my manners? I am Grandolpha Mutzgar, paramour of Xardorok Sunblight.”
“I do not know that word ‘paramour’,” Testikles said.
“It means she’s fucking him,” Milo put in. “We should probably kill her too.”
“Wait!” said Grandolpha, holding up a hand. “The thing is, Sunblight’s gone mad. He’s been messing around with that chardalyn stuff so long it’s addled him. I mean – he wants to conquer Icewind Dale!”
“Yes,” Jeoff said. He ventured into the room and took a seat next to the little chardalyn dragon construct. “What’s with that, anyhow? Why is he so keen on conquering…”
“A total shit-hole,” Milo said.
“A useless place full of sad, useless people,” Testikles said.
“A frozen hell full of inbreds and imbeciles,” Alea suggested.
“Not really a very good place,” Iledove finished.
By now, all had entered the room except for Mister Bear and Skrote the Pig, who fretted in the corridor outside.
“My point exactly,” Grandolpha said. “I haven’t the faintest idea why he’s obsessed with the Ten Towns and Icewind Dale, and frankly, I don’t care. This is an arranged marriage anyway. It’s about unifying our two clans, making them stronger together, supposedly. But I’ve seen enough. Xardorok tortures and harasses the people he’s working with – the people he’s supposed to lead. I want nothing to do with him.” She motioned to one of the cooks, and gave an order in her guttural native tongue. The cook hurried over and cut a sizable pile of slices from one of the odder-looking roasts. Grandolpha licked her lips. “My favourite,” she said. “Intellect Devourer. You sure you won’t have any? Goes down a treat with the mushroom drink my clan makes!”
Milo took a seat. After a moment, Testikles did too. The pair fell on the nasty-looking food, gobbling like their lives depended on it. Alea turned pale and looked away. Iledove looked sick.
Halflings stuffing themselves didn’t seem worth noticing to Jeoff. Instead, he turned his attention to the dragon construct. “This is amazing,” he said. “The workmanship!”
“Xardorok is good at that kind of thing,” Grandolpha said. “He gave it to me in the early part of the whole arranged-marriage thing. Personally, I think it’s ugly. I’d happily give it to you, but he had the thing attuned to me and it won’t leave.”
“Damn,” said Jeoff. He straightened up. “All right,” he said. “So you don’t support Sunblight. And you don’t want to fight us. What do we get out of it?”
Grandolpha’s glittering gaze swept the group. “You must be strong,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have got this far. But there aren’t many of you, are there?”
“Enough,” grunted Testikles. “As many have already discovered.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” said Grandolpha. “Here’s my offer: in this fortress, many are Sunblight but near as many are Mutzgar, and loyal to me. Kill Sunblight. Take anything you want. Leave me and my people alone. In return we will not help Sunblight against you, and afterwards we will take no action against Icewind Dale or the Ten Towns.”
“Stop Sunblight’s dragon,” Alea said. “Prove your good faith by saving the people of the Ten Towns.”
The old dwarf shrugged. “If I could, I wouldn’t hesitate. But Sunblight’s creation operates on pre-set orders. It is as much machine as it is dragon. It will do what he has told it to do. The only way to stop it is to destroy it.” She shovelled a mound of mystery meat into her mouth and chomped greedily. Juices ran down her chin, glistening in the wrinkles.
Alea folded her arms. “Not much of a deal,” she said.
“It’s the one on the table,” said Grandolpha. “As much of Xardorok’s treasure as you can carry, and only half the enemies to kill.” She smiled. “Of course, if it doesn’t appeal, I suppose we can always start right now. Find out what you’re really made of, eh?”
She seemed alarmingly confident. Jeoff wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“I don’t fear you, fiend,” Iledove said. “I am a loyal servant of the mighty Helm. In his light, I fear no evil!”
Alea took her aside and whispered to her.
Jeoff considered the situation. “What about afterwards?” he said. “What happens then?”
“You go. You don’t come back. We have nothing more to do with one another.” Grandolpha put out a hand. “Deal?”
After a moment, Jeoff nodded. “Fewer enemies, plus all the goodies we can carry. That’s acceptable.”
“She’s evil!” snapped Iledove.
“That’s probably true,” said Jeoff. “But she’s taken quite the risk. She knew we were coming, and she waited here to meet us.”
“We should kill her now,” Iledove said. “That’s what you do with evil.”
Jeoff looked around, but it was clear the rest of the bunch was happy with Grandolpha’s proposal. Good enough. “We’re in,” he told the old duergar.
“Excellent,” she said. “I’ll tell my people. Now – unless you want more food, I suggest you get moving. Sunblight’s down below. The longer you leave him to his own devices, the more likely it is he’ll build some crack-ass chardalyn monster from hell to kill you with.”
That seemed the moment to leave. Jeoff stood up, but Alea apparently had other ideas.
“How would we be getting down there, where Sunblight is?” she said.
Grandolpha shrugged. “There’s a couple of elevators. They’re constantly moving. Take one. Or both. I don’t care.”
Jeoff and Alea looked at each other.
“Where’s the back-up route?” Jeoff said. “You know. In case the elevators got damaged or something.”
The old dwarf looked at him like he was crazy. “Who’d damage the elevators? They’re the only way between the levels?”
“Just suppose something happened to them,” Alea said. “There’s a secret back-up, right?”
“No,” snorted Grandolpha. “If something happened to them, Sunblight’s people would fix them. That’s what they do.” She frowned at them.
“Hmm,” said Jeoff.
“Nearest elevator is just back up the corridor, in a guardroom watching the entrance. One of my boys is in charge there. In fact, I think he opened the door for you.” Grandolpha preened herself, patting her horrid, stringy hair into place. “See the benefits of co-operation?”
“Hmm,” said Alea.
“Right then,” Jeoff said. “We’ll be off.”
Given that both elevators were so much trash and spare parts, Jeoff decided not to accept Grandolpha’s word for the lack of alternative access. The group continued on down the corridor past the dining room until they found a crossing. A boring, ordinary, featureless stone door ended each of the three possible directions.
“Would it have killed them to put up some kind of signs?” Jeoff said.
“They know their way around,” said Alea. “Signs only help potential invaders.”
“Also, they’re evil, put in Iledove. “They like it when people are confused. They like it even more when people accidentally enter dangerous areas like forges and get burnt. It makes them happy.”
Jeoff felt the paladin’s definition of evil needed a degree of investigation and unpacking, but clearly this wasn’t the time. He pointed to the northern door, purely at random. “Milo?”
Milo yelped happily, and kicked the door in.
The interior was a bit disappointing. The inevitable braziers were there, but they weren’t lit. Operating from the uncertain light of the doorway, Jeoff saw… a stone bed. (Because dwarves, that’s why.) Oh – and also a stone trunk. That was promising. Jeoff strode over to investigate. Milo squeaked, and scuttled over as well. Much to Jeoff’s surprise, though, as he closed on the trunk it… shifted? Warped? Changed shape?
The top opened into a really big fucking mouth, and it growled.
“Oh, joy!” said Milo, with tears in his eyes. “My dreams have come true! A mimic! I shall love him, and keep him, and feed him, and he will be my very own best friend, and –”
The mimic lunged at Jeoff, but Alea shot it several times, and it scuttled back to the darker part of the room.
Milo jumped in front of it and held up his hands. “No! No! No!” he shouted. “Wait! Let me –”
Jeoff shot the mimic with a firebolt. It moaned, and screamed.
“Stop hurting him!” screamed Milo.
“For Thrund!” roared Testikles, bounding past with the Axe of Ashrem upraised. As Milo screamed and the mimic wailed, the Axe of Ashrem swept out in a vicious arc, and the lid of the ‘chest’ flew off, bouncing around the room until it settled and lost its shape on the floor, becoming… something.
“Noooooooo!” screamed Milo, sinking to his knees. “Mimicky! Noooooo!”
“Interesting,” said Jeoff. He investigated the remnants of the box part of the mimic/trunk, and right down the bottom he found a shred of paper. There was a crude, childish drawing on it which depicted a big, smiling box next to a disturbingly deformed stick-man with an equally depraved smile. Written above the picture in large, clumsy dwarf-runes were the words ‘Durth Loves Boxy’. Jeoff held it up for the others to see.
“So… it was Durth’s pet?” said Alea, after a moment.
Jeoff thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “After due consideration, I believe that is more likely than the scenario that first came to mind…”
“Eeeyewww!” said Iledove.
While Alea and Iledove tried to console and cajole Milo into a semblance of sanity, Jeoff got out his sharpest knife. Even a mimic had to have organs, he felt, and sure enough after some probing and slicing, he found a whole bunch of oddly-shaped squishy things that were vaguely connected. Definitely worthy of study. He also took a big swatch of mimic skin. That had to carry valuable information, didn’t it?
Back at the crossways, the eastern door gave onto another sad, empty little bedroom, except the walls were covered in mounted heads – hunting trophies, by the look. Nasty, moth-eaten things they were, too. The trunk – which Jeoff gave a solid kicking before allowing Milo to open it – held a jug of wine, a drinking horn, and a bit of leather with a charcoal sketch of a frowning, nasty-looking duergar woman on it.
“What in the hells do you suppose this is?” Jeoff said, showing off the charcoal portrait.
“Masturbation fantasies for sure,” said Iledove. “If the other room was Durth’s, then this one is probably Nildar’s. He was evil too. Exactly the sort to be enmired in the sin of masturbation.” She took another look at the sketch, and put her nose in the air. “Gross!”
“What do the little runes at the bottom say?” Alea said, leaning in close.
“Hmm,” said Jeoff. “Let me get closer to one of the braziers outside… wait. Oh. Yes.” He chuckled. “Dwarf-runes. They spell ‘Mother’, in Undercommon.”
“Aww,” said Alea. “There you go. He had a picture of his mother!”
“Of his mother?” gasped Iledove. “Eeyew! Eeyew! Eeeyew! That just makes it worse!”
Alea and Jeoff looked at each other…
The last of the three rooms, to the south, turned out to be some kind of training facility. It had the usual braziers, but there were also suits of armour and a bunch of those crappy wood-and-hessian dummies that warrior-types were always bullying. The armour was dwarf stuff and didn’t look any too special. Probably not even worth looting as they left. There were also some arrowslits, so at least there was a little light to go with the glow of the braziers. Annoyingly, the centre of the room was occupied by a sort of cage/shaft arrangement that was full of jammed, mangled bits of machinery.
“I suppose that normally this would have been an elevator,” Jeoff said. He poked at the machinery. It wobbled about in the shaft, clanking forlornly.
“Yeah,” said Milo. “Judging by the location, this is the one I fucked up at the start, when I sneaked through the arrowslits on the top level. Did a good job there, eh?”
“Great,” said Jeoff. “Peachy.” He sighed, and sat down. “That’s it,” he said, consulting his notes. “I believe we have investigated the entirety of this level of the fortress. Grandolpha spoke truly. The only access in either direction is… was the two elevators.”
Testikles sat down, and patted the floor to encourage Skrote to flop down as well. “We climb the shaft, then,” he said. “No worse than we’ve done before.”
“Still,” said Iledove, “This is probably, like, a bit of a nudge from Helm.” Everyone stared at her, so she cleared her throat and went on. “Well, we know Sunblight is down there. And if he gets the elevators fixed, we’ll know about that quick enough. So… maybe now we take a little bit of time to rest and prepare?” Her face hardened, and her voice turned shrill. “And maybe get all this fucking dwarf blood off?”
Jeoff nodded. For once, Iledove had a very good point.
The Last Bastion 