The Dungeoneers

by Jeffery Russell

  The Dungeoneers

  By Jeffery Russell

  The Dungeoneers, Copyright 2015 Jeffery Russell.

  All Rights Reserved.

  The right of Jeffery Russell to be identified as the

  Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  With the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

  Table of Contents

  Characters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Afterword

  Dramatis Pumilio

  The Dungeoneers:

  Command Team

  Thud: Leader of The Dungeoneers.

  Ginny: Leader of Trap Team.

  Nibbly: Leader of Acquisitions Team.

  Gong: Leader of Vanguard Team.

  Trap Team

  Mungo: Gadgeteer. Beard of suspicious provenance.

  Cardamon: Engineer.

  Acquisitions Team

  Dadger Ben: Public relations and requisitions.

  Leery: Inaccessible asset recovery.

  Tuft: Carrier of particularly heavy things.

  Support Team

  Goin: Animal wrangler.

  Gammi: Cook.

  Doc: Medical services.

  Vanguard Team

  Clink: Siege weaponry.

  Rasp: Blacksmith.

  Grottimus: Special weapons and tactics.

  Keezix: Tactical weapons and tactics.

  Max: No one is quite sure what Max does.

  Specialists

  Gryngo: Demolitions.

  Giblets: Geologist.

  Ping: Logistics.

  Dramatis Personae

  Ruby: A senior scribe of the Athenaeum.

  Durham: A city guard of Karthor.

  Farmer Radish: An onion farmer.

  Dramatis Fae

  Serril: A wood elf who would like to apologize to linguists for his section title.

  -1-

  “Moles on a spit!” Gammi said as he handed Durham a skewer. Durham had his mouth half open before the words caught up to his brain.

  “Ermmm...what?”

  “Classic dwarven dish. Very traditional,” the dwarf said. His bald head gleamed under the noon sun and his beard seemed to have acquired as many ingredients as the lunch. “Stuffed ‘em with diced-up wormies, just like me Elder used to,” he whispered theatrically at a volume precisely calculated to make sure everyone heard. “That's me secret ingredient. Don't tell!”

  “My lips are sealed,” Durham said. He gave the moles another look and closed his mouth tightly to demonstrate.

  There was a sound from across the knoll that resembled a coughing goat. Durham realized it was what passed for Thud's notion of laughter.

  “Not what ye was expecting for lunch, eh?” Thud said.

  “Well, I...” He glanced helplessly at Ruby, hoping for some help. She was a scribe and had more experience with dwarves than the six hours that Durham had acquired. He’d assumed that, as a fellow human, she would make an effort to be some sort of cultural ambassador to help him survive past lunch. Ruby’s current interpretation of being helpful seemed to be a silent smirk. She was perched on a stump in the shade of the oak that crowned the hill, scribbling in her journal as usual. Probably making note of the dwarven secret recipe for worm-stuffed moles on a spit, complete with sketches and charts. She also, he noticed, had bread and cheese—two things conspicuously absent among what the dwarves were eating. They'd been told meals would be provided but Ruby, apparently, had been wise enough to be skeptical. With age came wisdom, the saying went. Based on that, Ruby had an enormous quantity of it. The impression could be belied by the half dozen feathers she had sticking out of the gray bun of her hair. Durham had initially thought she was one of those people that dressed to try to look like one of the fae but eventually he’d realized they were extra quills.

  Thud made his way through the scattered groups of dwarves and plopped down on the grass next to him. Somehow he made the action grandiose. The dwarf always seemed to move and act as if he were standing on a stage. He looked the part, with a curled waxed mustache, crisp black kilt and colorful layers of shirts and vest beneath a long black coat with tails. Thud reached out and took the skewer from Durham's unresisting grasp, navigated it past his mustache and happily sank his teeth into it.

  “It's like this, lad,” he said, wiping mole juice off of his chin with his sleeve. “What's yer favorite food?”

  Durham paused, having not expected a direct question after an explanatory lead-in.

  “Well, sausage, I guess. And cheese,” he added, casting a longing glance toward Ruby's wedge. She scooted the cheese closer to herself without looking up from her journal.

  Thud nodded.

  “Aye, aye. Fine choices I'm sure.” He chewed his mole thoughtfully. “Cheese, where you takes liquid from a cow lady's business parts, mix it with a bit o' juices from a baby cow's fourth stomach and then let it grow all fuzzy-moldy for a few years, eh?”

  “I suppose...” Durham said, not having really thought about how cheese was made before.

  “And sausage,” Thud continued, “where you takes all the bits with the tubes and orifices and grinds 'em up together. Then you takes an intestine, squeeze the turds out of it and stuffs the ground-up tubey bits in.”

  Durham actually had seen sausage made once but had heretofore successfully repressed the memory.

  “Have you ever had a bananer?” Thud asked

  “Banana,” Ruby corrected. Thud ignored her.

  Durham shook his head, figuring that since he had no idea what Thud was talking about that 'no' was a pretty safe answer.

  “Fruit from down in Akama. S'like a yeller boomeroo, kinda, except round and sometimes it's red or green.”

  Durham mentally fished through that sentence for a bit.

  “Boomeroo?” he decided on, response-wise.

  “Kangarang?” Thud muttered to himself. “Don't recollect exactly. Looks like a crescent moon. Comes back at ya when you throws it.”

  “The moon? Or the banana?”

  Thud narrowed his eyes at him as if speculating on his intelligence.

  “Boomerang,” Ruby said. Thud ignored her.

  “No matter,” he went on. “Me point is that you never ate one so it can't be your favorite food, now, can it?”

  “No!” Durham said, happy to finally have an answer he was sure of.

  “Your favorite food is sausage and cheese. Why?”

  “They...they taste good?”

  “So do bananers but they ain't your favorite. Why ain't you never had one?”

  “Well, I don't live in Akama, I guess.”

  “Precisely!” Thud beamed at him as if an important point had been made. He frowned after a second or two as it became obvious that Durham had missed whatever that point had been.

  “I'm trying to explain cuisine to you, lad. Work with me here.” There was an edge of exasperation in his voice. “You have
cows and pigs where you’re from, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have sausage and cheese. You don't have nanner trees though so you ain't had one o' those. Where you live determines your cuisine, is me point.”

  “Right.” Durham felt like he'd finally caught up to at least part of the conversation.

  “Now, where do dwarves live?”

  “In the Hammerfell Mountains, in Kheldurn.” Durham answered. Several of the other dwarves promptly adopted slightly misty-eyed expressions.

  “Yes! Literally IN the bleeding mountain.” Thud said, jabbing enthusiastically with his finger, presumably in the direction of Kheldurn. “Think we has cows or pigs or nanner trees down there?”

  “No?” Durham guessed.

  “What we has is moles and worms and shroomies. Fungis and lichens. Wiggly white fish, bats and bugs.” He waved his skewered mole demonstratively, much of which he'd somehow managed to consume through the conversation. “So this right here? Fine example of dwarven cuisine, this is.”

  “Obliged!” Gammi called out. He was under the great oak, chopping more worms.

  “Some o' the things I've eaten across the world...well, make ya right happy for a mole on a stick,” Thud said.

  “You must travel a lot,” Durham quickly commented, hoping to change the subject before Thud could launch into a discourse on things he'd eaten in foreign lands.

  “Ah, yeh,” Thud said, taking the bait. “Comes with the job, don't it?”

  “I thought this was a one-time thing.”

  “Well, no. That's why we was hired. Experience, see. Your king didn't tell ya much, did he?”

  “Erm, no.” That was one way of putting it, Durham thought. Not only had he not yet ascertained the purpose or destination of the expedition he hadn't even been aware that the king had anything to do with it. Just a message from an assistant vizier, delivered via scrawny pageboy. 'Report courtyard, tomorrow, dawn. Accompany dwarven expedition. Assume several weeks. Food provided. Bring a hat.” He hadn't realized that the expedition was comprised of dwarves rather than being a human expedition to visit the dwarves until he'd arrived in the courtyard and seen them all, grubby and brown, beards bristling, bustling around in their pleated black kilts with their oxbear teams hitched to elaborate wagons. Plus Ruby, of course, who, while human, wasn’t much larger than the dwarves but managed to stand out by wearing a robe the same color as her name. The Athenaeum always managed to have a scribe on hand whenever anything interesting seemed like it might happen. Durham avoided scribes, figuring that “interesting” was not a word that was necessarily synonymous with “pleasant”. He hadn’t given the specifics of the message much thought, choosing instead to be stunned that he’d gotten the message at all. It had been a glimmer of hope, a chance.

  “So, you do this sort of thing often?” Durham asked, trying to be vague regarding how little he knew about what exactly they were, in fact, doing.

  “It’s our job, lad. We're The Dungeoneers!” Thud proclaimed. He gave his chest a thump. “Need something recovered from down deep in some rotten hole? We're the lads to get it for ya.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Artifacts, man, artifacts! See, no king worth his pointy hat wants some blasted relic laying around where any pig farmer can stumble in, pick it up and, say, overthrow the kingdom. Not good for stability. Take our last job, over in Iskae. The Horn of Ganadahn. Blow into the thing and anything for about a mile in front of ya gets blasted flat. You think the king of Iskae wanted that in anyone's hands other than his? Not by a long shot.”

  “So…you're adventurers?”

  Thud snorted. “Hells, no. Can't abide adventure. 'Adventure' is a word people use to put a shine on lack of preparation and surviving through dumb luck. We're professionals and that means we leave the adventure out of it.”

  “So, we’re headed to somewhere dangerous, then, to recover some powerful magic thing?”

  Thud squinted at him for a bit, the question of Durham’s intelligence apparently still unresolved. Even Ruby stopped writing long enough to spare an incredulous look. Thud reached into his breast pocket and pulled out one of the 'cigar' things that he seemed to always have in his mouth whenever he wasn't putting moles into it. As best Durham could tell it was bits of dried leaves rolled up in a larger dry leaf that the dwarf would then light on fire and put in his mouth. This was naturally followed by sporadic coughing and smoke seeping out of his head. Durham hadn't managed to determine the purpose of this yet but had decided it must be of great benefit in order to put up with a head full of smoke.

  Thud pulled a branch from the fire and pressed the glowing tip to his cigar, puffing at it until blue smoke began seeping from the corners of his mouth. He blew out a long stream then scratched thoughtfully at his tangle of beard. He had long fingers for a dwarf, adorned with silver rings.

  “We’re heading to the Crypt of Alaham to recover the Mace of Guffin. Figured you'd be more in the know, what with being the Vault Keeper and all...” he said.

  Durham's stomach fell as a few pieces clicked together in his head.

  “I'm...I'm not the Vault Keeper. That would be Dorham. We get mixed up on occasion. I'm just Durham the guard.”

  Thud let out a low, smoky whistle. Then he grinned.

  “Well, looks like you're in for a bit o' adventure then, eh?”

  -2-

  Durham had started the morning with a helmet that smelled of onions. It wasn’t an uncommon problem, as many of the night shift guards used the helmets as soup bowls and, particularly if it was an end of the shift meal, weren’t especially diligent about rinsing them out afterward. Finishing a shift with a gob of porridge glued into your hair or an errant pea or two behind your ears was just part of the price you paid for being a guard. The other part of the price was the two copper thumbs a day helmet rental fee and one more for a truncheon. Technically both articles of equipment were optional. Reality, however, was otherwise inclined. Without the stick no one took your orders very seriously. Without the official guard helmet you were just a guy with a stick and there were plenty enough of those to go around already. Then there was the thumb a day meal fee, another to put in the dented milk can that sat next to the coffee urn and three more for a bunk in the barracks. Their pay was a silver talon a day but the paymaster didn’t even carry talons as far as Durham knew. He just showed up with a sack of copper thumbs, deducted your expenses and gave you your change, minus an additional thumb for administrative expenses.

  Durham had been punctual, as always, when he arrived at the caravan. It was a lesson his adopted father had driven in to him. If you aren't where you're supposed to be then the things that are supposed to happen to you are going to happen to someone else, he'd always said.

  In Durham's experience, many of those things were of the sort that he'd have rather happened to someone else but he was still in the habit of punctuality. In this instance he was in agreement with his father. This was an opportunity, the first he’d had in years, and he had no intention of sleeping through it. He’d spent far more time in a dead-end guard posting than he was comfortable admitting to himself and now, at last, he had a chance to show his worth.

  The castle courtyard was already bustling at sunrise with activity of the sort that the nobility expected to have done before they awakened and carried out by the sort of people who didn't have much say in the amount of sleep they got. Woodsmoke hung low in the still dawn air and maids with yokes of steaming water skillfully pinwheeled their way through a stream of scullions rolling ale casks and barrels of potatoes and onions through the puddles and mud. The caravan he was to accompany had been pretty obvious in the midst of the bustle but the dwarves had rather surprised him. It was about four times as many dwarves as the sum total he'd seen in his life. He'd approached the wagons tentatively.

  “What's your business, sir?” a dwarf asked as he neared. He had little round spectacles, a long narrow beard with a mustache and a large green turban with a
blue jewel at the front. He was carrying a scroll nailed to a board, allowing him to write on it as he strutted around. It lent him an air of administrative authority as effectively as a stick and a helmet provided guard authority.

  “Durham reporting for duty, sir. I've received orders to accompany the caravan.”

  “Right then,” the dwarf said. He squinted at the scroll, muttering. “Durham…quantity: one.” He made a check-mark. “I’m Nibbly. Welcome to the company.” He gestured toward the wagons. “On ya go.” He began yelling orders at other dwarves, apparently of the opinion that Durham had received sufficient instruction.

  The wagons were unlike any Durham had seen before. Or, rather, they were like different types of wagons he’d seen but combined in a strange hybridization. Each was unique, seemingly designed for specialized purposes and then further customized by whichever dwarves were associated with it. Some were of wood, some of metal. Several had multiple levels, complete with balconies and cupolas. Smokestacks on a few, spikes on others, some open, some enclosed, some plain, some brightly painted in blues and greens and yellows like nomad wagons. A woman sat on one of them. She wore a wide cone hat, a deep red robe and the black cassock that marked her as a scribe. It was one of the more ordinary looking wagons, full of grain sacks, but with a row of trunks and bins ringing the exterior. The scribe was alternating between casting an appraising eye at what was being loaded onto the wagons and writing in a journal, likely recording her observations. Durham had once seen a stall at a street festival selling dolls with heads made from dried apples. The woman on the wagon would have fit right in amongst them, raisin eyes in a wrinkled apple head. Durham climbed up next to her.

  “Racist,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Ten wagons to choose from and you pick the only one that has a human on it. Racist.”

  “I...uh...I don't speak Kheldurn,” Durham fumbled.

  She grinned at him. “Just bumping your quill. I’m Ruby.” She offered a wizened hand for Durham to shake.