by Lee Duckett
“Eww! Why?” Fayne objected.
“Ta prank me mum,” Rurik explained, as if it were obvious.
There was a pause as Aria drew near. “Fine. But only because you saved my life.”
There was the sound of coughing mixed with a bit of gagging as Badger’s wife walked up to him. “That all of them?” he asked, mostly to cover the noise.
Aria nodded, walking past him. “If there are more, we can take them,” she stated with authority, turning to corner. “What are you two doing?” she demanded.
Peering around his wife, he saw Rurik, now normal sized, sitting next to Fayne. The archer was trying to stop coughing, her expression twisted up in disgust. “I was just givin’ her some dwarven smellin’ salts,” he explained. “A little bit woke her up, so I thought a bit more might help her get the rest o’ the way!”
“That’s not how smelling salts work,” she informed him, a bit of condescension creeping into her tone. She stood in front of them, and frowned, sniffing. “Rurik, did you give your cousin’ alcohol?”
He shrugged, “What did ya think I was talkin’ about? Biscuits?”
“Rurik Balderk! You can’t give your cousin alcohol, she’s sixteen!” she reprimanded.
“One-hundred and fifteen,” the elf in question wheezed. “I’m a hundred and fifteen.”
Aria dismissed her with a wave of her hand, “Like that matters.”
“But there be two things you be forgettin’, lassie,” Rurik informed her, before Fayne could do more than cough.
The cleric put her hands on her hips, “And those are?”
“One,” he held up one finger, “We be in medieval society. There ain’t no drinkin’ age here. Two,” he held up a second finger, taking the moment to drain his magically replenishing bottle of dwarven scotch. He put his hand down and grinned at her.
“What’s your other point,” she demanded.
He just shrugged, “Don’t remember, must be drunk.”
She looked like she wanted to strangle him before she caught herself, sighing. “I’m being silly, aren’t I?” she asked, still aggravated but no longer on the edge of losing her temper.
Rurik got to his feet smoothly, not bothered by what he’d consumed in the slightest. “A bit lass, ya keep thinkin’ we’re home.” he pointed to the long hallway, the dragonfire still raging at the end. “But we’re not.”
◆◆◆
Calmed down, cleaned off, and healed up, the party was ready to move on, but the fire was still raging. “Is it worth goin’ through all these rooms?” Rurik asked, looking down the long hallway.
Fayne, quiver once again full, shrugged, “Maybe? I only looked into the first few offices, and it was all boring dwarf bureaucracy stuff.” She glanced at the dwarf of the party skeptically, “That sound interesting to you?”
“What, ya think just ‘cause I’m a dwarf I like paperwork?” he asked, grinning. “Racist.” He shook his head, “Naw, ya find blueprints or notes on forgin’ techniques, those might fetch a charmin’ copper, but most of its prolly the ‘on this day we retrieved six hundred and twenty two point eight three pounds of ore, refined two-hundred point one seven pounds of metal, and I personally left three point six five pounds of in my personal chamber pot’ kind o’ blather.”
Fayne made an expression of disgust and Rurik just laughed. “If yer runnin’ a city, that kinda stuff’s needed, well, first two at least, but some of me folk take it a wee bit too far. Useful for the city, not even worth wipin yer arse with outside of it.”
“Now there’s an idea,” Aria commented, looking at the offices with newfound consideration.
Fayne let out a long breath, unholstering her bow. “There’s only one of those things per office, so I can handle opening and clearing them.”
Behind her back Badger and Rurik shared a look, the dwarf nodding to the gnome. “I’ll help,” the wizard offered. “If there’s more than one, or if something happens, I can support you from back in the hall.” The archer nodded, thankful.
“Then we’ll be lookin’ into the rest,” Rurik offered. “Lassie, you take the rooms on the right, I’ll take the left.”
The cleric nodded, and the party got to work. Moving slowly down the corridor, each time Fayne took down a remnant, she called Aria over to put it to rest permanently. As they worked, the fires slowly died down the hall, the room gradually darkening. “Why isn’t there any smoke?” Aria asked him when they were both in the hallway. Fayne & Badger paused, stopping to listen to the answer.
“Superior dwarven engineerin’,” he shrugged. “I be sayin’ that a lot, but it don’t be makin’ it any less true. Even with the elemental powerin’ it gone, these things are built to keep the air down here breathable. That means hidden ventilation. Wee man,” he called, pointing at a point in the ceiling, “Throw a bit o’ fire there.”
Badger shrugged, murmuring under his breath to cast the spell. The fire cantrip hit the seemingly flat ceiling, the flames twisting to the side and upwards around a hidden opening. Everyone else stared in surprise as Rurik chuckled. “We’ve been figurin’ out how to hide ventilation since we dug inta our first mountain. It’ll have enough twists, grates, and drops ta keep most things from settin’ up in it, and a summoned elemental will clear anything out right quick. ‘Alf the systems probably clogged to hell and back, but there be enough redundancies in it ta still keep us puffin’ just fine fer years. By the time the smoke gets out it’ll be spread out enough ta not give away the vent’s location.”
Mollified, the group returned to their work, interrupted half an hour later when Fayne cracked open a door to find, not another office, but a hallway, the sides carved into artistic depictions of dwarves at work. “Guys?” Fayne asked.
Gathered around the doorway, the group stared down the corridor. “Alarm spell on the hallway,” Badger commented, eyes glowing. “No wards on the door, but all that means is that if it’s trapped the mechanism is buried deep, or mechanical in nature.”
Fayne nodded, creeping forward quietly. Pausing, she examined one of the carvings, taking out a dagger and a bit of chalk. Carefully nicking the carving with the blade, it seemed to spark with hidden energy; she moved to the opposite side and did the same to the other side. Talking the chalk she judged the distance, marking a corridor in the center-left of the ten-foot-wide space. “Walk here when I tell you to,” she instructed, moving forward. The two doors at the end of the hall were dark iron, interlocking designs of hammers across it, meeting in the top and forming a stylized flame.
She looked at it, taking in the tubes hidden in the designs. “Some kind of fire trap,” she commented, motioning to the tubes hidden in the patterns, “The flammable gas flows up this way so if I just disrupt this one right here. . .” With a flick of the dagger fire gouted from underneath her blade, bleeding off the gas inside. “Interesting failsafe,” she commented stiffly, the plume of flame inches from her face.
“Failsafe?” Aria asked from the doorway.
Fayne let out a sigh, “Yeah, I’ve never seen it before personally, but this was in the knowledge dump I got when I levelled up. If the line’s broken, the tube is sheathed with a thin layer of flint so the braking of it creates a spark, which sets the gas on fire. I just didn’t want to breath it in, so I cut it away from me. If you tried to break it down, the entire thing might’ve exploded. It’s fine now,” she reassured the rest. “I’ll just unlock it.”
She worked quietly, not paying much mind to the small geyser of flame by her head. A moment later the door clicked and swung open as Fayne danced backwards, immediately holstering the dagger as she readied her bow, stringing an arrow. “I didn’t open it,” she called to the party, waiting. The fire was cut off, and the inside was revealed. There was a richly appointed office, a door set in the wall behind the desk, but nothing else.
“We good ta follow ya, lass?” Rurik requested. Without taking her eyes off the office she nodded. The others passed through the opening in the wards and joined he
r, Badger’s eyes aglow. “Lingering divination, but that’s it. Something used magic in here a minute ago,” the wizard informed them.
“Is it gone?” Aria asked, trying to spot what cast the spell. “Or a mimic?”
Badger shook his head, “Mimics don’t cast spells, but it might be invisible. Part of the invisibility spell makes the traces it leaves behind invisible too. If you could spot something invisible by just using a simple Detect Magic, then it defeats the point of the spell.”
“How long does it last?” the cleric asked.
Badger shrugged, “A few minutes, unless it’s some kind of undead, in which case it could hold it forever, at least until they broke the magic by attacking.”
“That works,” Fayne replied, loosing an electric arrow into the space to crash against a wall, shattering into fragments.
“What are you doing?” Aria demanded.
She loosed another arrow, “If there’s something hiding in there, I’ll just shoot into it until it shows up. I’ve got another two hundred arrows.”
“Peace! Peace!” a high-pitched, sniveling voice called from the room.
“Imp!” Aria snarled, readying her mace.
“Armistice! Truce! Ceasefire! Parlay!” It called, panicked.
“What’s an imp?” Fayne asked. “I know what an imp is back home, but what are they here?”
“They’re the lowest rank of devil: treacherous, lawful evil beings from the Nine Hells, another plane of existence,” the cleric explained, looking like she smelled something foul.
“Hey!” it objected, “Lemures are lower than us imps!”
There was a pause. “But the rest?” Badger finally asked.
“Nah, that’s spot on,” the voice replied, sounding like it shrugged.
“Will you show yourself, coward?” Aria demanded.
“Are ya gonna shoot me?” it asked right back.
Rurik shrugged, “It’s kinda got a point.”
The aasimar was outraged. “Are you taking its side?”
“What can imps do?” Badger asked, trying to defuse another argument.
Aria glared at her son before answering the question, “Detect magic and if something is good aligned, see a bit of the future, and contact more powerful beings on other planes of existence. They fly, turn invisible at will, and have a poison stinger.”
Fayne considered this, “Okay, I won’t shoot you unless you attack us,” she called to the hidden imp.
“Fayne!” Aria chided as a small, red, humanoid figure, about the size of a cat, appeared on the desk. It had bat wings out of its back, tiny little horns, and a long tail that ended in a spade tip, the very end narrowing to a point like a snake’s fang. Otherwise it looked like a very thin, tiny, red human.
“Oh praise Moloch,” it sighed. “Knew ya weren’t all goody two-shoes. Now, can we make a deal?”
“No making deals with devils!” Aria nearly shouted. “Especially you, Rurik!”
He looked at her askance, “Well now I gotta do it. What’ve ya got in mind, wee’st of men?”
Aria looked like she wanted to charge over and kill the imp herself. “Fine! But don’t come crying to me when you don’t have a soul anymore!” she pouted, folding her arms.
“Right. . .” the imp said awkwardly. “So, I’ve been stuck here for. . . a while. Ever since my old boss, who bound me here, up and died somewhere. I just wanna get the hell out of here, so what’d’ya want? Gold? Women? Power?”
“Can ya really be givin’ us any of those?” Rurik asked skeptically. “What?” he asked at Fayne & Aria’s twin glares, “I was gonna go for power!”
“Eh,” the imp hedged, moving his tiny hands in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “Not really. I can give ya the password to the old fool’s bedroom, which has got some gold and magic items, but that’s about it.”
“Can you look into the future for us?” Fayne asked.
He shrugged, “Sorry I can only do that once a day, and I already did.”
The elf mirrored its shrug, moving to grab one of the doors. “Then we’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Wait!” it called, panicked again. “Future sight sucks, only a single question that you’d find out in the next few hours and it’s wrong a fourth of the time! Do you know how much it blows to have your future be ‘you’re gonna be stuck in this room’ over and over again for decades. And then, when it’s wrong and tells ya yer gonna get out, you’re still here. I didn’t believe it until I heard the lock click. What’d’ya want to know?”
Fayne smirked. “How do we get out of here?”
“Back down the hall, second door on your right, up the stairs, hang a right on the main tunnel and it’ll take you right out!” it told her in a rush.
“We came in through the church and can’t go back that way, and there’s been a cave-in blocking the second door on the right,” she pointed out.
“Really?” it asked plaintively. Shaking its head at her expression it started muttering to itself in a language that just felt. . . wrong. It noticed Aria’s unamused look and snapped to attention, looking at Fayne, “Okay, so, it’s not exactly clear. . .”
“Out with it,” she said, sounding unimpressed.
“Left down the hallway, straight through the scribing pool, in the meeting room you press the stones on the back wall in the symbol of Andr. . . the god of this place.” it corrected, not wanting to say the god’s holy name. “That’ll take you down to the bottom and. . . And I’ll tell you the rest when you free me.” it said, catching itself.
“We could just kill it and find the rest of the way on our own,” Aria offered idly.
Fayne looked at her incredulously, but Rurik shrugged. “Killin’ a demon-”
“Devil!” it interjected, offended.
“Killin’ somethin from the outer planes don’t really kill it unless ya be killin’ it on the plane it comes from,” the dwarf explained. “It only keeps it from comin’ back here for a hundred years, ‘nless somethin’ more powerful be callin’ it.” At the party’s incredulous looks he thrust his chin out challengingly, “What? I put a point in knowledge ‘bout the planes, since y’all have yer own stuff for identifyin’ monsters.”
“Dwarf’s got a point,” the imp said, “Killing me just gets me back home. I’d prefer ya didn’t, but you’d still be doing me a favor.”
“We could just leave him here,” Aria proposed instead. “He’s bound.”
“Unless opening the door weakened the wards, and I’ll be out here in a few years now that you’ve done so,” the evil outsider countered. “It’ll be boring years, but then I’ll be free to do whatever I see fit.”
Aria scowled, turning to her husband, “Is that true?”
He gazed at the room, trying to see the magic in the room. “. . . Maybe?” he offered. “I don’t know that much about binding devils, and I wasn’t planning on doing that so I skipped that class to take another course on illusions.” Aria obviously wanted to be upset with his lack of knowledge, but couldn’t argue with his reasons.
“Gnome illusionist? Not really helpin’ the stereotype there,” the imp critiqued.
“Yer not really ‘elpin’ your case, little red,” Rurik commented. It just shrugged, hands up in a ‘what can you do’ gesture.
“Do they hold to deals?” Fayne asked.
Aria looked at her askance, “I’m not telling you how to make deals with devils.”
The elf just shrugged, “Then I’ll just do it blind.”
“Yes,” the cleric ground out. “They keep to the word of deals, not the spirit.”
“Thanks!” the elf chirped, turning to face the imp, tapping her chin as she thought. “Here’s the deal,” she finally said, “I break you out, you tell us, within five minutes of breaking whatever is holding you and in a way we can hear, how to get out and what’s waiting for us, and also for the next five years you do good, as defined by the standards of the greater populace of the location you are in and in a way that you cannot easily undo. If y
ou find yourself on another plane, the timer stops until you return to this plane of existence. Deal?”
The imp was smiling until the last sentence, whereupon its expression fell. “Didn’t take you for one of those stupid moral types. Fine. Deal.”
There was a flash of red light and the smell of sulfur. “The deal has been struck, and so it shall be held, on pain of revocation of the terms,” it drawled out from route memory. “Blah, blah, blah, now go grab the red and bronze book with the holy symbol on it, grab the carving inside, and break it! The sooner I get done being good,” it spat, as if it were speaking about gargling sewer water, “the sooner I can go back to having fun.”
Ignoring Aria’s muttered imprecations on her character, Fayne moved inside and extracted the indicated tome. Opening it, the book was hollowed out, a locked box inside. As she moved to sit at the desk to open it the imp flew in front of her. “No, don’t!” At her raised eyebrow it explained, “Seat’s trapped if you’re not a dwarf. As is the door to the bedroom. And the bed inside. Dude never had any fun. Visitor seats are fine.”
“Thank you,” she smiled, causing the devil to look like it sucked on a lemon. Sitting down, Rurik right behind her, she examined the lockbox, finding and defusing the rune trap before unlocking it. Inside was an obsidian carving of an imp whose eyes glowed with infernal light.
“That’s it,” the imp called, squatting down on the desk to look at it, trying to reach out for it, but hitting an invisible barrier. “Now break it,” the creature instructed, flying back to perch on a bookcase.
As she picked it up, preparing to smash it on the desk Badger called, “No! Throw it and hit it with an arrow. It might explode!”
“Spoilsport,” the imp muttered, watching as she stood up and did just that, tossing it up into the middle of the room and striking it with an electrified arrow. The carving did explode in a ball of dark red flame, consumed completely in hellfire.
The party looked at the imp expectantly and it promptly disappeared. From somewhere in the center in the room it spoke in Draconic “I promised to tell you, not that you could understand it! It’s your fault you stupid mortals never specified a language! I’ve been doin’ this since long before your twiggy little self was born, knife ears! Right, instructions. You don’t tap the back wall of the meeting room in the pattern of the dwarven god of magic, you tap the left wall, but only after turning the centerpiece completely around twice clockwise, once counterclockwise, and three times clockwise again. What lies down there I’m not sure exactly, and you didn’t specify that I had to know either, but all signs point to it being some kind of dragon living in the water reserves. There’s a tunnel in the water reserves that leads to the swamps outside the mountain, but you’ll need the water breathing potions in the bedroom. Password is ‘builders are the foundation, crafters are only artists’ in dwarven, hellfire my last master was a pretentious douchenozzle. Any non-dwarf needs to be lead in by hand or else the wards go off, even with the password. Have fun suckers, I’m gonna go to the Helvetian Islands!”