by Lee Duckett
“We’re bloody rich! Oi!” Rurik exclaimed as Fayne grabbed one of the coins and tossed it at him, bouncing it off his helmet. “What’d you do that. . . for,” he trailed off, leaning down and picking up the projectile, turning it over in his hands.
At first all he’d seen was shiny, coins, and thousands, but now that he examined it he saw it wasn’t gold, or even silver, but copper. They shone like they’d been freshly polished, or cleaned with acid, he realized, taking a seat on a small pile of money. He eyeballed the piles at around eleven thousand coins, give or take a few hundred. “The toe-ring ya took off that melanistic gator was worth more than all o’ this, ain’t it,” he grumbled.
She nodded, having taken out a ration from her bag, and tossing him another one. “Not even worth taking for more than pocket change. They’re just looking for magic, not much for us to do.”
“Fayne!” the wizard called. “I’ve got something for you to do! I found something, and I need your help to unlock it!”
“. . . or not,” she said, putting down the bundle of pre-packed food and not meeting the grinning dwarf’s eye. She sauntered over to Badger, who had uncovered a metal box that had been covered in the center of its pile.
“I didn’t see any magical traps, but I figured it’d be better if you looked at it,” he said, motioning to the pure black box unnecessarily.
She kneeled down, picking it up carefully and turning it over in her hands. “Nothing external,” she narrated, slipping out her tools and probing the lock. “No traps in the lock, and it’s only three tumblers. The locks on the office doors were worse.” With a few twists it clicked open. Inside was a wand, though it looked odd.
The one they’d scavenged from the overseer was a hexagonal rod, with bronze runes down every other side. The one from Shino, which she just remembered she had, was made of silver in the vague shape of a key. This one, however, looked almost organic.
Eight different types of wood and eight different types of metal spiraled together in a way that metal shouldn’t, forming a tight spiral about a foot long. The bottom third was sheathed in a pitch-black skin while the end of the spiral was a gemstone, covered in facets. Each facet seemed to be a different color, one the red of a ruby, one the blue of a sapphire, one the rainbow sheen of an opal, one a pure black that seemed studded with stars, and another the same golden yellow as the eyes of Aria’s holy symbol.
Not touching it directly, but manipulating it with a metal rod from her lockpick kit, she turned the wand over to make sure she hadn’t missed anything on the obviously magical device. Pulling the rod back she examined the tool she had touched the item with, carefully, sniffing it before wiping it off on a white cloth, seeing no trace of contact poison or any other residue left behind. Shaking her head, she put everything away. “No traps as far as I can tell, and it’s not poisoned. Box looks lead lined to stop anyone from detecting the wand. What does it do?”
Badger blinked, eyes glowing before he jerked his head back with a cry of pain, turning away as he covered his face, gritting his teeth. Fayne slammed the box shut as Badger stumbled backwards, Aria catching him and healing him of whatever had happened. After a minute, where he just stood still as she healed him, he finally lowered his hands. Rurik, who had walked over but had been quieted with a wave of his hand, let out a low whistle.
Badger’s face and hands were covered with blood, crimson tear tracks down his face. “That,” he pointed at the box Fayne was holding, not looking at it, voice more worried than it had been when he’d almost been eaten, “Is an Artifact. What the hell are we doing with an artifact, at this level?”
Rurik’s and Aria’s attention shifted to Fayne, or more specifically what she was holding. The elf looking between them and very carefully put the box down. “What’s an artifact? You said these were artifacts,” she tapped her armor and motioned to Rurik’s sword, “but they didn’t make you bleed just by looking at them.”
“Not artifacts, like old things, Artifacts, with a capital A. They be items of great power,” Rurik told her. “The kinds o’ things that kingdoms are rallied around, or against. If this,” he rested a hand on his sword, “Is the kind of things that help ya get legends written about ya, they’re the things that the legends are based around. It wouldn’t be Rurik Balderk, famous dwarven samurai who wielded Kage no Ken, it’d be Kage no Ken, who once was wielded by some dwarf, Urik Bol-somethin’.”
He walked over carefully opening the box with the tip of his wakizashi, staring at it. “But they be famous, like the Axe o’ the Dwarvish Lords, or a Deck o’ Many Things. This. . . I ain’t never heard o’ somethin’ like this.”
“And there’s always, a cost,” Aria added, glancing around. “This. . . this isn’t a reward. It’s a test.”
“Oi, what’s the cost to the Axe o’ the Dwarvish Lords?” Rurik demanded.
“It turns you into a dwarf,” she responded.
The dwarf folded his arms, “And?”
She paused, realizing that wasn’t a drawback for him, rallying with “And it puts you in the middle of dwarven politics!”
He looked at her, cocking his head slightly. “Lassie, I be a samurai. I’ve been dealin’ with dwarven politics since I could ‘old a sword.”
“But you hate politics!” she argued.
He slowly raised an eyebrow. “That be Max, Aria. Me brother be the one that ‘ates that, too much lyin’ for ‘im, but I live an’ breathe that stuff. Always ‘ave, prolly always will.”
“But you’re horrible at telling lies,” Fayne pointed out.
Rurik smirked, “Am I?”
“Yes,” she insisted.
He shrugged, “Fair ‘nough. It really be about tellin’ when others are lyin’.”
“Back on topic,” Badger interjected, having wiped his face clean. “Most Artifacts are more than just magic items, they’ve got history, power, and hefty side effects. I. . . I’m not sure what to do with this.”
“So, it might be okay to use, if we can figure out what it does?” the elf hedged. “I don’t want you to try again, but did you get anything from what you saw?”
The wizard frowned. “Evocation. Absolute Evocation. Its packed with the same kind of magic that creates fireballs, lightning bolts, and everything else that goes boom. If that’s a wand, it’s a wand of sheer. . . I don’t know, blastiness. I don’t know what it does, all I know is that I don’t want to be on the wrong side of it when it goes off.” He picked up the box, opened his character sheet, and sighed, “And now its messing with us.” There, under weapons, right below Nia-Gara, was listed one ‘Wand of Blastiness’, complete with single quotation marks. The range, damage, ammunition, and notes sections where all completely blacked out.
He flipped the latch closed and handed it to her. “Put it in the bag. We’ll deal with it when we get out.” She shrugged, moving to put it away, but the Bag of Holding wouldn’t accept it. It opened a little to accept the bottom of the box, but the wand seemed to be caught at on invisible fabric in the center of the opening of the bag, even from inside its container. “Daaamn,” Badger sighed. “It’s dimensionally locked. That’s not a good thing.”
“And what’s that mean, fer those of us who aren’t fancy, shmancy, finger-wagglers?” The dwarf prompted, only to get no response. “Oi, wizard!”
The gnome was lost in thought, but glanced over. “Huh? Oh, right. Bags of Holding are extra-dimensional pockets. They’re essentially micro-planes of existence, it’s why they don’t get heavier if you put things into them. Some things, usually important things, are locked to a single dimension to make sure they don’t get taken someplace they shouldn’t be, or more usually so they can’t be hidden.” He saw Rurik opening his mouth to speak and explained, “The outer planes are big. You can easily hide something on the material plane, where we are right now, for a couple hundred years, you can hide something on one of the other planes for a couple hundred centuries.”
Fayne stopped trying to put the box in the bag, loo
king askance at it. “So, what do we do with it?
“Give it to me,” the wizard instructed. “I can fit it in my kit, and if anyone has to use it, it should be me. It might not be the case, because, well, Artifact, but I’m trained in using arcane wands, so I’ll hopefully not do something horrible by accident.” She handed him the box and he unslung his backpack, making sure to stow it in the bottom.
He looked at the piles of copper all around him. “I know you guys were taking a break, but I need you to look through these piles. If this was buried, other things might be as well. For a dragon’s horde, even a young one, there should be more. We can take half an hour, but then we need to move.”
Fayne and Rurik nodded, moving along with Aria and Badger to start sifting through the piles of metallic coins. Sure enough, their efforts produced a motley assortment of items, each one quickly identified by Badger. They didn’t bother grabbing more than a few handfuls of copper, “for tolls,” joked Badger, though it was obvious he was doing it try to break the tension, and just spread them out to find anything buried. They worked through the pile, finishing just before their self-appointed deadline.
There was a belt that would increase the wearer’s strength by half as much as Aria’s spell had, an additional two points to that score, according to their character sheets, which Rurik quickly claimed. There was a set of magically strengthened dwarven chainmail, made of interlocking hexagonal bronze rings, which went to Aria. She made sure that Rurik didn’t want it, the dwarf telling her “Me armor’s better than that, even with the magic. Nah lass, I’ve already got a magic item from this horde. Take it.”
A dwarven quiver was identified as an ‘Efficient Quiver’. “It’s a Bag of Holding for arrows, bolts, javelins, spears, and staffs, and bows. It’ll reject anything else,” Badger explained, handing over to Fayne, who donned it immediately, filling it with over a hundred arrows from the Bag of Holding, a dozen poking out the top to be grabbed easily no matter how many she shoved into it.
Last was a brown mantle, the hem inscribed with runes. Badger donned it, the garment shrinking to fit him as he did so, and held his left hand out, speaking an arcane word. The cloth jumped into his hand and hardened, taking a texture similar to stone. “And this is a shield-cloak,” he said, “with another enhancement on top of it to make it an even more effective defence. I figured since everyone else had an item, no one would mind if I took it.”
“Didn’t you get the wand though,” Fayne pointed out.
Before the wizard could respond, Rurik spoke up, shaking his head, “Ya mean the thing we don’t want ta use? Nah lassie, that don’t be countin’.”
She nodded, accepting the argument, “Right, good point.” The elf looked around, frowning. “I’m surprised there were no gems.”
“Oh, there were,” Aria said, pulling several out of her backpack. “They were in a pile.”
Fayne looked at her with suspicion for a second before nodding, “Okay, we have a few hours left on our water breathing. Let’s go!” Taking a running leap, she dived into the water, barely disturbing the surface.
“Pfft, that’s not ‘ow ya dive,” Rurik scoffed, charging for the edge, yelling “Dwarfball!” as he jumped, curling up, hitting the water with a massive splash. Aria and Badger shared an eye roll and a smile before following their son into the depths.
◆◆◆
It took close to two hours for them to find the way out of the reservoir, entering a roughly dug tunnel that was obviously created by draconic claws, and navigate the maze of lightless tunnels out of the mountain. Whether it was luck, or more likely the fact that these were tunnels that led into a dragon’s lair, the party didn’t have any more encounters with hostile species during the frustrating process of working their way higher and higher through submerged passages. Many tunnels doubled back, led to tunnels too small to continue down, were collapsed, or were just dead ends. A couple of the last had traps that Fayne spotted before the party could set them off.
A sigh of relief was shared over the mental connection when they spotted a glimmer of light at the end of their latest passageway. ~Oh thank Solus!~ Aria exclaimed. After the first ten minutes of moving down dark tunnels she’d hitched a ride on Badger’s Staff, which at its medium setting still provided a good amount of thrust.
~Aye Lass,~ Rurik agreed, follow along the bottom of the tunnel, his armor, weapons, and gear letting him moonwalk instead of swimming.
Badger, alternating between the second and third modes on his staff, sped up, reaching the mouth of a shallow cave, the water forming a pool with a small stream flowing out. The other two joined the husband and wife, who had reached the mouth of the cave and were looking out across a mix of forests and swamps, no trace of civilization in sight.
“Where are we?” Fayne asked, looking out across the wilderness. The wizard fished his waterproof scroll case from his bag, pulling out a map and handing it to her before he cast prestidigitation, drying them all off. Aria continued to stare outwards, the evening sun bathing the forests in orange glow, the light of her god warming her.
“Well, if we be enterin’ here,” the dwarf stated, pointing at the mountain on the map, “and we be lookin’ west now, then. . . our camp be on the other side o’ the mountain. If we be around ‘ere, then there be a pass a dozen miles north that’ll get us on the right side. A couple a miles ta’ get through the pass, an’ then it’ll be another dozen miles ‘till we get back to where we started. That’s all assumin’, of course, that we be standin on the same mountain.”
Aria’s revere was broken by the probability of far too much walking. “Are you sure?” she asked. “And why wouldn’t we be in the same mountain?”
“As far as we be goin’ down, that underground lake might’ve been between peaks, and we mighta come out another one, but this is prolly still the same one,” he explained, looking at the map again. “Though there be a town about half the distance we need to walk thataway,” he said, pointing south. “It be all snuggled up ta the mountain a couple over. With the treasure we got, we could get another horse and one of us, or one of us an’ the wee man, could ride over and get the cart, supposin’ that it’s still there.”
“Why wouldn’t it be there?” inquired Aria. “We set an alarm to scare off bad things.”
Badger winced, “The alarm would’ve only lasted half a day. But if it was a predator, we could probably salvage the cart and some of the supplies. I vote we head for the town. What does everyone else think?”
“Anything that has less walking gets my vote,” the cleric stated.
Fayne rolled her eyes. “If we can get to the horse faster, that would be better, but it’s not gonna make that much of a difference. I don’t care.”
“That’s two for and one abstain, we’re going to the town!” Aria commanded.
Rurik started to say that he hadn’t voted, but let it go, knowing it wouldn’t really matter. The group stuck to the side of the mountain, picking their way across the natural formation instead of worrying about whatever might be living down in the wilderness below, as the predators of the forest woke with the twilight.
Night fell, and while they couldn’t see the town, the could see the light it made illuminating parts of the mountain ahead. Cresting a small ridge, it was laid out below them: a fortified village with a single road coming in, trees cleared fifty feet before a palisade of logs, tops carved into spikes.
“It probably be best if we approach it from the road, we be lookin’ less like raiders that way,” Rurik pointed out. Aria seemed offended that anyone would consider her a bandit, but the other two nodded, Fayne leading the way to the forest below.
As they approached the town, a guard at the gate called out to them “Halt! What be your business here!”
“We’re weary adventurers, looking for a place to rest before continuing our travels!” the aasimar called back, taking point diplomatically, which Rurik had to agree was probably for the best.
“You may approach the ga
te, but keep your weapons sheathed!” the guard shouted, waving them forward. As they got closer and he got a better look at them his wary expression shifted to a more welcoming one upon seeing the saintly light around the cleric’s head. “Welcome to Copperbell. Sorry for that, but we’ve had bandits, as well as something else out in the woods. You’ll be wantin’ to talk to George at the Iron Orc, down the main road. I’d give ya a speech ‘bout not causin’ trouble, but ya don’t seem the type,” he added, nodding to Aria. “Maybe ye could help us with a problem we’ve had. Tell George that Harry sent ya,” he directed, opening a doorway sized section of the large gate, pointing at a building by the entrance.
They passed through with thanks, Badger tossing him a gold coin for the info which was quickly pocketed. The indicated inn had an iron sign with a smiling orc emblazoned on it, and manning the bar was a laid-back orc that bore more than a passing resemblance to the sign. The place was fairly busy, the bartender serving drinks while two ghostly purple hands did the same further down the bar. “Um, are you George? We’re here for rooms,” Aria said as they walked up, looking a little uncertain. “Harry sent us?”
The orc, presumably the owner, saw her hesitance and snorted, expression sour. He looked past her to Badger, who was watching the mage hands pouring drinks with an expression of delight, and addressed him instead. “It’s a gold for a room, two for a room, dinner, and breakfast.”
“Sure!” the wizard replied, casting a Mage Hand of his own and floating over seven gold. At George’s raised eyebrow he said, “We’ll share a room,” pointing to his wife. The bartender shrugged, pointing to one of the empty tables.
They took their seats, Aria sighing, “Ah, back in civilization!” She looked around, nodding, “And I didn’t expect it to be so clean!”
“Why, because it’s run by an orc?” Fayne challenged, looking askance at Aria.
The cleric tilted her head in confusion, realization dawning. “Oh! No, because it’s a mining town. The grit gets everywhere. Why would you think that I’d think that?” she challenged right back.