“Get it, Arnold! Grab onto its leg!” Beldrak encouraged me with tears of laughter in his voice. “Show the bastard you mean business!”
While Trueanvil found our current predicament immensely funny, Jim and I were much less amused. An enchanted table ambushing and knocking you prone as a veteran of four campaigns, two battles, few dozen skirmishes, and almost two maze-mapping expeditions is embarrassing enough, but when the blasted piece of furniture starts treading on you, the experience gets positively painful.
The anatomy of tables didn’t make our situation easier. I would have trusted Jim to wrestle any human-shaped being into submission sooner or later, but the table was different. You cannot twist its legs until it gives up in pain. In fact, you cannot twist its legs at all. You might break them if you can grab onto them, and are strong enough. Sadly, this devil in furniture shape wasn’t just strong, but slick and graceful too. It kept treading on us, and when either of us tried to get up, the damned thing knocked us over again.
In the end, I got ahold of my hammer, broke one of the table’s legs, and that gave it a pause long enough for Jim to get up and go to town on this wooden abomination with his halberd. With a valiant effort, I stood up too, and we have beaten the cursed accessory into smithereens. Then we both glared at Beldrak who was openly in tears from laughter at this time.
“Might I inquire,” I asked, in the most threatening voice I could manage, “why haven’t you ordered the blasted piece of furniture to stop?”
“Because it was way too funny!” he answered utterly unapologetically. Then doubled over with laughter. “Great Barrel, when you tried to grab on its leg… You were like an overturned tortoise… And Jim… his face when the table knocked him down… Bruhahaha!”
The tiefling and I looked at each other, and in a rare moment of a total agreement, we grabbed the helplessly snickering dwarf, dragged him to the stream, and threw him in. That failed to put an end to his chuckling, but at least it made us feel better.
Then we got a stern lecture from Frór, the duergar chef, about breaking up his favourite table into firewood.
To be fair, it was their fault too. Our hosts could have told us that the enchanted furniture of the kitchen, besides obeying to dwarven commands, will attack anybody who is not a dwarf. We just went in cluelessly, wanting a second serving from that exquisite trout and lichen paste, and found ourselves in the middle of a bloody battle. Beldrak ordered the chairs and the counter to stand down, but as I have described above, the bastard let the long table do as it pleased with us.
The duergars seemed to find the incident at least as amusing as Beldrak did, except for Frór, who was seriously mourning the demise of his beloved table. He took it more ill that we destroyed this piece of furniture, than that we killed his comrade.
Truth to be told, none of the duergars seemed to mind very much that we disposed one of their number. It seemed the poor fellow was not very well-liked among his peers. Also, the duergars being a bunch of cynical, black-hearted ruffians, they probably felt that one duergar’s life wasn’t that high of a price (as long as they weren’t the ones paying it) for a skilful ally that proved itself useful on the very first day of the new partnership. It was rumoured that thanks to Beldrak, the researchers were already making progress faster. Meanwhile, our expedition on the 14th into the northern corridors and our subsequent fight with Idalla on the 15th convinced the duergars that we were not just boasting when we said we carved a bloody path through this maze.
On the downside that meant they were now seriously expecting us to take on Nighstcale.
“Remember how Calcryx almost killed you? And this was only a baby dragon,” I argued with Jim as we were going through Idalla’s library.
“So what? We are adventurers. Getting killed is an occupational hazard. I am tired of fighting small fry for scraps. We are killing orks or troglodytes for a few silvers apiece. I want to make a name for myself! And I want to make some real money!”
“Those small fries did capture you,” I remarked drily.
“Thanks to your shoddy planning,” he retorted.
“This time we will think it through.”
“Taking risks is one thing but committing suicide by dragon is entirely different,” I asserted. “According to what the duergars say, we won’t even see Nightscale, until she ambushes us! Even your eyes won’t detect a black dragon in the pitch-black night of a cavern when she is under many feet of water! And if I want to see anything, I will need to bring the magical candle, which means that I will be a visible target at all times.”
“Everything you say is true,” admitted Jim. “But I still think we should try and kill her. We came here to find these amazing weapons Durgeddin supposedly forged, and sell them to Baron Alton for big bucks. We have found some decent articles, but none of these will get us the kind of money we hoped for. We have searched the whole maze, and even if we scour it again, I don’t think we will find what we want. You know why? Because Nightscale has it, that’s why.”
“The dragon moved in less than twenty years ago if the duergars’ estimate is to be believed,” I objected. “The orks looted the place two centuries ago, it stands to reason that they would carry away the best weapons. Nightscale might not have anything but silver in her hoard for all that we know.”
“Dragons have a nose for valuable things. I bet she came here in the first place because she smelled a fortune.”
“What is this talk about dragons?” asked Beldrak, who just arrived with his floating disk for a new batch of books. “You are not seriously debating about taking on Nightscale, are you? Because we would be damned suicidal fools to do that.”
“Exactly my point,” I looked at Jim. “See? You are outvoted.”
“All right,” said the tiefling. “But you know who will be the sorriest of us if some other band of mercenaries waltzes in a few months from now, and steals the whole hoard of Nightscale for themselves? It will be you, the self-proclaimed incarnation of greed and curiosity. Whatever secrets will be uncovered, whatever riches will be obtained, none of it will be yours, and the knowledge that it could have been will torment both of you for the rest of your miserable, cowardly lives.”
“Well, I am quite happy at the moment,” said Beldrak. “A lot of valuable volumes here, a dozen or so spell scrolls, plenty of money. Killing this fiend was profitable enough for my taste. I’d rather pocket my modest winnings and stay alive. Even if Nightscale has a vast hoard as the duergars attest, what use would it be to me, if I am dead?”
“It really pains me to leave good money behind,” I said slowly. “But I just don’t see us killing the monster. We should lure the wyrm out of the water, ambush her, and kill her before she can disappear into her lake again. With enough gold, maybe we can entice her to show herself. But even then, all it takes is a bad move, and this acid breath of hers does away with us. We would need clothes soaked in slaked lime or something. And of course, some hard-hitting weapons that can deliver a finishing blow quick.”
Jim laughed. “I knew you would come up with a plan! As annoying you are, I have to admit that you have a talent for deceiving others and luring them into shady traps.”
“I,” I fumbled. “I did just come up with a raw draft for a plan, didn’t I?”
“Even that is a very generous assessment,” frowned Beldrak.
“Never mind that,” said Jim, waving away our worries. “We have time to refine it. We won’t have to leave for Avennar for five more days. As for the hard-hitting weaponry, I already have an idea…”
Eventually, both Beldrak and I got on board with attacking Nightscale. We spent the next three days after that with preparations.
Beldrak, besides diligently working on completing Durgeddin’s blueprint, also forged the weapon Jim called Endbringer. It was not a hard weapon to make, just a sword with a swarm of sharpened disks attached to either side. I was still sceptical of the usefulness of this contraption, but Jim’s demonstrations convinced me. True, it took him years of training to achieve any degree of accuracy with such a cumbersome weapon, but by now he was able to aim the discs well enough to mostly meet the target from twenty feet distance.
While my comrades were occupied in the smithy, I made a healthy amount of quicklime. The orks had some of the dangerous powder in their storages, but not much. Understandable, they were probably doing relatively little masonry nowadays.
Thus, I had to get limestone first. Thankfully, I remembered seeing some rock formed of the stuff on our way up to the mountaintop – I just had to get to those. After spending three days without glimpsing the sun or the sky, I was looking forward to working outside again. True, the weather was bad outside, with feet high snow, many clouds and ice-cold wind. Nevertheless, I was happy to see the sky and be on my way. I packed some supplies on Gaius and left the fort already in the afternoon of the 15th.
First, I needed a lime kiln. One man alone can hardly build a proper lime kiln, and then use it in mere three days, so I started to search for one. I was sure that at least the dwarves had to have one, and indeed, not far from one of the limestone rocks, there was a proper little kiln, even if in a ruinous condition. Making it usable again required a lot less effort than building one from scratch, so I got to work.
By the afternoon of the 16th, I had everything ready: I have quarried enough limestone and brought the necessary amount of charcoal from the fort. I prepared the kiln and set the fuel on fire. Now, I had to wait for the fire to burn out and the kiln to cool.
On the 19th the kiln was already cool enough, and I could retrieve all the quicklime I wanted.
My original idea, soaking clothes in slaked lime was a stupid one. Naturally, I didn’t even test it. On the other, the more I thought about it, the more I liked my second idea of carrying a few buckets of severely diluted slaked lime. If the dragon used her acid breath on us, we could still negate a part of the corrosive effect by pouring a bucket on ourselves.
I also thought about carrying some quicklime, and throwing the powder at Nighstcale, when she tried to attack us. In the end, we judged this as too dangerous, carrying quicklime around in a domain filled with creeks and lakes was bound to backfire, perhaps even in the literal sense.
The 20th of November went by finalising our preparations. We discussed our plan one last time. Each of us received a potion that would allow us to breathe underwater, and each of us would carry a bucket of slaked lime. Jim sharpened the steel disks on his precious Endbringer one last time, Beldrak read through the spells he obtained from Idalla’s library once again thoroughly, and I received a potion from Herja that would lend me the strength of a giant for one hour. Then, following the directions of Flóki, the duergar most familiar with Nightscale’s territory, we started to descend.
