New Recruits

As she continued to charge around the pit, Animir glanced down, and noticed with surprise that it contained four dwarves; manacled, dirty, dishevelled, exhausted-looking, but staring up at her and her companions with hope in their eyes.

Across the other side, Romae smashed down another kobold, and took a painful wound from its' comrade, the last one up. Thorkil, true to form, failed to hit anything with his crossbow, swearing loudly, and Akara's sling stone glanced off the last trog's foot as it continued to rain javelins on the party. However, his next stone caught it right between the eyes and it pitched into the prison dead as Romae accounted for the last kobold.

While Thorkil and Akara guarded the door, Romae set about freeing the dwarf prisoners, all of whom she knew, of course, and arming them from the kobolds' discarded short swords. Animir searched the trogs and found an assortment of coinage, which she tucked away.

The dwarves mentioned that there was a tool store, a few corridors away from their current location, in which they might find useful equipment. Animir led the small band carefully along the corridors, pausing at the junction [between 26 and 27] and listening to the sounds of mining coming from [26] the other passage. No-one had seen them, so she proceeded to the door the dwarves had indicated.

It was locked, but Animir had been studying a little about locks, and soon had it open. The local dwarves stared at the inside in some bafflement; the tools they were expecting were all stacked at one end, and a small folding bed was set up at the other. A padlocked wooden chest stood at the foot of it.

Cautiously, Animir examined this, and worked the mechanism back and forth with some small tools she'd picked up. With a click it opened, and she stepped to the side and opened the chest with a pick handle. Nothing went twang or bang, and the intruders peered inside.

They discovered the following:

• A leather backpack
• A wicker basket that clinked a bit when moved
• A carrier with three bottles of wine

Animir picked up the basket, and opened it, discovering a crystal goblet worth 5gp, a place setting of china dishware worth 20gp and 45gp worth of silver cutlery.

Romae investigated the wine, while Thorkil hefted the pack. The pack contained field rations, parcelled out into 28 one-day portions, and eight small bottles with clear red fluid in them, almost certainly magical potions; the wine had labels with writing on in a language Animir did not speak but felt sure she'd seen written before somewhere.

With a mental leap, she realized it was the same as that on the spider mace she'd found on Ryl the Troglydyte. Romae's memory jogged at that, and she realized where she'd seen the writing before.

It was the Fae Mhor script.....