DM Note: Just Allan and Gord this week. Aimo's off on Ascension Island for quite a while so no Méabh for a bit.| DM Note: Just Allan and Gord this week. Aimo's off on Ascension Island for quite a while so no Méabh for a bit. |
The next morning, Gorfang and Lynien were sitting in the Blue Knight having a late breakfast. Méabh was engaged in her own affairs, Setram was at the Mageguild, rather blearily working on his spell and Eloy was still out of town; so it was just the two of them.
Both had one thing on their minds; Setram's hoard. With the dragon 'trapped' in human form for the next seven days, there was little other than whatever he'd hastily set up as defences to prevent them from returning to Amberlan and making off with his treasure. While this was a really inconvenient time to be without Méabh's teleportation (or other) magic, the pair figured they could probably manage it.
 DM Note: Gord was on fire this session. Natural after natural. This was the first of many! |
Amberlan was five or six days' ride away, not bad but too slow. They wanted to be done and dusted by the time their erstwhile ally emerged from his postgraduate studies. Lynien cast her mind back, and from her memory of the hoard estimated around two hundred thousand gold pieces were waiting to be made off with. Gorfang was willing to trust her training on this, and they fell to planning how they were going to manage it.
Their 
recent disposal of loot from the Amberlan adventure had left them with a reasonable fund for equipment. Taking this with them, they hied themselves back to the Mageguild, and looked up Aloysius, rapidly becoming Gorfang's new best friend. The orc started by briefly discussing his desire to commission some enchantments on a new weapon he was making - a khopesh. Aloysius started off enthusiastic, but once Gorfang had gone into details, he was shaking his head. "That's beyond what we can do here," he said regretfully. "You'd need to go to the Dark Tower for that scale of enchantment."
"Never mind," 
said Gorfang, changing the subject. "We want to either buy or rent some magic for an expedition." He explained their needs - though not their objectives! - and Aloysius thought for a moment. "We don't rent items," he explained, "so often they don't come back. However, if you bring back items, I will cheerfully buy them back at standard purchase rates, regardless of where you got them. As far as temporary access to magic goes, the usual method of doing this involves scrolls. A scroll of Teleport is 1,125gp. Your arcanist can cast it, and I believe some others also receive training in the use of such items." Lynien grinned. This was true; the thieves' guild did teach the basics of triggering stolen spell scrolls, although the process was not without it's dangers!
After some dickering, they emerged from the mageguild equipped with four scrolls of the spell Teleport and two Bags of Holding large enough to hold nearly half the hoard each. Lynien, disgusted with the rough sacking appearance of the Bags, had additionally commissioned a custom one in red-tooled black leather, shaped to sling around her shapely form. This would be ready in a week.
A couple of hours later, the pair were standing, ready to go, in the unused (and unlikely to be used) ballroom of Gorfang's manor at Southwold. Lynien was neat and sleek, her 'working clothes' mended, cleaned and lightly scented. Gorfang's appearance, of course, was basically unchanged. Some of the dirt and blood had flaked off over the couple of days in town, and the mildly dowdy sack that was the bag of holding was cleaner than the rest of his equipment, but that was it. Lynien shifted her hips. "Still a bit damp," she said archly and untruthfully. Gorfang's blood pressure peaked briefly.
DM Note: Gord did it again with this one - another natural 20 to cast the spell! |
Lynien unrolled one of the scrolls rather nervously. Although she was familiar with this technique, she'd never tried it before, and didn't fancy the probable consequences of getting it wrong. Carefully she read the strange words through again and again until she had their pronunciation right. Then she lifted her voice and incanted them, heart in her mouth, holding the mound in the centre of Amberlan firmly in her mind. The magic flowed, and reality tipped as they were hurled across the miles.
Gorfang and Lynien blinked as the world settled down again, and looked around themselves. The ruins of Amberlan, blackened and scorched in many places, lay spread around them in the warm sun of a June day under the edge of the Engeror mountains. So far so good....
Walking over to the black pit of the well, they peered in. As expected, it didn't look any different; a dark shaft plunging out of view. Lynien strung a rope and abseiled down; about ten feet before she'd hoped to emerge into the dragon's lair, she swung into space. The walls were gone. No, not gone, just torn outwards and collapsed down. A moment later she touched down on rubble. The well was blocked. This they'd expected; but the question was, had the dragon really buried his treasure inside a heap of stone and earth? If he had, there'd be no open space inside the lair for them to teleport into. Without more evidence neither wanted to risk it.
After returning to the surface, she oriented herself, and paced out the distance from the lair to the place she'd briefly stashed some of the dragon's treasure the first time. This located the top of the wellshaft - once topped by a wellhead and located at a street junction - now almost collapsed and hidden by scrub and rubble. Squeezing and twisting themselves past the places where stones had sagged from the walls of the shaft, the pair descended into the depths. Finally, scraped and bruised, they dropped into the 
waterpipe below.
Three dessicated ratman corpses lay scattered where they'd fallen in battle with Lynien; the fourth had been shredded since she saw it, presumably by the furious dragon. Of the heap of loot she'd assembled there for future collection, nothing was left save a single gold coin, which Lynien picked up and looked at irritably. That was my loot, she thought.
A couple of minutes' slowly ascending walk took them to where the pipe joined the pump-room. Again, the passage was collapsed twenty feet or so along by a sloped fall of rubble. It was beginning to look as if they had a choice between a blind leap into an unknown location and giving up. Neither liked the idea, and Gorfang in particular was infuriated.
Siezing
one of the shovels they'd brought, he scrambled up the scree of rubble and attacked the fall near the top, excavating showers of earth and hurling great blocks of masonry down the slope. His fury doubled his strength, and Lynien marvelled at the volume of material he shifted with little more than muscle and bloodymindedness. Orcs were most famous as warriors and plunderers, but next most famous as miners. After around ten minutes of this, Gorfang heard the sound he'd been waiting for - the crunch as his shovel breached into an open space beyond.
Widening the hole, he hauled himself up to it and shoved his head and shoulders through. Inside, he saw a glorious sight. The cylindrical chamber was still there, more or less exactly as he'd last seen it with the obvious exception of the absence of the dragon. The other differences were that all the archways leading to the waterpipes had been collapsed, and that a Wall of Stone had been cast across the hole leading to the well-shaft above, blocking it and allowing Setram to collapse the shaft sides without filling his home with rubble. Heaps of gold and crafted items lay scattered around the central shaft hole in the floor. Gorfang studied the room for a long moment, wondering if there might be traps. Concluding that this was likely, he backed down the slope and called Lynien up.
Ditching her weaponbelt, 
the tiefling thief squirmed through the hole Gorfang had made and crept with enormous care. Once inside, careful not to disturb anything, she moved through the room, checking everywhere for traps. A few seconds were enough to confirm that there were no physical traps; she hadn't expected them. Poison dart traps are difficult to set with talons the size of mauls. Without either Eloy or Méabh, she had no means of sensing magic, but she was pretty sure there wasn't anything conventional in the line of magical traps either.
She was just about to tell Gorfang that the coast was clear when something that had been nagging at her all through her search suddenly reached her attention. When she'd last seen the hoard - and she was the only one of the party who'd seen it without the dragon perched on top - it had been smoothed and partially melted into position so as to make a comfy bed for a mighty dragon. Now it was not, it had been moved, and she suddenly realized that the patterns were familiar. Squinting, she considered, and it dawned on her. From above, the shape made by the windrows of shining coin would resemble, very strongly, a massive version of the same symbol formed by the Glyph of Warding she herself could sometimes cast. She gulped. Given the scale of the Glyph compared to hers, she dreaded to think what damage this one would have done were it triggered.
DM Note: Another natural on the Disable Device roll for this trap, what a session for Lynien!. |
For a moment, she pondered retreating to the breach and simply throwing a rock through it, but decided against it after a moment's thought. Carefully, she examined it, and finally her painstaking work paid off - she located where the spell was anchored to the mountain of coins. Slowly, she worked at the structure, isolating the few critical pieces from the rest until finally she had a small clear area of floor with five coins in the middle.
She waved Gorfang down, and the orc slthered down the rubble, bringing the rest of Lynien's equipment with her. Then the pair straightened and looked around, taking in the scale of the hoard properly for the first time. They glanced at each other and chuckled; then they unpacked the Bags of Holding and set to work.
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It took them a day and a night and half the next day to finish loading all the coin into the magical sacks. Their hands were black with ash and dust and their backs aching, but they'd done it. Gorfang glanced around. "It's a rubbish dragon, this," he said disparagingly. "no weapons. I can't believe no-one's ever come looking for him in all these years, nor that there weren't any in the city to begin with." Lynien nodded in agreement. Walking to the place where the well-shaft carried on downwards from the pump-room, she gazed speculatively down it. The sound of the rushing river came from below. Gorfang shrugged, and helped her anchor a rope. Slowly, Lynien bounced down the wall of the shaft until she was out of Gorfang's sight. Suddenly, her feet met nothing instead of stone wall, and she swung into a larger space. Looking around, she saw she was in another cylindrical room, not far above the level of the river. It was lined with weapon-racks.
In a tight voice, she called up to the orc, "Give me a bit of slack!" Gorfang paid out some more rope, and it went loose, accompanied by a metallic scraping and grating noise. Then she called again, "haul away!" Gorfang heaved. To his surprise, the weight on the end of the rope was far greater than Lynien's slight form. "What have you been eating?" he muttered under his breath, and hauled away with both hands. Over the lip came a huge mass of metal and rope, an impressive collection of weapons and armour all lashed together. "Lying lizard," thought Gorfang, "you did have an interest in weapons, didn't you?"
Lynien took a last look around, and located a secret panel in the wall. Inside she found a book, marked in Krultac runes, which turned out to be Setram's backup spellbook. She bagged this as well before climbing out.
The weapons and armour were squeezed into Gorfang's Handy Haversack, along with the balance of gold that the Bags couldn't hold. Then the pair stood close together while Lynien read another Teleport scroll, and a few moments later found themselves back in the ballroom of Southwold Manor.
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