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Gorfang, Lynien and Eloy stood and regarded the heap of mithril-skinned steel plates, and the orc glanced at the others. "Three ways?" he enquired, as if this was just a formality. Eloy shook his head. "Nope," he said easily, "I don't want any." Gorfang looked at him strangely for a moment, then turned to Lynien. "You want some?" he asked her. "I don't want some," she answered, and paused a beat; "I want it all." Then she shrugged. "Just being honest," she said apologetically. Gorfang chuckled. "Fifty-fifty it is then." he said.
Eloy was keen to explore more of Gadûhvrás, and offered to take some of Gorfang's humans hunting, but Gorfang appeared unhappy about the idea of Eloy wandering loose in the city. "There's nothing to look for," he assured them both, "This place has been thoroughly picked over in the last thousand years." Then he turned to Eloy. "If I ever find one of your churches in here, I'll burn it to the ground," he growled. Eloy glanced at the stone walls. "Burn?" he enquired innocently. "I'll set fire to the priest and take it from there," responded Gorfang. Eloy assured him he had no such plans. "I plan to raise Gadûhvrás once more," explained Gorfang, "make it great again, a city where orcs can be proud and free." Both Eloy and the fastidious Lynien made it quite clear that he was welcome to the place.
The battle with the magic-eating lizards had left enough armour and weapons for around thirty sets. Gorfang distributed these between Shufghoth's followers. The eight lizardmen fitted well enough into the plate armour, but it was too big for the orcs. They strapped the odd piece on anyway, and Shufghoth and his three most trusted orcs took the mail from the blue lizards. The orcs and lizardmen took greatswords, and the humans daggers - large enough for shortswords. The spares were stored in a chamber which was declared the armoury.
That done they turned their attention to the mithril, the real treasure. To get it off the steel plates, it would have to be melted. Gorfang had found a place - probably a fireplace, he told the others, though it had a sacrificial air about it - where a fire could be built, and his workers were able to gouge a runoff and a scoop in the floor to hold the precious metal while it cooled. That left the issue of fuel.
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Gorfang's sources had indicated that there had once been coal and iron mines in the mountain beyond the city proper. He proposed an expedition to these to secure enough fuel to melt the truesilver off the plates. After some discussion, the others decided to accompany him. He and Eloy emptied out their Bags of Holding into other containers to create space for the coal. As they did this, they realized that Lynien was casually but attentively watching what they were doing. "Yes?" said Gorfang. "Nothing," said Lynien innocently.
All three were tired, wet and wounded after the battle in the snow, so decided to get a 'night's' sleep before going, and bedded down thankfully in Thykon's bedroom. Before Eloy turned in, he spent half an hour talking quietly to the human ex-slaves.
However, only a few hours later, they were wakened by a commotion and sounds of strife. Leaping up and siezing weapons, they ran through to the minehall.
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They found a group of the workers gathered around two corpses. One was that of one of the human workers, almost flattened by a terrible strike from some kind of very large bludgeoning weapon. The other was a huge, blubbery troll, slashed by a dozen wounds, mostly from Shufghoth, who was very glad of his newly-provided armour and weapons.
The creature appeared to have wandered in from one of the side passages, and been taken completely by surprise to find armed and agile opponents. While pleased it had been stopped, Gorfang was reminded that this was not an ideal location to defend with less than fifty effectives. He either needed more warriors or a more defensible starting point for the new city.
The dead troll was hurled over the balcony without ceremony, but Gorfang and Shufghoth took the dead human away. It wasn't totally clear what happened after that, but Shufghoth and his fellow orcs looked cheerful and well-fed the next day...
Eloy's suggestion of hunting wasn't actually a bad one, given the ending of whatever supply chain Thykon had had in place, and a hunting party of two orcs and two humans was made up to locate an exit and see what they could bring back. Lynien had strong suspicions that what would come back was two slightly fatter orcs, but left this up to fate.
The three set off into the mountain, heading for the lower levels. As they set forth, Eloy unearthed his golden flute and began to play a 'bold setting forth' tune. Gorfang winced in anticipation, but surprisingly, the results were very musical. Eloy must have been practicing, he thought, or dropped on his head once too often.
The city of Gadûhvrás was built inside a mountain which divided into three peaks, each of a distinctive shape. The Bent Spire twisted bizarrely away from the others; the Central Spire was almost suspiciously straight; and the Cloven Spire was - as the name suggested - riven by a vast chasm from the peak almost to where it joined the main body of the mountain. The cluster of rooms where Thykon had set up camp were near the top of the outer side of the Cloven Spire, and the companions now began to descend through this towards the main bulk of the ancient city.
Level after level of dark stairs, cluttered with rubble, broken objects of lost meaning, and orc bones went on and on. Occasionally they came to where the great chasm tore through the mountain, and gazed across the abyss at the black mouths of passages opposite, once joined by many bridges, all now gone. Slowly, as they walked and walked, the vast scale of the mighty, ancient city of the orcs of the Erean Mountains grew in their minds.
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After six hours they emerged from the last of the levels (or 'rises') within the spire, onto the highest rise of the main city. Dark emptiness echoed all around them, the feeble pool of Eloy's lantern light revealing only how much more of it they could not see.
Slowly, they worked their way down another three levels, and then struck out towards the edge furthest into the mountain. After another half a day they reached the boundary between the city proper and the mines beyond; once a heavy gate, now a black arch of crumbling stone. Passing through, they entered the mines of Gadûhvrás.
Whereas the city proper had been well-cut (for orcs) stone, the mines were clearly nothing more than holes dug to reach desired minerals. The passages were rough and no larger than necessary, and the companions couldn't help noticing the spaces where there had once been pit-props to hold the roof up, now long rotted away. Piles of fallen stone were common, and occasionally fragments would fall simply from the vibration of them walking past - the first in who knew how many centuries.
It was ten miles before they started to see signs of coal in the walls, and another half a mile before they reached what had once been an active coalface. Rusted remnants of helveless tools lay scattered, and heaps of loose coal as well, around half what they would need. Work here seemed to have been abandoned all in a moment, the day the Dragon came....
It didn't take long to shovel the available loose coal into into the two Bags of Holding, after which they needed to dislodge about the same amount again. Eloy unpacked his fae mhor mace and looked at it doubtfully, but Gorfang rummaged in his Handy Haversack and brought out an old friend; the Maul of Brutality. It was the perfect choice. A succession of shattering two-handed blows with the weapon broke a shower of coal free from the face, and the three loaded it into the Bags. As they turned to go, bits of rubble slithered down around them and they paused, but the shifting stopped again and they hastened away.
Two hours saw them back the foot off the stairs leading from the rise connected to the mines up towards the Cloven Spire. Eloy and Lynien wanted to have a look around, and Gorfang agreed, so they went down another level. As soon as they emerged from the stairs onto the next rise down, they could hear voices. Coal sacks were grounded, and all drew weapons.
The voices were coming from two directions; a passage ahead and to the right, and faintly from one just over their left shoulders. Gorfang and Eloy could make out no details, but Lynien's keener ears picked up more. The voices were trollish, and speaking in their own rough and basic language. From what she could make out, there was a conversation going on about the absence of one Gugrath, apparently a scout sent up into the rises. Gorfang grinned. "Don't kill them straight away if you can help it," he said. "I can use these - I hope!" With that he drew his khopeshoi and headed down the passage ahead.
At the end the passage opened into a large square room, occupied by trolls. Lots of trolls. Gorfang was a little familiar with trolls, and was able to pick out what was what. At the back was the usual clutter of females and young, located as far from the entrance as possible in order to protect them from invaders, keep them out of the way if fighting developed, and to make it easier to eat some of them if times grew hard. To Gorfang's left were the young males, the bulls, gathered in their bachelor group, where they could grunt at, be macho with and occasionally maim each other as desired. The last group, to his right, were the relatively few male trolls who had made it through the young adult stage to get old enough to be (comparatively) wise.
The atmosphere in the room was definitely edgy. From the conversations, it appeared that Gugrath had been a popular troll, possibly something of a local hero, and his non-return from the upper levels had left the others agitated.
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Gorfang stood in the doorway and bellowed at them in their own language; "I want to be in your village to talk," he said, with all the proper grunts. The response was immediate. Half a dozen bulls came lumbering towards him, snatching up clubs and rocks as they came, until they loomed all around him, looking down. "What you want, little orc?" rumbled one disparagingly. Gorfang glared up at it. "Back off, and take me to your leader," he growled. "I need to talk to the brains."
A troll with grey streaks on his skin shambled to join the group from the leaders' corner. Gorfang eyed him. "Listen to me, or there will be only one orc left in this room. This city is being taken back by the orcs. There's plenty of room for everyone here, though. We can live in peace. If you come and serve me - you'd make good guards - everyone will benefit." The oldster bridled. "Guards? We free trolls!" Gorfang was ready for this. "You can be both," he urged.
Then the intelligence that had enabled the elder troll to reach his current age kicked in. He looked crafty. "You could be just saying this. You only one orc; small, stunty." Gorfang blinked; he wasn't used to being described in these terms. "I'll prove it on any champion you care to provide," he said. Old Troll wasn't sure what champion actually meant, but got the gist. He pointed to one of the bulls. "You!" he said. "Fight him." The troll lumbered towards Gorfang. "I have magic axe," it declared proudly, flourishing a battered battleaxe of orc make, which looked like a hatchet in his massive paw. "Any last requests?" Gorfang asked it. "Yeah, I get all your weapons when you dead," said the troll, waving the axe in the direction of Gorfang's khopeshoi, "I have magic axe!" Gorfang grinned. "If I win can I have that?" he asked. The troll lurched a laugh and charged.
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Gorfang didn't really want to kill the troll; if possible he wanted to acquire them as allies. So he shifted his grip on his weapons and attacked with the flats instead of the edges. The troll was slow compared to any serious opponent, but matched against the Master of Weapons he seemed to be standing still. Gorfang's right-hand khopesh cracked against the side of the troll's skull, staggering it, and then the left-hand one smacked flat squarely into the monster's groin. The troll's eyes crossed and it went over backwards with a curiously high-pitched cry.
Gorfang turned back to the elder troll. "Your champion will live," he declared. The old troll looked at the shuddering mound on the rock floor. "I don't think he wants to," he commented. "You spoke true." Gorfang sheathed his weapons. "Can you direct us to the main gate?" he asked. The troll looked afraid. "Yes," he said, "but we don't go there. Spiders outside, in the trees." Gorfang lifted an eyebrow. "What, little ones?" he said a bit scornfully. "Yes," replied the elder troll matter-of-factly, and held his hands out, with a space of around four feet between them, "little ones." He turned back to Gorfang. "You make us weapons, like those," he pointed at the khopeshoi, "and we fight for you," he said, "but how are you going to explain this to Big Jill?"
"Big Jill?" asked Gorfang.
Ten minutes later Gorfang was standing in another of Gadûhvrás' endless corridors, in front of a doorway, though this time one with an actual door. Eloy and Lynien, both invisible, lurked behind him. Gorfang shrugged, and knocked on the door. A voice bellowed from inside; "What?" It was loud, and definitely trollish, but also quite definitely female. "May I come in?" asked Gorfang. "Yes," was the answer, and he opened the door and went in.
Three trolls waited inside. Two were young females, unremarkable, one holding a flagon and cup and pouring some drink or other, but the third...! A full-grown female troll, but if possible more muscular than even the biggest of the bulls across the hall, Big Jill was dressed in most of a suit of human plate armour, 'let out' where necessary with the insertion of chainmail between the plates. Despite this, there was a lot of Big Jill that spilled over. Gorfang, being an orc, had been pondering the idea of experimenting with the trolls as breeding stock, but when this idea crashed into the reality of Big Jill, synapses in Gorfang's brain began to fuse and shut down in protest. The troll leader had told Gorfang that Big Jill wasn't really part of the tribe any more; she'd gone 'outside' and come back different. By the looks of her, she'd seen some kind of military service somewhere. She did not look pleased to see Gorfang.
"Who are you?" she asked impatiently. Gorfang introduced himself, and explained his plans for re-founding the city, but she was not enthused. "Get out," she growled, "I have been a slave and a soldier, been used by other races, and now I just want to be left alone. Go away." Gorfang tried to press the point, and Big Jill, unused to being refused, lost her temper and grabbed a greataxe from a corner. "You mud-wallowing orcs had this place once," she snarled, "and it was taken away from you. Get out and leave us alone!" Sensing things were going south, Lynien and Eloy fanned out, Eloy taking position to tackle one of the smaller females if it came to a fight. Big Jill swung the axe up to attack, but Gorfang once more attacked with non-lethal force. Her armour deflected some of his blows, but then he changed tack and swiped her legs out from under her, dumping her on the floor, and laid the curved edge of his khopesh at her throat.
She glared at him. "Finish it if you must, but I will not be a slave again," she snarled. Gorfang withdrew his blade, and she got up. "If those fools across the hall are going to submit to you, I'm leaving," she said bitterly, gathering some possessions into a pack. She glanced at her troll maids. "These two have seen me beaten by an orc," she said, and swiftly pulled a jagged dagger and cut their throats. Eloy and Lynien dodged frantically to avoid the gouts of black blood. Gorfang shrugged, disappointed, and left her to it.
When they reached the first flight of the long climb back to the Cloven Spire, Lynien and Eloy stopped. Neither had any interest in smithcraft and the idea of going straight back to start work on the mithril didn't appeal. They decided to have a look around now that they were here. Gorfang, happy to reduce the interruptions to the job, took both bags of coal and started back, leaving them to it.
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Taking care to mark their path so they could get back, the two set off to explore further, heading in roughly the opposite direction to the mines. After an hour or so, they noticed a greyness of pale light, and, following it, found themselves looking out of openings in the rock wall over a steep-sided valley with an ancient, crumbling orc-road leading to somewhere below them. They had found the Drake Gate, and were looking out over the main gateway to the fortress from the defensive positions above it. It was night below, and they looked for signs of life - lights, fires, spiders - but there was nothing.
They headed back into the level, poking into rooms here and there, shifting the rubble and bones, but what Gorfang had said was basically true - the ruins had long ago been picked clean. The only exception to this was where other explorers and interlopers had brought things with them and either abandoned them or died with them. In one place, not far from the Drake Gate, they found the remnants of quite a large orc settlement, a few decades old, probably the source of the troll champion's axe, but empty and abandoned. The unmistakable sooty smudge of a Fireball spell, roughly the same age, and some broken arrows of human make, gave some clues as to what had happened. Gorfang, it appeared, was not the first orc to attempt to re-colonize Gadûhvrás.
Making their way back across the rise, they came across a peculiar structure that attracted their attention. An oval doorway led into a cylindrical stone room, only about six feet across, which appeared to have no ceiling. After some exploration, they discovered that there was a corroded bronze lever sticking out of the wall nearby. There was also a 2" hole in both floor and celing near this. The whole area had a damp feel to it. Eloy closed the door - which fitted tightly - and then Lynien pulled the lever.
There was a couple of seconds' pause, and then from somewhere nearby came a gurgling rumble and a sound of rushing water. This went on for a couple of minutes, and then stopped. The door wouldn't open, so they returned to the stairs and ascended to the next rise up and located the place exactly above the strange cylinder. Sure enough, there was another, apparently identical, down to the stone floor and absent ceiling. Eloy stepped into it, and noticed that the stone floor rocked slightly, like a boat, when he stood on it. Lynien went back down to the original one and restored the lever to its' original location. After a couple of minutes and more rushing noises, the door released - and there was Eloy, sitting on the stone floor. The stone walls of the cylinder were streaming with water. It was a water-powered lift....
Some more experimentation discovered that two pumps on the handle would send the lift two rises up. Lynien and Eloy scratched their heads; it must have involved a lot of running up and down to open and close the doors. As an experiment, they left the lower door open and pumped the lever, at which point torrents of water gushed out of the portal and poured away into the corridors. Eloy fought the door shut, but long after that they could hear rushings and splashings as water ran into empty rooms and down dusty staircases. Occasionally there were other distant sounds, as if some creature or other had been disturbed by the flood. Eloy grinned shamelessly. "Be useful, that, once we get it fixed," he commented as they left hurriedly.
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A couple of hours later, they found themselves at the beginning of a long straight passage. Unlike most of the city, it was paved in squared slabs rather than having a rough rock floor. Arches marched along the walls, and half-way along, they discovered a jagged hole in the floor. The edges were weathered, but much less so than the rest of the stones - Eloy estimated the break as no more than fifty years old. Beneath was a dark void. Curious, Eloy hooked his lantern to a rope and lowered it carefully into the abyss.
Below was revealed a large, rough cavern, about the size of the area above but uneven in shape. As the bottom came into sight, Eloy's heart skipped a beat. Spread out over the cavern base was a mass of huge tentacles, as wide around as a man, attached to a large central mass. He braced himself for the attack, but nothing happened. Slowly, it dawned on him that the monstrosity below was dead - long dead, decades dead. The tentacles were skeletal and the central mass was shrivelled and mumified. Some movement did catch his eyes, though. Scattered around the cavern were tiny versions of the creature, alive but too small to be much of a threat. He and Lynien exchanged glances as they thought the same thing; these things might be useful one day.
By the time Lynien and Eloy had got back, it was the morning of the next day. Gorfang's smelting was well under way, and nearly half the mithril was stacked as rough-cast pigs in the corner of his makeshift forge. The heat was intense, and Eloy and Lynien took advantage of it to dry off a bit. Then they settled in to wait as the rest was melted and recast.
Finally, at midnight on the second day, the process was complete, and the stack of ingots shared out between Gorfang and Lynien. Gorfang gave Shufghoth some last instructions, and Eloy had a few brief words with some of the humans, then they were ready to be off. Bog joined them and they crowded
close while Lynien read the scroll of Teleport she'd brought. Carefully she incanted the spell, and with a slight pop of inrushing air, the four were gone.
Lynien had aimed her spell to drop them into the guest room she'd occupied on their last visit, as the most familiar place in the city. Fortunately, no-one was occupying it, and they popped into existence unobserved. However, when Gorfang opened the door and peered down the corridor, it was to see the steward who'd ministered to them on their last visit jogging towards the room with four guards and a mage. Evidently, teleporting unannounced into the Dark Tower was detectable!
As former guests, there was no difficulty in them resuming their previous acommodation, although the steward did request them to try and arrive more conventionaly next time. Food was provided, and Lynien sighed happily at the sight of the large bath in her quarters. She started towards it, carrying a tray of food, her eyes already going dreamy. Gorfang offered to scrub her back, while Eloy picked up a small square of cloth and held it up with a cheesy grin; "Hold your towel?" he suggested. Lynien firmly ejected them both before sinking into the warm water with a happy sigh.
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