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“So…you're adventurers?” Thud snorted. “Hells, no. Can't abide adventure. 'Adventure' is a word people use to put a shine on lack of preparation and surviving through dumb luck. We're professionals and that means we leave the adventure out of it.”
“Dwarves are sequential hermaphroditic parthenogens,”
“So, the changing sex thing. How does that work? Does it take a while or is it the sort of thing that might happen in the middle of a conversation?” “Hard to say,” Ruby said. “Does she need to clear her throat or did she just become a male? Is he just pausing for thought or did he just impregnate himself mid-sentence?” She shrugged. “Dwarf physiology isn’t really my field.”
There is a distinct evolutionary advantage to being fuzzy, as much of the mammal kingdom had discovered, particularly when you wanted a human to scratch your back. The dwarven evolutionary tree had embraced this concept wholeheartedly only to discover that once you started talking and expressing opinions a human’s desire to scratch your back became directly inverse to how fuzzy it was.
“I’m surprised you didn’t call them Left Ass and Right Ass.” Clink shook his head. “Too obvious. I feel that the avoidance o’ the overt pun adds an element o’ mystery lending depth an’ obscurity to the name’s humor.”
Accused of necromancy by one Lord Wingen of the Tanahael council. Responded by assassinating entire council and reanimating their corpses to declare him king. Reign renowned and feared for cruelty and execution spectacles (ref Scr. Wick III Vol XVII). Purportedly achieved lich status and enslaved ‘dozens of dead',
“A lich is an undead type thingy,” Dadger said. “Wizard hides his life somewhere outsides his body, like in a vase or a jewel or somethin' then keeps strutting around in the dead body. Makes 'em tough to kill as you have to find 'n' break whatever it is they hid their life in.” “In a prophylactery, it's called.” Giblets said.
“How did he destroy a town with...” Durham looked at the journal again. “...livestock reanimation?” “Well,” Dadger said, sucking at his mustache. “I imagine having yer dinner come back to life in yer stomach and expressing its displeasure might be the gist of it. Along with the bones from all your prior dinners knocking around the place. I’m hypothesizing though.”
Yesterday a guard, today an under-qualified expedition escort with possible prophetic complications. Next up a dungeon full of death and horror.
Just another day in the office!
His guard posting was the bottom rung of a tall career ladder and he’d been stuck there for years. Just because he now found himself on a different ladder didn’t mean that he couldn’t climb it.
“See, the place you’re born determines what type o’ fae you are. Meaning your environment. Dwarves is the fae o’ the mountains. Wood elves is forests, obviously. Then you got yer merfolk, yer harpies, trolls and whatnot. We all basically get crossed with our environment, or some with types of creatures. Pixies is the bug fae, goblins the rodents. But us bein’ related don’t exactly mean we see eye to eye on much. We has as much common ground in our thinkin’ as you humans do with monkeys. Forest elves is concerned with keeping the forest protected as if you cut down too many trees then you ain’t
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“Pray, state thy purpose, be it errand foul or mission blessed, lest we for injury claim redress.” “Bloody hells,” said Dadger. “Never had a headache come on quite this fast before.”
his expression adopting a faint touch of curiosity and a healthy slap of suspicion.
“Think of it as a character building experience. If ye don't mind me sayin' so lad, you could use a bit more character. Yer a bit drab amidst this wondrous company o' fine dwarves. No better place to start lookin' than up a chicken's arse.”
And if there ain’t no lich then there’s something else responsible so don’t miss the silver fer seekin’ the gold.
“Then they sell those wondrous things to others,” Nibbly said. “Those people then hire dwarves to build dungeons to protect their wondrous things. Then others hire us to go into those dungeons and recover those wondrous things to be locked away, creating a continuing market for new wondrous things. And thus the great wheel of the dwarven economy turns.”
“We made some dramatically different career choices to bring us to the same place,” he said.
“You gotta make the choices exist in the first place to get the ones ya want. If you just grab the ones that wander by ya end up on the postern gate.”
Durham took a swallow from the flask and felt the paint peel off of the interior of his entire gastrointestinal tract.
First thing tomorrow morning I’m gonna starts fixing this,” you says to yerself,” Thud went on. “Next thing ya know twenty years o’ tomorrows has gone by and yer still watching the sheep gate.” Durham stopped nodding, in spite of the fact that Thud’s second comment had been more prescient than the first.
There is a part of the brain that, ordinarily, doesn’t do too much other than watch and wait. The monkey brain, the bit that exists primarily for those moments when things are suddenly happening too quickly for the conscious brain to deal with; moments when destiny is suddenly approaching at high speed. And then it takes over. Its job is to make decisions and to make them instantly. It does this largely by circumventing the entire thinking process, taking no time to assess the consequences of its decisions or the likelihood of them leading to long-term success, merely choosing what seems the
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Running backwards is difficult at the best of times. This was not the best of times.
The monkey brain again chose shrieking as the best available option on its menu, perhaps because it was the one decision it had made already that hadn’t failed horribly. What actually came out of Durham’s mouth was a noise more like an asthmatic getting punched in the stomach.
“The sort of folks that build themselves tombs like this often has the notion that they gets to take all of their stuff into the afterlife as long as its buried with ‘em. Granted, if’n you’re a lichy sort and know that your afterlife is gonna take place inside the tomb I can see that bein’ a fairly practical type consideration.”
“Now we gotta boil these clean, record 'em for posterity and appraise 'em for prosperity,”
“A philosophical conundrum for your edification and perturbation; your discussion betwixt mastications,” he squeakily proclaimed.
“Don’t you see? It could be either! And therefore, until we observe it, both answers are correct! It leads to speculation of parallel realms with every possible outcome, each echoes of the others!”
“There are going to be demons in there?” Durham asked, looking toward the crypt. A bit of his stomach seemed to have relocated itself into his throat, leaving him queasy and swallowing.
There’s power in knowledge and a little power feeds the desire for more of it. If the knowledge is something that few others have then it makes the power rare and especially seductive. The thing about knowledge and power is that there’s always more of both to be had and each increases the other.
A smell rose from the darkness. A smell so strong it was a flavor. The sort of smell that coats one’s sinuses like a glaze. A smell like the forgotten container of cabbage, the potato at the bottom of the bin, a week old battlefield in summer, a rotting skunk drowned in a communal outhouse, a mummy's breath and boiling giblets, all rolled into one, tied with a bow and then left to ferment for a century. “Wasn't me,” Nibbly said.
“Well, looks like we found us an adventure after all,” he said happily. “I thought you hated adventure,” Durham said. “Aye, that I do.” He dabbed at his eyes. “That don't mean I don't miss it sumthin' fierce though.
Nibbly helped Leery untangle her arms and limbs then helped her to her feet. She wobbled a bit but seemed intact. Nibbly had figured out long ago that Leery’s value to the team was her pathological lack of self-preservation accompanied by seeming indestructibility rather than her questionable acrobatic skill. Dwarves excelled at somersaults but that was both the beginning and the end of the dwarven acrobatic legacy.
Mungo looked up at the corners where the walls met the ceiling. He idly calculated the quadrilateral binomial hypotenuse vectors, even while knowing that it wouldn’t lead to anything.
“Clink,” he finally said. “Might I briefly appropriate your eyeball? The glass one, not the biological one.” Clink arched his eyebrows then shrugged and pulled his glass eye out. It made a little schloop noise. “Yeah, if ye’d asked for my good one I’d probably have to turn you down.”
“Eureka!” Mungo yelled. It was a word that wasn’t actually a word but which he’d mathematically proved to exist in a parallel realm and he quite liked the sound of it when it came to needing something to yell in moments of cerebral triumph.
“Well, we ain't leavin' him behind one way or the other,” Thud said. “We may have lost team members before but I ain't never, ever, left one behind.”
Chickens are true creatures of zen-they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise
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The scribes were known for going to great lengths to avoid having any significant effects on how events played out, present simply to record what happened. “We don’t make the history, we write the history,” she’d told him once. Later, on reflection, Thud had decided that the two were one and the same. History wasn’t what had happened. History was what someone had written down about what happened.
“What’s your name?” Nibbly asked. “In order to pronounce my name you’d have to cleave your tongue in half, tie one half in a knot and choke on the other. I’d be more than happy to provide that service, should you wish. If not, call me whatever you like. Your choice will be utterly irrelevant within a few minutes.”
“His wyrd. ‘S a demon necromancers keep around so folks think they’re actually demonologists.” “That’s somehow better?” Dadger shrugged. “Messing around with dark and sinister entities in the pursuit of power, well, folks can understand the allure. Playing with dead things, however, not so much. So they have a demon to parade around and keep their skeletons in the closet.”
The extremely strict Dwarven laws over who could learn Dwarvish (dwarves only) guaranteed that dwarves could openly discuss strategy in front of their enemies, as long as they weren’t fellow dwarves. Some countries had come to consider a dwarf speaking Dwarvish to be an act of war and had, thus far, been spot on. It was the linguistic equivalent of a crossbow being cocked.
“What gave me away?” “Several things. First being that you have complete intelligence in a dungeon where all of the other skeletons have nothing of the sort. Second, you claimed that you couldn’t remember your name then a minute later claimed that memories don’t degrade for undead indicating to me that you were being deliberately obtuse. Third, Squitters was happy to see you in spite of the fact that I can’t think of much a talking skull could do to endear itself to a dog other than letting him gnaw on you, which you don’t show any signs of. Plus you referred to cookies as ‘biscuits’. Everyone
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“I thought that you…uh…animated things by tying their souls back to their skeletons.” “That is what many think. In fact, if you were to ask other necromancers, that is likely what they would say as well. But what is a soul other than a swirl of magical energy in the shape of what it inhabits? I learned that one can make the shape and then form the magic to it. And magic, why, magic can take any shape at all.
“Hot spot!” she yelled. It was a dwarven term, used to announce a location that was safe for the moment but very soon wouldn’t be. Demolitionists used it when they lit the fuse. Smelters used it when the molten iron was about to be poured. Soldiers used it when the shadow of an incoming catapult stone fell across them. Ginny used it now to tell Thud to move, fast, because now she could see the gear spinning its way toward him.
“Straight forward enough. Have a plan?” “Nope,” Thud said, “but seems to me there’s a dozen and a half more dwarves around this place somewhere and that’s a whole lot of gremlins in the works for Alaham that he seems to have discounted. So, I thinks step one is to start coordinating the problems.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a rock and a small hammer.
The Dwarven race is largely known, by the non-Dwarves of the outside world, for their proficiency at mining. It is a well deserved reputation, as mining to Dwarves is akin to eating or talking for other races. Dwarven children receive their first rock hammer in the crib, along with stones to bang on with it. They receive interesting rocks to break apart on their birthdays and their own mineshaft when they come of age. Dwarven music is comprised almost entirely of the sound of things hitting stone in complex rhythms and many a happy adolescence is spent burrowing deep into the bones of the
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You will be the new form of the continuance of my reign.” “Your reign over a hole in the ground full of puppets made of bone?”
The macabre horde pressed on around him.
Ruby was wire and leather, however, chewed by thousands of hours on the road into pure gristle.
