21. Half-Baked Half-Orc

The party trudged forward through the cave with respective preferred ranged weapons ready. Kagain estimated they were on the fourth floor of the mines, and judging from the bone-piercing cold and nauseating dampness, no one disbelieved him. The tunnel turned at one point, and the yipping of kobolds echoed around the bend. Jade stepped forward and peered around a corner. The cave opened up into a huge chamber, and there was in fact an underground river running past. A natural bridge spanned it, and on the other side were indeed kobolds.

"Kobold Kommandos!" Xzar squeaked. "Kanine Kolonels, if you will!"

Jade nodded her head three times to tally up the number of kobolds to her partners. Then, without warning, she popped out from behind the wall and fired. At that signal, the other four popped from around the side of the wall just as the arrow skewered the first kobold. Montaron managed to hit a second in the knee with a bolt, but a throwing axe soon followed and cleaved its head in two. Branwen's sling bullet pinged off the third's skull, merely dazing it, and Xzar's throwing daggers weren't even close. Jade already had her second arrow loosed, but as it flew through the air, the third kobold sent a flaming arrow back the other way, and as the little monster was skewered by Jade's arrow, Kagain found a burst of flame erupt on his chest where the kobold's arrow planted.

He grunted angrily, but when Branwen again knelt to offer healing, the dwarf chuckled and waved her aside with one hand while pulling out the arrow with another. "Now ye'll get to see some real dwarven stamina," he smiled, "Even this'll close up in an hour or two."

"Flames cauterize, no? Even if a little troll-dwarf you may be?" Xzar made weird twiddling motions with his fingers.

"Right you are, necromancer,' the dwarf nodded while taking out a dagger, "I scrape away the cauterized flesh, and then it'll grow back good as new! Foul trolls're too dumb to do the same; and it's a good thing." While the rest of the party, especially Xzar, watched with morbid interest, Kagain pulled his splint mail away from the wound and began to scrape the charred flesh with a small dagger, not even flinching. The wound then began to bleed, but Kagain only had to press his hand upon it for a few seconds to arrest that. He stuck a cloth bandage over the wound for good measure, then casually fastened his dwarven splintmail back over it.

"Well, what're you waiting for, young'uns? This bounty won't be around forever!" he called as he traipsed across the bridge, and the others followed.

After crossing the bridge over the underground river, Jade looted the bodies and added more flame arrows to her quiver. Her first magical arrows, she realized with a touch of pride. And she had fought for them.

They found a doorway descending to the supposed fifth level of the mines. Now they crept forward more carefully than ever, and soon came to the archway to a side room which had been laden with chests, blankets, and houkas. It looked like some Calimshani nobleman's chambers and thoroughly out of place in the dank mines.

A half-orc with dark hair, warty skin, and a lazy eye came running up the them from a bed at the back of the chamber, looking as crazy as he appeared strong. He held a flail and shield and wore splint mail emblazoned with the Dark Sun, and the same unholy symbol was clasped to his belt. Neither that nor his living quarters are good signs regarding his sanity, Jade thought.

"Tazok must have dispatched you, and my traitorous kobolds let them pass, didn't they?" the half-orc grunted in fright as he appraised the heavily armed party, his wide teeth chattering nervously. "I knew I could not trust them!" the lazy-eyed Cyricist continued. "Armed as such as you are, you were obviously sent to kill me! By Cyric, not a measure of ore leaves these mines unspoiled and still I am to be executed?! I'll not lose my head over this!"

"Ah...yes," Jade improvised, "Tazok is most displeased with you, yes! Reveal yourself and your treachery and perhaps we will spare you!" She growled authoritatively.

"Tazok is unfair!" the cleric babbled. "I am Mulahey, but I have no desire to cheat him, or thee! My letters will show, they are there, in that chest. Take them, take them to Tazok and he will see!"

Mulahey appeared to calm down a touch, but before Jade had even taken a full step forward, the man's face lit up, twitched several times, and took on a completely different expression, as if some new soul or personality had suddenly possessed the body. He began ranting again, very angrily, "Fools, you'll never have the chance to take anything! Minions, come forth and kill the intruders!"

"Talk about a split personality," Jade chuckled and readied her golden-hilted bastard sword in a two-handed grip. "I think I'll partition his body as well."

"Our battle be split as well!" Montaron cried as pattering noises began echoing in the hallway they'd come down. "I sees kobolds and skeletons outflanking us." He fired his crossbow down the hallway once, causing a koboldish squeak of pain to echo back a second later.

Mulahey commenced a clerical chant but Xzar's speedy ramblings and wild gestures sent a magical missile from his fingertips at the half-orc, bursting on him and devolving his incantations into a grunt of pain. Kagain stepped astride Jade to two-on-one the half-orc cleric while Branwen moved back, chanting to Tempus and raising high her own holy symbol, Tempus's Shield, as the clattering sounds of skeletons grew closer. Montaron fired off another bolt as a half-dozen kobolds and as many skeletons poured down the hallway they'd just come from.

As the monsters drew nearer, the halfling hooked his crossbow to his belt and drew from it his shortsword and buckler, and Xzar clasped both hands into the air above himself and uttered arcane words. A flash of light rippled from the necromancer's fingers, forming a rainbow wedge of clashing colors that flooded over Montaron's head, arcing through the darkness. The clashing light danced in the eyes of the kobolds, four of which twitched and dropped, in catatonic seizures. Montaron engaged the fifth in a shortsword duel, and Branwen summoned an etheral hammer and brought it down upon the triangular head of the sixth. The skeletons stepped over the comatose kobolds, their bony fingers reaching and grasping, but Branwen shouted mightily at them, and the flaming sword on Tempus's Shield seemed to truly glow with flame. The undead shrieked, half of them about-facing and skittering back down the tunnel. Montaron whacked out the knee-joints of another, sending it crashing to the ground, and Branwen dodged the fifth's clawed swipes while crushing its skull to shards with her spiritual hammer.

"Stop touching me!!!" Xzar shrieked as the sixth skeleton swiped across his robe, tearing it with bony finger-joints and drawing blood. The necromancer slashed his dagger through the neck of its spine with one hand, and grasped the top of the skull. He severed it from the body, and proceeded to bash the ribcage to splinters with its own skull, which remained animated, and attempted to bite the wizard's wrist. After he had finished decimating the body, Xzar threw the chattering skull against the floor and it fragmented. The trio then hastily bashed and hacked at the comatose kobolds before they might awaken.

Jade's sword and Kagain's axe crashed against Mulahey's flail and shield, and the half-orc's grunts again turned to a chant. Jade swiped at his head, but the edge of her blade ricocheted off his helmet. Kagain began a swing that surely wound have severed his leg at the knee, but the half-orc's spell punctuated with a loud and evil grunt, and the dwarf froze in place, glowing a faint yellow. Behind him, Montaron froze, and Branwen stopped as still as the statue she had been at this hour the day before. Jade's next swing glanced off Mulahey's armor, and he swung his large flail around, bashing Jade in the helmet and sending her to her knees, almost stunned, her bastard sword clattering to the ground. Inside her helmet, she could feel blood trickling down through her hair and over her cheek from where Mulahey had brained her, and she saw stars in her vision.

"Dieee," Mulahey bellowed and raised his flail high to bash her to a pulp. The blood trickled down her cheek and she licked the warm irony liquid from the corner of her mouth. Her rattled mind swam with images awash in blood and carnage and death.

KILL HIM...

Jade snarled as the flail closed in, rueing her recent dismissal of a shield, determined not to die. Instinctively, she flung her hand up, and a faint shimmer danced in a plane between her hand and the crashing flail, which ricocheted off the air, illuminating an ethereal disc. The half-orc balked in surprise, but Jade was as shocked, and Mulahey seemed to recover the initiatve for a second swing. This was was interrupted as a beam of blue 'flame' flashed over Jade's head, striking Mulahey in the face and coating it in frost, his hairy warts shattering, his thick face-skin cracking, his eyes lost under frost.

"Orcs on ice!" echoed the gleefull laughter of Xzar, and Jade tilted her head back to see the jet of ice enamating from the necromancer's wand as it sailed into Mulahey. The necromancer babbled on in an arcane tongue, lifted his other hand, and opened his palm to gift another magic missile to the half-orc, exploding his frozen face inside his helm. The faceless half-orc abruptly fell over with a sickening crash.

Xzar blew his breath over each hand theatrically, as if cooling off smoking implements. Then he grinned down at Jade. "Are you okay, mommy? Very smart, casting Shield like that. You didn't tell Xzar you knew magic! How wonderful! Now the chocolate-nymphs will dance and sing and shower us with honeymelon and raspberry-mist!"

"I...don't," Jade coughed, getting to her feet, pulling off her helm and rubbing her hand over her blood-sticky scarlet hair, pressing her head-wound. "I thought about studying magic, X, but I never did, even after you left."

It wasn't clear whether the necromancer understood the childhood reference, but he danced attentatively to her side, inspecting the wound carefully and grinning. "Perhaps mommy is a sorceress? Oh joy! That would be so much fun!"

Jade's heart hurt, both from the braining and the new mystery. "I was wishing for a shield, and...BAM! I got one."

"A magiphysical manifestation of will," Xzar grinned toothily, "A rush of emotion and instinct calling on innate power! How very fascinating, my sword-sorceress."

Jade sighed, and smiled at the excited necromancer in spite of herself. "I can't object to a mysterious power that just saved my life, but I'd rather I understood it."

Branwen sputtered angrily as she unfroze, surveyed the won battle, and healed Jade while Xzar skipped across the garishly furnished room, to a large brown-and-gold treasure chest.

"Wait, ye crazy fool!" Montaron's voice hissed, and Jade spun around to see the halfling growling while Kagain too came to life, blinking. "Could be trapped!"

Montaron scampered over to Xzar, peered at chest for a moment with his black eyes, then carefully flicked it open with the tip of his shortsword. "Magical scrolls!" Xzar gasped like it was birthday. "And...unmagical scrolls!"

"Those be called 'letters', wizard," Montaron snapped, and pulled two furled vellum scrolls from the compartment. Montaron unfurled and held them up for his taller companions to read.

My servant Mulahey,

I have sent you the kobolds and mineral poison that you require. Your task is to poison any iron ore that leaves this mine. Don't reveal your presence to the miners or you will find yourself swaped by soldiers from the local Amnish garrison. My superiors have recetnly hired on the services of the Black Talon mercenaries and the Chill. With these soldiers at my disposal, I should be able to destroy any iron caravans entering the region from the south and east. I don't want to deal with iron coming from the Nashekl mines so don't fail in your duty.

TAZOK

My servant Mulahey,

Your progress in disruption the flow of iron ore does not go as well as it should. How stupid can you be to allow your kobolds to murder the miners?! With your presence revealed you should be wary of enemies sent to stop your operation. Your task is a very simple one; if you continue to show that you can't do the job, you will be replaced. I will not send the kobolds you have requested as I need all the troops I possess to stop the flow of iron into this region. With this message I have sent more of the mineral poison that you require. If you have any problems then send a message to my new contact in Beregost. His name is Tranzig, and he'll be staying at Feldepost's Inn.

TAZOK

Save for Xzar's gleefull ramblings as he pulled scrolls and gold and an azure elvish sword out of the chest, the party stood stone silent as they pored over the letters.

"Tranzig...." Branwen grated her teeth, and her sneer practically reached her left eye.

Jade looked at her friend solemnly. "I think we'll lodge at Feldepost's very soon."

"I know the Talon 'n' the Chill," Kagain spoke up, "Chill's hobgoblins. Talon's humans, but not much more civilized. Give mercenaries a bad name," he spat. "I suppose it's them we've been dealing with up and down the highways. I have ta wonder who'd be wanting 'em to poison and disrupt the iron trade, and why? Sure it's weakening the Gate for war against Amn, but it's why Amn is ruffled in the first place! Rival iron supplier? Someone hoping to weaken us all? Zhentarim?"

Xzar's head spun from his scrolls toward the dwarf, and he twitched, but said nothing. Kagain noticed.

Jade smiled at the dwarf, and at Brawnen. "Hopefully this Tranzig will know more."

The party sprang apart like interrupted adulterous lovers as a ghostly, disembodied moan echoed through the cavern.

"We're dooooooomed......"