It's been a while since I've had a chance to write in my journal, as life has been hectic lately. An army of thousands of orcs attacked the town, far more than we felt able to deal with. Kriv, who had wound up being by default the highest-ranking Watch officer in Nyth, tried to rally an army by promoting a city guard to Lieutenant, but it was too late. The people were rioting over everything that had happened – which was hardly surprising, with my unnatural winter, Emmrietta's defection to the service of Shub-Niggurath, the zombie attack, and now these orcs. After the rioters stabbed the new lieutenant, and orcs ate Kriv's horse, we decided there was nothing we could do except flee.

We hurried to the docks and stole a boat. I should have protested, as much about the stealing as about our cowardice, but I felt too out of my depth in the situation to do much about it. The people of the town were rushing to the harbour and throwing themselves into the sea, begging us to take them on board. The dinghy we were in wasn't big enough to carry many people, but the five of us squashed up to make room for three men, one of whom had managed to reserve a place by clinging onto Kos's leg. Mordenkainen the wizard had disappeared, which I suppose is normal behaviour for a wizard, and at least we now didn't have to worry about whatever was going on between him and Rothgar. In retrospect, perhaps we stopped worrying too soon.

I felt deeply ashamed of fleeing, and Kriv seemed to feel much the same. He was sunk in despair, unwilling to talk or to look anyone in the eye, and concentrating on rowing the boat north up the coast to try to get round the army. There were four oars, and all of us except Bobbynock, who was too small to be very effective, took turns in rowing, but Kriv refused to rest throughout the voyage, as if hard, tiring physical labour could atone for all our failures so far.

As far as we could find out, the orc leader Waaagghh and his followers had come to Nyth to use the magic circle Happy had created to transport themselves to the Dreamlands. (I still wasn't quite clear about who or what Happy was, but I was to find out shortly.) The orcs were on a quest to find an artefact, the Eye of Gruumsch, to resurrect their god Gruumsch. In the meantime, however, there seemed to be a lot of orcs stationed back in our world.

In the meantime, we needed to get to know our new companions. 'I'm Bobbynock, and I'm the leader,' explained Bobbynock.

'I'm Kos, and I'm the smartest,' added Kos with his reptilian mouth twisted into what had to be a dragonborn's version of a smirk.

Kriv said nothing.

'I'm Beira, and I'm new. I've only known these people a few days, but they're very brave,' I said. 'Rothgar, don't you want to introduce yourself?'

'No,' said Rothgar firmly.

I realised again what an idiot I had been. I had got so used to knowing who Rothgar was that I had forgotten he was travelling incognito.

The newcomers introduced themselves as Jim, Sam, and Bob. 'That's a nice name,' Bobbynock said to the human Bob, with a grin.

Jim was regarding Rothgar suspiciously. 'You're him, aren't you? The King of Quaffy? What are you doing here?'

'No, of course I'm not!' said Rothgar hastily.

'Of course he isn't,' Bobbynock confirmed. 'It's just a nickname Beira gave him, because he looks a bit like King Rothgar.'

'Not very like him, of course,' added Kos. 'Nowhere near as good-looking.'

Fortunately, we were interrupted here by the boat rocking from side to side. Bobbynock nearly fell overboard, but Kriv managed to grab him just in time.

'I thought you knew all about boats?' teased Kos.

'Read all about boats,' groaned Bobbynock. 'I've never actually been on one before.' He was feeling quite badly seasick. I gave him a quick laying on of hands to make him feel better.

'I don't like the sea,' groaned Sam.

'Are you feeling seasick, too?' I asked.

'No, just scared,' said Sam miserably. 'There's things living in the sea, round here.'

'Why doesn't someone tell a story, to take our minds off things?' suggested Jim, putting a reassuring hand on Sam's shoulder. 'Tell us your life stories, maybe,' he added, still glancing curiously at Rothgar.

Bobbynock took a fat, leather-bound book of memoirs out of his bag. 'I'll begin at the beginning,' he said. 'I was born…'

'No, not there!' snapped Kos. 'We don't want to hear again about your earliest memories and how you grew up wanting to be a wizard. Get onto the adventures!'

'Well, we once saved a city from a dragon,' said Bobbynock. 'Greywing the Great was once part of the Talons of Power, before the humans were corrupted and…'

'Are we there yet?' interrupted Kos.

'No!' snapped Kriv.

'So, did you have to protect the city from the silver dragon?' I asked, puzzled. I'm not an expert on wildlife, but I had thought that metallic dragons were usually friendly to humanoids.

'It was years ago,' said Bobbynock. 'Back then, it was Rothgar and me, a high elf called Eru, and Gregor – he was a cleric of Halor…'

'He was so stupid, wasn't he?' put in Rothgar.

'Well, he'd have to be, to decide to come with us,' pointed out Bobbynock.

'What species was Gregor?' I asked.

'He was a human, like you,' said Bobbynock. 'Well, first of all, we had to take care of some kobolds…'

'Was that "take care of" as in "look after" or "kill"?' I interrupted.

'As in killing them,' Bobbynock confirmed.

'Well, would you mind saying "kill"?' I asked. 'I know it's pedantic, but I hate euphemisms – they make it so hard to tell people's real intentions. After all, we're supposed to be taking care of our guests here, and that doesn't mean we're going to kill them, does it?'

The newcomers, especially Sam, looked even more worried than before.

'Well, anyway,' said Bobbynock, 'the kobolds were holding a baby dragon captive in their camp. The baby's older sister was standing outside, crying – lucky you weren't with us then, Kos, or you'd probably have hit her…'

'But I thought Kos liked dragons?' I said. 'He's got a pet dragon, after all.'

'Yeah, but Sophie was disguised as a human,' Bobbynock explained. 'Anyway, we rescued Miadorus – the baby dragon – and killed the kobolds, but their leader got away – the one in gold armour.'

'Are we there yet?' asked Kos again.

'Look around you!' retorted Kriv. 'We're in the middle of the ocean! Obviously we're not there yet!'

'It was around that time that we first met Happy – and he really was quite happy and friendly, back in those days. You see, in order to work in Elventower, we had to join a guild. I wanted to join the Mages' Guild, but we took a vote as a group and voted to join the Adventurers' Guild. It was a bit down on its luck, and this talking cat, Happy, who was an important member of the guild, gave us the task of going into the Crypt of the Necromancer – this was before it was called the Crypt of the Nekomancer, remember – to look for Happy's friend Gramalin...'

'What species was Gramalin?' I asked. I know it's racist to keep on obsessing about people's species, but when people are talking about people I've never met, it's helpful to have some kind of mental picture of them.

'He was an elf,' said Bobbynock. 'He was a member of the Adventurers' Guild, and he was Happy's best friend, and he'd gone into the tomb and not returned. It turned out that he'd been killed and turned into a zombie, so we had to kill him again – not that we told Happy that part of the story. Anyway, we met a fairy dragon called Navi who insisted on turning Eru into a cat, over and over again – once he even did it when we were in the middle of a battle with some zombies. And Mr Who went absolutely mental…'

'You're saying you're not mental?' interrupted Kos.

Bobbynock ignored him and carried on with the story. 'Anyway, we found a crazed necromancer praying to an idol of Shub-Niggurath. We killed him and took his book, and for once we did the sensible thing and didn't try to read it. We took it back to the Guild and explained to Happy that Gramalin was dead – and then, of course, the next thing we knew, Happy had stolen the book and read it in the hope of finding a spell that could bring Gramalin back to life. He succeeded, but it cost him his sanity.

'Well, in the meantime, we went with Greywing the Great, the mother of Sophie and Miadorus, to her mountain. The three of them are the last three of the silver dragons…'

'Are we there yet?' repeated Kos again, who clearly knew this story by heart and was bored with it. Nobody bothered to answer, so he switched to making odd, dragonish sounds with his scaly cheeks. Bob, Jim, Sam and I glared at him.

'You may not want to hear the story, but I do,' Jim pointed out.

'So do I,' I said.

Kriv was busy staring down into the water at the side of the boat. 'There's something big down there,' he said.

'Can I have a go at fishing?' asked Rothgar. 'Have we got anything to fish with?'

'Not a good idea,' said Kriv. 'We need to head for the shore.'

Something odd flickered, and then something huge erupted out of the boat, grabbed Jim and hauled him overboard.

'Everyone to the centre of the boat!' shouted Kriv.

We obeyed, except for Sam, who screamed, 'Didn't help Jim much!' and rushed to the stern of the boat. Kriv grabbed the human in his strong, scaly arms and pulled him back.

'What? Where's Jim?' said Rothgar, puzzled.

'The sea monster ate him!' we all shouted.

Rothgar blinked. 'What sea monster?'

'Roth – valiant half-elf who looks like King Rothgar,' I said, trying to be tactful about this, 'have you ever thought that there might be a curse on you?'

'What? Why would there be a curse on me?'

'Well, it's just that I've noticed that your friends have to keep you tied up sometimes – look, would you let me cast Remove Curse on you? After all, if there isn't one, it can't do any harm, and if there is a curse that you're not aware of, it might help, mightn't it?'

'Well, if it makes you feel better,' Rothgar conceded, and I cast the spell. I wasn't sure whether it had worked, but it had to be worth a try.

'Does anyone know what that monster is?' Kriv asked.

Bobbynock thought about it for a moment. 'I'm pretty sure it's a kraken,' he said. 'I remember reading about them.'

The kraken groped another tentacle over the boat. We did our best to deter it – Kos trying to use a mind-control spell to persuade it to leave us alone, Bobbynock casting a ray of frost, and I hitting it with my mace – but it snatched Bob and disappeared underwater again. Kriv, Kos, Sam and I rowed as hard as we could for land, with Bobbynock conjuring an illusion of regular drum-beats to keep us in rhythm.

When the tentacle appeared again, it wasn't just groping for a single person, but doing its best to smash the boat apart. Bobbynock shocked it with a lightning bolt, and this at last seemed to hurt the creature enough to make it leave us alone – or perhaps, having eaten two people, it decided it wasn't hungry enough to bother fighting us for now. Sam was pale and shaking, but pulled on his oar as hard as he could – whether because he was desperate to reach land, or because he was afraid we might throw him to the kraken, I couldn't tell.

Somewhere in the midst of all this confusion, I realised that we had a wolf in the boat with us. He was obviously tame, considering the way he was letting Rothgar stroke his head and scratch behind his ears, so I wasn't going to panic, but I couldn't help wondering how even I had been unobservant enough not to notice him before. I hoped Sam wouldn't panic.

'Did we have a – dog with us when we got on this boat?' I asked.

'What? Oh, you mean Diefenbaker,' said Rothgar. 'No, he was dead, but I summoned him back to the realms of the living. I usually end up killing him. Anyway, do you want to hear the rest of our story?'

'Yes, please,' I said. Sam was too miserable over the deaths of his friends to say anything.

'Where was I?' Bobbynock leafed through his memoirs. 'Ah, yes – Greywing took us to her mountain…'

'And what about the time she tried to eat me?' protested Kriv.

'That was later!' said Bobbynock. 'Anyway, Greywing was a member of the Talons of Justice, which was part of the alliance of good metallic dragons protecting the world from the evil chromatic dragons. But the red dragons had bribed the humans to give them some information which enabled them to kill all the gold dragons and virtually all the silvers. Greywing and her children are probably the only three silver dragons left in the world now, and they're in hiding.'

I listened eagerly, trying not to be distracted by Kos and Rothgar, who were bored and bickering with each other. Bobbynock told how in another adventure, where they were again 'taking care of' the kobolds who were attacking a now, the alleged innkeeper who was supposed to be taking care of them had fed them drugged food to enable the kobolds to capture them. 'And that was Jeremy Wessell, of course,' said Bobbynock. 'Pretending to be an innkeeper, the same as he did when he was spying on us in Nyth, leading up to kidnapping you, Beira. Same old shtick, again and again.

'What happened next? Oh, yes – we met a red dragon, Xiembir, who was looking for a fire ring that gave power over fire. The ring was part of Tiamat's soul…'

I felt icy cold all over again as I realised what was going on. 'And – was that what my ice ring was, too?' I asked. 'Another piece of the evil dragon-god's soul?'

'That's right,' said Bobbynock, but at least he didn't stop for recriminations. 'Well, I managed to get the fire ring – though I lost it when I was killed, a bit later on. But for now, we had two important artefacts: the fire ring, and a map. We made it back to Elventower, and we were warned to keep them safe. But then Lolth, the Spider Queen, sent a tiefling to force me to reveal their location, and of course when I'd done that, the tiefling killed me.'

'What was it like, being dead?' I asked.

'Horrible,' said Bobbynock with a shudder. 'All the time I was dead, the agents of Shub-Niggurath were influencing me.'

So that makes at least three evil gods who we know are working against us: Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young; Tiamat, the five-headed dragon god worshipped by the chromatic dragons; and Lolth the Spider Queen, goddess of the drow (and also worshipped by purple dragons). Not that I'm frightened by any of this – fighting against evil is my job, and paladins are immune to fear. But it's something to bear in mind.

We haven't been able to find anywhere we can actually land and walk ashore, but as I write this, at least we're travelling across shallow enough water to be out of the kraken's reach. So I'm writing up these notes as I take a break from rowing.