We left the palace with a month of nothing ahead of us. The Duke is off arranging the dragon hunt he promised — an ancient cobalt worm is not the sort of thing you rustle up over lunch — so we were told to stay near the capital a day or two and keep ourselves occupied. I am very good at keeping myself occupied. It usually costs someone money.
First order of business was actually Spesof’s. He walked us past the three heat pumps, the ones that keep the crypt too cold for any unblessed soul to set foot in. I’d pictured pipes and steam and some grand engine. What you get instead are three of the most boring buildings in Elkenalden — plain fronts, nothing on the doors, the kind of place your eye slides right off. It’s only once you know what they are that the guards give it away. There’s a wall of them around each one. The heat itself is magical, no exhaust, no warm patch you can follow on a cold night; the whole city just runs a few degrees kinder and you never think about why. Spesof reminded me the plan is to destroy all three, quickly, in a row. Standing there counting guards, I understood for the first time that this is going to be genuinely difficult. I preferred it when it was theoretical.
Meanwhile there was the matter of the Professor. Lassagaseer had said his piece to the nobles and has no interest in a dragon hunt — necromancy is his trade, and he has had, by his own account, quite enough of dragons and quite enough of life-and-death evenings. Momen agreed it was time to send him home to the fief. So we called Rafnar, who appeared almost before Momen finished summoning him, complaining that he’d barely left. That is the beauty of whatever cutting-edge nonsense they’re brewing at the Spire of Dizif — nobody else can do it, so he can be as surly as he likes. Momen paid the fee, stacked up the Professor’s books to travel with him, sent along the jar of zombie beholder fluid he’d been carrying, and made sure Lassagaseer would have a comfortable place and the run of his laboratory. Then the man was gone in a blink, and it was just the three of us with time to kill.
I killed some of mine trying to find work. The Imperial Capital, it turns out, is a rotten town for a criminal — they hang you here for looking at things sideways — but I do have a contact, a counterfeiter, which is exactly the trade that thrives in the heart of an empire. He had one job on offer, and a rich one: steal the Imperial seal. Which was funny, because I already have an Imperial seal. Found it down in the beholder basement ages ago and never handed it back. I asked what he’d give for it. Ten thousand gold, and no, I don’t get the original returned. I told him that seemed low for a thing a forger could work miracles with, and I told him again, and I told him a third time, and he just shrugged and said ten thousand, take it or leave it, and refused to say a word about what he wanted it for. Secrecy’s the game, apparently. I left it. Something a man guards that carefully is worth more than he’s letting on, and I’d rather find out what.
He did give me a lead as a consolation. Two, really. The first was a life turner — a little hourglass that lets you steal an extra turn to drag a dead friend back to life, at the small cost of dropping dead yourself, permanently, no take-backs. I don’t know if something like that would be useful for us. The second was more my speed: a Wind-Up Merchant, a small wind-up toy that spits out a list of cheap magic items and, up to once a day, hands you whichever one you can pay for. The catch is the goods only last the day, but at twenty-five or fifty gold a piece — immovable rods, healing potions, dust of disappearance, scrolls — that is a very fine deal, and I finally found something I was willing to spend on. It had been lost when a Duergar band jumped a merchant on the road between Elkenalden and Innsten and dragged the thing off into a cave. That was all the excuse I needed.
Momen wasn’t interested; he stayed behind for his downtime, brewing and studying. So it was me and Spesof again. I’ll admit I’ve made a small career lately of hauling him off to places where he nearly dies, and this was no exception. I flew us out on the carpet, navigated us there without getting lost — which is about the best you can say for my survival skills these days; Spesof kept touching my hand for the little blessing die and it kept doing nothing — and asked around Innsten until a contact confirmed the story and pointed me at a big rock outcropping where the road runs close. Behind it, sure enough, a cave. Blocked off with stone.
Not fallen stone. Sealed stone. I climbed all over it looking for a gap and every place there should have been one had been plugged, deliberately, unnaturally neat. Spesof asked, reasonably, whether something sealed this tightly was something we ought to be prying open. I did not find that a compelling argument. He pulled out a miner’s pick and chipped away at a seam while I set two weasels and a giant rat loose to find another way in — they did not — and eventually he’d worried a hole just big enough to crawl through. I cast Pass Without Trace over the both of us before we went, kept my hood up and stayed invisible, and reminded him to keep within thirty feet since he wouldn’t be able to see me.
Then I looked past the wall and saw the umber hulks. Big lumbering armored things, and the maddening part is you can only see them out of the corner of your eye — turn to look straight at one and it vanishes from your senses entirely. There were several, and at least one roper sitting in the rock pretending to be rock. I whispered a warning. Spesof, being Spesof, kept his eyes on the job rather than the wall, and the moment he turned his back the roper wrapped him up in its tendrils and we were in it.
It was a long, ugly fight — Spesof got tenderized by mandibles and claws over and over, restrained and blind by turns. The umber hulks have a stare that leaves you dazed and confused, so partway through he shut his eyes and swung anyway, putting himself at a disadvantage rather than let them charm him. Better than getting charmed, he said, and he wasn’t wrong. My own war was quieter, as it always is: invisible, up on the thirty-foot ceiling where nothing could see me, picking my shots. The ropers can’t spot an invisible man and neither, it turns out, can the hulks — I walked right past one and it never knew. I put arrows and a fire arrow into the roper until it went up, and Spesof called down a whole squad of Einherjar with the brass horn to swarm the rest.
Between Spesof’s absurd strength, his eyes-shut hacking, and Einherjar beating a roper to death while it flailed its last tendrils, we ground them down. Two hulks dead in a pile, one of them still on fire; a third fled into the dark; the roper finished. So the cave is cleared, and the wind-up merchant is presumably still somewhere inside it, waiting. Now we just have to go in and find the thing. What’s the worst that could happen?