The crowd thinned out after Jurge flew off, and the guards drifted down off the stage, and for the first time since we’d bowed to that mountain of gold I felt like we could hear ourselves think. Momen wanted a word before we went anywhere. He was sweated clean through his clothes, though you’d never have known it to look at him up on that dais — he said it had felt, the whole time, like one wrong word would have sent him down the same gullet as the revolutionary. I told him he’d saved our skins and gotten us a deal besides. He didn’t seem to take much comfort in it.
What he took the time to explain was the difference between what we were being sent after and the sort of thing we’d tangled with before. An amethyst dragon is a gem dragon, all raw force. A purple dragon is another animal entirely — a chromatic, rare to the point that most learned folk file them under myth, and Momen himself hadn’t been certain they existed until now. Their element, for lack of a better word, is the mind. Psionics. Smaller than their cousins, trickier than all of them, and next to impossible to sneak up on, because it can feel your thoughts coming a mile off. He admitted, quietly, that a small part of him wanted to simply walk out of Jurgetown and let the psionic dragon go on making trouble for a creature who’s claimed all the gold in the world as his own. But these are Duergar, and they know the Tomori name, and Momen has made his bed and means to lie in it. He consoled himself that a live specimen of a genuine purple dragon would be worth a stack of papers to him. I offered that it made for good research. He agreed, without much heart in it.
We chewed on the paranoid possibilities for a while — whether Jurge himself might be an illusion, whether the purple dragon might be behind all of it, whether the whole town was a test and none of us were really standing where we stood. I’ll confess the thought was mine. When you’ve made a deal with a thing that swallows men whole, it’s a small comfort to imagine it isn’t real. Momen sketched the golden statue from every angle while we talked, since a statue at least holds still and doesn’t tire of being looked at.
The hard part of the planning was that we had no way to hide our heads from the thing. There’s a spell for it — mind blank — but it’s an eighth-level working that shields exactly one man at a time, which meant three scrolls to cover the party, and three eighth-level scrolls cost a great deal more than a wind-up toy is worth. I couldn’t help remarking that the reward looked awfully thin against the risk, and that I understood now why Jurge had been so glad to be rid of the errand. So we settled for what we had: my thinking cap, Momen’s locate creature to find the beast, and a plan to hem it in with the guards so tightly it couldn’t blink away. I dropped my attunement to the crystal greatsword to take up the cap, and — against my better judgment — decided to give the lunar musket its first outing. The bullets for it, when I finally ran them down, ran four gold apiece; I came away with a pack of lead and a single mithril round and the growing suspicion I’d bought myself a very handsome mistake.
We paid the inn its two silver a head and rested. Tittlin balked at the price and spent the night out in the streets instead, among what he described afterward as a great many unsavory types. Come morning Momen cast his spell, and the pull of it led us northeast, through the stone lanes, the guard captain Hesek and his men keeping pace to close the ring. The trail brought us to one of the largest apothecaries in town — a stone front reading Jurgetown Pharmacy, busy enough that half the district seemed to pass through it for one ailment or another. I questioned a local, got nothing useful, told him to clear off, and put my boot through the door.
Hesek flashed his badge and invoked Lord Jurge’s authority — harboring criminals and terrorists, he said, to a horrified pharmacist who kept insisting it was a pharmacy — and tied the dwarf up behind his own counter. Past him hung a curtain of beads, straight out of some seedy parlor. And on the far side of those beads, waiting, was the fight.
It was Duergar against Duergar — Hesek’s men and the pharmacy’s own, mind masters and stone-skinned brutes who swelled to ten feet when they enlarged themselves, and hammerers besides. The mind masters got into my head straightaway and turned my own hands against Momen; I loosed a shot at him and, mercy of mercies, missed. The musket proved every bit the mistake I’d feared — one shot to an action, useless up close, and I spent half the fight fumbling with it before I gave it up, stashed it, and drew the crystal greatsword. No radiance from it while I was unattuned, but the edge is still the edge. I raged, and after that I don’t remember the numbers so much as the sound — I split one of the giant dwarves near enough in half, and another, and cut a shrunken mind master clean out of the air. Momen called a nest of tentacles up out of the pharmacy’s own aquarium, water and writhing everywhere, and they wrapped the brutes up tidy. Ignis snapped and clawed at the door. It was, for a few minutes, going well.
Tittlin only managed to land a single shot the entire fight. He’d flown up on his carpet to peer in from outside, and every shot he lined up had one of our own dwarves standing in the way; he spent the whole battle hovering at the threshold, arrow nocked, begging Hesek to move so he could take a clean shot that never came. And that is where the dragon found him. It came blinking through the building — small, quick, silent, gone from one square to the next in a blink — and took hold of him where he sat exposed on his carpet, and no one inside could reach him through the wall of bodies. He tried to talk to it. Showed it card tricks, asked it what was wrong, told it there were better targets than a man on a rug watching giants. It never said a word. It only breathed on him — a neurotoxic fog that eats the mind — and then it worked something worse. It tore his very self out of his body, and Tittlin came apart into a pile of ash inside his own clothes. His periapt didn’t save him. There was nothing there to close a wound on.
It didn’t stop with him. It reached into Momen next and hollowed him out — feeble mind, thirty days of it, our necromancer reduced to a blathering child who could follow a friend and little else, poking Tittlin’s empty boots with his staff, not understanding what he was looking at. It bent Hesek to its will and set him on me. My own blows kept missing; Momen’s necromancy washed over the thing and it only chuckled. I got the antimatter rifle up over Momen’s shoulder for a shot and missed that too.
All of this for a wind-up toy. It was supposed to be a side quest. We should never have come down here.