There is a particular kind of chaos to fighting Duergar indoors. Half of them shrink down to nothing and half of them swell up until their shoulders scrape the ceiling, and the ceiling in that gatehouse was low enough that a tall man could put his hand flat on it. Momen rode Ignis through the whole of it anyway, the poor beast half-crouched under the stone, and for all that he handled himself well — he came down on a stone guard from behind and put teeth and both sets of claws into him before the dwarf could turn around, and that was the end of that one.
Tittlin was not himself. He got his bow up and drew, and the string simply would not come back for him; whatever Friar Zeckus did to put him back together, his arms haven’t finished agreeing to it yet. He spent a good while creeping about on the walls and the ceiling instead, which is a thing he does now, and which I have decided not to ask about.
I went looking for a way deeper in and found iron. A portcullis, and beyond it a room full of dwarves who could see me as plainly as I could see them, and no way to get a blade through the bars at any useful angle. I asked whether a man might stab through it; I was told a polearm would do the job, but that you cannot swing a greatsword through a grate, which is fair. So I sheathed the sword, took up the lunar musket — swearing, as always, that I would never let the thing fool me twice — and put a shot at the guard nearest the gate. A golden light bloomed across the bars and swallowed the ball whole. Another of their barriers, and this one stops honest lead as readily as it stops magic. Behind it a door thumped shut and I heard the bolt go home.
I will admit here that I did not know what to do next. It is an unpleasant feeling and I have not had much practice at it lately.
Momen, being a professor, had an answer, or at least the name of one: Counterspell, or a field that kills magic outright. One of the Duke’s mages stepped up and asked, quite politely, where I would like it aimed. That got us nowhere on the iron — you cannot argue a gate out of existence — but Momen remembered the observation window into the control room, and the runes cut into its glass. The mage went to it, spoke his working, and we watched the marks dim out like a fire going down. He looked back at us and nodded. Now hit it. One of the veterans stepped up with his cannon and put a hole through it big enough to reach an arm through, though not big enough to climb. His mate fired after him and the shot skidded off the reinforcement in the frame. A third spent the entire fight trying to shoulder a door down and never once managed it.
Meanwhile the mice. One of their mind masters had shrunk himself down to the size of a mouse, and he came out of a corner with a dagger no longer than my thumbnail and stuck Lt. Baggins twice in the leg. Baggins shouted that the little wretch had gotten behind us, and then the thing vanished and crawled inside one of the corpses on the floor to hide. So there were three of the Duke’s mages standing in a corner methodically setting a dead body on fire, over and over, until a veteran lost patience, walked up, put his longsword through the corpse, and lifted out a skewered mind master on the end of it.
Their stone guards were enlarged, and their javelins grow along with them, so they took to reaching straight through the portcullis to stab whoever stood nearest. They caught a mage that way, and a veteran after him. That was when Momen sent word along the bond to Opera to come now — we had not cleared our exit, but the alarm was well and truly raised and there was no sense pretending otherwise.
Then Momen opened the wall. He put a hole clean through into the control room, taking care to route it around the control table itself, because we needed the levers rather more than we needed the wall. Inside, the controls were marked plainly enough for a dwarf to read: first gate and second gate. He raised the inner portcullis, and later shut the outer one, which meant nothing more would be coming up the road from town to join the party. One thing at least going to plan.
With the gate up I could finally get my hands on the stone guards, and I did. I was in the middle of that when the veteran behind me lumbered forward strangely and put his sword into my back. It was a scratch and no more — but it was one of ours. I asked whether anything could be done for the man and one of the mages shook his head. Sorry, sir. Just grin and bear it. A moment later the veteran blinked, looked around, and asked what in the world he had just done. I told him no harm done, and to please not do it again. He obliged for as long as it took the next mind master to slip in and take him a second time, at which point he unslung his cannon and put a shot into a mage instead, and the mage slammed off a wall and took the mage’s own advice about grinning.
Then Baggins ended the argument. There were seven of them clustered in that room and he dropped a fireball into the middle of the lot, and I have rarely seen anything like it — one simply gone, and every other man in there burned past standing. He made a pistol of his fingers and blew across the tip. Fire and ice. One of his mages followed it up with a second fireball a heartbeat later, and that was most of the room finished. Say what you like about the Datrians, they sent us good men.
That is roughly when we heard fighting outside, and Momen said there’s Opera with the particular tone of a man who had assumed he had more time.
And that is also when the ceiling started killing us. There were slots cut in the floor above — meant for the gunners to see and to shoot down through — and the men up there had rolled their cannons into place. The first ball came down through the stone with a sound I felt in my teeth and took a veteran off his feet. The second found me, and I want it noted that a cannonball at that range is not something a man dodges. The third came for Momen, and he got his shield up at the last instant and turned it, and told me afterward that the force of it coming off the shield was enough to tell him exactly what it would have done had it not. Tittlin, meanwhile, was hanging upside down on the ceiling directly between two of the gun slots insisting he was hidden, on the grounds that there was a wall involved. He did at least do something useful: he produced an iron pot from somewhere and jammed it over the mouth of one of the guns.
Momen called it, and he was right. Anyone still in this room when the next volley comes is not coming back. So we ran. He got a door open, we poured out into the hall, and on his way through Ignis found the last shrunken mind master crouched under a dead stone guard and dealt with him.
I took the stairs at a dead run. At the top of them was one of the big stone guards bracing himself against a door, and behind him another of the little ones, who came at me the moment my head cleared the landing and put a dagger into me twice. The point barely broke skin — but there was something on the blade meant for the mind rather than the body, and it went through me like a spike behind the eyes. I have been hit harder by things I could actually see.
And then the doors at the end of the hall blew inward and Opera came through them, wings and all, and knocked that stone guard flat on his back halfway down the corridor without appearing to notice he had done it. He was laughing before he had finished landing. Ah — you seem to be in a little bit of rough shape. I told him I had seen worse days. He is unreasonably shiny in a dark stone hallway.
Momen reported to him that we had lost a mage to the cannons. Opera’s face went flat for the first time all day. That’s no good. It would do no good for the heroes to lose a man. Momen said we hadn’t been fast enough and that we would have to do better. See to it, then.
I put my sword through the little mind master while they were talking — stepped over the thing first so he had nowhere to duck — and Opera raised an eyebrow at me. I see you’re fighting the mice. I told him you would think something that small would be beneath notice, but that in my experience the smallest pricks hurt a lot. He said he couldn’t say he was familiar with the concept. I believe him.
The next door I did not open. Given where the cannons had been sitting and where the wheels sounded like they were rolling, I judged there was a decent chance of eating a ball at arm’s length, so I stacked up beside it and left it for someone else, which is a plan I stand behind. Lt. Baggins shoved through the crowd of us demanding to know what on earth we were all doing, threw the door wide, and found a duergar hammerer standing on the other side of it. The rest of Opera’s men — the half of the force we’d split off before we went in, which I had entirely forgotten about — came filtering in behind him, and a veteran went straight into that room swinging.
Opera looked around at the doors and asked where we were going: the double doors north, the small door east, and what looked like an armoury. Then he lifted his head and told us what he could smell. Fresh gunpowder being poured, which meant men working the guns. Somebody cooking. Stale bedsheets. Then he went off through the east door — bang, bang, bang — and came back to tell us he had found the cannons and to point the way.
Momen’s last trick was the best of the night. He told us his uncle’s old habit of putting a chicken on a stick through a doorway to see what bit it, and then did the same thing with his wizard hat: an illusion of himself sprinting through the door. Cannonballs came in from the left and the right at once. So now we know exactly what is waiting, and Ignis has squeezed through and put his breath down that corridor, and there is a great deal of gunpowder in there and a great many dwarves standing near it.
The gatehouse is very nearly ours. After that we go looking for Jurge.