It was not yet eight in the morning and I was still stuck to the ceiling.
That is where I spent most of the gatehouse, if we’re being honest about it. Ten feet up, palms and boot-soles flat on the stone, keeping myself low enough that I wasn’t putting my head through the floorboards of whatever room was above me. The silence I’d laid over the lot of us was still holding — nothing any of us did made a sound worth chasing, which is the only reason a party this loud ever gets anywhere — and my arms still would not do what I asked of them. I have not drawn my bow properly since Friar Zeckus rebuilt me. So I crawled, and I watched, and I kept out of the way, and I have made peace with that being my contribution for the morning.
The rest of them had it in hand.
Duergar fight badly in their own corridors. Half of them swell up until their heads are scraping the ceiling and their shoulders fill the hall, which looks very impressive until you notice that a man of ordinary size can simply walk under their arms. I said as much, at volume, and nobody took me up on it. One of the big ones came at Momen with a shortsword the length of a fence post and put it into the wall instead.
Spesof went north up the barracks hall and I mostly heard him rather than saw him. He got in among the guards and cut two of them down, and then drew that white light of his up out of the weapon and let it close his own wounds while he stood there, which is a trick I would kill for and could not learn in a hundred years. Then he started throwing doors open. All down that hallway there were doors with dwarvish letters cut into them, and none of us can read a word of dwarvish, so his method was to fling one wide and look at what was behind it. Latrines. Then more latrines. Then a great many more latrines. Somewhere in Jurge’s gatehouse there is a garrison of dwarves with a truly excessive amount of somewhere to sit.
He did better on the far end. A kitchen, with the morning’s work laid out on the counter — food, a stack of potions, and a wheel’s worth of cheese. He swept the potions into his bag, left the travel rations where they lay on the grounds that we are not that desperate yet, tore off a hunk of the cheese, put it in his mouth, and kept walking. Mid-fight. Chewing. I want that recorded because he will deny it later.
Opera did not use the doors at all. He came through a wall — through it, stone and all, in a spray of grit — bit a dwarf nearly in half, tore into another one on his way past, and kept going deeper without so much as slowing to see what he’d knocked down. I said aloud that this was quite rude, and that I had been given to understand he was one of the good ones. Nobody laughed. He did it again later to a pair of them in the open: picked one up bodily and threw him into his friend, and the two of them went across the room together and did not get up. There is a version of me that finds this appalling and a version of me that has been taking notes, and I’ll let you guess which one is writing.
Their mind masters had learned nothing from yesterday. One of them shrank himself down to the size of a mouse again and went scurrying along the floor looking for a crack to hide in, and Ignis ate him. Simply ate him, on the way past, the way a cat takes a mouse off a barn floor, and then looked around for the next thing. If you are going to make yourself small enough to fit in a boot, you want to check the room for cats first. Not the most mindful of masters.
Momen fought the whole morning from Ignis’ back, ducked down under the low ceiling, and at one point pulled a ring of ghostly blades out of the air around the pair of them that carved up everything within arm’s reach and left the cat untouched — the hat’s work, I assume, since the Professor has taken to wearing that thing everywhere and asking it for spells he never actually learned. Lt. Baggins came up behind and threw fire down the hall, his mages after him, and the Datrian veterans went past us at a dead run to get at whatever was left. One of them put his sword through a duergar so cleanly the man was dead before the surprise finished crossing his face.
And then it was over. A veteran took the stairs down, and we heard him shout clear, and that was that. The gatehouse is ours. They had the doors barred and the men posted before the bodies had finished cooling — say what you like about the Duke’s soldiers, they know how to move into a house that isn’t theirs.
Momen went straight down to the mage the cannons got yesterday and knelt over him and did whatever it is priests and professors do to keep a man from slipping the rest of the way out, and the man is still with us. Then he had him carried down to the hole in the wall by the water so he’d be near the barge when we need to leave in a hurry, which we will.
Then came the arithmetic, which I stayed out of. Three of the veterans came through the night worse than the rest — one of them badly, one of them properly, one of them barely — so those three stay behind to hold the gatehouse and keep our way out open. That leaves five veterans, five mages, Lt. Baggins, Opera and his half of the force, and us. Momen walked the whole plan past Baggins before he committed to it, on the grounds that they are Baggins’ men and not ours, which I thought was decent of him. Baggins looked it over and had nothing to add.
From the top of the wall you could see the town going about its morning. People out, moving, hauling, nobody looking up at us. Whatever alarm went up in here has not made it out there yet. The palace itself is another matter — there was movement all through it, purposeful movement, and no doubt at all that they know what has happened to the gate. So nobody’s coming from behind us. Everything ahead of us is awake.
We opened the inner doors and walked into a garden.
I do not know what I expected under a mountain, but not that. A great open court with statues of Jurge scattered all through it — Jurge rampant, Jurge coiled, Jurge looking nobly off at a wall — and fountains put down wherever there happened to be a gap, all different heights and shapes, none of them agreeing with one another. Every growing thing in the place is a pale washed-out blue. It is the garden of a creature who very badly wanted a garden and had nobody around him brave enough to say what it should look like. Spesof went suspicious immediately, on the grounds that fountains scattered at random in a dictator’s courtyard is exactly the shape a puzzle comes in. I went and climbed one of the statues, because if there is one thing this place has taught me it’s that being off the ground is worth more than being clever.
From up there I could see the paths, and I would like to note for the record that they are sized for a man, not for a dragon. All that stone poured into a monument to himself, and he cannot walk his own garden without stepping over it. What a nerd.
Before it started, Spesof took Momen aside for a word about dragons, which is a subject on which the Professor is either the greatest living authority or simply the man who has been killed by the most of them. Spesof wanted to know whether fire would be wasted on Jurge. Momen dug through everything he’s read and came back with this: adamantine dragons are not especially proof against fire — but thunder will do nothing to him at all, nothing, so anyone hoping to shout him down should save their breath. Spesof took that and set his little meteors circling from the diadem before the fighting started, so that he wouldn’t have to spend the moment doing it later, and slung the lunar musket, which is the weapon he swears at most and trusts most. Momen spread the soldiers out — he was very firm about it, said a tight formation is how ten men die to one breath — and Opera put himself out front, which is both the correct tactics and the only place he would ever consent to stand.
Then the light changed, and there was the sound of wings, and something roaring a long way off and getting closer.
He came down into his own garden out of the open sky, and he is enormous, and he is furious.
That is where we stopped. Everyone in position. Nothing to do now but find out how much dragon there is.