The Hidden Chamber, a Debt Paid, and a Dragon

They woke on the floor of the temple where they had fallen, among seven dead orcs going stiff in the cold.

Nobody was in a hurry to touch them. Bean went through their clothing and found she did not want to put her hands anywhere near it, and came away with nothing. Barnaby had fewer objections: he sat one of the bodies up, opened its throat, and held his waterskin under the cut until he had collected a measure of something dark and red and cold, then stoppered it and put it away. Hamish did the honest work, hauling bodies off one another where they had fallen in a heap, and found their packs clear of the blood on the floor — rations, waterskins of their own, ten gold in a small pouch, and a child’s doll with its head torn off.

Dax went to the leader. The armor was the thing that had bothered him since the fight: chain mail, well made, nothing orcish about it. He worked the straps loose and lifted it off over the body’s head, and what he saw underneath the blood was human work — the kind that comes out of a Neverwinter garrison and gets sent north to sit in a border post. He said as much aloud. This band had been taking things off people who could not stop them, and taking them from somewhere close.

In the leader’s pack was a rough piece of sheep hide covered in orcish scrawl, and a crude map of the Sword Coast. Hamish read it. Leilon was marked. So were the mountains, and the Triboar Trail, and the High Road, and a note about Phandalin. The markings were scouting notation — places worth raiding, ranked by preference, with a clear taste for high ground.

Nobody at the table could say what the note beside the map meant. Dax looked over the body one more time, found no rank markings, no tattoos, nothing to say the thing had been anyone important. A captain, maybe. A troop leader. Then he drew his sword, put it into the corpse once, pulled it out, flicked the blood off the blade, and walked away without saying anything.

Thom, meanwhile, had dug a thumb into the leader’s eye socket and pulled the eye out whole, optic nerve trailing, and handed it to Rut, who wanted a trophy. Rut had a manticore spike and a mimic tentacle already. He put the eye in his pack and asked what color orc eyes were supposed to be. Green, as it turned out.

It was Thom who remembered the rubble.

There was a wall of it at the end of one of the temple’s dead branches, packed too tight to shift by hand, and they had given up on it the night before. Rut looked at it and became a giant badger, and went at it with the claws for that, and after a while there was a hole through the far side big enough for a person to crawl through on hands and knees.

Beyond it was a round chamber, and in it two pedestals. On the left stood a statue of a horned dwarf, its stone face bent toward the enormous green gem cradled in its hands. On the right, another statue lay in pieces, scattered outward across the floor in a wide circle, as though it had come apart from the inside.

Thom, Bean, and Barnaby crawled in after him. Dax, Hamish, and Sage stayed outside.

Thom felt the draft first — a thin current of air moving through a room that had been sealed for centuries. He ran his hands along the wall until he found the seam, so fine it took a man who knew it was there to see it at all. There was no lever. There was no mechanism. Barnaby put his shoulder into the slab at a run and it did not move a fraction, and he came away with a bruise for it. Rut tried to burrow beneath and found solid rock. They searched the room together and found nothing, and eventually the only thing left in it worth looking at was the statue and the gem in its hands.

Bean checked for traps twice and was confident there were none.

Thom put up a mage hand and ran it along the edge of the gem, and nothing happened. He worked the hand under it and lifted.

The whoosh came first. Then the statue’s eyes lit, and it shook, and it burst.

Rut took the worst of it and lost the shape he was wearing, coming apart out of the badger and back into himself in a spray of stone. Barnaby, further off, got most of it turned by his armor. The gem was untouched.

Outside, the others heard the blast roll up through the tunnel and felt the dust come down off the ceiling. Rut crawled out first, soot-black and battered, and could not say much about what had happened beyond the fact that it had. Sage kept him outside and spent a spell on him, closing the worst of it. Dax and Hamish went in.

Thom held the emerald in front of him and gave them the story: a draft, a wall nobody could open, a gem nobody could resist, and a statue that had been waiting a very long time for someone to try. Where the statue had stood there was now a fresh pile of rubble, scattered in exactly the same pattern as the old one across the room. Someone had done this before. Nobody had learned anything from it.

Hamish went to the pedestals — both of them — and looked at what the explosion had opened up. Under the base of each, sunk into the floor, was gearing. He asked whether he could work them, and did, turning and worrying at the mechanism until it clicked, and then crossing the room and doing the same to the other.

The seam in the wall opened wide enough to get fingers into.

Behind it was an alcove barely larger than a closet, with a vent in its ceiling that explained the draft, and a pedestal with a small chest on it, flanked by two idols in miniature — the same figures that stood at the temple’s front doors, bent in prayer toward the box. Barnaby put himself on the far side of the room. Thom tried the latch with a mage hand and found it locked. Bean stepped up and had it open in a moment.

Inside: a small pile of tarnished silver, a larger one of gold, and a note. It was written in Common, which nobody could explain.

May all offerings to Abbathor forever cease. If you have found this room and you have survived, take what remains. Let the memory of Abbathor be forgotten.

A hundred and fifty gold, seventy silver. They took it. Thom kept a tally and put the emerald, the coffer of gems, and the coin into one pot to be divided later, and made the point that they had been formally invited to rob the place. He showed the note around so that nobody could say otherwise.

Sage did not feel good about it.

She said so — that she had tried to keep the peace with the dwarves and the dwarves had spent it, and that the treasure was theirs by right of the work, and that she still felt they had done them dirty. Thom’s answer was that if there had been a reckoning for the lie, the party had already taken it in the ribs from seven orcs, and that whatever it had cost, the expedition was now funded.

Rut had a different answer. In the forest, he said, squirrels put their nuts in trees, and he found the trees, and one winter was cold, so he ate the nuts. The squirrels came and chittered at him about it. But he was bigger, so they left.

Sage understood every individual word of that.

They filed out through the tunnel and into a morning that had barely started, the sun not yet up over the crags. Thom came last, well behind everyone, hauling a backpack that seemed to be trying to sit down.

On the road down, with nobody else in earshot, the talk between Dax and Rut came round to dragons. Dax told him that dragons eat people. He says everything the same way — flatly, reasonably, no tell in his face at all — and Rut believed him.

Then Rut looked over at Barnaby, and gestured.

“That’s why we make sure to keep him well fed.”

By the time Sage caught them up, Rut had the whole thing and was explaining it to her himself: dragons eat people, and that is why Barnaby is kept well fed.

Dax confirmed that dragons do, in fact, eat people.

Hamish and Sage went out ahead to scout, the two of them faster than the rest and better in the rock than anyone.

The tracks told a clean story. The seven that had come for them had come from the west, from the big encampment, and from the vantage point on the rocky crag the rangers could see that the main body had moved on — the grass trampled flat in a wide line running away over the horizon, well clear of the road north.

What the tracks did not explain was the animal.

It came out of the underbrush at a trot, making no effort to hide, and it was a panther, and it was coming directly for Sage. Hamish drew and held on it. Sage stopped him. She could not have said why, only that she felt something for the creature that she had no business feeling for an animal she had never seen, and she wanted to talk to it before anybody put an arrow in it.

She spent a spell and asked.

I found you. I finally found you. He had been asking after her — every animal that had watched the party pass had heard the question. He had no idea how the cat distribution system had managed to overlook him for so long, and he was, at last, extremely pleased to have a person. He would follow her commands. He had come from the west, and he could tell her the orcs had gone well away, and the road ahead was open.

Sage, who had known this was a thing that might happen to her and was nonetheless entirely unprepared for it to happen, said she would think about a name.

Hamish lowered the bow.

Later, the same conversation happened again about the panther. He would have to be kept fed as well, on the same principle — though a panther, Dax allowed, is a good deal easier to kill than a dragon, if it ever came to that.

Rut raised the feeding question with Barnaby directly.

North on the trail, they found the body.

It was one of the dwarves. He was face down with an orc javelin standing out of his back, and when Hamish turned him he found the fingers of one hand closed hard around something. He worked them open — they had been stiff a long while — and took out a smooth stone cut with runes.

Thom looked at it and knew it: a sending stone. Like tin cans on a string, he explained, if the string were gone and the distance did not matter. Which meant there was another one somewhere, and someone holding it.

He used it.

Hello there. We found this stone. Please let us know how to find you. I have bad news about the person who held it. My

The stone gives you twenty-five words and takes the rest. Thom said “my name is Thom” out loud, in the ordinary way, standing on the road. What arrived at the other end stopped at my.

The answer came back in his head in a voice he had heard before, and it was short.

Bring my brother back to Phandalin. I will bury him. P.S. Pay me what you owe.

That settled the argument about what to do with the body. Rut, whose position was that nature would take care of it the way nature takes care of everything, was talked around on the grounds that a dwarf would want burying and a brother would want a brother. Barnaby picked him up. They carried him north.

Adabra Gwynn was still at her windmill, and put her head out of an upper window when they came into the yard, and came down pleased to see them.

She was less pleased about the dwarf.

They had told her about the dragon last time and it had not moved her. This time Thom told her about the orcs — the encampment, the seven that had come up the canyon, the one now over Barnaby’s shoulder — and the color went out of her. She remembered the raids. A century back a war band had come through and burned Phandalin to the ground, and they had been picking at the region ever since, and orcs, she said, are quite devastating.

She would go back with them, if they did not mind. She went up to pack the equipment she needed for brewing.

She would not give up a bedsheet to wrap a corpse in, but she found them a burlap sack meant for hauling herbs. The dwarf went into it. His boots stuck out. Sage went out into the field and gathered what flowers she could find, and Rut coaxed the buds open for her, and they laid them on top.

Rut showed Adabra the orc eye. She told him it was very good work and patted him on the head. He also explained, while she was being pleasant to him, that the panther has to be kept fed so that he does not eat anybody.

Well, that’s advisable.

They came into Phandalin in the rain, muddy and slow and very tired, and Thom slower than any of them — by the end of the walk the emerald had him down to half his usual pace, though he could lift the thing out of his pack and throw it one-handed without trouble.

They left the body outside the Quest Master’s house, in a bush, in the rain, with the boots sticking up.

Harbin Wester let them in, delighted, and asked how it had all gone. Adabra told him the party had convinced her — that they had brought word of orcs in the area, and she had not felt safe. He said he was glad she was home.

Then he asked whether they had warned the dwarves about the dragon.

They had, they said.

And how had that gone?

“They left.”

They left! Excellent. Sounds like a job well done to me.

He paid out two bags, one heavier than the other: thirty-five gold for warning the midwife, seventy for warning the dwarves. Somebody pointed out that they had gone further than asked and actually brought Adabra home, and ought to be paid for it. Harbin shook his head and said he had already paid them more than he would have paid another group. It was mentioned, in front of her, that this meant Adabra’s life was worth thirty-five gold.

On the way out he said he was compiling some reports that concerned him, and that there was some unfortunate work that would need doing, and that it was part of the job. He would have more for them tomorrow.

He stood in his doorway a moment and sniffed the air and said it was probably nothing.

The inn was fuller than they had ever seen it, and the noise in it was wrong — too many townspeople, too much low talk, everyone worried about something they were not saying.

Norbus Ithermel was at the bar.

Barnaby carried his brother in and set him down at his feet.

He looked at the bag, and up at them, and started to cry. Around the room the patrons found other places to look and did not quite manage it, and did not want it known that they were watching, in case whatever had happened to the man in the bag turned out to be catching.

We could have just settled this together, he said. And then maybe my brother wouldn’t have died.

“You did run off,” Thom said.

Well, of course. What are we going to do against a bunch of heavily armed adventurers? We’re just miners. I’m not going to fight you. Do I look like a fighter?

He told them how it had gone. The orcs had caught them on the road — the same band, he assumed, that had gone on to the temple. They killed Dazlyn before he could react. He ran, and lived, and had been in this room ever since.

Dax told him the orcs were dealt with. “If it gives you any peace, they’re long dead.”

Rut held out the orc eye to him. Of everyone he had shown it to, Norbus was the first not to recoil. He said it was good, and then he hugged the gnome, and a rat squirmed out of his arms and bolted across the floor.

Then he put the second sending stone on the bar and pushed it away from himself. They had been a gift, he said — from his and Dazlyn’s mother and father, for the brothers to use on their new mining venture. He would not be needing it now.

They gave him twenty-five gold and seventy tarnished silver. The bag sat up fat enough in his hand that he thought it was more than it was, and he said it was decent, and thanked them. He asked to be left alone. They had more dwarves to swindle, he supposed.

Thom took one stone. The other went with the party.

Norbus turned back to his drink, and reached down and patted the boots, and then hunched over the bar with his head down and his shoulders shaking.

The others drifted toward the door.

Dax waited until they had, then went back and put down a second bag — fifteen gold, on top of what the party had already paid, and none of them saw it. He leaned in and said it low.

“If you ever come across another job that needs a sword, come find me.”

Norbus looked up and nodded.

What was your name again, sir?

“Dax.”

Dax. I’ll remember that, Dax.

He walked away.

They were turning for the door when it banged open ahead of them and a man came through it at a run with a report he had only just been handed.

Umbrage Hill had been attacked.

It was a dragon.

There was nothing left of it.