Aaliyah led the way through the maze of corridors at her usual quick pace. Like most New Yorkers, she had places to be and shit to do. Eresthanon, being more than half a foot taller and with a longer stride, had no trouble keeping up.
As they walked, she pulled out her badge and hung it from her belt, gesturing to Eresthanon he should do the same. He chose to slide his into the breast pocket of his jacket. The elf was definitely quick on the uptake, another sign he wouldn’t be a total anchor around Aaliyah’s neck.
They went through an innocuous door into a small room set up as a lounge and breakroom, then proceeded through another plain door into what appeared to be a shallow pantry closet. The shelves of paper plates, napkins, boxes of snacks, condiments, and so on, swung away when Aaliyah touched it in the right places in the correct combination. Knowing where to put your hands was just part of getting through this door; it would have been meaningless if either she or Eresthanon hadn’t been attuned to the network and carrying their badges.
A spiral staircase descended down a narrow stairwell. Eresthanon stopped just inside to make sure the door swung shut. The elf was security-conscious and attentive, so Aaliyah figured he must have noticed the door they’d come through was nearly a foot thick. He probably clocked the dense, metal crossbars that could slide into heavy brackets on either side of the door, as well.
“You probably saw the four buttons in the elevator when you came in, right?” Aaliyah asked.
“I did, indeed,” the elf replied. “There were some labels on the buttons I don’t think I’ve seen before.”
“U and M, I’m guessing?”
Eresthanon nodded.
Aaliyah snorted a laugh. “Yeah, that’ll screw with you. They mean Upper and Main, basically the first floor and the second, making four in total. Except that ain’t exactly accurate. We have an extra floor you can’t access except by super secret staircases that’re stashed away like this one. It’s all very Austin Powers meets Game of Thrones, I know, but we’re basically every law enforcement and spy agency rolled into one.”
“I see. So the basement is above the parking level?”
She scrunched her face up at that. “You know, I’m not sure. The buttons might be fibbing and, now that I think about it, I think they just might be.”
They passed through another thick security door at the bottom of the stairs and emerged into a hallway which, like the Cage, didn’t match the design style of the rest of the building.
The walls and ceiling were made of coursed rubble stone, supported by thick, pointed arches and the hall was lit by luminescent crystals hanging from the ceiling. Several passages branched off the hallway with irregular spacing, but Aaliyah led Eresthanon to a pair of heavy, iron-banded oak doors near the stairwell.
“We call this floor the Dungeon, mostly because of all the rock walls,” she said. “It used to be part of an old VC stronghold and they move the whole thing whenever they relocate. It’s a big pain in the ass, I’m sure, but it’s got old magic, y’know? The kind you can’t replicate too easy anymore. Not for nothing, but I probably wouldn’t relocate too often with that kinda pain in the ass hanging over my head. We’re heading to the Armory, right through here.”
She pushed open one of the stout doors and walked inside, the elf following in her wake. The Armory was nearly thirty feet across and four or five times as long. The walls were lined with a variety of racks, cases, stands, and other containers holding the primary contents of the room — weapons. They were present in nearly every shape, size, and description — daggers, swords, hammers, axes, spears, shields, and more.
The center of the room was an open space, sectioned into a number of distinct segments or lanes by long carpets that were between five and seven feet wide and fifty feet in length. The only other feature in the room was a great slab of wood in the corner across from the doors. Whether it was a podium or a desk was the subject of some debate, but the person seated behind it never bothered to clarify.
Aaliyah went directly to the desk, Eresthanon a couple steps behind. The man seated behind it was quite short, just a little over five feet, but nearly twice as broad as a heavyset human. Although he was without a beard, there could be no mistaking the powerful figure as anything but a dwarf. When the duo reached his desk, the dwarf spoke in their strange, ponderous language.
The dwarven language was made up of individual syllables, which were paired together to form a meaning and, all too often, a sub-meaning. It seemed simple, but it was devilishly complex. Sometimes a syllable pairing would change the meaning of other pairings, before or after it, or even the entire phrase. Add in pronunciation and emphasis for even more nuance, and the dwarven languages were basically a pain in the ass made manifest. Aaliyah knew it was an intricate, deep language, but to her it just sounded like those forehead guys from Star Trek.
“Gurd got. Duk mant. Beb terk. Bier mend,” the dwarf said.
Aaliyah, with all the solemnity she could muster, said, “Eresthanon, I present to you Stugrond, master dwarven smith and quartermaster of the Vigiles Creaturae of North America.”
The elf inclined his head slightly in greeting. The dwarf continued his dour recitation. “Sem kret. Olb dorn. Ree mak. Vurn.”
Before Aaliyah could speak again, Eresthanon replied in the same ponderous language. “Gish bik. Meg dutt. Yom bolk.”
Stugrond stared hard at Eresthanon for several seconds, then he bellowed a guffaw. “Fair enough, fella, fair enough.”
Aaliyah scowled at the two of them, but Stugrond was all smiles. “Don’t look at us like that, Dean! You can’t blame me that your first chance to screw with a rookie turned out to be an elf who happens to know the most infuriating dialect of dwarvish ever made.”
Eresthanon smiled politely at Aaliyah. “I’m terribly sorry, Quaesitor Dean. I didn’t know this was a traditional hazing. I presumed the master smith was having his own little joke and responded the only way I could to be respectful of their culture. As the old saying goes, ‘If a dwarf pulls your leg, kick them in the mouth.’”
Stugrond laughed again. “‘Kick their teeth up their nose’ was the way I’d always heard it, but my folk come from around the Mediterranean and aren’t so traditional.”
“Delightful,” Aaliyah said, fuming a bit at losing out on screwing with the new guy.
You had to be serious in a job like hers and doubly so if you didn’t want to take shit from nobody, but Enid and Stugrond had been her chance to have a little fun. Eresthanon had acquitted himself admirably in both cases and foiled her plans. The bastard.
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“Have no fear, Quaesitor, I’m sure you shall find ample opportunity to play japes at my expense,” the very same bastard offered.
He probably meant that sincerely, Aaliyah thought, which was extra frustrating. She wasn’t the sort of person to screw around at work — she was a professional — and she had doubts about whether they’d form the kind of camaraderie where she might get that relaxed with him. This was work and there were reasons she preferred to work alone, games of grab-ass and other assorted forms of asshattery among them. She had no desire to be “one of the boys.”
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out for opportunities to poke at the elf’s cool façade.
“Anyways,” she said, “Eresthanon has his badge and Enid set him up at the Cage, but he needs the rest of his kit.”
Stugrond nodded. “I was told there’d be a new vigiles today, so I’ve prepared the usual.”
The dwarf retrieved a lacquered box from behind the desk and placed it on the flat surface. Inside were four strange objects — a sleek, thick rod of wood half a foot in length, a metal plate about the size of the palm of Aaliyah’s hand, a small black pebble, and a coil of very thin, silvery rope. Aaliyah recognized them, of course, but Eresthanon was looking at them with some small amount of interest.
Stugrond lifted up the metal plate. “This carries two enchantments. One is a shielding charm. You’ll need to activate it and it won’t help much against repeated physical impacts, but it’s great against moderately potent magic attacks. The other is a morphing illusion. Most of our agents put it in the wallet with their badge where the ID would go. It allows them to modify the illusion to present decent credentials to nosy bureaucrats as long as they know what they want it to look like.”
He exchanged the plate for the stick. “Stun wand. Only good out to about five or six feet; it jostles the fluids of the inner ear, so most humanoid creatures will be affected. It’ll disorient and imbalance anything that isn’t heavily magical for several seconds.”
Next came the thin rope, with glittering strands interwoven that caught the light and shimmered faintly as the dwarf held it up. “This is our standard restraint. If you bind someone’s hands with it, it will greatly hinder their ability to access and manipulate aether. It can also resist fairly immense strength. It’s rated against trolls and ogres, but that’s about the top end and it’s just a general assessment, so some subjects might be able to break loose. You can never be sure when some jackass has heroic strength beyond the norm of their kind.”
Holding up the ends of the rope, Stugrond wrapped one end over the other, like the start of tying shoelaces. “You don’t need any complicated knots, even, just a half knot like so cinched tight will activate the binding enchantment. They’re not foolproof and slippery customers can finagle themselves out with some time, but it will hold against most bygones for several hours.”
Lastly, the dwarf held up the pebble, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “This is for emergencies. It’s a tiny dose of a potion of shadow form and will turn your body into an animate shadow for about thirty seconds. All you have to do is put it in your mouth, bite, and swallow. You won’t be able to pass through a nonporous surface like glass or plastic, but you can slither through even the tiniest of cracks and openings.”
After returning the tiny capsule to the box, Stugrond closed the lid and slid it towards Eresthanon. “We don’t issue dimensional storage, but nothing in your standard kit should interfere with those kinds of enchantments if you want to use a personal one. The last thing you’ll need to sort out is your armaments.”
Aaliyah had been looking forward to this.
Stugrond was an infamous stickler about not letting anything he forged go unless he knew it was going to a competent wielder. He made sure of that with completely unnecessary tests of skill that usually left the recipient battered and humbled.
This was, she’d been told, something of a dwarven custom, at least for the more serious artisans among them. Dwarves who made things with a certain degree of skill didn’t sell them to just anyone, they made sure the product of their work was going to a worthy home. Aaliyah thought it was an exaggeration until the first time she’d gone to a dwarven bazaar.
It had been a surreal experience — dwarf artists sitting in their stalls and stores, staring at potential customers, judging them. Then, if someone did want to make a purchase, they had to convince the dwarf to sell to them. Dwarven culture favored forthrightness and a degree of pride bordering on arrogance, so they tended to be brash and dismissive, even insulting, to anyone who hadn’t earned their respect.
Stugrond was a relatively tactful example of his people, but he was no less inclined to make someone work for it to receive something of his creation. Aaliyah had introduced him as a master smith, but it would have been more accurate to call him a weapons master or master armsman or whatever nerdy bullshit quasi-medieval term applied. The point being, Stugrond was exceptionally skilled in the use of a wide variety of archaic weaponry as well as their forging. Very few people who came to the Armory to get their kit walked out without getting pounded on by the dwarf.
Other than the things they did when no one was looking, there were few better ways to get the measure of a person than when they had to throw down for real.
“Just take a walk around the room, Tribune, and pick out a few weapon you’re comfortable using,” Stugrond said.
Eresthanon began to stroll along the racks, examining them at his leisure. “It may take a few minutes, I’m afraid, as I’ll need to see what jumps out at me. Shall I aim for a specific number?”
“As few or as many as you like, to start.”
The elf nodded and continued his circuit of the room, occasionally picking something up and performing a cursory examination of the weapon. More often than not, he’d set the weapon back on its rack, but he wound up with a small collection after several minutes — a polearm with a long, broad blade at the end, a pair of short swords with a vague resemblance to kukri which Aaliyah couldn’t identify specifically, and a mace with a flanged head. The elf had dithered over the mace more than any other weapon.
Stugrond had retrieved a rolling cart from the door behind his desk while Eresthanon searched and stood or laid each of the weapons on it as they were selected. When Eresthanon was done, he rolled the cart to one of the carpeted lanes.
“Which one first?” the dwarf asked.
Aaliyah hunkered down until she was sitting with her back against the wall, watching the two of them. If only Stugrond kept popcorn in the Armory! Eresthanon lifted the polearm out of the cart and Stugrond smiled.
The dwarf took a sword slightly taller than he was from one of the racks on the wall. The weapon had a large pommel, elevated rings on a very long handle, and small tines emerging from either side of the blade past the crossguard. It was a German sword, Aaliyah thought, with a really dumb name like ‘the two-hander’ or something like that. European swords all had stupidly obvious names — longsword, broadsword, bastard sword, arming sword, short sword, and so on — and she’d never really been interested in melee weapons.
She was more of a hands-on type, especially now that she was living in a world where firearms weren’t useful most of the time. Between her experience fighting barehanded and the innate gifts that came with being the Billy Badass kind of freakshow weirdo that she was, she’d never bothered to take anything from the Armory other than a long knife. That particular blade was modeled after the Egyptian khopesh and she hadn’t had a reason to draw it yet.
The dwarf hauled his giant — frankly ridiculous — sword onto the carpeted lane in front of the cart slung over his shoulder. He set the point of it down on the ground, the blade angled away from him. Then he pulled a flask out of a pocket and flipped the cap open, pouring some kind of oil down both sides of the blade.
“Do the same on the head of the glaive, please,” he told Eresthanon, holding it out to him.
Eresthanon seemed to have an understanding of dwarven culture, because the know-it-all prick followed suit without comment. He poured the oil down the long blade of the polearm and applied it to the metal cap on the butt of the haft, as well.
“A blunting agent?”
Stugrond nodded, a twinkle in his eyes. “My own concoction; I call it Dwarven Training Wheels. Blunts the blade and dulls impacts, but it also produces a magical jolt on contact so there’s no silly arguments about whether you scored a blow. Dean over there might be able to shrug off the juice without a visible sign, but even a dwarf’ll get the jitters for a second if this goop touches them.”
“A clever design,” Eresthanon said, capping the flask and handing it back.
Stugrond set the potion or whatever the crap it was on the cart, picked up his weapon, and took a position on the wide strip of carpet. The sword was angled downward so that the tip hovered just off the floor and he held it in a strange grip, one hand on the handle and the other on the blade between the guard and the small tines.
“Now,” Stugrond rumbled. “Show me your worth, Tribune.”