Chapter 4. Diplomacy and Persuasion

Jeremiah stayed just behind Allison, his round shield and short spear ready to link up with her kite shield and form a solid defense at a moment’s notice.

“Unless I’m supposed to do something else,” he thought. He tried to analyze her stance, then decided it best not to think about it too hard. She had her spear out now. If she switched to her axe or sword he’d try to adjust accordingly.

At first glance, the tomb entrance was just a cave as any other. Dank, dark, and deceptively slippery floors where slime mold grew in patches. Then Bruno pointed out that the walls, though rough, shared a certain repeated texture, and the dimensions of the tunnels were too uniform to be natural. “Someone dug all this out,” he concluded. 

“That’s an awful lot of work,” said Jeremiah. “I wonder why?….Oh.”

Emblazoned across a wall ahead, filling the entire space from floor to ceiling, were the words:

BEYOND LIES SER GEROME FIDELIOUS 

MASTER OF ORDER

KING OF CASTIGATION

KNOWER OF THE UNKNOWABLE

ENTER AND BE DAM

“‘And be dam’?” read Allison.

“Do you think they meant ‘damned’?” asked Delilah.

Bruno shrugged, the epitaph not concerning him.

Ahead, just at the limit of his night eyes’ range, Jeremiah could see Bruno creeping forward. He would occasionally stop and listen, but mostly he kept his gaze moving, sweeping their surroundings. “Trap remains,” he said, indicating a shape sticking out of the floor near the wall. The party froze while he inspected it. “Clear. Set off ages ago.”

They continued onwards. Jeremiah eyed the remains as he passed. A rusted iron piton had been driven into the stone, with a corroded loop near the head. It resembled a giant needle punching into solid rock. He saw another on the other side of the cave, in just as poor condition.

“Trip line,” whispered Delilah. Jeremiah could see how a cord could connect both pitons, but couldn’t identify a mechanism beyond that.

“What’d it do?” he asked.

Delilah pointed toward the far wall of the cave. After a minute of staring, Jeremiah spotted a tiny hole drilled into the rock. It didn’t tell him much.

“Got a body,” Bruno called. They stopped again while Bruno searched the immediate area. “We’re good. Come take a look,” he said, waving them forward.

As they advanced, Jeremiah made out the unnaturally still shape of a human lying on the cave floor. It was the body of a man wearing the light leather armor of the Dramir Scout Corps and a metal cap. His cap had been smashed flat, and his neck was twisted at an unnatural angle. Dried blood and a clear fluid was crusted around his ears.

“Can anyone tell me what happened here and what we might keep an eye out for?” asked Bruno.

“Broken neck,” Delilah said without hesitation, “smashed actually. Blow from overhead. Death would have been instant.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Bruno. “Jay, why don’t you tell us what may have done this?” There was an edge to Bruno’s voice. He wanted to prove something.

Jeremiah started to think out loud. “An overhead blow, but not much room to swing something overhead. At least, not that hard, right?”

“You tell me,” said Bruno, giving him nothing.

“Bruno…” Allison warned.

“It’s a learning experience! We’re giving chances now, right? Jeremiah, tell me what killed him, and where it is,” said Bruno.

Jeremiah’s temper flared. Whatever Bruno was trying to prove, Jeremiah wanted to prove him wrong. “Alright, I don’t see signs of fighting here, no blood splatter or bodies, and there are no other wounds on him. And we just saw one trap…”

Jeremiah started scanning the low cave ceiling, but there wasn’t anything obvious. Just the normal jags of rock and lichen…wait. In the stone, like an impossible crack, was a nearly invisible perfect circle, about a foot in diameter. It was right over the body of the dead man. He reached his spear up and wedged the tip into the crack. It betrayed just a tiny fraction of movement.

“This is dropped on him, didn’t it? Or maybe it moved aside and something fell through a hole? No it had to drop, there’s nowhere for it to move. This circle thing crushed him,” Jeremiah said with finality.

“Why?” asked Bruno

That was trickier. Why would it fall and hit this man? Clearly he set off the trap. Delilah had said death was instantaneous. That gave him an idea. He grabbed the body by the leg and hauled it roughly aside with the callousness of a man too familiar with death.

“Jay!” said Allison.

“Aha!” said Jeremiah. Beneath the body, he spotted a similar flaw in the stonework to the one in the ceiling, a matching circle. “He stepped on this !” he said, and jabbed the circle with the butt of his spear.

The circle in the floor shifted a tiny amount, there was a click, and a column of stone dropped from the ceiling. Everyone leapt away from the deafening crash as the column smashed into the circle on the floor. It was as tall as the room and must have weighed thousands of pounds.

Bruno snatched Jeremiah’s spear from his hands. “Why would you do that!”

“Sorry!” Jeremiah held up his hands. “No one was near the trigger, I thought it'd be safe.” He was somewhere between sheepish and defensive. After all, he’d been right. Whatever game Bruno was trying to play, Jeremiah had won it.

“It is never safe to set off a trap,” Bruno said. “Whoever built the trap wants it to be triggered, and we don’t give that person what they want. But yes, that’s what happened to him. Good job.” He returned Jeremiah’s spear with some reluctance.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

As they dusted themselves off, the stone column began to slowly raise back up into the ceiling. There was a soft metal clinking that could be heard coming from the stone above.

“How the hell does this thing work?” asked Jeremiah, “What’s pulling it back up? And how? Where are the mechanisms for all this? Is it a magic trap?” Jeremiah hadn’t seen any signs of enchantment anywhere.

“Those are the professional level questions,” said Bruno, “and what you can learn from their answers is indispensable.”

“Care to enlighten us then? I’m pretty curious myself,” said Delilah.

Bruno paced as he answered. “We can’t hear machinery. That means the mechanism is far away or magic. The column showed signs of tool work, and I hear the clink of chains from the hole, likely what holds up the column. So we can assume it’s mechanical. It's most likely powered by a waterwheel of some kind. Since we’re high up, that means the mechanisms likely go very far down, accessing some sort of ground water. All that means we’re in for a deep descent.”

“So it could be powered by magic?” asked Jeremiah hopefully. Even Thurok would be impressed by an enchanted trap.

“Doubtful,” said Bruno. “You wouldn’t go through all the trouble of a magic trap just to do something mundane like drop a rock. Magic traps are awful.”

“What do they do?” asked Jeremiah.

“Anything,” said Bruno, sneering at the ceiling.

“What’s so indispensable about all that? We were going to find out we had a long walk anyways,” said Allison.

“I don’t know yet,” Bruno said. “But we may need it later, so we pay attention.” He knelt on the ground and extracted a thin shiv of metal from his rolled pack. He unfolded it, over and over again until it was as long as he was tall. Slipping it into the crack around the trigger, he began probing around the circle, searching for something. Finally, he bent the shiv into a narrow arch and slipped the other end into the opposite of the circle. For several long minutes, he continued to feed the wire around the trigger, fiddling occasionally. Jeremiah was certain the column would drop at any second to crush Bruno’s hands. Finally, though, Bruno had snaked the wire all the way beneath the trigger, so that the two ends of the wire stood straight up, still on either side of the circle. He pulled a tiny box from his pack and snapped it around the two ends, connecting them into a loop.

“Lift,” he said to Allison, stepping away. He retrieved a basic pry bar from his bag and waited. Allison gripped the loop in both gauntleted hands and pulled upward as hard as she could, straining against an invisible weight. The stone circle slowly rose above the floor. Only a couple of inches of stone made up the surface of the trigger, and as Allison pulled, she revealed a solid pole of rusty metal beneath. Bruno shoved the pry bar beneath the stone facade and wedged it against the metal pole. He wrenched, and the metal broke free from whatever mechanisms it was connected to below. Allison stumbled backwards as the stone trigger came free, leaving a perfectly round hole in the cave floor.

“Let’s go,” said Bruno.

The cave began descending quickly, the slime-slick stone making for treacherous and careful climbing. Delilah and Bruno finally deployed a piton and rope to shimmy down a particularly steep slope.

“Check,” Bruno said, tapping a wall. There was a sequence of long white claw marks in the stone. Everyone went on high alert, proceeding at a snail’s pace. They rounded one more corner before they were hit with the smell. Jeremiah choked back a wave of nausea at the staggering stink of rot and offal. “Stay here,” said Bruno and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

He wasn’t gone long, “Troll up ahead, looks like he’s living here, but the cave goes deeper beyond.”

“We can handle a troll,” said Allison, hefting her spear. “Delilah, can you make fire or acid so we can stop it from regenerating?” Trolls were nearly immortal if you didn’t burn or melt their wounds shut, rapidly regenerating even lost limbs in a matter of moments.

“I can, but honestly Jay is a better source of acid,” said Delilah.

“No. Magic,” said Allison.

Delilah dug into her armor and produced some small clay pots, no larger than apples, and a wax paper envelope containing a white paste. “I’ve got five acid pots and a coating that will ignite a weapon its applied to. But…can I try something?” Allison nodded for her to continue. “Alright everyone, just follow me. Keep a pot and be ready to fight if this doesn’t work out.

Delilah took the lead and slowly led them through the increasing stench and into a wider chamber of the cave. It had a carpet of splintered bones and a huge pile of animal skins in a corner made a bed. Jeremiah could see wriggling maggots in the bed from across the room and his stomach turned again. There was a totem of neatly arranged skulls on one side of the room, scratched into the wall above it were primitive depictions of gigantic creatures devouring smaller ones.

Sitting beside the bed, nearly blending in with the cave walls, was the troll. It was gnawing on something with only its bumpy green back exposed to them. Even sitting, it was taller than Allison by at least two heads.

“Bruno, sneak up and see if you can cut one of its arms off,” whispered Allison. Bruno nodded, but Delilah stopped him.

“Ahem?” she called.

The troll started, sprang to its feet, and let out a roar of outrage. It loomed twice as tall as any of them now, its bellowing mouth showing row after row of razor sharp teeth. Its knuckles reached the ground while standing, and were tipped with long boney claws. Growling, the troll sniffed the air frantically with a long pointed nose, pawing at the bed pile. It came away with a huge club, most of a tree trunk really, with a wicked looking blade of metal tied to the end, like an enormous scythe. Next it hefted a line of logs wrapped together as an improvised tower shield.

"You didn't mention those," Allison said to Bruno.

Bruno drew a pair of swords. “News to me!"

Delilah stepped forward and bellowed. “Graaaaaaaaaguguuuuuuuugaaaaaa!” 

The troll raised its head and glared at her. It still held the weapon at the ready, but its posture relaxed ever so slightly. “Doooommuuuukaaaarrrrtoooooogaaaa,” it said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Bruno. Jeremiah shushed him.

Delilah continued. “Chaaaaa mmmmaaagoooo d-d-daaaaahruuuuuy. Umm, ta-taaaaarooooofeeeefaaaaaaa!” She pointed to the exit that would lead them further into the cave, to the group as a whole, and then to Allison’s weapons. The troll gave a malicious toothy grin, and began advancing on them, shield interposed and weapon held high.

“Not working!” yelled Allison, trying to force herself in front of Delilah. Delilah stopped her again, and threw an acid pot at the ground by the troll’s feet. The little green specks flicked onto the troll’s knobby toes and singed its skin. The troll winced but stopped its advance.

“Ciiiiiidaaaaaaaa,” said Delilah, pointing at the other pots. “Gangaganga ciiiiidaaaaaa.”

The troll squinted at her. “Ciiiiidaaaaaa?”

“Shit,” Delilah muttered. She started snapping her fingers, trying to think. “Fiiiishaaaafiss daaaaa?”

“Ciiiiiillllddaaaaaaa?” the troll seemed to suggest.

“Ah, yes! Ciiiiillllddaaaaaaa!” said Delilah.

The troll growled, weighing its options. Suddenly it pointed back at the goat it had been chewing to shreds and stomped its foot, brandishing the scythe. “Bangkada ro?”

“Duro,” said Delilah.

That seemed to satisfy the troll. It backed up to the wall and scooped the goat up again, never taking its eyes off the intruders. It chewed its meal as it watched them leave.

“You speak giant?” asked Jeremiah.

“Only enough to tell a troll we’re not worth the trouble,” Delilah said. “Seemed worth knowing. Like how to turn down a gnome’s dinner invitation, or tell a dwarf they’re wrong without offending anyone. Pretty important in diplomatic matters.”

Allison glanced back toward the trolls lair. “I wonder if I could recruit him? He seemed awfully reasonable. I’d get a huge bonus for signing up a troll."

"Put a pin in that, but yes, he was very reasonable," agreed Delilah.