Trivelin woke up hungry, hungover, and wrapped in silk sheets. It was the last one that concerned him, as it was an interruption to his usual routine. Sunlight prodded insistently against his eyes and stirred the tormented muddle of his skull.
He rolled onto his side, cracking an eye open to surveil his surroundings.
Somebody had set sugar-dusted balls of blackberry jelly in a golden bowl on the nightstand.
“Oh sweet relief.” He grasped a fistful and pushed them into his mouth one by one, savoring the sweetness that gave way to tart, fresh succulence.
He found the strength to ease his eyes open a little more, and discovered there was a half-full bottle of rum a little farther down on the nightstand.
“Oh salvation of mine.”
Ten minutes later Trivelin was making his way down the grand staircase of the palatial villa he found himself in, the bottle dangling from his fingertips with a tiny reserve of rum still sloshing around at the bottom. The house was rich, opulent, and very much to Trivelin’s tastes. At the bottom of the stairs, he found a silver bowl of fruit balanced on the bannister.
“Really excellent taste.” Trivelin commented as he popped a grape into his mouth. Just as he was reaching for another, a servant crossed his path carrying a tray of glasses and a tall pitcher of wine.
In two steps he had neatly intercepted them, lifting the tray from her hands. “I’ll handle this.”
“That’s for the lady of the house and her guest.” The maid stuttered, outraged by this shabby tomcat of a pirate in her clean house.
“Yes, and I’m the guest, so it’s halfway home already.” Trivelin replied. “Now which way to the lady.”
The maid pointed him towards a door, and with tray balanced in hand, Trivelin arrived in a large dining room. Seated at the end of the long mahogany table was the noblewoman he’d expected, yes, but she was a dwarf, and not a soft or demure lady at all. A scar indented the flesh of her cheeks. Streaks of white marred her golden hair, which was tied into an ornate knot of braids that hung down behind her head.
She sat with a book open, breakfast shoved to the side. A wooden box bound with silver chains sat on the table in front of her.
“I was half afraid you’d go out a window.” She noted, without looking up. She was beautiful in a stout way, he supposed, a fierce warrior woman way. Not his kind. He preferred women who weren’t skilled hands at revenge.
“I would never.”
The box jumped on the table, the chains holding it shut rattling.
Slightly unnerved, Trivelin set the tray down and began to mix water and honey into the wine with a silver stirring spoon. “And to who do I owe the pleasure?”
“The pleasure was all yours. Cathara Halfhand.”
Trivelin didn’t bother showing any contrition. He crossed the long, lonely dining table to set her glass beside her. “And… why?”
“You caught my interest, with all your talk of this Dungeon under our feet. I wanted to hear more.” The book finally slammed shut. She regarded him with green eyes. “And you can be quite charming when you’re drunk enough.”
“Should I be getting drunk now?” Trivelin enquired.
“If you want to live, you’d better.” She replied, in a tone so blunt he couldn’t be sure she was joking.
Pulling a chair out and spinning it around, Trivelin sat down backwards, his arms crossed over the chain’s back. “You wanted to hear about the Dungeon, yes? Where should I start?”
“You seem to know a lot about it. I’m curious where you learned so much.”
“Oh, I picked it up from rumors here and-” The box rattled suddenly, interrupting him.
Clearing his throat, Trivelin tried, “May I just say, I’ve rarely beheld a more radiant beauty.”
The box thumped. Cathara’s eyes narrowed.
“And the experience is one I shall never forget.”
Th-thump.
“From this day on, I shall have eyes for no other.”
THUMP. The box shook like it wanted to leap across the table and strangle him.
Trivelin tossed back his wine in a single gulp. Setting the cup down, he noted, quite casually, “You know, I can’t help but notice that box rattles every time I lie.”
“I can’t help but notice you lie.” She replied. “Like when you told all those people the Dungeon was full of golden trees, and even the rats were made of silver. That jewels grow on every branch and the water tastes like wine.”
“Well, I’ve always considered myself a storyteller. My work isn’t to tell people the meagre what is, but to invite them to consider the beauty of what could be.”
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She did not smile. Her eyes were hard and flinty. “Some of them are going to believe you. They’re going to go delving. And they’re going to die believing your tall tales. But tell me, and to try not to go telling stories- where did you learn about the Dungeon?”
“You know, I should be going…” Trivelin hadn’t risen halfway from his seat when the guards stepped through the door. And from the other door.
And he wouldn’t bet on there not being a guard waiting outside the window, too. Damn.
“I, um-“ Ask him to lie till he was blue in the face and Trivelin would oblige, but the messy truth always had a way of getting stuck in his throat. In this case, he literally couldn’t get the words to come out of his mouth. It was like his lungs had turned to iron. His tongue froze, his mouth hanging open.
“Breathe. I know a Contract when I see one.” She was looking at him with a frightening intensity. “The question now is, are you the Dungeon's slave, or did you make a deal with it?”
The moment he stopped trying to answer, the Contract let him have control over his own tongue again. He sucked in a deep breath of air. “I really can’t tell you that.”
She reached across the table, setting her hand on his. “Let me make this very simple. Are you Attuned?”
It was at that moment Trivelin caught sight of himself in a mirror. No wonder she had slept with him. He looked twenty years younger and thinner, his bald patch had filled in, his wrinkles were gone and his face no longer sagged so damn much. He was a dashing bravo of a buccaneer again.
Or looked like one, thanks to the Attunement of Disguise.
“... No?”
THUMP.
“A shame. Take him away.” The guards stepped forward. In his last moments of freedom, Trivelin poured and emptied another glass of wine.
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"Would this damn thing move!" Corris had never seen anything so slow, and he had worked with the laziest, the most workshy, the most utterly useless louts on the face of the earth for twenty years now.
This stupid thing beat them all.
It was some kind of bear with ludicrously long limbs and a white-masked face. As they watched, it leisurely loped down the tunnels, every motion so slow it looked like the beast was wading through treacle. The whole workcrew groaned as the lard-assed furball paused yet again to scrape its mossy green back against the walls, leaving behind traces of curling mushroom root.
One of the men picked up a stone and hurled it, the shot sailing in a beautiful arc that went bouncing off the creature’s skull with a nice hollow thonk. It barely reacted.
“Well, we may as well break for a while.” Reaching into his pockets, Corris took out a leather pouch full of papers and loose tobacco, deftly squeezing and rolling up a cigarillo. He lit the thing with a little fleck of firestone he kept on a pendant. The smoke helped to scrub his nostrils clean of the cloying stink of sewer-work.
“Pass me that firestone for a second, boss.” To his surprise, the dwarf they all called No-Nose was kneeling over a little nest of branches and leaves, with his helmet turned upside-down and perched atop as an impromptu frying pan. He was gathering up mushrooms from the wall, the funnel-shaped red ones that smelled like death, and tossing them in with a sprinkle of bacon from his lunch.
“Are you really going to try cooking down here?” Corris made a face, sticking his tongue out.
“Hey! Are you Corris the Broken!?” To the old dwarf’s surprise, it was a human who was calling his name, coming from the opposite end of the tunnel. As the human trudged forward through the mess of the sewer flow, Corris’s initial impression of a shock of red hair resolved into a messy, unkempt young man, his blunt jaw covered in stubble, his nose bent back enough to leave his face with a sort of bulldog-look.
“Jess Tulny.” The pup introduced himself. “I heard you’re the man to talk to about these sewers.”
“Aye?” Corris took the boy’s hand as it was offered, sizing him up as they shook. With a sword strapped to his hip, a waterskin and lamp dangling from the other, and a loop of rope cast round his shoulders like a bandoleer, it didn’t take a keen eye to spot the boy planned to be an adventurer.
It was equally clear, by the lack of scars and the carefree smile, that he wasn’t yet.
“Mhm. I’m looking for the Dungeon they say’s down here. Have you seen anything unusual about of late?” He paused, squinting over the top of Corris’s head at the lumbering bear-thing. “Is- is that unusual?”
“You could say it is, yep.” Corris pushed the smoke out of his lungs and into a swirling ring that bobbed through the air. “You could say it is.”
“And the mushrooms everywhere. Tha’s new.” No-Nose mentioned, happily prodding and stirring as his morsels bubbled in bacon fat.
Corris glared at him, but the would-be chef was oblivious.
“Ah, I wondered about those. Are there any blockages, maybe? Places where the tunnels have shifted recently for no reason?” The boy was grinning ear from ear, as if life was his oyster.
“Oh, we’re on our way to fix a blockage right now.” No-Nose blurted out. Corris could have tugged his beard out in frustration.
Instead, he sucked in a deep breath, and forced himself to nod along. “Ayep. Blockage up ahead, out of nowhere. Tell ya what, if you get this damn thing out of our way, we’ll lead you there. Deal?”
“Deal!” Grinning ear from ear, Jess Tulny drew his sword and advanced on the furball as it happily scratched its back against the sewer’s brickwork.
They all watched him go.
No-Nose opened his mouth to say something.
Corris clapped his hand over it.
He got in one good hack with that shiny sword of his, barely piecing through the bear-thing’s hide. That was enough to make it mad. It turned, faster than anyone who’d watched it idle about for the last two hours would have thought possible, and it swiped out with its long, long claws.
That claw cut right through the boy’s stomach like he was butter. Nearly split him. His top half sort of flopped over backwards, barely held together, and he toppled down into the flow of sewage.
“Why’d you tell him to do that?” No-Nose asked, his face pale, his appetite gone.
“Why’d you have to tell him about the blockage?” Corris dropped his cigarillo to the ground and angrily stomped it out. “This ain’t a game! The Families are counting on us! We’re going to go there, we’re going to look-see if it’s really the Dungeon, and we are going to be damn careful, damn quiet, about the whole thing! Y’hear me?”
“Aye boss.” They echoed, one by one, their eyes gone dull from what they’d just seen. They weren’t good people or good workers. Neither kind got sent down here, the worst of the worst assignments.
But they were all the people Corris had, and he didn’t intend to lose them.
Corris the Broken. It wasn’t a name in the proper sense. The first half he’d been born with, given the usual way, sure enough, but the latter…
The latter was saved for dwarves who were cast out from their own families. Dwarves who weren’t even worth calling dwarves any more.