How can things go from glorious victory to nightmare and misery so quickly?
It looked like things were finally going our way: I fought in the pits against Josi and it looked like I’d beat her if I could get one decent blow in. The the earth shook and part of pit floor caved in. Out of the hole climbed some great horned monster. Josi and I flanked it and gave it more than it had bargained with. The lumbering brute could barely touch us and it was a large target for our blades. We killed the thing just as Alynna and Jakob came to rescue us. I chopped part of the thing’s horn for the boy. Must be getting soppy in my old age.
Anyway, the crowd seemed to have entertained. Herpin Krappen eventually gave us the fighters and even agreed to join Kultzmann’s party himself given that his business had been ruined by the earthquake.
Later, we tracked down the noble’s daughter to a house that Alynna seemed interested in for other reasons. Inside, we found debauchery and mutation. Lord Quintus was very much alive and about the size of a wagon. I posed as a messenger from Lady Quintus when I spoke to him. I should know by now that people like that should be destroyed on sight. There were a couple of books – a ledger and something more sinister we should have left behind. In the cellar we found a girl – a woman the size of a young child … another mutant – aparently the Quintus’s daughter. Again, I should have cut her down, put an end to her misery, but she seemed so innocent. I won’t be so merciful next time.
We returned to the Quintus house and used the information and the ledger to have Lord Roland released. Mission accomplished. Alynna shortly afterward received a letter recalling her to Marienburg.
Later that night I caught a glimpse of the pages of that other book. Lustful scenes – disgusting, but somehow they seeped into mind - they even seemed to move, to speak to me … Lust obsessed me that evening and when the little halfling, Hanna, looked at me in the common room of the inn, I knew that I would break all dwarven custom and take her to my bed.
In the moment of hateful carnality, something posessed me and I reached out and throttled the girl. I glanced up to see the Quintus daughter in my room, then looked down at Hanna, her eyes still locked on my face, even in death.
When I looked up again, the Quintus girl wasn’t there. I grabbed my axe and ran for Alynna’s room, where I’d put her. She wasn’t there either. I couldn’t salvage even revenge from Hanna’s death. It was all my fault. And everyone would know, everyone saw us together.
I ran. I ran to the only place I could think of where I might find sanctuary – the Shalyan temple and Felix.
Choked with grief, I explained to the blind man what had happened. He seemed to understand, or at least not to judge me. Not like talking to my father, cleric of Grimnir. Felix had someone retrieve the book of carnal magic and he destroyed it. Then he informed me that Albert was here (I’d thought he’d done a run for it after the night of drinking) and that half the inn was dead – strangled. I immediately thought, No – it was just Hanna. But my memory was hazy. Maybe I’d gone on the rampage. But Felix assured me the magic of the book was powerful and must have taken the whole inn in its madness.
Reluctantly, I agreed to go back with Albert. I tried to put on a stoical appearance. When we got back, there was nothing else to do but help the innkeeper dispose of the dead bodies, even though Kultzmann had told me he wanted us to have nothing to with it. Well, Roland wanted us to find some other lost child while he fled the city and left us alone. He could run, but we would have to deal with the situation here, so I went against his wishes. By this stage it looked like Alynna had already left.
We met a couple of Kultzmann’s men we’d thought lost – Leo and Faustus (who I’ll always think of as a ‘jah-grapher’, as Rudegar would put it), and a friend of theirs, Halldor. They were happy to join us. As was the innkeeper – whose business would also be ruined when news of the deaths leaked out.
Cutting a long story short, we rescued the boy, in an attack on the house where he was being held. Another success, but the previous night’s events were weighing heavily on my mind all the time. At last we were in a position to leave Dunkelburg. Or at least we would be once the barge was finished, and Felix had smuggled the ‘patients’ on board. Furtunately, the next few days passed uneventfully. The nights, and the dreams that haunted them, were another matter …
