Gauntlgrym

“I don’t like coming here,” the orc woman remarked as she handed over the herb bag. She wasn’t tall for an orc, but still she towered over her diminutive counterpart.

“We are at peace, Jessa,” Nanfoodle the gnome replied. He pulled open the bag and produced one of the roots, bringing it up under his long nose and taking a deep inhale of it. “Ah, the sweet mandragora,” he said. “Just enough can take your pain.”

“And your painful thoughts,” the orc said. “And make of you a fool … like a dwarf swimming in a pool of mead, thinking to drink himself to dry ground.”

“Only five?” Nanfoodle asked, sifting through the large pouch.

“The other plants are full in bloom,” Jessa replied. “Only five, you say! I expected to find none, or one … hoped to find two, and said a prayer to Gruumsh for a third.”

Nanfoodle looked up from the pouch, but not at the orc, his absent gaze drifted off into the distance, and his mind whirled behind it. “Five?” he mused and glanced at his beakers and coils. He tapped a bony finger to his small, pointy white beard, and after a few moments of screwing up his tiny round face this way and that, he decided, “Five will finish the task.”

“Finish?” Jessa echoed. “Then you will dare to do it?”

Nanfoodle looked at her as if she were being ridiculous. “Well along the way,” he assured her.

A wicked little grin curled Jessa’s lips up so high they seemed to catch the twisting strands of yellow hair, a single bouncing curl to either side, that framed her flat, round face and piggish nose. Her light brown eyes twinkled with mischief.

“Do you have to enjoy it so?” the gnome scolded.

But Jessa twirled aside with a laugh, immune to his words. “I enjoy excitement,” the young priestess explained. “Life is so boring, after all.” She spun to a stop and pointed to the herb pouch, still held by Nanfoodle. “And so do you, obviously.”

The gnome looked down at the potentially poisonous roots. “I have no choice in the matter.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Should I be?”

“I am,” Jessa said, though her blunt tone made it seem more a welcomed declaration than an admission. She nodded somberly in deference to the gnome. “Long live the king,” she said as she curtsied. Then she departed, taking care to pick her way back to the embassy of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows without drawing any more than the usual attention afforded an orc walking the corridors of Mithral Hall.

Nanfoodle took up the roots and moved to his jars and coils, set on a wide bench at the side of his laboratory. He took note of himself in the mirror that hung on the wall behind the bench, and even struck a pose, thinking that he looked quite distinguished in his middle age—which of course meant that he was well past middle age! Most of his hair was gone, except for thick white clumps above his large ears, but he took care to keep those neatly trimmed, like his pointy beard and thin mustache, and to keep the rest of his large noggin cleanly shaved. Well, except for his eyebrows, he thought with a chuckle as he noted that some of the hairs there had grown so long that their curl could be clearly noted.

Nanfoodle took up a pair of spectacles and pinched them onto his nose as he finally pulled himself from the mirror. He tilted his head back to get a better viewing angle through the small round magnifiers as he carefully adjusted the height of the oiled wick.

The heat had to be just right, he reminded himself, for him to extract the right amount of crystal poison.

He had to be precise, but in looking at the hourglass at the end of the bench, he realized that he had to be quick, as well.

King Bruenor’s mug awaited.

Thibbledorf Pwent wasn’t wearing his ridged, creased, and spiked armor, one of the few occasions that anyone had ever seen the dwarf without it. But he wasn’t wearing it for exactly that reason: He didn’t want anyone to recognize him, or more specifically, to hear him.

He skulked in the shadows at the far end of a rough corridor, behind a pile of kegs, with Nanfoodle’s door in sight.

The battlerager gnashed his teeth to hold back the stream of curses he wanted to mutter when Jessa Dribble-Obould entered that chamber, first glancing up and down the corridor to make sure no one was watching her.

“Orcs in Mithral Hall,” Pwent mouthed quietly, and he shook his dirty, hairy head and spat on the floor. How Pwent had screeched in protest when the decision had been made to grant the Kingdom of Many-Arrows an embassy in the dwarven halls! Oh, it was a limited embassy, of course—no more than four orcs were allowed into Mithral Hall at any given time, and those four were not allowed unfettered access. A host of dwarf guards, often Pwent’s own battleragers, were always available to escort their “guests.”

But this slippery little priestess had gotten around that rule, so it seemed, and Pwent had expected as much.

He thought about going over and kicking in the door, catching the rat orc openly that he might have her expelled from Mithral Hall once and for all, but even as he started to rise up, some rare insight told him to exercise patience. Despite himself and his bubbling outrage, Thibbledorf Pwent remained silent, and within a few moments Jessa reappeared in the corridor, looked both ways, and scampered off the way she had come.

“What’s that about, gnome?” Pwent whispered, for none of it made any sense.

Nanfoodle was no enemy of Mithral Hall, of course, and had proven himself a steadfast ally since the earliest days of his arrival some forty years before. Battlehammer dwarves still talked about Nanfoodle’s “Moment of Elminster,” when the gnome had used some ingenious piping to fill caverns with explosive gas that had then blown a mountain ridge, and the enemy giants atop it, to rubble.

But then why was this friend of the hall cavorting with an orc priestess in such secrecy? Nanfoodle could have called for Jessa through the proper channels, through Pwent himself, and had her escorted to his door in short order.

Pwent spent a long while mulling that over, so long, in fact, that Nanfoodle eventually appeared in the corridor and hustled away. Only then did the startled battlerager realize that it was time for the memorial celebration.

“By Moradin’s stony arse,” Pwent muttered, pulling himself up from behind the kegs.

He meant to go straightaway to Bruenor’s hall, but he paused at Nanfoodle’s door and glanced around, much as Jessa had done, then pushed his way in.

Nothing seemed amiss. Some white liquid in the beakers on one workbench bubbled from the residual heat of recently doused braziers, but everything else seemed perfectly out of place—exactly the way the scatter-brained Nanfoodle always kept it.

“Hmm,” Pwent mumbled and wandered about the chamber, trying to find some clues—maybe a cleared area where Nanfoodle and Jessa might have—

No, Pwent couldn’t even let his mind take that tack.

“Bah, ye’re a fool, Thibbledorf Pwent, and so’s yer brother, if ye had a brother!” the dwarf scolded himself.

He started to leave, suddenly feeling like quite the terrible friend for even spying on Nanfoodle in such a way, when he noted something under the gnome’s desk: a bedroll. Pwent’s mind went back to that dark place, conjuring a tryst between the gnome and the orc, but he shook that thought away as soon as he realized that the bedroll was tightly tied, and had been for some time. And behind it was a backpack with all manner of gear, from bandages to a climbing pick, tied around it.

“Plannin’ a trip to Many-Arrows, little one?” Pwent asked aloud.

He stood up and shrugged, considering the likely options. Pwent hoped that Nanfoodle would be smart enough to take along some guards if that was the case. King Bruenor had handled the transition of power from Obould to his son with great tact and had kept the tensions low enough, but orcs were orcs, after all, and no one really knew how trustworthy this son of Obould might turn out to be, or even if he had the charisma and sheer power to keep his wild minions in line, as had his mighty father.

Pwent decided he would talk with Nanfoodle next time he had the gnome alone, friend to friend, but he had put all of it out of his mind by the time he slipped back out into the hallway. He was running late for a most important celebration, and knew that King Bruenor wouldn’t be quick to forgive such tardiness.

“… twenty-five years,” Bruenor was saying when Thibbledorf Pwent joined the gathering in the small audience chamber. Only a few select guests were in there: Drizzt, of course; Cordio, the First Priest of the Hall; Nanfoodle; and old Banak Brawnanvil in his wheeled chair, along with his son Connerad, who was growing into a fine young dwarf. Connerad had even been training with Pwent’s Gutbusters, and had more than held his own against much more seasoned warriors. Several other dwarves gathered about the king.

“I miss ye, me girl, and me friend, Regis, and know that if I live another hunnerd years, I’ll spend not a day not thinking of ye,” the dwarf king said. He lifted his mug and drained it, and the others did the same. As he lowered the mug, Bruenor fixed his gaze on Pwent.

“Apologies, me king,” the battlerager said. “Did I miss all the drink, then?”

“Just the first toast,” Nanfoodle assured him, and the gnome hustled about, gathering up all the mugs before moving to the keg at the side of the room. “Help me,” he bade Pwent.

Nanfoodle filled the mugs and Thibbledorf Pwent delivered them. Pwent thought it curious that the gnome didn’t fill and hand over Bruenor’s personal mug with the first group. Certainly no one could miss that mug among the others. It was a large flagon with the foaming-mug shield of Clan Battlehammer stamped on its side and a handle that sported horns at its top, into which the holder could settle his thumb. One of those horns, like Bruenor’s own helmet, had been broken short. In a show of solidarity and promise of unending friendship to Mithral Hall, the mug had been a gift years before from the dwarves of Citadel Adbar to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Garumn’s Gorge. No one would dare drink from that mug except for Bruenor himself, Pwent knew, and so he understood that Nanfoodle meant to deliver Bruenor’s mead personally, and last. He didn’t give it much thought, honestly, but it just struck him as curious that the gnome had pointedly not given that mug to Pwent to deliver.

Had he been paying close attention to the gnome, Pwent might have noted something else that would have surely raised his bushy eyebrows. The gnome filled his own mug first then turned his back more squarely to the gathered group, who were talking about old times with Catti-brie and Regis and paying him no heed anyway. From a secret pouch on his belt, the gnome produced a tiny vial. He eased the cork off so it wouldn’t make a popping sound, glanced back to the group, and poured the crystal contents of the vial into Bruenor’s decorated grail.

He gave it just a moment to settle, then nodded his approval and rejoined the celebration.

“May I offer a toast to my lady Shoudra?” the gnome asked, referring to the emissary of Mirabar whom he had accompanied to Mithral Hall those decades ago, and who had been killed by Obould himself in that terrible war. “Old wounds healed,” the gnome said, lifting his mug in toast.