The creature’s eye-stalks swiveled and froze, apparently only now realizing that Torvald was there. He jumped onto the dais and lunged, but the thing skittered to the side with surprising speed and swiped at him with one of its legs.

  The paladin twisted out of the way easily, stepped to the side and bulled forward, ramming bodily into it with a shoulder since his sword was out of position. Small, segmented limbs poked into his dirty gambeson as he struck and the monster crashed to the floor, tumbling back two paces before catching itself and rising back to its strange legs. Torvald pressed the attack, rushing in and swinging low to disrupt its footing. The thing was fast, but its balance wasn’t great and it didn’t even have proper arms. It wasn’t meant for this kind of fighting, he was sure.

  When Ruzinia’s warning came, he was half a second too slow. He’d been distracted and besides, he was focused on the opponent in front of him. Something hit the back of his left knee and he felt arms wrap around his leg as it folded underneath him. He sank down, awkwardly landing in a half-sitting posture on top of his assailant – the middle-aged Duergar woman.

  Kicking down, he wrenched his leg free and stumbled forward just in time for something cold, hard and wet to grab his left hand. The sensation was replaced almost instantly by a warm tingle.

  He glanced down to find bits of viscous, clear mucous smeared over the back of his hand. Shuddering, he tried to wipe it on his pants, but stopped after only a moment.

  His limbs were heavy, and the warm sensation was good. It was… calming. He was safe.

  The Duergar woman sat up slowly, her eyes focused nowhere, and crawled unhurriedly over to where the monster’s previous victim had lain. That was bad. He was going to save her. Her, and the other people here.

  “Patience,” whispered a quiet voice.

  The alien insect thing scuttled up to him, eyes flicking nervously left and right. It didn’t see the glowing golden sigil that floated over its head. The sign.

  He felt exposed by the way it stared at him, assessing him with naked curiosity. After a few seconds, it raised a limb and poked at him. Torvald didn’t react. It seemed like too much work to stop it, and besides, he felt great.

  Another thought skirted along the edge of his consciousness – that this was wrong, that he was in danger, and that he needed to act – but he simply… didn’t. Not really. He could only feel his grip shift ever so slightly on the sword he held in his right hand. This was fine. He’d been asked to wait.

  The creature continued poking at him, circling around him as if he were a horse it were looking to buy. Torvald couldn’t tell exactly how long it took for it to finally lose interest. Leaving him right where he stood, it turned back to where it had been. Where its next victim was already waiting, lying face up on the stone, her head resting in a small, smooth depression.

  At the exact moment the creature turned its back, light flared in his vision and the warm, comforting sensation vanished, replaced by a prickling, energizing cold. Torvald gasped a breath, but this time, he was ready for Ruzinia’s guiding hand. He slashed out, severing one of the thing’s eyes before bringing it down on its carapace with a brutal hacking motion that buried the sword a hand’s breadth in its side. The monster convulsed, tearing the sword from Torvald’s grip and he danced back as its legs flailed out and ichor gushed out of the wound. The golden glow faded from the dark sword instantly, but it didn’t go dark. One of the runes along the blade flashed a deep purple.

  A high-pitched screech filled the room, then the ichor caught fire. It burned blue, and by the way the creature writhed, Torvald guessed it wasn’t just burning on the outside. Just a few seconds later, the writhing diminished into twitches until, finally, the thing lay still, burning merrily.

  Carefully, he approached and reached out to retrieve the sword, drawing his hand back with a hiss when he touched it. It was hot. He’d have to leave it until it cooled, or find something to protect his hands.

  All at once, the knot of Duergar in the corner began to move. They twitched almost randomly and, little by little, started to shamble off in multiple directions. One fell off of the dais onto his ruined face and struggled to roll over. Torvald watched, both disgusted and horrified by the sight until a loud, high-pitched shout drew his attention back to the Duergar woman who had tackled him before. She scrambled back from the mutilated Duergar with a terrified whimper, rolled off of the dais and pushed back into the crowd.

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  The others blinked at each other in confusion, some murmuring quietly while others sat down where they’d been standing, as if too exhausted to stay upright. A few voices were louder, more awake, including one near the front of the crowd, calling out urgently in Duergar.

  Torvald looked around uncertainly, trying to decide what to do next. He couldn’t talk to them, and Ruzinia hadn’t provided further instructions. Could he help the injured Duergar, somehow? They didn’t look well…

  There was movement near the wall, where he’d come from, and soon, a familiar-looking Duergar man emerged, taking the same route Torvald had a few minutes before. He was still holding his broken spear, though he discarded it as soon as he came in view of the platform. When he reached the base, he skirted around it to the fallen Duergar man, who was still vainly trying to rise. Instead of helping him, he raised a booted foot and kicked him viciously in the face until he collapsed to the ground and stopped trying to rise.

  Then, with quick, efficient motions, he climbed up onto the dais and eyed first the other blinded Duergar and then Torvald warily. Deciding the paladin wasn’t a threat, he held up both hands, palm out, and gave a curt nod. He approached the still-burning monstrosity and wrenched Torvald’s sword out by the hilt, apparently unbothered by the heat.

  He rushed at the nearest of the monster’s victims, an old woman, and hacked into her head like a man chopping wood. She didn’t fight back. Instead, her head jerked to the side as if confused, then one of the sword’s runes lit up again and fire shot out of her bloody eyesockets in a spray of blue. That done, the soldier yanked the sword out and moved to the next one, repeating the process.

  Torvald looked away. He could guess what he was looking at here, and he didn’t need any more fuel for his nightmares.

  The crowd of Duergar below began to stir more, and several called questions up at the paladin that he couldn’t understand. He shrugged his shoulders and held his hands up in a pacifying gesture.

  “Sorry, I can’t understand you.”

  Would they have someone here who spoke Beseri? Yebidiah had managed to find someone, but Hvani was a clerk and presumably someone who was specially trained for diplomatic work.

  After a long, awkward moment, the soldier came to his rescue, stepping up next to him and waving the sword high up in the air. He hollered and, when the crowd quieted down a bit, began to speak in a loud, confident baritone. He pointed behind him at the dead insect thing, and then laughed roughly, reaching up to slap Torvald on the shoulder. Then he turned to face him and, much more quietly, asked him a question.

  Torvald just shrugged helplessly. Unperturbed, the soldier turned to the group and shouted a question at them instead. He waited expectantly for a few seconds, but no one answered. The gray dwarf frowned, scratched at his beard, then looked up at Torvald and spoke a few words in another language, enunciating very clearly as if to drive the words through his skull.

  It was a sort of dwarvish, much more similar to what Beseri dwarves spoke than Duergar. He was asking if he knew where to go, or maybe where they were? Torvald’s mother had ensured that he’d been taught dwarvish, but that wasn’t the same as actually learning it. He’d memorized a few of his favorite sermons in the language, but he’d never achieved any real mastery. Still, he could work with this. He nodded in the affirmative and, trying his best not to butcher the grammar too much, replied, “A god brings me to… uh… take you? I take you out. Away. For… help?”

  He cringed at the awful delivery, but the soldier seemed to understand well enough. The man nodded seriously, wiped the sword on the heavy canvas of his jacket and held it out to him with both hands, hilt first. They way he held it was clearly formal, not just someone handing back a borrowed sword. Maybe he was playing it up for the crowd.

  Unsure what he was supposed to do exactly, Torvald accepted the weapon with a slight bow and sheathed it, which was apparently good enough. The soldier nodded with satisfaction and shouted something else to the crowd, who parted down the middle to reveal a large, empty doorway at the far end of the massive chamber. Ruzinia’s guiding light hung in the darkness beyond, showing the way.

  Torvald climbed down and made his way there, followed closely by the soldier. The Duergar in the crowd looked exhausted, scared and hungry. Still, they rose to their feet and began to move with him, clearly intending to follow. A few pried light crystals out of the walls, and one younger-looking Duergar that Torvald could see started to slam a fist-sized rock into one of the carved reliefs, trying to deface it. A hand on his elbow drew his attention back to the soldier.

  “What god?” he asked, gesturing at Torvald. “What god comes…” He didn’t quite understand the rest, but it had something to do with too-bright light from far away and the word ‘foreigner’. But that was fine. He didn’t need to understand everything. He smiled at the man.

  “Ruzinia. She is…” he hesitated, trying to find the right words. “She is light in a dark place. Hope.”

  The gray dwarf frowned at him, then snorted with a small shake of his head. “Hope is a sun sickness. It is not for the Duergar…” he continued talking, making some kind of unintelligible metaphor about light. After that, Torvald could only pick out the occasional word as he gestured back at the others, speaking rapidly. Still, he understood “fire” and “dragon”, and that was enough to put the pieces together. These people were just like those with Yebidiah. They had nowhere to go back to.

  “A good sickness, then,” he said, taking time to make sure he put all the words in the right order. “I bring it wherever I can.”

  The Duergar man’s expression cracked and he chuckled, his voice warbling oddly, as if he didn’t quite know how to laugh right. He slapped Torvald on the shoulder again and grinned.

  “A good sickness,” he agreed.