Apostles of Doom

“Your last visit here set off all sorts of alarm bells, and now there’s a large group of investigators combing the city and the wargtown in particular, trying to understand what you were up to.”

“Why?” Tal Gor asked, shaking his head. “We went shopping, like we said.”

“Yes, but the alvar freaked out when they saw D’Orcs and D’Wargs.” Gastropé gestured to Schwarzenfürze.

“How do you know all of this?” Ragala-nargoloth queried.

Gastropé grimaced. “Because I’m with them. I was having dinner in Murgandy when the alvaran rangers arrived, having ridden around the clock to bring the news.”

Farsooth shook his head. “Damn elves, they blow everything out of proportion. Everything is a war to them! Seriously unpleasant people.”

“They keep talking about going across some imaginary sea to some sort of Promised Land, I wish they would just hurry up and go already!” Beya said angrily.

“Well, why don’t we just go explain things to them?” Vaselle asked. The orcs all turned to stare at him as if he was crazy. Gastropé had to agree with them that the warlock was nuts.

“You haven’t met that many elves, have you?” Farsooth asked.

“They are a bunch of know-it-alls who prefer to lecture the ‘lesser races’ that they so ‘nobly shepherd.’ They do not take advice from the sheep,” Beya said angrily.

Gastropé shook his head. “I’m not sure they are that bad, but they definitely seem to have gotten bees in their plate armor when they learned of the D’Orcs.”

Ragala-nargoloth nodded. “That sounds like them. They don’t like things they can’t easily control.”

“Well,” Gastropé interrupted, “according to the alvar, the D’Orcs are supposed to be the most fearsome warriors in the multiverse, Knights of Chaos excepted, apparently.”

Farsooth chuckled. “Well, they do have a point on that. They are the best of the best of orc warriors, and they are even more immortal than the elves. You skewer an elf and it croaks; skewer a D’Orc and it returns to the Abyss for a rest and then comes back to hunt you down.”

Ragala-nargoloth and Beya chuckled at this as well. Gastropé was not sure, but he thought maybe the new and absolutely horrifying expression on Tal Gor’s monster might also be a grin. She seemed to be understanding them. Which was all the more reason to wonder why she did not project one of those translation auras.

“So what are we going to do then?” Vaselle asked. “Even once Lord Tommus comes back, we are going to need to go into town and get supplies. We are going to need someplace we can rest or camp, a secure location for dream walking…” he gestured to the shamans.

Tal Gor shook his head. “Yes. Unfortunately, it’s a day’s flight to my clan, where we would be safe and secure, and we only have one D’Warg.”

“Gastropé, you’ve been to this city,” Damien stated, looking at Gastropé. “Do they have any place that might sell us a flying carpet?”

Gastropé twisted his head slowly from right to left, thinking, hedging. “I would seriously doubt it; the city’s something of a backwater.”

“Schwarzenfürze and I can wait here while the rest of you go into town to look for a carpet,” Tal Gor said. “Maybe bring me back some water. Or if there is no carpet, get us some camping gear.”

Damien shrugged in agreement. “That may be our best bet.”

Murgatroy

“Ugh,” Beragamos moaned, easing down onto one of the two small beds in Teragdor’s room at the inn. Stevos sat down on the bed across from him as Teragdor positioned himself to sit next to Stevos while holding two bottles of wine that Hilda had purchased in a local shop.

Hilda pulled out the small table and set upon it the tray of meat and cheese she had gotten from the inn’s kitchen master. “The sausage options were miserable; some passable venison sausage, a pot of too-fatty goose liver paste. I refuse to call it pâté! There are also some slices of beef and a very hard cheddar cheese, plus their standard bread loaf, which appears to be made of stone…” she clanked the loaf of bread against the side of the table to make her point.

“At this point, my dear, I just want a glass of wine,” Beragamos said.

Hilda snorted, shaking her head. “We shall see if that is what we have purchased.”

“This was an unusually long day,” Stevos remarked.

“Seriously bad luck running into those Grove people,” Beragamos agreed.

“I don’t think they were able to sense anything,” Hilda said, arranging the clay wine goblets.

“That Trevin D’Vils is very perceptive,” Beragamos said. “She’s clearly a skilled enchantress and I have no idea what race she is.”

“She’s not human?” Teragdor asked.

Beragamos shrugged. “I don’t believe so. We were not the only ones shielding ourselves today. I am not sure what she is, though. Possibly fae, or half-fae.”

“That would explain the association with the alvar,” Stevos said.

“But not the dwarves,” Teragdor said. “Dwarves and elves get along only slightly better than orcs and elves.”

“The Grove is a rather odd place, and I know very little of it,” Stevos stated.