Letter Seventeen

Dear Sneffles,
We rested for a short time. The castle was full of spooky noises and the stench rising from the bodies made me skittish, like the night we broke into that old charnel house on Slattern Street North. It’s a terrible thing what wharf rats do to the sad corpses of the unlucky. At least there was none of that kind of mayhem here.

The next day we returned to the heavy door barring our way. Szechuan and PJ quickly turned it to splinters while Laori and her cohort lurked in the background, more than happy to let us do the heavy lifting.

Inside, the room was full of detritus, tattered hangings smelling of mold, and the bones of the ancient dead. With amazement we discovered that one skeleton was wearing the fabled armor of old Mandraivus. His bones were as desiccated as grandma’s pap and exploded into powder when Finarfin, trigger-happy as always, blasted it with a lightning bolt.

Driar immediately honed in on the armor, brooking no dissent as he laid claim to it, eyes shining greedily while he laced it on. Even a holy man covets something, sometimes, as Wally the cross-eyed pimp used to say. The armor is a beautiful thing, though, even beneath its layer of grime. More power to Driar, I say. His luck brings us luck because old Mandraivus was an ass-kicking son-of-a-bitch and if Driar picks up even a copper of that we’ll be the ones who benefit.

Unfortunately, all our noise waked the powerful ghost of Mandravius, who apparently was still bound to the place. It cast a spell that almost knocked me out and sent Finarfin to dreamland faster than two spliffs and a bottle of red wine. I spent the next minute ducking as PJ duked it out with the angry spirit, finally blowing out its candle with a ray of searing light. “Rest in peace, old man,” I thought as he faded from view.

I hurried over to Finarfin’s limp form. All the anger and bluster had drained from him in slack-jawed slumber. What emerged was a vision of the innocent child he had been before my father wronged him. Perhaps this is what Shelley beholds when she gazes upon him in morning’s light, before waking him with a lusty roll in the hay. I, for one, remember the fierce, unrelenting, unforgiving Finarfin too well to soften much, but here, for a moment, I pitied him.

Splashing him with water soon revived him and he sat, surly and sore, on the chamber floor while we regrouped.

We poked around the bowels of the castle for a time but it was so obviously unused that the boys didn’t even bother to check for traps after awhile, which made me nervous but, hey, I’m the rookie and would have been dead 15 times over by now if they hadn’t been watching out for me. I’m not about to tell the holy rollers or the big brute to wait a minute while I look for a trip wire or garroting machine. They’re protected by gods and dumb luck, after all!

We soon came across a kitchen with three massive ovens, their back walls decorated with the grotesque charred shadows of endless victims—like a monochrome painting by Salvator Scream. The faint, nauseating smell of burnt flesh ruined what had been an otherwise perfect day. Yes, it was the smell of my flesh burning!

Daydreaming, I had been caught in the blast that erupted from an oven as a brace of fire elementals entered from the flue. I was singed all over and a bit overmatched in the ensuing fracas. These semi-sentient aspects of fire were able to enter the lungs of their victim, causing a violent hacking and coughing fit that incapacitated their foe, although Finarfin’s battered lungs warded them off with seeming ease as he spat a tremendous green-brown hocker at one of them, disappearing in a puff of stream. Soon the boys had dusted them off and PJ doused me with some kind of healing salve. After a time the pain became merely excruciating.

We got small loot, gold teeth and the like, but someone had obviously beaten us to the best of it. In the next room was a run-down torture chamber, adequate for their purposes I suppose, but I’ve seen better. I thought this castle was supposed to be legendary!

Finarfin poked his head through a window on the far side. Exclaiming with a loud curse that he saw a large courtyard dominated by a gray grim gallows. He said he also saw a well at one end and a stairwell leading up at the other.

What he didn’t say was that he had been observed by a coterie of fat-headed skeleton thingamabobs. They seemed as surprised as we were, only they didn’t have the brains to think about it so they turned as one and charged ferociously, swinging their heavy broadaxes. Well, this is why we brought a barbarian along. I whittled a little off them as they carved a lot off me. I was saved only by the ghost-touch material embedded in the sleeves of my armor.

Afterward, in the alchemy lab next door, we found a caged female halfling. We all expected her to get a rise out of our little guy but Finarfin eyed her indifferently. After some skeptical questioning by our cleric—who proves as cynical as a flesh peddler on Water Street—we called Laori and her pals in to winkle out the truth. Soon the pseudo-halfling melted into its true identity—a nighthag. I thought the residents of Pox Alley were ugly, but in comparison they’re a sunny day on the beach.

She said we had to destroy four spirits chained to another called Mithrodar. The four spirits were known as Castothrane, Nihil, the dragon Belshallam, and one whose name she did not know. She also warned us away from the west wing, which makes me want to go there.

With that we set her free. Unfortunately for her, Laori and her pals decided to escort her out—maybe all the way out. She sputtered noisily as they frogmarched her from the room. Driar sighed as if somehow defeated and I suddenly realized why Bardar, the good, had abandoned us.

We decided to explore the courtyard below. I watched Finarfin rising in the air like a fat red balloon when a shadow crossed him from above. I gasped in horror seeing the floating bulk of a dark umbral-dragon above him, and heard the ominous wafting of its gently flapping wings. It was Belshallam and its blast hit us before I could squeak a warning. Fortunately, I stood a little outside the blast’s cone of destruction and was spared the worst of it.

It had Finarfin pinned in one mighty claw and he cried like a virgin caught in the grip of Ort “Cherrypopper” Magdolore. He sprayed some acid at the thing but it only made the monster angrier. I got in some shots but it busted me down to nothing and the only reason I didn't pass out was by using that little spell of revive you taught me back in grade school.

For the rest of the battle I hid behind the well's wall—well within the cloud of darkness the dragon had conjured. When it died it somehow contrived to fall on top of Finarfin with a thud, nearly taking him to hell with it, but PJ and Driar were able to revive him by packing his orifices with a poultice made of spit, piss, sawdust, and fresh ogre-felch.

Then we retired to a back room with the dragon’s horded wealth and I spent the night sleeping on a pile of gold with jewels for a pillow. Praise Desna, for tomorrow we die!

Love Love Love,
Your Cordobles

Next is Finarfin's Eighteenth Report