From: riana@acca.nmsu.edu (Riana)
Subject: Story
Summary: bastan gets killed cause silver screws up,
Keywords: fantasy steampunk
Organization: New Mexico State University
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 08:30:52 GMT

	It was a small tavern that stood beneath Kingsbridge off Miric Street,
just ten feet from the edge of Dennesey Chasm, the main trade route of 
Shoridda.  There was a dim sign filling most of the window, traced in Lichten,
a flourescent paint made from certain fungi, that identified it as the Smoke-
hole.  From the clouds of blue smoke within that obscured the patrons and 
residents from view, one could see honesty, if nothing else, in its name.
	At a back booth, behind an ogkren table trimmed in black steel that
had long since turned to mostly brown rust, sat two thin figures in heated 
discussion.  Bastan, the red skinned one, looked up as the barmaid walked past,
calling in his whispery voice for another round of seriz.  The firelight and
its filter of azure haze cast odd, eerie sparkles off his smooth skin and green
leathers, and glinted off the two small horns that protruded from his head.
	The other figure was more obscure and she liked it that way.  Silver 
was quite at home in obscurity and smart enough to recognize the benefit that
went along with it.  She was human, and her hair had prematurely gone the color
of her name.  She sipped slowly at her mug of seriz, the pungent flavor of
distilled fire mushrooms flowing across her palate.  The light caught her eyes
and Bastan looked back at the two gleams of firelight in the shadows.
	"In case you haven't noticed," Silver continued from where she had left
off before the appearance of the waitress, "I am not concerned with the risks
involved.  I am quite happy with the idea of dying for my reasons.  It is a lot
better than dying without ever having had any."
	She sat there a minute, the fire in her eyes, and Bastan thought it 
looked quite appropriate.  As she leaned back into the darkness again, he shook
his head, the long thin mane of white hair quaking.  "I want you to understand,
I am not trying to mongutshit you into this, and I just want you to know ex-
actly what you are getting yourself into.  You have the job if you want it, but
I disclaim any responsibility.  I also want you to know that if you get caught,
and they make you squeal, you will look like a fool for using my employers name
since as far as they know, he is clean and clear."
	Smiling grimly, Silver chuckled.  "They have no way of making me 
squeal," she said softly.
	"We'll see.  Tomorrow night," replied Bastan.
	"I'll be there," she whispered as she slid out of the booth. He barely
had time to acknowledge her departure before she was gone, a grey cloaked face
in the crowd.
	"I'll admit, she's good, I can see that," he murmered to himself.  "I 
just pray she's as good under pressure." Bastan downed the rest of his seriz
and called for another round.

	Jostle was the type of guy that always seemed on edge, but whether he
was about to pounce or have a nervous breakdown was never something anyone
chanced deciding.  Most agreed that there would be little difference.  Just
under five feet tall, the dwarf was one of the most experienced beastwalkers
in the business, and, as he would tell anyone who was stupid enough to ask, the
best.  Whoever you asked, he never got a bad reference as far as his skills
went.
	He sat upright on the far-walker as the horselike reptile trotted into
the shadows of a back alley.  This side of town was as far as you could get
from the Guildhalls and still be in Centraltown Shoridda.  This meant that you were
either well-armed and practiced, or dead.  Jostle weighed the value of wasting
a shot, and decided for it.  He leveled the barrel of his pistol at the corner
and fired.  There was a squeal and he walked the thonallat over to the wall, 
squinting down at the dead sohn-qui curled there.
	From the eyes of the thonallat he saw a silhouette walking towards the
alleyway, and he wheeled the beast around to face the intruder.
	As the silhouette got closer and there was less steam between him and
it, he made out the shape of a woman.  From the glint of the hair, he could 
tell it was silver, but from the figure it was definitely no old crone walking
his way.  She must've been human, as she was taller than a dwarf, smaller than
a giant, and there were no telltale earpoints that would mark her as either an
elf or a demon.  "Ho, is that one Jostle?" she called out.
	"What if I'm not?" rang Jostle's voice.
	"I suppose I would have to kill you, then, for being a fool and lurking
in the darkest of shadows," she called back.
	"Aye, but since I am Jostle, 'tis only `lurkin' in the shadows what
suits me, right?"  Jostle grinned.
	"There are others who live here as comfortably," she said, and as she
did so saw him level his pistol.  She recalled the question Bastan had given
her to use as a signal the day before, and quickly recited, "Where does the
fire-bat lurk?"
	Jostle cocked his head to one side and raised an eyebrow. "In the Gran'
Lord of the Stonecutter's guild's beard, 'e does," he answered, as per the
arrangement.
	Silver grinned and tossed back her hair.  "It's just as well, then.
He needs one to kill the lice!" she laughed.  Jostle lowered the pistol and
let loose with a madman's grin of his own.  He knelt the far-walker and clam-
bered off.  
	"Welcome to the troupe, then.  I reckon you be Silver?" he asked.
	Silver just shook her tresses.
	"Can't figure you'd be anyone else.  Hope you're as good as Bastan
be sayin' you thinks you is."  His grin faded.  "He ain't here yet, you know."
	"I know.  He told me at the Smokehole last latehours he'd be here a bit
late," she said.
	Jostle just shook his head.  His bristly beard quivered.

	About an hour went by before Bastan showed up.  He arrived in black
leather breeches and a smooth midnight blue shirt, atop a thonallat of his own,
this one a deep ultramarine and a bit smaller than Jostle's.
	He greeted them in kind, and his soft whispers echoed off the alley 
walls.  He explained the situation quickly, his breath white in the fog, and
the other two nodded as he spoke.  They were to enter the Guild of Johag and 
destroy plans there for some device that used a liquid similar to shatterstone
to bore more quickly than any worker of the races could.  If this device was
released for use, there could be severe repercussions on the revolution since
that guild would then make great strides against the others, and if it suceeded
in controlling the area, it would then take strides against the revolutionar-
ies.  No one on the streets wanted that, and although the successful creation
of such a device would be a great step of progress, it would only empower
those who could afford it.  The only ones who could afford it were in charge
of the guilds.  Silver had wondered why they couldn't steal it, and Bastan
had merely explained that there was no guarantee they would make it out alive.
With the three of them dead and the design back in Johag hands, there was no
gain.  If they got in and destroyed it, there was one.  It was supposedly much
easier to get in than out.
	"So it's just us?" Silver asked, worried.
	"No, there's a dreamer working with us, too.  He'll not be around until
we get inside, and I don't know how often then, but it's better than nothing,"
replied Bastan.
	Jostle sighed.  He never liked the idea of needing a dreamer, though,
in fact, his talents were not all that different.  A one foot diameter sphere
of solid crystal rested in his backpack that was identical to the spheres the
dreamers used to enter the EarthDream.  Perhaps it was the fact that he was a
dwarf, uninterested in worlds of light, but he had never tried to learn the
Dreamtongue, the ancient speech of the DreamStones necessary to enter the
EarthDream.  Besides, he had a certain affinity for animals, and that helped a
lot in the empathic connection necessary to walk a beast.
	Silver mounted the far-walker behind Jostle.  He rose the creature, and
the three of them started off towards the chasm.

	There was a nearly a problem as they reached Dragonsbridge, one of the
least used bridges on the Dennesey Chasm, when they were stopped by a guard 
patrol.  Silver proved her worth right then, as she sang a song of forgetful-
ness and the two guards suddenly looked up as if lost.  One looked at the other
and asked what he had been about to do.  The second, a giant, replied that he
had no idea, and the two of them wandered off to question someone else.
	Another ten minutes of riding brought them to the Guilders Hall they
sought, and they found a quiet alley in which to chain their beasts.

	Jostle opened his backpack and reached inside.  The dreamstone within
it glowed brighter for a second, and then faded once again to its dull throb.
	A second later a small white ferret climbed out, up Jostle's arm, and
onto the gruff dwarf's shoulder.  Upon the riding leathers, it looked like it
nearly glowed itself, and in fact there was a faint light coming from a pendant
around the animal's neck.  Silver noticed that a similar pendant around the
neck of the far-walker had stopped glowing, and she remembered that she had
heard that beastwalkers needed such amulets to control their pets.
	Jostle sat down, and the ferret crawled back off onto the cobblestones.
It looked up at her and said, in a squeaking, high-pitched voice, "Lets do it."
	The ferret took the lead, and they made their way into a steam duct
that Ferret-Jostle brought them to.  The grating had rusted away and the pieces
that had remained fell away with only a slight jerk.  Bastan whispered back to
her, "It's gonna be hot.  You okay?"
	Nodding in assurance, Silver nudged him forward.  The two of them were
crawling on their hands and knees as they made their way up the slick metal
shaft led by the ferret which housed Jostle's consciousness.  The steam began 
to get warmer as they went, and soon the metal plating on the floors and walls
vanished, leaving them with only increasingly warmer stone to travel.  After 
about ten feet of stone they all heard a voice whisper in the air ahead of 
them, as if from the rock walls themselves, "You are almost at the end, but be
careful, there are a few workers in the room beyond, closing up the night's
work, I think."
	Silver assumed this was the dreamer Bastan had mentioned, and she 
nudged the demon for affirmation.  Bastan nodded.
	Ferret-Jostle sped ahead to check on the boiler room this shaft led to.
Outside of the grate stood a female demon and a human male.  The demoness was
yelling at the human, as he complacently mopped, apparently for taking so long 
to close up shop.  He ran back to the others and squeaked for them to slow 
down.  The voice of the ferret echoed on the walls and he rushed forward to
check again.  As he rounded the corner that brought him to the grate, he stop-
ped cold.  Outside the grate stood the demoness, squinting in at him.
	He stood there, and she tilted her head to one side while examining
him.  He merely stood frozen.  A voice came from behind her, "What is it?"
	"The skinniest rat I've ever seen," she replied.  Jostle felt a rush of 
indigancy from the ferret's mind as she turned away.  She shoved the human.
	"You done?" she said, examining the mop job.
	He stood looking stupid.  "Yeah, you're done," she said as she led him
to the door.  "Close enough for guild work at least." 
	Ferret-Jostle watched as the two left the room, and scampered back to
tell the others.

	Bastan rounded the bend with Silver close behind, following the ferret.
He looked out into the boiler room that was both an industrialist's dream and
a magician's nightmare.  For him it was neither.  He was just a burglar.
	They got the grate open with little difficulty, as Silver sang a song
of opening, and they clambered out into the dark, steamy room.  The voice of
Dawkins, their dreamer, whispered from the walls, "The room you are going to is
close by, but up one flight of stairs.  I see no guards on the stairs, but the
room is crystal free."  Bastan knew this meant that the dreamer had no way of 
seeing in the room, and nodded.

	In the EarthDream, Dawkins stood in a small grove of the figures the
dreamstones called "trees".  Before him was a series of windows into the real
world.  He whispered a few words in KoKhorn, the language of the 'stones, and
the view in one of them shifted to a hallway with a spiral staircase.  Again he 
spoke one word of Dreamtongue and then said, "There are no guards in the
adjoining hallway, either.  Go ahead."
	"Which way after I get to the top of the stairs?" Bastan's voice asked,
"In case we have to run."
	"The room is right above you.  A little to the left, and through the 
door you find.  It has lead and warding stones around the outside."
	Bastan, in the window, nodded.
	Dawkins' dreamstone sent him a thought.  There were beings nearby.  
They were well masked and the stone could not tell if they were dreamers or
dreamwraiths.  If they were dreamwraiths, Dawkins decided, he could handle
them.  If they were other dreamers, however, he had no idea if he could best
them or not.  The workday in the guildhall was over and Dawkins was afraid they
might be dreamers coming to watch over the hall through these very windows.
	He began to pull back, slowly, and saw them walking across the sunlit
fields of the EarthDream, down a thought-path.  He cursed as he saw that, with
the smoothness thay moved, they were probably experienced dreamers or very 
powerful wraiths.  He did not want to deal with either one right now.

	Silver and Bastan reached the top of the stairs and Silver set down
the Jostle-ferret, whom she had been carrying up the steps.
	Jostle ran ahead to the indicated door and cursed squeakily as he no-
ticed how well sealed it was.  He could not reconnoiteur the room.  Bastan
moved forward and turned the ornate handle that was part of the room's wards.
He added to Jostle's curse as he realized that the door was locked, but he had
actually been expecting that.  He dropped to one knee and pulled out a long
L-shaped piece of metal.  Letting his forked tongue hang out, he began to pick
the lock.
	He had it open in less than a minute, and he opened the door to reveal
a room filled with cabinets and centered by a heavy desk of a dark reddish
hardened Quabbaz, one of the many types of giant mushrooms that grew in the 
wilder parts of the deep earth.  Atop it was a large sheet of paper with a com-
plex design.  Bastan remembered the description he had gotten, and destroyed
the papers.  He then began to systematically burn all the papers he could find
that weren't obviously unrelated to the work that was now ashes on the table,
and he began to hope that the smell of burning coal and woodsmoke was strong
enough on this level to disguise the smell of the burning papers.
	A voice echoed from the walls, but it was not Dawkins'.  "Stop and wait
outside the room.  The guards will be with you in a moment," the voice echoed,
and Bastan let loose a curse that made all his prior vulgarity seem like pillow
talk.  He looked at Silver, his anticipations concerning her specialty appar-
ent.
	"I hope so," she agreed.

	Dawkins did some excessive cursing of his own as he hid in the space
just outside the grove.  His dreamstone had him masked, but if he attacked they
would see him quite clearly and he could very well be lizardmeat.
	He shook his head and began to speak quietly in the tongue of Dreams.
Only his dreamstone heard him, and it began to create the attack sequence he
commanded.  As he gestured, he glided into the grove and a thousand spiders
crawled alongside him.  The dreamers looked with obvious confusion, as they
had apparently not expected the intruders to have a dreamer running blunderbuss
for them.  One began to speak in the Dreamtongue and a huge frog burst into 
existence.  The other two merely looked on in confusion.  He reached forward
and passed his hand through one of them, as he directed all the spiders to
amass upon the one which had spoken KhoKhorn.  He had guessed by their inaction
that the two others were merely dreamriders, who did not know the dreamtongue
and could only appear in the EarthDream as shadows, observing but not control-
ling.  The one the spiders were attacking looked back at one of the riders and
barked, "Go get the guards out there, fool."  After a moments confusion, one
of the riders vanished.
	"Batshit!" screamed Dawkins, and then smirked with satisfaction as the
enemy dreamer screamed.  The spiders could be deadly if they attacked right
and the dreamer battled them long enough, but Dawkins' smirk vanished as he saw
the other dreamer vanish into the distance, pulling back early enough to sur-
vive.  He saw his satisfaction vanish.  The elven dreamer had won.  He noticed
that the other dreamrider had not left, and he spoke some more in the Dream-
tongue.  The rider's eyes grew wide and his hands began to spark.  Abruptly,
he vanished.  Dawkins knew he had experienced exactly that same thing back in
the real world, and would be rubbing his hands gingerly for a few days to fol-
low.
	He looked into the windows and saw that his companions were already in 
the steam shaft, and that five burly guards were in the hallway.  The guards 
looked in and the largest, a giant, directed half the rest to circle around to
the alley where the shaft came out.  His mind reeled -- Jostle was out there!
Suddenly he noticed that the ferret-Jostle was not in the shaft.  he searched
for the rodent, and found it in a corner.
	He whispered near the ferret, "What happened?"
	"I told them to leave me," the ferret said quietly.  "This one has
rabies and will be dead in a few days anyway."
	
	Jostle ran over to the giantish leader and bit him firmly on the leg.
The giant looked down annoyedly and picked up the ferret.  The formerly calm
ferrret began to writhe and twist wildly, biting the giant repeatedly on the
hands.
	Jostle opened his eyes and raised the pistol.  He had pulled out a 
split second before the giant had snapped the ferret in half.  He felt momen-
tarily bad, but he knew that the rodent would have died soon, and it had the 
satisfaction of taking an obnoxious brute with it.  He almost chuckled as he
thought about the leader not even knowing, but the three giants rounded the
corner to the alley just then and he had to concentrate on shooting and re-
loading.
	As the first guard dropped, Silver dropped nearly headfirst out of the
shaft.  Bastan appeared behind her and exited the rusted grate much more grace-
fully.
	As she dropped to the ground, Silver had already begun a song.  The
sound of the lullaby filled the alley, focused on the second guard.  He started
to drop, but caught himself.  She increased the power of the spell, and saw him
fall to the cobblestones, fast asleep.  She suddenly felt something wrong and
began to look frantically around for Bastan.  The haze of the magic had left 
her confused for a second, but she finally saw him, being bashed against a wall
by the third guard.  Bastan was not moving.
	Jostle cursed repeatedly as he fired a third shot into the back of the
third guard.  Suddenly, the guard wrenched backwards and dropped, a pool of
blood leaking out from the huge human's back.
	Silver began to frantically sing a spell of healing, but Jostle felt
Bastan's neck and stopped her.  "The humors ain't flowin' no more.  'E's dead,"
he said.
	Silver began to shake her head frantically.  "What happened?" she 
screamed, beginning to cry.
	"I dunno," Jostle said, "he fell over about the same time as the other
fella."  Jostle walked over and planted a bullet in the sleeping guard's head.
	"It's my fault," Silver began to repeat, crying, "I put him to sleep."
	Jostle picked her up, amazingly strong for one so small, and put her on
the kneeling far-walker.  He climbed in front of her.  "Maybe ya did, lass,"
he said quietly, "But then maybe ya saved us all."
	Silver fell asleep behind him as they rode away.



Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd