into the lion's den

We made our way into the slave pens and once more our scouting turned out to be inadequate. As we engaged the guards a door opened behind us and another half dozen drow appeared.

We managed to beat them down without them raising the alarm, of which I was thankful. Making our way into the slave pen there were some 30 or 40 slaves there that had clearly suffered at the hands of the drow. The others would happily have left them undefended but still chained up but it was clear they would need aid to escape from the underworld and return to Ptolus. We tried to offer them various options but they seemed afraid to try and escape by themselves, or even to stay and defend themselves should any drow happen by. I was left with no option but to stay with them to guide them back to Ptolus, or at least to the dwarven fortress. The others decided that our rescue mission was more important than the welfare of the slaves and while that didn’t upset me in itself, I was disturbed by Janne threatening my life should I attempt to lead the slaves out without giving him an hour headstart to assault the fortress.

Before the hour was up they returned and had the nerve to ask for healing, and then Janne persuaded the slaves that they wouldn’t be safe unless they were escorted out by the whole party. Well, if they were happy to commit themselves to his “care” then I was happy to leave them to it. We armed them with some of the weapons we had captured in our recent battles and left.

During their earlier excursion the others had found some sort of teleportation circle and we sent through a scouting party first and then the rest of us followed soon after.

Our destination was a small room with stairs at one end and a door out from the other end. After making sure it was clear upstairs we moved out of the door and into the corridor. Drawn on the floor was some sort of symbol that we tried but failed to decipher.

I couldn’t see what went wrong from my position at the back of the group but I heard some shouts and once I moved into a position where I could see past the others I saw some dire undead creature. I called upon the glory of the Lightbringer but it was beyond my ability to destroy. Not that we seemed to be doing to badly in combat with it anyway.

But then the side door opened and a drow started casting spells. Fortunately we seemed to resist most of his early efforts so while Deathspank handled the undead creature Janne and Kasaki pushed the drow back into his room.

It sounded like they were doing quite well there as well but then I heard calls of surprise and gathered that the drow had vanished. Sure enough just as the undead fell alarms started sounding in other parts of the tower.

At this stage we still didn’t know whether we were near the top, the bottom, or somewhere else in the tower. In fact we didn’t even know which tower we were in.

It was only then that I realised that Ig was missing and the others told me that he had vanished when he did something to the symbol on the floor. Kasaki cast a spell to locate him and we made our way down a spiral staircase we had found to look for him. At each level there were two drow standing guard and we fought through in the direction that Kasaki said we needed to go. Janne continued down another level to make sure we wouldn’t get any “surprises”.

We opened the door to the room beyond and there was a cage in the middle of the room with an elf who had seen better days. It looked like he had just been left there for people to abuse as they passed by. It limited our attack options as we couldn’t blast the whole room while the drow hiding at the back of the room had no such problem casting spells at us from behind the skilled drow warrior that blocked the door.

Actually, that armour he was wearing looked very familiar. Yes... I had definitely seen it before. It was Janne’s adamantine armour!

As we tried to cut through him the spellcaster behind him screamed and we saw two daggers appear from nowhere and bury themselves in his stomach. Ig had somehow made his way into this room and hidden until an opportune moment presented itself.

It would have been better if he’d managed to kill the drow but he didn’t and instantly he was magically frozen and a sitting duck. Kasaki managed to dodge through the doorway and set himself as a human shield to defend Ig.

I provided support spells to try and keep everyone on their feet while Kasaki finished the spellcaster, Deathspank and Janne handled the warrior, and Damian blocked another doorway through which more drow were trying to make their way into the room and into the battle.

We managed to clear the room and I patched up the obvious damage in our party. Janne stripped his armour from the dead drow and strapped it on and we tried to get some information from the caged elf, but he didn’t really know anything helpful.

We still have no clear idea where to look for Bemmut, and now that the alarm has been sounded we’ll either have to keep moving quickly or withdraw. I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about coming across this drow leader we keep hearing about without the element of surprise, but if we leave now I’m not sure we’ll get back in again so easily.