2.0.1 - Prologue

The Guild took everything you carried and locked you behind iron. It left you just enough to get out.

The last clear thing was Yennen's coin ringing on the sanctum floor. After it came a hood, hands on your arms, a wet cloth over the mouth and a smell like scorched honey. You held your breath for as long as a body can. Then you woke on cold stone, each in your own cell, in rock that somebody had carved long ago with knotwork and angular letters and that centuries had worn almost flat. An iron door with no handle. A hatch at its foot, shut. It took a while to work out how you had been divided: Gunnar and Brawn in one row with Orgrim and Grukk One-Tusk, Riven and Hanzt in another with Harald and Balder. Sorted by race, or by somebody's best guess at it.

You heard Tarod before you saw him. He dragged Vorgra along the iron doors, Gunnar's own weapon, and banged it into whatever it met so that nobody would be asleep when he started talking. He had something for each of you. For Brawn: "Five years in a cell and you found peace. Let's see if it holds in this one." For Hanzt: "Pathogen. You cut the braid and shaved the beard. You still flinch the same." For Gunnar: "Too much Ork for the Elves, too much Elf for the Orks. We put you with the Orks. Somebody had to guess." He admired the weapon in his hand while he said it. "A bat wrapped in wire. They raised you well." For Riven: "Fine bow. Tyr's work, I am told. It will fetch more than you ever would have."

Yennen came with him, once to each row, and he had not come to gloat. He begged. He apologised and then asked again: give up Hammerfall, let the Guild have it, please. He still would not say who had sent him. Harald and Balder heard him out and gave him no answer he could carry back. When he had gone, Balder told the boy what he thought. Let the city go. Come home to Yorvik, where Balder could keep him safe until he was older.

The other row gave him less. Orgrim called Yennen a snake and a coward and said he regretted ever letting him sit beside him on the Pact. Neither Ork wanted Hammerfall for its own sake. They would not be seen handing it over.

"Yoooou picked a poor place to beg, little man."

Grukk One-Tusk

Then there were the doors. Gunnar had woken in the pitch dark with his tongue swollen and no voice. Under the mouldy hay in the corner of his cell he found a mouse hole, and as a rat he went through it into the cell next door. Nobody was held there. Its iron door had melted shut in the frame, and a skeleton lay against the back wall with a cracked mirror in its left hand and soot burned around it like a shadow. A hole an inch wide looked through into Brawn's cell. Too small for a rat. Wide enough to see through, and for Gunnar and his own mirror, seeing a place was enough. On the far side Brawn had found that his door had been altered, a fitted plate across the top held by two diamond-shaped bolts. His chain hand closed around them like a spanner. With the plate off there was a gap above the door, a few fingers high. A rat's worth.

In the other row the Guild had left Hanzt drugs. He put them to work, with sulphur and coal residue scraped from Riven's cell and passed through the holes in the wall, the oil from his own unlit torch, and straw and cloth from the bed for a fuse. Riven's door carried a weld where it had once been repaired, which marked it as the weak one. The charge went back through the wall to him. His amulet swallowed the noise. Then Eirunn went through what was left of the door.

When both rows were out, Yennen told you of a secret way. Your gear was stashed for you, he said, at a place where the tunnels widen and a company can rest. He would meet you there. He sent you into the dark in two groups, by separate ways.

Remember For Next Time

• Tarod: He is the Guild's, he knows each of you, and he enjoyed himself. He was carrying Vorgra.
• Hammerfall: The Guild wants it given up. Harald has not agreed. Orgrim and Grukk refused to Yennen's face.
• Balder: He wants Harald to let the city go and return to Yorvik.
• Yennen: Sorry, begging, and now showing you the way out. He has not said who sent him.
• Your gear: Promised, and waiting where the tunnels widen.

Where We Are

In the tunnels, in two groups that have not yet found each other, walking toward a place where the passage widens. Yennen said he would be there.