Underkeeper

Bernt closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. On the page in front of him was a vastly simplified spellform that he’d cobbled together from examining Jori’s blood. The first thing Pollock had tasked him with was choosing the best base for his new hellfire-based derivative spell.

At first, Bernt had assumed that the pure hellfire would work best – it was a rawer form, less complicated. But, as it turned out, Jori’s blood had a few important advantages. While it was essentially also hellfire, it had aspects of blood magic. It was designed to course through demonic veins, to nourish their bodies, and to heal them. None of that directly addressed his own problem, but it was conceptually a lot closer to what he needed.

Now, he’d stripped out all of the bits of the spellform that he didn’t strictly need – not least all the bits that made it a real, physical material. That left him with a non-functioning scaffold of a spell that he needed to reconfigure quite a bit just to make it able to activate at all. Theoretically, this would already be way less dangerous than proper hellfire, but it would be much too chaotic for his purposes and too difficult to contain. He needed a gentle, steady flame that eroded the spirit in a smooth and predictable manner, like hot tea poured over a lump of sugar. Just… maybe a little slower than that.

“Alright,” Pollock’s voice sounded from behind him. “That’s enough for today. You can come back tomorrow to mess around with it some more. I expect this will take a few days, weeks if you're slow. I don’t mind if you come in here in the evenings, just don’t touch any of my things. And don’t try to do any tests or cast that spellform until you’ve shown it to me. You can do a lot worse than just burning your eyebrows off with something like this if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at.”

The old man looked over to where Jori was curled up on his discarded cloak, sound asleep.

“The spellforms can stay up, so you don’t need to bring the little imp with you next time. Poor thing was bored out of her mind. We’re lucky she didn’t try to burn down my lab…” he looked around at the heaps of papers and books that presumably contained his life's work. “Not that she could, of course.”

Bernt nodded, exhausted. It was getting very late, and the old man was a slave-driver. He was almost surprised to hear that he’d be allowed to work on this alone here. After tonight, Bernt worried that the old man would be looking over his shoulder the entire time.

Picking up Jori’s sleeping form, he thanked the old pyromancer one more time and made his way out of the building, toward the Undercity and bed.

–-------

Jori grudgingly waved her interns off and watched them scurry away, further into the building to meet Fiora. Since the duergar had started regularly attacking the walls, they hadn’t been allowed to work up on the surface. Instead, the humans let them run around at headquarters, fetching things and doing boring chores indoors.

One of the underkeepers from the surface brought them down every morning now, stopping by the orphanage on their way to work, but Gnugg still dutifully reported to Jori each shift, as he should!

Farrin had tried to stop the children from working at all considering the larger situation, but Gnugg had insisted on doing his duty and she didn’t really have the right to stop him. He was a proper kobold and a good minion!

Still, she couldn’t bring them. She was going on patrol today with Josie. Ed liked to place her with the warlock, saying it made people more comfortable to see her in the company of a solicitor every once in a while. It was a reminder to them that she wasn’t just a random demon running loose in the streets.

And it was a reminder to Jori, though he didn’t say that part out loud.

She made her way to the breakroom, where Josie was already waiting with Lin. The matronly goblin was showing her some kind of dried herb, which she apparently found very interesting considering the way she was looking at it. The imp waved to them.

Jori didn’t need a minder, and she didn’t want one. The warlock had seemed very suspicious of her at first, but she’d relaxed quite a bit since then. That was good, since they probably wouldn’t get along very well otherwise. Jori thought it helped that the other underkeepers, but especially the goblins, didn’t seem to have the same kind of inherent wariness of her that everyone else had. It was nice.

As it was, though, Josie still spent a lot of time drilling her with questions about the hells whenever they were alone. Jori didn’t like talking about the place. Bernt knew that – he could feel it through their bond. And so he didn’t ask. Josie didn’t have those kinds of inhibitions, and Jori was pretty sure that she wouldn’t let something like her discomfort deter her. The warlock was hungry for knowledge the same way that Jori thirsted for the water of life. Unfortunately, she didn’t really have the kind of information the warlock was looking for. The life of a spawnling imp was brutal and usually short. It didn’t include an education in how anything worked, beyond her basic instincts. Besides, she hadn’t really been that smart at the time.

“Dhzori.” Lin said in her rough goblin accent – a testament to the fact that she hadn’t grown up anywhere near humans. “Good morning! I see you have a nice new clothings!”

Jori nodded proudly, patting her new sleeveless robes. “Yes! Grixit did it, he made it fireproof! Mostly, anyway.” She’d managed to singe it a little bit at one of the seams when she tested it. But still, it was a lot better than her old robes.

“Grixit did, did he?” Lin scoffed with a wry smile. “Old liar, is that man – likes money too much. He brought that to me last week. I used sap from the old cinder trees, down in the south. You should put it on everything – dark, burning spirit like you. Mix it with wood or mineral ether to thin it a little. You can do it without help.”

Jori’s ears pricked up with interest. She didn’t really have any other clothes to treat, and she was sure that it wouldn’t be cheap, but it would certainly be better than getting everything from Grixit. Josie was intrigued as well.

“What does that cost?” she asked, “I’ve never even heard of this, and we deal with hellfire all the time. I had no idea there were natural materials with any resistance to it.”

Lin shrugged. “Some silver marks for a little bottle. It isn’t bad, the price. But there is not much to buy. Cinder trees have to be old to give good sap, and they are hard to find. Illurian humans take the wood to make boats.” She scowled, flicking her fingers in a dismissive gesture. “Stupid humans.”

Josie coughed and sipped her tea.

–--------

“Come on!” Josie called, taking a turn off of their patrol route to follow the force of underkeepers that were rushing down the path. It was the current interception team on duty, led by Dayle, and they were moving quickly.

Jori didn’t need to be told twice. Despite having been on interception duty herself more than once, she hadn’t gotten to fight even once since that odd duergar patrol had snuck into the tunnels, and that was forever ago.

Racing out ahead of the warlock, she rounded the bend to find Dayle organizing his people around a point in the tunnel wall. Ten guards, Nirlig among them, were organized in a loose half-circle around the mage, who stood directly against the wall. Inside the half-circle with him were two goblins. Lin, who was smearing some kind of reddish-brown sludge onto the floor in a smaller, concentric half-circle of odd-looking symbols, and a druid named Rindle.

The druid was watching Dayle, who slammed the small shovel that he used as his focus down into the ground with a loud crack, causing deep fissures to radiate out from the point of impact. Without a moment’s hesitation, the druid reached into a small pouch that hung at his belt and tossed little grains down into the cracks – seeds of some kind, probably.

Josie caught up behind Jori, but she stopped when she saw what they were doing, probably coming to the same conclusion as Jori herself. Stepping in now would only slow them down. They could provide support when they broke through – everything would go crazy then anyway.

“Alright, everybody, just like we done practiced.” Dayle drawled calmly. “Don’t none of you get cooked, now. You hear?” He looked all around. “All right. Here we go.”

Setting the tip of his trenching shovel against the stone wall, Dayle furrowed his brow for a few seconds, then he traced it over the stone in a pattern that only he could see. A hollow thump sounded against the wall, immediately followed by a muffled cracking noise.

On their side, it looked like nothing had happened, but Dayle backed off, nodding to the druid. Go on, there’s still movement in there.“

Stepping back into the line with the others, the druid took a deep breath and chanted under his breath, repeating the same phrase over and over. Jori didn’t know how druids worked, but all of their magic seemed to take much too long to be useful in a fight.

Something green was just starting to wriggle out of the fissures when the stone wall cracked. Then there was a loud crunch and rocks blasted out toward the underkeepers, only to bounce off of a force shield that Dayle had raised in time to protect his team. Jori flinched as something else ran into it and the spell failed. The entire thing lit up in a half dome for a split second, then it was gone.

A large duergar, not as big as Furin, but still too big for a normal dwarf, advanced on the group with a shout, swinging a heavy axe. Blood streamed from open cuts on his face, and Jori could see little bits of stone embedded in his skin. He didn’t seem seriously injured, though.

Nothing happened when he stepped over Lin’s odd circle of symbols, but the little plants that were still working their way out of the cracks beneath his feet proved to be a bit more effective. Thorny vines curled up and were caught on the dwarf’s boots, growing further in even as he tried to dislodge them. He tore some out, only to find himself ensnared in a fresh batch of slightly more mature plants with each step.

It didn’t look like a lethal attack, or even one that was very painful, but Jori could see that it was very distracting. Enraged, the dwarf looked down and kicked, trying to free his feet. At the same time, the closest underkeeper guards stabbed at him with their spears, making sure to stay back and out of the dwarf’s range.

It would have worked with an ordinary dwarf. This one, though, wasn’t – he’d obviously been enhanced somehow. Some of the attacks landed, slipping through gaps in his armor, but they didn’t penetrate. He bled a little, and was clearly in pain, but it would take hours to kill him like this.

Dayle had almost finished casting another spell when sulfurous fire shot out of the breach in the wall. The mage ducked, and Jori wasn’t sure if he’d managed to cast his spell or not.

She rushed forward, cursing herself for waiting, only to find that the situation was still under control after all. The flaming projectile bent in the air, circling like water down a drain to strike the odd circle of symbols that Lin had painted on the ground earlier. The runes lit up, and the entire sludgy mass vaporized into fine black ash.

So. Not something that would work twice.

Dayle threw his shovel into the hole overhand, cursing loudly as it went spinning in at unnatural speed to strike whatever had cast the fire out at them.

More flames gushed from the hole, but this wasn’t a directed attack. Hot air blasted down the tunnel, and most of the guards took a step back, turning their faces away from the heat instinctively. The overly durable duergar stumbled forward a step, nearly falling on his face as the thorny vines holding him suddenly shriveled away.

Hissing in rage and pain, a demon scrambled out of the hole behind the dwarf, barely taller than a gnome, but still a bit larger than Jori herself and with one wing torn clean off his frame, fire still gushing from the wound.

Now. Jori decided. Now they needed her help.

As Josie let out a disturbing, soul-withering scream next to her, Jori launched herself at the enemy imp.