Dolrim's axe was already in his hand, and he stepped forward, shifting into a battle stance as the red-haired woman shouted out in alarm... and then, a moment later, slumped to the floor as Almandar's spell hit her. Anyone else could be around the corner, perhaps the demon himself, or at least the more competent of his remaining slaves.
"Let's..." began Tarissa, and then her voice cut off as everything went black and the world seemed to spin around them.
"One of you cast a light spell!" grunted the dwarf when, after a few seconds, neither of the magicians had done the obvious.
There was no reply. The spinning had not disoriented him, and he had thought at first that the physically weaker magicians had been affected differently. But no, they were not here, and Dolrim was on his own. He wasn't even sure he was in the same part of the complex. For all that his eyes could adjust easily to the dim light of a dwarven cave system, nobody could see in the complete absence of light.
Unless, perhaps, they were a demon. He froze, straining his ears to catch any hint of what was around him -- although he was blind, Sashjant might not be. He could hear, somewhere in the distance, Tarissa's voice, muffled by walls of the fake stone, its texture just a little too regular to be the real substance, but otherwise similar in its properties. He took a step in the direction of the paladin's voice, but then stopped again as he heard a quiet footfall.
There was somebody else here. Someone behind him. Dolrim span about, whirring his axe through the air at what should be the waist level for a human, finding nothing but empty air.
"You deign to attack me physically? How crude!"
The voice was deep, masculine, and dripping with disdain. This was clearly the demon himself, and Dolrim was blind and alone. Yet, unable to make out any route by which he might escape, his only choice was to fight. Fortunately, Sashjant's voice had clearly given away his location, and the dwarf strode forward, swinging his axe.
The weapon hit something, eliciting no more than a grunt of surprise from his opponent. He could feel it bite into flesh, yet it did not feel right as he jerked it loose for a second swing. Something was not right here, but he did not have time to reflect on what, or even to deliver that second blow, before something slammed into his chest, pushing him backwards a few feet to crash into the wall, his armour clanging against its solid substance.
"I cannot be hurt by mere weapons, you fool!" spat the demon as Dolrim lunged in his direction again.
Something else hit him before he could reach his target, something that wrapped around him, trapping his arm and twisting a leg from under him so that he fell, helplessly to the floor. With shock he realised it was a net, and he struggled to bring the axe to bear against its strands. Yet, every time he moved, the strands of the net pulled tighter... they had to be magical, some kind of weapon he was unfamiliar with.
His left arm was tied to his side now, and his right barely free to move. As he tried to jerk the axe, hoping to cut some of the constricting threads, it pulled sharply against him, jerking his elbow into his body, reducing his leverage. As his legs kicked, the net pulled against them too; the more he exerted his strength, the more it pulled back, fighting against him with its own magical power. He was trapped, helpless.
"Time to end your life, you impertinent worm," sneered Sashjant.
A sickly greenish glow appeared in the air above the captured dwarf, a magical light surrounding a human-looking hand, yet illuminating nothing around it. It was a spell, and surely a deadly one -- if none of his companions arrived in time, Dolrim realised that he was staring death in the face.
"There are others?" hissed the voice, sounding surprised, although not as surprised as the warrior was to discover the demon could apparently read his thoughts. The glow vanished, returning everything to darkness. "Tell me about them!"
Dolrim said nothing, forcing his mind to think of stones and underground passages.
The demon snorted. "I can get around such paltry attempts to hide your knowledge. But not now. I will return for you, little dwarf, but I sense there are others I must deal with first."
Dolrim felt the net jerk around him, although his armour protected him from what he suspected would otherwise be a painful constriction. A moment later he sensed, rather than saw, a flash of red energy engulfing him, his body spasming in response... just before he slid into unconsciousness.
──◊──
The first thing he realised when he began to come round was that he was sitting down on a hard surface, propped up by something pressed against his back. He tried to move his hands, and discovered they were tightly tied behind him. He was not only disarmed, which he had expected, but divested of his armour, too, making him doubly helpless.
He opened his eyes, and shook his head to clear it. He was in a room, lighted, unlike the corridor, tied securely to what felt like a table leg, his ankles also bound together. He wore only his undershirt and his knee-length pants -- they had even taken away his boots.
He glowered angrily at the person sitting in front of him. At least it wasn't Sashjant, but all of the slaves were so thoroughly under his power that he doubted he had any chance of persuading her to free him. He would have to get free himself, or else hope that the other adventurers had had more luck than he.
"I see you are with us again," said the woman, an icy tone in her voice.
She was sitting on a small bed, nothing you would call luxurious, and from what he could see around him, he was in a workshop, with carpentry tools hanging from the wall. The stone of the floor, what he could feel of it beneath his fingertips, was fake, which meant that he was still inside the magical maze. Not that he had expected otherwise.
"Who are you?"
"My name is Geska," she said, "a craftswoman in service to the great lord Sashjant. More importantly, who are you, master dwarf?" He said nothing, not wanting to give away even that much. She snorted, "just like a dwarf, always keeping secrets, even when it doesn't matter."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"I know all about your kin, master dwarf", she said, standing up from the bed and beginning to pace. "I come from the southern lands, not far from one of the mountain homes of your people. I am a craftswoman, I could have learned much from the dwarves. They could have taught my family much, if they had wanted. But no, they all had to keep their secrets, the precious secrets of dwarven smithying."
Her southern ancestry was obvious when he looked. Humans might all be tall and soft, but it was easy enough to tell them apart. Geska's blue eyes and pale skin both marked her homeland out, for such things were rarely seen here in Haredil. She wore a long dress that almost reached her ankles, made of some pale grey fabric. He approved of the cut, with its high collar and long sleeves, a design that did its best to hide her ample bosom, more demure and respectable than seemed to be the norm among humans. A cold native climate probably encouraged that sort of sensible thinking.
By the standards of humans -- which, admittedly, was not saying much -- she was reasonably attractive. Her face was broad, her body not too willowy, and the pure blue of her eyes would have been almost fetching, had she not been glaring at him with such ill-disguised hostility.
"I am not a smith," he said, defensively, "it is not I who has kept those secrets from you." Although, from what she had said, her original home could not be far from his own birthplace, and it could well be his clansmen she was talking about. Dwarves were less numerous than humans; they had to keep their secrets as a matter of practicality, even were it not also a matter of pride, a part of their racial identity.
"Yet here you are, still keeping secrets. My master will read your mind, once he has dealt with your friends. So you might as well tell me now, to save yourself the torment. How did you get in here, where is Mei-Xing, how many of you are there?"
So Sashjant had not read enough to know how many of the adventurers there were. Since Geska was in here, that left three other women in the complex, in addition to Sashjant himself, and one of the women was unconscious. The numbers were even, and, aside from the barbarian, he doubted many of the slaves were very formidable. That gave them the advantage, and it perhaps gave the some of the adventurers the opportunity to escape detection for a while, and strike back at the demon.
It would, of course, help if he could keep Geska talking in here.
"Why should I tell you? I don't see anything in it for me." There; that was better than an outright refusal.
"You're saying you could be bribed? I doubt it, from what I know of your people. Don't think we didn't try, the people from our village. Wealth would not convince you to give up your crafting secrets, I know that much. You probably had too much of your own, with your mines and your unequal trade deals. What else could I bribe you with? I can hardly offer you power, and human things are of little value to the oh-so-skilled dwarves. You aren't interested in magic, you didn't want to trade in knowledge, and when a few women from my village got desperate enough to try offering their bodies, you made it perfectly clear that dwarves don't even talk about such things."
He flinched at the crudity of the last thing she had mentioned. Dwarves most certainly did not talk about such things, and in Dolrim's case, he had a secret shame that he really did not want to think about.
"I can see you don't even want me to talk about that," she said, sneering, "well, tell me, what do you claim to be interested in? Do you just want to live? Are you frightened?" He said nothing, unable to think of a response. "No, you would never admit that. Not a dwarven warrior. You're not frightened of anything. Well, apart from..."
She turned away from him suddenly, a slight smile of realisation on her face, and let out a barking laugh. "Apart from the one thing I mentioned that got a reaction from you," she said, partly to herself, not even looking at him. She turned back to face him, a calculating expression on her face that Dolrim was beginning to find worrying. "I may not be able to offer you much, but perhaps I can threaten you. What worries you, master dwarf?"
She knelt down on the floor, out of reach of his legs, should he have decided to kick her, although, tied up as he was, even that would have been difficult. "No answer? Well, let me tell you: intimacy. Dwarves always dress so heavily, and you, you're normally hidden in your armour. It probably embarrasses you just to be seen half-dressed as you are now."
"What are you going to do?" he asked, a note of real concern beginning to creep into his voice. He could cope with regular threats, but this was something else, something reminiscent of Raylana, a woman he really did not want to remember. At least there was no aphrodisiac this time.
"I'm going to do this," she said, reaching out a hand and sliding it under the hem of his vest.
