Page 34

Tenser pondered the question.  "And for what?"

He had walked all day and his feet hurt.  He was almost killed by giant centipedes and an ogre.  He had murdered five sleeping kobolds.  He hurt his back hauling a treasure chest up a flight of stairs.  He looked again at his hands.  His blood-stained hands.

And he realized, despite all those negatives, that he had never felt so alive.  So adventurous.  So free.  And, if he could, he would do it all again tomorrow.

Click to enlarge, or view here.

 

Page 33

Transporting a heavy chest full of coins up a tall flight of stairs was no picnic, even after Ehlissa offered to stuff her purse with coins to lighten the load.  Yrag kept urging them on, wishing for the relative safety of the surface world before he could take his time to search for false bottoms on the chest. 

Once they reached the top of the stairs and the ruined keep, Tenser watched intently as Yrag tipped over the chest and began tapping on the bottom.  He reached inside and shoveled out the coins with his hand so he could get to the bottom from the inside.  He tapped on the inside bottom and then all around the sides of the chest.  He slid his fist down to the bottom of the top-facing side, pulled down, and punched upward to see if he could make the wood perceptively buckle and judge how close to the bottom of the chest it was.

Frustrated by his lack of findings, Yrag glanced up at Tenser.  "Do they teach you anything about searching chests in wizard school?" Yrag asked with irritation in his voice.

"I must have missed that day," Tenser answered flatly.

Yrag grumbled and continued searching.

Click on image to enlarge or view here.

Page 32

Tenser was still fishing his hands through the copper pieces.  Yrag glanced down bitterly at his dented shield and wondered if all that copper would even be enough to pay for having the dent banged out.  But he remembered his first kill in a dungeon and his first taste of loot and could not begrudge Tenser his excitement at having won this prize, as slight as it was.  And Yrag still hoped to find more hidden in the chest, mixed in with all that copper. 

"Right," Yrag said at last.  He guessed they had been resting about 10 minutes since the battle and there was at least a 1 in 6 chance of something showing up soon to give them trouble again.  "Close up that chest.  We'll take the whole thing with us, topside..."

Click here to enlarge or view here.

Page 31

That Tenser had mistaken this area behind the curtain for a room had only confirmed for Yrag that Tenser was not yet accustomed to 10-foot wide dungeon corridors.  Why so many dungeon corridors were exactly 10-feet wide Yrag could not guess nor would he ever bother to do so.  He didn't care.  Treatises on the subject sat on dusty shelves in the Library of Greyhawk, written by learned sages and prominent wizards.  Most of them had been driven mad by their own questions, though, so maybe Yrag was better off for not caring anyway.

Click to enlarge, or view here.

Page 30

Ehlissa felt warm and not just because she was holding a lit torch and standing next to an ogre's burning loincloth.  Her cheeks were flush with anger from having seen the monster threaten Tenser.  Only once the monster bolted from the melee did Ehlissa realize she had to breath and that she had not breathed since before shouting at the ogre. 

Tenser adjusted his skullcap back into place.  The ogre had knocked him off-balance, but not off his feet as it had to Yrag. 

For both of them, it was a relief to see the backside of the monster as it fled.

Click to enlarge or view here.

Page 29

Yrag remained on the floor with the wind knocked out of him.  He could see that the situation was turning dire and Tenser looked to be the Eiger's next target.  An awful feeling welled up inside Yrag as the thought struck him that Tenser would be dead on the floor before Yrag could make it back up to his feet.

Click to enlarge or view here.

Page 28

The Kelbit warriors, referred to by Yrag and Tenser by their common name of "kobolds", hung back and let the Eiger living among them move forward.  Even the Kelbit used the derisive term of "ogre" for their foul, vicious, and powerful companion.  They hated it with a passion, for it bullied them constantly, but its strength was without peer on this level of the dungeon and made their clan strong by association.  Should the human intruders kill it, they would not mourn the ogre, even though its passing would leave them vulnerable.

Yrag, Tenser, and Ehlissa were lucky that the ogre felt so confident that it had strode out into the room to meet them halway instead of waiting in a doorway where it could not be flanked.  The torches worried it just a little, but the ogre planned to get rid of those nuisances just as soon as it had dealt with the swordsman...

Click to enlarge or view it here.