3.3 Interrogation

Iriala tossed her notes down on her small writing desk in disgust and paced around the cell, watching her prisoner. She’d interviewed the Duergar abjurer twice more since the first time, and the picture that had emerged was as bleak as it was bizarre.

“So, once again, from the beginning. Tell me if I’ve got this right,” she began, her interpreter repeating the words in Duergar as she spoke in a now well-practiced routine. “Your king, Grundrik, housed a powerful demon, Nuros, in the body of his son in exchange for power. Deciding that wasn’t enough, he has since fed the demon all the souls he could get his hands on. And when he ran out of soft targets down below, he decided to head toward the surface next.” She waited for Enki to finish and the Duergar mage to nod before continuing. “Alright. And you knew that he was also feeding it the souls of your people. Everybody knew.”

Another nod.

“And they’re… fine with it?”

As Enki translated, the Duergar, whose name was Yirik, frowned and then shrugged. “Every day, a stone falls from above.”

Iriala blinked at the bizarre idiom and looked over to Enki, prompting the dwarf to translate. She understood a lot of Duergar words—but that didn’t mean she understood what the hells they were saying.

“It means something like ‘that’s life’. Bad things are expected. It’s not that nobody cares, it’s more that nobody expects anything better. Duergar are very fatalistic. They probably have good reason to be, all things considered. I can’t imagine that someone like this Grundrik rules with a light touch.”  

That was an understatement if Iriala had every heard one. But they were getting off track. Yirik was lying to her. He’d explicitly said, and just confirmed again, that his king Grundrik was looking for soft targets. A surface city might technically qualify, considering how difficult it was to adequately protect a population from subterranean threats. But she knew the Duergar hadn’t come looking for Halfbridge. They’d met inside the kobold warren, and both parties had been trying to bring down Conperion’s lair – targets didn’t get any less soft than that. 

Now that she thought about it, the wily old lizard had gotten away clean and effectively dumped this problem in their laps!

Iriala paced around the stoic Duergar, considering what she’d learned. Why lie? Why lie about this?

“He’s trying to hide what he’s doing with the demons,” she concluded out loud. “At least for a little while. It’s not about soft targets, it’s about discretion!”

Enki looked at her with a puzzled expression and opened her mouth to translate for the prisoner, but Iriala waved at her to stop. “He said that Grundrik only rules a small part of the Duergar Empire. Think about it. Why fight a war against a dragon and his inexhaustible horde of kobolds and then try to destroy the first cities you find when you reach the surface? It’s stupid. The Duergar have never attempted to seize surface territory before – we weren’t a threat to them, and they don’t even like it here.”

Even as she said it, she realized how true it was. The Duergar prisoners who’d been tasked with rebuilding the Crafters’ District had terrible sunburns on every inch of exposed skin, despite the gloomy winter weather. A few had even started to suffer temporary loss of vision. It was so bad that the magistrate had begun exclusively working them at night after a few days.

“They must have plenty of enemies in the Depths that they could target instead of us. It would be like orcs going to the bottom of the ocean to slaughter the merpeople. So why come up here to kill our people? It’s because the rest of the Duergar Empire isn’t watching the surface. They don’t care about us, and they won’t notice if a city or three go missing. Not until Grundrik has his greater demon. At that point, he can leverage it down below, to seize power inside the Empire.”

Enki blinked at her, but then nodded slowly. “And you want me to check?”

“Yes, I want to see his reaction. Don’t accuse him of lying, just ask him why Grundrik is trying to hide his demon from their Imperial Council.”

Yirik was a skilled abjurer, but at the end of the day he was just a grunt. He didn’t really understand politics, and as it turned out, he wasn’t a very good liar. 

“Grundrik hides nothing!” he blustered unconvincingly. “He raises Norus for the glory of all Duergar. His peers stand in awe of his might, and our enemies quake in terror!”

Iriala snorted. The Duergar empire proper couldn’t possibly think that having a greater demon loose in their empire could be a good idea—under the control of one of their vassals, no less.

The late Madurian emperors had tried to bind demon lords and greater demons to their service, compensating them with the souls of their enemies. When those ran out, they pivoted to troublesome minorities, and then their most unruly towns. Millions had died, their souls devoured. It was this that finally got the gods involved. 

All of the gods saved souls from among their faithful, and none would abide poachers. When priests began to preach against the emperor’s blasphemy, they pushed out the temples and tried to banish their own gods from the holy city of Mahat’Ur. They drove the priests into hiding high up into the Sacral Peaks above the Phoenix Reaches, where the great temples still sat today.

Four of the gods—Eyeli, Balarian, Ruzinia and Noruk—had unmade the eldritch abominations that propped up the empire’s might and left the imperial family and the Circle of Nine to the tender mercies of their own populace.

The Empire’s ruling council had to know that they wouldn’t be safe from a power-mad Duergar king with a greater demon in his pocket. Even if they did, they had to have gods of their own. The Duergar had always been a very closed off people—that was why there were no clear maps of their empire, no detailed accounts of their history, or much information about their internal politics. Iriala had checked. But they were an ancient people, even older than the dwarven city states. Imperial records mentioned encounters with Duergar over a millennium ago, and they were described as a powerful nation, even then.

There was no way they didn’t know how dangerous of a game this was. And that begged the question: What would they do if they knew exactly what their errant vassal was up to?

“Where, exactly, is the larger Duergar Empire ruled from?” she asked. “How far away is it? Can we make contact?”

Yirik shook his head when he heard the question and gave a short, negative reply. Enki asked him a follow-up question on her own, and it took a few rounds of clarification before the dwarf finally turned back to Iriala.

“He can’t really point to it on one of our maps—he doesn’t know the surface geography since their borders don’t extend that far. Another problem is that it’s down just as much as it is any horizontal distance—the Duergar Empire is three-dimensional. He says he could reach the border to the “Seat of Molten Stone” territory on foot in about a month. I’m guessing that’s the center of the empire.”

That had to be an exaggeration, Iriala reasoned. Most of that would still be horizontal distance, no matter what the prisoner said. Duergar seemed to be heat-resistant, but she doubted even they could live much more than a league or two beneath the surface. Even if their territories were stacked on top of one another in layers, it didn’t really have to go that far down to accommodate enough of them to dwarf the former Madurian Empire in total size. Assuming normal conditions, that made maybe a hundred and fifty leagues. 

Unfortunately, that presented a new problem. If she decided to push the count to pursue this course of action, it would likely mean sending a delegation outside of Besermark’s borders. As if this mess wasn’t already complicated enough.

There was nothing for it. She needed more and better information than she could get from Yirik. It was time to get help. Sighing to herself, Iriala got up and collected her papers.

“Enki, please go over to the scryers’ office and ask them to relay a message to the Dwarven Confederation embassy on behalf of the Mages’ Guild. I’d like to formally request any intelligence they have, even historical, on the borders of the Duergar Empire and its internal political structure. Based on what we’ve heard from Yirik here, our own records are either outdated or outright fabricated.”

Enki grimaced slightly, tilting her head to the side. “Are you sure? The City States are pretty paranoid, generally speaking. They might think that’s just an excuse to try to build a better picture of where they are in the depths.”

“Yes, I’m sure. There’s no way they haven’t heard what happened here by now. They know we have a legitimate interest in this information, and it’s not like they’re friends with the Duergar, right?”

“I suppose.” Enki said reluctantly, rising. Beseri dwarves maintained their own culture within the country, and still spoke a wide variety of dwarvish dialects—but they didn’t get along very well with their cousins in the Confederacy of Dwarven City States that lay in the mountains to the west of Besermark. The Confederacy largely viewed those who lived on the surface as a sort of cultural traitor, and tensions between the groups was always an issue.

“Don’t give me that.” Iriala said grumpily. “You’ve got the easy part. I’m the one who has to go and present this to the count to try to convince him to do something. It’s not going to be easy with Arice pressuring him to declare victory so he can go home to play court politics as a war hero.

Iriala was halfway up to her office, trying to formulate an argument to drive the potential gravity of the larger situation home to the count, when a familiar voice called out from behind her.

“Archmage Iriala, urgent message!” It was Nole, breathing hard as he ran up the stairs behind her. She stopped and waited for him.

“What’s going on?”

“The scryers. Correspondence with Loamfurth was interrupted this morning. They assumed it was either a natural phenomenon, or perhaps interference from the Duergar again. They started out scrying the Depths locally, checking for another army, but there was nothing there.”

Nole paused, and Iriala raised her eyebrows at him. “I assume that’s not the news?”

“No, archmage,” he continued, flustered. “When the afternoon shift arrived a few minutes ago, they decided to try a long-distance far-seeing spell—all of them together.” He swallowed, nervously glancing to the side, as if struggling to choose his words. “Archmage, Loamfurth is burning. All of it.”

Iriala stared at Nole for a moment, uncomprehending. Loamfurth was one of the largest cities in Besermark, with a population of nearly fifty-thousand people. The Duergar had continued to conduct raids on Beseri towns and cities even after their defeat at Halfbridge, but Loamfurth hadn’t seen anything like the siege here. The city’s scryers had estimated there to be no more than a few hundred Duergar hiding in the Depths. There was no way they should have been able to threaten such a large and well-defended stronghold.

Evidently, they’d been wrong.