Iria tossed her notes down on her small writing desk in disgust and paced around the cell, watg her prisoner. She’d interviewed the Duergar abjurer twice more sihe 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 exge for power. Deg 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 surfaext.” She waited for Enki to finish and the Duergar mage to nod before tinuing. “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 trahe Duergar, whose name was Yirik, frowned and then shrugged. “Every day, a stone falls from above.”

  Iria bli the bizarre idiom and looked over to Enki, prompting the dwarf to transte. She uood a lot of Duergar words—but that didn’t mean she uood what the hells they were saying.

  “It means something like ‘that’s life’. Bad things are expected. Duergar are very fatalistic. It’s not that nobody cares, they just don't expeythier. Food reason, most likely. I ’t imagihat someone like this Grundrik rules with a light touch.”

  That was an uatement if Iria had ever heard one. But they were getting off track. Yirik was lying to her. He’d explicitly said, and just firmed again, that his king Grundrik was looking for soft targets. A surface city might teically qualify, sidering how difficult it was to adequately protect a popution from subterrahreats. But she khe Duergar hadn’t e looking for Halfbridge. They’d met ihe kobold warren, and both parties had been trying t down perion’s ir – targets didn’t get any less soft than that. Even if the kobolds were probably an easy source of souls, he had to know that taking a poke at a dragon ying with fire.

  Now that she thought about it, the wily old lizard had gotten away and effectively dumped this problem in their ps! He robably ughing at them, wherever he'd slunk off to.

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

  “He’s trying to hide what he’s doing with the demons!” she cluded out loud. “At least for a little while. This isn't about soft targets, it’s about discretion.”

  Enki looked at her with a puzzled expression and opened her mouth to transte for the prisoner, but Iria 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? Why try to destroy the first city you find when you reach the surface? It’s needlessly reckless and frankly unnecessary if Grundrik already had the entire might of the empire behind him. The Duergar have never attempted to seize surface territory before – why would they? We've never been a threat to them, and they don’t even like it here.”

  It was obvious, now that she sidered it. The Duergar prisoners who’d been tasked with rebuilding the Crafters’ District had suffered terrible sunburns on every inch of exposed skie the gloomy winter weather. A few had even started to temporarily lose their vision. It was so bad that the magistrate had begun exclusively w 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 oing to the bottom of the o to sughter the merpeople. So why e up here to kill our people? It’s because the rest of the Duergar Empire isn’t watg 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 leverage it down below, to seize power inside the Empire.”

  Enki bli her, sidering. Then she nodded. “Alright. You wao check?”

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

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

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

  Iria snorted. Grundrik's fellow vassal kings might not pay much attention to what occurred up on the surface, but she seriously doubted they wouldn't reize the threat Grundrik represented if they were aware of it.

  The te Madurian emperors had tried to bind demon lords and greater demons to their service, pensating 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 had finally gotten 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 bsphemy, 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, Barian, Ruzinia and Noruk—had uhe eldritch abominations that propped up the empire’s might ahe imperial family and their Circle of o the tender mercies of their own popuce. Their temples led the people in the revolt, and the religious order they jointly founded afterward – the Invigition – brutally suppressed the practice of demon-summoning in the former empire for turies afterward, tinuing to fun even as the newly liberated empire colpsed into chaos.

  Even if the Duergar had, by some miracle, missed the rise and fall of the Madurian Empire, they had to have gods of their oould balk at Nuros' as in their domain. She couldn't know with absolute certainty, of course. The Duergar had always been very closed off—that was why there were no clear maps of their empire, ailed ats of their history, or muformation about their internal politics. Iria had checked. But they were an a people, even older than the dwarven city states. Imperial records mentioned enters with Duergar over a millennium ago, and they were described as a rge and powerful nation, even then.

  So, that begged the question: What would the Imperial cil do if they kly what their errant vassal to?

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

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

  “He ’t really point to it on one of our maps—he doesn’t know the surface geography siheir borders doend that far. Another problem is that it’s down just as much as it is any horizontal distahe Duergar Empire is three-dimensional. He says he could reach the border to the “Seat of Molten Stoerritory on foot in about a month.”

  That had to be an exaggeration. Most of that would still be horizontal distano matter what the prisoner said. Duergar seemed to be heat-resistant, sure, but she doubted even they could live much more than a league or two beh the surface. Even if their territories were stacked on top of one another in yers, it didn’t really have to go that far down to aodate enough of them to dwarf the former Madurian Empire in total size. Assuming normal ditions, that made maybe a hundred and fifty leagues.

  Unfortunately, that presented a new problem. They would have to send a delegation outside of Besermark’s borders, and Iria wasn't so sure that she could get the t to support that kind of move. He wouldn't just have to get approval from the king, but also from whoever else's territory they would have to pass through. As if this mess wasn’t already plicated enough.

  Iria sighed and scribbled down a few here was nothing for it. She needed more aer information than she could get from Yirik. It was time to get help. Sighing to herself, she got up and collected her papers.

  “Enki, please go over to the scryers’ offid ask them to rey a message to the Dwarven federation embassy on behalf of the Mages’ Guild. I’d like to formally request any intelligehey 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 ht 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.”

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

  “I suppose.” Enki said relutly as she rose. Beseri dwarves didn’t get along very well with their cousins in the federacy of Dwarven City States, but Iria didn't have time to indulge mihnic rivalries right now.

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

  Iria was half to her office, trying to formute an argument to drive the potential gravity of the rger situation home to the t, when a familiar voice called out from behind her.

  “Archmage Iria, 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," he began, catg his breath. "Correspondeh Loamfurth was interrupted this m. They assumed it was either a natural phenomenon, or perhaps interference from the Duergar again. They started out sg the Depths locally, cheg for another army, but there was nothing there.”

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

  “No, archmage,” he tinued, flustered. “Wheernoon shift arrived a few minutes ago, they decided to try a long-distance far-seeing spell—all of them together.” He swallowed, nervously gng to the side, as if struggling to choose his words. “Archmage, Loamfurth is burning. The whole city. No signs of resistance remaining.”

  Iria stared at Nole for a moment, unprehending. Loamfurth was one of the rgest cities in Besermark, with a popution of nearly fifty-thousand people. The Duergar had tio duct 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 rge and well-deferonghold.

  Evidently, they’d been wrong.