"Sergeant Adzasit, reporting as ordered, sir." The captain took his time returning my salute, measuring me up I suppose, or maybe trying to intimidate me; it's a trick I've seen a thousand times, though it loses its efficiacy after you've been on a few battlefields. He gave up after a bit, and motioned for me to sit down. I made myself as comfortable as possible on the minimally-padded stone seat, probably hand-picked from some apprentice's reject pile for use by subordinates; odds were that if you were in his office long enough to be bothered, you weren't popular.
"Got a job for you, Sergeant," he said without preamble. "Not one I'd ordinarily hand a relatively new militiaman, but you've got more combat experience than the rest of my command put together, and this isn't exactly a police action."
"Forgive me, sir, but if it's a military affair...?"
"It's not exactly a military action either. Truth be told, we haven't a clue what it is. Does the name Thobatol mean anything to you?"
I thought for a moment. "Passed through it once or twice with caravans. Mining camp in the foothills, lots of artisans, probably be a lot bigger if it wasn't in the middle of nowhere."
"Indeed. And the last two caravans to travel there have reported that it was completely sealed off and apparently deserted."
I sat up rather straighter in my seat. A totally sealed fortress could mean a number of things, all of them bad. "Any sign of what might have caused them to button up, sir?"
"Not really; last year's caravan encountered a peddlar who put the fear of all the Gods into them, babbling about demons and monsters and heavens know what else. Their bodyguard recce'd the place from a good distance away. All they could make out was that all the siege doors had been lowered, and a fire had broken out among at one of the charcoal burners outside the main gate but nobody was trying to put it out. There was too much smoke to tell anything furthermore."
I sucked air through my teeth. "That can't be good. Thobatol's right on the edge of Ramelala Wood, literally; the treeline's a matter of yards from their front door."
"Quite; our elven friends were not best pleased, to say the least. The Guild of Merchant Venturers in Gil Awthrar put out an official advisory of suspected plague there, which was a likely enough explanation that we chose to wait out the quarantine period, but there was... some doubt expressed in certain quarters, enough that an armed expedition was thought prudent. Which is where you come in." The captain managed a thin smile. "Not quite the change of pace you were hoping for, I suppose?"
"Not quite, sir. But so it goes. How many men am I getting?"
"Seven militia and about twenty of the Duke's armsmen, and an apothecary who's been to Thobatol a few times himself. The elves are also sending a scouting party, but they may have been and gone by the time you arrive."
"Understood sir. I take it we leave at first light?"
"Naturally. That will be all, Sergeant."
I left his office and headed down the aggressively-polished corridor. Time to make that trip to the barber I'd been putting off.

The forces under my command were a study in contrasts. The militia were all fellow marksdwarves, their mail and bucklers gleaming new steel; the quartermaster's an old army pal of mine, and he'd seen we got the best he could offer. Our weapons were also fresh from the bowyer, a special militia design with spearheads mounted under the business end; damned handy in a melee, and no need to carry a truncheon and a shortsword around on regular duties. We were toting both for this job, though. They were good lads, all veteran constables trained and experienced in corridor-fighting, but I was a bit worried about how
they'd handle full-scale battle; breaking up tavern brawls and running after hoard-raiders does bugger-all to prepare you for going up against a real army, even some goblin mob.

The armsmen, on the other hand... Gods, I don't think I saw two weapons the same, or any dwarf in a matching set of armour. Armsmen are paid in board and lodgings and very little coin, and expected to supply their own gear, so battlefield salvage is the order of the day. Highlights from the weird and wonderful array of cutlery on display included one bloke with a pair of goblin-made scimitars across his back and a whip dangling from his belt, someone else toting the last three feet of a halberd cut down to serve as a battleaxe, and a buxom lass with a longbow and a wooden chair-leg with half a dozen nails hammered into it.
Duke Bomrek was known to take a dim view of pillaging, so I could probably expect no more than one or two outright beard-gnawing lunatics in this mob, but I was a bit worried about maintaining discipline; their normal modus operandi is to hammer the ever-loving snot out of the enemy, then wander off to get completely rat-arsed and shag something. Stuff like patrol routines and room-clearing was what better paid, harder-to-replace people came in and did when they were finished. Still, they'd all seen battle a few times and were probably strong-stomached.

Rith, our apothecary, wasn't a great deal more reassuring at first glance. She was a member of some local religious order that had forsworn spilling the blood of sentient beings, though apparently their tenets were at least slightly flexible about hitting sentient beings with a bloody great mace like the one she had slung over her shoulder. Her seemingly indefatiguable air of jollity did nothing to make me feel better, but I was assured that she was a highly skilled healer. I hoped wouldn't have to find out.

***

We hitched a ride most of the way with an outgoing caravan, which let us off at a way-station half a day's march to the north of Thobatol. We had less than an hour's daylight left and the bad weather was setting in, so I told the troops to settle in for the night whilst Rith and I spread an old map out on a table and tried to fill in the details it lacked.
"There's several doors cut into the hillside that I recall," she said. "One right at the bottom of the valley, another just above it and three or four just below the summit of that big hill." She
marked the appropriate locations with a brush and inkstone. "And see that valley there, near where the settlement's name is? They roofed that over and used it for storage."
"I remember as much; they were half-way through doing it when I passed through last. And didn't they build a sort of turret on that little mound there, over the entrance stairs and the hitching posts?" I added, pointing to the appropriate location.
"Yes," she agreed. "They always had one eye on defence; there were so few of them they could only weather a seige by turning turtle and waiting it out." She frowned. "I just can't understand it; even if every last dwarf was dead or dying by the time the caravan arrived, surely they would have had time to douse the charcoal ovens before the last of them succumbed, or was some lone madman trying to have a score of elves keep them company as they returned unto the earth?"
"Yeah, you're right," I mused. "Whatever happened to them must have happened fast. It's not like they were hanging around waiting for someone to winch the siege doors up again, either; there's a side-door off the trade depot left unblocked for emergencies like that."
My unease about this whole business was growing steadily worse. The only thing I knew of which could kill a whole settlement that fast was firedamp, if you hit a big pocket when you weren't prepared for it; it doesn't happen often, but it's not unheard of. But the correct approach to that particular problem is not to seal off the doors.
Well, there was no point brooding over it all night. I wandered out to the firepit to see if there was any hot food to be had.

The way-station was maintained jointly by the various merchant guilds, a collection of longhouses where travelers could lay up overnight in relative comfort. We currently had the place to ourselves except for a party of kobold travelling bards, one of whom spoke high dwarvish. He was in negotiations with one of the armsmen for use of the cooking fire he'd built up, and they reached some sort of agreement just as I arrived, the kobold spokesman reaching into a sack and pulling out an assortment of salted fish and meat. "Soup'll be up in half an hour, skipper," the armsman -there hadn't been time to learn everyone's names- informed me. "And this lad says he was inside Thobatol a few weeks before they went quiet."
I questioned the kobold, who gave his name as Bol, while we waited for the soup. "We were only there for one night," he explained. "Did a few ballads, and the interesting bits of one of your sagas; 'The Fall of Koganusuan' I think. They must've liked it; gave us two silver pieces and a pint of rum each."
"And there was nothing out of the ordinary, nobody sick or anything?" I persisted.
Bol shook his head. "Apart from the fact I was playing a gig to dwarves who turn their worked-out coal seams into art galleries and make as much money from dressmaking as blacksmithery and stonecrafting?"
"Takes all sorts to make a world," I replied mildly. "Anyway, can you remember anything about what the place was like inside? I only ever saw the hitching post in the gates."
Bol obliged by sketching a floor-plan on the back of our map, which I examined carefully as I ate. It was a tidy little settlement, the rooms laid out with near-fanatical precision. There were only three levels, four if you counted the main gates. Immediately below the surface were the living quarters, dining hall and sub-surface farms, as well as the metalwork shops and a couple of smelters. This level also contained the larder, the trade goods warehouse and the jail, which for some odd reason was right next to the dining hall; shortest possible distance to haul some drunken oaf who'd started a punch-up, I suppose.
Below that, we had an assortment of craft workshops and a cemetary of some description. Some dwarven traditions use exhausted mineral veins for the purpose, which is probably what they'd done here, but Bol hadn't seen inside it.
Last of all, we had a well, a small armoury and a pair of heavy iron doors leading to something they called 'The Keep'. Apparently it was some sort of last-resort defensive position; if they couldn't hold the main gates, they'd fall back down there and barricade themselves in to wait it out. It made sense; goblins or bandits would get bored and wander off after they'd drunk the cellar dry and pocketed anything worth nicking. If anyone was still alive, that would be where I'd expect to find them.

It took me a long while to get to sleep, and even after I finally rropped off I was plagued with troubled dreams of digging listlessly through a mess of rubble and burned wood, looking for something nameless yet terribly important. The word 'inauspicious' came to mind when I awoke the next morning.
Apparently I wasn't the only one with forebodings, as the mood over breakfast was decidedly subdued. Not even Rith seemed immune. I decided to get them on the march before our nerves could get any worse. "And lay off the booze 'til we get there and we know what's what," I added, with a pointed look at some of the armsmen. "I need you boys focused; we don't know what the hell went down in there so we're going to assume the worst. Alright, let's move out!"

I set a fairly easy pace; better we be reasonably fresh when we got there. I started to feel a little better as we marched; chances were it'd been a big goblin attack or something, and they'd been forced into the Keep in a hurry and not come out until the rumour mill had been working three shifts for a week. They were probably wondering where the merchants had all gone.
We reached a broad valley with a brook running through it. "Three miles to go," Rith observed. "Look for a sudden bend to the west after it narrows sharply; you'll be right next to the first entrance on the map."

We could hardly have missed the place even if Rith hadn't said anything, as it turned out; a huge cavern had been excavated out of the hillside a little way from the neck of the valley and sanded smooth. The walls had been covered in engravings, and the centre of the cavern was occupied by assorted scupltures and some sort of mosaic made from a variety of multi-coloured stones they had to have imported. "That's new since I was here last," she remarked. "It's just over that ridge now."
"Let's check it out, then." I unslung and cocked my crossbow, then slipped the leather cover off the spearpoint. "Marksdawrves with me; we'll head for the brow of the bridge and cover the rest."
We made our way up, careful to avoid skylining ourselves, and got our first glimpse of Thobatol proper. Yet another sculpture garden, with a wide stone canopy over it and a few wooden benches interspersed throughout. "Arty lot round here, weren't they?" one of the militiamen mused.
"Not much else to do of an evening, I suppose. Looks like they're still buttoned up," I added. A heavy wrought-iron barrier had been lowered over what was probably the first door Rith had marked on the map. A high, narrow window had been carved beside it, just wide enough to fire a crossbow out of.
No sign of life. No sign anyone had left the fortress. "Better go down there and take a look," I concluded.

We combed the area, finding a couple of broken crossbow bolts that could have been fired by a hunter and a discarded fishing rod that told us what we already knew; something had happened to make the inhabitants of Thobatol leg it inside and slam the doors shut, and then stay there. I tried peering through the window, but it had been bricked up. "Why would they do that?" I wondered aloud.
We headed uphill in grim silence, weapons out and ready. "No birdsong," Rith murmured. "Anyone else noticed that?"
I hadn't until she pointed it out. We were on the edge of the biggest forest in the known world; we should have been able to hear the birds from miles off. "I wish you hadn't said that," one of the younger armsmen said half to himself.
And then we got to the summit, and the lack of birdsong was suddenly the least of our worries. "Fu...ck...ing... hell!" I whispered.

Bones. Everywhere. There must have been a couple of hundred bodies here, but the fire that raged through the woodpile and the coal bins had reduced them to charred skeletons; it would take us half a season to even sort them by species.
"What the hell were they trying to do, bum-rush the watchtower?" I wondered. There were remains piled up against the fortifications, riddled with half-melted bolts. No wonder that peddlar had been babbling about demons; I saw one skeleton that had seven bolts tangled up in its ribcage and another through its eye-socket.
"There's all bloody sorts here, guv'nor," reported one of the militia. "Human, goblin, dwarf; think there might even be a troll or two in there somewhere." Goblins sometimes used them as siege engines, I recalled. But why the humans as well? Had some bandit finally done the unthinkable and joined forces with them?
"No weapons lying around," one of the armsmen noted. "Plenty of odd bits of armour, but no weapons."
"Someone stripped the battlefield?" Rith wondered.
"No point; the fire would've buggered the metal. And why would the locals take the weapons and most of the armour to melt down for scrap but not bother mending the charcoal furnace, let alone burying all these bodies?"
"This is fucking ridiculous," growled one of the armsmen. "I signed up to hit people, not solve bloody locked-room mysteries!"
"This hardly constitutes a locked room," one of the militiamen pointed out.
"You know what I mean!"
"Knock it off, you two," I interjected. "There's nothing else for it; we're going inside."
The side door hadn't been touched; either the invaders hadn't noticed it or they'd tried it and given up. The passageway it was set in was too narrow for a battering ram, but I'd seen it from the inside and it didn't look all that strong; a couple of good whacks with a sledgehammer would have it off its hinges in no time. That probably meant some sort of trap, so I picked up a heavy piece of stone that had probably been part of a charcoal furnace and lobbed it at the piece of old sackcloth lying in front of the doorstep.
An axe-blade wider than my shoulders and some four feet long dropped from the roof of the tunnel and hit the rock, which cracked in two. Experimentally, I pulled the larger of the two pieces away with the tip of my sword. The axe sprang back upwards.
"O...kay." I stepped back a bit to consider the problem. Duckboards probably wouldn't stop it going off -that rock had only weighed half a hundredweight at the most- and I didn't have anyone who'd know how to disarm it. We did have some collapsible emergency pit-props, but that axe blade must have weighed at least a third of a ton, and it had some complicated counterweights to put even more weight behind it; it'd probably need so many to wedge it that a mouse couldn't squeeze through the gap.
I slapped my forehead as recollection hit me. It's always the obvious stuff you overlook, isn't it? "Who's got the grapnels and the rope ladder?"

The mechanism for raising and lowering the main gates was in the turret, where the night-watchman could get at them in a hurry. They were designed to come down in a split-second; you hauled on the lever to release the brake and let gravity do the rest. Lifting them back up again took rather longer, despite a complicated set of gears making it the work of only one dwarf. I led the way in with the other militia whilst Rith slid back the bolts on the trapdoor at the top of the stairs leading down from the turret.
"We'll sweep the place one level at a time," I instructed. "You fellas had better stay up here for a bit." The armsmen bristled visibly. "Ahem. Are any of you trained for fighting at close
quarters inside a fortress, in the dark?" I didn't bother waiting for a reply. "Thought not. Let's go."
I nocked a bolt and trained my crossbow down the main staircase as one of the others struck a match and tossed it into the darkness; if there was firedamp in there we'd soon know it.
Nothing. We lit our helmet lamps, and I slung my crossbow and readied one of those collapsible pit-props. The other militiamen trained their weapons on the stairwell; anything going for me would get a seven-point head massage. I descended the stairs, striking each one with the pole as I did so. I reached the first floor landing and began probing the doorways to corridors going off in three directions. There was a soft click, followed by a tremendous thud as a lump of stone the size of my head fell from a concealed hatchway.
"Shit. They really do like their privacy, don't they?" I groused, sweeping my lantern methodically in a full circle. Three other, similar stones were lying in the corridors, and a pool of dried blood near the wall suggested that a fourth had clobbered someone in the not-so-distant past. That left one more, which I tripped with the pole. "Okay, all clear." I turned my attention to the double-doors leading off from the fourth point of the compass. If Bol's sketch-map was accurate, this should be the dining hall. I dropped the pole and readied my crossbow, thumbing off the safety catch, and booted the doors open.
"Oh, my...!"
I've seen just about everything that can be done to a person's body on the battlefield. I've seen people dismembered, eviscerated, impaled; every cause of death and maiming that the ingenuity of sentient beings can devise.
But I had never before seen people eaten. There were ... pieces scattered everywhere, and even in the dim glow from my helmet lantern I could see the bite marks. Dried blood was spattered across the walls and furniture, and a brazier had tipped over and scattered ashes across the floor. The smell had mostly dispersed after two years, but what remained was bad enough. I turned away in revulsion, barely controlling the urge to be sick. "Gods... What the fuck could do that?" I whispered. "Rith, you need to see this! And I warn you, it's not pretty."
The other militiamen took it beter than I'd expected; better than I did, for the most part. "Some nutjob. Got to be," one of them said. "That madhouse going on up the top, probably all of what passes for a militia in a dump like this killed trying to hold them off... someone snapped."
"One dwarf," I said slowly. "You think one dwarf did this. This is a mining settlement, for crying out loud! They hardly go off down the shit pit without their pickaxes, and they all spend one day a week digging. And you think one dwarf could do all this?"
"Have you got another theory?" he replied irritably.
"No," I admitted. "I haven't got a fucking clue. All I know is, unless whatever did this knows a way out that we didn't find, it's still in here. If we're lucky, it starved. If we're unlucky, it's bloody hungry."
"Larder's not been touched," another militiaman reported. "Either it likes its meat fresh or it's not bright enough to get the lid off a barrel."
"And there's not enough bits in there to account for all the locals," I added. "Some of them might still be alive, down in the Keep. They could cram a lot of food in there, maybe grow a few things..."
"Not forever," Rith added. She was white as a sheet and trembling slightly, and looked like she'd thrown up a few times.
"We're going in," I said, daring anyone to argue.

Not the smartest decision I ever made.