From the courtyard and the outside, the portion of Gloomwood Manor he’d handed over to the zarovians to convert into their living quarters looked similar to the rest of the manor exterior. It had towering rooflines lined with glimmering shingles, wood so dark it was almost black, and windows of dark-colored glass. This glass also looked to be frosted.
As he walked through the single door with Emily, however, the inside of the back portion proved to be something entirely different. While the bones of the manor interior were there—the same tall walls, the same wooden structures and arches, and the same dark wood—there simply wasn’t any furniture inside, at least nothing Drake would recognize as furniture.
It was also, unlike the manor, really dark. Almost no sunlight seemed to penetrate the windows. The fact that the floor was plain stone darkened by age assisted in the darkness. And finally, in the distance, he heard a steady, booming hammer sound.
Clang!
He spotted what looked like giant leather slings attached to pouches hanging from the ceiling by long cords. Zarovians curled up in those pouches like some contented cross between a big dog and a bigger lizard. Did they leap up into them? Or just pull them down?
At least his giant lizardmen had made themselves at home here. The gloom inside here really made Gloomwood Manor—the main, human-inhabited portion—look like it was simply posing as gloom. There also weren’t any glassed lamps along the walls in here, like those that burned in his part. Just a few bare torches flickering away.
Finally, it was hot. Drake was already sweating from the blast of heat that hit him the moment he walked inside. After the chilly air in the outside courtyard, this felt like walking into a sauna. How did the zarovians keep it warm? A big furnace? A massive fire pit? Flame magic?
“This way, lord!” Emily said. “Goktul’s smithy is down the hall and around the corner to the left! It’s not near so hard to navigate in here, since there’s no stairs or upper floor!”
She was shouting for no good reason. Was she trying to wake the lizardmen up? Or was she just so excited to finally show him the zarovian barracks that her cheer had overwhelmed her? Regardless, the steady clang! continued to reverberate down the hall.
As Drake followed Emily, he looked around at the hanging slings and counted visible zarovians. He reached eight by the time they approached the corner, which seemed about right. Two more zarovians would be at his doors, and six would be prowling the exterior of the mansion grounds with Cresh or one of his lieutenants. The rest were likely lounging or sleeping somewhere on the other side of the manor, around the next corner.
There was no need to go and check, however, because it was obvious Goktul’s forge was just ahead. The hammering sound he had heard at the entrance was much louder here, and getting louder with each step. It seemed none of the other zarovians minded the noise.
As the distant hammer of metal on metal echoed through the cavernous barracks, each strike made Drake’s ears ache. He was now close enough to see Goktul’s forge was a round structure of gray bricks built directly in the center of the barracks. Red light glowed within, and smoke rose steadily to the ceiling, where he spotted a barred metal skylight open to the sky.
He couldn’t imagine how hard Goktul was hammering whatever he was hammering, if it was this loud from this far away. Whatever it was, it was going to be really flat. Emily led him around the structure instead of straight toward it, which allowed him to get a view into the forge straight through its single open archway. That revealed the single zarovian inside.
Goktul looked to be the shortest zarovian he’d encountered by at least a head. He was also a bit more round than the others, but as Drake approached, he soon realized no one would mistake his width for fat. At least not if they got in a fight.
The armorer’s body was simply short, wide, and rippling with solid muscle. He looked like he could piledrive Cresh despite being half of Cresh’s physical size. Also, this zarovian struck Drake as older than the others.
His dark red scales looked more worn, and he had scars all over that looked to have come after a lifetime of work and fights. Additionally, while his overall color was a dark red like Cresh’s, large segments of his snout were white, as were all the scales around his eyebrows and head. Did zarovian skin color pale with age?
Behind Goktul, a huge iron bowl contained coals and a flame that Drake could feel from this far away. The zarovian was currently hammering on what looked to be a two-handed sword that was far too big for anyone who wasn’t a zarovian to wield. Drake also noticed, as the zarovian armor shifted his position, that the back half of his tail was missing.
The cut wasn’t rough. It was a clean cut, and unless Goktul had it done intentionally, the only reason he could imagine for the armorer missing half his tail was if someone else had lopped it off. Another punishment from Lord Crow? Or had he simply lost it in battle?
The hammering was still going on when they reached the open arch of the forge. Beyond and inside was the bowl of molten glowing stuff. The air was so hot Drake had to stop so he could breathe. He was sweating like a horse and hadn’t even walked inside the forge.
Emily strode straight into the forge and shouted. “Goktul!”
Drake barely heard her, probably because his ears were still ringing due to the hammering. He was going to get some earplugs made if he came down here again.
“Goktul!” Emily shouted again. Still no response. She picked up a hefty blacksmith hammer the old smith had left sitting against his forge.
As Drake’s eyes widened, he suffered a moment of panic. Was his crazy battle maid was going to take a swing at the old lizard? Emily raised the hammer, balanced it, then slammed it down on the anvil Goktul wasn’t using. The deafening ring made Drake grind his teeth.
With an annoyed sniff that Drake saw more than heard, Goktul lowered the anvil he’d been using to pound the living shit out of that big two-handed sword and slowly rotated to face Emily. She stood grinning with his spare hammer balanced in one hand.
Meanwhile, Drake’s ears were ringing so loudly he wondered if he’d just blown out an ear drum. He needed those for balance. He also simply liked to hear.
“Hey, Goktul!” Emily waved cheerily with one hand as she tossed the hammer to the floor with the other. “Lord Gloomwood is here to see you!”
The lizard armorer’s lidded eyes swept slowly toward Drake, then away. “Not.”
“This is the new lord!” Emily shouted. “The old one’s dead now!”
Goktul snapped his mouth like he’d just eaten a bug and once again eyed Drake. “Why?”
Goktul made Korrag look like a conversationalist. Still, Drake was more than capable of speaking for himself. He walked as close to the forge entry as he could manage without passing out from the intense heat and spoke. “I need a good weapon.”
“What?” the lizardman demanded irritably.
Of course the old zarovian would be half deaf. “I said I need a weapon, Goktul!”
“Why?”
Drake was very quickly getting an inkling of where this appointment with his armorer was going to go, and he really, really didn’t like it. “So I can kill people!”
Goktul pointed with one finger. “Club.”
Drake glanced the way Goktul pointed and found a big spiky club leaning against one wall of the big round smithy. The club’s business end was bigger than his head, and the whole weapon was at least four feet long. Drake doubted he could pick it up, let alone wield it.
“I was hoping for a crossbow!” he shouted.
“Why?”
Goddammit. “Do you have any crossbows, Goktul?”
“No.”
“Can you forge a crossbow for me?”
“Why?”
Drake couldn’t believe how irascible this old zarovian was. Still, perhaps he was missing something. Perhaps there was a weapon even better than a crossbow.
“I have another question!”
The zarovian snorted. “Ask.”
“If you wanted to kill someone, and you wanted to do it from somewhere far away where they couldn’t kill you? What weapon would you use?”
“Axe.”
“A throwing axe?”
“Axe.” He pointed again.
This time, Drake looked at the massive two-handed axe sitting in the other corner of the forge. It had axe heads on both sides, which might make it somewhat balanced for throwing, but it was also almost as tall as Emily. The old lizardman was fucking with him right now.
Or not. Drake suddenly had a vivid and disturbing vision of this huge zarovian bear thing tossing that giant two-handed axe clear across his courtyard and somehow hitting his target. Probably an elephant. And then the elephant would get sliced in half.
He looked back. “But what if I wanted to kill someone from a great distance?”
This time, Goktul pointed at Emily. “Use that.”
She straightened with obvious pride. “Oh, thank you!”
So Drake was going to have to be a dickish manor lord about this. “Goktul, I order you to forge me a crossbow! One light enough for me to carry, one that can shoot bolts I can easily carry in bulk, and one that’s easy to reload!”
He couldn’t compel Goktul to do that, of course. He’d have to hope the lizardman would simply do it because they were allies, and because he didn’t want to piss off Cresh.
Goktul snapped his snout and looked to the forge. “Take time.”
“How long?”
“Month.”
No, there was absolutely no way that was going to work. “If you set aside all your other work and start on my crossbow today, how long would it take you to finish it for me?”
For a moment, he was worried the old zarovian wouldn’t answer. Yet finally, the zarovian sighed heavily and with audible disappointment. “Day.”
He’d figured as much. “Goktul, I order you to set aside your other projects until you’ve finished my crossbow!” Rushing his order made him feel like a real tool, but he really wanted a good crossbow. “And, make the muzzle look like a dragon!”
“What dragon?”
It amused him that a giant talking lizard living in a fantasy world had no idea what a dragon was. “They look like you, except angrier!”
Goktul picked up his hammer. “Come pick up next night. After dark.”
Drake grinned in victory, relieved to finally accomplish his goal. That was the longest set of contiguous words he had managed to wring out of the old lizard.
“Go.” Goktul waved one claw as he turned back to his forge. “Busy.”
Drake was more than happy to leave before Goktul started hammering again. The fact that the smith wasn’t hammering anything suggested the zarovian was following Drake’s orders. He knew very little about forging and metallurgy, but he imagined one of the first things Goktul would have to do was find a cast for the iron pieces and work from there.
With luck, he would finally get a crossbow he could actually reload.
From the courtyard and the outside, the portion of Gloomwood Manor he’d handed over to the zarovians to convert into their living quarters looked similar to the rest of the manor exterior. It had towering rooflines lined with glimmering shingles, wood so dark it was almost black, and windows of dark-colored glass. This glass also looked to be frosted.
As he walked through the single door with Emily, however, the inside of the back portion proved to be something entirely different. While the bones of the manor interior were there—the same tall walls, the same wooden structures and arches, and the same dark wood—there simply wasn’t any furniture inside, at least nothing Drake would recognize as furniture.
It was also, unlike the manor, really dark. Almost no sunlight seemed to penetrate the windows. The fact that the floor was plain stone darkened by age assisted in the darkness. And finally, in the distance, he heard a steady, booming hammer sound.
Clang!
He spotted what looked like giant leather slings attached to pouches hanging from the ceiling by long cords. Zarovians curled up in those pouches like some contented cross between a big dog and a bigger lizard. Did they leap up into them? Or just pull them down?
At least his giant lizardmen had made themselves at home here. The gloom inside here really made Gloomwood Manor—the main, human-inhabited portion—look like it was simply posing as gloom. There also weren’t any glassed lamps along the walls in here, like those that burned in his part. Just a few bare torches flickering away.
Finally, it was hot. Drake was already sweating from the blast of heat that hit him the moment he walked inside. After the chilly air in the outside courtyard, this felt like walking into a sauna. How did the zarovians keep it warm? A big furnace? A massive fire pit? Flame magic?
“This way, lord!” Emily said. “Goktul’s smithy is down the hall and around the corner to the left! It’s not near so hard to navigate in here, since there’s no stairs or upper floor!”
She was shouting for no good reason. Was she trying to wake the lizardmen up? Or was she just so excited to finally show him the zarovian barracks that her cheer had overwhelmed her? Regardless, the steady clang! continued to reverberate down the hall.
As Drake followed Emily, he looked around at the hanging slings and counted visible zarovians. He reached eight by the time they approached the corner, which seemed about right. Two more zarovians would be at his doors, and six would be prowling the exterior of the mansion grounds with Cresh or one of his lieutenants. The rest were likely lounging or sleeping somewhere on the other side of the manor, around the next corner.
There was no need to go and check, however, because it was obvious Goktul’s forge was just ahead. The hammering sound he had heard at the entrance was much louder here, and getting louder with each step. It seemed none of the other zarovians minded the noise.
As the distant hammer of metal on metal echoed through the cavernous barracks, each strike made Drake’s ears ache. He was now close enough to see Goktul’s forge was a round structure of gray bricks built directly in the center of the barracks. Red light glowed within, and smoke rose steadily to the ceiling, where he spotted a barred metal skylight open to the sky.
He couldn’t imagine how hard Goktul was hammering whatever he was hammering, if it was this loud from this far away. Whatever it was, it was going to be really flat. Emily led him around the structure instead of straight toward it, which allowed him to get a view into the forge straight through its single open archway. That revealed the single zarovian inside.
Goktul looked to be the shortest zarovian he’d encountered by at least a head. He was also a bit more round than the others, but as Drake approached, he soon realized no one would mistake his width for fat. At least not if they got in a fight.
The armorer’s body was simply short, wide, and rippling with solid muscle. He looked like he could piledrive Cresh despite being half of Cresh’s physical size. Also, this zarovian struck Drake as older than the others.
His dark red scales looked more worn, and he had scars all over that looked to have come after a lifetime of work and fights. Additionally, while his overall color was a dark red like Cresh’s, large segments of his snout were white, as were all the scales around his eyebrows and head. Did zarovian skin color pale with age?
Behind Goktul, a huge iron bowl contained coals and a flame that Drake could feel from this far away. The zarovian was currently hammering on what looked to be a two-handed sword that was far too big for anyone who wasn’t a zarovian to wield. Drake also noticed, as the zarovian armor shifted his position, that the back half of his tail was missing.
The cut wasn’t rough. It was a clean cut, and unless Goktul had it done intentionally, the only reason he could imagine for the armorer missing half his tail was if someone else had lopped it off. Another punishment from Lord Crow? Or had he simply lost it in battle?
The hammering was still going on when they reached the open arch of the forge. Beyond and inside was the bowl of molten glowing stuff. The air was so hot Drake had to stop so he could breathe. He was sweating like a horse and hadn’t even walked inside the forge.
Emily strode straight into the forge and shouted. “Goktul!”
Drake barely heard her, probably because his ears were still ringing due to the hammering. He was going to get some earplugs made if he came down here again.
“Goktul!” Emily shouted again. Still no response. She picked up a hefty blacksmith hammer the old smith had left sitting against his forge.
As Drake’s eyes widened, he suffered a moment of panic. Was his crazy battle maid was going to take a swing at the old lizard? Emily raised the hammer, balanced it, then slammed it down on the anvil Goktul wasn’t using. The deafening ring made Drake grind his teeth.
With an annoyed sniff that Drake saw more than heard, Goktul lowered the anvil he’d been using to pound the living shit out of that big two-handed sword and slowly rotated to face Emily. She stood grinning with his spare hammer balanced in one hand.
Meanwhile, Drake’s ears were ringing so loudly he wondered if he’d just blown out an ear drum. He needed those for balance. He also simply liked to hear.
“Hey, Goktul!” Emily waved cheerily with one hand as she tossed the hammer to the floor with the other. “Lord Gloomwood is here to see you!”
The lizard armorer’s lidded eyes swept slowly toward Drake, then away. “Not.”
“This is the new lord!” Emily shouted. “The old one’s dead now!”
Goktul snapped his mouth like he’d just eaten a bug and once again eyed Drake. “Why?”
Goktul made Korrag look like a conversationalist. Still, Drake was more than capable of speaking for himself. He walked as close to the forge entry as he could manage without passing out from the intense heat and spoke. “I need a good weapon.”
“What?” the lizardman demanded irritably.
Of course the old zarovian would be half deaf. “I said I need a weapon, Goktul!”
“Why?”
Drake was very quickly getting an inkling of where this appointment with his armorer was going to go, and he really, really didn’t like it. “So I can kill people!”
Goktul pointed with one finger. “Club.”
Drake glanced the way Goktul pointed and found a big spiky club leaning against one wall of the big round smithy. The club’s business end was bigger than his head, and the whole weapon was at least four feet long. Drake doubted he could pick it up, let alone wield it.
“I was hoping for a crossbow!” he shouted.
“Why?”
Goddammit. “Do you have any crossbows, Goktul?”
“No.”
“Can you forge a crossbow for me?”
“Why?”
Drake couldn’t believe how irascible this old zarovian was. Still, perhaps he was missing something. Perhaps there was a weapon even better than a crossbow.
“I have another question!”
The zarovian snorted. “Ask.”
“If you wanted to kill someone, and you wanted to do it from somewhere far away where they couldn’t kill you? What weapon would you use?”
“Axe.”
“A throwing axe?”
“Axe.” He pointed again.
This time, Drake looked at the massive two-handed axe sitting in the other corner of the forge. It had axe heads on both sides, which might make it somewhat balanced for throwing, but it was also almost as tall as Emily. The old lizardman was fucking with him right now.
Or not. Drake suddenly had a vivid and disturbing vision of this huge zarovian bear thing tossing that giant two-handed axe clear across his courtyard and somehow hitting his target. Probably an elephant. And then the elephant would get sliced in half.
He looked back. “But what if I wanted to kill someone from a great distance?”
This time, Goktul pointed at Emily. “Use that.”
She straightened with obvious pride. “Oh, thank you!”
So Drake was going to have to be a dickish manor lord about this. “Goktul, I order you to forge me a crossbow! One light enough for me to carry, one that can shoot bolts I can easily carry in bulk, and one that’s easy to reload!”
He couldn’t compel Goktul to do that, of course. He’d have to hope the lizardman would simply do it because they were allies, and because he didn’t want to piss off Cresh.
Goktul snapped his snout and looked to the forge. “Take time.”
“How long?”
“Month.”
No, there was absolutely no way that was going to work. “If you set aside all your other work and start on my crossbow today, how long would it take you to finish it for me?”
For a moment, he was worried the old zarovian wouldn’t answer. Yet finally, the zarovian sighed heavily and with audible disappointment. “Day.”
He’d figured as much. “Goktul, I order you to set aside your other projects until you’ve finished my crossbow!” Rushing his order made him feel like a real tool, but he really wanted a good crossbow. “And, make the muzzle look like a dragon!”
“What dragon?”
It amused him that a giant talking lizard living in a fantasy world had no idea what a dragon was. “They look like you, except angrier!”
Goktul picked up his hammer. “Come pick up next night. After dark.”
Drake grinned in victory, relieved to finally accomplish his goal. That was the longest set of contiguous words he had managed to wring out of the old lizard.
“Go.” Goktul waved one claw as he turned back to his forge. “Busy.”
Drake was more than happy to leave before Goktul started hammering again. The fact that the smith wasn’t hammering anything suggested the zarovian was following Drake’s orders. He knew very little about forging and metallurgy, but he imagined one of the first things Goktul would have to do was find a cast for the iron pieces and work from there.
With luck, he would finally get a crossbow he could actually reload.
