23 Fentuary, 5A 169: Today I Fucked Up
As soon as it’s light, I take advantage of the fact that the sea remains calm to get back to where I left Erjolf and bring him the Muspah tail. Sure enough, he’s there waiting for me, or, more specifically, waiting for the trophy I’m bringing back. Well, I show it to him, and he gets excited! Rather than thank me, though, he asks me to keep this whole business on the down low, just in case the Fremennik elders find out that he didn’t score this trophy alone and make him do the rest of the trials in the usual manner. Given how he sponged on me this entire time, I tell him I can make no promises.
Well, he heads off to Rellekka to become a Fremennik, and I’m left trying to decide where I want to go next. One thing I could do is check in with the natural historian, and tell him that the Muspah sighting was… not of an actual Muspah at all. He’s disappointed by this, but I manage to fire up his excitement again by telling him where the Varrock museum might find that Muspah statue I unearthed in the desert. Pleased, he gives me a spirit lamp he’s been keeping around. I inhale… and am treated with brief flashes of visions of a craftsman at work. Interesting.
Since I’m already here in the Fremennik Province, I get it into my mind that I might want to see if the ban on entering the city has been lifted yet. So, I go through the mountainside tunnel and down to the river Kelda, and inquire about passage at the ferry dock. The ferryman is most obliging, explaining to me that the Consortium’s travel ban has cost them a lot of business, so they decided to rescind it, and are even allowing humans to travel in and out of the city for free, to make up for lost custom!
The boatman starts up the paddlewheel on the boat and casts off. Once we’re floating down the river, he tells me about the history of Keldagrim. It’s been 500 years, he says, since the reign of King Alvis, known to history as the saviour of Keldagrim and the victim of his own inventions. He explains: The King federated the city’s mining companies into a body called the Consortium, which was meant to serve the monarchy. But in time, it was the monarchy that became subordinated to the Consortium. Now, Keldagrim has no kings, and only the statue of King Alvis stands to remind its people of the old days, the dark days of monarchy.
The statue is right there on the approach to the city! We would be passing it, but as we approach, the engine of the boat emits a disconcerting noise and the craft begins to veer erratically hither and thither. And then the prow crashes into the statue and it falls into the water, shattering into fragments. Well, shit. What a start to my visit.
It gets worse, though: the moment we dock, a squad of Black Guards in gold-trimmed armour runs up and places us under arrest. I am separated from the ferryman and dragged to the guard’s headquarters, where its Commander, Veldaban, interrogates me. Or, rather, he wants a chat. See, it turns out I’m not actually under arrest: the statue was due for replacement anyway, and besides, it’s the ferryman’s damn fault for losing control of his boat. Still, he says, it would be good if I helped in the effort to recreate the sculpture, working as the assistant to Blasidar, Keldagrim’s finest sculptor. His workshop is on the eastern side of the Kelda. I reply that I’d be more than happy to help, which pleases Veldaban.
Before I go off to explore the city, I hang around the Black Guard HQ for a bit, even stealing a few words with the Supreme Commander, a black-bearded dwarf named Bisi. I ask him about his relationship to Veldaban, and he explains that, while Veldaban commands the Black Guard in Keldagrim (by far the largest command), he oversees all the Black Guard regiments all over the dwarven realm. For instance, Commander Lawgof is of equal rank to Veldaban, and subordinate to Bisi. Aha, that makes sense. I ask Bisi whether he’s heard any news around the city. Of course, he says, the biggest and latest news is the collapse of the statue, but he can’t shake the impression that it’s somehow connected to the other disturbances that have taken place around here recently. The ones that led to the city’s closure. Hm, if there’s anything to that theory, perhaps I shall find out as I work to rebuild the statue.
For now, though, I have a city to explore! Keldagrim is a marvel to behold, a city the size of Varrock built free-standing in a massive, vaulted cavern. The buildings are dour, squat affairs of grey stone reinforced with metal that exude solidity, and the streets are brightly lit with lantern-light. A remarkable place, but very, very dwarven. Even the heights of the storeys in the buildings are all wrong, my head bumping almost up against the ceiling of most of them.
I begin my tour of the city by walking about the western side. The first building that captures my attention is a small armour-shop run by Saro, who stocks it with high-quality wares— even adamantium, which is rare in human lands except by special order from the Grand Exchange. It would seem he’s working on something even better, a system of lightweight metal plates meant to increase the durability of armour, but all he’s got now is prototypes, and they’re extremely expensive.
The building next door is something of a dwarven stereotype: an inn called the King’s Axe, serving up dwarven stout to dwarves in search of the good stuff. I don’t know whether it’s the time of day (do dwarves living underground follow a day-night sleep cycle?) but it’s pretty empty right now. Still, I have a glass of dwarven stout along with a fun-loving dwarf named Gauss. After I’ve finished my pint, I go looking for the innkeeper to inquire about lodgings. He offers me a room, and lets slip there’s a gnomish delegation staying at the inn right now, come to negotiate with a cartel known as the Red Axe. I’m in pretty good stead with the gnomes, so I decide to have a chat with them. They are pretty aloof and standoffish, more so than most gnomes, though I figure they may be some of Glough’s flunkies. After talking to them for a while, though, I get the feeling that there’s something more sinister going on: I ask both gnomes I meet where they’re from, just casually, and they give me two different answers! The official story is that they’re from the Grand Tree, getting much-needed supplies of an unspecified nature, but the junior of the two delegates tells me they’re from Tree Gnome Village and is instantly corrected by her superior. I don’t know what to make of it, and can’t think of any way to press them into telling me the truth, so I move on.
Along the street to the south-east, I stop by a stonemason’s workshop to see whether he would consider selling stone to a human interested in furnishing her house. He tells me he sees no problem with that, and walks me through the varieties of stone he’s selling, from common limestone to vastly expensive magic stones.
On the same street is one of the entrances to the former royal palace, a grand hall that dominates the skyline and straddles the river. On this side, there are the gardens (a rather shabby affair by surface standards, with only a few fly-eating cave plants and an unkempt soil-bed), where I run into an uncommonly tall dwarf named Tombar (not really the talkative sort, though) and Rind, the palace gardener, who talks to me about the intricacies of growing anything so deep beneath the mountains. I ask him where the dwarves get their food supply, and he tells me they can grow a bit here, but most of Keldagrim’s food comes from trade via the mine cart tracks that run deep beneath the earth to various outposts. In the Era of Kings, though, technology was more primitive, and the food situation was worse, but the dwarves never considered abandoning the underground. I ask him why that was, and he replies that food shortages were preferable to being in the thick of the God Wars. This state of affairs continued well into the Fourth Age, and only after King Alvis’ glorious victory over the mountain trolls did the dwarves send scouts to the surface to check on the situation.
On the northern side of the west bank, I find a bank, staffed by dwarves but fully connected to the Bank of Gielinor network. Quite convenient! Further on, I make a few more stops. For instance, there’s a store selling quality weapons that even has runite longswords in stock: quite remarkable given the rarity of the metal. I also pop into some private dwellings to ask the locals what the gossip around town is. It doesn’t go too well. Some, like a certain Dromund, tell me to get out, and others, like a quarrelling dwarven couple, are too absorbed in their own quibbles to spare me any time. Fortunately, there’s a library nearby, and the librarian, Hugi (the name means ‘personification of thought’ in Dwarven) is pleased to have someone to talk to. I ask him about the collection, and he says it’s been accumulated over centuries, from the Era of Kings, to the Rise of the Consortium, to the present day, the Era of Prosperity. I glance through the books, but find nothing so exciting that I would put aside my exploration of the city to ensconce myself with it, so I make small talk with a human researcher— the first human I’ve seen in the city besides myself— then continue on my way.
Rather than visit the palace, which I expect will take a long time, I decide to cross over to the east bank via a bridge just upriver and look for the stonemason’s workshop. On the banks of the Kelda, I notice a section of the cavern wall that positively gleams with rare ores. I try to take a closer look, but a dwarf stops me, saying I’m trespassing on public property. Okay, fair enough: access to all that ore would have been too good to be true.
East Keldagrim is a bit of a different world from the west bank. The buildings here are smaller, shabbier, working-class. There is no public street-lighting, only lanterns hung from houses, and even the street is a bit of a foreign concept. Right by the bridge is a dock where I run into that damned ferryman and his boat. I give him a piece of my mind about his shoddy piloting, but he doesn’t seem fazed; he just caustically reminds me that I got my money’s worth for the journey. Grr.
I don’t know if it’s just my imagination, but the locals around here seem to be friendlier than the well-heeled lot over in West Keldagrim. There’s this one dwarf, Karl, for instance, who’s not angry at me for knocking on his door, but listens raptly to my firsthand account of the collapse of the statue and my subsequent arrest. Then, to the north of his place, there’s a shop selling kebabs, whose owner complains to me about some particularly drunken dwarves who live in the area. In fact, I run into one of them soon afterwards: as I’m passing by his house, he throws an empty bottle in my direction! I barge in to confront him, but see that he’s drunk well past the point of throwing the bottle maliciously: he’s hallucinating about dwarf-eating kebabs that have arrived to invade the city! Oh dear, I hope he will be all right.
On the far eastern edge of the city are the actual slums, little dwellings carved straight out of the rock, interspersed with some actual buildings. In one of the buildings, I find a dwarf selling decorative armguards, but he won’t sell to me, because apparently they’re not the right look for my arms (I don’t have forearms the size of a tree branch!). Oh well, should probably have seen that coming. Behind his house is a small coal mine where some of the locals from the cave-homes make their living. They say I can mine there as long as I don’t draw too much attention to myself. Alright, good to know.
The colourful sociological observations don’t end there. One of the locals is a dwarven male wreathed in smoke, who looks completely out of it. Is he doing some kind of drugs, I wonder? There’s also the mostly-deaf owner of a pickaxe shop, who sells remarkable-quality wares (even runite picks) but is burdened by his son, who is supposed to be helping him run the business but is actually kind of a layabout. I also encounter a dwarf who’s wallowing in self-pity because after ninety years mining, all he’s got is a small house on the east bank. I would tell him to count his blessings— it doesn’t seem like too bad a life— but I doubt he’ll listen, so I leave him be.
Further south, the character of the district turns from residential to industrial, with a number of important enterprises all located close to one another. There’s the lava flow mine, for instance, which is off-limits to humans but provides geothermal power for the mine cart network, so is of crucial importance to the functioning of the city. Then there’s a brewery, which advertises its alcohol by way of a drunken dwarf who walks around with a placard: apparently this is the only job he could get after being fired by the Red Axe for… not showing up to work in uniform one time too many, the brewer believes? Anyway, their profit margins are low, so they pay him in beer. I ask the woman at the bar if I can use the brewing facilities for my own purposes, and she tells me to go ahead: her husband Blandebir will charge me an appropriate amount for the yeast. I have it in mind to brew some cider, and unless I take another trip to Morytania (which, actually, I well might) this would be a decent place to do it. But for cider, I’ll need apples, and I don’t have enough right now to make any. What else? Oh, the brewery has a cat, but it’s big and mean and even when I speak to it in cat through my amulet, it just glowers at me.
South of the brewery is the rail yard, a sprawling tangle of mine cart tracks that spreads its tentacles to all corners of the dwarven realm. The main trunk line goes all the way to the Grand Exchange in Varrock, with a through stop at the Ice Mountain mines. I ask a conductor how much it would cost for me to travel by mine cart and learn that it is free for humans: another part of the city’s bid to get business booming again. Very useful stuff, though I still have a statue I’m duty-bound to rebuild before I feel I can leave.
Right by the rail yard, I notice a large factory building of some kind. The foreman outside isn’t very communicative, but he lets me know that this building houses the blast furnace, which the Consortium has opened up to all and sundry (even non-dwarves, which he’s displeased about) so that it can secure the manpower needed to run it. Since no one is stopping me from going inside, I head in and try my luck talking to the dwarves inside to find out more. The shop floor workers aren’t much help, but I finally manage to convince a foreman to talk to me. He tells me that the blast furnace is the pinnacle of dwarven metallurgy, cutting in half the amount of coal needed to refine ore. The downside is that it takes a five-man crew to get the thing going, and since management refuses to pay workers anything (they argue it’s a privilege even to be working on this technological marvel!) the furnace runs idle a lot of the time and requires human volunteers at all others. I question the logic of this business strategy, but hey, if it works for these guy, who am I to question it.
A few other dwarves are hanging around the blast furnace to support operations. One of them is an ore merchant, who sells large quantities of ore of various kinds (nothing rarer than mithril, though) to smiths who didn’t bring, or cannot procure their own; the other, meanwhile, is a quartermaster for the Black Guard, who buys top-quality armour from smiths who can’t be bothered to market the wares they produce here. Since the furnace isn’t running right now, though, his stock is all empty. Well, there’s nothing really for me to do here, so I go out again and look for that sculptor.
I find his shop right by the eastern entrance to the Consortium palace. Blasidar is a middle-aged dwarf with a greying beard who greets me with courtesy, but no special warmth— but that’s only to be expected from the dwarves, really. I tell him why I’m visiting him and ask whether there’s anything I can help with as far as rebuilding the statue goes. Blasidar thinks for a bit, then tells me he’s already got an assistant and a model, but could use an errand girl. I tell him to go on. He explains that his brief was to rebuild the statue exactly as it was, but, the dwarves not having much of a painting tradition, there exists no visual record of it. So, we’ll have to make do and produce a plausible facsimile using ornate, but probably ahistorical clothes. Specifically, he wants me to find a pair of boots, the fanciest I can find; robes in the royal style; and King Alvis’ axe, which is said to still survive. He has no idea where in Keldagrim I can find these items, but wishes me best of luck anyway in finding them.
That’s… more of a challenge than I expected. But I shall try to make some headway tomorrow (or at least, after I’ve had what would be a full night’s sleep above-ground). I’ll begin at the King’s Axe (I’ve a feeling the inn I’m staying in has that name for a reason) and move on to the Consortium palace: if there’s one place that’s bound to have rich dwarves and fancy clothes, it’s there.