Emmaline had just about managed to get control of her stomach and after rinsing her mouth out with some snow melt was feeling considerably better. There was still a buzzing at the back of her head, a bit like being drunk but not as pleasant, but she supposed she was probably not about to die at this point. That did leave the rather unpleasant question of what she was going to do. She still didn’t have the foggiest notion of how she had come to this place or where or what this place was, other than ‘in the mountains’ which was less than helpful. It seemed very unlikely she would be able to climb down the snow covered mountain in her current state and in any case, night would be falling soon and anyone caught out on the mountain would certainly be frozen to death. That left the doorway she had seen when she had come too. At least it would be out of the wind in there, and perhaps she would be able to find warm clothing and supplies to help her in the climb down tomorrow. Perhaps there would be treasure. That thought brightened her mood considerably, even though the reasoning part of her mind suggested it was more likely she would be swarmed by orcs or beastmen or Sigmar on knew what else. She wondered where Amal was. It was difficult to come to any guesses given she didn’t know how she had gotten here. There was a vauge memory of eating porridge and… had Myrtle Gertel poisoned her? What reason would she have to do such a thing, and even if she had, how had they gotten her away from Amal without catching a serious case of dagger-to-guts? Was it possible they had killed him? The thought went through her like cold ice for a moment before she got the better of it. The idea of someone named Gerd Gertel polishing of Amal seemed too foolish to credit. He would be ok, he had to be, Nothing to be done about it for the moment, the best she could do was to get inside and start looking around.

 

At first Emmaline had assumed the place was an abandoned dwarf hold. It was a reasonable assumption, they were in the World’s Edge Mountains after all, but it only took her a few minutes of wandering the passageways beyond the black door to dismiss the notion. Emmaline had never visited a Hold, few humans could claim to, but she had been around dwarves and their craftsmanship most of her life.  The tunnels beyond the door were too large, and they had an odd curve to them that was faintly unsettling. There was iconography of a sort on the walls, though it was so stylized she couldn’t understand what it was meant to represent. It wasn’t easy to read in the light of the small ball of golden light that she conjured, the spell flame seeming to render it in soft flowing panels rather than sharp and distinct. In some ways it reminded her of the lizardman city in Lustria, though she couldn’t quite have said why. She passed through several rooms of unknown function, any furnishings long since decayed to moldering dust. Though there were several side passages, they were heavily cobwebbed, a marked contrast to the clear passage she followed. It was obvious that someone was coming back and forth here fairly often. It was growing considerably warmer as she progressed deeper, and there was a strange smell on the air. She tried to shake Asp awake, as much for companionship as for need, but for some reason the snake remained an inanimate tattoo.

 

She had been walking for perhaps ten minutes when she became aware that there was light ahead of her. Instinctively, she doused her light, creeping forward the way Amal had been trying to teach her. The light grew brighter until it seemed like daylight, though it was far too warm in the tunnel to be the case. She gasped in shock as she reached the stone lintels of the next chamber. It was a garden. An entire garden underground! Not a peasants kitchen garden either, but something a noble might keep on an estate. Perhaps an acre of perfectly manicured trees, shrubs and bushes growing underneath a mountain. Light streamed in from above, pulsing out of a great crystal high above that seemed to counterfit the sun. By this point in her career Emmaline had seen some remarkable things, but this still took her breath away. A neat path of white pebbles wended its way gracefully through the groves of trees to an ornamental fountain that sparkled merrily. A number of small bushes surrounded it, each ingeniously pruned into shapes of fantastical beasts. A butterfly fluttered past her as she stood bemused, drawing her eye to a grove of cherries laden with fruit. Eyes wide with amazement she stepped out onto the grass, walking over to the cherry trees. After briefly examining the tree with her wizards sight, having seen enough Derek Shelft plays to worry about eating fruit in magical groves, she plucked a fruit and popped it into her mouth. It was delicious, tart and firm and perfect.

 

 

With a groan of pleasure she plucked a handful more of the fruit, chewing hungrily and spitting the pits into the undergrowth against the chance that some gardener might notice so small a theft. She wandered back towards the fountain, observing the carefully trimmed trees with some interest. One of them appeared to be a dragon though of an unfamiliar type, all serpentine and coiling with short feet and long mustache like protrusions from its snout. A bit like one of those sausage dogs that were all the rage in Carlsbad when last she had been there. Another looked like a four armed woman with the tail of a snake, each arm holding a sword of neatly trimmed leaves. For no reason she could discern, Emmaline felt a deep hatred and disgust rise up within her and was barely able to keep from ripping the plant to pieces.

 

“Get it together,” she whispered to herself. The last thing she needed was to be lost in flights of fancy when she needed to be focused. With considerable effort she walked across the garden and into the hallway at the other side, passing down another hallway and into another chamber. This one was considerably less fabulous, almost a disappointment, but no less welcome for all that. The place was obviously a larder. Food was piled on shelves, sacks of grain, jars of oil, wheels of cheese, bottles of wine and more besides. None of it looked like it wouldn’t be at home  in the wagons that rattled through the pass, though some of the seals on the wines suggested they came from further afield. Her eyes fell upon sacks of milled oats, the very same she had seen down in the village.

 

“Looted perhaps, tribute,” she mused, crossing to a pile of hessian sacks which smelled like they had once contained grain. She paused, weighing her options. Perhaps she should find somewhere to hide and wait for morning when climbing down the mountain might be a better idea than taking provisions now. On the other hand, if the cooks, or whatever was eating this food, were here during daylight hours she might not get another chance. Well, when in doubt, steal now and worry later. She snatched up the sack and took several wheels of cheese from the back of the shelves where she hoped their loss wouldn’t be obvious. To this she added some dried fruit and a few jars of jam, before finally taking a pair of wine bottles and adding them to her haul. Thinking of the arctic blast of air that had greeted her, she grabbed several more sacks that, in her mind at least, she might be able to use as additional garments. Hopefully she could convince Asp to come out and assume his staff form so she could use him as a bindle stick, although she suspected such a use would offend the serpents towering dignity. Having stocked up on supplies she headed back towards the garden, thinking that she could hide in one of the cobwebbed side passages to wait for morning. Then she stepped into the light and collided with something squat and green and with too many teeth. Emmaline bounced off the thing, lost her balance and landed on her rump on the grass at the edge of the chamber, sack flying from her hands and spilling out cheese and wine bottles. She stared up in shock into the beady hate filled eyes of a goblin. It was incongruously wearing some kind of garment of muddy blue cloth, bound at the waist with a belt of knotted black. Its prominent brows were shaded by a straw hat, not dissimilar to that seen on the head of peasant anywhere in the empire, and it gripped an iron tined rake in its clawed finger. A band of black iron had been sealed around its neck, a strange angular rune stamped into the metal.

 

“Humie loota!” it screeched in its own tongue and grabbed Emmaline by the wrist, its rake falling to the ground as its other hand grabbed her and pulled her struggling to her feet. Emmaline shrieked out the first spell that came into her mind and there was a flash of golden light. When she wasn’t immediately killed, Emmaline opened her shocked eyes. The goblin was frozen in mid shout, a solid block  of stone. Emmaline felt a momentary surge of triumph at having worked such a spell, a basic one for a Gold Wizard but a struggle for a student as indifferent as her. Unfortunately her triumph was short lived as the stone goblin, while impressive, hadn’t been anything like balanced, and it began to topple over, solid stone fingers still gripping Emmaline’s wrist. With a cry she toppled after it, finding herself on the ground a moment later, vaguely surprised not to have broken her wrist or been crushed beneath the goblins stony form. To make matters worse, she had no idea how to reverse the transfiguration spell. She pulled at her wrists but they might as well have been manacled for all the good it did.

 

“Shit.”