Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
The Tower of the Obsidian Prince
by Lot Smordyce
Part 4
The Adventurers went back along the river, looking for a dry river bed. They found one, heading north where the new course of the river turned west. They followed the old river-bed. A second night passed, then a third day, then a third night. All the way Finandriol was chcking the map every five minutes. On the fourth day, they came to a little ruin, nothing more than the bottoms of some stone walls. Once a building had stood here, a circular stone hut by the looks of it, about twenty feet across. Stone blocks lay scattered here and there, and the odd bit of slate.

'There's your thing,' said Finandriol, 'an ancient stone gazebo. Now if we head out at seventy-five degrees, we should see the tower soon enough.'

'Let's search the ruins,' said Ellion.

'Why?' asked Skarn in genuine surprise. 'There's nothing here you can't see straight off. It's just old stones with grass growing up through them. What can you find?'

'You never know what treasure there could be out here.' Finandriol was looking extremely dubious at this. 'Look,' said Ellion in pique, 'we are professional treasure hunters, aren't we? Now we've found a ruin in the middle of a wilderness. The thing to do now is searh it for treasure. What are you, a bunch of amateurs?' He jumped down from the saddle, tethered his horse and started searching through the ruins, tearing up the weeds that grew through the ruins to get a better view of what was beneath them, tossing fallen stone blocks out of the ring of walls. Tholdak joined in.

The other two looked at each other in disbelief. Then Finandriol shrugged, said 'The quicker we get this done, the quicker we can be going,' and got to work. Finally Skarn joined them, muttering under his breath.

After about half an hour of clearing the site and finding nothing, Ellion gave a sudden shout. 'Look here! A trapdoor!' He peeled back a layer of turf, and below it was a flat stone. The others joined in, clearing the top of the trapdoor and the space around it, and Skarn got the crowbar from his pack to lever it open. Bad air welled up, air that had been trapped for centuries with something rotten. Inside was a set of stone stairs leading down. They retreated upwind of the trapdoor and let the worst of the foulness disperse. Then Ellion went down with a lantern. Finandriol and Tholdak followed. Skarn decided to stay up top and keep watch. 'I went down the last shitty hole,' he explained, 'I'll skip this one.'

Down the steps they found a stone-walled cellar. Mould limned the walls. Small brown-red spiders glistened in the torchlight. The air was heavy with cloying, mildewed moisture. Small humps of debris lined the edges of the room. Perhaps these had once been bags or boxes of supplies. Ellion poked around in a couple with the point of his sword, but they were part of the soil now.

In one corner they found a skeleton, lying face down. They poked and pulled it. Next to its waist, on the right hand side, they found five gold coins under a light covering of mould. Near its right hand was some sort of stone-bladed knife. There was nothing else in the cellar worth having, so they went back up.

Finandriol laid the coins out on the grass and wiped the mould off with a rag, and then with loving care he rinsed them with a little of his drinking water. He looked admiringly at them, reading aloud the ancient lettering on them with some difficulty: 'Maddev Pattaling Tiddeshpad'. He translated, 'Emperor Petal-Emblem, lord of three kingdoms. Never heard of him. The language is Komari, which has been extinct for six hundred years. I'd say these little beauties are the best part of a thousand years old.' He got a little pair of scales out of his pack, and weighed each coin in turn. 'Remarkable,' he said beaming with happiness. 'Exactly half an ounce. These coins were minted centuries ago, and they're exactly the same weight as modern gold pieces. Truly, the financial system is as enduring as the eternal heavens.' Finandriol was deeply in love with money.

'So what are they worth?' asked Skarn.

'Five GPs.'

'What do you mean, five GPs?'

'Well that's what they are. A gold piece is a gold piece. It's a standard weight of gold. Who minted it makes no difference.'

'But these are antiques! Collectors' items!'

'All coins are collectors' items,' said Finadriol, misty-eyed, slipping into a waking dream in which he was wallowing in a bathtub full of gold pieces.

'I mean, there must be scholars who'd pay through the nose for this knid of stuff.'

'Eh?'

'Antiquarians. Historians. Whatever.'

'They've got no business sense if they pay out more than a gold piece just to get a gold piece.'

Skarn made a disgusted noise in is throat and walked off. He stooped for a stone and threw it at a small weasel-like creature, which ran off. Ellion produced the knife they'd found in the cellar. Its blade was triangular in cross-section, its three edges slightly irregular, made of what looked like a sort of polished black glass. 'What do you make of this, FInandriol? Flint?'

'Looks like obsidian to me.'

'Ah,' said Ellion knowingly, 'obsidian.'

'So what if it's obsidian?' asked Skarn, turning back toward them. 'What's that got to do with the price of bacon? Or antique coins?'

'Well,' said Ellion as though he was talking to an idiot, 'this tower we're going to was built by the Obsidian Prince.' He smiled smugly.

'So? So what? What's this mad bloke's title got to do with this knife?'

'They're both obsidian!' exlaimed Ellion as if the connection was blindingly obvious.

'I still don't see why that should mean anything,' said Skarn.

'Oh, you're just being deliberately stupid now!'

Skarn shrugged and wandered off again. He couldn't be bothered with this.