A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

Seventeenth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC

Ash Bottom, Lower City, City of Brass

"If this wizard we're supposed to fight is so damn powerful, what the hells are we doing down in the city's shithole?" Bronn asked no one in particular as he looked down the vast cavernous pipe sloping downwards through the basalt bowl lower than the lowest slum in the city. The smell of rancid oil and rotten meat rising from it was enough to make the most wretched beggar in Flea Bottom take to his heels for cleaner parts.

"Does this city look like it has enough water to fill that thing?" Maelor asked, shaking his head, or at least Bronn thought he shook his head. There was barely enough light down here to see by, the light of the burning sky covered by a web of rickety bridges and warped arches of the Lower City proper. "This isn't a sewer nor anything of the sort. No one's quite sure what dug these tunnels, mad wizards or the plans of some long forgotten Sultan. Some say they were here even when the city fell ages ago. One thing's for sure, if you want privacy to do things you really shouldn't be doing, this is the best place for it."

"So long as you do not mind smelling like a half-rotted dretch carcass," Sarell added darkly. "Are we likely to meet any patrols down there?" she added to Ashia. The girl who had insisted to show them the opening herself instead of drawing a map, either because she could not make heads or tails of the notion or because she uncharacteristically wished to be reunited with her master.

"Oh aye, there's dervishes, worse things, too. Demons, mad slaves who've grown pale, eyeless, and drink blood instead of water, all sorts of things."

To Bronn that sounded like the sort of bullshit masters told their slaves to scare them away from running. Then again, he knew demons were real and he'd seen stranger things than eyeless men in the jungles down south. "And what was your master doing down here, looking for those slaves?" he asked.

"Master Silas said secrets in the city either float to the top 'r sink to the bottom, an' it's safer to deal in the second than the first," the girl replied before hastily dropping her eyes, either a slave's reflex or she was keeping something back, but the sellsword trusted the boy would catch her in a lie if it came to that.

"Alright then," Maelor said. "Here, take this token and say..."

"I ain't going nowhere," the girl interrupted. "There's still a long way to go to where the Shaper ambushed master an' the rest..."

"We can't protect you down there," Maelor sighed. "Look, we've got magic to look for them and you don't have to go back to your master to be safe..."

Bronn was not in the mood to argue with some snot-nosed kid who didn't have the sense to run when she had the chance. "Listen here, we are going to have keep an eye on every rat hole just to stay alive down there. The last think we need is to be worrying about keeping you in one piece."

The child gave what was perhaps the strangest answer she could have, she giggled. The sound as alien to the stones all around them as the gurgle of a mountains stream. "Don't need you to watch out for me, I can watch out for myself." Fire bloomed in her hands, flickering as though she'd picked up a fistful of embers in each and even the stone on which she stood began to shimmer, the air rippling with heat haze. "I couldn't kill the brass golems, but I burned the giant's face off," she added, thank all the gods without the smile.


"Can you burn the denizens of this realm?" Sarell asked, cool as a Braavosi banker counting coins. Judging by the fact that she had drawn neither sword nor bow, whatever the girl was it wasn't some foe revealed to her devil's sight.

"'Course," the little sorceress replied. "Wouldn't be much point in master teaching me otherwise, would there?"

"So that's what the snake meant," Maelor muttered under his breath before handing the girl a warding amulet. "Stay close and careful where you cast those flames."

With that they passed into the strange tunnel out of sight of man or spirit.

OOC: There was no way to tell you this IC because Bronn does not know a wizard from a wombat, but since I know you are going to ask and Maelor did figure it out I might as well tell you here, Ashia is a warlock.