Chapter 69: Level 1
"Wait, Voros! You can’t go after him."
"I kill him!"
"I know he has done a taboo but you can’t, not right now. This isn’t even supposed to be the night we take action and we already dropped three bodies."
Vivian raced Voros in her dress on the stairway down.
"Listen, you dolt! You want to smoke Vladimir out? Be my guest. But how will you do it? What will happen next? We came here to look for clues, to make sure that Anastasia is really alive. If you blow that chance up, you won’t get it ever again."
As she finally managed to stop the anger-driven Voros, Vivian started looking down the stairway, making sure nobody was nearby. They just killed the Overseer of the Blackguard slave market as well as two guards on the way inside. Once those bodies are found, the whole place will go on lockdown for days and maybe even weeks, security won’t be as lax as tonight again.
The matter that pissed Voros off was the shattered Mithril coin found in the Overseer’s safe. From earlier, Voros and Vivian learned that Edmond Black and Ian Grayson were using the Blackguards as their foot soldiers for the Prince’s agendas and they wanted to launder the Mithril coins. They wanted to use the Duergar craftsmen in order to reforge the Mithril coins and use them for funds.
The only Duergar who can do that is none other than the best dwarven smith in the Black Market and it is Vladimir, the duergar who wanted to cheat Vivian when she first visited this place. He is one of the few slaves that have quite the relaxed restrictions since his value is immense and from what it seemed, he is in cahoots with the slavers against his own kind.
Such treachery was not uncommon but there were lines that none of the Duergar people dared to cross and even with the threat of death, the duergar wouldn’t sing the Mithril song to a human. Hell, most of them even would rather die than forge for humans despite their cowardly and greedy nature.
While Voros was uncommon among the Duergar for reasons for his madness and shenanigans, Vladimir too was uncommon for his excessive attitude as his slaver’s favorite pet. That led him to try and reforge Mithril and eventually ended up destroying a coin.
While all the coin and its fragments were collected, Voros still found it unforgivable to treat Mithril like that and it was something deeply embedded in Duergar tradition. Even Vivian herself, as an outsider, couldn’t fully understand the drama regarding the subject.