considered to be a model innkeeper for all Faerun.
In the dungeon of Southroad Keep:
A light was flashed once again through the window in Rassendyll's cell, when the guard retrieved the plate that had previously borne the slop that had been dinner. As the footsteps of the guards retreated off into the distance, Rassendyll waited for the return of his visitor.
Seconds stretched into moments, moments into hours, hours into immeasurable blocks of time that felt like years, yet the abbe Hoffman did not return.
Rassendyll reflected as he waited. Before the arrival of the dwarf, he had despaired and welcomed death, accepting it and his own continued captivity as inevitable and beyond his own ken.
The appearance of the cheerful dwarf had changed all of that. Maybe his inevitable fate was not all that cut and dried after all. True, his magical abilities and secrets had left him, and he was imprisoned in a hideous mask of iron in the bowels of a Mulmaster dungeon, but no matter what he had thought before, he was far from helpless and the time for action had arrived.
Rassendyll decided that it was time to take control of his destiny for the first time in his cloistered life. If an old dwarf has the spark of life within him, why not a mage-in-training?
Checking the small window in the door for a guard who might overhear his actions, and finding the coast to be clear, he moved away the blocking stone from the tunnel entrance, and with great care to avoid the telltale sounds of metal on rock caused by the hitting of the mask against the dungeon wall, Rassendyll shimmied through the entrance and crawled through the dwarf's tunnel.
The girth of the dwarf's torso necessitated a wide tunnel so the masked prisoner had little trouble moving through it. Within seconds, he arrived at its apparent end, and carefully pushed a stone not unlike the one on his end of the tunnel away, and hauled himself up into the dwarf's cell.
Hoffman was resting with his back against the cell wall. His eyes were closed and his breathing was unduly labored.
Rassendyll's heart sank. It appeared that his newly found reason for living was in his final hours.
As the masked mage moved the stone in place, he accidentally hit his head. The clang, soft as it was, announced his presence, and the dwarf opened his eyes.
'I have company, I see,' Hoffman said with a weak grin.
'Good manners required that I return the neighborly visit,' Rassendyll replied, approaching the infirm dwarf. He was shocked by how sickly the dwarf now appeared, when he had seemed so robust, not counting the coughing fit, when he had visited Rassendyll's cell earlier.
Hoffman instinctively read the look of surprise that existed beneath the mask on his fellow prisoner's face. 'I hope you don't mind me not going to the effort of casting a keeping up appearances spell. It would take a bit too much out of me at the present moment.'
'Not at all,' Rassendyll replied, his grin obscured by the iron mask.
'You were going to tell me how you wound up with that coal bucket on your head,' the dwarf reminded him.
'A blind wizard smith put it on me at the direction of a cruel but handsome looking man who resembled myself.'
'Tell me a little more about this good looking fellow, the bad guy. You can fill me in about yourself a little later.'
'He was dressed in silken robes with fur trim, and around his neck was a pendant of a blood-encrusted dagger. The blood was made up of red gemstones. Rubies, maybe,' Rassendyll tried to recall.
'That pendant represents the office of the High Blade of Mulmaster. I believe that the tormentor who looks just like you is the tyrant Selfaril himself. Rumors pass occasionally through these dungeon walls, and I recall that he ascended to the throne after killing his own father,' the dwarf explained. 'Are you sure that you resemble him?'
'Indeed,' Rassendyll replied. 'If I could remove this mask, I would show you.'
'Don't even try,' Hoffman advised with a cough. 'It is clearly ensorcelled. I'm afraid that not even during my younger years would I have been able to defeat a spell as strong as this one.'
'It also seems to have removed all of my own spellcasting abilities.'
'You were a spellcaster?' the enfeebled dwarf inquired.
'A mage-in-training,' Rassendyll explained. 'I had been in training for my entire life. Now, all those years have been wasted.'
'Maybe not,' Hoffman asserted. 'Though the ability to do is desirable, the ability to wield and recognize is also of great benefit.'
'I don't understand.'
'The enchanted metal of the mask acts as both an insulator and a leeching conductor of your magical abilities and spells. It prevents any spells formed within from being cast out, while conducting the knowledge and innate powers from within, onto its metallic surface, and eventually causing them to dissipate in the air around you. What it doesn't do is prevent you from using the general knowledge you obtained in your studies, such things as recognizing spells that are cast by others or using magically powered artifacts and objects.'
Rassendyll chuckled at the dwarf's optimistic observations. 'Little good those vestiges of my training will do me here,' he said, trying not to sound too despairing in the presence of the obviously dying dwarf.
'Don't be too sure,' Hoffman replied, his voice weakening rapidly. 'My years of tunneling around here are coming to an end. Originally I had an agreement with the former resident of your cell, that when my time had come I would aid him in his escape from this hateful place.'
'What happened to the former resident?' Rassendyll asked.
'He died at the hands of an overly playful guard, whose solution to the boredom of his regular duties was torturing the prisoners. In Kupfer's case, he went a little too far.'
'Oh.'
'When a person dies in the keep, their body is placed in a sack with a weight and dropped down the same drain that the garbage goes. It leads to an underground canal that eventually empties out into the Moonsea. The dead are bagged and weighted before the dinner service, and then collected on the same trip they retrieve the plates. I've seen it happen many times over, and it runs like clockwork. You can tell when it happens. The guards ring a bell to signal that someone has to bring down a sack and a weight.'
'Kupfer and I,' Hoffman continued, 'hatched a plan that when one of us died, the other would sneak into the cell, and trade places with him in the sack, on the off chance that there was a chance of surviving the underground trip out to sea.'
'Was Kupfer a dwarf too?' Rassendyll asked, intrigued by the plan.
'No,' Hoffman answered, his voice hardly a whisper, 'he was a firbolg.'
'Don't you think they would have noticed the difference in the size and weight?'
'Not with this, they wouldn't,' the dwarf explained holding out a charm. 'Don't touch it. I'm not too sure how long it will last in close contact with that mask of yours. It transmits an aura of disguise so that, for a limited amount of time, the guards will believe that the burden they are carrying is actually the mass of the previous bearer of the charm.'
The dwarf carefully placed it back in the pouch beneath his beard, making sure that the young used-to-be mage-in-training saw exactly where he kept it.
'Now quickly return from whence you came,' Hoffman instructed, 'and just let old abbe Hoffman die in peace. I am old and it is about time. When you hear the bell, wait for the dinner service to begin, and then hightail it on over here. Drag my body back to your cell, being sure to place it in the darkest corner possible. We only have to be able to trick the watch once. Then take my place in the sack, and go with Dumathoin, my son. Perhaps you will be able to find someone who can remove that coal bucket from your head.'
Rassendyll was saddened by the weakening condition of his newfound friend.
'Maybe you're being a bit premature about this whole thing,' he offered.
The dwarf shook his head slightly.
'Nope,' Hoffman replied, starting another frightful coughing fit. 'Afraid not. I'll be gone by dinner, and with any luck you'll be gone not too much later.'
