It was nearly two weeks later before Jumah’s wounds were well enough for him to travel again. The group set up camp in another of the dwarven buildings and the gnomes had busied themselves with investigating the mechanical spiders and their master as Gimbobble created and read off new lists of instructions to the great mechanical monster which had become much more agreeable since the speaking of the code-word.

Jumah’s feet had been charred black by their contact with the silver plated machine and the thick blisters and burns around his right ankle had turned into an angry red and pink band that would surely become an ugly scar before long. He looked down at it wistfully as he pulled on his leathers, sitting on the edge of the bed. Their time in Kal’ek T’nal was done and they would be leaving for Talanor in a few hours time.

Arrangements had been made with the machine to begin the exporting of its collected resources up to Talanor and they would also be accompanying the party back up in order to reduce the likelihood of problems arising with the kobolds along the way. In short order Talanor would be flooded with more readily usable materials than they had seen in years and the machine would keep them coming up out of the mines regularly.

Their new instructions had made sure that the machine would not attack any more living creatures and they had limited how many ‘appendages’ it would produce. In theory there would be no more danger of the machine continuing its work, work which they had discovered in the catacombs beneath Kal’ek T’nal.

Once they had located the storage chambers that had been carved out and stacked floor to ceiling with smelted, formed, blocked, and refined into pure, raw materials. There had been more there than Jumah had ever seen in one place before and even the gnomes had seemed surprised by the sheer volume of materials the machines had extracted from the mines. But the horrific part of their discovery was the hundreds of clear cylinders filled with some sort of viscous greenish liquid. Suspended in the liquid were people of all kinds, adventurers that had been captured by the spiders and bottled up for some unknown reason.

Unfortunately the use of the code word to shut down and reprogram the machine also seemed to have erased any memory it had of what it had been doing previously, or at least that was what it had told them when they inquired as to the purpose of the hundreds of well preserved adventurers in its basement. Jumah remained skeptical as to the whole situation, but Gimbobble was positively bubbling over with excitement and after spending more than a week pouring over the notes of the gnome that had created the machine, she had devised a new set of instructions that, she said, could never be misinterpreted or put to the use of anything other than the benefit of all of Kalijor.

The trip out of the mine was faster than the trip down. Led by the machines, laden with the first delivery of supplies, they were soon exiting the narrow mine shafts into the much more cavernous space where the industrial city of Talanor was built. Jumah’s feeling of concern lifted only slightly in the larger space as he collected his payment, along with a substantial bonus from Gimbobble for a mission well done.

As he made his way toward the gates that would lead him back into the open skies of the frigid Southern Wastes, Jumah looked across the empty space between him and the entrance to the mines with a deep sigh that suddenly caught in his throat as he saw what he swore looked like a bright green light shining in his direction. The light was there for only an instant and winked out so quickly that he wasn’t even sure if it had really been there or if it was all just a bad memory that would stay with him for a long time to come.