Tahta Bacak

Tahta Bacak ("Wooden Leg") is an inn in the dwarven city of Gromkar in the Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") campaign. Kemp Corvus, Sarah and Ephorus were told that work and the news of the city could be found there, while some of the inner inns served only particular dwarven clans.¹

The house

Its sign is a toy pony with a wooden leg. The inn is a square stone building with four entrances, a great hearth and chimney at its centre and stairs along its sides, rising some six or seven storeys with only a few rooms on each. Small traders, pedlars and wholesalers strike bargains and play dice there, and music is heard.^{2 3}

The food is that of the dwarves, built on cave mushrooms: mushroom dishes and mushroom bread, fish from underground waters and a choice of beers. By day the inn turns from gambling to drink, herb tea and talk.^{4 5 6}

The rooms where the company later fought held beds, wooden chests for belongings, a basin and cleaning things; around the chimney the windows were narrow, and an empty side room was divided off by a wooden partition.⁷

The innkeeper

The keeper is an old dwarf with spectacles and a beard full of gold ornaments, who also owns a brewery and distillery and other shops in the city, and marks their roofs as his own. He showed Sarah a cube-shaped device with a winding handle that plays and records music, saying a gnome friend had made it, and asked her to record a song in return for pay or lodging.^{8 9 10}

He also keeps a bookshop, where he offered Ephorus a newly printed travel book. He planned to have the magical door used in the inn's door-breaking game examined in the elven lands through the elven mission.^{11 12}

When the dwarves gathered on the square for the ashes of Bardin Demirkapı, the one-legged innkeeper came with his hammer like the rest, and in the war preparations that followed he gave what help he could, above all his money.¹³

The company's lodging

On the first night Ephorus won an arm-wrestling match against a dwarf companion and so paid for the dwarves' lodging.¹⁴

Sarah sang a new song about three brave dwarves' adventures on the surface, the guests set up a door-breaking game in which Ephorus ran at the door and failed to break it, and the drunken company climbed to their rooms; one of the dwarves slept across the threshold.^{15 16 17}

On one night in Gromkar the three friends went their separate ways from the inn. Kemp left it for the tavern Ejder Boku and told a new acquaintance that he could be found at Tahta Bacak.^{18 19}

A courier came for Sarah while she sang there and took her to a celebration outside the city at the invitation of the scholar Merrick Galevan; a carriage brought her back, and she sat in her room with the half-filled book of songs he had given her. Ephorus came back late from his own errands and found neither of them.^{20 21 22}

The company went on lodging there at a reduced rate. The alchemist Vincent Von Reigns came to the inn to sell them potions, and the armoured dwarf priest Godwin sought out Kemp and Sarah there to ask after their drow friend.^{23 24 25}

The night attack

At about three in the morning, while Ephorus was out, the barking of the pup Kısmet woke Kemp to five veiled drow with daggers in the room, one still climbing in at the window; Kemp and Sarah had been sleeping without armour, their weapons at hand.²⁶

Some of the attackers had poisoned their blades. The fight spilled out to the door and the stairs; soldiers smoking at the inn's door heard the cries for help and came in with swords, and the city's alarm bells began to ring.^{27 28 29}

Some of the attackers tried to flee. They had come lightly equipped, carrying poison but no money, and one was taken alive to be questioned about the drow's hiding places in the city.^{30 31 32}