A good meal and a good night’s sleep proved to be just what the Hand needed. Departing Zurhan at the last turn of the Phoenix watch, they rode a steady, sustainable pace of walk-and-canter that brought them to the gates of Kar Gevdan at the middle of the Unicorn watch, just after noon. Leaving the castle’s groomsmen to see to the care and stabling of their horses, most of the friends made their way quickly up to the Baron’s study where, his seneschal informed them, a light lunch had been laid out for them.

Devrik, however, made a beeline for the rooms set aside for his family, and an intense, if briefer than either would have liked, reunion with Raven. Afterward (and following the few minutes he allowed himself to play with his son) Devrik made his own way to his uncle’s study. He arrived just as the others were finishing their meal and preparing to get to work.

Lord Tynal recounted what little he knew, all of which turned out to be secondhand, gathered from the reports of his Captain of the City Guard– strange goings-on in the town below the castle, with strange animals appearing in the streets, rumors of ghosts and the walking dead, and several people mysteriously vanished. The only new intelligence concerned a suspicions shipping concern that might possibly be involved in moving the victims of the Darikazi slavers. Their ships and warehouse were in the Eastport Docks district, to the east of the castle and High Town, while the mysterious events, and supposed Darikazi base of operations, were both in the western Low Town.

It was decided that Haplo and the Guard captain would investigate Sheltam & Sons Shipping, while the bulk of the Hand would look into the more uncanny events in Low Town. At the fourth turn of the Wolf watch they set out on their various tasks, with the Baron’s blessing and good wishes.

Wending their way down the steep, narrow Rockfoot Lane from the High Town, headed for the Farmer’s Market, the larger group decided to split into three and approach from different streets, so as not to appear too overwhelming or intimidating a group. Mariala, Erol and young Jeb took the northern approach, whilst Toran and Korwin assayed the central passage, and Vulk, Devrik and Therok claimed the southern route.

 

The Low Town of Gevdan lay between two arms of of blue-black basalt to the east and the west. The western arm was lower, no more than 20 meters high in most places, while the eastern arm was both larger and higher – atop it’s 60 meter headland sat the castle, one wall and tower of which extended into the district. The area was dominated, however, by the great pinnacle of stone that rose up more than 40 meters from its heart . Upon its peak stood a circular tower of grey-white granite topped by crenelations and a great beacon, lit day and night by an oil-fed bonfire and a reflecting mirror of polished bronze.

The Farmer’s Market occupied a large area at the NE foot of the Lighthouse Rock, and should have been a bustling place on a springtime morning, Mariala thought. But today several booths stood empty, and the crowd was thin and nervous. Taking the lead, she set about putting the booth merchants at ease before bringing up the strange events of recent days. Most of the vendors appeared sullen and fearful, unwilling to talk. But eventually a baker proved not only willing, but downright voluble – Virnok was not shy in his complaints of the recent uncanny occurrences in the district.

“It’s bad enough that wild beasts and such have come into the town – why, two of the City Guard killed a great silver-back bear just a few days ago, not two streets from here (and didn’t they have a time of it, the creature near killed them before they managed to bring it down) – but now dark specters are prowling the streets and upsetting decent folk!”

“Specters?” Mariala asked. “Do you mean–”

“Specters I said and specters I meant!” the man continued obstinately, as if she’d been about to contradict him. “Dark specters! My own dear wife saw one just last night, and it near frightened her straight into her own grave! When a gods-loving woman can’t even get up at night to use the chamber pot without being terrorized by haunts and whatnot, well, I don’t know what things are coming to!”

“Um, yes… now, your wife–” Mariala tried to interject.

“Esmalda, a gem of a woman and a great helpmeet to me, I can tell you. She’d be here now, of course, she always is, but she was that upset by the specter. She left not a turn of the glass past, daren’t stay out now the sun is getting low!” The baker plowed on, warming to a new theme. “At least she had the heart to open with me – not like some of these jelly-knees who won’t even open their booths the last couple days. Why, all the standards have just gone to shite these days, if you’ll pardon my Khundari, and don’t get me started on the young folks–”

Mariala managed to stem this flow after a minute, and drew him back to the matter of the specter. “Well, I didn’t see it myself, of course… it had vanished by the time I’d leapt out of bed at Esmalda’s shriek – gods, that woman can scream – but she described it clear enough, once her heart stopped pounding so.

“All glowing green and transparent, she said it was… a gaunt, bearded fellow with a great helm on his head and armor beneath tattered robes. No, no, not anyone she recognized – who would she know who went around in such ironmongery in life? Probably some knight or warrior-cantor whose ashes were laid to rest beneath the temple in the old days, I should think.”

Erol was at first inclined to dismiss the man’s story, or rather the wife’s, as no more than a bit of undigested beef, but further questioning of other vendors revealed similar stories of a similar spectral figure, seen in the last tenday or so. Some said that it was a Khundari knight, others a great human warrior, although no one actually claimed to recognize it.

Several people also claimed to have seen actual walking corpses, however, and those were sometimes recognized. “Why ’twere the very corpse of that Nedor Felkin, ‘im what was killed last month by that run-away cart down to the docks!” one old woman told them breathlessly. “I saw ‘im clear as I’m seeing you, milady, from my bedroom window, when I ‘eard that poor young girl screamin’. I yelt at ‘im to let ‘er be and go back to the undertaker’s for proper burning! But he paid me no heed, and dragged ‘er into the dark, right from in front of the temple doors! ‘Twasn’t right, even if the lass was no better ‘en she should be!”

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Meanwhile, at the small park on the south edge of the market square Toran and Korwin were questioning a pig butcher and a barber who plied their respective trades there. After some general remarks about the weather and the chances of the fishing fleet having a decent catch today, it soon came out that the victim the old woman mentioned was not the only person to go missing in recent days. At least seven others had been reported by friends or neighbors to have vanished in the night over the last half tenday or so.

“I think the first one I can recall ‘earing about,” the ruddy-faced butcher said, frowning in thought when pressed on the matter,” was that n’er-do-well Bektram the Khundari. Er, meanin’ no offense to your lordship, of course…”

“None taken,” Toran replied with a dry smile.

The butcher coughed in embarrassment before continuing, “Ee does odd jobs ’round the town… mainly ‘ere in Low Town… and mostly bad repairs on metal-work, If’m honest. A surly fellow, and none to popular, yet underfoot all too often – though I can’t recall a sight of ‘im in the last tenday.”

“Well I saw him the day before the earthquake,” the barber offered. He was a tall, slender man with a surprisingly refined manner, in sharp contrast to the bluff, stocky butcher. “It was in the temple side yard. He was talking to that scruffy young fellow… I can’t remember his name… the one who’s always hanging about with one or another of those stand-offish foreigners. Anyway, the two seemed quite intent about something, until Bektram noticed me watching and dragged the boy off.”

The barber thought that the troubles in town had begun not too long after the earthquake… definitely by Saridás, though. “I hadn’t really thought about it before,” the barber said thoughtfully, “but now I wonder if that earthquake itself wasn’t the first of the troubles?”

“No, no,” the butcher disagreed, in that dismissive way only old friends can pull off. “I’m certain I first ‘eard about a missing ‘lura a day or two before the ‘quake… that blond-haired boy, it was; and old Randorf said he saw that ghost of ‘is before that.”

“I think not, you country bumpkin,” the barber disagreed amiably. “I was there when Randorf told you about seeing the spectral warrior, and it was two days after the earthquake at least…”

Korwin and Toran slipped quietly away as the two men fell into what was obviously an old and comfortable pattern of bickering. They joined Mariala and Erol, who were just passing on the street to the west of the park, and headed south toward the smaller Fishermen’s Market near the docks where they could see Devrik, Vulk and Therok.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Those three worthies had found the Fishermen’s Market to be even more anemically attended than its larger neighbor to the north. Part of that may simply have been that the fishing fleet was still out on the bay plying their trade, but the few vendors and patrons present seemed just as nervous and skittish as everyone else in the district. The first person they struck up a conversation with was the local ratter, a lucky break as he quickly proved very informative. He seemed rather an upbeat fellow, considering his profession, and he set down his wheelbarrow full of rodent corpses amiably enough when Vulk hailed him.

“It’s just as well her Ladyship isn’t here,” Therok muttered to Devrik as they peered at the pile of dead rats. The fire-mage grunted an amused agreement, while keeping a watchful eye on Brann and the ratter’s little terrier. The two dogs were circling one another and sniffing butts, and after a moment fell to playing, despite the size difference.

“So, how is business my good man?” Vulk asked heartily, leaning on his staff in a way he hoped was friendly and conversational. The man eyed his cantor’s colors a bit bemusedly, but seemed willing enough to talk, once he saw his dog was in no danger from the gentlemen’s hound.

“Well, your worship, it’s been a right windfall, truth be told, this tenday past. Or so I’d’ve said before yesterday… now I’m ‘avin’ me doubts.”

“Really? That looks like a, um, good haul,” Vulk offered, waving a hand at the man’s wheelbarrow. “Why are you having doubts?”

“Well, ser, ’cause of this!” The man reached into the pile of corpses and pulled out the body of an enormous rat. As he held it up by its tail for a proper viewing, Devrik could see that it was easily three times the size of any rat he’d ever seen. Vulk was less impressed, having once encountered the giant rats of the deep sewers of Tekolo, in the Theocracy of the Faith… but he had to allow that it was a rodent of unusual size.

“I figure the ‘quake musta shook up the usual beasties,” the ratter went on. “For awhile afterward it was a boom business, let me tell ya! But then the big ‘uns started showing up… which was fine, I suppose… they was a bit ‘arder to kill, but worth the effort. But when some buggers showed up four times bigger than this–” he raised the giant rat corpse a little higher, shaking  it for emphasis… and gave a shout of surprise and dismay when Cherdon swooped down and snatched it from his hand. Over his angry shouts the raptor soared back up to the nearest rooftop to devour his meal.

“Did you blokes see that?!” the ratter demanded of his visitors, his outrage momentarily overcoming any class consciousness. “That bloody ‘awk just stole m’ rat!”

“Er, yes,” Vulk agreed, looking blankly innocent. “Well, birds… what are you going to do? Shameless scavengers, the lot of them!” Devrik disguised his snort of laughter with a sudden cough, while Therok didn’t even try to hide his grin. “So, you were saying about these even larger rats…?”

With a disgruntled sigh, the ratter resigned himself to the loss of his rat, and continued on with his tale of rodents the size of the gentlemen’s hound. “One of ’em almost took off me ‘and last night!” he said, showing the still red welts and punctures on said appendage. Between monstrous rats, silver-back bears, and all the missing ‘luras and other night folk, it was getting too dangerous to be out after sunset, he was beginning to think…

“Last night ’twas the last straw, I’m thinking. Once I turn in the bounties for this lot,” he kicked the wheelbarrow, “I think I’ll take a few nights off…”

“Probably a good idea,” Devrik agreed. “Before you do though, could you recommend an inn or tavern nearby where a man might quench his thirst?”

“Oh, aye, you’re not far from the best place for beer on the docks, though it might be, er, a bit rustic for your lordships…” his gazed flicked to Vulk in particular. “It’s the Brass Kraken, just along the High Street there. You can’t miss it, there’s a big kraken, made ‘o brass, o’er the door…”

The three men thanked the man and made their farewells to him and his dog, Brann only reluctantly being pulled away from his new friend. As they walked up the street they paused as the rest of the Hand emerged from a northern cross street and joined them. They, too, had been directed to the Brass Kraken as the best establishment they were likely to find in Low Town, and the party repaired thence to compare notes and quench the thirst that such intense sleuthing had given them all.

The tap room of the inn was not empty, but was not nearly as full as might be expected given the afternoon hour, Devrik thought. Despite this, the service was somewhat slow, as only the proprietor and one young woman, presumably his daughter, seemed to be working. After an hour and three rounds of drinks, the debate on their next actions had degenerated into a scientific discussion on the relative merits of troll farts vs. troll belches as the primary cause of earthquakes, and whether or not Nitaran Gates required sentience to function.

Devrik, while firmly in the ‘uncertain’ column on the issue of subterranean humanoid bodily gasses and their possible relationship to earth movements, was able to definitively state that the Gates did sometimes activate spontaneously, and that people and animals were well known to pass through them, sometimes quite unknowingly. Mariala and Vulk were able to confirm this, so Vulk’s idea that the earthquake, whatever it’s ultimate cause, could not be ruled out as having triggered random Gate openings and therefore the recent flood of strange visitors.

But even if that were true, it didn’t explain the rash of ghost sightings, the walking dead, or the disappearance of seven or more of the Baron’s subjects, however lowly. Given the profession of many of the missing persons, Toran asked their host about local brothels, which brought a diffident suggestion that the gentleman might enjoy the delights of the Sow’s Silk Purse, just two streets over. A moment of confusion ensued before the man was made to understand that they were interested in the missing alura, at which point he was suddenly more congenial.

“Oh, I do beg your pardon, Ser,” he said, laying down the fourth round of drinks, a pile of wooden bowls and spoons, and the large ceramic pot of beef-and-onion stew Mariala had order in a probably futile effort to soak up some of the alcohol.

“I completely misunderstood your interest… but it wouldn’t do you any good, then, you see. The lads and lasses who sell their, er… that is, work freelance, as it were, ply their trade up in the temple side yard, as tradition dictates. So none of the proper houses of good repute would be like to know anything about them, I’m afraid.

“And my apologies again, gentlemen, lady, for the slow service this afternoon. I’ve been short-handed this six months past, ever since my tap-boy ran off to take up with those foreigners. Now Kemis was no great shakes, and I had sometimes wondered if he was worth half the trouble he caused… but he did know how to keep the beer flowing, a virtue I didn’t perhaps appreciate until it was gone, as the saying goes. With the disruption of the war I could never replace him, and now half my servers are afraid to come in, thanks to all these uncanny goings-on, well…” He shrugged apologetically and began gathering up the empty tankards and mugs.

“What’s this about foreigners?” Korwin asked sharply, grabbing the man’s sleeve to stay him. The barber had said something about foreigners too, but he’d not been able to follow up on it once the debate with the butcher had started.

“Oh, meaning no disrespect, of course,” the innkeeper assured him hastily. By the intense young man’s accent he was clearly a foreigner himself, though it was hard to place him exactly. West of the Worldspines, certainly… “Being a port town, we get folks from all over, and we’re really quite cosmopolitan –”

“Yes, I’ve no doubt,” Korwin assured him, if a tad impatiently. “No offense was taken. But tell us more of these specific foreigners, the ones your tap-boy – Kemis, you said his name was? – took up with.”

“Oh, well,” the portly man sighed, setting his tray back down and frowning. “Not much to tell really. Several men, showed up maybe half a year past… not sure from where exactly, but they sound Aruhsali to my ear. They took lodgings up near the temple, and soon enough Kemis had taken off. I assume hired to do for them… but given his slovenly habits, I’ve no idea why. I’d’ve thought some local widow might’ve served better…”

“What business do these men follow, do you know?” Vulk asked, dishing himself a second bowl of the stew, which smelled like ambrosia and tasted of paradise.

“Well, not as such, your reverence… they’ve always kept very much to themselves; usually send the boy to do the shopping and such, come to think on it. But I believe they’re about some sort of scholarly work… what I’ve seen of any of them, they seem a bit bookish… I know at least one of them makes regular visits to the old book seller. I’ve little use for books and such things myself, of course, but to each his own, as I always say.”

The only thing he could add, before insisting he had to be about his work and bustling off, was that the foreigners lodged in a building north of the temple side yard. A location that kept coming up, Vulk thought – the missing alura, the killing of the silver-back bear nearby, the conversation between the surly hobo dwarf and the renegade tap-boy, and now these mysterious foreigners…

A suggestion was made that maybe they should lay a trap that night in the temple side yard – either Mariala all tarted up, or perhaps Vulk in drag, since he was prettier. The cantor pointed out there was no need for that, as both men and women worked the trade, and some of both had been taken… and besides, he wasn’t shaving his goatee! After a few more desultory sallies of wit the idea was tabled, at least until they’d had a chance to investigate the area… something they should probably do while the daylight lasted.

After polishing off the last of the amazing stew, the group had barely stepped into the street when the sound of distant shrieks and screams brought them instantly alert. The commotion seemed to be coming from the north, the direction of the Farmers Market. They set off at a run and soon encountered a score of panicked citizens fleeing south. The reason became obvious as they entered the plaza – an enormous black cat, sleek, beautiful and deadly looking, was padding silently through the stalls, ignoring the fleeing humans, mostly. Instead her brilliant green eyes were fixed on the little park – and the butcher’s milling pigs!

Erol was in the lead, and he rushed the panther with his net. He feinted left then, as the claws swiped out, released the net to the right, entangling the creature’s head and front claws in its mesh. As the big cat snarled and twisted about, trying to free herself, Mariala squeezed between Therok and Vulk to cast Fire Nerves on it. With a yowl the big cat collapsed to the pavement, writhing and mewling piteously for several seconds before slipping into merciful unconsciousness.

By the time Toran and Therok had the creature hog-tied and muzzled the City Guard arrived in the person of four sweaty, slightly worried looking men-at-arms. They seemed instantly relieved to find that someone had already dealt with the problem, but quickly reverted to worried when they were told to take the still very much alive beast up to the castle and find some secure place to keep it for the time being.

As three of the Guardsmen hefted the still groggy cat, Erol then began to track the panther back along its path, uphill to the north. Although he lost the certain trail around the still blood-stained cobbles where the silver-back had been killed, there was little doubt the big cat had come from, or at least through, the temple side yard. The bear, too, had been in the side yard as proven by the single footprint Toran discovered in a patch of thin grass and damp, clayey soil.

The group decided to split their efforts again. Toran, Vulk and Therok headed north, to the building where they hoped to find the mysterious foreigners lodging. It was, not incidentally, also the direction all these unusual animals seemed to be coming from. The rest of the party followed Korwin into the Temple of Tyvos, where he had already gone to pay his respects to his patron, the Immortal Lord of the Seas. Erol briefly checked out a glass shop on the east side of the yard, called the House of Pane, before joining the others in the temple.

As they approached it Toran could see that the two story stone and timber structure on the north side of the temple side yard was actually two buildings, sharing a common courtyard. A narrow passage between the buildings led, via an iron gate from the street, to the courtyard. The gate was hanging open as they approached, swinging slightly in the spring breeze off the bay. Toran pointed out the tufts of coarse brown bear fur caught on a rough patch of the iron bars to Vulk, and they proceeded cautiously into the narrow alley.

The door to the larger building, on their right, was also wide open, and Vulk called out a hail. There was no answer. Toran moved past him into the small courtyard, knocking on the two doors of the western building, then peering into windows when he got no response. All three residences seemed empty.

Therok bringing up the rear, the three men stepped cautiously through the open door of the eastern house and into a modest, if well-appointed, study/living room. It was a strange mixture of academic and slovenly, as if a brilliant but careless student lived there… or several scholars and a wastrel youth, perhaps?

There were books everywhere, on a range of subjects, from geography to Khundari history, metaphysics to navigation. Spread over a large desk were sheets of cheap paper covered in calculations of the most arcane sort. Scattered amongst and over almost everything were dirty clothes, plates of dried food, and at least two empty bottles of wine.

There was a small kitchen off the main room, and stairs up to the second floor, but between them stood a doorway into a storage area. It was this that immediately drew their attention, as a trap door could be seen within, open against the far wall. More arresting was the fact that the door to the room had been shattered into flinders. As if a great beast had forced its way through…

“Looking at these marks around the opening,” Toran said, crouching down to examine the trap door, “I’d say the bear actually came up these stone stairs from the cellar and then clawed its way out of the room. The panther came afterward, obviously…”

Vulk and Therok stared dubiously down into the darkness below and then at the dwarf. Toran shrugged. “It’s what the evidence suggests, odd as it seems.”

“It’s not that,” Vulk said with a short laugh. “I’ve no doubt you’re right. It’s just I’m not too sure about following this trail any further on our own. It’s one thing to split the party for a little light reconnaissance around town, but…”

“Oh, well, I suppose you’re right,” Toran sighed. “We should probably go fetch the others… although I’m sure we’d be fine, and I’m cursed curious about how these animals are getting here… it must be some sort of portal or gate, as you first suggested, Vulk, but…” With a shrug he his friend chivy him back out of the empty house and towards the temple.

When the others had entered the vast, shadowy silence of the temple they’d found Korwin at the main alter, making whatever silent communion with his patron Immortal as was his custom. Mariala, moved by the grandure of the place, and the beautiful patterns the westering sun sent through the stained glass, stepped into the niche set aside for her own Immortal patron, Shala, to offer up her own thoughts and devotion.

Devrik, after convincing Brann to sit outside the temple’s main doors and be a good boy, entered and found the somewhat larger alcove devoted to Cael and made his own obeisance. By the time Erol and Jeb had made their way into the sanctum the others were finishing their devotions and beginning to look around. They all found it odd that no one seemed to be attending to the temple… even with all the uncanny activity that seemed centered on it, surely its religious custodians wouldn’t;t abandon it…

Mariala was thinking about going upstairs, where no doubt the high cantor had his office and perhaps other functionaries might be found, when her attention was drawn by a sound coming from the stairway leading down into the crypts. Stepping to the head of the stairs she peered down into the dimness… torches must be lit in the crypts, because all was not pitch black. In fact she could see four small red lights…

Creeping up the stone stairs were the two largest rats she had ever seen — each one was almost as large as Brann, and their feral eyes gleamed red and malevolent in the dimness. It took a moment for her brain to process what it was seeing, and when it did, it froze up entirely – adrenaline flooded her body and every muscle locked up, while her mind simply went white as her life-long phobia seized her.

As the nearest dire rat leapt for her throat Mariala finally let out a piercing shriek of horror and her body unfroze just enough for her to throw up her arm in defense. The vicious rodent sank its teeth into the hardened kurbul of her vambrace, and its rear claws shredded her tunic but failed to find purchase against the acid-washed kurbul cuirass she wore beneath it.

She tried to fling the creature from her, but it clung, and its stench filled her nostrils as it clawed at her… it was simply too much for her over-loaded brain… she just shut down. As Mariala collapsed to the flagstones, however, the immense rodent lost its grip on her vambrace and rolled away. But it was back on its feet in an instant, preparing to leap again for her throat.

Erol, only a few feet behind Mariala when she screamed, lunged forward with his trident in hand as she collapsed. Standing over her prone form as the rat scrabbled for traction on the stone floor he skewered it, flinging its body away behind him and nearly hitting Jeb. While he didn’t share Mariala’s crippling fear of rodents, he had come to loath them during his time as an enslaved gladiator, and that hatred combined with his sudden fear for her well-being to drive his fury.

The second rat managed to evade his next thrust, but it failed to dodge Grover, who leapt from Erol’s shoulder onto the immense rodent, savaging it’s throat. The creature died, but not without exacting a price – in it’s death throes its rear claws raked the ferret’s side, drawing blood and causing him to limp back to Erol and curl up in his pack, licking his wounds.

Erol would’ve loved to take the time to tend to his friend’s wounds, but already another of the huge dire rats had appeared, and by the sound of it more were swarming up the stairs behind it. Korwin impaled that next beast on his Frost Blade, while Erol skewed the one behind, but more were coming…

Vulk, who had arrived via a side door with Toran and Therok just in time to see Mariala go down, rushed forward to lean over the carved wooden railing above the stairs. He aimed the Staff of Summer downward and the glowing, milky strands of the Weaver’s Web shot out, filling the stairwell with scores of binding ropes, ensnaring another five of the slavering creatures.

The rodents snapped and hissed, struggling to free themselves, but they had no leverage and the strands resisted their teeth. Vulk considered what to do next… they really needed to investigate the crypts he supposed, and they did make a nasty roadblock to that end…

“Say, Devrik,” the cantor called suddenly, tuning to his friend, who was just helping a pale, groggy Mariala back to her feet. “Think you could give us a little fire over here.”

Devrik, passing the still shaken Mariala off to Vulk for medical attention, stepped to the head of the stares and peered down at the writhing mass of trapped dire rats and grinned as he caught his friend’s meaning. The flickering flame in a nearby presence lamp was all the seed he needed for his pyrokinesis to feed off of, and a small sphere of fire appeared above his open palm. With a flick he sent it flying into the midst of the faintly glowing tangle of giant rats.

As they’d found in the hamlet of Hart’s Lodge, the strands burst into sudden flame, eventually burning away – but not before immolating all of the ensnared rodents. The stench of burning rat fur and flesh was unpleasant, but in a very short time Devrik was able to kick the smoking corpses off the stairs, clearing the path into the crypts. Any other dire rats that might have been lurking below seemed to have taken the warning and fled.

Mariala, however, having regained her composure and gotten a grip on her phobia, was reluctant to go down to the lower level until she was absolutely assured there was no more immediate evidence of even so much as a mouse visible. When she finally made her way down, with Erol and Jeb bringing up the rear, she saw that Devrik had missed one burned rat corpse. She viscously kicked the smoldering body off the steps, sending it flying into the dimness, before continuing down with some grim satisfaction.

The crypt of the Temple of Tyvos was one vast open cruciform space, upheld by a dozen pillars of stone carved in a stylized wave motif, and dimly lit by a half-dozen bronze braziers filled with slow-burning sea peat. Eleven elaborate stone sarcophagi were scattered about, and the walls were lined with scores of bronze plates marking burial niches.

At the north end was an area enclosed by three walls, tiled with beautiful mosaics, and housing a large stone statue on a marble plinth. According to the inscription carved on it, this was the final resting place of, and eternal memorial to, the great cleric who had founded the temple and oversaw its construction 140 years ago. It also appeared to have been used more recently as a lair for creature or creatures unknown – bones, both old and well-gnawed and quite fresh ones with bits of meat still on them, littered the floor.

Korwin, trying to determine where the bones had come from through the use of his psychometry talent, became quite convinced the older bones had belonged to a show girl named Lola who’d worked at a cabaret named… the Cobra? The Cobra’s Bandana?… anyway, the hottest spot north of Sydora… sometime around the turn of the last century…

The others exchanged meaningful glances (and the odd eye-roll) when he shared this intelligence, and went on about the business of searching the crypts for secret passages, mysterious glowing portals, or other such subtle clues.

It was a full turn of the glass before the Hand found the thing they were looking for – in the shadows of the northwest corner of the crypts, behind a particularly large and ornate sarcophagus, a section of the foundation had been cracked and partially collapsed. The breach looked new, no doubt a result of the recent earthquake, as Toran agreed (his eye-rolling was getting a workout today) when Erol suggested it. The resultant opening was just large enough for a grown man to squeeze through, after squeezing by the sarcophagus first.

“Well, the panther might have gotten through this,” Korwin said, eyeing the hole dubiously and rubbing his temples. The psychometry attempt had given him a headache. “But there’s no way a silver-back bear got through there. There must be another way to the surface…”

“Oh, there is,” Vulk and Toran said simultaneously. The Khundari gestured for the cantor to continue. “We didn’t get a chance to mention it, with all the excitement and Mariala fainting and all.” Mariala cast him dark look, but said nothing.

“We were coming to get you all,” Vulk went on, oblivious. “We found the house the foreigners were renting, we think… it was certainly where the bear and panther, at least, came from. Up from the cellar, actually. Maybe we should – Hey!”

That last was directed at Erol who, impatient with all the milling about jaw boning and anxious to see where the hole in the wall led, had squeezed past the sarcophagus and was just vanishing into the dark gap. With a shrug Toran followed, and one by one the others did as well, Vulk invoking Fortune’s Light on everyone.

The gap in the foundation opened into one of the main sewer lines of the town. The fading light of the setting sun cast the shadow of a street grating above them onto the surface of the murky waters of the drainage channel. The smell was not as bad as it might have been, the spring rains having kept things flowing relatively recently. The arched walls and ceiling of crumbling brick were damp and covered in patches of dark moss.

A raised walkway allowed the party to keep their feet dry and relatively clean as they followed Erol single-file while he tracked the spoor of some large rats. The party hadn’t gone far when they suddenly encountered a pack of living rats in the odoriferous flesh – not the terrifyingly large dire rats, true, but giant rats nonetheless, clearly close cousins of the one the ratter had shown them (and Cheron had dined on).

Their eyes gleaming a feral red in the dim light, the rats paused as they saw the group — and then began a mad, chittering rush forward. Erol managed to get off one arrow, skewering the lead rat, which slowed the others only momentarily. But that was all his companions needed.

Toran cast Stavin’s Arrow and killed two of the nearer rats with the translucent bolts of force. Mariala, again in iron control of her phobia, was nonetheless staying far enough back that her Fire Nerves only managed to fell three of the creatures – although she was gratified to see them collapse twitching into the filthy water, where they would no doubt drown.

Devrik finished off the pack with an Orb of Vorol hurled into their midst. Two of the rats closest to the fiery orb simply exploded in superheated balls of flaming body parts. The remaining giant rats either burned to death in a more conventional manner or died in the searing cloud of vaporized sewer water that engulfed them.

Unbeknownst to the Hand, a hunting pack of a dozen Taloxta, silently approaching from the darkness of a smaller nearby tunnel, had witnessed the demise of their rivals and, in a rare display of intelligence, decided that they weren’t really that hungry after all… so many tempting eyes notwithstanding. They slunk off into the dark, and so lived to torment other victims another day.

After a brief and fruitless foray to the north, whence came the giant rats, the group turned south again and soon came upon a short, narrow corridor that led to a half rotting wooden door, ajar. The small chamber beyond appeared once to have been home to a down-on-their-luck itinerant or two, although now nothing but two moldering beds and a half-rotted chest remained.

More interesting was the collapsed section of wall in the southwest corner of the room. This damage looked older than the damage to the temple’s foundation – at least a year, Toran estimated after crouching down to study the fall of stone and dirt. He also peered into the fairly large tunnel that sloped down into darkness… although it wasn’t quite dark, now was it?

While Toran studied the damaged wall and the tunnel beyond it, Erol, who had quickly decided that the room held nothing of interest, at least to him, had returned to the corridor and continued south. Most of the others, finding the room equally uninteresting, shrugged and followed him. Only Devrik and Korwin remained, the former to watch his Khundari friend’s back, the latter to make absolutely sure that old chest didn’t hold any secrets. Or valuables. Or valuable secrets…

When Toran finally turned back to his companions he was briefly surprised to see the others were gone… but in his excitement barely gave it a thought. “Devrik, come here, you have to see this!” he called, gesturing urgently at the tunnel. “There’s a pulsing light down here!” Warily, Devrik moved up beside his friend, discreetly checking to make sure he wasn’t somehow ensorcelled by this suspicious light. Korwin, finally giving up on his fruitless search of the rotting chest, joined them.

“Look, all this dirt has been well tamped down,” Toran pointed out. “A great many feet – booted feet – have trod this tunnel. And several animals, too, more recently… see, there’s the print of a big cat… and the tunnel is big enough for a bear, certainly. But look down the tunnel… see that pale white light that seems to flicker from around that first bend?”

Devrik glanced cautiously down the dark passage, and did indeed see a faint glow once his eyes adjusted. It didn’t seem particularly enchanting, so that was good. Korwin also saw the light, and was immediately on board with the ninja-dwarf’s suggestion that they investigate, scoffing at Devrik’s reluctance to split the party.

“Oh, the others will come back soon enough,” the water-mage urged. “It’s not like they’ll find another glowing mystery light, or anything else half so interesting, wherever they’ve gone. Once they get tired of roaming the sewers they’ll figure out where we’ve gone quick enough, and follow right on.”

Despite his misgivings, Toran’s intensity and Korwin’s enthusiasm combined with Devrik’s own strongly itching curiosity, and he gave in. Probably there was nothing too untoward down there any way, and they’d likely be back before the rest of the gang returned… what’s the worst that could happen?

♦ ♦ ♦ 

It was barely a score of meters down the southern branch of the sewer line that Erol, Mariala, Vulk and the minions did, in fact, come upon something rather more interesting than a mysteriously glowing light in a hole in the ground. A large section of the sewer wall had recently collapsed, and the gap thus created revealed a moderately large chamber beyond – a chamber that appeared to be a very old Khundari burial chamber.

Clambering up the large pile of fresh rubble that half choked the sewer, then down into the chamber, they found that they hardly needed the goddess-given sight of Vulk’s ritual – the room appeared to be suffused with a faint greenish glow, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. Four distinctive Khundari sarcophagi were set in small niches around the room, and four carved pillars upheld a central dome. But it was a larger sarcophagus in an alcove in the north wall – almost a small room of its own, really – that drew their attention. The stone coffin was made of matte black basalt and was covered in arcane symbols and runic text.

“This is an ancient version of the runic alphabet,” Mariala said, peering at the large words spelled out on the side, but not moving from the center of the main chamber. “But if I’m reading this right… let’s see… yes, this is the tomb of someone named Kordäth… the… Bleakheart? It also seems to be a warning… and those symbols are defiantly wards of some–”

Before she could finish her sentence the sound of grinding stone-on-stone filled the fetid air as the lid of the sarcophagus slowly slid aside. Jeb and Therok both stepped back, subtly shifting to place themselves behind their principals, as a ghoulish figure sat up and began to pull itself out of the sarcophagus. It appeared to be a gaunt, white bearded Kundari, dressed in ragged, once-rich robes, beneath which pitted and corroded armor could be seen. It glowed with a sickly green aura, and the stink of the grave was on it.

There was nothing spectral or translucent about the figure, however, and as soon as its feet were planted on the stone flags of the floor it drew a wicked looking black dagger from its belt. It began to stalk slowly toward the party, it’s glowing green eyes mesmerizing, a greedy gleam flickering in the depths…

Mariala felt a sudden lashing of malevolent force against her mental shields, and she recoiled in distaste. In the brief instant of contact, before she repelled the creature’s attempt at domination, she experienced something of its mind – thoughts of rage and betrayal… buried alive, but sustained by an indomitable will and… a connection to… some great force… long centuries of imprisonment… rage banked to embers, but never wholly dying… sudden freedom, at last! And a terrible thirst… a thirst for the life of others…

“I don’t know what this thing is,” she warned the others. “I don’t sense the Shadow within it, thank Shala… but nevertheless, I think it would be an extraordinarily bad idea to let it touch you!”

Vulk, even more familiar with the cold nothingness of the Shadow, was greatly relieved himself to get no sense of it radiating from the creature —but he was taking no chances. Once again he summoned up the Weaver’s Web, filling the mouth of the alcove with glowing strands from side-to-side and floor-to-ceiling, imprisoning the horrifying undead dwarf.

His feeling of satisfaction was fleeting as a shriek from Jeb, followed by a slightly more manly bellow of fear from Therok, caused him to whirl around. Two skeletal knights, chests and skulls glowing with a brilliant green light from within, lumbering toward the group from behind.

As Jeb fumbled to nock an arrow and Therok grabbed for his sword, Erol leaped past Vulk to thrust his trident at the nearest skeleton. It’s pitted sword knocked the shaft down enough to avoid a blow to the spine, but its legs became entangled in the weapon’s tines and it stumbled to the ground with a clatter of rusted armor.

Marila, meanwhile, had whipped up her cross-bow, kept (like her nerves) on a hair trigger since they’d entered the temple crypt, and fired off a bolt at the second skeleton that was reaching for a shaking, wide-eyed Jeb. The iron shaft pierced the base of the spine, shattering it to dust. This seemed to break whatever unholy magic was animating the thing, and the undead horror collapsed with a clatter into a pile of bones and corroded armor. The sickly green light at its core quickly faded into nothingness.

Vulk aimed his staff at the first skeleton as it staggered back to its feet and let loose a flight of Stavin’s Arrows. The translucent force bolts seemed to have little effect, however, and the creature swung a surprisingly swift blow at Erol, who countered with his trident. This time he plunged the weapon into the verdigris light of the undead thing’s chest. Ribs shattered and the spine snapped, and it joined its companion as just another pile of decaying bones and rusted armor, its own green glow fading away.

The heroes were allowed no breathing room, however, as they turned once more to find Therok engaged with the revenant Kordäth, who had made short work of Vulk’s webs, slashing through them with his black dagger as if they were spider webs in truth. The barbarian retainer had been the first to notice, and had dashed forward to place himself between the creature and Mariala’s back.

His sword parried the blow aimed at his heart, but as the slashing blade slid aside Kordäth twisted it, managing to drive it into B-Fiddy-five’s calf. The barbarian staggered back with a yell, his leg giving out and dropping him to the floor. The undead Khundari reached one leathery, desiccated hand out toward him…

Mariala’s Fire Nerves struck the undead warrior full in the head… to no effect, beyond drawing its malevolent gaze toward her. She felt the draining cold of its mental assault on her shields again, but had no trouble deflecting it once again.

The delay had been enough to give Jeb time to loose the arrow he’d finally nocked and drawn. It flew true, straight for the ghoul’s head – only to be snatched from the air by the creature’s leathery hand, just centimeters from its left eye. With a malevolent grin the thing snapped the shaft in two and turned its cold gaze toward the young archer.

Before it could launch a psychic attack on the boy, however, Erol was on it with his trident, slashing and jabbing, forcing the revenant to dodge and twist, with surprising agility, and parry with its glittering black dagger.

At that point the undead thing that had once been Kordäth made a tactical error. It turned its back on Mariala to focus on the tall Telnori warrior, representative of an ancient enemy which its black soul remembered well. It dodged another feint, and then went in for a counterstrike, the wicked sharp edge of the obsidian dagger, glinting in the unnatural light of the crypt, barely missing Erol’s face.

The crossbow bolt took the undead warrior in the back of the head, piercing the skull with a sound like a mirror cracking, the iron shaft exiting though Kordäth’s open mouth. With a psychic wail that only Mariala heard the green light faded from its eyes even as Erol watched, the nimbus surrounding the body and filling the room dimming to nothing. As quickly as that, the revenant spirit was gone.

“Where the Void are the others?” Vulk asked as he invoked the Besssing of Kasira over the remains of all three of the former undead, now hopefully really and truly dead. He really hated the undead, and generally preferred a lot more backup than this when facing them…

“Hmmm, I guess it’s not such a good idea to split the party,” Erol said diffidently, wiping the gristly gore from his trident and checking on Grover, who was doing well, nibbling on his Baylorium®-infused Ferret Treat™ in his nest in his master’s pack. “Although I think we did rather well on our own… mostly.”

Therok, who was being helped back to his feet by Mariala, gave the former gladiator a narrow-eyed look, but said nothing. Vulk bent to tend to his gashed calf while Mariala turned to look out the collapsed wall into the sewer. Still currently-rat-free she noted, and sighed.

“I suppose we should head back and find the others…”

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Toran, Devrik and Korwin made their way down the mysterious tunnel to find themselves in what looked like an even more mysterious ancient Khundari chamber (easily 2,000 years old, by Toran’s estimate). Most of the walls had collapsed long ago (only the rubble-strewn tunnel they’d entered through looked fresh), leaving only a three cubic meter open space. In that space a column of shifting white light rose from floor to ceiling.

They all assumed it was a portal, of course, and this was confirmed almost at once. Appearing as if through a glowing fog, another panther, this one male, had materialized from the column. It stalked out of the shimmering light, giving them no more than a wary glance, and quickly disappeared up the tunnel.

Once again, at Toran’s excited insistence and Korwin’s relentless badgering, Devrik let his common sense be overruled. But not so far as to fail all basic precautions – before they plunged into the mysterious portal he wrote a note for the others on one of Mariala’s entangled papers. For good measure he left the original near the mouth of the tunnel, using a bit of rubble for a paper weight.

Then they’d stepped through…

… and out of a hazy white light to find themselves on a circular stone platform about 10 meters across. At the center of the platform, now behind them, rose the column of milky white light from which they’d just stepped. It was centered in a circle of what looked like melted, twisted and fused metal, three meters in diameter. Within the column’s light faint whorls of shifting, pale colors could be seen slowly writhing and curling in on themselves, like smoke from a pipe.

But what grabbed the attention almost instantly, was the fact that the platform was floating in the air very far above the ground… and the ground was the bottom of an immense spherical cavern perhaps 200 meters in diameter. A diffuse gray light filled the immense space, revealing three other identical platforms floating in the air nearby, each one, like their own, connected to a much larger circular platform between and below them by short flights of stairs. The large central platform was more than 30 meters across, the stairs that connected it to its satellite platforms spaced even around its rim, and the whole assembly floating uncannily at the center of the immense space.

The stonework of all five platforms looked old and worn, Toran noted, with a hint of scorch marks over large patches of the surfaces. The edges of the platforms were jagged and crumbling, and the stairs were in particularly bad shape. The shattered remnants of what may have been a circular walkway that once connected the outer platforms floated in a slowly orbiting ring around the  large platform.  The whole construction had an air of very great age… and an indefinable aura of long abandonment.

Each of the satellite platforms had its own central column of shimmering light, while the larger platform did not. At its center was a slowly rotating disk of matte black stone (basalt, Toran absently noted to his friends) into which sigils of glowing white light were etched. Around the perimiter of this disk was a band of shiny non-rotating black stone (obsidian, Toran observed in passing) that was etched with silver-inlaid runes. Runes of the very most ancient Khundari form.

“I think I might know where we are,” the Shadow Warrior said, almost too low to hear. A thrill of excitement and awe ran up his spine, and he shivered. “I think this is… the Fane of Gheas!”

“The what of who, now?” Korwin asked after a moment of blank silence. Devrik winced and swatted him upside the head, giving Toran an apologetic eye roll.

“The Fane of Gheas,” Toran repeated in annoyance, as the wonder of the moment slipped away. “It is a legend of my people, almost a myth I would’ve said. But this is so much as it’s described in the tales of the ancient world, tales I learned as a child…

“Tells us about it,” Devrik encouraged, as Korwin rubbed his head.

“During the time of the Codominion, when Khundari, Umantari, Telnori and the Immortals all lived together in harmony and peace, before the coming of the Demon Plague and the tragedy of the Demon’s Fist, during the time of the building of the Eight Cities of the Dwarves –”

“Yes, yes, it was a long time ago,” Korwin interrupted nervously. He really didn’t like heights, and even thought they weren’t that close to the edge… “Can we move it along?”

Toran stared at his companion for a moment, resisting the urge to put a throwing star into his shoulder. But he sensed the other man’s discomfort with their position and his jangled nerves, and with a sigh he let it go.

“So, the Fane of Gheas was said to have been built in that age, a master work of the Khundari priests of our Great God Gheas, made with His blessing and guidance. It was said to be a spatial nexus connecting many different places on, above, and beneath the world, by a method unrelated to the naturally occurring Nitaran Gates. Some say it could even connect to other worlds and dimensions, but that always seemed to me to be too fantastical…”

“Well, this seems pretty fantastical already,” Devrik growled, a little awed himself by the immense structure… and its unnerving defiance of gravity. “So I’m not discounting anything. But where in the world was – is – this Fane of yours? Where are we?”

“No idea… and no one knows,” Toran said with a shrug. “Only the most outrageous of the tales ever claimed to know where the Fane was located, some even claiming it wasn’t in our world at all. But whatever the truth, the secret of its physical location was known only to the founding priests of the Dha’ghean Khor sect. Through the centuries that and their successor brothers acted as “ferrymen,” of sorts, for travelers they deemed worthy to use the Paths of Gheas, whether individuals or small armies. It was also known as the Eye of the World–”

“What the Void is that?” Korwin interrupted again, grasping Toran’s shoulder and pointing to the platform directly opposite theirs. In the pillar of light at the center of that platform a figure had begun flickering in and out of sight – it appeared to be a Khundari, his face twisted in a rictus of fear or pain. Even as they focused on him, however, he faded away altogether…

“Huh!” Toran said with a surprised grunt, and immediately headed for the shattered steps down to the central platform, pausing only to pull a stick of charcoal from his scrip and mark “their” platform. Leaping down the steps he barely seemed to notice the crumbling stone, the gaps, or the 100 meter drop they revealed, moving as nimbly over them as if on a grand staircase in a ballroom… the benefits of a ninja education.

Korwin, on the other hand, very much noticed the gaps and the extremely dubious condition of the stairs. Moving to follow the dwarf, he paused with a jerk at the first step. But under Devrik’s sardonic smirk, he flushed, gathered his resolve, and… staggered was really the only word for it, the fire-mage decided… down the stairs.

While Devrik held his position on the high ground, Toran went right around the central basalt disk on the main platform, while Korwin went left – neither was prepared to risk those arcane glyphs without knowing more. Just as they came abreast of the stairs to the two intermediary satellite platforms the pillars of light on those two, as well as on the one ahead, shifted from white to a pulsing pastel, each one a different color. Devrik glanced behind himself, but the pillar they’d enter via remained a soft white, with only swirling hints of pastel colors in its depth.

Toran, glancing up to his right, was arrested by the sight of something emerging from the violet glow of the pillar there. As it stepped into focus, he found his battle-axe in his hands reflexively. The thing was perhaps the most hideous abomination of life he’d ever witnessed – a mass of writhing tentacles and scores of eyes of varying sizes and colors forming its central mass, which was upheld by two tree trunk-like legs, themselves made up of entwined tentacles. The body, if it could be said to have one, was an electric blue, fading to a translucent, pustulant green at the tips of the upper tentacles; the legs were a dark brown.  

The creature immediately spied Toran, and with a weird, wet ululation began to lumber, with surprising speed and grace, down the crumbling stairs towards him. Holding his battle-axe in one hand the Shadow Warrior gestured with the other and sent an almost-invisible flight of Stavin’s Arrows into the writhing abomination. The magical bolts struck its center of mass, the thing shrieking and falling apart as if each tentacle was a separate entity.

The pieces struck directly by the attack withered and died quickly, but the rest began to writhe about blindly for a moment. But within seconds they began to wriggle and squirm their way towards one another; in another few seconds they began to reform, twisting together once more to form a hideous whole.

Just as the transformation was nearing completion, however, Devrik’s Orb of Vorol, hurled from his own platform, struck the writhing abomination dead center. The reassembling pieces instantly flew apart again, this time with much greater force and in flames. The burning pieces of twisted flesh mostly plunged over either side of the stairs, raining down on the cavern floor far below like some hideous meteor shower.

With an acknowledging wave to Devrik, Toran re-stowed his weapon and resumed his jog over to the far platform, mounting its shattered steps as easily as he’d come down the first set. He had only to wait a moment before the colors of the three columns, including the one he now stood by, shifted back to white. Seconds after they did the shadowy form of the Khundari appeared again… it grew as if rushing towards him from a great distance, then flickered in and out of sight, never quite gone but never quite there…

Just as Korwin made his queasy way up to join Toran, the trapped Dwarf seemed to notice them. His expression changed from fear and pain to one of desperate hope. His mouth moved, but at first they could hear nothing, and the hand he reached out, although appearing solid, moved through Toran’s grasp as if made of smoke.

A few words became audible, but as if from a great distance. “…blood of a… Kundari… must take the…” There were gaps, though, where they saw the lips move but heard no sound, and the figure seemed to pulse in and out of phase with reality. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, the mysterious figure was gone, receding away again… but not completely, Toran realized. He could still see the faintest, ghostly hint of the man. A moment later, another cycle of colors began pulsing through the three active columns, eventually settling into three new shades. Through it all he could just make out the trapped figure, so translucent as to be almost invisible, and seeming both very distant and immediately present.

“I think I know what we need to do,” Korwin cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted across to Devrik. Fortunately sound seemed to carry well in the strange, dead air of the immense cavern, and the fire-mage had no trouble understanding him. “We need Toran to cut himself – a good cut right across his palm is probably best – and drip his Khundari blood into that central sigil, in the middle there. I think…”

Toran paid no particular attention to his friend, focused as he was on watching the pillar of light, waiting for the cycle to begin again. While the Imperial went on about his theory of Dwarven blood being needed to operate the Fane of Gheas Toran readied himself…

When the imprisoned Khundari, who he was fairly certain was the probably clan-less derelict Bektam, made his next phase back towards reality, he was ready. When the man seemed as solid as himself, when his words were audible, if distant, he shot a hand out to grasp the other’s arm. For an instant he felt an almost solid touch… but even as the sensation registered it was gone and he held nothing but misty light.

He’d tried to read Bektam’s lips, but the phasing flicker seemed to blur him around the edges and he could make out nothing. A few different words came through, but were little more help… “pure blood… sigil of… four-fold path…” It was so frustratingly close to being clear, he felt the answer was hanging just out of his grasp, like the delicious peacock tail fungi of old Farmer Mhyklop, growing from the ceilings of the cultivation caves.

He was torn from his thoughts by a warning from Devrik – something was coming through the portal from Gevdan Town…

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Erol, Marila, Vulk and the rest returned to the sad little bedroom off the main sewer line to find it empty, their friends nowhere to be found. Erol, checking for tracks, seemed certain that a large cat, at least as large as the panther they’d encountered early, had come through the room. But as there was no blood, and it was unlikely that such an animal could have bested all three of the men in any case, it was dismissed as irrelevant.

“But the tracks come from this tunnel,” he concluded. “And it looks like our friends went down the tunnel… before the cat came up, in fact. I just can’t believe they’d go down there without us.”

“Perhaps they had a good reason,” Mariala said, frowning. “Still, I’d expect Devrik, at least to – oh!” A sudden inspiration struck, and she reached into her scrip for her entangled parchment. Sure enough, there was one of Devrik’s with his surprisingly beautiful handwriting visible. It explained what they’d found and what they were doing.

“No, no good reason at all,” she sighed, handing the note to Erol to read. He snorted and handed it to Vulk, but the cantor waved it away with a distracted motion.

“Wait, I’m getting something… Cherdon is trying to… oh! I see what he’s trying to tell me… ” he smiled as he came out of his semi-trance. “I think we need to wait a few minutes before we follow the others. Jeb, Therok, I think you should head back to the surface…”

♦ ♦ ♦

Haplo made his way down from Kar Gevdan at a brisk pace. His mission to the High Town and the Eastport docks had proved both long and fruitless. The shippers had turned out to be no more dishonest than any successful merchant, and after extensive questioning and a very thorough searching of their various holdings, almost certainly not in league with Darikazi slavers. Or spies.

The one irregularity he’d stumbled across, the smuggling of a certain illicit substance from Pangonia, was so minor, in his eyes, that it seemed unfair to call them on it under the circumstances. The rather uptight Guard captain might have felt differently, but he’s missed the clue and Haplo saw no need to direct his attention toward it.

The younger of the Sheltam sons had been present and had blanched when he’d realized what Haplo had found. And had then shot the young mage a deeply grateful look when he’d realized he was going to let it pass – a byplay that, once again, the captain failed to note. Nor did he see the small pouch that was slipped to his companion as they were leaving the shipper’s offices to return to the castle.

Having made their negative report to the lord Baron, the captain had returned to his wife and home for supper, while Haplo had declined Lord Tynal’s invitation to dine. He was hungry, certainly, but decided to try and find the others. Perhaps they’d discovered a decent inn during their afternoon’s investigation, and he could hear all about their findings over a meal and tankard or two. And now he had something to share for afters, as it turned out.

The sun was already near the horizon when he reached the Low Town, and he was grateful for the torch the Baron’s seneschal had insisted he take. He lit it now with his flint and steel, and set out to find his friends. A few questions of the locals, and some garbled tales of giant black cats and magical nets, led his to the side yard of the local temple devoted to the Sea God Tyvos.

He was just casting about, trying to decide where to check next, when Vulk’s familiar, the sleek and beautiful peregrine falcon Cherdon, had dropped down onto his shoulder. Momentarily startled, he’d relaxed once he’d recognized the bird – and then had the sudden realization that Vulk might be looking at him through those too-intelligent black eyes. When it motioned with its head toward the temple, he took the hint.

At the temple doors he found Brann, Devrik’s good natured hound, dozing with his head resting forlornly on his paws. The beast leaped up when he smelled Haplo, and seemed pleased at a familiar scent, if not that of one of his own people. Man and dog followed the raptor into the temple, where they ran into Jeb and Therok coming up the wide stone steps from the crypt…

♦ ♦ ♦

As Vulk, Mariala, Haplo, and Erol stepped through the light and out onto the floating platform, they suffered the same sense of awe and vertigo that their friends had experienced earlier. They explained that they had left Jeb and Therok behind, with orders to report all they’d done and learned to the Baron if none of them had returned by the end of the Cat watch. But Cherdon and Brann were with them, and Grover was still comfortably ensconced in Erol’s pack.

The raptor took immediately to the air, and seemed to enjoy the strange open-and-yet-enclosed space. Brann seemed uneasy and stayed close to Devrik, who thumped his side reassuringly. Grover peered over the mouth of his pack, glanced around, and went back to sleep.

Once the people had acclimated themselves to the wonder of the Fane, and been told of the dangers (they all peered over the edge to look at the small, smoking dots that were the remains of the writhing abomination), they began to brainstorm the puzzle of freeing the trapped Khundari. They all agreed he was probably the mystery-Dwarf Bektam, and they had a great many questions for him.

Korwin, who preferred not to traverse the fractured stairs any more than necessary, stayed on the far platform, ostensibly to watch for the returning phase-shifting Dwarf, and called out his continued insistence that they needed to bleed Toran to make everything work… to no avail.

After examining the slowly revolving central disk Toran eventually pronounced that the thing to try was a drop of his own blood in the central, and probably controlling, sigil of the interlocking wards.

Korwin threw up his hands and shook his head in disgust…

But as Toran was moving towards the central disk, and Devrik moved down from the other side to occupy one of the outer sigils, the portals shifted colors once again. And this time, out of the column of light opposite the one from which the writhing abomination had come, an immense shape appeared.

It was at least 8 meters long, resembling nothing so much as a bizarre eel, with a long tubular body that ended in a wide tail and two fins just in back of the head. It’s underbelly was pale violet, while its topside was a deep, mottled purplish color, fading to teal at the tips of the extremities. A little bit back from the head were four long, clawed tentacles, two sprouting from across each other on the top, and two more of the same on the underbelly. The head was roughly triangular-shaped, with a spherical, somewhat beak-like nose and a round mouth like a lampreys, lined with razor teeth. Above the nose were their three glowing blue eyes, each one set atop the other. Tendrils and a few shorter tentacles dangled from the bottom of the head.

As the Hand watched in horror the thing drifted out, undulating through the air as if it were in water, a wave of psychic malevolence and self-satisfaction rolling off of it, to those sensitive to it. And with that psychic emanation seemed to come a name… Lagor’enth. But whether a proper name or species name was unclear, even to Mariala.

It seemed to focus its immediate attention on Toran, who had the misfortune to be in its direct line of sight as it cleared the smaller platform. The Khundari loosened his battle-axe and dropped into a fighting crouch…

The Lagor’enth suddenly stooped and whipped out two clawed tentacles. Toran rolled under the first to drive his axe along the creature’s pale underbelly, but to no effect — its skin seemed as hard as stone. The second tentacle he dodged with a brilliant leap and roll, coming to one knee as he loosed a barrage of Stavin’s Arrows. These struck the creature full on but seemed to do no more damage than his axe.

Erol, having taken Devrik’s place on the original platform, drew a shaft to his longbow and let fly, hitting the flying behemoth at the base of one of its main tentacle-fins. It snapped around as if bitten by some annoying tick, briefly thrashing its long tail.

Mariala stood at the base of the stairs below Erol, and as his arrow struck she released a blasts of Fire Nerves. This, too, seemed merely to discomfit the beast but not really damage it… although… was it moving a little slower now, and maybe a bit less smoothly?

Toran aimed his second casting of Stavin’s Arrows at what looked like a softer, less well-armored patch of the creature’s thorax, just below the mouth. This time the near-invisible bolts got a reaction – it reared back and thrashed the air, sending out psychic waves of disbelief, anger, and pain. Enough pain, apparently, that it turned from this small tormentor to go for seemingly easier prey – Devrik.

The Lagor’enth’s tentacle-claws whipped out viciously, but Devrik was ready, having keenly watched the others’ attacks and the beast’s responses. He nimbly dodged the two-pronged attack, leaping to use one tentacle to push off and into his counterattack. He struck at the same soft spot Toran had found, and from which blue-black ichor was already flowing. He drove his battlesword deep into the beast’s thorax, then ripped it down as he dropped to the stone floor, rolling away as the dark ichor gushed forth in a flood.

The creature reared up, emitting an almost ultrasonic squeal and another psychic blast of shock, fear and pain. Even those with limited psionic talent felt that one, and no one escaped the headache that followed. The body crashed to the main platform at its very edge, spasmed once, and then slowly slid off. The sound when it hit the cavern floor, joining the still smoldering bits of the writhing abomination, was like the world’s largest pumpkin dropped from a tall tower.

Once everyone was recovered, they decided they’d best move fast if they had any hope of gaining control of this immense artifact before something even worse emerged from one of the shifting portals. Toran, after a fruitless attempt to stop or slow the central disk’s rotation by hand, took his place in the center circle, while Devrik, Mariala, Haplo and Vulk took up positions in each of the satellite circles. Korwin stood ready to pull Bektam from his prison, while Erol guarded the portal home, arrow nocked to bow in case anything else came through another gate.

Toran pricked his thumb with his dagger and let several drops of blood fall to the basalt upon which he stood, then began to recite the words inscribed on the encircling stone band… the pace of the disk’s rotation was perfect for the task. The others focused their thoughts on Gevdan and home. A thrum of power began to build, and as it reached a crescendo the disk slowed and then locked into place with its four outer circles aligned with the four outer platforms. The pillars of light all flared once, then settled into four new shades of pastel colors. The sound died away.

A cry from Korwin drew everyones attention to the platform where he stood, now attempting to hold up the half-collapsed figure of a dazed and gasping Khundari. Everyone looked to Toran before stepping off their circles, and after a moment’s consideration, he nodded, freeing them. They all rushed to join Korwin and the now freed Dwarf. The central disk remained motionless.

“Bektam of Gevdan, I presume,” Toran said, taking the weight from Korwin and letting the weakened man sink to his knees.

“Yes, cousin, I am,” the Dwarf replied in Khundari accented with the sounds of the western Greatsone Mountains. “My eternal gratitude for freeing me from that horrible, horrible trap, may your sons carry your memory forward ten thousand years!”

“You’re welcome,” Toran replied drily. “But we’ll circle back to that gratitude after you’ve answered some questions we have. And not all my friends speak our tongue, so stick to the Common… I know you speak Esparic perfectly well.”

Bektam was reluctant to answer the Hand’s questions at first, his gratitude not withstanding, trying for vague generalities and noncommittal answers. But they quickly impressed upon him the fact that he wasn’t leaving this place until he’d provided the answers they sought. With a surly sigh, he grudgingly told his story.

“I’ve been a, a wander for twenty years now,” he began. “A free spirt of the open road.” (A renegade or outcast, Toran thought grimly, but let the deception, maybe even self-deception, pass).

“I came to Gevdan Town about seven years ago, and I’ve made my living as a handyman, of sorts, providing the Umantari with the benefit of Khundari metal-smithing skills and stone working…

“But I’ve never liked sleeping aboveground, and for several years past I’ve made my home in a snug little room in the Underneath, near the temple of Tyvos. This was going on just fine, I guess you’d say, until about a year ago. An earthquake shook the city… from that eruption of Mt. Katai, way off west, they said afterward.”

His audience studiously avoided looking at Devrik, whose infant son had been more-or-less responsible for that eruption. Devrik merely tightened his jaw and glowered at no one in particular. Bektam missed the byplay entirely and went on with his tale.

“It didn’t do much damage, though I was busy for a tenday, checking people’s chimneys and foundations. But ’twas my own digs that took the real damage. One corner of my room collapsed, opening the way to… well, if you’re here, you know to what. Took me awhile to widen and shore up the tunnel, but eventually I found the glowing portal to… here.

” I knew at once what this place must be… I remembered it from the tales my grand da told me before I– back when I was a young ‘un. It took me a bit to… well, I had all that work, you see, after the quake… anyway, eventually I tried one of the other portals. It took me to a frozen mountain top, with air so cold and thin I could hardly breathe! I didn’t stay long, ha!

“The next portal took me to an island in an endless sea… hot and humid, and all that horrible water as far as the eye could see. I went inland, hoping for better, but it was a small island.. and the dark-skinned Umantari were none too friendly. Besides, who could understand that jibber-jabber?

“But third time’s the charm as they say, and by Gheas I thought my luck really had changed with the last portal. I found myself in a cave in the foothills of the mountains, near a forest meadow, spring flowers abloom. I even thought the mountains looked familiar, like those of home. As it turned out, they were a part of the range north of my old home. A few hundred kilometers and I could have –

“Well, but these mountains were in Darikaz, that pit of vipers. A dark land, for all its beauty, the very worst of the cursed humans blighting–” He seemed to remember his audience, and grew silent. Although certainly Vulk looked to be in perfect agreement with his assessment.

“To cut the tale short, I wasn’t there two days before I fell into the hands of fiends in the guise of men – a Korönian clerical sect I came to learn, the Order of the Burning Tower. Over time I learned more — that they were in decline, having ended up on the wrong side of some religious dispute (or more likely a power grab) within their cult some years past. These, the last score of surviving brothers, now moved from place to place, plotting their revenge on all who had betrayed them… but most of all on the primate of their own religion. 

“By sheer bad luck (really the only kind I know) I arrived and had been enslaved just as the chaos caused by the assassination of the Darikazi king reached the hinterland. Their country had collapsed into civil war, but as things fell apart this Order saw only opportunity, a chance to regain their lost power. And maybe more… for I had told them how I had come to their land… and the legends of the Fane.

“One of their number, a leader amongst them, was a powerful mage and telekinetic named Sevrok Baltan, and he had actually heard tales of the Path of Gheas. He compelled me to take him through the portal in the hidden cave, to the Fane itself. He was… besotted by the possibilities.

“It took him five months of intense study and constant experimentation, but he slowly learned, and eventually was able to make the Fane function, at least in a semi-random fashion. My own status rose during this time, for he realized early on that he needed one of pure Khundari blood to make it function at all. I was still a prisoner and slave, but now at least a well cared for one.” He frowned bitterly at some memory, but didn’t elaborate.

“He learned to keep the connections between the Fane and Darikaz and Tharkia active, while allowing the other two portals to be shifted. But his control of those other portals was erratic… really little better than sheer chance, as far as I could tell. But slowly Sevrok did seem to be making progress…

“About six months ago, as their hoarded coin began to run low, they hit upon a plan to make the Paths begin to pay them for all their work. They began by setting up a network of spies in Tharkia and took to stealing slaves to fill their coffers back home, while Sevrok worked to discover how to open the Path to exactly where they wanted to go – the Korönian primate’s palace!

“Everything seemed to be going Sevrok’s way… until the 11th of this month. Gheas, please tell me it’s still Sarnia! I can’t have been trapped more than a tenday, could I?” He looked briefly panicked, until reassured it was only the 22nd of the month. He let out a deep breath and continued.

“Most of the brothers in Tharkia were in Zurhan that day to gather the latest harvest of slaves (they’d begun taking special orders from “clients”) and collect the reports of their spies. How they slipped up, I don’t know, but the King’s men apparently laid an ambush for them in the tavern they used for these meetings, and the ring was exposed and broken up.

“The only reason I know this was that a single member of the Order in Tharkia not taken or killed was an idiotic young acolyte, named Kemis. They’d recruited him as a local face for their mundane business, and had eventually come to use him as a native decoy to lure victims into slavery in the capital. The boy fled back to Gevdan after the debacle at the Mermaid’s Song Inn, and found me.

“And once he’d told his breathless tale, I saw my chance. Oh don’t look at me like that, cousin. Yes, they’d left me free in Gevdan, had done so for months. But there are other restraints besides the physical, and Sevrok’s hooks were deep. There was no escaping from them, except through death. My own, I’d always thought, but now I realized their deaths would serve me just as well. As long as I could stay out of the hands of the few remaining brothers in Darikaz!

“I knew the boy, Kemis, would never betray the Order – he’d drunk the wine too deeply – but I knew I needed two, at least, to operate the Fane. That bastard Sevrok had made sure to keep me far from his work, and as ignorant as possible of how he was achieving even his limited control of the paths. But he still needed me to actually do it, and I learned more than he realized. I was sure I could operate the Fane, and I had no care where the portals took me, as long as it was far from Darikaz or Tharkia!

“But I was not as clever as I thought I was… or else the Korönian scum had been better at keeping vital parts of the procedure secret. I put Kemis in the Gevdan circle, since he knew enough to know we needed to anchor that point. And I did succeed in shifting the pattern! The boy might have begun to suspect then, but he was never the sharpest blade in the rack.

“But I’d missed something. I made my dash for a portal but as I stepped off the central disk an intense pulse of energy burst out from the central platform. It shook the entire cavern, as if a giant had kicked it. I felt myself thrown forward, and for a moment I lay half stunned.

” When I staggered up I could see that the boy had been hurled from the center disk as well, and was laying unconscious on the far side. But I had no thought for him, I just wanted out. I stepped into the former “Darikaz” portal, knowing it had shifted destinations – only to be gripped as if by ten thousand tiny hands, all trying to tear me apart. I turned, trying to retreat, but I was trapped.

“My body began shifting in and out of phase – one second I was in the Cavern, the next in an open field, then back to the Cavern, and then a mountain top. Or rather, I was almost in those locations. It was an agonizing sensation, and I could never pull myself free. The three portals began randomly shifting, and every time they did I was torn between here and some new, random place. 

“It was the boy’s presence on the “Gevdan” circle that kept it locked to that location, and when he finally came around he took one look me, silently screaming, begging for his help… and he fled. Into the wrong portal.

“As I said, he wasn’t very bright. I have no idea where he ended up, he never came back. Never had a chance to, really, given when in the cycle he went through – they changed again within seconds of his passage.

“For… I don’t know how long… I was trapped in my painful limbo, only occasionally phasing into reality enough to communicate, but never for more than a few seconds, as you saw. Nothing came through my portal, I think because I was blocking it… but the other two saw a strange stream of traffic… wild beasts, monsters, and some things I can’t even describe passed through the open portals. 

“The creatures tended to wander the platform, then leave again… sometimes through the same portal (although it would almost always have reset to some other location by then), more often through one of the other functioning portals. Including the one to Gevdan.”

With Bektam’s technical description of what he understood of the function of the Fane, the Hand suddenly realized that all four portals had almost certainly been reset when they’d freed him. Erol volunteered to go through what had been the portal to Gevdan.

He was only gone a minute before returning to confirm that yes, the other side of the gate was no longer under the town of Gevdan. It was instead in the middle of a steaming tropical rain forest, and daytime, rather than just after sunset, as it should be. No one looked happy.

Korwin tried another portal, finding a white-capped gray sea below high white cliffs and a scudding wrack of clouds. It was either early morning or late afternoon, but he had no reference to be sure of which. Devrik stepped through a third portal into a burning dessert of red sand, dunes stretching as far as he could see, a deep blue bowl of sky above and the sun almost directly overhead.

Mariala was about to step through the last portal when Bektram suddenly leapt to his feet and, with surprising speed given his debilitated condition, dashed past her into the column of light. While Mariala hesitated a moment on whether or not to follow and drag him back, he suddenly staggered back through on his own. His eyes were wide and fixed, and sticking from his chest and back were a score of thin wooden darts.

Without a sound he collapsed at her feet and expired.

“I don’t think we need to try that portal,” Mariala said faintly, kneeling to take the Khundari’s pulse, careful not to touch any of the almost certainly poisoned darts. “Toran, can we spin the wheel again? In case whoever did… this… decides to come through. Maybe we’ll get lucky…”

There was some discussion about whether the Paths all led to places on Novendo, or if they really did sometimes lead to other worlds or dimensions, as they took their places on the sigils. Or even other times, although Vulk maintained time travel was impossible. Still, how could they be sure?

The second attempt to shift the Paths of Gheas at first seemed no more promising than the previous, until Erol stepped through the fourth portal. He was gone longer than usual, and Devrik and Vulk were preparing to follow him, when he stepped back through.

“I think this one might be our best bet yet,” he said. “It’s early evening, so it should be on the same side of the world as us. The stars are familiar, but seem shifted – I’d say it’s significantly south of home, but not in the southern hemisphere. And it is grassland as far as the eye can see. There’s an encampment maybe two kilometers away, on a slight rise, I could see their campfires.”

“That sounds like if could be the great steppes called the Sun Plains that lie along the southern reaches of Ysgareth,” Mariala said, a hint of optimism in her tone. Erol nodded in agreement. “The Sea of Storms lies to the south, the Hellstorch Mountains to the west, Tur Kovan to the east… and the Garlini horsemen could be a problem… but depending on exactly where this portal is, civilization could be only 100 leagues away, maybe less!”

“Assuming this is really the Sun Plains,” Devrik frowned. “How can we be sure? And what risks are we willing to take to get home?”

And so the debate began…

It was a lovely early spring day when the Hand set out from Zhuran, the sixth such day in a row the region had enjoyed. But pleasant as that was after the harsh winter, the resultant thawing had left the kingdom’s roads a muddy, gluey mess. The main road south was no exception, and they made poor time as a result – despite setting out an hour before noon, it was well after dark before the group arrived in the town of Ondazel, 25 km away.

Dor Ondazel was the keep long charged with guarding the southern approaches to the capital, and possessed of some of the best-maintained fortifications in the kingdom. For three years prior to his coup, it had been held by Crown Prince Laravad as Constable, a post his father had hoped would steady and calm his increasingly wild and erratic son. But Laravad had become, if anything, even more unstable, eventually using the keep as the focal point of his plot against his father, replacing the veteran soldiers of its garrison with his own creatures.

Now the keep was back in King Balen’s hands, the traitorous younger knights and mercenary soldiers rooted out and a new Constable assigned to oversee the rebuilding of the garrison. Ser Barot Atlar, a Knight of Tanar and married to a distant cousin of the king, greeted the Hand with courtesy and a hot meal. He had remained loyal to the king during the usurpation, leading a group of men and women in a guerrilla campaign from the nearby Verduth Woods. During the meal he was happy to tell his guests all he knew of the area and of the former prince’s infamous hunting lodge.

“Hart’s Lodge was by far Laravad’s favorite place,” he said as a servant passed around the table pouring the port that ended the meal. “He visited it every month for years, in hunting season or out… for all his passion for the hunt, it was passing strange, I always thought. Even as his madness grew, and his plots were set in motion, he always found time to visit for at least a day or two, and often held meetings there with his chief lieutenants.

“In fact, I and my little band of merry loyalists had some thought of ambushing and seizing the traitor on one of these visits – they were almost like clockwork, which made the prospect very tempting. But once his coup had succeeded, he never travelled without a large and well-armed party of his mercenaries and suborned knights around him. So close to the edges of the Porgos Marsh there is little high land or natural ambush points, and the one attempt we made proved futile when the usurper’s party took an unexpected detour… almost as if they anticipated us.

“Well, we never had a chance to make a second attempt, thanks to your timely intervention this past Kristala Va,” he raised his glass in salute. “Since then, the lodge has remained empty and abandoned… I can’t imagine His Majesty, nor the Crown Princess, has any desire to make use of the place, and I suspect it will be allowed to fall into ruin. A pity for the nearby village that supported it, of course, but there’s little help for it. Frankly, that’s probably where this talk of “disappearances” comes from – folks simply recognizing the inevitable and moving on to greener pastures. The kingdom is still in such a roil, it’s a good time to make such changes I should think!”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The next morning the Hand, although having less distance to travel, nevertheless set out at an early hour, after a hearty breakfast served up by Ser Barot’s servants. By early afternoon they reached the small village that took it’s name from the royal hunting lodge, which itself lay a further two kilometers into the forest. Almost immediately it was obvious that something was terribly wrong.

The village consisted of more than 30 buildings, mostly homes, several with business occupying the lower floor. Apple trees abounded, just beginning to bud, and it should have been a charming scene. But, while smoke drifted lazily up into the pale blue sky from many chimneys, the streets seemed abandoned. No one could be seen moving outside, no one gathered at the well in the center of the village, and no one worked the small garden plots or grazing pastures nearby. And something else… it took a moment before they realized that the usual cacophony of bird sounds, ever-present in the countryside, was entirely missing.

The uncanny feeling was only deepened when the group, entering the village proper, was assaulted by the stomach-turning stench of rotting flesh. The sudden fear that the villagers had all been murdered was eased, if not completely erased, by the sight of mutilated and gore-covered corpses of sheep and pigs all around – in pens and yards, some in the very streets. Covering their mouths and noses with scarves or handkerchiefs, they paused in the village common, near the common well, to ponder their next move.

Furtive eyes peered out at them from between slats of closed shutters in the upper windows of a few houses, and eventually Vulk sent Jeb to go knock on the door of one such. His first knock elicited no response from within. He knocked again, more forcefully, and called out “Halloo the house! Is any one home? We are–”

“Go away!” screamed a frightened male voice suddenly. “Leave us alone, for the love of Alea!”

“Please, don’t hurt our children!” sobbed another voice, female, followed by the muffled crying of at least a couple of children. Jeb was taken aback by this response, and took several involuntary steps back, looking over at Vulk in puzzlement.

Not inclined to force their way into the obviously terrified peasant’s home, Mariala instead reached out with her arcane senses, heightened by casting Deana’s Perception. She almost reeled from the resulting wash of horror, fear and overwhelming terror that flowed over her. Staggering back a step herself, she quickly ended the spell.

“Dear Shala, these people are deeply, deeply afraid,” she told the others, rubbing her temples. “It’s not clear what has traumatized them so… not exactly… but clearly our presence is exacerbating it.”

The party decided to head the rest of the way through the settlement, to see if they could find anyone out or at least figure out which home was the village reeve’s, the man who’d sent the requests for help. As they left the common and turned south on the largest of the village’s five roads, they finally caught their first sight of someone actually out-of-doors.

At the end of the road a man had his back to them, apparently intent on carving something into the wall of one of the larger houses in the settlement. A common peasant by his clothes, the man seemed oblivious to their approach, muttering unintelligibly to himself, until they were about 5 meters away. Devrik cleared his throat to speak, and the man whirled around with a snarl. Everyone froze in horror.

The left side of the man’s face was a pustulant mass of slimy green scar tissue, out of which erupted half a dozen writhing tentacles of various sizes. His left eye was missing, the socket filled with a gelatinous blue substance,  and within its depths a shadowy shape appeared to be… swimming. But more ghastly than his face was his right arm. The hand had been severed and the flesh of the forearm stripped entirely away, its bones sharpened into vicious double points. Bloody rags encircled the upper arm, where the flesh remained, and the smell of putrefaction was strong.

He appeared to have been using the sharpened bone ends to carve mysterious glyphs into the plaster wall of the house.

His one good eye glared at them, ringed in bloodshot white, the pupil fully dilated. Movements jerky, almost spastic, he lunged forward, bone arm extended, shrieking in a voice like finger nails on slate “Sacrifices for the Dol’Gurthog!”

Devrik drew his battlesword, Erol and Toran drew arrow and bolt, Korwin reached for his cutlass, and the others began to prepare spells – but it was Vulk who acted first. Leveling his staff at the lumbering figure he spoke a low word. The green resin ovoid at its head flared and glowing white strands of writhing energy erupted from it.

The Weaver’s Web spell engulfed the gibbering creature (Vulk could hardly think of it as a man), the countless ends of its milky strands attaching to the walls of the house. In seconds the man was ensnared in a glowing web of energy, immobilized completely, despite his thrashing and shrieking, in the “L” formed by the two wings of the house.

The Hand stared at the struggling thing and at one another. For a moment, no one spoke. Even the strongest of them felt a queasy, unpleasant roiling in the gut and the shivering goose-flesh of fear on their skin.

“I don’t recognize this script,” Mariala said at last, trying to shake off the feeling of creeping dread that was nibbling at the edges of her mind. Keeping a safe distance from the ensnared… individual… she peered at his unfinished carving.

“Maybe…” she cast a spell of understanding, but while the sounds the symbols represented swam clear to her mind’s ear, no meaning followed. Gibberish it might be, but her feeling of unease grew stronger the more she studied the jagged symbols… Erol, trying his own arcane methods of translation, had the same result. They both desisted quickly, looking at one another in consternation.

As they tried to explain to the others what they’d felt there came a series of answering calls to their prisoner’s continuing shrieks. The responding cries came from the woods beyond the village, and in moments several more cultists were rushing at the group from three directions.

Vulk immediately slipped into his link with Cherdon, the falcon already aloft and surveying the scene from above.  His attention was immediately drawn to the nearest threat, two men to the west moving from the woods into the narrow lane between two houses.

One man was equally as disfigured and brutalized as their first acquaintance, if in a different fashion – while he had his hand, the flesh on all his fingers had been stripped away and the bones sharpened to lethal claws. He had a chain around his neck, the other end of which was looped around the wrist of the other man. This fellow was somewhat better dressed, in robes of dark red and brown – although they were filthy with dirt and dried gore. There was no way to tell if his face, too, was disfigured, as it was covered by a crudely carved and painted frog mask. A necklace made of frog skeletons haphazardly woven together rattled at his neck, and the hand not holding the chain/leash appeared to be a single, massive tentacle.

“Therok!” Vulk called urgently but quietly to his barbarian follower. “Go up over that roof and come down on the other side… two of these… men… are moving up between the houses. Get behind them and attack!”

The Firilani warrior nodded his acknowledgment, and with feline grace leapt atop the stack of barrels against the side of the house, and from there to the roof. In a moment he had scrambled up the shakes and vanished beyond the peak.

Erol, meanwhile, had moved to engage the first of the new arrivals as they stepped into the road – another disfigured, tentacle-faced monstrosity brandishing a flail. The weapon was made of bone and wood, its head a small human skull and the leather strands of the whips knotted with human teeth. When the madman opened his mouth to shriek “Sacrifices! Flesh for His spawn!” it became obvious where the teeth had come from.

Erol’s thrust his trident forward, taking the rushing figure in the chest, and bright red arterial blood gushed from both the savage wound and the man’s toothless mouth. Unfortunately, even as the man collapsed with a wet, gurgling death rattle, the flail whipped out and dug into Erol’s leg, just below the leather of his hauberk and above the plate of his kneecop. The leg gave out and he went down, teeth clenched in pain.

Toran, alerted by Cherdon through Vulk, was prepared for the frog-masked, dark-robed zealot that lurched out of the alley northwest of the group. The Khundari Shadow Warrior swung his battle-axe in a horizontal arc that should have intersected with the cultist’s chest – but with a speed and finesse that astonished the Dwarf the man brought up his brown-stained bone sword and turned the blade. In the return motion he attempted to slash Toran’s face, but the hero leaned back, easily avoiding the counterattack.

Mariala had, for a moment, wrestled with getting her cross-bow from where it hung down her back, cursing herself for not preparing it as soon as they’d entered the eerie village. But as another disfigured horror staggered into the roadway near her she gave up and grabbed one of her throwing knives from its wrist sheath. The black-bladed taburi flew out and buried itself deep into the creature’s chest. It collapsed, gurgled wetly, twitched twice… and died.

Once he had sent Therok off and warned the others of what was coming, Vulk immediately turned to prayer, silently chanting the ritual of Kasira’s Smile to bring down the Immortal Lady of Luck’s blessing on his friend Devrik. The fire mage felt the subtle tingling that he had come to associate with the blessing of the goddess, and his sword flamed to life at his murmured  summoning.

Haplo’s Karmic Missiles missed their intended target, but Korwin’s Ice Needle took the same cultist in the thorax, and the man collapsed, shrieking and grasping ineffectually at the spike of ice protruding from his chest. As the cultist collapsed Haplo rushed over to join Toran’s fight, while a pained grunt and the sound of flesh and bone striking wood drew the others’ attention to the wide alley to the west…

Therok had scuttled quickly across the roof of the house to the north, and dropped down behind the two cultists, as per Vulk’s instructions. Unfortunately, the element of surprise he’d expected to enjoy didn’t materialize – before he could do more than bring his sword up the dark-robed man whirled on him, his tentacle-arm whipping out with blinding speed. It slammed into the barbarian’s chest, sending him flying sideways almost two meters to crash into the wall of the house whose roof he’d just traversed.

With a grunt, as ribs broke and his skull slammed into the wall, Therok crumpled to the ground, unconscious and bleeding from nose and mouth. His demented attacker loomed over him, raising a bone sword in his scarred but human-looking right hand to deliver the killing blow. The cultist’s twisted features relaxed into a look of bewildered surprise, however, as three sharp tines of metal suddenly erupted from his chest. His own blood gushed forth as his eyes rolled upward and he collapsed bonelessly at the feet of his would-be victim.

Erol, levering himself up on his wounded leg, had seen the attack on his friend’s bodyguard, and knew no one was in a position to reach the fallen man in time. Instinctively he’d whipped his trident back and hurled it with all his strength and skill, taking the thing full in the back. The deformed creature it had held on the chain, suddenly freed from control, rushed headlong at Erol then, stripped-to-the-bone finger tips clawing for his face. The fighter drew his gladius just in time for the shrieking thing to impale itself on the blade.

Meanwhile, Toran and Haplo between them finally managed to put down the Rasputin-like cultist they faced, who simply would not die. Even after Haplo almost severed his hand, the raving madman merely passed out… but at that point even his stamina couldn’t survive a battle axe to the neck, as Toran was happy to demonstrate.

Mariala hit the last attacking cultist with a second thrown taburi, burying the blade in its shoulder. Devrik followed up with his flaming blade, nearly severing the man’s arm and then leaving him to bleed out in the dirt.

While Vulk rushed to tend to Therok’s near-fatal injuries, Erol pulled his own vial of Baylorium-7 from around his neck and dosed his injured knee. In a matter of minutes the gash had begun to knit together, and by the time he joined the others gathered around the one crazed villager who was still alive and conscious, struggling in Vulk’s webs, only a slight ache and a thin pale line remained.

During the sharp, brief fight, the demented cultist had been hacking at the bands of white energy that restrained him with his mutilated blade-like forearm, and several of the strands had actually parted. Thinking to put a stop to that before they tried to question the prisoner, Devrik whipped his sword up in a sudden slash that severed the man’s arm at the elbow.  Unfortunately, the blade was still flaming with Goraten’s Brand, and the magical webs turned out to be highly flammable…

As the writhing creature became engulfed in flames, its shrieks quickly tapered off along with its struggles, and Mariala pinched the bridge of her nose, casting a baleful glance at her old friend.

“It would have been nice to have at least one of these… things… alive to question,” she sighed, shaking her head in exasperation. “I hope you’re not planning on burn down the whole village – again.”

“No, it’s not my intention,” Devrik growled, returning the glare. “How was I to know the damn webs were so flammable.” He focused his pyrokinesis on the burning corpse, now collapsed to the ground as the last of the magical webbing vanished into smoke, and then reversed the usual flow of his power… the flames flickered out quickly and only the smell of seared flesh remained. The usual nauseating-appetizing pork-like smell of burned human flesh was underlain by a disturbing stench of fetid rot.

“This one’s still alive,” Erol said diffidently, gesturing to the leashed creature that had spitted itself on his short sword. But even as the others turned to look, the body gave a last shudder, a rattling sound escaped its throat, and it settled into the unmistakable stillness of death. Mariala sighed again, but before she could say anything further a sudden sharp crack caused everyone to wheel back around to the first body.

To the group’s horror, the burned cultist’s head was bulging grotesquely at the base of the skull. The corpse began to jerk and shudder as the bone cracked again, the bulge expanding… and then suddenly the whole back of the former villager’s head exploded outwards in a spray of bone, blood and brains. From the gaping hole a slimy shape lurched out into the pale sunlight, and everyone took one horrified step backward.

The creature was slightly smaller than an average bullfrog, to which it bore a passing resemblance – save for the shiny green-black skin visible through the blood and brain matter dripping off it, the four small tendrils waving from its head, and the dark, empty sockets where its eyes should have been.

It turned its blind gaze toward the group and as one Devrik, Erol, Toran and a still shaky but revived Therok all raised their weapons, while Mariala, Korwin and Haplo each began to gather energy for various spells. Jeb whipped an arrow from his quiver and nocked it to his bow as Vulk aimed his staff, prepared to unleash–

“Stop!” a quavering voice called out, as the door to the house before which all the action had taken place suddenly flew open. “Don’t kill it, for the love of the Immortals, don’t kill it!”

As the Hand stared in surprise, a short, round-bellied man of late-middle years dashed out of the doorway, a large metal wash basin clutched in his pudgy hands. Sidling skittishly around the smoking corpse on his doorstep, he bent down and slapped the container over the unresisting frog-thing. With a relieved sigh he stood up straight and smiled tentatively at the group.

“We need it alive, you see,” he said, as if continuing a conversation. “So that you can defeat the beast. It – it–” At their blank stares he stuttered to a stop and looked momentarily doubtful. “That is, assuming… I mean, you are here to kill the Dol’Gurthog… aren’t you?”

“What in the Void is a ‘Doll Girth Hog,’ and who the Void are you?” Haplo demanded. “And what the Void is going on in this cursed village?!”

The man looked momentarily taken aback, but he quickly gathered his obviously frayed nerves and made a slight bow, first toward the silver-haired illusionist and then to the group as a whole. “My name is Hal Neelow, sir, and I am the Reeve of Hart’s Lodge Village. As for what is going on here, and the Dol’Gurthog… well, those are much related, I’m afraid…”

The nervous little man then explained to the Hand as much as he could. The village had been under siege from these horrifying cultists for two months now – most of whom were actually former villagers. He assured the party that his fellow citizens, all of whom he’s know his whole life, would never harm a fly – but after the first cultists appeared, strangers to the village, people began wandering off into the woods, seemingly in a daze… and coming back as savage monsters who can no longer even be called human, as they’d just witnessed.

After a few days the missing villagers first began to return, and if they seemed a bit ‘off,’ they weren’t actually mad – not slicing-off-their-own-hands mad, anyway. In the beginning they just tried to recruit others to come with them, talking of enlightenment and joy. A few villagers actually followed them back into the woods. Later they, too, returned, if anything even more violent. Their minds apparently were deteriorating over time, withering away, breaking down what control they once possessed. Eventually they began demanding that more townsfolk go with them, or the entire village would face the consequences.

The people of Hart’s Lodge fought back that first time the demand was made… Five men were left dead and another four were dragged off into the forest. Reeve Neelow pointed to the man with bone claws, the chain leash still around his neck.

“That’s one of them that was taken in the first attack – Jerama Merrol. So now the people of the town are too terrified to fight… I sent off messengers to the Chancellory, begging for soldiers to come to our aid.

“And the next day the Learned Rythek, a master of the arcane arts who makes his home amongst us, followed the cultists into the woods, determined to confront the evil at its source. For all that he was a mere hedge-wizard, he was quite strong, especially with fire.” He gave a sidewise glance at Devrik, whose flaming sword had been re-sheathed after the Reeve had begun his tale. “But there’s been no word from him since.”

“A tenday past two of the King’s (may the All preserve him) men-at-arms arrived, and they went off into the woods as well. They were quite big, strapping fellows, and very sure they could handle some ‘damn frog worshippers,’ as they said… but we’ve not heard from them again, either.”

“So what exactly is this Dol’Gurthog,” Devrik asked impatiently. “Have you actually seen it?”

“Well, no, not myself,” Neelow replied, “but others have described it… A frog the size of a wagon with nothing but empty sockets where there should be eyes. Four massive tentacles extending out of its back, lashing out wildly for meters around it, and spikes of bone running down the length of its spine. A beast of nightmare, it seems to me… but those besotted by it seem to think it is glorious and the source of all bounty and goodness.”

“So, essentially a larger version of the frog-thing you’ve trapped under your wash basin,” Mariala stated, glancing dubiously at said kitchen implement. “Why is it so important that we not kill the creature?”

“Because I’ve seen this happen before,” the reeve replied. “One of them emerging from the head of a cultist and all. That um, frog, hopped off into the forest, going back to its progenitor I believe. If you were to follow the creature, it should lead you to the very root of this evil…” He paused again, doubt and desperation warring on his round face.

“You are agents of the King, are you not?” he asked again, almost pleading. “Sent to succor us in this terrible time, in response to my second messenger?”

“Yes, yes,” Vulk assured him gently. “We are indeed sent by the King and his advisors to sort all this out. Have no fear, the Hand is here.”

♦ ♦ ♦

It was eventually decided that the village reeve’s plan was, in fact, the best they could come up with under the circumstances, lacking any actual living cultists to act as guide. No further deranged people emerged from the woods, so following the baby frog-thing it would be.

Reeve Neelow having retreated to the relative safety of his home after securing the groups horses in his stable, Erol lifted the sieve off the creature, which had remained silently unperturbed by its brief imprisonment, and the Hand stared down at it expectantly. The thing seemed to have almost doubled in size during its brief captivity, which was disturbing in and of itself.

After a moment of staring sightlessly back at its liberators, the frog-thing gave a deep croak and suddenly leaped forward, heading down the road toward the wood’s edge.

“Maybe we should put a… a harness, or something, on it,” Erol suggested, and reached down to pick the creature up before it could get too far away. But Haplo put a restraining hand on his arm.

“I wouldn’t touch that thing with a bare hand,” he said, frowning. ” Some frogs can secrete toxins through their skin, I’ve heard, and given what we know about this little monster… well, I shouldn’t think it worth the risk.”

“I agree,” said Mariala. “Given the rate it seems to be growing, I’m not sure we could keep a harness on it anyway. Besides, it’s not moving that fast, we shouldn’t have any trouble keeping up with it.”

She proved correct, and the frog-thing seemed to be perfectly happy to follow the rutted track that led westward into the woods, in the general direction of the royal hunting lodge – which meant the Hand didn’t have to scramble through the underbrush to follow it. The creature seemed to have no trouble avoiding any obstacles in its path, despite its lack of eyes, and occasionally the tendrils atop its head would lash out at insects, pulling them into its mouth to be devoured.

Despite the pleasant spring day, the woods were gloomy and nerve-wracking… shadows seemed to stretch longer than they should, and to be deeper, the flowers in the understory smelled foul rather than sweet, and not a single woodland creature was anywhere to been seen. Like the village, no sound of birdsong could be heard, and the silence was both eerie and unnerving. Cherdon, flying low over their heads, was the only other thing moving.

After some 15 minutes of steady travel the unnatural monstrosity had again almost doubled in size, and its leaps were becoming longer… though its pursuers had no trouble keeping up. It continued with a swift and confident determination, and as they all moved deeper into the woods the party began noticing disturbing things… strips of human flesh nailed to trees with spikes of bone… remnants of scattered fire pits, visible off the path, appeared to contain scorched bones, both animal and human… and at last some birds. But these sat in the trees, unmoving, eyeless, and giving out low sounds of anguish rather than pleasant chirps – the sound seemed almost taunting.

Another ten minutes brought them all to a fork in the road. The main path bent sharply to the left, while a narrower and partially overgrown track led straight on. The frog-thing took the narrower path, but as they came to the bend the party was stopped by sudden movement to their left.

Ten meters down the main road two cultists were hunched over the carcass of an enormous elk laid out in the roadway. One man had a needle and thread and the other held a vicious looking bone saw. The cultists turned to stare at the group as they came into view, and both dropped their tools to draw weapons. One grabbed an executioner’s axe while the other took up a sort of club with rib bones shoved through the wood, forming sharp spikes.

With a staggering, bucking motion the dead deer stood up as well.

The horrifying monstrosity stood over two meters tall at the shoulder. An open wound in its side revealed where some ribs had been removed – apparently the same ribs now sewn along its back to form a set of curving spikes. Its antlers were sharpened to jagged points and its eyes, while still intact, appeared to be bleeding. There were distinct wounds and stitches around the deer’s back legs… almost as if they had been hacked off and then hastily reattached. The revenant corpse was partially covered in a dark-blue slimy substance, and even at this distance the smell was strong, and foul.

With inarticulate shouts, the taxidermist cultists raised their weapons and rushed the party, their undead class project lumbering behind. Before they had moved more than a couple of meters, however, Erol had loosed a single shaft from his longbow. It plunged deep into the monstrous elk’s chest and through the heart it apparently still had… and needed. The beast crashed down with an impact that everyone felt in their feet and lay there, its legs twitching spasmodically.

At the same time that Erol was letting the grey goose fly Mariala and Haplo were unleashing their own arcane attacks. As the undead elk crashed to the ground behind them the two cultists were struck almost simultaneously by Fire Nerves and Mokel’s Karmic Missiles. Their jerking spasms and shrieks of pain caused by the first spell were almost instantly stilled as the invisible bolts of the second slammed into them. They fell like puppets with their strings cut.

It was all over so quickly that Vulk, who had continued to follow the baby frog-spawn, and Devrik, who had followed Vulk to keep him safe, were still in sight down the narrower track. After a desultory search of the dead cultists, which yielded nothing more interesting than a few coins and a crude sketchbook, the others hurried to catch up.

Mariala and Korwin studied the sketchbook, and passed it on to the others as they continued deeper in to the increasingly wrong-feeling woods. The pictures in the book were all charcoal renderings of a monstrous frog, with empty eye sockets, clawed feet, and waving tendrils snaking from its head. In the early pages the drawings were actually quite good, but as they progressed the images became cruder, more simplistic. The last sketch was so abstract that it could be construed as the Dol’Gurthog only by context.

Looking though the book only deepened the oppressive disquiet everyone felt as they moved deeper into the woods. No one objected when Korwin pocketed the book after everyone had seen it. What the Void, he thought, maybe he could publish it back in the Empire, perhaps as illustrations to his recounting of this adventure… suitably edited, of course… this sort of macabre shit sold big back home, in certain circles.

♦ ♦ ♦

Another half hour of steady walking at last brought the Hand to what seemed to be their destination – a massive cavern entrance set into a low, treeless hill that rose like an island from the forest. Stalagmites and stalactites lined the mouth of the cave, giving it the appearance of a snarling maw. The skeletons of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of frogs littered the ground in front of the opening.

Their own amphibious guide hopped toward the entrance without slowing, and vanished within.

“Maybe we should’ve killed that thing before it went in,” Erol muttered, but it was already too late, and none of his companions replied.

As they approached the entrance themselves, the group stopped suddenly in their tracks, almost as one. A delightful smell wafted out of the cave, making all of their salivary glands suddenly start working overtime. The odor was utterly alluring, yet impossible to identify precisely… it seemed to hit all the pleasure centers in the brain, evoking memories of baking cookies at Grandmother’s, holiday roasts turning on the spit, savory mushrooms fresh from the farming caves, brillberry wine fermenting in the cellar, clams hot from the coals… it smelled like all of these things and like none of them.

Half entranced by the smell, the group stepped into the cavern, where the same blue slime they’d seen on the cultists in the village and on the zombie elk in the woods coated the walls, flowing down as if oozing from the very stone. It seemed to be the source of the magnificent smell, and the urge to run a hand through it and then lick it off one’s fingers was almost irresistible. Almost.

It looks more like blueberry jam, Mariala thought. Just like old Nan used to make when I was a child. She’d baked it into the most delectable tarts… Mariala could smell them baking right now, in fact, and she longed for that innocent, beloved taste of childhood… she reached out for the wall and the beautiful blue jam…

Devrik was torn from his own reverie, of roasting venison and the sour cherry reduction that had covered it each Höl Kopia before he’d been sent off to the chantry, by the sight of his friend reaching out to touch the dripping slime. He hastily grabbed her wrist, pulling her back and speaking her name sharply. For a moment she stared at him, her eyes blank and glassy, then she frowned and shook her head.

“I’m… alright,” she said, pulling her arm from his grip and shaking her head as if to clear it. “By Shala, I really was going to eat that! Ugh!” She looked slightly green and she shuddered. While it still smelled wonderful, the spell was broken and she no longer had any desire to put the stuff in her mouth!

“Thank you Devrik,” she said, patting her companion on the shoulder. “That could have been… unpleasant.”

“No problem,” Devrik rumbled. “And I think we all need to keep an eye out for each other, and not just for enemies… pair up and make sure your buddy doesn’t try to taste that crap. Whatever it smells like, there’s no way it leads to anything good!”

Everyone agreed, with the exception of Haplo, who, a look of fascinated anticipation on his face, was reaching out to run his own finger though the goo even as Devrik spoke. Fortunately, Korwin was close enough to stop him before he could succeed, and after a sharp shake Haplo, too, snapped out of his trance and felt the urge to eat the horrible stuff subside. Despite the lingering scent of positive-reinforcement-memories in the air, no one else seemed terribly tempted to lick the walls after that.

The group continued cautiously into the cave. The initial cave, beyond the opening,  was over seven meters wide. Painted on the walls beyond the blue slime were various depictions of the monstrous Dol’Gurthog, primarily in white paint. But the void where the being’s eyes should be used some darker pigment… dried blood, as it turned out on closer examination.

The cave narrowed quickly as it led further into the hill, and downward. Rarely more than two meters wide, the descending pathway wound lazily and was lit by flickering torches mounted periodically along the walls. Whispers seemed to echo around them, with no distinguishable origin.

More of the strange blue slime began to appear, coating the walls in wide patches. Fortunately, the appetizing smell was no more compelling than it was near the surface and the urge to consume it was no longer strong. After traveling down a narrow path for a score of meters the way turned into a series of winding natural stairs which opened up into a large, roughly “L” shaped chamber.

In the center of this area, between four slender pillars topped with carved frog capitals, sat an enormous, if crudely realized, statue of the Dol’Gurthog. While not well crafted, the emotion that the artist was attempting to capture was clear – madness, deep and utter. Aside from the feelings it evoked, the most notable part of the statue were the two massive jet gemstones  set into the empty eye sockets.

Around the walls of the space the party noticed furtive movements in the shifting shadows cast by the few torches that lit the area. This quickly resolved into 30 or more large albino squirrels, scattered about the space and eating from various pools of the blue slime that formed near the walls. They seemed calm and docile, and some ran across the floor, large red eyes faintly glowing in the torchlight, as they curiously examined the visitors.

As the group made no hostile move, a few of the small creatures came hesitantly forward, sniffing warily at their clothes. One ran up Jeb’s leg and torso to perch on his shoulder, and began examining his hair. The youth was clearly freaked out, but before he could decide what to do Therok had stepped up and plucked the squirrel from him. He set it chitttering on the floor, and it ran off to join a knot of companions.

“If one of those things tries to climb up me, I’m Fire Nerving the lot of them!” Mariala said nervously, eyeing the milling crowd of subterranean rodents. While not mice or rats, the albino squirrels were close enough to set her musophobia to a hair trigger. Keeping a wary eye on the creatures, she made sure her back was to an empty section of wall.

Toran began examining the walls of the cavern, eventually coming to a bronze-bound door of black ironwood at the bottom a narrow sloped passage. The door was locked, with only a smallish hole in the center of the panel, and neither his lock-picking skills nor his magic key had any luck opening it. Half a dozen of the albino squirrels gathered around him to watch his attempts with apparent fascination.

Korwin scouted out the exit to the north and east, going only few steps down the narrow passage before retuning to the statue chamber, while Devrik, suppressing disturbing memories of Taloxta going for his eyes in another cavern, moved to examine the statue. As he did so, he noticed that the alluring smell was hardly noticeable any more… indeed, he had to strain to smell anything besides musty, wet stone.

Must have finally gotten used to it, he thought as, keeping a wary eye on his furry audience, he cast Goraten’s Brand, lighting up his battle sword with comforting yellow flames. As he examined the crude statue in the better light of his flaming weapon, he realized that a new smell was making itself noticed – a foul smell, as of putrefying flesh and rotting vegetation. As the stench grew, his tension ratcheted upwards, and he felt suddenly uneasy and angry… had his flames caused this terrible smell? Was it coming from the statue?

He poked experimentally at the ugly sculpture with the tip of his sword – and as if that were some sort of signal, every squirrel in the room suddenly burst into frenzied action. With a mad chittering they attacked whomever was nearest, running up clothes, leaping from niches in the wall, biting and clawing at exposed skin.

For a moment it seemed that sheer surprise would allow the swarming rodents to overrun the group, but the tide was quickly turned. True to her word, with a shriek of fear-fueled rage Mariala sent a wave of Fire Nerve energy fanning out across half the room and eleven of the attacking rodents fell writhing in agony to the stone floor. She kicked and stomped the ones nearest her to bloody pulp, and plucked one surviving creature from her hair to fling it across the chamber in disgust.

Therok and Jeb, having been more-or-less out of the initial attack by being still on the stairs, rushed down and began dispatching the writhing, chittering victims of the Fire Nerve spell, and then stomping or spitting any others that came near.

Erol, having dropped his trident when several of the albino vermin had sunk their teeth into his wrist, took to pulling them off himself and smashing them against the nearest wall. He also followed Mariala’s lead and began stomping the ones underfoot into paste until he could retrieve his trident, at which point it became a game of spit-and-hurl.

Vulk attempted to invoke Kasira’s Smile, but whatever foul power held sway in this place seemed to block his access to the Lady’s blessing. With a grimace he began to lay about him with his staff, sending vermin flying with each blow, breaking legs, backs and skulls.

Toran cast Fist of Kuhan on himself, and as his arms began to harden into mace-like strength and durability he merrily worked his way back up from the locked door to the main chamber, smashing albino squirrels right and left as he went.

Korwin’s hastily summoned Frost Blade allowed him to slay several of the insanely attacking vermin, and kept the rest of them at bay while Haplo’s invisible karmic arrows impaled three of the hoard. Both men stomped a few more into ruin for good measure.

Most of the remaining albino squirrels were incinerated by Devrik’s Orb of Voral, and as their smoldering corpses twitched on the smoking stone of the floor, the few survivors skittered away into the shadows.

The brief Battle of the Squirrel Temple had lasted less than a minute, but it left the group shaken and on edge, their nerves frayed and tempers short. Matters weren’t made better by the overpowering stench that now filled the air. While no longer getting stronger, the miasma showed no sign of abating, either.

Mariala attempted to cast Feel on both the statue and the door, but achieved little more than a pounding headache and the sense of powerful, chaotic, almost alien magic permeating everything around them. Unable to open the locked door, the group continued on through the northern exit.

Another 15 minutes passed as they moved slowly through the dimly lit, twisting passages, and as they did the stench began to slowly fade. The removal of the horrible odor lifted everyone’s spirits just by its absence, and by the time they arrived at a curtained doorway the pleasant smell of all things delicious had begun to fill the air again. As they pushed through into the chamber beyond, everyone was feeling optimistic and upbeat.

The new chamber appeared to be a living area. A rotting bed, with a nightstand nearby and a small chest at its foot lay at one end of the room. On the nightstand was a candle and a small green dragon statue. Closer to hand a pile of mostly decayed scrolls was visible on and around a battered desk – at least twenty scrolls in total – and uncomfortable-looking chair.  A moldering deer-skin rug lay in the center of the room and scraps of cloth were scattered around the room.

But what immediately caught their attention, just to the right of the entrance, was a man sitting against the wall and gazing up at the ceiling as if it were a night sky filled with stars, or perhaps a fireworks display. Dressed in soiled but still serviceable robes he possessed a long, grey beard and gnarled hands. He didn’t appear to be sliced up or otherwise mutilated like so many of the other cultists they’d encountered… but there was a madness, nevertheless, behind his gaze.

Stepping forward Toran, his battle-axe lowered but at the ready, cleared his throat. The man’s head snapped down and whipped to the left, his bloodshot eyes going wide as he stared at the party as if they were phantasms.

“Guests!” he gasped out suddenly… and in apparent delight, a smile lighting his face. “Here to see the Master, no doubt?” he asked, using a gnarled staff that had been leaning against the wall next to him to lever himself stiffly to his feet. “You have heard His call and seek to give yourself into His embrace, yes?”

The man was clearly mad, but it seemed a very manic sort of insanity, and his enthusiasm was almost disarming. Compared to the other cultists they’d met so far, he seemed almost normal, if a trifle eccentric. He stared expectantly at the group, his gaze moving hopefully from face to face.

Small flames flickered occasionally between the fingers of his right hand, something he seemed completely unconscious of, like a deeply ingrained habit…

“Er, yes,” Vulk said, stepping forward, his own magnificent staff held slightly forward. “We have indeed heard a call, and have come here to learn what it means… who is your Master, and who are you?”

“Oh, I am the Keymaster,” the old man chuckled as if at a great joke. “Yes, or the Keyholder… though some still call me Rythek, my name from before my Enlightenment and being granted my holy task…”

At which point he pulled a small book from his robes, one that seemed to be bound in leather made from human flesh, and reading from it went off on a rant about his deep love for the Dol’Gurthog and his “god’s” unsurpassed magnificence. Eventually, however, Vulk was able to bring him back around to the whole Keymaster/Keyholder subject.

“Ah, well, you see…” he began, tucking away his horrid book in the folds of his robe. “There is a special key to open the Inner Sanctum, allowing entry into the Holy Presence itself. The Dol’Gurthog, in His infinite wisdom, has made me His Keymaster, solemnly  charged with the duty of seeing that only those worthy of His radiant presence, those able to endure his puissant power without dying, may pass within.

“To do this, He has created a puzzle of sorts… to test the strength of mind of those who would worship Him. The Dol’Gurthog wishes to have only those who are strong of mind, who will not crumble so easily before his glorious presence, come before him. This room contains all of the clues you will need to get through the door behind me.” He gestured at a closed door set in the north wall of the room. Glowing numbers appeared to be etched into its surface: 5612469 2 23015.

“Just say the password and it will open for you… then down in the pit, amongst the playful Children, you will find the key to the Inner Sanctum.” He smiled widely then, and for the first time his teeth were visible. All had been filed down to needle-like points. He gestured again, this time at the wider room, encouraging them to begin the search for clues…

The group spent some time examining everything in the room, which contained scores of items from the mundane to the arcane, including such esoterica as: a commemorative platter on the liberation of Tharkia;  an ornate Lirilalian Carnivale mask, in red and gold metallic foil over leather; a silver-plated gauntlet set with six multi-colored glass gems; a crystal punch bowl and seven small glasses; an onyx statuette of a panther; and a great many musty books.

In the end the group narrowed their focus to three items that seemed of particular interest, as they were the only three items with numbers written on them in some fashion. First, the carved jade statuette of a green dragon from the nightstand had the numbers 412 7142 scrawled on a piece of parchment glued to the underside of its base.

“Ah yes, the very inspiration for the cypher,” Rythek said with a fond sigh of reminiscence as soon as Devrik had picked it up. “Where it all began… the clever green dragon.”

The second item was the small chest, or footlocker, at the foot of Rythek’s bed. When Korwin opened it and began shifting through the odd little “treasures” within (frog skeletons, strips of human flesh, bone dice – the usual sorts of things one would expect to find, really), Rythek again spoke up. “Oh yes, my treasures, my collection of beautiful things… please make sure they remain within my treasure chest.”

As Korwin turned to stare at the demented arcanist standing at his back his eye caught the numbers scrawled in dried blood on the inside of the chest’s lid: 6151 8956. Making note of it, he gently shut the lid, leaving the “treasures” undisturbed within.

The last item was a seemingly mundane broom that Toran found in a nook after he had finished a fruitless examination the pile of rotting scrolls around the old desk. The implement seemed nothing special, and Rythek offered no musings on it when the Khundari picked it up, but the numbers 013 were etched deeply into the broom’s handle.

The Hand wrangled the problem about for awhile, and to Mariala’s chagrin it was Devrik who first realized it was a simple substitution cypher that used only the consonants, ignoring vowels altogether. To Devrik’s chagrin it was Korwin who actually decoded the password first, blurting out the phrase “strength in numbers” before the fire mage could.

Rythek looked inordinately pleased, and clapped his hands together in child-like glee as the door in the north wall popped open with an audible ‘snick’ of a bolt releasing. There seemed to be a glimmer of true happiness behind the madness in his eyes.

“Now you need only retrieve the Key, the Eye of God, from its resting place amongst His Children,” he said, flashing his sharklike smile once more and gesturing them on toward the now open door. With a communal sigh, the Hand filed through the narrow doorway…

♦ ♦ ♦

Beyond the doorway was an equally narrow stairwell that descended another six meters. At the bottom the group found themselves on a stone platform with a drop of at least another seven meters into a pit of darkness. From within the darkness the croaking of hundreds of frogs could be heard, and the slithery, wet sounds of amphibian skins rubbing together.

The darkness was utterly impenetrable, pierced by neither torchlight nor spells nor rituals. Hoping there was another way to accomplish their goal, they searched beyond the platform area, but the only other thing to be found was a small chamber to the northeast that contained thousands of squirming maggots and the hunks of rotting meat that hosted them. Even the alluring smell of the blue slime could barely counteract the stench when actually inside the chamber.

Retreating back to the pit of darkness, Korwin had the brilliant idea of trying his glowstone bullseye lantern. To everyone’s surprise, it worked, actually piercing the uncanny blackness at the bottom of the pit. It revealed a writhing mass of juvenile frog-things, much like the one they had followed into this nightmarish cave complex, crawling over one another in a shallow pool of black water. To the left a narrow, crumbling set of natural stairs led down to the pools edge.

Toran produced the Cord of Qorelia-Sym, the magic Telnori rope he carried for Vulk, and tied one end around his waist. Korwin and Erol tied the other end around themselves, and began their descent into the pit as the Dwarf cast Joining of Merkünon on himself, causing his feet to become temporarily welded fast to the stone floor.

At the bottom Korwin cast a ball of freezing energy into the center of the squirming mass of frog-things, hoping to at least slow them down, but the additional cold seemed to have little effect on them… it didn’t even freeze the water he noted with consternation.

After considering his options for a moment, Korwin heaved a sigh and slid off the last step and into the icy, calf-deep water and thigh-deep scrum of squirming amphibians. The creatures didn’t seem to react to him, and after a moment, with Erol shining the light from the lantern around, he began reaching into the mass of wriggling flesh to feel for the Key.

The light proved to be less useful than one might’ve expected, and after almost two minutes of fruitless groping amongst the frog-things even Korwin was beginning to go numb from the penetrating cold. Then his fingers brushed against something not living flesh nor rough stone – something smooth and curved. He groped back, found it again, and closed his fist around it.

Opening his fist in the beam from the lantern Korwin and Erol saw a glass sphere the size of a large plum, greenish-black with an iris of virulent yellow and a slit-like pupil of pure black flecked with gold. The Eye of God, obviously, and their key into the Inner Sanctum.

♦ ♦ ♦

Once they had dried and warmed Korwin as best they could under the circumstances the Hand had returned to Rythek’s chamber and presented him with the Key. He had merely smiled his needle-like smile at them and waved them on.

“Back to the Outer Temple,” he’d chuckled, beaming in pride at their accomplishment. “Now you can open the way, and soon you will join us and be as one in the Dol’Gurthog… if not in His heart, then at least in His belly.”

On that unnerving note, the group headed back to the site of the albino squirrel massacre and the magically locked door that had previously barred their passage. Fortunately no more of the demented rodents had yet repopulated the chamber, and they passed unmolested.

Toran took the Eye of God and inserted it into the round slot in the center of the door. With a ‘thunk’ the glass sphere dropped out of sight, and then a flurry of clicks, whirring and clanks followed. In a few seconds there was a louder ‘ker-chunk’, as of a massive bolt withdrawing, and the door swung inward.

Beyond the doorway was another narrow flight of twisting, uneven stairs. They descended steeply some eight meters, over a span of perhaps 20 meters, to open out into the largest cavern the group had yet seen in the complex. The dim light from a score of torches, spaced erratically around the wall, reflected off the black, glassy surface of a large body of dark water that filled much of the center of the space. A smaller pool of equally still, black water lay off to the left, beyond the larger lake.

On the far side of the chamber, in a large natural alcove or bay, the Hand could see a collection of tables, shelves, what looked like a rack, a large glass aquarium, and a stone basin with a large fire burning in it. Three robed and cowled figure were moving about purposefully, obviously engaged in some arcane job of work. They made no sign that they were aware of the groups entrance into the cavern.

As the group slowly made their way around the dark lake several of the adventurers noticed four largish lumps rising from the black water near its northern end. It was Vulk who realized, with a shock, that they were the dark brow ridges, and empty eye sockets, of two enormous, monstrous frogs, apparently at rest beneath the water.

“They must be two-and-a-half meters tall, if they’re to scale with those, um, eyes” he whispered to the others as he quietly pointed out the beasts. As the group moved past them the glass-like surface of the lake was disturbed by small ripples as the giant amphibious heads turned to follow their progress.

As they rounded the end of the lake one of the cultists finally noticed their approach and stepped forward to hail them. “Who are you? I don’t know your faces… what is your business here?” His voice was cracked and not a little mad-sounding, but friendly enough for all that. His eyes glinted with a feverish excitement as he stared at the newcomers, and seemed to harbor no suspicion of them.

“We are, um, new to the worship of the Dol’Gurthog,” Vulk offered. “We have been sent by Rythek, the Keymaster, to meet the Great One and become one with Him.”

“Oh, how marvelous!” the cultist exclaimed, and the other two turned briefly from their own indecipherable tasks to grunt pleased agreement. The one nearest the speaker seemed to be working with frog-things taken from the large, dirty glass aquarium, stroking them to encourage the flow of blue slime from their skin. The one nearer the blood-stained rack seemed to be working on creating bone weapons, reinforced with iron bits… a barrel full of completed such stood nearby.

“But the God is sleeping now, as you can tell… Speaker Kythel will come for you when the Great One wakes,” he smiled and gestured at the dark archway off to the group’s right. “Would you like to help with our experiments while you wait?” This time he gestured at the array of bloody instruments strewn about the surface of the scarred and stained workbench behind him.

“Um, well, perhaps another time,” Mariala temporized, and the man seemed to take it in stride. “But if you’d like to tell us about your… experiments… what, for example is that blue slime –”

“Ooooh, the Primordial Ooze!” the man gushed, his excitement doubling. “It is from the Dol’Gurthog Himself! He exudes it and He causes the very earth to put forth a form of it,  here in His womb. To consume it is to be one with Him… and with it, the world shall be reborn.

“Once we have enough gathered, the forests, the lakes, the world will all fall under the influence of the Dol’Gurthog… and we, His humble servants, have been tasked with finding ways to better utilize the Blue Mana to this end… but so many tests require live human subjects, and there are never enough…” He eyed the group speculatively, but was easily diverted by another hurried question from Haplo.

It quickly became obvious that all three men were so far gone in madness that they had lost all sense of reality. They seemed highly suggestible, and Mariala suspected they would be very easy to manipulate into doing almost anything – if they believed their “god” desired it of them…

Before she could think of a way to take advantage of this, however, she noticed that the alluring odor in the cavern had faded away, and a growing stench was quickly beginning to take its place. At the same time, Erol made a slight miscalculation, in the sudden surge of annoyance and impatience that came over him…

Noting, as had Mariala, that the cultists seemed unusually gullible, he decided to cut to the chase and probe for more information about their nasty frog-god. “So, the um, Mighty One must be quite powerful,” he began. “Is there anything He is particularly vulnerable to, that might –”

He wasn’t even able to finish the question before the faces of all three men went from vaguely idiotic friendliness to masks of full-on twisted rage. “Why would you ask about how to harm the Master?” snarled the one near the weapons barrel, reaching out to grab a nasty-looking double-edged blade of razor honed bone.

As the other two also reached for weapons as well, from behind them came the sound of water cascading. As Toran darted forward to intercept the cultist coming at him, Erol turned and whipped up his longbow, nocking an arrow and letting it fly at the nearest of the gigantic green-black frogs lurching out of the lake. But the creature took a prodigious leap, and the shaft flew under its massive form. It came down less than three meters from the party, its companion tight behind.

Toran blocked the maddened cultist’s first blow with his battle-axe, chips of bone flying as the macabre weapon met the enchanted iron of Ergonkïr. The crazed zealot, unbalanced by the block, completely failed to dodge the Khundari’s counter attack. He collapsed with an almost soundless exhalation as his intestines poured out of the gash the axe opened in his abdomen, spasmed, and was still.

Vulk had instantly aimed the Staff of Summer at the remaining cultists, and the faintly glowing strands of the entangling Weaver’s Web shot forth, enveloping both men and their workbench in a cocoon of nearly unbreakable energy, while Mariala had whirled and fired of a blast of Fire Nerves at the nearest of the giant frogs.

The creature was just opening its mouth to launch its no-doubt lethal tongue at Erol, who was scrambling to drop his bow and bring up his trident, and the blast caught it full in the face. With an enraged croak, the beast turned its blind gaze on Mariala and leaped over the gladiator, intending to come down on the woman and devour her in a single gulp.

Devrik swung his battlesword up over his head in a mighty arc which bisected that of the monstrous amphibian – the creature’s guts spilled forth, much like its human compatriot’s had moments before, and it crashed to the ground less than a meter from its target. One clawed, webbed arm reached for her, but fell limp as the beast shuddered and died.

“Thank you, my friend,” Mariala gasped, more than a little shaken by the close call. That gaping mouth rushing down on her had looked big enough to have swallowed her whole! “I don’t think –”

“Ah, I doubt I could have reached the thing if your magics hadn’t weakened it before it leapt,” Devrik shrugged and gave her a wry grin. He flicked the blood and guts of the dead frog off his blade, and they both turned to deal with the last frog.

That beast was preparing to leap into the midst of the group, but even as it left the ground Haplo gestured and gave a shout – three shimmering, almost invisible bolts of karmic energy shot forth from his hands and entered the frog in head, throat and belly. It collapsed to the ground much like its companion, although it continued to twitch until Erol drove his trident through its skull.

The web-bound cultists were trying to shriek in rage and fury at the death of the giant frogs, but their mouths were bound by the glowing strands, and little more than muffled squeaks escaped them. Ignoring them, the Hand drew together to discuss their next move… they knew where their ultimate adversary in this labyrinth lay, but how to deal with such a powerful being…

“It’s clearly a demon-spawn of some sort,” Mariala said. “And we do not have the best record with demons… I don’t think we want to loose a third demon on the world…”

“Well, technically, we only freed one demon,” Vulk argued. “Admittedly, one of the five most powerful demons in existence, but… anyway, the spider-demon was already free in the world, we just failed to banish it once we’d killed its physical form.”

“Well, that’s not a mistake I plan to repeat,” Mariala declared firmly. “Here’s what I propose…”

♦ ♦ ♦

A few minutes later, the group was ready to descend into the thick, noisome darkness of the Dol’Gurthog’s inner sanctum. Both Erol and Devrik had tried, and failed, to enflame trident and battlesword, respectively; the oppressive, cold chaos magics of the caves seemed to choke off their own power.

Toran, however, managed to cast Bladesharp on his battle-axe, giving his already powerful blade a particularly lethal edge, while Vulk spent several minutes in mediation and succeeded in gaining Virtues Armor, its faint glowing golden light providing him with the Lady’s holy protection in the upcoming fight.

In the hopes of softening up whatever waited below for them, Erol tossed one of his crystal spheres, imbued with the power of the Blast of Norinos, down the broad steps and into the darkness of the lair… but whatever uncanny blackness filled that space seemed to be too much for the light magic, and nothing occurred.

Erol then used his psionic Amplification ability to power up his companion’s defensive spells and rituals, while Korwin opened the lens on his bullseye lantern, hoping that its arcane light would again prove able to pierce the frog-demon’s arcane darkness.

And so it proved to be, the beam punching through the murk as the Hand descended the wide, rough stairs into the inner sanctum of the Dol’Gurthog, leaving Jeb and Therok above to guard their retreat.

The chamber was not as impressive as one might have expected for a supposed demon-god – maybe 30 meters wide and 15 meters deep. Its black stone walls dripped with the blue Primordial Ooze, while pulsating, bilious green masses of fungus grew in patches on the rough floor. Scattered bones, human and animal, littered the area, including an large pile of human sculls, topped by an immense giant’s skull, that formed an alter of sorts. A black-robed man stood near this structure, but his fierce glare at the intruders hardly registered, given what loomed behind him in the darkest corner.

Even after seeing all of the sketches and monuments, the Dol’Gurthog’s actual appearance was both horrifying and fearfully impressive. It stared in the group’s direction with empty eye sockets as the four large tentacles rising from its back flailed around above its head. Massive warts covered its body and a dozen horns jutted from the top of its head. Blue slime dropped from monstrosity’s flesh to form puddles on the floor around it. The eyeless stare seemed to flay the soul, and for a moment they all hesitated, caught in a grip of overpowering terror.

But with a collective shudder the companions all threw off the stultifying horror of the creature’s gaze. The Hand grit their teeth and moved forward, weapons ready, and the demonic amphibian gave out a croak that shook the chamber. As the echoes died away a thousand higher-pitched croaks answered, as from a great distance.

“His children come!” shouted the robed figure, presumably the infamous Speaker Kythel. “You shall suffer for your insolence in entering the presence of the Great One with violence in your minds!” He drew a wicked looking dagger and lunged at Vulk with a shriek.

Vulk easily blocked the attack with his broadsword, but the wiry man was limber and fast, dodging his return blow. At the same instance a tentacle whipped out from the Dol’Gurthog, sending Korwin’s lantern flying, and darkness descended like a shroud.

As the light failed Toran leapt forward to strike at the now-invisible bulk of the demon, but the attack was blocked by a tentacle that in turn sent the Khundari flying into a wall.

Mariala cast the Syncope of Shala on the monster, and for a moment it seemed to have staggered the thing. The stench that permeated the air began to fade somewhat… but then, suddenly, a tentacle flashed out of the darkness, just missing her head as she stumbled back. The stench returned in full force, and another enraged croak shook the room.

Erol shot shaft after shaft into the darkness. If the arrows hit he couldn’t be sure, but he suspected, by the sound of  wood clattering to stone, that at least some were knocked out of the air by those damn tentacles. Haplo’s karmic missiles vanished into the darkness as well, but by the squeal of rage that followed, there was little doubt they had hit.

As the others did their best to damage and distract the beast, Devrik stood still in the darkness and gathered all his arcane and mental strength. When he had found his calm center, and the heart of flame that burned there, he closed his currently useless eyes. He sensed the massive bulk of the hideous creature… there! He opened his mouth wide and with a roar unleashed the Breath of Zhone.

The cone of intense flame that blasted forth burned the darkness away and engulfed the monstrous demon frog. As the searing flames made a living bonfire of it, the Dol’Gurthog writhed and shrieked in agony and fury, tentacles lashing out at random. In the light of the burning Toran had no trouble nimbly leaping and ducking away from the flailing limbs, but Kythel, stupefied into immobility at his master’s  immolation, was struck and sent flying into a wall.

Mariala clutched the Bowl of Barsol tightly in both hands, and she felt the moment when the demonic entity that animated the mutant frog monstrosity fled its dying host. She sensed it trying to leap into Devrik. But the power of the bowl was irresistible and the arc of its trajectory, visible only in her inner eye as a streak of violet light, was bent and sucked into the bowl. It swirled ever faster, caught in an inexorable vortex that forced it to the center of the shallow concavity – and then it was gone, at least to her mind’s eye. She felt its raging presence within the artifact, however, and she smiled coldly in triumph.

“Did it work?” Vulk demanded, rushing up to her, the others close behind.

“It did,” she replied, her sharklike smile widening. “Just as planned. The demonic form is trapped in the Bowl, and once we can get it to a proper Temple sorcerer it will be cast back out into the Void.”

The group’s rather raucous response was interrupted by a sudden, heart-stopping shriek. Kythel had regained consciousness and he now knelt on the cold stone floor near the charred, smoking remains of his god, hands clutched to his head and unintelligible sounds – moans, grunts, shrieks and even less identifiable noises – poured from his writhing mouth.

As the Hand soon discovered, all of the cultists still alive in the complex were in a similar state. Their minds seemed completely gone, leaving them trapped in what seemed an unending horror they couldn’t articulate. No amount of talk could get them to respond, and mental probes only threatened to spread the madness to the prober.

The only exception seemed to be old Rythek. When they found the hedge wizard in his chamber he seemed dazed and listless, but clearly not raving mad. As Vulk tended to him he slowly came to his senses, and under gentle prodding, he answered some of their questions. It seemed that he had been kept relatively sane by the Dol-Gurthog so as to act as the demon’s interface with the human world… just as the Crown Prince Laravad had done for the previous two years.

This revelation shocked the company at first, but on reflection made perfect sense. Papers recovered from Kythel’s “office” had further fleshed out the tale – never stable, the Prince had discovered the lair of the proto-demon on a hunting foray from his lodge, while the creature was still fairly young. It had found easy purchase in his mind, and seemed to understand that their ambitions ran parallel, at least for the time being.

The Prince had fed the demon on outlaws taken by his men, travelers seized on remote roads, and eventually on his own servants and peasants. His own sanity had deteriorated, as the months went on, and whether he directed the Dol’Gurthog’s actions or the demon controlled his was unclear. But when the Prince died the demon frog was left to its own devices… and had quickly spread its influence to seek followers/victims in the nearest settlement. If not stopped, there was no telling how far its insanity and power might have spread…

Rythek eventually grew strong enough to move, and agreed to return with the Hand to the village of Hart’s Lodge.  Making their way out of the cave complex the group came across thousands of baby frog-thing corpses, which had apparently been on the way to answer their progenitor’s summons – and died with it. They trod carefully, and with great disgust, over the stinking corpses, already beginning to slough into a fetid slurry.

Once out into the relatively fresh air of the surrounding woods, the group turned to look back at the mouth-like entrance to the caverns. There was a brief discussion about how to keep innocent people from wandering into the underground shit-show, and what to do about the mindless cultists still within, but before anything could be decided Rythek took the matter into his own hands. With a look of fierce concentration, he reached out with both hands and used his apparently substantial telekinetic powers to bring down the entrance to the cavern, sealing the madness away forever…

“Works for me,” Devrik said with a shrug after the dust settled, and turned to lead the way back to civilization… and a cold beer.

Devrik was deeply skeptical of Vulk’s “plan” to seek out and recover the long lost Staff of Summer, but eventually he succumbed to the peer pressure – that, and the boredom of enforced inactivity, due to the winter weather, in a city he knew little of. The execution, by beheading, of the treasonous and arguably mad Crown Prince the day before had also left everyone unsettled, and a little action might do them good. Still, his doubts remained…

“After all,” he grumbled as they rode out of Zhuran’s South Gate two days later, “it’s not like we’re two for two in the freeing-malevolent-entities-from-their-justly-deserved-imprisonment game or anything… so what could possibly go wrong this time?”

The others, having heard it all before, said nothing and the cavalcade proceeded west into the Arnoth Highlands as quickly as the frozen, snow-covered roads allowed. Fortunately the weather was clear and dry, if very cold, and promised to hold so for at least the next fivnight, according to Korwin. And so it proved, somewhat to his companion’s surprise.

They crossed the semi-frozen Eigaril River at the Sarnik Ford on the third day out from the capital. The narrow but fast moving stream’s rocky shallows were slick with a coating of ice, which nearly brought down Haplo’s horse, rider and all. But disaster was averted, if narrowly, and the next afternoon brought the group to the small mountain hamlet of Winter’s Forge.

Nestled in a narrow alpine valley in the foothills of Mount Eigarstal, this was one of several small communities in the region that claimed to be the settlement closest to the Halls of the Winter King. Vulk, after careful study of what texts he could find, and strongly influenced by his dream-intuition (he carefully didn’t emphasis the latter point, especially to Devrik) had come to the conclusion that Winter’s Forge was the real deal.

The hamlet consisted of a half score of ramshackle buildings, the largest of which appeared to be both town hall and occasional inn. It’s two modest arms (they could hardly be called wings) encompassed the local well, and a decrepit sign depicting an ice-covered anvil swung above the main door. The Hand’s arrival was known to all the locals before they’d even managed to inquire about rooms, apparently by some species of psychic osmosis, and the main room began to fill up quickly with curious natives.

Stabling was found for the horses in various stalls or sheds around the hamlet, as were rooms for the humans, eventually – the hamlet rarely received more than three or four travelers at a time, and the Frozen Anvil had only three rooms.

“None of which are fit for a Lady,” the proprietor exclaimed, almost wringing his hands in anxiety. He was a tall, slender man of middle years, his face leathery and his sandy hair fast receding from a high forehead, who went by the name of Olberth.

“I’m sure your rooms are perfectly adequate,” said Mariala with a reassuring smile – which in no way conveyed her certainty that nothing in this miserable mountain pimple was even close to adequate. Thank Shala she’d learned that cantrip for killing vermin in her first year at chantry. “If I may have the smallest chamber, the men can share the other two rooms between them–”

This suggestion was greeted with more hand-wringing. It seemed all the rooms were small, the beds not only small but few in number, and what with the leaking roof in the owner’s own room, well… Eventually, with the help of several of the locals, it was all sorted out and the men assigned various beds in either the inn or one of three other nearby houses. No one, however, seemed willing to put forth their own home as adequate for the Lady’s (Mariala could hear the capitalization) unquestionably refined needs.

The Margrave of Greentower was about ready to put her noble foot down when an older woman, who had entered the common room in the midst of the discussion on settling the men, spoke up. “Oh for the love of Alea, the poor woman can stay with me,” she snorted in exasperation. “I don’t imagine, having ridden out to the arse-end of nowhere, she expected to find a palace. If she says she’s fine with what’s available, why must you make a fuss, Olberth?”

Clearly abashed at this rebuke, but equally clearly relieved to have the intimidating noblewoman taken off his hands, Olberth managed a few garbled words before dashing off to get Vulk, Devrik and Erol settled in their rooms. As the others were carried off by their new hosts to settle into their own accommodations the old woman offered Mariala an awkward half-curtsey, half-bow. Mariala smiled, genuinely this time, and offered her hand, introducing herself. “Mariala, and thank you so much for your hospitality.”

The old woman snorted again, but this time with a smile of her own, and took the proffered hand. Her grip was dry, firm and surprisingly warm. “Arella, pleased to meet you m’lady. And you might want to actually see the accommodations before you thank me.”

As it turned out, Arella’s home was the second largest in the hamlet, after the town hall/inn, and although worn with age it was tidy and clean. The small bedroom she installed Mariala in was both pleasant and entirely free of vermin. She had dragooned a neighbor youth to bring Mariala’s horse along, as her own small stable was, she assured her guest, drier and warmer than the shed they’d planned to house the poor beast in. “My late husband, may he be one with the All, was very insistent that the animals be properly tended to, and I’ve kept it up since his death.”

After she’d had time to clean up and rest for a bit, Arella knocked on Mariala’s door and asked if she’d be joining her friends for supper at the Frozen Anvil. “Everyone will be there, it’s unusual to get any visitors this time of year, never mind so many. It’ll be crowded, but one thing old Olberth does well is set a decent table.” The man in question had to be at least a decade younger than Arella, Mariala thought in amusement.

“Yes, I’d planned on joining my companions,” Mariala replied, reaching for her cloak. “We’re searching for some… information, and were hoping the local common room might be the best place to find it. Will you be joining the crowd?”

It turned out she was, and that she’d been right about the village turning out for the excitement of the exotic visitors. Although every seat in the common room was taken when they arrived, and people lined the walls, Mariala had no trouble finding a spot between Vulk and Devrik. Arella gave one young man near the door a look, and he quickly scrambled to his feet and offered her his seat. Patting him kindly on the cheek with an approving smile, she asked him to be a dear and fetch her a hot cider as she sat down.

The Hand shared with the room what information of the larger world they seemed interested in, telling tales of the recent battles, the narrow escape of the Crown Princess, and the restoration of the king. These remote subjects of his seemed genuinely to think well of the old man, and to be grateful that he was again ruling over them. The fate of the late Crown Prince was glossed over, and no one seemed inclined to pursue the matter – it seemed the usurper was likely to be quietly and quickly forgotten by his own would-be subjects.

The crowd also seemed very interested in the marriage that had united the kingdoms of Nolkior and Arushal, and even the men seemed fascinated by the details of the event. Much discussion was given to how this union would affect Tharkia – would the new Kingdom of Ukala retain Nolkior’s claim to their own country, or would they relinquish it, leaving only Serviar’s claim to hang over the throne, and poor, beleaguered King Balen?

Eventually the conversation was brought around to local tales, and to the legend of the Winter King. A strange reluctance seemed to fall over the crowd as Vulk and Mariala pressed the point. It was clear from their own stories that the hamlet milked the legend for all they could, and that it was the main reason they even had visitors, now that the old iron mine was played out. Yet with these visitors they seemed oddly reticent… the Hand hadn’t identified themselves directly, but the stories they’d told had made it clear that this group was, at the very least, competent.

Eventually several people offered up directions to the supposed “mountain seat” of the Winter King, although claiming that at this time of year it was too dangerous to make the several-mile journey. Both Mariala and Vulk had no trouble detecting the falsehood of these statements, but they also could sense that there were lies of omission going on as well. Letting the conversation be led off onto other paths, the two leaned in to speak quietly amongst themselves and to Devrik.

“I think they know where the true Halls are,” Vulk said in frustration, “but they are adamant about keeping that information secret. They’re happy enough to make some coin sending seekers to some made-up spot, but not to the true location. Why?”

“I agree, my own spells have made it very clear that we’re being actively lied to,” Mariala said, “and that other truths are being deliberately withheld. But I’m no clearer on the why than you are… Devrik?”

“I take your word on the lying, of course,” the fire mage rumbled. “But I don’t see what we can do about it. We’ve offered money, rather a lot, and yet they seem absolutely –”

“Oh, they are hide-bound, superstitious and fearful fools,” a querulous voice suddenly interrupted Devrik. The three friends turned to find Arella standing close behind them, a look of mixed resignation and annoyance on her face. “I suggest you three join me for some tea at my home. It will be easier to explain there than in the middle of this barn dance.”

An hour later the four of them where seated comfortably enough around the small fire in Arella’s parlor, as the old woman began her explanation. “It’s pretty damn obvious that you lot are more than the usual run of souvenir hunters, thrill seekers or arcane historians we usually get here, seeking the way to the Halls of the Winter King. I’d say you’d be what they call them there “adventurers,” like what the old stories talk about… and the others sense that too.”

She waved her hand impatiently when Vulk began to offer explanations. “Pish, it’s neither here nor there, as long as you’re competent adventurers. That’s what we need right now, though the others might deny it.”

“I’d like to think we’re above average,” Mariala said smoothly, noting the sardonic gleam in Devrik’s eye and cutting off any snarky comments he might have been inclined to offer. “But please, won’t you tell us why you feel the need for someone like us just now?”

“Well, that’s why we’re hear, dearie, init?” the old woman said with a laugh, apparently satisfied about the group’s bona fides. “You see, it’s well know in this hamlet where the ancient fortress and high seat of the Winter King can be found – and has been known for generations. In truth, it’s not far from here at all.

“But you see, our folk were charged long ago to keep the secret from all who might come looking… legends say that after the great Telnori wizard Hastur had defeated the Winter King and imprisoned him in a block of ice deep beneath the mountain, this was the first place he and his apprentice reached.

“Hastur was near to death, having been mortally wounded by the fell magics of that giant necromancer, and would never have made it even this far without his apprentice’s help. This was a larger town then, although already much reduced thanks to the years of eternal winter, and there was a physician here… sadly, his skills were not enough, and after a tenday the great wizard passed to the All. But not before exacting a promise from the townsfolk that they would not let anyone near the old fortress, lest his spells be broken and the Winter King freed once more.

“Already the terrible, endless winter had ended, and a marvelous spring was bursting forth with astonishing speed, as if nature wished to make up for all the years of growth lost to the cold. In their gratitude (and fear, lest the miracle be withdrawn) the men and women of Winter’s Forge agreed, and their oath was reaffirmed and taken up by each new generation. Even as time took its toll, and the town shrank to a village, and the village to a hamlet, the faith has been kept.

“But I fear that the time has come to break that faith.” She paused for a moment, lost in some melancholy thought, before resuming her tale.

“In my lifetime, I have seen the winters in these hills grow ever harsher, ever longer, and the effects spreading ever-farther afield. My dear Harult traveled much in the region, and became convinced, near the end, that the spells of Hastur were slowly beginning to fail, and the power of the Winter King was growing and spreading once more. Some in the village dismissed our arguments, saying there have been harsh winters before; but they are willfully blind to what is happening, hiding their fear behind “faith” and “honor.” Others simply no longer really believe in the old legends.

“The believers fear to tamper with what has always protected us, the unbelievers don’t care, and so we sit, sliding ever closer to a terrible doom, I feel it in my bones. I don’t know what you can do, exactly, but you lot practically reek of the uncanny… if you can renew Hastur’s spells, or destroy the Winter King for good, either one… well, I think it’s better to risk it now than wait for him to regain his full strength. I’m too old to be living in eternal winter!

“I will tell you how to find the true High Seat of the Winter King.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

That night Vulk had “The Dream” again. Like the previous two times, it was identical in the action it portrayed, feeling far more like a memory than a dream. But this time when the dream faded he didn’t immediately wake up. Instead he floated in a dark void, and after a few moments he heard a voice, soft but piercingly clear… the voice of his Great Beast mentor, Dügora.

“He who takes the High Seat of the Winter King
If his heart be open to Winter’s beauty
Shall see all of Winter’s Realm laid bare
And then the Wheel of Heaven shall be his
To be turned at his will and with the path unlocked
Shall the treasures of Winter’s Heart be opened”

As the last syllable faded away, Vulk woke suddenly and completely. He reached for the stick of graphite and scraps of paper he’d been keeping by his bedside since the dreams had begun, and quickly wrote down the words – although they seemed etched in his mind, and he doubted he’d ever forget them. Re-reading them he realized, with a start, that some version of this had been in the Ur-Tel’naru documents he’d been translating – a section that he’d had trouble deciphering, but that now seemed perfectly clear.

He eventually laid back down, certain that he’d be unable to sleep.. but in minutes he had drifted off into a deep and, this time, dreamless slumber.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Early the next morning the Hand, having reassembled themselves in the yard in front of the Frozen Anvil, set off along the almost non-existent, overgrown, snow covered track Arella had described for them the night before. The few locals who were up to see them off, which included the anxious Olberth, seem dismayed at their choice of direction, but uncertain of how to dissuade them. All their blandishments and suggestions about the desirability of the opposite, much wider and better tended trail seemed to fall on deaf ears. No one had any illusions about using force on this group, of course…

After several hours of hard travel, they were forced to leave the horses behind, securely tied to trees in a wide clearing at the foot of a steep, stoney slope. Jeb and Therok were detailed to keep watch over them, and the rest of the party continued onward and upward. Arella’s directions had been admirably clear, and they knew from this point it was less than a mile to the “High Seat,” but a mile the horses could never traverse. Indeed, it took well over an hour for the humans (and human-adjacents) to finally come within sight of their goal.

Stepping out of a stand of snow-covered firs, a wide plateau opened suddenly to the east, a steep slope rolling down to the south and sheer cliffs to the north. A frozen  stream cascaded down from the highest cliff in undulating, icy sheets, to “flow” around a pier of stone on a middle level, before tumbling in silent, motionless waves down the lower cliff into a narrow pool then running down the slope to the east.

On the rocky pier was set a circular dais of light gray stone, upon which sat a massive chair of carved granite. Clearly meant for one of the larger species of Gyantari, it remained surprisingly free of snow and ice. A narrow flight of large, deep and high steps was carved into the stone of the nearer cliff, leading up to the central plateau and the High Seat. Unlike the seat itself, the stairs were covered in snow and ice, and looked treacherous. A cold, oppressive weight and a sense of foreboding seemed to bear down on everyone, with the exception of Korwin, who actually felt quite energized.

Before continuing, it was decided that Vulk should send Cherdon aloft to scout the stone chair and the area around them. But as the falcon soared upward in a widening gyre a series of sudden, sharp cracks, like a score of whips snapping at once, broke the snow-muffled silence. Rising up from the shattering ice of the frozen stream to the north were a dozen skeletal corpses of men, the “flesh” that knit their bones made of glittering blue ice. Some bore pitted, rusting blades, others merely razor claws of ice. Between these hideous specters, rising from the ice with them, were great hounds, the size of dire wolves, the solid ice of their forms cracking and instantly reforming as they stalked forward, eyes glowing red.

Erol was the first to leap forward to meet the shambling hoard as it moved toward the group, his trident flashing in the winter sun as he drove it into the flank of the nearest ice hound. It made no sound as it staggered back, great cracks radiating from it side… and it didn’t go down.

Toran had his battle-axe out and chopped mightily at the legs of another ice hound, causing it to stumble but also doing no real damage.

Near the back of the group, Mariala cast Resistance on herself, while Vulk attempted to cast Kasira’s Smile on Devrik, who was rushing forward, roaring out the incantation to Arkel’s Fiery Ribbons. Unfortunately both Vulk’s ritual and Devrik’s spell failed in the cold, forbidding atmosphere of the area.

Haplo, near the front, whipped his hand axe from his belt, swinging it in a mighty arc at the “belly” of the nearest ice zombie, shattering its spine as it claws scrapped uselessly against his armor. Even as it fell to pieces, once again merely lifeless bone and ice, a second one attacked. Haplo continued his follow through, turning it into a powerful counterattack that embedded the axe in the creature’s skull. It, too, collapsed in ruin.

As his spell sputtered out into nothing, an ice hound leapt for Devrik’s throat. The fire mage pulled his massive battle sword from its sheath on his back and counterstuck as he ducked beneath the glittering body. The blow shattered the beast’s hip, and it fell to the ground, writhing as widening cracks ran up its body, until it shattered into a thousand inanimate shards.

More ice hounds, outstripping the more shambling zombies, leapt to attack Erol and Toran, who blocked and evaded, waiting for their moment. Two bore down on Erol, who countered the first attack, piercing the ice warrior’s chest, and nearly dodged the second but couldn’t avoid a freezing gash to his thigh. Toran’s opponent wielded two ice-coated blades, and its attack was swift and vicious. It scored a screeching hit across the armor covering his belly, and managed to dodge the Khundari Shadow Warrior’s counterattack.

Devrik and Haplo both dodged attacks of their own, while Korwin summoned up his Ice Blade. The spell seemed to flow effortlessly from him, and the resultant blade that encased his right forearm seemed both sharper and stronger than any he’d yet manifested. Even so, the ice hound he first swung it at easily dodged his blow, circling around to try and get behind him.

As more of the ice dead swarmed over them, Erol shattered the brittle metal of a frozen sword and the hand that wielded it. Again, fractures radiated out from the destroyed limb, causing the zombie to collapse into shards. At the same moment Toran drove his battle-axe through shoulder of another ice zombie as it clawed at his chest, cleaving the creature almost in two and it shattering it.

Vulk had attempted to turn the clearly undead mob with his holy symbol, but in doing so had sensed no hint of the Shadow. Whatever these monsters were, they were not true undead. Of course, merely necromantically animated corpses were bad enough… Focusing past the dampening effects of whatever magic ruled this place, Vulk again cast Kasira’s Smile, and this time it worked – with a vengeance!

Devrik felt the surge of power flow through him, recognizing the blessing of Kasira. Momentarily free of opponents, he tried again to cast Arkel’s Fiery Ribbons, and this time achieved some measure of success. The spell seemed weak, however, and the ribbons moved sluggishly. Only one fully hit an ice hound, which collapsed to the ground as its legs melted beneath it, while a second hound almost dodged another ribbon, taking only a glancing blow to its left side, which sagged a bit.

The damage caused the beast to turn aside from Devrik, however, and instead it leapt toward Korwin. The water mage’s ice-blade managed to block the bite attack, the ice hound biting down on the blade and inadvertently driving it it through its own skull. It shattered into pieces at Korwin’s feet.

As Haplo and Erol caused more damage to the relentlessly approaching enemies, yet another ice zombie lunged at Devrik. As the fire mage’s counterstrike shattered its right arm and blade, sending a lethal spiderweb of cracks along its torso, the creature still managed to drive its second blade through his armor, scoring a deep cut along his abdomen. The injury itself was relatively minor, but the shock of the supernatural cold hit Devrik like a sledge hammer, driving him down into darkness…

Erol saw his friend topple over, and immediately felt his extratemporal psionic power engage. Time slowed to a molasses flow as he ran across the field to drive his trident into the side of the ice hound that was scrambling over the disintegrating corpse of its former companion to savage the unconscious Devrik. The hound cracked in two, and both halves shattered as they hit the ground. His second attack took the ice zombie shambling toward his friend in the neck, neatly decapitating it.

Haplo and Vulk, momentarily back-to-back, both managed to dodge attacks from an ice hound and an ice zombie, respectively. Toran sent a cross-bow bolt into the ice zombie threatening Vulk, taking off its weapon hand and causing a chain reaction of cracks that ended with it collapsing into shards off ice and bone.

Mariala, drifting back into the cover of the trees, managed to position herself behind another ice zombie as it lurched toward Devrik, who was being helped to his feet by Erol. Neither seemed aware of the danger, and she leapt to the attack with her Khundari dagger, taking the creature in the upper back, shattering it.

Korwin killed another ice hound at the same moment, but was wounded himself in the process – the gash sent a wave of intense cold through him, momentarily dazing him, enough so that, as he staggered back, he was unable to completely block the next ice zombie’s slash at his abdomen. Even as a second wave of black cold washed through him he drove his own ice blade into its head… as it disintegrated into its component parts he collapsed on top of it, unconscious.

Toran was forced to drop his cross-bow as an ice hound lunged at him from less than two meters away; he barely had time to whip two tabûri throwing knives from his belt and hurl them. They met the beast in mid-leap, taking it in the throat and belly, shattering it into several pieces. The creature’s momentum, however, couldn’t be stopped, and the disintegrating body slammed into Toran’s head, momentarily stunning him.

Another ice hound, thinking to take advantage of the situation, had time to be only briefly surprised when the Khundari, whirled around and cut its legs out from beneath it with his battleaxe. Erol took out the last of the ice hounds before turning to help Mariala, who was facing one of the last two zombies. But despite a few dodges and feints she needed no help, driving her dagger into the monster’s thigh, then whipping it back up to shatter its jaw with the pommel as it collapsed.

The last ice zombie lunged at Haplo, glittering claws grasping for his face, only to meet the head of his hand axe instead. As the mindless creature gnawed on the weapon, held at arms length, its arms flailing, Toran stepped up from behind and cut it in two at the waist with a single powerful swing.

As the silence of the snow-muffled mountains settled over them again, the Hand stared warily around, cautious of a second wave of uncanny enemies arising from the again-frozen stream. But when, after several minutes, there appeared no new attack, they began to tend to their wounds. Korwin was revived, and Vulk’s healing ability, along with the group’s vials of Baylorium 7, soon had everyone back in fighting condition.

Once everyone was rested and generally healed up, the group cautiously mounted the stone stairway up to the middle shelf of land that held the small island of the High Seat of the Winter King. The stairs were covered in drifts of snow and coated in ice, the stone cracked and uneven, making the ascent just as treacherous as they had feared. Only Korwin seemed to have no trouble, skipping eagerly up the stairs as if he was in his own home.

As the last of the others made it to the top they found the water mage standing at the edge of the frozen stream that flowed around the pier of rock containing the giant seat.He was unsure, as were his companions, whether crossing the stream might not be a very bad idea – another wave of undead? The water suddenly unfreezing and sweeping people over the falls? Worse?

Erol volunteered to go first, tying a rope around his chest, under his arm pits, while Toran cast Joining of Merkunon to anchor himself to the bedrock of the mountain, the other end of the rope firmly tied around his own waist. Certainly no one would be swept away, should that be the trap that awaited them, and if some other dire eventuality occurred they could at least drag Erol’s body back. Korwin cast Demokirian’s Freeze over the ice and touched everyone in the group, making them able to tread on the ice as if it were packed earth.

With the others gathered near the shore, except Toran who was anchored further back, Erol stepped out onto the ice and cautiously moved forward, wary of any hint of change to the opaque surface. “It seems very solid, very thick,” he called over his shoulder. “I don’t see any indication of water below, even; I think it’s frozen clear to the –”

He was halfway across when he suddenly stopped, in both mid-sentence and mid-stride. After a moment he looked around, then down at the rope tied around his chest, then back at the others. “Why is there a rope around me?” he asked, almost conversationally, as he loosed it and let it drop to his feet. “And who are you folks? It’s certainly very cold, isn’t it?”

“Oh shit,” said Devrik as his friend stepped over the coil of rope and started to wander away. “We can’t pull him back now – I’ll grab him!” He stepped out onto the ice and headed towards Erol. Kowrin also headed out on the ice, but more to get to the other side than to help his companions.

“You idiots, no!” cried Mariala, just a second too late. Devrik, less than halfway to Erol, suddenly stopped and looked around in confusion. Who was the read-headed lady who seemed so upset? What was she so upset about? And why was he standing in the middle of some frozen pond? Come to think on it, who the Void was he, never mind the odd group of people milling about over there?

Korwin, meanwhile strode briskly to the opposite side of the frozen stream and climbed up the short rocky path to the dais that held the giant stone chair. He mightily resisted the temptation to hoist himself up onto it and sit, despite his conviction that he was meant to do so. He’d felt, ever since he’d heard Vulk’s little dream ditty about the High Seat of the Winter King and the treasures of Winter’s Heart, that it was meant for him – the rhyme called to him in a way he’d never experienced before, and he was sure it was his destiny to sit on this throne…

But they’d agreed to go carefully, so he restrained himself, turning back to his companions. Devrik and Erol still stood on the frozen stream, and seemed to be introducing themselves to one another. Trying to, anyway, as neither seemed to know what their name was or who they were. They were distracted by the calls of the others who, with gentle words and promises of answers, gradually lured them back to the “safe” side.

Erol and Devrik approached the strangers warily, hands hovering near their weapons, but they didn’t draw and they didn’t bolt. Mariala tried to explain who they were and what had happened, but it seemed to make little impact on either man. Devrik continued to eye everyone suspiciously and looked dubious as the tale unfolded.

“You’re very pretty,” Erol said suddenly, interrupting Mariala’s monologue. “When we get back to a city or town or whatever, would you like to get a drink?” This stopped Mariala in mid-sentence, her mouth open in surprise. When she didn’t respond immediately, Erol asked if anyone wanted to make a snowman.

“Snap out of it, man!” growled Toran in annoyance, and he slapped the ex-gladiator upside the head, despite their height difference. “Wake up!”

Erol, looking surprised and then annoyed himself, took a swipe at the inexplicable Khundari, who nimbly dodged. He realized he knew what the shorter man was, but not who he was, which seemed odd… his disgruntlement at being slapped vanished when the silver-haired stranger bopped the dwarf on the helmet and told him to stop. As they began to argue he turned with a shrug and began rolling the base of his snowman…

Vulk managed to lead a wary Devrik over to stand near the happily whistling Erol, where he performed the ritual Blessing of Kasira on both men at once. Instantly they froze, their faces suddenly stiff and blank. Then it was obvious that memory and personality were flowing back into them. Erol looked down at the large sphere of snow in his hand, the torso of his snowman, and dropped it in puzzlement.

“Am I making a snowman?” he demanded of Devrik, in some confusion. “If so, why?”

“I have no idea,” Devrik replied. “Anymore than I understand how Korwin got to the other side of the river.”

Vulk, emboldened by Korwin’s safe passage across the ice and his own restoration of his friends’ minds, performed the Blessing of Kasira on himself, then set off across the ice to join the water mage. Safely on the far side with both mind and memory intact, he called across to the others.

“I don’t see any point in risking anyone else at this point. Korwin and I will go up and see what the situation is with this High Seat; the rest of you keep a sharp watch for anything unusual while we’re at it, please.”

The others agreed. No one was anxious to lose their minds just to sit on a no doubt very cold hunk of granite, even if Vulk could probably restore them. As the two men headed up the short path to the dais, they argued about who should sit in the throne first. In the end Korwin deferred to Vulk… right up to the moment when the cantor was pulling himself up onto the seat. Before he could turn and sit Korwin had leaped up beside him, and they sat simultaneously.

To Vulk’s chagrin, he saw nothing, felt nothing – beyond the searing chill of the frozen stone on his ass – even as it was obvious Kowrin was having a different experience. He felt the cold not at all, and as his own ass hit the stone his vision suddenly sharpened – the high seat looked out over the Arnoth Highlands below them, and he could see to the horizon with a clarity, and in such detail, that it took his breath away. The hamlet of Winter’s Forge looked like it was a model just a few feet away… he could actually make out the individual faces of various villagers going about their business…

His attention was wrenched away from this voyeuristic pursuit, however, when a sudden vision appeared in the air before the throne. It was a glowing blue-white orrery of the Ziran system, hovering in translucent three dimensional glory before him. The date glowed in large letters and numbers above the model, and as he reached out to try and touch the beautiful structure he found the planets of the system moved with his motions. As they moved, the date changed, and he quickly realized he could select any date by positioning the planets and moons in their configuration on that date – past or future!

Vulk saw nothing.

Once Korwin had described what he was seeing some debate followed about how the orrery should be manipulated to achieve “the path unlocked.” In the end they found that it was the date of the summer solstice, for any year, that was the key. When the model was set thusly, the vision faded and there was a sudden rumbling beneath their feet. Down the cliff, near the base of the southern slopes, a sudden spray of powdered snow could be seen puffing out and avalanching down into the trees below.

Rejoining the others, the group headed down the slopes to find a massive cave entrance had been revealed by the swinging open of great stone doors disguised as part of the hillside. Cautiously entering, the Hand found a series of large caverns and sinuous, winding passageways leading deeper into the mountain. Great outcroppings of glowing blue crystal grew in patches from walls, floors and ceilings, illuminating everything in a cold, eerie light. A natural stone bridge arched over a chasm where a once rushing stream was frozen far below, and giant steps lead downward.

One level was clearly a living space for a giant of tremendous size… ethereal fires burned still in great hearths in kitchen and hall, giving off no heat, as well as in braziers of bronze and onyx in study and bedroom. An immense bed occupied the center of the latter room, and beyond it a hidden door lead to what appeared to be a treasury. Although the shelves were bare, a massive chest stood at the far end of the long, narrow room, and it drew the party.

Toran quickly determined that the chest, almost as tall as he was, was protected by locks and traps both physical and arcane. While he could defeat the former with his own skill and his magic key, the latter were far beyond his ability to dispel. After the other mages tested their own skills against the magic defenses, Korwin decided to try a more practical tactic. He used his telekinetic hand to unlock the last lock and lift the lid – instantly the chest and everything for two meters around it were encased in ice.

Fortunately no one had been caught in the frigid explosion, but the resultant ice was like steel. Most of the Hand had felt the oppressive weight on their souls increase as they moved deeper in to the Halls of the Winter King, and their own arcane powers waning, especially Devrik. Attempting to summon fire to melt the ice, he found he couldn’t generate so much as a magical spark. Even his psionic pyrokinesis could produce no more than a pale, flickering flame.

Korwin was the only exception, in most regards, to the general malaise. His own powers felt energized and sharper the deeper they went, but at the same time he sensed a malevolence that seemed directed at him in particular. This feeling of jealous rage kept him on edge, and he felt it trying to subdue his powers, even as the sanctum itself (for that’s surely what this was, a natural Avikoran sanctum) boosted them. He was forced to admit that it would take him hours to sublimate the ethereal ice around the chest.

The group decided to leave the chest, for now, and see what they might do once the primary objective was achieved. Moving out of the living quarters they followed more winding, giant stairs down to an even lower level, and so found at last the Great Hall of the Winter King. It was a huge chamber with multiple levels of natural shelves rising from the solid ice floor, and a great dais inset in the southwest wall, upon which was a far more massive and ornate throne than the one outside.

And seated upon that throne was an enormous humanoid figure of solid blue-white, translucent ice, much like the ice hounds in fact. A cold blue light burned in the deep-set eye sockets as it turned its gaze on the intruders, the mere moving of its head sounding like the groaning and calving of glaciers. Massive fists clenched at the arms of the throne, their ice cracking and refreezing as it flexed.

“Who dares disturb the counsels of the Winter King?” a voice both deep and crystalline growled as the Hand stood frozen in their tracks.

“We seek an audience with you, mighty King,” Korwin said, before anyone else could answer. As he stepped forward the figure rose from its seat with the sound of an avalanche and gestured toward the much smaller mage.

“Die, interloper!” it rumbled as a large icy spike flew from the out-flung hand. Korwin’s eyes widened and he tried to dodge, but the freezing spear took him in the thigh and he fell screaming to the floor. His blood froze as it tried to pool around him, and his mind sank into blissful, pain-free darkness.

Erol immediately sent a shaft from his longbow into the left hip of the Winter King, followed almost without pause by a bolt from Toran’s cross-bow, which embedded itself in the giant’s right shoulder. Mariala hurled her dagger at an eye, but the blade was batted aside with ease, sending it skittering across the ice floor.

Haplo pulled his axe free with one hand and gestured with the other, sending a blast of invisible force, in the form of four Mokel’s Karmic Missiles, at the looming enemy. Cracks appeared at the left thigh, both shoulders and the right elbow, but they seemed to heal over almost as quickly as the formed.

The Winter King in turn made a similar gesture, and another spike flew from his hand, piercing Haplo’s right bicep, sending his hand axe and a spray of blood flying and the young mage to his knees, clutching at the wound and attempting to stop the bleeding.

Erol’s extratemporal power kicked in as he tried to cast Burning Shaft on his trident before hurling it at their foe. But the oppressive weight of the Avikoran sanctum caused the spell to sputter out in failure, even as the weapon itself shattered the left shoulder of the giant. The Winter King screamed in crystalline rage, seeming at last to feel something – just as Toran’s next bolt pieced his mouth, blowing out the back of his icy skull in a shower of glittering shards.

The blue fire in his eyes flickered out, and in slow motion the body of the Winter King toppled forward off his dais, to shatter into a million pieces on the floor of the Great Hall. For a moment there was a deep silence, broken only by Haplo’s muttered curses as he tried to staunch the flow of blood from his arm. Then the flood burst as everyone started talking at once.

“That was… surprisingly easy,” Toran said suspiciously.

“Tell that to Korwin,” said Vulk as he knelt by the unconscious man. “And Haplo.” Mariala was kneeling by the silver-haired mage, wrapping an improvised bandage around his arm. “Damn, he’s lost a lot of blood. Go through his scrip, see if you can find the rest of his Baylorium 7s!”

As Toran searched for the precious ceramic bottles, Vulk pulled the chain around Korwin’s neck from beneath his tunic and unstoppered the brass and crystal vial it supported. He slowly poured the dose into his friend’s mouth, making sure he swallowed it and didn’t choke or spit it back up. When Toran handed him the green ceramic bottle which contained a triple dose of the miracle elixir, he poured the entire thing over the gaping wound in Korwin’s thigh.

Almost at once the bleeding slowed, and in less than a minute it had stopped completely. Within five minutes the edges of the wound were visibly beginning to close, the flesh knitting itself back together. Two turns of the glass later, Korwin was back on his feet, if still weak and pale from blood loss, and favoring the wounded leg a bit.

Once satisfied that his friend would live, Vulk moved to check on Haplo. With Mariala’s help he had managed to swallow his own emergency vial of Baylorium 7s, but was more than willing to let the cantor apply the topical version to the wound itself. Nasty as it was, not having nicked an artery it began to heal even more quickly than Korwin’s injury, and by the time the group gathered at the foot of the giant throne he was already flexing his bicep and hefting his recovered hand axe.

“There is no way that this was the actual Winter King,” Vulk began once they’d all gathered. A thorough search of the hall had revealed no sign of the Staff of Summer, and in any case in his visions the Gyantari wizard had been a flesh-and-blood being, not a creature of solid ice.

“I don’t think Hosara-Tar actually turned his enemy into ice… that just feels wrong, somehow. No, I think this was just another animated trap of the actual Winter King, much like those ice zombies and even more like the ice hounds. But I’m not sure what to do next, we seem to have reached the bottom of this fortress…”

“Actually,” said Toran diffidently, “I found a hidden door while searching around for the Staff. I figured if no one else found the thing, I’d suggest we try there. Or even if they did find it, that we might find something worthwhile to loot…”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The secret door did, indeed, lead to something worthwhile… after winding down narrow, twisting passages, the Hand came at last down a final set of stairs and out into another large chamber, unlike any they had yet seen. The clumps of crystal there glowed with a pinkish white light, and the floor was made of deeply glowing violet ice. A huge ward was etched into the ice, filling the center of the room, and across from where they stood was a massive throne of amethyst. On that throne sat the true King of Winter, and he was terrible.

His flesh had fallen from his bones at some point, and in its place flickered a cold blue flame. This searingly cold new “flesh” mostly covered his bones, save that his skull shone through the flames wreathing his head. The deep sockets of his eyes glowed with a piercing blue light and a malevolent intelligence. Tattered robes and blackened armor covered him, and in his hand was a black spear of twisted wood, with a black metal point across which pale blue flames flickered.

As the Hand stepped into the room, crowding onto the area of bare stone at the entrance which rose slightly above the glowing violet ice, he rose. He stood almost seven meters tall, and when he spoke his voice was as dead and cold as the void between the stars.

“So, once again the little folk come to challenge my power, the power of Winter. You are fools, and will fare no better than the last witless child to face me.”

“That ‘witless child’ may not have been able to destroy you,” Vulk said, stepping forward to the edge of the ice, inwardly praying to Kasira for strength and wits. “But he certainly succeeded in imprisoning you here for over 13 centuries.”

For a moment the Winter King was silent, and when he spoke it was almost wistful, if only briefly so. “Has it truly been so long? But it is no matter… I may have fallen into that mageling’s trap, my power indeed confined herein – for a time. But for many years since that trap has become my own bastion, its power my power. I have slowly subverted its energies to my own purposes, and am its prisoner no more!

“Whether you come to steal the Staff of Summer or to make sure that the King of Winter is truly dead, you have failed already – for I live! Indeed, I have become immortal; and the Staff of Summer is no more! For behold, it has become the Spear of Winter, and soon it will usher in a never-ending Age of Ice across the globe!” He lifted the spear and slammed its haft down against the ice three times.

While this had been going on, Devrik had been desperately trying to ignite his battlesword with Goraten’s Brand, struggling against the tremendous pressure of not fire that beat against him like an ocean. Five times he tried to empower the spell, and each failure drained a little more energy from him… he could feel the fatigue beginning to sap his physical strength as well as his mental agility, and that last attempt had been almost as draining as the first four combined. Closing out all distractions, he focused his will inward even as he sent out prayers to Kasira and Xydona…

As the echoes of the last tap of the Winter King’s spear reverberated, and before Vulk could respond,  Erol and Toran, almost simultaneously brought up their bows and fired. Erol’s shaft flew true, he could feel it, straight for the monster’s heart – almost contemptuously the giant flicked his hand and the spear knocked the arrow aside like it was standing still. A second flick and Toran’s bolt was also knocked aside before it could pierce the “royal” breast.

“Impressive,” muttered Toran, and Erol echoed the thought with a respectful “Well played!”

As soon as the missiles had flown, Vulk had begun the ritual of Kasira’s Smile, seeking to aid Devrik. He knew his friend would need it in this frigid Avikor sanctum more than any of the others. His own will was oppressed by the cold, dark weight of the sanctum, but even through the darkness he could feel the light and power of the Immortal Lady of Luck. And even if it wasn’t the widest channel he’d ever opened, nonetheless he felt Her power flow through him and into Devrik…

With a roar, Devrik leapt up from where he had been kneeling behind the others, and his sword burst into flame with a roar of its own, its light and heat pushing back the cold and the dark. The fire mage pushed past his friends and rushed the giant, sword high. “Prepare to meet the true King of Summer!”

The Winter King rushed forward to meet the charge, chanting some incantation that caused his spear to burst into blue flames that radiated a deathly cold to match Devrik’s heat. The two met near the center of the chamber, and the giant was slightly faster – he thrust his flaming spear forward with all his considerable strength straight for his smaller opponent’s gut.

Devrik, still feeling the power of Kasira within him, went low and for the counterstrike. The shock of the blow numbed his right arm, but he kept his grip on his sword even as the Spear of Winter went flying from the Winter King’s grasp to clatter onto the ice to the right!

As the giant reeled back in apparent shock and fury, he was hit at almost the same instant by Mariala’s Passion Nerves spell, and Haplo’s four Mokel’s Karmic Missiles. Unfortunately both seemed to do little more than momentarily confuse, and then further enrage, the giant.

Erol went extratemporal with practiced ease, and hurled his net. The Winter King dodged it easily and dove for his Spear. Toran made a grab for the weapon as well – and beat him to it. The dwarf rolled quickly away and the spear’s icy flames flickered out as he tossed it to Vulk.

Vulk, who had been taken aback by the giant’s claim to have corrupted the Staff of Summer, quickly realized it had been a lie. He sensed the power in the spear, but it had no relationship to the Toraz convocation, or indeed to life itself. It was strictly a tool of death and entropy, and he tossed it out of the cave, into the passageway behind them.

Meanwhile, Haplo had kept the Winter King busy with a flurry of attacks with his flashing hand axe. The giant blocked each blow with iron bracers, but it kept him distracted long enough for Erol, still moving at speed, to entangle the giant with his net, causing him to stumble. To the ex-gladiator’s accelerated senses the opening this gave him was wide and long – his trident thrust pierced the necromancer’s armor and blue fire surged out of the wound in the giant’s side, staggering him.

With the Winter King reeling, Korwin cast his Drunken Hand spell, while at the same instant Vulk Cursed him. Seeing their enemy dazed, Devrik attacked again, bringing his fiery sword around for a mighty blow. The Winter King, who had retreated almost back to his throne, grabbed his own battlesword, propped against it, and ignited it with his icy flames even as he made a lightning counterattack. Fast as he was, he was clearly still feeling the effects of Korwin’s spell, and he staggered just a bit as he attacked – and by that was saved as Devrik’s blade missed him by a hair. His own blade cut into Devrik’s right thigh, however, splitting his armor.

Ignoring the pain, Devrik instantly moved in for another attack, and the Winter King muttered an incomprehensible incantation… three balls of crackling blue energy appeared around his upraised hand, and he hurled them at the fire mage. Devrik just managed to dodge the spheres, and could feel the burning cold radiating from them as they passed.

The giant took advantage of Devrik’s momentary distraction and raised his sword to attack – but before the blow could fall, one of Toran’s tabûri bloomed in his forearm, piercing the fiery flesh between the bracer’s straps and causing him to drop his weapon.

Mariala had been preparing to throw her own knife from behind Devrik, but in having to dodge the Blue Balls of Icy Death herself, she fumbled the blade. Cursing silently to herself as the blade clattered to the ice, she dove to retrieve it and hoped no one noticed her ungainly scramble.

Erol, Haplo and Toran kept up a barrage of attacks on the Winter King, keeping him from picking up his fallen sword and able only to block with his armored forearms. Fire continued to flicker from the gash in his armor, but he seemed little effected by the wound.

As he prepared for his next run, a sudden flash of inspiration struck Devrik. He disengaged from the battle with the Winter King, ducking a blow from his massive fist and rolling away toward the center of the room. Coming to his feet over the heart of the warding sigil etched into the ice, he yelled “This is either going to succeed wildly, or fail spectacularly!” as he raised his flaming blade over his head. Everyone in the chamber froze as he drove the burning sword deep into the heart of the mystic symbol.

The was a flash of blinding violet light, a tremendous CRACK like thunder, and everyone was hurled away from Devrik as if lifted by an invisible hand. Cracks propagated outward at terrible speed, and the icy floor of the cavern broke into dozens of fragments floating on a sea of bubbling, steaming mud. Devrik lay stunned on the largest fragment, his sword cold and inert nearby, the Winter King had been thrown back against his crystal throne, and the others were scattered variously across the floor fragments.

As the combatants slowly recovered from the shock of the blast, a low hum began to fill the chamber and all eyes were drawn toward the center. Rising up out of the mud, surrounded by a glowing green nimbus, was a staff of twisted ironwood, its branches forming a sort of basket at the head that encased a glowing ovoid of translucent green resin.

“At last!” cried the Winter King, his deep, crystalline voice sounding truly alive for the first time since the Hand had entered his prison. He leapt from his throne to the nearest segment of floating floor ice, headed for the Staff of Summer. But Devrik was closer by far, and he staggered to his feet, reaching out to seize the artifact – only to be blown back and slammed into the far wall.

Korwin, taking note of his companion’s fate, attempted to grasp the Staff telekinetically. But it proved impossible – the mental sensation his mind generated was like trying to grasp a perfectly frictionless oval, he simply couldn’t get a grip on it. With a curse he gave up and prepared to focus on tripping up the Winter King as he hopped from floe to floe…

But Vulk had started moving as soon as the head of the Staff had broken the surface of the bubbling mud, leaping like a gazelle from ice fragment to ice fragment, never stopping, never losing his forward momentum. With a final leap he snatched the glowing artifact from where it hovered and came down, the Staff firmly clutched in one hand, on the large floor fragment Devrik had first occupied. He whirled to face the Winter King, who now stopped one ice floe away…

In a timeless moment inside his own head, Vulk confronted the intelligence within the Staff of Summer. Two wills clashed, for what seemed hours, until the will within the Staff retreated, submitting to its new wielder. Vulk knew it would take much more time to fully master the powers of the artifact, but for now he was truly in control. His mind snapped back to full awareness, and he realized only seconds had passed.

He raised the Staff, preparing to deliver a stirring monologue before blasting the Winter King into the Void, when the giant burst into a long, deep laugh.

“Thank you, little would-be mageling,” the giant gusted out gleefully. “So easily manipulated, so deeply foolish. Everything you have done since entering my realm has been by my will. Now, by seizing Hasora-Tar’s cursed staff and making it your own, you have broken his spells of binding and restraint, freeing me at last from the bonds I could never have broken from the inside, not in less than another thousand years! No more painfully extending my power meter by creeping meter, year after slow year; now I feel it all rushing back into me at once, like a river! Soon I – I –”

He faltered suddenly in his gloating, and staggered, dropping to one knee. “No! What is– what–” He held one hand up to his face and watched in uncomprehending horror as the blue flame flickered out and the bones beneath, suddenly visible, began to crack and fracture. In seconds his hand was gone in a spray of glittering blue dust. “How?” was the last, anguished word from his lips before his legs crumbled away beneath him and he collapsed all at once into a swirling mass of glittering flecks. Eventually only the scattered pieces of his armor and scraps of cloth remained atop a pile of bluish dust, before dust, armor, and all sank into the bubbling mud.

“What did you do, Vulk?” asked Devrik as he wincingly pulled himself up from where he’d hit the wall. “Did you use the staff to…” He gestured toward where the last of the Winter King was disappearing.

“No, that wasn’t me,” Vulk answered slowly. “Not directly, anyway. I think… the Staff is telling me… it’s hard to explain! But I think the powers of life contained in the Staff of Summer, combined with his own magics, was what was keeping the Winter King “alive.” He’d tapped into somehow, but he never controlled it, and when the spells were withdrawn – when I took control of the Staff – all the centuries caught up with him at once.”

“So, if he wasn’t lying about manipulating us into all this,” Haplo mused, “then he really killed himself. Ha! Great twist, I love it!”

“Well, now that that’s taken care of,” Korwin said once the general chuckles had died down, “and Vulk has his new toy, I suggest we head back to that treasure room and see about that large, promising chest we left encased in ice. I have a feeling that there’s some really nice stuff in there…”

The ship Stalwart drove through the rough seas with grim determination, sending up sheets of white foam as she crested each sullen gray wave before descending into the next trough. The wind was fresh from the northeast, and tattered clouds of gray and white scudded across the pale winter sky as Devrik stood alone at the prow, his dark gaze fixed on the horizon, beyond which lay their goal.

He knew the others were not entirely sold on this venture, and that it was primarily his will that drove them forward in such a rush. But time was not on their side, he felt it in his gut… besides, he knew his friends well. If he’d indulged the group’s usual habit of arguing endlessly around what needed to be done, they’d have come to this same place eventually – they always knew what had to be done, even if they sometimes dithered on how to do it. But the hours lost could be critical ones this time, and his cousin Nina might not have the luxury of those hours.

Nor the Princess Relina, of course. But it was the fate of the cousin he’d never met that occupied most of Devrik’s thoughts and drove him into danger. Family was of supreme importance, and he had few enough to risk losing any. His other cousin, Wirdon, stood on the aft poop deck with the captain and the steersman, his own grim visage a constant spur to the seamen despite their fears of the destination. His tension was so palpable, as he brooded on his twin sister’s danger, that Devrik could almost feel it across the length of the vessel…

Beneath Ser Wirdon’s feet, in the captain’s stateroom, the rest of the Hand of Fortune were gathered around the ward table, discussing their options. No one was thrilled about daring the legendary dangers of Barasina Island and the even more legendary evil of the Ur-Tel’naru, especially with no real time to prepare. But Devrik’s argument that a swift strike gave them the element of surprise, combined with King Balen’s pleas and the fear in Baron Gevdan’s usually stoic eyes, combined to sway them, and here they were.

“I don’t mind facing evil, dark Telnori,” Toran groaned, “but why must we travel through this storm to do it?” His usually swarthy features were pale, with just a hint of green at the edges, and he clutched a brass chamber pot in his lap. He hadn’t had to use it yet, but…

“Storm?” scoffed Korwin, getting up to move to the sideboard and the decanter of port there, his rolling gait seemingly oblivious to the pitch and yaw of the ship. “The storm is long passed, my Khundari friend. This sea is merely a bit fresh.”

He poured out some of the dark liquid into a cup and brought it to his companion. “Here, drink this, I promise it will help settle your stomach. Just sips, mind you, don’t gulp it!”

Toran looked dubious, but if anyone in the group knew about the sea – the horrible, horrible sea – it would be the Oceanian water mage. He took a tentative sip, and when he didn’t immediately heave it back up he took another. His stomach did seem to settle a bit…

Mariala looked in sympathy at her friend and patted his hand. She was very grateful that she rarely suffered from sea sickness, although there had been that one time aboard the Fortune’s Favor in that gale… best not to think on that just now, perhaps.

“I’m afraid there’s little choice, Toran,” she said with a sigh. “One of the reasons the Ur-Tel’naru were imprisoned on Barasina in the first place was that there are no Nitaran Gates there. And thanks to the wards the Immortals themselves placed around it, none ever will manifest there.”

“So, what do we really know about these so-called Dark Telnori?” Erol asked, tearing off a hunk of bread from the salted loaf on the table. His stomach was just fine. He fed a morsel to Grover, who was perched on his shoulder.

“Well, I know a few ballads,” Vox offered. “Mainly about the Ur-Tel’naru of Shaista-var, beneath the Greatstone Mountains, but there might be something there we could use…”

At the others’ urging he pulled out his lute and sang the songs… an entertaining hour for the others, and it did seem to distract Toran from his queasiness, but ultimately not of much obvious use.

“So, they seemed to be obsessed with spiders,” Vulk summarized as Vox re-cased his lute, “liked to sacrifice others in dark rituals to extend their own lives, and committed every atrocity imaginable on innocent peasants and unlucky heroes. And, of course, feared and shunned the sunlight… although that last one seemed more metaphorical than factual.”

“Whatever the truth of the past was,” Haplo offered, “perhaps 15 or so centuries of isolation and introspection has mellowed the survivors?”

As the others considered this dubious proposition a faint cry came suddenly from the lookout in the crows nest.

“Land ho!”

♦  ♦  ♦

The longboat scrapped against the shale of the narrow beach, and two of the terrified crewmen who had “volunteered” to row the group ashore leapt out. Chill water lapped at their knees as they pulled the boat far enough onto the strand for the Hand to disembark with relatively dry feet. As soon as Toran’s boots gratefully hit the sand, however, the two men were shoving the boat back out and pulling themselves aboard in unseemly haste. Pulling hard, with fearful looks to where the the wreck of the princess’ ship rose from the waves, the seamen headed back to the Stalwart.

“I trust your cousin will be able to hold them here until we signal for pick-up,” Vulk said to Devrik, as he watched the  men row away. “And wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to await us here on the beach… or at least just off shore… in case we need to make a fast escape?”

“More sense, yes,” Devrik growled, already striding across the beach toward the wreck. “But Wirdon felt we’d pushed the men as far as we could, getting them this far. And that’s why he stayed aboard the Stalwart, to stiffen their spines and make sure they’re still nearby when Mariala calls for them.”

And that had been a struggle itself, getting Wirdon to stay behind. He’d naturally been hot to lead the charge to rescue his sister (and the princess, of course), but had eventually given way in the face of Devrik’s arguments… the main one being that the crew knew and respected him, making him best suited to keep them in place off this haunted island.

Examining the sea-battered wreckage the group quickly determined that it was indeed the remains of the Sea Sprite, Princess Relina’s vessel. A single chest was half-buried in the sand, and once Toran had worked his magic to open its lock it revealed the high-quality clothes of a noblewoman. Korwin attempted to determine if they were, in fact, the princess’ clothes, but his psychometric gift seemed cold and he learned nothing.

In the meantime some of the others scoured the beach, reading the signs left by the survivors. It was obvious that several people had spent some time attempting to salvage supplies from the shattered vessel, and that a party of perhaps a dozen had eventually made their way off the beach and up a bluff to the west.

Atop the bluff the Hand found signs of a temporary camp, including the cold remains of a large bonfire. Set close by the edge of the 20 meter cliff overlooking the sea, it had obviously been built as a distress beacon as well as a source of warmth against the winter chill. But there were also clear signs of a struggle…

“No blood, which is at least promising,” Erol mused as he studied the marks in the sandy soil. “But I have no idea what they were fighting… I’ve never seen tracks like these before.”

“Nor have I,” Devrik agreed. “But whatever attacked, they were large  and… clawed? And these marks here… I’d say large nets were used. And our people were dragged off to the south…”

“Um, yes…” Vulk said abruptly, a distant look in his eyes. “Probably by enormous spiders… ridden like horses, by men with lances, or long spears…” The others stared at him in surprise.

“Like those!” Vulk pointed to the south, where three immense spiders were just cresting the nearest inland hill, Cherdon circling in the air above them. Perhaps five meters across, they had glistening black bodies with bilious green underbellies and their jointed, spiked, claw-tipped legs rose high over the heads of their riders. These were clearly men, but men with dark blue skin and shining white hair. Clad in gleaming black plate and chain, trimmed with silver, each bore a tall weapon – a cross between a spear and a proper lance the fighters decided.

“Perhaps they’re the traditional welcoming committee,” Korwin suggested as it became obvious the group had been spotted. “Maybe we could try talking this time, before we kill everyone?”

“I’m all for talking,” Vulk agreed, raising his Herald’s Baton high and stepping forward. Korwin followed a few paces behind. The three riders had spurred their mounts and were approaching quickly.

In fact, “barreling down on them” might be a better way to put it, Toran thought… he loosed the battle axe across his back. At the same time Vox nocked an arrow to his longbow, and Erol drew his own weapon. Devrik, Mariala and Haplo began concentrating on combat spells…

“They really don’t look like they want to talk,” Vox suggested, although he kept his bow lowered. At that moment the lead rider reached down to something on the side of his odd saddle, coming up with a wicked-looking javelin. Even as Vulk called out the greeting of Kasira’s Peace the rider hurled the javelin straight at him.

Vulk dodged left and Korwin went right, and the weapon flew between them, thudding into the ground with a weird electric hiss. Green tendrils of energy momentarily snaked out from it, narrowly missing the heroes. With a look somewhere between annoyance and resignation, Vulk again raised his Baton, but this time he used it to Curse the lead rider.

Mariala unleashed her Fire Nerves spell but, despite being a near-perfect casting, it appeared to have little effect on either riders or mounts. The sheet of ice Korwin cast across their path was more effective… the lead spider slid and scrabbled for purchase, then turned to flee. Its rider struggled to control it while hurling another javelin at the water mage, which Korwin easily dodged.

Devrik let loose a Fireball and the other two spiders and their riders were engulfed in flames. One rider managed to leap from his burning mount relatively unscathed, but the other took Vox’s arrow to the head… his body burned merrily along with his spider’s. The stench was horrible and almost overwhelming, an acrid smell like burning hair combined with the nauseatingly appetizing aroma of roasting human flesh.

Haplo sent one of his sleeping darts at the dismounted rider, but was unable to hit any of the the relatively small patches of flesh not covered by armor. Toran had better luck with his own shot, as his cross-bow bolt took the warrior in the throat. The man fell to the ground, clutching at the  bolt, twitched twice, and expired.

Erol loosed an arrow from his bow that managed to knock the remaining rider from his seat just as he regained control of his mount, turning back to face the group. As the rider lay stunned on the ground Mariala reached out with Dü Latal’s Communion to try and sooth and control the remaining spider. It seemed to work, as the creature calmed and stood where it was, shifting on its stilt-like legs restlessly…

Unfortunately, this calm didn’t last once she tried to suggest an action to the creature, and it reared up, preparing to attack. Toran and Vox hacked it down before it could follow through, however.

“A nice try,” Toran consoled his friend as he cleaned his axe. Mariala shrugged and gave him a wry grin.”The usual didn’t seem to be working,” she sighed, “so I thought I’d go with something new.”

Erol and Devrik bound the fallen Ur-Tel’naru and dragged him upwind of the burning spider corpses for questioning. It quickly became clear that the sentry didn’t understand Yashparic, and the language he spoke, while it hovered on the edge of comprehensibility, was not the Espar they’d expected. But once Vulk performed the Ritual of Tongues, the words of the their captive quickly began to make sense…

“…ghra na’ormvesh vhile mayfly vermin, infesting our prison/home –”

“Why did you attack us?” Vulk demanded, interrupting the prisoner’s tirade. The man looked momentarily surprised, then understanding lit his dark features.

“Ah, a lapdog of one of the Great Betrayers… you use the meager power they allow you to speak Reshki, the true tongue. Little good will it do you, mayfly. I will tell you nothing!”

And after several minutes of back and forth, with Vulk occasionally translating for his companions the various threats, predictions of their grisly deaths, and how their paltry life-force would feed the Ur-Tel’naru, it was obvious their captive would not, in fact, be telling them anything useful.

“This is a waste of time,” Devrik said at last. “We’re wasting valuable minutes –”

“He did let slip that his people took the survivors of the wreck,” Vulk interrupted, his own frustration obvious. “Maybe we can trip him up agai–”

“Devrik is right, we’re wasting precious time,” Mariala said suddenly. Then, to the utter shock of her companions, she drew her dagger and slit the captive’s throat. Vulk leapt aside to avoid the sudden arterial spray, venting a string of curses.

“I’m sorry,” Mariala said calmly, sounding not the least bit repentant. She wiped her blade on the dead man’s tunic before re-sheathing it. “We all knew it would have to be done, eventually – we could hardly risk leaving him alive behind us, nor could we safely take him with us. My own Truthsense told me that he was absolutely adamant in his refusal to help us, and given what he did say about sacrificing us “mayflies” to extend his own people’s lives, I judged we had best waste no more time here.”

Vulk was furious, and prepared to argue the point at some length, but Devrik interceded before he could get fairly started.

“We can debate this later, my friend,” he said, pulling the cantor away and giving Mariala a quelling shake of the head. “For now I think time really is of the essence. Let’s back-track on the trail of these disgusting spider-mounts and see if we can’t find our missing folk, yes?”

While Devrik calmed Vulk, Erol and Vox began looking for tracks, and  Korwin and Toran quickly searched the bodies of the two non-flambed corpses. They found little of interest in the way of loot, with the exception of a rod made of some dark wood that the lead rider had carried. Capped with a large white crystal, its only decoration was a carved collar just below the head set with four smaller gems of red, blue, green and white.

Korwin once again attempted to use his psychometry on the rod, but ended up with nothing except a splitting headache and the faintest idea that it might be a key of some sort. That was enough for Toran, who tucked it into his belt while the water mage rubbed his temples, looking like he might puke…

♦  ♦  ♦

The trail led them inland, up the slope to the crest of the hills overlooking the island’s northern shore. Covered in moderately dense woodland, the path of the original capturing party was not hard to follow. The bare trees and rough ground were covered in a light dusting of snow as they climbed in elevation, eventually leveling out to a large upland plateau and a crude path.

Two hours of travel eased Korwin’s throbbing head somewhat, and brought the Hand to a relatively open space in the woods. A frozen pond lay at the western foot of a small bluff, atop which was a stone platform, carved in intricate, mystical designs that glowed faintly with arcane energy in the weak winter sunlight. The structure was guarded by two motionless Ur-Tel’naru sentries, who seemed unfazed by the biting wind.

Cherdon overflew the area a few times, allowing Vulk to accurately describe the lay of the land to his companions. Warm enough while they hiked, everyone was now beginning to feel the winter bite, puffing and blowing on gloved hands and pulling cloaks tight about them as they worked out a plan of attack. Only Korwin seemed completely comfortable, wrapped in his magical Robe of Kesadarin… really more of a hooded cloak, Mariala mused irritably as she shivered next to the smug bastard.

In fairly short order the Hand worked out their plan…

Toran used his Amulet of Deception to give himself the appearance of the dead spider-rider they’d questioned, and took Mariala as his “prisoner,” straight up the stairs on the gently sloped east side of the bluff. The others divided into two groups which stealthily gathered to the north and south under cover of the winter woods.

As their supposed brother-in-arms approached, the two sentries finally broke their statue-like rigidity, calling out to him in what sounded like puzzlement… but not suspicion, Vulk realized, his understanding of their tongue making him the only one of the Hand to now comprehend what they said.

As they approached the two sentries Toran repeated the rote phrase Vulk had taught him, to the effect that he’d found this “mayfly” female wandering in the woods. The deception lasted just long enough for them to get within striking distance. Even as suspicion flared on the mens’ faces Toran swung his battle-axe at the one on the left, and Mariala’s Khundari dagger slashed at the one on the right.

Both Ur-Tel’naru warriors had lightning reflexes – Toran’s target leapt back just enough to avoid being gutted, although the blow rent his mail and a spray of blood arced away from the axe blade; Mariala’s target blocked her blow with his plate vambrace, and quickly to drew his own sword.

At the instant of their attack Vox and Jeb let fly from their longbows, but both shafts veered suddenly away, as if a strong gust of wind had struck them. Both archers were chagrined, but only Vox had a suspicion that it was more than an errant gust that had waylaid their shafts. A second volley proved just as ineffective, and then Vox was certain some arcane mischief was afoot.

On the stone platform Toran had moved to put himself between both warriors and Mariala, knowing that with surprise gone she stood little chance against the longer reach of their wickedly curved black swords. As he parried the Ur-Tel’naru attacks, watching for any opening, Devrik rushed forward to join the fray.

But before he could reach his friends there was a sudden shriek from the sky and Cherdon stooped on one of the sentries, his talons ripping the flesh from the man’s face, and one eye as well. At the same instant a flash of silver-brown fur streaked up the leg and torso of the other warrior, and Grover sank his fangs into the man’s unprotected throat.

Apparently hitting an artery, the ferret savaged his prey and the sentry fell to the ground, clutching futilely at the now blood-soaked and slippery animal as his life drained away. With a single, merciful swing of his axe Toran put the other guard, shrieking and clutching at his face and ruined eye, out of his misery.

The others soon joined Toran, Mariala and Devrik on the stone platform, and while the Khundari examined the area for signs as to its purpose the others airily explained to the amazed Haplo and Vox that no, this was not the first time that Grover had taken out a grown fighter. Although it was Cherdon’s debut kill as a member of the Hand’s Animal Auxiliary.

Toran soon drew everyone’s attention to a circular carving in the center of the stone symbol to the left of the main one. It had four smaller circles placed within it, three on the edge and one in the center. Each of these had large, smooth crystals set within, the three outer ones an opalescent white, the center one a translucent gray.

 “If that rod we took of the dead Ur-Tel’naru captain is a key, as Korwin suspects, this may be the lock it opens.” Toran pulled the device from his belt and examined it more closely.

“Both it and the circle radiate a very faint magical aura,” Mariala said after a minute of concentration. “They do seem… related.”

Toran twisted the collar on the rod and was unsurprised to find that it moved. He aligned the red gemstone with the silver arrowhead embedded just below the head. With a click the large faceted crystal atop the rod began to glow with a deep crimson light. Looking at the others for a group consensus, he reached down and touched the glowing crystal to one of the white stones.

The stone he touched immediately began to glow red, as did the next one he touched. Absently waving off Korwin’s various suggestions, the Dwarf twisted the collar again, turning the faceted crystal blue. He touched it to the remaining white stone, which turned blue… as did the two red ones to either side!

With all three stones along the edge now blue the center stone also began to glow with its own blue light. Toran touched the rod to the center stone and, with a grating sound of stone-on-stone, the central part of the platform irised open, revealing stone steps leading down into darkness.

“Huh. Well, that was surprisingly simple,” he said, tucking the rod back into his belt. “Of course I have an instinct for these sorts of things. Shall we?” He gestured at the waiting opening.

Vulk performed the Ritual of Kasira’s Light, giving the group the ability to see in darkness and removing the need for possible tell-tale torches or other light sources. The Hand descended into the now not-so-dark darkness, leaving only Cherdon behind to keep an eye on the area.

As they filed down, no one, not even the sharp-eyed bird, noticed the sudden dark, sinuous movement that was briefly visible beneath the ice of the frozen pond…

♦  ♦  ♦

The stairs wound down for over 30 meters by Toran’s estimate before debouching into a sort of courtyard – one overgrown with lush, green vegetation! A gray light, like that of a bright overcast day, filled the area, obscuring whatever ceiling there was and giving the illusion of being out-of-doors. The air was warm and actually a bit humid.

Directly ahead was a large statue, at least twice life-size, of a beautiful and yet somehow cruel-looking woman. Its blue-painted skin and silver-painted hair marked her as one of the Ur-Tel’naru… or perhaps some deity they worshipped? The gown the figure wore seemed a thing of gossamer – spider silk carved in stone. Its outstretched hand held…

“Is that a human heart?” Mariala asked plaintively.

To either side of the statue stood doors of age-darkened oak, bound in black iron wrought in a spiderweb motif. Both proved to be unlocked, and it was a coin-toss as to which way they should go, there being no indications anyone could find to suggest one path over another.

In the end the Hand passed through the door on the left, after Mariala’s casting of Deanna’s Perception suggested that an air of malevolent hostility pervaded the entire area, and she could provide no particular sense of where it was coming from.

The corridors they traversed, dimly illuminated by the reddish light of ancient glowstones, were of a style not even Toran was familiar with. He and Korwin agreed that they had something of the flavor of First Millennium Telnori stonework about them… but with subtle and somehow unsettling differences. The scattered bones that littered the floors in many places did little to lift anyones mood, especially once they were able to identify at least some of them as humanoid…

The architecture also seemed engineered to be purposefully meandering and confusing, often leading to apparent dead ends where even Toran could find no secret doors or hidden purpose. They neither saw nor heard any signs of life as they progressed through what was obviously a labyrinth.

Eventually they came to a chamber larger than any they’d yet encountered, in the center of which was a square pit almost two meters across. It’s carved rim, raised a few centimeters from the floor seemed almost designed to trip the unwary into its unknown depths. A stone dropped in fell for six seconds before the faint ‘plunk’ of water echoed back up the shaft.

A flight of oddly angled steps to the north led to another apparent dead end, but to the south a corridor led into another large room, this one obviously a spa or bathing chamber. Intricate friezes in black marble lined the ceiling and mosaics of black, blue and silver glass could be seen through the gently steaming water on the floor of the pool. All of the artwork depicted scenes of extreme sexual debauchery, some of which even Vulk had never imagined.

While Vox and Vulk lingered (to make absolutely sure there were no clues secreted about the room), most of the Hand retreated quickly back to the pit room. Toran, drawn to the odd angles of the northern portion of the room, eventually found what he’d been certain had to be there – a secret door. The opening mechanism was not complex, and in a moment he had it open.

The room revealed was 10 meters long and three wide, stretching off to the left. An innocent pattern of stylized waves covered the floor, beneath perhaps 30 centimeters of clear water. But before he had time to notice any more than that, all the water in the room suddenly rushed to the center and rose up into a swirling pillar of raging foam.

“Oh crap, I think it’s a–” was all he had time for before a tendril of solid water lashed out and slammed into his chest, sending him hurtling backward as everything went black…

Mariala barely dodged Toran’s flying body, and instinctively cast a spell of Resistance on herself, preparing for another fight. Another damn water elemental?! She really needed to get Korwin to recharge that Amulet of Water Elemental Control…

Vulk, returning finally from the spa/orgy chamber, was just in time to see his Khundari friend slapped across room by the water elemental, and he lunged forward, eyes wide as he realized Toran was headed straight for the open pit. Vulk was much too far away to be of any help but, by the blessing of Kasira, Devrik wasn’t.

Grabbing the flying Dwarf, Devrik was jerked off his own feet by the momentum, but he was able to stop either of them from going over into the darkness. A lucky save, he thought, but if they had to fight with that Void-cursed pit behind them… he was relieved to see glowing strands of force weave themselves across the opening as Vulk waved his hands and muttered an incantation under his breath.

As the raging water elemental surged out of the chamber that had, apparently, imprisoned it and the Hand took up battle stances, Devrik focused his primal fire energies. Before the creature could make another attack the multicolored sheets of Arkel’s Fiery Ribbons poured from his hands and blasted into it.

With an explosive shriek unlike anything the Hand had ever heard the elemental vanished in a cloud of steam that quickly expanded to fill the room and pour out into the corridors beyond. Fortunately most of the scalding moisture was blown back into the elemental’s chamber, and no one was more than lightly poached. The steam quickly evaporated away, leaving Vulk free to tend to Toran’s injuries, and Vox’s hair a frizzy mess.

It only took a few minutes and a little of Vulk’s innate healing ability to bring the Khundari ninja back to consciousness and dissipate his incipient concussion. While this was going on Korwin explored the elemental’s sweltering prison, but found nothing of interest, to his intense disappointment.

In short order Toran was back on his feet and ready to continue. “Although, one of you lot can open the next hidden door,” he rumbled as they returned to the maze of corridors.

It was just twenty minutes later that the Hand finally encountered one of the Ur-Tel’naru who presumably inhabited this dismal dungeon. Erol opened yet another door, albeit an ordinary looking one, to reveal what looked like an ancient shrine. A raised dais, etched with glowing green sigils of power, held an enormous golden skull at least two meters tall. Kneeling before the self-evidently evil alter was a male Ur-Tel’naru, so deep in prayer or meditation that he failed to immediately realize his sanctum had been invaded.

“Where is the Princess?” barked Toran, stepping in after Erol and drawing his battle axe. The man’s eyes flew open, revealing solid red orbs without visible pupil. He was on his feet and reaching for a dagger at his belt faster than seemed possible, a snarl replacing the very fleeting look of surprise on his face.

But Erol’s extratemporal talent had kicked in as soon as he’d entered the room, and he moved even faster – he threw a tangle net at the Dark Telnori, ensnaring his weapon hand, then stabbed forward with his trident. His foe twisted away, but entangled in the net he couldn’t quite avoid the blades, and they ripped a deep double gouge in his left shoulder.

Toran leaped in then, swinging his battle-axe, which the man tried to block with his ensnared hand, but again the netting stymied him and he staggered back with a deep slash across his abdomen. Clutching at the gushing wound, his blood spattering the floor, the Ur-Tel’naru never even saw Devrik’s killing blow…

In the aftermath, many of the Hand wanted to properly loot the place, but Devrik gently conveyed to them his growing sense of urgency in such a way that, suddenly, no one felt the need to linger. Only Mariala resisted an immediate departure, insisting on checking out the small vestry/office to the north of the shrine.

While she did, Korwin and Toran searched the body of the dead priest or mage or whatever the man had been, but found nothing interesting beyond a few gems in a pouch and another rod-key, identical to the one they already had.

Mariala soon emerged from the other room, stuffing various papers and scrolls into her pack. At Devrik’s look she shrugged. “In the past some of the most valuable things we’ve gained came from captured documents like these. And given that no one has had any contact with these people for more that 15 centuries, who knows what we might learn?”

Devrik shrugged in return and took the lead as the group once more set out through the maze-like corridors. Another hour of cautious skulking uncovered twinned rooms filled with water, beneath which appeared to be the skeletal remains of two very large giants, what looked like a tack room and barracks for spider-riders, and a multiplicity of fascinating hallways.

“I swear, we’ve entered the domain of Hallolth, the Goddess of Narrow Enclosed Spaces,” Vox muttered as they followed another twisting corridor out of the tack room.

But this corridor led to a wider space and two immense double doors, which promised something more interesting than they’d yet encountered… maybe a throne room, or great hall? Someplace with the actual residents, perhaps?

“I’m not sure about this,” Toran commented as Devrik and Erol approached the large doors. “Look at these.” He pointed at four wide shafts that led upward through the ceiling opposite the great doors. Far above, the wan light of the winter afternoon could be seen.

“Given the proximity to that tack room, with all the strange saddles and bridles and whatever, and these shafts… I think this is how the spider-riders come and go. Which means that room is probably –”

But Devrik and Erol had already pulled open one of the heavy oak doors, revealing an immense hall, shrouded in a darkness. A few large glowstones  radiated a sullen red light that only served to deepen the shadows. And moving in those shadows was a shifting mass of gigantic spider shapes! Scores of multifaceted eyes turned towards the open door, and a hissing, scrabbling sound began as they began to move toward the light.

With muscles bulging, Devrik slammed the door shut as quickly as possible, and dropped the iron bar back into place across it. “We’re going that way,” he rumbled, point to the corridor to their right. “Now!”

After traversing a very narrow corridor for several minutes, it seemed the Hand had finally found a populated area of the structure. Peering around the corner from where their narrow hallway opened into a wider and better lit passage, a spider-rider could be seen atop his foul mount (this one black with a sickening blue belly). Spider and man sat in a large raised alcove that commanded the corridor in both directions.

A hurried, whispered discussion resulted in Haplo casting Avkirin’s Field to generate an area of white noise to cover the group’s movement, while Toran cast Mimic Sound, throwing the illusionary sound of something moving around the curve of the corridor to the left. As hoped, this drew off the spider-rider from his post, and as he vanished around the corner the Hand made a dash to the right and down another wide side corridor.

Down this short corridor and up a flight of shallow steps, the group found themselves before pair of double doors, one of which was slightly ajar. The faint sounds of what seemed to be a rhythmic chant or incantation could be faintly heard…

Erol, activating his cloak of invisibility, squeezed into the chamber beyond the doors… and found eight Ur-Tel’naru gathered along a balcony overlooking a larger chamber to the right. Two armed and armored guards stood to either side of the doors, and Erol moved as quietly as possible as he maneuvered to see what these blue-skinned devils found so enthralling.

Peering over the shoulders and between the well-dressed noblemen and women, he was able to see a room with numerous arcane circles etched into the stone floor, the largest one in the center. All glowed faintly with a violet light that almost hurt to look upon, while the central circle flared as bright as a bonfire. Across the room a matching balcony held more Ur-Tel’naru spectators.

In the ritual chamber itself, several blue-skinned figures dressed in highly ornate (and no doubt heavily symbolic) costumes stood around the larger power circle, in the center of which stood a human male. Naked, the man seemed bewitched somehow, making no move to escape or protect himself as the woman with the disturbing spider headdress reached out to grab his hair, pulling his head back and exposing his neck.

The woman’s chanting, which was what they’d heard through the doorway, grew in pitch and volume, and with a final shouted word she drew a sinuously curved dagger across the man’s throat in one fluid motion. As his life’s blood poured out it seemed to vanish in a violet haze before it could spatter on the floor, rising up again as misty tendrils of energy.

The tendrils appeared to want to seek out the Ur-Tel’naru nearby, but the male in the ornate robes across from the murderous woman moved his hands in esoteric patterns and the mists sank into the arcane sigil at their feet, which seemed to grow brighter.

The woman, whom Erol could only think of as some sort of High Priestess, turned to say something to the watchers on the nearer balcony, as did her male counterpart to the other balcony. Then he saw that she looked quite elderly, something he’d not yet seen in any of the long-lived Telnori race he was now a part of, much less this evil offshoot. He realized she must be very old indeed…

Making his way out of the balcony room again, Erol quickly told the others what he’d seen, his sotto voce recounting muffled by Haplo’s continuing white noise. Devrik, frustrated that Erol had spotted neither his cousin nor the princess, momentarily wavered – should they continue searching for the captives, or attack this gathering now? If their current ritual was over, the blue-skinned bastards might soon disperse, making the group much more likely to be discovered. On the other hand, they were outnumbered here slightly more than two-to-one.

Devrik smiled at the thought and made his decision. “This is clearly the heart of whatever foul magic they seek to perform – best to wipe out the leadership first and deal with anything else after. We attack now!”

Mariala cast Wallflower on Vulk, making the cantor essentially unnoticeable as long as he made no sudden or overt moves, and he then summoned his holy armor for protection. He followed the again-invisible Erol back into the balcony chamber, where the noble spectators were now milling about and speaking to one another in low voices.

Vulk’s mastery of their tongue had faded somewhat, but he retained, and would always retain, enough to partially follow what was being said… it seemed that they restrained a very powerful excitement, believing that some sort of apotheosis was almost at hand… something about their true immortality with the sacrifice of “the unborn princess.”

Frowning, Vulk slipped over the iron railing of the balcony and dropped into the ritual chamber below, just as Mariala blasted the nobles above with the Syncope of Shala. Six of the Dark Telnori collapsed instantly into a deep, deep sleep. Only the two guards and two of the ladies remained on their feet – Erol and Devrik made quick work of the warriors, while Haplo’s Karmic Missiles lived up to their name, taking out one of the noblewomen with a crippling blow to the groin. Vox’s arrow took the last Ur-Tel’naru female right between the eyes just as she was drawing a wicked looking dagger.

As the rest of the Hand either took aim from the balcony they now controlled or leapt down into the ritual chamber itself, Vulk made his way to the curved wall that divided the main ritual area from the back of the chamber. The wings of stone had blocked the view from the balcony, and he now saw that they were two separate walls, connected by a lattice of wrought iron bars, done in the ubiquitous spiderweb motif, which created a prison cell. And in that cell were Princess Relina and Lady Nina.

Vulk startled the women when he spoke, breaking the Wallflower spell (for them, if no one else). Their eyes widened in shock as they perceived him, then expressions of hope lit their pale, haggard faces.

“Who are you?” whispered Nina Askalan, leaning forward urgently.

“A friend of your cousin Devrik, and an agent of your father’s – both your fathers,” he replied, including the princess in his answer. “We’re called the Hand of Fortune, but that’s not–”

“Oh, I’ve heard of you,” Princess Relina whispered excitedly. “Remember, Nina? I was telling you about that group that destroyed that litch in Shalla last year?”

“Er, yes, your Highness, that’s us,” Vulk interrupted. “But lets concentrate on getting you both out of here.” He turned his gaze to the elaborate and very sturdy-looking lock on the bars, but was momentarily distracted by a call from Erol.

The Hand had been decimating the remaining Ur-Tel’naru in the room, with Korwin’s Ice Needles and Toran’s Stavin’s Arrow downing several opponents, while Erol’s Balls of Asakora bedazzled most of the nobles in the other balcony. But not all of them, and it was this Erol needed Vulk to deal with.

Stepping away from the women’s cage, the cantor gestured toward the balcony and muttered a few words. Strands of glowing white energy flew forth from each of his fingers, and as he moved his hands back and forth they formed a web of sticky tendrils all through the chamber. The already mesmerized noblemen and women were ensnared, as were all but two of their unaffected fellows.Those two leaped down into the ritual chamber, weapons drawn, and with his Wallflower protection now thoroughly gone, Vulk drew his broadsword and prepared to fight.

Meanwhile, Mariala’s attempt at Fire Nerves was again a technical success – but, again, seemed to have little actual effect on the Ur-Tel’naru, seeming to do little more than momentarily slowing them. But this proved enough. As the elderly High Priestess shook off the effect and began an ominous sounding chant while waving around some sort of wand or scepter, she suddenly stopped dead, with a longbow shaft protruding from her open mouth. It’s iron tip was covered in blood and gray matter, and her eyes rolled up into her head as she collapsed to the floor. Vox waved cheerily from the balcony.

“Kash-i’nar!” screamed the mage, whom Erol had engaged as soon as Vulk had webbed up the balcony. The man seemed shocked at the woman’s sudden demise, and the distraction was all the former gladiator needed. He speared the mans foot to the floor, holding him in place for the killing blow from his gladius.

Devrik shot an Orb of Voral at the remaining ceremonial warrior, incinerating the man instantly, then turned to succor the wounded Vulk, who was bleeding but still managing to hold off his two Ur-Tel’naru opponents. In a short, sharp fight, Devrik managed to dispatch both men. Even as the last of them fell, however, the spider-rider from the hallway burst suddenly into the chamber.

While Devrik, Erol and Vox worked to remove this last immediate threat, Toran and Haplo had made their way to the imprisoned women. Using his magic Key of Opening, Toran had the Princess and her lady-in-waiting out in a trice, and the two men escorted them away from the fight.

“Is that my cousin Devrik?” Nina asked in some wonder as the man in question shot multicolored ribbons of fiery death out of his hands, immolating the giant spider even as it scored his flesh with a claw.

“Yes, yes,” Haplo assured her. “And he’ll join us as soon as they’ve finished the last of these blue devils. But he wouldn’t thank us if we let you get hurt now–”

“Oh pish,” the redhead said, stooping to pick up a scimitar from a fallen warrior. “We should go and help him!”

Fortunately a shot to the thorax from Vox and simultaneous blows from Erol and Devrik brought down the spider and its rider before the headstrong young woman could enter the fray.

Dervik, still unaware of the presence of the women, yells to Korwin, still up in the balcony and merrily sliding the throats of the sleeping nobles and looting their corpses “Damnit! No looting until we find Lady Nina and Princess Relina! Get down here, now!”

“We are here, Ser Devrik,” the princess said with a smile, stepping around the wall that had screened them. Nina suppressed a giggle and waved at her cousin, who looked momentarily flummoxed – and then greatly relieved, a wide grin splitting his usually grim face.

“But I’m afraid there will be little time for looting just now,” Relina continued. “I must insist that we find my husband and the remaining crewmen of the Sea Sprite.”

While she explained what she knew of the layout of the complex to Devrik and Mariala, Erol and Korwin quickly and efficiently stripped the non-burning corpses of valuables and interesting weapons. Vox and Jeb spent the time reluctantly using their bows to dispatch the remaining Ur-Tel’naru still webbed up and/or asleep in the other balcony chamber. Reluctant not out of any squeamishness, but because they knew they’d never be able to recover the arrows so used. But war is Void-cursed, and what can you do?

After burning the body of the sacrificed sailor on a pyre of his killers, at the princess’ insistence, with prayers hastily, if fervently, led by Vulk, the party headed back into the maze. Between them the two rescued women had a fair idea of how to find the chamber where they had been held before being brought to the ritual chamber. In the twenty minutes if took to reach the prison they came across no more of the Ur-Tel’naru.

When Mariala commented on their luck, hoping it would hold, Lady Nina laughed. “I tried to keep an accurate count of all the enemies I saw… I can’t be entirely certain, of course, but I never counted more than 30. And I don’t think this is actually where they live – lived – but rather a ceremonial center of some sort. So, including the ones you killed on the surface, there can’t be more than two or three still alive here.”

“Perhaps,” Devrik said cautiously. “But that doesn’t mean others won’t arrive from wherever they do live, at any moment. And two or three men, on their own ground, can still hurt us. So let’s not get complacent, eh?”

That sobered everyone. Devrik worried that he might have offended his new cousin, but she seemed to take it in stride – and indeed began to pay greater attention to their surroundings, looking for possible ambushes. He smiled inwardly as they pushed on.

The chamber where the remaining survivors of the Sea Sprite were kept was unlocked and unguarded, to the surprise of all. The surprise was quickly dispelled once they entered the room, however. A pillar of carved black stone rose up in the center of the chamber, and atop it a ball of crystal pulsed with violet light.

The Captain of the Royal Guard, Prince-Consort Marik Masadin, stood as still as stone, staring blindly into the eerie glow. Five other men with him, by their garb crewman of the doomed ship, formed a rough circle. Their chests rose and fell and their eyes even blinked, if less frequently than normal, but no amount of calling could rouse them.

“It seems very like your Balls of Wonder, Erol,” Mariala said. “Although if they’ve been like this for several days, there must be some sustaining element involved as well.”

“Fascinating,” Korwin sighed. “But how do we free them?”

“Maybe it is like Erol’s spell,” Vulk offered. “Maybe if we shake them, “attack” them, it will snap them out of it.” He strode forward and grabbed the nearest sailor by the shoulder, pulling him around. But almost instantly his own eyes glazed over. As the sailor turned back to the orb, Vulk stood rigidly behind him, equally entranced.

“Oh, great,” growled Vox. “We’re never getting out of here!”

“Maybe we should try the rod-key,” Toran suggested, pointing at the circle of stones set in the wall to the left of the door. It was identical to the one that had opened the portal into the underground complex. He pulled the rod from his belt and repeated the sequence he’d used earlier. As all the key lights shone blue the violet orb suddenly flared much brighter.

Everyone in the chamber felt a sudden pressure in their heads, and a wave of dizziness… Korwin seemed to throw it off with ease, and Mariala, Haplo and Erol experienced only a brief headache. But Toran, Vox and Devrik suddenly turned their faces toward the pulsing crystal at the center of the room and slowly shuffled forward to stand as close to it as they could.

“What happened?” cried the princess. She and Lady Nina had remained in the corridor just outside the prison, peering in through the doorway. They both looked on in consternation as some of their would-be rescuers suddenly became prisoners themselves.

“Hmm, this is going to be tricker than we expected,” Mariala replied distractedly. “Your Highness, did either you or Lady Nina feel anything when the light flared moment ago? A pressure in your mind, anything like that?”

Both women denied any such sensation.

“OK, so only those within the chamber are at risk,” Mariala mused. “We’re going to have to try other combinations, obviously, and with only four of us left… well, six counting the princess and Lady Nina… we’ve got just so many changes to get it right.”

“Yes,” Erol agreed. “And since this effect is so similar to my own, why don’t I try it next?”

“Alright,” Mariala agreed, secretly pleased. She had planned to go last in any case, so that she could learn as much as possible from the other’s mistakes. She handed Erol the rod-key, which Toran had dropped when his mind was seized, and stepped out into the hallway with the others.

Fortunately, there would be no need to go through the rest of the group, as Erol chose to set the stones to red, and after a little careful experimentation succeeded. The orb flared again, but then went dark, and in a few seconds all the men in the room began to wake up.

Relina and her husband enjoyed a restrained, but obviously deeply felt, reunion. The princess also seemed truly happy at the survival of her remaining crewmen. They, in turn, were clearly in awe of their monarch’s daughter, and on the three hour trek back to the coast they were more than happy to describe to the Hand how she had defied their captors from the beginning, even revealing her royal status in the hope it might spare her men. Vulk chose not to mention the whole “unborn princess will make us immortal” thing just then.

As soon as the party was back on the surface Mariala used her entangled parchment to notify Ser Wirdon that they’d been successful, his sister and future monarch were safe, and that he should send both the Stalwart’s longboats to pick them up…

Haplo Marikilo stood tightly wrapped in his cloak against the chill of the Kristala Va midnight air and looked apprehensively at his companions. King Laravad, usurper of the Tharkian throne, seemed in one of his manic moods, gleefully bouncing on the balls of his feet, his breath visible as excited puffs of white. His chief lieutenant, Kinthol Arket, blew on his hands and smiled faintly at his monarch’s high spirits, while the six Royal Guards under his command (foreign mercenaries to a man) stood stoically arrayed around them. The royal “advisor” and de facto Court Arcanist, Jeriko Varan stood behind them all, in the shadows of the Royal Box, his face invisible in the deeper shadow of his hood, save for the ice-chip glint of his eyes.

It made his skin crawl to have the older man behind him, but there was little Haplo could do about it at the moment. In the month or so since he’d gained entreé to this increasingly unstable Court he’d risen steadily in the “King’s” favor, despite rebuffing the man’s rather desultory advances (while having no desire to be bedded by the syphilitic despot, Haplo was a little insulted the man didn’t make more of an effort). But his meteoric ascent was viewed with thinly veiled hostility by many of Laravad’s synchophants, with Lord Varan, as he styled himself, chief amongst them.

He was certain the mage had no clue of his true status as an agent of the Star Council, else he’d have denounced him on the instant. But that didn’t mean the man wouldn’t take any opportunity to stab Haplo in the back if he could manage it without earning his meal ticket’s ire. No doubt he feared the younger man was angling to replacing him as Tharkia’s head arcanist… and so his cold, reptilian gaze seemed always to linger on him…

Except at the holy day feast this evening – then Varan had been entirely focused on Laravad, the two almost completely ignoring the festivities to whisper conspiratorially between themselves. Their inattention had annoyed the various entertainers, although the only one to show any sign of pique was the newest jongleur Laravad had brought back from his progress last month. Fortunately the “King” had been too preoccupied to notice, but Haplo worried that Vox was going to get himself in trouble if he didn’t guard his emotions more closely.

The singer was, in fact, about the only person Haplo came close to trusting in this vipers nest. They’d met last year when he’d come across the jongleur and a group of the Norja Duin being attacked by angry villagers. Using both his fighting skill and his powers of illusion he’d helped the Night People drive off their attackers, and of necessity had traveled for several days with them to get clear of any reprisals. He and Vox had struck up a friendly acquaintance, and found some mutual respect, in that short time.

He’d been surprised to see the singer at Court when he’d found his own opening, shortly after the “King’s” Royal Progress had ended. And Vox had seemed actually dismayed to see him, in turn… or maybe embarrassed? For a tenday they’d warily circled each other in the gavotte of paranoia that Laravad’s Court fostered, until circumstances had finally brought them to a relatively safe place to hold a private conversation.

Although both were cautious and circumspect at first, it quickly became obvious the two held similar views on the current “government” of Tharkia. Able to relax a bit, Haplo had been relieved to learn that Vox’s presence was not entirely voluntary – and that he already knew of the monarch’s disease. Like Haplo, he’d managed to avoid Laravad’s lecherous advances, at least so far.

Haplo had been tempted to take the jongleur into his confidence and enlist his help. But it was too risky, and in any case not his call to make… the Star Council was pretty clear about that sort of initiative. In the end they had agreed to distance themselves, so as not to bring disaster on the other if one suddenly found themselves out of favor. The closest they’d come to speaking in the last tenday was tonight, when Vox had rolled his eyes at Haplo as he’d stalked out of the Great Hall after finishing only two ballads –

“Soon my young friend!” Laravad suddenly exclaimed, slapping Haplo on the back and snapping him out of his reverie. “Soon you shall have the show I promised you! Isn’t that right Jeriko? Any minute now!”

“Indeed, sire,” the Court Arcanist’s voice slithered from the shadows, dropping the temperature another two degrees at least, Haplo was sure. He still had no idea why the increasingly erratic king had insisted that his youngest mage should join his little expedition when they left Kar Zhuran just before midnight. Or why Varan hadn’t objected, not even to the extent of a cutting look or sarcastic comment.

“I promise you a night you won’t soon forget… nor will the enemies of my regime” Laravad had chortled, pulling the younger man along in his wake as the entourage hustled out the postern gate. “A night that shall see the end of my greatest foes!”

The usurper had a great many foes, Haplo had thought, and it was anyones guess which ones he found to be his greatest. Not long ago he himself would have said it was the Hand of Fortune, premiere agents of the Star Council (although Laravad was unlikely to know that particular secret). But the Hand had vanished over a month ago, after narrowly defeating the powerful head of the Vortex organization, to the great consternation of their, and Haplo’s, mentor Kiril Vetaris.

The mystery was not made any clearer when the party had arrived, after several delays caused by the crowds of drunken revelers that still packed the streets, at the site of an ancient and more than a little decrepit arena in the oldest part of town. Once used to house the early Taruthani games in a distant time before they’d been outlawed, in recent decades it had been used as a thrice-monthly farmer’s market. That use had come to an abrupt end, however, when Laravad had imprisoned his father and seized the throne some six months ago.

But it appeared to be back in use now Haplo realized as they entered through the Royal Door and climbed up the steep steps to the old Royal Box. The stone of the arena floor had clearly had recent work done, being now much smoother and even than he remembered from his previous visit to the market, several months past.

The seats and stairs, at least in this section, seemed also to have been refurbished, and a new canopy was spread over it. The twelve large stone fire basins around the perimeter had all been cleaned and packed with fuel, and now burned brightly. They illuminated the arena beautifully, although there was nothing to currently see… aside from the new stonework itself.

After several minutes of nothing Haplo had tried to draw out the “king” (and he really had to stop adding those quotes, even in his head – one day they’d leak out in his voice, and then he’d have some explaining to do), but Laravad seemed to have gone silent, merely vibrating with suppressed excitement… and nerves?… until now.

“A wonderful show,” the king repeated in a whisper, eyes huge and glistening in his pale face, lips parted as if in anticipation of a kiss.

As Haplo wondered just what this promised “show” was going to be, and how many people were going to die, there was a sudden flash of light from the floor of the arena – when his dazzled sight cleared, the young mage saw a pattern of seven Greater Warding Circles, glowing a brilliant blue-white, seared into the stone. A moment after that, but with no corresponding visual warning, six figures suddenly blinked into existence, one in each of the smaller circles of power.

Haplo’s eyes widened in shock as he recognized the six people caught in Laravad’s trap…

♦  ♦  ♦

Vox’s eyes widened in surprise as six people suddenly appeared out of thin air, standing in the eldritch glow of the magical symbols that had also suddenly appeared, seconds earlier. The singer was not unfamiliar with magic, but only with the common, simple magics of the everyday world – not this kind of obviously high-end, melt-your-brain, apocalyptic magic! He suddenly wondered what he’d gotten himself into…

It had been almost a whim that led him to follow Laravad and his lackey-patrol when he’d spotted them leaving the castle by the postern gate. He’d thought it odd, since the main gate was still open to allow revelers to come and go on this holy day of celebration. But the fact itself of the king leaving in the middle of the night was not particularly strange, given his debauched appetites, and Vox was disinclined to know more than he already did about such things.

But then he’d spotted his sort-of-friend Haplo amongst the group, looking worried, and had made the decision to follow along almost without conscious thought. Grabbing his cloak and, on another sudden impulse, his longbow and quiver, he’d hurried out the postern gate after the royal party.

It had been difficult to follow them – on this particular Day Between the Years the city of Zhuran had exploded in a frenzy of excess beyond what the holy day usually brought – an excuse to release the tensions of the last horrible half-year, perhaps? In any case, drunken parties were going on everywhere, and the streets were packed with throngs of inebriated citizens, soldiers, mercenaries, Ethmoniri and Firilani tribesmen, and who knew what others. The City Watch and the Royal Guard were clearly having trouble keeping it all under control… not least because a great many of the erstwhile guardians of law and order had been indulging all day themselves.

Vox smiled cynically at the thought, as he pushed through the crowds. Fortunately the king’s party was fairly large and not at all shy about roughly knocking aside tipsy revelers… he was able to follow their disrupted wake until he regained sight of them. The crowds thinned a bit once past Execution Square and over the canal, as they moved into the older part of town. But even here there was a density of inebriated citizenry unusual for the hour, if of a rougher sort than the more affluent crowds around the royal keep.

The mystery of what was going on only deepened when Vox saw the king and his party enter a run-down old arena. It had apparently been a farmer’s market, until the current monarch had come to power, and had sat empty in the months since. Shortly after he’d arrived in town, more-or-less stolen away from the Baroness of Ansilmoth by King Laravad, Vox had noticed some sort of activity going on there, a renovation of some sort, he’d assumed then. With no reason to give it a second thought, he hadn’t.

But now he began to wonder… the construction had started shortly after that strange woman had blown into town. In her late sixties, still handsome, if a bit worn down, no doubt from the road, she had impressed the young singer as someone not to be trifled with. She had been immediately received by Laravad, and the two were closeted for hours that first day.

A few evenings later Vox had been summoned to perform for them while they supped alone, although he was too removed to hear any conversation. She was in and out of the castle for a tenday, before vanishing just as mysteriously as she’d appeared. But he was sure now that the woman he’d spotted that day giving the workers instructions had been her…

Easily disposing of the rusty lock that secured one of the public entrances on the side opposite from that by which the king’s party had entered, Vox had crept slowly up the steep steps and out into the stands. Crouching down behind one of the flaming stone basins he’d peered carefully around the great shell shape of its light shield to see what he could see.

Which was the royal party, arrayed around the seats at the far side, under a new-looking canopy in the Tharkian royal colors. It was hard to be sure, given the distance and the shifting shadows and light, but Haplo seemed ill at ease, uncertain.

Ever since he’d come to aid of Vox’s adopted Zilkah Sül family of the  Night People, during that unfortunate incident with the irate villagers over the missing pig, he’d rather liked him. Impressed with the mage then, Vox’s respect was renewed when they’d finally had a chance to talk after meeting at Court.

Originally worried that his acquaintance had taken up with the usurper out of personal ambition, he’d been relieved to learn it was not so. It seemed pretty obvious that Haplo was working some angle – to damage, maybe even bring down, Laravad – but was too canny to admit it. It was also clear that he wanted to protect Vox by keeping away from his agenda, whatever it might be, in case things went bad.

Vox appreciated the thought, but he could take care of himself… and so had taken to keeping an eye out for his sort-of-friend. Which was why he had followed along tonight, and was now staring in amazement at the greatest magical feat he had ever personally witnessed… and wondering what the Void he should do, besides slink away…

Just as he began to turn away one of the faces in the arena came suddenly into focus, and he inhaled sharply – Vulk Elida! It had been four or five years, but  he’d know that tall, strong figure and beautiful face anywhere. He’d been an apprentice – no, they called them acolytes in the religion business – when he and his mentor had taken on the case of a young Norja Duin accused of being a runaway Darikazi serf in an Arushali town.

The cantor had gotten the charges against Vox dismissed, and he’d listened to the man’s sermon afterward, at first out of gratitude, but eventually out of real shared interest. It was that moment that had started him down the path to Kasira, his patron Immortal to this day. And he’d have shared Acolyte Vulk’s bed that night, too, given the obvious attractions they’d felt for one another, if Cantor Arindel had not been quite so vigilant of his ward’s chastity…

So now Vox had two dogs in this fight… and he was sure it was a fight, or soon would be. Skulking away was no longer an option, although he still wasn’t sure what he could do against such magic. He shifted his bow from his back, and nocked an arrow as Laravad began to monologue…

♦  ♦  ♦

Mariala stepped through the Gate – and felt a sudden wave of vertigo and nausea wash over her. This was not what she usually felt during a Nitaran translation… but the sensation passed almost as quickly as it had come, as she found herself… what the Void!

It was night, not late afternoon; it was even colder than it had been in the mountains; and rather than the expected copse of trees, she stood in the middle of what appeared to be an old, run-down Taruthani arena. And the moons… Osal was alright, just begin to wax from the new moon, as was right… but Aranda. Aranda was wrong. It had been a waning half-moon just last night, and now it was only a few days past the full!

The arena was well lit by large bonfires in stone basins, but the stands were empty of spectators… no, there were maybe a dozen people directly in front of her, in what must be the box reserved for the nobility… all staring down at her. Faces were hard to make out in the flickering, shifting light…

Glancing quickly around she was relieved to see the others were all here too, thank Shala! But then she noticed the eerie glow of arcane energies pulsing beneath her feet – and the Circle of a Sigil of Greater Warding that she stood on! Each of the others also stood within their own Circles, and all were encompassed by a larger Circle yet. Oh dear, this was not good…

Her attention was drawn back to what she was increasingly certain were their captors as a man stepped forward and spoke. Dark hair and beard, dressed in furs and very high-quality armor, he smiled down at the friends with a very… disturbing smile. His eyes, in the shifting light, seemed like black pools… and quite mad.

“Ah, the infamous “Hand of Fortune!” Welcome, my dear enemies, to your doom!” His voice was not particularly high, but there was an almost subliminal hysterical edge to it. “What so many others have failed to do, I, Laravad the Second, rightful ruler of Tharkia and soon of all the lands of the Ukali Basin, shall accomplish this night!”

So that’s the infamous Laravad, Toran thought as he cooly scanned the area, noting everything that might be useful in a fight. The man showed every sign of going on all night, so maybe it was time to shut him up… he began the mental construct for the Arrow of Stavin… only to find there was – nothing! He couldn’t feel his connection to the T’ara at all. Well, this was not good…

“The Mistress has told me of your interference in our plans,” Laravad droned on, “but that problem will soon be rectified – this very night, in fact! She… WE… have laid this little trap for you all – and you have fallen quite neatly into it.” He actually giggled then, a very disturbing sound Devrik thought.

Like the others, he’d tried to cast a spell only to find his connection to the Power gone. The cursed Warding Circles, without a doubt. But if magic failed, a more physical course might serve – he often preferred it that way in any case. He strode forward, reaching for the holy greatsword at his back – only to run into what felt like a wall of solid air. It gave slightly at first, but the more he pushed the harder the barrier became, until it was like steel. He stepped back, frowning in furious thought. This was certainly not good…

“She would have liked to have been here herself,” the demented usurper went on, “but I’m afraid your last meeting left her… a bit the worse for wear.” He seemed singularly unconcerned at his ally’s plight. “So she’s off… rejuvenating herself… a little spa retreat, I suppose you could say!” That giggle again. It really was creepy Erol thought.

Magic and physical strength having failed him, as the others, he was trying valiantly now to use his extra-temporal and power-enhancing psionic abilities. Actually, he was attempting something that Asakora had recently suggested was possible… to reverse the effect of his power, and dampen, rather than enhance, a nearby spell. But while he could feel the power within, he could not make it manifest in any way… no more than Grover, racing around in frantic circles, could pierce the barrier… but he’d keep trying, even if it wasn’t any good…

“So, it falls to me to eliminate the annoyance that is the Hand of Fortune... What a pretentious name!” Laravad sneered. “And soon I will do the same to your precious Star Council. Oh yes, don’t look so scandalized – I have no problem mentioning that secret cabal of vicious puppet-masters in broad daylight – well, at midnight, but you know what I mean. I have no fear of them!”

Vulk rather thought that last bit was more to convince himself than anyone else. The man seemed a bundle of insecurities to the cantor… little good the observation seemed to be at the moment, of course. While he was frustrated at his inability to access the T’ara and worried about Cherdon, circling above the barrier, it was the apparent severing of his connection to Kasira that had the cleric truly shaken. He’d hardly even been aware of the subtle thread of soul-silver that had bound him to his patroness until it was gone – and now he feared it might be broken for good. This was so not good…

“Now, my pet sorcerror will activate the spell that Madame Vortex worked so laboriously on – quite a complex one, I’m led to understand, a true masterpiece – and you will all vanish like that,” he snapped his fingers theatrically, “banished to some alien dimension, who knows where? Not I, certainly!

“You… but not your possessions, hee-hee! No, you shall go naked to your new world, and powerless, too. While I shall collect all your little knick-knacks, to gift to my loyal mages as the mood may take me… save for that ugly little ring the mistress desires, of course.”

Uh-oh, thought Korwin. Keeping the Ring of Dominion out of the hands of either of their crazed enemies was vital… but he’d be damned to the Void if he could see how they could do it. These Wards were simply too cursed powerful – even he couldn’t seem to break them. But he had noticed the presence of Master Vetaris’ other spy, Haplo Marikilo, up in the stands. Apparently the lad had found a way to infiltrate the Court after all! He could be the hidden card they needed to turn the tables… which was a good thing…

“But before Jeriko chants the final words that will complete the ritual and rid this world of you forever, my friends, we have one more bit of business to attend to.” Laravad made a sharp gesture, and two of the gurads stepped forward and seized Haplo. One, grinning at the young mage’s surprise, put a knife to his throat, forestalling any thought of immediate resistance.

“Did you really think you had pulled the wool over MY eyes, you foolish mageling?” the erstwhile monarch crowed, his face alight with glee. “I knew from the start that you were a tool of the Council… and like any wise ruler, I keep my enemies close, hee-hee! But the time has come to discard you, like a bad card, along with these other jokers. Jeriko! Throw him in with the others!”

The older mage had stepped forward out of the shadows when Haplo had been restrained, a cruel smile crooking his thin lips. Now he frowned. “Your majesty, I don’t know what his presence might –”

“I did not ask for your opinion, lackey,” Laravad screamed, his manic glee turning instantly to rage. Spittle flew from his lips and his hand trembled as he pointed at his Court Arcanist. “Do as your king commands!”

Vox, watching the drama unfold from his hiding place, saw the robed man shrug and motion toward Haplo. The younger mage was lifted off his feet as if by invisible hands – even from where he was Vox could see the surprise on his friend’s face. With another gesture he was hurled into the arena, landing almost gracefully, despite the assault, at the edge of the magic whosit circles.

The older mage then raised his hands, stepped to the railing of the box, and began to chant. Vox decided that if he was going to act, there wasn’t likely to be a better time… he stood, drew and released a shaft just as the man seemed to reach the climax of… whatever the Void he was doing…

♦  ♦  ♦

Several things happened almost simultaneously when Vox Arantia loosed his shaft, in what he instinctively knew was a perfect shot to the head…

Jeriko Varan, deep in concentration as he set in motion the complex series of interlocking spells Avira Vetaris had created, telekinetically swatted aside the incoming missile out of sheer reflex. Had his attention been less wholly focused on the spells, he would have simply stopped the arrow in mid-flight, and Fate would have bent in a very different direction. But it was, and he didn’t, and so…

The arrow arced sharply to the right under Varan’s push, piercing the compass of the Greater Ward Circle. It missed everyone in the circles, landing near the center of the Greater Circle. At that same instant the ritual was complete, and the interlocking spells flared to life… but Vox’s arrow, in breaking the surface of the barrier, had created a hole… and a path…

Suddenly, Erol’s efforts bore startling fruit as he both slowed time around him and simultaneously dampened the power of the spells blazing into reality… psionics, altered spells, fractured barrier… all interacted in ways no mortal could ever have predicted…

There was a blinding flash of light, a deafening non-sound, and the Hand felt as if their very souls were being ripped from their bodies. With silent screams each was caught up in a cyclonic kaleidoscopic of sights, sounds, pain, ecstasy, euphoria and despair that they could make no sense of. Vox, too, was caught up in this maelstrom as the energy raced back along the path of his arrow to engulf him. For an eternity the seven souls whirled in an ever-tightening spiral…

And then it stopped.

With no transition Toran found himself standing in a large, well-lit chamber facing a strange man in even stranger silvery armor. He felt disoriented and… wrong. It took him a second to realize it was because he seemed to be several feet taller than he should, that and the fact that he seemed to be encased in an armored shell himself… from head to foot! Strange sigils, their meaning just on the edge of understanding, glowed in the air before his face, next to little windows, like… small scrying pools?

Vulk was having a similar sense of disorientation in regard to height… already the tallest of his companions, he seemed even taller now. But more disturbing was the fact that his body seemed composed entirely of… living ice?! Looking around him in a daze, he realized he was surrounded by strangers… very queerly dressed strangers…

Korwin was not only having to deal with suddenly being in a strange body, in a strange place, with strange people – but also the fact that he was hovering in the air… wreathed in blue flames! How the Void did this happen?!

Mariana was having an easier time of it, not least because the body in which she found herself was not too dissimilar to her own. In better shape, perhaps, she quickly realized, and with amazing physical reflexes. There was no connection to the T’ara, however, which was disturbing. But there was something else… something about the voluminous black cloak she wore…  As she took stock of the situation she also realized that she rather liked the scandalously form-fitting black outfit she found herself in…

Vox had been facing the Hand when… whatever the Void that had been… happened, and the body he suddenly found himself wearing was also faced toward this new group of strangely-clad people – and the view beyond them. Through a wall of… crystal? Surely not glass, not even the Khundari could make such huge sheets, and so flawless… Beyond that magical wall lay a city unlike any he’d seen. Or imagined.

Towers of stone and metal and crystal rose impossibly high, as far as he could see. Blue skies, white clouds, golden sunlight… and yet the light was wrong somehow… off in a way he couldn’t quite define, but couldn’t help noticing. And then there was that emerald green tower that rose twice as high as any other, seeming to pierce the alien sky…

Erol was trapped in madness.

Too many voices, all clamoring at once… fear, anger, bewilderment… Asakora, Faerendol, an unknown young man, an ancient raven, an angry eagle, so many more… but worst of all, he was in two places at once… in a vast, bright room lit by an alien sun… and also in an ancient stone arena under a blue moon he knew well…

♦  ♦  ♦

At that same moment, if that concept has any meaning under such conditions, the bodies of the Hand were playing host to the consciousnesses of those they had displaced in that strange new world… and confusing the Void out of Haplo.

He had seen Vox rise up beyond one of the fire basins, saw him take his shot at Varan, and saw it  suddenly veer off and into the Wards, just as the mage finished his chant with a triumphant shout. There had been a flash and an arc of blue-white energy had snaked back along the path of Vox’s arrow to strike his friend.

And now… nothing.

Both Vox and the Hand of Fortune stood where they had been, only the glowing sigils of the Wards gone, the arena lit now only by the natural fire light of the stone braziers. For a moment silence reigned as everyone stood rooted in surprise. Then Laravad screamed, a piercing cry of rage and fear.

“She swore it would work!” he shrieked, turning on Varan, whose face was as white as the King’s. “YOU swore it would work! Now they’re free and they’ll kill us all!”

Arket immediately ordered four of his men to surround the king and joined them to escort their monarch out of the arena. As they hustled Laravad away he dispatched the other two guards to another task.

“Release the güls!” he ordered quietly. “Then join us to get his Majesty back to the castle.”

As a trembling Laravad raced down the stairs surrounded by his five mercenaries, Varan shook his head in annoyance. “That will never stop them… it will barely slow them down.”

Looking like he’d rather run hImself, Haplo rather thought, the older mage mastered himself and began murmuring another arcane chant…

Artemis looked around in confusion. A moment ago she had been confronting the Silver Samurai in a penthouse suite, with the rest of the Vanguard… then the villain had blown that ancient horn and there’d been that sudden twisting sense of vertigo… and now she was… here.

Wherever here was, exactly. It had been an early summer afternoon, now it seemed to be a winter night… under a large blue moon… with the sliver of a second, smaller moon just rising above the stone walls… another alien planet? She quickly dismissed the unsettling thought as currently irrelevant.

More pressing, her teammates had vanished and she was surrounded by strangers dressed like extras from Game of Thrones… hell, she herself was in some sort of Maid Marion get-up. Except… this wasn’t her, at least not her body. She knew her own form too well to be fooled… this body, while of a height with her own, was in nowhere near as good condition. Not flabby, or even unfit, just not up to her own (admittedly high) standards. More disturbing, she felt no connection to her cloak and its shadow powers… this could be bad…

Scion staggered momentarily as he tried to climb to his feet, wondering how he’d found himself sitting on his ass… and out of his armor! It took a moment for him to realize the problem – he wasn’t sitting. He was, in fact, maybe four-and-a-half feet tall! And with a huge, dark beard, and mustaches braided with… onyx beads?! And dressed like a Dwarf from the Lord of the Rings movies. In fact, as far as he could tell, he was Gimili… oh shit, this was bad…

Blue Flame found himself suddenly on the ground and fully human. Which was bad enough, and deeply unsettling, but what was really disturbing was that he seemed to be in the body of some sort of blond surfer dude! The long blond hair and the indefinable sense of water and the sea left him with that certainty. The weird clothes – like all the strangers around him, he seemed to be dressed like a reject form the Shannara Chronicles – didn’t fit, but he was too freaked out to think about it… because his power was gone! Try as he might to flame on, it just wouldn’t happen… this wasn’t just bad, this was a fucking disaster!

Quanta looked around in surprise. His first thought, that they’d all been teleported by the strange device the Silver Samurai had wielded, was immediately discarded as he realized he appeared not to be in his own body. Shorter, much stockier and, frankly, over-muscled… he also could feel no connection to his quantum powers. Some sort of mind-switch was, he supposed, a possibility… but for the moment and until more evidence presented itself, he was inclined to the theory that they were in some sort of very advanced virtual reality simulation. The D&D-style clothes and environment certainly supported the idea. A bad spot, to be sure… but also interesting…

Chilz was shocked to find himself much shorter than he’d been an instant before – and much meatier! He immediately reached for that switch in the back of his mind that triggered his transformation into living ice – and found nothing. Well, no… not nothing.  There was some other sort of connection there… ignoring all the strangers in the Renaissance Faire costumes around him, Chuck focused on that feeling… and felt a sudden surge of understanding… there was a link within his mind to a Power, different from his own but somehow welcoming… and he sensed a Presence… He began to listen, and realized things maybe weren’t all bad…

Phantom Ace found himself standing behind a stone shield that backed a huge bonfire, a bow in one hand and the long shaft of an arrow in the other, looking down on a group of strangers in a kind of gladiatorial arena. They were all dressed like escapees from one of the more garish Robin Hood movies – maybe that old stinker with Kevin Costner? His first inclination was to go insubstantial and teleport to a safer spot – but the connection to his power was… gone! Instead he felt a ghost-like presence… and the certainty that if he just relaxed and… listened… he could shoot this longbow like an expert… which, he suspected, wouldn’t be a bad skill to have in Nottingham, or wherever he was…

Totem thought he was going mad.

After that disturbing sense of vertigo and dislocation, suddenly all of his avatars were in his head, babbling variously at him – angry, confused, demanding. And there seemed two… no, three… other voices… an Asakora… a Faerendol… and… Erol? But worse than this cacophony of voices was the fact that he – they– seemed to be in two different places at once… in Emerald City, with the confused faces of his teammates around him… them… and in some old stone coliseum, under a beautiful blue moon, with equally confused strangers… No! Not strangers, one of the voices said… friends… at his drunkest, he’d never experienced double vision like this… the cacophony in his mind seemed to redouble… in two worlds he collapsed to the ground, clutching his head…

♦  ♦  ♦

“Hand! They’re getting away!” Haplo yelled in frustration as the supposed heroes of the Star Council just stood around looking variously confused while the mad usurper and his minions fled. “And I don’t know what that swine Varan is up to, but it can’t be good for any of us!”

“Do I know you?” Artemis asked the striking-looking young man who was shouting at her. His words hovered just on the brink of comprehension…and somehow her own words came out of her mouth in that same almost-understood language!

“Yes!” the silver-haired man shouted, clearly very frustrated by something. “We met last month, just before you all vanished – I’m Haplo Marikilo. But there’s not time for –”

Artemis thought she recognized a name in that last spurt of words… Haplow Marakeelow… she should introduce herself next. “I am Artemis. Can you tell me–”

“Artemis! Is that you?” The stocky, muscular man with the flaming red hair strode toward her, an enormous, shining sword in his hand. “It’s me, Quanta. We appear to be trapped in some sort of advanced virtual reality simulation, as far as I can determine.”

He spoke in the same half-familiar language as the other man, but this time something seemed to click and she understood him… “Yes, it’s me… and if you’re really Quanta, then I think we can assume these others are our other teammates, yes?”

They quickly established their identities, using the code phrases the Vanguard had developed for just such doubtful situations, while the silver-haired Haplow danced around in impatience. Chilz quickly explained what he’d divined about their situation, forcing Quanta to reluctantly reevaluate his theory. After several attempts, with Artemis and Scion oddly enough having the most difficulty, the group managed to tap into the powers of the bodies they now wore… along with hazy memories and fragmented thoughts.

“I think we’re in a world where magic really works,” Chilz said, shaking his head in wonder. “It’s amazing!”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Quanta sighed, shaking his own head in exasperation. “Only science we don’t yet understand. As Arthur C. Clarke said–”

But Kyle’s lecture was cut off before it could fairly begin by the sound of iron grinding on stone. From behind them and to either side openings appeared and four monstrous figures strode forth into the light. They were like nothing any of the Vanguard had ever seen – humanoid in build, with thick, muscular bodies, not especially tall, but far from short. Their jet black skin was covered in places with coarse, wiry black hair, and thick manes of blue-black hair covered their heads.

But it was the faces… those snarling visages seemed a horrifying mix of human and animal… snouted, fanged, with enormous tusks and  glaring red eyes. Various pieces of armor glinted ruddy in the bonfire light, as the creatures rushed forward, bellowing guttural shouts of eager bloodlust, wickedly curved weapons raised high…

Scion, overcoming his strong desire to unleash armor-piercing rounds from armor he didn’t have, instead listened to the dimmly-heard voice in his mind… and let instinct take over. Drawing three throwing stars from his belt, he hurled them at the nearest creature, where they sank into the flesh of its right thigh and hip. One of the blades must have severed an artery, for with a roar of rage and pain, the beast-man stumbled, collapsing to the ground. It twitched twice before going still in a fast-spreading pool of black blood.

Artemis instinctively reached for the throwing knife at her forearm… but although both “sides” of her knew the weapon well, the alienness of this body’s reflexes unbalanced her… the blade flew past the charging creature’s head by a hair’s breadth. With a silent curse, Artemis drew the large dagger at her waist, and as the beast’s weapon flashed past her head she ducked, dove forward, and drove her own blade into its belly. With a grunt it staggered back, doubled over, blood gushing between the clawed fingers of the one hand clutched to the wound. But it was still up, and the rage in its eyes was almost palpable…

Quanta, cooly accessing the inner template he was now able to sense within his own mind, decide to take this “magic” that some of the others seemed to find so amazing, and see what it could do. Shape the Form, pour in the Power – not so unlike what he did with his own powers, really – and then let it out into the “world”… or whatever this was. Multi-colored ribbons of flame shot from his hands toward the nearest charging humanoid. But the creature jinked and dodged, and the flames splashed harmlessly on the stone wall behind it. Hmmm, this was perhaps more difficult than it had seemed at first blush…

Phantom Ace didn’t hesitate, following the silent urgings of that voice within. He’d leapt down into the arena to join his teammates once they’d established their bona fides, and he still had longbow and shaft in hand. In a fluid movement, done without thought, he nocked the arrow, pulled back to his ear, and released… the shaft drove straight into the chest of the creature rushing toward Jonny/Korwin. It dropped without a sound, dead before its body hit the ground, curved mang skittering away across the stones. It was a little disconcerting to be getting two names for everything, but Gideon thought he was getting the hang of it now…

Haplo, still too mentally distracted to use his magic, whipped out his axe and leapt to attack the gül that was engaged with Mariala. While she had gotten in a lucky blow with that fancy dagger, she surely needed the help! His blow was blocked by the wounded Hovguvai, however, with such force it almost wrenched his weapon away. Seeing its new opponent off balance, the creature attacked in turn – only to miss entirely as the mage ducked beneath its killing blow. Driving his axe in an upward stroke with all his strength, the blade bit deep into the creatures groin with a meaty thunk. It took only seconds for the shrieking monstrosity to bleed out and go silent.

The gül (and where did that word come from, Kyle wondered) that had dodged his flame attack now aimed a vicious series of blows at Quanta, who unconsciously raised the sword he carried in both hands and parried every blow almost effortlessly. Ha, no doubt his old fencing skills coming to the fore in this strange situation… the black monstrosity stepped back and began to circle him warily… he circled in turn…

Which put Quanta in the perfect position to see the results of Varan’s arcane mutterings – with a rumble the ground shook in a rolling shock wave as a huge patch of stone rose up, like a balloon suddenly expanding. In seconds a vaguely humanoid shape made of dirt and stone towered over the heroes and loosed a roar that sounded like great stones grinding against one another.

“An earth elemental!” Haplo cried out, turning from the dying gül at his feet.  Perhaps if he could take out Varan with a Karmic Arrow… but the mage had vanished down the stairs as soon as his summoned minion had fully arisen. “Shit!”

Scion, disbelieving his eyes but never loosing his cool, instantly hurled another set of his shuriken at this massive apparition, almost before it had finished forming. But the metal stars merely plinked or cha-unked into the moving hill of rock and earth.

Chilz, coming out of the deep trance he’d been in for several minutes as he communed with Kasira – an actual goddess, this was SO frickin’ cool! – called on the silver thread he felt connecting him to Her. He felt Her power move down that thread and through him and out into the world – and felt the goddesses curse take hold of the shambling reject from Galaxy Quest! An actual holy curse! Hot damn!

Artemis, instantly forgetting her annoyance with Haplow’s interference – she’d have dropped the gül with her next attack, and he was lucky he hadn’t been killed himself – realized physical weapons would do little good against such a creature. Time to let this Mariala’s more arcane skills come to the fore… she relaxed and let the knowledge pour into her mind… it was very similar to the non-verbal communication she had with her cloak, truth be told…

With a shouted word and a hand gesture (overly dramatic, she couldn’t help but feel), Artemis released the energy she’d shaped – and felt it spread out to envelope the massive stone and dirt construct towering over her, fists raised. It stopped… it wavered… the arms dropped… and it toppled over with a deafening crash, and a shock wave that almost knocked them all off their feet.

Jonny had finally come to grudging terms with his new form as a damn surfer boy, and had been trying to let the body’s innate knowledge come to the front of his mind – a process suddenly accelerated when the ground had risen up in the shape of a man! Instinctively he’d begun forming a… well, a spell he supposed he’d have to call it… but by the time he sensed it was ready, the creature was already down.

Fortunately he didn’t need to let all that power go to waste… the gül that had been attacking Quanta/Devrik had been as taken aback as any of them by the appearance of the rock monster, but was again preparing to attack. Blue Flame unleashed his pent up spell of ice directly at the beast-man – and was gratified to see that the cone of frigid power was a beautiful blue. really, it was not that much different than a plasma blast. Just a lot colder.

The creature staggered under the onslaught of ice and cold, slowing it enough for Quanta to strike first. But in the excitement of the moment he overrode the instincts of the Devrik body and used his sword as if it was an épée. Which did have the advantage of being surprising – the blade slid into the beast’s gut, severing an artery and at least two vital organs.

But as is common with the gül-Hovguvai, it counter-attacked and even as it was fatally impaled, it slashed a wicked blow across Quanta’s stomach in return. The edge didn’t penetrate the armor he wore, except to score a shallow cut where front and back plates met, but the force of the blow was such that it knocked the wind out of him, and he collapsed wheezing to the ground, black whorls dancing before his eyes.

Once Chilz had used Vulk’s healing powers to revive Quanta, Haplo was finally able to get the group’s attention long enough to explain what was going on, from his perspective, and to learn who and what they claimed to be. While the others briefly debated their course of action Chilz also tended to the apparently delirious Totem/Erol, managing to get him to the point that he could at least stagger along  – with just a little help from his friends.

With time growing short, Quanta cut off the debate by unilaterally going after the fleeing men. “God knows what kind of damage these Ren Faire primitives are doing to our reputations back home – and to the city!” he yelled over his shoulder as he disappeared down the stairs from the Royal Box. “I can only hope they’ll be stymied by the technology…”

Realizing that their best bet to get home was, indeed, to defeat the local villains who had brought them here – keeping them alive to reverse the process, if that was even possible – the others rushed to following their hasty teammate. Haplo paused briefly to cast Aerik’s Whisper on the sleeping elemental, then spoke a few words in it’s “ear.”

“No idea if that will work,” he muttered to himself as he hurried out of the arena. “But nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

♦  ♦  ♦

The crowds of holy night revelers showed no sign of thinning as the seven heroes raced to catch up with Laravad and his men. Quanta had paused once outside the arena, seeing the crowds of people, and now allowed Haplo to take the lead, once he joined them outside.

“I have an idea,” Quanta muttered, bringing up the rear as they shoved through the milling, drunken mass of humanity, his mind turned inward…

It took nearly half an hour, or one turn of the glass as Haplo called it, to catch up to their prey through the winding, narrow, medieval-looking streets of the city. The so-called mage, Jeriko Varan, was just crossing a short bridge over a canal when Chilz caught sight of him. Beyond the fleeing man was a large open square, absolutely packed with drunken revelers… and beyond the square was a fortress-like structure that rose up into the clear, cold night sky, several stories higher than the buildings around it.

“The Royal Keep!” Haplo called out to his companions. “If we can stop them before they reach it… well, that would make this all much easier!”

Unfortunately there were two men, very obviously soldiers or City Watch, guarding the bridge, and as they approached it was equally obvious they’d been warned against the heroes. Weapons drawn, they blocked the way forward. Artemis, missing her Shadow Cloak, sensed a silent suggestion from the Mariala instincts within… Ah, this Wallflower spell was just the thing she needed…

Scion and Haplo met the guards with their own weapons, battle axe and hand axe, only to have their initial attacks blocked. It was clear these were some of Laravad’s elite mercenaries, not the lesser fighters usually found in the City Watch. Their own attacks were blocked by the Dwarf and the mage, and it looked like it might be a long stalemate – until an arrow suddenly appeared in the left leg of one of the guard’s.

Surprisingly, the man’s partner actually died first from Vox’s attack – momentarily distracted in his own attack on Scion, he let the diminutive hero in past his guard in a lightning counter-strike. The axe blow to the face killed the man instantly. While Haplo continued to spar with the remaining guard, who seemed little discommoded by an arrow in his leg, the rest of the Hand flowed past and into Executioner’s Square.

Artemis, intensely focused on the fleeing mage Varan, snaked through the crowd with much greater ease than her target could manage – the spell she’d cast, combined with her own 150 years of experience, caused the crowds to seem to part around her. She’d bypassed the bridge guards before the fighting had even begun and now had a commanding lead on her teammates…

Her brief amusement at the expression of fear she’d glimpsed on Varan’s face when he’d turned around, scanning for pursuit, disappeared as she glanced beyond him to see Laravad and his posse mounting the steps leading to the castle gates. They paused on the highest step, apparently feeling safe so close to home, and encouraged the panting mage to hurry.

But the king’s look of relief turned suddenly to one of horror. For a moment Artemis thought he’d somehow spotted her – how long did this “enchantment” last? But she realized he was looking at something behind her… a sudden flare of reddish orange light cast her shadow starkly ahead of her, and she risked a look behind…

♦  ♦  ♦

Chilz had discovered a new ability that his Vulk-form possessed – he was able to communicate with, and even see through the eyes of, the falcon that circled above the group as they shoved their way through the streets. Cherdon, the gentle, amused, and definitely feminine voice deep within had said. The initial mind-meld with the bird had been disorienting, and he’d almost barfed… but soon enough (and with some divine help, he strongly suspected) he’d learned to deal with the double vision and was able to shout out to the others the position of their quarry ahead of them.

Once they’d arrived at the densely packed main square in front of the looming castle, it occurred to him that they’d need to thin the crowd if they hoped to catch up with this king fellow and his men. Calling down the falcon, he’d pulled the pouch he’d examined earlier from his belt, and communicated his wordless desire to the familiar.

With a harsh cry the bird had clutched the leather bag in its talons and soared up and out over the crowds… and at Chilz‘ command turned it upside down. A shower of gold and silver rained down on the north side of the square… and, as he’d hoped, people pushed forward to try and grab as much as they could. This thinned the crowds to the south somewhat, and he saw the others moving more quickly towards the palace.

He also noted that people seemed to be giving Jonny a wide berth as he shoved through the crowd, and losing quite a bit of their holiday cheer in the process… oh yeah, his friend had said something about a Cloak of Merthados spell a few minutes ago… and after he’d cast it, muttered that he finally understood what those girls in high school French class had meant when they talked about ennui. Chilz followed in his wake, but didn’t get too close.

And then the night was driven back by a sudden flare of ruddy fire light…

♦  ♦  ♦

When the group had slowed to confront the guards on the canal bridge Quanta, who had been slowly bringing up the rear as he focused his thoughts on the structure he was building in his mind and absent-mindedly guiding Totem/Erol, came to a stop. He saw the massive crowd ahead, and decided he was ready… settling his still incoherently muttering friend on a crate near some pillory stocks at the edge of the canal, he sat down cross-legged in the middle of the street before the bridge.

It had been a fascinating study in dimensional mathematics as he constructed the appropriate Form in his mind, following the template the “Devrik” persona provided while also examining it from the enlightened perspective of 21st Century quantum physics… at first he’d thought this primitive culture had somehow found a way, crude as it might be, to breach the dimensional barriers of the multiverse and draw an intelligence from an alternate plane of reality into this one.

But as he moved through the steps and structures in his mind he’d come to the realization that what they’d actually done was find a way to latch onto the alien vibrational frequencies of an extra-dimensional entity that was already in this universe and merely bring it to their current position in space-time. Impressive enough he supposed, given their apparent lack of a proper mathematical/physical model of the structure of reality, but not what he’d been excited about initially – he’d hoped to use the method to get them all home, should other methods fail them.

Still, he’d completed the mental structure, and he was relatively confident that he could “summon” such an extra-dimensional intelligence… it would be fascinating, and perhaps instructive, to speak with such a being… he might learn quite a lot, really. Plus, if it was as physically impressive as the earthen being that the man had summoned back at the arena, then it could help them in the fight that would inevitably come up… this was the Vanguard, after all…

He poured the Power into the Form…

Quanta felt a tremendous heat rush through his body and out… out to the bridge before him… and the air began to swirl and thicken, growing brighter as flames seemed to be pulled from every torch and bonfire in the Square, all congealing into a massive humanoid form that was suddenly standing over the bodies of the two downed guards.

Haplo, who had finally brought down the second guard with his Karmic Arrow attack, and then immediately rushed onward into the Square, was brought up short as he heard a tremendous whoosh of flames and felt a great heat on his back. Whirling around, he saw a huge fire elemental standing astride the bridge, the bodies of the two guards smoking and turning black beneath its feet.

He’d known Devrik was rumored to be a very powerful fire mage, a natural by all accounts, but this was staggering. It was the largest such elemental he’d ever personally seen, easily rivaling the earth elemental Varan had summoned earlier. And this one had been summoned by an alien mind merely possessing Devrik’s body – what could the mage himself do, once back in his proper place? And of more immediate concern, could this “Quanta” person now control the creature he’d managed to summon?

A question Quanta was asking himself just then. He felt the mind of the alien connected to his own, visualizing the link as a fiery rope stretching between them. But that other mind was truly alien, and for a moment he shied away… but the surge of joy it felt as his control loosened was all too human, and made him realize he had no choice. His mental grip tightened on the rope and he pulled it taut… the alien pulled against him, but its will seemed chaotic and fuzzy, while his own was sharp and focused… in a moment he’d reigned it in, and he felt it grudgingly subside, giving itself over to his control… for now.

Quanta was fascinated at this strange new mind, and the opportunities it presented. He began to probe, asking questions – what was it composed of in its native dimension? Where exactly was its native dimension? Did it have a name? Did it know how to travel between dimensions itself? But his questioning proved fruitless. There was an intelligence, or at least a consciousness of self, in the creature, but it seemed too chaotic to really communicate effectively… but maybe, given enough time…

But that time seemed unlikely to be granted him Quanta realized, as he suddenly became aware of the ground beneath him, vibrating in a rhythmic thumping, as if giant feet were stomping… leaping to his feet, he saw the rocky head of the earth elemental from the arena just over the rooftop of the nearest house. As it cleared the last street before the bridge it paused, catching sight of its fiery cousin…

It let loose with one of its stone-grinding-on-stone roars and began to lumber forward, arms outstretched as it hurled rocks at its foe. The fire elemental roared in return, a sound like a massive forest inferno, and prepared to meet the other’s rush, batting aside the stoney missiles with fiery fists.

Quanta quickly decided discretion was his wisest course just then, and he dashed across the bridge just as the earth elemental reached it. With a simply indescribable sound the two behemoths met and cracks radiated out across the bridge…

As flaming stones flew through the fire elemental and into the the Square the early-morning partiers finally realized that some serious shit was going down. Those not struck by the debris took to flight in screaming panic… in moments the vast space was cleared, save for the bodies those unfortunates trampled underfoot or struck down by burning rocks, and people simply too drunk to notice two immense elementals battling nearby.

The half dozen mercenaries that had been bearing down on the Hand from north and south were temporarily slowed by the fleeing mass of hysterical humanity, but soon enough managed to confront the heroes. Unfortunately for them, Phantom Ace had restrung Vox’s longbow, after having the string snap during the fight for the bridge… two died instantly with arrows in the chest, while a third took a shaft to the skull.

Gideon felt a little queasy as he dashed past that last one – the man was still on his feet, but wandering around in circles, looking dazed and seemingly unaware of the arrow in the left side of his skull. His right leg didn’t seem to be working properly… which was why he was staggering in circles. Well, he shouldn’t have been working for an evil dictator if he’d wanted a long, non-brain-damaged life, right?

Scion took out two more of the mercenaries with his battle axe – he was finally getting the feel for the thing. He’d have to think about working up a high-tech version if they ever got home… could be very effective in the right situations. He grinned at the thought of taking an axe to the Big Brain as he caught up to Artemis.

Artemis had stopped on the steps up to the main gate to the castle, having seen Laravad, Varan and the others disappear within shortly after the appearance of the fire elemental. Her camouflage “spell” seemed to have worn off, and there was no way she was rushing through an unknown doorway in this body… not without backup. And damn, she was actually slightly winded after such a short dash…

“Well damn,” Blue Flame said, mounting the steps himself. “Did you smell the lamb stew that one vendor was selling? It was incredible! I was hoping to maybe get the recipe, once we got this all sorted, maybe take it home to see what the guys at Krazee Burrito could do with it. But the crowds knocked the pot over in the panic…” He exhaled in a deep and wistful sigh.

Artemis and Scion exchanged a glance and just rolled their eyes.

As the others joined them on the palace steps, everyone turned to watch the two elementals battle it out on the canal bridge. The one melted and fused parts of the other, the other hurled rocks though the one, ripping outward in flaming chunks… and Quanta lingered nearby, watching in apparent fascination.

“I left a magical suggestion in the earth elemental’s sleeping mind, to wreak as much havoc as it could when it woke up,” Haplo panted to the others, still winded himself from the running and the constant string of fights. “It seemed a safe order to give a being of elemental chaos, and I figured it might provide a needed distraction… but I never imagined this…”

Suddenly they saw Quanta dash toward the elemental combatants, raising his hand in a commanding gesture – and a tiny seed of flame leaped from his hand. It grew to a sphere 7 meters across and engulfed the earth elemental, which staggered back. Its flaming cousin surged forward, flinging out its own searing attacks. But the creature of earth and stone leaned into the flames, bringing its two fists down in a mighty overhead blow that tore the fire elemental in half – if only temporarily.

But that last blow had been the final straw – even as the fire elemental reformed itself, the bridge cracked and shattered, crumbling away beneath them, dropping both elementals into the frigid water below. With an explosive hiss a massive cloud of steam engulfed the shattered remains of the bridge.

By the time Quanta made his way back to his friends the steam had cleared away enough to show that the fire elemental was simply gone… and the earth elemental was no more than a quickly vanishing pile of mud and rock, eroding under the sluggish flow of the canal.

“Hmmm… so water beats both fire and earth in this universe,” he said, more to himself than to his companions. “Good to know.”

“Well, as dramatic as that was,” Haplo said impatiently, “we need to move quickly. Given the state of the castle, much like the city itself, I doubt Laravad has many more reliable mercenaries close at hand – but he could still kill his father and barricade himself in a tower, trying to wait us out. Time is not on our side here!”

“Well, lay on, MacDuff,” Chilz said. He and Scion were both now encased in a faint golden glow, the result of his latest communion with the goddess Kasira – very cool mystical armor! He drew his own sword and brandished it dramatically. “We will not rest until this injustice is set right!”

With Artemis shaking her head, and the others mostly just grinning, the team followed Haplo into the Grand Hall of Kar Zhuran to dig out “King” Laravad II, like a rabid badger from its den…

♦  ♦  ♦

The castle was still awake, mostly… and no more sober than the rest of the city. Dinners lingered in the grand banquet hall, although more than a few were asleep in their cups, Dozens still danced in the great ballroom, to the dragging music of a clearly exhausted band. And guards still patrolled the hallways.

Despite having been warned that enemies were in the keep, the guards proved little obstacle to the Vanguard/Hand’s search of the old pile. Not finding their quarry on the ground floor, they dispatched the guards on the stairs and proceeded upward – the direction Haplo was certain the panicked ruler would run.

Th second floor proved as empty of fleeing monarchs as the first, but had rather more mercenary guards. Between Artemis‘ skill with the dagger (killing one mercenary with a single blow), and her continued use of Mariala’s Fire Nerves; Scions skillful use of Toran’s axe work; and Haplo’s Karmic Arrows (one of which took a poor guard in the groin, incapacitating him – and only making him wish he were dead) and drugged blowgun darts,  it took only a few minutes to clear the way and complete their search.

Quanta suffered some injuries, however, and the brief loss of his sword, as he continued to override Devrik’s muscle memory and treat the greatsword as an épée. Eventually deciding he was more interested in the fascinating intricacies of the Devrik-form’s “magics” anyway, and inspired by both Blue Flame and Chilz, Quanta decide to attempt to actually alter the form he wore. Succeeding in properly formulating the steps of something called Immolate, he suddenly found himself composed entirely of flame!

Utterly fascinated at the new sensations he was feeling, he realized he might just gain some insights into how Jonny’s powers worked… maybe come up with some new ways for the kid to use those powers once they returned to reality. Half-abstractedly, Quanta wafted up toward the ceiling as the others headed for the stairs, seeping up to the third floor via the capillary-like network of cracks in the old stone of the castle…

It was on the third floor of the castle that the Vanguard/Hand finally cornered their badger –  screaming at his men as they attempted to force open a massive ironwood door. “Hurry, you idiots! I should have killed the old fool months ago! Why did I listen to her?! Why?!”

When he saw the Hand of Fortune pouring out of the stairway, Laravad gave a shrill yelp and made a break for it. Dashing past his men, who automatically formed a wall between him and his enemies, he almost knocked his Court Arcanist aside.

“Your Majesty, wait!” called Varan, clutching at his sleeve, but the panicked usurper paid him no heed, vanishing around the nearest corner. A moment later a door slammed. Grimacing in frustration, the mage ran after his idiot employer, motioning Arket to delay the cursed “heroes” for as long as possible. He had a little surprise prepared, but he had to catch up to that fool first–”

Before he could take more than ten steps, however, he was brought up short by an apparition of smoke and flame that rose out of the floor between him and Laravad. As it took on a more solid form he recognized the fire mage, Devrik Askalan… Immortals, how he hated Askalans, the bane of his existence these days it seemed! But he had a cure for this Askalan, he thought with a malicious inward grin…

Before the man of living flame could take a step, Varan gestured at him and a cone of silvery blue energy flashed out from his hands, freezing the very air between them and engulfing the fire mage in a cloud of pure cold. Devrik staggered back, his flame form flickering wildly for an instant before vanishing, leaving a slightly stunned but entirely living human body in its place.

Cursing darkly – that had been his most powerful casting ever of Breath of Arandu, it should have killed the bastard instantly – Varan dashed past his distracted foe and out the door after his wayward ruler.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We don’t have time for this,” Artemis said in exasperation as the rest of the team faced the wall of heavily armed mercenaries blocking their way. She gestured in the way she was becoming accustomed to, creating the Form and releasing the Power almost without conscious thought.

Kinthol Arket was just raising his longsword to attack when every nerve in his body suddenly felt like it was in contact with a red-hot iron. He spasmed so sharply he heard, dimly through the searing pain, his spine crack. The sword dropped from suddenly twitching fingers, and he dropped to the ground along with all six of his men, writhing in agony.

“You’re getting really good at that, Artemis,” Blue Flame said, stepping past her to look down at the twisting forms on the floor and brushing the horrible blond hair from his face. “I think I’m getting the hang of this magic stuff myself – watch this!”

Summoning up Korwin’s muscle memory and the psychic stamp left on this body’s brain, Jonny took only a minute or so to cast the Strands of Lakira. Webs of glowing white energy flowed from his hands, and as he gestured back and forth they began to wrap around the writhing men. Wherever they touched they seemed to cling, including to walls and floor. In seconds all the mercenaries, and their commander, were bound helplessly in place.

“That should hold them even after that fire-thing of yours wears off. Long enough for us to deal with their little king, anyway.”

With one of her slight smiles, Artemis led the others around the immobilized mercenaries and out the door Laravad, Varan and Quanta had used moments earlier. The team found itself outside, on what she estimated much be the roof of the grand ballroom… faint strains of music wafted up through the frigid air. A stone walkway and chest-high battlements surrounded an expanse of weathered wood on three sides, with the main tower of the castle rising on the fourth side, from which they had just stepped.

Laravad was almost to the farthest corner of the space, brandishing a magnificent-looking sword before him – at his own wizard! Jeriko Varan was trying desperately to calm his hysterical monarch, while glancing apprehensively over his shoulder at their gathering enemies.

“Laravad, please, listen to me! I can get us out of this, get us away – but you must let me–”

“No!” shrieked the usurper, spittle flying from lips drawn back in a feral snarl. “I see it all now! You’re in league with them!” His sword flicked briefly toward the now cautiously approaching Hand. “You’re in this together… planned this all along… to humiliate me… to take me prisoner and seize my throne! I know that’s what your vile mistress wants, to rule over every land! Well you won’t take my throne, you traitor!”

He slashed wildly at his would-be advisor, backing away from the man and breathing heavily. Varan began to move forward, hands outstretched somewhere between pleading and a desire to strangle, only to be hit in the back by Artemis‘ latest blast of Fire Nerves.

He staggered around to face this new threat, his own arcane power already dampening the pain, only to be faced with Devrik in his flame form once again. Before the Vortex mage could do more than gape, Quanta landed a powerful, burning roundhouse punch to his head, spinning him two-thirds around and dropping him like a puppet with its strings cut.

Racing past the downed mage, whose face was already beginning to blister as his hair smoked, Haplo approached the now seemingly fully mad ruler. He was backed into the corner where the battlements met, with no way out except a three-story drop to icy stone.

“Laravad… your Highness… if you’ll just let us–” Haplo barely dodged the swift blow aimed at his head, taking it instead on the forearm as he raised his dagger to block. The sharp pain of the cut across his arm and an uneven board beneath his foot as he pedaled backward sent him sprawling. Laravad’s eye’s gleamed with bloodlust and he raised his blade again…

Before the crazed royal could follow up, however, he was struck twice – first by a cross-bow bolt from Toran, which pinged off the plate greave protecting his thigh; and again, an instant later, by a longbow shaft from Vox. This shaft pierced the armor at Laravad’s left shoulder, sending him staggering back against the battlement.

Strangely, the wound seemed to actually calm Laravad somewhat, the hysterical tinge vanishing from his voice, and a cold, hard light coming into his eyes. He ignored the shaft sticking out of his body, and raised his sword in a defensive posture.

“I warn you, you’ll never take me alive,” he snarled at the arc of foes before him. “And I promise to take as many of you with me as I can! But it need not come to that, even now. Perhaps we can reach an… accommodation. I can be a generous master, when the mood takes me. Join with me, and we… we…”

His eyes suddenly rolled up in his head, and the soon-to-be-ex-king dropped bonelessly to the walkway, sword clattering musically on the stones.

The others all looked around in surprise to see Artemis/Mariala on the far side of the roof, a little pale and rubbing her temples. “I was in no mood for a monologue… and this magic stuff is really rather fatiguing. I wasn’t sure how much more this body had in it, so it seemed best to simply end things.”

This pronouncement was followed by a sudden silence on the freezing rooftop as it sank in that it was over, at least for the moment. Haplo was the first to recover, as it occurred to him that they’d just created a power vacuum – if they didn’t act quickly, things in Zhuran could get very ugly, very fast.

“We have to free King Balen before anything,” he said, helping Toran… no, Scion… damn, this was confusing… carry the unconscious usurper back into the castle. Devrik… Quanta… whoever, hefted the singed Vortex mage over his shoulder and followed on their heels.

Inside Laravad’s mercenaries were just beginning to recover from their recent encounter with Fire Nerves, to find that they couldn’t move more than a few centimeters, being bound up in some sort of sticky, faintly glowing white webs. Arket glared venom at the group as they strolled past him, struggling futilely against the restraints.

Haplo found Vulk… Chilz… by Shala, he really needed to get the Hand back into their proper bodies… any way, whoever was operating Vulk’s body was standing at the door Laravad’s men had been trying to break down, attempting to coax someone on the other side to unlock it. It took several minutes, and a judicious use of Abon’s Authority, but eventually the young page was induced to unbar the way.

Inside a very frail looking old man lay in the middle of a large, canopied bed. Haplo was shocked at the sight. King Balen was only 47 years old, he knew, but this man looked to be closer to 80… and not a healthy 80, either. His brown hair had gone entirely white, and his eyes were sunk in dark pits. But for all that the man seemed alert and in his right mind…

“You Majesty, we have… subdued… your son and his closest minions,” Haplo said, going to one knee and bowing low. “But the mercenary forces he controlled remain, many of them in the city. We need to – that is, what are your Majesty’s orders?”

Balen pulled himself upright, the young page rushing to help him and put pillows behind him so he could reclined against the massive carved headboard. His voice was surprisingly strong, coming from such a frail frame.

“I am grateful for your service, ser, but might I know who, exactly, you are who have done this deed?”

Haplo quickly introduced himself and the others, glossing over the complicating issue of possession and dual identities for the moment. Between them they managed to give the rightful – or at least legitimate – King of Tharkia a concise precis of the nights events, again leaving out some of the more arcane details. When they had finished the king had sunk back into his pillows, a look of deep grief on his face.

“So, the foolish boy finally decided he had to kill me… I never met this “Madame Vortex” he kept going on about, but it was obvious that she was the puppet master behind his treason, if not his growing insanity. I also knew she was the reason I was kept alive, although I could never decide why she wished it… perhaps as an additional lever on Laravad?

“He may have thought so, and while he wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t, disobey her… well, I think he found a way around that. Someone has been slowly poisoning my food for months now… once I realized it, almost too late, I enlisted young Gavin here to help me.” The page blushed and suddenly found something fascinating to examine on the floor.

“He has been my loyal servant in my imprisonment, and he began bringing me clean food, and helping me dispose of the poisoned fare, for awhile now. I don’t think the cooks know anything about the poison, for they never stay to watch me eat it…” With an effort of will, Balen threw off his morbid thoughts and turned to more pressing matters.

“You are quite right, young Ser Haplo, we must act quickly if we are to seize back control of the realm. Tell me, have you any word on my daughter, Princess Relina? I know from young Gavin that she escaped her brother’s assassins on the night of the coup, along with her husband, Captain Masadin and some of my loyal Royal Guards, whom he commanded… but we’ve heard no more since…”

“I’m sorry, Sire,” Haplo frowned. “I’m afraid I’ve heard nothing in the month I’ve been at Court… nothing more than whispered rumors, and a dozen of those, all conflicting.”

“Damn. Well, the next step is obvious, with or without the Princess – we must contact the Baron Gevdan and acquaint him with the current situation. He was the only one of my vassals that Laravad and this Vortex organization failed to either suborn or take by surprise. I know he has held out at Kar Gevdan since the Crown Prince’s treason, and been quite a thorn in his side, too. Controlling Tharkia’s only major port was, at the very least, a major inconvenience to my rebel son.”

Between the king and Haplo, enough loyal (and relatively sober)servants and fighters were rounded up over the next two hours to usher the remaining Kristala Va celebrants out of the castle, acquaint the few remaining mercenaries and Laravad loyalists with the dungeons, and close the gates. There were too few soldiers to properly man the castle, but riders has been dispatched to the Baron Gevdan before all else. “If he’s half the man I know him to be, he’ll be here with all the forces at his command by the end of the Unicorn Watch today,” the king assured his rescuers.

“And with almost the entire city, including most to the Watch and the men-at-arms, suffering hangovers, there should be very few awake before then to offer resistance.” Haplo grinned in anticipation… he had a few illusions he could try, to ease the Baron and his men into the city, if the need arose…

Once the castle had been made as secure as possible, Haplo knocked on the door to the Kings Chamber. Gavin let him in with a shy smile. The stench of his traitorous son still lingering in the room, despite the servant’s hurriedly removing all physical signs of him, Balen had nonetheless insisted on reclaiming them as his own immediately. Despite the late – or rather very early – hour the restored king sat at his desk, signing orders and reading what reports he had on the state of his realm.

“Sire, we are as secure as we can be for the moment,” Haplo began, once the formalities were dispensed with. “I’m afraid, however, there is an urgent matter that I and the Hand of Fortune must deal with now… a loose end left over from the magical attack at the arena last night.”

“Ah, that sounds ominous,” the king smiled wearily. “But I can hardly deny that you all seem to know what you’re doing. Certainly, you have my permission to leave the castle and attend to this business, as you see fit, ser. Will it be dangerous, tying up this loose end of yours?”

“I… hope not, your Majesty,” Haplo said with a grimace. “But with magic you just never know…”

♦  ♦  ♦

It was the hour before dawn, at the tail end of the Cat Watch, when the Vanguard and their new friend Haplo returned to the old arena. A section of the structure had collapsed since they’d last seen it around midnight – no doubt as a result of the earth elemental making its own exit.

Scrambling over the rubble, they viewed the open expanse before them. No sign of the sigils of the Greater Wards remained to be seen. Artemis turned to Totem/Erol and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“I/We should be able to do it, don’t worry,” the shaman/gladiator/mage said wearily. The team had recovered him from the spot on the edge of Execution Square where Quanta had left him, guarded by Grover and Cherdon. In the intervening time he had managed to come to some sort of understanding with all the various personas in his/their head(s), and learned to cope, somewhat, with the double vision of two very different realities.

“They’re ready on the other side, and Raven is prepared to work with Faerendol to recreate the framework… it won’t be the same as whatever the hell that cobbled-together nightmare of Avira’s was, but it should do the trick.”

As an afterthought he added, “Although I doubt the experience itself will be any more pleasant.”

As Totem/Erol/Raven/Faerendol/etc. made their preparations, the rest of the Vanguard/Hand gathered around Haplo.

“I don’t know how much of what we did tonight will be remembered by our hosts, once we all return to our proper bodies,” Scion said to the young illusionist. ” But you, and we, will remember. And if you should ever happen to find your way to our world… or time… or dimension… know that you’ll always have friends there, and will be welcome.”

For the last few minutes Haplo answered as many questions about his world as he could, mostly coming from Quanta and Artemis. But all too soon, Totem/Erol indicated that he/they were ready, and everyone took their places in the ghost-like echoes of the Wards that had appeared on the arena floor, and the shaman/mage began to chant…

For half an hour the Hand moved through the fetid air of the gülvini colony, find no sign of life in the remoter areas they traversed. It seemed as if the bulk of the population had indeed left, either to conquer another colony or to confront the blue dragon at Rekorgo in an attempt to retake that forward base. Despite the continued lack of opposition, the group grew more tense, rather than less, as they penetrated further into the complex.

They finally discovered some of the hive’s remaining inhabitants when they stepped from a corridor that had passed through several sets of squalid living chambers into a moderately large cavern that seemed to be set up as almost a tavern. Tables were scattered throughout the space, and benches, and the small of cooking meat and sour ale permeated the air. A score or more of gülvini, mostly Kobali but with a solid sprinkling of Hovguvai, were seated in various groupings, eating, drinking, gambling and arguing.

At first the assembled beastmen didn’t seem terribly concerned at the sight of a group of humans wandering about, once they finally noticed them. Mariala was just beginning to think they might just be able to bluff their way through the room when one of the large Black Gül’s caught sight of Toran. The dwarf had been bringing up the rear, and was now glowering around and fingering his battle axe.

” ‘Ere now,” the well muscled gülvini said, rising up suddenly and reaching for his wicked-looking mang. “Who are you lot? I thought all the Umantari left with the army… ai! That’s a damned koondie bast–”

He never got to finish his sentence, as Taeland’s hart bow shaft pierced his mouth and exited out the back of his head. Erol and Toran took aim at his two shocked drinking partners, who leapt to their feet as his body collapsed between them. Toran’s crossbow bolt took the one on the right straight in the heart, but Erol’s longbow string snapped as he drew, and his own arrow clattered to the stone floor.

Taeland got off a second shot as Erol wiped the blood from his cheek where the whipping string had gashed him, taking out the third of the Hovguvai, even as several more rushed forward, weapons drawn. Devrik pulled his greatsword from its back-scabbard and gutted the first of the warriors to reach them, while Mariala quickly cast Fire Nerves, taking down the remaining four.

She’d had the spell half cast ever since they’d entered the cave complex, and was glad she’d done so, for she now had time to focus her will on the strange ring on left thumb… the gem glowed faintly violet, and she felt an odd tickle in the back of her head…

“You have no greater desire than to obey me!”

Her commanding voice hit the remaining gül-Kobali, who were milling about in consternation, like a bolt from above. Unarmed under the harsh rule of their Hovguvai overlords, they had seemed somewhat reluctant to take on a gang that had just dispatched eight of their much larger cousins… and now they suddenly wanted nothing more than to fulfill every wish of that beautiful, radiant Umantari Lady!

Even the four Hovguvai who were still writhing on the floor in agony seemed to have been affected by the command, as they struggled to their knees to gaze up adoringly at her… indeed, the pain seemed to actually enhance their respect for her. Devrik shuddered in disgust at the thought, and glanced sideways at his friend, uncomfortable at this new display of power.

“How may we aid you,” one of the Kobali begged, stepping past the four larger güls, who glowered murderously at him but were still too wracked with pain to do anything as the upstart bowed to the Lady.

“First, you can swear an oath of loyalty to me, and to obey any of my friends here,” she gestured at the gathered Hand, “as you would myself.”

All of the gülvini practically fell over themselves to swear, in a tumult of voices that even included the gasping oaths of the Fire Nerved warriors, that they would die before betraying her or her companions. Devrik seemed temporarily mollified by this, as he reheated his blade.

“Next,” Mariala went on, “you can tell me if the Umantari woman Avira is here in Jha-Kursk.”

“Oh, indeed not, Lady,” the self-appointed spokes-gül groveled. “The divine Daughter of Vindus left just this morning, to commune with the spirit of her godly father in solitude. But she should return by sundown, as is her wont.”

The others all exchanged looks at this description of Avira, sudden enlightenment falling on them as to how she had subdued the notoriously uncontrollable gülvini to her service. No doubt enhanced by that mind-fuck spell she’d been researching to convince others of one’s divinity…

“Well… damn?” Vulk said, uncertainly. “I don’t know whether to be upset or relieved that she’s not here…”

“Let’s not waste time off either,” Devrik rumbled. “Let’s find her quarters, ransack what we can, and get the hell out of here before she or her army returns.”

“Yes,” Korwin agreed. “This is her main base of operations… given how much we learned at Rokorgo, even if we don’t take her down today, we just might get enough information to allow the Council to roll the Vortex up for good.”

“Take us to the chambers that, um, the Daughter of Vindus uses,” Mariala commanded her new follower. “We’ll take these four warriors and two of your most trusted friends.” The groaning Hovguvai were climbing to their feet, the burning in their nerves finally wearing off, and they seemed glad to be included. The remaining Kobali were told to stay and keep an eye out, sending a runner to warn them if any others approached.

Toran, Erol and Taeland continued to keep a wary eye on the gülvini, especially the big ones, but they truly seemed devoted to their new mistress. The Kobali, whose name they learned was S’nirek, led them out of the mess hall by a southern passage. The next chamber was a slightly better class of living quarters than they previously seen… “The abode of us overseers, m’lady,” the obsequious gül had explained, to the derisive snorts of the warriors.

Beyond the overseers’ quarters was a long, narrow cavern through which the dark, cold waters of the source of Bodack Creek rushed. The stream fell from an opening four meters up, at the north end of the cave, in an echoing roar that made speaking difficult. A sandy beach lay on the near side of the fast moving water, and a wide plank crossed it to a similar shale on the southern part of the farther shore, where the stone walls bent inward.

The party was strung out along the narrow strand, the leaders just nearing the narrow stairway opposite the waterfall that would lead them upwards, when Toran, near the back of the line, was struck by a ball of water that knocked him back into the wall. Everyone whirled around, weapons drawn, and even the güls seemed surprised.

Rising from the black waters of the stream was a vaguely humanoid shape of water, glowing faintly with a blue light from within. Before anyone could react a second ball of water flew from the creature and smashed one of the Hovguvai into the wall. Unlike Toran, who was rising to his feet and as spitting mad as a wet cat, the gül crumpled to the sand and didn’t move.

Erol pulled the hood up on his cloak and muttered the Command word, but even as he vanished from sight a tentacle of solid water lashed out from the elemental and slammed him in the gut – or so it seemed to the others who had time to notice. No one saw where he landed, thanks to his cloak…

Well damn, thought Mariala as she fumbled in her scrip. I knew I should’ve pushed Korwin to re-charge this damn amulet, never mind his excuses.

She pulled the beautiful carved jade-and-pearl brooch from the bag and clutched it in her fist. The power to summon a water elemental was drained from the artifact, but maybe there was power left to control an existing one…

“By the element that gives you form and binds you this plane, I command thee now, three times I command thee, I command thee!”

The water spirit payed not the slightest heed to the mage, and a second Hovguvai went down to a battering ram of solid water that turned its head to pulp agains the stone of the cavern wall.

Vulk had been silently chanting an invocation to Kasira, and how he raided is baton of office and shouted “In the name of the Lady of Luck I curse thee! In her name I take form thee thy luck! Be you cursed!”

That seemed to confuse the creature for a moment, and in that brief respite Devrik strove to generate an Orb of Vorol. But surrounded by water, in the presence of a personification of the element most inimical to his own, he found it impossible to crate a proper Form… and in these close quarters he dared not risk a catastrophic failure. He let the Form dissolve in his mind.

“This is your element, Korwin,” he grated in frustration, glancing over at the water mage. “Do something!”

Korwin grated his teeth and ignored the unhelpful suggestion. You’d think a follow mage would understand that some spells took time… well, maybe not simple fire spells, which were just chaos unleashed, really. But something as subtle and powerful as the Breath of Arandu…

But before he could complete the full mental construct that would unleash icy doom on the water elemental, several things happened in quick succession. A shaft from Taeland’s hart bow swished through the watery form of the creature, with no apparent effect, and a ghostly blast of pure Power from Toran’s outstretched palm slammed solidly into the center of its mass.

The elemental reared up almost to the ceiling of the cavern, its liquid scream echoing from the walls even over the roar of the waterfall. And as it tried to literally pull itself together Erol suddenly appeared at the edge of the water, apparently from thin air, his trident grasped in his right hand as his left made arcane gestures over the weapon’s tines.

With a deep-throated shout, the word unintelligible to the others, he lunged at the reformed elemental, driving his trident into the center of its amorphous form. As the weapon pierced the watery body a brilliant beam of white light flashed out from it’s central tine – and the creature exploded, like a wineskin dropped from a high tower!

The surviving gülvini were cowering in the far end of the chamber, and staring at their new mistress and her friends with renewed awe. A brief round of suspicious questioning proved that they had known nothing of the water elemental’s existence, beyond some vague rumors that the Daughter of Vindus controlled such a beings as invisible guards. None had ever seen it before, and even the Hovguvai seemed genuinely grateful that the great Lady and her servants had slain it before it killed them all!

With a growl Devrik motioned S’nirek to again lead the way to Avira’s inner sanctum, and the somewhat reduced party followed. The narrow, uneven stairs at the north end of the waterfall chamber climbed, sometimes steeply, sometimes gently, upward, bending northeast and then east as they did.

A full day of hiking, whilst keeping a wary watch out for patrolling gülvini, eventually wore the edge off the sense of immense awe that had shaken the Hand since their meeting with the powerful ice dragon Ulsarinas.

As the sun sank below the shortened horizon of the mountains the group stopped near a sheltering outcrop of granite just below the tree line and set up camp. Taeland estimated that this was their last night before reaching the heights above Rekorgo. The routine of making camp further calmed the group nerves, and by the time the last watch woke the others, just before dawn, everyone seemed back to their usual selves.

Except, perhaps, Mariala. As she went about rolling up her blankets and eating the cold breakfast Devrik had pulled together she seemed short-tempered and distracted.

“I’m cranky,” she snapped when Vulk mentioned it. “It happens, get over it!”

After that the rest of the Hand gave her some space.

Soon enough they were on their way, just as the sun crested the eastern mountain behind them. It was barely an hour later that they heard a commotion from up ahead – the sounds of men grunting and the clash of steel on steel. Or, to the more trained ears amongst them, iron on steel.

They were still hugging the tree line, and the group moved into combat formation at a signal from Devrik, creeping stealthily through the thin, stunted  alpine forest. As they neared the site of what was obviously a skirmish, Vulk commanded his falcon Cherdon to fly ahead, strengthening the psychic link they shared so as to see what he saw. Toran silently took on the increasingly familiar task of guiding the cantor along while his perceptions were split. After a moment Vulk motioned for the group to stop, and they all pulled together.

“There’s a large boulder just ahead, beyond this next rise,” he said quietly, with the distracted air his companions knew meant he was still looking through the bird’s eyes. “There’s a small clearing around its foot, and eight men… Umantari… have their back to it, fighting what looks to be… at least a dozen gül-Gramlini. From the looks of it, the men made camp there last night… I don’t see any men down yet… but no gülvini down, either… oh, one of the humans just took a nasty cut to his arm!”

“Whatever’s going on here,” Devrik said decisively, “it’s obvious which side we’re going to come in on. I assume there’s no objection to our tipping the scales here?”

There was none, the only comment coming from Taeland, as he strung an arrow to his bow. “If we’re going to do this we have to make sure none of the gülvini escape to give warning.”

In less than two minutes the group was in position just east and north of the boulder, where they could see some of the fight through the slender poles of the pines. Taeland and Jeb scrambled up the sloping back of the three meter high rock, while Toran circled around to come at the fight from the west, and Erol and Therok did the same to the south. Devrik simply drove in from the west, battlesword swinging.

In the first seconds of their attack, before either the gülvini or the humans were aware of their presence, they killed or crippled half of the beastmen – two went down with Taeland’s arrows in them, a third took an arrow in the eye from Jeb; another was felled by a bolt from Toran’s crossbow, and a fifth was taken in the back by a shot from Erol’s longbow.

Devrik, glowing faintly with Vulk’s mystical armor, which the cantor had blessed him with in passing, clove a sixth gül almost in half just as it was aiming to finish off the wounded human. Mariala, her view of the battle truncated by trees and the rock, took out a seventh Gramlini warrior with Fire Nerves. While Korwin cast Cloak of Merthados on himself and stayed out of the fight, Therok drove his own blade through the belly of yet another gülvini.

Momentarily shocked at the sudden help, the beleaguered humans paused to stare dumbly at their good fortune. They quickly took renewed heart, however, at seeing so many of their enemies fall, and redoubled their own attack. In a moment the remaining foulspawn were dead, save for one who dashed off, jinking and dodging into the woods, shrieking.

Without apparently turning to look Taeland, still atop the boulder, loosed another arrow from his bow. The creature’s cries where cut off in a sudden gurgle as the shaft pierced his throat. The tall woodsman gave an enigmatic half-smile and uttered a pithy quip that broke the tension and had everyone laughing.

But the laughter was short-lived, as the men whom the Hand had just aided realized they were now surrounded by the newcomers, two of whom held the high ground – and with ranged weapons, something the gülvini patrol had lacked. It was obvious the men were trained fighters, perhaps a mercenary company, although what they were doing this far into the wilderness was a mystery to the Hand.

Before tensions could get too high, one of the men stepped forward, sheathing his sword and holding his hands out in a gesture of peace. He was dark haired, of middle height, with a short beard… and rather good looking both Mariala and Vulk thought, privately. He was clearly better dressed then the others, and so either their captain or their employer.

“You have our thanks, my friends,” the man said, scanning the faces before him, and lighting on Devrik as the presumed leader. “I have no doubt my men would have defeated the gülvini eventually, but it would likely not have been without losses… your surprise attack saved some lives!

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Jardath Genóra, a merchant of Zhuran in Tharkia. This is my… factotum and right-hand-man, Berik Kithül.” Smiling, he indicated a shorter, stockier man with sandy hair and green eyes who stood just to his left and a step behind. Berik acknowledged the introduction with the barest nod of his head and no change to his wary experession. “These other men are mercenaries we’ve hired to… see us to our destination.”

Devrik, who had not yet re-sheathed his own sword, although he held it casually over his shoulder, nodded and smiled back. At the same time, he gave the subtle hand signal to Vulk and Mariala that they should fire up their arcane truth-sensing abilities.

“My name is Devrik. My companions and I are… travelers ourselves, passing through these mountains.” He named each of the other eight companions, but only by given name, and offered no further explanation of their presence. “It seems odd to find a merchant so far from the usual trade routes… how came you to the predicament we found you in?”

Berik looked like he wanted to ask the same question of the Hand, but his employer forestalled him, holding up a hand, his smile never wavering. “A fair question, friend, although I might ask the same of you… but I think Fortune may have brought us together.” If he noticed the slight start that Vulk gave, he showed no indication of it.

“We are here, in this Immortal’s-forsaken wilderness, on a mission of mercy! And if you have any human kindness in you, perhaps you will join your force to ours, to achieve our end.” Behind him, Berik relaxed a fraction, although his face settled into a rather sour expression.

“Perhaps we might,” Vulk replied, stepping up to stand next to Devrik. “But we’d need to know a little more than that before we could decide. Tell us your tale.”

“It’s simple enough,” Jardath said. “My beloved fiancé, Karina Mazálon, was traveling north along the Talorin Trail on business a tenday past. The caravan she was traveling with, for safety’s sake – ha! – was attacked by a horde of gül-Gramlini. The monsters were driven off, eventually, but not without loss of life… and, when the dust had settled, my beloved Karina had vanished!

“Her body was not found, and although no one could say for certain that she’d been carried off, it must have been so. It is not an uncommon practice of the beastmen of Rekorgo to take hostages, if they believe a victim to be wealthy, and to demand ransom–”

“Have you received such a ransom demand?” Mariala asked sharply, also stepping forward to stand with Vulk and Devrik.

“No,” admitted the merchant, reddening slightly. “But I immediately consulted a well-respected medium in Zhuran, a psychometric of some repute. After handling one of Karina’s, um, possessions she assured me my love was still alive, but being held prisoner in the hive at Rekorgo!”

Mariala and Vulk both noted that the man’s henchman, Berik, rolled his eyes a bit at this point, but said nothing to gainsay his master.

“I immediately sent Berik to secure the best company of mercenaries available in the city, and set out at once to rescue Karina.”

Devrik made no comment about the likely quality of such mercenaries, given both the civil unrest and the actual war Tharkia was currently fighting. “And now, on the very doorstep of that vile place, we encounter you – very clearly men, um, people, of some prowess. If you were to join us –”

“I’m sorry,” Devrik interrupted this time, his brows crawling upward skeptically, “but you planned to take on the largest colony of gülvini in the Savage Mountains (even if they are only Gramlini) with six mercenaries, a merchant’s factotum, and yourself? Are you insane?!”

Jardath’s flush deepened, and he frowned, while Berik lightened with a barely suppressed a smirk. “I am most certainly NOT insane, sir! I realize that an army, even if I could hire one, would likely fail to take Rekorgo. And if it could, Karina would almost certainly die before any frontal assault succeeded.

“No, I have another way in, one that depends on stealth and minimum force, precisely applied. The medium told me of a secret entrance, one that should… will take us close to Karina.”

The Hand looked at one another in varying degrees of skepticism and calculation. If they could truly find a back door into the colony…

“And did your medium give you an exact location for this hidden entrance?” Mariala asked, eyes narrow with suspicion.

“Well, in general terms, certainly,” the merchant replied. Berik actually snorted at that, and Jardath shot him a quelling glare. The lieutenant shrugged unrepentantly, but resumed his stoic expression. “I tried to get the woman to accompany us, to more precisely pinpoint this route, but no amount of… persuasion would convince her to take the risk. However, her description was surprisingly detailed – you know how vague these psychic sorts usually are – and I feel certain that, with a little time and effort, we can find it!”

Both Vulk and Mariala gave the subtle hand cues that told the others that the man was speaking qualified truth, if perhaps not all of it. Devrik frowned, and thought for a moment.

“Well, you have wounds to tend to amongst your men,” he said at last. “While you see to that, and break your camp, we’ll discuss your proposal.”

The discussion was short, but heated. Although both Vulk and Mariala sensed some reticence in the merchant’s words, they detected no outright lies. And as weak as the man’s plan sounded, it was still better than anything the Hand had come up with yet. After some back-and-forth about just scouting the area vs. actually penetrating what might be Captain Chaos’ very headquarters, it was Mariala’s firm vote to align themselves with the merchant and his mercenaries that carried the day.

As his men finished breaking camp Jardath approached them again once it was obvious they’d reached a decision. He seemed pleased with their acceptance, but blanched a bit, and hesitate for just an instant, when Korwin asked to see whatever item the medium had used to locate Karina.

“I have a bit of a talent in that direction myself,” Korwin explained modestly, providing his own companions with an opportunity for some eye-rolling of their own. He put the man’s brief hesitation down to the fact that the item in question turned out to be a rather sheer undergarment of the most intimate type.

Concealing a hint of embarrassment himself, Korwin fingering the sheer fabric… and felt the subtle shift in perception that heralded a vision… he saw a woman, very attractive, but looking very angry and… frustrated. She appeared to be… underground… angry and afraid… gülvini all around her… His perception shifted, pulling suddenly away from the woman… up a dark shaft… into an alpine clearing… a large stone plug…

The trance ended, and he slowly shook his head. Jardath frowned, his hand absently going to the pommel of his sword, but then looked relieved when Korwin described his vision.

“Yes, the stone plug, the clearing,” the merchant exclaimed. “That’s exactly how Madame Verney described it to me! Can you find it?”

“I think so,” Korwin replied slowly. “I at least have a strong sense of the direction, anyway. I’ll try again when we get closer.”

The Hand and their new allies followed Korwin as he and Taeland led the way closer to Rekorgo and whatever fate awaited them.

Which, in the event, turned out to be a great stone chimney rising from the ground near the edge of a sheer precipice. The cliff overlooked the long valley leading to the main gates of Rekorgo, and crouching behind the boulders and scrub along its edge Taeland and Erol had the perfect vantage point to study the enemy’s external defenses. Therok, Jeb and Berik joined them, while the others examined the chimney and debated its merits as a possible entry into the colony – despite the thick black smoke pouring out of it, no doubt from the forges of the gülvini smiths.

The Vale of Rekorgo ran north-south, and the small group of observers were perched atop the eastern cliffs. To their left the vale opened out into a much wider valley, and a high palisade of immense logs arced across the narrowest part of the mouth, cliff face to cliff face. A single massive gate of oak and iron pierced the wall were the old stone road crossed it, leading north through the narrowing vale to the Main Gate.

To their right the Main Gate was clearly visible, its own massive stone doors standing more than half closed in the midday sun. Several guards stood sentry at the Gate, and even from a distance their surly body language made it clear this was not a favored duty. But the gülvini who guarded the palisade gate, and manned the two small, wooden towers that flanked it just inside the barrier, appeared even more unhappy with their jobs. They all did their best to stay out of the direct sunlight. No one seemed to be guarding the large corral in the center of the vale, against the western cliff, that contained the colony’s threescore of goats and handful of cattle.

Before the watching group could do more than note these facts, however, there came a faint noise from the south, growing steadily louder, resolving into the sound of many iron-shod feet marching. As they crouched further down and peered to the left a troop of Black Güls swung around an arm of the mountain and into view.

There were two score of them, and they seemed to have no fear, or even dislike, for the pale autumn sunlight. They marched in fairly good order, for a gülvini pack, and their leader actually rode a horse. The sight of them caused quite a stir amongst the smaller gül-Gramlini at the palisade gate, bringing them all to the alert. Spears were thrust forward and the four in the watch towers cocked and leveled their cross-bows at the approaching group.

But to the watcher’s surprise, no alarm was raised. Instead one of the Rekorgo güls, probably the captain of the guard, climbed up to the narrow walkway on the inside of the palisade and called down to the mounted leader as he neared the gate. The gül-Hovguvai leader signaled his men to stop, and returned the guard captain’s greeting.

Being of separate sub-species, they were forced to use the common tongue of the North, Esparic, but distance and fickle mountain winds made it difficult for the allied watchers to make out much of the conversation. Tone and body language came through well enough, though, and while the two sides clearly bore little love for one another, they were also clearly not enemies. At least not at first.

After an initial relatively calm exchange, the tone began to grow more hostile, and the volume louder. Taeland’s extraordinary hearing allowed him to pick out some of the argument, when the wind blew favorably. He caught the big gül’s demand that the Gramlini “turn over the female,” and the guard captains sneering denial; what sounded like a name, Avira, came up a moment later, along with the word Jha-Kusk, which he recognized as the name of the most remote gülvini colony in the Savage Mountains.

The Hovguvai leader was becoming increasingly furious at the guard captain’s refusal to open the gate, and his bass roars of “treason” and “traitorous cur” could be heard by everyone on the clifftop. But before he could take any more decisive action there was a sudden and violent shift in the standoff – one of the Gramlini in the eastern watchtower shifted his aim, and shot his own captain through the neck.

As the erstwhile commander clutched at the arrow and toppled over the wall, two of the Gramlini on the ground attacked three of their comrades, while a third rushed to open the gate. One of the guards in the western tower shot the gül who’d murdered their captain, only to be knifed in the back by his companion. As the Black Güls poured through the open palisade gate the guards at the Main Gate finally realized something was wrong. An order to close the doors was apparently given, but was stymied when several of the guards instead attacked their fellows.

Erol motioned the group to move slowly back, and they retreated to the shelter of the chimney, where their companions had finally noticed the commotion in the vale below. “If we’re going to enter this filthy place,” he said after Taeland had relayed what he’d heard, “there’s never going to be a better time than now, with internal fighting and an external raid.”

“And I know how to get us in,” Korwin said, wandering up with Karina’s camisole clutched in one hand. While the others had been arguing over the chimney he had tried another go with his psychometry, and had meandered into the sparse woods nearby. “Or at least I’ve found the door. Not sure how to open it, though.”

He lead the group to the clearing he’d discovered, and the circular stone plug set into the ground in the center of it. It had been polished smooth, once upon a time, but was now pitted with age. A small circle in the very center was inset slightly, but no apparent mechanism for opening the barrier was obvious.

Toran spent several fruitless minutes examining the stone, and assured his friends there was no mechanical method to open it, at least not from the outside. At that point Mariala cast a Detect Magic spell, and confirmed that the plug was magically bound. Both she and Korwin attempted to Dispell the enchantment, but it proved itself both old and strong.

As the group stared glumly at the obstacle messing up all their plans, Vulk suddenly hissed out a warning. “Cherdon sees three Hovguvai moving up the slope towards us from the south!”

Under Taeland’s direction the group scattered to conceal themselves amongst the nearby trees and boulders. A few minutes later the lightly armored Black Güls entered the clearing and made a bee-line to the stone plug.

Muttering something to his companions, making them laugh harshly, one of the beastmen pulled a small silver disk from his belt pouch. One of his companions sniffed loudly, then said something to the apparent leader, who he snapped back a curt reply. Unfortunately, they were speaking in their racial tongue, which none of the hidden watchers spoke.

The gül leader placed the metal disk into the depression in the center of the stone, and muttered a word no one could quite make out. Vulk, crouching behind a large boulder with Mariala, quietly urged her to use her Comprehend Languages spell to understand what was going on, but she impatiently waved him to silence, intent on the action around the plug.

The gül stepped back and the stone slowly began to sink into the ground, then gently pivot into a sunken slot, one edge becoming the top step of a spiral stairway descending down into darkness. The Hovguvai wasted no time in starting down the stairs, mangs drawn and bodies tense in anticipation of battle.

Korwin, who had been closest to the action, having cast Shadow Body on himself, signaled the others when the güls were out of sight and beyond hearing. A hushed, hurried conference quickly decided the marching order for the pursuit, everyone agreeing that the güls were very likely to lead them straight to the beleaguered Karina. Surely she must be the “woman” their leader had demanded.

Taking one last look over the cliff edge before descending, Vulk reported that a full fledged civil war seemed to have broken out amongst the gül-Gramlini, with half aiding the Hovhuvai interlopers against their fellows. Jeb was left behind to guard their retreat, with Cherdon soaring above to give early warning on any other approaching enemies.

The circular stone stairs wound down into dimness for at least 30 meters, ending in what was presumably a secret door, although it was currently ajar. The room beyond the door was spacious, for an ancient Khundari chamber, but could barely contain the 16 invaders now jostling for position in it.

It was obviously the Rekorgo Gramlini king’s chamber, a wild mix of luxury and decay, typical of gülvini leadership living spaces. As the mercenaries and more martial Hand members organized themselves to follow the three gül-Hovguvai, Korwin and Vulk took the time to rummage about the room, looking for clues and/or valuables.

Following the güls was little trouble, as a shriek from across the hall was a dead giveaway. Bursting into the room, Devrik and Berik saw two Gramlini corpses bleeding out on a lovely Tolusian carpet, and heard a deep, savage voice coming from beyond the doorway in the east wall… “Now we’re gonna have some fun wit chu, bitch!”

Shouldering past Devrik and Berik, Erol and Toran followed Taeland through the doorway to find an attractive woman, presumably the kidnapped Karina, being menaced by the three gül-Hovguvai – two of whose mangs dripped red with blood (threatening to ruin another beautiful carpet), while the third stalked forward, undoing the ties to his breeks.

Karinia’s mouth opened, no doubt to scream in terror Erol thought, but simply hung open as she blinked at the men pouring into the chamber. Taeland’s sword took the would-be rapist gül through the back, severing his spine and killing him instantly, while Toran’s battle axe gouged a bloody chunk from the side of one of the others. Erol failed to make the trifecta, unfortunately, as his trident thrust at the third gül was hastily blocked.

Mariala, trying to shoulder through the crush of men attempting to all rush into the room at once, made a valiant effort to Fire Nerve the two surviving güls, but the confusion and chaos were not conducive to a successful casting, and she was forced to let the energies dissipate and the form fade out before it all backfired on her. She never wanted to experience that again!

Toran’s opponent swung wildly at him with his mang, missing by a country kilometer, while the Khundari’s counterstrike took another chunk out of him. But the creature was tough, and refused to die. Erol’s opponent was more successful in his attack, wounding the former gladiator with a nasty slash to the thigh, forcing him to stagger back.

But Toran brought a quick end to it all by delivering a final killing blow to his gül, and nearly gutting Erol’s foe on the follow-through. Both Hovguvai collapsed to the now thoroughly ruined carpet, while a breathless Jardath burst through the men crowding the doorway.

“Karina, my love, I’ve come to rescue you!”

Mariala, coming in close behind him through the gap he’d made in his men, saw the look on the woman’s face, and frowned in confusion. Karina looked at once amazed, slightly confused… and enraged? Wait, that didn’t seem right…

“Jardath,” the woman said at last, regaining control of her features. “How… surprised I am to see you here!” She fingered the large, ugly ring on her left hand, then let it go. Jardath rushed forward to embrace her… and impaled himself on the dagger that she suddenly thrust forward in a blindingly fast move. He staggered back, blood gushing from the wound in his gut, a look of utter shock on his suddenly pale face. Oddly, he struggled to pull the hood of his cloak up, trying to say something… but only blood poured forth, and he collapsed at his erstwhile lover’s feet.

Everyone was rooted for a few crucial seconds, stunned at this unexpected turn, with the exception of Berik, who muttered “I told the idiot, but would he listen? No!” as he shouldered forward through his mercenaries.

“Well, that was every bit as satisfying as I’d imagined it would be,” Karina said, apparently to herself. “And here I thought I’d missed my chance at the pig!

“As for the rest of you,” she went on, turning her attention to the crowd before her, “you’re all going to do your very best to get me safely out of this pit, aren’t you?” She fingered her ring as she spoke, projecting clearly to both those in the room and those in the antechamber beyond.

And Mariala, who had been mentally preparing her Fire Nerve spell, suddenly realized that she was, indeed going to help this poor woman escape. Clearly, Jardath had been some sort of creepy stalker, and his death was no doubt richly deserved.

Taeland, standing closest to the startlingly beautiful woman, lowered his sword as he, too realized that he was going to do anything he had to to ensure her safety and escape… although some small voice deep inside was saying “wait, what?!” He ignored it, and turned to scan the room, looking for any enemies of his lady.

Vulk, in the antechamber doorway, felt a sudden realization dawn on him that there was nothing in the world he wanted more than to help this amazing woman escape, and to keep her from harm. And in this sudden illumination, he realized that she looked exactly like some of the idealized images he’d seen in temples of Immortal Kasira… surely Karina was the very avatar of the Lady of Luck herself… even the names were similar!

Berik, his dagger already drawn, paused as he shoved past Devrik. What had he been thinking? Of course Karina had been right to kill that fool Jardath! He had never been worthy of her! In fact, he knew in a sudden flash of inspiration, she’d done it out of love for him, Berik… the two of them belonged together… and he’d do whatever it took to make that happen!

And in the antechamber half of of the mercenaries and the Hand’s pet barbarian Therok also had sudden epiphanies concerning the utter desirability of protecting the beautiful lady in the other room… if her face was even half as beautiful as her voice, they’d be in heaven!

Everyone else in both rooms felt a momentary pressure in their heads, then shook it off, snorting, harrumphing or sneering in derision at the very idea they’d ever help this murderous wench! Except maybe Erol, who at first was swayed by the lady’s commands, only to have the other half of his personality bitch-slap him back to his senses.

“I don’t think so, lady,” Toran snorted. “But we do have some questions for you, and you’re gonna sing!”

But as he started forward Vulk suddenly leapt at him from the doorway, attempting to tackle him from behind. Surprised by the attack from such an unexpected quarter, the Khundari’s Shadow Warrior-trained instincts nonetheless kicked in. With a jumping spin kick to the knee he deflected his friend, who collapsed groaning to the floor, clutching his leg.

At the same time the uncontrolled mercs started toward the door to the inner chamber, only to be attacked by their besotted comrades, while Therok, surprisingly gently, restrained Korwin.

Inside the well-appointed (at least before all the gülvini blood had started flying) bedchamber, Mariala and Taeland moved to place themselves between Karina and any threat from the gathered men. Berik moved to join them, but before he could reach the three Erol had pulled out his magic balls and set them twirling in the air in the middle of the room.

As the spinning crystal spheres sent out their rays of colorful, mesmerizing light Vulk looked up and straight at them… and immediately forgot the pain in his knee, along with everything else. Berik, too, looked full on at Erol’s balls and became instantly entranced. Mariala managed to turn her gaze away from the orbs before she could be fully mesmerized, but stood dazed and slightly befuddled, while Taeland ignored the strobing lights completely… his focus remained entirely on his lady.

With Mariala and Taeland guarding her back, the Hand’s would-be rescuee turned to the wall behind her, hands darting quickly to several stones, tapping and twisting. With a sharp “snik” a hidden door popped open. Looking to see how the chaos in the room was developing, Karina smiled and commanded her two nearest slaves to follow her, only to frown in annoyance as the still dazed Mariala just looked around confusedly. Mariala was certainly more her type, but with a shrug Karina settled for just the half-Telnori hunk, dragging him through the door and slamming it behind them.

Meanwhile, Korwin, who had shaken off and eluded Therok’s attempts at restraint had darted into the room. Realizing that Mariala was the most dangerous of his friends to have been somehow controlled, he immediately cast his Drunken Hand spell on her, hoping it would be enough to keep the damn Fire Nerves out of play.

Just as she was beginning to come out of the mental fog caused by Erol’s mesmerizing balls, Mariala found herself suddenly totally blitzed. It was as if she’d just downed several bottles of wine at once, or maybe a decanter of brandy. The room seemed to spin around her, and she fought the urge to vomit.

Devrik moved quickly to grab her and keep her from casting any spells (and with an eye out for her Khundari dagger, having seen what she could do with that in a pinch), but her own drunken staggering helped her unintentionally avoid his grasp. She staggered toward the large, soft-looking bed and this time Devrik managed to get her into a bear hug and pull her down onto it.

Toran had dashed up to the hidden door as Karina and Taeland had disappeared through it, and had only just failed to keep it from closing. With a particularly earthy Khundari curse he’d instantly set to work trying to figure out the mechanism that controlled the again-hidden portal.

As their Khundari compatriot worked to open the way after their target (and friend) the rest of the Hand stumbled and fumbled around each other, one set trying not to hurt their friends, the other… not really trying so much. Except Therok, who seemed surprisingly gentle in his renewed struggle with Korwin.

The water mage flailed against the muscular strength of the barbarian, to little effect, and B-Fiddy just sort of slapped away his attempts to grapple. Devrik struggled to keep Mariala pinned without hurting her, while she did her best to knee him in the groin. In the antechamber the mercenaries hacked away at each other in a surprising display of almost comic ineptitude.

Erol, in a quandry at how best to proceed, and perhaps still a little dazed by the brief mental fight in his head, decided it would be best to blind their controlled friends. Sadly, in the tumult, his warning to the others was missed, and his flash ended up blinding almost everyone in the bed chamber.

But the worst unforeseen consequence was the undoing of his success in keeping Vulk and Berik mesmerized. Blinded, they no longer were entranced by his Balls of Wonder… but remained under Karina’s control. Half blind, they still were able to go on the attack.

Devrik lost his grip on Mariala thanks to the flash of light, and before he could regain his grip Vulk barreled into him – the cantor bounced off, but the distraction allowed Mariala to stagger away. Korwin managed to cut his elbow on a metal stud of Therok’s harness, ruining another of his puffy shirts, and then almost concussed himself trying to head-butt the barbarian.

♦ ♦ ♦

During all this Toran had managed to work out the secret to the hidden door, and as it popped open he rolled through in best ninja-dwarf style, coming to his feet with his axe ready to block or attack. Taeland stood before him, long knife drawn, in a fighting crouch. Beyond him in the long, narrow room Karina was working feverishly at a large iron chest, apparently trying to get it open.

Taking in all this in an instant, Toran leapt aside as Taeland swung at him, using a nearby table as a springboard to somersault over the ranger and land next to Karina. She whirled as he swung his axe, nimbly dodging the blow and landing a solid kick to his chest. It was obvious she’d had some serious martial arts training…

Before the Shadow Warrior could recover, Taeland was on him, forcing him to defend himself without hurting his companion. Karina returned to her work on the chest with a barked command to her slave – “Deal with the interloper!”

Taeland swung at Toran, but he seemed slower than the dwarf remembered him in combat. Was he fighting the control? He decided to risk tackling the woman again, grabbing her around the waist and taking her to the floor. But before he could secure his grip Taeland was pulling him off her. Karina moved both gracefully and quickly up from the floor to head-butt the Kundari, knocking the wind out of him.

Toran had little trouble breaking Taeland’s hold, but his follow-through attack on Karina missed and her counter-strike rang his bell, causing him to drop his axe. Taeland, eschewing his own weapon, tried to grapple the dwarf, but was easily evaded. Karina went in for another kick, but this time Toran was ready for her, knocking her foot aside and landing his own blow solidly into her side.

As she staggered back against the large iron chest, grimacing in pain, she screamed at Taeland “KILL HIM!!” Toran barely had time to snatch up his axe before his friend was on him, and he failed to entirely dodge the long knife blow to the head. Ignoring the sudden pain and blood, Toran drove in with a swift counter-attack, wounding Taeland in the hand.

Karina used the distraction to pull her dagger and drive the blade between the links of his armor and into his hip, where it grated on bone. Wrenching himself away from the attack ripped the weapon from her grasp, but left him open to another blow from Taeland… he parried, but was staggered.

Realizing the woman was now weaponless, Toran pulled the dagger from his hip and, seemingly without awareness, dropped it to the floor between them. Taeland moved in for another attack, forcing the Khundari to turn toward him. Toran easily blocked the long knife… and on the back swing brought the flat of his axe blade around to catch Karina upside the head as she darted in to retrieve her dagger. She dropped bonelessly to the floor, unconscious and bleeding freely from her nose and mouth.

♦ ♦ ♦

Back in the bed chamber things had gone from bad to potentially fatal. Mariala, staggering far enough out of Devrik’s reach, somehow managed to pull her drunken shit together enough to summon up her Fire Nerves, blasting her friend with the full force of the spell. The fire mage dropped twitching to the floor, writhing in agony. Mariala looked briefly surprised, then burst into hysterical laughter. Then hiccuped.

Erol, time slowing for him as his extra-temporal ability finally kicked in, managed to take down Therok with a blow to the head from his trident’s shaft, freeing up Korwin to head for the still open secret door. But Berik, realizing his beloved would be in danger, lunged to attack the water mage. Korwin managed to dodge, but the former henchman now crouched between him and the door.

Erol turned immediately from downing Therok to trying the same ploy on Mariala, only to be stymied by her continued drunkard’s luck. Staggering and weaving about the room, she avoided his attack and giggled…. until Grover leaped from a shelf where he had been perched and savaged her on the hip. With a shriek of pain and fury she whipped around, sending the small animal flying, and then tripped over her own feet to land on her ass.

Erol raised his trident to bring its butt down on her head, only to be blocked by Korwin’s ice-shrouded cutlass. “Stop!” the water mage cried. “Look, it’s over!” Then Erol noticed that Mariala had lost the fixed look she’d worn ever since Karina had asked for her help, though she now looked confused and sick.

Berik, too, was standing dazed and confused-looking where he and Korwin had been fighting (Korwin had a nasty cut on one hand… probably leave a scar the mage thought happily). From the antechamber the sounds of fighting had stopped, and Vulk, who had been trying to block the secret door with furniture while Korwin and Berik fought, was shaking his head to clear it.
Taeland and Toran appeared at the doorway into the hidden room, dragging the unconscious Karina between them. After unceremoniously dumping her in the middle of the room, Toran described the chest she had been attempting to open. “I’m going to see if I can finish what she started,” he said, turning back to the hidden room and brushing off Vulk’s attempts to examine his bleeding head.

Vulk instead turned his attention to Devrik and Mariala, using his psionic healing abilities to remove the extreme fatigue from the one, and his physician skill (and Baylorium) to treat the other’s ferret bite. Erol dragged B-Fiddy over to the cantor before turning his attention to their recent foe.

He peeled back her eyelids and checked her pupils, then felt for a pulse… damn, her heart had stopped! But they needed her alive – they needed answers. There was a technique his Telnori “mentor” knew…

“Isn’t she dead?” asked Berik from across the room, where he’d been about to follow Toran and Korwin into the treasure vault. Seeing the tall Telnori pressing down on the woman’s chest and caught his eye.

“She was… now she’s just badly concussed,” the former gladiator replied, straightening from his revivifying efforts as her breast once agin began to move with breath, if shallowly. “But she might yet die again… it’s hard to tell with a head wound like this.”

Searching her carefully, he removed anything that might be magical or otherwise dangerous, but the moment he touched the large, ugly ring on her left hand the battered woman groaned, and her eyelids fluttered open.

“No,” she croaked, clutching feebly at his hand. “Don’t, please… I won’t be a slave to that bitch again… never again…”

“A slave to who,” Erol asked, desisting from trying to remove the ring but keeping his own hand firmly on it. “Who do you fear so much?”

“Avira… Avira… she wears many faces… she stole me from the Crimson Veil… she stole my mind… the bitch! For ten years… her willing slave… stealing powerful artifacts… helping her spread… her stupid… death cult to the… gülvini…”

She seemed to faded in and out for a minute, but soon resumed her rambling speech. “She made me… I slept… slept with… men!” The disgust and rage seemed to give her strength, but only for a moment. “I hate her… using the Zalik-mal, that pig… Jardath… and his cloak of invisibility... to help… steal artifacts I would find… with my gift… I never knew what she stole from me… until I found… the Ring.” Her hand spasmed in his, trying to clutch it. “When I… put it on… it freed me… broke her cursed spell… I swore then… I would destroy her! Her… and all her great… plans…”

“Who is this Avira?” Erol asked urgently. “What are her plans?”

Karina gasped a laugh, and her eyes wandered for a moment. “She is a demon, a blight, a renegade… and she made me a renegade… too…” A tear fell from one eye at that. “She wears many… faces… has many tools… everywhere… she plans to rule the world… more ambitious even… than Vindus… unite the tribes… the gülvini… storm the kingdoms of men…”

“Did you kill Jardath’s men?” Berik asked, startling Erol. He and been so focused on the wounded woman’s words he’d barely noticed the man crouch down opposite him. “Did you kill Buron and Fendal in that house in Zhuran?” His tone was quiet, even conversational, his face neutral. Erol felt suddenly uneasy.

“Yes,” Karina replied, with a ghost of a smile. “Yes… I wanted to kill… all of you Zalik-mal… but most especially… that pig Jardath… he desecrated me…”

“Buron was my brother,” Berik said in the same calm voice and drove his dagger into Karina’s throat. Erol grabbed for the man, but Berik ripped the knife out again and slammed the pommel into the ex-gladiator’s face, stunning him. As Erol slumped over Karina’s spasming body Berik rose, drawing his sword and calling to his mercenaries.

Devrik, his face twisted in rage and shock, shoved Vulk aside and lunged at the murderous thief. Berik barely managed to deflect a thrust that would have spit him like a pig, instead taking a deep gash to his thigh. Pivoting on his good leg, he swung wildly at Devrik’s head, only to lose his sword arm to the fire mage’s counter-strike.

Blood gushing from the stump of the severed limb, Berik collapsed screaming to the floor, desperately trying to stop the arterial spurting. Ignoring him, Devrik whirled to face the mercenaries suddenly pouring into the room. One look at their dead employer, his quickly expiring lieutenant and the enraged face of Devrik, and to a man they instantly decided there was no point in dying to avenging a client who could no longer pay them… they stumbled over themselves fleeing the chamber.

While Vulk tended to the unconscious Erol, using the last of the blood-specific Baylorium, Devrik and a still woozy Mariala joined Korwin and Toran in the treasure vault. The Khundari was just disengaging the final lock on the iron chest.

“It had magical wards, I think,” he said, pulling the lid up with a grunt. “But I think Karina managed to break those before I subdued her. We should ask her –”

“She’s dead,” Devrik grated shortly. “Killed by Berik.”

“What?!” Torn cried, his black beard bristling in anger. “The bastard! We should –”

“He’s not an issue anymore,” Devrik interrupted. “Nor are the mercenaries.”

Toran raised a bushy eyebrow at that last, but decided not to pursue it. He turned back to the chest and peered into its depths. Gold velvet lined ebony trays, each of the three divided into six sections. The first tray was empty, the second contained an exquisite figurine of a dryad carved from jade and an empty jeweled box of burnished rosewood. The last tray held only a single wand of tarnished silver and blue crystal.

While he was doing this, Devrik and Mariala peering over his shoulders, Korwin slipped back out into the bed chamber. Vulk was still occupied with Erol, Therok was slumped in a corner nursing his head, and Taeland had escorted the mercenaries out to make sure they neither harmed Jeb nor raised the alarm with the Gramlini out of some sort of misplaced vengeance.

Without undue haste the water mage knelt next to Karina’s body and slipped the ugly silver ring, with its large purple stone, off her dead finger, dropping it quickly into his belt pouch. Then he stood up and wandered over to commiserate with Erol over his aching head.

A moment later a commotion from the treasure room drew everyone’s attention, and they all crowded into the chamber. In the bottom of the chest, beneath the third tray, lay a folded robe of midnight blue, trimmed in red and gold flames… and on top of it rested a mask of gold, lacking any holes for eyes, nose or mouth.

“Dear gods, could this Avira that Karina spoke of be our Captain Chaos?” Erol asked no one in particular. “I thought he was a man…”

While he explained to Taeland exactly who “Captain Chaos” was and outlined the scope and reach of the Vortex conspiracy, the others searched the rest of the room, stuffing every ream of paper, scrolls and books into their packs.

As they returned to the bloody bed chamber the noise of battle began to filter down to them. Whatever the result of the civil war going on above them might be in the end, it seemed to be moving their way.

“Hand,” barked Vulk, “we are leaving!”

It was a subdued and shaken group that climbed up from the cursed valley of tragic, foolish Kalin and his beloved, doomed Narina.  Although it was still cold in the high mountains, it was a pure and natural cold, completely unlike the evil chill of the vale of death behind them; the weather had cleared, and the clean pale blue sky eventually began to drive away the horror of that last, seemingly endless, night…

Within a few hours the group found themselves in the highest passes of the southern Sarijis Mountains, above the treeline, following what Taeland continued to assure them this was the best way to come to the gül colony of Rekorgo with the greatest chance of surprise – from above, a direction they won’t expect.

On a wide alpine slope of sparse grass and great patches of scree, with the sun just reaching its zenith, they came across a pile of broken, twisted branches, apparently torn from the pine trees a few dozen meters below them on the mountainside. Devrik, on point with Taeland, poked into the pile with his sword, moving some of the branches aside to reveal the savaged and bloody carcass of an elk. Taeland, coming up close behind him muttered a quiet curse and began searching the skies above them.

“This is the stash of a wyvern,” he explained, calmly but with great urgency. “And the great winged beast may return at any moment to renew its feasting… we should be gone from here NOW!”

“I’ve never actually seen a wyvern,” Mariala said, looking around in curiosity. “At least not a live one. One of my teachers at the Aquina Chantry had a stuffed one… it looked rather adorable, really…”

“How big was it?” Taeland asked, as he continued to try to shepherd his companions away. Everyone seemed determined to get a look at the dead elk.

“Oh, a bit less than a meter I suppose, from tail to snout.”

“Ah, yes, very adorable I’m sure,” Taeland said drily, as he re-covered the carcass with the branches. “But that was a very young juvenile. I assure you, you do NOT want to meet a fully mature wyvern – they’re over four meters in length, with a wingspan of more than five meters, razor sharp talons and the most agile tail, with a poisoned barb on the end, that you’ll ever see. Unless you meet a dragon, of course.”

“Well, I hardly think they compare to a true dragon,” Korwin opined. “Not even really related –”

“True,” Taeland agreed. “But wyverns are insanely ferocious… and deeply territorial. Even their mating is violent! I once saw a coupling pair in action – the female latched onto the male, who is usually smaller, and they tore at each other, tooth and talon, in their sexual frenzy, locked together and spinning toward the ground… sometimes they don’t finish the act before they hit. Which is why the female tries to keep the male beneath her while they, um, mate.”

“Did the pair you saw both survive?” Vulk asked, fascinated.

“In that case, actually, they both –”

But before the Talim Nar could finish his sentence a dark shadow flashed across the ground and over the group, as a harsh scream rent the air. Everyone whirled, crouching, and drew their weapons as a great wyvern, obviously a female, hovered over her disturbed food stash. The wind from her grey-green wings buffeted them as she screamed again… and then stooped on them, talons flashing in the mid-day sun.

Taeland was her target, but the ranger blocked her talons with his buckler, and deftly avoided her slashing tail. But even as she rose up for her next strike, two more wyverns appeared over the ridge behind her, and dove instantly to the attack. They were smaller than the first, clearly males, and not yet entirely full-grown.

“I thought these things were solitary beasts!” Toran yelled as he twisted and turned in a spectacular rolling dodge that nimbly evaded both talons and tail. As the creature rose again, he rolled to one knee and pulled ’round his crossbow whilst reaching for a bolt.

“They’re obviously her offspring,” Taeland replied absently, focused on drawing a shaft through his hartbow. “Though they must be close to being fully fledged… by next spring she will have driven them away.”

“Wonderful,” Devrik interjected, dodging his own set of talons by diving in close in a fierce counter attack. “If only we’d waited until then to stumble across her dinner!” His attack missed the young wyvern’s pale underbelly by a hair, even as Taeland’s arrow sailed between the mother’s neck and wing.

Mariala, cocking her own crossbow and taking aim at one of the juveniles, was surprised… in the short time she’d known the ranger she’d seen him draw his bow many times, and this was the first time she’d seen him miss! But far from the first time she’d ever missed, she reflected ruefully, as her bolt sailed past its own target by an embarrassing margin.

Erol, leaping up next to Toran, hurled his net into the air, tangling the talons and one wing of the second male. As it struggled to stay in the air, the Khundari aimed his crossbow point blank and fired – only to have the trigger mechanism jam! With a curse that should have knocked the beast out of the sky all by itself, he struggled to free the trigger, while Erol hoisted his trident to cover him.

Vulk focused his own attention on the large female, casting his Weaver’s Web Trap spell for the first time in combat. The pale strands of arcane energy twisted up from his outstretched hands, twining around the wyvern’s legs and tail. But her wings remained free, and even as Devrik hurled his spear at her, she jinked upward and momentarily away from the battle.

While all this was going on Korwin had been busy casting a spell of his own, calling up Hortan’s Mist to obscure him from the sight of the winged beasts. As he faded from view Mariala called out in exasperation “How is that helpful, Korwin?!”

But before she could pursue the matter both mother and son had freed themselves from their entanglements, Vulk’s spell dissipating into flickering shreds of light and Erol’s net into just shreds which rained down around them all. In the same instant, the other male dove at Jeb, who had been trying to bring his own bow to bear, forcing the lad to roll for cover, dropping both bow and arrow.

As the other two wyverns stooped to the attack once agin, Taeland stood tall, seemingly unfazed as the larger male dove shrieking at him. In one swift motion he raised his hartbow and fired, driving the steel-tipped shaft right through the creature’s left eye. It’s shriek cut off abruptly, it twisted wildly in the air… and then it dropped like a stone.

The female pulled up from her own attack on Devrik, her shriek of fury and outrage almost ear-splitting. But before she could renew her attack, the battle took a sudden sharp turn toward the unexpected. Coming up over the ridge above them, gibbering in nonsensical shrieks, was a flock of hideous leathery-winged humanoid monstrosities, waving crude spears and throwing sharp rocks.

“Rokiriki!” Taeland cried, drawing and nocking another arrow from his quiver.

“Yelgri!” Toran cried in disgust, still trying to unjam his crossbow.

“Mountain Harpies!” cried Mariala, dodging as one stooped on her with filthy claws extended.

What looked to be two dozen or more of the disgusting creatures swarmed the two remaining wyverns, attacking with stones and spears, the cloud of their stench enveloping everyone on the slope. The wyverns attention was diverted to their ancient enemies, and the carnage quickly began. But while the wyverns were stronger and more powerful individually, the harpies were perhaps more agile, and certainly more numerous. Although several fell to the talons, teeth and barbed tails of the wyverns, the great beasts took many wounds themselves. It soon seemed that the female would prefer to retreat, but the male was frenzied in its attacks on the harpies, and the mother would not abandon her remaining child.

Not all of the harpies engaged the two wyverns, unfortunately – several dove to attack the group as well. Erol’s trident flashed out, blocking and counter-striking, sending two of the creatures to their graves, while Taeland, covering Mariala’s rolling retreat, moved like lightning and gutted another with his long knife.

Toran, giving up on his crossbow for the moment, fired off a blast of Stavin’s Arrow, knocking another harpy from the sky with arcane energies. Mariala, still shaken from her near miss, tried to blast the swirling mass above them with Fire Nerves, but her form was flawed and the spell failed.

Vulk decided it was time for some protection, and began to chant up his mystical armour, while Devrik decided he’d had enough of attempted death from above – he began to summon the energies to cast an Orb of Vorol spell. A moment later, as Vulk’s armour glowed golden around himself, a ball of flame leaped up from Devrik’s hands, expanding as it flew, to engulf the female wyvern and half a dozen shrieking rokiriki.

While the burning harpies dropped from the sky like screaming meteors, the tormented wyvern again turned her enraged attention on the fire mage below her, diving with talons outstretched and tail pulled back for a strike to puncture armour, muscle and bone.

Devrik’s battlesword flashed up to meet her neck even as he dodged her talons– and her head went flying in a spray of hot blood. Unfortunately for the warrior-mage, her tail kept going on its killing arc, its vicious barb striking him a glancing blow to the chest that sent him flying two meters, to land in a stunned heap near Vulk.

The remaining harpies had by now overpowered the last wyvern, bringing it down only a few meters from the corpse of its mother, and the entire flock swarmed both bodies in a feeding frenzy of deafening, sickening sounds. With the harpy’s entire attention focused on their defeated enemy, the Hand took the opportunity to decamp, Erol and Taeland hauling a dazed but still living Devrik between them. Vulk picked up his friend’s sword, and Korwin wandered out of his mist, drawing it up behind them to obscure their escape.

♦ ♦ ♦

For the next couple of hours, it seemed to the group they had escaped cleanly from the harpy flock. Once well away, they had stopped to tend to Devrik, who had been lucky as it turned out – while bruised and stunned by the blow from the wyvern’s tail, the poisoned barb had not penetrated his armour. Stiff and sore and slightly concussed, he was at least not paralyzed.

Later in the afternoon however, as the sun was more than halfway to the horizon, the group realized the harpies had not, in fact given up. A flock of twenty or more began harassing them from above, hurling spears, rocks and their own shit down on the fleeing humans. Those with ranged weapons would occasionally turn to fire into the flock, and while they downed a few, discouraging the rest for a few minutes, they always came back with seemingly as many as before.

Two hours of this fly-by harassment, while it had done little to actually hurt the Hand much, was beginning to fray their nerves. Dusk was not long off, and with it the problem of how to defend themselves in the dark, when they came to a great crevasse, splitting the mountainside across their path. A single, narrow natural bridge of stone arced across the chasm, and looked none to solid.

Coming to a stop, Taeland turned and shot one of the pursuing rokirki out of the air, as did Erol, while Toran downed another with a Stavin’s Arrow spell. Everyone dropped to the ground in exhaustion as the harpies temporarily retreated to the high crags behind them.

“We can’t cross this chasm with those damn things harassing us,” Vulk sighed. “We’re going to have to deal with them for good, and soon… crossing in the dark doesn’t sound much safer.”

“Agreed,” rumbled Devrik. “And here they come again.”

The Hand arrayed themselves for battle, and the harpies, seeing their victims stopped, dove in shrieking to the attack. This time Toran’s magical arrow failed to find a target, and Devrik’s Orb sputtered out, stillborn. Korwin had been leery of casting his most powerful spell, Breath of Arandu, recalling past misfires and their near lethal consequences… but as he hesitated, Jeb shot one harpy out of the sky, only to fall to the spear of another. Shocked into action, Korwin wasted no more time on doubts and began the long mental preparation to summon up the killing cold.

As the water mage focused on his spell, most of the others kept up the attack on the harpies. Taeland again missed a shot, to his great chagrin, while Erol scored a brilliant hit, taking one through the neck. Toran’s next spell also failed, while Mariala’s Syncope of Shala put four of the creatures to sleep, causing them to plummet to bone-cracking impacts on the rocky ground.

Only Vulk refrained from attacking, intent as he was on aiding the severely wounded Jeb. As the battle raged around them, he concentrated his healing powers on the heavily bleeding wound in the young man’s side. Gradually the blood flow slowed, then stopped completely, and the wound began to close. Before it sealed itself completely the cleric poured some of their precious Baylorium into the wound, to complete what he had begun.

Jeb began to regain consciousness just as Devrik’s latest spell backfired, resulting in a beautiful display of aerial fireworks that did no more than startle the remaining rokiriki. But as the gibbering monstrosities cackled and shrieked, preparing to dive down for another attack, a sudden cone of blue-white super-cooled air roared up from Korwin’s outstretched hands. Spreading as it rose, the blast caught all of the remaining harpies, turning them to frozen corpses in an instant… falling from the sky, their bodies shattered as they hit the ground.

♦ ♦ ♦

With the harpy problem solved, hopefully for good, the Hand now turned their attention to the problem of crossing the deep crevasse that blocked their way. The natural bridge that spanned it was thin and crumbling at the edges, and it seemed likely to crack at the slightest weight, plunging anyone on it into the chasm… in the failing light the bottom was entirely invisible.

“Well, Mariala is the lightest,” said Toran, considering the problem. “But I’ve far more experience with this sort of thing, and I’m not that much heavier… I suppose I should go first. I’ll take a rope with me, so as each of you follows, one at a time, you’ll have something to grab onto if worse comes to worst.”

“Excellent idea,” agreed Korwin. “But before you try it, let me try something… that last spell nearly drained me, but I might have enough left to strengthen the bridge with the Strands of Lakira…” But as it turned out, he didn’t have it in him, and the spell failed. He was not the only one to have a spell fail this exhausting day, of course, and given the spectacular success of his last spell, when it mattered, it would take awhile to run down his credit with his companions…

With a sympathetic shrug, Toran hoisted a coil of rope over his shoulder and started out across the delicate arch of stone, slowly testing each step. Just over three meters wide, it took only a minute to cross, even as cautiously as he moved. Once on the far side, the Khundari spread his legs to align with his shoulders, planted his feet firmly on the solid rock, and murmured a few words… a faint golden glow surrounded him briefly, before beginning to sink and gather around his feet, and finally seeming to seep into the ground.

“Alright,” he called across to his friends. “I’ve cast the Joining of Merkünon, which means I’m as firmly attached to the ground as the mountain itself… nothing can move me unless it moves the mountain itself!” After tying one end of the rope around his waist he tossed the other end across to Devrik, who anchored himself behind a boulder and ran the rope around his own torso, gripping it in his gloved hands.

Mariana was the next one to cross, and made it with no trouble, although she clutched the rope tightly as she went. Vulk wanted Jeb to go next, as he was still weak from his injury and blood loss, but the boy was too dizzy and unsteady. It was decided he and the cantor would cross together. Unfortunately, this proved too much for the delicate formation, which cracked and splintered beneath their feet. They barely made it to the far side before a great CRACK sounded, and the whole thing collapsed into the blackness of the crevasse.

Korwin had been preparing to cross next, and as the sounds of falling stone slowly died away, he again attempted to cast the Strands of Lakira… and this time he succeeded. In the gloaming light the white strands spewed forth from his hands, anchoring themselves into the stone on the far side. Moving his hands along the nearer side, he anchored them there, creating a softly glowing bridge of translucent… something… wider than the original stone bridge.

With a tired smile, Korwin lightly grasped the safety rope and strode quickly across the chasm. The rest of the party rapidly followed, with Devrik bringing up the rear. Twilight was upon them now, and everyone was exhausted, so they made it only another mile before deciding to stop for the night. A huge boulder, the size of a small house, with a sheer, slightly overhanging face on its south side lay just at the tree line, making a perfect campsite.

After a hasty meal, the tired companions rolled themselves into their blankets and quickly dropped off to sleep… except for the two unlucky ones who drew first watch. But the night was quiet and uneventful… right up until the end of the third watch, just before dawn. It was then that the harpies launched their third attack.

Taeland and Erol were both on watch at that hour, and each killed a harpy with their first arrows. Toran, wallowing up from his blankets with his freshly repaired crossbow in hand, fired in satisfaction, only to growl in annoyance as the bolt missed. Mariala, on the other hand, blasted three of the beasts into sleep and out of the sky practically asleep herself.

Vulk, assuming their adversaries must have good dark vision if they chose to attack so, decided to even the odds by chanting out the Ritual of Fortune’s Light, allowing his companions to see in the dark as if it were daylight… if a sort of greenish-gray daylight. This was a help to Devrik as he cast another Orb of Vorol, allowing him to target the largest group of harpies near them – five burst into flames and fell shrieking to the ground.

Korwin’s immediate, groggy reaction was to cast Cloak of Merthados on himself, which proved a wise action as several spears and stones almost immediately arched toward him… but with their energies dissipated by the Cloak, they fell harmlessly at his feet.

As the sun rose over the eastern shoulder of the mountain the Hand could suddenly see that they were surrounded by at least three score of the hideous Mountain Harpies. But even as their hearts fell at the overwhelming odds something else rose over the ridge, momentarily blocking out the newborn sun… and changing everything.

With a heart-stopping roar that shook the very mountainside, an enormous dragon bore down on the suddenly panicked flock of harpies. The Hand stood collectively stunned, hardly believing what they were seeing… a blue-gray body at least 12 meters long, wings stretching more than 15 meters across and looking like molten silver in the morning light, a mouth that could swallow a man whole, and intelligent eyes that glowed with a silver-blue light.

The harpies tried to scatter, but the dragon swooped low, passing only a few meters over the humans and raising its head toward the largest group, opening its mouth wide… a blast of blue white frost sizzled forth, catching fully half the rokiriki in its cone of icy death. If Korwin’s spell the day before had been a brazier, this was a blast furnace. A large blast furnace.

A rain of solidly frozen harpies began to fall from the sky all around the Hand’s camp, and Mariala, Vulk and Taeland narrowly missed being crushed only by having fast reflexes. The remainder of the flock spread out in panicked flight, shooting off in every direction. But the dragon seemed to take a positive delight in chasing after each group, sometimes blasting them with freezing breath, other times almost playfully batting them bloodily out of the air, occasionally swallowing one whole. It caught up with the last three just as they neared the ridge to the east, bringing its tail around in a graceful arc to catch all of them at once, crushing them against a cliff face.

With the last of the mountain harpies dead, the dragon turned and made directly for the Hand, settling down on the top of the great boulder overlooking their camp. With its wings folded behind it, and its tail wrapped around its feet and dangling lazily over the cliff face, it peered down at the group. The sheer power the creature radiated left even the strongest amongst the humans feeling powerless and small. Even Devrik felt not the slightest desire to challenge this magnificent, terrifying beast.

“So,” the dragon finally said, in a voice of silk and glaciers and cool femininity, “what are you little humans of the southern lowlands doing in my mountains?”

For a moment no one spoke, too overwhelmed by the sheer presence of the dragon and utterly uncertain of what to say. To everyone’s surprise (and carefully suppressed dismay) it was Korwin who spoke first, stepping forward to stand directly under the great worm’s gaze.

“Your mountains, great lady?” he asked. “I had not heard of any of the great Aranduin dragons claiming territory this far south in the Savage Mountains. And surely news of such a great and powerful dragon as yourself must have reached even into the kingdoms of the plains, if such were true…”

Although not physically built to smile, the dragon nonetheless gave the impression of doing just that. “Bold little human! And clever to boot, which is your saving grace I suppose… yes, I am newly come to these southern peaks, from my old home far in the north, above the Hidden Sea. And I do now claim this territory for my own. And I’m sure that this news will now quickly reach your lowland realms… assuming you live to tell the tale, of course.

“But come, you have not answered my question. What business are you about in these high places? Is it common for your kind to travel hither? I have not seen many of your kind, and those primitive and meek… you are the first bold and – what do you call it? Oh, yes, civilized – humans I have seen here. I’ve met such as you before, of course, in the north… and found them quite nice.”

No one was quite sure how to take that last statement – as pleasant guests or as a tasty meal?

“Indeed, beautiful lady,” Korwin answered, bowing his head respectfully. “Civilized humans rarely travel this far or high into the mountains. Your new territory will surely remain uncontested by our folk! But we come here seeking to put an end to the threat of those who might beset even you – the gülvini who infest these mountains and who seek to bring war on all our lands.”

“Hurumph, gülvini mean little to me, beyond a tasty snack from time to time… and better tasting by far than these nasty yelgri.” The dragon sniffed in disdain at her most recent meal, but then arched her neck down to snap up half a frozen harpy from the rock next to her.

“No doubt the gülvini could never pose a real threat to one such as you, to be sure,” Korwin agreed smoothly. “And yet I fear they could nonetheless, over time, come to discommode you with their constant disruptions and hectoring… for they may be more numerous than you know, coming as you do from the more sparsely populated north…”

“How numerous?” the dragon asked, her interest clearly piqued.

“The place we go to spy out, Rekorgo, has some 3,000 gülvini living there currently, the largest such concentration we know of… and they are always splitting off daughter hives, seeking to spread as far and wide as they can. I can only imagine how unrestful you might find such goings on…”

“Three thousand? Surely you exaggerate,” the dragon exclaimed. “But no, I sense you are telling me the truth, or at least that you believe it to be true. And in any case, I came here prepared to fight to claim my new territory if need be… with another dragon, true, but a few thousand of the gülvini could hardly be worse.

“In fact, I came here this morning expecting to face a young dragon of my own species – for I sensed the use of our ice breath yesterday, weak but unmistakable. But now I realize it was you, little Avikori mage… using the Breath of Arandu, yes?”

“Yes, gracious mistress of ice,” Korwin answered, flushing a little. “I sought to destroy our enemies, as you did so spectacularly this morning… although I could never hope to match your power or mastery of the Avikori element, of course.”

“Of course, that’s only natural,” the dragon agreed graciously. “Nothing to be embarrassed about. But let me give you a tip, dear child.” She bent her long neck down, bringing her head nearer to Korwin, who resisted an almost overwhelming impulse to step back. It as an impulse his companions shared but didn’t even attempt to suppress, taking a large step back as one.

For a moment he stared into the one great silver-blue eye she focused on him, his body going rigid. Mariala sensed the psychic tension between them, and stepped forward, although she wasn’t at all clear what she could do to help her friend, if in fact he needed help. But the dragon’s head rose back up, and Korwin relaxed, shaking his head as if to clear it.

“Thank you for your gift, bountiful lady,” he murmured after a minute, bowing again to the dragon, quite low this time.

“You are welcome, young Korwin Seaborn,” she replied. “And you may call me Ulsarinas… which is the part of my name you can pronounce.

“Now I must be about my own business, but it has been a pleasure meeting you all. It may be that I shall drop in on this Rekorgo you mention… you seem terribly few to take on 3,000…” She leaned down again to sniff the air around the seemingly frozen group of humans. “Although I sense that most of you are baby mages of various kinds.

“But not all,” she went on. “This one has been injured… but I smell… something odd. A flavor of Toraz, but with a hint of… something new. What is this?”

Jeb was utterly paralyzed under the dragon’s face, his eyes wide as saucers. Vulk stepped forward, hesitatingly, and spoke. “It is Baylorium you smell, um, mighty Ulsarinas. A healing potion recently devised by a friend of ours…”

“Fascinating!” Ulsarinas exclaimed. “Something new! Tell me all about this Baylorium!”

Ten minutes of explanation later Vulk trailed off with “…and that’s why we carry both kinds of Baylorium…”

“Marvelous! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve come across something truly new?” The dragon sniffed at Jeb again. “But as wonderful as this potion of yours is, your young friend is not yet fully healed… here, let me…”

Her eyes glowed briefly, and she breathed out a chill mist over the quaking boy. In a matter of seconds, however, Jeb’s look of terror turned to one of amazement.

“I – I feel fine,” he exclaimed. “My side doesn’t hurt, and my headache is gone… I don’t think I ever felt this good! And I don’t even feel cold anymore! Thank you, um, mighty, um, dragon!” Taking his cue from Korwin, he bowed low.

“You are most welcome, child. And now a gift for the rest of you, in payment of an amusing and informative morning.” The dragon breathed out her mist over the rest of the group. Flinching only a little, the Hand quickly realized that they no longer felt the freezing chill of the early autumn morning mountain air!

“That should last for several days, and see you to your destination,” Ulsarinas said, as she suddenly launched herself into the air. “And now, farewell! Mayhap we shall meet again!” The blast of air from her wings almost knocked several of the Hand off their feet as the mighty beast beat upwards and away, vanishing into the sun much as she had appeared.

After several moments off stunned silence, the group burst into excited babble. The consensus was that they had all expected disaster when Korwin started taking, but everyone had to admit he’d done a bang-up job. Vulk examined Jeb’s wounds and confirmed that they were gone; indeed, it was as if they’d never been.

Only Korwin was a little subdued, either because he was still assimilating whatever the dragon had imparted to him… or because he was bummed that he was no longer the only one who was immune to the cold. Or, knowing Korwin, maybe both…

Leaving the gül-Gramlini of Vabasht to deal with cleaning up their own affairs, the group set out early  the next morning with their new companion for Rekorgo. They followed the deep forest trails that Taeland knew so well, and which he assured them had the best chance of bringing them, undetected, to the well-guarded colony. All that day, as they traveled east and south around the 12,737 ft. bulk of Mt. Muntirsk, the weather, already cool and overcast, became increasingly windy and wet. By the time they made camp for the night the rain was coming down hard and the wind was increasing in intensity, promising a full-blown storm to come. It was a cold, damp and restless night for most of the Hand.

There was a brief lull in the weather towards dawn, which at least allowed the group to make a passable breakfast and to break camp in relatively dry conditions. But within two hours of resuming their trek a true gale hit in full fury. The skies grew dark, bringing almost-night to the forest floor, a darkness broken only by frequent flashes of lightning. The thunder shook the ground and the high winds whipped and bent the trees overhead. Falling branches were a real danger, and there were several near misses, although serious injuries were avoided.

After an hour of the storm’s increasing fury Mariala called for a halt on the lee side of a large boulder, the best, if wholly inadequate, shelter they’d seen in awhile. “Maybe we should stop, try to find some real shelter?” she shouted over the howling winds. “I don’t see how we can go on in this!”

“I agree, but we’re on an exposed ridge here,” Taeland shouted in reply, shaking his head. “It would be foolish to stop now, the chance of being hit by lightning up here is too great!” The words were barely out of his mouth when a bolt of lightning struck a tree less than 10 meters away, blinding and deafening everyone. It was all Toran could do to control the mule, even with Korwin’s help. The large tree, burning even in the driving rain, collapsed directly across the faint mountain trail they’d been following. Unfortunately, as its roots lifted out of the ground it started a landslide that grew with frightening rapidity… and threatened to engulf the party!

Half blinded and deafened, the group staggered away from the widening surge of rock and dirt that roared down the mountainside, pulled in the wake of their obviously more sensible Khundari mule, who headed to the left and downward. Sure-footed and with no actual cliffs to navigate, the sturdy animal didn’t stop until the roar of the landslide had faded away beneath the howl of the winds. Finally managing to pull everyone to a stop under the partial shelter of a copse of scrawny mountain pines half a kilometer down slope from the ridge crest, Taeland tried to get his bearings.

“That landslide has blocked the only real trail in this area,” he yelled over the storm. “But I think I can find a way around, get us back on the right track… and in any case, the further we are from the ridges and tall trees right now, the better!” With the muttered agreement of his companions, the wilderness ranger took the lead once again.

In the dark, wet and storm-lashed forest it was slow going, and always the easiest, and often the only, path seemed to lead downward and to the northeast… In the late afternoon, as the storm was finally showing signs of diminishing, Taeland called a halt to rest and eat by the side of a wildly rushing creek, swollen with storm run-off. There was no hope of getting a cook fire going, even with Devrik’s fire magics, and they contented themselves with soggy bread, hard cheese and sausage. Huddled together under a makeshift tarp improvised from Vulk’s tent, they made a miserable sight, had there been anyone else to see them…

“So, where exactly are we?” Vulk asked, washing down the last of his cheese with squirt of sour beer from the skin they’d been passing around. “Are we back on track yet?”

“That’s… difficult to say, exactly,” Taeland admitted, somewhat reluctantly. “Until the skies clear enough to give me a proper look at the stars, I can only guess. But given the direction we’ve been moving, and how far we’ve come… well, I’m pretty sure we’ve reached an area of the Upper Arhanath Hills that I’m not too familiar with.”

“I thought you knew these hills like the back of your hand,” Korwin groused. Despite being the warmest of the group, thanks to his magical blue robe, he was as soaked as any of them and seemingly the crankiest because of it… which struck Devrik as odd, given that the man was a water mage. You’d think he’d like being wet…

“Much of them, yes,” Taeland said, frowning. “But this region was always the responsibility of my mentor, Guardian Lesik Teryne. He never would tell me much about the area, just insisted that it had a bad reputation and that I should avoid it if possible. I do know that amongst the Firalani and Ethmoniri tribesmen it’s considered an area of bad omens, and even the Gülvini seem to avoid the valleys in the vicinity… I know of no colonies in these hills.”

“Well, doesn’t that sound ominous at all,” Erol said with a weary shake of his head. Grover stuck his head out from under ex-gladiator’s cloak, where he’d been sleeping wrapped around his master’s neck, just long enough to see that it was still raining, take an offered bit of sausage, and retreat to the relative warmth and dryness of his perch.

“It wasn’t like we had much of a choice, under the circumstances,” Taeland shrugged. “When the storm lets up, I shouldn’t have any trouble getting us back up onto the ridgeline and our proper course. For now, I suggest we keep moving until we find a decent place to make camp… look, the rain has almost stopped…”

Another hour of hiking, following the wildly rushing creek on their left, found the group in a narrow valley just  as the setting sun briefly broke through the scutting clouds. But they hardly had time to appreciate the sight before a mist began to close in around them. In less than a turning they were surrounded by a thick, coiling fog, visibility reduced to less than two meters. In that brief moment of clear light they had seen what looked like a large clearing further down the valley, and Taeland used all his woodcraft to guide them toward it.

But as they trudged forward, exhausted and wet, wanting nothing more than a place to set up camp, the sound of the creek suddenly grew muted, as if coming from a great distance distant. A sudden sense of confusion seemed to fall over the group, and even the experienced ranger felt disoriented and confused. Then the usually phleghmatic mule suddenly panicked, taking off into the mist with a distressed bray. Korwin and Toran took off in pursuit, ignoring calls from Devrik and Taeland to stay together. In various states of confusion and exasperation, the others felt forced to follow, or risk losing the others in the roiling, sound-deadening fog.

When the others caught up to Toran and Korwin, they’d caught and calmed the mule, although the beast remained skittish and nervous. The fog thinned briefly then, allowing the group to see two steep hills rising up on either side of them, a flat gap of perhaps 20 meters width between the slopes. Then the fog closed in again – although clearly thicker behind them than in front. As they milled about, still in some confusion, Toran pointed out a heavily overgrown track, perhaps once a road, practically under their feet. Its almost-filled-in wheel ruts were more sensed than seen beneath the grass and straggling bushes of gorse and baneberry that covered them.

“A road, even an abandoned one, must lead somewhere,” he pointed out. “We should follow it –”

“I don’t like the feel of this,” Mariala interrupted. Her mind felt clouded, but she had no confusion about the sense of dread those two mounds evoked in her. “And a road goes in two directions. I say we follow it back out of this valley.”

Most of the others agreed with her, and they turned to slowly trudge back up the valley. But the fog, already thicker in this direction, quickly grew worse until even with Vulk’s ritual light they couldn’t see their hands before their faces. Grasping onto the cloak of the person ahead, they began calling out to one another. But the fog seemed to muffle and distort all sounds, and their own voices often seemed to come first from one direction, then from another. The going was slow, but after a time the fog began to thin. A few minutes more and they once again saw the two hills rising up on either side of the overgrown track…

“Damn, we must have gotten turned around somehow,” Taeland growled in confusion. Muttering darkly, the group turned around and again headed away from the threatening mouth formed by the two hills. Again the fog grew thicker, confusing the senses and causing their steps to slow and falter. And again the fog thinned only to reveal the looming hills. They tried a third time, only to once again be brought back to the twin hills…

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Devrik said, with a weary sigh, “but it’s clear we’re either going forward or going nowhere at all.” With equally weary shrugs, the group gave in and trudged slowly forward, passing between the dark shapes of the looming mounds. A sense of deep gloom settled over them all.

Once beyond the gap the fog soon began to thin, though vision remained limited to thirty meters or so. Above, the scutting clouds occasionally parted enough for the light of the nearly full lesser moon to reveal gaunt trees, already denuded of leaves although it was only early autumn, looming out of the mists on either side of the ghostly track. The greater moon would not rise until after midnight, and even when it did would provide no better light, being just five days away from the new moon.

In a short time the travelers stumbled into the ruins of small village. Even in the dark and fog the overgrown foundations of buildings around them were obvious. They made their way to the central open area of the long-dead hamlet, where Korwin soon discovered a well – by almost falling into it, its walls having crumbled away to little more than a ring of gravel around the hole. After his near-accident, everyone agreed they were too tired, cold and miserable to go on. The ancient village Common was relatively clear of growth beyond grass and weeds, providing decent lines of sight to the limits of the swirling mists, and was the best campsite they were likely to come upon.

The group quickly set up camp, and Devrik even managed to get a small, if smoldering and hesitant, fire going, allowing for a hot meal. The fog continued to thin, but at the same time a ground mist began to rise,covering the ground thickly to a depth of half a meter. After a quiet, somber meal everyone was more than ready to retire to their tents for some much needed sleep. Devrik and Toran took the first watch, during which the skies finally cleared, revealing thousands of diamond-like stars strewn across the velvet blackness of heaven, and the last of the fog dissipated. The heavy ground mist remained however…

Several hours after midnight, with Erol and Jeb nearing the end of the second watch and trying desperately not to nod off, lights suddenly appeared in the woods off to the east. Obscured by both the trees and the lingering mist, Erol thought they seemed like the lights of a small village… or at least a cluster of buildings, Jeb agreed. Without a thought for waking the others, the two sentries headed for the lights, intent only on solving the mystery… the lights looked so inviting… like home… they entered the woods beyond the dead village…

After a few minutes the two came out of the woods, into a wide clearing. As they did, the lights suddenly vanished, leaving both men dazed and bewildered. As they looked at one another in confusion they heard a scrabbling sort of sound, seeming to come from the center of the clearing. The thick mist covering the open ground suddenly swirled in several places… and five dark shapes rose up in the starlight.

They were human, or had been once. Now their skin, where patches of it weren’t oozing off the bone, was pale and puffy, their faces a greenish/grey, with dark red/purple eye sockets. Their hair was matted with dirt, where large clumps of scalp weren’t simply missing, revealing ivory coloured skull below. The tattered, filthy rags that hung from their rotting frames seemed to hint that they had once been rural peasants – four men and an adolescent boy,  Erol estimated, as the fog that had hazed his mind since they entered this cursed valley suddenly burned away in the rush of the emotions that always came before a fight.

“Zamoraz!” he barked, in a warning that Jeb scarcely needed. The former farm boy had seen much in his months associated with the Hand of Fortune, and this was not his first rodeo with the undead. Nevertheless, his heart pounded in his chest and his blood turned to ice water at the sight of what staggered toward them out of the darkness. With an inarticulate shriek of fear and rage he nocked an arrow to his longbow and let fly at the nearest shambling horror…

At almost the same instant Erol hurled one of his javelins at another of the undead, and both missiles found their targets – the javelin piercing the forehead of one, the arrow taking the other in the mouth and exiting the back of its skull. Both creatures dropped, their bodies collapsing into dust even as they fell. The three remaining zamoraz continued to lurch forward with disturbing speed…

♦  ♦  ♦

Back at the camp, something jerked Taeland out of his heavy slumber. Had that been a cry he’d heard? It was silent now… eerily so, in fact. The mental fog that had clouded his mind all day was now obvious to him by its sudden absence. What in the Void had they been thinking? There was clearly something uncanny going on… something very much not right. Climbing out of his sleeping roll and to his feet the Aunari Talim Nar realized the night was utterly silent, with no sounds of life at all… then the silence was broken by a sudden scrabbling noise, as of something scuttling through the heavy ground mist… which swirled oddly in a score of places…

“Awake!” he bellowed, pulling his Telnori-made long knife from its sheath. “We’re under attack!” And where the Void were Erol and the kid… dead already? But the worry was driven from his mind as a score of unsettlingly quick zamoraz rose up from the mists surrounding the camp site. Driving his blade into the ground at his feet, he snatched up his hart-bow and began firing arrows into the undead horde.

As arrow after arrow smashed through the eyes, mouths and skulls of the shambling dead his companions were scrambling out of their tents and taking up their own weapons. Toran was the first to join the fray, sending a crossbow bolt clean through the skull of one undead and into the chest of another – the first collapsed into dust, but the second just kept on coming.

Mariala’s crossbow, unfortunately, chose this critical moment to jam, and after a moment of fighting with it she tossed it aside and drew her dagger, leaping aside at the last second as one of the undead lunged for her. It’s filthy, claw-like fingers missed her, and she drove the bright steel of her Khundari dagger into the side of its skull – the creature didn’t make a sound as it crumbled to dust.

Vulk, nearby, was not quite so lucky. Still half dazed with sleep, it took him a moment to fully grasp what was going on – and when he did a rising tide of panic threatened to overwhelm him. The undead! He had had his life force drained once before, by that monstrous gülmora in the hidden Naventhülian temple in Devok, and he’d sworn afterward, as he slowly recovered, that he’d never go through that again… never! Backing away from the advancing horde, he didn’t close his eyes, as he usually did, as he muttered the ritual words to invoke Kasira’s spiritual armor. Only as the subtle golden glow of her blessing surrounded him did he feel the panic and terror begin to recede.

Unfortunately, in protecting his soul he had neglected to pick up his sword to defend his body. A zamora, lurching up behind him, clawed frantically at him, tearing his cloak but failing to touch his flesh as the glow of his mystical armor flared and deflected the blow. The second blow, however, raked down his side, drawing blood. As the pain flared Vulk once again felt the terrible, cold nothingness of the Shadow engulf his mind, and stared into the terrifying abyss of utter negation that is the Void. His body turned to ice, his soul draining away, the cantor’s mind simply shut down, even as his last thought echoed in his soul – Not again!

Therok of the Ethmoniri had stumbled out of the tent he shared with his amazing leader, Vulk, considerably more alert and ready for battle, the beautiful steel-headed battle axe the cantor had gifted him with in hand. But he had jerked to a stop as he’d realized what they faced – the undead were not unknown to his barbarian people, and were one of the few things that truly struck terror into them. He had thought that demon they’d fought on the Blasted March, when he’d first seen the light of Kasira, had been the most frightening thing he’d ever seen, but this… he didn’t know if he could fight these horrors… monsters that could drain away a man’s life, steal any chance of reunification with the All, condemning him to eternity in the nothingness of the Void. His felt suddenly enervated, and his hands shook…

Then he saw his beloved Vulk go down under the claws of one of the vile creatures, and the cantor’s strangled cry broke Therok’s paralysis. With a roar he leapt across the intervening space and decapitated the undead monster with a single stroke of his axe – it crumbled to dust even as it stooped to drain more of the life force from the fallen man. But there was no time to check on his friend and mentor, for several more zamoraz, drawn to the immobile form, had turned towards them. Standing over Vulk, Therok realized he felt no more fear, only a burning rage…

Devrik, meanwhile, had rolled from his tent at Taeland’s first call, his greatsword at the ready. But on seeing the mass of shambling undead surrounding them, he had opted to go for the Flame – with the sword in his left hand he raised his right hand and muttered the mnemonic to create the Form, to hold the Power… and felt the psychic container crack and deform in his mind. With a curse, he released the potential energies back into the universe.

Instead he grasped his greatsword with both hands and took the arm off the nearest zamora in a single blow. The creature hissed and clacked its teeth and counterstruck at him, oblivious to the damage he’d done it. Unbalanced, though, it failed to connect, and Devrik drove the pommel of his sword into its forehead, crushing the skull like an egg. The thing crumbled to dust…

Korwin, trying to disentangle himself from his sleeping roll and tent, encumbered by his comfortable but unwieldy magical robe, managed to stumble over its sash, nearly pitching himself head first into the flickering flames of the dying campfire. Deftly recovering, he glanced around to see that no one had caught his little faux pas – and instantly forgot all about it as he realized what was happening.

Several of the undead horrors seemed to be making a beeline for him, but only one was an immediate threat… unfortunately, his cutlass was still in his tent. To buy himself some time, the water mage made a sharp gesture and muttered a few words, casting the Cloak of Merthados on the creature. Instantly the thing slowed down, its movements becoming lethargic and hesitant. That was all the respite Korwin needed to reach into his tent and recover his blade… at which point he decapitated the zamora quite handily. But two more were almost upon him…

Mariala, meanwhile, found herself back-to-back with Therok, standing over the still unconscious form of her downed friend. She had deftly evaded the next undead that had attacked her, and now she pulled one of her throwing knives and aimed for its head. But the creature jinked at just the wrong moment, and the blade disappeared into the night. More critically, the creature managed to rake a claw along her forearm – her bracers deflected most of the blow, but two talons scraped across her skin, and she felt the horror of the Shadow try to engulf her.

But Mariala had fought off the Shadow before, and she was far stronger now than she’d been back in Devok and that nightmarish temple. Her mind deflected the chilling power of the Void, and in the same instant she drove her dagger up through the jaw of the zamora and into its brain. It crumbled away into oblivion as it reached for her a second time…

Therok had managed to dispatch two more zamoraz himself, glad to have the witch-woman at his back. Unlike some of the males of his people, who often resented the weirding power of the matriarchs and their guardianship of the Sha, he had long ago decided it was a good thing to have on your side… much better than having it turned against you!

But when Mariala involuntarily cried out in pain as the zamora struck her, it distracted Therok just enough that he missed the sudden lunge of his next opponent, and the creature managed to dig its sharpened fingers into his left bicep. Unlike the witch-woman, the warrior’s mental defenses were not up to the overwhelming cold and terror of the Shadow that engulfed his mind, and he could feel his life, and his soul, draining away.

But if he could not oppose the Shadow, still the wild fire in his barbarian heart would not be so easily quenched. He couldn’t shake the claw that dug deeper into his flesh, and he felt a second wave of life-force flow out of him as he raised his axe over his head… and brought it down on the undead monster’s head, cleaving it in two, the blade driving down through its torso to wedge momentarily in its pelvic bone. But the axe was freed as the bone melted into dust to join its brethren in oblivion…

Toran was laying into zamora after zamora, hacking off limbs and heads with fierce abandon. More even than gülvini, as a practitioner of the Kahar-ün-Tem, he loathed the undead and all the works of the Shadow. Only once so far had one of the foul things managed to make contact with him, but he had fought off the horror of the Shadow – and he well knew that he was now immune to it for a time, which only made his attacks all the bolder. If he had not seen that his friend Vulk was down, and who knows with what injuries, he might almost have enjoyed the friendly, unspoken rivalry he and Taeland seemed engaged in, seeing whether axe or bow would dispatch more undead from the world.

On the other side of the campfire Devrik had dispatch more than a few undead himself, but he could see that they continued to stagger out of the dark all around them. With Vulk down, and Erol and Jeb missing, possibly already dead, it was time for more drastic measures…

The battle was intensifying, Taeland had finally missed a shot, but Toran was there to intercept the undead who tried to close, allowing the Aunari to send a shaft into the skull of a zamora coming up behind Mariala – missing her own head by a hair. Therok looked pale and shaken, although he continued to destroy every undead that came after his fallen friend, and Korwin seemed to be holding his own, his blade silvery with magical frost… but how long could this last? The shambling dead never tired, but they would, even the Dwarf…

Despite the strange fogginess that he couldn’t quite clear form his head, Devrik decided he had to risk a spell… he again summoned the Form, and this time it looked good… but as he poured the Power into the Form he suddenly saw the flaw he had missed… damn, too late…

With a crack like breaking crockery the seed of the Orb of Vorol flew from his hands and dove straight into the embers of the campfire… for a second nothing happened and Devrik dared to think Kasira smiled on him this night. Then a fireball erupted from the campfire with a sound like thunder. Flames engulfed a 3 meter-wide circle around the the site and flaming debris rained down for three times that distance around them.

Taeland was knocked flat, caught at the edge of the blast, but fortunately suffered no more than a singeing – and the zamora nearest him was decapitated by a chunk of burning wood the sizzled by the ranger’s head. Kasira’s little joke, no doubt, Devrik thought in dismay. But the goddess must have been looking out for them, in truth, as the rest of his friends managed to avoid any real damage… although one of the tents was a bit worse for the wear. But the undead didn’t stop coming, and there was no time for recriminations, self- or otherwise…

It was at that moment that Erol and Jeb appeared from out of the dark, cutting a path through the zamoraz with trident and axe to join their friends around the charred circle where the campfire used to be. Devrik thought that Erol looked pale, and was sure he’d faced the Shadow… but clearly he could still wield his trident effectively, so good! On the other hand, Jeb had that look of terror and exhilaration that young soldiers often get after surviving their first major engagement.

A moment later Vulk began to come around, slowly staggering to his feet between Therok and Mariala, the latter of whom helped support him until he could stand on his own. He gestured at Devrik, and when his friend had stepped closer the cantor reached out and called down the blessing of Kasira’s protection on him. He was gratified to see the faint golden nimbus appear around the fire mage/warrior.

Perhaps it was this Immortal touch that cleared Devrik’s mind, for a moment later he made another attempt to cast Orb of Vorol – and this time the fireball flew straight and true into the most closely spaced group of undead, immolating them all and clearing one side of the battlefront!

He turned to face the other side of the circle, and tried once again to unleash Arkel’s Fiery Ribbons, a potential more devastating attack, on their enemies. But the oppressive malaise of the cursed place seemed to fight the light of the goddess, and once again his Form was flawed – ribbons of glowing, multicolored flame shot from his hands, but rather than arcing towards the zamoraz they flew in every direction.

Mariala barely managed to roll to one side in time to avoid one of the searing fingers, as did Toran, his ninja Dwarf reflexes saving him despite having his back to Devrik. On the other hand Vulk, still dazed and shaking from the loss of life-force, did not fare so well – although the ribbon merely clipped him, singeing his clothes and hair, rather then burning him alive. The tent that had been set partially afire by the earlier misfire now burst into full flame, as did three of the four remaining tents.

One zamora was also unlucky enough to intercept one of the ribbons, and went up like a torch, so there was that…

Devrik gave up on magic for the moment and grimly hefted his sword… he methodically waded into the melee, decapitating heads and severing limbs with furious determination, and the others rallied around him. In another five minutes only the living still stood, panting and exhausted, in the smoldering remains of their camp…

♦  ♦  ♦

It took the Hand an hour to put out the fires and salvage what they could of their gear from the wreckage of the camp. Fortunately Vulk’s tent had been the only one not to burn, and his pack contained most of the group’s supply of Baylorium. Clothes and food were the greatest losses, as most really valuable and/or fragile items had been stored deep in packs or saddlebags.

It took longer to find and bring back their poor Khundari mule, who had pulled up his picket stakes and bolted into the night at the first sign of the undead invasion. “A sensible beast, obviously,” Toran had commented on finally finding the animal in a small clearing, munching phlegmatically on gorse and huckleberry.

“Not to mention lucky,” Taeland added, holding out one of his few remaining dried apples. Lured by the treat, he was able to slide the bridle back on the beast with no more trouble than a heavy, almost resigned equine sigh. “The undead don’t care whose life force they drain… but I suppose our souls burned brighter in their uncanny “sight,” allowing him to escape their notice.”

The sun, dim and weak, was just rising over the eastern hills when they returned to the camp site. Anemic as it was, everyone was grateful for its light – for the few minutes it lasted. Very quickly it rose into the renewed heavy cloud cover that had moved in again, becoming merely a bright spot in the turgid gray sky. The ground mist receded until only a few patches remained in the hollows, but the air was thick and misty, and visibility was less than a kilometer or so.

In the gray light the group was able to see that they were at the center of a narrow valley, with moderately thick woods surrounding the open area of the dead village. The trees, mostly leafless oak, ash and chestnut, mixed with conifers as the woods climbed up the steep slopes to east and west. More open land ran down the center, clearly once cultivated farmland, although now covered with heavy brush and a sprinkling of younger trees.

“About twenty years, I’d say,” Taeland commented as they prepared to get moving. “No more than thirty, certainly, since this fief was abandoned and allowed to turn back to Drina’s natural state.”

“I don’t know,” Mariala said, shivering. “Somehow it seems much older to me… almost ancient…” With the exhilaration of the battle over, a certain lassitude had slowly fallen over the group agin, an ennui that made any action a chore and even thinking was a struggle. The only thing that seemed clear was the desire to move forward, to get out of this cursed valley…

They followed the faint rutted road out of the ruins of the hamlet, continuing north as they had the day before. For awhile they discussed the events of last night and their current predicament, but it soon became too much of an effort, and they trudged on in silence. Even Grover and Cherdon seemed oppressed by the gray, somber atmosphere, and refused to leave their masters’ side to explore, as they usually did while traveling. Devrik was glad he’d left Brann with Raven and the wee baby Aldari.

They halted for lunch when the bright spot in the clouds seemed directly overhead, although Vulk could have sworn they’d only been walking for an hour, two at the most. But he was still suffering the after-effects of his most recent encounter with the Shadow, so maybe he wasn’t the best judge…

By late afternoon, as the sun dropped into the narrow gap between the clouds and the western hilltops, the arms of the valley had began to turn noticeably inward… perhaps they were finally coming to the end of it, thought Erol. Although he was sure it had only been an hour or two, at most, since lunch… and surely this valley wasn’t long enough to have taken a full day to traverse, even at the leisurely pace they’d kept… but the position of the sun argued otherwise…

The track turned sharply around thick stand of trees and undergrowth, and as it straightened out again the group came to sudden halt. They were clearly at the north end of the valley, as the land begin to rise sharply upward to meet the in-curving ridges east and west… and sitting before them was the dark, looming bulk of a large buiding. Little more than the silhouette could be made between the failing light and the gathering mists… but there was a sense of two storys, chimneys rising up and out-of-true, a feeling of gables, and the suggestion of many black, empty windows…

“It looks abandoned,” said Vulk diffidently. “But not in ruins, like the village.” He softly spoke the words of the ritual that would bring the vision of Kasira to himself and his friends… but the throbbing in his head, which had only gotten worse as the day progressed, suddenly redoubled, and he lost the train of thought – and the ritual with it. “Sorry,” he muttered in frustration.

Devrik patted his friend on the back and pulled several torches from his charred pack – amazingly, they hadn’t caught during the tent fire, though he rather thought it’d been a near thing. With a gesture and a thought he sent the Flame into their oil-soaked heads, and once they were fully burning passed one to Mariala, another Taeland, and kept the third for himself.

Korwin, meanwhile, had been rummaging in his own partially burned pack and now pulled out the lantern he’d had made back in Dürkon, utilizing the glowstone pebbles he’d discovered and simple water. Now he released the catch that allowed the water to flow from the upper reservoir into the central chamber filled with the pebbles, and they began to glow with a rich, warm light. He slid the collar around to turn the lantern into a bullseye lantern and aimed the beam at the house.

It had obviously once been the mansion of some wealthy lord or maybe a merchant – the manor house of this valley fief. But time had not been kind… the dark gray stone was pitted and covered in moss and lichen, and several chunks of stone were missing from the stone stairs that lead up to the main doorway. They were also stained with several large dark reddish brown patches. Two large doors lay on the ground outside the house, and showed signs that they had been ripped, or blasted, out of the house.

The patchy grass around the building was brown and sickly looking, scraggly brush choking what must once have been formal gardens, and black ivy crawled up the walls. Most of the windows were shuttered, but the few that were not showed broken glass in empty frames of rotting wood. The once royal blue, now black, slate roof sagged a bit in the middle, with many tiles missing. The two chimneys leaned slightly out of true. A smell of decay and rot wafted from the open doorway…

“Hmph,” Korwin said matter-of-factly, breaking the spell of dread. “Now that’s something I never expected to see out here! This house is done in the classic style of the Second Expansionist Period… a beautiful example of Imperial Oceanian architecture… look at that shell-and-seahorse motif around the windows…”

“So how old would that make it?” Mariala asked, rubbing her temples.

“Well, this style was popular, I don’t know… eight, nine hundred years ago? This house doesn’t look that old, even with all the decay… so I suppose someone copied the style. Still, the accuracy is amazing…”

While Korwin marveled at the architecture, the others discussed their options. No one was terribly excited about entering the house, but with the light failing quickly (and it sure seemed like this day had gone by unusually fast) it seemed a better shelter than another night in the open. Xydona knew how many undead might rise from the ground  this time… and the fog was thickening again, the ground mist rising…

“Well, I’m going inside,” Devrik said at last. “If nothing else it should be more defensible if we’re attacked again, and it may provide some answers as to what is going on in they cursed valley.”

With no other viable options presenting themselves, the rest of he party agreed, and they slowly mount the steps and crossed the threshold just as the last of the anemic sunlight vanished from the sky and full darkness engulfed the valley…

The inside of the ruined mansion, as revealed in the light of the party’s torches and Korwin’s lamp, was at least as dilapidated as its exterior. The main entry hall was large, it’s once-fine wooden floor heavily bloodstained. A closer examination of the main door’s frame revealed deep gouges where the doors were ripped out by… something. The two tall windows to either side of the doorway had been boarded up, but one had the boards ripped away, apparently from the outside, and the shutters now hung on wrenched hinges. A large stair- case, with several missing or damaged steps and a damaged banister, wound upward into darkness. Open double doors on the left also opened into darkeness, as did a similar doorway on the right; at the back of the hall was a third doorway. Under the staircase was the only undamaged, closed door to be seen, a stout mahogany door with a large pitted and verdigris-covered brass lock and handle.

 

Once in the house, events will begin to unfold on a strict timetable:

Dusk 17:00 The fog begins to thicken again, and the ground mist rises. Attack 1 – see separate section.

Dark 18:00  The sun finally disappears behind the hills, taking it’s anemic light with it. Niether moon is risen

19:00  Fog remains moderate, mist heavy, but the skies partially clear above. Attack 2 –see separate section.

20:00  The basement level starts to slowly cover with a thin layer of ice. All the surfaces are covered with a frost.

21:00  Osal, the Lesser Moon rises, but is waxing at half and blood red. Attack 3 – see separate section.

22:00  Screams and shouts are heard from the master bedroom. If the characters investigate, blood can be seen welling up from the canopied bed, pouring over the sides to form growing pools of blood on the floor.

23:00  The blood from the master bedroom is beginning to flow down the upstairs hall and down the stairs.

It is also oozing through the ceiling of the room(s) below. Aranda rises, but as waning sliver of little light.

24:00  The creature begins to stir in the basement, appearing from the floor in the main lab. The creature emits great screams of terror and horrendous noise as it is forming.

25:00  The final attack. Attack 4 – see separate section. The creature is now able to hunt the players.

The house was obviously once the mansion of some wealthy lord or maybe a merchant – the manor house of this valley fief. But it is in a state of considerable decay. The dark gray stone is pitted and covered in moss and lichen, the stone stairs that lead up to the main doorway are covered with patches of dark reddish brown stains. Several chunks of stone are missing from the stairs. Two large doors lie on the ground outside the house; they show signs that they were ripped out of the house. The patchy grass around the building is brown and sickly looking, scraggly brush chokes what must once have been formal gardens, and black ivy crawls up the walls. Most of the windows are shuttered, the few that are not show broken glass in empty frames of rotting wood. The black slate roof sags a bit in the middle, many tiles are missing, and two chimneys lean slightly out of true. A smell of decay and rot wafts from the open doorway… Note that Kasira’s Light will not work inside. All holy rituals and Toraz spells suffer a -10 penalty in the valley and -20 inside the house itself. It is cold in the valley, but it is much colder inside. Cold and water-based spells are at +10  / +20.

GROUND FLOOR

Hall – Only the open doorway illuminates this large bloodstained hallway. The doorframe is damaged where the doors were ripped out by the last hoard of sea zombies. The two tall windows in the hall had been boarded up, but one has had the boards ripped away (from the outside if anyone asks), the shutters hanging on wrenched hinges. A large stair- case, with several missing or damaged missing banister rails, winds up to the upper floor. An open double door on the left opens into darkeness, as does a doorway on the right. An open doorway at the back of the hall that leads to a third room, while under the stairs is a stout mahogany door with a large pitted and verdigris covered brass lock and handle.

Unlike the other doors, which are either missing or hanging in shattered fragments from bent hinges, this door does not seem to be damaged at all. It is locked and the lock is of a very good quality (level 7). This door leads down to the basement level via stone stairs.

Dining Room – This large room has the broken remains of a large dining table and the back of a few leather chairs. Most of the windows have been boarded up; some show signs of being broken in from the outside. Again, bloodstains and gouge marks mar the floor and walls. The open doorway at the back of the room leads into the Summer Room.

Summer Room – This open area appears to have once had glass doors that opened onto the rear gardens, but they are no more than shattered glass and twisted wood, open to the elements. Someone attmepted to board up the door- but the boards are rent and scattered across the room. More reddish-brown stains and deep gouges are all over the doorway and floor. There are the remains of white wicker chairs scattered around the room, as are leaves and debris from many autumns past, and a few scattered pages, apparently ripped from a book. [Entry #2]

Study – This room is lined with bookshelves, but the shelves have all been hacked and smashed into kindlling, the books torn and slashed, scattered over the floor. Most covered with mold and many with what looks like dried blood. The mouldering carcass of an immense wooden desk, once oplulent and deeply carved and gilded, lies in two pieces. The room is in utter chaos, but within the disorder may be found a small leather-bound journal. It’s dark blue leather is ripped and stained, but on the cover gilt letters can be made out: “Journa… Kalin Par…” The year is completely obliterated but for the last digit, a 7. Also to be found amidst the destruction are two arcs of a milky white crystaline substance, about 30 mm (1.2”) thick and 90 mm wide, carved with strange symbols. The edges, while jagged, appear to be clean breaks, with no splintering as one might expect… and the two pieces fit smoothly together, but don’t merge.

Living Room – This room contains large stains of dried blood on the rotting carpets covering the floor, and many pieces of wood that appear to have once been used to board up the shattered window frames lie cantered over torn and smashed furniture. More books and papers are scattered about as well. Anohter page of the journal can be found under a section of door lays atop a broken sofa, and one in the NE corner. [Entry 4 &  Entry 3]

The Stairs – Anyone walking on the stairs will feel they are unstable, as they creak and groan, but in fact they are safe.

SECOND FLOOR

Upper Hall – The hall on the upper floor has bare floorboards and mouldy paintwork peeling from the walls. Many lightened rectangles on the walls reveal where pictures once were. As on the ground floor all the doors are missing from the doorframes. It is very dark and gloomy up here; most windows in the rooms have been shuttered and/or boarded up with wood from doors, out buildings and furniture.

Bedroom #1 – This room only has a rotten straw mattress in it. The window is shuttered and boarded up. More dark stains on the floor and walls.

Bath #1 – A tin bathtub is in this room, several shards of glass crunch under the feet of anyone that walk into the room. The window has no wood boarding it up – most of the wood that originally boarded up the window is on the floor.

Bedroom #2 – A large ‘L’ shape room. The room contains several doors that have been piled into the centre. Several blankets and evidence of a small fire and a small cooking pot hint that this may be the ‘safe’ area that was chosen by some previous group of unfortunates who wandered into the valley. [Entry #1, Entry #5, Entry #6]  are hidden into the blankets, and the third part of the Torc is hidden in the hem of a blanket. All the windows are still shuttered.

Bath #3 – The room is empty; the window is still shuttered and boarded-up. The room smells of rosewater; a search into the smell reveals a small, highly decorative vial of perfume cracked and leaking on the floor.

Storage Room – This room contains many metal brackets that originally held up wooden shelves. Some shelves are still in place on the far wall, enough to board up 2 windows or one doorway. More dark stains and gouge marks cover the floor and walls.

Master Bedroom – This room has all of the windows broken through, lots of wood over the floor, loads of bloodstains splattered up the wall. The air has the smell of fresh blood and for the first time there are signs of fresh flesh and bone on the floor, as if something (or someone) was torn to pieces and (mostly) devoured. This is Narina’s room; there will be strange sounds coming from here later in the evening… the large canopy bed, its furnishings rotted and moldy, is covered in a massive dried bloodstain, much older than the other blood evidence elsewhere in the room.

Master Bath – The window is shattered open, shutters hanging; lots of wood on the floor. A brass bath tub has been overturned. Under the tub, a nearly naked body of a human male. His body has several deep, raking claw wounds, although none seem likely to have killed him. By the state of his semi-desicated body, he seems to have been dead for over a year. There is one small +1 dagger clutched in his hand.

Basement

This part of the house is cold, so cold that the adventurers can see their breath in the air. There is no ice though, not yet! There is a musty smell, not unlike stale grave soil which permeates the air. There are obviously no windows down here, so it is very dark. The floor is not wood, but heavy flagstone. Vulk and Taeland will both get an immediate feeling of dread and horror – the evil is almost palbable, even to the others. If they try to find out the source of the evil, they discover it emmenates from the soil of the great crater in the Main Laboratory.

Prep Area – Large wooden heavy benches and broken glassware are scattered about this room, along with many torn, mildewed and stained books and loose papers. The loose papers seem mostly to be lab notes, from what little can be dechiphered, in the same handwriting as the journal entries previously found. Another such entry will be found amidst the carnage. [Entry #7]

Fuel Storage – Large chunks of coal fill a large area of this room. A shovel is on the floor. The walls in this room are a deep black color, and even lanterns and torches don’t seem to illuminate it very well. Moving the coal will cause many rats to run from the cracks in the coal pile, they are rather vicious and under the control of the evil presence that rules the valley and the house. They won’t attack in numbers unless summoned by Kalin later. [25 Rats]

Glassware – This room contains many shelves that are littered with broken glass pipes, tubes, beakers and flasks. There are 2 wooden crates that each contain 4 large round-bottom glass flasks. The flasks could be filled with either oil or the chemicals from the Chemical Storage area as missile weapons.

Chemical Storage – The air in his room is heavy with many nasty smells, and multi-hued stains run up the walls and cover the floor. Most chemical bottles have been smashed, but there are three large bottles of a clear, strong-smelling liquid. The glass of these bottles is very thick; if they are thrown there is only a 15% chance that they will break. If the liquid is put in the glass flasks from the Glassware area, those will smash every time.

The liquid is a rather powerful acid – sniffing it will cause 1-4 IP of damage and a bleeding nose. Getting a small quantity of it on the skin will cause 2d6 IP of damage. If the acid gets on clothes or other items, it will quickly begin eating through them for 2d6 Combat Rounds (20-120 seconds) before losing potency. The acid does no damage to magical items or metal weapons, but any such items will still be covered with the acid for up to two minutes. If the acid is thrown, it will affect a 10-foot radius doing 3d8 IP damage to all creatures caught in the splash zone.

Main Lab – A huge stone table dominates the room, on which rests the mummified corpse of a woman. Her gown is tattered and mouldy, but her skin is as dry and desdicated as if she lay in a desert. There is no sense of rot or decay about her corpse, which retains a hint of beauty even now. There is much broken glassware, twisted metal on the floor.

In southern end of the room the stone of the floor has been shatterd, leaving a crater about 4 meters in diameter and 1.5 meters deep into the dark soil beneath. Flagstones around the crater are canted and cracked, and dirt and stones litter the floor for meters around. The wall nearest the crater is cracked and bulging in places, but still holds. To those sensetive to it, the evil radiates from this pit… The fourth and final segment of the crystal torc can be found under the dirt and rubble, but after the last journal entry is discovered under the stone table. [Entry #8]

Misc Storage.

This room contains lots of shelves, in various states of disrepair. The floor is covered with tubing, tripods and sacking.

Undead Kalin

Towering to over 2 meters (about 7 feet) in height, Kalin has a ghastly appearance. His body is covered with rank, putrid, decaying skin, a light green/grey in color with blisters that crack and seep yellow-green pus. His black robes hang is tatters arount his surprisingly fleshy frame – not fat, but neither is he gaunt, as might be expected. He has sharp clawed hands, and abnormally long arms. Kalin can cause a sphere of darkness with a 2 meter radius whenever he wishes. He can, at will, cause Fear (-20 to next skill/combat roll for all affected), Levitate (up to 3 meters, although in the house he’ll rarely be able to rise more than a foot or two) and Telekinesis (40 lbs of weight). Kalin is a strange sort of hybrid moruaz, more than a zamoraz, but less than a full gülmoraz. He has a Shadow Strength of 4, and thus a Shadow Conflict of 40– but his Shadow Radius is ten feet instead of four. Losing a conflict costs a victim 1 (MF) or 1d4 (CF) point(s) of Aura. As with zamoraz, winning provides immunity within the Shadow for a time.

Kalin is by now utterly insane, but cunning and devious for all that. He will use all the zamoraz at his command to try and weaken the group before he manifests himself. Although he commands many of the supernatural elements of this cursed valley, he is also a prisioner of it himself. All of the lifeforce he has absorbed over the centuries is retained in his decaying form, keeping him going (sort of) and making his Shadow stronger than it should be for a first-life gülmora (regular gülmora pass on their stolen lifeforce to their demonic master, more-or-less monthly – it’s been 700 years since Kalin was cursed).

He will use his control of the Darkness to confuse his opponents, then seek to get within five feet and initiate his Shadow Conflict. He will use his claw/claw attack (he is incredible fast, and so gets two attacks per round) if necessary, but tries to avoid physical conflict if possible. He will summon the rats from the coal room to attack the group, and hurl debris at them from a distance, seeking to confuse, injure and weaken his prey.

Kalin is immune to Fire Nerves or other such mental-based attacks (but not to Mental Bolt), and he wears an Ammulet of Kalos, which protects him from fire-based attacks. Holy weapons, such as Devrik’s sword, cause him permanent damage.

Some lines Kalin might utter: “You are unworthy to live while Narina does not! ”  “Yes, with so many, so vital… this time it will work! Yes, together we will restore Narina to life, as she deserves!”  “You desecrate Narina’s house! You must die, so that she may live again… yes, that is the fitting punishement for tresspassers!”

If the players reassemble the Torc of Ravarus, and invoke it while in battle with Kalin, then it will begin to glow with a violet light and in a moment a ghastly demonic face will appear in the shimmering air above it. The masked figure will laugh in delight. “By the Purity of Chaos, I had all but forgotten this Conduit! Do you still survive little Kalin, after all these centuries? Yes, I see you there! Not well, by the looks of you, but… oh my, how full of life you are! Many flies must have wandered into our trap over so much time, to leave you so… why, you’re  postively brimming over. And your gift comes at a most opportune time, else I might be inclined to let your punishment and torment continue… but no, I need what you have to offer… and offer it you will!”

“No!” screams Kalin, previously rooted in terror at the sight of the demon’s head. “No, this is all for Narina! It’s not too late, I can still bring her back! Please, you mustn’t – Noooooo!”

But even as he objects, seeking to flee, black tendrils rise out from the shimmering air over the torc and snake toward him. He is quickly caught by the thirteen writhing, smoke-like bands, and within seconds they thicken and begin to pulse – and his body begins to shrink and shrivel, his cries turning to thready shrieks. With one last wail of despair his body crumbles to dust, leaving only his rags to collapse to the floor. The tendrils withdraw into the torc, and the masked visage turns its attention on the group. “Congratulations! What mighty cattle you are, to have defeated one of my Master’s creatures… however flawed and debased he was. Well, perhaps we shall meet in person someday… although you won’t know me without my mask. But don’t worry, I never forget a face – or an Aura. And then we’ll see how you fare against a true Lord of Chaos!” His image fades with his chilling, confident, terrifying laughter echoing in your ears.

If they don’t use the Torc, and Kalin gets ahold of it, he will invoke it, thinking to use the power of Chaos to revive his beloved wife… and we’ll get the same results.