14th Day of Goodmonth, 565 CY
Drachensgrab Hills, The Pomarj
The ranger rushed forward, but Cygnus and Argo restrained him. There followed a few seconds of completely ineffectual pleading with Elrohir when suddenly the fire went out.
Elrohir broke free. Gokasillion was already in motion, the blade cutting through the now-thin ice as if it was water. Several strokes later, and in conjunction with Harve the wall fragmented. They rushed through, Cygnus now helping the samurai to his feet and holding onto him. Tojo was asking questions nonstop, but the mage had no answers for him.
At first there was nothing but blackened stone.
But then, a dim outline began to show itself to Cygnus. Right where Frump and Talass had vanished, a 10 foot square section of floor was covered in a dim, black haze.
Only Cygnus, Argo and Zantac could see it, however. The others saw only solid stone.
Save for Tojo, who remained totally blind.
"It's an illusion," commented Cygnus. "It's a pit, with an illusion of the floor over it! Concentrate, you'll see it soon enough. I'm going to see-"
But Elrohir shouldered roughly past him, still yelling out for his wife. Cygnus actually had to grab the ranger from behind to keep him from walking into the pit.
"I thought I heard her!"
"Stand still- you're right at the edge!"
"Talass!" yelled Elrohir again.
This time everyone heard the reply.
"I hear you, but I can't climb your voices out of here. Could someone please let down a goddamn rope?"
The voice sounded pained, but it was very definitely Talass. Soon as many people as possible were crowding over the edge of the hole. Everyone could now see through the illusion of the stone floor.
The pit was about ten feet deep. The bottom was surprisingly, covered in sand. Talass was sitting, one hand holding her newly-bloodied warhammer and the other clutching her ankle.
Next to her lay Wimpell Frump. The illusionist wasn't moving, and there seemed little chance that his crushed skull had resulted from his fall into the pit.
Elrohir took Tojo's rope from his knapsack and let it down the side of the pit. The ranger's voice was weak with relief even as he tried to make light of the situation.
"I think there really may have been one actual trap, dearest."
Aslan straightened up after healing the cleric's broken ankle. "Now, would someone mind explaining to me what in the Nine Hells just happened?"
"In a minute," Talass said, reaching her hand out to examine Tojo's face. The samurai jerked back at the unexpected touch, but the cleric grabbed Tojo's shoulder with her other hand. "Don't make this harder than it needs to be, Tojo. I swear, you men…"
With obvious displeasure, the samurai kept his face still. Talass moved the skin of Tojo's eyelids back and stared at the white orbs for a few seconds. She then motioned to Cygnus and Zantac, and the three huddled together like consulting physicians.
"I have a bad feeling this is permanent." Talass shook her head. "Even if any of us had a dispel, I'm not sure it would work."
"It wouldn't," Cygnus added grimly. "I know this spell. It's an instantaneous effect, like the wall of ice. I've never been able to learn it myself, but it's a nasty one."
"Can't you cure it, Talass?" asked Zantac.
The priestess nodded. "Yes, but I'll need to pray to receive that blessing. Tojo will have to wait."
"How long will that take?"
The three turned around. Aslan had joined them, while Elrohir, Argo and Nesco were making an effort to distract Tojo with small talk.
Talass sighed. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I was exhausted after that battle with the gnolls. Now I can barely keep on my feet. I'm guessing nine to ten hours."
Aslan's light blues eyes looked Talass over. She did look wretched. The paladin stroked his beard as he thought for a moment, and then announced in a voice that was clearly for everyone's benefit.
"I've got another idea. Elrohir, I'd like to teleport back to Chendl with Tojo. The Royal Church will cure him as per our contract, and I can mindrest fully in only a few hours- more quickly than I can here, that's for sure."
Elrohir turned the idea over in his mind.
"That sounds fine, Aslan," he replied at length, "but I want to get to the end of this tunnel first and see what's at the exit. Frump said we're only a few hundred feet from it, and I think he was telling the truth about that."
Aslan frowned while nodding at Tojo. "You want to take him with us as is? If we encounter more gnolls or worse-"
"I aber to fight, Asran-san," Tojo announced, standing straight and looking as solemn as ever. The samurai's hands caressed the hilts of his two swords, his wakizashi having been returned to him. "It not be first time I fight in darkness."
The others stared at him in amazement. Argo was the first to break the silence.
"I'm fine with that, Tojo- just don't try using your bow, okay?"
Amazingly, Tojo smiled back. "Not to worry, Argo-san. Arways know where you are. I just risten for rame jokes."
After the turn, the tunnel began to climb.
It was of course Tojo who made the initial pronouncement.
"Feer breeze on face. We nearing end."
"Smartass."
"Don't bug Tojo, Argo, "Aslan directed, and then changed the subject, "I believe that I was asking Talass about what happened back there. How did you know Frump was lying? I know you didn't have any divinations available."
"I've been trained in the ways of truth and falsehoods my whole life, Aslan," Talass began. "The way I reasoned it, Frump knew that as long as he obeyed our commands, we wouldn't kill him. Letting us know about the trapped door and giving us the key put him in our good graces for a start. Leading us through a trap-filled corridor would make him invaluable, but if there were no more traps, what then? He'd have to pay us off in information, and he clearly was unwilling- or more likely, afraid- to do that. So, his best bet would be to fool us into thinking we needed him."
"Damn it," Zantac muttered.
Everyone stopped to stare at the Willip wizard. "What?" asked Cygnus.
Zantac ran a hand through his mop of brown hair while sorrowfully looking at Talass. "I shouldn't have said out loud that we had no detects left. Hearing that probably put the idea in old Wimp's head to begin with. I'm sorry."
"Don't worry about it, Zantac." Talass brushed this off and began walking again. Everyone followed to keep up, but Cygnus noticed Zantac kept his eyes on the floor for the most part.
"Anyway," Talass continued. "None of us could identify through spellcraft if Frump really was disarming traps or not. That in itself made me suspicious. He was trying to play it calm, but his behavior just didn't match up with his body language. Frump was very nervous when he started that final chant, so I decided to call his bluff."
"So you weren't sure he was lying when you blurted out that he was?" Elrohir asked with some surprise.
His wife allowed a proud smile to cross her face for a moment. "If Frump had been telling the truth, he would have argued the point," she explained. "But he didn't. He made a break for it, and that sealed his guilt in my mind."
"But there was a trap there," Nesco felt constrained to point out.
Talass' confident demeanor abruptly vanished.
"Yes," the priestess said quietly. "Once I knew Frump was lying, it never occurred to me that there might be a real trap- and that he might use it in an attempt to get rid of us. I guess I underestimated him after all."
"The fire I can understand," Argo mused. "But that pit- and with a sandy floor, no less- how does that figure in?"
Talass let her smile return. "Imagine you're a slaver, Argo, and you've been captured by the enemy. They say show us the way or die. What do you do? You walk on ahead at sword or bow point, and suddenly fall through an illusionary floor onto a relatively soft surface. Meanwhile, your captors behind you are roasted alive."
"Clever," Bigfellow allowed.
Cygnus shook his head. "We're alive and he's not. I say the Clever Award goes to us."
"Or maybe just the Lucky one," Aslan admonished.
No one said anything else on the matter, so it was dropped.
The end came within sight.
Stars twinkling in a black sky were at first all they could see. It was nighttime in the outside world.
Aslan insisted upon scouting out ahead in fly-form. "I'll be mindresting back in Chendl, remember?" the paladin pressed. Elrohir seemed reluctant to agree for some reason, but eventually acquiesced.
The others hung back about twenty feet from the entrance and waited until Aslan was again standing there.
The paladin beckoned his friends forward. "It's all clear."
The party emerged onto the surface for the first time in three days.
The exit was a cave in the side of a small hillock. A dirt path descended down a hundred feet or so for perhaps six hundred feet through fields of wheat, glimmering softly in the moonlight. The path ended upon a large plain. In the direction that the cave faced, a large slum of shanties, tents and hovels squatted on that plain. A few pinpricks of arrange indicated torches or perhaps lamps. Perhaps a half-mile past, there was nothing but the inky blackness of water.
They were on an island.
On the far side of the docks, the slums ended abruptly at walls. The walls of a city.
The walls of Suderham.
Nesco could only gape.
"It hasn't been rebuilt," the ranger could only whisper. "This city never fell."
Suderham seemed quite small; barely deserving even of the title city. The stone walls, about thirty feet high, formed a square that the party estimated to be no more than three thousand feet on a side. Towers at each corner rose an additional twenty feet higher, and gatehouses were set in the middle, facing the slums, and in the back side, which faced south by Nesco's reckoning.
Patrols on top of the wall seemed numerous. Elrohir and Nesco looked at each other. Each could see an image of the hobgoblin stockade imprinted in the memory of each other's faces. They gave each other a small smile, and then returned their attention below.
They were high enough to look over the walls and down into the city. Unlike Highport, which sprawled out, Suderham as a confined city grew upwards, albeit not in an orderly fashion. Most of the buildings were made of stone, but many seemed to have upper floors that had been added onto an existing roof, and more often than not the result was not aesthetically pleasing.
The city seemed to be roughly divided into four quadrants, with a large amphitheater-styled building in the center. Strings of moving lights indicated patrols of what looked like soldiers moving through the streets.
"I see at least ten," Argo mused, frowning. "They must like their law and order here. I hate places like that."
"I'm surprised you like Furyondy then," Aslan couldn't help but comment with a wry grin.
Bigfellow raised his eyebrows at the paladin. "You'll notice I don't live in a city there, do I?"
"There aren't as many patrols in that southeast section," Nesco observed. "Must be where the lower class lives."
"Looks like a mix of Suloise and Oeridian architecture," said Zantac. "I wonder… if the city never fell, does the line of King Olarek still rule here?"
"I'm pretty sure the Mad King did have a son, although I don't know his name," Nesco recalled. "Still, from what I understand, the Slave Lords are in charge here in reality, if not in name. I don't think we can expect any help from the official quarters."
Elrohir was about to join in, but noticed his wife taking a few steps down the path and turn around to get a wider view. He joined her.
More farmland seemed to be on the far side of the city, but it was hard to tell. A thick forest cut off most of their view to the south. The ground seemed to be highest behind them, towards the southwest, and sloped down to the plain upon which the city sat.
Elrohir was looking northwest, trying in vain to see how far the lake that surrounded this island spanned, but it was too dark.
Then he heard his wife gasp. Talass was looking towards the southwest.
There wasn't much to see, as they were looking up a small hill that sat on a much larger slope. But Elrohir could see very clearly a dark shape rising a good mile into the night sky in the distance.
After what seemed like a very long time, Elrohir spoke.
"I don't suppose there's any chance that's not the same volcano you saw in your dream, is it?"
It was a weak jest, but Talass barely took notice of it. The priestess seemed almost in a daze as she replied. "It was daylight in my dream, but that's it. I know it is."
"That's Mount Flamenblut."
Nesco had joined them. "Did you say," the ranger continued, "that in your dream, the volcano erupted, Talass?"
The cleric nodded weakly, not taking her eyes off the mountain.
"If it's any consolation, Mount Flamenblut has been extinct for at least three hundred years. Perhaps longer. Do you really think it could come to life now?"
"Dao Rung."
Elrohir and Nesco turned. Tojo was standing by them, his blank white orbs facing the volcano as if he could see it as plainly as they could.
He said nothing else.
Talass closed her eyes. "The Earth Dragon," she whispered. There was more, but it was silent; the cleric's lips moving soundlessly- almost involuntarily, it seemed to her husband.
Elrohir knew how to read lips, though. He was the one who had taught Tadoa.
One of us won't be coming back.
Who would it be?
The ranger looked around. Tojo, with his stain of dishonor and unbending code of bushido seemed like the most likely candidate, but he wasn't the only one. Elrohir was always afraid that Argo Bigfellow's big mouth was one day going to get him into a situation he couldn't talk or fight his way out of. Then there was Cygnus, who so much wanted to be far away from here and back with his son, that he could easily make a distracted mistake at a critical moment. Aslan was usually a rock, but in the past few months the paladin had sometimes been dangerously erratic, although Elrohir wasn't sure why.
Nesco had joined after Talass' vision. That didn't mean her life was secure- hell, she had already died once- but if she did die again, that only meant she wouldn't be the only one.
Zantac? Perhaps. Elrohir was no expert on wizardry, but he knew the Willip mage wasn't nearly as powerful as Cygnus. Inexperience might mean his doom. It nearly had, back in Highport.
When Elrohir shook himself out of his reverie, he saw that Talass was now looking back at him. She managed a thin smile, and Elrohir knew that once again, his wife knew him better than he knew himself.
"Don't let it consume you, dearest." she said.
Silently, they stepped into each other's arms and held on tight.
Aslan and Tojo were at the cave entrance. The others were setting up about twenty feet inside; out of line of sight of anyone who might come into the fields. Cygnus would set up an alarm spell after the two had left.
"It should be daylight when we return, "Aslan was saying. "Maintaining secrecy is paramount, but see if you can learn any-"
"I'll handle things on this end," Elrohir said, with a light but deliberate note of impatience. "You two just don't go tavern-hopping. Get back here as soon as you can."
Aslan smiled to show he had gotten the point. "We will." The paladin turned to the others. "Be careful- all of you. We can't afford to let what happened in Highport happen this time."
Argo shrugged. "Well, I don't have my sling anymore, so we should be okay."
The paladin kept the smile a moment longer; then let it go as he clasped Tojo's hand firmly in his. "Ready, Tojo?"
By way of reply, the samurai turned so that his blank face was facing those who were remaining behind.
"Be wary, tomodachi."
He was trying very hard to avoid it, but they all heard the samurai's voice tremble.
"Dao Rung- it knows we are here."