25th Day of Goodmonth, 565 CY
The Dungeons of the Slave Lords
The Aerie, The Pomarj
We're a mess, thought Elrohir. Myself as much as anyone.
The group leader tried to shove the thought aside as he began pushing, pleading and cajoling his companions to resume their places in his marching order before they left the pool.
The thought refused to be ignored, however, and even grew strength with every new observation Elrohir noted.
Any brief improvement in the party's physical condition from their recent meal and brief rest had been more than wiped out by their battle against the giant crawfish. Everyone looked worse than ever. Elrohir knew that a little make-up would be all that would be needed for the lot of them to do a credible job of passing for a horde of zombies.
Sitdale took his place in the front row alongside Elrohir without any complaint. The half-elf, now holding the light-imbued piece of flint, even managed a brief smile as he caught Elrohir's eye, but there wasn't much behind it anymore.
Aslan was coming up to assume his place in the second rank when Nesco walked up and tapped the paladin on the shoulder from behind.
"Are you sure you're all right, Aslan?" she asked timidly. "I mean, we could rest here for a few more minutes, if you think it would help."
Aslan didn't need to turn and see Elrohir shaking his head before he responded.
"I'm afraid not, Lady Cynewine," the paladin replied with a sigh. "It won't be long before the next tremor hits; or worse. I'll go on because I have to go on; the same as any of us." He offered a tired grin. "A nice long rest and good food back at the Brass Dragon- that's the thought that's keeping me going right now."
Nesco glanced over to Elrohir for a moment.
His offer before we started all this, she wondered. They all asked me to come back and live with them when this is all over. If by the grace of the Thunderer we all do make it back, will that offer still stand? Lord, that seems like a lifetime ago.
The paladin's voice interrupted her reverie.
"Talass said you were praying over me, Nesco." Aslan took a deep breath, and at least managed to keep his eyes near Nesco's face. "Thank you again."
Nesco frowned in puzzlement. Prayer? I was praying, but only in my heart. How could Talass have-
Ah, the ranger realized. She must have seen-
Now it was Aslan's turn to look puzzled, but Nesco just flashed an embarrassed smile, nodded, mumbled, "I'd best get back to the rear," and left to rejoin Tojo, taking a deep breath to calm her nerves as she did so.
I'm so glad Talass doesn't know how to read lips.
Nesco did not see Talass' husband staring after her with narrowed eyes. Elrohir pursed his lips for a moment, and then turned and headed towards his wife.
Argo tightened his grip on his bone club as he came up and glanced over at Aslan. The paladin still looked uncharacteristically pale and weak to him, but then Aslan quickly glanced over to him before the big ranger could look away.
"Concerned, Bigfellow?" the paladin quipped. "One might almost think you'd care, if they didn't know better."
"I never claimed not to care," Argo responded with a shrug, "but I'd be more concerned about Lady Cynewine if I were you."
The paladin frowned at him.
Bigfellow gave Aslan a raised eyebrow. "I assume she gets your cabin if you shuffle off before we get home. Might not want her covering your back."
Aslan was about to retort when he detected additional meaning behind the big ranger's auburn eyes. And perhaps a question. Neither of which he felt like dealing with right now.
The paladin just shrugged and pretended to examine the shellfish dagger he held in his right hand.
Zantac and Cygnus were also silent. The two wizards moved into position behind Aslan and Argo. Cygnus seemed engrossed in the glow-fungus he held in one hand, but Zantac did glance up as Elrohir strolled by.
Talass, having just assumed her position behind Zantac and next to Unru, frowned as she watched her husband stride over to her. Elrohir's face held a grim expression.
It was only at the last moment that Elrohir decided not to confide in his wife his suspicions concerning Lady Cynewine. Every moment longer the ranger thought about, he had to admit it didn't seem worth bringing up now.
She'll probably tell you you were mistaken, and to be true I can't be sure I wasn't, he thought. And then she'll say it's irrelevant at this point anyway.
Elrohir sighed. Fine. He wouldn't mention that particular piece of business now, but that had always been secondary anyway.
He had something else he'd wanted to say to Talass for a while now, and he didn't give a damn what sharp comments she might have to say about that.
Talass crossed her arms and took a step forward to meet her husband. The cleric kept her face neutral. "What is it, Elrohir?" she asked, beating him to the punch.
Elrohir took a deep sigh and began.
"Is there any additional information you might have for me at this time, dearest?"
Talass' eyes narrowed.
"Such as?"
Elrohir flashed his wife a sardonic smile. "You've been consumed with your vision all this time, dearest, and yet you never referenced it once all the time you were working to save Aslan."
Talass didn't bother to hide her irritation. "I was rather busy, if you hadn't noticed," she scowled.
Her husband plowed on, undeterred. "You also seem quite confident that Mount Flamenblut is in imminent danger of erupting. I'm going to ask you this directly, Talass; are you remembering any more of your vision now that we seem to be moving towards its fulfillment?"
Elrohir almost missed the hesitation in his wife's reply.
But he didn't.
"In what way?"
He wished she wasn't pushing him like this.
"Insofar as to which one of us isn't going to make it back?"
Talass took a deep breath and looked down. It seemed to Elrohir that the cleric was choosing her words carefully.
"I don't know who it's going to be, Elrohir."
"But you have a suspicion. I heard it in your voice when you answered Arwald earlier."
His wife's light blue eyes flashed up to meet his own.
"Why do you say that?" she challenged.
"As I said; it didn't seem to me that you ever thought it was going to be Aslan, even as the rest of us were falling into a panic."
Talass made a gesture of hopelessness. "What would you have me do, Elrohir; not try to save Aslan because I thought he wasn't going to be the one?"
The ranger shook his head. "Of course not, dearest. We both want the same thing; we want your vision to be wrong. Oh, you can't admit it, being a priestess and all, but I know you want all of us-" here he paused and took another deep sigh- "all of us that are still alive to make it off this island and safely back home."
Talass' expression softened a little. "Of course I do. But that still doesn't explain why you think I might have suspicions about one person or another as to who might be referenced in my vision."
Elrohir said nothing in reply. He merely mimed putting a ring on his finger while staring hard into his wife's eyes.
He saw the hesitation again.
And then he saw Talass' lip tremble.
"Don't worry, dearest," she said, her voice hard and brittle-sounding at the same time. "It isn't going to be you."
"I'm not worried about myself, Talass. I just need to know if you have any feelings or suspicions about who it might be."
Talass couldn't even look at him anymore. She simply turned away and stepped back next to Unru, staring pointedly away from him.
When she heard her husband's voice again, it was cold.
"I don't expect dishonesty from you, dearest," the ranger said as he turned away. "Never from you."
"There is no dishonesty!" Talass abruptly shouted, whirling back to face him, heedless of eleven faces turning towards her own. "I didn't say anything!"
Elrohir stopped, but he never turned around.
Talass could hear the sadness in her husband's voice as it came back to her before he walked off towards the front of the line.
"You're a Priestess of Truth, dearest," Elrohir said. "Silence is how you lie."
As per Sitdale's suggestion, the party had trudged up the third passageway- the one that sloped upwards and that carried a slow stream of water downwards towards the pool. It twisted and turned as most of these tunnels again but continued for perhaps three hundred feet or so. Signs of water grew more and more evident and then the tunnel opened up again into another chamber, perhaps thirty feet in diameter.
But this one contained a miniature forest.
Fungi of all shapes and sizes filled a good portion of this chamber. As in the last cavern, Elrohir ordered his companions to spread out along the wall as they entered. It didn't seem right not to admonish everyone to keep an especially sharp eye out for shriekers or violet fungi, even though the ranger knew it was a superfluous warning.
Those seemed to be the only type of mushrooms not present here, by Elrohir's reckoning. A fantastic assortment of sizes, shapes and colors met the ranger's eyes everywhere they roamed. Some were of the traditional toadstool shape, but others boasted elaborate, flowery heads, like oyster mushrooms. Still others looked like giant, spongy rocks; some type of puffball, perhaps. The tallest of these fungi loomed nearly nine feet tall, with thick trunks just like those of terrestrial trees.
Blue, green, red, pink, yellow, white, even black- the subterranean flora put on a stunning show. Elrohir could feel the hunger building in his throat again, but he forced it down and addressed his companions.
"No one is to take any of these," the ranger ordered. "I couldn't even begin to tell which varieties might be poisonous. Given our luck, I wouldn't be surprised if they all were."
At this, Sitdale, still standing next to him, pointed towards the floor.
"Not to everyone," the half-elf remarked.
The floor of this chamber was covered by a mossy peat of some kind, no more than perhaps an inch thick. Still, it had been all too easy for the half-elf ranger to spot the tracks.
Elrohir couldn't place them. They were of some kind of three-toed biped, roughly human-sized. The group leader knelt down to examine them more closely, as did Sitdale and Argo.
"It was going barefoot, whatever it was," murmured Sitdale.
"What strikes me is how shallow the impressions are," Elrohir frowned. "This thing might be as tall as a human, but it couldn't weigh much more than a halfling."
"The foot is almost round, but the toes are stumpy," Bigfellow observed. "I don't think this thing can run very fast." He favored his fellow rangers with a pained smile. "Well, that's the first thing I always look for."
"At least under current circumstances, I can't fault you for that, Argo." Elrohir rose to his feet, his eyes again sweeping the cavern.
The tracks skirted the edge of the mushroom forest, and then led to one of the larger toadstools. Walking slowly over to it, Elrohir could see that thin strands of the orange trunk had been carefully peeled off from it. Somehow the ranger was reminded of butternut squash.
He looked upwards again. The cave's ceiling was uneven, ranging from perhaps ten to twenty feet in height, and sported numerous stalactites. Water ran down from a crack in the ceiling down the largest of the stalactites and fell perhaps a foot before running down the largest of the many stalagmites before pooling on the floor and finally running down the passageway they had come.
"Elrohir," Arwald's voice came in back. "Given the flow of water here and the growth of these mushrooms, how recent would you guess these tracks are?"
The ranger considered, and then took his best guess.
"I can't be certain, but I'd wager not more than a day or so." He looked at Argo, who nodded his agreement. "Why do you ask, Arwald?" Elrohir wanted to know.
"Because I just found an empty mussel shell."
When they had first entered, Elrohir had noted that the cavern that housed this fungi forest had three passageways leading from it in a "Y" shape. They had entered from the "stem" tunnel and had all spread out towards the right at Elrohir's command, rather than in both directions as in the previous fungi chamber. Elrohir was currently standing near the passageway to the right. At Arwald's words, the ranger spared a brief glance down it, but he was currently at the very edge of their illumination and could see no further. Elrohir was about to ask Sitdale to bring the light up when he suddenly heard the voice of Yanigasawa Tojo all the way in the rear.
"I see mushroom, Errohir-sama."
Elrohir furrowed his brow in confusion. What in The Nine Hells was Tojo talking about?
"Of course you see a mushroom, Tojo!" he finally replied in exasperation. "There are mushrooms all around us!"
"Very true, Errohir-sama." The samurai's voice held not the slightest hint of reproach to it. "But most of them not warking towards us."
The pushing and shoving that followed as the front of the party doubled back on the rear was hardly a textbook example of expert dungeoneering by any means, Elrohir thought ruefully. That was all forgotten now though. The ranger gaped in astonishment as he saw the figure now paused in the left passageway, just outside the chamber.
"It's the mushroom folk!" Elrohir heard Unru crack wise from somewhere.
The illusionist's description, while crass, seemed to fit. The creature did indeed look like nothing so much as a human-sized mushroom. Unlike the violet fungi however, this mushroom had short, stumpy feet and two human-like arms, which ended in three-fingered hands. It was an uneven white in color, but what looked for all the world like brown shelf mushrooms were actually growing out of its skin at several places on the creature's chest. Even more amazing was the pale orange fibrous pouch, complete with shoulder strap, that the thing was wearing.
It's earthsilk! Elrohir suddenly realized. They must harvest it from the giant toadstools and spin it into earthsilk just as dwarves do!
At first it seemed like the creature was wearing a giant, oversized red hat, but then the ranger could see that it was the humanoid's head. While the cap's skin was the same white as its skin, it was almost totally covered in a reddish moss which glowed with a faint scarlet illumination.
"Growing your own light source," noted Thorimund. "I must say, I'm impressed."
Under the cap were what looked like two protruding, white puffball mushrooms, but somehow Elrohir knew that they were in fact the creature's eyes.
The mushroom man turned slightly, regarding them all.
"No one move," ordered Elrohir. "Don't say or do anything threatening."
"Exactly how do you threaten a mushroom man?" Argo asked. "Whip out a frying pan?"
The creature looked at them all for another minute or so and then slowly turned around and lumbered back up the passageway it had come.
"Well?" Aslan asked his team leader. "Do we follow it or not?"
Elrohir hesitated. He hated to make decisions with what he considered insufficient evidence, but there was no helping it. In his mind, any decision at this point had to be made only according to the one overriding factor about their situation.
And that factor was time.
The ranger shook his head. "No. We take the other passage. Let's go."
"We're still heading upwards," Sitdale noted.
Elrohir nodded. They'd been travelling for several minutes now without incident. A sharp bend in the passageway presented them with another choice of tunnels- neither more enticing than the next. Elrohir merely pointed at one and the group continued on.
"Still a lot of stalagmites and stalactites," Bigfellow observed. "I have a feeling we're getting near."
"Near what?' Aslan, next to the big ranger, couldn't help but ask.
Argo shrugged. "An opportunity?"
Yet another cavern.
This one seemed almost identical to that which had housed the fungi forest- right down to the number and placement of passageways, except there were no giant mushrooms here.
A few small mosses and toadstools grew on the floor and on niches of the unhewn stone walls. Water dripped from the ceiling at a steady pace, although much slower than it had onto the mushroom forest.
A centipede crawled on the floor near their feet.
Curiously, while there were close to a dozen large and small stone stalagmites reaching up from the floor, there were no stalactites on the ceiling.
They all lay shattered in pieces on the floor.
"That looks recent," Sitdale observed, moving his light around.
"From the last tremor?" Argo guessed.
"Possibly," murmured Elrohir, looking around.
Something did seem different here, but the group leader couldn't put his finger on it.
"Is there some reason we've stopped, Elrohir?" Aslan asked from behind him.
The ranger started. He had signaled for the party to stop without even realizing it.
"Yes," he said in a voice so low only those adjacent to him could hear it, "but I don't know what it is."
Elrohir was so lost in his concentration that he didn't hear the voice of the two mages conversing two ranks behind him.
"Zantac?"
"Yeah, Ciggy?"
The tall wizard sniffed the air repeatedly.
"Am I going mad, or do I smell bat dung?"
There was a silence, and then Zantac literally leapt into the air with joy.
"Yes!"
Ahead of him and to his right, Argo Bigfellow Junior turned around.
"Man, and I thought I was starving."
"Bats, Bigfellow!" Cygnus slapped his palm into the big ranger's forehead. "Like the ones in your belfry! They won't stray that far from the-"
"Exit!" Aslan was caught up in the epiphany, as well. "Elrohir, which way?"
The ranger could only shrug. "Everyone spread out. See which one of those two exits the smell is stronger-"
Elrohir stopped in mid-sentence.
About ten feet in front of them was the largest stalagmite in this chamber, a little over six feet high.
Elrohir stared at it for one more second before he realized something.
It was staring back at him.