The water in the pool shuddered. The faintest ripples briefly passed through the pool, breaking the illusion in the water for a moment, then disappearing without a trace, lying unnaturally still.
The six of them all stared at the door as it rattled on its hinges, then let that strange scraping sound again from the small sliver of darkness from the room it guarded.
Valygar moved about two paces from the door, then slowly drew his katana from its sheath, tensing in anticipation of a strike. Minsc, Lidia, and Haer'Dalis stood behind him, their weapons at the ready, while Aerie and Nalia started preparing their first spells.
The scraping sound rose to a high pitch. With a violent swing, the door suddenly opened, striking the wall behind it with a sharp crack.
The thing that emerged from the door seemed to be sculpted from clay itself. It was about seven feet tall and formed in the shape of a barefoot, muscle-bound, beetle-browed, completely bald man. It was porcelain white and glazed to a bright, nearly flawless finish; the only place on its body that didn't gleam in the dim light were its eyes, which were empty and opened to two points of nothingness.
It said nothing. The sculptor had fashioned for it a sealed mouth. It was a clay being — a golem — given life by only a series of spells and a few well-thought-out commands.
The golem lumbered first in Valygar's direction, swinging a massive fist towards his head.
Valygar immediately dove to one side. The fist drove itself against the wall, barely missing him. One or two of the tiles cracked under the fist's force, but the massive hand remained unscathed.
A hail of thumb-sized red lights barreled towards the thing from Aerie and Nalia's direction, splashing against the hard, polished surface and not leaving a scratch.
It suddenly shivered, as though it were casting something off, then moved at twice its speed, shuffling rapidly from one side to the other towards Nalia and Aerie.
The four on the front line got there first, running forward at top speed and intercepting the creature while it was still a couple of paces away from the spellcasters.
The golem leaned back and wound up its arm.
Lidia swung her staff with everything she had, aiming for the creature's head.
With a crack, the staff broke in two, leaving a splintered edge where it made contact with the hard ceramic body. The blow would have caved in any ordinary skull. It didn't leave so much as a scratch here.
Minsc, meanwhile, gripped Larry by the blade and was using the large pommel as a hammer, driving it against the golem's chest with a raw shout.
"Ow — Ow — Ow —" Each time the stone on the end of the hilt made contact with the golem, Larry groaned. "My head ain't the best part of me, boss, but I still need it!"
Nonetheless, it seemed to be the only weapon that made so much as a crack or mark on the golem. It seemed to be just as confused about what Minsc was trying to do, if a golem was even capable of feeling confusion.
Lidia glanced down towards the axe in her hand. It was rare Azuredge spoke directly to her, but this time its voice was loud and clear:
Don't even think about it.
Lidia finally discarded any idea of following suit. In any case, having only a foot or so of leverage wasn't ideal and much too close for comfort.
She considered the open door the creature left behind. What was inside?
The last thing she wanted to do was run from a fight. But Minsc seemed to have the situation well in hand, and if she could find something to speed things along, so much the better.
As Minsc drove Lilarcor into the thing's chest again, she ducked behind it and slipped into the storeroom from which the creature had emerged.
She pulled out the small light gem from a hidden pocket and warmed it in her hand, bringing its cold light to bear on the room.
The room was round like the entryway, and it was a mess of mechanical equipment, open books, loose parchments, and messy shelves. Several iron canisters and strongboxes lay on the floor, covered in a thick layer of dust that smelled faintly of clay.
And, propped against a bookcase, was an arm that resembled a detached piece of armor. Seized by a sudden thought, Lidia examined it more closely.
The arm was at least twice as heavy and three times as thick as any other weapon she'd ever picked up. She could lift it, but not enough to get decent leverage — it was almost as long as she was tall and fully articulated, meaning it flopped around at the joints as soon as she raised it.
She laid it out on the floor, ignoring the hollow clanging sound the thing made as it hit the glazed earthenware tiles in the storeroom. The arm was slightly bent as though it were in repose, its fingers outstretched.
With some effort, she bent the arm outward, until the joint stiffly locked into place with a small click. She moved to the end, where the limb ended in a massive iron gauntlet easily twice the size of her own hand. With both hands, she pushed the joints into place, curling each finger into a giant iron fist.
Hopefully, this would hold on its own. She turned towards the sound of a raw cry through the open door.
Minsc stumbled, reeling from a direct hit from the golem's massive fist. His massive right arm was unnaturally stiff as he slumped to the ground over Larry's protests.
Valygar and Haer'Dalis sprang forward, one with a katana in hand and the other with two jagged shortswords. All three of these swords were powerful weapons — when they weren't fighting an enemy made of polished ceramic. Haer'Dalis and Valygar evaded each inhumanly fast swing, one by one in a complicated dance. They had little hope of doing much else.
For all their efforts, the six of them had managed to land only a few cracks on the golem's face and torso.
A small, sickly green dart flew from Nalia's hand, dissipating on contact and burning through the glaze, exposing the chalky white clay underneath and leaving behind a small pit on the golem's arm.
"That's my last spell," she called out, pulling out the crossbow she carried on her back. Aerie, too, was readying her slingshot.
No spells, only bladed weapons, and one blow had been enough to take Minsc out. They were out of options and time.
Lidia shut her eyes, focusing inward to the dark well. With an effort, she turned its energy towards her muscles and bones, keeping the power contained within her body.
The massive iron arm now felt as light in her arms as a twig did. It was still incredibly unwieldy, and it still took a couple of tries to find the right balance. But she raised it to her shoulder and kicked open the door with a force that almost detached it from its hinges.
She emerged from the room and raised an incoherent shout. The golem turned at once from Valygar and Haer'Dalis, twisting to face its new challenger.
There Lidia found her opening. She didn't give the thing a chance to parse what it saw. She sprang forward, driving the massive iron fist toward the golem's eyes.
The blow connected, with a sound between a crunch and a scrape.
Immediately the golem raised its hand over its face, splaying its finely polished fingers. It stumbled backward, then shook its head, casting a few misshapen porcelain shards to the ground from behind its hand.
It untwisted itself and removed its hand, revealing a new empty space between its eyes where its nose should have been, its face still strangely serene.
Immediately, Lidia drove the iron fist into its face again, driving it forward and upward. With a twist, she sank it into its face.
The clay head detached from the neck, only connected to the body by the barest of metal threads, and fell down upon the golem's chest.
She aimed her final blow close to its center of gravity, squarely in the middle of its torso.
It stumbled back onto the edge of the viewing pool, falling along the edge of the broad travertine. The head completely fell off the body, rolling a few times to a standstill, as impassive as ever.
Lidia stood over it, her improvised weapon at the ready in case it got up again.
Nothing happened. The arm suddenly felt heavy in her hands again, and she let it slide to the ground next to the
A single, furious thought filled her brain — she had a sudden desire to beat on this thing until it was nothing but pottery shards —
She was already half-reaching for the arm again but checked herself.
Why do you care? a thought spoke. It was never alive. It's just a thing.
She couldn't argue with that, or articulate any reason other than this: It's over. It's done.
Nalia spoke up from the other side of the room, breaking through Lidia's thoughts. She had rushed over to Minsc, who was still lying down where the golem had felled him.
She was waving her hand frantically in an attempt to get someone's attention, calling out, "We've got someone hurt over here,"
Aerie got there first. Her narrow brow furrowed as she pored over the wound. "Maybe…maybe you know something about this?" she asked Lidia. "It's…well, it's a strange wound to me."
"Let me see," Lidia said. She settled in, sitting cross-legged next to Minsc, then asked him, "How are you doing?"
"It was a great fight for justice, but Minsc cannot remain in this kind of shape," he said, clearly wincing. "Boo is worried so…see how he trembles?"
The tawny hamster rubbed his small pink nose. He was already sitting on Minsc's large, callused hand, which was swelling and rapidly turning the color of a bruise.
"Try moving it," Lidia said.
Boo curled up inside Minsc's palm and stretched out a little claw, as though to encourage the hand to move, but the purple-blue fingers didn't twitch, their color rapidly deepening. Somehow, the blood flow had been cut off. The sooner that could get resolved, the better.
She looked up. Despite the possibility of losing his sword hand, and the fine sheen of sweat covering his tattooed head, he still seemed energetic and in fine spirits.
"I'm going to try everything," she finally said, "and see if anything works."
Over the next hour, she spent every healing spell she had. By the time she was done, she felt exhausted, propping up her head with her left hand. Her right hand rested on her knee, fingertips tingling and almost devoid of sensation altogether. She lifted up her head and reached for a healing potion — but then stopped. If her right hand were still numb in a few hours, she'd consider her options then.
Minsc's hand was faring much better. His fingers still seemed somewhat discolored, and he still couldn't close his fist all the way, but the circulation had more or less returned and he'd still have a hand once they figured out the wound on his arm.
None of her spells had made any change to it. He had taken a blow from the golem near his elbow, and an hour later he was still unable to bend his arm. Rather than breaking his limb, it instead seemed to do the opposite — causing the skin to turn brittle and shatter in the center, creating a fine web of interlocking fractures in the surface. Some pieces had even fallen off, but with no sign of bleeding or a normal break in the skin.
The wound on his arm looked as though it had turned into clay itself, Lidia thought. She'd kept a close eye on it as she worked. It looked bad, and was probably cutting off some of the sensation and blood flow to his hand, but at least it wasn't worsening or spreading: a small mercy, when magic could swiftly corrupt.
Aerie passed by, silently observing her work, then asked: "What do you think?"
"I've done everything I can," Lidia said, looking up. "His wound was inflicted suddenly — after he took a hit from the golem. It's resisting normal healing spells, so I guess it's a magical curse. Do you have anything for that?"
"Not at the moment," Aerie said, "but I could after some rest. Although it'd mean we'd be stuck here for a while." She glanced to the other side of the viewing pool, where the others were waiting. "Valygar?"
"To be honest," Valygar said, "I hadn't thought traveling the sphere would take longer than the rest of the night."
They had brought enough rations for two days, and enough water for a week, and thought they had over-packed. The prospect of spending eight hours without leaving the first room made their preparations suddenly seem inadequate.
Lidia said, "We could still retreat from the sphere and get help, stay here and do the best we can ourselves, or keep going — though I'd rather not force Minsc to leave now, in case we run into further trouble."
"I second that. The last thing, I mean," Nalia said. "What if something even worse is on the other side of the door?"
"Believe me," Lidia said, "it's better to approach places like this one room at a time."
Valygar studied the door to the northwest, which had no handle but was controlled by a complicated set of brass gears. "In any case, there's no going past this room yet."
"Try over there," Lidia said, pointing towards the door to the storeroom "There's plenty of mechanical equipment; something there might work."
After some searching, Valygar emerged with a strange contraption about the size of his hand.
It was a thin, finely hammered brass bar with a threaded screw on one end and a butterfly-shaped handle on the other.
Upon closer inspection, the bar seemed to fit perfectly into a small hole in the northwest door, which was round and inlaid with the same design as the walls.
Valygar carefully screwed the device into this door until the brass bar slid in with a click. The gears turned a few times, and the device folded in on itself to form an oblong knob.
"That's done," Valygar said, seeming satisfied, "Now —"
The machinery of the planar sphere groaned beneath their feet, rustling the viewing pool again.
The sphere fell silent for a moment, and then a whirring sound arose: slightly at first, then growing louder and more frenzied until all six of the Company could feel its vibrations through their teeth.
The image of Athkatla faded into darkness. In its place, thin silvery lines traced themselves into the shape of a wheel with spokes with four concentric rings in the center. And, at the heart of this wheel, an oval glowed inside a small circle, like a ghostly cat's eye.
The distant machinery roared and lurched again, sending another tremor through the water. Around the edge of the pool, words suddenly appeared, glowing silver. Some of the group strained to read them.
"What does it say?" Aerie asked no one in particular. "I'm not really sure —"
Nalia spoke up. "It's in the old tongue. "'You now have initiated plane travel… '"
Her voice faded as she read the words, realizing what they meant.
Valygar rushed forward, as though he wished to read for himself. He bent over the edge of the pool, resting his hands against the travertine, as though he were trying to prop himself up.
Just as abruptly, he ran for the outer tunnel, trying the door that led outside to Athkatla. It was sealed shut.
Locked in this room, the Company huddled around the viewing pool as the sphere lurched and groaned, the noise rising and falling in regular intervals.
The light began to move within the wheel as the center oval faded. Then each concentric ring surrounding it lit and faded in quick succession. The light traveled down one of the wheel's spokes until the outline of a circle filled. Inside this circle, at the edge of the wheel of the cosmos, a sign appeared in simple lines: an arrow pointing downward, broken in two by the symbol of infinity splayed across the middle.
"What…what is that?" Aerie asks.
"A symbol for planar travelers marking the Abyss," Haer'Dalis said.
At once, Aerie's eyes went wide, and she covered her mouth with her hand, nearly gnawing her lower lip, but said nothing more.
Nalia was intently studying the words around the edge of the wheel. "It looks like this sphere traveled as a way to stop intruders," she said. Her voice faltered for a moment. "And…it says, 'you may not leave the sphere until the Master allows it.'"
"Of course," Valygar angrily said to himself. "Of course he'd do something like this."
Though the sphere protected them from the plane beyond, Lidia could already feel the hairs standing up from the back of her neck. The sphere was large and imposing before, when they had first set foot in it. Now, with only its thin walls between it and the endless torments of the Abyss, it felt fragile.
The noise and jittering from the sphere's machinery died down and it came to rest, settling into a bed of straining rock.
"Not a nice place at all, eh Boo?" Minsc said. "No matter! All we need is a good long rest, and then let all the evil things here tremble!"
The image of the wheel and its lighted lines faded from sight, leaving only a void. They all bent over the edge of the viewing pool without touching the water, their eyes fixed on the image out of some combination of dread or morbid curiosity. Gradually their destination came into view.
The planar sphere was sitting in a rocky, ochre-red basin in some desolate corner of a barren plane, where creatures were said to feed on hatred and strife the way others would food and water. The rock was marked by a faint pattern of whorls and rings that stretched across the stone, and here and there was studded with small pits of glowing embers. A series of long, thin rocks, the rusty brown color of dried blood, rimmed this basin like the ribs of a creature long-dead — or like teeth in a predator's starving maw. Unlike clear, star-filled night they left behind on the Prime Material Plane, everything here seemed swathed in a foul, grey haze.
"Ah, the infinite layers of the Abyss," Haer'Dalis said. "As the tanar'ri say, 'If there's anything you don't like, you'll find it here.' Depending on where we've come to rest, when we emerge from our little shell we could begin transforming into lemures, or shun our rations to consume the flesh of the living, or simply find there's not a breath to fill our lungs."
Rather than dreading any of these possibilities, he seemed animated, excited even.
"Well, bard, have you any idea why my ancestor would send us to such a damnable place?" Valygar asked.
"Methinks if the sphere was set to trigger to travel here," Haer'Dalis said, "Lavok had some purpose for casting us all adrift in the Abyss in particular. But we shall not discover his mind by standing about, yes?"
"What's the saying — 'if we be adventurers, let us adventure'?" Lidia said. "If the door's open, let's see what's in the next room, at least."
She surprised even herself. Certainly, she sounded more comfortable with the situation than she felt.
What was it she had said to Nalia, though? One room at a time.