The silhouette above her in the dark was Imoen shaking her, and she came rather groggily to alertness.
"Hey! Pru, wake up. Get up!"
Prudence passed her arm across her eyes; she did not often dream. It hadn't been a nightmare, only a disorganised recollection of what she already knew.
"'S your turn on watch, Jaheira and the necromancer're still sleepy," Imoen said. "And you were talking in your sleep besides, I heard Mr G.'s name, and you were shaking. Place giving you the creeps too?"
"Not really." Despite the harsh stone at their backs, if anything she felt invigorated, ready in mind and body to fight. Travel itself had not come reluctantly to her, and perhaps the dream was a simple reminder that they could only go forward.
"Must've been some dream," Imoen said.
"Nothing particularly dramatic." She'd never been told that she talked in her sleep, either. No complicated plot of knights and intrigue nor extraplanar creatures bleeding unearthly fluid; a half-conscious recounting of recent events, pursued by uncomfortable voicings. "Get some rest yourself before we do this, Im."
Prudence stood near the cave's narrow mouth, and stretched; this place was some distance removed from the cave upon the underground lake, its opening relatively concealed from even those with night's vision. Whether it was morning or evening in the world outside she could not tell. Dwarves and drow possessed their own ways of measuring time in their underground lives; an instinct lacked by humans. But she was not afraid of the dark itself, nor of the underground. That which required more caution would be the living enemies here.
She worked the stiffness of sleep from her muscles, at a slow and easy pace; and then drew on her chainmail, as quietly as she could. Outside the cave it was dark and grey, with no sounds of unwelcome interruption. Khalid snored lightly behind her, Montaron more deeply. She stood silently to watch, as if it were a guard's duty of Candlekeep; it was more interesting to work or read than to remain still, though she'd enough practice of using it for prayer and thought. The dreams were far different to that transcendent moment human ability couldn't properly remember, where she had woken up and discovered that she could heal people by touch; but for now she was as prepared as she could be. She waited, slightly cold, and behind her the mage woke from his own memorisations and preparations.
Xzar didn't trouble with anything resembling a 'Good morning', or afternoon or night or when it actually was. "You dreamed," he said, in a normally-modulated voice; "You'd nightmares; I heard it."
"Not nightmares, and not really your purview," she replied.
Though he was in shadowed silhouette, she thought that Xzar contrived to look gravely insulted. "Of course they are!" he protested. "I am a wizard—the nighttime visions of our companions are the stuffs of divinations and amateur psychology. What strange and elaborately metaphorical sights were you granted to illustrate your hidden and twisted depths?"
"That we couldn't return to Candlekeep via imagery of the very place. My hidden depths mustn't be fond of elaborately metaphorical sights," Prudence said.
"Oh." He paused, apparently nonplussed; then his voice brightened again, in preparation of one of his absurd theories. "It must mean something complicated about what you ate before going to sleep. Perhaps you're allergic to dry bread, your library symbolizes its walls and baking time and it's not impossible to make pages out of flour, is it?"
"I...wouldn't think it likely," she said. "Have you dreamed lately, diviner?"
"Yes. Of you."
That—hadn't been expected.
"You wore spiky armour with points on most parts of it," Xzar continued with enthusiasm, "under a dark blue sky at night on the top of a tower, and threw a knight off a balcony railing in the rain, and then glowing blood fell from him and filled the earth in impressive apocalyptic splendour like a flood and that was the general size and shape of the thing. You were much bigger, though, and you'd a beard and a different face...Also, you were a man."
She sighed in slight relief. "That's...probably not me at all, Xzar." The blood, though; not a pleasant thought. Spiked armour—not...? Still, there was a certain dearth of balconies below a mine.
"Hmm. A point worth considering," he said. "Don't take muscle-expanding drugs or find one of those tricky Nether Scrolls, unless you want to. Do you have any thoughts on spikes?"
"That they get in the way if you plan to fight alongside others," Prudence said.
"Never thought of that. Ought to pass it on to Monty, if he wishes to know," Xzar said. "Sometimes it's a slate-coloured mist in those dreams," he continued, more meditatively, speaking in his fluid tenor. "Not the stars shining through bright red; the slate-coloured fog that stifles everything. I remember someone who saw too far into the planes around and under and through and past everything; and they locked her up, and she still saw too far. What happened after that, at least it was still there to understand. Adia, was her name? Aphid? Slatemists, where there's nothing to dream about."
"Someone you used to know?" she said. A sad tale, in its fragments.
He shook his head fiercely, a shadow moving in the dark. "Why in the planes ought I to recall quaint immaterial fictions a very long time ago? Arhyme saw the footprints crowded by the countless others of the same place, and back then it mattered less that they could look. Then I was an apprentice; then the time when magic was free; then she of mysteries returned to everyone."
Quite young to start an apprenticeship. "You worked for another necromancer?" she said.
"Oh, I learned a good deal," Xzar said. "My mother was a powerful lich since before I was born, of course—it's important to use whatever you can do, what you have to look after things. I am become death, destroyer of towers with thorns of black festering ice, of course!" he said, almost cheerily; and whistled easily.
"And my mother was from the plane of very tall gnomes," Prudence said. The problems with that implied timeline—
He inclined his head to the left. "You don't really have the nose for it."
"G-good...ah, my wife will know when it is," Khalid said, rising from his thin bedroll. "Not far beyond evening above ground, I should say." Clerics of most of the darker deities chose to pray to renew their castings at night; a useful time to select to make an attack.
"You're used to such dark dungeons?" Prudence said; Khalid could probably see a smile through the shadows.
He chuckled nervously. "Nobody—I s-suppose nobody ever really can be used to it."
"I like being six feet under," Xzar said happily; Khalid seemed to decide to ignore him.
"Jaheira did f-feel it to be a caster," Khalid said; "you do know the mind-shielding patterns, Prudence? It can be a d-difficult thing for swordsmen—I know m-myself that sirines have charmed me in the past."
"I've studied them, yes," she said; in addition to faith's protections Gorion's lessons had helped her understanding. "Either—a much-narrowed focus upon a single goal, I think, or such a complicated contextual awareness that intrusion cannot dominate."
"I like to imagine a s-shield that covers me, plain and grey," Khalid said, "and also it is t-true feelings; I suppose I am always charmed by a lovely druid."
Jaheira was behind them.
"Or it helps to know how to cast spells of the school," Xzar said, "arcanists are even better at it than silly god-toadies of especially silly unhinged candle-blacked gods who aren't going to do anything to us tonight, and if you can do it then you get to be less afraid of it, and...It is a school of intricate casting," he lectured, "as the fine work of a needle rather than invocation's overly simplistic hammer or abjuration's thick bucklers."
"And a s-school...like necromancy...that 'tis very easy to m-misuse," Khalid said.
"But most of my components are all-natural," Xzar said; a reply intended for Jaheira, squabbling.
"Your disruption spells don't need any components, do they?" Prudence said. "And no more raising undead, especially if it's a priest."
"For myself I have petitioned Silvanus for silenced throats of those in opposition, among other means to strike enemies with natural force," Jaheira said, with great firmness (and, perhaps, forbearance).
"And are we to sit around with tea-party chitchat until we drop of old age, or go to make something dead?" Montaron spoke, quickly upon his feet.
—
She ran with Khalid through the hail of arrows. Fire bursting against their shields, suppressed by Jaheira's enchantment—there was reason to fear nonetheless, but that had to be turned into motion, granted to run swift and sure to where the guards waited—
The magelight burst to a vivid green shine; the kobolds certainly knew of their presence now, one hit and falling by Imoen's arrows.
Prudence pushed herself to the task, striving to make them drop their bows; she saw Khalid's shield hand clench the pouch, the small damp seeds spill upon the ground, and then they heard Jaheira's chant. The vines sprang smoothly up, a tight entanglement; she and Khalid killed kobolds—sliced into scaled flesh like meat on a platter, small creatures dying in the service of their false deity—and the ghouls came.
These pair were quite powerful; unnaturally strong, the ability to freeze others in place by a slash of their claws; not brought down by the usage of Imoen's remaining supply of the arrows of kobolds likewise serving their master. But it was a dwelling shielded by a makeshift water moat; and Khalid was an artist in the grace of his sword, easily tempting the one he fought too close to the edge and allowing it to overreach and fall.
The stone crumbled, there; a ground's weakness; the ghouls were creations of the same entity, the same underlying pattern of motion to their ravening hunger. Prudence managed to step aside, allow the ghoul's weight to rest on the unstable part; unbalance the rock herself by slamming the edge of her shield to the ground. Jaheira had caught up, her skin thick bark, her quarterstaff held with a bear's strong grip; she and Khalid would take point.
They know, of course, that we are here. The entrance was not wide, and dark. A physical miasma hit them like a blow: dark smoke that hung thickly in the air, sickly perfume, rotting food and flesh, waste, sulphur, charcoal, burned alchemy. Something cast, something communed with a strong black presence, something that might be so easy to see if she allowed it through, might take over her vision and blindingly ache; rational knowledge was more true than feelings of darkness but it was as a paladin she knew—
The magelight flew behind them. Three tunnels, seven kobolds within the first wielding swords, narrow darkness the second, the third a wide cavern, a trace of firelight in the back, glint of small metal device, carpeted floor three smaller rugs gold and green one large black, wall hangings with metal rings on metal rods, red one thick cloth purple one thinner already ripped from three rings, broad large figure rising from darkness bearing the dark holy symbol, bolted shelf with nine bottles two glass, thronelike chair, Cyric is god over trickery illusion destruction death chaos what spells, an instant to be aware of it.
Jaheira and Khalid went forward; Montaron to the left, the kobold guardians.
A voice from the figure; necessary to disrupt potential spellcaster. Hands to crossbow. "Tazok must have dispatched you! My traitorous kobolds—"
A name there; the half-orc was speaking, wearing armour glinting where not blackened, dark sun at thick waist. Bolt loaded—
"I am Mulahey, but I cheated him not! Kill the intruders, minions! Never take anything—" Objects the size of short thick logs he held, scattered on the ground; darkness of him intensified. "No, leave one! Elfblood to match—"
Bolt released; torso, more reliable than head, impact on armour; and skeletons springing, before Khalid and Jaheira, behind intermingled between kobolds, growing quickly from grey rock like strange trees. Yellow; bones shaped to claws; skulls leering.
The half-orc chanted again; Khalid and Jaheira sought to reach him.
"He's powerful—" Prudence got out; "Imoen, Xzar, for him—" Perhaps a match for Jaheira, given his time to entrench here—
It took time to exchange crossbow for weapon and shield; a lot of skeletons, she and Montaron keeping them back. Fighting summoned creatures, she thought, failing to reach the caster himself the key to it all; but that was the job of the Harpers. Prudence cut across a skeleton's spine; the bones chattered and moved even despite separation, and there were more rising, a small army of walking dead.
She saw Xzar, casting. A rainbowed twist between his fingers, flung like a dart, magic sending it to its path. Imoen, aiming arrows at the kobolds near to Khalid and Jaheira, trying to aid the clearing of their path, careful against hitting them. Montaron hit a skeleton's knees, and she blocked its retaliation by pushing scimitar against its hands, its bared metacarpals reaching to tear still. Then he went left to stab a kobold against reaching Xzar, she right against a skeleton that could have reached Imoen.
It was not fear that governed her, shielding against the skeletons, their mass large in number but unimpressive by individual. Nor anger, the miasma of the Cyricist himself palpable, cramping pain if she allowed it.
Perhaps—I start to know what I'm doing—
She could fix coldly upon the placings of each person. Imoen, trying to cast from that cloak. Xzar next to her, both back from the attacking minions. Khalid and Jaheira in the forefront, striking ever closer to the cleric himself. She and Montaron, moving forward, pushing their enemies to the mouth of the narrow tunnel: to face only a few at a time. The skeleton of a human was vulnerable in spine, joints, neck; a kobold was vulnerable to an attack from above on its skull, or shoulder or torso. She was practised enough that the movements of her weapon came before a thought was full-formed, unsettling though it was to face these undead. Block; strike. The key was for Jaheira and Khalid to fight through; secondary, for Imoen and Xzar to use their abilities, and to keep them alive meanwhile. Keep all of them alive.
Mulahey spoke in a language she did not know, bass-pitched and harsh in sound, and Xzar was not slow with his spells; the energy drain materialised between his hands, white and cutting the caster mid-syllable. The Cyricist growled, spoke again. Khalid and Jaheira cut easily enough through his servants, but there were many of them and Jaheira was too closely pressed to attempt a spell.
"It works!" Imoen called, gesturing with the swirling pink cloak; a kobold ahead, turning to watch her. Useful subversion— "Attack, my kobold friend!"
"Jaheira needs to get through," Prudence called; out of the corner of her eye she saw Imoen nod, saw Montaron sever a skeleton's kneecaps. Her sister would move that which she was charming; in her mind she saw that effect upon the battle—
Dead kobolds on the ground; bones in piles of skeletons subdued, some turning to dust by their destruction. Mulahey called upon his deity Cyric, and this time Xzar's attempts did not interrupt him.
It wasn't a visible attack, though darkness seemed to pass before her eyes as a sudden splash of black grease. She heard Jaheira's sharp hawklike cry, Khalid's brief stutter; then felt her own stagger, as if the casting had been released in some ever-expanding radius, black smooth cords tightening around her head and Montaron grunting, Imoen's soft gasp and Xzar's shriek.
...everyone you hate will die at your hands or everyone you love will die at your hands the immortal destruction the black illusion of the labyrinth...
She had prayed for protection on all of them and she was herself; the skeleton's sharp fingerbones lashing to her cheek. She knew of the reality of Khalid and Jaheira facing the Cyricist and of Montaron beside her, her sister and Xzar fighting the same presence, the shapes of the small bodies underfoot; of everything she could see and knew was tangible and there, any advantage she could think—
A second was far too long a distraction in a fight. She'd stepped back; the skeleton's clawing raked down across her mail; then she moved forward, pushing them back by shield.
"Out can't try that out of my head AWAY FROM ME!" Xzar cried out. He stumbled back, frightened; Imoen stood steady; and Montaron's movement had slowed and his blade pointed in the wrong direction.
It wasn't as if Montaron fought in his right mind; too slow. "Im—" Prudence called, thrusting her shield sharply forward to stop him, and her sister nodded quickly, her face pale but determined;
"You're my new best friend, right, Monty?" Imoen gestured—a blackness seemed to depart from Montaron's face, perhaps not long before he would have stabbed one of his allies. "Right, Monty?"
His blade was lowered, and he shook his head as if to clear it of strong alcohol; Prudence felt a skeleton's hand rip along the chainmail upon her forearm. Harsh danger, pain, the Cyricist—
"I'll kill ye later, kid," Montaron grunted, back to fight on their side. Jaheira and Khalid, unaffected; and at last Mulahey the Cyricist shouted out, Khalid's blade seeking joints in his plate, Jaheira's staff bludgeoning him through it.
Five skeletons; three kobolds, before them in the tunnel's mouth. If Mulahey had further kobold reinforcement he would have called upon it. He shouted again, and Jaheira's answering battlecry was fierce. Clattering bones fell around Prudence from Montaron's grim stab, separating kneecaps. Four skeletons. Leering, yellowed skulls for faces. She struck between the spinal cord's eight and ninth vertebrae of the one before her; it fell, and she could crack open the skull with the base of her shield.
"Cyric," Mulahey called, and Prudence could block away the feeling of it, fix her mind on what lay before her instead—"your darkness to hide your servant—"
She was blind. They all were; Montaron swore, Jaheira called Silvanus' name. Tangible and suffocating in its form, her nose and mouth and eyes blocked without relief as if by foul-tasting ink forced into her, black oil taken from the glands of a long-dead animal, his god's power manifested by this imprisonment.
Couldn't stop, anything but not stop— She brought shield and blade forward, where Montaron hadn't been; hit, perhaps wounded what was there, and where Mulahey would be—
"I can't see," Imoen said, sounding surprised as if she were a child once more, bewilderment and the same fear as all of them in her voice.
The least protected of course Mulahey will be there—
Prudence stepped back; the picture should have been in her mind to call upon, the spot where the rugs ended, the patterns of the brown-grey pebbles on the ground before the hollowed-out portion of the wall were Imoen and Xzar were, the distance—once Obe had given her a blindfold to fight with, though this was nothing like—Jaheira's light footfall and Khalid's slightly heavier run, scalemail clinking; bones creaking, chasing her, Montaron's cry to fix the blindness. Then something else. Darkness was a friend to those of certain deities.
She knew where her body was, and stepped forward. Her scimitar met plate metal on a high back, and not leather or wizard's robe; she sought the chain joints. A smell of filthy breath, and she whirled back and hoped that the sound of the morningstar whistling through the darkness was indeed meant for her—
She heard Imoen's gasp, the sound of movement mercifully away from her direction.
Laughter. "Tazok would hardly use you, blind human." The voice gave her a target; she lunged with arm outstretched, ready to take the reprisal. At his joints the plate was joined by weaker chain, but there was no way to aim at that—
Mulahey was close to her, moving past her attack; she flung herself back at the moment she hit thin air instead of where he ought to have been, but the spikes hit her right shoulder. Unbroken; she moved with the blow, falling away from it. She was foolishly hiding behind her shield as if it were a carapace, trying to imagine what she would do, where he would be; Khalid and Jaheira fought something, somewhere behind her. Right-handed, aggressive; sooner or later another blow—. She went left for him, quickly. Again her blade skidded across metal and she darted beyond him, running. Until Jaheira and Khalid—
"Fleeing, knight?" she heard the voice—and he thought he could toy with them, somehow, his mind unhinged as his master and that was no comfort of incapacity nor did she wish to sense more of the malevolent force behind him—and the quick sound of rattling bones and then a skeleton behind her. There were bone fingers around her neck, strangling her in her blindness. She flung herself back to where the wall ought to be—bodyweight far above skeleton despite its magical strength, smashing it to pieces—but Mulahey would—
"It's very unfair to leave us in the dark like this," she heard Xzar's voice, composed and relatively lucid; and then she saw his light. The spider eyes, twelve of them, bright and glittering in streamed, lit trails and flows across the prismed facets of the spiders who saw colours in the dark, glowing like the eyes of a pictured peacock's tail behind him.
Jaheira: "...at last he achieves something of use to the group..." she muttered, and a skeleton grasping her quickly fell. She called Silvanus' name once more, and the bark of her skin thickened and grew, covering over sap that had run from it in two wide streams.
Mulahey stood close to Xzar and his lights. "Tazok! What makes you think we don't know of him—" Prudence called, making an assumption of gender; she briefly touched her shoulder while she still could, healing the wound with a quick prayer—
"Tazok never sent you, and you won't get me—"
Mulahey barrelled toward her, and she could not retreat from him; he snarled, and quickly she knew that he'd been overconfident with them in their blindness, that he'd strength and skill Prudence only hoped was borrowed by a cleric's arts. The joint of his right elbow had been left open by Khalid, mail flapping loose, and she tried to aim for it. The half-orc growled, changed the direction of his mace mid-air—a faster trick than any of his other movements, too fast for her—and easily disarmed her. The scimitar clattered to the ground—not far from her—
Only a second's worth needed. Mulahey's eyes were red in the weird light, the Black Sun raised in his left hand. The ripped purple hanging was at her back; she tore it from its remaining rings, threw the cloth, and with a grunt Mulahey pulled it down from his face. Enough time that Jaheira threw down a skeleton assailing her, and flew forward, deer-swift. Before even that was a cry from Mulahey. When the Cyricist turned, he struck something that fell away from him; Montaron and his bloodied sword flew to the opposite wall of the cavern.
Yes. Heal him— Imoen was by Khalid, her bow drawn as if to celebrate the return of sight in the darkness, and an arrow bloomed in the chest of a kobold across the cavern. Montaron was standing, bleeding but less so than Mulahey, his blade still ready; Prudence went quickly for that, best to end the loss of blood. Deeply wounded—Montaron's toughness had to be respected as she healed him. Fewer servants remaining, the Cyricist fighting, crying phrases in an orc's language that to Prudence had the familiar cadences of a healing spell even as Jaheira's staff constantly hit.
"I will blind you in return, orqu—" she threatened.
Prudence heard rather than saw them, in her own fight; Mulahey laughed amidst his grunts of pain, and his voice commanded dark syllables even as Jaheira asked for her own boon. Xzar screamed some incoherent phrase of warning and flung himself flat on the ground moments before the effect took place. The blue fire scorched from Mulahey's dark sun, through Jaheira's barked chest, and beyond.
Lightning bolt—
It sheared through the one-fine material of the tapestries and cloth of the wall, ricocheted from the shelf and through a skeleton's ribcage. A spell that was not supposed to be cast indoors; Prudence threw herself to the ground, saw the skeleton by her unharmed by it—no reason why lightning shouldn't sear bone, protection, then—they listened to Mulahey's insane laughter, waited for the impossibly fast trajectory—Khalid was in front of Imoen, protecting her, and Jaheira lay fallen on her back and yet spoke the final phrases of her druid's incantation, hoarse-voiced but unfailing. In the split seconds of trying to keep down from the blue tide there was thought—only time to try to think, cold and spinning.
Lightning is not directly within Cyric's domain and one who can cast and protect skeletons from it works with—
Dry bones fell to the ground from Mulahey's hands and in the midst of the lightning four fresh-risen skeletons walked. The shelf was to her right, a wish that a poison brewer distilled protections he cast— Prudence swept the potions from the shelf, no time for finesse—Gorion had kept the kind for invocation trials and she knew the signs—the smell distinct (if not a secret poison) of wet hair and rusting iron, the liquid dark purple, absorption. She drank and tested empirically by standing and waiting for the turn of the path. The lightning hit as a blinding physical blow, and left her standing, shaking by static. Mulahey screamed: his eyes were black, by the insects that crawled across them and sunk down multiple legs and fangs. Jaheira's chant turned to healing upon herself.
Only four this time. He loses resources and he is blind—Prudence told herself. The weight of her blade, from a high strike, carried it through to pass through bone. She stepped through the skeletons to their master.
He was blind and she could see, this time; he'd that carapace of dented plate, that orc's strength. His heavy morningstar lashed through the air; she moved aside. The undead pursued her, and Imoen's pink wand flared a missile behind her. Xzar whispered, but that might have been simply to maintain the light.
Jaheira and Montaron had both wounded Mulahey. Prudence slashed at his upper right arm, where the platemail was dented. It was the bruising that Jaheira had left behind; in his pain she could think of Mulahey as something animalistic and his hurt madness with none of what separated sapient mind from beast, most importantly something that was trying to kill them all—
Or, to think so coldly about him, so carefully trying to hook the point of her blade between his plate's joints, to exploit Jaheira's bruises that he hadn't had the chance to heal. Better that than to react to that form of power gathered around him, mind on the fight and the undead that lurked behind. Blindly the morningstar sped again through the air, and in a reversal it was she to easily avoid. The motion turned both of them, such that it was he closer to the skeletons he had raised, closer to Khalid approaching. She could see the others easily, her back to the entrance.
Imoen's wand released another missile. It hit the back of Mulahey's neck, and he staggered forward. He shouted, his blind eyes rolling in his face, wildly gazing; and then a crossbow bolt hit, Montaron standing with the drawn weapon. Prudence sidestepped Mulahey's flailing form, and it was no great feat of swordsmanship to finish the task of bringing him to his knees—
Like that, he looked far smaller. "I yield," he said, as the point of her scimitar reached his neck below his chin, where his skin was bare above his stained gorget, and the morningstar fell from his hands; "Give you my papers, locked chest, give mercy, I yield."
"Jaheira, silence him," Prudence said quickly, and imagined that her voice did not shake.
There was triumph somewhere in him, a sick sense of rising dark bile and not before but behind her—
It was not four skeletons that he summoned at that last time.
Prudence turned in time, and her blade met the rusted sword of a skeleton striking at her neck, her shield smashing against its ribcage; but Mulahey rose and reached for her, his hands glowing a pale red, when the red hands are coming for you—
The spell tore through her body, her face melting, her organs boiling. Mulahey's eyes were wide and healed and seeing easily, ripping her from the inside and knowing exactly what he did; and he let her drop like a tattered rag. There was a red-glowing hammer, raised, to descend once on her. Her prayer patched, began, but her mind was not enough, the divine focus drained from her—
(but there was another inside her rising and her hands glowed a paler blue and it spread to the inside of her body, letting her live—)
She rolled aside, flung herself to her feet, shield discarded. It was a wild flash of instinct that she'd the knowledge that she could have repeated his red hands with that power, shaped it in the way a paladin could not; instead she healed as much as she needed to fight with—
His divine-forged hammer seemed to fly of its own will at his enemies. Her blade was ordinary metal and would be shattered by it, she remembered at the last possible moment, and instead of direct blocking stepped around him. The warhammer smashed into the wall, and where it did rocks fell with Mulahey's great strength. Like a mad bull, still inhumanly strong even in the last moments, even as Khalid moved forward. They both kept him fighting, but he did not fall again. The hammer whirled through the air like the lightning bolt he had called upon, everywhere at once, and even Khalid did not achieve more than to distract him. Cyric's borrowed power; and her own energy, stolen— His last skeletons attacked, Montaron and Jaheira holding them back.
"Some have weaknesses Monty won't like," Xzar said, playing with a dark green bottle between his hands, "and some can gain interesting weaknesses."
The rust-coloured liquid flew over Mulahey's head, plastered itself to a small area three-quarters down upon his breastplate, and began to wear through it. When it reached his skin he had only to cry a few words, and the divine energy of his god sealed the wound; but that was not the purpose of the weakness.
An angle, a clear angle and he is vulnerable. It could as well have been Khalid to do it, but he took Mulahey's attention by engagement with the hammer's striking, and Prudence withdrew slightly, carefully preparing to aim her cut for precision. It would have perhaps been more honourable had she thought of anything other than ending it, for she was tired.
The scimitar slashed through the gap Mulahey's own potion had rotted away, through the thick half-orc skin that protected the lower abdomen. He fell to the ground a second time, and she could not have spared him even if he had asked for it then; the blade sunk itself past his guts, and the hammer melted away from his hand. The bones fell; his heart stopped beating.
—
"I trust we are all yet hale," Jaheira said levelly; Imoen shrugged. Jaheira had cast a healing spell upon her, to cure her of scratches and scrapes of skeleton and kobold efforts. Her sister was well, Prudence told herself. One priest. In his own territory, granted, but he had been...
Jaheira bent over the corpse, turning it out efficiently, pressing Montaron away from her with an intimidating glare. "The holy symbol," she said, and carefully placed the black sun the size of her hand within a pouch on her belt, mercifully concealing it from view. "Berrun Ghastkill shall accept that as proof."
"More interesting boots," Xzar said, pointing. "Quite large, though."
"Not a repeat of stealing the very boots from the dead, if you please," Jaheira said. "He wears some metallic jewellery; but only of such a sort as to inspire mild greed. Components I do not care for. And there is this. A sickening thing."
She touched Mulahey's right hand, limp by recent death, holding it; and bent back the little finger, seeming to break it upon the corpse. Then she held a tarnished, dark ring, sized for a human thumb. "I know of these, and this is not of the Dark Sun by nature." She slowly reached for a flask hanging from her belt; she chanted, pouring water upon the ring, praying to Silvanus. The filth upon it washed away, and below it was yellow-coloured metal set with a green, flowerlike crystal, at the ring's centre a miniscule flash of brilliant red. "I purify it from its twisted use. These devices increase the mind and soul's capacity to hold divine strength, though not of my deity."
She looked in Prudence's direction. "You would hardly benefit from it as much as a cleric focused upon her calling; but Sune sponsors more paladins than she does druids. Use it."
Sune's ring flew through the air at her; it was rather pretty, but Prudence placed it in a pouch for the time being.
...Beauty and love are more than skin deep, based upon care for others; follow your heart to your true destination; perform a loving act each day, and seek to awaken love in others... The truest loves were those that faced the test of time and those which sought common good above individual longing, Prudence thought in patterns of dogma. Still in Mulahey's lair, it was not yet over.
"Magic ring of the goddess of love and beauty, Prune?" Imoen said, sanguine humour slowly returning to her voice. "Y' might want to get all those unsightly boils looked at, I'm just saying." Prudence rubbed gloved fingers along her chin, at Mulahey's damage; and looked, smiling, at her sister.
"Im, could you and Khalid check that middle tunnel, the dark one?" Prudence said. No enemies had come from it, but it might still be of interest; and she was sure that Khalid could watch over Imoen, and Imoen use her eye for traps. "Jaheira, it was damp near the upper tunnel; would you check that? And..." She looked at Montaron. "What did Mulahey leave in here?"
"Wizard, with me," Jaheira said, "there was unnatural magic in this place." She could trust that Jaheira wouldn't harm him.
"If you wish," Prudence said, "we have to make sure this cave is cleared; if anything happens call..."
"Hardly worth my time. After you and your blinding insects?" Xzar said; he scooped several bones from the ground, contentedly enough, and trailed after Jaheira's uncompromising figure.
Mulahey's footprints were wider and slightly longer than her own boots; Prudence stepped carefully in the irregular prints left on his rugs, where the way would not be trapped by whatever paranoid devices Cyricists habitually placed in their dwellings. A seat she could not refer to otherwise than as a throne, gilded, carved. Was it some unknown entrance or magic that he had transported these false luxuries by? The stench in the air testified to some form of alchemy; there ought to be some place here used for the making of his potions. There was a waste pit at the back, the smell of it worsened by all the other substances it mixed with; an obvious chest, a broken table. A wide purple hanging of heavily embroidered material was spread across one wall, and in his cautious progress through Mulahey's quarters Montaron stopped to pull it down.
Dirty crucibles and flasks lay beyond it; a waft of strong sulphur hit her like a wave dropping on her face; paraphernalia of potion-making, shafts of arrows to be altered.
"Best leave this to the mage," Montaron said impatiently. Dark green flasks of the same irregular kind as those in the kobolds' possession lay empty on the rough workbench. He went on, and severed a thin tripwire; cut through a rug not marked by footfalls, and manipulated something below it with a dagger. She saw him smile, approaching the chest. She felt the interest herself, of whatever Mulahey chose to keep locked up in this place; information of this Tazok, those it seemed had sent him upon this plot. (Now he was gone, she could say she doubted their selection practices and try to sound nonchalant about it.) A set of triple locks of apparent complication bound the thick metal band about the sturdy, long chest; she would not have liked to move it on her own.
"Think we can watch hawklike, do we?" Montaron said, sparing her a glance of—well, hostility relatively mild for him, she supposed.
"I'd the same for Imoen," Prudence declared. Quick-fingered rogues. She looked down at the metallic device not far from the chest, some sort of cross between a pipe and a lamp, a dark residue within a glass bulb. Scholars talked sometimes of consciousness-altering substances. The smell of the waste pit hit her again. "It's not possible he kept anything there?" A hiding place nobody would want to examine.
"Ye can go down first," Montaron said. Prudence looked into it—was that blood? What was that dark shape? The midden was chaotically arranged, with no sign of that any normal method had been used to lessen the stench; a torn, scaled body was uppermost amongst its contents. She could see no signs of crevasses along the sides of the dank pit, and even one like Mulahey would not wish to dig amongst that waste. There was a faint hissing sound from the chest; Montaron stepped back, eyeing it. To her eyes the fastenings of it were unchanged.
"A trap?" she said; she and Imoen had heard tales from Winthrop of poisoned bolts, even fireballs materialising from wrongly opened hiding places...
"Not any more. Can't expect a god-botherer to craft something right," Montaron said, but his shoulders dropped slightly as though in relief as he returned to prying the chest open. Prudence watched him carefully. It was plain Jaheira had not trusted that the two of them together would not get the better of her in some way; likeable or not, their task with Nashkel was done.
"Do you have plans after this?" she said.
"Yep. And they're less stupid than follow-after-the-idiot-paladin. Even the wizard's not as much a fool as all that," Montaron said; he exchanged tools in his hands, working two greased pieces of metal into the lock's first part.
She'd had to spare someone claiming to surrender; and then he'd gone on to attack them further, because sometimes scorpions didn't change their natures. "Mulahey talked," Prudence said. "If we'd been able to take him alive, he'd have had more to say."
"Oh, fancy interrogation practices," Montaron said. "Bit on the edge for your type, isn't it?"
"Not that," she said firmly—in Candlekeep, exposed to nothing of the sort; "people talk because it's in their nature to do so." She deliberately did not add, A case in point, or Lunatics in particular. "They lie too, but under any circumstance."
"Yer green enough that I'm shocked you're not another druid." Montaron's lockpicks moved deftly; she heard the slight noise of metal scraping on metal.
"Less so than I was," Prudence said; the half-orc's blood was spread across her hauberk. Principle or not, it would have been her fault if Mulahey had killed any one of them in his last rampage. There was always another possibility, if one only thought in time; could have made a cut to the throat subtle enough to only stop speech, if she'd known how to do that on a half-orc; tried to break the jaw with a kick...
"Expect a bloody pat on the back for doing your job and laying-some-hands-on-me?" Montaron said. He swore at the lock.
No more than you for getting charmed—no, that would have been unfair, and less than useful. "The job's done. Analysis is relevant only so far."
A quick glare up at her, his eyebrows beetling together and his face bitter; "Ye be as irritating as the wizard by times! Don't try nothing and keep yer mouth shut."
She shrugged, her hands at her waist. One wouldn't call his hostility bluster with nothing to it, for he was capable; but with insults filtered and appeals to pragmatism, she thought that latter quality made him not ill company. After a second Montaron looked down at the lock once more.
"None of my concern when ye die of most honourable stupidity, as long as I'm not around to be dragged down by it," he said, the dire prediction supplying him an improved mood.
There were shouts behind, interrupting. Imoen's voice, raised high:
"Jaheira! Pru! Over here!"
"Come on," Prudence said; reluctantly or not, Montaron ran beside her, drawing his sword, and they returned to where Imoen called to them—
A pale-faced elf leaned down between Imoen and Khalid, his arms supported by a shoulder apiece; smeared by injury and by the mud of this place, his black eyes wide and unfocused. From the opposite direction Jaheira came jogging.
"So we found this elf up there and he needs healing," Imoen was saying, "I picked all the locks on his chains all by myself—"
Jaheira stepped forward.
—
I did not expect to see stars again.
The ground was more arid and dry-stoned than it had a right to be, from the dampness of that foul prison. He would rather not think upon that.
Far above him in the sky's blue-black darkness were the serene prismatics of Mystra's spray, the fan-shaped nebula of a gathering of stars yet uncounted by elvish or gnomish arts. Before he had entered underground, it had been still in retreat; it was the month of Mirtul, and in the uncaring seasons the patterns rose and fell in the skies independent of any mortal action. Humans claimed it was a sign of the goddess, that magics pleased her; that he doubted. Above there was nothing but astronomical phenomena to which majesty pitiful mortal activities could never matter. It was something of a comfort to him. There was Auranamn, the Sentinel, the warrior formed by nine blazing stars; the pentamerous string of Corellon's Tears; the blue light of Deep Sashelas and its companions Tilvadar and Tambaun; Y'landrothiel and its calm guidance to travellers; Y'tellarian in its cold grey distance, faint to even an elven naked eye. Beyond him their endless passage of order and light through the dark sky had begun far before his life, and would continue long after his inevitable death.
His Moonblade had not left his hands since he had reclaimed it, though its light was dampened by the need to avoid undesired observation. Monsters lurked in these lands, one of the reasons for his sending; humanoid banditry upon the roads. Kobolds in the dark— Certainly he had enough of those. The motley group would shortly return to Emerson's entrance to rid the mines of the remnants of the Cyricist's foul worshippers; for all the small use he would be, perhaps he would follow, or perhaps never return to that darkness again. His mind shied away from the thought of it and he tried to breathe deeply in the air relatively without pollution.
He sat at the bank of the small stream, the glimmer of the banked campfire but a short distance away, by his wishes alone. The stream was a trickle of water through dry ground, clean enough that it had been better than no attempt at all to wash some of the filth from his body, his matted hair, his robes largely beyond repair. He was weak and starved enough that no healing spell could have fully restored him; but able at least to walk by himself, to sit to catch his breath. They had taken him through the secret exit on his instructions to below the sky; after finding himself free at last it would have been unbearable to be forced to remain in that underworld. The hilt of his blade was smooth and cool in his right hand, protected from contamination by its nature, the same blade he had held at the beginning of his journey.
I've seen blades like that go fer thousands of gold! the vaguely repellent halfling had voiced, with the larcenous intent of one who understood not the futility of gold-grubbing. Don't be foolish, Montaron; Mae govannen, ithil'ohtar, the taller human girl had mangled in Xan's language, Greetings, moonfighter. Very likely four out of the ten words the human knew of it, the remaining six being Please forgive you the bad speaking. She sat in the darkness, by his vision cleansing her armour. She had helped the half-elven woman to heal him, waiting upon her instructions and drawing from a smaller degree of power, a green-flowered ring on her right hand. He supposed she had spared her own face for it, dark brown features gravely marred for the time being upon the right side of her flat cheek and strong line of the chin.
The two half-elves, she forceful, he diffident; that halfling; and three humans he thought of as almost painfully young. The red-haired human adolescent unfastening his chains, cheerily boasting of it, chirping almost without end. Short and lithe, fine-featured for a human, and pestering him with exuberant questions on his blade. More pleasant than the necromancer's two questions of magic, both with implications he considered nothing short of frightening. Humans are unable to understand the Weave in their short lives, he had been taught, and it was true they had not the time to devote to a full and proper study; and yet the children in mage's robe and armour both called to mind other proverbs upon humans, That in their lifespan they are driven to act, and act with passion; that without the time to meditate they will dash in headlong, and therefore achieve something that resembles ambition, in paths most Tel'Quessir will never choose. The young mage's face was a mask of writhing black tattoos below wild fawn-coloured hair, his behaviour a display of the manic energy of the human pushed to madness, his movements swift and enthused. Xan had nothing against any of his rescuers, not even the halfling; but though the human's ability had clearly not yet strengthened into that of mages older than he, there was that in the unexpected ways he spoke of the Weave that gave him pause to wonder. The human girl of the official profession of suicide-monger, dark-clad and long-limbed as a gangling spider, walking with the slight awkwardness of height only recently gained. It was one of her tunics he wore in place of his rags, over breeches belonging to the male half-elf, belted at the waist with a ridiculously pink sash of the younger girl; halfway to his knees, loose-fitting, a dark grey weave notable more for durability than quality. He knew little of the inheritances of humans but he doubted a strong blood tie between her and the girl she called sister. Dark in the manner of richly complexioned human rather than corrupted drow, taller in length and stronger in feature, and with tight-curled hair twisted to beaded braids below her helm; Imoen was manifestly freckled where she was not pale, short, and her red hair straight along her shoulders.
"Imoen and I are independents," she was willing to frankly explain, "I suppose mercenaries. Jaheira and Khalid are friends of my late father, and Montaron and Xzar we met upon the road." Her voice reminded him of the sort of careful tones an enchanter was taught to use, a low alto pitch that he listened to despite his own knowledge; calm and convincing. He hadn't missed the dynamic, after his healing had given some ability to pay attention: the half-elves as one group, the human and the halfling as a second, and the human women the typical class of would-be young adventurers. The latter two being the only ones openly admitting to group affiliation.
"I am Xan of Evereska, a Greycloak sent to investigate the strange events of this area. For which group do you choose to act?"
"Mayor Berrun Ghastkill offers a reward," the woman Jaheira said after a pause; "we choose to investigate for the good of the region."
"Altruists," the halfling chimed in, unconvincingly; and, "Try not to be so aggravating, Montaron—a new friend, isn't he?" the necromancer said, smiling widely.
"In my official investigation—" Most importantly there was the moonblade hidden in the chest; and secondary to that were scraps of his own papers, his own magics, not defaced entirely by the beast; and the correspondence of the foul creature, much of which he had himself scribed. "I came here; I wrote myself what the Cyricist had prepared to send to his fellow conspirators; I have more understanding of their encodings than any other—"
"An official Greycloak," Prudence said reflectively, the voice determinative, "Jaheira, Xan's right; the papers ought to be his."
Some respect for law and order. The spells he could learn once more, his duty of investigation continued, however hopeless its apparent end. By obligation of his liberty he supposed he would aid the bedraggled group.
He rose from his solitary place by the stream, slowly, his footing not yet steady to walk without dragging by kobolds. Reverie or sleep, whichever he was capable of entering.
The paladin and the male half-elf were upright, undertaking some form of exercise without their armour. In the patterns of a false fight that lanky awkwardness and impression of all elbows-and-corners was shed from her, movements reasonably adept in their fluidity. She hailed him with a greeting, and again Xan noted the fatal quality of compulsion to hearken to that voice; the mark upon her of the ability to call others to suicide through following her. Touched by that which she swore fidelity to, even unto foolish death.
"Heya, Xan!" the younger girl called, playing with the tools of her larcenous trade in her hands; it was true that she had used it to aid him. He spoke vague civility in reply.
Faint green light shone from the pages of the necromancer's spellbook, levitated to open itself in front of him; frivolous, Xan considered. Cantrips for mundane purposes were sometimes useful, but never to excess.
"Greetings, fellow caster!" The direction of the necromancer's glance upwards from his book changed, briefly, to the pair sparring behind; then his madcap gaze met Xan's. "I see enough of it gathered about you; an elf, an enchanter, intricately spun; the shattered threads grow back to repair themselves, subtle but present."
"I would beg to be spared divinational deranged ramblings," Xan replied; "and you are no diviner in any case." He could understand why the halfling spoke of the human mage as an annoyance; what he said was vague sounds that anyone could have constructed to something resembling an interpretation.
"It's open; the stars are rocks of scarlet ice and blue fire; the stars are astral giant mice weaving cosmic nests—and yet that is neither yours nor my domain, really; enchantment, your own replaced spells..." He looked up with open curiosity.
"Are none whatsoever to do with you. We are of entirely different school and undoubtedly theory of practice," Xan said in rebuke.
"Then—well, I know your school's spell of charming, a version of it." A scroll within the pages of the spellbook had runes, human-written but legible as something he had seen before, turned to his viewing. Xan gave a glance to it; inscribed by a madman, but yet with a connection to the Weave, a reminder of what he had mastered several decades ago. He did not look away. "It makes people very boring, I understand that; and I have that one of sleep of the school; in both there's that interesting double turning," the necromancer said. A second page, and other runes halfway recognisable. "It's as clear as an orbit in honey circling the victims, at least as far as the concept of it, woven and sustained; the steps are admirable and perhaps a holding of the verbal component at the magnification point..."
"A reminder," Xan said. "I imagine that's some understanding of the theory."
"Necromancy's more fun, yes. In daisy chain experiments I've come to believe it's because things used to be alive and thinking so the currents of one's negative will store more readily within them; a fine skewer instead of a tapestry needle. As complicated, but dead people are more predictable," Xzar said. "I've another version in writing, it's transfigured to exchange volume for length at the consumption moment of the sleep sand, or rose petals if one is of a sort to traffic with such odd things. Softer, but blunter. Is it close to one you know?"
"Not very close," Xan said, though in part the lines upon the page did resemble that which he had mastered. That the other mage understood the purpose of the step was not particularly flawed... But he spoke of Xan's school as a critical listener to music he practised little of himself. Xan tore himself away from trying to read from the book; there was no point to beginning to recommence his studies in this fashion. "Leave me be. I shall collapse of exhaustion before I fall of anything else."
"I can do that," the human said, folding away his book with quick motion. "But I was trying to be nice, only telling you about the good invisible things and talking of the common spells; I've heard it's useful. Is it?"
Apparently he had just tolerated the young necromancer's version of an exchange of social courtesies. Xan sighed. "All peoples give undeserved adulation to meaningless interpersonal rituals; a futility no race has yet avoided," he explained to the socially inept. "It's all pointless."
"I suppose you ought to know," Xzar said, nodding. "Never mind. Off you go and pretend to be dead now."
Sooner or later they would all be, Xan reflected; he sat on the lent bedroll. He closed his eyes and wished for the pretence of oblivion in sleep, lest the images of that darkness of the mines rise again in reverie.
—