A half-buzzing feeling in his innards, like he was disobeying the binding, but it faded keeping his mind on what Xzar had said of Bodhi's meaning. Ways to sneak past it. He'd never been one for obedience.

The Bhaalspawn was coming; best keep ahead. The walls twisted and turned as crazy as anything the mad mage could patchwork up. Montaron had heard tales of wizards who could do that inside your head, pack you away to endless corridors until you solved them or died from it. Gaping-toothed faces of monsters screamed from the walls of peeling paint, colours faded like ghosts. Unfinished zigzag staircases that never went anywhere, false doors that couldn't be opened, alcoves that rose at odd angles and were invisible from the halls. Dust floated in the air and faint lights came from no source he could spot, and in different parts of the place faded out again with no rhyme or reason for it. Their boots left tracks on the dirty floors.

"Follow the left wall is the rule in the Underdark," the drow said, losing breath in her run. "That undead—that undead rothe! The mage openly flirts with the slattern, your eyes never leave her overstuffed fat chest—a disgusting sight. I'd slip poison in her goblet of blood if not for the contract. You gape and drool over her."

"'S not true," Montaron said, "height fixes things that way. Do a casting, woman—can't have ye falling behind." There were enough pictures of monsters, like warnings; but so far only some goblins had jumped out at them from an alcove. He'd finished them.

"Shar, grant me power—and grant me sight of the way," Viconia said, blinking at the circling walls. She straightened up, walking faster. "I know your height, pathetic male. It has points of convenience."

"Or, doesn't matter if you're both lying down," Montaron said. He tapped a wall done in plain green. "This one's hollow..."

"And Shar tells me a path extends beyond it," Viconia said. They pulled it open, stepped into the darkness behind it—

Yellow stripes hit him and danced inside him, and where he couldn't tell friend from foe Montaron tended to rush forward and stab whatever bled. He tasted acid blood, something falling apart wetly; heard screaming he didn't understand. He killed something—slit into plates of heavy stuff and felt the blood soak his hands. Something smelled of burning.

When he came back to himself, he held his blade pressed to smooth dark flesh, and behind him a hand reached down to wrap cool fingers around his throat. He knew the smell of the dead: huge insect-monsters that made ye forget everything. His head ached like someone'd been stirring teaspoons inside his skull and drinking the contents. The drow's breathing echoed twice over.

"Heethir'ku," Viconia said. And—

"Doppelganger," Viconia said.

"My dagger is against your spine," the drow he threatened said.

"My blade's back on ye," Montaron said, but it hadn't been him who said it.

"Fool. You were confused by the umber hulks," Viconia said. "My fires of Shar took down one of them."

"Mine. You blaspheme Shar, shapeshifter! Turn to your true form."

Fool mage-tests. Two doppelgangers, two of him and the drow, foul shape-shifters he'd seen once in Zhentil Keep; or it could be three doppelgangers and he the only real one. That's what he'd have done: thief's simple trick, have three nut shells and let the mark think that the ball was under one when it was under none. Were these fool mageries bright enough for that?

"Let me go, wench," he swore. "We could beat two shapeshifters without trying. Don't threaten me."

"Release me first," one of her complained. "I cannot trust that you are not. I will cast my poison spell below your skin, shapeshifter." The hand tightened on his neck.

Turn and stab the one behind before she cast her spell, or stab into the one in front of him. The one in his shape had the same one covered; Viconia threatened him back. Bluff or double-bluff; let them untangle themselves and he'd outfight the freak in his shape, but she'd like as not need time to get off a casting.

"I am the proper one," breathed the one who held his throat. "Fight with me and I'll..." She finished with whispering interesting examples of things to do, things they'd already done.

"Sakphul, I swear I'll rip your throat out with a dull blade," the one in front of him said, "and blind your eyes with a spell from Lady Shar and burn you even more than the wael—"

He stabbed backward. The shapeshifter's silver blood fell from a deep cut in its wrist and he wrenched the clawed hand away from his throat. The true Sharran bled from her neck, but she stabbed the doppelganger deep with a small hidden blade she'd asked him to obtain for her, and its grey hands shifted to their natural weaponry. He pulled as strong as he could on the bleeding wrist and sliced into the shapeshifter's neck, deep enough that even it couldn't fix a head half off. Viconia was a good distraction for the one she fought, if nothing better, and he stabbed it in the back to finish it off.

"They reached inside our heads," she said, angry, and then started a casting. It settled over his head like the confusions before he'd time to object, but it was shield instead of attack. "One test complete. When did you realise it was me, little man?"

"The death threats," Montaron said honestly, "you were nastier than the shifter."

"And you marginally more cunning than the other," the drow said. She healed herself; and stepped onward.

Bull-men had come roaring out of the passageways, like the mad mage had named, seven-foot tall axe wielders running round without britches. They were tough; but better them than mind magic, and each time he slit the hamstrings and brought one down to his height the blood managed to improve his mood. The drow's spell froze a few of them in place at once, all ripe for the pickings. Almost too easy. They rounded a corner and the stench of undead came up like rotten fruit.

"Turn..." Viconia prayed. "I have more power now. Shar, my lady..."

Fast-moving ghouls in tatters of mage's robes, as if they'd been crazy enough to never escape this place. Montaron might have noticed that the floor's patterning was drawn like a gate if he hadn't been busy fighting them. Some of them had old spells: acid hit his right shoulder and ate into the muscles of the arm. Too many of them. Viconia cried to her goddess and black fire wove into them. He changed hands for his blade and moved as fast as he could, for it was the only hope. Cut off rotting kneecaps and let them shamble over each other, forget the burning pain and defy the cold claws that tried to command him to stay permanently still. A ghoul lurched past him and to Viconia, stopping her casting, and she drew mace and fought it when her holy symbol raised to it didn't stop it. He sliced off a ghoul's hand casting for more acid, and on the floor it boiled away into green liquid. The flesh he touched at the end of his dagger slipped and slid over his skin like sewer mud. The ghouls reached for him, wounding him. Let them try, curse it.

"—The rivers run red—"

Pale fluid gushed from the undead. In the end he stood above the dead not moving any more, Viconia above her own. He needed a healing casting or a few, for they'd no time to rest. The red dripped from him, and the acid burned like Chessentan fire. The healing spell started to come at last. Then the gate opened below their feet and took them elsewhere.

He ran down a narrow hall of dry dusty ghosts, wishing for a healing potion. Wasn't myself, a long-dead crazy mage whispered. They all died in my experiment and I wasn't sorry, a second voice none too different from the mad wizard they were acquainted with. Too much happened and they broke me in the end, from a third robed ghost that disappeared when he turned his head to stare directly at it.

Going too fast, he thought. Newborn cully's mistake to give in to the enemy's traps. Mage-ghosts didn't matter to him.

I could not face the monster inside me and I shattered, another whined. Ye took what ye had and went with it, not stood around snivelling even after undeath.

Skindancers rising fleshless in the dead of the night. Harpers beating and torturing. Zhentilar marching into the Falls and reaving all they found there.

Ancient history, ancient as the drow—

She was ahead, panting her way through her share of ghosts. "Faern," she spat, "only dead faern—by Shar, disappear—" Some seemed to flicker away from her, a little. Then she got to that healing spell.

"We—started ahead of the Bhaalspawn," she said, tired-sounding. "How much more? Surely speed is of the essence. To—gain all control above being controlled, for some of the drow way serves well enough still..." She clenched her fists.

"I'll toil enough to feed my blade," Montaron said, though he thought she aimed a touch too high, and raised a plank of the floor for the disarming of a metal plate below that had it unsettled. He'd lost direction, turned around and about, but it felt like they headed upright, and the drow prayed and nodded where he went in the winding halls. Up to air away from Spellhold's suffocating walls and the fecking bloodsuckers.

This time the darkness came piece by piece in on them, soaking into hexagonal tiles on the walls and floors and turning where they walked to dark grey, and in their more-than-human sight they did not see the descent of the mage's night that blinded everything until too late.

Couldn't see his own hands; and couldn't feel the floor below. He spoke into the night and none answered back. Paced forward once, though ye shouldn't where the tiling and tripwires weren't known. Couldn't tell time passing, couldn't tell sight or feeling or hearing. Ye could lose a mind easily in here. A test the mad wizard couldn't have passed. Montaron turned his head back and forth, and clenched his hands and couldn't feel his own skin. Like clinging to a rope off the end of a black Keep tower, wet rain slicking the stones, and let go and plummeting to the ground, nothing to hold to. Fingernails scraped bloody against the sides of it and gargoyles' heads bruising the skull while you fell past. He remembered well enough. Held on to sanity in the dark.

He stepped forward again and again, for all there was no sign of direction to follow, and started to see things out of the darkness. A white translucent pointy-ear man, in chainmail and drawing an odd blade—drow, he reckoned, slightly shorter than Viconia.

"Valas," Viconia's voice cried out, "Valas, in this dark here, come back to me."

He answered her in drow tongue, and then she replied in the same language. This Valas had the same kind of shape as her, something in stance and long forehead and in-pointing cheekbones on his face. Valas raised his sword and cast some sort of false spell around his off hand, and then the drow shook and changed his shape. There was nothing he could do to a ghost; Montaron watched it happen. The lower half of the man fell off, legs in a bloodied heap below him, and then out of the drow's waist eight spider legs came down from him. The drow's teeth grew to fangs and the furred legs reared and bucked.

"Viconia, z'hann, z'hann—" the spider-drow shouted and screamed out of a spider-mouth, his eyes multiplying to eight in bubbling flesh on his forehead. "Nin!"

Viconia could be heard panting, half-sobbing, as if she ran exhausted. The spider-drow's magic flared white as his ghost-shape; invisible blades tore him bloody but he stood. An infant cried in the distance loud enough to set Montaron's teeth on edge.

"I face these tests," Viconia said viciously. "—You may show me your next shadow, for I am not bowed before that vision!" Then she went quiet again.

Nightmares. Set the mad mage here and he'd come up with worse, a maze of all the things he was in the dark ye couldn't manage to escape from. A decade or four ago Daggerfalls was the city of Daggerdale, Montaron could recall, mining and farming despite the name, a slum district of commonborn hin who lived in filth. All helpless enough when the Zhentilar marched in and killed to amuse themselves, they hid for a while but it were no use. If he'd not slit Gemara's throat worse would've happened to her, useless folk for looking after themselves. Time was later he'd been picked up by the Zhents himself for a hireling, and if they hadn't put him off by sending him south with the mad mage he'd not be here to start with. Ye were better off alone.

And Viconia started talking again, screaming. "Don't bury me! I shall not be in the ground! Iblith, zatoasten, waelen, qualla! Dorn elgg ir, dorn elgg ir—"

Too dark. There'd be ghosts here for him calling his name too. Marks he'd killed, ex-comrades he'd stabbed in the back. Every last bit that he wasn't fool enough to let into his nightmares when he'd a chance to rest.

Tested mages here for sanity, every last bit of what their mad minds dragged up. Montaron could remember his just the same, elfblooded girl with dirty copper hair crying, first time he killed a man in a fight and slid the dagger across a throat, cutting down a Flaming Fist from behind, a crossbow bolt to a woman's skull and feeling nothing of it, nothing at all for killing the bastards before they got to you first. The drow let herself live through her troubles.

It pulsed and buzzed like a gnome device, and two cords ran into it. Then he stopped Viconia's screams short.

The floor was plain wood and the room couldn't have been more than ten feet by ten. He'd pulled two wires out of a broken orb that hung on the walls, dead and grey and dirty-glassed. Viconia blinked, standing alone in the centre with her hands raised. They could see at last.

"What foolish thing did you do—pathetic male—"

"Walked 'till I felt something real," Montaron said, "and ended it. No point to putting yourself through that kobold crap."

"The test—the test was to remember. Valas—" she repeated. "My brother Valas. I had a brother called Valas. He—"

"Let ye flee the Underdark? I'm not stupid enough not to piece it together." Brother; they thought of men as the weak ones down there, instead of little girls.

"I did not realise you overheard." She stamped a foot. "This place—" Other orbs hung on the walls, and some still pulsed with light and other things inside them. There were switches beside them.

She was getting ideas. She rubbed a sleeve across the streaked glass of one, and inside it like a crystal ball were pictures of the asylum in full, dancing ghosts asking for guardians and the Shadow Thieves dead in jars and madmen locked in cells and the group of adventurers below, cutting their way through furred monsters. The mad mage alone, sitting still in a corner. "This is how they control," Viconia said. "This place is the asylum's power. From here—Shar, show me the way to seize the power!"

He took apart the panels of the wall, wires and switches and grinding gears like gnome-work. And a map, etched into one of the underside of the panels; runed in some mage-tongue neither of them could read, but the switch-gears were part of the maze and changed things around. One move, and that locked the mad wizard away where he couldn't make trouble. Viconia flung herself at the orbs, whispering of what she wanted to do to the bloodsuckers and general run of all, praying for divinations.

"This one— How else to find out but by testing?" she said, and flipped a switch grinning like a madwoman. "Ah, the lights, I see! High as possible then; for the burning! If it is hot enough to make flesh crinkle black, perhaps for the Lady of Night—and this one makes floors shake fit to produce earthquakes!"

"Could ye—" Montaron had hit the opposite wall, the floor still shaking; and he looked up with despair at the drow going among the orbs.

"This unlocks the cells of the mad inmates—let them roam! This does nothing—change it to full for what torments it brings! Merely waves of air blowing pages down in the mage's study—how tedious. He may have started to seek us. What power shall the next give me? Ah—a release of a devourer, umber hulk, eye tyrant, troll—to wreak havoc! This for scorching flames across the floor! This for sudden cold and ice spears! And this—for the emotions. Manipulation—turn one way and the emotion is despair, I can feel Shar's black night and the grave pressing in on me—"

Ye might as well give up, for— That was like that gloomy elf in Nashkel, mage-fooling, forget it and tell the drow to give it up—no, for the mage in the skin mask had already started to fight back. Viconia pressed a dial and a jet of flame spouted from the jar room's walls.

"Despair. I revel in it, for it is Shar's. Seal this room with adamant. Or this—it must be anger. Burning with irrational sentiment and blazing with unconsidered actions. Perfect for the case we are in; turning it high for the Bhaalspawn, for the vampires, for the foolish masked mage himself, may he simply—blast—" The light that slipped through the crystal ball was pure white and blazing, and Montaron still remembered to fear the one with the skin mask. "Turn this place apart at my will, for I am mistress here!"

Killing rages. Montaron spent most of his time hating the living and undead annoying and looking forward to bloodshed; he didn't trust his lifespan for mad slaying like the skin-dancers would have had it, barbarian killers who got themselves killed like that Shar-Teel wench. Viconia pulled the lever for another earthquake session, and the room's jolt slammed his skull against the back again. "A true and killing wrath," the Sharran repeated, triumphant, "for the son of Bhaal—"

The crystal ball gave visions of the asylum. Out of Benrulon's half-hin shape there came a crimson giant red in scales and golden of eye, obsidian teeth and claws reaching for and tearing apart one of the tiny companions by him, the giant tall as a mage's tower and far above ants scattered around it. And then Viconia's manipulations added a second nightmare, from the human girl in pink another monster, scaled and spiked and equally inhuman. It ran and ripped apart walls toward the bloodsuckers who had tormented it, to the mage of the jars himself; and in flames and earthquake Spellhold asylum tilted back and forth as if the winds would push it from the cliff itself. The earthquake never stopped, and the drow thrust her hand inside the bodies of the orbs and laughed as if it was all under her power.

His skull crashed heavily against a lever while purple lightning seemed to dance and fill the room, and then for a while he didn't know anything at all.

—