The sands of the arena flowed under their feet and a bunch of tall inhuman yellow-skinned folk faced them across the way. Xzar flung a fireball quick, and then two battles started at the same time.

Five of 'em, drawing swords and chanting spells to heal their burns and shield against more. Montaron started forward with Qilue for them. She fought like a drow, carrying a globe of darkness to blind their eyes; he went for kidneys in place of tendons, for Adalon's transmutation held after all this time. He stood by Qilue's back and they let the bastards try taking them.

"By Phaere!" Solaufein cried out, and hissing snakes—illusions, for one or two of the jet black creatures lapped over each other—roiled and twisted through the air and along the sands.

"The necromantic entrails see all! Be judged by all that is effluvious and rust!" Thorns of ice sparked from Xzar's hands. Sparkly, pretty, and mostly useless. One of the swordsmen came in for a lunge. It would've gone into Qilue's back, and a second one was going for him from the right. 'Twas why he didn't like having fools to look after in a fight, though at that moment Qilue managed to sink her sword into the collarbone and down, making the enemy fall and bloody the sands. Montaron held off both swords after him, his reach not enough to get in close just yet. Their silvery blades spat sparks, and that too ought to make the squidfolk sit up and take notice. He let them glance bright off his short swords.

"—The torutre of the priestesses! The whim of the Spider Queen! The moon above the world of Toril!" Solaufein howled out. Grey fog spewed from his hands and warped itself into monstrous shapes. Xzar threw down a large bone between them and the wailing shape of a banshee appeared from it, all hair and void eyes.

"For all that is cognisant and malevolent, I fight!" A black panther sped from Solaufein's hands to leap for throats.

"—Now, male, sweep behind me!" Qilue said. A crossbow bolt hit the shoulder of another of the enemy group and Viconia stepped back from the weapon's recoil. 'Twas only in stories that one bolt couldn't bring some fool hero down. The trueborn drow leapt up in the air in the fighting style best known as the one practised by idiot bards that turned all fights to last a few seconds because of getting messily killed. She drew eyes by the lightness of the jump and turned a double somersault in the air in fancy tricks, and while the enemy by her raised his sword to get her easily at the end of it, Montaron went under and got him between the ribs. Qilue landed without flaw and twirled gracefully and inefficiently to lunge forward once more.

Three down. Something like an acid arrow hit him painfully in the back. One of the two left standing cast spells. He stepped by one on the ground that clutched his wound and took on the caster with enough speed to distract the attention. Xzar and Solaufein fought their mage tricks for the squidmouth crowd and Viconia waited though she could have aimed another bolt.

"Moon above a foreign bank! Silver inlaid patins in skies above fair trees!" Solaufein spread out a forest of black thorns wide across the sands that strangled the banshee in their claws.

"Worms eat you! Taste xyster injustice!" A lot of scraping-knives came from thin air and flung themselves at the drow mage, who sidestepped some in acrobatics as bad as Qilue's and fought the others with blade. "They're bone-scrapers, by the way."

The yellow-skinned caster wasn't bad in her way. Montaron had swept his blades wide on purpose, like some fool showoff assassin, but she tired. She might've wept for her companions; she tried to be brave but any squidmouth would see that it was a false fight. He brought her down to the grey sands, and behind him Qilue finished her own last one.

Squidmouths weren't interrupting them yet. He and Qilue turned on each other, and of all things the drow seemed to like the play-fighting. Strong and she knew all the dirty tricks, concealed dagger picked up from one of the dead and shoved into her bracers, kicking sand in his face. Moved with twirls and jumps and tricks that any circus wirewalker would've paid in gold to learn. Solaufein panted as if his magery was starting to run out; he made golden creatures out of illusions that looked like kid's drawings of lions. Montaron stepped back and the duel with Qilue drew closer to the mad mage. Viconia chanted something he recognised as the casting for strength and speed.

The spell-throwing had been getting closer to the edges of the squidmouth bubble, and then Montaron felt the mad mage's new casting prickle into his skin as if he was trying to pull the drow skin off by flaying. The dragon's illusion was powerful—and made the thought of taking her out for revenge shiver the base of his spine, but that wouldn't help them now. Then his drow's shape went away from his body and stayed on his skin all the same, and Qilue came in low with a slash to his feet. He jumped up instead of starting back, too flashy, and went in to beat her reach and stab to her guts.

The transmuted images of him and the mad mage rose up like giants. He saw himself inside the squidmouths' bubble itself, fighting, and the long shades of him and Xzar reached out as if they'd already broken through it. They could see all of him five times the size, and not in his own shape he couldn't care less.

it was an accident and he'd say so afterward if anyone asked. Qilue came down from one of her fancy tricks and set foot on a fallen helmet, and when she fell she landed on his blade. Solaufein screamed out for her and then had the sense to weave it into a mourning chant that rang out like he was casting one of Eilistraee's spells. The warrior-drow was still good enough to get out of the way and held her guts together with her left hand to fight with her right. Blood soaked wet through her dark armour and she stood her ground but did no more.

Xzar started the mage-drow's casting against squidmouth powers and they must have reckoned that the twenty-foot shape of him had already broken through the shield. Montaron distantly saw a big squidmouth stand up in the seats and move, and it fought back. And its mindblast was good enough to send shatters through the shield; and then the arena audience saw good enough cause to join in.

"For Shar above all others, lil alurl!" Viconia screamed, her face twisted into something not far from what the mad asylum had given her. "Valas, burial, yochlol of the spider, Shar! Know my loss!"

It was a hit on the shield from the inside and the squidmouths swayed to drain it from her. There were clear holes in it now. Montaron took up the crossbow when she threw it to him. Some of the bolts were black like she'd spelled them while the duel went on, and he got the first shot well into a squidmouth's head beyond. Solaufein changed his chant into the same spell to hold their powers back and got it done in time with Xzar.

Viconia dropped to her knees above the caster out of the five and chanted a healing spell. The tall yellow-skinned woman got up, glaring out of black eyes. He'd taken care to leave her alive, her and the rest of them. They'd taken the message.

"The Gith assist," she agreed curtly, and bent to pick up one of her friends. Montaron stepped forward and did some of the real work, bolts fired into the crowd, but not all of them were held by the enspelling. The squidmouths gestured and waved tentacles around, and a net pierced through and over them, the same piercing headaches and tricks of the soaked brain that weren't so different from umber hulks. The weighted net went inside his mind, raised up and brought down like the sting of a whip, like the mad wizard chatted about flaying the grey matter. He felt a bolt release but where it went he didn't know.

"Yes," the mad wizard said. "They're strong. Stronger than me or our drow friend. But don't we Zhents admire power?"

He got out the demon mirror from his robes and held it up with the fragment joined to it, and something disappeared from them. Turn the squidmouths' power on themselves, that was it, and now they were running around and tripping over each other like stumbling mice—

Solaufein flung a drow spell over them that had some of them fall straight down in a hissing cloud of gas that hurt them, and the mad mage the same. Behind them, the arena guards had come. The Gith-creatures fought them.

"I prayed to Shar for more spells to kill than to heal," Viconia said. Qilue lay on the ground leaking bits of stomach. "Her powers do not come without a fair price. I cannot heal you enough for any good."

The warrior drow sketched the full moon's symbol with a shard of blade she clutched in her hands. "Go, Solaufein. You need all the fit assistance you can. Leave me—with my sword in my hand." She sat up, still clutching it, trying to staunch the wound. In more time than they had the other drow got up to say that he'd agreed to abandon her.

The ogre collars still worked fine to make them stop the prisoners. Wasn't an easy fight; but they got through and bludgeoned themselves to the slave complex. The buzzing started again in their heads, like twenty gnomes with hammers pounding on their skulls. Montaron looked back but the squidmouths there were still down.

"There will be an Elder Brain," said the Gith woman. "Find it and destroy it, primelings. It will seem like a vast amount of brain tissue in a large vat, the source of the psychic trauma. Most illithid encampments are governed by a detached psionic intelligence of great volume."

"Right. Could we get a reason for following your orders, lady?" Pointy ears like an elf but serrated; pale yellow skin that looked—and was—about as tough as light leather; humanlike features but too tall and gaunt to have much human blood. Gith, they called themselves, whether that was the name of this bunch in particular or their type as a whole. No way he'd trust them just for showing up and getting beaten.

"Githyanki are eternal enemies of the devourer, slave; they come from the planes; they have psionic power in their own right," Viconia said. "I declare an alliance."

The Gith woman made a formal gesture with her hands. "Without the destruction of the Elder Brain the doors that hold this subplane will most likely remain sealed. Go quickly." More guards flowed in, led by a pair of squidfolk.

The stone corridors turned over and over, floors and ceilings marked in foreign runes. The Elder Brain hadn't stopped the pummelling; the worst of hangovers was nothing to this. But he'd suffer through this for days and wade over twice the bodies if he had to. Anything was worth escape. Montaron stabbed into a squid on the ground and turned its head into a rain of red. They'd broken off from Solaufein and the Gith when a bunch of squidfolk had come through a hidden door and split them up and down. The fighting continued down both paths, in all the narrow corridors where only a few flayers could get through at a time.

"Shar, protect us," Viconia said, and once more the force of some finger-wiggled shield set around them. It helped, a little. Beside them walked a red-eyed skeleton with bones drawn from two ogres and a fallen mindflayer. It swung an ogre sword as big as those the crazy Rashemen beserker'd liked, limbs thick and strong and deathly white. The tentacles did little harm to it, and Viconia gloated happily about its power. "She gives me gifts."

Her hands gestured at a mindflayer the skeleton warrior fought; and as if she'd sucked the air from its lungs it clutched at its throat and fell. So did the two behind it. They moved on.

The skeleton paused and stopped at a way it couldn't pass. "I'll get it open soon enough," Montaron snarled. The door was fancy-patterned and sealed too tight for the undead to force it; always so bloody predictable that the elaborate entryways held the thronerooms and the like, trying to impress the commoners, squidfolk or surfacer alike. There was no lock he could spot but the hinges were on the outside this time, and so he laid a hand ready to unloose them.

It sped through his brain in black and the next thing he knew was lying on the floor far away from it.

"For Shar's sake rise and fight," Viconia said. He sat up and felt whether his skull was cracked. The mad wizard bent back from the door.

"Don't touch it, Monty," he said, "it's locked with psychic force. Only the mind of an illithid is meant to slide their tentacles into the engravings upon it and release their brainpower to step neatly through. Would my brain be complicated enough? I could transform my mind into something like the illithid's permanent brain-eating obsession and nasty overcomplicated plotting mental state and waggle my tentacles—I mean, my arms—"

"Ye ain't turning yourself into a flayer. Or I'll kill you," Montaron said. He could tell already the mad mage'd start sucking brains himself.

"All right, Monty. The second idea is to use a flayer ourselves!"

Montaron gestured to the dead squids lying about on the floor that he'd done himself.

"No, the brains need to be very fresh for me to preserve them. Brain tissue decays so quickly, although it's still very good on toast. Fetch me a nice new helping of mindflayer head?" Xzar clasped his hands together by his head like some village girl asking for hair-ribbon.

Not like there weren't plenty around. In the next room a couple of squid guarded what looked like coffins that Montaron didn't try opening up. Kill 'em all; he jumped in before Viconia's undead this time, and a few moments after smelt fresh blood and tentacle burns on his shoulders he hadn't felt in the fight. He hauled the most intact body quickly back to the mad mage and let Viconia try what she could in the way of healing.

The zombie mindflayer slipped its tentacles to the door and something started to happen.

"—Hide us," Montaron said; the sanctuary pattern should give them an extra moment or two. Viconia chanted for Shar, and he slipped through the shadows cast by the warped passage. The zombie squid marched ahead and fixed open another door, clustered by a faint blue glow that held it vacant and preserved like dead googly-eyed fish in an icebox.

Then they crossed into a room where veins ran from floor to ceiling and pumped blood into a beating floor of curled grey tissue shot through with red, moving like a tide of flesh. Over it three tall squidfolk stood up to guard. Behind them were creatures made from that same white lumpen stuff wound over itself many times, and in the centre stood a giant metal vat nailed and welded together. It stunk of disinfectant, blood, and the metallic smell that lingered after a mage ran lightning bolts through copper rods to bring up some corpse jerking to life.

Montaron's headache multiplied itself threefold. This was the Elder Brain. It had found them. It knew they were here. The grey creatures were golems of that same brain matter, and for all he would've liked to laugh at the squidfolk for using the soft stuff that made the reason why smashing in the skull killed easy, the golems moved like they were much tougher and heavier than they looked. Flesh golems ye poisoned with nightshade or castor-distil, stop their muscles and end their shapes; but he'd not those particular samples here.

They knew they were here and they might as well step out of the shadows already and present themselves for eating—

And that was a fool mind-trick, and he was staying where he was. The guards of the Elder Brain tore through the zombie squid without wasting a moment thinking about whether it was one of them or not, and a fist from one of the golems took down the skeleton. Then the illithid guards started roaming their tentacles about the room. They searched. He got under them, the Sharran's arm held in the crook of his elbow, and tried not to think about what they were doing. He got another hand on the lip of another small vial the squidfolk had left them. At the last don't let them take them, whatever they did.

Then the mad wizard came visible, a tentacle wrapped around his neck and tightening. He grabbed it with his left hand, lowered his mouth down onto it—

"Kozakuran cuisine's not unlike!"

Probably catch some horrible disease from it. Then the mad mage stepped up into the air.

"Drow levitation. The fool shows off," Viconia whispered disapprovingly, and didn't do the same herself.

"Hello, Elder Brain!"

The mad wizard even added a cheery little wave.

"Do you want my brain to add to that churning mass of neural connections? Can you reach me— Oh, yes. I hear you talking to me. Much louder than the usual dead people," the mad mage said. He tapped his head. "What about a game, brain-in-an-unusually-large jar? Mind against mind. Madness against your dreadful assimilating tide of utter sanity. That's it. Devour my mind if you can."

He pulled himself up and sat cross-legged in the air to dodge a squidmouth's grab; he must've been able to see down into that tank that bubbled and seethed. He distracted.

"Yes, you could suck it out of my nostrils and eat the grey matter with tentacles, but that's not the point. I feel you, you feel me, and your ultimate goal besides the bread-and-circus approach with us being mostly the circuses so far is to expand this little plane and take out the drow city through the portal and build the seeds of an empire of mind-slaves—

"Or, yes, I could've just thought that myself. I don't have to be reading your mind just because you're in mine. I see the grey mazes and the twists of the planes in eight dimensions all at once. I see the seed of the slug in the pools and the whisper under the saltwaters and the electric echoes speeding in the cells of the lobes. Your density of cranial tissue processes nineteen possible reflections in a second. Can you follow me all the way through my madness?"

"And so his insanity finally serves a purpose. I scarcely credit it," Viconia whispered weakly. The mad wizard grabbed attention; and it was time for them to do the real work. Montaron took her along the edge of the room, back behind the gathering guarding the front.

"How else could a contest of mind be settled but riddles! Mad riddles!" The mad wizard snapped his fingers, a small bolt of lightning dancing from hand to hand. His hair stood itself up. "Once the flames of her passion met the coolness of his touch; the long night fell and mourning came to blame their fervid clutch. Restored they were reborn apart and oathed to no more meet; and now their passings reflect in him how bright she shines to greet... Oh, you do know that one! What do I hear from you—

"Twice four and twenty blackbirds, were standing in my brain; I ate their minds and left a fourth, how many do remain? —None, of course, because the rest all flew into the sky, into clouds that are not clouds; the sky is unexplored and above there are things with teeth just as there are below, bubbles and grey shards that swallow birds who disappear, just as madness swallows you in its gold-green skies—"

Shapes in a tightening circle floated in the air by the mad wizard, roiling dark green smoke he pulled into shapes worse than the mage-visions of the skindancers. Blackbirds spread their wings and flew, and things barely possible to see ate first their claws and eyes. Xzar chanted another riddle.

He'd reached the back of the vat itself. Montaron reached out and thanked Mask he felt only cool metal, whether the spell of the drow holding or the squidmouths' own foolishness not important. Metal's weak points was always where it joined. He tested the iron bolts one by one.

"Glittering points that downward thrust, sparkling spears that never rust, the whole as a dagger in flesh will die, but then my clear tears may never dry." Xzar shook back his robes, his voice high and quick. "Very well! Ambrosia lives on our lips and mouths, build a six-walled gold house that is never to rust, lift now by the wind that tosses heads south, a sabre of death that pricks some to dust. Answer that if you dare—if you dare cross the labyrinth—"

There was one slightly looser than the others. He pried at it with a lockpick, screwing it out piece by piece. Couldn't afford to be overheard. Lightning bolts lanced and crackled through the air from Xzar's mad cackling. The riddle-chanting went on around them. He gestured to Viconia when he'd got it partway out, and she started chanting under her breath. Then he felt the right kind of strength enter into him. He ripped it out and a stream of red-grey fluid trickled out, laden with tiny tadpole-like things that swarmed and writhed, and he took the next step of parting the metal itself. It wasn't subtle, and it got the golems and guards turning on them. It didn't need to be too subtle.

In the vat the Elder Brain was a pulsing mass in two joined halves, grey worms in red fluid joined over and into each other like wet noodles. A brain large as a giant, living and wriggling like a conjoined slug. The red fluid washed over him and the drow like a lake while it drained from the vat. Montaron started stabbing.

"—Treachery!" the mad mage screamed. "Oh, vile treachery, lost in madness—what cannot be controlled or brought to bear! We're all mad here, the pinafored girl said to the disappearing cat's grin; madness to see all and know all; madness impossible and unconfined and never for you to find. It—hurts—"

Montaron sliced a first hole into the brainflesh, and took up the vial to dump its few black drops in deep. He'd scraped yochlol's demon poison up from the floorboards in Ust Natha and it soaked into the tissues. Viconia defended him behind, the golems and the squidmouths coming after them in penalty for it. The mad wizard fell to the ground in a dull thump into the fleshy base of the room, though Montaron didn't have time to look back. He hacked piece by piece in it—where the vitals in a brain? Where did the bloody thing keep its head? Bits of grey flesh looked like they were flashing and the thoughts changing. Parts convulsed black by the poison. The mad wizard kept on screaming, as if he was showing them how much it hurt. The scream was in their heads as well, but Montaron had always liked killing. He thrust his body into the vat with warm flesh swallowing him whole, like a willing woman except where it wasn't— He drove swords deep into the brain tissue and let it fall to slug pieces around him. The screams while it died made it easier to kill.

Ye wanted the bloody noise to stop. Grey matter fell in slashed pieces around him. Xzar's voice stopped the screaming and there were sounds of other things falling. He didn't stop hacking until the drow called for him.

"Support me, sakphul! The golems have fallen, it is dead—fight for me!"

She'd already taken care of one of the squidfolk. Underfoot the floor had stopped pulsing and flowing. He felt burns on his face and something confusing his head, but after the fight was done the squids were dead like the brain tissue. Viconia lowered her hands from a casting. The mad wizard stood up and wiped blood from his forehead.

"I want some of that, Monty! Just a vial...or three..." He threw himself into the Elder Brain's remains. They dragged him out and started running for it, for chances were high more squidfolk'd want revenge on their master.

Mask bless 'em, they came on an opened way that showed the Underdark on the other side of it. It could have been the surface but he'd be relieved enough to get back even to that place. Not far from it were a line of squidfolk fighting a bunch of human-looking captives trying to get to the same place; Solaufein and Qilue fought the same, the warrior with a rough bandage on her waist and slowed movements. The mad mage lifted his hands and called for a blast of lightning, and then nothing happened. He spread his empty hands. Montaron felt himself tire as the drow's spell of strength stopped, and she glared at the battles.

"Could you take on a score of devourers, sakphul?" Viconia said sharply. Montaron saw one of the humans dying quickly; the tentacles found their way into the nose, and twined out the grey stuff like a string and ate it like candyfloss. One or two of the gith yellow-skinned ones fought in the melee. So far the squidfolk hadn't turned back and the three of them could stand and watch. Qilue swung her blade at a mindflayer's head, and fell short when its staff went into her wound. Then it grabbed her arms by both its hands and pulled her close. The drow warrior slammed a foot into where the groin should've been, but the squid didn't move or care. Solaufein called out to their goddess. Qilue screamed, louder, and another human went down from an umber hulk fighting alongside the mindflayers.

The last gathering of the mindflayer army right there, bad cess to them.

"We don't bleed and die for them," Montaron said, and turned and went into the portal. One step forward and they stood on plain solid rock looking back at the battle in the illithid place.

"Closed," Viconia said sharply, "or they will prey on Ust Natha. Not that that should be any loss; but the devourers would have to be fought again."

Qilue had collapsed slack-bodied in the illithid's arms, grey and red leaking from her nose; Solaufein tried to fight like a tanar'ri to get to her. In the distance they still saw him slicing mindflayer heads and shouting something too incoherent to hear. The portal was rimmed by a gem set in the top. They worked to take that to fragments, and the mad mage gestured to help close the thing and leave the illithid plane to the winners. Save the innocent folk in the Underdark from mind slavery. Mebbe the good and noble goddess Eilistraee'd even thank them for it one day. Montaron smiled without humour. Bare rock stood before them and no sign of flayer tentacles or upset noble-naked drow took chase.

—

Note: Riddle answers supplied on request.