Durlag's Tower, Ghosts
The carpets were rich on the floors. Embroidered in detail, fine threads in vivid dyes, sparkling below the magelight. Our boots sank into a bright red-and-yellow design of a dwarven warrior wielding an axe above the head of a blue creature; nice and soft, feeling rather homely... The decoration on the warrior's armour and weapon was different to the runes describing Durlag's apparel in the histories of himself; probably not the dwarf himself.
"How far down are we, druid?" Shar-Teel said; the guardians' box, designed by dwarves, had hurtled some distance through blackness. It had felt like a narrow coffin indeed, crushing us; and there was the nervous feeling that it could have chosen to drop us somewhere even less pleasant than this ominously silent set of rooms.
"We are still some way above the centre," Faldorn said absently. She sniffed the air. "I do not like this smell. Not dead, and yet not alive. Foreign to my experiences."
Empty pieces of dwarven armour were piled, and sometimes hung, about the room; and old, crumbling weapons near them. Past a crumbling archway lay old statues, some broken; others twisted into odd poses, apelike and sinister in their grinning expressions. The carpet in that room showed a detailed portrait of a blue-skinned humanoid monster, with bright yellow eyes that bore a hole in the viewer's face wherever one looked. To either side of its face were set a pair of ugly statues.
Words in dwarven were carved darkly on the opposite wall.
"Moved...ne'er by rage and ne'er by anger. Cold is the trait'rous...doppelganger?" I said slowly.
"Heethir'ku; shapeshifters," Viconia breathed. "I have heard of them. That is their natural form."
The grey-blue figure with sharp teeth below our feet. Its eyes stared, pointing to the statues on either side of it. Both, when one looked closely, had hinges built into their joints.
"What do you think, Imoen?" Beyond the rug with the doppelganger's image lay nothing but a pile of rubble, old shields and crumbled statues; the only visible doors were to our left and right.
"Well? I can't spot any triggers on 'em. Go ahead and press if you can't spot anything, sometimes you find things first." She studied them with me; I reached forward, and pushed the one to the right.
The ominous sound of stone creaked, and a small cold disturbance in the air reached us. A door had slid open.
Quite an elaborate room; carpet, cushions, paintings still intact, a chest of drawers and a red four-poster bed sized for a dwarf. A beautiful wooden cupboard, with marquetry laid over it in a cobalt blue design; and a lock that looked suspiciously inviting.
Faldorn was already at the chest-of-drawers. "Another runestone," she said; and grasped—
"It could be a trap!" Imoen called.
The stone door slammed closed. Shar-Teel cursed.
"But it's natural," Faldorn said. She held the red-runed stone. "This was intended, I think."
"Fools," Viconia hissed.
"Islanne..."
Islanne was the name of the dwarven sorceress, heroine of Durlag's war against the drow and of the siege of Falwin, his wife Islanne...
None of us had spoken the word.
"Islanne..."
It was a dwarf. Grey-bearded, powerfully muscled, his features slightly older and vaguely similar to the four statues above. He wore cloth rather than armour, not dressed for war; several layers of various shades of practical brown covered him below his thick beard.
"Islanne, my love, your hair is down..." The dwarf didn't look at any of us; he called her name.
"Ghost," Imoen whispered. "Hey! Mister dwarf ghost!" she called defiantly, her voice only faltering a little. "Can you hear us?" Viconia fixed her with a fierce glare, moving her hands about her dark circle and muttering words of prayer.
"'Tis time we slept, my sweetling. Islanne, gold-honeyed Islanne, my treasure-of-the-earth, my splendarr-findar..." The dwarf looked at something beyond us, passing through as if we were nothing to him. An echo—the one who had loved Islanne. A spectre, walking over the carpet and past the old chests-of-drawers, as if he had done so a thousand and more times.
Splendarr-findar: something that shone, something that gave good fortune. The dwarf must have spoken in his own language, surely. But except for that phrase which I knew in the dwarven tongue, it had sounded as the common language to me.
"A ghost is a male as any other," Shar-Teel snarled, and wrenched out her sword. "It's solid enough."
"It is not a ghost." Viconia held up a hand to stop her, and her skin seemed slightly grey under Imoen's light. "Tell me what you are, hargluk!"
"The torches gutter and darkness falls," the dwarf said; he neared the bed's bright curtains. There was something tragic to it, that he loved and he sought and she was no longer there. "Islanne, my love, my taerin, taerin, taerin," he said; for taerin is the dwarven word for love, and means to them a true and deep love in that tongue, deliberately in contrast to the yearning for gold or simpler pleasures, like in old Chessentan humans used the word agape when they spoke of the highest love possible.
Faldorn's mouth suddenly opened. "Sulphur," she said, "get down and away! Now!—" Panic had darkened her eyes; she flung herself to the ground; we were quick to react to her.
"Islanne, my love, my thsss, my thsssss..." It was a hiss. There was no translation for it in any language. Suddenly there was a long pale dagger in the dwarf's hands, suddenly it plunged into the heart of a woman and opened her to bleed. And then there was fire to immolate us...
Burning. It set everything ablaze, but all that belonged to Islanne was yet there. All the cushions lying still, her red curtains and her cupboards and her carpet, unmoved and tranquil; and the monster that crept into her bed standing tall and inhuman and grey, silver-eyed and with flesh that shifted as if it belonged to a rotting corpse, casting spells with a voice too deep to belong to any dwarf or human, suddenly five of it gesturing with sharpened claws.
Shar-Teel, of course, attacked then, and Viconia was behind her. Imoen was screaming, and I did not try to heal her but only put an arm around her, because I did not want to try to do it. Shar-Teel stepped easily forward with her sword, cutting into the doppelgangers' flesh, which shifted in response to her as if she cut into the ocean. Ajantis, after a delay, cried something himself, trying to join her; a deep three-clawed wound scored itself in his cheeks below the open-faced helm.
"Heethir'ku," Viconia called, her voice as strong as when she spoke with her deity, "I know not how you are here, but you will die this day—"
A black-coloured bullet from her sling hit one of the doppelgangers in the forehead; it disappeared. An illusion, a twisting and shaping illusion.
"Get 'cha bow. Do I have to tell you everything, kiddo?" Imoen said, and she was smiling with a grin I last saw on a ghoul's face, set in place and frightening to the enemy.
I aimed. An arrow could hurt an illusion's image, could show which was right and which was wrong. A rogue's eye saw into shadows, a rogue's eye saw what lay below a raised stone or inside metal gears of a lock; that in itself did no violence. The arrow struck between Shar-Teel and Ajantis, not hurting either of them, having a false doppelganger cease to be. But the doppelganger itself wouldn't lie down; its body shapeshifted to protect against wounds, its claws sliced forward again.
Faldorn, calm again, stepped forward with her flame blade; cautiously struck below Shar-Teel's protection. Her sword could burn, leave the doppelganger's shifting flesh black; Shar-Teel's blade scored deeper marks. It took a long time to kill.
The doppelganger's body fell to the ground, light-coloured blood flowing about it from so many wounds. An arrow stuck out from it; otherwise, false flesh was sliced into ribbons. And there was no sign of the bleeding on the thick carpet about it, upon Islanne's fine furnishings and site of her death.
Shar-Teel punched down at the head of the body; and instead of the skull shattering her fist was halted by a pale light that sprung up around the head, the doppelganger's corpse preserved by some magic.
Islanne, my wife, I love you still. 'Twas just your form they made me kill.
The stone doors slid open once more.
Imoen sat over parchments from Islanne's cupboard, occasionally asking me to explain the sorceress' dwarven notes where the magic was difficult for her to read. Red and black runes swam across Islanne's papers like a school of tiny fish, glittering deep under the sea's depth and impossible to keep all in one's mind for me; but for Imoen they could be translated into the Weave that she could see. Faldorn and Viconia had healed us all, and needed to rest lightly; Shar-Teel and Ajantis sat slumped on the ground, the latter with his armour laid aside. I paged through more of the tome about Melair I, from Clangeddin's altar. In battles, he'd used all honourable means available to him at the foe, through swift marching and maneuvering to make the enemy believe he had the advantage, attacking quickly and moving onward once the objectives were attained.
"She'd want us to use her spells to help, probably," Imoen said, sketching some patterns in the air with her fingertip, leaving traces of pink light to glow in front of her, as intricate as small spiderwebs. "Need to understand more. Mr G. and Dynaheir helped, Edwin, he was all recite-this-do-that-control-that, Garrick, he imagined it and sung it out, I want to fiddle with it but I don't know enough, yet. She must've thought up this one, and I can't wrap my head into even the first part to get what it does. What's it about?" She pointed to a few lines written in a tight dwarven script, next to the complex magical patterning.
"It says only..." I searched the phrasebooks. "It makes them vulnerable. That's all."
"The doppelgangers?—No, they killed Islanne if it happened that way, she wouldn't've known," Imoen said. She stared fiercely at the scroll again, her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth. "Nope. I'll ruin it like that other one if I keep trying. Have to wait 'till later." She placed it carefully at the bottom of her pack, and went to the next scroll in her small pile. "Hmm, I think this one's kinda like charming people. Maybe this'll work..."
The next part we explored lay beyond another heavy door, a great stone hall, a long carpet in scarlet and gold, a raised throne behind it, of red granite on a white dais, thick curtains behind it. A throneroom, entrapped by pressure plates guarding the entrance, by a razor-sharp tripwire at slightly below the ankle-height of a human. On the white stone that ornamented the dais lay a helmet gilded gold. Thin banners made of pale rotting cloth hung from the sides of the walls, hung over stone columns. On a few of them remained enough fabric to recognise the remains of insignia from the accounts of Durlag's chief dwarves of his clan; foremost among them, his eldest son Kiel Legion-killer.
"Cold and dry," Faldorn said, sniffing disapprovingly at the air. "Nature needs a home here."
"Think carefully before you attempt anything, child," Aquerna said, perched at the top of Imoen's pack.
Ajantis' armour creaked slightly as he pointed. "That helmet," he said. "Does it have a purpose here?"
"Too small for even your sad little head, jaluk," Viconia taunted. "Skie, there is a door to the left, examine it."
Locked with the same kind of unbreakable seal that held the other stone doors in this place. I went forward instead; the helmet glittered a reddish gold under the light Imoen raised, and carved before it:
Here fell Kiel, the Legion-killer.
There was something that lay in the shadows under the helmet's bowl. "I'm going to pick it up," I said unsteadily; for...
"Kiel! Kiel, my first-born!" the armoured dwarf said jovially; strong and barrel-chested, he was the same man who had greeted his wife Islanne. The plate he wore was gold-coloured, but not elaborate in design: simply very well-fit to his body, and tough in appearance. "Why so stern all the time, my boy? Come down from that throne!"
I poised an arrow ready; —and Imoen aimed a shaft faster than me, into the dwarf's chest. It simply dissolved into thin air. The dwarf heeded it not. Shar-Teel aimed her crossbow, one bolt after the next, and they all failed to cause injury. The dwarf came closer and closer to the throne and the dais, and I ran back and away from it.
"Revel with your family for a spell! Ale and good company, 'tis no findar to brood so long alone," the dwarf said, and at the throne he took down his axe and brought it into the neck of his son from behind.
Here fell Kiel, the Legion-killer.
Imoen screamed as green smoke filled the room and left them unconscious. Three of the doppelgangers were at once all in the room, the doors sealed, making their gestures to cast their spells—
Faldorn's wolf was free against breathing the smoke, and ran for the throat of the first. Shar-Teel, stubborn, yet stood, her crossbow working at last, bolts thrust into that foreign flesh and sparking fiercely with the lightning enchantment upon them. One lunged at her.
"Fight, you fools!" Viconia held a cloth over her face, coughing, spluttering green and swaying on her feet. She vomited on the ground. Imoen lay still.
It was an ordinary arrow—well, a poisoned arrow, dishonourable. I'd a short range and a clear aim for the backs of the doppelgangers; it wasn't wrong to protect friends. The arrow embedded into the back of the nearest, and interrupted what it chanted; it turned, and I remembered the words that doppelgangers were cold. It was out of the gas cloud; my second arrow was fire, and bloomed in its chest as it raced toward me. Then I drew a sword, and tried to hold it off. Its shapeshifting did not hide the burns of its chest.
Viconia shrieked out a few words; —Shar-Teel stabbed through the throat of the one that lay down in front of her, and she struggled through the fumes. Ajantis helped Imoen, Faldon chanted a spell and where she walked the green gas faded away—
The doppelganger I fought was not colder than Varscona, because after all he was still breathing. Or she. It was fast and it ripped into my leathers; I bled again and all I could do was to hold the creature away. Its movements stayed fast, though it had been pierced by arrows. The burn marks remained despite its shapeshifting.
Imoen cast a spell; her flaming arrow, magical, hit the doppelganger I fought in the back, and made it cry out. It stumbled, its body smoking; I hurt it badly, stabbing into its torso and cutting down. The light-coloured flesh tore apart. These—repaired themselves, could take far more injury than a human.
I stepped back; it pursued me. I shifted out of the way and below Kiel's throne, an impromptu shield. The claws raked the marble and left no trace of a cut in it, just as Islanne's furniture had been unharmed. Enchantment. The throne was a shield and I ran around it; Shar-Teel and the others had moved close to the one other doppelganger, slicing it apart by pieces.
Varscona hit, almost at random, taking a small strip of skin from the doppelganger's hand. It walked on two legs; it was alive; I was only trying to fight it because there was no-one else near.
And yet I had to. Imoen's magic missiles had it distracted, raising its outstretched arms and trying to fend them away, and Varscona made a stronger hit in the doppelganger's body. Shar-Teel and the others had left the second in a pool of its own blood; and I duelled...
I don't know if doppelgangers have hearts in the same place as humans, or have them as all, and I won't ask Viconia if she knows or how she might know. There was an opening when the doppelganger attacked and missed and I was lucky enough that Varscona went somewhere into the middle of its torso, and it seemed to die.
The wardstone that was left under the helmet was bright yellow, almost golden. Kiel's. The stone doors opened to a room of weapons and symbols, gold engraved with accounts of the battles of the Legion-Killer, disorganised heapings of what Durlag's son had once been. It was also a chamber filled with traps for the unwary; and filled with ash and the husked bodies of creatures that had dared it, guarded by the off-white shells of some large creature, as if giant versions of the terrifying carrion crawlers had made nests here...
Kiel the Legion-killer gained his name in a war against the drow; nimble, he ran into the fierce battle alone behind the enemy's lines, and one by one slew them, and not one of their attacks could pierce him for speed.
There was a bridge that ran from Kiel's trophies, over vast streams of a smith's materials. Some form of steel or iron, still flowing in wide channels—what great projects did Durlag and the smiths of his clan create before the tower was invaded?
Four voices, intertwined: a female soprano, two males in tenor, one in deep bass.
"Durlag, my taerin, come to me, lay down your kuld, your agland, I will cast against you—"
"What beldarak be this, I swear on my samman I will fight it—"
"Father, father, I will use my bow if I have to, stop this deladar—"
"'Tis time we slept; 'tis time we all slept—"
They saw us; they attacked just like the others had done—
"Hey, can you understand us?" Imoen shouted. "Viccy says you're sapient! D' you want to be trapped in here forever?" She scooped up a rock from the ground, and flung it instead of a more deadly arrow. "Maybe we don't even have to fight!"
Maybe we don't—
The one I kept back from her and Viconia with Varscona had changed to its grey-fleshed form, its silver eyes and alien stare.
"You could surrender and we won't hurt you! You must be trapped down here just like us, and you're outnumbered so it's not fair!"
"Not—" Shar-Teel's sword ripped into the two doppelgangers she fought, sending them a step back in retreat; and then she quickly took a healing potion from her belt, for she was bleeding badly from her right arm.
"Fei'ir? The act of the lowest of oolos," Viconia murmured, and carefully aimed a sling bullet to the back of the head of a doppelganger.
"Yeah, well—you're not listening, are you?" Imeon called again. She aimed a striking spell into the head of the one fighting Ajantis and Faldorn; its head turned to her direction, but no noise came out of its mouth; they only said words when they played as the dwarfs... "All right then, I can see I'm getting through like a toothpick on a stone giant. If we have to hurt you, that's it."
Imoen had thought of that. That was Imoen; I knew what I'd done.
"Canna nil da ultok," I asked for a meeting in the dwarven tongue, stepping back from the dopelganger I fought, raising Varscona away from it; and just like it had done to Imoen it failed to reply. Then I cut into its flesh...
We had fought the other doppelgangers. We killed those four, leaving their bodies discarded on the ground. Fire arrows and spells hurt them to a greater extent than poison, repeated sword-cuts to the same part of their bodies, and one had to guard against the awful claw-strikes when the limbs would suddenly extend and grow... Doppelgangers. A difficult fight. Over the bridge we were bathed in the faint red light of the substances that streamed underneath. Little of relevance; we did not find another ward-stone upon the bodies that had fallen.
And in the passageway from that bridge was a horrible trap. A steel anvil twice as long as Shar-Teel's height, that slammed down from the ceiling and pulverised everything under it. I only realised by looking up, seeing the slight difference in the normal ceiling. Fortunately they stopped when I screamed, and then when I threw a misshapen lump of iron into the centre of it, after a second or two the roof slammed down and smashed it to dusty fragments.
"Well spotted," Shar-Teel said, after the anvil had slowly squealed back into the roof, attached on a giant corkscrew.
"I can't hold a thing that size up!" Imoen said, gasping; she had been closest to it when I had screamed. "How're we supposed to get through a thing like that? I don't want to know what that Durlag was thinking—I've got a few thinks for him—"
"Calm yourself, jalil," Viconia said. "We've a druid in our possession; a druid who loathes iron and steel for particularly foolish reasons."
We brought down the steel trap again with debris we threw under it; and Faldorn jumped to the top of it, casting a spell to rust and destroy iron upon the large screw that raised and lowered it. The steel block that would have killed us all fell by itself to the ground, not to rise again.
A row of yet-burning torches lay beyond; an enchantment of some sort, for they shone a sober blue-white, etched with dwarven runes of mourning, I found through reading. At the end of a long dark passage, four shadows of dwarves stood about a sealed coffin.
Viconia stared at them, a flash of darkness crossing her already-blackened eyes. "Haruks'argt," she said. "These are spirits bound to undeath. It would be the act of a fool to disturb them."
We passed by the grave, quietly; Kiel, Clan-Prince of this dark tower. You made your death your finest hour. So it was written for him.
The spirits stirred, when Faldorn passed, though she did nothing. "Fuernebol," came from the first of them, whispered out like a snake's hissing.
"Too young to fight," said the second.
"Young samman," said the third.
"A healer and an archer," the fourth said.
Faldorn looked at them. "I am no dwarf," she said. "And I am no child."
"So Fuernebol said also, that latter," echoed the warders.
"But it is an injustice of nature that the young should die for the actions of others. May I seek to correct it?" Faldorn said.
"Young, but with power." The dwarves were black shadows, unclear and half-ghostly, waiting for us.
"You may pass."
Faldorn made her low-pitched chant to summon her wolf, as if she needed to prove something.
Further in the darkness was a chamber of ashes enclosed in urns, shelves engraved with names. Hallanuk Rogmor. Slain by doppelgangers whilst guarding Clangeddin's shrine. Erilla Fahil. Slain by doppelgangers whilst training with axe. Smergar Hollowhand. Slain by doppelgangers aiding Kiel the Legion-killer. Alanon Thradmul. Slain by doppelgangers within the library. Long-dead dwarves. The dread of it came when one looked up, and one looked down, and one looked across: and there were too many urns for one person to account. A small temple was marked dedicated to Moradin with the silver symbol of his anvil; and on its altar lay another wardstone, taken by Faldorn.
We passed through traps; a silver axeblade designed to swing from the ceiling and sever an invader's head from their body; or their torso from their legs, for an invader Shar-Teel's height. A spiderweb-thin tripwire. A triggering device with a principle I'd seen before, but with a result of fierce fire. Shar-Teel's words had begun to make complete and full sense: You don't touch anything unless you're sure it's not trapped, poisoned, cursed, or about to summon some abomination from the Nine Hells. You check again if you're sure. You don't step anywhere unless you know it won't kill you. You don't walk anywhere alone. One misstep, and they would all be hurt because I made a mistake...
The wall ahead of us was part wood instead of wholly stone, and complex; a network, tinged by magic. Polished oak and ash were laid out in a tight geometrical trellis and fortified by stone that would be difficult to break through, and showed dark spaces of an area beyond them. Hollowed-out marble spaces in the structure suggested the placement of runestones, and Faldorn stepped forward. The ground below her was also overlaid by wood, and showed signs that it had been burned in the past. Yet I had not seen a trap within it.
A golden rune lit below Faldorn's feet where there had merely been dark marks before; clearly dwarven magic, and dwarven magic she seemed comfortable enough with at that. She brought out the wardstones she'd saved, arranging them within the hollows in motions somewhere halfway between cooking and juggling, displacing and rearranging them as if they were eggs to be slotted into the right space upon shelves.
"Silvanus aid me to decipher this," she muttered. "Those who guard; Islanne; Kiel; those otherwise fallen. There must be a way through."
"I'm the transmuter wizard here, Faldy," Imoen said, elbowing her way in beside her. "What d' you think goes where?"
"And what do you think," Shar-Teel said, "is going to explode in your fool's faces?"
"Well, I'm trying," Imoen said, cheerfully and reasonably. "We've got to pass through here, right? Haven't found the way down yet, maybe we just need more wardstones."
Faldorn slipped the golden wardstone into the leftmost slot, and with her head tilted to one side considered the effect. Imoen reached for Islanne's, and laid it above.
They disintegrated before our eyes.
"Death is not something to mourn," Viconia said. Ajantis cried out suddenly and loudly, and took a step back from where they had been; Imoen, gone—
"Heya!" Imoen's voice sounded cheerily from behind the barrier. "'S a teleport thing, right, Fal?"
"Faldorn," Faldorn said sulkily.
"Get on the rune, all of you, we'll fetch you over," Imoen said, and then I heard her gasp loudly. "You've...got to see this."
There were implements on the walls like something I had once seen in a nightmare somewhere deep underground. Knives and other tools and a table with hinges. Cold ash that lay where fires had once burned. Most obviously, there were the cages, many of them. They were made with iron bars, but in the spaces between the bars the light did not reflect normally. And at the bottom of seven of them lay dead doppelgangers. Two of them showed signs of having been wounded by ice.
"They're the...ones we killed," I heard Imoen whisper. "They're here. They're not really dead."
On the table waited a goblet almost running over with some dark, viscous fluid; richly made and hammered with goldleaf, though the black engraving in it was roughly done. It drew the eye to it; the only implement that did not have an obviously painful purpose.
"The shapeshifter lifespan," Viconia said, "is not supposed to be greatly above a century-and-a-half."
The cages of the doppelgangers were glassed over their iron frames, transparent bell jars. Shapeshifters; they might have transformed their bodies to pass through bars alone. Pale light danced over the seven doppelgangers. I squinted to look more closely, and it appeared that their wounds were gradually healing.
"So they're summoned here when they die," Imoen muttered. "And then they heal all over again..."
"The cycle must be broken, for it is not natural," Faldorn said, and raised her hands. "I will try to call a strike of nature's flame within that cage."
"Because it's a punishment," Imoen said. "They have to be trapped like this because of a punishment. Free them—" she ordered.
Faldorn finished her chant and clapped her hands together; but only the faintest of a spark showed within one cage. She shook her head.
"There's more obvious way," Shar-Teel sneered. Her strength behind her iron gauntlet broke a panel of glass, efficiently, and she pushed her sword down at the skull of the doppelganger within.
Her powerful blow did not pierce the flesh. The same pale protection appeared over it as had done in Islanne's chamber.
"Taste my fear." I bent over the runes of the goblet; the smell of it was blood, thick and warm despite the cold of the tower. I gagged, and stepped back.
"Fear kills you," Shar-Teel said. "What's the cup for? Too pretty for a dungeon."
Imoen shrugged. "Let me cast, I'll figure it." She chanted the words to a spell; a white light gathered around her eyes, and she stared at the cup. Her eyes did not move as she spoke. "They were all dead," she said. "Shadows. They were reflections. They were people we knew, but they were trying to kill us. They had weird silver eyes. I can't see properly. C'mon... Shapeshifters and you were afraid they'd be behind you again. You captured some and had them brought here. You experimented on what they were afraid of, and you wanted to get rid of your own fear. Fear is blood on your hands and not knowing if it really was someone you cared about. Fear is losing them, so you have to make the other ones scream so it won't ever happen again. Locking them up and taking fear from them and making them act out what happened every night. I don't want to drink this thing; I don't want to be afraid..." She shook her head; the light faded from her eyes. "Sorry. That's not very clear, I'm not that good at the spell. But it's meant to be someone's fear in here. Probably ol' Durlag's, and the doppelgangers'. He's torturing them because he was scared."
"Fear can kill you," Faldorn said. "I know a casting for it. It summons a frightening image from nature, perhaps a banshee or a redcap, and sometimes your victim who defiled nature is so scared that their heart fails and they die on the spot."
"Once I knew a similar prayer also, in the Underdark," Viconia said; she touched a graceful finger to the beauty mark on the right of her face, and slowly smiled as if in complacent reminiscence. "Few things are less pleasurable than the moment the eyes of your rival widen in a dark scarlet, when they are completely at your mercy and able to see nothing but their own nightmare. The beat of blood tenses as shards of biting ice within their veins, and they collapse and die cold without the need to lay a hand or whip upon them. It was what I inflicted upon my sister for her betrayal with my husband, and alone in that cavern with her I believe that it was my own face she feared above all. Shar is also a goddess with power over the black weights that steal your soul in the darkness. You and I may discuss our methods, dalhar, later, perhaps..."
"Morally reprehensible," Ajantis' squirrel remarked.
"If fear can make you die like that," Imoen said, sweeping her right hand through the air, "then it's what we have to do. We can't leave anyone like this, even doppelgangers—" She glanced at the tools upon the wall, and turned her head. "Icky, but it's right."
"Shall I? This existence is certainly unnatural. It is not entrapped?" Faldorn's hand slowly reached for the goblet, and her long, coarse fingers wrapped around its broad filigree and engraving. "I should like to believe that he would have restored the fear to them himself, if he was still here."
She went to the cage Shar-Teel had broken, and poured a few droplets upon the doppelganger within. The thing convulsed; its silver eyes opened and bulged, staring; it writhed and made a faint, gasping noise from its mouth. It was afraid, and then it shook. Its pale body moved and shifted and melted, like frozen mud peeling apart on a warm day. The skin parted, in places, growing black and decayed, with long holes sliced in it like a tanner's knife parting a leather jerkin and the skin flapping freely. The body withered before our eyes, not into a pile of dust but into shrivelled skin stretched over bones, roughly torn and sliced apart. Shar-Teel stepped forward to push down with her sword again into the body, and this time the protection was not invoked. To attack with fear was to send them away forever...
Faldorn placed a few drops of blood into each cage, one by one. The goblet's fluids were drained, more slowly than one would have expected by its size. There was still some darkness in the wide bowl of the goblet, and Faldorn reached into it and took a wardstone embedded below the blood. The stone was coloured dark for its soaking in that substance, and the cup's blood slowly dripped from her hand.
"And this stuff," Imoen said, pointing to the tools, "we're—wrecking, at the least." We did not leave that equipment in good condition for another.
There was a door that would have been small even for a dwarf, at the end of the dungeon chamber; and the wardstone opened it. It swung through roughly, with a thick sound of stone grating, and across from it were two cobblestones that triggered fire and a slim tripwire. Then further in the room: two rows of finely carved levers, with dwarven writing engraved above each of them.
Slowly we could decipher the meanings. The doors to Islanne's chamber. Kiel's. The furnace room. The bridge. The tombs below. And Fuernebol. There were far-away sounds of doors scraping open, slight changes in the air that could have been promising gusts of wind.
Faldorn led our steps to the door that was marked with the name of Durlag's younger son. There were dark shapes in the shadows that raised the shape of weapons at us; we tensed and prepared to fight, but they were only training-dummies. They hid caches of arms that had not been used against the old doppelgangers. Imoen reached for a quiver of arrows, and then the doors slammed upon us.
The old dwarf's form was jovial, red-faced, laughing. He called; "Fuernebol, my son! Trade your bow for a lute and play something mournful for your father, will ye?"
"He was young," Faldorn breathed. "And he did not know how to fight well; could only play..."
It is not wrong for a child to play a lute, perhaps a dark whisper came from the sound of the training dummies, rusting to oblivion.
"Why do ye hesitate, child? 'Tis your father's face beneath this beard." The dwarf's thick arms spread widely; he welcomed his child for an embrace.
There was a sound as if of a bow suddenly releasing, an arrow skittering away across the floor. None of us had acted.
The dwarf's face turned to a scowl; "Fire upon your very father, would ye, dwarfling? Thsss—don't make me laugh—"
A doppelganger at last. It changed to full height and gestured, starting a spell; but we had no chance to aim our weapons, for Faldorn dashed the remaining contents of the goblet upon its face. It screamed; it fell...
"This is the wardstone we need," Faldorn said simply, and reached below where Imoen's hand had been to take a wardstone patterned in green runes. "Pups who cannot defend themselves should not die, not like this." She gestured; a small grouping of long blades of grass appeared between her hands, tied lightly together with a vine. Then she bent to the ground, laying the rough posy below dwarven lettering carved in stone:
Too young to fight, except to fall, Here died my son, young Fuernebol.
The final threshold was marked by the need for the wardstones, and a dance with the dead. Giant skeleton warriors, green fumes that caused us all to sicken and fall, easy prey for their vast swords.
We escaped by falling, down through a dark twisting tunnel that led deep below, slipping over slick moist steps and tumbling into the depths of the labyrinth Durlag left behind.
Shar-Teel forced herself upright to brace against an archway before us, and one by one we fell into her strong back, groaning and grunting, lying dishevelled and nauseated upon the stone ground. In front of her was a pit of fire that renewed itself every few seconds...