soles quite accustomed to a lack of boots. Twilight felt oddly light on her feet, a sensation much like being slightly tipsy on Calishite wine.
Ignoring the feeling, Twilight examined the exit. A series of blades and rods folded and fit together like a genius child's puzzle to make up the cell door. A lever, when shifted, would cause it to open in what Twilight could only guess would be a scintillating wonder of engineering. This door was highly sophisticated, magically wrought, and definitely something Twilight wouldn't expect outside of a dwarf citadel, the mage towers of Evermeet, or the mystic kingdom of Halruaa.
The lock, on the other hand, was a simple padlock that held the lever in place.
'Now that's juxtaposition,' she mused. 'But no sense turning down the Lady's kiss before it becomes a bite.' She reached for her belt, which was not there. She wore only the tattered remains of a once-white chemise. The musky air was chill on her skin.
Twilight groaned. Not that she objected to nudity out of principle-she had found it quite useful in a tight spot or three-but it meant that she had no picks when it mattered.
Her eyes scanned the hall. Shadows. Good. Twilight closed her eyes, relaxed her thoughts, and… instead of dancing into the shadows, nothing happened.
'By the Maid,' she cursed. 'A mage cell.'
'You aren't going to find Tymora's favor with that portal.'
Twilight whirled and slammed her back against the marvelous door. Again, her hand twitched toward her missing belt, this time to draw a nonexistent rapier.
How she'd failed to notice the young man in the shadows was beyond her, but there he sat, on a crude, stained cot. She could see little about him but for his mismatched eyes-one green, one gray-blue-which shone dully in the dim torchlight.
Many thanks, strange lad who offers sage but perfectly obvious advice at crucial junctures, she thought, but she kept silent. Such a quip would be unnecessarily rude, and Twilight was never unnecessary.
'I wouldn't stand there,' her companion added. 'Tlork upsets easily.'
'Tlork,' she repeated.
Instinct sent her springing just before a mass of iron slammed into the door. The bars creaked and bent inward under the impact of a warhammer with a head the size of an ale keg. Even from half a pace away, the concussion sent her stumbling.
She ended up headfirst in the lad's lap.
'But, uh… we've yet to be properly introduced!' he protested.
Ignoring him, Twilight scurried to her feet and stared up at the twisted creature that loomed in the corridor, and blurry memories started coming back.
It was a troll-or at least, it had been, once.
Both its original arms had been severed at the shoulders and replaced. Its left-holding the hammer-was long and wiry with half a dozen digits, and its right was a muscled limb three times as thick that ended in a clawed hand. A stumpy, elephantlike leg rooted it to the floor alongside a ganglier limb. It was balanced by a segmented, prehensile tail that looked like a scorpion's. Because of the oddly imbalanced limbs, the creature walked with a drunken sway. Half its skin had been replaced with the mottled pelts of demons: vrock, babau, and several she didn't recognize.
'Pretty elfy-not pretty when Tlork crush.' It-he-made a twisted face.
Twilight remained crouched in the shadows until the troll left. She remembered exactly how heavy that hammer was, and exactly how fast that distorted body could move. Now she remembered how she'd come to the cell.
'He's gone, methinks,' said the man. The troll had not seemed to notice him.
'My thanks again,' Twilight murmured under her breath.
Then the implications of her situation hit her, and her hand darted up to her breastbone. The youth might have thought her frightened, but in reality she was searching. Her hand fell.
It was gone.
Twilight's blood ran a touch colder. How long? How long had she lain visible?
The youth stood and walked into the light. He wore a coarse tunic, dirt, and sweat. 'Well met, Lady. I am Liet-Liet Sagrin of Harrowdale.'
Twilight took his hand. It bore sword calluses, but was otherwise soft and limber. By human age, Twilight guessed this Liet could not have seen thirty winters.
Twilight smiled… and drove her knee up between his legs.
Liet yelped like a wounded puppy, eyes bugging. He seemed as if he would remain standing, so she kneed him again, this time in the stomach. He sagged, only to catch her backhand with his nose. Then Liet's only resistance was a moan-a moan of surprisingly high pitch.
Within a breath, Tlork was back, drooling greenish spittle that sizzled when it struck the floor. 'What you do? You-you shut yourself up in there!' The words came out together awkwardly- the troll put them together with effort, it seemed.
No, Twilight thought with a whimsical grin, you shut me-self up in here.
Aloud, she gave no response, but put a bare heel-hard-into Liet's stomach, eliciting a breathless groan.
The troll fumbled with a huge key and opened the lock. Then, for all of the portal's intricate engineering, the troll wrenched it open like any other door, almost tearing it from its hinges. Tlork roared and leaped inside.
Just as the troll's claws were about to close around her head, Twilight ducked, dived, rolled between the mismatched legs, and darted out the door. A flick of her wrist clicked the padlock shut behind her.
By its dull, confused grunt, the troll was almost as stunned as the groaning Liet.
Twilight ran down the hall, her eyes darting back and forth for signs of an ambush. She felt unusually light on her feet and faster for it.
Good. Unarmed, she could not fight an attacker. Evasion, subtlety, and attention-her own, and not that of her enemies- were her three best allies for now. The shadows further comforted her, like the mother's caress she had long forsaken, or the arms of a loving god-if such a thing existed. Outside the confines of the mage cell, a brief shadowdance just might be possible.
The corridor, perhaps a spearcast in length, curved and snaked off to other cells. Some contained enough space for a dozen prisoners, some only enough for one or two.
For political prisoners, she guessed, or mages. She remembered the anti-magic field in her own cell. She hadn't been able to feel it, but that confirmed its presence.
Twilight had known many disciplinary facilities-what some called dungeons-in her day, but none shaped like this, with its twisting and curling corridors. What maniac had imagined such atrocious architecture? Most elves would have blamed a dwarf, but Twilight was not most elves. Who had built this place?
These questions made it easier-easier not to think about being alone, weaponless, and nearly naked in a dark prison, and when-if that troll caught her…
Twilight saw no other guards. Four small cells were shut, all of them dark-she guessed they held prisoners. Twilight passed them by. She had her priorities.
At the end of the corridor, she came to a chamber whose smell told her, beyond a doubt, that she had discovered the fiendish troll's lair. It had once been a torture room, she decided upon seeing the rusty knives, moldy rack, and pitted cauldron meant for boiling oil. The withered devices seemed relics of an ancient age.
'Years pass,' she murmured, 'methods of conversation remain the same.'
She noticed a creature of darkness and dived behind the cauldron. She listened, tense, but the only sounds she heard were of a furious troll bashing on cell bars.
After a heartbeat, Twilight sniffed. An onyx griffin crouched in the center of the room. Its features appeared mad, making it all the more frightening, but it was only stone.
'Interesting taste,' Twilight said.
A stout chest lay nestled under the onyx griffin's claws- locked, of course. Casting about for tools, Twilight wrenched a rusty blade from an unpleasant looking harness. Crude, but she had worked with worse. And if her
