She slowed her heart with the exercises Neveren had taught her. 'What?'
'You argued for his 'word,' ' Gargan said. 'What means this?'
'A promise. Not that I suppose it matters much to a sharn, but I would not break my word, once given.' She managed to smile. 'That's why I never give it.'
Gargan did not find that amusing. 'You argued for something you knew to be false?' he asked. 'Why?'
'I was hoping to get him to release Liet.' She hated herself for her feelings, but she was past such considerations now. 'Then we could flee this place, the three of us.'
'Davoren and Slip? Would the sharn think Gestal had killed us and free them?'
Twilight shrugged. It truly did not matter. 'Wouldn't miss him,' Twilight said. Then she sighed. 'And she'd be regrettable. But for all we know, they're…'
She did not finish the thought. For all they knew, Liet was dead.
'You would shirk our duty to them?' Gargan said. 'Our companions.'
Twilight waved. 'Duty is overrated,' she said. 'I am a creature of chaos, as is the sharn. We both know this- there would be no surprise.' That wasn't strictly true, but it might as well have been. She had never dealt with a sharn before, but the fact that this one was cursed made the situation even less predictable.
At that moment, Twilight brushed away dust and some old bones and found a crease in the floor. She traced the outline of a door cut into the stone. Through the bones, fur, and filth that littered the floor, she found an old brass ring attached to the stone. Twilight twisted the ring. The stone gave a lurch and sank downward, then to the side, revealing darkness below.
There came a sound of scuffling on stone, and Twilight looked down the hall, toward the levitating disk they had used to ascend to the crypt above. She thought she saw a flicker of movement.
'Who?' Gargan asked, drawing his sword.
Twilight shrugged. 'We've no shortage of enemies,' she said. 'The sharn, or its golems. Gestal. The fiendish lizards.'
'Tlork,' Gargan added grimly.
'Darkness, don't forget the grimlocks,' said Twilight. 'We didn't part on the most amiable of terms.'
Nothing moved for many long breaths. Twilight left Gargan watching the darkness and looked down into the new passage. It smelled foul and radiated humidity like a tropical swamp. Where the tunnels above had been dry and dead, this new level seemed the opposite.
A world built on opposites, Twilight thought.
Twilight wondered why they were going down. Had not the sharn spoken of Gestal dwelling 'above?' Sink to rise, she reflected.
She put her leg down into the darkness and froze.
With a mighty heave that broke more than a few bones, Tlork finally wrenched himself out of the sewers. As he stood in the forested street, letting limbs pop back into place and torn flesh flow back together, he cast his stitched face about, searching, just in time for the swarm of abeil to descend with spears, halberds, and stingers.
Snarling, the troll whipped hammer and claw through the air in fury to drive off the swarm. Bee-creatures fell crushed, killed at the very touch of Tlork's weapons, but there were hundreds, and three replaced every one that fell.
Soon, the battle was like stirring mud, trying to swat them away while they rained pain and torment all over Tlork. Abeil speared his skin, stinging and stinging like mad, and soon he could hardly focus on anything but the stabbing and cutting. His body throbbed as though a thousand hearts beat just under his skin.
Slave, came a voice in the back of his head. Like all thoughts, his own or another's, it caused Tlork pain. Come, slave.
As he batted another abeil out of the air to smash like a ripe plum against a distorted building, Tlork whined like a dog. 'But I come so far!' he argued. 'I close!'
Come, the thought came again, to the chapel.
Unfair. Tlork didn't like the up-down room. It always made his stomach knot. The fiend-troll gave a great, strangling cry, turned, and ran. He dived through the hole into the sewer, ignoring the pain that came when his arm splintered against the edge.
That elf-she would pay for this. Not the pain, which Tlork had long since stopped minding, but the indecency of making him trek all the way back, even past the up-down room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Twilight stared into the dark hole. Much of this world was inverted, she mused. It was a sharn's idea of order, curves where buildings should have corners, towers that sloped downward, even upside-down stairs on the underside of ledges. She had thought herself prepared for any shift of paradigm imaginable.
This, though, far exceeded any reasonable anticipation.
Gargan, seeing her hesitation, crawled over the edge, holding the lip, and let go. He didn't fall. Instead, he stood on the underside of the floor, looking down at her past his feet. It was as though Twilight stood on a mirror that reflected a world not her own.
'Come,' Gargan said. 'Sink to rise.'
The implications struck Twilight like a thunder blow. Damned Netherese.
Now she knew why she had felt unsettled going into the dungeon, almost like falling. The gravity was in flux here, so close to the limits of the mythallar's field.
That was why the ceiling of the sewer had been as stained as the floor.
That was why half the architecture was upside down, why all the symbols of Mystra-or whatever the goddess of magic in ancient Netheril had been called-had been inverted.
Now she knew why the sand had not fallen in from the 'ceiling' of the cavern, settling instead as though along the bottom of a bowl. Gravity was reversed in Negarath, all pulling down toward the dungeon, and below it…
All that time they thought they had been rising, they had been descending.
Gargan watched her uncertainly, but at last Twilight swung a leg down and pushed off, climbing to her feet on the ceiling of the chamber below. She passed through an invisible barrier that made her stomach go limp before she emerged in another world, one where gravity was opposite.
They stood in a crude tunnel sloping up from where they stood, down from the dungeon. Gone was the fine, if eccentric, carving and stonework of Negarath. The air was musty, and a faint, foul odor wafted through the tunnel. Rough steps led up.
'Gestal should be somewhere up there-or down…'
Twilight could not help feeling a touch disoriented, but she did her best to dismiss it. 'Up. Definitely up, if Negarath is upside down, below us.' Twilight's head ached.
She noticed Gargan kneeling by the trapdoor, hand out, and narrowed her eyes. 'What are you about?'
He drew his hand back and she saw that he had placed a stone in the air. It dipped back toward the dungeon, then up toward them, then merely floated, caught in that space where gravity pulled both ways. At the innocent fascination the goliath showed in the phenomenon, Twilight smiled despite herself. 'Come.'
Gargan-ever a man of few words-nodded and went with her.
They had not gone ten paces up the tunnel when they heard a scuttling from behind, as of a rock falling to the floor. Something had disturbed Gargan's floating stone.
The goliath was already charging back by the time Twilight had her weapon out and was pursuing him. Though her reflexes might have been the faster, he had keener ears. With the boots from the sharn, she ran as fast as he did. They fell upon their pursuer at almost the same instant.
There it was, five steps from the trapdoor. The shadow yelped and danced back, startled. Gargan's black sword swept aside a hastily raised mace, even as his other hand shot out and shoved its wielder over. Even as the
