first followed behind that parry, the cultist had no defense.
Athrogate waded in, disregarding again the stab of one cultist and the heavy swing of the other. He took hits to trade the hits, and his weapons were better by far. A human Ashmadai stabbed him deep in the front of his shoulder as he brought his arm around, but that didn’t deter the blow, for the dwarf was beyond feeling pain at that terrible moment, at the realization that he had destroyed the most sacred and ancient of dwarven homelands.
He felt his muscles tearing, but didn’t care, and completed the rotation. The morningstar crashed down upon the human’s lowered, leading shoulder with such force that it threw the cultist face down to the floor.
Athrogate stomped on the back of the Ashmadai’s neck as he turned to face the second, and accepted a crack on the hand holding his other morningstar, the price of a missed block. Normally such a hit would have taken the weapon from his grasp, but not with Gauntlgrym exploding around him.
He plowed on with fury, both weapons swinging, driving the cultist back toward the lowered portcullis.
The Ashmadai ran out of room to retreat, so he worked his staff furiously to deflect and block. But a blow got through, crunching him in the side, driving him into a lurch. A second blow from the other side straightened him again, only to be hit again on the first side, higher up.
Then from the second side again, battering him, crushing his bones to dust, tearing his skin and sending his blood and brains flying wide to one side, then the other.
He crumpled to his knees and Athrogate kept hitting him-the only thing holding the dead cultist up were the dwarf’s blows.
Dahlia was far more cautious. She worked her weapons defensively, picking off every thrust and swing, still fighting two enemies-a human woman and a male half-orc-long after Athrogate began to bull his remaining opponent backward.
She played for her opponents’ mistakes, and as good as they were, Dahlia was better.
The Ashmadai to her left, the half-orc, moved to flank her, and the woman to her right predictably used her turn to come ahead boldly with a stab for Dahlia’s turning hip.
But Dahlia reversed, and her swing indicated that she would send her left weapon all the way across to try to hook the spear aside.
The half-orc braced for the ruse, and was caught by surprise as Dahlia’s right-hand weapon came up and under instead, yanking the spear-staff nearly from his grasp-and indeed, it would have taken that weapon away had that been Dahlia’s intent. She disengaged with a subtle twist instead, and allowed herself to overbalance and fall to her leading, right knee, where she reversed the spin of that weapon and swept it low, taking the human’s legs out from under her.
Dahlia rotated fully to bring her second weapon to bear, though she had no angle for such a spinning flail to do any real damage.
Except it was no longer a flail in her left hand, but a four-foot length of spear, and a slight twist stabbed it down hard into the woman’s face, driving right into her opened mouth as she tried to scream. A burst of lightning exploded with the impact, and it seemed to jolt Dahlia back to her feet, where she broke the staff once more into twin flails, and waded into her remaining opponent.
She had the half-orc cultist backing up, though the ugly brute was skilled and managed to hold his ground well as Dahlia played out her momentum.
A flicker of silver flashed over Dahlia’s shoulder and she dodged away and glanced back at the same time. She turned right back to her opponent, though, when she realized the flash was from one of Jarlaxle’s endless daggers, which he’d buried deep into the half-orc Ashmadai’s left eye.
Dahlia spun back as her last opponent fell aside, to see Jarlaxle rushing for the portcullis. Athrogate had amazingly hoisted the gate up to his shoulders once more.
Under went Jarlaxle, and Dahlia was quick to follow, fearing that those two would drop the gate and leave her to die-and who could blame them?
Jarlaxle rushed to brace his shoulder under one end, Dahlia the other, and Athrogate managed to scramble through.
The floor rumbled, the walls shook. The ghosts of Gauntlgrym were all on their knees, eyes and hands lifted in prayer to Moradin.
The trio ran on.
By the time they reached the circular stair, the complex was shaking violently. As they climbed back into the vast open cavern, they saw dire corbies falling and flailing. Bridges of stone that had survived the millennia cracked apart and tumbled down into oblivion.
“What have I done?” Athrogate wailed. “Oh, but a cursed creature I am!”
“Fly away!” Jarlaxle yelled at Dahlia. “Become a crow and be gone, you fool.”
Dahlia tugged at her cloak, but not to enact its magic. She pulled it off and threw it into Jarlaxle’s face. “Go!” she yelled at him.
The drow could hardly believe it, but he didn’t don the cloak and flee. He urged Athrogate on instead, and tugged at Dahlia to keep up.
They reached the top of the stair exhausted, but they couldn’t rest. The quaking diminished in violence as they ascended, but arches cracked and tumbled, and jambs tilted, sealing doors, perhaps forever.
But still they ran on, and kept running until they again came to the circular chamber with the jeweled throne, and kept running through the tunnel and out the gates, and kept running to the edge of the underground pool.
Jarlaxle threw the cloak back at Dahlia. “Make your way,” he told her. “And we’ll make ours.”
“How will you cross?” she asked.
Jarlaxle looked at her as if she was mad. “I am Jarlaxle,” he said. “I will find my way.”
Dahlia donned the cloak and became a great bird. She flew away, across the lake and down the tunnels.
A mere two days later, she emerged into the dirty streets of Luskan, surprised to see that the city was still standing, and that life there seemed normal. She looked to the southeast, to the sky above Gauntlgrym.
There was nothing.
Perhaps she had overestimated the power of the trapped primordial. Perhaps they had merely shut down the forge, and had not loosed a cataclysm.
“Say nothing of our adventure,” Jarlaxle bade Athrogate when they, too, made it back to Luskan, later that same day, having ridden their summoned mounts-hell boar and nightmare-all the way from Gauntlgrym. They had crossed the underground pond on the back of a giant, flightless bird, created from the feather on Jarlaxle’s hat, for thankfully, the pond was quite shallow.
“Ye should’ve left me to die there,” the sorely wounded Athrogate replied.
“We’ll find a way to fix it,” Jarlaxle promised. “If it even needs fixing,” he added, for he, too, was somewhat surprised to see the normalcy of life in Luskan.
Soon after, though, the very next dawn, he realized that it would indeed need to be fixed, for in the distant southwest, Athrogate spotted a plume of black smoke rising lazily into the air.
“Elf,” he said, his voice somber.
“I see it.”
“What is it?”
“Catastrophe,” Jarlaxle answered.
“Ye said we’d fix it,” Athrogate reminded him.
“At the very least, we’ll repay those who did this.”
“Was meself!” Athrogate said, but Jarlaxle shook his head, knowing better.
For surely the worldly drow had recognized the distinctive garb of the woman who had arrived in the anteroom to mock Dahlia and steal away with Valindra and Dor’crae. She was Thayan, a disciple of Szass Tam, no doubt.
As he considered that, Jarlaxle looked back at the plume of black smoke, so many miles distant, but still visible in the morning sky. He didn’t know much about the archlich of Thay, but from what he did know, he thought, perhaps, that they might be better off facing the primordial.
