“The echoes of your scream threw me off balance,” Travic whispered back. “You almost had a nasty tumble.”
“Sorry,” she said. “It just came out.”
Roghar got to his feet and helped Travic stand. He put an arm around Tempest’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Are you all right?” he said.
She nodded, but her eyes couldn’t hold his gaze.
“We can still go back,” he said.
“No.” She shrugged out of his half embrace and nodded toward the tunnel mouth, no more than ten yards away. “It was just a slip.”
Roghar scowled. The storm of whispering echoes was growing unbearable, making it impossible to think. He resolved to discuss the “slip” with Tempest later, and he started back down the path. The echoes of their footsteps grew more intense as Roghar went on, but despite his growing sense of anticipation, he reached the tunnel mouth without further incident.
The tunnel had been dug out of the earth, and it was shored up with a mix of fresh lumber and ancient stone columns. It ran even more steeply downward than the path in the crater, and curved sharply around to the left, cutting off Roghar’s view. He saw no sign of light coming up the tunnel, so Roghar reached into the pouch at his belt and found a sunrod. Before he could light it, Travic came and stood beside him.
“I’ll take care of the light,” the priest said. He rested a hand on the seal of Bahamut that adorned Roghar’s shield and closed his eyes for a moment, then a mote of light like a tiny sun sprang to life on the shield.
“Now my enemies can have no doubt where I am,” Roghar said, smiling.
“It’s no different than if you were carrying that sunrod,” Travic replied.
“I wasn’t complaining. Let them try to get past this shield and my armor. Better that than have them attacking the two of you.”
“Roghar,” Travic whispered, with a glance at Tempest. The tiefling was staring into the crater.
Roghar raised an eyebrow.
“She screamed
Roghar watched Tempest as she turned back toward them, her eyes still wide and her mouth set into a thin line. Had she experienced some kind of vision? Perhaps her nightmares had come to plague her by day as they did every night. Was she going mad?
Just a slip, he thought. But a slip of her foot? Or a slip of her self-control?
Tempest kept such tight rein on her thoughts and her emotions-it was part of what allowed her to keep control over the sinister power she wielded. If that control was slipping …
“What are we waiting for?” Tempest demanded. She met Roghar’s gaze with a mischievous smile, and he couldn’t help but smile back at her.
“Travic needed a moment to pluck up his courage,” Roghar said. “The older he gets, the longer it takes.”
Travic laughed. “That’s true of a lot of things, but not this. Let’s move.”
Roghar turned to the tunnel mouth. He’d have to duck his head to enter, and if anything attacked in the tunnel he’d be at a disadvantage, fighting in very close quarters. On the other hand, the curve to the left was slightly to his advantage, giving him better reach with his sword hand than an opponent coming up the other way. Assuming his hypothetical opponent used weapons.
“Who’s plucking up his courage now?” Travic said behind him.
Shooting a grin back to the priest, Roghar stooped and entered the tunnel. The bedeviling echoes ceased at once, and his footsteps seemed muted by comparison. The light Travic had put on his shield shone clear and bright, filling the tunnel until it curved out of sight. Alert for any sound around the curves, Roghar advanced as fast as the low ceiling would allow.
He saw nothing to indicate who might have excavated the tunnel or why. The shoring was crude but effective, employing scavenged materials that had evidently been well chosen for strength and size. The tunnel spiraled down until Roghar figured they were lower than the bottom of the crater and then, without warning, it opened up into a wider hallway with a gentler downward slope. The hall looked like it had been part of a manor house above ground before the cataclysm that dragged it into the earth. Smooth stone walls gave him ample room to move and swing his sword, and the ceiling accommodated even his nearly seven-foot height. The hall showed signs of its displacement, though-jagged cracks ran through the walls, crumbling masonry littered the floor, and the two doorways Roghar could see leading off to the sides were half collapsed. Roghar eyed the ceiling cautiously, wondering how many tons of rock were overhead now.
He paused as Tempest and then Travic emerged from the corkscrew tunnel and found their bearings in the new hallway. “I see light coming around that corner,” he said, pointing down the hall.
“Smells like incense,” Tempest added.
Roghar took a deep breath through his nostrils and noticed it as well-sandalwood or something similar.
“I’d wager we’re about to walk into a secret temple,” Travic said. “Tiamat?”
Roghar bristled. As a paladin of Bahamut, he had a special loathing for the cults of Tiamat, mirroring the enmity between the two dragon gods, the twin children of Io. But this didn’t feel like a cult of Tiamat to him. The whole arrangement suggested devils-the temple nestled in the ancient ruins, the menacing whispers in the crater, and the spiraling descent, like a passage through the Nine Hells. “Five gold says it’s Asmodeus,” he said.
Travic sniffed the air and smiled. “You’re on. There’s no hint of brimstone.”
Roghar scowled. “I stand by my bet. Come on.” He shifted his grip on his shield and started down the hall.
“Stop!” Tempest said quietly, but with an urgency that stopped him dead. She moved up to stand beside him and pointed at the floor just in front of his feet.
Roghar crouched and squinted, and finally saw the slender tripwire stretched across the hall a few inches off the floor. “Thank you,” he breathed. He cast his eyes around the hallway but didn’t see any other sign of a trap-no block of stone rigged to fall from the ceiling, no slits in the walls where blades might spring out. It didn’t matter. Even if it was only rigged to ring a bell in the secret temple, alerting the cultists to their approach, he’d almost walked right into it. He stood and put a hand on Tempest’s shoulder. “Do you see anything else?”
“Not from here. But maybe I should go first.”
Roghar didn’t like the idea-it would make her more vulnerable in an attack, and possibly cost them precious time in a fight as she fell back behind him. On the other hand, she was probably more likely to notice signs of an ambush or hear approaching attackers than he was, as well as being more likely to spot traps and tripwires. He nodded and squeezed to the side of the hall so she could get past him.
Tempest stepped carefully over the tripwire and paused to make sure Roghar crossed it safely. Roghar mimicked her motions, provoking a snicker that Tempest quickly hid with a cough. He grinned at her, then pointed out the tripwire to Travic so the priest could step over it as well.
Roghar nodded to himself as he followed Tempest down the hall. This is how it’s supposed to work, he thought. Teamwork, each member of the team relying on the others’ strengths and covering each other’s weaknesses.
I’m starting to sound like a priest of Erathis, he thought with a laugh. The god of civilization promoted the ideals of people working together to build and invent and civilize, sometimes even to conquer. But those ideals were not far from Bahamut’s-the Platinum Dragon exhorted his followers to protect the weak and defend just order, order that might be established in Erathis’s name.
Tempest led them past several collapsing doorways, the rooms beyond mostly or completely caved in, showing no sign of having been touched or inhabited in the last century. An alcove on the left side of the hall held a decorative guardian, a stone sculpture in surprisingly good condition, depicting a proud human knight in plate armor. Roghar paused as the knight’s stone eyes caught his gaze-they were so lifelike, so expertly carved, that he found himself wondering for a moment if the statue might be a living man turned to stone by a medusa or basilisk. But the pose was that of a watchful sentinel, not a man turned to stone in midstride, and he dismissed the thought.
Travic lingered at the statue as well, admiring the sculptor’s art. Tempest held up a hand and hissed a warning, wrenching Roghar’s full attention back to the end of the hallway.
