attacked Rozt'a together.
Dru recovered quickly from the fire spell. He had two more memorized. The angles were bad now that Rozt'a was fighting. The odds of hitting her were almost as high as hitting one of her opponents. Dru took aim at their third pursuer, the one hanging back. He'd lost the advantage of surprise. The fellow dodged and, despite the close range, wound up singed, not burned.
Rozt'a backpedaled and, for an instant, Druhallen was closer to the attackers' swords than she was. Using the torch as if it had been the ax shaft he'd left behind, Dru beat steel with green wood. It was a close call-a chunk of wood went spinning in the air-but Dru survived and retreated.
He dropped the bit of quartz. There wasn't anything he could do for Rozt'a except prepare his second and last fireball, in case they attracted more attention. There was something Sheemzher could do, and he did it well. The goblin scurried forward, low to the floor, and jabbed his spear at Rozt'a's opponents whenever they tried to get beneath her guard.
Sheemzher didn't draw blood, but he kept the swordswingers off-balance until Rozt'a did. With a shout and a swallow-tail slash, she disarmed her right-side attacker and made sure he'd never swing a sword again. The goblin got past Druhallen and finished the wounded attacker with a thrust and a twist. In that moment, Rozt'a got the upper hand on the other swordswinger. She put him down with a two-handed cut across the mid-section.
The third attacker-the attacker that Druhallen had singed-beat a retreat. Dru's last fireball burnt itself out without stopping him.
'I'm whole,' Rozt'a declared before anyone asked.
'And I,' Dru added. 'Sheemzher? Tiep?'
Tiep answered that he was fine. Sheemzher's attention was on the corpses. Druhallen called the goblin off before he butchered them; then he willed his light magic to its greatest radiance.
'Demons!'
The goblin was wrong, but the bodies belonged to creatures unlike any Druhallen had seen before. They had the torsos of men, the limbs of elves, the faces of goblins, and the jewel-red eyes of Wyndyfarh's mantis servants. The corpses were bald and instead of either pointed or rounded ears, their skulls bore what appeared to be parchment drumheads behind their temples. Their skin was a shade lighter than Sheemzher's, but scaled in places, especially around their hands. They had four fingers, two of which were jointed; the other two were rigid and opposed like an insect's claws. The pair wore scabbard belts for their weapons but nothing else in the way of clothing. Short of cutting them open, Dru couldn't tell if they were male or female.
Dru pried the sword from one death-frozen hand. The hilt had been adapted for their odd combination of pincers and fingers, but the balance was tolerable, the steel better. He handed the weapon to Tiep who hesitated and wouldn't take it.
'Not me.'
'Take it,' Dru insisted. 'You could get lucky with it; you won't without it. Get the belt and scabbard, too. You don't want to gash yourself while we're walking.' He loosened the second corpse's belt.
Rozt'a gave one of her disdainful snorts. 'Walking! We'll be moving a damn sight faster than that! You were right. There, I admit it. We're not ready for this. We've got planning to do.'
'Too late for that, Roz.' He freed the belt and exchanged it with the one that supported his folding box. 'One got away. He's going to tell somebody what he survived. By sundown, whatever else lives in these mines is going to be laying for us. We've got one chance, right now, to find Sheemzher's egg, snatch the scroll, and beat a once-and- forever retreat.'
'You can't be serious-' Rozt'a began.
The goblin cut her off. 'Sheemzher find egg. Not far. Sheemzher find sky new way, yes?'
'Yes.'
'Have you got anything useful left?' Rozt'a asked.
'Enough light to see us until tomorrow's dawn. A fireball. A pall of gloom. Warding, if we found an empty room and needed to hide, and let me blur you next time; no arguments.' Her chin dipped. 'Tiep, get that belt.' The boy didn't move. 'You've seen worse. You didn't think this would be a walk in the park, did you?'
'I hoped,' Tiep admitted, but he got the belt and fastened it around his waist.
When they got back to the sky-as Sheemzher put it-Druhallen expected his nerves would quake for a month; in the meantime, he nudged Tiep in the goblin's direction. Sheemzher's sense of time and direction were better underground than they'd been in the Weathercote Wood. They truly hadn't gone much farther when light glowed ahead of them.
They approached with caution: ten steps, then wait and listen. The tunnel widened but remained a rough-cut passage to a chamber that was filled with a faint, but steady, pale green light. Dru dampened his own light spell and strained his senses searching for another wizard's magic. He found it, too: powerful, but alien. A glance through his ring revealed nothing they couldn't see with their eyes alone. It should have been reassuring; it wasn't.
Dru successfully stifled a twinge of guilt when Sheemzher waved his hands in silhouette to indicate that he'd be the first to enter the chamber.
Go ahead, he mouthed, moving his lips but making no sound.
Tiep scowled and drew his sword. The sound was louder than thunder in a summer's night, but didn't precipitate disaster. Sheemzher walked ten paces, twenty paces into the light. He turned and beckoned them closer.
'Empty. All empty.'
Rozt'a led Druhallen and Tiep into a large, but not huge, chamber. The light, which seemed to rise from the chiseled floor on the far side of the chamber's center, revealed an irregular dome that formed both walls and ceiling, but the light wasn't nearly bright enough to banish shadows. Dru thought they were alone, though he couldn't prove it. The center of the chamber was clear, but the sides were cluttered with boulders and piles of smaller rocks. Anything man-sized or smaller could be hiding there.
The chamber was damp, even misty. There was water here, and there had been for a very long time. Dripping icicles of stone hung from the ceiling; glistening spires grew beneath them. When Dru touched them with his ring he felt only the faintest magic and manipulation.
The same could not be said for a series of pools had been dug out of the floor. Their shapes were regular, their lips precisely square, and the largest of them was the source of the light that filled the chamber. Rozt'a knelt to examine it and without warning dipped her hand beneath the surface. She'd raised her hand to her lips before Dru found his voice. She was already spitting when he told her not to swallow.
'Brine!' she sputtered between spits. 'Brine from the worst pickles ever made!'
Tiep chuckled, Druhallen resisted.
'How do you get brine in the middle of a mountain?' she demanded.
'Rock salt,' Dru suggested seriously enough, though Tiep took it for a joke.
The rock all around them was the same gray granite they'd been hiking through for days. Good for making buildings, but useless for pickles. Dru took Rozt'a's place beside the pool. He looked down into the light, saw the underwater passages connecting the light-filled pool to the smaller, dimmer pools on either side.
'What good is brine?' Tiep asked. 'You can't drink it.'
'The oceans and seas are filled with creatures that don't drink brine,' Dru replied and collected a few drops of the suspect liquid on his fingertip. He'd seen an ocean just once, after his visit to Candlekeep. It had little in common with the brightly lit Dekanter pool, including the taste. The brine on Dru's finger was far saltier than Candlekeep's ocean and slick, reminding him of blood.
Rozt'a observed, 'I don't see anything swimming in there.'
'Be grateful,' Dru replied in a tone meant to discourage further questions.
Thanks-as usual-to Ansoain's relentless collection of useless facts and her determination to share those facts with her son and apprentice, Dru had begun to put the puzzle pieces together. The central piece was a bit of information Amarandaris had given him about the second garrison slaughter. The Zhentarim and Red Wizards had torn each other apart. Those were the honored divide-and-conquer tactics of those who'd mastered the discipline of usurping another sentient mind. Dru could name a handful of living wizards and a score of races or monsters who were known to usurp sentient minds, but only one such race made use of brine-filled pools.
If Druhallen was remembering Ansoain's lessons correctly then the Beast Lord wasn't a god but a colony of mind flayers and they were in a world of hurt.
