For half an hour the Hand moved through the fetid air of the gülvini colony, find no sign of life in the remoter areas they traversed. It seemed as if the bulk of the population had indeed left, either to conquer another colony or to confront the blue dragon at Rekorgo in an attempt to retake that forward base. Despite the continued lack of opposition, the group grew more tense, rather than less, as they penetrated further into the complex.

They finally discovered some of the hive’s remaining inhabitants when they stepped from a corridor that had passed through several sets of squalid living chambers into a moderately large cavern that seemed to be set up as almost a tavern. Tables were scattered throughout the space, and benches, and the small of cooking meat and sour ale permeated the air. A score or more of gülvini, mostly Kobali but with a solid sprinkling of Hovguvai, were seated in various groupings, eating, drinking, gambling and arguing.

At first the assembled beastmen didn’t seem terribly concerned at the sight of a group of humans wandering about, once they finally noticed them. Mariala was just beginning to think they might just be able to bluff their way through the room when one of the large Black Gül’s caught sight of Toran. The dwarf had been bringing up the rear, and was now glowering around and fingering his battle axe.

” ‘Ere now,” the well muscled gülvini said, rising up suddenly and reaching for his wicked-looking mang. “Who are you lot? I thought all the Umantari left with the army… ai! That’s a damned koondie bast–”

He never got to finish his sentence, as Taeland’s hart bow shaft pierced his mouth and exited out the back of his head. Erol and Toran took aim at his two shocked drinking partners, who leapt to their feet as his body collapsed between them. Toran’s crossbow bolt took the one on the right straight in the heart, but Erol’s longbow string snapped as he drew, and his own arrow clattered to the stone floor.

Taeland got off a second shot as Erol wiped the blood from his cheek where the whipping string had gashed him, taking out the third of the Hovguvai, even as several more rushed forward, weapons drawn. Devrik pulled his greatsword from its back-scabbard and gutted the first of the warriors to reach them, while Mariala quickly cast Fire Nerves, taking down the remaining four.

She’d had the spell half cast ever since they’d entered the cave complex, and was glad she’d done so, for she now had time to focus her will on the strange ring on left thumb… the gem glowed faintly violet, and she felt an odd tickle in the back of her head…

“You have no greater desire than to obey me!”

Her commanding voice hit the remaining gül-Kobali, who were milling about in consternation, like a bolt from above. Unarmed under the harsh rule of their Hovguvai overlords, they had seemed somewhat reluctant to take on a gang that had just dispatched eight of their much larger cousins… and now they suddenly wanted nothing more than to fulfill every wish of that beautiful, radiant Umantari Lady!

Even the four Hovguvai who were still writhing on the floor in agony seemed to have been affected by the command, as they struggled to their knees to gaze up adoringly at her… indeed, the pain seemed to actually enhance their respect for her. Devrik shuddered in disgust at the thought, and glanced sideways at his friend, uncomfortable at this new display of power.

“How may we aid you,” one of the Kobali begged, stepping past the four larger güls, who glowered murderously at him but were still too wracked with pain to do anything as the upstart bowed to the Lady.

“First, you can swear an oath of loyalty to me, and to obey any of my friends here,” she gestured at the gathered Hand, “as you would myself.”

All of the gülvini practically fell over themselves to swear, in a tumult of voices that even included the gasping oaths of the Fire Nerved warriors, that they would die before betraying her or her companions. Devrik seemed temporarily mollified by this, as he reheated his blade.

“Next,” Mariala went on, “you can tell me if the Umantari woman Avira is here in Jha-Kursk.”

“Oh, indeed not, Lady,” the self-appointed spokes-gül groveled. “The divine Daughter of Vindus left just this morning, to commune with the spirit of her godly father in solitude. But she should return by sundown, as is her wont.”

The others all exchanged looks at this description of Avira, sudden enlightenment falling on them as to how she had subdued the notoriously uncontrollable gülvini to her service. No doubt enhanced by that mind-fuck spell she’d been researching to convince others of one’s divinity…

“Well… damn?” Vulk said, uncertainly. “I don’t know whether to be upset or relieved that she’s not here…”

“Let’s not waste time off either,” Devrik rumbled. “Let’s find her quarters, ransack what we can, and get the hell out of here before she or her army returns.”

“Yes,” Korwin agreed. “This is her main base of operations… given how much we learned at Rokorgo, even if we don’t take her down today, we just might get enough information to allow the Council to roll the Vortex up for good.”

“Take us to the chambers that, um, the Daughter of Vindus uses,” Mariala commanded her new follower. “We’ll take these four warriors and two of your most trusted friends.” The groaning Hovguvai were climbing to their feet, the burning in their nerves finally wearing off, and they seemed glad to be included. The remaining Kobali were told to stay and keep an eye out, sending a runner to warn them if any others approached.

Toran, Erol and Taeland continued to keep a wary eye on the gülvini, especially the big ones, but they truly seemed devoted to their new mistress. The Kobali, whose name they learned was S’nirek, led them out of the mess hall by a southern passage. The next chamber was a slightly better class of living quarters than they previously seen… “The abode of us overseers, m’lady,” the obsequious gül had explained, to the derisive snorts of the warriors.

Beyond the overseers’ quarters was a long, narrow cavern through which the dark, cold waters of the source of Bodack Creek rushed. The stream fell from an opening four meters up, at the north end of the cave, in an echoing roar that made speaking difficult. A sandy beach lay on the near side of the fast moving water, and a wide plank crossed it to a similar shale on the southern part of the farther shore, where the stone walls bent inward.

The party was strung out along the narrow strand, the leaders just nearing the narrow stairway opposite the waterfall that would lead them upwards, when Toran, near the back of the line, was struck by a ball of water that knocked him back into the wall. Everyone whirled around, weapons drawn, and even the güls seemed surprised.

Rising from the black waters of the stream was a vaguely humanoid shape of water, glowing faintly with a blue light from within. Before anyone could react a second ball of water flew from the creature and smashed one of the Hovguvai into the wall. Unlike Toran, who was rising to his feet and as spitting mad as a wet cat, the gül crumpled to the sand and didn’t move.

Erol pulled the hood up on his cloak and muttered the Command word, but even as he vanished from sight a tentacle of solid water lashed out from the elemental and slammed him in the gut – or so it seemed to the others who had time to notice. No one saw where he landed, thanks to his cloak…

Well damn, thought Mariala as she fumbled in her scrip. I knew I should’ve pushed Korwin to re-charge this damn amulet, never mind his excuses.

She pulled the beautiful carved jade-and-pearl brooch from the bag and clutched it in her fist. The power to summon a water elemental was drained from the artifact, but maybe there was power left to control an existing one…

“By the element that gives you form and binds you this plane, I command thee now, three times I command thee, I command thee!”

The water spirit payed not the slightest heed to the mage, and a second Hovguvai went down to a battering ram of solid water that turned its head to pulp agains the stone of the cavern wall.

Vulk had been silently chanting an invocation to Kasira, and how he raided is baton of office and shouted “In the name of the Lady of Luck I curse thee! In her name I take form thee thy luck! Be you cursed!”

That seemed to confuse the creature for a moment, and in that brief respite Devrik strove to generate an Orb of Vorol. But surrounded by water, in the presence of a personification of the element most inimical to his own, he found it impossible to crate a proper Form… and in these close quarters he dared not risk a catastrophic failure. He let the Form dissolve in his mind.

“This is your element, Korwin,” he grated in frustration, glancing over at the water mage. “Do something!”

Korwin grated his teeth and ignored the unhelpful suggestion. You’d think a follow mage would understand that some spells took time… well, maybe not simple fire spells, which were just chaos unleashed, really. But something as subtle and powerful as the Breath of Arandu…

But before he could complete the full mental construct that would unleash icy doom on the water elemental, several things happened in quick succession. A shaft from Taeland’s hart bow swished through the watery form of the creature, with no apparent effect, and a ghostly blast of pure Power from Toran’s outstretched palm slammed solidly into the center of its mass.

The elemental reared up almost to the ceiling of the cavern, its liquid scream echoing from the walls even over the roar of the waterfall. And as it tried to literally pull itself together Erol suddenly appeared at the edge of the water, apparently from thin air, his trident grasped in his right hand as his left made arcane gestures over the weapon’s tines.

With a deep-throated shout, the word unintelligible to the others, he lunged at the reformed elemental, driving his trident into the center of its amorphous form. As the weapon pierced the watery body a brilliant beam of white light flashed out from it’s central tine – and the creature exploded, like a wineskin dropped from a high tower!

The surviving gülvini were cowering in the far end of the chamber, and staring at their new mistress and her friends with renewed awe. A brief round of suspicious questioning proved that they had known nothing of the water elemental’s existence, beyond some vague rumors that the Daughter of Vindus controlled such a beings as invisible guards. None had ever seen it before, and even the Hovguvai seemed genuinely grateful that the great Lady and her servants had slain it before it killed them all!

With a growl Devrik motioned S’nirek to again lead the way to Avira’s inner sanctum, and the somewhat reduced party followed. The narrow, uneven stairs at the north end of the waterfall chamber climbed, sometimes steeply, sometimes gently, upward, bending northeast and then east as they did.

A full day of hiking, whilst keeping a wary watch out for patrolling gülvini, eventually wore the edge off the sense of immense awe that had shaken the Hand since their meeting with the powerful ice dragon Ulsarinas.

As the sun sank below the shortened horizon of the mountains the group stopped near a sheltering outcrop of granite just below the tree line and set up camp. Taeland estimated that this was their last night before reaching the heights above Rekorgo. The routine of making camp further calmed the group nerves, and by the time the last watch woke the others, just before dawn, everyone seemed back to their usual selves.

Except, perhaps, Mariala. As she went about rolling up her blankets and eating the cold breakfast Devrik had pulled together she seemed short-tempered and distracted.

“I’m cranky,” she snapped when Vulk mentioned it. “It happens, get over it!”

After that the rest of the Hand gave her some space.

Soon enough they were on their way, just as the sun crested the eastern mountain behind them. It was barely an hour later that they heard a commotion from up ahead – the sounds of men grunting and the clash of steel on steel. Or, to the more trained ears amongst them, iron on steel.

They were still hugging the tree line, and the group moved into combat formation at a signal from Devrik, creeping stealthily through the thin, stunted  alpine forest. As they neared the site of what was obviously a skirmish, Vulk commanded his falcon Cherdon to fly ahead, strengthening the psychic link they shared so as to see what he saw. Toran silently took on the increasingly familiar task of guiding the cantor along while his perceptions were split. After a moment Vulk motioned for the group to stop, and they all pulled together.

“There’s a large boulder just ahead, beyond this next rise,” he said quietly, with the distracted air his companions knew meant he was still looking through the bird’s eyes. “There’s a small clearing around its foot, and eight men… Umantari… have their back to it, fighting what looks to be… at least a dozen gül-Gramlini. From the looks of it, the men made camp there last night… I don’t see any men down yet… but no gülvini down, either… oh, one of the humans just took a nasty cut to his arm!”

“Whatever’s going on here,” Devrik said decisively, “it’s obvious which side we’re going to come in on. I assume there’s no objection to our tipping the scales here?”

There was none, the only comment coming from Taeland, as he strung an arrow to his bow. “If we’re going to do this we have to make sure none of the gülvini escape to give warning.”

In less than two minutes the group was in position just east and north of the boulder, where they could see some of the fight through the slender poles of the pines. Taeland and Jeb scrambled up the sloping back of the three meter high rock, while Toran circled around to come at the fight from the west, and Erol and Therok did the same to the south. Devrik simply drove in from the west, battlesword swinging.

In the first seconds of their attack, before either the gülvini or the humans were aware of their presence, they killed or crippled half of the beastmen – two went down with Taeland’s arrows in them, a third took an arrow in the eye from Jeb; another was felled by a bolt from Toran’s crossbow, and a fifth was taken in the back by a shot from Erol’s longbow.

Devrik, glowing faintly with Vulk’s mystical armor, which the cantor had blessed him with in passing, clove a sixth gül almost in half just as it was aiming to finish off the wounded human. Mariala, her view of the battle truncated by trees and the rock, took out a seventh Gramlini warrior with Fire Nerves. While Korwin cast Cloak of Merthados on himself and stayed out of the fight, Therok drove his own blade through the belly of yet another gülvini.

Momentarily shocked at the sudden help, the beleaguered humans paused to stare dumbly at their good fortune. They quickly took renewed heart, however, at seeing so many of their enemies fall, and redoubled their own attack. In a moment the remaining foulspawn were dead, save for one who dashed off, jinking and dodging into the woods, shrieking.

Without apparently turning to look Taeland, still atop the boulder, loosed another arrow from his bow. The creature’s cries where cut off in a sudden gurgle as the shaft pierced his throat. The tall woodsman gave an enigmatic half-smile and uttered a pithy quip that broke the tension and had everyone laughing.

But the laughter was short-lived, as the men whom the Hand had just aided realized they were now surrounded by the newcomers, two of whom held the high ground – and with ranged weapons, something the gülvini patrol had lacked. It was obvious the men were trained fighters, perhaps a mercenary company, although what they were doing this far into the wilderness was a mystery to the Hand.

Before tensions could get too high, one of the men stepped forward, sheathing his sword and holding his hands out in a gesture of peace. He was dark haired, of middle height, with a short beard… and rather good looking both Mariala and Vulk thought, privately. He was clearly better dressed then the others, and so either their captain or their employer.

“You have our thanks, my friends,” the man said, scanning the faces before him, and lighting on Devrik as the presumed leader. “I have no doubt my men would have defeated the gülvini eventually, but it would likely not have been without losses… your surprise attack saved some lives!

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Jardath Genóra, a merchant of Zhuran in Tharkia. This is my… factotum and right-hand-man, Berik Kithül.” Smiling, he indicated a shorter, stockier man with sandy hair and green eyes who stood just to his left and a step behind. Berik acknowledged the introduction with the barest nod of his head and no change to his wary experession. “These other men are mercenaries we’ve hired to… see us to our destination.”

Devrik, who had not yet re-sheathed his own sword, although he held it casually over his shoulder, nodded and smiled back. At the same time, he gave the subtle hand signal to Vulk and Mariala that they should fire up their arcane truth-sensing abilities.

“My name is Devrik. My companions and I are… travelers ourselves, passing through these mountains.” He named each of the other eight companions, but only by given name, and offered no further explanation of their presence. “It seems odd to find a merchant so far from the usual trade routes… how came you to the predicament we found you in?”

Berik looked like he wanted to ask the same question of the Hand, but his employer forestalled him, holding up a hand, his smile never wavering. “A fair question, friend, although I might ask the same of you… but I think Fortune may have brought us together.” If he noticed the slight start that Vulk gave, he showed no indication of it.

“We are here, in this Immortal’s-forsaken wilderness, on a mission of mercy! And if you have any human kindness in you, perhaps you will join your force to ours, to achieve our end.” Behind him, Berik relaxed a fraction, although his face settled into a rather sour expression.

“Perhaps we might,” Vulk replied, stepping up to stand next to Devrik. “But we’d need to know a little more than that before we could decide. Tell us your tale.”

“It’s simple enough,” Jardath said. “My beloved fiancé, Karina Mazálon, was traveling north along the Talorin Trail on business a tenday past. The caravan she was traveling with, for safety’s sake – ha! – was attacked by a horde of gül-Gramlini. The monsters were driven off, eventually, but not without loss of life… and, when the dust had settled, my beloved Karina had vanished!

“Her body was not found, and although no one could say for certain that she’d been carried off, it must have been so. It is not an uncommon practice of the beastmen of Rekorgo to take hostages, if they believe a victim to be wealthy, and to demand ransom–”

“Have you received such a ransom demand?” Mariala asked sharply, also stepping forward to stand with Vulk and Devrik.

“No,” admitted the merchant, reddening slightly. “But I immediately consulted a well-respected medium in Zhuran, a psychometric of some repute. After handling one of Karina’s, um, possessions she assured me my love was still alive, but being held prisoner in the hive at Rekorgo!”

Mariala and Vulk both noted that the man’s henchman, Berik, rolled his eyes a bit at this point, but said nothing to gainsay his master.

“I immediately sent Berik to secure the best company of mercenaries available in the city, and set out at once to rescue Karina.”

Devrik made no comment about the likely quality of such mercenaries, given both the civil unrest and the actual war Tharkia was currently fighting. “And now, on the very doorstep of that vile place, we encounter you – very clearly men, um, people, of some prowess. If you were to join us –”

“I’m sorry,” Devrik interrupted this time, his brows crawling upward skeptically, “but you planned to take on the largest colony of gülvini in the Savage Mountains (even if they are only Gramlini) with six mercenaries, a merchant’s factotum, and yourself? Are you insane?!”

Jardath’s flush deepened, and he frowned, while Berik lightened with a barely suppressed a smirk. “I am most certainly NOT insane, sir! I realize that an army, even if I could hire one, would likely fail to take Rekorgo. And if it could, Karina would almost certainly die before any frontal assault succeeded.

“No, I have another way in, one that depends on stealth and minimum force, precisely applied. The medium told me of a secret entrance, one that should… will take us close to Karina.”

The Hand looked at one another in varying degrees of skepticism and calculation. If they could truly find a back door into the colony…

“And did your medium give you an exact location for this hidden entrance?” Mariala asked, eyes narrow with suspicion.

“Well, in general terms, certainly,” the merchant replied. Berik actually snorted at that, and Jardath shot him a quelling glare. The lieutenant shrugged unrepentantly, but resumed his stoic expression. “I tried to get the woman to accompany us, to more precisely pinpoint this route, but no amount of… persuasion would convince her to take the risk. However, her description was surprisingly detailed – you know how vague these psychic sorts usually are – and I feel certain that, with a little time and effort, we can find it!”

Both Vulk and Mariala gave the subtle hand cues that told the others that the man was speaking qualified truth, if perhaps not all of it. Devrik frowned, and thought for a moment.

“Well, you have wounds to tend to amongst your men,” he said at last. “While you see to that, and break your camp, we’ll discuss your proposal.”

The discussion was short, but heated. Although both Vulk and Mariala sensed some reticence in the merchant’s words, they detected no outright lies. And as weak as the man’s plan sounded, it was still better than anything the Hand had come up with yet. After some back-and-forth about just scouting the area vs. actually penetrating what might be Captain Chaos’ very headquarters, it was Mariala’s firm vote to align themselves with the merchant and his mercenaries that carried the day.

As his men finished breaking camp Jardath approached them again once it was obvious they’d reached a decision. He seemed pleased with their acceptance, but blanched a bit, and hesitate for just an instant, when Korwin asked to see whatever item the medium had used to locate Karina.

“I have a bit of a talent in that direction myself,” Korwin explained modestly, providing his own companions with an opportunity for some eye-rolling of their own. He put the man’s brief hesitation down to the fact that the item in question turned out to be a rather sheer undergarment of the most intimate type.

Concealing a hint of embarrassment himself, Korwin fingering the sheer fabric… and felt the subtle shift in perception that heralded a vision… he saw a woman, very attractive, but looking very angry and… frustrated. She appeared to be… underground… angry and afraid… gülvini all around her… His perception shifted, pulling suddenly away from the woman… up a dark shaft… into an alpine clearing… a large stone plug…

The trance ended, and he slowly shook his head. Jardath frowned, his hand absently going to the pommel of his sword, but then looked relieved when Korwin described his vision.

“Yes, the stone plug, the clearing,” the merchant exclaimed. “That’s exactly how Madame Verney described it to me! Can you find it?”

“I think so,” Korwin replied slowly. “I at least have a strong sense of the direction, anyway. I’ll try again when we get closer.”

The Hand and their new allies followed Korwin as he and Taeland led the way closer to Rekorgo and whatever fate awaited them.

Which, in the event, turned out to be a great stone chimney rising from the ground near the edge of a sheer precipice. The cliff overlooked the long valley leading to the main gates of Rekorgo, and crouching behind the boulders and scrub along its edge Taeland and Erol had the perfect vantage point to study the enemy’s external defenses. Therok, Jeb and Berik joined them, while the others examined the chimney and debated its merits as a possible entry into the colony – despite the thick black smoke pouring out of it, no doubt from the forges of the gülvini smiths.

The Vale of Rekorgo ran north-south, and the small group of observers were perched atop the eastern cliffs. To their left the vale opened out into a much wider valley, and a high palisade of immense logs arced across the narrowest part of the mouth, cliff face to cliff face. A single massive gate of oak and iron pierced the wall were the old stone road crossed it, leading north through the narrowing vale to the Main Gate.

To their right the Main Gate was clearly visible, its own massive stone doors standing more than half closed in the midday sun. Several guards stood sentry at the Gate, and even from a distance their surly body language made it clear this was not a favored duty. But the gülvini who guarded the palisade gate, and manned the two small, wooden towers that flanked it just inside the barrier, appeared even more unhappy with their jobs. They all did their best to stay out of the direct sunlight. No one seemed to be guarding the large corral in the center of the vale, against the western cliff, that contained the colony’s threescore of goats and handful of cattle.

Before the watching group could do more than note these facts, however, there came a faint noise from the south, growing steadily louder, resolving into the sound of many iron-shod feet marching. As they crouched further down and peered to the left a troop of Black Güls swung around an arm of the mountain and into view.

There were two score of them, and they seemed to have no fear, or even dislike, for the pale autumn sunlight. They marched in fairly good order, for a gülvini pack, and their leader actually rode a horse. The sight of them caused quite a stir amongst the smaller gül-Gramlini at the palisade gate, bringing them all to the alert. Spears were thrust forward and the four in the watch towers cocked and leveled their cross-bows at the approaching group.

But to the watcher’s surprise, no alarm was raised. Instead one of the Rekorgo güls, probably the captain of the guard, climbed up to the narrow walkway on the inside of the palisade and called down to the mounted leader as he neared the gate. The gül-Hovguvai leader signaled his men to stop, and returned the guard captain’s greeting.

Being of separate sub-species, they were forced to use the common tongue of the North, Esparic, but distance and fickle mountain winds made it difficult for the allied watchers to make out much of the conversation. Tone and body language came through well enough, though, and while the two sides clearly bore little love for one another, they were also clearly not enemies. At least not at first.

After an initial relatively calm exchange, the tone began to grow more hostile, and the volume louder. Taeland’s extraordinary hearing allowed him to pick out some of the argument, when the wind blew favorably. He caught the big gül’s demand that the Gramlini “turn over the female,” and the guard captains sneering denial; what sounded like a name, Avira, came up a moment later, along with the word Jha-Kusk, which he recognized as the name of the most remote gülvini colony in the Savage Mountains.

The Hovguvai leader was becoming increasingly furious at the guard captain’s refusal to open the gate, and his bass roars of “treason” and “traitorous cur” could be heard by everyone on the clifftop. But before he could take any more decisive action there was a sudden and violent shift in the standoff – one of the Gramlini in the eastern watchtower shifted his aim, and shot his own captain through the neck.

As the erstwhile commander clutched at the arrow and toppled over the wall, two of the Gramlini on the ground attacked three of their comrades, while a third rushed to open the gate. One of the guards in the western tower shot the gül who’d murdered their captain, only to be knifed in the back by his companion. As the Black Güls poured through the open palisade gate the guards at the Main Gate finally realized something was wrong. An order to close the doors was apparently given, but was stymied when several of the guards instead attacked their fellows.

Erol motioned the group to move slowly back, and they retreated to the shelter of the chimney, where their companions had finally noticed the commotion in the vale below. “If we’re going to enter this filthy place,” he said after Taeland had relayed what he’d heard, “there’s never going to be a better time than now, with internal fighting and an external raid.”

“And I know how to get us in,” Korwin said, wandering up with Karina’s camisole clutched in one hand. While the others had been arguing over the chimney he had tried another go with his psychometry, and had meandered into the sparse woods nearby. “Or at least I’ve found the door. Not sure how to open it, though.”

He lead the group to the clearing he’d discovered, and the circular stone plug set into the ground in the center of it. It had been polished smooth, once upon a time, but was now pitted with age. A small circle in the very center was inset slightly, but no apparent mechanism for opening the barrier was obvious.

Toran spent several fruitless minutes examining the stone, and assured his friends there was no mechanical method to open it, at least not from the outside. At that point Mariala cast a Detect Magic spell, and confirmed that the plug was magically bound. Both she and Korwin attempted to Dispell the enchantment, but it proved itself both old and strong.

As the group stared glumly at the obstacle messing up all their plans, Vulk suddenly hissed out a warning. “Cherdon sees three Hovguvai moving up the slope towards us from the south!”

Under Taeland’s direction the group scattered to conceal themselves amongst the nearby trees and boulders. A few minutes later the lightly armored Black Güls entered the clearing and made a bee-line to the stone plug.

Muttering something to his companions, making them laugh harshly, one of the beastmen pulled a small silver disk from his belt pouch. One of his companions sniffed loudly, then said something to the apparent leader, who he snapped back a curt reply. Unfortunately, they were speaking in their racial tongue, which none of the hidden watchers spoke.

The gül leader placed the metal disk into the depression in the center of the stone, and muttered a word no one could quite make out. Vulk, crouching behind a large boulder with Mariala, quietly urged her to use her Comprehend Languages spell to understand what was going on, but she impatiently waved him to silence, intent on the action around the plug.

The gül stepped back and the stone slowly began to sink into the ground, then gently pivot into a sunken slot, one edge becoming the top step of a spiral stairway descending down into darkness. The Hovguvai wasted no time in starting down the stairs, mangs drawn and bodies tense in anticipation of battle.

Korwin, who had been closest to the action, having cast Shadow Body on himself, signaled the others when the güls were out of sight and beyond hearing. A hushed, hurried conference quickly decided the marching order for the pursuit, everyone agreeing that the güls were very likely to lead them straight to the beleaguered Karina. Surely she must be the “woman” their leader had demanded.

Taking one last look over the cliff edge before descending, Vulk reported that a full fledged civil war seemed to have broken out amongst the gül-Gramlini, with half aiding the Hovhuvai interlopers against their fellows. Jeb was left behind to guard their retreat, with Cherdon soaring above to give early warning on any other approaching enemies.

The circular stone stairs wound down into dimness for at least 30 meters, ending in what was presumably a secret door, although it was currently ajar. The room beyond the door was spacious, for an ancient Khundari chamber, but could barely contain the 16 invaders now jostling for position in it.

It was obviously the Rekorgo Gramlini king’s chamber, a wild mix of luxury and decay, typical of gülvini leadership living spaces. As the mercenaries and more martial Hand members organized themselves to follow the three gül-Hovguvai, Korwin and Vulk took the time to rummage about the room, looking for clues and/or valuables.

Following the güls was little trouble, as a shriek from across the hall was a dead giveaway. Bursting into the room, Devrik and Berik saw two Gramlini corpses bleeding out on a lovely Tolusian carpet, and heard a deep, savage voice coming from beyond the doorway in the east wall… “Now we’re gonna have some fun wit chu, bitch!”

Shouldering past Devrik and Berik, Erol and Toran followed Taeland through the doorway to find an attractive woman, presumably the kidnapped Karina, being menaced by the three gül-Hovguvai – two of whose mangs dripped red with blood (threatening to ruin another beautiful carpet), while the third stalked forward, undoing the ties to his breeks.

Karinia’s mouth opened, no doubt to scream in terror Erol thought, but simply hung open as she blinked at the men pouring into the chamber. Taeland’s sword took the would-be rapist gül through the back, severing his spine and killing him instantly, while Toran’s battle axe gouged a bloody chunk from the side of one of the others. Erol failed to make the trifecta, unfortunately, as his trident thrust at the third gül was hastily blocked.

Mariala, trying to shoulder through the crush of men attempting to all rush into the room at once, made a valiant effort to Fire Nerve the two surviving güls, but the confusion and chaos were not conducive to a successful casting, and she was forced to let the energies dissipate and the form fade out before it all backfired on her. She never wanted to experience that again!

Toran’s opponent swung wildly at him with his mang, missing by a country kilometer, while the Khundari’s counterstrike took another chunk out of him. But the creature was tough, and refused to die. Erol’s opponent was more successful in his attack, wounding the former gladiator with a nasty slash to the thigh, forcing him to stagger back.

But Toran brought a quick end to it all by delivering a final killing blow to his gül, and nearly gutting Erol’s foe on the follow-through. Both Hovguvai collapsed to the now thoroughly ruined carpet, while a breathless Jardath burst through the men crowding the doorway.

“Karina, my love, I’ve come to rescue you!”

Mariala, coming in close behind him through the gap he’d made in his men, saw the look on the woman’s face, and frowned in confusion. Karina looked at once amazed, slightly confused… and enraged? Wait, that didn’t seem right…

“Jardath,” the woman said at last, regaining control of her features. “How… surprised I am to see you here!” She fingered the large, ugly ring on her left hand, then let it go. Jardath rushed forward to embrace her… and impaled himself on the dagger that she suddenly thrust forward in a blindingly fast move. He staggered back, blood gushing from the wound in his gut, a look of utter shock on his suddenly pale face. Oddly, he struggled to pull the hood of his cloak up, trying to say something… but only blood poured forth, and he collapsed at his erstwhile lover’s feet.

Everyone was rooted for a few crucial seconds, stunned at this unexpected turn, with the exception of Berik, who muttered “I told the idiot, but would he listen? No!” as he shouldered forward through his mercenaries.

“Well, that was every bit as satisfying as I’d imagined it would be,” Karina said, apparently to herself. “And here I thought I’d missed my chance at the pig!

“As for the rest of you,” she went on, turning her attention to the crowd before her, “you’re all going to do your very best to get me safely out of this pit, aren’t you?” She fingered her ring as she spoke, projecting clearly to both those in the room and those in the antechamber beyond.

And Mariala, who had been mentally preparing her Fire Nerve spell, suddenly realized that she was, indeed going to help this poor woman escape. Clearly, Jardath had been some sort of creepy stalker, and his death was no doubt richly deserved.

Taeland, standing closest to the startlingly beautiful woman, lowered his sword as he, too realized that he was going to do anything he had to to ensure her safety and escape… although some small voice deep inside was saying “wait, what?!” He ignored it, and turned to scan the room, looking for any enemies of his lady.

Vulk, in the antechamber doorway, felt a sudden realization dawn on him that there was nothing in the world he wanted more than to help this amazing woman escape, and to keep her from harm. And in this sudden illumination, he realized that she looked exactly like some of the idealized images he’d seen in temples of Immortal Kasira… surely Karina was the very avatar of the Lady of Luck herself… even the names were similar!

Berik, his dagger already drawn, paused as he shoved past Devrik. What had he been thinking? Of course Karina had been right to kill that fool Jardath! He had never been worthy of her! In fact, he knew in a sudden flash of inspiration, she’d done it out of love for him, Berik… the two of them belonged together… and he’d do whatever it took to make that happen!

And in the antechamber half of of the mercenaries and the Hand’s pet barbarian Therok also had sudden epiphanies concerning the utter desirability of protecting the beautiful lady in the other room… if her face was even half as beautiful as her voice, they’d be in heaven!

Everyone else in both rooms felt a momentary pressure in their heads, then shook it off, snorting, harrumphing or sneering in derision at the very idea they’d ever help this murderous wench! Except maybe Erol, who at first was swayed by the lady’s commands, only to have the other half of his personality bitch-slap him back to his senses.

“I don’t think so, lady,” Toran snorted. “But we do have some questions for you, and you’re gonna sing!”

But as he started forward Vulk suddenly leapt at him from the doorway, attempting to tackle him from behind. Surprised by the attack from such an unexpected quarter, the Khundari’s Shadow Warrior-trained instincts nonetheless kicked in. With a jumping spin kick to the knee he deflected his friend, who collapsed groaning to the floor, clutching his leg.

At the same time the uncontrolled mercs started toward the door to the inner chamber, only to be attacked by their besotted comrades, while Therok, surprisingly gently, restrained Korwin.

Inside the well-appointed (at least before all the gülvini blood had started flying) bedchamber, Mariala and Taeland moved to place themselves between Karina and any threat from the gathered men. Berik moved to join them, but before he could reach the three Erol had pulled out his magic balls and set them twirling in the air in the middle of the room.

As the spinning crystal spheres sent out their rays of colorful, mesmerizing light Vulk looked up and straight at them… and immediately forgot the pain in his knee, along with everything else. Berik, too, looked full on at Erol’s balls and became instantly entranced. Mariala managed to turn her gaze away from the orbs before she could be fully mesmerized, but stood dazed and slightly befuddled, while Taeland ignored the strobing lights completely… his focus remained entirely on his lady.

With Mariala and Taeland guarding her back, the Hand’s would-be rescuee turned to the wall behind her, hands darting quickly to several stones, tapping and twisting. With a sharp “snik” a hidden door popped open. Looking to see how the chaos in the room was developing, Karina smiled and commanded her two nearest slaves to follow her, only to frown in annoyance as the still dazed Mariala just looked around confusedly. Mariala was certainly more her type, but with a shrug Karina settled for just the half-Telnori hunk, dragging him through the door and slamming it behind them.

Meanwhile, Korwin, who had shaken off and eluded Therok’s attempts at restraint had darted into the room. Realizing that Mariala was the most dangerous of his friends to have been somehow controlled, he immediately cast his Drunken Hand spell on her, hoping it would be enough to keep the damn Fire Nerves out of play.

Just as she was beginning to come out of the mental fog caused by Erol’s mesmerizing balls, Mariala found herself suddenly totally blitzed. It was as if she’d just downed several bottles of wine at once, or maybe a decanter of brandy. The room seemed to spin around her, and she fought the urge to vomit.

Devrik moved quickly to grab her and keep her from casting any spells (and with an eye out for her Khundari dagger, having seen what she could do with that in a pinch), but her own drunken staggering helped her unintentionally avoid his grasp. She staggered toward the large, soft-looking bed and this time Devrik managed to get her into a bear hug and pull her down onto it.

Toran had dashed up to the hidden door as Karina and Taeland had disappeared through it, and had only just failed to keep it from closing. With a particularly earthy Khundari curse he’d instantly set to work trying to figure out the mechanism that controlled the again-hidden portal.

As their Khundari compatriot worked to open the way after their target (and friend) the rest of the Hand stumbled and fumbled around each other, one set trying not to hurt their friends, the other… not really trying so much. Except Therok, who seemed surprisingly gentle in his renewed struggle with Korwin.

The water mage flailed against the muscular strength of the barbarian, to little effect, and B-Fiddy just sort of slapped away his attempts to grapple. Devrik struggled to keep Mariala pinned without hurting her, while she did her best to knee him in the groin. In the antechamber the mercenaries hacked away at each other in a surprising display of almost comic ineptitude.

Erol, in a quandry at how best to proceed, and perhaps still a little dazed by the brief mental fight in his head, decided it would be best to blind their controlled friends. Sadly, in the tumult, his warning to the others was missed, and his flash ended up blinding almost everyone in the bed chamber.

But the worst unforeseen consequence was the undoing of his success in keeping Vulk and Berik mesmerized. Blinded, they no longer were entranced by his Balls of Wonder… but remained under Karina’s control. Half blind, they still were able to go on the attack.

Devrik lost his grip on Mariala thanks to the flash of light, and before he could regain his grip Vulk barreled into him – the cantor bounced off, but the distraction allowed Mariala to stagger away. Korwin managed to cut his elbow on a metal stud of Therok’s harness, ruining another of his puffy shirts, and then almost concussed himself trying to head-butt the barbarian.

♦ ♦ ♦

During all this Toran had managed to work out the secret to the hidden door, and as it popped open he rolled through in best ninja-dwarf style, coming to his feet with his axe ready to block or attack. Taeland stood before him, long knife drawn, in a fighting crouch. Beyond him in the long, narrow room Karina was working feverishly at a large iron chest, apparently trying to get it open.

Taking in all this in an instant, Toran leapt aside as Taeland swung at him, using a nearby table as a springboard to somersault over the ranger and land next to Karina. She whirled as he swung his axe, nimbly dodging the blow and landing a solid kick to his chest. It was obvious she’d had some serious martial arts training…

Before the Shadow Warrior could recover, Taeland was on him, forcing him to defend himself without hurting his companion. Karina returned to her work on the chest with a barked command to her slave – “Deal with the interloper!”

Taeland swung at Toran, but he seemed slower than the dwarf remembered him in combat. Was he fighting the control? He decided to risk tackling the woman again, grabbing her around the waist and taking her to the floor. But before he could secure his grip Taeland was pulling him off her. Karina moved both gracefully and quickly up from the floor to head-butt the Kundari, knocking the wind out of him.

Toran had little trouble breaking Taeland’s hold, but his follow-through attack on Karina missed and her counter-strike rang his bell, causing him to drop his axe. Taeland, eschewing his own weapon, tried to grapple the dwarf, but was easily evaded. Karina went in for another kick, but this time Toran was ready for her, knocking her foot aside and landing his own blow solidly into her side.

As she staggered back against the large iron chest, grimacing in pain, she screamed at Taeland “KILL HIM!!” Toran barely had time to snatch up his axe before his friend was on him, and he failed to entirely dodge the long knife blow to the head. Ignoring the sudden pain and blood, Toran drove in with a swift counter-attack, wounding Taeland in the hand.

Karina used the distraction to pull her dagger and drive the blade between the links of his armor and into his hip, where it grated on bone. Wrenching himself away from the attack ripped the weapon from her grasp, but left him open to another blow from Taeland… he parried, but was staggered.

Realizing the woman was now weaponless, Toran pulled the dagger from his hip and, seemingly without awareness, dropped it to the floor between them. Taeland moved in for another attack, forcing the Khundari to turn toward him. Toran easily blocked the long knife… and on the back swing brought the flat of his axe blade around to catch Karina upside the head as she darted in to retrieve her dagger. She dropped bonelessly to the floor, unconscious and bleeding freely from her nose and mouth.

♦ ♦ ♦

Back in the bed chamber things had gone from bad to potentially fatal. Mariala, staggering far enough out of Devrik’s reach, somehow managed to pull her drunken shit together enough to summon up her Fire Nerves, blasting her friend with the full force of the spell. The fire mage dropped twitching to the floor, writhing in agony. Mariala looked briefly surprised, then burst into hysterical laughter. Then hiccuped.

Erol, time slowing for him as his extra-temporal ability finally kicked in, managed to take down Therok with a blow to the head from his trident’s shaft, freeing up Korwin to head for the still open secret door. But Berik, realizing his beloved would be in danger, lunged to attack the water mage. Korwin managed to dodge, but the former henchman now crouched between him and the door.

Erol turned immediately from downing Therok to trying the same ploy on Mariala, only to be stymied by her continued drunkard’s luck. Staggering and weaving about the room, she avoided his attack and giggled…. until Grover leaped from a shelf where he had been perched and savaged her on the hip. With a shriek of pain and fury she whipped around, sending the small animal flying, and then tripped over her own feet to land on her ass.

Erol raised his trident to bring its butt down on her head, only to be blocked by Korwin’s ice-shrouded cutlass. “Stop!” the water mage cried. “Look, it’s over!” Then Erol noticed that Mariala had lost the fixed look she’d worn ever since Karina had asked for her help, though she now looked confused and sick.

Berik, too, was standing dazed and confused-looking where he and Korwin had been fighting (Korwin had a nasty cut on one hand… probably leave a scar the mage thought happily). From the antechamber the sounds of fighting had stopped, and Vulk, who had been trying to block the secret door with furniture while Korwin and Berik fought, was shaking his head to clear it.
Taeland and Toran appeared at the doorway into the hidden room, dragging the unconscious Karina between them. After unceremoniously dumping her in the middle of the room, Toran described the chest she had been attempting to open. “I’m going to see if I can finish what she started,” he said, turning back to the hidden room and brushing off Vulk’s attempts to examine his bleeding head.

Vulk instead turned his attention to Devrik and Mariala, using his psionic healing abilities to remove the extreme fatigue from the one, and his physician skill (and Baylorium) to treat the other’s ferret bite. Erol dragged B-Fiddy over to the cantor before turning his attention to their recent foe.

He peeled back her eyelids and checked her pupils, then felt for a pulse… damn, her heart had stopped! But they needed her alive – they needed answers. There was a technique his Telnori “mentor” knew…

“Isn’t she dead?” asked Berik from across the room, where he’d been about to follow Toran and Korwin into the treasure vault. Seeing the tall Telnori pressing down on the woman’s chest and caught his eye.

“She was… now she’s just badly concussed,” the former gladiator replied, straightening from his revivifying efforts as her breast once agin began to move with breath, if shallowly. “But she might yet die again… it’s hard to tell with a head wound like this.”

Searching her carefully, he removed anything that might be magical or otherwise dangerous, but the moment he touched the large, ugly ring on her left hand the battered woman groaned, and her eyelids fluttered open.

“No,” she croaked, clutching feebly at his hand. “Don’t, please… I won’t be a slave to that bitch again… never again…”

“A slave to who,” Erol asked, desisting from trying to remove the ring but keeping his own hand firmly on it. “Who do you fear so much?”

“Avira… Avira… she wears many faces… she stole me from the Crimson Veil… she stole my mind… the bitch! For ten years… her willing slave… stealing powerful artifacts… helping her spread… her stupid… death cult to the… gülvini…”

She seemed to faded in and out for a minute, but soon resumed her rambling speech. “She made me… I slept… slept with… men!” The disgust and rage seemed to give her strength, but only for a moment. “I hate her… using the Zalik-mal, that pig… Jardath… and his cloak of invisibility... to help… steal artifacts I would find… with my gift… I never knew what she stole from me… until I found… the Ring.” Her hand spasmed in his, trying to clutch it. “When I… put it on… it freed me… broke her cursed spell… I swore then… I would destroy her! Her… and all her great… plans…”

“Who is this Avira?” Erol asked urgently. “What are her plans?”

Karina gasped a laugh, and her eyes wandered for a moment. “She is a demon, a blight, a renegade… and she made me a renegade… too…” A tear fell from one eye at that. “She wears many… faces… has many tools… everywhere… she plans to rule the world… more ambitious even… than Vindus… unite the tribes… the gülvini… storm the kingdoms of men…”

“Did you kill Jardath’s men?” Berik asked, startling Erol. He and been so focused on the wounded woman’s words he’d barely noticed the man crouch down opposite him. “Did you kill Buron and Fendal in that house in Zhuran?” His tone was quiet, even conversational, his face neutral. Erol felt suddenly uneasy.

“Yes,” Karina replied, with a ghost of a smile. “Yes… I wanted to kill… all of you Zalik-mal… but most especially… that pig Jardath… he desecrated me…”

“Buron was my brother,” Berik said in the same calm voice and drove his dagger into Karina’s throat. Erol grabbed for the man, but Berik ripped the knife out again and slammed the pommel into the ex-gladiator’s face, stunning him. As Erol slumped over Karina’s spasming body Berik rose, drawing his sword and calling to his mercenaries.

Devrik, his face twisted in rage and shock, shoved Vulk aside and lunged at the murderous thief. Berik barely managed to deflect a thrust that would have spit him like a pig, instead taking a deep gash to his thigh. Pivoting on his good leg, he swung wildly at Devrik’s head, only to lose his sword arm to the fire mage’s counter-strike.

Blood gushing from the stump of the severed limb, Berik collapsed screaming to the floor, desperately trying to stop the arterial spurting. Ignoring him, Devrik whirled to face the mercenaries suddenly pouring into the room. One look at their dead employer, his quickly expiring lieutenant and the enraged face of Devrik, and to a man they instantly decided there was no point in dying to avenging a client who could no longer pay them… they stumbled over themselves fleeing the chamber.

While Vulk tended to the unconscious Erol, using the last of the blood-specific Baylorium, Devrik and a still woozy Mariala joined Korwin and Toran in the treasure vault. The Khundari was just disengaging the final lock on the iron chest.

“It had magical wards, I think,” he said, pulling the lid up with a grunt. “But I think Karina managed to break those before I subdued her. We should ask her –”

“She’s dead,” Devrik grated shortly. “Killed by Berik.”

“What?!” Torn cried, his black beard bristling in anger. “The bastard! We should –”

“He’s not an issue anymore,” Devrik interrupted. “Nor are the mercenaries.”

Toran raised a bushy eyebrow at that last, but decided not to pursue it. He turned back to the chest and peered into its depths. Gold velvet lined ebony trays, each of the three divided into six sections. The first tray was empty, the second contained an exquisite figurine of a dryad carved from jade and an empty jeweled box of burnished rosewood. The last tray held only a single wand of tarnished silver and blue crystal.

While he was doing this, Devrik and Mariala peering over his shoulders, Korwin slipped back out into the bed chamber. Vulk was still occupied with Erol, Therok was slumped in a corner nursing his head, and Taeland had escorted the mercenaries out to make sure they neither harmed Jeb nor raised the alarm with the Gramlini out of some sort of misplaced vengeance.

Without undue haste the water mage knelt next to Karina’s body and slipped the ugly silver ring, with its large purple stone, off her dead finger, dropping it quickly into his belt pouch. Then he stood up and wandered over to commiserate with Erol over his aching head.

A moment later a commotion from the treasure room drew everyone’s attention, and they all crowded into the chamber. In the bottom of the chest, beneath the third tray, lay a folded robe of midnight blue, trimmed in red and gold flames… and on top of it rested a mask of gold, lacking any holes for eyes, nose or mouth.

“Dear gods, could this Avira that Karina spoke of be our Captain Chaos?” Erol asked no one in particular. “I thought he was a man…”

While he explained to Taeland exactly who “Captain Chaos” was and outlined the scope and reach of the Vortex conspiracy, the others searched the rest of the room, stuffing every ream of paper, scrolls and books into their packs.

As they returned to the bloody bed chamber the noise of battle began to filter down to them. Whatever the result of the civil war going on above them might be in the end, it seemed to be moving their way.

“Hand,” barked Vulk, “we are leaving!”

It was a subdued and shaken group that climbed up from the cursed valley of tragic, foolish Kalin and his beloved, doomed Narina.  Although it was still cold in the high mountains, it was a pure and natural cold, completely unlike the evil chill of the vale of death behind them; the weather had cleared, and the clean pale blue sky eventually began to drive away the horror of that last, seemingly endless, night…

Within a few hours the group found themselves in the highest passes of the southern Sarijis Mountains, above the treeline, following what Taeland continued to assure them this was the best way to come to the gül colony of Rekorgo with the greatest chance of surprise – from above, a direction they won’t expect.

On a wide alpine slope of sparse grass and great patches of scree, with the sun just reaching its zenith, they came across a pile of broken, twisted branches, apparently torn from the pine trees a few dozen meters below them on the mountainside. Devrik, on point with Taeland, poked into the pile with his sword, moving some of the branches aside to reveal the savaged and bloody carcass of an elk. Taeland, coming up close behind him muttered a quiet curse and began searching the skies above them.

“This is the stash of a wyvern,” he explained, calmly but with great urgency. “And the great winged beast may return at any moment to renew its feasting… we should be gone from here NOW!”

“I’ve never actually seen a wyvern,” Mariala said, looking around in curiosity. “At least not a live one. One of my teachers at the Aquina Chantry had a stuffed one… it looked rather adorable, really…”

“How big was it?” Taeland asked, as he continued to try to shepherd his companions away. Everyone seemed determined to get a look at the dead elk.

“Oh, a bit less than a meter I suppose, from tail to snout.”

“Ah, yes, very adorable I’m sure,” Taeland said drily, as he re-covered the carcass with the branches. “But that was a very young juvenile. I assure you, you do NOT want to meet a fully mature wyvern – they’re over four meters in length, with a wingspan of more than five meters, razor sharp talons and the most agile tail, with a poisoned barb on the end, that you’ll ever see. Unless you meet a dragon, of course.”

“Well, I hardly think they compare to a true dragon,” Korwin opined. “Not even really related –”

“True,” Taeland agreed. “But wyverns are insanely ferocious… and deeply territorial. Even their mating is violent! I once saw a coupling pair in action – the female latched onto the male, who is usually smaller, and they tore at each other, tooth and talon, in their sexual frenzy, locked together and spinning toward the ground… sometimes they don’t finish the act before they hit. Which is why the female tries to keep the male beneath her while they, um, mate.”

“Did the pair you saw both survive?” Vulk asked, fascinated.

“In that case, actually, they both –”

But before the Talim Nar could finish his sentence a dark shadow flashed across the ground and over the group, as a harsh scream rent the air. Everyone whirled, crouching, and drew their weapons as a great wyvern, obviously a female, hovered over her disturbed food stash. The wind from her grey-green wings buffeted them as she screamed again… and then stooped on them, talons flashing in the mid-day sun.

Taeland was her target, but the ranger blocked her talons with his buckler, and deftly avoided her slashing tail. But even as she rose up for her next strike, two more wyverns appeared over the ridge behind her, and dove instantly to the attack. They were smaller than the first, clearly males, and not yet entirely full-grown.

“I thought these things were solitary beasts!” Toran yelled as he twisted and turned in a spectacular rolling dodge that nimbly evaded both talons and tail. As the creature rose again, he rolled to one knee and pulled ’round his crossbow whilst reaching for a bolt.

“They’re obviously her offspring,” Taeland replied absently, focused on drawing a shaft through his hartbow. “Though they must be close to being fully fledged… by next spring she will have driven them away.”

“Wonderful,” Devrik interjected, dodging his own set of talons by diving in close in a fierce counter attack. “If only we’d waited until then to stumble across her dinner!” His attack missed the young wyvern’s pale underbelly by a hair, even as Taeland’s arrow sailed between the mother’s neck and wing.

Mariala, cocking her own crossbow and taking aim at one of the juveniles, was surprised… in the short time she’d known the ranger she’d seen him draw his bow many times, and this was the first time she’d seen him miss! But far from the first time she’d ever missed, she reflected ruefully, as her bolt sailed past its own target by an embarrassing margin.

Erol, leaping up next to Toran, hurled his net into the air, tangling the talons and one wing of the second male. As it struggled to stay in the air, the Khundari aimed his crossbow point blank and fired – only to have the trigger mechanism jam! With a curse that should have knocked the beast out of the sky all by itself, he struggled to free the trigger, while Erol hoisted his trident to cover him.

Vulk focused his own attention on the large female, casting his Weaver’s Web Trap spell for the first time in combat. The pale strands of arcane energy twisted up from his outstretched hands, twining around the wyvern’s legs and tail. But her wings remained free, and even as Devrik hurled his spear at her, she jinked upward and momentarily away from the battle.

While all this was going on Korwin had been busy casting a spell of his own, calling up Hortan’s Mist to obscure him from the sight of the winged beasts. As he faded from view Mariala called out in exasperation “How is that helpful, Korwin?!”

But before she could pursue the matter both mother and son had freed themselves from their entanglements, Vulk’s spell dissipating into flickering shreds of light and Erol’s net into just shreds which rained down around them all. In the same instant, the other male dove at Jeb, who had been trying to bring his own bow to bear, forcing the lad to roll for cover, dropping both bow and arrow.

As the other two wyverns stooped to the attack once agin, Taeland stood tall, seemingly unfazed as the larger male dove shrieking at him. In one swift motion he raised his hartbow and fired, driving the steel-tipped shaft right through the creature’s left eye. It’s shriek cut off abruptly, it twisted wildly in the air… and then it dropped like a stone.

The female pulled up from her own attack on Devrik, her shriek of fury and outrage almost ear-splitting. But before she could renew her attack, the battle took a sudden sharp turn toward the unexpected. Coming up over the ridge above them, gibbering in nonsensical shrieks, was a flock of hideous leathery-winged humanoid monstrosities, waving crude spears and throwing sharp rocks.

“Rokiriki!” Taeland cried, drawing and nocking another arrow from his quiver.

“Yelgri!” Toran cried in disgust, still trying to unjam his crossbow.

“Mountain Harpies!” cried Mariala, dodging as one stooped on her with filthy claws extended.

What looked to be two dozen or more of the disgusting creatures swarmed the two remaining wyverns, attacking with stones and spears, the cloud of their stench enveloping everyone on the slope. The wyverns attention was diverted to their ancient enemies, and the carnage quickly began. But while the wyverns were stronger and more powerful individually, the harpies were perhaps more agile, and certainly more numerous. Although several fell to the talons, teeth and barbed tails of the wyverns, the great beasts took many wounds themselves. It soon seemed that the female would prefer to retreat, but the male was frenzied in its attacks on the harpies, and the mother would not abandon her remaining child.

Not all of the harpies engaged the two wyverns, unfortunately – several dove to attack the group as well. Erol’s trident flashed out, blocking and counter-striking, sending two of the creatures to their graves, while Taeland, covering Mariala’s rolling retreat, moved like lightning and gutted another with his long knife.

Toran, giving up on his crossbow for the moment, fired off a blast of Stavin’s Arrow, knocking another harpy from the sky with arcane energies. Mariala, still shaken from her near miss, tried to blast the swirling mass above them with Fire Nerves, but her form was flawed and the spell failed.

Vulk decided it was time for some protection, and began to chant up his mystical armour, while Devrik decided he’d had enough of attempted death from above – he began to summon the energies to cast an Orb of Vorol spell. A moment later, as Vulk’s armour glowed golden around himself, a ball of flame leaped up from Devrik’s hands, expanding as it flew, to engulf the female wyvern and half a dozen shrieking rokiriki.

While the burning harpies dropped from the sky like screaming meteors, the tormented wyvern again turned her enraged attention on the fire mage below her, diving with talons outstretched and tail pulled back for a strike to puncture armour, muscle and bone.

Devrik’s battlesword flashed up to meet her neck even as he dodged her talons– and her head went flying in a spray of hot blood. Unfortunately for the warrior-mage, her tail kept going on its killing arc, its vicious barb striking him a glancing blow to the chest that sent him flying two meters, to land in a stunned heap near Vulk.

The remaining harpies had by now overpowered the last wyvern, bringing it down only a few meters from the corpse of its mother, and the entire flock swarmed both bodies in a feeding frenzy of deafening, sickening sounds. With the harpy’s entire attention focused on their defeated enemy, the Hand took the opportunity to decamp, Erol and Taeland hauling a dazed but still living Devrik between them. Vulk picked up his friend’s sword, and Korwin wandered out of his mist, drawing it up behind them to obscure their escape.

♦ ♦ ♦

For the next couple of hours, it seemed to the group they had escaped cleanly from the harpy flock. Once well away, they had stopped to tend to Devrik, who had been lucky as it turned out – while bruised and stunned by the blow from the wyvern’s tail, the poisoned barb had not penetrated his armour. Stiff and sore and slightly concussed, he was at least not paralyzed.

Later in the afternoon however, as the sun was more than halfway to the horizon, the group realized the harpies had not, in fact given up. A flock of twenty or more began harassing them from above, hurling spears, rocks and their own shit down on the fleeing humans. Those with ranged weapons would occasionally turn to fire into the flock, and while they downed a few, discouraging the rest for a few minutes, they always came back with seemingly as many as before.

Two hours of this fly-by harassment, while it had done little to actually hurt the Hand much, was beginning to fray their nerves. Dusk was not long off, and with it the problem of how to defend themselves in the dark, when they came to a great crevasse, splitting the mountainside across their path. A single, narrow natural bridge of stone arced across the chasm, and looked none to solid.

Coming to a stop, Taeland turned and shot one of the pursuing rokirki out of the air, as did Erol, while Toran downed another with a Stavin’s Arrow spell. Everyone dropped to the ground in exhaustion as the harpies temporarily retreated to the high crags behind them.

“We can’t cross this chasm with those damn things harassing us,” Vulk sighed. “We’re going to have to deal with them for good, and soon… crossing in the dark doesn’t sound much safer.”

“Agreed,” rumbled Devrik. “And here they come again.”

The Hand arrayed themselves for battle, and the harpies, seeing their victims stopped, dove in shrieking to the attack. This time Toran’s magical arrow failed to find a target, and Devrik’s Orb sputtered out, stillborn. Korwin had been leery of casting his most powerful spell, Breath of Arandu, recalling past misfires and their near lethal consequences… but as he hesitated, Jeb shot one harpy out of the sky, only to fall to the spear of another. Shocked into action, Korwin wasted no more time on doubts and began the long mental preparation to summon up the killing cold.

As the water mage focused on his spell, most of the others kept up the attack on the harpies. Taeland again missed a shot, to his great chagrin, while Erol scored a brilliant hit, taking one through the neck. Toran’s next spell also failed, while Mariala’s Syncope of Shala put four of the creatures to sleep, causing them to plummet to bone-cracking impacts on the rocky ground.

Only Vulk refrained from attacking, intent as he was on aiding the severely wounded Jeb. As the battle raged around them, he concentrated his healing powers on the heavily bleeding wound in the young man’s side. Gradually the blood flow slowed, then stopped completely, and the wound began to close. Before it sealed itself completely the cleric poured some of their precious Baylorium into the wound, to complete what he had begun.

Jeb began to regain consciousness just as Devrik’s latest spell backfired, resulting in a beautiful display of aerial fireworks that did no more than startle the remaining rokiriki. But as the gibbering monstrosities cackled and shrieked, preparing to dive down for another attack, a sudden cone of blue-white super-cooled air roared up from Korwin’s outstretched hands. Spreading as it rose, the blast caught all of the remaining harpies, turning them to frozen corpses in an instant… falling from the sky, their bodies shattered as they hit the ground.

♦ ♦ ♦

With the harpy problem solved, hopefully for good, the Hand now turned their attention to the problem of crossing the deep crevasse that blocked their way. The natural bridge that spanned it was thin and crumbling at the edges, and it seemed likely to crack at the slightest weight, plunging anyone on it into the chasm… in the failing light the bottom was entirely invisible.

“Well, Mariala is the lightest,” said Toran, considering the problem. “But I’ve far more experience with this sort of thing, and I’m not that much heavier… I suppose I should go first. I’ll take a rope with me, so as each of you follows, one at a time, you’ll have something to grab onto if worse comes to worst.”

“Excellent idea,” agreed Korwin. “But before you try it, let me try something… that last spell nearly drained me, but I might have enough left to strengthen the bridge with the Strands of Lakira…” But as it turned out, he didn’t have it in him, and the spell failed. He was not the only one to have a spell fail this exhausting day, of course, and given the spectacular success of his last spell, when it mattered, it would take awhile to run down his credit with his companions…

With a sympathetic shrug, Toran hoisted a coil of rope over his shoulder and started out across the delicate arch of stone, slowly testing each step. Just over three meters wide, it took only a minute to cross, even as cautiously as he moved. Once on the far side, the Khundari spread his legs to align with his shoulders, planted his feet firmly on the solid rock, and murmured a few words… a faint golden glow surrounded him briefly, before beginning to sink and gather around his feet, and finally seeming to seep into the ground.

“Alright,” he called across to his friends. “I’ve cast the Joining of Merkünon, which means I’m as firmly attached to the ground as the mountain itself… nothing can move me unless it moves the mountain itself!” After tying one end of the rope around his waist he tossed the other end across to Devrik, who anchored himself behind a boulder and ran the rope around his own torso, gripping it in his gloved hands.

Mariana was the next one to cross, and made it with no trouble, although she clutched the rope tightly as she went. Vulk wanted Jeb to go next, as he was still weak from his injury and blood loss, but the boy was too dizzy and unsteady. It was decided he and the cantor would cross together. Unfortunately, this proved too much for the delicate formation, which cracked and splintered beneath their feet. They barely made it to the far side before a great CRACK sounded, and the whole thing collapsed into the blackness of the crevasse.

Korwin had been preparing to cross next, and as the sounds of falling stone slowly died away, he again attempted to cast the Strands of Lakira… and this time he succeeded. In the gloaming light the white strands spewed forth from his hands, anchoring themselves into the stone on the far side. Moving his hands along the nearer side, he anchored them there, creating a softly glowing bridge of translucent… something… wider than the original stone bridge.

With a tired smile, Korwin lightly grasped the safety rope and strode quickly across the chasm. The rest of the party rapidly followed, with Devrik bringing up the rear. Twilight was upon them now, and everyone was exhausted, so they made it only another mile before deciding to stop for the night. A huge boulder, the size of a small house, with a sheer, slightly overhanging face on its south side lay just at the tree line, making a perfect campsite.

After a hasty meal, the tired companions rolled themselves into their blankets and quickly dropped off to sleep… except for the two unlucky ones who drew first watch. But the night was quiet and uneventful… right up until the end of the third watch, just before dawn. It was then that the harpies launched their third attack.

Taeland and Erol were both on watch at that hour, and each killed a harpy with their first arrows. Toran, wallowing up from his blankets with his freshly repaired crossbow in hand, fired in satisfaction, only to growl in annoyance as the bolt missed. Mariala, on the other hand, blasted three of the beasts into sleep and out of the sky practically asleep herself.

Vulk, assuming their adversaries must have good dark vision if they chose to attack so, decided to even the odds by chanting out the Ritual of Fortune’s Light, allowing his companions to see in the dark as if it were daylight… if a sort of greenish-gray daylight. This was a help to Devrik as he cast another Orb of Vorol, allowing him to target the largest group of harpies near them – five burst into flames and fell shrieking to the ground.

Korwin’s immediate, groggy reaction was to cast Cloak of Merthados on himself, which proved a wise action as several spears and stones almost immediately arched toward him… but with their energies dissipated by the Cloak, they fell harmlessly at his feet.

As the sun rose over the eastern shoulder of the mountain the Hand could suddenly see that they were surrounded by at least three score of the hideous Mountain Harpies. But even as their hearts fell at the overwhelming odds something else rose over the ridge, momentarily blocking out the newborn sun… and changing everything.

With a heart-stopping roar that shook the very mountainside, an enormous dragon bore down on the suddenly panicked flock of harpies. The Hand stood collectively stunned, hardly believing what they were seeing… a blue-gray body at least 12 meters long, wings stretching more than 15 meters across and looking like molten silver in the morning light, a mouth that could swallow a man whole, and intelligent eyes that glowed with a silver-blue light.

The harpies tried to scatter, but the dragon swooped low, passing only a few meters over the humans and raising its head toward the largest group, opening its mouth wide… a blast of blue white frost sizzled forth, catching fully half the rokiriki in its cone of icy death. If Korwin’s spell the day before had been a brazier, this was a blast furnace. A large blast furnace.

A rain of solidly frozen harpies began to fall from the sky all around the Hand’s camp, and Mariala, Vulk and Taeland narrowly missed being crushed only by having fast reflexes. The remainder of the flock spread out in panicked flight, shooting off in every direction. But the dragon seemed to take a positive delight in chasing after each group, sometimes blasting them with freezing breath, other times almost playfully batting them bloodily out of the air, occasionally swallowing one whole. It caught up with the last three just as they neared the ridge to the east, bringing its tail around in a graceful arc to catch all of them at once, crushing them against a cliff face.

With the last of the mountain harpies dead, the dragon turned and made directly for the Hand, settling down on the top of the great boulder overlooking their camp. With its wings folded behind it, and its tail wrapped around its feet and dangling lazily over the cliff face, it peered down at the group. The sheer power the creature radiated left even the strongest amongst the humans feeling powerless and small. Even Devrik felt not the slightest desire to challenge this magnificent, terrifying beast.

“So,” the dragon finally said, in a voice of silk and glaciers and cool femininity, “what are you little humans of the southern lowlands doing in my mountains?”

For a moment no one spoke, too overwhelmed by the sheer presence of the dragon and utterly uncertain of what to say. To everyone’s surprise (and carefully suppressed dismay) it was Korwin who spoke first, stepping forward to stand directly under the great worm’s gaze.

“Your mountains, great lady?” he asked. “I had not heard of any of the great Aranduin dragons claiming territory this far south in the Savage Mountains. And surely news of such a great and powerful dragon as yourself must have reached even into the kingdoms of the plains, if such were true…”

Although not physically built to smile, the dragon nonetheless gave the impression of doing just that. “Bold little human! And clever to boot, which is your saving grace I suppose… yes, I am newly come to these southern peaks, from my old home far in the north, above the Hidden Sea. And I do now claim this territory for my own. And I’m sure that this news will now quickly reach your lowland realms… assuming you live to tell the tale, of course.

“But come, you have not answered my question. What business are you about in these high places? Is it common for your kind to travel hither? I have not seen many of your kind, and those primitive and meek… you are the first bold and – what do you call it? Oh, yes, civilized – humans I have seen here. I’ve met such as you before, of course, in the north… and found them quite nice.”

No one was quite sure how to take that last statement – as pleasant guests or as a tasty meal?

“Indeed, beautiful lady,” Korwin answered, bowing his head respectfully. “Civilized humans rarely travel this far or high into the mountains. Your new territory will surely remain uncontested by our folk! But we come here seeking to put an end to the threat of those who might beset even you – the gülvini who infest these mountains and who seek to bring war on all our lands.”

“Hurumph, gülvini mean little to me, beyond a tasty snack from time to time… and better tasting by far than these nasty yelgri.” The dragon sniffed in disdain at her most recent meal, but then arched her neck down to snap up half a frozen harpy from the rock next to her.

“No doubt the gülvini could never pose a real threat to one such as you, to be sure,” Korwin agreed smoothly. “And yet I fear they could nonetheless, over time, come to discommode you with their constant disruptions and hectoring… for they may be more numerous than you know, coming as you do from the more sparsely populated north…”

“How numerous?” the dragon asked, her interest clearly piqued.

“The place we go to spy out, Rekorgo, has some 3,000 gülvini living there currently, the largest such concentration we know of… and they are always splitting off daughter hives, seeking to spread as far and wide as they can. I can only imagine how unrestful you might find such goings on…”

“Three thousand? Surely you exaggerate,” the dragon exclaimed. “But no, I sense you are telling me the truth, or at least that you believe it to be true. And in any case, I came here prepared to fight to claim my new territory if need be… with another dragon, true, but a few thousand of the gülvini could hardly be worse.

“In fact, I came here this morning expecting to face a young dragon of my own species – for I sensed the use of our ice breath yesterday, weak but unmistakable. But now I realize it was you, little Avikori mage… using the Breath of Arandu, yes?”

“Yes, gracious mistress of ice,” Korwin answered, flushing a little. “I sought to destroy our enemies, as you did so spectacularly this morning… although I could never hope to match your power or mastery of the Avikori element, of course.”

“Of course, that’s only natural,” the dragon agreed graciously. “Nothing to be embarrassed about. But let me give you a tip, dear child.” She bent her long neck down, bringing her head nearer to Korwin, who resisted an almost overwhelming impulse to step back. It as an impulse his companions shared but didn’t even attempt to suppress, taking a large step back as one.

For a moment he stared into the one great silver-blue eye she focused on him, his body going rigid. Mariala sensed the psychic tension between them, and stepped forward, although she wasn’t at all clear what she could do to help her friend, if in fact he needed help. But the dragon’s head rose back up, and Korwin relaxed, shaking his head as if to clear it.

“Thank you for your gift, bountiful lady,” he murmured after a minute, bowing again to the dragon, quite low this time.

“You are welcome, young Korwin Seaborn,” she replied. “And you may call me Ulsarinas… which is the part of my name you can pronounce.

“Now I must be about my own business, but it has been a pleasure meeting you all. It may be that I shall drop in on this Rekorgo you mention… you seem terribly few to take on 3,000…” She leaned down again to sniff the air around the seemingly frozen group of humans. “Although I sense that most of you are baby mages of various kinds.

“But not all,” she went on. “This one has been injured… but I smell… something odd. A flavor of Toraz, but with a hint of… something new. What is this?”

Jeb was utterly paralyzed under the dragon’s face, his eyes wide as saucers. Vulk stepped forward, hesitatingly, and spoke. “It is Baylorium you smell, um, mighty Ulsarinas. A healing potion recently devised by a friend of ours…”

“Fascinating!” Ulsarinas exclaimed. “Something new! Tell me all about this Baylorium!”

Ten minutes of explanation later Vulk trailed off with “…and that’s why we carry both kinds of Baylorium…”

“Marvelous! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve come across something truly new?” The dragon sniffed at Jeb again. “But as wonderful as this potion of yours is, your young friend is not yet fully healed… here, let me…”

Her eyes glowed briefly, and she breathed out a chill mist over the quaking boy. In a matter of seconds, however, Jeb’s look of terror turned to one of amazement.

“I – I feel fine,” he exclaimed. “My side doesn’t hurt, and my headache is gone… I don’t think I ever felt this good! And I don’t even feel cold anymore! Thank you, um, mighty, um, dragon!” Taking his cue from Korwin, he bowed low.

“You are most welcome, child. And now a gift for the rest of you, in payment of an amusing and informative morning.” The dragon breathed out her mist over the rest of the group. Flinching only a little, the Hand quickly realized that they no longer felt the freezing chill of the early autumn morning mountain air!

“That should last for several days, and see you to your destination,” Ulsarinas said, as she suddenly launched herself into the air. “And now, farewell! Mayhap we shall meet again!” The blast of air from her wings almost knocked several of the Hand off their feet as the mighty beast beat upwards and away, vanishing into the sun much as she had appeared.

After several moments off stunned silence, the group burst into excited babble. The consensus was that they had all expected disaster when Korwin started taking, but everyone had to admit he’d done a bang-up job. Vulk examined Jeb’s wounds and confirmed that they were gone; indeed, it was as if they’d never been.

Only Korwin was a little subdued, either because he was still assimilating whatever the dragon had imparted to him… or because he was bummed that he was no longer the only one who was immune to the cold. Or, knowing Korwin, maybe both…

Leaving the gül-Gramlini of Vabasht to deal with cleaning up their own affairs, the group set out early  the next morning with their new companion for Rekorgo. They followed the deep forest trails that Taeland knew so well, and which he assured them had the best chance of bringing them, undetected, to the well-guarded colony. All that day, as they traveled east and south around the 12,737 ft. bulk of Mt. Muntirsk, the weather, already cool and overcast, became increasingly windy and wet. By the time they made camp for the night the rain was coming down hard and the wind was increasing in intensity, promising a full-blown storm to come. It was a cold, damp and restless night for most of the Hand.

There was a brief lull in the weather towards dawn, which at least allowed the group to make a passable breakfast and to break camp in relatively dry conditions. But within two hours of resuming their trek a true gale hit in full fury. The skies grew dark, bringing almost-night to the forest floor, a darkness broken only by frequent flashes of lightning. The thunder shook the ground and the high winds whipped and bent the trees overhead. Falling branches were a real danger, and there were several near misses, although serious injuries were avoided.

After an hour of the storm’s increasing fury Mariala called for a halt on the lee side of a large boulder, the best, if wholly inadequate, shelter they’d seen in awhile. “Maybe we should stop, try to find some real shelter?” she shouted over the howling winds. “I don’t see how we can go on in this!”

“I agree, but we’re on an exposed ridge here,” Taeland shouted in reply, shaking his head. “It would be foolish to stop now, the chance of being hit by lightning up here is too great!” The words were barely out of his mouth when a bolt of lightning struck a tree less than 10 meters away, blinding and deafening everyone. It was all Toran could do to control the mule, even with Korwin’s help. The large tree, burning even in the driving rain, collapsed directly across the faint mountain trail they’d been following. Unfortunately, as its roots lifted out of the ground it started a landslide that grew with frightening rapidity… and threatened to engulf the party!

Half blinded and deafened, the group staggered away from the widening surge of rock and dirt that roared down the mountainside, pulled in the wake of their obviously more sensible Khundari mule, who headed to the left and downward. Sure-footed and with no actual cliffs to navigate, the sturdy animal didn’t stop until the roar of the landslide had faded away beneath the howl of the winds. Finally managing to pull everyone to a stop under the partial shelter of a copse of scrawny mountain pines half a kilometer down slope from the ridge crest, Taeland tried to get his bearings.

“That landslide has blocked the only real trail in this area,” he yelled over the storm. “But I think I can find a way around, get us back on the right track… and in any case, the further we are from the ridges and tall trees right now, the better!” With the muttered agreement of his companions, the wilderness ranger took the lead once again.

In the dark, wet and storm-lashed forest it was slow going, and always the easiest, and often the only, path seemed to lead downward and to the northeast… In the late afternoon, as the storm was finally showing signs of diminishing, Taeland called a halt to rest and eat by the side of a wildly rushing creek, swollen with storm run-off. There was no hope of getting a cook fire going, even with Devrik’s fire magics, and they contented themselves with soggy bread, hard cheese and sausage. Huddled together under a makeshift tarp improvised from Vulk’s tent, they made a miserable sight, had there been anyone else to see them…

“So, where exactly are we?” Vulk asked, washing down the last of his cheese with squirt of sour beer from the skin they’d been passing around. “Are we back on track yet?”

“That’s… difficult to say, exactly,” Taeland admitted, somewhat reluctantly. “Until the skies clear enough to give me a proper look at the stars, I can only guess. But given the direction we’ve been moving, and how far we’ve come… well, I’m pretty sure we’ve reached an area of the Upper Arhanath Hills that I’m not too familiar with.”

“I thought you knew these hills like the back of your hand,” Korwin groused. Despite being the warmest of the group, thanks to his magical blue robe, he was as soaked as any of them and seemingly the crankiest because of it… which struck Devrik as odd, given that the man was a water mage. You’d think he’d like being wet…

“Much of them, yes,” Taeland said, frowning. “But this region was always the responsibility of my mentor, Guardian Lesik Teryne. He never would tell me much about the area, just insisted that it had a bad reputation and that I should avoid it if possible. I do know that amongst the Firalani and Ethmoniri tribesmen it’s considered an area of bad omens, and even the Gülvini seem to avoid the valleys in the vicinity… I know of no colonies in these hills.”

“Well, doesn’t that sound ominous at all,” Erol said with a weary shake of his head. Grover stuck his head out from under ex-gladiator’s cloak, where he’d been sleeping wrapped around his master’s neck, just long enough to see that it was still raining, take an offered bit of sausage, and retreat to the relative warmth and dryness of his perch.

“It wasn’t like we had much of a choice, under the circumstances,” Taeland shrugged. “When the storm lets up, I shouldn’t have any trouble getting us back up onto the ridgeline and our proper course. For now, I suggest we keep moving until we find a decent place to make camp… look, the rain has almost stopped…”

Another hour of hiking, following the wildly rushing creek on their left, found the group in a narrow valley just  as the setting sun briefly broke through the scutting clouds. But they hardly had time to appreciate the sight before a mist began to close in around them. In less than a turning they were surrounded by a thick, coiling fog, visibility reduced to less than two meters. In that brief moment of clear light they had seen what looked like a large clearing further down the valley, and Taeland used all his woodcraft to guide them toward it.

But as they trudged forward, exhausted and wet, wanting nothing more than a place to set up camp, the sound of the creek suddenly grew muted, as if coming from a great distance distant. A sudden sense of confusion seemed to fall over the group, and even the experienced ranger felt disoriented and confused. Then the usually phleghmatic mule suddenly panicked, taking off into the mist with a distressed bray. Korwin and Toran took off in pursuit, ignoring calls from Devrik and Taeland to stay together. In various states of confusion and exasperation, the others felt forced to follow, or risk losing the others in the roiling, sound-deadening fog.

When the others caught up to Toran and Korwin, they’d caught and calmed the mule, although the beast remained skittish and nervous. The fog thinned briefly then, allowing the group to see two steep hills rising up on either side of them, a flat gap of perhaps 20 meters width between the slopes. Then the fog closed in again – although clearly thicker behind them than in front. As they milled about, still in some confusion, Toran pointed out a heavily overgrown track, perhaps once a road, practically under their feet. Its almost-filled-in wheel ruts were more sensed than seen beneath the grass and straggling bushes of gorse and baneberry that covered them.

“A road, even an abandoned one, must lead somewhere,” he pointed out. “We should follow it –”

“I don’t like the feel of this,” Mariala interrupted. Her mind felt clouded, but she had no confusion about the sense of dread those two mounds evoked in her. “And a road goes in two directions. I say we follow it back out of this valley.”

Most of the others agreed with her, and they turned to slowly trudge back up the valley. But the fog, already thicker in this direction, quickly grew worse until even with Vulk’s ritual light they couldn’t see their hands before their faces. Grasping onto the cloak of the person ahead, they began calling out to one another. But the fog seemed to muffle and distort all sounds, and their own voices often seemed to come first from one direction, then from another. The going was slow, but after a time the fog began to thin. A few minutes more and they once again saw the two hills rising up on either side of the overgrown track…

“Damn, we must have gotten turned around somehow,” Taeland growled in confusion. Muttering darkly, the group turned around and again headed away from the threatening mouth formed by the two hills. Again the fog grew thicker, confusing the senses and causing their steps to slow and falter. And again the fog thinned only to reveal the looming hills. They tried a third time, only to once again be brought back to the twin hills…

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Devrik said, with a weary sigh, “but it’s clear we’re either going forward or going nowhere at all.” With equally weary shrugs, the group gave in and trudged slowly forward, passing between the dark shapes of the looming mounds. A sense of deep gloom settled over them all.

Once beyond the gap the fog soon began to thin, though vision remained limited to thirty meters or so. Above, the scutting clouds occasionally parted enough for the light of the nearly full lesser moon to reveal gaunt trees, already denuded of leaves although it was only early autumn, looming out of the mists on either side of the ghostly track. The greater moon would not rise until after midnight, and even when it did would provide no better light, being just five days away from the new moon.

In a short time the travelers stumbled into the ruins of small village. Even in the dark and fog the overgrown foundations of buildings around them were obvious. They made their way to the central open area of the long-dead hamlet, where Korwin soon discovered a well – by almost falling into it, its walls having crumbled away to little more than a ring of gravel around the hole. After his near-accident, everyone agreed they were too tired, cold and miserable to go on. The ancient village Common was relatively clear of growth beyond grass and weeds, providing decent lines of sight to the limits of the swirling mists, and was the best campsite they were likely to come upon.

The group quickly set up camp, and Devrik even managed to get a small, if smoldering and hesitant, fire going, allowing for a hot meal. The fog continued to thin, but at the same time a ground mist began to rise,covering the ground thickly to a depth of half a meter. After a quiet, somber meal everyone was more than ready to retire to their tents for some much needed sleep. Devrik and Toran took the first watch, during which the skies finally cleared, revealing thousands of diamond-like stars strewn across the velvet blackness of heaven, and the last of the fog dissipated. The heavy ground mist remained however…

Several hours after midnight, with Erol and Jeb nearing the end of the second watch and trying desperately not to nod off, lights suddenly appeared in the woods off to the east. Obscured by both the trees and the lingering mist, Erol thought they seemed like the lights of a small village… or at least a cluster of buildings, Jeb agreed. Without a thought for waking the others, the two sentries headed for the lights, intent only on solving the mystery… the lights looked so inviting… like home… they entered the woods beyond the dead village…

After a few minutes the two came out of the woods, into a wide clearing. As they did, the lights suddenly vanished, leaving both men dazed and bewildered. As they looked at one another in confusion they heard a scrabbling sort of sound, seeming to come from the center of the clearing. The thick mist covering the open ground suddenly swirled in several places… and five dark shapes rose up in the starlight.

They were human, or had been once. Now their skin, where patches of it weren’t oozing off the bone, was pale and puffy, their faces a greenish/grey, with dark red/purple eye sockets. Their hair was matted with dirt, where large clumps of scalp weren’t simply missing, revealing ivory coloured skull below. The tattered, filthy rags that hung from their rotting frames seemed to hint that they had once been rural peasants – four men and an adolescent boy,  Erol estimated, as the fog that had hazed his mind since they entered this cursed valley suddenly burned away in the rush of the emotions that always came before a fight.

“Zamoraz!” he barked, in a warning that Jeb scarcely needed. The former farm boy had seen much in his months associated with the Hand of Fortune, and this was not his first rodeo with the undead. Nevertheless, his heart pounded in his chest and his blood turned to ice water at the sight of what staggered toward them out of the darkness. With an inarticulate shriek of fear and rage he nocked an arrow to his longbow and let fly at the nearest shambling horror…

At almost the same instant Erol hurled one of his javelins at another of the undead, and both missiles found their targets – the javelin piercing the forehead of one, the arrow taking the other in the mouth and exiting the back of its skull. Both creatures dropped, their bodies collapsing into dust even as they fell. The three remaining zamoraz continued to lurch forward with disturbing speed…

♦  ♦  ♦

Back at the camp, something jerked Taeland out of his heavy slumber. Had that been a cry he’d heard? It was silent now… eerily so, in fact. The mental fog that had clouded his mind all day was now obvious to him by its sudden absence. What in the Void had they been thinking? There was clearly something uncanny going on… something very much not right. Climbing out of his sleeping roll and to his feet the Aunari Talim Nar realized the night was utterly silent, with no sounds of life at all… then the silence was broken by a sudden scrabbling noise, as of something scuttling through the heavy ground mist… which swirled oddly in a score of places…

“Awake!” he bellowed, pulling his Telnori-made long knife from its sheath. “We’re under attack!” And where the Void were Erol and the kid… dead already? But the worry was driven from his mind as a score of unsettlingly quick zamoraz rose up from the mists surrounding the camp site. Driving his blade into the ground at his feet, he snatched up his hart-bow and began firing arrows into the undead horde.

As arrow after arrow smashed through the eyes, mouths and skulls of the shambling dead his companions were scrambling out of their tents and taking up their own weapons. Toran was the first to join the fray, sending a crossbow bolt clean through the skull of one undead and into the chest of another – the first collapsed into dust, but the second just kept on coming.

Mariala’s crossbow, unfortunately, chose this critical moment to jam, and after a moment of fighting with it she tossed it aside and drew her dagger, leaping aside at the last second as one of the undead lunged for her. It’s filthy, claw-like fingers missed her, and she drove the bright steel of her Khundari dagger into the side of its skull – the creature didn’t make a sound as it crumbled to dust.

Vulk, nearby, was not quite so lucky. Still half dazed with sleep, it took him a moment to fully grasp what was going on – and when he did a rising tide of panic threatened to overwhelm him. The undead! He had had his life force drained once before, by that monstrous gülmora in the hidden Naventhülian temple in Devok, and he’d sworn afterward, as he slowly recovered, that he’d never go through that again… never! Backing away from the advancing horde, he didn’t close his eyes, as he usually did, as he muttered the ritual words to invoke Kasira’s spiritual armor. Only as the subtle golden glow of her blessing surrounded him did he feel the panic and terror begin to recede.

Unfortunately, in protecting his soul he had neglected to pick up his sword to defend his body. A zamora, lurching up behind him, clawed frantically at him, tearing his cloak but failing to touch his flesh as the glow of his mystical armor flared and deflected the blow. The second blow, however, raked down his side, drawing blood. As the pain flared Vulk once again felt the terrible, cold nothingness of the Shadow engulf his mind, and stared into the terrifying abyss of utter negation that is the Void. His body turned to ice, his soul draining away, the cantor’s mind simply shut down, even as his last thought echoed in his soul – Not again!

Therok of the Ethmoniri had stumbled out of the tent he shared with his amazing leader, Vulk, considerably more alert and ready for battle, the beautiful steel-headed battle axe the cantor had gifted him with in hand. But he had jerked to a stop as he’d realized what they faced – the undead were not unknown to his barbarian people, and were one of the few things that truly struck terror into them. He had thought that demon they’d fought on the Blasted March, when he’d first seen the light of Kasira, had been the most frightening thing he’d ever seen, but this… he didn’t know if he could fight these horrors… monsters that could drain away a man’s life, steal any chance of reunification with the All, condemning him to eternity in the nothingness of the Void. His felt suddenly enervated, and his hands shook…

Then he saw his beloved Vulk go down under the claws of one of the vile creatures, and the cantor’s strangled cry broke Therok’s paralysis. With a roar he leapt across the intervening space and decapitated the undead monster with a single stroke of his axe – it crumbled to dust even as it stooped to drain more of the life force from the fallen man. But there was no time to check on his friend and mentor, for several more zamoraz, drawn to the immobile form, had turned towards them. Standing over Vulk, Therok realized he felt no more fear, only a burning rage…

Devrik, meanwhile, had rolled from his tent at Taeland’s first call, his greatsword at the ready. But on seeing the mass of shambling undead surrounding them, he had opted to go for the Flame – with the sword in his left hand he raised his right hand and muttered the mnemonic to create the Form, to hold the Power… and felt the psychic container crack and deform in his mind. With a curse, he released the potential energies back into the universe.

Instead he grasped his greatsword with both hands and took the arm off the nearest zamora in a single blow. The creature hissed and clacked its teeth and counterstruck at him, oblivious to the damage he’d done it. Unbalanced, though, it failed to connect, and Devrik drove the pommel of his sword into its forehead, crushing the skull like an egg. The thing crumbled to dust…

Korwin, trying to disentangle himself from his sleeping roll and tent, encumbered by his comfortable but unwieldy magical robe, managed to stumble over its sash, nearly pitching himself head first into the flickering flames of the dying campfire. Deftly recovering, he glanced around to see that no one had caught his little faux pas – and instantly forgot all about it as he realized what was happening.

Several of the undead horrors seemed to be making a beeline for him, but only one was an immediate threat… unfortunately, his cutlass was still in his tent. To buy himself some time, the water mage made a sharp gesture and muttered a few words, casting the Cloak of Merthados on the creature. Instantly the thing slowed down, its movements becoming lethargic and hesitant. That was all the respite Korwin needed to reach into his tent and recover his blade… at which point he decapitated the zamora quite handily. But two more were almost upon him…

Mariala, meanwhile, found herself back-to-back with Therok, standing over the still unconscious form of her downed friend. She had deftly evaded the next undead that had attacked her, and now she pulled one of her throwing knives and aimed for its head. But the creature jinked at just the wrong moment, and the blade disappeared into the night. More critically, the creature managed to rake a claw along her forearm – her bracers deflected most of the blow, but two talons scraped across her skin, and she felt the horror of the Shadow try to engulf her.

But Mariala had fought off the Shadow before, and she was far stronger now than she’d been back in Devok and that nightmarish temple. Her mind deflected the chilling power of the Void, and in the same instant she drove her dagger up through the jaw of the zamora and into its brain. It crumbled away into oblivion as it reached for her a second time…

Therok had managed to dispatch two more zamoraz himself, glad to have the witch-woman at his back. Unlike some of the males of his people, who often resented the weirding power of the matriarchs and their guardianship of the Sha, he had long ago decided it was a good thing to have on your side… much better than having it turned against you!

But when Mariala involuntarily cried out in pain as the zamora struck her, it distracted Therok just enough that he missed the sudden lunge of his next opponent, and the creature managed to dig its sharpened fingers into his left bicep. Unlike the witch-woman, the warrior’s mental defenses were not up to the overwhelming cold and terror of the Shadow that engulfed his mind, and he could feel his life, and his soul, draining away.

But if he could not oppose the Shadow, still the wild fire in his barbarian heart would not be so easily quenched. He couldn’t shake the claw that dug deeper into his flesh, and he felt a second wave of life-force flow out of him as he raised his axe over his head… and brought it down on the undead monster’s head, cleaving it in two, the blade driving down through its torso to wedge momentarily in its pelvic bone. But the axe was freed as the bone melted into dust to join its brethren in oblivion…

Toran was laying into zamora after zamora, hacking off limbs and heads with fierce abandon. More even than gülvini, as a practitioner of the Kahar-ün-Tem, he loathed the undead and all the works of the Shadow. Only once so far had one of the foul things managed to make contact with him, but he had fought off the horror of the Shadow – and he well knew that he was now immune to it for a time, which only made his attacks all the bolder. If he had not seen that his friend Vulk was down, and who knows with what injuries, he might almost have enjoyed the friendly, unspoken rivalry he and Taeland seemed engaged in, seeing whether axe or bow would dispatch more undead from the world.

On the other side of the campfire Devrik had dispatch more than a few undead himself, but he could see that they continued to stagger out of the dark all around them. With Vulk down, and Erol and Jeb missing, possibly already dead, it was time for more drastic measures…

The battle was intensifying, Taeland had finally missed a shot, but Toran was there to intercept the undead who tried to close, allowing the Aunari to send a shaft into the skull of a zamora coming up behind Mariala – missing her own head by a hair. Therok looked pale and shaken, although he continued to destroy every undead that came after his fallen friend, and Korwin seemed to be holding his own, his blade silvery with magical frost… but how long could this last? The shambling dead never tired, but they would, even the Dwarf…

Despite the strange fogginess that he couldn’t quite clear form his head, Devrik decided he had to risk a spell… he again summoned the Form, and this time it looked good… but as he poured the Power into the Form he suddenly saw the flaw he had missed… damn, too late…

With a crack like breaking crockery the seed of the Orb of Vorol flew from his hands and dove straight into the embers of the campfire… for a second nothing happened and Devrik dared to think Kasira smiled on him this night. Then a fireball erupted from the campfire with a sound like thunder. Flames engulfed a 3 meter-wide circle around the the site and flaming debris rained down for three times that distance around them.

Taeland was knocked flat, caught at the edge of the blast, but fortunately suffered no more than a singeing – and the zamora nearest him was decapitated by a chunk of burning wood the sizzled by the ranger’s head. Kasira’s little joke, no doubt, Devrik thought in dismay. But the goddess must have been looking out for them, in truth, as the rest of his friends managed to avoid any real damage… although one of the tents was a bit worse for the wear. But the undead didn’t stop coming, and there was no time for recriminations, self- or otherwise…

It was at that moment that Erol and Jeb appeared from out of the dark, cutting a path through the zamoraz with trident and axe to join their friends around the charred circle where the campfire used to be. Devrik thought that Erol looked pale, and was sure he’d faced the Shadow… but clearly he could still wield his trident effectively, so good! On the other hand, Jeb had that look of terror and exhilaration that young soldiers often get after surviving their first major engagement.

A moment later Vulk began to come around, slowly staggering to his feet between Therok and Mariala, the latter of whom helped support him until he could stand on his own. He gestured at Devrik, and when his friend had stepped closer the cantor reached out and called down the blessing of Kasira’s protection on him. He was gratified to see the faint golden nimbus appear around the fire mage/warrior.

Perhaps it was this Immortal touch that cleared Devrik’s mind, for a moment later he made another attempt to cast Orb of Vorol – and this time the fireball flew straight and true into the most closely spaced group of undead, immolating them all and clearing one side of the battlefront!

He turned to face the other side of the circle, and tried once again to unleash Arkel’s Fiery Ribbons, a potential more devastating attack, on their enemies. But the oppressive malaise of the cursed place seemed to fight the light of the goddess, and once again his Form was flawed – ribbons of glowing, multicolored flame shot from his hands, but rather than arcing towards the zamoraz they flew in every direction.

Mariala barely managed to roll to one side in time to avoid one of the searing fingers, as did Toran, his ninja Dwarf reflexes saving him despite having his back to Devrik. On the other hand Vulk, still dazed and shaking from the loss of life-force, did not fare so well – although the ribbon merely clipped him, singeing his clothes and hair, rather then burning him alive. The tent that had been set partially afire by the earlier misfire now burst into full flame, as did three of the four remaining tents.

One zamora was also unlucky enough to intercept one of the ribbons, and went up like a torch, so there was that…

Devrik gave up on magic for the moment and grimly hefted his sword… he methodically waded into the melee, decapitating heads and severing limbs with furious determination, and the others rallied around him. In another five minutes only the living still stood, panting and exhausted, in the smoldering remains of their camp…

♦  ♦  ♦

It took the Hand an hour to put out the fires and salvage what they could of their gear from the wreckage of the camp. Fortunately Vulk’s tent had been the only one not to burn, and his pack contained most of the group’s supply of Baylorium. Clothes and food were the greatest losses, as most really valuable and/or fragile items had been stored deep in packs or saddlebags.

It took longer to find and bring back their poor Khundari mule, who had pulled up his picket stakes and bolted into the night at the first sign of the undead invasion. “A sensible beast, obviously,” Toran had commented on finally finding the animal in a small clearing, munching phlegmatically on gorse and huckleberry.

“Not to mention lucky,” Taeland added, holding out one of his few remaining dried apples. Lured by the treat, he was able to slide the bridle back on the beast with no more trouble than a heavy, almost resigned equine sigh. “The undead don’t care whose life force they drain… but I suppose our souls burned brighter in their uncanny “sight,” allowing him to escape their notice.”

The sun, dim and weak, was just rising over the eastern hills when they returned to the camp site. Anemic as it was, everyone was grateful for its light – for the few minutes it lasted. Very quickly it rose into the renewed heavy cloud cover that had moved in again, becoming merely a bright spot in the turgid gray sky. The ground mist receded until only a few patches remained in the hollows, but the air was thick and misty, and visibility was less than a kilometer or so.

In the gray light the group was able to see that they were at the center of a narrow valley, with moderately thick woods surrounding the open area of the dead village. The trees, mostly leafless oak, ash and chestnut, mixed with conifers as the woods climbed up the steep slopes to east and west. More open land ran down the center, clearly once cultivated farmland, although now covered with heavy brush and a sprinkling of younger trees.

“About twenty years, I’d say,” Taeland commented as they prepared to get moving. “No more than thirty, certainly, since this fief was abandoned and allowed to turn back to Drina’s natural state.”

“I don’t know,” Mariala said, shivering. “Somehow it seems much older to me… almost ancient…” With the exhilaration of the battle over, a certain lassitude had slowly fallen over the group agin, an ennui that made any action a chore and even thinking was a struggle. The only thing that seemed clear was the desire to move forward, to get out of this cursed valley…

They followed the faint rutted road out of the ruins of the hamlet, continuing north as they had the day before. For awhile they discussed the events of last night and their current predicament, but it soon became too much of an effort, and they trudged on in silence. Even Grover and Cherdon seemed oppressed by the gray, somber atmosphere, and refused to leave their masters’ side to explore, as they usually did while traveling. Devrik was glad he’d left Brann with Raven and the wee baby Aldari.

They halted for lunch when the bright spot in the clouds seemed directly overhead, although Vulk could have sworn they’d only been walking for an hour, two at the most. But he was still suffering the after-effects of his most recent encounter with the Shadow, so maybe he wasn’t the best judge…

By late afternoon, as the sun dropped into the narrow gap between the clouds and the western hilltops, the arms of the valley had began to turn noticeably inward… perhaps they were finally coming to the end of it, thought Erol. Although he was sure it had only been an hour or two, at most, since lunch… and surely this valley wasn’t long enough to have taken a full day to traverse, even at the leisurely pace they’d kept… but the position of the sun argued otherwise…

The track turned sharply around thick stand of trees and undergrowth, and as it straightened out again the group came to sudden halt. They were clearly at the north end of the valley, as the land begin to rise sharply upward to meet the in-curving ridges east and west… and sitting before them was the dark, looming bulk of a large buiding. Little more than the silhouette could be made between the failing light and the gathering mists… but there was a sense of two storys, chimneys rising up and out-of-true, a feeling of gables, and the suggestion of many black, empty windows…

“It looks abandoned,” said Vulk diffidently. “But not in ruins, like the village.” He softly spoke the words of the ritual that would bring the vision of Kasira to himself and his friends… but the throbbing in his head, which had only gotten worse as the day progressed, suddenly redoubled, and he lost the train of thought – and the ritual with it. “Sorry,” he muttered in frustration.

Devrik patted his friend on the back and pulled several torches from his charred pack – amazingly, they hadn’t caught during the tent fire, though he rather thought it’d been a near thing. With a gesture and a thought he sent the Flame into their oil-soaked heads, and once they were fully burning passed one to Mariala, another Taeland, and kept the third for himself.

Korwin, meanwhile, had been rummaging in his own partially burned pack and now pulled out the lantern he’d had made back in Dürkon, utilizing the glowstone pebbles he’d discovered and simple water. Now he released the catch that allowed the water to flow from the upper reservoir into the central chamber filled with the pebbles, and they began to glow with a rich, warm light. He slid the collar around to turn the lantern into a bullseye lantern and aimed the beam at the house.

It had obviously once been the mansion of some wealthy lord or maybe a merchant – the manor house of this valley fief. But time had not been kind… the dark gray stone was pitted and covered in moss and lichen, and several chunks of stone were missing from the stone stairs that lead up to the main doorway. They were also stained with several large dark reddish brown patches. Two large doors lay on the ground outside the house, and showed signs that they had been ripped, or blasted, out of the house.

The patchy grass around the building was brown and sickly looking, scraggly brush choking what must once have been formal gardens, and black ivy crawled up the walls. Most of the windows were shuttered, but the few that were not showed broken glass in empty frames of rotting wood. The once royal blue, now black, slate roof sagged a bit in the middle, with many tiles missing. The two chimneys leaned slightly out of true. A smell of decay and rot wafted from the open doorway…

“Hmph,” Korwin said matter-of-factly, breaking the spell of dread. “Now that’s something I never expected to see out here! This house is done in the classic style of the Second Expansionist Period… a beautiful example of Imperial Oceanian architecture… look at that shell-and-seahorse motif around the windows…”

“So how old would that make it?” Mariala asked, rubbing her temples.

“Well, this style was popular, I don’t know… eight, nine hundred years ago? This house doesn’t look that old, even with all the decay… so I suppose someone copied the style. Still, the accuracy is amazing…”

While Korwin marveled at the architecture, the others discussed their options. No one was terribly excited about entering the house, but with the light failing quickly (and it sure seemed like this day had gone by unusually fast) it seemed a better shelter than another night in the open. Xydona knew how many undead might rise from the ground  this time… and the fog was thickening again, the ground mist rising…

“Well, I’m going inside,” Devrik said at last. “If nothing else it should be more defensible if we’re attacked again, and it may provide some answers as to what is going on in they cursed valley.”

With no other viable options presenting themselves, the rest of he party agreed, and they slowly mount the steps and crossed the threshold just as the last of the anemic sunlight vanished from the sky and full darkness engulfed the valley…

The inside of the ruined mansion, as revealed in the light of the party’s torches and Korwin’s lamp, was at least as dilapidated as its exterior. The main entry hall was large, it’s once-fine wooden floor heavily bloodstained. A closer examination of the main door’s frame revealed deep gouges where the doors were ripped out by… something. The two tall windows to either side of the doorway had been boarded up, but one had the boards ripped away, apparently from the outside, and the shutters now hung on wrenched hinges. A large stair- case, with several missing or damaged steps and a damaged banister, wound upward into darkness. Open double doors on the left also opened into darkeness, as did a similar doorway on the right; at the back of the hall was a third doorway. Under the staircase was the only undamaged, closed door to be seen, a stout mahogany door with a large pitted and verdigris-covered brass lock and handle.

Once in the house, events will begin to unfold on a strict timetable:

Dusk 17:00 The fog begins to thicken again, and the ground mist rises. Attack 1 – see separate section.

Dark 18:00  The sun finally disappears behind the hills, taking it’s anemic light with it. Niether moon is risen

19:00  Fog remains moderate, mist heavy, but the skies partially clear above. Attack 2 –see separate section.

20:00  The basement level starts to slowly cover with a thin layer of ice. All the surfaces are covered with a frost.

21:00  Osal, the Lesser Moon rises, but is waxing at half and blood red. Attack 3 – see separate section.

22:00  Screams and shouts are heard from the master bedroom. If the characters investigate, blood can be seen welling up from the canopied bed, pouring over the sides to form growing pools of blood on the floor.

23:00  The blood from the master bedroom is beginning to flow down the upstairs hall and down the stairs.

It is also oozing through the ceiling of the room(s) below. Aranda rises, but as waning sliver of little light.

24:00  The creature begins to stir in the basement, appearing from the floor in the main lab. The creature emits great screams of terror and horrendous noise as it is forming.

25:00  The final attack. Attack 4 – see separate section. The creature is now able to hunt the players.

The house was obviously once the mansion of some wealthy lord or maybe a merchant – the manor house of this valley fief. But it is in a state of considerable decay. The dark gray stone is pitted and covered in moss and lichen, the stone stairs that lead up to the main doorway are covered with patches of dark reddish brown stains. Several chunks of stone are missing from the stairs. Two large doors lie on the ground outside the house; they show signs that they were ripped out of the house. The patchy grass around the building is brown and sickly looking, scraggly brush chokes what must once have been formal gardens, and black ivy crawls up the walls. Most of the windows are shuttered, the few that are not show broken glass in empty frames of rotting wood. The black slate roof sags a bit in the middle, many tiles are missing, and two chimneys lean slightly out of true. A smell of decay and rot wafts from the open doorway… Note that Kasira’s Light will not work inside. All holy rituals and Toraz spells suffer a -10 penalty in the valley and -20 inside the house itself. It is cold in the valley, but it is much colder inside. Cold and water-based spells are at +10  / +20.

GROUND FLOOR

Hall – Only the open doorway illuminates this large bloodstained hallway. The doorframe is damaged where the doors were ripped out by the last hoard of sea zombies. The two tall windows in the hall had been boarded up, but one has had the boards ripped away (from the outside if anyone asks), the shutters hanging on wrenched hinges. A large stair- case, with several missing or damaged missing banister rails, winds up to the upper floor. An open double door on the left opens into darkeness, as does a doorway on the right. An open doorway at the back of the hall that leads to a third room, while under the stairs is a stout mahogany door with a large pitted and verdigris covered brass lock and handle.

Unlike the other doors, which are either missing or hanging in shattered fragments from bent hinges, this door does not seem to be damaged at all. It is locked and the lock is of a very good quality (level 7). This door leads down to the basement level via stone stairs.

Dining Room – This large room has the broken remains of a large dining table and the back of a few leather chairs. Most of the windows have been boarded up; some show signs of being broken in from the outside. Again, bloodstains and gouge marks mar the floor and walls. The open doorway at the back of the room leads into the Summer Room.

Summer Room – This open area appears to have once had glass doors that opened onto the rear gardens, but they are no more than shattered glass and twisted wood, open to the elements. Someone attmepted to board up the door- but the boards are rent and scattered across the room. More reddish-brown stains and deep gouges are all over the doorway and floor. There are the remains of white wicker chairs scattered around the room, as are leaves and debris from many autumns past, and a few scattered pages, apparently ripped from a book. [Entry #2]

Study – This room is lined with bookshelves, but the shelves have all been hacked and smashed into kindlling, the books torn and slashed, scattered over the floor. Most covered with mold and many with what looks like dried blood. The mouldering carcass of an immense wooden desk, once oplulent and deeply carved and gilded, lies in two pieces. The room is in utter chaos, but within the disorder may be found a small leather-bound journal. It’s dark blue leather is ripped and stained, but on the cover gilt letters can be made out: “Journa… Kalin Par…” The year is completely obliterated but for the last digit, a 7. Also to be found amidst the destruction are two arcs of a milky white crystaline substance, about 30 mm (1.2”) thick and 90 mm wide, carved with strange symbols. The edges, while jagged, appear to be clean breaks, with no splintering as one might expect… and the two pieces fit smoothly together, but don’t merge.

Living Room – This room contains large stains of dried blood on the rotting carpets covering the floor, and many pieces of wood that appear to have once been used to board up the shattered window frames lie cantered over torn and smashed furniture. More books and papers are scattered about as well. Anohter page of the journal can be found under a section of door lays atop a broken sofa, and one in the NE corner. [Entry 4 &  Entry 3]

The Stairs – Anyone walking on the stairs will feel they are unstable, as they creak and groan, but in fact they are safe.

SECOND FLOOR

Upper Hall – The hall on the upper floor has bare floorboards and mouldy paintwork peeling from the walls. Many lightened rectangles on the walls reveal where pictures once were. As on the ground floor all the doors are missing from the doorframes. It is very dark and gloomy up here; most windows in the rooms have been shuttered and/or boarded up with wood from doors, out buildings and furniture.

Bedroom #1 – This room only has a rotten straw mattress in it. The window is shuttered and boarded up. More dark stains on the floor and walls.

Bath #1 – A tin bathtub is in this room, several shards of glass crunch under the feet of anyone that walk into the room. The window has no wood boarding it up – most of the wood that originally boarded up the window is on the floor.

Bedroom #2 – A large ‘L’ shape room. The room contains several doors that have been piled into the centre. Several blankets and evidence of a small fire and a small cooking pot hint that this may be the ‘safe’ area that was chosen by some previous group of unfortunates who wandered into the valley. [Entry #1, Entry #5, Entry #6]  are hidden into the blankets, and the third part of the Torc is hidden in the hem of a blanket. All the windows are still shuttered.

Bath #3 – The room is empty; the window is still shuttered and boarded-up. The room smells of rosewater; a search into the smell reveals a small, highly decorative vial of perfume cracked and leaking on the floor.

Storage Room – This room contains many metal brackets that originally held up wooden shelves. Some shelves are still in place on the far wall, enough to board up 2 windows or one doorway. More dark stains and gouge marks cover the floor and walls.

Master Bedroom – This room has all of the windows broken through, lots of wood over the floor, loads of bloodstains splattered up the wall. The air has the smell of fresh blood and for the first time there are signs of fresh flesh and bone on the floor, as if something (or someone) was torn to pieces and (mostly) devoured. This is Narina’s room; there will be strange sounds coming from here later in the evening… the large canopy bed, its furnishings rotted and moldy, is covered in a massive dried bloodstain, much older than the other blood evidence elsewhere in the room.

Master Bath – The window is shattered open, shutters hanging; lots of wood on the floor. A brass bath tub has been overturned. Under the tub, a nearly naked body of a human male. His body has several deep, raking claw wounds, although none seem likely to have killed him. By the state of his semi-desicated body, he seems to have been dead for over a year. There is one small +1 dagger clutched in his hand.

Basement

This part of the house is cold, so cold that the adventurers can see their breath in the air. There is no ice though, not yet! There is a musty smell, not unlike stale grave soil which permeates the air. There are obviously no windows down here, so it is very dark. The floor is not wood, but heavy flagstone. Vulk and Taeland will both get an immediate feeling of dread and horror – the evil is almost palbable, even to the others. If they try to find out the source of the evil, they discover it emmenates from the soil of the great crater in the Main Laboratory.

Prep Area – Large wooden heavy benches and broken glassware are scattered about this room, along with many torn, mildewed and stained books and loose papers. The loose papers seem mostly to be lab notes, from what little can be dechiphered, in the same handwriting as the journal entries previously found. Another such entry will be found amidst the carnage. [Entry #7]

Fuel Storage – Large chunks of coal fill a large area of this room. A shovel is on the floor. The walls in this room are a deep black color, and even lanterns and torches don’t seem to illuminate it very well. Moving the coal will cause many rats to run from the cracks in the coal pile, they are rather vicious and under the control of the evil presence that rules the valley and the house. They won’t attack in numbers unless summoned by Kalin later. [25 Rats]

Glassware – This room contains many shelves that are littered with broken glass pipes, tubes, beakers and flasks. There are 2 wooden crates that each contain 4 large round-bottom glass flasks. The flasks could be filled with either oil or the chemicals from the Chemical Storage area as missile weapons.

Chemical Storage – The air in his room is heavy with many nasty smells, and multi-hued stains run up the walls and cover the floor. Most chemical bottles have been smashed, but there are three large bottles of a clear, strong-smelling liquid. The glass of these bottles is very thick; if they are thrown there is only a 15% chance that they will break. If the liquid is put in the glass flasks from the Glassware area, those will smash every time.

The liquid is a rather powerful acid – sniffing it will cause 1-4 IP of damage and a bleeding nose. Getting a small quantity of it on the skin will cause 2d6 IP of damage. If the acid gets on clothes or other items, it will quickly begin eating through them for 2d6 Combat Rounds (20-120 seconds) before losing potency. The acid does no damage to magical items or metal weapons, but any such items will still be covered with the acid for up to two minutes. If the acid is thrown, it will affect a 10-foot radius doing 3d8 IP damage to all creatures caught in the splash zone.

Main Lab – A huge stone table dominates the room, on which rests the mummified corpse of a woman. Her gown is tattered and mouldy, but her skin is as dry and desdicated as if she lay in a desert. There is no sense of rot or decay about her corpse, which retains a hint of beauty even now. There is much broken glassware, twisted metal on the floor.

In southern end of the room the stone of the floor has been shatterd, leaving a crater about 4 meters in diameter and 1.5 meters deep into the dark soil beneath. Flagstones around the crater are canted and cracked, and dirt and stones litter the floor for meters around. The wall nearest the crater is cracked and bulging in places, but still holds. To those sensetive to it, the evil radiates from this pit… The fourth and final segment of the crystal torc can be found under the dirt and rubble, but after the last journal entry is discovered under the stone table. [Entry #8]

Misc Storage.

This room contains lots of shelves, in various states of disrepair. The floor is covered with tubing, tripods and sacking.

Undead Kalin

Towering to over 2 meters (about 7 feet) in height, Kalin has a ghastly appearance. His body is covered with rank, putrid, decaying skin, a light green/grey in color with blisters that crack and seep yellow-green pus. His black robes hang is tatters arount his surprisingly fleshy frame – not fat, but neither is he gaunt, as might be expected. He has sharp clawed hands, and abnormally long arms. Kalin can cause a sphere of darkness with a 2 meter radius whenever he wishes. He can, at will, cause Fear (-20 to next skill/combat roll for all affected), Levitate (up to 3 meters, although in the house he’ll rarely be able to rise more than a foot or two) and Telekinesis (40 lbs of weight). Kalin is a strange sort of hybrid moruaz, more than a zamoraz, but less than a full gülmoraz. He has a Shadow Strength of 4, and thus a Shadow Conflict of 40– but his Shadow Radius is ten feet instead of four. Losing a conflict costs a victim 1 (MF) or 1d4 (CF) point(s) of Aura. As with zamoraz, winning provides immunity within the Shadow for a time.

Kalin is by now utterly insane, but cunning and devious for all that. He will use all the zamoraz at his command to try and weaken the group before he manifests himself. Although he commands many of the supernatural elements of this cursed valley, he is also a prisioner of it himself. All of the lifeforce he has absorbed over the centuries is retained in his decaying form, keeping him going (sort of) and making his Shadow stronger than it should be for a first-life gülmora (regular gülmora pass on their stolen lifeforce to their demonic master, more-or-less monthly – it’s been 700 years since Kalin was cursed).

He will use his control of the Darkness to confuse his opponents, then seek to get within five feet and initiate his Shadow Conflict. He will use his claw/claw attack (he is incredible fast, and so gets two attacks per round) if necessary, but tries to avoid physical conflict if possible. He will summon the rats from the coal room to attack the group, and hurl debris at them from a distance, seeking to confuse, injure and weaken his prey.

Kalin is immune to Fire Nerves or other such mental-based attacks (but not to Mental Bolt), and he wears an Ammulet of Kalos, which protects him from fire-based attacks. Holy weapons, such as Devrik’s sword, cause him permanent damage.

Some lines Kalin might utter: “You are unworthy to live while Narina does not! ”  “Yes, with so many, so vital… this time it will work! Yes, together we will restore Narina to life, as she deserves!”  “You desecrate Narina’s house! You must die, so that she may live again… yes, that is the fitting punishement for tresspassers!”

If the players reassemble the Torc of Ravarus, and invoke it while in battle with Kalin, then it will begin to glow with a violet light and in a moment a ghastly demonic face will appear in the shimmering air above it. The masked figure will laugh in delight. “By the Purity of Chaos, I had all but forgotten this Conduit! Do you still survive little Kalin, after all these centuries? Yes, I see you there! Not well, by the looks of you, but… oh my, how full of life you are! Many flies must have wandered into our trap over so much time, to leave you so… why, you’re  postively brimming over. And your gift comes at a most opportune time, else I might be inclined to let your punishment and torment continue… but no, I need what you have to offer… and offer it you will!”

“No!” screams Kalin, previously rooted in terror at the sight of the demon’s head. “No, this is all for Narina! It’s not too late, I can still bring her back! Please, you mustn’t – Noooooo!”

But even as he objects, seeking to flee, black tendrils rise out from the shimmering air over the torc and snake toward him. He is quickly caught by the thirteen writhing, smoke-like bands, and within seconds they thicken and begin to pulse – and his body begins to shrink and shrivel, his cries turning to thready shrieks. With one last wail of despair his body crumbles to dust, leaving only his rags to collapse to the floor. The tendrils withdraw into the torc, and the masked visage turns its attention on the group. “Congratulations! What mighty cattle you are, to have defeated one of my Master’s creatures… however flawed and debased he was. Well, perhaps we shall meet in person someday… although you won’t know me without my mask. But don’t worry, I never forget a face – or an Aura. And then we’ll see how you fare against a true Lord of Chaos!” His image fades with his chilling, confident, terrifying laughter echoing in your ears.

If they don’t use the Torc, and Kalin gets ahold of it, he will invoke it, thinking to use the power of Chaos to revive his beloved wife… and we’ll get the same results.

As they rode north along the narrow mountain tracks, Prince Rhoghûn motioned Toran to fall back with him a bit for a private interview. The Prince’s Guard drew away to give them a small bubble of space wherein they could speak quietly and not be overheard. Only the head of the Shadow Guard remained near his ruler, riding on his left.

Like most of the Prince’s supporters, Toran was glad to see that Rhoghûn was personally leading the army against the gülvini of Fächnor. He also inwardly smiled at the mingled frustration and hope he’d noted in those who still, however silently for now, opposed Prince Rhoghûn’s efforts to open up Dürkon to the world once more. Frustrated, because victory would only cement the Prince’s popularity and enshrine his policies; hopeful, because failure might yet turn popular sentiment against him. And his actual death might lead to a fundament more to their liking resting on the Seat of Thürox…

“I have something for you, Toran,” the Prince began when they were sufficiently isolated. He reached into a leather satchel at his side and pulled out two palm-sized, egg-shaped objects. The bottom half of each was made of common stone, the upper half of cloudy, gold-flecked quartz. They seemed to be perfectly, seamlessly joined, even though the lower piece had a rough finish, while the upper was polished to perfect smoothness.

“These, as you may recognize, are traditional army egg timers,” he continued, handing one to Toran and holding up the other to examine himself. “While they may be used in several ways to communicate between commanders in the field, in this case the simplest of their functions will suffice.

“When you have achieved your goals, and most especially when you have neutralized whatever arcane aid the gül-Bogabai possess, twist the two halves of your timer – when you do, the crystal will begin to glow. At the same time the crystal of it’s mate, which I will retain in my possession, will also begin to glow. This will be our signal to attack, and as my troops move into position I will likeswise twist my own device – at which point both will begin to glow red, and slowly pulse. Then you will know that within the hour the battle will be joined!”

“I understand, your Highness,” Toran replied, examining the device closely. “But, if I may ask, why such caution in giving me this?”

“It is not that I don’t trust our allies,” the Prince replied, smiling and answering the unspoken question. “Quite the contrary! But you do not lead the group, and this is a Khundari army, dealing with a Khundari problem – however much the other races may appreciate what we do here. I would rather that a Khundari warrior be the one to make the decision to summon us to battle, for I have no doubt you will only do so if you are certain we’ll have a level battlefield.”

“I understand, my lord,” Toran replied, tucking the stone away in his own scrip. “Do you wish me to keep this a secret…?”

The Prince smiled again. “No need, young Shadow Warrior, I wish to slide no wedge of distrust between you and your comrades, our allies. But only you can activate the device – that is, only a Khundari can – for I cannot risk it falling into enemy hands, where it might lead us into a trap.”

With a nod and a wave of his hand the Prince dismissed Toran back to his friends, and himself pulled ahead to rejoin his vanguard.

♦ ♦ ♦

The next day the Hand and the Army of Dürkon parted ways, with squads of Khundari warriors peeling off to take lesser mountain paths to their positions around, but hidden from, the gülvini colony. Scouts had gone ahead to remove any outlying sentries or patrols, and the Hand was assured of a safe approach to the environs of Fächnor.

They left the ponies tied in a dense copse of fir and mountain ash over a mile from the entrance to the ancient mining colony, making their way stealthily and on foot the rest of the way. Khundari intelligence had assured them that the ruins of the old village, despite being a little over 100 meters from the main gate, would be the safest place to reconnoiter the lay of the land.

Laying on the north side of the large creek that flowed down southeast of the cliffs of Fächnor, and nearby the fishing pond created by an ancient dam, the village had once housed Umantari subjects, who provided their Khundari overlords with grain, fruits and vegetables, and tended their herd beasts. Five hundred years of abandonment had left nothing but ruins, even the sturdy Khundari stonemason’s walls only half standing, blurred by thickets of blackberry, mountain grape and blueberry, as well as numerous stands of mountain ash and one immense oak tree.

“For whatever reason, no doubt long forgotten by the cursed creatures themselves, the area has become taboo to them,” Lekorm Darkeye had explained back in Dürkon. “They never come there, under any circumstances… although I would not slack my vigilance, and would take care to stay hidden. Even the gülvini are not such fools as to fail to act on enemies so close, whatever fears they have of the place!”

The trees, ruins and brambles did indeed turn out to be more than adequate cover for the Hand, who settled in to observe their enemies, the late morning sun filtering through the red-golden autumn leaves. Jeb and B Fiddy-five gathered a bounty of blackberries and blueberries while the others made their plans…

The area around the Gate of Fächnor was cleared of trees and brush for perhaps 80 meters to the west, south and north. To the east steep hills and bare cliffs rose 30 meters to a ridge running NW to SE. At the NW end a taller prominence, maybe 40 meters high, was crowned by a stone tower some seven meters tall. Three gülvini sentries could be glimpsed occasionally, moving about atop the tower.

Below, the ancient Khundari roadway, known in happier times as the Silver Path, ran west to east, ending in the steep hillside where the old gate of the mining colony still stood. For all the length of it that they could see, the roadway was lined with pyramids of skulls, human, dwarven and gülvini, giving the path it’s current name: the Avenue of Skulls.

But there was a new gate the road passed through before reaching the Main Gate – the gülvini had erected a 3 meter high palisade of logs, sharpened to points at the top, in a great arc from the base of the tower, sweeping south and east, to the cliff face nearest the old village. A crude tower rose above the wall inside and to the north of where the road pierced it, manned by a single sentry.

A second lone sentry stood hunched and miserable looking in the fall sunlight near the large corral/pen, north of the road and outside the palisade. The enclosure contained several score of pigs, at least a score of goats, and a few sick-looking sheep.

Unfortunately, the new palisade, although not entirely finished on the SE side nearest them, blocked any good view of the Main Gate itself and much of the space before it. But Vulk took the hood off of his familiar, the falcon Cherdon, stroked its head for a moment, and then let it fly. The cleric then settled back against a tree trunk and closed his eyes…

The mental link he shared with his familiar sharpened, and suddenly he was seeing through the eyes of the bird as it soared above the land. It was all laid out before him like a map on a table, and after the momentary disorientation that always came with this change in perception (at least he wasn’t vomiting any more), he was able to note what had been invisible to them before.

“There are no other gülvini within the palisade,” he murmured to his companions. “Except the four clustered around the Main Gate itself. They are crowding into the slight recess… trying to stay out of the direct sunlight as much as possible, I think… the gate is crude, compared to the Khundari stonework around it… obviously inferior gül-work, after they took the place… yes, just three guards in the stone tower… but no opening in it anywhere except the trap door up top…”

“There wouldn’t be,” Toran confirmed. “The only entrance would be from below, a tunnel from the colony itself.”

“Any sign of the hidden entrance to the secret escape tunnel mentioned in the Archives of Dürkon?” asked Korwin.

Toran snorted at the absurdity of any non-Khundari spotting one of his people’s hidden doors, even on the ground and much less from high in the air and moving. Nonetheless, Vulk directed Cherdon over the general area they knew the hidden egress to be located, and focused intently…

“No clue, I’m afraid,” he finally had to admit. “Secret Khundari work, plus more than five centuries of weathering and plant growth… hardly surprising.”

It was obvious the Main Gate was not a viable option for entering the gülvini hive, and there was some discussion of diversions or scaling the stone tower, or both; but in the end it was agreed searching for the hidden escape route was their best option, and Toran the obvious choice to do the searching.

Both Mariala and Korwin cast their separate spells of concealment on the Khundari warrior, and it was an unnoticeable gray shadow that slipped into the woods an hour before noon, followed by the sinuous gray shape of Grover, Erol’s ferret friend. Screened by magic, forest and the shoulder of the hill south of the Main Gate, Toran made his way to the steep, stoney area south and east of the unfinished section of palisade, Grover silent and stealthy behind him.

It took forty-five minutes, but in the end he found the hidden door. High enough in a stone wall to be unobscured by vegetation, the stone work was so cunningly wrought that even he might not have spotted it if not for the wear and weathering of five centuries and no maintenance. Once found, the Dwarf had the door opened in just minutes, and sent Grover back to bring the rest of the group.

While Toran was searching for the way in, Devrik had settled himself down in front of the small, smokeless fire he’d made and cast his Flame Harken spell. Staring into the flames, he’d slipped into a semi-trance and the sounds of the woods around him had faded, to be replaced by the harsh grunts, barks and chitterings that made up the speech of the gülvini. Somewhere nearby, at least two of the beastmen were talking near a moderate-sized fire, and Devrik could hear every sound as if he were there himself.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t understand a single word that was spoken – the two must be of the same subspecies, and thus had no need to use Yashparic or Khundaic. Nonetheless, the fire mage listened for as long as he could before the spell began to fade, in hopes of gleaning something useful. With a sigh he shook his head, coming out of his trance and back to the world around him.

Grover returned shortly thereafter, running up Erol’s body, chirping in his ear, and then running back down and away. Moving stealthily and quietly, the Hand followed the ferret to the hidden door without being spotted by the gülvini sentries.

Vulk gave thanks to Kasira for the bright day, after so many rainy, gray ones recently – with human guards it would have been a problem, but the gülvini hated and feared the sun, even if they could function under its light at need… and their eyesight was not well adapted to the day.

The sun was no more than a turn or two past noon when the last of the Hand slipped through the rough square opening and into the secret escape tunnel of the old Khundari Governors of Fächnor, Jeb pulling the door closed behind them. No one had used the door or passage since it had been built, the gülvini attack that took the mining colony having been so fast, so overwhelming, that no one had had a chance to escape this way.

Vulk took a moment as they stood in total darkness to murmur an invocation to Kasira, and as his words faded away the darkness began to fade. In a moment everyone in the party could see as well as if outside on a cloudy day, although no actual light was being cast… no tell-tale torch or lantern would give them away as they moved through the tunnel.

With Toran and Erol in the lead, the group headed into the narrow, low-ceilinged passage, the taller members of the party forced to stoop or crouch-walk to avoid bashing their heads. The tunnel sloped steeply down for 20 or 30 meters, then leveled out some and turned sharply to the left. Another 50 meters, then it began to descend once more, before coming to a T-junction.

Left or right, both passages led to seeming cul-de-sacs, but it took Toran only seconds to spot the mechanism to operate the hidden doors. It was decided to try the northern route first (the others took Toran’s word for it that they faced north).

The small square opening debouched into what was obviously a Dwarven crypt, and not a few members of the party shuddered as they crawled over the scattered and obviously desecrated bones of some long-dead Khundari – lord, lady, artisan or miner, who could tell now?

The crypt opening was about a meter above the floor of the long, narrow chamber. Three meters wide and perhaps 30 long, it was lined on both sides by other crypt openings, eight to the north and eight to the south. But all of the crypts seemed to have been long ago looted of whatever barrow goods they once held, the gnawed and broken bones of the occupants scattered about. The gülvini could hardly have derived any nourishment from such long-interred bones – the vandalism had been simply malicious and wanton.

Cracked or shattered glow-stones were set in the walls between crypts, drained of all light, and at the far end of the chamber a great bronze door stood ajar. The group cautiously made thier way to the door, careful to disturb the scattered bones that littered floor as little as possible.

Beyond the door was a 3-meter wide corridor that ran perpendicular to the crypt. To the left it faded into darkness, but to the right a flight of stone steps led upward towards some dim light source. Toran started slowly up the stairs, his crossbow at the ready, while the others gathered near the foot, waiting to see what he found.

But before Toran had reached the top of the stairs there came a harsh cry from the darkness behind them, angry words spoken in Khundari. As everyone whirled to see what was behind them, weapons at the ready, a strange figure stepped within the circle of their goddess-given sight.

He was short and stocky, with a dark beard well streaked with gray, and quite obviously a Khundari. But he was dressed in elaborate robes of red, orange and midnight blue, embroidered with arcane symbols in gold and silver. A wide belt of gold-chased leather was at his waist, and on his head was a traditional skullcap of black and copper. In his hand was a gnarled staff, which he pointed at the group in furious punctuation to his words.

Despite months of studying Khundaic, few in the group were very fluent, and the apparition before them was speaking quickly and with passion – it was hard to follow his full meaning. But they caught enough to know he seemed to think that they were gülvini of some sort, and was promising to drive them from the colony. Then his words turned into a completely unintelligible chant, and the head of his staff began to glow faintly…

But he abruptly cut himself off when he caught sight of Toran, who was descending the steps quickly to see what was going on. He passed through his friends and slowly approached the strange figure, crossbow at his side, his left hand held out and open.

The old Khundari’s face lit with a mixture of joy and confusion, and he began speaking even more rapidly and in lower tones, slowly moving forward as if only half believing what he saw. He seemed to be greeting Toran as a long-sought friend and ally. Toran replied in their shared language, and in a moment he motioned his friends forward.

“You see,” he said to the older Khundari, gesturing at the others. “They are not gülvini at all – they are Umantari. Well, and one Telnori… sort of. It’s a long story. Anyway, they are allies… friends, come to help us.”

The old man’s grey eyes lit with sudden hope, and the etched lines of his face seemed not so deep. He bowed low to the group, and spoke in deeply accented Yashparic.

“Forgive my rash greeting, friends,” he croaked. “For so long it has been only the vile –” here he burst into a string of harsh-sounding words that only Toran seemed to understand – “the beastmen! Long have I held them at bay, smiting them with my magics when they try to enter the crypts, protecting the children…

“Yes, the children… I must protect them, I can never leave them, to take the fight to the enemy… at all costs I must get the children away to safety!”

It was during this speech that Mariala’s eyes widened, and she nudged Devrik, who stood next to her. She pointed to the floor behind the old Khundari. The dust of five centuries laid thick and undisturbed back into the darkness… yet where the Hand had trod, the dust was blurred and marked by footprints.

“But how have you come to be here, in the middle of of our enemies, alone, grandfather?” Toran asked, intent on the other’s face and missing the byplay behind him. “Did you enter by the secret way, as we did?”

“The secret way? You know of it? Yes, of course… but we did not enter, no, we must leave that way! I must get the Governor’s children to safety! Ah! The Bogabai came upon us in the night… so suddenly, we had no warning… their numbers overwhelmed us!”

“I don’t understand–” Toran began, but then he, too, noticed the lack of footprints behind the old Khundari, and he felt a chill run up his spine. He took an involuntary step back, but then steeled himself. “How… how long have you been fighting the gülvini, grandfather? How long have you been here, protecting the children?”

‘”How long?” For a moment the old mage looked uncertain. “It was this very night that… no, no… it has been longer than that… it seems almost like centuries… but how could that…” A sudden look of immense grief and sadness fell on the old man’s face, and he looked away into the darkness.

“I failed,” he whispered, as if to himself. “I failed the children… the creatures were already in the southern tunnels, they cut us off… we were so close, so very close… a score of the cursed things died screaming in flames, by Gheas they did! But they had arrows…” His hand went involuntarily to his throat. “And we died…”

For a moment there was utter silence in the crypts of Fächnor. Then Vulk spoke, a whisper, almost a prayer. “Where did you die, my lord? Where are the children?”

Without a word the ghost motioned beyond the group and to the left. They parted as he moved forward, then closed in behind to follow him into another crypt chamber, virtual twin to the one through which they had entered. Scattered bones covered the floor here, as well, ripped from the 16 burial chambers, gnawed and broken.

But amidst the more ancient bones, near the center of the chamber, where three less old skeletons, mostly whole, rotted fabrics still covering the whiter bones. Two small skeletons, one larger one, and beneath the larger  lay a broken, gnarled staff. The shafts and feathers of the arrows that had killed them were brittle and collapsed into dust as Derik knelt to examine them, but the iron arrowheads remained.

“It comes back to me,” the old mage said quietly. “How had I forgotten? We were trapped… if I could but hold them off, help must come… but it didn’t, not soon enough… not ever…

“But Zarak Firehand had driven the fear deep into the vile creatures, by the burned and strangled corpses of their fellows I did! Their leaders forced them into the chamber, eventually… to loot our bodies… but they still feared even my corpse… as well they should… for I will never rest until their kind is driven from our home!

“They despoiled my body, tentatively, fearfully, at first… but they grew bolder as no bolt struck them, no vine ensnared them… but before they could touch the children… then they saw me as I am now! Too weak then, too new to this deathless state, to truly harm them but still they shrieked and fled in terror... and eventually, when they dared to return, hungry and greedy… by then I had learned to wield the T’ara again. If not as strongly as in life, it was yet enough to maim and slay any that came within my compass.

“And slay them I did, by fire and wind and vine… and always they try to seal up the crypts, but always I tear down their seals… it has been long years, I think, since any have dared these passages, but they do not forget the terror that awaits them here!

“Ah, that night, it seems just yesterday… if only I had not dined with the Governor that night… I would have been in my own chambers… I would have taken the Horn and used it, and perhaps… perhaps…”

The sad ghost of Zarak sighed and seemed to grow translucent.

“Wait!” cried Toran, in Khundaic. “We have come as the spearhead of an army out of Dürkon, to take back what is ours. Soon your long battle will be over, and you can rest… but will you not help us? What is this horn you speak of? Do the gül-Bogabai possess it?”

Zarak seemed suddenly to be aware that he was not alone, as if he had forgotten. He became solid looking again, and nodded at Toran.

“The Horn of Korgis,” he sighed regretfully. “A great relic, the gift of my teacher of old… whoever holds the Horn and winds it at need will find himself and all friends who hear it heartened, renewed in strength and hope and the will to fight; but all enemies who hear those same notes will loose their hope and sink into despair, their hands and souls becoming weak and nerveless.

“If only I had been able to reach it that night… but Gharez had to go to the battle, and he begged me to protect his children… if only…”

Toran interrupted before this slide into memory and regret could pull the ghost from them. “Master Zarak, do the gül-Bogabai now possess the Horn? Have they used it over the years, in battle against our people?”

“I fear so, my young warrior… for in looting my body they took the key to the chest wherein all my greatest treasures lay…” He reached into his ghostly robes and pulled out a chain, upon which was a large key. It’s head was carved in the spiral symbol of Khundari neutral magic. “The chest cannot be opened, nay, not even moved, without this key inserted within its lock. But they have the key, and they have the Horn… I have heard it blown… more than once, I think…”

With this he became silent, and seemed sunk in grief and despair. Even when Vulk led the others in collecting the bones of the Khundari children and laying them side-by-side in an empty crypt he said nothing, though he nodded in grim approval.

But when Vulk would have gathered up the mage’s own bones, he spoke one last time. “No! Let me lay where I fell, for I will not rest until the gülvini are either dead or driven from this place. Drive them to me, if you will, and I shall slay them. But only when the last deathspawn in these halls has joined me in death itself, then come and lay my bones to rest… for only then will my long battle be ended and my oaths fulfilled…”

With that the apparition faded from their sight.

♦ ♦ ♦

After taking a few minutes to gather themselves together, the Hand resumed their mission, leaving the bones of Zarak Firehand as they lay in the crypt where he had died. Vulk murmured a last prayer as he pulled the bronze door shut.

They found Jeb and Therok waiting for them in the main crypt corridor – the barbarian had flatly refused to follow them when he had realized the mysterious Dwarf was an actual ghost, and Jeb had stayed to keep an eye on him. Or so he said, though Erol hadn’t noticed any particular enthusiasm on Jeb’s part to gain a closer acquaintance with the apparition himself.

At the head of the stairs leading up from the crypts they found a well-lit intersection of two major corridors. Steady glow-stones illuminated three possible direction, beyond the one from which they’d come.

Although the area was guarded, the sentries failed to immediately note Erol and Toran bearing down on them, and were dispatched with relative ease and in almost total silence. Jeb and Therok were tasked with dragging the corpses back to the crypt to hide them, a task the barbarian had to be shamed into performing, given his fear of “haunts.” But his admiration for Vulk was so great that he swallowed his fear and only looked a little pale as he and Jeb lugged the first gül corpse away, trying to leave as little of a blood trail as possible.

After a quick debate it was decided to take the right hand passage as they looked for the stairs that would take them to the upper level and, presumably, what they sought. Coming to a short flight of stairs leading down, it seemed a promising start for they could see two guards slouching before a set of large double doors.

Toran, enchanted in spells of cloaking (and being a Shadow ninja dwarf in any case), snuck down the stairs and took out the first guard, at which Devrik leapt after him and dispatched the second gül equally quickly. Jeb and Therok, just returning from disposing of the first bodies, were dismayed to find two more awaiting removal…

As the two lackeys resignedly hauled the new corpses up the stairs, Toran and Devrik listened intently at the doors. No sounds came from within, and they slowly swung them open. They found themselves in the corner of a large chamber, some 40 meters long by 32 meters wide.

To their left a 3-meter wide walk led north before turning east to run the length of the north wall; to their right the walkway abutted another large open space containing two enormous smelters, their fires banked for the night but giving off a faint red glow.

The bulk of the space was sunken 2.5 meters below the walk and the smelters, with a mine rail running from a tunnel in the east wall to a two-way split just before the western stairs that down to them. Stone pillars lined the track and rose 12 meters to a shadowy ceiling. Great piles of stone and ore were littered about the area, and at least one great boulder seemed to have fallen from the ceiling.

Despite the glow-stones scattered about the walls, and the ruddy light from the smelters, the Hand did not immediately see the two gül-Bogabai guards stationed just within the mouth of the mine tunnel, and began to spread out to explore the chamber. Not, at least, until one of the gül leaped from the dark tunnel mouth, shouting in surprise, short sword drawn. His companion was not far behind him.

Toran instantly whipped up his crossbow and fired a bolt, which pierced the foot of the creature on the right, pinning it to the wooden tie of the rail. Even as it opened its mouth to shriek a second bolt took it between the eyes. Mariala lowered her new crossbow and smiled in satisfaction – she was obviously a natural at this!

As the crossbow bolts flew Devrik had leaped down and quickly dispatched the second guard, who had been fatally distracted by his companions sudden demise. Thus, when Therok and Jeb again returned to the group, they found two MORE bodies to dispose of. With deep sighs they trudged over and hefted the first corpse…

After making sure there were no more surprises hiding in the mine, the group began to quickly examine the mine head. Two doors in the west wall, north of the main entrance, were the only other apparent exits beside the mine tunnel. Mariala listened carefully at the northern door, Korwin beside her, and then slowly opened it. It creaked faintly.

The room beyond was clearly a weapons forging shop, with a massive table in the center, two small forges and several anvils of various sizes in various spots around the room. Mangs and crude copies of Khundari short swords lay on the table in various stages of creation, and hammers, tongs and more esoteric tools of the weaponcrafter trade hung from the walls.

A door in the north wall and a corresponding one in the south wall were the only other exits from the chamber. After a quick scan around to make sure there were no surprises hiding anywhere Mariala approached the northern door. Like all the ancient Khundari doors that had survived the original gülvini invasion this one was thick and heavy, and she could hear nothing beyond it. Slowly she pushed it open…

In the dim light of the glow-stones she could see several racks of finished weapons lining the walls, and one large free-standing rack in the center of the room. An armory then – except why was there a large bed over in the far corner to her left? Even as her mind formed the question Mariala realized the bed was occupied… by a largish gül who was furiously… she had to gag back a sudden urge to vomit, and her retching gasp echoed loudly in the room…

The creature, suddenly aware of her, grunted in surprise, then growled in lust. Still fully rampant, it leapt from its bed and charged at her. Mariala raised her Khundari dagger and tried to counterstrike as the gül punched her hard in the stomach. Her armor took the brunt of the impact, but her breath was knocked from her, and her blade only sliced air.

She staggered back and swiped hard at her attacker’s face, but he easily dodged the frantic attack. The beastman’s arms and shoulders were immense and immensely powerful… probably the blacksmith, Mariala realized in a corner of her mind as she gasped for breath… time slowed in that strange adrenaline-fueled state of fear and calm of battle…

But before the gül could take advantage of his strength and her stunned gasping, Korwin was upon him, cutlass steaming with the Frost Brand. The creature tried to dodge, but the freezing blade pierced his shoulder and he stumbled to his knees, shrieking in pain. That moment was all Mariala needed to gather her breath, her wits and her power – as the vile thing tried to stagger up her Fire Nerves spell took it full in the chest.

As the creature writhed in agony on the floor, his already hideous face made even more horrible by a rictus of silent anguish, Korwin drove his sub-freezing blade through its skull. The body relaxed into death. One nice thing about Frost Brand, Korwin thought as he pulled his cutlass free, was that you never had to clean the gore from your weapon – it just dropped off in frozen chunks.

“Very timely, Korwin,” Mariala said gratefully, as she sheathed her dagger and tried to regain her composure. “I’ve never seen one of this species so big before!”

“Well, I’m no expert, but it didn’t seem that large to me,” Korwin said, glancing down at the naked corpse. “But perhaps you’ve seen more gül-Bogabai in flagrante delicto than I have…”

With a half-swallowed growl of rage Mariala slugged him in the stomach as she stormed out of the room, her face crimson. Korwin grinned unrepentantly and followed her out – after a quick scan for further enemies.

The others, meanwhile, had found nothing of interest in their search of the rest of the mine head and it’s adjoining chambers. Once Jeb and B Fiddy-five had disposed of the latest bodies, having been spared moving the blacksmith’s since he was in a dead-end room anyway, the group headed back into the main corridor from whence they’d come.

Returning to the intersection near the crypts, they paused to discuss, sotto voce, their next move. But at that moment their luck ran out. A lone guard posted somewhere up the northern corridor must have heard something for, he came to the head of the short flight of stairs about six meters from the group and stared in shock. But only for only an instant. He let out a piercing cry and turned to run back up the corridor.

In a flash Erol was after him, Grover hot on his heels. Before the others could do more than draw their weapons, a door to the west slammed open and a grizzled gül stormed into the hallway, scimitar in hand and roaring what sounded like a question. Whatever the question, it was obviously answered by the sight of the Hand just 3 meters away. His next roar was equally obviously a summons to arms to his hive-mates!

From two doors further west down the corridor more gülvini stumbled into the hall, buckling armor and brandishing mangs and short swords, three from each door. Toran stepped forward and fired his crossbow at the roaring leader, but the bolt whizzed past his heads he dodged aside.

The threat of ranged weapons momentarily stalled the foulspawn’s rush, however, giving Devrik and Mariala the few seconds they needed to launch their own more esoteric attacks. The leader and the nearer three warriors fell in writhing agony as Mariala’s Fire Nerves again came into play; the three warriors beyond them found themselves engulfed in searing flames as Devrik’s Orb of Vorol exploded between them.

Korwin dashed forward as the leader tried to stagger to his feet, finishing him off with a deep thrust to the guts. Toran unlimbered his battleaxe and waded into the other gülvini, his blade whirling about in a blur, as if he were chopping cabbages. In seconds the corridor was again silent, filled only with the coppery smell of blood and the stench of burning gül flesh.

Erol returned just then, to report that the other guard had been dispatched.

“A few well-placed jabs with my trident brought him to the ground,” he said laconically, “and Grover finished him off once he was down. Didn’t see any point in dragging the body back, I think our moment of stealth has passed.”

But in that Erol appeared to be mistaken. Despite the commotion and nosie, there was no sound of alarm and no further rush of attacking gülvini.

“Maybe we’ve cleared out this level,” Vulk said after a few tense moments had passed. The others agreed, and it was decided to try for the upper level again. The great double doors just up the north corridor were still closed, and apparently quite soundproof.

But before they could be opened Vulk had a sudden thought. “What was it that guard was guarding up the corridor? Did you check any doors Erol?”

“No,” the former gladiator shrugged. “There was just the one, and nothing popped out, despite the sounds of violence and death, and I didn’t see the point of borrowing trouble when you all might have been in need of me.”

“Maybe we should check it out,” the cantor suggested. “I don’t like leaving anything behind us if we can avoid it.”

“A good point,” Devrik agreed. “I’m not fond of surprises myself. Better to be sure there are none blocking our line of retreat!”

So the group moved up the short flight of stairs to the north and stopped before the solid black oak door the lone gülvini had been guarding. A quick search of his nearby body found a single iron key on an iron ring, and Toran quickly had the door unlocked.

Inside, they found four large iron cages, a bloody table, and a single large brazier full of hot coals. The latter provided the only illumination in the room, and revealed two cowering figures in separate cages. Devrik summoned up a hand flame to better see, and it was soon obvious that these prisoners were Umantari, and in a pitiable state.

“We don’t have time for this,” he grated after a few minutes of Mariala and Vulk trying to calm the poor wretches and get information from them. “We have a mission and a tight time table… getting tighter every minute. It’s a miracle we haven’t raised a general alarm yet.”

But neither of his friends were willing to just leave the prisoners, and after Toran managed to pick the lock on one cell, and smash the other when it proved intractable, the men calmed down a bit. They were merchants from the Republic, taken in a high pass the better part of a tenday ago, when their caravan was overwhelmed. Four others were taken as well, but one by one they’ve been taken away, never to return.

Unwilling to take the men with them, and at least some of the party unwilling to leave them to their own devices, it was eventually decided to take them to one of the gülvini sleeping chambers. There Mariala cast her sleeping syncope on them, with promises to return for them when their mission was accomplished. The men seemed inclined to object, but only manage a few outraged words before they slipped into deep sleep.

Finally the group was ready to ascend the great staircase the ancient map had indicated would take them to the main level of the colony. Wide and high-ceilinged, the stairs rose steeply to a wide landing, turning left and then left again at a second landing. At the top the stairs opened onto another wide north-south corridor.

After some quite debate, Korwin’s desire to try the wide double doors just across the corridor and slightly to the right of the them won the day. Listening at the doors, the sound of at least two people, probably guards, could be faintly heard. Erol smiled and pulled out his Balls of Wonder…

When the doors were pushed quickly open, the two surprised guards whirled instantly around, spears coming down, only to be mesmerized by the spinning, swirling lights of the Erol’s Balls.

“That one’s good for the duration,” Erol assured his companions in a whisper, motioning to the gül on the left. “But this one… hmmm, he may shake it off soon…”

So, while he was still stunned and under the enchantment of Erol’s Balls, Devrik gently bound the creature’s hands and hobbled his legs, then the two fighters stuffed a rag in his mouth and swiftly dragged him out of the room and into the stairwell. This brought the beastman out of his stuppor, of course, but left him unable to do more than squirm in their grasp and make muffled grunts.

Once on the lower landing, and hopefully safe from hostile ears, Vulk began to question their captive, while Mariala listened with her Truth Sense active. The interrogation was long and twisting, to the annoyance of the more impatient members of the party, but in the end Vulk found the key to cooperation.

“You’d make a better king than this young upstart Gunük,” he cajoled. “He’s barely even seen six summers, you say? Far too young, I agree… the wisdom of 15 years would make King Fârchul a much better ruler! And the females would no doubt appreciate a more mature male, yes.”

“Yessss,” Fârchul hissed reluctantly, his imagination caught in spite of himself. “But why would you see me on the Great Seat? You Pale Ones come to kill us all…”

“No, no, my friend,” Vulk assured him. “We come only for treasure… help us to take Gunük’s treasure, and we will leave all the rest to you… we have no interest in the gül-Bogabai beyond that…” Fortunately Toran had stayed to keep an eye on the entranced guard, and Fârchul had never seen him, or this gambit would never have flown. The gülvini know of the implacable hatred of the Dwarves, and share it; whatever his greed and ambition, the captive would never have believed a Khundari would help any gül!

It took a long, tedious time, but eventually Vulk got the creature to tell them what they needed to know. It turned out they had made a fortuitous choice in going north first – the complex of rooms Fârchul and his companion guarded included the King’s chamber as well as the Queen’s, with the hive’s main egg crèche, and the Princesses’ rooms, all to the south.

Unfortunately, it also contained the barracks of the Queen’s Guard, perhaps the most vicious and capable of the hive’s fighters, females everyone. Only three males were permitted beyond the double doors – the King and two of his King’s Guard. Over a score of female fighters, eight nasty Princesses, one tough old queen, and the King remained to deal with, if Fârchul’s intelligence was accurate.

Mariala assured her companions it was, and then cast her Syncope on Fârchul, causing him to slip into a deep sleep. They carried him back up the stairs and set him in a corner near his still mesmerized companion. While they considered their situation Vulk cast Virtue’s Armor on Devrik, who then called up Goraten’s Brand on his battlesword, causing a sheen of flame to flicker across the blade.

Five doorways lined the corridor they stood in: two to the south, the nearer of which was the King’s chamber, the further leading to the Queen’s suite, including the Princesses and crèche; two to the north, both of which led to barracks for the Queen’s Guard; and a curtained alcove at the far end, which led to the privy.

The big problem was that the nearer of the two barracks chambers had no door, unlike the other chambers. Peering in, although the light was dim, the rows of crude bunks and the sleeping fighters in them could be dimly seen, and their sleepy grunts and loud snoring clearly heard.

If they could kill Gunük quietly, in his sleep, and recover the Horn (which was unlikely to be far from the king), they might make their escape and leave the colony in chaos come morning or whenever Fârchul woke up – whatever promises they had made, once it was learned Gunük was dead the Hand knew the little creep would have to fight to claim his “throne.”

But how likely was it they could pull it off? Toran carefully tested the door to the King’s chamber, and found it locked. He pulled his magic key from its pouch and inserted it quietly into the lock… with a twist the tumblers fell into place, and the door was unlocked. As his friends prepared spells and weapons and kept an eye on the open barracks archway, he slowly pushed the door open.

But no gülvini, and most especially a king, sleeps in a room with oiled and silent hinges. Gunük was no exception, nor was he actually asleep. He sat at a table before a large fireplace, apparently reading some papers, a tarnished silver goblet and a wineskin at his left hand. At the creak of the door, he was up and grasping his sword, dropping into a fighters crouch faster than Toran would have believed possible.

Gunük was the largest gül-Bogabai he’d had ever seen, even bigger and more muscular than the blacksmith Korwin and Mariala had killed. But he was also shockingly fast – Toran leaped as soon as he saw the gül, his battleaxe swinging at the creature’s gut, but Gunük dodged aside and counter-struck, dealing the Khundari a glancing blow to the head with his bastard sword.

Toran staggered back as the King rushed on him, roaring in his beastial language… so much for doing this quietly. Gunük’s sword flashed in, and Toran’s own counter was too slow – the blade bit deep into his shoulder, and the world whirled down into darkness…

Fortunately for Toran, Devrik had been right behind him, with Mariala framed in the doorway – she hurled Fire Nerves at Gunük and the flickering fire on Devrik’s sword burst into full flame. The gülvini was staggered by the sudden onslaught of pain, hissing in agony, but managing to stay on his feet and even to block Devrik’s first stroke.

But his own return thrust was sloppy and weak, enervated as he was my Mariala’s magic, and Devrik’s counterattack took him in the face, leaving a deep gash from forehead, across his right eye and nose, to his left cheek. The wound cauterized instantly from the searing heat of the blade, and the creature’s whole face began to blister. With a strangled cry of pain and rage, Gunük collapsed next to Toran.

Unfortunately, his bellows had awakened the Queen’s Guard across the hallway, who began to surge up from their beds, slapping armor on and seizing weapons. But Erol, trident out and blocking the doorway, had been prepared for this. As soon as there was a sufficient density of fighters on their feet he tossed a small glass sphere into the center of the large room… three seconds later a blast of searing white filled the space with jagged shards of solid light, scything through everything in their path.

Six of the gülvini females died almost instantly, shredded by the Blast of Norinos; the other four staggered around, blood leaking from a dozen wounds, dazed and confused. Vulk summoned another Virtue’s Armor, this time on Erol, who quickly dispatched the remaining warriors as they tried to force the door.

Meanwhile, others of the Queen’s Guard had begun pouring from both the far barracks and the the guard post in the Queen’s suite. Mariala again wielded her Fire Nerves to good effect, striking down the leading four screaming females and slowing those behind.

This gave Korwin time to recover from his first failed attempt to cast Strands of Lakira, and for Devrik to send Arkels Fiery Ribbons down the hallway. Half a dozen gülvini went down shrieking in pain as the colorful ribbons of flames engulfed them, and a few seconds later their sisters, leaping out of the doorways over their smoldering bodies, found themselves trapped and entangled in a mass of sticky webs that suddenly filled the passage from wall to wall and ceiling to floor.

“The Strands of Lakira will hold them for maybe ten minutes,” Korwin said, smiling in satisfaction. “I suggest we be well on our way by then!”

The others heartily agreed, and they all turned their attention to the King’s chamber, where Vulk had applied one of Toran’s vials of baylorium to his wound, and then bound up the unconscious gülvini leader. Toran was already on his feet, and while favoring his left shoulder, seemed ready for another fight.

“This must be the chest the ghost told us of,” he said as everyone crowded into the room, pointing to a solid, well built chest of iron and oak in one corner. He tried to open it, but had no luck, and even his magic key failed to do the trick. He couldn’t lift the chest or even shift it in the slightest. It was definitely Zarak’s old chest.

“I think this is what we need,” Vulk cried triumphantly from near the fireplace, where he’d been searching Gunük. He held up a key that was the living twin of the ghostly one Zarak had shown them. It had been on a chain around the gülvini king’s neck, under his crude armor.

Taking the key, Toran inserted it into the chest’s lock, and instantly the lid sprang up. Inside were a variety of items, including gold and silver coins and ingots, gems… and right on top, a beautiful horn of bone and bronze. There was no time to dig deeper, so Toran slung the Horn of Korgis around his neck, shut the lid, and then he and Korwin hefted the chest between them.

Devrik slung the still unconscious Gunük over his shoulder, Mariala grabbed all the papers he’d been reading, and Vulk called out “Hand, we are LEAVING!” Toran pulled the stone-and-crystal egg from his scrip and gave it a sharp twist… the crystal began to glow amber… the signal was given. As he slipped it back into his scrip the amber glow turned red, and began to pulse. “The army will be here within the hour!” he announced to murmurs of relieve and approval.

But as the Hand passed out of the king’s room into the hallway Vulk stopped, with a sharp “oh shit!” In the deep confusion of the last ten minutes it seemed that Fârchul had awakened, slipped his bonds, and escaped. His mesmerized partner still stood gazing at Erol’s Balls of Wonder, however.

“Done is done,” said Erol with a shrug. “Let’s just move and hope we can escape before the little rat can organize help.” With that he stabbed the mesmerized gül in the back and scooped up his Balls.

But his advice proved futile, for as the Hand came to the head of the stairs leading down to the crypt level they ran into Fârchul, at the head of a squad of what was almost certainly the King’s Guard, coming up. By some quirk of fate Therok was at the head of party and, without hesitation, the barbarian ran the would-be king straight through, then hurled his body down into the midst of his followers.

This gave Devrik time to once again summon Arkel’s Fiery Ribbons; but although the colorful tentacles of flame slithered down the stairs, most of the gülvini somehow managed to avoid anything worse than a mild singeing.

“We don’t have time for this,” muttered the fire mage, and this time he called up an Orb of Vorol. “Dodge this!” The flaming ball hit the landing just below the massed gülvini, and when it exploded only two were left standing. These suddenly remembered there were other things they should be doing, and ran shrieking back down the stairs.

The alarm was certainly up now, and the Hand wasted no time in following them, slowed only slightly by having to step over and around the charred and still smoking (in some cases burning) bodies of their former enemies. They woke the merchants from their arcane sleep, and herded them quickly into the crypts and toward the escape tunnel.

Toran and Korwin where the last to enter the crypt, and as he glanced into the dark to the south, the Khundari Shadow Warrior saw the ghost of Zarak Firehand standing there. The spectre raised his staff in salute, nodding his head in slow approval. Toran nodded in return, and the figure faded away into the darkness… but the Shadow Warrior was certain that any gülvini who tried to escape this way would meet a messy end.

The rest of the escape from Fächnor was relatively uneventful. With most of the gül-Bogabai focused on events inside the colony, it proved easy enough to retrace their steps to the ruined village. There they stopped to consider their next step.

“Whatever else we may do,” Toran said at once, “it is my clear duty to get the Horn of Korgis to Prince Rhoghûn and the army. If it has helped the cursed foulspawn defeat us all these years, it will certainly help us this time!”

Devrik and Erol, having little interest in interrogating the ex-king of Fächnor, agreed to ride with him to find the approaching Khundari force and lend their own swords to the cause. Within minutes the three were off, knowing exactly where to go thanks to Vulk and his connection to Cherdon, who again rode the updrafts over the colony.

As soon as their companions were gone Mariala and Vulk took to questioning their prisioner, who had been awake for the last 15 minutes or so. It was a long and torturous session, despite the arcane and holy aid they brought to bear, but in the end they were able to piece together a timeline of recent events in Fächnor…

It seemed that the six-year-old, who really was very young for a “king” even amongst the fast breeding, fast developing gülvini, had ruled for five months now, having challenged his predecessor to open combat and slain him within seconds.

The precipitate reason for the challenge was the old king’s refusal to accept the teachings of an Umantari priestess who had been taken prisoner about a month earlier. Gunük, apparently unusually thoughtful for one of his breed, as well as unusually large and strong, had found her message of a “Death God” to be compelling. He seemed to see in it a way to increase his tribe’s (and thereby his own) power. Zhügok, the old king, lacked this sense of vision and it took only a little prompting from the priestess, Zeliona, to convince Gunük that he had to go.

Once that inconvenient roadblock had been eliminated, the new king allowed Mistress Zeliona to set up a temple in the complex, and began learning from her. With her displays of power and his own physical might, the gül-Bogabai were quickly brought into line with the new teachings, and so began the organization of the colony.

Gunük greatly desired to conquer the nearby gül-Nomai colony of Zabfel whose king, in his own bid for hegemony, had been making demands for tribute from Fächnor and other regional hive-colonies. Zeliona, who came & went as she wished once the “faith” had taken hold amongst her new flock, encouraged Gunük in his ambition, and even planted the seeds of a larger “realm” in his imagination…

Gunük recognized that Fächnor was near its population limit, which meant a civil war or swarm was imminent. If the assault on Zabfel were to go well, his people would have room to grow; if it failed, the casualties would be enough to postpone a civil war or swarm. Regardless of success, he also knew that many of his Bogabai would be killed and Fächnor thus made vulnerable to counter-attack by either another tribe or the Khundari. He was therefore improving his fortifications before launching his attack on Zabfel.

The priestess Zeliona left Fächnor five days ago, going where the young king didn’t know; but if she held true to her custom, she would return in a tenday or so. Nothing more could he tell them of this human “priestess,” although he went on at length about the virtues of her “Death God.” This supposed deity had no other name, needing none beyond that of his function – to bring death and destruction to his enemies.

By the time they had prised all they could from the ex-king of Fächnor the Khundari army of Dürkon had arrived and begun the assault. From the safety of their redoubt amongst the old ruins Vulk, Mariala, Korwin, Jeb, Therok and the two rescued merchants watched the battle unfold as best they could. Vulk supplemented their own restricted view with descriptions of what Cherdon saw from high overhead, as the gülvini poured from the various entrances to meet their ancient enemy.

But though they seemed in some confusion, they still fought well enough in defense of their home, even without a king. As the Khundari fought to throw down the outer defenses Korwin had a sudden idea, with which the others agreed readily enough. Vulk especially, who could see his friends easily enough in the midst of the Khundari fighters, was anxious to maximize their chances of surviving the battle.

So, while Vulk summoned Cherdon back to his wrist, Therok pulled back Gunük’s head by his greasy hair, stretching his neck over a rock, and decapitated the squealing, struggling gül. It was a heavy load for the raptor to bear, but with Vulk’s encouragement the bird managed to get aloft with the severed head, its talons clutching the long hair… moments later it dropped the blankly staring head of their king into the middle of the gülvini horde.

It was like dropping a stone into still water, Vulk told the others, watching through Cherdon’s eyes as the ripples of panic, confusion and chaos spread out in concentric circles. And a moment later, when a loud, clear horn call sounded out from the midst of the Khundari host, the gülvini seemed to loose all sense and hope, and their lines fell apart like a parchment in a rainstorm.

The watchers felt their own hearts lifted at the sound of the Horn of Korgis, blown by Toran himself, at the Prince’s behest. They had to check themselves from rushing to join the battle as well, but as it turned out the battle eventually came to them, in the form of a few stragglers fleeing defeat. In their fear and panic, ignoring the taboo on the village, they stumbled into the Hand’s lair, only to de dispatched by the swords of Therok, Korwin and Vulk.

By sundown the battle was over. The Dwarves of Dürkon had at last taken back the mines of Fächnor!

Wherein the Hand of Fortune discover missing workers, investigate a grizzly murder, locate a missing family, fight sewer rats of unusual size, sewer taloxta of moderate size, and sewer ‘gators of normal size, battle a self-made litch and demonic serial killer, rescue several desperate citizens (including their own hapless manservant Cris), and solve a generation old mystery. And wherein Korwin’s dreams of selling Canary Killer ale are dashed, perhaps forever.

A more detailed recap of these events with follow anon, as time allows…

On the second day after the royal wedding the Hand of Fortune was summoned to the war council of the co-rulers of the new Kingdom of Ukalus. The royal couple had gathered together as many of the great nobles and war leaders of both the constituent realms as could be spared within the precincts of the Abbey of Rivona. Across the Sürkil River a combined military force had been quietly gathering for the last tenday in and around the keep of Dorjen.

“We intend to move on the false Earl of Yorma, and retake Kar Urkonis,” Queen Miralda began bluntly, when the Hand were gathered before her in the refectory that had been taken over as a war room. King Dorikon and a half-dozen other war leaders were also present, as was Miralda’s Mistress of Esoterica and a grim looking Lady Thilisa Kleftin.

“We have officially named the false Earl a renegade and traitor, something We were reluctant to do if there was any chance of recovering the true Earl. But We have been convinced by Our experts, and your own recent experience,” she gestured vaguely at Erol, declining to get more specific in this too-public venue, “that poor Sedris is truly gone beyond all hope.

“We have attaindered all of the property of the Earldom and decreed that the false Earl may be executed by any loyal subject of the joint realms – given the arcane powers of the man, and those of the shadowy group behind him, it seems wisest not to attempt capture.”

Lady Thilisa’s grim visage turned even stonier, and Mariala thought she detected a sheen of water in her gray eyes… but no tear fell, and she nodded firmly at her queen’s words.

“We have also affirmed the Lady Thilisa Kleftin as Countess of Yorma in her own right, to rule the fiefdom as vassal primus to Us, her unborn child to be named Heir in the hour of his – or her – birth. But the title shall not pass to the child until the Countess herself dies or chooses to step down.”

At this point the Mistress of Esoterica stepped forward and set a large wooden box down on the table in front of the King and Queen. Miralda laid a hand on it and frowned contemplatively down. After a moment she smiled and her eyes rose to meet the collective, curious gaze of the Hand.

“Which brings us to why We have summoned you to Us today. We would have you complete as task for Us that will greatly help in the retaking of Kar Urkonis. You have been there, you know that it is a mighty fortress, one of the strongest in the land. It is well garrisoned, its native troops bolstered by mercenaries and barbarian warriors of the North. It will be a long and costly siege, to simply storm the castle as it stands now… and we cannot afford long and costly right now.

“Therefore We propose to use a strategem.” She flipped a latch on the box and pulled off its top panel, causing the four sides to fall to the table. Inside was metal sphere the size of a summer melon, etched with arcane symbols, inset with colored crystals  and held  in place by four stubby feet. A large many-faceted crystal was set into the top.

“This has been created by Our Mistress of Esoterica, with the aid of Master Vetaris and others o thef Guild of Arcane Lore. It has within it an image of Myself, laying out the charges against the false Earl, stating that he is an impostor who has murdered the true Earl, and declaring his widow as the true Countess of Yorma and his unborn child as Heir. We also pronounce Our marriage and the formation of the new, united realm, and call on all the loyal citizens of Urkonis to overthrow the usurper and open the gates to their true ruler.

“We do not, of course, imagine that this will actually happen – too many mercenaries and barbarians are in positions of power within the castle and town. But the confusion this sows will make the defense much more difficult, as some portion of the false Earl’s troops may be expected to rebel, or at least drag their feet.

“We will not go further into our plans for the siege, for security, since we are asking you to infiltrate Kar Urkonis and place this device on the top of the highest tower therein. It has been calculated that his will provide the widest visibility of Our message to both castle and town. You will need to make sure that no one can interfere with the device for six minutes, once it is triggered… and it must be triggered manually.”

“This is a great and dangerous task We ask of you,” King Dorikon said, taking up the thread. “But the past deeds of the Hand of Fortune have won you renown in both halves of Our new kingdom… and the trust of two monarchs. We would not ask this of you if We did not think you capable of achieving success. But it is a serious decision, and you should have time to think on it.”

Vulk looked at the others, and a silent communication passed between the friends… trepidation and worry, to be sure, but also a strong resolve and calm certainty. They all remembered the true Earl of Yorma, the kind, strong man they had rescued from nightmarish imprisonment – and they remembered their last encounter with the monster who now inhabited his body. The desire to avenge Lord Sedris’ tragic death was strong.

“I do not think we need more time, your Majesties,” Vulk spoke for the group. “It will be our honor to help in whatever way we can, and our pleasure to avenge Lord Sedris if we can!”

Both monarchs looked pleased, and with little more ado they set about brainstorming the best way to infiltrate the castle and deliver the device. Countess Thilisa was heavily involved, since she knew the secrets of Kar Urkonis best. Two hours of intense study and discussion, and a plan was formed. As the council broke up for dinner, Thilisa pulled aside Mariala, Vulk and Devrik.

“You knew my husband, however briefly,” she said quietly. “And I think you know how hard it has been to accept that he is really gone. But he is, and I do not want you to hesitate if you get the chance to destroy the… the THING… that wears his body! Do not risk yourselves for it, but if the opportunity arises – strike without doubt or second thoughts!”

The three friends murmured their understanding, and after a few words of sympathy the Countess released them and returned to the Queen’s side.

•••

Three days laters a brace of carts approached the gates of Kar Urkonis. One held three large kegs of beer, and was driven by a young blond man, obviously the brewmaster’s apprentice, and his Khundari assistant, equally obviously there to protect the wares from thirsty highwaymen. The other cart held various glasswares, packed securely against the bumps and jarrings of the road but visible to tempt potential buyers. This one was driven by a tall, good-looking man, clearly the master glass artisan, and his equally pretty and even taller body-guard.

The gates of the castle had opened shortly after dawn to allow the regular commerce of the town to flow in. Now, two hours later, the first bustle of farmers and tradesmen had passed within; but this was a holiday, the Alean celebration of the Feast of the Golden Horn, and tomorrow was an even greater one – Höl Kopia, the great celebration of the autumnal equinox. So traffic was heavier than normal, and it was hardly surprising to see brewers and glassmen pushing their wares.

As the two merchants set up their carts in the castle’s main courtyard, two others made their way in with the crowds – a dark-haired mercenary, looking for work, and an elderly farmer with a sack of cabbages on his back. The first was directed to the barracks commander, the latter ignored after a cursory glance in the sack.

“Well, that went rather well,” the old farmer said in a surprisingly feminine voice, as he sidled up to the brewer and glassmaker’s wagons. He was fingering a small amulet hung on a cord around his wrinkled neck.

“Don’t undo the illusion just yet, Mariala,” the Khundari warned the old man, who stopped fiddling with the amulet, giving him a gap-toothed smile. “That was the easy part. Now we have to get into the castle itself.”

“We need to get to the castellan,” Devrik said, having sided-stepped the trip to the barracks. He patted the barrels on Korwin’s cart. “The beer is our best bet, since it will get the troops attention – they won’t give a rat’s ass about the glass. Once they convince the castellan he should try the beer, we’ll be able to snag his interest with the glassware, though.”

A half hour of giving out free samples of beer, the best the Abbey of Rivona could provide (which was very good indeed), did eventually bring the castellan out from the massive donjon to test its quality for himself. Despite this initial success, Korwin continued to occasionally mutter under his breath that his own Sanguinary Canary Ale, would’ve really clinched the deal.

Vulk opened his mouth to tell his friend to shut up about his damn home brew, but instead vented a sharp “oh shit!” The approaching castellan was trailed by a mercenary, either body guard or assistant, and it was someone Vulk knew all too well – his asshole cousin Tynal Elida!

Drawn by his hissed warning, the others moved to screen the cantor from his cousin’s sight as Vulk shifted to the far side of the glass cart. Most of the others had met Tynal only once before, in this very castle, and while it had been a brief encounter it had also been very intense. Fortunately Erol and Mariala were entirely unrecognizable, most of the others were variously disguised, and Tynal was probably the sort to whom all Khundari looked the same.

“This is really quite good,” the castellan, Ser Biob, agreed after quaffing from the personal cup he had handed to Korwin to fill. He didn’t offer any to Tynal, who stood slightly apart watching the goings-on with a bored indifference. “But his Grace has developed a taste for wine over beer lately… and I fear this is too good to waste on the troops. While his Grace believes in letting his men eat and drink well, this might be a bit much…”

“Ah, but you say this interest in wine is recent?” Korwin asked. As he did, Mariala, having cast Wallflower on herself, stepped closer and spoke soto voce into the man’s ear while mentally “pushing” him with all her will.

“Wouldn’t you like to surprise the Earl with such a fine brew? Might this not renew his interest in beer? Which is, after all, less expensive than those wines…”

“Of course,” Ser Biob continued, frowning slightly, “this is such a fine draft… perhaps it would reinvigorate his Grace’s interest in beer. And the Immortals know, it would help my poor budget if his Grace demanded fewer of those expensive Kadaran reds… yes, yes, I think if the right price could be negotiated… we should discuss this further.

“And some of this glassware is very fine indeed… his Grace has begun to express a true nobleman’s taste for such exquisite things in recent months. I have heard him complain about how the metal goblets affect the taste of his beverages. So yes, let us repair to a more comfortable venue to discuss prices…”

With Mariala effectively invisible to most people, and Devrik just assumed to be part of the party, the Hand was whisked past the sentries guarding the main door into the keep with only a cursory glance. Devrik helped Vulk heft one of the beer barrels, careful to keep the cantor’s head screened from his cousin’s view, while Erol made a show of the precarious load of glassware he carried, focusing everyone on the exciting prospect of sudden disaster.

Once past the guards Ser Biob led the group to a sitting room off the main corridor. It was nicely appointed, and clearly used to receive casual visitors. After setting up the glassware display and pouring the castellan another “sample,” the dickering over prices began. But this was just a cover for Korwin to cast his Drunken Hand on the poor man, increasing his blood alcohol levels far beyond what two beers could account for.

It didn’t take long for the man to become noticeably inebriated, which made him even more susceptible to Mariala’s “suggestions.” Instructing Tynal to keep on eye on the visitors, the castellan mumbled agreement with the idea that a short rest might do wonders to put his thoughts back in order, and stumbled out the door and off to his chambers.

Resisting all attempts to get him to try the beer, Tynal looked like he was becoming seriously annoyed at what he clearly thought was a waste of time… and suspicious of the odd behavior of Ser Biob. At Mariala’s urging, and against his better judgement, Korwin attempted Drunken Hand on the mercenary. When this showed no apparent effect, Mariala stepped forward and cast a spell of her own, negating her Wallflower invisibility in the process.

Even as Vulk’s cousin finally noticed her, stepping forward in alarm and reflexively half drawing his sword, the Syncope of Shala hit him like a wall of down pillows, and he collapsed bonelessly to the floor in a deep sleep. After Erol and Devrik arranged him comfortably on a couch Mariala grasped Toran’s amulet hanging from her neck and concentrated on the Tynal’s face. Her features began to flow and in a moment she was his perfect döppelganger.

“Wouldn’t the castellan be a better choice of disguise?” Korwin asked diffidently as the transformation finished.

“Maybe,” Mariala replied shortly. “But we don’t know where he is, what route he took to get there, and who might have seen him along the way. If he was then seen coming along again from a different direction – no, this is the better option.”

While she had been transforming Toran and Vulk had been opening the wine barrel and removing both the group’s larger weapons and the oil-skin-sealed device they had come to plant. Devrik stood before the small fire in the brazier in the corner of the room and attempted to locate the false Earl by means of his Fire Ears spell. But if the man was near a fire, he wasn’t speaking.

Once everyone was armed the group slipped into the hall , Tynal-Mariala leading the way. But before they could make their way to the main staircase they were stopped by two guards in the entry hall. Both were clearly retainers of the Earl, not mercenaries, and equally clearly didn’t much like Tynal.

“Hold on,” the senior guard called out. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m taking these guests up to the roof,” Tynal-Mariala replied in as close an approximation of Tynal’s voice as she could muster. “Ser Biob’s order, while he consults with his Grace.”

“Well my orders come straight from the Earl,” the guard sneered, “and he says no stanger goes beyond the main hall without his express permission. And I doubt you’ve got that, mercenary.”

“Actually,” said Erol, stepping forward and rummaging with one hand in his scrip, “if you just take a look at my balls, I think we could sort this all out in short order.”

The guard’s looks of astonishment at this bizarre suggestion quickly turned to anger, and they both moved toward the group, drawing their swords.

“Oi! What’ve you got there?” the senior guard cried out. “Let’s see your hands!”

With a smile and a muttered word Erol withdrew his hand from his scrip, revealing two small crystal spheres which he held out, close to his chest. This prevented his friends, with the exception of Mariala, from seeing the speheres, which began to glow and pulse in a rhythmic cascade of multi-colored light.

“Here now, what’s this… then… …you just… put… those…” the guard’s words tapered off into silence as he and his companion stood slack jawed, arms limp at their sides as their swords clattered to the stones, mesmerized by the bewitching sight of Asakora’s Balls of Wonder.

Mariala felt the pull of that fascination as well, but with a burst of her not inconsiderable will power she was able to wrench her gaze away. As the others crowded forward to see what was going on Erol closed his hand over the spheres and slipped them back into his pouch.

“That was… very impressive,” Mariala said, looking at Erol with suddenly narrowed eyes. For someone who’d barely believed in the power of the T’ara a few months ago, this was actually amazing…

“What happened? What did he do” Vulk asked, standing in front of the mesmerized guards, who continued to stare blankly ahead.

“No time to explain, the effect will wear off in about a minute,” Erol replied, bending to pick up the fallen weapons. He quickly slipped them back into the sheaths the men wore, and motioned to the stairs. “They won’t remember anything of the last few minutes, so they won’t be raising the alarm. Assuming we’re not standing here when they come out of the trance, of course.”

They all moved with alacrity then, and were up the wide central staircase well before the two befuddled men began to come to their senses. Mariala lingered near the top of the stairs to make sure they really wouldn’t be sounding an alarm.

“Um, Stahn, why are we, um standing in the middle of the hall,” the junior man asked, sounding confused but not sleepy or drugged.

“I… I have no idea, Holivar,” the senior man replied, equally confused. “And… why is my sword in your sheath?”

Mariala grinned as the sounds of the two confused men receded, returning to their proper ground floor post. Confused, to be sure, but apparently with no memory of seeing and confronting the Hand. A neat trick, she thought, as she hurried to catch up with the others.

Unfortunately, there was no time for another neat trick with the second set of guards. Watching over the main hallway on the first floor they were instantly suspicious, seeing a group of strangers without a native guide. Calling out an order to halt, they drew their weapons and advanced.

But once again Erol leapt into action first – with blinding speed he drew his own sword, and in less than two heartbeats both mercenary guards were down, dying in pools of their own blood. Devrik and Korwin reshathed their own blades, muttering something unintelligable, but Toran, hefting his battle axe, was completely audible as they all stalked past the bodies toward the next set of stairs.

“Show off!”

On the second floor, the stairs opened into a large vestibule where two more men stood watch outside a pair of closed doors. Despite the speed with which Erol had taken out the guards below, something had alerted these two, and they already had weapons drawn as the Hand confronted them. And since Erol still had his sword in hand, blood dripping from it, there could be little doubt about the nature and business of these strangers…

With a yell the first guard leapt at Erol, going for a killing thrust. But the former gladiator brushed the stroke aside with his own blade, and with his free hand punched his opponent in the throat. With a strangled wheeze the man collapsed to the floor. As he struggled for air through a crushed larynx his companion moved in quickly to his own attack.

Erol was again able to parry, but his counterstrike failed to connect, and the guard danced back. Toran rushed forward from his left and slashed the man across the gut with his axe, rending the leather armor and sending a spray of blood arcing to the far wall. The mercenary staggered, but didn’t fall, his face a rictus of pain and rage, his sword arm steady.

Now Devrik moved in from the other side of Erol, and feinted at the snarling man, then moved in with a lightening backhand slash. The guard tried to counterstrike, but his blade skittered along Devrik’s larger one, which bit heavily into his side.

Again, the man staggered back, but refused to fall. Instead, he lunged forward at Erol, a sudden twisting thrust that almost slipped past his block. Erol’s counter thrust hamstrung the mercenary, who finally fell to one knee. To everyones’ amazment the man lifted his sword for another attack, struggling to stand, but before he could follow through Erol kicked him in the head, and he collapsed at last.

There was no time to admire the man’s stamina and courage, however – this fight had certainly alerted whoever awaited them on the next floor, and they couldn’t give them any more time to prepare. The fighters turned as one and made for the stairs, Mariala and Vulk close behind.

But Korwin had been ahead of them. Realizing that they were losing the element of surprise, he had jumped over the first fallen guard and made for the stairs before the second guard had launched his attack. Summoning the Frostblade, he kicked open the door to the large room directly beneath the roof.

The lone guard stationed there had been about to open it himself, and he staggered back as Korwin barreled through. But he was an experienced mercenary, alerted to trouble from the muffled sounds coming from below, and with his sword already in hand. Recovering almost instantly, he lunged forward in a savage attack.

Korwin, blood pumping and adrenaline flowing, ducked under his enemy’s blow and counter-struck with the silvery blade of ice covering his hand. Moving almost faster than the eye could follow, the freezing blade slid between the mercenary’s ribs and pierced his heart. With a look of utter surprise, mirrored on Korwin’s face, the man stopped cold, then slowly collapsed to the floor.

A moment later Devrik led the charge into the room, Erol and Toran on his heels, to find the water mage standing over his fallen foe wondering how you wiped blood off a blade of ethereal ice. He looked up and smiled blandly at the surprised looks on his friends’ faces.

“I killed him before he could raise the alarm,” he said casually, gesturing toward the ceiling. “I don’t think the ones up there are any the wiser yet.”

“Um, yes, well… um, well done Korwin,” Devrik rumbled. He exchanged a glance with Erol and Toran, who shrugged. Mariala pushed past them, Vulk behind her, and with barely a glance at the dead mercenary began to formulate a plan to take the roof without alerting the rest of the garrison.

“Time is short,” she said impatiently when Korwin tried to impress her with the tale of his brief fight. “We’ve left a trail of bodies behind us, and the alarm could be raised at any moment. We have a job to do, but I’d rather it not turn into a suicide mission, so…”

“Her Ladyship is right,” Devrik agreed with a sardonic smirk, making Mariala blush. But he quickly turned serious. “We don’t have much time, so let’s get those last guards down here somehow, and get on with our job.”

A brief debate on how best to do this ensued. Eventually Mariala, again wearing the form of Tynal Elida, climbed up the ladder and pushed open the hatch in the ceiling. As she/he stepped up onto the creaking boards of the roof the men posted at the four corners turned toward her. Seeing their sub-commander, they obediently came over at her gesture.

“The Earl has decided we all deserve a little something to celebrate the Feast Day, boys,” she said in her half-assed Tynal voice, hoping the wind blowing around them would cover any auditory sins. “He’s sent up a keg of decent ale and a haunch of venison. I’ll cover the watch while you enjoy a quaff, boys, but don’t be too long at it, right?”

The bored and wind-blown mercenaries needed no more encouragement than that, and one by one, they slid down the ladder into the room below… and onto the waiting blades of Devrik, Erol, Vulk and Korwin. Toran stood by as back-up, in case they found another Rasputin, but the unwary soldiers died quickly and quietly.

Once the bloody work was done the Khundari pulled the oil cloth-wrapped metal sphere from his pack, unwrapped it and handed it up the ladder to Mariala. She in turn set it on its stumpy legs halfway between the trap door and the front parapet overlooking the main courtyard. Quickly pressing the sequence of colored crystal buttons she’d memorized, she stepped back.

The large clear crystal set in the top of the sphere began to glow, and suddenly an enormous, full color image of Queen Miralda sprang into being, towering a hundred feet over the castle. It was hard to tell from her truncated angle, but Mariala thought it looked very lifelike, despite a slight translucency. Then the image began to speak, in a voice loud and commanding, but not deafening.

Psionics, Mariala thought to herself as she scrambled back down the ladder. Everyone in range would hear the message as if spoken directly to them. Very clever… she suspected the hand of Master Vetaris in this…

As the gigantic image of the queen began her explanation of the strange treason of the false Earl, the true Earl’s murder at the hands of an evil sorcerer who then took possession of his body, and her appeal for her loyal subjects to overthrow the usurper, the Hand began a hasty retreat. To stop anyone from gaining entry to the rooftop for the few critical minutes needed for the message to finish at least one loop, Toran magically sealed the door behind them, and after they had passed down the stairs Korwin cast Webs of Lakira, blocking the way with a tangle of sticky strands.

“If anyone thinks of it, a torch will make short work of them,” he said to Toran as they hurried to catch up to the others. “But if it slows them down even a few minutes…”

“Yes,” the Khundari agreed, smiling grimly. “And then they’ll have to deal with the door – and it’ll take more than a torch to get through that! Now let’s just hope we live to brag about all this, eh?”

For a few minutes it seemed that they might just do that, and without further trouble – racing down staircase after staircase, they could hear sounds of confusion and consternation behind closed doors, but met no one in the hallways. The queen’s voice echoed throughout the castle, always at the same volume even as they moved away from the nominal source.

Their luck, however, seemed to run out as they hit the long hallway on the first floor. As they came off the stairs the large double doors that led to the gallery overlooking the dining hall on the ground floor swung open, an anxious servant bowing as an enraged Lord Sedris stalked through, bellowing in rage.

“What in the name of all the demons of the Void is going on –” he stopped in mid-bellow and mid-stride, almost causing the two men-at-arms following in his wake to crash into him.

“You!” he hissed as he took in the Hand, stopped dead in their own tracks. “I might have know the bitch would send you! What does she think –”

This promising monologue was cut short as Erol rushed to the attack, only to have the false Earl easily block the blow with a sword that hadn’t been in his hand an instant before. A backhanded blow with his other hand caught Erol upside the head, and he dropped, stunned, to floor.

As his guards moved up to flank the Earl, and the servant ran shrieking back into the gallery, Mariala let loose a blast of Fire Nerves. A gesture from the mage inside the possessed body dissipated the energy harmlessly, however. Unfortunately, at least for his minions, he could not simultaneously block the Orb of Vorol that Devrik hurled at almost the same instant.

While the searing blast of the fireball seemed to have no effect on the putative nobleman, beyond singing his ermine robe, his two henchmen died screaming in flames. “Sedris” hardly seemed to notice.

“I believe this is almost exactly where we met last time,” he sneered at them, stalking slowly forward. “When you so rudely made off with my “wife” and our future queen. You got lucky that time, but your luck has run out, you miserable vermin!”

He gestured and a blast of hurricane force wind knocked everyone back, momentarily stunning them. Everyone but Erol, who was now behind the Earl and climbing to his feet. He moved to attack their foe from behind, but “Sedris” moved with preternatural speed, his dagger out and slashing at Erol’s throat. Telnori reflexes saved him from a killing stroke, but Erol staggered back, hand clutched to his neck, red seeping through his fingers as he sank to his knees.

The distraction was enough, however, for Toran to move in close to the false Earl, his axe blade whirling before him. As the man was forced back, his sword parrying the flurry of blows, the handsome face he wore twisted into a strange combination of rage and excitement.

“When I bring your heads to m’Lord Chaos,” he snarled, turning his retreat into a brisk counter attack, “he will be so pleased – he has long desired to collect the whole set! A pity that demon got your gladiator friend, though.”

Vulk took the opening to rush in and pull Erol aside, pouring half a vial of Baylorium into his injured friend’s mouth and the other half over the wound on his neck. Almost instantly the bleeding stopped, and in a matter of seconds the edges of the cut began to draw together.

When he was certain Erol would recover, the cantor turned back to the battle, a determined light in his eyes. As Devrik and Toran pressed the impostor nobleman with a coordinated attack from two sides, Vulk focused intently and murmured a ritual prayer he had never used before, calling down the Curse of the Lady of Luck on their enemy.

“Lord Sedris” continued to parry the blows of Devrik and Toran with apparent ease, and began forcing them back. As his sword wove a blinding pattern in the air, clashing again and again against axe and battlesword, he gestured with his left hand and began an invocation.

Before whatever spell he sought to cast could be completed, though, he staggered under the sudden pain of a second, more successful, Fire Nerve blast from Mariala. In obvious pain, though not taken down, he struggled to contain the power he had been summoning. Whether due to the Fire Nerves or the Curse, or some combination of the two, his spell misfired – he was hurled backward into the gallery, slamming with tremendous force against the balustrade overlooking the room below.

Even then he was not out of the fight. Although shaken, he surged back to his feet as Devrik and Toran rushed to re-engage, using the sudden space to begin another spell. But the Hand was destined to never know what devastating arcane attack he might have unleashed on them – Korwin’s blast of razor sharp Ice Needles took the false Earl full in the chest.

The expression of rage and determination on his stolen face turned to one of surprised disbelief as the faux Earl looked down at the flowers of red blooming across the fine material of his tunic… and was still wearing the expression when Devrik’s battlesword separated his head from his body.

The fountain of blood from the severed neck obliterated the small red stains on the tunic as the impostor’s body toppled sideways. Toran made a left-handed catch, grabbing the now truly dead Earl’s head by its shoulder-length hair before it could hit the floor as well.

“Not the first man to lose his head over you, my friend,” he said grinning, as he handed the trophy to Devrik. “But the first Earl, I imagine.”

Devrik actually laughed as he took the head and held it up. That last expression of surprise, forever locked on the handsome face, seemed just right…

“Admire your prize latter,” Mariala called out as she helped Erol to his feet. “We’ve still got to make it to the Portal chamber, and there’s a great many of the dead man’s mercenaries still running around!”

Tearing a wide strip from the dead Earl’s body, Devrik wrapped the still dripping head in it and stuffed it into his pack. Then they all made a dash for the stairs.

Unfortunately, they were just a moment too late – half a dozen armed mercenaries burst through the doors from the courtyard just as the Hand reached the main entry hall, blocking them from the guardroom and the stairs down to the Portal chamber, and escape.

“Damn,” Devrik muttered. “So close!” As the angry mob of men rushed forward he gestured and a stream of multi-colored fiery ribbons arced out to meet them. But these were battle-tested veterans, and not easily cowed by magic – jinking and dodging, they managed to avoid anything worse than a light singing.

Which may have been some small satisfaction to the lead merc in the last seconds of his life. His attack on Devrik was effortlessly deflected and countered, and the great battlesword took the man in the gut. Using a boot to shove the man off his blade, Devrik whirled to meet the next man…

Mariala found herself facing her own large, angry man, with only her Khundari dagger in hand. She staggered back under his attack, blocking the main force of his blow, but taking a nasty cut to her arm. Fortunately Erol was there, driving the man back and away from her. In the breathing room this gave her, Mariala attempted to focus on casting Fire Nerves…

But pain and fear are not the most conducive states for wielding magic, and she suffered her own misfire, the energies she attempted to cast instead wracking her own body with intense pain. She collapsed to the floor in burning agony.

Meanwhile, the confused melee surged across the wide entry hall as more mercenaries rushed in from the guard room that was the Hand’s goal. Devrik,  Vulk and Erol parried and thrust, while Toran attempted more than once to cast one of his seldom-used combat spells.

Korwin, preparing to cast a spell of his own, noted the Khundari’s futile efforts out of the corner of his eye, and snickered to himself that the dwarf would be more effective if he just waved his arms about. But when his own Sheet of Sleet spell failed to materialize, he decided it might be prudent to keep his observation to himself…

Devrik had taken out another mercenary, giving himself enough time to summon up an Orb of Vorol. The fireball took out two more soldiers, while Toran, having given up on combat magic for the moment, amputated the leg of a third with a single blow from his axe, and in the follow-through took down a fourth.

“Eyes!” Erol called out, as he threw one of his glass spheres into the air. His compatriots closed their eyes, but the remaining mercenaries’ gazes were drawn to him. Handor’s Flash went off, blinding the three fighters who were looking directly at the sphere.

At the same time Korwin finally succeeded in casting his spell, and a sheet of ice covered the stairs down to, and large portion of, the main courtyard, rendering the Hand temporarily safe from further reinforcements. With only three blind mercenaries standing between them and freedom, one would think the Hand were home-free.

It was not the Hand’s finest hour.

One of the blind fighters managed to wound Devrik, who failed to return the favor. While Vulk managed to avoid actual injury, he also failed to land a single blow on his own blind opponent. Erol  did manage to eventually land a blow on the third blind merc, only to be brought down himself by another stunning blow to the head in the process.

It was Mariala who finally ended the absurd dance, having recovered enough to center herself, focus, and again attempt Fire Nerves. This time the spell worked as expected, and the three blind men dropped in writhing agony. Toran gave each of them a precise thump on the head to make sure they stayed down.

With the way to the dungeons finally clear, the Hand gathered themselves for the last dash to freedom. Racing down the narrow stairs, Devrik dispatched the two guards outside the Portal chamber with impatient efficency, while Erol kicked in the door.

The two guards inside the room had their weapons out, crouched in a fighting stance, when Devrik strode through the doorway, the late Earl’s head swinging by its hair in one hand, his immense battlesword dripping red in the other.

“We’ve had a tough day,” he roared in his most nerve-grating voice. “But your false Earl has had a worse one. I suggest you decide quickly what kind of day you want to have.”

Very quickly the two men decided they would opt for a better day than their ex-boss, and threw down their weapons. As Erol and Toran shoved them out of the room and slammed the door on them, Vulk was at the carved arch on the far side of the room, summoning up the Nitaran portal that would, hopefully, take them to the safety of Kar Landsar.

One by one his friends stepped through and vanished, until only Vulk was left. Then he stepped through…

Glad to have some expert advice from the Star Council, if somewhat uncertain about their new associate’s actual field experience, Vulk led Tarbol Arbitar to where Farendol lay, expalining how the Telnori had come to be killed and resurrected.

“I think he may be in some sort of healing trance,” the Kasiran cantor concluded. “I was working in the middle of a combat crisis, his injuries were significant, and the fight interrupted my treatment… it’s possible there remains some internal damage to his heart or lungs.”

Tarbol nodded and pursed his lips judiciously. “I’m sure you did the best you could, given your skills. Of course we in the Order of the Vigilant Shepherd are more well versed in combat healing than most others.”

Before Vulk could formulate a response to that, beyond raised eyebrows, the Alean cantor went on.

“Before I begin my examination, let me say a few words to you all on the virtues of healing through the great goddess Alea.”

He then launched into a half-hour sermon that left his audience variously glazed, dazed and/or annoyed. Just when Mariala thought she could bear no more, and was wondering if she could Fire Nerve him without revealing herself as the source of his sudden agony (and would it still be a sin if he didn’t know?), he wrapped it up and knelt down next to Farendol’s body.

He then made a great show of examining “his patient,” as he kept referring to the Druid. After several minutes he rose and turned to once again address the dubiously watching group.

“I’m fairly certain that what we have here is a Telnori healing trance,” he pronounced in a lecturing tone, “no doubt due to some missed tissue damage near the heart. Or perhaps the lungs.”

Vulk and Mariala exchanged incredulous glances… wasn’t that what Vulk had said just prior to the sermon?

“My recommendation,” he went on, standing up and adjusting his tunic, “is that he be moved somewhere safe, cool and quiet, where he will no doubt awaken in his own good time. The Telnori are a resilient folk, after all.”

After a moment of disbelieving silence, Vulk just shook his head and thanked the man for his opinion… and didn’t particularly try to muffle his added “twit!” as he turned away. It was obvious the fellow was too young and too inexperienced, and all-in-all an unlikely agent of the Star Council.

As the others prepared to break camp Mariala and Vulk further questioned Tarbol, but he certainly knew about the message to Master Vetaris, and details of the Star Council that indicated a close connection to that very secret organization. When pressed for why he didn’t have a Star Council signet ring, he was forced to admit that this was his first “away mission,” and there just hadn’t been time to issue him a ring, given the matter’s urgency.

“But my great-uncle Kiril is greatly concerned about the Hand’s penchant for releasing demons,” the young man huffed, getting a bit defensive as he finally sensed the tone of the questioning. “He felt that with my training in demonology and possession – my Order, the Vigilant Shepherd, specializes in these things – I would be the right choice to guide you through these perilous waters!”

Dropping the name of Master Vetaris as a relative, along with his other admittedly difficult-to-refute proofs, eventually forced the pair to accept Tarbol as a true representative of the Council, or at least of Master Vetaris, however unlikely that seemed.

“Vetaris must really be angry with us,” Mariala muttered to Vulk as they turned away, “to saddle us with this nitwit.”

Vulk could only agree.

♦ ♦ ♦

They had their camp struck in short order, despite Tarbol’s stumbling about trying, and failing, to stay out of the way. At one point he exclaimed over the dubious wisdom of the Hand in bringing a child along on such a perilous quest, before realizing that Toran was a grown-assed Khundari.

“How many children does he know with full beards?” the dwarf growled to Devrik as he stalked away to check the straps of the travois one more time.

After some debate as to where they should go, it was decided that they should head for Dor Dür and Draik’s expertise (and supply of Baylorium). As far as they knew it still held out as one of the frontline fortresses of the war against Tharkia and the rebel/impostor Earl of Yorma. Also, Devrik’s wife and child were there, at Raven’s insistence, as she disliked the “big city” when her husband was absent.

Tarbol offered to summon the Gate, but the group hastily assured him that it would be unnecessary, thanks very much. Instead Devrik called up the Sight and the energies to open the Nitaran Gate, and two-by-two the Hand of Fortune (and guests) stepped through the invisible portal –

– into sudden darkness and a humid heat that hit them like a solid wall. The mules brayed plaintively in surprised discomfort, and in seconds everyone was soaked in sweat. Devrik, bringing up the rear, groaned in dismay and muttered “Oh, not again!”

It took a few minutes for their eyes to adjust and for the group to realize they were not in total darkness. They were, in fact, outside under a night sky that blazed with stars. They seemed to be on a wide shelf of relatively flat land that dropped sharply away in front of them, while the dark shape of a mountain loomed up behind them. A slight breeze did nothing to relieve the heat, but did carry a plethora of scents, from the perfume of mysterious flowers to the stink of fetid plant life, and the susurration of rustling leaves. The scream of some unknown animal in the dark below them broke the silence and made the mules start in fear.

Just at the moment that both Mariala and Korwin realized that they couldn’t recognize a single constellation in the sky, moonlight broke over the shoulder of the mountain behind them and they breathed a sigh of relief – it was the blue light of Aranda, the Greater Moon, and it was just past full, as it should be.

”Well, at least we haven’t traveled to another world,”Mariala sighed after pointing out the arrangement of the sky to the others.

”Or another time,” Korwin added, morosely. “Probably.”

The silver-blue moonlight revealed the valley below them to be covered in a thick jungle of broad-leafed trees in a variety of species, none of which any of the Hand had ever seen before. Across from them tall peaks rose up, and stretched away to either side, enclosing a bowl perhaps five kilometers wide by 15 kilometers long. To their right, which must be north, the silvery plumes of three tall waterfalls could be seen plunging from a mountain cliff into the darkness, and occasional glints of silver showed where a river must wind through the valley.

“Ok, this is really beautiful,” Vulk said after a minute. “But I think we’d better try again, yes?” He looked at Devrik with a raised eyebrow.

“Opening these damn Gates takes it out you, you know that,” he grumbled. “I don’t think I could do it again right now, but you’re welcome to try.”

So Vulk began his own ritual to Kasira, summoning up the Second Sight which allowed him to perceive the otherwise imperceptible warping of space-time that marked a Nitaran Gate. He found nothing.

“Um, there doesn’t seem to be a Gate here,” he said, reluctantly, after several minutes. “This could be a problem.”

Devrik frowned and despite his exhaustion summoned up enough energy to renew his own Second Sight… he too could find no hint of a Gate.

At that point Vulk called up Kasira’s Holy Light, bestowing it on his companions, allowing them all to see without risking a more mundane light source that would announce their presence to any watching eyes. As they began discussing what to do next Toran pointed out a surprisingly wide path that seemed to lead from their plateau down into the jungle.

“If you can’t open a Gate,” he said to Vulk and Devrik, ignoring Tarbol’s assertion that he was sure he could open one, “then I guess going down is our only real option.”

This led to some debate, and Mariala drew out her deck of cards. She laid seven cards out on the ground before her as the others watched quietly. Frowning in concentration, slipping into the oracular trance, she examined the cards, touching each in turn. After a few minutes she seemed to come up from some great depth, swaying for a moment before gathering up the cards.

“I see some danger ahead, to be sure, but opportunity as well. It’s not clear to me if the two are one and the same, or two possible paths. But what is unmistakably clear is that going back is not an option – that way is blocked… as if by a mountain.” She smiled, looking up at the massive wall of stone looming behind them.

“We must’ve been shunted to a Gate that is one-way only,” Devrik concluded. “They are rare, but hardly unheard of. We’ll just have to hope that we can find another, normal one somewhere nearby.”

“But where are we?” Tarbol suddenly wailed, breaking his long, and blessed, silence.

“Given that I do not recognize any of these stars, somewhere in the southern hemisphere, I should think,” Korwin replied diffidently. “And on the other side of the world, too… by the moon I’d estimate it’s not much before midnight here, so… say, 10 or 12 hours ahead, or behind, of where we were?”

Tarbol’s eyes grew wide, but he didn’t say anything else.

It was decided that they wouldn’t risk taking the mules down the trail in the dark, given the need to leave Farendol slung between them — the trail might be deceptively wide here at the clearing, but become narrower or more treacherous further along. The group set about making camp for the night.

Tarbol, being new and in any case not having any gear aside from his medical satchel, was left standing near “his patient,” whining quietly to himself, “But I don’t want to sleep outside!”

Mariala and Vulk had the first watch, and they spoke quietly to one another after the others had settle down to try and sleep.

“I wish I had an explanation for that idiot,” Vulk groused. “He seems so ill-suited to this, yet he knows too much to be an impostor.”

“Korwin had a disturbing idea,” Mariala replied. “ He thinks that Master Vetaris had the Nitaran pattern for this one-way gate subconsciously planted in Tarbol’s mind, to be triggered when we tried to travel anywhere.”

“What?! Why does he think Vetaris would do that?”

“To exile us where we could free no more demons, of course. And he gets rid of an embarrassing, dimwitted relative to boot, I imagine.”

“That’s a depressingly plausible scenario, actully,” Vulk said after a moment of horrified thought, and shuddered.

They were quiet for the rest of their watch, each lost in contemplation of other possible expressions of wrath the Star Council might be capable of.

Tarbol was left out of the watch rotation, of course, an insult which he completely failed to notice.

♦ ♦ ♦

When the sky was brightening in the morning, though the sun itself remained hidden behind the mountain, the Hand broke camp and headed down the path into the mysterious jungle below, now alive with the songs of exotic birds and the howls, chirps and calls of who-knew-what other sorts of creatures.

No one had slept well, except Tarbol, having gone to bed at what their bodies thought to be early evening. Despite their exhaustion from the last five days, it was only shortly before the creeping dawn that most of them had really begun to sleep… so it was a grumpy bunch that man-handled the mules and their precious cargo down the mountain. Tarbol proved to be surprisingly good at the task, Toran noted. The mules seemed to like him.

In the clear morning light they had spied smoke rising from what looked to be a smallish settlement on the banks of the river to the south, near the center of the valley, and the trail seemed to head in that direction. It took two hot, sticky hours, but they eventually came out from the canopy of the jungle into a wide clearing. Crops were planted there, and on the far side of the river a bend in the flow partially enclosed a small village of maybe 30 huts of wood, wicker and thatch, raised 1-2 meters above the ground. A wooden palisade formed an arc from bank to bank, guarding the landward approaches, although its gates stood open to the warm morning breezes. As the group approached no one seemed alarmed, or even terribly surprised, to see such strange travelers.

And they were strange, in comparison to the local people. These were shorter, on average, with medium to dark brown skin and thick black hair, which seemed to run from straight to wavy. Most of them seemed to possess brown or black eyes, although Devrik noted a few startlingly green eyes, and they all had a very slight epicanthic fold. They were dressed in simple, lightweight clothes in blues, grays and browns, with sandals on their feet, and both men and women wore conical hats of some woven fibre. The children went naked and seemed excited rather than frightened by the strangers.

As they arrived at the gate a party of older men and women gathered to greet them. Unfortunately, the language was completely foreign to the Ysgarethi travelers. The outpouring of melodious, almost liquid, sounds was beautiful to their ears, but utterly incomprehsible. After a few attempts at mutual communication, a particularly old man shuffled forward and began to speak in halting, heavily accented, very broken Yashparic.

Fortunately Vulk had begun chanting the Ritual of Tongues as soon as he’d recognized the language barrier, and he soon felt the strange pressure in his head that indicated the sudden presence of new knowledge as Kasira imparted to him a basic knowledge of the local language. He knew he’d only retain about half of what he now knew when the ritual ended, but for the duration he could speak moderately fluent… Varui, he realized the language was called.

Between the old man’s broken Yashparic and Vulk’s newly acquired Varui, the group was soon able to learn that they were in the Valley of the Golden Orchid, on the island of Kensuai, in the nation of Couri. Which meant absolutely nothing to any of them, no one having ever heard of any of them.

Vulk tried to explain where they had come from in terms the obvious peasant might understand, but the old man, whose name was Usolu, interrupted his increasingly byzantine tale with a gesture toward the eastern mountains.

“Yes, yes, m’sahiri, you came through the Mountain Gate, of course. It delivers strange visitors several times each year, although it cannot take them away again.”

Excited that the man seemed to a least grasp the nature of Gate travel, Vulk asked if there was another such Gate anywhere nearby, or indeed anywhere on the island. The old man looked down at his feet and emphatically shook his head. There were no other gates anywhere that the villagers knew of. No matter how he phrased the question Vulk could get no other answer, and had to conclude that there really was no other Gate, at least not nearby.

“But if other visitors come through here, they must leave your valley somehow, yes?” Vulk took a different tack. “This is an island, there must be a port…?”

Usolu looked up then and smiled, agreeing eagerly that there must. It was the great city of Tegari-hon, which lay on the coast seven days journey south of the valley. How great a city? Oh very great, perhaps as many as one thousand people lived there, or so rumor said. Usolu himself was dubious that so many could live all in one place, but his grandson had been there once, and he was an honest boy, so perhaps it was true. Although of course the young do tend to exaggerate…

In response to further queries he agreed that, yes, ships came to Tegari-hon, very frequently. How frequently? Oh, perhaps as many as once a month or so, mostly from the great islands of Vavau, Yaro and Tongari… but occasionally they came from as far away as Orkora and even semi-legendary Shoidan in the north. Although, this is the beginning of the rainy season… traders may be more sporadic for the next three months or so…

This news was rather disheartening, and Devrik was the least pleased among the group when Vulk relayed it. “I’ll be void-cursed if I’m going to take six months or a year to make my way home to Raven and Aldari!” he growled furiously. His words might have been unintelligible to the crowd, but his mien, and the grating tenor of his damaged voice, caused more than a few of them step back.

“Well, there has to be Nitaran Gates somewhere in the region, statistically speaking,” Mariala pointed out calmly. “No doubt a larger town or city will point us in the right direction. It’s unlikely well have to take the long route all the way home, Devrik.  He grudgingly acknowledged her logic, but remained unhappy.

When it became clear to the villagers that the strangers understood the need to travel to the coast, they became quite eager to help them on their way, smiling and encouraging them to get started right away. Yes, this very day, m’sahiri, no point in lingering, the rains could start at any time, making the journey twice as long! They offered to trade them local foodstuffs for what seemed criminally low prices, not even haggling. But perhaps that was the way of things in this part of the world… who knew?

As the others were pantomiming the exchange of goods and beginning to pack the food for the trip, Vulk and Tarbol brought Farendol to the village shaman, a bent old crone who walked with the aid of a beautiful ebony staff, to get, as Vulk put it, “a second opinion.” The insult flew straight over Tarbol’s head he noted in exasperation.

A crowd of villagers gathered to watch the old woman carry out her examination of the comatose man. As she peered, prodded and shook a few carved and feathered objects over him, Tarbol took the opportunity to give a sermon to the locals, apparently unconcerned that they couldn’t understand a single word he said. And since they couldn’t, Vulk didn’t object – at least it kept the little git occupied.

The old woman eventually finished her exam and stood, shrugging. She fired off a rapid string of words at Vulk before turning to mount the stairs into her hut. His grasp of the language was beginning to fade a bit, but he thought he understood her to have said there was “no help for that one,” an odd way to phrase it, if he was still grasping the subtleties of the tongue. But, Tarbol’s absurd diagnosis not withstanding, it was about what he’d expected.

Nonetheless, he was grateful for her attempt and called out to her before she disappeared into her home. She turned and he pulled a silver ring from his finger and handed it up to her. She took it with a nod and another shrug, then vanished within. Vulk returned with his charge, and Tarbol (sermon cut short), to the others.

There he tried one more time to ask Usolu if there was any rumor, a hint even, of another Gate somewhere on the island, and the old man was emphatically denying it when he went suddenly quiet, his eyes growing wide before lowering to stare at the dirt near his feet. The whole village had gone quiet and the group turned to find another old man, even more wrinkled and wizened than Usolu, walking through the gates.

“Nonsense, m’sahiru, m’sahara,” he said in excellent Yashparic, strangely accented but pleasantly melodious. “These are mere peasants, and too superstitious and fearful about things they do not fully understand.”

They hadn’t seemed particularly fearful to Vulk, quite the opposite, actually…

The man was noticeably taller than most of the villagers, if still shorter than Vulk, and he was dressed in more colorful clothes of a clearly superior cut, decorated with fanciful stitching. A wide sash of white silk belted his saffron silk tunic, and the feet below his red linen trousers were clad in leather half-boots. He wore a white head wrapping of some sort and carried an intricately carved staff of a beautiful dark red tropical hardwood. He stopped before the group, smiling warmly at them all, then eyeing the villagers behind them more cooly.

“One must forgive them, m’sahiri,” he said, addressing Vulk. “By their own uneducated lights these ones were simply trying to protect you, believing the long overland trail to the coast would be safer for you than to vanish into nothingness, as they think of it. This one is afraid that such as these have no concept of such travel.

“But there is, in fact, another Gothaka-zhuhan, a – how do you say it? A Nitaran Gate – in this valley. This one’s Master, the Learned Thuron Yan, has built his home near it, so that he may study it. This also affords him the grace to meet and provide respite and safe haven to m’sahiru, noble travelers, such as yourselves, waylaid by the so-infamous Mountain Gate.”

By the time he finished speaking almost all of the villagers had disappeared, either back to the fields or into their homes. A few of the elders remained to watch the interchange, but from a distance. Only Usolu remained with the group, continuing to stare at his feet and saying nothing.

“This one has the honor to be the Learned’s… hmmm, major domo in your tongue? This one is known as Olbu,” the newcomer continued. “Might this one be graced with such knowledge of the honored m’sahiru as may seem good to them to share?”

After a quick glance at the others, Vulk introduced himself and the party, skipping the fact of Farendol’s Telnori identity, saying only that he was a sick friend. Olbu expressed concern over the welfare of one who was so obviously dear to them, and immediately proposed they accompany him home.

“My Master is currently away on one of his journeys, but he is expected back in only a day or two… it is his custom to invite all travelers arriving via the Mountain Gate to partake of the comforts of his villa, modest as they may seem to such obviously noble folk as yourselves. He would be most upset were this one not to extend that invitation in his name.”

“We are honored by your invitation, good Olbu,” Vulk replied smoothly, slipping into Herald Mode, “and would love nothing more than to meet the Learned Thuron Yan. But out friend needs special medical care, and his urgent need requires us to decline your gracious offer… if you could but direct us to the Gate you spoke of, we would be eternally in your debt.”

An expression of such abject sorrow fell across the wrinkled visage of the old major domo, that for a moment Vulk suspected parody. But the man bowed deeply in regret, and his words seemed sincere. The herald reminded himself that cultural cues could be hard to judge accurately.

“It saddens this one, m’sahiri, that he is unable to do as you so graciously and reasonably request, for the precise location of the Valley Gate is not within this one’s knowledge. And even if it were, it saddens this one further to report that the Valley Gate is of a periodic nature, opening and closing, he is given to understand, in a cycle that even the Master has not yet fully fathomed, in twenty years of study.

“But the Learned Thuron Yan is a master of many arts, not the least of which are those of healing. It may be that he can provide the succor you desire for your friend when he returns. And the Valley Gate is seldom closed for more than a tenday.”

It was hard to argue that Farendol would be more comfortable in either this poor village or bouncing along between two mules for seven days or more, rather than in the no-doubt-luxurious villa of a wealthy and apparently noble scholar. Both Mariala and Vulk had surreptitiously used their arcane abilities to sense emotions and truth, and neither had discovered anything overtly suspicious. Olbu seemed to be just what he seemed, and his offer a legitimate one.

While taking leave of Usolu and the others, thanking them for their assistance, some of the Hand noticed that the villagers refused to meet their eyes… and no one looked directly at their new guide. But they were peasants, after all, and no doubt intimidated by the chief servant of the local lord – not an unusual occurrence even in Ysgareth, to be sure. They shrugged the matter off.

The journey to Halani-var, as the Learned Thuron Yan’s villa was called, took a little over an hour, on a road somewhat better than the one they had followed down the mountainside. The jungle rose thick and tangled on either side, arching over into a canopy of green through which the late morning sunlight flickered mysteriously. The sounds and smells of this fetid and fecund world seemed very alien to the companions, and the humidity sapped their strength unmercifully — they were all overdressed, and shed as much of their attire as they reasonably could.

It was a relief to leave the sweltering hot-house of the forest for the large hilltop clearing wherein sat Halani-var, and a mildly cooling breeze. The villa itself was a large, single-story complex of pale yellow stone and dark, almost black, beams of rough-hewn tropical hardwood. A roof of dark red tiles curved up into a maze of peaks and gables, with ridge-lines of the dark wood carved into the shapes of snakes and fantastic birds with dragon heads at the ends. Directly under the deep eaves long, narrow, glassless  windows let in air and light via beautiful grillwork of black iron, intricately wrought in the shapes of twisting vines, leaves and flowers.

Wide, shallow steps of the yellow stone led up to a long porch at the front, where two tall bronze doors stood closed. They were etched in deep bas relief, showing various scenes of people, animals and plants apparently acting out stories of religious, mythological or historical import… none of which any of the Hand remotely recognized.

But it was not to these doors that Olbu led the group. Instead, he directed them along a track that turned left and then curved around the building to the north. There they found a small stable and some storehouses jutting out from the main edifice, where Olbu saw to the comfort of the mules.

“This one apologizes for making honored guests wait on such mundanities,” the old man said as he quickly and efficiently went about his task. “But the Master retains no staff beyond this one’s humble self, in the general course of things.”

At their expressions of surprise, he elaborated.

“There were originally several other servants, when the villa was first built. But the Master is both particular in his habits, and modest in his needs… he eventually found the presence of so many k’hiniru, unenlightened ones, more bothersome than helpful. One by one he dismissed them, until only this one remained, who has been with him since youth. Now we simply hire from the village if more hands are needed… perhaps once or twice a year, no more.

“Your own servant,” he indicated the barbarian Therok (the broad brush strokes of the red-painted “55” on his chest were finally beginning to fade), “may make his bed here in the stables, there is a loft for just such purpose there, above the stalls.”

Once the mules were fed and watered and the saddle bags distributed Olbu lead the group into the villa by a small door between the stable and the jakes. With their “servant” and Devrik carrying the stretcher on which lay the still form of Farendol, he showed them to two long, narrow interior rooms just a few paces away.

Both rooms, which formed an “L” but shared no connecting door, appeared to be dormitories, with multiple beds in each, as well as large communal tables, low, stool-like chairs of bamboo and wicker, and slim, elegant armoires. Silk wall hangings  were the only decorations, but these were of such beauty that they took the breath away and caused the eye to linger.

Farendol was laid on a bed in the first room, the one running east to west, and Vulk and Devrik took the other two beds there. A large hexagonal window of carved wood, filled with a black iron filigree of geometric shapes, looked out into a small green courtyard. Mariala, Korwin, Toran and Tarbol took the four beds in the larger room around the corner, oriented north to south, which lacked a matching window, but had two of the long, narrow grilled openings running its length near the ceiling, to the first room’s single such.

Once Olbu had seen that the quests were settled comfortably, he suggested that they should rest and refresh themselves before the midday meal. When he mentioned that a sauna and hot pools were available, they shuddered at the idea, but on learning that there were cool plunging pools as well, Vulk, Mariala and Korwin decided to partake. Torbol volunteered to stay with Farendol, while Devrik and Toran came along for the tour, if not the waters.

As the old major domo guided them, with a certain quiet pride, through the joys of his master’s splendid creation, it occurred to Mariala that the villa was almost more museum than home. It was decorated in a very spare yet elegant style, simplicity of form emphasizing function… and everywhere there was art. From wall hangings and paintings to gorgeous inlaid tables of exotic woods to porcelain bowls and carved jade statues, the hallways and rooms boasted a seemingly endless array of artifacts and object d’art.

Yet in no way was there any sense of overcrowding or excess – there seemed to be only ever just the right number of objects, in just the correct juxtaposition, in just the right place. Thick, richly woven carpets covered many of the floors, themselves polished black wood inlaid with designs in matte black woods, and red silk panels hung from the ceilings.

The interior, despite being open to the outdoors by the narrow eaves-windows and a few larger ones looking out into various courtyards, was significantly cooler than might be expected. Toran noted with approval that the stonework was excellent, and was put together without mortar or cement.

After refreshing themselves in the sybaritic luxury of the spa suite, located in the southern wing of the villa, and enjoying the art along the way, the group reconvened in the large dining room for a three course meal, served by Olbu. This seemed to be the only room furnished with Ysgarethi-style chairs, for which the group was grateful.

After the meal Olbu reappeared and invited them to enjoy the public rooms of the villa, but emphasized that they must avoid the Master’s private chambers, his arboritum/greenhouse and the large central courtyard, which they had glimpsed through grill-covered windows on the earlier tour.

“The great courtyard is the Master’s sanctum for his private meditations and spiritual renewal,” he explained regretfully. “But the smaller courtyard near your own chambers is certainly free for the enjoyment of the m’sahiru.

“This one must now attend to his delayed chores, and so leave you to your own devices until the light repast that is customary in this part of the world after sundown. The grounds are open to you, of course, but only until sunset – it is not safe to be outside after dark, and this one begs of you not to stray outside again until after sunrise.”

The rest of the day was spent relaxing, discussing the events of the past tenday, and theorizing about the nature of their absent host. Tarbol took advantage of the afternoon light to walk the perimeter to lay a Ritual of Protection of the Innocents around the building, which should give them an advantage should things prove to be less innocent than they seemed. At the same time Vulk attempted to locate the promised Nitaran Gate, but could find no hint of it before he was driven indoors by a sudden late-afternoon downpour.

The evening meal was, as promised, a lighter affair, again served by Olbu in the dinning room. Afterward the still very tired companions retired to their rooms, calling it an early night. Mariala tried to coax Grover to come sleep with her, but the ferret refused to be budged from his perch on top of her backpack. With a shrug she gave up the effort and prepared for sleep.

Wards were set, and not only by Mariala, but nothing external disturbed their rest during the night, to everyone’s relief. Tarbol was especially grateful to have a bed to sleep in, even if it was of an odd construction called a “tofu” or maybe it was a “futon.” Something foreign-sounding, anyway…

Nothing external disturbed the Hand’s slumber…but Mariala again dreamed of Erol, on the same vast dark plane. Although this time she felt she could almost make out his words before he again vanished into the darkness. And that night Vulk dreamed of Erol as well… also on a dark, endless plane; but he was no more able to communicate with his dead friend than Mariala had been.

♦ ♦ ♦

The whole of the next day the Hand spent in blessed idleness and rest, with Olbu appearing only to serve meals in the dining room. Finally beginning to feel like themselves again, they took the time to more closely examine the treasures recovered form the ruins of Yalura. Between their various arcane skills they managed to figure out which items were magic and which mundane.

Further divination and study revealed the nature of the four magical artifacts, as well: the small key of tarnished silver proved to be an Amulet of Defeating Locks, able to open locked doors or containers; the pale blue robe was a Robe of Kesadarin, which would shield its wearer from the effects of natural cold and, to a lesser extent, magical cold; the silvery silken rope turned out to be a Cord of Querelia-Sim, able to knot and unknot itself when invoked… it was Toran who discovered its command word, Ünkonai, woven into the threads at each end.

The last item, a polished amber bowl some 30 cm across, proved to be the most interesting… and the most difficult to pry free from its secrets. By the time Olbu summoned them for the evening meal they had only determined that it was seriously magical and seemingly of the X’avarna convocation. Mariala reluctantly set the bowl back into her pack, and noticed Grover leaping to curl up in his usual place atop it as she left the room.

They had just begun the first course, and Obul had left them to return to the kithchen, when the doors to the entry foyer opened to reveal a most striking figure – a tall man with stark white skin (a form of makeup, they learned later, affected by the nobles classes in this land), dressed in elaborate robes of green and black. A yolk of black leather rested on his shoulders from which a black silk collar rose up into a tight skull cap that enclosed his head, leaving only his white face exposed. It was impossible to guess his age, which could have been anywhere from 30 to 70.

“Good evening, my most honored guests,” the man said in a strong tenor voice, only lightly accented by the musical cadences of the local tongue. “I am Thuron Yan. Please forgive that I was not here to greet you myself. But visitors from the Mountain Gate arrive all too seldom, and my studies took me away on a matter that would not wait.”

Stepping into the room and moving to the empty chair at the head of the table, he held up a burlap sack of earth out of which protruded a delicate looking flowering plant of dark green leaves and pale blue flowers. Some species of orchid by the look of it, Vulk thought, and was reminded of Draik.

“I recently, finally, had word of a very rare plant which I have long sought… one that only flowers under the light of the full blue moon and the dark of the violet moon. The way was long and arduous, but the results most worthy of the effort expended.”

Offering the bloom for his guests’ examination, he studied them as they admired his trophy. He seemed to approve of their interest, and he quickly fell into a brief treatise on botany. Flowers were clearly his passion and his main area of study, although he made it plain that medicine was a close, and related, secondary field of interest.

“I will be pleased to show you my collection of rare and exotic plants – especially exotic, I imagine, to visitors from your distant, chilly part of the world – but first I would be pleased to look in on your injured companion, whom Olbu has told me of, if you think my humble knowledge might be of some use.”

At this point Vulk suddenly had an instant, and fully formed, suspicion that this Thuron Yan was in fact Olbu in his true form. He was frantically trying to communicate this idea to Mariala on the sly when Olbu entered the room from the other door, bearing a tray with the second course. Vulk shut his mouth and sat back abruptly, hoping the sudden flush of his cheeks would be attributed to the heat.

After the final course, with cordials of a delicate pink liquor in hand, the group took their host to examine the comatose Telnori; although they still failed to mention his race. But such discretion, or deception, proved both futile and unnecessary. It took only a few minutes for the scholar to determine that the sick man was not Umantari.

“Ah, your friend is one of the Star Children… yes, I can understand your caution. They are not unknown in these lands, but they are not as prevalent, I think, as in the North and West… and are too often feared by our unenlightened peasantry, sadly. Fortunately, I have known a few in my day, and so am not unfamiliar with their biology…”

Another few minutes of examination, and Thuron Yan stood back and frowned. He seemed lost in thought, oblivious to his waiting guests. With an effort he pulled his intense gaze from Farendol, and bowed in apology.

“Forgive me, my guests, I was pondering… the possibilities. It seems to me that your friend has suffered some great injury, yes?”

Vulk nodded, but offered no particulars. He’d learned his lesson with Tarbol, and kicked the Alean when he started to open his mouth. Thuron Yan either didn’t notice the byplay, or simply chose not to acknowledge it.

“I am certain that he is in the Telnori healing trance… it is impossible to say how long he will remain in this state, but in my (admittedly limited) experience it seems certain that he will eventually come out of it.

“I would not recommend moving him until he does, however – he needs all of his physical and mental resources focused on his own healing. An arduous journey is contraindicated, unless it were absolutely critical. And I’m even less sure what effect Gate travel might have –”

“Yes,” Vulk interjected. “About the Gate we’ve been told is nearby. If you could –”

Thuron Yan waved his hand languidly and shook his head, interrupting ever-so-graciously in turn.

“No, honored guest, I can offer no firm advice in that area… even if I knew that such travel was safe for a Telnori in this condition, my Gate is not open just now. It is of the periodic type, and I have not yet discerned a reliable pattern to predict its fluctuations.”

At the friends’ frowns, he smiled and gestured placatingly.

“I understand your concern, but it is unfounded. Although I cannot tell precisely when the Valley Gate will be active again, I can assure you with confidence that it will be no more than two or three days. Surely you can endure the hospitality of my home for that much longer, yes? And it can do your friend no harm to rest here for that long. Once the Gate is active, if he has not recovered, we can further discuss the advisability of  taking him through it.”

There seemed to be no polite answer to this perfectly reasonable argument, and so the friends prepared to retire once again, after their host had departed. But suspicion still smoldered in some…

“I suppose it is possible that we’re over-thinking all this,” Vulk admitted as the group discussed their options. “We’re so used to conflict and chaos, perhaps we’re seeing everything as a nail that needs to be hammered – and maybe this time it’s not.”

“We’ve certainly tried to find the hidden motives, the lies, the danger,” Korwin agreed. “But it all seems perfectly benign. It’s a different culture, so maybe that’s where the vague, um… creepiness… comes from?”

The debate went on for awhile, without coming to any solid conclusions. In the end everyone drifted off to bed and sleep. But wards were again set, other precautions taken as well. And again came the dreams of Erol on a vast, dark plain – to Mariala, Vulk, and this time to Devrik, too.

♦ ♦ ♦

The next day Thuron Yan took the companions to see his beloved arboretum/hot house wherein he kept his most prized botanical treasures. The immense room occupied the entire east wing of the villa, almost 50 meters long north-to-south and 13 meters wide east-to-west. Two iron-grilled windows, set in alcoves, and a bronze-gated doorway pierced the western wall, giving out onto the large sunken central courtyard. Matching alcoved windows were set into the eastern wall, and opposite the courtyard gate was a large, intricately carved teak door. Set in the wooden ceiling were glass skylights, running the length of the room on either side of the massive central beam.

Unlike the rest of the villa, which was marginally cooler than the outdoors, the arboretum was somewhat warmer and much more humid. A riotous profusion of plants filled the space, from large potted trees to small, delicate ferns and flowering shrubs. From the central beam hung a series of lattices over which grew vines and other creeping or hanging plants, many with flowers of gorgeous colors, some of immense size. In the center of the room stood a large oval work table of yellow sandstone, on which lay a confusion of gardening tools (as well as implements of more mysterious purpose), empty pots, and piles of rich, dark soil.

It took over an hour for the most cursory tour of the many plants the Eastern scholar had amassed, and even the most uninterested in the party couldn’t help but be impressed. Not only were there an incredible number of plants they’d never heard of, much less seen, Thuron Yan’s knowledge of them, of their uses either medicinal, practical or culinary, was immense.

“But I have saved the best for last, my dear guests,” he said at length as they paused near the work table. “My most beloved and valuable treasures… my orchids!”

With that he threw open the carved teak door behind him, revealing a small chamber some 6 meters square. Work benches lined the north and south walls, with several racks on each reaching up to the ceiling, and a desk-cum-work bench filled a small niche in the east wall, beneath an iron-grilled window.

Orchids of every imaginable size, shape and color occupied the racks and benches, and on the desk lay scrolls, parchment, pens, brushes and inks. Several of the papers could be seen to contain exquisite renderings of various orchids, with notes in a flowing, alien alphabet beneath them. The beautiful blue orchid their host had shown them the night he’d returned sat on the desk, and a partially finished sketch of it held the central place of honor.

Almost another hour was spent learning about the manifold virtues and wonders of the orchid in all its wild variety of species. It became clear their host had spent decades learning and writing about his tropical speciality. But eventually the scholar ran down, perhaps sensing the slightly glazed looks which even the most interested of his guests were beginning to sport.

“Well, I must return to my work,” he said, gesturing toward the door back into the arboretum. “And I understand some of you have expressed curiosity about my private library. Olbu could not grant you access, of course, but having seen your enthusiasm over my small public collection, it would be my pleasure share the larger collection with you.”

He then led the party out the southern door of the arboretum, through several short winding corridors to a set of carved double doors. Pulling a key from his belt, their host unlocked the doors and ushered them into his private library. It was a large room, 15 x 10 meters, and a double row of tall bookshelves ran down the center of the room, crammed with books, scrolls and loose-leaf folios. Being an interior room there were no windows, but four square skylights of frosted glass let in the day light; glowstones set about the room would provide illumination at night.

“I allow no open flames in here,” Thuron Yan said as he prepared to leave them. “And I expect you will treat the volumes here as befits their age and value… but I know that you are scholars yourselves, and need no instruction in this arena. I do ask that you not remove anything from this chamber, however.”

With a gracious bow he turned and left the group to their own devices, returning to the study of his new orchid. The Hand went wild in this treasure trove of exotic documents – each one of them found at least one volume of intense interest, and some more than one.

Toran found a volume on rare fungi cultivation written in an odd form of Kundaic, by the Dwarves of Svarlün, in central Ishkala; Tarbol was able to decipher an ancient treatise of the use of various plants in successful exorcisms; Mariala and Devrik kept calling one another over to see some new find, wandering from shelf to shelf, while Korwin browsed, and fingered the small gardening implement in his pocket that he had stolen from Thuran Yan’s workshop. He had been successfully containing his kleptomania with all the lovely object d’art laying about this place, but he just couldn’t resist this odd little tool…

Vulk was especially taken with a large illustrated volume, quite old, but from their own part of the world, that extensively covered the flora of Ysgareth and its subcontinent Xenoca, as well as that of the Shattered Sea. He had heard Draik speak of it on occasion, Merasid’s Illuminated Botanica, as a very rare and extraordinarily thorough encyclopedia that any herbalist would give his left nut for. He wondered how much he could copy during their stay here… and which were the best bits…

It was hours later that they reluctantly broke off their studies for the midday meal, after Olbu’s second, slightly testy announcement that it was ready. Thuron Yan did not join them, sending his apologies via his servant, but did promise to join them for the evening meal. As usual, the food was mostly excellent, if occasionally too alien – for instance, no one was inclined to try the chilled monkey brains…

Afterward, several of the group were inclined to return to the library, but Mariala insisted that they should finish trying to figure out what that last magic item was, the mysterious amber bowl. Retiring to the room she shared with Korwin, Toran and Tarbol, after checking on Farendol, she booted Grover off her pack and carefully removed the artifact. The ferret nipped at her hand, but quickly settled near her feet as she sat down, the bowl in her lap.

It took a combination of her own divination skills, Korwin’s psychometry talent, and Vulk’s prayers to finally uncover the nature of the item – a soul catcher created by the Telnori mage Barsol, over a thousand years ago. It was designed to capture either ethereal beings or the souls of the recently departed within a certain proximity. When properly invoked the captured soul could be transferred to another living or properly prepared artificial body… it took some more divination to discover the operant word to be lila’tometh. It didn’t take the group long, however, to realize what this might mean…

“This was less than a hundred meters away when Erol was killed,” Vulk exclaimed in sudden excitement. “That’s well within its range, yes Mariala?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, frowning thoughtfully. “I think a kilometer is the approximate, um, capture zone of the device… but it can only hold one soul, I’m positive of that! And Farendol was… um, died… before Erol did. Wouldn’t his soul have been the one to be captured?”

This gave them all pause for a moment. It certainly would explain why the Telnori’s body remained alive after Vulk’s healing, but seemingly unoccupied, if his soul was captive within the bowl. On the other hand…

“Telnori souls, like their minds, are stronger than ours,” Vulk pointed out. “Farendol may have been immune to the artifact’s power, or able to resist it… it is also possible that he wasn’t completely dead dead before I healed him. Maybe his should never left his body, and he really is in a healing trance?

“Also, why has Grover been so attached to this thing? Looking back, don’t you see it? He’s stayed as close to the bowl as he could, whether it was in a saddle bag or your pack – or on your lap right now?”

Indeed, the little animal was currently staring up intently at the bowl, never taking his eyes off of it. A sudden thought struck Vulk –

“Or maybe Erol’s soul ended up in Grover, somehow!” he blurted out.

“Well, I don’t see how that would have worked,” Mariala frowned. “No, I think there’s a soul in this bowl, and while I’m uncertain whose soul it is, I’d have to agree Grover’s behavior makes me lean toward it being Erol’s. That, and the dreams I’ve been having lately… if it’s not just wishful thinking…”

Devrik seemed more divided in thought, and said nothing. He really would like it to be Farendol’s soul in that bowl, making his murder, as he thought of it, of the Druid suddenly reversable. On the other hand, he knew Erol well and would like to see his comrade returned to life. Although, come to think of it, how would they even accomplish that? The man’s own body was no longer a viable option, certainly!

The same thought seemed to occur to the others just then, and a discussion began about how to figure out if it was really Erol in the bowl, and if so, what to do about it. Mariala could divine no way of communicating with the en-bowled soul, although she claimed it should be theoretically possible. She was extremely reluctant to invoke the control word without a suitable vessel nearby for the soul to enter into.

Vulk eyed Grover speculatively at that point, but when the ferret briefly pulled its attention away from the bowl to growl in his direction, he shrugged off the idea. He doubted Erol would be much enthused by being a ferret in any case.

“It occurs to me,” he said after a few minutes of intropsection, “that I have within my mind, the knowledge of how to grow a new body for Erol… a gift of my recent possession, er, symbioses with the Elemental Beast of Earth. But it would take many months, I think, to do this…”

“Or, I could fashion him an artificial body” Toran offered. “With the help of my people I’m sure we could create him a most wonderful, powerful form. As a fighter he might like that!”

“I’m not really sure he’d appreciate giving up the sex, though,” Devrik growled. “Although it might do as an interim measure, while Vulk grows this new body…”

“We could always dump him into Tarbol’s body, I suppose,” Korwin suggsted with a laugh. This brought a squeak of rage from the plump cantor, who had heretofore been following the discussion in wide-eyed, horrified fascination.

“You can’t allow him to possess another living, conscious being,” he shrilled in anger, leaping to his feet. “Not mine and not anyone elses! It would be blasphemy, and a secular crime as well, and–”

“It was a joke, Tarbol,” Mariala soothed gently, giving Korwin a quelling frown. But he saw the glint of laughter in her eye nonetheless, if Tarbol did not. Devrik snorted and shook his head, while Vulk and Toran couldn’t look at each other for fear of bursting into laughter. Tarbol grudginly sat back down, mumbling about people who jested about possession, and the bad ends they would no doubt come to.

The brief humor had broken the tension of the moment, and with a collective sigh the Hand realized there was nothing more to be done just then. But getting back to Shalara, and the resources of the Star Council, was suddenly even more urgent in all their minds. Vulk determined to press their host once more over dinner for the location of the Gate, something the man had deftly sidestepped up until now.

“And maybe we will find a way to communicate with Erol in our dreams tonight,” Mariala said as they rose to go about their separate concerns. “If so, maybe he’ll have an idea about what we should do…”

•••

Under Vulk’s persistent questioning, which began to border on the rude, Thuron Yan finally revealed that the Valley Gate was located in the Great Courtyard at the heart of the villa, as they had suspected all along. He went further, and said that he fully expected it to become active within the next 25 to 35 hours, at which point he would, with regret but full understanding, see them all on their way.

Having got the information he wanted Vulk attempted to repair his breach of manners by enthusing about the volume he had been studying in the library that morning. He explained about Draik, and soon found himself describing the discovery/invention of Baylorium, and it’s amazing healing powers. Their host’s slight coolness dropped away as he came to fully understand what the cantor was saying.

“By the Seven,” he exclaimed when Vulk had finished, his usual dignified reserve abandoned for the moment. “This is quite amazing! I have, of course, heard of Baylora and her frightening, brilliant skills in the Torazin arts… and of her tragic fate. But this… have you a sample of this wondrous elixir with you?”

“Sadly, no,” Vulk lied, without hesitation, although he wasn’t sure why he did so. “We used the last of our reserves after our last battle, to heal ourselves and to attempt to do the same for our Telnori friend. It is another reason why we are so anxious to return home, to restock our supply of the elixir.”

Thuron Yan seemed briefly disappointed to hear this news, before his usual cloak of distant, amused detachment fell back into place. But he was aroused to sharp-eyed interest once more when Vulk continued.

“But we plan to travel straight to Draik once your Valley Gate is open, sir. You should accompany us – I know my friend would be pleased to exchange ideas and knowledge with one so learned in the field that he himself loves so much. Who knows what a fusion of your talents and wisdom might produce? The possibilities, sir! And if you were to join us, perhaps you could bring Merasid’s Illuminated Botanica along, so that he might have it copied while you conferred…”

Thuron Yan seemed much taken with this idea, and promised to think upon it that night. As the meal wound down he motioned to Olbu, who came and bowed down to hear his master’s whispered instructions. The servant withdrew, to return several minutes later with a tray containing glasses of a pale blue cordial. Passing them out to the guests, he served his master last.

“To new friends,” the Eastern scholar said, raising his glass. “And to new beginnings, which may bring much good into the world.”

While the others drank without hesitation, Vulk and Devrik shared a glance across the table, and only touched their glasses to their lips. The subterfuge did not go unnoticed by their host.

“You do not care for the ub’arasl,” he inquired cooly, setting down his own empty glass. “Perhaps some other beverage…?”

“No,” Vulk replied, smiling tightly. “Thank you. I’m afraid something in that last course has upset my digestion… I fear further alcohol might exacerbate the problem.”

“And I do not drink distilled spirits,” Devrik rumbled blandly, setting his own untouched glass down. It was a believable enough assetion, certainly, as he had drunk nothing but watered wine during their stay at Halani-var. “But we both salute the toast, and the sentiment behind it.”

Mollified, Thuron Yan rose and graciously bid his guests a good night, reminding them once again not to leave the safety of the villa during the night. As Olbu began to clear away the dishes the Hand likewise rose, bowed to their host, and departed to their own chambers.

•••

Despite all evidence of his good will, both Devrik and Vulk had been suspicious of their host and of his special blue cordial. But in the event at least one of their suspicions was totally unfounded – the cordial had not been drugged or poisoned, had indeed been nothing more than a delicate, delicious, and very expensive liquor, distilled from a rare mountain fruit. It was a singular honor to have had it offered to them.

It was the food that had been drugged.

Retiring to their respective rooms, each of the companions found their eyes drooping even as they undressed. They were all asleep as soon as their heads hit their pillows — a deep and dreamless sleep.

Dreamless, except for Vulk. He slowly became aware of himself, though all around him was dark, and he could not move. There was a sense of concern, but not of panic, as he tried to move even a finger. Failing, he became aware of… not a presence, exactly… but maybe an echo of a presence. Following his sense of this not-presence, Vulk suddenly found himself aware of his body in its totality. It was something like what he sensed when he healed someone psionically, but much stronger – an awareness of every cell, every atom, of his biology.

With this awareness came a sense that all was not right… yes, there, he could… see/hear/taste/feel/smell… the alien pattern. He’d been poisoned! No, not poison he realized… drugged. A soporific of some kind… and very stong!

He could see how it flowed through his blood, how it interacted with his brain… and yes, he could suddenly see how to neutralize it… to turn it into something inert and harmless… all at once.

He did that thing.

♦ ♦ ♦

Vulk’s eyes opened as he came fully, instantly, awake; but no other part of his body moved to give away his sudden return to consciousness. Which proved a good thing, for across the room he could see two shadowy figures bent over the still form of Farendol, silhouetted by the dim red light one of them held. A deep red glow stone, he realized, perfect for seeing in darkness without ruining one’s night vision.

It was Thuron Yan and Olbu, of course. Vulk tensed, prepared to leap up if they made a threatening move… but Thuron Yan reached down and lifted the Telnori into his arms as if he weighed no more than a child. He said something to Olbu, too low for Vulk to hear, and the servant nodded, moving toward the open door. Thuron Yan followed, Farendol’s body cradled almost tenderly in his arms, and they passed out of the room.

Vulk was off of his futon instantly, and kneeling beside Devrik, who snored gently. No amount of shaking could rouse the drugged warrior-mage, however, and after a moment the cantor realized he would need to do for his friend what he had somehow done for himself. But how? He wasn’t even sure what he’d done, exactly. He closed his eyes and reached within…

And it was there. The knowledge of how to see the foreign substance, and how to alter it, make it harmless and inert. He reached out with his native psionic healing ability into Devrik’s body… and did the thing.

Devrik’s eyes flew open and he had his hand around Vulk’s throat before the latter could react. Fortunately Devrik didn’t seem confused or groggy, and he quickly recognized his friend.

“Sorry,” he grated quietly, releasing his grip. “Not a good idea to wake me that way.”

“No choice,” Vulk gasped sotto voce, rubbing his bruised neck. “We were all drugged. I’ve thrown it off, and neutralized it in you. But our host and his servant have just taken Farendol, and I think we need to stop whatever it is they have planned!”

Instantly Devrik was on his feet and buckling on his armor.

“Wake the others and follow after me,” he order Vulk. “I’m certain they’ve gone either to the arboretum or to the central courtyard.”

“That would be my guess too,” Vulk agreed, and dashed out the door, turning left. Devrik was only a few paces behind him, and turned right as he pulled his battlesword from its sheath on his back.

In the other room Korwin, being closest to the door, was the next person Vulk woke. Like Devrik, he came instantly awake, but with a less immediately aggressive response. When his friend had explained the situation to him the water mage grabbed his own weapons and armor, and dashed out the door to follow Devrik.

Tarbol was next, but Vulk felt they could do without the little nitwit’s “help,” and skipped over him to awaken Toran. The Khundari seemed to have been naturally fighting off the effects of the drug, and Vulk was able to dispel the soporific more easily than in the others. Toran too, on learning the way of things, donned his armor and grabbed his weapons to follow Korwin.

Mariala proved more difficult to awaken. Vulk knew he was getting tired, using his abilities so quickly in succession and at such strength, but there was something beyond mere exhaustion at work here. He could sense the toxin, yes, but there was something else, something that seemed to pervade the structure of her blood and brain… it was subtle, difficult to make out, and it seemed to be interacting with the drug in unexpected ways.

Twice he tried to neutralize the foreign agents in Mariala’s blood, and twice he failed. After the last attempt, he knew he only had one more go-round left before his psionic ability gave out completely. Reluctantly, he turned to Tarbol.

It was the most exhausting effort yet, but he managed to eliminate the drug from his fellow cantor’s body, and the young man woke with a start. Vulk grudgingly explained the situation, and asked if the Alean knew of any ritual that might work. Tarbol said he just might, and immediately knelt down beside Mariala and took her hands in his, bending his head to pray. In just a few seconds the woman before him began to  groan, and her eyes flickered open. She was groggy, and a bit confused at first, but she quickly grasped the urgency of the situation and rose to her feet, with Tarbol’s help.

Vulk had run back to his own room to grab his weapons, and now reappeared in the doorway to urge them on. They raced down the hallways toward the arboretum and the clashing of steel on steel, and he invoked the ritual of Virtue’s Armor, touching Mariala’s shoulder as he spoke. Kasira’s shimmering golden protection flowed over her…

♦ ♦ ♦

Leaving Vulk to rouse the others, Devrik had headed straight for the arboretum. He kicked in the northern door to Thuron Yan’s plant sanctum, splinters of wood flying as the lock twisted free of the frame, and blew through without even stopping.

In the center of the room, on the oval sandstone table, cleared now of all gardening detritus, lay Farendol’s empty but living body. At his head stood Thuron Yan, hands hovering near the Telnori’s temples, face twisted in intense concentration.

Between Devrik and the pale scholar was Olbu, who had whirled around at the sound of the shattered door, drawing a wicked looking sword with a curved tip. He advanced now toward Devrik, his sword lowered and making placating gestures with his free hand.

“Please, m’sahiri, let this one explain,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “The Master means no harm to your friend. If the m’shairi will just –”

“Get out of my way,” Devrik growled in his most nerve-grating voice, never breaking his stride. Red rage filled his vision as he saw his chance of redemption being pawed over by that ghost-faced… botanist!

Seeing that the Westerner would not be stopped by words, Olbu brought his own weapon up in a surprisingly fluid motion and attacked. Devrik was forced to stop then, barely managing to parry the slash toward his stomach. The strength of the blow shocked him out of his one-track focus on Farendol – the old man was about his own height, but must be 20 kilos lighter than him. How could he be so strong?

Devrik slashed his own blade two-handed at the old man’s stomach in return, only to have the blow turned deftly and the movement turned into a blinding counter attack. Devrik grinned then and blocked in turn.

When Korwin dashed into the room a few minutes later, he skidded to a stop at the sight of the frail-looking old mass of wrinkles holding his own, stroke for stroke, with Devrik! A moment later Toran skidded into the room, and was also impressed – although he didn’t recognize the style, he knew a master of the martial arts when he saw one. He started to crank his crossbow…

By the time the others arrived the old man made one last spinning attack to drive Devrik back, and then disengaged. He stood a dozen paces back, sword again lowered. Devrik was panting slightly, but Olbu seemed perfectly composed, his breathing regular and controlled.

“M’sahiru, please listen to this one,” he called out to the group. “Things are not as they may seem.”

“You drugged us, stole our friend’s body, and seem to be preparing some sort of mystical shenanigans,” Vulk said in his best Herald’s voice, putting a restraining hand on Devrik’s shoulder. The fire mage glowered but didn’t resume the fight.

“If your intentions are benign,” Vulk continued, “why did you drug us into oblivion?”

“Merely to keep things simple, m’sahiri,” the old man said, grimacing. “Though that seems not to have worked… this one had suggested the Master should confide the truth to you, but his curse has haunted him so long… it is difficult for him to trust…

“But truly, he means no harm to the one you call Farendol… for that one is no longer in this world. You resurrected his body, m’sahiri, but his soul must have already sped to whatever comes after. You have created, most inadvertantly, a rare theological occurrence – and the answer to the Master’s dilema.

“Stop speaking in riddles,” Devrik growled. “And stop stalling. Explain yourself now, or prepare to fight us all!”

“The Master is afflicted with a rare… condition.. One he considers a curse and a great burden. He has spent three decades seeking a cure from the plants of these jungles. But while he has managed to… alter… some of the parameters of his condition, he has found no cure.

“Now you bring him a solution we never thought to employ, a healthy but spiritually empty body into which he can transfer his wonderful mind! And a Telnori one at that – his genius may go on for centuries more in such a form! He knows the plants that will induced the trance, he knows the mental discipline to achieve the tansfer… now he just needs the time to achieve it. Will you not give him this?”

“It’s not his body to dispose of,” Vulk said hotly. “Even if Farendol’s soul is gone… and it’s true, we’d begun to suspect it… it is not for your Master, or for us, to decide what becomes of his mortal form. We must take it back to his–”

“But can you not see the value?” Olbu countered passionately. “Thuron Yan is a great man, an enlightened man, and what better tribute to your deceased friend than that his abandoned shell should now house this great soul!

“You yourself believed that much good could come of a collaboration between the Master and your friend in the West… Draik, that one is named, yes? It was Thuron Yan’s intention, once the burden of his curse was lifted from him, to join you, as you suggested.”

Vulk paused, considering the old man’s words. It seemed certain now that Farendol really was gone… and if so, what difference could it make to him what use his body was put to now? Aside from the drugging, Thuron Yan had treated them well… and it’s not like he’d actually poisoned them, something a plant expert such as himself would certainly have been capable of…

“Well, I can see an argument for what you’re saying,” he said slowly. “But let your master make that argument himself. He has endured his burden, whatever it is, for this long… a little longer can hardly matter. If he’ll stop what he’s doing, we can sit down and–”

“Oh, to the Void with this!” Mariala cried out suddenly, and let go a blast of Fire Nerves at the elderly major domo, who staggered back. Her friends were momentarily shocked at this uncharacteristically unilateral action, except for Toran, who took it as a signal to loose a crossbow bolt at the still-seemingly-oblivious scholar working his ritual over Farendol’s inert form.

The bolt missed, but it forced Thuran Yan to sway back, and broke his concentration. He glared then in fury at the Khundari and the others, his elegant fingers crooking into claws of rage.

“You fools!” he hissed furiously. “This is no affair of yours, I would have let you leave here alive in the morning, with my gratitude and friendship… but since you seem determined to interfere in things you have not the slightest understanding of, so be it! Olbu!”

At his call the old man stood straighter, a feral grin on his face, seemingly no more than inconvenienced by Mariala’s spell. “This one bears a… related… condition to the Master’s. But this one does not consider it an affliction or a curse – this one embraces it!”

As he spoke his skin began to flow and the bones beneath seemed to heave and buckle… his face elongated and then flattened out, and he grew taller, as orange, black and white fur erupted from his skin. His clothes ripped apart and fell from him as his body expanded, muscles seeming to bubble up from nowhere. In a matter of seconds his transformation was complete, and he towered over the group, a roaring creature half man and half tiger.

With a snarl the were-tiger leapt at Devrik, mouth agape and claws extended. The warrior-mage backpedaled, barely avoiding a lethal slash across his belly. Toran fired his crossbow, then dropped it as the were-tiger twisted away from the bolt. The Khundari jumped into the fray then, with a fierce Dwarven battle cry, drawing his battleaxe.

With his were-creature servant engaging his uninvited guests, Thuron Yan dropped the fight from his attention and turned back to his attempt to transfer his mind and soul into the empty body on the slab before him.

But Tarbol was having none of this! He had been shocked that Cantor Vulk had seemed ready to even discuss the blasphemous suggestion of allowing the transfer, and he would be damned to the Void if he would let Alea down now! He dashed forward, past the snarling mass of fighting were-tiger, Umantari and Khundari, whirling his staff about his head and howling his outrage. Vulk grabbed at his sleeve, and missed, while Mariala cried out for him to stop.

“You shall not commit this abomination, you fiend!” he shrieked, closing on the apparently unconcerned scholar, and aiming for his head.

At the last moment, almost languidly, in a single fluid movement Thuron Yan pulled two long, razor-sharp blades from the sash at his waist. With one estoc he effortlessly parried the staff, and as the surprised youth staggered around, carried by his own momentum, the other estoc whipped up and across Tarbol’s throat.

With a gurgling, inarticulate cry, the Alean cantor collapsed to the floor, blood spurting from a severed artery to form a growing pool around him. He twitched once and was still. Vulk, Korwin and Mariala stood momentarily paralyzed by shock.

Ignoring the corpse he had just made Thuron Yan strode toward the group, loosening his robes and smiling grimly. As he came on, his body began to shift and flow as Olbu’s had, but with subtle differences. By the time he reached the group he was an enormous pale white snake, with a human torso and arms, but a face that was a disturbing mixture of man and reptile. A cobra-like hood flared from his shoulders and framed his malignant visage.

“See what you would condemn me too!” he raged in a sibilant hiss unlike his normal, urbane voice. He attacked, slashing out with razor sharp claws and a battering-ram-like tail. Vulk took a raking blow across his shoulder, and countered with his sword. Korwin drew his saber, slashing at the horror before him, and was rewarded with a line of blood oozing along the creatures flank.

Mariala blanched and drew her lucky Khundari dagger...

At that point the fight between Olbu and Devrik and Toran came to a sudden end, as the Khundari Shadow Warrior took advantage of a momentary distraction by Devrik to slide between the were-tiger’s legs, hamstringing the creature and bringing it to its knees. Whirling around he swung his battleaxe in a flashing arc that ended in the back of the tiger-man’s skull. As it collapsed in death the body began to flow and shift, and in a few seconds it was the naked corpse of the elderly Olbu that lay at their feet.

Meanwhile Vulk was trying desperately to disengage from the enraged were-snake so that he could tend to poor Tarbol. There was no hope of saving the idiot’s life, he knew, but if he could get to him quickly enough he could place him in Stasis for possible revival later on. Fortunately at that moment Devrik joined their fight, diverting Thuron Yan’s attention sufficiently for the cantor to disengage and make a dash to his fallen comrade. Even as he fell to his knees he began to perform the Ritual of Stasis…

Thuron Yan appeared to be as ambidextrously agile with his claws as he had been with his blades, and while he fended off Devrik with one, and Korwin with his tail, he slashed viscously at Mariala, raking his claws across her chest and shoulder. Cloth shredded, and she staggered back, but the flare of golden light proved that Vulk’s blessing of Virtue’s Armor had done its job – her skin remained unbroken!

The momentary surprise at the failure of what should have been a killing stroke proved to be Thuron Yan’s undoing. In that brief instant Mariala, rather than retreating, leapt forward and drove her dagger into the were-snake’s belly, slashing up with all her strength. The finely-honed Khundari steel cut through muscle and viscera as though through cloth, and slid under the ribs to come to a stop, almost missing the heart. Almost, but not quite. The tip of the dagger pierced that organ, and Thuron Yan collapsed, clutching at his spilling guts, dead even as he hit the ground.

There was a stunned silence in the room as the Hand considered the sudden carnage before them. In death Thuron Yan, like his servant before him, returned to his human form, looking small and forlorn, curled around his sliced up guts in a spreading pool of blood.

Across the room, near the slab that held Farendol’s body, Vulk stood up from where he had been at work on Tarbol’s corpse. A faint bluish glow now surrounded the dead cantor’s form.

“I’ve managed to get him into Stasis,” Vulk called out. “With any luck his uncle – look out!!”

At his warning the others whirled around as four large figures dropped from the skylights behind them. Four more were-tigers – no, these were were-tigresses they soon realized. After a brief grief-stricken keening towards the body of old Olbu, the creatures snarled at the group and prepared to leap.

“To the Void with this!” Devrik roared in exasperation. A Orb of Vorol appeared in his hand, and with a sharp gesture he hurled the fireball toward the creatures. They had balked momentarily at the sight of the sudden flame, and now they tried to scatter. But the brilliant fire-seed exploded into a tremendous ball of searing death, catching all four in its blast.

Shrieking in pain and fury as fur and skin burst into flame, two of the creatures collapsed almost at once, twitching into smoldering, stinking stillness. The other two attempted to escape, one toward the central courtyard and the other out the shattered northern door. The first collapsed clawing at the grillwork of the window; the other died atop the splintered ruins of the door.

Unfortunately, this allowed the flames to get a firm hold in the wooden parts of the structure in both places. In combination with all the burning plants, trellises, ceiling and support beams, the fire threatened to quickly grow into a conflagration.

“Well, shit,” Devrik said, as his first elation was replaced by chagrin. He reached out with his pyrokinetic ability and attempted to control and quell the flames. But it proved to be more than he could handle… the best he could do was slow the spread a bit.

Fortunately, Korwin was able to summon up a large quantity of ethereal water, made easier perhaps by the high humidity of the area, and doused all the burning bits in the arboretum. With relief Devrik loosed his control as most of the flames spluttered out with a steaming hiss.

“Now we need to find the Gate and get out of here,” he sighed. “Before some other cursed thing comes up!”

No one disagreed, and Korwin and Mariala dashed off to collect their things, including the mules and Therok. While Toran and Devrik searched the central courtyard Vulk made a bee-line for the library. At least now he wouldn’t have to try and copy bits of that book for Draik… he could just give him the real thing! And maybe they could come back for all the rest of this amazing collection of tomes…

In the courtyard Devrik could still not sense any Nitaran Gates, and he began to wonder if Thuron Yan had lied to them… about more than just his intentions for Farendol’s body. Did a Gate exist at all? And if so, where was it? It could take days, even months, to scour this thick rain forest trying to find it. They might be forced into an overland journey to the coast after all… Raven was going to be so pissed… he’d told her he would be home days ago…

“I think this might be it,” Toran said, pulling Devrik from his increasingly gloomy reverie. He stood next to the elaborately carved stone and metal fountain from which water gushed from a wide central pipe into the large square pool at the heart of the courtyard. At Devrik’s inquiring grunt he reached up and twisted a metal collar around the base of the water pipe.

Instantly the flow of water stopped, and a second later there was a rumbling from the pool. Another few seconds and it was obvious that the water level in the pool was dropping, and quickly. In less than three minutes the pool was entirely empty, save for a few puddles on its stone floor. Steep stone stairs on three sides of the square led down about three meters to a small open space.

“As  you know, Nitaran Gates don’t form in solid matter… nor underwater,” he said, shrugging at Devrik’s quizzical look. “Most people don’t think about that much, but we Khundari are a subterranean folk, and we take advantage of the fact to guard Gates into our realms. It seemed fairly obvious to me, what with this rather large fountain and pool right at the heart of this place, that Thuron Yan might do the same.”

By then the others had returned, and a discussion quickly began about how much of Halani-var they could realistically loot, with already loaded saddle bags and two bodies to carry. No one was quite sure who first suggested cutting the body count in half by placing Erol’s soul into Farendol’s body. Given that Tarbol’s Stasis-rigid form was slippery and tricky to handle, and would need to be securely strapped to the travois, a task Vulk, returned from the library, was just completing, it seemed like a good idea…

Farendol’s body was still in the arboretum, on the central work slab, and they all trooped in to gather around him, leaving Vulk’s barbarian lackey to watch the mules, packs and ex-Tarbol. Mariala lifted Barsol’s Bowl up, holding it directly over the still form, as Grover darted excitedly around her feet.

“Lila’tometh!” she said in a commanding voice, and there was a purplish flare of light in the bowl, as a faint musical note rang in the humid air.

Erol opened his eyes to find his friends gathered around and staring down at him, eyes wide and faces variously concerned, anxious or worried. He realized he was lying down, and moved to sit up – whoa! He felt very odd. His body seemed to react differently… things seemed weirdly speeded up, but not in the way he was used to with his extratemporal sense… He swung his legs over the stone table he was on and stood up.

“By Cael’s balls,”he gasped. “You’ve all shrunk!”

It took awhile to get Erol to understand what had happened to him. He remembered the fight in the demon’s chamber, but not his grabbing the control artifact and being booted from his own body. His memory of his time in the bowl was hazy at best, although he did seem to remember dreaming of Mariala… and maybe Vulk and Devrik?

Unfortunately, they had to cut the explanations short at that point, as the northern portion of the arboretum collapsed in a shower of fiery sparks and burning wood.

“Shit!” Devrik cried. “The flames must’ve gotten into the attic rafters and spread above the ceiling!”

He reached out again with his power, but soon sensed the fire was much too big now for him to quell, too widespread for even Korwin’s ethereal water to do much good… and it was overhead as well as to the south…

“Hand, we are leaving!” he roared, and headed for the gate out to the courtyard. Most of the others followed, “Farenderol” staggering about amidst the falling embers, simultaneously exultant and frustrated trying to learn to work this new body. Vulk and Mariala, however, headed for the library.

“We have to save as many books as possible,” Vulk called over his shoulder at Devrik’s angry shout. “We’ll be right there!”

Dodging falling embers from the quickly charring ceiling in the library the two friends grabbed as many books and scrolls as they could. But when they’d grabbed all they could carry, there were so very many books and scrolls still left…

“Vulk, I know you must be exhausted,” Mariala cried out as bits of burning ceiling began to fall around them. “But if we chain our energies, could we cast a Stasis field around the bookshelves? We can’t let all this knowledge burn!”

It was insane, but there was no time to argue. Vulk invoked the ritual once more, this feeling the T’aran energies from his friend flow into and through him… and then a flickering blue haze enveloped the row of elegantly carved bookshelves running down the center of the room. Nothing they could do for the artwork along the walls, and Kasira only knew how long the Stasis would hold, but they’d done what they could…

The two staggered out of the library under their burdens of books and scrolls and raced down the hallways toward the arboretum and the relative safety of the courtyard. They had just made it out the gate when the rest of the arboretum’s roof collapsed, sending a shower of sparks and a blast of superheated air out the doorway and windows. The mossy floor of the courtyard began to smolder in places…

Stuffing books and scrolls into every available space in packs and saddlebags, Mariala found that Korwin had rushed back in to Thuron Yan’s workshop while she and Vulk had been in the library, and rescued as many of the scholar’s notebooks and papers as he could. And he had the delicate blue orchid, now planted in an equally delicate gray glazed pot, clutched in his hand.

As the smoke began to fill the courtyard and the heat became almost unbearable, Vulk summoned up Kasira’s Key, and opened the Valley Gate of the late Thuron Yan at last. Coughing and choking, the Hand passed through…

…and found themselves on the wooded slopes of the Elf Mound, just outside the town and keep of Dor Dür, with late afternoon sunlight bathing everything in summer gold. The air seemed blessedly cool and dry after the humid heat of the island of Kensuai, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

“Halt and identify yourselves!” a commanding voice cried out, and a sudden rustling of leaves revealed they were surrounded by a dozen archers in brown and green, arrow nocked and bows taut, all aimed at the group. A man stepped forward then, tall, muscular, and black-haired, a grim expression on his face.

An expression that vanished and was replaced by a wide grin as he recognized the travelers. He motioned to his men, and they faded back into the woods.

“Brother!” Black Hawk laughed, coming up to Devrik and embracing him. “We have been expecting you this past pentnight, since you sent your message to my sister! Some were becoming worried, although not Raven – she said you’d be along in your own sweet time. And here you are!

“It is good to see you all… although it seems you have been recently in battle.” His smile faded then as he took in the smoke-blackened and blood-stained group, and scanned their faces. “And where is Erol? That is not his body at least, that I see there between the mules… is he –”

“Alive, brother,” Devrik said, slapping his brother-in-law on the back and turning toward the path to the keep. “But not quite himself. It’s a long story, and I’m very thirsty…

The Hand set off from the ruins of Yalura with Farendol in the lead, the lurid red light of Gendor’s Comet glowing ominously on their right before the rising winds lifted enough dust into the air to obscure it. Despite the danger of the growing storm, they were all relieved when the comet was hidden – it had seemed a malevolent eye watching them. Exhaustion, no doubt, and yet a lingering dread seemed to hang over the group…

That feeling was not assuaged an hour or so later, when the ground beneath their feet began to shake and roll. The earthquake lasted only 10 seconds, but it was all Toran and Korwin could do to keep the mules from bolting in their sudden panic. Despite the increasing sting of the wind-whipped dust, Farendol, with Mariala’s assistance, took a few minutes to sooth the spooked beasts.

Once the mules had regained some of their usual phlegmatic calm, he gestured the group to continue, yelling over the shriek of the wind that they should reach refuge within an hour, no more than two.

“Where are we going, exactly?” Devrik bellowed to the Druid as he resumed his place at the head of the line next to him.

“It is an old Royal Armory, and mostly underground,” the Telnori replied, barely audible as he pulled his scarf more tightly over his nose and mouth. “When last I saw it, 150 years ago, it was still intact, no reason for that to have changed.”

With that he pulled ahead, urging his companions to greater speed, though the shifting dust made the footing treacherous, and the wind was beginning to sting exposed skin raw. If not for the quartz goggles he had given them, the group would have been blind by now, as well as almost deaf. As it was, Vulk had to lead Barbarian 55 by the hand, since the warrior had no goggles and so was forced to cover his eyes as well as his nose and mouth with scarves and cloak.

Time seemed to lose its grip on the group as they staggered northwestward, feet slipping in the dust, the wind ever-increasing and seeming now to come from every side, and the light of moons, stars and comet all swallowed up in endless blackness. Even when Farendol, Vulk and Devrik summoned arcane lights, they pierced the swirling gray gloom for only a few feet before being swallowed as well.

No one was really sure how long they had been traveling when the second earthquake struck. Toran’s Khundari senses detected it first, and at almost the same instant as the mules – he grabbed tight at the lead line he held, pulling the beast’s head down, prepared to calm it.

But Korwin, lacking any warning, had his own lead line ripped from his hand, his panicked mule dashing into the murk as the earth began to heave and buckle. Toran, sensing more than seeing its bulk as it passed him, made a grab at it… but in doing so lost his grip on his own beast. With a curse he watched his mule disappear into the dark after its partner.

There was, quite literally, a king’s ransom in the saddle bags on those two animals, and it took no time at all for both Toran and Korwin to decide to go after them. While the ground still rolled and shook beneath them they staggered off into the dark in pursuit. It’s uncertain that even if they had been able to hear Farendol’s screams to stay together that they would have obeyed.

This quake lasted almost a full minute, and was much stronger than the first, the roar of the shifting earth almost drowning out the scream of the wind. Vulk’s barbarian charge was ripped from his grasp and he himself fell to his knees. It took several tries for the cantor to regain his feet, and he wallowed after the still semi-charmed warrior, calling his name…

Mariala was knocked off her feet almost at once, and by the time she regained her footing she had lost sight of both Devrik and Farendol in the maelstrom. She heard what she thought was Farendol, yelling something, and lurched off in the direction she thought they’d been going, eyes straining for a flicker of Devrik’s flame…

Devrik had managed to keep his balance, more or less, but in whirling around to grab for Mariala behind him he had let his palm flame flicker out. He couldn’t see her, but could just make out the shouts from the rear of the party, something about the mules! He started toward the sounds, but the winds whipped them around him confusingly, and he stopped. By the time he turned to where he thought Farendol was, he could no longer see even the Telnori…

Erol, bringing up the rear of the cavalcade, was lifted off his feet by the first shock of the quake, and slammed down hard on the hard, cracked ground, briefly stunning him. The almost subsonic roar of the temblor seemed to rattle the very teeth in his head as he staggered up, uncertain of the direction he’d been heading. Was that a shadowy form he saw there, one of his companions? He stumbled forward toward the dimly seen outline…

By a seeming miracle, some time after the shaking of the ground had subsided, stumbling around in the pitch black sand blaster that was the storm, the group eventually managed to find itself again. Toran and Korwin caught the mules, and Erol lurched up out of the dark behind them. A short time later Vulk and Barbarian 55 stumbled into them almost simultaneously from different directions. It was many minutes later that Mariala staggered out of the swirling darkness, while Devrik appeared a moment later from the other side of the mules. Only Farendol was still missing as the friends huddled together in what little windbreak the pack animals offered, putting their heads together to make themselves heard…

At that moment there came a sudden lull in the fury of the storm – the winds died somewhat, and overhead the light of the full Greater Moon broke through streamers of dust, dim but seeming a beacon after the utter darkness of the last few hours. And just visible a few dozen meters to his left, Toran spotted a dark bulk rising up from the rolling flatness of the Blasted March.

“There!” he cried, needing no more than a bellow to be heard now. “It might be a building, but even if it’s just a cliff or another ruin it will give us at least some shelter!”

“Yes,” Devrik agreed, his usual grating rumble even more unnerving in counterpoint to the shrieking wind. “It might even be the place Farendol was leading us to; if so, we may find him there. But there’s no point in stumbling about trying to find him – the winds could pick up again at any moment!”

And as if on cue, the fury of the storm suddenly renewed itself, seemingly redoubled, and the light of Aranda vanished as if the moon had been snuffed out. But they knew now the direction they needed to go, and it took only a few minutes to stumble their way to what they hoped was safety.

As they approached the hoped-for shelter another brief lull in the storm let them see that it was, indeed, a building – a low slung structure of stone, windowless and featureless, any ornamentation blasted away by five centuries of storms such as this one. Wide, shallow stone steps, at the moment scoured almost clean of dust, led up to great doors of badly corroded bronze, perhaps four meters tall.

As the strongest of the group attempted to pry them open, Mariala could see that the doors had once had carved panels, perhaps illustrating the purpose of the edifice… but try as she might, she could make no sense of them; they had long ago been eroded to nothing more than a suggestion of shapes and figures.

With much groaning and grinding of metal on stone, Devrik and Erol managed to pries open one leaf wide enough to permit the passage of the mule, once the beasts’ packs had been removed. As Toran cajoled the second mule into the darkness the winds began to rise once again, and it was with great relief that Devrik stumbled last into the relative calm of their shelter.

After hours of the senses-stunning howl of the storm, it seemed almost silent inside… but an echoing kind of silence. When both Devrik and Vulk had summoned up light, allowing Korwin to find and pull his lantern from a pack and light it in turn, it could be seen that their refuge was a single rectangular chamber, roughly 16 meters by 24 meters, which seemed to occupy the whole building. Dead glow stones were set in the walls near the 5 meter high ceiling.

Two large alcoves at either corner of the wall holding the doors sheltered large statues, apparently of tarnished silver, of what might be Telnori priestesses… except that the Telnori have no religion, as such. Whatever they depicted they were dwarfed my two truly massive statues, of an unmistakably martial nature, that flanked a great central column. The two warrior figures guarded a wide staircase that descended into darkness, and as the companions wearily set about making camp they tended to avoid coming too near the opening.

Toran was the only one undisturbed by the ominous stairwell, and volunteered to check it out for potentially dangerous surprises. Lighting one of the torches from a pack, he descended into darkness in a small pool of flickering orange light. The stairs went down perhaps six meters, ending in a three meter wide passageway that ran straight westward beyond his sight.

Moving forward slowly, battle-axe drawn, Toran examined the walls closely – good workmanship, he conceeded, for all that it was clearly Telnori-made. Drifts of dust covered the floor but the underlying structure seemed sound, despite the recent earthquake and centuries of who-knows-what other disasters. He could make out faint traces of color on some sections of the walls, but they were too faded and blurred by dust to make out.

After what he judged to be 15 or 16 meters Toran found himself at an archway opening into a larger space. Three wide, shallow steps led down into a chamber some seven meters across and 10 meters wide. The torchlight caught glints along the walls, and on closer examination the Khundari found that bands of various metals, of various widths, were set in the walls and that they encircled the room. Unlike the corroded doors and tarnished statues above, these metals seemed untouched by time, only furred to dimness by the ever-present fine dust of the Blasted March.

On the opposite side of the chamber from his own entrance, three matching steps rose up to what looked to be the room’s only other exit. But a sheet of smooth, featureless steel blocked the way, and a cursory examination yielded no obvious opening mechanism. Toran was as exhausted as any of the companions, and he wasted little time on the puzzle… it was unlikely that anything living existed down here in any case. As he made his way back to his friends he resolutely didn’t dwell on the fact that some things didn’t need to be living to be dangerous…

By the time he returned to the group and reported his findings, Erol and Korwin had prepared a cold meal and some light ale. After eating and some desultory worry about Farendol, the group drew straws for sentry duty. Devrik and Toran came up on the short end, and with resigned sighs took up posts at the door and the head of the stairs, respectively. In minutes the sounds of gentle snoring made it clear the others had dropped off almost instantly.

The wind continued to wail and howl outside, and to Devrik it almost sounded like fell voices calling to him… then the calls seemed to turn to rhythmic chants, almost hypnotic… but he was an old campaigner, and he had never fallen asleep whilst on watch in his life; he certainly wasn’t doing to start now. Of course that ale of Korwin’s might not have been… the best… idea…

Toran heard no voices, chanting or otherwise, on the winds. But the he did find the rhythmic breathing and snoring of his friends to be almost hypnotic in their own way… Mariala’s snore was quite lady-like, he thought… and an interesting counterpoint to Korwin’s deeper snore… lucky his training made falling asleep on duty impossible… and speaking of Korwin… maybe that ale… wasn’t such a… good idea… really…

Both Devrik and Toran jerked fully awake at almost the same instant, guiltily staring across at one another from where they had each slid down to the floor, and into sleep… but any thoughts of recrimination, self- or otherwise, were instantly dispelled by the sunlight streaming in through the now fully open doors – and the sound of birdsong!

As Devrik backed slowly away from the doors, drawing his sword, Toran moved toward them, eventually coming to a stop at his friend’s side, his own battle-axe in hand. They both stared in wonder at what they saw… the tall bronze doors where shining in the morning light, the bas-relief Telnori symbols sharp and clear and deep. The room itself was greatly changed as well – the walls now stained in shades of blue and white, the statues’ silver buffed and polished, and the glow stones bright with a warm yellow glow. The ceiling was a deep blue and set with thousands of flecks of silver, like the stars in the night sky.

But what really left them stunned and open-mouthed was the view out the open doorway – rolling fields of grain, copses of summer-green trees, and a small lake sparkling in the new-risen sun on a perfect summer day. And aside from the unexpected sounds of the birds, there was also the babble of running water and the rustle of leaves in the trees… sounds not heard in the Blasted March for over five hundred years! By the time the two erstwhile sentries could gather their thoughts together the others had awakened and were staring about them in equal shock.

“What the Void is going on?!” Devrik grated out, gripping his sword with both hands. As if that had broken a dam, the others all began to speak at once, exclamations of wonder, shock and disbelief. But before they could even begin to make sense of what had happened, the idyllic summer morning was suddenly shattered by the sound of clashing steel and fierce voices yelling in some unknown but harsh and guttural language.

A group of Telnori warriors appeared from the south, and rushed up the steps of the building toward the companions. It quickly became clear they were being pursued by an even larger group of – something horrible. They looked a little like Black Güls, but were very much larger than any of that race was likely to achieve; indeed, taller even then the Telnori they chased, by half a head or more!

“By Gheas, they look like Güruk-nai!” Toran blurted out in shock. “But that’s impossible!” The Güruk-nai had been minions of the Necromancer, his terrible shock troop, probably the ancestors of modern Gülvini… and driven to extinction in the century following the Great War.

There was no more time for thought or comment, however, as by then the score of Telnori warriors were around them, and their monstrous pursuers on the steps below. Four of the warriors turned and grabbed the two leaves of the great door, slamming them shut just in time – the guttural cries of anticipation turned to shrieks of thwarted rage. Metal weapons began pounding furiously on the bronze doors. Unfortunately, these seemed not to have been made to be barred nor locked, and several more warriors had to join their companions to keep the portal sealed.

The Hand had stepped back as the Telnori had rushed in, and it was only then that they realized that not only was Barbarian 55 not with them, the pack mules, along with their precious cargo, had vanished as well. But they had no time to digest this, as they were suddenly confronted by the leader of the Telnori soldiers.

“I thought the King had ordered all of the Younger Races evacuated to the coast days ago,” he asked in obvious exasperation. Tall, with dark hair, bronze skin and hazel eyes, he was, like most Telnori, beautiful. “Who are you and  what are you doing here, of all places?”

Vulk stepped forward to answer him, but had barely begun when a loud boom echoed through the chamber and the warriors at the door surged back as the leaves bent inward. They managed to shove them shut again, but it was clear the situation was unstable.

“Captain,” the man next to the leader said urgently. He was the only non-warrior in the group, a scholarly looking Telnori with ash-blond hair and pale green eyes. “We must hurry. If–”

“Yes, I know, Bertothin,” the commander barked, giving his companion a harried look. Turning back to the humans before him, he shook his head in annoyance and shrugged.

“I have no time to sort this out, and at this point it matters little – you are here, and quite frankly we can use all the help we can get. The Güruk-nai moved faster than we expected – already they are past the defences of the Khonira, and by midday they will be at the river. But they shall not pass the Ebony Bridge, the King’s Wards will yet protect the city.” He sounded more hopeful than certain on that last point.

“I am Elahir, Captain of the King’s Guard, and this is Bertothin the Keeper,” he went on, his piercing gaze taking in the group before him. “I perceive you are no minions of the accursed Necromancer, though you are no citizens of Serviana… who do you serve?”

“We serve the Star Council,” Vulk answered without hesitation. “And we are no friends of any creature of Chaos!”

Elahir frowned, and glanced at the Keeper, who frowned in turn and shook his head. “We do not know this Star Council you speak of, but if you oppose the Necromancer it is enough for me in this dire moment. Will you aid us now?”

A chorus of eager affirmatives caused the Telnori captain to actually smile, if only briefly. “Good! We must secure an artifact that lies at the heart of this sanctuary – not only to keep it out of the hands of the Necromancer, but to see that it comes to the King as quickly as possible! Now come!”

With an anguished look at his men holding back the deadly hoard beyond the door, he motioned the remaining half of his command to follow as he and Bertothin dashed down the stairs, the Hand right behind him. The stairwell and the corridor beyond it were lit by glow stones in the ceiling, and the walls that last night had been faded and dust blurred Toran now saw painted in abstract patterns of red, gold and white.

As they reached the three steps down into the room Toran had briefly explored the night before, the sounds of fierce fighting came echoing down the corridor from above – the Güruk-nai had broken through, and Elahir’s soldiers were doing their best to buy him time…

The room was much as Toran had last seen it, if much cleaner and with walls stained white. The metal bands seemed as shining and bright as they had before, and the steel wall blocking the exit as mysterious. Bertothin immediately dashed across the room and up the steps to the bright sheet of metal. He pressed his hands to the center of the barrier, and bent his head, muttering low-voiced words that even Mariala, standing closest to him, could not quite make out.

As eight glowing sigils appeared on the surface of the steel panel, across the room three battered and bleeding Telnori warriors backed down the steps into the chamber, followed by half a dozen Güruk-nai slashing viciously at them and howling in triumph. The three went down even as their companions rushed to join them, holding the monstrous fighters at bay.

But more were pouring down the corridor behind them, and Erol and Toran jumped in to join the fray, and Vulk called up his holy armor while drawing his own blade. Devrik began chanting silently, his eyes focused on the archway above them, and Mariala began to prepare her Fire Nerves spell… only to abort it as she saw a Güruk-nai, just inside the door, raise a blowgun to its lips. Mariala cried a warning, but too late, as Elahir staggered back, clasping a hand to his neck, and then collapsing to his knees.

A moment later the last of the Telnori warriors fell beneath the blades of their enemies, and only the Hand and Bertothin remained standing, along with three of the Güruk-nai. But more began pouring in from the corridor, too many more.

Until Devrik yelled “Duck!”

Erol, Toran and Vulk dropped to their bellies as a fireball flew from their friend’s hand, streaking over their prone forms to burst into a roaring sphere of flame just before the archway. Eight Güruk-nai briefly shrieked in agony and rage as they burned like torches, then collapsed into the  silence of death.

At Mariala’s call, Vulk turned and dashed to where she cradled Captain Elahir’s head in her lap. She held a black dart that she had pulled from his neck, where it had found a narrow gap in his armor. As Vulk sank to his knees next to them, the Telnori shook his head and looked grim.

“It’s no use, lad,” he said, grasping the cantor’s arm and pulling himself up. “I’m afraid I’m done for, curse the Necromancer and his poisons… but I have some fight left in me yet. That fireball has given them pause, but those monsters fear nothing, safe perhaps their master. The survivors will soon regroup…

“I shall hold them off as long as I can, which should be long enough.” He motioned toward the Keeper, who stood at the now open doorway out of the room. “Go with him, protect him, and he will get you to the heart of the Sanctuary. Take the artifact that we have so long guarded there – it is the Eye of Arial, the great gemstone into which the Lady of Heaven poured a portion of her vast power.

“It was a gift to the Telnori Kings of old as a shield and tool for them. But it has long been prophesied that the Shield would become a Sword in the hand of the King in a time of our greatest need. You must see that it reaches the hand of King Taharazod – he will use its power to animate the Iron Knight and defeat the Corruptor – and who knows, after that perhaps Vindus the Necromancer himself!”

With that he pulled himself up, and stepped away from the supporting grip of Vulk and Mariala. He wobbled for a moment, then seemed to draw strength from some inner reserve, and bent to pick up his sword.

“I shall stay with you,” Devrik declared, moving to the Telnori captain’s side. When the others started to object, he shook his head. “Erol, Toran, you must go with them, they may need your strong arms to protect the Keeper. I will follow behind, once we’ve finished off these beasts – there can’t be many of them left!”

Before anyone could marshal any further arguments six more Güruk-nai rushed into the room, with roars that curdled the blood. As Elahir and Devrik leapt forward to meet them, the others fell back to the open exit behind them and the waiting Keeper.

“Hurry,” he called, casting a worried look at the battle beyond them. “Once I seal this door, we need not fear the beastmen, they cannot open it.”

The companions streamed past him, then turned in the corridor beyond to look back as he moved to seal the steel panel. They saw Devrik decapitate one of his foes, and Elahir drive his sword through another – and gasped as a third brought a great axe down on the Telnori’s neck. As his captain fell in a fountain of blood Bertothin paused for one horrified instant – and in that moment a seventh, unseen Güruk-nai stepped from the shadow of the opposite archway and raised a blowgun to his lips.

With a piercing cry, the Keeper staggered back, clutching at his face. As he collapsed to the ground the shocked Hand could see the black feathered dart protruding from between the fingers that covered his left eye. Vulk and Mariala were instantly at his side, she pulling the dying man’s hands away, while the cantor plucked the poisoned dart from the eye. Bertothin convulsed and grasped Mariala’s hands tightly, his good eye seeking Vulk’s face.

“Hanar-Ariala-Ebeth,” he gasped forcefully. Then the strength seemed to leave him and he fell back. “Hanar-Ariala-Ebeth,” he repeated more weakly, then struggled to say something else… but his throat seemed to seize up, and in a few seconds he was dead. By this time Devrik had finished killing the last of the Güruk-nai warriors, and was just rising from checking on Elahir.

“I’m afraid he is dead too,” he told his friends as he cleaned and sheathed his sword. “But so are all the beast-men,” he added with a grim smile. “They may be bigger than Gülvini, but they die just as easily it seems. So, what now?”

“If they’re really all dead, maybe we can take a minute to figure out what the Void is going on,” Vulk replied from where he knelt over Bertothin’s body. Korwin had crouched down on the other side of the dead Telnori and was beginning to search him. At Mariala’s annoyed glare, he shrugged.

“He may have useful items we’ll need if we’re going to complete his task, as Captain Elahir asked us to,” he said calmly.

“Yes, but are we actually going to do that?” Erol asked. “I don’t understand what’s going on, and we haven’t had a minute to think since we woke up!”

“It seems fairly obvious,” Devrik replied. “Somehow we’ve been moved back in time – more than five hundred years, apparently, to the middle of the Great War, before the Desolation of Serviana. And if that’s really true, then maybe we can change the outcome…”

“Impossible!” Vulk said forcefully. “We’re taught that changing the past is not something that even the Immortals can do!”

“Yes,” Mariala agreed slowly, frowning in thought. “But that’s not the same as saying time travel itself is impossible. In fact, a large body of T’ara Kul thought holds that Nitarin Portals could just as easily be used to move through time as through space. In fact, Talorin himself claimed to have done it, and believed that he had created a… what did he call it? A divergent timeline…”

“The Church rejects that so-called ‘many worlds’ theory,” Vulk said. But then added after a thoughtful minute, “Of course, there is the Methankin Heresy, which claims the Immortals actually travelled back in time when they arrived on Novendo and found it a dead and sterile world – that gave them the time needed to bring forth new life, and for it to cover the world…”

“I don’t understand what any of that actually means,” Erol growled, kicking one of the bleeding bodies at his feet. “Like Toran said, these things sure look like what the legends say of the Güruk-nai, and we all know those Neandergüls have been extinct for five hundred years. I don’t know from ‘many worlds’ or ‘divergent timelines’ – I just know what I see and feel and smell.

“And it sure seems like we’ve gone back in time… and if so, nothing is going to stop me from trying to change what’s about to happen; I don’t give a damn about what the Church or anyone else says is impossible!”

“If there’s even a chance of changing the past,” Mariala said after a moment of silence, “or even of creating a new, better timeline… then I think we have to take it.”

“So, did our arrival here already change things,” Toran wondered. “Did we cause Elahir and Bertothin’s mission to fail? Or did it fail in, um, the ‘original’ timeline, and our arrival represents a chance to change that?”

“We defeated the Corruptor once before, in the future,” Devrik said with one of his grim smiles. “If this artifact of Elahir’s is as powerful as he says, then I’m sure we can help King Taharazod not only imprison the demon, but maybe even destroy it this time!”

“Past, present, whatever,” Korwin said, standing up with the Keeper’s satchel in his hands, “time is running on, one minute per minute, for each of us, and who knows if more of the Necromancer’s forces are  close behind these. If we’re going to go on, we’d best be doing it now… and I suspect we may need these.”

He opened the satchel to show his companions what he’d found – two sealed blue-dyed leather flasks of unknown liquid; a brown leather bag secured by a golden cord and containing black, loamy dirt; three square rods of translucent red crystal; and a large silver coin, incised with strange symbols that no one immediately recognized, although both Mariala and Toran thought they had an Ancient feel about them.

After laying out the Telnori bodies on the far side of the room from the stinking corpses of the Güruk-nai, the Hand returned to the corridor beyond the steel door Bertothin had opened. Toran tried for a few minutes, but could find no way to close it, so they reluctantly decided to move on and trust that nothing would come up from behind…

Ten meters down the corridor it opened up into another chamber, this one diamond shaped, with four doorways at the cardinal points and a large column of smooth, pure white marble rising from floor to ceiling in the center of the space. The walls of the room were white as well, but of a darker shade and of rougher stone, not marble.

Examining the central pillar more closely, if could be seen that eight sigils had been carved into the marble, at about chest height. The grooves of each had been stained a different color, and seemed to glow very faintly.

“These are the symbols of the eight types of magic recognized in the Telnori arcana,” Mariala said after examining them all. “Divination, Transmutation, Evocation, Abjuration, Illusion, Conjuration, Enchantment, and Necromancy.”

“Yes,” agreed Korwin. “And each in the traditional color of that type.”

He placed his hand on one of the symbols, the golden yellow of Divination. Nothing happened, and eventually they tried touching all of the symbols, with the same result. After a few fruitless minutes they decided to move on, exiting the chamber via the east archway, opposite to the one they’d entered by.

Another twelve meters of plain corridor ended in a cul-de-sac where the walls turned inward at 45° angels to create three blank walls. Excised into the gray stone of the central panel were three of the Telnori magical symbols: Illusion, Abjuration, and Conjuration. But these were not colored in any fashion, nor did they glow even a little.

Toran came forward to examine the dead end, looking for secret or magically concealed doors, but could find nothing. At Korwin’s suggestion, he touched his palm to the symbol of Illusion – which flared with a bright violet light, fading quickly away. Toran pushed and tugged and reexamined the panels, but nothing seemed to have changed.

The group turned and made their way back to the room with the marble column, where they then tried the southern exit. This led directly into a room seven meters square, with only one other exit, in the center of the western wall. But the group had reached the center of the room both doorways suddenly disappeared, leaving very solid looking stone walls in their place.

Only Toran had felt a slight dizziness as the walls seemed to materialize before them, and he examined both minutely. “These are very solidly built walls, and quite old,” he concluded. “They have never had doorways in them, secret, magical or otherwise – I’m certain of it!”

After a moment of thought, as the others continued to tap and pound on the walls and floors of their prison, he smiled with sudden inspiration.

“Hanar-Ariala-Ebeth!” he said loudly and clearly. And again he felt the slight dizziness as the walls vanished, to be replaced by the open doorways. He smiled smugly as the others congratulated him (although Korwin was certain he’d have figured it out momentarily himself).

“I think this room is linked to a nearly identical one nearby, via something like a Nitarin Gate,” he explained. “I felt the same dizziness I get when gating, and I knew it couldn’t be the same room!”

Able now to continue, the Hand followed the western corridor for twelve meters until it turned north, and then seven meters further on, where it ended in a cul-de-sac identical to first one they’d encountered.

“Not exactly identical,” Devrik pointed out when Vulk commented on it. “Look, the sigils are different – Evocation, Enchantment, and Necromancy this time.”

Like the first time, pressing palms to sigils resulted in a flare of colored light, but nothing else that anyone could detect. After more fruitless experimentation the group trudged back to the central room, and tried the northern exit.

Easily disarming an identical teleportation trap, they followed another eastern-leading corridor mirroring the southern one, to find another dead end. Here the sigils on the central panel were Necromancy, Divination, and Transmutation. More flares of colored light and frustration.

Eventually Mariala noticed a correlation between the sigils on the pillar facing each exit and those on the cul-de-sac walls, and also realized something else.

“They are protecting a powerful artifact here, right?” she explained. “Perhaps the way can never be opened by just one person – perhaps it needs three. A failsafe of sorts.”

So she and Devrik took the western passage, Toran and Erol the southern, and Vulk and Korwin the northern, carefully counting out their paces so that each would arrive at their panel at the same time, and place a palm to the sigil that matched the one on the pillar facing their exit.

Three sigils flared almost simultaneously, and with a low hum and grinding noise, the walls turned 45° left on a central core, opening the passage to all three corridors into an intersection with the first path continuing now to the west. Reunited, the group continued on into what no one doubted would be another test.

The new corridor stretched westward 15 meters to end at the top of a flight of stairs. Leading steeply down, they disappeared into a pool of still black water some three meters square. Two niches, one on each side near the bottom of the stairs, held statues of idealized young women carved from some translucent blue stone. The women held crystal bowls before them, and beyond them, on wide shelves set into the walls above the pool were two statues of recumbent panthers of shining onyx, with glittering green eyes of emerald.

Devrik and Toran were in the lead, and moved cautiously down the stairs, the others following behind with Erol and Korwin bringing up the rear. As they approached the water a matching flight of stairs could be seen rising from the far side of the pool, with a corridor beyond implied but not visible.

While they paused, contemplating the possible depth of the water and the practicality of leaping, freezing or otherwise avoiding it, a faint music came to their ears, from where it was impossible to say exactly. And rising up from the water were two of the most gorgeous creatures either fighter had ever seen… one was a lithe and buxom woman of piercing beauty, for all that she was translucent, as was the shorter, muscular man beside her, and equally breathtaking.

Although they seemed to be made of water, they also seemed to be warm, living flesh, and after a brief flash of doubt, both Devrik and Toran found themselves entranced… the figures strode up out of the water, moving seductively to reach for them… the female wrapped her arms around Devrik and bent to kiss him, while the  male did the same to Toran.

Completely ensnared by the charms of the water spirits, neither man heard the warning cries of their friends, nor noticed as they were slowly drawn into the water… all they were each aware of was the pure bliss they felt and the promise of more and greater to come… you could just drown in those blue eyes…

Erol felt a sudden “pop” in his head, and then he felt again the presence of Asakora / Kiren Frostwind in his mind. And with that whispering presence he suddenly knew what to do. Reaching into the Keeper’s satchel that Korwin carried, he drew forth the two blue leather flasks.

“Here,” he said urgently, thrusting one into the hands of the water mage. “Break the seal and pour the contents into the crystal bowl that nymph statue is holding! I think we’d better do it at the same time, though…”

He snapped open the seal on the flask he held, and after a moments hesitation Korwin did the same to his. Together they each turned to the statue nearest them, and poured what seemed to be simple water into the crystal bowls, filling them to the brim.

Below them Vulk and Mariala were struggling to pull Devrik and Toran back from the water, with little success. As soon as the water settled in the bowls, however, the two translucent forms suddenly froze in their seductions, then collapsed into cascades of water that soaked the two men as it flowed back into the pool.

Toran and Devrik shook their heads, and seemed momentarily bewildered, like men woken suddenly from a deep sleep.

“Why am I wet?” Devrik demanded in annoyance, shaking himself like a dog. Toran just peddled back quickly, up the stairs and out of the water, shuddering in horror. Khundari didn’t usually swim well, and he in particular just tended to sink like a stone…

After some argument, it was generally agreed that no one wanted to wade through the water, although it could now be seen to be little more than a meter deep. Instead, Korwin was allowed to try to freeze the water solid, a feat he managed to do, to everyone’s relief, without giving them all frostbite.

Once they had all slid carefully across the frozen pool, they ascended the stairs on the other side and found themselves in another corridor identical to the ones behind them. Another span of 15 meters brought them to another room, rather different than anything they had yet seen.

The corridor jutted out a meter or so into the ten meters square chamber, and ended. The chamber’s floor was half a meter below, and covered in a low ground cover of lush green vegetation. Taller plants grew in a great tangled profusion on either side of the room, leaving only a narrow strip of the ground cover clear down the center, leading to an archway in the far wall, where the corridor seemed to begin again.

Set in the ceiling was a strip of crystal panels running above the path, glowing with diffuse sunlight – if they hadn’t know they were many meters underground, the Hand might have thought it was a skylight. The light illuminated the central path through the overgrown room, but cast the sides into gloomy shadows. After several days in the barren sterility of the Blasted March, even gloomy greenery seemed a balm to weary souls.

This time Vulk was at Devrik’s side in the lead, and they stepped down onto the springy ground cover. They moved cautiously forward, and then heard Mariala behind them call out a question.

“Are those giant spider webs on those bushes? There, in back?”

At that moment vines suddenly shot up from the ground about their feet, and began to entwine themselves around everyone’s legs. Leaping about and hacking at the grasping vegetation, the group tried to avoid being held, but the plants seemed to spring up in increasing density – for everyone they hacked down, two more took their place!

One by one, the group began to be immobilized… and then things got worse. Half a dozen giant spiders, huge, black and hairy, multifaceted eyes glowing red, began to scuttle out of the shadows and move toward the increasingly helpless group.

Devrik lashed out with his sword, slicing one of the grotesque creatures in two. But triumph turned to horror as the two halves began to twist and flow, sprouting new legs, a new eye… in a moment there were two spiders where there had been one. Smaller, perhaps, but that was absolutely no comfort to anyone…

Even as Erol was hacking away at the vines that tried to restrain him, that whispering presence in his mind returned… and suddenly it was very clear what the solution to their dilemma was!

“Korwin!” he called, spearing a spider with his trident. “The dirt! Scatter the dirt around us, all along this path!”

This time Korwin didn’t hesitate, pulling the leather pouch from the satchel and tugging it open. Then he did hesitate, if only for a second – he really hated getting his hands dirty. But needs must, when a demon drives, so with a sigh he plunged his hand into the loamy black soil and began casting it about him.

Wherever the soil touched, the vines suddenly turned brittle, falling away into dust… and the humongous spiders stopped and then turned to scuttle back into the shadowy shrubbery. Freed from his vines, Korwin darted along the path, scattering dirt around his friends’ feet, and in moments the danger seemed to have passed.

No one was inclined to linger in the now-dubious charms of the garden room after that, and they exited with alacrity, into another westward running corridor of dressed gray-white stone. After another 15 meters the passage opened into a chamber six meters square, the room dominated by a large square plinth of black basalt, atop which a cheery fire blazed in a large bronze bowl. The yellow-stanined stone walls were lined with bands of black iron, six inches wide and maybe a foot apart, from floor to ceiling, which was five meters high. Set in the ceiling were matching bands of iron in concentric circles, ending in a silver disc set in the center.

The plinth was carved into sinuous shapes of snakes and flames intertwined, and from each of the four faces a larger snake head jutted out in serious bas-relief. The detail was exquisite, Toran notice, down to the diamond shapes lightly etched on the foreheads and running down the back… poisonous snakes then, he thought.

The room had no visible exits, save the doorway the group had entered through, and they began setting about looking for hidden or magical doors. Attempting to detect specific magic in a place like this, which was obviously permeated with arcane energy, was pointless, although Mariala gave it a shot anyway.

Just as she was announcing that she could detect nothing beyond the ambient magic field the single doorway into the room vanished, replaced by a blank stone wall identical to the other three. At the same instant the fire in the bronze bowl suddenly flared, shooting up to splash off the silver disc in the center of the ceiling.

Almost instantly the flame died down again, although to about twice it’s previous volume and size, and the silver disc began to glow… at first yellow, then red, then blue… within a minute it was white hot! At that point the glow quickly began to spread out along the concentric bands of the ceiling. The temperature began to rise noticeably…

“Toran,” Vulk called to his friend from across the room. “Did you feel dizzy? Is this another teleportation trap?”

“No, I felt nothing,” the Khundari replied, staring intently about him. “No, I’m certain we’re in the same room. But maybe – Hanar-Ariala-Ebeth!”

They all waited in sweating anticipation, but the glowing bands continued to spread outward, reaching the walls and then beginning to run down those bands. Within three minutes all the metal bands were glowing red hot, and everyone was forced toward the center of the room by the increasing heat radiating from them. Already the room was hotter than any forge, and the bands began shifting from red to blue…

Somewhat more accustomed than the others to intense heat, Toran continued to examine his surroundings, while Devrik tried to use his pyrokinesis to control the flame atop the plinth and Korwin attempted to summon ice and cold… both to no avail.

But the Khundari suddenly slapped himself in the forehead, and grabbed the Keeper’s satchel from Korwin. Rummaging inside, he pulled out the three square rods of red crystal and held them up. Yes, they were square in cross-section – unless you rotated your perspective 45°. And then they were diamond shaped!

“Like the three-person door,” he crowed. “Three crystal keys, all placed at once, and I think I know where!” He pointed to the etched diamond shape in the middle of the forehead of the nearest snake carving.

“But there are four snake heads,” Vulk gasped, the increasingly hot air beginning to sear his lungs. “And only three keys. Which three heads…”

Toran thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “The previous three-way lock used the west, north and south points of the compass… the Telnori are obsessive about the west… lets stick with the pattern…”

He handed a key to Devrik and another to Mariala, and the three of them took up positions at the three snake head carvings. Raising the crystals to the diamond shapes, on his command they all pressed downward. With a soft resistance the rods began to sink into the stone, until only a few centimeters remained protruding.

Immediately the metal bands in ceiling and walls began to fade from white hot, through blue, to red and yellow, and then to cool black iron once more. The flame atop the plinth shrank to it’s original size, and the temperature in the room dropped quickly from nearly lethal to merely very warm. Everyone was sopping wet with sweat, but they were alive.

After several minutes of gasping recuperation, it was Erol who first noticed that the walls at the north and south sides of the room now had large archways in them, leading to corridors beyond. After some debate it was decided to try the southern corridor first.

Only three meters up the passage turned back eastward, and after an equally short distance debouched into a six meter square room filled with the tinkling sound of falling water. Three basins of carved basalt jutted out from the north, east and south walls, with silver pipes above them from which clear water gushed out to splash into them. The walls were of a deep red stone, the floor and ceiling black.

But what instantly caught the eye and seduced the senses was in the center of the room – on a square of white stone, was a circular plinth of the same dark red stone as the walls, a meter-and-a-half high. Atop the the plinth floated a sphere of shifting, translucent energy, and within its heart was the tantalizing suggestion of… something… difficult to make out… but something infinitely wonderful…

Mariala tore her gaze away from the mesmerizing sphere, after some unknown time, and recognized it for what it was – another trap. Her companions all stood staring blankly at the shifting colors of the sphere, with exception of Toran who just rolled his eyes at her in resignation.

“You realize they’ll probably just stand there until they starve,” he said. “Or, more likely, die of thirst.”

She clapped her hands sharply, while the dwarf whistled piercingly, and they both yelled.

“Hey, wake up guys!!”

“Get your heads out of your assess!!”

With a start Devrik and Korwin suddenly shook their heads and looked away from the shining sphere. Vulk took a moment longer to come out of it, and it took several shakes and a slap to bring Erol up from his trance. In the end they all successfully threw off the illusion of the sphere, which thereafter looked like nothing more than a simple crystal ball.

“Not even a good crystal ball,” Toran snorted. “Look at all those damn inclusions!”

The northern passage, as expected, was a mirror image of the southern, except that it jogged west instead of east. But coming around the corner the group came to a sudden halt. Where they would have expected a room similar to the fountain chamber, instead they found a wall of dirt and stone where the corridor had collapsed.

“Well, we’re not getting through that, I can promise you,” Toran said glumly. “Not without a work gang of my cousins and a lot of pick-axes.”

But as they started to turn away and consider what to do next, Vulk suddenly made a surprised noise and darted forward. He vanished into the pile of rubble and dirt, his voice drifting back to them.

“It’s another illusion!”

Toran was the next to see through the deception, muttering angrily to himself that he should never have missed such an obvious fake… one by one the others came to see through the illusion, Erol again the last one to pierce it, and only then when Toran took him by the arm, had him close his eyes, and guided him through the imaginary wall of debris.

Passing through the illusory landslide, the group found themselves in a chamber about seven meters square, with walls of rough golden sandstone. The ceiling was vaulted and eight meters high, done in a deep red stone, with glow stones set around the edges. The central portion of the floor was raised almost a meter above the rest, and on this section rested a round plinth of red stone some two meters high.

Four sets of narrow steps curved up its sides to where, floating in a sphere of coruscating blue-white energy was a large transparent red crystal some 5” in diameter, faceted along the rim and back, with a smooth plane on the face, set in an intricately carved setting of silvery metal, hung from a heavy chain of the same.

It was difficult to make out the details of the carvings from the floor of the chamber, and Erol, Toran, Devrik and Korwin all moved to a staircase and began to ascend. But it became increasingly difficult to keep going, the air seeming to grow thicker around them. By the halfway point it had become quite impossible to move forward.

From that point, however, they could each see the top surface of the plinth, which was deeply carved with the runes of a Greater Ward, glowing blue-white like the sphere floating above it. And the details of the carvings on the pendant seemed like they were just on the edge of resolving… but never quite did so, although they left an unsettled feeling in one’s mind…

Coming down the stairs was almost as difficult as going up them, at first, although the effort got easier the closer they got to the floor. A great discussion then ensued about what they had each seen, and what it all meant, and what course they should take next. Only Mariala took little part in the debate, staring pensively around the room and returning her apprehensive gaze again and agin to the pendant floating above them.

In the end it was decided that they would have to try and dispel the enchantment that protected the pendant, obviously the Eye of Arial. It was unlikely that any one of them could break a Telnori enchantment that must be very strong, but perhaps if they pooled their power…

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Mariala finally said, as the other mages in the group prepared to cast the massive Dispel spell. “Something about this place feels… wrong…”

But the others would not be persuaded, feeling the pressure to recover the artifact and change the course of history. While Erol, Vulk and Mariala watched, Devrik, Toran and Korwin linked their powers and cast the spell… and Erol gave it a surreptitious boost…

There was a flash of violet light around the energy sphere encapsulating the pendant, and the flickering light of the ward began to flare randomly. And at that moment an enormous Güruk-nai burst into the room, roaring inarticulately and swinging a massive battle-axe.

Devrik, still partially dazed from the united spell casting, reached for his battlesword, but stumbled to one knee and almost dropped it. Vulk and Erol, not part of the spell, drew sword and javelin respectively, and attacked, to no apparent effect as the massive beast jinked and twisted away with speed and agility belying its size.

Toran and Korwin, also coming out of the haze of the joint spell, made their own moves – the Khundari whipped up his crossbow and launched a bolt at the monster, while the Oceanian mage began his Ice Needle spell. The bolt missed, and the spell would take a few seconds…

Mariala, shocked out of her worried funk, reacted instinctively, and with a gesture hurled a blast of Fire Nerves at the hulking brute. It hit, and the creature staggered back. Devrik was on his feet again, and preparing to swing his holy sword –

At that moment the Ward protecting the pendant fell to the Dispel of the Hand’s mages – and in that instant the scales suddenly fell from Mariala’s eyes, and she saw several things at once.

She saw that the room they were in was old, cracked and full of the dust of the Blasted March, the glow stones dead, the only light the malevolent red glow of the pendant floating above them –

She saw that there was no giant Güruk-nai in the room, only the Telnori Druid Farendol, grimacing in pain as his nerves burned, the pain apparently blinding him to the danger on his left –

She saw Devrik, poised to plunge his sword into the back of Farendol –

She screamed.

“Devrik, no! It’s an illusion! It’s Farendol!”

Devrik jerked his head around at her scream, but it was too late to fully stop the blow. His sword went into the Druid’s back, if not all the way through, and he didn’t twist and rip it out as he might otherwise have done. But the damage was enough. The blade pierced his heart and the Telnori died.

But with his dying thought, he send out a mental blast that was like a cold but bracing wind, shredding the illusions that fogged the minds around him, freeing them.

Devrik stared in horror at the body at his feet and the blood dripping from his sword, black in the ruddy light of the stone above him. Like Mariala, he now saw the reality of the room around him, as did all of their companions.

Before any of them could react, however, they were each frozen in place and pulled inward, to the centers of their own minds, where they confronted… something different for each of them. But the gist was the same – they could have whatever their hearts most desired in all of Space and Time. All they had to do was take up the pendant, and they would have it all, worlds at their feet…

Each one wrestled with their demon, not yet knowing it was all one demon, and one by one they rejected its temptations, piercing this final deception and stripping away the masks to see what they truly faced – an embodiment of Chaos and evil that promised only death.

All except one…

They were back in the red-lit chamber again, Farendol still dead at their feet, and the crystal pendant pulsing vilely above them. Vulk dashed over to the fallen Telnori and immediately began to channel his healing energy into the dead form, knitting torn tissue back together, preparing to try to restore life…

“It is Haranol, the Sakal-Ur,” Mariala said in horror. “The Elemental Demon Lord of Air. By all the Immortals and the All itself, what have we done?!”

“No,” Devrik said dully, staring down at the man who had gifted him his wonderful new sword. The sword he had just killed him with. “It’s not a disaster yet… at least, not a complete disaster. As long as no one touches the accursed artifact, the demon remains trapped within it and is powerless against us… without a physical form all it had were illusions. And we have survived those. Most of us…”

“But we can’t just leave the pendant here, now that we’ve broken the Wards,” Korwin said sickly. “I don’t know how far its power reaches, but if it ensnares some other unsuspecting traveller… don’t the Telnori patrol the March? If they come too near…”

“Yes, we’ll have to warn the Star Council, and stay… well, not here, but nearby… until help can arrive…” Mariala said, her numbed mind beginning to work again.

It was Toran who noticed that Erol, who hadn’t spoken since they’d broken the demon’s hold on their minds, was no longer standing next to him. He looked around and saw the ex-gladiator moving toward the stairs around the pillar, eyes fixed on the glowing pendant that still hung in the air, though it’s shielding sphere was gone.

“Erol, no!” Toran yelled, and leaped after his friend. But Erol, although apparently still under the demon’s beguilement, was a seasoned and crafty fighter, and he dodged the Khundari’s grab. Dropping all attempts at stealth, he now raced for the pendant, his friends in a scrambling rush to stop him. Just as he reached the top of the pillar, Mariala hit him with her Syncope of Shala in an attempt to put him to sleep.

He staggered on the last step, his eyes drooped, and his hand faltered as it reached for the prize… but momentum was (or was not, in the end) on his side, and as he fell forward his hand caught onto the pendant, clutching it even as he collapsed across the plinth.

For a moment everyone froze, and Mariala thought they’d done it, they’d saved Erol from a fate worse than death – and the world from a great deal of suffering. But then Erol stirred, and rose to his feet – rather bouncily, she thought with an almost hysterical internal giggle, quickly supressed.

The pendant was still clutched in Erol’s hand – no, not Erol, they could all somehow see. Perhaps it was the deep red glow in his eyes. Whatever now possessed their friend’s body raised the pendant and slipped the chain around its neck, settling the heavy stone on its breast.

“Well, isn’t this nice?” something said in a voice two octaves lower than Erol’s, stretching Erol’s face in a ghastly smile that managed to look nothing like the real Erol’s. “You can’t imagine how good it makes us feel to have a body again… and how maddeningly dull the latticed order of a crystal prison is to a being of pure Chaos. Frustrating, let us tell you!”

Throwing off their moment of shocked despair at realizing Erol was almost certainly dead, his friends moved as one to take down the creature who now occupied his shell… and maybe it wasn’t too late to save his soul, at least…

Devrik  shot a Fireball from his left hand, while at the same time throwing his battle sword with his right, as if it were a javelin; Korwin blasted out the freezing Breath of Arandu; Mariala again shot out a spray of Fire Nerves; and Vulk called down the blessings of Kasira on them all as he began preparing Abon’s Authority. Toran quietly faded into the shadows, slipping a bolt into his crossbow.

Haranol/Erol laughed deeply and in apparent sincerity as it was wrapped in flames, seared with cold, and nerve enflamed. As the visible effects faded away, its laughter died to a chuckle. It was holding Devrik’s sword, and as it looked closely at it a sudden spasm crossed its face, and it hurled the weapon to the floor – behind it. Then it regained its composure and smiled again.

“Ah, that tickled a bit… the Fire Nerves, we think. The others were just… refreshing.” It gestured abruptly, and a great wind suddenly began to swirl around the room. In seconds it had grown so strong that the dust and debris became like flensing knives, and everyone was forced to shield their faces lest they be blinded.

Then the wind broke into several separate whirlwinds, wrapping each of the humans in a fierce grip and lifting them off the ground. As they hung suspended in midair, on a level now with the demon on its tall pedestal, the creature frowned.

“One, two, three, four… weren’t there five of you? Oh yes, the little one… little dwarf, little dwarf, come out from the shadows… you can’t hide from us, you filthy little rat!”

With that a fifth cyclone plucked Toran from the shadows and whirled him into place near the others. Now the Erol-creature was grinning maniacally, eyeing its new toys in apparent delight.

“We thank you so much for freeing us,” it gloated, beginning to spin them slowly around him, like planets orbiting a demented sun. “And for bringing us this wonderful body… we would have made do with any of you sub-creatures, of course, but this one was the best of this pathetic lot, already attuned to our element.

“We would have loved to eat its soul, as we’ve done with so many others over the millennia, adding their distinctiveness to our own and increasing the Chaos within… but best to eject it, to take no chances, when so newly freed, and we are not at full –” it suddenly stopped, then veered sharply in another direction.

“Ah, how we remember the delights of these squishy bodies of yours! The many pleasures that can be squeezed from them… now, we can never remember… which of your types is meant to be fucked?

“Oh well, it scarcely matters, we’ll just fuck you all – we do remember that that was always so much fun. Especially once I’ve reshaped this body to our accustomed form.. you won’t believe how big all our… bits are… and sharp, too.” It grinned lasciviously, flicking a tongue that seemed much longer than it should over teeth that looked much sharper than they had earlier.

Indeed, Erol’s former body was visibly larger than it had been his, the skin rougher, the fingers longer… and the chest was noticeably broader, which apparetnly was beginning to discomfit the creature, as it casually reached up and ripped Erol’s breast-and-back armor off, dropping it to the floor.

“Much better,” it grinned again, and Mariala was horribly fascinated… despite the changes, it was still definitely Erol’s body, and yet the face looked very different, the animating spirit moving or holding muscles in a different way… and the body language was all wrong… and why the Void was she spending her last minutes noticing crap like this?!

“Now were were we,” the demon went on. “Ah yes, the sex… and then there’s the food! I’m sure you’ll all taste quite yummy, especially after I’ve filled you up with my–”

“Sleep!” Vulk suddenly called out in the irresistible voice of Abon’s Authority. And for just a moment they demon swayed, the red eyes half closing. The winds faltered, and the prisoners sank slowly floorward. But the moment passed, and the Erol-thing shook its head, snarling in rage, and seizing control of the winds again.

But before it could regain total control, Toran brought up the crossbow he’d kept carefully hidden behind his back, and fired at almost point blank range. The bolt moved even faster than the demon could react, at least in its still-weak new form, and pierced the creatures chest through-and-through. Unfortunately on the right side, not the left, and so missed the heart.

But it staggered back, clutching at the wound as red-black blood gushed from it, and the winds died away completely, dropping the surviving members of the Hand to the floor. Devrik dove for his battlesword, which he had landed near, Toran cranked another bolt into his crossbow, and the others prepared spells and rituals in desperate speed.

Above them the demon-Erol still stood, and the wounds in its chest were already beginning to heal… rage twisted its features, but Devrik thought he also saw doubt. And fear.

“Gah, you vermin are not worth our time,” the demon spat out. “Do not doubt that you shall meet us again, pathetic sub-creatures… and on that day, oh how we will make you suffer!”

While it spoke a whirlwind had been forming around it, and on its final word the demon vanished, gone with the wind. The room was plunged into total darkness.

Vulk quickly granted them all the Fortune’s Light, and they drew together over the body of Farendol, in grief-stricken silence over the loss of both the Druid and, more unbelievably, Erol. It took a few minutes for them to notice that Vulk knelt by the dead Telnori – and that he wasn’t dead anymore!

“I’ve healed the worst of the trauma,” the weary cantor sighed. “But he’s not waking up. I’m not sure what’s wrong…”

“I don’t know either,” Devrik replied. “But I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He certainly hoped so, because then he wouldn’t be responsible for murdering a six hundred year old man who had befriended them.

“We have to get out of here,” Mariala said suddenly, shaking off the fog of grief momentarily. “We have to warn the Council… Master Vetaris... everyone! We’ve just released one of the most powerful demons in existence, and we have to warn them!”