Swords rang out and then they didn’t, and a whip cracked loudly and then silently.
The battle raged in complete and utter quiet. The green spellcasters, their dweomers lost in the muting silence, tried to flee, predictably, but Guenhwyvar leaped far and high and bore one down beneath her.
Catti-brie hit the second square in the back with an arrow as it half ran, half hopped away, obviously trying to get beyond the radius of her silence spell.
And then it was clear, and turning, and casting . . .
. . . only to catch a glob of green goo right in the face. The slaad tried to claw it away, sputtering.
As Jarlaxle was still in the globe of silence, his laugh could not reach its ears.
That slaad turned and fled.
A red slaad fell, its face cut in half by Charon’s Claw. The other turned and tried to get away, but Zak was with it, step for step, then Jarlaxle, too, stabbing it over and over until it stumbled down, while Entreri helped Guen finish the green-skinned monster.
Catti-brie, still back in the room and outside her spell of silence, turned and leveled Taulmaril, picking her shots. She found few opportunities, though, for more drow and dwarves and orcs had joined in the fight, the few remaining giants and slaadi being taken down under the furious, coordinated assault. Catti-brie put away the bow then, and turned her attention to her wounded allies. And there were many, Galathae among them, though the paladin continued to battle, her shining blue sword almost fully red from the blood of her enemies.
The battle wound down quickly in the room and in the tunnel, with Jarlaxle, Entreri, and Zak running off after the fleeing green slaad and Guen returning to Catti-brie’s side.
The woman moved about, casting her spells of healing and restoration where needed, where there seemed any possibility of disease or of injected eggs. She kept looking to Ilina for confirmation, and the aevendrow priestess kept nodding.
“Take no chances with any wounded by a slaad,” Ilina called to her, as Galathae had instructed her back when they had first set out. “Cure an infection, whether you think there is one or not.”
Catti-brie nodded and went at her work with fervor, fueled by her memories of Zak’s brutal trials. She hoped—she could only hope—that her spells would be enough.
One poor dwarf writhed about, having been stepped on by a giant, and the aevendrow priest working over him had no spells to deal with such a brutal injury. Catti-brie nudged him aside, closed her eyes, and called to Mielikki for her greatest healing gift. She held the dwarf steady as the magic flowed between them, as the waves of warmth flowed through him.
When she let him go, he was no longer writhing, no longer gurgling in agony. He looked at Catti-brie with sincere appreciation. She kissed him on the forehead and thanked him for his courage this day, promising him that he would fully heal.
When she stood up, she felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to see a smiling Ilina. “Come,” the drow told her. “Galathae is resting.”
They started away, but Catti-brie stopped and motioned to the far wall, to a giant who was sorely wounded but still stubbornly struggling against heavy silk cords that were being wrapped about it, holding it down and helpless.
When it began to scream, one of the orcs walked up to it and slapped a handful of goop—hagfish mucus, Catti-brie believed—over its mouth, but pointedly kept it clear of the behemoth’s nose.
Scanning the rest of the room, Catti-brie noted drow moving about, stabbing falling slaadi with their white swords and spears, and checking fallen giants to make sure they were truly dead. Others ran the shelves, collecting the surviving eggs, placing them in secure boxes set on some of the litters.
“A prisoner?” Catti-brie finally asked when she and Ilina moved near to Galathae, who was leaning against the wall.
“We need some clarity on what this portends,” Galathae answered. She pointed to the original battle in the room, to the baby creature cut in half and lying dead on the floor.
“It looks like a remorhaz,” Ilina said.
“The polar worms, yes,” Catti-brie agreed.
“This is a dangerous turn,” Galathae said, her gaze locked on the giant. “We’ll get our answers from that giant.”
“Then what?” Catti-brie asked. “I saw no giants among the folk of Callidae.”
“Nor will you” was all Galathae would reply. “When our priests and wizards are done interrogating him and scouring his thoughts, he will be mercifully and quickly dispatched.”
Catti-brie wasn’t about to argue. She looked to the giant, fully bound now but still kicking at anyone moving too near, even throwing itself over at one point in an attempt to crush an aevendrow under its bulk.
Catti-brie turned to the now-quiet tunnel, diving farther down into the mountain. Some aevendrow were there, discussing options. She moved past them, seeing the three fallen slaadi.
She heard a shout from far below. The aevendrow came past her, weapons ready.
“Go to Zaknafein,” Catti-brie instructed Guenhwyvar, and the panther leaped away, rushing past the surprised aevendrow and down into the darkness.
Chapter 23
Writhing Riddles
Down through the near-darkness Guenhwyvar ran, speeding along the corridors, quick-stepping down a long, enclosed rough-hewn circular stair of huge proportions, coming out on a ledge overlooking a natural chamber where a battle was well under way.
To the side she saw Zaknafein and Entreri rolling and running circles about a giant, stabbing where they could find an opening, diving and dodging swings from a heavy club. A second giant was on the floor, crawling, pulling itself along, destroyed legs behind it, leaving a trail of blood on the uneven stone, its very life pouring out with each labored movement.
Not far away, a green monster hurled flame at Jarlaxle, who responded with a lightning bolt, a duel of magic back and forth.
Guenhwyvar leaped high and far, silently flying across the room.
She felt the impact as she crashed down on the green slaad. She felt it folding up beneath her, dug in her claws so that as it crumpled and tumbled, she would not let it go.
She bit deep and hard into the side of the monster’s head, back claws raking fiercely, front claws and teeth digging deeper, holding fast as the beast thrashed.
Raking, digging, long after the beast lay still.
Freed from his magical duel—one that had stung him painfully in many places, including his forearm, where the skin was licked and shriveled by a fireball—Jarlaxle gave a yelp of surprise, then a great deal of thanks for Guen’s unexpected intervention. He turned his attention to the remaining enemy, to his friends staying one step ahead of disaster and slowly, painfully, wearing the giant down.
Jarlaxle lifted his uninjured arm, waiting for the giant to come around, then shot a bolt of lightning into its ugly face.
The brute howled and dropped its club, its hands going up to slap against its destroyed eyes.
Entreri and Zak went for the kill, leaping up and stabbing, leaping and stabbing, Charon’s Claw in its belly, Zak working Cutter against a treelike leg while repeatedly snapping his powerful bullwhip up across the giant’s hands and face. They had it disoriented and off balance.
They weren’t about to let it ever find its balance again.
The behemoth came down hard to one knee, its left leg torn apart by the fine edge of Khazid’hea. Entreri went to work methodically, his razor-like red blade sliding up to the hilt with every thrust.
The giant crumpled and expired, not far from where the other one now lay still.
The area fell quiet. Looking about, Jarlaxle said, “What is this place?” It was a large chamber, mostly natural but with shaped sections like the ledge and the stairs. Several tunnels ran off it, most of them worked stone, hinting at a much larger complex.
“The green frog is dead,” Zak replied. “We should get back with the others. There’s too much here for us to risk getting separated.”
“Agreed,” said
Jarlaxle. “But I’m still curious. What is this place?”
“A nursery,” Entreri answered from a large door he had just opened near to the last kill, one that led into a chamber that opened back under the tunnel that had brought them here. Jarlaxle and Zak hustled to join him.
“Amazing,” Jarlaxle murmured when he got there and peered in. The room before them was brighter than this one, with the same glowing globes as the room above, except this glow was purple instead of red, with one enormous light globe hanging over an open stone pit with angled walls so that the bottom was wider than the top.
So that the polar worms could not crawl out.
The three companions moved to the edge of the hole. Below them, scores and scores of young remorhazes squirmed and tangled. Some flapped tiny wings set just behind their heads to lift up toward the newcomers, toothy jaws opening to reveal their gullets, like baby birds when the mother returns to the nest. These were larger than the hatchling in the other room, some twice, some thrice, some four times that length. Several of the larger ones showed a heated glow along their spines, and the friends could feel the warmth from twenty feet above them.
“Why would . . .” Entreri started to ask, but the question trailed off and he just shook his head.
“Building an army, perhaps,” Jarlaxle answered. “To send them all crawling for Callidae.”
“How could they even control them?” Entreri replied. “And how big do these ugly things get?”
“Look at this,” Zak said, walking over to them and holding out his hands, showing them several crystals. He motioned behind him, and the other two followed his gaze to the corner, to a pile of crystals.
Down in the pit, the worms began to click their mandibles frantically, and soon almost all of them had the front parts of their centipede-like bodies upright, small wings filling this room with a furious fluttering sound.
Jarlaxle motioned to Zak, who tossed one of the crystals down. The worm nearest its descent snapped at it, but missed, sending it clattering to the floor, where a cluster of polar worms attacked it, cracking it, powdering it with those powerful jaws.
“They eat crystals?” Entreri said skeptically.
“Look at the floor,” Zak said, for indeed, now that they knew what they were looking for, the friends noted bits of crystal all about.
A low growl from Guenhwyvar and movement in the other room reminded them that this place wasn’t secured, but they were relieved indeed when they turned about to find a sizable contingent of Callidaeans moving into the larger chamber.
Azzudonna and Emilian joined the companions at the edge of the pit.
“These beasts are among the most feared monsters to us in Callidae,” Azzudonna explained. “They can burrow through the glacier walls at great speed and come upon us anywhere in the city. That our enemies are apparently breeding them is unwelcome news.” She turned back to the other room, calling upon the soldiers. “Destroy them. All of them.”
Aevendrow and orcs filtered in, all armed with long spears.
“I pray we’ve caught them early in this devious plot,” Emilian said, moving to join the friends. “These are all young, very young, I think. I have seen some truly monstrous examples of their kind, several times larger than the largest in this pit, fierce and huge enough to swallow a drow whole. They do not feel the cold, they cannot be hurt with fire, and their jaws bite with more power than our armor can deflect.”
“So we’ve seen,” said Zak.
“Come,” Emilian bade them. “Let us finish our tasks here and be quickly to Callidae to alert the Siglig.”
“This bodes ill,” Azzudonna agreed.
More than you think, Jarlaxle thought but did not say, for he was afraid that he was beginning to piece this all together now. He glanced over at the pile of crystals, then back to the pit, as the high-pitched screams of the doomed creatures began to fill the air.
The cacophony did not bring any more giants or slaadi into the room, and the scouting parties discovered that the other tunnels led mostly to empty rooms or back up to empty caves on the surface. Their job here completed, the expedition soon after departed for Callidae, the bound frost giant, unhatched eggs, and several dead young remorhazes in tow.
“They’re going to kill that giant tonight,” Catti-brie told the other three as she joined them for dinner one night, the expedition about halfway back to Callidae.
“If you expect me to speak against that, you’ll be sorely disappointed,” Jarlaxle replied.
“If they need any help . . .” Entreri offered.
“Their priests and wizards have used spells to scour his thoughts and have learned little,” Catti-brie explained. “He is a dull-witted brute, more than you would expect, and it seems as if he has been tending this place for a long while. He doesn’t even know what they do with the remorhazes when they leave the hatchery—and it would seem from what the aevendrow have learned that many have indeed left this place, unfortunately.”
“It seems obvious enough what will be done with them,” said Zak.
“Does it?” Jarlaxle asked, his serious tone catching them all off guard.
“You heard Azzudonna and Emilian,” Zak reminded them.
Jarlaxle threw the question out to any of them. “Why do you think the hot springs flow? What brings all those small tributaries to create the lifeblood of the aevendrow city, the River Callidae?”
“Probably a volcano deep below,” Entreri answered. “Maybe a god of fire, like—”
“Like Maegera,” Catti-brie finished. “I had thought that. Is it possible that this glacier lies atop a captured primordial of fire?”
“I thought the glacier was an elemental of ice, or a wind god, Qadeej, or whatever they call it,” Zak added.
Catti-brie shrugged. They could not know.
“Did you feel such a primordial back in the town near to the glacier?” Zak asked her. “When you reached through the ring, was there another Maegera there to answer?”
“I didn’t sense anything like that. Just the glacier itself.”
“Yet the aevendrow have been here for millennia, so they claim,” Zak put in. “This area they have carved out has been stable all that time. Could opposing primordials be that evenly matched for that long?”
“Is it stable? Weren’t there five boroughs until fairly recently?” Catti-brie countered.
“Yes, as with the abandoned Ulutiun village,” said Jarlaxle. “Is the glacier gaining the edge?”
“What are you getting at, Jarlaxle?” Catti-brie asked.
“They ate crystal,” he replied.
“Yes?” she said, not getting his point. “We have seen polar worms in Icewind Dale. They eat anything and everything, including humans and drow. I have heard it said that they eat crystals to gain the power to so wickedly heat their back scales. Others say they eat crystals and stones to sharpen those teeth, or mandibles, or whatever they might be.”
The mercenary nodded and looked to Zaknafein. “They ate crystal.”
A look of epiphany came over the weapon master. “The breathless rooms,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
“There are places in the Underdark,” Jarlaxle explained to his surface-dwelling friends, “vast chambers of great heat and energy, though few are anywhere near to Menzoberranzan. We call them the breathless rooms, because if you remain in one, the heat of it will burn your lungs so that you will never again be able to speak, or perhaps even to draw breath. Huge, vast chambers full of crystals. Beautiful, like flowering gardens of stone, but deadly. Crystals the size of the tallest trees of the Crags. Even the svirfneblin, who value such pretty baubles above all else, cannot mine them, because the heat is too much for them. Their priests would have to work harder than the miners simply to protect them from the burning energy of the massive crystals.”
“I have heard of drow priestesses whose faith was doubted being locked into such a chamber, where only their fealty to Lolth could grant them enough spells of protection to s
urvive the duration,” Zak added.
“So, you believe that the slaadi and giants are breeding the worms to . . . what? Eat crystals?” Catti-brie asked.
“They feel no heat and feel no cold,” Jarlaxle reminded. He noted the doubting expressions coming back at him.
“Breathless rooms wouldn’t bother remorhazes,” Zak said.
“It is only a possibility,” Jarlaxle admitted.
A large storm came up the next day, but the following few days went along uneventfully, with no enemies but the wind and the ice coming up before the expedition. When the clouds finally broke, they were swept away on bitterly cold winds, but the four friends had their magic to protect them, and the clothing of the Callidaeans clearly kept them all warm enough.
The stars sparkled above; the moon made its return, and the Merry Dancers, too, green curtains setting all the frozen land aglow. On a high pass, the friends saw the river of ice, which they were now calling the Qadeej Glacier, in the distance, stretching out over the ice pack far away from the mountains.
“It really must be a primordial or a god,” Catti-brie remarked. “How could such a glacier as that exist? Glaciers are rivers of ice that lock into mountain passes or spill down from higher peaks, but this . . . this looks like the legends claim, like a giant, frozen, now ice-covered creature that just lay down atop the ice and died.” She shook her head. “It makes no sense.”
“Have you not seen Anauroch, the Great Desert?” Jarlaxle asked her.
Catti-brie, who had been reborn after Iruladoon into a Bedine family, well knew Anauroch, a landscape equally out of place, and whose origins were legends no less exotic than the aevendrow explanation for this formation.
“Come,” Azzudonna bade them. “We are almost to a place you must see.”
She took them to Galathae and Emilian, who joined them in the hike for another hour, then turned the four friends away from the marching line and down a different trail, one going higher on the mountain the expedition was traversing.
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