Ususi coughed slightly and continued. “In the short time I knew Eined Datharathi, I found that her character was among the finest and strongest I’ve known. She was willing to endanger herself to accomplish what she thought was right, and for that willingness, she made the ultimate sacrifice, despite our best efforts to guard her.”
Ususi paused, leaned down, and laid her hand on the wrapped figure’s forehead for a moment. She straightened, and a tear traced a sudden line down her cheek. She said, “Eined Datharathi’s sacrifice in bringing us here, to the Celestial Nadir, could be the difference between the extinction of the rest of her family and its survival. Moreover, had she not risked all to guide us here, Deep Imaskar would have no chance at all for salvation. If we survive to record it, Eined Datharathi’s name will be remembered among the greatest heroes of our people.”
Iahn squinted slightly, the only outward sign of his consternation. Ususi had broken the law of the Great Seal again by speaking of Deep Imaskar to those who did not dwell there. He hoped he would not bear the burden of imposing discipline on her.
“And,” added Zel, “If we survive this, those of us untainted by Shaddon’s folly will raise her to the status of family saint, and put her likeness in stone in our hall.” Zel squeezed Warian’s shoulder again, and the young man bent down to tie Eined’s blue sash around her wrapped wrist.
With a gesture from Ususi, the body slid toward the edge of the path. Instead of dropping, it drifted gently into the dark. Iahn noted that the wizard had the keystone clutched in one hand. Ususi’s mastery of the Nadir uplifted the wrapped body.
The white form slowly receded. As Eined dwindled, she flared with illumination, taking on the same glow as all the other objects that drifted within the artificial space. The body receeded, growing smaller and smaller, until Eined’s light was indistinguishable from the other motes that wafted through the darkness.
She was gone.
With a subtle swing of her head, Ususi gestured Iahn to follow, and they walked a few paces down the stone path. Warian and Zel remained together, gazing into the dark.
The vengeance taker said in a low voice, “A good sendoff.”
Ususi said, “Thanks. That was one of the harder things I’ve had to do.” She rubbed her lower lip. Then, “Let’s give them a few more moments. Besides, I want to tell you something.”
He cocked his head, disliking drama.
“Iahn, I know you want me to create some route that’ll connect us immediately to Deep Imaskar. But listen. The source of the attack on our city is close. And unless I miss my guess, it comes from …” the wizard pointed down the path that was blocked by a shimmering screen, blurring the image of an incredibly tall fortress tower, “… there.
“That fantastic structure, my friend,” explained Ususi, “exactly matches a painting hanging in the audience chamber of the lord apprehender.”
“I’ve seen that painting. What is it?”
“The Purple Palace. The ancient seat of the Imaskari Empire.”
Iahn blinked. “Incredible.”
“A paragon of understatement. Do they train you for such subtlety?” asked Ususi. “Apparently, the entire palace was stored in the Celestial Nadir before the end of the empire. The records in Deep Imaskar assume that the palace remained in the world, buried below the shifting sands of Raurin. Turns out, it’s been here all along.”
“It does not quite look ‘here,’ though,” commented the vengeance taker.
Ususi’s brow furrowed, and she gazed at the structure through the keystone.
Still gazing through the translucent stone, she said, “You’re right. It’s not. How strange!”
“What?”
“It has slipped into our world! It has returned …” Ususi continued to observe the structure through the lens of her keystone, apparently learning additional information through its tiny aperture, “… can it be? Yes! It has found its original foundation. But it retains a tenuous link with the Celestial Nadir. The link is Pandorym’s influence. Its psyche is entangled with something still here.”
“Let me take a stab—is it entangled with that?” Iahn pointed down the path to the great misshapen boulder.
“Difficult to say.”
“Then let’s find out.” The vengeance taker gripped his dragonfly blade, wondering what sort of violence he could bring to bear on such a large rock. Ususi followed him. She said, “Whatever the link, Pandorym remains rooted in the palace. Which makes sense. Some of the creatures it threw at us, like the shadow eft, are remnants of a race that now exists only in the Imperial Weapons Cache. Pandorym must have released and subverted them to its own power. I wonder what else it’s released.”
Iahn nodded as he studied the great rock, more concerned with it than Ususi’s musing for the moment.
The vengeance taker looked to the wizard and saw she was standing some paces back, inspecting the boulder through her keystone. After a few moments, he grew impatient and sheathed his weapon. Then he pulled himself up onto the stone.
With skill acquired during a childhood spent in a gargantuan cavern, he free-climbed the overhanging, bulging rock surface. He easily reached the lowest jagged crack in the boulder’s mostly smooth surface.
Iahn was somewhat familiar with geology, thanks to Deep Imaskar’s location, and therefore knew a geode was a hollow, spherical rock whose cavity was lined with crystals. Some geodes were completely filled with crystals. Those were called nodules.
Gazing into the crack, Iahn thought this great boulder was completely filled with Celestial Nadir crystal, making it a nodule. But something glimmered at the nodule’s center. A palely glowing blot like a luminiferous fungus, or subterranean sea shape …
Then …
Darkness.
Blowing, howling, damp gloom. Shadows reaching like fingers … grasping. Stretching closer. Screaming …
Iahn’s eyes snapped open. He lay on the path, at the nexus of the three ways. Ususi bent over him, patting his cheek and looking concerned. The two Vaelanites stood nearby, looking useless.
He demanded, “Tell me what happened. I recall … a nodule?” Darkness clawed at his brain and was gone again in a flash. He clutched his head.
Ususi said, “You tell us. One moment you were describing how the cavity was filled with agate. Then you screamed and fell fifteen paces without trying to catch yourself. I thought you’d been struck dead, or petrified. Then I heard you mumble about fingers. We dragged you back here. What did you see?”
“Something we need to destroy.”
The vengeance taker tottered to his feet. Pain lanced his left shin, and his right shoulder and arm—souvenirs from the fall he couldn’t remember, he supposed.
He told them, “Something terrible is caught in that nodule … Pandorym, you called it? If we destroy it, we destroy the threat reaching into the world, and into Deep Imaskar.” Now who was the loose-lipped one? Didn’t matter. His conviction made him reckless.
The one with the crystal arm stepped forward. His eyes were red, and his face tear-streaked. “Yes, let’s destroy it!”
“Iahn, Warian, wait. You’re only partly right. That husk of stone may—may—imprison Pandorym’s body, whatever shape it truly possesses. Or it could be some other entity completely unrelated to Pandorym. The Celestial Nadir is filled with such dangerous detritus. Either way, it’s important to remember that the body and mind of Pandorym were never kept in the same place—too dangerous.”
“Explain,” he ordered.
“I described before how Pandorym was a doomsday weapon the Imaskari didn’t dare release. They only wanted to threaten Pandorym’s release, and thus the entity’s psyche was extracted from its physical shell and stored in the Imperial Weapons Cache of the Purple Palace.”
Ususi turned to point at the wavering façade of the palace. “Now the psyche has partly freed itself, with Shaddon’s help. The mind is the only vulnerable portion of Pandorym. The body, even if that is it, is beyond my ability to affect,
even if I use the keystone to scrape away the Celestial Nadir crystal that has scabbed over it. We must go to the palace, find the vessel that once contained Pandorym’s psyche, and close it again.”
Warian asked, his face flushed, “Since Pandorym has all these servitors, why doesn’t it just coerce one into fully releasing it?”
Ususi said, “I’m sure Pandorym’s tried that many times. The longer we fail to contain its growing influence, the sooner it will be successful in freeing its mind from the arcane constraints that yet tether it.”
Iahn asked, “My duty is to return you to Deep Imaskar so you can stem the incursion. Yet you say our best hope is to enter the Weapons Cache of the Purple Palace instead of returning first to our imperiled city. Will you stake the safety of Deep Imaskar on this course of action?”
“I don’t see any other option. If we go to Deep Imaskar to fight whatever else Pandorym has corrupted and freed from the Weapons Cache, we’ll be attacking only the symptoms. We must get to the root of the problem and restopper Pandorym’s mentality before it does find a way to free its mind and reunite with its physical shell.”
The vengeance taker considered Ususi’s words. Her assessment was probably correct. He glanced at the irregular nodule. Darkness flashed again through his thoughts and skittered away. He’d seen something that he’d not soon forget.
“Very well, Ususi,” agreed Iahn. “Let’s go.”
The dragonet’s glimmer preceded Kiril and Prince Monolith through the narrow stone corridor. They circled up, up, and up in a gyre whose eventual termination seemed unlikely. The slope was shallow at first, but progressively steepened. Every hundred paces brought them past a sealed arch. Kiril supposed these opened to the tower’s core, but each was bricked over with purplish stone. Like the corridor, the sealing stones were scarred and stained by some great drowning years ago.
The monotony was eventually broken by a scattering of cracked bricks that spilled into the corridor. The stones sealed an arch that had partially collapsed—centuries ago, by the look of it. Xet fluttered past the gap in the corridor without slowing.
Kiril paused a moment to peer through the broken masonry.
“Hey, I see light!”
Monolith, bringing up the rear, said, “This tower is too large for us to explore every room, or even every floor. Nor need we, because Thormud provided Xet with a route to our objective.”
“What if we stumble on something useful?”
“Leave it be—we have a long way to go.”
Kiril sniffed and lingered in the breach to see what she could. The space past the arch was a great foyer, high-beamed and supported by massive columns. Twelve or thirteen pits, each as wide as a human was tall, marred the otherwise smooth floor. Rusted, egglike metallic objects, partly crumpled, dented, or otherwise damaged, plugged all but one of the pits. The open pit was covered with a metallic oval, but it hovered just above the pit, slowly rotating. A pale lavender light shone up from the hole, bathing the rotating egg and glinting off silvery highlights.
“Xet, come here a moment,” Kiril instructed. Thormud’s familiar chided her with a series of high-pitched bell tones, but flew to her and perched on her shoulder. Thormud must have also commanded the familiar to listen to her orders. Xet wasn’t happy about it. Too bad.
With the additional light provided by the dragonet, she could make out the ceiling of the chamber, some forty or fifty paces above the pitted floor. Cavities in the ceiling exactly mirrored those in the floor. A thin streamer of smoke or moisture rose from the top of the single rotating egg, swirling and spiraling toward the ceiling, where it was sucked into an opening. Was each ceiling cavity a chimney?
“What do you suppose …?” began Kiril.
“Come.” Monolith put a huge hand on her back, but refrained from pulling her back.
“All right, you damn rock,” she consented. She knew he was right: Thormud depended on their swiftness.
Onward.
Walking up the spiraling slope in the darting, flickering light given off by Xet took its toll on Kiril before long. The wavering shadows, unexpected flashes of illumination, and stretches of unrelieved blackness were enough to give Kiril a splitting headache. With her head pounding, she called a rest.
“Hold on,” the swordswoman said. “My eyes are throbbing. I need a moment.”
Xet bleated, circled in the air twice, and settled to the floor of the passage. Behind her, Monolith said, “Very well.”
Kiril sat, leaning her back against the cool wall of the corridor. She held her forehead, then rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms, stopping only after she had induced phantom stars. She rested for a while in soothing darkness. As a torch, the swerving, erratic Xet was a failure. The choice was either to stop for a rest from its frenzied illumination, or smash the little dragonet into so many pretty shards. A few moments of darkness and a sip from the verdigris god took the edge off.
She sensed Prince Monolith’s disapproval even without opening her eyes. The big rock was too much of a purist. She barked, eyes still closed, “Leave off. Trust me, you’d like me far less without my flask.”
The elemental lord’s silence felt like further condemnation. She swore, “Blood and fire!” She opened her eyes. Prince Monolith was gone. She’d constructed the entire exchange. Was it guilt? Disgusted, she threw the enchanted flask as hard as she could. It clanged against the opposite wall and toppled to the floor. A thin stream of whisky poured into the corridor. She felt shame at how far she’d tumbled, at how much she depended on that flask. There had been too many drunken nights. And days. Had she held too tightly to the Cerulean Blade? Angul should have remained where he was forged.
She shook away the phantoms and asked, “Where has that rock gotten to?”
Xet, thinking she commanded it, launched into the air and shot up the corridor in the direction they’d been traveling.
Kiril snatched up the leaking verdigris god and screwed on the top before Xet’s light was completely gone. The inexhaustible contents could easily be the genesis of another deluge in the ancient corridor, and she preferred to keep the spirits for herself. She dashed after the retreating light and carefully clipped the flask to her belt as she jogged.
Ahead, Xet’s light paled before a new source of illumination. A dim gray glow leaked down the corridor. Kiril pulled Sadrul from its sheath and chased Xet to the corridor’s end.
She entered a chamber whose dimensions measured at least a hundred paces in all directions. Slender five-story windows punctured the wall to her right. The wan, gray light pushed into the tower through them. She supposed the windows pierced the tower’s exterior, and therefore looked out over the Raurin, but a gauzy haze filled each narrow enclosure, smothering most of the light.
Pillars scribed with glyphs, unfamiliar to Kiril, held up the beamed ceiling. Great slabs of stone made up the walls opposite the windows, each bearing line after line of unreadable script. A massive humanoid sculpture stood on the left side of the chamber, near the wall glyphs. Its arms were extended so that its hands rested against a convex glass wall perhaps as high as an ancient oak. Its posture suggested that it sought to push the circle of glass farther into the wall—or to hold back the wide circle from moving into the chamber. Whatever its intention, the threat of action was proved hollow by the centuries it had stood. Kiril could make out some sort of fluid languidly churning and turning behind the dusty glass.
The sculpture was three times as tall as Prince Monolith, but the earth elemental ignored his stony kin. He gazed with some agitation at the glass wall. The tiny dragonet lit on Monolith’s shoulder.
“Thanks for leaving me in the dark,” said Kiril as she reached the elemental lord.
“Xet was with you,” replied Monolith, distracted. “I heard something … splashing … and moved to investigate while you rested. Kiril, look at this barrier—can you sense what lies behind it?”
“I can see that it—”
“It is a terrible threat
. It is water, elemental and potent! Something beyond even my power, perhaps, caught here in a vast glass globe. This stone sculpture holds it in place, else it would roll forth. Even outside the glass, I can feel its enmity, its will to drown, dissolve, and erode all that it encounters. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such raw hatred before. The animating spirit that suffuses it—it is asleep! Perhaps I should vanquish this aqueous insult….” The elemental lord ran its great hand across the glassy wall, as if feeling for a seam.
“Monolith!” yelled Kiril. “You really irk me sometimes, you know? Who told me to leave off prying into things that don’t concern us? Leave it alone, unless this sphere is the evil influence that Thormud tracked across half of Faerûn.”
The crystal dragonet chimed.
The earth elemental paused, then lowered its massive limb. “No, it has nothing to do with what we seek. Xet says we must ascend still higher.”
“Then step away.”
Prince Monolith complied, but said, “When we finish, I will return to determine the nature of the entity trapped in this chamber, and dispose of it permanently.”
“Great. I’m happy for you,” Kiril snorted.
Xet, sensing resolution, launched itself into the air. The dragonet arrowed toward the far side of the chamber, toward a great door, slightly ajar.
A flicker of darkness flashed from the dimness behind the door and struck Xet.
Thormud’s familiar rang like a chapel bell as it dropped from the air, its light quenched.
“What the …?” Kiril hunkered down and raised Sadrul. Something behind the door was shooting at them. In the light from the covered windows, she spied the fletched shaft that had brought down the dragonet. The arrowhead was carved of bone and bore the inscription “AQ” in the elven alphabet.
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