Depths of Madness

by Erik Scott De Bie

  Completely inexplicable, Twilight thought as she put them on. It didn’t occur to her to refuse. The boots adjusted themselves to fit her feet.

  “And thissss.” A silvery window opened in reality and a black hand extended through it. It dropped a sack that smelled glorious to her.

  Twilight yanked open the pouch. It was filled with dried strips of meat and bread that smelled of corn. Also inside was an oiled paper packet with some sort of honey—Twilight wondered if it came from the abeil. She took a hunk of bread and two pieces of meat for herself, then offered the food to Gargan, who accepted it silently.

  Another of Ruuk’s hands offered a wineskin filled with a drink that tasted sweet, like some manner of fruit, with a distinctive, odd taste Twilight recognized as a sort of mushroom. Rarely had she tasted the wine of the Underdark, and unlike most elves, she enjoyed it. Gargan refused it, but the sharn offered him a waterskin instead.

  Emboldened by the sharn’s hospitality, she spoke up. “One question,” she said. “If it please you, great lord.”

  There was a long pause. She reasoned she could take their continued existence for a yes.

  “Why don’t you … destroy him?” she asked. “You are so much … more powerful than us. Why us?”

  “Hissss issss magic chaossss,” Ruuk said. “Centuriessss millennia agessss ago, Ruukthalmuramaxamin wassss curssssed. Musssst sssstay. Power mine.”

  For the first time, it didn’t occur to Twilight to respond. She sat, rapt.

  “Negarath wassss a city of the mad,” Ruuk said. “Inverted, floating upsssside down, buildingssss of curvessss, archessss, twisssstssss, with disssstorted creaturessss on dissssplay. Flayed mind flayerssss, ghosssstssss of elementalssss, demonssss of celesssstia, angelssss of outer darknessss.”

  “And a mad prisoner,” Twilight stammered. “A sharn cursed to order.”

  “And dying!” Ruuk said. The sound was so loud that the temple shook. “Body failing, order rotting. Godssss of chaossss have turned away, abhorrent.”

  “Then help us,” Twilight said. “Break free—” Her head burst and she sank again.

  Even as her senses fled in pain, her half-mad mind perceived a certain kind of logic in the sharn’s gift. It had threatened them, made them used to being threatened, then thrown them off balance. Its “random” actions apparently followed a set order.

  The three heads spoke at once, but said three things. “Not free. No cure. No help.” Then they joined together. “Ssssink to risssse. Kill Gesssstal or die!”

  Hands lifted her and her feet scrabbled across the stone.

  She looked up, and it was Gargan lifting her. “We go,” the goliath said.

  The sharn’s hands blazed with golden magic, and arms reached from portals around them. Then the world shuddered to a halt, burned away as though scribed on parchment. They felt a sensation of falling, and then they were elsewhere.

  Gods-only-knew how long later, Twilight stirred. Darkness had become her world, but that was easily remedied. She opened her eyes and perceived flickering torchlight. She saw the prison where they had left Tlork.

  “We’ve arrived, it seems,” Twilight said.

  She was glad when Gargan, completely unexpectedly, broke the silence. He was kneeling at her side. Twilight felt weary and inexplicably old. She took his hand.

  “How mighty is this creature?” Gargan asked. “This … sharn?”

  Twilight shrugged in a fatalistic way. “What little I know, I shall put by analogy,” she said. “You have heard of the Seven Sisters, or the Sage of Shadowdale?”

  Gargan shook his head.

  “Thay, perhaps,” she said. “All the red wizards?”

  Again.

  “The empire of Shade?” That got a nod. Curious.

  “Well, then,” said Twilight. “All the princes of Shade would jump to do a sharn’s bidding, for if they didn’t, it would likely destroy a city out of whim before resuming its morning meal of the stillborn children of gods.”

  “Ah.” Gargan nodded hesitantly.

  There was a pause. They both sat silent, listening for any sign of an occupant other than themselves. The dungeon was still.

  “There must be another way down,” she said. “If we must sink to rise, that is.”

  The goliath nodded, and they stole about the prison together, hands on hilts. They plied their senses at their keenest, followed every instinct, and explored every tiny crack and crevice in the floor and walls with their fingers. Dust, bits of bone, scraps of metal, and flecks of refuse Twilight didn’t want to identify obscured the cold, damp stone.

  They made their way into Tlork’s chambers. The troll was not at home. All they found was a destroyed onyx griffin. Twilight resolved not to forget their hunter’s strength.

  “Why did you argue?” Gargan asked suddenly, making Twilight jump.

  She slowed her heart with the exercises Neveren had taught her. “What?”

  “You argued for his ‘word,’” Gargan said. “What means this?”

  “A promise. Not that I suppose it matters much to a sharn, but I would not break my word, once given.” She managed to smile. “That’s why I never give it.”

  Gargan did not find that amusing. “You argued for something you knew to be false?” he asked. “Why?”

  “I was hoping to get him to release Liet.” She hated herself for her feelings, but she was past such considerations now. “Then we could flee this place, the three of us.”

  “Davoren and Slip? Would the sharn think Gestal had killed us and free them?”

  Twilight shrugged. It truly did not matter. “Wouldn’t miss him,” Twilight said. Then she sighed. “And she’d be regrettable. But for all we know, they’re …”

  She did not finish the thought. For all they knew, Liet was dead.

  “You would shirk our duty to them?” Gargan said. “Our companions.”

  Twilight waved. “Duty is overrated,” she said. “I am a creature of chaos, as is the sharn. We both know this—there would be no surprise.” That wasn’t strictly true, but it might as well have been. She had never dealt with a sharn before, but the fact that this one was cursed made the situation even less predictable.

  At that moment, Twilight brushed away dust and some old bones and found a crease in the floor. She traced the outline of a door cut into the stone. Through the bones, fur, and filth that littered the floor, she found an old brass ring attached to the stone. Twilight twisted the ring. The stone gave a lurch and sank downward, then to the side, revealing darkness below.

  There came a sound of scuffling on stone, and Twilight looked down the hall, toward the levitating disk they had used to ascend to the crypt above. She thought she saw a flicker of movement.

  “Who?” Gargan asked, drawing his sword.

  Twilight shrugged. “We’ve no shortage of enemies,” she said. “The sharn, or its golems. Gestal. The fiendish lizards.”

  “Tlork,” Gargan added grimly.

  “Darkness, don’t forget the grimlocks,” said Twilight. “We didn’t part on the most amiable of terms.”

  Nothing moved for many long breaths. Twilight left Gargan watching the darkness and looked down into the new passage. It smelled foul and radiated humidity like a tropical swamp. Where the tunnels above had been dry and dead, this new level seemed the opposite.

  A world built on opposites, Twilight thought.

  Twilight wondered why they were going down. Had not the sharn spoken of Gestal dwelling “above?” Sink to rise, she reflected.

  She put her leg down into the darkness and froze.

  With a mighty heave that broke more than a few bones, Tlork finally wrenched himself out of the sewers. As he stood in the forested street, letting limbs pop back into place and torn flesh flow back together, he cast his stitched face about, searching, just in time for the swarm of abeil to descend with spears, halberds, and stingers.

  Snarling, the troll whipped hammer and claw through the air in fury to drive off the swarm. Bee-
creatures fell crushed, killed at the very touch of Tlork’s weapons, but there were hundreds, and three replaced every one that fell.

  Soon, the battle was like stirring mud, trying to swat them away while they rained pain and torment all over Tlork. Abeil speared his skin, stinging and stinging like mad, and soon he could hardly focus on anything but the stabbing and cutting. His body throbbed as though a thousand hearts beat just under his skin.

  Slave, came a voice in the back of his head. Like all thoughts, his own or another’s, it caused Tlork pain. Come, slave.

  As he batted another abeil out of the air to smash like a ripe plum against a distorted building, Tlork whined like a dog. “But I come so far!” he argued. “I close!”

  Come, the thought came again, to the chapel.

  Unfair. Tlork didn’t like the up-down room. It always made his stomach knot. The fiend-troll gave a great, strangling cry, turned, and ran. He dived through the hole into the sewer, ignoring the pain that came when his arm splintered against the edge.

  That elf—she would pay for this. Not the pain, which Tlork had long since stopped minding, but the indecency of making him trek all the way back, even past the up-down room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Twilight stared into the dark hole. Much of this world was inverted, she mused. It was a sharn’s idea of order, curves where buildings should have corners, towers that sloped downward, even upside-down stairs on the underside of ledges. She had thought herself prepared for any shift of paradigm imaginable.

  This, though, far exceeded any reasonable anticipation.

  Gargan, seeing her hesitation, crawled over the edge, holding the lip, and let go. He didn’t fall. Instead, he stood on the underside of the floor, looking down at her past his feet. It was as though Twilight stood on a mirror that reflected a world not her own.

  “Come,” Gargan said. “Sink to rise.”

  The implications struck Twilight like a thunder blow. Damned Netherese.

  Now she knew why she had felt unsettled going into the dungeon, almost like falling. The gravity was in flux here, so close to the limits of the mythallar’s field.

  That was why the ceiling of the sewer had been as stained as the floor.

  That was why half the architecture was upside down, why all the symbols of Mystra—or whatever the goddess of magic in ancient Netheril had been called—had been inverted.

  Now she knew why the sand had not fallen in from the “ceiling” of the cavern, settling instead as though along the bottom of a bowl. Gravity was reversed in Negarath, all pulling down toward the dungeon, and below it …

  All that time they thought they had been rising, they had been descending.

  Gargan watched her uncertainly, but at last Twilight swung a leg down and pushed off, climbing to her feet on the ceiling of the chamber below. She passed through an invisible barrier that made her stomach go limp before she emerged in another world, one where gravity was opposite.

  They stood in a crude tunnel sloping up from where they stood, down from the dungeon. Gone was the fine, if eccentric, carving and stonework of Negarath. The air was musty, and a faint, foul odor wafted through the tunnel. Rough steps led up.

  “Gestal should be somewhere up there—or down …” Twilight could not help feeling a touch disoriented, but she did her best to dismiss it. “Up. Definitely up, if Negarath is upside down, below us.” Twilight’s head ached.

  She noticed Gargan kneeling by the trapdoor, hand out, and narrowed her eyes. “What are you about?”

  He drew his hand back and she saw that he had placed a stone in the air. It dipped back toward the dungeon, then up toward them, then merely floated, caught in that space where gravity pulled both ways. At the innocent fascination the goliath showed in the phenomenon, Twilight smiled despite herself. “Come.”

  Gargan—ever a man of few words—nodded and went with her.

  They had not gone ten paces up the tunnel when they heard a scuttling from behind, as of a rock falling to the floor. Something had disturbed Gargan’s floating stone.

  The goliath was already charging back by the time Twilight had her weapon out and was pursuing him. Though her reflexes might have been the faster, he had keener ears. With the boots from the sharn, she ran as fast as he did. They fell upon their pursuer at almost the same instant.

  There it was, five steps from the trapdoor. The shadow yelped and danced back, startled. Gargan’s black sword swept aside a hastily raised mace, even as his other hand shot out and shoved its wielder over. Even as the intruder fell, Twilight lunged the intervening four paces—she loved these boots already—and rode it to earth, Betrayal at its throat.

  The shadowy figure froze and put its hands up. “Stop! Stop!” she screamed. “’tis me! ’tis me!” Twilight almost drove her blade in anyway, but Gargan caught her arm and saved Billfora Brightbrows’s life.

  “Slip?” Twilight asked, brow furrowing. “What are you doing here? Didn’t they capture you? How did you escape?”

  The halfling stared with terror-stricken eyes. “I-I-I …” she tried, but couldn’t speak with the elf pressing her lungs, and a blade lying a thumb’s breadth from her jugular.

  Twilight straddled the little woman and bent low, keeping the blade still and putting her free hand on the halfling’s shoulder. It would take hardly any force to push it through Slip’s unarmored neck—in case it wasn’t really the halfling, but a trick.

  “Speak,” she commanded, and Slip did.

  “I-I got away,” she said. “When those bee-things came, one o’ them knocked me cold. When I woke up, I was under a toadstool. It must have broke my fall, and I was …”

  “You weren’t a prisoner?” Twilight asked, her heart suddenly racing. That would mean only Davoren and Liet were Ruuk’s prisoners, and that meant …

  “Uh,” said Slip. Twilight heard her only distantly. “No. No, I wasn’t.”

  “Did you see anyone else?” Twilight asked. “Where’s Liet?” Slip shook her head. “I didn’t …”

  “Why so quick?” Gargan asked, his voice dark. There was no pain in his words, only suspicion about the one who had been his friend.

  It struck her that the earring was not translating his words to Elvish, as it must have for Taslin. Somehow, Twilight had become less than an elf—but she accepted that.

  Slip blinked at the goliath and she smiled widely. “Eh?”

  “Why are you here?” Twilight asked, clarifying. “How could you get here so fast? The sharn teleported us. What of you?”

  The joy went out of Slip’s face. “Well, I … I …” Gargan was staring at her, and her lip shook. “I’ve been coming this way for a day. I didn’t … know where you were, so I came this way, because …” She blinked. “I’m afraid of bees.”

  No matter how heavy the moment or how deathly serious the look that had passed between Slip and Gargan, Twilight could not help but grin at that.

  “Very well,” she said, and got off the halfling. “My apologies. We reacted as we had to.” She sheathed Betrayal and started up the stairs.

  The halfling got to her knees, rubbing her temples. “Ah, r-right,” Slip said, smiling blankly as though she had tried her best and largely failed. “Uh …”

  “Come along,” Twilight said. “We’ve a demon priest to slay.”

  “Aye, that,” Slip said. She hurried to catch up with the shadowdancer—no mean feat with her short legs, and hugged Twilight about the waist, stopping her.

  By reflex, Twilight put an arm up to drape it around the halfling’s shoulders, as one might show affection to a child, but she stopped herself.

  “Just …” Slip said, shifting awkwardly.

  “Yes?”

  The halfling’s voice wavered and her eyes were very round as they fell upon the pouch of food that hung from Twilight’s belt. Her stomach growled as though she hadn’t eaten for days—which, of course, was the case. “Can … can I have something to eat?”

  Smiling, Twilight extended the
sack to Slip, who fell to it like a ravenous beast.

  Gargan watched, doubtless thinking himself hidden in the darkness, but if Twilight had learned one thing in half a century in service to a god of deception, it was to watch the shadows carefully. She had never seen Gargan’s face so dark and grim.

  The air became even heavier and warmer as the tunnel led the three upward, and the smell from above grew in intensity. It was salty and sickly sweet, a combination of rotting vegetation and the acrid scent of blood. In this new, unknown place, Twilight forbade torches. She could lead the others with her darksight. From where she crept along, Slip made a face that was barely visible, reflecting her own feelings on the matter. Gargan hardly seemed to notice.

  The tunnel was largely natural, but for a few spots along walls and floor that had been crudely carved as though by stone axes and picks. Their path rose to the edge of a rough, circular chamber from which led yet more passages. In the chamber, they found light—luminescence from green and blue fungi that grew from the walls, ceiling, and floor. Stalagmites jabbed out of the ground to loom above even the seven-foot Gargan’s head. They twisted and curled in a way that reminded Twilight of Negarath.

  They saw none of the lizards, but they could smell them. Husky and gangrenous, their odor lurked over hollows in which foulness lay pooled.

  “Two sewers.” Twilight wrinkled her nose. “’tis Westgate all over again.”

  “Westgate?” Slip asked, and Twilight smiled ruefully.

  “A long story,” she said. “One day, perhaps.”

  “You have lots of stories,” Slip said excitedly. “I enjoy collecting stories—’tis like collecting lives, aye?”

  A trifle unsettled by that comment, Twilight looked at Gargan, whose disapproving expression gave her all the excuse she needed. “We should be silent,” she said. “One never knows what may be awaiting.”

  Slip, suitably chastened but undiminished, grinned innocently.

  The next chamber they entered, following Twilight’s direction, was not as vacant as the first. Nearly a dozen of the man-lizards occupied the cavern, milling about as if waiting for something. Eight devoured something rather bloody, while the other four stood apart, spears clenched in distorted claws, and scanned the shadows with bloodshot eyes.