The Nether Scroll (22 page)

Tiep had other things to worry about before then. By rough count, about ten
swordswingers had herded about forty goblin slaves to the center of the chamber, facing the
large, glowing pool. Nothing was said—at least nothing that Tiep heard, but after a few moments
four of the healthier goblins went to work shoving fallen rocks to the sides of the chamber.

The goblins knew what they were doing. They'd done it before—the chamber was ringed with
heaps of fallen rock. Tiep recalled the twisted metal debris in the egg chamber. This all had happened
before. The big open egg with the golden scroll on top wasn't the first transformation egg. There'd
been others; they'd exploded. The goblin slaves had cleaned up here in the pool chamber and in the
egg chamber, too. All Tiep had to do was wait and the slaves would show him a way to the egg
chamber.

Of course, forty slaves and ten swordswingers meant a lot of bodies between them and
Druhallen, but Tiep was a born optimist. He'd offer freedom to the slaves—never mind that he
didn't speak a word of their language. They'd get the message the instant he took a swing at one of the
swordswingers. He and Rozt'a would have forty allies. By Tymora! They'd have guides, too, back to
the surface! They'd be heroes.

And he'd be the biggest hero of all—

A high-pitched whistle disrupted Tiep's glorious daydream. The goblins who'd been
shoving rocks abandoned their work. They rejoined the other slaves and they all bowed
themselves low on the stone. Even the sword-swingers bowed low.

The pool got brighter. Tiep expected that whatever was going to happen would happen
there. He wasn't looking at the chamber walls and couldn't see the walls to his immediate
right and left. The tall man in a full-length dark cloak was several strides into the chamber
before Tiep noticed him. He'd gone another stride before Tiep realized the tall man wasn't
alone: one of the long-limbed swordswingers walked naked beside him.

The naked swordswinger didn't have a sword or the sense great Ao had given ants. It
stumbled at every step and would have fallen if the tall man hadn't held it firmly by the upper
arm. The pair approached the bright pool. The whistling got louder. Strange patterns flickered
across the man's cloak. Writing, Tiep thought, spells.

The man had to be a wizard. Druhallen dressed like a shopkeeper, but Galimer would
have worn a flashy cloak like that. Sememmon had been dressed like a merchant, too, that
night when Tiep had tried to cut his purse strings. Dru and Sememmon were better at magic
than Galimer was—especially Sememmon. Maybe the man in the flashy cloak wasn't as good as he
thought he was. Maybe that was why his egg exploded and his monster had the blind staggers.

It would have fallen into the pool if the tall man hadn't reached left to grab—

Tymora have mercy!

Tiep's thoughts shattered. Man? Man? Had he thought the cloaked magician was a man?
Tymora protect him, that thing was no man.

Tiep didn't know what race the cloaked figure had been born to, and didn't want to know.
He called it a nightmare and begged his goddess to wake him up, but he wasn't asleep. Even
after it had captured its stumbling slave and no longer faced the tunnel where he and Rozt'a
were hiding, Tiep couldn't banish the horrific image from his mind's eye.

The nightmare magician's skin was a mottled purple in the pool's pale green light and
stretched dried-corpse tight over its bones. Its head was too large and bulged behind, as if its
brain had burst the back of its skull and then kept growing. Its eyes were a dull white with
neither pupils nor irises. But it wasn't a nightmare because of its skin or its eyes or because
its brain hung out of its head. The magician was a nightmare because it had four ropy
tentacles hanging off its face.

The tentacles writhed and twitched. They caressed the bald head of the clumsy
swordswinger. The other swordswingers pounded their chests while the crouching slaves
rocked from side to side and the whistling grew so loud it was physically painful.

Tiep clapped his hands over his ears, which helped a little, and watched with open-jawed
astonishment as the clumsy swordswinger folded its arms to its chest. It wove its mismatched
fingers together, which might have been a of response to the tentacles caressing its head,
but reminded Tiep of nothing so much as an insect about to feed—

The mantises!

The bug lady's messengers!

The metallic egg and Sheemzher's tale of the Beast Lord sacrificing his wife and a mantis
and getting a demon in return.

Sheemzher's wife hadn't been exchanged for a demon, she'd been merged with a bug and
transformed into one of the long-limbed swordswingers. The nightmare with worms on his
face was the Beast Lord. Tiep imagined the look on Druhallen's face when he—the street rat
with worse-than-no magic talent—told him how he'd figured out what was going on underneath
Dekanter.

Then, like a cold breeze on a hot day, Tiep recalled that his foster father was trapped in
the egg chamber. The breeze became a blizzard. If Tiep was right about the egg chamber
and the egg, then that naked, just-hatched creature standing in front of the nightmare could
be all that was left of Druhallen.

Come closer. Come closer. Share. Feed. Open your mind—

A thought that was not his own rode the whistling sound into Tiep's mind. The Beast Lord's
tentacles lost none of their horrific qualities but, suddenly, Tiep wanted to be near them, to
feel them against his skin, to offer up his paltry thoughts and emotions to a superior mind for
its amusement, its pleasure.

Tiep was not alone in striding forward. All of the slaves did, and the swordswingers ... and
Rozt'a. He wasn't alone until he fought the compulsion and threw it out of his mind. The
whistling went away, too, and Tiep swore to himself that he'd never again complain about the
way magic didn't work around him. Then he reached out to stop Rozt'a from taking another
step toward the nightmare.

Rozt'a fought him more vigorously than she'd fought him at the egg-chamber wall, and for
no good reason. Desperate to avoid attention, Tiep punched her on the chin. Striking his
foster mother was one of the harder things Tiep had done, good cause or bad, but it broke
the Beast Lord's hold over her. Rozt'a was herself again—the remote, passive self she'd been
since they'd found a solid granite wall between them and the egg.

Unless the Beast Lord had walked through stone, Tiep was sure the other egg-chamber
tunnel was somewhere—not far—to his right. More than anything in the world, he wanted to find
that tunnel and get back to the egg chamber. He was gathering his courage for a walk along the pool
chamber wall when Rozt'a succumbed to the Beast Lord's compulsion for a second time. This time a
hug, rather than a punch, was sufficient to keep her beside him in the dead-end tunnel, but the moment
Tiep released her, she surged again.

Body contact with a body unaffected by the compulsion was apparently sufficient to keep
Rozt'a free from the Beast Lord's compulsion but holding hands wasn't enough contact. Tiep
draped his arm around her shoulder and kept it there as he weighed the risks of leaving the
dead-end tunnel.

On the up side—the Beast Lord had his worshipers' complete attention, which meant no one was
paying any attention to the chamber walls. Rocks had toppled since the whistling began and not drawn
a sideways glance from the Beast Lord or his swaying congregation. On the down side—if Rozt'a
slipped back into the Beast Lord's power or his own immunity weakened ...

The down side won.

Tiep stayed put and watched the newly hatched swordswinger enter the green-glowing
pool. The enslaved goblins joined hands in a circle around the pool. They blocked Tiep's
view; he took that as a sign that Tymora hadn't abandoned him. His confidence rebounded—
he and Rozt'a could wait. The pool chamber had been empty when they first arrived; it would become
empty again.

He hoped.

Rozt'a leaned against him. She shuddered every few minutes. At first, Tiep thought that
was the Beast Lord trying to get into her mind, then he noticed that his shirt was damp and he
realized that she was sobbing. He'd be sobbing, too, if he let himself think about what had
happened or what likely lay ahead, so he remembered the good times.

There had been good times in Tiep's life, but not many that didn't involve Galimer,
Druhallen, or Rozt'a. He felt tears brewing and tried to think of nothing at all.

Time passed—more than a few minutes, less than an hour. The pool-side ritual showed no sign of
ending: The goblins were still in a ring, and all the swordswingers were in the water. The Beast Lord
was going from goblin to goblin, massaging their scalps with his tentacles. Tiep could watch now, he
was beyond nausea.

A rock shifted to the right of their tunnel. Tiep thought nothing of it; other rocks had shifted.
It would be a while before the chamber completely recovered from the shaking it had
received when the egg hatched out a swordswinger.

Another rock moved and Tiep heard a sound that could have been a boot crunching over
gravel. All the sounds had come from the right side. He tightened his hold on Rozt'a. He saw
a shadow, then a silhouette.

It was tall enough, but the shape was wrong—headless and hunch-backed. It stopped in
front of the tunnel ... turned. It was lop-sided now, and maybe it did have a head ... maybe it
was carrying something over its shoulder.

"Dru?" Tiep called in a voice not loud enough to reach his fingertips. "Dru?" he called, a bit
louder.

"Tiep? Is that you, Tiep?"

Dru came down the tunnel. Tiep got Rozt'a on her feet and they met him halfway. The
lump on Dru's shoulder was the goblin, who wasn't moving and might have been dead for all
Tiep knew or cared.

There was safety in his foster father's embrace, and not merely because they'd found each
other. Druhallen hadn't merely thrown off the Beast Lord's compulsion the way Tiep had.
Being a wizard, Druhallen kept the Beast Lord at an arm's length—at two arms' lengths. As soon
as they'd entered Dru's shadow, Tiep felt the pressure ease in his mind. By the time they were touching
each other, Rozt'a stood tall without any help from him, though maybe magic had nothing to do with
that.

"What happened?" Tiep whispered. "Did you get the scroll?"

"Later. We've got to get out of here while the Beast Lord's distracted."

So much for impressing Druhallen with his cleverness.

Dru wasn't worried about being seen or heard as they escaped from the pool chamber.
Speed was more important, and keeping a hold of Rozt'a.

"You can take care of yourself, can't you?" Dru asked.

Tiep straightened proudly. "Sure I can."

"Good. Stay close and be ready to grab Rozt'a if she breaks away. She's got no defense
except what you or I can share with her. I'll whisk up some light as soon as we're out of
range."

Out of range was farther into the escape tunnel than any of them would have liked. Rock
fall cluttered the path. They couldn't move fast, or quiet, and there were no guarantees that
the Beast Lord had called all his swordswingers to the pool chamber. Dru was in command of
their path and pace. He said he remembered the way, but there was a danger they'd miss an
intersection in the dark. Tiep was relieved when Dru finally cast his light spell. Not only did
that mean that they were beyond the Beast Lord's compulsion, but they could see fallen rocks
and the intersections, too.

They got more good news when they returned to the spot where they'd battled and blasted
the Beast Lord's swordswingers. The corpses were untouched.

"No one's come back for their dead," Rozt'a said. Her voice was shaky, but her mind was
working again. "That means the ones that ran off haven't reported yet and there've been no
other patrols."

A fighter's morale, she said, depended in part on his confidence that he'd be given an
appropriate funeral before his death was avenged. She seemed to think the Beast Lord cared
about morale; she didn't remember anything that had happened after they'd found the granite
wall. Tiep whispered and told her what she'd missed without going too deeply into the details.

"It's all a blank," she shrugged. "I remember hitting that rock until I saw stars, then nothing
but a slice of empty in my memory. Damn strangest thing that's ever happened to me."

Privately, Tiep thought it was lucky more than strange, but neither he nor Dru said
anything. And the goblin was still unconscious over Dru's shoulders.

"The little fellow knew what was happening, I think," Dru explained in a soft voice as they
walked away from the swordswinger corpses. "I told him to jump, that we'd come back for it,
but he knew a goblin was going to die, one way or another. He wasn't coming down without
the scroll. He had both hands on it and was pulling for all he was worth when it came alive
like a bolt of lightning and threw him against the wall. He started to come around once, when
the Beast Lord was loading the athanor. I had to hit him pretty hard to keep him quiet."

Tiep was unimpressed. "You should've left him behind and come with us."

Dru replied with a sigh, nothing more.

"At least you got the scroll," Rozt'a added.

"No. We hid while the Beast Lord was loading up the athanor. I was pretty sure it couldn't
see us as long as we did nothing to attract its attention. Things got pretty wild after it left and
the transmutation was underway. I saw some things I'll never be able to explain and I think I
lost a few slices of time myself—I never saw the scroll vanish, but when everything was done and
over, there wasn't anything that I could see sticking out the top of that athanor.

"Something went wrong—you probably figured that much yourselves. The Beast Lord was a long
time coming back into the chamber; I was starting to think maybe I was trapped in there. Mystra's
mercy—I was starting to think that if I did get one of those doors open I'd find myself in the Outer
Planes! It was just luck that I hadn't tried picking the locks on the athanor when the upper door finally
cranked open. The Beast Lord had a hard time getting its newest swordswinger up and moving."