“There are still answers to be found down here,” Dor’crae said when they were away. “In the roots of the Hosttower, if not in Valindra’s home.”
“There are answers to be found in there, as well.”
“I doubt she knows much of the Hosttower’s origins, or wards.”
“But Arklem Greeth may well know,” Dahlia assured him. “I would speak with him again.”
“You spoke with him? When you held the gem? It is not wise—”
“Short conversations,” Dahlia promised with a grin. “It’s near dawn now. I’m going back to the city—I have an audience with Borlann the Crow, one of the High Captains. Perhaps he will tell me more of these drow, this Kimmuriel and Jarlaxle.”
“And I?”
“Follow the inland root of the Hosttower,” Dahlia ordered. “I would know where it goes.”
Dor’crae nodded.
“I will return to Valindra tomorrow night, and every night thereafter. Join us as soon as you can.”
“Should I escort you up?” asked the vampire.
Dahlia just looked at him.
“Ghouls, ghasts, and other beasts …” Dor’crae started to explain.
He stopped when Dahlia stared at him as though he’d lost his mind at long last, and she took up her fighting staff.
Before the next dawn, Dahlia hung by one arm from the bottom lip of the uppermost well, peering into the chamber below. She slowly turned, scanning the room for the undead she knew were there, but knew she wouldn’t see.
They could see her, hanging up high, her walking stick sparking with blue light, but it didn’t matter. Even if she’d come down in complete darkness and as silent as a shadow, they would know. They would smell her. The aroma of her sweet, living flesh would almost overwhelm them.
Dahlia dropped to the floor below, springing open her staff as she descended. She landed in a crouch and hopped in circles.
There were too many.
Out they came in a swarm, from every exit and every shadow: ravenous ghouls, hunched low, running on all fours, their long nails scratching against the stone. They appeared as emaciated human corpses, gray skin stretched over skull and bones, but there was more to them than that: claws and teeth and a hatred for all things living, and a hunger for all flesh, alive or dead. There was a score of them at least, and Dahlia had nowhere to run to gain a more defensible position.
But neither did they.
She sprang straight up, inverting with her hands set firmly at the top of her planted staff. She straightened upside down, thrusting her legs back inside the well. She snapped her legs out wide to the sides, locking them against the sides of the well, and bent up, hand-walking her staff before her until she turned upright back in the well, with the swarm of ghouls below her.
“Enjoy this,” she whispered to the ghouls and she tugged a ruby gemstone free from her necklace and dropped it. It exploded the moment it hit the floor, flames rolling out in every direction, nearly reaching back up into the well with Dahlia.
With her legs still locking her firmly in place, the warrior clapped her hands over her ears to diminish the awful keening below.
The fireball lasted only a heartbeat, a single, devastating gout of flames, but the sting remained, fires clinging to the ghouls’ skin, eating hungrily. They shrieked and screamed in high-pitched, otherworldly voices, hellish calls befitting the Abyss itself. They ran about madly, arms flailing to chase the biting flames away, claws slashing to keep their insane companions at bay, for indeed some jumped upon others and began chewing and tearing at undead flesh, at any flesh, at anything that might make the pain stop.
In the midst of that insanity, Dahlia dropped back to the floor, releasing two-foot lengths at the ends of her four-foot center pole. She had those outer poles spinning even as she landed, and she came right out of her crouch and pivoted left, launching a strike that caved in the skull of the nearest undead beast.
They were too agonized, too agitated and insane, to coordinate their movements against her, and Dahlia waded through them. Every reaching arm shattered under the weight of her spinning staff. Any ghoul’s face that got too near to her felt the butt end of Kozah’s Needle’s center pole.
She sprinted clear, down a tunnel, and when she heard pursuit, she broke the center pole apart and set her two weapons into coordinated motion, building momentum.
The ghouls neared—a pair of them, she believed.
Dahlia rounded a corner, her free poles spinning furiously at her sides, back to front. Then on one turn, she flipped her wrists under, bringing that spin even tighter so that the poles came up into her armpits, where she locked them tight. And she never eased the pull from those front poles in her hands right before her, up and angled away, straining to pull their ends free. Dahlia growled and tightened every muscle in her body, it seemed, straining greatly to hold the back poles in place while at the same time straining to yank them free.
She leaped out at the last moment to face the pursuing ghouls, and at that instant lifted her elbows. The poles shot forward with tremendous force, each flying like a spear into the ugly face of a surprised ghoul. The sickening splat of their butt ends cracking through skulls, one sounding wetter as it drove right through a ghoul’s eye, came as sweet music to the elf.
Everything seemed to freeze in place at that moment, Dahlia and the ghouls holding that macabre pose for what seemed like many heartbeats. The elf woman exploded into action again, tugging the ends free of the ghouls’ already rotten brains. They snapped straight back behind her own head where she shifted her hands ever so slightly to use that momentum to put them into reverse spins at her sides, then overhead with her right hand and down and across to smash the side of the skull of the ghoul on her left. At the same time, her left hand went up over her head and followed the same path as the first, only left to right, and that other ghoul’s head snapped to the side as it flew against the wall and crumbled into a dead heap.
Dahlia casually set the poles into motion again and stared back the way she’d come, though even with her keen elf vision, she couldn’t see much.
But there was no pursuit. She reformed her staff and buckled it once more into a single walking stick, then tapped it on the stone to bring forth the flickering blue light.
“Ah, Valindra Shadowmantle,” she whispered as she started away, “I do hope you’re worth all this trouble.”
Dor’crae was a vampire, and a vampire couldn’t sweat, of course, but still he felt the moisture all over his body, his clothes clinging uncomfortably to him. Normally, Dor’crae wouldn’t have needed a light to navigate subterranean chambers, but his complete inability to see anything piqued his curiosity.
He brought forth a candle and some flint and steel, and when the wick finally caught, the vampire peered around even more curiously. He was in a wide, high chamber, as he had suspected, but he still couldn’t see very much at all, just an opaque wall of steam brightened by his pitiful candle.
“What is this place?” he whispered to himself.
He had passed into a chamber full of steam that smelled like piles of rotten eggs, and that hissed as if he’d entered a pit of vipers. He’d traveled many miles from Luskan after several days following the inland “root” of the fallen Hosttower. The tunnels were of dwarven craftsmanship, surely, though it was obvious to Dor’crae that no dwarves had been there in a long, long time.
He kept the candle burning, though it was all but useless, and slowly navigated the chamber. He moved toward one hissing sound, and found it to be a vent in the floor, a crack in the stone through which poured more hot steam, and the awful smell only worsened.
He found no other easy exit from the chamber, but his eyes widened with surprise when he noted that the root of the Hosttower did not continue through it but snaked down one wall and disappeared through the floor. The vampire smiled, thinking his journey at its end. He blew out the candle and became as insubstantial as the steam around him. The vampire flowed through a crack in the floor, descending beside the root.
Several days later, somewhat shaken but thoroughly intrigued, Dor’crae arrived once more in the chambers of Valindra Shadowmantle.
The queen of Luskan’s underworld had many candles burning, and seemed more animated than usual, more lucid. She greeted Dor’crae pleasantly, even expressing her regret at not having seen him for a tenday.
“I followed the root of the Hosttower,” he explained. “You remember the Hosttower …?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know the place, the grand hall where it disappears under the ground?”
“She has no answers for you,” came another voice.
Dahlia stepped into sight from around one of the many decorative screens set about the chamber. She gave a little grin and nodded toward the skull gem on the shelf, the one inhabited by the spirit of Arklem Greeth. “But he does.”
“You’ve been …?”
“Tell me of this ‘grand hall’.”
“It’s a most remarkable place, as big as some cities in the Under—”
“Gauntlgrym,” Dahlia interrupted, and Dor’crae looked at her, obviously not understanding.
“The ancient homeland of the Delzoun dwarves,” Dahlia explained. “Long lost—some consider it a myth.”
“It is real,” said Dor’crae.
“You explored it?”
“I was turned away before I could get too far.”
Dahlia looked at him with one eyebrow raised.
“Ghosts,” the vampire explained. “Dwarf ghosts, and darker things. I thought it prudent to return to you with what I had unearthed. What did you call it? Gauntlgrym? How can you know?”
“Greeth told me. The Hosttower was tied to that most ancient of dwarven cities, and was built by dwarves, elves, and humans in a long-ago age, and for the benefit of all, though few dwarves ever lived in the Hosttower itself.”
“But its power benefitted this city, this ‘Gauntlgrym’?”
Dahlia crossed the room, shrugging as she went. “I would expect as much. Arklem Greeth knows little more, or at least I could discern little more, though I will try again soon enough. He is old—not that old, of course, but he seems confident of the work, masonry and magical, that built the Hosttower of the Arcane, and that it was indeed somehow tied to …” Her words trailed off as she noticed the puzzled look upon Dor’crae’s face.
“You wear two diamonds again in your right ear,” the vampire explained. “Eight in your left, and two, again, in your right.”
“Surely you cannot be jealous,” Dahlia replied.
“Borlann the Crow needed incentive, I expect?”
Dahlia merely smiled.
“Jealous?” Dor’crae replied then, with a laugh. “ ‘Relieved’ would be a better word. Better another in your right ear than you come to believe your left might look better with nine.”
Dahlia stared at him for a very long time, and the vampire feared that perhaps he hadn’t been wise to tip her off to the fact that he understood the significance of her jewelry.
“We know where to look now,” Dahlia said after a very long and uncomfortable silence. “I will continue my work with Arklem Greeth, gaining whatever insight he has to offer, and you must gather as much information as can be found about Gauntlgrym, or of how we might navigate its wards, like these ghosts you speak of.”
“It’s a dangerous road,” the vampire replied. “Were I trapped in this physical body, I would have had to fight my way in, and fight my way out, against formidable foes.”
“Then we will find even more formidable allies,” Dahlia promised.