52. A River Doesn't Run Through It

52. A River Doesn't Run Through It

The terrain did not improve north of the ruin of Ulcaster, but ever more arid and jagged it sawed onwards, until the party stood before a deep and wide ravine, its floor sandy, not like that of open desert, but the packed, dry silt of a parched riverbed. Montaron led now, for they were growing ever closer to his home, along the low cliff the south bank of the deceased Firewine river, until they gained sight of the same-named bridge. It stood like a ruin in little better shape that the desecrated mage school, with caved-out gaps like missing teeth visible even from afar, but the halfling assured passage via small plank-bridges kept up over the chasms of disrepair. Jade twisted her mouth, having been looking carefully for easy ways down into the ravine or up the other side, and thus far seen none.

“Were these by any chance invisible planks?” Edwina asked as they stood before the crumbling bridge itself, and plainly saw no promised bridges-within-a-bridge. “I don’t recall any mention of invisible trees in my botanical or arcane studies. Perhaps an unbalanced druid-illusionist might have bred such a specimen, though?”

The bridge had fallen out at two points, leaving chasms between once-smooth stone brigdeway. Jade stepped out, hesitantly at first, onto their end of the bridge. She found it perfectly solid of course, many feet thick or purplish-gray stone upon pillars thicker still, as she traipsed to the first gap. She felt sure she could have jumped it, even still wearing her lovely light mithril chainmail, and surely the ever athletic and long-striding Kivan could have, but not likely the shorties or the wizards. She looked straight down over the crumbling edge, to the jagged rubble some fifty feet below.

“My Zulkirdom for a floating disk spell,” Edwina sighed from the edge of the bridge, “Even if it is misclassified as evocation.”

“We’ll have to hike in and out of the ravine,” Jade grumbled as she returned.

“Or…” Montaron trailed off, nervously tapping his fingertips against their opposite numbers, and nodding to the stonework rising out of the desert at the south foot of the bridge, “There be a ruin at Firewine which is supposed to go under.”

“After Ulcaster,” Jade grimaced, “I think I’ll pass.” The other six followed as she walked on to scour the cliff edge to the east of the bridge until they found a jagged but gradual switchback down into the steep ravine, and hiked in. The riverbed was infuriatingly hot, the silt glimmering with mirages of the silvery water that once must have flowed there, the heat-rippled air still and tepid and deathly quiet into it was pierced by a mad, high-pitched shriek that echoed between the ravine walls in a cascade of eardrum torture. Party members turned to scowl at Xzar, but the necromancer shrugged innocently. The source became apparently as a woman in robes no less royal red than Edwina’s came flailing through the haze of heat. She was tall, blonde, and clearly insane.

“He’d driving me…mad!” she screamed in a voice suitable for listeners ten times further than the party, even without the reinforcements of the echoes. Jade even felt spittle rain on her cheeks, and worried that the screams might trigger avalanches. “Oh please make it stop, make him stop his screaming. AAAhhhhhhhhh….Shut it up!”

“You’re the one screaming,” Jade stated bluntly. “Lady, if you want help, you’re going to have to calm down.”

She was little surprised when for the woman’s reaction, she might as well have communicated in Gnomish. “He…it’s in my head! It won’t be quiet, just keeps on whispering and whispering. You see this jar. Do you SEE it?!!!!”

Jade glanced humorlessly to the lady’s hands, which clutched a spherical black vial. It had a faintly illicit look to it, like something her friend Siria would have snuck into her bedroom to inhale from. Jade ruefully had to keep her thoughts from drifting back to Candlekeep, though. “We see the jar, sis,” she spoke, “Just calm down and tell us what’s happening.

“My companions and I…we explored the Firewine ruins…and we found…we found this jar. It…it drove them all mad. They hacked and they cut, and…the blood, so much blood. They’re all dead now, and only I’m left. The voice…it tells me to say the name. If I say the name, it promises great rewards. But…I won’t…I won’t…”

Jade shrugged. “So get rid of it. Or give it to us.”

“NO!” the woman recoiled. “Carsa will not give the jar. The jar is Carsa’s and hers alone. Get away…get away or Carsa will say the name…and we all all die. It’s mine. MINE!”

Xzar leered, “Is it…precious to you?”

”Stay away!” Carsa recoiled further. “Stay away or I say the name! Stay away!””

“Xzar…” Jade drawled, reaching for her companion’s collar to drag him back, but it was too late. Xzar did nothing more, but the lady went utterly berserk.

“NOOOOoooooooooooo….” She wailed, slumping to her knees, and her jaw quivered for a moment, as if she were fighting it. “KAHRK!!!” she screamed. “OH MIGHT KARHK-” her eyes and tongue bulged out of their respective recesses, and exploded, and she fell back with jets of blood shooting up from her face like some courtyard fountain in a Loviataran temple.

“Dammit,” Jade snarled and drew her scimitar. The spherical jar exploded not in shards of glass, but a brimstone-scented puff of smoke, and from the expanding, ever spherical haze emerged an ogre - nine feet of warty green skin and brightly colored clothing - bubbled in yet another sphere.

“Globe of invulnerability,” Edwina groaned, loading her sling, and looking up at the beady-eyed monster. “An ogre mage.”

“KIIIIAAAAAAAA!” Jade screamed, lunging at the monster with a curving technique designed to disembowel the brute.

“I am free!” Kahrk bellowed mightily as Kivan’s first arrow glanced off some other geometric solid of magical protection, and he hammered down with his own meat cleaver of a scimitar and bashed Jade away like maid swatting a mouse with a broom. The girl tumbled back onto the sand, and would have been winded if her kia hadn’t so usefully already blasted the air from her lungs. “Free at last! Mortals, before you die, know that you have pleased Kahrk, mightiest of the Ogre Magi. Your deaths shall feed my power, for now I am weak.”

Kagain and Branwen rushed around her with their armaments while Kahrk simultaneously gloated and spellcast. Jade rose, and her eyes widened in horror as the ogre released a lightning bolt clear through the center of Branwen’s armored body, blowing he off her feet while the bolt sailed out the small of her back, mercifully sailing over Montaron’s head before blasting Edwina. The Red Wizardess was thrown onto the sound with a ghastly scorch mark across her stomach, and Jade was horrified, sure she was dead. While Kagain hacked his enchanted axe deep into the mottled flesh of the ogre’s calf, as If trying to chip it down like a tree, the ogre brought its scimitar down on the dwarf’s winged golden helm with a discordant clang that rang off the ravine walls. Jade screamed and dashed in again while Montaron’s new rapid-fire crossbow peppered two bolts at the face of the monster before the first hit, only to have them both deflected like Kivan’s arrow. She was joined by Kivan now closing in melee with Drizzt’s other weapon, but the ranger was blown off his feet just like Branwen by another lightning bolt, and as it streaked over the riverbed Xzar screeched and flung himself to the silt.

Jade’s vision went red, and she saw the heavy scimitar of the monster cleaving down once again like an execution’s axe, this time not to parry, but to cleave her head in two. In that split second she knew she couldn’t possibly have time to make it by the falling blade, gutting the ogre mage with her own while its elbow. She heard the echoing voice from her dreams again, and focused her will against the crude falling scimitar. The ogre mage grunted as his weapon stopped with a jerk against a wall of force, and Jade ran under her sorcerous manifestation, hooking her scimitar into his gut, and twisting in a crescent that opened his belly and spilled massages of disgusting, nauseating gray-black intestine. The ogre mage roared and opened his weaving free hand toward her a spiteful last spell that never formed as she whisked Icingdeath up over her head and sheared his hand off at the wrist. Kagain made another chop deep into his leg, and wheezed “timber!” with an irreverent chuckle as he fell backwards, crashing onto the sand and grunting before Kagain summarily beheaded him with a true executioner’s chop.

Jade turned around, and felt sick not from the ogre’s carnage but from the sight of Branwen, face and hair blackened, ignoring her own external and sure internal burns as she knelt over Edwina, repeatedly pumping the wizardess’s solar plexus just above the awful burned patch of her stomach. Montaron was standing over a prone Kivan, who at least was breathing, emptying a healing potion down the elf’s wide-open mouth and kicking his shoulder. “Ye better stick with us, pretty-boy, or I swear to ye I’ll piss on yer corpse!”

Xzar was alternating mouth-to-mouth on Edwina with Branwen’s pumping, and during a particularly involved aided breathing the Thayvian sputtered to life, shrieking and shoving the necromancer’s face away from her own. “I knew you were a necrophiliac! Well I’m not dead yet, you barnyard hack! Keep your electrodes and negative energy away from my perfectly stunning-as-is form!”

“She’ll live,” Branwen pronounced, wincing with the pain of simply speaking. She incanted two healing spells upon herself, the second pronounced more easily than the first after her insides began healing, and then cast onto Edwina until her wounds subsided, leaving a burnt-away bare midriff to her robes. Rising to her feet and whining about the sand, the healed conjuress did look rather plussed with the new cosmetic alteration, thought of course the rough, singed edges would have to be hemmed.

After catching their winds and looting the woman and the ogre, the party moved unenthusiastically across the ravine, searching for a climbable pass up the north face, but after an hour still had found nothing. Reluctantly, Jade looked at Montaron as she brushed a mudlike layer of sweat-dampened dust from her face. “Fine. Let’s try your ruin.”

--

It was irritably reminiscent of Ulcaster. A stairway descended into the surface stonework, and at the foot of the stair, in near-complete darkness, three passages raced away along straight lines. But the walls here looked less time-worn, even engraved with many rows of unrecognized iconoglyphs that raced away into the darkness. As another mage light floated overhead of Edwina, beady red eyes glimmered in the gloom ahead, skittering noises were heard, and the all-too-familiar sounds of twanging echoed.

“Kobold kommandos!” Xzar shrieked as a flame-tipped arrow whizzed by his face.

“I hate these guys…” Jade groaned as another bounced off her mithril, and she lunged forth, drawing her scimitar and slashing down to take off a pointy-eared head and send it flying like a golf ball while Branwen smashed its partner into the floor.

The party hung back as Montaron chugged an invisibility potion and slunk forth into the darkness. They waited in near paranoia for slow, agonizing minutes until the halfling’s whisper indicated his return. He had searched around the mazelike twists and self-feeding loops to find the passageways converging into a larger, rectangular chamber which a squadron of the irritating fire-flinging kobolds had made their warren.

“Ooooh, that isn’t so terrible,” Xzar giggled, threatening to alert the beasts with the echo. A glare from Jade lowered his voice as he withdrew a skull from his acid-green robes, pouring a small packet of black, sulfurous powder down into an eyesocket. “Bone daddy has a brand new spell, and the fuzzy bunnies will never get him now…” Xzar eagerly pushed his way to the front of the party, holding the invisible Montaron’s hand as they were led around several turns. At last the halfling stopped, and tapped Xzar’s palm irregularly, communicating in a silent Zhentish code. A tiny flare, little more than a spark, erupted in the necromancer’s palm and was flicked into the eye socket, and he then counted to three under his breath and pitched the skull down the hallway. It disappeared in the darkness, and his companions snickered for a moment. They stopped dead when an explosion and bone-shattering pop echoed, soon harmonized by a chorus of agonized yippings.

Jade dashed, tailed by the mage light, and found the chamber littered with mutilated kobolds writhing and spasming on the floor, red streaked across the stones as they bled from dozens of tiny wounds where bone-shards had embedded in their fur and eyes.

“’Tis not honorable battle…” Branwen murmured, finishing off a helplessly maimed kobold with her spiritual hammer.

“…but it’s effective,” Jade smirked as she beheaded another. She found herself fishing under the collar of her mithril, and fingering the ruby chessknight she still wore about her collar.

While Jade and Kivan conscripting the irritating fire arrows of the kommandos, a still-invisible Montaron resumed his reconnaissance. The chamber bore hallways out the other three walls, and he somewhat arbitrary chose the left. The halfling wandered alone for some time through the labyrinth, marking a map on the back of his hand, ever paranoid and scouring for more booby traps especially after his self-immolation in Ulcaster. Twice he found the same trap, self pressure-plates, and merely stepped around them with careful marks on the back of his hand lest the full party return. He passed another band of kobolds slumbering in an alcove, who remained none the wiser for his passing. Eventually, each dutifully explored branch would feed back into what he realized would lead back to the central chamber, opposite the way they’d first come. He whispered out again as he returned gratefully to his companions, now with only one way to go. The party now tailed him a decent ways behind, although Montaron still worried this would prove but another dead end, yielding no pass under the riverbed, or that his companions might insist he must have missed a turn and should re-explore the entire damn dungeon. This passageway though snaked in long, straight hallway that ran around and cut off the others. Eventually it receded away from the rest of the maze, and the halfling became more hopeful he was nearing some end, and his intuition suggested he had gone far now from their descent, and in the direction leading beneath and across the ravine.

He balked, though, as he came upon the odd sight of a wizard tending to a flesh golem, engrossed in what appeared to be the final steps of the disgusting creation process, sculpting its meaty thigh like some artist even more deluded than the one Jade’s brother had spoken of. He retreated to as far as his companions had followed and conveyed this.

“No parlay,” Jade whispered flatly. “We fight them.” She was getting so accustomed to hostile psychotics in the strangest locations, that she simply had an intuition, by now, it would come to bloodshed any way she approached it.

They huddled around the corner from the hallway the wizard and his pet lurked at the far end of, and Xzar enspelled another of his explosive skulls, then dashed around the bend, and with a fancy spin fit for a shot-put toss lobbed the cranium down the hall. Another dry explosion resounded, echoed by the shrill screams of the wizard. Jade and Kagain charged as abreast as a woman and dwarf can, Kivan and Branwen behind in the narrow hallway. They found the wizard dead, and it ran through Jade’s mind she would have liked to question him after they dealt with the injured flesh golem. It pounded its meaty fists down at its assailants, but Jade reared back and with an upward crescent of her icy scimitar shore off the fingers of its right hand, and Kagain simply stood stoutly while its left fist extended its reach and fell short, or rather tall of him, and as with the ogre mage proceeded to chop down the construct at its legs. Kivan’s arrows and Montaron’s bolts peppered what passed for its face, and Jade ran behind the thing and slashed apart exposed tendon and muscle fibre until the thing heaved, and went dead on its feet. Jade hastily backdanced as it crashed onto the floor.

Before she could even catch one breath, gruesome laughter echoed up the hall behind her, and she recognized it all too well; so like Kahrk’s she wondered if the brute had somewhat cheated death. If not, she was sure it was an ogre mage. “Charge the sides!” she shouted, and ran up the hall. She had guessed both the enemy and its first tactic, a lightning bolt zooming up the center of the hallway. It flashed between herself and Kagain, then between Kivan and Branwen. The ogre mage stood in a small anteroom, Jade had no time to take heart from the presence of an upward stairwell. The ogre mage like his kinsman wore a couture of abjurations. For the first time Jade found herself with the reserves for a second adrenal burst of the incredible energy when a “KIAAAAAAA!!!” echoed out of her lungs, and now through the entire labyrinth. She blazed down the last paces to the ogre mage as he brandished his weapon at her, and it seemed that somehow, he was moving too slow, his mucus-streaked lips mashing in incantation at the pace of a snail or a committee, his body gradually shifting its weight like gelatin. She charged past his left side, dragging Icingdeath aside her body and cleaving forth. The cold edge of the scimitar cut clear through the leg, skin and muscle and bone, so easily she nearly ran into the wall past the ogre, who let forth a bellow of extreme negative surprise, and at once toppled over. Jade spun on one heel, curving the scimitar about her body like a baton, and with an up-crescen beheaded the ogre vertically before his body had crashed to the cool floor.

She panted, and smiled, and felt a flush in her cheeks as she saw Kivan looking back at her from across the mountainous corpse, his face unusually loosened in slackjawed surprise. She grinned at him, gripping her ruby pendant and savoring the moment for the time it took Montaron to loot the wizard and then this ogre mage, although with his disturbing expertise as a burglar that took none too long.

The halfling then, carefully as ever, crawled up the stairs. He came to a wooden doorway at the top, and after a moment of inspection, burst through. What he found was utterly unexpected but not altogether unpleasant – another halfling, in a round-walled and distinctly hobbit-furnished basement room.

This resident, a black-haired halfling man with an atypically sharp-featured face and a none too pleasant one at that, glared at the intruder. “WHAT in the nine hells are you doing in my burrow home! I don’t know why you’re here, but any assumptions you might have about halfling hospitality do not apply to me! When an intruder breaks into my home’, I kill ‘em.”

Montaron grinned and leveled his crossbow of speed at the green-garbed fellow. “That so, ol’ Jenkal?”

Jenkal blanched, blinking several times at the other halfling’s face as much as his very ready weapon. “Montaron? Monty Sackins?”

“At yer service,” Montaron sneered. “It be smellin’ like kobold in yer little hole. I wonder why that is? We folk hate the little yippers….” His eyes bulged then, and he snarled angrily. “You! It be you that let ‘em into town!” His minded flooded with angry memories. “The Scouring! I mighta been off then, but I heard about it from me pals! It was ye that let the horde of little bastards into town! Into my town!”

He squeezed the trigger before he knew his eyes would well with tears and ruin his aim. Jenkal was thrown back against an armoire with a bolt lodged in his throat. He gargled for a moment, clutching the wound as dark red streaked his tunic, then slumped over dead at once. Montaron unloaded two more quick bolts into his chest, then threw his crossbow down, and kicked the body several times, yelling and cursing.

Jade barged in through the secret door, smacking her head against the low ceiling and growling. “What the…” she drawled as she saw Montaron beating a dead kinsman. Her party thief looked at her with a face of moral outrage, a new sight to her memory, and babbled out about traitors and kobolds and his village.

The rest of the party could barely all fit in the room as they poured in, and as soon as Montaron could loot the basement of valuables worth carrying, he ran up the curving stairs and did the same to Jenkal’s ground floor. While the party filed up after him, he stepped out of the front door into the sunlight. His kinsfolk merrily waddled to and fro, or toiled, or more likely just sat and smoked outside their round burrow homes. Tobacco and earth mixed in his nostrils, and Montaron wiped the dirt and grime from his face as he appraised the lush gardens cultivated on the otherwise arid expanse the town of Gullykin was nestled in.

He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said.