Mel Odom - The Lost Library of Cormanthyr

The tunnel dipped down suddenly, throwing Baylee off-balance. He released the corpse as the tunnel opened up into another chamber. Shadows moved before him, but he had trouble discerning targets. Light from his lantern glinted across a sword blade swinging at his head. He blocked it, then instinctively followed the line of the slash and found the flesh and blood body in the shadows at the end of it. Before his opponent could draw back, the ranger thrust again. The man was dead before he hit the ground.

Light filled the chamber without warning. Baylee was careful to keep it at his back, letting it play over the handful of drow warriors in front of him. "You have a chance at living," he told them. 'Take it and run. We're coming through."

The drow seemed uncertain, looking among their ranks for someone who could provide an answer. Then two of them went down with throwing darts embedded in their foreheads. The remaining ones broke and ran.

From the exhibition he'd heard about at the forgathering, Baylee knew who'd thrown the darts. He turned toward Cordyan. "They didn't have to die."

"I disagree," she said coolly as she stepped forward with her lantern. She put her foot on the faces of the dead men and tugged her darts free. "These are drow. If I could have, I'd have killed them all. Now we have to worry about the survivors getting confident enough to try sneaking up on us in the dark and killing whomever they can." She wiped the darts and put them away in her clothing again.

Calebaan brought Baylee his bow. "She is right," the wizard said. "You can't trust even a drow's cowardice. There may be something he lies about that he is even more afraid of." Listen to the truth, Baylee, Xuxa said.

The ranger settled the strung bow over his shoulder, tying it to the gnomish work leather. He took up his lantern in his empty hand, keeping the long sword naked in his fist. He kept his thoughts to himself about the matter, but he felt there was usually some other alternative to outright killing if an opponent wasn't directly menacing.

"What about the drow woman?" Baylee played his lantern over the dead scattered in the tunnel.

"We haven't seen her," Cordyan answered.

"She's part of this."

"Well, she's not here now."

"Her path may yet lie ahead of us," Cthulad said.

The ground shook again, more forcibly this time, knocking them all from their feet. The duration of the tremors lasted longer this time as well. Rocks and debris rained down from overhead, banging painfully into Baylee.

"The hook horrors have broken through the wall!" someone shouted from behind.

"Lead or get out of my way," Cordyan yelled. Lantern light played across her blood-stained face.

"A moment," Baylee responded. He played the lantern over the dead drow again. "They're not carrying packs, nor any extra rations."

"They're from somewhere near," Cthulad agreed. "The question is, though, are these all of them?"

Baylee shook his head. "The female wasn't with them. There's something else afoot in these twisted tunnels." He went forward, charging into the darkness. Behind him, he could hear the chittering and clacking of the hook horrors.

Krystarn felt a stab of fear as she rounded the final corner and came face to face with the hobgoblin horde. Despite the fear she had put into Chomack, she knew there was the possibility that the hobgoblin chieftain could have figured to put her powers to the test. In a way, it was humorous, her gifting Chomack with the same skill at duplicity as she was currently employing against Shallowsoul.

The hobgoblins showed her only fear and deference. They were a ragged, motley bunch, covered with dust from the swirling debris that ran through the caverns. Chomack strode out of the waiting shadows.

"Sorceress," the hobgoblin chieftain acknowledged.

Krystarn nodded at him. "Are your warriors ready, Chieftain Chomack?"

"Aye."

The drow elf took the lead, guiding the large party through the labyrinthine mazes of tunnels that led up to the partially collapsed structure where she kept her rooms. In minutes, they were at the wall where Shallowsoul had always opened the dimensional door.

No lights burned in the hallway. If it hadn't been for Krystarn's own infravision and that of the hobgoblins, she knew she wouldn't have been able to see a thing. Broken rock from the ceiling overhead covered the floor. She made her way through it carefully.

Halting at the dead end, she brought out the crystal ball. She chanted, summoning up her spell energy, and praying to Lloth as she focused the forces she used through the crystal ball. The crystal ball was already in tune with the magic the lich was using. She knew how to cast a dimension door, but casting one into the library was much harder. For one, she didn't know exactly where it was in the physical world even though she'd been through it a number of times. And for another, she felt the actual distance it was from the dead-end wall was much further than she could transfer herself using her own spell.

The hobgoblins fell into line behind her at Chomack's order. Their bared weapons clinked against their armor.

Perspiration covered Krystarn's face as she locked into the exchange of energies. A headache throbbed at her temples. She pushed herself past the pain, thinking of the library only, of all the power that would be within her grasp in the next few minutes.

Through her slitted eyelashes, she saw the wall start to glow. At first it was a patch no bigger than the end of her finger, but quickly spread until she couldn't cover it with both hands. And it kept growing as the dimensional door swung open wider.

The trail came to an end in a crypt.

Be careful, Xuxa warned as she fluttered to a wall and perched upside down from the rough, craggy surface.

Baylee played his lantern over the crypt, lighting tumbled stone caskets thrown across the interior of the smashed building. The roof was long gone, but the cavern above had sunk to within a few feet, giving it the appearance that a roof still existed. Pieces of half a dozen skeletons lay strewn across the floor, but none of them tried to reassemble themselves or grab for weapons, as Baylee more than half expected.

"Which way?" Ciwa Cthulad asked from behind him.

"The map shows that the trail runs west," Baylee responded. "But this crypt wasn't shown."

"It sank from above," Cordyan said.

"Yes," Baylee replied. The lantern light broke against the cracked back wall. Going through it would still have constituted something of an engineering miracle.

"The drow must not have come this way," Cthulad said.

Baylee aimed the lantern at the plain of smooth dust and dirt in front of the crypt. "If they did, any footprints they might have left have been erased or covered over."

"Perhaps there's a way around," Calebaan said.

Baylee pulled back out of the crypt and went around to the left of the building. A narrow space between the building and the one next to it loomed in a slice of darkness. He shoved the lantern forward, playing it over the jumble of rock waiting ahead of him. The incline went down, deeper into the series of underground caverns. Beneath the rubble, he spotted the set of stone-carved steps that had been depicted on the map. They sat in the narrow mouth of a tunnel that continued west.

"Here," he said.

"Get a man on that crypt door," Cordyan ordered one of her guardsmen. "If anything moves behind us, I want to know about it."

The hook horrors had given up the chase a few minutes before, after one of them had been doused in oil and set afire. And one of the tunnels the party had traveled through had been too narrow for the large creatures to get through. However, the hook horrors had managed to locate one of the drow warriors trying to follow the Waterdhavian unit.