James Ward - Pool of Radiance

Ren led the way, and three teleports and a walk upstairs later, they came upon Yarash, sitting against the corner of a room filled with books and ledgers, obviously his personal study. His robes were seared to his body, and his flesh was horribly burned, but he was still able to summon another contingent of fish-men. With no water, the strange creatures gasped for air, their malformed gills heaving and collapsing with such effort it seemed they would drop, but instead they crowded forward as their counterparts had, threatening the adventurers with their bulk and poison spittle. This time, there were no surprises. Shal, Tarl, and Ren went straight for the creatures' oversized heads and gawking eyes. In moments, their flopping, twitching bodies and decapitated heads littered the floor. Shal knew the wizard's paltry effort signaled his defeat, but she did not anticipate his next move.

As the last of the creatures flopped and twitched on the floor in death, Yarash began to rant. "Killing my creations! All my research, gone! You can't carve my brain! You won't get my secrets! You'll never get my secrets!" And before they could reach him, he had disemboweled himself with his own dagger.

"Tyr and Tymorah!" Tarl pressed his hands against the spasming body to stop its grotesque twitching. "What do you suppose the sick fellow was thinking of?"

"It looks to me like the answer might be in those ledgers," said Ren. He wasted no time getting started on a search of the sorcerer's belongings. "Bloody divination!" he shouted as he rifled through one of the larger ledgers. "Look at these maps! He was going to try to contaminate the entire Moonsea and use those freaks of his to control things! He was sicker than-"

"Cadorna," said Shal, who had also started poring over the ledgers. "Yarash's notes are thorough. Cadorna knew everything. Look at this! The councilman didn't send us to check out a rumor or even to stop the pollution. He knew exactly where he was sending us. He did it to get the ioun stones."

Ren moved behind Shal and started reading over her shoulder. "Would you look at that? Yarash wasn't even going to give the stones to Cadorna. The Lord of the Ruins had offered a higher price!" Ren stopped cold and then began reading aloud. "'… I can't imagine what all the fuss is over a couple of rocks. The dragon has dispatched assassins to Waterdeep and beyond, looking for the stones, and now the councilman wants me to give them to him… '."

Ren's eyes were wide. "The Lord of the Ruins-he sent the assassin to kill Tempest!"

Shal reached out and patted Ren's arm soothingly. Then she pointed to an entry in another ledger and started reading it aloud. " 'Thank goodness Porphyrys has followed the instructions of the Lord of the Ruins this time and had those two interfering windbags killed. Between the red mage and that blue fellow, they were seriously depleting my supply of experimental stock…' " Shal could read no further.

"I've seen enough!" she said. "I wanted vengeance. Now I can get it. I want Cadorna to pay for this. Between these writings and what the three of us know already, I think we can convince the First Councilman of his guilt."

"If we can't," said Tarl, helping Shal load the ledgers into the Cloth of Many Pockets, "there's more than one bad apple on the council."

Outside, the pyramid still looked like a giant bauble protruding from the landscape, but Yarash's abominable creations had ceased forever. The conduit that had pumped the vile byproduct of his unnatural magical creations into the Stojanow was still, and the last of the black sludge had begun its slow journey downriver to the wide expanses of the Moonsea.

The trip back, without the mare, was slow, in places arduous. Even with Cerulean carrying all their equipment, it was taking the three nearly twice as long to return to the city as it had to travel to the sorcerer's island. No one was complaining, though. In fact, all three of the companions were lost in thoughts of their own.

Ren was thoroughly enjoying what was proving to be a quiet return journey. He realized that the victory against Yarash had been Shal's, but as he watched the Stojanow's waters begin to wash away the black poison from the sorcerer's pyramid, he felt an unrivaled sense of achievement. He looked at the brown riverbanks and imagined what they would look like in another year, with healthy new grasses spreading across the now-barren earth and the first saplings poking their leaves above the ground. The recovery would be far from instantaneous, and the gray stumps would remain for years, ugly reminders of one man's gross abuse against nature, but the healing growth would be a signature of hope.

Ren realized that an entire lifetime of thieving in the city wouldn't give him half the sense of purpose he'd felt on the missions to Thorn Island and the gnoll stronghold, and contributing to the purge of the Stojanow had done more for his spirit than any loo t he had ever stolen as a thief.

Ren was as ready as he would ever be to accompany Shal as she sought Cadorna's punishment for the slaying of her mentor, and he had already made up his mind to ignore Tarl's insistence that the young cleric face the vampire alone. But most of all, Ren was ready to face the Lord of the Ruins himself, whoever he was-the real murderer of Tempest.

In this quiet interlude as the cleric and his companions hiked the length of the rejuvenating Stojanow, Tarl meditated on the messages he had received from his god when he met him in the innermost sanctuary of the temple. In the same moment in which he comprehended that his healing powers would be greatly enhanced by the ioun stone, Tarl had also learned that Anton could not possibly recover until the master of the word embedded in his forehead was banished from this plane. The tremendous joy he'd felt when he healed Shal was nearly overshadowed by the fact that, try as he might, he could not heal Anton. Neither would Tarl recover the Hammer of Tyr and avenge the deaths of his brothers until he saw the destruction of the beast that ruled over the graveyard.

Tarl's faith had carried him through Sokol Keep, and it had driven him through the gnoll encampment. He wanted very much to believe that Tyr would see fit to aid him against the vampire, but the memories of the sounds-the soul-rending shrieks of the horses and the agonized screams of his dying brothers-challenged his faith over and over again. Tarl had never known such fear, and as much as he wanted to destroy the vampire and its minions, he was also terrified of facing them.

Shal was still thinking about her confrontation with Yarash. The terror she had felt initially at confronting the powerful sorcerer had turned to exhilaration as her mastery of the weather challenged his and she was able to match him spell for spell in magical combat. She understood now that she had failed at her Weather spells earlier simply because it had not been important enough for her to succeed. She had learned the invaluable lesson that a spell's intensity could be magnified many times over by the attitude of the caster. It had not been until she was able to channel her own raw fear and use it against Yarash that her power over the cyclone had become complete and she was able to cast spell after spell in rapid succession.

The fact that the Staff of Power was gone was just beginning to sink in. Without the staff for protection, Shal could no longer think of spell memorization as routine or idle. If she had faced Yarash without the staff, she would have been forced to cast a Lightning Bolt spell of her own. Her life and the lives of her friends would have depended on the spell's success. She could never again afford to look at her magical studies as mere academic exercises. Every time she committed a new spell to memory, it would be in preparation-preparation to do whatever necessary to see to the conviction of Porphyrys Cadorna, preparation to aid Tarl in his quest at Valhingen Graveyard, and preparation to help Ren as he sought the beast responsible for the murder of Tempest.