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“I had no idea this was here,” Rook said, keeping a hand on the wall as he crept along the narrow passage.

Tellwyrn half-turned her head to scowl at him, the orb of light hovering over her hand casting eerie shadows across her face. “That’s because you never needed to know. In fact, once all this nonsense is over with, you can forget you knew about it, understand? This is an emergency access.” She turned back to face forward, her continued grousing clearly audible. “If the students find out about this, it’ll be full of beer bottles and bodily fluids by the end of the week. What is it with kids and dark, private places… I should’ve just adopted fifty cats.”

Rook glanced back at his compatriots, none of whom offered a comment. Wisely, he didn’t either.

The tunnel couldn’t have been that long, but already their passage through the cellar of the Ale & Wenches seemed like it had occurred in another life. Down here there was nothing but bare granite walls. Though full of dust and cobwebs, the stone was glossy smooth and seamless, clearly having been bored out of the mountain with impossible precision, no doubt by some arcane craft of Tellwyrn’s. It had no lights of any kind save that which she had brought, and as she kept it at the head of the group, Finchley kept nervously speeding up to outpace the darkness behind him, earning irritated grumbles every time he bumped into Moriarty.

“Ah, here we are,” Tellwyrn said after a long, awkwardly silent hike.

“Finally,” Moriarty muttered.

The appearance of a circular chamber ahead took them by surprise; though their guide’s slim profile concealed little, the darkness and her control of the light source meant none of the three were really aware of their destination until the Professor was stepping out into it.

The chamber was round, gray, and otherwise exactly like the tunnel which led to it, carved from granite as smooth as glass, its surface gleaming in the glow of her light. It was dim even with the glowball present, just large enough to swallow its relatively feeble rays, but not so much that there were any areas left in blackness. That, plus the absence of any corners due to its round construction, made the place less spooky than the tunnel. All three stumbled into each other and nearly lost their footing in their haste to get inside.

Professor Tellwyrn gave them a disparaging look, then stepped onto the low platform in the center. “Well, come on. It’s chaos up there, if you hadn’t noticed. I haven’t time for your pratfalling.”

They crept obediently up the single step onto the small, circular dais. Apart from the open segment through which they stepped, it was encircled by a waist-high rail of tarnished brass, set about half a foot inward from the perimeter. The space was big enough to comfortably hold a person, and was quite snug with four.

“You’ll want to hang onto the rail,” Tellwyrn said, not making any move to do so herself. “Stay away from the open edge and don’t stick out your hands, or anything else you may need later.”

“What?” Rook grimaced at the dusty rail under his hands, shaking a spiderweb off his fingers. “What is this, a teleporter of some kind?”

“Teleportation isn’t safe near a hellgate,” Moriarty snapped. “Otherwise she could have just ported us all there from Calderaas.”

“So what’s the…” Finchley trailed off, having spied the circular hole in the ceiling, sized exactly the same as the dais. Beyond it was only blackness. “…oh, bugger.”

Tellwyrn grinned. “This comes out in the staff lounge, which has a sink. So if any of you are inclined toward motion sickness, I strongly suggest you hold it until we arrive.”

“If we were inclined toward motion sickness,” Rook retorted, “you’d have found out on the RAAAAIIIII—”

There was no preparation or warning of any kind. The stone platform just shot straight upward with a speed that nearly flung all of them to the floor. Except, of course, for Professor Tellwyrn, who folded her arms and balanced calmly in the gap at the front, watching smooth stone walls whiz past as they ascended.

“Been a while since I hung around with soldiers,” she murmured to herself. “Seems to involve a lot more screaming than I remember.”

 

“Are you sure you’re okay? How’s your head?”

“You didn’t hit my head, just winded me.”

“I’m really sorry about—”

“Fross,” Ruda said firmly, grinning up at her. “Just for future reference, if the options are between smacking me around a little and letting me get eaten and/or landed on by a giant fucking bird-eel-dragon thing from Hell, make with the smacking. I’m fine. Let’s focus on fixing this bullshit.”

“Okay,” the pixie agreed, bobbing down lower. “I’ll work on my fine control. I’m not used to levitating something person-sized with, y’know, precision.”

“Mm hm,” Ruda said absently, crouching behind a pile of rubble as a small group of hiszilisks buzzed past in the near distance.

The cafeteria was a shambles. In addition to the shattered windows along its front face, half the roof had been caved in by the nurdrakhaan’s impact. The wreckage provided a convenient path for them, though, between the dangerously exposed facade of Helion Hall and the now-smashed astronomy tower. Between heaps of fallen timber and brickwork, upset tables and chairs and the building’s remaining walls and support pillars, there was plenty of cover for them to creep through. Best of all, the hiszilisks didn’t seem interested in poking around through it, perhaps due to its wrecked state.

“Are we wasting our time?” Fross asked in a hushed tone. “Surely they’re not still planning to meet at the tower. It’s smashed.”

“It was the last plan we had,” Ruda replied just as quietly, peeking out to keep an eye on the demons outside. “Most of it was knocked over the side of the mountain, so the lobby area seems to still be there. And I don’t see any of the others. I’m hoping none of ’em are dumb enough to just mill around out there and get picked off; if we remembered to meet up at the tower, maybe the others will, too.”

“I guess,” Fross said doubtfully. “But we may have to go out looking for them.”

“We’ll check the tower, and if that doesn’t work out, it’s a relatively sheltered place to make a new plan.”

They crept forward through the jumble of broken furniture, keeping a wary eye on the open front of the building. The buzzing of giant wasp wings filled the air, punctuated by bone-shivering hisses from the nurdrakhaan, but there were no voices from their classmates. Also no screams, which was some comfort at least. Ruda moved in short bursts, from one piece of cover to the next, pausing to gauge the situation at each spot. Fross simply stayed low to the ground.

Then something landed right outside.

Both of them instinctively ducked behind an upturned table, then very carefully peeked back out. They were a good ten yards distant, almost half the width of the building, and it was facing away, but the newness of it compelled caution. Humanoid, it was lean and oddly misshapen, as though its lumpy black skin was pulled too tight in places, twisting it off center.

“Uh oh,” Fross whispered, “it’s not just hiszilisks now; they’re bringing in real forces from across the portal. That’s a hthrynxkh.”

“It’s a fuckin’ what?” Ruda spat. “Naphthene’s tits, what is with these freaks and their names? Does Elilial spend her free time sitting around making up impossible new consonants?”

“Colloquially called a shadowlord,” Fross recited. “Sentient demon, high-caste. Non-caster, but possessing limited inherent camouflage and short-range shadow-jumping abilities. Very durable skin, but not magically resistant like a hethelax, it’s all armor. Stronger than they look, but less agile.”

A second hthrynxkh dropped to the ground next to the first, holding a sword that seemed to be made of something’s jawbone. They conferred momentarily in their harsh language, then the first darted off across the lawn, while the second let out a piercing whistle.

A dozen hiszilisks assembled in front of the shadowlord, which began speaking to them. It sounded angry, but that might have just been the effect of its harsh voice and guttural language.

“Round the back?” Ruda suggested very quietly.

“Round the back,” Fross agreed.

They retreated toward the opposite end of the cafeteria. The windows there looked out over the Golden Sea; one had been shattered by the damage that had wracked the building, but the rest had held, having been enchanted to be far more durable than simple glass. Wind whistled through the opening; directly overhead, hidden by what remained of the roof, the nurdrakhaan hissed again.

They ducked around behind the serving counter into the hallway which ran adjacent to the kitchen, immediately picking up speed now that they were out of sight of the open front of the building. Just as quickly, however, they slowed, coming to a complete stop a few yards from the door that led to a small, walled garden area between the cafeteria and the classroom at the base of the astronomy tower.

“Was that left open before?” Fross asked quietly.

Ruda shrugged, creeping silently forward. The door opened outward; she pressed herself against its frame and leaned gingerly out just enough to peek around the edge.

Another hthrynxkh stood with its back to them, not more than ten feet distant, gesticulating and barking orders at several hiszilisks. At each motion of its arm, one of the flying demons buzzed off, but there were still half a dozen present.

“Fuck,” Ruda muttered, pressing her back against the wall inside the hallway.

“Okay,” Fross said quietly, “that’s out.”

“Hm… You said camouflage and shadow-jumping. How far can they jump?”

“Only a few feet, it’s more for combat maneuvering than travel. Limited, like I said.” The pixie fluttered back down the hall. “Speaking of camouflage, I have a stealth spell. Not true invisibility, is the problem; I don’t think it’ll work here. We’d have to get too close to him to sneak by. Should work on the other side, though, there’s more room to maneuver out there. If we head back to Helion Hall we can go in and look for…I dunno, something. Tellwyrn’s office is in there, she’s bound to have—”

“Hey, asshole!”

Fross chimed in alarm, buzzing back toward the door, through which Ruda had just stepped, drawing her rapier. She came to a stop right before the opening, muttering to herself.

“That surprised me. Why did that surprise me? I’m supposed to be the fast learner here…”

 

Hiszilisks scattered at her passing, but Vadrieny didn’t pause to deal with them. She flitted to the broken-off second floor of the erstwhile astronomy tower, then from there to the spires atop Helion Hall, then to a precarious perch in a swaying elm tree, pausing at each spot to peer around desperately. There was a brief golden flash that suggested Toby or Trissiny in the corner of her vision, but it was gone when she turned to look for it again. Nothing but buzzing demons and the hissing of the nurdrakhaan.

Nowhere a glimpse of silver.

Frantically she took wing again, swatting a particularly slow hiszilisk out of the way, and cut a wide arc over the descending terraces of the campus. Everywhere demons. Not a sign of her classmates. Not a hint of the silver glow of Themynra.

A low groan rose involuntarily in her throat, emerging as a thin keening.

She’s fine, she’ll be fine, Teal said anxiously within her, failing to convince either of them. She’s smart, she’ll get to shelter. There are all kinds of buildings. She knows the campus.

Vadrieny landed too hard on the battlements of Ronald Hall, causing the partial collapse of a stretch of crenelated stone that would have sent Tellwyrn into a towering rage in any other circumstances and would likely pass unnoticed now. The hiszilisks were gleefully causing havoc wherever they landed; they weren’t strong enough to do much to the stone buildings of the campus, but Vadrieny could see small fires in a dozen places, to say nothing of smashed windows and fairy lamps. And that wasn’t even touching the damage to the cafeteria and astronomy tower.

Then her attention was caught by the arrival of more demons.

They were lean black figures whose shapes she recognized immediately. Shadowlords; used by Elilial’s forces as shock troops, but likely to be operating more as guerillas, considering the origin of this particular demon army. At least a score of them were descending onto the campus from the hellgate, each carried downward by two hiszilisks, with more steadily appearing. Several had already landed by the time she noticed them, and were clearly giving directions to the smaller flying demons.

Vadrieny sank her talons into the stone.

“We have to fight.”

Vadrieny…

“Teal,” she said in anguish, “she’s out there. Maybe alone, maybe hurt. These will be setting out to search the campus; they’ll find her. They’ll find her faster than we can, due to sheer numbers.”

Teal was silent inside, radiating terror for Shaeine, and beneath that, deep reluctance at what her other half was suggesting.

“We can’t negotiate with these,” Vadrieny insisted. “Demons only understand force. But they’re bringing in those of higher rank now. If we make our point to them, they may call a retreat.”

We can’t. Please…

“I know,” Vadrieny whispered. “Love, I know. But… She’s out there.”

There was a heartbeat of abject stillness within, then a rush of pure sorrow.

I understand.

The archdemon drew in a breath and let it out slowly through her fangs. “Go deeper inside, Teal. You don’t want to see this.”

No. I’m as responsible as you. I won’t hide.

She found nothing to say, simply sent her a rush of love, which was returned in kind. Both were spiked with fear and remorse.

Then Vadrieny, the last princess of Hell, flared her wings and let out a scream that shattered windows remaining all over the campus.

She launched herself forward, zooming straight at a cluster of four hthrynxkhs, surrounded by a buzzing throng of hiszilisks. Before they could react she had seized the closest in both hands, talons sinking deep into its armored flesh, lifted it up, and tore the creature in half, flinging its pieces away.

Two shadow-jumped a few feet back from her, raising weapons; the third actually dropped its obsidian knife, raising both hands.

“Wait! I surr—”

A swipe of her claws ripped its head clean off, sending the remainder of its body tumbling end-over end across the lawn.

The surrounding hiszilisks shot away in all directions, desperately putting space between themselves and the raging archdemon.

The last two shadowlords were still shadow-jumping in retreat, but they could go only so far at a time. It was only seconds before Vadrieny got her claws on one, sinking them deep into its ribs and dragging it closer.

“You don’t surrender!” she screamed directly into the flailing demon’s face. “This is my world! You leave, OR YOU DIE!”

She tossed it straight up into the air, seized it by one of its ankles, and set about swatting hiszilisks out of the sky with the still-shrieking hthrynxkh. Only for a few moments, though; the hiszilisks were a mere distraction. Spotting another shadowlord, Vadrieny dived at it talons-first, screaming a challenge.

Deep inside her, Teal watched it all in silence.

 

The nurdrakhaan hissed its displeasure, trying to flick her off with its fin, which didn’t quite reach. Trissiny, gritting her teeth, braced one booted foot into the corner of its jaw, where the edges of its beak didn’t quite close, gripped her sword firmly with her right hand, and with her left, punched it hard in its lowest eye.

The beast hissed like never before, thrashing up and down in midair. For a moment she thought she was about to be shaken loose, but her sword held in the groove in its facial armor left by one of Vadrieny’s claws, and she actually managed to wrap the fingers of her other hand around the lower edge of its eye socket.

That, needless to say, made it even madder.

Bucking up and down, and then from side to side, it failed to dislodge her, though in those tense moments the simple act of hanging on consumed the entirety of Trissiny’s attention.

She was beginning to have second thoughts about this idea.

Failing to remove the pest that way, the nurdrakhaan changed tactics. Its flight leveled out; the smoother motion gave her a much needed moment to gather her bearings. She lifted her head, chancing a peek forward at its course, discovering at the last possible second that they were diving straight toward a very familiar sight.

Trissiny wreathed herself in a golden shield, pouring every iota of power she could summon into it; the sphere cut right into the armored face of the nudrakhaan, prompting an enraged hiss, but did not dissuade it in the slightest. She ducked her face against its steaming carapace, tightening her grip as best she could, and shielded so fervently she could feel the beginnings of heat in every nerve, as the monster smashed face-first into the stone bridge connecting the campus to Clarke Tower.

It was a split-second’s utter chaos; the impact jarred her, both physically and in the auric senses connecting her to the golden shield. For a moment, she couldn’t even be sure which way was up.

A moment later, she opened her eyes to discover that “up” was precisely where they were going. The bridge plummeted in fragments toward the plain below, the tower spinning slowly as it drifted off into space. Then she could spare no more attention for the wreckage that had been her home for most of the year.

Her sword had worked itself loose in the impact; both her boots had been knocked free. She clung to the nurdrakhaan’s eye socket with the fingers of her left hand, flailing with both feet to regain purchase as it arced around upward, ascending straight toward the hellgate.

Going through that, she reflected, would be less than ideal.

Before she could get a firm grip, however, the nurdrakhaan shook itself again, more violently this time, and suddenly she was gripping nothing. Trissiny tumbled head-over-boots through the sky, hurled almost straight upward, the slight arch of her flight probably not even enough to send her off the mountain.

Or such was the best she could figure; no amount of martial training had prepared her to keep her wits under conditions like these.

Light flared as her shield snapped reflexively back into place; golden wings stretched outward behind her, stabilizing her descent.

She had barely a second to realize she was plummeting straight toward the open maw of the nurdrakhaan, rushing up to meet her.

Trissiny kicked backward, adjusting her body at the last possible second to be sure to meet it sword-first.

 

“No!” Toby shouted impotently as the glowing light of his fellow paladin winked out above the monster’s head.

“Hrrash k’vankhthrazk! Hkhaasha vnarr!”

He whirled at the voice, finding himself being approached by three shadowlords, the nearest leveling a spear at his heart. It had an obsidian head, the haft made from what was unmistakably something’s leg bone, despite being black. The creature holding it looked twisted, misshapen, its scaly hide worked into uneven ridges and lumps as if it didn’t fit properly over its lopsided frame.

“No,” he whispered again.

Black, leathery lips drew back over yellowed fangs in a mocking grin, and it drew back its spear to strike.

Toby’s eyes narrowed to slits, and he bared his own teeth.

“No.”

The spear plunged forward. He caught it just behind the head, spinning, and yanked the demon forward into its own thrust. As it staggered past, he stepped neatly out of its path, wrenching the weapon from its grasp, and thrust the butt of the spear between its legs, twisting and sending it tumbling to the ground.

The two behind it charged him.

Toby flared alight with golden power, causing both demons to hiss and stumble, closing their eyes against the glare. The Sun Style didn’t favor offensive strikes, but it was the work of seconds to sweep the legs out from under one and tip the other over backward.

All this had drawn extra attention, however. The first hthrynxkh had regained its feet and was circling him warily; two more, armed with weapons of obsidian and bone, were dashing toward him. Worse, a sizable swarm of hiszilisks was assembling. They seemed to be holding off for the moment, perhaps to give the shadowlords their prerogative to strike first.

“This is not your world,” he said, hearing the snarl in his own voice and not hating it as much as he should. “This realm belongs to the gods. I will not have this…this barbarism.”

The nearest hthrynxkh snarled and lunged; Toby jabbed it straight between the eyes with the butt of the spear, knocking it to the ground, senseless. It was the most brutal strike he had ever performed against a living being.

“I will not have you here!” he roared, twirling the spear overhead and slamming it point-first into the ground in front of him. The light rose in his aura, first blinding the nearby demons, then pushing them physically back while they shrieked in protest, some beginning to smoke.

“I. Will have! PEACE!”

It was as if the sun rose where he stood.

Golden light burned with such an intensity that even he couldn’t see. Demons screamed, steamed and tumbled backward, but couldn’t move fast enough to escape; there was no outrunning light. It rose all around, flaring outward with kinetic force the blasted the grass flat in all directions.

Toby could feel the burning at the edge of his consciousness, knew what it heralded, and didn’t care.

But before it could grow worse, the light just as suddenly winked out.

It seemed he should have been blinded by it, but he stood, not even blinking, in a clear space in front of the smashed cafeteria. A few shards of obsidian lay on the ground nearby, even the bone and sinew to which they had been attached gone now; it had been demonic in origin, too. The shadowlords and hiszilisks were gone; even the corpses piled up from the party’s earlier confrontation had vanished. There was only ash, dancing on the wind.

 

Gabriel’s attempts to climb back onto the uppermost terrace had only attracted more hiszilisks to him. His wand had kept them at bay for a while, but he hadn’t found where the other one had fallen when he’d been thrown by the nurdrakhaan’s impact, and now he wasn’t even sure where he was. The demons had quickly figured out that he could only shoot at one of them at a time, and it was easy enough to get behind someone who had no one left to watch his back. He found it very difficult to navigate with three wolf-sized demons actually climbing on him.

He flailed, staggered, managed to shoot himself in the shoulder in his efforts to get them off, and succeeded in dislodging one. Mostly by pure luck, he shot another dead as it attempted to zoom in to fill the recently opened space. Past the jumble of legs and wings clinging to him, he spied a tree, and lurched toward it.

Spiny legs pinned his left arm to his size and mandibles pinched at him in two places, but for all their tenacity, these creatures didn’t have the magic it would take to actually pierce his skin. That magic would have killed them even faster than it would him. He wasn’t as utterly screwed in this situation as most of his friends would have been, but he was still not in control.

He managed to reach the small copse of trees, one of which had been uprooted and knocked over somehow, and turned, slamming his back against the trunk of an oak. The hiszilisk clinging to him from behind screamed in protest. Gabriel stepped forward and bashed it again, and then a third time, until it finally let go.

He managed to turn, aim, and shoot it through the chest before it could get up.

Then the one climbing on him on the front bit him right on the crotch.

Howling in outrage, Gabriel leveled his wand at it, then thought twice.

In that moment of hesitation, its tail lashed forward, the stinger driving right into his eye.

Even his soft tissue wasn’t vulnerable to physical damage, but it definitely wasn’t impervious to pain. That was the last straw.

The roar that tore itself from his throat was no longer human. He whirled, flailing furiously and peppering the entire area with wandshots. Beams of light arced out in all directions, actually driving back the swarm. Eyes totally black, roaring and snarling, Gabriel quite by chance laid his free hand on the hilt of the sword hanging at his waist. Purely on instinct, he ripped it free of its sheath and hacked at the creature clinging to him.

He had it off in seconds, but didn’t stop there. While the hiszilisks twitched and squealed, he pummeled it artlessly with both the sword and his wand, which was still spewing wild bolts of power. He slashed, bludgeoned and blasted for nearly a minute until he was assaulting little more than a black smear and scattered chunks of smoldering meat, before finally pausing to look around.

At some point, the remaining hiszilisks had decided to seek less deranged prey. He was alone.

The half-demon planted one foot on the fallen tree, brandished both weapons in the air, and let out a wordless roar of triumph.

“All right, that is enough of that.”

Suddenly, impossibly, the sword twisted in his grip, its blade flaring bright white. It plunged straight downward, stabbing through his foot and pinning him to the tree.

He was too shocked even to scream.

“You are completely out of control, boy, and your allies are scattered to the wind. I’d be content to leave you to your fate, but I will not be carted back to Hell as some kind of trophy. Centuries down in that wretched hole were bad enough. So against my better judgment, I am going to help you, hellblood. Now, let’s see what we have to work with.”

Gabriel clutched the sword’s handle, frantically trying to pull it out of his foot, grunting and snarling with each jerk. He might as well have been trying to pick himself up by the hair for all the progress he made. All the while, and though his berserking mind made little sense of it, the voice carried on in his ears.

“Ah, an enchanter. Not a good one, but it’s something. A cleric would be better, though obviously that’s not possible for you… An arcanist can’t do much with infernal magic, but the infernal can take power from the arcane. Hm, you can’t actually use that power, though, can you? Ah, part hethelax, I see. Well, perhaps there’s a workaround we can use.”

Desperately, he fired a furious salvo of wandshots at the sword, succeeding in drilling holds in the log, blasting his own shoe to fragments and not so much as singeing the leather wrapping its hilt.

“We can’t use your aura to power your spells, but vice versa? Ah, yes, the problem is you lack cognitive control over your infernal nature. It comes out as this…imbecilic carrying on you’re doing right now. Shuts off the brain completely. This you can’t do anything about, it’s a venting mechanism; if we blocked it you’d be overwhelmed by your own aura and likely combust or something. But we can change the way it vents. Ah, yes, I see how it can be done. I’m using your own skills, of course; I’m no arcanist. You could have figured this out yourself if you weren’t so afraid of your own nature. But perhaps that’s wise of you. Oh, stop that,” the voice added in disgust as he leaned forward and gnawed on the sword’s handle. “You’re like a dog, even more than most humans. Right, I’m going to use your own stored arcane energy to effect a small change in the connection between your aura and genetic code. This is the most fundamental essence of your self we’re playing with, here, so I imagine this will hurt quite a lot.”

In the next second, he completely forgot about the sword pinning his foot.

Pain subsumed every inch of Gabriel’s body, and then clawed its way into his mind, and into something which lay beyond that, beyond what he could have found words for even had he been capable of words at that moment.

He arched his back, thrashing and heaving helplessly with the throes of agony, howling at the sky. His whole body twisted, tensing and twitching against itself in existential protest. His eyes, black and fathomless, bulged so wide they seemed on the verge of popping out entirely.

And then, for just a moment, they flared orange.

Fire raged across his vision, then just as quickly subsided, and Gabriel straightened up, blinking.

Confused, he looked around, taking stock. His clothes were ripped in dozens of places and his left shoe was a ragged, scorched mess about to fall off. Only the enchanted green coat Tellwyrn had given him seemed to have survived undamaged. But…survived what?

The memory wasn’t there. He’d been swamped by demons… Which were now gone. He still had the wand in his right hand, and the black sword in his left. There was the faint memory of a voice talking to him from a great distance, but it flittered away like a barely-remembered dream when he tried to focus on it.

He swiveled in place, staring around. Demons were everywhere, gleefully wrecking the campus. Neither that nor his confusion over what had transpired in the last few minutes could hold his attention, however; he could feel pressure building up inside himself, as if something in his core was burning, growing hotter and causing him to expand beyond the volume he could safely hold. Flames licked at the edges of his vision.

Suddenly, understanding clicked into place. He took aim with the wand, and a beam of pure orange fire, pencil thin and intense enough to melt stone, blazed out. Deftly, he cut a rapid zig-zagging pattern through an approaching cluster of hiszilisks, and a second later, they were tumbling to the earth in scorched pieces.

Gabriel lowered his wand, awed. He understood. It was the berserking, the defense mechanism that hethelaxi had evolved against infernal corruption, channeling the hellfire in his blood in a way that didn’t drive him mad or destroy his body. Except it was channeled further now, somehow reaching through the pathways he used to access arcane magic. It still raged in him; it still demanded an outlet. He had to spend this power or it would overwhelm him again, taking away his ability to think. But he could spend it now.

Had he done this on instinct, somehow? He would never have voluntarily gone messing around with his own nature that way. Any enchanter knew better than to try to enchant himself; in the history of magic, that had led to a handful of towering successes and thousands of horrific tragedies.

Whatever the reason, it was done, and he hadn’t the luxury of standing around in introspection. Hellfire raged in him, demanding an outlet.

Gabriel stalked forward, channeling his inner fire through the black enchanter wand and laying waste to any hiszilisks which buzzed too close to him. He could control it far more finely than the wand’s native power, creating walls and spirals of fire, even directing fireballs that chased after their targets. All the while, he peered around, taking stock, his thoughts driven forward with the same frantic energy that fueled his magic.

The nurdrakhaan was hissing and flailing about high above; he dismissed that for the moment as it didn’t seem interested in him. He couldn’t see any of his friends… This was a disaster. None of them could last long alone.

Then a screaming streak of fire flashed past overhead. Gabriel stopped, his eyes tracking her path. She dived down onto a fleeing shadowlord and in seconds was airborne again, leaving her prey in pieces partially ground into the dirt. He could see evidence of several such attacks in the near distance.

Vadrieny soared back out overhead, and he calmly leveled his wand, directing a bolt of power straight into her path.

The fireball exploded on impact, sending the archdemon tumbling skyward. She recovered her balance in midair, screaming in fury, and dived straight down at him.

At the last second she adjusted her flight so as not to hit directly, landing hard enough to crack the pavement before him.

“Have you lost your mind?!” Vadrieny howled into his face.

“HAVE YOU LOST YOURS?!” he roared right back at her. The archdemon actually reared back, momentarily shocked into silence. Gabriel didn’t give her a moment to recover. “You’re flailing around killing them one by one! What do you think that’s going to accomplish? There are hundreds, and more keep coming! We have to assemble our friends before they’re picked off!”

“I am trying to keep them safe!” she shot back. “We have to drive the demons back—”

“You aren’t driving anything anywhere! Stop for a moment and think. They started with shock troops, then sent more dangerous ones. Eventually someone important will come through. We need to get him when he lands, and not just kill him but control him, and for that we need the group back together!”

“I can’t find them!”

“Then let them find us!” He thrust his wand skyward, letting loose a geyser of pure hellfire, venting off the pressure had had been building up during the conversation. Vadrieny took a step back, looking warily up at the gout of molten energy. “You’re a living fireball; the others can see you clearly. They’d have grouped up on you already if you would quit flying around! Get back aloft and stay in a holding pattern above me while I make my way back to the cafeteria lawn. Watch for Toby, Trissiny and Shaeine; you’ll see their magic as easily as they’ll see ours. We’ll gather whoever’s there to meet us and then find the rest, and then we will deal with the asshole behind this bullshit when he shows his face.”

Vadrieny blinked her glowing eyes. “That’s…actually a really good—”

“Go!” he bellowed, pointing skyward again. To the surprise of both of them, she did, shooting upward and settling into a glide above him, circling like a vulture while he stalked up the stairs to the next terrace, lashing out with his wand at any hiszilisk that came near.

They reached the lawn just in time to be momentarily blinded by an impossible corona of golden light. Gabriel paused, shielding his eyes until it subsided, then blinked at the lone figure standing in front of the wrecked cafeteria amid a swirl of ash.

“All right,” he said to himself with a grin. “That’s two.”

He set off toward Toby with long strides, wand at the ready and Ariel still hanging from his hand, forgotten.

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It was only seconds before a group of a dozen or so buzzing demons peeled off from the swarm, diving directly toward the freshmen.

Trissiny spoke rapidly. “Hiszilisks have a compound hive mind. The whole swarm doesn’t act as one, but smaller groups can. Keep your mind on the group, and don’t let yourself focus on an individual. They’ll try to make you do that, bait you into being distracted so the others can get you from behind.”

“Right,” said Fross. “Goddamn demons. Got it.”

“Practice situational awareness, stay in circle formation and don’t let them flank us or get behind anybody,” Trissiny said tensely. “Here they come.”

The group of demons had descended close enough to be much more than specks now; still somewhat vague with distance, it was apparent that Vadrieny’s earlier description had been accurate. The hiszilisks flew on thrumming, wasp-like wings and had stubby tails tipped in hooked stingers. They possessed only four limbs, though, which despite being proportioned somewhat like an insect’s ended in lizard-like claws. Their faces, topped with antennae, were oddly humanoid, notwithstanding the addition of huge compound eyes and snapping mandibles extending from their jaws to cover their mouths.

As they descended the shrill whine of their wings was augmented by a raspy screeching from their open mouths. The group approached at a steep angle that would have overshot their target, except that they abruptly dived with uncanny synchronization, plummeting almost straight downward.

They ran straight through a sudden puff of icy mist; their orderly dive-bombing was transformed into an ungainly tumble as wings froze over. The entire flock smacked into a silver shield that slammed into place above the group, keening and chittering unintelligibly. It clearly burned them on contact; they thrashed in pain, only about half their number managing to get back aloft, the others twitching and smoking against the shield. None of them got far. A second barrier rose above the silver one, this one golden and completely diffuse, more a mist than a wall. It rose upward, catching the demons as they tried to escape and causing them to burst actively into flame. All but one finally fell, plummeting down to land with their smoldering cousins against the barrier.

The survivor, the largest of the group, retreated upward a few yards, screaming furiously down at them.

The golden glow vanished, and directly below him, a circular hole appeared in the silver shield.

The hiszilisk screamed and dived straight at it, trailing soot. It plowed right into a bolt of lightning from Gabriel’s wand. Sparking, smoking, and now tumbling aimlessly, the creature hit the ground in the middle of their circle and lay there, legs twitching and charred wings still trying to buzz. It lurched to one side, snapping its mandibles at Teal’s leg.

Trissiny planted a boot in its neck, holding it down, and Ruda impaled the demon through the center of its body with her rapier. Finally, its struggles ceased.

The hole in the shield closed, and the entire thing tilted sideways, sloughing off the pile of burning demons, before finally winking out. They fell to lie in a smoking heap on the grass beside the students, not a one so much as twitching. Juniper grabbed the last one by its stinger and casually heaved it over to join them; she overshot the mark, sending the corpse spinning off to impact one of the columns in front of the cafeteria.

“And that is how it’s done,” Trissiny said with grim satisfaction.

“Let’s save some of the fun for those of us with swords, yeah?” Ruda said, grinning. “I don’t think that last one counted as a kill.”

“I suspect you will have plenty of opportunity,” Shaeine said.

“I feel kinda bad saying it, since I didn’t really help that time,” Juniper said with a huge beaming smile, “but we’re kinda awesome, aren’t we?”

“Nobody get cocky,” Toby warned. “Never around demons, that’s how they get you. Stay sharp, we seem to have drawn some attention to ourselves.”

The swarm was diverging, various groups descending gradually toward different parts of the campus, others continuing to circle above as if looking for something. None of them appeared to be in any great hurry—except for those which had clearly spied the students. As they watched, two smaller swarms honed in on them, one swinging out wide from across the campus and coming at a nearly horizontal angle, a second heading almost straight downward at them over the portal.

“Gabriel, Fross, Toby,” Trissiny pointed with her sword at the hiszilisks coming from the side, “soften those up before they reach us. Toby, make a shield if any get to melee range. Shaeine, hit that group above. Don’t just block them, smack them. Try to get them dazed and out of the air.”

Nobody offered any argument or discussion, but moved swiftly to obey, changing positions around the group to have the line of sight they needed. In the next second, Gabriel was blasting lightning bolts and cleaner beams of white light into the oncoming demons, augmented by more lightning expelled by Fross. Toby held himself at the ready, waiting until they came close enough for him to control a light shield effectively. Shaeine, with Teal holding her shoulders gently, executed her command perfectly. A silver shield raced upward, impacting the swarm as it dived at them; the force with which they hit apparently stunned the entire group, actually sending several tumbling straight upward from the blow. The entire cluster fell in all directions, smoking and flailing. The silver shield remained mobile, lashing back and forth to slap any which looked to be regaining their wings.

“Excellent!” Trissiny said firmly. “All right, any who make it to the ground will regroup to come at us as one unit; let them, it’s a lot easier to hit them while they’re massed than with them flying around everywhere.”

In fact, none of the first group survived; Gabriel and Fross had so decimated them that buzzing into Toby’s golden shield destroyed the only three which had survived to that point. True to Trissiny’s prediction, however, the demons that plummeted to the ground held off, reorganizing themselves in front of the observatory tower rather than charging directly.

“How’s everyone doing on energy?” Trissiny asked, facing the assembling hiszilisks but keeping her eyes moving in case more groups honed in on them.

“I am not tired.”

“So far, so good!”

“I’m okay!”

“All right,” the paladin said. “Toby, give us a thin, diffuse shield to soften ’em up as they charge. Ruda, Juniper, to the front with me, we’ll take these and give our casters a break. Gabe, behind us, shoot down any that try to flank. Here we go!”

It went beautifully, the demons buzzing obligingly into the golden glow Toby threw up in their path. Screaming, they tumbled into the ground, their forward momentum keeping them rolling right to the foot of the freshman formation. Juniper kicked the first to arrive, hard enough that it flew back over the heads of its compatriots in three pieces. The next managed to recover themselves enough to actually attack, but one paused to scream menacingly at them and received a rapier thrust directly in its open mouth. The third hit Trissiny’s shield; she pushed it back and lopped off its head before it could regain its balance. Two survivors did indeed attempt to circle around them, one falling to Gabriel’s wand. Fross froze the second, which had successfully used the students for cover to avoid his fire. Ruda stepped forward and neatly flicked the tip of her blade through its throat before it could get its wings working properly again.

“Fish in a barrel,” she said, grinning.

“Does anyone actually do that?” Gabriel asked. “Shoot fish in a barrel?”

She blinked at him. “…huh. Now that you ask, I can’t figure a reason why somebody would.”

“Focus!” Trissiny said sharply. “More incoming. General formation, defensive stances. Shaeine, make us a choke point. Ruda, up here with me. June, I need you to support Shaeine. Boost her energy if she tires, like you practiced.”

A silver dome appeared above them, but with a wedge-shaped section missing, like a cake with a slice cut out. Trissiny and Ruda stepped up into the breach, Fross hovering above their heads.

At least five separate groups of hiszilisks had come swarming down on them, buzzing furiously around the shield where there wasn’t room to attack the opening. And attack they did, so furiously that the press of bodies deprived the rest of space to push through.

Trissiny wedged herself forward into the gap, glowing furiously and laying about with her blade and shield equally. Ruda held position just behind, her nimble rapier lashing to to stab any attackers who made it past the paladin. Fross unleashed blasts of ice, lighting and explosive blue orbs of pure arcane energy, blowing back demons and felling them in considerable numbers.

Not considerable enough. As the pitched battle dragged on, more and more hiszilisks zeroed in on them, pressing at the barrier. Toby was spinning in a slow circle, having cast a wall of diffuse golden light that he dragged around and around outside Shaeine’s bubble, mowing down the demons that clawed at it from all sides. They burned, screamed and faltered as the orbiting cloud washed over them, some perishing beneath it, but more always came. Sparks began to fly from the impacts of claws and stingers on all sides of the shield; Shaeine was gritting her teeth in concentration, her expression very nearly one of pain. Juniper had shouldered Teal aside and wrapped her arms around the drow’s shoulders from behind, holding onto her; there was no visible exchange of magic, but Shaeine was nonetheless holding up the shield under enormous pressure, far better than she’d ever managed before.

“This can’t last,” Gabriel shouted. He held both wands at the ready, but had no avenue of attack except through Ruda and Trissiny. “If Shaeine wears herself out, we’re screwed!”

“Step back,” Teal ordered, moving into the center of the circle; he obeyed, crossing to the wall opposite Trissiny’s glow.

There was barely space within for Vadrieny’s wings, but she flared them outward nonetheless, grazing the silver shield on two sides. It seemed there was a momentary lull in the hiszilisks’ attack at the archdemon’s appearance. Then she threw back her head, flexed her claws outward, and screamed, and all doubt was removed.

The enormous swarm broke, buzzing away in all directions a lot faster than they had arrived. In seconds, the students were left surrounded by smoking corpses, piled into a chest-high drift in front of the opening and littering the grass on all sides.

Finally the bubble collapsed and Shaeine slumped backward against Juniper.

“I’ve got her,” the dryad said as Vadrieny jerked compulsively toward her. “Don’t touch, you’ll lose form if you grab me.”

“I thought these demons weren’t in Elilial’s pocket?” Gabriel said, still scanning the skies. For the moment, the swarm seemed unwilling to approach them again. “Wasn’t that the whole problem here? How come they listen to Vadrieny now?”

“Coyotes don’t answer to the bear, either,” said Trissiny. “Doesn’t mean they want to try charging it. Shaeine, are you all right?”

“Tired,” the drow said, gently pulling herself upright and out of Juniper’s grasp. “Not burning yet, but I cannot do that again tonight. I suggest we find some physical cover before engaging again.”

“What’s our endgame here, Trissiny?” Toby asked. “They just keep coming. Even if we get set up to survive a long siege like that one, what good does that do? No telling how many of these have already headed out to who knows where.”

“Which is why we can’t rely on Vadrieny except in a crisis like that; scattering them is a long-term defeat. For now, we trust that the gods have a plan,” Trissiny said firmly. “And that is not a religious platitude; this is all on their orders and we don’t have a better option right now. The astronomy tower can be entered from above, but its lobby will have only two access points, the front door and the stairwell. Shaeine, if we hole up in there, can you block off the stairs so we can defend the door?”

“That will be much less exhausting, yes.”

“All right, let’s move—”

The sound that emerged from the portal wasn’t quite a roar. It was like a breath, almost like a whisper—except, like a roar, it was powerful enough to shake the ground and the very air around them. It almost wasn’t a sound; there was something more to it, as if it was resonating across more than physical space. As one, the students looked up at the portal, just in time to see what began to emerge.

“What is that?” Ruda whispered, too stunned even to curse.

“That,” Trissiny said flatly, “is a good reason to keep two paladins and their allies on site.”

 

The enchantments powering the vehicle were designed for pulling entire caravans, not propelling a single car under full thrust. It screamed along the Rail line at a speed that could only charitably be called “unsafe.” The Rail glowed a furious blue beneath it, and where it passed there were not only sparks but flashes of lightning. As the car rounded the final long curve approaching Last Rock, its emergency inhibitor charms activated, causing the Rail to gleam nearly white with the volume of arcane power being used. Sparks flew in a wide fan to its right, and the car actually began twisting slightly off-center.

With a brilliant flash and a bang that echoed across the plains like rolling thunder, the lead car finally tore loose from the enchantments binding it to the Rail. The Rail line itself snapped at the point of breakage, its two halves twisting away like rearing serpents and spraying sparks and arcs of lightning in all directions. The tallgrass burst alight in a dozen places.

The car itself was flung forward, tumbling end-over-end through the air like a stone hurled from a catapult on a course that would have sent it smashing into the middle of the town. It righted itself midair, however, slowing dramatically, until it drifted lightly the last dozen yards of its journey and settled to the ground next to Last Rock’s Rail platform so delicately that the nearby tallgrass was not even disturbed.

Lacking the support of the enchanted Rail line on which it was meant to rest, it immediately toppled over on its side.

The hatch burst open and Professor Tellwyrn bounded nimbly out, landing on the platform and straightening her vest. “Offhand I can think of a dozen ways to improve the performance of that vehicle,” she muttered. “Ah, well. Any landing you walk away from, as they say.”

A figure emerged at the hatch, dragged itself weakly over the lip and tumbled to the ground.

“Earth!” Rook gasped, pausing to actually kiss the dirt. “Sweet, blessed ground! I will never leave you again. Pleh, blah,” he added, spitting out loam and wiping his mouth.

“Remind me never to get in anything with you again, Professor,” Finchley added shakily, pausing astride the hatch to give Moriarty a hand up.

“Oh, you’re fine, you drama queens,” Tellwyrn said disparagingly. “I made certain of that. Pull yourselves together, this night is going to get harder before it gets easier.”

She strode to the edge of the platform and stood, fists on her hips, staring up at the peak of the mountain. Above the campus, swirling black specks swarmed in all directions. Behind her, the three soldiers finally straggled up.

“Oh, fuck me,” Rook whispered, staring up at the distant demons.

Tellwyrn grunted. “The time for that was before all hell broke loose. Now we focus.” She hopped down from the platform, disdaining the stairs, and strode forward into the town.

Rook snorted as he and the others followed. “Well, it’s not like that was on the table, anyhow.” “How would you know? You never tried.”

He missed a step. “Wh—you’re not… Wait, that could actually…?”

Tellwyrn glanced over her shoulder, grinning. “Too late now.”

Rook sighed heavily, shoulders slumping. “You’re a bad person, Professor Tellwyrn.”

“Mm hm. Whine more, women love that.”

“Professor,” Moriarty said hesitantly, “I’m not entirely sure why you wanted us along for this.”

“Because I need my faculty riding herd on those damn kids. Who knows what else they’ll come up with; I’ve already had one pry open a hellgate and the entire freshman class do this bullshit. All it’ll take is for one more disaster to happen in the middle of a major city and I’ll never get the Imperials off my butt. What we need to do here is close that damn portal, which means somebody has to go through it to work the other side.”

Finchley squeaked.

“Not you,” she said acidly. “I will see to that. Luckily two of the little asshats up there are arcanists and three are light-wielders, so assuming they can follow simple instructions, they can handle it from this end. But with part of the group doing that, I need somebody to shoot demons and let them work on it. That’s your job.”

“Shooting stuff we can do!” Rook promised.

“Hm,” she grunted. “It occurs to me suddenly that I’ve never actually seen you try.”

“That’s not true, remember when that Longshot clown was—”

All four came to an immediate halt when they heard the noise. The sheer wrongness of it made it more disturbing than the sound itself deserved to be; what should have been an eerie whisper was powerful enough to vibrate their very skeletons. In unison they lifted their eyes to the hellgate above the University.

What emerged was horrifying first and foremost for its size. The armor-plated, birdlike face, ending in a wickedly hooked black beak, was surmounted by a triple row of incandescent red eyes that seemed too small for it by far. It was easily large enough to swallow a Rail caravan. And still, the thing kept coming. It oozed outward, snapping at a group of hiszilisks in passing, its sinuous body continuously unfurling from the portal. The thing was proportioned very much like an eel, but partially covered with plates of rusty-looking armor, from between which emerged an orange glow, as if the beast were filled with fire and its skin cracking. An almost comically small pair of fins waved just behind its head, with above them pulsing translucent sacs that definitely were full of fire, inflating and collapsing with the rhythm of its breath. When it finally fully emerged from the portal, with a flick of its finned tail, it was longer than a passenger zeppelin, and roughly as massive.

“No,” Moriarty whispered.

“Hm,” Tellwyrn mused. “That hellgate’s bigger than I realized.”

“What the hell is that?” Rook asked shakily.

“It’s called a nurdrakhaan,” she replied, resuming her stride. They trailed along behind her, after a moment’s hesitation. “You may note a similar root in there to the word ‘dragon.’ That’s Hell’s version of the same basic thing. Less intelligent, less restrained, considerably more destructive.”

“You’re awfully calm,” Rook said, his tone almost accusing.

“Just as soon as it becomes productive to panic, I assure you, I’ll take up the habit. Now, since we can’t teleport this close to the active gate, we’re gonna have to take the slow way back up the mountain.”

“I don’t know about you,” said Finchley, “but after hiking up that thing we may not be in the best shape to fight demons!”

“I said the slow way, not the stupid way,” Tellwyrn snapped. She had led them across the outer square of the town, abutting the Rail platform and scrolltower office, to the front of the Ale & Wenches. The Professor grabbed the front door by its handle, which immediately glowed blue for a moment, and the lock clicked open. She pulled the door open and stepped within. “Come on, come on. Time’s wasting.”

 

“Well…that’s one way to do it,” Ruda said slowly. They watched, weapons at the ready, as the enormous monstrosity spun through the air above them, snapping up whole clusters of hiszilisks in its gigantic maw. It appeared to move slowly, its undulations almost dreamlike, but that was an illusion created by its size. It was clearly faster than the smaller, more nimble demons. Their habit of grouping together made them more vulnerable to its attacks, but they didn’t seem in a hurry to learn.

“Why is it helping us?” Gabriel demanded, turning to look at Trissiny.

“It’s not,” she said tersely.

“But it’s only attacking the demons, not the campus!”

“A nurdrakhaan doesn’t help.”

“We were told those demons don’t answer to Elilial,” Toby said slowly, frowning up at the scene playing out above them. “With the implication that whoever opened the hellgate and brought them here didn’t, either. What if she sent something to clean up the mess on the other end?”

“Regardless,” Trissiny said sharply, “that thing cannot be allowed to run amok on the mortal plane. In the very immediate term, yes, it seems to be cleaning up the hiszilisks for us, which is fine. But it’s also a vastly greater threat than they are, and we need to bring it down.”

“What if it just goes back through the portal after it finishes with those guys?” Fross asked.

“Demons don’t do that.”

“Then the question,” Shaeine said softly, “is how do you propose to kill it?”

Trissiny frowned. “…Vadrieny, can you knock it out of the air?”

“I don’t have the physical strength,” the archdemon admitted. “There’s no leverage in the air. It’s not aerodynamic, as you can see; it flies by magic, and it has a lot of magic. I don’t know how to interfere with the spells holding it up.”

“How much can you hurt it, do you think?”

She flexed her claws. “As much as I can get these on, which…would annoy it, sure. Maybe I could put out its eyes?”

“Somehow I don’t think having that thing reeling around blind would be a positive development,” said Gabriel.

A small pack of hiszilisks came at them from a steep dive, screeching. They hit a cloud of ice expelled by Fross, then tumbled through a barrage of Gabriel’s wandfire into a haze of golden light, finally impacting a silver shield which immediately flickered out, leaving them to tumble, smoking, to the ground a few feet distant.

“What about mithril?” Fross suggested. “Sounds like it’ll fall naturally if we block the magic in it. In fact, that might kill it outright. I doubt that thing could breathe in this atmosphere if we impose objective physics on it.”

“We have one mithril item in our possession,” said Ruda, patting her rapier, “and apart from the difficulty of getting it up there, it’s just not big enough to make much of a dent.”

“Triss, does it have vital points?” Juniper asked.

Trissiny shook her head slowly, still staring up at the gargantuan demon. “Presumably. It’s not as if anyone’s ever dissected one in a lab. I imagine they’re somewhere on the inside.”

“Then we brute force it,” said Gabriel. “Vadrieny can probably rip through that armor, given time and space to work. Juniper cancels infernal power just by touching it. Ruda’s sword—hell, Trissiny’s sword will harm it. So…all we have to do is get it on the ground, dazed or too wounded to fight.”

The nurdrakhaan opened its huge maw and that disconcerting hissing roar sounded again. Hiszilisks fled in all directions; one group was too slow, and vanished in a snap of its jaws.

“Oh, is that all,” Ruda said. “Well, we’re just about done here then, aren’t we? I’ll go get a head start on planning our victory bash.”

“I hope that’s making you feel better,” he told her, “because it sure as hell isn’t helping.”

“Right, keeping on point,” said Toby. “I think Gabriel’s right. So we need ideas.”

“To begin with, we can’t do that here,” said Trissiny. “There’s just not room on the mountaintop for that thing to lie down. We’ll have to abandon this position and lure it down onto the plain somehow.”

“Then I’d better take point,” Vadrieny said. “I’m the only one mobile enough in the air to manipulate it that closely.”

“Ahem,” said Fross.

“Fross, even if you’ve got the firepower to damage that thing,” said Gabriel, “you’re probably too small for it to see.”

“You may be right,” the pixie said grudgingly.

“What if you get eaten?” Trissiny asked Vadrieny.

The demon grinned, displaying her disturbing complement of fangs. “Then I’ll be closer to its vitals, won’t I?”

“Let us call that Plan B,” Shaeine said firmly.

“Then we have a strategy,” said Trissiny. “Moving will attract the hiszilisks, which isn’t ideal, but I don’t see a choice. We need to make our way down the mountain and away from the town. Vadrieny, you’ll have to stay on top of the nurdrakhaan. As long as it’s just killing hiszilisks, leave it alone, but if it—”

“Incoming,” Fross interrupted. “Two o’clock, eighty degree elevation.”

Trissiny turned her head to scowl at the cluster of hiszilisks now heading straight for them in a steep dive. That particular flock had just had half their number snapped up by the nurdrakhaan, which was now moving past behind them.

“Shaeine, rest,” Trissiny said tersely. “Gabe, discourage them. Toby, Fross, stand by for them to close.”

Gabriel had already raised both wands and unleashed a barrage of blasts at the incoming demons. Lightning snapped through the cluster, arcing between several targets; they were singed but not as badly affected by pure electricity while not grounded. His other wand, the ebony-hafted enchanter’s weapon the Crawl had given him, did a lot more damage. Two demons plummeted from the sky, and a third veered to the side, clipped by a wandshot.

“You’re getting better with that thing,” Toby commented.

Gabriel grinned, half-turning his head to reply.

In that moment a stray shot struck the nurdrakhaan, near the tip of its tail.

The enormous beast instantly pivoted in midair, turning to glare down at them directly, and opened its mouth to emit that skeleton-vibrating hiss.

The good news was that the hiszilisks immediately abandoned their attack, scattering in all directions.

“Oh, come on,” Gabriel whispered. “It’s made of armor. How did it even feel that?”

“Arquin, we’ve only known each other less than a year,” Ruda said in a tone of resignation, “but somehow I feel I’ve always known that when I died, it would be your fucking fault.”

“Shh,” Trissiny murmured. “Don’t move. Maybe it—”

The mammoth demon hissed again and dived straight toward them. Suddenly its motion didn’t seem nearly so slow.

“Get moving!” Vadrieny ordered, and with a beat of her wings shot upward, straight at the creature.

The archdemon curved sideways in flight to approach it at an angle, and slammed straight into the side of its armored beak, actually forcing the monstrosity off course. Letting out a wild scream, she clawed savagely at the thick shell plating its face, tearing loose handfuls of chitinous armor. The nurdrakhaan hissed in protest, shaking its head to dislodge her.

“New plan!” Trissiny announced. “Run for it! Keep an eye on the sky, we’ll have to—”

Another, even louder hiss that literally shook the ground made them all pause, wincing; Shaeine clapped both hands over her sensitive ears. The nurdrakhaan twisted in midair, smashing its face against the upper level of the astronomy tower and crushing Vadrieny into the edifice. Stone crumbled under the blow, the entire structure swaying dangerously. The nurdrakhaan pulled back; in the next second, Vadrieny was visible, dragging herself out of a collapsed pile of masonry and flexing her wings for another takeoff.

Moving faster than they had yet seen it do, the nurdrakhaan whipped around, smashing its tail against her and the tower.

The entire tower was pulverized, rubble flying outward over the side of the mountain to plummet to the plain below. There was no sign of the archdemon amid the carnage.

“She’s fine,” Trissiny said, grabbing Shaeine’s shoulder as the drow took a compulsive step toward the ruins. “No amount of physical force will harm her. She has her job to do; we need to keep moving! Stay together—”

“No,” Ruda shouted, “scatter!”

It came down on them like a falling star, ridged jaws wide and hissing furiously. The students bolted in two directions as the colossal demon hit the ground mouth-first. It scooped out a huge swath of the lawn, changing course at the point of impact with astonishing agility, seemingly unfazed by the force of its own landing. Dragging its long, armored bulk through the rut it had bitten out only widened it, tossing soil, fragments of stone walkways and hiszilisk corpses in all directions.

No one was slow enough to be swallowed, but no one was agile to get completely out of the way, with the lucky exception of Fross.

“I gotcha!” the pixie shouted, yanking Ruda with her on an invisible cord of magic. The pirate flew straight backward into the hefty doors of Helion Hall, where she crumpled to the ground, dazed. “Oh, crap,” Fross yelped, zipping over to her.

Juniper managed to keep her feet, even as the very ground under her was torn up and rippled outward like a tidal wave. She even bounded toward the massive demon as its coils ground past, slamming a fist into its side. The blow was ineffectual and cost her enough balance to send her tumbling back down, but for at least a moment she managed to provide a testament to the martial forms in which Professor Ezzaniel had drilled her in lieu of having her actually fight other students.

Shaine and Gabriel were hit directly by the edge of the nurdrakhaan’s beak; he went sailing straight into a tree, managing to keep a grip on only one of his wands. She had the presence of mind to wreath herself in a silver shield, and to sustain it as the magical orb was sent bouncing down the stairs to the next terrace down, where it collapsed, as did she.

Toby, rather than running from the demon, threw himself at Trissiny, who had side-stepped neatly but not attempted to flee. Throwing his arms around her shoulders from behind, he wreathed them both in a golden glow, firmer than those he had been using against the hiszilisks. Her own golden shield covered them more closely. The double layer of protection barely saved them.

Her dodge had taken her out of the immediate range of the demon’s mouth, but in the subsequent disturbance of the ground, she hadn’t the footing to evade the impact of its fin. Whether by chance or intention, it flicked them upward, sending the two paladins hurtling onto the roof of the cafeteria. Their joined shields held up to that blow and the impact, but that was all.

Toby staggered to the floor, winded, Trissiny barely keeping her feet. Just beyond them, over the low lip of stone that surrounded the roof, the nurdrakhaan ascended skyward again, hissing.

“Now what?” Toby wheezed, dragging himself upright.

“I have a plan,” she said grimly, her eyes on the beast. Her aura flared gold again. “Are you close to burnout?”

“Not nearly. I’ve been pacing myself. I’m assuming you can go even longer, being part elf?”

She nodded. “Light up. Shield yourself and put out as much of a corona as you safely can.”

He did so, watching her for further cues. She followed her own advice, keeping her gaze fixed on the enormous demon. Between the two of them, the entire roof of the cafeteria blazed as if under the noonday sun.

“Okay, what next?”

Trissiny pointed at the beast with her sword; the ancient, pitted blade glowed nearly white with the intensity of the magic gathering in it, then blazed forward in one concerted burst.

He could see why she didn’t use that tactic as a weapon. The light flowed out more like radiance from a shuttered lantern than the directed energy of a wandshot. It was focused enough, however, to make a gleaming patch along the side of the nurdrakhaan.

The monster whirled again, fixing its six scarlet eyes on them, and hissed.

“Trissiny?” Toby said urgently.

“Gather and rally everyone,” she ordered, glaring up at the demon.

“Oh, no you don’t, I know what you’re thinking and you can forg—”

“Together we can do this, but they’ll be picked off individually,” she snapped. “They must rally. Get it done, Caine.”

The nurdrakhaan hissed once more and dived straight at them.

Trissiny whirled and planted a snap kick right in the side of Toby’s shield, booting him toward the edge of the roof.

All his years of training in the martial arts were thwarted by his own shield; he had never practiced keeping his balance while at the fixed center of an indestructible sphere. The orb of energy hit the foot-high wall and rolled neatly over, lifting his feet right off the floor and sending him plummeting off the side.

He hit the ground hard for the second time in the last sixty seconds, again losing his hold on the shield. He immediately flung it back up, barely avoiding being crushed by debris as the nurdrakhaan ripped a huge gouge out of the roof of the cafeteria.

Through the dust, at a painful angle around the broken masonry between him and the beast, he could see it rising skyward again, hissing its displeasure, the source of which was the glowing Hand of Avei clinging to its face with her sword lodged in one of the gouges Vadrieny had made in its armor.

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7 – 5

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The scene at the central Rail station in Calderaas was one of orderly chaos, a familiar sight to those who had lived through well-mannered disasters. In accordance with the Imperial proclamation freezing Rail travel, the station was emptied of its normal clientele and much of its normal staff. With the throngs of travelers gone, the cavernous space turned out to have ample room for the refugees from Last Rock, though they were huddled uncomfortably close together in some cases.

Imperial personnel moved rapidly about, mostly civilians from the Ministry of the Interior in suits and dresses, distinct from the townsfolk chiefly by their silver gryphon badges and brisk manner. Uniformed soldiers carrying staves were posted at the entrances and windows and strategically throughout the station, keeping watch; more of them, sans weapons, had been put to work helping to shift cargo. For the most part, the townsfolk were admirably calm and orderly. The frontier bred hardy people more inclined to work than to complain, and the proximity to the University had taught these particular souls a degree of comfort with the unexpected. Nonetheless, there were raised voices, minor scuffles and the odd backup of traffic as someone misunderstood directions or refused to follow them. Clerics were moving through the crowd, mostly Universal Church parsons, Omnist monks and several Izarites, helping to keep people calm and seeing to whatever needs they found.

The townsfolk were being settled into hastily-cleared offices and storage warehouses, with several in tents erected along the wider thoroughfares and main lobby, while the students were being set up along the platforms suspended above the actual Rail lines. Imperial officers, familiar with the handling of upset civilians in a crisis, had taken one look at the two groups and promptly separated them. Even now, with distance and casually wandering soldiers between them, a lot of the townspeople were directing angry looks and mutters at the students. Even aside from the general presumption that the University was responsible for whatever nonsense befell the town, there were more than a few Rockies intelligent enough to do the arithmetic on the situation and deduce that a student, or students, had to be personally responsible for the hellgate. By this point, that awareness had sifted through the entire population, and even some of the more laid-back citizens were growing irate. The usual run of University tomfoolery was one thing, but they’d now been separated from their homes and were facing the possibility of having no homes to which to return. The priests had a full job maintaining calm.

Professors were helping with that. They moved among the students, keeping order better than the Imperials could (apparently enough of the Interior personnel were acquainted with college students to know not to try clamping down on them), and also speaking with the civilians. University staff grew to be more familiar to the folk of Last Rock than students, simply by virtue of having more time to get to know them. Most were liked, at least to an extent, and they had a measure of trust accumulated which was paying off in this situation.

Nobody was under the delusion that this was a long-term solution. Apart from the simple sanitary concerns of having that many people in a confined space, the simmering tensions would only get worse the longer people were kept in such a tight situation. It was just a matter of time until someone lashed out, one way or another, and that raised the very real possibility of an escalating conflict. In theory, it should all be resolved one way or another within two days, but the Ministry of the Interior was already drawing up a resettlement plan for the refugees. So far, only some of the senior University faculty and the mayor and Sheriff of Last Rock had been informed of this, on the reasoning that seriously discussing the possible destruction of the town would only escalate tensions. For the time being, everyone was focusing on tending to the needs of the refugees and keeping calm and order among them.

“YOU WHAT?”

Almost everyone.

Professor Tellwyrn stood nose-to-nose with a man whose Army uniform bore a captain’s stripes below a Strike Corps insignia; he stared back at her with remarkable calm considering the situation.

“We are not embarking for Last Rock, or anywhere else,” the captain said patiently. Behind him, the three other members of his strike team stood in relaxed postures that belied the cold stares they all directed at Tellwyrn. A second strike team stood off to the side, having casually arranged themselves into a staggered diamond formation that gave them all a direct line of sight at the Professor, placing their warlock at the head of the group and the cleric in the back.

“Tell me that again,” Tellwyrn hissed. “This time, speak slowly and use small words, as I appear to have gone completely insane. There is no other possible explanation for what I thought I just heard.”

“The orders are directly from the Emperor. Forces are being dispatched from Tiraas, and as I just said, Professor, all other details are classified. I couldn’t tell you more even if I knew more.”

“Do you?”

He smiled thinly. “That’s also classified.”

“That’s nonsense!” she barked. “Calderaas is the provincial capital and the established staging area. There is no reason to re-route resources from Tiraas, hundreds of miles south, when there are soldiers, zeppelins and strike teams here!”

“I am confident that his Majesty knows what he is doing,” the captain said calmly.

“Maybe I should go ask him,” Tellwyrn snorted, taking a step back.

Immediately, a faint buzz of arcane energy sprang up around all eight Strike Corps members, along with a small but noticeable increase in the ambient temperature and a golden glow wreathing the two clerics. Both fae magic users slipped hands into their coat pockets.

“Be extremely careful, Professor,” warned the captain quietly. “That was uncomfortably close to a threat to the Emperor.”

“Boy,” she said disdainfully, “do you really imagine I’m impressed by—”

“Do you imagine I am?” he shot back. “Yes, yes, we know, big bad Arachne can bring this whole place down around all our heads. Either do it or pipe down and behave yourself, lady. There’s a crisis going on, if you haven’t noticed, and nobody has time for your grandstanding. The Empire is handling this. You will be informed of anything you need to know.”

Behind him, the priestess in his team sighed heavily and shook her head. The warlock next to her grinned.

Tellwyrn regarded the captain with a curious expression for a moment before opening her mouth to speak again.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

“Oh, what now,” Tellwyrn muttered, turning her back on the Strike Corps to seek out the new disturbance.

She stalked through the informal blockade of soldiers, none of whom moved close enough to make that difficult, to the platforms where the student groups were being organized. A mixed gaggle of sophomores and freshmen were clustered together, confronted by Janis van Richter, who was scarlet-faced and hyperventilating with a mixture of panic and fury.

As Tellwyrn arrived, Professor Yornhaldt emerged from the crowd in response to the noise, several other faculty members and a couple of Imperial Marshals gravitating over behind him.

“Janis,” Tellwyrn said sharply, “what is the—”

“Look!” Janis shrieked, reaching out to grab Ruda by the shoulder. Her hand passed straight through, eliciting no reaction from the girl. Next to her, Tanq and Natchua exchanged a nervous glance.

Tellwyrn halted, frowned, and pushed her spectacles up her nose, peering at the students through rather than over them. Her expression immediately grew an order of magnitude more angry. She held up one hand and snapped her fingers.

Instantly, the entire freshman class dissolved in a clatter of sparks and falling objects. Smoke drifted up from the wreckage of charred enchanting components now lying inert on the metal platform. The one exception was Fross, who immediately veered sideways and went shooting drunkenly off over the Rail tracks. In seconds, she lost cohesion and dissolved in a blur of mist.

“Wh—that—they—“ Professor Yornhaldt clapped a hand to his forehead. “I didn’t even— Arachne, I’m afraid I must immediately tender my resignation on the grounds that I have become a senile old fool.”

“Oh, shut up, Alaric,” she growled. “If I expected you to match wits with duplicitous teenagers I’d have to pay you better. What’s more to the point is they could not have done this alone; eight illusionary kids boarding a caravan would have drawn some notice.” She tilted her head down, glaring at the members of the sophomore class now standing around the destroyed golems. “Unless someone was covering for them.”

“The Hand of Avei has a calling, and an obligation to face the demons,” November said stridently. “It’s an honor to be of service to her in that!” She was only present because a caravan with a special safety harness had been found to carry her, and was now (much to her irritation) confined to a wheeled chair with a heavy lap quilt on Miss Sunrunner’s orders.

Beside her, Natchua shrugged, folded her arms and looked away. “If the froshes all want to get killed, I respect their choices.”

“Wait, wait, stop,” said Chase, his eyes wide. His lower lip started to tremble dramatically. “You man…that wasn’t really them? D-does this mean me and Trissiny aren’t getting married?” November shot him a filthy look.

“Those. Little. Shits.” Tellwryn hissed.

Behind her, Professor Ezzaniel cleared his throat. “It’s not like that group to do something so dangerous without a specific reason, Arachne. Considering the situation, I suspect Omnu and Avei are directly behind this.”

“Who did you think I was talking about?” she snarled, whirling and stalking away up the platform.

There was a clatter and a fountain of sparks as the connector between the Rail driver car and the compartment immediately behind it severed. Instantly, the entire empty caravan fell onto the Rail itself with a tremendous crash that brought people running from all directions. Except the driver car, which floated up into the air, turning completely around as it drifted back past the wrecked caravan and settled gently onto the Rail, facing back the way it had come.

Immediately, its hatch swung outward and a shaken-looking Imperial enchanter leaned out. “What in Omnu’s flaming name—?”

“Change of plans!” Tellwyrn said, stomping up to him. “This car is going back to Last Rock. Now. Out.”

“I’ve received no such orders,” he blustered.

“You just did, boy,” she snapped. “Get out of the car before I have to get you out.”

“Now see here!” He drew himself up fully, which was quite impressive as he was still leaning awkwardly forward out of the hatch. “The Imperial Rails answer to no one but his Majesty! If you think for one moment—”

“Driver!” a voice shouted from the near distance. The crowd of nervous onlookers parted, disgorging three Imperial soldiers with Private Moriarty at their head, pointing imperiously at the enchanter. “A further crisis has developed. On the authority of his Imperial Majesty I am commandeering this vehicle. I’ll need you to step out, please.”

“Oh, well,” he hemmed, glancing back into his compartment. “I guess if that’s—eep!” The enchanter staggered, barely catching his balance as Tellwyrn tugged him out onto the platform.

“Good work,” she said curtly, pausing just inside to point at the trio. “You three! Get in here, I may need some warm bodies to throw at a problem.”

“Well, if you’re gonna sweet talk us, I guess we have no choice,” Rook drawled, ambling forward.

It was crowded with four of them in the compartment. The three soldiers pressed themselves back onto the padded bench along its rear wall, groping for the provided handholds, of which there were not enough for all of them.

“Ugh, what is this?” Tellwyrn growled, yanking the hatch shut and glaring at the runic console. “What a mess. I told them to keep the controls simple. What does this even do?” She prodded a bank of symbols and immediately the Rail beneath them began to glow blue, humming furiously and emitting odd sparks. “Oh, I see. Well, that’s handy, needed that anyway. What are you leering at?” she demanded, turning her head to look at Rook, whose insane grin had been reflected on the inside of the windscreen.

“Moriarty broke a rule!” he crowed.

“The exalted rank of private doesn’t give us the authority to commandeer anything,” Finchley added. “Especially Imperial property.”

“An Imperial Rail driver wouldn’t yield his assigned place under any threat,” Moriarty huffed, folding his arms. “And he was standing between Arachne Tellwyrn and what she wanted. I just saved that man’s life.”

“You are rapidly becoming my favorite, Moriarty,” Tellwyrn said, turning back to the controls. She flicked her fingers across two runes and grasped a lever.

“Oh, gods,” he groaned, and that was as far as he got before she pulled the lever.

The car shot forward like a bolt of lightning, accelerating faster and far less smoothly than Rail caravans were meant to. Within seconds, they were outside the city and rounding the first gentle curve, smashing the three men into the wall and eliciting a chorus of screams. Tellwyrn gripped the lever and a hanging strap, balancing upright without apparent difficulty.

“For heaven’s sake, cut out that racket,” she snapped. “Let me concentrate! I’ve got about ten minutes to figure out how to stop this thing.”

For some reason, that didn’t seem to help.

 

“Did you see them go?” Ruda asked as the girls stepped onto the bridge toward the main campus from Clarke Tower. After months of making the trip, they barely gave the frightening drop a glance.

“Fross came to collect us,” Shaeine replied. “We were not attending the window at the time, but I gather it is confirmed? We are alone on campus?”

“Oh ho,” Ruda said, waggling her eyebrows. “And what were you attending—”

“Somehow that was the first time I’ve watched a Rail caravan depart from the vantage of our room,” Trissiny interrupted her. “It was a surprisingly awesome sight. Makes me feel like I’ve wasted opportunities all these months to see it happen. You just don’t appreciate how fast those things move when you’re inside one.”

“On the inside you mostly appreciate how roughly they move,” Teal said with a grin.

“Well, it’s not like you can just sit at your window waiting for it,” Juniper said reasonably. “Last Rock is only barely on the regular stop roster, and most the time nobody’s coming here, much less leaving. The caravans don’t come around all that often.”

“How do you know that?” Ruda asked.

The dryad shrugged. “I read, I talk to people. It’s not exactly a secret.”

“I thought the plan was to meet up on the cafeteria lawn,” Trissiny said as they reached the gate to the main campus and found Toby and Gabriel there waiting.

“Yes, well, we decided to surprise you,” said Toby with a smile. “Purely out of concern for your well-being and not at all because this place is unbearably creepy when it’s deserted.”

“It’s hard to tell,” Gabe added, “but I think it would be even without… You know.” He pointed skyward, and they all paused to look up.

The wispy spiral of clouds had, over the last hour, grown to a huge thunderhead, twisted into a slowly rotating vortex and casting a shadow over the mountain, the town and their surroundings. There were no other clouds in the sky, as if all had been drawn to the hellgate. As the sun was falling and the sky reddening, a sickly orange glow illuminated the clouds. It might have been a natural result of the sunset, except that it was too faint, and the way it reflected on the swirls of vapor made it plain that the source was at the center of the spiral. There was no thunder, no sound of any kind, but flashes occurred periodically among the clouds, like distant lighting, except an ominous red in color.

“Might as well get over there, anyway,” said Fross. “I don’t know how much difference it’ll make, but…that’s where the center of it is.”

“Yeah,” Trissiny agreed, nodding, and set out on the path toward the cafeteria. The rest fell into step with her.

“Arquin, just what the fuck do you think you’re doing with that thing?” Ruda demanded.

Gabriel placed a hand protectively on the hilt of the black sword hanging at his side. “Well, considering what we’re up against… I figured it was best to be as prepared as possible.”

“Being prepared means knowing how to use the weapons you have,” she snorted. “You’re prepared to cut your damn foot off.”

“It doesn’t cut me,” he said, scowling. “I checked.”

“Yeah, way to really hone in on the important point there.”

“Gabriel has been training with the sword,” said Trissiny, “with my help. He’s making progress.”

“Really?” Ruda raised her eyebrows. “Well, damn. Color me impressed.”

“I do what I can,” Gabriel said with blatantly false modesty.

“Progress,” Trissiny clarified, “in this case meaning that I trust him, barely, not to harm himself more than an enemy. I’m a lot less confident about him swinging that thing around while the rest of us are standing nearby. Please stick to the wands, Gabe.”

“I was planning to anyway,” he said with a sigh.

“Why do you even still have that?” Fross asked. “I thought you were gonna have the spells on it analyzed. Somehow it seems like Tellwyrn would have made you get rid of it.”

“Which is why I didn’t take it to Tellwyrn,” he said, winking at her. “I showed it to Professor Yornhaldt; he said it’s very old and was clearly the work of an archmage or something similar.”

“That’s it?” Teal asked. “No word on what the spells actually do?”

“He couldn’t tell. Apparently they’re extremely complicated and very tightly woven together, or…something. It got a bit technical for me; I learned some new terms to look up but even so I never did follow the whole thing. But no, he said to really understand what the magic was supposed to do, he’d have to start unraveling the enchantments on it, which would probably ruin them. He did suggest I could probably sell it to a collector for a good sum, or even turn it into the Empire for a bounty. Apparently the government likes to take powerful magical artifacts out of circulation whenever possible.”

“And yet…there it still is,” Toby noted.

Gabriel shrugged, looking self-conscious; he touched the hilt again, lightly brushing his fingers over it. “It’s… I dunno. It just didn’t feel right. It’s almost like I rescued her, y’know?”

Ruda snorted. “Her?”

“Well, Ariel’s a girl’s name, right?”

“I’m a little more concerned with the fact that you’re carrying a weapon loaded down with extremely powerful spells and you don’t even know what they do,” Trissiny said, turning to glance at him as they walked. “I wish you’d just left it in your room, Gabriel. Failing that, please leave it in the sheath. We are assuredly not going to need extra sources of trouble tonight.”

“Yes, General,” he grumped.

They walked in silence the rest of the way to the lawn, and by unspoken design formed into a loose circle outside the broken cafeteria windows, gazing upward. Silent lightning flickered through the clouds. It was subtle, but distinct: the flashes were coming more regularly now.

“It will be all right,” said Toby quietly. “This isn’t an accident. The gods sent us here; they have a plan.”

“Yup,” said Ruda, unconsciously gripping the jeweled hilt of her rapier. “I’m just hoping the plan isn’t ‘these paladins suck, let’s waste ’em and get new ones.’”

Everyone turned to look at her, wide-eyed.

“No,” Trissiny said solemnly. “Omnu would never do such a thing.”

The tension abated just like that; Toby actually had to clap a hand over his mouth to stifle a burst of laughter.

“I’m telling her you said that,” Ruda said with a grin, lightly punching her roommate’s shoulder.

“By all means, do,” Trissiny replied, smiling. “That’s a conversation I would dearly love to see.”

“Guys,” Gabriel said tersely. “Look.”

They saw them just barely before they heard them. They started as tiny black specks, pouring out from the center of the maelstrom, but in the quiet, the sound of buzzing immediately became audible…and then, grew. Figures continued to stream out, still too distant to be distinct, but swarming ever closer to the ground. Dozens of them, scores… Quickly, though they were uncountable in their multitudes, it became clear they numbered in the hundreds, at least. As they came, the sound of buzzing wings grew ever more insistent.

“Just so we’re clear,” Trissiny said grimly, “nobody minds if I kill these, right?”

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7 – 3

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“Trissiny, could I borrow you for a moment?”

Trissiny rose smoothly from the crouch she had assumed on the lawn (a position she claimed was quite comfortable, which none of the rest of the group had been able to hold longer than five minutes), turning to face the approaching elf.

“What is it, Ms. Sunrunner?”

“She goes by ‘Miss,’” Ruda said helpfully.

The shaman and paladin both ignored her. “November is awake,” Miss Sunrunner said, “and is…not going to be an easy patient. All she really needs is to lie still and rest for a while, which she seems adamantly averse to doing. She’s requested your presence.”

“Mine?” Trissiny raised her eyebrows.

“I’d hoped you could perhaps get her to listen,” the healer said dryly. “At the very least. Otherwise I’m going to have to sedate her, which I hate to do unnecessarily, even with someone who won’t need to be bundled into a Rail caravan within the hour.”

Trissiny sighed softly. “Oh.. Of course. Be back in a bit, guys,” she added to the others before following Miss Sunrunner into the cafeteria. They simply stepped over the broken sills of its front ledge, the glass having already been swept up.

“That’s gonna be embarrassing,” Gabriel said cheerfully. “Fross, can you rig up a remote-listening spell on the fly?”

“Yes I can, and no I won’t!” The pixie dived in front of him, barely avoiding bopping him on the nose. “That’s extremely rude! How would you like it if someone spied on your private conversation?”

“Whoah, hey!” Gabriel protested, holding up his hands. “It was a joke!”

Fross chimed discordantly. “You know, Gabe, I’m starting to think you just say that when you don’t want to face the social consequences of something you said in earnest.”

“She’s onto you,” Toby murmured. Gabriel shot him a scowl.

There occurred a soft disturbance of raised voices and shifting bodies as the various students and staff assembled on the lawn turned to look upward. The freshmen did likewise, those who had been sitting shooting to their feet.

From the swirling vortex above, an orange streak had materialized and arced outward in a long spiral toward the ground. Vadrieny banked out over the campus so as to approach from a shallower angle and beat her wings upon nearing the ground, settling down softly in a clear space. Before sending her up, Professor Tellwyrn had spoken to her sharply about her habit of plummeting down hard enough to shake the ground, pointing at the fresh gouges in the stone floor outside the cafeteria for emphasis.

“You’re all right?” Tellwyrn asked, striding over to the demon.

“Perfectly,” Vadrieny replied in a clipped tone. “There’s little enough in Hell that can threaten me, and apparently not much that would want to try.”

Tellwyrn nodded. “What did you find?”

“It’s not good,” the archdemon said. Students shifted forward to listen, though her distinctive voice was powerful enough to be plainly audible all over the lawn. “In fact, it’s virtually as bad as it could possibly be. There’s a sizable hiszilisk hive a few miles distant into the Darklands, close enough to be plainly visible. It has a citadel built into the top displaying Scaontar iconography. Most likely the demons there are in control of the hiszilisks. That’s not uncommon.”

The Professor frowned. “Scaontar? What’s that?”

“Oh?” Vadrieny raised an eyebrow. “You mean there’s something the great Professor Tellwyrn doesn’t know?”

“Young lady,” Tellwyrn began, scowling thunderously, “this is not the time—”

“Yes, yes,” the demon snapped, waving a clawed hand. “They’re…not quite a faction, but a philosophy. They oppose Elilial, but not in any organized manner, so she hasn’t moved against them in force. Really, they oppose any organized power; they fought Scyllith during her reign, too. They’ll even fight each other if different groups cross paths. Sort of like centaurs, or some tribes of plains elves.”

“In other words,” Tellwyrn said grimly, “we’re positioned exactly next to a major concentration of the one force in Hell who won’t stand down if you tell them to.” Vadrieny nodded. “Did they appear to be mobilizing?”

“It’s impossible to tell,” the demon replied. “The hiszilisks were swarming about, but that’s what they do. They can’t have missed seeing the hellgate open, though, even if they weren’t behind it. They definitely won’t pass up the opportunity. Best to assume they are gearing up to attack.”

“Did you seriously not know you were building a University right across the dimensional barrier from something like that?” Anoia burst out. A junior in the divinities program, she was an elf with the horizontal ears of the plains people.

“First,” Tellwyrn said, shifting her body to face the assembled students as a whole, “hellgates don’t just pop open in the normal course of things, which is why no one looks into what’s on the infernal plane when beginning construction unless they plan to be messing with dimensional barriers. Just looking is sometimes enough to let something slip through. Second, the Darklands are a counterpart to the Golden Sea, and in fact are connected to it. That is how centaurs navigate; they use demonic contacts on the other side to move the Darklands, which causes similar shifts in the Sea, until the Sea reorganizes itself to mend the changes.”

“Still, awfully bad luck, though,” Chase noted.

“Luck has absolutely nothing to do with it,” Tellwyrn snapped. “Whoever opened that gate had a powerful demon ally on the other side to communicate with; they have to be worked at from both ends. Most likely that gnagrethyct. A creature like that could easily shift the Darklands to plant something exceptionally nasty next to us, either before opening the gate or right afterward.”

“What’s a hissy-lisk?” Tanq asked.

“Picture a cross between a wasp and an iguana,” said Vadrieny, “the size of a wolf, nominally sentient, and venomous.”

“So… Not answerable to Vadrieny, raider philosophy, and with a bunch of fliers,” said Professor Rafe, who had returned from the town only a few minutes previously. “I do say that’s tailored to be a threat to this campus. Look, kids, if you’re not happy about the food, there’s a suggestion box. This is just excessive.”

“Admestus,” Tellwyrn said wearily, “do shut up.”

Everyone turned to look as one of the three zeppelins parked below began to ascend, the silver Imperial gryphon embossed on its long gas capsule gleaming blindingly in the prairie sun. Two remained on the outskirts of Last Rock, still taking on passengers.

It had been several tense hours on the lawn; Tellwyrn had insisted upon everyone remaining in sight, in case the gnagrethyct returned. Over that time, runners (chosen from the faculty and in groups of two) had moved back and forth between the campus and the town, keeping her appraised of developments, since her teleportation was apparently unsafe to use. Miss Sunrunner had given her an earful about being non-consensually teleported that close to the hellgate, to which Tellwyrn had replied that obviously it wasn’t yet open at that point.

This had set off no end of speculation. Most of the student body had been present in the cafeteria at that time, and clearly none of them had been engaged in infernal portal-opening. Then again, if that order of events was correct, the gnagrethyct had crossed over before the gate had been formed. Either there was something more behind the situation that they hadn’t yet figured out, or whoever was responsible had taken great pains to confuse the issue and cover their tracks. Quite possibly both.

By this point, the University’s non-essential personnel—which Tellwyrn defined as those lacking any skills that would be useful if demons began pouring out of the portal—had already been sent below and evacuated via Rail. The dorm overseers, Stew the groundskeeper and a few of the professors were already gone. The students and more powerful faculty remained, both to pose a threat to anything emerging from the hellgate and to give more vulnerable people first access to the evacuation measures in place. They were also the most likely targets of further gnagrethyct attacks, a risk that was somewhat mitigated by having all of them present and under Tellwyrn’s watchful eye. Even after sending Vadrieny up to scout the portal, she had assured them she could deal with the demon if it returned. She had declined to explain further, and yet no one doubted the claim. For the most part it had all gone quite smoothly, except for a kerfuffle when Mrs. Oak flatly refused to abandon her kitchen and Tellwyrn flatly refused to make her. They both seemed quite unconcerned with the situation, but a number of the students were upset at the thought of leaving her behind, despite the cook’s surly disposition and general lack of popularity.

Trissiny emerged from the cafeteria and stalked back toward her classmates, just as Vadrieny withdrew, leaving Teal to do the same. They reached the group at more or less the same time. Shaeine gently took Teal’s hand in both of her own; Trissiny just came to a halt, glaring into the distance with her jaw set. A faint but noticeable blush hung over her cheeks.

“So,” Gabriel said sweetly, “how did it go?”

“She’ll be fine,” Trissiny said shortly. “I could have done without hearing her deathbed confession.”

“Wait, deathbed?” Juniper frowned. “I thought you said she’ll be fine.”

“I did. She will. I think she was rather embarrassed to learn it, afterwards.”

“How the hell did she not learn it until you got there?” Gabe asked, grinning in delighted schadenfreude. “I mean, she had to have woken up with Miss Sunrunner right there explaining things…”

“You’ve met November, haven’t you?” Trissiny snapped.

“And what did she confess, exactly?” Ruda asked, grinning insanely.

“There is no need to discuss it,” Trissiny said curtly. The pirate burst into laughter.

“We should respect other people’s privacy,” Toby said, carefully keeping his expression neutral. “I actually hadn’t realized before today that November was a priestess of Avei.”

“She is not,” Trissiny said firmly.

“But…we all saw her, with the glowing,” Gabe said, frowning. “And everyone knows she’s an Avenist. I think she’s managed to make that clear to everybody in the province.”

“November discovered Avei last year, after arriving at the University,” Trissiny said with a sigh. “She was born with the ability to channel divine energy without a relationship to any god.”

“What?” Juniper tilted her head. “I thought that was impossible.”

“A lot of dwarves can do it, but yes, for humans it’s unheard of,” Trissiny replied. “That’s why she’s here, instead of at a school for normal people.”

“Maybe she’s part dwarf,” Gabriel speculated.

“Are you kidding?” Ruda snorted. “I could fit both my hands around her waist. If anything, she’s part elf. She’s got the pointy features.”

“Anyway,” said Toby more firmly. Trissiny looked up, meeting his gaze, and after a moment they nodded at each other. In unison, the two paladins turned to stare seriously at their classmates. “Guys…we need your help. Fross, can you do some kind of silencing spell over us so we can’t be overheard?”

“Simplicity itself!” the pixie boasted, zipping outward and flying in a complete circle around the group. A very faint shimmering effect rose in the air, roughly spherical and isolating them from the rest of their classmates. Within the pale blue ball, all sound from outside was abruptly cut off.

“Neat,” Gabriel noted. “For the record, I could’ve done something similar.”

“Yeah, but you mostly use glyph engraving,” Fross replied. “That would’ve taken longer. More stable, though. So, uh, why did I need to do that?”

Toby took a deep breath and held it for a moment, apparently looking for word. Trissiny spoke before he could find them.

“We have to stay,” she said simply. “We need you guys to cover for us.”

The others stared at them in silence. Toby let out his breath, finally nodding in mute agreement.

Outside their bubble, several other students were watching them curiously, plainly aware what the spell was for, but no one was moving to approach. Tellwyrn was currently distracted by a conversation with Professor Ezzaniel, who had just returned from the town.

“Gonna need a little more detail than that,” Gabriel said tersely.

“Omnu spoke to me while Professor Tellwyrn was talking just now,” Toby said quietly, carefully angling his body so no one outside the group would be able to read his lips. He raised an eyebrow, glancing at Trissiny. “I assume Avei said the same to you? Right. This is a paladin thing, a matter of our calling. We’re to remain here after the mountain has been evacuated, and face whatever comes out of that portal.”

“Obviously, Tellwyrn isn’t going to have it,” Trissiny added. “She’s made it abundantly plain, numerous times, that she has no regard for the command of the gods. So…we need help. I’m sorry to have to ask this, but we need you guys to conjure some kind of illusion to make it seems we’re bugging out with everyone else, and make sure she and Professor Yornhaldt don’t get a close enough look to penetrate it. You can do that, right, Fross? Gabriel?”

“Actually,” Gabe mused, “I might have just the thing. It’s something new, so Tellwyrn probably isn’t aware of it. It’s actually based on something a succubus tried to do in Onkawa earlier this year, making portable self-directing illusion golems to impersonate people. Substituting arcane techniques for the infernal magic used, some of the big experimental spellcrafters in Calderaas replicated the effect and published their work. All so they could make a quick doubloon, of course; they’re selling kits. I bought some.”

“You bought magic golem kits?” Ruda asked, raising her eyebrows. “With what money? We didn’t clear that much from the Crawl.”

“Actually this was months ago, before the Crawl,” he said, “and it wasn’t that expensive. It’s called mass-production, Ruda, join the century. Anyhow, remember when you guys got jewels from the Golden Sea expedition and you insisted I get a share? That’s how I can afford it.”

“I thought you were going to build up some savings,” Toby said with a note of reproach.

“I was,” said Gabe, grinning unrepentantly, “but then this one started kicking my ass in the class rankings.” He nodded at Fross. “Since I can’t skip sleep to study, I’ve subscribed to several trade journals and catalogs and I’ve been ordering junk to tinker with. Come on, you’ve seen my collection. Did you think I was stealing it?”

“How many of these kits have you got?” Fross asked. “If you show me the diagrams I can help you put them together. Depending on how complex it is, we can maybe rig up some spares from general components if you haven’t got enough to cover all seven people.”

“Seven?” Toby said sharply.

“Should have plenty,” Gabriel replied to the pixie. “I got these to tinker with, remember, and you should always count on ruining some units. I should have about a dozen left. If we’re careful not to overload or miswire any it oughtta be enough.”

“You’re gonna need biological samples from each of us, aren’t you,” Ruda said resignedly. “Ugh, fine, you may pluck one hair. I’m not donating any fucking fluids.”

“Will it be okay to use mine?” Juniper asked worriedly. “I’m pretty much made of fae magic; that can react badly to arcane stuff.”

“Now, hold on,” Toby protested.

“There’s a standard spell lattice to work around that,” Gabriel assured the dryad. “It’s…hm, it takes some specific reagents, though, and we’ll have to be very careful about integrating it into the golem units. I don’t have the materials on hand.”

“I’ve got some,” Fross assured him, “and I can swipe the rest from one of the spell labs. Easy peasy, it’ll take me two minutes, tops.”

“Of course, you’re easy enough to duplicate,” he said, grinning up at her.

Fross bobbed up and down, chiming excitedly. “Standard will-o’-the-wisp illusion! I can anchor it to one of the golems without messing it up, I think.”

“Stop,” Trissiny said firmly. “You are not coming with us.”

“Trissiny,” Shaeine said serenely, “you know that I like and respect you, I trust?”

“I… Well, I suppose so,” the paladin said, frowning. “But—”

“Good. With that established, in this case, I must regretfully instruct you to shove it sideways.” Trissiny and Toby rocked back from her in unison; the rest of the group turned to stare, with the exception of Teal, who tried to cover a smile with her free hand. “It is an insult and a diminishment of our friendship that you so blithely assume we would abandon you to face such a threat,” the drow said firmly. “Do you note that every one of us immediately assumed we would accompany you? It seems to have been obvious to all except yourselves.”

“This is something we have to do,” Trissiny insisted. “It’s about what we are. There’s no reason for you guys to put yourselves in the same kind of danger.”

“Before you build up that stand-alone complex too much, let the resident bard lay a little lore on you,” Teal said. “Historically speaking, paladins rarely acted alone. And in fact, only a few gathered up followers exclusively or even mainly from within their own religions. You guys may be used to feeling isolated because there haven’t been paladins in a few decades, but most of your predecessors depended heavily on their allies. Heck, a lot of the greatest adventurer teams were built around some paladin or other.”

“But—”

“Look,” Ruda said, cutting Toby off. “We can stand here jabbering in a circle about history and responsibility and whatever other shit you wanna bring into it, but at the end, what’s goin’ down is that we are not leaving you. You can accept this with or without me needing to slap the stupid off your face, Boots, but the outcome will be the same. I don’t get the feeling we can spare the time to argue about it. Am I right?”

Trissiny sighed, looking down at the grass between them. “I just… I’ve been prepared to die since I was called. I’m a lot less prepared to be responsible for you dying.” Toby nodded agreement.

“Bullshit,” Ruda snapped. “Every one of us is capable of making our own goddamn decisions. Being a paladin may be about sacrifice, but it doesn’t give you the right to decide where anyone else spends their own lifeblood.”

“You’re our friends,” Juniper said simply. “I can’t let you do this alone, not when I could help you.”

“Hell, you guys are the only friends I’ve got,” Gabriel added, grinning. “And think about what you have here. Half-demon with wands and spells, fairy mage, dryad, archdemon, shield-specialized priestess, swordswoman with a magic-blocking weapon. This group is practically custom-tailored to beat back a demon invasion. Come on, guys, did the gods specifically tell you that you’d have to do this without help?”

Trissiny and Toby locked eyes, a silent question passing between them.

“Didn’t think so,” Gabriel said smugly. “So maybe entertain the possibility that the gods want us to help you, yeah?”

“We have not spent the last year learning to work together for nothing,” Shaeine added.

Trissiny sighed. “All right.”

“What?” Toby exclaimed. “Triss—”

“Maybe this is the bias of my own upbringing talking,” she said, “but I don’t have it in me to tell brave people they can’t fight when their conscience commands them to. That doesn’t mean I feel good about this,” she added, dragging a baleful look around the rest of the group. None of them looked remotely repentant.

“All right,” Toby said grudgingly. “I just… Augh. You’re right that we don’t have time to argue. But this leaves us in exactly the same position. No, a worse one! The whole class can’t just disappear, and those golems aren’t going to fool Tellwyrn. I bet she can see right through one.”

“If she has reason to look closely, yeah,” said Gabriel, frowning. “Tricking an archmage isn’t exactly part of my novice repertoire…”

“If you think like an arcanist, sure, that’s a tall order,” said Ruda. “That calls for a more basic kind of trickery; we just need to arrange for her to be looking in another direction. Let’s be honest, Tellwyrn is a hammer-headed brute. Surely we can work around her.”

“Once again, same position,” Toby said in annoyance. “We need somebody to actually do that for us, and if you guys all insist on being there, that won’t work. Someone has to stay behind.”

“Nah,” Juniper said brightly, “we’ll just have the sophomores do it.”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

“What?” Gabriel said finally.

“The sophomore class,” she explained. “I mean, think about it. There’s several people there who’ll help us out, for various reasons. November would do pretty much anything Triss asked of her.” Trissiny flushed again, looking away, but the dryad carried on blithely. “And she’s laid up, and she’s being difficult about it, so that’s a distraction right there. With some of the others to help, she can hold attention. I bet Natchua would help, too.”

“Natchua hates us,” Gabriel protested.

“No, she does not,” Shaeine said quietly. “Natchua is grappling with her own issues. She can be generally rather hostile, but I do not believe she harbors actual malice.”

“Not even toward you,” Juniper agreed, nodding. “I’ve actually talked with her.”

“In bed?” Ruda said resignedly.

The dryad shrugged. “Yeah. Most people are more willing to talk about personal stuff after sex, I’ve noticed. I keep meaning to ask why that is.”

“Later,” Ruda said firmly.

“Yes, right. Anyway, Natch’ll help if we ask her the right way, and Chase and the guys definitely will.”

“Whoah, hang on,” Gabriel protested. “Chase and the guys who tried to…um, y’know, get too handsy with you last semester?”

“Yeah,” Juniper said matter-of-factly. “They mostly follow his lead, and Chase was pretty accommodating even before that. Now that he knows I can give him really great sex or yank out his spine with one hand, he pretty much falls over himself to do whatever I ask.”

“Something about that is profoundly wrong,” Gabe muttered, “but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“If we survive this, I’ll explain it in detail,” Trissiny sighed.

“On second thought, ignorance is bliss.”

“Okay, so!” Ruda said. “We split up as soon as Tellwyrn lets us. Juno had better talk to the sophomores, since she’s the one with all the ins. Or maybe we should have Triss speak to November?” She grinned at Trissiny’s expression.

“Nah, I’ll talk to her,” said Juniper. “After that confession she’s probably too embarrassed to talk to Triss anyway. She’ll be especially eager to make amends.”

“Right,” Ruda went on. “Fross, Gabe, where can you go to work on that golem shit?”

“Our room,” Gabriel said immediately. “The lads went down to the town with the first group, so we have it to ourselves. It’s where I’ve got all my stuff anyway.”

“Except that female students can’t get into your dorm,” Teal protested.

“Nah, Fross and I work together on homework a lot anyway,” Gabriel said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Yeah!” Fross chimed. “Remember Tellwyrn said the sex barrier is to lower the chances of someone getting pregnant? Well, I’m nominally feminine but I don’t have a biological sex, so it doesn’t bar me.”

“Handy,” said Ruda. “We have a plan, then?”

“I wish you guys would just stay behind,” Toby muttered.

“Yeah, well, sorry. Your friends love you.” Teal grinned at him. “Life’s hard, Toby. Suck it up.”

Sound abruptly rushed in on them as their sonic barrier collapsed. They whirled in unison, finding themselves face-to-face with Tellwyrn, who still had a finger upraised from pricking their magic bubble.

“Now that we are all present and attentive,” she said dryly, “it’s time to begin heading out. The town is nearly emptied; there are just a few left to get on the zeppelins. There are Rail caravans standing by; it’ll take several trips to move all of us, but the caravans will keep coming as soon as room is made. The Empire is devoting a lot of extra resources to this, but there is only a single Rail line through the town. The situation is this: we have likely a few hours until something comes out of the portal, and according to Professor Shinhai and Miss Sunrunner, the gnagrethyct appears to have left the area. However, this is no time to be complacent. I want you in groups of no less than two at all times, and I would prefer much greater. You have half an hour to collect any necessities from your rooms and re-assemble at the campus gates. That much time should be enough to get the last of the townsfolk out and begin moving you lot and the faculty. I will be down in Last Rock attending to a few final matters.”

“Professor?” asked a junior. “What’s going to happen to the University?”

“I am not ceding my campus to whatever idiot did this,” Tellwyrn growled. “As soon as you are all safely away, I will be coming back here to close that damned hole. I’ll need help, but the Empire is surely sending strike teams at the least. Don’t you worry about that; we’ll all be back in time for graduation.”

She turned in a full circle, taking stock of those present. “All right, time’s wasting. If any of you feel the need to say last-minute goodbyes or anything else in private, tough. You should’ve emulated the freshman class, here. Get whatever stuff you urgently need and that you can’t afford to possibly lose to demons, and above all, don’t make me come get you. That, you will regret till the end of your days, I promise.”

“We’ll have to move fast, then,” Gabriel murmured.

“Yes, Mr. Arquin,” Tellwyrn said acidly. “If only you displayed such a keen grasp of the obvious in class. Alaric, you stay here and keep your eyes on that portal. If anything comes through, dissuade it. Taowi, Admestus, stay and help him in any way he requires.” She peered around at the assembled students and teachers one last time. “All right, kids, time is not on our side. Move it.”

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“She’s evil!”

“Mm.”

“She’s a maniac!”

“Eh.”

“I sense a lack of solidarity, here,” Gabriel groused.

Toby finally looked up from his report, making a sardonic face. “Gabe, if you want to gripe, don’t let me stop you. Personally, I don’t find much use in it.”

“Look, we’ve had to do some crazy shit at this school,” Gabriel said, slapping his own report down on the table and narrowly missing Teal’s bowl of pudding. “But it was all craziness with a purpose.”

“You and I remember things very differently,” Trissiny murmured, still reading her own.

“Granted, the purpose was usually only apparent in hindsight, but this? It’s over now! We’re in hindsight territory, and it still doesn’t make any goddamn sense! Why the hell would she assign us a test that can’t be passed?!”

“If you think about it,” said Teal with a smile, “this whole pass/fail dynamic really only happens in academia. I see it as a good sign that Tellwyrn isn’t just teaching us how to be good students.”

“Besides, the logic of it is pretty apparent, at least to me,” Trissiny added. “It was an impossible challenge, but one that was still worth attempting. And we’re still being graded on our efforts; it’s not as if our essays were thrown to the wind.”

“I, for one, found Professor Tellwyrn’s commentary unusually insightful,” Shaeine remarked, eyes on her own report sheet. “Acerbic as always, but in depth and clearly intended to be helpful.”

“Well, I liked the assignment,” Fross added. “It was challenging!”

“It was impossible!” Gabriel complained.

“Um, yes, by definition,” the pixie replied. “It doesn’t get much more challenging than that.”

“Really, seems like only one of us is throwin’ a fit about this,” Ruda said, grinning. “Didn’t do so good, didja, Arquin?”

He huffed and folded his arms sullenly, crumpling his report in the process. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

Ruda cackled. The others continued alternately to read over their reports and work on the remains of lunch in relative quiet. The atmosphere in the cafeteria as a whole mirrored that at the freshman table; somewhat subdued, as students studied the results of exams and finished meals, with here and there outbursts of dismay (mostly relating to the former) and exultation. Beneath the distracted quiet and the periodic upsets, there was a feeling of anticipatory excitement in the air. Classes were over, tests administered, and a few free days remained before the senior class’s graduation and the ensuing mass exodus of the student body for summer break.

“How’d you fare, then?” Gabriel pointedly asked Ruda, who had been busy eating, seemingly unconcerned with such trivialities as her grades. She had only just pushed away her empty plate and opened the folder in which her academic results waited.

“Not bad. Good marks. In Tellwyrn’s exam…huh,” she mused, studying the report sheet. “I passed.”

“Excuse me, you what?” Juniper demanded, setting down her spoon.

“What do you mean you passed?” Gabriel exclaimed. “Nobody passes the freshman history exam. That’s the point!”

“The assignment was to propose and defend a plan to achieve world peace,” Trissiny added, staring at her roommate. “If it could be done, it would have been done. How in heaven’s name…”

“Well, I got to thinking about what peace really means, and how it can be achieved,” Ruda mused, her eyes darting over her report and Tellwyrn’s commentary. “So I laid out an eleven-step plan to obliterate all sentient life on the mortal, divine and infernal planes. I got an academic award.” She turned the page. “…and a notice from Tellwyrn that I’ve been added to some kind of Imperial watch list. Neat! Wait’ll I tell Papa!”

“I desperately want to be surprised by this turn of events,” said Gabriel, shaking his head. “But…it just isn’t there.”

Trissiny grunted. “You don’t have to sleep in a room with her.”

A sudden, bone-chilling wail of agony tore through the room, catapulting students to their feet and all but physically turning them toward its source.

At the table currently occupied by the sophomore class, November Stark had bolted straight upright, howling in pain. In fact, her posture was so erect it was nearly unnatural, right up to the neck, beyond which her head lolled as if she were suspended from a noose. As everyone stared in shock, she rose still higher, till her feet left the floor.

A golden corona flickered to life around November, but an erratic, lopsided one, faltering in multiple places as if the power she was drawing on were being leeched away. In the glow, however, a shadow appeared. It was only a vague shape, but it roughly mirrored that of her own body, only larger. The discoloration, revealed where her divine glow exposed it, seemed to encase her like a cocoon, or to be trying to.

“Something’s got her!” Chase shouted, scrabbling among the silverware on the table as if looking for a weapon.

Tanq and Natchua both grabbed November by the legs, trying to pull her back down; almost immediately he went staggering back with a cry of pain. The drow gritted her teeth, clinging doggedly even as a more visible curl of shadow extended, wrapping around her upper body. All around the room, golden light sprang up as nearly every divinely-gifted student in the cafeteria called up power.

“Stop! No blessings!”

Vadrieny’s choral voice froze everyone, even as another shriek of pain tore itself from November’s throat. The archdemon flared her wings once, propelling herself forward; in a single, enormous leap, she shot across the cafeteria, planting her talons on the sophomore table and reaching out to grab November by the throat. Her enormous claws completely encircled the young woman’s neck. Vadrieny forcibly hauled November and her attacker closer, opened her mouth to fully display her complement of fangs, and screamed.

Everyone reeled backward, clapping hands over their ears; several of the elven students cried out in pain. After two seconds of the noise, the plate glass windows lining the south wall of the cafeteria shattered, followed by glasses and plates all across the room.

And then, another voice joined the screaming. Not as loud as Vadrieny’s, but somehow more terrible; it wasn’t so much a physical sound as a rending vibration through existence itself all around them.

The shadow faded to full visibility, and finally relinquished its victim. Drifting backward from the archdemon, it lost cohesion and shot upward in a cloud of smoke, vanishing into the ceiling.

Vadrieny broke off her cry, carefully catching November before the girl could fall to the ground.

“Healers!” she exclaimed, sweeping the mess of dishes and papers off the table with one clawed foot and lowering November to its surface. Natchua, who hadn’t let go the entire time, helped arrange her, quickly assisted by Hildred. Students began stepping forward through the mess of shattered crockery.

“Back up, all of you!” Professor Tellwyrn ordered, stalking forward from the cafeteria doors. “Clear a space there. Yes, that means you, Warwick. Move.”

At her furious direction, the students shifted back, making an opening near the head of the table on which November was now lying unconscious. Tellwyrn pointed there, and with a soft pop, Taowi Sunrunner materialized in the space. She had clearly been sitting down and staggered, but with characteristic elven agility regained her balance and straightened up, her eyes immediately falling on November.

“What happened?” she demanded, shooing Vadrieny and Natchua aside and bending over the fallen girl’s head.

“Gnagrethyct attack,” Tellwyrn said tersely.

Miss Sunrunner jerked her head up, staring at her in shock, but only for a split second, then was bending over November again, carefully running her fingers over the patient’s head and the sides of her neck.

“W-w-what?” Hildred croaked, ashen-faced.

“Gnagrethycts are also called priestkillers,” Tellwyrn explained, raising her voice slightly to be heard by all those present. Behind her, Vadrieny withdrew, leaving Teal looking shaken until Shaeine approached to take her hand. “They have the gift of transmuting divine and to a lesser extent other types of energy into infernal. A living insult to the Circle of Interaction. Miss Stark was extremely lucky today; about the only thing a gnagrethyct does not want to mess with is a bigger, meaner demon. All your blessings would only have killed her faster. Had Vadrieny not been here, we would be dealing with a corpse.”

“Where did it go?” demanded one of the soon-to-graduate seniors. Several students immediately directed their eyes to the patch of ceiling into which the gnagrethyct had vanished.

“A pertinent question indeed,” Tellwyrn said grimly. “I’m more curious right now about where it came from. Gnagrethycts do not bumble about the mortal plane indiscriminately. These are favored and rare servants of Elilial. There are only nine in existence—”

“Seven,” Teal interrupted.

Tellwyrn turned to stare at her, and the bard’s cheeks colored. “Um…sorry. Go on.”

“As I was saying,” Tellwyrn continued, finally tearing her piercing gaze away from Teal, “these are powerful demons which are very seldom seen. I have made my own arrangements to ensure that Elilial does not personally encroach upon this campus, which means that thing is here because one of you little bastards summoned it. And that means somebody has gotten neck-deep into something they absolutely should not have.” She panned a grim stare around the assembled student body. “Look, kids. I didn’t assemble the best and brightest destructive troublemakers in the Empire onto one mountaintop without expecting some seriously twisted shit to occur from time to time. I’m a reasonable woman—Avelea, if I turn around and see that you’ve opened your mouth—good. I’m a reasonable woman, and I’ll deal with this reasonably. Meaning, if the person responsible for this comes to me and explains what happened, how, and why, I will do what is necessary to clean it up without being a whit more vindictive than the situation absolutely demands. If, however, I have to chase down the culprit, she or he will be treated as a traitor and enemy to this campus and a threat to the students under my protection. People who fall under that description learn things about pain that none of you possess a sufficient frame of reference to adequately fear. Is that understood?”

The students stared back in silence, several unwilling to meet her icy stare.

“Yes, ma’am!” Chase said loudly, saluting. Tellwyrn gave him a sour look before turning back to the campus healer.

“Taowi, how is she?”

“Weak,” Miss Sunrunner replied immediately. She had her eyes closed and one hand resting on November’s forehead, concentrating. “No worse than that, as best I can tell. I detect only the most minor physical damage, and no infernal corruption worth noting. This is a case without precedent, Arachne; not a lot of people have been attacked by gnagrethycts, and this is the first survivor ever, to my knowledge. I will learn more when she wakes, but for now, this seems very like a bad case of mana fatigue. The best cure would be rest.”

“Good,” Tellwyrn said tersely, nodding. “Commandeer any of these layabouts for any assistance you need. Falconer! Come along, I want a word with you.”

She turned and strode toward the cafeteria’s side exit, students parting before her in silence. Teal sighed, glanced nervously back at her fellow freshmen, and followed.

Behind and around the building, everywhere except for the glass-walled (and currently unwalled) south face looking over the lawn, ran an open-sided but roofed walkway, shady and pleasantly cool in the summer weather. It was also relatively private; along the western side, it overlooked a small drop to a decorative pond, beyond which was a sunken garden and then only the exterior wall of the University grounds, separating them from a plunge to the prairie far below. Tellwyrn led the way to the halfway point of this stretch of colonnade, then turned.

She gave Shaeine, who had silently followed, a long look, then grimaced, shook her head and turned to Teal. “All right, out with it.”

Teal glanced at Shaeine and then back at Tellwyrn. “Professor?”

“Falconer, my patience for nonsense is even lower than usual at this moment. That demon of yours is supposed to be amnesiac. First I find that someone has summoned one of Elilial’s own servants onto my campus, which not just any warlock could do at the best of times. And then you start spouting specific and hitherto unknown tactical information about the forces of Hell. Believe me, if there were any record on the mortal plane of two of the gnagrethycts having been lost, I’d have heard of it. None of them have been here in six centuries. Vadrieny’s memories starting to return would be a serious concern under any circumstances. Right now, it’s officially a problem.”

Teal’s eyes had progressively widened as she spoke. She shifted her gaze to the near distance, apparently focusing inward; Tellwyrn gave her a moment of quiet, crossing her arms and drumming her fingers against her sleeve impatiently.

“She…doesn’t know,” Teal said finally. “It’s like…common knowledge. Not anything with a personal meaning attached.”

“Mm,” Tellwyrn grunted. “In fiction, retrograde amnesia which deletes personal memories while leaving general knowledge intact is a common enough plot device. In reality, that’s something that technically could happen but pretty much never does, because that is not how brain damage works. Such effects generally only occur as a result of magical manipulation, where someone imposed them deliberately. So even if Vadrieny’s memories are not starting to spontaneously return… This isn’t a good sign.”

“I understand,” Teal said seriously. “But, Professor… Even if Vadrieny’s memory came back, it’s not as if she would suddenly return fully to what she was. She and I are too integrated… And even with the restored memory of her old life, the new one isn’t nothing. I don’t think it would be as simple as her just…reverting to a destructive demon.”

Tellwyrn sighed, turned, and began to slowly stroll along the colonnade. Both girls fell into step behind her. “That’s all well and good… But I’m left with the question of just who the hell has been summoning powerful demons onto my campus. It has to be an initiate of the University itself; the geas on these grounds would stop most warlocks and alert me to any powerful enough to beat it. Initiates necessarily occupy a blind spot, as I can’t come running every time a student casts a spell around here. For the record, Teal, I do believe you. However, until this matter is cleared up one way or another, Vadrieny has to remain a suspect.”

“I get it,” Teal said softly. “I guess I’ll…work extra hard to keep away from demonic influences then.”

“That is what you should do to deflect suspicion,” Tellwyrn said slowly. “But…I’m not sure that’s the most important priority right now. If Vadrieny looks to be regaining her past, for whatever reason, it’s probably best that this happen on her own terms, and yours, rather than according to the plans of whoever sent her here.”

“I cannot believe that having Vadrieny research demonology would yield a positive result,” Shaeine said quietly.

“Not demonology,” Tellwyrn retorted with some asperity. “Demonic history, though, is another thing. I’m sure you were told the basics by the Church, but we have things in the archives here that they don’t show to people, and even a few they may not have. I’ll instruct Crystal to help you.”

“That…actually, I think that would be good for her,” Teal said slowly. “We’re doing pretty well, making friends and connections here, but it’s hard for her, having no hint of where she comes from. I mean…someone could be missing her, you know? I don’t know how they do things in Hell, but surely even demons have families.”

Tellwyrn abruptly came to a halt and pivoted to stare at her, wide-eyed. Both girls stopped, Teal’s expression growing nervous under the elf’s uncharacteristic look of shock.

“Professor?” she said uncertainly.

Tellwyrn’s voice was quiet. “You don’t…know?”

“I, uh… What don’t I know?”

“I never imagined… You spent months with the Universal Church. You were personally examined by several deities. They didn’t tell you?”

“What are we talking about?” Teal demanded.

Tellwyrn shook her head slowly, still staring at her. “Teal, I… I’m sorry. It was never my intention to keep it from you… The thought simply never crossed my mind that you hadn’t been told. The Church has buried a lot of records, but it’s not unknown. It doesn’t make sense; they had to expect you would find out sooner or later. I thought even Trissiny might know, given her upbringing…but I guess not, if you’re still in the dark. That girl can no more keep her mouth shut than she could punch the moon.”

“Professor,” Shaeine said sharply, “the dramatic suspense grows excessive.”

Tellwyrn pulled off her spectacles and polished them on her sleeve, dropping her gaze from Teal’s. “Vadrieny is a known figure, Teal. She’s been on the mortal plane before, and made quite an impression every time. I’ve not personally encountered her before you came along, but I was alive for quite a few of those incidents. We know exactly where she comes from, and who she is.”

“What?!” Teal exclaimed, stiffening. “You do? How can… Wait, the Church knows this?”

“The Church, the Wreath, the Empire… It’s sort of classified, but not very. Kept out of the general public’s eye, but any Nemitite in a central temple could probably dig up the records if you asked them.”

“How is that…” Teal trailed off and she swallowed heavily. “They never said a thing about it. Well, who is she, then?”

Tellwyrn stared at her in silence for a moment as if gathering her thoughts, then sighed and put her glasses back on. “Vadrieny is one of the seven daughters of Elilial.”

It took Teal a long few moments to close her mouth, swallow, and manage a whispered reply. “What?”

“This is beyond ridiculous,” Tellwyrn muttered, frowning into space. “Especially after you were sent here. What the hell is Justinian playing at? He can’t possibly have expected it would be kept a secret from you forever.”

“She…has a family?” Teal asked, her voice trembling. “You said seven daughters? She has sisters?”

Tellwyrn looked back at her, then closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. “Ugh… I really am the worst possible person to deliver news like this…”

“Just spit it out!” Teal snapped.

The Professor sighed. “Teal… We’ve identified all the attack sites. Seven occurred simultaneously, Vadrieny’s possession of you and six other identical attempts. You…were the only one who managed to integrate the demon.”

“No,” Teal whispered. Shaeine stepped close, wrapping an arm around her.

“I have since had personal confirmation from Elilial,” Tellwyrn said quietly. “The other girls perished. The demons, too, in the attempt. Vadrieny…is the last. I’m sorry.”

Teal pulled roughly away from Shaeine, hunching forward and clutching her head. The sound that emerged from her was not one a human throat could have produced.

“Love, please.” Shaeine said urgently. “You are not alone.”

Vadrieny emerged in a rush, claws gouging deep rents in the stone floor. Her wings fanned out behind her, barely missing Shaeine. “Please,” she rasped. “I need…just let me…”

The demon clenched her teeth, then suddenly threw back her head and let out a long wail of anguish. In the next moment, she had staggered to the side, out from under the roof, and shot skyward.

Shaeine clenched her fists at her sides. “I don’t disagree, Professor,” she said tightly. “You are the worst possible person to deliver news like that.”

Tellwyrn sighed again. “She’ll be all right.”

The drow slowly turned to stare at her. “In what possible manner do you think she will be all right?”

“Do not get snippy with me, miss. I didn’t say it would be quick or easy. But yes, she will heal. People do, you know. And she’s not alone. She’ll be less alone when she calms down enough to talk with you about it, but even now, she has Teal. I have faith in them both.”

The Professor turned and set off toward the front of the building, her forehead creased in a frown.

“You do?” Shaeine asked quietly, following. “Just moments ago you were suggesting she was guilty of summoning demons.”

“Look at it this way, Miss Awarrion: I can either have faith in Teal, or put her down like a rabid animal. Which would you prefer?” Tellwyrn shook her head. “Anyhow, as I said at the time, I don’t seriously consider them suspects in this, though they logically have to remain such on paper. Neither has the aptitude for such skullduggery. Vadrieny has always been something of a brute, and Teal… Well, I’ve rarely met a bard so straightforwardly ethical, let me put it that way.” Abruptly she stopped, lifting her head. “…do you feel that?”

The ground shook from the impact of Vadrieny landing a few feet away, in front of the cafeteria.

“Well,” said Tellwyrn, “that was fast. Feeling any—”

“No,” the archdemon said curtly, “but my problems are not the center of the universe. There’s something you need to see.” She pointed one long, curving talon skyward.

Tellwyrn stepped out from under the roof, turning and craning her head to look. Shaeine followed suit, even as she pressed herself against Vadrieny’s side, wrapping an arm around her waist. They weren’t the only ones there; students had begun to trickle out of the damaged cafeteria, several already looking upward. Most of the rest did likewise, to see what so commanded everyone’s attention.

“No,” Tellwyrn whispered. “Damn it, no.”

It was a very standard sort of day for the region—clear, but windy, with puffs of white cloud scudding rapidly across the sky. Except that now, they seemed to have halted in their course and begun to swirl around a central point directly above the University, rather like water going down a drain. The broad spiral of white vapor was already wider than the mountain, slowly revolving and shifting in size as more clouds were caught in it.

Professors Rafe and Ezzaniel stepped up next to Tellwyrn, having evidently been inside the cafeteria. Ezzaniel remained silent; Rafe muttered something in elvish.

“Yeah,” Tellwyrn agreed quietly, then placed a fingertip against her throat. In the next moment, her voice boomed across the entire mountain, audible in every room on the campus. “All students and faculty will immediately assemble on the lawn outside the cafeteria. This is an emergency. Do not use any kind of teleportation, nor attempt to access any bag of holding or other dimensional storage. There is an effect active over the mountain which makes any kind of portal magic extremely dangerous.” She removed her finger, turning to the two professors, and spoke in a normal voice. “You two, get down to the town pronto. Emilio, go to the scrolltower office and contact the Empire. Hold nothing back; we need help, immediately. Admestus, speak with Sheriff Sanders, have him pass the word on to the mayor. Last Rock needs to be evacuated. Within hours, as soon as it can be done. Go.”

“Evacuated?” Ruda demanded stridently, stomping up to her as the two men nodded and dashed off toward the stairs down the mountain. “What the fuck is the big crisis? What’s going on with those clouds? Is that swirly thing dangerous? Doesn’t look like any storm I’ve ever seen; a cyclone would be moving a hell of a lot faster and this isn’t typhoon country.”

“That swirly thing,” Tellwyrn said grimly, “is the result of air pressure equalizing across a rift between two different atmospheres. As for why it’s dangerous, Punaji, look at the expressions of any of your classmates who can sense infernal energy. That, kids, is a brand-new hellgate.”

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The grate lifted seemingly on its own and Professor Ezzaniel pushed the doors open, letting in a rush of cool night air laden with the scents of earth and grass. The whole party pressed forward, and would have pushed him out of the way had he not stepped quickly aside. They straggled out and stopped, a unified sigh of relief rippling through the whole group, and all stood, faces up, savoring the coolness and the moonlight.

Only one person was there to meet them.

“Well,” said Professor Tellwyrn, planting her hands on her hips. “Well. We do very occasionally lose someone down there, but this… This is unprecedented, I must say. How exactly did you pick up gnomes?”

“She makes us sound like a case o’ hiker’s foot,” Steinway muttered to his companions.

“They were lost,” Fross reported. “In fact, there may be other things in the Crawl that aren’t supposed to be, these days. Rowe was doing something he shouldn’t in the Grim Visage, trying to get out.”

Tellwyrn raised an eyebrow. “Was? Did you ruffians kill my bartender?”

“He was alive the last we saw,” said Ruda with a leer. “He’ll probably stay that way at least a while. Melaxyna doesn’t strike me as the type to give out swift and merciful punishments.”

“You took him to…” Tellwyrn sighed heavily, rolling her eyes. “Ugh. Now I have to go trap another Vanislaad demon, or something equally sketchy. Leaving a succubus down there without competition isn’t on the table; she’d be running the place within a year. Shamlin, what the hell were you doing in my Crawl?”

“Making my fortune,” he said with a broad grin. “Oh, come on, don’t act surprised, Professor. It’s been two years; I’ve talked with every student group and faculty guide you sent. You had to know I was down there. Nice to see you again, by the way!”

“Well, here it is barely a week on, and here you lot are.” Tellwyrn adjusted her spectacles and fixed her eyes on Teal, who was carrying the long wooden box. “Only the third freshman group even to reach the objective, and you’ve absolutely destroyed the previous speed record. Let’s have a look.”

“I’m sure you already know everything, seeing as how you were here waiting,” Teal said, stepping forward as the others cleared a space. “I got a look at the apparatus in the basement of the Visage, the one that I gather students aren’t supposed to see.” She knelt, setting the box down on the grass, unlatched it, and lifted the lid. Within, in their custom-fitted grooves in the red velvet lining, lay the elven sword and dagger, gleaming lustrously under the moonlight.

Tellwyrn gazed down at them for a long few moments, her expression far away. Then, she blinked, shook herself slightly, and lifted her eyes. “Well! That’s the treasure, all right. Since you were lugging them around, Teal, may I assume the honor of the find was yours?”

“It was a group effort,” Teal said firmly. “I was the one to put my hands on them. We had to divide forces to make that happen.”

“She’s being modest,” said Gabriel, grinning. “Teal made the plans that led to us getting them at all. Fairly earned spoils, I’d say.”

“Well, I certainly cannot argue with results,” Tellwyrn said. “I’ll be reading Professor Ezzaniel’s report in detail, but frankly, you completed your assigned task with flying colors, and showed up every previous group to undertake it in the process. Unless you were transcendently stupid in your approach to every step thereof, which seems improbable, you not only receive an A, but a measure of extra credit for this. Right now, kids, I think you can consider last semester’s Golden Sea debacle obviated.”

“Yay!” Fross cheered.

“And we’ll find lodging for our guests, of course,” Tellwyrn went on, turning to the trio of gnomes, who had moved to the side with Shamlin. “I won’t send you down to the town at this hour; neither of the resident innkeepers would appreciate being roused after midnight. If you can bear with me, though, I’ll have to wake my groundskeeper and have one of the unoccupied student dorms opened up. I’m afraid they’ll be rather dusty.”

“Ma’am,” said Sassafrass respectfully, “we’ve been livin’ in the Crawl these last…what’s it been, lads?”

“Least ten months, I reckon,” said Woodsworth. “Me sense o’ time is understandably a bit off-kilter. I’d no idea it was night out.”

“Point bein’,” Sassafrass continued, grinning up at the Professor, “dust is nothing. If you can offer us a bit o’ somethin’ other than mushrooms and stringy ham, an’ a mattress not made o’ patchy leather, you’ll ‘ave gained three devoted slaves.”

“No, thanks,” Tellwyrn said with a wry smile. “The downside of slaves is having to feed them; they make expensive pets. Anyhow, I believe my hospitality can furnish a higher standard than that.”

“It’s a real honor to meet you, by the way,” Steinway said, grinning broadly.

“Yes, I’m sure. As for you.” Tellwyrn leveled a finger at Shamlin. “You may as well stay the night, too, though I’ll be wanting a prolonged word with you before you skitter off.”

“Uh oh,” he said, grinning.

“All right, that’s enough for now,” the elf went on briskly. “It’s an altogether ungodly hour and I have class in the morning. You lot are excused from tomorrow’s classes, of course, but that’s all the time you’ll have to reset your biological clocks. Education waits for no one.”

“Oh, come on,” Juniper protested. “You thought we’d be down there for three weeks! We should get some time off.”

“Juniper,” Tellwyrn said, staring at her over her glasses, “what have I told you about whining?”

“Um…well… Actually, nothing.”

“Mm hm. Would you like to hear my opinions about whining?”

The dryad crept backward a half step. “Actually, now that I think about it, no.”

“Good. All right, off with you. Emilio, have time for a cup of tea with me before retiring?”

“I’m just beginning my day, Arachne,” Ezzaniel said amiably. “I don’t look forward to classes next week. The young can spring back from these sleep cycle disruptions so much more quickly.”

“I have faith in you. Shamlin, the Wells is currently empty. I know you know where that is. Kindly escort our guests there, and I’ll send Stew along to spruce it up for you.”

“Oh, my,” said the bard, grinning. “But Professor, that’s a girls’ dorm!”

“When there are girls in it, yes,” Tellwyrn said acidly. “I’ll just have to trust you not to impregnate the dust bunnies. Move along, Shamlin.”

“Your wish is my command!” he proclaimed, bowing extravagantly. Tellwyrn snorted at him and strode off, Ezzaniel prowling along beside her.

“Welp, it’s been a right pleasure adventurin’ with you kids,” said Woodsworth.

“Aye,” Sassafrass agreed, “you be sure to pay us a visit before we ‘ave to head out.”

“Count on it,” said Toby with a smile.

They stood in silence, breathing in the clean night air and watching the other two groups vanish around corners into the shadows of the campus.

“Well,” Ruda said at last, “who woulda figured it was midnight?”

“I think I’ve had enough of being underground forever,” Juniper muttered. “No offense, Shaeine.”

“None was offered, even by mistake,” Shaeine replied, smiling. “I doubt I would fare well in your home, either.”

“Actually,” said Fross, “Crawl excursions are kind of a big deal at this school. We’ll probably have at least one a year. Maybe one a semester from now on.”

Juniper groaned.

“Here’s what I’m thinkin’,” said Gabriel. “The pubs down in the town are closed, and our dorms are spelled to keep out the opposite sex. But since we’re all awake, and we’ve been subsisting on Crawl food for a week…” He grinned wickedly. “Who’s up for raiding the cafeteria?”

“That is extremely out of bounds!” Fross said shrilly. “It violates multiple school rules as well as personal directives given out by Professor Tellwyrn, Stew, and Mrs. Oak! We could get in so much trouble, especially since we’re supposed to be going to bed!”

“Well,” Ruda began.

“So,” the pixie continued, “you’d better let me go ahead and scan for detector charms. Gabe, I may need your help with the locks!”

Chiming exuberantly, she buzzed off in the direction of the cafeteria.

“Well, blow me down,” Ruda said in wonder. “They really do grow up fast, don’t they?”

 

“I know how many of us suffer, day by day,” Branwen said. Her voice and expression were painfully earnest; the magical spotlight illuminating her was an expensive piece of spellwork that made her easily visible to anyone looking, as if she were standing right in front of them. The charm that made her words echo throughout the grand auditorium was a more conventional piece of magic. “The sad thing about the trials in everyone’s lives is how they can disconnect us, how they can distract us, encourage us to retreat into ourselves and become fixated upon our own problems. It creeps right up on you, doesn’t it? But if you look around you, at the people here tonight, at the people you pass on the street every day, even at the people you love, people you work with… Each time, you are passing another whole story, someone with his or her own struggles. They are different struggles than yours, but no one’s challenges are less important. What you should mourn is not that you face challenges, but what they can cost you, without you even realizing it. It’s the saddest thing in the world, not to see another’s pain.

“Because it’s in those challenges that we have our greatest opportunities. It’s in the connections we can form with our fellow human beings that we may find the simplest solutions.” She smiled, an expression so brimming with optimism and love that Darling, as a fellow artist working in the medium of facial features, found himself in awe of her mastery. Awed, and wondering just how deep those waters ran, considering her well-established facade of pretty uselessness. “It is natural that we should look upward, to the gods, in our most troubled times. But we must be careful. That can lead to despair when solutions do not come down to us from the gods. And that despair is a trick, played on us by our own minds. It’s not what the gods can give us, but what they have given us, that matters.”

She placed a hand over her own heart, a gesture that was totally innocent and yet drew attention right to her impressive bosom. The plain Bishop’s robes she wore, with the pink lotus pin of Izara at the shoulder, were far more carefully tailored than those of her colleagues, emphasizing her voluptuous figure in a manner that was just subtle enough not to be called out upon, while still pushing the envelope of ecclesiastical dignity.

“Each of the gods stands for something which they have bestowed on the world for our use. To cry out to them to solve our problems for us is missing the point of these precious gifts. The gods have given us the means to raise ourselves up. They ask that we have faith in them, because they have faith in us!” Her expression stayed solemn, though her eyes were alight with passion. “The gods believe in you. I believe in you. Whatever you face in your life, I know you can rise to meet it. You must believe in you!”

The mostly-silent crowd stirred at that, a smattering of applause and hushed voices rising up. It was a bit more exuberant than the last such; Branwen was working this audience with absolutely masterful skill. Darling had seen this done before, many a time, in his observations of religious ceremonies. There was a rhythm to it, a familiar pattern. It would be a while yet before she built it to its climax. Tonight’s festivities had only just begun.

He tore his gaze from Branwen to look around the darkened theater. She’d drawn quite a crowd, with the full resources of the Church and every major newspaper in the Empire pushing her forward to fame. The place was full of the hoi palloi thronging the cheap seats below, the slightly more upscale classes in the balconies and the wealthy few occupying boxes like himself. The arrangement tickled at his mind. It somehow seemed very appropriate to have used a commercial theater for this address rather than the Cathedral.

“Damn, but she makes a good speech,” Embras Mogul remarked, dropping heavily into the seat next to Darling and stretching out his long legs. “Fills out that robe quite exquisitely, too, doesn’t she? I have to say, that was a genius move on Justinian’s part. I wonder how long he’s been grooming her for this? Doubtless the lady has her own ambitions, but his Holiness doesn’t strike me as the type to catapult one of his underlings into power without spending a good long while sculpting them first.”

Darling was aware that he was staring, and didn’t bother to stop. “Well,” he said finally. “You’re not quite the last person I expected to see tonight, but… If Scyllith pops in here, too, I may just have to check outside and see if the world has ended.”

“If you encounter Scyllith under any circumstances, I think that’s a worthy concern,” Mogul said, grinning broadly.

“To what do I owe the honor, Embras?”

“Oh, this’n that. I thought you might be missing your tracking charm.” Mogul’s spiderlike fingers deposited a small metal object on the arm of Darling’s chair. It had been badly scorched and bent nearly in half. “Somehow it ended up under my collar. Funny, the way these little things wander off, isn’t it?”

“You said it,” Darling said easily, picking up the destroyed charm and making it vanish up his sleeve. “I owe you one, old man. I tore my whole study apart last night looking for this.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Mogul crossed his legs, lounging back in the plush chair. Below them, Branwen continued to soliloquize, but neither man spared her a glance. “After our little game of tag yesterday, I found myself mulling over your motivations.”

“I’m flattered!”

“And I’m curious. Here’s a man clearly playing both ends against the middle. Or all three ends, or more. The point is, you’re balancing far too many loyalties to be truly loyal to all of them.”

“It does seem to keep people on their toes,” Darling agreed solemnly.

“Loyalty, now, people don’t generally understand how that works,” Mogul mused. “It’s a lot less important than they think. What matters is motivations, those are what lie at the root of loyalties, and everything else. So I got to wondering, and decided to arrange a little test.” He leaned away from Darling and angled his body toward him so he could spread his arms wide. “Thus, here I am! The big, bad leader of the Black Wreath, sitting not a foot away, in a theater just crawling with the Church’s agents. A golden opportunity for you to raise the cry and try your luck at cutting off the snake’s head, so to speak!”

“This speech has the smell of an approaching ‘but’ about it,” Darling said wryly.

“Oh, I dunno,” Mogul replied, grinning broadly. “Or at least, that is what we’re here to find out, isn’t it? After all, you’d be pitting the assembled powers of the Church against whatever I have prepared to come to my aid, which you just know is gonna be something nasty. Obviously I’m a powerful player and I wouldn’t have come here unless I were pretty confident of my chances. On the other hand, Justinian wouldn’t have placed his newest, prettiest pet in such an easily shootable position without ample protections at the ready. Sounds to me like a pretty close contest! The only thing that makes it complicated…” He leaned forward, crossing his arms on the box’s low wall, and peered down at the rapt crowd below. “…are aaaallll those innocent people, just waiting to be pulverized in the crossfire. Priests and demons and the gods know what else, running amok in a crowded theater. Why, it fairly scalds the imagination, doesn’t it?”

“Innocent people.” Darling chuckled darkly, turning his gaze back to Branwen. “We both know there’s no such animal.”

“That a fact?” Mogul leaned back again. “Why not kick off the festivities, then, Antonio? Unless you’re bothered by the thought of unleashing hell on their heads.”

“Have you learned nothing about the modern world from this little campaign?” Darling said mildly, gesturing at Branwen. “Everything’s connected. There are a lot of reasons beyond the moral not to start a fire in a crowded theater.”

“Yes, and we could discuss in detail why the Church doesn’t need to worry about those matters, but that would be a tediously long back-and-forth and quite frankly, I believe we’re done here. At any rate, I’ve got what I came for.” Mogul smiled at him, a thin, smug expression. “So there is a core of decency motivating you, old fellow. Well, I must say, that is…fascinating.”

“I’ll be honest, this kind of gloating seems beneath you,” Darling remarked. “You can’t possibly be that bored. Are you really that sore about losing out to the Archpope on this project? I’m sure your pet columnists would have been valuable and all, but just look at her! Isn’t she adorable? A gift to the world, if you ask me.”

“Losing out,” Mogul mused, raising his eyebrows. “Maybe you can clarify that for me. I have a respected journalist setting out to present my perspective to the world. I have that bosomy little piece speaking what amounts to secular humanism, mortal ambition and self-empowerment—all the things the Wreath stands for. And frankly I have to admit she does make a better mouthpiece than anything I had lined up to do the job, and with the Church’s own credibility behind her, too! The people of this city and the Empire have begun questioning the line of divine bullshit they’ve been fed from the cradle. The cults that pose the greatest threat to me have lost face, while that scheming spider Justinian has gained power, and don’t even pretend you fully understand what he aims to do with it. So, what is it, exactly, that I have lost? I confess the point escapes me.”

“You know, I am trying to watch a speech. If you want to exchange taunts, we can do that in the heat of battle sometime. Butting in like this is rather rude.”

“Why, you are absolutely right.” Mogul stood, swept off his hat and bowed deeply. “My most sincere and humble apologies, Antonio. You enjoy the rest of the evening, now. It’s a great speech.”

“See you later, Embras,” Darling said, waving languidly at him, his face already turned back toward Branwen.

Mogul didn’t even try to move silently and didn’t shadow-jump out, simply pacing back to the curtained door of the box, whistling. Darling listened to him leave, ignoring Branwen for now. With his back to the warlock’s exit, he permitted his features to fall into a grim scowl.

 

Midnight had long passed and the moon was drifting toward the horizon when the doors to the Crawl eased open again. A wary, slate-gray face peered out, glancing left and right, before pushing them wider. The figure who stepped forth was followed by two others, all looking around in blended wonder and nervousness.

“Just as he said,” the lone male whispered in the subterranean dialect of elvish.

“We will go directly,” said the woman in the lead. “There are sure to be wards and defenses, and we are not out for a fight. Stay low, and—”

The soft pop was the only warning they got.

“Right on schedule,” Professor Tellwyrn said grimly, stepping out of thin air. “Congratulations! Most of your compatriots aren’t dumb enough to try this. You get the rare honor of being an example.”

The three drow had fallen to their knees before her as soon as she spoke.

“Arachne,” the second woman said breathlessly. “We’ve—”

“I don’t think I like hearing that from you,” Tellwyrn interrupted. “Well, the good news is, with Rowe’s nonsense at an end, it shouldn’t be too hard to find and plug whatever hole you lot are creeping out of. I do not need drow in my Crawl, except the ones I send in myself. Hm,” she added thoughtfully, frowning. The three kneeling elves flinched. “Now, there’s an idea. A Scyllithene priestess would be a worthy check on Melaxyna’s ambitions. If, that is, I could find one of a modest enough nature not to be an excessive pest. Doesn’t seem likely.”

“We are both priestesses of Scyllith,” the second drow woman said eagerly, not seeing or ignoring her companion’s frantic expression of warning. “I would be—”

“Well, not you, obviously,” Tellwyrn said with a grimace.

The flames were brief, lasting only a split-second, but more intense than the interior of a blast furnace while they burned. In the darkness and quiet after they had vanished, Tellwyrn dismissed the invisible shield over her and brushed drifting ash from her sleeves. A circular patch had been scoured completely clean just in front of the Crawl’s entrance, the upper layers of dirt melted to a puddle of still-steaming glass. It was rapidly hardening, cracking as it did so, the energy of the fire having been removed far more swiftly than simple physics would allow. Nothing was left, not even skeletons. They had not even had time to scream.

“Stew is going to gripe about this for weeks,” Tellwyrn remarked, wrinkling her nose at the hardening glass. “Ah, well. He loves griping.”

She stepped around the burned area to the doors, pushing them carefully shut, then paused. The Professor laid a hand against the dark wood for a moment, smiling fondly, before turning and setting off to wake the groundskeeper for the second time that night.

 

“Good evening, your Grace,” Price said serenely, taking his coat. “I trust the presentation was enjoyable?”

“Good morning, Price,” he said, yawning. “The presentation was fine, as propaganda shows go. I never object to staring at Branwen. Then I had to go to the Intelligence office and the Church and report on more Wreath nonsense. Brandy, please.”

“Of course,” said Price. “Your Grace has a guest, waiting in the downstairs parlor.”

“I have a— It has to be one o’clock in the morning!”

“Yes, your Grace,” she said calmly. “The Crow appears generally unconcerned with such trivialities.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he muttered, stalking off toward the parlor.

“Ah, Antonio,” Mary said as he entered. She was sitting on the back of his favorite chair, her feet perched on one of its armrests, nibbling one of Price’s scones. “It seems I picked a poor moment to leave the city on business. You managed, though, did you not?”

“Mary, it’s an absolutely stupid hour of the morning and I’m exhausted. What do you want?”

She tilted her head. “You are unusually tetchy. I’m accustomed to seeing you more smooth under pressure. Was it really that stressful?”

“If by it, you mean the grand cavalcade of stalking and violence you missed, then no. It was actually rather fun. But I’ve just had my nose rubbed in it by the Wreath’s mortal head and had to explain all this twice, to two separate groups of superiors, so yes, I’m damn well tetchy. Even more so now that I find myself again having to repeat. What do you want, Mary?”

“Merely to discuss events,” she said, hopping lightly to the floor. “I waited, as I’ve found you generally amenable to holding late hours, but if you are unduly stressed I can return tomorrow. Would you like me to ease your weariness before I go?”

“Thank you, no,” he grumbled. “But do you happen to know a time travel spell? What I would like is to go back about a week and a half and warn myself not to get into it too closely with Embras bloody Mogul.”

“As I should hardly have to remind a Bishop of the Church,” she said evenly, “messing with time travel is an extraordinarily bad idea. Vemnesthis punishes such infractions without mercy. Even I don’t aggravate the gods in person. You might ask Arachne.”

“It was a joke,” he said wearily. “The last damned thing I need is Tellwyrn anywhere near anything I’m trying to do.”

Mary studied him in silence for a moment. “What happened?” she asked, her voice more gentle. “You are rattled. I confess it’s a little disconcerting, coming from someone so self-assured.”

“Yes, well, circumstances and other people’s bullshit I can cope with just fine,” he said. “Ah, thank you, Price.” Darling tossed back the proffered brandy in one gulp, then set the glass back on her tray. “It’s more disappointing when I screw up. I’ve been going about this all wrong, sneaking around, playing the thief against the Black Wreath. It’s been mentioned often enough lately—hell, I’ve had reason to comment that Eserites and Elilinists think very much alike. I should never have tried to match them at their own game.”

“Is that not also your game?” Mary asked mildly.

“Yes, and that would be the problem,” he said, striding past her to the window, where he pulled aside the curtain and glared out at the dark street. “The whole reason the Empire has done so well militarily is its doctrine of asymmetrical warfare. Not just the Strike Corps utilizing the Circles of Interaction to advantage, but leveraging different kinds of assets against different enemies. Hit them where they’re weakest. The Guild against the Wreath is just…attrition. For all the Church’s resources, Justinian is a schemer, too. He and Vex have been doing the same thing. We’re never going to get anywhere if we keep obliging their love for skullduggery.”

“What, then?” Mary inquired. “If the Empire were able to pin down the Wreath and use its military power against them, it would have done so long since.”

“I can pin them down,” he said. “Next time, I am going to hit the bastards with sheer overwhelming force.”

“You don’t have overwhelming force,” she pointed out.

He turned from the window, grinning broadly at her, a predatory expression that was not meant to be pleasant. Mary, unsurprisingly, seemed totally unimpressed, which didn’t bother him.

“I cannot fathom why people keep saying things like that to me,” he said. “New strategies or not, I’m still a priest of Eserion. When I need something, I’ll take it.”

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Sarriki finally entered the room proper, her eyes coldly fixed on Teal. There was something animalistically intent in that gaze, like a hungry coyote focusing on an inattentive rabbit. For all of that, and the naga’s generally alien appearance, Teal felt no fear. It was partly her knowledge of the sanctuary effect in the Visage, partly the fact that whatever a naga might do to a human, there were few things on or below the earth which posed a serious threat to Vadrieny, but partly—perhaps, even, mostly—the sense that she understood what was happening here. That sense had brought her to this juncture; it hadn’t misled her so far.

She lifted the snake flute the last few inches to her lips and began to play.

At the first thin, reedy note, Sarriki froze, her eyes widening. She still stared at Teal, but the menace was abruptly gone from her face, replaced by a complex expression. Wonder, longing, sorrow, too many emotions for her features to easily process. When Teal glided into the notes of the unlocking melody inscribed on the walls of the naga shrine, however, Sarriki finally let her eyes drift closed. Slowly, she eased her head backward, listening.

Then she began to dance.

It was a sinuous motion, unsurprisingly. She rose higher (the ceiling in the kitchen was remarkably spacious), supporting her weight on a smaller portion of her long tail, first swaying gently from side to side. As the melody progressed, her whole spine began to undulate subtly, shoulders tilting back and forth, arms rising to move gently with the rhythm. A human woman would have been moving her hips seductively to achieve that kind of sway, but on the naga, Teal couldn’t help noticing the motion did not seem sexual.

At least, until Sarriki shifted her gyrations to roll her body slowly from back to front, rather than side to side, letting her hands trail behind her. Teal very nearly missed a breath, but managed not to falter. She hadn’t actually noticed it before, but Sarriki was beautiful. Both in the alluring way a woman is beautiful, and in the wild manner of an animal. Or perhaps, she simply hadn’t been before, until she felt a reason to be. Suddenly, the resemblance was there; the statues in the shrine were no longer just a vaguely remembered face, but a familiar one.

Her dance grew more complex, the languid undulations of her arms growing more precise and choreographed, her simple swaying developing into gyrations that coiled her around herself, keeping her tail moving so that it looked at certain moments as if she were balancing upon a single loose knot of serpent coils. The fins decorating her head flared rhythmically, and even finger motions began to appear as ever more precision and rhythm worked its way into the motions of her hands.

Teal reached the end of the fairly short melody and simply launched into it again. Sarriki showed no signs of halting in her dance; somehow, the idea of ending her music was unthinkable.

The bard simply let the notes flow through her and out of her. It wasn’t a familiar piece in the way of the tunes she had known and practiced all her life, but she remembered it well, and it was beautiful, powerful enough on its own to command the spirit and take her drifting away as all truly good music did. Out the notes poured, seeming to hold enough life of their own that they demanded only a small share of her concentration. She was free to stare, over the sinuous flute and her own shifting fingers, at the dance of the naga.

Sarriki never once opened her eyes, fully immersed in the music and the motions of her own body. She swayed, wound and wove around herself, practically gliding in place. Her face expressed silent rapture the entire time.

Teal almost didn’t notice the song was coming to an end on the second repetition, but Sarriki’s motions directed her attention to it, drawing to a nearly frenzied peak upon the last sounding of the theme, her whole spine arched and hands thrown backward, and then, as the final notes sounded, she rolled her body forward, coils sliding out from beneath her, and finished on a kind of bow. Lifted high off the ground on a portion of the tip of her tail that seemed too small to support her, she had most of her length arched for balance, her upper body actually hanging forward with her head pointed toward the ground, arms up and crossed, facing down. Forefingers and thumbs extended, pinkies half-curled, the other fingers tucked against her palms. It was odd how that little detail so caught Teal’s attention.

For a moment there was silence, the music echoing in their minds after it no longer echoed in the room, as music did.

Slowly, Sarriki straightened herself out, settling her coils back to the floor and lifting her head; Teal gently lowered the flute at the same motion, almost as if they were connected by strings that moved them unison. Finally, the naga opened her eyes.

One tear slid from the inner corner of each. She didn’t move to wipe them away.

“We had such festivals,” she all but whispered. “Even in the naga courts, resources are not plentiful. No feasting, no over-burning of fuel…nothing you would probably recognize as a party. But such joy. The music, the chants, artworks created…and dancing. Oh, how we danced. How we danced. On those precious days, I could come down from my high pedestal and join in. I did so love to dance that way, for my consorts.”

She fell silent. Teal opened her mouth, finding only then that she had no idea what to say. Somehow, something fell out of her lips anyway.

“You were beautiful.”

“I was,” Sarriki murmured, a smile curling her mouth. Her eyes were still far away. “Oh, I was.”

“What happened?” Teal asked quietly.

The naga drew in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. It made her whole, long body arch slightly. “Many things. It’s a long story, as dull to recite as it was painful to live through. You should be glad, for the sake of your party, that I am here and not where I’m supposed to be, bard. Why are you not where you should be? The others walked into what they must have thought would be a fight. That demon of yours would be useful.”

“Vadrieny doesn’t use lethal force, out of consideration for me. And…anyway, this seemed more important.”

“More important.” Sarriki sighed again, wistfully this time. “At least to one of us, yes. I had never thought to hear that melody again. Once, I might have been furious at you for raising the memory. Now… Now, I feel I owe you greatly.” Finally her eyes swam back into focus, fixing on Teal’s own. “Where did you learn it? You can’t have traveled all the way down to the courts.”

“There’s…a shrine,” Teal said carefully. “Not close, but not that far down. It held the waystone the others used to get to Level 100.”

“A waystone? In my shrine?” For just a moment, anger creased the corners of Sarriki’s eyes, but just as suddenly she relaxed, letting out a rueful chuckle. “Ah, yes… Arachne. She does redecorate as she sees fit, does she not?”

“I’ve noticed that, yeah.”

“Well, speaking of that.” She began to slither forward again, and Teal instinctively shifted aside, circling away from her. The naga didn’t attempt to corner her, though, gliding past to stop in front of the door. “I owe you something, and I owe nothing to that incubus. Yes, I believe I shall help you after all.”

“You…have the keys?” Teal asked carefully. Sarriki wore a simple, stark vest of leather that had no pockets and fit her torso very tightly, with nothing on her lower body. It was hard to imagine where she might be carrying keys.

The naga shook her head, glancing over her shoulder at Teal in amusement. “These locks aren’t my work. This represents the fruits of years of obsessive labor by Rowe. Amid all the junk that percolates through this tavern, once in a while we find a few real treasures. Any that have to do with sealing or locking things, he appropriates. Over a decade he’s been at it. Never mind the locks you can see, this door is secured by magics you should fear to stand too close to. It just might be the most impenetrable door in the entire Crawl, now.”

“Oh,” Teal said, deflating. “Well, if you can tell me where to—”

She broke off as Sarriki languidly waved a hand over the edges of the door. One by one, locks snapped open and popped loose, some tumbling to the floor. In seconds, every impressive fixture securing the door shut was disarmed, falling harmlessly away. As a final touch, the latch itself turned, seemingly on its own, and the door eased a few inches open with a soft squeak.

“How…did you do that?” Teal inquired.

“Clever people are not necessarily wise people,” Sarriki murmured, smiling down at the door handle as she reached out to grip it. “Rowe is quite the smooth operator…but.” She snorted softly. “After years of lording it over his little domain, he’s allowed himself to think he truly rules the roost, forgetting that he stays in place because Arachne chooses to allow it. It doesn’t occur to him that he bosses me around because I let him. And once he decided all those drow who trickle through aren’t useful to his plans, he stopped bothering to wonder why they keep trying to sneak up to the University. Heh.”

She pulled the door fully open, revealing a staircase housed in a narrow corridor that descended into darkness, cut roughly from the surrounding stone. The naga turned her head to smile coldly at Teal. “How do I dismantle locks in my own Crawl? Please. Your friends are hard-hitters, but you are not the biggest, baddest thing that ever came adventuring in these depths. I have faced scores of those, and crushed them all.” She turned back to the doorway, hiding her expression from Teal. “And if hauling terrible drinks for sentient detritus and sucking up to a smarmy sex demon is the price I must pay for never having to do that again… I’ll take it, and consider it a bargain.”

Sarriki slithered forward, ducking to vanish into the stairwell. Her voice echoed back, somewhat muffled. “Come on, bard. See what you’ve won.”

Teal waited until the tip of the naga’s tail was well out of reach before following. Both because it would have been awkward to step on it in the dark, and because it gave her a moment to compose her features.

“So…” Fross said. “He’s the boss? That’s kinda anticlimactic. If Melaxyna was relegated to Level 2, what’s this guy got?”

“I? Boss of the Descent?” Grinning down at them, Rowe leaned against the stone Naga Queen’s head, dragging the backs of his fingers sensuously down the curve of her cheek. “If that’s the case, this is a terrible likeness. Happens every time I pose for a statue. They never get my good side. Or my legs.”

“Where is she, then?” Toby asked calmly.

“Well, she isn’t here, so I guess that means your little adventure is at an end,” Rowe replied, still smirking. “No boss, no prize. You’re only the second group to even get this far, and they walked out empty-handed, too, for the same reason you’re about to: you cheated.”

“We did not!” Juniper snapped.

“We kinda did, though,” Ruda said more thoughtfully. “But there’s a difference between cheating and cheating. The Crawl allowed this. Hell, it encouraged this.”

“Oh, you poor little truffles,” Rook said, shaking his head sadly. “Arbitrary distinctions between shenanigans that do and don’t count? Long build-ups to disappointing conclusions? Doing everything right and getting nothing for your efforts? Welcome to reality.”

He hopped down from the statue’s shoulder, fanning his wings to catch the air, and settled lightly to the ground in front of them. “The Crawl isn’t the world, kids, at least not to you. The poor bastards who have to live down here are one thing. The adventurers of old who’d come through looking for fortune and glory, they were something else again. But you? You’re on a field trip. This is a class exercise, with abundant safeguards in place to keep you from getting too badly killed. You’re floating along on a personal feather pillow, thanks to the Crawl and Tellwyrn. So be grateful this hasn’t gone worse for you. I told you the simple truth: life is disappointment. You get an object lesson in that inescapable fact without the agonizing consequences that usually accompany it. Be grateful, my little cream puffs. You’ve won the greatest prize of all.” He grinned, widely and unpleasantly. “Education!”

“Uh huh,” said Ruda, glancing around at the others. “So, do we all agree this asshole’s completely full of it?”

“He’s got a point, though.”

“Fross!” Ruda exclaimed.

“Oh, no, he’s totally trying to scam us,” the pixie clarified hastily. “I’m just saying, he’s got some good points in there. Removed from the present context, and maybe with the cynicism toned down a bit, it’s stuff worth thinking about.”

“The most effective way to lie is with a cunningly misrepresented truth,” Trissiny said flatly.

“She’s quoting doctrine again,” Ruda stage whispered. “You can tell. She’s using that voice.”

“This is fantastic,” Rowe said merrily. “Have you kids considered giving up this adventuring bit and going onto the stage?”

“Welp, if there’s no prize and this is all an exercise in disappointment, I say we fuck him up on general principles,” Ruda suggested, drawing her sword.

“No,” Gabriel said suddenly. Everyone turned to look at him; his eyes were still fixed on Rowe, his expression penetrating. “This isn’t that kind of game.”

The stairwell wasn’t long, but it was uneven and angled just enough to hide what lay below from view of the upper door. At the bottom, Sarriki continued forward, gliding into the space, but Teal had to stop on the lowest step, just staring around.

It was oddly disorienting, as if the outdoors had been crammed into an indoor space. What she suspected were the boundaries of the room were defined by a ring of standing stones, ancient-looking and carved with spiraling glyphs that meant nothing to her. There was a slightly domed ceiling, apparently a natural one to judge by its stalactites. The floor, too, looked like a cave feature, relatively flat but far from even, and bisected erratically down the middle (roughly), with half the room set about a foot higher.

The door was apparently set in one of the thick, square stone pillars; the ring they defined left the space with seven “sides.” None of these were walls, though. They appeared to be completely open, except that they opened onto totally different places.

“You can’t pass through them,” Sarriki said, slithering in a slow circuit of the chamber. “Rowe can, because of the sneakery he’s been up to down here. I possibly could; I have considerable favor amassed with the Crawl. But to you, despite how this all must seem, they’re only windows. You can look, but you can’t touch. I’m not certain what would happen if you tried. I don’t recommend it.”

Teal finally stepped down, staring around in awe. One of the spaces between the pillars showed her friends, facing off against Rowe himself in what was unmistakeably a Descent level. Level 100, assuming the waystone they’d retrieved worked as advertized. Apparently so; this chamber and Rowe’s alleged ability to use it explained his presence there. The other views were different; one looked out on the slanting main cavern of the Crawl, one on some kind of subterranean lake. Two showed what were clearly cities, one of these a cramped warren of scavenged pieces of everything from giant shells to fragments of metal and hides, swarming with goblins; the other was a more graceful and carefully built complex, with at least a foot of water standing in its floor, through which naga slid. Upon a closer inspection, the effect lost some of its power. There was no sound, no smell or breath of air from any of these views, which took away much of their realism.

Teal gave them all a rather cursory look, except for the one showing her classmates, who seemed just to be talking with the incubus for now. Other objects in the chamber deserved attention; it was a peculiar combination of pantry and reliquary. She made note of the barrels and racks of wine bottles, hanging haunches of meat and bundles of herbs tied to stalactites above, and meager sacks of grain. These, in the Crawl, must be the true wealth of the hidden chamber, but more relevant to her interests were the precious objects displayed on stands against each of the pillars. Weapons, clothing, goblets both plain and bejeweled, statues, pieces of jewelry, several objects whose purpose wasn’t clear despite their obvious quality of workmanship… All of these she might have expected to see in a treasure room somewhere, but here they were all rigged together in some kind of absurd network. Bent, dented and corroded lengths of copper pipe, trailing wires, glass rods, even rune-inked coils of paper were stretched all over the room like a vast, utterly demented spiderweb, arching above to give space to walk between them.

“The objects themselves have been gathered from all over the Crawl, over the course of years,” Sarriki said, coming to a stop and smiling faintly. “The rest of this, the…connectors? Mostly from your fellow students. In the modern world, it seems enchanting paraphernalia is relatively cheap and widely available. There’s basically nothing college students won’t do for free beer, even if it tastes like foot fungus.”

“The point of beer isn’t the flavor,” Teal said absently, studying the network. “That’s what good wine is for.”

A semester and a half with Professor Yornhaldt hadn’t prepared her to decipher much of what she was seeing, but in the overall shape of it, a clear purpose emerged, made even clearer by a few key details.

The box she recognized from Tellwyrn’s description; it sat open and empty against the base of a pillar, beside a rough stone plinth on which stood an ornate vase, wired to the network. The contents of the box were also recognizable. In the center of the room, a low table of stone sat, with a large, chipped scrying crystal on one corner. In the middle, though, were the sword and dagger. They were sleekly curved and actually quite similar in design to the black sword labeled Ariel, though their hilts were of hammered gold, the leather wrapping them a soft brown, bound in silver wire. Each weapon was balanced on its tip on the stone table, held aloft by the wires, pipes and filaments connecting them to the network. The network of which they, clearly, were the center.

“How much power,” Teal mused aloud, “would it take to forcibly manipulate the Crawl?”

“Roughly, give or take…all of it,” Sarriki said with a humorless grin. “The key, as I’m sure you can deduce, is the extremely magical pair of items in the middle there, which also have a very strong connection to Arachne.”

“The Crawl’s favorite person.”

“Just so. And I,” Sarriki said, spreading her arms wide, “am their guardian. I decide who wins the Descent and gets to retrieve the sword and dagger. And Rowe knew just what I wanted.”

“That doesn’t seem like much of a challenge to suss out,” Teal said frankly. “It sounds like being a dungeon boss sucks. Anyone would want a way out. Melaxyna sure does.”

“Ah, yes. Melaxyna.” Sarriki shrugged. “Long as I keep my freedom, it matters little to me who gets to swagger around the Grim Visage calling him- or herself the boss. One child of Vanislaas is more or less the same as another. But then again… Perhaps Mel is more of a people person. To judge by Level 2, she certainly seems to be more of an organizer. Of course, she is not supposed to leave the Descent; it’ll take her some time to weasel her way out of there, but I’ve no doubt she’ll manage.”

“But why?” Teal asked. “What is the point of all this? It’s an impressive setup, sure, but I don’t understand what it does.”

“What it does is confer a measure of power over the Crawl onto its owner,” Sarriki replied, lightly brushing a length of wire with her fingertips. The entire network shivered slightly. “What it’s meant to do, if he can ever get it to work properly, is provide a way out. Incubi and succubi fare poorly when confined. The Visage isn’t normally a place that draws visitors from other planes of existence, or even other dungeons. The arrival of misplaced gnomes and dimensionally-lost ogres is due entirely to our friendly bartender’s meddling. Likewise the tendency of nosy drow to pop up; there’s not an actual, physical opening to the Underworld in the Crawl. Rowe wants an escape; Mel wants to take it from him. But he hasn’t managed to make it work.”

“Melaxyna,” Teal said slowly, “has made herself something of a specialist on Crawl-based portal magic. Or at least she employs them.”

Sarriki nodded. “Perhaps it would be best if she didn’t find anything down here she could use to finish Rowe’s work.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Teal said grimly. She stepped up to the table, reached out with both hands and grabbed the sword and dagger.

Pulling them free brought the entire structure crashing down.

“You think this is a fucking game?” Ruda demanded.

Gabriel nodded, still staring at Rowe. “Of course it is. Or at the very least, it’s an exercise. It’s like he said: the Crawl isn’t real life. Different rules apply.”

“We can stand here chatting about it until we’re all out of oxygen,” Rowe said cheerfully. “It won’t change the facts. The game is over. You played well; you’re assured a better than decent grade, I expect. Time for you kids to leave.”

“What are you getting at, Gabriel?” Trissiny asked.

“Remember Teal’s theory? So far, she was dead on. Now, here we are, with no Naga Queen and no sign of Tellwyrn’s treasure. Just this guy, popping up in a place he has no business being.” Gabriel tucked his hands into his coat pockets, smiling coldly at the incubus. “I think he cheated.”

“Nonsense,” Rowe snorted. “You get to cheat, up to a point—for all the good it did you. You’re students. This is all arranged for your benefit. Me, the others who call this delightful dungeon our home? We just live here. There’s not cheating, because there are no goals.”

“Which makes the fact that you cheated especially bad, doesn’t it?” Gabe asked. “Let’s look at this logically. The boss and the treasure are gone, in clear contradiction of the Descent’s pattern. Rowe is here—which not only shows that he can get into places where he’s not supposed to be, but shows he has a good reason to come. He’s now in a room with a powerful band of adventurers who showed up expecting to have to kill whatever they found. Why take the risk?”

“Because,” Shaeine said softly, “if we came and found nothing, we would naturally have investigated. In all modesty, we are a fairly capable group when we pull together and focus. Upon investigating, we might have found what we sought… Unless someone were here to convince us there was no point.”

“Oh, is that what this is?” Rowe asked, grinning. “By all means, then, investigate! Sniff around the empty chamber to your little hearts’ content. Admire the portraits and statuary. We’ve all got nothing but time.”

“So what do we do about it?” Toby asked, studying the incubus through narrow eyes.

“We could always just kill him,” Trissiny suggested.

“We wait,” said Gabriel, pulling his hands out of his pockets and folding his arms.

“Wait?” Juniper frowned. “On what?”

“On the person who figured this out first. Teal knows what she’s doing. I bet you anything she’s within inches of the treasure right now.”

“You’re pinning all your hopes on the party’s bard?” Rowe’s grin had reached insane proportions. “You kids really haven’t studied the histories of adventurers, have you?”

“I most certainly have!” Fross declared in an affronted tone.

“If you’re right and she was right,” Trissiny said, “she’d also be within inches of the Naga Queen.”

“That doesn’t sound promising!” Rowe chirped.

“She is in the Visage, under sanctuary,” Shaeine said calmly. “She is practically impossible to harm. And I have absolute faith in her ability to solve this. However, we are missing an obvious preparatory step.”

Rowe yelped as a wall of silver light appeared behind him, shoving him forward; his wings smoked slightly where it impacted them. As he stumbled, flaring wings and pinwheeling arms for balance, the wall arced forward, reshaping itself into a bubble with him inside it.

“Oh, this is cute,” he snorted. “Really mature. Let’s harass the bartender now that he’s out of sanctuary.”

“Ruda,” Shaeine said evenly, “you still have the Level 2 waystone?”

“You bet your sweet ass I do,” Ruda said, grinning.

“Then I believe we have a bounty to collect. Link arms, everyone.”

“Hey, now,” Rowe said, beginning to look more serious. “You kids are better than that. Nothing warrants that kind of—”

“Will he be ported along inside that bubble?” Toby inquired.

“I believe one of us will need to be touching him,” Shaeine replied as the group moved together, setting themselves in order to use the waystone. “It prevents a minor logistical problem, as he seems likely to be uncooperative.”

“You’ve got bigger problems than that,” Rowe said sharply. “Keep in mind who you morsels are dealing with. The Crawl likes me. I came down here to offer you a friendly hand. You’re going to turn on me? Think very carefully about your prospects for getting safely back out if you go and do something like that.”

“He talks a lot, doesn’t he?” Juniper said.

“Is he wrong, though?” Trissiny asked, frowning. “The Vanislaad are nothing if not manipulative, and he’s had plenty of time to work on the Crawl. What if—”

The entire room trembled once, then a low groaning rose up from all around, as if the very stones of the Descent were grinding against each other.

“What the fuck now?” Ruda demanded, gripping the waystone with one hand and reaching for her rapier with the other. With Gabriel holding one of her arms from behind and Toby the other, she had little chance of actually drawing it, much less fighting.

The room began to change.

Beams of light suddenly shone down from above, spotlighting each of the marble statues of the students. All around the rim of the chamber, the murals faded to black, and then new pictures formed. Each of them featured Rowe. Each depicted a different kind of torture.

“Answers that question,” Gabriel said, grinning.

“Well,” the incubus said fatalistically, “shit.”

“That’s my girl,” Shaeine whispered.

Juniper, who was at the end of the chain of linked arms, stepped forward, bending the whole group as she approached the silver bubble.

“Now wait a second,” Rowe said nervously.

“Nope, don’t think so,” the dryad replied in a cheerful tone. “Shaeine, can I have a hole, please?”

“That’s what she said,” Ruda cackled.

“Thanks!” the dryad said, thrusting her arm through the saucer-sized gap that appeared in the bubble. Rowe tried desperately to evade her, even going so far as to press himself against the bubble opposite her groping hand. That proved to be a mistake; they could hear the sizzle of him impacting Themynra’s power. The incubus yelped and lurched back forward, right in time for Juniper to clamp a hand on his upper arm.

The shield flickered out of existence.

“Happy birthday, Melaxyna,” Ruda said cheerfully, tracing her finger along the glyph in the waystone.

One and all, they vanished.

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6 – 30

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“Are you sure you should be confronting this guy?” Carter asked as they strode rapidly along the rooftop. “And no, I’m not making a tactical suggestion; this is in my professional capacity of looking for information.”

“Duly noted,” Mogul said with a grin. “I’m curious about the question, however. This chap and his various lackeys have attempted to spy on our interview and then assaulted and killed my personnel when confronted about it. While I happen to have a miscellaneous handful of warlocks and demon thralls in the area, this seems like an ideal opportunity to have a word with him.”

“But the djinn strongly advised you not to. I’m just puzzled that you’d ignore his advice after summoning him to ask for it.”

There came a pause in the conversation when they reached the edge of the building. The darkness swelled around them, and then they were stepping onto the next roof over, two stories up and thirty feet away across a broad street. Carter stumbled again, but less dramatically; he was growing more accustomed to the disorientation.

“Mr. Long,” the warlock said as they resumed walking, “I’ve just spent much of the afternoon making the case to you that the Black Wreath are not at all as you believe them to be. With that established, let me just emphasize that demons are every bit as dangerous as you’ve always been told, and worse. That is why the Wreath is important, because believe me, no one else who tries is adept at handling them without creating a mess. Making allowances for individual personalities, they are highly aggressive. Infernal magic has that effect on any form of life it corrupts. Now, djinn aren’t able to physically interact with the world, which doesn’t diminish their propensity to cause trouble; it only limits the methods by which they can do so.”

The roof along which they were walking wasn’t another flat top like the previous one; their path was a lip of stone along the edge of a steep incline shingled in ragged old slate tiles. They came to the corner, where the path was interrupted by a decorative finial, and Carter had to accept a hand to navigating his way over the smooth slope and back onto even ground on the other side. It was an apparently L-shaped structure, to judge by the long distance it stretched out on the side ahead. Embarrassing as it might be to be handed about like a lady in silks and slippers, Carter wasn’t too proud to admit he needed the assistance. Despite the excitement of this assignment, he was keenly aware of being out of his element. His avuncular suit and briefcase didn’t lend themselves to nocturnal rooftop shenanigans.

“Ali and I have a well-negotiated contract,” Mogul continued as they moved on again. “He doesn’t lie to me and answers direct queries with a minimum of obfuscation. But beyond the simple answers to my questions, in the realm of his personal opinions and asides? You’re damn right I ignore his advice. It’s calculated to trip me up, without exception. Either with the goal of weaseling out of our contract, or just to create general mayhem.”

“But…if he can’t lie…”

“And what did he say, exactly?” Mogul grinned and winked. “That I would learn humility? Come on, what does that mean? You have to be eternally on guard when negotiating with demons. Any demons, but particularly the crafty ones. Sshitherosz, djinn, Vanislaad, all the schemers. They’ll promise you your own doom in a frilly dress, and you’ll step right into it if you make the mistake of paying too much attention to the frills. The exact wording gets you every time.”

“That sounds…exhausting,” Carter mused.

“Warlocks and lawyers, Mr. Long,” Mogul said cheerfully. “Warlocks and lawyers. Ah, here we are. You may want to keep back, we’re about to have some company.”

They had come to the end of the building, where there was a small rooftop patio. Raised beds held sad-looking old dirt and the twisted skeletons of small shrubs. Mogul hopped down from their improvised walkway and positioned himself against the bannister looking over the square below, beckoning Carter over to join him.

In the next moment the shadows gathered and took shape in the lee of the overhanging roof, then receded, leaving two figures standing there. One, dressed in obscuring gray robes, was hunched over with an arm across its midsection, supported by the other, which was clearly some kind of demon. Armored plates covered its forehead and limbs.

“Ah, still breathing,” said Mogul. “I’m glad to see that.”

“I had to confiscate her potion belt,” noted the demon. “She may have already taken more than the safe dosage.”

“It hurts,” the robed figure rasped, her voice taut with pain. “Inside. Bricks landed on my back… Think I have ribs broken. And lower.”

“That’s bad,” Mogul said, frowning, “especially if you’ve been chugging potions on top of internal bleeding. You know better, Vanessa. Hrazthax, get her to a healer. You two are out of this evening’s events.”

“You sure you won’t need me here?” the demon asked.

Embras waved a hand. “She’s urgent, and by the time you got back this would all be over. Be careful, though. Speak to Ross on your way out and have him pass along the word: anyone with a Vanislaad thrall needs to send it away, and everybody watch for holy symbols popping up in surprising places. There’s a reaper on the loose.”

Hrazthax frowned heavily. “A reaper? A real one? Just on patrol, or… It’s not good if Vidius is taking an interest in this.”

“You let me worry about that,” Mogul said firmly. “Take Vanessa’s talisman and get her to help. And when you find Ross, tell him to get everyone organized; our quarry is heading to the intersection of 31st East Street and Alfarousi Avenue. Don’t impede them; get everyone set up and ready to spring at that location, on my command.”

“Got it,” said Hrazthax, nodding. “But what about—”

Vanessa groaned and slumped against him.

“Go.”

The hethelax nodded to Mogul once more and took something from Vanessa’s hand, which she relinquished without argument. There came a few soft clicks as he manipulated it one-handed, and then the shadows welled up again, swallowing them.

“Busy, busy,” Mogul said, straightening his lapels. “Ah, well. When things go the way I want them to, I have the damnedest time keeping myself entertained. Ironic, isn’t it? This way, if you please.”

One shadow-jump later, they were on yet another rooftop across the street, and heading toward…Carter didn’t know what. The district was like an island of quiet and darkness. On all sides, not too far distant, the lights of Tiraas blazed like a galaxy come to earth, and at this altitude the sounds of carriage traffic and periodic Rail caravans were audible, but immediately around them was desolation. He doubted he could have navigated this jumble of broken-down structures even with the streetlights working, but Embras seemed to know where he was going.

“What’s a reaper?” Carter asked, regretting having put his notebook away. Ah, well, he wasn’t great at writing while walking at the best of times, and would likely have broken his neck trying to do it while navigating rooftops.

“Grim reaper,” Mogul said as they moved, “soul harvester, valkyrie. You’ve surely heard of them under one name or another.”

It took the journalist a few seconds to gather his thoughts before he could reply.

“Well… I must say, this night is going to leave me without things not to believe in.”

Embras grinned at him. “Oh, they’re very real, but you can be forgiven for not knowing it. The Vidians don’t encourage people to ask about them, and really, nobody on the mortal plane is likely to interact with one at all unless they dabble in necromancy. It’s the reapers who usually get sent to shut that down. Oh, and Vidian exorcisms? All theater. If the death-priests want a spirit laid to rest, they put on a big show to make you think they’re being useful while a valkyrie quietly gets rid of it. Warlocks only need to know about them because they have the same authority over incubi and succubi—which, as you may know, are human souls who are not supposed to be on this plane.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Vlesni is going to wring every ounce of pathos out of this anecdote she possibly can. I hear tell getting sent back by a reaper is…uncomfortable.”

“Do you really think you can intercept your opponent if he’s got an invisible spirit working with him?” Carter asked, glancing around somewhat nervously.

“Intercept him? I’m going to do no such thing.” Mogul stopped at the edge of the current roof, one long leg raised with the foot propped on the low wall surrounding it, and grinned at him. “We’re meeting him at the end. The man’s going excessively out of his way to spell out a message. I really ought to let him finish it, don’t you think? That’s just good manners.”

“Where the hell are we going?” Weaver snarled. “And don’t feed me that bullshit about just wasting time. You keep insisting on taking specific routes!”

“Lang—“

“Child, I swear by Omnu’s hairy third testicle I will shoot you right in the fucking mouth.”

“Settle down, good gods,” Darling reproved. “And yes, Weaver, you’re right, we are heading for an intersection a few blocks up.”

“Great, well, you should know there are warlocks and demons moving parallel to us in the same direction. We’re either walking into an ambush or being escorted by a mobile one.”

“Okay, how do you know this stuff?” Peepers demanded. “Where are you getting intel?”

“He’s got a spirit companion,” Joe explained.

“I want one. You have any idea how valuable that would be in my line of work?”

“You wouldn’t get along,” Weaver grunted.

“Don’t even ask,” added Joe, “it just gives him an opportunity to be standoffish and coy about it. He loves that.”

“About how many?” Darling interrupted.

Weaver cocked his head as if listening for a moment before replying. “Nine warlocks. Six of them have companion demons of various kinds. No incubi or succubi. And…a guy in a white suit almost straight behind us on the rooftops. With Peepers’s friend.”

“He’s not my friend,” she said with a sigh. “Never was, probably sort of hates my guts now.”

“Shame,” Weaver said, grinning nastily. “He was cute. Ah, well, guess you’re destined to be an old maid.”

“Joe, please shoot him in the foot.”

“Maybe after we deal with the demons.”

“You’re not wrong,” said Darling, “we are heading somewhere. There’s a small square up ahead close to the bordering canal of this district. That street leads straight to one of the bridges out.”

“The ones you said not to go near because they’d be guarded?” Joe asked.

“Yup!” Darling didn’t slacken his pace in the slightest; none of them were having trouble keeping up, though Peepers was starting to look a little haggard. “But it’s been enough time, approximately. I hope. I chose this particular bridge to approach because it leads to the most direct route toward the main temple of Shaath.”

“And…that is relevant…why?” Peepers asked.

“This must all be part of that plan he doesn’t have,” said Weaver, rolling his eyes.

“The Wreath has both oracular and divinatory sources of information,” Darling said lightly. “Many warlocks can use enough arcane magic to scry, and there are demons who trade information for favors. Any plans we made could be found out and countered, heading up against what we were.”

“There are methods to block both of those,” Joe noted.

“Yes,” said Darling, nodding, “and when I have time to arrange a real campaign against the Wreath, with Church and Imperial support, you better believe I’ll be using them. On the fly like this, though, there’s a loophole that can be exploited: they can’t scry a plan that doesn’t exist.”

“Not having a plan doesn’t strike me as a great plan,” Peepers muttered.

“I know the board,” Darling said more quietly, “and I know the pieces. I set in motion the ones most likely to lead to the result I want. Plans are nice, kids, but sometimes they’re a luxury you can’t afford to count on. If you know what’s going on, and if you’re a little lucky, you can tell more or less how things are going to play out. Even arrange them the way you want, sometimes.”

The other three glanced at each other.

“This is not how I wanted to die,” Peepers sighed.

“Oh?” said Joe. “How did you?”

“Of sex-induced heart failure on top of a gigolo in my eighties, wearing a fortune in jewels and nothing else. And drunker than any woman has ever been.”

He flushed deeply and didn’t manage to form a reply. Weaver actually laughed.

“And,” Peepers said in a more subdued tone, “certain my little brother was going to be taken care of…”

“He’ll be fine,” said Darling soothingly. “We will be fine.”

“You are so full of it,” Weaver snorted.

“Yeah.” Darling glanced over his shoulder and winked. “Luckily I keep enough of it on hand to throw into my enemies’ eyes. It’s always worked so far.”

“Ew,” said Peepers, wrinkling her nose.

“I think that metaphor got away from you,” Joe added.

Weaver shrugged. “Eh, they can’t all be winners.”

“Oh, shut up, all of you. We’re almost there. Mouths shut, eyes open, and be ready to fight or flee.”

“Of course,” Andros rumbled to himself, staring across the canal at the darkened district up ahead. “What better place? I’m a fool for not thinking of it.”

“Holy shit, that all looks abandoned,” Flora marveled. “How long has it been like this?”

“Less than a week,” said Savvy. “It’s not going to be left this way long, but while it’s there… Yes, it really is an ideal venue.”

They had stopped in the shade of two warehouses flanking the road which became a bridge into the condemned district. The spirit wolf had come unerringly here, then halted, glaring ahead with his hackles raised. He growled quietly until Andros rested a hand on his head.

Ingvar and Tholi immediately set to prowling around, investigating, with Flora and Fauna following suit after a moment. The elves, after peering in every direction, nimbly shimmied up lamp posts and perched improbably atop the fairy lights, peering ahead into the district. The two Huntsmen kept their attention chiefly on the ground, tracking back and forth.

“Cities,” Tholi muttered disparagingly. “Nothing leaves tracks.”

“Not easy tracks,” Ingvar said in a more even tone. “And the rains wash away what little there is very quickly. These are not elk, Tholi; be sure you are not following the wrong kind of spoor. Look.”

He had crossed to the foot of the bridge and knelt, drawing his hunting knife and carefully scraping it across the pavement.

“Infernal magic isn’t useful for stable area-of-effect spells, unlike arcane wards,” Ingvar said, holding up the knife. “It is anchored to something physical. In this case, the paving stones.”

The tip, where he had dragged it against the ground, was now spotted with rust. Even as they all stared, the reddish stain crept up the blade another half an inch.

“Infernal wards cause rust?” Fauna asked, frowning down at them.

“The weapons of Huntsmen are blessed by the Mother,” said Andros, glaring over the bridge.
“They do not decay, nor suffer damage from the elements. Heat, cold, moisture… Such an effect is the result of magical corruption. They are here, and they have warded this bridge against intrusion.” He began to glow subtly.

“What mother?” Flora asked.

“Honestly,” said Savvy, pointing at the wolf. “Have you ever seen divine magic used for anything like that? Most of the Huntsmen’s arts are fae in nature. I really need to explain this? I was almost certain you two were elves.”

“I don’t like you out of uniform,” Fauna announced.

“Enough,” Andros growled. “What can you see from that vantage?”

“Movement,” Flora said, peering into the dark district. “Through windows and gaps in walls, mostly. There’s activity directly ahead, hidden behind things. People moving inside buildings.”

“Without lights,” said Ingvar, nocking an arrow to his bow. “That’ll be the Wreath. Once we go in there it will be increasingly hard to track our quarry. They won’t appreciate our presence.”

“Let them come,” Tholi said, grinning savagely. Behind him, Ingvar rolled his eyes. “I just hope the Eserite we’ve come to rescue isn’t dead. If he’s running around in there with warlocks and demons after him… Doesn’t look good, does it?”

“Darling would die swiftly in our wilds,” Andros said, “but we fare almost as poorly in his. The man is adaptable and this is his city. He chose to enter there. I will believe he has fallen when I’ve buried him. We proceed.”

“Agreed,” Savvy said crisply, deftly smoothing her hair back with both hands. She shrugged out of her coat, reversed it and swept it back on, and just like that the illusion vanished, leaving the immaculately attired Butler straightening her tie.

“Uh,” Fauna asked, “what was the point of that, then?”

“Camouflage,” Andros said, nodding approvingly. “There are few enough Butlers in the city that some know all their faces, and their masters. Best not to advertize that Bishop Darling has run into trouble.”

“Wait!” Flora said suddenly, straightening. “I see people coming into the square— It’s him! And the others!”

“And more coming out of hiding,” Fauna added. “In robes. With demons.”

“Then this is the time,” Andros declared, starting forward and raising his bow. The spirit wolf stalked at his side. “Ingvar, Tholi, strike down the demons. I will attend to any infernal arts used against us.”

“And the people?” Ingvar asked. “The warlocks?”

Before he had finished speaking, Price strode forward onto the bridge, gliding smoothly down its center. Flora and Fauna leaped from their perches, landing on either side of the Butler. The three of them walked without apparent hurry, but at a pace that devoured the distance between them and Darling.

“That,” said Andros with a grim smile as he stepped forward after them, “appears to be attended to.”

Teal staggered slightly upon materializing, but quickly caught her balance and straightened, self-consciously smoothing her coat.

“That’s a neat trick,” Sarriki noted, pausing as she slithered past with a tray of empty mugs, bound for the bar. “You shouldn’t be able to teleport into here. Are you even a wizard?”

“Not using arcane magic, no,” the bard said with a smile, holding up a waystone. “But the Crawl’s methods work just fine.”

The naga cocked her head to the side. “I thought you kids couldn’t afford to buy from Shamlin.”

“Shamlin has decided to return to the surface,” Teal explained. “As such, he was quite interested in Tiraan bank notes. Where’s Professor Ezzaniel?”

“Here,” he said from the second level of the bar. “And what are you up to, Miss Falconer? It is not generally wise to split up the party.”

Teal tilted her head back, staring mutely up at him for a moment. “It’s funny how you’re supposed to be evaluating our progress down here, yet you haven’t been around for any of it. You just sit here drinking and chatting with the other patrons.”

“Since you make such a point of my absence, what makes you think you know what I’ve been doing while not under your eyes?” Ezzaniel leaned one arm against the railing and smiled down at her.

Teal stared at him thoughtfully, then glanced at Sarriki, who chuckled and set about pulling herself up the steps.

“It’s not like you to nakedly evade a question like that, Professor,” she said quietly.

Ezzaniel raised an eyebrow. “I assure you, Miss Falconer, everything is attended to. Professor Tellwyrn has made appropriate arrangements for you to be graded fairly.”

“I don’t doubt she has. Where is Rowe?”

The Professor shrugged. “I don’t much wonder about him when he is not in front of me. He is entertaining company, but in a rather exhausting way. One does get tired of always keeping a hand on one’s purse strings.”

She turned from him and bounded up the stairs in two long leaps, then paused, glancing around. The Grim Visage was fairly quiet at the moment. A lone drow man was nursing a drink in the far corner; he nodded politely to her as her gaze fell on him. A small party of five goblins were conversing quietly next to the fireplace. Not far away, Sarriki was clearing dishes and trash off an empty table.

Teal squared her shoulders and strode past the naga, straight through the curtained doorway next to the bar.

She paused only momentarily in the kitchen beyond, quickly taking in its meager furnishings and stored food at a glance, then stepped across the floor to study the door opposite the exit. It was secured with multiple locks. Unlike most of the rusted, battered and apparently recycled equipment the students had seen in most parts of the Crawl, these looked new. Clean, strong, and highly effective. Teal didn’t need to start tampering with them to know there was magic at work, too. This door would not be opened by someone who wasn’t entitled.

“You know, you’re not supposed to be back here.”

She turned slowly to look at Sarriki, who stood framed in the doorway, her arms braced against it on both sides.

“My friends are going directly to Level 100,” she said quietly.

“Oh?” The naga smiled, a bland, languid expression. The light framing her wasn’t bright enough to make her features difficult to see, but it was sufficiently darker in the kitchen than in the bar that the contrast made for good dramatic effect. “Excellent. I had a feeling, you know. And I’ve just won a bet. If they manage to beat the boss, I’ll be absolutely rolling in it.”

“The going theory,” Teal went on, “is that the final boss of the Descent is the Naga Queen.”

“Interesting idea. My people mostly live far below, you realize. It’s rare that any of us climb to this level.”

“Mm hm. It would fit, though, wouldn’t it? She’s easily the most formidable personality in the Crawl… One possibly powerful enough the Professor Tellwyrn wouldn’t want to leave her running around at liberty.”

Sarriki shrugged. “Whatever. Your friends are hard-hitters; they have as good a chance as anyone. I’m fairly confident of my odds.”

“You have more at stake here than a bet, don’t you?” Teal asked softly.

The naga’s eyes hardened. “Little girl, it is seldom wise to stick your nose into other people’s business. Now, if you’re hungry, kindly come back out front and I’ll make you something. This area is not for patrons.”

“Where’s Rowe? It’s odd for him not to be around. With Melaxyna placing bounties on his head, it’s not exactly safe for him to leave, is it?”

“Child,” Sarriki said sharply, “I’m losing patience. There’ll be no fighting in here, but you’ll find there is a lot I can do to make your stay in the Visage and the Crawl unpleasant if you disrupt the peace in my bar. Now, for the last time, out.”

“Actually,” said Teal, stepping aside and pointing at the locked cellar door, “I need to get through here.”

Sarriki actually laughed, loudly. “Oh, you silly little thing. That is not going to happen.”

They were familiar with the drill by now, after making extensive use of Melaxyna’s portal and waystone. Immediately upon landing, the students unlinked arms, Fross zipping out from under Ruda’s hat, and fell into formation, weapons up, eying their new surroundings carefully.

It was definitely the Descent. The distinctive proportions of the room were right, and the staircase behind them was just like those they had seen dozens of times before. It was the contents of the room that made them all straighten, staring.

“Well,” Toby said after a moment, “I don’t know what I was expecting.”

The wall were covered with masterfully painted murals, all depicting in exquisite detail their adventures through the Crawl thus far. The scenes blended one into the next as they marched around the walls, but everything was familiar, if portrayed somewhat more dramatically than the events had actually occurred. Juniper laughing in delight as she hugged a capling, Trissiny standing at the foot of the throne with Melaxyna smirking down at her, the whole group in disarray and being chased by boars, Gabriel studying an invisible maze with an expression of intense thought while the others ostentatiously bickered around him, the group lined up facing a row of chessmen. The scenes continued, wrapping around the chamber and showing the details of every step of their journey through the Descent, though they did not portray anything from before or after that. Nothing of the Grim Visage, the complex of dream-inducing mists, Shamlin’s grotto or the Naga Queen’s shrine.

There were statues, too, nine of them. Towering marble depictions of the students lined an avenue straight toward the opposite end of the chamber, each over eight feet tall even without the plinths on which they stood. At the far end, rather than another staircase downward, there was a semicircular indentation in the wall, in which stood an even larger statue, this one of the Naga Queen.

Of the Queen herself, there was no sign.

“I kind of wish I had one of those lightcappers,” Juniper mused. “Remember, from Tiraas? I mean, just look at these portraits! Makes me feel kinda proud, y’know?”

“Maybe we can come back with one?” Gabriel suggested.

“Unlikely,” said Fross. “This was all arranged for us on this visit. I bet it’ll all be blank as soon as we leave.”

“Experience is by nature a transient thing,” Shaeine said quietly.

“Only one direction to go,” Trissiny said, stepping forward. Ruda fell into step right beside her, the others quickly following suit.

They came up short a moment later, before they’d gone ten feet, when the sound of clapping began to echo throughout the chamber. Slow, rhythmic, and coming from only a single pair of hands, it resounded sourcelessly from the stone on every side, leaving them peering around again, weapons raised.

He materialized then, fading from invisibility into view atop the Naga Queen’s statue, where he was perched on her stone shoulder. Rowe continued to applaud, smirking down at them.

“Well done, kids. Well done. I congratulate you on your highly improbable victory.”

“Son of a bitch,” Gabriel murmured, not noticing the sour look Trissiny shot him. “Teal was right.”

“I have a theory,” Teal said, drawing the snake flute from within her coat. “One I’ve been working on since we came here. A lot of the pieces to the puzzle were hard to find, but several of the more important ones fell into place for us just recently.”

Sarriki had fallen still, eyes fixed on the flute. Her expression was purely hungry. Teal raised the instrument toward her lips.

“Let’s see if we can come to an understanding, your Majesty.”

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6 – 28

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The long gallery was lined by murals of rough stone in muted primary colors, displaying slightly abstract patterns that looked like simple geometric decorations one moment and aquatic depictions the next, depending on where one focused. Shapes resolved themselves into fish, clams, strands of seaweed and even waves and whirlpools, without coming together in a way that portrayed any discernible scene. It was all further muddled by the streamers of water that flowed down the walls at irregular intervals, and the coatings of moss and lichen that filled most of the grooves in the stonework, spreading out to partially obscure the murals in places.

Though the walls were square-cut, both floor and ceiling were uneven and appeared natural. The craggy roof of the gallery was set with softly glowing crystals that filled the whole space with a pale, scintillating light. Its floor was partially underwater. There was a path of sorts, relatively flat banks of stone standing out from the pool below. Water laughed and gurgled on all sides, shimmering patterns of light reflecting from it all over the walls, but there was something ominous in the depths of it. Below the stepping stones was only blackness, with no hint at how deep it ran, or what currents might lie beneath. The stones, too, were wet with spray and slick with lichen, adding to the unnerving effect of the watery floor.

While the entrance of the gallery was a simple crack in the cave wall, its exit at the far end was more grand. A double staircase arced around a towering statue of a naga woman wearing a spined crown, leading to a platform above. The arched doorway beyond was huge enough to be easily visible even from the lower level and the far end of the chamber; it was blocked by vertical bars, offering only a glimpse of whatever lay beyond. The statue of the Naga Queen was the most impressive, but far from the only one of its kind. Her sinuously lithe frame and regal features marched along the walls, interrupting the murals and in a couple of cases being constantly washed by falls of water from above.

“Does this look a little familiar to anyone else?” Juniper asked, turning slowly to peer around.

“It’s really, really pretty,” Fross all but whispered. “Like, wow.”

“Yes,” the dryad said, smiling briefly at her. “But it’s a little like Shamlin’s grotto, isn’t it?”

“That just looked like a wet cave,” said Ruda.

“I sort of see what she means, though,” Trissiny mused, also studying the gallery. “If you take away the carvings and the murals… It’s a wet cave of the same basic type. You think there may be a connection?”

“That’d imply that the grotto has some relationship to this place,” Toby said, frowning.

“Shamlin didn’t mention anything like that,” said Gabriel. “Though now that I think of it, we went there and found out about this… And not only did he have exact directions to this place, it wasn’t even all that far. Think there’s more going on here than he told us?”

Ruda snorted. “Hell, at this point I’m assuming nobody we talk to is telling us the straight truth about anything. Everybody keep on your toes.”

“Agreed,” Trissiny said solemnly. “I see no motive for Shamlin to entrap us, but…”

“But if we understood everyone’s motives, our trip would have gone very differently,” Gabriel said, grinning.

“Teal?” Shaeine asked quietly. The bard was staring intently at one section of wall, wearing a frown of concentration unlike the more casual observations of her classmates. At the priestess’s question, everyone turned to look at her.

“I think,” Teal said quietly, trailing off.

“Yes?” Ruda prompted after nearly a minute passed.

Teal shook herself slightly. “Do you see a pattern to these? It’s…tugging at me, somehow.”

“An enchantment?” Trissiny asked worriedly, turning to Gabriel, who shrugged.

“No,” said Teal with a hint of irritation. “A pattern. I swear there’s some kind of meaning to this, but I just can’t put my finger on oh gods it’s music!”

Shaeine actually had to steady her; Teal pointed eagerly at the wall, seeming not to notice that she had nearly slipped into the water in her excitement.

“Look! See, the clams and fish and things are notes! They’re set on horizontal wave patterns that threw me off because they curve up and down, and they break off and continue in chunks… But it’s five parallel bars, and the… Let’s see, the seashell would correspond to…” She meandered off into muttering, leaning forward to peer at the walls.

“Please be careful,” Shaeine cautioned, still holding onto her. “If you slip we are both likely to fall.”

“Here’s a question for the bard,” said Gabriel. “Are you familiar with the term ‘confirmation bias?’”

Teal made a swatting motion at him with one hand, not turning around.

“Ruda?” Trissiny asked. “Do you see music in that?”

“Not as such,” Ruda said, turning slowly to peer around at the walls. “But now that she points it out… I could see it being what she says. I mean… Yeah, see? The five bars, and the way the fish and clams and shit repeat along them. Look how the seaweed breaks up the groups of them. Like measures, see?”

“I don’t even know what that means,” said Gabriel. “Is musical notation really universal? Seems odd that cave-dwelling naga would use the same script as everyone else.”

“There are different systems of notation, but the Crawl doesn’t exactly exist without context,” said Fross. “I mean, adventurers from above were a heavy presence down here for thousands of years even before Professor Tellwyrn started exerting her influence. It doesn’t seem so unbelievable to me.”

“Do you think this is important, Teal?” Toby asked quietly.

Teal apparently ignored him, intent upon the walls. She was now humming broken snatches of music to herself.

“Shamlin didn’t say anything about it,” Trissiny said slowly, frowning into the distance. “But he did say that the snake flute was the key to this. That lends credence to the idea that music is significant here. Fross, can you keep an eye on Teal, please? Help Shaeine if she slips.”

“You got it!”

“And the rest of us?” Toby asked.

“I think it wouldn’t hurt to explore the chamber a little bit,” Trissiny replied. “I’d caution everybody to stay in sight, but…there doesn’t seem to be any place in here that’s out of view. Just be careful where you step, please.”

“You’re telling us?” Ruda cackled. “Boots, nobody else here is dressed in metal. We can probably swim; you’ll go down like a rock.”

“Thanks,” Trissiny said dryly, moving off toward the stairs and placing each footstep with extreme care.

Despite the urgency of their situation, the long antechamber was actually quite beautiful. The soft, shimmering light and constant sound of flowing water was soothing. Even Teal’s intermittent humming didn’t disturb the effect, and in fact added to it. There wasn’t much to see, though. The students knelt (very carefully) to investigate the water below, which remained cool, flowing, and impenetrably dark. After examining the naga statues and apparently musical murals a bit more, they all gravitated naturally to the stairs and the dais above. That, at least, had a smooth, artificial floor, which had the further advantage of not being wet. Everyone breathed a little easier with their feet solidly upon it.

The arch was a nearly perfect circle, flat only at the bottom where the level of the floor ran across it. Vertical bars blocked their way, fitting neatly into holes in the top and bottom of the archway. Despite the fact that this was clearly meant to be a door, there seemed to be no mechanism by which they could move. They were very solid to the touch, albeit rather odd. Slightly uneven, they were a dull gold in color, and looked like animal chitin but felt like metal. Rang like metal, too, which Ruda experimentally tapped on them with her rapier. Neither that nor anything else they tried brought a response.

“Well, I guess you have to stand here,” said Gabriel, shifting his feet in the circle of red stone set into the floor in front of the door. “And do…what?”

“Play the song with the snake flute, I bet,” said Juniper, glancing past the Naga Queen’s stone shoulder to her remaining classmates below. Fross had apparently been put to work illuminating the murals; Teal was working her way slowly up the chamber toward them, humming and studying as she went. “Guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

“That has to be the shrine, too,” said Toby. He slid his fingers absently along one of the glossy bars, peering through them.

The chamber beyond was shaped like a keyhole, with another long, narrow space terminating in a wide, circular one. There seemed to be a gap in the floor around the perimeter of the circle, though it was difficult to make out from this angle. In the center of it, on a dais, stood a large statue of the Naga Queen, her hands folded just in front of her navel. Something glittered between them, obscured by distance.

“Can anyone make out what that is?” Trissiny asked.

“It’s a waystone,” Juniper reported. “Or… I’m pretty sure it is. It’s the same shape as the other two we’ve seen and has that swirly symbol. It’s etched in gold, though, and the stone’s kind of dark gray.”

“Hmm,” Gabriel mused, stepping off the circle and wandering closer to squint into the shrine. The hall leading to it was dark, but the statue was brightly lit from above, the source of the light currently hidden from them. “That fits. Shamlin said the flute was the key to the…uh, key to skipping to Level 100.”

“Which means our bard is the key to the key to the key,” said Ruda, grinning. “And speaking of!”

Teal was drawing the sinuous flute from within her coat as she ascended the stairs, Shaeine’s hand tucked into her arm. “Yep,” she said. “I’ve got it down. Ready to give it a go?”

“Are you certain you have it?” Trissiny asked. “I don’t mean to be rude, Teal, but I remember the last musical puzzle we met. If the murals were confusing enough that you didn’t even recognize it at first…”

“It’s like…a code,” Teal said, shaking her head. “Not a very hard one, even. Once I matched up the symbols I could read it as easily as any piece of sheet music. Trust me, I made certain. Where I messed up in the Descent was in not planning far enough ahead; I made sure to look over the whole thing down there. It’s the same melody, it just repeats along the walls.”

“Guess we’re ready, then,” said Gabriel, backing away from the circle. “Not like there’s any other apparent solution.”

“Okay,” said Trissiny, drawing her sword as Teal approached. “Everyone, be on the alert for a trap; I still don’t quite trust anything about this. Shaeine, you’re on shields; Fross, stand by to levitate us if the floor falls.”

“You’re gettin’ paranoid, Boots,” Ruda observed.

“Yes, well, after we’ve been teleported halfway down the Crawl and then sent on a circuitous mockingjay hunt, I think a little paranoia is called for.”

Juniper frowned. “What’s a mockingjay?”

“Ain’t no such animal,” Gabe said with a grin. “That’s the point. See, you take somebody out in the woods and—”

Shaeine cleared her throat pointedly.

“And then Gabe shuts up,” he finished weakly.

“Every story should end that way,” said Ruda.

Teal stepped into the circle, raised the snake flute to her lips and as they all looked on tensely, began to play.

The melody was slow, soft and haunting. Something about it was intangibly exotic; of them, only Teal probably had the vocabulary to describe what it was about the tune that tickled at the mind that way, but its progression wasn’t what they were used to. It seemed unable to decide whether it was a major or minor key, yet everything flowed together and resonated beautifully. The snake flute had a sharp, reedy sound very unlike any flute any of them had ever heard, more reminiscent of an oboe.

Teal played through the tune once, then after a barely perceptible pause, went into it a second time. It wasn’t a long piece of music, but after two repetitions, they were starting to grow increasingly nervous. Nothing seemed to have happened; the bars still blocked their way forward, but at least no traps had sprung, either.

Coming to the end of her second play-through, Teal stopped, frowning at the bars. Gabriel opened his mouth to say something, then closed it when she lifted the flute back to her lips and took a breath.

In that moment, the bars abruptly slid upward with a soft rasp, vanishing into their holes along the upper curve of the doorway.

“Nice work!” Ruda crowed, slapping Teal on the shoulder.

“Yes indeed,” Trissiny agreed with a smile.

“That’ll teach people to say bards are useless!” Fross chimed.

Everyone turned to stare at her. After a moment, she dropped about a foot downward, her glow dimming slightly. “What? What’d I say?”

“Stay sharp, everyone, we haven’t arrived yet,” said Trissiny, turning and stepping into the hallway toward the shrine.

“Was that rude of me?” Fross asked sotto voce as they proceeded after her.

“It’s okay, Fross,” Teal assured her, grinning. “They say a lot of the same things about bards that they do about pixies. We’re all in this together.”

The circular shrine proved to be much deeper and taller than the rest of the small complex. The island on which the Naga Queen’s statue stood rose out of a deep pit, the entire periphery of the chamber plunging downward into dimness. There was a bridge to it from the hall approaching, barely two feet wide and without rails. As they neared, they could indeed see the stone, exactly as Juniper had described it. The Queen held her hands a foot or so apart; the waystone hovered between them in midair, rotating slowly in silence.

Teal crept to the edge and leaned forward, peering over. “More mushrooms. This place is just…wait a second. Are those…?”

Gabriel joined her, looking down. “Holy shit, I don’t believe it. They are!”

“They are what?” Trissiny demanded, craning her neck. “They just look like mushrooms to me. A little sparkly, but…oh, you can’t be serious.”

“What is it?” Juniper asked from behind them, not having pushed her way forward to join the group.

Ruda had, and now stepped back, grinning broadly. “That, Juno, is a big circular pit entirely full of absolutely enormous glittershrooms.”

“Gods above,” Gabriel whispered. “Look at the size of them. Look at the quantity! The amount of gold we’re staring at—”

“No,” Trissiny said firmly.

“Well, obviously, I know we’re not going to harvest them. Let me just appreciate it for a moment!”

“Wow,” Team murmured, shaking her head. “I didn’t know they grew that big.”

“Actually they don’t really have an upper limit on growth,” Juniper commented. “Glittershrooms are a superfungus. They could get tree-sized or bigger, if they had a sufficiently dark, damp space with enough room. You don’t generally see that because somebody usually eats them long before they grow that big.”

Ruda laughed loudly.

“More to the point,” Juniper went on, “this is a little more subtle than we’re used to, but it’s pretty obviously a trap, guys. Glittershrooms release airborne spores that have the same effects as eating the caps or stalks.”

“They do?” Gabriel asked, turning to face her and stepping carefully away from the ledge. “I didn’t know that. Seems like someone would’ve found a way to use that.”

“Well, in theory, but for practical reasons the spores don’t make a good drug. They’re about as potent as the flesh of the fungus itself, but they’re tiny. Also, they only go airborne when the mushrooms get about that big, which, like I said, doesn’t often happen. Glittershrooms have been used as an intoxicant for so long that most modern varieties have a stunted ability to reproduce; they’re used to people cultivating them. I think we’re looking at an older, primal species, here.”

“How does that make it a trap?” Toby asked.

“Well, because that’s a big pit full of them,” Juniper explained. “If somebody fell into that, the impact would make them all drop spores, and whoever was down there would be too stoned to move before they could think about standing up.”

They regarded the ledge and narrow footbridge in silence for a moment.

“Well,” said Ruda, “the obvious answer to that is not to fall in. Which makes it too easy.”

Trissiny nodded, her expression grim. “And the prize is just sitting there. Odds are if you try to get the waystone, something knocks you into the pit. All right.” She turned to face the others. “Options? Ideas?”

“Frost!” said Juniper.

The pixie darted in front of her. “Yes?”

“Oh! Not you, I said ‘frost,’ not… Well, actually, you would need to do the… I mean, I didn’t mean I don’t want to talk to you! Or that you’re just—”

“June.” Toby placed a hand on her shoulder, grinning. “Start from the beginning?”

“Right,” the dryad said, somewhat abashed. “If we ice over the shrooms, that’ll stop them from releasing spores. A good frost will shut down basically anything in the plant or fungus kingdoms.”

“Oh! I can do that!” Fross chimed, bobbing about excitedly. “Just give me a second, I’ll have the whole thing frozen in a jiffy!”

“Careful,” Trissiny urged her as the pixie darted out over the pit.

“It’s okay,” she chimed, “I’ll just lay out some whoof!”

A jet of blue-tinged mist spurted up from below, catching Fross and blowing her roughly backward, straight into Teal’s face. The pixie bounced off her with a puff of glittery blue fog and drifted away, dust still shaking off her wings. A musty smell started to waft through the air.

“What the heck was that?” Fross demanded, vibrating rapidly and shaking off more dust.

“I dunno, but it was…kinda nice,” Teal said, grinning emptily. As they stared, she swayed slightly on her feet.

“Teal?” Shaeine asked sharply.

“Heeeey, love,” the bard drawled, leaning toward her…and then overbalancing. Shaeine barely caught her, staggering under her weight. Teal just continued grinning and twined her arms around the drow’s neck. “Why don’ we lie down for a bit?”

“Okay, this would be hilarious under other circumstances,” Ruda said. “Um, can anyone…fix her?”

“Divine healing doesn’t do anything for intoxication,” Toby said, frowning. “And by the way, let’s everybody step back away from that ledge?”

“Y’all should just relax,” Teal burbled into Shaeine’s neck. “Errybody so tense…”

“I can sort her out,” said Juniper, stepping forward and gently but firmly pulling the bard back upright. She paused then, holding Teal up by the shoulders while her head lolled vacantly about, and grimaced. “Um… I, uh, only know one way to do this, Shaeine. Sorry, but…”

“Please just remedy her,” the drow said, actual worry working into her voice.

Juniper sighed, pulled Teal forward and kissed her firmly on the lips.

This went on for several long moments.

“Uh,” Gabriel said awkwardly.

Suddenly Teal jerked backward, her eyes widening. Juniper released her, stepping back, as the bard scrubbed a hand across her mouth.

“Oh, gods,” Teal whimpered, her panicked eyes finding Shaeine. “Oh, my…I’m so sorry, I don’t—”

The drow interrupted her by stepping forward and wrapping her up in a hug.

“It’s all right,” she murmured. “No one’s fault.”

“It’s actually pretty interesting!” Fross said brightly. “I did some research after the Golden Sea episode. Dryads don’t actually heal, per se; it’s technically a form of attribute theft. They take harm onto themselves, which in most cases isn’t noticeable on them because dryads are crazy durable and highly resistant to mind-altering effects. That’s why it works so well on drugs and poisons!”

“Fascinating,” said Trissiny, turning to stare grimly at the mushroom pit. “Did anyone else notice how that reacted to us having a plan to deal with it?”

“Yeah,” said Juniper, nodding. “I don’t think it’s just mushrooms down there.”

“Hmm…” Gabriel abruptly sat down with his back to the wall and began taking out his enchanting paraphernalia. A moment later he had his charm book open and was busily inscribing a glyph on a sheet of paper.

“See, I’m not sure that’s it,” said Ruda. “It reacted to Fross being physically within range. Think about it: why go to the trouble of keeping something intelligent in your crazy hazy mushroom pit when you can just have them reflexively shoot spores at anything that gets too close? Seems much simpler.”

“That makes sense,” Juniper said thoughtfully. “There are predatory plants and fungi that react that way to motion. A pixie flying over them could set that off.”

“Either way,” said Trissiny, “we’re left with the problem of getting over the pit un-stoned. Assuming that theory is correct and it’s not actually responding to us personally. I wouldn’t be surprised if that thing is an extension of the Crawl’s intelligence.”

“Easy way to check,” Ruda said lightly, strolling forward.

“Wait!” Trissiny shouted as the pirate brushed past her.

“Keep your distance, now,” Ruda told her, stepping out onto the footbridge. She strode firmly and without hesitation, seemingly unbothered by the narrowness of the path.

In the next second a cloud of blue dust shot up from directly under the bridge, surrounding her.

“Phew!” Ruda coughed, waving it away from her face. “Smells like somebody’s closet’s asshole. Fleh. I don’t understand why anybody wants to eat these things when there’s a whole world of fine-tasting booze out there.”

“That’s because alcohol is a depressant!” Fross said cheerfully. “Glittershrooms induce a state of euphoric calm, with mild hallucinations at higher concentrations. Totally different kind of drug! Hey, I’m glad your anti-alcohol effect works on it, though. I should’ve thought of that.”

“It works on magic cornbread, too,” Toby said, grinning.

“And enchanted pancakes,” Ruda added. “And whatever else is going down. All right, everybody, cover me. If something nasty’s gonna happen, it’ll happen now.”

She had stepped onto the island proper, and paused to brush puffs of glittershroom spores off her coat. Her head didn’t even reach the collarbones of the statue; Ruda had to climb up onto the coils of the Naga Queen’s lower body to get to the floating waystone. Behind her, the students tensed as she reached up and placed her hand on it.

The stone came away easily and without any reaction, as if nothing at all had been holding it there. Ruda waited for a moment, glancing about for a trap, then grinned and bounced it once on her palm.

“Well! Bout time something in this damn place was simple.”

Moving much more jauntily, she hopped down from the Naga Queen’s coils to the floor, and then strolled forward onto the footbridge, grinning at them. Another cloud of blue spores shot upward to surround her, even bigger than before, driving the rest of the students quickly back from the ledge. Ruda just grinned more broadly, tucking the waystone into her coat to wave the smog away with both hands.

It rose up behind her in utter silence; it was only the shouts of her classmates that made Ruda whirl to behold the creature.

An enormous gnarled stalk, long and sinuous as a serpent’s body, uncoiled itself from the pit below. As it ascended to the height of the Naga Queen’s stone hands, the glittering, oblong mushroom cap topping it split apart, revealing a maw lined with uneven fangs of glinting blue crystal. The thing exhaled a blast of dusty-smelling spored directly at Ruda, who coughed in protest and drew her rapier.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she demanded.

The mushroom monster reared back, opening its mouth wider and clearly preparing to strike like a snake. Ruda edged back as rapidly as she dared toward the relative safety of the hall, keeping her sword up and eyes on the monster.

A blast of white light ripped past her shoulder, piercing the thing’s head.

It let out a shrill squeal, followed by another as a second shot cleaved off the tip of its lower jaw. Gabriel strode forward into the encroaching cloud of spored, holding a glyphed sheet of paper over his mouth and nose with one and and continuing to fire his wand with the other. After five shots, the badly damaged mushroom beast appeared to have had enough and lowered itself back into the pit.

Ruda took that opportunity to turn and dart out of its range.

A fine haze of glittershroom spores had started to drift down the hall, with the students retreating rapidly from it. At Ruda’s approach, Fross fluttered forward, conjuring up a blast of wind that propelled the dust right back at the shrine, and lifting most of it from Ruda and Gabriel’s hair and clothes in the process.

“Hang on, guys,” the pixie said, hovering around them. “You’re just covered in it. I need to blow you properly.”

“You wanna tell her, or shall I?” Gabriel asked, his voice muffled by the page.

“No, no,” said Ruda, grinning hugely. “Let’s see if we can get her to say it again in mixed company. And how about you, eh? You’ve been downright useful on this trip, Arquin! It’s almost creepy.”

“Well, you know how it is,” he said modestly. “My day isn’t complete until a woman calls me creepy.”

“You might not want to open your mouths,” Fross advised, zipping around them and directing careful streams of air, driving away every deposit of glittershroom spores she could find.

They regrouped back on the dais above the water hall, well out of range of the Naga Queen’s shrine, its lurking guardian and the intoxicating mushroom spores. Ruda produced the waystone from her pocket, holding it up for the others to study as they clustered around.

“Well, it seems simple enough,” Toby said. “Assuming this works like the other waystones, we know where it’ll send us.”

“At least, according to Shamlin,” added Gabriel. “Whom we have apparently chosen to trust.”

“As suspicious as I generally am of the Crawl and everything and everyone in it,” said Trissiny, “I think Shamlin wouldn’t try to get us into trouble. Remember, he’s an initiate of the University. He knows its name.”

“What if he’s an initiate with a grudge?” Gabriel suggested.

She shook her head. “He’s a bard. Loyal alumnus or bitter dropout, or whatever else, he would have to be either insane or suicidal to pick a fight with Tellwyrn. Maybe I’m not the best judge of character, but he didn’t seem either to me.”

“I agree,” said Toby. “That, and his explanation for the rest of what’s befallen us makes sense. His directions to the shrine worked, and he did apparently help us get the snake flute.”

“Claims he did, anyway,” Ruda grunted.

Toby shook his head. “Guys, we can go around like this all day. Ultimately, we’re gonna have to take a risk, one way or the other. I think Shamlin is being straight with us. Does anyone disagree?”

After a moment in which they looked around at each other in silence, he nodded. “Then… Here we go. Level 100 and, I guess, the Naga Queen herself.”

“Wait, I thought she was just down in the bottom of the Crawl,” said Gabriel. “What makes you think she’s the boss of the Descent?”

“Who better?” Trissiny asked. “Besides, if she’s as powerful as all that, Tellwyrn wouldn’t likely leave her running around at liberty. Even if it’s not her, though, we are about to step into a serious fight. Link arms as usual to use the waystone, but be ready to pull weapons. Ruda, since you retrieved it, do you want to do the honors?”

“Wait,” said Teal, stepping backward from them. “I’m not coming.”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

“Why?” Shaeine asked quietly.

Teal gently took her hand and held it. “I’ve been thinking, putting things together. You really won’t need me going into a fight. Vadrieny won’t use deadly force at my request. I believe there’s something else going on here, something that I actually can help deal with, but it’ll require me to work elsewhere while you’re occupied in the Descent.”

“What do you mean?” Trissiny asked, frowning.

“I’ve got a theory,” said Teal. “Let me tell you what I think.”

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“Good morning,” Shaeine said, approaching. “Approximately, perhaps.”

Toby gave her a smile, glancing around the chamber. The group had huddled together near its center, around the remains of their fire, which had burned down to a small patch of slowly shifting orange light. Fross was making a gradual circuit of the perimeter, likely out of boredom, unless she was investigating the Crawl’s inherent magic. She’d seemed relieved for the opportunity to move about when Toby had come to take her post at the front, watching the door to the complex.

“I’m a little charged up,” he admitted. “I gave up on getting back to sleep after lying awake for an hour or so.”

The priestess glided over to stand beside him, glancing at the door before turning to regard him seriously. “You are troubled.”

Toby hesitated, then shook his head. “It’s…I’ll get over it. I’m just…wondering, suddenly, how many murderers there are in my social circle. It’s a little disconcerting, being in a position where I need to wonder that.”

She gave him the ghost of a smile. “Since you seemed quite supportive of Juniper, may I assume this is about Trissiny and Gabriel?”

He sighed. “I would rather drop it. It’s really not fair of me to be dragging all this up. I mean, it was months ago, they’re obviously over it, so what’s the point? It’s just… Well, it’s a new revelation to me. Kind of a heck of a thing to wrap my head around. Especially,” he added somewhat bitterly, “since nobody told me the truth about what happened.”

They were silent for a moment, watching the empty doorway side by side.

“Clerics of Themynra serve a judicial role in Narisian society,” she said at last. “I am years yet from being authorized to render judgment in an actual case, but my training has included the necessary skills, or at least the basics thereof. As someone thus trained, and who witnessed the event in question, perhaps I can offer you some clarity on the matter? If you wish it.”

He nodded, slowly. “Actually… I think that would help. I respect your judgment more than almost anyone’s, Shaeine.”

She smiled more broadly for a moment, then her expression grew serious again. “I don’t know the approach taken by Imperial law or Avei’s disciples, but in my culture we analyze every identifiable factor influencing a case before rendering judgment, which includes the education and known predispositions of those involved. To take the fight in question as an example…if this had occurred in Tar’naris, how the investigation would proceed might depend greatly on which House the accused hailed from. Had a member of my own House acted as Trissiny did, she would likely be held summarily culpable, as it would be assumed that a diplomat would know better than to start a fight. Had it been someone from House An’sadarr, which forms the backbone of the Queen’s military, however, matters would become more complicated. A trained warrior, confronted by a hostile demonblood, might understandably resort to force.”

“So…ignorance is an excuse?” he said skeptically.

“No. It is, however, sometimes an explanation.” Shaeine glanced back at the others; none of their forms were stirring, and Fross’s silver light was poking through one of the distant wings of the chamber which had formed an infinite hall when it was active. “I see no doubt that Trissiny instigated violence without justification. In determining culpability, though, it’s necessary to consider what she did not understand, and what Gabriel did.”

“What he understood?” Toby frowned.

“Recall that at the time, they hardly knew each other. All Trissiny knew about Gabriel was that he was a demonblood, something of a loudmouth and had a penchant for slightly sexist humor. Given that and her upbringing, her actions seem a bit more logical. Not justifiable, in my opinion, but also not totally unreasonable. Especially considering that she had previously not instigated a conflict with him, despite the surprise of learning his condition in a manner that was traumatic for them both.”

“Hm,” he said noncommittally.

“Gabriel, on the other hand, has grown up as a half-demon in Tiraan society, and has every reason to keep his head down and refrain from causing trouble. He has ample practice at this, and was very well aware of the likely consequences of doing so. Yet, he very deliberately provoked Trissiny, showing a degree of hostility which, frankly, was wildly out of character for him. I had never seen such aggression from him before, nor have I since.” She half-turned to look up at him, her expression solemn. “I have wondered, since… Toby, you know Gabriel better than any of us. Has he ever given any indication, before, that he wished to die?”

Toby made no answer, but his face lengthened and his eyes grew wider as he considered the implications of the question.

“Verbally assaulting the Hand of Avei as he did had that as a very likely outcome,” Shaeine continued after a short pause. “Moreover, his comments in the situation itself indicated that he was quite aware of this.” She shook her head. “Ultimately, then, Trissiny’s offense was several orders of magnitude more severe: the use of force against a civilian who was not a physical threat. However, given her perspective, there are mitigating factors. Gabriel’s role is precisely opposite: his is guilty of nothing more serious than rudeness and causing a disturbance, but is almost entirely culpable for creating that conflict in the first place. A conflict which was needless and which he clearly knew was likely to result in harm to himself, and possibly to bystanders and property.”

She let the silence hang momentarily before continuing. “Ultimately… Had I been tasked with judging this case, at the time, I would have punished them both equally, and with far worse than washing dishes. And… As time has passed, I have come to appreciate Professor Tellwyrn’s solution. Mine would have been a tremendous mistake.”

Toby turned to face her, raising an eyebrow in surprise. Shaeine, for her part, turned her head to gaze back at their sleeping classmates.

“Over the last few months I have watched those two benefit from knowing each other, in ways I would never have anticipated. It’s a slow and subtle thing, and I can’t say what this is building toward, but I have come to believe it is best to leave them alone and let it happen.” She smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t repeat this to Trissiny, nor advocate it as a general practice… But in this one case, it seems to me that everyone is better off because justice was not done.”

Frowning, Toby stared into the empty space beyond the door. The faint reddish glow of the main cavern was visible, but the atmosphere was slightly hazy, more so than at the Grim Visage’s level, giving them no view to speak of. After a moment, he nodded slowly.

“That sounds a lot like what I’d concluded. Except in a lot more detail and with a lot more understanding. It all makes sense to me, though. Oh…I’m sorry,” he added, turning to face her. “I don’t mean to take credit for your insight or anything.”

“Not at all,” she replied with a smile. “I’m pleased I was able to offer you some clarity. Toby…” Shaeine tilted her head, studying him intently. “We seem to have a difference of opinion among the group concerning whether the Crawl is trying to torment or educate us here. In either case, however, I find myself unsurprised that it would show you images of your friends in conflict. Forgive me if I presume, but you do seem more concerned with the welfare of others than your own.”

He shrugged, but smiled faintly. “I’m comfortable with that assessment. A paladin’s life is sacrifice.”

“In Tar’naris, everyone’s life is sacrifice. Culturally, we see it as dangerous ostentation to grind oneself down in order to be of service to others. For the whole to function, individuals must understand their own needs, and see them met.” She laid a hand gently on his upper arm. “If you prefer to spend your energies caring for others, be sure to let others care for you as well. You will be no use to anyone if you burn yourself out.”

Toby looked down at the floor, then out at the cavern, then nodded again, finally meeting her gaze. “Thank you.”

Shaeine smiled back, letting her hand fall. While the first sounds of the others stirring began to grow behind them at the campsite, they stood in companionable silence, keeping watch.

“Okay,” said Ruda, straightening the lapels of her coat. “Has anyone taken the time to look outside?”

“I have!” Fross chirped.

“Fantastic. Got any working theories concerning just where the fuck we are?”

“Well… I’m pretty sure it’s far below the place where we entered the central cavern. I mean, it’s not likely there was much above that, you know? And it’s different enough I didn’t recognize any landmarks. It’s the same cavern, all slopey with some paths along the walls and a few stretching over the middle.”

“Great,” Gabriel sighed. “So basically, we’re lost as hell.”

“We’re not lost!” Fross protested. “We just have to go up!”

“That will depend upon finding viable paths,” said Shaeine.

“We have an advantage there, in that two of our party can fly,” Trissiny pointed out. “If Fross and Vadrieny scout ahead, like they did in the mazes in the Descent, we can hopefully avoid getting any more lost than necessary.”

It hadn’t been the most comfortable night, but the students were relatively rested, at least in comparison to how they’d felt before making camp. Now, fed, packed away and ready to head out again, they were clustered in the wing of the complex which led to the exterior door.

Toby sighed and squared his shoulders. “All right, it’s not getting any easier while we stand here. Let’s go have a look.” He started forward, the others proceeding in his wake.

Until Gabriel abruptly halted, straightening up from his customary slouch. “Ambush?”

Everyone stopped, turning to stare at him.

“What’s an ambush?” Ruda asked.

“I just… Someone said ‘ambush.’”

“Uh, yeah,” she replied. “You.”

“No, I mean, before that. You guys didn’t hear anything?”

There was a round of exchanged glances and shaken heads.

“I did not hear the word until you said it,” Shaeine replied.

“Well, if Ears didn’t hear it, nobody spoke it,” said Ruda. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Arquin, but you have gone batshit insane. We may have to push you in the pit.”

“That course of action might be premature, Boobs,” said Shaeine.

Everyone turned to stare at her in shock.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said placidly. “I thought we were renaming each other based on prominent features. Or shall we instead agree not to do that?”

“All right, all right, point taken,” Ruda muttered.

“There are any number of explanations for disembodied voices,” said Trissiny. “In this wretched place, insanity on the part of the person hearing them isn’t even the most likely. Whatever madness the Crawl inflicts on us next, we can’t afford to hunker down and let it. Gabe, let us know if you hear any more whispers. That goes for everyone else, too. For now, I say we proceed assuming we might be ambushed, which is a good idea anyway. Agreed?”

After a round of assent, Trissiny nudged them back into formation, and was the first one out, wreathed in a low-intensity golden corona that clung close to her skin. She paused in the doorway, carefully studying the scene. It did, indeed, look very much like what they had previously seen of the slanting main cavern, right down to the reddish glow from far below. Only the finer details were different. Stone paths hugged the walls in several places, with openings dotting them, and a few were suspended improbably over the vast empty space. There was no great sculpted face, obviously, though there was a structure of some kind built against on the forty-five degree slope to the right of their door, rather like a castle in miniature.

“No sign of movement,” she reported, “except for several large avians a good distance above us. I don’t think they see us down here, or at least aren’t interested.”

“Lemme see!” Fross chimed, zipping out to hover next to Trissiny’s shoulder. “Oh…oh, wow. Those are really rare. I thought they were supposed to be extinct! They’re pretty dangerous, but basically blind; they won’t come at us unless we get close enough to attract their attention. Let’s not do that, it would be a shame to kill them.”

“What exactly is them?” Juniper asked, craning her neck to peer through the gap.

“Greater horned chiropteroid raptors! They hunt in small packs of four or five, with very good coordination in attacks, almost like a military team.”

“You don’t mean…” Teal trailed off.

“Yes! Dire goddamn bats!”

“I hate this place,” Trissiny muttered.

A sudden whoop startled them; Trissiny raised her shield instinctively and Fross darted around behind her head.

Directly ahead, two paths converged in a fairly sizable floating island, ringed by low walls—much more safety-conscious than those they had seen above. One of the paths leading to it branched off from the ledge onto which their door opened, some distance to the left. There was another, smaller island above this one and slightly off-center. Three tiny figures had suddenly plunged off the edge of this and onto the lower island with a unified battlecry, vanishing below the level of the wall.

The sounds of a scuffle ensued, accompanied by curses in two languages. A single spell was fired, flying wildly into the air where it splashed against the cavern wall.

In the next moment, several figures emerged from concealment, where they had been crouching out of sight. There were three of them, all drow, and they had straightened up only to run. They pelted off down the path, two women leading, one armored, one in robes; behind them came a man in rather ragged pants and shirt, trying to sprint while crouched with his head tucked under his arms. He yelped as he was pelted from behind by pebbles.

“Yeah, you better run!” shouted a voice from the island. In moments, the drow had skittered away through a tunnel opening and were lost to sight.

“Those are the same three who have been hanging around the Grim Visage,” Shaeine noted.

“You’re sure?” Ruda asked, frowning.

“Yes. You will have to trust my word on it, I’m afraid. I know how we all look the same to you.”

“You’re in rare form today,” the pirate commented.

“Yoo hoo!” A small figure had clambered up onto the wall, followed by two others. “Hey, kids, glad to see you’re all okay!”

“Hey, look,” said Gabriel, peering over Trissiny’s shoulder now that she’d let her energy shield drop. “We found gnomes.”

“Gnomes found us,” Toby corrected. “Triss, can we move this forward a bit? I think that ambush situation was just taken care of…”

“Hm,” she said skeptically, but stepped out onto the ledge.

“There ye go!” cried the gnome in the center, now sitting down on the wall with his legs dangling over the abyss. “Well, c’mon out, let’s not be all day about it. Places to go, people to see! I’m Woodsworth, and with me are me companions, Sassafrass and Steinway.”

“Charmed!” called the female in the group, grinning rakishly and resting the haft of her battleaxe over her shoulder. It was a human-sized one, the handle nearly as long as she was tall.

“All right, there?” added the last fellow, apparently Steinway, waggling his fingers.

“Do we…know you?” Trissiny asked.

“Not to the extent of havin’ been formally introduced,” Woodsworth replied. “Though we have shared quarters recently! The Grim Visage is a goodly distance above, but there’s ways to get around the Crawl expeditiously if you’re on its good side. This is all very adventurous, by th’way, but might we ‘ave this conversation from a closer distance an’ a lower volume?”

“Um,” she said carefully. “With all respect, and with thanks for the apparent help…we’ve had a rough time lately and aren’t in the most trusting mood.”

“Well, sure,” said Sassafrass. “It’s not like we can make you do anything, nor would if we could. But, if you’re not absolutely married to the idea of wanderin’ around down here with no clue where yer goin’, maybe we can ‘elp?”

“There’s someone you ought to talk to, see?” Woodsworth added. “Nice fella of your acquaintance who sent us down ‘ere to ‘help out when we caught wind those three were after ye.”

“Not to sound paranoid,” Gabriel said, “but how can we be sure they meant us harm?”

“Are you serious?” Teal demanded.

“They were lying in wait, concealed from view, at a chokepoint where we’d be strung out along an unrailed path over the chasm before we knew they were there, Gabe,” said Trissiny. “That is not friendly behavior. What do the rest of you think?”

“I hate to default to racial stereotypes,” said Toby, “but I’ve never heard of gnomes robbing or ambushing anyone.”

“What the hell, he’s got a point,” Ruda added. “We’ve got no fuckin’ clue where we are or how to get where we want to be. Short help’s better than no help.”

“Let’s take it easy with the s-word while we’re in their company,” Teal suggested.

“Who did you want us to meet?” Trissiny asked, turning back to the gnomes and raising her voice.

“Well, we could stand here shoutin’ about it or we can just show you,” Woodsworth called back, grinning. “See that there little castle along the slope? The ledge you’re on’ll take ye there. Follow it till you reach the tunnel, go in that, and it’ll bring ye back out on another ledge that leads right t’the door. Meet you there!”

With that, the three gnomes hopped down behind the wall. Moments later they reappeared, trundling rapidly along the path opposite the one the drow had taken, which led them toward the indicated structure along a route parallel to the one Woodsworth had pointed out to them.

“Well,” said Teal after a moment in which nobody moved, “my dad has a saying for uncertain situations like this.”

“Oh?” Toby asked.

The bard grinned at him. “Eh, what the hell.”

The ledges and tunnel led exactly where their new acquaintances said they did, and in just a few minutes the students were assembling on the narrow balcony outside the tiny castle. It was actually little more than a round tower, built into the slope of the cavern, with a crenelated wall ringing its top and arrow slits not far below that. There was no door, only an archway leading to the interior, through which the gnomes had passed just before they arrived.

Inside, the room was rather cozy, mostly open all the way to the top, though stone steps circled around the entire interior of the tower, terminating in a trapdoor which presumably led to the roof. A fireplace was built into one wall, currently dark and cold, though an iron pot was suspended above it. Along the walls were various items of furniture: trunks bookshelves, chairs and a vertical rack of hammocks.

The gnomes had already assembled. Woodsworth and Sassafrass sat in chairs a bit too tall for them around a small round table and were laying out a card game; Steinway was piling what looked like coal in the fireplace. He looked up at the students when they entered, grinning.

“There y’are! Go on back, he’s expecting you.” With that and a nod at the wall opposite the entrance, he went back to shoveling.

A short flight of steps led to another doorway, beyond which was relative darkness. The students paused, studying their new environs carefully.

“Well, go on,” said Sassafrass. “It’s not like we’ve any appointments, but there’s no sense in keeping the man waiting.”

“Eh, what the hell. Remember?” Ruda said, grinning, and nudged Trissiny in the back. The paladin sighed, but stepped forward, her sword and shield in hand.

They crossed the chamber, climbed the steps and passed single-file through the doorway, Fross accompanying Trissiny in the front. Her light was welcome, as this led to a short tunnel that lacked light and appeared to be natural, to judge by its uneven walls. After a couple of twists, it opened out into a natural cavern completely unlike anything they had yet seen in the Crawl.

Not much larger than Tellwyrn’s classroom back at the University, it was much longer than wide, narrowing in the center. Ledges of stone lined the walls, with a softly gurgling river running down the middle of the space; just past the narrow point, rough-cut steps led to a higher level, where a small waterfall trickled down. Gaps in the ceiling admitted streams of water and clean white light from some unknown source. There were several giant mushrooms growing in clumps along the walls, as well as draperies of hanging lichen and softly glowing crystals embedded in the stone here and there. It was a strikingly peaceful place, cool and lovely, if slightly damp. And it was occupied

“Ah, there you are!” said Shamlin, bounding lightly down from the upper level and grinning at them. “About time; if I hadn’t been following your progress thus far I’d have begun to worry. But surely the eight of you had nothing to fear from the Apparitorium.”

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Ruda demanded.

“Well, that’s the thing,” he said, smiling rather smugly. “At issue, I think, is what you are doing here. Got a little lost, did we?”

“The demons on Level 2 seem to have misdirected us,” Trissiny said grimly.

“Ah, ah.” He held up an admonishing finger. “Leaping to conclusions, there, aren’t we? In fact, Melaxyna is going to be furious when she finds out someone got lost taking her portal. I expect she’s already starting to worry; the longer a student group remains absent after passing through it, the more likely she’ll have to deal with a very irate Professor Tellwyrn, which is enough to give anyone gray hairs. No, I wouldn’t describe the demons as trustworthy, broadly speaking, but they know which side their bread is buttered on. Nobody down here wants to pick a fight with the Unseen University.”

“Waaaaaiiit a second,” Fross said. “You called it…”

“That I did.” Shamlin’s smile widened. “Come on, you never wondered what a human is doing down here? The geas on the campus is serious business indeed. Tellwyrn does not suffer outsiders to mess around on her property, but University initiates sneaking into the Crawl for various purposes…why, that’s downright traditional. The Grim Visage and Level 2 are both popular spots for hosting off-campus parties.”

“Huh,” said Teal, sounding utterly bemused.

“Then what are you doing down here?” Toby asked.

“Making gold hand over fist,” Shamlin said with a grin. “It’s not exactly a luxurious spot to set up work, but there’s no shortage of opportunity here. In fact, I’m just about ready to cash in and return to the land of the living, but there are just a few things I need to square away first. There are the trio out there, for one thing.”

“Are they University alums, too?” Gabe asked.

“No, actually, they didn’t come from up top. That’s a Venomfont delving crew that managed to get as lost as anyone has ever been.”

“Venomfont?” Trissiny frowned. “That’s clear up in the Wyrnrange, not far from the Spine. There’s no way it’s physically connected to the Crawl.”

“And there we come to it,” Shamlin said, his expression abruptly growing more serious. “A number of things have gone screwy down here of late, most of them traceable to one or the other resident Vanislaad messing around with the Crawl.”

“I knew it,” Trissiny muttered.

“The Crawl, as I hope you’ve figured out by now, is very much a living thing,” Shamlin continued, seating himself on the steps, heedless of the damp. He stretched out his long legs and lounged backward, his casual posture contrasting with his solemn tone and expression. “It has its rules, but it’s also amenable to making exceptions. It relates to people on a very individual level—at least, those who either take the time and trouble to cultivate relationships with it, or somehow manage to piss it off. In my case, that means this little grotto, which I’m allowed exclusive use of while I stay down here. Nobody gets to visit without my approval. That, plus a few tricks I’ve acquired that enable me to move about the Crawl rapidly, are the result of a long campaign of…”

“Shmoozing?” Ruda suggested.

“I was going to say friendship,” he said with a grimace. “But…you’re not entirely wrong. There are a number of people you’ve encountered who have earned favor with the Crawl, and thus begun to wield a disproportionate influence. There’s Professor Tellwyrn, first and foremost; this place loves her. I have no idea how she arranged that. Most people she meets can’t wait for her to leave.”

“We have noticed,” Gabriel said dryly.

“Darling Melaxyna, as you also know, has accrued enough favor to make Level 2 her own little domain, as has Rowe with the Grim Visage. That last detail is the source of some of the problems I’ve seen developing recently. Thanks to his screwing around, there are lots more places connected to the Visage than there ought to be, which is how the trio came to be stranded here. Did I not know better, I’d suspect he was trying to arrange an exit from the Crawl that didn’t involve going back through the topside door, and thus right under Tellwyrn’s nose. She would notice that, and after sticking those two down here, she’s not about to let them wander off. Of course, opening such a door is entirely out of the question…under normal circumstances.”

“Normal, how?” Toby asked.

Shamlin leaned his head back, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip for a moment. “I’m afraid you’ve been caught in the feud between Rowe and Mel. With both of them using their influence to bend the rules in their favor, and trying to do so against one another… Well, you stepping through that portal and ending up in the wrong place is just a case in point. Stuff isn’t working quite as it should.”

“And you want to fix this before you leave?” Juniper asked, speaking up for the first time. She looked hollow-eyed and exhausted, as she had since the day before.

“That,” Shamlin said, nodding. “And I have…other reasons. Suffice it to say, I’m the reason you are here.”

“You son of a bitch,” Ruda snarled, stomping toward him and pulling her rapier from its sheath.

In the next moment, Shamlin rolled nimbly to his feet and scurried back up the steps away from her, while Toby and Trissiny intercepted their furious classmate before she could reach him.

“Whoah, hang on!” he protested, backing further away and raising both his hands. “Let me explain! I didn’t arrange to have you sent to the wrong place from the portal. I don’t want Tellwyrn mad at me, either, which is the whole point. Once I caught wind of the fact you were going to be misdirected… Well, suffice it to say, the whole idea behind that was to get you so good and lost that you’d never be found again. I stepped in and got you sent to the Apparitorium instead. Just took a little persuasive speaking, really; the Crawl is interested in testing and teaching you, because that’s what Tellwyrn asked of it. That place is even better set up for that than the Descent. Albeit in somewhat different ways.”

“Fucking bullshit,” Ruda spat. “That place was a load of—”

“Will you please just let the man talk?” Toby interrupted in exasperation. “I for one would like to find out what’s going on around here!”

“What’s going on,” Shamlin said quickly, “is that between Melaxyna’s greasing your wheels and your own talents—by which I mostly mean firepower—you kids have been looking a lot like you were going to get all the way to Level 100 and retrieve the prize. And that…well, that would throw off certain plans in a way that the creators of those plans just couldn’t have. So, knowing that…” He folded his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, grinning broadly. “…how would you like to kick those plans right straight to hell?”

There was a moment’s pause while the students looked around at each other.

“Go on,” Trissiny said finally.

“There are limits to how much I can help you,” said Shamlin. “You’re still student adventurers and the Crawl still has its mandate. But I can set you in the right direction. For example, have you discovered how the Crawl feels about cheating?”

“Yes, unfortunately,” Gabe replied, making a face.

“We were actually talking about that not long ago,” said Fross. “Me and Ruda, I mean. It’s almost like…it doesn’t mind cheating, if you cheat in the right way.”

Gabriel blinked. “Huh?”

“She’s got the right of it,” said Shamlin, nodding approvingly. “The Crawl doesn’t like being contradicted, but it also approves of lateral thinking. You tend to bring trouble down on your heads if you break its rules, but there are provided shortcuts, the use of which it fully accepts…if you can find them. The finding is the challenge. And I, as your friendly neighborhood dungeon cartographer, can set you up with the ultimate prize: a way to skip directly to the hundredth level of the Descent.”

“And…do you offer that to every student group that comes down here?” Juniper asked skeptically.

“Oh, gods, no,” he said fervently. “Most student groups would get chewed up if I just dropped them into that. Plus, there’s the important fact that I don’t actually have it.”

“The more this clown talks, the more convinced I become that he’s wasting our time,” Ruda snorted.

“Now, hear me out,” Shamlin said soothingly. “I don’t have the means to skip, but I can provide you with it. Or rather, I can tell you how to provide yourselves. There’s a shrine of the Naga Queen which contains what you seek. You already have the key; you just need to find the lock, and you’ll have your reward.”

“Okay, two questions,” said Gabriel. “First, what the hell is the Naga Queen?”

“Are you serious?” Fross exclaimed. “She’s the main boss of the Crawl, down on the lowest level of the whole shebang! The oldest and possibly most powerful dungeon boss in existence. Adventurers went delving in here for centuries before the University came along, and the few that even reached her after fighting through the naga court got… Well, you don’t mess with the Naga Queen, is all. The last guy who made a really serious effort got beaten to death with his own face!”

“That account may be apocryphal,” said Teal, repressing a smile.

“Okay, that’s plenty ominous,” said Gabe with a sigh. “Second question, we’ve already got the what now? Did somebody pick up a key?”

“Well, there’s a reason I had you brought to the Apparitorium,” Shamlin said smugly. “It’s the prize for passing the trails there.”

“What, this?” Gabriel pulled the black sword free and held it up.

Shamlin frowned. “What? No, it’s the snake flute. Please tell me you obtained the snake flute. What the hell is that?”

“I have the flute,” Teal reported, pulling it out of the inner coat pocket where she’d stashed the instrument.

“Oh, good,” said Shamlin, relaxing slightly, then turned back to Gabriel. “Are you saying you got that thing too?”

“It was in the box with the flute. What, that’s not supposed to happen?”

“Hm. Mind if I take a look at that?”

Gabriel passed the sword over to him; Shamlin examined it carefully, pulling it partly free of the scabbard to study the blade. “Well…this thing is magical as hell, but I can’t tell what any of these charms do. Radivass could, maybe. Seriously, though, Ariel? That’s like naming a sword Jane.”

“Shaeine thinks that’s the name of its original owner,” Gabe suggested.

Shamlin shook his head. “Doubtful. This weapon is more magic than steel. People who create things like this don’t call them… Well, we’re just speculating, and anyway this is all getting us off topic.” He carefully handed the sword back to Gabriel. “Be careful with that, at least until you’ve had it studied by an expert. Concerning the actual point, you’ve got the flute, I can provide the directions, and from there you can obtain your shortcut. Interested?”

“What will we find,” Trissiny asked slowly, “if we skip to Level 100? After the impediments we’ve already suffered, I can only expect some further disaster.”

“Disaster might be putting it a bit over-dramatically,” Shamlin said with a grin. “But you’re not completely wrong. You won’t be stepping into what Tellwyrn sent you here to face.”

Toby heaved a sigh. “And you can’t tell us what it is?”

“I could,” he said, shrugging. “It would cause you more problems from the Crawl in the long run, though, and to be frank I’m not a hundred percent certain what form your final challenge will take. If you do take me up on the offer, though, I can promise you this much.” He smiled at them again, a self-satisfied expression that was more than half smirk. “School is no longer in session, kids. You’re now dealing with real powers who have real-world goals and concerns. If you make it to Level 100, be prepared for the confrontation of your lives.”

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