Tag Archives: Shaeine

7 – 1

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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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“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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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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6 – 23

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“Are you sure?” Trissiny demanded. “How can you tell?”

The group backed away as another hammer blow knocked loose a cascade of ice fragments.

“I’m a fairy!” Fross exclaimed. “I know when I’m in the presence of one of Naiya’s daughters!”

“Fuck,” Ruda said emphatically. “For one blessed moment, I thought this was gonna be simple. Dunno why, but I did.”

The monster roared again, smashing the wall with both colossal fists. That entire segment collapsed, and it began forcing its way through the gap.

“Retreat!” Trissiny barked, backing away. “Fross, slow her down!”

“On it!”

“Retreat where?” Ruda demanded, even as she backed up from the creature. Fross zipped back and forth, rapidly building inverted icicles; the columns of ice were only waist-high to the creature, but the pixie was arranging them as an obstacle course in the transformed dryad’s path, forcing her to stop and batter through them. “There’s nowhere to go but back to the nexus!”

“That may work,” said Toby. “We didn’t see any illusion effects in there, right? Maybe if we coax her out of this hall, she’ll revert to herself.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Trissiny, nodding. “All right, slow retreat. Fross, good work; keep her from catching up to us. We don’t want to get too far ahead, let her keep us in view. Gabe, can you fine-tune your wandshots not to damage her? We may need to provoke her to keep following us.”

“I don’t really have that kind of control,” he said.

“I advise against it in any case,” Shaeine added. “If she does not return to herself upon reaching the nexus, we will have to coax her down. Hurting and enraging her will make that vastly more difficult.”

They beat a slow, nervous retreat back to the center of the complex, staying carefully out of Juniper’s reach with the help of Fross’s various ice constructions, while keeping her in view. No taunting proved necessary; the monstrosity kept after them, roaring and lashing out with her various limbs, which was both convenient for their plan, and rather worrisome. Fross, for her part, seemed to get into her task with enthusiasm, making her impediments increasingly elaborate and fanciful in shape as they progressed. Of course, they all ended up in pieces.

The Crawl didn’t try to thwart them, for once. In what seemed like less time than it had taken to get that far into the hallway, they were backing out of it, leaving the mist behind and stepping into the wide-open space of the central nexus. Fross laid off the ice works, zipping back to join the others as they picked up their pace to put some extra distance between themselves and their pursuer.

Roaring, she stomped forward to the edge of the mist, stingers poised to lash out. The students retreated nearly to the center of the chamber.

“Come on, June,” Trissiny muttered, keeping her shield in front of her.

The dryad-monster stomped forward, flaring her breathing sacs. The fog faded behind her, leaving her towering shape framed against a dense white backdrop. Emitting a guttural growl and flexing both stinger-tails, she took another step forward.

“Okaaaay,” said Ruda. “What was Plan B?”

“I’m gonna try something,” said Gabriel, taking a step forward.

“Gabe,” Toby warned.

“It’s okay. Shaeine, can you please be ready to rescue me from my own stupidity if need be?”

“That is my customary practice, yes.”

He grinned at her momentarily before continuing forward at a slow walk.

The monster roared at him; Gabriel didn’t falter. “Hi, Juno,” he said. She stopped, stingers poised menacingly, and bent forward as if to sniff at him.

Keeping his pace slow, he continued on. “I know you don’t like to talk about what’s bothering you. Like I’ve told you before, though, you can. Whatever this is, whatever you’re so afraid of…you don’t need to be. At the very least, you don’t have to face it alone.”

He stopped, finally. The monster took one step forward and leaned down, planting both fists on the ground on either side of him. Her stingers arched over her shoulders, hovering menacingly above his head.

“Gabriel, you are too close,” Shaeine said. “I can’t put a shield around you without burning her.”

“This doesn’t have to happen,” Gabriel said, ignoring the priestess. He slowly raised one hand toward the creature’s face, what there was of one. “There is no reason it will. You are what you choose to be.”

She exhaled sharply, blowing his hair back. He winced; they could smell it from yards away. He did not retreat, though.

“Choose,” Gabriel said quietly, placing his hand against her. “You’re not alone.”

The monster’s roar was almost enough to physically bowl him over at that distance. She seized him by both shoulders and hiked him bodily off the ground, straightening up.

Before anyone could even cry out, a tiny silver point appeared from the creature’s upper chest, just in front of Gabriel’s face.

The monster emitted a guttural wail, dropping Gabe as suddenly as she had picked him up, and staggered backward, incidentally dislodging Ruda from her back. The pirate rolled away, nimbly landing on her feet, as the mutated dryad slumped to her knees, sagging in place.

“What did you do?” Toby shouted.

“Mithril,” Ruda said, retreating from Juniper without taking her gaze away. “Think Triss had the right idea back there. Good for cutting off magic. Hopefully not just hers; it should work on the Crawl’s, even.”

“That’s right through—you could kill her!” Gabriel exclaimed in horror.

“Nah, I’ve stabbed her with it once before. Just shook her up some.”

“You’ve what?”

Juniper’s hulking form was listing markedly to one side now. As they watched in appalled fascination, the green of her mottled skin faded to brown, the brown to gray. Before their eyes, flesh turned to wood and began to crack, as if from age and rot.

“Look at her!” Gabriel shouted. “You bloody maniac, you—”

“Listen!” Shaeine said urgently, cutting him off.

In the silence which followed, a soft noise could be heard from the stilled monster, an apparently sourceless shuffling. Then, its central body shifted and seemed partially to collapse in on itself. Ruda’s rapier was tugged firmly to the side, its jeweled hilt knocking loosed a large chunk of calcified flesh.

“Have we yet been on an adventure when you didn’t stick this thing in somebody?”

The voice, though muffled, was unmistakeable. Gabriel leaped forward, followed swiftly by Toby and Ruda. They had to actually dig into the huge bulk of the body, pulling aside half-rotted chunks of wood, but in only seconds Juniper’s green hair was visible. With remarkably little effort—the husk of the monster now seemed about as sturdy as papier mache—they were carefully pulling her out of the ruins, still with the rapier through the center of her chest. There was no sign of her sundress.

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked the dryad solicitously. “How do you feel?”

“Impaled,” she grimaced. “It doesn’t feel good. But…thanks, Ruda. That was a pretty awful thing.”

“People underestimate the curative powers of stabbing,” Ruda said with a grin. “Good to see your pretty face again, Juno. I’m gonna want that back, by the way.”

“Well, that’s fine, I’d just as soon have it out.” Grimacing, the dryad shifted around, giving Ruda access to the hilt protruding from between her shoulder blades.

“This might sting a bit,” Ruda warned.

“Less than it did going in I beoww!”

“You really do like to stab people,” Teal said, grinning.

“Hey, guys?” said Fross. “Look.”

The mist had faded from each of the side halls, revealing their shapes—which in all cases were virtually square. They extended no further back than they were wide, and seemed oddly sad, with nothing to reveal but blank stone surfaces.

“That’s almost insulting,” Ruda muttered.

“How so?” Trissiny asked.

“Couldn’t say, really. I just feel generally insulted.”

“Fair enough,” Trissiny replied with a smile.

“Well, I guess this means we officially won,” Gabriel said, letting go of Juniper’s hand and stepping past the group toward the middle of the room. In the precise center of the floor there now sat a small wooden chest.

“Are we sure we’re not still in the Descent?” Ruda demanded, planting her fists on her hips.

“Pretty sure, yeah,” said Fross. “Totally different style and methodology here. I’m equally sure it’s still the Crawl, though.”

Gabriel knelt and raised the lid. “…well, this is kinda disappointing.”

“What’d we get?” Teal asked, looming over his shoulder and craning her neck.

“I think this is for you,” he said, picking up an ebony flute from within the box and handing it to her. It was quite average in size, though carved in the slightly sinuous form of a snake, with another, smaller serpent cast in gold winding about its length.

“Ooh,” she whispered, accepting the instrument and cradling it tenderly before her face.

“Um, don’t blow in that,” Fross said nervously. “That thing is lousy with enchantments, and I can’t even tell what most of them do. It’s old, too. No telling what might happen.”

“We can have Professor Yornhaldt look at it when we’re back topside,” Toby suggested.

“Only one other thing here,” Gabe reported, straightening and holding up the remainder of their winnings. “So, uh, who needs a sword?”

 

After a fairly minimal discussion, they decided to make camp. Everyone was exhausted, hungry, and generally not feeling up to more adventure at the moment, and the only two ways they had out of the complex held the prospect of further trouble. The eighth hall did indeed terminate in a door out of the area, which Fross peeked through and reported opened onto the huge, sloping central cavern of the Crawl. There were no recognizable landmarks; they were either far above or below the level of the Grim Visage. They also had their waystone, of course, but as the portal from Level 2 was the apparent culprit in their current predicament, Trissiny was not alone in mistrusting the welcome they could expect from the demons there.

Fortunately, their shopping from immediately prior to this misadventure had equipped them to settle in if necessary. They improvised a fire by laying down a hearth-sized array of Gabriel’s spell paper inscribed with elemental protection charms, on which they made a puddle of oil of combustion, which Fross then enchanted with a minor time-dilation effect. The resulting campfire was somewhat eerie, shifting very slowly rather than flickering as flames normally did, and producing a peculiar hissing sound rather than crackling cheerfully. It put out heat and light, however. Soon enough, they had arranged their collapsible cook pot over the languid blaze, and set a stew of pork and mushrooms to simmering, while they chewed on unappetizing mushroom bread to stave off hunger.

“I feel kinda bad, though,” Gabriel was saying. “Are you sure nobody else wants it?”

“For the last time, only two of us use swords, and neither of us needs an upgrade,” Ruda said, grinning at him. “You picked it up, you may as well keep it.”

“Don’t try to fight with it, though,” Trissiny said firmly. “I’ve seen you handle a sword in class; you’ll impale yourself. That thing might just be magical enough to do you harm, too.”

“That’s sort of what I meant,” he said with a rueful grin. “Just seems like a waste.”

“Or you could view it as motivation,” Shaeine suggested. “Now you have a reason to learn the sword.”

“Or you could sell it,” said Ruda. “I can tell it’s old, and elvish. Fross says it’s heavily enchanted. Gotta be worth some serious coin.”

“Mm,” he mused, pulling the saber half-out of its sheath to study the blade. “I dunno. That feels…wrong, somehow.”

The leather wrapping the hilt was black, as was its attached scabbard. The blade itself was a single long curve, continuing to form an equally curved handle with only the most minimal crossguard and a heavy, rounded pommel. Its design was, indeed, clearly elven.

“What’s that written on the blade, there?” Toby asked.

“It’s some form of elvish,” Gabriel reported, holding up the sword and squinting at it in the firelight. “I can’t read it.”

“It says ‘Ariel,’” said Teal.

He frowned. “Ariel? What’s that mean?”

“It is a name,” said Shaeine. “A rather popular one among elves until about a millennium ago. I know three women named Yrril, which is the Narisian variant. Not as commonly used these days.”

“Well, I guess that makes sense!” said Fross. “A lot of magic swords have names.”

“I suspect Ariel was the sword’s previous owner,” Shaeine replied. “It would be the equivalent of a sword named Jane. Not inconceivable, but…rather odd.”

“Hmm,” Gabriel mused, sliding the blade back into its sheath and setting it aside. “Well…I might actually show it to Professor Tellwyrn, see what she says. Between the unidentified spells on it and the fact I suck at swords, I’m gonna leave it alone for the time being.”

“I think that’s a very good idea,” Toby said firmly.

“So!” Ruda said. “If we’re all settled in and done beating around the bush, let me pose the obvious question. What the fuck was all that?”

“Do we really need to talk about it?” Gabriel asked after a moment’s strained silence.

“In some cases, I think we do,” said Toby. “Some of the things we saw… I think the base question is, how much of it was true?”

“About a fifty-fifty split in our case,” Gabe replied, looking over at Trissiny. “It started off with some miscellaneous spookiness before it really got hold of us. Then Triss was turned into some kind of alternate universe version of herself, and I got dragged through that mess with Madeleine again.”

“Madeleine?” Teal asked.

“Wait, stop,” said Ruda, grinning hugely. “Alternate universe Trissiny?”

“One in which I was raised by my biological mother, rather than the Sisterhood,” Trissiny said quietly.

“Wh—your mother, that smarmy Eserite elf? Naphthene’s tits, what were you like?”

“A lot like you, actually.”

Ruda barked a laugh. “You poor, abused child.”

“I can see why the Crawl would come up with that,” Teal mused. “Avenists and Eserites are about as opposite as it comes. There’s probably no better way to attack Trissiny.”

“I don’t think it was an attack,” Trissiny said pensively, frowning into the fire.

“Go on,” Toby said after a moment.

She sighed and lifted her gaze. “I’ve been…wondering. The whole time I’ve been at this University it seems I can’t do anything except mess up; I’ve only succeeded in places like the Golden Sea and Sarasio where there’s an enemy to fight. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise,” Ruda said amiably, producing a bottle of whiskey, “you do shit like try to execute classmates and start civil insurrections.”

“….yeah,” Trissiny said with a grimace. “It was Bishop Darling who put the idea in my head that…that maybe the other side of my heritage might have value. I’m an Avenist raised and trained, but I’m also the offspring of a particularly devious thief. Everyone keeps going on about how the old ways don’t work in the new world. Avei herself said the new paladins were being called after such a long time as a break with old traditions, so the gods could prepare us for other ways of thinking. And… Sitting here now, I find I’m feeling grateful for the experience.”

“Grateful?” Gabriel’s eyebrows rose sharply.

Trissiny nodded. “That girl I was…I remember her. Not the details of her life, but what it was like, seeing the world through her eyes. Studying the angles, the complexities, always looking for the less-trod path, the perfect place to put the tiniest pressure to achieve her ends. And…and finding such joy in it. The constant thrill and, and celebration in being challenged and having to survive with nothing but your wits and skills. If that’s what life is like for Eserites… Well, I think I understand them a lot better. And I think that may be exactly the thing I needed to learn. I’m not sure how to incorporate that into my mindset, but…it’s a start. I feel it was important for me.”

“Tellwyrn and Ezzaniel both called the Crawl a teacher,” Teal said, frowning into the fire. “Could this really have all been arranged for our benefit?”

“In some cases more than others,” Gabriel grunted. “I don’t see the educational value in the shit I had to deal with.”

“I have to ask,” said Trissiny, looking up at him, “how did that play out in the real world? I know I wasn’t there to rescue you that time.”

He shrugged, not meeting her gaze. “Madeleine’s bargain-basement diabolism didn’t hold. The hethelax demon broke through the circle and managed to restrain me before I could hurt her. After that… My dad had a little talk with her, and Toby arranged for Church summoners to send the demon back where he came from. I didn’t see her again.” He sighed heavily. “Not even a week later I went back there looking for her, because I’m really not that bright, and her whole house was cleaned out.”

“Not many people want to be on your dad’s bad side,” Toby said with a small smile.

“Well, I don’t think we necessarily need to drag everyone’s deep, dark secrets into the light,” said Ruda. “I for one don’t see a reason to discuss the crap it dumped on me back there.”

“Yeah, it is kind of counterintuitive that you’d be afraid of becoming an accountant.”

Ruda slammed her bottle down. “Fross.”

“Sorry!”

“Really?” Gabriel tilted his head inquisitively. “You’re actually really good with figures. How come—”

“Arquin, after the day we’ve had I barely need an excuse to come over there and fuck you up.”

“Peace, please,” said Shaeine. “This has been extremely trying for all of us. Let us please not make the mistake of taking it out on each other.”

“Anyway,” Ruda said loudly. “With that said, I agree with Toby. There is some stuff we really do need to talk about.”

She looked pointedly at Juniper. One by one, the others swiveled their heads to do the same.

The dryad sighed, slumping slightly. She had been silent up till now, sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees. After being sluiced off with some of Fross’s stored water to get the slime and rotted wood off her, she’d been persuaded to don one of the lightly-enchanted robes they’d acquired as Descent level rewards and been unable to sell. The whole time, she had been uncharacteristically quiet and pliable.

“I’m made of magic,” she said quietly. “I’m a living conduit to my mother’s power. Even if I can’t do much magic, that’s a lot of power. It’s a huge amount. Basically infinite. And…and it can change.” She paused to gulp heavily, still staring at the slow flames. “Dryads… One way or another, that’s how we end up. After hundreds of years, we start getting a little weird. In the head, I mean. And a dryad who’s lost a sense of herself tends to…change.”

“Into creatures like that?” Gabriel asked.

Juniper shrugged, not looking up. “Not necessarily. I don’t even know what that was. Some personification of my worry, I guess. And it’s not just age that does it; we’re not built to handle mental trauma, either. A dryad who lives long enough to go senile, or suffers a bad enough emotional shock… Well. Anything could happen.”

“What kind of anythings can happen?” Ruda asked sharply.

“Cherry…I don’t even know what happened to her, but she became a kind of aquatic monster. She swims up and down rivers, pulling people in and drowning them. She doesn’t even eat them, just wants to watch them die. Sequoia turned into a tree when the mortals she had become friends with were massacred. Some elves built a grove around her so they could protect her until she wakes up, which was nice of them, but…I think if she were going to she would have by now. And that’s nothing compared to what happened to Jacaranda.”

Fross abruptly forgot to keep flying and plunged into the stew pot.

She was out the next second, spluttering and spraying droplets of gravy everywhere. “What? Who? What did you say?”

“Yeah,” Juniper said, nodding. She finally raised her eyes to look at the pixie.

“Wait, you know that one, Fross?” Toby asked.

“J-Jacaranda? That’s the Pixie Queen’s name! It can’t be the same person, she hates dryads!”

“That…could be an argument in favor of it being the same person,” Shaeine said thoughtfully.

“It is,” said Juniper, still watching Fross. “She…well, to make a long story short, she fell in love with someone, and he decided he didn’t want her. She couldn’t cope with that.”

“Wait, the Pixie Queen is a dryad?” Gabriel exclaimed.

“No,” Juniper said wearily. “The Pixie Queen is just one of the things that can happen to a dryad who gets her heart broken. She wanted to always feel loved, and to be distracted from her own thoughts. She wanted it more than she wanted to continue existing, wanted it badly enough to warp her very nature. Like I said, we’re hugely magical. If we lose sight of ourselves…the sky’s the limit. Anything can happen.”

“So, then… Does this make you…my…aunt?” Fross whispered.

Juniper managed a smile at that. “Well, the relationships aren’t exactly biological, y’know? You’re a piece of her aura. Part of her conduit to Naiya. Basically the same thing I am, but smaller, with more structure. So… I guess I’m more your big sister. Is that okay?”

“I…I…” Fross sounded completely overawed. “That’s okay with me.”

“So, I understand your worry about becoming a monster,” Toby said quietly. “How about why you’re worried about it?”

Juniper dropped her gaze again. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? Whatever happens, will happen.”

“No,” he said firmly, then stood and strode across the circle to sit down beside her and drape an arm around her shoulder. “Juniper, I’ve had time to think since Tiraas, and I’ve come to realize I wasn’t being a good friend to you at all. I was hovering around, worrying and generally treating you like some kind of dangerous animal instead of doing what I would for someone I care about. Which means, in this case, a little tough love.”

“Uh, I am not certain this is a good idea,” Trissiny said carefully.

“It’s a good idea,” Ruda insisted. “Juno, hon, we all know you’ve been gnawing at this, and we all know the basics of why. And we’ve left you alone about it, but it’s time to lay some cards on the table. If those are the stakes we’re dealing with… Your issues are everybody’s business. You get that, right?”

“Take all the time you need to get it out,” Toby said gently, rubbing her shoulder. “But we need to talk about this. Tonight.”

Juniper hunched in on herself, tightening her grip on her knees, as if to shut them all out. She leaned against Toby, though. “I… I did something really bad,” she whispered.

“Yeah?” said Ruda. “Why’d you do that?”

“Ruda!” Trissiny exclaimed.

“I’m not just bein’ an ass here. It’s a pertinent question. If you knew it was bad, what was your reason for doing it, Juniper?”

“I didn’t,” the dryad said miserably. “I didn’t understand… It was never like…” She paused to swallow painfully. Toby continued gently rubbing her shoulder. “We were apart from everything, you know? Naiya’s favored daughters. We did what we wanted. I always tried to keep in balance with nature, do what I saw other animals do. Only kill to eat, only when I needed to. Most of my sisters did the same, but some… Mostly the older ones… They were weird. They’d hunt for sport, or… Well, some of them had funny hobbies. And that was fine! It didn’t seem like much fun to me, but they were dryads. In the Deep Wild, dryads do whatever they want, and it’s okay. By definition.”

“Just to be clear,” Gabriel said carefully, “we are talking about you eating humans?”

“It was just the one,” Juniper whispered. “Just that one time. He was the first one I’d ever seen. I was curious.”

“Curious?” Teal burst out, then clapped a hand over her mouth, looking abashed.

“Well, see, that’s already not as bad as some of us were thinkin’,” Ruda said lightly. “That’s why I was asking about motivations. You didn’t know better, right? I mean, don’t get me wrong, that was a shitty thing to do and it sure as hell mattered to him, not to mention his family, but you’ve gotta make allowances for the circumstances.”

“I was curious,” Juniper went on, barely above a whisper. “I wanted to know everything. Sample…try everything. See what it all was, how it worked. So…I ate little bits. From each part. And used healing to keep him alive so they all stayed fresh.”

The silence was deafening. Even Fross settled to the ground, stilling her wings.

“How could you do something like that?” Gabriel whispered at last.

Juniper buried her face in her arms.

“Okay,” Ruda said slowly, “that is pretty fucked up. You understand that, right?”

Juniper made a soft whimpering noise.

“I asked you a question,” Ruda said with a bit of an edge to her voice. “I’m not making small talk, here, Juno, we are discussing this.”

“I didn’t know!” Juniper wailed suddenly, raising her head. Tears were pouring down her face. “He was a monster! Humans were just these unnatural creatures that lived out of balance and destroyed things for no good reason. I didn’t know how complicated it all was! How, what, it…” She choked off, swallowed twice, and continued, her voice breaking. “But people are different than animals, and they matter, and I get that now. I shouldn’t have done that, and I can’t go back to thinking he was just a thing. It hurts, and I can’t make it stop, and I’m scared! I don’t want to be a monster!”

“Hey, hey, take it easy,” Ruda said more gently. She stood and went over to sit on Juniper’s other side, leaning against her. “Hon, guilt is a nasty thing. It will fuck you right up if you don’t learn to deal with it.”

“How do you deal?” Juniper sniffled.

“There are many ways,” said Shaeine.

“Personally, I have duty to fall back on,” Ruda said. “I have a job to do. I don’t get to wallow in my bad feelings. If I’ve done something wrong, I do my best to make it right. If that can’t be done… Then I remember I’ve done wrong in the world and make an effort to add some good to it. For my family, my people, everyone who depends on me.”

“That sounds…complicated,” Juniper said, her face falling.

“It is,” Toby agreed. “Any method you settle upon will be. This is not something that can be corrected with a few magic words, Juniper. What you did… The action you describe is abhorrent almost beyond description. But.” He gently placed his fingers under her chin, lifting her face when she tried to hide under her arms again. “The fact is, you do feel this way. You understand, you have the empathy to know it was wrong. And you started feeling this way when you developed that understanding. You really are a kind person at heart, Juniper. I don’t believe you could have done that, had you known what you were doing then. Would you do it now?”

“Never!” she burst out, looking panicked.

“Then it’s time to go forward,” he said firmly. “Backward is only pain. You need to take some responsibility for your own growth. I hate to tell you this, June, but you’ve had an absolutely terrible upbringing.”

“That’s sure as hell true,” Ruda agreed with a grin.

“My mother is a goddess,” the dryad said, frowning. “I’m sure she did right by me.”

Toby sighed. “Did she ever tell you she loves you?”

“What? I don’t… Why does that matter? I know she does. She protects me, after all. You’ve all seen that.”

“Okay,” he said. “But did she ever tell you?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she huffed.

“Juniper,” Teal said gently, “you know we love you, right?”

“I… Well, sure. I love you, too.”

“Right.” Teal nodded, smiling. “But isn’t it so much better to hear it?”

“The thing is,” Toby went on while Juniper frowned in thought, “you were raised with no boundaries. No ethics. You learned to do whatever you wanted, to whoever you wanted… June, that’s a recipe for a person with no moral center who can’t function in the wider world. Honestly, it sounds like your mother didn’t even try to raise you at all, you or any of your sisters. She just…turned you loose.”

“I’ve been proceeding under the assumption that dryad morality is simply alien and inscrutable,” Trissiny said thoughtfully. “But if you’ll forgive me for saying it, Juniper, when I look back over our interactions, there’s nothing that can’t be explained by you simply being spoiled. I wonder if that might not be why your sisters are so vulnerable to emotional trauma. What reason have any of you had to develop emotional resilience?”

“I’m starting to feel kind of ganged up on,” Juniper muttered sullenly.

“Yes, well, we just learned you tortured somebody to death,” Gabriel said sharply, “because you were curious. This is kind of a serious matter.”

“You do have a habit of saying anything you don’t like is unnatural,” Ruda said. “Contributing to the spoiled theory.”

“All right!” Juniper exclaimed. “What do you want from me?”

“What do you want?” Toby asked more quietly.

She paused, blinking in confusion, then frowned. “I… I’m not sure.”

“It doesn’t have to be a big question,” he said. “We’re not settling your whole life or anything. Think in the immediate term. What is it you would like to happen, Juniper?”

“I…” She swallowed again. “I just want to stop feeling so bad, right now. And…and I feel like that’s even worse. Selfish. I should suffer.”

“It’s good that you have a sense of fairness,” said Trissiny, “but inflicting suffering for suffering is rarely constructive. Justice is about everyone getting what they need, not what they deserve. What anybody deserves is often too complex a matter for us mortals to judge.”

Shaeine stood, stepped around the fire and crouched in front of Juniper. “You understand why my healing works for Gabriel when Toby and Trissiny’s does not?”

“Well…yes. Professor Tellwyrn explained that to us in Sarasio.”

The drow nodded. “To call upon Themynra’s attention is to invite her judgment. If it will put your mind at ease, Juniper, we can give you the word of no less than a goddess on the matter of your culpability.”

“It’s…divine magic,” Juniper said nervously. “It’s not good for fairies, even if she…y’know.”

“It will weaken you, yes,” Shaeine said seriously. “But believe me, you will know the difference between that and Themynra’s wrath. I will not impose this upon you, but if you would like to have the clarity, I offer it.”

“I…okay,” the dryad said in a small voice. “I think…yes, please.”

“Give me your hand.”

Gently taking Juniper’s hand in both of her own, Shaeine lit from within, a subtle silver corona forming around her. The dryad winced, staring down at her hand, which was in the center of the brightest part of the glow. It subsided after only a few seconds, however, and Shaeine released her. She pulled her hand back, flexing her fingers experimentally.

“That…tingled. And…and I feel a little weak.”

“But not burned,” Shaeine said with a smile. “Not judged. A full ritual to call upon Themynra’s judgment in detail is another matter; I fear that is beyond a priestess of my relatively low rank and training. But you know, now, that for immediately practical purposes, she does not deem you worthy of being struck down.”

“See?” Ruda said lightly. “All good.”

“It’s a long road forward, but you have friends to help you along it,” Toby added, gently rubbing her shoulder again.

Juniper frowned in thought, staring into the fire for a long moment before lifting her eyes again. Her gaze settled on Trissiny. “Can…can you do that, too?”

Trissiny straightened, a frown crossing her features. “I… That’s not the same thing, Juniper. Avei is a very different goddess than Themynra. The light I call on is subject to the Pantheon’s mandate, not her individual judgment.”

“But Avei is the goddess of justice,” the dryad said, staring intently at her now. “Can you do…like Shaeine said? Ask her judgment?”

“Once again, Avei’s judgment is not like Themynra’s. I can, yes, but it’s not something to be done lightly.”

“In all honesty, I don’t think anything about this is light,” Gabriel noted.

“Would you, Trissiny?” Juniper asked.

“June,” the paladin said, her tone worried now, “what you’re asking for… If Avei passes judgment on you, I will have to carry it out. There are certainly extenuating circumstances, but what you did… This would mean a death sentence in any nation of laws, anywhere.”

“You’re saying you’d kill her?” Ruda said, scowling.

“On the direct command of my goddess, at Juniper’s own request? I wouldn’t have a choice. It’s not just a question of my position beneath her. Avei doesn’t inflict death needlessly; if she deemed it necessary for Juniper to die, I would trust her judgment.”

“That’s kinda fucked up, Boots,” Ruda said. “You know that, right?”

“It is not an unreasonable position,” Shaeine said.

“You said it’s not likely she would demand my death,” Juniper said. “And…that there are extenuating circumstances. Right? You were raised Avenist, you know how Avei thinks. Do you think she’d order that?”

“I don’t…think so,” Trissiny said worriedly. “But I also cannot rule it out. Juniper…think about what you’re asking for.”

“She’s asking for closure,” Toby said quietly. “She wants to take responsibility. I think it’s a very important step.”

“If…I mean…” Juniper sighed, looking down at the ground for a moment before raising her eyes again. A determined expression settled on her face as she met Trissiny’s gaze. “I’d rather not die, obviously. But…if Avei has some punishment for me… I sort of think I would feel better.”

Trissiny stared at her in silence for a few seconds, then sighed heavily. “Juniper…be sure. Whatever the details, you are asking for an outcome that may be very permanent.”

“I’m sure,” the dryad said firmly. “I’m… Nature is balance, Trissiny. I’m out of balance; it hurts me like a lost limb. I’m asking for your help.”

The paladin rose slowly to her feet. “We had best step away from the others, and the fire. Gabriel…keep well back, please.”

Juniper followed her meekly several yards away, leaving the rest of the group sitting in silence around the campfire, watching them closely. At Trissiny’s direction, both of them knelt, facing each other. Trissiny drew her sword, setting the tip against the floor and bowing her head over the hilt.

For more than a minute, they simply knelt there. Juniper glanced uncertainly back at her classmates.

The change was subtle, but abrupt. Trissiny spoke, her voice carrying a resonance that made it seem to fill the huge chamber.

“Priestess, shield the demonblood in Themynra’s light if you do not wish to see him obliterated.”

“Wait, what?” Gabriel squeaked, even as a silver sphere flickered into existence around him.

Trissiny stood, and Avei stood with her.

It was almost like looking at an image through water, the perspective flickering with each shift of the eyes. Trissiny was there, a slim blonde girl in armor, but it was also Avei, a powerfully built woman with her black hair pulled back in a severe tail, towering over them in more ways than the physical. The room was suddenly illuminated as if by the noon sun, but no shadows were cast anywhere.

Juniper stared up at her, eyes so wide they bulged, her mouth clamped down into a thin line.

“You are not mine to judge, daughter of Naiya,” Trissiny and Avei said, their voices resonating in unison rather like Vadrieny’s, but with a power that made the walls vibrate. “You stand apart from the world, from all the laws which govern mortals, shielded from the natural consequences of your actions by the favor of your mother. By inviting my judgment, you ask that this state be changed. If this is your intention, Juniper, be certain. My judgment is not to be gainsaid, once pronounced.”

“I’m certain,” Juniper managed, her voice trembling.

Very slowly, the paladin and goddess nodded, staring down at her. “Naiya is a protective but inattentive mother. You have seen the fates of your sisters who fell from their given state. Once changed beyond recognizability, they were beyond her notice. To strike you down would be to invite her retaliation… But to separate you from her sight is another matter.

“I see in you the capacity for significant virtue or fathomless carnage, dryad. The thing that seems most promising to me is that you have called this upon your own head. You have sought to place yourself in the world of mortals, to walk among them as one of their own. To take responsibility. Know, though, that while your crimes were committed in innocence, they are no less severe for this.

“My judgment, Juniper, is both punishment and aid. I hereby sever you from the unmerited favor of your goddess.”

Golden wings sprang up from behind Trissiny, and a matching pair flared into existence from Juniper, accompanied by a golden corona. The dryad cried out in apparent pain, slumping forward and barely catching herself on her knuckles, short of falling to the floor. The golden light around her faded quickly, leaving her gasping for breath.

“You are alone now, child,” Avei said. “Exactly as alone as all mortals are. You shall have only the connections you build, only the power you earn for yourself. I cannot lessen the magic that animates you, nor change your essential nature, without destroying you utterly. But know this: you are no longer watched over by divine mandate. If you fall, you will not rise again. The creatures of the wild will respect your power, but they will not see in you the will of your mother. You are a powerful fairy, Juniper. But you are no longer, for all intents and purposes, a demigod.

“This is the price of your crime… And the promise of the life you seek to build for yourself. Judgment has been passed.”

The light diminished, quickly but smoothly, leaving the chamber in the same omnipresent dimness that prevailed in the Crawl, lit by the students’ campfire. Trissiny staggered for a second as if dizzy.

Juniper drew in a shuddering breath, tears spilling down her cheeks. She started to rise, but lost her balance, once again barely avoiding a fall.

Trissiny knelt before her and wrapped her arms around the quivering dryad. Juniper’s shoulders began to shake in silent sobs; she clutched the paladin as if Trissiny were the only thing holding her up.

“Soooo,” Ruda said after more than a minute had passed with no sound but Juniper’s quiet weeping. “Who wants stew?”

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6 – 22

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“Slowly,” Madeleine purred, replacing the stopper in the decanter and setting it down on her dining room table. “Hold a sip on your tongue and inhale slowly through your nose. Taste, smell, savor it. A fine wine is an experience for all the senses, my darling.”

“Mm,” Gabriel agreed wordlessly around a mouthful of crimson wine. He let his eyes drift close, inhaling deeply through his nose.

“This is so precious I may have to chew my foot off to escape it,” Triss remarked, lounging against the door frame. “That’s drugged, by the way. Nobody who cares that much about wine would have it already decanted before her guest even arrived, unless she wanted to tamper with it first.”

“Oh…wow,” Gabriel mused, after finally swallowing. “You know, I never expected that to be so…”

“I know,” Madeleine said with a pleased smile.

“I sort of assumed people only used alcohol to get themselves drunk. It’s just so delicious.”

“You were right the first time,” Triss observed, while Madeleine nattered on about wine. “Booze is for getting plastered, candy is for pleasing the tongue. Confusing the two is the province of pretentious twits. Well, this seems to be some kind of memory, so at least you didn’t die.”

She perked up, suddenly paying attention upon hearing Madeleine’s next line.

“Do you trust me?”

The girl was gazing up at Gabriel through her lashes, eyes limpid but her expression serious.

“What?” He lowered his wineglass, frowning at her in consternation. “You know I do. I thought we’d had all this out long before now.”

“That is what I’d hoped,” she replied, smiling somewhat wistfully. “I see so much potential in you, Gabriel. You’re going to do great things, and I hope to be a part of them.”

“Great things wouldn’t be any fun without you there,” he said, grinning and moving closer, setting his glass down on the table.

She stopped him by placing a hand in the center of his chest, still gazing seriously into his eyes. “No one should ride your coattails, my dear. I fully intend to earn a place at your side. There are so many things I can teach you, show you… Ways I can help you gain what you need. What you deserve.”

“Oh, she’s good,” Triss breathed.

“You don’t have to earn anything,” Gabriel said, frowning now. “I just want… I like being with you, Madeleine. That’s all I need.”

“Then you do trust me?”

“Of course!” he said fervently.

“You, sir, are too stupid to live,” Triss announced.

“Good.” Madeleine nodded slowly. “I’ve prepared something… Something that will help you. It may be a bit of a shock, darling. I just want you to know everything I do is in your best interests. Please believe that.”

“You know I do,” he said, taking her hand in his and raising it to his lips.

“Then I have something to show you,” she replied, stepping back and leading him along with her.

“This oughtta be rich,” Triss muttered, following them.

Madeleine led him through her kitchen to a heavy door which she unlocked with a slim key produced from her bodice. Beyond this, steps led down into darkness, with just a hint of eerie light staining the walls of the stairwell.

The hostess stepped to the side at the base of the stairs, allowing her guest to have a view of the cellar. He came to a dead halt on the bottom step, staring; Triss had to crane her neck behind him to see within.

The wine cellar was clean, well-built and well-stocked with neatly racked and labeled bottles. It was also dim, the only light coming from the spell circle currently inscribed on the floor in the center. Within, a humanoid figure rose slowly from a crouching position at their entry.

“What have you done?” Gabriel whispered.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said.

“You’re a warlock!”

“I?” Madeleine had the nerve to sound amused. “A warlock would be able to let him out of the circle and control him. Sadly, I have no such power. Connections open many doors, my dear; gold opens even more. All it takes to summon a demon is the capacity to acquire some rather expensive reagents, and follow directions.”

“What is that?” he demanded.

“Bored,” said the figure in the circle, short tail waving behind him. “Extremely bored. You could’ve left me a book or something, you know.”

“This,” Madeleine said in a satisfied tone, “is a hethelax. He can teach you to properly control your—”

“No!” Gabe shouted, taking a step back up the stairs and crowding into Triss, which he apparently didn’t notice. “I don’t need to control that. I don’t need to know anything about it!”

“Gabriel, darling, the last thing I want is to insult your father, but that’s him talking, not you,” she said. He flinched when she approached, but allowed her to take his hand. “And I can appreciate his desire to protect you…but the method he’s chosen is foolish in the extreme. Your blood will not simply go away if you ignore it. It is there, and can be used against you. It will be used against you, one way or another. The only way around this is to understand it. If you will not make use of whatever gifts it brings, that’s up to you. But you must know the facts, or you will be vulnerable.”

“I have my doubts about this whole enterprise,” the demon said calmly, shifting from side to side. The motion made light glint of the carapace shielding his forehead and forearms; he wore a short, tattered robe without sleeves, which concealed the rest of his body. “My advice to you is not to mess around with anything demonic, kid. If you want to have any kind of a life up here on this plane, that will only make your options fewer. But she’s not wrong; what you don’t know can and will be used against you.”

“That’s true,” Triss murmured. “You’re being played like a fiddle, of course. The truth is a good bow.”

“And what do you get out of this?” Gabriel demanded.

The demon chuckled, spreading his hands; the shells over his knuckles sparked against the invisible cylinder in which he stood. “I’m not really in a position to dictate terms, am I? But she’s promised to send me back after I help, and this I don’t mind doing. I’ve not sired any half-bloods myself, but I know those who have. You kids have it rough up here. It’ll make me feel good if I can actually lend you some insight.”

“I…” Gabe glanced rapidly between the hethelax and Madeleine, stepping back and eliciting a grunt of protest from Triss. “I…need to think. I’m gonna go.”

“You’ll go talk to your father,” she said with a wry twist of her pouty lips, “and your friend Tobias. And then I will be arrested for unlicensed demonology. You’re here, Gabriel, and so is he. Take advantage while the offer is available, then decide what you want to do about it.”

“I’m not going to just turn you in, Madeleine,” he said, practically vibrating with tension. “But this is too much. I really need to reconsider some stuff.”

“Gabriel,” she said firmly, “if you walk out that door, you will be placing yourself and everyone you meet in serious danger.”

“What?”

“I know you too well, my darling,” she said with a sad little smile. “I will spend whatever years it takes atoning for this, but to protect us both I had to take steps. In a very short while, your blood will rise, and you will need to learn to deal with it.”

“What? What did…” He trailed off, then raised a hand to his lips. “What did you do?”

“Fucking called it,” Triss grunted.

“I’m curious about that myself,” the hethelax said sharply. “This isn’t what we discussed.”

“It’s a simple demonic accelerant in the wine,” Madeleine said calmly. “Very mild. Not even dangerous to handle or injest, but where infernal magic is already present, it enhances it. In your case, once fully absorbed, it should induce a berserking state.”

There was a moment of dead silence.

“Lady,” Triss marveled, “you are either really evil or really fucking dumb.”

“I wish you’d shared more of your plan with me,” the demon said icily. “I could have warned you not to do such an utterly harebrained thing.”

“How could you do that to me?” Gabriel whispered. He was beginning to shake. Triss stepped backward up the stairs, putting a little space between her and him. “I trusted you.”

“He can tell you how to cope,” Madeleine said, staring intently up at him. She stepped backward, pulling him down into the room; in an apparent state of shock, Gabriel let himself be led. “You can do it, Gabriel. I know you can. I have unequivocal faith in you. And I…” She languidly lifted her free hand, dragging her fingertips slowly up the deep arch of her bosom, and carefully unfastened the top button of her dress. “I will provide you with an outlet.”

“Sinister, stupid and awkward,” the hethelax snorted. “I’m so happy to be included in this.”

“You creepy piece of shit,” Triss hissed. “And I’m not talking to the demon!”

Gabriel’s breath had begun rasping; he suddenly hunched forward, pressing his free hand to his chest.

“It’s all right, my love,” Madeleine said firmly, pulling herself closer. “You are in control.”

“Woman, shut up,” snapped the demon. “Gabriel, listen to me. The berserking state is a simple one, it shuts down all unnecessary thought. You can’t control it, but you can influence it heavily. Keep one thought firmly in the forefront of your mind right now and it’ll carry forward. Focus on your positive feelings for her. This is your woman; concentrate on love. You can hash out this argument later, just remember right now that you love her!”

“Right now, I don’t think I do,” Gabriel growled. He actually growled, his voice rasping heavily, as if his vocal cords were no longer designed for human speech.

“Love may be too complex,” said Madeleine, taking another step closer, almost near enough to embrace him. “Sex is simple. I know how much you want me, Gabriel. You can have me.” She lowered her voice, looking heatedly up through her lashes, and firmly placed his hand upon her breast. “You are about to have me. You, not the monster. You are you, and you are in control!”

He snarled and snapped at her like a wild dog; she did not so much as flinch as he seized her by the neck with his other hand. It wasn’t big enough to encircle her throat, but he clutched her viciously, his thumb digging into her jugular.

“I want you to know I’ve worked for two incubi and had a fling with a succubus,” the hethelax grated, “and none of them were are sexually freaky as this idiocy.”

“You…backstabbing…whore.” Gabriel’s speech was only barely recognizable as words. Madeleine emitted a soft sound of pain as he forced her head back, but her expression did not change in the slightest.

He flung her fiercely away; Madeleine careened off a wine rack, sending bottles crashing to the floor, and lost her footing in the resulting mess. She cried out as she landed on broken glass.

“Gabriel!” the demon shouted urgently, waving frantically at the half-blood, who was now stalking toward Madeleine, claw-tipped fingers flexing menacingly. “Gabriel, listen to me! Focus on my voice! Just take her. You can sort out your issues later. Take what she’s offering; it’ll keep you grounded. There’ll be no coming back from this if you kill her!”

“Hell with it, I don’t care how this was supposed to end,” Triss said, and launched herself onto Gabriel from behind.

It was far from her first time ambushing someone. She wrapped her arms around him, neatly pinning his own arms to his sides with one move, and twined her legs over his upper thighs, squeezing hard enough to impede his steps. He staggered, making her fear for a moment that they’d both fall into wine and broken glass, but caught his balance, twisting furiously this way and that. Triss could feel hardness along his arms beneath his shirt, where scales or carapace were forming, and only squeezed harder. Berserking or not, he wasn’t preternaturally strong, only preternaturally durable, and while she was in excellent shape, the Gabriel who’d never taken any of Professor Ezzaniel’s classes was a scrawny layabout. She held him firmly; his struggles gained nothing.

“The key to tricking people is to help them trick themselves,” she grated into his ear, grunting with each abrupt shift of his body. He staggered back and forth, at one point barely avoiding a fall, but couldn’t dislodge his invisible attacker. “People want to see what makes sense to them. You don’t know I’m here, so you’ve gotta—nf!—create your own narrative.”

He careened into another wine rack, sending another cascade of bottles crashing to the floor. Triss yelped, her right bicep taking the brunt of the impact, but tightened her grip, refusing to yield.

“That’s right,” she growled, “you can’t attack and there’s no outside explanation, so it must be you. You’re not attacking her because you don’t want to. Figure it out!”

Gabriel toppled to his knees, momentarily catching her foot painfully between his thighs. Still she clung to him.

“Listen to the monster and the creepy bitch,” Triss said into his ear, more calmly now that his struggles were starting to abate. “You’re in control. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

He panted heavily, shoulders heaving with each breath, and slumped forward.

“You’ve got this,” she said. In the relative quiet, her voice was soft, calm. “I believe in you, Gabriel. Not because I have plans for you, but because I’ve seen you in action. You’re a good friend. You’re a good man.”

She slumped forward, resting her forehead on his shoulder, feeling his breath grow calmer.

“I just wish you knew that.”

Above them, the cellar door banged open. Mist poured down the stairs, silent but furious as a waterfall. In seconds it had washed over them, rising above the level of their heads, obscuring everything from view.

It was absolutely quiet. There was nothing to be heard except their breathing.

She could no longer feel his labored heartbeat through her breastplate.

Gabriel laboriously raised his head. “…thanks.”

Tentatively, Trissiny relaxed her grip slightly. “You okay? Are you back?”

“I—yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.” He shifted slightly to look over his shoulder at her, bringing his face very nearly into contact with hers. “…you?”

Finally, she let him go, settling back to the ground behind him. “I’m fine. Everything’s…back. I think.”

Slowly, he stood, self-consciously straightening his coat. Trissiny shifted the weight of her shield on her back experimentally, grasping the hilt of her sword for reassurance. When he finally turned fully to face her, they could only stare at each other in a painfully awkward silence.

Eventually, he cleared his throat. “You, uh… How much do you remember?”

“Everything.” She swallowed. “You?”

“Same.” He tore his gaze from hers, peering around them. “Well, it’s… Here we are, again.”

The hall was exactly as it had been at the beginning: broad, apparently infinite, and empty except for the omnipresent mist.

“So…did we win?” she asked cautiously.

Gabriel sighed heavily. “Do you feel like we won?”

“I—” She broke off, clutching her sword again. He followed her gaze and pivoted to face down the hall, reaching into his coat for his wand. A figure was approaching them, its feet resounding softly against the stone, gradually resolving itself out of the gloom. So dense was the fog that they couldn’t get a clear view until he was only a few yards distant.

Toby came to a stop, studying them closely. His face was drawn, expression guarded. He’d lost his staff somewhere, but flexed his hands in a very uncharacteristic display of martial readiness.

“I only caught the tail end of that,” he said quietly. “Are you two okay?”

Trissiny and Gabriel exchanged a glance.

“More or less,” she said cautiously. “Are you…you?”

“Gods, I hope so,” Toby replied with a humorless smile. “To be frank I don’t know if I can be sure anymore. This place…”

“Yeah,” said Gabe, nodding. Suddenly he grinned. “Hell, Toby… Nightmare vision or not, I’m really glad to see you.”

Toby nodded, not returning the smile. “There’s a nexus up ahead, with halls branching off from it. Eight of them, almost like this place was tailored to us. I came looking when I got out of mine; I bet the others are in there, too.”

“We’d better go help them, then,” Trissiny said firmly, taking a step forward. “How far is it?”

“Not very.” Toby shifted his gaze to her. “The things you saw… Is this place showing truth? Or just things that might have been?”

Again, Trissiny and Gabriel looked at each other.

“I think…both,” Gabe said slowly. “Whatever accomplishes its goals. Whatever those are.”

“That night on the quad.” Toby’s voice was quiet. “When you two had your… Gabriel, you told me it was your fault. You said you started a fight with her.”

“Uh, is this a good time or place to talk about that?” Gabe said nervously, glancing around at the ominous emptiness surrounding them.

“I want to know if what I saw was the truth,” Toby said flatly. “You yelled at her. Made demands and insults. That was it?”

“That was it,” Trissiny said quietly.

Toby looked back at her, in silence for a moment. When he spoke, finally, his voice was heavily strained. “And for that, you came at him with a sword?”

“Toby,” Gabe said sharply. “This is ancient history. It was months ago. We have long since talked it out. Both of us screwed up badly that night, but we learned from it.”

“You’re right,” Toby replied. “I guess that’s the difference. You’ve had time to get used to it. I only just learned that one of my friends tried to murder another because he was rude to her.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that,” Gabriel protested.

“Why do I get the feeling that’s your guilt talking again?”

“You’re both right,” Trissiny said wearily. “It wasn’t that simple, and I was completely, inexcusably in the wrong. What do you want from me, Caine? All I can do is apologize and try to do better. I have, months ago. I hope never to blunder that badly again.”

“Blunder?” Toby’s voice rose in pitch. “You attacked my best friend with a blessed weapon and all the power of Avei over—”

“Enough!” Gabriel shouted. “For the gods’ sake, that’s enough! You two want to have this out? Fine, we can have it out, clear the air. But we can do that later. This, right here, is not the fucking time!” He glared at them in silence for a moment until they both dropped their gazes, then continued. “Think about what’s happening here, will you? The Crawl set this whole thing up to mess with us, to screw up our heads. Well, right now, I’m the one telling you two to shape up and behave yourselves. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the sign we have been successfully messed with. So suck it up, deal with it later, and keep your minds on the task at hand. Okay?”

“Right,” said Toby, nodding. “You’re right. We need to go find the others.”

“Yeah, Trissiny agreed. “I hope a few of them have met up, too. Otherwise this is going to be a very long day.”

They set off into the mist in strained silence.

“You’d better shift back.”

“Hm?” Teal twitched slightly at the sudden comment, half-turning to look at Ruda without stopping.

“If this fucking place keeps playing the same tricks,” Ruda said, “Vadrieny’s chief fear seemed to be getting buried inside you. Once she came out, she was in control and managed to save our asses, too. Might be best if she takes the lead in here.”

“Oh. Yeah, that actually makes good sense.” Teal stepped to the side, giving Vadrieny room to extend her wings without hitting her classmates with them. A moment later, the demon was padding along beside them, her talons clicking against the stone floor.

“Fross, you okay?” Ruda asked. “Need to go back in the bottle?”

“I don’t think so,” the pixie demurred, orbiting her head once. “The need didn’t develop last time. If this place is picking out deeply-held fears, that sorta makes sense in hindsight. Ending up like the other pixies back in the glade was basically the worst thing I could think of happening to me, but it’s not something I’ve ever been particularly afraid of. I don’t see any way it could happen.”

Ruda nodded. “Small blessings, then. All right, ladies, keep—”

“Punaji!”

She groaned. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“This is absolutely your final warning,” Mr. Jones proclaimed, stalking forward out of the mist. “if you are not back at your desk in—”

“Fuck off, needle dick,” she said curtly, brushing past him.

He gaped at her. “How dare you—”

Ruda stopped, whirled, and punched him in the eye. The reedy little man was bowled head over loafers, tumbling against the wall of the corridor.

“I quit,” she announced, then turned her back and stomped off up the hall. Vadrieny paused to grin at the felled accountant before following her.

“Something’s up ahead,” Fross reported, dropping back to eye level; she had been periodically floating higher to get a better vantage. “My augmented sensory spells aren’t working in this mist, but I think it’s a person.”

“Doing that?” Ruda asked tersely.

“Sitting.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Sounds like a trap,” Vadrieny said, flexing her claws. “Be ready.”

Within moments, the figure coalesced out of the mist as they approached, and all three came to a stop, studying her.

Shaeine sat cross-legged in the center of the floor, robes arranged neatly around herself and hands resting on her knees. Her eyes were closed, her spine perfectly straight. She was breathing so slowly it took a few moments for them to be sure that she actually was.

“Is that…her?” Fross asked hesitantly. “Shaeine? Is that you?”

The priestess made no reply, nor any indication that she’d heard.

“It’s her,” Vadrieny said firmly, stepping forward and kneeling beside the drow.

“What kind of primal fear is this?” Ruda asked, lifting her hat momentarily to scratch her head.

“It’s not,” the demon replied, pride filling her voice. “She’s won.”

“Won? She’s just sitting there! It’s like she’s asleep or something.”

“Meditating,” Vadrieny replied, glancing up at her. “And do you see any nightmares or visions taking shape around us? A stilled, controlled mind isn’t susceptible to such manipulation. She found a way to beat it.”

“I can’t say that’s much of a strategy,” Ruda snorted. “Just sitting down isn’t a way out of trouble.”

“It is,” Vadrieny said firmly, “if you know help is coming.”

Very gently, she picked Shaeine up, arranging the drow in her arms. Shaeine didn’t move or apparently react at all, but allowed herself to be cradled a little too neatly to have been dead weight.

“If you know someone will always come for you,” Vadrieny whispered. Then she turned without another word and strode off the way they had come.

Ruda glanced up at Fross, shrugged, and followed. “Well, okay then. At least one of us got the better of this thing.”

She paced slowly around in a circle, giving Teal and Shaeine some space and carefully not looking in their direction. They weren’t doing anything but tightly hugging and rocking slightly back and forth, but given how Shaeine generally felt about displays of emotion, it was obviously an intimate enough moment to deserve a little privacy. For a wonder, Fross followed suit, hovering silently around Ruda’s head without a hint needing to be dropped.

“Hey,” Ruda said suddenly. “Look alive, girls, we’ve got company.”

She gripped her rapier and half-drew it, watching shapes form in one of the nearby halls. As Trissiny, Toby and Gabriel emerged from the mist, however, she re-sheathed the weapon, a grin blossoming on her face.

“Guys!” Teal exclaimed, approaching. She and Shaeine were still holding hands. “Gods, it’s good to see you. Are you okay?”

“We’re…here,” Toby said tersely.

“Okay is probably pushing it,” Gabe agreed. “Man, I’m getting really nostalgic for the Descent. This place is doing a number on my head. How’re you girls?”

“More or less the same,” said Ruda, glancing back at the others. “We have considered the matter carefully from all angles and come to the conclusion that fuck this shit.”

“We’re still missing someone,” said Trissiny, her eyes darting over the group. “Have any of you seen Juniper?”

“We have only seen each other,” said Shaeine, “and now, you.”

“Great.” Gabriel dragged a hand through his hair. “Hell…she’s all alone in there. Okay. Which halls have you checked?”

“That one, that one and that one,” Ruda reported, pointing to each of the three in question.

“I came out of there,” said Toby, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “and found these two in the one right behind us there.”

“That was Gabriel’s,” Trissiny added. “I entered it from a cross-hall, so…I started in that one to the right.”

“You had a cross-hall?” Ruda demanded, planting her fists on her hips. “Man, why the fuck do you always get the good stuff?”

“Easy, there,” Fross chided. “We jumped halls too, remember?”

“Yeah, but that’s cos you’re smart. It wasn’t handed to us.”

“Let us focus, please,” Shaeine said firmly. “There’s no telling what Juniper may be suffering while we dally. It sounds as if we have to check those two adjacent halls across the way, yes?”

“Right,” Trissiny nodded. “Does it matter which?”

“Not that I can see,” said Gabe. “Start with the one on the right?”

“There is the question of what lies in the final one,” Shaeine observed. “Apparently Fross and Ruda were deposited together, and of course Teal and Vadrieny are inseparable. The nine of us were distributed through seven of the eight paths.”

“I think whichever one we try will have Juniper in it,” said Fross. “Geography is very malleable down here, we’ve more than established that. It makes the most sense for the final hall to be the way out. We won’t find that until everybody’s done.”

“All right, then,” Ruda said grimly. “Forward march, troops. Let’s go right. It’s a good, honest direction.”

They started moving, falling unconsciously into the formation Trissiny had drilled them on over the last few days. Up ahead, another misty opening loomed, tendrils of white fog beckoning them silently forward.

“To state the obvious,” Trissiny said quietly as they walked, “we all know what’s been bothering Juniper the most lately. Or at least the general shape of it. Given what this place does, turning our memories against us…”

“Odds are good,” Ruda finished, “we are about to see something seriously fucked up.” She glanced around at the others. “I think it’s a good idea that we decide up front not to judge anybody based on anything we see in here. You don’t know someone’s story till you’ve walked in their boots, and I’m pretty sure this fucking place is picking whatever shit will screw us up the most. I refuse to give it the satisfaction.”

“Well put,” Gabriel agreed.

“A nice thought as far as it goes,” Toby said more quietly. “I think a few of us are going to need to talk some things over once we’re out of here, though.”

Nobody had a response to that. In the next moment, they stepped into the mist.

They drew together as they continued down the path, not speaking, but taking comfort in one another’s presence after their recent trials. Fross darted ahead and then back, then rose upward, continually scouting around for a better view.

“I think I see something,” the pixie reported, her shrill voice echoing startlingly in the quiet. “It’s either close or a lot bigger than—”

A deafening roar cut her off, and the group instantly halted, each of them settling into a combat stance with weapons up. Teal shifted forms, Gabriel sidestepped to have a clear shot ahead and Shaeine lit with a soft, silver glow. The footsteps rapidly approaching them were terrifyingly loud.

In the next seconds a true nightmare stomped forward out of the fog.

It was easily twelve feet tall, and looked like it might have been part tree at one point. At least, its legs ended in broad, flat stumps lined with stiff tendrils resembling roots. Vaguely humanoid in shape, it was the mottled brown and green of rotting meat, and smelled much the same. Viscous slime dripped from it all over; near its squat head, enormous translucent sacs inflated rhythmically with its breathing, lit from within with a pale glow like the luminous mushrooms of Level 1. Whatever heritage it owed to the plant kingdom, the claws and spikes protruding from its misshapen limbs at odd intervals were very clearly animalian. Two tails extended from its back, of unequal lengths, arching forward and tipped in massive stingers.

Stopping just in front of them, it roared again, its lower jaw not so much opening as unfolding, to reveal a saw-like arrangement of teeth. It stuck out a long tongue at them, which was tipped in yet another stinger, flanked by a nest of writhing tendrils. If it had eyes, they were obscured by the crazy crown of slime-dripping thorns that wreathed its head.

“Fucking goddamn ew,” Ruda observed.

“Looks fae,” Trissiny said tersely. “Vadrieny, Gabe, hang back; if this thing is powerful enough to scare Juniper it could really hurt you. Light-wielders to the front; Ruda, be ready with that sword, we’ll try to make you an opening. Anything that unnatural will suffer if you stick mithril in it.”

“Wait!” said Fross. Whatever she had been about to add was cut off by another enraged howl from the monster. It charged forward, lashing out with tongue, limbs and stingers, and slammed against a huge silver shield that appeared across the entire hall in front of them.

Shaeine actually grunted with the impact, wincing. The creature, though, fared much worse, reeling backward; it was actually smoking in several places where it had come into direct contact with divine magic.

“Remember your Circles,” Trissiny said urgently. “Demons, back away; we need to flare up!”

“Wait!” Fross shouted.

The howl unleashed by the monster was its loudest yet, and filled with a wordless rage that flirted with insanity.

“Shaeine, hammer it!” Trissiny cried.

“STOP!” Fross shrieked, darting across the hall in front of them. A spray of water fanned out form her aura, coalescing into a waist-high wall of ice. She quickly made a second pass, then a third, completely walling off the corridor in seconds.

“Fross,” Trissiny said impatiently, “advise on the go! We don’t have time for this, that thing has Juniper!”

“No,” the pixie cried, “no, that’s not what this is!”

Shards of ice sprayed over them as the wall cracked with a hammer blow from one of the monster’s colossal fists. A second caused a section of it to collapse; a stinger probed through the gap.

It didn’t roar again, though, giving Fross an opening to speak.

“That thing is Juniper!”

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6 – 19

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“Y’know,” Gabriel mused, “when I pictured going on a dungeon adventure, I somehow imagined there would be more stabbing and less…accounting.”

“I don’t see you doing any accounting,” Ruda remarked, not looking up from her spreadsheet. While the others at the table had bowls of stew in front of them, she had only a bottle of rum wedged between her legs and papers fanned out on the table before her, a collection of charts, receipts, maps and several bearing columns of her own mysterious notation. “Unless you wanna pitch in, belay the complaining.”

“Whoah, hey,” he protested. “It was just an observation! I wasn’t complaining.”

“Mm. Well, forgive me for assuming. It’s you, after all.”

“It’s too early in the day for me to be the butt of the joke,” he muttered sullenly, dragging a piece of stiff bread through his stew to soften it. The “bread” was not baked, but rendered alchemically, somehow, from mushrooms. Juniper had pronounced it fairly nutritious, but it took considerable softening to be chewable, and never quite got to the point of palatability.

“Never too early,” Ruda said, grinning at her paperwork as she tallied.

“He didn’t actually do anything that time,” Trissiny remarked.

“He will, though. Best to settle up in advance.”

“That’s true.”

“You guys suck,” Gabriel grumbled.

“Yep, there it is,” said Trissiny, spooning up another mouthful.

Juniper entered the main bar from the market area, yawning. “Hey, guys. Morning.”

“You were up early,” Trissiny said.

“Too early… I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep again. Went for a walk. Thanks,” she added as Toby set a bowl in front of the empty place and began ladling stew into it.

“You went for a walk?” Fross exclaimed. “In the Crawl? That’s dangerous!”

“Well, I didn’t leave the Visage,” Juniper replied, seating herself. “Ooh, the stew has tubers! Are we splurging?”

“Ruda says we can afford it,” said Fross. “So…you’ve been walking around the Visage for half the night? I’m, uh, confused.”

“Nah, I met Radivass, who couldn’t sleep either. She’s got a little place behind her stall, offered me some tea. We got to talking, and then making love.”

“Thanks for the update,” said Ruda, pulling another sheet of paper over and beginning to jot figures without looking up.

“Yeah, I usually try to think more about people’s privacy, but she was pretty into letting people know she ‘nailed’ me.” Juniper shrugged, blowing on a spoonful of hot stew. “It’s weird how people get about sex. I mean, it’s companionship and pleasure and pretty good exercise. What else do you need? Maybe folks would enjoy it more if they got out of their own heads a little.”

“Sound advice,” Trissiny said gravely.

“Good morning,” said Shaeine as she and Teal entered the bar, the latter with a broad smile.

“Morning!” Fross chirped. “Yay, everyone’s here! Pull up a chair, there’s plenty of stew.”

“Ah, yes. The famous stew,” Teal said with a grimace, holding out a chair for Shaeine.

“It’s good stew this time though!”

“Relatively,” Gabriel clarified.

“We’re indulging a little bit,” said Toby. “It’s got some tubers we bought, some of our pork and actual spices. Nothing fancy, but…”

“Fancy is relative,” Shaeine said calmly.

“Exactly.”

“All right!” Ruda set down her pen decisively. “We’re doin’ good.”

“We’re doing well,” Fross corrected.

The pirate drummed her fingers once on the table. “Fross…”

“Right. Sorry. Go on.”

“We are, as I say, doing well,” Ruda said, giving the pixie a pointed look. “Better quality of loot the farther down we go, though we begin to run into a slight bottleneck in terms of time and effort spent on disposing of it; not as much market for higher-value items, vendors can never be sure when they’ll be able to unload some things and so we can’t always get fair value. But still! We are putting away a substantial amount of gold once it’s converted to liquid assets.”

“Awesome,” Gabriel said, grinning.

Ruda nodded. “So, I’m gonna recommend we start spending money more aggressively.”

“Um…” His face fell slightly. “Why’s that?”

“Let’s keep in mind what we’re down here for,” Ruda said firmly. “We’ve gotta get to the bottom of the Descent, get Tellwyrn’s crap and then we can go home. Making money is nice and all, but that’s not our job. The assets we’re accumulating should be leveraged here where we most need the leverage.”

“We have been slowing down slightly,” Trissiny mused. “I noticed yesterday. We’re still making consistent headway and none of the puzzles have stumped us for long, but the fighting is getting harder.”

“I think it’s going well!” Juniper said brightly. “The tactics you’ve been teaching us are really solid, Triss. I feel like we’re getting better at it the more we practice!”

“We are,” Toby agreed, “but it’s also true that the threats are growing harder to batter through.”

“And battering through threats is exactly where we can turn money into advantage,” said Ruda, nodding. “The enchanted weapons and armor the Crawl is giving us are nice and all, but there’s more we can do to up our performance. There are alchemists who can provide some very good enhancers, and there’s a lot more we could be doing with enchantment. No offense, Gabe, but you’re not on Radivass’s level, or even Khavibosh.”

“That’s fair,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve got tricks that are helpful down in the levels, but permanently augmenting gear is beyond me.”

“There are other items available for purchase that could prove helpful,” Shaeine remarked. “Even things as simple as camping gear and serviceable clothing.”

“And better food,” Juniper added. “Nobody’s getting nearly malnourished yet, but right now Fross and I are the only ones running at our physical peak. You guys need nutrients that you can’t get from pork and mushrooms.”

“Better food will cost more than the rest of that combined,” Toby murmured.

The dryad shrugged. “Like I said, it’s not urgent. But it’s something you’re gonna want to look into before much longer. Nobody’s gonna starve in three weeks, but a properly nourished person is happier and more effective than somebody subsisting on scavenged crud. We need vegetables.”

“So, yeah,” said Ruda. “The challenges are starting to slow us down, and it’s only gonna get harder as we go deeper. At the same time, we’re getting more disposable income. There are vendors in the Visage and on Level 2 who can help gear us up; I think the time has come to take full advantage. The financial policy should be to spend according to our means. We’ve got no reason to save up.”

“I have at least a general idea how we’re doing financially, though I’m clearly not up to Punaji standards of accounting,” Gabriel said with a grin. “And there’s still a range of things in both places that are beyond us. Not everything on display was in our price range, and Shamlin, Radivass and that twitchy sshitherosz on Level 2 have all hinted they’ve got even better stuff that’s not on display.”

“Which twitchy sshitherosz?” Trissiny muttered.

“Right,” Ruda said patiently, “so there’s room to grow. I’ve got a feeling there will be, right till the end.”

“I agree,” said Toby. “I’m in favor of spending the time and money on caution. Better prepared is just better.”

“Ruda’s right!” Fross chimed. “This is how dungeons are supposed to work! The deeper you go, the harder it gets, but you get better equipment to deal with it!”

“Right, then. Any questions? Arguments?” Ruda waited for a few seconds, then grinned and took a swig of her rum, reaching for a bowl with the other hand. “It’s looking like a somewhat abbreviated day of adventuring, then! I suggest we take our time shopping both here and with the demons before we get into the Descent proper.”

“Does that mean you’re giving each of us an allowance to spend?” Gabe asked, grinning.

“It means,” she said, giving him a look, “I will help you shop, those of you whose judgment I don’t trust to know what gear you really need and can afford. Which is pretty much just you.”

He sighed. “You are just never gonna let up, are you?”

Ruda grinned at him and scooped up a spoonful of stew. “Well, that depends on you, doesn’t it?”

“And there they went,” Rowe said, peering through the door into the long merchant wing of the Grim Visage. He turned back to Professor Ezzaniel with a grin. “You’ll be wanting into the back room to keep tabs, then?”

“Later,” Ezzaniel said, keeping his eyes fixed on the go board on the table between them. It was already more than halfway through, lines of white and black stones marching across the grid, seeking to flank and encircle one another. “There’s no need to monitor their every little move. I’ll be notified if something goes badly wrong.”

“My, aren’t we trusting,” the incubus said.

Ezzaniel placed a black stone. “They’re fine. The whole point of this exercise is for the kids to learn how to be effective without someone lurking over their shoulders to supervise. I must say I had my doubts about this particular batch, but they appear to be making even better progress than Arachne had hoped.”

“Yes, quite the team of terrors and titans, so I hear,” Rowe mused, setting down a stone. “Who knows? They could even get to the bottom of your little mystery. Or maybe the Crawl will throw up enough challenges at the lowest levels to bar them like all the other groups. Firepower and magical invulnerability aren’t everything.”

“Mm.” Ezzaniel lifted his eyes to catch Rowe with his head turned, winking at a group of three drow, two women and a man, just then filing through the door into the merchant wing and the exterior door beyond. The last woman through turned and gave the incubus a sly smile before slipping out. “Well. You’re too good to let me catch you plotting what that looked like, so may I assume it wasn’t directed at my students?”

“Oh, nonsense,” Rowe said breezily, turning his attention back to the board. “Honestly, Emilio, I’m surprised at you, leaping to conclusions that way. Of course it was directed at your students. Those three have been lurking around for days and I’m beginning to have a bad feeling about them. Always do, when drow from the depths get too cozy up here. The last thing I need is them trying to creep up to the University grounds and bring Arachne down, causing me headaches.”

“I see,” Ezzaniel said flatly.

“Oh, don’t make that face,” Rowe chided, grinning. “You just said they’re a capable group. It’ll cost them little time and hardly any effort to demolish a trio of snooping Scyllithenes for me. And they could use the extra experience and loot. Everybody wins!”

“I suppose there’s a compliment in that,” Ezzaniel said with a sour twist of his mouth. “When you decide to really interfere it won’t be with anything so…mundane.”

“Pfft, why should I want to interfere with your little ducklings?” Rowe asked innocently. “They have enough to worry about.”

Gabriel groaned, blinking. He was…down? He hadn’t fallen, exactly. Hands and knees, looking at a stone floor. He didn’t remember falling. Didn’t hurt, wasn’t dizzy…nothing to explain why he was down here.

Carefully, he straightened up, peering around. Behind him was a stone wall, towering up into darkness; an obvious doorframe was set into the wall, but there was no door within it, only more neatly mortared blocks. Experimentally, he reached back and rapped on it, then pushed a few of the bricks. No…just stone.

The space was almost like a hall, in that it seemed to be longer than it was wide. It was plenty wide, though, about like one of the streets of Tiraas on which he had grown up. Worse, it was filled with mist. Tendrils of fog slowly uncurled close to him, slightly obscuring his view of the nearby walls and reducing the distance to nothing but a white void.

He was alone. What had happened to the others?

Checking his pockets, he found everything in place. His wands were holstered, his various supplies in each of the coat’s magical compartments.

Gabe turned in a complete circle, pondering. They had set out from the Visage, gone to the Descent, spent some time buying supplies in Level 2…then paid their silver and stepped into Melaxyna’s dimensional gate, allegedly to be ported down to Level 43 to continue their campaign. Then…

Nothing. On previous trips, stepping through the portal had been like stepping from one room to another, completely devoid of flash or identifying sensation. He couldn’t remember anything happening after the last one; he had merely stepped through the gate along with his classmates, and then…he was here.

“Guys?” he said hesitantly, then steeled himself and raised his voice. “Toby? …Trissiny? Fross!”

He didn’t even make an echo. Well…that had probably been too much to hope for.

“Wherever you are, Trissiny,” he muttered, “looks like you were right about the demons. I really, really hope I get to hear you say ‘I told you so.’”

Squaring his shoulders and straightening his coat, Gabriel did the only possible thing left to him and stepped forward into the mist.

He quickly found it to be magical in nature. Not arcane, he would have sensed that, and clearly not divine, as it did him no harm. But it didn’t respond to the charm he sketched out and laid down, which should have dispelled fog and any obscuring effects in its vicinity. Natural fog, anyway, but any relatively persistent magical effect would have overridden his simple charm. Infernal magic trumped arcane, but fae magic countered it… Then again, there was also the possibility that it wasn’t true magic in the sense he was used to thinking of it, but a genius loci at work. Within a sufficiently powerful one, the will of the place was absolute law. This clearly wasn’t the Descent—the proportions of the walls were all wrong—but could it still be the Crawl?

He did manage to arrange a light for himself, anyway. A rolled up and properly inscribed sheet of his spellpaper produced a blue glow from one end, just like a small torch. It didn’t penetrate far into the mist, but it made him feel better.

Gabriel proceeded carefully, keeping alert and constantly scanning around. The fog itself didn’t offer him anything to look at, but he stayed close enough to one wall to keep it in view—which necessitated drifting ever nearer to it the farther in he got, as the mist seemed to thicken with every step. It was all he could think of, though, to avoid getting hopelessly turned around.

Which was why he noticed immediately when the wall began to change. Vague shapes started appearing in the stone, as if carved or built that way; a few more yards down, they grew clearer, and then clearer still. Doors, corners, front steps and the blunt shapes of windows. Then, further down, more elaborate touches, light fixtures, details of stonework, window of actual glass and doors of wood, rather than their mere shapes cut in plain stone. Gabriel judged that he was deeper down this passage than any of the Descent’s levels was long by the time it became clear that he was walking along a street. The architecture was familiar, not specifically but generally; this particular street was one he’d never seen before, but he had a very strong sense that he was back home in Tiraas.

The appearance of the figure out of the mist in front of him—on what was now clearly a sidewalk—was quite sudden in comparison to everything else, so much so that he skidded to a stop, barely repressing a yelp. What started as a vague patch of darkness coalesced into a humanoid form—in fact, a human one. She stepped lightly into the glow of his makeshift torch, streamers of fog being scattered from her twirling parasol.

Gabriel’s eyes widened. “What—no. No, absolutely not.”

“Well,” she said, pouting. “That’s very nearly enough to hurt my feelings. I should think you’d be a little glad to see me, after all this time.”

“Why the hell would I be—you know what, no. I am not doing this. This isn’t real, you aren’t here, this is the Crawl messing with my head.”

“All right, Gabriel, I’ll play along.” Still idly spinning the parasol in her neatly gloved hands, Madeleine smiled, angling her body in that way she had which put forth the best details of her profile. “This isn’t real, neither of us is here. You still have to deal with it, one way or another. This time, darling, it doesn’t look like running away will be an option.”

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The portal from Level 2 was almost anticlimactically easy to traverse; for all intents and purposes, it opened a simple door between the metal arch in the demon village and the entrance at the base of the stairs to Level 6. The passage was silent and completely without flashy effects, unlike the Descent itself. Their destination slowed the students down somewhat as they had to again navigate the invisible maze, but their trip this time was a much faster one. Fross had evidently memorized the route, and helpfully marked it for them by blocking the wrong paths with ankle-high walls of ice.

They straggled to a stop at the base of the stairs on the level below, warily craning their necks to peer at the inert chess pieces.

“Yeah, I can see them now,” said Toby, pointing. “Bands up near the top, see?”

Though both sets appeared to be made of plain granite, the pieces on one side had accents of hammered copper, those on the other bedecked with cast iron. That wasn’t the end of their coloration, however; as Toby indicated, every piece had a colored ring near the top of its body, just below the symbolic “heads” that identified each piece’s role.

“Conveniently color-coded,” Teal mused. “Blue, green, gold and red, just like dragons. I feel a little dense for not spotting that before.”

“I’m certain we would have figured it out if we’d stopped and tried to,” Trissiny said firmly. “It really was a convenient place to call a halt. All right, then… Gabriel, you ready?”

“And waiting!” he said, producing one of the glyphed sheets of parchment from the folder he carried and holding it out.

“Good,” Trissiny said, nodding. “Fross? You’re up.”

“On it!” the pixie chirped, swooping down and grabbing the sheet from his hand. She fluttered out into Level 7 proper; her classmates stilled momentarily in apprehension, but the chess pieces did not react.

“Mm, looks like they respond to feet on the floor,” Ruda mused. “Might be a way we can use that.”

“We have a plan,” said Trissiny. “It’s something to keep in mind in case it doesn’t work, though.”

They tensed again as Fross fluttered carefully to the ground near the front row of the “white” pieces and released the glyphed paper onto the square of one of the pawns. It drifted slightly in the draft of her tiny wings, but settled to the floor, brushing almost against the base of the chess piece.

Again, they did not react. Fross shot back toward the rest of the group a lot faster than she’d gone out, however.

“Okay,” Trissiny said grimly. “Here we go.”

Very carefully, she stepped down and planted one boot on the floor.

Immediately, the pieces swiveled to face her, just as they had done the day before. In the next second they were bouncing forward, the crashing of their hops echoing deafeningly in the enclosed chamber.

All, that is, except the one whose square was marked by Gabriel’s charm. It stood there, evidently inert. The pieces behind it navigated around, careful not to knock into it, which slowed down their approach.

Trissiny lifted her foot, hopping back up onto the steps, and the pieces immediately stopped. With another loud grinding noise of their stone bases against the stone floor, they swiveled about and proceeded to hop back to their starting positions. There was a brief traffic jam among the white team as a bishop found its path home blocked by pawns, but after some loud confusion they straightened themselves out, eventually bouncing back into the proper configuration half a minute after the black team had settled in.

“Whew,” said Gabriel, grinning. “I was half afraid that wouldn’t work!”

The others turned in unison to stare at him silently.

His grin faltered. “Well… It should have worked. I was reasonably sure. That’s a simple stillness charm, it’s known to be effective against basically any kind of creature or effect that isn’t specifically set up to counter it. But, y’know, it’s the Crawl. Not everything goes how it should.”

Trissiny snorted softly. “If you’re uncertain about your role in a plan, Gabriel, it’s better if we know before we have to test it in action. Just for future reference.”

“Whatever you say, General,” he snipped back.

“Just give her the glyphs,” she said, exasperated. “Fross, looks like this is all on you.”

“Leave it to me!” the pixie crowed, swooping over to collect the stack of paper charms Gabriel held up to her. She fluttered out into the chamber, the papers hovering beneath her, and began carefully laying them down in front of each chess piece.

“I wonder how groups without an enchanter solve this,” Teal murmured as Fross worked.

“Well…it’s clearly a combat puzzle,” Toby said slowly. “Did you see how they’re careful not to bash into each other? And that’s a scary sight when they’re all coming at you, but really they weren’t moving any faster than an average person walks. Clearly it’s a test of coordination and maneuverability. You have to stay mobile, lead them along into the right formations so that your various magic users can hit their corresponding colors.”

“Do we just have to hit the right piece with the right kind of magic?” Teal asked. “Or does it need to be actually on the colored band?”

“Shamlin didn’t specify, but I assume you have to strike the band,” said Trissiny, frowning as she watched Fross systematically disable the pieces. “Otherwise this would be preposterously easy.”

“Yeah,” Ruda grunted. “And with those bands well above head height…it’s pretty much preposterously fuckin’ difficult.”

“It occurs to me that we don’t actually have an offensive arcane magic user,” Trissiny remarked. “Fross is a mage, yes, but most of her tricks are just that. I’ve only ever seen her use fae magic in combat.”

“The classic Arcane Bolt is a very simple spell,” said Gabriel, his attention focused on the diagram he was carefully inking on a clipboard. “It’s also a pretty weak one, especially compared to her ice magic. There’s been no reason for her to use it so far, but I’ll be amazed if she doesn’t know it. You know how she likes to study.”

“If it’s so weak, will it work?” Ruda asked.

“We’ll test,” said Trissiny. “But if we were told correctly, you only need to hit the band with the right kind of magic to disable the piece.”

“Also, there’s the wand I just got on Level 6,” Gabriel continued. “Shoots actual arcane blasts, not simple lighting like a cheaper wand. That should qualify, too.”

“Speaking of groups not having enchanters,” Ruda went on, “I can’t help noticing that we’re once again not doing the challenge the way it’s supposed to be done. I’ve gotta wonder what delightful surprise the Crawl will have for us afterward.”

“Only one way to find out,” Trissiny murmured. “Gabe, don’t you need to attune that thing to the individual glyphs?”

“Nah,” he said, still inking. “This is set up to be keyed to their positions on the chessboard. Long as I ink in each sigil correctly—which I am, don’t worry—it’ll work.”

Fross finally came fluttering back to them, carrying several extra glyphed papers. While she had set out with an orderly stack, these were blowing about underneath her in a small cloud and had frost accumulating on their edges. “All done! Gabe, here, take these.”

He set aside his clipboard, grumbling, and began gathering up the fallen pages as Fross released them with an audible chime of relief. Apparently keeping them aloft individually was a significant test of her coordination.

“All right,” said Trissiny. “Moment of truth.”

Once again, she carefully stepped down onto the chessboard floor.

Nothing happened.

There were several grins and swiftly released breaths from the others; Ruda let out a whoop. Trissiny herself had to smile. “Excellent work, you two!”

“Happy to be of service,” Gabe said, tucking away his last page with a flourish.

“Likewise!”

She led the way toward the middle of the chamber, the others peering around uncertainly at the chess pieces as they followed. They grew more confident with each step, however, once satisfied that the monoliths were going to remain inert. The glyphed pages lying at the foot of each glowed a very faint blue that was barely distinguishable in the sourceless, omnipresent light.

“The sign for Level 8 hasn’t lit up,” Ruda commented, pointing at the opposite door.

“Well, we haven’t beaten the challenge,” Trissiny said reasonably. “Gabe, may I have that, please?”

“Now hang on,” Ruda protested as he handed over the clipboard to her. “How come you get to be in charge?”

Trissiny raised her eyebrows, then held the clipboard out to her. “You want to do this?”

“Aw, c’mon, Boots, you know me,” she replied, grinning. “I just want to bitch and complain while you do the heavy lifting. Lemme have my fun.”

Trissiny stared at her for a long moment before a smile broke through her reserve. Shaking her head, she turned back to Gabriel. “Okay, how’s this work?”

“Hold it by the board as much as you can,” he said. “The ink shouldn’t smudge, but you don’t want to accidentally trigger one, I’m assuming. All right, I’m sure I don’t have to explain the chessboard diagram to you. This side is the white team, this side is the black team, each is marked with a sigil like one of the stillness charms. Touch it with a fingertip to deactivate it, and…boom.”

“Boom,” she repeated, nodding. “All right, everybody…line up, please.”

They did so, somewhat unevenly, Ruda dramatically rolling her eyes in the process. Trissiny paced down the row once, frowning thoughtfully at them, before taking a position at the end closest to the exit. “Teal.”

“Yes?”

“I’m operating on the assumption that you don’t want or need to learn combat formations. Can we talk to Vadrieny, please?”

“Righto,” the bard said with a rueful grin, which immediately became rather menacing as it shifted into a double row of glossy fangs. Vadrieny rolled her neck from side to side, flexing her wings straight outward behind her.

“Very good,” Trissiny said, nodding. “All right, I want you to be our first individual test.”

“I’m honored,” the archdemon said dryly.

“You are suitable,” Trissiny said. “You’re in no physical danger from these things, you have the advantage of flight which will enable you to reach the glyph, and you’re strong enough to throw the thing back even if you miss. Your capabilities aren’t being evaluated, we’ve all seen them. This is a test to make sure this system is going to work the way we planned.”

“Right,” Vadrieny said, nodding.

Trissiny pointed to one of the white pawns marked near its crown with a blue band. “I’m going to release that one. Show us how it’s done.”

Without further warning, the paladin pressed her gloved thumb onto the corresponding glyph on her chart.

Instantly, with a sharp pop, the charm lying in front of the blue-marked pawn went up like a blue firecracker. In the next second, the pawn charged forward at them.

Vadrieny was on it with a single pump of her wings. She landed right on the statue’s front, digging her talons into its stone surface and clutching its head with one hand. The pawn stopped, apparently confused, and began twisting back and forth, trying to throw her off. Grinning, Vadrieny drew back her free hand and drove her claws forward directly at the blue band.

The instant they touched it, the entire thing exploded in a spray of gravel, dropping her unceremoniously to the floor. She beat her wings once more, landing gracefully amid the ruins, then turned to the others, and bowed.

Ruda cheered again; Toby and Gabriel both applauded.

“Good work,” Trissiny said in a satisfied tone. “All right, people, we have our practice session lined up. Vadrieny, back in formation, please.”

She paced up and down the row once more, studying them and ignoring the faces Ruda made, pausing when she came back to the other end. “Tobe, come here, please?”

He glanced at the others, then stepped over to her.

“Can I see that staff?” she asked, holding out her free hand.

“Sure,” he said, offering it over. Trissiny took the weapon, twirled it once, thumped its end upon the floor, peered critically at the grain of the wood and handed it back. She carefully set the clipboard on the ground to one side, then drew her sword.

“All right, I’m going to assume the monks of Omnu didn’t teach you this trick, but it’s fairly simple.” She held up the scarred old blade; as they all watched, it came slowly alight, golden radiance illuminating it from within and seeming to pool in its nicks and dents like water. Gabriel, who was already a good handful of yards away from them, edged backward further. “It’s very much like healing—you simply let the power of your god flow through you, into the weapon instead of a patient, and hold it there.”

Toby tilted his head to one side, frowning thoughtfully at her, then transferred his stare to his staff. After a moment, his frown intensified. Only a few seconds later did the staff begin to glow faintly.

“This is harder than using it on a person,” he muttered, now almost scowling at his staff.

“Wood’s not very conductive, magically speaking,” said Gabriel.

Juniper cleared her throat. “Actually…”

“Okay, I stand corrected,” he said, grinning at her. “Wood conducts fae magic very well, but not the other branches. That’s why it’s used in wands: slows down the current, gives you more control.”

“Control comes with practice,” said Trissiny. She rapped Toby’s staff sharply with the flat of her sword; he nearly lost his grip, having to scramble to keep hold of it and letting the light wink out

“Hey!” he protested.

“The really hard part is keeping the flow of power into it steady while you’re swinging it around and hitting things,” she said with a smile. “As I said, practice will help. Also, we should look into getting you a staff with some metal accents. Gabe’s right, that’ll help it hold magic. But since Omnu doesn’t grant any offensive use of his power, this is the only way you’re going to pass this trial.”

“I’m not clear on why exactly I need to pass this trial,” he said, frowning. “I’m a healer, Triss.”

“You are a martial artist,” she replied. “Your cult developed a martial art to the high standards it did for the specific purpose of being able to counter and deflect force without inflicting harm. Well, imbuing your attacks with holy power is the next step in that. The energy you use will mitigate and even counter any damage you do with that weapon against average mortals.”

“Unless they’re half-demons,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” she agreed, nodding. “Yes, Toby, if it were a perfect world, you would never be placed in a situation where you might accidentally hurt someone with the best of intentions. You want to gamble on that?” She held his eyes in silence for a moment until he shifted his gaze aside, sighing. “Remember what Professor Ezzaniel said that first day,” she went on more gently. “For there to be peace, the people who love peace have to be better at war than those who love violence.”

“Actually, I think you put it better than he did!” Fross said.

“All right, I take your point,” said Toby, lifting his head and regarding her with new determination. “I’m up next, then?”

“If you please, yes.” Trissiny picked up the clipboard again and stepped to the side, pointing at a pawn with a green band. “There’s your target. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

She released the pawn in question and he raised his staff.

Toby actually made nearly as quick work of his opponent as Vadrieny had. All it took was a swift upward jab with his faintly glowing weapon and the thing dissolved into gravel.

“Good!” Trissiny said firmly. “Very good. Your fine control is excellent. All right, Juniper! The red one there. You ready?”

Juniper took a little longer with hers, and actually forced the other students to break formation and scatter as the bouncing monolith pushed her back into their line. She pushed right back, however, growling and swinging her fists, each blow inflicting cracks and dents, and finally tipped it over by slamming her shoulder into it. From there, she simply climbed on top of the twitching pawn and drove her fist into the red band, causing it to burst underneath her.

“Brutal,” said Trissiny, “but effective. Juniper, I’ve noticed this just about every time I see you fight something: you’re all brute force and no technique.”

“So?” the dryad said somewhat petulantly, brushing gravel and dust off herself. “It works for me.”

“Thus far it has,” Trissiny agreed. “But the fact that you are so powerful may be holding you back. No matter who or what you are, no matter how strong, there is someone stronger out there, and the nature of the Circle means that there are many things considerably weaker than you which are still a threat to you. I know Professor Ezzaniel has been working with you about agility and precision.”

Juniper grimaced. “I don’t get the best marks in his class.”

“Well…keep in mind that he does things for a good reason. I’ll be glad to help you work on it, too.”

“I don’t need—”

“Let me rephrase that,” Trissiny said sharply. “While you’re part of this group, all of our safety depends on the competence of everyone else. You have a weakness in your abilities; refusing to correct it puts us all at risk. Do I need to assume that’s your intention, or will you let me help you?”

Juniper huffed and folded her arms sullenly. “I guess,” she muttered.

Trissiny sighed. “All right. Gabriel! The gold one, right there.”

Gabe, too, swiftly took his target down using only his wand—the new one he’d been awarded from the maze level. It took him more than one shot, but all three of his hit the pawn in the right general area on its head, the third causing it to collapse. He grinned at the applause of the others, bowing.

Shaeine dispatched her foe by stalling its forward bouncing with a shield of silver light, then raised a second one horizontally above her and slammed its razor-thin edge into the green band surmounting the pawn. The whole time, she kept her expression serene and her hands folded in the wide sleeves of her robe.

Trissiny had a bit more trouble with hers, due to the shorter reach of her weapons. Both the white pawns marked with fae green had already been taken down, so she selected one of the black ones to target. In the end, she brought it down by jumping at and kicking off one of the inert pawns, landing a perfect strike on the green band of her foe to destroy it.

“Damn, but that was excessively flashy,” Ruda said with a huge grin as soon as the cheering died down.

“Not something I’d do in most situations,” Trissiny agreed, smiling. “These things really are extraordinarily simple, though. They don’t actually attack in any meaningful way. All right, Ruda! Fross!”

“What?” the pixie asked, swooping overhead in confusion. “Both of us?”

“I’ve been giving this some thought,” said Trissiny, sheathing her blade. “I want you two to start operating as a unit when we’re in hostile situations.”

“Think I need my hand held?” Ruda asked with sudden, deadly calm.

“Don’t do that,” Trissiny shot back. “You know very well I respect your capabilities; we all do. We’ve seen you fight, and most of this group owes their lives to your ingenuity.”

“There was also that time she stabbed Gabriel,” Juniper said helpfully.

“Fucking,” said Gabe, holding up one finger. “She fucking stabbed me. Let’s be precise about this.”

Trissiny cleared her throat loudly. “Anyway. Ruda, you are devastating in hand-to-hand combat and improving all the time. That sword of yours is useful to counter magic. However, the fact is that you’re the only member of this group without some kind of magical defense; you’ll be the most prone to injury.”

“Fuck that,” Ruda snorted. “I get hurt less than Gabe. And yes, Gabriel, I know what you’re about to say. Even disregarding that one time it was me doing it, how often have you gotten injured?”

“The fact that you don’t get hurt much is another reason nobody doubts your fighting skill,” Trissiny said firmly. “The truth is still what it is, however. There is absolutely no shame in not being the strongest. You saw the difficulty I had taking down my pawn just now? That doesn’t mean I’m any less skilled, it means I was facing a specific situation in which my skill set left me with a handicap. I have to be frank, Ruda, any of us could kill you in a fight if we had to. Except probably Toby.”

“Hey!” he protested.

“She’s about as good as you are in combat and that sword would pierce your shields,” Trissiny said to him. “Which, again, doesn’t reflect poorly on you. It’s just that—”

“All right, all right!” Ruda exclaimed. “Point made, you can quit fuckin’ harping on it already!”

Trissiny nodded to her, then turned to the pixie. “And Fross… You are an extremely effective combatant on your own. However, our purpose here is in learning to fight as a group, and in that area, you cause some problems.”

“I do?” Fross asked in a small voice. “…sorry.”

“This isn’t recrimination,” Trissiny said kindly. “Not of anyone; we’re finding areas where we need to improve and addressing them. In your case, the issue is that people fighting as a unit need to know one another’s positions, capabilities and tendencies very well in order to rely on them without having to think or question. That is the essence of fighting together. Your very mobility undercuts that, Fross. On the boar level, the ice you laid down to trip them was as much of a hazard to us as to the enemy. We never knew where it would appear or where to safely step; having to watch our feet that carefully while fighting was a serious handicap. Anchoring you to Ruda will help the group to anticipate where you are and what you’ll be doing.”

“It will also help an enemy to predict those same variables,” Shaeine said quietly.

“That’s true,” Trissiny agreed, nodding. “In my opinion, for the purpose of this discussion, the advantages outnumber the drawbacks. If anyone disagrees, though, I’m quite open to discussion.”

“Um,” said Fross, “before we get to any discussion, can you just tell us what you had in mind?”

“Of course. If you stay near Ruda and make it your priority to assist her, you both gain several advantages. Ruda is an excellent tactician; if you get in the habit of following her directives, you’ll be a lot more effective in general against an enemy, even aside from being a more reliable member of the group. Working together, you two gain the ability to fight both in close quarters and at long range, which is something none of the rest of us alone can match. Shaeine’s shields have a limited offensive role and Gabriel just isn’t very good at hand-to-hand. And, of course, you have magical defenses that can help keep her safe when we face things that don’t have the courtesy to attack using mundane methods. Is that clear to everyone?”

“For the record,” said Gabriel, “I’m getting better at fighting.”

“Yes, you are,” Trissiny agreed with a smile and a nod, “but you’re still the least effective fighter in the group without your wands. Gabe, don’t pout. Remember what I said? No one is throwing stones, here. We can all stand to learn.”

“Yeah?” Ruda folded her arms. “And what is it you’re gonna learn, since we’re all on allegedly equal footing here?”

“Nothing I’m likely to be able to pick up down here,” Trissiny replied, frowning, “though I have been giving that serious thought. For one thing… I think Toby and I both need to work on our abilities with divine shields. If three of us could do what Shaeine does, the group’s options increase greatly. Even assuming we won’t get as good at it as she is, which I think is a safe assumption. Shaeine has clearly put a great deal of work and practice into her shielding skills.”

“That is true,” the drow said. “And I would be glad to teach you what I know. To the best of my knowledge, the different sources of our power should not make a great difference; the type of energy is the same, and my techniques ought to work for you. It does take a considerable investment of effort, however. I would not expect either of you to master remote shielding during this exercise.”

Trissiny nodded to her. “In addition, I’m realizing that my training hasn’t made the best use of my own capabilities. I was always trained as a human, but the truth is, I’m half elf. I have more innate agility than strength, and I’m using a combat style which has opposite priorities. That’s a weakness. I also don’t make very effective use of my magic; elves can channel more energy safely, which is a potential asset I’ve left almost completely undeveloped. I think if you’ll all consider these questions, each of you will find something you could be doing to make yourselves more effective in a fight—even if you don’t care to do actual fighting. Having dedicated healers and defenders is a great asset to the group.”

She let the silence hang for a long moment, watching their expressions; though Fross was of course unreadable, they all appeared to be considering her words.

“There’s another thing,” Trissiny went on more quietly. “All of us who use magic of any kind need to learn the Circle of Interaction techniques that enable us to draw power from whichever school is vulnerable to our own. We have fairies, demons, light-wielders and a mage. Many of us are relatively untrained, magically speaking, but most happen to have considerable reservoirs of pure energy. Being able to donate it, so to speak, to another member of the group at need is simply a more effective use of our resources. Don’t you agree?”

At that, everyone but Shaeine frowned, glancing uncertainly around at each other, but no one offered any objection.

“Anyway,” Trissiny went on more briskly. “Fross, Ruda, you’re up. White pawn, red band, there on the end.”

She had been somewhat nervous about this prospect, and had considered whispering a warning which Shaeine would certainly have been able to hear. In the end, though, Trissiny followed her instinct, which told her that the best thing she could do was have faith in her classmates. Besides, if Ruda and Fross got in a really desperate situation, Shaeine or Toby would probably intercede unprompted.

They took the longest to bring down their target, and forced the others to move out of the way several times, but after several false starts Ruda and Fross clicked together. The pixie arrested the pawn’s advance with a waist-high ice block, peppering it with little bursts of sleet to keep it focused on her, while Ruda positioned herself behind it. A quick burst of levitation from the mage brought her up high enough to stab its vulnerable band. Though the rapier wasn’t aligned with any particular school of magic, its energy-blocking qualities appeared to do the trick; one good thrust and the pawn collapsed in a wash of gravel and dust.

“And there we are,” Trissiny said approvingly when the approbations had died down. “Everybody knows how to handle themselves. Now for the hard part.”

Gabriel groaned. “I hate the hard part.”

“Gabe, do you even know what the hard part is?”

“I don’t need to know! It’s the hard part! That’s always the worst part!”

Trissiny rolled her eyes. “Juniper, Vadrieny, come stand by me, please.”

They did so, and she turned to face the others. “All right. With time and exposure, we will work up various formations, strategies and tactics for a variety of situations. For now, though, we don’t really have the time, nor can we spare the energy, so I’m going to lay out a basic formation for us. To begin with, this is our front line. Paladin, dryad, archdemon. We’re relatively hard hitters, but more to the point, all three of us are resilient. Toby, Shaeine, behind us, please.”

She waited till they were in position before continuing. “You two are support. Shields and healing. Toby, you’re going to be a little under-utilized for the time being, as your healing would actually be harmful to a lot of the group.”

“All the more reason for me to work on those shields,” he said with a grin.

“Just so,” she agreed, nodding approvingly. “Ruda and Fross, left flank. Gabriel, right. You guys are our long-ranged attackers, with the added factor that Ruda is also extremely effective at short range. I don’t want you to get too married to the idea of being on the left or right; until Gabe’s melee skills are significantly improved, he needs to focus exclusively on shooting, while Ruda and Fross stay mobile and head in where they can do damage up close. Fross, that goes double for you; your ice abilities are excellent crowd control. You two are our battlefield superiority. Your job is to keep the enemy where we need them, and take them down.”

“Fuck yes,” Ruda said, grinning.

“That means this isn’t going to be a tight formation,” Trissiny continued, turning and stepping back out of the designated front line to keep everyone in her field of view. “Shaeine and Toby need to be able to see what’s going on; Ruda and Gabe need space to move so they can reposition themselves as needed. The three of us in front need to be able to rotate; the person taking point will depend on what we’re facing. This is going to be every bit as steep a learning curve for me as the rest of you, guys; an adventuring party’s tactics are nothing like a Legion phalanx. So we’re going to start slow, start careful, and learn as we go. The perfect place to begin is here, with these chessmen. These guys are practice. All right, form up, facing the white ranks! I’m going to activate the remaining pawns.”

“All of them?” Juniper demanded, wide-eyed.

“We can do this,” Trissiny said, pouring conviction into her voice. “We have the capability; we only have to get a handle on it. I believe in every one of you, and the potential of what we can be together. Now form up and get ready.”

At that moment, there came a sharp musical jangle and flash of light from across the room. The sign indicating the path to Level 8 lit up, and a treasure chest popped into being below it.

“Well,” said Gabe after the group had stared wordlessly at this for a couple of seconds, “I guess someone approves of your coaching, Triss.”

“Ignore that,” Trissiny said grimly. “Eyes on the enemy, people.”

She gave them a moment to get positioned and focused.

“Now!”

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