Depths of Madness td-1

by Erik Scott De Bie

  "Ruukthalmuramaxamin issss not cruel," the sharn said. "You and he remain here, my guesssstssss until you go."

  So those are the stakes, Twilight thought. She did not know how long a sharn could live, but fancied it would prove much longer than her own span.

  "What if Gestal kills us? Will you release them, or keep them as prisoners?"

  The sharn answered instantly, having already considered that. "No use for them," it said. "They go free."

  "Your word?" she asked. Gargan looked at Twilight as though she had lost her mind, but she did not react.

  The sharn growled, hissed, and spat at her, all at once with three heads. A spasm shook its body, and rune-shaped veins stood out on its black torso. It wrenched its heads toward her and bowed. "My word bindssss," it said. "My word given."

  "All of them go free?" she asked, her heart speeding up.

  "Both them."

  A weight pressed upon Twilight's chest, then, and she would have fallen had not Gargan reached out strong arms to steady her. In one three-pronged syllable, the sharn had told her that Liet might live, yet his chance was only two in three.

  "Which?"

  "Those whom order definessss," said the sharn. It spat the word "order" with another gob of the blackish blood.

  Twilight's mind raced. Surely that included Davoren-he was vile, yes, but predictably vile, to a fault. And devils had created the most rigid hierarchy in the multiverse outside the planes of law and clockwork. So that was one. One other…

  Was it Slip or Liet?

  Twilight closed her eyes and swore inwardly. What did it matter? She owed it to both of them, and if she might save one… she preferred Liet.

  It was not that she felt remorse. Twilight had never had much use for morality. Foolish concepts like right and wrong fell before necessity, in every instance. Two things she understood, though, were weakness and shame, and her cheeks colored in both.

  What kind of monster could have wished the sweet halfling dead in that moment? One with black hair, pale skin, and eyes that seemed gold-red in the light of heavy magic.

  Oh, Liet.

  "Release one of them now," Twilight said.

  The sharn glared at her with something much like surprise, mingled with a goodly amount of outrage. "Who, why, what?"

  "The one called Liet Sagrin. If you release him, we will-"

  Ruukthalmuramaxamin's mouths curled downward, and she would have fancied it confused. "No and no."

  "Why not?" She cursed the desperation in her voice.

  "No and no," the sharn warned.

  Heedless of the pain she knew was coming, Twilight opened her mouth to argue, but Gargan caught her arm in a hard grip.

  She hissed at him, but the goliath ignored her.

  "What is Gestal?" he rumbled.

  "Powerful priesssst," said Ruuk. "Demon-priesssst."

  A demon thrall. Twilight's eyes narrowed. A servant of chaos in darkness, then, even as Davoren had been a servant of order, of a fiendish sort. But was not the sharn born of chaos? Did he not possess the very powers this Gestal worshipped? Why…?

  "Why do you not face him yourself?" asked Twilight. "He must be mighty indeed, for surely you-"

  Then the sharn eyed her with a look that stole more of her breath than when he had nearly killed her at a glance. Not only did her head explode in agony, but her throat closed of its own accord and she staggered. Gargan reached out and caught her, and she didn't have the strength to fight him off.

  "Do not quesssstion!" Ruuk roared. "Agree! Agree or die!"

  Barely able to breathe, Twilight coughed. "Well," she said. "Then we… agree."

  The sharn hissed, spat, and clucked in what must have been approval. Twilight assumed it must, for she was still alive a breath later.

  "Here." Its mood changed utterly. "Take," the sharn said most amiably, as though offering them tea.

  One of its arms stabbed into the air, through reality, to extend through a silvery portal before them. In the palm was a pair of crimson boots, which appeared to be sized for a human.

  Completely inexplicable, Twilight thought as she put them on. It didn't occur to her to refuse. The boots adjusted themselves to fit her feet.

  "And thissss." A silvery window opened in reality and a black hand extended through it. It dropped a sack that smelled glorious to her.

  Twilight yanked open the pouch. It was filled with dried strips of meat and bread that smelled of corn. Also inside was an oiled paper packet with some sort of honey-Twilight wondered if it came from the abeil. She took a hunk of bread and two pieces of meat for herself, then offered the food to Gargan, who accepted it silently.

  Another of Ruuk's hands offered a wineskin filled with a drink that tasted sweet, like some manner of fruit, with a distinctive, odd taste Twilight recognized as a sort of mushroom. Rarely had she tasted the wine of the Underdark, and unlike most elves, she enjoyed it. Gargan refused it, but the sharn offered him a waterskin instead.

  Emboldened by the sharn's hospitality, she spoke up. "One question," she said. "If it please you, great lord."

  There was a long pause. She reasoned she could take their continued existence for a yes.

  "Why don't you… destroy him?" she asked. "You are so much… more powerful than us. Why us?"

  "Hissss issss magic chaossss," Ruuk said. "Centuriessss millennia agessss ago, Ruukthalmuramaxamin wassss curssssed. Musssst sssstay. Power mine."

  For the first time, it didn't occur to Twilight to respond. She sat, rapt.

  "Negarath wassss a city of the mad," Ruuk said. "Inverted, floating upsssside down, buildingssss of curvessss, archessss, twisssstssss, with disssstorted creaturessss on dissssplay. Flayed mind flayerssss, ghosssstssss of elementalssss, demonssss of celesssstia, angelssss of outer darknessss."

  "And a mad prisoner," Twilight stammered. "A sharn cursed to order."

  "And dying!" Ruuk said. The sound was so loud that the temple shook. "Body failing, order rotting. Godssss of chaossss have turned away, abhorrent."

  "Then help us," Twilight said. "Break free-" Her head burst and she sank again.

  Even as her senses fled in pain, her half-mad mind perceived a certain kind of logic in the sharn's gift. It had threatened them, made them used to being threatened, then thrown them off balance. Its "random" actions apparently followed a set order.

  The three heads spoke at once, but said three things. "Not free. No cure. No help." Then they joined together. "Ssssink to risssse. Kill Gesssstal or die!"

  Hands lifted her and her feet scrabbled across the stone.

  She looked up, and it was Gargan lifting her. "We go," the goliath said.

  The sharn's hands blazed with golden magic, and arms reached from portals around them. Then the world shuddered to a halt, burned away as though scribed on parchment. They felt a sensation of falling, and then they were elsewhere.

  Gods-only-knew how long later, Twilight stirred. Darkness had become her world, but that was easily remedied. She opened her eyes and perceived flickering torchlight. She saw the prison where they had left Tlork.

  "We've arrived, it seems," Twilight said.

  She was glad when Gargan, completely unexpectedly, broke the silence. He was kneeling at her side. Twilight felt weary and inexplicably old. She took his hand.

  "How mighty is this creature?" Gargan asked. "This… sharn?"

  Twilight shrugged in a fatalistic way. "What little I know, I shall put by analogy," she said. "You have heard of the Seven Sisters, or the Sage of Shadowdale?"

  Gargan shook his head.

  "Thay, perhaps," she said. "All the red wizards?"

  Again.

  "The empire of Shade?"

  That got a nod. Curious.

  "Well, then," said Twilight. "All the princes of Shade would jump to do a sharn's bidding, for if they didn't, it would likely destroy a city out of whim before resuming its morning meal of the stillborn children of gods."

  "Ah." Gargan nodded hesitantly.


  There was a pause. They both sat silent, listening for any sign of an occupant other than themselves. The dungeon was still.

  "There must be another way down," she said. "If we must sink to rise, that is."

  The goliath nodded, and they stole about the prison together, hands on hilts. They plied their senses at their keenest, followed every instinct, and explored every tiny crack and crevice in the floor and walls with their fingers. Dust, bits of bone, scraps of metal, and flecks of refuse Twilight didn't want to identify obscured the cold, damp stone.

  They made their way into Tlork's chambers. The troll was not at home. All they found was a destroyed onyx griffin. Twilight resolved not to forget their hunter's strength.

  "Why did you argue?" Gargan asked suddenly, making Twilight jump.

  She slowed her heart with the exercises Neveren had taught her. "What?"

  "You argued for his 'word,' " Gargan said. "What means this?"

  "A promise. Not that I suppose it matters much to a sharn, but I would not break my word, once given." She managed to smile. "That's why I never give it."

  Gargan did not find that amusing. "You argued for something you knew to be false?" he asked. "Why?"

  "I was hoping to get him to release Liet." She hated herself for her feelings, but she was past such considerations now. "Then we could flee this place, the three of us."

  "Davoren and Slip? Would the sharn think Gestal had killed us and free them?"

  Twilight shrugged. It truly did not matter. "Wouldn't miss him," Twilight said. Then she sighed. "And she'd be regrettable. But for all we know, they're…"

  She did not finish the thought. For all they knew, Liet was dead.

  "You would shirk our duty to them?" Gargan said. "Our companions."

  Twilight waved. "Duty is overrated," she said. "I am a creature of chaos, as is the sharn. We both know this-there would be no surprise." That wasn't strictly true, but it might as well have been. She had never dealt with a sharn before, but the fact that this one was cursed made the situation even less predictable.

  At that moment, Twilight brushed away dust and some old bones and found a crease in the floor. She traced the outline of a door cut into the stone. Through the bones, fur, and filth that littered the floor, she found an old brass ring attached to the stone. Twilight twisted the ring. The stone gave a lurch and sank downward, then to the side, revealing darkness below.

  There came a sound of scuffling on stone, and Twilight looked down the hall, toward the levitating disk they had used to ascend to the crypt above. She thought she saw a flicker of movement.

  "Who?" Gargan asked, drawing his sword.

  Twilight shrugged. "We've no shortage of enemies," she said. "The sharn, or its golems. Gestal. The fiendish lizards."

  "Tlork," Gargan added grimly.

  "Darkness, don't forget the grimlocks," said Twilight. "We didn't part on the most amiable of terms."

  Nothing moved for many long breaths. Twilight left Gargan watching the darkness and looked down into the new passage. It smelled foul and radiated humidity like a tropical swamp. Where the tunnels above had been dry and dead, this new level seemed the opposite.

  A world built on opposites, Twilight thought.

  Twilight wondered why they were going down. Had not the sharn spoken of Gestal dwelling "above?" Sink to rise, she reflected.

  She put her leg down into the darkness and froze.

  With a mighty heave that broke more than a few bones, Tlork finally wrenched himself out of the sewers. As he stood in the forested street, letting limbs pop back into place and torn flesh flow back together, he cast his stitched face about, searching, just in time for the swarm of abeil to descend with spears, halberds, and stingers.

  Snarling, the troll whipped hammer and claw through the air in fury to drive off the swarm. Bee-creatures fell crushed, killed at the very touch of Tlork's weapons, but there were hundreds, and three replaced every one that fell.

  Soon, the battle was like stirring mud, trying to swat them away while they rained pain and torment all over Tlork. Abeil speared his skin, stinging and stinging like mad, and soon he could hardly focus on anything but the stabbing and cutting. His body throbbed as though a thousand hearts beat just under his skin.

  Slave, came a voice in the back of his head. Like all thoughts, his own or another's, it caused Tlork pain. Come, slave.

  As he batted another abeil out of the air to smash like a ripe plum against a distorted building, Tlork whined like a dog. "But I come so far!" he argued. "I close!"

  Come, the thought came again, to the chapel.

  Unfair. Tlork didn't like the up-down room. It always made his stomach knot. The fiend-troll gave a great, strangling cry, turned, and ran. He dived through the hole into the sewer, ignoring the pain that came when his arm splintered against the edge.

  That elf-she would pay for this. Not the pain, which Tlork had long since stopped minding, but the indecency of making him trek all the way back, even past the up-down room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Twilight stared into the dark hole. Much of this world was inverted, she mused. It was a sharn's idea of order, curves where buildings should have corners, towers that sloped downward, even upside-down stairs on the underside of ledges. She had thought herself prepared for any shift of paradigm imaginable.

  This, though, far exceeded any reasonable anticipation.

  Gargan, seeing her hesitation, crawled over the edge, holding the lip, and let go. He didn't fall. Instead, he stood on the underside of the floor, looking down at her past his feet. It was as though Twilight stood on a mirror that reflected a world not her own.

  "Come," Gargan said. "Sink to rise."

  The implications struck Twilight like a thunder blow. Damned Netherese.

  Now she knew why she had felt unsettled going into the dungeon, almost like falling. The gravity was in flux here, so close to the limits of the mythallar's field.

  That was why the ceiling of the sewer had been as stained as the floor.

  That was why half the architecture was upside down, why all the symbols of Mystra-or whatever the goddess of magic in ancient Netheril had been called-had been inverted.

  Now she knew why the sand had not fallen in from the "ceiling" of the cavern, settling instead as though along the bottom of a bowl. Gravity was reversed in Negarath, all pulling down toward the dungeon, and below it…

  All that time they thought they had been rising, they had been descending.

  Gargan watched her uncertainly, but at last Twilight swung a leg down and pushed off, climbing to her feet on the ceiling of the chamber below. She passed through an invisible barrier that made her stomach go limp before she emerged in another world, one where gravity was opposite.

  They stood in a crude tunnel sloping up from where they stood, down from the dungeon. Gone was the fine, if eccentric, carving and stonework of Negarath. The air was musty, and a faint, foul odor wafted through the tunnel. Rough steps led up.

  "Gestal should be somewhere up there-or down…"

  Twilight could not help feeling a touch disoriented, but she did her best to dismiss it. "Up. Definitely up, if Negarath is upside down, below us." Twilight's head ached.

  She noticed Gargan kneeling by the trapdoor, hand out, and narrowed her eyes. "What are you about?"

  He drew his hand back and she saw that he had placed a stone in the air. It dipped back toward the dungeon, then up toward them, then merely floated, caught in that space where gravity pulled both ways. At the innocent fascination the goliath showed in the phenomenon, Twilight smiled despite herself. "Come."

  Gargan-ever a man of few words-nodded and went with her.

  They had not gone ten paces up the tunnel when they heard a scuttling from behind, as of a rock falling to the floor. Something had disturbed Gargan's floating stone.

  The goliath was already charging back by the time Twilight had her weapon out and was pursuing him. Though her reflexes might have been the faster,
he had keener ears. With the boots from the sharn, she ran as fast as he did. They fell upon their pursuer at almost the same instant.

  There it was, five steps from the trapdoor. The shadow yelped and danced back, startled. Gargan's black sword swept aside a hastily raised mace, even as his other hand shot out and shoved its wielder over. Even as the intruder fell, Twilight lunged the intervening four paces-she loved these boots already-and rode it to earth, Betrayal at its throat.

  The shadowy figure froze and put its hands up. "Stop! Stop!" she screamed. " 'Tis me! 'Tis me!" Twilight almost drove her blade in anyway, but Gargan caught her arm and saved Billfora Brightbrows's life.

  "Slip?" Twilight asked, brow furrowing. "What are you doing here? Didn't they capture you? How did you escape?"

  The halfling stared with terror-stricken eyes. "I–I-I…" she tried, but couldn't speak with the elf pressing her lungs, and a blade lying a thumb's breadth from her jugular.

  Twilight straddled the little woman and bent low, keeping the blade still and putting her free hand on the halfling's shoulder. It would take hardly any force to push it through Slip's unarmored neck-in case it wasn't really the halfling, but a trick.

  "Speak," she commanded, and Slip did.

  "I–I got away," she said. "When those bee-things came, one o' them knocked me cold. When I woke up, I was under a toadstool. It must have broke my fall, and I was…"

  "You weren't a prisoner?" Twilight asked, her heart suddenly racing. That would mean only Davoren and Liet were Ruuk's prisoners, and that meant…

  "Uh," said Slip. Twilight heard her only distantly. "No. No, I wasn't."

  "Did you see anyone else?" Twilight asked. "Where's Liet?"

  Slip shook her head. "I didn't…"

  "Why so quick?" Gargan asked, his voice dark. There was no pain in his words, only suspicion about the one who had been his friend.

  It struck her that the earring was not translating his words to Elvish, as it must have for Taslin. Somehow, Twilight had become less than an elf-but she accepted that.