The others looked at her in amazement.
"What are you talking about?" asked Tristan.
"Why, over there ... where the light is coming from. Hey, where did it go?" Tavish looked in amazement up a side tunnel. "I swear I saw daylight in that tunnel, just a minute ago. . . . "Wait a minute!" The bard, excited, put the spectacles back on her face and looked up the passage. "Yes, I can see it! We just have to go around a corner or two, and there's a shaft of light coming through the roof! We can get out there!"
"You're looking around the corners?" asked the king, incredulous. Nevertheless, they followed the bard as she quickly led them up the passage and through a winding corridor that connected to it until they reached a hole in the ceiling. They stood in a circle, looking up at a glowering patch of gray cloud, unmistakably outside the lair.
Kamerynn held to the trail of his quarry through the growing might of the winter storm. Even when the ground upon which the hateful thing had walked became buried benea th a thick blanket of snow, the spoor of evil lay like an obscene snake across the earth.
The unicorn never hesitated nor wavered from his mission. He sensed that the killing of the thing he followed would not bring back the world he had known, would not free his beloved druids from their stony prisons. But he sensed that killing this creature was something he could do, and that had become all-important.
The trail entered the Fens of the Fallon, a region Kamerynn had rarely trod before. But now he charged forward, wading through the freezing water and boldly forcing his way through the entwining foliage. The proud spire of his horn remained upthrust before him.
Finally Kamerynn sensed the presence of the thing itself, and for the first time, he hesitated. His nostrils dilated as he searched the air, seeking confirmation of the awareness
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that seemed to penetrate directly to the depths of his soul. A great darkness lurked nearby, and all the unicorn's senses urged attack.
His mind, however, counseled caution, and so he slowed to a deliberate walk, facing the blustering wind, still holding his head high. He approached a great dead tree, its huge root duster rising before him like the gaping maw of a hungry dragon, and he knew he had found his enemy.
The beast exploded from its shelter in a snarling attack of yellow eyes and long, drooling teeth. Sharp claws raked the unicorn's flanks as Kamerynn's hooves lashed out, driving the monster backward. The creature crouched on the ground before him and then sprang again.
Wiry tentacles lashed out toward the unicorn's flanks, but he skipped aside. Kamerynn reared and kicked again, but he missed the lightning-quick body of his foe. Driving his horn downward, the proud animal thrust. Kamerynn struck only air, but at the same time he heard the clamping of mighty faws behind him. His sudden attack had thrown off the cat-beast's aim.
Once more the horn missed the black pelt, and the unicorn's blood streaked his snowy flanks. Kamerynn reared backward, crying out a shrill challenge as he fought on.
It was a fight that could only end in the dea th of one of the combatants.
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"And now we shall turn to Corwell."
"Such is the will of Bhaal." Ysalla nodded her head, the yellow skull-spines bobbing in agreement. "But first my people shall have their feast and their celebration."
"But we must make haste!" Hobarth, hissing in the language of the sahuagin, argued. He himself had already gathered a hefty sack of gold coins, not so much for his own use桯obarth had little need of material wealth梑ut because he thought it might prove useful in furthering the plan of Bhaal.
"You make haste, human. We have won a great victory, a battle we have fought for the spoils. You shall not cheat us of those spoils."
The cleric looked at the high priestess, surrounded by a rank of her own sahuagin clerics, and knew that further argument was pointless. "Very well. I shail await you at the mouth of the bay."
Hobarth was not a gentle man, nor was he burdened with a surplus of kindness, but the 'celebration' of the victorious sahuagin was a thing he had little stomach for. The sheer scale of the massacre could not help but raise glimmers of doubt and fear in his almost inhuman psyche.
Not, of course, that he would mourn the deaths of the many men, women, and children of the north who fell beneath the Claws of the Deep. Their deaths had been willed by Bhaal, and as such, Hobarth's role in bringing them about could not be questioned. These people were not necessarily enemies of Bhaal, but their existence was an
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inconvenience to his lord. Therefore their extermination should bring him joy.
But instead it raised the growing specter of fear in his soul. Bhaal's aim, of course, was to make of Gwynneth an island of death, a monument to his inhuman evil. The fact that this massacre occurred on the much smaller neighboring island of Oman could be dismissed as a diversion, or a rehearsal for the annihilation of Corwell. That kingdom, of course, would be their next target.
Yet for the first time, Hobarth wondered about his own role in his master's plan. He had been a true and devoted cleric for all of his adult life, giving all of himself for the greater glory of his god. But soon Bhaal's will would be done, and then what of Hobarth? If the god of death wanted no human life to mar his island, what would become of his unmistakably human cleric?
Grimly Hobarth shook off these doubts. He had cast his die, and he would live梠r perhaps perish梬ith the roll. Certainly he would hasten his own destruction if his master should suspect anything less than total obedience.
Thus far, Bhaal should have no complaints. Hobarth's earthquake spell, the most powerful of all his enchantments, had torn the wall from the Iron Keep. Exploiting the breach, hundreds of sahuagin had poured into the suddenly exposed castle. The dead of the sea had followed, lumbering up the steep slope and through the wide gap until the entire keep had been overrun.
Now the animated corpses lolled senselessly about the battlefield, for they depended upon the commands of Ysal-la's clerics for movement or any other action. And those clerics were now, with the rest of the sahuagin, embarked upon a frenzy of killing, eating, and looting.
This left Hobarth to worry about the next phase of the plan. Of course, it was irrational that he worry. The might of Bhaal had proven unstoppable thus far, and if the fish-men wished to revel in their victory for a night before embarking for Corwell, so be it.
Still, Corwell was an ancient kingdom, protected not just by doughty warriors but by some kind of benign and super-
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natural force. Or so it seemed. The Beast, Kazgoroth, had not been able to break the might of the kingdom. Of course, Kazgoroth could not cast the earthquake spell, and his minions had been living, breathing warriors, capable of failures of morale.
Nevertheless, Hobarth felt a strong sense of urgency, an urgency that was not shared by his allies. He took up a position at the mouth of Iron Bay, sitting upon a rocky promontory overlooking the scene of fire, chaos, and death below. He closed his eyes and prayed to Bhaal for a restoration of the spell he had cast during the battle. The recovery of the earthquake power would take most of the night, anyway, so he might as well put the time to good use.
And as always, his god Bhaal heard him and answered his prayer.
Snow spilled down the narrow hole, but the broken rock of the fallen ceiling had created a natural stairway. Tristan led the way, holding his sword in his right hand as he used his left to pull himself upward, out of the firbolg lair and onto the snow-covered ground.
"It's clear," he whispered. "Come on!"
He reached down to hoist Robyn to the ground beside him, and then the pair of them flanked the hole as Yak helped lavish, Pawldo, and Canthus up. Newt popped out under his own power, and the firbolg had no difficulty lifting himself from the underground labyrinth.
They emerged into a landscape of black and white梑lack where the trunks of the dead trees towered from the snow, stark against the gray sky, and white everywhere else. The snow had stopped falling, but the wintery blanket covered the ground to a depth of a foot or more.
"The deathbirds are gone, or else they're still watching the entrance. Let's make some time!" Tristan started to move away from the ruins and suddenly stopped short. He looked up toward the gray sky, but the overcast gave no hint of the sun's location. "Which way is north?" he wondered aloud.
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Robyn, directly behind him, looked around at the bleak forest, lavish, meanwhile, pulled out the broken spectacles, perched them on her nose, and looked at the sky. "Just as I thought! These glasses let me see things as they really are! It's really quite remarkable. For example, I can tell you that the sun is over there. That must be east, so north is that way!"
"Seems as good a guess as any," grunted the king. "Tb the north, then."
For several hours, they pushed across the snowy ground. Tristan led for a while before turning the lead over to Robyn. It proved much easier, in the snow, to follow in the exact steps of the leader, so after this they changed the order of march frequently and took turns breaking the deep snow.
The warmth of their evening camp had revitalized all of them. Though they talked little, they made steady progress, and the firbolg lair fell quickly behind them. They saw no sign of the ghastly birds and began to hope that the predators had also been left behind.
For Tristan, Daryth's death still burned like a deep wound. His own part in it seemed an act of tremendous evil. But he was now convinced that the challenge before them offered him a way to absolve himself of that guilt.
In most places, they walked among the gaunt trunks and tangled branches of the forested fen. The patches of land they encountered now seemed larger than those of the previous day.
An unlikely benefit of the cold temperature became apparent the first time their path took them from one of the hummocks of land back into the wetlands of the fens. The cold temperatures had frozen the water, in most places creating a layer of ice thick enough to walk on. In these cases, they put Yak in the rear of the party, since the firbolg's weight always caused the ice to give way. The rest of them made it across several such icy patches with little worse than an occasional wet foot.
Tristan took over the lead after one such stretch, looking behind at the plainly visible path they left in the snow. "I
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hope those birds are too stupid to follow a trail," he said to Robyn as she stood aside to let him pass.
"I'm afraid not." She pointed to the sky, and his heart sank as he saw a soaring shape wheeling just below the level of the low clouds. It was soon joined by another, then several more.
"They're pretty far away," he said hopefully.
"But I think they're coming this way."
The king started breaking trail with a vengeance, as if he hoped they could outdistance the awful creatures, but more and more of the flock appeared in the sky. Though they did not chase the companions with any apparent urgency, it was clear to the companions that the deathbirds were getting closer.
"What will we do once we're past the fens?" asked Robyn, bringing up a question Tristan had avoided thinking about. "Can we stick to the forests and keep them off our heads there?"
"I doubt it. The woods are too open to provide much of an obstacle. "We might be forced to fight them," said the king, without much hope. They all knew the odds of such a fight were grim.
Right now he faced a more immediate problem, as he hacked a network of dead vines out of the way and pushed himself through a tangle of trees, only to stop short.
"What do we do now?" he groaned, gesturing to the obstacle he had discovered.
Before them, neatly bisecting their path, stretched a steep-sided gorge that had once been a riverbed. The bottom was only about twenty feet below them, but the smooth, rocky sides offered few promising handholds. Snow lined the bed of the gorge, revealing the tops of huge boulders. On the far side, they could see well beyond the fens, for the ground rolled away uninterrupted by trees or any other cover, descending gradually to the north. In the distance, unfrozen and dark, sprawled the polluted expanse of Myrloch.
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Yazilliclick squeezed his eyes shut. He felt the grip of massive claws on his shoulder and waited to be killed. And waited some more. Still nothing happened.
He began, without peeking, to take stock of his surroundings. He could hear the deep, raspy breathing of some creature beside him. A warm, smoky smell filled the air, and he thought he detected the scent of meat roasting on a fire. Indeed, he could hear it sizzling.
Against all his attempts to stifle it, his belly rumbled from hunger. Of course, he reminded himself, that wouldn't matter after this horrible beast had killed him. And still he waited, and still he wasn't killed.
Daringly he decided to sneak one eye open a tiny crack. He peeped from beneath the trembling lid and caught sight of a huge warty nose, flanked by a pair of beady eyes. A troll! Immediately he squeezed his eyes shut, and he once again waited to be killed.
"Well? Why'd ya nock?" The gruff voice, propelled by a burst of unimaginably bad breath, rumbled in his ears. He didn't dare move, or speak, or look, or anything.
"Woke me up, ya did! Banging on the gate, you wuz桰 heard ya!"
"G-Gate?" The sprite dared another look at the thing. "Gate to what?"
"Why, to Faerie! You is a stoopid one, ain'tcha?"
"Y-Yes, I mean, n-no! I m-mean, I didn't knock梔idn't knock. I am stupid, though. You're right梤ight!"
Yazilliclick looked up hesitantly at the troll again. The creature's green skin was covered with warts, and it towered over the faerie, even as it squatted before him. In size, it nearly equaled a firbolg.
It was much skinnier, however, with spindly arms and legs that looked awkward and frail. The sprite knew they were lined with supple sinews far stronger than any human's, however. The great, hooked nose wagged menacingly at him, and those gleaming, incongruously tiny eyes fixed him with a baleful glare.
"Did ya wants in or out? I kin pitch ya back out if ya wants!"
