Yeva was kneeling on the ground, one hand reaching toward Anusha. She was steaming. Dissolving!
Anusha dashed back to her companion, allowing her sword to fade so she could throw both hands around Yeva.
The moment they touched, Yeva sighed, and her image returned to solidity.
Yeva said, "I summoned the storm's lance with psionic will. Apparently to my detriment."
Anusha nodded. It made her stomach convulse to realize Yeva's existence was so tenuous. But she said, "You were incredible! They would have got us if you hadn't knocked the watcher out of the air with your magic."
Yeva allowed herself a social smile at Anusha's words.
She said, "Psionics, not magic. Just like the mental powers you harness, I believe."
"Right," said Anusha, not certain she agreed, but unwilling to gainsay the woman who obviously knew something of the mind's functions. And really, did it matter what the source of their abilities was, so long as they worked?
"We need to find the exit," said Anusha. "Something terrible is going on here. Some sort of rousing. The yellow one was afraid we might interfere. All I want to do is leave. I don't think we want to be here when whatever the Elder is wakes up."
Yeva climbed to her feet, accepting Anusha's help again. Then she pointed, concern widening her eyes.
The swarm of flitting aboleths over the yellow corpse had moved toward the two women while they talked. One aboleth, a gray-green specimen with more tentacles than the others, hovered only twenty feet away, its three crimson eyes scanning.
Anusha clapped a hand over her mouth, then leaned to Yeva's ear. She whispered, "Even if they can't see us, they can hear us. We need to move!"
The women retreated toward a massive opening in the chamber's far wall. They walked rapidly, but quietly. The swarm didn't follow, though the gray-green one surged forward to land only a few feet from where they'd last stood, slapping its damp tentacles around as if hoping to flush out invisible prey.
The opening in the wall wasn't so much a tunnel mouth as an elongation of the chamber, one that began a shallow turn up and to the left like the bottom end of a tightly wound, but thick, hollow coil.
They left behind the aboleth ritual chamber poised over the alien orrery.
A mucous light suffused everything. The rocky floor, walls, and even ceiling were thick with eroded protuberances like granite obelisks worn down to nubs only two or three feet tall, though others reached five or six times that height. Here and there, icy stretches of condensed memory clung to the corridor in ragged patches. Anusha and Yeva gave those a wide berth as they ascended the sloping, gradual curve. Shallow pockets were common in the massive passage, creating hollows some ten feet on a side. Some were empty and dry. Others contained residual slime stinking of rotten fish. Most, however, were filled with a syrupy mass of fluid in which the shape of an unmoving aboleth lay ensheathed.
"Many monsters sleep here, but they are waking," said Yeva. She pointed to an empty but slime-slicked hollow.
Anusha nodded, distracted. Her eyes constantly scanned for an exit. Would she know it if she saw one?
Also, she was conscious of a new sensation.
She turned to Yeva. "Do you feel that? A kind of… I can't quite describe it. A current? As if we're walking in a shallow stream in the direction it's flowing?"
Yeva cocked her head. "Now that you say it… Yes. It is a psychic undertow."
"What's that?"
Yeva shrugged. "It is a force akin to what allows lodestones to draw iron filaments, I suppose. But what we're feeling draws minds."
"Wouldn't the psychic attraction be in the opposite direction, from where we escaped the expanse of frozen dreams?" asked Anusha. "I thought that was where my mind had refocused. If this 'undertow' leads away from the ice, maybe we should allow it to sweep us up? Maybe it'll tumble us out of this nightmare!"
Yeva gave her a doubtful, sidelong glance and said, "I would advise against trying that. Of course, you're right, up to a point. For centuries, stray dreams were swept up and apparently lodged within the expanse we escaped.
However, if the Eldest is waking, then its mind is reintegrating. Which means stray dreams and lost spirits may be falling directly to it now. Whereupon they will be consumed-gone forever."
Anusha's skin prickled, even though she knew full well she had no physical form.
She swallowed and said, "Then let's resist it."
"Agreed."
"Yeva, I just remembered something… When the yellow aboleth tried to snare me with its mind, it triggered some kind of vision. I saw a friend of mine traveling downward. I heard his voice. He said… he said he was coming to rescue me."
Yeva cocked a brow. "Are you sure it was a true vision?" "No. I can't be sure, but it seemed real." The woman shrugged. "Is there any reason to believe your friend-What is his name?" "Japheth."
"Japheth! All right, does Japheth have the means to come to our aid?"
"Actually, yes. He knows spells and swore a pact to an archfey who grants him many odd abilities."
Yeva said, "Hmm. Perhaps your vision is a true one. He swore a pact, you say? I've heard tell of such things."
Anusha nodded. "And he has a cloak that's bigger on the inside than out. I don't really understand how it works."
For the first time, Yeva actually seemed encouraged. "Perhaps he could devise a new body for me… if he's truly on his way."
"Let's act as if he is," Anusha said. "Which is another reason to find an entrance-so we can meet him."
"Either way, our immediate goal is the same," said Yeva.
The women renewed their upward slog. The vast tunnel, roughly tubelike, continued its gradual rise. They wound their way around putrid aboleth burrows and pillars.
A churning, bubbling sound drew their attention. They turned in time to witness a previously sleeping aboleth surge from its hollow, spraying goo in a wide radius. It lay on the floor for several moments, its sides heaving and its tentacles writhing.
"Should I kill it with my sword?" Anusha whispered.
"Let's see what it does. It's not yellow."
The aboleth finally rolled onto its stomach. Its tongue rasped out of its tri-slit mouth and tasted the floor. Then it began to move. Half primeval fish, half enormous slug, the creature skated forward on a bed of mucus, up the shallow spiral.
Anusha got her stomach under control. She whispered, "All right, we'll follow it."
Yeva said, "Not that we have any other way to go."
It was true enough. But Anusha hoped there was more to this city of Xxiphu than a long coil of aboleth- hollowed tunnel from bottom to top. There must be an exit. How else could the creatures come and go?.They paced the aboleth, keeping about a city block's worth of distance between them and it. The creature slid forward like a snail moving nightmarishly fast. Sometimes it paused to touch a tentacle against a protruding obelisk. When it did, purple light flared at the obelisk's tip. Then the aboleth continued, leaving behind a flamelike flicker of purple.
Anusha said, "I wonder what it's doing."
"Perhaps it is setting lights to encourage its still sleeping siblings to wake and join it."
Anusha grimaced. "What else can you tell me about Xxiphu and the Eldest? You seem to know a lot about this place."
"I am not of Faerun, or even Toril. I come from a higher realm where knowledge of ancient things is not wholly forgotten. But even so, Xxiphu is an obscure topic. I know only what I once read in a crumbling scroll during a brief visit to the House of Knowledge."
Anusha had never heard of the House of Knowledge. She glanced forward to make certain their furtive conversation wasn't being noted by the aboleth. So far, so good. She said, "What did the scroll say?"
"I was searching dusty lore to learn more about illithids, not aboleths. Still, it caught in my memory, for its oddness. Written in Deep Speech, the scroll proclaimed an Abolethic Sovereignty once attempted to rule your world but was foiled. The text described a colossal thing sleeping in darkness. A nasty, terrible, many-handed, and manyeyed monster. The passage indicated its massive bulk was the result of great age. It never ceased growing, inch by inch, year by year, and century by century. Even millennium by millennium."