Cale said, "I don't understand" and began to back off toward Jak and Magadon.
The Skull moved with him and spoke sharply in the same tongue. Before Cale could utter another reply, the Skull's eyes flared and a green ray fired from the sockets. Cale, trying but failing to sidestep the beam, instinctively brandished Weaveshear before him.
To his shock, the shadows around the sword swallowed the beam. The blade grew hot in his hand and began to shake. He felt the power contained within it, sensed its desire to be released. With nothing else for it, he pointed Weaveshear's tip at the Skull.
The green beam, interspersed with hair-fine threads of shadowstuff, blazed forth. It hit the surprised Skull between its eyes, and for a moment the creature shook violently, as if it was about to blow apart.
But it did not, and instead the Skull cocked itself curiously to the side and eyed the blade. It spoke a long string of phrases, each in a different language. Cale understood almost nothing, catching only one word that he knew: coluk, a Turmish verb meaning, "to absorb."
Behind the Skull, the battle raged on. Fire and lightning lit the cavern. The stone was awash in magical energy and blood. The Skull before Cale uttered a piercing, keening wail. A second Skull engaged in the battle turned sharply at the sound. It turned from the battle and veered toward the ledge.
Cale's heart hammered in his chest. He could not manage two Skulls.
Still holding Weaveshear between himself and the Skull, he moved nearer to Jak and Magadon, knelt, and grabbed the halfling by the cloak.
"Get up, Jak," he hissed. "Mags . .. up. Now."
With Cale's help, his two stunned companions climbed to their feet, still smoking and dazed from the fireball. The second Skull was nearly to the ledge. The first kept its impassive gaze fixed squarely on Cale.
"Riven!" Cale called, not seeing the assassin.
"Here," Riven's voice called from behind them and to their right.
Cale glanced over his shoulder to see Riven crouched against the wall, his one eye fixed on the Skull. He held throwing daggers in each hand-paltry weapons against so formidable a foe. His clothes were blackened, but he looked generally unharmed by the fireball.
"We're leaving," Cale said, speaking as much to the Skull as to his comrades. "We're leaving," he said again, but in Turmish, hoping the Skull would understand.
The Skull softly muttered something in reply. The second Skull was nearly there.
Pulling Magadon and Jak along, Cale backed toward Riven.
Mags, he projected, show me where the slaadi went.
The Skull began to mouth arcane words. The second Skull fell in beside it and joined its incantation. Cale feared that Weaveshear would not be able to absorb whatever was coming next.
Put your hand on me, Riven! Cale projected. Mags, now!
Riven grabbed a fistful of Cale's cloak as a mental image formed in Cale's brain: a smooth walled cavern with a formation of stalagmites on the right and a shallow pool. While Cale knew that teleporting in the Underdark presented danger, he had no choice. He drew the shadows around him as quickly as he could and willed them to move to the cavern-willed them to move that instant.
The Skulls' dead eyes stared holes into Cale. Their power gathered, and Cale summoned power of his own.
With alarming suddenness, a wave of incredible magical force exploded outward from the Skulls.
Cale closed his eyes against the impact. He felt a flutter in his gut, and everything went black.
CHAPTER 19
SOWING
Cale materialized in a ready crouch, Weaveshear in hand. He took a quick scan of the tunnel. It extended in both directions to the limits of his darkvision. Clusters of stalagmites stood at intervals on the uneven floor, and stalactites hung from the ceiling like drips of stone. A still pool was along the wall to the right, its dark water smeared with a gray fungal growth that floated on top. Cale had no sense of how far they were from either Skullport of the battle they'd just fled. He found the feeling disorienting, isolating.
The tunnel was silent but for their breathing. The slaadi were nowhere in sight.
"Where are we?" Jak asked.
"Somewhere in the Underdark," Cale replied. "Light, little man. Mags, find them."
Beside Cale, Jak struck a sunrod on the rocky ground. The thin shaft of alchemically treated metal rang softly off the stone and began to glow more brightly than a torch. It would last an hour or so. Jak held it aloft, illuminating the tunnel for all of them. Though Cale had not needed the sunrod to see, he welcomed its dim luminescence for the shadows it cast.
Magadon's knucklebone eyes took in the surroundings, and scoured the floor.
"Blood," the guide said.
He moved to a splotch of dark matter on the floor. Cale followed the guide's gaze and saw a large smear of black blood, intermixed with chunks of flesh and a shard of bone. The stone floor near the remains looked malformed, as though it might have melted and been reformed.
Magadon put his fingers to the blood, studied it. He rubbed the flesh between two fingers.
"Slaadi," he said. "And still damp. One of them was wounded here."
He wiped his fingers clean on his trousers.
"Which way, Mags?" Cale asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
He knew they had only moments to stop the slaadi, and they could ill afford to get the direction wrong.
Magadon studied the floor near the blood while Cale silently implored him to hurry. The guide brushed his fingers along the stone as if communing with it. He moved across the stone, stopping here and there to examine the floor more carefully.
"What is it?" Jak asked.
Magadon replied, "Scratches from their hind claws. Very faint. They must have transformed back to their natural forms." He stood and nodded down the tunnel. "They went that way."
Cale exhaled and thumped him on the shoulder.
"Let's go," he said.
They sped down the tunnel. Magadon ran at Cale's side, while Jak and Riven brought up the rear. Weaveshear still vibrated in Cale's hand and continued leaking shadows.
Not more than two hundred paces later they found a wide corridor that opened off the tunnel. Unlike the rough, natural walls of the cave, the corridor had a finished floor lined with marble. It looked like a road, or some kind of processional. It curved after a short distance, and from around the curve emanated a soft orange glow.
Weapons and holy symbols ready, Cale led them forward.
The corridor went on for only a short time after the curve before it ended, as though cut off with a knife, and opened onto a breathtaking panorama.
"Trickster's hairy toes," Jak oathed.
Cale could only agree.
They stood at the edge of the corridor, in an opening halfway up a sheer cavern wall that was easily as tall as three bowshots. A great circular cavern stretched before and below them, nearly as large as the one that contained Skullport. Within the cavern lay ruins. Toppled buildings of gray granite, impossibly thin towers of stone carved from stalactites, and collapsed temples of white marble littered the cavern's floor in a chaotic jumble. Their stone skeletons obscured the otherwise mathematically precise web of wide roads and broad avenues that once had connected the districts of the city. The ruins reminded Cale of Elgrin Fau, but instead of a necropolis of intact tombs, only one structure remained whole.
In the center of the cavern, glowing orange with power, towered an immense spire of rough gray stone like the finger of a god. It appeared unworked but for a covered cupola of metal that capped its top. Open archways yawned in the cupola, one on each of the four sides of the spire, and all of them leaking orange light. It was impossible to see within.
Tumors of clear crystal bulged here and there from the stone of the spire. A thin strip of protruding crystal, like wire around a sword hilt, wound a path from the base of the tower to a platform before the near archway in the cupola. It took Cale a moment to realize that the crystalline spiral was either a stairway or a ramp.