“One moment,” he said. He was certain the Door was there; visions did not lie, though it was possible that he had not understood what he’d seen. He fought down his sudden panic at that thought, and carefully pronounced his seeing spell, weaving his hands in the precise mystic passes of the casting.
The murk of the room lightened before his eyes, and the original shape of the ruined paintings and tapestries became clear to him. He had no attention to spare on the room’s ruined splendor, though-before him, revolving slowly in the air, a spiral of dancing silver light shimmered with ancient magic.
“Morthil’s Door,” he breathed.
It was there, as his vision had predicted, simply hidden from hostile eyes by the star elf’s old wards.
Araevin stepped forward, admiring the artistry of the ancient spell, but then he heard something strange. From the shadows overhead came a soft, fluttering, piping sound like the quick trill of a flute, followed by an odd crumpling or dull snapping beat. Araevin froze and stared up at the dark galleries in the top of the chamber, searching for the source.
“Beware!” cried Nesterin. “The nilshai come!”
The black hallways leading into the chamber erupted with the twisting blue-black forms of the alien nilshai, darting and swooping as they poured into the room. In the space of five heartbeats a dozen of the monsters appeared in the darkness, burbling and calling to one another in their weird piping voices.
Maresa’s crossbow snapped, and one nilshai balled up in a dark tangle in midair, shrieking in anguish around the quarrel embedded in its wormlike body. Ilsevele and Jorin began to fire as well, sending arrow after arrow up at the creatures. But the nilshai were not so easily driven off. Two of the creatures flared their wings and hovered, stabbing down at Araevin and his companions with brilliant bolts of lightning. Araevin leaped aside and rolled on the flagstones, his cloak smoking from a shower of hot sparks, and the rest of his companions scattered.
He found his knees and hurled a blazing fireball up into the middle of the chamber. A great burst of crimson flame blossomed overhead with a frightful roar, blackening the old tapestries and sloughing the gray mold from the walls. Nilshai reeled wildly and shrilled in anger, but before Araevin had even climbed to his feet the monsters resumed their attack. One struck at Donnor with some kind of illusionary threat that only the Lathanderian could see. The human knight cried out in dismay and began to fend off an imaginary attacker with desperate parries of his heavy blade, backing across the hall and leaving his companions to fend for themselves. Another of the monstrous sorcerers created a whole writhing nest of blind, sucking lampreylike maws right at Nesterin’s feet, and the star elf battled furiously to pluck the slavering mouths from his limbs as the things fastened themselves on him. “Get them off me!” he shouted.
Arrows hissed in the darkness, and more nilshai trilled in pain or lunged out with their awful magic. Araevin spied one of the monsters hovering back out of the fight, engaged in a great summoning spell that it was completing with fearsome quickness.
I don’t want to see what it’s trying to conjure up there, he decided.
He threw out his hand and barked the words of a powerful spell, and before the nilshai finished its terrible conjuration a great golden hand materialized around it. The giant-sized fist closed around the monster, cutting off its spell and crushing the flying worm against the far wall, slowly grinding the life from the thing.
Araevin whirled to look for a new foe, but another of the nilshai seized his body in a telekinetic grip and hurled him into the air. He heard Ilsevele shout in terror, and the room spun end-over-end. As quick as he could, Araevin began a flying spell to save himself from the fall, but he was too slow-he hit the cracked flagstones with a bone-jarring impact before he finished. His skull bounced on the stone floor, and everything went black for a long, cold moment.
Damn, he thought. They’re quick.
He started to fight his way back up through the darkness to his battling comrades, distant and strangely high above him. With a groan Araevin managed to roll over onto his elbows and knees, and pushed himself upright. His head swam and his left arm dangled at his side with a searing hot pain burning in his forearm.
He staggered to his feet and pointed his wand at the first nilshai he could see, barking out the command word for the device. A terrible shriek of tortured air split the darkness as the frightful blue bolt of disruption ripped the ancient hall, bursting one of the nilshai asunder and tearing the wing from another one behind the first. Araevin whipped around to blast at another one of the aerial sorcerers, but he missed the creature-in the blink of an eye it simply vanished from sight, teleporting away.
All around him, the sounds of battle slowly faded. He looked around, and realized that the nilshai had broken off the fight, fleeing back into the black depths of the old tower. Half a dozen of the monsters lay crumpled on the dark flagstones around the party, some burned, some riddled with arrows and bolts, one hacked into pieces.
“They ran off!” Maresa cried. “Come on back whenever you’re ready, you foul flying slugs!”
“Is everybody all right?” Ilsevele asked. She straightened up, still searching the dark galleries overhead for any sign of the flying monsters.
Araevin glanced around. Nesterin bled freely from the ugly sucker bites on his legs and arms, and Jorin was hunched over, his clothes smoking from the lightning bolts the nilshai had thrown. But they all seemed alive, and no one terribly hurt. He looked down at his left arm. His hand trembled and ached when he tried to close his fist.
“I think I broke my arm,” he said.
Donnor Kerth sheathed his sword and came over to examine his hand. “So it seems,” the Lathanderian agreed. He chanted a healing prayer, setting one big hand firmly over Araevin’s injured arm, and the hot ache faded somewhat. “It will trouble you some for a day or two, but you should be able to use it now,” Kerth said.
“Thank you,” said Araevin. He flexed his arm and made a fist. It hurt, but not as badly as before.
“Now what, Araevin?” asked Ilsevele. “Where do we go from here?”
“Morthil’s Door,” Araevin replied. He spoke a few arcane words, and revealed the floating aura for his companions to see. Nesterin’s eyes widened in wonder. “What I’m looking for is in there.”
“Do what you came here to do, and do it quickly,” Jorin advised. “The damned nilshai might return at any time.”
“Go ahead, Araevin,” Ilsevele said. Her bow was still in her hand, and she shook the hair out of her eyes. “We will stand watch.”
“I will be as quick as I can,” Araevin promised. He turned to face the revolving cloud of silver lights in the room’s center. It, too, was a portal of sorts. He whispered the words of an opening spell. The nimbus of magic slowed its turning, and grew brighter, so bright that his companions could make it out even without Araevin’s help.
Without waiting, Araevin stepped into the gleaming spiral of magic. At once he felt himself carried away, lifted up into a marvelous chamber of streaming mist and translucent walls, a ghostly room that hovered in the air above the black courtyard. His companions stared at him in amazement, but they were dim and indistinct. He suspected that he’d become nothing more than a spectral blur of himself when he entered Morthil’s Door, at least to the eyes of any who waited outside. But within the ghostly chamber, he felt completely solid. He glanced down at his hands, and found that his body had indeed grown somewhat translucent. He could see the lightless hall outside through his own garments and flesh.
Some sort of extradimensional space, he decided. Araevin was familiar with spells of the sort, though he had never studied any of them at length, and hadn’t heard of any that endured as long or as perfectly as Morthil’s evidently had. He turned his attention to the chamber’s contents, and as he did so he felt himself drift farther into the ghostly walls. The world outside faded to a dull dark smear obscured by misty walls beneath his feet, and the ghostly chamber grew more substantial. Spectral shelves and tomes began to appear all around him, the secret library Morthil had preserved in the ethereal matrix so long ago.