Maresa glanced down to check herself, as if she expected that not all of her would have made the trip. Then she grunted in satisfaction and said, “Well, we’re here. What next?”
Araevin quickly took his bearings. The citadel was really three distinct spires in one structure, winding around each other as if they had grown out of the ground in that form. About halfway up the height of the central spire, one of the two smaller ones branched off and soared out as a hanging minaret. The other, the one Araevin and his friends stood on, branched out a little bit higher. The whole edifice spurned the earth below, boldly leaping out over dizzying drops below with the support of long, slender buttresses. Beneath their feet loomed a drop of two hundred feet or more.
“This way,” he said, and he led his friends to the doorway close at hand.
The archway was guarded by a warding symbol, glowing red with malevolent magic. Araevin studied it for a moment and framed a negating spell to suppress it while they passed. Inside the spire, he found a chamber finished in red marble with gold veins. A broad stair circled up to the floor above, and another led below. The room was appointed as a conjury of some kind, with summoning diagrams inscribed on the floor and shelves filled with scrolls of sallow parchment.
The third shard whispered to him from somewhere above. Araevin started for the stairs leading up-but then Nesterin hissed in alarm. “There’s a devil following us!” the star elf said. He stood by the archway leading outside, peering back the way they had come. “It’s alighting on the balcony…”
Maresa drew her rapier and melted into the wall beside the archway. Nesterin and Jorin backed up, readying their bows, while Donnor found the best cover he could on the opposite side of the archway from Maresa and hefted his broadsword. Araevin found a good place in an alcove along the far wall… but then he heard a hissing, scrabbling sound coming from the downward stairs to his left. He looked down just as a trio of chitin-plated canoloths appeared on the stair, spiky tongues lolling from their barbed snouts.
A black-scaled shadow filled the archway. It was a towering devil, easily the height of a good-sized giant, though it was lean and lanky. A bladed tail whipped anxiously behind it, and the fiend gripped a long, barbed chain in its talons. Two great, curled horns crowned its fearsome visage.
“Stupid mortals,” it gloated. “Did you think your sealing spell could hold us for long? You will soon learn-”
“Enough of this,” Jorin said.
The ranger loosed his arrow and buried the slender shaft in the thick scales over the fiend’s chest. The devil roared in pain and started toward the archer just as Maresa slipped in from the left side of the portal and skewered its hip-the highest part of the creature she could easily reach-with her rapier. The devil roared again and leaped away from her, ripping her rapier from her hands.
“Impudent insect!” the creature snarled. “I will eat your liver before your dying eyes!”
It lashed out in a blinding frenzy, whirling the huge barbed chain in its taloned hands. With one quick strike it wrapped the cruel chain around Maresa’s shins and jerked the genasi off her feet, and with the other end it smashed the bow out of Jorin’s hands. The monster wheeled and lashed its bladed tail at Donnor, striking the knight’s shield with a resounding clang that sent him staggering to his knees.
“Araevin! The stairs below!” Nesterin shouted. He gave voice to a sharp atonal song that scoured the lean monster’s side with a blast of blue power. An instant later he very nearly lost his left leg to the creature’s bladed tail as it whipped around and lashed at him, slicing through his mail as if it were paper. The star elf cried out and fell, his leg buckling.
“I know!” Araevin answered Nesterin.
The canoloths below bounded up the stairs with startling speed for creatures so large and heavy. Doubled jaws, wide enough to bite a man in two, gnashed and slavered. He snapped out the words for an ice spell, sealing the top of the stairway with a glistening white wall. The ice shuddered as the monsters below hurled their strength against it, but it held.
The horned devil glanced once at the ice sealing the stairwell then fixed its hateful eyes on Araevin. “You are the mage who tampered with the speaking stone,” it hissed. It began to gather a ball of green fire in one fist, but Donnor Kerth surged forward and laid into its black-scaled flesh with his broadsword.
“For Lathander!” the human knight shouted.
He turned and hewed at the devil’s knee, cutting its leg out from under it. The devil threw out its wings for balance-knocking Maresa off her feet again, just as she disentangled herself from the end of the chain-and hopped awkwardly, trying to stay aloft. It hammered Donnor to the ground with one spiked elbow, and flicked its chain out at Araevin in an easy motion that would have shattered his skull if he hadn’t ducked at the last instant. Instead, the chain whistled over his head and pulverized a divot of red marble out of the wall behind him.
The devil drew back for another strike, but a red-feathered quarrel sprouted behind its ear as Maresa’s crossbow thrummed. From the floor she had quietly cocked her weapon and waited for the perfect shot. The towering fiend crumpled to all fours, fumbling to pull out the bolt with one taloned hand, but that brought its head within reach of Donnor’s sword. The cleric surged up and clove the devil’s skull in two with one huge overhand swing. Black blood sizzled and smoked on the dusty ground as the creature folded.
“Well struck, Donnor,” Jorin said.
He stooped and retrieved his bow while Maresa reclaimed her rapier from the devil’s corpse. Nesterin struggled to his feet, having improvised a bandage for his wounded leg by ripping the sleeve off his shirt and binding it tightly over the cut.
“How long will your ice wall hold?” the star elf asked Araevin.
“Only a few minutes. We must move quickly now.” Araevin took a moment to cover the archway leading out to the balcony with a mass of gluey webbing, just in case the canoloths had a way to double back and climb the outside of the tower. Then he hurried to the stairs leading up. “Come on, my friends! The third shard is close.”
Bruised and battered, Araevin and his companions rushed up the curve of the stairs to the next chamber. Two clicking mezzoloths appeared on the stairway above them, iron tridents clutched in their thick talons. “Fight through them!” Araevin called. The mezzoloths raced down the steps to meet them. One hurled its trident at Donnor, who ducked under the weapon and kept going. Jorin and Nesterin shot together, their arrows transfixing that monster long enough for Donnor to bound close and cut it down. Araevin handled the other one, blasting it into flakes of smoking ash with an emerald ray of disintegration. He did not even break stride as he leaped past the wreckage of the two infernal warriors.
They came to the top of the stair, and Araevin halted in amazement. The chamber filled the entire top of the spire. Despite the black ruin that had come to the tower, it was still majestic, soaring half a hundred feet above his head. In the center of the room hovered the third shard of the Gatekeeper’s Crystal, suspended twenty feet above the floor by magic. A great shield of elemental fury enclosed the artifact-dancing bands of ruby fire, crawling arcs of blue-green lightning, spinning boulders covered in foot-long spikes of stone. The sound was indescribable as the flames roared, the lightning snapped and thundered, and the heavy stone spheres howled through their orbits.
“Selune’s starry eyes,” Maresa said. She had to shout to make herself heard over the roaring that filled the room. “There it is, all right, but how do we get it?”