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"Lady Shauku?" asked Magfire. "Why call her the Yellow Lady?"

"She's yellow."

Silence.

Taurion rubbed his beard. "You, what's your name?"

"Prince."

That hadn't been one of the original names, but Taurion" let it go. "You never leave the caves. So what do you eat?"

More silence. Hanging inverted, kobolds stared at the walls and floor like naughty children.

Magfire raged, "Kill them!"

"What?" asked Adira. "Why?"

"They eat our dead!"

"How do you know? Wait!"

The warchief swung her iron spike in a vicious arc. Kobolds screamed and covered their heads. Jedit swung them aside as Adira blocked Magfire and Taurion snagged his sister's arm. Vainly he tried to shush her.

"Our scouts and warriors disappear into the castle!" shouted Magfire. In flickering torchlight her face was strained and ugly. "They never return, none of them! Their corpses are never found! So these little wretches-"

"Belay!" Adira Strongheart still blocked Magfire. "We're not finished asking questions!"

"All you'll get is lies!" Magfire's bosom heaved under her long wool shirt, seething with anger. "We should stave in their skulls and throw their carcasses into Shauku's courtyard."

"Fine idea!" retorted Adira. "Tell the enemy we've penetrated under her castle! Would you pipe down and think? It's bally lucky your tribesmen have survived this long, if you go bulling headlong into every fracas."

Abruptly Magfire rammed her palm against Adira's breastbone, nearly toppling the pirate. Only Taurion, trapping her arm, kept Adira from being smitten with lethal iron.

Magfire rasped, "You criticize my leadership? I'll kill you in single combat!"

"You pigheaded pelican!" retorted Adira. "Save it for Shauku."

Pirates and woodsfolk stirred, some hands drifting to weapons. Still clutching the kobolds, Jedit Ojanen wedged his bulk between the two women. Silence crackled and spat like the finicky birch-bark torches.

"Sister." Taurion was surprisingly mild. "Before we proceed, may I ask a few more questions of our prisoners? Any knowledge we gain aids our quest to oust Shauku."

Miraculously, the fiery Magfire backed off before her brother. Huffing and glaring, she stuffed her iron-headed spike in her belt and plunked on a boulder. Adira's mercenaries marveled at Taurion's diplomacy. The trailblazer only scratched his chest above his wolf-mask and concentrated on interrogating the enemy.

Calm and persistent, listening intently with a dash of sympathy, Taurion actually elicited some useful answers. The kobolds had lived in these caves for several of their generations, though they were short-lived and couldn't express the time in years. Lady Shauku, an archmage, had magically summoned the kobolds to tend fires. Sometimes, the trio said, when they behaved, kobolds were shifted home and exchanged for brethren. They had no idea where lay the Blue Mountains, had no concept of being near the western coast of Jamuraa. That these caves were warm and offered food contented them. Taurion gently steered around their ghoulish cannibalism. The kobolds told the truth because it was easier, and they weren't punished. They were simple as untutored children but capable of viciousness if let off the leash.

Taurion asked, "Why do you maintain the fires?"

"We're guards," piped all three.

"Talk about pitiful defenses," muttered Murdoch.

"What do you guard?" asked Taurion patiently.

"The crying horror."

The adventurers pricked their ears.

"It's big and ugly and chopped up," said a prisoner.

"It fell from the sky."

"It cries all the time. Not out loud. In your head."

Pirates and pinefolk goggled. Taurion asked for details, but the kobolds couldn't explain.

"I'm more confused than ever," said Murdoch. "What kind of a thing falls from the sky?"

"I don't know," said Adira, "but we'll find out. You three. Show us."

Johan's journey into the caves beneath Shauku's castle showed at once his personal bravery and his thirst for knowledge, for both were sorely tested as he descended short wooden stairs within the sham wine tun.

His first warning was a smell so awful it made his nostrils cringe and his head ache. The air was already ripe with eye-watering wood smoke, but worse was a stench that carried like a slaughterhouse, the corruption of carrion.

Below the wine cellar ran a dim catacombs, no more than a craggy rambling tunnel. Bolted to two walls were chains with manacles but no prisoners.

A shriek welled up from the darkness beyond.

A victim? Of Lady Shauku?

Chiding himself for squeamishness, Johan girded his loins and took another step in his bare feet. He had to see Shauku's secret source of knowledge, learn more of whatever she glimpsed when donning the dream coat. It lay ahead, Johan guessed, or hoped. He had to go on. Still invisible, almost intangible, Johan crept forward toward a dim flickering light.

As he crept along, one hand brushed the dusty walls. Odd walls, he found, that grew stranger with each step. So queer was the substance, Johan stopped to investigate where two walls intersected at a shallow angle. With a flint-hard fingernail he shaved silver-gray stuff from a doorway. It wasn't stone but was soft as chestnut wood. Holding it to his eye, Johan saw the sliver was veined like skin with a delicate webbing.

Surely, thought the mage, that couldn't be right. The veins had to be tracks of old vines or water stains, even cracks of metallic flaking. Stepping to another oddly-angled wall, he scraped another sliver. The same. Marveling, Johan drilled a thumb through the porous not-stone. Not soapstone, riot wood, not glass, so what was it? Shaking his head, the mage realized he was truly puzzled for the first time in decades.

All the walls were made of this not-stone material. Whence had they come?

That answer, at least, was simple. The ruined castle was built atop even more ancient ruins of…?

Shaking his head, Johan passed on.

Finally, where smoke billowed along the ceiling of the angular catacombs, Johan reached his destination. He stopped in shock.

A chamber big as a mead hall was lit by a ring of fire. At first glance, the archmage thought of a giant nest occupied by some ugly baby bird. Yet the reality was far stranger.

Covering the floor of the cave were fractured crystals of amber. Even broken, their gorgeous golden luster, reflected a million times in firelight, gave the room a scintillating homey glow.

As if by contrast, wedged in the center of the room was the ugliest creature Johan had ever beheld.

Big as a house, a gray mound of fetid flesh sprouted toothy mouths, bulging eyeballs, whiplashing tentacles, and questing tongues. The thing stank abominably, like sewage and sulfur and gangrenous flesh. Gaping in shock, Johan thought it some alchemist's wild experiment gone awry, as if some dastard had herded together elephants, then hacked the poor beasts to pieces, then mashed and fused the pieces together. Yet this mess still lived and suffered every second. For there was no doubt in Johan's mind that the being, or thrust-together beings, was fully conscious and in enormous pain. Never still, the giant thing quivered like a jelly. Mouths champed, fangs clashed, tongues waggled, tentacles whipped, eyes bulged fit to explode. One source of the monster's pain was clear, for it was surrounded by a trench filled with burning charcoal and chunks of freshly stoked wood. The ring of fire hemmed the creature so close the heat licked its tortured flesh like a bluring tongue.

"Impossible!" Johan shook his horned head, doubting his eyes. He'd seen so many hideous hallucinations lately, this must be another. "But I smell it! And the noise!" Johan didn't know what to think. If he did imagine this giant freak, surely his sanity had teetered into the abyss.

Someone came into sight. Feeling like a child stealing apples rather than an emperor, Johan ducked behind a boulder and peeked, heart pounding, throat dry.