Curampah merely blinked, but Nogah recognized the confusion that tightened his scales.
"You wonder what use these are to us; after all, as a superior breed, we can already breathe air and water both. However, another effect of the elixir renders the imbiber immune to the crushing weight of extreme watery depths. It shall work for us as well as for any humanoid."
She handed the junior whip one of the vials. He carefully removed the wax-sealed stopper and sucked its contents down without mixing too much of it with the surrounding water. She did the same with her own elixir. It tasted of salt and kelp.
Curampah examined his hands and scaled forearms. He said, "I feel no different." "We shall see," she replied.
Nogah gave a slight tug on the reins, enough that the nautilus shell moved several body lengths away from the green stone and the black six-sided door.
"Now, Curampah-open that metallic door. Let us discover what these mind flayers worked so feverishly to uncover." She gestured to the entrance with her staff.
The junior whip pushed away from the coach deck and swam toward the door embedded in the green mantle stone. To his credit, he merely hesitated, saying nothing, when he realized he swam alone while she remained behind, watching.
She judged the protective effect surrounding the coach ended somewhere half-way between the nautilus and the door.
When he made it all the way to the six-sided valve without ill effect, Nogah joined him.
Unsealing the valve was a lengthy process. Having no other way to force it, the two whips were finally reduced to directing co-generated strokes of lightning against the dull metal. Again. And again. They rested between each blast just long enough to rekindle their capacity to produce the next electrical discharge. Each subsequent blast showed some effect, just enough to hint that persistence would eventually sear the metal through. The only question was, how many bolts?
Nogah fretted. The effects of the elixir were temporary. Worse, the undead mind flayer was likely regenerating its own strength while they spent theirs against the stubborn entranceway.
Finally, the valve seared through.
In-rushing water snatched both her and Curampah, wrenching them through the irregular, red-hot puncture. Agonizing heat seared her flank. A mesh of madly spinning bubbles blinded her. The inrushing water dredged her forward, down an irregularly dug tunnel. She tumbled wildly, end over end. She flailed, trying to get a hold on something, anything. A muffled scream sounded somewhere within the roar of rushing water. Was it Curam-
A jutting rock smashed her temple, and she screamed too. She was hurtled along, her voice lost in the boil of crushing water. Nogah's mind whirled as she tried to gain her bearings.
She was able to do so only when the inrushing water finally filled the space beyond the door. Though remnants of turbulence still spiraled around the narrow tunnel, Nogah managed to halt her forward momentum.
Bruised and burnt, the whip praised the Sea Mother for her survival. She floated in cold darkness. A figure drifted past her, limp and slowly revolving. It was Curampah. His arms were broken, and his head bore a terrible puncture from which dark fluid thickly jetted into the water, spiraling around his drifting body.
She hissed, a loss assaulting her like a physical blow. Poor Curampah; his faith had proved too weak.
Then she saw what the illithids had delved so deeply to unearth. The merest edges of something. Something horrible. The mere act of trying to comprehend it was like scraping her naked brain with a trowel. Surely it was an abomination. She turned to swim free, flexing her legs for the first mighty escape stroke…
Nogah blinked, and in that instant, her perception shifted. Curiosity rekindled.
Instead of swimming away as if her sanity depended upon it, she drifted closer through the swirling blood and sediment, hardly realizing she did so. She still couldn't grasp the magnitude of the image. She tried to wrap some mote of comprehension around the object, partly chiseled from stone… from stone whose age dwarfed the mountains above. Which meant the enigma, the massive thing that refused to clearly reveal itself to her understanding, was older than continents.
Blinking, Nogah shuddered. Had the Sea Mother sent her to unbury this artifact, to finish what the mind flayers had started? A head-size stone lay near the greater object yet bound in its stone matrix. It seemed the illithids had broken away a sample from the far more gargantuan object still frozen in the wall, before their dig outside the seal had drowned.
She said a quick prayer to the Sea Mother, asking for guidance. Her inquiry fell into a void of silence.
Her hand moved to trace the spherical artifact. If she couldn't grasp the whole, perhaps the tiny piece would yield up clues.
She picked it up. What was it? A stone bauble? A tiny portion of a… what? A petrified remnant of some long-dead sea beast? Something like that, a strange certainty informed her, though even that notion was, somehow, a failure of imagination. If she grasped a piece of something far larger, that which was in turn only the merest tip of something… monstrous.
The elixir's duration was almost complete. Without giving herself time to weigh the decision, she retained her grip on the loose piece, rough from where the illithids had cut it away from its parent.
Her first impression had been correct-it was essentially round but already seemed lighter in her hands. Though the object was about the size of her head, she was able to carry it without difficulty.
As she kicked back toward the nautilus, past the drifting corpse of her junior whip, her fingers began to tingle, then her arms. Odd notions suggested themselves, like worms insinuating themselves through Nogah's consciousness. Odd, even disquieting.
But so fascinating…
CHAPTER THREE
Eleven Years After the Spellplague The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) New Sarshell, Impiltur
A thin man with a pocked face chalked a flat expanse of gray slate in quick, precise strokes. The sharp scent of limestone grew in the stuffy chamber with each mark.
The scratching chalk grated at Lady Anusha Marhana's ears. She glanced away from the lesson her tutor scribed to gaze out the open window. How she wished she were outside. She hated her lessons. She'd rather be down at the docks watching the ships come in, watching the men unload salvage from other lands.
More notably, she had planned to attend the revelry in the Marivaux mansion this evening. Anusha had bought a new gown, new shoes, had the servants do her hair, sent out a reply confirming her attendance, only to have her half brother dash her hopes. Behroun said Marivaux was of a social stratum lower than her own, and that it wouldn't do for her to mix with them. Rubbish! In fact-
"Lady Marhana." The reedy voice of her tutor pulled Anusha's attention back to the board.
"Yes?" she said, as if she'd been paying attention all along.
The man gave her an admonishing glare and said, "Lord Marhana pays me to advance your education. Would you waste his hard-earned coin?"
Anusha's first instinct was to shrug. Her half brother, Lord Behroun Marhana, cared only for appearances. He was all about the facade, and substance only for what it contributed to the image of courtly nobility. The man wanted to cement himself among the reforming aristocracy of scarred Impiltur. In an attempt to gain a seat on the nascent Grand Council forming after the failure of the royal line, Behroun required the family to appear to possess a polite education.
Despite her opinion, she restrained her instinctive, dismissive gesture. Anusha was twenty years old this month, and even without her recent course on high society manners, she recognized a shrug might be perceived as childish. Instead she merely looked her tutor in the eye, trying to appear interested.
The man sighed, shaking his head as he turned back to point at what he'd written on the board. "What does this say?"