"Daile," he asked the young ranger with a frown, "where is Ren?"
The look in her eyes made his heart stop. He watched her with growing dread.
Daile swallowed hard, stumbling over the words. Her voice was bleak. "We were attacked by a fiend outside the guard tower," she finally managed to say, her voice trembling. "He slew it, but it… it…" She drew a ragged breath. "My father is dead," she said quietly. "Ren o' the Blade is dead."
Miltiades hung his head. "Then this day Faerun has become a darker place indeed."
"Now where to?" Daile asked, sticking a pair of arrows into her leather belt.
Not a quarter hour before, Daile had broken down in tears as she told the story of her father's death. Now a cold light shone in her eyes, and there was a grim set to her jaw.
"This way," Kern said, pointing in one direction. He wasn't sure how to get out of the catacomb, but it was almost as if he heard a faint trilling in his mind, showing him the way.
"You hear the voice of Tyr's hammer, don't you?" Miltiades asked him softly.
"I… I think so, Miltiades." Kern cocked his ear, listening closely. The trilling had grown slightly louder.
The undead paladin nodded. "Your destiny calls you, Hammerseeker."
Kern led the way into a long, roughly hewn corridor which spiraled off into the darkness. The corridor opened into a larger chamber. With a word, Sirana conjured a small spark and flung it upward. When it struck the ceiling high above, it burst into a brilliant glowing ball, illuminating the chamber.
"I could have done that," Listle grumbled, banishing her own smaller puff of pale, silvery light with a perturbed gesture.
The chamber appeared to be a throne room of some sort. Two dark rows of columns, each carved in the form of a beast-faced pit fiend, supported the high domed ceiling. In the chamber's center was a raised dais bearing an onyx throne.
"Are you certain we're heading the right way, Kern?" Listle asked, scrambling over the remains of once opulent furniture. "I don't see any way out of here."
"This has to be right, Listle." He cocked his head and nodded. Yes, the hammer's song was clear. Suddenly he frowned. He could hear another sound as well, like a distant groaning. He glanced at the others. By their puzzled expressions, they heard it also. Rapidly the noise grew louder, building to a roar that echoed down the corridor.
"What is it?" Daile asked, gripping her bow with a white-knuckled hand.
"Does that answer your question?" Listle pointed, silvery eyes wide.
A small army of blank-eyed creatures lumbered into the chamber. Some were human in form, others elven or dwarven. All of them were horribly decayed. A putrid, overpowering reek preceded them. Jagged bones stuck out through their mottled skin, and chunks of flesh fell from their limbs as they moved. Their eyes bulged as they hungrily stretched out their arms.
"Ghouls!" Miltiades shouted to the others. "Arm yourselves!"
The first wave of creatures shambled within reach, baring their broken teeth. Like zombies, ghouls were undead, raised from the grave with evil magic. But unlike zombies, ghouls had an insatiable hunger for living flesh. Only Miltiades was of no interest to them.
Kern swung his warhammer in a blazing arc, smashing through the heads of the first two ghouls. Their bodies collapsed to the floor, twitching. In revulsion, Kern shook gobbets of rotting flesh off his weapon.
Daile loosed several arrows in rapid succession into the chest of another ghoul. The creature momentarily staggered backward, then continued forward, oblivious to the shafts protruding from its body. Realizing her bow was useless, the ranger quickly slung it over her shoulder and drew the magical daggers Right and Left from her boots. She slashed out at a ghoul reaching for her. The enchanted blades sliced through the thing's flesh, both of its arms dropping to the floor with a sickening plop. The ghoul stumbled away in a daze.
With his broadsword, Miltiades was cutting a wide swath through the horde of undead. Listle uttered the words of a spell, and suddenly a half-dozen of the ghouls were transformed into healthy, live humans and elves. It was an illusion, of course. However, seeing apparently living beings in their midst sent a score of ghouls into a frenzy. They dragged the illusory creatures to the floor and began to feed on them.
Kern had lost count of how many ghouls his warhammer crushed into pulp. Magical lightning sizzled and crackled constantly over the ranks of the undead, charring them to ashes-the work of Sirana's magic. Yet despite the broken, twitching bodies that piled up, still more ghouls shambled forward. Kern's heart pounded in his chest. He wasn't certain how long he could keep up the steady onslaught of his hammer. But the moment he stopped, the ghouls would drag him down with their clammy hands and start feasting.
He kept fighting.
A cry of pain snapped his gaze around. He saw Daile stagger backward. A ghoul had torn a ragged gouge the length of her arm. Swiftly Miltiades stepped next to her, cleaving the filthy ghoul in two with one swing of his sword. The ranger clenched her jaw against the pain as she continued to lash out with her deadly daggers.
"We can't keep this up forever!" Kern shouted, shattering the rib cage of a dwarven ghoul.
"Well, we can't exactly stop, either," Listle retorted. A trio of ghouls lunged toward her, only to impale themselves on a rack of ancient, rusted spears the elf had turned magically invisible.
"The Hammerwarder's dark magic has summoned every being that has ever perished in this valley," Miltiades explained. He decapitated a female ghoul clad in a rotting silk gown. "This has always been a place of evil, and of peril. I can only guess that thousands of lives have ended in this vale."
"I think there is a way to stop the ghouls from coming," Sirana said, "though I had hoped not to have to resort to it." From beneath her gown she drew out a strangely shaped amulet of polished bone and pointed a finger toward the chamber's entrance. The stone archway began to glow a dull orange, then a fiery red. Molten rock flowed down, incinerating a dozen ghouls. In moments the molten rock began to cool and solidify. Soon the entrance was sealed by a dark, shapeless blob of solid stone.
The adventurers swiftly dispatched the remaining creatures, reducing them to putrid-smelling heaps of carrion and bone. Exhausted, they slumped on the dais before the onyx throne, gasping for breath-except for Miltiades, who seemed tireless.
"Your spell did the trick, Sirana," Kern said, his chest heaving. "Why did you wait so long to use it?"
"I had hoped not to have to use the amulet," the wild mage replied. "It may have stopped the flood of ghouls, but it has also sealed off the only way out of this chamber."
They saw to their battle wounds then. Most had escaped with only a few bruises, but the gash on Daile's arm was more urgent. A wound caused by a ghoul's filthy claws invariably festered, poisoning the blood. Eventually, the victim would die-and become a ghoul.
"Fear not, Daile," Miltiades reassured the ranger. He knelt beside her, removing his gauntlets, and whispered a brief prayer to Tyr. A blue nimbus sprang to life about his skeletal hands. In moments the gouge on Daile's arm closed and scabbed over. Miltiades nodded in satisfaction, replacing his gauntlets. "It is done."
She sighed in relief. "Thanks, Miltiades."
Kern gazed at his own hands wistfully. He wondered if there would ever be a paladin's healing in their touch. He shrugged and put the thought out of his mind. They had more pressing matters to worry about
"None of these walls are illusory," Listle proclaimed in disgust after searching the throne room for the third time. "And I can't find the slightest hint of any hidden doorways."
"I thought elvenkind had particularly keen eyes in such matters," Sirana murmured. The wild mage was examining a bruise on Kern's arm where his armor had been dented.