Their heads were broad and round, with veins that pulsed beneath their skin of their hairless scalps. Dead white eyes peered from deep, bony cavities. And in place of a nose and a jaw-in place of any lower face at all-they had four thick, writhing tentacles.
Illithids, whispered Dandra to Geth and Singe. Mind flayers.
The creatures lived up to their name. Dandra’s last moment of coherent contact with Tetkashtai dissolved in tearing mental anguish.
She could feel Singe’s growing horror and Geth’s growing rage. She held onto the memories though, wrenching them up into her mind and watching numbly as Tetkashtai-along with Medalashana and Virikhad-was subjected to the most gruesome of psychic tortures and probed by psionic powers to rival their own. Their bodies were bound to tables, their minds pinned back by bizarre devices of jointed metal and dark crystal clamped over their skulls. There was no way to know how much time passed. The light in the terrible underground laboratory never varied. The mind flayers came and went, but never in any pattern that made sense. Sometimes dolgaunts would come, torturing the kalashtar’s bodies. Hruucan was the worst of them. He made certain the captives knew his name so they would fear him even more.
Always there were Dah’mir’s eyes. Acid-green eyes. Watching.
Then spidery fingers closed on Dandra, ripping her away from Tetkashtai and placing her atop a tripod of long, crooked needles, suspended on their points. Virikhad’s violet crystal and Medalashana’s blue crystal were placed on similar tripods to either side of her. Dandra caught a glimpse of some strange device, an array of brass and crystal, wires and tubes-all of them writhing around a dragonshard, a huge blue-black Khyber shard as large as an anvil.
The mind flayers gathered around the device and their white eyes lifted to the shard. Their bodies grew still, but Dandra could sense the psionic energy building among them, growing increasingly more intense and more powerful-until it burst like a silent thunderclap.
Dandra’s presence stretched horribly, her being expanding, then contracting. Her connection to Tetkashtai seemed to twist, to turn inside out. The kalashtar was wailing, screaming as she had never screamed before. When the power of the mind flayers’ energy faded, though, Dandra realized that she was the one screaming. That she was breathing and physically struggling against her bonds. That Tetkashtai rested across the laboratory, her presence locked away in the yellow-green psicrystal.
The mind flayers retreated. The dolgaunts returned, and for the first time, Dandra felt pain directly.
On the hillside overlooking the Eldeen Reaches, she opened her eyes to sunlight. Singe and Geth were staring at her. Both men’s faces were pale. Within her, Tetkashtai hung silent and still, a ghost. No one said anything for a long, long time, until finally Singe ran a tongue across his lips and croaked. “You escaped?”
The thought-link was growing tenuous, worn away by the horrors that had flowed across it and stretched thin as Dandra’s powers flagged. She managed to send one last memory across it, a memory of waking in near-darkness, her spirit pared down to a lean core trapped in aching flesh. She shifted, writhing in agony-and realized that the dolgaunts hadn’t bound her, perhaps thinking her too weak to escape. In Dandra’s spirit, the core of her being steadied and grew strong. Although it sent new pain tearing through her, she sat up.
“When a psion creates a psicrystal,” Dandra told Geth and Singe as she watched the memory play out, “she splits off some part of her own psyche to give personality to the intelligence that she creates. The psicrystal grows out of that simple personality.”
In her mind’s eye, she felt herself climb to her feet and, with single-minded focus, shuffle across the laboratory toward a seemingly distant yellow-green glow. At the time she had been conscious of nothing but reaching the source of that glow-her crystal-but as she focused on the memory, she became aware of other things. Of how slow and painful her progress had been. Of the two crystals that rested on either side of her own, one a violet ember, the other a dead blue shell. She could have taken them. She could have turned her head, sought out Virikhad’s and Medalashana’s bodies. She hadn’t. She had one goal and no other.
“The core of my personality,” she said, her voice thick, “was determination. That’s what saved me.”
The hand of her memory-self closed on the yellow-green crystal-and Tetkashtai exploded into her head. Maddened kalashtar and determined psicrystal combined with a single, wild instinct-escape. Their powers-once Tetkashtai’s alone, now Dandra’s as well-flared. A thought spun out a line of vayhatana and Tetkashtai’s spear, carelessly thrown aside by Dah’mir’s servants, soared through the air to Dandra’s hand. Her feet floated free of the ground and she glided out of the laboratory. Dolgrims moved to confront her. She summoned whitefire out of the air and flung it against them. Her heart thundering, she raced on through half remembered tunnels as roars of outrage at her flight shook the mound behind her …
The thought-link finally collapsed, fading away and leaving her breathless at her own memories. She staggered, but caught herself. One hand, she realized was clutching her crystal so tight that the bronze wire that bound it pressed painfully into her skin. Dandra forced her fingers open and looked up at Singe and Geth.
“The rest,” she said, “you know. I’ve told you the truth about that. The Bonetree hunters were after us before that first night was over. I was lucky that I could skim over obstacles that they had to wade through.” She touched her belly. “And I can sustain myself with psionic energy, where they had to find food. But even with my powers, I could barely stay ahead of them. I just ran. I knew Yrlag was on the north edge of the Shadow Marches and I would have gone there, but clearly I went too far. If I’d gone a different way, I probably would have ended up in Droaam or lost in the mountains somewhere. When you and Adolan found me, Geth, I was exhausted. If I’d kept going, I probably would have killed myself-if those displacer beasts didn’t kill me first.”
She pressed her palms together and bent her body toward the shifter. “Thank you,” she said sincerely.
Geth stared at her, his eyes wide, but Singe drew a deep breath. “Virikhad?” he asked. “Medalashana?”
“Dead if they’re lucky.”
“Why did Dah’mir do this to you? Why does he want you back so badly?”
Dandra’s stomach clenched. “I’ve asked myself that a thousand times.” She felt her cheeks burn. “I don’t know!”
“Maybe,” growled Geth, “we should go and ask him.”
He said it so bluntly that for a moment all Dandra could do was blink and stare at him. “Revenge?” she asked finally. Geth nodded. Dandra felt numb-even Tetkashtai flinched at the idea. “Geth, you can’t do that. Dah’mir is … powerful.” She touched her chest. “He held three kalashtar in his grasp!”
“I’m not a kalashtar. I’ll put my steel against whatever power he has. And I can’t think of a better memorial to Adolan and the other Hollowers than snuffing out a cult of the Dragon Below!” The shifter closed his gauntleted fist with a clash of metal.
Dandra flung up her arm to point behind them. “But the hunters and the dolgrims are still after us!”
“I haven’t seen a sign of them since dawn and even that was a long way back.” Geth’s lips curled back from his teeth. “We hurt them last night and they don’t have horses. They’ll need to rest and regroup. We’ll ride through the day and be well ahead of them.”
“I don’t know where the Bonetree camp and the mound are!” she blurted. “Dah’mir had us all in a daze on the way there and I was lost on the way out.”
“Then we’ll start where you met Dah’mir-Zarash’ak.” Singe stepped forward. “I’m with Geth.”
Geth shot a dark look at him. “No,” he growled.
“You’re going to do this yourself?” the Aundairian asked. “You’re not that good, Geth. I owe this to Toller.” His eyes narrowed. “Not to mention that I’ve been looking for you since Narath. Do you think I’m going to let you out of my sight now?”