His legs made long shadows in the lantern light. He felt like a spider scuttling down a hole. Real spiderwebs broke as he descended through them; they clung to him in a gossamer net.
Ancient rungs cracked under his feet. The lantern light didn't reach the bottom of the well. How deep did this shaft go? The dungeons under both castle and palace were below the sewers, he'd once been told, and he'd come another two hundred feet, at least. The chill made fleeting smoke of his breath.
This could only be a way into Undermountain.
The cacophony of shouts, roars, and shrieks grew deafening. It sounded as if whoever was down there wouldn't survive much longer.
A smooth stone floor became visible below. It belonged to a small chamber, sporting only a door of iron-banded oak in one wall. Leaping from the ladder, Noph landed in a crouch. His feet stirred thick dust as he rushed toward the door. A fat oak beam was cradled across it; the brackets that held it glowed with blue motes of power.
The circling sparks settled into letters, spelling out a clear warning: DO NOT OPEN UNDER PAIN OF DEATH.
"Open up!" a man shouted, from just beyond the barred door. It shuddered with blows from fists or hammers or axes but did not give way. There was a slim crack between the boards, and an eye glared at Noph through it. "Open up, or we'll die!"
Noph looked again at the stern inscription. "You'll have to find another way out!"
"There is no other way out, blast you! We're barely holding off a pair of deep ogres. Open up!"
"Then I'll be barely staving them off," Noph pointed out. "Besides, there's an inscription. A prohibition. A law. I can't compromise the security of-"
"Yes, yes, Piergeiron's Palace! We know! We're agents of his… or some of us are!"
"But under penalty of death-"
"It's the death of four or the death of one, lad. Save your own skin and you've doomed ours. Open the door, and we can fight side by side."
The choice was obvious. It was written large in enchanted letters before him. If the folk trapped on the other side really were agents of Piergeiron, they'd not ask him to defy laws and jeopardize the security of the palace. What if the deep ogres won past, and climbed up to rampage through the palace? More likely there were no deep ogres, and this was a band of villains wanting to trick their way into the palace. What were the lives of four unknowns worth in the balance against his? The choice was obvious.
A terrible scream came through the door, followed by a wet thrashing sound.
"I feel like a gods-damned traitor," Noph hissed, heaving the beam out of its bracket.
The enspelled timber had not even struck the floor before the door crashed open. Noph fell back, sword hissing out.
A moon-faced man tumbled through first, his fancy clothes much slashed and beribboned with blood. Stumbling over him came a soot-besmirched dwarf.
"Belgin! Rings!" Noph gasped. "What-?"
A slender woman in glimmering armor staggered out next.
"Aleena!" Noph yelped.
A weak, answering smile showed through the blood and grime on her face as she collapsed beside the others. There was a man behind her, a silver-garbed paladin. Miltiades! The paladin backed slowly into the room, his warhammer ringing and swinging with the profound, determined motion of a blacksmith's maul.
His anvil was a gigantic creature. Its eyes-dinner plates awash in blood-glowed furiously from grimy folds of flesh. The sheer weight of the ogre's lips shaped a permanent scowl around jagged green teeth. Hands as big as men groped from the darkness, snatching at the paladin's armor. Only the persistent, ringing blows of the hammer kept those hands at bay.
If the ogre emerged from the cramped passage, they'd all be slain. And another beast would follow the first.
A sudden flare of flame drew Noph's eyes. The oak beam he'd pulled from the door was afire. It rattled and gave off a high whistling as the magics laid on it did their work. The heat coming off it was already enough to shrivel the cobwebs clinging to Noph into smoky tracers.
The choice was obvious.
The young hero dropped his sword, bent, and hefted the hissing beam. Fire raced across his hands and up his arms. Agony stabbed through him. He snarled, heaving the timber above his head, and lunged at the ogre, thrusting it like a spear into the monster's gaping maw. One end distended the squalling beast's throat. Green teeth clamped on blazing wood.
"Down," Noph shouted, shoving Miltiades to the floor. They fell together and rolled.
A corona of fire flared from the ogre's astonished face, and its mantle of hair ignited with a whoosh, standing away from its head. The beast's throat bulged out like a bullfrog's. The log in its chattering teeth flared bright red, then white, and then exploded.
What was left of the beast fell, minced and bloody meat now. It was followed, with a slowly growing roar, by a rush of dust, rocks, and rubble.
When the shaking ended and the echoes faded, dust hung thick in the antechamber. The passage was closed by rubble. Noph rolled stiffly off the pile, looking grimly at the fire-blackened flesh below his wrists. He'd be a match for Entreri, now, but missing two hands instead of one.
There was much coughing. Miltiades and Aleena rose, and after some grunting moments, the dwarf Rings and the moon-faced sharper Belgin followed.
The latter squinted at Noph. "A long shot, youngling, but a gamble that paid off." His was the voice that had implored Noph through the doorway.
Noph did not reply. Bloodied and battered, he slumped beside the lantern. In its light, his figure seemed sculpted in gold.
"Noph?" growled Miltiades, coughing. "I should have known you'd be alive to rescue us like this."
Piergeiron's quarters were far from the dark and dusty grave of the ogre. Bright and filled with a sea breeze, looking out at the clear blue air above Waterdeep, the chambers seemed as high as golden griffons and white stacks of cloud. Outside one set of tall windows, the Sea of Swords glimmered with morning sunlight. Past another sprawled Waterdeep in all its splendor, roofs of red and green tiles glowing like rubies and emeralds in the sun.
The company, too, was an improvement on headless ogres. Noph and the four who'd stumbled through the door had been bathed, bandaged, and healed. Noph's new hands tingled from time to time; he'd been restored by the same priest who'd given Entreri his arm back.
The palace healers had given the heroes loose white robes, similar to those of Piergeiron. They all looked like monks, or devout priests, fitting in this place of white marble and silver trim. Only Khelben wore black. That, too, seemed right. He was black thunder to Piergeiron's white lightning.
Now both listened to a silver paladin. "-Unwise in the extreme, I'd say, for a young man charged with guarding the dungeon to open it to attack from Undermountain."
"Yes, Miltiades," the Blackstaff soothed patiently. While the others hovered in an uncertain circle around the Open Lord's sickbed, Khelben lurked by one of the windows, his attention on a bronze kettle perched in a quietly hissing brazier. "Yet if he hadn't, you'd all be dead now, correct?"
The warrior seemed irritated. "Better we die than let ogres into the palace to kill the Open Lord."
"I've been dead before," Piergeiron noted wryly. He drew in a deep breath of tea-scented air. "I'll be dead again, too."
"Better that none but an ogre die," Khelben added. His deft hands slipped into a window seat and drew forth teacups. "Noph made a decision. An heroic decision, and in the end the right one."
Belgin nodded agreement. "Sometimes you've got to place your bets and roll the dice."
Miltiades steamed, a human counterpart to Khelben's kettle. "That wall of rubble won't keep them back for long. The security of the palace-"