Harp kissed Liel one last time before he reluctantly broke away. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“But you have,” Liel said. “Or rather, you changed back.”
“I hate to break up your reunion, but Verran’s haze of death is still rising,” Boult told them.
“Actually, it’s not,” Verran said defensively, looking over the railing at the dead niferns slumped on the ground. “It looks like it’s going away.”
“Liel, that is Verran,” Harp said. “You know Kitto, of course.”
Liel embraced the boy. “Kitto, it’s been so long.”
“Good to see you, Liel,” Kitto mumbled shyly.
“And that is Boult, a friend of mine from Vankila.”
Boult and Liel shook hands. After spending time with the husk, Boult seemed a little disconcerted at meeting the real Liel, but Majida had vouched for the elf and that would be enough to convince Boult to trust her. Verran, however, wasn’t as understanding.
“We’ve already met you,” Verran said curtly. “We met your husk.”
Liel turned white. “Oh no. What did it do?”
“Nothing,” Harp said quickly. “There was little contact, and we learned the truth soon enough.”
“We have to stop him,” Liel said angrily. “Stop him from making more husks and stealing the Torque, and whatever else the bastard is planning.”
“Cardew?” Harp asked.
“Cardew’s just a puppet,” Liel said bitterly. “He has a patron. A man named Tresco, who has been orchestrating events here in Chult.”
Harp felt his heart beating rapidly in his chest. Just like that, his torturer had a name. The man who had chained him down and mutilated him had an identity, just like anyone else. When he thought of the gray-haired man as Tresco, his memory seemed less potent somehow. Harp had the irrational thought that it was easier to kill a man with a name.
Or at least it was easier to track him down and then kill him.
“Are you all right?” Liel asked, taking his hand. She was watching Harp’s face closely.
“Tresco is the man who tortured me at Vankila,” Harp said. “We knew him as the Practitioner.”
“I knew that Tresco ran … affairs at the prison, but I didn’t know he did it himself,” Liel said, laying her hand on Harp’s arm.
“Wait,” Boult said. “Tresco Maynard? He was Anais’s son’s tutor.”
“At the Winter Palace?” Harp frowned.
Boult nodded. “It was Ysabel, Cardew, and Tresco that survived.”
“So, maybe Cardew’s not just a puppet in this particular scheme,” Harp said. “Maybe he’s been a puppet all along.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Liel said. “Tresco wants the throne in the hands of a ruler he can control. One who’ll chase anyone not human from Tethyr and give him all the power he wants. That’s not a plan that happens overnight.”
“Why does Tresco want the Torque?” Kitto asked.
“I’m not sure exactly,” Liel told them. “It suppresses magic somehow.”
“That doesn’t seem very useful,” Verran said dismissively.
“Majida told me that the Torque shields the wearer. But from what I’ve overheard it sounds like it prevents spells from being cast,” Liel said. “It’s possible whoever wears the Torque can cast spells, but no else can. That seems very useful to me. And to Tresco.”
“Am I feeling the effects of the Torque?” Verran asked. “It feels like I wouldn’t be able to cast a spell, even if I wanted to.”
“I think so,” Liel said. “I feel that too.”
“Then we must be close to it,” Boult said. “Let’s quit chatting and get it.”
“Can you take us to the Torque?” Harp asked.
“Unfortunately, I can’t,” Liel said. “Come and see.”
A crystal clear lake blocked the path to the Torque. As if it were a giant cup filled with water, the vast hall under the golden dome was completely submerged. They’d entered the hall from the balcony and stood on a whispering gallery ringing the perimeter of the cylindrical palace. Directly under the dome, the gallery was the highest point in the hall, but the water lapped gently under the walkway, making it feel more like a dock than a lofty perch.
“As you can see, there’s a water problem,” Liel said.
The dome was completely smooth on the outside, but he inside had slender golden trusses made from twisted metal that radiated from its apex down to the gallery where they stood. The base of the dome was so close that Harp could reach up and touch the metal, which had been enchanted to permit light to permeate its surface. The golden sheen radiating from the dome gave off heat, and the hall was as warm and as bright as if they were standing directly under the sun. Where other buildings were crumbling, the dome was solid, and kept the debris from outside out of the water that filled the hall.
Harp leaned over the crumbling railing and peered down into the water. It was clear enough to see all the way down to the blue and white floor of the hall. From where he stood in the gallery, he could just see the top of the arched doorway and the glitter of silver stones that had been set into it, a mirror image of what they had seen outside when they stood in front of the palace.
“No wonder the Scaly Ones didn’t want anyone opening the door from the outside,” Harp said. “They’d get a face full of water.”
“They were serious about protecting the Torque,” Boult agreed. “Even if we can get rid of the water, is there any way down from the gallery?”
“There’s a ramp over there,” Liel said, pointing across the water to a stone ramp that arched from the gallery to a large gilded pillar in the center of the hall. The ramp spiraled down the massive pillar, which was inlaid with a geometric pattern of turquoise and gold tiles. The ramp continued down through a circular opening in the floor below until it disappeared into watery darkness.
“Can either of you cast something and drain the water?” Harp asked Liel and Verran, who shook their heads.
“I’ve tried it,” Liel told him. “Nothing happens. It feels so dead and cold.”
“Majida said the Torque was below the entrance hall,” Harp said. “Can we just swim down?”
“I don’t think we can hold our breath that long,” Verran said.
“Have you searched for a lever or a switch that might empty the water out of the hall?” Boult asked Liel.
Liel shrugged. “Thoroughly, but that doesn’t mean much in this place. There’s nothing obvious, but the sarrukh were clever architects. It could take a lifetime to find.”
“It’s all we can do. Let’s spread out,” Harp said. “Kitto and Verran, check along the railing. Boult and Liel, check the walls. I’ll go over the floor. Go carefully. Anything that looks strange, call it out.”
Mosaics adorned the wall of the whispering gallery, and the intricate tile patterns were unblemished despite the years since their creation. In a display of skillful arti-sanship, the rich array of colors illustrated the history of the sarrukh. They didn’t seem to tell a sequential history, though. Harp passed one panel that depicted an army of serpentfolk sweeping across a grassy meadow like a plague of locusts. The next panel showed basking serpentfolk surrounded by piles of gold in a verdant jungle.
As Harp progressed down the gallery, the mosaics became more grisly, as the sarrukh chronicled their fondness for mass slaughter and mayhem-chained humans being decapitated, chained humans clearing rocks from a pit, and chained humans hauling massive stones up a mountain under a swirling gray sky while the overseers whipped them. Harp stopped paying attention to the walls and focused on searching the floor. But Boult couldn’t take his eyes off the macabre scenes plastered on the wall.
“Those are pleasant,” Boult said sarcastically.
Boult continued down the curve of the wall until he came to a panel that showed dwarves in bondage being led out of a cave by serpentfolk. A line of dwarf heads were mounted on pikes along a rocky ridge. Dwarf men were laid out on the ground in a line as yuan-ti prepared to roll a massive stone over them and crush them to death.
“Boult!” Harp called. He could see a thin, silver cord nestled in between two rows of tile and obscured by grit and dust. “I think I’ve found something.”