“See what? I complained,” Lucan said.
“No, you said you were going to. I win.” She smiled sweetly at him and swung the door open with a shriek of rusted hinges that must have been audible to every denizen of the Keep.
“Where does it go?” Paelias wondered.
Biri-Daar walked through into the drier and infinitely less odoriferous chamber beyond, a small landing at the foot of a stair going up. “It goes out of there,” she reported. “What else do we need to know right now?”
They climbed the stairs, gradually shedding the stink of the sewer pit-and also, more ominously, shedding the light charm Keverel had maintained on the steel they wore or held. “Something about the magic of this place,” he said, with a worried expression.
“Or something with you,” Kithri said. “Truth, holy man. Is the cut on your head just a cut on your head?”
He nodded. “Here,” Biri-Daar said, holding out a small pewter vial to him. Keverel took it with a questioning look.
“It is a healing brew, from the clan,” she said. “If it can heal the burns of an acid fog or the madness of hearing a banshee-and it can, I have seen it-it can dispel whatever ails you.”
Keverel drank it off, his face twisting. “Awful,” he gasped.
“My people are not vintners,” Biri-Daar said. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. On they went into what appeared to have been a dungeon once. The cell doors were open and hanging crookedly on rusted or broken hinges. “The Road-builder may know we are here already,” Biri-Daar said. “We must be on guard.”
They peered into each empty cell as they passed. Some contained bones, and once or twice a rat flitted through their light back into the darkened corners. But nothing rose to oppose them. A torture chamber exposed to the light for the first time in centuries yielded only hanging chains and instruments long since corroded into ruin. After it, they found a stair leading up. As they climbed it, Lucan said, “We’re going down right now.”
“Don’t talk about it.” Paelias looked a bit queasy.
“Best to keep it in mind, I think,” Lucan said.
“Keep it in mind all you want,” the star elf replied. “Just don’t talk about it.”
That was when Remy sprung the trap. He felt a stone shift under his foot and instinctively he leaped forward and up to the next stair, one hand against the wall to his right, looking down between his feet for the hole or blade or poisoned needle he was sure must be there. As he landed, he heard a fading scream. He spun and saw that a pit yawned open where the two stairs below him had been. Stones at its edges were still tumbling inward. Shocked, Remy saw Kithri and Paelias above the gap, Keverel below it-and Lucan hanging by his hands from its edge, scrabbling to get a foothold on the vertical wall below.
“Biri-Daar!” Kithri screamed down into the darkness. An answering roar told them she was alive. Paelias was reaching down for Lucan when he looked up, said, “If the fall didn’t kill her, it won’t kill me either,” and let go.
“Pelor,” Remy whispered. The others were shouting down into the hole. He heard Lucan’s answering voice, Biri-Daar still roaring. He heard the clash and ring of steel, and a throaty inhuman rumble like no voiced sound Remy could remember.
The next thing he knew he was jumping in himself, tearing free of Paelias’s grasp and holding out his gloved hands to keep track of the walls as he fell. His mouth opened and a barbarian’s yell came out. It felt good. Whatever creature was down there, it would know that Remy of Avankil was coming.
He hit the ground in a rubbish heap. Rotting garbage and discarded bits of clay, glass, wood-everything that might conceivably have been thrown away during the years of the Keep’s normal existence-splattered away from him as he sank waist-deep in the slippery muck at the bottom. There was shouting, and that gurgling rumble, echoing all around him. Light flared as if Biri-Daar was using her dragonbreath just around the bend… but what bend? Remy couldn’t tell where the walls were. He pulled one of his feet free, feeling it hang up on something hard; as he shifted his weight, looking around for Lucan and Biri-Daar, he realized that his foot was stuck beneath a long bone. “Out of the way!” someone shouted from above. Remy slogged off to his right as Paelias and Kithri hurtled out of the darkness into the filth side by side. They too fought their way off to one side as Keverel scarped down the chute and landed awkwardly on his back, nearly disappearing into the refuse before Remy and Paelias caught him and steadied him so he could get upright.
“Lucan!” Remy called. “Biri-Daar!”
Light flared again, and Remy started to understand that the room they were in curled in on itself. He put one hand on the inside wall of the curve and followed it. Ten steps later he was in sight of Biri-Daar and Lucan. And the three incredible creatures that menaced them.
They were low to the ground and reptilian at first, their skin slick and oily, their legs splayed and jointed like an alligator’s. But they were larger than any alligator Remy had ever seen, and their mouths were nearly circular, gaping large enough to swallow a halfling whole. From their shoulders sprouted tentacles with clusters of serrated barbs at their tips, and-most incredible of all-a tail-stalk with a vertical row of three reddish eyes, faintly luminescent, curled over the beasts’ backs, wavering back and forth to take in the newcomers.
“Otyugh,” Keverel said from just behind him. “If we can see three, there are probably more.” He and Paelias pivoted to form a rear guard as Remy and Kithri surged forward. One of the otyughs was wounded, its tentacles both amputated and great rents showing around its jaws. Taking advantage of their brief moment of surprise, Remy slashed its eyestalk off. The spurt of blood smelled even worse than the rotted slush underfoot. Tears filled Remy’s eyes; he blinked them away and struck again as Biri-Daar hit the otyugh from her side with a reversed blow that tore huge gashes along the hollow of its jaw. In a fountain of stinking blood, the creature fell, wallowing in its death throes.
Fresh yells from behind him told Remy that Keverel and Paelias were encountering more of the otyughs. He closed in on the second facing Lucan and Biri-Daar; the third, mortally wounded by Lucan’s flickering blade, waved its tentacles feebly as it died. In the uncertain light Remy could see that both Biri-Daar and Lucan were wounded. Infection would be almost certain given the environment. He hoped that Lucan’s ranger lore would keep both of them from blood poisoning.
Over his shoulder he saw that Paelias and Keverel already had dispatched the fourth otyugh. Remy turned back to the sole survivor of the first three. With Biri-Daar and Lucan and Kithri, he cut it down, Lucan applying the killing stroke.
Immediately Keverel and Lucan began treating wounds. Biri-Daar and Lucan himself were scored by the tentacles’ barbs. “A walking font of disease, the otyugh,” Keverel said, disgust plain on his face. The worst wound was on Biri-Daar’s hip and thigh, where one of the otyughs had bitten partially through her armor. The punctures left were deep and already blackening around the edges. Fever was beginning to shine in her eyes.
Lucan found a packet of dried herbs in his satchel and ground them between his fingers. He pressed a small amount into each puncture, Biri-Daar hissing as he did so. “That will hold the infection off. Or should. Let’s get healing, holy man,” he said.
“Until we get out of this rot, no healing will take hold,” Keverel said.
“Light,” Paelias said. A stone in his hand blazed up brilliantly, illuminating the dimensions of the room. It was high-ceilinged, with holes in the ceiling that must have been rubbish outfalls. “Back to the chute from the stairwell,” he said. “Perhaps we can climb it.”
But it was too high from the floor. Paelias played his light around, noting every cranny and shadowed corner in the spiral room. “Why this shape?” he wondered aloud. “The floor slopes down as well. It’s-”
“There’s probably a drain at the bottom. Long ago, when this keep was still in the ground, its builder found a way to let the garbage rot and drain into an underground river. It’s the same thing they do at Crow Fork Market, no?” Lucan thought for a moment. “If we could get out that drain, we might be able to scale the side of the Keep.”