Depths of Madness

CHAPTER ONE

A dull, half-hearted light leaked in from the torches burning in the hallway. The woman opened her eyes a crack.

She awoke cold and mostly naked in muddy darkness. Her splitting headache made the world thrash as she tried to comprehend what had happened. Little sniffling sounds, like deep breathing or perhaps growling, came to her ears. Every bit of her ached, and her mind was as bleary as her eyes. She saw, dimly, a scar on her right hand, and contemplated it as she awakened.

"Typical," Twilight murmured.

She wondered, for a moment, which cheap dive she had awakened in this time. The mustiness and the water dripping on her forehead reminded her of the Curling Asp in Westgate. The vaguely disturbing sounds brought back a certain guest chamber she had occupied on her one and only visit to the unsightly bowels of Zhentil Keep. The salty foulness in the air-a blend of spit, rot, and dried excrement-brought to mind a certain Haggling Harpy in Athkatla, which was ostensibly named for a local legend. Its name actually came from the technique that one needed to ply in order to procure a decent room.

The Fox-at-Twilight realized, though, that her cheek was stuck to cold stone that was far too comfortable to be one of the pallets at the Harpy. She peeled herself off and blinked. She detected a certain mixture of damp fur, mildew, and useless tears mixed with human foulness. She could practically hear the unanswered prayers from decades of prisoners.

"A cell," Twilight said as she rose to a sitting position, grateful that she could move. She sniffed and scowled. "Not as typical."

She focused on the sole source of light-a murky, pink-red radiance in the corridor. She padded to it on thick soles quite accustomed to a lack of boots. Twilight felt oddly light on her feet, a sensation much like being slightly tipsy on Calishite wine.

Ignoring the feeling, Twilight examined the exit. A series of blades and rods folded and fit together like a genius child's puzzle to make up the cell door. A lever, when shifted, would cause it to open in what Twilight could only guess would be a scintillating wonder of engineering. This door was highly sophisticated, magically wrought, and definitely something Twilight wouldn't expect outside of a dwarf citadel, the mage towers of Evermeet, or the mystic kingdom of Halruaa.

The lock, on the other hand, was a simple padlock that held the lever in place.

"Now that's juxtaposition," she mused. "But no sense turning down the Lady's kiss before it becomes a bite." She reached for her belt, which was not there. She wore only the tattered remains of a once-white chemise. The musky air was chill on her skin.

Twilight groaned. Not that she objected to nudity out of principle-she had found it quite useful in a tight spot or three-but it meant that she had no picks when it mattered.

Her eyes scanned the hall. Shadows. Good. Twilight closed her eyes, relaxed her thoughts, and… instead of dancing into the shadows, nothing happened.

"By the Maid," she cursed. "A mage cell."

"You aren't going to find Tymora's favor with that portal."

Twilight whirled and slammed her back against the marvelous door. Again, her hand twitched toward her missing belt, this time to draw a nonexistent rapier.

How she'd failed to notice the young man in the shadows was beyond her, but there he sat, on a crude, stained cot. She could see little about him but for his mismatched eyes-one green, one gray-blue-which shone dully in the dim torchlight.

Many thanks, strange lad who offers sage but perfectly obvious advice at crucial junctures, she thought, but she kept silent. Such a quip would be unnecessarily rude, and Twilight was never unnecessary.

"I wouldn't stand there," her companion added. "Tlork upsets easily."

"Tlork," she repeated.

Instinct sent her springing just before a mass of iron slammed into the door. The bars creaked and bent inward under the impact of a warhammer with a head the size of an ale keg. Even from half a pace away, the concussion sent her stumbling.

She ended up headfirst in the lad's lap.

"But, uh… we've yet to be properly introduced!" he protested.

Ignoring him, Twilight scurried to her feet and stared up at the twisted creature that loomed in the corridor, and blurry memories started coming back.

It was a troll-or at least, it had been, once.

Both its original arms had been severed at the shoulders and replaced. Its left-holding the hammer-was long and wiry with half a dozen digits, and its right was a muscled limb three times as thick that ended in a clawed hand. A stumpy, elephantlike leg rooted it to the floor alongside a ganglier limb. It was balanced by a segmented, prehensile tail that looked like a scorpion's. Because of the oddly imbalanced limbs, the creature walked with a drunken sway. Half its skin had been replaced with the mottled pelts of demons: vrock, babau, and several she didn't recognize.

"Pretty elfy-not pretty when Tlork crush." It-he-made a twisted face.

Twilight remained crouched in the shadows until the troll left. She remembered exactly how heavy that hammer was, and exactly how fast that distorted body could move. Now she remembered how she'd come to the cell.

"He's gone, methinks," said the man. The troll had not seemed to notice him.

"My thanks again," Twilight murmured under her breath.

Then the implications of her situation hit her, and her hand darted up to her breastbone. The youth might have thought her frightened, but in reality she was searching. Her hand fell.

It was gone.

Twilight's blood ran a touch colder. How long? How long had she lain visible?

The youth stood and walked into the light. He wore a coarse tunic, dirt, and sweat. "Well met, Lady. I am Liet-Liet Sagrin of Harrowdale."

Twilight took his hand. It bore sword calluses, but was otherwise soft and limber. By human age, Twilight guessed this Liet could not have seen thirty winters.

Twilight smiled… and drove her knee up between his legs.

Liet yelped like a wounded puppy, eyes bugging. He seemed as if he would remain standing, so she kneed him again, this time in the stomach. He sagged, only to catch her backhand with his nose. Then Liet's only resistance was a moan-a moan of surprisingly high pitch.

Within a breath, Tlork was back, drooling greenish spittle that sizzled when it struck the floor. "What you do? You-you shut yourself up in there!" The words came out together awkwardly- the troll put them together with effort, it seemed.

No, Twilight thought with a whimsical grin, you shut me-self up in here.

Aloud, she gave no response, but put a bare heel-hard-into Liet's stomach, eliciting a breathless groan.

The troll fumbled with a huge key and opened the lock. Then, for all of the portal's intricate engineering, the troll wrenched it open like any other door, almost tearing it from its hinges. Tlork roared and leaped inside.

Just as the troll's claws were about to close around her head, Twilight ducked, dived, rolled between the mismatched legs, and darted out the door. A flick of her wrist clicked the padlock shut behind her.

By its dull, confused grunt, the troll was almost as stunned as the groaning Liet.

Twilight ran down the hall, her eyes darting back and forth for signs of an ambush. She felt unusually light on her feet and faster for it.

Good. Unarmed, she could not fight an attacker. Evasion, subtlety, and attention-her own, and not that of her enemies- were her three best allies for now. The shadows further comforted her, like the mother's caress she had long forsaken, or the arms of a loving god-if such a thing existed. Outside the confines of the mage cell, a brief shadowdance just might be possible.

The corridor, perhaps a spearcast in length, curved and snaked off to other cells. Some contained enough space for a dozen prisoners, some only enough for one or two.

For political prisoners, she guessed, or mages. She remembered the anti-magic field in her own cell. She hadn't been able to feel it, but that confirmed its presence.

Twilight had known many disciplinary facilities-what some called dungeons-in her day, but none shaped like this, with its twisting and curling corridors. What maniac had imagined such atrocious architecture? Most elves would have blamed a dwarf, but Twilight was not most elves. Who had built this place?

These questions made it easier-easier not to think about being alone, weaponless, and nearly naked in a dark prison, and when-if that troll caught her…

Twilight saw no other guards. Four small cells were shut, all of them dark-she guessed they held prisoners. Twilight passed them by. She had her priorities.

At the end of the corridor, she came to a chamber whose smell told her, beyond a doubt, that she had discovered the fiendish troll's lair. It had once been a torture room, she decided upon seeing the rusty knives, moldy rack, and pitted cauldron meant for boiling oil. The withered devices seemed relics of an ancient age.

"Years pass," she murmured, "methods of conversation remain the same."

She noticed a creature of darkness and dived behind the cauldron. She listened, tense, but the only sounds she heard were of a furious troll bashing on cell bars.

After a heartbeat, Twilight sniffed. An onyx griffin crouched in the center of the room. Its features appeared mad, making it all the more frightening, but it was only stone.

"Interesting taste," Twilight said.

A stout chest lay nestled under the onyx griffin's claws- locked, of course. Casting about for tools, Twilight wrenched a rusty blade from an unpleasant looking harness. Crude, but she had worked with worse. And if her guess about the chest's contents was correct, this was the only lock she would be picking with an iron shard.

Though really, she thought, what are the chances?

It didn't matter. She had to have the Shroud.

Twilight bent to work on the chest and her delicate ears picked up the jangling of keys-telltale sound of a troll getting smart. If she lingered a heartbeat longer, she would be caught, and it would almost be worth it. But she wasn't certain about the chest, so she made the logical decision.

It was not easy, though-she wasn't sure she didn't prefer death.

With a wince and an oath, Twilight left the chest and dived into the shadows. She concealed the rusty spike along her forearm-it might prove useful.

As soon as she reentered the curving corridor, Twilight grimaced. She saw the troll fumbling with a thick key ring to get the padlock open. She couldn't dance back into a room that forbade magic, and she would never slip past a cautious troll.

Not without her other powers-powers he had taught her.

Though it twisted in her gut like a serrate blade, Twilight knew it was necessary. A creature of pragmatism, she could not let personal anger interfere with survival, no matter how much it vexed her.

But without the Shroud, it made her nervous.

"Chameleon watch my comings and my goings," she murmured. "Take my hand and guide me through the darkness."

With the words came a feeling the Fox-at-Twilight knew only too well. A cool mantle of power-like the shadows, but teasing her every nerve-settled over her. It would vanish in the anti-magic field, but she would make it in.

As always, a tiny, mocking laugh tickled the back of her consciousness, one she had long ago learned to ignore. It sounded too familiar to be real.

When she moved, Twilight may as well have vanished.

Tlork threw the door open and lumbered into the hall, hefting his massive hammer. Wherever the elf had gone, he would find her and crush her. No one made a fool of Tlork Thunderhead.

The troll paused and winced. It was happening again. Tlork was, painfully, thinking. Like a paralyzing plague, rationality settled upon Tlork's scrambled mind and forced the troll to a grinding halt.

A dim memory associated with the moniker Tlork Thunderhead struggled to assert itself. The troll's mind chugged along: That's not what the master calls me, not quite Th-underhead.

The thought rumbled through Tlork's head and departed, and the troll breathed a sigh of relief.

Then Tlork heard the cell door bang closed. He whirled, only to find the elf lounging on one of the pallets in the cell, swinging her legs idly.

The troll furrowed his brow. If he had been confused before, now Tlork tumbled entirely off reason's cliff into a mad, upside-down sea. When he last checked, she had run out, not in, and no one could have gone past him. Tlork growled at her through the bars.

"What you do there?" Tlork growled.

"You'd know better than I," the elf said. "I don't know why you put me in here."

"Tlork put you?" Tlork said. "You prisoner. Tlork guard."

"And an excellent job you're doing with that." She spread her hands and laughed brightly. "I thought I could escape, but apparently I was wrong. Silly me, eh, guard?"

"What?" Tlork was confused-a sensation familiar to him. "Tlork guard."

"And a wonderful job you're doing with that," she said.

Tlork would not be undone so easily. "But you out."

"No, I'm in."

Tlork was lost.

Twilight stretched languidly on her stone pallet and rested her head on her hands. She would enjoy this immensely.

"You out," Tlork said.

"Oh," she said, feigning confusion. "You want me to come out?"

"No." Tlork paused. "But you out."

She shrugged, rose, and dusted herself. "Well, if you say so, but I was getting quite comfortable in here. It's rather nice, isn't it? Despite the misery and decrepitness-right, Lee, Late, Li…?"

"Liet." The youth groaned from the corner in which he had curled into a ball.

"Right," said Twilight, not looking away from Tlork. "But since you're being so insistent, I might just pop out for a spell. I mean, not literally, you know." Unfortunately, Liet was a little too dazed and Tlork a little too dumb to appreciate that witticism. "At your insistence, of course."

Tlork's answer came in the form of an incoherent grunt.

"Eh? I think I missed that, handsome," Twilight said.

"You in."

"You said I should come out."

"No, you…" Tlork's head almost made an audible grinding sound as he fought for the right verbiage. "You stay in. But you… out. Was out."

The way he said it, one would think his use of the past tense a grand victory.

"I was out," Twilight said, slowly. "Oh! You must mean before you put me in."

"No. After."

"After we're speaking? Oh, don't jest! I know that hasn't happened yet."

"No. Before." Tlork's head visibly ached from the complex concepts.

"Before you put me in, yes?"

The troll finally gave up trying to make himself understood, gave an impotent snarl, and stamped off down the hall. Twilight imagined he was trying to make sense of a situation impossible to understand without a child's grasp of tense and grammar. She rubbed her hands together, stretched where she stood, and looked around.

Twilight was not surprised to find Liet still in the cell. In the brief moment in which she had formed an impression of him- before seriously compromising his fathering capabilities-the human had not struck her as particularly experienced or strong, overly courageous or bold, or for that matter, armed.

"Well… done," he managed from the corner. "Bold… and ruth… less…"

"I have plenty of ruth. I just know when to use it and when to ignore it."

"I… see…"

She lay down again and contemplated the ceiling. "Really, trolls should all have tattoos that say, 'This one's stupid.' I guess whoever altered that one forgot to add a brain while he was mucking around with everything else."

A groan was the only reply forthcoming.

"Oh, come now," Twilight said. "You've had the count of at least three hundred to recover. Don't tell me you're still crippled."

"Only my pride," said Liet. "And the fact is, lass-"

"Don't call me that," said Twilight. "I'm five times your age."

"Maid-"

"Not a maid either. None too young or overly innocent."

Liet flushed. From his expression, he hadn't considered it. "Then lady-"

"Not that either. Neither that old nor that rich, lad-of-twenty-eight-winters-or-so."

"How do you know how old I am?"

"Trade secret."

Liet seemed hesitant to accept that answer, but since no other was coming, it would have to do. "Well. The fact is… you hit really hard."

Twilight rolled her eyes. She had to admit that bit.

She swung down-not complaining to be off the filthy pallet-and helped Liet up. He was handsome, with sandy, wavy hair. Other than the oddity of his mismatched eyes, she saw nothing remarkable about him. Not much in the way of muscle, even less grace, and a glass jaw-or, rather, groin. If he could've faced a goblin, fully armed and girded, and not soiled his breeches, Twilight would have been surprised.

She looked down at his hand clasping hers. Good grip, though.

"My thanks." Liet placed his hands protectively over his midsection. One of his sleeves slipped a finger's breadth and revealed gray, puckered flesh beneath. This one had been tortured, perhaps. He saw the gap, reddened, and covered the wrist.

Twilight yawned and returned to her pallet. There she flopped, letting one leg swing, and stared at the ceiling. The boy let out a breath and limped to his pallet.

A pause filled the space between them.

"So what do I call you, then?"

Twilight's pale eyes flicked in his direction. "Hmm?"

"Besides lass or lady, that is," said Liet with a shaky smile.

"The Fox-at-Twilight-princess of elves, seducer of kings, lover of gods. Shadowdancer and divine seeker." She made the titles suitably grandiose-convincing. Two of those were actually true. Then she yawned. "You can call me 'Light."

Liet blinked at her. "What kind of a name-"

"First rule, brightblade," she said, holding up a finger without looking at him. "No questions about me."

"But-"

"Second rule, jack: No questions about the rules."

"Well." Liet fidgeted, twisting his fingers in a way that looked almost like spellcasting. Twilight didn't feel the familiar resonance that would have meant use of the Art, though she supposed the aura of anti-magic would have spoiled it.

"Any other rules I should know about?" asked Liet. "I wouldn't want to break any of them accidentally-consequences, you know." He gave an unconvincing chuckle.

She examined the nails on her left hand. With her right, she held up three fingers.

"Aye?"

"No stabbing me in the back, and I won't return the favor." One finger uncurled.

"Simple enough." Liet shrugged. He pointed at her last raised finger. "And?"

A brief smile flickered across Twilight's face. "No falling in love with me."

Liet snorted. "Well, that's easy," he said. "I assure you, oh lovely hipskirts…"

He paused, perhaps to see if she had taken offense to that remark, which she hadn't. It was a somewhat more polite version of the phrase "pretty woman" than she was used to on the streets of Waterdeep or Westgate.

This was not, of course, to imply that she failed to address it.

"Oh, come now, lad," she said. "Longclaws, that's more appropriate, or slickhips, perhaps-as opposed to lickhips, which I don't recommend saying to anyone. Or, kisscloak, if you're feeling flirtatious. Or, if you feel witty-"

"Ahem!" Liet went even redder and hurriedly finished his thought, cutting her off there. "Oh, lovely hipskirts who shows little regard for my manhood-I shall have no difficulty with your rule the fourth." He thought he was being funny.

Twilight pursed her lips and nodded. "Oh, I have no doubt."

"You don't believe me?"

"About as much as I believe any jack on thy side of the court with oiled and sharpened arms." This was as if to say not at all. "But I digress. You believe you can follow these rules?" Languidly, she put out a delicate hand.

"To be certain," said Liet as he took it. "But why?"

"Welcome aboard," said Twilight, "partner."

"Partner in what?"

"Our grand escape."

Now it was Liet's turn to look unconvinced. "Very well, then-excellent jest."

"You don't believe me?"

"Oh, I have no doubt," Liet said, imitating her sarcastic tone.

"I see." Twilight drew out the shard of iron she had taken from the torture chamber and twirled it between her fingers. "Well, I shall simply have to disappoint."

"Did you see that mountain of a guard? With the big hammer, aye?"

Twilight shrugged noncommittally. "I've seen stranger things."

She lay back. Reverie would not come-she knew that, of course-and her mind was too active to permit sleep, but it didn't matter.

"So why'd you return?" Liet asked after a five-count. "You could've escaped."

"That was just scouting."

"Scouting." Liet laughed ruefully. "I don't think he'll fall for that again."

Twilight just smiled and closed her eyes.

Torchlight flickering, Gestal stared at her, eyes not a hand's breadth from her face. Lord Divergence knew she feigned sleep-her breath was soft and regular. She waited to enact her plan.

Rid of her troublesome amulet, he could watch the elf directly. He'd taken steps to ensure that would not change when she found it again, as well. For now, though, he could not reach into her mind-only cut through the webs she weaved so deftly.

"Your lies fail to impress," he mused.

Gestal considered how she had dealt with the boy-ruthlessly, brutally. The scarred hand hovered over her cheek, wondering at its softness.

Was this the one? he wondered.

He would soon find out.