Gauntlgrym

THE HOSTTOWER’S SECRET

“So it is true.”

“Truer in the past,” Dor’crae replied. “They’re more rare in the city these days, since Luskan has lost its luster as a trading port. But still they remain, or visit at least, advising the High Captains and offering their wares.”

“Interesting,” Dahlia replied, but she was, in fact, losing interest in her lover’s dissertation of the politics of the City of Sails.

Dor’crae had led her to a most unusual place, a cordoned-off area of ancient ruins overgrown with roots and the hulking remains of dead trees, like a long untended and decrepit garden.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“Illusk,” Dor’crae replied. “The most ancient part of an ancient city. And more than that, Illusk is Luskan’s barrier between the present and the past, between the living and the dead.”

Dahlia took a deep breath, inhaling the heavy aroma of the air around her.

“Do you not feel it?” Dor’crae asked. “You, who have lived at the edge of the Dread Ring of Szass Tam, must sense the transition.”

Dahlia nodded. She did indeed feel the damp chill, the smell of death, the sense of emptiness. Death, after all, was about all that she had known for the past decade of her life-continuously, personally, pervasively.

“It’s a sweet thing,” Dor’crae whispered to her, his voice going husky as he moved near to her exposed neck, “to walk in both realms.”

Dahlia’s eyelids felt heavy and for a few heartbeats she was hardly aware of the vampire’s approach. It was as if she smelled the invitation to the other realm, permeating her very being.

She popped open her eyes and they flashed dangerously at the nearby vampire. “If you bite me, I will utterly destroy you,” she whispered, mimicking Dor’crae’s teasing tones.

The vampire grinned and stepped back, remembering to bow once as he did.

She shifted just a bit to show Dor’crae the brooch she wore, the gift from Szass Tam that granted her heightened powers against the undead. A vampire would prove a formidable opponent to any living warrior, but with that brooch, and her own amazing physical discipline, Dahlia was quite capable of following through on her threat.

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked.

“Behold the gateway to the undercity,” Dor’crae explained, moving to a nearby ruin, a pile of broken stones scattered in a roughly circular pattern as if they had once formed the rim of a well.

Dahlia hesitated and glanced across to the island that had once held the Hosttower of the Arcane, its rubble still clearly visible, and her expression remained doubtful.

“There are tunnels,” Dor’crae explained. “Beneath the waves.”

“You have been down there?”

The vampire smiled and nodded. “It is where I seek my respite from the sunlight. A most remarkable place, and with a most remarkable hostess.”

That last remark had Dahlia looking at the vampire with intrigue. “Hostess?” she asked.

“Yes, an exquisite creature.”

“Do not mock me.”

“You will like Valindra Shadowmantle,” the vampire promised.

With a flourish of his arms, Dor’crae flipped his cloak up over his shoulders. He seemed to blur, and Dahlia had to momentarily look away as the vampire transformed into a large bat, which dived into the well, disappearing from sight. With a sigh, knowing Dor’crae knew she couldn’t easily follow, Dahlia slipped into the hole. She had her staff doubled into a four-foot walking stick, and she spoke a quiet command and tapped it against the stone. Its folded end reacted to her command with flickering bursts of blue-white light.

Down Dahlia went, staff in one hand, her free hand and two feet working fast to bring her down the well. After about thirty feet, the narrow shaft opened up below her, so she crouched as low as she could and poked her staff below, illuminating the chamber. The floor was barely a dozen feet below her, so she didn’t even bother to squirm lower and hook her fingers to hang, but just folded up and dropped.

She landed in a crouch and glanced all around to find Dor’crae back in human form and waiting for her near another hole. Down they went again, to a crossing corridor and through a door into a side chamber. Several staircases, ladders, and narrow chutes later, they came into a labyrinth of tunnels and corridors, ancient structures, walls and doors and broken stairs, the oldest incarnation of the city that had come to be known as Luskan.

“That corridor,” Dor’crae indicated, pointing west, “will take us out to the islands.”

Dahlia walked over, leading with her illuminated walking stick, studying the walls and floor.

“Along its ceiling, you’ll find a mystery of the Hosttower,” Dor’crae explained.

Dahlia opened her staff to its full length and allowed the crackling light to wander to the tip once more. Then she thrust it above her, nearly touching the remarkably high ceiling of the tunnel.

“What is it?” she asked, running the staff tip along what seemed like veins in the ceiling.

“Roots?” Dor’crae asked as much as answered.

Dahlia looked at him curiously, but recalled the tree-shaped appearance of the now destroyed Hosttower of the Arcane.

Then a hissing sound from the tunnel spun her around, staff at the ready as some undead beast rushed at her, its long tongue darting between pointy yellow teeth.

Dahlia put her staff into a spin, but Dor’crae intervened, stepping forward and lifting his hand toward the ghoul and staring at it intently.

The ghoul slowed and stopped, staring back at the vampire, a greater being among the enigmatic pecking order of the undead. With a howl of protest, the stinking creature skulked back into the shadows the way it had come.

“The catacombs are full of the ravenous things,” Dor’crae explained. “Ghouls and lacedons, half-eaten zombies…”

“Lovely,” Dahlia remarked, and she lamented that the undead seemed to follow her wherever she went.

“Most are small, but there are at least two large ones,” the vampire explained, turning his attention and the conversation back to the curious roots. “Hollow tubes, one running out from the foundation of the ruined Hosttower to the open sea, the other running back inland to the east, southeast.”

“How far?”

The vampire shrugged. “Well beyond the city walls.”

“What magic is this?” Dahlia asked, lifting the light and peering again at the nearly translucent greenish tube and the streaks of red.

“Ancient.”

Dahlia shot the vampire an unappreciative look.

“If I had to guess, I’d say dwarven,” Dor’crae elaborated.

“Dwarven? It’s too delicate.”

“But the stonework around it is impeccable, all the way to the Hosttower’s foundation stones, which certainly showed the mark of dwarf craftsmen.”

“You’re asserting that the Hosttower of the Arcane, one of the most magnificent and magical structures in all of Faer?n, a wizards’ guildhouse from beyond the memory of the oldest elves, was made by dwarves?”

“I think it likely that dwarves worked with the ancient architects of the Hosttower,” Dor’crae replied, “who were likely not dwarves but elves, I would guess, given the history of the region, and the treelike shape of the place before its fall.”

Dahlia didn’t argue, though she suspected that more than a few humans would have needed to be involved to bring the elves and dwarves together.

“Roots?” Dahlia asked. “And you think these are import-“She stopped as she noticed some movement above, then screwed up her face curiously when she saw some kind of liquid sloshing through the tube above her.

“The tide,” Dor’crae explained. “When it rises, some water is forced along the tunnels-the roots, the veins, whatever you wish to call them. It’s not much, though, and goes back out with the tide.”

Dahlia had no idea what any of this surprising information might mean. She and Dor’crae had come to Luskan to learn if the destruction of the Hosttower had anything to do with the earthquakes that had been wracking the Sword Coast North since its fall. Magical wards had burst in the fall of the tower, it was said, and somehow, given the timing of the quakes, those wards affected not only Luskan but the forested hills known as the Crags.

She turned to follow the line of the strange “root” back to the southeast.

“What else have you learned?” the warrior elf asked.

“Come, I will take you to the lich Valindra, and an older and more powerful being-or one who was more powerful, before he was driven insane in the Spellplague.”

He started away, but Dahlia didn’t immediately follow, silently recounting what she knew of the recent history of Luskan, something she had studied intently before leaving Thay.

“Arklem Greeth?” she asked, referring to the lich who had once commanded the Hosttower in the name of the Arcane Brotherhood, and who had been defeated in its fall. Defeated, but not likely destroyed, she knew, for that was the manner of liches, after all.

Dor’crae grinned, showing his approval.

“A formidable foe,” Dahlia warned. “Even with Szass Tam’s brooch protecting me.”

Dor’crae shook his head. “Once, perhaps, but no more. The drow have taken care of that matter for us.”

A short while and a dozen chambers and corridors later, the pair came into a strange room.

“What is this place?” Dahlia asked, for it seemed more the drawing room of a fancy inn than a subterranean chamber amidst a network of damp caves. Colorful tapestries hung around the chamber, which was set with lavishly-decorated and well-crafted furniture, including a marble-topped vanity with a large, gold-gilded mirror set atop it.

“It is my home,” said a woman seated on a delicate chair in front of that vanity. When she turned in her seat and smiled at the couple, Dahlia tried hard not to wince. She might have been beautiful, with long, lustrous black hair and delicate features, though what color her eyes might once have been was long lost to the red dots of a lich’s unnatural inner fires. Her smile was a ghastly thing, for her gums had rotted back, making her teeth seem far too large, and her pallid skin seemed almost to crack as she smiled.

“Do you not like it?” she asked sweetly-too sweetly, as if she was a young girl at play, perhaps.

“Oh, we do, Valindra! Oh, we do!” Dor’crae said with exaggerated enthusiasm before Dahlia could even begin to reply. The warrior looked to her vampire companion then back at the lich.

“You are Valindra Shadowmantle?” she asked.

“Why, yes, I am,” Valindra replied.

“I have heard stories of your greatness,” Dahlia lied, and Dor’crae squeezed her hand in approval. “But even those flattering tales greatly understated your beauty.”

With that, Dahlia bowed low, while Valindra tittered and laughed.

“Where is your husband, good lady?” Dor’crae asked, and when Valindra spun as if looking for someone, Dor’crae nodded his chin up toward a shelf on a glass-fronted hutch, where sat a most curious, skull-shaped gem the size of Valindra’s fist.

As they all considered that phylactery, the eyes of the skull flared red, brightly for a moment before going soft once more.

“Greeth is in there?” Dahlia quietly asked her companion.

“What’s left of him,” the vampire replied. He directed Dahlia’s gaze the other way, to a second skull-shaped gem, which showed no life within its smoky white crystal.

“Valindra’s phylactery,” Dor’crae explained.

Dahlia felt at the brooch on her vest as she considered the gems. She dared walk over to the hutch, and noting that Valindra still smiled stupidly, she dared to open the door. Dahlia glanced back at Dor’crae, who held up his hands, having no answer.

“A most beautiful gemstone,” Dahlia said to Valindra.

“It’s my husband’s,” the lich replied.

“May I hold it?”

“Oh, please do!” said Valindra.

Dahlia wasn’t sure if that sweetness was from her apparent simple-mindedness, or if it was an enthusiastic prodding for more nefarious reasons. Holding the phylactery of a disembodied lich, after all, was reputedly the easiest way to get oneself possessed.

But Dahlia wore Szass Tam’s brooch, which offered great protection from such necromancy, and so she took the gemstone in her hand.

Almost immediately, she felt the rush of confusion, anger, and terror contained within that gemstone. She knew it was Arklem Greeth, and would have even if Dor’crae hadn’t told her so, for the lich screamed at her to release him, and to kill someone named Robillard.

She saw flashes of the glory that had been Hosttower of the Arcane, for Arklem Greeth had been its final master. So many images assaulted her, so many discordant thoughts flickered in her consciousness. She felt herself being drawn into the inviting depths of the gemstone.

She began to wonder where Dahlia ended and Arklem Greeth began.

In a flicker of recognition, Dahlia dropped the skull gem back onto the shelf and quickly stepped back, gasping for breath and trying hard to hold her composure.

“Your husband has a magnificent gemstone, Valindra,” she said.

“Oh, but he does, and mine is no less wondrous,” the lich answered, and her voice sounded different then, husky, threatening, sober.

Dahlia turned on her.

“Why are you here?” Valindra asked. “Did Kimmuriel send you?”

“Kimmuriel?” Dahlia asked, looking more at Dor’crae than the lich.

“One of the leaders of the dark elves in Luskan,” the vampire explained.

“Where is he?” Dahlia asked.

“He went home,” Valindra unexpectedly answered, her voice full of regret. “Far, far away. I miss him. He helps me.”

The warrior and the vampire exchanged curious glances.

“He helps me remember,” Valindra went on. “He helps my husband.”

“Did he give you the gemstones?” Dahlia asked.

“No, that was Jarlaxle,” Valindra answered, “and the stupid dwarf.”

Dahlia looked to Dor’crae, who shook his head, then back at Valindra.

“Bwahaha!” Valindra erupted, ending with a sour expression and an even more sour sigh. “Stupid dwarf.”

“So, Jarlaxle is a dwarf?”

“No!” said Valindra, seeming quite amused by that notion. “He is drow. Handsome and clever.”

“And he is in Luskan?”

“Sometimes.”

“Now?”

“I… I…” The lich’s eyes darted around, seeming at a loss.

Dahlia looked to Dor’crae, who had no answers. “What do you know of the Hosttower?” she asked the lich.

“I lived there once, for a long time.”

“Yes, then it was destroyed…”

The lich turned away, throwing her arm up across her eyes. “It fell! Oh, it fell!”

“And its magic was broken?” Dahlia pressed, moving near to the distraught woman. She asked again, and when Valindra looked at her blankly, she rephrased the question several different ways.

But it was soon obvious that the lich had no idea what she might be talking about, so Dahlia wisely shifted the conversation to other, more mundane things, then to the topic of Valindra’s beauty once more, something that seemed to calm the undead woman.

After some time, she asked, “May I visit you again, Valindra?”

“I do so enjoy company,” the lich replied. “But tell me before, that I might prepare…” She paused and looked around, and appeared increasingly distressed.

“I… where is my food?” Valindra asked, and she looked at Dahlia curiously. Then she threw her hands up over her face and fell back with a great wail.

Dahlia moved toward her, but the lich thrust one hand forward to keep the elf warrior away. “My food!” she said, then she began to laugh.

“I will bring you some food,” Dahlia promised, and Valindra laughed all the louder.

“I need no such sustenance,” the lich replied. “Not for so many years now. Not since the Hosttower fell.” She looked at Dahlia with a sad grin. “Not since I died.”

She seemed to calm then and Dahlia retreated to stand by Dor’crae.

“I forget sometimes,” Valindra explained, her voice sober once more. “It is so lonely.” She cast her longing gaze at the skull gem phylactery of her husband.

“Then you would welcome us back?” Dahlia asked.

Valindra nodded.

Dahlia motioned for Dor’crae to follow and started out of the room.

“But no food,” Valindra called after her.

“There are still answers to be found down here,” Dor’crae said when they were away. “In the roots of the Hosttower, if not in Valindra’s home.”

“There are answers to be found in there, as well.”

“I doubt she knows much of the Hosttower’s origins, or wards.”

“But Arklem Greeth may well know,” Dahlia assured him. “I would speak with him again.”

“You spoke with him? When you held the gem? It is not wise-”

“Short conversations,” Dahlia promised with a grin. “It’s near dawn now. I’m going back to the city-I have an audience with Borlann the Crow, one of the High Captains. Perhaps he will tell me more of these drow, this Kimmuriel and Jarlaxle.”

“And I?”

“Follow the inland root of the Hosttower,” Dahlia ordered. “I would know where it goes.”

Dor’crae nodded.

“I will return to Valindra tomorrow night, and every night thereafter. Join us as soon as you can.”

“Should I escort you up?” asked the vampire.

Dahlia just looked at him.

“Ghouls, ghasts, and other beasts…” Dor’crae started to explain.

He stopped when Dahlia stared at him as though he’d lost his mind at long last, and she took up her fighting staff.

Before the next dawn, Dahlia hung by one arm from the bottom lip of the uppermost well, peering into the chamber below. She slowly turned, scanning the room for the undead she knew were there, but knew she wouldn’t see.

They could see her, hanging up high, her walking stick sparking with blue light, but it didn’t matter. Even if she’d come down in complete darkness and as silent as a shadow, they would know. They would smell her. The aroma of her sweet, living flesh would almost overwhelm them.

Dahlia dropped to the floor below, springing open her staff as she descended. She landed in a crouch and hopped in circles.

There were too many.

Out they came in a swarm, from every exit and every shadow: ravenous ghouls, hunched low, running on all fours, their long nails scratching against the stone. They appeared as emaciated human corpses, gray skin stretched over skull and bones, but there was more to them than that: claws and teeth and a hatred for all things living, and a hunger for all flesh, alive or dead. There was a score of them at least, and Dahlia had nowhere to run to gain a more defensible position.

But neither did they.

She sprang straight up, inverting with her hands set firmly at the top of her planted staff. She straightened upside down, thrusting her legs back inside the well. She snapped her legs out wide to the sides, locking them against the sides of the well, and bent up, hand-walking her staff before her until she turned upright back in the well, with the swarm of ghouls below her.

“Enjoy this,” she whispered to the ghouls and she tugged a ruby gemstone free from her necklace and dropped it. It exploded the moment it hit the floor, flames rolling out in every direction, nearly reaching back up into the well with Dahlia.

With her legs still locking her firmly in place, the warrior clapped her hands over her ears to diminish the awful keening below.

The fireball lasted only a heartbeat, a single, devastating gout of flames, but the sting remained, fires clinging to the ghouls’ skin, eating hungrily. They shrieked and screamed in high-pitched, otherworldly voices, hellish calls befitting the Abyss itself. They ran about madly, arms flailing to chase the biting flames away, claws slashing to keep their insane companions at bay, for indeed some jumped upon others and began chewing and tearing at undead flesh, at any flesh, at anything that might make the pain stop.

In the midst of that insanity, Dahlia dropped back to the floor, releasing two-foot lengths at the ends of her four-foot center pole. She had those outer poles spinning even as she landed, and she came right out of her crouch and pivoted left, launching a strike that caved in the skull of the nearest undead beast.

They were too agonized, too agitated and insane, to coordinate their movements against her, and Dahlia waded through them. Every reaching arm shattered under the weight of her spinning staff. Any ghoul’s face that got too near to her felt the butt end of Kozah’s Needle’s center pole.

She sprinted clear, down a tunnel, and when she heard pursuit, she broke the center pole apart and set her two weapons into coordinated motion, building momentum.

The ghouls neared-a pair of them, she believed.

Dahlia rounded a corner, her free poles spinning furiously at her sides, back to front. Then on one turn, she flipped her wrists under, bringing that spin even tighter so that the poles came up into her armpits, where she locked them tight. And she never eased the pull from those front poles in her hands right before her, up and angled away, straining to pull their ends free. Dahlia growled and tightened every muscle in her body, it seemed, straining greatly to hold the back poles in place while at the same time straining to yank them free.

She leaped out at the last moment to face the pursuing ghouls, and at that instant lifted her elbows. The poles shot forward with tremendous force, each flying like a spear into the ugly face of a surprised ghoul. The sickening splat of their butt ends cracking through skulls, one sounding wetter as it drove right through a ghoul’s eye, came as sweet music to the elf.

Everything seemed to freeze in place at that moment, Dahlia and the ghouls holding that macabre pose for what seemed like many heartbeats. The elf woman exploded into action again, tugging the ends free of the ghouls’ already rotten brains. They snapped straight back behind her own head where she shifted her hands ever so slightly to use that momentum to put them into reverse spins at her sides, then overhead with her right hand and down and across to smash the side of the skull of the ghoul on her left. At the same time, her left hand went up over her head and followed the same path as the first, only left to right, and that other ghoul’s head snapped to the side as it flew against the wall and crumbled into a dead heap.

Dahlia casually set the poles into motion again and stared back the way she’d come, though even with her keen elf vision, she couldn’t see much.

But there was no pursuit. She reformed her staff and buckled it once more into a single walking stick, then tapped it on the stone to bring forth the flickering blue light.

“Ah, Valindra Shadowmantle,” she whispered as she started away, “I do hope you’re worth all this trouble.”

Dor’crae was a vampire, and a vampire couldn’t sweat, of course, but still he felt the moisture all over his body, his clothes clinging uncomfortably to him. Normally, Dor’crae wouldn’t have needed a light to navigate subterranean chambers, but his complete inability to see anything piqued his curiosity.

He brought forth a candle and some flint and steel, and when the wick finally caught, the vampire peered around even more curiously. He was in a wide, high chamber, as he had suspected, but he still couldn’t see very much at all, just an opaque wall of steam brightened by his pitiful candle.

“What is this place?” he whispered to himself.

He had passed into a chamber full of steam that smelled like piles of rotten eggs, and that hissed as if he’d entered a pit of vipers. He’d traveled many miles from Luskan after several days following the inland “root” of the fallen Hosttower. The tunnels were of dwarven craftsmanship, surely, though it was obvious to Dor’crae that no dwarves had been there in a long, long time.

He kept the candle burning, though it was all but useless, and slowly navigated the chamber. He moved toward one hissing sound, and found it to be a vent in the floor, a crack in the stone through which poured more hot steam, and the awful smell only worsened.

He found no other easy exit from the chamber, but his eyes widened with surprise when he noted that the root of the Hosttower did not continue through it but snaked down one wall and disappeared through the floor. The vampire smiled, thinking his journey at its end. He blew out the candle and became as insubstantial as the steam around him. The vampire flowed through a crack in the floor, descending beside the root.

Several days later, somewhat shaken but thoroughly intrigued, Dor’crae arrived once more in the chambers of Valindra Shadowmantle.

The queen of Luskan’s underworld had many candles burning, and seemed more animated than usual, more lucid. She greeted Dor’crae pleasantly, even expressing her regret at not having seen him for a tenday.

“I followed the root of the Hosttower,” he explained. “You remember the Hosttower…?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know the place, the grand hall where it disappears under the ground?”

“She has no answers for you,” came another voice.

Dahlia stepped into sight from around one of the many decorative screens set about the chamber. She gave a little grin and nodded toward the skull gem on the shelf, the one inhabited by the spirit of Arklem Greeth. “But he does.”

“You’ve been…?”

“Tell me of this ‘grand hall’.”

“It’s a most remarkable place, as big as some cities in the Under-”

“Gauntlgrym,” Dahlia interrupted, and Dor’crae looked at her, obviously not understanding.

“The ancient homeland of the Delzoun dwarves,” Dahlia explained. “Long lost-some consider it a myth.”

“It is real,” said Dor’crae.

“You explored it?”

“I was turned away before I could get too far.”

Dahlia looked at him with one eyebrow raised.

“Ghosts,” the vampire explained. “Dwarf ghosts, and darker things. I thought it prudent to return to you with what I had unearthed. What did you call it? Gauntlgrym? How can you know?”

“Greeth told me. The Hosttower was tied to that most ancient of dwarven cities, and was built by dwarves, elves, and humans in a long-ago age, and for the benefit of all, though few dwarves ever lived in the Hosttower itself.”

“But its power benefitted this city, this ‘Gauntlgrym’?”

Dahlia crossed the room, shrugging as she went. “I would expect as much. Arklem Greeth knows little more, or at least I could discern little more, though I will try again soon enough. He is old-not that old, of course, but he seems confident of the work, masonry and magical, that built the Hosttower of the Arcane, and that it was indeed somehow tied to…” Her words trailed off as she noticed the puzzled look upon Dor’crae’s face.

“You wear two diamonds again in your right ear,” the vampire explained. “Eight in your left, and two, again, in your right.”

“Surely you cannot be jealous,” Dahlia replied.

“Borlann the Crow needed incentive, I expect?”

Dahlia merely smiled.

“Jealous?” Dor’crae replied then, with a laugh. “ ‘Relieved’ would be a better word. Better another in your right ear than you come to believe your left might look better with nine.”

Dahlia stared at him for a very long time, and the vampire feared that perhaps he hadn’t been wise to tip her off to the fact that he understood the significance of her jewelry.

“We know where to look now,” Dahlia said after a very long and uncomfortable silence. “I will continue my work with Arklem Greeth, gaining whatever insight he has to offer, and you must gather as much information as can be found about Gauntlgrym, or of how we might navigate its wards, like these ghosts you speak of.”

“It’s a dangerous road,” the vampire replied. “Were I trapped in this physical body, I would have had to fight my way in, and fight my way out, against formidable foes.”

“Then we will find even more formidable allies,” Dahlia promised.