“You!” the mage growled, turning to the lizard. “This is your fault.” He hurled his words like a mad monk throwing shurikens. They spun with poisonous, deadly precision, unconcerned whether or not they caused harm. “She came here after you. You should have held on to her. You lost her. We could have saved her, and you lost her. What kind of accursed beast are you? Who pulls your strings?”
With each accusation, the mage took a step toward the exhausted, grieving lizard until he had backed him against the wall and was standing over him nose to muzzle. Akabar screeched at the top of his lungs, “Answer me or, I swear, I’ll wear your hide as sandals!” He reached down to grab the creature by the shoulders.
He never got the chance. Dragonbait used the finder’s stone to smack the mage on the side of the head. The Turmishman staggered back and stumbled over the lizard’s sword.
Dragonbait walked up to the mage and bent over him to retrieve his sword. Standing, he snarled down on him. His unblinking lizard eyes narrowed as the mage began to intone a short, deadly spell.
The Turmishman’s spell and the lizard’s leap to attack him were both interrupted when the ground shifted beneath them. Akabar forgot his spell and Dragonbait sprawled across the floor. They both looked back at the wall. The blue glazing from the bricks began to crack and flake away.
The lizard rolled away from the cascading shards of brickwork while the mage crab-crawled backward, keeping his eyes on the destruction. The glazing sloughed completely off, the brick beneath crumbled to dust. The red-colored mortar remained suspended in air for a moment and then crashed to the floor in a cloud of dust.
In the light of the finder’s stone, it looked to Akabar as if a second wall stood just beyond the first, only this wall was composed of garbage, rotted plants, and turned earth. And bound in the center of the wall was Alias, her eyes closed, her body still. Her arms and legs were pinioned beneath coverings of moss and moist plant roots. Beneath the wet lichen covering her right arm, the runes pulsed like an evil, blue heart.
Akabar cried out, but Alias did not stir. She was unconscious. Just above the warrior woman’s head, in the garbage wall, a human eye opened. Then, to the left of Alias’s head, a feline eye opened, followed by a third eye above that, as large, milky, and deep as a dragon’s. A fanged mouth opened to the right of Alias’s right hand. A sharp hyena bark filled the room.
Tendrils shot out from the base of the wall-thing, and with these it began to drag itself forward, a rotting juggernaut. More tendrils oozed from slime-dripping pores, wet and thick tendrils, ending in mouths filled with sharp fangs.
The mage scrambled through the spells he had memorized. All he could think to try was another magic missile. He was struggling to calm himself so that he could begin chanting when a scaly arm grabbed the collar of his robe and dragged him down the passage and around the bend.
Akabar jerked away from the lizard’s claws and knocked his arm away. “Was this your plan, beast,” he spat, “to sacrifice her to that thing?”
Dragonbait’s face twisted into a deep scowl, and Akabar thought the lizard was going to hit him again. Instead, he pointed around the corner, back toward the living wall.
It had become a wave of pungent rot. Fresh green shoots sprouted over it, and it moved with surprising speed, already having lumbered over the spot where Akabar had been standing only a moment before. New taproots shot out every second, and brownish slime oozed from beneath its flowing bottom. Alias remained asleep, entranced, trapped against its leading edge.
“So, you’ve saved me,” Akabar shrugged. “How do we get Alias back?”
Dragonbait scowled again and pointed up.
Akabar had no better plan, so he allowed himself to be tugged back through the passages, looking behind every few yards to see if the wall of slime was still following them.
It was. The wall lumbered along like a mastodon, its bulk filling the corridor, oozing into different shapes to fit the narrower corridors. Its multiple mouths were babbling now, each inhuman throat finding its voice, wheezing through rotted pipes too long ignored.
The mage and the lizard finally reached the secret door from the stairs into the garbage midden. The stench of human waste was strong, but fresher and more alive than the dead-rot that followed them. The door had resumed whining, trying to overcome the rocks Alias had jammed in its path.
Dragonbait began kicking the stones away.
“No!” Akabar shouted, trying to push him away. “You can’t do that! She’ll be trapped in there with that thing!”
The lizard shoved him across the platform toward the stairs and kicked the last stone from the door’s path.
The mossy barrier slammed shut.
“What have you done?” Akabar screamed.
Suddenly, Akabar gasped, breathless. Sharp pains laced through his chest like needles running beneath his skin. His lungs labored for air.
Dragonbait pointed upward and began climbing the stairs.
“Damn you!” the mage shouted up the steps from the platform. “I may be a greengrocer, but I know better than to abandon a friend! I’ll die before I abandon her to that thing, you coward.”
Directly behind him, the wall with the secret door exploded and the great, oozing mass surged into the pit. The stone platform began to collapse under its great weight, but the corruption cascaded downward still babbling from innumerable mouths. Now, the squealing cries were chanting in chorus.
In voices ranging from frog piping to deep, resonant tongues as ancient as the great elven forests, the word repeated over and over was Moander.
The Turmish mage blanched and fled up the stairs.
19
Moander’s Resurrection and Mist’s Return
Dragonbait was waiting for Akabar halfway up the stairs. The lizard’s breathing was fast, but nowhere near as labored as the mage’s. Akabar staggered up the stairs with his hands clutching his chest. The pain there had changed from sharp needle pricks to a deep, crushing sensation. His face was drenched with sweat. His shoulder and back ached.
“Why?” he gasped, his furor burned out by the fire in his lungs, “why did you let her die?”
Dragonbait made a quick dismissive shake of his head such as an adult might use to warn an overbearing child. Then, noticing the perspiration dripping down the Turmishman’s anguished face, the lizard reached out to take his shoulder.
Akabar retreated from his grasp. “No,” he insisted. “You go ahead. I can’t run. Muscle cramp,” he lied. “If it climbs up the walls, maybe I can slow it, maybe have a chance still to free her. Go!”
The mage collapsed in a heap on the stairs.
Dragonbait slipped past Akabar a few steps lower and knelt to get a better look at him. He put the finder’s stone down beside him and reached out with both clawed hands. He laid his palms and fingers over the slime-spattered robe covering Akabar’s chest.
The smell of woodsmoke enveloped them. A small aura of light flared around the reptile’s claws. Nowhere but in the blackness of this pit would Akabar have been able to see the light the lizard generated. A feeling of warmth and relief spread out from Akabar’s torso.
Akabar stood and the pain in his chest, back, and shoulder was gone. He stared at the lizard in confusion.
“Who in Gehenna are you? What are you?”
But Dragonbait’s attention was fixed on the pit. He stared over the edge of the staircase into the earth’s depths. Akabar tried to adjust his eyes to the darkness to see what held the lizard’s gaze. A bright, blue light shimmered in the depths. At first, Akabar thought it might be the moon reflected in water, but the sky above the pit was dark.