"All right, all right," the young champion said with resignation. "Please, respected druid, return to your true form and relate what you saw."
Greenleaf seemed to sprout out of a pelican. When his feet were no longer webbed, but the properly booted appendages of a half-elf, the druid beamed a smile at the trio of expectant observers. "It is there, plainly visible, not more than twenty feet overhead. The step is directly above the center of the islet."
"How do we get up to it?" the hillman queried.
"The rope again, I think," Gord murmured as he freed the coil and began to work it into a noose. The rest was easy going, comparatively speaking. The line anchored itself around seemingly nothing, Gord swarmed up it, and hung from the top of the Gord as if levitated.
"It hasn't taken me to some other place yet," he called down, "so I suppose the rope is hanging on the edge of the portal. Chert, help Curley to climb, and I'll pull him up before I change position. Then you come up and haul Gellor on after you. Be sure one of you brings the line, too!" When the druid arrived and forced Gord to move closer to the center of the opening that was invisible save from above, the others saw Gord vanish. Chert then climbed up and took Green-leafs place. The druid, too, disappeared as he moved elsewhere.
"I don't know how to free the rope," Chert said loudly to the climbing bard. "Can you manage it?"
"No, blast it!" Gellor was thinking furiously as he replied. He could almost recall Gord's magical words of command that controlled the enchanted horsehair line, but what if he made a mistake? Just then he attained the platform, and the matter was taken out of his hands. As Chert moved to make a place for the bard to clamber onto, he tripped over his own foot and fell. Clutching out desperately, one of his huge hands grabbed onto Gellor's studded leather jack and held fast. Both men were thus precipitated into an unceremonious heap within the next of the intradimensional pockets devised by Gravestone.
There was nothing in the new place. Some grayish illumination seemed to fill the air, but there was no sun, stars, moon, or even sky. All of them were within a bubble — a bubble of stone. "Out of the great worm's hole..." Chert said slowly as he looked around.
"And into the maw of the waiting dragon," Gord supplied. "It is worse than before!"
"This time I might have to agree." Gellor said. "I see no step anywhere, and there can be no invisible one in this place."
"Which of you has the rope?" the young thief asked without taking his eyes off the dome of the ceiling overhead.
"Ah, well... err..." Chert managed.
"It is behind. Lost, Gord, by no fault of ours," the bard told him. How exactly he didn't relate to Gord, naturally. "Did you think it would be useful in this cyst?"
"Perhaps..." the young acrobat-thief replied distractedly, seeming to dismiss the magical Gord as unimportant. "See there at the apex of the ceiling? That appears to be a hooked stone projecting there."
"I see it. So what?" Chert demanded.
"It seems evident that we escape this trap by going there," Gord related patiently, still studying the dome of granite. "As feet are placed on the ceiling, the counterpart of this floor, it is my guess the individual will be sent on to the next stair."
The dilemma was finally solved by Gord. He rummaged around in another of the magically expansive pockets hidden in the thick girdle banding his waist. There were several enchanted rings therein, and one possessed power over air. "It is sufficiently strong to carry two upward. You, Gellor, will wear it, and bear Curley upward with you. As your boots touch the ceiling, you must drop the ring from your finger. Be swift, for if it is transported through the portal with you, then Chert and I will be stranded here forever."
The troubador managed the trick — barely! Gord then jammed the rune-worked circlet of ancient metal upon a finger and floated up, he and Chert clutching each other like long-lost relatives reunited after a generation of separation. A push against the curving wall, a mid-air somersault, and the two were with their comrades.
The place all four were in now was a totally alien one, its landscape of such distorted shapes, sky of jarring coloration, atmosphere so noxious that all of the adventurers were shaken to the core. Whatever it was that pervaded this far world, its effect was to erode the mind, tear away sanity, insinuate madness.
Somehow Gellor managed to begin a heroic ballad, draw forth his little kanteel of ivory with silver strings and gold inlays, and turn back the insanity that would have overwhelmed them otherwise. The stair was the most revolting feature in view, but they found the mental strength to mount it nonetheless.
Next was a Jungle, but not of vegetation. The wild growth around them consisted of various tentacles. Some were one color, some another, with suckers, poison, claws, barbs, and so forth. Each set of the waving members sought to seize and slay and devour. Two, three, four, five, even as many as a dozen tentacles surrounded each of the sphincterlike mouths into which a victim would be thrust. The solution was simply to hack and slash the attacking tentacles, to strike them with magic and weapons. It was the thickest and largest cluster of the things that hid a step in the midst of the viciously hook-fringed and venomous tentacles.
That step took the four into a reeking moor whose fetid, miasmal air was filled with swarms of biting insects and whose mud and water swarmed with leeches and similar forms of hungry parasites. The place where the next step was located was evident; an expanse of high ground far in the distance. It lay but five or six leagues distant as the crow flies. Translated to the real terms of the place, that meant five or six days of hard going on foot through the low-lying, infested swampland.
They tried that mode of travel only for an hour. It was soon evident that they would be infected with a half-dozen diseases, anemic, and worm-ridden at the very best after much more of the same. Then they heard the monstrous bellowings and croakings and splashings of the native fauna of this stinking swamp world, and that decided the matter promptly. Curley Greenleaf, as a last resort, used some of his remaining magical capability to create a fiery vehicle that would carry them to the ridgelike step. It took the four of them quite a while to build a fire of sufficient size to effect the magic, but it was accomplished, and the aerial Journey was simplicity itself. The chariot set firmly down upon the monstrous-sized next step.
The next stratum was worse, for the stair-portal shot them into the space between galaxies, and the heatless, airless void would have slain them in an instant except for the presence of the champion of Balance. The power vested in him was such that all of them were sent to the next entrapped step in the instant after the malign dweomer left by Gravestone precipitated them into the freezing, suffocating void where they were meant to die.
Time to rest." Gord said with tiredness and strain filling his voice.
"This is a far less lethal area than any we have encountered so far," Gellor said as he surveyed the surroundings. "At least on the face of it...." What they saw was simply a strange landscape, a plain of infinite dimensions. It was covered with flights of stairs.
"We all need some strong, prayerful treatment to rid our bodies of the pestilences of that miasmal fen," the druid said firmly. "Some of us bear wounds and other hurts which would do with some treatment and healing. As we take our ease here a time, I'll see to that," Curley told them.
Gord was given preferential care because he alone was the Balance's hope. Then Greenleaf cared for himself, just in case some unperceived disease was affecting him. Chert had fallen asleep immediately, as was his wont whenever the opportunity permitted. The troubador had spent some time scrutinizing the surroundings, but soon he too was dozing. "Seeing those sluggards makes me sleepy, too," Gord yawned in Curley's general direction. "After you've done your best for Gellor and Chert, wake me up."