Breathing a sigh of relief, the hawk-nosed thief scrambled away from the window. Now that Kelemvor and Midnight knew he was on their trail, it would be much more difficult to kill them.
After watching Midnight’s spell misfire, Kelemvor peered out the window. Cyric was nowhere in sight. “You missed,” he reported, still too numbed by Adon’s death to react.
Midnight did not respond. She lay curled up on the floor, gasping for breath and sweating uncontrollably. Her body ached from head to toe, and the magic-user felt as though willpower alone held her spirit inside her body. She recalled Bhaal’s warning that she would burn herself up if she did not learn how to wield Mystra’s magic.
That was exactly what it felt like she had done. Any spell wore a magic-user down, and part of a mage’s training involved increasing her body’s tolerance to magical energies. But Midnight, newly gifted with the ability to call upon a limitless supply of magic, did not yet have the endurance to withstand such energies. In theory, she could call upon her magic to do almost anything, but she now understood that the effort might leave her a lifeless husk of flesh and energy.
When he turned around, that was exactly what Kelemvor feared he was seeing. “Midnight!” he gasped.
For the first time since Adon had entrusted it to him, Kelemvor set the Tablet of Fate aside. He dropped the saddlebags, knelt beside Midnight, and took her into his arms. “How can I help?” the fighter asked softly. “What can I do?”
Midnight wanted to tell him to hold her, to keep her warm, but she was afraid to speak. Right now, she needed her strength just to stay conscious.
Kelemvor heard the shuffling of heavy steps on the stairway, and he knew the zombies had discovered their hiding place. His first thought was to charge the stairs, but he knew the undead would tear him to pieces. That would leave Midnight alone and at their mercy.
Instead, he cut the bucket away from the rope and threw it aside. The fighter tied the free end of the rope around Midnight’s waist. He intended to lower her into the cavern, then climb down after her.
He quickly realized he did not have time. The first zombie appeared in the door just as he slipped the mage into the hole. Kelemvor ignored the thing and began lowering Midnight. Two more of the walking corpses entered the room.
Midnight only knew that Kelemvor was lowering her into the darkness and that her strength was slowly returning. With the cavern walls echoing its bubbles and gurgles back toward her, the stream sounded incredibly large, more like a small river.
A few moments later, her descent stopped and she found herself hanging in darkness. Though it sounded as if she were only a few feet above the stream, there was no way for the mage to confirm or deny that suspicion. Midnight looked up and saw a dim square of light. There were forms dancing around it, but she could not make out any details.
Back in the tower’s basement, the first zombie ignored Kelemvor and picked up the saddlebags containing the Tablet of Fate. The fighter finished lowering Midnight, then grabbed his sword and hacked at the zombie. The thing’s arm fell off and it dropped the tablet. But before Kelemvor could retrieve the artifact, the zombie’s fellows joined it and all three attacked.
The fighter slashed at them to no avail. He connected solidly with the one whose arm he had already lopped off, opening a gash in its abdomen and temporarily stunning it. Heedless of their own safety, the other two corpses closed in, flailing wildly.
Forced to retreat away from the tablet, Kelemvor stumbled into the pit in the middle of the room. He grabbed the rope to keep from falling, then leveled a vicious slash at one of his attackers. The zombie’s head flopped off its neck and dropped to the floor. Another of the undead threw itself at the hand Kelemvor was using to hold onto the rope. The fighter instinctively slashed and connected. Then the stroke continued past the zombie’s body and the warrior could not draw back quickly enough to avoid cutting the rope.
Midnight heard Kelemvor scream, then the rope popped and went slack. She dropped into the stream, felt the current grab her, then began fighting to keep her head above water. Though she was still exhausted from the misfired spell, she knew that she had to find a reservoir of strength or drown.
Two splashes sounded to Midnight’s left as Kelemvor and the sword he had dropped hit the water in quick succession. The mage tried to swim toward the disturbance, but she was too weak and the current was too strong.
A moment later, Kelemvor called to her. “Midnight? Where are you?”
“Here,” she croaked. In the rushing water, she barely heard her own voice and knew it would not be audible to her lover. Midnight tried to swim toward the fighter, but the stream simply swept her away.
Kelemvor had more strength than Midnight, but he didn’t try to swim out of the current. He knew that the mage had to be downstream and was determined not to lose her. Allowing the tablet to fall into Myrkul’s hands was bad enough, but Kelemvor was unwilling to face life without Midnight.
The warrior swam downstream with all his might. He paused every now and then to cross the current, hoping to find Midnight. It was a good plan, but the fighter had underestimated the power of his strokes. He was quickly so far ahead of the mage that he stood no chance of meeting her.
Kelemvor continued his search for fifteen minutes before growing so exhausted that he could only concentrate on survival. For another quarter-hour, the stream swept the fighter and the magic-user farther into darkness. Sometimes it rushed into long passages completely filled with water, and both Midnight and Kelemvor believed they would drown before they bobbed back to the surface, exhausted and gasping for breath. At other times, they bounced against rocks or the cave’s walls. Despite the pain of such encounters, though, they always clutched and grasped at the slick surfaces, hoping to latch onto something and pull free of the current.
Neither one drowned nor pulled free. Both Kelemvor and Midnight continued into the darkness, cold and blind, aware of nothing but the rush of the stream, the weight of their soggy clothes, and the fetid water they swallowed with every other breath.
After a time—Kelemvor could not say how long he’d been in the water or how many miles he had floated—the stream straightened its course and grew more quiet. The fighter started to remove his clothes, for their weight was only contributing to his fatigue. But a strange slurping sound echoed off the cavern walls, and Kelemvor paused to hold his head above the water and listen. The noise was coming from the middle of the channel.
He swam across the stream, then the current grew faster and the slurping grew louder. Kelemvor turned his body away from the noise, then stroked harder and harder as the current spun him around. Finally, he felt himself being pulled back up the stream. The exhausted fighter lowered his head and swam with all his strength. At last, he broke free and continued downstream.
The twisting current had been the edge of a whirlpool, the warrior realized. It had been a small one, or he would never have broken free, but the effort still left him exhausted.
Then Kelemvor remember Midnight.
“Midnight!” he called. “There’s a whirlpool. Swim to the right!” He called this warning over and over again, until at last he could no longer hear the sucking sound of the whirlpool.
Even if she had been close enough to hear the warning, Midnight could have done nothing to avoid the danger. She was too drained to swim or even to pull off her heavy clothes. Her limbs were numb and clumsy with cold and exhaustion, her lungs burned every time she took a breath, and her mind was incoherent with fatigue.