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.His pulse quickened, and the lackadaisical demeanor lent him by the dust shattered.Japheth gasped, “Ambush!” Too late.Someone grabbed him, pulled him clear.A line of coruscating acid just missed him.“Thank you,” he mumbled, assuming his rescuer was Anusha’s dream.The ex-whip yelled, her voice shaking with pain, “Gethshemeth knew!”A granite block boomed down from the ceiling, neatly filling the passage they’d used to enter the strange garden hollow.The light fell by half.More figures scurried around the periphery of the chamber.All kuo-toa except for one—a giant quadruped with too many limbs and skin darker than coal.Were those wings unfurling, and a serpent’s tail? It was hard to make out through the odd growths surrounding the pool.It loosed a primal hunting scream that tried to root them all in place with fear alone.“The pool! Into the pool,” gurgled Nogah.As if on cue, the rippled water disgorged a blob of bluish green slime.The amorphous mass poured forward, extruding long pseudopods ending in starfish-like appendages of goo.“Nogah,” said Thoster, rising, “what.”The ex-whip fell to her knees, staring dumbly down with one good eye at the blood-soaked bolt buried in her chest.“My species.will become as these? How could I have been so blind? The Dreamheart poisoned my mind! Sea Mother, forgive—”She coughed a spray of vicious fluid, shivered as if devil-possessed, then collapsed.Nogah lay without breath on the beslimed flagstone.Thoster tore the quarrel from his shoulder with hardly a flinch.The air around him seemed to burn, and he drew his clicking, whirring blade.Nyrotha stumbled upright and began to hack at the tentacle-like streamers of slime.His eyes bulged, and spittle flecked his lips.A pseudopod lanced forward.The flayed grasping pad struck the man’s face full on, sealing his voice behind a gag of putrescent ooze.Flesh and blood began to boil under the grasp.In moments, there was only bone and cartilage where Nyrotha’s face had been.Disgust and stomach-churning terror dispersed the last of Japheth’s dust haze.He grabbed for Seren’s and Thoster’s shoulders, one in each hand, and tried to propel them around the pool toward the arched passage he’d spied upon entering.“This way, or we all die!” he yelled.Seren was weakly accommodating in his grip, but Thoster shrugged away.Savage, small-eyed kuo-toa converged from all sides.Japheth grabbed the captain again, mouthing a spell as he did so.They all fell into his cloak.And immediately appeared on the opposite side of the pool, as if having made a single step.A warlock’s transposition—the spell had only strength enough to move him, and him alone, hardly more than ten paces.But with the Lord of Bats’s own skin wrapping his body, he was able to bring others along.“Now follow me!”Japheth ran into the darkness, Thoster and Seren at his heels.Behind, a great roar of fury drowned out the gurgling of slime-digesting flesh.The tunnel punched downward into stone-lined darkness.Behind him came the swish of the wizard’s slippers, and Captain Thoster’s iron boot tips ringing on the stone floor.Following them, monsters scrabbled and shrieked.Japheth uttered three fell words, and his vision returned, though distant objects remained cloaked in black haze.He said, “I can find—”The tunnel beneath their feet fractured.They plunged into ice-cold saltwater.CHAPTER SIXTEENThe Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Plague-wrought Land, Vilhon WildsCity-sized blocks of granite churned within the crater, forming a vortex that sucked air and anything unfortunate enough to fall within its grinding grasp.The clamor of stone on stone was a physical thing.The sound threatened to dislodge Raidon Kane from the wooden span that somehow, even without visible supports, bridged the ravenous gap.Streamers of blue fire scudded across the sky, like rivulets of water finding their way down a cliff side.Or, Raidon thought, like blue veins pulsing close under the skin of a giant’s fleshy back.The monk blinked away the unwelcome image and fixed his attention on his companions
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