Depths of Madness - Erik Scott De Bie [89]
That terrified her.
Twilight suppressed a shiver and shoved the thoughts violently aside. Liet had attempted to convince her of her sanity the previous night, but her own mind seemed Hells-bent on proving him wrong.
"If we climb that tower," Slip repeated, "we should be able to get out, right? I mean, we're underground, and going up takes us aboveground, aye?"
Twilight didn't have the heart to bring up complications like cave ceilings or the inability to fly. "If only it were that simple," she muttered.
"Aye, love?" Liet whispered at her side.
Twilight just shook her head. She wished he wouldn't call her that.
The High Tower-Davoren had assured them it must be the High Arcanist's Tower, if this had truly been a floating enclave, but Twilight was not comfortable so naming it-was free of the hive but not the garden. The Nocturnal Garden, he'd called it, and that name, Twilight did not dispute.
They wandered through a nightmare landscape of twisted, alien stalks and blossoms of myriad, disturbingly vibrant colors. Fumes and spores that could only come in dreams threatened to send them dizzily to the ground, but Gargan seemed able to guide them around the more dangerous plants. When they saw one giant snapping beast indistinguishable from the surrounding ferns lash out with its tentacles to pull a passing bee-creature down its pod-gullet, Twilight was glad she wasn't leading the way.
They made their way slowly, in relative silence, avoiding carnivorous flowers and attention from the bees. Several times, they ducked and hid in the shadows of Negarath to avoid a flight of three or four. Most of the time, the creatures stopped to harvest nectar from the various unearthly plants, and Twilight understood the purpose of the garden. The necter-dependent bees would be hard pressed for a for a food source if anything were to happen to their garden.
Within a bell's time, they entered the overgrown, moss-ridden High Tower.
The rooms had long since faded into a dizzying array of vast, empty affairs that must have held opulence beyond reckoning in the days of Netheril. Tapestries remained, but they had withered to blank sheets of cloth canvas. Most of the rooms and the curled furniture were entirely of some sort of metal-iron or steel-coated with cracked marble, sandstone, or obsidian, while some-the dangerous ones-were but broken glass.
The stairs that led up through the many stories snaked treacherously and madly, inside and outside the building, over and under balconies. A dozen times, steps crumbled underfoot, and a companion leaped to solid ground with a curse. Some sections of stair twisted upside down, unsettlingly, and these the five climbed over awkwardly.
Several times, they had trouble mounting inverted stairs- which had no support but magic-until Slip demonstrated that they needed to climb them upside down. That only increased Twilight's unease.
Having not eaten or had more than a few swallows of water in over two days, they were all weak and growing weaker, even the mighty goliath. As Twilight watched, Davoren fumbled and tripped over broken rock. She saw the lack of strength in his movements-the lessened energy.
"A morning meal would have helped, eh?" she asked once as she held him steady after a step crumbled.
Davoren glared at her. "We could've eaten the halfling, you and I," he said. "But oh, yes-you tejected that opportunity. Mark my words-you will regret it."
Twilight decided then that she wouldn't have minded seeing Davoren topple to his doom, were she not certain the fiend would blast them as he fell. She never got the chance to see if she guessed rightly.
Twilight exercised additional caution in those places where unbroken stairs flared