Prince of Lies - James Lowder [66]
The cavern itself was huge, with stalactites and stalagmites of ice glistening everywhere. Kelemvor had entered with eight men, armed and armored for battle. The cave, then as now, was home to a clan of frost giants. As Kezef slipped unnoticed into the cavern, a dozen of the monstrous brutes were gathered around a crystalline altar. A squat statue atop the rough-hewn stone pedestal glowed blue-gray in themidnightgloom. The giants shouted prayers to some inhuman god from the Abyss, a frost elemental Kezef had faced once or twice long ago.
Kelemvor had battled giants here, and the frost elemental, too. The conflict had been fierce, violent, and bloody, with the warrior's eight companions being slaughtered in short succession after some heated exchange between the men and the giants. Only Kelemvor weathered the fight unharmed, felling three of the hulking brutes on his own. By fleeing, he survived to fight again. A ragged human, freed from the giants during the battle, followed in the sell-sword's wake.
Kezef sniffed the prisoner's trail and barked feral laughter. Cyric! The thin, starving man who'd run from the cave at Kelemvor's side was the Prince of Lies – mortal then, of course, but Cyric nonetheless. Howling in mirth, the Chaos Hound darted from the cave and headed south.
One of the giants turned away from the altar, scanning the darkness with glittering blue eyes. He raised a callused hand to his lips, mostly hidden by a dirty beard, and said, "Quiet. Something's in here."
"What is it, Thrym?" one of the giant's fellows asked. Like a driving wind, his whisper blew whorls of powdery snow from a nearby ledge. "More Venturers?"
Thrym reached slowly for his massive axe. "No, not warriors. Something else… some creeping thing. I heard laughing, and now I smell something, too."
"All you smell is the bodies," a dark-haired giant complained. He stuffed a blunt finger in his ear and scratched, squinting the eye on that side of his face. "You let them sit near fire too long. No good to eat now."
Thrym swatted the dark-haired giant with the flat of his axe blade. The blow echoed out of the cave, resounding over the frozenmidnightlandofTharlike thunder. "This not good," Thrym ventured after a time. The greasy hair stood up on the back of his tree-trunk neck, and a vague, gnawing fear made his stomach churn as if he'd eaten a yew bush. "Something powerful spying on us."
"Just more Venturers. A mage or something." The dark-haired giant dug into his other ear. "Maybe Zzutam heard our prayers and is gonna show up again."
Thrym got to his feet and carefully searched the corners of the cave, though he felt an unusual fear at venturing too close to the darkest of them. He found nothing, which was both relieving and troublesome.
"Here," the black-haired giant said when Thrym returned to the prayer circle. "Maybe you need to eat. This meat still good." He smiled his best conciliatory smile for the chief and offered him the last strips saved from the mad human Thrym himself had slain a few tendays ago.
Later, after finishing the prayers to Zzutam and devouring the last of the salted meat, Thrym dreamed of a terrible, unsettling conflict. A lean, hawk-nosed man led a hundred hell hounds, all belching flame. The beasts drove the giants from their home and cornered them against a black wall. The enchanted stones were too high to leap over and too slick to scale.
A vague memory of the dream haunted Thrym for days, filled with the hawk-nosed man's cruel laughter and the snarls of the hell hounds as they tore into the trapped frost giants…
* * * * *
Waterdeep boasted many magnificent buildings, both ancient and modern, but few were the subject of as much gossip asBlackstaffTower. Home to the wizard Khelben Arunsun, the tower often hosted visiting royalty and explorers of great renown. Many throughout Faerun sought Khelben's advice on matters of state and matters of sorcery, and for that reasonBlackstaffTowersported no doors, no windows. The featureless facade discouraged would-be mages and young adventurers