The Lost Library of Cormanthy - Mel Odom [128]
No lights burned in the hallway. If it hadn't been for Krystarn's own infravision and that of the hobgoblins, she knew she wouldn't have been able to see a thing. Broken rock from the ceiling overhead covered the floor. She made her way through it carefully.
Halting at the dead end, she brought out the crystal ball. She chanted, summoning up her spell energy, and praying to Lloth as she focused the forces she used through the crystal ball. The crystal ball was already in tune with the magic the lich was using. She knew how to cast a dimension door, but casting one into the library was much harder. For one, she didn't know exactly where it was in the physical world even though she'd been through it a number of times. And for another, she felt the actual distance it was from the dead-end wall was much further than she could transfer herself using her own spell.
The hobgoblins fell into line behind her at Chomack's order. Their bared weapons clinked against their armor.
Perspiration covered Krystarn's face as she locked into the exchange of energies. A headache throbbed at her temples. She pushed herself past the pain, thinking of the library only, of all the power that would be within her grasp in the next few minutes.
Through her slitted eyelashes, she saw the wall start to glow. At first it was a patch no bigger than the end of her finger, but quickly spread until she couldn't cover it with both hands. And it kept growing as the dimensional door swung open wider.
26
The trail came to an end in a crypt.
Be careful, Xuxa warned as she fluttered to a wall and perched upside down from the rough, craggy surface.
Baylee played his lantern over the crypt, lighting tumbled stone caskets thrown across the interior of the smashed building. The roof was long gone, but the cavern above had sunk to within a few feet, giving it the appearance that a roof still existed. Pieces of half a dozen skeletons lay strewn across the floor, but none of them tried to reassemble themselves or grab for weapons, as Baylee more than half expected.
"Which way?" Civva Cthulad asked from behind him.
"The map shows that the trail runs west," Baylee responded. "But this crypt wasn't shown."
"It sank from above," Cordyan said.
"Yes," Baylee replied. The lantern light broke against the cracked back
wall. Going through it would still have constituted something of an engineering
miracle.
"The drow must not have come this way," Cthulad said.
Baylee aimed the lantern at the plain of smooth dust and dirt in front of the crypt. "If they did, any footprints they might have left have been erased or
covered over."
"Perhaps there's a way around," Calebaan said.
Baylee pulled back out of the crypt and went around to the left of the building. A narrow space between the building and the one next to it loomed in a slice of darkness. He shoved the lantern forward, playing it over the jumble of rock waiting ahead of him. The incline went down, deeper into the series of underground caverns. Beneath the rubble, he spotted the set of stone-carved steps that had been depicted on the map. They sat in the narrow mouth of a tunnel that continued west.
"Here," he said.
"Get a man on that crypt door," Cordyan ordered one of her guardsmen. "If anything moves behind us, I want to know about it."
The hook horrors had given up the chase a few minutes before, after one of them had been doused in oil and set afire. And one of the tunnels the party had traveled through had been too narrow for the large creatures to get through. However, the hook horrors had managed to locate one of the drow warriors trying to follow the Waterdhavian unit.
Baylee let his long sword guide the way, holding the lantern up. He started down the stone steps, then the next series of quakes shook the ground. Blocks of stone tumbled from overhead.
"Shields up!" Cordyan screamed. She extended her shield over Baylee and herself as the debris poured down.
Baylee stayed under the proffered shelter as