The Nether Scroll - Lynn Abbey [80]
"The oceans and seas are filled with creatures that don't drink brine," Dru replied and collected a few drops of the suspect liquid on his fingertip. He'd seen an ocean just once, after his visit to Candlekeep. It had little in common with the brightly lit Dekanter pool, including the taste. The brine on Dru's finger was far saltier than Candlekeep's ocean and slick, reminding him of blood.
Rozt'a observed, "I don't see anything swimming in there."
"Be grateful," Dru replied in a tone meant to discourage further questions.
Thanks-as usual-to Ansoain's relentless collection of useless facts and her determination to share those facts with her son and apprentice, Dru had begun to put the puzzle pieces together. The central piece was a bit of information Amarandaris had given him about the second garrison slaughter. The Zhentarim and Red Wizards had torn each other apart. Those were the honored divide-and-conquer tactics of those who'd mastered the discipline of usurping another sentient mind. Dru could name a handful of living wizards and a score of races or monsters who were known to usurp sentient minds, but only one such race made use of brine-filled pools.
If Druhallen was remembering Ansoain's lessons correctly then the Beast Lord wasn't a god but a colony of mind flayers and they were in a world of hurt.
"You know something, Druhallen. Tell me what you know," Rozt'a demanded.
"I don't know anything." And Dru didn't, not yet. The picture wasn't nearly complete and much of it remained contradictory. The commanding presence of a mind flayer colony- something called its Elder Brain-was supposed to reside in a brine-filled pool. Without an Elder Brain, there was no colony-according to Ansoain, who might have been wrong. She'd never encountered a mind flayer, merely learned about them as she learned about everything else.
"Is this what you're calling 'the egg'?" Dru asked Sheemzher.
Sheemzher shook his head. "Egg not here, good sir. Egg there." The goblin pointed to a tunnel in the shadows that Dru hadn't noticed before.
"Let's go then."
The tunnel was short and led to a room square enough to have been hollowed out by dwarves but cluttered with rock debris and chunks of twisted metal, some of them larger than a full-grown man. Sheemzher's egg stood in the center of the room. It was no more an egg than the creatures they'd been killing for the last few days were demons, but it was an athanor of dangerous proportions. Dru judged the oval engine was twice as high as he was tall and perhaps a third as wide as it was high. It was made from hammered and riveted plates of bronze, or possibly brass. Double-doors, hinged at the athanor's widest point, had been left open and revealed a two-chamber interior. The bottom chamber was large enough to accommodate a goblin or three. The upper chamber, though much smaller, could have held a good-sized snake or a hundred of Lady Wyndyfarh's mantises.
Metal pipes and parchment hoses connected the two interior chambers and other parts of the athanor, too. The widest pipe of all disappeared into one of the walls above an incised rectangle that might have been the start of another rock-cut passage. Two more pipes were bolted to the floor. Dru figured he knew what the athanor did and was asking himself how it worked and what it had to do with a Nether scroll when he looked up and found the answers to both questions in the same place.
A golden cylinder as long as his forearm stuck out of the top of the athanor and up into at least a score of wires dangling from the ceiling. Some of the wires were shorter than the others. All of them were soot stained. He didn't know what leapt between the wires and the scroll-maybe fire, maybe lightning, maybe something he'd never studied-but he understood the principle of using explosive spells to power engines both arcane and ordinary.
The metal litter on the floor-the smaller sections of pipe and larger sheets of brass- could have formed the shells of earlier eggs. The Beast Lord-the mind flayers-hadn't perfected the transmutation