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The cleric’s voice sounded very far away. “Coming …”

A moment later he struggled into view. Blood covered the left side of his face and he moved gingerly as he swung his legs around to step down. “Took a fall,” he said. “The road crew was kind enough to throw the rope down while they restored the tomb to its pristine state.”

Heedless of the thigh-deep filth, Biri-Daar recrossed the sewer pit and lifted Keverel into her arms. She set the cleric down on the ledge. “Lucan,” she said. “See to him.”

The ranger looked over Keverel, first checking to see that the gash on his head was superficial and then working down the length of his body. “Nothing seems broken,” he said, “and I think the cut on his head is just a cut on his head. What say you, holy man? Take a drink.”

Keverel drank from the skin Lucan offered. He pushed himself to a sitting position against the wall and said, “My head aches and only this witch doctor of a ranger would say that nothing is wrong with the rest of me. But I’ll feel better if we get out of this stench.”

“Me too,” Kithri agreed. “As it happens, there’s a door right over here.”

By the light from her knife blade, she showed them a barred iron door. “An old lock,” she said, producing a set of picks folded into a leather purse. “I’ll have it open before Lucan can find something else to complain about.”

“I doubt that very much,” Lucan said. “For example, I will complain about Keverel’s ignorance of shamanistic traditions among the rangers of the Nentir Vale.”

The lock popped open. “See?” Kithri said.

“See what? I complained,” Lucan said.

“No, you said you were going to. I win.” She smiled sweetly at him and swung the door open with a shriek of rusted hinges that must have been audible to every denizen of the Keep.

“Where does it go?” Paelias wondered.

Biri-Daar walked through into the drier and infinitely less odoriferous chamber beyond, a small landing at the foot of a stair going up. “It goes out of there,” she reported. “What else do we need to know right now?”

They climbed the stairs, gradually shedding the stink of the sewer pit—and also, more ominously, shedding the light charm Keverel had maintained on the steel they wore or held. “Something about the magic of this place,” he said, with a worried expression.

“Or something with you,” Kithri said. “Truth, holy man. Is the cut on your head just a cut on your head?”

He nodded. “Here,” Biri-Daar said, holding out a small pewter vial to him. Keverel took it with a questioning look.

“It is a healing brew, from the clan,” she said. “If it can heal the burns of an acid fog or the madness of hearing a banshee—and it can, I have seen it—it can dispel whatever ails you.”

Keverel drank it off, his face twisting. “Awful,” he gasped.

“My people are not vintners,” Biri-Daar said. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. On they went into what appeared to have been a dungeon once. The cell doors were open and hanging crookedly on rusted or broken hinges. “The Road-builder may know we are here already,” Biri-Daar said. “We must be on guard.”

They peered into each empty cell as they passed. Some contained bones, and once or twice a rat flitted through their light back into the darkened corners. But nothing rose to oppose them. A torture chamber exposed to the light for the first time in centuries yielded only hanging chains and instruments long since corroded into ruin. After it, they found a stair leading up. As they climbed it, Lucan said, “We’re going down right now.”

“Don’t talk about it.” Paelias looked a bit queasy.

“Best to keep it in mind, I think,” Lucan said.

“Keep it in mind all you want,” the star elf replied. “Just don’t talk about it.”

That was when Remy sprung the trap. He felt a stone shift under his foot and instinctively he leaped forward and up to the next stair, one hand against the wall to his right, looking down between his feet for the hole or blade or poisoned needle he was sure must be there. As he landed, he heard a fading scream. He spun and saw that a pit yawned open where the two stairs