Barrabus paid little attention to the details, and heard not the man’s pitiful cries. In his mind, Barrabus still heard the screams of the sentry at Lord Hugo Babris’s house, rockstinger poison coursing through him like sharp-edged fire. He would be well into the second phase of the poison by then, his muscles contracting painfully, his stomach knotted, vomiting still though he had nothing left to discharge. The morning would bring to him a tremendous weariness and a dull ache, both of which would last for days. Whether the sentry deserved such a trial, Barrabus could not know. The man’s only “crime” had been to arrive at Hugo Babris’s door soon after Barrabus had entered the chamber. That, and a bit too much curiosity.…

The assassin sneered and shook the unwelcome notions from his thoughts. He turned back to the foursome, coming his way, though they couldn’t see him in the shadow of the building.

Good sense told Barrabus to fade back into the alleyway, to be gone from that place. Prudence demanded that he attract no unwanted attention in Neverwinter. But he felt dirty at that dark hour, and so he felt the need to be cleansed.

“Well met, again,” he said as the gang of four came up even with him out in the middle of the road. They turned as one to regard him, and he pulled back the cowl of his elven cloak to give them a clear view.

“You!” exclaimed the one he’d earlier pained.

Barrabus smiled and faded back into the alleyway.

The four, three brandishing crude clubs, the fourth with a knife, rushed in after him, roaring in outrage and promising retribution, though one staggered more than rushed. Three of them entered the alley at full speed, not even realizing that Barrabus had only faded in a couple of steps and was in no way trying to get away from them. How the timbre of their obscenities changed when he appeared in their midst, all elbows and fists and flying feet.

Just a few moments later, Barrabus the Gray walked out of the alley onto the dimly lit Neverwinter street, and not a groan followed him forth.

He felt better. He felt cleaner. Those four had deserved it.

Chapter 4 - The Hosttower's Secret

DARK ELVES,” DAHLIA SAID, SEEMING QUITE AMUSED BY THE PROSPECT.

“So it is true.”

“Truer in the past,” Dor’crae replied. “They’re more rare in the city these days, since Luskan has lost its luster as a trading port. But still they remain, or visit at least, advising the High Captains and offering their wares.”

“Interesting,” Dahlia replied, but she was, in fact, losing interest in her lover’s dissertation of the politics of the City of Sails.

Dor’crae had led her to a most unusual place, a cordoned-off area of ancient ruins overgrown with roots and the hulking remains of dead trees, like a long untended and decrepit garden.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“Illusk,” Dor’crae replied. “The most ancient part of an ancient city. And more than that, Illusk is Luskan’s barrier between the present and the past, between the living and the dead.”

Dahlia took a deep breath, inhaling the heavy aroma of the air around her.

“Do you not feel it?” Dor’crae asked. “You, who have lived at the edge of the Dread Ring of Szass Tam, must sense the transition.”

Dahlia nodded. She did indeed feel the damp chill, the smell of death, the sense of emptiness. Death, after all, was about all that she had known for the past decade of her life—continuously, personally, pervasively.

“It’s a sweet thing,” Dor’crae whispered to her, his voice going husky as he moved near to her exposed neck, “to walk in both realms.”

Dahlia’s eyelids felt heavy and for a few heartbeats she was hardly aware of the vampire’s approach. It was as if she smelled the invitation to the other realm, permeating her very being.

She popped open her eyes and they flashed dangerously at the nearby vampire. “If you bite me, I will utterly destroy you,” she whispered, mimicking Dor’crae’s teasing tones.

The vampire grinned and stepped back, remembering to bow once as he did.

She shifted just a bit to show Dor’crae the brooch she wore, the gift from Szass Tam that granted her heightened powers against the undead. A vampire would prove a formidable opponent to any living warrior, but with that brooch, and her own amazing physical discipline, Dahlia was quite capable of following through on her threat.

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked.

“Behold the gateway to the undercity,” Dor’crae explained, moving to a nearby ruin, a pile of broken stones scattered in a roughly circular pattern as if they had once formed the rim of a well.

Dahlia hesitated and glanced across to the island that had once held the Hosttower of the Arcane, its rubble still clearly visible, and her expression remained doubtful.

“There are tunnels,” Dor’crae explained. “Beneath the waves.”

“You have been down there?”

The vampire smiled and nodded. “It is where I seek my respite from the sunlight. A most remarkable place, and with a most remarkable hostess.”

That last remark had Dahlia looking at the vampire with intrigue. “Hostess?” she asked.

“Yes, an exquisite creature.”

“Do not mock me.”

“You will like Valindra Shadowmantle,” the vampire promised.

With a flourish of his arms, Dor’crae flipped his cloak up over his shoulders. He seemed to blur, and Dahlia had to momentarily look away as the vampire transformed into a large bat, which dived into the well, disappearing from sight. With a sigh, knowing Dor’crae knew she couldn’t easily follow, Dahlia slipped into the hole. She had her staff doubled into a four-foot walking stick, and she spoke a quiet command and tapped it against the stone. Its folded end reacted to her command with flickering bursts of blue-white light.

Down Dahlia went, staff in one hand, her free hand and two feet working fast to bring her down the well. After about thirty feet, the narrow shaft opened up below her, so she crouched as low as she could and poked her staff below, illuminating the chamber. The floor was barely a dozen feet below her, so she didn’t even bother to squirm lower and hook her fingers to hang, but just folded up and dropped.

She landed in a crouch and glanced all around to find Dor’crae back in human form and waiting for her near another hole. Down they went again, to a crossing corridor and through a door into a side chamber. Several staircases, ladders, and narrow chutes later, they came into a labyrinth of tunnels and corridors, ancient structures, walls and doors and broken stairs, the oldest incarnation of the city that had come to be known as Luskan.

“That corridor,” Dor’crae indicated, pointing west, “will take us out to the islands.”

Dahlia walked over, leading with her illuminated walking stick, studying the walls and floor.

“Along its ceiling, you’ll find a mystery of the Hosttower,” Dor’crae explained.

Dahlia opened her staff to its full length and allowed the crackling light to wander to the tip once more. Then she thrust it above her, nearly touching the remarkably high ceiling of the tunnel.

“What is it?” she asked, running the staff tip along what seemed like veins in the ceiling.

“Roots?” Dor’crae asked as much as answered.

Dahlia looked at him curiously, but recalled the tree-shaped appearance of the now destroyed Hosttower of the Arcane.

Then a hissing sound from the tunnel spun her around, staff at the ready as some undead beast rushed at her, its long tongue darting between pointy yellow teeth.

Dahlia put her staff into a spin, but Dor’crae intervened, stepping forward and lifting his hand toward the ghoul and staring at it intently.

The ghoul slowed and stopped, staring back at the vampire, a greater being among the enigmatic pecking order of the undead. With a howl of protest, the stinking creature skulked back into the shadows the way it had come.

“The catacombs are full of the ravenous things,” Dor’crae explained. “Ghouls and lacedons, half-eaten zombies.…”

“Lovely,” Dahlia remarked, and she lamented that the undead seemed to follow her wherever she went.

“Most are small, but there are at least two large ones,” the vampire explained, turning his attention and the conversation back to the curious roots. “Hollow tubes, one running out from the foundation of the ruined Hosttower to the open sea, the other running back inland to the east, southeast.”

“How far?”

The vampire shrugged. “Well beyond the city walls.”

“What magic is this?” Dahlia asked, lifting the light and peering again at the nearly translucent greenish tube and the streaks of red.

“Ancient.”

Dahlia shot the vampire an unappreciative look.

“If I had to guess, I’d say dwarven,” Dor’crae elaborated.

“Dwarven? It’s too delicate.”

“But the stonework around it is impeccable, all the way to the Hosttower’s foundation stones, which certainly showed the mark of dwarf craftsmen.”

“You’re asserting that the Hosttower of the Arcane, one of the most magnificent and magical structures in all of Faerûn, a wizards’ guildhouse from beyond the memory of the oldest elves, was made by dwarves?”

“I think it likely that dwarves worked with the ancient architects of the Hosttower,” Dor’crae replied, “who were likely not dwarves but elves, I would guess, given the history of the region, and the treelike shape of the place before its fall.”

Dahlia didn’t argue, though she suspected that more than a few humans would have needed to be involved to bring the elves and dwarves together.

“Roots?” Dahlia asked. “And you think these are import—“She stopped as she noticed some movement above, then screwed up her face curiously when she saw some kind of liquid sloshing through the tube above her.

“The tide,” Dor’crae explained. “When it rises, some water is forced along the tunnels—the roots, the veins, whatever you wish to call them. It’s not much, though, and goes back out with the tide.”

Dahlia had no idea what any of this surprising information might mean. She and Dor’crae had come to Luskan to learn if the destruction of the Hosttower had anything to do with the earthquakes that had been wracking the Sword Coast North since its fall. Magical wards had burst in the fall of the tower, it was said, and somehow, given the timing of the quakes, those wards affected not only Luskan but the forested hills known as the Crags.

She turned to follow the line of the strange “root” back to the southeast.

“What else have you learned?” the warrior elf asked.

“Come, I will take you to the lich Valindra, and an older and more powerful being—or one who was more powerful, before he was driven insane in the Spellplague.”

He started away, but Dahlia didn’t immediately follow, silently recounting what she knew of the recent history of Luskan, something she had studied intently before leaving Thay.

“Arklem Greeth?” she asked, referring to the lich who had once commanded the Hosttower in the name of the Arcane Brotherhood, and who had been defeated in its fall. Defeated, but not likely destroyed, she knew, for that was the manner of liches, after all.