The Nether Scroll (19 page)

"Sheemzher said he left Dekanter six years ago. Do you think he's got the count right?"

Druhallen blinked foolishly, his thoughts had wandered a long way from goblins. "Yes," he
answered slowly, then repeated himself as his opinions crystallized. 'Yes, six years sounds
about right. Amarandaris said things began changing in Dekanter about seven years ago."

"When the Beast Lord stopped being a nuisance and became a problem?"

Sometimes one casual statement brought everything else into line, like stranded pearls.
"Exactly!" Dru nodded. "The scroll? Did the Beast Lord always have the scroll or did he find it
seven years ago? Tymora's tears! How long has the Beast Lord been Ghistpok's god? How
long has he been filling these mountains with misshapen goblins? So many questions and no
one to ask!"

"Except Sheemzher."

"Except Sheemzher," Dru agreed. "Tiep had a point—the way Sheemzher talks, you think you
understand what he's said because you think he's simple."

"You've noticed how he repeats things exactly as he hears them? Lady Wyndyfarh told
him that together they'd save his children. She didn't say anything about that to us. When you
said you'd bring her minions back in a gilded cage, she told you not to bother. She never said
a word about goblins."

"And Sheemzher himself said it was too late to save his children." Dru took a deep breath
and shook his head. "Goblins live fast, Rozt'a. Most of them are probably dead by the time
they're twenty-five. Six years is a long time at that rate."

"That's an excuse? Goblins don't live very long, so just let whoever's running that egg he
described hatch out misshapen goblins to his heart's content?"

Rozt'a took Dru by surprise with her vehemence. He thought carefully before answering
her—

"Galimer comes first. We get the scroll, we get Galimer. Nothing else matters. There's too
much going on in Dekanter that we can't begin to understand and shouldn't poke our noses
in. I've forgotten about the Red Wizards, Rozt'a; you don't want to start thinking about the
goblins. Let Amarandaris, the Red Wizards, and the Beast Lord worry about the goblins."

"I'm not worried about goblins." The tension was back as Rozt'a got to her feet. "I'm
worried what our guide's going to do when he realizes that his 'good lady' isn't worried about
them, either."

6 Eleint, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR)

The Greypeak Mountains

Blue skies greeted the quartet and their horses when they left the cave the next morning.
Tiep complained of a headache and tired easily, but was otherwise on the mend. They put
him up on Hopper and covered more ground in the morning alone than they'd covered since
they'd crossed the Dawn Pass Trail.

In the afternoon, a trio of red dragons flew freely overhead—a mother and her young, by the
look of them. The first time they spiraled between the peaks, Sheemzher had led a pell-mell charge
from the stone ledges to the bogs where they'd cowered, dreading an attack that didn't come. The
second time the dragons swooped, they held their ground and watched an aerial dance of fire and
grace. By the third and fourth times, they had better things to think about and just kept walking.

The ground was rising. There was more stone, less boggy forest. Sheemzher said they
could push on with torches and reach Dekanter after dark, or camp above the last bog and
arrive mid-morning at their destination. Dru thought of who and what they might find among
Ghistpok goblins and decided he rather wait until daylight.

No one spoke out against Dru's caution.

The night was quiet with the clouds rolling back after midnight. There was no dawn, just a
gradual brightening of the gray sky. Rozt'a said she'd seen something that might have been
one of the misshapen goblins shortly before she'd awakened Dru.

"Makes sense," he said, rubbing his eyes. "They're goblins, after all. They don't like the
sun. Yesterday would have been misery for them. They'd have spent the day hiding from the
light."

Rozt'a nodded, "Then today they're hungry and hunting. Let's get out of here fast."

They did, but not before filling all their skins with water, all the horse nets with grass and
shoots, and gathering fresh rushes and green wood poles for making torches. Dru could cast
a durable light spell. It would last the better part of a day or night and he could control its
brightness with a thought, but only complete fools would venture underground without
torches and the natural means to light them.

After they'd gathered all their gear, Sheemzher proposed that they march straight into
Ghistpok's colony.

"People good. Ghistpok good! Remember Sheemzher. Welcome Sheemzher. Welcome
all."

Dru and Rozt'a harmonized on the word "No!" and the goblin assured them that they could
get into the mines without introducing themselves to Ghistpok. There were ancient air shafts
opening onto something he called the High Trail. All was going according to plan along the
High Trail until they stumbled against a rockslide at an inconvenient narrows. There wasn't
space to turn the horses around. The animals had to be coaxed backward to a wide spot. The
goblin apologized continuously for his mistake.

Six years was a long time. Even ordinary mountains changed in that time, and Druhallen
remembered what Amarandaris had told him about the futility of maps in Dekanter. Druhallen
supposed the goblin had made an innocent error, but the rockslide had reignited Tiep's
suspicion of all things goblin.

At least the youth was behaving like his usual self again.

Sheemzher found another path. The humans judged it prudent to send him and Rozt'a
ahead to check for rock slides. They were back sooner than Druhallen expected.

Rozt'a was nearly breathless. "You're not going to believe this, Dru," she said.

"Another rockslide?"

"No—the mines, the ruins—I was expecting a hole in the ground, but nothing like this. There's a
hollow mountain up here. You could fit Scornubel inside the ruins and have room left for a village or
two."

But the path she and Sheemzher had followed was too steep and rocky for the horses.
Tiep said he'd stay behind.
"Who's interested in a hole where goblins live?"

Druhallen didn't try to explain. He scrambled ahead of Rozt'a and was breathing hard
when he emerged from another rockslide ridge. The ruined mines took his breath away. All
the conflict, loss, hardship, and deception that had brought him to this moment faded to
insignificance—though he wished Galimer were beside him to share the sight.

Like Rozt'a, he'd expected ruins—true ruins: heaps of rubble left by miners and magicians alike,
and dark doorways to the underground standing empty like so many blind eyes. Nothing could have
been further from the truth. He'd forgotten that the dwarves had quarried stone from Dekanter as well
as metal ore. In rough shape, Dekanter was an amphitheater; in size, the theater had been built for
giants. Five receding tiers—each at least twenty feet high and twenty feet wide—rose from an
irregular plain Dru judged to be a half-mile wide and slightly longer. Zig-zag patterns etched the tiers.
Dru looked closer and realized they were ordinary stairways.

On the opposite side of Dekanter—across the narrows to the eastern side of the quarry—a gorge
had been cut through all five layers of dark gray granite. The gorge curved and disappeared. Dru
guessed it led to the Dawn Pass Trail, though in days past, surely it had been the western end of a road
that wound into Netheril's heart.

Dekanter's great tiers weren't perfect. Here and there the rain, frost and snows of
countless winters had shattered the quarry's deliberate structure. Streams of paler rock
spread onto the lower levels. The untouched debris looked as if it could have fallen
yesterday. With a shake of his head Druhallen dismissed his eyes' conclusion. Dekanter was
ancient; even the scars of its abandonment were ancient.

Yet Dekanter wasn't abandoned. Ghistpok's goblins—Sheemzher's relatives—dwelt on the
rubble-strewn plain at the bottom of the quarry. Their colony was a black-and-green smear across a
small portion of the granite plain. Gardens, Dru thought—marveling for a moment that goblins would
have the sense or skill to grow vegetables. Then common sense reclaimed his mind. The green patches
weren't gardens—at least not deliberately planted crops. Ghistpok's goblins weren't farmers, they were
merely living atop their garbage. What he'd taken for gardens were weeds erupting from the trash.

Dru rough-counted forty huts on the midden and one larger, stone-built structure. From
their vantage, in the crease between the rectangular tiers and naturally irregular stone of the
untouched mountains, the goblins were little more than dots between the huts. The stone
building was as crude and ugly as any of the huts, but had the squat solidity of Zhentarim
construction. He'd bet it was where the Network's minions lived while the slave trade
flourished; and he almost pitied them for the stench and filth they'd surely endured.

There were more dots around the stone building than anywhere else. If power and status
had run true to form, the goblin chief, Ghistpok, had moved in once the Zhentarim left.
Sheemzher might blame Takers for goblin slavery, but there'd never been a slave-trade that
didn't rely on the cooperation of some element within the enslaved population.

There were two other landmarks on the plain. One, slightly north of the goblin colony, was
a water pool so perfectly circular that it couldn't have been natural—and couldn't have been
carved out of the stone by the goblins either. The second area lay some distance south of the colony.
At first glance, it resembled a wizard's conjure circle painted white on the stone, but conjury required a
measure of intelligence Dru would not grant any goblin, even Sheemzher standing silently at his side.

A black spire-stone jutted out of the white circle. The Greypeaks were, as their name
implied, a study in shades of gray, without a trace of pure black or white. Both the stone and
its circle were out of place, ominously out of place.

"What is that?" Dru asked the goblin.

Sheemzher had been staring at his own feet and raised his head slowly. His eyes were
red and watering. He didn't like sunlight, even on an overcast day, and had suffered since
losing his hat, which left Dru wondering about how many goblins the nearly shadeless colony
contained. Surely more than he could see among the huts.

Cupping his hands around his eyes, Sheemzher peered out across the plain.

"Beast Lord, good sir."

Just when he thought he was getting a measure of goblin intelligence, Sheemzher would
utter something unbelievable. "The Beast Lord is a black stone?"

"Sheemzher never see Beast Lord, good sir. Ghistpok say drink wine. Ghistpok say
dance. Ghistpok say sing. Ghistpok say Beast Lord come. Ghistpok say not-look, never-look.
Sheemzher look once. Elva go away. Sheemzher not-see Beast Lord. Sheemzher see black
stone. Sheemzher see Takers."

Was the stone a teleportation focus? Dru asked himself and asked Sheemzher, "Did the
Takers come out of the stone? Did your wife vanish in a flash of bright light?"

"No," Sheemzher answered, a touch of exasperation in his voice. He calmed himself. "No,
good sir. Takers under Dekanter. Takers walk. Elva walk into darkness, walk into mountain."
The goblin tapped his foot on the stone. "Sheemzher tell already. Good sir forget, no?
Sheemzher follow Elva. Here. Below. Into mountain. Sheemzher follow. Sheemzher find egg.
Sheemzher tell already, good sir."

"You've been told," Rozt'a chided. "Pay attention to what he tells you from now on."

Dru didn't know if she was joking. "Do I understand that there's an entrance to the old
mines at the bottom of the quarry? Do we have to climb down these tiers to reach it? Do we
have to meet Ghistpok? You said that wouldn't be necessary."

He'd been paying attention when Sheemzher assured them they didn't have to meet
Ghistpok in order to steal the scroll.

"Many ways in, good sir. One way all rocks, no good. One way below, yes. Other ways.
Many other ways. Sheemzher find. Not worry, good sir."

A strange sound filled the quarry. It started soft, grew louder, and as hard as Druhallen
listened, he couldn't decide if it came from an animal or some kind of horn, and, if an animal,
whether from a single beast or many. He was thinking magic when Rozt'a slapped his arm
and pointed to the southern tiers. About twenty goblins were marching down the zigzag
stairways. His imagination rebelled. Goblins couldn't make such a noise and twenty of them
couldn't fill the quarry with echoing sound.

Then Sheemzher added his note to the chorus. The goblin's eyes were shut and his head
was thrown back. His lips shaped the sound which he made in the depths of his throat.

"Sheemzher! Stop! Quiet!"

Sheemzher didn't obey. He didn't appear to have heard Druhallen's words. He opened his
mouth wider; the sound deepened in pitch. Dru felt it beneath his ribs more than he heard it in
his ears.

"Enough!" he shouted and seized the goblin's shoulders. "When I say to stop something,
you stop! Understood?"

The goblin quaked and nodded his head vigorously. "Sheemzher understand. Sheemzher
forget. Hunters return. Pots full." He pointed at the goblins on the zigzag stairs. "Welcome
hunters. Sheemzher forget."

A trickle of goblins left the midden, racing southward.

Druhallen pulled off his ring and squinted through it. The descending goblins had spears
very similar to the one Sheemzher carried slung between their shoulders and animal
carcasses slung from the spears, none was larger than a swamp rat. He realized that goblins
weren't herders or farmers. Maybe it had been different when the Zhentarim ran their slave
market in the quarry. Maybe they'd seduced the goblins with food, but since Amarandaris
abandoned the market, the bog forests were the goblins' sole source of food. No wonder
Amarandaris believed Ghistpok's goblins were starving.

And, no wonder that the sight of hunters returning with meat had roused an instinctive
welcome from their own goblin.

"You're not one of Ghistpok's goblins any more," Druhallen reminded Sheemzher. "Your
loyalty lies with us—with your good lady."

"Sheemzher not forget, good sir. Sheemzher remember. Sheemzher find way now, good
sir?"

"Soon."

"Soon?" Rozt'a sputtered. "How long are you planning to stay here? I'm for getting this
damned scroll today, if we can, and getting our tail feathers out of these mountains before
they're plucked."

The goblin nodded. "Sheemzher say yes! People eat now. People happy. Nobody look.
Nobody see. Nobody know."

Druhallen thought of the spells he'd memorized last night. They weren't the ones he'd
planned to use when he tried to crack the Beast Lord's egg. "We don't want to rush ahead
blindly. We want to be prepared."

"You want to wait until after midnight." Rozt'a saw through Druhallen's caution. "You want
to change your mind."

"I'd feel safer with different spells. You'd be safer."

Dru withered a little in their disappointment and when Rozt'a suggested that she could
follow the goblin as he searched for a way into the mines that didn't expose them to scrutiny,
he agreed even though a part of him felt that they shouldn't be splitting up.

There were more mysteries in Dekanter than a man could count, starting with ancient
Netheril and working forward in time to the Beast Lord and the real reason Amarandaris and
the Black Network had pulled their slave market out of this place. If he'd had the time, the
magic, and the muscle, Dru would have liked to unravel a few of those mysteries. Lacking all
those things, he easily stifled his curiosity and hoped only to escape with the golden scroll.

He returned to the horses and Tiep, scouting campsites along the way.

"You and I make the night's camp," he told the youth when they were together. "Rozt'a's
gone off with the goblin to find tomorrow's way in. I spotted a blind gully with runoff pool. If we
can get the horses in, they'll have plenty of water and won't go wandering. We'll take them in
one at a time. You grab Hopper—" He took Star's rein. If they could get him and Hopper up the
path, the others would follow peacefully.