When they got back to the sky—as Sheemzher put it—Druhallen expected his nerves would quake for a month; in the meantime, he nudged Tiep in the goblin's direction. Sheemzher's sense of time and direction were better underground than they'd been in the Weathercote Wood. They truly hadn't gone much farther when light glowed ahead of them.
They approached with caution: ten steps, then wait and listen. The tunnel widened but remained a rough-cut passage to a chamber that was filled with a faint, but steady, pale green light. Dru dampened his own light spell and strained his senses searching for another wizard's magic. He found it, too: powerful, but alien. A glance through his ring revealed nothing they couldn't see with their eyes alone. It should have been reassuring; it wasn't.
Dru successfully stifled a twinge of guilt when Sheemzher waved his hands in silhouette to indicate that he'd be the first to enter the chamber.
Go ahead, he mouthed, moving his lips but making no sound.
Tiep scowled and drew his sword. The sound was louder than thunder in a summer's night, but didn't precipitate disaster. Sheemzher walked ten paces, twenty paces into the light. He turned and beckoned them closer.
"Empty. All empty."
Rozt'a led Druhallen and Tiep into a large, but not huge, chamber. The light, which seemed to rise from the chiseled floor on the far side of the chamber's center, revealed an irregular dome that formed both walls and ceiling, but the light wasn't nearly bright enough to banish shadows. Dru thought they were alone, though he couldn't prove it. The center of the chamber was clear, but the sides were cluttered with boulders and piles of smaller rocks. Anything man-sized or smaller could be hiding there.
The chamber was damp, even misty. There was water here, and there had been for a very long time. Dripping icicles of stone hung from the ceiling; glistening spires grew beneath them. When Dru touched them with his ring he felt only the faintest magic and manipulation.
The same could not be said for a series of pools had been dug out of the floor. Their shapes were regular, their lips precisely square, and the largest of them was the source of the light that filled the chamber. Rozt'a knelt to examine it and without warning dipped her hand beneath the surface. She'd raised her hand to her lips before Dru found his voice. She was already spitting when he told her not to swallow.
"Brine!" she sputtered between spits. "Brine from the worst pickles ever made!"
Tiep chuckled, Druhallen resisted.
"How do you get brine in the middle of a mountain?" she demanded.
"Rock salt," Dru suggested seriously enough, though Tiep took it for a joke.
The rock all around them was the same gray granite they'd been hiking through for days. Good for making buildings, but useless for pickles. Dru took Rozt'a's place beside the pool. He looked down into the light, saw the underwater passages connecting the light-filled pool to the smaller, dimmer pools on either side.
"What good is brine?" Tiep asked. "You can't drink it."
"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.
