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Ivo Trant

Lissa — three steps back from me, spine to the wall, out of reach of all five, and one look at the roof while you move. This shrine keeps things overhead, and I want you nowhere near any of these when I throw: what's coming takes the smallest heads first and it can't tell you from a snail. Then I give them the words Pettifer squeezed onto that last page when his ink was going — the whole of Sleep, held in my head since the great door — thrown down the tunnel at all five. And while it settles, the business the dark ate, said plainly, because you've marched beside me a full day on a plan you never heard. There's no light anywhere in this shrine — no oil, no flint, nothing to burn — and my night's rest is done. So past these five: the great door, and the sun for a reading lamp. One hour's study at the threshold, Sleep out of my head and Read Magic in, and the parchment read at last. That's why I can spend it on snails without a pang — it was coming out of my head at first light anyway, and five things at once is exactly what it's been waiting for. Two things I want out loud on your turn. How did we come through the east brass door — it was blank from our side; did you find a way I never saw? And where's Roby — with us, or left by the lantern? Last: if all five don't go under, we don't trade with the ones left standing. We walk. And if you can see these things better than I can, say where the light's coming from — light in an exhaust tunnel comes from somewhere, and somewhere might be a chimney, and a chimney goes up.

DM

The last word falls flat into the soot. Sleep takes 9 Hit Dice: all five soot snails slump into the greasy runnel, senseless for 11 turns. Lissa has not yet moved—her turn had not come—but Ivo placed the spell farther down the tunnel, clear of both companions. Sleep is spent. Nothing moves on the blackened roof, and no daylight reaches this deep into the tunnel.