Very Good Glue

Water dripped through new cracks in Xanathar’s lair. Maeril heard it before Hazarak led them out of the excavation and into a round passage with doors.

No one challenged them. One door hung from melted hinges; another had been forced outward hard enough to tear its frame from the wall. Rishi looked into each room they passed while Hazarak paused at the crossings, head low.

“What do you smell?” she asked.

“Dead fear.”

“As opposed to the lively variety?”

“That runs.”

He moved on. Maeril followed, placing her bad foot clear of a fallen rack of crossbows. Beyond it, ledgers soaked in runoff beneath a broken shelf, their figures dissolving into the water.

Xanathar’s eye had been painted on a skull above an arch. The skull lay beneath a beam now.

Hazarak stopped at a circular doorway. “The fish room. This is where I left him.”

Maeril passed him and entered.

The metal frame of the aquarium leaned against the wall. Curved glass covered the carpet and the stone beyond it. Decorative gravel had collected in the cracks, bright among ash and boot marks. A small brass castle lay on its side beneath a table.

Rishi stopped beside her. His staff hovered above something near an overturned chair.

Three fingers and part of a palm lay in the glass. The wrist ended in a jagged line.

Maeril looked farther into the room.

A fold of stone robe had broken from a shoulder. A bootprint crossed a smaller fragment and had ground one edge into powder. Beneath the aquarium stand, a head lay face-first toward the wall.

She crossed to it and knelt. Pain went through her leg when it struck the floor, but her hands were already beneath the stone.

A crack passed through one closed eye. His mouth remained open around an unfinished breath. She turned the face toward her: the narrow cheeks, the brow that always made a room seem badly secured.

Dust clung to one side. Maeril wiped it away with her sleeve.

Behind her, Hazarak stepped through the doorway and stopped. “He was standing when the ray reached him.”

She held the head still.

“The next ray cut the floor between us,” Hazarak continued. “I could not get back across. I did not see him fall.”

Rishi crouched beside her. He put his staff down carefully. “Can he be restored?”

Maeril looked at the pieces beneath the stand. She could imagine ending the petrification. She could not make herself imagine what would happen to the flesh.

Her thumb rested beneath Firemind’s ear. “We put him together first.”

“And after that?”

“We find someone better qualified to say no.”

Rishi picked up the broken hand. “Then we take every piece.”

“Every grain we can identify. Hazarak, we need cloth. Something clean to wrap him in.”

The dragonborn went back into the passage. Maeril heard him push a door open, then another. He returned with two stout sacks and a folded length of linen.

Rishi tore the linen into squares. Maeril kept Firemind’s head in her lap while he cleared a place for it, brushing the glass away with a piece of wood.

Hazarak crouched beside the frame. White grit filled a fresh dent in its lower crossbar. A broken piece of shoulder lay beneath it.

“He may have struck this when he fell,” Hazarak said.

Maeril looked from the dent to the fragment. One edge had been crushed flat. She wrapped the head before allowing herself to look farther.

They began with what they could recognize.

Rishi gathered the larger pieces, laying cloth between the broken edges. Hazarak lifted the shoulder with both hands and lowered it into an open sack. Maeril matched the thin plates of transformed robe where she could, keeping them together without forcing the joins.

A piece of chest followed. They found fingers under the aquarium frame and another beneath the carpet. His left boot remained almost whole.

The carpet held a long tear near the broken glass. Maeril remembered Hazarak’s account of Elisa falling, and moved her knee away from it.

Along the wall, fine burns formed half a circle. Some curved inward. Others ended against empty air.

“Was that where he opened it?” Maeril asked.

Hazarak looked up from the piece in his hands. “Yes. He kept working while the room burned.”

Maeril had watched Firemind correct a mechanism sketch until the concealed hammer could no longer trap them. She tried to picture those hands opening a passage here, with Elisa beside the shattered bowl and Chime waiting for a gap wide enough to follow.

She looked down. A stone finger rested against her boot.

She wrapped it and passed it to Rishi.

When they had gathered the visible fragments, Maeril rose with one hand against the wall. “Now the pieces we cannot see.”

She opened her magical sight.

The room sharpened into overlapping traces of violence. Xanathar’s rays had left harsh lines across the stone. A fainter working clung to the place where Elisa had fallen. The fragments in the sacks answered her sight in the same dull bands.

Three fainter traces remained.

“Beneath the carpet,” Maeril told them. “Inside the frame. And there is dust caught in the water groove by the door.”

Hazarak used the points of his claws to lift powder onto squares of linen.

Maeril searched again, slowly. Nothing more answered. “That is everything I can find.”

Rishi looked at the water groove where it passed beneath the door. He folded the last square of cloth and put it with the others.

The portal had left a different mark.

Its geometry had torn rather than folded. Lines reached toward the wall and continued in directions the room did not possess. Maeril followed them with her good eye until the pattern drew her back toward the aquarium stand.

Something lay beneath the glass. She swept the shards aside with the folded cloth.

The wand had split along its core. Its wood was scorched from within, and the metal bindings had opened. She laid the shorter piece on the cloth and held the longer one above it, keeping the broken ends apart. There was no continuous working left for her to follow.

Then the residue caught her.

For an instant she felt streets that crossed without meeting. Doorways stood above, below, and inside one another. Languages changed into keys. A city occupied the center of directions no map could hold.

She caught the edge of the stand with her free hand.

Rishi was beside her before the room steadied. “What happened?”

“The passage left something in the wood.”

She waited for the impossible angles to withdraw from her sight. “The City of Doors.”

“Sigil?”

“I think so. I saw enough to recognize the descriptions.” She looked down at the broken wand. “His own city. Of course he’d send them there. And once he broke this, Xanathar couldn’t follow them through.”

She turned toward the wrapped head. “Oh, you clever man.”

Rishi looked at the two pieces. “Can it take us there?”

“It cannot work like this. But something remains, and I would like to examine it in a room that is not falling down.”

“I did not see Elisa or Chime,” she added. “This may tell us where the passage went. It cannot tell us what happened after they crossed.”

Rishi rested one hand beside the wrapped head. “They went through together. We begin there.”

Maeril wrapped both halves separately and put them in her satchel.

Hazarak drew the sacks together. When Maeril reached for the heavier one, he laid a hand over its gathered mouth. “Elisa kept me standing during the hunt. Firemind closed the quarry’s way behind it. They both stayed when they could have gone.”

“You came when they asked,” Maeril said.

“I said that would answer the debt.”

His claws closed carefully around the cloth. “Answered. Not forgotten. I carry him.”

Maeril withdrew her hand.

Rishi took the smaller bundle against his chest. She picked up his staff and stood beside him while he settled the weight. His left elbow stayed close to his ribs.

Before they left, she looked once more at the room. The little brass castle lay beneath the table. Beyond it, the torn carpet marked where Nar’l had put Elisa in Xanathar’s way.

“Nar’l is dead,” Maeril said. “I killed him.”

The memory of the cold steadied her.

Hazarak looked at her, then at the torn carpet.

Rishi adjusted the linen around Firemind’s head. He smoothed it where a broken edge pressed against the cloth, his eyes lowered.

Maeril tightened her grip on the staff and followed Hazarak out.

For several passages, none of them spoke. The wood helped her keep the weight off her leg. She could hear Rishi’s breathing beside her, careful whenever the floor changed beneath his feet.

“We need a large table,” she said at last. “Every restoration expert Vajra can compel, persuade, or frighten. And glue.”

Rishi turned toward her.

Her jaw trembled. She held it still. “Very good glue.”

“We will find it.”

At the first branching passage, she stopped Hazarak and leaned the staff against the wall. She took a scrap of paper from her book and wrote what they had found and what they needed, leaving gray fingerprints beside the words. Beneath them she added a request for planar references and a place to examine Nar’l’s broken wand.

The spellguards at the breach could take it to Vajra ahead of them.

Maeril folded the note and put it where her fingers could reach it. Then she took up Rishi’s staff again, and they carried Firemind toward the light from the Vault.