He glanced down to see a lizard-fish climbing over the toe of his boot. With a squawk of alarm, Jig kicked it back into the water. A few more steps, and it could have killed him. From then on he ignored the growing tunnel and worked on staying alive and poison-free.

The humming of the rod grew painfully shrill, then cut off. The instant the noise stopped, Barius gasped and clutched his head. “What did it do to me?”

Ryslind gazed into the newly formed tunnel. He tapped the stone, as if to insure its solidity. “I suspect your tunnel intersected the magic that held the whirlpool in place. The backlash will leave you with quite a headache for the next day or so.”

“You should have warned me.”

Ryslind smiled, a picture of innocence. “Magic comes with a cost, dear prince.” Before Barius could answer, he ducked his head and entered the tunnel, vanishing in the darkness.

The tunnel was barely taller than Jig, and he hunched over as he walked. The walls and ceiling were damp and cool, but they didn’t appear to leak. The cold air was eerily still, and their footsteps echoed down the tunnel. He almost refused to follow. The tunnel walls were only a few inches thick, and Jig didn’t see how that could be strong enough to support the weight of an entire lake.

That was another facet of the rod’s magic, of course. Those stone walls were probably stronger than the rest of the mountain. Still, Jig expected the tunnel to collapse at any second. He wondered if the water and rock would crush him before he drowned.

They reached the end. A perfectly round hole two feet across opened into blackness. The sides were smooth and damp. Darnak passed the lantern up to Ryslind, who slanted a beam of light into the room below.

The Necromancer’s throne room was the same as when they had left, empty and foreboding. The corpses were gone. Darnak had insisted on disposing of them when they came back from Straum’s lair, saying it was disrespectful to leave bodies sprawled about like that. They had spent several hours dragging the corpses to what Jig had dubbed the “Pit of Big Bats” and tossing them over the edge. How that was more respectful than leaving the bodies to decay, Jig hadn’t bothered to ask.

“Perhaps a ladder?” Ryslind suggested.

Barius frowned, but didn’t argue. He pointed the rod at the hole, and a bit of stone dripped into the room to form a thin ladder. From the lines on his forehead and by his eyes, Jig guessed he was concentrating harder this time. Sweat dripped down his face by the time he finished.