Jig hurt. His head felt like one enormous bruise, his muscles ached, and his waterlogged loincloth gave him a chill he couldn’t ignore. But to squeeze out the excess water would require him to move, which didn’t seem like a good idea yet. Not to mention that modesty prevented him from stripping down in front of the adventurers.

While he waited for the throbbing in his head to die down, he cracked his eyes and took his first look at the Necromancer’s territory.

As Ryslind had predicted, the whirlpool flowed through a large crack in the ceiling and into this room. The spinning cylinder of water stood like a pillar as wide as Jig’s outstretched arms. The surface was smooth as glass, and only the bubbles rushing around in quick circles broke the illusion. Jig wondered how he had passed through the barrier that kept the water in place. Was it a part of Ryslind’s spell, or the nature of the pillar itself? Neither answer brought much comfort. Especially given the force of the water trapped behind that invisible barrier.

I fell through that. As if I didn’t have enough fodder for my nightmares.

Everyone else had made it through more or less intact. Ryslind was checking on the dwarf, who looked as though he was still unconscious. Riana bled from a cut on her head, and her cheek sported an angry bruise. Barius slumped against a far wall, barely awake. All of them, Jig noticed, sat in the center of large puddles. At least he wasn’t alone in his discomfort.

Moving slowly so as not to aggravate his headache, Jig fumbled with the wet ties on his belt pouch. Eventually he managed to undo the knot so he could check on Smudge.

A blast of steam caught him in the face like a miniature geyser. Smudge leaped a good foot into the air, trailing steam beneath him. He turned to run away from Jig, spotted the tail of the whirlpool, and raced right back to the goblin’s side. Jig searched the room for something to feed the battered fire-spider. A few bugs, an old rat, anything would do. Smudge had been through a lot, and he deserved some reward. But the room was as clean as any he had seen.

The walls were black marble, polished to reflect the lantern light. Someone must have relit the lamp, since Jig doubted the flame could have survived the trip. The floor was the same black marble, and up close, Jig could see that red lines ran jaggedly through the marble like tiny veins. As for the ceiling . . . Jig stared. Before when he glanced at the crack in the ceiling, his mind hadn’t registered the glass tiles and swirls of color. This was another mosaic, the same as in the shiny room up above.