Ignoring the valuables of clerical sort, and the leather bags of coins as well, Gord singled out several finely made caskets, knowing that such containers were likely to be used for prized gems and precious jewelry pieces.
“Beautiful!” he gasped involuntarily as he opened the first and viewed the array of gems within. Huge emeralds, massive rubies, great, glittering diamonds. A rainbow of colors, and a strange stone too. The latter, held in a special velvet pouch, was a round, nearly fist-sized black opal whose green flecks pulsed with strange lights and at whose heart a vermilion light like a flame seemed to dance. “This I’ll have too,” Gord uttered in awe, and he thrust the orb of opal into his own leather pouch quickly. Though this gem alone was a monumental prize, he didn’t forget that he was here first and foremost to regain the nine black star sapphires.
By the time he had searched the last of the little coffers. Cord’s mood was one of utter despair. Although he had tucked several other fine pieces of jewelry into his pouch, he had failed to locate the gems he so desperately desired.
“Gods rot you, stinking priest of a misbegotten one! I’ll have them from you personally!” With that, Gord returned to the little chamber and worked the sconce again-but this time he dived into the larger chamber as the small room began to rotate back to its previous position.
“You’ll come back through this portal, priest,” Gord muttered. “On that I’ll stake my life. And when you come from your unholy sacrifices this night, I shall be here to greet you.” Then he found a chair, pulled it to a convenient place near where the secret entrance to the place would open, and waited inside his self-imposed prison.
Several hours later the chief cleric of Nerull did indeed return to his own chambers, alone and exhausted from his night of obscene rituals and debauchery. The dark stains of blood and other substances covered him, and he was busily stripping off his soiled gown even as the little chamber rotated to allow him access to his apartments. Gord fell upon him with remorseless fury, pummeling the priest into senselessness before the man could do more than utter a brief, shrill scream for help. Gord used the cleric’s stained cassock to stifle that noise even as he beat the fellow unconscious.
After binding the priest’s arms and legs with cords, Gord turned him face down and slid his dagger beneath the man’s chin, placing the edge of the blade a fraction of an inch from the exposed flesh of his throat.
“Awaken, grave-rat!” Gord commanded, pouring some wine from a bottle he’d found on a table in the bedroom of the cleric. As the liquid splashed on the back of his head, the priest of Nerull groaned and tried to raise his face. He turned his eyes to the side and up, and even in his half-dazed state managed to get out a threat.
“I’ll have your life and soul for this, intruder! Don’t you know who I am?”
“Stay still, or who you were will be the correct terminology,” Gord said, using his free hand to emphasize the point by shoving the fellow’s head back down with force. “Feel the burning at your throat? That is where my dag’s edge even now slices a bit of your tender flesh. Speak only to answer my queries, or that edge shall bite deeper!”
The priest became instantly motionless. “What do you want?”
“Only a bit of information. Give me that, and I will spare your vile life. Where are the nine black star sapphires set with diamonds in a necklace of wrought platinum?” The question was met with silence, so Gord brought his weapon hand up a bit and drew the blade of his dagger ever so lightly across the man’s throat. That was all it took.
“Wait, wait! I recall the piece you refer to now-I had forgotten it, that’s all! I’m trying to cooperate!” The malign priest whined the last piteously.
“Where is the necklace, then?”
“It’s… I… not here,” he gasped fearfully.
“You lie! It must be here. I know those gems are far too valuable for you to allow them to be out of your possession!”
“No, no! I lie not, I speak true to you. Precious they were, but not so precious as a great op-er, another gem which was given in exchange.”
Gord was unable to believe his ears. “When? When did this exchange take place?” He brought his dagger away from the bound man’s throat, feeling himself getting caught up in the cleric’s explanation and not wanting to accidentally slash his quarry before he had told everything.
“But a sennight ago.”
“Who did you bargain with, then? Tell me straight and quickly. My dagger thirsts for your foul life, cannibalistic rat.”
“It was a being of great power, one no longer human, but grown mighty and unhuman, a dweller in shadow, a servant of my god, a devoted follower of Ner-”
Thump! Gord struck the cleric hard across the temple with the pommel of his dagger before the man could finish uttering the name. There was no sense in taking chances that the terrible one would hear and attend, for they were within the deity’s own house and his great priest was being threatened. The fellow stirred and moaned, so Gord spoke again.
“Mind your tongue! I am not so foolish as to allow it to wag thus. Try once more, and I’ll end its wagging forever. Now, say it short and straight: To whom did you give those stones I seek?”
“The Prime of evil shadows, the Lich of Liches-that is with whom I exchanged treasures.”
“What made him desire to part with that… other stone of greater value than the black sapphires? Surely one so puissant as this Prime would recognize his loss and your gain.”
“He wished to remove his from… let us say that my possession of the one he held pleased his sense of propriety,” the priest hurriedly substituted. He was beginning to regain his senses and gather his courage as well.
“The stones are now with him?” Gord demanded. When the cleric answered affirmatively, the young adventurer then asked, “And the lick you call Prime is where?”
“In the Realm of Shadow, thief, and beyond your reach!”
“So be it,” Gord said calmly. He struck the fellow’s shaven pate again. “You’ll sleep awhile, now, and give me ample time to leave your precincts.” Gord was much distressed at the words of the priest, but he was used to disappointment. Besides, someday perhaps he would find a way to penetrate the plane of shadowstuff and seek out the lich and his treasure then. Now it was high time for him to be leaving here with his mementos. The temple would shake under the wrath of the high cleric when the man discovered that his treasury had been looted and his prized black opal was missing.
It would have been an easy escape, but for his getting temporarily lost in the maze of narrow passages beneath the temple. It took far longer than Gord had hoped it would for him to retrace his steps and find the way above. By then the high cleric had recovered his senses, freed himself, and sounded the alarm. Even so, Gord had nearly made it to a place where he could get over the surrounding wall when he was spotted.
A swarm of arrows and bolts swept around him, humming and buzzing like angry wasps as they passed close. A thick quarrel took the young thief in his left arm, and the shock of its entry made him feel. Cursing, he managed to break off the feathered end and push the tip through, but that act took time, and it was his undoing.
The shaven-headed high priest had been helped above by then, and his dark eyes fell upon the struggling rogue with evil anticipation. Uttering a singsong litany of vilest sort, the cleric called upon his dark deity to deliver the most terrible of painful deaths to the man who had dared to violate temple and priest both! The spell spewed forth from the priest’s mouth even as his arm raised and his long fingers shaped themselves into a pointing sign of evil. A dark and evilly red ray of light sprang from his hand, and the lurid ray struck Gord full on his turned back, bathing his head and torso in awful radiance.