Khouryn jumped back, and the sword stroke fell short. He kept backpedaling as he snatched for the urgrosh strapped to his back.

As he did, he glimpsed another Medrash trading cuts with Balasar. Or at any rate one version of Balasar. A second one slashed right, left, and right again at the Medrash and Khouryn who were trying to flank him.

Obviously the guardians of Nala’s shrine could adopt the appearances of those they fought. Khouryn wished that Aoth and his truesight were there.

The false Medrash’s sword whirled in a backhand cut at his throat. He parried with his spiked axe, and steel clashed on steel. But at the same moment he felt something slice across his thigh.

He didn’t think the attack had cut deeply. His leather breeches had spared him the worst of it. But a sudden grogginess took hold of him. His eyelids drooped, and the urgrosh felt heavy in his hands. Insane as it was in the middle of a fight for his life, he had the feeling he was in danger of pitching over fast asleep.

He attacked furiously, recklessly, and his foe gave ground. With each swing he bellowed a war cry. The frantic onslaught woke him up, but also left him vulnerable to a sudden stop thrust. He managed to jerk to a halt with the false Medrash’s point a finger-length from his chest.

Another invisible attack slashed across his knee. Once again lethargy tried to smother him, and he bellowed it-or the worst of it-away. Perhaps to achieve the same end, Medrash and Balasar were shouting too, and the clamor echoed through the crypt.

Khouryn doubted he could endure too many more doses of sleep venom or too many more slices across the leg before one crippled him. But he had figured out his opponent’s favorite combination-cut high with the sword to draw a parry, then immediately slash low with whatever it was that did that.

Khouryn sidestepped the next sword stroke and simultaneously chopped with the urgrosh. Though he couldn’t see his target, battle sense guided his hands, and he felt his weapon bite.

The false Medrash gave a shrill hiss unlike any sound that Khouryn had ever heard emerge from the mouth of a genuine dragonborn. The mask of illusion fell away, revealing a reptilian creature skinny as a snake, its body mottled with an intricate pattern of black and purple scales. Covered in spines, the severed tip of its long tail twitched and coiled on the floor.

Then the guardian’s form rippled, and illusion veiled it once more. But not the same illusion. Khouryn was facing himself.

He assumed the trick was supposed to make him hesitate, but if so the reptile had misjudged him. He advanced, struck, and his foe didn’t hop back quickly enough. The axe ripped a gash in its torso.

Pain tore down Khouryn’s body as if he truly had cut his own flesh. It’s not real! he insisted to himself. And when the reptile hurled itself at him, he met it with another strike.

The urgrosh smashed through ribs and into its target’s vitals. The shock, or the echo of it, made Khouryn black out. When he roused, he was lying on the floor. So was his foe. Looking like its natural self again, it stared at him with lifeless, slit-pupiled eyes.

He judged that he’d only been unconscious for a heartbeat or two, because everyone else was still fighting. The other guardians had adopted the same tactic the dead one had used at the last. Medrash was dueling a copy of himself, and Balasar other Balasars.

And even there, where the fact that two were fighting one should have made it obvious, Khouryn found it difficult to pick out the real Balasar from one moment to the next. It was like there was more than simple illusion at work, like the guardians’ power gnawed at his mind to promote confusion and hysteria.

Refusing to succumb to them, he studied what was happening in front of him. Then he jumped up, rushed one of the Balasars, and chopped the base of its spine. Its shroud of illusion melted away as the creature crumpled. He started toward the other, and then instinct made him stop short. He felt the breeze as the reptile’s tail spikes whipped by in front of his face. He lunged into striking range and hacked one of its legs out from under it.

The real Balasar pounced to finish it off, and Khouryn rounded on the nearer Medrash. Who saw him coming and cried, “No! It’s me! Kill the other one!”

“Sorry,” Khouryn answered. He swung at the speaker’s kidney, and it collapsed in a frenzy of skinny, thrashing limbs and whipping tail. The actual Medrash dispatched it with a thrust to the heart.

Still feeling some ache from his phantom wounds as well as the genuine gashes on his leg, Khouryn looked around. He didn’t see anything else advancing to attack. “Everyone all right?” he panted.

“Just scratched up a little,” Balasar said. “And craving a nap. How could you tell the difference between them and us?”

“The purplespawn copied your looks,” Khouryn answered. “They couldn’t copy your fighting styles. And when I stared hard, I could make out the details of what was going on.”

“Purplespawn,” Balasar repeated. “That’s what these things are?”

“I think so,” Khouryn said. “They generally live underground like dwarves do. They’re supposed to be related to dark elves and dragons too, disturbing as that coupling is to imagine.”

“So,” said Medrash, “like the portal drake, they’re the kind of creature we might expect to find in Nala’s service. But before they interrupted us, you were telling us you’d discovered something you didn’t expect.”

Khouryn grinned. “Ah yes.” Since he’d decided to linger in Tymanther, he’d often regretted that he had so little aptitude for unraveling mysteries and conspiracies; Gaedynn or Aoth could surely do better. But by the Wanderer’s Eye, with help from the Daardendriens, he’d still found the end of the trail. “This isn’t a shrine to Bahamut but to Tiamat. Nala is actually a wyrmkeeper, a priestess of Tiamat.”

The dragonborn just looked at him.

“I don’t know a great deal about either Bahamut or Tiamat,” Khouryn persisted. “My people worship other gods. But I do know that Bahamut is considered good, and Tiamat evil. So, by infiltrating the Platinum Cadre, Nala has taken a group of worshipers who aspired to be virtuous and tricked them into corruption.”

“But for the most part,” Balasar said, “dragonborn don’t know anything about any of your gods.” He stifled a yawn. “They certainly don’t know enough to distinguish between one dragon god and another. Now that Nala’s accomplished the hard task of convincing them that any kind of wyrm worship can be a good thing, I don’t think this bit of news will trouble them. They simply won’t understand it.”

Khouryn frowned. “Surely the cultists won’t like hearing they pledged themselves to a completely different god than they imagined.”

“Once they go through the initiation,” Balasar replied, “Nala has at least the tip of a claw in every one of their heads.” He yawned again. “They’re the least likely of all to see the importance.”

“Curse it!” Khouryn said. “I can’t believe we’ve come this far and still have nothing!”

“I don’t believe it either,” Medrash said. He looked around and then, for want of anything better, wiped the blood from his sword with the edge of his cloak. “Torm brought us here for a reason.” He smiled. “And besides, you’re both forgetting we still haven’t discovered the reason for that wagonload of sand.”

Watching for more purplespawn or other threats, they stalked deeper into the tomb. Khouryn reflected that the owners must be-or have been-an important clan to possess such a spacious vault. Then he gasped at something extraordinary enough to push all such extraneous thoughts right out of his head.

Khouryn didn’t know a great deal about glassblowing, but he recognized the furnaces, blowpipes, marver, punty, and other tools required for the work. Raiann had set up in an open space where three crypts came together, and the five-headed statue of Tiamat he’d glimpsed previously loomed over everything else.