The bitch took another step backward, a battleaxe in one hand now; with the other hand she pulled a small vial from her belt and gulped it down. The wound on her chest closed, leaving a scar. Meanwhile her bodyguard unleashed both axes on Talon to devastating effect. Time for serious measures; Talon pulled a sphere from his necklace and threw it to the ground at the bitch's feet, then flipped back out of the way of the ensuing explosion. He rolled back to his feet to find both gnolls staggered, singed, and soot-stained.
    I hated to leave Talon like this but I was little use without speech, and kept backing up. Another ten feet and I could hear again, including an awful noise from the bottom of the stairs where Scott was still busy with his double. The gnoll left off following me in favor of charging at Phoenix Talon again, dealing him another axe wound.
    The other two took the opportunity to swig more healing potions while Phoenix Talon turned to deal with this new threat, punching and kicking. The gnoll staggered back, then he grabbed a potion.
    Now that I knew the spell's range, I had to get back to where I could do something about it. There was a narrow place where I could stand outside its range and still see into the room. The cleric had a rather panicky look on her face now as she pointed at Talon and shouted, "Die!"
    He looked back at her and said, "No." He was flanked, though; the one he had fireballed charged at him while the other attacked from the other side. Talon dodged most of the flurry of attacks, collecting more minor wounds, and lashed out with a kick at the second gnoll that took him down.
    I touched the hand again and whispered some unpleasant words; the gnoll cleric gave a cry as her heart was crushed. She staggered back and healed herself of some of the hurt I had just done her--but not all of it.
    Two steps forward, one step back....
    The remaining gnoll warrior appeared to have run out of potions. He continued attacking Talon, however, as Scott finally appeared around the bend behind me. I could be sure it was Scott because if it wasn't, it would have killed me before I knew it was there.
    "Phoenix, we need to swap places!" He couldn't hear me through the silent zone in the doorway. Damn.
    Talon was concentrated on the warrior, as the woman was now too far away for him to reach easily; the gnoll was in gratifyingly bad condition. I ran through the silent zone and whacked at the once facing Phoenix Talon with my staff.
    "What?" the gnoll barked, more aggravated than hurt by my little stick.
    "Talon, you might want to get some distance," I told him. "Go after her. You don't look good." He was a ragged, bloody mess by now, and I probably didn't look any better.
    The gnoll looked at the two of us and decided Talon was the bigger threat, but entirely failed to hit Talon.
    "You think you've seen my real power? I've been suppressing it," Talon told him with a snide look--and called on Da'an's power to heal himself.
    "It--it can't be!"
    I kept up my attempt at a distracting assault. It might take an hour, but we would get rid of him. Meanwhile, Scott's silver body slid into the room and towards the gnoll female, who was running toward one of a series of four doors in the far wall. He lashed out and caught hold of her with a tendril. "Get over here." She tried to cast a wounding spell on him, which failed utterly due to him not being actually alive.
    The gnoll turned his attention to me as I bounced around him; he hit me a couple of times, looking somewhat surprised when I didn't fall down. Phoenix Talon went after him again, a solid strike at last that crushed his ribcage.
    Being Talon, he then ripped out the gnoll's heart and let him see it before he died. I winced. Scott and his prey were too far away for the best attack spell I had left, so I spent a few moments curing some of my human companion's copious wounds.
    "Now go take her out," I suggested. "I'm tired."
    Not necessary, as it turned out; Scott closed with her and walloped her. In the condition she was in, once was all it took. He looked through the doors and found only gnollish bedchambers, all empty. He checked under the beds, just in case, and we looked for secret doors. Nothing; there was no other way out of this place. We had cleared the tree of Gretchen's forces, and it wasn't even midnight.
    "We don't have anyone to interrogate, do we?" Talon realized.
    "We killed them all. Which was the plan, as I recall...."
    "She might still be... no," Scott realized, looking at the gnoll.
    "I have Speak with Dead."
    "Let's do it!"
    I think Talon just wanted the novelty, really. "We can only ask six questions...."
    "We might want to wait for the incoming commander, see if there's anything he wants to know," Scott suggested.
    We agreed that was a good idea, left the bodies to lie where they were for the time being. While were up upstairs Samantha and Telek had done what they could for the prisoners. We took the screen from the shadow room and put it in front of the pool, to keep any casual passers from looking in. Discussing the likelihood of bridge repair, we were startled to find the raven diving at us and immediately took cover inside, except for Scott who became a vapor around its head, confusing it greatly. Talon ran back up and grabbed a gnoll corpse to placate it.
    With a lot of flying around and some strenuous hauling, some of us reattached the bridge to its supports, while others ferried rescued prisoners down to the ground, where they took command of the slaves. I tended to some of the wounded, including myself.
    "We're going to get you all out of here," one assured the crowd. "How many gnolls did you kill?''
    "Not enough!" came the enthusiastic reply.
    "Question," Scott asked one of the slaves in the meantime. "What's with the composting of evil? What're you guys doing?"
    The man shrugged. "I don't know, they just made us do it."
    He looked for someone more knowledgeable, who said, "We go out and we gather compost and stuff, and bring it in, drop it off up there in the central well chamber. It drops down and composts, and feeds the tree."
    "Oh, it's an evil tree?" Talon concluded.
    "No."
    "And then you dredge the sludge out?" Scott followed up.
    "The sludge gathers down here, and we collect the sludge from here and bring it out so it composts around the outside."
    "Oookay."
    "It's how the tree got big, I think," the man shrugged.
    "Seems like it should be evil-er," Talon mused.
    I pointed out that they were putting corpses into the mix upon occasion. "I think we should go take a look."
    There was a significant part of the tree none of us had been into yet, above the mosquito-raven nests Scott had found and below the rope bridge. We hurried past the nests before the dwellers therein could waken, and then slowed our steps as the ramp arched into the familiar long clock-wise arc around the tree. We passed several doors, which Scott poked his "head" under to find more gnoll barracks, empty, and regaled us with tales of his battle. On the left we passed a door beyond which was a long ramp down.
    We entered cautiously, Scott first. A thin film of water covered most of the surfaces, and it was quite narrow as well. Phoenix Talon had no trouble; I moved with great care. At the bottom we found a chamber where the floor seemed to bulge up slightly. In the middle of the floor sat a pouch, so ordinary-looking that we glanced at one another with raised eyebrows. Scott used Mage Hand; inside the pouch were a dozen copper pieces.
    The floor wiggled. He put the pouch back.
    "It's a trapper!" Talon snapped. "Run!"
    I backed up, very carefully. And slipped. Splash. Fortunately, Talon was wrong; it was just water. Which began surging up once my impact broke the surface tension, filling the corridor we had come down. Talon threw me a rope, which I grabbed onto while swallowing water and being buffeted off the walls and ceiling by the rapidly rising flow. Talon dove down and grabbed my arm, hauled me to the surface. Scott hastened ahead to make sure we wouldn't be crushed against the door; a wave of water carried us out into the corridor where we lay like the proverbial drowned rats and I hacked a pint or two of water out of my lungs.
    Then we kept going. Another turn around the tree and there was another door to our left, opening onto a ramp heading down.
    "Wait here a moment, guys," Scott suggested kindly.
    "I think we'll do that," I agreed.
    This time it went down into a large chamber with a slightly soggy-looking floor and a door on the other side. This one was air-tight. He contemplated the door for a moment and opened it. Releasing a floor of... sludge, which quickly filled the room.
    We smelled it from where we were waiting. It seems drainage in the tree is not as good as it might be. Scott went to gaseous form and rejoined us.
    "You don't want to go in there," he said. "We're leaving that door locked."
    We continued. After another circuit I noticed two things more or less at once; the hidden door to my immediate right, and ahead of me, the two massive tendrils that had been disguised as natural variations in the tree wall, and which were reaching out to nab Phoenix Talon. I had enough time to yelp a warning, and he dove out of their way, leaving the tendrils flailing in the corridor.
    Scott suggested falling back. I pointed out that Talon appeared to have an excess of energy just now. Talon drew his katana and slashed at one of them; something screamed behind the wall. I stayed back from the affray.
    "Hey Scott, want to take a look here?"
    The golem misted through the battle and looked through the door for me. It led onto a ramp that led around the area of the corridor where the tendrils held sway.
    The tendrils that had just grabbed hold of Talon, slammed him against the wall, and were constricting him quite painfully from the sound of it.
    Now above us on the ramp, Scott lashed out with a burning tendril at the shambling mound that had hold of Talon; he cut into its substance but failed to free our struggling comrade. I called upon my goddess' power and struck with my staff. The tentacles continued to squeeze.
    Talon disappeared. Fortunately, we had seen him do that before; the question now was where he was; since he was nowhere in sight, we assumed he had gone back down to the base of the tree.
    "We'll deal with you in the morning," I told the mound, and carved a little "do not pass" note in the wall.
    Scott doesn't need to sleep; he did his best to organize everyone else while we grabbed a bit of sleep. By dawn we had visitors.
    "We weren't expecting you this soon. How did it go?" their commander asked.
    "Fairly well. We've got most of the place cleared out," Scott told him.
    "There's still some problems," Talon advised.
    "Yeah, if you see a sign on the wall that says Don't pass this point, there's a shambling mound up there. You don't want to go past that."
    "Okay. Did you kill all the gnolls?" he inquired,
    "Some of them got away. There were too many of them," the golem shrugged. "There's just no way to take all of them, too many doors out of here."
    "How many do you think got away?"
    "Maybe fifteen."
    "All right. We'll have to scour the woods, we can do that. The tower's been taken? That's the important thing."
    We allowed as how there were a couple of corners we hadn't gotten to yet.
    "We'll need a steady supply of giant rats," Talon told him.
    "What?"
    We explained about the raven.
    "Did you do any damage that we wouldn't be able to repair?"
    "No, we pretty much left the infrastructure untouched," I told him. "Amazingly enough."
    "Except for that roomful of sludge," Scott remembered.
    We gave him some more details, then, "Would you like to accompany us to interrogate the gnoll corpse?" Talon invited.
    "Excuse me?"
    "If you have any questions you would like to ask of their commanding cleric, we can do that," I explained.
    "Why don't we wait until the old man gets here?" Scott suggested.
    "He won't be here for a couple more days."
    
    

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