Scott wondered aloud about what three gods might be referred to by the map's brief instruction, and I delivered an impromptu lecture on the history of those involved. We had plenteous suggestions of Jarl, and Yasmina had admitted to Sutha's involvement —which meant we were likely to find undead guardians. Da'an does not get on well with either of them. Of his remaining enemies, Xyrgoth seemed most likely, assuming the other two could put up with him long enough for all three of them to cooperate in the venture.
    "If Xyrgoth knew, I can't see Gretchen leaving this thing sitting out here," he noted.
    "It's not like it was easy to find," I shrugged. "Maybe he didn't tell her." The ways of the gods are sometimes beyond human comprehension—and sometimes, depressingly, very much within human comprehension.
    We killed one of the giant rabbits and spent the night in a tree, to avoid the boars—a few of them scrabbled around the bottom in the deep night—and woke stiff and chilly. I restored Thunderbolt's health to its usual sterling state, and we flew across the lake, high enough to avoid any leaping fish. On the other side was a sandy beach, which quickly became rocky. The island-within-an-island was several miles across and almost featureless; no trees had taken root there, no grasses grew among the tumbled rocks, no rabbits bounded away from us.
    There was a circle of five plain stone pillars, ten feet tall, surrounding a pit, close to but not in the center of the island. Looking through the pillars, we found the pit to be some thirty feet across and twenty feet deep, decorated for the first five feet with abstract designs. Below that it was entirely encrusted with garnets, which Scott and Privateer appraised with expert eyes. In the center of the pit was a black stone with a ruby set in it and an inscription. Privateer pulled out his spyglass. He read, "Beware the sun god's direct attentions unless you throw what his left hand once bore into the center of stone."
    "What his left hand once bore?" I frowned.
    "Are garnets associated with any of the three gods?"
    Neither they nor rubies have any symbolism I know of. Talon and I conferred; Da'an bore a spear in combat, but it was usually in his right hand, unless he was using both. He was never pictured with a shield.... Was it literally "nothing" that the riddle meant?
    No. Da'an had been married once. Of course. Theirs was the first marriage. His ring had been silver, and Lorae's had been gold, that's where we got the tradition.
    "So we need a silver ring?" Talon concluded. Our local pirate had a few of those, no problem.
    Scott suggested experimentation first. He threw in a stick; nothing happened. The sun wasn't on the ruby yet; that would not happen until noon, which would be an hour or so.
    "You look like you have an idea; please share," I invited Scott.
    "No, because it's not a good one."
    Okay, then.
    Scott reached in and grabbed the stick back out; still nothing. He thoroughly searched the pillars and found nothing of interest.
    "It might not react to you," I noted; it might not have been designed to deal with golems. Time for someone to give it a try.
    "I will go. It's my responsibility; it is also my god," Talon noted; the rest of us deferred to him. We discussed waiting for noon, and decided against it. He took a silver and a gold ring from Privateer and jumped down into the pit. Nothing happened. He walked over to the black stone, looked for anything that might be a trap.
    Watching through the spyglass, Privateer noticed that the ruby was distinctly off-center. He mentioned this to Talon, who was getting ready to try to replace the ruby with the ring.
    "Maybe you're supposed to put it beside the ruby?" I wondered. That didn't look right, either, it left the ring half-resting awkwardly on the ruby.
    "Hey guys, there's a little silver down here already. On the inscription."
    Scott made a little "ahah" sound. "Put it on the 'o' in stone."
    He did so, and got out of the pit. We waited.
    At noon the sun fell without shadow into the pit. The ruby began to glow, and the black stone began to rise on a shaft of stone, until it was about halfway to ground level. The ruby glowed brightly, and beaming out from it came a ray of red light that struck the wall. The wall disappeared.
    We scrambled down and through the hole, faster than we needed to it seemed, as the sun declined slightly from its zenith and the door remained in place. We were in a passage, about ten feet wide and stretching out in front of us about fifty feet.
    Privateer led the way, Phoenix Talon guarded the rear, and the rest of us clustered in the center. Phoenix Talon used his Gem of Brightness, and I cast a light spell, and we moved cautiously forward until we reached a T-intersection, the path disappearing into darkness in both directions. Glancing back, the door was still there behind us. There were no carvings on the walls anywhere. We found a few cobwebs, long uninhabited, and some dried insect husks on the floor, looked like locusts. After a brief colloquy we chose the left-hand path.
    Soon after that we could see a door blocking the corridor. Privateer crept up to it and looked it over, determined that it was not trapped. Pausing to listen there came the sound of chanting arythmically; it sounded like spellcasting. He drifted back and informed us of this.
    "Scott, can you mist under the door?" Talon asked.
    He determined that he could, and began slipping through the space. As he did so, he felt something touch his heart, washing over him and placing there the certainty that he was entering a place he should not be.
    "I think he knows we're here," he whispered. "I'll knock the door open, you guys'll shoot him a lot?"
    It was a plan. No sense sneaking now; Scott smashed in the door, and Talon dove into the room, feeling the same sense of wrongness as he faced the reason for it. The room was a large temple, with an altar near the far wall, and in the middle of the room a mummy wearing a massive headdress and holding a mace in one hand as he snickered in the breathless way the undead have.
    "Foul bane! In the name of Da'an I shall destroy you!" Talon shouted, looking for power items. There was a circle of candles, each bearing some magical light rather than flame, and the altar to Sutha. Behind the altar was a statue of a woman with the lower body of a snake and six arms. There was no other way out of the room. As the mummy raised its arms and began another chant, Talon jumped at it and slashed in with his sword, interrupting the spell. The swarm of locusts that should have come vomiting forth from his mouth turned into a mere dribble, a small cloud flitting about rather than an insectoid nightmare.
    One piece of Privateer's rather odd gear that I haven't mentioned so far is a bit of sentient rope. He flung it toward the mummy with hopes that it could bind the thing's mouth shut, but overshot his throw. The rope landed behind the mummy and coiled there like a snake, weaving uncertainly.
    Come on, mom, I thought, and bent the power I could call on against the mummy. Nothing; this one was too strong for me. We would have to fight it.
    Scott coiled up and struck at the undead, and Thunderbolt moved fully into the room to unleash a lightning bolt, which the mummy seemed to shrug off. The rope moved in to try and trip the mummy, but was batted aside by the mace with another of those hissing laughs; the affronted rope swayed back and forth like a cobra, contemplating its next move. Phoenix Talon's katana flashed in the magical light; both good strikes but it was hard to tell if he was getting anywhere with it. He opened a cut in its arm and sand poured out for a moment before the bandages moved to cover it.
    A terrible sense of despair came over me, leaving me unable to move for a few moments. Thunderbolt appeared to be similarly affected. Privateer tried to time his next movement to interrupt any additional spells the mummy tried to cast, but the ancient undead instead attacked Phoenix Talon, simply striking him twice with his free hand. Scott leaped in again, undaunted, and managed to stagger it back a couple of paces.
    Privateer made the mistake of meeting the thing's eyes; although he remained able to move, he was hampered by an almost overpowering sense of dread. The rope, having considered, tried entangling the thing again, with no better results, although it was serving as something of a distraction. Phoenix Talon swung the blade again; the mummy batted it aside with the mace. Hissing laughter was barely audible over the noise of the fight, as Privateer drew his rapier and darted in, managed to touch the creature.
    The mummy chanted briefly, dropped the mace to dangle from the thong around his wrist, and reached out to grab hold of Talon's head and draw him near for a kiss. Talon shuddered as the effects took hold, weakness invading his body.
    Scott continued his thus-far-successful tactic of simply slamming at the thing, and thought he might have heard a bone break with a sound like a dry twig underfoot. Granted, it didn't seem to slow the thing down at all. Thunderbolt shook off the paralysis; with Talon so close to the mummy, he raised a hand and sent forth a barrage of magic missiles—which arced around Talon, toward their target, and disappeared an inch from its body. Frustrated, he gestured for Talon to get out of the way so he could use his more dangerous spells. At least by this time we had the thing more or less surrounded.
    The rope, having no desire to be in close proximity to a fireball, crossed the room toward the statue, in case it should animate. Hanging in grimly against the effects of the mummy's kiss, Talon attacked it again, to little effect, and then backed away to give Thunderbolt more room. Privateer leaped backward, firing his crossbow.
    That helped, but the mummy then cast yet another spell, this time summoning several small demons, which materialized in the corridor behind me and began worrying at me. Finally overcoming my paralysis, I decided that the mummy was gaining far too many advantages from the spells he had cast upon himself, and I cast one of my own—Dispel Magic, ignoring the small demons as best I could in the meantime. Once the mummy was stripped of several of the spells that were aiding him and hampering us, Thunderbolt was able to set him on fire, and it was short work after that. We got rid of the little demons, too.
    And then, of course, the snake-woman began to animate. Or tried to, as Privateer's rope had her thoroughly entangled, which seemed to surprise her quite a bit. Before she could launch into speech or spell, the statue was rubble. We tipped over the altar and left; no sign of the Eye of Da'an here.
    Retracing our steps back to where we had started, we followed the corridor in the other direction; after a short way it began to angle downward, and eventually made a right-angle turn to the left. Before the turn there was a round stone set into the wall, and the floor beyond the turn was marked as if something heavy had been dragged over it. We deduced that the wall to the right was not entirely solid; Scott tried to take a look, but the seal was very tight, so we settled for experimenting.
    Sure enough, when the button was pressed, the wall slid forward—slowly and with considerable noise—to block off the corridor to the left and reveal a way open to the right. Since left had turned out to be a less than good idea last time, we decided to explore this right-hand passage. It did not go very far before it debouched in another large, temple-like room, this one devoid of mummies although it did hold a few corpses, well-preserved in the dry air and lack of scavengers. We sent Privateer back to wait beyond the moving door, in case something should trigger it from here and trap us.
    The room also held, on an altar at the far end, a gently glowing sphere. I studied it for a few moments; while it did give off an aura of magic, it was nothing like the potency I would expect of a divine artifact. And those who had been here before us appeared to have starved to death. We decided to leave the place and explore further. If we found nothing else, we would return and examine it more closely, but this gave every sign of being a trap.
    We went back, moved the wall again, and tried the left-hand passage. It turned a few times and finally opened up into a small room from which three passages led left, right, and center. We went left, and quickly found ourselves in a labyrinth. Passage after passage dead-ended as we worked our laborious way through. It seemed we had been down there forever already, and we were all somewhat tense, not to mention tired and more or less wounded, particularly Phoenix Talon. Sometimes, in the distance, we thought we could hear something moving, a squelching, gurgly sound that did not seem to bode well, but we continued our search.
    Nor was it unrewarded. In a small, hidden compartment that we nearly overlooked, behind some rather ineffectual traps in an unremarkable stretch of the maze, we found four keys: silver, bronze, lead, and brass. We took them with us, in case we should encounter any locks, and continued searching, only to eventually find ourselves back the triple branch.

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