"Hmmm... You have something there, Gord. I am nearly ready for renewed effort." Greenleaf shook his head, then corrected himself. "I haven't managed to restore my greater powers. Perhaps It hasn't been so long a napping as we supposed."

"No.... My instinct tells me we have slept very long," Gord countered. "Hey! Useless sentry and would-be guard! Wake up!" As he spoke, the young adventurer moved over to where Gellor slept and toed him gently and cautiously. There was no telling what reaction he would have upon awakening. Gellor stirred and sat up slowly. He looked tired still, and his movements were sluggish.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm a bit muzzy with sleep yet." With a lot of stretching and eye-blinking, the bard finally stood and joined Gord.

Waking the barbarian hillman was a more difficult task, but finally Gord and Gellor managed it in tandem. "Let me rest just a bit longer," Chert said. He was only half-conscious. "These damned traps have worn me out! Besides, there's no hurry. The stair we need is the smallest we can see from here, and time has no meaning here. We can snooze as long as we wish and then get away easily."

"Rubbish," Gellor shot back. "What makes you say all that?"

"It was my dream — as clear as glass from Hardby, too. I'll wager my life it was a true sending."

"That you will, should you attempt to stay here longer." Gord said with a sarcasm-laden voice. "Nothing which Gravestone prepares is true in any sense save evil and death!" He dragged on the hillman to get him into a sitting position, and with the help of Gellor eventually managed it. Then he shouted, "Come here, druid, and use your hands and words to heal these two deserving heroes. As soon as that is done, we must find out how to escape this slumber-filled nothing. It is a most perilous place which will lull us all into death's bed."

Gord was correct, of course. Lethargy, weakness, and a growing need to sleep, sleep, sleep forever were imbued into the substance of the quasi-real space that the fourteenth stair had brought them to.

As they went toward the flights of steps that sprang like strange growths from the slightly yielding surface of the ground, each found it harder and harder to place one foot in front of the other.

The environment would possibly have proved fatal, except that Gord correctly gambled that one portion of Chert's dream was true. They had to choose one stairway and head for it, wasting no time, so Gord thought and hoped that the stairway Chert referred to was the actual one. He was right, and they barely made it to the new plateau before succumbing to deathly lethargy.

Draughts from an enchanted flask that the bard supplied gave the four sufficient strength and refreshment of vigor to deal with a place that was like a giant plane of fly paper, populated by flying horrors ready to saw off choice bits of any creature stuck down and unable to defend itself. Chillingly, they had to step up on just such an unfortunate creature in order to be magically moved to the next test.

The residual strength from the elixir that Gellor had shared round, plus his own signing too, gave the four the ability to resist the terrible pain that pervaded the next area — agony borne by the sights, sounds, smells, and very touch of the place. Where the torment was worst, there too the stair for escaping it.

"Upon my life, Gord." Chert spat, "never was a sheer ice cliff before and an angry cave bear behind half so fun as the entertainments you have always managed for us!" He said that as they came floundering down a slime-coated slope toward a precipice.

"If you and Gellor hadn't botched up and lost—" he began to retort, then stopped wasting his breath to do something about their dire situation. Tumbling and somersaulting to the lead of the group, the young adventurer plied his enchanted dagger to dig in and make a firm place to hold to. Greenleaf, immediately behind, slid past, while Chert caught onto Gord's belt and Gellor grabbed Chert's leg. In desperation the druid used one of his least powerful spells and succeeded. The dweomer caused the slime to stiffen and grow, and the stuff caught Curley and held him fast just as he was on the brink of destruction.

Eventually they found the way to free themselves from the slime world, but wound up in a place where gigantic gears with grinding teeth of spiked surfaces threatened to pulp them all. This is a nightmare of some mad technologist," was all Gord could manage. Chert pointed out the way, and then he set the example by grabbing fast to one of the free-rolling spiked wheels and rode it upward to where a small ledge was visible. It was the wrong one, and getting down was trickier than getting up, but after managing it they found the correct ledgestep and were gone from the clockwork plane.

There followed an acid world, a place of animated metal shapes of geometric form and malign purpose, a desert of alkaline sort, a quasi-plane where they had to hop from tooth to tooth of a giant mouth as it clashed open and shut trying to swallow the four. From there to a globe of prehistoric sort that teemed with dinosaurian monsters they went, and thereafter to a brazen city filled with fiery denizens. Of course, Curley Greenleaf handled the City of Brass and the efreet well enough. In fact, the sultan of those elemental beings actually directed the party to a place where there was a portal that bypassed many of the stair-traps that Gravestone had devised. The four adventurers used it to ascend the helix to a point twice as far along as that of their previous progress.

But on that fiftieth plane the druid suddenly found himself face to face with the avatar of Infestix known as Nerull. Chert saw the devil-duke Amon. The troubador confronted the netherlord, Hafdoligor Kaathbaen, master of the undead realm. And Gord stood before none other than Tharizdun himself!

Here at last, it seemed, was the final challenge for each of them. How would they react? How would they fare? They all reacted the same, but not in their usual way. Instead of leaping to the attack or poising themselves for defense, each of the four simply stood, motionless and uncaring. They were filled not with courage and spirit, but with the heaviest, most oppressive despair that any of them had ever known.

Chapter 12

"LEAVE ME." Infestix uttered in his worm ridden voice. The various daemons and netherworld things that served the great lord hastened to obey. "Let none enter until I personally command." he added as the last of his servitors was departing. That ghastly daemon, one of the Diseased Ones, bowed low and firmly closed the ancient door behind itself.

Infestix was now alone in the chamber, a minor audience room he favored because its location allowed him to access so many places easily. The master of the netherplanes sprawled back on the wide chair. His form shifted to that of Nerull, the skeletal god of death, and in his hands appeared the terrible scythe wielded by that deity. Then the terrible figure bounded up from the seat as quickly and nimbly as it he were a young man full of vigor and life rather than a bony monster eons old and laden with plagues. Infestix laughed a booming, iron throated laugh, as in his Nerull avatar he swung the scythe in great arcs around the chamber, the rusted, blood-stained blade singing a death song that was most pleasant to the being as he danced thus and laughed in pleasure.

"The planets come slowly into alignment, and all signs and portents are favorable," Nerull caroled loudly. There were none to hear, of course. He shared the news with nobody, for none save he would soon ascend to be the Chosen of Tharizdun. No master of devils, no chief of any other power in the whole of the netherworlds had come close to accomplishing all that Infestix-Nerull had managed.

Now the culmination of all he had worked for and labored to produce was at hand. With an abrupt cessation of motion. Nerull stopped his cavorting. The terrible being swished his long-edged instrument through the air. There, where it had passed. Oerth and the Flanaess appeared at his feet.