The Nether Scroll Chapter 9: Into Dekanter's Mines and the Beast Lord's Lair
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Chapter 9 finally gets us to Dekanter, and it does not disappoint.
The day starts with blue skies and actual progress. Tiep’s recovering from his head wound, dragons are flying overhead but leaving them alone, and the group covers more ground in one morning than they have in days. It feels almost hopeful.
Then Dru and Rozt’a climb up to see the ruins, and every bit of that hope transforms into something much more complicated.
Dekanter Is Not What They Expected
Rozt’a is the first to see it and she comes back practically breathless. She’d been expecting a hole in the ground. What she found was a hollow mountain.
Dekanter is an amphitheater carved by dwarves. Five tiers of stone, each twenty feet high and twenty feet wide, rising from a half-mile-wide plain. There are zigzag stairways cut into the tiers. A gorge on the eastern side leads toward the Dawn Pass Trail. The scale of it is staggering.
At the bottom, Ghistpok’s goblins live on top of their own garbage. About forty huts and one stone building that screams Zhentarim construction. The goblins are little more than dots from above. There’s a perfectly circular pool that couldn’t be natural, and further south, a white circle with a black spire-stone jutting out of it.
That black stone? When Dru asks what it is, Sheemzher says simply: “Beast Lord, good sir.”
Not that Sheemzher has ever actually seen the Beast Lord. Nobody looks. Ghistpok commands everyone to drink wine and dance and not look. Sheemzher looked once, the night Elva walked away. He didn’t see the Beast Lord. He saw a black stone and Takers.
Going Underground
Rozt’a wants the scroll today. Sheemzher wants to go now while the goblins are eating and happy. But Dru wants to wait until after midnight so he can memorize different spells. This is such a Druhallen move. The man is cautious to his bones. He’d rather have the right spells than the element of surprise.
They compromise. Rozt’a and Sheemzher scout ahead while Dru and Tiep make torches and set up camp. When the scouts return with a viable route into the mines, Rozt’a talks Dru into at least going down for a look.
“We won’t steal the godsforsaken thing,” she says. “We’re just going to try to get a look at it so we can decide how we’ll steal it tomorrow.”
Tiep grabs the extra torches. “Who says we won’t steal it?”
I love Tiep sometimes.
The Mines
The underground sections are genuinely tense. Dru’s light spell reveals gilded dwarven runes on the ceiling. There are Netherese chambers with ancient script on the walls that Dru is dying to read. His heart says stop and translate, his head says keep moving. It’s a great character moment. This man cares about knowledge the way other people care about gold.
But the real tension comes from navigation. Sheemzher navigates by smell, not by the dwarven runes Dru can’t read anyway. When they reach intersections in the dark, the goblin closes his eyes, sniffs the air, and chooses a path because “Sheemzher remember egg-smell.”
Meanwhile, Dru is silently panicking. They have no food, no water, limited light. If they take a wrong turn, they die in the dark. He memorizes the runes at every intersection like his life depends on it, because it literally does.
Then they hear something in a side passage. Sheemzher says “Demons!” and they have to run. When running fails, they fight. Dru’s fireballs light up the tunnels. Rozt’a takes on swordswingers with Sheemzher working low with his spear to keep attackers off-balance. One enemy escapes.
And that changes everything. No more scouting. No more planning. One got away, and by sundown everything in these mines will be looking for them.
The Brine Pool and the Athanor
They press forward and find a chamber filled with pale green light rising from a pool of brine. Rozt’a, being Rozt’a, immediately sticks her hand in and tastes it. (“Brine from the worst pickles ever made!”)
But Dru isn’t laughing. He knows what brine pools mean. Thanks to Ansoain’s endless lessons about obscure monsters, he realizes the Beast Lord isn’t a god or a beholder. It’s a colony of mind flayers. Brine pools are where their Elder Brains live.
And then Sheemzher leads them to the egg chamber, and there it is: the athanor. Twice Dru’s height, made of hammered bronze plates, with a golden cylinder sticking out the top connected to wires dangling from the ceiling. The golden cylinder is the Nether scroll. The debris scattered across the floor is the remains of earlier, smaller versions. The Beast Lord has been rebuilding and improving.
Sheemzher scrambles up the athanor to grab the scroll. Dru lifts him up. It can’t be this easy, Dru thinks.
And it isn’t.
They hear the sound of a heavy latch being thrown.
What a cliffhanger. Abbey really knows how to end a chapter. Everything about this sequence builds perfectly. The slow approach, the mounting dread, the brief surge of hope, and then the sound of that latch telling you that something very bad is about to walk into the room.