his boots. He carefully removed from his enchanted vest any of his many talismans that might be harmed by the water, then put the vest back on. Next he lashed his daggers into their sheaths. The thread he used would prevent them from falling out when he was underwater but was thin enough to be broken easily in an emergency.
When he was done, he looked up at Pharaun and said, "Ready."
The mage nodded and pulled a small sheet of mushroom-skin paper from his pocket. Unfolding it, he handed its contents to Valas: a small blob of a black, tarry substance.
"Eat it," the wizard instructed.
Without asking what it was, Valas popped it into his mouth. It had a bitter taste, and it stuck to his teeth. With an effort, Valas forced his jaws apart, unsticking his molars.
Pharaun laughed and said, "You don't have to chew it. Just swallow."
Valas swallowed the substance, then stood waiting as Pharaun chanted the words to his spell. The mage ended by fluttering his fin-gers against Valas's chest, like a mother imitating a spider in a child's nursery rhyme. When Pharaun was done, the scout's fingers and toes felt gummy. He lifted onehand from the rock, and sticky strands of web followed it.
Pharaun reached into a pocket of hispiwafwia second time and pulled out a short length of some kind of dried surface plant.
"Ready?" he asked.
Valas nodded.
The mage grinned and said, "Then rake a deep breath."
Valas did, and Pharaun blow through the stick at him, complet-ing his second spell.
Valas's chest felt heavy, and water trickled from his nostrils.
"Go!" Pharaun shouted.
Valas didn't need any urging. The pressure of the water that filled his lungs was incentive enough. Scrambling over the edge, he scurried down the cavern wall like a spider, his sticky hands and feet allowing him to crawl along the sheer cliff face. Head-down, he hur-ried toward the water, eyes squinted against the spray. Above him, the waterfall arced out and over, obscuring his view of the tunnel he'd just left, it hit the water below in a thundering roar that grew louder as he descended.
The scout was still a pace or two above the surface of the lake when the urge to breathe overcame him. Expelling the water in his lungs like a vomiting man, he tried to draw air - and nearly drowned.
Sputtering, he at last reached the lake. As his head plunged be-neath the cold, choppy surface he drew in a great lungful of water and felt relief.
He continued down, following the wall of stone until the churn-ing water washed the stickiness from his hands and feet. Pushing off from the wall, he swam, allowing the current caused by the water-fall to carry him deeper. The water was cold - and dark. He swam through it for some time without seeing anything, relying on his keen sense of direction to keep him oriented toward the middle of the lake. Pharaun's spell would enable him to keep breathing water for more than a cycle - he could rest on the bottom of the lake, if he needed to - but he hoped it wouldn't take him that long to find some sign of where the aboleth city was.
After he swam, and rested, and swam a while longer, Valas saw a glow in the darkened water ahead. As he made his way toward it, the glow resolved itself into a pattern of tightly clustered, greenish-yellow globes that brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed.
Are those the lights of Zanhoriloch? Valas thought as he stroked toward them, only to be disappointed as he drew near enough to see the lights more clearly.
The glowing globes turned out not to be the lights of the abo-leth city but a school of luminescent jellyfish. There were hundreds of them, each the size of Valas's palm. They moved together, their tendrils contracting, then pulsing in unison, each pulse pumping up their light from greenish-yellow to yellow.
Valas started to turn away, disappointed, when he spotted a sil-houette swimming between him and the jellyfish. The scout froze, not wanting to betrayhimself with movement. Drifting with the current, he hung in the water, watching.
The silhouette was the same size as a drow and had two arms and two legs, each of which ended in a wide webbed hand or foot. It also had a fluked tail - but no tentacles. Definitely not an aboleth then . . . but what race was it?
The creature swam beside the jellyfish, herding them with a staff it held