### 257

Your Kai Mastery skills and your sheer will to survive save you from succumbing to a grisly death in this morass. After an agonizing ordeal, you finally reach the door at the end of the hall and haul yourself through it. Aching with fatigue (lose 4 ENDURANCE points), you lie on the solid flagstones for several minutes until you regain sufficient strength to be able to continue your hunt for Wolf’s Bane.

You can feel a warm breeze wafting along this hall and you sense that it comes from a stairwell at the far end. When you investigate it, you rediscover Wolf’s Bane’s footprints on the stone steps. You cast your hands over them and detect that this is not a false trail: your enemy passed this way sometime within the last hour.

Slowly you ascend the stairs and arrive at the arched entrance to a large, vaulted stone chamber. Gathered around a fountain set into its north wall are a group of six grey-skinned humanoids. They are busy drinking a clear, oily fluid that pours from the fountain’s spout into a semicircular trough. All are barefoot and clad in rags, and they are each armed with a spear and a bow. The only exit from this chamber appears to be an archway set high in the north wall. There is a balcony in front of it that can only be reached by two flights of stairs which rise up on either side of the fountain.

Quietly you observe the creatures slaking their thirsts, and you try to formulate a way in which you can get past them and reach the balconied exit in the north wall.

If you possess a Bow and the Discipline of Magi-magic and have attained the rank of Kai Grand Guardian, turn to 138.

If you possess Kai-alchemy and have attained the rank of Grand Crown (and wish to use it), turn to 26.

If you do not possess these skills, or a Bow, or if you have yet to attain the required levels of Kai Mastery, or if you choose not to use either of them, turn to 121.