“Azelore has my clothes, daggers and tools. He said I’d be less likely to try to escape without them… but the collar prevented me from going more than a few dozen yards from him… so I’m sure he just wanted me naked. It was probable the first time in his miserable life he didn’t have to pay a woman for it,” Ysabel sneered. “I searched his body thoroughly,” Roryn reported, still eyeing the tiefling’s delightful naked form with open admiration, “and the whole area… there’s nothing but a few magic trinkets and supplies. Her clothes must have burned up in the fireball… I’m afraid she’ll just have to stay like that.” “Magic trinkets!?!” Zharilee exclaimed in exasperation. “A staff, a wand, a pair of rings and some spell components,” she elaborated, “but no spell books… no wizard travels without his spell books!” “In his pouch is a piece of black cloth,” Ysabel advised, ignoring the dwarf’s lustful glare, men of all races had always looked at her like that, assuming her demonic blood meant that her morals where just as tainted; until she was enslaved by the Zhent wizard, most of them learned otherwise painfully. Then she rose to her feet and started toward his remains, adding; “I’ll show you.” Stooping over the wizard’s body, she looked down at his face with disgust, then fished out a fine, silken cloth that the dwarf had likely dismissed as nothing more than a handkerchief from his pouch and moved to an open area. Snapping it open in the air, to reveal a six-foot diameter utterly black circle, she let it fall to the ground. On contact the cloth became a hole ten feet deep, with a ladder leaning again its side and several chests of various sizes scattered around it. “A portable hole,” Coran confirmed, he’d seen one before, also in the possession of an arcane spellcaster. Despite its appearance, it wasn’t actually a hole, but an extra-dimensional space. Ysabel quickly descended the ladder, moving immediately to a specific trunk where she retrieved her cloths and possessions. Zharilee joined her, opening the other chests to quickly survey their contents, finding the Zhent wizard’s spell books and a supply of spell components, but nothing to shed any light on how he knew where to find the entrance to the Morningstar estate catacombs. Roryn took a moment to examine the edge of the “hole”, then moved toward the ladder only to be halted by Coran; “It’s crowded enough down there… why don’t you take a look at the excavation site and see if it’s safe?” Grumbling to himself, the dwarf moved off, motioning to the temple’s warriors to follow him, as Coran turned his attention back to the two women in the “hole” and asked; “What can you tell us about this skull of Deamous?” “Azelore didn’t tell me anything about it… he only used the name in the geas spell,” Ysabel replied as she finished dressing, noticing that his voice lacked the degrading tone she was used to hearing. “I actually wasn’t asking you,” Coran stated in a harder tone, his eyes boring down at Zharilee, who looked up to meet them with a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. “With all that research you said you did before coming here, I doubt that something so significant wouldn’t have been mentioned. You knew the skull was here all along… but you didn’t warn us about it.” “I knew it was here,” the elf confessed, “but as long as we don’t disturb it, it’s no threat to us. The elves have shielded the world from many such things for longer than men have walked Faerun. The skull has been in the charge of my house since the early days of Myth Drannor… its evil is contained by powerful magic, and it must remain so!” “What else haven’t you told us?” Coran demanded sternly, looming over her at the head on the ladder.