Kael's "we'll think about it" had not survived the walk back. If Ihanvas left this chamber, the southern passages would close behind him and the ambush to the west would spring on someone else's terms. The decision was made before they crossed the threshold a second time. They walked in. The fight opened on the pool.
Lightning tore upward from the water, a towering elemental of arcs hissing the chamber into steam, hiding Ihanvas behind the veil. Siax's first arrow passed clean through it. Illusion. He corrected in the same breath. Arya answered with wither and bloom and Ihanvas's illusion melted away. Her wildfire spirit burned the cultists working the chains. Tiaumil's sickening radiance settled on them like a second atmosphere. Panceska, the elf Arya had freed days earlier, drove a blade through a kneeling cultist despite Kael's shout. "These people enslaved me." The chains above kept pulling upward. Something was being reeled in.
Then the dragon turtle breathed, and steam filled half the room in a single exhale. Arya's second freed elf died in the first instant of it. Panceska stayed standing, barely. Kael took thirty points of scalding fire and did not move. Ihanvas ran. Siax's lunge tripped him, and he teleported mid-fall onto the turtle's shell, spitting confusion across the front line from the safety of its back. Siax's indomitable held. Arya's did not, and she drifted into the fog of it, weapon rising at whatever came closest. Kael, remembering Idris doing something equally stupid once, dashed forward and climbed the turtle. Holy weapon lit in his hand. He swung. The turtle bucked, and it was only heroic will that kept him on.
Cornered and bleeding, Ihanvas cracked his last smile. "You think that's all I have?" The hovering water globules along the walls split. Armored shapes rose out of them, halberds lifting, limbs of moving water clad in steel. Then they froze mid-step. Ihanvas's triumph turned inside out. "Elf! No! This room, aggh!" Tanjus had reached in through the cracks. The sword Kael carried was the hook, and she pulled.The last cultist spat a ray of enfeeblement at Kael. Ihanvas, shaking with exhaustion, cast dominate and watched it glance off. The end came fast. Siax's bow sang twice. The first arrow took the Pool Master through the shoulder with enough force to spin him. The second pierced the opposite shoulder and balanced him upright. He fell to his knees and stayed there. Tiaumil claimed the soul as it rose.
Kael commanded the turtle calm. The turtle, disadvantaged against such things, obeyed. In Draconic it answered plainly: it understood, it wanted no fight, it wanted a sky. It had woken in chains here and would leave if the passages through the water were not too narrow for its size. It was stuck. It offered reward if the party could free it. Kael told it they wanted only to leave.
Tanjus arrived with those words still in the air, a portal opening beside the pool and merrow flanking her like hounds. "My, my, my dearies, you have done me a great favour today. How may I assist you?" She offered two routes for freeing the turtle. A chamber deeper in the floor that could transport creatures piece by piece, with some sacrifice. Or the vent on the overseer's floor above, which could flush the entire pool complex out to sea. She asked the turtle its name and received it. When Arya pressed on how to send it home to the Plane of Water, Tanjus demurred. That kind of knowledge would not be free.
Her own ambitions came tied to the offer. She had been trying to seize the tower through its own mechanisms, but the floors between her and her goal were too many. The teleportation circle under her pool, the one she had failed to master, might open a clean path back to the Forgotten Realms if the party could succeed where she could not. Worth thinking about, she said. For now she paid them for Ihanvas. Every creature on the floor tied to her would let them pass. She caught Kael's sword out of the air when he threw it to her, held it for a breath, and threw it back. He caught it changed: a harpoon now, chain coiling from its base, a weapon that could pull back what it pierced.
The Pool Master's body gave up the rest. Five ordinary keys and a portal key that turned out to be the glyph for the Predator Pools themselves. Four vials of dark blue liquid, purpose unknown. A crafted shell humming with magic. A vest of silk that could not be gripped no matter how tightly a hand closed on it. A sealed ivory case that matched one of the mundane keys. Five tourmaline jewels. Above, Tanjus told them, was the Golem Laboratories.
She paused as they gathered to leave, and softened. Most of her creatures would step aside for them. One she could not command: a chained soul in a cage, somewhere in her halls. Pass it freely, she said. Just do not meet its eyes.