You stand in a large, dimly lit basement chamber. There are some light beams here, and nothing else - until, startling you, a tiny creature apparently made of ice pops up out of the floor and grans something you are carrying! The little thing only comes up to your knee and looks like a wizened gnome or gremlin. But the pest has stolen one of your Possessions! You take a swing at the Ice Mite as it scuttles off into the shadows. Roll two dice for each of you and add your SKILL scores to find your Attack Strengths (the Ice Mite has a SKILL of 8). If you have the higher Attack Strength, turn to 211. If the Ice mite has the higher Attack Strength, turn to 109.
Ice Mite 16, Tallpipe 18. Tallpipe wins!
You take a swipe at the Ice Mite and smear the little horror all over the floor. It disintegrates into ice crystals - but, even as you look down at them, they slowly begin to reassemble themselves! You take back the item the Mite stole from you. (However, if you met the Ice Mite earlier and it took something of yours, you do not recover the first item you lost!) This gloomy basement clearly has nothing of interest in it, so will you now enter:
The red beam?
The blue beam?
The beam of pure darkness?
The green beam?
Entering the darkness...
You now stand in a spacious chamber at the top of the Tower of Airy Light. For a moment as you entered, you thought you were in a huge auditorium, like a theatre; you could see a stage, huge red curtains, the familiar laughing and crying mask-faces to either side...then the apparition is gone. Instead, in this high-roofed and grand chamber stand ice sculptures and busts of Elves, the sculptures animated and expressive, almost lifelike in appearance. There are many more sculptures running round a gallery which you could reach by climbing a balustrade of blue ice, or you could go elsewhere by entering one of the light beams in this chamber. Will you:
Roam around the gallery upstairs, if you haven't already done this?
Enter the red light beam here?
Enter the blue light beam here?
Enter the white light beam here?
After all the trouble we took to get here, I assume you'd want to check the gallery instead of just leaving....
Whoever crafted the sculptures in the gallery was a master of his art, and you linger for a moment, appreciating his work. You stand before the largest, with the name Mealin etched below the noble face, admiring it especially and wondering if this was the craftsman himself.
"I was indeed the craftsman," the bust says to you. You step back startled. "Do not fear, I, who am speaking to you now, am long dead. My spirit will be at peace, although others here will lie uneasy in their cold tombs. They have old sins to pay for or errors which cost them dear. Zeverin's apprentice lies, enlombed in an undying madness, in the Black Tower; bringing him death would be an act of charity. He is just one of the imprisoned souls unhappy in death. Down in Elokinan's catacombs, where only holders of the Ice Keys can enter now, good spirits still dwell; but there are others whose spirits have become twisted into bitter, terrible forms. If you have any pity, stranger, that is where you must look. For myself, I confess that I cared not; I had my own concerns. But I might have something of use to you, something to help you distinguish what is real and what is illusion. If you are intelligent enough to be worthy of it, that is."
I'm assuming the ghost we fought in the Tower of Black Ice is the "apprentice" which he refers to, not the human that we rescued from the sphere. Which explains why we gained Honour from winning the fight.
You suddenly find yourself back on the floor below the gallery; hanging in the air is a small item of jewellery that you can't make out properly from here. Below it is a monolith of ice, which has appeared in the room, on which eight clock-faces are etched. The first seven have a hand chiselled on them, but the eighth is bare. The first seven run in the following sequence:
You have to work out the eighth and final symbol which would complete the sequence correctly. "I do not help those without wits and skill," Mealin s voice echoes one last time.
If you solve the puzzle, you will know which position on the clock-face the hard should be pointing to, and how many arrow-heads there will be on the hand. Multiply these two numbers together, and then tum to the paragraph with that number. If you can't solve the puzzle, and want to give up, turn to 300.
If you have a Potion of Flying and want to use that to get to the jewellery, turn to 238.
Okay, the scanned picture's clarity isn't very good, and frankly I need to squint a bit even when I was reading the hardcopy book to make out the number of arrowheads, so for those who have trouble seeing those from the picture:
The first clock (left to right) on the top row has only 1 arrowhead.
The second clock on top has 4.
The third from top has 2.
The 4th from top has 2.
The 1st from bottom row (left to right) has 5 (this is the hardest to make out.
The 2nd from bottom has 3.
The 3rd from bottom has 5.
And this is only the first of many complicated puzzles in this book (thankfully not all of them are graphic-based)! Anyone can solve this one?