You step backwards. The room then, behind you, curtails and mounts itself into a shape resembling a centaur or a trembling rider; you are now at the hindquarters of the room: above, at the head, rest an illuminated causeway of stairs guarded by a legion of hooded monks.

"What was that thing back there?"

"If all else fails we will have to escape to Harpydiom. Then, I fear, the patients will have to trod that dark passage until they reach the fortress of Caradhraim."

He shushes you. "It was a minotaur. The men of Bravos tame them and use them as warmachines against us."

The water trickles above and hits your head. You see now that the ceiling is a wide cage. "Bravos is their city. A den of slaves and slaveners, whores and masters of pain." There are men fighting up above. Blood trickles upon your brow. "Many beastmen come there to earn some renown, then it has come to be now as the City-of-Beasts; For it is the city founded by the fourth khan Gulbeb, the Heretical One."

"The one that followed the Merzubiel Witch?" you wipe the blood as you say this.

"Their water is impure, so says legend, so impure that they called it a curse; Uranus, they say, was a god slain by Gulbeb in the early days, but it was so that he cursed the waters to flow and breed forever with his impure blood. And whoever that drank from it should become like a beast"

"I believe that a lie"

"But that is what they believe. But I believe that a magician has meddled with this"

"Magician?"

"Olabach has said, that while there are no living magicians capable of meddling with such a powerful force; there is a dead one capable of it"