The Fallen Fortress

by R. A. Salvatore

  A second blast roared in, grounding out at Cadderly’s feet, scorching the rug around him.

  “How many can you stop?” the wizard cried, suddenly enraged. He took up his chant for a third time, and Cadderly knew that his protection spell would not deflect the full force of another bolt.

  Cadderly reached into his pouch and pulled forth a handful of enchanted seeds. He had to strike fast, to interrupt the wizard’s spell. He cried out a rune of enchantment and hurled the seeds across the room, triggering a series of popping, fiery explosions.

  All images were stolen in the burst of swirling flames, but Cadderly was wise enough to doubt that his simple spell had defeated his foe. As soon as the seeds left his hand, he took up a new chant.

  Aballister stood trembling with rage. All the room around the wizard smoldered, and several small fires sizzled and sparked along the folds of a magical tapestry behind him. He seemed uninjured, though, and the area immediately around him was unscathed.

  “How dare you?” the wizard asked. “Do you still not know who I am?”

  The wild look in the wizard’s eyes, purely incredulous, frightened Cadderly, brought back distant memories and distant images, and made the young priest feel small indeed. Cadderly didn’t understand any of it—what unknown hold might the wizard have over him?

  “Your magic fended off the lightning,” Aballister cackled. “How do you fare against fire?”

  A small glowing globe arced through the air, and Cadderly, distracted, couldn’t dispel its magic in time. The fireball engulfed the room, except for Aballister’s protected area, and Cadderly glowed green, as the same defensive spell he’d used against Old Fyren’s breath successfully defeated the attack.

  But more insidious were the aftershocks of the wizard’s spell. Smoke poured from the tapestries, and sparks flew from all directions at the continuing release of magical energies. Each one ignited a new green or blue spot on Cadderly’s defensive shields, further wearing at them. And the young priest had no defense against the thick smoke stinging his eyes and stealing his breath.

  Cadderly could hear that Aballister was casting again. Purely on reflex, the young priest threw up his clenched fist and cried out, “Fete!”

  A line of fire shot out from his ring at the same time Aballister’s next lightning bolt thundered in.

  The bolt blew away the blue globe, and snaked through to slam Cadderly in the chest and hurl him backward into the burning wall. His hair danced wildly, and his blue cape and the back rim of his wide hat smoldered.

  The air cleared enough for him to see Aballister once more, standing unhurt, his hollowed face contorted in an expression of rage. What magic did he possess to get through the wizard’s seemingly impenetrable globe? the young priest wondered. Cadderly had known all along that wizardry was a more potent offensive force than divine magic, but he hadn’t expected Aballister’s defenses to be so formidable.

  Panic welled in the young priest, but he focused on the sweet harmonies of the song and forced his fears away. He worked fast to create the same reflective field he’d used against the manticore. His only chance was to turn the wizard’s magic back against him.

  Aballister worked faster, waggling his skinny fingers again and uttering some quick runes. Bursts of greenish energy erupted from his fingertips and hurtled across the room. The first burned painfully into Cadderly’s shoulder. The young priest stubbornly held his concentration, though, enacting the shimmering field, and the second missile, and the three flying behind that, seemed to disappear for an instant then appear again, heading back the way they had come.

  Aballister’s eyes widened with surprise, and he instinctively started to dodge aside. As it had with Cadderly’s spells, though, the wizard’s globe absorbed the energy.

  “Damn you!” the frustrated Aballister cried.

  Out shot the metallic rod, in thundered another lightning bolt, and Cadderly, still dazed and pained from the previous hits, still trying to find his breath in the thick smoke, ducked away.

  The lightning blasted into the reflective field and shot back out the other way, smashing against Aballister’s globe and throwing multicolored sparks in every direction.

  “Damn you!” Aballister growled again.

  Cadderly noted the wizard’s frustration and wondered if Aballister might be running out of attack spells or if his globe neared the end of its duration. The battered young priest tried to hold on to that hope, to use Aballister’s obvious distress as a litany against pain and hopelessness. He tried to tell himself that Deneir was with him, that he was not over-matched.

  Another lightning bolt sizzled in low, cutting a wake in the carpet and slipping under Cadderly’s shield. The young priest felt the burst under his feet then felt himself flying, spinning in the air.

  “Not so large a shield!” Aballister cried out, his tone brimming with confidence once more. “And pray tell, how does it handle angles?”

  Lying on the floor, trying to shake away the stunning effects, Cadderly realized that he was about to die. He focused his thoughts on the wizard’s last question, and saw the wizard chanting again, holding his metal rod, but looking to the side, to the wall.

  Desperation grabbed hold of the young priest, an instinctual urge to survive that momentarily numbed him from the pain. He heard the song of Deneir, remembered the bridge he’d dropped in Carradoon and the walls he’d caused to bite in the mountain valley. Frantically, he searched out the elemental makeup of the bare wall behind him.

  Aballister’s lightning bolt hit the wall to the side and deflected at a right angle. Cadderly, reaching for the wall behind him, grabbed its stone with his magical energy and pulled a section of the slab out, reshaping it.

  The lightning bolt hit the back wall, would have deflected again at the perfect angle to destroy Cadderly, except that the wall’s surface had changed, was angled differently. The bouncing blast shot out straight across the room, again slamming the wizard’s globe to shower harmlessly in multicolored sparks.

  Still on the floor, Cadderly closed his eyes and fell more deeply into the song. More magical missiles came in, leaping around the reflective field, diving in to scorch and slam at the young priest. The divine song compelled Cadderly to fall into its sweetest notes, the notes of healing magic, but Cadderly understood that the delay created by attending to his wounds would only invite more attacks from the wizard.

  He pushed the song in a different direction, heard the croak of his pained voice, and thought he would surely suffocate from the acrid smoke. Another missile slammed his face, scorching his cheek, feeling as if it had burned right to the bone.

  Cadderly sang out with all his strength, followed the song into the Elemental Plane of Fire, and pulled from there a hovering ball of flame that shot a line of fire down on the wizard.

  Cadderly couldn’t see any of it, but he heard Aballister’s agonized cry, heard retreating footsteps clicking on the stone of the hallway beyond the room. The smoke continued to thicken, to choke him.

  He had to get out!

  Cadderly tried to hold his breath, but found no breath to hold. He tried to grab at the song, but his mind was too numb, too filled with confused images of his own impending death. He kicked and crawled, grabbing at torn carpet edges and pulling himself along blindly, hoping that he could remember the exact course out of the room.

  TWENTY-ONE

  TRUCE?

  Danica spent a long while staring blankly at Dorigen. Unsure of her feelings and stunned by the news that Dorigen had just given her, the monk had no idea what to do next.

  “I have no intention of interfering,” Dorigen said, trying to answer some of the questions etched plainly on Danica’s delicate features, “with Cadderly, or with you and your other friends.”

  Other friends! In all the craziness of the past few moments—the fight with the hydra, the desperate attempt to get at the wizard Aballister—Danica had almost forgotten them.

  “Where are they?” the monk demanded.


  Dorigen held out her hands, her expression curious.

  “We were separated in a corridor—” the monk explained, realizing that Dorigen probably didn’t know the course that had brought Danica to her—“a corridor lined with many traps. Darkness engulfed us, and the end of the corridor tilted as we tried to pass through.”

  “The Malagent Halls,” Dorigen interrupted. “They’re quite adept at defending their territory.”

  The woman’s obviously derisive tone as she mentioned the clerics gave Danica hope that the apparent rivalries within Castle Trinity might reveal a weakness.

  “The dwarves and the elf fell through trapdoors,” Danica went on, though she wondered if she might be giving her enemy information that could be used to the detriment of her lost friends.

  But Danica sensed that she could trust Dorigen, had to trust Dorigen, and that realization put her doubly on her guard, again bringing fears that the wizard had used some enchantment on her. Danica reached within herself, sought out her discipline and her strong will. Few charms could affect one of her rigid mental training, especially if she was aware that one might be in place.

  When she focused again on Dorigen, the wizard was slowly shaking her head, her expression grim.

  “The giant went through a side chute,” Danica went on, wanting to finish her thought before the woman cast some evil tidings over her.

  “Then the giant has probably fared better than the others,” Dorigen said. “The chute would place him in a lower passage, but the trapdoors….” She let the thought hang ominously, slowly shaking her head.

  “If they’re dead….” Danica warned, similarly letting the words hang unfinished. She dropped into a defensive position as Dorigen stood up behind the desk.

  “Let us discover their fate,” the wizard replied, taking no apparent heed of the threat. “Then we might better decide what to do next.”

  Danica had just begun to stand straight when the room’s door flew open and a contingent of several armed guardsmen, a mix of men and orcs, rushed in. Danica leaped straight for Dorigen, but the wizard uttered a quick spell and vanished, leaving the monk to grab at empty air.

  Danica spun around to face the approaching soldiers, six of them, fanning out with weapons drawn.

  “Hold!” came a cry as Dorigen reappeared, standing along the wall behind the soldiers.

  The soldiers skidded to a stop and glanced back at Dorigen.

  “I have declared a truce,” Dorigen explained. She looked directly at Danica as she continued, “The fighting is ended, at least until greater issues can be resolved.”

  None of the fighters put up their swords. They glanced from the monk to the wizard then looked to each other for some explanation, as though they feared they were being deceived.

  “What is you about?” one burly orc demanded of the wizard. “I gots fifty dead in the mess hall.”

  Danica’s eyes sparkled at the news. Perhaps her friends were indeed still alive. “Fifty dead, and where are the enemies?” Danica had to ask.

  “Shut up!” the orc roared at her, and Danica smiled at its unbridled anger. An orc rarely cared for the deaths of companions as long as the threat to its own worthless hide had been eradicated.

  “The truce stands,” Dorigen declared.

  The burly orc looked to the soldier standing beside it, another orc, its filthy hands anxiously wringing its sword hilt. Danica could tell they were silently deciding whether or not to attack, and it seemed as if the wizard believed the same thing, for Dorigen began chanting softly. Dorigen blinked out of sight once more, the orcs turned to Danica, roared, and came on.

  Dorigen reappeared right in front of the orc leader, her hands out in front of her, thumbs touching and fingers spread wide. The orc threw its arms up defensively, but the sheets of flame that erupted from the wizard’s fingertips rolled around those meager barriers to lick at the creature’s face and chest.

  The other orc came in hard at Danica. She started for the desk, hopping as though she meant to go over it. The orc swerved, heading for the side, but Danica dropped back to her feet, and kicked its sword out wide. It tried to bring the weapon back in to bear, but Danica grabbed its wrist then caught its chin with her free hand. She whipped the monster’s head back and forth fiercely and snapped a quick punch to its throat that dropped it in a gasping heap.

  Danica’s foot was on the side of the orc’s face in an instant, ready to snap its neck if any of its companions advanced.

  They didn’t, and all but one of them had sheathed their weapons. The single enemy still holding his sword looked at Dorigen and the smoking corpse in front of her, glanced at the fierce Danica, and quickly decided that his remaining friends were wise in putting up their weapons.

  “I declare a truce,” Dorigen growled at the soldiers, and none of them seemed to disagree. Dorigen turned to Danica, nodded, and said, “To the dining hall.”

  Cadderly lay on the stone floor, sucking air into his parched throat as the fires in the room behind him died away, having consumed the magical manifestations of curtains, tapestries, carpet, and wood.

  Cadderly knew that the grand hallway’s walls merely appeared to be stone, but were in fact magical fields too dense to be affected by mundane fire. The young priest felt safe from any advancing flames, and he thought it a curious thing that the properties of such extra-dimensional pockets followed the same physical laws that governed the real materials. He wondered what might be the potential, then, if he could create something in an extradimensional space, through the use of magic, and bring it back to his own plane?

  Cadderly filed the notion far away in his mind, reminding himself that his present business was more pressing than any hypothetical possibilities flashing around in his always questioning thoughts. He forced himself to his knees and noted the wizard’s sooty footsteps on the floor, and saw by their long stride and small imprint that Aballister had left the room in full flight.

  A dozen yards down, with several doors lining either side of the corridor, the wizard had apparently realized he’d been leaving obvious tracks, for they simply disappeared, forcing Cadderly to figure out which way Aballister had gone by other means.

  Still kneeling, Cadderly took out his crossbow and loaded an explosive dart. He laid the weapon on the floor beside him and realized that he held one advantage over Aballister, the greatest advantage of a cleric over a wizard. The young priest fell back into the song of Deneir, and let it take him where it had compelled him previously, into the sphere of healing.

  Brushing a hand over his scorched cheek, he closed the wound and mended the skin. He placed his hand firmly against the mark on his chest, where the lightning bolt had thundered home. When he took up his crossbow and stood, just a few moments later, his wounds were rather less serious.

  But where to go? the young priest wondered. And what traps and wards had the clever Aballister set for him?

  He moved to the nearest door, a simple, unremarkable one to his left. He scanned for any obvious traps then called upon his magic to scrutinize it more fully. Unremarkable, it seemed, and from what Cadderly could tell, unlocked.

  He took a deep breath to steady himself, held his crossbow out in front of him, grabbed the knob in one hand, and slowly turned it. He heard a distinctive click, a hissing sound as the door’s edge slipped past the jamb.

  The door flew from his hand, snapping open in the blink of an eye. A fierce, sucking wind grabbed at Cadderly, pulling him to the open portal. His eyes widened in fear as he came to realize that the doorway was a gate to yet another plane—one of the lower, evil planes judging from the growling shadows and acrid smoke filling the unbordered area in front of him. He grabbed at the doorjamb and held on with all his strength, and held on, too, to his precious crossbow.

  He was stretched out fully into the new plane, feet leading the way. Fearful tingles caressed his body, a sensation that malignant things were near him, touching him! The pull was too great. Cadderly knew he couldn’t
hold on for long.

  He locked his hands in place and forced himself into a state of calm. As he’d done in the previous room, he used his magic to study the magic of the area, of the door and the threshold.

  All of the portal area was magical, of course, but a single spot stood out to Cadderly, its emanations of magic different and more intense than the fields around it. The young priest let go with one hand, straightened his crossbow, and drew a bead.

  He couldn’t be sure if it was the seed of the actual gate, the specific key to the interplanar barrier, but his actions were wrought of desperation. He put the crossbow in line and let fly. His shot didn’t hit the mark, but struck close enough so that the resulting explosion encompassed the target spot.

  The wind stopped. Cadderly’s instincts and mounting knowledge of magic screamed at him to roll for the threshold, to tuck his legs in and get his hands clear of the doorjamb. He was wise enough not to question those instincts, and he dived headlong for the threshold, just ahead of the suddenly swinging door.

  The door snapped shut, slamming Cadderly and pushing him on his way. He stopped rolling when he hit the corridor’s opposite wall, his legs and lower back bruised and sore. He glanced back and was amazed as the door swelled and shifted shape, twisting tightly into place, seeming to meld with the surrounding jamb.

  Aballister’s extradimensional mansion apparently protected itself from such torn planar rifts. Cadderly managed a smile, glad that Aballister’s work had been so complete and so farsighted, glad that he was not hanging in some non-space, some formless region between the known planes.

  Ten steps down the stone corridor two more doors loomed. One was unremarkable, like the one Cadderly had just encountered, but the other was bound with heavy straps of iron and showed a keyhole below the handle. Cadderly searched for traps, and checked around the edges for any sign that it too might be a portal to another plane. Nothing dangerous reveal itself, so he reached down and slowly turned the handle.