by Ed Greenwood
He met Dasumia’s startled eyes—and she brought one hand to her mouth, glanced down at the sword lying so close to him—and vanished, just moments before El completed his spell.
It was a blood magic incantation. El threw back his head and shrieked at the pain. As the magic healed his wounds, it felt like fire raging through his gigantic body—fire that flared, raged, then swiftly faded as the healing neared completion. It could also teleport him to wherever his freshly shed blood might be—on the floor beneath him, on the sword mere feet away … and on the hands of the queen, wherever she might be!
The spell flashed, the temple around him twisted, and he was suddenly behind the altar, where a crouching Dasumia was looking up at him in startled surprise. He reached out to clutch at her should she try to flee, and threw himself off-balance so as to fall on her. Dasumia back flipped again, her heels grazing the floating Black Hand of Bane—and El crashed down inches away from her frantically rolling form. He grabbed at her, but couldn’t reach, and was still huffing and wallowing and trying to pivot his great bulk around so that his bloated and deformed arm could reach her when she fetched up against the back wall of the temple and cast another spell, favoring him with a catlike smile of triumph.
Something flashed. El turned his head in time to see one of the floating helmed horrors flow and twist, breaking apart into a whirling sphere of jagged metal shards—shards that came out of their dance in a stream that leaped right at him.
El threw one ponderous arm up in front of his eyes and throat, and with the other grabbed blindly, felt Dasumia’s struggling form, closed his grasp mercilessly, and hauled her like a rag doll back up in front of him as a shield.
As searing shards cut into him in three places or more, El heard Dasumia gasp, a sound that was cut off sharply. When he lowered his shielding arm, he saw that she was biting her lip, blood trailing down her chin and eyes closed in her contorted face. Jagged shards had transfixed her in a dozen places, and she was shuddering. The blue-white motes of magic leaking from her might be contingencies … or might be something else. As he watched, a shard drooped, dangled, then broke off and fell, visibly smaller. Another seemed to be melting into her, and another—gods!
The sudden pain made Elminster drop his foe. Her ravaged body fell onto his great bulk—and the real pain began. A burning … smoke was rising from where she lay sprawled on his mounded flesh, and she was slowly sinking.
Acid! She’d turned her blood to acid, and it was eating away at him and at the shards. Well, the watching gods knew he’d spare flesh in plenty to lose, but he had to get clear of her. He snatched at her, threw her as hard as he could at the floating Hand of Bane, and had the satisfaction of seeing her strike it limply and stick for a moment before her own weight peeled her free, to fall from view behind the altar. Wisps of smoke curled up from the hand as a little left-behind acid ate at it, too.
El sat back grimly and sighed. Unconscious she might be, but he lacked the strength to crush her. Perhaps if he pushed her into the pit and shouldered those two loose pews into it on top of her …
Nay, he could not be so cruel. And so, when she awakened, Elminster Aumar would die. He was almost out of spells and still trapped in this grotesquely enlarged form, probably unable to fit through the passages that had brought him here. He could do little more to stop the evil Lady Master whom Mystra had sent him to serve. Her magic overmatched his, as his outstripped that of a novice. She would make a magnificent and able servant of Mystra, a better Chosen than he, if she were only biddable enough to obey anyone.
He shut his eyes against the banner of Bane and called up a mental image of the blue-white star of Mystra. “Lady of Mysteries,” he said aloud, his voice echoing in the now-silent temple, “one who has been thy servant cries to ye in his need. I have failed thee, and failed in my service to the one called Dasumia, but see in her strength that could well serve thee in my place. Succor this Dasumia, I pray, and—”
Sudden, searing cold shocked him into an inarticulate cry. He could feel himself trembling uncontrollably as magic stronger than he’d ever felt before surged through him. Numbly he waited for whatever killing strike Dasumia would deal him, but it did not come. Instead, a warmth gently grew within the ice, and he felt himself relaxing, even as a strange crawling sensation swept over him. He was healed, he was growing smaller and lighter and himself again, and a face that he could barely see through flooding tears was bending over him.
Then he heard a voice speaking to him tenderly, a voice that belonged to the Queen of Galadorna but no longer held the cold cruelty of Dasumia. “So you pass the test, Elminster Aumar, and remain the first and dearest of my Chosen—even if your brains are too addled to recognize when a ritual of Bane is being perverted, bringing pleasure to his altar instead of pain, and shedding the blood of someone willing.” A fond and musical laugh followed, then the words, “I am proud, this night.”
Gentle arms enfolded him, and Elminster cried out in wonder as he felt himself lifted up, in a soaring flight that should have smashed them both into the ceiling but did not, reaching high and clear into the stars instead.
The roof of the House of the Unicorn burst apart, towers toppling, as a column of silver fire roared up into the night. As men on the battlements screamed and cursed, something chill and chiming that had been coiled hungrily around a spire close by their heads fled in a misty parabola, to drift away low over the streets of Nethrar, cowering in the night.
Silver fire danced on dark water, throwing feeble reflections onto purple-bordered tapestries of deepest black. High on those tapestries, in purple thread, were worked their sole adornments: cruel, somehow feminine smiles.
The inky waters of the scrying font rippled, and the scene of silver fire soaring up out of a castle was gone.
Someone close above the water said excitedly, “You saw? I know how we can use this.”
“Tell me!” a cold voice snapped, sharp with excitement, then in lower tones, in another direction, said more calmly, “Cancel the Evenflame service. We’ll be busy—and undisturbed, mark you, Sister Night—until further notice.”
And so it was that Galadorna lost its queen and its court mage in the same night, less than a tenday before the armies of Laothkund rolled down from the tree-girt hills to set Nethrar ablaze, and shatter the Unicorn Kingdom forever.
BOOK TWO
SUNRISE ON A DARK ROAD
Eleven
MOONRISE, FROSTFIRE, AND DOOM
Adventurers are best used to slay monsters. Sooner or later, they become your worst monsters, and you have to hire new ones to do the obvious thing.
Ralderick Hallowshaw, Jester
from To Rule A Realm, From Turret To Midden
published circa The Year of the Bloodbird
“Seems peaceful enough, don’t it?” the warrior rumbled, looking around from the height of his saddle at the forest of hiexel, blueleaf, and gnarled old phandar trees that flanked both sides of the road. Birds called in the distant depths of its shade gloom, and small furry things scuttled here and there among the dead leaves that carpeted its mossy stumps and mushroom-studded dead falls. Golden shafts of sunlight stabbed down into the forest here and there, lighting little clearings where shrubs fought each other for the light, and the moss-draped creepers were fewer.
“Don’t say such foolhead things, Arvas,” one of his companions growled. “They sound all too much like the sort of cues ambushing brigands like to follow. That sentence of yours sounds like something that should end with an arrow taking you in the throat—or the chunk of road your charger’s standing on rising up to be revealed as the head of some awakened titan or other.”
“I’ll take the ‘or other,’ you merry-faced killjoy,” Arvas grunted. “I just meant I don’t see claw-sharpening marks on trees, bloodstains … that sort of thing—which should make you even more cheerful.”
“You can be sure the High Duke didn’t hire us to block the Starmantle road while we argue about things I’d r
ather other ears didn’t hear about,” a deeper voice said sharply. “Arvas, Faldast—stow it!”
“Paeregur,” Arvas said in weary tones, “have you looked up and down this road recently? Do you see anyone—anyone—but us? Block the road from what, may I ask? Since the deaths began, travel seems to have just about stopped along here. Possibly about the same time you got this funny idea into your head that you’re somehow entitled to give the rest of us orders! Was it that new armor, the heavy helm pressing hard on your brains? Or was it the new thrusting codpiece with the—”
“Arvas, enough!” said someone else, in exasperation. “Gods, it’s like having a babbling drunk riding with us.”
“Rolian,” his halfling comrade said, from somewhere below the level of the humans’ belts, “it is having a babbling drunk riding with us!”
There was a general roar of laughter—even echoed, albeit sarcastically, by Arvas himself—and the Frostfire Banner urged their mounts into a trot. They all wanted to find a good defensible place to camp before dark, or have time to get back to Starmantle if no such site offered itself, and it wouldn’t be all that many hours, now, before the shadows grew long and the sun bright and low.
High Duke Horostos styled himself lord over the rich farmlands west of Starmantle, along a forested cliff of a coast that offered few harbors (and no good ones). As realms went, it was a quiet and safe land, plagued by the usual owlbears and stirges from time to time, the odd band of brigands, thieving peddlers; small problems that a few armsmen and foresters with good bows could handle.
Lately, it seemed, at about the time the worst winter snows ended and folk considered the useful part of the Year of the Awakening Wyrm to have begun, the High Duchy of Langalos had somehow acquired a big problem.
Something that left no tracks, but killed at will—passing merchants, woodcutters, farmers, livestock, and alert war bands of the Duke’s best armsmen alike. Even a high-ranking priest of Tempus, traveling with a large mounted and well-armed bodyguard, had gone missing somewhere along the wooded road west of Starmantle, and was thought to have fallen afoul of the mysterious slayer. Could this be the “Awakening Wyrm” of the prophecies?
Perhaps, but hired griffon-riders flying over the area had found no sign of large caves, scorched or broken trees or any other marks of large beasts … or any sign of brigands or their encampments, for that matter. Nor had the few foresters who still dared to venture anywhere near the trees seen anything—and one by one, these were disappearing too. Their reports told of a land that seemed barren of any beast so large as a fox or hare; the game trails were grown over with ferns.
So the High Duke had reluctantly opened his coffers while he still had subjects to tax and refill them and had hired the classic solution: a band of adventurers—in this case, hireswords who’d been thrown out of service to wealthy Tethyrians for a variety of reasons, and gathered as the Frostfire Banner to seek their fortunes in more easterly lands, where their past indiscretions would be less well known.
The money offered by Horostos was both good and needed. The Banner were ten in all, and numbered among their ranks a pair apiece of mages and warrior-priests, yet they went warily. This was unfamiliar country to them—but death knows all lands, intimately and often.
So it was that cocked but unloaded crossbows hung across several saddles, though it was bad for the strings, and no one rode carelessly. The forest stayed lovely—and deserted.
“No stags,” Arvas grunted once, and his companions, nodding their replies, realized how silent they’d fallen. Waiting for the blow to fall.
A goodly way west of Starmantle the road looped around and beneath an exposed spur of rock, an outcropping that pointed out to sea and upward like the prow of some great buried ship. Once the sun sank low and the Banner knew they had to turn around, they settled on the rocky prow as their camp.
“Yon’s as good a place as the gods provide, short of bare hilltops. One to watch along the road and down the cliffs, and two to face the forest along the neck of it, here, tie up our horses below and be-damned to anyone trying to use the road by night, and we’re set,” Rolian grunted.
Paeregur gave a wordless grunt as his only answer. The tone of that grunt sounded unconvinced. The silence of fear hung heavy over the camp that night, and evenfeast was eaten in hushed tones.
“We’re as close to death as we’ve ever been,” the halfling muttered as they rolled themselves in their cloaks, laid weapons to hand, and watched the stars come out over the water.
“Will you belt up about dying?” Rolian hissed. “No one can come at us unseen, we’ve set a heavy watch, the dippers and the shields are ready for a fast wakening … what more can we do?”
“Ride out of here and go back to Tethyr,” Avras said quietly—yet the camp had grown so still that most of them heard him. Several heads turned, wearing scowls … but no one said a word in reply.
Overhead, as deep night came down, the stars began to come out in earnest.
“What’s that?” Rolian breathed, beside Paeregur’s ear. “D’you hear it?”
“Of course I hear it,” the warrior replied quietly, rising silently to his feet and turning slowly, his drawn blade glinting in the light of the new-risen moon. He could hear it best to the west, somewhere very close by, a thin, aimless chiming sound. A bridle? A bell on a minstrel’s instrument, or on the harness of a wayward horse? Or—the little fey ones, come calling?
After a moment he took a few cautious crouching steps across the rock spur, picking his way between the still forms of his sleeping fellows. A thin thread of mist was drifting in the lee of the rock spur—strange, that, with the moon rising—but there was nothing to be seen. Not even seabirds, or an owl. In fact, that was why this was so eerie—the woods were still. No scuffling, no night cries or the shrieks of small animals being caught by larger prowlers … nothing. Paeregur shook his head in puzzlement, and turned slowly to go back. There it was again, that faint chiming.
He turned back to the west again and became a listening statue. After a time the chiming was gone. The tall warrior shrugged, glanced down at the horses below the prow—and froze.
Where were the horses? He took two quick strides to the other side of the prow, in case they’d all shifted to the east of the overhang—their lead-reins were long enough—but, no. They were gone. “Rolian,” he growled, beckoning sharply, and ran along the prow to its very tip, where the still, cowled form of Avras sat facing out to sea, his sword across his knees. Hah! Some watch guard he’d turned out to be!
“Avras!” he hissed, clapping a heavy hand on the warrior’s shoulder, “where are the horses? If you’ve been drinking again, so help me I’m g—”
The shoulder under his hand crumpled like a thing of dry leaves and kindling, and the faceless husk of Avras pivoted toward him for a moment before collapsing into ash. The man’s skull tumbled out to bounce off Paeregur’s boot before falling out and down to the road below with a dull clatter.
Paeregur almost fell off the spur recoiling in horror. Then he scrambled back along it to the first of his sleeping companions, and turned the blankets back with the point of his blade. A skull grinned up at him.
“Gods,” he sobbed, slashing with his sword tip at the next cloak. His blade caught on the garment and dragged it half off; bones spilled out in a confusion of ash and collapse. Paeregur knew real gut-wrenching terror for the first time in his life. He wanted to run, anywhere, away from here.
Rolian was taking a damned long time to arrive.
Paeregur glanced along the spur to where Rolian had been sitting beside him, facing the forest—had been whispering to him, only a few breaths ago. Where had—?
The chiming, coming again—only this time, from among the wall of dark trees they’d been facing—sounded almost mocking. A little mist was curling around their trunks, and Rolian—
Rolian was standing in those trees with his sword in the crook of his arm and the laces of his codpiece in his hands, in the etern
al wide-legged pose of men relieving themselves in the woods, facing away into the darkness. Paeregur started to relax, then fresh fear coiled in the pit of his stomach. Rolian was standing very still. Too still.
“Frostfire awake!” Paeregur roared, with all the volume he could muster; the very rocks rang back his shout, and an echo came back faintly from the depths of the forest. He was running as he bellowed, back along the spine of the spur toward Rolian … already knowing what he’d find.
He came to a stop behind that still form and tried to peer past it. Fangs? Eyes? Waiting blades? Nothing; the moonlight was enough to show him nothing but trees. He stretched out his sword gently. “Rolian?”
The warrior gave a long, formless sigh as he toppled forward into the trees. He broke into three pieces before he hit the ground, his blade bouncing away among dead leaves … and left Paeregur staring at a pair of empty boots and a tangle of slumped clothing. Ye bloody grave-sucking gods!
The tall warrior took two quick steps back from that place and spun around. Was he the only one left alive? Had any—but no. He almost shouted with relief: the mage Lhaerand was on his feet, face pinched with sleepy disapproval, as was the giant among them, slow-witted but loyal Phostral, his full plate armor make him a gleaming mountain in the moonlight. Two. Two of them all.
“Something has killed all the others,” Paeregur told them tightly. “Something that can slay in a moment, and silently.”
“Oh?” Lhaerand snarled. “Then what’s that?”
It was the chiming again, only loud and insistent now, as if standing in triumph over them. Suddenly the mist was back, sliding past their feet and bringing its own chill with it as it drifted along the spur. Paeregur’s eyes narrowed.