The Siege

by Denning, Troy

  Khelben circled the vineyard once to make certain there were no more unseen threats, then dropped to the ground beside Keya, who was examining Dexon’s mangled leg and assuring him—or perhaps herself—that Pluefan Trueshot and Hanali’s priestesses were perfectly capable of restoring the limb. Dexon’s face was pained, but he seemed more concerned about the possibility of another attack than his gruesome injury.

  “I told you to stay close, young lady,” Khelben said.

  As he spoke, he noted that the battle roar had all but vanished. Shadovar veserab riders were flying toward the edges of the valley, swarming around the tentacled orbs of fleeing beholders—the phaerimm had abandoned their mind-slaves and teleported away.

  Looking back to Keya, Khelben gestured at the bracers. “What if I had needed those?”

  “If you had needed them, you wouldn’t have given them to me.” Keya pulled the bracers off and thrust them into his hands, then, slipping a supportive arm around Dexon’s waist, stretched up to kiss Khelben on the lips. “But thank you.”

  “Y-you’re welcome,” Khelben stammered. He felt himself blushing and smiled to cover it. “Very welcome, my dear.”

  Keya’s eyes shifted past his shoulder and suddenly widened in surprise, as did Dexon’s, and Khelben heard a familiar “ahem” behind him. He turned to find Laeral standing there, tapping the tip of a smoking wand against her crimson-streaked armor.

  She cocked her brow, then shifted her gaze to Keya. “Tell me, young lady—what does a girl need to kill to get a kiss around here?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  21 Mirtul, the Year of Wild Magic

  Vala hung motionless in the ceiling spider webs, watching in silence as Corineus spun around the sanctum below, slashing eyestalks from beholder heads and cratering illithid chests with bolts of golden magic, somersaulting under bugbears and diving over kobolds. All the while, he somehow kept himself between his enemies and the four spellbooks resting on a dusty oak table in the corner, amidst a pile of crowns, scepters, rings, bracers, and other magic relics recovered from the lairs of the phaerimm they had slain so far. The monster bodies were beginning to pile up, slowing the baelnorn’s bladedance to the point that he began to take hits. It hardly mattered. Steel weapons only bounced off his white flesh, and he absorbed disintegration rays and mind blasts the way leaves drank sunlight. Even antimagic beams had no effect. The beholders casting them never lived long enough for their blade-wielding comrades to take advantage.

  Finally, there were just too many bodies for Corineus to continue his bladedance. He stumbled spinning in for a kill, and two kobolds bounced across the carnage into the corner, each grabbing for one of the spellbooks on the desk. Though they were no more than twelve feet below Vala, close enough that she could smell their musky odor even over the charnel stench that filled the room, she continued to hang under the ceiling, her arms and legs aching from the strain of holding herself in such an unaccustomed position. This time, Corineus had told her to be a spider, to let the prey twist itself into their web before striking.

  As Corineus struggled to regain his balance, a pair of bugbears leaped onto his back and bowled him over. He started to throw them off, and more started to squeeze through the doors one after the other, adding their weight to the heap. The pile continued to rise, but more slowly, then finally sank back toward the floor. The baelnorn’s muffled voice called out an incantation, and a brilliant spark flashed somewhere under the tangle of hairy limbs.

  A sheet of silver lightning fanned across the room, momentarily blinding Vala. There was a single communal death-growl, then the room fell silent. The reek of scorched flesh pervaded her nostrils, and her chill-numbed flesh began to prickle as the baelnorn’s cold aura suddenly vanished. She blinked the dazzle from her eyes to find the sanctum piled three layers deep in scorched body halves, many pouring smoke into the air and some still twitching.

  Corineus was encased in a shimmering sphere of force, his withered face twisted into a mask of agony as he struggled to his feet. He was moving only slowly and with great effort, with his eyes bulging out of their sockets and lines of black blood running from his ears and nostrils. The sphere was contracting visibly, crushing the baelnorn in its inexorable grasp.

  Vala remained where she was, all too conscious of the shiny red diamonds starting to peer at her from the corners of the web-strewn ceiling. The giant spiders had vanished through their hidden bolt holes the instant Corineus entered the sanctum, but with his chill aura gone, they were eager to return and reclaim their webs. Her goosebumps rose again, though this time they had nothing to do with being cold.

  Finally, the object of her ambush appeared, the largest phaerimm yet, with amber scales and a tail-barb as long as the blade of her darksword. The creature paused a moment in the door, then floated over to the sphere in which Corineus was imprisoned and stopped. The baelnorn turned his head in its direction. His eyes were bulging so badly they were about to pop their sockets, and the black stuff running from his nose and ears had fanned across his entire lower face. The undead elf began to fumble through the gestures of an enchantment.

  So clumsy were his efforts that even Vala knew the spell would never go off. The phaerimm simply floated there before him, and eventually Corineus stopped trying. The pair simply stood beside each other and did nothing. Vala was confused for the first several moments, until the baelnorn’s gaze shifted to the captured spellbooks, and she recalled that phaerimm communicated with their captives telepathically. The thing was interrogating him, no doubt trying to learn how he had been slipping past the wards designed to keep him at bay.

  Vala prayed to Tempus to give Corineus strength—then remembered herself and asked Corellon Larethian, the elf god of war, for the same thing. They had taken care to leave behind no trace of her presence in the lairs they had broken so far. If the baelnorn betrayed the secret, she would not survive long enough to realize their plan had failed.

  A tremble in the web drew Vala’s gaze to the opposite corner of the ceiling, where a wolf-sized spider was creeping out of its bolt hole. She fixed it in place with a glare but did not dare do more. Corineus had warned her not to move until the instant she attacked. Her only camouflage was spidersilk and darkness; any magic that the baelnorn might have used to hide her would have drawn the phaerimm’s attention as surely as a flame.

  Emboldened by the first, a second spider crept out onto the web, this one only half a dozen yards from Vala’s feet. She glanced toward the phaerimm, trying to gauge her chances of making the leap. Not good. The thornback was over by the main door with the baelnorn; she was in the opposite corner, above the spellbooks. Corineus had said the thing would not be able to resist such a treasure. So far, it seemed to be withstanding the temptation all too well.

  A third spider crept onto the web, this one in the corner above Corineus, who was enduring long past the point when a living elf would have been crushed. His eyes were hanging out of their sockets, flattened against his cheeks, while his arms and legs were bent at impossible angles and pressed back against his body. Vala wanted to yell at the baelnorn to give up and let himself be destroyed already, but she didn’t even know if that was possible. Besides, he had to make it look real. If he gave up too easily, his tormentor would grow suspicious—and few things were more dangerous than a suspicious phaerimm.

  The web began to tremble violently as the first spider darted for Vala, fangs dripping venom and pedipalps reaching out. The second made a dash for her legs but stopped to face the other one when it changed its direction.

  Vala started to throw her sword in desperation—then had a better idea and looked back to the spiders. She ran her blade through the spider web, cutting a huge crescent around the bottom of her feet. The web came free with a series of brittle pops, and she swung down from the ceiling, descending toward her target in a swift-moving arc. The phaerimm swung its huge mouth toward her.

  Vala leaped straight at it, whipping the darksword around for a vicious, two
-handed downstrike. She heard scales cracking and felt the blade splitting flesh. A pair of phaerimm hands caught her by the throat and began to squeeze. She turned the blade and began to drag it through the thing’s body. The barbed tail arced up, clanked off her backplate, and drew back to try again.

  Vala knocked a phaerimm hand from her throat—only to have it replaced by two more. Her vision began to fade, and her right leg erupted into fiery pain as the tail barb penetrated her armor and began to pump its poison into her body. She pried her darksword free, swinging the blade up through two feet of tendon and flesh. Her vision darkened to something darker than black, and Vala’s stomach suddenly rose into her chest. A bitter chill stung her flesh, and there was an endless eternity of falling. She grew queasy and weak and heard nothing but the pounding of her own heart, slowing with each beat, then even that was gone.

  Vala’s first hint that she was not … well, gone, was the reek of battle gore. The second was pain. Something was lodged in her leg, holding up her whole body by the big thigh muscle and flicking across the bone. She thought for a moment that she was dead and in the Nine Hells with no memory of how she had come to be there. Then she saw a huge, amber-colored phaerimm lying flayed and motionless on the floor above her—no, below—and recalled the fight in the sanctum.

  Vala was not in the sanctum. Instead of the four captured spellbooks and great heap of recovered magic she and Corineus had piled in the corner, there was a single open book floating in a green spell field and several shelves of neatly arranged relics. There were the mind-slaves’ sleeping palettes lined up along the wall, and the ward symbol above the door that kept her baelnorn ally at bay. Most of all, there was the thornback itself, lying motionless and gutted on the floor beneath her, its long tail preventing her from floating to the ceiling by the painful barb lodged in her thigh.

  After Vala’s attack, the thing had attempted to teleport to the safety of its lair and arrived dead. At least she thought it was dead. She brought her arm down to cut herself free—or, rather, tried to bring her arm down. It didn’t move in response to her will, nor did her legs or neck when she tested them—or even her tongue, when she attempted to curse.

  Eventually, Vala knew, the crushing sphere would destroy Corineus’s body and free his spirit to seek one of the spare bodies he had hidden in the Irithlium—but that was not going to help her. Until she broke the warding symbol above the door, the baelnorn could not enter the lair. There was nothing to do but hang there in pain until the poison wore off.

  The Shadovar were not conspicuous in Arabel—or rather in what had been Arabel before the ghazneths and their orc hordes reduced it to rubble—but they were there. On the dark side of a broken tower, a pair of swarthy masons were using a shadow saw to size blocks. Through the window of a bakery, a potter with gleaming amethyst eyes was fashioning an oven from darkclay. In an alley, a tall and gaunt carpenter was installing an ebon-wood door.

  None of them more than glanced in Galaeron’s direction as he passed by with Aris and Ruha, but that meant nothing. With an elf, a Bedine witch, and a stone giant traveling together, the Shadovar had to know who they were looking at.

  Aris stooped down to within three feet of Galaeron and Ruha. Though the giant had spent much of the past two days sipping Storm Silverhand’s healing potions, he remained unsteady enough that Galaeron would rather he wasn’t leaning over them.

  “This is going to be harder than we thought,” Aris said quietly. “I keep seeing Shadovar.”

  Galaeron nodded. “Sent to watch for us.”

  “So many?” Ruha shook her head. “The Shadovar have easier ways of watching than rebuilding a whole city.”

  “What do you know?” Galaeron snapped. “With the information I have about the phaerimm, the Shadovar would do anything to get me back.”

  “I am sure they would,” Ruha said patiently.

  She pointed at the base of a nearly rebuilt tower, where the foundation had been patched with the same dark amalgam that served as mortar in Shade Enclave.

  “They have been here for some time,” the witch continued. “Their purpose here is to make an ally of Cormyr, not find us.”

  Galaeron considered first the foundation, then the rest of the broad street, and had to nod. While the city still looked like a rubble heap at first glance, the outlines of its former shape were beginning to re-emerge. Many of the larger buildings were already rising to the second or third story, and most showed signs of Shadovar work—if not in the mortar then in the precision fit of the stones and the dark wood of the balconies, or even in the depth of the shadowed window alcoves.

  “You’re right, of course,” Galaeron said, transferring his ire from Ruha to Storm Silverhand. “Even the Shadovar couldn’t do this overnight—and Storm had to know it when she teleported us here.”

  “Most likely,” Ruha admitted.

  “So why send us?” Galaeron demanded. “It would have made more sense to teleport us to Waterdeep and come to Cormyr herself.”

  “Perhaps you have answered your own question,” Ruha said. “That is what the Shadovar would expect. Or matters in Waterdeep may be more complicated than we know. I am given to understand that Storm’s sister Laeral is friendly with the Shadovar.”

  “Say no more,” Galaeron grumbled.

  Storm’s reaction to him in Anauroch had convinced him how unlikely he was to persuade any of the Chosen of anything. For loosing the phaerimm on the world, they might have forgiven him eventually, but for bringing the Shadovar into the world after them, and getting Elminster banished to the Nine Hells—never.

  “We’re better off taking our chances with the Cormyreans,” Galaeron admitted.

  “Then you accept that Storm did the wisest thing?” Ruha asked.

  Galaeron shrugged. “How can I know? But she has to have a better hope in Waterdeep than I do. Lord Piergeiron certainly isn’t going to take my word over Laeral’s.”

  An approving twinkle came to Ruha’s eyes. “You may survive this yet. I think you are finally learning to control your shadow self.” She glanced over at a pair of Shadovar stone cutters who had stopped work to watch them pass, then added, “But perhaps we would draw less attention if we disguised ourselves and found a safe place to leave Aris.”

  “At this point, speed is better than stealth,” Galaeron said. “The sooner we present ourselves at the palace, the more difficult it will be for Telamont Tanthul to have a troop of his lords spirit us back to the enclave.”

  “Well said,” Aris agreed, glancing out over the half-built city. “Besides, there isn’t a place to hide a stone giant within twenty miles of here.”

  It was no exaggeration. Though Storm had teleported them into a field only a quarter mile outside Arabel, the walk to the gates had been plenty long enough to bear witness to the devastation wrought by the dragon Nalavarauthatoryl and her ghazneths and orcs. Even a year after the terrible war, nothing grew in the once-lush fields except a few black thistles and carpets of foul-smelling moss, while the great forest that had once flourished to the south and west of the city was still struggling to put the first spindly leaves in its canopy.

  Despite their presence in Arabel, the Shadovar were not helping matters. With the melting of the High Ice carrying so much rain and cool air west toward Waterdeep, a steady wind had been blowing northward through Cormyr, carrying with it the heat of the southlands and the mugginess of the Dragonmere.

  Had the zephyr but dropped a fraction of its moisture on its way over the kingdom, the change of weather might actually have helped matters. Instead, the air remained miserly with its water until it crashed into the northern Stormhorns and abruptly cooled. As a result, the kingdom was enduring its worst, hottest, most miserable drought in a thousand years, while at the same time its two largest rivers, the Starwater and the Wyvernflow, were flooding their banks and washing away whole villages.

  Galaeron was far from certain that he would be able to secure an audience with the rulers of the kingdom, much
less persuade the Cormyreans that Shade Enclave was causing their problems. But, as Storm had said, they would be eager for an explanation and inclined to listen. All he had to do was get the shadow blanket into Vangerdahast’s hands. After that, the royal wizard would convince himself.

  They reached the city palace, which—to Galaeron’s great disappointment—had been rebuilt from the second story in the same pearly stone as Villa Dusari. Atop the highest spires, dozens of Shadovar polishers were crawling over the turrets like spiders, putting the final touches on the magnificent building. Fortunately, the guards at the door still wore Cormyr’s purple dragon, or Galaeron would have concluded that the Shadovar had claimed Arabel for their own and left immediately.

  As the trio ascended the steps, two of the guards crossed their halberds in front of the entrance. The sergeant—no older than his comrades, but with a badly scarred face and an eye patch—stepped forward to address them.

  “You have business with Lord Myrmeen?” he demanded.

  Galaeron shook his head. “Our business is with Princess Alusair and her wizard,” he said. “It concerns the abnormal weather Cormyr has been suffering of late.”

  The sergeant seemed not to hear the last part of his explanation. “This is the palace of Myrmeen Lhal,” he said. “The Steel Regent keeps her home—and her wizard—in Suzail.”

  Alarm bells started clanging inside Galaeron’s mind. “You are saying Arabel is no longer part of Cormyr?”

  The sergeant’s one eye narrowed. “What I’m saying is that unless you have business with Myrmeen Lhal—”

  “We have it on good authority that Princess Alusair and Vangerdahast are inside,” Ruha interrupted. She removed the Harper’s pin from inside her robe and pressed it into his hand. “Please deliver that to her with the message that our lives may depend on a swift audience—and perhaps the fate of Cormyr’s growing season, as well.”