The Siege

by Denning, Troy

  At the base of the hill, where the mansions of the Knoll District gave way to the exorbitant shops and inns that populated the rest of Old Town, Vangerdahast turned through the gate of the Windlord’s Rest, which he had appropriated to serve as the headquarters of the war wizards. Instead of entering the cozy inn itself, he led the way past a mixed troop of war wizards and Purple Dragons into the livery.

  Inside, the “device” sat covered in its wagon, fans of golden light spilling through the slats of the cargo bed to illuminate the stable floor. The light was incredibly bright, though it did not seem to burn the eyes of either Vangerdahast or the guards the way it did Galaeron’s. He had to shield his face, and his palm began to nettle.

  Vangerdahast smirked at Galaeron’s reaction, then removed from his pocket a ring bearing a crude copy of the Purple Dragon of Cormyr.

  “Sorry for the workmanship,” the royal magician said, “there wasn’t much time.” He passed it over. “Put it on.”

  Galaeron slipped the ring onto his finger and immediately felt better. He also saw that the light was not nearly as bright as he had thought, barely showing through the slats at all.

  “Interesting,” he said. “How does it work?”

  “I’ll explain at the circle,” Vangerdahast said. He turned toward the main doors, where Aris was crouched on hands and knees peering into the stable. “I would be indebted if you would draw the wagon for us. Translocational magic tends to make draught horses panic.”

  “My pleasure.”

  The giant stretched an arm through the doorway to grab the hitch—then a cry of alarm sounded from the courtyard behind him, and he stopped to look over his shoulder.

  “Stonebones shield us!” Aris cried.

  Galaeron stepped to the door and saw a company of dark forms peeling themselves out of the shadows, spraying the astonished guard companies outside with darts of black glass and bolts of shadow magic.

  Aris cried out as a dark ray lanced out to pierce his forearm, then lashed out at his attacker with the same hand. Before the giant could close his fingers, the Shadovar changed back to shadow and drained away, then emerged behind him and pierced his thigh with another beam.

  Aris screamed and whirled around. Galaeron saw a trio of Shadovar emerging adjacent to the door and could pay no more attention to the giant. He drew his sword and, waiting until the warriors began to assume a semblance of solidity, beheaded the nearest one. The body simply drained back into the shadow, but the dead man’s companions whirled on Galaeron, their hands rising to unleash shadow spells.

  Galaeron ducked back into the stable. “Warn the princess!” he yelled. “They’ve found me!”

  “They’ve found my device,” Vangerdahast corrected, peering past Aris’s dancing legs into the courtyard. “But how? This city is warded!”

  His bodyguards were beginning to counterattack with lightning bolts, crossbow quarrels, and—Galaeron was disappointed to see—bolts of raw magic. Even after hearing how the Sharn Wall had been breached, Vangerdahast had ignored Galaeron’s suggestion that the War Wizards strike all spells of raw magic from their battle lists.

  “I told you those wards were useless,” Galaeron said, “as the Shadovar are about to prove.”

  The shadows inside the building began to undulate as more shadow warriors arrived. Galaeron tapped Vangerdahast on the shoulder, and the wizard glanced over his shoulder into the thicket of silhouettes rising behind them.

  “Vexatious beings, aren’t they?” the royal magician said.

  Vangerdahast pointed at his device and made a lifting motion. The canvas cover rose to reveal a globe of living light, its exterior etched with hundreds of black glyphs similar to the warding tile Galaeron had seen two days before. The glyphs were swimming over the surface like water striders on a pond and casting dark shadows of themselves across the interior of the stable. As the silhouettes fell on the Shadovar warriors, the corresponding glyph stopped moving and affixed its shadow firmly in the center of the target’s chest.

  The Shadovar wailed in agony and tried to dodge aside or drop back into the shadows. It was difficult to say what happened to those who retreated into the fringe, but the others screamed in agony as their glyphs moved across the orb to keep the dark emblem painted on their torso. A second later, the symbol burst into golden flames, and they dissolved into sooty black smoke.

  Galaeron noticed that, despite the ring Vangerdahast had given him, he was growing uncomfortably warm himself. He took shelter behind the wizard’s ample form.

  “Impressive.” He glanced around behind them, expecting the ones who had retreated into the Shadow Fringe to reemerge at their backs. When the shadows remained as still as shadows should, he said, “Using a shadow to project the symbol prevents them from escaping into the fringe.”

  Vangerdahast beamed. “Imagine what I could have learned, had you actually demonstrated shadow magic.” The wizard went to the front of the wagon and picked up the hitch. “Help me get this out where it will do some good.”

  Galaeron went to the other side and began to push against the crossbar. The wagon was incredibly heavy, as if the orb it carried were made of gold metal instead of gold light.

  “Corellon’s bolts!” he gasped. “Wouldn’t it be faster to use magic?”

  “It is folly to rely on magic for things your own strong back can do better,” Vangerdahast said, frowning across the bar at him. “A wise woman taught me that.”

  “So you’re saying you’ll need your telekinesis spells later,” Galaeron surmised.

  “Exactly.” Vangerdahast leaned into the hitch. “Now put your back into it.”

  Galaeron braced his feet and did as the wizard commanded. The effort was almost enough to make him break his promise not to use shadow magic. The floor was slick with dust and there was a slight incline at the threshold, and the battle raging in the courtyard had already become a desperate one. Purple Dragons lay two and three bodies deep, and Vangerdahast’s war wizards were having to stand back to back to keep their Shadovar attackers from slipping through the shadows to attack from behind. Even then, the Shadovar were far more adept at using their defenses to stop Weave spells than the Cormyreans were at using their magic to stop shadow spells, and more than a dozen of the kingdom’s battle mages already lay among the fallen dragoneers.

  Aris was staggering around like a drunken fire dancer, bleeding from a dozen wounds, alternately trying to stomp enemy warriors flat or kick them out over the inn’s roof.

  “Aris!” Galaeron yelled. “Help us!”

  The giant crossed the battle in a stride, scattering a trio of shadow warriors with a sweep of his large foot. He dropped to a knee and pulled the wagon across the threshold so quickly that Galaeron and Vangerdahast had to leap aside to keep from being crushed under the wheels. The silhouettes of the old wizard’s glyphs danced over the surrounding walls for less than a second, then began to settle on their targets. The wispy screams of anguished Shadovar filled the air, then a thicket of golden flames flared to life across the courtyard, and their attackers vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

  Galaeron rolled to his knees and found Vangerdahast lying against the opposite doorjamb, his chest heaving and his face contorted with pain. Galaeron’s mind leaped immediately to the worst possible conclusion.

  “Vangerdahast?” He scrambled across the doorway and pulled the portly wizard into his lap. It wasn’t easy. “Are you hit?”

  “No … just getting … old,” the old wizard groaned. He rubbed a shoulder, then looked from Galaeron to one of his assistants who had come running and extended a hand. “How bad?”

  “We lost thirteen war wizards and most of your dragoneers.” The fellow used both hands to pull Vangerdahast to his feet—then grinned broadly. “But you were right about those ward tiles, milord. They lured the Shadovar in through the fringe just like you—”

  “Yes, well, we’ve no time to waste congratulating ourselves,” Vangerdahast growled, casting a sidelong gla
nce in Galaeron’s direction. “Let’s finish this.”

  He rubbed his signet ring, then looked into the sky and said, “Alusair, the time has come. Are you in position?”

  The wizard was silent for a moment, then nodded and looked back to his assistant. “The attack is citywide. Leave them no place to hide. Demolish any building they enter, if you must.”

  “I’ll pass the word.” The assistant acknowledged the order with a bow, then turned to cast a spell.

  A weary look came to Vangerdahast’s eyes. He motioned Galaeron to follow and shuffled toward Aris and the orb of light. Seeing that the battle had already taken more out of the wizard than the old fellow cared to admit, Galaeron offered a hand in support … and was not rebuffed.

  “You planned this?” he asked. “You picked one of your own cities as the battlefield?”

  “We certainly didn’t let them take us by surprise, if that’s what you were thinking,” Vangerdahast snapped. “Cormyr has fought a few wars … and won them all.”

  “If I underestimated you, I apologize,” Galaeron said, “but all that talk on the wall tower—”

  “For the spies,” Vangerdahast said. “The Shadovar do use spies, you know.”

  “I know,” Galaeron said. “I thought you weren’t listening to me.”

  Vangerdahast fixed Galaeron with a rheumy eye. “Who says I was?”

  Galaeron was too stunned to laugh. Though Tilverton’s evacuation was under way, he had seen for himself that there had still been hundreds of women and children in the city earlier that evening—and the Cormyrean plan risked them all. How hard, he wondered, had been the lessons they learned in their last war against the dragon Nalavarauthatoryl? Had they truly grown so cold that they would knowingly sacrifice so many to win a quick victory—and save how many more? Perhaps that was what it required to defeat the Shadovar, and, more importantly, the phaerimm.

  They reached the wagon, and the wizard stopped beside Aris’s knee. “Stay close,” Vangerdahast said. “I may have need of your talents.”

  Without waiting for a response, Vangerdahast cast a quick spell and lifted his hand heavenward. The golden orb shot high into the air, its glyphs growing motionless as they found their first targets. The battle din beyond the courtyard continued unabated for a moment, then slowly changed pitch as the symbol silhouettes began to take their toll. The wizard cocked his head as if listening to a distant voice, then moved his hand a few inches. The golden sphere floated a hundred yards across the sky.

  “Come along. We need a better vantage point.”

  Vangerdahast laid a hand on each of them, spoke a magic word, and pulled them through the dark square of a magic door. There was a timeless instant of falling, then Galaeron found himself standing in bright golden light, feeling very hot and dizzy, listening to the sounds of a battle far below.

  “Don’t worry about being seen,” said a familiar voice. “I’ve cast a couple of spells that will keep us hidden.”

  Galaeron recovered from his afterdaze enough to recall that he was somewhere in the middle of the battle for Tilverton.

  Vangerdahast was shaking him by the arm and pointing down at the ground. “What’s that he’s doing?”

  Galaeron looked down—a long way down—and grew so dizzy that it took him a moment to find what the wizard was pointing at. It was a dark figure more than a hundred paces from the tower where they stood looking out over the raging battle. Barely visible beneath the canvas awning of a patio tavern, the figure was waving his outstretched arms in small circles, apparently summoning the black fog that was rising out of the cracks of the flagstones at his feet and spilling out into Old Town—much to the confusion and distress of the companies of Alliance warriors rushing about the streets flushing Shadovar from their hiding places.

  “It’s hard to tell without seeing how he cast the spell,” Galaeron said, “but he seems to be summoning shadowstuff.”

  Vangerdahast raised his brow. “Shadowstuff? Would that be raw—”

  “Don’t tell me!” Galaeron had a sinking feeling. “The glyphs—”

  “Not the glyphs, or their silhouettes,” Vangerdahast said, “but the sphere itself is raw magic.”

  “And the light?” Galaeron asked.

  Vangerdahast shrugged. “Not in itself, but born of raw magic.”

  “Close enough,” Aris said. He was kneeling on the other side of Vangerdahast, his elbows resting on the tower’s stone crenellations to take some of his weight off the roof. “There is a disruption already.”

  He pointed into a street around the corner from the Shadovar, where the black fog was rolling out of the shadow of the building into the orb-lit street—and swirling about the shins of a company of Sembian mercenaries who had been attempting to sneak up on the object of their attention. Though the general battle din was too loud to hear their screams, their writhing arms and contorted postures left no doubt about their pain.

  As Galaeron and the others watched, the warriors plunged to mid-thigh in the fog, then fell prone and vanished entirely. A moment later, the light of Vangerdahast’s orb turned the shadowstuff itself to ash. It sank to the ground, covering the street in an inky stain of darkness devoid of shape or texture—or even any apparent substance.

  Vangerdahast pointed at the fog and cast what Galaeron recognized as a spell of magic dismissal. The shadowstuff continued to roll out of the Shadovar’s hiding place, floating across the dark stain to brush against the orb-lit foundation of the mansion across the street. The stone disintegrated as had the legs of the Sembian mercenaries, and the building itself collapsed into the inky murk that had been, until a few moments earlier, a cobblestone street.

  It vanished without raising so much as a dust plume.

  Another building on the other side of the Shadovar spellcaster collapsed, then a company of Purple Dragons came charging into view with a tide of the shadowstuff rolling down the street behind them. It appeared they would be fast enough to reach safety—until the rear rank threw up their arms and fell, bringing down those in front of them, and so on until the entire company was gone.

  Trees and buildings began to vanish in a widening circle as the shadowstuff spread, first creating lacy paths of nothingness where the black fog worked its way into orb-lit areas, then gradually developing into a solid disk of murk as adjacent areas were exposed to the golden light. The battle at the edge of the circle grew wildly intense as Shadovar and Alliance warriors fought for control of the escape lanes, filling the dusk sky with flashing lightning bolts and hissing rays of darkness. Only the patio where the fog-summoner himself stood remained untouched, revealing a huge figure in a horned helm still waving his outstretched arms, calling more shadowstuff up into the streets.

  Galaeron clasped Vangerdahast’s arm. “You’re destroying the city!” he said. “Annul your spell, or at least move it out over the plain.”

  “And let the Shadovar destroy our armies?” Vangerdahast scoffed. “Better to lose a city than a kingdom.”

  Galaeron stared out over the collapsing city and thought of all the dying warriors, of all the innocents who would perish if the shadow fog continued to spread. Vangerdahast had tried to dispel it and failed.

  But Vangerdahast could not use the Shadow Weave, and Galaeron could. What kind of person would turn his back on the deaths of so many—even if it meant the return of his shadow self? Galaeron had recovered from it once, and with Aris and Vangerdahast, and the entire kingdom of Cormyr to stand with him this time, he could certainly do so again. Even if he could not, what was he sacrificing, really? Only his life, and hundreds had done that already.

  Galaeron took a deep breath, then raised his hands and started to open himself to the Shadow Weave—and found Aris’s big hand reaching over Vangerdahast to pluck him off the rooftop.

  “Galaeron, you are forgetting your promise.”

  “Not forgetting,” Galaeron said, “but I can’t let thousands die while I do nothing.”

  “So your shadow would
have you believe,” the giant replied, “but you know better than to think you can dispel the magic of someone like Prince Rivalen.”

  “That’s Rivalen?” Vangerdahast gasped.

  Aris nodded. “I would recognize that face anywhere. Can you not see his golden eyes?”

  Galaeron was undeterred. “I have to try,” he said. “If there’s any chance I can save Tilverton—”

  “There is not, and you know it,” Aris said, “but the choice must be yours, or your shadow has already won.”

  He placed Galaeron on the roof beside Vangerdahast. Galaeron watched another mansion tumble into nothingness, then the golden blaze of a dozen Shadovar warriors burning into ash beneath the light of the war wizards’ artificial sun.

  Vangerdahast glanced into the street below. “Fog’s coming this way,” he observed. “Our tower will go soon.”

  Galaeron started to lower his arms, then felt such a pang of guilt that he realized he would not be able to live with himself if he just let all those innocent people die.

  “I have to try—”

  “No you don’t.” It was Vangerdahast who knocked Galaeron’s arms down this time. “You’re no match for Rivalen, and we both know it.”

  “But—”

  “There are other ways,” Vangerdahast said. There was an emotion unaccustomed to the wizard’s face in his expression, something sad and contrite, almost kind. “If you’re going to throw your life away, at least do it wisely.”

  He placed Galaeron’s hand on his sword, then motioned him to wait and looked into the sky. “Caladnei, I need you. We’re on the Tower of Wond—”