by Ed Greenwood
“You hid behind the traps in the catacombs whenever my father’s forces—or adventurers, seeking tomb coins—came calling, and you hunted outside these walls only at night … and only as a longfangs,” she said slowly, reasoning aloud. Her thoughts brought her to a halt a few paces away from the old man.
Sarasper nodded again. “I’ve grown very tired of raw meat,” he told her, something that might almost have been pleading in his rough voice. He raised an eyebrow in what might have been a challenge and then looked away again.
“Then stop hiding,” Craer said with sudden urgency, almost pleading, “and live again! Once we rode together for Blackgult—remember, Sarasper? Now, we need healing; Hawk and the Lady both. She was as much the baron’s prisoner as any chained healer. Will you aid us … please?”
For a long and silent time the old man looked at them out of his sunken eyes, his face expressionless. Then he said heavily, “I will. But there will be a price.”
* * *
Delvin of the Many Harps and Helgrym Castlecloaks had retreated behind a row of tombs to decide what to do next. They could hear the groans of a few Silvertree soldiers, but the doorway into the Silent House seemed entirely blocked with a massive flow of loose stone. “It’s probably filled the room inside that doorway,” Helgrym judged grimly, “if so much has been spilled outside. I’ve walked all around this place in younger years—from a distance, I’ll grant—and I don’t remember any other way in. It seems not so much for a ballad, after all.”
“Just turn around and go, you mean? After risking our necks creeping up here?” Delvin protested, with the disappointment of youth fresh from the victory of excitement over fear and unwilling to soon taste emptyhanded defeat.
“Know you a wiser course ahead for us?” Helgrym asked, “or …”
Something large and dark swooped out of the night and snapped Delvin’s head off with one bite. The headless corpse staggered, blood fountaining in all directions, and did not reply.
Helgrym cursed and turned to run, knowing as he did so that doom was upon him. As he sprinted through the uneven darkness, he started to sing his favorite ballad. If one had to die, ’twould be nice to hear it, just one more time.…
When dark wings swooped and the song abruptly ended in a wet, gnawing sound, eyes peering out of the doorway of a nearby tomb blazed golden with anger. A hand stroked the curves of a harp whose strings it did not touch, and a low voice told the night, “Stupid mages—may you all boil in the bile of your own arrogance! I had plans for those two!”
* * *
Sarasper did something to one of the stones in the wall, and it swung inward to reveal a niche, out of which he pulled a fist-size wooden box. He slid one side of it open, and light spilled out: bright radiance centered on a pebble, which he set on the floor before pinching out Hawkril’s candle lamp with steady fingers.
“My price,” he told the smoking candle gruffly, “is your aid in a matter that rides me day and night.”
“A debt? A quest?” Craer demanded. “Something lost that must be found?”
“Four things to be recovered,” Sarasper said shortly. “The quest may last longer than the life remaining to me.”
“I don’t know if I’m hurt that badly,” Hawkril rumbled, and looked at the pale, pain-lined face of Lady Silvertree.
“I fear I am,” she whispered, so softly that the armaragor had to lean forward to hear her. She raised her voice to add calmly, “Say more of this quest, healer.”
The old man was busy at another place on the wall. The stone that opened this time yielded a robe that was more tatters and varicolored patches than whatever garment it had started out as. He shrugged his way into it, ignoring a strong smell of mildew, and said in his rough voice, “The patron of all healers is Forefather Oak, mightiest of the Three, and betimes he speaks to we who heal by sending us visions in our dreams.”
Hawkril shrugged. “I often have dreams that blaze bright—or dark—enough to recall when I’m awake … most of them of blood, and battle, and friends gone down fighting. Does the Old One’s face appear, or do you just do as most priests do and sort out the dreams that are to your liking and deem them the ones sent you by the Forefather?”
Sarasper stiffened. Slowly he drew himself erect, as grandly as if he were himself a baron, and said slowly and coldly, each word dropping forth like a stone, “Were the Forefather to send you a vision, you’d know it and not speak so. With gold fire he laces about his scenes, and they burn forever, fading not. Trust me in this, swordmaster, as I would trust you to correct me in weapon work.”
Hawkril nodded, a little abashed. “Say on,” he bade, waving a hand.
The old man inclined his head, as if dispensing royal justice, and said roughly, “Steep this price may be, but this quest gnaws at me.”
He stopped and glared around at them all. “It should gnaw at all folk up and down the Silverflow. It should snarl and prowl at the hearts of every warrior and wizard in what was once Aglirta—and must be again!”
His voice lost its imperious edge and became a rough mumble once more. “It has worked on my thoughts these last few years, the visions coming again and again until I prowl these ways endlessly, never able to rest. The Worldstones must be recovered. The Dwaerindim must then be placed correctly to awaken the Sleeping King … who will rise, as the tales say, to restore peace and bounty to the land.”
“Ah, horns and bebolt!” Hawkril burst out in disgust. “That’s but a legend, a fancy tale to make children’s eyes bright! ‘But find the Four Lost Stones, and the castles will rise, the mountains fall, and golden age come upon the land, and everyone will grow fat and happy on endless plenty, as the perilous beasts flee afar!’ Nursemaids prattle suchlike!”
Embra Silvertree nodded. “My shelves back at the castle still hold three tellings of the saga of the Dwaerindim that tutors read to me until I could read the words for myself. Those books are old. If the Sleeping King ever existed, he’ll be but bones and dust by now! Tell me, Sarasper: just how would you tell if you’d made some dust come awake?”
Sarasper’s voice was more tired than patient as he growled, “I’m neither mad nor minstrel-witted. I can tell you only that I speak of truth, not empty legend. I suppose you think the Serpent in the Shadows is just another pretty tale, too?”
“Some evil mage now worshiped by dabblers in poison and the like?” Hawkril rumbled.
“A wizard—,” the old healer and the sorceress began, together. They fell silent and looked at each other. Sarasper gestured like a courtier to Embra, indicating she should continue. She gave him a narrow-eyed look and then nodded and said softly, “A wizard who had a hand in the enchanting of the Stones but went mad, or was mad, and murdered several rival mages to strengthen the enchantments he was placing on a Dwaer. When his deeds were discovered, the other mages of the Shaping confronted him. He fled into serpent form to try to fight his way free of their spells—and they imprisoned him in a serpent shape. He wears it still.”
“He’s still alive, too?” the armaragor asked, voice heavy with disbelief.
“Swordmaster,” the healer asked in return, “is there anything in all Darsar you believe in, beyond that sword in your hand and the next meal heading for your belly? Or is it all coins and wenches, better armor and a good bed to sleep in?”
“Old man,” Hawkril Anharu replied, fixing Sarasper with a level eye, “I often think all Darsar would be a better world to dwell in if more folk concerned themselves with such things and less about following gods and raising kingdoms and slaughtering their neighbors. Oh, yes—and dreaming clever dreams, too.”
Armaragors with guttering torches held high cast towering shadows on the stone walls. Wordlessly they led the cloaked and cowled figures up secret stairs into a room dark with tapestries, somewhere high in the castle of Baron Ornentar.
A shimmering occurred in the air as each visitor parted tapestries and stepped within. Most of them knew it as a shielding against spying magics,
and welcomed its small reassurance. If the barony of Ornentar was to escape the yoke of Silvertree, Baron Eldagh was at least taking basic precautions against Faerod’s Dark Three.
None of the visitors was particularly surprised to see magical wands in the hands of the hooded figure who stood behind the baron or armaragors seated on either side of him with loaded crossbows in their laps and swords naked and ready on benches before them … but then, none of the visitors had themselves come unprepared. Dark deeds—and plotting them—demand desperate measures. Doubtless armaragors stood ready behind every tapestry around the room: armaragors who served the desperate man who sat facing them all.
They all knew him, at least by face and repute. The Baron Ornentar was a fat, stone-faced man. His dark, lidded eyes were both cold and sinister. A man who thought himself subtle but was no more so than a descending ax—once one realized he was ruled always by his hunger for power.
His visitors did not recognize the wizard with the wands behind the baron, but had taken care that any mage traveling out of Silvertree would be observed, and any spying magic blocked. Whoever this masked stranger was, he was no tool of Faerod. His was probably the backbone that had made the baron bold enough to take this open step against Silvertree.
More visitors were arriving: tall and broad-shouldered warriors, the faint rattle of armor beneath their cloaks, and heavy war swords at their sides. There were even a few more sly and slight men; procurers, perhaps.
“The count is complete,” the baron said at last. “Let the full guard be mounted.” Tapestries swirled as armaragors behind them gave salutes and left for their posts. “Be seated, if you will, and unmask,” the master of Ornentar added. “We are all here, I think, for the same reason, and need know no strife within these walls.”
The same whispered word had indeed brought all of these visitors to Ornentar Castle, and that word was Dwaer.
“Word has spread up and down Coiling Vale as swift as a sunrise, it seems,” the baron began, “and yet I’ve heard wild embellishments growing about the tale even within my own halls. Have patience, then, as Urdras—a scribe out of Sirlptar—recounts what little is known, for certain.”
A slight, nervously restless man with gray, receding hair, who wore plain, worn robes and a worried expression, arose from a chair near to the baron, sketched a bow, and hugged himself, keeping his hands within his crossed sleeves. “I—ah—yes,” he began uneasily.
Within a few words, he was pacing, his nervousness lending urgency to his steps. “A matter of days ago, a wizard died: the mage Yezund of Elmerna. He claimed to have deduced the present location of one of the Dwaerindim: Candalath, the Stone of Life. He did this, he reported, both through his own far-seeking spells and examination of old texts, and by the reports of hireswords whom he sent exploring. He places it somewhere in the library of the dead wizard Ehrluth, in the ruined city of Indraevyn.”
Urdras paused to look around the room. The silence was as heavy as the dark tapestries on all sides, and with a nervous cough the scribe continued: “Yezund reported all this triumphantly to wizards gathered at the House of the Raised Hand in Sirlptar, where followed both derision and excited discussion. This house is a private club for mages, where Yezund was a member of no particular rank or regard.”
The scribe paused again for dramatic emphasis, felt the cold eyes of the baron on his back, and hurriedly added, “Yezund swept out of the house immediately after making his pronouncements and walked home. He reached the Street of Lamps—and there was torn apart by unseen magics—perhaps wielded by the same sinister mage or mages who pillaged and then burned Yezund’s house, within an hour of his death. The slayer remains unknown, but something or someone ruthless and magically powerful is obviously after the Dwaer.”
The scribe bowed again and sat down without delay. Before anyone else could speak, the baron said, “Have my thanks, Urdras. You appreciate the importance of this news, gentles: if this Dwaer is found, it can be used to devastating effect. If it falls into the hands of Silvertree, none of us in all Aglirta is safe. Wherefore we are here, to speak freely. Sing out, if you will.”
There was a general stir, and at least three voices started to speak at once. The baron lifted a hand to cry order, but a deep, thunderous voice cut through them all to say, “I—and many who swing swords, I daresay—know the Dwaerindim from mothers’ tales. Let our scribe stand again, and tell us plainly what power these Stones have, without all the grand mystery that mages like to wield like swords against us lesser wits!” The speaker was a large and scarred warrior, seated near the back and wrapped in a dark green cloak that could have smothered three scrawny scribes out of Sirlptar.
“Claws of the Dark One!” one of the cowled mages snarled. “Must we sit through endless explanations for idiots?”
“Yes,” a warrior sitting near snapped, and then added in words slow, clear, and cold: “We idiots appreciate it.”
There were chuckles and “ayes” of agreement from around the chamber, and at a nod from the baron the scribe arose once more, almost stammering in his nervousness now.
“This Stone is said to be able to raise the dead to life once more and to have many other powers besides. The Dwaerindim each have magics, and when used together, by one who knows how to place and command them, can unleash yet more spells.”
“So what, beyond the death to life, makes them any better than a dozen hired wizards?” the deep-voiced warrior demanded.
Urdras smiled weakly, and said, “Forgive me, all here who know already, but it must be plainly said: magical control, creativity, and ability to shape and work forces comes from within a wizard, but the raw power that brings any spell into being is always called forth from enchanted items. Most items—pebbles that give forth light, for instance, or yonder gauntlets …”
Many eyes turned to look at the table where the scribe pointed. A pair of war gauntlets drawn off by one of the warriors was crawling restlessly around on their fingertips like aroused spiders. Their owner shrugged and said, “Whenever strong magic is at work, nearby. Here: the shielding spell, no doubt.”
The scribe nodded vigorously. “Precisely. These items show us magic because spells are cast upon them, or stored within them, to issue forth. The time will come when their magic is gone, exhausted. All items of lasting enchantment—whose magic lasts more than our lifetimes, and which can be drawn on to power spell after spell, without being extinguished—are created by spells that involve sacrificing the life of an accomplished wizard. Most mages will do anything to acquire such an item. This Dwaer, like its fellows, is of this rare, lasting sort of item.”
“You have just spoken,” one hooded mage said softly, “secrets I will slay you for revealing, when I can. There is no place you can hide from our spells, master scribe.”
Cowering and white-faced, Urdras sat down—and promptly slumped to the floor in a faint. It could be seen that he’d soiled himself.
“Your spells work swiftly,” someone commented sardonically.
“Yet the words cannot be unspoken,” a warrior countered the hooded mage, “and I see no crime in unfolding truths to better us all.”
“In arming you,” another mage snarled, “he has disarmed us!”
The baron brought the flat of his hand down on the table with a crack that brought silence. He rushed into it with the words, “No secret stands forever, and we speak of something more important than daily concerns of power. All our lives, gentles, are forfeit should this Stone fall into the wrong hands.”
“I think we are all agreed that the hands of Faerod Silvertree are the wrong hands,” another warrior said, “but I doubt me if any three of us here could agree for long on whose hands are the right ones, to wield such power. Would any of you trust me, while I held such a blade at your throat?”
Suddenly everyone was speaking, raising their voices over one another to be heard; the baron stood and bellowed, “Be still!” in a roar that shocked echoes back from the walls even through the tapes
tries.
In the head-turning silence that followed, he said, “This is the one point upon which we all know, I think, that our converse must needs fall apart into dissension. So let it be agreed, here and now, that we not wrangle over it. The time for such dispute must needs come if the Stone is ever held by any of us. Here, tonight, let us consider the threat, and benefits, of the Stone, so that no matter who comes to hold it, the most able men in Aglirta—we who are here tonight—know what it can be used for and won’t act out of ignorance. Isn’t ‘not knowing’ what we fear most?”
“As in, ‘not knowing when the husband will return’?” someone commented, and after a moment of startled silence, there was a roar of shouted laughter, almost of relief that someone had found a jest. When it died away, a hush came over the room unbidden, born of the excitement—the peril—all who were present felt.
“We are all ambitious,” the baron added, “but some of us are rightly fearful. Unhood, mages of Ornentar, and speak as plainly as this brave scribe dared to. My fear is that we’ve no time to spare for threatening each other or speaking cryptically.”
“You speak truth as usual, Lord Baron,” one of the mages replied. “The lure of this Dwaer is almost irresistible to any mage—but out of habit, many wizards are as fearful as they are ambitious.” His hands drew back his hood, and most in the room recognized the calm countenance of Huldaerus, the Master of Bats, whose interests included using magic to give human warriors bat wings, taloned hands, and utter obedience to him. He was known up and down the River Coiling, and feared. A minstrel had once said at a Moot that “Aglirta’s worst nightmare would be Huldaerus and Silvertree, working together—a terror for Silverflow Vale one year and all Darsar, the next.” That minstrel had not been seen for some time.
The mage sitting next to him also unhooded, to reveal the handsome, faintly smiling countenance of Nynter of the Nine Daggers, who habitually defended himself with winged flying daggers and collected gemstone statuettes and pretty slave girls. His curls were dyed the hue of old honey, and his dancing eyes were merry with excitement. He was feared in Ornentar, but not so much beyond its borders as the Master of Bats … perhaps because he traveled less.