Shadowrealm

by Paul S. Kemp

  “For what?” Riven asked.

  “Give it to him,” Cale said.

  Rivalen spoke a word and the tarnished chalice, still leaking shadows over its rim, appeared in his hand. He handed it to Riven.

  “Heavy,” the assassin said.

  “Yes,’ Cale said, and knew they weren’t talking about the chalice.

  Riven looked at Cale, at the contents of the chalice, and drank.

  Then he began to scream.

  Furlinastis devoured the distance. The border of the Shadowstorm drew closer, larger, the wind and rain more intense. In moments they had reached the edge of the storm. A wall of churning black clouds and green lightning stretched from the plains to the heavens.

  Abelar leaned forward, clutching his blade, as the dragon breached the dark wall.

  The wind and rain did not abate. Lightning and thunder still shook the sky. But the darkness deepened, deadened sound, and dulled senses. Abelar felt the storm’s life draining power testing Cale’s ward. A vibration shook Abelar’s body. It took him a moment to realize that the dragon’s growl had caused it.

  “The air stinks of Kesson Rel,” Furlinastis said.

  “I feel Shar in it,” Abelar answered.

  “The one is the other,” the dragon said, and beat his wings.

  Abelar leaned over the dragon’s neck, searching for his company.

  “Wide arcs,” he said to the dragon. “As fast as you can. We are looking for a company of men and women, over two hundred strong.”

  The dragon lowered his altitude and angled left and right as he flew ever deeper into the storm.

  “There,” the dragon said above the wind.

  “Where? Where?”

  “Ahead,” Furlinastis said.

  Abelar heard the battle before he saw it—the high pitched keen of shadows, the shouts of men and women.

  And then he saw them, a light in the darkness.

  His company stood shield to sword in a circular formation. Thousands of shadows swirled in the air over them, before them, around them. Light flared here and there within the circle—no doubt Roen and the priests—but swarms of shadows pounced on it, tried to extinguish it. But for every light the shadows extinguished, the priests lit another. Abelar heard the clarion of Trewe’s trumpet over the thunder and his heart soared.

  “Let them know we are here Furlinastis,” he said.

  The dragon drew in a breath and expelled it in a roar that overwhelmed the thunder. Heads turned to look up. The red eyes of shadows glared out of the black.

  Wanting the company to know it was him atop the dragon rather than another enemy, he struck a sunrod on the dragon’s scales and the tip of the small device flared to life. The glow caused Furlinastis to growl as they streaked over the battlefield.

  “I am with you!” he shouted but didn’t know if they heard him.

  Trewe’s trumpet sounded another clarion. He looked back and saw blades raised, heard cheers. They’d heard him.

  And so, too, had the shadows.

  Ahead, behind, above, and below, he saw scores and scores of black, red-eyed forms arrowing toward them. Furlinastis roared and angled upward. The darkness extinguished the sunrod.

  “Abelar is with us!” Regg shouted, and drove his illuminated blade into the chest of a shadow, one of Forrin’s former soldiers. The blow extinguished the creature’s eyes and it boiled away, shrieking, into a cloud of foul vapor.

  “The light is in you all!” Roen shouted from behind as another globe of white luminescence burst into being above their formation.

  Shadows thronged the air all around the formation, darting past, streaking down from above. The presence of so many undead turned the already chill air frigid, and Regg’s breath formed clouds in the air as he slashed, stabbed, butted with his shield.

  The keening of the shadows filled his ears, but so did the comforting calls and shouts of the men and women of his company. Beside him, Trewe exclaimed in pain and fell to his knees. Three shadows reached into his chest. Trewe’s mouth opened but no sound emerged.

  “Down to whatever hell will take you!” Regg shouted. He brandished his shield, showed them the rose of Lathander, and let some of his soul move through him and into the rose.

  A wedge of rose-colored light flared from the shield, vaporizing the three shadows attacking Trewe. A backhand crosscut slew another shadow and he grabbed Trewe with his shield arm, pulled him to his feet, and let healing energy flow into the young warrior.

  “Well enough?” Regg asked.

  “Well enough,” Trewe answered.

  Both men turned and eyed the horde of shadows that filled the air so thickly it was nearly impossible to separate one of the creatures from another. Black bodies clotted the sky, made the air impenetrable. Hundreds of them veered high to engage Abelar and his dragon. Regg didn’t stop to consider how Abelar might have bent a shadow dragon to his service. He didn’t care. He cared only that his friend fought with them. They couldn’t hope to hold for long, but they would hold as long as they could and hope their sacrifice meant something for the Saerbians.

  “Keep us in light, Roen!” he shouted, and slashed another shadow. “Hold this ground, men and women of Lathander!”

  Riven fell to his knees, his head thrown back in a scream. The sky seemed to echo his agony with booms of thunder and flares of lightning.

  Cale knew what Riven was feeling, the emptiness that accompanied revelation. He knelt beside the assassin, let his shadows cloak him, comfort him.

  Rivalen watched them both intently, golden eyes alight, the Black Chalice already recovered from where Riven had dropped it and returned to the extra-dimensional space in which the Shadovar stored it.

  “It will pass,” Cale said to Riven. “It will pass.”

  Riven gritted his teeth, hugged himself, writhed, and screamed again.

  After a time the screams ended. He drew a shuddering breath and let Cale pull him to his feet. His good eye regained focus. He doubled over, vomited. When he was done, he looked up at Cale.

  “It’s that simple? It’s been there all along?”

  Cale nodded. “That simple.”

  They stared at one another for a long moment.

  Both knew that one of them, at least, must die. Both if they failed to kill Kesson Rel.

  “We need to know where he is,” Cale said over his shoulder to Rivalen. “Now.”

  The shadows around Rivalen swirled. He cocked his head, consulting his brother through some unseen magical means.

  “Kesson Rel is not in Ordulin,” Rivalen said, his tone mildly surprised.

  “Then where in the Nine Hells is he?” Cale said.

  Brennus communicated Kesson Rel’s location to his brother then cut off the connection. He closed his hand around his mother’s necklace and placed it in his pocket, where he would keep it forever.

  He couldn’t murder his brother. Murder itself didn’t trouble him, but murdering his brother did. The consequences were too great.

  If he betrayed Rivalen, his father would kill him. His other brothers would wonder what had happened, would eventually learn of it. Sides would be chosen and his family would splinter. The revived Empire of Netheril would die stillborn.

  He couldn’t do that to his family, to his people. He would bear the knowledge of Rivalen’s deed alone, just as he would bear his mother’s necklace.

  But he would not do nothing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  6 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms

  Abelar gripped the makeshift harness and steadied himself atop Furlinstasis’s back. Shadows poured from the dragon’s purple and black scales. A cloud of ink stained the air around them and left a path of smeared black in their wake. The rain felt like sling bullets against his exposed face. The roar of the wind filled his ears, pierced only by the keening of the undead.

  Living shadows thronged the air, swirled around him, a colony of red-eyed bats on the wing. They swooped and dived at him and the dragon. Furlinas
tis wheeled, pulled up, bit at the undead within reach of his jaws. His teeth closed on three of the creatures and they boiled away into oblivion. His claws shredded several more into gossamer ribbons carried off in the wind.

  Holding the rope harness with one hand, Abelar tried to anticipate the dragon’s movements while he slashed and stabbed with his enchanted blade. A shadow darted in from his right, arms outstretched, and his blade tore through the space between its head and body. Its red eyes winked out as Furlinastis beat his wings rapidly and wheeled right to avoid a throng of the undead. A shadow swooped in and passed a hand through Abelar’s chest. His heart rebelled, constricted. Cold sank into him. Grunting, he stabbed the shadow through the back as it streaked away. He felt the slight, tell-tale resistance that indicated the magic of his blade had found purchase in the incorporeal flesh. Whipping around, he saw another shadow streaking for him from the right. A reverse cross-cut slashed it into a dissipating cloud of foul-smelling smoke.

  The dragon roared, reared, and slashed at a score of shadows congregating around his head and neck. His jaws killed several, but more streaked in to replace the dead.

  “Down!” Abelar shouted at the dragon.

  Furlinastis dived, leaving the shadows and their keening behind. Abelar bent low and held on.

  On the plain below he saw his company between the breaks in the cloud of shadows, a circle of white light holding their ground against a swirling army of shadows. He saw flashes of rose colored brilliance, holy power channeled through priests and those given over to Lathander, saw shadows turned to vapor before it.

  In the pauses between thunder, lightning, and the dragon’s roars, he heard the shouts and chants of his company, the men and women who stood in the light. He raised his blade, hacked at a shadow that came within reach, and watched some of its form boil away into the darkness.

  Furlinastis pulled up and wheeled, sending Abelar’s stomach into his throat. The dragon swooped through a group of shadows. Claws, teeth, and Abelar’s sword destroyed half a dozen of the undead as the dragon streaked through and past.

  Thunder boomed, rolled, and lightning ripped the sky and struck the earth near the battlefield. Abelar turned to look and saw several trees burning on the plain.

  From the right, a throng of shadows, a hundred or more, flew like arrows at Furlinastis. More streaked toward them from the other side.

  The dragon roared, beat his wings, and angled upward.

  Nearly unseated, Abelar held on, feeling the tendons in his forearm stretch. He cursed and kept his wits enough to wave his blade at a nearby shadow, but missed. Another appeared from nowhere, passed through him. Cold settled in his bones, but Furlinastis’s speed carried Abelar away from the creature.

  The dragon veered again, swooped downward, and Abelar caught another glimpse of his company, of their light. Had he still stood in Lathander’s light himself, he could have healed himself, could have turned his blade into a beacon, could have channeled the Morninglord’s power through his body and soul and used its light to sear the shadows out of existence, could have rallied his company against even the Shadowstorm. But he had fallen, descended so far into shadow that he rode them into battle.

  He shouted, slashed, stabbed, and killed. Shadows whirled around him, around the dragon. The sky was filled with them. They reached through his armor, tried to still his heart, tried to steal his life. He thought of his son, of his friends, and roared defiance. He slashed, cross-cut, and stabbed.

  Furlinastis answered his shouts with roars of his own, the sound as loud as the thunder. The dragon wheeled through the sky, a Gondsman’s engine of destruction. Great claws swept shadows from the sky like so many stinging insects. Teeth snapped up the undead by the half-dozen.

  But the shadows were numberless, and Abelar knew that another would rise from the body of each man and woman of his company that fell to their life-draining touch. And as the storm moved across Sembia, it would add still more to its numbers.

  He feared he was looking at the end of the world.

  Furlinastis dived low, swooping over the company of Lathanderians. Abelar couldn’t make out faces. He noted only the rise and fall of blades, shouts of pain and anger. Some had fallen. He saw their bodies flat on the black earth, spattered with mud and shadows.

  Above the wind, above Furlinastis’s roars, Abelar heard several of the men shout the battle cry of his company.

  “We stand in the light!”

  Growing despair made the words at first seem silly to Abelar, trivial in the face of a darkness that could not be slowed, a darkness that ate its victims and vomited them back up in a new form to serve it. But he found a kernel of hope in the words and grabbed at it. He realized that the only thing to do in the face of darkness was stand and fight beside like-minded men and women. He had fallen into shadow, true, but there was light in him still.

  Shouting, he slashed a shadow, stabbed another, another. One of the creatures struck him in the chest and arm, turned his sword arm numb. He waved his blade ineffectually as the shadow reached into his chest. His breath left him. His heart lurched.

  Another abrupt dive by Furlinastis left the shadow behind and saved Abelar’s life.

  He gathered himself and looked back, expecting to see the shadow army in pursuit. Instead, he saw them peeling off, streaking in the opposite direction.

  Below and behind, a cheer went up from the battlefield. Trewe’s trumpet blew a victorious note. The dragon, too, roared.

  Abelar watched the shadows wheel away, gather some distance away, and felt only dread. The shadows swarmed around a point perhaps two long bowshots away from the company. Their numbers stunned him. The swirling column of their forms seemed to reach from the ground to the clouds.

  “So many,” he said, marveling at their numbers.

  Without warning the rain and thunder stopped. Trewe’s horn and the cheers of the company went quiet. For a moment, all was silent, pensive.

  Cold seeped across the battlefield, a deeper cold than that of the shadows. Supernatural fear accompanied it. It reached into Abelar, sent his teeth to chattering, stole his nerve. The dragon growled his discomfort. Abelar heard inarticulate whispers in his mind. He discerned no words he could understand but the sibilant tone touched something primal in him, set his heart to racing, lit his mind afire with terror.

  A moan went up from his comrades below. He heard Regg shouting to the company, his old friend’s voice on the verge of panic. “Hold! Hold!”

  Abelar fought through the terror as best he could and scanned the darkness for the source of the cold and fear. He could see little through the impenetrable cloud of living shadows. He sensed something at the fringe of his vision, something large, dark, remorseless, terror given form and set loose in the world.

  “What new evil is this, dragon? I cannot see!”

  Furlinastis extended his neck to look behind them, hissed, and veered left.

  “A nightwalker,” the dragon said. “But I have never seen nor heard of one so large. Terror lives in its eyes, and death in its hands. This foe is beyond your companions, perhaps beyond even me. They are lost, human, as is the battle.”

  The cloud of shadows parted like a stage curtain and the nightwalker stepped between them. It towered as tall as ten men, looming over the field like a siege engine. It had the shape of a man, but hairless, featureless, its entire form smooth and black, like an idol carved from onyx by the jungle savages of Chult. The shadows broke ranks and darted around its massive form like flies around a corpse.

  It regarded the battlefield, Abelar’s company, and another wave of terror went forth from it. Thousands of shadows keened.

  Abelar’s company answered not with another moan, not with shouts of terror, but with the clarion of Trewe’s trumpet.

  “Back, dragon!” Abelar shouted. “Turn back!”

  Furlinastis shook his head as he flew, completing his turn. “It is over, human. I will take you to—”

  “Turn back! Now!”
>
  “My service to the Maskarran does not extend to self-sacrifice. It is over.”

  From behind and below, Abelar heard Trewe’s trumpet issue the order to form up.

  Desperate, Abelar took his sword in both hands, turned as best he could in his makeshift harness, and put it in the divot on the dragon’s back between his beating wings. He made sure Furlinastis felt the point.

  “You will turn back or I will sink this to its hilt! They will not stand alone!”

  The dragon’s head whirled around, jaws open, streams of shadow leaking from his nose and throat.

  Abelar pressed down on the blade. “Do not test me, wyrm!”

  Furlinastis hissed in rage.

  “Try to dislodge me or use your killing breath on me and I’ll do it. It will take but a moment. You may not die, but you will not be able fly and you will face the nightwalker on foot.”

  Anger stoked the fire in the slits of Furlinastis’s eyes

  “How will you have it?” Abelar said, and pushed the point of his blade harder against the scales. “How? Decide!”

  The dragon roared with rage, snapped his head forward, and started to wheel about.

  “You are no servant of the Morninglord,” Furlinastis shouted above the wind.

  Abelar considered what he had done, knew that he would do it again if necessary.

  “Perhaps not,” he said softly.

  Abelar looked over the dragon’s wing as they came around and saw his company assembling not for a last stand but for a charge. Trewe’s clarion rang out again, sounding the ready. Illuminated blades at intervals held the darkness of the Shadowstorm at bay. Dead men and women lay scattered about the field. Abelar presumed their souls, raised by the Shadowstorm, had already joined the army of shadows. He hoped that Jiriis was not among them.

  The dragon continued its slow turn.

  Regg stood at the forefront of the company. Abelar heard his voice but couldn’t make out his words. He saw Roen and another priest moving quickly from soldier to soldier, healing with a prayer and a touch. The company answered Regg’s words with raised blades and a shout.