Farthest Reach

by Richard Baker

  Arrows hissed in the darkness, and more nilshai trilled in pain or lunged out with their awful magic. Araevin spied one of the monsters hovering back out of the fight, engaged in a great summoning spell that it was completing with fearsome quickness.

  I don’t want to see what it’s trying to conjure up there, he decided.

  He threw out his hand and barked the words of a powerful spell, and before the nilshai finished its terrible conjuration a great golden hand materialized around it. The giant-sized fist closed around the monster, cutting off its spell and crushing the flying worm against the far wall, slowly grinding the life from the thing.

  Araevin whirled to look for a new foe, but another of the nilshai seized his body in a telekinetic grip and hurled him into the air. He heard Ilsevele shout in terror, and the room spun end-over-end. As quick as he could, Araevin began a flying spell to save himself from the fall, but he was too slow—he hit the cracked flagstones with a bone-jarring impact before he finished. His skull bounced on the stone floor, and everything went black for a long, cold moment.

  Damn, he thought. They’re quick.

  He started to fight his way back up through the darkness to his battling comrades, distant and strangely high above him. With a groan Araevin managed to roll over onto his elbows and knees, and pushed himself upright. His head swam and his left arm dangled at his side with a searing hot pain burning in his forearm.

  He staggered to his feet and pointed his wand at the first nilshai he could see, barking out the command word for the device. A terrible shriek of tortured air split the darkness as the frightful blue bolt of disruption ripped the ancient hall, bursting one of the nilshai asunder and tearing the wing from another one behind the first. Araevin whipped around to blast at another one of the aerial sorcerers, but he missed the creature—in the blink of an eye it simply vanished from sight, teleporting away.

  All around him, the sounds of battle slowly faded. He looked around, and realized that the nilshai had broken off the fight, fleeing back into the black depths of the old tower. Half a dozen of the monsters lay crumpled on the dark flagstones around the party, some burned, some riddled with arrows and bolts, one hacked into pieces.

  “They ran off!” Maresa cried. “Come on back whenever you’re ready, you foul flying slugs!”

  “Is everybody all right?” Ilsevele asked. She straightened up, still searching the dark galleries overhead for any sign of the flying monsters.

  Araevin glanced around. Nesterin bled freely from the ugly sucker bites on his legs and arms, and Jorin was hunched over, his clothes smoking from the lightning bolts the nilshai had thrown. But they all seemed alive, and no one terribly hurt. He looked down at his left arm. His hand trembled and ached when he tried to close his fist.

  “I think I broke my arm,” he said.

  Donnor Kerth sheathed his sword and came over to examine his hand. “So it seems,” the Lathanderian agreed. He chanted a healing prayer, setting one big hand firmly over Araevin’s injured arm, and the hot ache faded somewhat. “It will trouble you some for a day or two, but you should be able to use it now,” Kerth said.

  “Thank you,” said Araevin. He flexed his arm and made a fist. It hurt, but not as badly as before.

  “Now what, Araevin?” asked Ilsevele. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Morthil’s Door,” Araevin replied. He spoke a few arcane words, and revealed the floating aura for his companions to see. Nesterin’s eyes widened in wonder. “What I’m looking for is in there.”

  “Do what you came here to do, and do it quickly,” Jorin advised. “The damned nilshai might return at any time.”

  “Go ahead, Araevin,” Ilsevele said. Her bow was still in her hand, and she shook the hair out of her eyes. “We will stand watch.”

  “I will be as quick as I can,” Araevin promised. He turned to face the revolving cloud of silver lights in the room’s center. It, too, was a portal of sorts. He whispered the words of an opening spell. The nimbus of magic slowed its turning, and grew brighter, so bright that his companions could make it out even without Araevin’s help.

  Without waiting, Araevin stepped into the gleaming spiral of magic. At once he felt himself carried away, lifted up into a marvelous chamber of streaming mist and translucent walls, a ghostly room that hovered in the air above the black courtyard. His companions stared at him in amazement, but they were dim and indistinct. He suspected that he’d become nothing more than a spectral blur of himself when he entered Morthil’s Door, at least to the eyes of any who waited outside. But within the ghostly chamber, he felt completely solid. He glanced down at his hands, and found that his body had indeed grown somewhat translucent. He could see the lightless hall outside through his own garments and flesh.

  Some sort of extradimensional space, he decided. Araevin was familiar with spells of the sort, though he had never studied any of them at length, and hadn’t heard of any that endured as long or as perfectly as Morthil’s evidently had. He turned his attention to the chamber’s contents, and as he did so he felt himself drift farther into the ghostly walls. The world outside faded to a dull dark smear obscured by misty walls beneath his feet, and the ghostly chamber grew more substantial. Spectral shelves and tomes began to appear all around him, the secret library Morthil had preserved in the ethereal matrix so long ago.

  Morthil did not want that knowledge to be lost, Araevin realized. He created a place where his books and tomes would be preserved forever, safe from harm or theft, yet accessible to anyone who entered without deceit. Even though Mooncrescent Tower had been swallowed entirely by the nilshai plane, Morthil’s library survived unspoiled.

  I have to find a way to bring this out of darkness. I cannot leave it here like this.

  He glanced up, at the higher and better-defined floors overhead, and his eye fell on a great dome above him. Centered beneath the streaming mists stood a reading stand carved in the shape of two entwined silver dragons. In their outstretched claws they held a large, heavy tome of burnished copper plate, its pale vellum pages shining brightly in the muted light.

  It was the tome he had seen in his vision, the tome in which Morthil had inscribed the words of the telmiirkara neshyrr, the Rite of Binding.

  He approached the massive tome on its ornate stand. He could feel the magical power contained in the book. Golden glyphs crawled across its burnished pages, glowing softly in the sourceless light of Morthil’s vault. He could no longer see or hear his companions in the black hall outside, but he paid that no mind. The tome absorbed his attention completely.

  He touched the pages, and sigils of molten gold lifted from the tome and began to swirl around him. An eldritch melody of ancient notes thrummed in the air, as if the book itself spoke to him.

  Eyes shining in wonder, Araevin began to read.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1 Flamerule, the Year of Lightning Storms

  Curnil looked ahead into the thick green woods, dark and damp with the second straight day of rain, and shook the raindrops from his hair. All around him rode the cavalry of the elven-host, a column of gray-clad riders moving quietly alongside the Ashaba like so many ghosts. The battle at the Zhentish camp was six days behind Evermeet’s army. The elves and all the Dalesfolk who could be spared marched hard, retracing their steps back toward Ashabenford. Curnil was no strategist, but it was plain enough to him that Lord Miritar had no choice but to march the army back to Mistledale as fast as he could.

  Since the skirmish at the farmhouse, Ingra and Curnil had stayed with Storm Silverhand, riding in a small company made up of all sorts of odds and ends. Some were plain-looking Grimmar who turned out to be former adventurers, murderously deliberate in the thickest of fights. Others were freebooters and travelers from all corners of Faerûn who had simply showed up to ride at Storm Silverhand’s side. None of the twenty-odd riders who followed the Bard of Shadowdale wore a uniform or held a commission, but Curnil guessed that half of them at least wore the silver pin of the Harp
ers under their dirty jerkins and worn hauberks. They’d all fought like lions on the earthworks of the Zhentish camp.

  Curnil glanced toward the head of their small company, where Storm Silverhand rode, her long white hair plastered to her back. She was laughing and speaking with one of the other riders in their odd little company, when she whipped her head up and to the left, searching the treetops overshadowing the narrow track alongside the river. He glanced that way, wondering what had caught her eye, when realization dawned.

  “Ambush,” he hissed.

  From the treetops a dozen brilliant bolts of fire streaked down, exploding among the elven cavalry all around Storm’s small company. Horses whinnied and screamed, fair voices cried out in pain or fear, and the dull gray drizzle of the day flashed into heat, steam, and mayhem. A fire-bolt blasted into a rider near Curnil, incinerating man and mount in one terrible, glaring blast that hurled gobbets of liquid fire throughout the small company. One thick gout splattered across his horse’s face and clung to the animal’s flesh, blazing fiendishly. The animal bolted off at once, fleeing in blind panic.

  “Whoa! Whoa, damn you!” Curnil cried, but he realized that he would never get the animal under control with the fire clinging to its face.

  Curnil kicked his feet out of the stirrups, and let the horse run out from under him. He stumbled into the mud on the trail, but a moment later he had his feet under him again, and he scrambled ten feet toward the river to crouch by a boulder and figure out what was going on.

  The air was filled with winged swordsmen and sorcerers, armed for battle. Curnil stared in amazement. They were elves, of a sort, though their skin had a crimson hue and their eyes blazed with malice. “The daemonfey,” he breathed.

  The first flight swooped past the panicked column, and Curnil saw that it was not a true ambush. The daemonfey had simply streaked in through the rain and drizzle, soaring low and fast over the treetops and falling on the elven column like a fiery thunderbolt. More spells and blasts came from above as the creatures wheeled in midair, scouring the track with emerald globes of acid and crackling yellow lightning. Curnil’s ears rang with the fury of the explosions.

  White arrows hissed up through the air at the flying sorcerers, and a few of the daemonfey warriors reeled or crumpled in flight. Storm Silverhand burned half a dozen of the sinister warriors out of the air with a great blast of blinding silver fire, carving an argent swath out of the rain-streaked sky.

  Curnil swept his swords out of their scabbards and shouted defiance up at the sky. “Come on down and fight, you bastards!”

  He had cause to regret his challenge only a moment later. A wave of strange, low booming sounds washed over him, leaving a foul acrid stink in the air. All around the column terrible demons appeared, teleporting into the elven ranks. Behind Storm Silverhand a pair of hulking monsters materialized, gripping huge cleavers in their horned claws. But the silver-haired swordswoman was already engaged in a furious melee with two more monsters in front of her, her sword flashing as she battled against them.

  “Storm! Behind you!” Curnil shouted.

  He hurled himself forward, charging at the demons attacking her. For one timeless instant the battle drifted motionless around him, his blood thundering in his ears, and Storm turned slowly to meet the new threat. Then he crashed into the closest of the ogre-sized monsters, ramming the point of his silvered sword into the small of its back. Curnil was not a small man, and even though the green-scaled monster towered over him, he sent the thing stumbling off-balance directly into Storm Silverhand.

  With a single clean slash of her gleaming sword, she took the demon’s head. She flashed Curnil one quick smile, the fierce smile of a warrior born, and her eyes flew open in horror.

  A terrible blade of bronze flashed past Curnil’s eyes and slammed into his shoulder, driving him to his knees. He grunted in cold shock, as the hulking demon wrenched its gore-spattered cleaver out of his chest. Hot metal grated on bone, and a horrible spurt of blood burst out of Curnil’s collar.

  “Curnil!” screamed Storm.

  The demon’s blade stuck for a moment, and with a growl of irritation the hellspawned monster shook Curnil viciously until he was flung off the axe. He landed badly, crumpled in the mud of the trail.

  Get up, he told himself. You’ll die if you just lie here.

  But dark spots gathered at the corners of his vision, and he felt empty. His swords slipped from his grasp.

  He tried to push himself upright, to stand, to clap a hand over the awful wound, even to call for help, but he had no strength in his limbs and no breath in his throat.

  Damn, he thought. I don’t think I can get up.

  Then the darkness swallowed him.

  Araevin sat cross-legged on the floor of Morthil’s vault. The great tome of the star elf archmage lay open on his lap, but he no longer looked at it. The telmiirkara neshyrr was upon him, and having begun it, he was powerless to draw back. Of their own accord the endless passages and phrases of the rite tumbled from his mouth, and the air of Morthil’s library trembled with the magic he had unleashed.

  Some small part of him wondered how long he had been engaged in the reading, how much time had passed since he had spoken the words Morthil had learned from Ithraides and left for others after him to find. With each word he felt his power, his strength, his vitality draining away, dissipating like frost misting away on a winter morning, leaving him empty, hollow and aching. He could not bear to continue another moment, and yet he realized that if he halted there he would not survive.

  He pressed on, repeating the ancient prayers and supplications of the spell, even as his strength began to fail him and his chin drooped toward his chest.

  I cannot stop, he told himself. I must not stop.

  Yet even though his will was firm, his words began to slur, and his voice dropped to a mumble. He felt like a cold cinder, a graying coal reduced to nothing but an empty shell of ash.

  Softly, slowly, he slumped to the mist-wreathed floor. It feels as though I’m falling asleep, he thought. Falling asleep with my mind awake. Am I dying?

  He knew that he should care about dying, that he had great things to do and friends who needed him, but Araevin had no determination left to fend it off. He had lived long and well, he had traveled the world and left it a better place than he had found it. What was there to fear?

  He surrendered to the soft gray blanket that was stealing over him. Darkness hovered within, strangely close and warm, but then he sensed a growing light. He felt a presence approaching, coming to him through the dark. It was a woman, radiant and beautiful, an elf in shape and features, yet incandescent with the power contained in her form.

  He looked up to her, and saw her with his own eyes. She was a creature of starshine and wonder, a fey queen whose eyes shone like the sun. There was light and affection of a sort in her face, but there was something more besides—a terrible strength and willfulness that awed him. She was magic made flesh, the sudden power of the storm, the capriciousness of the wind, the delight of the ancient stars.

  “An eladrin,” he whispered. I have called a queen of the Court of Stars, a high lady of the fey lords!

  She stooped over him, her eyes stern, and laid a hand on his forehead. Her touch was frigidly cold.

  Few have spoken the words you have spoken this day, she said with her eyes alone. Is this truly what you wish, Araevin Teshurr?

  “It is what I have to do,” he answered, his breath as faint as candlelight.

  There is nothing that you have to do, she said. That is the gift of the gods to mortals. To complete the telmiirkara neshyrr is to surrender something precious beyond words.

  He looked into her eyes, as brilliant as suns, and did not flinch.

  The fey queen seemed to sigh. You will learn the price of your power, Araevin, she told him. But this, too, you are free to choose.

  She leaned down and kissed him, her lips soft yet bitterly cold, and she breathed into his mouth a single whi
sper of breath.

  Radiance, warmth, and life poured into his heart. He drew a great breath, and felt his soul kindle in unbearable fire. Yet it did not harm him, and it did not diminish. In the space of a dozen heartbeats the fire within had spread to the tips of his fingers and the bottoms of his feet, until it felt as though his entire body was a single sheet of steel-hard flame, dancing and flowing and burning and yet frozen into the shape of an elf.

  He looked at the white lady in wonder. “What have you given me?” he asked.

  It is not what I have given you, Araevin Teshurr. It is what I have taken away. She smiled sadly, and her eyes glimmered. You will count this a great gift for now, yet you will also know regret.

  Then she vanished, fading away into golden light and leaving him alone in Morthil’s ethereal sanctum.

  Morthil’s great tome was lying beside him, closed.

  Araevin lay there for a long moment, trying to understand what it was he felt. Then, slowly, he pushed himself upright. He glanced up at the ethereal walls of Morthil’s vault, and realized that he could see the threads of magic, the warp and woof of the Weave, woven with skill and care thousands of years ago. He reached out to touch a wall, and watched as his fingertips caused a ripple in the flowing magic just as a child might start a ripple in a still pool by brushing his fingers over the water.

  Despite himself, he laughed out loud in delight.

  He noticed that his fingertips seemed to glow in his mystic sight. Frowning, he drew his hand close to his face and studied it. Veins of magic pulsed beneath his skin, intertwined with his own blood. His flesh was possessed of an unmistakable radiance. It was still his own hand, warm, alive, and feeling, yet it was changed. Like a fine golden foil it served to indicate his shape and form, but it was delicate, paper-thin, nothing but a hollow shell of magic in which his sense of self existed.