by Ed Greenwood
The mage’s clear green eyes danced with mirth. “On the contrary, my seven years are long past and well served.” The two stared at each other. Wind whistled forlornly over jagged stone. “So,” he said finally, “they sent you here, too?”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head in lieu of an answer. “I have a camp nearby. There’s a fire waiting to be lit.”
Ravendas gazed at him critically, then shrugged. Night was falling. Already she could see a few pinpricks of starlight in the slate-blue sky. A fire would be welcome. Besides, she knew she could simply kill him if he tried anything she did not like. She sheathed her sword and slung her pack over her shoulder.
“Lead on, mage.”
It was full dark by the time they reached a small hollow protected by a granite overhang. The mage spoke a word of magic, and a neatly laid fire burst into crimson flame. At least he could do that much, Ravendas thought grudgingly In the golden light, she could see that he was handsomer than she had thought, his nose long and straight, his jaw prominent beneath a few days’ growth of coppery beard. As she watched, he began fashioning a stew of jerked venison, raisins, and sun-dried tomatoes. Neither spoke as they ate, huddled close to the fire. A thin, sharp crescent of moon rose above the far peaks. When they finished, the mage took her bowl and put away the remaining food. He sat down across the fire from her.
‘They sent you here, didn’t they?” he asked. ‘They gave you a mission to prove your worth, just like they did me.” Gold flecks danced in his green eyes. “The Zhentarim.”
She wondered right then if she should kill him. Perhaps the Zhentarim had sent them both here to see who was the stronger. If so, she intended to win. Her hand strayed toward the eating knife at her belt.
A half-smile touched his lips. “Feel free to kill me, warrior. Of course, know that if you do, you will never discover the way to climb the walls of Gurthang yourself.”
Ravendas could only laugh. The mage was young, yes, but he was clever. “And I suppose you would tell me if you knew?”
“Only fate can say,” he said mysteriously, drawing a deck of cards from a leather pouch at his belt. He shuffled them deftly with uncallused hands.
“Draw three.” He fanned the cards out before her. “Set them face down before you.”
“I’m a little old for card games,” she noted acidly, but did as he asked.
“This is your past,” he said, turning the first card. The Empress of Swords. A spark of magical blue light shimmered about the outline of a stern woman standing before a dark, broken landscape, a red-tinged sword in her grip. “A woman of ambition wields death to gain what she desires.”
Ravendas nodded. The card suited her well enough When she was seventeen, she had left her home and journeyed to Baldur’s Gate, where she joined the city’s elite guard, the Flaming Fist. Within five years, she had risen high in the Fist. But Baldur’s Gate was just one city. The Black Network wove its dark webs across all the Heartlands. That was why Ravendas sought to join the Zhentarim. One day she intended to stand mighty among them.
The mage continued. “This is the path you now tread.” He turned the second card. The Scepter. Again, blue light flickered over the drawing. The mage’s eyes met hers. “You seek great power for yourself, at any cost.”
She simply shrugged. She did not need a wizard’s trick to tell her something she already knew.
“And this is your fate,” the mage said, turning the third card. She reached out and snatched it from him before he could look at it. She’d had enough of this game.
“I make my own fate,” she said flatly, shoving the card into a pocket of her leather jerkin. He nodded, but she could see a strange curiosity in his expression.
“All right, apprentice, you’ve had your fun,” she growled. “Now, tell me what you know about Gurthang.”
He stood to retrieve a book from his pack. It was bound in timeworn leather, its pages yellowed and cracked with age. “This tome contains fragments of a lost cycle of epic poems, the Talfirian Eddas,” he explained. “The eddas tell many legends of these mountains, and of the now-vanished people who once dwelt here, the Talfirc. Unfortunately, Talfir, the language this was penned in long ago, is a forgotten tongue. I’ve been translating it as I journeyed, but it has been tedious work. Only today did I reach a passage that concerned the sorcerer Ckai-el-Ckaan.”
Ravendas leaned forward eagerly. “What does it say?”
The mage opened the ancient tome to a place marked with a black ribbon. “It tells many things. But perhaps most importantly, it tells that we are not the first to attempt to gain entrance to Gurthang.”
“What do you mean?”
The mage’s expression was grim. “The last fragment I translated tells how, in the centuries after the fortress was raised, many tried to climb Gurthang’s walls.” He bent his head to read the strange, spidery script on the page before him. “To the sorcerer’s keep they journeyed, the walls of midnight to climb: Kaidel the Ancient, Sindara of the Golden Eyes, and Loredoc who slew the great wyrm of Orsil. One by one they came, and one by one they perished. For thus speaks the prophecy of Ckai-el-Ckaan, that no one hero will ever be great enough to scale the walls of Gurthang.’”
Slowly the mage shut the book. “No one has ever climbed Gurthang. Not in a thousand years.”
Ravendas could not suppress a shiver. “Then it’s impossible,” she whispered.
The mage nodded. “Apparently.”
She swore vehemently and stood, pacing about the fire “Then why would the Zhentarim send two prospective agents here, to prove their worth by attempting a task that mythical wizards couldn’t accomplish? It makes no sense!”
“No, it doesn’t,” the mage said quietly. “Unless they considered these prospective agents a mere nuisance, of no great ability or use. Unless they never had any real intention of allowing them to join the Zhentarim.”
Instantly Ravendas knew it was true. The Zhentarim had simply wished to be rid of her. Just like the mage, A nuisance of no great ability.
“We are fools,” she spat.
The mage shrugged at this. “Perhaps. But then, the game has not been played to its end.” He rose and banked the fire. “It’s late. We should sleep.”
Ravendas let out a deep breath. She locked away her fury, saving it for the morning light, when it might serve some purpose. She pulled her blanket from her pack and spread it on top of the mage’s bedroll. He regarded her in surprise. Yes, she thought, he was indeed handsome.
“It’s going to be cold tonight,” she explained with a crooked grin. She burrowed beneath the woolen blankets. The mage laughed-the bells again, low and soft-and moved to join her.
The warrior and the mage rose early the next morning to begin the impossible-the scaling of Gurthang. His name was Marnok, and he came from the city of Illefarn far to the north. That much he told her as they broke camp in the steely predawn light.
“I am curious, warrior,” he said as they gathered their things. “What makes you think we can accomplish something no other has in a thousand years?”
“Sometimes a rat can find a way into a castle barred against wolves,” she replied mysteriously, shrugging her pack onto strong shoulders. “Besides, I’m not willing to let the Zhentarim defeat me. At least not yet. This isn’t the first time I’ve done something others had said was impossible.” She fixed him with her night-blue gaze. “Why? What makes you think we can do it?”
“You shall see,” was his only answer.
She frowned at this, then set off across the barren, rocky basin, heading toward the beckoning finger of the fortress. The mage followed behind.
“So, am I to know your name or not?” he asked as they scrambled over a jumble of boulders.
“Ravendas.”
He paused to look up at her, the cold wind tangling his long, copper-colored hair. “That’s not your real name.”
She froze without looking at him, then continued on. “I
t is my real name. Now. But when I was a child, I was called Kela.”
“Why did you take another name?” he asked as they reached the top of the boulder heap.
They sat for a moment, catching their breath. The tops of the peaks surrounding the basin looked molten with the first touch of sunfire. “I’ll tell you a story, Marnok. My father was a mercenary, one of the proudest warriors between the Sword Coast and the Caravan Cities. Then a woman caught his eye. He married her, and to please her he Put down his sword to take up farming. They had two daughters, and I suppose they were happy.” She ran a hand through her short, white-gold hair. “Until one day when three brigands rode onto the farm. My father wanted to kill them, but my mother begged him not to resort to violence. So he strode outside to tell the highwaymen to leave. They just laughed, and while my sister Kera and I watched, they gutted him where he stood.”
Marnok regarded her sadly. “I’m sorry.”
She laughed, a harsh sound. “Don’t be. It taught me something I will never forget. Love shackled my father, made him forget his strength, and he paid for it with his life. That day I vowed I would never be weak like him. So when I was finally free of that house, I took a new name, a strong one. Kela was a child’s name. It is not my name.” With that she started down the slope, leaving the mage to scramble after her.
The sun had just crested the eastern escarpment of the basin when they reached the fortress. Despite the new morning light, Gurthang was utterly black, an ancient sentinel keeping watch over the valley.
“All right, Marnok, how do we accomplish the impossible?” she asked.
From one of the myriad pouches at his belt he drew out a small clay jar marked by strange runes. “With this.” He broke the jar’s lead seal. She could see some sort of emerald green salve inside. “Give me your hands.” She held them out, and he carefully spread a thin layer of salve over them. “Now, try to grip the wall.”
She glared at him. Did he take her for an idiot?
“Grip the wall, Ravendas,” he urged again.
She supposed she might as well discover what game he was playing. Walking to the wall, she reached out and attempted to grasp the smooth black surface. Her fingers sank into the stone. She recoiled in shock, staring at her hands. Gradually realization dawned over her.
“Where did you get this, Marnok?”
His expression was unreadable. “I have my sources.”
She turned back toward the wall and dug her fingers once more into the rock. It was a strange sensation, like plunging her hands into thick, cold mud. She began pulling herself upward. Why should she wait for the mage, now that she had thе means to reach the top herself?
“I wouldn’t recommend climbing any higher.”
Something in the mage’s voice made her halt. She glared down at him. “Why?”
“Come down and I’ll show you.”
She paused, thinking. True, there must be some reason Marnok had not simply used the salve himself to climb the wall. She let go and dropped lithely to the ground. The mage was peering into crevices and under rocks, searching for something.
“This will do,” he said after a minute.
She approached and squatted down to see what he had found. It was a small, unidentifiable animal, long dead. Its flesh was gone, but dried sinews bound its bones together. She could see by the worn, flat stubs of teeth in its skull that it had died an old animal. A few ragged tufts of fur still clung to the small carcass.
“If you’re hungry, you might want to find something a little fresher,” she noted caustically.
Ignoring her, he carried the little skeleton to the ground before the dark wall. After dabbing a small amount of the emerald salve on the dead creature’s paws, he chanted a dissonant incantation in a low voice. The skeleton began to move. Ravendas raised a curious eyebrow. Perhaps the mage was more powerful than she had guessed.
“Climb,” he whispered.
The animal skeleton lurched toward the wall, then began to scrabble upward, the magical salve allowing it to sink its claws into the smooth, dark stone. The skeleton was perhaps twenty feet above Ravendas when she noticed something strange. The stone some distance to the creature’s right was undulating, almost as if it had turned to liquid. Suddenly she swore. As if emerging from dark water, a shape rose from the smooth surface of the wall, long and sinuous, with horns like curved scimitars and teeth like daggers. It was the head of a dragon, as perfectly black as the stone from which it sprang. Two glowing crimson slits appeared above its snout. It was opening its eyes.
“Look there,” Marnok said softly, pointing to a section of wall off to the undead animal’s left. Ravendas followed his gaze to see another dragon emerge from the stone. Each of the dark, serpentine heads turned toward the skeletal creature that climbed between them. Without warning, a beam of hot crimson light shot from the fiery eyes of the first dragon. The beam arced around the curved wall of the fortress. It struck the animal skeleton, but the reanimated creature kept climbing.
‘The dragon’s gaze didn’t harm it,” Ravendas uttered in amazement.
“Keep watching,” the mage instructed.
Moments later the eyes of the other dragon flared. A second beam shot from its eyes, arcing around the wall from the opposite direction to strike the undead animal. As the two beams connected, their color changed from violent red to searing white. In a brilliant flash of light, the skeleton of the undead animal exploded. Smoking splinters of bone rained down on Ravendas and Marnok. The two dragon heads shut their glowing eyes and sank silently back into the smooth surface of the wall.
“Now you see why I was not so eager to begin climbing,” Marnok said softly.
“How does it work?” Ravendas asked in dread fascination.
“I’m not entirely certain,” the mage said, “but I have conducted a few other experiments like the one you just witnessed.”
She listened then as he explained his discoveries. It seemed that within the circular wall of the fortress there resided four columns of magical energy, one situated at each point of the compass. When something-or someone — climbed the wall, a dragon’s head would rise from each of the two columns that bordered the quadrant where the intruder climbed. The eyebeams of one of the dragons didn’t appear to cause harm, but when the eyebeams of both dragons met, the arc of magical energy was completed, and the climber was-as they had so graphically witnessed-destroyed.
“Why don’t you simply wave your staff, mage, and make wings sprout from our backs?” Ravendas said caustically. “Then we could just fly over the wall.”
“And we would die just as quickly,” Marnok replied evenly. “I have watched birds that flew too close to the keep. The dragons found them with their gazes easily enough.”
Ravendas swore in frustration. “So why don’t we smear that salve of yours over our entire bodies? Then we could just walk right through the wall.”
“Yes,” the mage said calmly. “And then we could just as promptly suffocate with our lungs full of rock. The salve does not make our flesh incorporeal, Ravendas. It only causes stone to flow around it.”
She threw her hands up in disgust. “I suppose you have some other solution in mind that will absolutely dazzle me with its cleverness?”
A smile danced in his eyes. “No. Not yet, anyway. However, at least I have learned how the tower’s defenses work. That is some help.”
“Perhaps,” Ravendas replied skeptically. “But then, I’ve found that sometimes knowledge only gets in the way. Sometimes knowing the truth can make one give up in despair.” She clenched a fist. “And I am not about to give up yet”
The mage answered only with silence.
As the morning wore on, Ravendas prowled around Gurthang, searching for something that could help them. On the west side of the fortress she discovered a tarn, a mirror to the cold blue sky. The pool lapped up against the outer wall of the fortress, and she half-wondered if there might be some secret portal beneath its surface. But instinct told her
that the way into the tower was upward, over the wall. She returned to find the mage sitting on a sun-warmed stone, poring over the old book he had shown her the night before.
“I’ve just translated the final passage about Ckai-el-Ckaan,” he said. The wind tugged at his purple cloak.
“And?”
Marnok ran a finger over the ancient parchment. ” ‘Know that should the Finger of Ckai-el-Ckaan ever be lifted from its resting place, Gurthang shall fall, destroying all within. There is but a single path for one who would live: he must face the sunset, and give himself to darkness.’ ” Slowly he shut the book. “I’m afraid that’s it.”
Ravendas was unimpressed. “Forgive me for saying so, but that was hardly helpful.” The mage only shrugged in silence. “So what do you think it is?” she asked thoughtfully then, gazing at the dark spire of the tower. “The relic, I mean.”
“A magical wand, maybe. Or a staff of great power. But if we’re ever going to find out, we’ll have to do something different than all those heroes who died here one by one.”
Suddenly it was so clear. Ravendas took a step toward the fortress. “But that’s it, Marnok. Don’t you see?” By his perplexed expression, he apparently did not. ” ‘One by one they came, and one by one they perished.’ You read it yourself in that damned book of yours. In the past, the arrogant bastards who tried to climb Gurthang did it alone.” She fixed him with her indigo gaze. “But there are two of us.”
“What are we to do?” Marnok asked in astonishment.
She began rummaging through her pack. “Rope,” was all she said. “We need rope.” Shaking his head in confusion, Marnok moved to help her.
By afternoon, they were ready.
The two stood before the northeast quadrant of Gurthang, Ravendas close to the north column of invisible defensive magic, Marnok close to the east. A coil of rope hung from Ravendas’s belt, its end staked to the ground. The rope was knotted at intervals a fathom in length, approximated by the span of her arms. Marnok had a similar coil. The mage had already coated their hands with the magical salve.