The Ghost King t-3

by Robert Anthony Salvatore

  “Not today,” the drow explained. “Today, we meander.”

  “Bah, but I’m wantin’ a bumpy road to shake a few belches free, ye damned elf.”

  “Today we walk,” Jarlaxle said with finality.

  Athrogate looked at him with suspicion. “So ye’re not for knowin’ where we’re to be goin’.”

  The drow looked around at the rough terrain and rubbed his slender chin. “Soon,” he promised.

  “Bah! We could’ve gone back into Mirabar for more food!” Athrogate blanched as he finished, though, a rare expression indeed for the tough dwarf, for Jarlaxle fixed him with a serious and withering glare, one that reminded him in no uncertain terms who was the leader and who the sidekick.

  “Good day for a walk!” Athrogate exclaimed, and finished with a great belch.

  They set their camp only a few miles northeast of the field where they had met with Marchion Elastul, on a small ridge among a line of scraggly, short trees, many dead, others nearly leafless. Below them to the west loomed the remains of an old farm, or perhaps a small village, beyond a short rocky field splashed with flat, cut stones, most lying but some standing on end, leading Athrogate to mutter that it was probably an old graveyard.

  “That or a pavilion,” Jarlaxle replied, hardly caring.

  Selûne was up, dancing in and out of the many small clouds that rushed overhead. Under her pale glow, Athrogate was soon snoring contentedly, but for Jarlaxle, the thought of Reverie was not welcomed.

  He watched as the shadows under the moon’s pale glow began to shrink, disappear, then stretch toward the east as the moon passed overhead and started its western descent. Weariness crept in upon him, and he resisted it for a long while.

  The drow silently berated himself for his foolishness. He couldn’t stay present and alert forever.

  He leaned against a dead tree, a twisted silhouette whose shadow looked like the skeleton of a man who reached, pleading, to the gods. Jarlaxle didn’t climb it—the old tree likely wouldn’t have held his weight—but instead remained standing, leaning against the rough trunk.

  He let his mind fall away from his surroundings, let it fall inward. Memories blended with sensations in the gentle swirl of Reverie. He felt his own heartbeat, the blood rushing through his veins. He felt the rhythms of the world, like a gentle breathing beneath his feet, and he embraced the sensation of a connection to the earth, as if he had grown roots into the deep rock. At the same time, he experienced a sensation of weightlessness, as if he were floating, as the wonderful relaxation of Reverie swept through his mind and body.

  Only there was Jarlaxle free. Reverie was his refuge. I will find you, drow.

  Hephaestus was there with him, waiting for him. In his mind, Jarlaxle saw again the fiery eyes of the beast, felt the hot breath and the hotter hatred. Be gone. You have no quarrel with me, the dark elf silently replied. I have not forgotten!

  ‘Twas your own breath that broke the shard, Jarlaxle reminded the creature. Through your trickery, clever drow. I have not forgotten. You blinded me, you weakened me, you destroyed me!

  That last clause struck Jarlaxle as odd, not just because the dragon obviously wasn’t destroyed, but because he still had the distinct feeling that it wasn’t Hephaestus he was communicating with—but it was Hephaestus!

  Another image came into Jarlaxle’s thoughts, that of a bulbous-headed creature with tentacles waving menacingly from its face.

  I know you. I will find you, the dragon went on. You who stole from me the pleasures of life and the flesh. You who stole from me the sweet taste of food and the pleasure of touch.

  So the dragon is dead, Jarlaxle thought.

  Not I! Him! the voice that resonated like Hephaestus roared in his mind. I was blind, and slept in darkness! Too intelligent for death! Consider the enemies you have made, drow! Consider that a king will find you—has found you!

  That last thought came through with such ferocity and such terrible implications that it startled Jarlaxle from his Reverie. He glanced around frantic, as if expecting a dragon to swoop down upon him and melt his camp into the dirt with an explosion of fiery breath, or an illithid to materialize and blast him with psionic energy that would scramble his mind forever.

  But the night was quiet under the moon’s pale glow.

  Too quiet, Jarlaxle believed, like the hush of a predator. Where were the frogs, the night birds, the beetles?

  Something shifted down to the west, catching Jarlaxle’s attention. He scanned the field, seeking the source—a rodent of some sort, likely.

  But he saw nothing, just the uneven grasses dancing in the moonlight on the gentle night breeze.

  Something moved again, and Jarlaxle swept his gaze across the abandoned stones littering the field, reached up and lifted his eye patch so he could more distinctly focus. Across the field stood a shadowy, huddled figure, bowing and waving its arms. It occurred to the drow that it was not a living man, but a wraith or a specter or a lich.

  In the open ground between them, a flat stone shifted. Another, standing upright, tilted to a greater angle.

  Jarlaxle took a step toward the ancient markers.

  The moon disappeared behind a dark cloud and the darkness deepened. But Jarlaxle was a creature of the Underdark, blessed with eyes that could see in the most meager light. In the nearly lightless caverns far below the stone, a patch of luminous lichen would glow to his eyes like a high-burning torch. Even in those moments when the moon hid, he saw that standing stone shift again, ever so slightly, as if something scrabbled at its base below the ground.

  “A graveyard …” he whispered, finally recognizing the flat stones as markers and understanding Athrogate’s earlier assessment. As he spoke, the moon came clear, brightening the field. Something churned in the dirt beside the shifting stone.

  A hand—a skeletal hand.

  A greenish blue crackle of strange ground lightning blasted tracers across the field. In that light, Jarlaxle saw many more stones shifting, the ground churning.

  I have found you, drow! the beast whispered in Jarlaxle’s thoughts. “Athrogate,” Jarlaxle called softly. “Awaken, good dwarf.” The dwarf snored, coughed, belched, and rolled to his side, his back to the drow.

  Jarlaxle slipped a hand crossbow from the holster on his belt, expertly drawing back the string with his thumb as he moved. He focused on a particular type of bolt, blunted and heavy, and the magical pouch beside the holster dispensed it into his hand as he reached for it.

  “Awaken, good dwarf,” the drow said again, never taking his gaze from the field. A skeletal arm grasped at the empty air near the low-leaning headstone.

  When Athrogate did not reply, Jarlaxle leveled the hand crossbow and pulled the trigger.

  “Hey, now, what’s the price o’ bacon!” the dwarf yelped as the bolt thumped him in the arse. He rolled over and scrambled like a tipped crab, but jumped to his feet. He began circling back and forth with short hops on bent legs, rubbing his wounded bum all the while.

  “What do ye know, elf?” he asked at length.

  “That you are indeed loud enough to wake the dead,” Jarlaxle replied, motioning over Athrogate’s shoulder toward the stone-strewn field. Athrogate leaped around.

  “I see … dark,” he said. As he finished, not only did the moon break free of the clouds, but another strange lightning bolt arced over the field like a net of energy had been cast over it. In the flash, whole skeletons showed themselves, standing free of their graves and shambling toward the tree-lined ridge.

  “Coming for us, I’m thinking!” Athrogate bellowed. “And they look a bit hungry. More than a bit! Bwahaha! Starved, I’d wager!”

  “Let us be gone from this place, and quickly,” said Jarlaxle. He reached into his belt pouch and produced an obsidian statue of a gaunt horse with twists like fire around its hooves.

  Athrogate nodded and did likewise, producing his boar figurine.

  They both dropped their items and called forth their steeds toget
her, an equine nightmare for Jarlaxle, snorting smoke and running on hooves of flame, and a demonic boar for Athrogate that radiated heat and belched the fire of the lower planes. Jarlaxle was first up in his seat, turning his mount to charge away, but he looked over his shoulder to see Athrogate take up his twin morningstars, leap upon the boar, and kick it into a squealing charge straight down at the graveyard.

  “This way’s faster!” the dwarf howled, and he set the heavy balls of his weapons spinning at the ends of their chains on either side. “Bwahaha!”

  “Oh, Lady Lolth,” Jarlaxle groaned. “If you sent this one to torment me, then know that I surrender, and just take him back.”

  Athrogate charged straight down onto the field, the boar kicking and bucking. Another green flash lit up the stony meadow before him, showing dozens of walking dead climbing from the torn earth, lifting skeletal hands at the approaching dwarf.

  Athrogate bellowed all the louder and clamped his powerful legs tightly on the demon-boar. Seeming no less crazy than its bearded rider, the boar charged straight at the walking horde, and the dwarf sent his morningstars spinning. All around him they worked, heavy glassteel balls smashing against bone, breaking off reaching fingers and arms, shattering ribs with powerful swipes.

  The boar beneath him gored, kicked, and plowed through the mindless undead that closed in hungrily. Athrogate drove his heels in hard against the boar’s flanks and it leaped straight up and brought forth the fires of the lower planes, a burst of orange flame blasting out beneath its hooves as it landed, boiling into a radius half again wider than the dwarf was tall and curling up in an eruption of flame. The grass all around Athrogate smoked, licks of flame springing to life on the taller clumps.

  While the flames bit at the nearest skeletons, they proved little deterrence to those coming from behind. The creatures closed, showing not the slightest sign of fear.

  An overhead swing from Athrogate brought a morningstar down atop a skull, exploding it in a puff of white powder. He swung his other morningstar in a wide sweep, back to front, clipping three separate reaching skeletal arms and taking them off cleanly.

  The skeletons seemed not to notice or care, and kept coming. Closing, always closing.

  Athrogate roared all the louder against the press, and increased the fury of his swings. He didn’t need to aim. The dwarf couldn’t have missed smashing bones if he tried. Clawing fingers reached out at him, grinning skulls snapped their jaws.

  Then the boar shrieked in pain. It hopped and sent out another circle of flames, but the unthinking skeletons seemed not to notice as their legs blackened. Clawing fingers raked the boar, sending it into a bucking frenzy, and Athrogate was thrown wide, clearing the front row of skeletons, but many more rushed at him as he fell.

  * * * * *

  Jarlaxle hated this kind of fight. Most of his battle repertoire, both magical and physical, was designed to misdirect, to confuse, and to keep his opponent off-balance.

  You couldn’t confuse a brainless skeleton or zombie.

  With a great sigh, Jarlaxle plucked the huge feather from his hat and threw it to the ground, issuing commands to the magical item in an arcane language. Almost immediately, with a great puff of smoke, the feather became a gigantic flightless bird, a diatryma, ten feet tall and with a neck as thick as a strong man’s chest.

  Responding to Jarlaxle’s telepathic commands, the monstrous bird charged onto the field and buffeted the undead with its short wings, pecking them to pieces with its powerful beak. The bird pushed through the throng of undead, kicking and buffeting and pecking with abandon. Every attack rattled a skeleton to pieces or smashed a skull to powder.

  But more rose from the torn soil, and they closed and clawed.

  On the side of the ridge, Jarlaxle casually slipped a ring onto his finger and drew a thin wand from his pack.

  He punched out with the ring and its magic extended and amplified his strike many times over, blowing a path of force through the nearest ranks of skeletons, sending bones flying every which way. A second punch shattered three others as they tried to close from his left flank.

  His immediate position secured, the drow lifted the wand, calling upon its powers to bring forth a burst of brilliantly shining light, warm and magical and ultimately devastating to the undead creatures.

  Unlike the flames of the magical boar, the wand’s light could not be ignored by the skeletons. Where fire could but blacken their bones, perhaps wound them slightly, the magical light struck at the core of the very magic that gave them animation, countering the negative energy that had lifted them from the grave.

  Jarlaxle centered the burst in the area where Athrogate had fallen, and the dwarf’s expected yelp of surprise and pain—pain from stinging eyes—sounded sweet to the drow.

  He couldn’t help but laugh when the dwarf finally emerged from the rattle of collapsing skeletons.

  The fight, however, remained far from won. More and more skeletons continued to rise and advance.

  Athrogate’s boar was gone, slain by the horde. The magic of the figurine could not produce another creature for several hours. Jarlaxle’s bird, too, had fallen victim to slashing digits and was being torn asunder. The drow lifted his fingers to the band on his hat, where the nub of a new feather was beginning to sprout. But several days would pass before another diatryma could be summoned.

  Athrogate turned as if he meant to charge into another knot of skeletons, and Jarlaxle yelled, “Get back here!”

  Still rubbing his stinging eyes, the dwarf replied, “There be more to hit, elf!”

  “I will leave you, then, and they will tear you apart.”

  “Ye’re askin’ me to run from a fight!” Athrogate yelled as his morningstars pulverized another skeleton that reached for him with clawing hands.

  “Perhaps the magic that raised these creatures will lift you up as a zombie,” Jarlaxle said as he turned his nightmare around, facing up the ridge. Within a few heartbeats, he heard mumbling behind him as Athrogate approached. The dwarf huffed and puffed beside him, holding the onyx boar figurine and muttering.

  “You cannot call another one now,” Jarlaxle reminded him, extending a hand that Athrogate grasped.

  The dwarf settled behind the drow on the nightmare’s back and Jarlaxle kicked the steed away, leaving the skeletons far, far behind. They rode hard, then more easily, and the dwarf began to giggle.

  “What do you know?” the drow asked, but Athrogate only bellowed with wild laughter.

  “What?” Jarlaxle demanded, but he couldn’t spare the time to properly look back, and Athrogate sounded too amused to properly answer.

  When they finally reached a place where they could safely stop, Jarlaxle pulled up abruptly and turned around.

  There sat Athrogate, red-faced with laughter as he held a skeletal hand and forearm, the fingers still clawing in the air before him. Jarlaxle leaped from the nightmare, and when the dwarf didn’t immediately follow, the drow dismissed the steed, sending Athrogate falling to the ground through an insubstantial swirl of black smoke.

  But Athrogate still laughed as he thumped to the ground, thoroughly amused by the animated skeletal arm.

  “Be rid of that wretched thing!” Jarlaxle said.

  Athrogate looked at him incredulously. “Thought ye had more imagination, elf,” he said. He hopped up and unstrapped his heavy breastplate. As soon as it fell aside, the dwarf reached over his shoulder with the still-clawing hand and gave a great sigh of pleasure as the fingers scratched his back. “How long do ye think it’ll live?”

  “Longer than you, I hope,” the drow replied, closing his eyes and shaking his head helplessly. “Not very long, I imagine.”

  “Bwahaha!” Athrogate bellowed, then, “Aaaaaaaah.”

  * * * * *

  “The next time we face such creatures, I expect you to follow my lead,” Jarlaxle said to Athrogate the next morning as the dwarf fiddled once more with his skeletal toy.

  “Next time? What do ye kn
ow, elf?”

  “It was not a random event,” the drow admitted. “I have been visited, twice now, in my Reverie by a beast I had thought destroyed, but one that has somehow transcended death.”

  “A beast that brought up them skeletons?”

  “A great dragon,” Jarlaxle explained, “to the south of here and …” Jarlaxle paused, not really certain where Hephaestus’s lair was. He had gone there, but magically with a teleportation spell. He knew the general features of that distant region, but not the specifics of the lair, though he thought of someone who would surely know the place. “Near to the Snowflake Mountains,” he finished. “A great dragon whose thoughts can reach across hundreds of miles, it seems.”

  “Ye thinking we need to run farther?”

  Jarlaxle shook his head. “There are great powers I can enlist in defeating this creature.”

  “Hmm,” said the dwarf.

  “I just have to convince them not to kill us first.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Indeed,” said the drow. “A mighty priest named Cadderly, a Chosen of his god, who promised me death should I ever return.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But I will find a way.”

  “So ye’re sayin’, and so ye’re prayin’, but I’m hoping I’m not the one what’ll be payin’.”

  Jarlaxle glared at the dwarf.

  “Well, then ye can’t be going back where ye’re wanting—though I canno’ be thinking why ye’re wanting what ye’re wantin’! To go to a place where the dragons are hauntin’!”

  The glare melted into a groan.

  “I know, I know,” said Athrogate. “No more word-songin’. But that was a good one, what?”

  “Needs work,” said the drow. “Though considerably less so than your usual efforts.”

  “Hmm,” said the dwarf, beaming with pride.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BROKEN CONTINUUM

  Drizzt Do’Urden slipped out of his bedroll and reached his bare arms up high, fingers wide, stretching to the morning sky. It was good to be on the road, out of Mithral Hall after the dark winter. It was invigorating to smell the fresh, crisp air, absent the smoke of the forges, and to feel the wind across his shoulders and through his long, thick white hair. It was good to be alone with his wife.