The Ghost King t-3

by Robert Anthony Salvatore

  But the beast was dead—again.

  “What evil has come to these woods?” the young woman asked.

  “I don’t …” Temberle started to answer, but he stopped. Both he and his sister shivered, their eyes going wide in surprise. A sudden coldness filled the air around them.

  They heard a hissing sound, perhaps laughter, and jumped back to back into a defensive posture, as they had been trained. The chill passed, and the laughter receded.

  In the firelight of their nearby camp, they saw a shadowy figure drift away.

  “What was that?” Temberle asked. “We should go back,” Hanaleisa breathlessly replied. “We’re much closer to Carradoon than Spirit Soaring.”

  “Then go!” Hanaleisa said, and the pair rushed to the camp and scooped up their gear.

  Each took a burning branch to use as a torch, then started along the trail. Cold pockets of air found them repeatedly as they ran, with hissing laughter and patches of shadow darker than the darkest night shifting around them. They heard animals screech in fear and birds flutter from branches.

  “Press on,” each urged the other repeatedly, and they whispered more insistently when at last their torches burned away and the darkness closed in tightly.

  They didn’t stop running until they reached the outskirts of the town of Carradoon, dark and asleep on the shores of Impresk Lake, still hours before the dawn. They knew the proprietor at Cedar Shakes, a fine inn nearby, and went right to the door, rapping hard and insistently.

  “Here, now! What’s the racket at this witching hour?” came a sharp response from a window above. “What and wait, ho! Is that Danica’s kids?”

  “Let us in, good Bester Bilge,” Temberle called up. “Please, just let us in.”

  They relaxed when the door swung open. Cheery old Bester Bilge pulled them inside, telling Temberle to throw a few logs on the low-burning hearth and promising a strong drink and some warm soup in short order.

  Temberle and Hanaleisa looked to each other with great relief, hoping they had left the cold and dark outside.

  They couldn’t know that Fetchigrol had followed them to Carradoon and was even then at the old graveyard outside the town walls, planning the carnage to come with the next sunset.

  CHAPTER 4

  A CLUE IN THE RIFT

  A throgate held the skeletal arm aloft. He grumbled at its inactivity, and gave it a little shake. The fingers began to claw once more and the dwarf grinned and reached the bony arm over his shoulder, sighing contentedly as the scraping digits worked at a hard-to-reach spot in the middle of his itchy back.

  “How long ye think it’ll last, elf?” he asked.

  Jarlaxle, too concerned to even acknowledge the dwarf’s antics, just shrugged and continued on his meandering way. The drow wasn’t sure where he was going. Any who knew Jarlaxle would have read the gravity of the situation clearly in his uncertain expression, for rarely, if ever, had anyone ever witnessed Jarlaxle Baenre perplexed.

  The drow realized that he couldn’t wait for Hephaestus to come to him. He didn’t want to encounter such a foe on his own, or with only Athrogate at his side. He considered returning to Luskan—Kimmuriel and Bregan D’aerthe could certainly help—but his instincts argued against that. Once again, he would be allowing Hephaestus the offensive, and would be pitted against a foe that could apparently raise undead minions to his command with ease.

  Above all else, Jarlaxle wanted to take the fight to the dragon, and he believed that Cadderly might well prove the solution to his troubles. But how could he enlist the priest, who was surely no willing ally of the dark elves? Except one particular dark elf.

  And wouldn’t it be grand to have Drizzt Do’Urden and some of his mighty friends along for the hunt? But how?

  So at Jarlaxle’s direction, the pair traveled eastward, meandering across the Silver Marches toward Mithral Hall. It would take them easily a tenday, and Jarlaxle wasn’t sure he had that kind of time to spare. He resisted Reverie that first day, and when night came, he meditated lightly, standing on a precarious perch.

  A cold breeze found him, and as he shifted to curl against it, he slipped from the narrow log upon which he stood and the resulting stumble startled him. His hand already in his pocket, Jarlaxle pulled forth a fistful of ceramic pebbles. He spun a quick circle, spreading them around, and as each hit the ground, it broke open and the enchantment within, dweomers of bright light, spewed forth.

  “What the—?” Athrogate cried, startled from his sleep by the sudden brightness.

  Jarlaxle paid him no heed. He moved fast after a shadowy figure racing away from the magical light, a painful thing to undead creatures. He threw another light bomb ahead of the fleeing, huddled form, then another as it veered toward a shadowy patch.

  “Hurry, dwarf!” the drow called, and he soon heard Athrogate huffing and puffing in pursuit. As soon as Athrogate passed him, Jarlaxle drew out a wand and brought forth a burst of brighter and more powerful light, landing it near the shadowy form. The creature shrieked, an awful, preternatural keening that sent a shiver coursing down Jarlaxle’s spine.

  That howl didn’t slow Athrogate in the least, and the brave dwarf charged in with abandon, his morningstars spinning in both hands, arms outstretched. Athrogate called upon the enchantment of the morningstar in his right hand and explosive oil oozed over its metallic head. The dwarf leaped at the cowering creature and swung with all his might, thinking to end the fight with a single, explosive smite.

  The morningstar hit nothing substantial, just hummed through the empty night.

  Then Athrogate yelped in pain as a sharp touch hit his shoulder, a point of sudden and burning agony. He fell back, swinging with abandon, his morningstars crisscrossing, again hitting nothing.

  The dwarf saw the specter’s dark, cold hands reaching toward him, so he tried a different tactic. He swung his morningstars in from opposite sides, aiming the heads to collide directly in the center of the shadowy darkness.

  Jarlaxle watched the battle with a curious eye, trying to gauge this foe. The specter was a minion of Hephaestus, obviously, and he knew well the usual qualities of incorporeal undead denizens.

  Athrogate’s weapon should have harmed it, at least some—the dwarf’s morningstars were heavily enchanted. Even the most powerful undead creatures, the ones that existed on both the Prime Material Plane and a darker place of negative energy, should not have such complete immunity to his assault.

  Jarlaxle winced and looked away when Athrogate’s morningstar heads clanged together, the volatile oil exploding in a blinding flash, a concussive burst that forced the dwarf to stumble backward.

  When the drow looked again, the specter seemed wholly unbothered by the burst. Jarlaxle took note of something unusual. Precisely as the morningstar heads collided, the specter seemed to diminish. In the moment of explosion, the creature appeared to vanish or shrink.

  As the undead creature approached the dwarf, it grew substantial again, those dark hands reaching forth to inflict more cold agony.

  “Elf! I can’t be hitting the damned thing!” The dwarf howled in pain and staggered back.

  “More oil!” Jarlaxle yelled, a sudden idea coming to him. “Smash them together again.”

  “That hurt, elf! Me arms’re numb!”

  “Do it!” Jarlaxle commanded.

  He fired off his wand again, and the burst of light caused the specter to recoil, buying Athrogate a few heartbeats. Jarlaxle pulled off his hat and reached inside, and as Athrogate swung mightily with his opposing morningstars, the drow pulled forth a flat circle of cloth, like the black lining of his hat. He threw it out and it spun, elongating as it sailed past the dwarf.

  The morningstars collided in another explosion, throwing Athrogate backward again. The specter, as Jarlaxle expected, faded, began to diminish to nothingness—no, not to nothingness, but to some other plane or dimension.

  And the fabric circle, the magical extra-dimensional pocket created by the power of Jarlaxle
’s enchanted hat, fell over the spot.

  The sudden glare caused by waves of energy—purple, blue, and green—rolled forth from the spot, pounding out a hum of sheer power. The fabric of the world tore open.

  Jarlaxle and Athrogate floated, weightless, staring at a spot that was once a clearing in the trees but seemed to have been replaced with … starscape.

  “What’d’ye do, elf!” the dwarf cried, his voice modulating in volume as if carried on gigantic intermittent winds.

  “Stay away from it!” Jarlaxle warned, and he felt a slight push at his back, compelling him toward the starry spot, the rift, he knew, to the Astral Plane.

  Athrogate began to flail wildly, suddenly afraid, for he was not far from that dangerous place. He began to spin head over heels and all around, but the gyrations proved irrelevant to his inexorable drift toward the stars.

  “Not like that!” Jarlaxle called.

  “How, ye stupid elf?”

  For Jarlaxle, the solution was easy. His drift carried him beside a tree, still rooted solidly in the firmament. He grabbed on with one hand and held himself easily in place, and knew that an easy push would propel him away from the rift. That was exactly what it was, Jarlaxle knew, a tear in the fabric of the Prime Material Plane, the result of mixing the energies of two extra-dimensional spaces. For Jarlaxle, who carried items of holding that created extra-dimensional pockets larger than their apparent capacity, a pair of belt pouches that did the same, and several other trinkets that could facilitate similar dweomers, the consequences of mingling them was not unknown or unexpected.

  What surprised him, though, was that his extra-dimensional hole had reacted in such a way with that shadowy being. All he’d hoped to do was trap the thing within the magical hole when it tried to flow back into the plane of the living.

  “Throw something at it!” Jarlaxle cried, and as Athrogate lifted his arm as if to launch one of his morningstars, the drow added, “Something you never need to retrieve!”

  Athrogate held his throw at the last moment then pulled his heavy pack off his back. He waited until he spun around, then heaved it at the rift. The opposite reaction sent the dwarf floating backward, away from the tear—far enough for Jarlaxle to take a chance with a rope. He threw an end out toward Athrogate, close enough for the dwarf to grasp, and as soon as Athrogate held on, the drow tugged hard and brought the dwarf sailing toward him, then right past.

  Jarlaxle took note that Athrogate drifted only a few feet before exiting the area of weightlessness and falling hard to his rump. His eyes never leaving the curious starscape that loomed barely ten strides away, Jarlaxle pushed himself back and dropped to stand beside Athrogate as the dwarf pulled himself to his feet.

  “What’d’ye do?” the dwarf asked in all seriousness.

  “I have no idea,” Jarlaxle replied.

  “Worked, though,” Athrogate offered.

  Jarlaxle, not so certain of that, merely smirked.

  They kept watch over the rift for a short while, and gradually the phenomenon dissipated, the wilderness returning to its previous firmament with no discernable damage. All was as it had been, except that the specter was gone.

  * * * * *

  “Still going east?” Athrogate asked as he and Jarlaxle started out the next day.

  “That was the plan.”

  “The plan to win.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m thinkin’ we won last night,” the dwarf said.

  “We defeated a minion,” Jarlaxle explained. “It has always been my experience that defeating a minion of a powerful foe only makes that foe angrier.”

  “So we should’ve let the shadow thing win?”

  Jarlaxle’s sigh elicited a loud laugh from Athrogate.

  On they went through the day, and at camp that night, Jarlaxle dared to allow himself some time in Reverie.

  And there, in his own subconscious, Hephaestus found him again.

  Clever drow, the dracolich said in his mind. Did you truly believe you could so easily escape me?

  Jarlaxle threw up his defenses in the form of images of Menzoberranzan, the great Underdark city. He concentrated on a distinct memory, of a battle his mercenary band had waged on behalf of Matron Mother Baenre. In that fight, a much younger Jarlaxle had engaged two separate weapons masters right in front of the doors of Melee-Magthere, the drow school of martial training. It was perhaps the most desperate struggle Jarlaxle had ever known, and one he would not have survived were it not for the intervention of a third weapons master, one of a lower-ranked House—House Do’Urden, actually, though that battle had been fought many decades before Drizzt drew his first breath.

  That memory had long been crystallized in the mind of Jarlaxle Baenre, with images distinct and clear, and a level of tumult enough to keep his thoughts occupied. And with such emotional mental churning, the drow hoped he wouldn’t surrender his current position to the intrusive Hephaestus.

  Well done, drow! Hephaestus congratulated him. But it will not matter in the end. Do you truly believe you can so easily hide from me? Do you truly believe your simple, but undeniably clever trick, would destroy one of the Seven?

  One of what ‘Seven’? Jarlaxle asked himself.

  He put the question to the back of his mind quickly and resumed his mental defense. He understood that his bold stand did little or nothing to shake the confidence of Hephaestus, but he remained certain that the hunting dragon wasn’t making much headway. Then a notion occurred to him and he was jolted from his confrontation with the dragon, and from his Reverie entirely. He stumbled away from the tree upon which he was leaning.

  “The Seven,” he said, and swallowed hard, trying to recall all that he had learned about the origins of the Crystal Shard—and the seven liches who had created it.

  “The Seven …” Jarlaxle whispered again, and a shiver ran up his spine.

  * * * * *

  Jarlaxle set the pace even swifter the next day, nightmare and hell boar running hard along the road. When they saw the smoke of an encampment not far ahead, Jarlaxle pulled to a halt.

  “Orcs, likely,” he explained to the dwarf. “We are near the border of King Obould’s domain.”

  “Let’s kill ‘em, then.”

  Jarlaxle shook his head. “You must learn to exploit your enemies, my hairy little friend,” he explained. “If these are Obould’s orcs, they are not enemies of Mithral Hall.”

  “Bah!” Athrogate said, and spat on the ground.

  “We go to them not as enemies, but as fellow travelers,” Jarlaxle ordered. “Let us see what we might learn.” Noting the disappointment on Athrogate’s face, he added, “But do keep your morningstars near at hand.”

  It was indeed a camp of Many Arrow orcs, who served Obould, and though they sprang to readiness, brandishing weapons, at the casual approach of the curious pair—dwarf and drow—they held their arrows.

  “We are travelers from Luskan,” Jarlaxle greeted them in perfect command of Orcish, “trade emissaries to King Obould and King Bruenor.” Out of the corner of his mouth, he bade Athrogate to remain calm and to keep his mount’s pace steady and slow. “We have good food to share,” Jarlaxle added. “And better grog.”

  “What’d’ye tell ‘em?” Athrogate asked, seeing the porcine soldiers brighten and nod at one another.

  “That we’re all going to get drunk together,” Jarlaxle whispered back. “In a pig’s fat rump!” the dwarf protested.

  “Wherever you please,” the drow replied. He slid down from his saddle and dismissed his hell-spawned steed. “Come, let us learn what we may.”

  It all started rather tentatively, with Jarlaxle producing both food and “grog” aplenty. The drink went over well with the orcs, even more so when the dwarf spat out his first taste of it with disgust. He looked to Jarlaxle as if dumbstruck, as if he never could have imagined anything potent tasting so wretched. Jarlaxle responded with a wink and held out his flask to replenish Athrogate’s mug, but with a different mixture,
the dwarf noted.

  Gutbuster.

  Not another word of complaint came from Athrogate.

  “You friends with Drizzt Do’Urden?” one of the orcs asked Jarlaxle, the creature’s tongue loosened by the drink.

  “You know of him?” the drow replied, and several of the orcs nodded. “As do I! I have met him many times, and fought beside him on occasion—and woe to those who stand before his scimitars!”

  That last bit didn’t go over well with the orcs, and one of them growled threateningly.

  “Drizzt is wounded in his heart,” said the orc, and the creature grinned as if that fact pleased him immensely.

  Jarlaxle stared hard and tried to decipher that notion. “Catti-brie?” “A fool now,” the orc explained. “Touched by magic. Daft by magic.” A couple of the others chuckled.

  The Weave, Jarlaxle realized, for he was not ignorant of the traumatic events unfolding around him. Luskan, too, a city that once housed the Hosttower of the Arcane and still named many of the wizards of that place as citizens—and allies of Bregan D’aerthe—had certainly been touched by the unraveling Weave.

  “Where is she?” Jarlaxle asked, and the orc shrugged as if it hardly cared.

  But Jarlaxle surely did, for a plan was already formulating. To defeat Hephaestus, he needed Cadderly. To enlist Cadderly, he needed Drizzt. Could it be that Catti-brie, and so Drizzt, needed Cadderly as well?

  * * * * *

  “Guenhwyvar,” the young girl called. Her eyes leveled in their sockets, showing their rich blue hue.

  Drizzt and Bruenor stood dumbfounded in the small chamber, staring at Catti-brie, whose demeanor had suddenly changed to that of her pre-teen self. She had floated off the bed again, rising as her eyes rolled to white, purple flames and crackling energy dancing all around her, her thick hair flowing in a wind neither Drizzt nor Bruenor could feel.

  Drizzt had seen this strange event before, and had warned Bruenor, but when his daughter’s posture and demeanor, everything about the way she held herself, had changed so subtly, yet dramatically, Bruenor nearly fell over with weakness. Truly she seemed a different person at that moment, a younger Catti-brie.