The Ghost King t-3

by Robert Anthony Salvatore

  “With hope,” Jarlaxle added.

  Drizzt turned his gaze to Catti-brie, who sat calmly, fully withdrawn from the world around her.

  CHAPTER 7

  NUMBERING THE STRANDS

  This is futile!” cried Wanabrick Prestocovin, a spirited young wizard from Baldur’s Gate. He shoved his palms forward on the table before him, ruffling a pile of parchment.

  “Easy, friend,” said Dalebrentia Promise, a fellow traveler from the port city. Older and with a large gray beard that seemed to dwarf his skinny frame, Dalebrentia looked the part of the mage, and even wore stereotypical garb: a blue conical hat and a dark blue robe adorned with golden stars. “We are asked to respect the scrolls and books of Spirit Soaring.”

  A few months earlier, Wanabrick’s explosion of frustration would have been met by a sea of contempt in the study of the great library, where indeed, the massive collections of varied knowledge from all across Faerûn, pulled together by Cadderly and his fellows, were revered and treasured. Tellingly, though, as many wizards, sages, and priests in the large study nodded their agreement with Wanabrick as revealed their scorn at his outburst.

  That fact was not lost on Cadderly as he sat across the room amidst his own piles of parchment, including one on which he was working mathematical equations to try to inject predictability and an overriding logic into the seeming randomness of the mysterious events.

  His own frustrations were mounting, though Cadderly did well to hide them, for that apparent randomness seemed less and less like a veil to be unwound and more and more like an actual collapse of the logic that held Mystra’s Weave aloft. The gods were not all dark, had not all gone silent, unlike the terrible Time of Troubles, but there was a palpable distance involved in any divine communion, and an utter unpredictability to spellcasting, divine or wizardly.

  Cadderly rose and started toward the table where the trio of Baldur’s Gate visitors studied, but he purposely put a disarming smile on his face, and walked with calm and measured steps.

  “Your pardon, good Brother Bonaduce,” Dalebrentia said as he neared. “My friend is young, and truly worried.”

  Wanabrick turned a wary eye at Cadderly. His face remained tense despite Cadderly’s calm nod.

  “I don’t blame you, or Spirit Soaring,” Wanabrick said. “My anger, it seems, is as unfocused as my magic.”

  “We’re all frustrated and weary,” Cadderly said.

  “We left three of our guild in varying states of insanity,” Dalebrentia explained. “And a fourth, a friend of Wanabrick’s, was consumed in his own fireball while trying to help a farmer clear some land. He cast it long—I am certain of it—but it blew up before it ever left his hand.”

  “The Weave is eternal,” Wanabrick fumed. “It must be … stable and eternal, else all my life’s work is naught but a cruel joke!”

  “The priests do not disagree,” said a gnome, a disciple of Gond.

  His support was telling. The Gondsmen, who loved logic and gears, smokepowder and contraptions built with cunning more than magic, had been the least affected by the sudden troubles.

  “He is young,” Dalebrentia said to Cadderly. “He doesn’t remember the Time of Troubles.”

  “I am not so young,” Cadderly replied.

  “In mind!” Dalebrentia cried, and laughed to break the tension. The other two Baldurian wizards, one middle-aged like Cadderly and the other even older than Dalebrentia, laughed as well. “But so many of us who feel the creak of knees on a rainy morning do not much sympathize, good rejuvenated Brother Bonaduce!”

  Even Cadderly smiled at that, for his journey through age had been a strange one indeed. He had begun construction of Spirit Soaring after the terrible chaos curse had wrought the destruction of its predecessor, the Edificant Library. Using magic given him by the god Deneir—nay, not given him, but channeled through him—Cadderly had aged greatly, to the point of believing that the construction would culminate with his death as an old, old man. He and Danica had accepted that fate for the sake of Spirit Soaring, the magnificent tribute to reason and enlightenment.

  But the cost had proven a temporary thing, perhaps a trial of Deneir to test Cadderly’s loyalty to the cause he professed, the cause of Deneir. After the completion of Spirit Soaring, the man had begun to grow younger physically—much younger, even younger than his actual age. He was forty-four, but appeared as a man in his young twenties, younger even than his twin children. That strange journey to physical youth, too, had subsequently stabilized, Cadderly believed, and he appeared to be aging more normally with the passage of the past several months.

  “I have traveled the strangest of journeys,” Cadderly said, putting a comforting hand on Wanabrick’s shoulder. “Change is the only constant, I fear.”

  “But surely not like this!” Wanabrick replied. “So we hope,” said Cadderly.

  “Have you found any answers, good priest?” Dalebrentia asked.

  “Only that Deneir works as I work, writing his logic, seeking reason in the chaos, applying rules to that which seems unruly.”

  “And without success,” Wanabrick said, somewhat dismissively.

  “Patience,” said Cadderly. “There are answers to be found, and rules that will apply. As we discern them, so too will we understand the extent of their implications, and so too will we adjust our thinking, and our spellcasting.”

  The gnome at a nearby table began to clap his hands at that, and the applause spread throughout the great study, dozens of mages and priests joining in, most soon standing. They were not cheering for him, Cadderly knew, but for hope itself in the face of their most frightening trial.

  “Thank you,” Dalebrentia quietly said to Cadderly. “We needed to hear that.”

  Cadderly looked at Wanabrick, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his face tight with anxiety and anger. The wizard did manage a nod to Cadderly, however.

  Cadderly patted him on the shoulder again and started away, nodding and smiling to all who silently greeted him as he passed.

  Outside the hall, the priest gave a sigh full of deep concern. He hadn’t lied when he’d told Dalebrentia that Deneir was hard at work trying to unravel the unraveling, but he hadn’t relayed the whole truth, either.

  Deneir, a god of knowledge and history and reason, had answered Cadderly’s prayers of communion with little more than a sensation of grave trepidation.

  * * * * *

  “Keep faith, friend,” Cadderly said to Wanabrick later that same night, when the Baldurian contingent departed Spirit Soaring. “It’s a temporary turbulence, I’m sure.”

  Wanabrick didn’t agree, but he nodded anyway and headed out the door.

  “Let us hope,” Dalebrentia said to Cadderly, approaching him and offering his hand in gratitude.

  “Will you not stay the night at least, and leave when the sun is bright?”

  “Nay, good brother, we have been away too long as it is,” Dalebrentia replied. “Several of our guild have been touched by the madness of the pure Weave. We must go to them and see if anything we have learned here might be of some assistance. Again, we thank you for the use of your library.”

  “It’s not my library, good Dalebrentia. It’s the world’s library. I am merely the steward of the knowledge contained herein, and humbled by the responsibilities the great sages put upon me.”

  “A steward, and an author of more than a few of the tomes, I note,” Dalebrentia said. “And truly we are all better off for your stewardship, Brother Bonaduce. In these troubled times, to find a place where great minds might congregate is comforting, even if not overly productive on this particular occasion. But we are dealing with unknowns here, and I am confident that as the unraveling of the Weave, if that is what it is, is understood, you will have many more important works to add to your collection.”

  “Any that you and your peers pen would be welcome,” Cadderly assured him.

  Dalebrentia nodded. “Our scribes will replicate every word spoken here t
oday for Spirit Soaring, that in times to come when such a trouble as this visits Faerûn again, Tymora forefend, our wisdom will help the worried wizards and priests of the future.”

  They held their handshake throughout the conversation, each feeding off the strength of the other, for both Cadderly—so wise, the Chosen of Deneir—and Dalebrentia—an established mage even back in the Time of Troubles some two decades before—suspected that what they’d all experienced of late was no temporary thing, that it might lead to the end of Toril as they knew it, to turmoil beyond anything they could imagine.

  “I will read the words of Dalebrentia with great interest,” Cadderly assured the man as they finally broke off their handshake, and Dalebrentia moved out into the night to join his three companions.

  They were a somber group as their wagon rolled slowly down Spirit Soaring’s long cobblestone entry road, but not nearly as much so as when they had first arrived. Though they had found nothing solid to help them solve the troubling puzzle that lay before them, it was hard to leave Spirit Soaring without some measure of hope. Truly the library had become as magnificent in content as it was in construction, with thousands of parchments and tomes donated from cities as far away as Waterdeep and Luskan, Silverymoon, and even from great Calimport, far to the south. The place carried an aura of lightness and hope, a measure of greatness and promise, as surely as any other structure in all the lands.

  Dalebrentia had climbed into the wagon beside old Resmilitu, while Wanabrick rode the jockey box with Pearson Bluth, who drove the two ponies.

  “We will find our answers,” Dalebrentia said, mostly to the fuming Wanabrick, but for the sake of all three.

  Hooves clacking and wheels bouncing across the cobblestones were the only sounds that accompanied them down the lane. They reached the packed dirt of the long road that would lead them out of the Snowflakes to Carradoon.

  The night grew darker as they moved under the thick canopy of overhanging tree limbs. The woods around them remained nearly silent—strangely so, they would have thought, had they bothered to notice—save for the occasional rustle of the wind through the leaves.

  The lights of Spirit Soaring receded behind them, soon lost to the darkness.

  “Bring up a flame,” Resmilitu bade the others.

  “A light will train enemies upon us,” Wanabrick replied.

  “We are four mighty wizards, young one. What enemies shall we fear this dark and chilly night?”

  “Not so chilly, eh?” Pearson Bluth said, and glanced over his shoulder.

  Though the driver’s statement was accurate, he and the other two noted with surprise that Resmilitu hugged his arms around his chest and shivered mightily.

  “Pop a light, then,” Dalebrentia bade Wanabrick.

  The younger wizard closed his eyes and waggled his fingers through a quick cantrip, conjuring a magical light atop his oaken staff. It flared to life, and Resmilitu nodded, though it shed no heat.

  Dalebrentia moved to collect a blanket from the bags in the wagon bed.

  Then it was dark again.

  “Ah, Mystra, you tease,” said Pearson Bluth, as Wanabrick offered stronger curses to the failure.

  A moment later, Pearson’s good nature turned to alarm. The darkness grew more intense than the night around them, as if Wanabrick’s dweomer had not only failed, but had transformed somehow into an opposing spell of darkness. The man pulled the team to a stop. He couldn’t see the ponies, and couldn’t even see Wanabrick sitting beside him. He had no way of knowing if they, too, were engulfed in the pitch blackness.

  “Damn this madness!” Wanabrick cried.

  “Oh, but you’ve erased the stars themselves,” said Dalebrentia in as light-hearted a tone as he could manage, confirming that the back of the wagon, too, had fallen victim to the apparent reversal of the dweomer.

  Resmilitu cried out then through chattering teeth, “So chill!” and before the others could react to his call, they felt it too, a sudden, unnatural coldness, profound and to the bone.

  “What?” Pearson Bluth blurted, for he knew as the others knew that the chill was no natural phenomenon, and he felt as the others felt a malevolence in that coldness, a sense of death itself.

  Resmilitu was the first to scream out in pain as some unseen creature came over the side of the wagon, its raking hands clawing at the old mage.

  “Light! Light!” cried Dalebrentia.

  Pearson Bluth moved to heed that call, but the ponies began to buck and kick and whinny terribly. The poor driver couldn’t hold the frantic animals in check. Beside him, Wanabrick waved his arms, daring to dive into the suddenly unpredictable realm of magic for an even greater enchantment. He brought forth a bright light, but it lasted only a heartbeat—enough to reveal the hunched and shadowy form assailing Resmilitu.

  The thing was short and squat, a misshapen torso of black flesh and wide shoulders, with a head that looked more like a lump without a neck. Its legs were no more than flaps of skin tucked under it, but its arms were long and sinewy, with long-fingered, clawing hands. As Resmilitu rolled away, the creature followed by propelling itself with those front limbs, like a legless man dragging himself.

  “Be gone!” cried Dalebrentia, brandishing a thin wand of burnished wood tipped in metal. He sent forth its sparkling bolts of pure energy just as Wanabrick’s magical light winked out.

  The creature wailed in pain, but so too did poor Resmilitu, and the others heard the tearing of the old wizard’s robes.

  “Be gone!” Dalebrentia cried again—the trigger phrase for his wand—and they heard the release of the missiles even though they couldn’t see any flash in the magical darkness.

  “More light!” Dalebrentia cried.

  Resmilitu cried out again, and so did the creature, though it sounded more like a shriek of murderous pleasure than of pain.

  Wanabrick threw himself over the seat atop the fleshy beast and began thrashing and pounding away with his staff to try to dislodge it from poor Resmilitu.

  The monster was not so strong, and the wizard managed to pry one arm free, but then Pearson Bluth screamed out from in front, and the wagon lurched to the side. It rolled out of the magical darkness at that moment, and the light atop Wanabrick’s oaken staff brightened the air around them. But the wizards took little solace in that, for the terrified team dragged the wagon right off the road, to go bouncing down a steep embankment. They all tried to hold on, but the front wheels turned sharply and dug into a rut, lifting the wagon end over end.

  Wood splintered and the mages screamed. Loudest of all came the shriek of a mule as its legs shattered in the roll.

  Dalebrentia landed hard in some moss at the base of a tree, and he was certain he’d broken his arm. He fought through the pain, however, forcing himself to his knees. He glanced around quickly for his lost wand but found instead poor Resmilitu, the fleshy beast still atop him, tearing at his broken frame in a frenzy.

  Dalebrentia started for him, but fell back as a blast of lightning blazed from the other side, lifting the shadowy beast right off his old friend and throwing it far into the night. Dalebrentia looked to Wanabrick to nod his approval.

  But he never managed that nod. Looking at the man, the magically-lit staff lying near him, Dalebrentia saw the shadowy beasts crawling in behind the younger mage, huddled, fleshy beasts coming on ravenously.

  To the side, Pearson Bluth stumbled into view, a beast upon his back, one of its arms wrapped around his neck, its other hand clawing at his face.

  Dalebrentia fell into his spellcasting and brought forth a fiery pea, thinking to hurl it past Wanabrick, far enough so its explosion would catch the approaching horde but not engulf his friend.

  But the collapsing Weave deceived the old mage. The pea had barely left his hand when it exploded. Waves of intense heat assailed Dalebrentia and he fell back, clutching at his seared eyes. He rolled around wildly on the ground, trying to extinguish the flames, too far lost to agony to even hear the cries of his frien
ds, and those of the fleshy beasts, likewise shrieking in burning pain.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, old Dalebrentia could only hope that his fireball had eliminated the monsters and had not killed his companions.

  His hopes for the former were dashed a heartbeat later when a clawed hand came down hard against the side of his neck, the force of the blow driving a dirty talon through his skin. Hooked like a fish, blinded and burned by his own fire and battered from the fall, Dalebrentia could do little to resist as the shadowy beast tugged at him.

  * * * * *

  Had he remained at the door where he’d sent the wizards off more than an hour before, Cadderly might have seen the sudden burst of fire far down the mountain trail, with one tall pine going up in flames like the fireworks the priest had often used to entertain his children in their younger days. But Cadderly had gone back inside as soon as the four from Baldur’s Gate had departed.

  Their inability to discover anything pertinent had spurred the priest to his meditation, to try again to commune with Deneir, the god who might, above all others in the pantheon, offer some clues to the source of the unpredictable and troubling events.

  He sat in a small room lit only by a pair of tall candles, one to either side of the blanket he had spread on the floor. He sat cross-legged on that blanket, hands on his knees, palms facing up. For a long while, he focused only on his breathing, making his inhalations and exhalations the same length, using the count to clear his mind of all worry and trials. He was alone in his cadence, moving away from the Prime Material Plane and into the realm of pure thought, the realm of Deneir.

  He’d done the same many times since the advent of the troubles, but never to great effect. Once or twice, he thought he had reached Deneir, but the god had flitted out of his thoughts before any clear pictures might emerge.

  This time, though, Cadderly felt Deneir’s presence keenly. He pressed on, letting himself fall far from consciousness. He saw the starscape all around him, as if he floated among the heavens, and he saw the image of Deneir, the old scribe, sitting in the night sky, long scroll spread before him, chanting, though Cadderly could not at first make out the words.