The Ruin

by Richard Lee Byers

  “It won’t happen again,” said Dorn.

  “My friend,” Pavel said, “I know it’s all but unbearable. Kara was wonderful. You yearned your whole life for a love like that, never dreaming you’d find it, then had it torn away from you. But Lathander teaches—”

  Dorn slammed his human fist into Pavel’s jaw. The punch flung the blond man backward and he landed on his rump in the snow.

  “I said,” the big man growled, “I won’t sneak off again. You don’t have to nag me about it.” He turned and trudged away.

  Brimstone regarded his companions, and took some slight solace in the fact that none of them appeared panicky or demoralized. They might be his inferiors, and an aggravation much of the time, but they had a toughness that made them useful pawns.

  “The drakes are called Tarterian wyrms,” he whispered, keeping his voice even lower than usual. He and his comrades had retreated a goodly distance back down the tunnel, but he assumed the creatures outside heard as well as dragons generally did. “They dwell in the Abyss and certain other parts of the dark worlds. Archdemons and the like employ them as jailers, sentinels, and coursing beasts.”

  Taegan arched an eyebrow. “I trust you aren’t saying the elves built their stronghold in Baator or someplace similarly uncongenial, and we’ve landed there now.”

  “No,” Raryn said. “We’re in the far north of Faerûn, just as we expected. I only caught a glimpse of the sky and stars before we had to scurry for cover, but I could tell that much.”

  “Sammaster stationed the Tarterian dragons here,” Brimstone said, “as he left a Styx dragon in Northkeep, and used shadow wyrms to mount a guard over King Gareth’s soul. His primary concern was always the drakes of our own world, but he also had an interest in wyrms native to other levels of existence. He learned to command some varieties, and negotiated covenants with others.”

  “And here they are,” sighed Karasendrieth, slumped, ashen, and generally haggard-looking, her makeshift bandages spotted and giving off the enticing scent of blood. The smell wore away at Brimstone’s self-restraint. “I suppose the Tarterians were a better choice than chromatics, since he doesn’t want the latter learning anything about the source of the Rage. But still, by all the stars and every melody they sing, how many barriers did he put in our way?”

  “We’ve known from the start,” Taegan said, “that he has a penchant for intricacy and elaboration. It was manifest in his cipher, so complex that even Firefingers and the other scholars couldn’t unravel it. But we’ve outplayed him so far, and will again. Though I confess, I’m uncertain as to how.”

  Raryn scratched his silvery goatee. “I see two choices. We four can try to find and destroy the heart of the Rage without running afoul of the Tarterian dragons and whatever other dangers are lurking about. Or, someone can go for reinforcements.”

  “The latter,” Brimstone said, “is the wiser course, and I’m best equipped to do it. I can fly, I command the most potent magic, and I emerged from our recent battles relatively unscathed. I am, moreover, impervious to the cold. I believe a fading enchantment like the one protecting the site in the Novularonds still warms the valley to some degree, but none of you could bear the chill that prevails beyond the mountains.”

  Raryn smiled. “I could, but I don’t see how I’d manage if I was riding you and you had to turn into smoke. Anyway, I’d rather bide here, because I think we should try both plans. You go for help, and the three of us will try to sneak into the castle.”

  Taegan nodded. “With time slipping through our fingers—or talons as the case may be—I agree.”

  “So be it.” Brimstone rose and stretched. Twinges shot through his body as if he were a mortal creature. “You’ll want to find a different hiding place, and keep your heads down for a while. If the Tarterians spot me, they may think to search for other intruders, and a tunnel leading to a magical gate is the first place they’ll check.”

  Kara said, “You could rest before you venture forth.”

  Brimstone sneered. “I’ve already recovered about as much of my vigor as can be expected until I slake my thirst. So, unless one of you is volunteering his or her blood, I see no use in delaying.”

  He turned and crept down the tunnel to the exit. Then he invoked his gift for transformation. For a moment, nothing happened, or rather, nothing but a fresh stab of pain, but then his body dissolved into smoke and embers.

  Though a sentient cloud, he could see and hear as clearly as before. Crouching in the mouth of the passageway, he peered about. As far as he could tell, none of the Tarterians was in the immediate vicinity, so he skulked out and up, hugging the rocky, snowy slopes as he drifted, snaking through fissures in the stone whenever available, making himself as inconspicuous as possible.

  Twice, he froze and waited while one of the dark, gaunt Tarterians glided overhead. But he ascended to the gap between two peaks without Sammaster’s sentinels detecting him, and from there, he could survey the country beyond.

  It was endless desolation, mile after mile of ice and stone, where nothing stirred but the moaning wind, and here on the threshold of it, where the ancient wizards’ enchantment of warmth began to fail, the temperature plummeted. It caused Brimstone no distress, but it was cold enough to stop Taegan’s heart in a matter of moments. He doubted even Karasendrieth could endure it for any length of time, certainly not in her current injured and debilitated state.

  That might have its positive side, if it meant that even the Tarterians were averse to venturing far beyond the zone of relative warmth. If such was the case, once he put some distance between himself and the mountains, he’d be safe.

  Encouraged, he flowed onward, until, without warning, the world whirled and tumbled. Silvery light flashed and glimmered around him. Then, when the vertiginous spinning stopped, he found himself hovering in a corridor of milky translucent crystal, or possibly curdled light. The passage forked ahead of him, and doglegged out of sight behind.

  Taegan, Raryn, and Kara crept through the scree and litter of bones at the base of the mountains, looking for hollows in the rock. According to the dwarf, since there was one cave, there were almost certainly more.

  He, naturally, led the procession, and Taegan served as rearguard, leaving the middle position, the safest spot, to Kara. The bladesinger supposed the arrangement was paradoxical, considering that she was the most formidable. But primarily in dragon shape, and that close to the heart of the Rage, it was more important than ever that she keep to her womanly form as much as possible.

  It was a nerve-wracking trek. Periodically, one of the Tarterian wyrms screeched or glided near, and the seekers ducked undercover until it passed. They also spotted the vague, semitransparent semblance of a dragon stalking along the ground. For a moment, Taegan wondered if it was Brimstone, back already and congealing from vapor. Then he realized it was a ghost, still haunting the battleground where the ancient elves had killed it.

  Such obvious menaces were alarming, but in essence, they were the same sort of horror he’d been fighting for the better part of a year, and perhaps for that reason, they didn’t daunt him quite as much as they would another. It was actually the bizarre manifestations of enchantment gone to rot that he found most disquieting, even though the majority didn’t appear particularly dangerous. A stone spoke to him in a language he didn’t recognize. His mother’s face formed and dissolved in a trickle of water pattering down the escarpment. Fragrant black lilies sprouted from the frozen earth, rubbed and twined together in an exploratory kind of way, then exploded into furious motion, tearing at one another with barbs concealed among their petals.

  With such wonders to distract him, it was a while before he actually registered what he was picking his way through. What he even trod on and crushed occasionally. But when he finally did notice, he froze.

  Perhaps he made a sound as well, for Kara and Raryn turned around. “What is it?” whispered the bard.

  “The bones,” he breathed.

 
Raryn stooped to examine one of the skeletons. Took hold of a bone and lifted it up. For a heartbeat, the armature of a bird-like wing hung revealed, then the structure crumbled.

  “I’ve never actually seen the skeleton of an avariel before,” the white-haired hunter said, “but I assume this is one.”

  Taegan swallowed. “And there’s another, and over there, another. Sune’s ruby comb, they’re all around us, everywhere!” He paused, studying their faces. “Do you see what it means?”

  “Keep your voice down!” Raryn said.

  “Yes, my friend,” Kara said. She took Taegan’s hand. “I do understand.”

  “It could have been any breed of elf wizards who created the Rage,” he said. “But it was avariels who defended this place. Who died by the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, protecting it when the wyrm lords and their minions attacked.”

  “Interesting,” Raryn said, “but now’s not the time to stand and chat about it.”

  Taegan struggled to regain his composure. “Yes, of course. Pray, pardon my foolishness.”

  As they skulked on, he did his best to keep watching for trouble, but found it considerably more difficult. He couldn’t wrench his thoughts away from his discovery.

  The avariel race, his own race, whom he’d spent his life disdaining, had been instrumental in overthrowing the dragon kings. His ancestors had fought and died so Faerûn could be free. They hadn’t been cowards then, nor later, he was certain, when they’d withdrawn into the wilderness. With so many of their kindred slain, and probably, vengeful drakes intent on slaughtering the rest, reclusion had been their only hope of survival.

  Taegan started to cry.

  Brimstone resumed solid form. If he couldn’t escape the snare that had caught him, he’d likely find himself facing one or more of the Tarterians in the very near future, and they probably commanded magic capable of hurting him even in his guise of sulphurous vapor. Better, then, to wear a shape that would allow him to strike back.

  He supposed that Sammaster, aided by the Tarterians, who reportedly favored magical traps such as that, had laid the enchantments throughout the ring of mountains. Though the labor involved in such an endeavor must have been considerable, particularly in light of the fact that the only conceivable purpose was to catch folk who somehow learned of the ruined castle’s location, traversed a trackless, frigid wilderness to reach it, then tried to climb over the peaks.

  Only mad, brilliant Sammaster, endlessly obsessive and wary of Mystra, the Chosen, and the other foes who’d foiled his previous schemes, would have bothered. Brimstone had never hated the lich more than he did at that moment.

  But hating wouldn’t help him. He had to think. He lacked the power to cast enchantments like that, but had learned of them in the course of his studies. None of his counterspells would set him free, but supposedly, an exit existed somewhere, just as if the extradimensional prison were an ordinary maze.

  So he scuttled along, seeking it, the edges of his wings brushing along the pearly, featureless walls and ceiling. He took one turn, another, reached a dead end and doubled back, meanwhile striving to construct a map of the labyrinth in his mind.

  Still, before long, he was all but certain he’d blundered down a blind alley he’d explored before. With every surface flat and blank, the maze was more like an abstract exercise in geometry than an actual place, and that made it easy to become confused.

  But he had to get out, and quickly. It wouldn’t help him to escape back into the mundane world if he found every Tarterian in the valley already waiting to pounce on him when he did.

  If, somewhere, an opening connected the maze to normal space, then perhaps air was flowing. In or out, it didn’t matter, he could still use the breeze to orient himself. He tried to feel a draft, but couldn’t.

  He spewed a cloud of his hot, smoky breath, then studied the billowing fumes. They hung in the air for what felt like a long while, then started to waft in one direction.

  Or at least he hoped they had. The drift was so subtle, it was impossible to be sure. No creature with vision less acute than a dragon’s could have observed it, and it was possible that even he was only imagining it.

  Instinct prompted him to dash against the current instead of with it. When he reached a choice point, he spewed more smoke. At that rate, he’d have no breath weapon left for fighting when he emerged onto the mountainside, but he’d just have to manage without it.

  Soon his chest started to ache with the effort of generating so much vapor, and only a thin haze emerged when he expelled it. He lost track of how many turns he’d taken, and started to fear that, somehow, his plan was flawed, or else no egress existed. Then a rectangle of dark sky and stony earth appeared in the whiteness ahead.

  He was so relieved to see it, he nearly flung himself heedlessly through, but remembered caution just in time. He stuck his head out, twisted his neck, peered, and spotted the Tarterian wheeling overhead.

  He scrambled through the doorway, and with a magician’s heightened awareness, felt the maze, deprived of its prisoner, wither from existence. He focused his attention, however, on the enemy above. He couldn’t look up, because he didn’t want it to know he’d sighted it, but trusted his hearing to tell him what it was doing.

  Hide rattled and creaked as it furled its wings and dived. Brimstone waited until it was plummeting too fast to change course easily, then sprang. The Tarterian slammed down into the space he’d just vacated. Brimstone lashed his pinions and took to the air.

  For the moment, he possessed the advantage of height, but it wasn’t enough. Across the valley, other Tarterians shrieked and hissed as they raced in his direction. He had to end the confrontation quickly and get away.

  Eyes burning like green fire, his foe glared at him, and power whined through the air. Brimstone tilted his wings and spun himself to the side. A bubble of shadow shimmered into existence where he’d been a split second before.

  He riposted by conjuring darts of flame, which streaked at the Tarterian, splashed against its dorsal surface, but didn’t seem to cause it any pain. It cocked back its head, opened its jaws, and spewed expanding ripples of something akin to pure force. Brimstone tried to dodge, but the breath weapon still clipped him, snapping the end of one pinion. He plummeted and smashed down hard.

  The Tarterian sprang on top of him and pressed him against the cold, rocky ground. Its talons punctured his scales, and its jaws sought his neck.

  All but immobilized, Brimstone frantically twisted his head into position to gaze into his adversary’s luminous emerald eyes. Stop, he thought, stop fighting me. I’m your master, and you’re my slave.

  For a moment, it didn’t seem as though it was going to work, and small wonder if it hadn’t. The Tarterian had a dragon’s strength of mind. But then it stopped tearing at him and cringed. Brimstone plunged his fangs into its throat. The Tarterian writhed for a moment, then went limp.

  Yet Brimstone too found his will constrained, by need and greed. He was parched, weak, and the Tarterian’s blood, though laced with bitterness, was an intoxicating fountain of vitality. He guzzled in a frenzy as fierce as the Rage.

  But he had to stop. Had to, or his prey’s kindred would overwhelm him, and Sammaster would win. Finally he managed to wrench his mouth away from the gushing wounds.

  At once he discerned that he might have waited too long. Ragged shadows against the stars, the other wyrms were nearly upon him.

  He couldn’t retreat directly away from them, farther into the mountains. It was too likely he’d blunder into another snare. He’d have to flee at a right angle to their approach and swing back into the valley, even though it meant letting them get even closer than they were already.

  At least his drink of blood had mended his broken wing. He sprang into the air and flew, meanwhile whispering a charm to augment his speed.

  He beat high, swooped low, and zigzagged from side to side to throw off his pursuers’ aims. Even so, some attacks found him. Another blast of
breath weapon bashed him, shadowy, disembodied hands clawed him, and a mesh of gummy cable materialized on his wings, binding them until, with a flap, he tore the web apart. It was only a matter of time until one assault or another would kill him, cripple him, or at least slow him down enough for the Tarterians to catch up.

  Peering about for anything that could help him, he spotted the entrance to the portal up ahead. He took stock and realized that his breath had renewed itself at least to a degree. He dived to earth in front of the cave, spewed smoke and embers, then scrambled inside.

  As soon as he was out of his pursuers’ view, he dissolved himself into vapor and sparks, identical, or so he hoped, with the haze he’d created a moment before.

  The Tarterians thudded onto the ground and charged through the two overlapping clouds without perceiving any difference between them, then hurtled on down the passage.

  Brimstone waited while his enemies vanished in the dark. Then he flowed through the smoke that was not himself, out into the open air, and onward, until he found a hiding place amid big, jumbled stones which, on closer inspection, turned out to the broken remains of a huge golem or earth elemental. Despite the erosion that had blurred its features, he could still make out eyes, an ear, and the contours of a three-fingered hand.

  From that vantage point, he watched the Tarterians emerge, hissing and snarling to one another, presumably marveling at the abilities of the quarry who’d managed both to escape through the gate and to destroy it in the process.

  He waited for some time after they dispersed, then skulked onward in search of his comrades. Eventually, he found Raryn scraping lichen from a rock. Alert as ever, the dwarf sensed his approach, pivoted in his direction, and raised his axe.

  Brimstone congealed from smoke into solid form and said, “Don’t be alarmed. It’s me.”

  “I take it,” Raryn said, “something kept you from stealing away.”