Cloak of Shadows

by Greenwood, Ed

  Or worse, perhaps. A forcebolt lashed out from Taernil’s hand, angled with careless ease to scorch both beasts out of existence at once. There was a flash, a feline voice raised in mild annoyance, and a sudden fury of force that tumbled Taernil back against the foot of the plainer bed, limbs tingling in seared pain. Scorched by his own forcebolt!

  Jarthree stifled her mirth before it became audible, which was a prudent thing. A reflective spell-shield. Well, why not? As the awakened cats rose lazily and stretched, her eyes drifted up to the ceiling and she gasped in half-mocking admiration. “Oh, look at this,” she breathed, reaching back with a tentacle to beckon at Taernil.

  “What?” he growled, rolling his massively muscled form upright once more.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have that above your bed?” Jarthree asked him, pointing.

  Taernil looked up and scowled. “No,” he said shortly, staring at the circle of star-studded darkness. He knew little of Faerûn’s night sky and cared less, but he recognized the gleaming trail of Selune’s Tears drifting off to one side, and knew what he was looking at. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

  “Hhmmph,” he said, stomping boldly through the doorway. “I’d rather have one that showed me what I directed it to, like Dhalgrave’s scrying portal.”

  “Dhalgrave is no longer,” Jarthree reminded him softly as he glared at the cats, stomped past the bed, and reached for the handle of the room’s other door, a door that looked to be made of a single piece of smoothly polished obsidian.

  Jarthree faded quickly and silently to one side, shifting her form to look like the blue-white swirling shadows, and took up her place among them.

  She was coiling in almost perfect unison with the other shadows when Taernil flung the door wide and launched his most powerful spell into the room beyond. Nine arrow-straight, needle-thin ravening beams of fire leapt from his breast, sizzling across the room into the heart of the strange whirling magic that hung there. Three faces stared at him, two gaping in astonishment and the third grimly expectant.

  And then things happened very quickly. The room seemed full of whirling forcebolts, darting and ricocheting in all directions, with something flashing and writhing in their midst. As Taernil’s beams tore into the heart of this confusion, the two startled people were snatched back against the far wall as if yanked by tentacles, and the grim-faced woman stood serenely facing him, her hands rising out to either side as if tracing an invisible wall. She did not seem to see him, but rather was staring down his beams, trying to perceive their source. Some of them were striking her—she should be falling as flaming ash! Other beams were striking the whirling confusion of lights and roiling mists, and seemed to be turning into … other things.

  Tumbling bones and mauve bubbles … boulders and single shoes, many-eyed sea jellies and sparkling, rain-dewed flowers …

  As the beams began to fail, Taernil frowned in bewilderment and hurled another spell, a fireball that should scour that chamber and all within it, leaving him free to face Khelben Blackstaff, who must be in the room beyond.

  Behind him, he heard Jarthree gasp—a short indrawn breath of utter terror—even before his fireball twisted in the doorway, meeting that whirling chaos of shoes and bones and things, and spilled back toward him, expanding hungrily across the bedchamber.

  The woman still stood facing him, her arms a barrier to the expanding wild magic—by the blood of Malaug, that’s what it was! The magic was all around him now, blowing blue-white shadows away like wisps of smoke to tumble suddenly revealed cylindrical wardrobes to the floor, and grounding the bed with a thump. It whirled Jarthree and himself back into their true shapes, with the shimmering of Milhvar’s cloak of spells suddenly gone from around them.

  Taernil gulped, then shuddered uncontrollably as a firm hand stabbed through him, parting his flesh like melting butter, to grasp and crush his organs, one by one.

  “So now they’re sending young Malaugrym to Blackstaff Tower, are they?” Khelben’s voice was calm and level, and profoundly unimpressed. “I’m quite particular about whom I invite into my home. And you, Taernil son of Oracla, would not have been among my first eighty thousand or so choices. Out with you!”

  And as a last, shattering pain exploded through him, those were the last words Taernil ever heard.

  “I suppose you’re going to plead for clemency for this one?” Khelben asked, eyes softening as he looked at his lady love.

  Laeral looked down at Jarthree and then slowly shook her head. “No,” she said. “Ushard was a lazy idiot, but he did not deserve to die as he did. This one is the brightest and most dangerous of the three Malaugrym who came here this night. I am learning, slowly, not to let kindness be taken for weakness, and through such kindness let the ranks of our enemies slowly but surely grow. The Malaugrym understand only the cruel use of power, and learn only lessons of death. Teach her.”

  Khelben shook his head grimly and brought his hand down. Jarthree did not have time to scream as her body convulsed once and then slowly rose from the floor, floating toward the conjured fire that would consume it.

  As the awareness that was Jarthree faded, she tried to weep, for Khelben had taken his lady’s words literally, and the last moments of the Malaugrym were a whirlwind of images of the love and beauty, the things wondrous and exciting, to be found in the Realms. Things she might have had, and now, never could.

  Khelben watched the flames dwindle and fade away, going to the same place—a demiplane of shifting shadows, with an ancient castle at its heart—as he’d sent the dying whirlwind of wild magic. When the flames were gone, he straightened to watch Laeral restore the last of the floating wardrobes to its cloak of concealing mists. She stood quite still beside him, only the stirring of her hair about her shoulders betraying the complex magic she was wielding. Gods, but she was beautiful.

  Khelben took one tress of hair in his fingers and curled it absently, stroking its softness. She turned toward him with that dark smile that still awakened excitement in him, after all these years, and asked, “How fared your spell-court, my lord?”

  The Lord Mage of Waterdeep shook his head. “If I’d had the sense to take my ready-staves with me, I just might have been overcome by the desire to ram them both swiftly upward in places that might have painfully removed two mages from the Realms, and thereby done wider Faerûn a lot of good. However, my foresight remains weak.”

  “Oh, I think it does well enough,” Laeral said softly, curling herself into his arms as her magic floated them both toward the bed.

  “Ah, my lady,” he said, blinking. “The—your apprentices! They—”

  “Have to start learning the most important things sometime,” she murmured, her mouth against his.

  Khelben lifted his eyebrows. Then he recalled the spell he needed and brought his hands down, precipitously transporting startled apprentices and indignant cats alike to a room lower down in the tower.

  It just wouldn’t do, twice in one night, to plunge apprentices elbow deep into a very real, very dangerous, and possibly runaway experiment.

  14

  Visitors to the Castle

  Thay, Kythorn 18

  Elminster caught only glimpses of the stars over Thay as shadowy death loomed around him, blotting them out. The smoky clouds of dense gloom were alive and reaching for him. As he frowned and willed his magical undergarments to let him descend at a slightly less precipitous rate, he wondered just what this giant was, who’d created it … and why.

  Just once, ’twould be nice to know.

  * * * * *

  Thay, Kythorn 19

  It is hard to become a Zulkir of Thay. Someone always holds such a title already and must be willing to give it up voluntarily—or be made to die. A final death, that is, admitting of no resurrections, clones, or death-cheating contingencies. As most of the present Zulkirs enjoy the powers their titles bring (if not always the responsibilities) and have honed their magical powers—and accumulated allies and magical safeguards, tr
aps, and useful items—for centuries, bringing final doom to one is no easy task.

  It is quite possible to become a very powerful Red Wizard without ever seeking the mantle of Zulkir, and indeed many “Bloodcowls” (as certain mages of other lands derisively call Red Wizards) have no interest in the exposure—not to say danger—of the position.

  It is not easily possible, however, to reshape the teachings, habits, and direction of an entire school of magic without either being its Zulkir or having his full support.

  Consider, then, the plight of a man who feels he must accomplish such an end, and is neither Zulkir nor has much chance of gaining the support of the incumbent—centuries-old Szass Tam, Zulkir of the School of Necromancy—or unseating that infamous and awesomely powerful lich, archmage, and master of undead. According to most observers, Szass Tam hasn’t sunk into the decadent ennui of many lichnee. He still enjoys besting rival Zulkirs and Red Wizards, and remains driven by an elusive goal: the destruction of Rashemen. This makes both his resignation and destruction unlikely—his death is irrelevant—and leaves a Thayan necromancer who’d like to change the interests of the School of Necromancy in an untenable position, the more so when his tentative approaches to colleagues in the craft are received with cold rebuffs and open suspicion of being an outlander agent or spy.

  So he withdraws into apparent bitterness (real) and aimless researches (for show), and behind this mask sets about accomplishing an almost impossible goal: gaining power enough to destroy Szass Tam and anyone else who stands in his way, and force Thay to follow the road he sees for it. He stages an apparent disaster in his spell laboratory, that reportedly weakens him and leaves him disfigured, and becomes The Masked One. Colleagues foolish enough to try to take advantage of his apparently failing powers fall victim to his one real accomplishment, the magical ability to dissolve the person—and subsume the powers of—anyone his most secret spell can envelop.

  A few Red Wizards vanish, and The Masked One grows in power until he can craft a giant to ensnare wizards. Then he must wait, for he dare not use it openly and invite attack from all sides by terrified Bloodcowls. He must wait until a time of chaos, when wizards can be trapped alone … or avatars, falling from the sky!

  When the Fall of the Gods becomes living truth, no longer empty prophecy, the Masked One exults in a hidden place and raises his giant to stalk the avatar he’s detected roaming Thay, the mortal who holds the lessened powers of Hoar the Doombringer, Hurler of Thunders. The avatar is very near, and even the lessened power he wields shames the vaunted might of the greatest Red Wizards.

  The giant rises and stretches forth his hand, attracting the attention of the One Who Is Hidden (and therefore unknown to The Masked One and his calculations). Ao deems the giant a creation of evil far more dangerous than the status quo in cruel Thay, and looks for something to foil such a dark scheme. Something that always seems to drop into the midst of troubles in Faerûn … something called Elminster.

  * * * * *

  The Old Mage waved a hand to direct his pipe smoke out of his eyes and grunted, “So here’s a hearty thankee to thee, Ao, for dropping Elminster into the midst o’ things again! Bah!”

  As these kindly words left Elminster’s lips, the giant seemed to see him, turning a head as large as a good-sized castle to regard the falling wizard, and emitting a thunderous rumble. A distinctly unfriendly sound, Elminster thought, his fingers already weaving a complex pattern in the air. At a certain point, he murmured an incantation that left his pipe behind. As he beckoned the still-smoking item to follow, silver spheres began to coalesce and grow in the air around, like a stream of gigantic bubbles falling to earth with him.

  His suspicions were soon confirmed. From the outstretched hands of the dark, menacing mass streamed fire, two lines of eight spinning balls of flame per hand. They loomed up at him very quickly, howling and crackling as they came, and El sent two of his spheres drifting out to meet them. He’d best intercept the fireballs before they could burst. The days when he could serenely survive the fiery blasts of two meteor swarms at once were long gone.

  He spun another spell thoughtfully but left it hanging, lacking but a final word to call it into being and send it on its way. Best to wait a bit and let this titanic construct exhaust a few spells more before battle began in earnest. Above and around him, balls of fire met silvery spheres and winked out of existence together in velvet silence.

  The giant destroyed the last few fireballs itself, banishing them to spreading steam by the touch of gray-white rays of conjured cold. They hissed out from its hands like angry drifts of cloud, and Elminster’s eyes narrowed. Lesser strikes, so soon?

  Those must be one of the forms of a freezing sphere spell. Did the thing hurl only duplicates of the same spell? Perhaps it was some sort of projected image raised by an over-clever Red Wizard, and merely aped spells-in duplicate that the Thayan was casting, somewhere far below.

  As silver spheres spun and darkened before him, drinking in drifting cold, Elminster let loose his hanging spell. The ruby ray stabbed down, right between the two whirlpools of darkness that served the giant for eyes. Wisps of cloud blocked his view of its striking, but an instant later, when El tumbled out of the pale, clinging cloudy drift, the giant stood unchanged.

  It stepped forward, shaking the earth far below, as if goaded by his spell, or as if it now knew just where he was and intended to finish him. Elminster sighed, gathering silver spheres around him in a falling wedge, and pulled them all to one side with him, to see if the giant would hurl its spells at where he should have been.

  It did not. From one hand flashed a spreading arc of lightning, leaping from cloud to cloud in a blinding needle to spear a sphere that Elminster hurriedly thrust its way. The sphere lit up blue-white for a moment, then slowly faded into darkness, flickering once, and was gone.

  Elminster barely saw it. His eyes were on the giant’s other hand, which had made a throwing motion but seemed empty. What could—? Then his eyes narrowed, and he shifted spheres into a line, out from himself toward the giant.

  One sphere flared almost immediately, lit from within by tongues of fire, and was gone. A delayed blast fireball. “So we think ourselves clever, do we?” Elminster asked the night almost absently, and launched his response.

  The spell was one he’d always thought unfair, one called “disintegrate” that devoured matter as if it had never been, wiping out struggling creatures and things of beauty alike, visiting such prompt oblivion that El thought it something no mage should habitually use. Ah, high principles. The Old Mage shrugged, and used it now.

  One vast arm was his target, to see if an overbalanced giant would fall, or if a one-armed giant could hurl only one spell at a time. He peered into the falling night, and obligingly, the arm that had hurled the stealthy fireball vanished.

  * * * * *

  Not far away, The Masked One lifted a sweating face and gasped out a heartfelt curse on Mystra and Tymora both—fickle women, to turn their faces away in the moment of his triumph. Now the old man falling from the sky had a chance, when his memories and mastery should already have been flowing into an impatient Thayan necromancer. The Masked One snarled and raised his hands to cast a spell he hadn’t expected to have to use.

  * * * * *

  And in a place of shifting shadows, Milhvar of the Malaugrym stared into his scrying globe and smiled, stroking the shimmering stuff of the cloak of shadows in his fingers. Soon would come the time to use it. Soon.

  * * * * *

  Thay, Kythorn 19

  To a warm and scented pool where several pairs of soft hands stroked a bored Zulkir with oil, there came a sudden commotion. The cause of this commotion rose up, alarm on his face, spilling silent slaves away from him, and said aloud, “My cloak and towels to the Turret of Stars, at once!” Not waiting to hear their murmured replies, he uttered the word that took him there. Someone was hurling around more magic than any man should be able to harness, out there in the night, in th
e very heart of Thay! Even if this was no attack or act of treachery, thousands of bindings could be broken! Why had no one informed him? Why was he always the last to learn of such things?

  * * * * *

  As the stars over Thay glittered and swam, the giant lurched and turned ponderously, raising its remaining arm in silence to point at the Old Mage, who shrugged and began the casting of a firestorm.

  The weaving he was attempting was a slow and complex thing, denying it much use on battlefields or in sorcerous duels, but this strange drifting struggle was unlike most duels. This might well be the fire spell’s best chosen time.

  The giant struck first. A fiery comet streaked skyward, well above the Old Mage, and burst, raining down fiery death from above. El finished his casting with a flourish and looked up to enjoy the show. He’d not seen a Rain of Fire light up the darkness since three magefairs ago.

  And then he saw the spreading rainbow that was his foe’s other sally, and muttered a curse of old Myth Drannor.

  * * * * *

  Thay, Kythorn 19

  In a tower whose spires stroked the stars, a tall robed figure turned sharply away from the battle he’d been watching—the wrestlings of a captured couatl and a winged devourer he’d conjured into existence not long before—and said aloud, “Something’s amiss!”

  He turned to the west, in time to feel the surge again. Greater magic than he’d ever felt on the move before, even in the battles where massed Red Wizards had together hurled storms at the witches of Rashemen. Greater magic than any mortal should be able to control.