Furlinastis's mind turned immediately to vengeance. He ceased his aerial acrobatics and turned his eyes to the ground below, scanning the swamp for Kesson Rel, sniffing the air for the spoor of the theurge.
Nothing. Kesson Rel had fled.
It is not for you to kill him, he thought, recalling Avnon's words.
Breathing hard, Furlinastis landed atop the stone altar and took it into his claws. He beat his wings, hovered, and cast the sacrificial stone far out into the swamp. It vanished under the dark water.
He alit on a dry patch of ground. There, he pondered.
The seer had sacrificed his brethren and borne the souls to the swamp within his own body. As he died, the priest had cast his own soulspell, one to counter that of Kesson Rel, one that required the power of eight souls to loosen the binding of the theurge.
But why?
Furlinastis looked into the mirror of the still pool and examined the sheath of shadows that enshrouded him. They swirled around and in the swirls Furlinastis saw faces, forms. He realized the truth of it then, and it gave him a start: The souls of the priests were bound to him. He was their vessel. "Why?" he asked.
A face took shape in the shadows, distorted but visible in the reflection on the pool's surface: Avnon Des.
"His soul remains too, dragon," Avnon mouthed, and his voice was barely a whisper. "We hold it in check; we can no more harm it directly than he could us. We are prisoners so that you might be free."
Furlinastis digested that.
"Remember your oath to us," Avnon said. "The two who will come will free us all."
With that, the face dispersed back into the shadows around his body.
Furlinastis frowned. His will was once again his own, but he owed it to the priests. The shadows around him were a spiritual battlefield, and would remain so for…
How long?
He knew the answer as soon as he asked himself the question: Until the First and the Second of the Shadowlord find Kesson Rel and kill him.
The wait would be long.
FIRST FLIGHT
Edward Bolme
Netheril Year 3398 (-461 DR)
Serreg kneeled, picked a dead stalk of grass, and inspected it closely. It was withered, with some pale green still trapped in its blades, mocking its vanished vitality. Serreg rolled it in his fingers, then let it drop. He dug into the earth with his hand and loosened a clod. The lifeless dirt crumbled between his fingers, trailing pale dust on the thin breeze. It's happening again, he thought. Serreg stood, took a deep breath, and looked around, hands on hips, at the patch of desiccated vegetation. It was several miles across and perfectly centered beneath the city that floated a half mile over Serreg's head. Delia was Serreg's home, one of the enclaves built on inverted mountaintops that sailed majestically across the skies of Netheril.
Serreg took another deep breath in a vain effort to purge the weight in his heart, then he cast Oberon's flawless teleport to return to his chambers. After years of teleportation, instantaneous travel no longer disoriented the archwizard. He materialized in his chambers already walking across the floor to his desk. Opening one drawer, he pulled forth a small crystal sphere. He held it lightly in one hand and passed the other in front of it. It began to glow with an inner light.
"Sysquemalyn, please deliver this to Lady Polaris promptly," he said. "Thank you."
He passed his hand twice in front of the orb, and spoke again, saying, "Lady Polaris, the land beneath us is also blighted, as if the very life is sucked out of the soil. The grass withers in place. Insects and even small animals lie dead in the shadow of the city. There is no decay. The cycle of life and death is not heading back to rebirth. I shall keep you apprised of my findings."
He turned the hand holding the crystal upside down and the item rolled out of his hand. It floated-light as a soap bubble, yet purposeful of movement-directly out the window, then turned right toward the Central Keep. Serreg strode out the door.
The archwizard's chambers lay in the innermost circle of Delia, in the palace the city's founder, Lady Polaris, built nearly a thousand years before. People called it the Glade; there had been some sort of garden there originally, and short of the Central Keep where Lady Polaris and her two aides lived, it was the most prestigious neighborhood in Delia.
The city had been built in concentric rings, and Serreg walked easily down one of the radial streets toward the north rim of the enclave. The archwizard had lived in Delia for over two centuries, and he no longer noted the gradual deterioration in the cityscape as he walked ever so slightly downhill from the clean, elegant lines of the Glade to the peasant's huts and farmers' markets at the rim.
There was no railing around the rim of Delia. Those citizens who ventured near the edge either knew to remain safe, or else they departed the city rather more abruptly than they had intended. But though dangerous (especially on windy days), the rim afforded a gorgeous view. It was like a view from a mountaintop,but without the rest of the mountain in the way.
Nevertheless, for all the panoramic beauty, Serreg's eye drifted to the north, and a touch east, where he knew another patch of dead earth lay, ten miles across. He fancied he could just see a part of that barren patch-and his eye saw something else. A long line started beneath his feet and lightly arced to the barren patch to the north, a trail of wilting grass and pale earth. Whatever blight had struck the land beneath their fair enclave, it had followed Delia as Lady Polaris moved the city to greener pastures.
The land was dying beneath Delia, and without the land, Delia would die as well.
For the next year, Serreg labored intensely, studying the blight. He had the resources of the Delian libraries at his disposal, as well as his decades of scholarship and magical studies. It was gratifying to put his knowledge and studies to tangible, practical use. Such a grave crisis merited the superior mind of the archwizard. He had always wanted to exercise his power in a serious pursuit like smiting the enclave of Doubloon, destroying the Lich of Buoyance, or something else of — that order. While the puzzle of the crop blight was not as immediately gratifying as combat would be, the challenge at least carried mortal stakes.
Alchemical analysis determined that the enclave had not been altered. No insidious plague lingered on the underside of Delia's granite, and the city's shadow had no strange new side effect. Of the dead creatures themselves, they could not be resurrected, which implied that whatever spark gave them life had been utterly crushed. Test animals placed anywhere within the area of the blight suffered a similar fate, despite the efforts of Serreg and the temple healers to preserve their essence. Once removed from the zone, the subjects resumed normal lives, if a bit weakened ever after.
Lady Polaris moved Delia twice during that year at Serreg's behest, and each time the blight followed the city's path exactly. The radius of the blight below expanded as Delia remained stationary over that spot. In a similar manner, the width of the blighted trail left in Delia's wake varied inversely with the speed with which the enclave moved.
Throughout his researches, Serreg assiduously recorded small anomalies in a separate tome reserved for that purpose. Minor mysteries all, and hardly worth note, except that they persisted as Serreg pursued this research.
Then Serreg began adding unrelated news into this journal. Quasimagical items that had functioned perfectly for scores of years intermittently failed. Illnesses increased in lethality, especially among the elderly. Serreg himself saw a rather dramatic failure of the enclave's longevity field take place on the streets of the Grove. One of the more revered tutors of the magical college aged from his apparent fifty years to his true age of over four hundred. Within the space of a breath he withered, died, and crumbled to dust.
The entries in the journal began to fit an insidious pattern, but Serreg could not tie together the magical failures with the death of the ground-dwelling creatures below.
Serreg attempted detections and divinations, revelations and dispellings, but none produced any answers. Ye
t all the negative results pointed to something that hid itself. Eventually he came to the inescapable conclusion that Delia suffered from a vast and powerful spell, too subtle and carefully woven for even an archwizard to unveil. At least not directly.
Rather than find out the spell's purpose, Serreg turned his attention to finding out who was casting it. He began by eliminating those who weren't casting it. Through careful examination, he removed specific people as well as potential vectors, one by one. It wasn't Karsus, thankfully, for who wanted to engage in battle against the premier Netherese archwizard? It wasn't extraplanar in origin, again thankfully, for Serreg had little desire to combat creatures from other dimensions. The blight did not hail from Realmspace, nor from any of the gods. Serreg's divinations also cleared the Lich of Buoyance, to his small displeasure.
Every so often, Serreg would get close, and he'd feel the spell squirming to evade his scrying eyes. He was never sure if the spell itself took action to evade definition, or if the practitioners behind the magic made adjustments to keep it out of Serreg's hands, but every instance gave the Delian archwizard a better idea what was happening.
And at long last, he had enough information to try a field test.
Again he drew a small crystal ball from his desk drawer, and waved his hand to activate it.
"Lady Polaris, Candlemas, and Sysquemalyn"-I have narrowed the source of the blight as well as I can, and it appears to be subterranean in origin. Deeply subterranean. There is no doubt in my mind that the dwarves are innocent, because they do not delve to the depths from which the spell originates. I wager they also lack the subtlety to weave a spell of this nature.
"In any event, I cannot pursue this further from the laboratory, so I shall go and test my hypothesis in the field. I may come back empty-handed, but I think it is far more likely that I shall uncover the source of this evil magic, and show them what it means to cross a Netherese archwizard. In any event, I should be back within a few hours at most, and I shall report to you my results. Keep a supper warm for me. Good day."
He let the orb go, and by the time it reached the window, the study was empty.
Serreg arrived-magically, of course-shortly before sundown at the location he had chosen. He placed everburning lights around the area, in case his efforts required more than an hour.
He closed his eyes and clasped his hands for a few minutes to cleanse himself of the excitement and impatience that tugged at his mind. Though eager to pull aside the last veil over the spell, he knew he must be careful, lest his eagerness alert those behind the blight, and they slither away from him once again.
Once relaxed, he ensorcelled himself with Zahn's seeing and began to dig using Proctiv's earthmove incantations. As he dug, his mind's eye scouted ahead with the seeing enchantment, looking for any hollow areas under the ground wherein creatures might lair. On finding a small fissure, he widened it all the way to the surface. He picked up one of his lights and dropped it down the cleft, then used the earthmove spell and began following the fissure down, digging as he went.
Well after dark, he finally found what he was looking for-or, more precisely, what he was looking for found him.
His excavations had settled into a dreary routine, taking far longer than expected. The constant rumble of earth being moved, the continuous projection of his vision, and the endless standing as he wrought his magic all taxed Serreg's alertness, lulling him into a casual state of mind not unlike his long hours spent in one of the university laboratories.
As he had done several times before, Serreg paused briefly from his exertions, suspending his spells to slake his thirst with a sip of water. As he recorked his flask, however, he noticed that something was different.
The sound of moving earth hadn't stopped.
He looked quickly at his excavation; it sat there undisturbed. The sound came from behind him. He stepped back and turned his head toward the noise, and as he did he realized that there was more than one source. Something disturbed the earth to his right, and something else did the same on his left.
Seeing nothing, Serreg briefly closed his eyes and took a deep breath to purge himself of surprise. Facing the sources of the noise, he adopted a prepared stance, feet shoulder width apart and hands in front of his abdomen with his fingertips touching lightly, all as he had been taught in the martial spellcasting courses. He stared at the empty space between the sounds. He was ready.
And frankly, he was relieved to be interrupted. It saved him the trouble of hunting the miscreants down. Once his surprise passed, Serreg didn't even think to be frightened. After all, what did a Netherese archwizard have to fear from any but his own kind? He simply prepared his mind to deal with whatever creatures might come forth. Kill all but one, and trap the last for detailed interrogation. Then, if it turned out to be something new, perform an intensive autopsy.
At the edge of the illumination from one of his stones, Serreg saw the surface tremble, crack, and heave upward. He smiled slightly and waited.
The ground rose higher, pushed from below, and as it did so it tumbled to the side, until Serreg saw the creature itself rising out of the dirt. At first, he saw a flurry of hands, perhaps three or four, pushing the earth to the side. Vile-looking hands they were, shaped in some unsettlingly inhuman fashion with long, wicked fingers that seemed to end in talons. Then dark, bulbous flesh pushed itself out of the ground, a wad of meat a good fathom wide. As it rose, Serreg saw the beast's arms retract wholly into the puckered tissue.
The creature continued to rise, though Serreg saw no obvious means of movement. It rose from the ground as a dead fish rises from a fishmonger's barrel, pulled forth by the hook through its mouth. As more of the creature's body hove into view, it narrowed toward the tail, adding to the image of a dead fish. Serreg raised one eyebrow in interest. Long, blunt spines, slightly curved, covered the majority of the shapeless body; perhaps a grotesque decoration, perhaps a defense, perhaps some kind of bizarre full-body system of legs.
The creature rose further, leaving behind an open hole in the ground, somehow all the more repulsive for the sickening creature that floated placidly out of the wound. Fully eight feet of nauseating monster had risen from the cavity by the time its width had diminished to the thickness of Serreg's leg. He watched as another yard emerged from the ground, ending in a vicious barbed tail.
The beast turned itself more or less horizontal, lounging in the air, with its tail drifting slowly back and forth. It turned its rounded front toward Serreg, and he saw a puckered mouth with countless hooked teeth all gnashed together in the center. "Fascinating," said Serreg.
He would definitely have to bring the creature back. "Serreg's subterranean tubuloids," he would call them. Ah, the immortality of discovery!
He did not notice that the speed of the wind began changing unnaturally around him.
Well, best get to work, he thought, and cast Aksa's morphing upon the creature.
He intended to alter the beast into what it first reminded him of: a fish. There on the open plain, a fish could easily be caught and transported back to Delia. Once back in the safety of one of the university laboratories, he could return the thing to its natural state.
Serreg was rather affronted when the morphing failed, and the magical power frittered itself away, flickering across the thing's flesh and jumping from spine to spine.
Annoyed, Serreg cast Mavin's flesh-stone transmutation on the beast. An eleven-foot-long statue would be more tedious to transport, requiring telekinesis and all, but on the other hand stone was much less slimy than a flopping fish, and petrification afforded the stupid beast no opportunity to bite him.
That spell failed as well.
Serreg paused. Eithei' haste from the excitement of discovery ruined his spellcasting, or else the grotesque abomination was highly resistant to magic. Serreg preferred to consider the former to be the case. He began to cast Pockall's monster hex, a spell with which he was quite well versed as he practiced it regularly on laborato
ry animals. But as he gathered the energy and spun the incantation, the creature opened its mouth, a vile circular maw full of mismatched jagged teeth arranged around the rim in no particular order. Serreg fought to keep his mind focused on finishing the incantation..
The creature lunged. Its four arms flew out from its body, erupting from the soft flesh into which they had withdrawn. The mouth gaped open far wider than Serreg had thought possible. Ref lexively, Serreg abandoned his spell, its power dispersing harmlessly while he flopped onto his back under the speeding bulk of the monstrosity.
The thing swept almost soundlessly over him. Serreg reflected for just a moment that no matter how intensive one's combat spellcasting training might be, it was always very easy to panic in the field. That flash of realization crystallized his discipline, and Serreg drew upon the countless hours of repetitive drills he'd performed. He rolled quickly to his feet, and as he rolled, his arms also flew through the requisite gestures for General Matick's missile. It was a basic technique, but a very useful one. No sooner did Serreg finish the incantation than he pushed himself to his feet and aimed the magical strike.
The creature passed over one of his light stones and was lit repulsively from below as it turned back toward Serreg. He fired the spell, and a cluster of tiny red flares shot from his finger toward the beast. They arced in and impacted its hide, flaring as they struck the creature with their deadly energy.
The monster seemed not to notice. Even a horse will flick its hide from a horsefly's bite, but Serreg saw not even that much of an expression of annoyance from the thing.
¦ With the amazing speed born of fury, Serreg cast another, more powerful attack spell: Noanar's fireball. As the creature turned to attack him again he sent the blazing ball of flames straight into the monster's open mouth. His aim was perfect, and the creature drew up short and screamed in a strange, monotone hoot. Despite the alien sound, Serreg knew he had struck a solid blow.
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