Storm of the Dead зкp-2

by Lisa Smedman

  By all the gods. He had put a kiira on his head.

  He must have been crazy.

  Alexa stepped closer and ran a hand over the carving on the door. "What is this place?" she asked. She craned her head to look up at the inscription. "Kraanfhaor. What's that? An ancient House name?"

  "Not a House," Piri said softly. "A college."

  Q'arlynd ran a hand through his hair. His fingers were trembling. He had no idea what Piri was talking about-but admitting that would make him seem a fool in front of the others. He assumed the tone of a master grilling a student. "Tell the others what you know about it, Piri."

  "I read about this place in a text written by the surface elves. The entry was a short one. It said only that 'Kraanfhaor's Door' was supposedly the entrance to an ancient college of the same name, one that dated back millennia, to an age before the Descent. It added that dozens of adventurers have tried to open the door, and dozens have failed." Piri shrugged. "That's all there was, but I think we can guess the rest." His glance slid sideways to Q'arlynd. "This is where you found the kiira, isn't it?"

  "Abyss take me," Baltak blurted. "We're in the ruins of Talthalaran?"

  "Yes," Q'arlynd said, his mind racing. "Talthalaran."

  That sounded right, somehow. It helped Q'arlynd-a little-to know where he was: somewhere under the High Moor. In Talthalaran. But how could he have teleported there? During his months spent searching that ruined city, he'd found one or two subterranean chambers that had survived the Dark Disaster, but none that looked like this. He was certain he'd never seen this place before. Except, perhaps, for the door…

  He glanced at it again. No, he was wrong. He definitely hadn't seen it before.

  Then how had he teleported there?

  A terrible realization came to him then: he must have seen it before. Perhaps even been there before. The kiira had torn a hole in his memory, ripping chunks of it away like a hand clawing apart a fragile web.

  Eldrinn stared at the door. "You know something? I have the oddest feeling. That I've stood here once before. In front of Kraanfhaor's Door."

  Q'arlynd was instantly wary, though he didn't understand why.

  "I remember…" Eldrinn tipped his head and closed his eyes slightly. "The moor. Someone shouting at me. Something in my hands." He began to lift his hands to his forehead, then abruptly halted. His eyes sprang open and he glared at Q'arlynd. "I had the kiira, didn't I? When you found me on the High Moor. I tried it, and it feebleminded me, and I forgot all about it. And now the same thing's happened to you. Except that you weren't feebleminded, because you knew how to word the contingency."

  "That's… possible," Q'arlynd admitted.

  Eldrinn's eyes narrowed. "You lied to me," he said in a tight, quiet voice. "You didn't find the kiira. I did. And you took it from me."

  Nervous sweat trickled down Q'arlynd's back. The boy had accused him, and the others were all staring. If Q'arlynd didn't come up with something quickly, everything would fall apart. The relationship he'd built with Eldrinn and the other three mages he'd selected as apprentices-not to mention the steady source of coin the boy's father provided-all teetered on the brink of ruin. Yet what could he say?

  Then it came to him. Drawing himself up, he spoke imperiously, like a matron mother addressing a boy. "You're alive, Eldrinn," he said sternly. "Any other drow would have slain you-or left you to fend for yourself on the High Moor, fodder for the monsters that prowl there. I, however, not only saved you, but invited to share with you whatever knowledge the kiira held. And where is your gratitude?"

  The other mages were staring at Eldrinn. The sava board had been turned. The boy winced. He opened his mouth, closed it, then muttered a grudging apology. "Sorry, Q'arlynd."

  Q'arlynd acknowledged it with a nod, then turned to the others. "Did any of you see me put the kiira back?"

  "You must have," Baltak said. "It's gone."

  "Yes, but did you see me?"

  "Not directly," Eldrinn said, finding his voice again. "But only a few moments elapsed between the time you teleported away and my scrying; you probably teleported straight here. When I saw you in the font, you were standing with your palm pressed to the door, as if you'd just pushed it shut."

  "So you're not certain I opened the door," Q'arlynd said. "Perhaps the kiira is still on me, or somewhere nearby. Search me."

  "All right." Eldrinn pulled a piece of forked twig from his pocket and whispered a quick incantation. He held the twig above Q'arlynd's head, then ran it down first the front of his body, then the back.

  "You don't have it," he concluded. "And…" He turned in a circle. "It's not here. At least, not on this side of the door."

  Q'arlynd's heart raced. "So I 'put it back,' did I?" He turned slowly toward Kraanfhaor's Door. If it turned out to be what he suspected, knowledge beyond his wildest dreams was his for the taking. "That's an odd choice of words-one which makes me wonder what this door opens onto. A library with dozens of ancient kiira? Hundreds? Thousands?" He paused for breath, barely able to restrain himself from laughing out loud in delight. If this door could be opened, it wouldn't matter if the College of Divination fell. Beyond the door was a treasure trove he could use to purchase all of the power and prestige any wizard could ever desire.

  Assuming he was right about what lay behind it.

  He glanced at the others and smiled as he saw parted lips and gleams in their eyes. Even Zarifar was paying attention. So was Alexa, but that couldn't be helped. Q'arlynd would have to invite her to join his college as his fifth apprentice, after all, to ensure her silence. Fortunately the ring was in his pocket. He might need it to test her potential loyalty.

  "Instead of squabbling about who had the lorestone first," he suggested, "we should ask ourselves a more important question." He rapped a hand against the door. "How do we get this open again?"

  Eldrinn nudged the empty stonefire bomb with a toe. "It's supposedly impossible."

  "Wrong," Q'arlynd said. "I just opened it, didn't I? And if you had the kiira before me, Eldrinn, you must have gotten it from somewhere-perhaps by also opening the door. We just need to figure out how it's done."

  He turned to the others. "Piri, I want you to study that text you read for other clues. Baltak, you can try assuming different shapes; perhaps the door is keyed to a particular race. Alexa can provide teleportation back and forth between Sshamath and here. Assuming, that is, she's willing to join our school and not tell anyone else about the door."

  Alexa nodded briskly.

  "And Zarifar can…" Q'arlynd paused. The geometer mage stared dreamily at a spot above Kraanfhaor's Door, idly tracing a pattern in the air with his finger. "Zarifar can study the door's… patterns. Or something. Eldrinn and I will be away for a time on the trade mission, but I'll be scrying you-frequently-to check on your progress."

  That would, of course, be impossible where Q'arlynd was going-but they needn't know that.

  He held up a finger in a gesture reminiscent of a lecturing master. "Remember this: if any of us does find the key, I want him to inform the others immediately. When the time comes to open the door, we're going to do it together."

  Heads dutifully nodded.

  Q'arlynd knew better than to trust them, however. They'd only worn their rings a short time, and they weren't used to working as a team yet. One or more of them would probably try opening the door on his own-or her own-while he and Eldrinn were gone. Q'arlynd doubted they would succeed, though. Eldrinn, he suspected, was the key.

  And Q'arlynd intended to keep that key securely in his pocket.

  CHAPTER 6

  Urlryn Khalazza strode through the scriptorium door-literally strode through it, as if the heavy wooden door were a mere illusion. The scribe at the table closest to the door gave a start and lost control of his quill, but the others kept at their copywork, forefingers twitching as they magically directed quills that scribbled rapidly on parchment.

  Seldszar glanced past the tiny spheres that circled his hea
d, noting the door. For several moments, it held an outline of Urlryn, limned in crackling indigo. Then the faerie fire faded.

  "Master Urlryn," he said. "Thank you for responding so swiftly to my invitation."

  The master of the College of Conjuration and Summoning nodded. He was a large male, broad-shouldered for a drow, with a stomach that strained the ties of his vest, the visible result of his love of excessively rich, conjured feasts. His college insignia hung against his chest on a mithral chain: a golden goblet, ensorcelled to expand and fill with wine whenever he raised it to his wide lips. Though Urlryn's thinning hair and drooping jowls gave the impression of age and sloth, he was amply protected. Trotting at his side-invisible to the scribes but clear to Seldszar's eye-was a vicious phantasmal dog. It eyed Seldszar warily, lips twitching and hackles raised. At the slightest hint of a threat to its master, it would attack.

  Urlryn halted in front of Seldszar and stared meaningfully at the faerie fire that sparked from the other master's forehead. "You wish to discuss our mutual problem?"

  "Indeed I do." Seldszar spoke while staring at the spheres. Though the faerie fire posed irritating interruptions to his view of them, his observations continued. He'd shifted their focus to his own college and the mages therein. "I've learned something interesting about the… disruption."

  Urlryn cleared his throat in warning and tipped his head at the nearest scribes.

  "Indeed," Seldszar told him. "Pointed ears and private business." He hissed, releasing a spell. Heads thunked onto wooden tables as the scribes fell forward, unconscious. An inkwell clattered to the floor, leaving a splash of dark blue ink. The quills continued scribbling a moment more, then collapsed onto their parchments.

  "Have your sages come up with any answers yet?" Urlryn asked.

  Seldszar glanced briefly at the sphere that showed his college's most learned wizards arguing vociferously around a table. "No. But I recently received a visitor who claims to know who's causing this plague of faerie fire-though she was vague on the details. That visitor was a priestess of Eilistraee, from the Promenade. She blames Kiaransalee's cult. Something they are doing in a temple far to the northeast is augmenting Faerzress throughout the Underdark-including ours."

  "I see."

  For several moments, neither wizard spoke. The only sound came from a water clock that hung from the scriptorium's ceiling. Drops fell steadily from a tiny hole in the bottom of the cut-glass bowl into a pan below with dull, metallic thunks. The clock was a thing of the World Above, calibrated to mark the quarters of the day and night, so of little practical use in the Underdark-until then. Like the water sinking almost imperceptibly lower in the bowl, time was running out.

  "I, too, received a visitor," Urlryn said at last. "A cleric of Vhaeraun, from Skullport. He told me much the same thing. Including the fact that the augmentation of the Faerzress seems to be affecting only drow."

  Seldszar nodded, his attention still on his spheres. He'd offered the other master a morsel of information, and Urlryn had done as he'd anticipated. Gulped it down, then offered a tidbit of his own. It was the way the game was played.

  Seldszar, of course, already knew of the "Nightshadow's" visit to Urlryn's college. When Miverra had departed from his college, Seldszar had locked one of his tiny crystal balls on her. Through it, he'd seen her alter her female body, reshaping it into the image of a male rogue. She'd then teleported into the heart of the College of Conjuration and Summoning-something that should have been impossible for a stranger. It had drawn Urlryn's attention at once. Questioned by him, she admitted to being a Nightshadow, then spun much the same story for Urlryn that she had for Seldszar.

  Except that she'd told Urlryn it was Vhaeraun's clerics who needed the Conclave's aid.

  It was almost as if she'd known of Urlryn's role in conveying the survivors of the slaughter in the Tower of the Masked Mage to safety-an act that had seemed out of character for Urlryn, unless one knew of the little "favor" the black-masked assassins had done for him, more than a dozen years ago. A favor involving poison.

  "Did you believe the Nightshadow's story?" Seldszar asked.

  Urlryn shrugged. "Possibly."

  Noncommittal answers were typical of Urlryn. Yet the other master had obviously taken the visitor seriously. Like Seldszar, Urlryn had agreed to attach wizards from his college to the band of spies that would be snooping around Kiaransalee's temple. Even then, one of the spheres orbiting Seldszar's head showed Urlryn's three conjurers making their departure. Fortunately, it zipped past too swiftly for Urlryn to make out details of the scene it contained.

  "Did you tell the Nightshadow anything about the Faerzress?" Seldszar asked. He waited for the answer-there was a slight chance that Urlryn had confounded his earlier scrying.

  The other master shook his head. "No."

  Seldszar saw his purple sphere speed past; its color hadn't changed. Urlryn might have shielded his mind against intrusion-every mage capable of it did so whenever they stepped within range of Seldszar's spells-but Urlryn couldn't do anything about the crystal. He wasn't lying. Their secret was safe.

  And a strange secret it was. For centuries, it had been passed down from one master to the next. Seldszar wasn't privy to how this had been done in the College of Conjuration and Summoning, but he knew how it worked within his own college. More than two centuries ago, when the previous master of the College of Divination had died and Seldszar had been selected to sit in the master's chair, he'd had a dream. In it, the college's first master, Chal'dzar, had appeared in ghostly form to impart the tale of how their city came to be.

  More than four thousand years ago, Chal'dzar, together with a powerful conjurer named Yithzin who specialized in teleportation, had worked a spell that forever altered the face of Sshamath. They'd wrenched loose the Faerzress that permeated the stone surrounding the city, forever flinging aside this impediment to their spells.

  Or so they thought. For three centuries prior to their casting, more males than females had been born. After the Faerzress "disappeared," the city's rulers-at that time, priestesses of Lolth-noticed that males trained in spellcasting were developing augmented powers. If the uneven birthrates persisted, those individuals, combined, would one day wield power greater than Lolth's clergy. In a typically drow attempt to thwart the rebellion they were certain would come, the priestesses attempted a culling of those with arcane talent. Their attack quickly brought about the rebellion they'd tried to prevent in the first place. The noble Houses fell and the wizards stepped into power. The Conclave had ruled Sshamath ever since.

  The ghostly Chal'dzar had imparted no details of the spell he and his partner had wrought, but he had speculated upon one point. That the Faerzress, instead of being shifted to another location in the Underdark, had found a new home in Sshamath: within the drow who inhabited the city. Were all of Sshamath's drow to suddenly depart the cavern, he surmised, the Faerzress would return to the stone from whence it came.

  The centuries that followed provided ample evidence that Chal'dzar had guessed correctly. As the city's population rose, the percentage of those born with innate arcane talents gradually declined. The Faerzress, it seemed, spread itself thinner as it took up residence within all of the drow of Sshamath-both those born there and those only recently arrived in the city-until it bled out of them every time a drow cast a spell involving divination or any of the various modes of teleportation.

  With a nod, Seldszar indicated the faerie fire that crackled between his forehead and the circling spheres. "Did the Nightshadow warn you that it's going to get worse?"

  "Yes. Though it won't be as bad for us as it will be for you. Only about half of our spells will cease to function. We'll still have one leg to stand on-until someone shoves us over." Urlryn gave a sarcastic laugh. "I might be able to fool the other masters, for a time, by arranging for an 'incident' that will force a magical lockdown of the city, but Masoj will figure it out, in time."

  "As will the rest of the Conclave,
" Seldszar said. He nodded at the sphere that showed the cluster of fine-spun stalagmites and stalactites that formed the temple of the Spider Queen, but it moved too quickly for Urlryn to peer into it. "And so will Lolth's priestesses. They may jump to the conclusion that all of the colleges are about to topple. It could be the Rebellion, all over again. In reverse, this time."

  Urlryn conjured a silk handkerchief into his hand and wiped his forehead. Despite the cool, dry air of the scriptorium, he was sweating. A flick of his fingers, and the handkerchief vanished. "Do you think it is the Crones?"

  "I don't need to think. I know. They are the cause of it."

  Urlryn tilted his head slightly, something he did whenever he had second thoughts. "Should we inform the Conclave? Send an army?"

  "No," Seldszar said. Forcibly. "That would be the wrong thing to do."

  Urlryn nodded. "One of your premonitions?"

  "Yes." Seldszar spoke more to himself than to Urlryn. "Absolutely the wrong thing to do. Observe." He held one palm over the other and spoke an incantation; after a moment, an image appeared between them. Into it, he projected the memory of what his brief contact with the Astral Plane had revealed: a glimpse into a future in which the warriors of Sshamath fought, died, then rose to fight again-against their former comrades. Wave upon wave of undead spread through the Underdark, overwhelming all like a rushing tide, feeding and growing with each new army sent against it. As the vision unfolded, a single word pealed like a bell: Defeat… Defeat… Defeat.

  "Thus did the Observarium predict," Seldszar said, clapping his hands shut.

  It was a moment before Urlryn spoke. "If we could find a way to reverse the spell that Yithzin and Chal'dzar cast and drive the Faerzress back into the stone, then perhaps-"

  "I thought of that too, but it's no solution. It will conceal the problem but not make it go away. Inside us or inside the stone of Sshamath's cavern, the Faerzress will still negate our spells."

  "Our colleges could relocate. Somewhere beyond the effect."