by Lisa Smedman
A dragonman stepped out of the mad whirl, thrusting at the warrior's heart with an oaken spear as thick as a man's arm. The Vaasan brought his sword up to block and slashed through the shaft as though it were a twig, then smiled darkly, opened his attacker across the chest, and waded after more victims.
His success inspired another warrior to snatch one of the weapons, and a woman in the shelter grabbed one to defend her children from an approaching dragonman. They killed their first enemies and underwent transformations similar to the first sword-taker, then they, too, began to cut a swath through the attacking saurians. A dozen dragonmen leaped into the air, angling for the rack of deadly swords. They were met by a like number of Vaasans, all pulling weapons off the hangers and putting them to good use.
Bodvar appeared at Melegaunt's side, nearly losing his hand when he made the mistake of grabbing the wizard's shoulder without warning.
"Stop them!"
"How?" Melegaunt caught a battering wing on his shoulder, then lopped it off and slashed his attacker across the back of the knees. "The choice is theirs. They would rather live than die."
"Not live in your service!" Bodvar objected. "You arranged this."
"Not arranged." Melegaunt pointed his palm behind the angry Vaasan's head and blasted a would-be attacker with a shadow bolt. "You give me too much credit."
"And you do not give me enough." Bodvar stepped close, and Melegaunt felt the tip of a sword pressed to his back. "Release my clan."
Melegaunt glared at the chieftain. "At the moment, Bodvar, you have worse enemies than me." Relying on his shadow armor to protect him, he reached back and snapped the steel sword with his bare hand. "If you want them released, do it yourself. All you need do is persuade them to set aside their swords."
Melegaunt shoved the chieftain away and turned back to the battle. With most of the glass swords now in hand, the Vaasans seemed to have matters well under control. The dragonmen were being forced steadily away from the shelters, and even when they attempted to use their wings to slip over the defenders, they were met with a flurry of flashing shadow. Finally, they gave up trying and took wing-at least those who could.
Dozens of wounded saurians remained behind with wings too shredded or broken to lift them yet still strong enough to fight-and ferocious enough to do it well. The Vaasans quickly set to work on them, herding them into a tight ball and driving them toward the cliffs on the east side of the work site. Seeing that only one sword remained, Melegaunt left them to their work and quietly went to the rack and slipped the last sword into his empty scabbard-and that was when Bodvar choose to assert himself again.
"My warriors, look at each other!" he called. "See what Melegaunt's devil weapons have done to you?"
Melegaunt groaned and shook his head in resignation. Were Bodvar not so stubborn and sure of himself, the wizard supposed, he would not be worth the trouble in the first place. He turned to find the chieftain and his loyal wife standing behind their warriors, Idona holding a cloak loaded with an armful of steel swords, which Bodvar was trying none too successfully to press into his clansmen's hands.
"Finish the battle with your own weapons," he said.
One of the sword-takers-Melegaunt thought it was the first-scowled. "Why would we do that?" He hefted his darksword and said, "These are better."
"Better?"
Bodvar lunged for the sword-and was dropped to the ground by a solid elbow to the face. This one belongs to me," the warrior said.
"Does it?" Idona dumped the steel swords on the ground. "Or do you belong to it?"
She glared over her shoulder with a look that sent a cold shiver down Melegaunt's spine then grabbed her husband beneath his arms.
"Come, Bodvar." She pulled him to his feet and turned to leave. "We are Moor Eagles no more."
"Leaving?" gasped the warrior who had struck Bodvar. He looked at his darksword a moment, then, as a discontented murmur began to build among his fellows, lowered the weapon. "Wait."
Melegaunt cursed Idona for an ungrateful shrew, and fumbling in his thoughts for some way to salvage the situation, started forward. As usual, it was the dragonmen who saved him. All at once, they burst into action, hurling themselves at the distracted Vaasans. The first sword-taker and another warrior fell instantly, and the work site erupted into a maelstrom of violence even more confused and ferocious than the first. Melegaunt saw a pair of saurians springing in Bodvar's direction and took the first out with a bolt of shadow, but the second was too quick. This one bowled the chieftain over on the run and lashed out for Idona, then a half-dozen other melees drifted between Melegaunt and the young wife, and he lost her.
He rushed forward swinging sword and spraying shadow, but the battle was as mad and confused as it was quick. Before he could find Bodvar again, he had to slay two dragonmen and use a spell of shadow-grabbing to keep from being dashed lifeless on the rocks at the base of his own cliff.
When Melegaunt did find the chieftain, he wished he had not been so quick to save himself. Bodvar was standing in the midst of a bloody pile of Vaasans and dragonmen, holding two broken swords of steel and searching the carnage around with a look of utter terror on his face.
"Idona?"
Bodvar found a female leg kicking at the ground from beneath a dead dragonman and used a boot to roll the white-scaled corpse away, but it turned out that the leg belonged to the mother who had grabbed one of the swords to defend her children.
He turned away from her without comment and called again, "Idona?"
"There," rasped someone. "They've got her." Melegaunt spun toward the speaker and found a pallid-faced sword-bearer pointing across the work site to a small knot of fleeing dragonmen. They were just starting down the trail toward the boulder walk, each one with a limp Vaasan body slung over its shoulders. The last body in line was that of Bodvar's young wife, her throat ripped out and her head dangling by the spine alone, her blue eyes somehow still locked on Melegaunt's face.
"No!" Melegaunt gasped. He laid a hand on Bodvar's shoulder. “I’m sorry, Bodvar. Sorry beyond words."
"Why? You have what you came for." Bodvar reached down to Melegaunt's scabbard and drew the last dark-sword, then turned to start after his dead wife. "You have your twenty souls."
Liar's Game
Jessica Beaven
The Year of the Starfall (1300 DR)
At the edge of a city in Faerun, a sewer main empties into the swamp. The light reaching inside gives way quickly; any who enter must proceed by touch. Deeper, the sewage grows thicker. It sucks at one's calves. Deeper still, and the refuse is dry. The procession from wet to dry challenges the very imperative that water must flow downward. And yet the sewers go even deeper. Debris has come to rest here: a shoe with a foot decaying in it; a head wedged against a pipe protruding from the floor; worse.
With no heavenly bodies to mark its passing, time loses meaning. A drip falls, then fades into the past, dripping forever in its moment.
The pipes give way to catacombs. Sounds of weeping fill the close air.
From one corridor, light issues; it seeps from the walls. Shifting animal forms inhabit this hall. Bars and wire hold them in, stripe their features. Some of the creatures look normal-cats shivering in shelved cages, mongrels drooping, even a lion cramped in a forward-sloping cell, its hide pressed into the bars.
The weeping creature in one of the larger cells has retreated to a corner to express its grief. Only fur is visible. For some reason, it stops crying and shifts.
It is another cat-or rather, two. One is joined to the other, exactly upside-down on its back-head melting into head, hip into hip, one tail twitching against another limp one. The piggybacker is motionless, legs flopping, tongue protruding, yellow eyes glazed an inch or two above the green ones. The living cat is lacerated, so that its intestines have spilled from its middle and drag behind it upon the floor.
This corridor is long. It passes into more corridors with small carry-cages abandoned here and there, jumbled
alongside tables, cushions, and tapestries. A doorway breaks the expanse of one wall.
Inside the doorway, a would-be archwizard turns, as if sensing a presence. Then she returns to poring over a book of beasts. Druidic scrawl covers the pages.
She appears beautiful, with that ruggedness of druids- lithe body, sun-tinted dark brown hair, blue eyes-but that is only the body she chose to wear today.
She is a descendant of a woman and a man who withdrew, with the everdark Shade Enclave, to the Plane of Shadow centuries ago. She had learned the story as a fledgling druid just starting to taste the power that would entice her to archwizardry, and the ancestral memory of Shade Enclave added fuel to that fire.
Now she can hear the enclave sometimes, calling to her, reminding her of its hold upon her. The Shadovar will soon return to her land, the land of the enclave's birth.
When they do, she will make Shade her home.
She rises and leaves her study.
1
"Pain is reality. But false pain is easy to engineer."
— Chever's last notes
The druid rose and glanced about her chamber, following an impulse to leave prematurely for the meeting of aspiring archwizards. The meetings came more frequently of late. Perhaps, like her, the older the dark ones grew, the more the Plane of Shadow called to them.
She strolled through her museum of abominations, following an urge to check upon them. She had thought she felt a disturbance earlier, but no-all seemed in order. She paused before her double cat, which was the most vocal, and closed her eyes to let its pain seethe over her. It had stopped crying for the moment. It had almost forgotten that it once had a life before this, but its despair remained, to confirm reality for the druid-wizard. Only real pain could call forth such misery. This brought the druid-wizard vicious comfort, similar to what a survivor of a shipwreck must feel upon stealing a life raft from a drowning shipmate. She had known doubts about the nature of reality once, long ago. It had been like finding that she could no longer trust the ground to hold her up.
The best specimens were those who had known dejection before she found them-mutations that lived in fear of sounder-bodied predators. Any suffering she could heap upon these abominations compounded that which they already knew. The thrill she derived from their torture could prove almost excruciating, and she would cry out in dark joy. The power she gained from those sessions-the afterglow-lasted for days.
An emissary from the Twelve Princes of Shade had come to her group earlier in the year, having somehow gotten wind of the clandestine organization. After testing the group for sympathy to the Shadovar through various-in some cases fatal-means, the emissary had assigned tasks. After the moot, the druid-wizard would set to her task: to seek out a collection of notes written by the archwizard Chever, who had lived in ancient Netheril. Chever had created the Opus Enclave, which had once housed Netheril's centers of learning.
In his last days, Chever had contacted and conversed with myriad extraplanar creatures and taken down his notes, which made little sense compared to the well-organized books and lectures he had delivered in earlier days. In fact, they allegedly made little sense compared to most anything. His later recordings, especially, disclosed madness.
But the Shadovar deemed the notes valuable, so the druid-wizard would find them. The emissary had given her a starting point: the notes were last rumored to have been in the hands of a scholar living near the northern end of the Desertsmouth Mountains.
The moot passed with relative ease. The would-be archwizards spent most of the meeting clustered, heads bent, over this or that tome, debating the consequences and efficacy of proposed actions. They seemed to have it under control, so the druid-wizard slipped away early, both to prepare for her journey and to escape being assigned a new task.
She had things to attend to-like her beast collection, which would fit so perfectly deep inside the catacombs of the floating enclave. Others might control the enclave's surface, but she would take advantage of the fact that surface has no depth; only one who rules an object's substance truly commands it. She would be the one who whispered suggestions that must be followed, the one who masterminded activities that the enclave's figureheads would consider their own.
She made the trip back to her stronghold automatically, not remembering anything of the distance she had traveled from the wizards' moot to her room. She checked her beasts' water supply, which she had tapped from drainage pipes. The system kept the creatures watered automatically, so she would not need to worry about them dying in her absence. She dressed in the traveling garb of a druid and filled her satchel with the items she would need in the Desertsmouth. She would let her druid aspect ascend for this trip, as she would need to give the wizard full control upon her return.
2
"At the edge of darkness is where the light is greatest."
— Chever's last notes
She chose to walk to her destination-a walk of many nights, but one that allowed her to flex her druidic muscles. She would live off the land and revel in moon, stars, sun, and earth. She supposed some part of her would miss these things when she moved to Shade Enclave, but then it wasn't as if she couldn't leave now and…
Anyway, it didn't really matter. When she reined in the druid again after this trip, the wizard would find satisfaction. Best to please that-the strongest of her two natures-first.
As the Desertsmouths rose on the horizon, the bushes and small trees along the banks of the river by which the druid-wizard had been traveling gave way to meadow grass as she neared the foothills. She curved away from the river and followed a brook through sun-speckled groves and alpine flowers.
After traveling for several more hours, with ground squirrels and meadowlarks as her only companions, she broke free of a small patch of oaks and aspen to encounter a cottage near a dip in the creek she had been following. She had passed several cabins along the way, but until now she had come across none that had the aura of promise she sought. This one, though… this one was different.
She peered into a warped-glass window, but the dwelling's single room was empty. A bowl of stew and sheets of parchment on a rough-hewn table told her of recent occupation. In fact, a door between a case of shelves and some gardening tools against the back wall was cracked open, allowing a ray of sunlight to reach in and illuminate dust motes and floorboards.
She would observe the cottage's owner. It had been a while since she had enacted the Change, and it would feel good to assume wolf form again. She performed the ritual and watched lazily as her palms thickened into paws, her fingers withdrew into pads. She felt her nose and mouth pull out as if some god shaped them of clay. Fur sprouted all over her body; she was the earth in spring, shoots of hair emerging from her in a quiet burst. Her bone structure changed, forced her prone. Her knees reversed; her tailbone extended into a plume. The process lasted a mere moment, and a strange voice in her mind wove through it all, as if it, and not she, had commanded the Change.
The druid-wizard veered into the meadow grasses, slunk to a vantage point among them. Her brown ears and blue eyes lifted to just above the grasses' tips.
The man's back was partially turned to her. He was slim yet muscular, and his facial features-silhouetted against the green and yellow of the creek's trees and the sun on the leaves-formed smooth angles against his tousled hair.
He spoke in the voice that had accompanied her Change.
The druid-wizard sidled around to better see what the man was doing. He was crouched near a vegetable garden, shaded under an eave. He spoke to a rose plant.
But his lips did not move.
His voice seemed to fade for a moment, as if the druid-wizard's surprise at the realization forced That Which Was to become That Which Was Not. But then her credulity caught up to her. She had known stranger things than this in her hundreds of years of magic. Why had this affected her?
The voice returned, rising and falling in windlike rhythm. It seemed to create a wind, for though no
breeze swept the grasses among which the druid-wizard hid, the rose nodded and swayed, almost as though it responded to the man's thoughts.
The druid-wizard swiveled her ears, as if to better catch those thoughts.
… fell asleep in my stew and dreamed of music. In that music, you spoke to me. And I tried to tell you "soon," but I don't know if my words reached you. Now I am awake, and I can talk to you only like this. Please understand me. Please know that I am talking to you. Ah! You nod! But I never know if your replies are real or merely figments of my desperation. I have lost my ability to know anything with certainty. I am… I am lost…
He broke into quiet sobs. The druid-wizard thought she sensed an image in his mind-an image of a woman…
Clearly the man had gone mad in his isolation. Fascinating.
The druid-wizard could almost imagine that he spoke to her somehow, and not to the rose. Some part of her responded to the idea with a surge of longing so sudden that she could not breathe, an imperative that, for a moment, wiped out all else.
She had not lost control of her emotions in such a way since childhood. To know surprise at a simple hermit's thought-projection! To be blindsided by emotion hitherto suppressed, unsuspected! She should leave; power of this magnitude could ruin her. Even as she thought this, she knew that whatever force was at work here had already secured its hold on her. Plus, she must complete the task for the Shadovar, and that meant exploring every avenue of this country. She must see where this path led.