by Troy Denning
A film of oily shadow spread across the ceiling, filling the cavern with a soft, rainlike patter as thousands of drops of water lost their tenuous hold and plummeted into the lake. Vala drew her darksword and in a single smooth motion sent it whirling up at the nearest phaerimm. The glassy black blade tore a three-foot gash across the thornback's body and became lodged with little more than the hilt showing.
The stain on the ceiling swept past overhead. The astonished phaerimm came loose one after the other, the hardened lime-mud camouflage falling in cakes from their squirming bodies and their strange language of winds stirring the air into whistling vortexes. The phaerimm hit the water almost as one and sank beneath the surface.
Escanor and his shadow lords stopped working and whirled toward the splash rings, shouting to each other in their own language and trying to make sense of what was happening.
"Phaerimm!" Vala stretched her hand toward the one she had attacked and thought of her darksword, and the blade rose out of the water and flew back into her grasp. "Three of them!"
She heard Galaeron intoning his second spell and looked over to see him flipping the ring of shadowsilk toward the place the third phaerimm had entered the water. A disk of black shadow appeared two inches above the surface. Vala was distracted as the startled phaerimm activated their floating magic and began rising out of the water. The two nearest the curtain came up in the midst of the astonished shadow lords, who quickly proved the truth of Escanor’s boasts by assailing them with shadow webs and darkswords.
Even caught off guard, the phaerimm reacted like the terrors they were, unleashing a flurry of fire strikes and lightning bolts that left a dozen Shadovar bobbing dead in the darkening waters. A pair of scorched shadow lords popped up beside Vala, their arms and legs blasted off by the force of the strike that had killed them. Vala threw her sword again, only to see her target scythed down the middle by a falling wall of black glass as Escanor unleashed his own magic.
Vala glanced over to see the third phaerimm's tail vanishing into the circle of shadow Galaeron had placed over its splash ring. The elf himself was pointing across the lake roughly in her direction. Knowing the creature would be disoriented for a moment when it emerged from Galaeron's shadow door, Vala nodded and reached out to summon her sword back.
Galaeron's finger shifted in Prince Escanor's direction. "No, Galaeron!" Vala cried. "Here!"
Too late. The third phaerimm had already reappeared, stunned and disoriented by its dizzying journey through the shadow plane. But Escanor happened to be turning to attack their other surviving foe, and so this thornback appeared behind him instead of in front. Vala's stomach turned to ice. With the prince at least twenty paces away and in a direct line beyond the dazed phaerimm, she did not dare throw her sword again.
She started toward him, yelling, "Escanor, behind you!"
The prince cocked his head in response but only stretched a hand toward the second phaerimm, who was assailing five of his lords with a roaring storm of meteors. A sphere of spinning darkness shot from his hand and streaked through the thing's torso, leaving a basket-sized hole in the heart of its body. The creature splashed into the lake and slowly sank out of sight.
The third phaerimm was already bringing its tail out of the water, ten steps away. "Watch your back!" she cried.
A murky aura of darkness-more of Galaeron's magic, Vala guessed-enveloped the phaerimm, but the spell did not prevent the creature's tail from catching Escanor in the pit of the stomach as he spun to meet the attack. The barb sank to its root, doubling the prince over and drawing an eerie gurgle of anguish.
Vala hurled her darksword. The blade tumbled three times, then sank hilt-deep in the phaerimm's torso. The creature began to flicker between material and immaterial, and Vala was astonished to realize that Galaeron had not cast his spell to protect the prince but to trap the phaerimm beside him. Had Galaeron finally been taken by his shadow self?
Escanor wailed in pain and slipped off the barb, then rolled to his back and floated, groaning. Vala called her darksword back to her grasp and began to angle in the prince's direction.
"Vala, no!" Galaeron splashed into the water. "The phaerimm! It knows too much!"
Vala glanced at the prince, who, unlike most of his wounded lords, was at least floating face up. She decided to place her trust in Galaeron a little longer. She sprang at the phaerimm, her black sword blocking the tail as it arced toward her throat, lopping the dangerous barb off at the root. On the backswing, she removed two of the thing's four arms, then reversed her grip, jammed the blade into the creature's enormous mouth, and split it down the side.
The dark aura vanished from around the phaerimm- only to reappear an instant later as Galaeron recast his snare spell. The phaerimm flickered between materiality and immateriality again as it tried once more to teleport away, and again Vala sank her sword deep into its body. It pummeled her with one of its remaining arms, and the other clamped onto her throat, trying to crush her windpipe. She kneed it in the flank and felt sharp pain as one of its body thorns impaled her thigh. The phaerimm began to overpower her, pulling her face toward the fang-filled mouth atop its shoulders. She croaked in Galaeron’s direction.
He was already pointing a sliver of obsidian at the creature and yelling a string of mystic syllables. A finger-thin ray of darkness left his hand, catching the phaerimm in one of its remaining arms and severing it at the elbow. Vala snapped the other with a palm strike, then kicked free and brought her darksword around in three eviscerating swings.
The thing's heart slipped out of the second gash, still beating. Vala sent it flying off with a flick of her blade, and the phaerimm dropped, motionless, into the water. She struck again and again, not stopping until she had opened it from tail to lip and left it floating in the water like a dressed eel. Galaeron waded up. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm alive." She shook her head clear and gave herself a cursory glance, then looked over and found herself staring into a pair of black, empty eyes. "G-Galaeron? How many spells did you cast?"
Instead of answering. Galaeron pushed her toward Escanor's floating form. "See to the prince and the others," he said as he turned and started toward the shadow curtain. "I'll finish the Splicing."
CHAPTER TWO
28 Tarsakh, the Year of Wild Magic
The city appeared just before dusk, hovering low over a rosy desert butte, a distant diamond of umbral murk silhouetted against the purple twilight of the eastern sky. As usual, it was surrounded by wisps of black fog, giving it the appearance of a storm cloud, a mirage, or an angry djinn. The V-shaped specks of a hundred or so vultures wheeled in lazy circles beneath the city, chasing the constant rain of garbage that dropped from its refuse chutes. "There," Galaeron said.
Though it had been two days since he'd completed the Splicing, the icy tingle of shadow magic still permeated his body-and he hungered for more, longed to cast spells until he was numb and cold from head to foot, until he was filled with the power of shadow and beyond mortal frailty. Instead, he pointed at the floating city and said, "See it?" "So far?" Malik complained.
A pudgy little man with a moon-shaped face and bug eyes, Malik el Sami yn Nasser was the Seraph of Lies, a favored servant of the evil god Cyric and an oddly stalwart traveling companion who had saved Galaeron's life more than once.
"I apologize for my accursed luck," the little man said. "It has always been its nature that just when I think matters could seem no worse, a turn of bad fortune comes along to prove me wrong."
"In this desert, things look farther than they are," Vala said. Limping a little from her wounded thigh, she started down the dry wash at their backs. "We'd better get moving, or we'll lose sight of it when dark really falls."
Nodding, Galaeron turned to follow. As a precaution against attack, Shade Enclave appeared only briefly each evening and always in a different place. Given that Escanor's company had failed to finish the Splicing and raise the shadowshell at the appointed time, it made sense to p
ut some distance between the floating city and the Sharaedim battlefields. Assuming they were lucky enough to reach the city before it vanished again, Galaeron only hoped they would not fall victim to any new defenses intended for the phaerimm.
In the bottom of the wash, they found the Shadovar survivors preparing the company's mounts for departure. Though most of the shadow lords had already recovered from the cavern battle, Escanor had taken an egg when he was impaled and remained incoherent with fever. The longer it stayed inside him, the harder it would be to remove, but his chances were far better than those of most humans would have been. Shadovar were fast healers. Most of their wounds had closed within an hour after the battle, so it seemed likely that the prince would survive even a difficult extraction.
Galaeron followed Vala over to the nominal leader of the group in Escanor's incapacity, a ruby-eyed lord so swarthy that he looked more like an obsidian statue than a live man. "Lord Rapha," Vala said, "we've located the enclave."
"That is well." Rapha did not look up. He was looping a length of shadow strand around the hands of a dead comrade, using it to secure the man in his saddle. "We'll soon be ready."
Galaeron and his companions waited for Rapha to ask where or how far off the enclave was, or to give some indication that he was concerned about getting Escanor to the city quickly. Rapha ignored them.
Finally, Galaeron said, "The enclave is a long way off. You might want to send Escanor ahead."
The Shadovar fixed his ruby eyes on Galaeron. "Concerned for the prince, are we?" "Of course," Vala said.
"Most concerned," Malik agreed. He hesitated for a moment, then was unable to keep from adding, "But we are even more concerned for ourselves. We know who will be blamed if he dies."
This drew a sour smile from the shadow lord. Like everyone in the company, Rapha knew that Malik had been cursed by the goddess Mystra to speak only the truth or not all. It was an irony in which Shadovar seemed to take special delight.
Rapha clapped a hand on the little man's shoulder. "You have nothing to fear, my stubby friend. You were not even at the Splicing."
"But››0M were," Galaeron said, wondering what Rapha was playing at. "You know I meant no harm to the prince."
"I know what I saw," Rapha said. "You used a shadow snare to keep the thornback trapped beside the prince."
"Had I let the thing teleport away, the shadowshell would be no prison at all," Galaeron retorted. "Those phaerimm were there to learn its secret, and what they discovered was important, or they would have attacked us long before I found them."
Rapha considered this, then his voice grew quiet and menacing. "How is it you know so much about the phaerimm, elf? Why could you find them when twenty shadow lords could not?"
Galaeron glanced away. "I can't say why," he admitted. "It just seemed right that they would be there." "It just seemed right," Rapha echoed dubiously.
"I think his shadow knew," Vala said. "He didn't say anything about them until his shadow self asserted itself."
Rapha shook his head impatiently. "The shadow self is only an absence of what a person is, a darker image of himself that he creates simply by being what he is. It cannot know more than its creator, any more than its creator can know it."
Galaeron shrugged. "Then I can't explain it," he said. "I just had a feeling they would be there-and I was right"
"And risking Prince Escanor's life?" Rapha asked. "You just had a feeling about that?"
"I had to do it to save the shell," Galaeron said. "I knew that, just like I knew the phaerimm would try to teleport away."
Rapha shook his head. "You can't be sure," he insisted. "Your shadow self has you in its grasp. Your thinking could have been subverted-"
"But I can be sure that he needs a healer-and soon," Galaeron interrupted. This Rapha was a sly one, accusing Galaeron of trying to harm the prince-and wasting valuable time. "Unless you have some reason for delaying? Perhaps you'd like to see Escanor hatch a thorn-back egg?"
Rapha's eyes flared from ruby to white-orange. "I have nothing but love for all the princes of Shade, elf."
"Then wouldn't it be wise to have someone return him to the enclave at once?"
"It would, had Prince Escanor been lucid enough to tell us today's word of passing," Rapha said. "As it is, anyone who tries to enter through the shadows will find himself plummeting through to the Barrens of Doom and Despair."
"So we must return the slow way," Vala said, placing herself between Galaeron and Rapha to cut off further argument. "Can Escanor ride?"
"It would be better if he didn't," Rapha said. "Perhaps your friend would be kind enough to take a passenger."
The shadow lord motioned across the wash, to where a grim-faced stone giant with sad gray eyes was kneeling over a ten-foot block of quartzite. He was clinking away with his sculptor's tools, fashioning a life-sized model of the struggle between Escanor and the phaerimm that had wounded him. Though the work was still rough, it was obvious by the snaking forms and undulating hollows that he had captured not only the details, but the spirit and swiftness of the battle-and from little more than a description of the events.
"I am confident Aris would be pleased to be of some small service to the prince," Malik said. "While we were watching the camp, he said many times-if once can be considered many-that he wished he were small enough to accompany the rest of the company into the Underdark and do his part to seal the fate of the phaerimm."
"Good. Will you be kind enough to ask him for me? Ill have the prince brought over directly." Rapha waved Malik toward Aris, then turned to Galaeron and Vala. "You can tell which mounts are yours? Well be leaving shortly."
"We'll be fine," Vala said. "I banded a leg on each of ours."
The precaution was not a frivolous one. The Shadovar's flying mounts-veserabs-were odd, furless creatures that had no faces and uniform midnight-blue skin. With four spindly legs, fan-shaped ears, and a pair of gargoyle-like wings folded alongside their tubular bodies, they looked like an unfortunate cross between bats and earthworms. Once they impressed on a rider, their devotion was absolute-to the point that they would spit noxious fumes into the face of anyone else who tried to mount them.
Galaeron followed her down the draw until they found a trio of veserabs wearing copper bands on their legs. Vala pointed to one with a band on its right foreleg. Galaeron gave the wing joint a tentative squeeze and slipped a foot into the stirrup. The creature did not react until he lowered his full weight into the saddle, when- much to his relief-an undulation of pleasure ran down its long body.
A few moments later, Malik returned and climbed into his saddle, and Rapha signaled the departure. The veserabs charged down the wash until they gathered enough speed, then spread their wings and rose into the air in flawless formation. Many of the shadow lords were tied across their saddles, but only Escanor's mount was riderless. The company had recovered all of its casualties and carried them through fifty twining Underdark miles back to the surface.
As they climbed out of the wash, a huge dome of darkness rose into view over their shoulders at Anauroch's western edge. Even from a dozen miles into the desert, the barrier was immense, curving away high into the sky and stretching north and south as far as the eye could see. Through its black translucency, Galaeron could just make out the stacked crests of the foothills of the Desert Border South and, looming behind, the familiar crags of High Sharaedim itself. He could not help thinking of what lay beyond those peaks, the vale and city of Evereska-and his sister, Keya, safe within the city's protective mythal. He knew better than to think that his warrior father had been lucky enough to survive his duties to return to her side, but Lord Aubric Nihmedu was as resourceful as he was brave, and there was no harm in praying it so.
Once the veserabs had ascended high enough to avoid being surprised by an attack from the ground, Aris rose into the air on an ancient Netherese flying disk. Though the bronze saucer was neither as swift nor as maneuverable as a veserab, it was capable of carryin
g not only the giant's weight but also that of the wounded prince, his campaign tent, and Aris's half-completed statue. Its one drawback was that Aris could not defend himself in an air battle. The disks had been designed as battle platforms for Netherese archwizards, not stone giant clerics.
As the company leveled off and fixed their course on the murky silhouette of Shade Enclave, the formation began to loosen, giving the veserabs room to relax and stretch their wings. The creatures did not fly so much as swim through the atmosphere, reaching forward to grab a piece of air, then pulling themselves past. The turbulence and slipstreams created by tight formations made it more difficult to stay aloft with this strange motion, so they usually divided into smaller groups and flew side by side when traveling long distances. Vala and Malik drew up on opposite sides of Galaeron, spacing themselves about thirty feet apart.
Even had they been close enough to speak comfortably, the pounding veserab wings would have made it impossible to hear. They continued toward the dusk with only their own thoughts for company, leaving it to their mounts to steer a course toward the enclave while they watched their assigned slice of sky. Though most of the phaerimm were trapped inside the shadowshell, their hosts of servants and slaves remained free and apt to attack at any time. Twice, Rapha dispatched fliers to chase down and slay asabi lizardmen lest they were scouting for a larger company, and once they themselves had to swing into the shadows beneath a long line of cliffs when Vala spied the flea-sized spheres of a distant beholder troop bobbing across the moon's face.
Galaeron spent most of the trip brooding over the bitter words that had passed between him and Rapha. When they reached Shade Enclave, the lord clearly intended to blame him for what had befallen Escanor, and part of Galaeron even wondered if that could be justified. His shadow self was as insidious as it was dark, always working to make him see dishonorable motives in the actions of everyone around him, and for some time he had been growing angry about the hungry look in Escanor's eyes whenever he addressed Vala. Was it possible that Galaeron had sent the phaerimm to Escanor not because he wanted to be certain of killing it, but because his shadow self wanted to see the prince harmed instead?