Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel

by Henderson, Samantha

  She tilted her head at a rustle in the leaves up the slope. Lusk was casting about, looking for spoor, tracks, or other signs of the gnolls. She leaped gracefully off the boulder and called out between the trees.

  “See anything?”

  “Not much.” His voice echoed, disembodied in the crisp fall air. “No gnoll sign, I think. I found the skull of a deer, but that could be from a big cat, even a wolf. Or it could have just died in the winter—it’s full-grown. Wait—no, a predator got it. There’s flesh still on it—fresh.”

  A whisper of a boot on dead dried leaves told where Lusk cast about in the woods above. Lakini loosed her sword in its sheath across her back—ordinary predators were nothing like gnolls, but it was best to be cautious—and leaned against the grainy surface of the boulder, enjoying the heat that the stone had gathered through the day on her back.

  “Lakini?” Lusk’s voice had a quality that made her stand straight and reach for her dagger.

  “What, Cserhelm?” she called.

  “Keep watch, Lakini. I found the rest of the deer. All of them.”

  A long, liquid snarl sounded behind Lakini, behind the boulder that overlooked the crevasse. She turned, crouching and reaching for her greatsword, in time to see an enormous wolf round the stone at speed, leaping for her with an intent that had nothing to do with a workaday predator. Caught off-guard, she had the vague impression of cruel, knifelike claws outstretched for her and a mouthful of wicked teeth before it bore her to the ground. Cursing herself for an inattentive fool, she rolled as soon as she hit, avoiding a swipe of claws aimed at her gut, and unsheathed her dagger. The length of her sword on her back pressed into her muscles. Still tumbling, she lashed out with her dagger and saw the creature flinch back. She came out of the roll into a one-legged kneeling position, knife extended, and faced the wolf that slavered a few feet before her, feeling her lips rise into a snarl in return. Dark blood dripped down the wolf’s leg where she’d slashed at it, but it wasn’t any kind of serious wound.

  “Lakini!” called Lusk, somewhere behind her.

  “I found the wolf,” she called back, not moving from her position, and not shifting her gaze from the creature in front of her. The thing’s mouth seemed to open wider in a grin, and saliva pooled in the corners of its lips.

  Very slowly Lakini shifted her dagger to her left hand. The outsize wolf’s eyes—one brown, one an angry-looking red—followed her every movement. The smell of chemicals—sulfur and something like burned iron—filled the air.

  With a smooth motion Lakini grasped the knife hilt in her left hand and reached for her sword with the other. The wolf leaped for her again. She rose to her feet and seized the sword hilt, drawing it and bringing it down in one fluid, powerful arc. The blade missed the creature’s skull by a hair, but it bit through the edge of its upright, pointed ear, taking off a third of it. At the same time, Lakini sliced the knife up in an undercut, protecting her left side and cutting deeply through the wolf’s forelimb.

  The animal howled and jumped back, well out of the range of her sword, farther away than it should have been able to jump. The burned metal smell intensified. She watched as the bones of the wolf’s face seemed to melt beneath the surface of the skin and the thing stood upright, hind legs lengthening and forelimbs turning into long, burly arms, still tipped with black claws. Rearing to its full height, it topped her by two heads.

  The thing snarled. Its eyes, one still scarlet, were sunk deep on either side of the broad nose. Its face and what parts of the body weren’t covered with thick leather armor were as hairy as the wolf. Its right arm was cut to the bone, dark blood coating fur and armor, and part of its left ear was lopped off, the side of its head wet and matted.

  Sweet Selûne served with parsnips, thought Lakini. It’s a barghest.

  Quickly she sheathed the dagger and took the worn, familiar grip of her sword in both hands. “Lusk!” she called, not taking her eyes off the lycanthrope for a second. “Barghest! There might be more!”

  “At least one,” he replied grimly, and she heard the furious scream of a wounded animal.

  The barghest glared at her, and a coldness rose through her body like a tide. Her joints ached and she felt a dull despair, heavy as iron on her shoulders.

  You’ll die here, a small voice whispered in her head. This thing will kill you, and you’ll never see the sun again.

  She hesitated, confused. The hobgoblin moved a step closer. The smell of sulfur was almost overwhelming now.

  It was an invisible attack, as deadly as that mouthful of teeth slashing at her—some barghests had the skill to project despair into the minds of their opponents, dulling their senses and making them easier prey.

  Without letting the tip of her sword droop, Lakini concentrated. Part of her still focused on the threat before her, while another sought the river of Astral grace that ran inside her always, sustaining and illuminating. All devas, save perhaps those few who had become corrupted by their experiences in this plane, contained within their spirit the gift of Astral light, born as they were in the hallowed seas.

  She visualized two hands scooping the luminous material into a sphere and hurling it at the barghest, straight through the miasma of doom it was inflicting on her. Her unseen counter was effective, and the beast staggered back as if struck.

  She pressed her advantage, striking at its midriff, then swung again at its wounded right arm. It jumped back toward the boulder, and she pursued it, unwilling to let it take refuge in some cave in the chasm and heal. It would be madness to let such a dangerous creature survive so close to the sanctuary.

  There was a narrow ledge where a person could stand between the boulder and the drop-off. The wounded barghest was crouched against it, grinning at her. She raised her sword to strike it down.

  The enormous curved edge of a battle-axe chopped down between her and the wounded barghest. Only by scrabbling backward uriously did she escape the blow that would have sunk deep into her knee. The blade bounced off a stone in front of her, drawing sparks.

  Idiot, Lakini thought. He was luring you into a trap.

  The second barghest, a female slightly smaller than the first, was covered entirely with black fur, save for two white blazes that started high on the wide, flat scalp and extended down both sides of the body. It growled and lifted the battle-axe again, and Lakini deflected the downward blow with an upstroke of her greatsword. The weapons met with a clash that made the metal ring and sent a great jolt of pain through her shoulder.

  Stupid. She had fallen so easily into the assumption that there would be two, that the beast Lusk battled upslope would be the only other danger. Partnering with Lusk and patrolling the limited demesne of the sanctuary had made her soft. She had forgotten about the sheer variety of evil that made Toril its home.

  She had thrust the white-striped barghest back with her sword, and while it regained footing, the first darted under her guard and slashed at her with its claws. She cried out as pain knifed into her side. It had penetrated her side armor, leather, skin, and muscle, and opened a gash along her ribs. The blow had flung all her weight onto her right leg, and Lakini used that, delivering a solid kick to the creature’s knee with her booted foot. It yipped and sprawled on the ground.

  Nausea took her, and the wound in her side throbbed. She was going to die here, and Lusk as well. Shadrun would be cracked open like an egg and the bones of those that sheltered there left to weather under the sky. Lakini looked up to see the female barghest glaring at her, gripping the axe at the ready.

  Lakini tried to find the river of light inside her to counter the barghest’s psychic attack, but this time it eluded her.

  It swung the axe and she leaned back, letting it whistle through the space where her torso had been a second before. When it backswung, she countered it, fighting to remain strong through the pain of her lacerated side and the despair that bore down on her. The thing snarled in her face and its head flattened. Its ears rose on either side, an
d the snout lengthened. Teeth bristled in the open mouth, and the stench of sulfur was overwhelming. It was changing into a wolf, with its white stripe still blazing down its lupine body.

  It raised the battle-axe again, and she struggled to counter, to get in a blow of her own. Something whistled over her right shoulder, and the black fletch of Lusk’s arrow brushed her cheek. The bolt buried itself in the beast’s furry neck. The barghest froze, a look that might have been astonishment in the beast’s eyes. It staggered backward, swayed at the edge of the chasm, and vanished over the side.

  The first barghest had recovered its footing and stood at the lip of the cliff, staring down at where its companion had vanished. Slowly it turned its massive, maimed head and pierced her with a look of purest hatred, its red eye glowing like a bloody ruby. With a scream, it leaped for her, a tremendous jump that spanned three of its own body lengths. Ready for it, she braced herself for the attack. Her greatsword pierced the abdomen, and she thrust as hard as she could, feeling the blade part sinew and muscle and then grate against the creature’s backbone. It froze for a second, the hairy, bloody head almost lying on her shoulder. Then, without a sound, it collapsed to the ground, sliding off her blade.

  A freshening wind came from the mountaintop, blowing away the smell of sulfur and leaving the iron tang of blood behind.

  Lakini limped to the edge of the chasm to make sure the other barghest was dead. Half-wolf and half-goblin, the white-blazed body sprawled broken over a root that jutted out of the cliffside. She shivered at the sight of the monstrous hybrid, neither one species nor the other.

  Lusk called her away, examined her wound, and wrapped it tightly. “It’s not as bad as it might have been,” he remarked. “Make sure it’s cleaned out well and it’ll heal quickly.”

  She nodded, forbearing to point out to him that after centuries in this incarnation, she was well aware of the necessary care of battlefield wounds.

  Together they hiked through the trees to recover Lusk’s dagger, stuck firmly between the ribs of the third barghest, a smaller goblinoid sprawled next to a pile of deer bones picked clean.

  “Where did they come from?” she said. “How did we not know they were here?”

  Lusk, meticulously wiping the barghest’s black, sticky blood from his dagger, shrugged. “We’re in the wilderness, Cserhelm. We can’t control every handbreadth of the mountain.” He sighed. “I suppose I should get my arrow back, but I don’t want to crawl down after that thing.”

  She stared at the beast’s body and at the remains of the deer. There must have been fifteen or twenty. “We should have been aware of this kind of predation. And I didn’t expect there to be three.” She still heard the big male barghest’s last scream, before it impaled itself on her sword, full of rage but also a kind of despair. It was the same kind of despair a barghest could inflict upon its prey, but heartfelt within itself. Why? Was the skunk-striped barghest its mate?

  “Perhaps the chasm does extend to the Underdark,” remarked Lusk, giving the blade a final polish and sheathing it, “where the eldritch spawn of Rophile roam. Listen!” He put his hand to his ear. “Can’t you hear them?”

  On the breeze came the faint bleating of sheep, probably from a herd grazing in the meadows below. Lakini laughed, ignoring the pain in her side. At least the lycanthropes wouldn’t be preying on the crofter’s flocks.

  Lakini knew the gouge in her side would heal quickly, but she suspected it would be a long time before the baffled roar of the barghest faded from her mind.

  “Come home,” she said, laying her hand briefly on Lusk’s arm. “You’ve not even paid respects to Shadrun yet, and the Vashtun will want to see you.”

  The Vashtun had not always been the Vashtun, of course. His birthname had been discarded and forgotten long before. The sanctuary keeper of Shadrun-of-the-Snows was always called the Vashtun; the name of the first keeper had become a title over the length of years.

  Years before, in the Year of Azuth’s Woe, that first Vashtun, a quiet, unassuming city scribe, had laid aside his transcription of the bloated history of a rich merchant’s ancestors, tied his ink pot and quills at his side, and walked away from the busy streets and commerce of his native place, walked into the heart of the country, down a road teeming with market folk, private guards, and weary would-be adventurers in search of coin to be made honestly or not. He passed dwarves bound for town to negotiate trade treaties, halflings in search of a day’s labor and mischief afterward, and farmers taking their town goods home. At night he would sleep by the side of the road in the travelers’ shelters raised by local lordlings or town councils for the public good, drinking from public wells and sharing food with fellow journeyers if they had it to spare.

  He walked roads farther and farther away from human habitation, and when he came upon a crooked mountain path that pleased him, he turned aside from the main road and climbed up, past oaks clustered thick and twisted at the mountain’s foot, past thickets of pine and deep, white-barked, rustling birch to where ferns grew in a sunny meadow stretched in the sun beneath the peaks and ravines of the summit. There he found the remains of a forgotten temple, little more than blocks of moss-grown marble tumbled around the warm trickle of a mineral spring. He found the carved onyx head of some ancient, obscure godling, cleaned the dirt from its time-worn features, and propped it up against the ruins of a retaining wall. He washed his road-sore feet in the warm, slightly sulfurous waters of the spring and found himself a comfortable seat in last season’s fallen leaves. Vashtun sat contemplating the long and crooked snakelike road that coiled between the cities of the plains.

  He had spent so many days putting one foot before the other in such a steady rhythm that the simple action had become hypnotic. Gone was the strange impulse that made him set aside the heavy parchment, filled with line after line of neat writing, push back the chair from the slanted desk, and leave the rich man’s library to walk ceaselessly. Now he wanted nothing but to make his mind a blank, like a blown glass bulb containing a perfect vacuum. He wasn’t bored, or frightened. Sometimes he felt a little hungry or thirsty, but to stir from his perch to find berries or water would stir the still, cold waters of his mind, so he pushed such sensations away.

  As the sun reached its zenith, a crofter a few miles away spotted crows circling, curious, over the ruins and sent his child to see what went forward. The boy returned an hour later to say a man was there, with strange clothing and nothing but a pouch at his hip, and he had found an old god in the dirt and restored it to the spring. The strange man said nothing but watched the horizon with an abstract smile.

  The crofter’s wife sent the child back with a bottle of mead and a basket of bread and fruit paste, as well as an old patched cloak against the night chill, for it was clear to her a holy man had been sent to guard the old spring at Shadrun. Word spread to the other crofters in the foothills, keepers of the mountain cattle that thrived on the rough brush and stiff grasses of the slopes, the rangers that wandered the woods, and finally to the villages rooted below, the same villages the scribe had passed in his journey. Folk came to see him, to bring him food and what few items he seemed to need. He looked upon everyone with the same dispassionate smile, and he did not resist placing his hand on their heads when they kneeled before him and asked it.

  Some of the men built him a simple shelter with the cracked, chipped blocks of the old shrine. Others restored the retaining wall around the spring, and the steps going up to it, so that again it pooled, warm and steaming, before trickling away between moss-blanketed boulders. Passive as a child fed his dinner and tucked into bed, he watched as these things were done, but anyone who kneeled before him and looked into his eyes knew that behind their benign, blue-sky expression, an encompassing intelligence moved.

  Sometimes when someone sat beside him, breathing the same way and able, over the course of hours or days, to focus on nothing, they felt a tickle in their mind, a sense of someone outside of them possessing their senses. Some
heard a whispering in an incomprehensible language, drifting through their brain like the cold insinuation of the winter wind. Most who sat and meditated with the holy man Vashtun did not attempt it again, leaving the task of communing with the gods to those with the inclination for it. One, the dreamy son of a stolid crofter, began weeping after an hour of sitting at Vashtun’s feet and refused to ever go near the spring again (on the positive side, he became far more industrious in the fields and sheep pens then he ever had been before). But there were those few who seemed to thrive on the same strange state the holy man manifested, who stayed with him as the air thickened with cold and the snows came. With the help of the locals, they added to the shrine shelter, making it a warm place to stay throughout the winter, heated with steam from the spring.

  When the thaw came, a trickle of pilgrims, some from the cities of the plains, some from far beyond them, began to arrive. The locals were glad to guide such visitors up the crooked mountain paths for a small fee, and also to house and feed them, likewise for a small fee. Over time, the mountain path became a decent-sized and passable road, and small houses and inns sprang up beside it to take care of the travelers’ needs. The tiny ruined shrine beside Shadrun spring was expanded and rebuilt to become Shadrun-of-the-Snows, a refuge for the weary traveler as well as the questing pilgrim. The lords of cities and estates, as well as forward-looking merchants, sent tribute and manpower to Shadrun-of-the-Snows, for here was a sanctuary and safe resting place for those journeying between domains and kingdoms, where one could rest and recover, safe from mercenaries, beasts, and bandits, before proceeding on one’s way.

  Vashtun became the Vashtun, served and protected by those who found comfort in always being in his presence. After the length of his days was done and he was buried on the slopes above the sanctuary, another took his place. Having spent long hours meditating with the Vashtun, the thrumming, insistent whisper that pervaded the holy man’s mind possessed his as well. Never himself a scribe, he tied the old pouch of scribes’ tools at his belt, and all called him the Vashtun. He was protected and served in his turn, as was the case with the one who came after him, and the one who came after her. There were many who thought, hundreds of years later, that the same silent and meditative Vashtun sat in a quiet room at the shrine of Shadrun-of-the-Snows, and in some ways they were correct.