The spore haze seemed to move with the creature. The light emitted by the haze gave everything an unearthly blue tint, a halo of sorts. By its illumination, Raidon saw the tunnel ahead was clear of stumbling fossils. So far.
The strange creature held the sorcerer securely in one arm, nestled against its chest like a mother might hold a babe. The pose lent Raidon sudden reassurance—for whatever reason, the fungus hulk was protecting Adrik. Intuition told him that as long as the creature lived, Adrik would be safe.
Raidon’s shadow suddenly deepened and stretched ahead. Kiril and Angul must have entered the tunnel. He glanced back, saw the elf managing a pace quicker than he would have supposed, though her blade probably fed her speed. That sword, cursed though she proclaimed, was a relic of power unlike Raidon had ever seen.
In their wake, a flood of stone-clasped marauders followed.
Kiril held her sword like a standard. She marched beneath its haughty certainty. Angul burned like a brand, with a cerulean fire unique to it, illuminating the wide, high tunnel down which she coursed. The hard-edged light Angul shed fought with the softer, bioluminescent haze that clung to the fungus hulk, which bloomed along the same tunnel. The enigmatic creature yet gripped the sorcerer in a tender clutch. The beast bled ichor from scores of wounds. It had lost so much internal fluid without impairment Kiril wondered if the ichor was necessary for the creature’s survival.
Such certainly wasn’t the case for Adrik. A portion of the elf’s mind, free of sword-influence, worried about the injured, too-quiet sorcerer. What did the great striding creature want with him? It didn’t seem to wish any of them harm; rather, it had fallen in with them as if an old ally. Perhaps it was as concerned about the undead uprising in its quiet tunnels as they were. The horrors rumored to stalk Stardeep’s underdungeon had proved all too real. No wonder so few had ever managed to make the trek between Sildëyuir and the dungeon proper.
As she held Angul aloft, she noted on the back of her left hand the ugly burn scar she’d received more than half a decade ago, years after she’d set aside her duties as a Keeper. A too-close encounter with the magma heart of an active volcano. Nothing to do with Traitors, aberrations, ancient gods, undead, or fell sorceries. Seeing that scar pulled her more fully from Angul’s mental grip. She took a deep breath. Gliding above, pacing her as it did so effortlessly these days, Xet chimed upon noticing her regard, as if to ask if she were returned to her right mind. She was, but she didn’t sheathe the sword.
Behind them moved a cluster of ravenous fossils, and if her vigor evaporated, she’d fall behind into their remorseless clutch.
Then came a sound so hideous Kiril saw Raidon flinch. It was the sound of demons screaming torment, or the tortured cries of a thousand victims bawling out their last breath after days on the rack. It was a sound she hoped never to hear again.
The sound came from ahead. But no path was possible other than the direction of the hellborn screams. They continued their mad dash, and moments later, elf, half-elf, and fungus hulk emerged into a vast cavity.
The roof rose steadily upward and was crowned by a violet flame that stuttered and flared, one moment dim, one moment sun bright.
The light illuminated an army of hundreds, perhaps thousands of hard white figures in the midst of a terrible riot, all trying to crowd into a space beneath the light on narrow streets in the ruins of a blasted city.
Here and there, amidst the white backs and pale eroded heads, she saw the silhouettes of Knights. By the Sign, how had they come here? Many fought alone—isolated clashes surrounded by a sea of undead, each desperately swinging a weapon against a teeming mass that didn’t register pain or loss. For each Knight she saw standing, she spied three more being ripped asunder by red-stained undead.
Despite the decimation of what must have been half an Empyrean company or more, the undead seemed more intent on reaching a central pyramid built of their stony brethren, which squirmed and buckled, but held its shape well enough to support a blood red throne of rough-cut crystal.
On one side of the throne a fossil, caped and crowned in violet luminescence, brandished a staff of deadly energy. Was it the Traitor, or some fell working created by the Traitor? No, Angul thought not. But yet …
On the other side of the ruby throne appeared a male star elf who wore the trappings of a Keeper! And in this man’s hands, a blade whose outline was night’s progenitor.
Something in Angul stuttered. It imparted to her, That sword is somehow familiar …
Kiril gasped. Angul had never before betrayed even a hint of uncertainty in the entire decade she’d wielded him.
At that moment, the fungus hulk gave voice to what sounded like a despairing moan. It crashed to the ground, turning its body as it buckled, protecting the man it held from its weighty fall. Kiril touched Angul’s tip to the creature’s lichen-covered carapace.
Dead, pronounced her blade. A sacrifice for a righteous cause. Turn aside now, and go to that Keeper who yet holds faith with the Sign!
Kiril winced. The blade’s implication was that she, Kiril, did not hold such faith …
I will see us through this press, promised her sword. His fire fumed and grew, new strength rushed into her limbs, and surety of purpose infused her will. The last thing she saw as she plunged into the mob of animate neoliths was the monk bending to cradle Adrik’s lolling head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Stardeep, Underdungeon
Oppressive slumber relinquished its clotted hold, and Adrik opened his eyes. Tunnel walls rushed by on either side, bluish with luminescent haze. The hue seemed somehow familiar … such an effort to recall to mind why.
And what held him so snugly in arms overgrown with lichen and trailing tiny rootlets through the dank air?
He tried to voice his question, managing only to croak. The noise was enough to catch the attention of something above him—a great head swiveled forward and down to fix him with its … gaze? A lopsided, vegetable-like visage of wavering rhizomes and empty sensory pits. A vacant face, yet somehow, one that communicated intelligence.
Adrik was so far past exhaustion the face held little terror for him. He allowed his head to fall the other way, and saw that below, at the side of the great creature that clutched him, padded his friend from Telflamm, and the elf woman they’d met.
Unaccountably, sadness touched him. There were so many questions he had, like friends whose company he never tired of. But those friends were drifting away now. He sensed his curiosity dispersing to find a host whose life wasn’t dripping away with each stuttering, slowing heartbeat.
What surprised him the most was the pain. The numbness began to give way to an agony unlike any he’d before imagined. Except for the pain right before the stern star elf guarding Stardeep’s outer gate had healed him. Some lingering nilshai curse was released from the bonds that had temporarily held it. The taint began to bite into him anew.
He began to shriek. He tried to flail; the unrelenting grip of the fungus hulk held him fast. The tunnel walls continued to speed by, painted blue in the creature’s spore halo.
He noted Raidon glancing anxiously up at him, but at that moment the tunnel disgorged into a ruin of arching white columns choked with thrashing fossils whose lives ended thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago. The blue light was drowned by a greater fire, the fury of which seemed to sear Adrik’s eyes. The light reached him in shafts and rents obscured by crumbling spires and broken towers.
The swordswoman Kiril dashed forward. A hundred or more colliding stone figures turned from their rush down the too-narrow streets to fix their blind regard on the newcomers.
Adrik turned his face up, uncaring. For the pain was lifting, disappearing as suddenly as it had pounced upon his failing flesh. A calmness fell upon him, and into that pearly space came thoughts, wandering and unconcerned with the sprays of rock dust emerging from the cerulean whirlwind of Kiril as she moved into the ruined city chamber.
; He saw a face, like his own, yet older. He recognized his brother Erik, fellow adventurer and wide wanderer in the world, who yet waited his return in Emmech. What plans they’d made! Once their fortune was secured, why, they’d disturb the councils of kings, confer with the elder mage of Shadowdale, and shake the foundations of the world! Ah, yes. He smiled to think on it. It saddened him, though, to imagine his brother waiting in vain. His heart could barely muster the strength to put one beat after the next. Then he envisioned his brother’s grief when, long past Adrik’s promised return date, Erik finally realized the truth.
The one he would see next, Adrik decided, would be the god whose domain was death. Would the great beast holding him transfer him directly into Kelemvor’s hands? Memories, realizations, regrets—the time for all such activity was past. Accept it, Adrik, he chastened himself. Cease these mental acrobatics, compose yourself.
He thought then of a girl he’d once known. Her name … what was it? Chelsea, it was Chelsea, of course. A love cut down before its time when cruel disease had claimed her. His grief over her untimely demise was the final impetus that launched his adventures with his brother. With her end, nothing else could keep him home.
She awaits you now. And his childhood friend Macknar who’d drowned, and grandfather, too, most likely. Old friends, old loves. Would they greet him?
Suddenly Raidon was there before him, cradling his head. Was it real, or a vision? The monk’s visage was scribed with compassion and regret.
Grieve not, he tried to say to the half-elf. Kelemvor comes, and shall deliver me to a place I do not fear to travel. Perhaps a place where I can continue to ask my questions.
His drifting thoughts persisted for one final heartbeat. Raidon’s eyes, glassy with unwept tears, faded into a translucent mist, through which a golden light began to break, a celestial light whose brilliance washed Adrik Commorand away from the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Stardeep, Underdungeon
Bolts of consumptive fire leaped from the ancient one’s immaterial staff. Telarian caught each blast on Nis’s length, turning ravening flame to puffs of harmless ash.
More troubling was the Keeper’s footing. Telarian’s stance was a constant dance upon the biting heads and grasping hands of an imbecilic army of fossil zombies. Nis lent him an agility beyond the limits of mortal flesh, yet still he gasped and trembled on the cusp of failure. Cold calculation, another gift of his dark blade, revealed it was only a matter of time before a fatal blast or stony claw broke his defense. Then he would be pulled down by so many grasping hands his enhanced strength and blade-given healing would fail.
He attempted to close with the bolt-flinging lich, the creature both he and Nis agreed was responsible for the fossil uprising. Again, the undead creature was whisked away on its followers hands, while the elf’s passage was thwarted by a frenzy of activity.
Had Telarian stood upon solid ground that wouldn’t suck him down at its first opportunity, his own arsenal of prepared spells waiting patiently for release might have made the difference. Waste no time on fantasies, chastened Nis, only on what is achievable.
And so the unnamed lich and Telarian continued their erratic orbit around the throne, one vainly attempting to catch the other. And all the while, his insurance, the Empyrean Knights, died in the undead tide that surged around the central mound. He could hear their yells, their calls to each other, and their death screams.
His opponent suddenly darted its caved-in face away from Telarian. The diviner followed its gaze—and saw a blue flame outlining a sword twin in shape to his own. Angul! Wielded by Kiril, the blade flashed with an energy it had withheld when last Telarian beheld it, when he’d ordered a small troop of Knights to retrieve it.
Its power in Kiril’s hands was nothing short of awe inspiring. She didn’t attempt to bypass the massed petrified undead. She swept through them, reducing the creatures to so much dust within the vortex of Angul’s flashing influence. He knew Nis could not equal what he now witnessed. Could it be, he wondered, that in Kiril’s hands, lost love urges the soul fragment to greater heights?
Nis’s failure to respond was answer enough.
The lich, too, recognized the greater threat that now approached. It redirected its bedeviling bolts toward Kiril. Telarian was tempted to yell out a warning, but was quelled by Nis: Kill this creature while it is distracted.
Telarian scrambled up onto the throne, and unlike his expectation, wasn’t struck with some nameless curse. With a solid foundation underfoot, he was finally able to bring Nis to bear. Even as the lich realized its lapse, Nis’s black length fell full upon its head.
The undead’s crown of fire flared then failed beneath the stroke. But the fading crown provided Telarian’s foe one last moment of salvation from Nis’s penetrating blade. The lich countered with its staff, catching the diviner on the shoulder. Pain, quickly damped down by Nis, couldn’t hide the smell of cooked meat.
The rending noise of stone being pulverized announced Kiril’s arrival at the base of the pyramid of squirming bodies. She abandoned her sweep-and-smash technique in favor of agility. She ascended the active pile almost as nimbly as Telarian. He noted with interest that Angul’s gifts to his wielder didn’t include dexterity to the same degree that Nis did.
Kiril reached the summit and her eyes flitted across him, then Nis, but she turned her attention fully on the lich. She bellowed, “Suffer not abominations!” Her accompanying strike sheared the lich’s staff into so many disintegrating tongues of flame. Even as it raised its fiery cape into great wings, as if to bear itself away, Kiril and Telarian simultaneously struck at it.
Angul stabbed low, into its abdomen, Nis swept high, at its head. The flaming wings collapsed and winked out. The unnamed king of fossils who’d sat alone beneath the violet flame for years uncounted tumbled down the mound, unsupported by its subjects. It struck the hard cobbles at the pile’s base and shattered with a sound high and pure.
A wave of stillness was born in that instant, an expanding circle whose circumference quickly raced away in all directions, leaving in its wake hundreds of unmoving, eroded, cracked, broken, and blood-stained statues. Above, the violet flame guttered and winked out.
Here and there across the vast city, lantern light flickered to life as surviving Knights sought to coalesce back into a unified force.
Telarian wondered how many remained to service his greater scheme, but pushed such distractions from his head for the moment. Kiril demanded all his attention and wit as she stared coolly at him, her features highlighted by Angul’s blue fire. He yet held Nis, whose length remained night’s own domain.
Sheathe me, instructed Nis. As always, Telarian obeyed.
The diviner blinked, and sudden fear clawed at his guts. She’d cut him down! She—
Kiril sheathed Angul in one easy motion, plunging them into darkness. Into that absence of light, Kiril spoke, her tone strangely even. “What news of the Traitor, Keeper of Stardeep?”
Telarian called up a quick spell of radiance and set it to dance on the throne top. In that glow, he lowered himself from the throne to stand on equal, if uneven, footing with the swordswoman.
He replied, “The Traitor strains at its chains in a fashion never foreseen. It has assumed mental domination over my fellow Stardeep Keeper! Things have nearly fallen completely apart in Stardeep’s Inner Bastion.”
“The compromised Keeper,” said Kiril, “that would be Telarian? I’ve heard his name from the lips of the blood-flecked spy he hired to steal Angul! Telarian, the one who tried to lure me to Stardeep with his promise that …” She gulped, and sudden moisture welled in Kiril’s eyes.
The diviner frowned, swallowed his fear, and said, “You’ve been partly misled—it is Keeper Delphe, still ensconced in Stardeep, who has fallen wholly into the Traitor’s grasp.”
Kiril’s eyes narrowed as she said, “Which means you are Telarian?”
He raised conciliatory hands. “I am—but forge
t what you think you know, and listen—”
The woman stepped forward and jabbed him in the chest with a pointing finger, asking, “And what of Nangulis? Was that your lie?”
“Hear me out, and you’ll learn the truth.”
“Out with it, then!”
He licked his lips. “Delphe, once under the Traitor’s control, knew the one implement that could end her new master’s escape was Angul. Thus she sought to steal him away from his wielder, and failing that, kill you and take Angul. To further confuse the matter, she used my name to shield her identity should her scheme ever fall apart. As it has!”
“So Nangulis …”
“Has not returned. I am so sorry,” said Telarian. Though he couldn’t produce Nangulis, he could offer her the next best thing.
“However, what was once Nangulis has stirred.”
She looked back, hope and suspicion battling for control of her features.
“Just as Angul holds one half of Nangulis’s fractured soul, Nis holds the remainder!” He drew forth Nis once more, the blade’s cool touch returning his confidence threefold and quashing his fear beneath its black weight.
Kiril’s eyes grew round. She murmured, “But how is that possible? When we forged Angul, we pulled from Nangulis all purity and zeal, discarding the rest …”
“Not discarded. Cynosure encapsulated all that remained of Nangulis, and preserved it against future need. A need that materialized when I realized Delphe had fallen into shadow.”
“How?”
“I worked in secret, forging the blade beneath Delphe’s very nose, until Nis was complete. At the last, she discovered my intent. I’m afraid that with Cynosure under her control, I was forced to flee Stardeep. But even with Stardeep’s sentient construct set against me, with Nis in hand, I was able to escape. She’d closed the Causeway after sending out those few Knights she suborned to ravage the countryside. The only place I could flee with the remaining Knights still uncorrupted and loyal to the Cerulean Seal was down, into Stardeep’s underdungeons.”
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