The Sorcerer rota-3

by Troy Denning

  "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  "What do you think?" Galaeron retorted. "I escaped."

  "Escaped? From the Palace Most High?"

  Galaeron nodded. "I had to use the Shadow Weave," he said, looking back down the main aisle of the nave, where Aris's four guards lay in various forms of death. Tm sorry."

  Aris's heart went out to his friend.

  "You have not failed anyone." He laid two fingers on the elf's shoulder and said, "I am proud you did not yield before this."

  "I didn't yield," Galaeron said. "I chose. Telamont is after Vala."

  Aris went hollow inside.

  "Then he knows?" asked the giant.

  "Knows?"

  "About the Chosen," Aris said. "They couldn't find the mythallar, so I sent them to Vala."

  A shadow descended over Galaeron's face.

  "The Chosen must have freed her," he said. Galaeron motioned Aris to his feet and turned toward the Black Portal. "I gave them away. That’s s what he meant."

  Aris rose, but made no move to follow.

  "What who meant?"

  "The sharn," Galaeron answered as he continued down the aisle. "He appeared to me in the Palace Most High. He said he had come to repay the favor he owed us, and told me I had a choice to make."

  "And?"

  "And he left, and I made my choice," Galaeron replied. "I couldn't bear the thought that Telamont would capture Vala again, but now I see he was talking about more-much more."

  Seeing that Galaeron was not going to wait, Aris caught up to him with a single step. He plucked Galaeron off the floor and held him at head height.

  "The sharn from Karse came to you in the Palace Most High?"

  "Isn't that what I just said? Put me down. We need to go find Vala and the Chosen."

  Aris continued to hold Galaeron and said, The sharn left you there to free yourself? He left you and told you to use the Shadow Weave?"

  If Galaeron saw the reason for Aris's alarm, he showed no sign.

  "The sharn was warning me," the elf said. 'Telamont had just been there, trying to convince me to use the Shadow

  Weave to save Vala. When I refused, a strange look came over him. Telamont said hope was stronger than he had imagined and left."

  "That was what the sharn was warning you about?"

  Galaeron shook his head and replied, "I think Telamont knew I was defying him because I expected something to happen soon. It must have dawned on him that Vala had help escaping, because he left in a hurry. We have to find the Chosen and warn them."

  "All very plausible," Aris said. "But the sharn left you there with no way to escape except to use the Shadow Weave."

  Galaeron shrugged and said, "I had to accept the inevitable, and I'm the stronger for it."

  He peeled Aris's thumb back and slipped free, landing on the floor in an easy crouch.

  "Who is stronger?" Aris asked, a little frightened by how easily Galaeron had broken his grasp. "How can you be certain it was the sharn you saw and not some trick of Telamont’s?"

  "Because we beat him," Galaeron replied, starting toward the Black Portal again. "My shadow and I matched wills with Telamont Tanthul, and we beat him."

  "Galaeron, listen to yourself," Aris said. He stepped over the elf, then spun and stooped down to block his way. 'Telamont Tanthul has been trying to trick you into yielding to your shadow since the day we arrived in Shade. You finally do it, and suddenly you're stronger than he is?"

  "Yes," Galaeron said simply. "The Shadovar thrive on deception and subterfuge, I know that, but the biggest fraud they ever committed on me was when Melegaunt tricked me into fighting my own shadow. He filled me with doubt, and doubt made me weak."

  "And now you are sure," Aris said, filling his voice with mockery and mistrust. "Now you are strong."

  "Now I am whole," Galaeron snapped back. "That makes me strong. I have no time to explain it now."

  He whispered a mystic word and waved his hand at Aris's foot, and the foot started to slide across the floor.

  "I am going to the mythallar," Galaeron said, stepping under Aris toward the Black Portal.

  "Wait!" Aris turned, growing ever more suspicious, and said, "Back in Arabel, you told me you didn't know how to find the mythallar."

  "Not on this plane."

  Galaeron pressed a palm to the Black Portal and spoke a few words in ancient Netherese. The door dissolved into shadow mist.

  The elf turned to Aris and said, "I hope you'll come with me. One way or the other, I don't think Shade will be safe for you very much longer."

  Aris's mind was whirling with suspicions, foremost among them the fear that Telamont was using Galaeron to reveal Vala and the Chosen to the Shadovar. But for that to be so, Galaeron could not be under the Most High's sway, for if he were Telamont would have only to ask to learn what he wished to know.

  "I'll come," he said, stepping toward the shadowy portal, "but first you must promise that when this is done, you will never touch the Shadow Weave again. You can still be saved."

  "I was inviting you, Aris, not begging," Galaeron said in a voice that held both scorn and patience. "I don't need to be saved from anything."

  Galaeron turned and stepped through the Black Portal, leaving Aris alone in the Temple of the One and All, alone and feeling angry and abandoned. He could not decide whether it was Galaeron who had just departed or Galaeron's shadow-or someone Aris did not even know. The elf's parting rebuke had left him feeling both resentful and hurt, and such rudeness simply was not like his friend. It made Aris want to retreat into his work, but of course that was foolish. If Galaeron's plan worked, it would all be rubble in a few minutes anyway, and if the plan failed, the last thing he wanted to do for the next few hundred years was devote his talent to hiding Dark Moons in the sacred sculpture of other deities. Besides, whether or not he still knew the elf, Galaeron was his friend, and no matter how strange they became, one did not desert one's friends as they went off to fight Telamont Tanthul and the Princes of Shade-at least stone giants did not.

  Aris followed Galaeron through the Black Portal and into the shadow mist. The air grew frigid, and the floor turned as soft as snow.

  Aris called into the blackness, "Galaeron?"

  He took another tentative step, doing his best to continue in a straight line.

  "Where are you?"

  When no answer came, Aris decided he had waited too long. The shadows were no place to become lost. He turned around and retraced his steps exactly.

  Three steps later, he remained in the dark.

  Perhaps his first two steps had been longer than he thought. Holding his arm before him, Aris took another step forward.

  "Galaeron!"

  A small hand pressed itself to his kneecap and the elf whispered, "Quietly, my friend."

  Aris's sigh was anything but soft.

  "I thought you'd left me behind."

  "I have too few friends to leave them wandering around the Fringe alone," Galaeron replied. He pulled on the leg of Aris's trousers, guiding him forward. "We must be careful. I don't know who else might be watching."

  "Watching?" Aris whispered.

  Galaeron stopped, and the black mists ahead slowly grew translucent. Aris saw that they had stopped just inside the Shadow Fringe. Ahead lay a large crater lined in obsidian, with no apparent seams and a surface as smooth as the interior of a glass bowl. Standing near the bottom, spaced at equal intervals along the inner wall, were Khelben and the four sisters. They held their arms outspread, fingertips pointing toward their comrades to either side, so that they formed a great ring around the interior. Within this circle lay a disk of gray opalescent light, which they were slowly walking toward the bottom of the basin.

  Vala was nowhere in sight. Nor were Telamont and his princes.

  Aris kneeled at Galaeron's side and stooped down to whisper, "Perhaps they did not find-

  Galaeron made a motion, and the rest of Aris's sentence vanished into silence.


  The mythallar is beneath that dimensional portal, Galaeron's voice said inside his head. Vala is here somewhere, you may be sure.

  Aris was about to ask whether Telamont was also there when, about a quarter of the way around the crater, the dark figures of all ten surviving princes emerged from the Shadow Fringe. They did not step from the obsidian lining so much as they peeled themselves out of it. They began to slide silently down the wall. Aris reached for his tool pouch for something to throw and started to rise, but Galaeron put out a restraining hand.

  The Chosen will have foreseen this.

  The princes were almost upon the Chosen when they struck an invisible barrier and came to an abrupt stop, tiny forks of golden energy crackling outward around each impact point. They leaped to their feet, wailing in pain and shock, and scrambled a few steps up the wall then stopped there, bleeding dark mist into the air. Three of them collapsed again almost immediately and melted back into the Fringe. The others hurled globes of shadow magic toward the bottom of the crater. The bails hit the barrier and erupted into huge black sprays, then rained back down in tiny beads of darkness that skittered across the invisible surface like drops of water on a hot frying pan.

  While the others continued to assail the barrier, the gaunt figure of Prince Lamorak conjured a shadow disk. He and his brother Malath stepped aboard and floated out toward the center of the crater, their fingers working madly as they twined strands of shadowsilk into the shape of a small hand axe.

  Aris grabbed one of his chisels but before he could pull it from his tool bag to throw, a bolt of golden magic streaked down from the opposite crater rim to blast Lamorak's shadow disk into shards. Malath pitched headlong into the invisible barrier and fell instantly limp, his body first melting into a black puddle, then coming apart and skittering across the surface in steaming black globules. Lamorak hit on his back, screamed once, and managed to bounce himself into the air. He vanished with the sharp crackle of a teleport spell.

  Aris looked across the crater toward the source of the golden bolt and glimpsed a swirl of Vala's golden hair as she dropped out of sight behind the rim. Though he had never seen her cast a spell, it was not a wild guess to think that one of the Chosen might have loaned her a ring or wand capable of hurling the magic bolts. Unfortunately, Aris was not the only one who had spotted her. Yder and Aglarel scurried after her, their lanky limbs oddly spider like as the princes ascended the slick wall.

  Aris glanced down and was relieved to find his friend staring after Vala, his elf brows arched high in concern. Still, Galaeron made no move to go after her. Recalling how, while facing a similar situation under the influence of his shadow self on the Saiyyadar, the elf had nearly gotten him killed by using him to bait a dragon into an ambush, Aris grabbed Galaeron's shoulder and urged him after her.

  Galaeron pulled free of Aris's hand.

  They would have foreseen that. We must wait here in the Fringe for what they did not foresee.

  Aris started to ask angrily what that might be, but Galaeron's spell kept him silent. He could only wait and watch as the Chosen, ignoring the princes' ever more frantic efforts to penetrate the mystic barrier, continued to walk the dimensional portal toward the bottom of the basin. Yder and Aglarel reached the rim of the crater and disappeared over the top. The basin began to tremble and fall away beneath them.

  Aris's jaw dropped. The Chosen had done it — Shade was falling. He snatched Galaeron up. Determined not to become separated from the others whatever the elf said, he jumped into the basin — but landed in the same place he had been, with the basin continuing to fail away below him.

  When we are needed, Galaeron hissed. Not before.

  How long he had lain chained on Shar's altar, Malik could not say. All he knew was he had grown so weak with hunger that his belly had lost the strength to rumble, that his tongue was so swollen with thirst he could not have drunk if someone had given him water, that his ears had become so inured by the constant hissing of the Hidden One's worshipers that the sudden silence left him feeling deafened and dizzy.

  He had the sensation of floating — a sensation that only grew stronger when his shadow on the ceiling started to shrink and loom ever darker, when the stream of silver magic pouring from the stone began to swirl around him in beads as large as his head, and especially when the confused forms of Shar's worshipers began to tumble through the air and bounce along the shadow-stained ceiling.

  So weakened by thirst and hunger was Malik that for a few moments, he was too confused to comprehend what he was seeing. Had he finally died and begun his journey to the Shattered Castle, or had the harlot Shar suddenly granted all her worshipers the ability to fly? Or perhaps it was an hallucination. Perhaps all the hardships he had endured on behalf of his god Cyric had finally taken their toll, leaving him as demented and mad as once his god had been.

  Then Malik hit the end of his chains and felt his withered hands nearly slip free of one of the manacles, and he knew what had happened. The One had answered a prayer. Finally, Cyric had taken mercy on his poor servant and raised a finger to help in the impossible mission he had assigned him, and soon the Sharites would pay for all of the torment and abuse they had heaped upon him while he lay chained to their goddess's stolen altar.

  "Your doom is upon you!" Malik yelled through the floating swirl of silver beads. "Cyric has come for me at last, and he shall take a terrible vengeance on you."

  "Fool!" — the voice that hissed this came from his own shadow, lying flat upon the ceiling not a dozen paces above him-"Nothing could be farther from Cyric's mind than your misery."

  "You cannot know that!" Malik said, more for his own comfort than because he believed his shadow needed to know. "You are nothing to him." He meant to stop there, but felt more words welling up as Mystra's curse compelled him to speak the full truth. "Except another torment for me!"

  This drew a purple smile from the shadow, which said, The one service I am happy to perform for your lying god, but that does not change the truth of what is happening. The city is falling."

  "Falling?" Malik shrieked. He noticed that other voices were beginning to join him. "With me in it?"

  "A pity, is it not?" the shadow asked.

  "More than you know." hi this, Malik was telling the truth, for Cyric was fond of telling him the fate that awaited him if he ever failed in one of the divine missions assigned to him. It took only an instant for the thousand promised torments to flash through his mind, for in his infinite wisdom, the One had made Malik memorize them until he knew them all as well as his own name.

  But there was no way to avoid it. The city was going to crash into the desert, and he was going to die along with everyone else, no doubt crushed beneath the Karsestone, since he was still chained to it… and that was when Malik saw how he would save himself.

  Once before, when Cyric had sent Malik to fetch a sacred book from inside the Keeper's Tower at Candlekeep, the One had told him he had only to call the name of the One and All three times once he had succeeded in his duty and he would be rescued. Given that Yder had called the Karsestone the crown of his goddess Shar, and given that it was also the only remaining source of the ancient whole magic in all of Faer?n-perhaps even Toril itself-it seemed reasonable to suppose that he who controlled the Karsestone might also control the Shadow Weave.

  The stone might be, Malik realized, just like a crown. If not actually the source of Shar's power over the Shadow Weave, it was at least a symbol of it, and he had learned in Calimshan that he who controlled the symbol soon owned the power.

  When the city's true caliph had lost his crown to a ring of thieves, the master of the thieves had audaciously set the crown on his own head and challenged the caliph to take it back. Try as he might, the old man never succeeded, and it was not long before the city revered the thief as the new caliph.

  And so it would be with the Karsestone, Malik believed. No-he knew. There could be no other reason the goddess of shadows would permit an artifact of such bla
zing light to serve as the High Altar in her holiest of temples.

  Seeing that he had floated to within five feet of the ceiling- and that his shadow was little larger than he himself, but as black as obsidian-Malik closed his eyes. He had no idea how long it would take the city to crash into Anauroch, but they had been falling for a full five or ten breaths, and they had to hit soon.

  "I have it, Mighty One! I have the Shadow Weave chained right here on my back!"

  When Mystra's curse did not compel Malik to add anything more, or even to clarify that it was just a symbol, he decided his plan was going to work and called, "Cyric, the One, the All!"

  Nothing happened. He floated so close to the ceiling that he could not see anything except his shadow's smirking face.

  "How pitiful you are," it said. "It shames me to know I spring from your image. Even if Cyric could hear you, do you think he would answer?"

  "If he could hear me?" Malik screamed. "What do you mean if?"

  "What do you think I mean?" the shadow retorted. "This is the temple-"

  The explanation came to an abrupt end as Malik touched the ceiling and came into contact with his shadow. The red eyes winked out and its shape grew more squat and less monster like. Malik experienced a rush of cold magic as it reattached itself to his body.

  "Thish is justh what you desherve!" With his face pressed against the stone ceiling, it was impossible to speak clearly. "You will be with me when I fathe the One'sh anger!"

  The ceiling lifted away from his face, and Malik thought for a moment that his shadow had been wrong, that Cyric had come for him after all. Then he heard splashing, and screaming, and all around him he saw Shadovar flailing their arms and beads of silver magic assuming teardrop shapes as they plummeted back toward the temple floor.

  Closing his eyes, Malik yelled again, "Cyric, the One, the All!"

  Nothing happened, except that a steady roar began to build beneath Malik. No sooner had he identified the sound as the Karsestone's steady stream of magic pouring into the pool below than the roar exploded into a thunderous splash, and the air shot from his lungs as his back slammed into the Karsestone. He bounced once and felt his legs come free as the shackle bolt holding his feet came out, then he felt bones snapping in one hand as it was pulled through the closed manacles.