Still lying behind the smokethorn, Takari nocked two arrows on her bow and began to regret she had not tried a more direct plan. Had they just rushed the rift, they would have been attacking by then. The phaerimm might even be dead. Apparently, the illithid’s attention remained focused on the battle, and it was unaware—
Yurne gurgled in pain, then let the bow slip from his hands and reached for his head. Takari remained utterly motionless, quietly searching for the source of the attack. She found no hint. The illithid remained as invisible as before, with no telltale footsteps or shuddering bramble twigs to give away his location. Yurne’s eyes went blank, and he began to crawl around on his knees, holding his temples and groaning incoherently.
There was a one-sided lull as the phaerimm ceased spellcasting long enough to consult with its minion telepathically, then the conflagration resumed even more fiercely than before. Takari bit her lip and tried to avoid thinking about how many of her friends were dying while she lay there hiding. If the phaerimm was worried enough about its own safety to use invisibility magic so powerful it would keep an attacker hidden, it was worried enough to pick a guard who would not make foolish mistakes.
A seeming eternity later, Yurne lowered his hands and began to shake his head clear. The illithid remained hidden, at least until the hermit stumbled upon his discarded bow. Apparently forgetting he still had a full quiver hanging from his shoulder, he began to search the ground for an arrow he had never drawn. A bramble twig fluttered ten paces behind him, and Yurne’s head snapped back as an invisible hand grabbed his hair and jerked him over backward.
That was all the target Takari needed. Rolling to her knees in one swift motion, she set her aim just behind Yurne’s head and let fly.
The arrows were still in the air as she leaped over the smokethorn and charged down the hill. The shafts thumped to a stop behind Yurne, in what appeared to be empty air. A cascade of dark blood erupted around the heads of the arrows and poured down on the scout’s head. He screamed and rolled away as Takari jumped over him, her bow discarded ten steps up the hill and her sword and dagger already in hand.
A huge mouth filled with fangs and ringed by four thin arms was just rising out of the rift and turning toward the fallen illithid.
Takari knew better than to hesitate. She simply lowered her head and dived past the fangs, slashing and hacking as the thing’s dark mouth rose around her. Her sword slashed through something sinuous and tough, then her dagger sank into a mound of ooze as large as her head. The jaws started to close, and she brought her legs to her chest just in time to avoid having them bitten off.
A sour-smelling liquid burbled up from the depths ahead and coated her face in hot, caustic slime. Gagging, Takari pushed off against the back of its teeth, driving herself and her sword deeper into the thing’s gullet and dragging her dagger beside her, stabbing and chopping at anything that seemed like it could be cut.
The fleshy passage, now slick and warm with blood and other precious fluids, clamped down and began to push her back toward the mouth. Realizing she was about to be regurgitated, Takari spread her knees to wedge herself in place, then planted her dagger to the hilt and held on.
The muscles began to convulse, squeezing her so tightly she thought she would be crushed. Takari pushed her sword as far as she could reach, twisting the blade to and fro, circling the tip in awkward crescents that sometimes found nothing and sometimes cut through fleshy masses that could only be organs.
When her sword sliced through something soft and gauzy, the phaerimm stopped trying to expel her. A flood of warm blood rose up to fill the dark passage. Everything went limp, and Takari’s stomach rose into her chest. She thought they were falling, but the feeling seemed to last forever—a timeless eternity—and a strange chill burned her flesh. She grew queasy and weak, her pulse hammered in her ears, and her mind began to reel.
Then she was simply somewhere else, someplace dark and foul, someplace filled with hot caustic slime. Her flesh was stinging, her eyes were burning. The stuff was in her nose and throat and lungs, suffocating her, choking her, drowning her. She coughed and felt hot flesh all around—not squeezing, merely touching and holding—and she recalled where she was.
Or rather, where she had been when the phaerimm teleported to safety.
Heart hammering, Takari pushed back up the dark passage. The flesh remained limp and motionless around her, but heavy and suffocating. She found herself fighting not to breathe and succeeding—fighting not to cough and failing. More of the phaerimm’s foul bile gushed down her throat and made her want to vomit, but she managed to fight back the impulse by reminding herself that she would only end up swallowing more of the awful stuff. She came to the thing’s teeth and, finding them clamped shut behind her, pressed her back against the roof of its mouth.
The teeth came apart. A shaft of brilliant sunlight came pouring in from outside, bringing with it a much needed draft of cool mountain air. Inhaling through her fingers to avoid swallowing any more blood or bile, Takari sucked it in, coughed out a flagon full of red mucous that might have been hers or the phaerimm’s, then filled her lungs again. Only then, after she had gained control of her reflexes, did she turn and peer out from between the creature’s pebbly lips.
Below her lay a vast staircase of dead and barren vineyards, descending toward Evereska’s embattled walls in a series of smoke-shrouded terraces, with no living thing in sight except the cone-shaped forms of fifty floating phaerimm.
CHAPTER THREE
12 Flamerule, the Year of Wild Magic
Mount Untrivvin’s east wall stood a mile away, a looming face of rock and ice hidden behind a curtain of milk-white steam, its form discernible only as a dim gray wedge against a bright gray sky. A blurry fleck of darkness could be seen in front of the mountain, flying a lazy oval about a third of the way up. When the speck reached the end of its loop and banked around to go in the other direction, it assumed a vaguely crosslike shape with a long, thin body and swept-back wings. Even without the clear-seeing spell she had cast, Arr would have recognized the figure as one of the Shadovar’s worm-bat mounts, a veserab.
So we are seen, Tuuh whistled beside her. They were standing on the High Ice, staring at the sentry across the sunken vastness of a Shadovar shadow blanket. We will not have long to wait.
Arr turned to Tuuh. With a receding hairline, black beard, and dark eyes, he was an exact double of the famous—and very troublesome—Khelben Arunsun.
“Use your mouth and speak Common,” Arr instructed. “The scout may have ears as well as eyes.”
If that is so, you are more likely to betray us with your words, Tuuh replied, continuing to speak in Winds, using magic to stir the icy air into the whistling language of the phaerimm. Even if he is listening, humans have trouble recognizing our voices.
“The Shadovar are not human.”
They are close enough.
“Perhaps, but this is my plan—one endorsed by the entire WarGather. If it fails, do you really wish to give them an excuse to blame you?”
The WarGather does not frighten me. Despite the boast, Tuuh said in Common, “And, if something does go wrong, you are the only one they will blame. I’ll see to that.”
Tuuh turned, and remembering to use his legs as would a human, he stormed off across the ice. Though she was burning inside to demand a gift of contrition—or at least remind him that the WarGather had placed her in charge—Arr had no choice but to let him go. This was the great shortcoming of the phaerimm, their inability to work toward a common cause.
They all knew it, of course—were they not all geniuses, the wisest race ever to inhabit Toril?—but that did not mean they could overcome their one weakness. Beings of such intelligence were too impatient with the folly of others and too easily bored by any company but their own. Sooner or later, every phaerimm compact was doomed to disintegrate in a tempest of clashing winds and bitter magic. That was the nature of her people, and it was only their fear and hatred of the
Shadovar that had kept them working together at all through the dark months of their imprisonment in the Shaeradim.
But if Arr’s plan worked, if she could trick the Shadovar and the other two-leg realms into making war on each other, then maybe—just maybe—she could keep her people united long enough to capture Evereska. Once they had claimed its magic-nourishing mythal for their own and the phaerimm saw what they could accomplish together, who knew how long their patience might be extended? Perhaps Arr could find even greater goals to unite them. If she planned carefully and always kept the meat dangled before the teeth of her fellows, it would not surprise her to see them take their natural place as the masters of the world—and she would be the master of masters. Why not? Was she not the wisest and most cunning of the phaerimm?
“Arr!” This from Beze, who had assumed the silver-haired form of Khelben Arunsun’s paramour, Laeral Silverhand—right down to the tiny limb sprouting from the stump of the arm Laeral had lost in the Shaeradim. “Your feet!”
Arr looked down to find her feet dangling beneath her, the toes not quite touching the glacier. She felt something warm rush to the cheeks of her human face, then lowered herself through a conscious act of will and started to walk to her place in line.
“Watch your tone, sister,” Arr said. Save that she stood a little taller than Beze and wore her silver hair somewhat longer, her appearance was much the same. She and Beze had assumed the shape of the Silverhand sisters, Storm and Laeral. “Remember who is leading this mission.”
“How could I forget?” Beze nodded in both directions along the steep bank that led down to the shadow blanket and said, “Your humble followers await.”
Arr glared just long enough to make it clear that the sarcasm would not be forgotten, then glanced in both directions Beze had indicated. The shadow blanket had melted a deep basin into the ice, and the rest of their number were carefully spacing themselves along its rim, each about a thousand feet apart.
Like Tuuh, Beze, and Arr herself, the last two phaerimm had assumed the likenesses of Mystra’s Chosen: Alustriel Silverhand and Dove Falconhand. Arr would have liked to have a larger force, but given that Syluné was a ghost who never left Shadowdale, Qilué Veladorn seldom involved herself in the affairs of humans, and Elminster was still missing with the Simbul, five was largest number of Chosen they could reasonably impersonate.
Arr waited until Beze and Ryry signaled that everyone was in position—the fog was too thick for her to see Tuuh and Xayn at the far ends—then raised her arms and began to chant. The others joined in at once, gesturing and intoning odd-sounding syllables in a carefully choreographed imitation of a human casting. The process was, of course, absurdly slow and primitive—at least compared to how the phaerimm cast magic—but it seemed a necessary step for humans. Arr and her fellows wasted most of the next minute on this nonsense, then lowered their arms and simply thought the spell.
A long, crescent-shaped blade of magic light appeared before them, the lower lip teetering on the rim of the steep slope at their feet. Arr glanced through the steam bank and saw the dark fleck of the sentry still holding his position in front of Mount Untrivvin. She raised her arm and pointed forward, and as one the five “Chosen” pushed their creation over the bank.
The blanket peeler slid fifty feet to the bottom of the basin, where its lower lip slipped under the shadow blanket’s edge and quietly rolled it one yard back.
That was all the sentry needed to see. When Arr next looked, the veserab was vanishing southward through the steam. She allowed herself a moment to savor the genius of her plan, then waved to the others and slid down the icy bank to the shadow blanket.
At the bottom of the pit, they found themselves standing in six inches of icy water. The discomfort was not something phaerimm were accustomed to, but it was a simple matter to fix with a little resistance magic. They soon started to push, and the magic peeler worked just as Arr had planned, cutting the blanket free of the ice and rolling it back on itself. The more material there was, the tighter the tool rolled it.
The only problem came when they encountered stones hidden beneath the ice, a surprisingly frequent occurrence since rocks often fell from the mountain, then were carried forward by the glacier and slowly buried by more snow. Still, the phaerimm quickly learned to push these obstacles out of the way with simple telekinesis magic. Two hours later, they had made so much progress that Mount Untrivvin blocked their entire view of the western horizon, and they could hear the faint ringing that gave the peak its name—in the native tongue, untrivvin meant “singing rock.”
Arr was beginning to fear that her plan had failed when a jagged line of shadows began to appear in the steam ahead. She continued forward until the line resolved itself into a rank of Shadovar warriors, all fully armored and carrying their deadly black swords. Arr’s companions were instantly at her back, arriving by teleport magic even as the enemy began to advance.
Instead of breaking into a charge as Arr had anticipated, the Shadovar line stopped thirty paces from the rolled shadow blanket. A huge warrior with braided hair tails and bright coppery eyes stepped forward and raised his dark blade in salute. He was the one they called Escanor.
“With the phaerimm loose in the world again, I should think the Chosen of Mystra would have better things to do than rob Shade Enclave of its water.”
“If Shade kept its water to itself, we would,” Arr replied.
She had not expected the Shadovar to be more interested in talking than fighting, but she had to respond in kind. While phaerimm never hesitated to use force, she and her fellows had to behave as the Chosen would, and the Chosen were reluctant to start a fight until they knew they had no other choice.
“Your shadow blankets are flooding half of Faerûn,” she continued, “and robbing the rest of rain. Since you refuse to remove them, we will do it for you.”
Escanor took one step forward and said, “Faerûn’s suffering is the price for restoring Shade to its birthright.”
“Then let Shade pay the price,” Arr said, trying to put herself in Storm’s place. “Your birthright is no concern of Faerûn’s.”
“It is. You abandoned us to the Plane of Shadow for seventeen centuries. You cannot imagine how we suffered.”
“We abandoned no one.” Arr wondered if she had conversed enough to seem like one of the Chosen, then decided probably not. They talked a lot. “Leaving was your city’s choice.”
“Choice?” Escanor scoffed. “It was leave or die.”
“Then it is a pity Shade did not choose the latter,” she said. The Shadovar’s talkativeness puzzled Arr. Surely, he knew as well as Arr did that there was going to be a fight—so why was he stalling? “It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.”
“Rude, as well as ungrateful.” Escanor looked from Arr to Ryry and said, “You are known to be the reasonable sister, Lady Alustriel. Surely, you can see that opposing us will only lead to more Tilvertons. Wouldn’t your energies be better spent helping Faerûn’s people adjust to the new climate than adding to their troubles by starting a war you cannot hope to win?”
“No one ever wins a war, Prince Escanor,” Ryry said, sounding like Alustriel in voice as well as meaning. “They only lose less than the enemy. Given what Shade lost at Tilverton, I should think you would understand that.”
“Our city is still here.”
“And so are a hundred of ours,” Arr countered. “Who do you think can stand to lose more?”
Escanor’s eyes flashed orange.
“The question is not how many cities you can lose, Lady Storm.” His voice was sharp and seething, yet he seemed as content as before to stand there talking instead of fighting. “The question is how many you can destroy. We have already proven what we can do.”
“And if you lose an army with each city, we will not have to destroy your city at all,” Arr said. As she spoke, Arr was running her gaze down the Shadovar line, searching for the other princes. “By the third or fourth city, i
t will be ours for the claiming.”
“We have learned from our mistake.” Escanor glanced at the shadow blanket rolled up between them and said, “You, apparently, have not. You will remove your tool and allow us to replace the shadow blanket. I will ask this only once.”
Arr completed her search of the Shadovar line and finding no more princes placed a hand on her hip in the stubborn way Storm often did.
“And if we refuse?”
“The battle will not be fought here,” Escanor said. “It will be Faerûn’s cities that pay—”
“Liar.”
Nothing would have made Arr happier than to think the prince was telling the truth, but the Shadovar were too cunning to announce their plan in advance. She raised her arm and with a thought unleashed the spell she had spent most of her imprisonment in the Shaeradim developing. A steady stream of silver-white flame boiled out of her fingertips toward the prince. His spell-guard flashed black as the fire struck. The shadow magic in this defense triggered a secondary spell, sending an antimagic beam shooting from the head of the flame stream.
A gapping hole appeared in Escanor’s spell-guard, allowing the white stream behind to pour through. The effect was a reasonable imitation of the silver fire of the Chosen, and Escanor fell, screaming and engulfed in flames.
Arr started to whistle a command to her fellows, then caught herself and yelled, “Watch our backs! The other princes—”
She was interrupted by the hissing crash of a dark bolt striking home behind her. Beze went tumbling over the rolled shadow blanket and landed a dozen yards away, wisps of shadow rising from a gaping hole in her chest. She began to thrash about and whistle in pain, then rose into the air, too weak and dazed to hold herself on the ground.
“Laeral, no!” Arr yelled. “Get down and be—”
The word “quiet” was lost to a horrific roar as battle magic—both phaerimm and Shadovar—started to crack and sizzle behind her. Escanor’s company answered with a thunderous war cry, then lifted their arms and began to gesture. Arr countered by raising a wall of scintillating color in front of them—Shadovar hated prismatic magic—then she realized she had forgotten herself and neglected to gesture and incant. She covered by waving her arm and booming out a dozen syllables of mystic nonsense, then toppled the wall over on the enemy.
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