Realms of the Arcane a-5

by Brian M. Thomsen

  For the third time, his attention was drawn to the strange tome, and Wes found himself picking it up again.

  The history lesson was over. Now Wes read a story of a young man who worked in the library of Candlekeep, a probationary novice many years ago, and who was known to have disappeared without a trace. Jeffrey, the probationary novice, had been bawled out by one of the monks for being lazy and good-for-nothing, and had been sent by the abbot to the north corner of the library to clean an old reading room for some scholars who were expected the next day.

  In sudden fear, Wes pushed the book away.

  "No!" he rasped, "this cannot be. That story is about me, but a long time ago."

  He looked around nervously. He wanted to leave, then and there, but the abbot's orders had been clear enough. He dared not disobey.

  Take a deep breath, Wes, he told himself. You've just gotten spooked-that's all. No need to look at that slim volume anymore. Back to cleaning the reading room…

  On the other hand, a peek at a few more books couldn't hurt much, now could it?

  The Lady And The Shadow

  Philip Athans

  It was the vile smell that triggered the defensive twitch that saved the archwizard's life. The stream of deadly venom sprayed from the mouth of the huge, snakelike thing and fell to the floor, sizzling away into a fetid green vapor. The archwizard Shadow spun on his heel and brought his hands up, his fingers moving through a fast and complex series of patterns. The words he shouted at the beast meant nothing, but held great power.

  The blast of fire singed Shadow's eyebrows, and the naga screamed in agony. The ball of orange flame was gone as fast as Shadow had conjured it, and smoke poured off the creature that was its target. The naga's rough, spiky hide was already black, and now it smelted scorched.

  Shadow took three long strides backward, starting to smile, nearly bumping into the corner of his big four-poster bed. He stopped in front of the seldom-used dressing table when the damned thing laughed.

  "Painful…" it hissed, its voice like gravel being scraped across steel.

  Shadow's blood went cold. He hadn't been prepared for another assassination attempt today. It was a bad time.

  The naga slithered forward, scraping huge furrows in the expensive wood floor, now scorched from the intense heat of the fireball. The poison still dripped from the corners of its mouth. Four huge gray-yellow fangs filled the gaping maw, and were too big to let it close its mouth all the way. When the poison hit the floor, there was more sizzling, more awful smell, more damage to the woodwork.

  The archwizard's fireball had set the curtains behind the naga ablaze. A little dusty wooden sculpture of a dancing woman had fallen off the windowsill and was also on fire.

  Shadow reached down to his long black boot and fumbled for the knife there. He had been given the knife for just this sort of eventuality.

  The naga drew its hideous face back and seemed to grin as its throat filled with more of the poison.

  Shadow actually gasped the word, "No!" and the knife was in his hand. The blue-silver blade seemed to scream through the air, but Shadow knew he hadn't actually thrown it that hard. It crossed the span of his bedchamber faster than a crossbow bolt and sank into the naga's tough black hide with a wet cracking sound. When the naga screamed, the poison welled out of its mouth in a nauseating gurgle and drenched the thing's still-smoking body with the deadly liquid. It screamed again, louder this time. The knife was buried to its golden hilt, about halfway down the thing's twelve-foot body.

  "Turn!" Shadow shouted, and something made the naga look down.

  The knife twisted in the tight wound, and a quiver of pain and surprise ruffled through the naga's body. It grunted this time instead of screaming and called Shadow something that must have been a terrible insult in whatever dark pit the naga and its kin called home. The thing's blood was a pasty red, so dark it was almost as black as its charred skin.

  'Turn!" Shadow shouted again, standing to face the naga and taking another step back away from it. He bumped the little nightstand, and it fell over. A glass shattered on the floor, and a bit of water started to mix with the droplets of blood that were beading on the floorboards.

  The knife started to turn again and the blood seemed to pop out. The naga didn't scream this time either. It twisted its head down and latched onto the enchanted blade with its jagged fangs. The snake body quivered again with the pain of pulling it out. When the enchanted blade fell free of the wound, it was followed by a fast torrent of blood.

  The sound it made must have been a laugh.

  Shadow considered his possible escape routes. The secret door he had installed in his bedchamber three years ago, when everyone was having them installed in their bedchambers, was on the other side of the naga. He could turn invisible, but the thing could still spray the room with poison, and Shadow would be just as dead as if he'd lit himself with faerie fire. He couldn't teleport, and if he jumped out the window it would be a mile straight down off the side of Karsus enclave to the fields below.

  He realized he was going to die right then.

  Damn, he thought, Shadow wouldn't-

  He stopped even thinking when the naga's head popped off its body and bounced twice on the floor before coming to rest. The body flapped and flailed, spraying black-red blood all over the sparsely furnished room. So much of it shot out when the headless body hit the floor that it put out the fire on the curtains.

  "Shadow?" asked a woman who had come from nowhere to stand behind the twitching naga corpse. Her voice was the true opposite of the naga's, rich and lyrical.

  She was standing almost against the far wall. The secret door hung open behind her, apparently not a secret anymore. In her hand was a rapier with a blade so long and thin it drooped when she held it still and whistled through the air like a whip at her slightest twitch.

  "Are you Shadow?" she asked him again.

  Coughing from the searing blast of fire, the spraying blood, and the stench of the boiling venom, he nodded.

  The woman started toward him, her strides simultaneously guarded and confident.

  "I suppose," he started to say, "I should thank you for-"

  The sound of the whip-rapier shrieking through the air stopped him, and he was actually alive just long enough to feel his head hit the floor after mouthing the word "Damn" on the way down.

  Moments before and hundreds of miles away, the archwizard Grenway stood before a giant glass tank filled with a thick green semi-liquid that was moving with a life of its own.

  "Very nicely," the old man muttered to himself, turning in the cluttered laboratory and shuffling slowly to the great palantir that had been a gift from his third wife, just before he'd had her killed. "Coming along nicely."

  He had only to think the name of the would-be assassin he'd sent after Shadow, and he could see everything she saw. The information he'd given her, about the tunnel that led under the wall, below Karsus's private gardens, then into the complex of rooms and laboratories inhabited by his foe, was so far proving to be quite correct.

  She was running with almost supernatural speed down the dim, low-ceilinged passageway, and Grenway had to admire her physicality. This was something he had been able to admire only from afar, or for a price, since his own body tended to be little more than a frail, withering container for his vast intellect and even greater greed. Yes, he thought, quite a specimen this one. A shame, really.

  He looked back over to the huge glass tank, as big as a commoner's house. Something heavy thudded against the inside of the tank. Grenway could see something solid and rough drag itself along the inside of the glass before disappearing back into the thick green medium.

  "Soon," he muttered to the tank's inhabitant. Grenway smiled and laughed for little more than a second before falling into a fit of ragged, sputtering coughs. Spittle hanging from his gray, stubbly chin, he smiled yet wider.

  Alashar Crywinds, with the tip of her bare left toe, rolled Shadow's head so she cou
ld see his face. He was handsome enough to make her frown. Destroying things never really made her happy. Destroying beautiful things almost made her want to stop destroying things altogether. Almost.

  She pulled the sack through her belt, and shook it open. Her employer told her it was waterproof; the bloody head wouldn't soak through. He promised her she could even walk the streets of Karsus enclave without attracting attention. Of course, she didn't intend to stay in Karsus that long. She wanted to get back to loulaum, deliver her package, and be done with it all before her damnable conscience started whispering in her ear again. Profitable as it may be, she hated working for archwizards. She hated how insignificant they made her feel.

  She sheathed her rapier and crouched, slipping her feet back to avoid the blood on the floor, which would have seemed impossible-would have been impossible-for most people.

  "Excuse me," a voice behind her said. She stopped dead, not bothering to whirl at the intruder with her whip-rapier, not bothering to run. She recognized the voice. She was good with voices.

  "Shadow," she said, turning her head slowly to see him standing in the high, arched doorway.

  Someone was standing behind him, in the shadows of the dimly lit corridor. There was something familiar about the outline, but it was eclipsed in her mind by the presence of the man she'd just decapitated, whole and hearty, dressed in his signature black silks. She resisted the temptation to glance back at the head on the floor to be sure it was still there. It was.

  "Damn," the archwizard breathed, "those things are a pain to replace-"

  She let her hand slip to the hilt of her whip-rapier, and then heard him mumble something. When her hand stopped just a fraction of a fraction of an inch from the hilt, she knew she was paralyzed. She wanted to curse, maybe say good-bye to the world, but couldn't. She couldn't do anything.

  "What a rness," Shadow said, stepping carefully into the room. The figure behind him followed, and if Alashar had been able to do anything but breathe shal-lowly, she might have screamed.

  It was her. She was looking at herself, long auburn hair, crystal green eyes, dark green leathers, bare feet, whip-rapier, and all.

  The room he brought her to was pure Karsus enclave. This insane city was full of buildings with floors on the walls and bridges where people walked on the top and bottom at the same time. Anyone not actually from there was always dizzy. "Down" seemed to be whatever the bottoms of your feet were touching.

  This room must have been hewn from the solid rock of the inverted floating mountain. Four ornately carved pillars looked like spokes holding the whole thing together, but they didn't meet in the center. Each was about forty feet high, leaving a good twenty feet between the top of one and the top of the next.

  Floating in the center of the huge chamber was a yellow-green crystal fully eight feet in diameter. It gave off a gentle, somehow disturbing glow.

  Alashar's double had carried her here from Shadow's bedchamber. The true Alashar was still frozen in the crouched position, still almost touching the hilt of her whip-rapier, still unable to do or say anything. She rode along in a state of stunned awe at the perfection of the double, the attention to detail in what had to be an illusion.

  On some level, she was embarrassed. Shadow must know her, and know her well, though she was sure he had never seen her before.

  "You," Shadow told her conversationally after having her rigid form placed gently on the floor near the room's only piece of furniture, a well-organized desk, "are going to help me today. Help me with a bit of an experiment."

  He stood behind the desk, shifting absentmindedly through a stack of parchment and paper sheets while he spoke. His voice was lively, as if he was really excited about whatever he was going to do to kill her. Of course he would kill her. She had already killed him, after all, for money. Revenge was actually a more laudable motive for murder than money.

  "Usually when I catch an assassin alive, I send him into the demiplane of imprisonment."

  She touched her whip-rapier. She felt the warm leather-wrapped hilt against the insides of her fingers. She tried to stand or stretch, but couldn't yet.

  "But it never occurred to me," he continued, "to arrange some method for their retrieval. It was always a sort of… life sentence."

  She could get her jaw to open just a little wider now. She made each small move as slowly as she could, so as not to attract his attention.

  "I knew you were coming, of course," he said, turning away from her now to walk gingerly over to one of the huge pillars. "I have at least as many spies in Grenway's employ as he has in mine. Still, I must admit you are quite good. That simulacrum has… had successfully fended off seventeen major assassination attempts. Bravo."

  She could finally bend her elbow a good three degrees, and now that he had his back to her, she started to strain, her sluggish muscles bunching, pushing hard against nothing, but a nothing that was still effectively paralyzing her. He had to know the spell was wearing off, or would be wearing off soon. Certainly, she hadn't much time.

  Otherwise engrossed in tracing the pattern of one of the pillar's cryptic carvings, Shadow continued, "Anyway, I made up a simulacrum of you. Or, well, had one made at any rate. This way I can leave you imprisoned for a few years and use the simulacrum's link with you to pull you back out. Well, if the last few components are finished by then."

  He glanced back at her. She stopped, but felt a bit of a teeter. She'd almost thrown herself off-balance, but it didn't look as if he noticed. He looked away again, shrugged, and said, "Actually, it could take twenty, thirty years. Honestly, it's not a high priority in my research right now. I'm still rather captivated by the demiplane of shadow, as you may have guessed. But perfecting a simulacrum-link with the prime material… home, as it were… is rather vital to that endeavor as well. Your having destroyed my own simulacrum will mean I'll have to stick around here until I get a new one together.

  "Rather inconvenient, actually."

  By conjuring some kind of big black disc under their tingling feet, he lifted both of them up toward the crystal in the center of the room. She was gaining greater movement, but so slowly she still wouldn't be able to defend herself before he did whatever he was going to do.

  Below, Alashar could see the copy of herself staring blankly ahead, standing in her own customary pose, weight on her right foot, arms crossed over her chest.

  Shadow almost never looked at Alashar, instead watching the gemstone nearing above them. "All you have to do is touch it," he told her, not really sounding too consoling. "You won't feel a thing."

  They were almost there, an inch away, when he added, "As far as I know-"

  Alashar grabbed him. Her elbow was shot through with pain, and it felt as if the joint popped, but her hand took a firm hold of his slippery silk robe. She felt him flinch. She wished she could laugh when he screamed out his own name.

  Wherever they were, it was dark gray.

  A cold wind whipped the hair around Alashar's face, and she forced herself to stand, releasing Shadow's robe. He stepped away. They stood together on a rolling plain covered in a sort of tall grass with small, sparse leaves. Sprinkled across the gray landscape were the shapes of trees, which ruffled in the wind but made no sound. The grass and trees seemed to blend together where they touched or overlapped.

  Nothing had real substance; nothing had color.

  Shadow looked at her with a strange mix of anger, relief, and… could that be admiration? His face was the only color anywhere. His cheeks were flushed, his lips unnaturally red. In a black and white world, anything but gray is garish.

  When she started backing away from him, he didn't say anything. When she drew her whip-rapier, he laughed. When she threw her body at him, sword first, he disappeared.

  "You can't kill me here," he said from behind her. She spun on him, but he was too far away, a hundred yards or more. Movement in the corner of her right eye made her reflexes explode. She drew her whip-rapier through the air. It whist
led for a split second. Then there was silence and resistance as it cut through something.

  Her own shadow had come up from the ground at her feet and was trying to touch her. Or was it trying to claw her? Scratch out her eyes, or put a reassuring hand on her shoulder to tell her it would be okay if she just-

  No, it was trying to kill her. Its touch was like ice, but not even ice was this cold. Her body shuddered-not a shiver but a seizure. She curled the tip of her whip-rapier back at her own shadow, and it passed again through that same strange substance that dragged at the wire-thin blade.

  "Kill it!" Shadow's voice called to her. It sounded as if he was farther away, but the wind, the bizarre feeling to the air, and the… shadowy quality to the ground, the grass-everything-made it impossible for her to judge sound here.

  Her bare feet were numb from the cold, but moved fast even for her. She managed to keep the tiling away from her. It was a gray, flat nothing, literally a shadow in her shape. Sometimes the arms seemed deformed and stubby, other times overly long and thin. How it was managing to touch her, she had no idea, but when it did it hurt.

  Only a few seconds had passed, but she was starting to get weaker. There was more movement. More shadows, or maybe creatures casting shadows of their own, were approaching.

  She heard Shadow curse and grunt. There was a flash of light, and he cursed again, almost screamed.

  Her own shadow stopped just long enough for her to drag her whip-rapier through it once more. It fell away all at once, even though she never got the feeling she'd hurt it. Her head was spinning, her knees were about to give way, and the whip-rapier quivered in her weakening grip. She looked around and saw dozens more shadows. They were everywhere, in the grass, slithering out of the trees, in a hundred shapes and all sizes. The one coming at Shadow was absolutely gigantic.