The Herald

by Ed Greenwood

  One by one, eyes fixed on Larloch, the Prefects sat down, settled themselves against the wall, and acquired that head-bent stillness that accompanies intense and careful concentration upon the wards.

  Larloch cast a look down at Elminster, and with it came the silent mind-message: You make this possible by stabilizing their minds. Guiding them. Do it.

  The feel of Larloch’s mind was somehow familiar.

  Ah. This is who had quenched and compelled the wards from afar when he and Storm had been hiding in crone shape and working with Amarune on mending the Weave.

  A fellow meddler. As if he’d needed more proof.

  In his mind, El saw a door opening, and beyond it was a bright, swarming chaos of mental images and sounds, remembered conversations and moments. He was looking into the mind of one of the Great Readers. Across that whirling maelstrom another door opened as he watched, revealing a more ordered whirling mass of memories, this one driven by an insistent rhythm, a many-voiced chant that went on and on. Ah, yes—the Chanter’s mind, of course. Beyond it, another door swung wide into greater chaos.

  “Not too many doors, now!” Elminster mumbled warningly, more in his mind than with his mouth. “Let me master these, first …”

  “Are Chosen of Mystra so much less than Chosen of Mystryl? I can ride them all, and at the same time watch over and command every last lich who serves me. And most of them have minds both stronger and much nastier than these monks. Surely, Old Mage, you can manage a mere eleven minds? Trained and disciplined—but sheltered—minds, at that?”

  “Despite what ye may have heard, brutalizing minds is not something I have overmuch experience with,” El growled.

  “Ah, yes, you prefer to be loved. I find it far more efficient and practical to be feared. Do it your way, then—but no more slowly than you must. And forget this not: you will need to encompass all eleven before we’re done.”

  Mind to mind, they gazed at each other, and Elminster gave the archlich a slow nod. Larloch smiled like a dragon surveying prey, and withdrew to the far end of the row of eleven imaginary rooms, leaving those vaults of whirling, flashing thoughts brighter in front of Elminster.

  Who sighed, recalled a beautiful tune an elf had harped to him on a soft summer night far too long ago … and drifted gently into the first room.

  The mind of Great Reader Albaeron Thalion, once of Athkatla, a calligrapher and artist who’d become a scribe and then heard the whispered summons of Oghma one night, in a dream drenched in moonlight and words written in moonfire crawling across empty air, a calling to Candlekeep on its rocky height overlooking the endless waves …

  Thalion was aware of him now, as a softly stealing shadow in his own mind, and alarm welled up despite knowing who the intruder was and why he was here, warm red sharp-edged apprehension, rising …

  Distantly, El felt his hair stand on end as more ward energy than he’d ever been able to tap on his own leaked into him. He stepped into and through that warm scarlet wash of apprehension, moving boldly deeper into the monk’s mind. Only to find himself swimming among strands of darkening emotion that circled alongside him like gigantic sharks, wary and menacing and closing in.

  Sharks Elminster needed to banish, to relax Albaeron Thalion enough to win trust enough to gain the secrets he sought without the winning of each one becoming a bruising battle that darkened the monk’s mind a little more with each yielding …

  For each monk must be set at ease, or at least given new confidence, so their mind would share what they knew of the Weave, and the Weave energies they controlled, rather than fighting to deny and deceive and keep that knowledge secret.

  Gently, now …

  Calm and smiling confidence to the fore …

  El projected reassurance, envisaging it as a lantern coming softly to life, a small and brass-barred hand lantern like the one that had comforted Thalion as a child in his small bedchamber, a room the graying Great Reader still sadly missed, yearned to see again, the little bed and the stuccoed walls curving to a smooth arching cavelike ceiling close overheard, the precious street map of Athkatla on the wall with the important buildings drawn so clearly, prettier than they were in life …

  El pushed the lantern ahead in Thalion’s mind and drifted gently in its wake, going deeper now, past more recent memories and the excitement of discoveries in pages brittle with age, the revelations of discerning what was meant when two sages’ screeds disagreed yet intersected, and on into the secrets the Great Reader had been thrilled to learn. Where certain tomes were hidden, and wands and scepters too, passwords that opened spell-locked doors, and (ah, here) the ways of taking hold of the wards of Candlekeep, and changing a paltry few of their settings … all that had been shown to Thalion. The Great Reader visualized the handles of the wards as a harness, a coach harness from the wealthier streets of Amn, that could be grasped here and here and here, thus, and altered by doing this … El made that alteration with Thalion, shadowy hands cupping the Great Reader’s own imaginary one, and radiating thanks with the lantern light ere drifting on.

  A thread of power loosed from the wards by Thalion rippled with him, and he passed on into the second chamber, the next monk’s mind, where the Endless Chant of Alaundo rose around Elminster and enfolded him in its insistent recitations, the deeper male voices dominating—the voices the Chanter, whose mind he’d entered, remembered from his first days in the keep, when he strode at the rear of the long procession, repeating more prophecies than were uttered these days. The current chant, quieter thanks to fewer voices and shorter with the fulfilled or false foretellings being lost, kept its own tireless refrain, looping around the older chant.

  Of course this would be how the Chanter defended his mind against intrusion. El joined the older chant first and then the current one, moving with them and then drifting to one side of their relentless flow so as to move forward, deeper into the monk’s mind, rather than boring through them and doing damage, but the ribbon of ward energy trailing El seemed to melt everything it touched in Nabeirion the Chanter’s mind, and awakened bright flares of crimson anger that boiled up swiftly to tower like a great fist.

  El darted at the base of the rage before any hammer blow could fall, and plunged into it, ricocheting and swirling down through a maze of razor-sharp flashing thoughts, sparks whirling up around him and traveling with him like a great billowing cloak of winking lights, every mote of it failing but not before being replaced by two or more tiny dancing stars. Light that was reflected warmly by thoughts ahead, thoughts El swooped at, though his invading shadow felt like it was being stabbed by thousands upon swift thousands of pins and needles, and burned feverish hot all over, yet as chill as ice down his back, a coldness that gnawed at the back of his neck and started to flood up his scalp and down his jaw.

  Nabeirion the Chanter was angry indeed, because he took such pride in being a master of the Weave. To relinquish or share that was to lessen his special status—to lessen him. Or so he firmly believed, and was using the might of the Weave against this intruder—for only the flow of the Weave could deliver fire and ice at once in the same spot.

  And only one who had worked so long and so closely with the Weave could survive that conjunction. But for how long?

  El hastened on, worried that he might be overwhelmed before he could unleash the ward energies in this second mind—only to stumble upon the Chanter’s memories of being shown the wards by a Keeper now dead, a blind monk, in the Chanter’s memory, who could no longer read a word or recognize a face or banner, but who saw the wards like shifting, flowing golden lace in his dreams … something the Chanter himself was now getting his own fleeting glimpses of, mere echoes …

  The beginnings of attunement. El seized on those memories and made them his own, for the Chanter had been shown much, more than El himself had ever guessed or been told or felt through the Weave.

  Ah, there was a threefold lock, devised to foil Netherese arcanists and Thayan zulkirs and all those who habitually c
reated their own spells—the Imaskari, for example—alike. A sigil had to be traced in the mind, not in the air or on stone, then a word written in the mind, then a second sigil traced—and then the first one redrawn, something just not done in any of the human traditions. Dwarves did that, but then dwarves murmured over runes and passed fire over runes and sprinkled blood or tears over runes—they did nothing without scratching runes first. Writing just the word, in the right place in the keep when someone else had half unlocked that place, allowed you to change a setting or even add a spell effect to the existing wards, but all three were needed to substantially alter the wards, shift their boundaries, or bring them down.

  And now he, Elminster, had this control. He commanded the means of releasing great amounts of the ward flow without the Chanter’s assistance, or that of any other monk for that matter.

  Yet he was not the sort to gloat or exult. That was for younger or more crazed-wits mages. El allowed himself a thin smile—and restricted himself to a deft, minor unleashing, gliding along that released power out of the Chanter’s mind and traveling with it into the mind of another Great Reader, this one younger and full of himself, and so dark with resentment at the invasion into his mind.

  Great. Think of young and crazed-wits, and behold! Faerûn obligingly presents such a one—so much for thin smiles! El fought his way through the dark thunder of resentment, and used what he’d learned from the Chanter to wrest ward energy from what this younger mind controlled without even asking for permission. Less friendly, but there was no welcome here at all, so it was best to save time, and just take and move on …

  On into the fourth mind, which presented as a vault of darkness with real resistance, a stubborn and opposed will that thrust at his advancing shadow and the ward energies with a moving wall of darkness, rolling forward like one of the great storm-driven waves El had often seen racing at the Sword Coast, trying to halt El and shove him back into the unfriendliness of the mind behind him.

  El called up his lantern again and made of it a blinding sphere, a brightness that seared and tore at the unyielding darkness, forcing it to shrink back and melt away and—collapse utterly as El hurled the radiance into the heart of it. That mind fled, shrieking, in all dark directions at once, leaving El wincing in the barren heart of it and wondering what damage he’d done.

  He felt the cold edge of Larloch’s amusement as he freed a carefully small amount of ward energy as quickly as he could, and raced on. Through a mind that wavered on the brink of collapse, clawing at Elminster until he dimly saw the chamber he was in again, and the source of that clawing.

  (On the balcony, a Prefect shuddered, hands twitching and then clawing the air in a sudden frenzy, foam bursting from bitten-through lips as a whispering, wordless snarl erupted through clenched teeth, eyes staring at nothing as the head jerked from side to side, as if staring fixedly at things that were not there. The Avowed on either side of the stricken monk shrank away from him in fear and disgust—ere he collapsed into a lolling, almost lifeless heap.)

  “Idiot,” Larloch said in disgust.

  El rode the echoes of the lich’s comment onward out of the ruined mind, and plunged into two more monks’ minds in swift succession that were both brighter and more cacophonous, yet fought him not. He swerved and banked and slowed at will in their chaotic midst, deftly unleashing trifling amounts of ward energy from each, to add to the flow already accompanying him, and raced on again, into a seventh mind.

  And into a sudden mental assault, his heart pounding as maleficent dark lances of thought thrust into him, ward energy leaking like golden gore … El fed those blades silver fire and had the satisfaction of seeing them vanish into smoke, their shafts recoiling to a source that shrieked in pain. The wild screaming went on and on as the mind of its owner shuddered and yawed and shrank back in a wet, crimson retreat. Again El took what he wanted, quickly and ungently, and moved on.

  He could see the end of his work ahead, just four minds remaining between him and the coldly waiting presence of Larloch, and could feel the power of the ward energy he was riding, the first sense he’d had of any sort of inevitability to his success. He was rolling into minds that weren’t expecting to withstand him now—and so probably couldn’t.

  Another Great Reader, who was more fearful than anything else, and only too happy to let the invading shadow glide to where it needed to go, so it would be gone all the sooner.

  Into a very different sentience. Pride here, and real power. The First Reader’s mind was alert and watchful, aware of his every movement within it and accompanying the shadow that was El like a watchful armored sentry with spear held ready, keeping pace with El, crowding close to peer as the ward energies this mind controlled and was fully attuned to—only the Keeper of the Tomes had known more—were tapped, then ushering him carefully out, and on.

  Into the mind of the Gatewarden, who was friendlier but no less aware and vigilant, escorting El’s shadow like a smiling light. There was real power here, too, but it was might that was kept largely hidden, roiling and shifting and pursuing other matters at the same time as it shared ward secrets.

  Last, El flowed into the mind of the Guide. This mind was both curious and suspicious at once, offering no resistance but massing so as to offer battle the moment it seemed needed. Some thoughts the Guide snatched away, to be kept hidden from the intruder, others the Guide advanced like armored knights to form a defensive wall. El glided past as much of it as he could, then proffered the bright lantern when he needed to turn into the massed-against-him wall and reach through those close-clustered thoughts to the ward memories. Which proved even more extensive and useful than the Chanter’s: attunement plus mastery without the strong defenses of the First Reader or the Gatewarden.

  He was almost done and out when the mind around him spasmed as if struck by a gale—and then blew apart in bright and terrible ribbons and the roaring blackness of lacerating annihilation whipping past.

  The mind he’d been in had just died.

  El flung the ward flow to Larloch, but spun his own consciousness up and out and away rather than plunging into the depths of that darkly waiting and coldly amused intellect. Seeing only enough of Larloch’s thinking to see a deeply hidden connection with … the mythal of distant Myth Drannor?

  Oh, no! He had to … had to …

  Return to himself enough to perceive what was happening in the chamber.

  He did that, just in time to see what was left of the Guide’s body—a head and limbs loosely attached to what had become a great hole of gore and burned robes and wet flesh—toppling from the gallery to splatter on the floor right in front of … himself.

  El realized his neck was stiff, and his arms and shoulders felt numb. When he moved, to break off staring up at the gallery, he discovered why. He had been standing like a statue all this time, and now—

  Now the room was full of angry Moonstars, different Moonstars than he had flung the Shadovar at, with Alustriel and Laeral at their head.

  Their spells had slain the Guide, though their target had been Larloch, and the unfortunate Prefect merely the archlich’s helpless shield. More spells were crashing into the gallery, shattering it as the gallery above it had been blasted. This was no safe place to stand, when all that stone came hurtling down.

  And other spells were leaping at him!

  El dashed them aside with the wards in an instant, but even as he did so, felt that there was something not quite right.

  Something clawed at him, commanding his attention—ah! The ward flow he’d harvested, small rill by small rill, was a vigorous stream when it reached Larloch, and rushed through the Shadow King into the Weave. Yet after that—

  El felt through the Weave to try to see what it was from another vantage than his own place along the flow, and saw what was amiss.

  He’d been duped.

  And Luse and Laer might have come too late.

  The ward flow was reaching the Weave, but invigorating and brightening
just this local bit of it—because Larloch controlled the entry of the ward energies, and their path, too—which was to circle in this fringe of the Weave and depart it right back into … Larloch!

  The Shadow King had played him for a fool.

  And won.

  Larloch gave Elminster that soft, knowing smile, and with a spell, sent all the Prefects hurtling down out of the gallery. Then he released the spell that held up the shattered gallery, so its shards tumbled after the screaming monks.

  Standing unconcernedly on empty air, the archlich gave El back some of the ward energies—in the form of a great, rolling wave of thrumming force that plummeted from the gallery to crash onto the floor where the Guide had landed, hurling Prefects through the air like dolls to smash down into Elminster, Alustriel, Laeral, and all the Moonstars, before dashing them all back against the far wall.

  El slammed into a layer of several Prefects, and felt broken bones grating under the force of his solid arrival. Where the ward energies continued to pin him, the Moonstars, and the Prefects, holding them all helpless against the wall.

  “I must thank you, all of you,” Larloch told them mockingly, “for your assistance in giving me most of the power I need to remake the Weave as I see fit. I’ll collect the rest in Myth Drannor. Farewell, fools.”

  And the tall, dark figure standing in midair abruptly vanished.

  Leaving Elminster, Alustriel, and Laeral to stumble away from the wall caked in dead and dying Moonstars and Prefects, in a swiftly darkening room.

  They all knew why the light was failing.

  They could feel it.