The Herald

by Ed Greenwood

  Laeral gave her sister a sardonic look. “This is why he never gets any work done!”

  “Oh, I’d not say that, Sister,” Alustriel countered, watching El and the Srinshee weeping softly and murmuring to each other, rocking back and forth in each other’s arms. “We all have our talents. I’ve accomplished much, doing that and more.”

  “This one yet lives,” one Moonstar announced to another, who hastened across the high-vaulted and now blood-spattered room in Candlekeep, slipping on the rubble underfoot.

  On all sides, glum-faced Moonstars were tending injured monks or moving the bodies of the dead.

  “The wards gone …,” one muttered in head-shaking disbelief.

  More than a few of his fellows peered at the stone walls soaring up into dimness above them, as if expecting Candlekeep to collapse on their heads without warning. Soon.

  “I,” said another quietly, “find myself wondering what we should all do, after these needs have been seen to … for what is to be done, now that we’ve failed?”

  “Much,” a new voice said firmly, from beyond a dark archway. A woman’s voice, but deep and rich as many a man’s. Moonstars all over the littered room looked up sharply, and more than one hand sought a sword hilt.

  The speaker strode into the room, and they beheld a warrior woman, tall and broad shouldered and clad in silvery coat of plate. Her close-cropped hair was of the same hue. “If you would serve Khelben’s vision still,” she said, “and do great service to all the world, come with me now. There’s still vital work to be done.”

  “And who, exactly, are you?” a Moonstar asked warily.

  “I am Dove Falconhand. Of the Seven. Chosen of Mystra.”

  Several Moonstars stirred, and some of their faces darkened, but before any spoke, Dove added as sternly as any battle commander, “If we are to defeat the Three Who Wait in Darkness—the very purpose for which the Moonstars were formed—we must go to Myth Drannor and fight the Shadovar there. I understand there’s no shortage of them there right now; there’ll be foes enough for each of you.”

  “I lack the spells to take more than a handful of us there,” another Moonstar objected.

  Dove gave that man a smile. “Portals will serve us. I know three within the keep, all of them an easy stroll from here.”

  Another Moonstar frowned at her. “I’ve lived and worked in this monastery for more than thirty years, and have never seen nor heard of any working portals.”

  Dove winked. “That’s what ‘secret’ means. Trust me.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then stay behind. I might well be going to my death, and would rather not have someone at my shoulder who believes not in what we must do now.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Die cheerfully, fighting hard, so our world may survive,” Dove replied. “I know bards talk like that all the time, but I don’t. I mean every word. And I’m not waiting. So stay, or come.” And she turned and strode back through the archway.

  Moonstars looked at each other doubtfully. Then one of them rose, drew his sword, and hurried after Dove.

  Then another.

  And another.

  Then two in unison, swiftly followed by another pair, and then by the rest, in a sudden rush.

  Leaving just one Moonstar, who gazed around the room surveying the corpses and the wounded monks, sighed, and announced to the empty air, “I’ll miss this place.”

  He walked through the archway, following his fellow Moonstars. “Will the bards sing songs about us, I wonder?” he asked himself.

  A few slow, faltering paces later, he stopped long enough to ask, “And if I’m dead, how will I ever get to hear them?”

  Another pair of grand and firmly closed crypt doors, and another baelnorn standing in grim guardianship before them, bared longsword in hand. The long, slender blade was studded with clear-cut gems that winked as the baelnorn lifted the war steel, facing the three Netherese as they strolled up to it.

  “I am Prince Mattick, and this is my brother, Prince Vattick. We are Tanthuls of Thultanthar,” Mattick announced almost jovially. “You won’t have heard of us, but that matters not. Surrender or be destroyed.”

  He didn’t bother to mention the lone surviving arcanist with them, but neither that Shadovar nor the baelnorn seemed to mind.

  “I am the guardian of House Hualarydnym,” it announced calmly. “I shall not surrender.”

  “You surprise me not,” Vattick drawled, and lifted a finger, unleashing a roaring spell that howled around the doors of the Hualarydnym crypt like two talon-headed emerald serpents, then plunged through the seams around them—and exploded with a last ear-clawing bellow.

  The doors shattered and burst outward, huge stony shards stabbing right through the baelnorn from behind. The other shards, large and small, hurtled past the guardian for a moment or two, then curved around in the air, every one of them, to race back at the baelnorn, impaling it from all sides.

  Vattick’s catlike smirk widened into a broad smile of delight as they watched the sharp stone fragments speed right through the glowing guardian, but leave their glows behind.

  The baelnorn gasped and reeled, the magical auras the stone shards had borne now protruding from it in an ungainly, bristling array. It looked like a fitfully glowing, stumbling parody of a porcupine.

  The guardian took several shuddering steps toward them, hissing in pain … and then darkened, gasping out puffs of glowing unlife as it sank into crouching, trembling agony.

  And died, falling into a collapse of fading nothingness.

  “Down after the first blow,” Mattick remarked approvingly. “Nicely done.”

  “It’s all this tomb magic we’ve been drinking,” Vattick replied, beaming. “They crafted magic well; I’ll give them that, these ancient elves.”

  He looked down at the stretch of scorched but empty smooth stone where the baelnorn had been, shook his head, and strode through the ravaged entrance of the crypt.

  House Hualarydnym had not been a fertile family. Either that, or most of its fallen had been interred elsewhere. There was magic, right enough, but not much of it.

  Mattick scowled. “Hardly worth the spell you spent on the door guard,” he said to Vattick.

  Who shrugged, still smiling, and replied, “That was one baelnorn-reaping I enjoyed.”

  “Hunh,” was Mattick’s eloquent reply to that, as he led the way back out into the passage. Vattick chuckled, but the lone arcanist left carefully said nothing at all, even when Mattick turned and glowered at him.

  The passage wound its way around massive tree roots that protruded from the ceiling and descended into the floor like the sloping, half-buried bodies of gigantic snakes. Then the tunnel-like way started to ascend, until Mattick could see leaf-dappled daylight and hear the distant din of battle. Its walls held no more doors.

  “Damned longears,” the prince growled. “They can’t have built a city this big with just the families we’ve found so far; there have to be more crypts—but the passages that lead to them could be anywhere. And if we follow this one to the light, we’ll soon be up to our necks in squalling elves trying to lash us with spells we’ve never learned any counters to! While we blunder about in the heart of a battle searching for ways back down again! Shar spit!”

  “She does, I’ll grant,” Vattick agreed, “and a trifle too often for my pleasure, but as it happens, we don’t face the doom you fear. Father didn’t want us to run out of crypts so soon.”

  Mattick swung around sharply. “What?”

  The silent arcanist deftly stepped to one side, eyes downcast.

  Vattick watched the Shadovar’s maneuver with obvious amusement before he met Mattick’s gaze again, and said gravely, “The Most High impressed a map of sorts into my mind. I know where other nearby crypts can be found.”

  Mattick stared at his brother in still silence, a deepening frown spreading across his face. Both the last arcanist and Prince Vattick knew, as clearly a
s if he’d shouted the words, that he was thinking “Why Vattick and not me?”

  Mattick said nothing, however, until he abruptly turned away and flung back over his shoulder curtly, “Tell me, Brother: Did the Most High share anything else with you that you’ve neglected to mention until now? Orders, perhaps?”

  Vattick’s laugh was brief and harsh. “No, Brother. On that, you can trust me.”

  Those words fell like stones into a bottomless well of deepening silence as Mattick strode to the nearest tree root and bounced a clenched fist off it, making no reply.

  When he turned around again, Vattick was strolling back down the passage the way they’d come, the arcanist walking uncertainly in his wake.

  Mattick swallowed a growl and hastened to catch up.

  Rocks and trees unrolled swiftly below. The breeze was stiff, and the clouds scudded like ships driven by a gale; Thultanthar was flying at speed.

  “It won’t be long now,” Aglarel commented, leaning out between two merlons to peer ahead, though he knew they were still too far away to see any sign of Myth Drannor in the great sweep of Faerûn spread out below and ahead.

  His father didn’t bother to reply.

  Or rather, as Aglarel saw a moment later, the Most High’s attention was fixed on something in the air above them.

  A black line where there should be none, in the hitherto-empty sky.

  A line swiftly broadening into a dark rift—that became a black star, low overhead and seemingly of about the same size as the many-spired city flying beneath it, a star that for just a moment seemed to be one dark, coldly knowing, somehow feminine eye.

  It was an orb Aglarel felt would freeze his heart if it happened to turn and gaze upon him, and he knew the deity it belonged to was aware of him—knowledge that made his heart sink into deeper despair, in that instant, than he’d ever felt in his life before.

  Shar was manifesting in midair to his father. This must be urgent.

  “How can you be so patient?” Amarune burst out. “The world may be shattered before nightfall, and you’re sitting there calmly reading recipes!”

  “Not calmly,” Arclath whispered, looking up from the heap of old books he’d fetched down off dusty shelves onto Storm’s kitchen table, and she saw that his hands were shaking. “Just feigning calm. Something nobles are taught young. Pretend to be calm, keep your true emotions off your face, and cultivate patience.”

  “Thank the gods I’m not noble!”

  “Ah, but you are now.” Lord Arclath Delcastle set the book aside and rose to go to his lady and embrace her. The look he gave her, once they were in each other’s arms, was more grim than grave. “And if there’s someone in this room who must learn patience to keep the world from being shattered, probably many times in the years ahead of us, it’s you, Rune. Haven’t you noticed that it’s one of Elminster’s best weapons?”

  “No. I guess all the kingdom-shattering spell-hurling he does distracted me.”

  “Misdirection,” Arclath replied, with the faintest ghost of a smile, “is another of his best weapons. That and his sense of humor.”

  Rune gave him a dark look, and warned, “Don’t you say one word, Lord Delcastle, about how I’m related to him, and have inherited this or that. Just don’t.”

  “All right, I won’t.” Arclath smoothly disengaged her clasping arms, returned to the table, and said, “There’s an interesting recipe here for turtle soup—”

  And being noble, he watched anyone standing near out of the corner of his eye, and so was ready to duck aside as she hurled a handy onion at him.

  The great black eye floating in the sky above the flying city blinked. It and its dark rays and the rift they had appeared through were all gone in an instant, and bright sun banished the temporary gloom that had fallen on the battlements.

  Sunlight that lit the High Prince of Thultanthar like a torch as he turned to Aglarel in sudden haste.

  “Go,” he ordered, “and fetch my herald. Don’t hurry.”

  His most loyal son bowed and backed away, but was taken aback and didn’t try to hide it. “Your herald? Who—?”

  “The arcanist Gwelt,” Telamont snapped. “Go.”

  Aglarel turned away, cloak swirling. “Since when have you had a herald?” he muttered, as he hastened away.

  The Most High shrugged. “I’ve always needed one,” he replied, knowing his magic would take that quiet reply to his son’s ears.

  Then he strode down a stair and along a passage, passed through a door and spell-sealed it behind him with the wave of a hand, and hurried to his innermost spellchamber.

  He sealed its doors too, warding himself within a room that was colder and darker than it should be.

  When he turned around from the doors, she was waiting for him.

  There’d been a secret door in the wall of the passage just outside the doors of the second crypt they’d plundered. The time-worn stone steps beyond had come up inside a hollow tree—or rather, the crumbling stump of a long-dead and fallen shadowtop, the roofless room inside its ring as large around as a good-sized turret.

  Vattick worked a disguising spell on himself without slowing that left him looking like an elf high mage, and his brother and the lone surviving arcanist hastened to follow suit. Vattick seemed to know the way onward unerringly. He went to a cleft in the stump, stepping through it into a drift of dead leaves as if walking along a passage he took every day.

  Mattick and the arcanist kept close behind him, as they strode past armed elves rushing here and there through the trees, the drifting smoke of a fire, and the screams and clangor of battle that wasn’t far off at all.

  They strode along like men bent on business, who had every right to be there, ignoring all elves and walking with brisk purpose. Soon enough they ducked between two old and mighty duskwoods and down into a passage so old its ceiling had collapsed, leaving it as a deep trench in the forest, open to the sky—yet shielded by the thick forest canopy high overhead, and here and there by the small trunks of fallen saplings and the living nets of forest creepers.

  Vattick led the way as sure-footedly as if the rotten-leaf-strewn ditch was very familiar, and soon enough it curved to the right and angled down underground into darkness. Dirt-and-root walls soon gave way to stone every bit as ancient as the underways they’d been traversing from crypt to crypt earlier.

  Ahead, something ghostly and deep blue glided into their path, to bar their way.

  Vattick never slowed, even when all three elf high mage disguises melted from them to the accompaniment of a hiss of disgust from the guardian ahead.

  “So, what family bones do you guard?” he asked it cheerfully.

  “Human, you intrude upon the resting place of House Alavalae,” the baelnorn replied coldly. “Halt, and go back, or face mortal peril.”

  “Indeed,” Vattick smiled—and let fly with the same spell he’d used on the last guardian. Not at the doors of a crypt, this time, but at the baelnorn itself, two talon-headed serpents of emerald force that the guardian countered almost casually, with some sort of barrier that held the prince’s spell at bay in front of it, writhing and clawing and spitting emerald fury in all directions.

  Vattick waved to his twin as if he was directing him to a seat at a feast table—and Mattick strode forward with a smile whose malice would have done credit to any ruthless wolf, and unleashed some of the magic he’d drained from the crypts of Myth Drannor.

  His ravening magical fire snarled around in a great arc to stab at the undead guardian from behind.

  It backed away hastily to avoid being caught between two destroying spells at once—but the doors it was bound to guard were all too near, robbing it of space enough to flee into.

  Its blue glow seemed to catch fire, going red and emerald green and then boiling up inky black—until it managed some sort of more powerful warding, and forced the princes’ contemptuously hurled magics back.

  That was when the arcanist dared to step forward and add his spel
l to the fray, a careful casting that shattered the warding, consuming itself in doing so.

  The spells the twin princes had cast crashed in on the guardian from either side—and it winked out of visibility, letting the spells crash together and roil angrily in midair.

  When they were spent, the last force rolling away from their meeting to strike the walls and rebound, like a wave striking a rocky shore, the guardian faded back into visibility—much closer to the three Shadovar than it had been before.

  Mattick spat a curse and Vattick ducked hastily aside as he worked a spell, but the baelnorn had guarded this spot for centuries, and had made some preparations. It spread hands that pulsed with blue fire—and flat, sharp-edged stones burst free of the walls all around and whirled at the human trio like whirling blades.

  Scores of stones, a volley that Mattick and Vattick flung themselves to the floor to try to survive, arms cradling their heads.

  The arcanist wasn’t swift enough in joining them. He staggered, his skull shattered and his arms and ribs breaking with sickening thuds under the barrage of piercing stone … and then he fell over backward, his throat crushed and his head lolling limply.

  The stones flashed through the air with unabated force, ricocheting off one another and the walls amid deafening krrracks and sprays of small shards as one after another broke apart. They flashed through the baelnorn without doing it any harm, but the two groaning, crawling princes of Thultanthar weren’t so lucky.

  Vattick finally managed to cast something that flung all the stones at the ceiling, then sent them racing at the floor, and then back at the ceiling again. At each thunderous meeting of hurtling stone with immoveable floor or ceiling, more shatterings spat clouds of curling dust and sprays of pebble-like shards everywhere.

  And then, at last, it was done, and Mattick and Vattick surged painfully to their feet, teeth clenched, and advanced on the baelnorn.

  Who gave them a serene smile, and worked the same magic again.

  This time, Mattick—who’d half suspected such a tactic, for all his snarling rage—had enough warning to work a strong ward shield. Vattick’s went up more slowly, but protected him against the worst whirling shards—and when the second stone storm died away, he did something that caught the baelnorn by surprise.