The Herald

by Ed Greenwood

  Nice, but she needed something nearer the siege. If the mythal was weakening as badly as she’d feared it was, she might be able to use trees and ridges she’d glimpsed while they were fighting in the forest. Wait, that dead, leafless duskwood, silhouetted against the bit of sky that had gone orange from the Shadovar spell … yes …

  Yes! There it was, in the crystal! With drifting smoke from some campfires beyond it, the scene in the crystal moving and alive … which should mean she could look at something—those two dark, entwined trees—at the far left of what she was seeing, make them the center of her view, then look left again, and so face Myth Drannor.

  Or what was left of it.

  She’d half expected to see a milky shroud blocking any clear view of the city, but there was nothing like that. Just scorched towers and splintered and smoldering trees and a few still-beautiful, leaping bridges arcing between them, cascading gardens of flowing water and lush, spreading plants—and corpses. Everywhere the dead, heaped and strewn and being trodden underfoot by hurrying still-alive elves in blood-besmirched armor, and inexorably tramping mercenaries. Some bridges were broken, abrupt jagged ends thrusting out into empty air, and others trailed what had seemed at first glance to be creeping vines, but that Rune now saw were dangling bodies.

  The besieging Shadovar forces were tightening their grip, the exhausted elf defenders ceding more and more of their city—which was being hurled down by the spells of arcanists, tower by tower and bridge by bridge crashing to the forest floor.

  And just there, Rune saw, was the lashing tail of an angry dragon that was crawling around, seemingly unable to fly and obviously seething with rage!

  “We have to be there,” she told Arclath. “Every last sword and spell is needed. If I could somehow snatch up all the Purple Dragons on duty in Cormyr right now and set them down in the heart of that siege, I’d do it.” She turned to give her beloved a hard look. “But I can’t, so you’ll have to be all of them.”

  “Lady,” her lord replied, eyes bright with unshed tears, “command me.”

  “We go back to Myth Drannor. Now.”

  Arclath nodded, and then spoke like an imperious noble. “Use the jakes first,” he ordered briskly. “Both of us. Then finish this soup. We don’t know when we’ll next—”

  “Now I know how the endlessly annoying nobles of Cormyr continue to lord it over the Forest Kingdom,” Amarune snapped, smiling despite herself. “They always finish their soup.”

  Arclath bowed low, indicating the garderobe door with a courtly flourish. Then he held it open for her.

  She lifted her chin, for all the world as if she’d been born noble, and in one of the haughtiest houses at that, and went in, reading the teleport scroll to herself.

  He closed the door behind her, regarded its dark and polished wood, and murmured, “All gods bear witness, I love you, Rune. Was ever a man so fortunate as I?”

  “Yes,” a ghostly voice answered him, from somewhere behind him in the room.

  Arclath spun around, sword half out, staring everywhere, shocked into silence.

  The voice—gentle and low, coming out of nowhere, a woman’s tones—added, “Yet lovers are so easily lost. Treasure every moment you have left together.”

  “Who—who are you?” he asked, sword out as he peered around, trying to see where the voice was coming from.

  “Once, I was Syluné. Eldest of the Seven. They called me the Witch of Shadowdale. Now I am but an echo in the Weave. Your Amarune is doing the right thing, young lord of Cormyr. May victory be yours.” The voice faded steadily as it spoke, and by that last victory wish, Arclath could hear it no more.

  The garderobe door swung open. Amarune peered out, frowning. “Who were you talking to?”

  “A-a ghost,” Arclath replied, as he rushed to embrace her.

  Their kiss was fierce and deep, but brief—as Rune broke free and whirled away from him, to point at the door and command, “Hurry!”

  It was dimly blue wherever they looked, and everywhere they beheld blue leaves and green glowing softly against the dark brown of old dead leaves and the brown-black of forest soil. On all sides the great dark pillars of duskwoods and blueleaf trees soared up to an almost unbroken blue-green canopy. In every direction, over gentle hills cloaked in endless trees, the vista looked much the same.

  “Where by Shar’s howling holy darkness are we?” Mattick snapped. “These tluining trees!”

  He slashed at the nearest leaves in his temper, sending them spiraling down to the moss-girt fallen trunks underfoot.

  “Still in the forest,” Vattick offered, mock-helpfully.

  They’d been fleeing wildly through the seemingly endless deep woods around Myth Drannor for some time now, just the two of them. Both were scorched, breathless, and bedraggled.

  They’d escaped death by the proverbial hair-slicing thickness of a sharp sword blade’s edge, by both desperately working the same last-moment spell to forcibly swap places with Shadovar arcanists elsewhere in the siege.

  So two bewildered unfortunates had almost certainly died in the spells hurled by the coronal and her four high mages, while Mattick and Vattick, wounded and more frightened than they’d been in battle for a long time, had found themselves out in the forest surrounded by startled mercenaries.

  Whom they’d departed from the company of immediately, for they were interested now only in getting away. To Shar’s never-seen rump with their father’s grand plans, and with butchering their ways through this old and overgrown elf city they’d never seen before and didn’t care one whit if they ever saw again! It was time to get gone, far and fast, and—and seek their own lives, for as long as they could.

  Oh, the Most High would find them soon enough, and that meeting would be less than pleasant, but in the meantime they were still alive, and—

  “I,” Mattick vowed, crashing through some dead branches and seeking a little open ground to stride through, “am going to get me some folk I can lord it over, for once. I’m done with all of this conquer worlds upon worlds for the greater glory of Shar!”

  “And the greater satisfaction of Telamont Tanthul,” Vattick agreed, before he came to a frowning stop.

  “Brother,” he added, “I thought we were leaving Myth Drannor behind, but look.”

  He pointed with his sword through the trees ahead.

  Mattick peered and swore.

  “Elves! More bloody elves! Everywhere we go, it’s rutting, fluting-voiced, tree-swinging elves!”

  The twin princes strengthened their wards and strode to meet these new foes, who likewise stalked through the trees to meet them.

  As they got closer, both princes could see bodies, both human and elf, strewn here and there, and some shattered walls and towers that were now mostly heaps of rubble.

  “We must have got turned around, somehow,” Vattick mused. “That, or Myth Drannor spreads through the forest farther than I’d thought, with far-flung clusters of buildings and wild forest between them.”

  “I,” declared Mattick, “am beyond caring about elf architecture or settlement patterns. I just want to hew me some longears! Yeeeeeearrrgh!”

  And with that sudden bellow, he launched himself into a wildly swinging charge. Vattick planted his sword in the soft forest mold beside him and worked magic instead—and as the elf warriors closed in, limp bodies and blocks of rubble rose into the air behind them, to whirl forward in silent haste and dash the elves to the ground.

  Preparing to hack his way into half a dozen foes, Mattick found them all writhing helplessly at his feet, so it was ease itself to ruthlessly stab through the backs of their necks, one by one.

  Only one determined elf reached him upright, and that was after four elf corpses had slammed into that elf from behind. Off-balance and winded, the elf could only parry desperately as Mattick slashed at his face. Which left him vulnerable to the prince’s hearty crotch kick.

  As the elf was propelled into the air, mewing in shocked pain, Mattick move
d to where he could hack the falling body viciously—and did so. The elf’s neck broke at his second blow, and its owner slammed heavily into the ground, loose limbed and dead or dying.

  Mattick regarded his work with some satisfaction, but Vattick slapped his arm on the way past and hissed, “Come on. There’ll be plenty more showing up if we tarry!”

  Mattick sighed, nodded, and followed his brother over a heavily wooded ridge, and down into a little dell ringed by the smooth-curved walls of elf buildings that looked more like gigantic garden plantings than dwellings. Fearful-faced elf children and wrinkled elders emerged from the arched doorways of some of the buildings, all heading off to the princes’ left.

  A lot of children, but only a few withered elders—and no other sort of elves at all.

  The two princes looked at each other, then nodded in unison, hefted their swords, and started forward.

  “It’s always a good day to butcher elves,” Vattick hissed, as they began their charge.

  Storm was fighting hard in the teeth of the fray.

  She was drenched with blood not her own, and despite subsuming the spark of silver fire she’d swallowed in her kitchen—the spark that had once belonged to her fallen sister Syluné—she was more than tired. She kept her matted silver tresses plucking up fallen daggers whenever she saw them and hurling them at the hireswords she couldn’t reach, the ones crowding to get at her from behind the men she was busy killing at the moment.

  And those men seemed endless. The Myth Drannor still in elf hands was down to just a few buildings, the battered and weary defenders dwindling to mere hand counts—and still the Shadovar hirelings came pouring out of the trees, a forest of moving helmed heads that outnumbered the trees within sight.

  There could be only one end to this, and it might well come very soon.

  Slashing open a warrior’s throat and kicking his body down off the high stump he’d joined her atop won her a few moments to draw breath and twirl for a proper scan all around.

  That whirlwind of dying mercenaries was Fflar and three or four elf knights fighting with him, and—

  There. That was the coronal. Fighting hard, too, with none too many knights and not a single high mage left to stand with her in battle.

  “Sorry, saers—must run!” Storm called merrily to the besiegers warily approaching her stump, and she sprang down to hit the ground sprinting. She might as well get as close to the coronal as she could before she had to stop and hack and hew the rest of the way.

  Storm could still run like the wind when she had to, and got surprisingly far, but her reward for that was to have a score of silver-plate-armored armsmen converge on her. Obviously all stalwarts hailing from the same elite mercenary company.

  All that gleaming armor gave her an idea, but she would have to time things just right. When the foremost trio of the shiny helms reached her, Storm backed away hastily, looking scared.

  And as she’d hoped, one of them fell for her ruse, sneering at her and swaggering forward, drawing back a great war axe for a cleaving blow.

  Storm sprang at him like a panther, reversing her sword and dagger so two hard pommels slammed into the axeman’s nearest elbow, driving his swing farther back than he’d intended. He overbalanced with a profanely startled yell—and crashed back into the knees of his fellow full-plate mercenaries, driving them back in turn. One crashed back into the hurrying man behind him, and the other fell unopposed to the ground but bounced and flailed, tripping another mercenary who was at a full run, charging to get at Storm.

  Which meant all these stalwarts were in clanging contact, so it was time.

  Storm spent a tiny spurt of silver fire—as chain lightning.

  And saw it leap and crack from man to man, back along the colliding stream of them.

  Grunts became screams, but she hadn’t time to watch the fun; she needed all the time their disablement and brief careers as spasming, helplessly convulsing armored barriers would buy her to get to the coronal.

  As it happened, Ilsevele Miritar was no fool in battle, and between foes, she constantly snatched moments to glance around her. So she saw Storm while the blood-drenched Chosen was still far off, but sprinting her way, and turned to slash her own route to meet Storm.

  She hewed her way through five besiegers—then six—the last one a tall hulk of a man in bright armor that didn’t fit him, sobbing his way down into death. Falling to reveal another dying, sagging mercenary beyond him, dying in the arms of … Storm Silverhand.

  “Well met!” Ilsevele greeted her, and they traded wry smiles. Both knew things were far from well for the defenders, and would rapidly get very worse.

  “You must get all the Tel’Quess out you can, now!” Storm panted. “The city is lost!”

  “I know,” the coronal agreed grimly. “We’re doing that already. The youngest ones first, with the weakest of our elders—to guide and teach them, should the rest of us fall. You know Iymurr’s Gate?”

  Storm nodded.

  “Find the door in its tallest tower adorned with a diagonal line of four star gems. Pluck them out, reverse each one and put it back in, and a portal will form, right there—if the mythal is too weak to prevent it.” And with a sigh, the coronal added, “And I’ve been feeling the mythal weakening more and more, as the day draws on.”

  Storm nodded again, but said not a word. This must be heartbreaking for Ilsevele; she wasn’t going to say anything to make it worse.

  “That way leads to Semberholme,” the coronal went on. “But if the portal won’t open, then any who gather to take it will be trapped there and doomed if these Shadovar-serving slaycoins take that end of the city. There’ll be no other way out.”

  Storm shrugged and hefted her sword. “With this I’ll make one, if I have to. May we all live to see another dawn.”

  They embraced, kissed, then whirled and rushed their separate ways, back into the hard-fought slaughter.

  Some of the arcanists were reluctant to leave their towers. Thultanthar was now close enough to Myth Drannor that nine or more rising pillars of smoke, where some of the mercenaries had set fires, could clearly be seen from high windows and balconies of their city—and they wanted to miss nothing.

  “Accursed spectators,” Gwelt muttered darkly. “They’d sit and watch the world get devoured, and never lift a hand to defend it, for fear of spoiling the spectacle.”

  Aglarel gave Gwelt a grim half smile as he nodded, but he said not a word. His attention was on the arcanists hastening to obey the summons of the Most High and assemble in the great courtyard below. There would be few better moments for treachery than this one, with the High Prince of Thultanthar walking among most of the city’s arcanists, arranging them to stand in the best places for the spell-linkage.

  So the great mythal-draining magic could begin.

  It would take the services of most of the arcanists of the city, and they were streaming into the courtyard, converging on the Most High. Telamont was warded and mantled, of course, but such defenses do little against a spellcaster standing so close as to be within all wards and mantles. Wherefore Prince Aglarel was worried and intent on seeing every person, at every last moment.

  “I’ll happily attend you later, Gwelt,” he muttered almost absently, moving to a better vantage point. “When I have rather fewer duties to perform all at once.”

  “Of course,” Gwelt agreed quickly, backing away.

  He took great care to step behind several hurrying arcanists, so Aglarel—and the prince’s father too, for that matter—wouldn’t see him slip away from the swiftly growing assembly.

  Not that he need have bothered. Aglarel had already spotted something that alarmed him—the patiently inexorable way another arcanist was stalking toward the Most High—and was hurrying to deal with it.

  The commander of the Most High’s personal bodyguard was fast, and imposing enough with his height and manner and well-known obsidian armor that arcanists hastily got out of his way, yet even so he was almost
too late.

  The suspicious arcanist threw up both hands and sent a shrapnel-star spell rushing across the heads of his fellows. A magic that would have sent jagged blades of steel thrusting in all directions among the assembled Thultanthans.

  Even before Aglarel’s hasty counterspell sent the shrapnel star veering away, its creator had started to bellow.

  “Fellow citizens of Thultanthar! I call on you to refrain from what is contemplated here, to not assist in this draining of great magic! For this is madness, madness I tell you, and imperils our city! If we do this, our own Thultanthar will in turn be destroyed! I—eyyyurkkh!”

  Aglarel’s sword met the shouting man’s skull hard but cleanly.

  It was like cleaving a large and wet melon, but Aglarel cared not how much he got splattered, or how many fellow Thultanthans got covered in blood. He went right on brutally beheading the man from behind.

  The body reeled, spurting blood in all directions, and Aglarel sprang atop it and bore it bloodily to the flagstones, holding it down as its writhing became sluggish … and then stopped altogether.

  He looked up, drenched in blood, and beheld his father, regarding him down a long open path that had almost magically opened in the jostling ranks of the arcanists.

  Telamont looked calm, but impatient, as if expecting an explanation.

  “Order,” Aglarel told him, “has been restored.”

  His father nodded gravely, something that might have been thanks and might merely have been satisfaction in his eyes, and worked the swift and simple spell that would take his words to every ear.

  Then he lifted his chin, looked at the arcanists all around him, and raised both arms.

  “This,” the Most High of Thultanthar announced calmly, “is how we shall begin …”

  There were only six Moonstars still standing beside Dove, and they were as bloody, weary, and wounded as she was.

  And they’d retreated, step by hard-fought step, until they could retreat no more. The central buildings of Myth Drannor stood on all sides, and not far behind their backs were the backs of the thin line of elf defenders facing the other way—who were somehow holding back besiegers still numerous enough to stretch back through the trees as far as the eye could see.