The Shadow Stone

by Richard Baker

  Oriseus circled the stone, studying the mages one by one. “This stone represents that which existed before anything else existed. It is a symbol, a link to the blind and voiceless power that was displaced from our sphere in the very beginning of things. It did not save the Imaskari, but with this they slew gods when the world was young.” Oriseus looked up at them, his eyes glinting. “Here, my fellows, is the strength that even gods fear. Set your hand on it and it is yours. You need only ask.”

  Aeron closed his eyes, his face flushed with the energy that danced before him. Oriseus had once told him that the Weave was the spirit, the soul of the world. The stone was something else, a void or vacuum that injured the world by its very existence. It was potential without purpose, eager for the hand and mind to guide it. With nothing more than his intuition, Aeron understood that once he touched the stone with his will and sight, he would be able to call upon its power anywhere, anytime, joined by an ethereal link to something that defied distance and hesitation. He shuffled closer a half-step, drawn by the power.

  Ahead of him, Dalrioc Corynian broke the ranks of their circle and boldly stepped forward, an arrogant sneer on his face. “Very well, Oriseus. I ask.” He moved to stand beside the stone, studying it without a hint of hesitation. Dalrioc reached out and set his hand on the glossy rock and stood petrified, enraptured, his face twisted in a rictus of astonishment as the black energy coursed over him, freezing him in his grasp.

  Aeron paused, waiting and watching while, one by one, the other students and masters stepped forward to join Dalrioc beside the stone. As each touched the gleaming black surface, he ceased to move, straining to contain and master the power that exceeded him.

  Oriseus’s face contorted with unholy glee. His eyes flashed living darkness. With the light touch of his hand on the stone, he directed the fearsome black energy as it coiled and smothered each mage who approached. His expression appalled Aeron, and for the first time, he allowed himself to sense what he’d known from the moment he felt the stone’s influence.

  It reeked of evil.

  It was powerful and majestic, a conflagration of energy that defied his senses. But it stained him to stand so close to it. There was a conscious malevolence behind its splendor, an ancient, aching hunger that shrieked for Aeron’s willing soul. He knew that if he set his hand on the dark stone, he would be lost forever, consumed and filled with something older than time and unspeakably, irredeemably evil.

  As if waking from a dream, Aeron gasped and threw a panicked glance around the cold stone chamber. Cold and hateful light seared his eyes, leaving painful afterimages that blinded him. Across the room, Master Sarim—the last who had not touched the stone besides Aeron himself—staggered forward, his teeth bared and eyes staring vacantly, fighting with every ounce of his dying will to resist the stone’s greedy pull. It was not enough. Marching like a broken doll, he was jerked to his knees and thrown prostrate before the black talisman, betrayed by his own muscle and bone. He whimpered in terror as the energy surged forward to devour him.

  Aeron had thought the room silent, but now he became aware of a crackling, snapping sound as violet energy whirled and darted in a sickly aura around the rune-marked ring. The roaring deafened him, but now he heard clearly the mindless yammering, the moans and shrieks, the insane howls of the mages who stood transfixed by Oriseus’s will and the sinister font of energy. How could I not have sensed this? he thought. How could I have been so blind?

  “Again you are last, Aeron,” Oriseus called, voice clear and strong above the din. “Join us. You are part of our circle now.”

  Stark terror jolted Aeron into action at Oriseus’s words. He took two steps back, not in defiance, but in weakness. “No,” he whispered, horrified. “No.”

  Oriseus smirked, confident of his victory. “You wanted power, Aeron. You left your home behind to come to the college. You desired the strength to shield yourself from harm, to strike down your enemies. Well, here it is. Stand with me and you will carve your name on the heart of the world. None will stand against you. None!”

  “This isn’t what I wanted,” Aeron said in a small voice.

  Oriseus snorted. “You’ve wanted this all your life, boy. More than anything, you want to be the one people fear. Come … you are damned already.” The conjuror raised his hand, and Aeron felt his feet slog forward, dragging him toward the stone’s fatal embrace. In horror, he tried to will his feet to stop, but his body refused to obey.

  In blind panic, Aeron reached into the recesses of his memory and seized a spell of translocation, a spell he’d barely grasped just a few short days ago. In the daylight world, under perfect conditions, it strained his abilities to the utmost to work the enchantment. Here, it was completely beyond his skill. But desperation lent him the strength to gasp out the words that keyed the spell, and in his mind, he unfettered the complex sigil that defined its form.

  His own life-force was the merest fraction of the power the dimension leap required. Yet there was no Weave to work the spell. The stones were cold and lifeless, the air still and dead. The only power Aeron could tap was the dark inferno before him, and in his terror, he seized it and channeled it before he realized what he was doing. The dark energy seared him with a cold taint; he gagged in revulsion, as if grave dirt had been shoved beneath his skin. It sank frigid fingers into his belly and knotted under his ribs, drowning him in madness even as the chamber whirled away in shadow and mist.

  Aeron caught one last glimpse of Master Oriseus’s startled face as his spell wrenched him out of the Shadow Stone’s chamber and hurled him through the vast, lightless void between the worlds. The darkness wormed its way through his veins, creeping into his heart with tendrils of cold fire. Unable to withstand another moment of the venomous assault, Aeron’s mind slipped into the shadows and reeled away into the night.

  Eleven

  Cold, wet dirt fouled his mouth.

  Aeron gagged and coughed, weakly scraping the back of one sleeve across his face. He was lying with his face pressed into mist-wreathed earth. The lightless dusk of the shadow plane surrounded him still, and he shuddered uncontrollably as his body reminded him of the numbing cold. When he’d first stepped through the silver door, the chill air had sapped the heat from his feet and hands, searing his nose with each breath. Now the center of his chest ached with a dull leaden pain, as if the blood in his heart was starting to freeze. Aeron groaned and tried to push himself upright, his limbs shaking with fatigue.

  He was at the bottom of a steep hill, lying in a patch of soft ground where a noisome trickle of dark water carved a bitter rill at the foot of the slope. Dead gray grass grew in wiry tufts, broken by forbidding thickets of black briars and stands of sere, leafless trees. At first his mind was as blank as slate, devoid of any thought except a cognition of his surroundings, but like a candle guttering in the wind, his faculties began to return. Where am I? he wondered. How did I get here? Awkwardly Aeron gained his feet and staggered a few steps, struggling to wring motion from his hollow frame.

  I’m still in the shadow land, but the pyramid isn’t in sight, he thought. He’d been standing in the chamber of the stone, the last of Oriseus’s circle to resist its influence … and then he’d worked a spell to escape. He felt he’d traveled a very long way indeed. Apparently his spell had worked, only not in the way he’d intended.

  That led to the next obvious question: Where was he now? Aeron frowned, thinking. He was not anywhere near Cimbar’s harbor or the place in the shadow plane that corresponded to the city’s location. The lay of the land was wrong. But he could be a few miles inland, or hundreds of miles away. Or it might not make any difference, since he stood in the shadow plane. He’d heard that time and distance were distorted here.

  “Of course,” he muttered to himself. He knew a minor divination that would pinpoint his location. Absently he unlocked the spell’s symbol in his mind, reaching for the spark of power within his own heart to give it life. The land and air around hi
m were cold and dead, devoid of the Weave. He touched the merest flicker of his own life and spoke the spell.

  A dark, coiling veil seemed to shift and slither in his heart. It was as if a black, hungry worm crawled through his thoughts, rasping against the inside of his skull, pulling at the substance of his mind like a piece of bone dragged through mud. Aeron clapped his hands to his head, reeled, and fell, gabbling in animal terror as the cold, slimy form extended thousands of needlelike bores throughout his body. Light and sanity fled as he shrieked in revulsion.

  From a tiny island in the inchoate confusion of his shattered mind, Aeron realized that he’d felt the stone’s influence again. In the tower, he’d touched the stone, drawn upon its power, and like a serpent, it had embedded its venom in his heart. Reaching for the Weave to work his divination had awakened the poison.

  He became aware of a distant arrhythmic thumping sound and realized that he was listening to his heels drumming on the ground while the dispassionate stars wheeled over his head. After a time, the trembling seizure released him from its grip, but an icy fist remained clenched in the center of his chest.

  In blank horror, Aeron stood and moved away with clumsy, jerking steps, a marionette driven by nothing more than a weak desire to flee. No strength or volition remained to him, but after a time, the dark rill and the bracken-covered hill faded into the gloom behind him, and he found himself following a worn and ancient track that cut through the brooding hills.

  He walked until his legs gave out. After a time, his strength returned and he walked again. The road wandered, tunneling through dark woods filled with whispers and rustling sounds, though no wind blew. From time to time, he crossed ivy-grown bridges of cracked stone that spanned sluggish dark brooks, or passed watchful old ruins that slumbered on barren hilltops. The twilight never brightened or faded; it was impossible to say whether it was day or night.

  He walked for a long time, determined to find something familiar, some sign of shelter or a way back to his own world, but the road wound through mile after mile of gray, barren hills and black thickets. The chill slowly permeated every portion of his body, knifing into his chest with each breath, deadening his face and limbs with the cold. He staggered and fell, picked himself up, then collapsed again. The dim twilight sapped his will with each step.

  Can’t give up, he told himself. There must be other doors, another way back. Aeron fixed his eyes on the distant hills, limned by the cold glimmer that served as the only source of illumination in this gray land. I’ll find something there if I can just push on a little farther, he thought.

  After an endless struggle, he looked up and saw that the hills were no closer. But there was something peculiar in the way the light danced and brightened in front of him. Streaks of rose and orange were appearing over the hilltops. His breath caught in his throat as a sliver of crimson sunlight slid over the hill. The fields, the trees, the road, shone with a faint red blush as they caught the sunrise and sparked to life.

  As the sun appeared, the shadows fled. The cold grip on Aeron’s heart wavered and dissipated as the daylight drove back the borders of gloom. The racing edge of dawn swept over him, and the dead gray hills and twisted black forests seemed to come alive, the gloom fading away to reveal fresh green slopes and lush young buds gracing the trees and shrubs. The sunrise brought me back, Aeron realized. I must have been right on the borderline between the shadow and the real world.

  But where am I?

  Groaning, Aeron pushed himself to his hands and knees, then tried to stand. His legs wouldn’t bear his weight. He collapsed and surrendered to a deathlike sleep.

  “Hey, there! You dead or alive?”

  A harsh voice dragged Aeron back to consciousness, accompanied by an ungentle toe in his ribs. He blinked, stirred, and found himself staring up at a large, dark-skinned man who towered over him. The fellow was dressed in a colorful dyed jacket and pantaloons, and he scowled as he looked down at Aeron. “Oh, you’re alive,” he muttered. “Well, you shouldn’t be. It was bitter cold last night. You’re damned lucky you didn’t freeze to death, lying out in the road like that.”

  Aeron shook his head and climbed to his feet. He was weak, trembling with cold, completely disoriented, but the supernatural chill that had nearly extinguished the fires of his life was gone. He turned slowly, studying his surroundings. The long, low valley and crossroads matched the last place he’d seen in the plane of shadow, but the empty fields now seemed to be furrowed with an early spring planting. “Where am I?” he said to himself.

  The big man beside him took Aeron’s question literally. “You’re near Markelmen, lad. It’s maybe five miles down that road there.” He looked at Aeron’s dress and added, “You certainly don’t look like you’re from around here.”

  Now that Aeron was standing, the man didn’t seem quite so tall, although he topped six feet. He was a heavyset fellow with a round gut and thick, powerful arms. A draft horse and a cart full of small barrels waited a few yards away. The mage considered the carter’s words and shook his head again. “Markelmen doesn’t mean anything to me. Where’s that?”

  “Did some highwayman give you a knock on the head, lad?” the carter asked. Aeron met his eyes with a clear and level look, and the fellow shrugged. “Well, this is the county of Orsraun. The Ors Valley is just over that rise; the river empties into the Reach about twenty miles farther south.”

  Orsraun? Reach? They still didn’t make much sense. Aeron struggled to fit the names into his mind. Finally he made some sense of it. “You mean we’re in Turmish?”

  “Tyr’s blind eyes, lad! Of course we’re in Turmish! Where in Faerûn did you think you were?”

  I wasn’t certain I was in Faerûn at all, Aeron thought, but he chose not to give voice to that remark. He’d read about Turmish and seen its shape on a map during his studies of the lands about Chessenta. It lay west of Cimbar, on the other side of the Akanapeaks, along the northern shore of the Vilhon Reach. He was hundreds of miles from the college. “What day is it?” he asked the westerner.

  “Today? It’s the eighth day of Ches. Are you certain you haven’t been rapped on the skull?”

  Ches? But last night was the fifteenth of Marpenoth. Could I have been in the shadow plane for five months? Aeron stared at the man in amazement until the fellow shifted his feet nervously and took a half-step back. “Well, you seem to be up and about. I’ll be on my way, then.”

  Aeron shook himself out of his astonishment. “Wait! Which way is it to Hlondeth?” If his memory served him right, that was the major port in this part of Turmish.

  “Take the western way from the crossroads,” the trader said, pointing. “The road leads straight to Hlondeth, but it’s forty miles or more.”

  “Thanks,” Aeron said. He left the Turmishite shaking his head as the fellow drove his cart off in the other direction. He began walking north, slowly warming up as the morning sun brightened and his exertions worked some of the ice out of his limbs.

  At first he kept his mind on the road and the wind-scoured hillsides, deliberately avoiding any serious thought. As the morning wore on, he eventually found himself considering his situation. He had nothing more than the clothes on his back, a handful of coins in his pouch, and a dozen or so spells locked in his mind, ready to use … if he dared. Each spell he expended would be gone, and without his spellbook—presumably resting on his desk in the college, five hundred miles away—he could not refresh his memory of any spells he cast. More to the point, what would happen if I did work a spell? he thought. Will the stone’s influence reach me, now that I’ve left the plane of shadow? Or am I safe now?

  There was one certain way to find out, but Aeron was hesitant to experiment. In the first place, he would waste an irreplaceable spell, and secondly, what if the experiment demonstrated that he was still within the stone’s grasp? He shuddered, recalling the abominable sensation of cold foulness boring through his body, mind, and spirit. He quickly turned his thoughts elsewhere. “W
ell, where to now?” he asked of the empty road. “Back to the college?”

  He frowned, weighing his words. Oriseus waited back at the college. And the stone was much closer there, even if it lay across the threshold of night. The Shadow Stone’s power would certainly not be diminished the closer Aeron came, and it might even increase. That thought frightened him. His spellbooks, his studies, everything he needed remained in Cimbar, but Aeron did not dare return. Well, where then? he asked himself irritably.

  From a still place deep in his aching heart, the answer welled up into his mind: home. It had been more than a year—no, almost a year and a half now, if Ches was already upon the land—since Aeron had left Kestrel and Eriale to study at the college. Suddenly he missed them terribly, longing for the shelter and simplicity of his former life with a fierce pain that brought tears to his eyes.

  He gazed east for a long time, until his homesickness faded into a quiet despair. It would take weeks, maybe months, to round the Vilhon Reach, cross Chondath on the southern shore, and then find his way across Chessenta. “It won’t get done until I begin,” he said softly, and he started on his way again.

  Late in the afternoon, Aeron began to flag. He’d been walking all day after a harrowing ordeal, and his strength was giving out. The biting wind and dropping temperatures served as an additional discouragement to pressing on. He looked for an inhabited house or a roadside tavern, but the land nearby was desolate, and he eventually settled for a ruined cottage, its roof open to the sky.

  To his surprise, he was neither hungry nor thirsty. He felt only a leaden exhaustion and a bone-deep chill that ached in his limbs, although he was too tired to shiver. One of the spells in his mind would serve to revitalize him somewhat, restoring some of his energy and dispelling his fatigue, and Aeron thought long and hard about attempting it. Another cold night could leave him a very bad way, and he desperately wanted to feel warm again.