Shadow of the Flame - Chris Pierson

by Dragonlance

  The central tower was the last standing; it was stronger than the rest, dwarf-crafted, reinforced with sorcery. But even it couldn’t hold up against the devastation that tore through Suluk. Cracks webbed its white stone, widening as she watched. Bodies poured out the rents in its sides, kings and courtiers who hadn’t been able to get to safety. Finally, the spire shattered, folding in on itself, dropping almost straight down into the earth …

  But not all of it.

  “Gods of the kender,” Shedara swore.

  Hult stared too, and so did those who stood nearby. The top of the white tower hadn’t fallen; it stayed aloft, borne by a whirlwind of blue and green dust. It hung suspended there, impossible, and Shedara laughed in spite of all the carnage, in spite of her own impending death.

  Essana was safe up there. And she wasn’t alone. Her son was with her.

  “Well done, Azar,” she murmured.

  Very near, a temple of Zai erupted into slivers of marble and crystal. The flying debris turned those standing nearby to red and black mist. Shedara flinched, throwing up an arm to shield herself. Hot winds buffeted her. This is it, she thought. She turned to say good-bye to Hult.

  He wasn’t there. In his place was a shimmer of silver light, swiftly fading. She felt the sting of magic in the air, fading … then growing stronger, coalescing around her body. She recognized the sensation as it built within her, shining white, growing ever brighter. Her stomach dropped, as if she had just looked down into a bottomless chasm. The world grew hazy, indistinct. A sharp chunk of a boulder passed right through her, and it didn’t hurt at all.

  A sending spell. Azar hadn’t forgotten them.

  Oh, she thought, as the wharf turned to a wasteland of corpses and ruin around her, as the soldiers of the Rainwards and the hobgoblins of Aurim alike blew away. Very well done.

  Then she was gone.

  Chapter

  17

  CLOVENMONT, THE RAINWARD ISLES

  Maladar’s pulse quickened as he reached the top of the ridge and beheld the mountains beyond. They were harsh crags, lashed by rain and wind, their lower reaches blanketed with black pines, their tops treeless and snow-capped. This was an old range, though much changed by the Destruction and the hard years after. Still, he knew it well, recognized many of its peaks from the years of his rule. There was the one known as the Blue Giant, which the ancients once believed was a sleeping titan, and there was Erestem’s Pillar, still broad and mighty, though two of its five summits had collapsed centuries ago. Beside them towered Icefinger, still familiar though its frozen pinnacle had broken off and lay scattered down its slopes, and Kharshan’s Tower, half crumbled into talus, with only a jagged remnant remaining.

  He gave each of them only a cursory glance, standing exposed atop the highest of the foothills that swelled up to the mountains’ edge. His real goal lay before him, surrounded by the other peaks. Neither the most massive of the mountains nor the tallest, it might have been the least remarkable of the lot, save for two things. For one, there was its pinnacle, which was split down the middle as if the gods had struck it with an axe. Snow blew off both of its tines in thin plumes. Thus its name, the Clovenmont, called Jun Er-Fuil by long-vanished natives, who had held it holy and built a temple to some forgotten god within its cleft.

  The second extraordinary thing lay beneath.

  Maladar’s breath came hard and fast, the cold air flooding his lungs. It hurt to breathe and his hands had been cut to bloody ribbons climbing the hills, but he didn’t worry about the pain, forcing it down deep so that Barreth Forlo’s soul absorbed the worst. He felt the man cringe, which pleased him. When he finally claimed a new body, he would entertain himself by torturing this old one for a while before leaving it. He would cut tiny slivers of flesh off Forlo with a razor, as he used to do to his enemies. He would roast them over a flame and force Forlo to eat his own burned flesh. He would pour acid on the open wounds. It would be a pleasant way to reward the man for robbing him of the Taker.

  For the moment, though, he allowed the man to look out through his own eyes, to see the Clovenmont looming before him as he descended the hither side of the ridge. He moved down into the trees again, catching occasional glimpses of the mountain’s twin summits and the cracked and toppled columns of the fane betwixt them. The ground rose up, laced with giant, moss-bearded boulders that loomed among the pines. His pace grew swifter, surer.

  He knew the cloaked shape was moving beside him long before he chose to acknowledge it. Finally, reaching a clearing that gave an unimpeded view of the mountain, he glanced to his right. Hith floated an arm’s length away, shapeless within his billowing black mantle. The hood turned to look at him, and though there was only darkness within, he could sense the god was smiling.

  “You are clever, Emperor of Emperors,” Hith whispered. “I worried, while you were gathering the hobgoblins, that you believed they might serve as your army.”

  Maladar laughed. “Of course not,” he scoffed. “After all this time, do you take me for so great a fool? They were a means to an end, nothing more.”

  “Yes,” the god said. “And what an end, weaving the Rainwards’ doom into your plans. You did not need to do that. It is an … unnecessary flourish.”

  “By my experience, the destruction of an enemy is seldom unnecessary. The foe you spare might stab you in the back tomorrow.”

  Hith made a scratchy sound that must have been a chuckle. “Still sore about the cupbearer, are you?”

  Maladar didn’t answer, only started walking again, his eyes fixed on the Clovenmont. Hith continued to waft along beside him.

  “So,” the god said after a time. “It must be strange, coming here like this. Why did you not simply use a sending spell? This moving about on foot … again, it seems unnecessary.”

  “No,” Maladar said, “it was very necessary. Much has happened since I last saw this place. I might have sent myself into a collapsed chamber and died trapped in the rock, which, I suppose, would have pleased you.”

  “You wound me. I would take no pleasure in your suffering, my servant. You are too useful.”

  Maladar shrugged, not believing a word of it. “Even so, I could not trust things to be as I remembered them, and my own warding spells kept me from scrying this place.”

  “Ironic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever the case, though, you are here now. Another leg of your long journey complete—and one more, the last, waiting to begin.” The cloak turned to face him and bowed—a strange, elaborate folding, with no flesh within the garment to guide it. “Welcome home, Your Majesty.”

  Maladar wanted to argue, to point out that the place had never been his home, only a safe haven. Before he could, though, the cloak unraveled, dissolving into black smoke and blowing away on the wind. He frowned, considering the thought. Perhaps it was home of a sort. He’d certainly dwelt there longer than anywhere else in his long life.

  He hesitated, hearing something far off. It took him a moment to place the cries of pain and rage and terror. Many leagues away, people were dying: men and dwarves and hobgoblins. He smiled. The battle had begun. The Rainwards’ fall was nigh: the kings and their armies would all be gathered in Suluk, making their heroic stand, not realizing they’d sealed their own fate. The thought renewed his purpose, and he strode on.

  The door was where he remembered it: a stone plug ten paces high, carved out of the mountain rock, featureless save for a tracery of jagged glyphs about its edge. Many of those were chipped away, a few wreathed by soot. Charred bones lay in the weeds, scattered and unburied. Robbers had tried, time and again, to force their way in there. It had taken them centuries to succeed.

  A line of black showed between the door and the surrounding stone: the last ones to pass through hadn’t closed it fully, letting the protective spells bleed away into the air and soil. Maladar sensed no enchantment about the door, not anymore. Strangely, that made him angry. Even if it had served his purposes, he still didn�
�t like to see his magic foiled.

  The door swung open at a touch. He paused on the threshold then stepped through into a long, dark cavern. Again, he felt annoyance when nothing bad happened: he’d set guardians there, bat-winged demons charmed to sweep down out of the shadows and devour anyone who set foot within. He’d half expected to have to fight them himself, even though they were his servants: seeing Forlo’s body, they might not have recognized the soul that lived within. But no shrieking beasts emerged from the gloom, and after he walked for a bit, among huge columns carved to resemble dragon’s fangs, he saw why: their shriveled corpses lay broken on the floor, their wings splayed awkwardly around them, their serpentine faces little more than skulls covered in parchment. The interlopers had defeated those guardians too.

  Of course they had. They’d thwarted all his defenses, straight through to the Clovenmont’s heart. It could be no other way, or they never would have found him. They never would have brought the Hooded One up from the depths, setting in motion all that had happened since. If the vault were better protected, he’d still be down there, waiting. He might have waited forever. He should have been glad his defenses weren’t perfect.

  He walked on, past the demons’ remains, deeper into the crypt—for crypt it was, the place his soul had fled to after he’d died. The place where he’d bided, bound within the statue, for a thousand years.

  The stairs wound down and down, moving in a broad sweep for what felt like miles. He walked for hours, through dust piled thick with the passage of centuries but disturbed by other footprints. Men had been there before, perhaps a year ago: treasure-seekers, the same ones he had mutilated at Bishan. They’d come and set in motion the doom of the Uigan, the League, the Rainwards … and soon, if nothing was done, all of Taladas.

  Down and down, down and down. He was far below the Clovenmont now, far below the earth. Strange insects crawled on the walls, centipedes and beetles that glowed with pale blue luminescence. They chirped and twittered, filling the air with their maddening song. He walked on for another hour, two. He descended below even the seafloor, into the nameless depths. Goblins didn’t go down that deep, nor dwarves; even the dragons preferred not to have so much stone above their heads. The air grew warm, damp. Yellow-brown mist clung to the steps, bringing the tang of brimstone to his nose. He remembered, when he first excavated the caves, thinking that if he went much deeper, he would break through to the Abyss itself.

  But when the stairs finally ended, it wasn’t the fiery wastes of the underworld he beheld, but a vast, domed cave, lit by the glowing bugs that covered its walls. Gnarled stalactites hung from the ceiling, dripping milky water onto stalagmites below; in places, they had grown together into pillars, some half a hundred feet wide. The cavern’s walls undulated with flowstone, glistening in the light. Pools rippled on the floor. The sulfurous stench was overpowering, filling his nose and mouth. Maladar reveled in it, though elsewhere in his mind he heard Forlo groan, almost drowning in the stink.

  Heedless, he walked on, through the mists. As he did, the shadows at the room’s edges began to shift. Instinct told him to react, to ready a spell, to look to his left and right and see what was there, but he did none of those things. He caught only fleeting glimpses of the shapes, large and shambling things, vaguely manlike creatures covered in slime-slick shells of horn, their bloodshot eyes staring, their sharp teeth gnashing.

  Disir. The denizens of the deep. He had heard of them in tales spoken by adventurers in his court. They must have tunneled in from other caves in the years since the Destruction. There were a hundred at least. They shuffled toward him, and the rotting-meat reek of their slime overwhelmed the brimstone. Taloned hands groped the air.

  Get away, thought Maladar, raising his hands.

  The disir flew backward as if he’d struck them. Some hit stalagmites with ugly, splintering sounds then rattled to the ground, keening with pain; others vanished into the shadows. He moved past them, to the rear of the cave, and found another tunnel, ankle-deep in brackish yellow water. He had to duck his head to pass through, stooping beneath jagged overhangs. More disir lurked in the passage but shied back as he drew near, leaving a clear path through the flood, on into the Clovenmont’s innermost sanctum: his goal, at hand at last.

  When the passage ended, it opened not into another cavern, but rather into a chamber of dark red stone, carved out by magic rather than water. Runes were etched into the walls, running all the way to the apex of its ceiling; the floor was plain, broad, flat. Cracks ran through the walls, dribbling water into a shallow pool that filled the room; time and the Destruction had taken their toll but hadn’t been able to collapse the place. No, it had survived, and even the gods hadn’t been able to thwart his return: if they’d collapsed the cave, all his designs would have been undone. But they hadn’t, or perhaps Hith had protected it from the rest of his kin.

  The chamber was not empty—far from it. Thousands of figures stood in the water, facing away from him, toward a raised platform that served as a dais at the far end. They were statues, hewn of dark gray stone, carved into the shapes of warriors who stood two heads taller than he did. Each held a sword, a bow, or a spear; each wore full, splinted armor in the old, Aurish style; each had a plumed helm, sculpted into the visage of a snarling dragon.

  “My army,” Maladar breathed.

  He walked among them, between the rows upon rows of soldiers. They loomed all around, lifeless, staring straight ahead with empty eyes. In time, he reached the dais at the far side of the room and climbed the stairs to its top. Turning, he looked out upon the statues, the sea of fanged and scaly faces. He moved to the highest point of the dais, where there was only the thinnest coating of dust. The Hooded One had stood here for a millennium, watching over the soldiers, waiting to be found. It had been Maladar’s home, from his death until the moment when the raiders of Bishan won their way past the crypt’s defenses and stole the statue away.

  The Hooded One was gone, destroyed.

  But Maladar gazed down upon the soldiers and smiled.

  The black moon was full, and its energy surged through the room like a river at the bottom of an icy crevasse. He fanned his fingers before him and set them to dancing, drawing in the power. It filled him, singing in his veins. He spoke words that stung his mind like angry wasps, ugly sounds that echoed off the chamber’s far wall. The magic moved through him, digging into his thoughts like burrowing thorns. Inside him, Forlo tried to scream and sob, but the man’s soul could only watch, helpless, as Maladar’s hands stopped suddenly, pointing once more at the statues.

  “Awaken,” he bade in a voice so loud it made the chamber ring like a bell.

  Red light, the color of blood rather than fire, sprang from his fingertips, sweeping over the statues. It flooded the room, flickered on the walls, made the water on the floor bubble and boil. Every inch of Maladar’s flesh felt on fire, and he reveled in it, though Forlo’s silent voice screamed.

  Then, just as he was sure Forlo could take no more, when the man was staring over the edge of howling madness, the burning stopped. He lowered his hands. The fire and the ice and the thorns receded. He looked down at the statues.

  As one, they raised their heads to look up at him, their eyes shining with crimson light.

  “Yes,” said Maladar, his chest swelling with pride. “My warriors, my servants. It is time now. Will you follow me?”

  The statues said nothing, but the walls rang with the echo of deep words, as though ten thousand voices had spoken at once, and he was only hearing the reverberating response.

  WE WILL FOLLOW. YOU ARE SOVEREIGN.

  “Then free yourselves, my creations!” Maladar shouted. “Escape this prison, and walk at last beneath the sun!”

  For a long moment, the statues did not budge. Then, again moving in perfect unison, they slowly lifted their heads, looking up toward the dome above. Their eyes blazed like suns. They raised their weapons. The walls rang with the echo of a wild cry.

 
Then, with a wave of heat and wind and noise that nearly blew him off the dais, the ceiling exploded.

  Maladar shouted with joy, watching the red light devour the stone above him, eating through layer upon layer of rock until the sky lay bare overhead, distant and evening-blue, shot through with clouds. The light didn’t stop there, however; it kept going, rising high into the sky and bursting into a vast ball of bloody fire. A shockwave swept outward, sending devastation in all directions—including toward Suluk. He had foreseen that and knew what would befall the city. The winds and heat of the blast would destroy that place and the Rainward kings and their armies too. The hobgoblins would perish as well, but that didn’t matter. He had another army, far mightier than any hobgoblin horde could ever be.

  The blast would destroy Suluk and, with it, his last opposition. He would march back to the Cauldron with the statues as his army and cross all the way to the midst of the Burning Sea. There he would raise the Chaldar. And finally, there was no one who could stop him.

  Chapter

  18

  THE RUINS OF SULUK

  There were survivors, though for many that was no great mercy. They lay beneath rubble, mantled by a pall of dust that never seemed to settle, crying out for rescue or pity. What was left of the city resounded with their groans and wails, even a day after the battle’s disastrous end.

  Those few who had escaped the devastation intact—and they were few, for even among those left alive, many lay broken and bloody, waiting for the too-few surviving Mislaxans to care for them—dug through the wreckage, trying to reach those trapped below. Common folk used pry bars and shovels and bare hands, scraping their knuckles raw; the remaining wizards cast spells the lifted blocks of stone into the air and cast them aside, drawing moon power until it depleted them. Every now and then, they pulled someone out, white-faced with dust, eyes hollow and haunted from the ordeal. But many of those were maimed or crippled, and quite a few died very soon after. And for every subdued cheer that arose when someone dragged a survivor free, three muted, plaintive voices beneath the rubble fell silent and were never heard from again.