SOULBOUND
Paul S. Kemp
The Year of False Hopes (-646 DR)
Avnon Des the Seer, First Demarch of the Conclave of the Hall of Shadows, awakened from his vision. Something was amiss. He opened his eyes to the darkness of his meditation cell and listened.
Silence. Unusual silence.
The air felt changed. The shadows in the cell appeared more substantive, almost viscous. Pressure made his ears ache, made his head feel thick.
He rose from his prayer mat, pensive, uncertain, and walked to the narrow wooden door of the cell. He lifted the cold metal latch and pushed the door open.
Darkness in the apse beyond, broken only by two wan candles burning atop the square block of an altar. All appeared in order, yet....
The main double doors to the temple stood open and dark. It was midday, yet he could see no light beyond the doors. He could hear no sounds from the city streets outside.
What was happening?
Barely daring to breathe, and with a sense of foreboding heavy enough to bow his shoulders, he moved toward the temple's doors. Some of his fellow demarchs emerged from their meditation cells, others from the doors behind the altar that led into the sanctum.
All shared the same confused look; all muttered the same confused questions.
Like wraiths, they walked toward the doors. They seemed content to let Avnon lead, and he reached them first. He looked out and could not control a gasp.
There was no city beyond the doors, no streets, no carts, no horses, only plains of tall, black grass waving in a soft breeze.
His heart thumped in his chest. His brethren came up behind him, around him, and their gasps echoed his own.
His legs felt leaden, but he walked through the doors and onto the black-veined marble porch immediately beyond them. He was having trouble finding breath; it was as though the air was too thick to inhale.
All around him was dark, shadows, and gloom.
In his mind, a voice—his voice—kept repeating, "I did not foresee this. I did not foresee this..."
He looked up into the sky and saw no sun, no stars, no twin moons, only black splotches of clouds backlit by some sourceless, sickening ochre light.
"Kesson Rel has stolen the sky," he breathed.
Kesson Rel, the first Chosen of the Shadow God, stood in ankle-deep water and waited for the dragon to show itself. Protective magic sheathed his body, warding him from both physical attack and the dragon's life-draining black breath. Another dweomer allowed him to speak to and understand the dragon in any language the creature might use.
The perpetual dimness of the Shadow Deep did not limit his vision. The swamp stretched in all directions as far as he could see. Flies and bloodsucking insects thronged the air; huge bats wheeled in the sky above. Steaming pools stood here and there, leaking the stink of organic decay. Stands of droopy leafed trees sat forlornly at the edge of the pools.
And roofing it all was the black, starless sky of the Shadow Deep.
Kesson enjoyed the gloom of the place. The Deep felt like home to him. He knew it would eventually drink the life from most mortals. His /brmerfellow demarchs of the Hall of Shadows soon would learn that lesson. They still did not realize fully what he had done, what he planned.
Perhaps Avnon Des foresaw his end? The thought brought a smile to Kesson's face. He—
The insects vanished in a blink. The sounds of the swamp fell silent. Stillness reigned.
The shadow dragon, Furlinastis, was approaching.
Kesson scanned the sky, looking for the tell-tale cloud of darkness that cloaked the dragon. He saw nothing but the thin, black clouds, backlit by the dim, ochre light of the plane.
A sound behind him, a whisper of movement. He * whirled, the beginnings of a spell on his lips.
Too late.
The dragon leaped toward him, filling his field of vision with a cloud of shadows, scales, and claws. He
had only a moment to marvel at the ability of the creature, as large as a temple, to move in near silence.
The dragon's hind claws hit him with the force of a trebuchet shot, wrapped him in their dark grip, and drove him flat on his back underwater. If his magic had not warded him, all of his ribs would have been shattered under the wyrm's crushing weight. "Even with the magic, the beast's claws managed to score his skin, to squeeze the breath from his lungs. If he didn't act quickly, he would be drowned.
Looking up through the lens of the dark water, he could make out no details. The mammoth form of the dragon looked like a wall of black.
"I smell the protective magic on you, human," the dragon said, and its whispery voice was audible even through the shallow water. "Let us see if it can fill your lungs."
The dragon ground him farther into the mud, farther under the water.
Kesson fought down the instinctive rise of panic that threatened to overwhelm him and gathered his thoughts. As always, he had prepared in his mind several spells that he could activate without words, without components, with only his will.
While his body strained for breath, he triggered with his mind a spell that would move him from one location to another in a blink. When the spell took effect, he vanished from underneath the dragon and reappeared, wet, muddy, and out of breath, in the shadows of a copse of trees perhaps a stone's throw behind the reptile. With an exercise of will, he pulled the shadows more closely to him, cloaking himself in a darkness that not even the dragon's sight could penetrate.
Despite himself, Kesson found the dragon, a creature of myth on Kesson's home world, awe-inspiring to behold. Black and purple scales, some as large as tower
shields, rippled with the movement of the vast muscles and sinews beneath them. Claws as long as swords sank deep into the mud. The dragon's wingspan could shade a castle.
And all around the huge body shadows danced, leaking from the creature like steam. Even to Kesson, himself a creature of shadow, the dragon's outline appeared blurred. At the margins, the dragon appeared to meld with the darkness of the plane.
Despite the dragon's majesty, Kesson knew that he was the more powerful servant of the shadows.
Still sheltered by the trees, he began to whisper the words to the first of two compulsions.
The dragon must have sensed that he was no longer under its claw. The great creature whirled a circle, seeking him out, its great head waving hack on forth on the serpentine neck, dark eyes blazing.
"You are near, human," said Furlinastis in his susur-rus voice. "The stink of your invader temple is upon you."
Kesson almost smiled. The Shadowlord's temple was not an invader of the Shadow Deep but an exile. Kesson had moved the temple and all its aspirants there after its ruling conclave had branded him a heretic for drinking from the Chalice. Perhaps later, he would move all of Elgrin Fau into the Shadow Deep, just to watch the City of Silver die in the darkness.
The dragon chuffed the air, searching, searching. Water lapped around its huge feet.
Kesson stepped forth from the obscuring shadows. The dragon's eyes fixed on him and the pupils dilated. The creature reared back its head, no doubt about to exhale a cloud of its life-draining black breath.
"Remain still," Kesson said, and held up his hand.
Power went forth from his palm, the might of his will made manifest and augmented by the power of his
spell. It met the will of the dragon, bound it, dominated it—but only barely. It would not last long.
The wyrm stood as still as a statue before Kesson, bound to obey his command. Wisps of shadowstuff leaked from the holes of the reptile's nostrils. The creature's respiration was as loud as a forge bellows.
Kesson waded into the water and stepped nearer the dragon until he stood within reach of its jaws. He felt the dragon continuing to struggle against his spell. Left alone, the dragon would in time escape the magical bondage. But Kesson would not be leaving the dragon alone.
"I will not harm you, beast," Kesson said. "But you will be made to do as I and my god require."
Hearing those words, the dragon strained still harder against the spell—to no avail.
Kesson smiled, stretched forth a hand and laid it on the dragon's scales. The shadows leaking from Kesson's pores mingled with those surrounding Furlinastis.
"It will not be a difficult task," he promised, and ran his fingertips over a scale. It felt cool and smooth beneath his skin, like an amethyst. "You spoke of the invader temple, so I know you know of it. Look at me," he commanded.
Slowly, with palpable reluctance, the power of the spell bent Furlinastis's head down until the dragon's dark eyes fixed upon Kesson. Kesson could see the anger smoldering there, the hate. He thought he had never' before seen a creature so hateful of servitude as the dragon. He wondered if all of dragonkind was similarly prideful.
"Once, I served in that temple," Kesson said. "But then the Shadow God made me his Chosen and allowed me to drink from his Chalice. He subsequently blessed me by transforming my flesh—" he held up his hands to show the dragon the dusky flesh, the sheathe of
shadows that encapsulated him—" my spirit, and showing me this world. Rather than a blessing, the Conclave of Demarchs saw my transformation as a mark of transgression. They named me heretic." He licked his lips and controlled his anger. "But I name them fools. As punishment for their foolishness, I used the power bestowed on me to take the temple and all of its occupants from my world to this place, where they will die in the dark for their ignorance. You will kill them."
To that, the dragon could say nothing.
"You wish to speak?" Kesson asked. "Speak then."
His words loosened the binding of the spell enough to free the dragon's tongue.
"Kill them yourself, human," hissed the dragon, and the force of its breath pasted Kesson's cloak to his body. "I am not-"
"Silence," Kesson commanded, and the dragon stopped speaking in mid-sentence.
"I would do so if I could, Furlinastis." He shook his head and smiled at the absurdity. "But I have oathed to never directly take the life of a fellow priest—as have they oathed with regard to me. And those oaths were sealed with the most powerful binding spells known to my people: soul spells. Such spells are unbreakable and impossible to bypass, unless the two souls be willing." He saw the dragon desired again to say something. "Speak."
Furlinastis said, "Your words are nonsense. Your spells but paltry magic that fortune favored this time. And when I am free—"
"Silence," commanded Kesson again, and again Furlinastis fell silent. "You will never be free, dragon. The enchantment that now binds you is but a temporary measure. It is with a soul spell that I will bind you to me... forever."
Again the dragon strained against the spell, managing in his anger to lift a claw a hand's breadth out of the water. Kesson admired the dragon's strength, but knew it would not be enough.
He began to cast the soul spell, a type of magic unique to his world, a binding fed by the strength of his own spirit. His fingers, leaking shadows, traced an intricate path through the fetid air. His lips spoke the words of power known only to the priests of his people. When he pronounced the last of the words, he felt his soul bifurcate, felt the magic of the spell siphon some small portion of his essence and shunt it to the dragon. There, it diffused into the wyrm's own soul, like a dram of ink dropped into a pail of water, and bound the creature to whatever Kesson might command.
The effort cost Kesson a small part of himself, weakening him enough that he might not have been able to defeat the dragon again had they done battle just then.
"Henceforth, in all things you will obey me," he said, and knew that his voice was pounding like a maul into the creature's brain. "Your first duty is this: every twenty-four hours, you will come to me here and I will give you the name of a priest in the temple. After receiving that name, you will fly thence, take up the named priest, harming no others, and bring him before me."
Kesson imagined how it would feel to look upon his traitorous brothers, one by one, as they died. He wanted them to understand before the end how little they understood the will of their god.
"At my command you will devour the named priest, or perhaps eviscerate him. This you will do until all of the priests within the temple are dead."
Ordering another to kill did not violate his oath. He would see them die, though he could not do it by his own hand. Kesson knew that forty-four priests of
the Shadow God resided within the temple: thirty six aspirants and initiates, and the eight members of the conclave. He would begin with the aspirants. "Vennit Dar," he said.
The slaughter began with Vennit Dar and continued once every twenty-four hours thereafter for... How long had it been now? Furlinastis wondered. Too long.
The dragon had no qualms about the slaughter of the priests. He simply found it intolerable that the human, Kesson Rel, had bound him with a spell—a soul spell—such that Furlinastis would die to obey any command uttered by the theurge.
Soul magic. Furlinastis had never before heard the term, and hoped never to hear it again. He needed, desperately needed, to free himself of the magic. Like others of his kind, Furlinastis was a force of nature, a thunderstorm in the flesh. And storms could not be bent to another's will, not even that of a theurge.
But he had no inkling of how he might free himself of the spell.
He roared in anger, sending a blast of his life-draining breath streaking into the starless sky. Seething, he beat his wings and soared through the gloom of his home plane. As always, a cloud of shadows enswathed him. A name filled his mind, vibrated in his soul, forced him onward: Nelm Disvan.
Nelm would be the next to die.
Avnon paced the Hall of Shadows. The velvet mask he wore—the symbol of his faith—made him feel as
though he was being suffocated, but he resisted the urge to pull it from his face. He knew the urge came from more than merely finding it difficult to breathe. It came from a crisis of faith. The Shadow God appeared to have abandoned them in favor of Kesson Rel, the heretic who had defiled the Chalice.
No, Avnon thought; shaking his head. His visions had shown no such divine displeasure, and he and all of the other priests—aspirants, initiates, and members of the conclave alike—still could call upon the Shadow God for spells. Their god had not abandoned them.
Not now, he thought, not ever.
Kesson Rel had dared drink from the Chalice. As punishment, the Shadow God had marked him an apostate by transforming his flesh. But the god's purpose was inscrutable to Avnon. Perhaps the god wanted to test the temple priests by seemingto favor Kesson for a season. Perhaps he wanted to determine which of them was the stronger: Avnon and the orthodoxy, or Kesson Rel the heretic.
Of course, Avnon already knew the answer. None of the temple's priests could stand against the theurge. Kesson had been the First among them, and after his blasphemy, Avnon had stepped into the theurge's sandals only with reluctance. Avnon was but a simple priest. Kesson commanded both arcane and divine magic, with a skill and power unmatched by any. Even collectively, the entire conclave could not defeat the theurge. Nor could they defeat the dragon that Kesson had recruited to do his bidding. The huge reptile came "daily" to collect the tithe of flesh that Kesson took as recompense for his excommunication. Avnon had no doubt that each priest so taken died horribly, and that Kesson Rel gloated over the kills.
Why did the Shadow God permit it? Avnon wondered. He had no answer. His faith was failing. Would they
all die there, on the barren plains of a dim, shadowy hell? So it appeared.
The conclave had attempted to open a portal back to their own world, but it appeared that Kesson Rel had anchored them to the Plane of Shadow when he moved the temple there. The conclave also had discussed fleeing the temple, spreading out and taking their chances on the gloomy plains. But none had been able to get farther than two hundred paces in any direction before bumping up against an invisible force that forbade further travel. The theurge had bound them fully and completely to that single world, to that single temple, on a clump of dark ground as wide as a long crossbow shot. They were penned animals awaiting their turn at the slaughter. The theurge meant to see them all dead, Avnon knew, and he wanted them to die with terror and faithlessness in their hearts.
At first Avnon and his fellow demarchs had tried to resist the dragon's assault with force of arms and spells. But their incantations and weapons bounced harmlessly off the creature's scales. The dragon had taken care not to kill anyone, but the priests had been and remained powerless to stop the creature. Terror went before it in a wave so powerful that even the most senior of the priests cowered at the dragon's approach.
Each day, the unstoppable reptile left the temple with a single priest grasped in its claws, and over time the demarchs had learned helplessness. Their faith was not failing; it had already failed. Avnon saw it in their eyes. If it had not been ingrained in them by their oaths, Avnon thought his fellow priests might have taken their own lives rather than endure the agony of watching death inevitably approach. But watch they did, and each awaited the daily return of the reptile and its dire pronouncement. They had not
attempted to understand the dragon's speech. They understood enough. The reptile spoke the name of Kesson Rel, and the name of the doomed.
Thirty-five already had been claimed. The next day, the dragon would come for the thirty-sixth. After that, only the conclave would remain.
Kesson had saved the choicest morsels for last.
Avnon sat in the solitude of his meditation cell. His fellow priests had went to do as they would as they waited for death. Some slept, some prayed, some milled aimlessly about. Unprepared to surrender, unwilling to believe that the Shadow God would leave them helpless before the theurge, Avnon sought a vision. He was the Seer of the Demarch Conclave and his faith could not be shaken, even by recent events. Surely the Shadow God would provide a means to save at least some of his faithful.
Avnon sent his consciousness inward, found his center, and made his mind an open vessel.
With a suddenness that caused his body to spasm, he began to see.
Wings beat in the dark, reptilian scales sprouted mouths lined with teeth, Kesson Rel railed in the shadows, souls floated free in a swamp. He sensed motion, and knew he was seeing time and worlds pass him by. There, in another time, he saw the swamp again, bigger, darker. In it stood two men, a tall, bald man with flesh like Kesson Rel who held in one hand a blade of black steel that leaked shadows, and a smaller, one-eyed man who wielded twin blades. Avnon sensed that, like him, they too served the Shadow God. Together, they faced a dragon—the dragon—but the huge reptile was swathed not only in shadows but in...
Avnon came out of the vision in a startled rush. Sweat covered his clammy skin. His breath came hard. He understood then the purpose of his god, and it frightened him.
Kesson Rel was not a heretic. Nor were the priests of the Hall of Shadows. Both served the Shadow God, and as Avnon had thought, the god wanted to determine which of his servants was the stronger. But the determination was not between Kesson Rel and the demarchs of the temple. It was between Kesson Rel and the two men Avnon had seen in his vision.
Avnon and his fellow demarchs were to play a role in setting up that contest. They were one more challenge for Kesson Rel to face. They were allies of the two men in the vision. He felt stunned by the realization and its implications. For a fleeting moment, but only a moment, he felt betrayed by his god.
And yet he remembered the image of the enshrouded dragon.
With a sigh, he accepted his fate. Men of faith must always suffer, and many men had suffered worse than he would. Besides, he found it distantly satisfying to think that he could die in service to his god's plan. He could die to live.
For the time being, he needed to speak with his fellow priests, to convince them of what they must do. They would not like what he was going to demand but they would do it anyway. He was the First Demarch of the Conclave, and it was the only way.
After he spoke with his fellows, he would need to speak to the dragon.
Below, Furlinastis saw the temple. It sat alone in the barren plains, a rectangle of black-veined marble
slabs and fluted columns. As he swooped a wide circle through the dark sky, the few humans outside the temple scurried inside, terrified.
Furlinastis took scant pleasure in their fear. His anger at his bondage denied him even that. For the thirty-sixth time, he ground his fangs against each other and struggled against the soul spell that bound him. For the thirty-sixth time, he failed to overcome the compulsion. The small piece of Kesson Rel's being that infected his soul forced him to obey his charge.
He roared in futile rage as he spiraled downward toward the temple. Still fighting, still failing, he alit and sank his claws into the marble stairs, threw open the huge bronze doors, and spoke his pronouncement into the darkened doorway:
"Kesson Rel sends you greetings, and death. I am sent to retrieve one of your number. Send forth Lorm Diivar. He is the next to die."
The temple was quiet. Furlinastis waited, gouging his claws into the marble of the temple's stairway.
After a time, not one but two priests emerged. Both wore the black masks symbolic of their faith. Furlinastis smelled the fear on both of them. They had not come to fight. The elder of the two held an arm around the younger and spoke soothingly to him. Pale and weak, the young priest looked up at the dragon.
The power of Kesson Rel's soulbinding allowed Furlinastis to know that the younger of the priests was Lorm Diivar. He extended a foreclaw.
The older priest stepped before younger and said, "My name is Avnon Des the Seer, First Demarch of the Conclave. What is your name, dragon? Are you bound?"
Furlinastis cocked his head. The priests of the temple had never before attempted to communicate with him. He started to answer but the soul magic compelled him
to be about his task. He brushed aside the elderly priest and caught Lorm Diivar up.
The young priest went limp in his grasp. Perhaps he was praying. Furlinastis could not tell.
"Maintain your faith, aspirant," the elderly priest called up to Lorm. "Your death is not in vain, nor is our exile here."
Lorm made no reply that Furlinastis could see. He prepared to take wing.
"I see the soul of Kesson Rel on you, dragon," said the elderly priest. "If you would be free of it, the name you pronounce tomorrow must be mine. Do you understand?"
Furlinastis could not reply, though the priest's words struck him like arrows. Free! He leaped into the air and spread his wings. The elderly priest's voice haunted his flight.
"Avnon Des the Seer! Remember it! You must come for me tomorrow or you will remain his slave forever."
Furlinastis devoured Lorm Diivar while Kesson Rel mocked and smiled. The flesh tasted foul and the young priest's screams were unsatisfying. Furlinastis preferred his meat spoiled in his swamp before dining upon it. He also preferred to dine of his own free will.
Afterward, as he scoured with his tongue the last remnants of the human from between his fangs, he thought of the elderly priest's words. Avnon Des had spoken of freedom from Kesson Rel, from the accursed soulbinding that had made him a slave.
Kesson Rel hovered before him, floating in the air under the power of a spell, lost in thought. Despite his elaborate planning and affected glee, the theurge
seemed to take little actual pleasure in the death of his former fellows.
Furlinastis glared hate at the theurge, at the human who had bound him. He decided abruptly that he had nothing to lose by cooperating with Avnon. He was nothing more than a slave to Kesson Rel, a fate that he found worse than death.
To Kesson Rel, he said, "One of the priests, other than the one called, emerged from the temple and offered a challenge."
Kesson looked up from his thoughts, frowned, and asked, "You did not harm him, did you?"
Furlinastis knew that Kesson wanted each of the priests to die before him. He had commanded Furlinastis to kill none, except at his command.
"The challenge was not to me," Furlinastis replied. "It was to you."
"Indeed?" Kesson said, arching an eyebrow. "Which priest? Describe him to me."
Even that slight command triggered the magic of the soul spell and the words poured forth from Furlinastis as of their own accord.
"He was tall and elderly, with black hair graying at the temples. His build was slight and his face was hairless. Like all of them, a mask obscured his eyes. He said his name was Avnon Des the Seer. He seemed unafraid at the mention of your name."
Furlinastis added that last to tweak Kesson's pride. The human's mouth tightened and he crossed his arms across his chest.
"Avnon... Avnon. I had planned to save him for last."
"He named you a heretic," Furlinastis said, recalling the words of Kesson Rel upon their first meeting in the swamp.
The human looked up sharply and glared at Furlinastis. The dragon knew his words had struck home.
"Tomorrow," Kesson said, "journey to the temple and bring back to me Avnon Des the Seer. He will die before this heretic."
The magic of the soul binding sank into Furlinastis's will but he did not resist. He had no lips with which to smile, though he would have if he could.
Twenty-four hours later, Furlinastis again soared over the temple. He saw no scurrying figures below, no hurried motion. The temple was as still as a tomb. He alit on the marble stairs, before the open doors.
From within, he caught the scent of blood. Lots of
it.
The binding of the magic took hold and he said, "Kesson Rel sends you greetings. And death. I am sent to retrieve one of your number. Send forth Avnon Des the Seer. He is the next to die."
A figure appeared in the doors. Blood spattered his robes; crimson glistened on his hands; a peculiar aura of shifting darkness surrounded him, not shadows but ... something else. His eyes behind the mask were tired but determined. He walked forward to the dragon.
"You have done well, dragon," Avnon Des said in his deep voice.
The compulsion did not allow Furlinastis time for questions or comments. He took Avnon Des in his claw and took wing. Strangely, it felt as if the priest was squirming in his grasp, though he could see that the human was motionless.
As they flew away from the temple and toward the swamp, the soul spell's grip on him grew less compelling and freed his tongue.
"You spoke of my freedom," he said.
The dragon tried to keep the urgency, the hope, from
his tone. He found it odd to be conversing with prey in his claws.
"And you shall have it," the human said, over the rush of the wind.
Furlinastis thought Avnon's voice sounded different, softer, breathier, younger.
"You stink of blood," Furlinastis said. "Did you kill your fellow priests?"
To that, the human said only, "We were of like mind and they were willing."
"The darkness around you..." the dragon said. "What magic is this?"
Avnon Des twisted around in the claw to look up into Furlinastis's eyes. When he spoke, his voice sounded like that of a human female.
"A special kind," he said. "The only kind that can free you." The human looked off into the gloom, thoughtful. "I must see him, speak to him, before this ends. He must have a chance to repent his sins."
Furlinastis snorted, and streamers of shadow went forth from his nostril.
"He repents nothing, human."
"We will see," replied the priest, and his voice was his own.
For a time, they flew in silence. The human continued to feel as though he was wriggling in Furlinastis's grasp, and Furlinastis kept adjusting his grip to compensate. Soon, they would reach the swamp, and Kesson Rel.
"There is more, dragon," the human said. "Before this can be completed, I must have your oath, an oath on your soul."
Furlinastis snarled and pulled the human up before his face—a difficult maneuver while in flight. He hissed a tiny amount of shadowstuff into Avnon's face and squeezed him a little in his claw.
The priest winced, tried to turn away from the life-draining breath.
"No oaths, priest," Furlinastis said. "And no mention of souls."
He had experienced enough of oaths and souls. Avnon Des's gaze did not waver from behind his mask as he said, "Your oath, dragon, or we will not free you." "We?"
"Oath, dragon!" the human demanded, and his voice sounded as though it were many voices.
The shadows around Furlinastis writhed with his anger. The darkness around the priest swirled as if in answer.
Furlinastis ground his fangs, roared into the sky, and shook the priest in his claw before he finally said, "Very well."
The priest managed to look relieved even through his mask.
"In a time far from now, two men will enter your swamp. The taller will be bald, and will bear a blade of black steel that leaks darkness. The shorter will have only one eye, and will carry twin blades. These are the First and Second of the Shadow God. You will allow them passage without harm and will lend them what aid you can. It is they who will fulfill the will of the Shadow God and destroy Kesson Rel. Oath it, dragon. On your soul."
Furlinastis swallowed his pride and said, "I swear it, priest. On my soul."
At those words, the piece of Kesson Rel that contaminated Furlinastis's soul wriggled in agitation.
The priest sagged in the dragon's grasp. Furlinastis moved his claw and passenger back to the more comfortable flying position. The swamp was near.
"But / will kill Kesson Rel," the dragon said. "After you've freed me from the soul magic."
Avnon spoke, and it sounded again like many voices speaking at once, "It is not for you to kill him. Nor for us."
Furlinastis spiraled downward toward the swamp and replied, "We will see."
He landed on the muddy ground behind a flat stone, almost an altar, that stood on the shore of a shallow, stinking pool. Blood from Avnon's fellow priests still stained the gray stone of the altar brown. The beat of his wings bent the black-leafed trees of the swamp and sent up a mist of water.
Kesson Rel floated above the pool, aloft under the power of a spell, cloaked in shadows. He eyed Furlinastis's passenger coldly.
As he had with each of the dead priests, Furlinastis set Avnon down on the altar and pressed the point of one of his claws into the human's abdomen. The greasy, squirming feeling surrounding the human's flesh went quiescent, as though trying to be inconspicuous.
Kesson Rel began to laugh—a hateful sound to which Furlinastis had become accustomed. The theurge floated forward, alit on the soft ground, and stood over the prone Avnon.
"Avnon Des," he said, looking down on the captive priest. "I had proposed to save you for last, that you could see the temple and all in it die before you met your own demise."
The priest squirmed under Furlinastis's grasp, trying to free his chest enough to speak.
"You are a heretic, Kesson Rel, and a thief. You drank of the Chalice of Night and thereby made yourself apostate. For that—"
Kesson Rel lunged forward, tore off Avnon's mask, and seized the priest's jaw in his hand.
"And you are a fool, First Demarch, a timid fool. Do you think the Shadow God would have made me this—"
Kesson Rel released the priest and stood back and held up his arms, showing his dusky skin, his yellow eyes, and the shadows that danced around him—"if he did not want me to drink of the Chalice? Do you?"
Under his claw, Furlinastis felt the darkness around the prone priest writhing. Kesson Rel seemed not to notice.
"Repent now, Kesson Rel," Avnon said. "It is not too late. You are the first Chosen of the Shadow God, but you are not his First. Repent, or you will die."
The theurge smiled and said, "I think not." He stared into Avnon's face while he said to Furlinastis, "Eviscerate him, dragon. Slowly."
Keep your promise, priest, Furlinastis thought, as the soulbinding forced his hand. And I will keep mine.
Furlinastis drove the tip of his foreclaw into Avnon's abdomen.
The priest grimaced, but managed to mouth a prayer. Furlinastis heard the power in the words, though most of them were lost in a bloody gurgle as Avnon's mouth began to fill with blood. Waiting for something, .anything to occur, Furlinastis continued to tear open the priest. Avnon did not scream, just continued to pray as he was laid open. The prayer reminded Furlinastis of the words used by Kesson Rel to cast the soul spell that bound him.
When Avnon finally breathed his last, nothing happened. Nothing.
Furlinastis could hardly contain a roar of frustration.
Kesson Rel chuckled and said, "Goodbye, First Demarch."
In that instant, a moan sounded, as though from deep under the swamp, and a black fog rose from the freshly dead corpse of the priest. In that fog, Furlinastis saw shapes, faces.
Souls, he realized. The souls of the priests from the
temple. Avnon had killed them all, sacrificed them perhaps, and borne their souls to the swamp in his own body.
Wide eyed, Kesson Rel backed up a step. His gaze went from the fog of souls, to the dragon.
"What have you done, dragon?"
Furlinastis heard the fear in the theurge's voice and knew that Avnon had not lied to him.
Kesson Rel began to cast a spell.
"Freed myself, theurge," Furlinastis replied, and hoped that he was right.
The soul binding still prevented him from harming the theurge, so all he could do was sit, wait, and hope.
The cloud of souls moved from the body of the priest, stretched around Furlinastis's body, and merged with the shadows that always surrounded him.
Instantly, a charge ran along his scales, a tremor of power. His scales began to burn, to crawl over his flesh. The shadows around him churned. It felt as if millions of insects were crawling beneath his scales, walking along his flesh, biting his skin.
Kesson Rel's voice trailed off before completing his spell.
"Stop, dragon," Kesson Rel screamed. "Stop."
But Furlinastis could not stop.
Furlinastis leaped into the air, writhing, twisting, roaring. The souls swarmed him, covered him. He hissed in agony as the priests burrowed into his being. He felt like daggers were being driven behind his eyes.
"Avnon Des, you betrayed me!" he screamed between roars.
Then he felt it, and knew that he had judged wrongly.
The souls of the priests, all eight of them, permeated his soul, scoured his being until they located the portion of Kesson Rel's soul with which the theurge had
bound Furlinastis. A battle began within Furlinastis, an invisible war that he could sense but not see.
The two sides crashed into each other like warring armies. Furlinastis heard the conflict only dimly, as though from a great distance. Bolts of spiritual energy burst from the sheath of shadows that surrounded him. Distant shouts rang in his ears. Furlinastis felt the binding on the soul spell of the theurge loosen, as though someone was withdrawing a parasite that had wormed its way into the deepest recesses of his flesh.
He felt the chains on his will release, and he was free of the soul binding. The battle in his soul went quiet, though he still felt tension.
Furlinastis's mind turned immediately to vengeance. He ceased his aerial acrobatics and turned his eyes to the ground below, scanning the swamp for Kesson Rel, sniffing the air for the spoor of the theurge.
Nothing. Kesson Rel had fled.
It is not for you to kill him, he thought, recalling Avnon's words. •
Breathing hard, Furlinastis landed atop the stone altar and took it into his claws. He beat his wings, hovered, and cast the sacrificial stone far out into the swamp. It vanished under the dark water.
He alit on a dry patch of ground. There, he pondered.
The seer had sacrificed his brethren and borne the souls to the swamp within his own body. As he died, the priest had cast his own soulspell, one to counter that of Kesson Rel, one that required the power of eight souls to loosen the binding of the theurge.
But why?
Furlinastis looked into the mirror of the still pool and examined the sheath of shadows that enshrouded him. They swirled around and in the swirls Furlinastis saw faces, forms. He realized the truth of it then, and
it gave him a start: The souls of the priests were bound to him. He was their vessel. "Why?" he asked.
A face took shape in the shadows, distorted but visible in the reflection on the pool's surface: Avnon Des.
"His soul remains too, dragon," Avnon mouthed, and his voice was barely a whisper. "We hold it in check; we can no more harm it directly than he could us. We are prisoners so that you might be free."
Furlinastis digested that.
"Remember your oath to us," Avnon said. "The two who will come will free us all."
With that, the face dispersed back into the shadows around his body.
Furlinastis frowned. His will was once again his own, but he owed it to the priests. The shadows around him were a spiritual battlefield, and would remain so for...
How long?
He knew the answer as soon as he asked himself the question: Until the First and the Second of the Shad-owlord find Kesson Rel and kill him.
The wait would be long.
FIRST FLIGHT
Edward Bolme
Netheril Year 3398 (-461 DR)
Serreg kneeled, picked a dead stalk of grass, and inspected it closely. It was withered, with some pale green still trapped in its blades, mocking its vanished vitality. Serreg rolled it in his fingers, then let it drop. He dug into the earth with his hand and loosened a clod. The lifeless dirt crumbled between his fingers, trailing pale dust on the thin breeze. It's happening again, he thought. Serreg stood, took a deep breath, and looked around, hands on hips, at the patch of desiccated vegetation. It was several miles across and perfectly centered beneath the city that floated a half mile over Serreg's head. Delia was Serreg's home, one of the enclaves built on inverted mountaintops that sailed majestically across the skies of Netheril.
Serreg took another deep breath in a vain effort to purge the weight in his heart, then he cast Oberon's flawless teleport to return to his chambers. After years of teleportation, instantaneous travel no longer disoriented the archwizard. He materialized in his chambers already walking across the floor to his desk. Opening one drawer, he pulled forth a small crystal sphere. He held it lightly in one hand and passed the other in front of it. It began to glow with an inner light.
"Sysquemalyn, please deliver this to Lady Polaris promptly," he said. "Thank you."
He passed his hand twice in front of the orb, and spoke again, saying, "Lady Polaris, the land beneath us is also blighted, as if the very life is sucked out of the soil. The grass withers in place. Insects and even small animals lie dead in the shadow of the city. There is no decay. The cycle of life and death is not heading back to rebirth. I shall keep you apprised of my findings."
He turned the hand holding the crystal upside down and the item rolled out of his hand. It floated—light as a soap bubble, yet purposeful of movement—directly out the window, then turned right toward the Central Keep. Serreg strode out the door.
The archwizard's chambers lay in the innermost circle of Delia, in the palace the city's founder, Lady Polaris, built nearly a thousand years before. People called it the Glade; there had been some sort of garden there originally, and short of the Central Keep where Lady Polaris and her two aides lived, it was the most prestigious neighborhood in Delia.
The city had been built in concentric rings, and Serreg walked easily down one of the radial streets toward the north rim of the enclave. The archwizard had lived in Delia for over two centuries, and he no longer noted the gradual deterioration in the cityscape as he walked ever so slightly downhill from the clean,
elegant lines of the Glade to the peasant's huts and farmers' markets at the rim.
There was no railing around the rim of Delia. Those citizens who ventured near the edge either knew to remain safe, or else they departed the city rather more abruptly than they had intended. But though dangerous (especially on windy days), the rim afforded a gorgeous view. It was like a view from a mountaintop,but without the rest of the mountain in the way.
Nevertheless, for all the panoramic beauty, Serreg's eye drifted to the north, and a touch east, where he knew another patch of dead earth lay, ten miles across. He fancied he could just see a part of that barren patch—and his eye saw something else. A long line started beneath his feet and lightly arced to the barren patch to the north, a trail of wilting grass and pale earth. Whatever blight had struck the land beneath their fair enclave, it had followed Delia as Lady Polaris moved the city to greener pastures.
The land was dying beneath Delia, and without the land, Delia would die as well.
For the next year, Serreg labored intensely, studying the blight. He had the resources of the Delian libraries at his disposal, as well as his decades of scholarship and magical studies. It was gratifying to put his knowledge and studies to tangible, practical use. Such a grave crisis merited the superior mind of the archwizard. He had always wanted to exercise his power in a serious pursuit like smiting the enclave of Doubloon, destroying the Lich of Buoyance, or something else of - that order. While the puzzle of the crop blight was not as immediately gratifying as combat would be, the challenge at least carried mortal stakes.
Alchemical analysis determined that the enclave had not been altered. No insidious plague lingered on the underside of Delia's granite, and the city's shadow had no strange new side effect. Of the dead creatures themselves, they could not be resurrected, which implied that whatever spark gave them life had been utterly crushed. Test animals placed anywhere within the area of the blight suffered a similar fate, despite the efforts of Serreg and the temple healers to preserve their essence. Once removed from the zone, the subjects resumed normal lives, if a bit weakened ever after.
Lady Polaris moved Delia twice during that year at Serreg's behest, and each time the blight followed the city's path exactly. The radius of the blight below expanded as Delia remained stationary over that spot. In a similar manner, the width of the blighted trail left in Delia's wake varied inversely with the speed with which the enclave moved.
Throughout his researches, Serreg assiduously recorded small anomalies in a separate tome reserved for that purpose. Minor mysteries all, and hardly worth note, except that they persisted as Serreg pursued this research.
Then Serreg began adding unrelated news into this journal. Quasimagical items that had functioned perfectly for scores of years intermittently failed. Illnesses increased in lethality, especially among the elderly. Serreg himself saw a rather dramatic failure of the enclave's longevity field take place on the streets of the Grove. One of the more revered tutors of the magical college aged from his apparent fifty years to his true age of over four hundred. Within the space of a breath he withered, died, and crumbled to dust.
The entries in the journal began to fit an insidious pattern, but Serreg could not tie together the magical
failures with the death of the ground-dwelling creatures below.
Serreg attempted detections and divinations, revelations and dispellings, but none produced any answers. Yet all the negative results pointed to something that hid itself. Eventually he came to the inescapable conclusion that Delia suffered from a vast and powerful spell, too subtle and carefully woven for even an archwizard to unveil. At least not directly.
Rather than find out the spell's purpose, Serreg turned his attention to finding out who was casting it. He began by eliminating those who weren't casting it. Through careful examination, he removed specific people as well as potential vectors, one by one. It wasn't Karsus, thankfully, for who wanted to engage in battle against the premier Netherese archwizard? It wasn't extraplanar in origin, again thankfully, for Serreg had little desire to combat creatures from other dimensions. The blight did not hail from Realmspace, nor from any of the gods. Serreg's divinations also cleared the Lich of Buoyance, to his small displeasure.
Every so often, Serreg would get close, and he'd feel the spell squirming to evade his scrying eyes. He was never sure if the spell itself took action to evade definition, or if the practitioners behind the magic made adjustments to keep it out of Serreg's hands, but every instance gave the Delian archwizard a better idea what was happening.
And at long last, he had enough information to try a field test.
Again he drew a small crystal ball from his desk drawer, and waved his hand to activate it.
"Lady Polaris, Candlemas, and Sysquemalyn—I have narrowed the source of the blight as well as I can, and it appears to be subterranean in origin. Deeply subterranean. There is no doubt in my mind that the dwarves
are innocent, because they do not delve to the depths from which the spell originates. I wager they also lack the subtlety to weave a spell of this nature.
"In any event, I cannot pursue this further from the laboratory, so I shall go and test my hypothesis in the field. I may come back empty-handed, but I think it is far more likely that I shall uncover the source of this evil magic, and show them what it means to cross a Netherese archwizard. In any event, I should be back within a few hours at most, and I shall report to you my results. Keep a supper warm for me. Good day."
He let the orb go, and by the time it reached the window, the study was empty.
Serreg arrived—magically, of course—shortly before sundown at the location he had chosen. He placed everburning lights around the area, in case his efforts required more than an hour.
He closed his eyes and clasped his hands for a few minutes to cleanse himself of the excitement and impatience that tugged at his mind. Though eager to pull aside the last veil over the spell, he knew he must be careful, lest his eagerness alert those behind the blight, and they slither away from him once again.
Once relaxed, he ensorcelled himself with Zahn's seeing and began to dig using Proctiv's earthmove incantations. As he dug, his mind's eye scouted ahead with the seeing enchantment, looking for any hollow areas under the ground wherein creatures might lair. On finding a small fissure, he widened it all the way to the surface. He picked up one of his lights and dropped it down the cleft, then used the earthmove spell and began following the fissure down, digging as he went.
Well after dark, he finally found what he was looking for—or, more precisely, what he was looking for found him.
His excavations had settled into a dreary routine, taking far longer than expected. The constant rumble of earth being moved, the continuous projection of his vision, and the endless standing as he wrought his magic all taxed Serreg's alertness, lulling him into a casual state of mind not unlike his long hours spent in one of the university laboratories.
As he had done several times before, Serreg paused briefly from his exertions, suspending his spells to slake his thirst with a sip of water. As he recorked his flask, however, he noticed that something was different.
The sound of moving earth hadn't stopped.
He looked quickly at his excavation; it sat there undisturbed. The sound came from behind him. He stepped back and turned his head toward the noise, and as he did he realized that there was more than one source. Something disturbed the earth to his right, and something else did the same on his left.
Seeing nothing, Serreg briefly closed his eyes and took a deep breath to purge himself of surprise. Facing the sources of the noise, he adopted a prepared stance, feet shoulder width apart and hands in front of his abdomen with his fingertips touching lightly, all as he had been taught in the martial spellcasting courses. He stared at the empty space between the sounds. He was ready.
And frankly, he was relieved to be interrupted. It saved him the trouble of hunting the miscreants down. Once his surprise passed, Serreg didn't even think to be frightened. After all, what did a Netherese archwizard have to fear from any but his own kind? He simply prepared his mind to deal with whatever creatures
might come forth. Kill all but one, and trap the last for detailed interrogation. Then, if it turned out to be something new, perform an intensive autopsy.
At the edge of the illumination from one of his stones, Serreg saw the surface tremble, crack, and heave upward. He smiled slightly and waited.
The ground rose higher, pushed from below, and as it did so it tumbled to the side, until Serreg saw the creature itself rising out of the dirt. At first, he saw a flurry of hands, perhaps three or four, pushing the earth to the side. Vile-looking hands they were, shaped in some unsettlingly inhuman fashion with long, wicked fingers that seemed to end in talons. Then dark, bulbous flesh pushed itself out of the ground, a wad of meat a good fathom wide. As it rose, Serreg saw the beast's arms retract wholly into the puckered tissue.
The creature continued to rise, though Serreg saw no obvious means of movement. It rose from the ground as a dead fish rises from a fishmonger's barrel, pulled forth by the hook through its mouth. As more of the creature's body hove into view, it narrowed toward the tail, adding to the image of a dead fish. Serreg raised one eyebrow in interest. Long, blunt spines, slightly curved, covered the majority of the shapeless body; perhaps a grotesque decoration, perhaps a defense, perhaps some kind of bizarre full-body system of legs.
The creature rose further, leaving behind an open hole in the ground, somehow all the more repulsive for the sickening creature that floated placidly out of the wound. Fully eight feet of nauseating monster had risen from the cavity by the time its width had diminished to the thickness of Serreg's leg. He watched as another yard emerged from the ground, ending in a vicious barbed tail.
The beast turned itself more or less horizontal, lounging in the air, with its tail drifting slowly back
and forth. It turned its rounded front toward Serreg, and he saw a puckered mouth with countless hooked teeth all gnashed together in the center. "Fascinating," said Serreg.
He would definitely have to bring the creature back. "Serreg's subterranean tubuloids," he would call them. Ah, the immortality of discovery!
He did not notice that the speed of the wind began changing unnaturally around him.
Well, best get to work, he thought, and cast Aksa's morphing upon the creature.
He intended to alter the beast into what it first reminded him of: a fish. There on the open plain, a fish could easily be caught and transported back to Delia. Once back in the safety of one of the university laboratories, he could return the thing to its natural state.
Serreg was rather affronted when the morphing failed, and the magical power frittered itself away, flickering across the thing's flesh and jumping from spine to spine.
Annoyed, Serreg cast Mavin's flesh-stone transmutation on the beast. An eleven-foot-long statue would be more tedious to transport, requiring telekinesis and all, but on the other hand stone was much less slimy than a flopping fish, and petrification afforded the stupid beast no opportunity to bite him.
That spell failed as well.
Serreg paused. Eithei' haste from the excitement of discovery ruined his spellcasting, or else the grotesque abomination was highly resistant to magic. Serreg preferred to consider the former to be the case. He began to cast Pockall's monster hex, a spell with which he was quite well versed as he practiced it regularly on laboratory animals. But as he gathered the energy and spun the incantation, the creature opened its
mouth, a vile circular maw full of mismatched jagged teeth arranged around the rim in no particular order. Serreg fought to keep his mind focused on finishing the incantation..
The creature lunged. Its four arms flew out from its body, erupting from the soft flesh into which they had withdrawn. The mouth gaped open far wider than Serreg had thought possible. Ref lexively, Serreg abandoned his spell, its power dispersing harmlessly while he flopped onto his back under the speeding bulk of the monstrosity.
The thing swept almost soundlessly over him. Serreg reflected for just a moment that no matter how intensive one's combat spellcasting training might be, it was always very easy to panic in the field. That flash of realization crystallized his discipline, and Serreg drew upon the countless hours of repetitive drills he'd performed. He rolled quickly to his feet, and as he rolled, his arms also flew through the requisite gestures for General Matick's missile. It was a basic technique, but a very useful one. No sooner did Serreg finish the incantation than he pushed himself to his feet and aimed the magical strike.
The creature passed over one of his light stones and was lit repulsively from below as it turned back toward Serreg. He fired the spell, and a cluster of tiny red flares shot from his finger toward the beast. They arced in and impacted its hide, flaring as they struck the creature with their deadly energy.
The monster seemed not to notice. Even a horse will flick its hide from a horsefly's bite, but Serreg saw not even that much of an expression of annoyance from the thing.
¦ With the amazing speed born of fury, Serreg cast another, more powerful attack spell: Noanar's fireball. As the creature turned to attack him again he sent the
blazing ball of flames straight into the monster's open mouth. His aim was perfect, and the creature drew up short and screamed in a strange, monotone hoot. Despite the alien sound, Serreg knew he had struck a solid blow.
The flames died out rapidly, and in the dim light of his globes, Serreg saw the beast wagging its body back and forth. He saw the blackened teeth framed by blistered skin, and spittle and ichor being slung about as the creature wagged its... its head?... to clear the pain.
Serreg started to smile in conquest. But instinct tempted him to look over his shoulder instead.
Two more of the horrid things hung stationary in the air behind him.
As he blinked in surprise, the multiple arms of the two creatures issued forth, and began making mystical passes in the air. Serreg glanced back at the wounded beast and saw that it, too, wove a spell.
They had him surrounded.
He sprinted away, not caring which direction he took. He zigged and zagged as the obscene taloned hands of the three subterranean slugs launched magical spells. A crack of raw magical power flew past him to one side. Another spell of unknown nature ripped the ground open a few yards behind him, and just as he thought himself lucky, a wave of magical frost struck him from behind. It hit like a gale, cutting through his archwizard's vestments and biting his flesh. The impact knocked Serreg off his feet, and the sudden drop in temperature made his back arch.
Too cold to shiver, Serreg stood. The three creatures studied him. One cast another spell as he rose, too quickly for Serreg to dodge or counter, and he found himself framed in flickering red light.
Enough, he thought, and pulled one of the most powerful spells he knew to the forefront of his mind,
something to burn all three of these vile things: Vblhm's chaining.
Serreg's eyes glowed with raw power as he quickly moved through the invocation. He watched with grim satisfaction as the three creatures gathered together and closed upon him.
He launched the spell. A thick bolt of electrical power sprang from his fingers, a bolt of lightning that struck the lead creature, then arced to the other two. For a moment, the power of Serreg's attack illuminated the entire area.
By that light, Serreg clearly saw that only one of the creatures flinched. And the one he'd already wounded, he watched as the arcing lightning bolt erased the fire's blisters, healing the monstrous being with its magical power. The lightning bolt never grounded itself out as it was supposed to. The creature had sucked in all the power Serreg had just spent trying to kill it.
Vblhm's chaining. One of the best spells he knew. And still they came. Not only did they resist magic, they could absorb the raw energy to give themselves more power.
Dumbfounded, Serreg had no idea how to defeat them. Then one of them cast a spell, a maddeningly familiar one, yet one Serreg knew he had never seen before, and the light globes all dimmed and went out, leaving him in the dead of night, with those things... and a flickering red halo.
Serreg knew panic.
For his whole life, his power had been his magic, and suddenly it was utterly useless. The scaffolding of decades of training collapsed beneath him, leaving him in the terror of uncontrolled freefall, falling into a darkness filled with those hideous creatures.
He sensed them moving closer. Serreg knew he couldn't outrun them, so he desperately gambled with
Oberon's flawless teleport. East, toward the enclave, toward Delia.
Even as he cast the spell, Serreg felt one of the things try to counter it, while another clutched at him with its claws. Praying they had not interfered too greatly, Serreg submitted himself to his spell and vanished.
He reappeared several miles away, safely close to the ground. The spell collapsed around him just as he exited its effect, but that didn't matter. He'd gotten away! He exhaled explosively, free from the panic that had gripped him. The lightness in his head caused him to stagger briefly, and he almost laughed, feeling the giddy release of tension.
Then the flickering red aura around him flared into brilliant life, a beacon in the night. They had done that, to find where he'd gone. Serreg frantically summoned the most potent dispelling he could muster, cast it, and watched in relief as the flickering light vanished.
He knew he had at least a few minutes before the subterranean obscenities could reach him. They didn't look like they moved that fast. He took a few deep, panting breaths to get his heart and lungs under control, then wracked his brain for spells. To his horror, he sensed his spells fading, their power draining from his mind like the life had been drained from the soil beneath Delia.
That's how they do it! he thought in alarm. A huge spell, sucking the life and magic out of our enclave like a ghoul sucking the marrow from our bones!
Everything was clear. The intermittent failures of magical items, spells abruptly collapsing without warning, the odd side effects as he tried to pursue his investigation through magical means. They intended to drain Delia of all life and magic. The dirt and all its plants and animals just happened to be in the way.
At long last, Serreg knew who was behind the blight, and how it worked. But it was too late.
They were after him. They probably even knew he knew. They had been watching him all along, trying to prevent him from finding them, concealing their dark enchantment, interfering with his magic. And they had just tapped his very mind and drained away the arcane power of the spells he knew.
He had nothing left but himself. He had to hide. On that open plain, they'd find him easily. Frantically, he looked around, and barely visible as a shadow against the stars, he saw a ridge jutting out of the plains, about a mile east.
His only hope lay in that ridge, and somehow blending in with it, finding a cave or a large rock to crawl under or a large bush or something to use for cover. He couldn't let them find him. He had to live. He had to warn the others.
He ran.
After only a hundred yards his lungs burned within his breast. His legs protested the sudden advent of intense physical labor. His whole body complained. He started stumbling, open mouthed, with spittle dangling from his chin, but fear pushed him on.
Panting madly, he reached the foot of the ridge, which jutted like a dragon's spine out of the plains. He climbed, randomly exploring those places that were easiest to reach. After several agonizing minutes' search, he scrabbled up to a small cleft barely visible in the moonlight. He wormed his body backward into the crevice, frantically scanning the starlit sky to the west. Even with rough rock on all sides, his bruised and raw hands tried to push him even deeper into the crack. His ribs protested the strain, but he did not relent, for it seemed that the stones themselves wanted to push
him back out into the night, out where they were looking for him.
He blinked the sweat out of his eyes, salty tears of fright already gone icy in the cold night air. His heart, too was chilled, and his soul felt the toll the creature's had taken, stealing his life-force itself. One of the creatures screeched in the darkness, a horrid, alien sound.
"Please," he gasped, using the word for the first time in his life. "Please... someone... anyone... help me!"
Half of his brain desperately pleaded for aid, any aid, while the other half ;astigated itself for panicking. Self-control and reason were needed then, not pointless calls for help. No one was near. No one but them____
Serreg heard a clash of steel on steel, a burst of melee fighting close at hand, and his heart caved.
They've found me! he thought. But wait—they weren't carrying weapons...
No sooner did that realization cross the rational half of his brain than a flash of light winced his eyes. A star-burst of swords, axes, and spears clashed and sparked in the darkness, erupting like a vicious steel flower blooming in an instant, flowing outward with strokes and parries like a smoke ring, then vanishing as a tall, powerfully-built man stepped out of its midst.
Serreg stared in frank shock, his contorted body frozen in the crevice.
The man was a giant. He stood nine feet tall, and Serreg couldn't understand how he'd stepped out of a small ring of moving steel without cutting himself, let alone stooping over. He had the proud, easy, alert stance of the warrior. He looked askance at Serreg, keeping one ear alert while focusing most of his attention on the hapless fugitive wedged in the rock.
"Well, now," said the giant, with a deep and gravelly voice. It reminded Serreg of steel-shod boots marching
over bones, or boulders catapulting into the masonry of castle walls. "A helpless archwizard. That's not something you see every day."
Serreg's eyes traveled down the length of the visitor's body. He was unshaven, and his nose had been broken multiple times, but he was no less handsome for it. His broad, battle-scarred chest was bare, protected only by the cloak that covered his wide shoulders. His arms, all— all three, no, four... or five... well, all that Serreg could see... all carried weapons: a spear, a scimitar, an axe, a war flail's spiked heads dangling near his ankles, and a skull wielded like a club, gripped with fingers through the eye sockets and thumb under the teeth.
The giant cocked his head and asked, "Do you talk, boy? Or was that magic, too?"
"Wh—why—?" Serreg stammered.
"You called for help," said the giant, spreading his many arms, "and here I am."
Serreg's brow furrowed. Called for help? Yes, he supposed in his panicked state he must have. It didn't matter. Help had come.
"So... what—uh, who are you?"
"Psshht!" guffawed the giant. "You really are helpless, aren't you?"
He turned away and scanned the landscape. Serreg felt affronted that he no longer merited the giant's attention.
"But... but I don't-"
"IamTargus."
For a long time there was silence, broken only by the delicate drip-drip of droplets steadily dribbling from the hem of the giant's cloak.
"Targus," said Serreg finally.
Targus's head swiveled from side to side as he smelled the air.
"Targus," said Serreg again.
The giant ignored him. "Lord of War," added Serreg.
"Yes," replied Targus simply. He turned to face Serreg again, and snorted. "That's all right with you, isn't it?"
"Wh-what are you doing here?" asked Serreg.
"You called," answered Targus with a shrug.
"But—but you're a god!" blurted Serreg.
"So? I had a whim to answer you." There was something awfully frightful about that voice, thick with death and carnage, speaking whimsically. Serreg surmised Targus could speak of rape and slaughter with equal aplomb. "You ought to be thankful, since the only other possible help is three tired farmers a few dozen leagues from here." Targus looked pointedly at Serreg, who mutely nodded his assent. "Besides," the god added, "you have potential."
"All right..."
Targus stepped forward, put one heavy boot on a rock outcropping, and leaned over Serreg in the crevice. Serreg wasn't sure how he fit his massive bulk into that small crack, but then again, he was a god.
"So," said Targus with a conspiratorial wink, "I'm here. What do you want?"
"What do you mean?" asked Serreg.
The mere presence of a god had eclipsed all other considerations at that moment.
"You asked for help," said Targus reasonably. "What sort of help would you like?"
Serreg thought about it for a moment, and an idea struck him
But before he spoke, Targus, seeing the glint in Serreg's eye, interjected, "Understand that I will not fight your battles for you. I am the supreme general, and while I give my troops the best odds of winning, it's up to foot soldiers like you to do the fighting."
Curse the luck, thought Serreg, selfishly ignoring the amazing good fortune that had caused his frantic plea to catch the ear of a god.
He thought some more, carefully formulating his answer.
"What I would like," he said, "is a weapon. A physical weapon, because spells do no good. Something small and light, like a knife or an ice pick, because I haven't had military training. I want this weapon to inflict great damage. And I also want it to grant me powers."
Targus pursed his lips knowingly and replied, "Powers? Plural? No. Were I to grant you that, we'd be here all night listening to you prattle off your avarice. Choose one, and be quick."
"I want it to polymorph me, changing me from one creature to another, in such a manner that those things out there can't steal the magic away."
Targus grinned broadly.
"As you wish," he said. "You'll have your weapon. But be careful, because it likes to draw blood." He bowed ever so slightly. "Good evening, good luck, and I hope you live up to your potential."
The giant collapsed in on himself, leaving nothing but the echo of a thousand screams and war cries, and a cloud of droplets suspended five feet off the ground. Serreg saw a dagger hanging in the center of the mist. He grasped the handle, surprised at the warmth of the supernatural fog. As he pulled the dagger closer to inspect it, three things struck him at once.
It was a beautiful dagger, exquisitely wrought and decorated.
His hand was covered with warm blood.
The night insects started chirping again.
Until that instant, Serreg hadn't even realized they'd stopped. His intuition told him that the entire
conversation had occurred outside of time, suspended on a whim by Targus. That meant the demons were close....
Serreg heard a grunting moan, and saw a dark bulk rise in the darkness, blotting out the stars behind it. He turned the dagger blade down in his hand and gripped it tightly. The thing came closer. Its four arms waved gracelessly, tracing embers of magical fire in the night. It abruptly turned toward him in a manner that indicated it had noticed him in his hiding place. The creature made a few mystic passes with its arms, spinning an incantation. A web of phosphor spread all around the monster, Serreg, and the cleft, then vanished.
Concealment, thought Serreg. It wants me all to itself.
The creature paused, swimming back and forth for a moment, and Serreg had the distinctly unpleasant sensation that it was studying not him, but his dagger.
Then without further preamble or caution, it charged straight for him. It seized Serreg's torso with two of its four arms and hauled him out of the cleft, while the other two grabbed his head to maneuver it toward the gaping, spiny-toothed maw.
Serreg desperately plunged the dagger into the creature's mouth, sinking the weapon up to the hilt into the pulpy flesh behind the teeth. The thing screamed, an unholy and utterly alien monotone cry, and suddenly the creature was eight times as large, filling the sky, and Serreg fell from its loosened grip.
How did he get so high up? He had no time to consider that, so instead he spun his tail around to land on his feet, and ran. The ridge seemed much larger than it had before. He leaped for a rock outcropping, landing nimbly on his forelegs and pushing off with the back, just in time to—
Forelegs? thought Serreg.
He quickly scurried behind the outcropping and hid. The moaning creature nursed its wound on the far side of the rock, so Serreg chanced a look down at his paws.
Paws?
He had two furry forelegs ending in paws. He lifted one up, flexed the claws, and stared. His tail twitched in irritation and confusion, because he—
He looked over his shoulder to see haunches and a lashing tail, all covered in soft tabby fur.
He was a cat.
A cat? Well, he hadn't wished to be a cat, never told the dagger to change his shape, but it had anyway. Fair enough. But where was the dagger? For that matter, where were his clothes? He looked at his claws again, and sure enough, one of the claws on his right paw glinted merrily in the moonlight.
He smiled. All he had to do was change into a sparrow and dart out of there. A sparrow would be very tough to follow, and he knew he could out fly one of those things. Heck, once he got away from the immediate vicinity, he could become a falcon and really put some speed on.
He looked at his claw and gave the mental command: Change me into a sparrow.
Nothing happened.
I command you to change me into a sparrow.
Nothing. Did it have to be verbal?
"Rreeooowwf, he said as quietly as he could.
Again, he started to panic. How could he command the dagger if he could only howl like a cat? But wait—he'd never asked to be a cat in the first place, it just—
A great, cold hand with two opposable thumbs plucked him off the ground. He wriggled and writhed,
knowing how hard it is to hold an uncooperative cat, but the thing held him fast. Three other arms spun spells of divination upon him to discern the cause for his change, and perhaps to try to undo it.
The vile creature gave up quickly, however, much to Serreg's dismay. Instead, the maw opened wide to swallow Serreg whole. Desperately the tabby archwizard attacked the creature's thick skin, using his pathetic little weapons of tooth and nail. It was like trying to bite a wall, or scratch stone. He looked up as the mouth drew closer, filling his vision, and amidst a new frenzy of struggle, he felt himself change again.
The world shrank around him, and the powerful hand that held him diminished in size and strength, shifting quickly from an iron band around his body to an unfriendly mitt trying to scratch at his ribs. Serreg's instincts told him he was at an awkward angle, his body too vertical and too close to the ground, so he beat his wings rapidly to get his center of gravity back under control.
The evil abomination gaped at the sudden transformation, four arms wide in shock and spiny mouth formed into a perfect ugly circle. Serreg hissed, craning his head forward. He flew upward a few dozen feet and settled upon a rocky pinnacle. The creature rotated its loathsome body to follow his movements.
Quickly, Serreg looked down to take inventory. Two reptilian claws clutched the promontory, and two leathery wings hung at either side. A wyvern?
Thus distracted, Serreg did not see the beast gather itself and lunge at him. Its massive bulk impacted Serreg's body, and the fangs bit into his exposed side. Four arms scrabbled for a grip on Serreg's scaly hide. Reflexively, Serreg thrust with his stinger tail, bones and sinews straining with the strike. As the poisoned barb flew past his head, he caught the briefest metallic
glimmer, then the stinger plunged deep into the monster's body, pumping poison as it went.
The creature grew in size again, and Serreg slipped through its outstretched arms and fell. Looking down, he saw the ridge slope clearly, and he knew an impact was coming. He pinwheeled his arms to right himself, hit the ground hard, and tumbled and slid for more than thirty feet before coming to an abrupt and painful stop against a bush.
He looked up. The abyssal monstrosity writhed in the air, black blood dribbling down its side. It turned toward him, bellowing in its singular voice, and Serreg tightened his grip on the dagger. Thankfully, he hadn't lost his grip on it when he fell. The beast moved toward him, but then abruptly deflated of menace and sank a few feet toward the ground. The arms started to retract, then grew limp. Its barbed tail swished a few times back and forth, then quivered and was still.
His dagger held defensively in front of him, Serreg moved back up the rocky slope. The beast hung above the ground, dead, yet still suspended seven feet in the air. Its arms dangled and bloody drool oozed its way out of the grotesque mouth, but the tail was still raised.
Serreg inspected the creature—as much as he could without getting too close. He saw the gaping wound his stinger had left, saw the single scratch on one of the wrists from his claw. The blood from the mouth attested to his first dagger thrust.
Odd that I can see so clearly in the dark, he thought.
He looked down at his hand. It was a hand all right, but not human—rougher, more powerful. His clothes were his, somewhat the worse for wear though nonetheless the robes of an archwizard, but they no longer fit properly.
His callused fingers found a wide face with low cheekbones and a sloping forehead. Small tusks sprouted from his mouth under a snotty nose.
"An ore?" he said, his voice muddy and unrefined. "Well, at leasht I can shpeak."
He cast a subtle detection spell, and discerned that the evil creature's concealing weave still stood. Confident that the others were unaware of the monstrosity's demise, Serreg limped back down the ridge, his dagger dangling from one tired hand.
He turned westward, doubling back on his original flight, hoping that the other things would search for him farther east. He increased his speed from a stagger to a walk, then to a jog, and even a bit better than that. Trotting along, he found he rather appreciated his ore body. His eyes pierced the darkness easily. The pain in ribs and wrist impeded him less than he expected; perhaps an ore's nervous system was partially inured to pain. He loped along at a good clip without getting appreciably winded. His muscles were tireless and his piggy snout with wide, flaring nostrils was ideally suited to bring in large quantities of air. True, the constant dribble of snot affronted his cultured upbringing, but he would happily endure that disgrace to get farther away from those nightmarish beasts.
He moved throughout the hours of darkness, ever to the west, finding a good steady pace he could maintain for hours. As he trotted, he contemplated the dagger in his hand and the position it had put him in, somehow blaming the dagger for his plight more than he blamed the hulking beast it had killed for him.
That the blade was priceless went without saying. It was a gift from a god—a god!—and though no one would ever believe the tale, its powers were unquestionable. It had slain a hulking brute that his magic hadn't even singed, and it had changed his shape, what, three
times already? If only he could learn how to control it, what power he would have! Soar up to Karsus Enclave on the wings of a nighthawk, sneak through the city streets as a cat, change to a gnat to penetrate a gap in any locked window—there was a thought! A gnat with the intelligence and magical powers of an archwizard! No secret would be safe. All those other archwizards, scheming and plotting against Delia, trying to destroy his enclave and his people, their secrets would be exposed, their plans foiled! But it all depended on that damnable dagger....
Serreg tried to force the weapon to change his shape for him. He tried every incantation he knew, and as many religious supplications as he could bring to mind or invent. He expressed the desire as a wish, a command, and a bargain; verbally, mentally, and to the best of his ability, kinesthetically. He tried drawing his own blood with the blade to activate the ability, as well as spitting on it, sweating on it, kissing it, and eventually, cursing at it. Nothing worked.
By daybreak, after a full night's run and endless hours spent beating his will fruitlessly against the magic blade, Serreg was ready to quit. He'd survived those monsters he had unwittingly unearthed, so why bother with this thrice-damned intractable item anymore? His tired brain could think of no reason. He'd just throw the blade, sling it hard, get it away from him, be done with it. The dagger seemed to squirm in his grasp. He clenched his fist tight, cocked his arm, took a deep breath—
And stopped.
He couldn't throw it away. He was still an ore.
His shoulders sagged, and he sat heavily on the ground, head drooping in defeat.
Until he figured out how to change himself back into a human, he had to keep the blade. So long as he
was an ore, any human he met would kill him on sight. The two races had been warring for three millennia already, and they wouldn't stop just for him. He had no magic left to teleport to his laboratory, and even if he did, the other mages would roast him alive. He'd be overwhelmed. And he certainly wasn't going to stoop so low as to try to move in with an ore tribe. He had to keep the dagger until he discovered how to make it work for him, instead of just working on him.
But that would have to wait for later. He was tired, injured, and the sun was too bright. So thinking, he lay back, flung his left arm over his eyes, and fell asleep, his right hand clutching the dagger to his chest.
He had no idea how long he'd been asleep, nor why he felt the sudden need to roll, hard, but he did so, only to see the tip of a spear imbed itself firmly in the dirt a scant few inches in front of his eyes.
He heard someone yell, "You jackass! You woke it up!" and a grunt as the spear was pulled out of the ground into the too-bright sky.
Hunters, militia, a stray farmer, Serreg didn't know. He didn't even have a clear idea where in Netheril he was.
But he knew his life was in mortal danger. His ore glands fired amazing amounts of adrenaline into his system, giving his senses such sensitive clarity that his ears rang in pain. The battle frenzy was a new sensation to the normally intellectual archwizard, one he was neither mentally nor emotionally, prepared for. Forgetting his magical training, he leaped to his feet bellowing a mighty battle cry. He saw a silhouette nearby, dark against the painful blue sky, with a spear held defensively. Serreg charged. Ore instinct,
or perhaps an ingrained warrior's training granted by the dagger, urged Serreg to roll under the spear. He dived, tumbled forward, and his feet came back in under him. Serreg lunged upward again, the full weight of his body and force of his legs burying the dagger deep into the hapless human's abdomen. Serreg heard him grunt in pain—
And the archwizard was in an entirely different world.
A great shapeless mass moved slowly toward him, so Serreg slid gracefully aside to let it pass. His mind expanded freely, seeing everything all around, as if his entire being was a single pupil designed to take in the whole world.
This is interesting, thought Serreg, hanging effortlessly in space a great distance above the surface of the world.
A baritone thunder rolled through the air, but Serreg saw that the sky was a cloudless blue, so he flew closer to the sources to investigate.
He was tiny.
Four towering hunters stood with spears, moving slowly as though through water. One was falling, doubled over, and Serreg saw drops of blood dripping from his belly, gracefully descending to the ground. On a whim, Serreg zipped under the dying hunter, weaving his narrow body between the crimson orbs as they fell.
Serreg flew up and hovered high above the hunters as he analyzed the situation. He found that he could inspect his body without turning his head, which was good, since it appeared he could hardly turn his head at all. A rapier-thin emerald thorax extended out behind him, and six legs dangled beneath. His four wings made a steady swoosh-swoosh sound as he absentmindedly flapped them. The perspective was a
hard one, actually being an insect instead of studying one impaled upon a silver pin, but it did appear that he was a dragonfly.
And the dagger? Where was it?
He scanned his feet, but saw nothing. But then, right in front of his eyes, he saw a glint of steel. One of his mandibles, of course. He still had his weapon.
He checked the hunters again. One tended to his fallen comrade. The others looked around nervously, wondering to where the ore had vanished. Serreg would have smirked, had he been able to with his chitinous jaws. Instead, he turned back toward the west, keeping a careful watch for any predatory swallows or tree frogs.
As a dragonfly, Serreg didn't feel like he was going particularly fast, but he dismissed that to the apparent dilation of time and the very real dilation of the world. He knew he was out flying the best speed he could have made as a human. But what bothered him as he continued on his way, was how he would eat.
He started to feel a gnawing hunger. Had it been minutes or hours that he'd been a dragonfly? Serreg had no way of knowing. The hunger felt,different as an insect than it did as a human, a simpler sensation, but hunger just the same. And he had no idea what dragonflies ate.
Insects to him were pests to be swatted, or specimens to be inspected in a gallery, or a jar full of parts in an apothecary's lab. Beyond that, he'd never bothered with them. So what did insects eat? He thought about it, then decided he'd have to test potential foods. He knew different insects ate the pollen from flowers, others ate the plants themselves, and some even ate other insects. He also knew some ate dead animals or other, more repugnant substances, but he willfully neglected to pursue those lines for the moment.
He touched down on a stalk of wild grass waving in the breeze. It didn't look appetizing, but he tried to bite it anyway.
Nothing.
He flew farther until he found a wildflower, glowing brightly to his dragonfly eyes, but again, it didn't look appealing, he had no idea how exactly to bite it, and when he did manage something, it just wasn't right.
So he turned toward attacking insects. He lunged at a grasshopper, but it was far too large to handle. A gnat was too small to catch, and a fly too fast. Finally, he managed to catch a small fluttering insect—he didn't even know what it was called—and crushed it in his jaws. The meal filled his mouth—
For a split second. He found himself sitting on his haunches, surveying the landscape from a sizeable elevation. He drew his lips into a self-satisfied sneer, smearing a small insect across one jagged fang. He swiveled his head to look at the world from this new perspective, but his eyes did not really see anything. His attention turned inward, feeling the raw power that coursed through his veins. He stretched out his great leathery wings, and gave an experimental beat. He drew a deep breath into his cavernous lungs, and exhaled a stream of pungent acid.
Oh, yes. He was a dragon.
And he was hungry.
He sniffed the air, catching the musky scent of wild oxen on the breeze. His eagle-sharp eyes saw them half a mile away. They hadn't noticed his sudden transformation. No surprise, it's not every day that a dragonfly becomes a dragon. He folded his wings, and stalked them, catlike, through the grass. The herd startled at the noise of his approach. Serreg roared and took wing, moving like a thunderclap, low, heavy, and powerful. He circled the herd once, then struck the largest of the
beasts with his lethal breath, liquefying its head as it ran.
He landed with a flurry of wings and a heavy thud as the herd stampeded away, screaming in animal panic. Serreg walked up to his kill and raised one paw to rend the meat when a glint of steel caught his eye. The foreclaw on his right front leg shone in the sun, carved with elegant glyphs.
The dagger.
His superior dragon intellect immediately understood: every time heti stabbed something, the dagger changed him.
Carefully Serreg set that black-scaled foot back down, and worked on the carcass with his other leg and his formidable teeth. He'd had no idea how much he would enjoy cracking bones between his jaws. Maybe it was part of being a dragon, or maybe he'd finally tapped into a heretofore unreachable part of his soul. Whichever the case, Serreg liked it.
The ox devoured, Serreg sat for a moment and contemplated the sky. Just as the dawn had driven away the darkness, so too had the day replaced the horrors of the past night with a bright new future. Life was looking good. Let those vile creatures sap the strength of the enclaves. Serreg didn't need them anymore.
Still, archwizards were not people to be trifled'with, and they did not take kindly to dragons, no matter what their lineage. Serreg took one last look toward the skies where he'd grown up, then faced west again.
Serreg eventually found a luxurious swamp in which to lair. He exulted in feeling the mud between his talons. It was far better than the remote and isolated life on Delia's rock.
But what to do with the dagger? He didn't want it on his forepaw anymore. He didn't even really want it around. It reminded him of his pathetic past, and the last gasp of his cowardice. In the end, he did as dragons do: he used it to start his hoard.
Carefully placing his right foreclaw in his mouth, he closed his teeth upon it. He clenched it tight, then flexed his paw and neck, prying the claw out of his toe. Fiery pain raced beneath his magical fingernail, his limb quivered with nerves begging for peace, but he persisted. The dagger tried to hold to his tender flesh, but then he heard a ripping sound as he disembedded it. With one final pull, one last flash of pain, it was free.
And so was he.
Serreg turned his head to the corner of the grotto that he had chosen for his stash, and let the dagger drop from his teeth. It struck the muddy floor with a ring, a keening metallic sound of frustration, and bounced far higher than physically justifiable. It bounced again, and again, and again. Eventually it landed, rocking from side to side, and the vibrations rotated the blade around until it pointed accusingly at Serreg.
With the back of his left paw, Serreg nudged the blade aside, but the push carried the blade around until it pointed at him again.
Complain if you want to, thought Serreg, I have no further need of you.
Limping slightly on his right forepaw, he moved to the entrance to his grotto.
I've studied long enough, he thought. Time to put that knowledge to use.
So thinking, he soared into the sky.
GORLIST'S DRAGON,
Elaine Cunningham
The Year of the Trumpet (1301 DR)
Ten-year-old Gorlist stared with open-mouthed dismay at the gift that commemorated the end of his word-weaning years. His reward for surviving a decade in the squalid outer caverns of Ched Nasad, for endless hours struggling with the intricacies of the dark elven speech, hand cant, and written language, was a book. A book!
His tutor, T'sarlt, watched expectantly. Gorlist snatched up his gift and hurled it across the room.
Folding his thin arms, he leveled a mutinous glare at the old drow and said, "Soldiers don't have the time to read."
"The time, or the wit?" T'sarlt snapped. "Raise your aspirations, boy! Some drow are bred for battle fodder, but you—you are a wizard's son."
According to the laws and customs of the drow, Gorlist was no such thing. The wizard Nisstyre had - sired him and sent T'sarlt to teach and care for him, but Gorlist was Chindra's son—Chindra, the gladiator who'd won free of the arena and worked her way up the ranks of the city's elite guard.
Chindra's son, Gorlist concluded sullenly, should have had a dagger as his word-weaning gift.
T'sarlt retrieved the book from the rough stone floor and placed it open on the table. He tapped the faintly glowing markings with a spidery black forefinger.
"You are entering your second decade of life. It is time for you to learn simple spells."
The boy glanced at the book and quickly snatched his gaze away. The magical markings seemed to writhe and crawl on the page, like maggots feasting upon a rotting glowfish. He repressed a shudder and twisted his lips in an imitation of the sneer Chindra wore whenever talk turned to such matters.
"Magic," he scoffed, "is for weaklings. Give me a sword, not bat dung and bad poetry."
T'sarlt pushed the book closer and said, "There is power here, and Nisstyre wishes you to wield it."
"So? All of Nisstyre's wishes won't keep Chindra from putting this book in the privy and making good use of its pages."
"If that's your measure of this book's worth," he said in a voice tense with controlled rage, "you are as stupid as you are arrogant."
Gorlist shrugged aside the insult and said, "Any education worth having comes from blood spilled, not books read. You can tell that to my mother's cast-off parzdiametkis."
The vulgar term, most commonly employed in a brothel, found the limits of T'sarlt's patience. The old
drow lunged for the boy, his long, skinny fingers curved like a raptor's talons.
Gorlist easily danced aside. He lifted one hand in a rude gesture as he darted out of the cave they shared with Chindra. He scampered down the narrow stone alley, leaping over piles of street offal and dodging his tutor's grasping hands.
T'sarlt soon gave up the chase and clung, wheezing, to one of the twin stalagmites framing the entrance to Dragonsdoom Tavern, the brothel that provided Gorlist with his colorful vocabulary, as well as the occasional coin.
"Gorlist, come back at once!" T'sarlt called. "You'll be whipped for this!"
No doubt he would be, but not badly. Since Gorlist could write a little, he could send word to his father. T'sarlt was too old to take on another drow youngling. If Nisstyre dismissed him, where would he go?
Perhaps Chindra would keep him on. A sly grin twitched Gorlist's lips at the thought of his tutor spit-polishing Chindra's boots. Chindra had never shown much interest in T'sarlt, or in Gorlist, for that matter, but Gorlist took pride in his mother's steadfast refusal to relinquish him to Nisstyre.
"Males claiming children? Can't be done," she'd proclaimed. "Sets a bad precedent."
The memory of his mother's clipped, military tone brought a smile to the boy's face. What need had he of books? Chindra couldn't read or write, but she had her own mark, and those who mattered knew and feared it.
Gorlist reached inside his tunic and ran his fingers over the crude pendant hidden there—a small, flat stone, onto which he'd scratched Chindra's mark. To him, it was as fine as any matron's gems.
He squeezed through the crowd lined up outside Zimyar's Exotic Mushrooms. Beyond the market cavern
lay a maze of tunnels, lairs for Underdark beasts and would-be ambushers. Gorlist started running as soon as he broke free of the crowd, his mind fixed upon glories ahead.
He made his way to the guard's training cavern without incident. Skirting the main entrance, he climbed the rough-hewn rocks to a small, secret cave high above the battleground. There he'd spent many stolen hours, watching the females train.
Two soldiers were on the field, moving together in a tight circle. His eyes went immediately to the taller female, a well-muscled drow whose shaved head was shiny with sweat and oil. That could be none but Chindra. Other females valued the beauty of flowing white hair, but Chindra refused to give her opponents the benefit of a hand-hold.
A happy sigh escaped Gorlist as he watched his mother. T'sarlt had often chided him for that dangerous affection.
"The heart is a subtle weapon," he'd cautioned. "It will be turned against you, if you're fool enough to hand it to another drow."
Gorlist cared nothing for his tutor's cautions. He loved everything about Chindra—her fierce grace in battle, the tune she whistled whenever she headed for the taverns, the welter of scars on her forearms. He'd asked her about them during one of her rare good moods, and was rewarded with the longest conversation they'd ever shared.
"Tangled as Lolth's web," she'd said proudly, turning her arms this way and that to display her battle scars. "Get in knife fights, and you're going to get cut. The skill is managing how and where, and how deep. You'll learn the way of it, if you live long enough."
"Will you teach me?" he'd asked eagerly.
That had amused her.
"Are you so anxious to bleed, drowling? Watch to learn, learn to wait. The rest will come in time."
That very day he'd followed Chindra to the practice field for the first time. After all, where better to watch and learn?
Gorlist took his treasures from a cranny in the rock wall: a broken whetstone and a once-rusty sickle he'd found in a garbage heap. He settled down and began to smooth the stone over the slim, shining blade as he watched the battle below.
The fighters were testing new weapons—thick gloves tipped with curving metal talons. Gorlist watched, heart pounding, as the two females circled and slashed. The smaller female took a vicious swipe at Chindra. She leaned out of reach and countered with a quick, snatching movement that, captured her opponent's hand. She clenched, forcing her opponent's claws to bite into her own hand. Chindra's claws followed, disappearing into her opponent's flesh.
The smaller drow shrieked and slashed out with her free hand. Chindra repeated the capture, then threw their entangled hands out wide, yanking the female toward her. Her forehead slammed into the other drow's face. The female's nose flattened into a sodden mess, and her eyes rolled up until the whites gleamed.
Chindra held her grip while the fighter slumped senseless to the stone floor. Then she peeled off her gloves, one at a time, leaving the claws embedded in the warrior's fisted hands. She dropped the gloves and the female together, as casually as she might discard a soiled garment. It was a gesture of magnificent contempt, and the watching fighters stomped and roared their approval.
Their chant swept Gorlist to his feet. He stomped and hooted along with the warriors, shaking his crescent blade overhead in imitation.
When the applause had died down and the fallen fighter hauled off to the healers, he regarded his small scythe and to his surprise and delight, saw that it was ready. The dull-bladed sickle meant for harvesting mushrooms boasted keen edges on its inner and outer curves. It was not the heart-seeking dagger of his dreams, but it was a start.
Perhaps, he thought with a grin, he would test its edge on the bindings of T'sarlt's wretched book.
Sickle in hand, Gorlist slid down the wall. He sauntered down the stone passage, practicing a soldierly swagger. He was nearly home when he heard a faint rustling in a side tunnel—not a foot passage, but a fetid, steep-sloping midden shoot.
Kobolds swarmed out of the midden hole like the rats they resembled. There were at least seven of the two-legged lizards, each nearly as tall as the drow child. Confident of an easy kill, they came on, yapping excitedly.
Gorlist planted his feet in unconscious imitation of his mother's battle stance. He ducked under the first kobold's grasping hands and drew his sickle across its soft-scaled belly. He danced back a step or two, then lunged back to slash the nearest kobold's snout. Before the startled creature could react, Gorlist reversed the blade's direction. The curved tip bit into the kobold's neck and hooked its wind pipe.
The creature fell, gurgling and pawing its ruined throat. Gorlist let out a savage whoop and threw himself at the next foe, slashing in joyous frenzy.
The kobold pack did what kobolds do when faced with unexpected resistance: they fled, squeaking curses. Gorlist stomped on a ratlike tail and cut the creature across the spine. It arched its back in a spasm of agony. The drow child seized one of the kobold's small horns, pulled the head back, and drew the sickle across
its throat. He threw the body aside and sprinted after the others. Launching himself into a flying tackle, he brought down one of them—who, in its frantic scramble to escape, tripped one of its kin.
When both slaughters were completed, Gorlist staggered to his feet. He leaned against the stone wall, his breath coming in ragged gulps. For the first time in his life, he felt fully alive.
The wondrous battle frenzy ebbed all too soon. Gorlist took stock of the situation. His tunic and hands were sticky with kobold blood, and he ached in every joint and sinew. Remarkably, he was unmarked by any kobold tooth, claw, or weapon.
Gorlist all but danced back to Chindra's cave. His tutor glanced up sharply. Before he could comment, Chindra strode in. Her brief, dismissive glance sharpened into a soldier's accessing gaze.
"How much of that blood is yours?" she asked the child.
Gorlist's chin came up proudly and he answered, "None."
"Whose, then? No merchant's whelp, I'm hoping. Too short of coin to pay the blood price." "It's kobold blood."
Her crimson eyes widened. "Dead kobolds in the tunnels. Yours?" In response, he brandished his still-bloody sickle. A grin split Chindra's face.
"A fine harvest!" she crowed. "Five kobolds! How did you learn to fight?" "By watching you."
Because that seemed to please her, he gave her the salute he had seen so many times, that of one soldier to another.
Her hand flashed toward him like a striking snake and caught his wrist.
"Not that," she said firmly. "Never that. No male may give or get honor among the guard." Her eyes grew reflective. "But there are other ways..." Her gaze focused, snapped to his face. "You would be a fighter?"
He managed a fervent nod.
"Then you will learn as I did. Come."
She strode through the market, Gorlist following like a small shadow. Excitement filled him, moving him beyond a child's enthusiasm for adventure—he had long desired to see the gaming arena—and into the wonder of unforeseen possibilities. Chindra was a soldier, so of course that was Gorlist's goal. But she had first been a renowned gladiator. He would match her fame, and follow her path from its beginning.
Gorlist padded silently after her down a series of side tunnels, narrower than those leading to the practice arena. He did not have to be told why: The better to defend the city should any of the arena's beasts escape— or for that matter, if by some marvel the arena fighters decided to band together in common purpose.
The stone corridor opened, and the arena lay before them. It was a huge chamber, ringed with tiers of seats. Slim walkways crossed overhead. Gorlist gave the structures scant attention. His eyes were fixed on the arena floor. Wondrous beasts, creatures never seen in the tunnels around Ched Nasad, fought and died there.
So, apparently, did drow gladiators. Several fighters sprawled on bloodied stone. Two others hacked at a hideous, gray-skinned creature with long limbs and astonishing powers of regeneration. A severed arm writhed on the arena floor, forgotten. The torn shoulder knitted. A bud of flesh appeared and blossomed into five gray petals. Those grew claws, which flexed and wriggled as a hand took shape at the end of the swift-growing new arm.
"I learned here," Gorlist's mother said, "and so will you."
Joy flared bright in the young drow's heart.
"I will win every fight," he promised.
She laughed and clapped him on the shoulder—a soldierly gesture Gorlist had never seen her offer a male. It was the proudest moment of his young life.
Chindra scanned the warriors who stood to one side, then raised her hand in a hail.
"Slithifar, Mistress of the Ring!"
A tall female looked up, frowning. Something about her gave Gorlist the impression of many snakes, melded by some mad wizard into a single dark elf. Her white hair was plaited into several braids, and she carried a bone-handled whip of leather thongs. Her face was as angular as a pit viper's, her gaze as flat and soulless.
But she lifted one hand in recognition and strode over to meet the newcomers. She and Gorlist's mother clasped forearms in a fighter's salute.
"What brings Chindra back to the games?" the ring mistress asked. "Come to show these younglings how fighting's done?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes," she responded, dropping her gaze to the child at her side.
Slithifar's white brows lifted. "And who is this bloody urchin?"
"Gorlist, Son of Chindra," the soldier said. "He is blooded indeed, and none of it his own."
The ring mistress ran a finger along Gorlist's stained tunic then touched it to her lips.
"Kobold?"
"Seven of them," Chindra lied proudly. "Hacked into fish bait with a mushroom sickle."
Slithifar slid a calculating gaze over the drow child, then turned back to his mother and said, "A worthy feat."
"Worth much," Chindra countered.
They went on in that vein for quite some time. Gorlist wandered over to the railing to watch the fighting. One drow still battled the gray monster, too intent to notice the severed limb slithering up behind him. Long knobby fingers seized the unwitting drow's ankle. The fighter let out a yelp of surprise and pain. Gorlist laughed with derisive delight.
A strong hand landed on his shoulder, lacquered nails biting into his flesh. He jumped, then grimaced. His response, and more importantly, his inattention, was too like the drow below to suit his pride.
"A troll," Slithifar said. "Good for training. It heals as fast as our younglings can slice it, and it eats those who lose."
Gorlist shifted his free shoulder in an impatient shrug. What was that to him?
His mother chuckled and said, "You see? He is not afraid."
Slithifar spun him to face her, and her red eyes licked over him like twin flames. "He will be," she promised.
Without looking up, she tossed a small bag to Chindra, who caught it deftly. She saluted the ring mistress and sauntered off. Gorlist started after her, but the butt of Slithifar's whip slammed into his gut, driving the air from his body.
"You are mine now," she said. "You go and do on my bidding. Do you understand?"
In truth, he did not. Then Chindra began to whistle her tavern tune. A trio of goblin slaves, scenting her good humor, held out importunate hands. She reached into the little bag, tossed the beggars a coin, and disappeared around the corner without a backward glance.
"She sold me," he said, his voice a raw whisper. "To you."
Tor more than you're worth... yet."
Gorlist noted her leer, and young though he was, he understood that, too. He returned her assessing gaze, letting her see his hatred and fury. Slithifar threw back her head and laughed with dark delight.
"Oh, you will earn your price and more! Come along, my little troll bait."
He followed, for he had no other choice. As he went, he tore the leather thong from around his neck and dropped the stone bearing Chindra's mark onto the rough path. Blinking strangely moist eyes, Gorlist forbade himself to mark where the stone fell.
His mother hadn't looked back, and neither would he.
The Year of Dreamwebs (1323 DR)
Years sped past. Gorlist grew as tall and well-muscled as Chindra .had been. And he'd kept the promise made the day she'd sold him into slavery: he had won every fight.
His grim dedication was upon him as he sparred with Murdinark, his training partner and the closest thing to a friend he'd ever had.
As was their custom, they loosened their muscles in a bout with quarter staves. Gorlist met Murdinark's flamboyant, sweeping attacks with precise movements, and answered with deft counters that got through his friend's guard more often than not. Gorlist was the better fighter, but the crowds loved Murdinark. He suspected they came not to see Murdinark fight, but to watch him bleed. Gorlist took great pride in the fact that he himself was unmarked, flawless. Undefeated.
Even as the thought formed, Murdinark twisted his staff apart into two shorter sticks, each tipped with a
metal hook. He raised both, caught Gorlist's descending staff in a cross parry, then whipped his arms out wide. The hooks sliced through Gorlist's staff like a knife through new cheese. The upper end clattered to the stone floor, and Murdinark kicked it aside.
"Hidden weapon. Well done," Gorlist admitted as he brought his shortened staff back into guard position.
"Your staff would have done that, too. You just had to know where to twist it."
"When did you intend to pass that information along?"
Murdinark flashed a cocky grin and said, "After I'd won, of course."
He tossed aside the divided staff and pulled a short sword from his belt. Gorlist followed suit. To his surprise, the taller drow hauled back his arm and launched the weapon into tumbling flight.
"Xipan-letharza!"he shouted.
An unseen hand tore the sword from Gorlist's grasp. It spun away, chasing after Murdinark's weapon. The two blades clashed together an instant before they hit the stone floor.
Intrigued, Gorlist strode over. The weapons lay together, as closely stacked as bodies in a commoners' crypt. He stooped to reclaim his sword. Murdinark's clung to it as if the two swords had been welded together.
He turned over the enjoined weapons, noting the engraved pattern—a macabre design depicting skeletons entangled in posthumous orgy. The metal revealed by the etching held a faint bluish tinge.
"The magnetic ore found in the lower levels of Drum-, lochi Cavern?" he asked.
Murdinark grinned and replied, "Good guess, especially for someone who's never set foot out of Ched Nasad."
His words held a slight taunt. Arena fighters who won their bouts earned certain privileges: trips to the bazaar, visits to taverns and festhalls, even an occasional surface raid. Gorlist preferred to exercise the winner's right to decline any female's advances, so he let the jibe pass and resumed his inspection of the sword.
"Where did you get this?" asked Gorlist.
"From Slithifar. A morning gift," he said with a wink.
A wave of revulsion swept through Gorlist. "How can you endure that two-legged snake?"
The other drow shrugged and said, "It means rewards and pleasures."
Gorlist's gaze raked across his friend's forearm, which bore a stylized mark.
"Such as being branded like a he-rothe?" Gorlist said.
"You'll wear her mark, you know," Murdinark replied, all the humor fled from his face. "The first time you lose."
"I haven't lost yet," Gorlist reminded him, "and I don't plan to."
His friend glanced around to see if any might be listening, then he leaned in close and said, "Then you'd better get yourself down to the beast pens."
That advice seized Gorlist's attention. Slithifar had been practicing a rather tedious economy when it came to the purchase of new and exotic creatures for the arena.
"What is it this time?" he said, affecting a boredom he did not feel. "A displacer beast? Another drider?"
"A dragon. From the surface."
For a long moment Gorlist stared at his friend. Murdinark confirmed that extraordinary news with a nod. Without a word, Gorlist strode toward the holding pens.
Finding the dragon was not too difficult. A creature from the World Above would require more light than Underdark dwellers. He followed the sputtering, smoking torches thrust into wall brackets to a deep, brightly-lit pit. When his eyes adjusted, an incredulous snort of laughter burst from him.
The dragon was a juvenile, no more than twenty feet long. Its scales were bright green and probably still soft enough to cut with a table knife. As Gorlist watched, a rat darted past. The dragon sucked air as if to fuel its breath weapon. Instead of poisonous gas, it loosed a hiss and some foul-smelling spittle.
Gorlist sneered. What did Slithifar expect the creature to do? Drown him in saliva?
He returned to his quarters to change his clothes in preparation for the midday meal—and to steal a few private moments to ponder Slithifar's latest test. To his surprise, Nisstyre awaited him there.
His wizard sire was slender and graceful, with long hair of an unusual coppery hue and features handsome enough to catch many a female's eye. His size and strength, however, would not carry him through a single bout in the arena. Despite all, Gorlist was not sorry that he resembled his mother.
"I have spoken to Slithifar," the wizard said without preamble. "She is not pleased with you."
"Slithifar's pleasure is the least of my concerns," Gorlist told him.
"Curb your arrogant tongue, boy! Without the mistress's favor, without magic, how can you expect to survive in this place?"
"Magic hasn't kept me alive these many years. This has."
Gorlist drew his mother's sword, won in combat and taken from her dead hand. "You'll have need of more subtle weapons," Nisstyre
said. "I have heard rumors of your coming bout. It is no small thing to battle a dragon." "A hatching," Gorlist sneered.
"Never dismiss a dragon. Even the young are cunning and resourceful."
"The only resources the beast can command are teeth and claws. It is too young to bring its breath weapon to bear."
"It would so appear," Nisstyre agreed. "But dragons are profoundly magical creatures. It is difficult to discern whether or not there's additional magic about them."
Gorlist began to understand.
"So Slithifar might have had the beast enchanted to appear younger than it is?"
"Entirely possible. You should expect to face the dragon's breath weapon. A red dragon's weapon is fire."
Gorlist's brow furrowed in puzzlement and he said, "But the dragon is green. I saw it."
"I do not doubt that you saw a green dragon," Nisstyre said, "but you will not fight one."
"Explain," Gorlist demanded.
"There are ways to steal secrets with magic. I took from Slithifar the knowledge of two dragons: one green, one red. The green dragon was a secret you were meant to learn. There is always a second deception, which would be the illusion of the dragon's youth, the absence of danger from its breath. Surely Slithifar expects you to see through these ploys. She would have you prepare to battle a dragon that breathes gas, while planning to send you against one that breathes fire."
Gorlist considered that. It made good sense, considering the source of the "secret." After all, Murdinark must have done something to earn those new weapons.
"You are certain?" he demanded.
"Where drow and dragons are concerned, little is certain. Slithifar went to great trouble and expense to bring dragons from the surface lands. She is confident you will lose."
"How do you know?"
Nisstyre smiled coldly and said, "She made a wager with me. My prize, should you win, is your freedom from the arena."
"I will win."
"Of course you will, because you will cheat."
Before Gorlist could object, Nisstyre held up a small crystal object: a miniature dragon skull, marvelously rendered and filled with dust that sparkled and spun.
"This holds a powder that quenches dragonfire. Throw it into the dragon's mouth if it draws breath to fuel its fires."
The fighter regarded the object with distaste and said, "I dislike using magic."
"I can assure you that Slithifar has no such scruples. In fact, she has no scruples at all."
Nisstyre pushed up a voluminous sleeve, revealing a slender arm bearing Slithifar's personal mark. Revulsion shuddered through Gorlist, deepening when he noted the furrows in the wizard's flesh. A faint glow emanated from the old wound, speaking of powerful and no doubt painful magic.
"An ever-burning acid quill," Nisstyre said succinctly. "Punishment for my attempt to purchase your freedom shortly after your mother sold you. You can expect this and worse, if you lose this fight."
"I don't plan to lose."
"No one plans to lose," the wizard snapped. "But he who doesn't plan to win will lose all the same. If you lose this fight, she can make you her parzdiamo.
Believe me when I tell you this is not a fate to be envied."
"You are free with your favors, father," Gorlist sneered. "Perhaps she had a son from you, as well?"
An icy film slid over Nisstyre's eyes, an expression Gorlist had seen on many an opponent's face when a well-aimed blow sundered a beating heart.
"A daughter," he said shortly. "You fought and killed her, fairly early in your arena career."
Something almost like remorse gripped the young fighter.
"I didn't know."
"And now that you do, you see how little such knowledge is worth," Nisstyre said, his tone ringing with the finality of a subject closed. He handed Gorlist the crystal skull, then drew out a second vial.
"You wear Chindra's sword," he said, "and so you know that every champion eventually falls. If you do not defeat the dragon, drink this poison. It will not hurt you, but some hours after Slithifar claims her prize, she will die screaming, and none will know why."
Gorlist accepted both items and said, "With that image in mind, I almost regret my coming victory."
"Your pride will strengthen your arm," Nisstyre said, "but remember that every drow uses hidden weapons. The wise fighter employs his enemies' as well as his own."
The fighter regarded Nisstyre for a long moment, waiting for him to add detail to that cryptic advice. After several moments, the answer came to him. His lips curved in a small, secret smile. Perhaps there was something to be said for magic, after all.
"Chindra would never have fathomed so subtle a revenge," the wizard said.
The young fighter responded with a grim smile and said, "So? Who is this Chindra, and what is she to me?"
On the day of Gorlist's bout, he would have no one but Murdinark help him prepare. His friend carefully clipped Gorlist's hair close to his head, then helped him into his leather armor. Murdinark tested the edge of Gorlist's weapons and slid them into sheaths attached to the fighter's forearms, boots, and weapons belt. Throughout it all, he freely betrayed Slithifar's secrets.
"... trainers say the dragon fights primarily with its teeth. Its forepaws have but little reach. Avoid its bite, and you will fare well."
"... the wings have been trimmed to keep it from flying, so you have nothing to fear from the wing claws..."
"... should take this spell scroll for a bubble of pure air, in case the dragon can breathe a poison cloud..."
"Enough, Murdinark," Gorlist said at last.
He managed a smile and held out his hand for a comrade's grasp. Murdinark took the offered hand in both of his own. His smile froze, and his eyes widened.
"Damn me for a drider, I almost forgot!" He reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of gloves. He held one open for Gorlist and said, "Very fine leather, excellent grip. They belong to Slithifar." He grinned. "I thought it might please you to wear them until you can replace them with gloves of dragonhide."
Gorlist joined the drow in a dark chuckle and donned the gloves. With one hand on the hilt of Chindra's sword, he swaggered into the arena. A chorus of ululating cheers greeted him. A full house.
Smudge pots ringed the arena, and goblin slaves tended the coals. Gorlist noted Nisstyre in the stands before colored smoke began to rise from the pots, obscuring the audience from his view. Since Gorlist
could see no purpose to the smudge pots, their presence made him uneasy.
Then the gate opened, and the dragon trotted into the arena. It was, as Nisstyre had predicted, a red dragon, considerably larger than the young green.
Gorlist threw a fulminating glare back at the arena gate.
Murdinark shaped the hand signals for, J did not know. This I swear.
The fighter sneered and turned to meet his foe. He drew Chindra's sword—
Which promptly flew from his hand.
The sword struck a ringing blow against a blue metal shield hanging on the wall.
"Oh, well done, Murdinark," Gorlist said softly.
He did not anticipate that his "friend" might have a third sword of magnetic metal, one with a hilt resembling Chindra's sword.
He drew another sword from the scabbard on his back. He'd fastened his own baldric, and that weapon he trusted.
Then the light hit him, and his confident smirk turned into a rictus of pain.
Terrible light filled the arena, bright as the sun that interrupted the joyous carnage of surface raids and sent the dark elves fleeing back to their deep places. Suddenly Gorlist understood the purpose of the smudge pots. The crowd sat in comfortable shadows, watching the fight though a filtering haze of smoke rising from magical braziers while he was forced to fight in near-daylight conditions.
So be it.
It took all his strength and will to endure the punishing illumination. He would not fall to light, pain, or treachery. Tears poured in rivulets from his burning eyes, but he did not so much as squint. He let out a roar,
one that reverberated through the cavern.
After a moment, Gorlist realized that another voice had joined his. The clamor of the crowd gave way to hushed anticipation. The roar of a dragon, even a soft-scaled youngling such as the one he faced, was sufficient to awe even that jaded crowd.
Gorlist fisted his watering eyes and struggled to focus. Blood-bright scales reflected light like vengeful moons as the dragon came on. It moved like a lizard, with an undulating crawl, but there was also something in its approach that reminded Gorlist of a displacer beast: the feline grace, the promise of a sudden pounce amplified by the wings held high and curved, ready for the downbeat that would launch it into flight. It hissed, catlike, revealing stiletto teeth.
But the dragon's first attack had nothing to do with teeth and talons. Its long red tail slashed toward Gorlist like a priestess's whip. The drow nimbly leaped, but the dragon was quicker still. The blow caught him in the air and sent him flying. Gorlist rolled to deflect the force of impact and came swiftly to his feet.
He lofted his sword and ran in. The dragon lifted an armored foreleg to accept the blow, then traced a deft, circular movement, eerily similar to the move a swordsman would make to disarm an opponent-provided that opponent had too tentative a grip on his weapon.
To Gorlist's surprise, the tactic worked. His sword flew from his hand. As he ducked the next swipe of the dragon's paw, he quickly smeared one glove against his cheek. The leather had been oiled. Wearing such gloves, he could never hold a sword for long.
He danced back, stripping off the gloves, burning with the twin fires of betrayal and pride. The dragon had been trained to know Gorlist's imposed weakness.
It had disarmed him, a feat no drow had ever been able to accomplish.
The dragon advanced. Gorlist ripped a shield from the wall and thrust it up to meet the coming blow. The creature's forepaw shredded the tough hide. Gorlist shield-smashed the snout, and the dragon spat teeth.
Roaring in pain and anger, it reared up, rampant. Crimson breastplates shifted with the swelling intake of air as the creature prepared a killing blast. Confident in his father's magic, Gorlist hurled the tiny crystal skull into the dragon's open mouth.
The dragon let out a mighty belch. What came from its mouth was not the smoke of a quenched flame, but a cloud of foul-smelling gas.
Gorlist staggered back, gagging and choking. His burning, streaming eyes perceived the huge red bulk closing in on him. He went for his dagger and found that it had been peace-bound into its sheath.
Silently cursing that new treachery, Gorlist rolled aside and came up holding a bloody tooth. He sliced the leather thongs with it and jerked the dagger out. He thrust up blindly as the huge weight descended, bearing him down into the darkness.
Gorlist awoke to a strange silence, interrupted only by the high-pitched whine in his ears. He shook his head to clear the noise, and instantly regretted it. Nausea swept through him. Strong hands helped him sit, steadied him while he was brutally sick.
When the sickness passed, Gorlist realized he was still in the arena. It had emptied of spectators. The dragon was dead, and the hilt of a long dagger protruded from between two chest scales. Gorlist's face burned, and he was covered in blood.
"Whose?" he demanded, indicating the red stain. A familiar face swam into focus, a narrow foxlike face surrounded by coppery hair. "Not yours, not the dragon's," said Nisstyre. "What, then?"
"If you can stand I will show you."
Gorlist nodded and allowed Nisstyre to help him to his feet. The first stiffness soon gave way, and he noted with relief that he seemed not badly hurt. With Nisstyre's support, he made his way over to the huge corpse.
"Look at the breast plates," the wizard directed.
Gorlist looked. The red scales were mottled, and beneath the bright hue was another color.
"This was actually a green dragon, painted to appear red in the bright light," Nisstyre said with obvious chagrin. "I did not believe Slithifar would take the deception to another level."
"So the powder that should have quenched a red dragon's fire-breath had no effect on the cloud of gas."
"A little, fortunately, or you would be dead. I suspect that you were also aided by the magical smoke. Its purpose was to hold the poison in the arena, protecting the crowd. Slithifar is clever," Nisstyre concluded ruefully. "The light served three purposes: to put you at a disadvantage, to disguise the dragon's true nature, and to provide a misleading explanation for the poison filter."
Gorlist nodded, taking it all in.
"My face," he said, touching his burning cheek.
"The pain will fade," Nisstyre assured him, "but the mark will not. I took the liberty of giving you a magical tattoo, one that will glow with colored light—all but invisible to any eyes but a drow's—that corresponds to the color of any nearby dragon."
"A tattoo?" Gorlist repeated, finding the notion strangely appealing. Scars were unacceptable, but a
magical tattoo that marked him as a dragon slayer? That he could wear with pride.
"Let it be a reminder to us both. Dragons are treacherous beasts, but it is possible to know their nature and predict their actions. This is not true of our most deadly enemy: our fellow drow. It is no longer safe for us in Ched Nasad."
Gorlist responded with a derisive snort.
His father waved the sarcasm away with a sharp, dismissive gesture and said, "I am without clan, which makes me anyone's meat. Once you leave the arena, you will leave behind the protection that successful gladiators enjoy. Do not think for a moment that Slithifar's wrath will not follow you."
"But what else is there? The wild Underdark?"
"The wide world," Nisstyre replied. "There are other males like us, other places we might go, other gods we might worship."
The blasphemy of that struck Gorlist like a fist, but the possibilities were intoxicating. He was still speechless when Murdinark approached, hands held out wide in a gesture of peace or surrender. As unobtrusively as possible, Gorlist gathered up a handful of dragon teeth and put the vial of poison among them. He clenched his hand, breaking the vial and coating the ivory daggers with the poison.
"Gorlist, I swear I knew none of it. It was Slithifar—"
Gorlist surged to his feet, slamming into Murdinark and driving them both several paces back. They struck the arena's stone wall. Gorlist shoved his forearm against the other drow's throat, all but cutting off his air. With his free hand he slammed a dragon tooth into Murdinark's upper arm.
"That's for the blue-metal sword."
He thrust a tooth though the fleshy part of Murdinark's nose.
"This for the tail swipe."
Another tooth went into the traitor's belly.
"And this for the peace-tied dagger."
Gorlist had several grievances and enough dragon teeth to lend emphasis to the recital. When only one was left, he lifted it to Murdinark's face, prepared to drive it into his eye.
After a moment, he released the gasping warrior and threw the tooth aside.
"Every drow has hidden weapons," he said dully, "and you were Slithifar's. No warrior melts down a sword because it was used against him. Go to Slithifar, tell her I will return to the arena in a tenday. I will challenge and defeat her, as I did Chindra."
He sent a quick glance toward Nisstyre, and received an almost imperceptible nod of approval. Every drow had hidden weapons. Gorlist would use Slithifar's against her. He gave the poisoned drow a final, contemptuous shove and followed his father out of the arena, away from Ched Nasad.
And he never glanced back.
THE KEEPER OF SECRET
Ed Greenwood
The Year of the Weeping Moon (1339 DR)
It was the eve of the Revel of Storms, and as the gods usually seemed to want such an evening to be, it was a warm, breezy night in crowded and stinking Waterdeep, with the sort of eager rising wind that meant rain was coming.
Laughter and eager chatter carried far on the scudding airs, and folk were out in plenty on the streets. Little of that restless wind, however, found its way past the smoke-blackened tapestries that shrouded the inner booths of Darth's Dolphyntyde, a tiny fish-and-quaff corner shop on south side Watchrun Alley, to stir the stinks of its deepest, darkest corners.
The fat bulk that most of Waterdeep knew rather unfavorably as Mirt the Moneylender sat in the rearmost booth, the awakened power of his ironguard ring tingling on one finger.
Blades in the ribs were a peril all too easily offered hereabouts not to spend the magic—and Darth himself was one who owed him coin, and would shed no tear if something befell Mirt in a dark corner of the Dolphyntyde.
The beads of the booth curtain rattled slightly, and Mirt's forefinger tightened on the trigger of the cocked and loaded handbow that lay ready in his lap, under the table.
"If you slay me now," a nasal voice came from the darkness beyond the curtain, "you'll see far less than what I owe. Far, far less."
"But I'll be rid of all the waiting in places like these for ye, Yelver," Mirt growled. "Ye're late—as usual."
"So arrive late yourself, and save the waiting," Yelver Toraunt hissed, sliding in through the curtains like a wary snake in an uneasy hurry. "I fear I've no welcome words for you this night, where're the gods smile."
"Ye can't pay off thy debt just now," Mirt said, his words a judgment rather than a question. "As usual."
Yelver Toraunt shrugged and said, "I can't find coin for so much as a raw eel to eat, just now. Rooms, clothes—all gone. Just Yelver, trying to scare up coins owed to him, so as to have something to hand to you. Times are hard."
The fat moneylender scowled, "So they say, loud and often, yet 'tis strange that not every last one o' my sometime business associates fail to hand me some o' the glint, when 'tis due. Thy tardiness'll cost ye an extra four dragons—and none o' thy shaved gold, neither!"
"Fair enough, I s'pose," Yelver replied with a shrug. "Blood-written?"
Mirt lifted his visible hand aside to reveal a waiting parchment, and thrust it forward with two fat and hairy fingers. Unhooding his lamp just one notch, he
illuminated a small arc of table that included the page and a needle-knife too short to be much of a weapon.
Yelver took up the knife, the moneylender's eyes never leaving him, and slowly and carefully pricked the tip of one forefinger and wrote out the added debt, adding his mark. Then he set the blade down with the same exaggerated care and stepped well back.
"And so?"
"And so," said Mirt, "a tenday hence, at dusk, we'll meet at the Yawning Portal, where ye'll render something in the way of payment—or I'll start seizing the trade goods ye forgot to mention, from the loft on Slut Street, Moro's cellar off Fish Street, and thy oh-so-secret hidehdlds in Sea Ward."
Yelver swallowed at the moneylender's grim ghost of a smile and muttered, "Aye. I'll do that. Some coins, at least."
"And if ye don't? And if, say, the city holds no hair of ye by sunset tomorrow?"
"Then it'll profit you little to go looking for my bones," Yelver replied. "Seek for whatever I've left with the Keeper of Secrets."
And he whirled away and was gone in a rattle of beads ere Mirt could ask more.
The Revel of Storms had been marked by a trio of furious, fast-racing cloudbursts that had snarled across the city near highsun, leaving behind a hot, damp evening trimmed around its edges with ominous rolls of distant thunder.
Mirt the Moneylender growled in tune with them as he tramped in out of the darkness, the well-oiled back door of the Yawning Portal swinging wildly in his wake. He ignored a disapproving look from one of
the sweat-cloaked cooking lasses and lurched past her with nary a leer—leaving her looking warily at his back and wondering what calamity he was bringing word of.
In truth, Mirt's dark temper was due to nothing more than a bad day of trade. Two debtors had paid off early, another two had vanished without trace, and four more were showing him empty hands and claiming poverty, while having no skills that Mirt could hire out to recoup his coins.
A season or so back, in the Company of the Wolf, swift sword thrusts would have handed such grinning-up-their-sleeves wastrels fitting rewards ... but just as he was no longer Mirt the Merciless, helm-lord of hireswords who'd been better disciplined blades than the grandest royal guards he'd seen anywhere, Mirt no longer handed out fitting rewards that carried high prices. His own neck, for instance.
No, 'twas time for a drink and a quiet demolition of Durnan across a lance-and-lion board, whilst muttering forth heartfelt venom on all wastrels, idiots, and unsympathetic gods.
There it waited under the lamplight at one end of the smooth-polished bar, all the pieces set out on the lancers and lions board, with Durnan's own battered tankard standing behind it, but—Mirt blinked—his old friend was across the room, grimly wrestling a slumped, gore-drooling body up out of a chair. Blood dripped from dangling fingertips as the lifeless man was swung up and under one of Durnan's stone-thewed arms. A lolling head faced Mirt for a moment: Yelver's.
"Spew of Sune!" Mirt snarled. "Dur, how-?"
"Throat dart," Durnan said. "Handbow, with his slayer sitting across from him. Young elf lass, by the one glimpse of an ear I had out the cowl of her cloak
as she whirled away." He waved his free hand down the room. "Tharl tried to bar her way—but she murmured magic and the cloak swallowed her and itself before he could lay hand or blade to her."
By then the innkeeper had reached his destination, and his hand fell to the ring of an all-too-familiar trapdoor, awakening the glow of the spell that let only him open it.
Mirt lurched forward sputtering, "Hey-hoy! Nay so swift! I can have his memories spell-read."
The innkeeper shook his head, and thrust a pointing thumb at something glistening that was starting to slide out of Yelver's left nostril, its black and slimy end questing obscenely into the air like a corkscrew seeking a bottle.
"See?" said the innkeeper. "Some jack who did darker business than yours with goodman Toraunt made him swallow a brainworm."
Black and glistening, the worm slid a little way out of Yelver's nose, swollen from its meal of man-brain.
"Seventeen dragons" Mirt snarled disgustedly, glaring at it. "Gone for good." He turned away to slam one hairy fist down on a handy table—and remembered something, and turned back to where Durnan was calmly feeding the corpse down a chute into the unseen depths below.
"Have ye ever heard of the Keeper of Secrets?" asked Mirt.
As Durnan peered at his friend, lifting a surprised eyebrow, Yelver Toraunt's dead limbs thumped and thudded on stone walls a long way down. Something that slobbered was waiting for their arrival. After the final, meaty landing, made a swift but noisy disposal of Durnan's offering.
Someone sitting at a table nearby winced at the gnawing sounds, and turned away.
"Gods below," a sailor muttered, "but I need more bellyfire after hearing that! Keeper!"
"The master's name is Durnan," the man seated across from him growled. "And orders aren't bawled here. Twice."
The sailor's reply was a sneer, but Durnan was already striding across the floor, every inch a prowling warrior. The flicker of the candle wheels overhead gleamed on the broad metal bracers he wore on his forearms, and on the hilts of the three ready daggers sheathed in each of them.
"What'll you have, thirsty guest?" he asked calmly. "Another tall tankard of Black Sail? Or something warmer?"
"Uh, er, I'll stick to Sail," the sailor said, a little sullenly.
"A sturdy quaff, to be sure," Durnan agreed, standing back with a smile.
The serving lass who stepped in front of him to place a glistening-with-condensation tankard and a half-moon of seed-spiced cheese in front of the man wore only a smile, a magnificent mane of startlingly blue hair, baggy breeches, and a bewildering tangle of dark tattoos that confused every gazing eye.
The sailor blinked away from her beauty and mumbled, "I've no coin for yon cheese. Take it aw—"
"Nay, nay," the tattooed woman said in a husky, smoky, surprisingly deep voice, patting his arm like a hungry whore." 'Tis free—of my making, and Durnan's compliments. We like to treat friends well here, lord of the waves."
The sailor shot her a swift, hard stare, seeking some sign of mockery, but found none. With a rather sheepish grunt, he raised the cheese in thanks, found himself looking into Durnan's half smile, and sought refuge in the tankard.
When he set down both his drink and a remnant of cheese to draw breath a swallow or three later, he looked almost surprised to still be unpoisoned, or free of bitter-salt or other trickery.
By then Durnan was setting an even larger tankard in front of Mirt, moving his first lancer forward to a fortress square, and saying, "I've been hearing about the Keeper of Secrets, Mur. A woman who deals with the desperate, they say. Her shop's in North Ward."
"North Ward? A fence? A pawn-hand? And why've I never heard of her?"
Durnan shrugged and said, "I guess you've not yet been desperate."
Mirt snorted. "Not a rat gnaws nor a chamber pot breaks in this city that I don't hear about—excepting guild inner circle whisper-moots and what goes on behind the walls of the nobles' towers. Ye know that, Dur."
The innkeeper shrugged, his eyes ranging around his taproom.
"She's not been in business long, I'd guess," he said.
Mirt moved a lion, and Durnan's fingers flipped up the trapdoor on the next square to reveal the grinning skull that meant he was bringing his lich into play—and dooming Mirt's piece—without the master of the Yawning Portal ever looking down at the board.
"She does her trade in dark rooms atop an empty all-mending shop on north side Sammarin's Street," he added quietly. "Rooms of locked iron bar gates that're never lit, so no eye ever sees her. Neighbors hear her singing at all hours—haunting airs and unfamiliar tongues, but a beautiful voice."
"Happy dancing hobgoblins," Mirt said, not believing a bit of it. He moved a lancer away from the revealed peril of Durnan's lich. "I can't believe I've never heard a breath of this..."
"Deafness comes to us all, in the end," Durnan murmured, moving his lich forward to capture a lion—and doom Mirt's throne-princess in the process.
The moneylender stared at his imminent defeat and sighed heavily.
"I yield me. Another game?"
The innkeeper smiled and took down his cloak, signaling to Luranla to take the bar. The tattooed lass gave him a smiling wave and wink, and turned to survey the room as Durnan had been doing.
Mirt stared up at his friend and asked, "Do I play that badly?"
"This night, yes. Yet we're friends, so I've agreed."
The moneylender blinked.
"To seek out your other game," Durnan replied, taking down a baldric heavy with warblades from a peg on the wall, slinging it over his shoulder, and reaching for its cross-buckles. "And visit this Keeper of Secrets."
-—<!£TO—'
"Your business, gentlesirs?"
The ever-so-slightly hollow voice seemed to come from their left. Down a speaking-tube.
Durnan looked at Mirt, and made the "your speech" gesture they'd both known he'd make. Words had never been his chosen weapons.
Still wheezing from their trip up the dark stairs, Mirt said, "Secrets. Yelver Toraunt told us to seek here."
"What sort of secrets are you interested in leaving with me? Did Yelver say anything of my rates?"
"Nay, he did not—and being upstanding merchants of Waterdeep, lady, we have no secrets," Mirt joked, assuming an air of exaggerated innocence.
Her answer was the snort he'd expected.
"Lady," he added, "we came here, at his bidding, to learn what secrets Yelver had left with you."
"And where is Yelver, to give me his permission to reveal anything to you?"
"Dead," Mirt replied. "Eaten."
"You can prove this, of course?"
Mirt looked at Durnan—who'd acquired a faint smile—and lifted his hand.
"Lady," the innkeeper replied, "I'm the keeper of the Yawning Portal, Durnan by name. Yelver was most definitely dead—murdered—when I put him down the shaft to where the beasts below lurk."
"Interesting," the voice observed.
Mirt waited, but the unseen woman said nothing more. He sighed, and waved at Durnan to unhood the lantern completely.
"Lady," he said, "Yelver was a business partner of mine—"
"So much I know, Mirt the Moneylender, and more— every detail of your dealings together, in fact. Know you something now: I keep secrets, not betray them. Even the secrets of the dead. Especially the secrets of the dead."
The lamplight showed the two men a vertical row of identical small, round holes—one of which must have been the speaking-tube in use—in a stone block wall before them. Stout—and chained and locked—iron bar gates blocked the way to closed stone doors to their left and right. The landing they stood on led nowhere else except back down the steep stair they'd ascended, to the street door below.
"Keeper of Secrets," Durnan asked, "let us understand each other. Is there any way we can learn what Yelver told us to seek here? The payment of a fee, perhaps?"
"No, goodman Durnan. I have no need of bribes, and if, as you say, Yelver Toraunt is dead, I can henceforth never trust anyone claiming to be him, or with a letter purporting to be from him. Unless, of course, you two are lying to me now—which makes you both untrustworthy in my eyes, and so not to be given Yelver's secrets in any circumstances."
"So there's no way we can ever learn Yelver's secret?" Mirt growled.
"None," the voice from the wall said lightly. "A good evening to you, good sirs."
"It seems we've slipped from 'gentle' to merely 'good,'" Durnan observed aloud, waving Mirt toward the stairs.
"Evidently the price one pays for being made wiser," Mirt agreed. "Farewell, Keeper of Secrets."
"Farewell," the calm voice replied.
The two men traded glances, shrugs, and smiles.
Mirt set his boot onto the topmost step and asked suddenly, "Why the darkness? And all these bars?"
"I like darkness," was the reply, as calm as ever.
Durnan waved at Mirt to get moving, and rehooded the lantern. They went down the stairs quietly.
"Mayhap Yelver just wanted to have one last, lame laugh at me," Mirt mused aloud, as they crossed a fish guts-littered alley where rats scurried fearlessly this way and that, and made for Adder Lane. "Why'd ye bring us this far south, hey? The Portal's a good—"
"To see if all the men strolling along back there were following us, of course," Durnan muttered.
Mirt stiffened, but managed to avoid turning around.
"And-?" he asked.
"They are * Durnan replied. "A dozen, and one may be a mage." "Watchful Order?"
"Far less official, Fd say. Let's duck into Roldro's cellar."
The innkeeper strode ahead, rapped on a particular panel set into a crumbling wall, and sang a brief, wordless phrase of music. A much smaller panel nearby slid open, and someone uttered a non-committal grunt from beyond it.
"Flashscales," Durnan murmured in reply—and the response was the click of a bolt being slid back.
The door, a few paces along the wall, looked more like a series of boards nailed over a disused hatch than a usable entryway. But the innkeeper snatched it open as he reached it, and was gone through it like a diving sea hawk. Mirt huffed and plunged after, banging the door closed not far ahead of a sudden shout and clatter of hobnailed boots on cobbles.
"Cellar to cellar, and so away," Durnan told his friend several rooms and startled young Roldro children later, as they went down damp steps into a room that stank of rotting tide wrack and mildew. "To rouse the Portal."
Mirt nodded a little wearily and said, "Aye, where they know where to find us."
Something wriggled inside his head, and he stumbled up against the wall of Murktar Roldro's cellar with a groan.
"Magic?" Durnan snapped, putting a steadying hand on Mirt's shoulder.
The moneylender nodded and waved a vague hand struck dumb by a flood of memories—faces, places, names, and amounts owed and due dates and—and—
The invasion was gone, as swiftly as it had come.
"Someone ... in my mind," he wheezed, clutching
at Durnan's stone-steady arm. "That mage following us."
The innkeeper nodded and asked, "Seeking memories of Yelver?"
"Aye. Turned up everything—gods, my head's a-whirl still—but Yelver, yes, an' our talk with the Keeper. I wonder what Yelver was mixed up in?"
Durnan was already whirling past him.
"Stay here," he said. "Be right back."
Mirt leaned against the wall, groggy, listening to his friend's boots racing up the stairs—and more slowly coming back down again. The keeper of the Yawning Portal wore another of his grim smiles.
"They're all racing away back nor'east, of course."
"To the Keeper of Secrets," Mirt grunted. "Knowing she told us nothing, we're now nothing—but she remains a danger." He slapped his hand to his sword hilt, drew in a deep breath, and started up the stairs himself. "So, 'tis back to Sammarin's Street."
"Way ahead of you," Durnan replied cheerfully, bounding past.
"Aye," Mirt agreed. "Everyone always is."
The flash and the trembling of cobblestones under their feet came when they were still a street away from the Keeper's shop.
Faint sounds of startled cries, curses, and the crashes of things falling and breaking arose in the tallhouses and shops all around. Durnan broke out of the trot that let Mirt keep pace with him, and raced ahead.
Almost immediately he returned with the terse explanation: "Two Watch patrols."
"Rooftops," Mirt replied, waving at a distant tall-house with carved dolphin downspouts.
Durnan flashed him a smile and dropped it off his face as he looked back behind them.
"More Watch coming," said the innkeeper.
Mirt shrugged and replied, "So we're innocents, look ye. Deafinnocents."
"No sort of innocent climbs downspouts in the middle of the night."
"Innocent downspout inspectors do," Mirt growled. When Durnan rolled his eyes, the moneylender protested, "I've a palace badge, and know what names to invoke. I—"
The uppermost floor of the building they'd visited not long before burst apart with a roar, in an eruption of stones, roof slates, and the shattered bodies of men.
A head and what looked like a knee bounced and pattered wetly to the cobblestones nearby. Durnan abandoned any attempt to look innocent and clawed at Mirt.
"Down" he hissed, "and look dazed."
Blinking around at the tumult of running Watch officers and still-rolling shards of stone, Mirt complied.
They crouched together against the wall of what looked to be a toy shop as shouting uniformed men ran past, lanterns bobbing.
"Yelver surprises me more and more," the fat moneylender muttered, "but we'll never know his secrets now. No one could've—"
There was a creaking close at hand as a "downsteps door" opened. Durnan peered down a narrow flight of stone steps past the usual clutter of rain barrels and discarded trash, into one of the many cellar-level entries common to that part of North Ward. After the blasts, someone could come out curious, or wanting to flee, or waving a blade and wild enough with fear to use it on anyone.
Mirt hastily drew back his boots to let the lone cloaked and cowled figure mount the steps, noting bare, empty hands clutching at her—yes, her—cloak to keep her features covered.
She stopped, peering up at the two men, and said, "Stand back, if you please, and let me pass."