Cloak of Shadows

13

Blackstaff Tower, Waterdeep, Kythorn 19

It was a dull morning outside the windows of Black-staff Tower. Storm clouds hung purple and heavy over Mount Waterdeep, and pearly gray sea mists rolled in under them from the harbor. The clop of hooves echoed up from the street below, but the usual cries, rumbles, and other incessant noises of the City of Splendors were muffled. It sounded as if the city were half-asleep.

It was always quiet inside Blackstaff Tower, the velvety, waiting quiet of shielding magic that robbed footfalls of their echoes and shouts of their resonance, and gave to everything a heavy, unbroken hush. Many an apprentice had fallen asleep while studying in the tower, and many an experiment had ended explosively without disturbing the occupants of neighboring chambers.

Laeral hoped this wouldn't be one of those experiments. With Khelben away in Elturel, sitting in spell-court over a long and entangled dispute between two feuding archmages, Blackstaff Tower felt empty, like a throne without its king. Laeral was acutely aware that no one but she was on hand to repair things if her two senior apprentices really botched their work.

Tath was overly shy and almost as overly nervous, but his painstaking check-things-and-check-them-again safety precautions had probably prevented a dozen minor disasters thus far. Baerista, on the other hand, was the impulsive, even reckless, let's-try-it sort. Her occasional flashes of brilliance were the stuff of which real advances in Art were wrought. For the first time in decades, Laeral thought that apprentices might craft something of true worth in the tower, advancing what was known to all workers with magic, and not merely go over well-known ground one more laborious time.

Wherefore the Lady Mage of Waterdeep was quite willing to work late at their sides, the night through if need be-and she just had.

Laeral stifled a yawn as she saw the morning sun climb past the windows, and turned to peer again at the flickering, shadowy edges of the shields Baerista had devised and Tath was struggling to control.

A strange, leaping… well, growth of sparks and bubbling spinsmoke was clawing and rebounding around a small sphere of swirling green-gold radiance in the open end of the laboratory, the limits of the wild magic area Laeral had called into being. Normally, Khelben forbade such evocations anywhere in the city, let alone in the tower, but Art is not advanced without making exceptions. Laeral had swallowed once or twice and gone ahead with it.

Now her apprentices, who'd not long ago been safely in the realm of excitedly discussing the possible, probable, and theoretical, were elbow deep in a very real, very dangerous, and possibly runaway experiment. Having created the wild magic field, Laeral could do nothing to control it. Had she not been one of Mystra's Chosen, but merely a mortal archmage of mighty powers, she would have stood no chance of reliably and safely banishing it. She stood watching silently, awaiting the disaster that might all too easily come.

Soon, perhaps, for the wild magic was tirelessly trying to spread, and Baerista, teeth bared in a fierce grin of concentration, was trying to keep it enveloped in the shields she'd raised, without letting it get free or having the shields collapse. Tath was trying to keep Baerista's struggles to direct the lively shield-stuff here and there from tearing the shields asunder, and was just barely holding his own.

The shield was an amorphous area in which bolts of magical force endlessly and chaotically whirled about, something like the blade barrier used by certain priests, wherein blades of all sorts whirl and flash about. The unique feature of the shield was the tight turns and collisions of the bolts along its edges, which caused a humming, crackling energy discharge that seemed to repel the chaos of wild magic. Laeral wasn't sure just how this worked, and she knew as well as any of the gods that neither Baerista or Tath had more than hazy theories to explain it, either.

But that wasn't stopping the shield from working, after a fashion. "Steady!.. Steady…" Baerista was snapping, sweat standing out on her forehead as she stared at the shield, stretching it by redirecting individual forcebolts. She'd almost completed the englobement now, shaping the shield into a sphere that lacked only a small area of coverage to be complete, but Laeral had more than a hunch that the wild magic would explosively resist being completely surrounded, or the shield itself would collapse through ever-increasing instability.

As if to confirm her fears, the hum of the shield began to climb in pitch, rising steadily into a scream. Tath blinked away sweat and hissed, "Slow down, Baera!" It was the first time he'd dared speak so, and betrayed just how nervous he was about the shield's survival. His arms were trembling as he conjured spell-hooks and murmured wardings, struggling to hold the flashing webwork of bolts together.

Not good. Laeral looked to the ceiling to be sure the vent hatch to the roof was unlatched, so any explosion could roar skyward and not burst out sideways to hurl fragments of Blackstaff Tower into nearby buildings. Satisfied, she glanced again at the windows and murmured the word that brought plates of stone and of metal sliding across them, walling out the world. It was crucial that nothing disturb them now.

A closet door swung noiselessly open somewhere in the cellars far beneath Blackstaff Tower, causing an alarm to flash. Ushard of Athkatla frowned at it in annoyance and passed a hand over the sphere, causing it to wink out. Elminster or one of the more restless wizards of the Alliance come visiting again, no doubt. He muttered a word and looked at the scrying stone in time to see Rylard of Neverwinter cross the chamber, waving merrily at Ushard, and vanish toward the stairs, followed by a pair of patrician, gray-bearded master mages of that city whom Ushard hadn't been introduced to. They nodded impassively in his direction and followed.

Well, if they'd come to talk to Khelben, they were going to be right out of luck. Too tiggarty bad, and all that. Ushard shrugged and turned back to the forty-third volume of Pelmurt's diaries. In the long and yawn-inducing account of the eighth magefair, Ushard was sure crafty old Pelmurt had hidden some clue as to just how he had opened The Door Obler Had Forgotten and got into The Lost Library of Funderdelve, where Eltaran Earthshaker and six other powerful mages of Netheril had stored their spells.

But where was the clue? Was it in the catalog of names given as winners of the illusion-Grafting contest, in which six names appeared, but only four prizes had been awarded? Or was it in the description of the victory feast that followed, with its wealth of attention to smells, colors, and shapes of the food served?

Hmmm. "Blurturt," Ushard said rudely, uttering the ancient Sword Coast obscenity with crisp gusto, and drummed his fingers on the desk top. It was here on these few pages somewhere, he just knew it, but going from a certain inner feeling to finding and opening that fabled door was a journey that mages had failed to make long before Ushard had seen the route.

Blurturt indeed. Ushard bent forward to read the all-too-familiar passages again, hoping that somehow what he was seeking would leap up and grab him by the throat.

Of course, even lowly apprentices should be careful what they hope for.

Had Ushard watched the image in the scrying stone an instant longer-as he was supposed to, for it dimmed only when the closet door that had activated it closed again-he'd have seen the spectral doomguard emerge from the door frame and follow the two master mages. And he'd have known that they weren't what they seemed to be.

Had Ushard been attending to the scroll-copying he'd been assigned to do, he would have noticed the glowing globe over his desk bob and dim for the briefest of moments, and known that the dumbwaiter had been called down from beside the desk (where it was holding his evening snack of mulled cider, smoked oysters, and a melted-cheese-sliced-pickles-and-mustard bun-now cold because he'd forgotten them) to the nether regions.

Had he cared about welcoming uninvited guests and summoning Laeral to receive them, as he was supposed to do, Ushard would have wondered why they hadn't come up the stairs, passing through any of the various detection fields and screening spells, and wondered about the eccentricities of six-foot-tall mages preferring to somehow fold themselves into a square box about two feet long on a side to ascend into the tower instead.

And had he possessed half the brain he thought he did, Ushard would have slapped every alarm he could lay hands on when the dumbwaiter's door opened by itself to reveal a very squashed bun and a complete lack of both oysters and cider tankard. As it was, he glanced up, frowned, and said "Damned ghosts. Why can't they go bother the girls? At least they'll scream."

He'd actually turned back to his book, whistling the melody of "She Was Only A Mermaid In Waterdeep Harbor" between his teeth-badly off-key-when it struck him that something odd might be going on.

A moment later, he concluded that something most definitely was, as his book erupted into a pair of steely talons that shot up and grasped him by the throat, propelling him firmly backward away from the alarms.

His back arched painfully, Ushard of Athkatla fought for breath, choking and flailing his arms futilely about, flapping hands that might one day hurl spells to humble all known Faerun… or might not. The gods weren't telling.

An instant later, the chair and Ushard overbalanced and crashed to the floor together, but the talons merely closed, tearing out the apprentice's throat. His body bounced and flopped once as everything faded, and then his eyes brightened. All that rhapsodizing about frog salad! The name of the frog was really… But he had no throat to speak, and there was no one to hear, and he was sinking into darkness that rushed in from all sides, and-

"I believe that melody, properly sung, goes like this," an icy voice told the unhearing apprentice. But a second voice interrupted the speaker with an urgent, " 'Ware, Taernil! Behind you!"

Rylard of Neverwinter was rapidly ceasing to look like himself and more like Taernil of the Malaugrym, even before the intruder spun around to face the spectral guardian rising from the underside of the dumbwaiter. The box was rising up its shaft despite its open door.

"Stop that thing!" Taernil snarled, meaning the box, but Balatar's arm grew into a spike that rushed across the study with impressive speed to pin the guardian to the wall.

"Hah! Die, bone-bag!" Balatar laughed, enjoying himself immensely-and then his laughter twisted into something else.

If the guardian had been solid and tangible, it would have perished on the spot. Instead, it merely let the Malaugrym's arm pass through it and coalesced around that arm, eating away at the flesh with its chilling unlife as it extended its own ghostly arms into overlong scything blades and began to hack at Balatar.

He howled and shrank back but couldn't get out of the guardian's reach without sacrificing the large part of his body that he'd poured into making the spike. Though he was retracting that spike as fast as he dared, the undead thing was riding on it, refusing to let go, and eating away at it steadily.

Balatar son of Alcarga had never felt such agony before, nor had he felt the cold clutch of real fear. He collapsed, shaking, and Taernil looked at him in disgust. Then he met the gaze of the third cloaked Malaugrym and snarled, "Come on! If we tarry here to help him, the whole tower'll be roused and come down on us. Through this door!"

Jarthree stared at him, then down at Balatar, and then lifted her head and nodded, shedding the last of the dignified white beard and stately dignity of a master mage of Neverwinter. She frowned as they went through the door together, leaving a sobbing Balatar to his fate. He began to shriek and curse them as they went, and Jarthree jerked her head back at the noise and complained, "I thought doomguards couldn't do that."

"It's not a doomguard. More a watchghost, I think." Taernil frowned as the curses behind them died into incoherent moans, and then shrugged and grew two tentacled arms to probe ahead of him as he crossed a darkened parlor-where a trio of driftglobes helpfully brightened into soft life and then faded again as they hurried past-pulled open another door, and mounted a circular stone stair. "There're probably other strange things ahead of us," he added helpfully. "Besides Khelben, I mean."

At the sound of that name, something thrummed nearby, something just above them. They hurried around a bend, ascending, and saw what it was.

The stone pillar that formed the heart of the stair broke off cleanly beside a certain glowing stone step, and resumed again perhaps eight feet higher. In the cylindrical gap that should not have existed (without the staircase collapsing!) floated a vertical black staff. It was covered with runes and gnarly protuberances studded with small silver glyphs and inset metal studs. Tiny lights winked here and there down its sinister length. Its power hung heavy and silent around it. The very air tingled.

"The Blackstaff!" Jarthree's exclamation was a hoarse whisper of longing, and without thinking she reached forth an impossibly long, growing arm to seize the ebon-hued staff.

Taernil's tentacles struck her arm roughly aside. "Are you mad? It might burn you to nothing or call Khelben to itself if touched by anyone but him! Don't you know how suspicion-crazed human wizards are?"

"I know how suspicion-crazed Malaugrym mages are," Jarthree replied, with the first smile Taernil had ever seen on her lips.

He shook his head. "Then you know you shouldn't touch it. Don't… just don't." He advanced cautiously and added, "We'd better not touch this step, either. It might awaken anything."

Jarthree sighed. "We're here to slay Khelben if we can, remember? Stop shying away from mere traps and shadows." Her tone was cold and scornful. She sounded almost bored.

Taernil looked back at her sharply, his lips thinning. "These 'traps and shadows,' as you term them, could trammel us just long enough for Khelben to call on any number of friends and guardians. Milhvar's precious cloak didn't save Balatar from the first undead he met with. I don't trust it to make us immune to everything the Blackstaff can throw at us!"

Jarthree waved a dismissive hand. "I merely meant that we'll do best if we strike quickly and keep moving. These are only mortal mages. They can't possibly be as powerful as Milhvar, or-"

"Oh, no? Then how did just one of them kill so many kin that Dhalgrave kept us out of Faerun for centuries?" And with those grim words Taernil launched himself up the last few stairs and into the room beyond at a dead run, his arms widening into glide-fins to allow him to cleave the air in a clean turn as he swept in, hands raised to hurl destroying magic.

The end of the room he was so grandly menacing contained a simple but large bed, with maroon bedding and a dark, polished wooden headboard. A pointed hat hung from a hook on one side of it, and something slim and silky hung from the corresponding hook on the other side. A single forcebolt crisped whatever it was before it could stir to strike, as the rush of Taernil's charge brought his feet into contact with the headboard.

He kicked at it and rebounded in a backward somersault to land catlike, facing the bed. Jarthree sloped her body into something ropelike to get out of his way and said dryly, "I'm sure the lady mage's best black silk stockings were very threatening…"

Taernil whirled to face her, hot death in his eyes. "Do you mock me?" he demanded.

Jarthree shrugged. "I'd call it only a lighthearted observation," she said easily, "but if you're so desperate to dominate me that you must press a challenge here in the heart of a hostile wizard's tower, perhaps I should leave." Her long-taloned hands went to her belt.

"No!" Taernil said quickly, too quickly. Jarthree's slow, catlike smile told him that she'd taken her measure of him and knew the real interest behind his seemingly casual glances at her. He grimaced and turned his head away, then straightened with a snarl to fix her coolly mocking gaze with his own hot stare.

"While we're here, with Milhvar judging what we do," he said heavily, "the only course prudence allows us is full cooperation. Do I have your agreement on this?"

"You do," Jarthree said simply, and the catlike smile was gone.

"Then let us be about it," he hissed, and his skin bulged out into plates as rugged as armor. As he strode to the door facing the foot of the bed, his form broadened until an umber hulk-with the long-fingered, nimble hands of an elven conjurer and fingertips to match those of the apprentice he'd strangled downstairs-laid hands on the ring in the center of that door and pulled.

The door swung out and up, revealing a swirling blue-ness beyond. The two Malaugrym stared at it, startled to see something so nearly the image of the shadows that swirled about the battlements of the castle they called home.

Neither of them saw the black staff on the floor under the bed-a twin of the one they'd passed on the stair- wink to life and vibrate in silent urgency, turning over once as it rose a few inches off the dusty floor to hang there, quivering.

Two rooms away, Laeral felt the staffs awakening as it sent a warning thrumming through her body. She glanced quickly around the room, seeking anything that should not be there. Intruders! By all the gods, why now? Then her lips twisted in a rueful smile. Of course, now, because of the fall of all the gods, no doubt.

She closed her eyes and whispered something that made a man half a world away stiffen and heed her. Khelben, she called silently. Oh, my love, where are you?

The two Malaugrym stared into the room before them. This bedchamber was larger than the one they were standing in, and its walls were half-hidden in blue-white mists that swirled amid darker shadows, like the shadows of home. Whoever had conjured up the shadows almost had to have seen Shadowhome, the demiplane ruled by the blood of Malaug.

"It's some sort of trap," Taernil snapped, eyes dark.

In those swirling mists anything could be concealed, but Jarthree suspected nothing more immediately menacing than hanging cylindrical wardrobes were prominent among them. The glossy, unbroken black rectangle of a door could just be seen across the room. Between that door and the one they were looking through, filling much of the room, was a huge circular bed floating three-feet or so off the fur-covered floor. On its silken sheets sprawled two smoky-gray furry things that raised heads to favor the intruders with unblinking, inscrutable stares. Cats.

Or worse, perhaps. A forcebolt lashed out from Taernil's hand, angled with careless ease to scorch both beasts out of existence at once. There was a flash, a feline voice raised in mild annoyance, and a sudden fury of force that tumbled Taernil back against the foot of the plainer bed, limbs tingling in seared pain. Scorched by his own forcebolt!

Jarthree stifled her mirth before it became audible, which was a prudent thing. A reflective spell-shield.

Well, why not? As the awakened cats rose lazily and stretched, her eyes drifted up to the ceiling and she gasped in half-mocking admiration. "Oh, look at this," she breathed, reaching back with a tentacle to beckon at Taernil.

"What?" he growled, rolling his massively muscled form upright once more.

"Wouldn't you like to have that above your bed?" Jarthree asked him, pointing.

Taernil looked up and scowled. "No," he said shortly, staring at the circle of star-studded darkness. He knew little of Faerun's night sky and cared less, but he recognized the gleaming trail of Selune's Tears drifting off to one side, and knew what he was looking at. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

"Hhmmph," he said, stomping boldly through the doorway. "I'd rather have one that showed me what I directed it to, like Dhalgrave's scrying portal."

"Dhalgrave is no longer," Jarthree reminded him softly as he glared at the cats, stomped past the bed, and reached for the handle of the room's other door, a door that looked to be made of a single piece of smoothly polished obsidian.

Jarthree faded quickly and silently to one side, shifting her form to look like the blue-white swirling shadows, and took up her place among them.

She was coiling in almost perfect unison with the other shadows when Taernil flung the door wide and launched his most powerful spell into the room beyond. Nine arrow-straight, needle-thin ravening beams of fire leapt from his breast, sizzling across the room into the heart of the strange whirling magic that hung there. Three faces stared at him, two gaping in astonishment and the third grimly expectant.

And then things happened very quickly. The room seemed full of whirling forcebolts, darting and ricocheting in all directions, with something flashing and writhing in their midst. As Taernil's beams tore into the heart of this confusion, the two startled people were snatched back against the far wall as if yanked by tentacles, and the grim-faced woman stood serenely facing him, her hands rising out to either side as if tracing an invisible wall. She did not seem to see him, but rather was staring down his beams, trying to perceive their source. Some of them were striking her-she should be falling as flaming ash! Other beams were striking the whirling confusion of lights and roiling mists, and seemed to be turning into… other things.

Tumbling bones and mauve bubbles… boulders and single shoes, many-eyed sea jellies and sparkling, rain-dewed flowers…

As the beams began to fail, Taernil frowned in bewilderment and hurled another spell, a fireball that should scour that chamber and all within it, leaving him free to face Khelben Blackstaff, who must be in the room beyond. Behind him, he heard Jarthree gasp-a short indrawn breath of utter terror-even before his fireball twisted in the doorway, meeting that whirling chaos of shoes and bones and things, and spilled back toward him, expanding hungrily across the bedchamber.

The woman still stood facing him, her arms a barrier to the expanding wild magic-by the blood of Malaug, that's what it was! The magic was all around him now, blowing blue-white shadows away like wisps of smoke to tumble suddenly revealed cylindrical wardrobes to the floor, and grounding the bed with a thump. It whirled Jarthree and himself back into their true shapes, with the shimmering of Milhvar's cloak of spells suddenly gone from around them.

Taernil gulped, then shuddered uncontrollably as a firm hand stabbed through him, parting his flesh like melting butter, to grasp and crush his organs, one by one. "So now they're sending young Malaugrym to Blackstaff Tower, are they?" Khelben's voice was calm and level, and profoundly unimpressed. "I'm quite particular about whom I invite into my home. And you, Taernil son of Oracla, would not have been among my first eighty thousand or so choices. Out with you!"

And as a last, shattering pain exploded through him, those were the last words Taernil ever heard.

"I suppose you're going to plead for clemency for this one?" Khelben asked, eyes softening as he looked at his lady love.

Laeral looked down at Jarthree and then slowly shook her head. "No," she said. "Ushard was a lazy idiot, but he did not deserve to die as he did. This one is the brightest and most dangerous of the three Malaugrym who came here this night. I am learning, slowly, not to let kindness be taken for weakness, and through such kindness let the ranks of our enemies slowly but surely grow. The Malaugrym understand only the cruel use of power, and learn only lessons of death. Teach her."

Khelben shook his head grimly and brought his hand down. Jarthree did not have time to scream as her body convulsed once and then slowly rose from the floor, floating toward the conjured fire that would consume it.

As the awareness that was Jarthree faded, she tried to weep, for Khelben had taken his lady's words literally, and the last moments of the Malaugrym were a whirlwind of images of the love and beauty, the things wondrous and exciting, to be found in the Realms. Things she might have had, and now, never could.

Khelben watched the flames dwindle and fade away, going to the same place-a demiplane of shifting shadows, with an ancient castle at its heart-as he'd sent the dying whirlwind of wild magic. When the flames were gone, he straightened to watch Laeral restore the last of the floating wardrobes to its cloak of concealing mists. She stood quite still beside him, only the stirring of her hair about her shoulders betraying the complex magic she was wielding. Gods, but she was beautiful.

Khelben took one tress of hair in his fingers and curled it absently, stroking its softness. She turned toward him with that dark smile that still awakened excitement in him, after all these years, and asked, "How fared your spell-court, my lord?"

The Lord Mage of Waterdeep shook his head. "If I'd had the sense to take my ready-staves with me, I just might have been overcome by the desire to ram them both swiftly upward in places that might have painfully removed two mages from the Realms, and thereby done wider Faerun a lot of good. However, my foresight remains weak."

"Oh, I think it does well enough," Laeral said softly, curling herself into his arms as her magic floated them both toward the bed.

"Ah, my lady," he said, blinking. "The-your apprentices! They-"

"Have to start learning the most important things sometime," she murmured, her mouth against his.

Khelben lifted his eyebrows. Then he recalled the spell he needed and brought his hands down, precipitously transporting startled apprentices and indignant cats alike to a room lower down in the tower.

It just wouldn't do, twice in one night, to plunge apprentices elbow deep into a very real, very dangerous, and possibly runaway experiment.