Key of Stars

CHAPTER NINE

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

Aglarond, Yuirwood Forest

Japheth surveyed the circle formed by the glowing sigils. A hazy image of a forest path glimmered within its circumference. He and Seren had spent a good part of the afternoon scribing the design on the catacomb floor with golden chalks and purple inks.

He and Anusha had said their good-byes after the meeting in the salon. It’d been too hurried, with too many things left unsaid. She’d gathered her things, including her travel chest, and left the mansion. She’d accompanied Captain Thoster and Yeva, whose metallic form was concealed in a hooded cassock, down to the docks to see about Green Siren.

Watching her go had been as hard as resisting the call of his addiction. All Japheth wanted to do was run off with her to someplace safe from all worries. Childish fantasy, of course. Anusha was committed to putting things right. The only way he and she could have any kind of future was if he did his best to help her foil Malyanna and Xxiphu’s search for the Key of Stars. Whatever that was.

He still hated that Anusha’s plan required that he and she separate. When he considered all the terrible things that might befall her, he felt dizzy.

And he was going to miss her.

But, damn it, he was angry too. He’d shown he’d do anything for her by stealing the Dreamheart and imperiling his own sanity, and the world itself, to save her.

He’d put her first.

But she very obviously didn’t put him in the same place. He was secondary to her concern over dealing with the Sovereignty. That thought burned him. He’d sacrificed everything and laid his soul at her feet. She hadn’t reciprocated; she had put other things before him. More than that, she had pushed him away.

His skin warmed.

Two could play at that game. If she wanted to be quit of him, and that was her way of showing it, fine.

Japheth clenched his hands and ground his teeth.

“The circle is complete,” said Seren. “You and the monk should be on your way before it fades.”

For a moment, Japheth’s anger urged him to turn and simply walk away from it all.

Raidon, who’d spent the last few hours sitting in a lotus position meditating, stood. The half-elf’s sheathed blade released a cerulean spark that skittered across the floor. The monk bowed to the wizard.

“Thank you,” he said. “Without your help, none of this would have been possible. I hope we see you again after this is all over.”

Seren was caught off guard by the monk’s words. She nodded, coloring. “You’re welcome,” she managed to say. “And you will see me, because I mean to collect. Don’t go getting yourself killed just to get out of our bargain.”

When Raidon actually smiled, Japheth’s smoldering anger faded somewhat.

Then the monk turned to him and asked, “Ready?”

The warlock released a long breath. Of course he wasn’t going to walk away. He could stew about Anusha anytime, damn it.

“Yes,” he replied. He had everything he needed for a long trip hidden away within his cloak.

Japheth focused on the blurred forest inside the circle. He stepped past the threshold, into the image. He gripped his rod in one hand, ready for-

There was no ground on the other side of the linked portal.

Japheth fell. Branches lashed his body and his flailing limbs.

Then his cloak caught him in a fist of lightless safety.

When the darkness let go, Japheth stepped onto a buckled, overgrown flagstone path shadowed by a thick forest canopy.

Weathered stone columns poked from the ground, pointing at awkward angles like teeth in an orc’s mouth. They had probably once formed a ring, but time and some past earth movement had destroyed their symmetry.

A crash of branches jerked his head around.

Raidon slid down the bole of a tree, slowing his descent with a single hand on the trunk. The monk made being dropped out of thin air into a tangle of tree branches seem like an everyday occurrence.

When the half-elf’s feet were on the ground, he said, “I’ve experienced worse, but that transition was unexpected.”

“I hadn’t realized how disrupted the circle was,” Japheth replied. “Now that I see this side, I’m surprised it worked at all.”

Raidon gave a slight nod. The monk’s attention shifted to the trees that pressed close beyond the periphery of leaning stones. “Back in Aglarond,” he murmured.

Japheth studied the monk. The man seemed more like the person he’d first met below Gethshemeth’s island. The listless detachment Raidon had displayed since they’d returned from Xxiphu was still somewhat in evidence, but it was clear the man was making an effort to throw it off.

Raidon continued gazing into the trees, as if recalling an old escapade.

“What is it?” said Japheth.

Raidon shook his head. “Not important,” he said. “Is Malyanna near?”

Japheth frowned and said, “Give me a moment.”

The warlock drew in a breath. He focused on his pact. He imagined it as a physical thing, as a thin strand of celestial fire connecting his heart to all that lay beyond the vault of Faerun’s sky.

Since he’d sworn his new pact, he’d noticed occasional tugs and tiny yanks on the connection. At first, he hadn’t thought anything of it. Then three nights before, he’d awoken from a dream of empty space with an insight. The sensations corresponded to individual and particularly powerful beings associated with the stars. And the two he recognized were the Eldest, and Malyanna.

It scared Japheth more than a little that those two were so entwined with his new spell source he could sense them, even if only vaguely, through the connection he shared. It was something he tried not to think about too much. Unfortunately, just as he could sense them, apparently they were aware of him; Malyanna had crafted a glyph that allowed the Lord of Bats to find him with little effort. He’d have to devise a way to shield himself from such scrutiny.

But it was the Lord of Bats’s appearance that made him realize that each tug he discerned through his connection to the star pact probably indicated literal shifts in the geographical or planar positions of Malyanna and the Eldest. Because she’d sent Neifion after him, Japheth realized he could track her the same way.

Unfortunately he couldn’t yet imagine how to fashion a glyph as potent as the one Neifion enjoyed. Not that he’d had any time to spend on it, given that Neifion had only appeared the day before. Then, that night …

Japheth shook his head, trying to clear it of distracting thoughts. Concentrating on the celestial thread of his pact was difficult enough without the memories of the silky warmth of Anusha’s skin intruding-

Stop it.

He placed his hands palm to palm and closed his eyes. He imagined the thread once again, trying to detect in it the tiny shifts of tension that would betray Malyanna’s location to him.

It’d be child’s play to see where the eladrin noble was if he placed a crystal of traveler’s dust in one eye. The gates of perception would open wide, then.

No! No, not unless he’d exhausted every other method. The desire for the dust still lived in him. Thankfully the urge to dig out his supply wasn’t the irresistible geas it had once been. Lately, it was more like the memory of an urgent desire rather than the desire itself.

Was he finally leaving the crimson road behind?

“Can you sense her?” said Raidon.

“Don’t rush me,” snapped Japheth. In truth, he was embarrassed. He was allowing distractions to cloud his mind. He was scared to make a real effort and engage so intimately with the star pact.

He drew in a slow breath and released it, imagining as he did so that he expelled all the diversions, all the fears, and any concern other than the sense of connection with the stars.

There! The celestial connection pulled and shifted … that way! She was near. But something was muffling his ability to determine specific distance. It was as if Malyanna were not fully in the world.

Japheth cleared his throat. “This way, but I don’t know how far,” he said. He pointed north, away from the path, into the darkness between the trees.

“Then we’d best start,” said the monk. He stepped off the path and headed in the direction Japheth indicated.

Walking between the trees proved easier than Japheth had guessed. The trunks were several paces apart, and at least in the region they moved through, the undergrowth was suppressed beneath a layer of reddish humus. They advanced up a slope at an angle. The ground was studded with stones and larger boulders, occasional ravines, and deadfalls, requiring that they divert from the straight-line path Japheth tried to stay on.

Birdsong brightened the air, but it was infrequent and tentative. The warm smell of a growing forest was evident, but an underlying tang of sweet rot underlay everything, as if corpses of dead animals and overripe fruit lay just beneath the loam.

A few times a curling, scratchy sensation skittered across Japheth’s skin and crazed his sense of connection to his pact. When that happened, the disagreeable smell grew stronger. The first time it happened, Japheth nearly gagged. He realized then the smell wasn’t the odor of rotting flesh-it was the odor of decaying magic.

It was the aroma of a pocket of active spellplague.

Raidon didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he kept his poker face perfectly intact. The warlock resolved to do the same, but he paid careful attention to his surroundings. He didn’t want to step into an unknown sinkhole dancing with unbound wild magic.

After traveling for what seemed like a quarter hour, Japheth stopped.

“What is it?” asked Raidon.

“We’re hardly getting any closer,” the warlock replied. “I don’t understand it. It’s as if she’s moving just enough to stay ahead of us … no, that’s not it. It’s like she’s behind some sort of veil.”

“If Malyanna is looking for Stardeep, she could well be behind ‘a veil’ as you say; she could be in the Feywild,” said Raidon. “Stardeep lays in a splinter of Sildeyuir, itself a fragment of ancient Faerie. With the Feywild’s return, Sildeyuir, and perhaps the prison complex of the Keepers, was reabsorbed, and not gently.”

“How do you know that?” asked Japheth. “Sounds sort of esoteric for someone like …” He trailed off, but let his comment stand without apology.

“You know I bear the Cerulean Sign and the blade Angul,” Raidon said. “Is it really a surprise I know something of what has occurred here, where the Keepers sheltered?”

“I suppose not.”

“Before I found you in Gethshemeth’s lair, I was in communication with the last remnant of Stardeep; a sentient golem named Cynosure. It was Cynosure that transferred me across the face of Faerun more than once, first to collect Angul, then to the island where we met.”

“So this Cynosure-it’s in Stardeep?” said Japheth. “It sounds like a useful ally. Are you talking to it now?”

“No, Cynosure is gone,” replied Raidon. “It used up the last stores of its endowed life to get me to the isle, so I could sunder the Dreamheart before the Eldest woke.”

Japheth thought back to that subterranean cavern and winced. Stealing the relic, and thus preventing Raidon from concluding his quest had been his only option. But of course the monk had never forgiven him for what he’d done. Were the warlock in Raidon’s place, he’d probably feel the same way.

It was a bit unsettling to travel alone with a man who’d just tried to kill you the day before.

Japheth cleared his throat. “Right!” he said. “So you’re saying that if we find a way to step over into the Feywild, I could trace Malyanna better?”

“It could be.”

The warlock pursed his lips, considering.

Raidon said, “This forest is rife with portals into what was once Sildeyuir, though Cynosure indicated many of them were likely contaminated with spellplague.”

“More than likely; it’s a certainty,” said Japheth. “I can sense it, you know. Pockets of spellplague. Cynosure was right. It’s like a battlefield through here, scattered with dead and twisted fragments of the old Weave.”

Raidon narrowed his eyes, glanced around, then shook his head. “You can sense it? I don’t detect anything,” he said.

“Really?” said Japheth. “Trust me, we’ve passed some nasty bits I steered us around.”

“I don’t doubt it,” replied Raidon. “Most of my abilities are manifestations of the power of my mind over my body. Perhaps spellplague doesn’t pull at me like it does a spellcaster. When the Year of Blue Fire found me, it didn’t like my taste, and spit me out, though not without consequence.”

Japheth’s eyes dropped to the spellscar on the half-elf’s upper chest.

“You were lucky to get off so light,” said the warlock.

The monk made no reaction.

“Anyway, we should head back to the last concentration of spellplague I noticed,” Japheth said. “It was big. Sometimes such sharp concentrations indicate the presence of an old portal.”

They backtracked. First there was a smell of sour oranges, but soon enough, the revolting odor was turning the warlock’s stomach again. It put Japheth in mind of an undead whose flesh was nearly sloughed off. In their case, though, it was the world’s facade ready to fall away.

They skirted the bole of a large, tree that stood dead center in the spellplague pocket.

In a hollow between two of the tree’s massive roots, a sinkhole created a natural stair that apparently provided an entrance into the forest’s understory down steps of dead roots, boulders, and raw earth. Another root curled over the top of the hollow, creating a natural lintel.

Japheth advanced, one hand extended before him. When his boot heel touched the first rocky step, the “lintel” and the hollow beyond it burst into blue flame. A streamer of fire separated from the blaze and reached for him.

Japheth yelled and threw himself back. His cloak, sensing his desire to escape, automatically tried to pull him into its protective embrace.

Like the head of a striking cobra, the streamer of spellplague lunged. It speared Japheth through the gut and retracted, pulling him through the arch and in an explosion of blue flame.

Raidon leaped for the trailing hem of the warlock’s cloak. His fingers brushed the fabric, but it jerked away like a live thing.

The filament of fire retracted, and Japheth disappeared in sapphire light. The Sign on Raidon’s chest tingled in sympathy.

The monk’s unsuccessful leap put him on the lip of the hollow.

The light of the roused spellplague pocket danced before him. Through it he saw past the arch to the hollow’s far wall. The warlock was not inside the tree.

A disconcerting sense of loss swept over Raidon.

Had Japheth found an active portal into the Feywild, or had he simply been dissolved by the roused plague? Dissolved, like the people in the trade caravan taken by the fire during the Year of Blue Fire. Just like Hadyn, the youth who’d died trying to gain a spellscar in the Plaguewrought Lands. Just like …

He wrenched his mind from the trap of contemplating the death of his adopted daughter.

Instead, Raidon made fists capable of breaking stone. But no foes offered themselves for him to sate his urge to hurt something.

Angul murmured and shifted on his back, as if imploring the monk to take some foolhardy action anyhow.

He forced his hands open. He had to think, and not let emotion channel his decisions-especially the part of himself that hoped the warlock really was dead, burned to ash by remnant wild magic. It would be a fitting punishment for the man responsible for keeping the threat of the Eldest alive.

Only one way to find out what had really happened. He would have to pass through the natural arch himself.

“So be it,” he said. He’d survived contact with spellplague on more than one occasion. Perhaps he had developed resistance. He touched the Sign on his chest. Once more the image of his mother came to him, stronger than ever.

Not a bad thought to go out on, he thought, and walked into the hollow through a screen of flame.

Warmth brushed his skin, like the sun’s caress on a clear day. Colors, mostly blue, swirled before his eyes. One more step, and he was someplace else.

The scent of cedar and loam sharpened. The air was cooler too. It was like a draft of cold water on a hot day, refreshing and bracing, and just slightly intoxicating.

He was still surrounded by forest, but one whose majesty exceeded the Yuirwood in every way. The trunks here were massive. They marched away like pillars in an emperor’s throne room whose lofty ceiling was a canopy of mists, leaves, and dancing firefly lights.

He stood on a granite step draped in a fall of autumn colors. A nimbus of blue fire played at its periphery. Japheth sprawled half on, half off the platform. The warlock wasn’t moving, and smoke curled up from inside his cloak. Despite everything, Raidon was relieved to see his companion still in one piece.

The half-elf bent and placed a finger along the fallen man’s neck. He detected a pulse, slow and steady. Raidon pulled Japheth all the way onto the platform so that his feet weren’t dangling over the residual tongues of blue flame. As far as he could discern, the warlock hadn’t suffered any obvious burns from the fire. Nor could he discover any sign of a spellscar. Maybe the warlock has passed through the portal too quickly to be affected. On the other hand, sometimes spellscars took time to manifest …

A rustle of leaves drew Raidon’s attention to the forest.

A gnarled mass of tree roots stepped out of the undergrowth, revealing itself to be a man made of bark and boughs. He looked like a rougher, cruder version of Grandmother Ash, the entity who’d guided Raidon across the Plaguewrought Land. If the creature was so close to a spellplague-infested portal, perhaps it was touched by the same wild magic.

“Who are you?” said Raidon.

The creature snarled “Desecrator!” in the fey language Raidon’s mother had taught him, then charged.

The monk slipped to the outside of the creature’s massive clublike arm, then sidekicked it in the neck. The snap of breaking branches ricocheted through the forest, and the woodling dropped like the felled tree it resembled.

Two more woodlings appeared on the edge of the clearing. They studied the tableau. One murmured to the other. Its rough voice was too soft for the monk to make out distinct words.

“We are not here to fight you. I’m sorry about your companion here,” called Raidon in Elvish. “But we will defend ourselves if attacked.”

The creatures returned their attention to the granite step. One said, its voice louder, “Then you’d best prepare your strongest defense.”

The woodlings melted back into the forest.

When he was satisfied the two creatures were not preparing an immediate offense, Raidon stooped and pulled Japheth up onto his shoulders. He stepped over the first crumpled fey creature and off the low platform. The faint play of flames surrounding the platform doused itself.

The monk made his way to the base of the closest tree trunk. He studied it for signs that it might suddenly animate into a far larger tree monster like the one the Lord of Bats had briefly called below Marhana Manor.

He detected no telltale signs of an imminent threat. He carefully rolled Japheth off his back and arranged him to a sitting position.

He produced a wineskin. He took a swig of the wine himself, then bent over the warlock. Raidon wet Japheth’s lips before pouring a tiny portion of the red fluid into the man’s mouth.

The warlock coughed and opened his eyes. “What’re you … Oh,” he said. Japheth looked around, taking in the forest, the platform, and the unmoving man made of branches.

He abruptly glanced down at himself, his hands, arms, and torso. He was looking for something, but seemed afraid to find it.

“The spellplague didn’t care for your taste, it seems,” Raidon said. “It happens. You’re fortunate.”

Japheth blew out a breath. He returned to scanning the surrounding panorama. He smiled and nodded as if satisfied in what he saw.

“This is Faerie?” said Raidon. “Or, what was Sildeyuir, merged back into Faerie?”

“Faerie, at the very least,” said Japheth. “A forest vista like this one is visible from the cave mouth where Neifion laired in the Feywild.”

“And Malyanna?”

Japheth closed his eyes and cocked his head to one side. He raised a finger and pointed off through the trees. “That way,” he said. “I can sense her as clearly as if she were standing right there. She’s close.”

“Close?”

“The veil is gone,” Japheth replied. “She’s within this realm, and no more than half a day’s walk, if that. But be on your guard. I’m pulling on the thread that leads to her. Unless my luck changes for the better, she’ll feel the tug, and know we’re coming.”