The Ghost King

I know she is in constant torment, and I cannot go to her. I have seen into the darkness in which she resides, a place of shadows more profound and more grim than the lower planes. She took me there, inadvertently, when I tried to offer some comfort, and there, in so short a time, I nearly broke.

She took Regis there, inadvertently, when he tried to reach her with the ruby, and there he broke fully. He threw the drowning Catti-brie a rope and she pulled him from the shore of sanity.

She is lost to me. Forever, I fear. Lost in an oblivious state, a complete emptiness, a listless and lifeless existence. And those rare occasions when she is active are perhaps the most painful of all to me, for the depth of her delusions shines all too clearly. It’s as if she’s reliving her life, piecemeal, seeing again those pivotal moments that shaped this beautiful woman, this woman I love with all my heart. She stood again on the side of Kelvin’s Cairn back in Icewind Dale, living again the moment when first we met, and while that to me is among my most precious of memories, that fact made seeing it play out again through the distant eyes of my love even more painful.

How lost must my beloved Catti-brie be to have so broken with the world around her?

And Regis, poor Regis. I cannot know how deeply into that darkness Catti-brie now resides, but it’s obvious to me that Regis went fully into that place of shadows. I can attest to the convincing nature of his delusions, as can Bruenor, whose shoulder now carries the scar of my blade as I fought off imaginary monsters. Or were they imaginary? I cannot begin to know. But that is a moot point to Regis, for to him they are surely real, and they’re all around him, ever clawing at him, wounding him and terrifying him relentlessly.

We four—Bruenor, Catti-brie, Regis, and I—are representative of the world around us, I fear. The fall of Luskan, Captain Deudermont’s folly, the advent of Obould—all of it were but the precursors. For now we have the collapse of that which we once believed eternal, the unraveling of Mystra’s Weave. The enormity of that catastrophe is easy to see on the face of the always calm Lady Alustriel. The potential results of it are reflected in the insanity of Regis, the emptiness of Catti-brie, the near-loss of my own sanity, and the scar carried by King Bruenor.

More than the wizards of Faerûn will feel the weight of this dramatic change. How will diseases be quelled if the gods do not hear the desperate pleas of their priests? How will the kings of the world fare when any contact to potential rivals and allies, instead of commonplace through divination and teleportation, becomes an arduous and lengthy process? How weakened will be the armies, the caravans, the small towns, without the potent power of magic-users among their ranks? And what gains will the more base races, like goblins and orcs, make in the face of such sudden magical weakness? What druids will tend the fields? What magic will bolster and secure the exotic structures of the world? Or will they fall catastrophically as did the Hosttower of the Arcane, or long-dead Netheril?

Not so long ago, I had a conversation with Nanfoodle the gnome in Mithral Hall. We discussed his cleverness in funneling explosive gasses under the mountain ridge where Obould’s giant allies had set up devastating artillery. Quite an engineering feat by the gnome and his crew of dwarves, and one that blew the mountain ridge apart more fully than even a fireball from Elminster could have done. Nanfoodle is much more a follower of Gond, the god of inventions, than he is a practitioner of the Art. I asked him about that, inquiring as to why he tinkered so when so much of what he might do could be accomplished more quickly by simply touching the Weave.

I never got an answer, of course, as that is not Nanfoodle’s wont. Instead, he launched into a philosophical discussion of the false comfort we take in our dependence on, and expectation of, “that which is.”

Never has his point been more clear to me than it is now, as I see “that which is” collapsing around us all.

Do the farmers around the larger cities of Faerûn, around Waterdeep and Silverymoon, know how to manage their produce without the magical aid of the druids? Without such magical help, will they be able to meet the demands of the large populations in those cities? And that is only the top level of the problems that will arise should magic fail! Even the sewers of Waterdeep are complicated affairs, built over many generations, and aided at certain critical points, since the city has so expanded, by the power of wizards, summoning elementals to help usher away the waste. Without them—what?

And what of Calimport? Regis has told me often that there are far too many people there, beyond any sensible number for which the ocean and desert could possibly provide. But the fabulously rich Pashas have supplemented their natural resources by employing mighty clerics to summon food and drink for the markets, and mighty wizards to teleport in fresh sustenance from faraway lands.

Without that aid, what chaos might ensue?

And, of course, in my own homeland of Menzoberranzan, it is magic that keeps the kobolds enslaved, magic that protects the greater Houses from their envious rivals, and magic that holds together the threads of the entire society. Lady Lolth loves chaos, they say, and so she may see it in the extreme if that magic fades!

The societies of the world have grown over the centuries. The systems we have in place have evolved through the many generations, and in that evolution, I fear, we have long forgotten the basic foundations of society’s structures. Worse, perhaps, even re-learning those lost arts and crafts will not likely suffice to meet the needs of lands grown fatter and more populous because of the magical supplements to the old ways. Calimport could never have supported her enormous population centuries ago.

Nor could the world, a much wider place by far, have attained such a level of singularity, of oneness, of community, as it has now. For people travel and communicate to and with distant lands much more now than in times long past. Many of the powerful merchants in Baldur’s Gate are often seen in Waterdeep, and vice versa. Their networks extend over the leagues because their wizards can maintain them. And those networks are vital in ensuring that there will be no war between such mighty rival cities. If the people of Baldur’s Gate are dependent upon the craftsmen and farmers of Waterdeep, then they will want no war with that city!

But what happens if it all collapses? What happens if “that which is” suddenly is not? How will we cope when the food runs out, and the diseases cannot be defeated through godly intervention?

Will the people of the world band together to create new realities and structures to fulfill the needs of the masses?

Or will all the world know calamity, on a scale never before seen?

The latter, I fear. The removal of “that which is” will bring war and distance and a world of pockets of civilization huddled defensively in corners against the intrusion of murderous insanity.

I look helplessly at Catti-brie’s lifelessness, at Regis’s terror, and at Bruenor’s torn shoulder and I fear that I am seeing the future.

— Drizzt Do’Urden

CHAPTER 10 BEARDED PROXY

You garner too much enjoyment from so simple a trick,” Hephaestus said to his companion in a cave south of Spirit Soaring. “It is a matter of simple efficiency and expedience, dragon, from which I take no measure of enjoyment,” Yharaskrik answered in the voice of Ivan Bouldershoulder, whose body the illithid had come to reside in—partially, at least.

Any who knew Ivan would have scratched their heads in surprise at the strange accent in the dwarf’s gravelly voice. A closer inspection would only have added to the onlooker’s sense of strangeness, for Ivan stood too calmly. He refrained from tugging at the hairs of his great yellow beard, shifting from one foot to the other, or thumping his hands against his hips or chest, as was typical.

“I am still within you,” Yharaskrik added. “Hephaestus, Crenshinibon, and Yharaskrik as one. Holding this dwarf under my control allows me to give external voice to our conversations, though that is rarely a good thing.”

“While you are reading my every thought,” the dragon replied, no small amount of sarcasm in his tone, “you have externalized a portion of your consciousness to shield your own thoughts from me.”

The dwarf bowed.

“You do not deny it?” Hephaestus asked.

“I am in your consciousness, dragon. You know what I know. Any question you ask of me is rendered rhetorical.”

“But we are no longer fully joined,” Hephaestus protested, and the dwarf chuckled. The dragon’s confusion was apparent. “Are you not wise enough to segment your thoughts into small compartments, some within and some, in the guise of that ugly little dwarf, without?”

The Yharaskrik in Ivan’s body bowed again. “You flatter me, great Hephaestus. Trust that we are inexorably joined. I could no more hurt you than harm myself, for to do to one is truly to do to the other. You know this is true.”

“Then why did you reach out to the dwarf, this proxy host?”

“Because for you, particularly, who have never known such mental intimacy,” the illithid answered, “it can become confusing as to where one voice stops and the other begins. We might find ourselves battling for control of the body we both inhabit, working each other to exhaustion over the simplest of movements. It is better this way.”

“So you say.”

“Look within yourself, Hephaestus.”

The dracolich did exactly that and for a long while did not reply. Finally, he looked the dwarf straight in the eye and said, “It is a good thing.”

Yharaskrik bowed again. He glanced to the side of the chamber, past the four animated corpses of the Baldurian wizards, to the pair of huddled creatures in the deeper shadows.

“As Crenshinibon has externalized parts of itself,” the illithid said in the dwarf’s voice.

Fetchigrol stepped forward before Hephaestus could respond. “We are Crenshinibon,” the specter said. “Now we are apart in body, sundered by the magic of the falling Weave, but we are one in thought.”

Hephaestus nodded his gigantic head, but Yharaskrik, who had felt a strange evolution over the last few days, disagreed. “You are not,” the illithid argued. “You are tentacles of the squid, but there is independence in your movements.”

“We do as we are commanded,” Fetchigrol protested, but it rang hollow to the Ghost King. The illithid was correct in his assessment. The seven apparitions were gaining a small measure of independent thought once more, though neither feared that the Ghost King could be threatened by such an occurrence.

“You are fine soldiers for the cause of Crenshinibon,” said Yharaskrik. “Yet within the philosophy that guides you there is independence, as you have shown here in these mountains.”

The specter let out a low groan.

“We exist in two worlds,” Yharaskrik explained. “And a third, because of Crenshinibon, because of the sacrifice of Fetchigrol and his six brethren. How easy it was for you, how easy it is for us all, to reach into the realm of death and bring forth mindless minions, and so Fetchigrol did.”

“Carradoon is in chaos,” the specter’s voice said, though the dark humanoid’s face gave no indication that it spoke. “As the fleeing humans are killed, they join our ranks.”

Yharaskrik waved his hand to the side, to the four undead wizards he had lifted from their death, one even before the flames of a fireball had stopped crinkling its blackened skin. “And how easy it is!” the illithid said, the even cadence of its voice thrown aside for the first time in the conversation. “With this power alone, we are mighty.”

“But we have more than this singular power,” Hephaestus said.

Fetchigrol’s spectral companion floated forward, willed by the Ghost King.

“The fodder of Shadowfell are ours for the calling,” Solmé said. “The gate is not thick. The door is not locked. The crawlers hunger for the flesh of Toril.”

“And as they kill, our ranks grow,” Fetchigrol said.

Yharaskrik nodded and closed his dwarf eyes, pondering the possibilities. This curious twist of circumstance, this fortuitous blending of magic, intellect, and brute power, of Crenshinibon, Yharaskrik, and Hephaestus, had created seemingly unlimited possibilities.

But had it also created a common purpose?

To conquer, or to destroy? To meditate, to contemplate, to explore? What fruit had the tree of fate served? To what end?

Hephaestus’s growl brought Yharaskrik from his contemplation, to see the dragon staring at him with suspicion.

“Where we eventually wander is not the immediate concern,” the dragon warned, his voice thick with pent up rage. “I will have my revenge.”

Yharaskrik heard the dragon’s internal dialogue quite clearly, flashing with images of Spirit Soaring, the home of the priest who had aided in the demise of all three of the joined spirits. On that place, the dragon focused its hatred and wrath. They had flown over the building the night before, and even then, Yharaskrik and Crenshinibon had to overrule the reflexive anger of Hephaestus. Had it not been for those two mediating internal voices, the dragon would have swooped down upon the place in an explosive fit of sheer malevolence.

Yharaskrik did not openly disagree, and didn’t even allow its mind to show any signal of contrary thought.

“Straightaway!” Hephaestus roared.

“No,” the illithid then dared argue. “Magic is unwinding, arcane at least, and in some cases divine, but it has not fully unwound. It is not lost to the world, but merely undependable. This place, Spirit Soaring, is filled with mighty priests and wizards. To underestimate the assemblage of power there is fraught with peril. In the time of our choosing, it will fall, and they will fall. But no sooner.”

Hephaestus growled again, long and low, but Yharaskrik feared no outburst from the beast, for he knew that Crenshinibon continually reinforced its reasoning within Hephaestus. The dragon wanted action, devastating and catastrophic, wanted to rain death upon all of those who had helped facilitate his downfall. Impulsive and explosive was Hephaestus’s nature, was the way of dragonkind.

But the way of the illithid required patience and careful consideration, and no sentient creature in the world was more patient than Crenshinibon, who had seen the span of millennia.

They overruled Hephaestus and calmed the beast. Their promises of a smoldering ruin where Spirit Soaring stood were not without merit, intent, and honest expectation, and of course, Hephaestus knew that as surely as if the thought was his own.

The dracolich curled up with those fantasies. He, too, could be a creature of patience.

To a point.

“Hold that flank!” Rorick yelled to the men on the left-hand wall of the cave, scattered amidst a tumble of rocks. They stood in ankle-deep water and battled hard against a throng of skeletons and zombies. The center of the defensive line, bolstered by the three Bonaduce children and Pikel, held strong against the attacking undead. The water was nearly knee-deep there, its drag affecting the advancing monsters more than the defenders.

To the right, the contours and bends of the tunnel also favored the defenders. Before them, where the tunnel opened even wider, lay a deep pool. Skeletons and zombies alike that ventured there went completely underwater, and those that managed to claw back up were rained on by heavy clubs. That pool was the primary reason the defenders had chosen to make their stand there when at last the hordes had found them. Initially, it had seemed a prudent choice, but the relentlessness of their enemies was starting to make many, including Temberle and Hanaleisa, think that maybe they should have chosen a more narrow choke point than a thirty-foot expanse.

“They won’t hold,” Rorick said to his siblings even as Hanaleisa kicked the head off a skeleton and sent it flying far down the tunnel.

Hanaleisa didn’t need clarification to know what he meant. Her gaze went immediately to the left, to the many rocks along that broken section of tunnel. They had believed those rocks to be an advantage, forcing the undead press of monsters to carve up their advancing line to get past the many obstacles. But since the monsters had engaged, those many scattered boulders were working against the defenders, who too often found themselves cut off from their allies.

Hanaleisa slapped Temberle on the shoulder and splashed away to the side. She had barely gone two steps, though, before Rorick cried out in pain. She spun back as Rorick fell, lifting his already injured leg, blood streaming anew. Temberle reached for him, but a splash sent Temberle tumbling. A skeletal fish broke the water and smacked him hard in the face.

All across the middle of the line, defenders began shifting and groaning as undead fish knifed through the water and found targets.

“Retreat!” one man cried. “Run away!”

“Nowhere to run!” shouted another.

“Back down the tunnel!” the first screamed back, and began splashing his way deeper into the cave with several others in his wake. The integrity of their center collapsed behind them.

Rorick and Temberle regained their footing at the same time. Rorick waved his brother away. Temberle, blood running freely from his broken nose, turned back fast and hoisted his heavy greatsword.

Hanaleisa glanced to the left flank just in time to see a man pulled down under a dozen rotting hands. Out of options, all of it crumbling before her eyes, she could only cry out, “Uncle Pikel!” as she had done so many times in her life, whenever confronted by a childhood crisis.

If Pikel was listening, it didn’t show, for the green-bearded dwarf stood away from the front line, his eyes closed. He held his hand out before him, gripping his magical cudgel, and he waved his stump in slow circles. Hanaleisa started to call out to him again, but saw that he was already chanting.

The young monk glanced toward the left wall and back to the center. Realizing she had to trust her uncle, she bolted for the rocks, toward the group of skeletons pummeling and tearing the fallen defender. She leaped into their midst, fists and feet flailing with power and precision. She kicked one skeleton aside and crushed the chest of a zombie. She immediately went up on the ball of her foot, the other leg extended and pumping furiously as she turned a fast circle.

“Come to me!” she called to the fallen man’s companions, many of whom seemed to be turning to flee, as had several of those from the center of the line.

Hanaleisa winced then as a skeletal hand clamped upon her shoulder, bony fingers digging a deep gash. She threw back an elbow that shattered the creature’s face and sent it falling away.

Then she redoubled her kicking and punching, determined to fight to the bitter end.

The men and women deeper in the cave abandoned all thoughts of retreat and came on furiously. Hanaleisa had inspired them. Hanaleisa had shamed them.

The warrior monk took some satisfaction in that as the horde was beaten back and the fallen man was pulled from the undead grasp. She doubted it would matter in the end, but still, for some reason, it mattered to her. They would die with honor and courage, and that had to count for something.

She glanced at her brothers just as Pikel, on his fourth try, finally completed his spell. A shining white orb as big as Hanaleisa’s fist popped from the dwarf’s shillelagh and sailed over the heads of the lead defenders. The orb hit a skeleton and bounced off. Hanaleisa’s mouth dropped open in surprise as the skeleton that had been hit locked up and iced over.

“What—?” she managed to say as the small orb splashed into the water. Then she and everyone else gasped in shock as the radius of the pond around the orb froze solid.

The fighters in front yelled out in surprise and pain as the icy grasp spread to them and knocked them backward or grabbed them and froze them in place. An unintended consequence, no doubt, but no matter, for the monstrous advance, including the insidious undead fish, was immediately halted.

Frigid trails spread from the center of the ice, moving to the sides and away from the defenders, following Pikel’s will.

“Now!” Hanaleisa called to her fellows at the left wall, and they moved furiously to turn back the undead tide.

Those not caught in the ice chopped vigorously to free their companions. They moved with desperation when they saw newly arrived undead from behind the frozen area coming on undeterred, climbing up on the ice and using their stuck companions as handholds to help them navigate across the slippery surface.

But Pikel had bought the defenders enough time, and the battered and bruised group retreated down the tunnel, deeper under the mountains, until they crossed through a narrow corridor, a single-file passageway that finally opened—mercifully—into a wider chamber some hundred strides along. At the exit to that tunnel, they made their stand. Two warriors met the undead as they tried to come through.

And when those two grew weary or suffered injuries, two others took their place.

Meanwhile, behind them, Rorick organized a line of defenders who had found large rocks, and when he was certain he had enough, he called out for the defenders to stand aside. One by one, his line advanced and hurled rocks into the tunnel, driving back skeletons and zombies. As soon as each had let fly, they ran off to find another rock.

This went on for some time, until the rocks hit only other rocks, until the monsters were driven back and blocked behind a growing wall of stone. When it ended, the stubborn monsters still clawing on the back side of the barricade, Pikel stepped forward and began to gently rub the stone and dirt of the tunnel walls. He called to the plants, bidding them to come forth, and so they sent their vines and their roots, intertwining behind and among the stones, locking them ever so securely.

For the moment, at least, it seemed that the threat had ended. It had come with many cuts and bruises and even more serious wounds, and the man who had been pulled down amid the undead wouldn’t be fighting any time soon, if he managed to survive his injuries. And the defenders were deep into the tunnels, in a place of darkness they did not know. How many other tunnels might they find under the foothills of the Snowflakes, and how many monsters might find those as well, and come against them yet again?

“So what are we to do?” a man asked as the enormity of their situation settled upon them.

“We hide, and we fight,” said a determined Temberle, sniffling through his shattered nose.

“And we die,” said another, an old, surly, gray-bearded fishing boat captain.

“Aye, then we get back up and fight for th’other side,” another added. Temberle, Hanaleisa, and Rorick all looked to each other, but had no rebuttal.

“Ooooh,” said Pikel.

CHAPTER 11 LIVING NIGHTMARE

I need to get you new mounts,” Jarlaxle said with an exaggerated sigh. “We done a thousand miles and more from Mithral Hall,” Bruenor reminded. “And pushed them hard all the way. Even with the shoes….” He shook his head. Indeed, the fine mules had reached their limit, for the time being at least, but had performed brilliantly. From dawn to dusk, they had pulled the wagon, every day. Aided by the magical shoes and the fine design and construction of their load, they had covered more ground each and every day than an average team might cross in a tenday.

“True enough,” the drow admitted. “But they are weary indeed.” Drizzt and Bruenor looked at each other curiously as Pwent shouted, “I want one o’ them!” and pointed at Athrogate’s fire-spitting boar.

“Bwahaha!” Athrogate yelled back. “Be sure that I’m feeling big, ridin’ into battle on me fiery pig! And when them orcs figure out me game, I squeeze him on the flanks and fart them into flame! Bwahaha!”

“Bwahaha!” Thibbledorf Pwent echoed.

“Can we just harness them two up to pull the damned wagon?” Bruenor asked, waving a hand at the other two dwarves. “I’ll nail the magical shoes on their feet.”

“You understand the pain I’ve known for the last decade,” Jarlaxle said.

“Yet you keep him around,” Drizzt pointed out.

“Because he is strong against my enemies and can hold back their charge,” said Jarlaxle. “And I can outrun him should we need to retreat.”

Jarlaxle handed the mule off to Drizzt, who slowly walked the weary beast around to the back of the wagon, where he had just tethered its partner. Their days of pulling the wagon were over, for a while at least.

The hells-born nightmare resisted Jarlaxle’s tug as he tried to put it in the harness.

“He’s not liking that,” said Bruenor.

“He has no choice in the matter,” Jarlaxle replied, and he managed at last to harness the beast. He clapped the dirt off his hands and moved to climb up beside Pwent and Bruenor on the jockey box. “Keep the pace strong and steady, good dwarf. You will find the demon horse more than up to the …” He paused, and in pulling himself up, encountered the skeptical expressions of both dwarves. “I give you my mount, and you would have me walk?” Jarlaxle asked as if wounded.

Pwent looked to Bruenor.

“Let him up,” Bruenor decided.

“I’ll protect ye, me king!” Pwent declared as Jarlaxle took his seat next to the battlerager, with Pwent between the mercenary and Bruenor.

“He’d kill you before you ever knew the fight had started,” Drizzt remarked as he walked past.

Pwent’s eyes went wide with alarm.

“Oh, it is true,” Jarlaxle assured him.

Pwent started to stutter and stammer, but Bruenor nudged him hard.

“What, me king?” the battlerager asked.

“Just shut up,” said Bruenor, and Jarlaxle laughed.

The dwarf king snapped the reins, but instead of moving ahead, the nightmare snorted fire and turned its head around in protest.

“Please, allow me,” Jarlaxle said with obvious alarm as he grabbed at the reins, which Bruenor relinquished.

With no movement of the reins at all, Jarlaxle willed the nightmare forward. The demonic creature had no trouble pulling the wagon. The only thing that slowed the pace was the drow’s deference to the two mules tied to the back, both exhausted from the long road.

And indeed it had been long, for they had covered most of the leagues by morning, and the Snowflake Mountains were in sight, though fully a day’s travel away.

Jarlaxle assured them that his magical beast could continue after the sun had set, that it could even see in the dark, but out of continued deference to the mules, who had given the journey their all, Bruenor called for a halt that mid afternoon. They went about setting their camp in the foothills.

Jarlaxle dismissed his nightmare back to its home on a lower plane, and Athrogate did likewise with his demonic boar. Then Athrogate and Pwent went out to find logs and boulders to fashion some defenses for their camp. They had barely started moving, though, and Jarlaxle and Bruenor had just untied the mules when the beasts began shifting nervously and snorting in protest.

“What’s that about?” Bruenor asked.

Jarlaxle tugged the reins of his mule straight down, hard, but the creature snorted in protest and pulled back.

“Wait,” Drizzt said to them. He was in the wagon, standing beside the seated Catti-brie, and when the others looked to him for clarification, they went silent, seeing the ranger on his guard, his eyes locked on the trees across the road.

“What’re ye seeing, elf?” Bruenor whispered, but Drizzt just shook his hand, which was outstretched toward the dwarf, bidding him to silence.

Jarlaxle quietly retied the mules to the wagon, his gaze darting between Drizzt and the trees.

Drizzt slid Taulmaril off his shoulder and strung it.

“Elf?” Bruenor whispered.

“What in the Nine Hells?” Thibbledorf Pwent howled then, from behind the trio.

Bruenor and Jarlaxle both looked back at him to see a long-armed, short-legged creature with bloated gray and black skin dragging itself over the boulders toward Pwent and Athrogate. Drizzt never turned his gaze from the trees, and soon enough saw another of the same monster crash out of the underbrush.

The drow froze—he knew those strange creatures all too well, those clawing, huddled, shadowy things. He had gone to their umbral home.

Catti-brie was there.

And Regis.

Had he gone there again? He lifted his bow and leveled it for a shot, but took a deep breath, thinking that he might again be in that state of mental confusion. Would he let fly only to put an arrow through Bruenor’s heart?

“Shoot it, Drizzt,” he heard Jarlaxle say in Deep Drow—a language Drizzt hadn’t heard spoken in a long time. It was as if Jarlaxle had read his thoughts perfectly. “You are not imagining this!”

Drizzt pulled back and let fly, and the magical bow launched a searing line of energy, like lightning, at the fleshy beast, splattering its chest and throwing it back into the brush.

But where there was one, there were many, and a shout behind from the two dwarves clued Drizzt in to that fact even as more of them crashed out onto the road before him.

The ranger pumped his arms furiously, reaching into his magical quiver to draw forth arrow after arrow, nock it, and let it fly, tearing the darkness with sizzling lines of bright lightning. So thick were the beasts that almost every arrow hit a fleshy mass, some burning through to strike a second monster behind the first. The stench of burning flesh fouled the air, and a sickly bubbling and popping sound filled the dead calm between the thunderous blasts of Taulmaril.

Despite the devastation he rained on the crawlers, they came on. Many crossed the road and neared the wagon. Drizzt let fly another shot, then had to drop Taulmaril and draw out his blades to meet the onslaught.

Beside him, Bruenor leaped down from the wagon, banging his old, trusted shield, emblazoned with the foaming mug of Clan Battlehammer. He gripped his many-notched axe, a weapon he had carried for decades upon decades. As the dwarf leaped down, Jarlaxle sprang up onto the seat and drew out a pair of thin wands, including the one he had used earlier to restrain Drizzt.

“Fireball,” he explained to Bruenor, who looked at him, about to ask why he wasn’t on the ground with a weapon in his hand.

“Then light ‘em up!”

But Jarlaxle considered for a moment, and shook his head, unsure of the casting. If his other wand malfunctioned, he might glue himself to the wagon, but if this one backfired, he’d light himself up, and Bruenor and Catti-brie, too.

To the dwarf’s surprise, Jarlaxle shifted both wands to his left hand, then snapped his right wrist, bringing forth a blade from his magical bracer. A second snap of his wrist elongated that blade to a short sword. A third and final thrust made it a long sword.

Jarlaxle moved to put the fireball wand away, but changed his mind and slid the other one into his belt. If the situation deteriorated to where he needed to use a device, he decided, he’d have to take the chance.

Athrogate worked his morningstars magnificently, the heavy spiked balls humming at the ends of their chains, weaving out before him, to this side and that, and over his head.

“Get out yer weapon!” he yelled at Thibbledorf Pwent.

“I am me weapon, ye dolt!” the battlerager yelled back, and as the fleshy creature crawled nearer, just before Athrogate stepped forward to launch a barrage of flying morningstars, Pwent charged and dived upon the enemy, fists pumping, knees thumping. Locked in place with his fist spikes, the trapped creature flailing and biting at him, Pwent went into a wild and furious gyration, a violent convulsion, a seizure of sorts, it seemed.

The dwarf’s ridged armor tore apart the beast’s flesh, fast reducing the monster to a misshapen lump of pulped meat.

“Bwahaha!” Athrogate cheered, grinning, saluting and belly-laughing as he leaped past Pwent and went into an arm-rolling assault of morningstar over morningstar at the next beast coming in.

The blunt weapons weren’t quite as lethal against the thick and malleable flesh, which gave way under the weight of their punishment. A typical fighter with a normal morningstar would have found himself in sorry shape against the shadowy crawlers, but Athrogate was no typical fighter. His strength was that of a giant, his skills honed over centuries of battle, and his morningstars, too, were far from the usual.

He worked the weapons expertly, maneuvering himself right in front of the battered creature before coming in with a mighty overhead chop that splattered the crawler across the stone before him.

He had no time to salute himself, and just enough time to tell Pwent to get up, before another three beasts came in hard at him, with many more following.

Black clawing hands reached at him repeatedly, but Athrogate kept his morningstars spinning, driving them back. Out of the corner of his eye, though, the dwarf saw another monster, on the branch of a tree not far away, and when that beast leaped at him, Athrogate had no manner of defense.

He did manage to close his eyes.

Bruenor reminded himself that Catti-brie lay helpless behind him in the wagon. With that thought in the dwarf’s mind, the first crawler dragging itself at him got cut in half, head to crotch, by a mighty two-handed overhead chop. Ignoring a fountain of blood and gore, Bruenor kicked his way through the mess and took out a second with a sidelong cut, blocking the third’s slashing claws with his heavy buckler.

He felt a fourth coming from the other way and instinctively cut across hard with his axe, not realizing until it was too late that it was a drow, not a fleshy beast.

But the nimble Jarlaxle leaped up and tucked in his legs. “Careful, friend,” he said as he landed, though he slurred his words for the wand he carried in his teeth. He stepped in front of the surprised dwarf, stabbing forward with two swords, popping deep holes in the chest of the next approaching monster.

“Could’ve warned me,” Bruenor grumbled, and went back to chopping and slashing. A screech behind him and to his right warned him that the beasts had reached the mules.

Drizzt didn’t even have a moment to take in the sight of Bruenor and Jarlaxle fighting side by side, something he never expected to see. He rushed in front of the duo, slashing with every stride, and into a fast spin, blades cutting hard and barely even slowing when they sliced through the meaty body of a crawler. A second spin followed, the mighty ranger moving along as he turned, and he came out of it with three running strides, stabbing repeatedly. He pulled up short and turned, then leaped and flipped sidelong over another of the creatures, managing to stab down twice as he went over. Drizzt landed lightly on the other side of it, immediately falling into another spin, his scimitars humming through the air and through gray-black flesh all around him.

The drow turned back toward the wagon then, and took heart in seeing Jarlaxle’s nightmare punishing any crawlers that came too near, the hellish steed stomping its hooves and blasting out miniature fireballs.

Drizzt cut in behind it, his eyes going wide as he saw a beast coming over the opposite side rail. The drow hit the jockey box in full stride and leaped over the rail without slowing. He darted in front of Catti-brie at full speed, his scimitars cutting apart the beast as he passed.

How he wanted to stay with her! But he couldn’t, not with the mules tugging and thrashing in terror.

He sprang down right between them, agilely avoiding their kicks and stomps, and deftly clearing away enemies with precision thrusts and stabs.

Just behind the mules, he stopped and veered again, thinking to re-run the route.

No need, he realized as soon as he took note of Jarlaxle and Bruenor, fighting together as if they had shared a mentor and a hundred battles. Jarlaxle’s fighting style, favoring forward-rolling his blades and stabbing, compared to Drizzt’s wide-armed slashes, complemented Bruenor’s straight-ahead ferocity. In tandem, they worked in short, angled bursts for one to engage a creature, then hand it off to his partner for the killing blow.

With a surprised grin, Drizzt slipped behind them instead of in front of them, running a circuit of the wagon and taking care to give the furiously thrashing nightmare a wide berth.

Athrogate yelled out, thinking himself doomed, but a second form flew through the air, head down, helmet spike leveled. Thibbledorf Pwent hit the leaping crawler squarely, skewering it with his spiked helm and pushing it aside with him as he crashed to the rocky ground. He bounced up and began hopping about, the fleshy beast bouncing atop his head, fully stuck and dying fast.

“Oh, but that’s great!” Athrogate cried. “That’s just great!”

Too enraged to hear him, the fierce battlerager charged into a group of the beasts, thrashing and punching and kneeing and kicking, even biting when one clawed hand came too near his face.

Athrogate rushed up beside him, morningstars spinning furiously, splattering black flesh with every powerful swing. Side by side, the dwarves advanced, enemies flying all about, one still bobbing in its death throes atop the helmet spike of Thibbledorf Pwent.

Bruenor and Jarlaxle fought a more defensive battle, holding their ground with measured chops and stabs. As the ranks of monsters thinned and the wagon became secure, Drizzt hopped up on the bench, retrieved his bow, and began firing toward the tree line with flashing arrows, further thinning the horde coming at Bruenor and Jarlaxle.

Pwent and Athrogate, their rocky campsite cleared, joined the others, and Drizzt again dropped the bow and drew out his scimitars. With a communal nod and knowing grins, the five went out in a line of devastation, sweeping clear the grassy patch near the road and sweeping clear the road as well before turning and running as one back to the wagon.

With nothing left to hit, four of the group, the dwarves and Jarlaxle, each took up positions north, south, east, and west around the wagon. Drizzt scrambled into the wagon bed beside Catti-brie, Taulmaril the Heartseeker in hand, ready to support his comrades.

His attention was soon turned to his beloved cargo, though, and he looked down to see Catti-brie jerking spasmodically, standing upright though she was not trying to walk. She floated off the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head.

“Oh, no,” Drizzt muttered, and he had to fall back. Most agonizing of all, he had to step away from his tortured wife.

CHAPTER 12 WHEN THE SHADOWS CAME TO THE LIGHT

Danica and Cadderly rushed through the hallways of Spirit Soaring to see what the commotion was all about. They had to push through a bevy of whispering wizards and priests to squeeze their way out the door, and the grand front porch of the structure was no less crowded.

“Stay up here!” a mage called to Danica as she squirmed through and jumped down the steps to the cobblestones. “Cadderly, don’t let her …”

The man eased up on his protests as Cadderly lifted a hand to silence him. The priest trusted in Danica, and reminded the others to do the same. Still, Cadderly was more than a little perplexed by the sight before him. Deer, rabbits, squirrels, and all manner of animals charged across the lawn of Spirit Soaring, in full flight.

“There was a bear,” an older priest explained.

“A bear is scaring them like this?” Cadderly asked with obvious skepticism.

“Bear was running just as fast, just as frightened,” the priest clarified, and as Cadderly frowned in disbelief, several others nodded, confirming the wild tale.

“A bear?”

“Big bear. Has to be a fire.”

But Cadderly looked to the south, from whence the animals came, and he saw no smoke darkening the late afternoon sky. He sniffed repeatedly, but found no scent of smoke in the air. He looked at Danica, who was making her way to the southern tree line. Somewhere beyond her came the roar of another bear, then one of a great cat.

Cadderly pushed his way to the front steps and cautiously descended. A deer bounded out of the trees, leaping frantically across the lawn. Cadderly clapped his hands, figuring to frighten the creature enough to make it veer to the side, but it never seemed to hear or even see him. It went leaping by, knocking him back as it passed.

“I told you!” the first mage cried at him. “There’s no sensibility in them.”

In the woods, the bear roared again, more powerfully, more insistently. “Danica!” Cadderly called.

The bear was roaring out in protest and in pain, its threatening growls interspersed with higher-pitched squeals.

“Danica!” Cadderly cried again, more insistently, and he started toward the trees. He stopped abruptly as Danica burst out of the brush.

“Inside! Inside!” she yelled to them all.

Cadderly looked at her questioningly, then his eyes widened in surprise and horror as a horde of crawling beasts, long arms propelling them along at tremendous speed, charged out of the trees behind her.

The priest had studied the catalogs of Faerûn’s many and varied animals and monsters, but he had never seen anything quite like these. In that instant of identification, Cadderly got the image of a legless man crawling on long, powerful arms, but that reflexive thought did not hold under closer scrutiny. Wide, hunched shoulders surmounted squat torsos, and the dark-skinned creatures used their arms to walk. They had something resembling feet at the end of their stubby legs, like a sea mammal’s flippers. Their locomotion was half hop, half drag. Had they stood straight up, they would nearly match an average man, despite their vestigial feet and their compressed heads, a sort of half-sphere set on their shoulders.

Their faces were far from human in appearance, with no forehead to speak of, a flat nose, nostrils open forward, and shining yellow eyes—malignant eyes. But their mouths, all toothy and vicious, most alarmed Cadderly and everyone else staring at the beasts. They stretched almost the width of their elongated faces, with a hinged bottom jaw that protruded forward and seemed to project right from the top of the chest, snapping upward hungrily in an eager underbite.

Danica was ahead of the monstrosities, and a fast runner, but one of them closed fast on her, cutting an intercepting angle.

Cadderly started to call out to her with horror, but bit it off as she dropped her weight to her heels and skidded to a stop, threw herself around in a circle, and leaped into the air, tucking her legs up high as the creature came in under her. It too stopped fast, long arms reaching up, but Danica’s legs were faster and they drove down hard against the monster’s upturned face. She used the press as a springboard and leaped away. The monster bounced under the weight of the blow.

Danica put her head down and ran with all speed, sparing a heartbeat to wave Cadderly back into the cathedral, to remind him with her desperate expression that he, too, was in grave danger.

As the priest turned, he saw just how grave that danger was. Coming out of the woods were more of the crawling beasts, many more. That unseen but oft-heard bear lumbered out, too, thrashing and stumbling, covered with the shadowy creatures.

His heart pounding, Cadderly leaped to the stairs, but on the porch, the many wizards and priests were in a panic, crushing against the door with few actually getting inside. To both sides of the double doors, windows flew open, those inside beckoning their companions to dive in from the porch.

They weren’t going to make it, Cadderly realized as he glanced back at Danica. How he wished he had his hand crossbow, or even his walking stick! But he had come down thinking that nothing was seriously out of sorts. Physically, he was unarmed.

But he still had Deneir.

Cadderly turned on the top step and closed his eyes, falling into prayer, praying for some solution. He began spellcasting before he even realized what he was attempting.

He opened his eyes and threw his arms wide. Danica hit the bottom step and sprang up past him, a host of creatures right behind her.

A blast of energy rolled out from Cadderly across the ground and through it in a great, rolling wave, lifting the cobblestones and grass, and many of the creatures.

More waves came forth, washing the beasts back in a series of rolling semicircles, like a ripple of waves from the shore of a still pond. The hungry beasts tried to fight past it, but inevitably lost ground, washing farther and farther backward.

“What is that?” a wizard asked in obvious awe, and despite his concentration, Cadderly heard the woman.

He had no answer.

None, that is, except that his spell had bought them the time they needed, and into Spirit Soaring they all went, Danica and Cadderly coming last, with Danica practically pulling her stunned husband in behind her.

Danica was relieved to hear other people calling out commands to guard the windows and doors, because Cadderly could do little at that moment, and he needed her. She looked around only briefly, suddenly realizing that someone was missing. Spirit Soaring was a huge place of many, many rooms, so she hadn’t noticed the absence before. But in that moment of urgency and danger, she knew that the Spirit Soaring family was incomplete.

Where was Ivan Bouldershoulder?

Danica glanced around again, trying to recall when last she had seen the boisterous dwarf. But Cadderly’s gasp brought her back to the situation at hand.

“What did you do out there?” Danica asked him. “I have never seen—”

“I know not at all,” he admitted. “I went to Deneir, seeking spells, seeking a solution.”

“And he answered!”

Cadderly looked at her with a blank expression for a moment before shaking his head with concern. “The Metatext, the Weave …” he whispered. “He is part of it now.”

Danica stared at him, puzzled.

“As if the two—perhaps the three of them, Deneir, Metatext, and Weave—are no longer separate,” Cadderly tried to explain.

“But save for Mystra, the gods were never a part of—”

“No, more than that,” Cadderly said, shaking his head more forcefully. “He was writing to the Weave, patterning it with numbers, and now …”

The sound of breaking glass, followed by shouts, followed by screams, broke short the conversation.

“They come,” said Danica, and she started off, pulling Cadderly behind her.

They found their first battle in the room only two doors down from the foyer, where a group of priests met the incursion of a pair of the beasts head on. Smashing away with their maces, and mostly armored, the priests had the situation well in hand.

Cadderly took the lead, running fast to the central stairwell and sprinting up three steps at a time to get up to the fourth floor and his private quarters. Just inside the doorway, he grabbed his belt, a wide leather girdle with a holster on either side for his hand crossbows. He looped a bandolier of specially crafted bolts around his neck and sprinted back to join Danica, loading the crossbows as he went.

They started for the stairs, but then discovered an unwelcome talent of the strange, crawling beasts: they were expert climbers. Down the hall a window shattered, and they heard thumps as one of the creatures pull itself through.

Danica moved in front of Cadderly as he dashed that way, but as they reached the room and kicked the door wide, he pushed her aside and lifted his arm, leveling the crossbow.

A beast was in the room, a second in the window frame, and both opened wide their mouths in vicious snarls.

Cadderly fired, the bolt flashing across the room to strike the chest of the beast in the window. The dart’s side supports folded inward, collapsing on themselves and crushing the small vial they held. That concussion ignited magical oil in an explosive burst that blew a huge hole in the monster’s black flesh. The force blew the crawler back out the window.

Cadderly aimed his second crossbow at the remaining creature, but turned his arm aside as Danica charged it. She stutter-stepped at the last moment, brought her left leg across to her right, and swept it back powerfully, deflecting both clawing arms aside. She expertly turned her hips as she went, gaining momentum, for as her left foot touched down, she snap-kicked with her right, driving the tip of her foot into the beast’s left eye.

It howled and thrashed, arms swinging back furiously, predictably, and Danica easily stepped out of reach, then followed through with a forward step and front kick to the creature’s chest that drove it back against the wall.

Again it reacted with fury, and again she easily leaped out of reach.

This was the way to fight the creatures, she decided then. Strike hard and back out, repeatedly, never staying close enough to engage those awful claws.

Cadderly was more than glad that she had the situation under control when they heard the window in the adjoining room shatter. He spun around the jamb, turning to kick open the next door, and swept into the room with his left arm upraised.

The beast huddled right before him, waiting to spring at him.

With a startled cry, Cadderly fired the hand crossbow, the bolt hitting the charging crawler barely two feet away, close enough that he felt the rush of concussive force as the dart exploded. Then the beast was gone, blown back across the room where it settled against the wall, its long arms out wide and trembling, a hole in its torso so large that Cadderly realized he could slide his fist into it with ease.

His breathing came in surprised gasps, but he heard a commotion just outside. He dropped the hand crossbow from his left hand—it bounced off his mid thigh, for it was securely tethered—and worked fast to reload the other weapon.

He nearly dropped the explosive dart when Danica rushed into the hall behind him, slamming the door of the first room.

“Too many!” she cried. “And they’re coming in all around us. We’ve got to call up help from below.”

“Go! Go!” Cadderly yelled back, fumbling with the dart as a shadowy form filled the window across the room.

Danica, hardly noticing the nearby enemy, ran for the stairwell. The fleshy beast hurled itself at Cadderly.

The crossbow string slipped from his grasp, and he was lucky to stop the dart from falling out of its grooved table. His eyes flashed from bow to beast and back again, and back, to see a filthy clawed hand slashing at his face.

The center stairs at Spirit Soaring ran down a flight, turned around a landing, then ran down another flight in the opposite direction, two flights for every story of the building. Danica didn’t actually run down the steps. She went halfway down the first flight and hopped the railing, landing lightly halfway down the second flight. She didn’t bounce right to the third set of stairs, but leaped down to the landing to reconnoiter the third floor.

As she had feared, she was met by the sound of breaking glass. She yelled down the stairs again and sprang halfway down the next stairway, then leaped to the fourth set of steps. She heard the commotion of many people running up the stairs.

“Break into patrols to secure each floor!” Danica yelled to them, her point accentuated when the lead group reached the landing to the second story and immediately encountered a pair of the beasts rushing down the hallway at them.

Waggling fingers sent bolts of magical force reaching out. Armored clerics crowded into the doorway to shield the unarmored wizards.

Few at Spirit Soaring were untested or unseasoned in battle, and so several broke off from the first group with precision and discipline, most continuing up the stairs.

Danica was already gone from the spot, sprinting back up three steps at a time. She had been away from Cadderly for longer than she had anticipated, and though she trusted in him—how could she not, when she had seen him face down a terrible dragon and a vampire, and when she had watched him, through sheer willpower and divine magic, create the magnificent library cathedral? — she knew that he was alone up there on the fourth floor.

Alone and with more than two dozen windows to defend in that wing alone.

He cried out in alarm and turned away from the blow, but not enough to avoid the long, vicious claws. He felt the skin under his left eye tear away, and the weight of the blow nearly knocked him senseless.

Cadderly wasn’t even aware that he had pulled the trigger of his hand crossbow. The bolt wasn’t set perfectly on the table, but it snapped out anyway, and good fortune alone had the weapon turned in the correct direction. The bolt stabbed into the monster’s flesh, collapsed, and exploded, throwing the beast backward. It flew against the wall, shrieking in a ghastly squeal. Clawed hands grabbed at the blasted-open wound.

Cadderly heard the scream, but couldn’t tell whether it was pain, defeat, or victory. Bent low, he stumbled out of the room, blood streaming down his face and dripping on the floor. The blow hadn’t touched his eye, but it was already swollen so badly he could see only splashes of indistinguishable light.

Staggering and disoriented, he heard more creatures dragging themselves through other rooms. Load! Load! his thoughts silently screamed, and he fumbled to do just that, but quickly realized that he hadn’t the time.

He closed his eyes and called out to Deneir.

All he found were numbers, patterns written on the Weave.

His confusion lasted until a creature burst into the hall before him. The numbers formed a pattern in his mind, and a spell issued from his lips.

A gleaming shield of divine energy enwrapped the priest as the creature rushed in, and though Cadderly instinctively recoiled from its bashing, clawing attacks, they did not, could not, seriously harm him.

They couldn’t penetrate the magical barrier he had somehow enacted.

Another spell flowed into his thoughts, and he wasted no time in uttering the words, dropping his hand crossbows to hang by their tethers and throwing his hands high into the air. He felt the energy running through him, divine and wonderful and powerful, as if he pulled it out of the air. It tingled down his arms and through his torso, down his legs and into the floor, and there it rolled out in every direction, an orange-red glow spider-webbing through the floor planks.

The creature whacking at him immediately began to howl in pain, and Cadderly ambled down the hall, taking the consecrated ground with him. Too stupid to realize its error, the fleshy beast followed and continued to scream out, its lower torso sizzling under the burn of radiant energy.

More creatures came at him and tried to attack, but began howling as they entered the circle of power. The magic still moved with Cadderly as he turned toward the stairs.

There, the mighty priest saw Danica gawking at him.

The first creature died. Another one fell, then a third, consumed by the power of Deneir, the power of the unknown dweomer Cadderly had cast. He waved for Danica to run away, but she didn’t, and went to join him instead.

As soon as she drew near, she too began to glisten under the light of his divine shield.

“What have you done?” she asked him.

“I have no idea,” Cadderly replied. He wasn’t about to stand there and question his good fortune.

“Let’s clear the floor,” Danica said, and together they moved down the hallway.

Danica led with a flurry of kicks and punches that finished off two of the beasts as they writhed in pain when the consecrated ground came under them.

One creature tried to scramble into a side room, and Danica turned toward it. But Cadderly cast forth a pointing finger and cried out another prayer. A shaft of light, a lance of divine energy, shot out and skewered the beast, which howled and crashed into the doorjamb as Danica neared.

The crawler survived the spearlike energy, but it sparkled and glowed, making it easy for the expert Danica to line up her blows and quickly dispatch it.

By the time five bloodied and battered priests arrived on the landing of the stairs to support the couple, one wing of the fourth floor had been swept clear of monsters. Cadderly still emanated the circle of power flowing around him, and discovered too that his wounds were magically mending.

The other priests looked at him with puzzlement and intrigue, but he had no answers for them. He had called to Deneir, and Deneir, or some other being of power, had answered his prayers with unknown dweomers.

There was no time to sit and contemplate, Cadderly knew, for Spirit Soaring was a gigantic structure full of windows, full of side rooms and alcoves, plus narrow back passages and a multilevel substructure.

They fought throughout the night and into the early dawn, until no more monsters came through the windows. Still they fought throughout the morning, weary and battered, and with several of their companions dead, painstakingly clearing the large spaces of Spirit Soaring.

Cadderly and Danica both knew that many rooms remained to be explored and cleared, but they were all exhausted. The task began to reinforce the windows with heavy boards, to tend the wounded, and to organize battle groups for the coming night and the next possible attack.

“Where is Ivan?” Danica asked Cadderly when they finally had a few moments alone.

“He went to Carradoon, I thought.”

“No, just Pikel, with Rorey and …” the names caught in Danica’s throat. All three of her children had gone to Carradoon, had traveled through the mountain forests from which those hideous creatures had come.

“Cadderly?” she whispered, her voice breaking. He, too, had to take a deep breath to stop himself from falling over in fear.

“We have to go to them,” he said.

But Danica was shaking her head. “You have to stay here,” she replied. “You cannot—”

“I can move more quickly on my own.”

“We have no idea what precipitated this,” Cadderly complained. “We don’t even know what power we’re up against!”

“And who better than I to find out?” his wife asked, and she managed a little grin of confidence.

A very little grin of confidence.

CHAPTER 13 I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY

She wore a little knowing smile, a smile at odds with her eyes, which had rolled again to white. She was floating off the ground. “Ye mean to kill him?” she asked, as if she were talking to someone standing before her. As she spoke, her eyes came back into focus.

“The accent,” Jarlaxle remarked as Catti-brie’s shoulders shifted back—as if she thought she was leaning back in a chair, perhaps.

“If ye be killing Entreri to free Regis and to stop him from hurting anyone else, then me heart says it’s a good thing,” the woman said, and leaned forward intently. “But if ye’re meaning to kill him to prove yerself or to deny what he is, then me heart cries.”

“Calimport,” Drizzt whispered, vividly recalling the scene. “Wha—?” Bruenor started to ask, but Catti-brie continued, cutting him short.

“Suren the world’s not fair, me friend. Suren by the measure of hearts, ye been wronged. But are ye after the assassin for yer own anger? Will killing Entreri cure the wrong?

“Look in the mirror, Drizzt Do’Urden, without the mask. Killin’ Entreri won’t change the color of his skin—or the color of yer own.”

“Elf?” Bruenor asked, but at that shocking moment, Drizzt couldn’t even hear him.

The weight of that long-ago encounter with Catti-brie came cascading back to him. He was there again, in the moment, in that small room, receiving one of the most profound slaps of cold wisdom anyone had ever cared enough about him to deliver. It was the moment he realized that he loved Catti-brie, though it would be years before he dared act on those feelings.

He glanced at Bruenor and Jarlaxle, a bit embarrassed, too much overwhelmed, and turned again to his beloved, who continued that old conversation—word for word.

“… if only ye’d learn to look,” she said, her lips turned in that disarming, charming smile that she had so often flashed Drizzt’s way, each time melting any resistance he might have to what she was saying.

“And if only ye’d ever learned to love. Suren ye’ve let things slip past, Drizzt Do’Urden.”

She turned her head, as if some commotion had occurred nearby, and Drizzt remembered that Wulfgar had entered the room at that moment. Wulfgar was Catti-brie’s lover at that time, though she’d just hinted that her heart was for Drizzt.

And it was, he knew, even then.

Drizzt began to shake as he remembered what was to come. Jarlaxle moved up behind him then, and reached around Drizzt’s head. For an instant, Drizzt tensed, thinking the mercenary had a garrote. It was no garrote, however, but an eye patch, which Jarlaxle tied on securely before shoving Drizzt forward.

“Go to her!” he demanded.

Only a step away, Drizzt heard again the words that had, in retrospect, changed his life, the words that had freed him.

“Just for thoughts, me friend,” Catti-brie said quietly, and Drizzt had to pause before continuing to her, had to let her finish. “Are ye more trapped by the way the world sees ye, or by the way ye see the world seein’ ye?”

Tears streaming from his lavender eyes, Drizzt fell over her in a great hug, pulling down her outstretched arms. He didn’t cross into that shadowed plane, protected as he was by Jarlaxle’s eye patch. Drizzt pulled Catti-brie down to him and hugged her close, and kept on hugging her until she finally relaxed and slipped back to a sitting position.

At last, Drizzt looked at the others, at Jarlaxle in particular.

“I am not your enemy, Drizzt Do’Urden,” he said.

“What’d’ye do?” Bruenor demanded.

“The eye patch protects the mind from intrusion, magical or psionic,”

Jarlaxle explained. “Not fully, but enough so that a wary Drizzt would not be drawn again into that place where …”

“Where Regis’s mind now dwells,” said Drizzt.

“Be sure that I’m not knowin’ a bit o’ what ye’re talking about,” said Bruenor, planting his hands firmly on his hips. “What in the Nine Hells is going on, elf?”

Drizzt wore a confused expression and began to shake his head.

“It is as if two planes of existence, or two worlds from different planes, are crashing together,” Jarlaxle said, and all of them looked at him as if he had grown an ettin’s second head.

Jarlaxle took a deep breath and gave a little laugh. “It is no accident that I found you on the road,” he said.

“Ye think we ever thinked it one, ye dolt?” asked Bruenor, drawing a helpless chuckle from the drow mercenary.

“And no accident that I sent Athrogate there—Stuttgard, if you will—into Mithral Hall to coax you on the road to Spirit Soaring.”

“Yeah, the Crystal Shard,” Bruenor muttered in a tone that showed obvious skepticism.

“All that I told you is true,” Jarlaxle replied. “But yes, good dwarf, my tale was not complete.”

“Me heart’s skippin’ to hear it.”

“There is a dragon.”

“There always is,” said Bruenor.

“I and my friend here were being pursued,” Jarlaxle explained. “Nasty buggers,” said Athrogate.

“Pursued by creatures who could raise the dead with ease,” said Jarlaxle. “The architects of the Crystal Shard, I believe, who have somehow transcended the limitations of this plane.”

“Yup, ye’re losing me in the trees again,” said Bruenor.

“Creatures of two worlds, like Catti-brie,” Drizzt said.

“Maybe. I cannot know for certain. That they are of, or possess the ability to be of two dimensions, I am certain. From this hat, I can produce dimensional holes, and so I did, and threw one such item at the creature pursuing me.”

“The one what kept melting before me morningstars could flatten it out,” Athrogate explained.

“Plane shifting,” Jarlaxle said. “And it did so as my dimensional hole fell over it, and the combination of two extra-dimensional magics tore a rift to the Astral Plane.”

“Then the creature’s gone,” said Bruenor.

“Forever, I expect,” Jarlaxle agreed.

“And ye’re needin’ us and needin’ Cadderly why, then?”

“Because it was an emissary, not the source. And the source …”

“The dragon,” said Drizzt.

“Always is,” Bruenor said again.

Jarlaxle shrugged, unwilling to commit to that. “Whatever it is, it remains alive, and with the terrible power to send its thoughts across the world, and send its emissaries out as well. It’s been calling forth minions from the realm of the dead with abandon, and perhaps”—he paused and looked back to the scene of the slaughtered beasts around them—“the power to call forth minions from this other place, this dark place.”

“What’re ye about, ye durned elf?” Bruenor demanded. “What did ye pull us along to?”

“Along the road that will find an answer for your dear daughter’s plight, I hope,” Jarlaxle replied without hesitation. “And yes, I put you beside Athrogate and I in our own quest, as well.”

“Ye dropped us in the middle of it, ye mean!” Bruenor growled.

“I’m wantin’ to punch yer skinny face!” Pwent shouted.

“We were already in the middle of it,” Drizzt said, and when all turned to regard him as he knelt there hugging Catti-brie, it was hard for any to disagree. Drizzt looked at Jarlaxle and said, “The whole world is in the middle of it.”

CHAPTER 14 SCOUTS’ DISMAY

We cannot just wait here for them to assail us again at twilight!” a young wizard cried, and many others took up that refrain. “We do not even know if that will happen,” reminded Ginance, an older woman, a priest of Cadderly’s order who had been cataloging scrolls at Spirit Soaring since its earliest days. “We have never encountered such creatures as these … these lumps of ugly flesh! We know not if they have an aversion to sunlight, or if they broke off the attack at dawn for strategic reasons.”

“They left when the dawn’s light showed in the east,” the first protested. “That tells me we’ve a good place to start in our counterattack, and counter we must—aggressively.”

“Aye!” several others shouted.

The discussion in the nave of Spirit Soaring had been going on for some time, and thus far Cadderly had remained quiet, gauging the demeanor of the room. Several wizards and priests, all of them visitors to the library, had been killed in the brutal assault of the previous night. Cadderly was glad to see that the remaining group, some seventy-five men and women, most highly trained and skilled in the arcane or divine arts, had not given in to despair after that unexpected battle. Their fighting spirit was more than evident, and that, Cadderly knew, would be an important factor if they were to sort through their predicament.

He focused again on Ginance, his friend and one of the wisest and most knowledgeable members of his clergy.

“We don’t even know if Spirit Soaring is cleared of the beasts,” she said, quieting the exuberance.

“None are out biting at us, the vicious creatures!” the first mage argued. Ginance seemed at a loss to overcome the tidal wave of shouts that followed, all calling for action beyond the confines of the cathedral.

“You presume that they’re mindless, or at least stupid,” Cadderly finally put in, and though he hadn’t shouted the words, as soon as he started talking, the room went silent and all eyes focused his way.

The priest took a deep breath at that reminder, yet again, of his importance and reputation. He had built Spirit Soaring, and that was no small thing. Still, he remained unnerved by the reverence shown him, particularly given that many of his guests were far more seasoned in the art of warfare than he. One group of priests from Sundabar had spent years traversing the lower planes, battling demons and devils. Yet even they stared at him, hanging on his every word.

“You assume they ran away because they didn’t like the sunlight, rather than for tactical reasons,” Cadderly explained, carefully choosing his words. He shook his foolish nervousness away by reminding himself of his missing children, and the missing Bouldershoulder brothers. “And now you assume that if there were any more of the beasts still inside Spirit Soaring, they would rush right out ravenously instead of hiding away to strike at more opportune moments.”

“And what do you believe, good Cadderly?” asked the same young wizard who had been so fiery and obstinate with Ginance. “Do we sit and fortify, to prepare for the next onslaught, or do we go out and find our enemies?”

“Both,” Cadderly replied, and many heads, particularly the older veterans, nodded in agreement. “Many of you did not come here alone, but with trusted friends and associates, so I will leave it up to you to decide on the sizes and dispositions of battle groups. I would suggest both brawn and magic, and magic both divine and arcane. We don’t know when this … plague will end, or whether or not it will get worse, so we must do our best to cover all contingencies.”

“I would suggest groups of no less than seven,” said one of the older wizards.

They began talking amongst themselves again, which Cadderly thought best. Those men and women didn’t need his guidance on the details. Ginance came over to him then, still troubled about the notion that Spirit Soaring might be hosting some uninvited guests.

“Are all of our brethren available after last night?” Cadderly asked her.

“Most. We have two score or so brothers ready to scour Spirit Soaring—unless you would have some go out with the others.”

“Just a few,” Cadderly decided. “Offer our more worldly brothers—those who have spent the most time gathering herbs that might be used medicinally, who best know the terrain surrounding the library—to the various scouting teams sorted out by our many guests. But let us keep most of our own inside Spirit Soaring, as they know best the many catacombs, tunnels, and antechambers. That is your task, of course.”

Ginance took that great compliment with a bow. “Lady Danica would be most helpful, as would Ivan …” She paused at the sour look Cadderly flashed her way.

“Danica will be out of Spirit Soaring within a short time,” Cadderly explained. “Mostly in search of Ivan, who seems to be missing, and …”

“They’re safely in Carradoon,” Ginance assured him. “All three, and Pikel, too.”

“Let us hope,” was all Cadderly could reply.

A short while later, Cadderly sat on the balcony of his private room, looking southeast, toward Carradoon. So many thoughts fought for his attention as he worried about his children, about Danica who had gone out to look for them and for the missing Ivan Bouldershoulder. He feared for his home, Spirit Soaring, and the implications its downfall might have on his order and more personally, upon him. The horde of unknown monsters that had come against them so violently and determinedly had done little true damage to the cathedral’s structure, but Cadderly had felt the shatter of every window upon his own body, as if someone had flicked a finger hard against his skin. He was intimately bound to the place, and in ways that even he didn’t truly yet understand.

So many worries, and not least among them, Cadderly Bonaduce worried about his god and the state of the world. He had gone there, to the Weave, and had found Deneir, he was sure. He had been granted spells the likes of which he had never before known.

It was Deneir, but it was not Deneir, as if the god was changing before his very eyes, as if Deneir, his god, the rock of philosophical thought that Cadderly had used as the foundation of his very existence, was becoming part of something else, something different, perhaps bigger … and perhaps darker.

It seemed to Cadderly as if Deneir, in his attempt to unravel the mystery of the unraveling, was writing himself into the fabric of the Weave, or trying to write the Weave into the Metatext and taking himself with it in the process!

A flash of fire from a wooded valley to the east brought Cadderly back to the present. He stood up and walked to the railing, peering more intently into the distance. A few trees were on fire—one of the scouting wizards had enacted a fireball, or a priest had called down a column of flame, no doubt.

Which meant that they had encountered monsters.

Cadderly swept his gaze to the south, in line with distant Carradoon, off beyond the lower peaks. He could see the western bank of Impresk Lake on that clear day, and he tried to take some solace in the water’s calm appearance.

He prayed that their near catastrophe was local to Spirit Soaring, that his children and Pikel had gone to Carradoon oblivious to the deadly horde that had come into the mountains behind them.

“Find them, Danica,” he whispered to the late morning breezes.

She had gone out from Spirit Soaring first that day. Going alone allowed Danica to move more swiftly. Trained in stealth and speed, the woman quickly put the library far behind her, moving southeast down the packed-dirt road to Carradoon. She stayed just to the side of the open trail, moving through the brush with ease and speed.

Her hopes began to climb as the sun rose behind her, with no sign of monsters or destruction.

But then the smell of burned flesh filled her nostrils.

Cautious, but still moving with great speed, Danica ran to the top of an embankment beside the road, overlooking the scene of a recent battle: a ruined wagon and charred ground.

The Baldurian wizards.

She descended the steep decline, noting the piles of melted flesh and having no difficulty recognizing them as the remains of the same type of monsters that had assaulted Spirit Soaring the night before.

After a quick inspection revealed no human remains, Danica glanced back to the northwest, toward Spirit Soaring. Ivan had been out gathering wood the night those four had left, she recalled, and typically, the dwarf did so to the sides of the eastern road—the very road upon which she stood.

Danica’s hopes for her friend began to sink. Had he encountered a similar shadowy horde? Had he seen the Baldurian wizards’ fight and come down to aid them?

Neither scenario boded well. Ivan was as tough a fighter as Danica had ever known, capable and smart, but was out alone, and the sheer numbers that had come against Spirit Soaring, and had obviously hit the four mighty wizards on the road, could surely overwhelm anyone.

The woman took a deep, steadying breath, forcing herself not to jump to pessimistic conclusions regarding the wizards, Ivan, or the implications for her own children.

They were all capable, she reminded herself again, supremely so.

And there were no human or dwarf bodies that she could identify.

She began to look around more carefully for clues. Where had the monsters come from, and where had they gone?

She found a trail, a swath of dead trees and brown grass leading northward.

With a glance to the east, toward Carradoon, and a quick prayer for her children, Danica went hunting.

The blood on Ginance’s face told Cadderly that his concern that some beasts hid within Spirit Soaring had been prudent.

“The catacombs crawl with the creatures,” the woman explained. “We’re clearing them room by room, crypt by crypt.”

“Methodically,” Cadderly observed.

Ginance nodded. “We leave no openings behind us. We will not be flanked.”

Cadderly was glad to hear the confirmation, the reminder that the priests who had come to the call of Spirit Soaring over the last years were intelligent and studious. They were disciples of Deneir and of Gond, after all, two gods who demanded intelligence and reason as the cornerstones of faith.

Ginance held up her light tube, a combination of magic and mechanics using an unending spell of light and a tube of coated material to create a perpetual bulls-eye lantern. Every priest at Spirit Soaring had one, and with implements such as those, they could chase the darkness out of the deepest recesses.

“Leave nothing behind you,” Cadderly said, and with a nod, Ginance took her leave.

Cadderly paced his small room, angry at his own inactivity, at the responsibilities that held him there. He should be with Danica, he told himself. But he shook that notion aside, knowing well that his wife could travel more swiftly, more stealthily, and more safely by herself. Then he thought he should be clearing the library with Ginance.

“No,” he decided.

His place wasn’t in the catacombs, but neither was it in his private quarters. He needed time to recuperate and mentally reset both his determination and his sense of calm before going back into the realm of the spiritual in his search to find Deneir.

No, not to find him, he realized, for he knew where his god had gone. Into the Metatext.

Perhaps for all time.

It fell on Cadderly to sort it out, and in doing so, to try to unravel the strange alterations of the divine spells that had come to him unbidden. But not just then.

Cadderly strapped on his weapon belt and refilled his dart bandolier before looping it over his shoulder and across his chest. He considered his spindle-disks, a pair of hard, fist-sized semicircular plates bound by a small rod, around which were wrapped the finest of elven cords. Cadderly could send the disks spinning to the end of their three-foot length and back again at great speed, and could alter the angle easily to strike like a snake at any foe. He wasn’t certain how much effect the weapon might have on the malleable flesh of the strange invaders, but he put the weapons in his belt pouch anyway.

He started toward the door, passing the wall mirror as he went, and there he paused and considered himself and his purpose, and the most important duty before him, that of leadership.

He looked fine in his white shirt and brown breeches, but he decided those weren’t enough, especially since he looked very much like a young man, as young as his own children. With a smile, the not-so-young priest went to his wardrobe and took out his layered light blue traveling cloak and looped it over his shoulders. Then came his hat, also light blue, wide-brimmed and with a red band bearing the candle-over-eye emblem of Deneir set in gold on the front. A smooth walking stick, its top carved into the likeness of a ram’s head, completed the look, and Cadderly took a moment to pause before the mirror again, and to reflect.

He looked so much like the young man who had first discovered the truth of his faith.

What a journey it had been! What adventure! In constructing Spirit Soaring, Cadderly had been forced into a moment of ultimate sacrifice. The creation magic had aged him, swiftly, continually, and greatly, to the point where all around him, even his beloved Danica, had thought he would surely perish for the effort. At the completion of the magnificent structure, Cadderly was prepared to die, and seemed about to. But that had been no more than a trial by Deneir, and the same magic that had wearied him then reinvigorated him after, reversing his aging to the strange point where he appeared and felt like a man of twenty once again, full of the strength and energy of youth, but with the wisdom of a weathered veteran more than twice his apparent age.

And he was being called again to the struggle, but Cadderly feared the implications were greater to the wider world even than the advent of the chaos curse.

He looked at himself in the mirror carefully, at the Chosen of Deneir, ready for battle and ready to reason his way through chaos.

In Spirit Soaring, Cadderly gained confidence. His god would not desert him, and he was surrounded by loyal friends and mighty allies.

Danica would find their children.

Spirit Soaring would prevail and they would lead the way to whatever might come when the time of magical turbulence sorted out. He had to believe that.

And he had to make sure that everyone around him knew that he believed it.

Cadderly went down to the main audience hall of the first floor and left the large double doors open wide, awaiting the return of the scouts.

He didn’t have to wait for long. As Cadderly entered the hall under the arch from the stairwell, the first group of returning scouts stumbled into Spirit Soaring’s front doors—half the group, at least. Four members had been left dead on the field.

Cadderly had barely taken his seat when a pair of his Deneirrath priests entered, flanking a young and burly visiting priest—surrounding and supporting him, with one trying to bandage the man’s ripped and burned shield arm.

“They were everywhere,” the scout explained to Cadderly. “We were attacked less than half a league from here. A wizard tried a fireball, but it blew up short and smoked my arm. A priest tried to heal me on the field, but his spell caused an injury instead—to himself. His whole chest burst open, and … bah, we can’t depend on any magic now!”

Cadderly nodded grimly through the recounting. “I saw the fight from my balcony, I believe. To the east …?”

“North,” the priest scout corrected. “North and west.”

Those words stung Cadderly, for the fireball he had witnessed was opposite that direction. The priest’s claim that “they were everywhere” reverberated in Cadderly’s thoughts, and he tried hard to tell himself that his children were safe in Carradoon.

“Without reliable magic, our struggle will be more difficult,” Cadderly said.

“Worse than you think,” said one of the Spirit Soaring escorts, and he looked to the scout to elaborate.

“Four of our nine were slain,” the man said. “But they didn’t stay dead.”

“Resurrection?” Cadderly asked.

“Undead,” the man explained. “They got back up and started fighting again—this time against the rest of us.”

“There was a priest or a wizard among the monsters’ ranks?”

The man shrugged. “They fell, they died, they got back up.”

Cadderly started to respond but bit it short, his eyes going wide. In the fight at Spirit Soaring the night before, at least fifteen men and women had been killed, and had been laid in a side room on the first level of the catacombs.

Cadderly leaped from his chair, alarm evident on his face.

“What is it?” the priest scout asked.

“Come along, all three,” he said, scrambling toward the back of the room. He veered to a side door to corridors that would allow him to navigate the maze of the great library more quickly.

Danica picked her way carefully but quickly along the trail, staying just to the side of the swath of devastation. It ran anywhere from five to ten long strides across, with broken trees and torn turf along its center, as if some great creature had ambled through. She saw only patches of deadness along the edges—not complete decay as she found in the middle of the trail, but spotty areas where sections of trees seemingly had simply died—along both sides.

The monk was loath to walk across that swath, or even enter the area of deepest decay, but when she saw a print on an open patch of ground, she knew that she had to learn more. She held her breath as she approached, for she recognized it as a footprint indeed, a giant footprint, four-toed and with great claws, the impression of a dragon’s foot.

Danica knelt low and inspected the area, taking particular interest in the grass. Not all of it was dead on the trail, but the nearer to the footprints, the more profound the devastation. She stood up and looked around at the standing trees along the sides, and envisioned a dragon walking through, crushing down any trees or shrubs in its path, occasionally flexing its wings, perhaps, which would have put them in contact with the bordering trees.

She focused on the dead patches of those trees, so stark in contrast with the vibrancy of the forest itself. Had the mere touch of the beast’s wings killed them?

She looked again at the footprint, and at the profound absence of life in the vegetation immediately surrounding it.

A dragon, but a dragon that killed so profoundly with a mere touch?

Danica swallowed hard, realizing that the hunched, fleshy crawlers might be the least of their problems.

CHAPTER 15 THE WEIGHT OF LEADERSHIP

They’re less likely to take comfort in his dwarf heritage if they think him an idiot,” Hanaleisa explained to Temberle, who was more than a little upset at the whispers he was hearing among the ranks of the Carradden refugees.

Temberle had insisted that Pikel, the only dwarf in the group and the only one who seemed able to conjure magical light in the otherwise lightless tunnels, would lead them through the dark. Though a few had expressed incredulity at the notion of following the inarticulate, green-bearded dwarf, none had openly disagreed. How could they, after all, when Pikel had undeniably been the hero of the last fight, freezing the water and allowing a retreat from certain disaster?

But that was yesterday, and the march of the last few hours had been a series of starts and stops, of backtracking and the growing certainty that they were lost. They had encountered no walking dead, at least, but that seemed cold comfort in those dank and dirty caves, crawling through tunnels and openings that had even the children on all fours, and with crawly bugs scurrying all around them.

“They’re scared,” Temberle whispered back. “They’d be complaining no matter who took the lead.”

“Because we’re lost.” As she spoke, Hanaleisa nodded her chin at Pikel, who stood up front, lighted shillelagh tucked under his stumped arm while he scratched at his thick green beard with his good hand. The strange-looking dwarf stared at a trio of tunnels branching out before him, obviously without a clue.

“How could we not be lost?” Temberle asked. “Has anyone been through here, ever?”

Hanaleisa conceded that point with a shrug, but pulled her brother along as she moved to join the dwarf and Rorick, who stood by Pikel’s side, leaning on a staff someone had given him to aid his movement with his torn ankle.

“Do you know where we are, Uncle Pikel?” Hanaleisa asked as she approached.

The dwarf looked at her and shrugged.

“Do you know where Carradoon is? Which direction?”

Without even thinking about it, obviously sure of his answer, Pikel pointed back the way they had come, and to the right, what Hanaleisa took to be southeast.

“He’s trying to get us higher into the mountains before finding a way out of the tunnels,” Rorick explained.

“No,” Temberle was quick to reply, and both Rorick and Pikel looked at him curiously.

“Eh?” said the dwarf.

“We have to get out of the tunnels,” Temberle explained. “Now.”

“Uh-uh,” Pikel disagreed, and he grabbed up his cudgel and held both of his arms out before him, mimicking a zombie to accentuate his point.

“Certainly we’re far enough from Carradoon to escape that madness,” said Temberle.

“Uh-uh.”

“We’re not that far,” Rorick explained. “The tunnels are winding back and forth. If we came out on a high bluff, Carradoon would still be in sight.”

“I do not disagree,” said Temberle.

“But we have to get out of the tunnels as soon as possible,” Hanaleisa added. “Dragging a gravely wounded man through these narrow and dirty spaces is sure to be the end of him.”

“And going above ground is likely to be the end of all of us,” Rorick shot back.

Hanaleisa and Temberle exchanged knowing looks. Watching the dead rise and come against them had profoundly unnerved Rorick, and certainly, the older twins shared that disgust and terror.

Hanaleisa walked over and draped her arm across Pikel’s shoulders. “Get us in sight of the open air, at least,” she whispered to him. “These close quarters and the unending darkness is playing on the nerves of all.”

Pikel reiterated his zombie posture.

“I know, I know,” Hanaleisa said. “I don’t want to go out and face those things again, either. But we’re not dwarves, Uncle Pikel. We can’t stay down here forever.”

Pikel leaned on his cudgel and gave a great, heaving sigh. He tucked the club under his stump and stuck a finger in his mouth, slurping about for a moment before pulling it forth with a hollow popping sound. He closed his eyes and began to chant as he held the wet finger up before him, magically sensitizing himself to the current of air.

He pointed to the right-hand corridor.

“That will get us out?” Hanaleisa asked.

Pikel shrugged, apparently unwilling to make any promises. He took up his glowing cudgel and led the way.

“We require the other four,” decided Yharaskrik, still in the body of Ivan and speaking through the dwarf’s mouth. “The lich First Grandfather Wu is lost to us, for now at least, but four others are missing and awaiting recall.”

“They are busy,” Hephaestus insisted.

“No matter is more important than the one before us.”

The dracolich emitted a low, threatening growl. “I will have them,” he said.

“The drow and the human?”

“You know who I mean.”

“We already have lost First Grandfather Wu to the drow,” Yharaskrik reminded. “It is possible that Jarlaxle was killed in that same conflict.”

“We do not know what happened to First Grandfather Wu.”

“We know that he is lost to us, that he is … gone. There is nothing more we need know. He found Jarlaxle and was defeated, and whether the drow was also killed—”

“Is something we would know if you cared to search!” Hephaestus said, and there it was, the true source of his simmering rage.

“Do not overreach,” the illithid in the dwarf’s body retorted. “We are great and mighty, and our power will only multiply as more minions are brought through the rift, and more undead are called to our service—perhaps we will soon learn how to raise the bodies of the crawlers, then our army will be unending. But mighty, too, are our enemies, and none more so than the one we have here, within our reach, at the place they call Spirit Soaring.”

“Magic is failing.”

“But it has not failed. It is unpredictable, of course, but potent still.”

“Fetchigrol and Solmé have bottled this mighty enemy up in his hole,” Hephaestus argued with dismissive sarcasm, his voice dripping as he referred to Cadderly as “mighty.”

“They are out on the trails even now.”

“Where many have been killed!”

“A few, no more,” Yharaskrik said. “And many of our minions were consumed in the battle. They do not issue from an inexhaustible source, great Hephaestus.”

“But the walking dead do—millions and millions will answer our call. And as they kill, their ranks increase,” the dracolich proclaimed.

“The summoning is easy for those of this world who have fallen,” Yharaskrik agreed. “But it is not without cost to the power of Crenshinibon—and who more likely than the powerful Cadderly to discover a countering magic?”

“I will have them!” Hephaestus roared. “The drow and his human companion—that Calishite. I will have them and I will devour them!”

The body of Ivan Bouldershoulder settled back on its heels. The illithid within was shaking the yellow-haired head with dismay and resignation. “A creature of centuries should know more of patience,” Yharaskrik scolded quietly. “One enemy at a time. Let us destroy Cadderly and Spirit Soaring, then we can go hunting. We recall the four apparitions—”

“No!”

“We will need all of our power to—”

“No! Two in the north and two in the south. Two for the drow and two for the human. If First Grandfather Wu returns, then bring him back to our side, but the other four will hunt until they have found the drow and the human. I will have those treacherous fools. And fear not for Cadderly and his forces. We will peck at them until they are weak, then the catastrophe of Hephaestus will fall over them. I went out to Solmé this very day and the ground beneath me died at my passing, and the touch of my wings rotted the trees. I fear no mortal, not this Cadderly nor anyone else. I am Hephaestus, I am catastrophe. Look upon me and know doom!”

With a large part of his enormous consciousness still residing within the coil of the dragon, sharing that body with Hephaestus and Crenshinibon, Yharaskrik understood that it could not convince the dragon otherwise. The illithid also realized, to its dismay, that Hephaestus was gaining the upper hand in the competition for the alliance of Crenshinibon.

Perhaps the illithid had erred in abandoning that coil with so much of its consciousness. Perhaps it was time to return to the others within the lifeforce of Hephaestus, to better battle the stubborn dragon.

A smile creased the face of Ivan Bouldershoulder—an ironic one indeed, Yharaskrik thought, because he was at that moment concluding that sacrificing the dwarf to the rage of Hephaestus might placate the dragon for a while, long enough for Yharaskrik to regain some measure of dominance.

A chorus of weary cheers erupted when at last the beleaguered refugees of Carradoon saw a stream of daylight. Never had any imagined how deep and dark mountain tunnels could be—except for Pikel, of course, who had been raised in dwarven mines.

Even Rorick, who had warned against going outside, couldn’t hide his relief at learning that there was indeed an ending to those lightless corridors. With great hopes, they turned a long and curving corner leading to daylight.

And arrived with a communal, profound, and disappointed sigh.

“Uh-oh,” said Pikel, for they had not come to the end of the tunnel, but merely to a natural chimney, and a very long and narrow one at that.

“We’re deeper than I believed,” Temberle admitted, staring up the shaft, which extended upward for more than a hundred feet. Most of it could not be climbed, and was too narrow in many places for any attempt, even for nimble Hanaleisa or Rorick, who were the slimmest of the group.

“Did you know we were this far down?” Hanaleisa asked Pikel, and in reply the dwarf began drawing mountains in the air, then merely shrugged.

His reasoning was correct, Hanaleisa and the other onlookers knew, for their current depth was likely more dependent upon the contours of the mountainous land above than the relatively mild grade of the tunnels they had been traversing.

The high shaft confirmed, though, that they were indeed moving deeper into the Snowflakes.

“You have to get us out,” Temberle said to Pikel.

“To battle hordes of undead?” Rorick reminded him, and Temberle shot his brother an irritated look.

“Or at least, you have to show us … show them”—he glanced back at the many Carradden moving into sight around the corner—“that there is a way out. Even if we don’t go outside,” he added, looking pointedly at his little brother, “it remains important that we know we can go outside again. We’re not dwarves.”

A cry sounded down the line. “They’re fighting in the back!” a woman yelled. “Undead! Undead sailors again!”

“We know there’s a way out,” Hanaleisa said somberly, “because now we know there’s a way in.”

“Even if it’s the way we already came,” Temberle added, and he and Hanaleisa made their way along the line to take up arms once again, to battle bloodthirsty monsters in an unending nightmare.

By the time Hanaleisa and Temberle arrived at the scuffle, the small skirmish had ended, leaving a trio of waterlogged and rotted zombies crumpled in the corridor. But one of the Carradden, too, had fallen, caught by surprise. Her neck had been broken in the opening salvo.

“What are we to do with her?” a man asked, speaking above the wails of the woman’s husband, a fellow sailor.

“Burn her, and be quick!” another shouted, which elicited many cries of protest and many more shouts of assent. Both sides in the debate became more insistent with each passing shout, and it seemed as if the whole argument would explode into more fighting then and there.

“We cannot burn her!” Hanaleisa yelled above it all, and whether by deference to one of Cadderly’s children or simply because of the strength and surety in her voice, Hanaleisa’s yell interrupted the cacophony of the brewing storm, at least for the moment.

“Ye’d have her stand up, then, to walk like one o’ them?” an old seadog argued. “Better to burn her now and be sure.”

“We haven’t any fire, nor any tools for making fire,” Hanaleisa shot back. “And even if we did, would you have us trudging through tunnels filled with such a smell and reminder as that?”

The dead woman’s husband finally tore away from those trying to hold him back, and shoved his way through the crowd to kneel beside his wife. He took up her head, cradling it in his arms, his strong shoulders bobbing with sobs.

Hanaleisa and Temberle looked at each other, not knowing what to do.

“Cut off her head, then!” someone yelled from the back, and the dead woman’s husband lifted a hateful and threatening gaze in the direction of the gruesome suggestion.

“No!” Hanaleisa yelled, again quieting the crowd. “No. Find some rocks. We’ll bury her under a cairn, respectfully, as she deserves.”

That seemed to mollify the distraught husband somewhat, but some in the crowd began to protest all the more loudly.

“And if she comes to a state of undeath like all the others, and charges at us?” a nearby dissenter remarked to Hanaleisa and Temberle. “Are you two going to have the will to cut her down, and in front of this poor man here? Are you sure you’re not being cruel in thinking to be kind?”

Hanaleisa found it a hard point to argue, and the weight of responsibility for the calamity pressed down heavily on her young shoulders. She looked back at the husband, who obviously recognized her dilemma. He stared at her pleadingly.

“A few heavier rocks, then,” Hanaleisa said. “If whatever abomination that is animating the dead reaches her, which I think unlikely,” she added for the sake of the distraught man, “then she will not be able to rise against us, or anyone else.”

“No, she’ll be trapped flailing under our heavy stones, and what an eternity that’s to be!” the old seadog said. More yelling ensued, and again the husband’s expression fell as he hugged his dear dead wife more closely.

“Aye, so if we cut off her head and that happens, then she can tuck it under one arm, what, and walk about forever like that?” another man chided the first.

“I hate this,” Temberle whispered to his sister.

“We’ve no choice,” Hanaleisa reminded him. “If we don’t lead, who will?” In the end, they settled on Hanaleisa’s suggestion, building a cairn of heavy rocks to securely inter the dead woman. At Hanaleisa’s private suggestion, Pikel then performed a ceremony to consecrate the ground around the cairn, with Hanaleisa assuring all, particularly the husband, that such a ritual would make it very unlikely that any necromantic magic could disturb her rest.

That seemed to calm the bereaved husband somewhat, and mollify the protestors, though in fact, Pikel had no such real ceremony to offer and the impromptu dance and song he offered was no more than a show.

At that dark time, in that dark place, Hanaleisa thought a show was just as good.

She realized it was better than the alternatives, of which she could not think of even one.

CHAPTER 16 DARK HOLES

Danica saw the cave entrance far in the distance, long before she realized that the trail of death led to that spot. She knew instinctively that such a creature as had caused that withering and decay would not long bask in sunlight.

The trail meandered a bit, but soon bent toward the dark face of the distant mountain, where it ended abruptly. Likely, the dragon had taken flight.

When Danica at last arrived at the base of the mountain, she looked up at the black mouth of the cavern. It was indeed large enough to admit a great wyrm, a subtle crease high in the mountain wall, inaccessible to any unable to fly.

Or unable to climb with the skill of a master monk.

Danica closed her eyes and fell inside herself, connecting mind and body in complete harmony. She envisioned herself as lighter, as unbounded by the press of gravity. Slowly, the woman opened her eyes again, lifting her chin to scan a path among the stones. Few others would have seen much possibility there, but to Danica, a ridge no wider than a finger seemed as inviting as a ledge upon which five men could stand breast.

She mentally lifted her body, then reached up to a narrow ledge and locked her fingers in place, counting out the cadence of the next few movements. She scrambled like a spider, seeming effortless, walking the wall on all fours, hands and feet reaching and stretching. Danica moved horizontally as well as vertically, shifting toward better ridges, more broken stones and better handholds.

The sun crossed its midpoint, and still Danica climbed. The wind howled around her, but she ignored its cold bite, and would not let it dislodge her. Of more concern to her was her timing. Her estimate in beginning her ascent was that the creature she sought was a beast of the darkness, and the last place she wanted to be when it emerged from its hole was splayed out on a cliff face, hundreds of feet above the ground.

With that unsettling thought in mind, Danica pushed on, her fingers and toes finding holds, however tentatively. She constantly shifted her weight to minimize the pull against any one limb or even one digit. As she neared the cave opening, the ascent became more broken and not so steep, with several stretches where she could pause and catch her breath. One long expanse was more a walk than a climb. Danica took her time along that trail and paid extra care to use any cover she could find among the many tumbled stones along the path that led to the stygian darkness of the waiting cave.

Numbers.

He was counting and adding, subtracting and counting some more. A compulsion dominated his every thought, to count and to add, to seek patterns in the many numbers that flitted though his thoughts.

Ivan Bouldershoulder had always been fond of numbers. Designing a new tool or implement, working through the proper ratios and calculating the necessary strength of each piece had been among the dwarf craftsman’s greatest joys. As when Cadderly had come to him with a tapestry depicting dark elves and their legendary hand crossbows. Working from that image and his knowledge and intuition alone, Ivan had replicated those delicate weapons to near perfection.

Numbers. It was all about numbers. Everything was about numbers—at least, that’s what Cadderly had always argued. Everything could be reduced to numbers and deconstructed at will from that point forward, if only the intelligence doing the reducing was great enough to understand the patterns involved.

That was the difference between the mortals and the gods, Cadderly had often remarked. The gods could reduce life itself to numbers.

Such thoughts had never found a home in the far less theorizing and far more pragmatic Ivan Bouldershoulder, but apparently, he realized, Cadderly’s sermons had created a far bigger imprint on his brain than he had assumed.

He thought of the implication of numbers, and that memory of a long-ago conversation was the only thing that made the befuddled dwarf realize that the numbers constantly flashing before him just then were nothing more than a purposeful and malicious distraction.

Ivan felt as if he were waking up beside a babbling brook, that moment of recognition of the sound giving him a real space outside of his dreams, a piece of solidity and reality from which to bring his thoughts fully to the waking world.

The numbers continued to flash more insistently. The patterns flickered and disappeared. Distraction.

Something was keeping him off balance and out of sorts, away from consciousness itself. He couldn’t close his eyes against the intrusion, because his eyes were already closed.

No, not closed, he suddenly understood—whether they were closed or not was of no practical consequence, because he wasn’t the one using them, or seeing through them. He was lost, wandering aimlessly within the swirl of his own thoughts.

And something had put him there.

And something had kept him there—some force, some creature, some intellect that was inside him.

The dwarf had broken the enchantment of distraction and lashed out from the cocoon of numbers, though he flailed blindly.

A memory flashed quickly through his thoughts, of fighting on a rocky slope north of Mithral Hall, of a piece of shale spinning through the air and taking the arm from his brother.

As abruptly as Pikel’s arm, the memory was gone, but Ivan kept running through the darkness of his own mind, seeking flashes and moments of his own identity.

He found another recollection, a time when he had flown on a dragon. It wasn’t anything substantial, just a sensation of freedom, the wind blowing through his hair, dragging his beard out behind him.

A brief flicker of mountains’ majesty unfolding before him.

It seemed a fitting metaphor to the dwarf. He felt the same way, but within himself. It was as if his mind had been lifted above the landscape of all that was Ivan Bouldershoulder, as if he were overlooking himself from afar, a spectator in his own thoughts.

But at least he knew. He had escaped the distraction and knew again who he was.

Ivan began to fight. He grabbed at every memory and held it fast, steeling his thoughts to ensure that what he remembered was true. He saw Pikel, he saw Cadderly, he saw Danica and the kids.

The kids.

He had watched them grow from drooling, helpless critters to adulthood, tall and straight and full of potential. He took pride in them as if they were his own children, and he would not let that notion go.

No creature in all the multiverse was more stubborn than a dwarf, after all. And few dwarves were as far-thinking as Ivan Bouldershoulder. He began immediately to use his recognition of the creature telepathically dominating him to begin a flow of information back the other way.

He knew his surroundings through the memory of that other being. He understood the threats around him, to some extent, and he felt keenly the power of the dracolich.

If he wanted to survive, if there was any way to survive, he knew, in that moment when he would at last find a way to reassert control of his mortal coil, that he couldn’t allow himself to be confused and couldn’t allow himself to be surprised.

The face of Ivan Bouldershoulder, controlled solely by Yharaskrik the illithid, smiled.

The dwarf was waking up.

Because of the illithid’s own uncertainty, Yharaskrik knew, for as it had begun to consider the wisdom of returning fully to consciousness within the draconic host of Crenshinibon, so it had also, unavoidably, lessened its grasp on the dwarf.

Yharaskrik understood well that once a possessed creature of strong intellect and determination—a dwarf perhaps more than any other race—had broken out of the initial mental invasion of psionic power, it was like a trickle of water through an earthen dam.It couldn’t be stopped, even if Yharaskrik had decided that it was critical to stop it. It could be temporarily plugged, perhaps, but never fully stopped, for all of the mental cobwebs Yharaskrik had enacted to keep the dwarf locked in a dark hole were beginning to erode.

The illithid amused itself with a notion of freeing the dwarf right before the waiting maw of fearsome Hephaestus. He thought of departing the dwarf’s mind almost fully, but leaving just a bit of consciousness within Ivan so that it could feel the desperate terror and the last moments of the dwarf’s life.

What, after all, could be more invasive and intrusive than being so intimate a part of another being’s final moments?

And indeed, Yharaskrik had done that very thing many times before, as it pondered the truth of death. To the illithid’s frustration, however, never had it been able to send its own consciousness over into the realm of death with that of its host.

It didn’t matter, the illithid decided as it pushed away those past failures with a mental sigh. It still enjoyed those voyeur moments, of sharing those ultimate sensations and fears uninvited, of intruding upon the deepest privacy any sentient creature could ever know.

Through the eyes of Ivan Bouldershoulder, Yharaskrik looked upon Hephaestus. The dracolich lay curled at the back of the largest chamber in the mountain cavern, not asleep, for sleep was for the living, but in a state of deep meditation and plotting, and fantasizing of the victories to come.

No, the illithid decided as it sensed the dragon’s continuing feelings of superiority. Yharaskrik would not give Hephaestus the satisfaction of that particular kill.

Methodically, the illithid in the dwarf’s body walked over to retrieve Ivan’s antlered helmet and his heavy axe, formulating the plan as it went. It wanted to feel the dwarf’s extended terror, his fury and his fear. Yharaskrik moved out of the cave, signaling the four undead wizards to follow, and stepped out onto the rocky descent a short way, then paused, calling Fetchigrol to its side.

On Yharaskrik’s command, the specter crossed the unseen threshold once more, past the realm of death and into the other world, the Shadowfell, that had been opened to them through the power of the falling Weave.

Yharaskrik paused only a moment longer, to taunt the thoughts of Ivan Bouldershoulder.

Then it let the dwarf have the control and sensibilities of his mortal coil back once more, surrounded by enemies and with nowhere to run, and no way to win.

Ivan knew where he was and what was coming against him—he had garnered that from the consciousness of his possessor. He felt no shock from the illithid departing, and so Ivan Bouldershoulder woke up swinging. His axe hummed through the air in great sweeping cuts. He smashed the burned wizard, sending up a cloud of flecks of blackened skin. His backhand opened wide the chest of a second zombie and sent the horrid creature tumbling away. When another came in at him behind the arc of that cut, Ivan lowered his head and butted hard, the deer antlers on his helmet poking deep holes in the charging beast.

With a groan, the undead wizard fell backward off the helmet spikes, just in time to catch the dwarf’s axe swing right in the side of its head. The axe blew through and dived into the fourth as it shuffled up to grasp at the dwarf.

By that time, Ivan’s initial fury played out, more enemies swarmed toward him: huddled, fleshy beasts.

Ivan sprinted down the trail, away from the cave, though he knew from memory that the route was surely a dead end, a long drop. But the invading consciousness still hovered over him, he sensed, anticipating just such a run.

So Ivan turned and bulled his way through the close pursuit of a pair of crawling beasts, knocking them aside with sheer ferocity and strength. He ran all the faster, right for the cave mouth, and straight into it.

And there lay the moldering skeleton of a titanic dragon, itself imbued with the animate power of the undead. It was already moving when Ivan came upon it, leaping up onto its four legs with amazing dexterity.

The sight nearly knocked the breath out of Ivan. He knew that something big and terrible was in that cave before he’d fully awakened, but he couldn’t have anticipated a catastrophe of such proportions.

A lesser dwarf, a lesser warrior, would have hesitated right there at the entrance, and the huddled beasts would have fallen over him from behind, and even had he somehow prevailed in that crush, the great monster before him would have had him.

But Ivan did not hesitate. He lifted his axe high and charged the dracolich, bellowing a war cry to his god, Moradin. He had no doubt he was going to die, but he would do so in a manner of his choosing, in the manner of a true warrior.

The first sounds of battle alerted Danica. She scrambled around a stone and her heart fell, for there she saw Ivan, fighting valiantly against overwhelming odds of crawling beasts and a few horribly maimed walking dead. Behind them, directing them, Danica sensed, was some spectral being, huddled and shadowy and shimmering like simultaneously thinning and thickening gray smoke. Danica’s first instinct was to go to Ivan, or rush behind the pursuing throng and attack the leading creature, but even as she digested the awful scene, the dwarf turned and sprinted away, up the trail toward the great cave.

The monsters pursued. The specter rushed behind them.

Danica followed.

Into the cave went Ivan. Into the cave went the monsters and the zombies and the specter. To the edge of the entrance went Danica, and there she skidded to an abrupt stop, and there she saw Ivan’s doom, saw her own doom, saw the doom of all the world.

Danica couldn’t even catch her breath in the sight of the great dracolich, and enough of the dragon remained intact for her to recognize the red scales of the wyrm. Her gaze locked on the beast’s face, half-rotted, white bone showing, eye sockets burned out horribly, and a peculiar, green-glowing horn protruding from the very middle of its forehead.

She felt the power emanating from that horn.

Awful power.

Ivan’s battle cry broke her trance, and she looked down at the dwarf’s charge, his axe up high over his head as if he meant to tear his way right through the beast. He charged at the dracolich’s front leg, and the wyrm lifted its foot at the last moment.

Ivan dived, and so did a trio of huddled fleshy beasts and one of the undead—one of the wizards from Baldur’s Gate, Danica recognized with a heavy heart.

The beast stamped with power that shook the whole of the mountain spur, sending cracks spiderwebbing across the stone floor.

The air around its foot was sprayed with blood and gore, a crimson mist of ultimate destruction, a stamp of pure finality.

Danica couldn’t contain her gasp.

A few of the creatures that had not followed the dwarf to doom, falling back and stumbling every which way from the sheer concussion of the stomp, noted that faint noise.

Then Danica was running away from the cave, hungry beasts in close pursuit. She sprinted down the trail, trying to figure out how or where she might go, for the navigable angle of decline would not hold, not in any direction.

She glanced over her shoulder, turned back, and cut fast behind a stone outcropping, and cut the other way around another, trying to gain some distance so that she could get over a ledge and begin her descent down the cliff face.

But there were too many, and every turn did no more than put different monsters close on her tail.

She ran out of room and skidded to the edge of the cliff, perched at the point of the longest drop, for not only did it rise above the hundreds of feet of cliffs that had led Danica to that awful place, it went far deeper on one side, into a gorge low in the foothills of the Snowflakes.

Danica turned around, then fell flat as a beast leaped at her. It sailed over her, its hungry cry turning to a scream of terror, fast receding as it plummeted to oblivion.

Up hopped Danica, kicking out to knock back the next monster in line. The third, as if oblivious to the fate of the first, leaped into the air and tumbled at her. Again she ducked, though not as fully, and the creature brushed her as it went over. Danica fought hard and regained her balance just in time.

But the creature’s flailing claw caught her shoulder and tugged her back. All the fury and tumult of the moment seemed to stop suddenly and Danica’s ears filled with the emptiness of a mournful wind. And she was falling.

She twisted around, looking down a thousand feet and more to the tops of very tall trees.

She thought of Cadderly, of her children, of a life not yet complete.