The Herald

CHAPTER 3

I can’t believe,” Rune panted, as the two thousandth bramble of the day whipped across her face, drawing yet more blood, “anyone has passed this way in the last generation or so. Owww.”

Dry and dead thorncanes crackled as she forced her way through them, marveling again at the lithe grace of the silver-haired bard ahead of her, whose shapely behind and muscled back she’d been rather grimly following for what seemed a very long afternoon. Of course, when your hair can reach out like a dozen strong arms to pull branches, vines, and brambles apart, it’s a lot easier to travel thick, trackless wilderland woods in the unmapped beyond, to be sure …

“Not long now,” Elminster murmured from right behind her. They were far from Elturel, in a forest reached through an ancient portal Amarune couldn’t have found again if she’d wanted to. This forest was thinner and higher than the one that held Ralaskoun’s tomb-which was seven days behind them now-on rocky and rising ground.

They’d been climbing higher for some time, and right then were ascending a steep, lightly forested slope where loose stones underfoot were only outnumbered by growing things that bristled with sharp thorns. Rune was very glad she’d worn thigh-high boots, or her legs would have looked as if she’d fought a long and hard battle against halfling children armed with thornsticks.

The air around her smelled of sharp spices she couldn’t name that were probably drifting from the seedpods they’d been disturbing. There was nothing stealthy about their crashing progress, but their surroundings certainly seemed remote and overgrown, and, well, forlorn.

Storm came out into a small glade floored in thick moss, beneath the shade of some gnarled hurthar trees. Ahead, the soft green carpet underfoot ended and bare rock thrust up from the earth into a tumbled cliff of sorts, rising out of sight. Before them, as Rune and El joined the bard, in a cleft between two thrusting tongues of ancient rock, stood a head-high mound of stone so overgrown with clinging creepers-and, yes, more thorns-that Amarune could barely make out that the mound was a cairn whose upper reaches were worked and finished in smooth blocks that supported something tall, thin, and carved from a single block of stone. A statuette of some standing figure? No … a harp!

A high-prowed hand harp, of the sort successful bards and elves played, and few others could afford.

“What is this place?” Rune asked. “Some safehold sacred to the Harpers?”

El and Storm both gave her wry half smiles.

“In a way, ’tis indeed,” Elminster replied. “This is the tomb of the Lady Steel, one of the founders of the Harpers. Too long ago.” He sighed, shaking his head at the overgrown harp, then added briskly, “ ’Tis warded; we should be able to hide here.”

Rune peered around. “Here? Under these trees, in the open? If it rains, we’re going to get drenched. And I’ll bet that cliff will become one giant waterfall.” She looked down at the soft, thick moss under her boots. “Takes a lot of damp to keep moss this lush.”

“So it does,” Storm agreed serenely, “but we won’t be out here, under the stars, soaked in the night mist. When Dath died, we didn’t just leave her lying on the ground for wolves to tear apart, you know.” She plucked some creepers aside to lay bare more of the carved stone harp, and murmured, “Dathlue Mistwinter. You’d have liked her.”

Amarune murmured wistfully, “I’m beginning to mourn the loss of so many people I was born too late to meet. Truly.” She collected the gazes of both of her older companions, and added firmly, “But that doesn’t mean I want to meet their ghosts. Echoes of the fallen beyond counting are caught in the Weave, aren’t they?”

Elminster merely nodded. Then he lifted one hand to her in a silent beckoning, and led the way around the overgrown cairn to the cliff behind.

Where Rune found herself looking at many deep clefts in the old and weathered rock, none of which looked larger than her arm or deeper than the length of her body, even if she could somehow sink through solid stone and lie flat.

“Is this more Dale humor?” she asked lightly, and quoted the old jest: “ ‘Pray, my lord, what see you? For I see only rocks and trees. Look again, for there is more. I see it not, Lord, what is it? Trees and rocks, of course. Trees and rocks.’ ”

El smiled thinly. “I remember the lady minstrel who first said that, and set highborn and backwoods folk alike to laughing. But as it happens, those words are pertinent. Look again. Hard. Right there.”

Amarune followed the line of his pointing finger-and gazed at the rocks he was indicating.

They were just solid stone. Yet …

Hard, he’d said, so she stared at them hard. For an uncomfortably long time.

Whereupon they seemed to ripple, subtly.

Ripple …

“You have the Gift,” Storm explained softly. “You can see what most cannot. Some of these rocks are the wards playing at being solid stone, and most are truly stone. To someone who commands no Art, all of them will feel the same.”

Then Storm stiffened, and murmured warningly, “El.”

The old archmage nodded calmly and strolled to where he could put a hand on Rune’s and Storm’s elbows from behind.

“I’d noticed too,” he muttered. Amarune felt magic flood silently through her from Elminster’s touch, leaving her tingling all over. She felt the prickling in her nostrils that meant every hair on her body was trying to stand on end.

Then the world in front of her exploded in a blinding flash, and something smote her so hard she flew through the air, crashing through branches in a raging hail of shredded leaves and splintered twigs that whirled her into a nest of groaning, swaying boughs high in the tangled meeting of two hurthars.

Men were screaming-raw, throat-stripping, keening howls of agony. Through a blur of tears she saw mens’ arms clawing empty air in pain, their helpless bodies dancing in spasms outlined against an angry, roiling glow of risen magic. Two of those dark silhouettes abruptly vanished-and from somewhere near at hand she heard Elminster snarl a short and angry incantation and felt him pull at the Weave, with the same sort of beckoning gesture he’d made to her.

And suddenly those two men were back where they’d been standing before, looking startled.

No, terrified.

“Minor arcanists of Thultanthar,” Elminster identified them, more weariness than anger in his voice.

Behind the two he’d dragged back from wherever they’d teleported to, the other men who’d been hiding behind the wards of the tomb collapsed silently to the ground, dropping weapons and looking very dead.

“And the swordswingers who run with them, like browbeaten dogs,” El added, shaking his head.

One of the arcanists hissed something, deft fingers weaving a pattern in the air that Storm sliced to ribbons along with several of the man’s fingertips, her sword so swift that the man never saw it. The tip of his tongue exploded in blood as she cut it on her backswing.

Then she and the man she’d just wounded were flung aside like two rag dolls, as magic erupted from deeper in the unseen tomb and smashed into them-a tongue of devouring force that sheared a path of destruction through the trees. It would have stabbed at Rune, caught in the tangle of still-swaying boughs, had it not struck the harp cairn and rebounded from it back into the tomb-evoking a startled curse, and the brief clacking thunder of many tumbling stones.

“That ward, I spun when I was stronger than I am now,” El muttered in satisfaction, striding to the other arcanist and lifting his knee into the man’s crotch.

The Shadovar cried out in startled pain and fell into a crouch, clutching himself-and El swarmed all over him, dagger out. The air around them flared as a frantic spell rebounded from Elminster back onto its caster, leaving the arcanist sobbing and staggering. He went down in abrupt silence when the old archmage slammed the pommel of his dagger down on the back of the man’s neck, leaping into the air to add force to the blow.

“Ye think me foolish enough to go about with a mantle spell that reflects only one attack?” he asked the crumpled heap contemptuously, turning to walk right into the seemingly solid rock that masked the tomb.

The cliff silently swallowed him.

Rune discovered she’d been biting her lip and holding her breath. She let it out gustily and hastened to clamber down out of the trees, wincing at the pain in her battered limbs. Oh, there’d be bruises! Happy dancing hobgoblins, every damned time she went anywhere with these two, she got battered about as if she was a-

Storm came limping out of the tattered trees, sword in hand and blood on her cheek. Exasperation flared on her face when she saw Rune hastening to the ground alone.

“He went in there, didn’t he? Ever since Alassra … thinks he’s invincible …”

And in a whirl of long silver tresses, the Bard of Shadowdale plunged into the fissured cliff face, and was gone.

Leaving Amarune to peer wildly at the rocks and trees all around her, this way and then that, seeking any foes. Hearing and seeing nothing, she cautiously went to the cliff, at exactly the same spot she’d seen Storm step through it, and … just kept walking.

The tingling was as if a storm of sparks had plunged into her, stabbing at her eyeballs and racing up her nose and down her throat. She screamed, or tried to, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound. Could only plunge on, sightless, her whole world a blinding cloud of raging sparks that shook her body until her very teeth rattled. Her fingernails felt as if they were coming out, her innards groaned, her tongue undulated involuntarily-

She was through, and reeling in dank darkness, standing on a floor of smooth old stone that seemed to yaw and pitch under her, refusing to stay still.

A strong hand caught hold of her arm, just below the shoulder, and steadied her.

“Easy, now,” Storm reproved. “Most of us learn wards and attune ourselves to them, instead of trying to rush through them like a bull at rutting time.”

“But,” Rune gasped, “you just vanished, and left me there, all alone! Wasn’t I supposed to follow? If I’m to stand with you and in time take over from you, how can I-?”

“Ye speak level-headed truth, as usual, lass,” Elminster said glumly, from somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. “Yet we’re all too late. The Shadovar lying in wait had no inkling-this time-that we can rebuff more than one spell. Or that while Thultanthar hid on the Plane of Shadow, this plane’s lesser wielders of the Art might just have built wards stronger than overconfident young arcanists can spin or anticipate. If he hadn’t thought to amuse himself by shattering Dathlue’s marker …”

“So his own spell came right back at him,” Amarune interpreted, “and-what? He hurt himself?”

“His magic shattered her casket, and its shards, caught within the wards, had nowhere to go, and so raged around inside it. Shattering some of his limbs, by the looks of all this blood. He took himself back to wherever he came from just before I could get to him and finish him.”

“Finish him?” Storm shook her head. “El, don’t fool yourself. We were fortunate. If they’d been a little more patient, and let us step into the tomb before attacking us-or just resisted the urge to hurl spells first, and stuck daggers into us instead …”

Elminster waved a hand, and a dim radiance kindled all over the walls of what Rune could now rather blearily see was a small stone room with a round dais at its heart. A dais now strewn with stone rubble and yellow-brown shards that might have been very old bone. More rubble lay scattered across the floor beyond it.

The Old Mage’s face, as he gazed at Storm and Amarune, was grim.

“Ye’re right, as usual,” he admitted. “We were lucky to prevail.”

He looked down at the ruin of the casket. “Dove used to camp here, when harsh winter weather caught her in these parts …,” he murmured, as if to himself. “Where is she now, I wonder?”

Amarune gave him a sidelong look. “Dove?”

In reply, he lifted his chin and said firmly, “We can skulk about mending the Weave here and there no longer. We’re hiding from no one. Time is, as they say, running out.”

“Running out before what?” Rune asked.

El regarded her thoughtfully, and she burst out, “No, don’t stand there deciding what to tell me and what to keep secret. I can’t give what feeble aid I’m capable of if I don’t know what’s going on! Damn all the gods, Elminster, hear me: every last woodcutter and farmer and cook across all of Faerûn deserves to know what’s going on!”

Elminster kept on looking at her expressionlessly for what seemed a very long time, and then smiled a wide, fond smile, shook his head at her in seeming admiration, and growled, “Ye humble me, lass. Ye do. Well, then, the short of it is this: the agents of Shar are proceeding boldly to carry out the wishes of the Dark Goddess.”

His face changed, and he raised his arms, closed his eyes, and added, “A moment, please.” Then he muttered something fluid that sounded Elvish, but that included not a single word Rune had ever heard before.

The tingling rose within her again.

“What’re you-?”

“He’s twisting the wards,” Storm murmured in Amarune’s ear, “just as he did back at Ralaskoun’s tomb. To hide the three of us from anyone magically watching and listening from afar.”

“So this little council will be ours, and ours alone,” El added.

“ ‘Council’?” Rune asked wryly. “Is that what centuries-old archmages call the moments when they grandly decree what will be done, and everyone else listens?”

Storm chuckled. “I’ve no doubt you’ll make a great successor, Amarune Lyone Armala Whitewave, if …”

“If you can keep me alive long enough?”

The Bard of Shadowdale winced. “You’ve less learning to do than I’d thought.”

“If ye’ve stopped trying to be clever and tart-tongued for a moment or two,” El said to Amarune, sounding more amused than severe, “hear my decree. We must leave off this Weave work for now, and turn all of our efforts to stopping the agents of Shar.”

“And if we fail?”

“If Shar succeeds before the Sundering of Toril and Abeir is complete, she will forever be the goddess of magic, her name written in the renewed Tablets of Fate, and darkness and shadow shall spread across Faerûn and hold sway forever.”

“Enslaving all intelligent beings, and pitting them against each other for her amusement,” Storm added quietly.

“For her sustenance,” Elminster corrected. “She feeds on pain and loss, on the keeping and sharing of secrets, and on what is forgotten when rememberers are slain without passing on what they know. Despair and oblivion and what she calls the Cycle of Night. Life will become an endless intrigue of cabals battling each other for survival and dominance, inspired and commanded by a goddess who wants them all to fail and fall. The Endless Night, as the Mad Bard of Netheril called it when Shar whispered it to him, more than an age ago.”

Amarune shuddered, despite herself. “All right,” she told the two Chosen of Mystra, “you’ve succeeded in frightening me. Again. So rather than wallowing in despair or grimly assuring each other that we must not fail, or the world is doomed, tell me something useful. Such as: in light of all that, what do we do now?”

“I,” Elminster told her without a moment’s hesitation, “must go to Candlekeep. Alone.”

“Why?” she asked bluntly, in such perfect mimicry of his tone that Storm grew a wide grin.

“If there is a key to rebuilding the Weave-something that would swiftly restore most of the great tapestry of interwoven forces, at a stroke-it lies hidden in Candlekeep’s library, or survives nowhere at all. I must find it.”

“How do you know such a power, or process, or whatever it is, exists at all?”

“Mystra herself once whispered as much to me. And told me the explanations were hidden-well hidden-in Candlekeep, and that I was not to seek nor concern myself with them, unless doing so became crucial to preserving everything she stood for. And she is the Weave, so …”

“So, it’s time,” Amarune agreed. “You know, leaping about bare-skinned while busily hurling bottles at brawling nobles in the Dragonriders’ was so much easier …”

“Ye are far from the first to voice such sentiments,” the Old Mage told her dryly. “Though not all that many of Mystra’s Chosen have been mask dancers. Khelben and I lacked the figure for it, to be sure.”

“You at least got to wear a mask,” Storm told Rune. “Laeral and I never did.”

“Laeral and-? This I have to hear!”

“Later,” Storm told her firmly. “Save the world first, remember? I rather suspect, if the Shadovar are after wards-and they sure look to be-they’ll head for Candlekeep sooner or later.”

Elminster nodded. “And if anyone can aid in holding the great wards of the keep against them …”

Rune rolled her eyes. “No lack of confidence in this particular tomb, is there?”

Elminster chuckled. “Blood of my blood, say rather that it’s a task I’d not want to saddle anyone else with. While I’m, ah, sporting amongst the monks, both of ye must go to Myth Drannor, to aid the elves in withstanding the siege.”

“Agreed,” Storm said simply. They both looked to Amarune.

Who shrugged her assent, because she knew not what else to do. If she ran into a Sharran who wasn’t a priest or a shade, she probably wouldn’t even recognize them, and so could be surrounded by foes at any time and not even know it. And how would she even go about deciding where and how to fight the Dark Goddess and all her servants?

“What if-?” she began, but fell silent, startled, as Storm put two swift fingers across her lips.

The radiance in the room had abruptly died, leaving them in darkness, but a moment later a damp wilderland breeze blew around their ankles, bringing with it the faint light of day from outside.

Someone from afar had snuffed out the wards. Again.

El reached out a hand and pulled Rune down to her knees. He and Storm crouched on either side of her, both of them suddenly crones again.

“Are you doing this, so you need not answer me?” Rune whispered to him, exasperated.

Elminster shook his head, looking grimmer.

And frightened. Again.

The smell of the sea was strong here, amid these dark and ancient rocks that rose like the prow of a great ship above the endless thunder of the waves. The rocks crowned by the gigantic and many-towered monastery of forbidding stone. Candlekeep was called a fortress in blunt truth. Grim and crude compared to floating Thultanthar, but impressive enough when towering high above him, as it was now. It would have been disconcerting to stand in this place when the earth still shook often, as it had all spring and most of the summer. Something Shar had wrought, he’d heard. But then, one heard a lot of wildness at times like these. Like Yder sending warriors to defend the Hall of Shadows!

Thinking of which …

Give yourself to the shadows.

Maerandor smiled, and did that. One moment he was a dark-clad man, and the next he was roiling shadows, shifting and drawing away into the darkness of the clefts and hollows in the rocks all along the unseen barrier.

The ancient wards of Candlekeep were legendary and many layered, peerless in power. Not living things like mythals, but accretions of layers upon layers of spells, some of them knit to others, and some of them embroideries and extensions of simple, mighty magics hoary with age and as enduring as mountains.

Here, prickling his cheek with their nearness, they pulsed with power. Throbbed with the deep currents of spreading heat thrown off by sullen magma through miles of rock, with the tug of the tides, with the fury of the waves crashing on the shore it crowned, with the warmth of the sun on its towers and the rocks around it … and with the slow, ponderous might of the turning world.

A might that was lessening, just now, thanks to the Mistress of the Night. Though the wards remained a shell very few besieging armies of mages could hope to shatter-and not more than a handful of archmages.

However, he was not here to make war on the wards from outside.

He was here to creep through them, a shadow amongst shadows, making use of the very spaces that kept one spell from flooding into the next and bringing them all crashing down in an uncontrollable torrent of raw, wild spellfire. How could a brick wall keep out a man who could pass through mortar?

Oh, there were a few spells within the wards that made war on shadow magic, but they had been worked by wizards dwelling in a world that did not know mortals could become shades-and had become shades-and what such shadowed folk could now do.

Wherefore he could make his way through the wards and live. Though it would be a slow and agonizing process and would deliver him inside the walls naked and shorn of any active spells.

Maerandor sighed, gave himself to the wards, and let the pain claim him.

Only his will would hold him together through what followed.

But then, without a will greater than the best forged steel, no Art adept of Thultanthar lasted long enough to claim the title of arcanist, let alone to become a shade.

Nor yet the personal agent of the Most High of the city.

Maerandor smiled again. By the time he was finished forming it, that smile was all that was left of him.

The rabbit stew would be good-Storm had a way with sauces-but the wind was like icy daggers slicing at them, as it whistled between the rocks. Here in this rocky wilderland the gods alone knew exactly where, somewhere near the eastern border of Cormyr, well up in the backlands away from the coast.

Amarune shivered one more time, and shook her head in exasperation. She was about done with hiding her aggravation.

“Well if this mysterious spy is watching us from who knows where, surely they can see me-as I’ve not gone around disguised for one moment-and figure out in a short instant that I’ve ditched two old crones somewhere. Crones they probably already know are-were-you and Elminster.”

Storm nodded. “Yes.”

“So why are we just marching along as ourselves now? What was the point of all that, four months of Weave work in tombs and old ruins and standing stones and that old mill and the broken bridge and-and all the other places I’ve forgotten already?”

Storm stirred the pot, and told it serenely, “The point was to keep anyone spying on us as confused as you’ve been. So they’d watch to see what we were up to, figuring all the Weave work was a cover for something else, rather than attacking us. So we went on strengthening the Weave unhampered. Until these last few days.”

“And El, is he strolling across the lands, pipe in mouth, wearing his usual old robes?”

“No. He’s still in disguise. Many guises.”

Rune crooked an eyebrow. “So he matters, and we don’t?”

Storm nodded. “Precisely. Until there’s a Mystra again, he matters more than any other mortal alive in the world.” She grinned. “A role he’s used to, I’m afraid.”

“Is that why he’s so insufferable, so often?”

Storm chuckled, gave Rune a twinkling smile, and murmured, “I’ve met worse. Most old wizards are far worse.” She sipped at a ladleful of stew, nodded her approval, and announced, “It’s ready. Your cup?”

Rune held out her battered belt mug. “So we’ll be walking all the way to Myth Drannor as the Bard of Shadowdale and her sidekick, the lowly mask dancer from Suzail? It’s early in Marpenoth, yes, but snow could come any day.”

“Unlikely this year, but yes, it could. And yes, we’ll be walking, unless you’d prefer a disguise. Yet we are the decoys, and I must warn you that my magic isn’t much. My disguises run more to costumes and smudged faces and mimicry than magic.”

“No, I’ve no particular trouble being myself,” Rune informed her dryly. “Seeing as myself has a good chance of persuading a certain Lord Delcastle to accompany me. If you can spare the time for us to detour and visit him.”

Storm gave Rune a wide grin along with her full and steaming mug. “We can indeed, and he’ll be right welcome. His sword will come in useful, his arms will make you happier, and I wouldn’t mind a bath and a good bed in Suzail for a night, before we all troop off to die.”

Rune stopped with the too-hot mug close enough to her lips to sip from, and asked quietly, “You mean that, don’t you?”

Storm sighed. “I hope not. But yes, I fear I do.”

In a dark and deserted wardrobe chamber in Candlekeep, full of winter cloaks, high boots upturned on angled racks, scarves hanging on pegs, and shelves upon shelves of caps and gloves, a deeper darkness drifted oh, so slowly, coalescing into a pool of shadow. A pool that rose to stand like a man, shook itself, peered cautiously around the room to make sure it was empty of monks, and then coughed.

Maerandor shook his head again, irked with himself. Though he was far from solid yet, his phantom jaws ached from the smile he’d been foolish enough to shape ere roiling into shadow.

Idiot. A small thing, yet small things could get one killed, even in Candlekeep.

Hmmph.

Especially in Candlekeep.

He stood stock-still at the end of a line of cloaks, his back to a wall, and listened hard. But there were no sounds of anyone nearby. He could smell old, worn leather, but no trace of mildew, and that confirmed he was inside the wards, which fought and killed molds and mildews. It was why the monks went outside their fortress to dine in the open fields below when they wanted to enjoy cheese.

That was just one of many, many mundane details he knew about the monastery, thanks to years of Shadovar spying-and, of course, what the minds of captives had yielded up less than willingly. Right now, however, he had to use what he knew of the monks themselves. The senior monks.

He had to find and murder the right monk.

Klaeleth or Norldrin would be best. Chethil would do, or Guldor or Aumdras. Cooks and warders, men of learning and years, who were respected but did not command, who saw to their own duties and walked their own ways in the vast old fortress. Monks who knew how to momentarily open a way through the wards without damaging them or alerting others that such a breach had been made.

A cook would be best, being as Maerandor of Thultanthar was hungry. Worming through the wards was exhausting work.

A dark and silent shadow in the darkness no normal man’s eyes could penetrate, Maerandor drifted to the door, and through the gap beneath it.

It was time to be a-murdering.