Cloak of Shadows asota-2 Page 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  14

  Visitors to the Castle

  Thay, Kythorn 18

  Elminster caught only glimpses of the stars over Thay as shadowy death loomed around him, blotting them out. The smoky clouds of dense gloom were alive and reaching for him. As he frowned and willed his magical undergarments to let him descend at a slightly less precipitous rate, he wondered just what this giant was, who'd created it… and why.

  Just once, 'twould be nice to know.

  Thay, Kythorn 19

  It is hard to become a Zulkir of Thay. Someone always holds such a title already and must be willing to give it up voluntarily-or be made to die. A final death, that is, admitting of no resurrections, clones, or death-cheating contingencies. As most of the present Zulkirs enjoy the powers their titles bring (if not always the responsibilities) and have honed their magical powers-and accumulated allies and magical safeguards, traps, and useful items-for centuries, bringing final doom to one is no easy task.

  It is quite possible to become a very powerful Red Wizard without ever seeking the mantle of Zulkir, and indeed many "Bloodcowls" (as certain mages of other lands derisively call Red Wizards) have no interest in the exposure-not to say danger-of the position.

  It is not easily possible, however, to reshape the teachings, habits, and direction of an entire school of magic without either being its Zulkir or having his full support.

  Consider, then, the plight of a man who feels he must accomplish such an end, and is neither Zulkir nor has much chance of gaining the support of the incumbent-centuries-old Szass Tam, Zulkir of the School of Necromancy-or unseating that infamous and awesomely powerful lich, archmage, and master of undead. According to most observers, Szass Tam hasn't sunk into the decadent ennui of many lichnee. He still enjoys besting rival Zulkirs and Red Wizards, and remains driven by an elusive goal: the destruction of Rashemen. This makes both his resignation and destruction unlikely-his death is irrelevant-and leaves a Thayan necromancer who'd like to change the interests of the School of Necromancy in an untenable position, the more so when his tentative approaches to colleagues in the craft are received with cold rebuffs and open suspicion of being an outlander agent or spy.

  So he withdraws into apparent bitterness (real) and aimless researches (for show), and behind this mask sets about accomplishing an almost impossible goal: gaining power enough to destroy Szass Tam and anyone else who stands in his way, and force Thay to follow the road he sees for it. He stages an apparent disaster in his spell laboratory, that reportedly weakens him and leaves him disfigured, and becomes The Masked One. Colleagues foolish enough to try to take advantage of his apparently failing powers fall victim to his one real accomplishment, the magical ability to dissolve the person-and subsume the powers of-anyone his most secret spell can envelop. A few Red Wizards vanish, and The Masked One grows in power until he can craft a giant to ensnare wizards. Then he must wait, for he dare not use it openly and invite attack from all sides by terrified Bloodcowls. He must wait until a time of chaos, when wizards can be trapped alone… or avatars, falling from the sk
y!

  When the Fall of the Gods becomes living truth, no longer empty prophecy, the Masked One exults in a hidden place and raises his giant to stalk the avatar he's detected roaming Thay, the mortal who holds the lessened powers of Hoar the Doombringer, Hurler of Thunders. The avatar is very near, and even the lessened power he wields shames the vaunted might of the greatest Red Wizards.

  The giant rises and stretches forth his hand, attracting the attention of the One Who Is Hidden (and therefore unknown to The Masked One and his calculations). Ao deems the giant a creation of evil far more dangerous than the status quo in cruel Thay, and looks for something to foil such a dark scheme. Something that always seems to drop into the midst of troubles in Faerun… something called Elminster.

  The Old Mage waved a hand to direct his pipe smoke out of his eyes and grunted, "So here's a hearty thankee to thee, Ao, for dropping Elminster into the midst o' things again! Bah!"

  As these kindly words left Elminster's lips, the giant seemed to see him, turning a head as large as a good-sized castle to regard the falling wizard, and emitting a thunderous rumble. A distinctly unfriendly sound, Elminster thought, his fingers already weaving a complex pattern in the air. At a certain point, he murmured an incantation that left his pipe behind. As he beckoned the still-smoking item to follow, silver spheres began to coalesce and grow in the air around, like a stream of gigantic bubbles falling to earth with him.

  His suspicions were soon confirmed. From the outstretched hands of the dark, menacing mass streamed fire, two lines of eight spinning balls of flame per hand. They loomed up at him very quickly, howling and crackling as they came, and El sent two of his spheres drifting out to meet them. He'd best intercept the fireballs before they could burst. The days when he could serenely survive the fiery blasts of two meteor swarms at once were long gone.