The Herald Read online

  She hadn’t known that, after all her centuries, Storm could still feel that afraid.

  The Most High of Thultanthar stood in the last and innermost room of his sanctum, dim and dark and private. The room he had just sealed himself in.

  With every step away from the dying fire of the seal he’d just cast on the last door, the floor faded under his boots, and the darkness grew.

  This most secluded of his spellcasting chambers was as dark as the void, and almost as cold. Telamont could feel its chill stealing into him as he strode on, seeking the place where the floor would be entirely gone, and it would seem as if he was floating.

  The void swallowed echoes, so they came back strangely, and then muted, then not at all. When he reached the right spot, he waited, feeling the cold slowly and silently claim him, visualizing a serene and beautiful feminine face of dark beauty, whose eyes were utter pits of darkness.

  My Chosen, the familiar whisper came to him, from everywhere around yet so close it seemed he could feel her icy breath in his ear, have you completed the task I set you?

  “Which one?” he dared to ask.

  He did not quite dare to add the bitter thought that flared in him then: my sons are not endless in number.

  Had he dared, he suspected the Mistress of the Night would merely command him to sire and rear more, orders that would come wreathed in cruel laughter.

  One more task, that would be, among the many that continued, both large and small. The one that had recently consumed most of his time was the hunting and slaying of Chosen. All Chosen but Shar’s own—especially the Chosen of Mystra—were to be destroyed so her ambition to finally command and reshape the Weave in her image could unfold unchecked.

  Is the training of your special agents complete? Are they ready?

  Shar did not sound angry, merely eager.

  Telamont swallowed despite himself. He hadn’t realized how strong relief would feel, flooding through him. “I trained five. Doing so slew one; another engaged in treacheries and was eliminated; a third was found lacking and again was destroyed—but two are ready.”

  Good. Use them as I have commanded. You are to leave the slaying of Chosen to the underlings you have already set to the work, and take up the task of seizing and draining the mythal of Myth Drannor and the mighty wards of Candlekeep. You shall use the power they yield up to gain control of the nascent Weave, so I can transform it into a new and more powerful Shadow Weave.

  Telamont managed a smile. “To give You dominion over magic everywhere.”

  Of course, Shar replied, and was gone, leaving him falling through the icy void.

  The tomb was somewhere behind them in the deep, trackless forest. At least seven ridges back … or was it eight?

  Rune helped the two bent, waddling old crones on, over tree roots and through the slimy mats of dead leaves between. They trudged with slow and grunting care through the trees, setting many small unseen things to scurrying away into hiding behind the moss-girt trunks and the fallen, toadstool-infested hulks of long-fallen duskwoods and felsul.

  El, she dared think at the noisier of the two old women with her, who are we hiding from?

  The Sage of Shadowdale sighed heavily. His reply, when it came, was grim.

  Neither Storm nor I have any idea who compelled the wards from afar—but whoever did so has more power than either of us possesses.

  We want to get to cover. Quickly. Storm’s thought was just as gloomy.

  They were upset.

  Rune suppressed a shiver, and helped them hasten on. Slowly.

  Telamont suppressed a shiver. He still felt cold.

  The bone-deep chill took longer to leave him every time.

  The doors of the audience chamber were closed, so he’d made the dais itself glow with enough amber radiance to let the two men standing before Telamont see their Most High as more than the deepest shadow, like a dark flame on the throne of black glass.

  It suited him for those summoned before him to see his face and feel his power.

  They faced him impassively, all dark and slender menace. Silent and still, as watchful as two cold-eyed snakes.

  Maerandor and Helgore, the two agents he’d trained, wizards he’d plucked from youthful ambition and raised right past the ranks of the arcanists, forging them personally—and separately—into blades as deadly as he could manage in the far too little time he’d been given.

  Still, they would have to do. Time waited not even for the gods, despite what those deluded fools who called themselves “chronomancers” were wont to believe.

  He watched them give the tammaneth rod the briefest of curious glances, then fix their gazes on him. He smiled inwardly.

  Curiosity is a razor-sharp blade with two edges and no hilt. It slices us even as we wield it, yet we cannot resist swinging something so sharp.

  He passed his hand casually over a particular spot on the left arm of the throne, causing the secret way in the wall to the left of him to slide open, and watched them both start to look in that direction, then school themselves to keep their gazes on him.

  Better and better. He’d forged them well.

  He locked eyes with Maerandor and ordered crisply, “Depart at once for Candlekeep. Follow the plan; it stands unchanged.”

  Then he turned to Helgore, and commanded, “To Myth Drannor. You know what you are to do.”

  He looked meaningfully at the way he’d just opened. Turning from him and seeing the great doors they’d come in by standing closed, they took the hint and strode across the room, departing by that secret way.

  He passed his hand over the arm of the throne again, closing the way behind them, and permitted himself a sigh.

  Then rose in haste, fighting down another shiver.

  Age was riding him down at last.

  Was it time to become even less human, and so cheat the ravages of the passing years?

  Would he be able to snatch the time it would take for the exacting, painstaking process of becoming a shadow lich, in this spreading chaos and tumult? Or did she have other ideas?

  Perhaps he should pursue some of the alternatives. What sort of a life did a floating skull enjoy? Skinless, bodiless, reduced to little more than malice and sinister whisperings …

  How far from that am I right now, really?

  Those dark thoughts took him down from the dais and, striding unhurriedly, to the great double doors. His will made them swing open at his approach, heavily but in velvet silence.

  His will then made his staff appear out of nowhere in his hand as he walked.

  Well, at least some things still obeyed him without pause or question.

  Aglarel was waiting for him just outside the doors. Of course.

  Aglarel, tallest of his sons and bareheaded but resplendent in his obsidian armor, was the commander of the Most High’s personal bodyguard—and the closest thing to a trusted friend in Telamont’s life for too many years to count now.

  He fell into step a careful half stride behind Telamont, as usual, the faintly purple crackling of his armor’s ward surrounding Telamont’s own invisible mantle. Nothing short of a falling spire from one of Thultanthar’s loftiest towers should be able to reach the Most High through their combined wardings.

  Not that anything in this city had dared to try, for some time.

  Yet there would come another attempt someday. One always did.

  Aglarel did not ask where they were heading. Wherever his father desired to go, he would walk escort unless ordered away.

  Truth to tell, Telamont enjoyed his company.

  “You sent your two new wizards off on their first assignments?” Aglarel asked casually.

  “Yes,” Telamont told him flatly.

  No more words passed between them as they walked the length of the long and deserted forehall. Although they were alone, Aglarel tirelessly peered this way and that seeking trouble, as was his habit.

  They came out into the round reception hall with its lofty and magnificent va
ulted ceiling, where guards stood at attention, carefully impassive. Telamont turned left.

  “You’re not going to tell me what those missions are, are you?” Aglarel asked calmly.

  “Not yet,” Telamont replied, his tone matching his son’s.

  Together they strode through a hall of gloom and shadows where their footfalls echoed as if across great distances, and there were no guards. Beyond themselves, there was no one at all.

  They proceeded in calm silence through an archway, to emerge into a room lit by the soft, steady purple glow of magic, and crossed it to another archway opening into deeper darkness.

  They were halfway down the long passageway beyond, walking in darkness no mere human could have navigated through, when Aglarel ventured, “In order to protect you properly, Father, I would like to know the reason behind your sudden prohibition on using magic that attacks minds, or contacts them at all. Working blind is … unsettling. And dangerous.”

  “So is suffering damage to our own minds, whenever we use such magics,” Telamont replied. “And that’s what recently began to occur. If you try to read minds a dozen times before nightfall, you’ll go to bed a far lesser arcanist than you were this morning.”

  “Who’s behind this?” Aglarel’s voice was ever so slightly sharper. “Surely we should all know everything we can learn about such a peril, so as to deal with it swiftly, before all else.”

  Telamont looked at him. “Have you never wondered why for so long I forbade all attempts to bring Hadrhune and your brothers back from death?”

  “I presumed it was to avoid any chance of those who make undead their thralls—such as the one called Larloch, and Szass Tam of Thay—extending their influence among us. I take it I was wrong.”

  “You were right, but a new reason has been added to that. What most call the Spellplague, this continuing chaos of the collapsing Weave, does not mean the Weave is dead. Holy Shar would not seek its capture, were that so. Lesser wielders of magic than we went mad, or had their brains literally melt or explode, when the Spellplague began. Those greater wielders of the Art who still live are far less sane than they were. And now, lurking in the Weave, are fell sentiences that prey on us—on all of Shade—when we work magic that contacts other minds. For a time, Hadrhune was one of these lurkers. They yet include some of your fallen brothers and rival arcanists, of this city and others.”

  “They died, and yet still live?”

  “Their minds are caught in the Weave. They seek to regain full life. They need more life-force, depth of will, and scope of mind to forcibly take over a capable living person. Their best road to doing so is to plunder minds they know. So they wait for us—and when we work those sorts of magic, we lay ourselves open to them, and they stealthily rob our minds of some power, every time. It’s happened to you. To me. To most of your brothers, perhaps all.”

  Aglarel stopped, mouth agape. “How is this possible?”

  Telamont shrugged. “None can ever fully understand the Art. Yet when I seek to compel the Weave, to conquer it locally and claim it for Shar, it resists me as it always has. Which means Mystra yet survives, or enough of her Chosen, to offer resistance.”

  Aglarel’s face hardened. “Which is why they must all die,” he snapped. “More than that—be utterly destroyed, minds shattered and severed from the Weave. I am going to be so bold as to guess you have sent your two agents to bring us closer to that goal.”

  “So much is obvious,” Telamont replied. He spun around to stare into Aglarel’s silver eyes, their noses almost touching. “I tolerate all the intrigues, petty treason, and misbehavior of your brothers and lesser citizens of our city so long as they stray not from that goal. Every last creature of Mystra, and the vestige of that goddess herself, must perish utterly. We cannot rule this world, else. And in time to come, through patient achievement that ruins not the prize we seek to claim, rule it all the worthy among us shall.”

  That last word was said with icy firmness, ere the Most High turned on his heel and strode on.

  “The worthy among us,” Aglarel muttered, lengthening his stride to catch up to his father.

  “Tell me, how many of us are worthy?”

  “All too few,” the High Prince of Shade replied curtly. “It’s why I went on siring sons.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Silent Harp

  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 l
ifted 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.