Authors: Troy Denning
The roars of the wounded bugbears were lost to the sound of the collapsing doorway. Vala ducked a massive axe as the quickest of the bugbears whirled to attack, then removed the arm holding it and opened its chest on the backstroke. She glimpsed another axe coming and barely managed to pivot away, though not before the blade slashed along her chest, denting steel scales and hurling her into a pair of hairy arms as big around as her waist. With her arms pinned at her sides, Vala brought her feet up over her head and smashed her booted feet into her captor’s face.
The blow was not sufficient to drop a bugbear, but it did startle it. The creature’s grasp loosened enough for her to bring her sword around beneath her. So weak was the attack that not even the sharpest steel would have penetrated the bugbear’s thick hide, much less the apron of leather armor it wore over its loins.
The darksword’s glassy blade slashed through the leather like gossamer. The bugbear bellowed in shock
and started to squeeze, and Vala cocked her wrist, driving the tip of her weapon deep into its abdomen. The hairy arms went limp and dropped her on her shoulders, her captor’s huge body doubling over above her face. Reaching up behind it, she grabbed a handful of fur and pulled herself through its legs and to her feet.
A huge hand axe came tumbling through the air and smashed into her helmet, breaking one of the horns off and knocking it from her head. Sure of only the direction the attack had come from, Vala spun around to the opposite side of the bugbear she’d just wounded and found another big axe swinging toward her throat. Barely flipping her darksword up in time, she caught the weapon near the top, using the attack’s own momentum to cleave the shaft and send the head spinning off to lodge itself in one of the attacker’s wounded companions.
Faster than the others, this bugbear followed its first attack by slamming a huge fist into Vala’s armored ribs, launching her across the room into a shelf full of artifacts. She dropped to the ground in a limp heap, still holding her sword and struggling to get the wind back in her lungs.
Snorting in triumph, the bugbear snatched a weapon from a wounded companion and stomped toward Vala. Behind it, she saw a spherical form float out of the dust cloud rising from the collapsed doorway. Of Corineus, there was no sign.
Vala bounced to her feet and raised her darksword to throw. The bugbear pivoted away and brought its big axe around to block. Vala hurled the blade anyway. As the weapon sailed past the astonished brute to split the beholder down the center, she charged after it. Seeing its mistake too late, the bugbear swung back into the attack, but Vala was inside the arc of its weapon by then, her boot heels driving for its face in a flying side kick.
The bugbear leaned aside in an attempt to slip the blow. Vala kicked her feet apart and caught its head between her ankles. As she swung into its torso, she scissored her legs and swung herself around to the side. Though the bugbear was easily three times her size, the weight of her body acted like a pendulum, pulling it down face first. It slammed to the stone floor with a heavy thump and immediately began to push itself up again.
Vala’s sword was already returning to her hand. She brought it down on the back of her attacker’s neck, then leaped up and dispatched the wounded bugbears in a series of cautious, darting attacks from the rear. By the time she finished, the dust in the fallen doorway had cleared enough for her to see Corineus standing in the service corridor on the other side of the rubble.
“Well done, woman.” he said, pointing past her toward an iron door on the adjacent wall. “Above the door, you will find a holy symbol painted in black blood. Break it.”
Vala turned in the direction he pointed. When she’d had a chance to examine the room, she could see that it was divided into two sections. She had entered the front area, which the bugbears, beholder, and illithid all shared with the assortment of magical items she’d noticed earlier. In the back, opposite the door Corineus was pointing at, an assortment of gem-studded scepters, rods, rings, tomes, and other powerful artifacts of magiceven a diamond ball the size of a halfling’s headfloated inside a field of green spell light. Vala’s throat went dry, for she understood the phaerimm well enough to realize when she was standing in one of their lairsand to know that had the creature been present, she would have been too busy fighting to take in all that she was seeing.
“What are you waiting for?” Corineus demanded. “Break the seal.”
“Not so fast,” Vala said, retrieving her helm. She had no idea whether it would still protect her from the phaerimm mind control with only one horn, but it was worth a try. “Not until you answer a few questions.”
“The phaerimm who claims this laboratory lair will soon realize it has been broken into and return,” Corineus replied. “That is the only question you need answered.”
“Afraid not,” Vala replied. “You surrendered your right to claim my trust when you sent me through that door without warning.”
“You had to be tested.”
Vala bit back the rage she felt rising inside and said, “I passed.”
She turned toward the nearest shelf and picked up a pair of fabulously decorated silver bracers.
“Put that back!” Corineus started forward, only to encounter a field of flashing blue energy that hurled him back against the wall. “You’ve no right!”
“No?” Vala raised her brow and considered threatening the lich-elf, then recalled how touchy elves could be about their ancestral treasures and decided to try a different tactic. “Consider these a token of good faith.”
She tossed the bracers through the door.
Corineus’s eyes went wide, and he nearly let the bracers fall. “The symbol, woman! You’ve no idea what you just did.”
Vala’s mouth went dry, but she managed to meet the white elf’s gaze without shaking. “Don’t be too sure.”
Corineus’s white eyes glared at Vala for a moment, then drifted to the symbol over the door.
“Have you ever heard of a baelnorn?” the white elf asked.
Vala shook her head. “I take it I’m looking at one.”
“Sworn to a duty more sacred than you can know.”
A dull clunk sounded from the other side of the door.
“The time has come for you to choose,” he said. “Without my help”
“One moment,” Vala interrupted, jerking the iron door open.
A teleport-dazed phaerimm tumbled into the room, its four spindly arms windmilling wildly. Vala brought her darksword down across the thick part of its body and clove it cleanly in two, then stepped back and opened both halves along their length. When she was certain the thing was dead, she cut off the wicked tail barb, then finally reached up with her sword and broke the holy symbol painted above the door.
Corineus rushed into the room, his white eyes shining bright with rage. “How dare you disobey”
“How dare 7?” Vala tossed the tail barb into the baelnorn’s face, then touched the tip of her darksword to his throat. “Let’s get something straight, White Eyes. I need you as much as you need me, but lf you ever send me into a lair again without warning me, it’ll be you I’m carving into little pieces. Clear?”
The baelnorn moved closer, enveloping her in his chill aura. “I do not think you understand who you are talking to.”
Vala stepped even closer, so close that her face and hands began to ache with cold. She laid a bloody palm on his flesh-freezing face.
“Oh, I understand,” she said, “but what you need to know is I mean to see my son again, and I’ll gut anything that makes that less likely.”
A low groan rolled from beneath the roots of the smoke tree, where Aris lay hidden in an undercut
carved out of the dry riverbank by some long-ago flood. Galaeron, standing watch outside, dropped to his haunches and peered inside, where Ruha kneeled beside the unconscious giant’s head, using a wet rag to drip water onto his cracked lips. His broken arm was stretched out beside him, splinted to the straightest pair of branches Galaeron had been able to find in a mile of dry riverbed. A shield-sized circle of charred flesh on his chest marked where the dragon’s lightning bolt had entered his body, and a blackened foot marked where it had left. Of the most concern to Galaeron, however, were the giant’s black and sunken eyes, which Ruha said were signs of the head injury he had suffered.
Aris groaned again, and a gray tongue appeared between his lips. Ruha squeezed the cloth hard, dribbling water directly onto the tip of the tongue, then tilted her head at the pair of empty waterskins resting on the shadow blanket beside the giant.
“More water,” she said.
“More?” Each skin held two gallons, and Galaeron had filled them twice already since the dragon attack. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
Ruha shrugged. “How much would a healthy giant drink in a day? I don’t know.” She placed the rag in a small hollow she had lined with dragon skin and filled with water. “It takes water to heal, and I would say the matter remains uncertain.”
The witch did not look at Galaeron as she spoke, and her voice remained cold. He reached into the undercut and pulled the waterskins off the shadow blanket, then left the scant shade of the smoke tree to creep along the edge of the dry riverbed. Ruha’s manner had been much the same since she’d used her air magic to float Aris into the shelter of the undercut. She clearly held Galaeron
responsible for the giant’s injuries, and he was not so sure he disagreed.
The shock of seeing Aris pinned beneath the dragon had jolted his conscience into asserting itself again, driving his shadow self back down into the dark realm beneath his conscious mind, and he had instantly realized how his actions must have seemed to someone else. Even given the spell he had cast to confuse the dragon when it wheeled on Aris, preventing the witch from attacking the dragon’s belly must have reeked of cowardice. If Galaeron doubted his own motivations in that first instance, he did not in the second, when he had used a shadow snare to drag the dragon back to ground. At that point, his only concern had been for the shadow blanket, and it had not even occurred to him that Aris would be further injured when the wyrm crashed into the ground.
The dragon’s corpse still lay out on the Saiyaddar, surrounded by a ring of glutted predators and blanketed beneath a mountain of flicking feathers. Galaeron longed to move beyond sight of it, and not only because looking at it reminded him of his terrible selfishness. If a Shadovar patrol or another of Malygris’s dragons happened across the corpse, he and his companions were certain to be found. Ruha lacked the magic to move Aris a long distance, and Galaeron was determined never again to use his own. He could no longer touch the Weave at all, and he recognized he was far past the point where he could wield shadow magic without yielding control of himself to his shadow. The next time he cast a spell, he feared, even causing a friend’s injury would not be enough to bring him back.
Galaeron reached a clump of giant featherwoods growing along the outer curve of a bend in the riverbed and kneeled beside a deep hole nestled down among the
tree’s roots. Though the bottom was concealed in shadow, there should have been enough light for an elf to see whether it contained any water.
Galaeron saw only murk.
He was not even all that surprised. Since touching the Shadow Weave, he had gradually started to become less and less of an elf. He had lost the ability to enter the Reverie and started to sleep just like a human, and even to dream. He was awakened by nightmares almost nightly and occasionally talked in his sleep, and he no longer felt any mystic connection in the presence of other elves. He could no longer see in dim conditions. It was, he had decided, a symptom of his shadow’s growing hold over him. Elves were born with a special bond to the Weave and his connection was being weakened by the Shadow Weave’s power over him. The only thing that remained was for his senses to grow as dull as those of a human. He thought of himself running around with a three-day sweat, thinking he smelled as fine as a spring rain, and shuddered.
Galaeron dropped a pebble into the hole and heard only a wet thud. The hole had not yet refilled. He gathered himself up and wandered half a mile down the riverbed to the next wellalso in the roots of a featherwoodand found water. Ruha had explained that it was only worth digging under a featherwood, and only when they grew on the exterior curve of a river bend.
Though even this short trip in the hot sun was enough to make Galaeron thirsty, he filled both waterskins first, and by then there was barely a handful of muddy liquid left for him. He quaffed it down gratefully, then shouldered the waterskins and climbed out of the well to find a tall, silver-haired woman in elven chain mail, elven boots, and an elven cloak standing before him, her hand resting on the hilt of a fine elven long sword. The
woman, however, was definitely humanand one he recognized from an ancient portrait hanging in the halls of Evereska’s Academy of Magic.
“Well met, Lady Silverhand,” Galaeron said, holding out one of the waterskins. “If you’re not my dying hallucination…”
“You should be that lucky, elf,” Storm said, not taking the waterskin. “After the evil you brought into the Realms, I’ll send you to the Nine Hells to look for Elminster before I let you die a peaceful death in Anauroch.”
“The Mage Masters at the Academy always said you were the merriest of the Seven Sisters,” Galaeron retorted, concealing the hurt the words caused him behind a facade of cynicism. He hefted the waterskins onto his shoulders and started for the undercut. “If you are about to open a hell-mouth beneath my feet, at least wait until I deliver this water. My friend Aris is in danger of dying.”
“I didn’t come here to punish you, elf,” Storm said, ignoring Galaeron’s attempt to elicit her concern for the stone giant. “That is not my placeeven were you worth the trouble.”
Galaeron glanced up at the blazing sun and licked his cracked lips, then asked, “Well then, if you didn’t come to help and you didn’t come to punish, what are you doing here?”