Pool of Twilight (8 page)

“I ask the questions here,” Sirana proclaimed imperiously. Dutifully, the creature fell silent.

Sirana was well pleased. It seemed the guardian of the pool of twilight had kept its part of the bargain. She had never seen a creature of such perfect blackness. It was beautiful. And it was all hers.

“Shall I enter the dreams of your foes and feed upon them, mistress?” the bastellus hissed.

“That is within your powers?”

The bastellus nodded.

Sirana smiled in cruel satisfaction, tapping a thoughtful finger against her smooth jaw. “Very well, Sigh.”

She laughed then, a rich, evil sound, the flecks of twilight-colored light flickering in her dancing eyes.

“Thieves?” Tarl asked in shock. “But how can you be sure?”

“It was the way they handled themselves in battle that gave me the first clue,” Anton replied. The big, shaggy cleric of Tyr sat in a heavy oak chair in the main chamber of Denlor’s Tower. Shal was bandaging a ragged gash on Anton’s shoulder in her typically efficient manner. Kern and Listle sat at a nearby table, picking at some food Shal had set out for them. Neither was particularly hungry. Once the excitement of the battle had faded, Kern found the feeling replaced by exhaustion and not just a little trepidation, for the fiends had made it clear they were after him.

“Those warriors were used to moving about unencumbered,” Anton went on. “And they were obviously accustomed to using smaller and shorter weapons. They kept trying to attack at close quarters even though they didn’t have adequate room to swing a long sword. All that points to their being members of the thieves’ guild. But what clinched it were the notched ears.”

“Notched ears?” Tarl asked with a frown.

“That’s right. The last guildmaster, Bercan, lost his left ear in a duel some years ago. Ever since, the thieves of Phlan have notched their left ears as a sign of loyalty.” Anton grimaced in pain as Shal deftly but firmly tightened the bandage around his shoulder. “By all the gods of light, woman, can’t you be a little gentler? I’m hurt enough as it is.”

“Something tells me you’ll live, Anton,” Shal said dryly. He gave her a glowering look, which she returned with a laugh. She gathered her salves and bandages, and turned her attention to Kern. Fortunately, none of his wounds were as deep as the gouge in Anton’s shoulder.

Listle spoke up. It was virtually impossible to keep the elf out of a conversation for very long anyway. “What would the thieves of Phlan want with the Hammer of Tyr, Patriarch Anton? Could they have ransomed it back to the temple for gold?”

“Perhaps,” Anton replied with a shrug. “Or more likely they were interested in the riches that are said to be hidden with the hammer.”

Tarl struck fist against palm. The blind cleric paced before the hearth in agitation. “There’s still something about this that bothers me. The thieves’ guild has never attacked the temple before, let alone in broad daylight. And posing as warriors is very unusual. What could have made them do it? There’s something else to this mystery.”

“Fiends.” Shal looked up from her work, a grim light in her emerald eyes. “Since when have thieves been able to summon fiends from the Nine Hells?”

Anton stood. “Since never,” he growled.

“Then it might be interesting to know who summoned them,” Shal mused. “If we answer that question, I think we’ll find out who it is that so desperately wants the hammer. And the Hammerseeker.” She frowned disapprovingly at her son as the salve she had smeared across one of his cuts turned into a puff of sticky blue cobwebs. “I told you to concentrate on keeping your wall of resistance down, Kern,” she said sternly. “The salves won’t work if you can’t control your unmagic for at least a few seconds.”

“Sorry.” Kern’s expression was sheepish. “I don’t know why, but it keeps getting harder.”

Shal studied him for a long moment. “It’s most likely the aftereffect of the battle,” she decided. “The more danger you’re in, the stronger your unmagic is likely to get.” She set down the jar of magical salve, reaching for a cloth soaked in warm water laced with willow bark. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to heal naturally this time.”

“You’d better get used to battle, Kern,” Anton warned the young man gravely. “I have little doubt that this was only the first in a wave of attacks. Someone wants the Hammer of Tyr very badly, and they’re going to do whatever it takes to get it. I imagine that even now our mysterious foe is enslaving more fiends from the nether worlds.”

Listle sighed deeply. “The poor fiends.”

Kern gaped at her. “‘The poor fiends?’ ” he practically choked. “What on Toril are you talking about, Listle?”

“They didn’t ask to be summoned and enslaved,” the elven illusionist said indignantly.

“Listle, they’re fiends,” Kern retorted in disbelief. “They’re evil.”

“How do you know all of them are really evil?” Listle demanded, hands on her hips. “Maybe some of them have been ordered to attack us against their will.” She fidgeted with the shimmering ruby pendant hanging at her throat.

Kern shook his head in amazement. What had gotten into the foolish elf? “Believe me, Listle, only an evil wizard would have summoned them. So they have to be evil.”

“Is that so?” Listle said scathingly. Her silvery eyes were blazing. She spun around and flounced right through a wall of solid basalt. Kern could only gawk after her in bewilderment.

“What’s the matter with her?” he asked in a wounded voice.

Shal regarded her son seriously, then sighed. “You’re very pigheaded, Kern.”

“Kern didn’t do anything wrong,” Anton protested. “Listle was talking nonsense.”

The red-haired sorceress rolled her eyes. “Men!” she exclaimed, as if that were explanation enough. Kern, Tarl, and Anton wore looks of confusion.

“Oh, quit gaping like that,” Shal snapped. “There are some things men never seem to learn.”

The looks of confusion grew even worse. Shal smacked a palm against her forehead. “Never mind!” she said in exasperation.

With a groan, Shal left the three men and went in search of her apprentice. She finally found the elf in an unlikely place—sweeping the floor in Shal’s own spellcasting chamber. It wasn’t a task the elf generally volunteered to do. She must be upset, indeed, the sorceress thought.

After a long moment, Shal spoke gently. “Kern can be a bit stubborn, can’t he?”

Listle looked up from her work in surprise. Then she nodded, sighing. “You can say that again.”

Shal smiled fondly. “He’s his father’s son in that regard. But he didn’t mean to upset you, Listle. You know that, don’t you?”

The elf nodded. “I know, Shal. And I’m not mad at him, really.” A faint, impish smile touched her lips. “Well, not much anyway.”

Shal laughed at this. She took the broom from Listle’s hands and sat the elf down in a chair. Then she brewed a pot of herbal tea over a small brazier and poured two cups full of the steaming, fragrant liquid.

Shal sat and regarded her apprentice thoughtfully for a moment. The truth was, Listle was almost as much a mystery to the sorceress as she was to Kern. The elf had shown up at the tower two years before, wanting to learn the craft of magic, and Shal did not have the heart to turn her down. Besides, Shal had sorely needed an apprentice to help out around the laboratory, and Listle had proved to be both a quick study and a hard worker, if a bit unpredictable at times.

Yet after two years, Shal knew little more of the elf than she had been told that first day. Listle’s homeland was Evermeet, the land of the silver elves far across the western Sea of Swords, but she spoke of her past rarely. And Shal was not the type to pry.

Listle broke the silence. “Shal, tell me how Tarl first brought the Hammer of Tyr to Phlan. He had a difficult time, didn’t he?”

The sorceress stared in surprise at Listle’s unexpected question. Then she nodded. Sometimes the best way to forget your own troubles was to listen to someone else’s. She sipped her tea, thinking.

“It was more than thirty years ago,” Shal began. “Tarl had just become a cleric of Tyr—under Anton’s watchful eye, of course—and he journeyed with a dozen of his brethren to Phlan. Their mission was to deliver the Hammer of Tyr to the temple that had just been built here, and to join the few clerics already in residence. You see, in those days, most of the ancient city of Phlan lay in ruins, overrun by creatures of evil. Only a few sections, small bastions of light and order, were civilized. As they arrived at the outskirts of the city, the clerics were attacked by the undead of Valhingen Graveyard.” Shal shook her head sadly. “Of the newly arrived clerics, all but Tarl and Anton were killed, and a dread vampire stole the hammer.”

Listle drew her knees up to her chin, caught up in the tale. “You were in the city then, too, weren’t you, Shal?”

The sorceress nodded. “I had come by means of a wishing ring, in hopes of finding what had become of my master. I had the good fortune to meet Tarl, as well as our closest friend, the ranger, Ren o’ the Blade.”

She shook her head, smiling fondly at the memories of her first adventures with Tarl and Ren. “Together, the three of us discovered that the leader of the city’s Council of Ten was in league with an evil dragon, the Lord of the Ruins. As it turned out, the councilman was responsible for the death of my dear master, who had stood in his way, as well as the death of Ren’s beloved Tempest, a thief who had stolen the magical ioun stones the dragon needed to control the pool of radiance that lay in the ruins. Together, we managed to defeat both the council leader and the dragon. Then Tarl fought the vampire in Valhingen Graveyard. With his faith in Tyr, he was victorious, and regained the hammer.”

Shal set down her empty teacup. “With the hammer resting on the altar in the temple of Tyr, it wasn’t long before the city began to grow and prosper. More and more of the ruins were rebuilt, the monsters driven away. Phlan was truly restored, and it was the hammer’s doing.”

Listle nodded in understanding. “But with the hammer gone…”

“The process is reversing itself,” Shal said grimly. “Eventually, Phlan will again become the ravaged place it was for so many centuries.”

Listle’s eyes went wide. “What are we going to do, Shal?” she asked breathlessly.

Shal tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I think I know someone who just might be able to help. The prophecy spoke of a magical pool somehow being involved in all of this, didn’t it?”

Listle’s head bobbed. “That’s right. ‘The twilight pool.’” She frowned, her bottom lip jutting out. “Whatever that is.”

Shal laughed. “Well, there’s only one expert on pools that I know of. Perhaps I should pay her a call. Come, let’s go tell the others.”

The sorceress bent over a small iron caldron hanging above a flickering fire. The special brew had to be exactly right. There was no margin for error. She pulled a few dried leaves from a leather pouch at her belt. Carefully, she crumpled them into the bubbling contents of the caldron.

The sorceress shivered, drawing her heavy sheepskin coat more tightly about her shoulders. The autumn air of the glade was chill with the coming winter. All around her, leaves fluttered down, mantling the ground with a crisp, crackling blanket of russet, crimson, and tarnished gold. Squirrels chattered in the branches of the ancient oak and ash trees that surrounded the clearing. The sorceress cocked her head, trying to listen to the small animals. After a minute she gave up. All squirrels ever seemed to talk about were acorns.

The sorceress sprinkled a pinch of black powder into the caldron. Close, very close, she thought. But not yet. She couldn’t risk any mistakes. She leaned back against a fallen tree trunk to wait and think. She was a woman who prized patience. Patience was the key to the greatest magic.

The sorceress was clad in deerskin breeches, a thick wine-colored tunic of fine wool, soft but remarkably tough boots of wyvern leather, and a heavy cloak of forest green, its weave so tight rain dripped right off it. It wasn’t a wizard’s typically gaudy garb, but it suited her perfectly.

All in all, there was a rather ageless quality about the sorceress. Her long, chestnut-colored hair was marked only by a single, rather dramatic streak of gray. At first glance the sorceress might have seemed a woman barely past her third decade, but there was a wisdom in her deep green eyes that was strangely at odds with her youthful appearance. And anyone versed in the magical arts who observed the sorceress at her craft would have realized instantly that she had far too much power to be as youthful as she appeared.

In truth, the sorceress was well over a century old.

Once, she had lived an entire lifetime as an ambitious mage, doing whatever she could to acquire more and more magical power. It was an ambition that ultimately had led to disaster. She had sought to exploit a legendary pool of radiance to make herself the greatest wizard in Faerun. But her ego had proved her downfall. She had not been able to control the chaotic enchantment emanating from the pool of radiance. She was blasted into unconsciousness, and when she awoke, she found herself no longer an aged wizard, but a young woman once again. All her skills as a sorceress were gone.

Others might have quit, given up. But she had been granted a chance to live again, and she did not intend to throw away such an opportunity. Realizing the perilous nature of the magical pools that were concealed throughout Faerun, she had vowed never to rest until she found and destroyed them all. She had begun her magical studies anew. This time she had not sought power only for power’s sake, but instead to combat the force of the pools. Over the course of the last thirty years, she had destroyed more than a dozen of the treacherous pools. Even so, her quest was far from over, if ever it truly would be.

Now she tended to the steaming caldron, adding a few more odds and ends from the numerous pouches strung along her belt. In her concentration, she did not hear the faint crackling of leaves in the trees behind her.

A pair of golden eyes gazed at the woman from the shadows of the forest. A lithe, tawny shape slunk between the trees, drawing closer to the glade. A stray beam of amber sunlight filtered its way through the branches above, briefly illuminating the stalker. It was a great cat, its muscles rippling under its smooth pelt. A beautiful creature, its buff-colored fur turned to a rich brown around its paws, muzzle, and the tip of its tail. Its eyes winking like green-gold gems, the cat’s long whiskers twitched in anticipation. Its sensitive nose had caught the scent of the woman in the glade. A low rumble vibrated deep in the cat’s throat.