The Ruin (23 page)

Such obvious menaces were alarming, but in essence, they were the same sort of horror he’d been fighting for the better part of a year, and perhaps for that reason, they didn’t daunt him quite as much as they would another. It was actually the bizarre manifestations of enchantment gone to rot that he found most disquieting, even though the majority didn’t appear particularly dangerous. A stone spoke to him in a language he didn’t recognize. His mother’s face formed and dissolved in a trickle of water pattering down the escarpment. Fragrant black lilies sprouted from the frozen earth, rubbed and twined together in an exploratory kind of way, then exploded into furious motion, tearing at one another with barbs concealed among their petals.

With such wonders to distract him, it was a while before he actually registered what he was picking his way through.

What he even trod on and crushed occasionally. But when he finally did notice, he froze.

Perhaps he made a sound as well, for Kara and Raryn turned around. “What is it?” whispered the bard.

“The bones,” he breathed.

Raryn stooped to examine one of the skeletons. Took hold of a bone and lifted it up. For a heartbeat, the armature of a bird-like wing hung revealed, then the structure crumbled.

“I’ve never actually seen the skeleton of an avariel before,” the white-haired hunter said, “but I assume this is one.”

Taegan swallowed. “And there’s another, and over there, another. Sune’s ruby comb, they’re all around us, everywhere!” He paused, studying their faces. “Do you see what it means?”

“Keep your voice down!” Raryn said.

“Yes, my friend,” Kara said. She took Taegan’s hand. “I do understand.”

“It could have been any breed of elf wizards who created the Rage,” he said. “But it was avariels who defended this place. Who died by the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, protecting it when the wyrm lords and their minions attacked.”

“Interesting,” Raryn said, “but now’s not the time to stand and chat about it.”

Taegan struggled to regain his composure. “Yes, of course. Pray, pardon my foolishness.”

As they skulked on, he did his best to keep watching for trouble, but found it considerably more difficult. He couldn’t wrench his thoughts away from his discovery.

The avariel race, his own race, whom he’d spent his life disdaining, had been instrumental in overthrowing the dragon kings. His ancestors had fought and died so Faerűn could be free. They hadn’t been cowards then, nor later, he was certain, when they’d withdrawn into the wilderness. With so many of their kindred slain, and probably, vengeful drakes intent on slaughtering the rest, reclusion had been their only hope of survival.

Taegan started to cry.

Brimstone resumed solid form. If he couldn’t escape the snare that had caught him, he’d likely find himself facing one or more of the Tarterians in the very near future, and they probably commanded magic capable of hurting him even in his guise of sulphurous vapor. Better, then, to wear a shape that would allow him to strike back.

He supposed that Sammaster, aided by the Tarterians, who reportedly favored magical traps such as that, had laid the enchantments throughout the ring of mountains. Though the labor involved in such an endeavor must have been considerable, particularly in light of the fact that the only conceivable purpose was to catch folk who somehow learned of the ruined castle’s location, traversed a trackless, frigid wilderness to reach it, then tried to climb over the peaks.

Only mad, brilliant Sammaster, endlessly obsessive and wary of Mystra, the Chosen, and the other foes who’d foiled his previous schemes, would have bothered. Brimstone had never hated the lich more than he did at that moment.

But hating wouldn’t help him . He had to think. He lacked the power to cast enchantments like that, but had learned of them in the course of his studies. None of his counterspells would set him free, but supposedly, an exit existed somewhere, just as if the extradimensional prison were an ordinary maze.

So he scuttled along, seeking it, the edges of his wings brushing along the pearly, featureless walls and ceiling. He took one turn, another, reached a dead end and doubled back, meanwhile striving to construct. a map of the labyrinth in his mind.

Still, before long, he was all but certain he’d blundered down a blind alley he’d explored before. With every surface flat and blank, the maze was more like an abstract exercise in geometry than an actual place, and that made it easy to become confused.

But he had to get out, and quickly. It wouldn’t help him to

escape back into the mundane world if he found every Tarterian in the valley already waiting to pounce on him when he did.

If, somewhere, an opening connected the maze to normal space, then perhaps air was flowing. In or out, it didn’t matter, he could still use the breeze to orient himself. He tried to feel a draft, but couldn’t.

He spewed a cloud of his hot, smoky breath, then studied the billowing fumes. They hung in the air for what felt like a long while, then started to waft in one direction.

Or at least he hoped they had. The drift was so subtle, it was impossible to be sure. No creature with vision less acute than a dragon’s could have observed it, and it was possible that even he was only imagining it.

Instinct prompted him to dash against the current instead of with it. When he reached a choice point, he spewed more smoke. At that rate, he’d have no breath weapon left for fighting when he emerged onto the mountainside, but he’d just have to manage without it.

Soon his chest started to ache with the effort of generating so much vapor, and only a thin haze emerged when he expelled it. He lost track of how many turns he’d taken, and started to fear that, somehow, his plan was flawed, or else no egress existed. Then a rectangle of dark sky and stony earth appeared in the whiteness ahead.

He was so relieved to see it, he nearly flung himself heedlessly through, but remembered caution just in time. He stuck his head out, twisted his neck, peered, and spotted the Tarterian wheeling overhead.

He scrambled through the doorway, and with a magician’s heightened awareness, felt the maze, deprived of its prisoner, wither from existence. He focused his attention, however, on the enemy above. He couldn’t look up, because he didn’t want it to know he’d sighted it, but trusted his hearing to tell him what it was doing.

Hide rattled and creaked as it furled its wings and dived. Brimstone waited until it was plummeting too fast to change

course easily, then sprang. The Tarterian slammed down into the space he’d just vacated. Brimstone lashed his pinions and took to the air.

For the moment, he possessed the advantage of height, but it wasn’t enough. Across the valley, other Tarterians shrieked and hissed as they raced in his direction. He had to end the confrontation quickly and get away.

Eyes burning like green fire, his foe glared at him, and power whined through the air. Brimstone tilted his wings and spun himself to the side. A bubble of shadow shimmered into existence where he’d been a split second before.

He riposted by conjuring darts of flame, which streaked at the Tarterian, splashed against its dorsal surface, but didn’t seem to cause it any pain. It cocked back its head, opened its jaws, and spewed expanding ripples of something akin to pure force. Brimstone tried to dodge, but the breath weapon still clipped him, snapping the end of one pinion. He plummeted and smashed down hard.

The Tarterian sprang on top of him and pressed him against the cold, rocky ground. Its talons punctured his scales, and its jaws sought his neck.

All but immobilized, Brimstone frantically twisted his head into position to gaze into his adversary’s luminous emerald eyes. Stop, he thought, stop fighting me. I’m your master, and you’re my slave.

For a moment, it didn’t seem as though it was going to work, and small wonder if it hadn’t. The Tarterian had a dragon’s strength of mind. But then it stopped tearing at him and cringed. Brimstone plunged his fangs into its throat. The Tarterian writhed for a moment, then went limp.

Yet Brimstone too found his will constrained, by need and greed. He was parched, weak, and the Tarterian’s blood, though laced with bitterness, was an intoxicating fountain of vitality. He guzzled in a frenzy as fierce as the Rage.

But he had to stop. Had to, or his prey’s kindred would overwhelm him, and Sammaster would win. Finally he managed to wrench his mouth away from the gushing wounds.

At once he discerned that he might have waited too long. Ragged shadows against the stars, the other wyrms were nearly upon him.

He couldn’t retreat directly away from them, farther into the mountains. It was too likely he’d blunder into another snare. He’d have to flee at a right angle to their approach and swing back into the valley, even though it meant letting them get even closer than they were already.

At least his drink of blood had mended his broken wing. He sprang into the air and flew, meanwhile whispering a charm to augment his speed.

He beat high, swooped low, and zigzagged from side to side to throw off his pursuers’ aims. Even so, some attacks found him. Another blast of breath weapon bashed him, shadowy, disembodied hands clawed him, and a mesh of gummy cable materialized on his wings, binding them until, with a flap, he tore the web apart. It was only a matter of time until one assault or another would kill him, cripple him, or at least slow him down enough for the Tarterians to catch up.

Peering about for anything that could help him, he spotted the entrance to the portal up ahead. He took stock and realized that his breath had renewed itself at least to a degree. He dived to earth in front of the cave, spewed smoke and embers, then scrambled inside.

As soon as he was out of his pursuers’ view, he dissolved himself into vapor and sparks, identical, or so he hoped, with the haze he’d created a moment before.

The Tarterians thudded onto the ground and charged through the two overlapping clouds without perceiving any difference between them, then hurtled on down the passage.

Brimstone waited while his enemies vanished in the dark. Then he flowed through the smoke that was not himself, out into the open air, and onward, until he found a hiding place amid big, jumbled stones which, on closer inspection, turned out to the broken remains of a huge golem or earth elemental. Despite the erosion that had blurred its features, he could still make out eyes, an ear, and the contours of a three-fingered hand.

From that vantage point, he watched the Tarterians emerge, hissing and snarling to one another, presumably marveling at the abilities of the quarry who’d managed both to escape through the gate and to destroy it in the process.

He waited for some time after they dispersed, then skulked onward in search of his comrades. Eventually, he found Raryn scraping lichen from a rock. Alert as ever, the dwarf sensed his approach, pivoted in his direction, and raised his axe.

Brimstone congealed from smoke into solid form and said, “Don’t be alarmed. It’s me.”

“I take it,” Raryn said, “something kept you from stealing away.”

“Magical snares seeded through the mountains.”

The burly, white-bearded scout returned his attention to the lichen. His knife scratched against the stone. “Then it’s good there’s at least a little something to eat. I spotted bistort and coltsfoot, too.”

Such provender may sustain you and the others for a time, Brimstone thought. But when my thirst becomes too keen to bear, the only things I’ll have to eat are you.

13-16 Uktar, the Year of Rogue Dragons

In Sossal, corpses weren’t hard to find. The slain lay where they’d fallen, buried only by the premature snows. But even so, Zethrindor’s instincts led him to seek out an old cemetery, where sunken graves crumbled in on themselves, and weathered markers listed, a place given over by ritual and custom to the dominion of death.

He waited for the moon to set, then, hissing and murmuring incantations, used a talon to inscribe pentacles and sigils, some in the frozen earth, others on granite headstones and the facades of mausoleums. Several of the monuments, hallowed in the name of one beneficent power or another, couldn’t bear the desecration without cracking or crumbling.

Gradually the night grew even colder, though, paradoxically, the graves began to smell more strongly of decay. Neither manifestation bothered him.

He snarled a final invocation, and something—the underlying structure of the world, perhaps, on which seas, plains, and mountains lay like paint on a canvas—moaned in protest. The patch of ground before him spun and churned like a whirlpool. A hollow formed at the center, and a horror oozed and clambered out of it into the open air. Essentially, it was shapeless, though Zethrindor could make out forms within the squirming central mass: a femur, skulls, a tarnished brass coffin handle, worms, and a length of stained and filthy winding sheet.

The thing peered back at him with several rudimentary eyes made of earth, mold, and scraps of rotten wood. “I wondered,” it said, in a slow, slurred voice, “when you would next summon me.”

“I name you G’holoq,” Zethrindor said, “and I bind you by the staff, the crown, and the hexagon.”

G’holoq laughed a muddy laugh, intensifying the ambient stench of rot, and a marker sculpted in the shape of the Earthmother, crowned with roses and holding a sheaf of grain, flowed and deformed like a melting candle. “Such caution between old friends! When did I ever attempt to deny you?”

“Never,” Zethrindor said, “because I always constrained you properly.”

“Ah, but then you were a mere wyrm. Now you’re an omnipotent dracolich, predestined lord of a goodly portion of Faerűn. How, then, would a humble spirit like me dare to defy you, whether you performed the ceremony properly or not?”

Zethrindor bared his fangs. “Continue to mock me and I’ll show you how powerful I’ve become.”

“No need. I watched your final spat. with Iyraclea. Very impressive. Have you wondered, though, what the Frostmaiden thinks of you, now that you’ve killed her special servant?”

“I don’t care. The time of the gods is over.”