In Sylvan Shadows
Page 1
THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT THAT YOU ARE
IN CONTROL OF CASTLE TRINITY.
“The elves are few, but my troops are many,” the ogrillon went on. “I will not fear even a few thousand dead when Shilmista falls under my shadow.”
“My shadow?” Dorigen asked slyly. For the first time since she’d entered the tent, she saw a hint of trepidation in the ogrillon’s gaze.
“You were away on private matters,” Ragnor argued, somewhat subdued. “The time had come to attack, and I did. I struck with every soldier I could muster. I led the attack myself and carry the scars of battle.”
Dorigen bowed her head respectfully to calm the volatile beast. Ragnor had told her much more than he had intended. With the ogrillon so adamant in his statement that Shilmista would fall under his control, and not to Castle Trinity, Dorigen worried just how far Ragnor’s newfound independence would take him.
She had no desire to be anywhere near the ogrillon when he decided he didn’t need Castle Trinity.
“The Orc King finds Drizzt’s whirling scimitar blades tackling both familiar foes and refreshingly ambiguous moral challenges … The story line marks the continuation of Salvatore’s maturation as a writer, introducing more complex themes into a frequently black-and-white fantasy landscape.”
—Kirkus
“(R.A. Salvatore) knows how to fashion a story so that you have to keep reading—even if it’s two in the morning and you have to get up at five, even though you still have more than a hundred pages to go, and even if you’re so tired you have to keep telling yourself you will read only one more page, just one more, and that’s all.”
—Terry Brooks
R.A. SALVATORE’S
THE CLERIC QUINTET
BOOK I
Canticle
BOOK II
In Sylvan Shadows
BOOK III
Night Masks
BOOK IV
The Fallen Fortress
BOOK V
The Chaos Curse
The Cleric Quintet, Book II
IN SYLVAN SHADOWS
©1992 TSR, Inc.
©2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC
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eISBN: 978-0-7869-5433-9
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v3.1
To Bryan, Geno, and Caitlin,
My three little motivation pills.
—RAS
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One: By Surprise
Chapter Two: A Book Worth Reading
Chapter Three: Intrigue
Chapter Four: Indecision
Chapter Five: First Contact
Chapter Six: The Quality of Mercy
Chapter Seven: Pragmatic Magic
Chapter Eight: Quietly
Chapter Nine: Daoine Teague Feer
Chapter Ten: Betrayed
Chapter Eleven: The Trouble with Traps
Chapter Twelve: Under Guard
Chapter Thirteen: Ooooo, Said the Deer
Chapter Fourteen: Revelations and Reluctant Allies
Chapter Fifteen: Aiming High
Chapter Sixteen: Ancient Wisdom
Chapter Seventeen: A Desperate Attempt
Chapter Eighteen: A Wood Worth Fighting For
Chapter Nineteen: Through the Lines Dangerously
Chapter Twenty: When Magic Filled the Air
Chapter Twenty-one: Long Live the King
Chapter Twenty-two: Visions of Hell
Chapter Twenty-three: Between A Dwarf and A Hard Place
Chapter Twenty-four: Pack of Wolves
Epilogue
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Cadderly moved his quill out toward the inkwell then changed his mind and put it down on his desk. He looked out the window at the foliage surrounding the Edificant Library, and at Percival, the white squirrel, tangling with acorns along the rain gutter of the lower level. It was the month of Eleasias, Highsun, the height of summer, and the season had been unusually bright and warm so high in the Snowflake Mountains.
Everything was as it always had been for Cadderly—at least, that’s what the young scholar tried to convince himself. Percival was at play in the sunshine, the library was secure and peaceful once more, and the lazy remainder of summer promised days of leisure and quiet walks.
As it always had been.
Cadderly dropped his chin into his palm then ran his hand back through his sandy brown hair. He tried to concentrate on the peaceful images before him, on the quiet summer world of the Snowflake Mountains, but eyes looked back at him from the depths of his mind: the eyes of a man he had killed.
Nothing would ever be the same. Cadderly’s gray eyes were no longer so quick to turn up in that boyish, full-faced smile.
With renewed determination, the young scholar poked the quill into the ink and smoothed the parchment before him.
Entry Number Seventeen
by Cadderly of Carradoon
Appointed Scholar, Order of Deneir
4 Eleasias, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)
It has been three and a half tendays since
Barjin’s defeat, yet I see his dead eyes—
Cadderly stopped and scribbled out the thought, both from the parchment and from his mind. He looked again out the window, dropped his quill, and rubbed his hands over his boyish face.
This is important, he reminded himself.
He hadn’t made an entry in more than a tenday, and if he failed at his year, the consequences to all the Southern Heartlands could be devastating. Again the quill went into the inkwell.
It has been three and a half tendays since we defeated the curse that befell the Edificant Library. The most distressing news since then: Ivan and Pikel Bouldershoulder have left the library in pursuit of Pikel’s aspirations to druidhood. I wish Pikel well, though I doubt that the woodland priests will welcome a dwarf into their order. The dwarves wouldn’t say where they were going (I don’t believe they themselves knew). I miss them terribly, for they, Danica, and Newander were the true heroes in the fight against the Talonite priest named Barjin—if that was his true name.
Cadderly paused for a few moments. Assigning a name to the man he had killed didn’t make things any easier for the innocent young scholar. It took him some time before he could concentrate on the information necessary to his entry, the interview he had done with the interrogating priests.
The clerics w
ho called back the dead man’s spirit warned me to take their findings as “probable” rather than exact. Witnesses from beyond the grave are often elusive, they explained, and Barjin’s stubborn spirit proved to be as difficult an opponent as the priest had been in life. Little information was garnered, but the clerics came away believing that the evil priest was part of a conspiracy—one of conquest that still threatens us, or so I must assume. That only increases the importance of my task.
Again, many moments passed before Cadderly was able to continue. He looked at the sunshine, at the white squirrel, and pushed away Percival’s staring eyes.
Barjin served the goddess Talona, and that bodes ill indeed for us all. The Lady of Poison is a vile deity of chaos, restricted by no moral code. But I am hard-pressed to explain one discrepancy: Barjin hardly fit the description of a Talonite disciple; he had not scarred himself in any visible way, as priests worshiping the Lady of Poison typically do. The holy symbol he wore, though—the trident with small vials atop each point—does resemble the triangular, three-teardrop design of Talona.
But with this, too, we have been led down a trail that leads only to guesses. More exact information must be gained, and gained soon, I fear.
This day, my quest has taken a different turn. Prince Elbereth of Shilmista, a most respected elf lord, has come to the library, bearing gloves taken from a band of marauding bugbears in the wood. The insignia on these gloves match Barjin’s symbol exactly—there can be little doubt that the bugbears and the Talonite priest were allied.
The headmasters have made no decisions yet, beyond agreeing that someone should accompany Prince Elbereth back to the forest. It seems only logical that I will be their choice. My quest can go no farther here; already I have perused every source of information on Talona in our possession—our knowledge is not vast on this subject. And as for the magical elixir that Barjin used, I have looked through every major alchemical tome and have consulted extensively with Vicero Belago, the library’s resident alchemist. Further study will be required as time permits, but my inquiries have hit only dead ends. Belago believes that he would learn more of the elixir if he had the bottle in his possession, but the headmasters have flatly refused that request. The lower catacombs have been sealed—no one is to be allowed down there, and the bottle is to remain where I put it, immersed in a font of blessed water in the room that Barjin used to house his vile altar.
The only clues remaining, then, lead to Shilmista. Always have I wanted to visit the enchanted forest, to witness the elves’ dance and hear their melancholy song. But not like this.
Cadderly set the quill down and blew lightly on the parchment to help dry the ink. His entry seemed terribly short, considering that he had not recorded anything for many days and there was so much to catch up on. It would have to do, though, for Cadderly’s thoughts were too jumbled for him to make sense of them in writing.
Orphaned at a very young age, Cadderly had lived at the Edificant Library since his earliest recollections. The library was a fortress, never threatened in modern times—not until Barjin had come. To the young Cadderly, orcs and goblins, undead monsters and evil wizards, had all been the stuff of tales in dusty books.
It had suddenly become all too real and Cadderly had been thrust into the midst of it. The other priests, even Headmaster Avery, had called him a hero for his actions in defeating Barjin. Cadderly saw things differently, though. Confusion, chaos, and blind fate had facilitated his every move. Even killing Barjin had been an accident—a fortunate accident?
Cadderly honestly didn’t know, didn’t understand what Deneir wanted or expected of him. Accident or not, the act of killing Barjin haunted the young scholar. He saw the Talonite’s dead eyes in his thoughts and in his dreams, staring at him, accusing him.
Outside the window, Percival danced and played along the rain gutter as warm sunshine filtered through the thick leaves of the huge oaks and maples common to the mountainside. Far, far below, Impresk Lake glittered, quiet and serene, in the gentle rays of the summer light.
To Cadderly, the “hero,” it all seemed a horrible facade.
ONE
BY SURPRISE
Twilight.
Fifty elf archers lay concealed across the first ridge and fifty more waited behind them atop the second in the rolling, hilly section of the Shilmista Forest known as the Dells. The flicker of faraway torches came into view through the trees.
“That’s not the leading edge,” the elf maiden Shayleigh warned, and indeed, lines of goblins were soon spotted much closer than the torches, traveling swiftly and silently through the darkness. Shayleigh’s violet eyes glittered eagerly in the starlight; she kept the cowl of her cloak up high, fearing that the luster of her golden hair, undiminished by the quiet colors of night, would betray her position.
The advancing goblins came on, their shortbows bent back, arrows poised to strike.
The skilled elves held their longbows steady, not one of them trembling under the great pull of their powerful weapons. They looked around somewhat nervously, though, awaiting Shayleigh’s command, their discipline severely tested as orcs and goblins, and larger, more ominous forms, came almost to the base of the ridge.
Shayleigh moved down the line quickly. Two arrows away and retreat, she instructed, using a silent code of hand signals and hushed whispers. On my call.
Orcs were on the hillock, climbing steadily toward the ridge. Still Shayleigh held the volley, trusting in the erupting chaos to keep her enemies at bay.
A large orc stopped and sniffed the air just ten paces from the ridge. Those in line behind the beast stopped too, glancing around in an effort to discern what their companion had sensed. The porcine creature tilted its head back, trying to bring some focus to the unusual form lying just a few feet ahead of it.
“Now!” came Shayleigh’s cry.
The lead orc never managed to squeal a warning before the arrow dived into its face, the force of the blow lifting the creature from the ground and sending it tumbling back down the slope. All across the north face of the hillock, the invading monsters screamed out and fell, some hit by two or three arrows in just the blink of an eye.
Then the ground shook under the monstrous charge as the invading army’s second rank learned of the enemy concealed atop the ridge. Almost every arrow of the elves’ ensuing volley hit the mark, but it hardly slowed the sudden press of drooling, monstrous forms.
According to plan, Shayleigh and her troops took flight, with goblins, orcs, and ogres on their heels.
Galladel, the elf king of Shilmista, commanding the second line, turned his archers loose as soon as the monsters appeared over the lip of the first ridge. Arrow after arrow hit home. Groups of four elves concentrated their fire on single targets—the huge ogres—and the great monsters were brought crashing down.
Shayleigh’s group crossed the second ridge and fell into place beside their companions then turned their longbows and joined in the massacre. With horrifying speed, the valley between the ridges filled with corpses and blood.
One ogre slipped through the throng and nearly got to the elven line—even had its club raised high for a strike—but a dozen arrows burrowed into its chest, staggering it. Shayleigh, fearless and grim, leaped over the closest archer and drove her fine sword into the stunned monster’s heart.
As soon as he heard the fighting in the Dells, the wizard Tintagel knew that he and his three magic-using associates would soon be hard-pressed by monstrous invaders. Only a dozen archers had been spared to go with the wizards, and those, Tintagel knew, would spend more time scouting to the east and keeping communication open with the main host than fighting. The four elf magic-users had mapped out their defenses carefully, and they trusted in their Art. If the ambush at the Dells was to succeed, Tintagel and his companions would have to hold the line in the east. They could not fail.
A scout rushed by Tintagel, and the wizard brushed aside his thick, dark locks and squinted with blue eyes toward the north.<
br />
“Mixed group,” the young elf explained, looking back. “Goblins, mostly, but with a fair number of orcs beside them.”
Tintagel rubbed his hands together and motioned to his three wizard comrades. All four began their spells at about the same time and soon the air north of their position was filled with sticky filaments, drifting down to form thick webs between the trees. The scout’s warning had come at the last moment, for even as the webs began to take shape, several goblins rushed into them, becoming helplessly stuck.
Cries went up from several sources to the north. The press of goblins and orcs, though considerable, couldn’t break through the wizard’s spells, and many monsters were crushed into the webs to gag on the sticky substance and slowly suffocate. The few archers accompanying the wizards picked their shots carefully, protecting their precious few arrows, firing only if it appeared that a monster was about to break loose of its sticky bonds.
Many more were still free, beyond the webbing. Many, many more, but at least the spells had bought the elves in the Dells some time.
The second ridge was given up, but not before scores of dead invaders lay piled across the valley. The elves’ retreat was swift, down one hill, over the piled leaves at its base, up another hill, then falling into familiar positions atop the third ridge.
Screams to the east told Shayleigh that many monsters had approached from that way, and hundreds of torches had sprung up in the night far to the north.
“How many are you?” the elf maiden whispered, almost out of breath.
As if in answer, a black tide rolled down the southern side of the second ridge.
The invaders found a surprise waiting for them at the bottom of the small valley. The elves had leaped over the piled leaves, for they knew of the spike-filled pits hidden beneath.
With the charge stalled, showers of arrows had an even more devastating effect. Goblin after goblin died, and tough ogres growled away a dozen arrow hits only to be hit a dozen more times.