The Floodgate

by Elaine Cunningham

  The stout stick caught him across the flat of his back, slamming him forward. Pain radiated through his limbs like molten fire, but he pushed it aside and used the momentum to help him thrust the sword deep between the sow’s ribs. Still holding the hilt, he threw himself from his perch, wrenching the sword to one side as he fell. He let go and rolled away from the wounded beast. Coming up in a battle crouch, he pulled his jordaini daggers and waited.

  Blood poured from the pig’s snout and dripped from its tusks, but it took a few staggering steps toward Andris. It closed in, nearly to arm’s length, before its legs finally buckled and gave out. The stubborn beast fell, twitched, and went still.

  Andris released his breath on a long, ragged sigh of relief. He cast a wry look at Kiva. Her angular, elven face was drawn and ashen, almost gray beneath its coppery tone. He bit back the sarcastic “thanks” that danced ready on his tongue and set to work butchering. Kiva managed to light a fire. By unspoken agreement, they worked together and with great haste. Night was falling, and scavengers would soon come prowling. They quickly seared and ate several small chunks of meat.

  When their hurried meal was over, the elf gestured toward a nearby mazganut tree. Andris helped her climb into its branches. He leaned against the stout trunk, winced with pain, and shifted around until he found a position that didn’t hurt his bruised shoulders too badly. They settled down in relative safety to await the dawn.

  The silence stretched between them, heavy with unanswered questions. Kiva spoke abruptly. “This is no paladin’s quest you undertake. Have you the stomach for it? For me?”

  She reached out and touched his throbbing shoulder. “This journey started painfully. Most likely, matters will not improve. I won’t mouth regrets I don’t feel, and I’ll do whatever it takes to avenge the wrongs done to your people and mine. Knowing this, will you follow me still?”

  Andris answered as honestly as he could. “I can’t pretend to understand all that you have done, but I believe we share a common goal.”

  “And that will content you, jordain?”

  He hadn’t expected anything more. Aloud he said, “Where do we start?”

  Kiva’s smile was suddenly feline. “We meet some of those allies I promised you. I admire your confidence, Andris, but did you really think that we two could take on the whole of Halruaa?”

  Andris awoke while the sun still slept. He watched as light slowly filtered through the layers of forest canopy and lit the quiet, ravaged face of the elf woman beside him.

  Kiva was in reverie, the uniquely elven state of wakeful dreaming, more restful than sleep. Her feline eyes were open, fixed upon some distant, pleasant sight. A small, innocent smile curved her lips. She looked very young, and not at all like the coldly determined magehound who had shattered his life. For a moment Andris wondered how far back Kiva had to go to find this person, these memories.

  Then, suddenly, she was awake, and her eyes were as cold as a hunting cat’s. Andris glanced aside, but not before she took note of his scrutiny.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “We have much to do. I will ponder the mystery of evil some other day.”

  She looked puzzled, then astonished. For a moment he thought she would dispute his assessment. But Kiva was no jordain, and apparently she did not share his passion for either disputation or truth.

  Or perhaps, he realized, his opinion simply did not matter to her.

  Without further speech they unwound the vines that tethered them to the mazganut branch. Kiva quickly braided her hair into two plaits, and they drank some of the dew that collected in the large, almond-scented leaves.

  As they scrambled down the tree into the deeply shaded clearing beneath, Andris noted that the elf seemed stronger. She seemed to be absorbing strength from the teeming life of the forest. An image flashed into Andris’s mind—the hideous laraken gaining flesh as it drained magic and life. Like mother, like child. The analogy sent a shudder of revulsion through Andris. He dropped the last few feet onto the thick carpet of moss, suddenly eager to put some distance between himself and the elf woman.

  As Kiva’s foot touched the forest floor, an arrow flashed into the clearing. It pierced one of her jade-colored braids and pinned it securely to the tree.

  The elf woman’s eyes went wide, but she did not struggle. She called out in a language that was more akin to wind and birdsong than to human speech.

  Five elves stepped into the mazganut clearing, soundless as shadows. All were male, and none stood taller than Andris’s shoulder. Their sharp-featured faces were beautiful, their skin ranging in hue from copper to polished sandalwood, their hair rich shades of brown or green. These were not primitive folk, as Andris had always heard, but people who possessed artistry, even riches. They wore finely woven linen, and the arrowhead that pinned Kiva to the tree was carved from a gemstone.

  These thoughts flicked into Andris’s mind and were gone, chased by a growing sense of awe as the elves stalked in. They moved with the taut, deadly grace of jungle cats. Never had Andris beheld warriors who filled him with more admiration or more foreboding. And these wondrous people were his kin!

  Of course, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kill him where he stood.

  With great reluctance, he reached for his sword.

  “Put away your weapon, karasanzor,” one of the elves said in heavily accented Halruaan. “We mean no harm.”

  A moment passed before Andris realized the elf was speaking to him, not Kiva. The former magehound was weaponless, yet the elf fixed his gaze upon her as he spoke.

  Because he wanted to believe them, and because he really had no choice, Andris accepted the elf’s pledge. He slid his sword away and lifted both hands in a gesture of peace. Still no one met his eyes.

  “You are of the People,” the elf said to Kiva, “and your voice knows the song of the jungle. Yet you wear human clothes and travel with a human … companion.”

  Kiva started to speak in Elvish, but the male cut her off with a few sharp words. She went pale, but her chin lifted. “Very well, I will speak the human tongue until I have earned the right in your eyes to speak as one of the People.

  “I have lived among the humans of Halruaa for many years, but once my name was sung in these forests as Akivaria, a daughter of the Crimson Tree.”

  The elves exchanged glances. “Yes, I am that Akivaria,” Kiva said tartly. “A survivor of the village you patrol—the only living survivor. My kinsman Zephyr was slain by the humans.”

  A moment of profound silence met this news. Tears burned in one elf’s eyes and ran down his face, unchecked and unashamed. Andris felt the elf’s grief as if it were his own, yet mingled with it was a strange sense of joy. Zephyr was Kiva’s kin, and this warrior wept a kinsman’s tears over the old jordain. Perhaps these elves were his family in fact, and not just through distant bonds of shared race.

  Family—it was a word he had never thought to employ in his own service. He turned it over in his mind, trying to fit what he knew of such things to the watchful, wary elves with their alien eyes and ready weapons.

  “Why have you come back now?” There was no kinsman’s welcome in the elf’s copper face. Andris would not have noticed Kiva flinch had he not felt an identical pain.

  “Is it not enough that I want to come home?” asked Kiva.

  “If that were true, you would have come sooner.” The elf tipped his head toward Andris. “You would have come alone.”

  Kiva let that pass. “We are still several days’ walk from the Crimson Tree. You found us quickly.”

  “Our scouts brought word of humans in the forest pass,” offered another, younger elf. “Several hunting parties. The latest had only three men, but unlike the others, they found and followed the karasanzor’s path.”

  A deep foreboding came over Andris. “Were they dressed in white, and did they wear medallions like mine?”

  The elf leader and Kiva shot identical quelling glares at their companions. But Andris took
his answer from the glint of surprise in the young elf’s eyes.

  So Matteo had come looking for him. That was not completely unexpected, but it was distressing nonetheless. There was no friend whom Andris valued more and no enemy he would rather avoid.

  “We remember Akhlaur,” the elf spokesman said. “We remember the raid on your village. Later, many of us lost friends and kin to Akhlaur’s swamp monster. We want nothing to do with Halruaa or with People who love the humans enough to live among them and their foul magic.”

  “Do you love the boar, the river eels, the swamp dragons?” demanded Kiva. “If you intend to hunt a creature, you must first stalk it and observe its habits. I know Halruaa better than she knows herself.”

  The elf folded his arms. “So?”

  “Knowledge is a deadly sword. I offer it to the People of Mhair.”

  “We’re to hunt wizards, are we?” demanded the elf leader with knife-edged sarcasm. “With what? The weapons of the jungle?”

  “With their own weapons,” Kiva countered. “We will fight with wizardly magic.”

  The elf sniffed derisively. “You might as well offer to bring sea-going ships into the jungle! What value are weapons we cannot use?”

  “I can use them. I am a wizard,” Kiva said. She grimaced, then amended, “Or so I was, until the laraken drained away my spells.”

  A moment of profound and respectful silence fell over the elves. “You have faced the laraken? And it took no more from you than your human spells?” demanded the speaker.

  “I am weakened,” Kiva admitted, “but I still live.”

  “How is this possible, when the monster ripped so many elves from life so swiftly that they left holes in the very fabric of the Weave?”

  “My wizardly magic was strong,” Kiva said. “The laraken drank and was satisfied. What was taken from me can be restored.”

  The elf leader glanced at the ghostly jordain. “And the karasanzor?”

  “He is called Andris. He also survived the laraken. He is a jordain, a name humans of Halruaa give to their lore-masters. He is also a battlemaster, resistant to wizardly magic and skilled at fighting against it”

  The elf looked puzzled. “He is these things, you say?”

  “Yes. Is.”

  Andris was not sure what this cryptic exchange meant, but he noted that Kiva had neglected to mention his elf blood. He ached to claim what kinship he could. Before he could speak, Kiva stabbed him with a glare, eloquently and unmistakably warning him to silence.

  The elf spokesman was not yet done with his questions. “Let us say that you have these weapons of magic. Let’s assume that we could prevail against the humans. Why would we want to fight them again, when peace was so hard-earned and long in coming?”

  “Because if we don’t, Akhlaur could return.”

  Stunned silence met her words. Andris felt as shocked and skeptical as the elves looked.

  “All these many years,” Kiva went on, “the laraken’s source of strength was a trickle of water from another world, a world full of magic—an endless supply of magic. The laraken escaped into that world. So did Akhlaur.”

  Horror startled Andris into speaking out of turn. “Why did you help it escape?”

  The elf woman’s glance flicked over to him. “Why would I lead an army of magic-dead warriors against the laraken, except to destroy it? It was my intention to enter the Plane of Water once the laraken was destroyed, to face Akhlaur. But Tzigone did not hold the laraken, choosing instead to waste her spells attacking me.”

  Andris thought back upon the confusion and chaos of battle. The laraken had broken free of Tzigone and rushed back to the spring just as Kiva conjured a large, bubbling gate. When Kiva fell, it was within arm’s reach of this gate. Perhaps the larakan’s escape truly had been accidental, but the notion of her “facing Akhlaur” was too much for his mind to absorb.

  “Kiva, the necromancer disappeared over two hundred years ago. No doubt he is long dead.”

  “Since when was a necromancer inconvenienced by death?” Kiva spoke as if quelling a child who interrupted his elders’ conversation. “Do you think him incapable of transforming himself into a lich?”

  Andris had no answer. The specter of an undead Akhlaur dwarfed any possible response into insignificance.

  “There is more,” the elf woman went on. “It was Akhlaur who created the laraken, fashioning it so that whatever magic the monster absorbed would pass to its master. Now the laraken is again within Akhlaur’s grasp. That can only speed his return to power and to Halruaa. When he emerges—and eventually he will—alive or dead, it matters not—it will be as the most powerful deathwizard Halruaa has ever known. If he is to be stopped, it must be now.”

  Andris nodded slowly, seeing a thread of logic in Kiva’s complicated tapestry. How could she avenge herself and her people if the wizard responsible for so much suffering was beyond her grasp? Given what he knew of Kiva, her plan involved more than a simple spellbattle confrontation. He did not exactly trust Kiva, but if at the end Akhlaur was vanquished once and for all, wasn’t that worth the risk?

  The elves seemed equally conflicted. “I am called Nadage,” the elf spokesman said at last “I am a scout and warrior. What you suggest is a matter for the elders.”

  “There is little time,” Kiva protested. “Such a trip would take days.”

  “Not so. When humans were first spotted in the forest pass, battle preparations began. We can reach our camp by nightfall. You will come and speak before the People.”

  Without further discussion, the elves turned and headed westward. Kiva gave Andris a little shove, and they fell into step behind.

  “Perhaps it was a mistake for me to come with you,” Andris observed softly. “They seem reluctant to speak their minds before strangers.”

  “It is not the elven way. I was born in this jungle, but I have been gone for many years. You’ll notice that they did not welcome me with joy or offer to gossip about all that has happened since I left.”

  “They disapprove of mixed blood?”

  Kiva gave a derisive sniff. “You jordaini have a talent for understatement”

  Andris found this painful, but logical. “Reasonable enough, given the dwindling numbers of elves. I assume they perceive elfbloods as a threat?”

  She sent him a small, hard smile. “If they considered you a threat, you’d be dead. Did you notice that they did not look at you?”

  “Yes, but I was too busy being glad they didn’t shoot at me to worry about it overmuch,” Andris responded. After a moment’s consideration he added, “Perhaps I owe my life to the fact that they thought me already dead.”

  “That’s very close. They called you karasanzor. That means ‘crystal one,’ and it is a term of respect They did not look at you because we do not gaze upon the crystal ghosts of our elf kin.”

  Andris gestured toward his translucent form. “So looking like this is a good thing, according to the forest elves?”

  “It puts you in a unique position,” Kiva agreed. “You’re clearly human—you should pardon the expression—but you appear to share the karasanzor’s fate. Furthermore, you faced the laraken and lived. They don’t know what to make of you.”

  “They are not alone,” Andris muttered.

  They did not speak again until the elves stopped for the evening. The scouts showed them to a small house built high into the forest canopy, well away from the camp itself.

  Andris and Kiva ate the fruit that the scouts left for them and settled down for the night Deeper in the jungle, the unseen elves began to sing. The melody was slow and languorous, with a gently pulsing rhythm.

  Andris had never known a mother, but he suspected that this song was a lullaby. Never had he heard anything so moving. It comforted and saddened him at the same time.

  Kiva stopped brushing her hair and turned to him. “What do you know of the Lady’s Mirror?”

  The sudden question shattered the music’s spell. Andris frowned. “It i
s a pool sacred to Mystra, Lady of Magic, tended by wizards who worship her servant Azuth, the Lord of Wizards. Some say that on a full moon the face of the goddess can be seen in the still waters. This sight is considered to be a sign of great blessing.”

  “There is a small temple near the shore of the Mirror. A repository of spellbooks and artifacts, and not a particularly well-guarded one.” Her glance slid over, held his puzzled stare, and waited for him to catch up.

  Comprehension came over him slowly. A score of Azuthan priests served the temple, and at any given time there might be perhaps another twenty visitors who came for pilgrimage or study. There was no fortified keep, just a few small buildings, little more than traveler’s huts, scattered throughout the nearby grove. Yet none of the magical books or items had ever gone missing. Such an act would be tantamount to ripping tapestries off the walls of King Zalathorm’s festhall.

  “You cannot mean to desecrate the Lady’s Mirror!” he protested

  “No,” she said with dark amusement “I plan to raid it. Upon the morrow, you will tell me how.”

  She smiled at his dumbfounded expression and patted his cheek as if he were a slow but promising child. “Get some sleep. We rise with the dawn.”

  Andris settled down, certain that he would never find slumber with such a task before him, but the evensong of elves spoke to him as wizardly magic could not. It stole into his blood, into his soul, soothing and calming him in a manner he had never dreamed possible.

  Andris wondered about elven reverie and wistfully coveted the vivid, waking dreams that were said to be more refreshing than sleep. Perhaps here, in this place, he might share some of that fey peace.

  When he slept, though, his dreams were not of peace. And when the morning came, the plan he lay before Kiva made her eyes burn with golden fire.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The distant spires of Azuth’s Temple rose against the sunset clouds as Matteo and his friends emerged from the forested pass.