Storm of the Dead

by Lisa Smedman

Her feet were sore from her long walk across the hard, salty plain and she was tired of having to constantly carry her sword. Daffir had boots and belt. She took both. She hacked off the bottom of the leather sheath that held his dagger, modifying it to accommodate her sword. Then she cinched the belt around her waist. The wizard’s clothes were a ruined, bloody mess, so she left them on his body. She picked up his eye lenses and mirror and tied them into a piece of cloth, then knotted this around his wrist. If the priestesses back at the Promenade succeeded in reviving Daffir, he would need them.

  These preparations made, she seized Daffir by the ankles and dragged him over to the portal. Rolling him into it wouldn’t be a very dignified way to get him back, but she couldn’t very well carry him. If there were hostile creatures on the other side of the portal, she’d need both hands free to fight.

  With a grunt, she rolled Daffir into the hole.

  His body vanished.

  Cavatina drew her sword and held it in both hands. “Watch over me, Eilistraee,” she whispered. “Guide my steps.”

  She leaped into the portal.

  “Down” was suddenly behind her. She landed flat on her back on a cold stone floor, knocking the wind from her lungs. She scrambled to her feet and whirled, her sword humming a deadly warning. She was in a room, next to a quicksilver pool—a room dominated by a goat-headed statue twice her height.

  A statue of the demon prince Orcus.

  “Eilistraee!” she cried. “Shield me!”

  Moonlight streaked with shadow erupted from her skin, washing out the fainter light of the Faerzress-impregnated walls, ceiling and floor.

  The statue didn’t move. It was, it would seem, mere stone. But appearances could be deceiving.

  She stood directly in front of an arch that led into darkness, and a second arch stood on the other side of the statue. Across the room was a slab of studded iron that looked like a door. She backed away from the statue, half turned to the door, and searched for a handle with one hand.

  There wasn’t one.

  “Looks like there’s only one way out of here,” she whispered, speaking to Daffir’s corpse as much as to herself. “That other portal. I just wish you were still alive to tell me where it leads.”

  She dragged his body in front of the second arch. She lay her sword on the floor, tucked her hands under his body, and started to roll him into the portal. Before she could finish, she felt something tug on Daffir. Alarmed, she yanked the body back—hard enough to reveal hands clutching Daffir’s robe. Each of the dark fingers was adorned with a silver ring.

  A Crone!

  Cavatina snatched up her sword. As the silver-ringed hands yanked Daffir back through the portal, she thrust through it, aiming for the spot where the Crone would be. The sweet peal of her sword was muffled as it passed into what lay beyond. She felt the weapon strike home. She yanked it back; the blade was bright with blood.

  “Eilistraee!” she cried.

  Sword singing, she charged into the portal.

  Q’arlynd landed on a stone floor with an ankle-jolting thud. Thick, hot smoke surrounded him, blown by a roaring wind. Beside him, Eldrinn staggered sideways, his hand tearing out of Q’arlynd’s grasp. Q’arlynd heard the clatter of the staff falling and rolling away. He could see nothing, however. The smoke was too thick, and it stabbed into his throat and lungs each time he breathed. Tears streamed from his eyes.

  “Eldrinn!” he coughed. “The staff!”

  He heard more rattling.

  “Got it,” the boy wheezed back.

  Through the smoke, Q’arlynd saw a blue-green glow that shone brightly from the floor and walls. Faerzress? Worry flooded him. Had he landed off target? Or had the Faerzress there simply grown that strong?

  “Someone’s in the corridor,” a husky female voice cried from somewhere to Q’arlynd’s left. “Inside the smoke!”

  “Alexa?” Eldrinn shouted back. “Is that you?”

  “It’s Eldrinn! He’s back!”

  More voices were talking, but not loud enough for Q’arlynd to make out the words.

  “And Q’arlynd—I’m here, too!” he shouted. He didn’t want anyone blasting him with a spell. When no one did, he let out a sigh of relief—which quickly turned into a rattling cough.

  Eldrinn bumped into him from behind, and Q’arlynd grabbed the boy’s piwafwi. Dragging Eldrinn in his wake, he fought his way toward the voices, forcing himself sideways through the howling wind.

  They were out of the smoke. Kraanfhaor’s Door was just ahead, and so were Alexa, Baltak, Piri, and Zarifar. Q’arlynd’s teleport had been precisely on target, after all.

  “What in the Nine Hells …” he coughed, “… are you apprentices …” he coughed again, “… doing?”

  Piri crouched, holding a rod that extended into a hole he was busy burning in the stone beside the door. Heat waves danced above the rod. But for his demon-skinned hands, Piri’s skin would have blistered away. Smoke billowed past him, out of the blackened hole.

  Zarifar stood next to him, twiddling his index fingers, directing the smoke away down the corridor Q’arlynd had just teleported to. He stared dreamily at the fierce horizontal tornados his spell had turned the smoke into.

  Baltak and Alexa stood next to a pile of gear. Bedrolls had been spread out on the floor. Alexa hurried forward to help Eldrinn, who’d doubled over in a coughing fit. Baltak remained where he was, hands on his hips. He’d abandoned his owlbear accoutrements for something new. His muscular body bore a layer of coin-sized, ice-white scales. The dragons carved into the door’s surface had probably inspired his latest shapeshift.

  “About time you two got back,” he bellowed, his voice reverberating in his chest. “We’re almost through.”

  “Let’s see if you’re right.” Piri eased the rod out of the hole, hand over hand. Metal scraped against stone. A spent stonefire bomb pot was attached to the end of the rod, and the metal just below it was white-hot. The light of it lent a garish sheen to Piri’s oily, green-tinted skin.

  “How was Sschindylryn?” Alexa asked.

  Eldrinn straightened. “Huh?”

  “Knee-deep in travelers, as usual,” Q’arlynd quickly answered.

  “And the trade mission?” Baltak asked.

  “It’s drawing to a successful conclusion, even as we speak,” Q’arlynd said, catching Eldrinn’s eye.

  “That’s right,” Eldrinn said. “Successful. No need for us there, any more. The negotiations were going so well we were able to leave early.”

  Q’arlynd hid his wince behind a nod and a smile. The boy’s fumbling words sounded suspicious. But at least Eldrinn had stopped protesting. The boy had taken some convincing, but he’d eventually come around to Q’arlynd’s way of thinking.

  Neither of them, Q’arlynd had explained to Eldrinn before they’d teleported, knew a spell that would channel positive energy. They would be unable to help destroy the voidstone. Once Q’arlynd teleported the priestesses to the Acropolis, their part in the expedition would be at an end.

  In the meantime, there was Kraanfhaor’s Door to worry about. The staff had to be used before the Faerzress grew so intense that it blocked divinations altogether. Had Q’arlynd and Eldrinn remained at the Acropolis and waited for the priestesses to finish their work, it might have been days before they could return to Kraanfhaor’s Door. By then, it might have been too late.

  Thanks to Q’arlynd’s teleport, the priestesses had sprung a surprise attack on the Acropolis. Even then, those singing swords of theirs would be making short work of the Crones. And Leliana and her priestesses would deal with the voidstone. All according to plan.

  Q’arlynd had no reason to feel guilty.

  None at all.

  Piri let the rod clatter to the floor and waved his hands back and forth, cooling them. He could feel heat, even if it didn’t harm him. “I hear Sschindylryn is having problems with their Faerzress.” He nodded at the walls. “It’s getting worse here, too.”

  Q’a
rlynd gave a noncommittal grunt and walked over to the door. Smoke curled from the hole beside it, though not in the dark billows it had before. Zarifar was still playing with the wind he’d conjured up, so it was hard to hear what anyone said above its roaring.

  Q’arlynd caught his arm. “Stop that.”

  Zarifar lowered his hands and blinked. “Oh, hello, Q’arlynd. Where did you come from?”

  Q’arlynd crouched and peered into the hole. Though the stonefire bomb had blackened and melted the stone next to it, the door itself was unblemished. Not so much as a streak of soot marked it. The hole was about ten paces deep, the length of the rod Piri had just hauled out of it. Kraanfhaor’s Door, Q’arlynd saw, was just as thick.

  He touched the front of the door. The stone under his fingers was cooler by far than the hot air that filled the corridor.

  Q’arlynd nodded down at the stonefire bomb. “That isn’t going to work.”

  “That’s what I told them,” Baltak boomed.

  “We’ve proved one thing, at least,” Piri said. “The stone that makes up that door exists in some sort of extradimensional space. Each time the stonefire started to reveal the far side of the door, it extended farther.”

  Alexa picked up a wooden tray and began sorting through the glass vials it held. “I tried several different acids on the door itself, but none made even the slightest mark.”

  “Frost won’t crack it, either,” Baltak boomed. He slapped a hand against the door. His fingers ended in claws, clear and glistening as ice. They scritched against the door as he drew them across it. “The stone can’t even be scratched.”

  “There are patterns,” Zarifar said. “I tried to identify them, but I can’t quite …” His fingers traced lines in the air. “They seem so familiar, and yet …” he shrugged and let his hand fall, “they elude me.”

  “Excellent!” Q’arlynd announced.

  The others stared at him blankly.

  “Listen to you—you’re working together. Well done.”

  His students glanced sidelong at one another when he said that—wary that he’d been talking between the lines. Had they let down their guard, shown some vulnerability, done something wrong?

  Q’arlynd chuckled. “Well done,” he repeated. “And I mean just what I say.”

  It was the truth. Leaving his apprentices on their own had been the best move he could have made. Had he remained there, he would have directed their experiments, led them along by the nose like rothé. Instead they’d tried to come up with solutions on their own. Fruitless attempts, but attempts just the same. Their initial decision to work together might have been motivated by a desire to keep an eye on each other, but that didn’t matter. They’d become a team.

  And since Q’arlynd knew how to open the door, they’d reap the rewards.

  The anticipation nearly made Q’arlynd giddy.

  He realized he was smiling. He set his face in a more serious expression. A smile could be an unnerving thing, to a drow. It usually preceded some sort of painful punishment.

  “Eldrinn,” Q’arlynd said, “your staff. It’s time to open this door.”

  “You really think the staff is the solution?”

  “We’ll know that soon enough.”

  “I can’t believe it!” Baltak shouted. “Q’arlynd knew how to open it, all along.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Piri asked, his voice thick with suspicion.

  “It was a test,” Q’arlynd answered, “of your willingness to work together. You passed.”

  He took the staff from Eldrinn. As the others crowded around, he closed his eyes. It took a moment to block out the rustles of their clothing, and their rapid, anxious breaths, but soon he achieved full concentration. He drew the staff toward himself and touched his forehead to the crystal at the center of it, just as Daffir had done.

  “Show me the past,” he whispered. “Show me how the Miyeritari opened this door.”

  Despite Q’arlynd’s concentration, he heard Alexa’s surprised murmur, “It can do that?”

  Q’arlynd waited several moments, but nothing happened. No visions popped into his mind, no voices whispered in his ear. He tried for several moments more, with his eyes open. Nothing.

  Heat prickled his cheeks. Daffir had never uttered a word when using the staff, but perhaps there was some silent mental command that was required. Eldrinn had assured Q’arlynd there wasn’t, but knowledge of the command may have been stripped from the boy’s mind by the feeblewit spell.

  Q’arlynd felt a mind tickle his—probably Baltak. Q’arlynd pushed whoever it was out. “Don’t distract me,” he growled. “I’ll show you how it’s done in just a moment.”

  He decided to test the staff. Silently, he implored it to show him a vision, from just a short time ago, of the arrival of himself and Eldrinn. A vision instantly coalesced in his mind: the pair of them, stumbling out of a thick pall of smoke. Elated, Q’arlynd banished that vision and concentrated harder, trying to force his mind back to the distant past. Centuries ago. Millennia. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a brown-skinned elf, standing in front of the door, hand raised. Then the Faerzress crackled across the vision, obscuring it in a blaze of blue-green light.

  “Spit me on a lance,” Q’arlynd whispered fiercely.

  He glared at the nearest wall. The Faerzress wasn’t strong enough—yet—to block divinations entirely. But it wasn’t allowing him to maintain the concentration he needed to reach so far back into the past.

  Q’arlynd’s palms were damp with sweat. The voidstone, obviously, had not yet been destroyed. Had his decision to part ways with the priestesses been a terrible mistake? Were Leliana and the others lying dead atop the Acropolis, even then? If so, the Faerzress there would continue to brighten, eventually rendering all divination impossible. If Q’arlynd had remained at the Acropolis and blasted a few of the Crones with his spells, might the priestesses have prevailed?

  “What’s wrong, Q’arlynd?” Eldrinn asked.

  “Nothing,” Q’arlynd said tersely. Irritation flared inside him at the fact that Eldrinn, a mere boy—an apprentice—had been able to pluck the necessary vision from the past when Q’arlynd couldn’t. But that had been nearly two years ago, prior to the Faerzress. He …

  Just a moment. Q’arlynd didn’t need to look back to the time of ancient Miyeritar. Kraanfhaor’s Door had been opened much more recently than that. Eldrinn had opened it less than two years ago. And Q’arlynd himself had opened it even more recently than that.

  He closed his eyes again and concentrated. Show me myself, opening the door, he silently commanded the staff. Show me how I did it.

  The Faerzress still impeded the divination, but it didn’t obscure it entirely. Q’arlynd watched, fascinated, as an image of himself appeared. The vision-Q’arlynd had a kiira on his forehead, and was walking toward the door. It was odd, observing himself—and a little unnerving, to see the glassy look in his own eyes. The kiira had been utterly controlling him. He watched intently as the vision-Q’arlynd stepped up to the door, raised a hand, touched a finger to the massive block of stone and …

  The vision-Q’arlynd bent forward and cupped a hand over his moving fingers, blocking Q’arlynd’s view of his hand.

  The kiira had anticipated that someone might be watching.

  Q’arlynd took a deep breath, steadying himself. It didn’t matter. He could still solve the riddle by observing Eldrinn. There had been no kiira on Eldrinn’s forehead, the first time he’d opened the door.

  He tried again. Show me Eldrinn, he silently commanded the staff. Show me the first time he opened Kraanfhaor’s Door.

  In his mind’s eye, Eldrinn appeared, standing in front of Kraanfhaor’s Door. The boy was wearing different clothes, and was holding the staff. Another male—the soldier Q’arlynd had found dead on the High Moor—stood next to Eldrinn. The fellow was going to die soon but didn’t know it, poor wretch.

  Q’arlynd shoved the useless sentiment aside and concentrated on E
ldrinn. He watched as the boy held the staff to his forehead, just as Q’arlynd was doing. After a moment, Eldrinn laughed. His hand moved up to the door, his finger traced a sign.

  Q’arlynd leaned forward expectantly but could see only a portion of the sign, the same sequence they’d glimpsed during their experiment with the chitine. The rest was hidden when the soldier stepped up next to Eldrinn, blocking Q’arlynd’s view.

  The vision faded.

  “Well?” Baltak boomed.

  “I’m making progress,” Q’arlynd snapped.

  He stood, thinking. If he shifted position, to the opposite side of the vision-Eldrinn, he might be able to see the entire sign. He strode to that side of the door and summoned up the vision again. He peered intently through the obscuring blur of faerie fire as the vision-Eldrinn went through the same motions, walking up to the door, touching the staff to his forehead, and tracing his finger along the door.

  Then the same thing happened, someone blocked the view. And yet Q’arlynd could see the soldier clearly, standing just behind Eldrinn. Had a third person been there when Eldrinn opened the door?

  Whoever it had been, Q’arlynd couldn’t make out details. The form was vague, indistinct. It was there, but somehow … not there.

  Q’arlynd’s jaw was clenched. Realizing that would betray his frustration, he pretended to stretch sore neck muscles. He didn’t want the others thinking the door had defeated him. Calm down, he told himself, and try again.

  He moved to the other side of the door and summoned up the vision again. Once again, someone blocked his view. Q’arlynd concentrated on this person, trying to bring him into focus. The staff fought him. It felt as if the diamond and his forehead were two lodestones, pushing each other apart. Q’arlynd persevered, concentrating until sweat beaded on his temple.

  At last he saw that the third person clearly. The person’s back was to him, but Q’arlynd recognized him at once by his distinctive hairclip. It was Eldrinn blocking the view.

  For a moment, Q’arlynd thought the real Eldrinn had stepped in front of him. Then he remembered that his eyes were closed. The duplicate Eldrinn was also holding the staff. The two Eldrinns were identical in every way, except that one held the staff to the side as he traced the sign on the door, while the other held the staff to his forehead, eyes closed. And no matter what Q’arlynd did, the second Eldrinn blocked his view.