The Siege

by Denning, Troy

  “We call ourselves Shadovar,” this one said. “In our tongue it means ‘of the shade.’ ”

  “Ah, then you are shades.” Malygris said. Shades were two-legged mammals that traded their souls for shadow essence. In the light of day, they seemed normal men, but as the light grew dim, they grew strong. “I understand now. I have met a few shades in my centuries.”

  Curiosity satisfied, he tightened his grasp to crush them—and felt his claws close on air. He sensed them emerging behind him and whirled around to find the steel-eyed one stepping from the shadows in front of his nest. The other, the one with the crushed body, lay in a hollow on top.

  They were between him and his phylactery.

  “Clariburnus and I are shades,” the one with steel eyes said. “But not all Shadovar are shades, and not all shades are Shadovar. A Shadovar is a citizen of Shade Enclave.”

  “I see your game.” Malygris started forward, his great tail launching whole mountains of coins into the dark air as it flailed back and forth. “Try, then. One way or the other, I will take pleasure in the end.”

  The steel-eyed one—Brennus—raised his hand and said, “Stop. We’re not here to attack you, but you are done attacking us.”

  Malygris stopped, not because the human commanded it—he hadn’t—but because he found himself snorting in laughter. “You threaten me?” Tiny forks of lightning began to dance around his nasal cavities. “Truly?”

  “We are not threatening.” This from the crushed one, who had already healed enough to sit upright. “We came to talk.”

  “Talk?” Malygris settled onto his haunches and waved a claw at the floor before him. “Very well, you may present your gifts.”

  The two humans—Shadovar—glanced at each other, then Brennus said, “We bring you no gifts.”

  “No gifts?” Malygris gasped. Even more interesting—insulting, but interesting. “How can you beg without gifts? How can you grovel with nothing to offer?”

  “We’re not here to beg,” Clariburnus said. He stood—so soon after being crushed—and limped down to stand beside his companion. “But Shade Enclave does have something offer.”

  Malygris sensed Namirrha’s arrival within the lair and whirled toward the entrance. The necromancer, a balding and wrinkled figure even by mammal standards, was already well inside, striding down the golden aisle between Malygris’s carefully stacked chalices.

  “You warmbloods!” he hissed. “Do you all think my lair yours for the entering?”

  Namirrha made a show of appearing frightened, stopping to steeple his fingertips together and bow deeply. “A thousand pardons, Sacred One. I was informed that you have been hurling lightning about and thought you might be in need of assistance.”

  The necromancer cast a meaningful eye at the Shadovar.

  “You think I need the assistance of a human?” Malygris sneered. “When that is so, you will scatter my bones across the Blight.”

  “As you command, Sacred One,” Namirrha replied.

  As Malygris had known he would, the necromancer stroked his amulet, and all of Malygris’s anger drained away.

  Malygris hated that, really hated it, but there was nothing to be done about it. He could no sooner attack Namirrha than he could regrow his long-rotted hide and scales. He was the necromancer’s creature from nose-bone to tailbone, and the fact that the sly old warmblood took pains to make it seem otherwise only added insult to injury.

  Still, Malygris found himself saying, “Perhaps you can serve me, however. These shade things—” He flicked a claw in the Shadovar’s direction. “—have come with an offer.”

  Namirrha’s white brows rose. “Have they?” He advanced along Malygris’s flank—a somewhat long journey that took the better part of a minute—and stopped across from the Shadovar. “And what is it that Shade Enclave wishes to offer Mighty Malygris, Suzerain of the Blight and all its wyrms?”

  The two Shadovar glanced at each other, then Clariburnus shrugged and said, “We would be happy to remove the Zhentarim from Anauroch.”

  “Remove them?” Malygris growled. “What will my followers eat? I would sooner remove you—”

  “What harm will it do to hear them out, Sacred One?” Again, Namirrha stroked his amulet, and again a numb calmness descended over Malygris. A smirk came to the necromancer’s face, and he asked, “And in return for this small service, what do the Shadovar wish?”

  “The service is more than a small one,” Brennus said, addressing himself directly to Namirrha, “and so is what we expect in return: peace with the dragons, and their aid in the war against the phaerimm.”

  Malygris craned his neck to look down at Namirrha. “There is a war against the phaerimm?”

  “Have I not suggested that you get out more, Sacred One?” Namirrha replied. “They have escaped their prison and captured the Sharaedim.”

  “Evereska’s Sharaedim?” Malygris snorted in amusement. “The LastHaven of the elves? Well done, I say. Let them have it!”

  Again Namirrha reached for his amulet. Malygris tried to flick a claw out to stop him, but found his foot too heavy, his toe too stiff.

  “The matter is not as simple as that, Mighty One,” Namirrha said. “The phaerimm pose a danger to us all. Even your shipments have been forced to detour far north or south.”

  “Ah, the shipments.” Though Malygris had no idea what shipments the necromancer meant—and would not have cared if he did—he found himself nodding sagely. “We mustn’t let them interfere with my shipments.”

  Namirrha smiled at the Shadovar. “If Malygris commits, the host he will bring to this war is without rival. Surely, his aid is worth more than simply driving the Zhentarim from Anauroch.”

  “How much more?” Clariburnus asked.

  Namirrha grew serious. “Malygris would like to see them gone—wiped from the face of Faerûn.”

  “Then let Malygris do it himself, if his host is so mighty,” Brennus said. “The Shadovar will not.”

  “Will not?” Namirrha demanded. “Or can not?”

  The eyes of both Shadovar flared. “It is the same to you,” Brennus growled. “We did not return to Faerûn to fight the Cult of the Dragon’s battles for them. If you will not strike a bargain, you may be certain the Zhentarim will.”

  Namirrha stepped forward, perhaps trusting more than was wise to Malygris’s imposing presence to back him up. “Then why aren’t you speaking with the Zhentarim instead of me?”

  Clariburnus craned his neck to look up. “Because the Zhentarim don’t have Malygris.”

  “If it is my help you seek, then you should have brought gifts,” Malygris rumbled, angered at being so obviously cut out of the negotiations. He knew as well as anyone who was in control of him, but he insisted on appearances. He still had that much pride. “You should be begging me.”

  “There is no need for that, Malygris.” Namirrha stroked his accursed amulet. “This is something I should negotiate for you.”

  “Fine,” Malygris said, and he meant it.

  The Shadovar said nothing and stared at Namirrha.

  Namirrha remained silent for several moments, then nodded and said, “Done.” He offered his hand to Brennus. “We have a bargain.”

  The Shadovar stared at the appendage as though he wasn’t quite sure what should be done with it, then glanced over the necromancer’s shoulder at Malygris. “The Mighty One will honor the deal?”

  Namirrha nodded, and stroked his amulet. “Of course.”

  “Good.” Brennus smiled broadly, baring a mouthful of needle-tip fangs that even Malygris had to envy. “Done.”

  The Shadovar clasped Namirrha’s hand then, in a move so swift even Malygris hardly saw it, pulled him forward onto the blade of a glassy black dagger. Namirrha screamed in surprise and tried to call on his servant for help, but the Shadovar’s hand was over his mouth in a black blur, and Malygris felt no urge at all to defend the necromancer. Brennus finished the attack by first pushing his black blade down to Namirrh
a’s crotch, then splitting him up the center and letting the two halves of the body fall separately.

  When he was done, the accursed amulet was hanging from the back side of his dark blade. This he dropped at Malygris’s feet.

  “There is your gift, Malygris.”

  Malygris eyed the amulet warily, as he did the bloody mess in which the Shadovar stood. “If you think to ingratiate yourself with your warmblood treachery—”

  “We think to avenge the insult he paid us by implying that Shade was not the equal of a piteous bunch of wretches like the Zhentarim,” Clariburnus said, “and the insult he paid you as well, in treating the Blue Suzerain like a trained attack dog.”

  Had Malygris still had lips, he would have smiled. “For that I thank you—but why should I honor the bargain he made? My dragons need Zhents to eat.”

  “They will have plenty to eat in the war,” Brennus said. “That I promise you.”

  “If you think on it, you will find yourself still bound by Namirrha’s promise,” Clariburnus said. “You sold yourself to the Cult of the Dragon, and even we princes of Shade cannot free you now.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  9 Mirtul, the Year of Wild Magic

  Night in Shade Enclave came as a deepening of the general murk, when the air grew heavy and tepid and drew in on itself in inky mist. Galaeron sat on the balcony outside Villa Dusari’s master bedchamber, not keeping watch, but watching. Despite the hour, the steady murmur and clatter of passing traffic growled up out of the ebony gloom, just loud enough to keep a company of restless householders from their pillows. Aris was down in the lower warrens of the city, plinking away in his workshop. Ruha was skulking about the house searching for Malik, who was obviously somewhere other than his chamber. Only Vala was in bed, on the other side of the door from where Galaeron sat. She was not sleeping, just staring into the blade of her black sword, a wistful smile on her full lips and a softness in her eyes alien to them during the day.

  She was, Galaeron knew, looking in on her son in Vaasa. At night, her darksword often lulled her into a trance and showed her what was happening in the bedchambers of the Granite Tower—’dream walking’ she called it, though it was more akin to spying. During their months together, he had learned to read her expression and tell when she was visiting Sheldon. That the sword seemed to be looking in on the boy more often these days was one of few things that made Galaeron think the weapon might not be entirely sinister.

  Though he did not begrudge Vala these glimpses of her son, Galaeron did envy them. His own father and sister were lost to the fog of war—dead or beyond reach, he did not know which. The Swords of Evereska’s desperate attempt to save the gate at the Rocnest had already become the stuff of legend. By all accounts, Aubric Nihmedu had been leading the charge, and Galaeron was not fool enough to believe a mere bladesinger likely to survive any combat in which Khelben Arunsun—one of Mystra’s Chosen—had vanished without a trace.

  His sister, Keya, remained trapped in Evereska—though Galaeron could not be certain of even that much, as the phaerimm had long ago stopped all communication with the LastHaven by raising a magic deadwall around the Sharaedim. He could hardly bear to think of his little sister—at eighty, barely an adult—sitting alone in Treetop, sad and frightened, probably hungry and perhaps even in despair, while outside the phaerimm circled the city waiting for a chance to enter. Yet, the alternative—that the mythal had already collapsed and Evereska fallen—was too horrible to contemplate.

  And it was Galaeron’s doing—the escape of the phaerimm, the besieging of Evereska, the whole war. He had caused it in one of those terrible moments a person replayed in his mind a thousand times, telling himself that if he had done this, or said that, or just left it all alone, everything would have been fine. Instead, Galaeron and his Tomb Guards had followed a band of crypt-breakers down into the long-forgotten workings of a dwarven mine and found Vala and her Vaasan warriors preparing to rendezvous with their shadow mage master, Melegaunt Tanthul. In the confusion that followed, Galaeron had given the order that breached the Sharn Wall, nearly two dozen men and elves had died, and the phaerimm had escaped to begin their assault on Evereska.

  Vala and the Shadovar had told him a hundred times that he had only been performing his duty and wasn’t to blame, but their words could not change what had happened—or how he felt about it. Eager to undo his mistake, Galaeron had joined forces with Vala and her shadow mage master and set out to summon the only help that seemed capable of defeating the evil he had unleashed. Along the way, he had learned to use shadow magic and had overreached his limits, opening himself to the corrupting influences of the Shadow Weave and beginning a desperate battle against his own shadow for the possession of his spirit. At every step of the way, it seemed, he had made the wrong decision, and now that he could not be certain whether the thoughts running through his mind belonged to him or his shadow self, he was almost afraid to decide anything at all.

  But there was one thing he knew for certain, one decision he knew to be his own. He would do anything to save Evereska, make any sacrifice to amend his terrible mistake.

  Galaeron settled back and tried to clear his mind, but found himself too agitated. His thoughts kept returning to the morning, wondering whether Hadrhune would arrange the promised audience or find yet another excuse to put it off—and whether the Most High’s help would be the solution to his shadow problems, or just one more mistake. Certainly, it did not bode well that the Shadovar had concealed the fact that Shade Enclave was moving away from Evereska. But even Galaeron could see how his shadow would have used that information to feed his suspicions and make him distrust the one most able to help him win his spirit back.

  While there was a time when he could have stilled his thoughts by retreating into the Reverie, Galaeron had lost touch with that facet of elf nature when he allowed his shadow to invade. Instead of slipping into a semilucid trance of memories and the shared emotions of other elves, he sank into the same insensible, nightmare-filled slumber as humans.

  But this night even sleep would not come. He passed the black hours staring out into the darkness, listening to the city clatter past beneath his balcony, replaying the same thoughts and doubts over and over again until the gloom paled from night-ebony to dawn-gray and Aris came striding out of the murk carrying his statue of Escanor’s battle against the phaerimm.

  Already completed, the piece was Aris’s finest yet, so flowing it seemed in danger of writhing from the giant’s hands. The prince’s figure was noble and majestic, one hand still stretched toward the phaerimm he had just killed as he twisted around to face his new attacker. The creature itself was connected to him by the tail piercing his abdomen, and also by two hands wrapped around his throat, an artistic license taken to impart the impression that the beast was hovering beside him unsupported.

  “Aris, it’s magnificent!” Vala said, joining Galaeron on the balcony as the stone giant stepped into the courtyard. “You did that in one night?”

  “I could not have finished without Malik,” Aris said. The statue was at balcony level, and the giant was speaking down from above. He half-turned toward the empty gate. “He did most of the polishing.”

  “And what has this favor cost you?” demanded Ruha, stepping out of the colonnade to meet them. “An arm, or a soul?”

  “That is no business of yours, shrew,” Malik said. “You cannot be expected to understand what one friend does for another, since you have none of your own.” He craned his neck up toward the balcony. “You would do well to make yourselves decent. The prince is on his way here.”

  “The prince?” Galaeron asked. “Which one?”

  “Escanor, of course,” Malik said. “If you are wise, you will benefit by my experience and do nothing to encourage him to return. There is no thief worse than a royal.”

  Galaeron glanced at Vala, who merely shrugged and turned to don her armor—by Vaasan standards, a far superior mode of dress to any of the dusky gowns Hadrhu
ne’s servants had delivered. Galaeron opted for his scout’s cloak, as even the coarsest Evereskan cloth was considered extravagant by non-elves.

  By the time they had changed and joined the others in the courtyard, Escanor’s entourage was pouring through the gate. Tall even by Shadovar standards, the prince was visible in the middle of the group, his coppery eyes glaring out over the heads of his escorts. Galaeron and the others dropped to a knee and waited while the guards took their stations around the perimeter of the courtyard.

  Escanor went directly to Aris’s statue and circled it slowly, running his fingers over its smooth stone. When he came to where the tail barb punctured his stomach, he winced visibly and turned away, craning his neck to address the kneeling giant.

  “Very lifelike,” he said. Though Escanor had spent three days in bed recovering from the removal of the phaerimm egg, he showed no sign of weakness. “I could swear it’s moving.”

  “Thank you,” Aris said. “That means much, coming from you.”

  “In truth, I am so fond of it I would like it for my villa,” Escanor said. He motioned an unarmored servant forward. “Mees will pay whatever you think fair.”

  “Pay?” Aris seemed to puzzle over this for a moment, then said, “Unfortunately, I have already promised this piece to Hadrhune.”

  A collective gasp went up from the entourage, then Escanor snapped, “To Hadrhune?”

  “For the Most High, Esteemed Prince,” Malik said quickly. “Though I am sure Aris can make another in no time at all, especially considering that price is of little concern.”

  “Another?” Aris echoed. “Why should there be two?”

  “There are many good reasons,” Malik said, daring to rise and start toward Escanor’s entourage without permission. “I’ll tell them all to you later, but first let me speak with the prince’s steward.”