Curse of the Shadowmage

by Monte Cook

  Kellen let out a sigh of relief as they wound their way deeper into the safety of the trees. Then Mari uttered something that made their hearts sink.

  “We’ve lost Caledan’s trail,” she said quietly.

  After that, they rode for a long time in silence.

  Eleven

  The wanderer came to the gates of Triel on a gloomy day late in the month of Uktar.

  Even from a distance, Beris thought there was something strange about the fellow, a man clad all in black riding a mist-gray horse. Beris shivered inside his beaten-steel breastplate, chalking it up to the clammy air as he gripped his spear tightly. An unsettling thought drifted through his mind. Didn’t one of Lord Elvar’s priests say that sometimes the King of the Dead appeared in the guise of a dark man riding a pale horse? Like all soldiers, Beris was a superstitious man. Under his breath, he muttered a charm against evil spirits.

  “What are you mumbling about now, Beris?” asked the grizzled soldier who stood with him before the open gate.

  “I was just wondering who that rider is, Sarig,” Beris answered hastily. Beris was the youngest of the twenty mercenaries Lord Elvar paid to guard Triel, and he took enough abuse from the older men as it was. He didn’t want Sarig to think he was afraid of a lone horseman. Which he wasn’t, of course. “Who do you suppose it is?”

  “Looks like some beggar to me,” Sarig grunted in disgust.

  Beris nodded. “I suppose he’ll be seeking hospitality, then.”

  Sarig gave a harsh snort of laughter. “Lord Elvar isn’t very hospitable!”

  While the lord was not an evil man, his distrust of strangers was nearly as legendary as his propensity for switching religions. Elvar ruled a small district, of which Triel was the center. Triel itself was more of a fort than a proper town. Here the Dusk Road met up with the larger Trade Way, which continued on all the way to the great city of Waterdeep to the west. Triel served mostly as a way station for traveling merchants. Its small cluster of cottages and storehouses was surrounded by a sturdy stockade of stone and wood.

  When the rider finally came to a halt before the gates, Beris breathed a relieved sigh. The man’s skin was mushroom pale, and dark half-moons hung beneath his faded green eyes, but he looked far more like a sick beggar than an incarnation of Death. His midnight blue cloak was spattered with mud. Despite the wanderer’s ragged appearance, the gray mare he rode was an exceptional animal.

  “State your business!” Sarig barked, brandishing his spear.

  The wanderer blinked, as if he had just waked from a deep slumber and was surprised to find himself in some new time and place. “Can you help me?” he asked hoarsely. “I’m so tired. And hungry.”

  Sarig gave a derisive snort. “I told you, Beris—a beggar.”

  Beris ignored him. There was something about the man—perhaps the deep sorrow in his eyes—that made Beris think he was more than a simple vagabond seeking alms. “I’d best take you to Lord Elvar,” he told the wanderer. “If you’ll dismount, I’ll lead your horse for you.” He reached out to grip the gray mare’s bridle, but she bared her big yellow teeth menacingly. Beris was forced to snatch his hand back quickly.

  The ghost of a smile touched the wanderer’s lips. “I’d better lead her,” he said quietly. “She bites.”

  “So I noticed,” Beris said dryly.

  The wanderer dismounted. Beris gestured for him to follow, and they entered the stockade to seek out Lord Elvar. They soon found him standing before the open door of the stockade’s large stone granary. Elvar was having a fit. Again.

  “Look at that!” he shouted, jowls waggling. Elvar was an overlarge man with beady eyes and an upturned nose that gave him a distinctly piggish look. His expansive gut was stuffed into a too-tight waistcoat of food-stained green velvet. He thrust a torch into the darkened doorway of the granary. A squealing gray form scurried out, vanishing down a nearby drainpipe. “There’s another!” Elvar raged. “Rats—they’re everywhere!”

  A small group of townsfolk, merchants, and soldiers had gathered around the irate lord. “The rats will eat all the grain,” he continued his tirade. “And with winter coming, we’re all going to starve!” Elvar looked like a man who had never wanted for food in his life, but his eyes were wide with fear all the same. He bore down on a thin-faced man clad in the drab brown robe of a priest.

  “You!” Elvar growled angrily. “You told me that if I prayed to Malar, Lord of All Beasts, he would keep the rats away from the grain. But Malar has done nothing!”

  “It is not for us to question the actions of the gods,” the priest said pompously.

  “I’ve had enough of you and your foolish prattling, priest!” Elvar roared. He turned to a pair of soldiers. “Take this charlatan and throw him out of my town. I am a disciple of Malar no longer.”

  The priest looked shocked as the mercenaries grabbed his arms and hauled him away. Elvar had converted to worship of the god Malar nearly a moon ago. By Beris’s calculations, that actually made this one of Elvar’s longer religious commitments. Most gods didn’t last a tenday in the lord of Triel’s chapel.

  When Elvar continued to rant about how they were all doomed to die of hunger this winter, Beris decided this was not the best time for a stranger to beg for hospitality. He turned to tell the wanderer they might do better to wait until later, then stared in alarm. Leading his pale mare, the stranger approached Elvar. Beris made a grab for the man but was too late.

  Elvar glared at the wanderer in annoyance. “What do you want?”

  “I am hungry,” the strange man said quietly.

  “And I suppose you want me to feed you,” Elvar said in disgust. He rested his chubby hands on his broad hips. “I suppose you think we should be happy to give a cretin like yourself food when we haven’t enough to make it through the winter ourselves.”

  The wanderer gestured to the storehouse. “You have plenty of grain.”

  “Don’t tell me what I have or don’t have,” Elvar snapped. He studied the wanderer. Suspicion gleamed in his beady eyes. “Tell me, beggar, where did one so wretched get such a fine horse?”

  “She’s mine.”

  “Liar,” Elvar hissed. “I say you stole it.”

  Beris pressed forward. “Excuse me, milord, but I think that the horse does belong to him. She seems to obey his—”

  “Shut up!” Elvar commanded. “If I say he is a thief, then he is a thief.” He gestured to a trio of mercenaries. “Lead the horse to my stable, then take this man and cut off his hands so everyone will know him for the thief he is.” With that, Elvar waddled toward the large stone manor house in the center of the stockade.

  Beris tried to protest, but the other soldiers pushed him roughly aside. Two grappled the wanderer, ruthlessly twisting his arms behind his back. Another grabbed the gray mare’s reins. She let out a defiant whinny, rearing back on her hind legs.

  “Stop!” a commanding voice thundered.

  Everyone froze—the townspeople, the soldiers, even Lord Elvar—staring in amazement. An aura of power surrounded the wanderer, who now looked more like a king than a vagabond. The pale horse quieted and let out a soft nicker.

  The wanderer fixed Elvar with his pale green gaze. “If there were no rats in your granary, would you have given me something to eat?”

  Elvar licked his lips. “Of course,” he lied hastily.

  Reaching into a leather pouch at his belt, the wanderer produced a set of bone pipes. He lifted them to his lips and began to play. The throng stared in trancelike wonder. Beris had never before heard such music—mournful, vaguely threatening, yet so achingly beautiful he thought it would break his heart. As the man continued to play, a gasp rose from the crowd. From a dozen dim corners and shadowed alleyways emerged countless small, dark, lithe forms.

  Cats.

  In moments there were a hundred of them, as black and silent as smoke. The wraithlike felines padded swiftly toward the granary, emerald eyes winking mysteriously, before disappearing th
rough the open door. The hideous cacophony that followed nearly drowned out the piper’s music. People clapped hands over their ears against the horrible din of squealing and yowling. Abruptly, the noise ceased. The dark cats streamed out of the granary now, each bearing a gray bundle in its mouth. As they passed the stunned Elvar, each of the cats dropped its grisly burden at the lord’s feet. In moments there was a furry mound of dead rats heaped before the lord of Triel. The wanderer lowered his pipes; the strange music faded into the air. The dusky cats melted once more into pools of darkness.

  “Now may I have something to eat?” the wanderer asked solemnly.

  Elvar gaped at him, then nodded emphatically. “Of course! You shall have my very finest!” This time, Beris noted, sincerity was written across the lord’s porcine face. “But please, stranger,” Elvar implored, “tell me your name, so that I can know who has saved Triel from disaster.”

  The wanderer hesitated a moment, as if he did not quite remember his name. When at last he spoke, he seemed a figure of majesty no longer, but simply a weary traveler.

  “Cal,” he said haggardly. “You can call me Cal.”

  * * * * *

  The statue watched over the ancient crossroads with deep, moss-filled eyes. A cool wind rushed through the sentinel trees, and the misty forest air was filled with cast-off leaves of copper red and burnished gold. Mari reached out and touched the timeworn stone.

  “I’ve found another one!” she called out.

  There was a crashing in the underbrush as the others approached, leading their horses among the trees.

  “It is indeed a Talfirian Watcher,” Morhion agreed after a moment of study. “You have found the path again.”

  Whether the statue had once represented man, woman, or god, Mari could not tell. An eternity of wind and rain had worn away all features except the staring pits of the eyes. They had come upon a dozen of the mysterious stone figures over the last two days as they wended their way southward, deeper into the Reaching Woods.

  It was Jewel who had first discovered the path, the morning after their harrowing flight from the three shadevari in Hill’s Edge. At first they thought it was a game trail that paralleled the river. Here and there they turned up what seemed to be cracked paving stones. Then they came upon the first of the Watchers. Morhion instantly realized the significance of the crumbling statue.

  “This was a road, once,” he explained, “built by the Talfirc, the people who dwelt in this land a thousand years ago. They set the Watchers here to guard the way.”

  They had decided to follow the ancient road southward. Again and again they had lost the faint tracks in the underbrush and were forced to stop and make a laborious search. The loss of time worried Mari.

  “This path divides in several directions,” Kellen noted in his grave manner. “Which way do you think we should go?”

  “Whichever way leads fastest toward something to eat, besides hardtack and acorns,” Cormik said forlornly. He picked futilely at the dried leaves and burrs that clung to his once-elegant attire.

  Jewel parted her ruby lips in a wicked smile. “Personally, I think our strict regimen is doing you good, my sweet, expansive elephant. Sparing amounts of food and generous amounts of exercise are exactly what you need.”

  With his one good eye, Cormik glared darkly at her. “If I had wanted your opinion, my dear geriatric tart, I most certainly would have requested it. I know exactly what I need, and it involves large and plentiful quantities of roasted pheasant, sweet subtleties, and red Amnian wine. And soon!”

  “This path has gradually veered east, away from the River Reaching,” Morhion said. “Let us try west. Perhaps that way leads to a ford. We have to get across the river if we’re going to pick up Caledan’s trail again.”

  The green forest light was fading to dusk when the narrow path broadened, and they came upon the ruined city. The endless wall of trees parted before them, and the voice of the river roared like thunder on the air. Here the paving stones were intact, though late wildflowers and sweet herbs pushed their way up between the cobbles. Most of the city’s structures were little more than jumbled heaps of stone, tangled with vines and crowned by stands of oak and ash. However, in the center of the city was a circular plaza, in the middle of which rose a tapering, step-sided building.

  “I think this was a city of the Talfirc,” Morhion said, raising his voice above the rushing river.

  “What happened to them?” Mari asked in wonder. “Why did they leave?”

  Morhion shook his head. “It is a mystery. The Talfirc dwelt in this land for a long age. However, by the time our ancestors came westward over the mountains, the Talfirc were already centuries vanished. No one knows where they went, or why.”

  “They built this city awfully close to the river,” Cormik noted. “I wonder if they built a bridge as well.”

  Morhion’s eyes gleamed brightly. “Let us find out if you’re right.”

  The Talfirc had indeed built a bridge. Unfortunately, the river had shifted in its course over the centuries. The ancient yet solid span of stones now arched over the verdant floodplain. The river came nowhere near it.

  “Well, that’s about as useful as a rowboat in the desert,” Jewel said drolly.

  “Not even that,” Cormik chimed in.

  They made their way back to the central plaza. The light was failing rapidly.

  “We might as well camp here,” Mari said, though she shivered as she did. The years rested heavily on this place.

  “What’s that boy doing?” Cormik asked with a scowl.

  Mari followed Cormik’s gaze, then gasped. Kellen was climbing nimbly up one side of the stone pyramid. “Kellen!” she cried out in alarm. “Come back down!” He seemed not to have heard her over the roar of the river, for he kept climbing. It was unlike him to behave so rashly, but she could see now what had attracted his attention. Atop the pyramid was a gleaming golden orb.

  Morhion was the first to the pyramid. He leapt from the saddle and swiftly scrambled up the side after Kellen. Seconds later, Mari, Jewel, and Cormik dismounted and started up the stone steps after the mage. These three were perhaps a quarter of the way up the pyramid when Kellen reached the summit. Glancing over his shoulder, he grinned when he spotted Morhion right behind him. But there was something wrong with Kellen’s eyes, Mari realized. They were dull, vacant. And Kellen never grinned, Mari remembered. Sometimes he smiled, but he never bared his teeth and grinned.

  “Look at it, Morhion,” Kellen said in a strangely flat voice. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Morhion also sensed something was wrong. He reached a hand out toward the boy. “Kellen, don’t touch the—” But the mage was too late. Kellen had already laid his left hand on the orb.

  Green lightning split the sky. A bolt of sizzling energy shot down from the angry clouds and struck the golden orb. Both Kellen and Morhion were thrown backward by the blazing force of the strike, tumbling down a dozen steps before coming to a halt. Kellen staggered to his feet, dazed, but Morhion lay still, sprawled upon the stones. Mari could see a red stain spreading across his forehead.

  Mari scrambled up the side of the pyramid, quickly outpacing Jewel and Cormik, who followed behind her. A heartbeat later, the golden orb flashed. There was a hissing noise, like air escaping through a crack, and a grating of rock on rock. Mari cried out as the stones beneath her shifted. In moments they no longer formed a staircase, but instead a smooth, steep ramp down which she slid backward. Over her shoulder, she could hear screams. She twisted her neck just in time to see Cormik and Jewel disappear into a dark pit that had opened at the base of the pyramid. Mari clawed at the stone to slow her descent. Then she heard Kellen’s frightened cry.

  “Mari, look out!”

  She looked up in time to see Kellen and Morhion sliding rapidly toward her. She tried to twist out of the way, but she was too slow. Child and mage struck her at the same time. She lost her grip on the stone, and they all went tumbling down into darkness.


  * * * * *

  Surprisingly, it was Cormik who took charge. The corpulent crime lord was accustomed to a life of luxury; nonetheless, he reacted to their predicament with coolness and aplomb.

  The five had fallen through an opening into a perfectly spherical chamber formed of seamless black stone. Moments after they struck the bottom, there came a low grinding noise. The entire hollow globe seemed to rotate. Mari scrambled on all fours, trying to keep from tumbling end-over-end like a rat trapped inside a spinning ball. When the sphere’s movement came to a halt, the opening through which they had fallen was no longer above them, but was instead situated halfway down one of the curved walls. A second stone wall now lay beyond the opening; apparently this sphere was contained within another, larger stone globe. Only a small slit breached the outer wall at this point, a narrow window through which came the faint gray-green light of dusk.

  Kellen remembered nothing of what had occurred outside. Whatever power had compelled him to climb the pyramid seemed to have no influence here. He was back to normal, as dazed as the rest.

  Cormik began issuing orders. “Jewel, examine that opening in the far wall and see if there’s some way out of here. Kellen, please assist her. You have smaller hands and may be able to reach things she cannot. Mari, we’re going to need more light—can you do something about that? I’ll see to Morhion.” The mage had not stirred. He lay on the ground, unmoving, his skin like alabaster against the black marble floor. The wound on his forehead had blossomed into a grisly crimson flower.

  Numbly, Mari set to her task. She rummaged in her pockets until she found a stump of candle, flint, and tinder. Creating fire was no simple feat. She struck the flint repeatedly against the edge of her steel eating knife. After many failed attempts, a glowing spark landed directly on the tinder. Quickly, she blew on the bit of fluff. There was a wisp of smoke, and suddenly a bright flame curled out of the tinder. She held the candle’s wick to the flame. The candle caught, golden light filling the dark sphere. Mari took a deep breath. Concentrating on the mundane chore had calmed her nerves. She realized that this was probably one of the reasons Cormik had assigned her the task.