Final Gate lm-3

by Richard Baker

  “Let go of me!” Nesterin snarled. His sword dropped to the ground and bounced with a shrill ringing sound, and he struggled in the monster’s grasp.

  “Nesterin!” Araevin started another spell, but halted in mid-word. Any magic he hurled might strike his friend as well as the nycaloth. He settled for a simple magical attack that hammered small darts of arcane power into the nycaloth’s chest, eliciting another roar from the beast. It rose higher, trying to get out of his range. Then Nesterin threw back his head and sang out a potent warding spell against evil. The nycaloth hissed and recoiled, driven away by the abjuration-and Nesterin fell twenty feet or more to the hard stone floor of the Waymeet’s chancel. He landed badly and sprawled to the ground, grimacing in agony.

  Araevin started toward him, but Nesterin waved him back. Blood seeped from his wounded shoulders, and his left leg turned at a bad angle.

  “I can hold the shard right here,” the star elf said. “Speak the rite, Araevin!”

  Maresa appeared on the far side of the chancel, holding her shard of the crystal. “Is this good?” she called.

  He glanced at the genasi, and back to Nesterin, and quickly backed ten steps, trying to position himself correctly. He raised his shard, and looked into it, seeking the combination of willpower and knowledge to trigger its power.

  Icy needles scythed into him from behind, piercing his flesh like hateful icicles. Cold so intense that his nerves shrieked as if on fire stabbed into him at shoulder, neck, arm, and back. Araevin screamed once and staggered away, dropping the Gatekeeper’s Crystal from hands suddenly too numb to hold it.

  “You feckless fool! You would destroy a work twelve thousand years old? You are little more than a vandal!” Malkizid strode into the Waymeet’s heart, emerging from the mist-wreathed pillars behind Araevin. His taloned hands clenched in anger, and the glass walls of the place shivered at the anger in his melodious voice. “I have worked for this day too long to allow you to ruin it, ungrateful whelp!”

  Araevin groveled in agony, plucking at the icicles that transfixed him. Across the chancel, Nesterin pushed himself to his feet and pointed his own shard at Malkizid-but the archdevil made one sharp gesture of his hand and sent the star elf hurling into the glass walls behind him. Nesterin hit heavily and slumped to the ground, stunned. Across the chamber, Maresa took one look at Malkizid and leaped for cover, disappearing into the ribbed columns on the far side of the room. Malkizid snorted in amusement as she ducked out of sight.

  “Where does the half-breed think she can hide from me?” he rumbled aloud. “I control all the doors in this place now.”

  Get up! Araevin exhorted himself. I have to do something!

  Cold wracked his body, pinning him to the ground. He reached behind his back and drew the icicle out of his shoulder with a hiss of pain. Its tip was stained red. Then he felt for the one in the back of his neck. Warm blood ran down his collar, but only a trickle. The frozen dart had found muscle, not the great arteries or the windpipe. The searing numbness in his throat diminished, and he found he could speak again.

  “Not yet,” he rasped.

  He stretched out his hand toward Malkizid and spat out the words of his iridescent ray spell. Blazing beams of emerald green and sickly violet washed past Malkizid, and the fiery orange beam grazed one wing. The archdevil’s feathered wing smoked as the amber-red flames seared him.

  Malkizid twisted away from the brilliant stabbing rays, sheltering behind his wings until the flames died away. He straightened up and bared his teeth at Araevin. “You have ceased to amuse me, Araevin Teshurr,” he snarled. Araevin tried to strike again with another spell, but Malkizid proved faster. The archdevil intoned terrible words, and with one taloned hand inscribed an intricate set of arcane passes in the very air.

  A shell of golden force surrounded Araevin before he could roll away. In the blink of an eye it began to tighten around him, folding him into an awkward ball and constricting. He lost the spell he was trying to speak, and fought for breath. He threw out his arms and pushed back, trying to keep from being crushed, but the relentless orb compressed tighter with his struggles.

  “That is better,” Malkizid said in his beautiful voice. “I shall enjoy watching you die, mage.” Then something struck him just under the collarbone. The Branded King roared and stepped back, and Araevin glimpsed a crossbow quarrel quivering in the archdevil’s flesh. Malkizid yanked it out-only the very tip of the bolt had managed to pierce his flesh-and threw it aside. He glared into the maze of iron-bound glass columns. “You shall die slowly for that, impudent whelp!” he called into the maze of the Waymeet.

  For once, Maresa had the sense to keep her mouth shut. She did not answer, prudently remaining hidden. But behind the archdevil, Nesterin stirred slowly. Still trying to resist the crushing weight of the sphere around him, Araevin’s eye fell on the shard next to the star elf. The ghost of an idea flickered through his mind.

  Fighting to clear his mind of pain, he muttered the words of a simple message spell and whispered to the Sildeyuiren lord. “Nesterin! Take up your shard, and summon the Gatekeeper. The crystal may still commune with the mythal.”

  Nesterin looked up at Araevin, caught in the floating sphere, and nodded. He fumbled for his shard, and concentrated on the great master stone in the heart of the Waymeet. The shard began to glow in his hands, and a few stray gleams of light leaked out from beneath the iron bands encircling the great speaking stone.

  Malkizid whirled to glare at Nesterin, and strode angrily toward the wounded elf. His second step stuck abruptly, throwing him off balance. From the stone floor of the Waymeet, a spear of crystal had suddenly condensed around his foot, arresting his movement.

  “What is this?” the archdevil snarled. He looked down at the luminescent crystal encasing his ankles, and pure black fury twisted his face.

  Flaring his powerful wings wide, he tried to wrench himself out of the solidifying crystal. The glassy stuff cracked and split, but more filaments condensed around him, clinging to his form like gossamer webs.

  “Stop this, Gatekeeper!” he demanded. “I command you!”

  “You are not my maker, Malkizid.” The Gatekeeper’s voice was a weak whisper that echoed among the columns of soaring glass. “I still have some small power to resist your demands.”

  “I will teach you obedience, then!” Giving up on efforts to wrench himself clear of the mythal’s snowy threads, Malkizid abruptly vanished, teleporting away… but blue lightning flickered across the highest spires of the Waymeet, and the archdevil instantly reappeared in the same place. The Branded King roared in anger, and drew his black sword to slash at the filaments settling around him.

  The ruined speaking stone quivered once, and the Gatekeeper whispered to Araevin, “I cannot hold him for long, Araevin Teshurr. I beg you to release me from this durance.”

  Araevin struggled for each breath as the golden sphere crushed ever tighter. Malkizid finally wrenched himself clear of the Gatekeeper’s crystal webs. He slashed his black sword in a fierce arc, gouging the glass pillars around him. “Insolent device!” he growled.

  The force-sphere spun slowly and tightened more. Dark spots gathered in Araevin’s sight, and needles of icy agony transfixed him. There was no more time. He had to chance everything on one desperate throw.

  He stopped fighting the sphere and let it pin his arms to his torso.

  The sphere squeezed in, eagerly pressing closer, but he’d bought himself an instant for a single spell. Awash in pain, desperately short of breath, still he found the concentration to wheeze the words for a minor teleportation. In the blink of an eye he huddled ten yards away, free of the crushing sphere. The shard he had dropped lay on the ground before him, and he snatched it up. From his new vantage he glimpsed Maresa crouched in an interstice of the soaring spars a hundred feet away, laying another quarrel into her crossbow. Scarlet blood streaked the side of her head, but the genasi still had her shard. She looked at him and bared her teeth in defianc
e.

  The archdevil realized that Araevin had moved, and he wheeled in a quick circle, searching for the mage. But Malkizid, along with the master stone, stood between Nesterin, Maresa, and Araevin.

  “Now,” Araevin said.

  He staggered to his feet and raised the shard of the crystal above his head, and in one swift instant of will and decision he triggered the ancient weapon’s most fearsome power. Beams of brilliant violet fire shot out from the crystal in his hands, seeking the other two shards. A lopsided triangle of unbearable brightness burned between the points anchored by Araevin and his friends.

  “No!” shouted Malkizid, and he leaped into the air, climbing toward safety-too late.

  Everything inside the triangle defined by the shards of the crystal vanished in a furious blast of incandescent light. The Waymeet shrieked in protest, and shattered glass scoured the place like a rain of razors. Dozens of tiny slivers drove into Araevin’s flesh before the concussion picked him up and threw him headlong into the wall behind him.

  In the heart of the brilliance, the speaking stone burst apart in a fountain of blue-white power, uncapped and wild. The infernal iron bands restraining it charred into black ash and vanished. Malkizid himself staggered in the air, and wrapped his wings around his body to protect himself. Shredded by flying glass and seared by the supernal light, still the archdevil was not destroyed. He raised his head and looked on Araevin with pure hate, blood pouring from his brand.

  “I will flense your soul for that!” he shrieked.

  Then the terrible brilliance filling the triangle guttered out and vanished, drawn back into the uncapped speaking stone in the center. A wind of dust and glass howled into the glowing triangle as the unimaginable power of the Fhoeldin durr collapsed in on itself and drained out into nothingness. Malkizid was picked up and dragged into the vanishing stream of blue fire, then expelled screaming into the void.

  One more bone-shaking detonation rocked the Waymeet, and the raving brilliance and thunder died away. A great three-sided patch of the ancient glass cathedral was dull, gray, and lifeless, absolutely devoid of power. Araevin groaned and let his head drop to his chest.

  The Gatekeeper had been extinguished. It was only a matter of time until the Last Mythal of Aryvandaar died.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  22 Eleasias, the Year of Lightning Storms

  Sarya Dlardrageth curled her hands into fists so tight that her talons drew blood from her palms, and screamed defiance at the metal and glass around her.

  “I will not stand for this!” she shrieked. “I am the rightful Queen of Cormanthor! My House has waited five thousand years to claim what was stolen from us. We will return and drive our enemies from Myth Drannor. I swear it!”

  Her eye fell on a dull gray column of crystal nearby, and with hardly a conscious thought she barked the words of a violent spell and smashed it to splinters of glass with a spear of purple force. The iron cladding that had covered the thing fell to the stone floor, and she seized the heavy plating with a telekinesis spell and hurled it headlong into another flickering portal, shattering its lintel into a spray of diamond dust.

  “I will drink their hearts’ blood for my wine before I am through with the lot of them!”

  “And you will, Lady Sarya,” the spymaster Vesryn Aelorothi said smoothly. He bobbed his head up and down like the vulture he so resembled. “But your just vengeance must wait for a little while. You must see to your survival first. You cannot exact satisfaction from the palebloods if you are caught now.”

  Sarya wheeled on the presumptuous fey’ri with murder in her eye. Briefly, she considered killing him for his insolence. “No one tells me what to do,” she hissed. “No one!”

  Vesryn bobbed his head again, and steepled his fingers in front of narrow chest. “Of course, Lady Sarya. Forgive me, I beg you, but we must not linger here.”

  There is little point in killing him, she decided. She could not spare the obsequious Vesryn, not when all that was left of her kingdom were Xhalph, Vesryn Aelorothi, three warriors, and two vrock demons. Mardeiym Reithel, her faithful general, was dead. Teryani Ealoeth had simply vanished, likely using her shapechanging talents to slink away. The daemonfey queen turned away and folded her wings, her back to the pitiful stragglers, and fought to master the blinding rage that surged and roiled within her dark heart.

  Betrayed! she fumed. Malkizid promised that the spells he could teach her would make Myth Drannor unassailable. Yet the cursed palebloods had found away to destroy her reweaving of the ancient wards anyway. She was throne-less again.

  “Which way from here, Mother?” Xhalph rumbled. “Vesryn is right. We must decide swiftly. This place is disintegrating around us.”

  “I can see that!” Sarya snapped.

  She studied the Waymeet’s maze of portals and corridors with a fearsome scowl. She knew several doors that might lead to useful destinations, but something had happened to the ancient mythal only moments after she and her small entourage had emerged from the door leading back to Myth Drannor. All around her, portals were growing unstable. Some remained open continuously, others surged and closed unpredictably, and still more were guttering out into dull gray uselessness. Malkizid’s work? she wondered. Or the work of the palebloods?

  “We need a place where our enemies will not follow,” she said aloud, “a place where we can rebuild our strength in secret. We must hide for now, and in time we will embark on a new campaign against the usurpers of our birthright-a campaign of stealth, subterfuge, and deceit. The next time we move against the palebloods, we will do so in secret. For now, we must survive.” If skulking and hiding was all that she could do, then she would do it as well as she could.

  “What of the refuge beneath Lothen?” Xhalph said. “Our enemies do not know of it.”

  “It strikes me as dangerously close to the wood elves of the High Forest, Lord Xhalph,” Vesryn Aelorothi offered. “The palebloods will certainly use divination magic to sniff us out. It might be better to hide somewhere far away.”

  Xhalph did not often stand for correction from one of their lessers, but in this case he did not rebuke the vulturelike fey’ri spymaster. Even he had realized that sheer fury and bloodlust might not be the way to victory any longer. “The Abyss? I doubt the palebloods would follow us there.”

  Sarya shook her head. “I will not go to the Abyss in defeat. I have no wish to beg protection from a demon lord.” There were some who might offer her refuge, but she would not allow herself to be made into a vassal again. She thought about it for a moment more and made her decision. “We will seek out a portal to some remote part of Faerun

  … Chult, perhaps, or maybe the lands beyond the Unapproachable East. Come; we will find a speaking stone and make the Gatekeeper show us a suitable portal.” And if they happened to encounter Malkizid, why, she might demand an accounting from the archdevil.

  She unfurled her wings and leaped into the air, soaring easily over the mazelike arrangement of corridors and walls that made up the Waymeet. She spied the cluster of higher towers and spars that marked the center of the device, and banked in that direction. Below her, she spied several dead mezzoloths, sprawled out in one of the main boulevards of the place. What is going on in this place? she wondered. Is Malkizid at war with some other infernal power?

  “There has been fighting here,” Xhalph said. “Those yugoloths have not been dead long.”

  The actinic flash of a lightning-spell close by threw a harsh white glare across the Waymeet’s towers and columns, followed an instant later by a sharp crack of thunder. Apparently, the fighting was not yet over. Sarya would have ignored it and continued on her way, but as it happened, her chosen course was leading her toward the place where the lightning had flashed.

  “It’s the master speaking stone,” she hissed. “Allow me, Lady Sarya,” one of the fey’ri warriors said. “I will spy it out and see who is there.”

  “Very well,” she agreed. “Be swift, and do not allow yours
elf to be seen.”

  The warrior murmured a spell to cloak himself in invisibility and hurried off toward the center of the complex. Sarya alighted on a high spar to await his report. The Waymeet rumbled with a deep, ominous groan, and not far off one of the high spires lost its footing and toppled over slowly, crashing to the ground with the shriek of twisting iron and the shrill sound of shattering glass. More portals flickered and went dark.

  “I do not think we will be able to return to this place once we depart,” Vesryn said quietly.

  “It suits me for now,” Sarya replied. “Presently, no one will be able to follow us through this place. That may turn to our advantage.”

  She heard the beat of unseen wings, and her warrior returned. He allowed his invisibility to fade. “It is the paleblood mage, Lady Sarya,” he reported.

  “Araevin Teshurr?”

  “Yes. He has several companions with him-a human, a half-breed, an elf of a kindred I do not recognize, and some other planetouched woman. They are in the square of the master speaking stone, as you said. They just drove off a small number of yugoloths and baatezu.”

  “The mage must have damaged the Waymeet,” Sarya breathed. Malkizid had told her that he had gotten his hands on a shard of the Gatekeeper’s Crystal. Was that sufficient to explain the destruction of the mythal around her? Or, for that matter, was that how the palebloods had dealt with her defenses at Myth Drannor?

  “There is something more, my queen,” the warrior said. “The mage, the strange elf, and the half-breed all are wounded. The strange elf and the half-breed can’t walk without help. They are heading that way”-he pointed, indicating a course at right angles to Sarya’s-“making for a portal.”