The Crimson Shadow

by R. A. Salvatore

  “I was only bargaining for the best price,” the halfling explained in a whisper.

  “Price?” balked the wizard. “I just plucked you from certain doom!” He shook his head and sighed. “Very well, then,” he said after a moment of thought. “If that is not enough for your service, I will give to you passes into Montfort and information that might keep you alive once you get there. Also, I think that I might be able to convince this merchant you robbed that his continued pursuit of you would not be worth the trouble. And the favor I ask, though undoubtedly dangerous, will not take so long.”

  “Explain it,” Luthien said firmly.

  “Over dinner, of course,” the wizard replied, motioning to the wooden door.

  Oliver rubbed his hands—now the man was talking in terms that he could agree to—and turned for the door, but Luthien stood resolute, arms crossed over his chest and jaw firm.

  “I’ll not dine with one who will not give his name,” the young Bedwyr insisted.

  “More for me,” Oliver remarked.

  “It is not important,” the wizard said again.

  Luthien didn’t blink.

  The wizard moved to stand right before him, staring him in the eyes, neither man blinking. “Brind’Amour,” the robed man said, and the gravity of his tone made Luthien wonder if he should know that name.

  “And I am Luthien Bedwyr,” the young man replied evenly, his eyes staring intently as if daring the wizard to interrupt.

  Brind’Amour did not, though, allowing the young man the honor of a proper introduction.

  The table in the adjoining room was simply spectacular, set for three, including one place with a higher chair.

  “We were expected,” Oliver remarked dryly, but as he aproached the table and saw the display set out, he had no further demeaning comments. Fine silverware and crystal goblets, cloth napkins, and plates fine and smooth were set and ready for the meal. Oliver was, too, judging from the way he hustled over and hopped up into the high seat.

  Brind’Amour moved to the side of the room, an artificial chamber with bricked walls, very different from the one they had left behind. He opened several secret cupboards, their doors blending perfectly with the bricks, and brought out the courses—roasted duck and several exotic vegetables, fine wine, and clear, cold water.

  “Surely a wizard could have conjured a servant,” Luthien remarked after he had taken his seat, “or clapped his hands and let the plates float across to the table.”

  Brind’Amour chuckled at the notion. “I may have need of my powers later this day,” he explained. “The use of magical energy is taxing, I assure you, and it would be a pity indeed if our quest failed because I was too lazy to walk over and bring out the food!”

  Luthien let the explanation go at that. He was hungry, and besides, he realized that any important conversation he might now hold with Brind’Amour would only have to be repeated for Oliver’s sake. The halfling was practically buried in a bowl of turnips at the moment.

  By the time he lifted his glass of wine for a final sip, Luthien had to admit that Brind’Amour had set the finest table he had ever known.

  “Perhaps we in Gascony should give another look to our wizard-types,” Oliver remarked, patting his fattened belly in whole-hearted agreement with Luthien’s thoughts.

  “Yes, you could appoint them chefs in every town,” Brind’Amour replied with good-hearted sarcasm. “What else would a wizard have to do?” he asked of Luthien, trying to draw the young Bedwyr into the casual conversation.

  Luthien nodded but remained distant from the banter as Oliver and Brind’Amour went back and forth, with Oliver recounting the tale of an adventure he had experienced in a wizard’s tower, and Brind’Amour adding some detail to Oliver’s descriptions and generally nodding and gasping at the appropriately polite places. Now that the meal was done and the formal introductions were at their end, Luthien was anxious to focus on the task at hand. Brind’Amour had saved them from the cyclopians, and passes to Montfort (the last chance he figured he might have of ever catching up with Ethan), as well as getting that merchant off their backs, was a reward the young man could not ignore.

  “You mentioned a task,” Luthien was finally able to interject. The ease of the conversation disappeared in the blink of a halfling’s eye. “Over dinner, I believe you said, but now dinner is over.”

  “I did not think that I could get my words in above the clamor of an eager halfling guest,” Brind’Amour said with a strained smile.

  “Oliver is done,” the stern and determined Luthien remarked.

  Brind’Amour sat back in his chair. He clapped his hands and a long-stemmed pipe floated out of a cubby, lighting as it approached the man, then settling gently into his waiting hand. Luthien understood that the magical display was for his benefit, a subtle reminder that Brind’Amour was in control here.

  “I have lost something,” the wizard said after several long draws on the pipe. “Something very valuable to me.”

  “I do not have it,” Oliver remarked, clapping his hands.

  Brind’Amour gave him a friendly gaze. “I know where it is,” he explained.

  “Then it is not lost.” This time, the halfling’s humor did not evoke any appreciative response from Brind’Amour or from Luthien. The young Bedwyr could see the pain on the old man’s wizened face.

  “It is in a great sealed cave complex not so far from here,” he said.

  “Sealed?” Luthien asked.

  “By myself and several companions,” Brind’Amour answered, “four hundred years ago, before the Gascons came to the Avonsea Islands, when the name of Bruce MacDonald was still prominent on every tongue in Eriador.”

  Luthien started to respond, then stopped, stunned by the implications of what he had just heard.

  “You should be dead,” Oliver remarked, and Luthien scowled fiercely at him.

  Brind’Amour took no offense, though. He even nodded his agreement with the halfling. “All of my companions are long buried,” he explained. “I live only because I have spent many years in magical stasis.” He waved his hands suddenly, wildly, indicating that he needed a change of subject, that they had gotten off the issue at hand.

  Luthien could see that the man was plainly uncomfortable.

  “The world might be a simpler place if I was dead, Oliver Burrows,” Brind’Amour went on. “Of course, then you two would also be dead,” he pointedly reminded them, drawing a tip of the hat from Oliver.

  “My task for you is simple,” the wizard explained. “I have lost something—you are to go to the caves and retrieve it.”

  “It?” both friends asked together.

  The wizard hesitated.

  “We must know what we are looking for,” Luthien reasoned.

  “A staff,” Brind’Amour admitted. “My staff. As precious as anything I own.”

  “Then how did you come to leave it in this cave?” Oliver wondered.

  “And why did you seal the cave?” Luthien added.

  “I did not leave it in the cave,” Brind’Amour replied rather sharply. “It was stolen from me and placed there not so long ago. But that is another story, and one that does not concern you in the least.”

  “But . . .” Oliver began, but he quieted as soon as Brind’Amour’s dangerous scowl settled on him.

  “As for the cave, it was sealed to keep its inhabitants from roaming Eriador,” the wizard said to Luthien.

  “And what were they?” Luthien pressed.

  “The king of the cyclopians and his mightiest warriors,” Brind’Amour replied evenly. “We feared that he would ally with the Gascons, since we knew that they would soon be on our shores.”

  Luthien stared hard at the old man, not sure he believed the explanation. Oliver was even more doubtful. Gascons hated cyclopians more than did Eriadorans, if that was possible, and any potential alliance between the people of the southern kingdom and the one-eyes seemed unlikely at best.

  Also, Luthien could not begi
n to fathom why such extreme measures would have been taken against a race that had been savaged not so long before that. Bruce MacDonald’s victory had been complete, bordering on genocide, and as far as the young Bedwyr knew, the cyclopian race hadn’t fully recovered to this day.

  “Now, with any luck, the cave is uninhabited,” Brind’Amour said hopefully, obviously trying to press on past that last point.

  “Then why do you not go there and retrieve your so precious staff?” Oliver asked.

  “I am old,” Brind’Amour replied, “and weak. I cannot hold open the portal from here, my source of power, if I go through the tunnel to that other cave. And so I need your help—help for which you have already been, and will yet be, well paid.”

  Luthien continued to study the wizard for some time, sensing that what the man had said was not true, or not the whole truth. Still, he had no more specific questions to ask, and Oliver simply sat back in his chair and patted his tummy. They had ridden far that day, fought on the road, and eaten well.

  “I offer you now the comfort of warm and soft beds,” Brind’Amour promised, sensing the mood. “Rest well. Our business can wait until the morn.”

  The companions readily accepted, and after a quick check on Threadbare and Riverdancer, who had been put in an empty chamber to the side of the library, they were soon nestled comfortably in featherbeds, and Brind’Amour left them alone.

  “Four hundred years old?” Oliver asked Luthien.

  “I do not question the words and ways of wizards,” Luthien replied.

  “But does not this magical stasis intrigue you?”

  “No.” It was a simple and honest answer. Luthien had been raised among pragmatic and solid fisherfolk and farmers. The only magic prominent at all on Bedwydrin were the herbs of healing women and premonitions of weather conditions offered to the captains of fishing boats by the dock seers. Even those two rather benign magic-using groups made Luthien uncomfortable—a man like Brind’Amour put the young man totally out of his element.

  “And I do not understand why a cave holding nothing more than a cyclopian—”

  Luthien cut Oliver off with a wave of his hand.

  “And who would steal a wizard’s staff?” Oliver put in quickly, before Luthien waved his words away once more.

  “Let us just be done with this task and be on with our—” Luthien began, and then he paused at an obvious impasse.

  “With our what?” Oliver prompted, and wondered, and young Luthien wondered, too.

  What would he and Oliver Burrows, who called himself Oliver deBurrows, get on with? Their quest? Their lives? The road to continued thievery and, perhaps, worse?

  The young Bedwyr had no answers—either for what would come, or for what had just passed. Ever since the arrival of Viscount Aubrey and his entourage in Dun Varna, Luthien’s world had been turned upside down. He had left Dun Varna in search of his brother, but now he was beginning to get a feel of just how big the world truly was. Over the last couple of days, Oliver had explained to him that ships left the Avonsea Islands for Gascony by a dozen different ports, from Carlisle on the Stratton River to Montfort. And Gascony was a bigger place than Avon, Oliver assured his unworldly companion, with hundreds of cities larger than Dun Varna and scores larger even than Carlisle. And Duree, the land of the war Ethan was supposedly going off to fight, was over a thousand miles south of Gascony’s northern coast.

  A thousand miles!

  How could Luthien hope to catch up to Ethan when he didn’t know what course his brother might take?

  Luthien never answered Oliver’s question, and the halfling, soon snoring contentedly, didn’t seem anxious to know.

  CHAPTER 10

  WHITE LIES?

  THE FIRST THING THAT OLIVER and Luthien noticed when they exited Brind’Amour’s new magical tunnel was that the cave they had entered was uncomfortably warm. And it was huge. Luthien’s torch reflected off of one wall only, the one they had exited, and the two could barely see the crystalline glimmer of the sharp-tipped, long stalactites hanging ominously far above their heads.

  There came a flash from behind them, and they turned to see Brind’Amour’s portal beginning to shrink. At first, the two scrambled for the light, thinking the wizard meant to desert them. The swirl continued, diminished to the size of a fist, but its light was no less intense.

  “He only wishes to make sure that no cyclopians, if they live, could come through,” a relieved Oliver remarked.

  “Or to make sure that we do not come through until we have found the staff,” Luthien added. “He has that crystal ball and will watch our every move.”

  Luthien moved over to the wall again as he spoke, studying its curious texture. He hadn’t been in many caves—only the wizard’s and the sea caves along the rocky coast near Dun Varna—but still, this one seemed somehow strange to him. The rock of the walls was coppery in color and rough, as Luthien would expect, but interwoven with it were lines of a darker hue, smooth to the touch.

  “Melted ore,” Oliver explained, coming to join him. The halfling looked up and all around. “Copper, I would guess. Separated from the stone by some very large heat.”

  Luthien, too, studied the area. “This must be where the wizards sealed the cave,” he decided. “Perhaps they used magical fires to create the avalanche.” It seemed to be as much a question as a statement.

  “That must be it,” Oliver agreed, but he, too, did not sound convinced. He tapped the stone gently with the pommel of his main gauche, trying to gauge its density. From what he could tell, the wall was very thick. That, in turn, led him to the conclusion that something on this side of the wall had caused the heat, but he kept his thoughts private.

  “Come along,” the halfling muttered. “I do not wish to be in here any longer than is necessary.” He paused and looked at Luthien, who was still studying the melted ore, and got the feeling that the intelligent young man’s reasoning was following the same trail as had his own. “Not with so many fattened purses awaiting my eager grasp in Montfort,” he added a bit too loudly, for echoes came back at him from several directions. His words took Luthien’s thoughts from the wall, though, as he had hoped.

  No sense in worrying, Oliver believed.

  The floor was uneven and dotted by rows of stalagmites, many taller than Luthien. Even though this area was a single chamber, at times it seemed to the two as if they were walking along narrow corridors. Shadows from Luthien’s flickering torch surrounded them ominously, keeping them tense, continually glancing from side to side.

  They came to a steeply sloping area, and in the open area below they could see that a path had been made through the stalagmites—trampled, it seemed, with great hunks of broken stone scattered all about.

  “The traveling will be easier,” Luthien remarked hopefully. He gingerly started down the slope, leaning back so far that he was practically sitting down.

  Oliver grabbed him by the shoulder and tugged hard.

  “Do you not even wonder what broke those things?” the halfling asked grimly.

  It was a question that Luthien preferred not to answer, not even to think about. “Come along,” was all that he replied, and he resumed his controlled slide to the lower level.

  “Wizard-types,” Oliver muttered under his breath, and with a last look back to the now-distant wall and the wizard’s portal, he shrugged and followed the young man.

  When Oliver stopped his descent and looked up once more, he found Luthien standing very still, staring off to the side, looking over one broken stalagmite.

  “What . . .” the halfling started to ask, but he got his answer as he came up beside Luthien. Pieces of skeletons lay broken behind the rocky pile. Both the friends looked about nervously, as if expecting some horrid and powerful monster to rush out and squash them.

  “Human,” Oliver remarked as he moved over to investigate, holding up a skull that showed two eye sockets. “Not cyclopian.”

  They pieced together three bodies in all, bu
t only two skulls, for the third had apparently been smashed into a thousand pieces. There was little more than whitened bone, but it didn’t seem to either of the companions that these corpses had been here for all that long, certainly not four hundred years. One of the legs, buried under some rock, showed ligaments and pieces of skin, and the clothing, though tattered, was not so rotted.

  “We might not be the first group Brind’Amour has sent in search of his staff,” Luthien remarked.

  “And whatever was in here lives still,” Oliver added. He looked around at the toppled stalagmites and the crushed skull. “I do not think cyclopians could have done this,” he reasoned. “Not even a cyclopian king.”

  First the melted ore along the wall, then the line of broken rock mounds, and now this. A sense of dread dropped over the companions. Luthien replayed Brind’Amour’s words about the cave in his mind. In light of these new discoveries, it seemed to Luthien that the wizard was indeed lying, or not telling the whole truth.

  But what could Luthien and Oliver do now? The portal offered them no escape unless Brind’Amour widened it, and Luthien knew that the wizard would not do that until they had recovered his lost staff.

  “If the staff is so valuable, then we should expect to find it among the treasures of whatever rules this place,” Luthien said determinedly. “And this trail of rubble should lead us to it.”

  “How fine,” Oliver replied.

  The trail soon led them out of the vast chamber and they moved down a wide corridor. Both walls were within the area of torchlight then, and they could see the ceiling as well. That offered them little comfort, though, for whatever had come through this passage had not only flattened stalagmite mounds but had broken short the hanging stalactites, as well.

  The air seemed to be growing even warmer in here, and the walls shone a deep crimson. After a few hundred yards, the corridor dipped suddenly, turning almost vertical for a few feet, until it widened into a chamber on a more level but still descending slope. Luthien skidded down first, Oliver coming close behind.

  They had come to the banks of an underground pool, its still waters shimmering a dull red and orange in the reflections of the light. The torch seemed much brighter in here, for the walls were lined with quartz and other crystals. Across the pool, the companions could see the entrance to another corridor, running generally along the same direction they had been traveling.