Staying close to the central tower, the archmage arcane moved along and spotted the banners of his principle enemies, the invading Lord Brambleberry, so far from home, and the fool Deudermont, who had turned the city against him.
He studied the field for a short while, mentally measuring the distance with supernatural precision. The tumult all around him, the screaming, dying, and explosions, seemed distant and unremarkable. A spear flew his way and struck solidly, except that his magical protections simply flattened its metal tip and dropped it harmlessly to the ground before it got near to his undead flesh.
He didn’t even wince. His focus remained on his principle enemies.
Arklem Greeth rubbed his hands together eagerly, preparing his spells.
In a flash he was gone, and when he stepped through the other side of the dimensional portal in the midst of a fighting throng, he tapped his thumbs together before him and brought forth a fan of fire, driving away friend and foe alike. Then he thrust his hands out wide to his sides and from each came a mighty forked lightning bolt, angled down to thump into the ground with such force that men and zombies, dwarves and ghouls went bouncing wildly away, leaving Arklem Greeth alone in his own little field of calm.
Everyone noticed him—how could they not? — for his display of power and fury was so far beyond anything that had been brought to the field thus far, by either Brambleberry or the Hosttower.
Barely controlling their mounts at that point, both Brambleberry and Deudermont turned to regard their foe.
“Kill him!” Brambleberry cried, and even as the words left his mouth, so too came the next of Arklem Greeth’s magical barrages.
All around the two leaders, the ground churned and broke apart, soil spraying, rocks flying, roots tearing. Down they tumbled side by side, their horses twisting and breaking around them. Brambleberry’s landed atop him with a sickening cracking of bones, and though he was luckier to fall aside from his thrashing and terrified horse, Deudermont still found himself at the bottom of a ten-foot hole, thick with mud and water.
Up above, Arklem Greeth wasn’t finished. He ignored the sudden reversal his assault on Brambleberry, and particularly upon beloved Deudermont, had wrought in the army around them, their fear quickly turning to outrage aimed at Greeth alone. Like the one point of calm in a world gone mad, Arklem Greeth followed his earth-shaking spell with an earthquake that had all around him stumbling and falling. The line of the tremor was aimed perfectly for the loose mounds at the sides of the chasm he had created. He meant to bury the Waterdhavian lord and the good captain alive.
All around them realized it, though, and came at Greeth with fury, a roiling throng of outrage closing in on him from every side, throwing spears and rocks—even swords—anything to distract or wound that being of ultimate evil.
“Fools, all,” the archmage arcane muttered under his breath.
With one last burst of power that broke apart one side of the deep hole, Greeth fell back into his wraith form, flattening to two dimensions. He narrowed to a black line and slipped down into the ground, running swiftly through narrow cracks until he stood again in his own chamber in the Hosttower of the Arcane.
Exhaustion followed him there, for the lich had not utilized such a sudden and potent barrage of magic in many, many years. He heard the continuing roar outside his window and didn’t need to go there to understand that any gains he’d made would prove temporary.
Dropping the leaders had not turned the mob, but had only incensed it further.
There were simply too many. Too many fools…too much fodder.
“Fools all,” he said again, and he thought of Valindra out along the southern rocks of Cutlass Island. He hoped she was dead already.
With a heavy sigh that crackled across the collection of hardened mucus in Arklem Greeth’s unbreathing lungs, the lich went to his private stash of potent drinks—drinks he had created himself, fashioned mostly of blood and living things. Drinks that, like the lich himself, transcended death. He took a long, deep sip of one potent mixture.
He thought of his decades at the Hosttower, a place he had so long called home. He knew that was over, for the time being at least, but he could wait.
And he could make it hurt.
The chamber would come with him—he had fashioned it with magic for just such a sudden and violent transportation, for he had known from the moment he’d achieved lichdom that the day would surely befall him when he’d have to abandon his tower home. But he, and the part he most coveted, would be saved.
The rest would be lost.
Arklem Greeth moved through a small trapdoor, down a ladder to a tiny secret room where he kept one of his most prized possessions: a staff of incredible power. With that staff, a younger, living Arklem Greeth had waged great battles, his fireballs and lightning bolts greater in number and intensity. With that staff, full of its own power to taste of Mystra’s Weave, he had escaped certain doom many times on those occasions when his own magical reservoir had been drained.
He rubbed a hand over its burnished wood, considering it as he would an old friend.
It was set in a strange contraption of Greeth’s design. The staff itself was laid across a pyramid-shaped stone, the very center of the six-foot long staff right at the narrow tip of the great block. Hanging from chains at either end of the staff were two large metal bowls, and up above those bowls, over the staff and on stout stands of thick iron, sat two tanks of dense silver liquid.
With another sigh, Greeth reached up and pulled a central cord, one that uncorked plugs from the mercury-filled reservoirs, and dropped out chutes directly over the corresponding bowls.
The heavy fluid metal began to flow, slowly and teasingly dripping into the bowls, like the sands of an hourglass counting down the end of the world.
Such staves as that, so full of magical energy, could not be broken without a cataclysmic release.
Arklem Greeth went back to his secure but mobile chamber with confidence that the explosion would send him exactly where he wanted to go.
They were winning the field, but the Luskar and their Waterdhavian allies didn’t feel victorious, not with their leaders Brambleberry and Deudermont buried! They set a defensive perimeter around the churned area, and many fell over the loose dirt, digging with sword and dagger, or bare hands. A torn fingernail elicited no more than a grimace among the determined, frantic group. One man inadvertently drove his dagger through his own hand, but merely growled as he went back to tearing at the ground for his beloved Captain Deudermont.
Fury rained upon the field: fire and lightning, monsters undead and magically created. The Luskar matched that fury; they were fighting for their very lives, for their families. There could be no retreat, no withdrawal, and to a man and woman they knew it.
So they fought, and fired their arrows at the wizards on the balconies, and though they died ten-to-one, perhaps more, it seemed that their advance could not be halted.
But then it was, with the snap of a magical staff.
Someone tugged hard at his arm, and Deudermont gasped his first breath in far too long a time as another hand scraped the dirt away from his face.
Through bleary eyes, he saw his rescuers, a woman brushing his face, a strong man yanking at his one extended arm, and with such force that Deudermont feared he would pull his shoulder right out of its socket.
His thoughts went to Brambleberry, who had fallen beside him, and he took heart to see so many clawing at the ground, so much commotion to rescue the Waterdhavian lord. Though he was still fully immersed in the soil, other than that one extended arm, Deudermont somehow managed to nod, and even smile at the woman cleaning off his face.
Then she was gone—a wave of multicolored energy rolled out like a ripple on a pond, crossing over Deudermont with the sound of a cyclone.
The sleeve burned from his extended arm, his face flushed with stinging warmth. It seemed to go on for many, many heartbeats, then came the sound of crashing, like trees falli
ng. Deudermont felt the ground rumble three or four times—too close together for him to accurately take a count.
His arm fell limp to the ground. As he regained his sensibilities, Deudermont saw the boots of the man who had been tugging at his arm. The captain couldn’t turn his head enough to follow up the legs, but he knew the man was dead.
He knew that the field was dead.
Too still.
And too quiet, so suddenly, as if all the world had ended.
Robillard kept his forces tight and organized as they made their way north along Cutlass Island. He was fairly certain that they’d meet no resistance until they got within the Hosttower’s compound, but he wanted the first response from his force to be coordinated and devastating. He assured those around him that they would clear every window, every balcony, every doorway on the North Spire with their first barrage.
Behind Robillard came Valindra, her arms tightly bound behind her back, flanked by Maimun and Arabeth.
“The archmage arcane falls this day,” Robillard remarked quietly, so that only those close to him could hear.
“Arklem Greeth is more than ready for you,” Valindra retorted.
Arabeth reacted with a suddenness that shocked the others, spinning a left hook into the face of their moon elf captive. Valindra’s head jolted back and came forward, blood showing below her thin, pretty nose.
“You will pay for—” Valindra warned, or started to, until Arabeth hit her again, just as viciously.
Robillard and Maimun looked to each other incredulously, but then both just grinned at Arabeth’s initiative. They could clearly see the years of enmity between the two overwizards, and separately reasoned that the taller and more classically beautiful Valindra had often been a thorn in Arabeth’s side.
Each man made a mental note to not anger the Lady Raurym.
Valindra seemed to get the message as well, for she said no more.
Robillard led them up a tumble of boulders to get a view over the wall. The fighting was thick and vicious all around the five-spired tower. The ship’s wizard quickly formulated an approach to best come onto the field, and was about to relay it to his charges when the staff broke.
The world seemed to fall apart.
Maimun saved Robillard that day, the young pirate reacting with amazing agility to pull the older wizard down behind the rocks beside him. Similarly, Arabeth rescued Valindra, albeit inadvertently, for as she, too, dived back, she brushed the captive enough to send her tumbling down as well.
The wave of energy rolled over them. Rocks went flying and several of Robillard’s force fell hard, more than one mortally wounded. They were on the outer edge of the blast and so it passed quickly. Robillard, Maimun, and Arabeth all scrambled to their feet quickly enough to peer over and witness the fall of the Hosttower itself. The largest, central pillar, Greeth’s own, was gone, as if it had either been blown to dust or had simply vanished—and it truth, it was a bit of both. The four armlike spires, the once graceful limbs, tumbled down, crashing in burning heaps and billowing clouds of angry gray dust.
The warriors on the field, man and monster alike, had fallen in neat rows, like cut timber, and though groans and cries told Robillard and the others that some had survived, none of the three believed for a heartbeat that number to be large.
“By the gods, Greeth, what have you done?” Robillard asked into the empty and suddenly still morning air.
Arabeth gave a sudden cry of dismay and fell back, and neither Maimun nor Robillard considered her quickly enough to stop her as she leaped down at the face-down and battered Valindra and drove a dagger deep into the captured wizard’s back.
“No!” Robillard cried at her when he realized her action. “We need…” He stopped and grimaced as Arabeth retracted the blade and struck again, and again, and Valindra’s screams became muffled with blood.
Maimun finally got to Arabeth and pulled her back; Robillard called for a priest.
He waved back the first of the clerics that came forward, though, knowing that it was too late, and that others would need his healing prayers.
“What have you done?” Robillard asked Arabeth, who sobbed, but looked at the devastated field, not at her gruesome handiwork.
“It was better than she deserved,” Arabeth replied.
Glancing over his shoulder at the utter devastation of the Hosttower of the Arcane, and the men and women who had gone against it, Robillard found it hard to disagree.
CHAPTER 17
CONSEQUENCE
T he irony of pulling a battered, but very much alive Deudermont from the ground was not lost on Maimun, who considered how many others—they were all around him on the devastated field—would soon be put into the ground, and because of the decisions of that very same captain.
“Don’t kick a man who’s lying flat, I’ve been told,” Maimun muttered, and Robillard and Arabeth turned to regard him, as well as the half-conscious Deudermont. “But you’re an idiot, good captain.”
“Watch your tongue, young one,” Robillard warned.
“Better to remain silent than speak the truth and offend the powerful, yes Robillard?” Maimun replied with a sour and knowing grin.
“Remind me why Sea Sprite didn’t sink Thrice Lucky on the many occasions we’ve seen you at sea,” the wizard threatened. “I seem to forget.”
“My charm, no doubt.”
“Enough, you two,” Arabeth scolded, her voice trembling with every syllable. “Look around you! Is this travesty all about you? About your petty rivalry? About placing blame?”
“How can it not be about who’s to blame?” Maimun started to argue, but Arabeth cut him short with a vicious scowl.
“It’s about those scattered on this field, nothing more,” she said, her voice even. “Alive and dead…in the Hosttower and without.”
Maimun swallowed hard and glanced at Robillard, who seemed equally out of venom, and indeed, Arabeth’s argument was difficult to counter given the carnage around them. They finished extracting Deudermont at the same time that another rescue team called out that they had located Lord Brambleberry.
The ground covering him had saved him from the explosion, but had smothered him in the process. The young Waterdhavian lord, so full of ambition and vision, and the desire to earn his way, was dead.
There would be no cheering that day, and even if there had been, it would have been drowned out by the cries of anguish and agony.
Work went on through the night and into the next day, separating dead from wounded, tending to those who could be helped. Guided by Robillard, assault teams went into each of the four fallen spires of the destroyed Hosttower, and more than a few of Arklem Greeth’s minions were pulled from the rubble, all surrendering without a struggle, no fight left in them—not after seeing the unbridled evil of the man they’d once called the archmage arcane.
The cost had been horrific—more than a third of the population of the once-teeming city of Luskan was dead.
But the war was over.
Captain Deudermont shook his head solemnly.
“What does that mean?” Regis yelled at him. “You can’t just say he’s gone!”
“Many are just gone, my friend,” Deudermont explained. “The blast that took the Hosttower released all manner of magical power, destructive and altering. Men were burned and blasted, others transformed, and others, many others, banished from this world. Some were utterly destroyed, I’m told, their very souls disintegrated into nothingness.”
“And what happened to Drizzt?” Regis demanded.
“We cannot know. He is not to be found. Like so many. I’m sorry. I feel this loss as keenly as—”
“Shut up!” Regis yelled at him. “You don’t know anything! Robillard tried to warn you—many did! You don’t know anything! You chose this fight and look at what it has gotten you, what it has gotten us all!”
“Enough!” Robillard growled at the halfling, and he moved threateningly at Regis.
Deudermont h
eld him back, though, understanding that Regis’s tirade was wrought of utter grief. How could it not be? Why should it not be? The loss of Drizzt Do’Urden was no small thing, after all, particularly not to the halfling that had spent the better part of the last decades by the dark elf’s side.
“We could not know the desperation of Arklem Greeth, or that he was capable of such wanton devastation,” Deudermont said, his voice quiet and humble. “But the fact that he was capable of it, and willing to do it, only proves that he had to be removed, by whatever means the people of Luskan could muster. He would have rained his devastation upon them sooner or later, and in more malicious forms, no doubt. Whether freeing the undead from the magical bindings of Illusk or using his wizards to slowly bleed the city into submission, he was no man worthy of being the leader of this city.”
“You act as if this city is worthy of having a leader,” Regis said.
“They stood arm in arm to win,” Deudermont scolded, growing excited—so much so that the priest attending him grabbed him by the shoulders to remind him that he had to stay calm. “Every family in Luskan feels grief as keen as your own. Doubt that not at all. The price of their freedom has been high indeed.”
“Their freedom, their fight,” the halfling spat.
“Drizzt marched with me willingly,” Deudermont reminded Regis. That was the last of it, though, as the priest forcibly guided the captain out of the room.
“You throw guilt on the shoulders of a man already bent low by its great weight,” Robillard said.
“He made his choices.”
“As did you, as did I, and as did Drizzt. I understand your pain—Drizzt Do’Urden was my friend, as well—but does your anger at Captain Deudermont do anything to alleviate it?”
Regis started to answer, started to protest, but stopped and fell back on his bed. What was the point?
Of anything?
He thought of Mithral Hall and felt that it was past time for him to go home.
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