The Ghost King t-3

by Robert Anthony Salvatore

  “These ain’t Cadderly’s,” Ivan confirmed a moment later. Since he had designed and built Cadderly’s hand crossbows and its quarrels, his words carried undeniable truth.

  “Then who?” asked Rorick.

  “We weren’t that far away,” Temberle added. “And this battle’s not so old. This happened fast, and it happened quietly.” He looked with great alarm at his sister and his Uncle Ivan.

  “Poison-tipped,” said Hanaleisa.

  More than a few eyes widened at that, for most folk knew the dire implications of poison-tipped hand crossbow darts.

  “Has the whole world gone upside down, then?” asked Ivan, his tone more sober—even somber—than ever. “I’m thinking the sooner we get to the surface, the better we’ll be.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pikel agreed.

  On they marched, swiftly, and with all feeling that the enemy of their enemy would most certainly not prove to be their friend.

  * * * * *

  The hairless, black-skinned giant lurched forward another step.

  Click. Click. Click.

  The monster groaned as three more darts punctured its skin, adding to the drow sleep poison coursing its veins. Its next step came heavier, foot dragging.

  Click. Click. Click.

  The giant went down on one knee, barely conscious of the movement. Small, dodging forms came at it, left, right, and center, slender blades gleaming with magic. The nightwalker waved its arms, trying to deflect the approaching enemies, to block and to swat aside the dark elves as though they were gnats. But every swing, waved under the weight of a most profound weariness, was waved too slowly to catch the agile warriors. Every block failed to drive off the stabs and thrusts and slashes, and the giant nightwalker swatted nothing but the cavern’s stagnant air.

  They didn’t maul the giant. Every strike landed precisely and efficiently in an area that would allow the smoothest and swiftest flow of blood. The behemoth didn’t get hit a hundred times, not more than a score even, but as it settled to a prone position on the floor, overcome by poison and loss of blood, the nightwalker’s wounds were surely mortal.

  The last group, Valas Hune signaled to Kimmuriel. The way is clear.

  Kimmuriel nodded and followed his lead team through the chamber. Another giant bat crashed down against the far wall, coaxed to sleep in mid flight. Many crawlers still thrashed on the floor, their movements uncoordinated and unfocused but defiant until one of the drow warriors found the time to finish the job with a sure stroke to the neck.

  Out of that chamber, the Bregan D’aerthe force moved down a corridor to an area of tunnels and chambers puddled by lake water. After only a few more twists and turns, every dark elf squinted against the brightness of the surface. Night had fallen long ago, but the moon was up, and sensitive drow eyes stung under the brilliance of Selûne’s glow.

  Can we not simply leave this place? more than one set of fingers dared flash Kimmuriel’s way, but they were met one and all with a stern look that offered no compromise.

  He had determined that they needed to go to the ruined town on the lakeshore before leaving the uncivilized reaches between Old Shanatar and Great Bhaerynden, and so to the place known as Carradoon they would go.

  They exited the tunnels in the cove north of the city and easily scaled the cliffs to the bluff overlooking the ruined town. More than half the structures had burned to the ground, and less than a handful of those remaining had avoided the conflagration. The air hung thick with smoke and the stench of death, and skeletons of ship masts dotted the harbor, like markers for mass graves. The dark elves moved down in tight formation, even more cautious outside than in the more familiar environ of the tunnels. A giant nightwing occasionally flew overhead, but unless it ventured too near, the disciplined drow held their shots.

  Led by Valas Hune, scouts broke left and right, flanking, leading, and ensuring that no pursuit was forthcoming.

  What do you seek in this ruin? Valas’s fingers asked of Kimmuriel soon after they had entered the city proper.

  Kimmuriel indicated that he wasn’t quite certain, but assured the scout that something there was worth investigating. He sensed it, felt it keenly.

  A commotion to the side broke the discussion short as both drow contemplated the beginnings of a battle along a road parallel to their path. Another giant nightwalker had found the band and foolishly came on. The tumult increased briefly as the closest drow engaged and lured the behemoth to a narrow stretch between two buildings, a place where drow hand crossbows could not miss the huge target.

  Kimmuriel and the bulk of his force continued along before the thing was even dead, confident in the discipline and tactics of the skilled and battle-proven company.

  A scout returning from the quay delivered the report Kimmuriel had awaited, and he led swiftly to the spot.

  “That bodes ill,” Valas Hune remarked—the first words spoken since they had come out of the tunnels—when they came in sight of the rift. Every dark elf viewing the spectacle knew it immediately for what it was: a tear in the fabric of two separate worlds, a magical gate.

  They stopped a respectful distance away, defenders sliding out like tentacles to secure the area as only Bregan D’aerthe could.

  “Purposeful? Or an accident of misfiring magic?” Valas Hune asked.

  “It matters not,” answered Kimmuriel. “Though I expect that we will encounter many such rifts.”

  “A good thing, then, that drow never tire of killing.”

  Valas Hune fell silent when he realized that Kimmuriel, eyes closed, was no longer listening. He watched as the psionicist settled back, then lifted his hands toward the dimensional rift and popped wide his eyes, throwing forth his mental energy.

  Nothing happened.

  “Purposeful,” Kimmuriel answered. “And foolish.”

  “You cannot close it?”

  “An illithid hive could not close it. Sorcere on their strongest day could not close it,” he said, referring to the great academy of the magical Art in Menzoberranzan.

  “Then what?”

  Kimmuriel looked to Mariv, who produced a thick wood-and-metallic rod the length of his forearm. Delicate runes of red and brown adorned the cylindrical item. Mariv handed it to Kimmuriel.

  “The rod that cancels magical effects?” Valas Hune asked.

  Kimmuriel looked to a young warrior, the same who had led the way through the gate in the tunnels, bidding him forth. He signaled the rod’s command words with the fingers of his free hand as he passed the powerful item to the younger drow.

  Licking dry lips, the drow moved toward the rift. His long white hair started to dance as he neared, as if tingling with energy, or struck, perhaps, by winds blowing on the other side of the dimensional gate.

  He glanced at Kimmuriel, who nodded for him to proceed.

  The young drow lifted the rod up to the rift, licked his lips again, and spoke the words of command. The magical implement flared with a brief burst of power that flowed its length and leaped out at the rift.

  Back came a profound darkness, a gray mist that rolled through the conduit and surged into the hand of the drow warrior, who wasn’t wise enough or quick enough to drop the rod in time.

  He did drop it when his arm fell limp. He looked at Kimmuriel and the others, his face stretching into the most profound expression of terror any of them had ever witnessed as his life-force withered to shadowstuff and his empty husk fell dead to the ground.

  No one went to aid him, or even to investigate.

  “We cannot close it,” Kimmuriel announced. “We are done here.”

  He led them away at a swift pace, Valas recalling his scouts as they went.

  As soon as he thought them far enough so that the rift’s continuing fields wouldn’t interfere, Kimmuriel enacted another of his dimensional doorways.

  “Back to Luskan?” Mariv asked as the next least of the band was brought forward to ensure the integrity of the gate.

  “For now, yes,” answer
ed Kimmuriel, who was thinking that perhaps their road would lead them much farther than Luskan, all the way back into the Underdark and Menzoberranzan, where they would become part of a drow defense comprised of twenty thousand warriors, priestesses, and wizards.

  The young drow stepped through and signaled from the other side, from the subterranean home Kimmuriel’s band had constructed under the distant port city on the Sword Coast.

  The Bregan D’aerthe force departed the Barony of Impresk as swiftly and silently as they had come.

  * * * * *

  The human refugees’ eyes, too, stung as they came in sight of the surface world after several long and miserable days of wandering and fighting in the dark tunnels. Squinting against the sunrise reflecting across Impresk Lake, Ivan led the group to the edge of the cave at the back of the small cove.

  The rest of the group crowded up beside him, eager to feel the sun on their faces, desperate to be out from under tons of rock and earth. Collectively, they took great comfort in the quiet of the morning, with no sounds other than the songs of birds and the lap of waves against the rocks.

  Ivan brought them quickly into the open air. They had found more slaughtered nightwings, nightwalkers, and crawlers. Convinced that the tunnels were infested with dark elves, Ivan and the others were happy indeed to be out of them!

  Getting out of the cove took longer than expected. They didn’t dare venture out near the deeper water, having seen too much of the undead fish. Getting up the cliff face, for they had come down with magical help from Pikel, was no easy task for the weary humans or the short-legged dwarves. They tried several routes unsuccessfully and eventually crossed the cove and climbed the lower northern rise. The sun was high in the eastern sky when they at last managed to circle around and come in sight of Carradoon.

  For a long, long while, they stood on the high bluff looking down at the ruins, saying not a word, making not a sound other than the occasional sob.

  “We got no reason to go in there,” Ivan asserted at length. “We have friends—” a man started to protest.

  “Ain’t nothing alive in there,” Ivan interrupted. “Nothing alive ye’re wantin’ to see, at least.”

  “Our homes!” a woman wailed. “Are gone,” Ivan replied.

  “Then what are we to do?” the first man shouted at him.

  “Ye get on the road and get out o’ here,” said Ivan. “Meself and me brother’re for Spirit Soaring …”

  “Me brudder!” Pikel cheered, and pumped his stump into the air.

  “And Cadderly’s kids with us,” Ivan added.

  “Shalane is no farther, and down a safer road,” the man argued.

  “Then take it,” Ivan said to him. “And good luck to ye.” It seemed as simple as that to the dwarf, and he started away to the west, a route to circumvent the destroyed Carradoon and pick up the trail that led into the mountains and back to Spirit Soaring.

  “What is happening to the world, Uncle Ivan?” Hanaleisa whispered.

  “Durned if I know, girl. Durned if I know.”

  CHAPTER 27

  ELSEWHERE LUCIDITY

  Cadderly tapped a finger against his lips as he studied the woman playing out the scene before him. She was talking to Guenhwyvar, he believed, and he couldn’t help but feel like a voyeur as he studied her reenactment of a private moment.

  “Oh, but she’s so pretty and fancy, isn’t she?” Catti-brie said, her hand brushing the air as if she were petting the great panther as it curled near her feet. “With her lace and finery, so tall and so straight, and not a silly word to pass those painted lips, no, no.”

  She was there, but she wasn’t, Cadderly sensed. Her movements were too complete and too complex to be merely a normal memory. No, she was reliving the moment precisely as it had occurred. Catti-brie’s mind was back in time while her physical form was trapped in the current time and space.

  With his unique experience regarding physical aging and regression, Cadderly was struck by the woman’s apparent madness. Was she really mad, he wondered, or was she, perhaps, trapped in a bona fide but unknown series of disjointed bubbles in the vast ocean of time? Cadderly had often pondered the past, had often wondered if each passing moment was a brief observance of an eternal play, or whether the past was truly lost as soon as the next moment was found.

  Watching Catti-brie, it seemed to him that the former wasn’t as unrealistic as logic implied.

  Was there a way to travel in time? Was there a way to bring foresight to those unanticipated preludes to disaster?

  “Do ye think her pretty, Guen?” Catti-brie asked, drawing him from his contemplation.

  The door behind Cadderly opened, and he glanced to see Drizzt enter the room, the drow wincing as soon as he recognized that Catti-brie had entered another of her fits. Cadderly begged him to silence with a wave and a finger over pursed lips, and Drizzt, Catti-brie’s dinner tray in hand, stood very still, staring at his beloved wife.

  “Drizzt thinks her pretty,” Catti-brie continued, oblivious to them. “He goes to Silverymoon whenever he can, and part o’ that’s because he’s thinking Alustriel pretty.” The woman paused and looked up, though surely not at Cadderly and Drizzt, and wore a smile that was both sweet and pained. “I hope he finds love, I do,” she told the panther they could not see. “But not with her, or one o’ her court, for then he’s sure to leave us. I’m wantin’ him happy, but that I could’no’ take.”

  Cadderly looked at Drizzt questioningly.

  “When first we retook Mithral Hall,” he said.

  “You and Lady Alustriel?” Cadderly asked.

  “Friends,” Drizzt replied, never taking his eyes off his wife. “She allowed me passage in Silverymoon, and there I knew I could make great strides toward finding some measure of acceptance in the World Above.” He motioned to Catti-brie. “How long?”

  “She has been in this different place for quite a while.”

  “And there she is my Catti,” Drizzt lamented. “In this elsewhere of her mind, she finds herself.”

  The woman began to shake then, her hands twitching, her head going back, her eyes rolling up to white. The purple glow of faerie fire erupted around her once more and she rose a bit higher from the floor, arms going out wide, her auburn hair blowing in some unfelt wind.

  Drizzt put the tray down and adjusted the eye patch. He hesitated only a few moments, at Cadderly’s insistence, as the priest moved closer to Catti-brie, even dared touch her during the dangerous time of transition. Cadderly closed his eyes and opened his mind to the possibilities swirling in the discordant spasms of the tortured woman.

  He fell back, quickly replaced by Drizzt, who wrapped Catti-brie in a tight hug and eased her to the floor. The drow looked at Cadderly, his expression begging for an explanation, but he saw the priest even more perplexed, wide-eyed and staring at his hand.

  Drizzt, too, took note of the hand that Cadderly had placed upon Catti-brie. What appeared as a blue translucence solidified and became flesh tone once more.

  “What was that?” the drow asked as soon as Catti-brie settled. “I do not know,” Cadderly admitted. “Words I hear too often in these times. “Agreed.”

  “But you seem certain that my wife cannot be saved,” said Drizzt, a sharper tone edging into his voice.

  “I do not wish to give such an impression.”

  “I’ve seen the way you and Jarlaxle shake your heads when the conversation comes to her. You don’t believe we can bring her back to us—not whole, at least. You have lost hope for her, but would you, I wonder, if it was Lady Danica here, in that state, and not Catti-brie?”

  “My friend, surely you don’t—”

  “Am I to surrender my hope as well? Is that what you expect of me?”

  “You’re not the only one here clinging to desperate hope, my friend,” Cadderly scolded.

  Drizzt eased back a bit at that reminder. “Danica will find them,” he offered, but how hollow his words sounded. He continued in a soft voic
e, “I feel as if there is no firmament beneath my feet.”

  Cadderly nodded in sympathy.

  “Should I battle the dracolich with the hope that in its defeat, I will find again my wife?” Drizzt blurted, his voice rising again. “Or should I battle the beast with rage because I will never again find her?”

  “You ask of me … these are questions …” Cadderly blew a heavy sigh and lifted his hands, helpless. “I do not know, Drizzt Do’Urden. Nothing can be certain regarding Catti-brie.”

  “We know she’s mad.”

  Cadderly started to reply, “Do we?” but he held it back, not wishing to involve Drizzt in his earlier ponderings.

  Was Catti-brie truly insane, or was she reacting rationally to the reality that was presented to her? Was she re-living her life out of sequence or was she truly returning to those bubbles of time-space and experiencing those moments as reality?

  The priest shook his head, for he had no time to travel the possibilities of such a line of reasoning, particularly since the scholars and sages, and the great wizards and great priests who had visited Spirit Soaring had thoroughly dismissed any such possibility of traveling freely through time.

  “But madness can be a temporary thing,” Drizzt remarked. “And yet, you and Jarlaxle think her lost forever. Why?”

  “When the madness is tortured enough, the mind can be permanently wounded,” Cadderly replied, his dour tone making it clear that such was an almost certain outcome and not a remote possibility. “And your wife’s madness seems tortured, indeed. I fear—Jarlaxle and I fear—that even if the spell that is upon her is somehow ended, a terrible scar will remain.”

  “You fear, but you do not know.”

  Cadderly nodded, conceding the point. “And I have witnessed miracles before, my friend. In this very place. Do not surrender your hope.”