The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel)
Page 1
Pain in the old man’s hands. An ache from knuckle to knuckle to knuckle. A weakness of his grip. He bundled his hands in the sleeves of his robe and rubbed them together to ease the hurt, but it rippled from knuckle to wrist, and then from wrist to the bones of his thin, wrinkled arms. His world was shrinking away from him, swirling into a vortex of dull, constant pain.
The Old Stargazer had lived far longer than was natural, far longer than was safe. He felt it in his body and he felt it in his spirit, but he carried on. He had made his deals, and he had offered his sacrifices. Bits of him were gone for good—were in the hands of things both old and terrible. But to whom he had given so very much, he had gotten much in return: Longevity. Insight. Power. So much power. All to keep his home safe. All to keep generation after generation protected. All to let the village of Haven remain untouched through the rise and fall of an empire, and through the ebb and flow of evil. Through law and through chaos. Through prosperity and trial.
There was pain in the old man’s hands. His eyes were dim and did not work as they once had. His fingertips were no longer quick and nimble. His neck was stiff and slightly curved. His body and spirit crept ever so slowly awake in the early morning, and failed to stay alert as the day progressed. He often slept on his feet—when he observed the stars in his scrying crystals and the eyepiece of his telescope, or stood on his balcony surveying Haven. He did not work the fine mechanisms that moved the mirrors and concave lenses of his apparatus with the accuracy he once had. The whispering spirits spoke to him more quietly than ever, and he could no longer make out much of what they were saying. But that was not the worst of it.
Ioun bless me, I don’t know where my mind is going.
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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® novel line
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The Last Garrison
Matthew Beard
Dungeons & Dragons
THE LAST GARRISON
©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC.
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Cover art by: Wayne Reynolds
eISBN: 978-0-7869-5942-6
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www.DungeonsandDragons.com
v3.1
For my girlfriend Abby and my wife Jessica.
Contents
Cover
Other Books in the Series
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
About the Author
In the shadow of empires, the past echoes in the legends of heroes. Civilizations rise and crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and nature claim what the higher races leave behind, while chaos and darkness fill the void. Each new realm must make its mark anew on the world rather than build on the progress of its predecessors.
Numerous civilized races populate this wondrous and riotous world of Dungeons & Dragons. In the early days, the mightiest among them ruled. Empires based on the power of giants, dragons, and even devils rose, warred, and eventually fell, leaving ruin and a changed world in their wake. Later, kingdoms carved by mortals appeared like the glimmer of stars, only to be swallowed as if by clouds on a black night.
Where civilization failed, traces remain. Ruins dot the world, hidden by an ever-encroaching wilderness that shelters unnamed horrors. Lost knowledge lingers in these places. Ancient magic set in motion by forgotten hands still flows in them. Cities and towns still stand, where inhabitants live, work, and seek shelter from the dangers of the wider world. New communities spring up where the bold have seized territory from rough country, but few common folk ever wander far afield. Trade and travel are the purview of the ambitious, the brave, and the desperate. They are wizards and warriors who carry on traditions that date to ancient times. Still others innovate, or simply learn to fight as necessity dictates, forging a unique path.
Truly special individuals are rare. An extraordinary few master their arts in ways beyond what is required for mere survival or protection. For good or ill, such people rise up to take on more than any mundane person dares. Some even become legends.
These are the stories of those select few …
Pain in the old man’s hands. An ache from knuckle to knuckle to knuckle. A weakness of his grip. He bundled his hands in the sleeves of his robe and rubbed them together to ease the hurt, but it rippled from knuckle to wrist, and then from wrist to the bones of his thin, wrinkled arms. His world was shrinking away from him, swirling into a vortex of dull, constant pain.
The Old Stargazer had lived far longer than was natural, far longer than was safe. He felt it in his body and he felt it in his spirit, but he carried on. He had made his deals, and he had offered his sacrifices. Bits of him were gone for good—were in the hands of things both old and terrible. But to whom he had given so very much, he had gotten much in return: Longevity. Insight. Power. So much power. All to keep his home safe. All to keep generation after generation protected. All to let the village of Haven remain untouched through the rise and fall of an empire, and through the ebb and flow of evil. Through law and through chaos. Through prosperity and trial.
There was pain in the old man’s hands. His eyes were dim and did not work as they once had. His fingertips were no longer quick and nimble. His neck was stiff and slightly curved. His body and spirit crept ever so slowly awake in the early morning, and failed to stay alert as the day progressed. He often slept on his feet—when he observed the stars in his scrying crystals and the eyepiece of his telescope, or stood on his balcony surveying Haven. He did not work the fine mechanisms that moved the mirrors and concave lenses of his apparatus with the accuracy he once had. The whispering spirits spoke to him more quietly than ever, and he could no longer make out much of what they were saying. But that was not the worst of it.
Ioun bless me, I don’t know where my mind is going.
The thought made him smile, but without joy. Now I turn
to the gods, he thought. After all this time spent in communion with a very different kind of power. Now that it is far too late to request their attention, I turn to them. Kolber, his dear friend from many, many decades back, would laugh to know the Old Stargazer entertained any such longing for the favor of the gods—Ioun especially.
Kolber. The Axe of Ioun. His gleaming shield. His silver eyes. Indomitable. His axe aloft and bloody. His cry rattling the bones of his enemies. Crowned with silver light, abyssal blood marking his fists. A crack in his smile. A vortex at his feet. Crooked, sharpened teeth. A shadow covers him over. A howl. Kolber triumphant over dozens. Kolber striking down the darkness, bringing secrets to light for Ioun. Shouting his thanks to his god, and laughing at his luck. Kolber, his dear friend, lost to the years.
Or Galsey, the archer, always by their side. Fey trickster. Cocksure shot who would, it seemed, melt away when a battle commenced. Not out of cowardice, though. After a victory, a pile of bodies, arrows in their chests. Galsey and his shining eyes. Galsey and his missing finger. Galsey cackling at his own terrible jokes.
The Old Stargazer howled in his study; startled back out of the daydream of his friends. He sat in his chair. Where is my mind? he wondered. Where is it going? There was a time when even the most fleeting ponder, the simplest musing, was—in a voice that was not his own—answered in some manner or another. No more, though. The allies—the creatures beyond the stars who spoke to him, who granted him power, who loaned him wisdom, who extended his life—were still with him. He could feel them. Though now they were speaking a new language. They were whispering to one another. They were letting his body fail him. There had always been a barrier between himself and them—by virtue of the strength of his will, he was his own man regardless of his pacts. This barrier was breaking down. He suspected that it was them pounding away at it, breaking stones from the wall. They were planning something. They had designs. They were looking through him. Looking past to the world around him. He worked hard to keep them at bay, but he knew they were gaining ground. And something else: it seemed that they were laughing at him. His skull entombed their laughter. How long would they be contained?
Voices in the old man’s head. Jibes and discouraging sentiments. The creatures, the once fellow travelers—that advised him, that helped him, that gave him access to ever more powerful magic—were now adversaries. And though they felt as if they were within him, he perceived only that he fought with himself. It exhausted him. It distracted him. It drained away his spirit. And always, the pain.
So much pain. So much pain in the old man’s hands.
CHAPTER ONE
For Nergei, there may as well have been no world beyond Haven. He knew everything beyond the village only from the maps in his master’s books—thin black lines on paper, city names and features illustrated in miniature. His world was as small as his understanding, he thought.
He had Haven, a small village in a sloping valley, surrounded on all sides by high mountains. To the east, the sea. To the west, the plains and the cities of a world the villagers rarely thought about, and where they rarely went. They preferred the safety of their home, preferred to hunt and farm, preferred to hide away from whatever lay beyond the village confines, the woods to one side and a steep incline to the other. To the south, a melt-water river flowed west, searching for a path down the mountain. Sometimes Nergei wished he was as brave. There was little for him in Haven other than his service to his master. If he had been any other villager, he would’ve known nothing but his small village life. But serving his master had made him aware of just how big the world truly was.
His master’s world was vast. The man, the Old Stargazer, lived in an isolated and old structure up a path to the east. An observatory, he called it, because he spent his time on a rooftop deck observing the heavens. (He also used it to watch over Haven. He had long been its protector.)
Nergei’s knowledge of his master’s arcane art was rudimentary, but he was aware that the old man was, in fact, in league with the stars in some way. He took notes. He drew maps of the locations of the stars. He even spoke to them. His master’s domain was both the heavens and the world. Nergei’s, though, was just the observatory, and the village shops, and a small section of the woods where he was sent with a basket and a parchment filled with drawings of the things his master required.
The village had a square in the center where the people of Haven gathered to trade and celebrate. It had a great hall where the council and the village chief, the Crook of Haven, met to plan out the particulars of their small lives. It had a small temple with two priests, adepts of the sun god Pelor, because even though the old man offered them protection, the villagers made sure to give a small part of their devotion to the one who helped their harvest come in every year, who kept them not just safe, but fed. The farmland, laid out in widening rings made flat on the gentle village slope, was not much, but enough for the villagers to squabble over now and then. The hunting in the woods to the west was regular. The village was hidden and life was quiet. Nergei longed for something, but was never clear about what. So, instead, he worked.
The master had sent Nergei into the woods to gather hyssop for afternoon tea, but the tea would be late; thanks to the arrival of the others in the clearing where Nergei had been searching. Unable to move from his hiding place behind a felled hardwood three times the breadth of the village’s biggest men, Nergei could only listen to the voices on the other side of the fallen trunk. While he listened, he practiced slowing his breathing and calming his blood as the Old Stargazer had taught him, so that he would not panic or cry out, no matter what he heard.
It was hard—much harder than usual. The reasons were legion. The first was that two of the voices on the other side of the near-wall of wood belonged to Kohel and Padlur. Kohel was the village chief’s son, and Padlur was the strongest of all the boys Nergei’s age, capable of running faster, jumping higher, and pulling a heavier bow than any of the others. Together, they were the worst of the boys who tormented Nergei whenever he passed through the village in the robes the old master insisted he wear, the pouches he insisted Nergei carry, all his wardrobe a contrast to their heavier leathers and animal hides, their belts slung with dagger and quiver—the trappings of hunter and warrior instead of the scholarly, the weak. That was how the young in Haven viewed anything to do with the observatory, it having been many years since the Old Stargazer had been called upon by the villagers for anything. Memory was often short, and some tales were no longer told. The source of the old man’s power—strange, dark, and uncommon in the villager’s view—relegated most stories about him to whispers among the elderly, scary tales meant to protect the children’s innocence. No one except Nergei and some of those same old men knew that the Old Stargazer had once stood at the center of Haven’s life, participating in generation after generation of the village, without question or comment about his long life and the way he never seemed to age.
It was not so now, had not been as long as Nergei had been alive. But the Old Stargazer had told him tales of the old days, and Nergei believed them, for he had never known his master to lie.
His master could be many things—quiet, distant, and cruel or melancholy and kind—but a liar was not one of them.
Kohel and Padlur together was the first reason for Nergei’s still-unslowed breath, his too-quick pulse. Luzhon was the other.
It was the presence of Luzhon that doomed Nergei, that guaranteed he would not remain hidden from his bullies as he had so many other times, in all the hiding places a boy as weak as he learned to love: the dusty attics, the quiet spots behind houses, the farthest bench back in the meeting halls, and the deepest part of the forest near Haven.
He continued to try to slow his breathing, as he had been taught, but a forceful thump against the opposite side of the trunk broke any chance of Nergei entering a meditative state. Disrupted, he allowed his curiosity to overtake his fear, began to make the long slink around the edge of the trunk, whe
re he might be able to peek through the berry-choked bramble, a thick patch of brush grown in newly sunlit space caused by the falling of the tree, the removal of its leafy canopy.
He was halfway around the trunk when he felt the tree move again. He stopped, closed his eyes, but saw it there anyway: Kohel, pressing himself against Luzhon. Kohel, saying, “It’s only us. Only us. No one will see.”
Of course it wasn’t only them—Padlur was right there, laughing, and then there was Nergei, hidden but still able to bear witness.
“We are not alone,” Luzhon replied. Her voice lumped Nergei’s throat, added to his urgency. “And we are not promised to each other.”
Kohel snickered. “Not yet, but soon. I am to come into my father’s holdings, and then we shall be matched. So why wait?”
Even though Nergei could not yet see the trio, he had seen Kohel rehearse his flirtation before, had seen him press himself to other, less-comely versions of Luzhon throughout the village. In his mind’s eye—in that imagination that so often tortured Nergei with what he could not have—he saw Kohel prod the girl’s ribs with his blunt hands, saw him pull her to him. Nergei knew she would push back, but not as he would have her do. In his imagination—if not in fact—her push was flirtatious, rather than serious, because no one pushed Kohel away, not in the end, not if they wanted their fathers to retain their seats in the village council, or for their mothers their pick of the best plots for growing wheat and barley on the communal terraces carved out of the rock. Even beyond all thought of family loyalty, each and every girl in the village had been enticed by Kohel’s attentions at one time, because even with his mischievous nature and oft-discussed reputation, he was by any objective measure a handsome young man. Willful and self-involved, devious and unreliable, but strong and sturdy, unblemished and dark. That was Kohel, son of the village chief.