Prince of Ravens: A Forgotten Realms Novel

by Richard Baker

  The sorcerers glanced at Jack and went back to their work. Jack simply stepped forward and thrust his rapier straight at Jezzryd’s heart—but an inch before the steel point pierced the sorcerer’s robes, a green field flashed into visibility around Jezzryd’s body, stopping the point as surely as if Jack had stabbed a stone wall. An electric jolt like a buzzing of angry wasps ran up the hilt and through Jack’s arm, so sharp and intense that he dropped his blade with a cry of pain. Ten feet away, Kurzen fared no better—the warhammer he leveled at Jaeren’s skull rebounded with such force that he staggered and fell, swearing.

  “Your efforts are futile, Lord Wildhame,” Jezzryd remarked. “But you may continue them if you wish.”

  Kurzen picked himself up and tried to bodily tackle Jaeren, but he rebounded as before. “Damn it all,” he growled. “Jack, what do we do?”

  Jack stared, helpless. He could feel the mounting power of the mythal. The sorcerers could scour all life from the plaza with a mere thought if they decided to. In pure desperation he shouted, “Guard me!” and stepped forward to brush his fingertips against the mythal stone, reaching out with his arcane senses and opening himself to the intangible flow of mystic energies that seethed around the wild mythal.

  The torrent was powerful enough to stagger him where he stood, but he kept his feet and fixed his mind on sending the device into dormancy again. To his amazement the raging column of magic visibly dimmed and weakened … but then Jaeren and Jezzryd, standing on the opposite sides of the stone, detected his interference and redoubled their own efforts to feed the stone’s churning power. “You have outlived your usefulness, Ravenwild!” Jaeren snarled. “Continue this interference at peril of your life!”

  “I believe I will take my chances,” Jack replied. He tried to shape a force-missile spell to blast the drow sorcerer, but the instant he diverted his attention from the struggle for control of the mythal’s power Jaeren shaped the torrent into a blazing emerald flame that nearly incinerated him on the spot. Only a desperate mental lunge for the unseen strands of power saved Jack; he retaliated with the same attack, but Jezzryd interposed an impenetrable barrier, protecting his brother. The mythal’s power was a knife, lethal and beautiful, poised directly between them—and like three warriors struggling over a single blade, whichever one of them lost his focus or will first would die.

  In the corner of his eye Jack observed the battle raging around the mythal plaza. A drow warrior ran through the tattooed fighter Monagh from behind, slaying him as he battled two other dark elves. The guard-sergeant Sinafae leveled her crossbow at Jack, but Kurzen barreled into the dark elf and knocked her down. Sinafae slashed Kurzen across the midsection with the short sword in her other hand, but the dwarf’s armor held, and he smashed her shoulder and breastbone with his hammer. Narm tore into drow warriors with a berserker’s fury, leaping and darting like a cornered tiger.

  In the center of the plaza, Myrkyssa Jelan faced Dresimil Chûmavh. “I have seen that no spell can harm you,” Dresimil snarled at the Warlord, “but Lolth strengthens my hand, human. Let us see whether you are immune to my mace.” An aura of pale white fire seemed to surround the drow marquise, empowering her with the Spider Queen’s blessing; the silver scepter in her hands flew and struck like a switch of willow, but each blow shattered flagstones or pulverized blocks in the walls. It was all Jelan could do to avoid Dresimil’s attacks.

  Jaeren and Jezzryd’s grasp on the wild mythal grew ever stronger, and Jack felt his hold beginning to slip. Jezzryd shielded his brother, guarding for both of them, while Jaeren bent his full attention to Jack’s destruction. One opponent Jack might have been able to stand against; after all, it was his mythal. But two working together were rapidly overwhelming him.

  “Excellent, my brother!” Jaeren shouted within the coruscating sheets of raw magic. “Feed me more strength, so that I may finish this impudent human!” Jezzryd heard his twin and responded, pouring his strength into the mythal. Jack’s knees buckled and he sagged to the floor, fighting for nothing more than sheer survival.

  Behind him, Dresimil cornered Myrkyssa. “And you were supposed to be impossible to defeat,” she laughed, and drew back for one blow of overwhelming strength. The silver mace rose high into the air, and then came down—but instead of attempting to parry the blow that could not be stopped, Jelan dropped her katana, reached up with her hands to seize Dresimil’s hands on the grip of the mace, and allowed herself to fall under the blow. With all her strength she pulled down on the mace, adding her strength to Dresimil’s Lolth-granted might, and allowed the drow noblewoman to overbalance. Dresimil struck the cold flagstones face-first, landing on her head and shoulders as she flipped over Jelan. Dresimil struggled to right herself, but Jelan was quicker. She seized the katana on the floor beside her, gripped it at hilt and mid-blade, and punched ten inches of its chisel-like point through the mail covering Dresimil’s chest.

  Myrkyssa Jelan rolled to her feet and stood. “And you supposed that magic made you invulnerable,” she said. “Give your dark goddess my regards.” She looked for another foe, just as one of Dresimil’s bodyguards nearly killed her with a sword-slash across the ribs. Jelan cried out and staggered back, a hand clapped across her wound, but before the dark elf could finish her, a small crossbow quarrel appeared in his left cheek, and he sagged to the ground unconscious. Arlith bared her teeth in a fierce grin from her place at the edge of the plaza and drew back her string for another shot.

  Emerald fire crackled around Jack, mere inches from consuming him. He felt his strength beginning to give out … but Myrkyssa’s ploy suggested a desperate gambit. Rather than directly resisting Jaeren’s power, he abruptly shifted the nature of his defense, throwing his effort into deflecting Jaeren’s attack toward the mythal itself and recklessly drawing as much power as he could to aid the effort. The mythal’s magic was caught, absorbed, and magnified to be returned an instant later. With each heartbeat the magical conflagration doubled and redoubled in strength.

  Jaeren sensed the danger. “You fool, stop!” he shouted at Jack. “You will destroy us all!” He tried to arrest the mythal’s power and regain control of its energy, but Jezzryd was slower to perceive the danger and worked to shield his brother with ever more determination. Now Jack and Jezzryd worked together to stoke the fires of the mythal, while Jaeren frantically tried to rein in the mounting power. Before Jack the mythal stone grew completely transparent, the stone only a hint of dark glass encasing a blazing emerald fire that was too bright to look at. Bolts of green incandescence escaped from the blaze, lancing randomly across the plaza to pulverize ancient ruins or strike down unlucky warriors. Drow and surface adventurers alike retreated from the fierce blaze. Half-blinded by the day-like brilliance and fighting without the leadership of Dresimil, the dark elves wavered and began to break.

  The others standing near felt the mythal’s strain, too. Halamar turned a stricken look on the rogue and shouted, “Flee, Jack! It’s going to shatter!” But Jack hardly heard him; his blood sang with the mythal’s unquenchable fire, and for one dizzy instant he teetered on the brink of the precipice. Then, suddenly, he felt the crumbling of the last wards and checks designed long ago to preserve the mighty device from being consumed by the magic it controlled. He released his grasp on the mythal and staggered back; Jaeren and Jezzryd could not spare even the eyeblink of attention it would take to destroy him, as the drow sorcerers tried to bring under control something that had slipped all bounds of mortal magic.

  Shimmering cracks appeared in the mythal stone, and everyone still fighting in the plaza, drow and non-drow alike, abandoned their duels to distance themselves from the incipient disaster. Jack staggered away, suddenly exhausted beyond all measure. He had no idea what would happen when the mythal failed, but whatever it was, there could surely be no harm in being as far from the stone as possible. He decided on a sturdy old wall that looked like it might offer some shelter … but then he found his feet rooted to the ground. He looked back
in horror, and saw Dresimil Chûmavh—lying on the ground, blood bubbling from her lips—holding a fist clenched in front of her, her eyes fixed on him. “Not so fast, Jack,” she rasped. “You can die where you stand, or you can help my brothers contain the mythal.”

  Jack strained to escape the spell of holding, but it was useless—he was unable to take another step. He glanced once more at the mythal, now turning black with the virulence of its power, and averted his face. Just then, Myrkyssa Jelan ran back onto the plaza, and moved to shield him from the mythal with her body. “You are insane!” he shouted against the howling of the unrestrained magic.

  “On the contrary, I have confidence in my curse,” she replied. The mythal gave one final tortured blast of energy toward the cavern ceiling, and Jelan suddenly hugged Jack as tightly as she could, shielding him. Then the mythal exploded. Wild magic lashed and flailed the ancient ruins, shattering buildings and bringing huge falls of rock and dust from the cavern ceiling far overhead. Jack felt the mythal’s end as if someone had reached into the very core of his being and severed some taut cord with a sharp knife. Jaeren and Jezzryd, standing only ten feet away, simply disintegrated in the wash of arcane power. Dresimil was blasted into an unyielding stone wall with enough force to break every bone in her dying body; drow and adventurers a hundred yards away were thrown from their feet. But the raving emerald streams passed around Myrkyssa Jelan … and Jack as well, guarded by her antimagic.

  Echoes of thunder rolled through the cavern as blackness descended once more. Jack blinked away bright green after-images that dotted his vision and found his feet free to move. He pulled away from Jelan with a simple nod of thanks, and then looked around the plaza. Slowly, his surviving comrades were standing up and checking themselves for injury. Halamar and Kurzen appeared unharmed; Narm lay unconscious, apparently knocked out by a chunk of flying masonry, and the priest Wulfrad had been crushed under a cart-sized stalactite that lay broken around his body.

  “Jack! Jack!” The rogue looked up and saw Seila and her father hurrying down the avenue leading to the plaza, columns of armsmen flanking them on each side. “Are you hurt?”

  “Seila?” Jack called. He picked his way through the wreckage, and then ran over to catch her in his arms.

  Jelan stood staring at the wreckage of the wild mythal. She held up her hand and, with a small frown of concentration, evoked a small green flame from her fingertip. “Remarkable,” she breathed. “I can feel the substance of magic. I can feel it!”

  “Is that it, then?” Norwood wondered aloud. “Are they truly beaten?”

  Jack looked around for more dark elves, anticipating that they might be regrouping in the shadows—but there were no conscious drow in sight. He’d seen Jaeren, Jezzryd, and Dresimil killed outright, and even if some cousin or another survived to claim leadership of House Chûmavh, most of their warriors and slave monsters had been wiped out in Norwood’s assault. Fetterfist, Cailek Balathorp, was dead under Jack’s own blade … but there were certainly any number of slaves to rescue.

  A small, wiry figure groaned and stirred quite close to the mythal’s resting place, then slowly pushed himself to his feet. Jack frowned, wondering who it was … and found himself staring at his own visage, although somewhat burned and disheveled from the force of the explosion. The shadow-double met Jack’s eyes, smirking in silence, and then darted off into the smoke and gloom of the ruined city. Jack took two quick steps and seized a drow crossbow to bring down the creature before he got away, but it was too late—by the time he had the weapon in hand, the simulacrum was nowhere in sight.

  “What was that, Jack?” Seila asked.

  “No one of consequence,” Jack said slowly. Apparently the simulacrum was disheveled enough that Seila hadn’t noticed the resemblance. Tarandor must have indeed found his way down to Chûmavhraele and interred his double in the wild mythal sometime in the last few days before the attack on Blackwood Manor and Norwood’s attack. He wondered if the abjurer would discover that the imprisoned Jack was now free, and decided it didn’t matter. Whatever Tarandor feared, the ancient mythal stone was a smoking heap of rubble, and even Jack, dabbler and dilettante that he was, could see that there was no magic that could ever make it whole again.

  Halamar and Kurzen limped up, joined a moment later by Jelan. “Well, I expect that bounced every wizard within a thousand miles out of his bed,” Halamar remarked. “Did you have to destroy the thing, Jack? Great magics like that are rare wonders indeed, you know.”

  “It was that, or let the drow have it for their own. I don’t want to think about what Dresimil and her brothers would have done with the wild mythal; it was too powerful a weapon to leave in anyone’s hands,” Jack answered. “In fact, Mystra herself told me as much once upon a time. I only hope there is not too great an area of dead magic left behind. Raven’s Bluff without magic would be little fun.”

  Halamar frowned. “Dead magic? The arcane currents flow unconstrained, Jack.”

  Jack blinked. “I do not sense them,” he said. He glanced at Jelan, and a sudden suspicion came to him. His magic was born of the wild mythal, in its way. Had he just deprived himself of his own sorcery? Or had Myrkyssa Jelan’s curse been transferred to him when the overwhelming power of the mythal’s destruction had washed over them both? He tried a minor cantrip, summoning up a light spell … but absolutely nothing happened. Quickly he tried several more spells; he might as well have been making up nonsense. “My magic’s gone,” he groaned.

  Myrkyssa Jelan bowed her head. “If I caused it, Jack, then I am sincerely sorry; I only meant to see you spared if I could manage it.” Then she looked up with a wry smile. “And yet irony is again served; you once deprived me of my magic, and now perhaps I have deprived you of yours. However, look at it like this: You may find there are certain advantages to learning to rely on wits, character, and hard work alone.”

  Jack made a small strangled sound in his throat. “What a horrible thing to say.”

  Seila came to Jack’s side and slipped her arm around his waist again, quietly comforting him. She looked around the ruined plaza and gave a small shake of her head. “It seems that we are done here,” she said. “What do we do now?”

  “Now?” Jack answered. He stood silent for a moment, wondering whether his magic was indeed gone forever or merely dormant for a time, and then shook off his self-pity with a low laugh. He stepped back to kiss her hand, rendering a florid bow. “Now, my dear, we go home, enjoy a flagon of the best wine gold can buy, and celebrate! I, for one, am through with the Underdark, the drow, and all their works.”

  Seila laughed, and kissed Jack until his heart thundered in his chest; and he was consoled by the thought that there was more than one sort of magic in the world.

  RICHARD BAKER IS A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR AND AWARD-winning game designer, and one of the principal architects of the new edition of the Forgotten Realms® campaign setting. A former Navy officer, he currently resides in Western Washington.

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