Cry of the Ghost Wolf
Page 1
TIME IS RUNNING OUT …
Gleed and Ashiin had trained her. Kesh Naan had given her wisdom. Nendawen had given her new birth. But the old Hweilan still haunted her. And it was time to lay that ghost to rest.
THE FINAL BATTLE HAS BEGUN …
Hweilan clenched her fists and closed her eyes. Every instinct in the human part of her brain told her to run away from the tide into which she was wading—that it meant not just death, but something far worse. Something not meant for this world. A profanity against creation itself.
BUT THE HAND OF THE HUNTER IS NOT ALONE.
Hweilan felt them all around her—those who had left this world but still watched with their gods, giving strength to those who stayed behind to continue the fight.
Time is running out.
Help me.
CHOSEN OF NENDAWEN
Book I
The Fall of Highwatch
Book II
Hand of the Hunter
Book III
Cry of the Ghost Wolf
ALSO BY
MARK SEHESTEDT
THE WIZARDS
Frostfell
Slavers stole her son and she would sacrifice everything to get him back. In the uncaring, frozen north, will it be enough?
THE CITADELS
Sentinelspire
With the powers of an archdruid at hand, the mad master of the fortress of Sentinelspire will bring death to more than just his enemies—he will call down doom on all of Faerûn.
Chosen of Nendawen, Book III
CRY OF THE GHOST WOLF
©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Hasbro SA, represented by Hasbro Europe, Stockley Park. UB11 1AZ. UK.
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All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Cover art by: Jaime Jones
Map by: Robert Lazzaretti
eISBN: 978-0-7869-5943-3
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v3.1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Ed Greenwood, for creating such a vast world for the rest of us to play in.
Special thanks to Elizabeth Mills for her editorial expertise and constant creative encouragement. My fingers made it through the book intact, though I’m not sure the same can be said of Liz’s nerves.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Map
Prologue
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
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
PROLOGUE
THE CANDLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FLOOR GUTTERED, drowning in its own wax. Soon the flame would die, plunging the stone chamber into absolute blackness. Dim as the light was, though, Argalath could not bear to look at it. Its meager glow stabbed into the back of his skull like hot needles. It had been a long day, fraught with effort, and his strength was failing him. Despite the power that burned inside him, his body would have to rest soon.
He sat cross-legged on the stone floor. He must hold the power in check. But it was more of a struggle with each moment. If she didn’t return soon …
When Jagun Ghen had first possessed Argalath, joining with him at the most elemental level, it had felt like riding the back of a dragon—lord and master of all he desired. Argalath could do so much more now. The price he paid had been worth it. But over the years, he had begun to suspect that the power was consuming him, like the wick’s fire ate away the candle wax., Each time he allowed Jagun Ghen to bleed through, it left Argalath feeling like a burst wineskin. And the distinction between them … he wasn’t sure it was there anymore. He and the thing of flame and hunger had become one, and darkness was his lone comfort from the burning. Only in darkness could Argalath touch the last of his humanity. He looked down at his hands in his lap. They were shaking like those of an old man.
The air in the room stirred, causing the candle flame to dance.
“Kathkur returns,” said Guric, his voice coming out of the darkness. The former lord of Highwatch stood against the far wall where the light of the flame could not reach.
The breeze in the room rose to a scream, snuffing out the candle and plunging them into absolute darkness. Argalath allowed himself a moment of relief.
And then the air in the middle of the room split. Black as the chamber was, Argalath could see with more than his eyes, and he watched the thing surge into the room.
Kathkur stepped through the door, but Argalath saw at once that the demon wore a new form. The woman Merah was gone, and the demon stood clad in the frame of a tall eladrin, his face and hair caked in drying blood and grit. The portal closed behind him and he stood, the symbol gouged onto his forehead still dripping tiny bits of red-orange light. The eladrin swayed on his feet a moment, then fixed his gaze on Argalath. “She was there.”
It took Argalath a moment to grasp his meaning. “The Hand?” he said. “She is with Maaqua already?”
Kathkur growled his assent.
“Why didn’t you kill her?”
“It was all I could do to get away. This one … is not like the others. Far more powerful. She … she reeks of … of him. His stench bleeds out of her pores. I could not go near her. Not alone.”
The symbol on the eladrin’s forehead spit one last flicker and died. He took a lurching step forward and fell to his hands and knees, his long hair falling over his face. A tremor passed through his body so violently that Argalath heard his teeth clack together.
Then Arga
lath sensed the power change in the room, like a chord in which one note suddenly turned high and shrill. Guric must have sensed it, too, for he rushed forward. The eladrin shrieked, thrust one fist in front of him, and the air in the room swirled and coalesced into a solid current that he sent outward like a whip. Guric’s body took the brunt of it, and he flew against the wall with bone-crunching force.
“Let me go!” the eladrin screamed. “Hweilan, help me!”
Jagun Ghen stirred inside Argalath, like a dragon rising from its nest. The demon’s power combined with that of Argalath’s spellscar, and the blue skin that swirled and splotched over his entire body flared with a sickly blue light. Argalath’s muscles cramped, and he felt his eyeballs turning up in his skull.
Power surged in him, filling him with fire, both agony and ecstasy, like dark wine running through the threads of cloth, staining it. Argalath felt it, reveled in the strength that connected him to everything in the room.
Like a spider detects the vibration of one thread and so knows where the moth struggles in its web, Argalath could feel the eladrin struggling against Kathkur. Argalath followed, writhing under skin, through muscle, flowing over bone until he found the vessel that supplied the brain with blood. Argalath surrounded it, like water covering a root, and when it was completely enmeshed, Argalath flexed. His power moved like water no longer, but solidified and tightened, like jagged ice. Argalath groaned at the pain this caused his own body, but he did not weaken his grip.
The eladrin’s cries of fury and defiance turned to pain. “Let me …! Hweil—!”
And then he pitched forward.
Argalath released the power. He wanted the eladrin unconscious, not dead. Hot blood resumed its flow into the eladrin’s brain. The glow of Argalath’s spellscar faded, and the last of the power dissipated, like smoke scattered by cold winds.
He crumpled to the floor. As the last fragment of consciousness shattered and fled from him, he thought he heard, just for a moment, the sound of laughter—a rumble of consuming fire.
CHAPTER ONE
HOWLING. IT FILLED HWEILAN’S EARS, AND HER FIRST thought was that the Master was coming for her again. Hunting her. He would find her. And he would kill her teacher while she watched.
Hweilan had grown up listening to wolf songs, and they had never before frightened her. Scith had taught her all about the animals held in great respect by the Nar people. It was the wolves that had first taught men to hunt.
But since that night in the Feywild when Nendawen hunted her and she swore herself to him, the howling had haunted her dreams. It was a reminder that the Master was never far away.
She sat up.
The sheer weight of the evening sky almost pressed her back down again. No forest. No Feywild. She sat near the crest of a long highland, looking down upon a gold and green steppe that disappeared into forever. She could see from horizon to horizon in every direction. Not even a wisp of cloud marred the firmament. Off to her left, where heaven met earth, the sky still glowed a pale blue where the sun had just dipped beneath the rim of the world, but in the east darkness was swiftly gaining hold, and the first stars were already out.
Howls drifted over her again, as if borne on the breeze hissing through the grass. Looking down into the lowlands, she saw a stain marring the steppe, a vast dark blotch moving across the land. Looking closer, she saw it was not a solid mass but made up of many hundreds of shapes moving across the grassland. Swiftstags or something very like them.
Other shapes, some dark, some pale as snowflakes, nipped at the edge of the vast herd. Wolves.
Hunters. Like you.
The voice spoke directly into her mind, but she sensed something watching her and turned.
On the crest behind her, no more than a few paces away, stood a wolf, white as frost. More milled around behind him—a gray-and-white female, her tail held high, signifying her as the chief’s mate. A huge male, brown as a cave bear. And others, some wise and lean from years of hunting; others small and hale, barely more than pups. As Hweilan’s gaze took them in, stars blazed to life in the sky overhead, and their light glinted off the wolves’ coats in dozens of colors, like moonlight glinting off ice. The chief wolf’s eyes drew her in. The pupils were black and wide in the dying light, but around them was a blue that shone like a cloudless winter sky.
Well met, Hweilan.
“Where am I?” she said. She looked down and saw that she was still dressed in the clothes she had been wearing when … when … what? “How did I get here?”
The wolf tilted its head, and something about it hinted at a smile.
“Who are you?” she asked.
We are always with you. Watching.
Thin is the veil that separates us.
Where had she heard that before? And then she remembered. On that day in the Feywild when Gleed had first taught her to cleanse the demons from the sacred weapons of the Master. She had seen Scith and her parents in the midst of the Witness Cloud. And the ghost wolves.
“Hweilan!”
A new voice intruded on her thoughts with so much force that it brought a twinge of pain to her head. It seemed to come from both sky and earth, but she thought she recognized it. Almost.
Time is running out, said the wolf.
“Time for what?” she said. “Who are—?”
“Hweilan!”
The voice sounded familiar, but under it she could hear a deeper sound, like distant thunder. It grew stronger by the moment, and Hweilan felt the ground trembling. She looked back down the slope and saw that the herd of swiftstags had turned. The wolves were driving them uphill, straight for her. Their hooves tore the soil, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake. Their great antlers made them look like a leafless forest on the move.
“Hweilan, please w—!”
The roar of thousands of hooves drowned out the rest of the words. And then she saw it. Amid the herd, just behind the lead stags, ran another antlered shape, this one on two legs. A mask of bone hid his features, but green light, hot and alive, burned from the sockets. He held a massive black iron spear in one hand, and his other hand, tipped in sharp claws, dripped fresh blood.
“Hweilan, you have to wake up!”
This time the voice didn’t seem to come from all around but right in her ears. Even as the first of the beasts ran past her and the antlered hunter raised his spear, the sky and grasslands tore apart, like smoke scattered by the breeze. The stars winked out. She turned to run, and for a moment, the wolf before her filled all the world, its eyes shining like the sun through high clouds, and then he and his pack were gone, leaving darkness behind.
“Hweilan?”
She opened her eyes and saw the outline of a head and shoulders bending over her. But no antlers. The head turned, just slightly, looking beyond her, and dim light lit up his profile. Darric.
“She’s coming to,” he said.
Hweilan pushed herself up on her elbows. Darric, who had been shaking her shoulders, sat back. Behind him, the skinny Damaran who talked too much—Jaden, she remembered—was shivering on the ground with his back against a stone wall. Hweilan looked around and saw the older knight Valsun sitting not far behind her. Frost clotted his beard from his own frozen breath.
Rock walls riddled with holes and cracks hemmed them in on every side, the farthest of them no more than a few paces away. The walls rose over them a good fifteen feet or more where they ended in a ceiling of gray sky. With all the holes in the rock, Hweilan knew she could have easily climbed out, but not far above their heads was a cross section of black iron bars. They came right out of one wall and slid into the next. No sign of a door or lock.
Hweilan tensed her muscles to stand, then thought better of it. Her entire body ached. She felt as if she’d been stretched to the point of tearing, then rolled in hot gravel. Even the roots of her teeth hurt. She had no idea how she’d come here. The last thing she remembered was facing that abomination in front of the hobgoblin fortress. The thing had taken Mend
uarthis, possessing him like a warrior fitting into a new shirt of mail, and disappeared. The hobgoblin queen Maaqua had said, “Seize them,” and then—
“Where am I?” said Hweilan. Looking down, she saw that her equipment was gone—her knives and arrows, her pouches with all her supplies, the bone mask, and the bow that had cost her so much—all gone. “How did I get here?”
“When you went down,” said Darric, “I thought she’d killed you. It wasn’t until they threw us in here that Valsun said you were still breathing. But when we couldn’t wake you …”
Hweilan looked down at him, opened her mouth to retort, and realized she had no idea what he was talking about.
“You thought who had killed me?”
“Maaqua,” said Darric. “She ordered her folk to seize us. You and Mandan held out the longest, but Maaqua used her magic. Something shot out of her staff. Some kind of … lightning. You staggered, tried to get back up, and then she hit you again. And again. And then …” He looked around at his companions again.
“They threw us in here,” said Valsun.
It hit Hweilan then that not all of them were here. “Where is Mandan?”
The looks on their faces told her that the news wasn’t good.
“We don’t know,” said Darric. “The big brute broke Mandan’s club with that black sword of his. After that, the others swarmed him. He …” Darric swallowed hard and looked away.
“You don’t know he’s dead,” said Valsun. “Mandan took a great many of them down, though even he couldn’t stand against all their nets and clubs. But I don’t think he’s dead.”
Jaden snorted.
“Why would they bother using nets to kill him?” said Valsun. “Nets means capture. Had they wanted him dead, they could’ve filled him full of arrows and spears.”
“Had they wanted to wine and pamper him, they wouldn’t have used nets,” said Jaden. “Nets means they likely have something nastier in mind for him. And for us.”
Time is running out …