Darkwell

by Douglas Niles

  “The using, yes, but not the abuse or destruction! It is when humans destroy that which supports them that the goddess suffers most keenly.”

  “You, like your king, are wise beyond your years,” mused the northman. “I do not like the thought that my people are responsible for bringing this evil to the land.”

  “Perhaps you can help us to remove it.” Tristan spoke earnestly, staring his guest in the face.

  “I owe you my life. Ask what you will. If it is in my power to give, you shall have it.”

  “For now, I’ll be happy to have your friendship,” Tristan said warmly. “Let’s toast: To peace between us, and between our children!” Both kings raised their mugs and drank deeply, thumping them back to the tabletop at the same instant. Tristan realized, suppressing a belch, that he had had a lot to drink.

  “Time for some dancing!” proclaimed Tavish suddenly. She rose and unstrapped her lute, checking the tuning of a few errant strings. Eager Ffolk pushed some of the tables aside, and Tristan turned to Robyn, ready to kick up his feet. She shook her head in confusion, and he leaned over toward her, again concerned.

  “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’m not feeling well at all. I think I’d better go to bed.”

  He offered to walk her to her room, but she declined. “Well, wake me at first light,” he offered. “We’ll ride at dawn.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “I’ll wake you then,” she said with a laugh, “but you’ll surprise me if we leave before midmorning!” With a forced smile, she left the hall.

  Tristan turned back to the table and bumped someone who had not been there a moment earlier. With surprise, he saw the red-haired woman wiping the contents of a spilled mug from her apron.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Let me—”

  “That’s all right,” she interrupted. She smiled at him, a rich, glowing look that caused his blood to race. He had not noticed earlier just how attractive she was.

  “Sit here,” he said, not knowing why he offered the seat Robyn had just vacated. “Move, Newt.” He pushed the faerie dragon aside, and Newt, with an indignant “Hmph!” disappeared.

  The woman handed him another mug as he sat heavily beside her. He stared at her mutely as Ffolk throughout the hall rose to dance to the strains of Tavish’s lute. Something very appealing, and a little wicked, gleamed at him from her eyes.

  “You are a very handsome king,” she said quietly. Her voice was soft and husky.

  His head swirled, and lust rose unbidden within him. Her hand fell softly on his leg, and the pressure of her fingers burned into his flesh.

  “Who are you?” He realized as he asked the question that her answer would mean nothing to him. It didn’t matter who she was. He did know that he wanted her with a physical yearning beyond anything he had ever felt.

  Tristan was unaware, or chose to ignore, the uncomfortable looks of Pawldo and Randolph as his two friends cast sideways glances at their king. He took no note of Pontswain’s sneer, nor even of the hot anger burning in Daryth’s eyes. The Calishite glowered at the girl, but she squeezed the king’s thigh more tightly.

  Abruptly she stood and swirled away from the table, her loose gown flowing around the full contours of her body. Tristan stumbled to his feet as she slipped away. A desperate fear rose within him—he mustn’t let her get away.

  “Sire?” came the call from behind him in Daryth’s strained voice.

  Friar Nolan stood and laid a restraining hand upon Tristan’s arm, but the king angrily shook it off. The cleric shrank back into his chair under the intensity of Tristan’s blazing stare.

  But then the king had eyes only for the luscious creature that slid sinuously across the great room. She passed through the door, into a darkened hallway. He followed behind, eagerly hurrying to her side, but she twisted away and dashed up the stairs to the royal living quarters. Tripping on the first step, he regained his balance and followed her.

  Somehow she found his bedchamber, and he followed her inside, pulling the door shut with a slam behind him. Her robe fell away, and the sight of her nakedness took his breath from him. He lunged toward her and they fell across the huge bed, his own tunic falling, unnoticed, around his ankles.

  Desire took hold of his brain, giving him clear focus and strong purpose. Nothing could be more important than this warm, wanton woman beneath him.

  Newt looked blearily at Tristan and Robyn from his invisible position next to a recently full pitcher of ale. Suppressing a belch, he squinted. What was wrong?

  That wasn’t Robyn! Sitting up in shock, the little dragon watched the woman—that floozy!—lead the unfortunate Tristan toward the door. This wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all! Where did Robyn go? What did that awful creature have in mind for his friend?

  “I’ll save him!” he vowed, blinking again. Already his mind whirled with illusions he could use, perhaps a nest of snakes in her hair, or a great, fat wart, right on her—

  But he couldn’t let them get away. Already the door was closing behind them. Newt sprang into the air, wings humming. But wait! His head was spinning uncontrollably from the effects of the ale. And what was wrong with his wings? Why were they flying him in this direction? And where had that great, looming pillar come from—the one right in front of his nose.

  No one in the hall heard the tiny thunk as the dragon crashed, and Newt knew only blackness as he fell lightly to the floor.

  Once behind the solid oaken door to her room, Robyn began to feel better almost immediately. The sudden queasiness passed, and she decided it must have been a combination of excitement and too much food and wine. She lay on her familiar down mattress and dwelled for a moment on her glowing pride in Tristan.

  He made a splendid figure of a king! She had always sensed a great destiny before him, but now she began to see it take form. Would that he could end the centuries of strife between northmen and Ffolk! And after that accomplishment, where would he go next?

  She hoped, very deeply, that she would be able to share that pride and progress with him, that they could have children and grandchildren who would see that legacy live on after them. And with him at her side, she felt confident that they could conquer the evil cleric and his legions in Myrloch Vale.

  Suddenly she sat up, thinking of the celebration in the hall below. Her illness had passed. There was no reason she shouldn’t go back and enjoy herself. And Tristan had been disappointed, she could tell, when she had left. She felt a twinge of guilt, knowing how important this homecoming was to him. There was no reason why they shouldn’t have a night of enjoyment before embarking upon their quest. And she really did enjoy dancing.

  She went downstairs and saw with surprise that Tristan was not there. Daryth left the party, too, as soon as he saw her come through the door. She thought he looked angry. Pawldo and Randolph didn’t seem to know where the king had gone, though their answers when she questioned them seemed forced.

  Perhaps he had been taken ill also. Could they have shared a piece of spoiled food? Concerned, she started back up the stairs. The first thing to do, she decided, was check his room.

  Tristan didn’t notice the door swing open behind him, but the sudden wash of torchlight broke his concentration. Robyn’s voice, as if from a great distance away, reached him.

  “Tristan? What’s wrong? What—”

  And then he was cold sober as he turned to stare into the druid’s shocked face. Robyn slowly lowered the torch, her mouth hanging slack in astonishment. The yellow flames reflected vast depths of pain in her green eyes. He tried to sit, but the tunic betrayed him and he sprawled across the woman, who laughed in delight.

  And then the door to the room slammed shut with a force that shook the stones of the castle and sent its echoes reverberating through the long, empty passages of his heart.

  Shapes slipped past overhead, dark green against the purple of the sea. The stream of bodies continued for many minutes, sinuous forms swimming easily through the depths, dark and scaly
and silent, always silent. Ysalla stared upward all the while, watching the army gather above her. Her mouth gaped slightly and her forked tongue darted, unnoticed by her, back and forth from her maw.

  The force gathered like a cloud in the sea, blocking the scant sunlight that penetrated this far down and surrounding Ysalla with a welcome darkness. The throbbing power of the Deepsong filled the sea around her and brought a fierce joy to her soul.

  Below her, along the floor of the vast undersea canyon, another army gathered. This was a plodding, methodical force, lacking the speed and grace of the swimming sahuagin, but it offered its own terrors to any foe.

  For the second army was a force made up entirely of death. The shambling corpses, animated by the dark power of her faith, dumbly awaited a command.

  Her command.

  Ysalla was a cleric of Bhaal, in her own way as powerful as Hobarth. However, while the human Hobarth presided over a domain of air and land and light, Ysalla practiced her craft in the dark, chill regions below the surface of the sea.

  As Keeper of the Eggs, she ruled her scaly congregation together with Sythissal, the king. Her priestesses—yellow, sleek creatures, as opposed to the sturdy green warriors that made up most of her kind—enforced the will of Bhaal as that will was made known to their mistress.

  Now Ysalla and Sythissal had assembled an army more vast than any in the memory of the Deepdwellers. Beside the legions of fierce sahuagin warriors at their command fought the dead of the sea—sailors who had drowned in the oceans of the Moonshae and had been animated by the power of Bhaal to serve as mindless servants of evil. And now, too, they had the remnants of the army of the Black Wizard. These troops, humans mostly, but also the dead remnants of the Ogre Brigade, marched beside the dead of the sea in answer to Ysalla’s command.

  And over them all swam the sleek legions of sahuagin, ready to burst forth from the surf to lay waste to the lands of northmen and Ffolk alike. They awaited but the command to march.

  Summoned by the thrumming cadence of the Deepsong, the army massed in the city of Kressilacc, deep beneath the narrow realm of men. They huddled among the towers and domes of the vast city on the bottom of the sea, gathering force and ferocity from the song.

  To the east, they had suffered rebuff and loss against the skill of the new king and the might of the Earthmother. Ysalla sensed that the goddess was not the threat she had been, and the new king was now a hated enemy. The king gave focus to Bhaal’s hatred, in a new direction, and so he directed his priestess toward the west.

  Toward Corwell.

  Ysalla keened sharply from her temple, high on the canyon wall of Kressilacc, summoning her priestesses to the sword. Sythissal called his legions together, and they started on the march to the west. Propelled by the command of Bhaal, they would march to land and lay waste to all the settlements of man they found there. Northmen or Ffolk, it mattered not—the Claws of the Deep would slay regardless.

  The god of murder dangled a tempting prize before them. Should they slay the humans along the shore and destroy the ports of Gwynneth, Bhaal would reward them in a way Ysalla could only dream about.

  For if they emerged victorious, Bhaal had promised to sink the island. Gwynneth, and the kingdom of Corwell itself, would fall beneath the waves, to become the permanent realm of the sahuagin.

  The Earthmother had reigned over the Moonshae Islands far longer than any of the men who had made their homes there. Even the graceful Llewyrr, the elves who had once claimed the islands as their own, had come to a land where the goddess already ruled unchallenged

  In those decades and centuries, she had witnessed the birth of creatures misformed by genetic accident. She had beheld the cruel ravages of disease, often deforming and crippling the animals that roamed her lands. All too often, she had been forced to bear the scars of war, the cruelest of such crimes for it was the most avoidable. Her forests had burned; whole villages had fallen to the sword, or the axe, or the fiery magic of evil sorcery.

  But never had she witnessed a greater blasphemy than the Children of Bhaal. Their very existence was a challenge to the balance, and their birth, wrought by the magic of the Darkwell, was a challenge to her soul.

  She looked upon all the creatures of the isles as her offspring, and this compounded the outrage. Perhaps her heart bled most bitterly for the fate of the great brown bear. Grunt had been a faithful servant and protector of Genna Moonsinger for a very long time, measured in human terms, and the destruction of the bear and his subsequent perversion into a thing of evil were the cruelest cuts of all.

  But all her knowledge, awareness, and outrage slowly faded as her weakness grew. A blackness, the expanding void of death, surrounded her.

  And then she knew no more.

  ecoiling in shock and grief—anger would not come until later—Robyn stumbled back to her room. There she took refuge in the Scrolls of Arcanus. Burying herself in these talismans of faith, she sought an answer that did not exist.

  A tiny voice cried within her. Why? Why would he betray me thus? And then the plaintive voice vanished beneath the din of cold anger. Her rage swelled inside of her like an unnatural poison, hurting her but also directing a fiery scorn toward the young king who, hours earlier, had claimed her love.

  Robyn’s door thumped beneath a persistent pounding, and she vaguely realized that Tristan stood without, calling her name. She made no reply, and after a while he went away, allowing her to return to the scrolls.

  Each was a sheet of frail parchment, inscribed at the top with a stylized rune depicting a blossoming rose within the circle of a blazing sun. The parchment curled of its own will, shaped by long storage within the tube. Each was covered with strange runes, symbols Robyn had never seen before.

  All of the scrolls bore a similar border, inscribed in green ink faded to a dull brown. Delicate tracings outlined the thorny stems of roses, framing each page. The stems encircled a vivid image of the sun in each corner, then came together in an involved depiction of the rose blossom itself at the top center of the parchment.

  The druid dropped her eyes to the writing on the page. The runes seemed to dance and waver before her gaze. Her vision blurred, and a dull ache throbbed in her forehead, but she held to her scrutiny. The pounding in her head grew to a roar, and the runes seemed to twist all over the page, as if attempting to evade her.

  Gradually, by the force of her will, she began to bend the text to her understanding. The shivering of the runes ceased, and each lay flat and motionless on the page like a normal inscription. The pounding in her head diminished, and as it did, the runes became visible as symbols, and then the meaning of those symbols became clear.

  As she read, she learned secrets deeper than any she had imagined. The scrolls were exquisitely preserved, but incredibly ancient. She was certain they predated even the age of Cymrych Hugh, before the very earliest era of the Ffolk.

  I believed that you, Tristan Kendrick, would be a leader as great as Cymrych Hugh. You would unite the Ffolk, I thought. You would be the light that would drive evil from our lands. How could you fail me so?

  The first of the scrolls told her of the gods of the planes and the delicate harmony of power that ebbed and waned between good and evil, law and chaos. She saw her own druidic doctrine of the balance reflected in this struggle and sensed that the message of the new gods was not so very different from her own faith in the goddess Earthmother. Where she had long known of the four elements, water, earth, fire, and air, the scrolls promised secrets of wind and stone, ocean and flame.

  The writing on the scrolls was clerical in nature, strange to her eyes. Some of the symbols—those in which she sensed the greatest power—still hurt her eyes as she beheld them. Some mighty enchantment lurked within these runes. But she forced herself to overcome the pain and discomfort. If she had been weaker, the symbols might have blinded her or driven her mad, but her discipline was such that she bent the power of the scrolls to her will and mastered them. Instead of a threat, th
e scrolls became a source of spiritual nourishment and growth.

  How I wanted to bear your child … our child. He would have been so strong! He would have been so wise! We could have done so much together, you and I. How could you betray me?

  The next of the scrolls held the tale of the elements and told how the gods had used them in the creation of the Realms. Prime among them rolled the great mass of the sea. Eternal, imperturbable, unchanging, the sea had marked the boundaries of the world since the dawn of time. Holding fast to the slender page of the scroll, Robyn came to know the gods as beings of and from the sea, forces whose original essence was the vastness of the oceans.

  You, too, could have been a force of primordial power, Tristan. Your mark could have been as vast as the ocean! Your power, with me at your side, would have run as deep, your legacy have been as eternal, as the sea itself!

  Then she took up the parchment that told of the secrets of stone. She read of the land’s rising, bleak and lifeless yet solid and firm, from the bosom of the sea. Thus were the Realms born, and their earth made the foundation for all that would follow. Stone was the flesh of the world, and in this secret—and the mastery of stone promised by the scroll—she began to sense a hope for her fellow druids.

  You were my foundation, my rock! You were the firmament upon which I rested my hopes, not just for us and ours, but for the land and peoples of the isles! You could have been the unshakable base for generations of growth and peace and progress!

  The following scroll told the story of fire. Fire, hot to the touch, killing and cleansing in its heat. Fire was the forge of the world, the spark from which emerged all the multitude of life that came to live upon the isles.

  And the heat of passion that burns within that life. How could that fire consume you so easily? How could you be so weak?

  And last she read the tale of wind, the breath that gave life to the world. Vitality came to all things through the wind, she learned. Even the plants breathed, and air was the vessel that brought health to life and carried waste and corruption away. Wind, so tenuous and untouchable yet so pervasive and strong. Without the air that was its medium, nothing could live.