Darkwell

by Douglas Niles

  “Where is it?”

  “I d-don’t know for sure. You go through a g-gate and you’re in Faerie; it’s that easy—easy. There are so many gates, especially to here, to the v-vale.”

  “Did you come through one of them?” Tristan tried to divert the sprite’s attention from his misery.

  “Oh, yes! L-Long ago, I came here to the vale—the vale. It was so beautiful here, just like F-Faerie. Wh-why did they have to kill it all?”

  “It is not gone forever. Whatever is causing this must have a weakness. We’ll find it.”

  “It’s all d-dead,” wept the faerie, unconsoled.

  Tristan looked at the wasteland through new eyes and wondered at the evil before him. This vale had never been more than a vast wilderness to him. It was well stocked with game, to be sure, but he knew that, to Robyn, it was very much more. It was the center of her faith and the heart of her goddess’s power. He began to picture, very vaguely perhaps, what its desecration meant to her.

  Canthus never hesitated for a moment as he trotted through the twists and turns of the path. Somehow Daryth had followed the trail through the thick of the night, and the king marveled at this evidence of his friend’s nocturnal skills.

  The trail suddenly dropped into a rocky gorge, and here Tristan called Canthus to slow as the horses made their way carefully down the steep and gravelly path. The moorhound sprinted ahead and then waited impatiently. He pranced in a circle in agitation, then dashed forward as soon as Avalon drew near.

  Tristan lost sight of the hound as Canthus leaped around a bend in the gorge wall. As always, the moorhound hunted silently, so the king heard no barking to help locate his dog. Spurring Avalon into an easy trot, the fastest gait he dared on this rough ground, he came around the same bend. The stallion reared back in surprise, his nostrils flaring, and Tristan’s hand darted instinctively to his blade.

  But the shock before them was in its tale, not in its terror. Canthus had stopped at the bottom of the sheer granite wall of the gorge. The hound stood up on his hind legs, his forelegs reaching up the wall higher than the height of a man’s head.

  Following the gaze of his dog, the king looked up to see a garish streak of blood across the face of the rock. The stuff had dried to a reddish brown color, but its nature was unmistakable. Tristan raised his eyes and saw bloodstains running down the entire side of the gorge.

  Robyn came around the bend then, and he saw her face grow pale. She looked first to the right, and then to the left. “Back up the trail! We can get out of the gorge and come around on top!” No sooner had she spoken than she whirled the mare around and sent it racing up the trail.

  Canthus dashed between Avalon’s legs and raced up the gorge past Robyn. Daryth had been the dog’s trainer and beloved teacher, and Tristan sensed dire urgency in the dog’s manner. The gnawing dread he himself had experienced all morning broke into cold terror. Pawldo and Tavish, bringing up the rear, turned quickly and led the column out of the gorge. They raced along the rim, dreading what they would find.

  Hobarth walked among villages of leather-covered huts huddled in glens among the great fir forests of northern Gwynneth. This land contrasted sharply to Corwell, which lay upon the southern shore of this same island. While Corwell was pastoral and open, a place of farmers and fields, this was a place of hunters and warriors. While the Ffolk of Corwell looked to the land for their sustenance, the northmen looked to the sea. But they would die just the same, mused the cleric. And their dying would give as much pleasure to his god as would the passing of the more peaceful Ffolk to the south.

  Finally the cleric reached the shore and saw the work of Bhaal in all its glory. The northern shore of Gwynneth was separated from Oman’s Isle by the Strait of Oman. Upon Oman’s Isle was the great fortress known as the Iron Keep, former palace of the northman king Thelgaar Ironhand. Oman, and especially Iron Keep and its sheltered bay, were the focal points of northman power in the Moonshaes.

  But this focus, already dimmed by the catastrophic Darkwalker War, was about to be diffused.

  Already the waters of the strait lay heavy and dark in the channel. The cleric could see the rocky bulk of Oman’s Isle, but his attention was drawn instead to the sea itself.

  Great patches of brown scum and thick foam floated across the water. Hobarth, invisible to man, observed the distress in the northman villages as sleek hulls began to show signs of early rot and a putrid odor rose from the waves and wafted ashore.

  He witnessed the consternation of fishermen as they pulled bloated, rotting fish from the strait. He watched with delight as a swollen, drowned body washed into a quiet cove and frightened a group of women.

  Soon the northern folk would ignore these trifling inconveniences, as Hobarth’s god put his plan into action. When that happened, the existence of pollution or poor fishing or foul scent would mean naught to these humans. By then, they would be confronted by the ravaging menace of the sahuagin.

  And worse.

  Kamerynn galloped through a stretch of marshy fen, his broad hooves sucking effortlessly from the muck with each supple bound. Brown water splashed and foamed all around him, streaking his flanks with grime. His thick fetlocks clung to his legs, soaked in a mass of putrid ooze that spattered to his belly.

  But he held his head high, and his mane floated, unblemished, behind him. His ivory horn remained proudly upright, a challenge to the desolation all around.

  Soon he charged up a smooth slope and stopped on dry ground once again. Normally he would have paused to nibble a patch of clover or very young grass, but now there was no food to be found.

  Every day the unicorn progressed farther in his exploration of the devastated vale. And each day, the scene around him grew more miserable, more hopeless. Kamerynn’s ribs now showed clearly through his dirty hide, but his stance remained ever proud and unbowed.

  And then he was off again, moving with the easy canter he could maintain all day. He loped through a chaotic jumble of hills, where all the dead trees had lost their roots in the sandy soil and lay like matchsticks, a nearly impenetrable tangle. The unicorn forged ahead, forcing his way among the trunks and nearly getting stuck before he emerged from the other side.

  He came into a shallow draw and followed a pebbly stream bed, now dry, down the center. This was free of trees, so he was able to canter again.

  Finally the unicorn stopped in his tracks, his nostrils flaring. His great head swiveled as he looked this way, then that, before turning his attention to the ground. A spoor lay there, crossing the path that Kamerynn followed. As a trail, the spoor was completely invisible, for the thing that had passed had neither disturbed even one tiny stone nor broken the most insignificant of twigs.

  Nevertheless, its passing was written boldly on the land for the eyes of the unicorn. Kamerynn saw the mark of four huge paws, carrying a heavy body of supple grace. But the thing that made the unicorn’s ears perk upward and widened his large eyes was the fact that the spoor on the ground was written not in trail sign, but in sheer, palpable evil.

  The god of murder sucked hungrily at the warm life of the Moonshaes, like a vampire claiming the blood of its victim. And like the vampire’s prey, the goddess Earthmother’s strength faded toward eternal nothingness.

  The history of Bhaal is a tale of treachery and betrayal, murder and death, on a scope undreamed of by most creatures. Creatures of the lower planes, creatures of the mortal world—all had tasted death at the hands of Bhaal and his minions.

  But his killing had never before claimed a god.

  anthus, leading the others along the trail, discovered the body first. The moorhound probed Daryth’s corpse mournfully as Tristan dismounted and walked slowly to the remains of his friend. He heard Robyn behind him, but he did not turn.

  He had no doubt that the Calishite was dead. A ghastly wound had torn away half his chest. The scene lay under a blanket of blood, more blood than Tristan could imagine. Numbly he watched as Robyn knelt beside the body and close
d Daryth’s eyes. She bowed her head, and he followed her example, too stunned to compose a prayer of his own. The others stood back silently, sharing in their grief.

  I did this to him! a voice screeched in Tristan’s mind. He watched Robyn’s back, saw her shoulders shake as she wept. At that moment, he dreaded, more than anything he had ever feared, that she would turn to him and accuse him of the very thing he was blaming himself for. If she did that, he knew that his grief, and his guilt, would surely drive him mad.

  In a moment, she rose and looked at him with tear-filled eyes. Her gaze held no accusation, only a deep, aching sorrow. “I shall find a place to bury him,” she said and walked into the woods.

  Tristan nodded dumbly and watched her go. As Robyn disappeared between the trees, his eyes were drawn unwillingly back to the corpse. Angrily he tore his cloak from his shoulders and knelt beside Daryth, covering him with the garment. And then he wept.

  “By all the gods, my friend, I know I failed you!” He spoke softly, to himself only, and to Daryth. He hoped devoutly that the Calishite could know his sorrow. “I did not deserve the loyalty of one such as you, and yet you gave it to me.”

  Tristan raised his eyes to the gray sky, staring upward through the blur of his tears. “By those same gods, I vow to avenge your death. I know I cannot bring you back, but I can only pray that your memory will grant me forgiveness!”

  He wept for the loss of his friend, and for his own terrible guilt in that loss. He seemed, everywhere, to be confronted by evidence of his own failure. He felt as if his life was degenerating into chaos. All of his failures seemed to culminate in the lifeless body of his friend, growing cold in this dead forest.

  “No more!” he hissed, almost inaudibly. Pressing his fists to his eyes, he willed his tears to stop. He started at the touch of a hand upon his shoulder and looked up to see Tavish beside him.

  “He was a brave man, and true,” she said, her own eyes moist.

  “And I was the one—” Tristan began angrily.

  “Don’t say it!” warned the bard, an iron edge in her voice. “You are the High King of the Ffolk, king of us all. Our destiny is wrapped within yours, and some of us will die before you reach that destiny!”

  The king listened. He wanted to argue, but the tone of her voice compelled him to remain silent.

  “It grieves you to witness the death of those who serve you, and that is good, for you must share our pain. But you cannot carry the blame for those deaths. You must have a goal, and that is the goal for all of our people. That goal is the important thing!”

  Tristan wanted to shout at her, to tell her that this was different. This was a death for which he bore special responsibility, for it was brought on by his own selfishness and arrogance.

  But he said nothing. Instead, he thought about her words. It seemed a long time that he stood there, while Tavish sat beside a tree and began to strum a slow anthem on her lute.

  The music floated around him, sweet and heartbreaking at the same time. It was full of minor chords, yet it resounded with a triumphant pattern that urged a listener to look up, not down.

  “I always knew he needed me to look after him,” said Pawldo miserably. The halfling’s face was red with grief. Tristan had always suspected that the diminutive adventurer cared for the Calishite more than he had admitted.

  Newt and Yazilliclick curled up dejectedly on the ground. The faerie dragon’s scales had darkened to a deep purple, a hue the others had never seen him take on. Yazilliclick peered into the woods nervously, his antennae twitching in agitation. Robyn returned, having found a suitable grave site, and Tristan carried the body behind her. The others offered to help, but he would have no assistance for this task.

  They prepared Daryth for burial as best they could, covering his body and its horrible wound with his favorite red cloak. Robyn tenderly brushed his hair, and finally Daryth had the look, almost, of one who rested peacefully.

  Tristan gently removed the Calishite’s ensorcelled gloves and laid Daryth’s hands across his chest. Turning to Pawldo, he held the soft leather objects toward the halfling. “These came from a place of long ago,” he said haltingly. “I think he … he would have wanted you to have them.”

  The despondent Pawldo said nothing, but he took the gloves reverently and slid them onto his hands. Though they had been too large for the halfling while Tristan held them, they quickly shrunk to a skintight fit.

  They laid Daryth to rest in a small clearing, high above the winding gorge. Robyn said a quiet prayer over his body, asking the goddess Earthmother to help his spirit in its search for fulfillment. Tavish strummed another anthem, heartbreakingly beautiful, and they stood for a moment of silence.

  Tristan stared at the rough ground, the dirt he had piled with his bare hands. He had never felt more forlorn. But all the time he had labored, a grim resolve had begun to crystallize in his mind, a determination that this drifting of his life into chaos must end.

  Hobarth decided that the community before him must be the largest on this forsaken shore. He stood on a high, bald hilltop less than a mile inland from the town. From the summit, he could see the wooden and animal-skin buildings scattered around the shore of a small cove. Rickety wooden piers jutted into the water, and a number of small boats bobbed at rest.

  It wasn’t much of a town, but the other human settlements he had discovered were even smaller, tiny fishing villages of a score or two buildings. The north coast of Gwynneth seemed a poor place for an attack, if plunder was the object. The plans of Bhaal were not obvious to his humble cleric, however. Here Bhaal had ordered the attack, and so here it would be.

  The waters of the strait were devoid of boats, as the filth of pollution now spread thick across the surface. In the far distance, he could vaguely make out the bulk of Oman’s Isle, faintly outlined through the haze. The sun had passed into afternoon, but many hours of daylight remained.

  The cleric spent several minutes exploring the hilltop, finding a jumble of rocks that marked its highest point. He walked in a tight circle around this summit, chanting a careful litany and dropping a powder made from finely crushed diamonds. As he cast, a glowing pattern of lines formed across the rocks, until he had inscribed a circle of magic around the crest. The lines seemed to have been carved into the rock itself, and they shimmered with a silvery cast, enclosing the cleric in a circle of enchantment.

  His glyph of warding cast, Hobarth could now prepare his major spell in security. He knew anything trying to interrupt him would be stopped by the glyph, or surprised very rudely if it tried to penetrate the magical barrier.

  Finally Hobarth sat upon the summit and closed his eyes. He called upon all the faith in his black heart and all of the knowledge in his twisted mind, then began the spell of summoning. For long minutes, he sat as motionless as a statue, his face wrinkled in concentration, his eyes tightly closed. Only the flaring of his wide nostrils gave visual proof that he still lived.

  But if an observer could have looked beneath the veneer of optical senses, he could have seen the real proof of Hobarth’s vitality. Concentrated in the invisible employment of magic, the cleric’s spirit sent out a call deafening in strength to those who could hear it, and compelling in nature to those same listeners.

  Beneath the brackish waters of the Strait of Oman swam one listener who heard and immediately moved to obey the summons. Ysalla, high priestess of the sahuagin and devoted cleric of Bhaal, had long awaited the call from her human counterpart.

  Ysalla hovered in the upper reaches of the sea, where the sun’s illumination penetrated dimly. The water here was shallow, and the smooth bottom was heavily layered with silt, but the priestess took no notice of this. She drifted slowly between the surface and the bottom, waiting.

  All around her waited the legions of the sea. Standing abreast upon the bottom stood the rank of ogre corpses that had perished in battle, only to be reanimated by her priestesses and the power of Bhaal. The fat bodies resembled monstrous maggots,
swollen from their immersion. The blue-black water swirled around them, but the stolid corpses remained immobile, awaiting the command of the priestess and the black power of her god.

  Behind the ogres came the dead of the sea, the thousands of drowned sailors, fishermen, and soldiers who had also been animated from death to serve Bhaal and his minions. Only after these vast ranks of undead came the sahuagin themselves, the Claws of the Deep. They would swarm ashore in the wake of the dead army and complete the annihilation of the foe. Glory to Bhaal and his legions!

  And to his legions across the strait, where King Sythissal and more of the sahuagin warriors massed in similar might. As Ysalla sent her charges onto the shores of Gwynneth, Sythissal would send his own fighters, lusting for blood, into the human settlements on Oman’s Isle. When the coastal communities had been ravaged, the two armies would combine to enter Iron Bay and bring the great keep there to ruin.

  Now the summons came, and Ysalla sensed its source. The great yellow fins along her spine bristled, and the priestesses of her order saw the signal. Their own spines bristled in silent acknowledgment, and the legions surged forward.

  The dead marched stolidly across the silt, climbing the sloping shelves toward the beach. The sahuagin swam slowly behind them, the entire mass gliding through the water like great, sinister fish.

  Then the broad ogre heads broke through the listless surf, and eyeless sockets fastened upon the shore. The bloated bodies lumbered from the shallows, their clubs, axes, and great hammers held high. The skin of the lifeless monsters had bleached to milky white during the long immersion, and the waterlogged bodies moved slowly, heavily forward.

  They were indeed slow—but they could not be stopped.

  Koll’s heart pounded as he left the tiny inn and walked the few steps to the pier. The Starling bobbed prettily at dockside, even amid the scum that had coated the water lately. Though small, the little sailboat was the perfect setting for his purpose.