The Coral Kingdom tdt-2

by Douglas Niles

  Finally she was finished, but she still wasn't ready for sleep. Instead, she turned to the tome she had been perusing earlier, the volume detailing a host of tactics and procedures for traveling throughout the known planes of existence. It was heady stuff, but Deirdre absorbed it easily, as she did all her reading. She learned much about the dangers, and potentials, of working one's way through the ether, communicating with distant realms for good or ill.

  Particularly entrancing was the discussion of a small village that existed some thousand years ago. It had been menaced by a creature from the Lower Planes, and the beast had only been vanquished when the village cleric identified the two symbols holding most power over the monster's plane of origin-in this case, a circle encased within a square. Then the townsfolk had plowed the requisite symbols into the dirt of a lush field and goaded the creature into the trap. At that point, a simple teleportation spell had sufficed to banish the creature back to its unholy lair.

  Finally, that lesson completed, Deirdre slept, uncaring of anything for several hours. When she finally awakened in the late morning, it was with the languorous ease of a well-fed feline. She allowed the sunshine to wash over her, basking in the warmth.

  When she eventually rose, she didn't partake of the bread and cheese that had been delivered to her anteroom. Instead, she turned to the mirror.

  Quickly an image came into focus. It was a picture of Synnoria, the valley that was no longer pastoral. Stark lines of black earth, splintered trees, and muddy wreckage marred the green fields, and Deirdre quickly observed the image of Ityak-Ortheel, the Elf-Eater. The beast, rolling smoothly, rapidly forward on its three legs, moved resolutely down the valley.

  For the moment, Deirdre could see no sign of her mother or sister, nor of their companions. But then a small group of riders thundered into sight, and when Keane's lightning bolt exploded against the monster, she knew beyond a doubt that she had found the party of Ffolk.

  Deirdre leaned closer to get a better look at the tiny figures in the mirror. A tiny smile creased her mouth. She didn't know why, but she found the spectacle in the looking glass strangely amusing.

  "Who's hurt?" asked the queen, her voice a harsh note of reality amid the dreamlike silence that followed the battle.

  No one replied, but the companions all held their weapons ready, staring after the diminishing form of the monster as it moved down the valley.

  "Pawldo. ." Alicia spoke her friend's name as if in a daze. "We have to avenge him!"

  Robyn laid a hand upon her daughter's shoulder, but her look followed the creature that had slain their friend. The princess gazed after the beast as well, but her mind recalled only the smiling halfling who had brought her treats since she was a little girl. He can't be dead! She tried to lie to herself, but her recent memories stubbornly reminded her of the truth.

  Then, as if for the first time, the High Queen turned to look at the two disheveled Llewyrr, the pair whose plight had drawn them into the attack in the first place.

  "Brigit?" she asked tentatively.

  "Robyn-or is it 'Your Majesty'?" replied the elf, shock written across her features.

  "Yes," said the human woman, adding a wry laugh. "Though not so unchanged by time as yourself."

  "You saved our lives …" the elfwoman realized with dawning amazement, quickly turning to suspicion. "And yet by all rights you should not even be here! How did you pass our border? What brings you here at all?"

  "Those reasons can wait until later," said the High Queen in a tone as firm as Brigit's. She indicated the tracks of the monster, scoured in the black dirt. "We have a more pressing problem now!"

  "The Llewyrr have a problem. This is an invasion of Synnoria, not Corwell," the sister knight replied stiffly. "Your aid is appreciated. As I indicated, your presence saved our lives."

  "Our actions saved your lives!" Alicia snapped, indignant at the elfwoman's arrogance. She would have spoken further except that her mother raised a hand.

  "This monster is a horror that menaces all Gwynneth," Robyn declared. "And therefore, it is my problem. I am the monarch of the lands beyond your valley! Whether it ravages all Synnoria while we stand here in discussion, or whether we work together to stop it is up to you."

  The humans in the party stood silent. Even the elves seemed taken aback. Brigit's eyes flashed, but she worked visibly to hold her tongue. Clearly the situation called for urgency. . and cooperation.

  "You are right… Your Majesty. It has been too long since I have seen a human. I had come once more to think of you as the group that is the danger, instead of remembering the individuals who were my friends. Forgive my lack of grace."

  "I understand," Robyn answered. "Now-what was that thing? And where is it going?"

  They gathered the horses while they talked, mounting an elf behind Alicia and Hanrald, who were the best riders.

  Pawldo! He's lost-gone forever, Alicia realized with a tearing pain in her heart. Her eyes blurred, and she went through the motions of riding without thinking. It took a great effort to clear her head enough to listen to the conversation between Robyn and Brigit.

  "… not from this world, nor any place I have ever heard described," the elfwoman was saying. "There are legends, more than a millennia old, of a three-legged giant who preyed upon the elves. I cannot help but wonder if this is an incarnation of the Elf-Eater." She said nothing about the Fey-Alamtine or the recent flight of the Thy-Tach.

  "It is most assuredly a being from one of the Lower Planes," Keane observed, riding beside the pair, "requiring a very powerful force to call it hence-not an easy gate to open nor to control."

  "Gate?" Brigit's face had gone pale, though she said nothing further. She looked furtively away from Alicia as the princess stared, puzzled, at the elven horsewoman.

  "Can we send it back … to its own plane?" asked the queen.

  "Not a chance that I know of," said Keane, before turning to Brigit. "Unless you have some wizardry in this valley of yours that goes beyond anything I've ever seen!"

  "I fear not," replied Brigit. "From what I've seen of your powers, no elven sorcerer could hope to offer something beyond your ken."

  "If we can't send it away, we'll have to kill it," observed Brandon, who had been brooding in silence since the battle. His face focused into a grimace of determination as he spoke. It was obvious that his anger had focused into this clear and warlike purpose.

  "Yes," agreed Brigit simply.

  But none of them had any idea how.

  Deirdre reclined on her bed, enjoying the spectacle in the mirror. She had been thrilled by the battle with the Elf-Eater, shocked-and horribly fascinated-by Pawldo's gruesome death, and now intrigued by the challenge presented by the extraplanar beast.

  She wondered, for a moment, why she felt no sorrow, no grief, over the death of the halfling she had known all her life. True, she had always thought the Lord of Lowhill a somewhat pompous stuffed shirt, but she had seen him several times a year throughout her life, and he had been a good friend of her parents. Nevertheless, his death triggered no particular emotion in the youngest Kendrick.

  The specter of the Elf-Eater, on the other hand, drew her attention with a secret, forbidden excitement. The memory of her recent readings thrilled in her blood, for she now understood how the gates and the planes worked.

  She doubted whether the Elf-Eater could be slain. Such was the root of its might that its true life-force existed in some nether place far removed from the world of the Realms. Without access to that soul, those who attacked the beast could at most hope to vanquish the incarnation appearing in the present time and place. If that were accomplished, the thing would be forced back to its lair.

  Yet even that relatively straightforward task, she thought, may well prove beyond the abilities of the elves and their human allies. In her readings, the task of controlling a beast such as this required careful research and diligent preparation.

  Research? Her lips curled in a tight smile. She rose, p
adding across the floor in her bare feet to the table where stood her great stack of books. Without hesitation, she lifted several tomes out of the way, found the one that she wanted, and returned to her bed.

  There she started to read.

  A vast ridge, emerald green in color, loomed beside Sinioth. Soon the towers of great manors, lairs to the noble scrags of the Coral Kingdom, dotted the rolling sea bottom. Great fields of kelp, tended by sahuagin overseers and mermen and dolphin slaves, drifted through the warm currents overhead, while a rolling horizon of coral edifices and dark, green-shaded valleys sprawled in all directions.

  Sinioth, in the body of the giant squid, swam with the king of the sahuagin, Sythissal. In these depths, the body of evil's avatar showed as a murky shadow on the coral seabed-the huge, blunt trunk, the long tentacles trailing behind, the powerful flukes driving the creature through the water. The humanoid fishman swam with powerful kicks of his legs, eager to obey the commands of his great master. Together the two would make known the wishes of Talos.

  The approach of the giant squid drew scrags and sahuagin, the inhabitants of the submarine city of Kyrasti, from their towers and domes. Great legions of the finned, fanged humanoids swam behind Sinioth as he approached the highest reef, climbing again to where the dark water gave way to soft shades of green and blue.

  Before him loomed a place of towering spires. Curved domes of clear shell arched over many enclosed dwellings, while other places spiraled upward, open to the sea on all sides.

  A great thrumming sound boomed through the sea, summoning the warriors and the nobles of the Coral Kingdom. A huge scrag swam forth from the palace gates, trailing delicate chains of gold and silver.

  This mighty sea troll stood more than ten feet tall when he settled his webbed feet on the coral stair. His scaled skin rippled over folds of taut sinew, and his mouth gaped, sharklike, to reveal rows of needle-sharp teeth. Unlike his smaller cousins, the sahuagin, the scrag had no row of sharp spines down his back, but his head was covered with a kelplike growth of hair that waved about his face in the current, concealing his mouth one moment and then drifting aside at the next.

  "Greetings, Master," gurgled this mighty one, floating forward to prostrate himself before the giant squid. "Welcome to Kyrasti, to the palace of Krell-Bane, King of the Sea. Our master, Talos, has brought us together for a great cause!"

  Yet even as he groveled, the huge sea troll looked sideways at his new masters, his eyes reflecting jealousy, resentment. . and hatred.

  6

  Shattered Glass

  "Flee! The vengeance of the gods comes upon us!" A dozen panic-stricken elves stumbled toward the causeway leading to Chrysalis. Some of them bled from horrible wounds, and all of them shambled with the half-dead gait of complete exhaustion.

  "The trout farm!" gasped one of the Llewyrr, collapsing before a pair of guards at the start of the causeway. "We're the only ones to survive!"

  "What?" demanded the guard. "What was it?"

  "Horror!" groaned the elf. "I don't know what it was … it was huge! And it killed-it killed everyone!!"

  As soon as they got this much of an answer, garbled as it was by fear, one of the watchmen raced toward the city gates, crying a general alarm.

  Myra, ranking sister knight in the city, heard the commotion at her post near those silver portals. She raced up the winding stairs into one of the needlelike spires that lined the city's walls. In moments, she heard the shouted explanations from the causeway and ordered the city's permanent garrison of warriors to muster outside the gates.

  Where was Brigit? The question loomed paramount in her mind. She knew that today the captain had intended to patrol the same valley of the Fey-Alamtine and the trout farm. Cold fear began to tighten her heart as she looked across the peaceful lake toward the fields and forest beyond. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, the idea that some horrific beast was out there seemed unthinkable.

  Nevertheless, minutes later the small company of permanent-duty guards, silver speartips gleaming in the sun, followed Myra's orders and filed out the gates and over one of the long causeways connecting the island city to the shore.

  Here the elven warriors deployed in a three-rank line of pikes, blocking the most direct route into Chrysalis.

  Myra watched them go, telling herself that they were just a precaution. Nothing seemed unusual about the forest as she looked to the west, but the hysteria of the trout farm workers dispelled any sense of security she might have felt. And still she wondered: Where was Brigit? The captain of the sister knights held overall command of Synnoria's troops; Myra was a mere substitute, and she longed for the older elf's guidance.

  Meanwhile, the citizens of Synnoria mobilized for their own defense. The young and the old, the pregnant and the infirm Llewyrr, all fled from the far side of the city in an orderly column. Myra would have liked to send them toward the Fey-Alamtine and, if necessary, the ultimate sanctuary of Evermeet. However, the monster's approach precluded that course. Indeed, it was perhaps fortunate that she had no way of knowing that the Synnorian Gate lay in a heap of crumbled rock, shattered by the beast's violent arrival.

  Now these refugees would take shelter in the wooded valleys opposite the monster's reported avenue of approach. The adults, meanwhile, gathered any weapons that they could find and began to assemble in the City's park-like grand plaza.

  The warriors of the Thy-Tach tribe made haste to join in the defense force, offering nearly four dozen powerfully muscled spearmen. These trotted swiftly along the causeway behind the pikes, ready to form a backup of that formation.

  Then, as Myra stared at the bright woods, she sensed that something was horribly wrong. Treetops shivered and fell away one after the other in a clearly defined path-a path that led straight toward the elven city! Myra thought of a field of tall grass where a small dog bounds through, unseen, except these were great trees, many of them centuries old. Whatever crushed them aside possessed unspeakable strength.

  Finally the Elf-Eater came into sight on the wooded shore, a looming form pressing the lush pines to either side in a waste of splinters and great, muddy footprints. It rumbled forward in its awkward gait, appearing to roll along like a top reaching the end of its spin. Yet in the case of the Elf-Eater, this clumsiness was completely misleading. Clear of the trees, it leaped forward to race across the grassy field on the shore.

  Silver pike tips gleamed in the sun, the same sun that had witnessed the arrival of this beast barely three hours before. The Llewyrr of the guard company stood firm, those in the fore kneeling, the second rank standing with pikes held at the waist, and the third rank with their long weapons held at shoulder height. The effect, to the front, was an array of razor-sharp steel tips, bristling like the spines of a cactus in tightly packed array.

  Quickly the Elf-Eater broke from the confines of the forest, advancing across the grassy meadow in broad strides. Mutters of apprehension shook the elves as they got their first good look at the monster. Its broad snout was drawn in, gaping wide below the rim of the domed carapace, revealing its nest of churning appendages, surrounded by the web of flailing tentacles. The creature ran with one leg in front, the two others side by side to the rear.

  The massive form rumbled forward, breaking into a rolling gallop on the broad field. The ground shook with each pounding step, and the monster's charge took it straight toward the wall of pikes. The elves in the path of the charge stood firm. Few of them had ever faced a real opponent before, but all of them had trained and prepared for decades-or centuries, in many cases. Now they met the test of that training and passed with fortitude.

  Myra held her breath as she watched from the tower. Many more Llewyrr gathered in the streets below. The city's heavy silver gates stood closed, firmly barred. She could do nothing more except pray that the courageous pikemen and the spear-throwers of the Thy-Tach would turn the monster away.

  The longest of the beast's tentacles stretched outward as it reached the Llewyrr, g
rasping pikes below the heads. Some sharp edges met the tendrils with their blades, but even the keen elven steel rarely pierced a leathery limb. The monster tugged against the pikes it still held firmly, jerking them to the sides and disrupting the precision of the steady line.

  Not that precision mattered. The elves held their weapons braced with every muscle in their bodies, often with the butts of the weapons planted into the ground. The razor-edged pike heads, crafted of the hardest elven alloys, bore enchantments powerful enough to penetrate the hardest armor, the toughest scaly skin. But the Elf-Eater tucked its body as it rolled into the pikes, so that the bulk of the weapons met the hard carapace. The poles of a dozen pikes snapped simultaneously, the preciously crafted steel falling useless to the ground.

  A few of the elves, their pikes held very low, angled the weapons below the carapace and met the skin around the creature's mouth. The weapons plunged in, and the Elf-Eater recoiled for a moment. Then a nest of tentacles converged, plucking the weapons from the wounds and casting them aside. The tentacles descended, and elf after struggling elf was plucked up and cast into the gaping maw.

  On her tower-top vantage, Myra felt sick to her stomach. She saw that soon the monster would reach the city gates, and she knew that she would have to be there as well.

  "Summon the clerics!" shouted the sister knight. "All the priests and priestesses of the city! Gather here at the wall!"

  She cast a last despairing glance for Brigit, but she could see no sign of any white horse or rider in the splintered path of the Elf-Eater's trail. Finally she raced down the spiraling stair, quickly reaching the street, where hundreds of armed but undirected Llewyrr mingled around in growing confusion. Through apertures in the white marble wall they could see the progress of the battle.