His legs made long shadows in the lantern light. He felt like a spider scuttling down a hole. Real spiderwebs broke as he descended through them; they clung to him in a gossamer net.
Ancient rungs cracked under his feet. The lantern light didn’t reach the bottom of the well. How deep did this shaft go? The dungeons under both castle and palace were below the sewers, he’d once been told, and he’d come another two hundred feet, at least. The chill made fleeting smoke of his breath.
This could only be a way into Undermountain.
The cacophony of shouts, roars, and shrieks grew deafening. It sounded as if whoever was down there wouldn’t survive much longer.
A smooth stone floor became visible below. It belonged to a small chamber, sporting only a door of iron-banded oak in one wall. Leaping from the ladder, Noph landed in a crouch. His feet stirred thick dust as he rushed toward the door. A fat oak beam was cradled across it; the brackets that held it glowed with blue motes of power.
The circling sparks settled into letters, spelling out a clear warning: DO NOT OPEN UNDER PAIN OF DEATH.
“Open up!” a man shouted, from just beyond the barred door. It shuddered with blows from fists or hammers or axes but did not give way. There was a slim crack between the boards, and an eye glared at Noph through it. “Open up, or we’ll die!”
Noph looked again at the stern inscription. “You’ll have to find another way out!”
“There is no other way out, blast you! We’re barely holding off a pair of deep ogres. Open up!”
“Then I’ll be barely staving them off,” Noph pointed out. “Besides, there’s an inscription. A prohibition. A law. I can’t compromise the security of—”
“Yes, yes, Piergeiron’s Palace! We know! We’re agents of his… or some of us are!”
“But under penalty of death—”
“It’s the death of four or the death of one, lad. Save your own skin and you’ve doomed ours. Open the door, and we can fight side by side.”
The choice was obvious. It was written large in enchanted letters before him. If the folk trapped on the other side really were agents of Piergeiron, they’d not ask him to defy laws and jeopardize the security of the palace. What if the deep ogres won past, and climbed up to rampage through the palace? More likely there were no deep ogres, and this was a band of villains wanting to trick their way into the palace. What were the lives of four unknowns worth in the balance against his? The choice was obvious.
A terrible scream came through the door, followed by a wet thrashing sound.
“I feel like a gods-damned traitor,” Noph hissed, heaving the beam out of its bracket.
The enspelled timber had not even struck the floor before the door crashed open. Noph fell back, sword hissing out.
A moon-faced man tumbled through first, his fancy clothes much slashed and beribboned with blood. Stumbling over him came a soot-besmirched dwarf.
“Belgin! Rings!” Noph gasped. “What—?”
A slender woman in glimmering armor staggered out next.
“Aleena!” Noph yelped.
A weak, answering smile showed through the blood and grime on her face as she collapsed beside the others. There was a man behind her, a silver-garbed paladin. Miltiades! The paladin backed slowly into the room, his warhammer ringing and swinging with the profound, determined motion of a blacksmith’s maul.
His anvil was a gigantic creature. Its eyes—dinner plates awash in blood—glowed furiously from grimy folds of flesh. The sheer weight of the ogre’s lips shaped a permanent scowl around jagged green teeth. Hands as big as men groped from the darkness, snatching at the paladin’s armor. Only the persistent, ringing blows of the hammer kept those hands at bay.
If the ogre emerged from the cramped passage, they’d all be slain. And another beast would follow the first.
A sudden flare of flame drew Noph’s eyes. The oak beam he’d pulled from the door was afire. It rattled and gave off a high whistling as the magics laid on it did their work. The heat coming off it was already enough to shrivel the cobwebs clinging to Noph into smoky tracers.
The choice was obvious.
The young hero dropped his sword, bent, and hefted the hissing beam. Fire raced across his hands and up his arms. Agony stabbed through him. He snarled, heaving the timber above his head, and lunged at the ogre, thrusting it like a spear into the monster’s gaping maw. One end distended the squalling beast’s throat. Green teeth clamped on blazing wood.
“Down,” Noph shouted, shoving Miltiades to the floor. They fell together and rolled.
A corona of fire flared from the ogre’s astonished face, and its mantle of hair ignited with a whoosh, standing away from its head. The beast’s throat bulged out like a bullfrog’s. The log in its chattering teeth flared bright red, then white, and then exploded.
What was left of the beast fell, minced and bloody meat now. It was followed, with a slowly growing roar, by a rush of dust, rocks, and rubble.
When the shaking ended and the echoes faded, dust hung thick in the antechamber. The passage was closed by rubble. Noph rolled stiffly off the pile, looking grimly at the fire-blackened flesh below his wrists. He’d be a match for Entreri, now, but missing two hands instead of one.
There was much coughing. Miltiades and Aleena rose, and after some grunting moments, the dwarf Rings and the moon-faced sharper Belgin followed.
The latter squinted at Noph. “A long shot, youngling, but a gamble that paid off.” His was the voice that had implored Noph through the doorway.
Noph did not reply. Bloodied and battered, he slumped beside the lantern. In its light, his figure seemed sculpted in gold.
“Noph?” growled Miltiades, coughing. “I should have known you’d be alive to rescue us like this.”
Piergeiron’s quarters were far from the dark and dusty grave of the ogre. Bright and filled with a sea breeze, looking out at the clear blue air above Waterdeep, the chambers seemed as high as golden griffons and white stacks of cloud. Outside one set of tall windows, the Sea of Swords glimmered with morning sunlight. Past another sprawled Waterdeep in all its splendor, roofs of red and green tiles glowing like rubies and emeralds in the sun.
The company, too, was an improvement on headless ogres. Noph and the four who’d stumbled through the door had been bathed, bandaged, and healed. Noph’s new hands tingled from time to time; he’d been restored by the same priest who’d given Entreri his arm back.
The palace healers had given the heroes loose white robes, similar to those of Piergeiron. They all looked like monks, or devout priests, fitting in this place of white marble and silver trim. Only Khelben wore black. That, too, seemed right. He was black thunder to Piergeiron’s white lightning.
Now both listened to a silver paladin.
“—Unwise in the extreme, I’d say, for a young man charged with guarding the dungeon to open it to attack from Undermountain.”
“Yes, Miltiades,” the Blackstaff soothed patiently. While the others hovered in an uncertain circle around the Open Lord’s sickbed, Khelben lurked by one of the windows, his attention on a bronze kettle perched in a quietly hissing brazier. “Yet if he hadn’t, you’d all be dead now, correct?”
The warrior seemed irritated. “Better we die than let ogres into the palace to kill the Open Lord.”
“I’ve been dead before,” Piergeiron noted wryly. He drew in a deep breath of tea-scented air. “I’ll be dead again, too.”
“Better that none but an ogre die,” Khelben added. His deft hands slipped into a window seat and drew forth teacups. “Noph made a decision. An heroic decision, and in the end the right one.”
Belgin nodded agreement. “Sometimes you’ve got to place your bets and roll the dice.”
Miltiades steamed, a human counterpart to Khelben’s kettle. “That wall of rubble won’t keep them back for long. The security of the palace—”
“Is being taken care of,” snapped Khelben. “Have the courtesy not to pillory the man who save
d your life.”
“Enough,” Piergeiron said wearily. “I called for a report, not an argument.”
Miltiades visibly caught hold of his temper. “Yes,” he said. “Well, the company of paladins was necessarily parted in the dungeons of King Aetheric III. Half our folk, my comrade Kern among them, remained behind to heal young Kastonoph and to seek out and destroy the bloodforge. I understand they succeeded in the former, but not the latter.”
Khelben was suddenly at the paladin’s side, a cup of tea steaming in his grasp. “And did you succeed in your task, to rescue Eidola? Tea?”
Flustered, Miltiades took the cup. “Yes, thank you. I mean, no, we didn’t. But we found out… the rescue was not… that is—”
Sipping from his own cup, Piergeiron said gently, “Take a moment. Gather your thoughts.”
Miltiades took one swallow and set his cup aside. “I led the group seeking Eidola. We pursued her from the dungeon beneath the palace of Aetheric III, even, as I’m told by Kastonoph, as the squid lord struggled in his death throes.”
The young man nodded confirmation, brushing the crumbs of a biscuit from his lips.
“He’s also told me you know of your bride’s true nature. Is this correct?” Miltiades asked stiffly.
Piergeiron winced. “Tell me again, so all is out in the open.”
“Well, this comes as no surprise to the Lord Mage or your daughter,” Miltiades said heavily. “Your supposed bride was in truth a greater doppelgänger, an agent of the Unseen who aimed to rule Waterdeep not only from your bed, but through your mind. She’d been created, I know not how, in the image of your dead wife, Shaleen, and empowered, through subtle magics, to take hold of your mind. I am not surprised her abduction sent you into a coma, so powerful was her hold on you. I’m only surprised it didn’t kill you.”
“It did kill me,” Piergeiron corrected. “I descended into death to follow her… to bring her back.” He set down his teacup, gaze suddenly distant. “She was no illusion. I pursued someone real, powerful, brilliant and true. The presence I found there flung me out of death, back into life. That was no doppelgänger.”
“Ah, yes,” Miltiades replied. “In any case, Eidola was among the most powerful weapons of the Unseen, a creature meant to spread their influence throughout Faerûn. There must be others such as her about.”
“In fact, through your efforts and my own, their ranks have been thinned in the past month,” Khelben noted. “Aleena and I have been doing more than brewing tea.”
Miltiades gave the Lord Mage a dark look. “I’d like to know why you two waited so long. Aleena told me you both knew the truth about Eidola before the wedding. Why didn’t you stop her then?”
“She was a fine piece of work,” Khelben replied. “Dangerous, yes, but less so than those who created her. If we’d destroyed Eidola, her creators would have made another creature to infiltrate the palace, and done a better job of it. We needed her alive to trace her makers, which I’ve done.” There was unmistakable finality in his voice.
The Lord Mage set down his teacup and added, “Until then I’d fitted her with a girdle of righteousness, binding her actions.”
“I—ahem—am the one who removed the belt in the mage-king’s dungeon,” Noph volunteered, redness creeping up his neck. “I thought it was a… that is, she implied… er, I still thought she was a woman of honor, you see, and what more ignominious torment is there for such a one as… well, a chastity belt?”
Eyebrows lifted around the room. Hiding a smile, Khelben came to Noph’s rescue. “Another decision that turned out to be right. By removing the belt, you revealed at last what Eidola really was and almost lost your life demonstrating it. The belt had served its purpose by then; once Eidola was abducted, I hired an assassin to track her down in the Utter East and kill her. The best such blade in all Faerûn.”
“Too bad he failed,” Miltiades said disdainfully.
Khelben shrugged. “No matter; he’s dead. And where he failed, you succeeded. You ended up killing the woman you were sworn to rescue.”
“Yes,” Miltiades replied, despite himself. Scowling, he reached into a bag at his belt, and drew forth the slender hand of a woman, severed mid-forearm. It was rigid, bleached of all color, and clutched a gigantic diamond.
Sudden stillness governed the room. Miltiades bore the hand to the Open Lord’s bedside. “Eidola is well and truly dead. I brought this back as proof. We’ve not been able, by means muscular or magical, to tear the gem from her grasp. The gem holds her soul. Fearing the Unseen might use it to create Eidola again, we bring it to you for Khelben to deal with.”
Vapor from Piergeiron’s teacup spun lazily around the lord as he gently took Eidola’s hand in his own. For a moment, gazing at the thing, he seemed to see the grasping octopodal tree of his dream.
“You say what she was, and I believe you. Her mind spell nearly killed me, and yet…” He turned the grisly trophy over and over in his grasp. “I cannot shake the sense that what I met in the world of the dead was no false lady… no malicious trickery.”
The change in his face was so subtle that no one there could have ascribed it to a shifting crease or a widening pupil. But all of them felt the silent agony underlying it. Piergeiron drew in a long, shuddering breath, and said, “To me, she was not a monster. To the people of Waterdeep, she was none other than my bride. She’s gone, so what does it matter what she really was? To me, to the people, let her remain a vision of good.”
Miltiades gazed down at his boots, clearly shocked and not knowing what to say. Rings and Belgin stood in respectful silence. Aleena looked at Khelben, back beside his kettle. Noph’s eyes met the Open Lord’s, and in the young hero’s gaze dawned understanding and admiration.
“Hold,” Khelben said gently. “Before this gem-bearing hand can be laid to rest, the soul within must be dispersed. I anticipated the truth of this diamond. There’s only one sort of gem a doppelgänger would cling to so strongly.”
He took the severed hand from Piergeiron and held it up, his eyes glinting back its reflected light. “Now that we’ve all had at least a sip of the tea I brewed—a pleasant drink and protection against soul possession—it should be safe to discover just what Eidola might have to say for herself.”
The company fell back to give the wizard room. A wide-eyed Miltiades lifted his now-cool cup and downed it to the dregs.
Khelben’s hand began an intricate dance in the air about the jewel. Purple and green mists trailed his fingers with each arcane gesture. Then dark and menacing words came from his lips. Mists swirled around the stone. The incantation sounded again by itself, the words seeming to echo with the vicious barbed edges of ancient evils brought into the light of a new day.
Up from the mists swirled a cloud of smoke that shivered, rippled, and became a feminine face, eyes closed, and high cheekbones almost too beautiful.
“Shaleen!” Piergeiron gasped in sudden hope.
The vision’s eyes opened. Her pupils were vermilion slits, glowing with hatred. “All you wanted was me, Piergeiron. All I wanted was all you had. We could have done very well for each other.”
“Begone, vile beast!” Khelben growled. “Let only the memory of your outward virtue remain!”
In the moment before Eidola’s soul dissipated forever into the bright morning breeze, her humanity melted away. A gray-skinned, dull-eyed, wholly inhuman something stared hatefully at them all.
Interlude
Musing and Madness
I’m no longer dead, but on some level I must be mad.
Mad with loss, first for my Shaleen, and now for my Eidola. It’s the privilege, perhaps the responsibility, of survivors, especially mad survivors, to remember the dead always, to reassemble them not out of trivial facts but eternal verities.
If we must all die—and we must, of that I’m sure—at least let what remains of us in the hearts and hopes and dreams of friends be what was best and brightest. Death can have the rest.
Perhaps
I am mad, Miltiades, but let me mourn. Perhaps I am heroic, Noph, but do not overindulge me. Perhaps I am both mad and heroic, for what are humans but those who know they’ll die and go on living, madly heroic? Whatever I am does not matter. Whatever she was does not matter. Judge if you wish and come to your own conclusions, Waterdeep. I ask one thing only…
Mourn with me.
Chapter 5
Having Met the Open Lord on Two Previous Occasions, Death Drops by for One Last Visit, Delivers a Housewarming Gift, and Heads Off to Other Engagements
Khelben watched from his all-too-accustomed spot in the balcony of the renovated chapel. There were solemn acolytes, of course, and glauren and all groaning their way through yet another dirge. This rendition of the funeral march, the third in one week, at last captured the true spirit of the music. Ponderous. Torpid. Grating. Bilious. Not merely lifeless but verging on putrific.
Khelben wouldn’t have attended, but he had to support his luckless friend Piergeiron in his time of greatest need. He was also on hand to prevent Lasker Nesher from using the chance to grandstand. He would not have come, save that he knew what would inevitably follow.
The rest of Waterdeep had turned out eagerly, almost hungrily. To them, this was the funeral of a princess. Already, gossip had piled tale upon idle tale, building Eidola up into tragic proportions. Folk who had never seen, let alone met, her fell upon each other’s shoulders in sobbing grief. More had been spent on flowers in two days than had been spent on shipbuilding in the past two years. The chapel was a veritable garden of white and green, all destined tomorrow to be as dead as the woman they were meant for.
Piergeiron had been right. After all the confusion of the last month, the people needed to mourn, wanted to mourn. So did the Open Lord. Even Khelben felt reluctantly moved by the common sorrow, the grand whelming of heart-pouring loss.
Into the midst of solemn flowers and weeping witnesses came the once-dead Open Lord. Mighty in bright-polished armor, Piergeiron moved with slow reverence up the aisle, bearing a discreetly folded silken cloth that held the hand of his mortal bride.
Forgotten Realms - [Double Diamond Triangle Saga 09] - The Diamond Page 6
