Key of Stars

by Bruce R Cordell

  A clawed fist slammed Raidon’s head so hard he saw white. He smashed through the balcony railing and fell. His trained instincts tucked him into a spin. He fell into a roll, and transferred the momentum of the fall so that he was on his feet in an eyeblink. A bloody imprint from his wound marked the floor.

  “What in the Bitch Goddess’s name is going on?” came a voice.

  Captain Thoster stood in the chamber entrance. Behind him was Seren. And the faintest outline of a woman in articulated gold armor.

  “Wait your turn, mortals,” growled the Lord of Bats. One clawed hand gestured at the doorway. A wall of surging water appeared beneath the entrance arch. It roared like a mile-high waterfall, sealing Raidon and Japheth into the chamber with the archfey.

  Neifion’s other hand formed a strange crooked configuration. The room shuddered.

  “Come, my allies of the Old Woods,” said the Lord of Bats.

  The domed ceiling seemed to peel away, revealing a twilight forest of towering trees. A moon many times bigger than normal peered down through the lofty canopy. One tree bent, and before Raidon quite recognized the threat, it smashed him into the floor with a gnarled fist the size of boulder.

  Cerulean fire lit the dark path back from unconsciousness.

  He was sprawled at the center of a crater in the stone floor. Pain stitched him to the shattered stone even as he saw his limbs straightening. His hand had maintained a death grip on his blade. Raidon sensed Angul was hard pressed to return him from oblivion’s edge. But the blade couldn’t spare him the bone-deep ache as his body was forcibly reknit into a functioning whole.

  The monk rolled onto his side, gasping. The torrent of water still blocked the doorway. The Lord of Bats remained on the balcony. Thankfully the tree creature that had flattened the half-elf, along with the odd moonscape that had accompanied the thing’s appearance, was gone.

  Japheth stood only a pace from where Raidon lay, his back turned to the monk as he whispered another spell to engage his foe.

  The sword pulled Raidon’s hand toward the warlock’s unprotected back.

  “No,” whispered Raidon, as he struggled to his knees. “The archfey first. The thing on his brow is an abomination that must be extinguished.”

  Japheth had retrieved a green rod with a shattered end. A bolt of emerald energy lanced from it and struck the Lord of Bats. Neifion grunted and stepped back half a pace, but a smile remained firmly on his lips.

  A woman’s voice said, “Lord of Bats, you’ve got your power back. Japheth has renounced your pact and your castle; why don’t you leave us alone?” The monk recognized the voice as Anusha’s, but he saw no hint of her presence.

  “Because I swore revenge,” replied the archfey, glancing around. “When I said I’d quench my anger by eating Japheth’s liver, I wasn’t making idle threats.”

  The Lord of Bats laughed.

  Then he screamed. A flash of golden light briefly revealed Anusha’s new location. For the barest instant Raidon saw her standing behind Neifion. Her dreamsword was plunged straight into the archfey’s broad back.

  The outline of a great dog burst from the shadows. It grabbed the flickering image of Anusha and bore her to the balcony’s floor, out of Raidon’s sight. The dreamsword protruding from the Naifion’s back blew away like smoke.

  Japheth yelled, “No!” and released another crackling beam. The emerald energy played across Neifion’s body, pocking his clothing and flesh with miniature smoking craters.

  The healing torrent continued surging from the Cerulean Blade. Under its impetus, Raidon stood.

  The Lord of Bats glared down at the warlock and monk, smoothing his garments. Where his hands passed, some of the rents in the fabric and his flesh were made whole, though others still gaped and bled.

  “Do your worst—I surpass you in every way,” Neifion said. “Besides, Malyanna and I are allied. See?” He pointed to the rune on his forehead. “She’s no simple eladrin, nor even an eladrin noble. The strength lent her by the Sovereignty makes her equal to me … if not stronger! And that’s just a splinter of the strength she and I will soon claim. Shall I call her to my side now, or will you relinquish Japheth?”

  “You’re weakening; all your talk is a ploy to gain time,” Raidon said. He turned to Japheth. “Can you put me next to him?” he asked.

  The warlock blinked to see Raidon standing, but nodded. Without any audible command, the folds of the warlock’s cape billowed toward the half-elf.

  Night enfolded him, then Raidon stood on the narrow balcony, Japheth at his back.

  A shadow hound crouched in front of him, between Raidon and the Lord of Bats. Of Anusha there was no sign.

  Raidon charged, leaping over the black mastiff’s head before it realized a threat had appeared on its flank. But the dog was quick. It loosed a low-pitched bay of warning. Neifion spun around. Angul’s sweeping blow failed to lop the archfey’s head from his shoulders. Instead, the vicious cut removed half the creature’s left hand raised in unconscious defense. The fingers dropped to the balcony’s stone floor and flexed in a mindless parody of life.

  The Lord of Bats screamed. The overwhelming sound buffeted Raidon and shook the catacombs’ walls. The monk nearly lost his grip on Angul when his body insisted he clap both hands over his ears.

  He ignored his body. He feinted with Angul but put all his power into a front kick that blasted into Neifion’s solar plexus. A nearly comical expression of surprise crossed the archfey’s face as he launched backward off the balcony. The Lord of Bats followed a trajectory similar to Raidon’s own earlier fall. However, Neifion didn’t fall half as gracefully.

  When the archfey struck the ground, his body broke into a hundred tiny pieces of winged blackness.

  The motes swirled around the stone block. All were dark as night save one that shimmered green. It was the sigil that had earlier graced the Lord of Bats’s brow.

  A slobbering mouth caught the back of Raidon’s right arm, the one holding Angul. The shadow hound clamped down and shook its head with frenzied strength.

  When the blade finally slipped from his grip, Raidon’s surprise was nearly as great as the sword’s. A wave of agony blindsided the half-elf. The sword had been insulating him from the aftereffects of the tree creature’s lethal bludgeoning after all. The sword spun and clattered on the floor below.

  “Let him go, you damned beast!” cried Japheth.

  Raidon saw the warlock release a torrent of red fire. The flames licked the shadow hound. It growled, but did not release its jaws. Instead, it leapt from the balcony with Raidon’s arm still clamped in its mouth.

  Neither monk nor hound managed an elegant landing. Raidon’s elbow smashed straight down on the stone with a sickening jolt, but at least his arm jerked free of the dog’s clenched teeth.

  Everything was spinning. His body felt like a bundle of twigs whose tie was pulled loose. Part of him wondered at his flailing ineffectualness. What had become of the Raidon of old? He mentally groped for his focus.

  Instead, his hand found Angul.

  What a stupid dog, thought Raidon, to disarm him, only to drag him back within reach of his weapon. The Blade Cerulean’s influence blasted through him like a forge furnace. It lifted him to his feet as a mother might right a fallen child.

  Raidon whirled, searching for his quarry.

  He saw Neifion’s swarm of flickering motes follow the hound down a lane of shadow exiting the chamber in a direction that didn’t exist in the world.

  The half-elf sprinted to close the gap, but the darkness fled in a candle’s flicker.

  Rage burned suddenly from the sword, following the conduit of his arm. The emotion pulsed through the buffer of his Cerulean Sign. It was rage, white-hot and righteous in its certainty. Raidon shifted his grip, so that he wielded the blade like an axe, and began to hack at the catacomb’s stone wall where the Lord of Bats, the hound, and the aberrant rune had seemed to flee.

  When a minor avalanche of loose maso
nry rained across him, Raidon continued to swing Angul. With each blow, he liberated a sizeable chunk of raw stone.

  “In the name of Nine,” Japheth said. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Raidon glanced back. The warlock had come down from the balcony. He stood only a few paces from him. The monk was also peripherally aware that Thoster and Seren stood in an entranceway free of water. And there was Anusha too, visible as a faintly translucent figure in a sun-bright panoply.

  But Japheth captured his attention.

  The warlock had thieved the Dreamheart. He had sworn a star pact. Both Angul and his Sign could discern the thread of aberration in the man like an apple hiding a worm; fell energies trickled through him. Japheth stood near his enigmatic iron sculpture, glaring at Raidon as if the monk were the one who had transgressed the laws of the natural world. As if …

  The blade lashed out.

  The metallic sculpture lurched into Angul’s path. The Blade Cerulean glanced off the suddenly animate shape in a shower of blue sparks.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Watch on Forever’s Edge, Feywild

  The watchtower shuddered. Taal swayed with the quaking structure, unconsciously canceling out the motion of the rolling flagstones with well-honed reflexes. He’d become used to the relentless tremors during the centuries of his servitude.

  Taal reached into a pocket of his shirt and carefully pulled out a tiny bird. It fluttered its wings, releasing a splendid rush of iridescent purple and green. The colors were too vivid for the watchtower. It was a creature of Faerie, and the watchtower lay beyond Faerie’s edge.

  How it had found its way into the tower with one hurt wing, Taal couldn’t guess. But the innocent beating heart had brought him a bit of joy when he’d looked at its dazzling plumage. Taal had spent part of the last month tending to the wing and feeding the bird from his rations.

  Taal judged the creature was fit to fly once more.

  He lifted it in one hand. Its tiny feet clamped tight around his forefinger.

  “You’ve got your strength back,” he said. “Now, fly away toward the light. Return to Faerie, and never again look into this dark corner.”

  The bird cocked its head at him, but made no move to take wing.

  He gave his finger a little shake. “Go!” he said. But the creature clung.

  Then the tower quaked again, and with that unsettling jolt, the bird took to the air.

  Taal walked to the tower’s edge and followed the creature’s progress as long as he could make it out. The bird winged above the darkling landscape. Boulders, bare rock, and the occasional stunted tree poked up below it. Light glowed along the far horizon, and the flash of color flittered toward that promise.

  Even after he lost the bird in the glow, Taal continued to stare at the distant light. The illumination waxed and waned over a period of hours that were several shy of twenty-four, as if time moved slightly more quickly there.

  Or, as was actually the case, slightly more slowly at the tower along the void.

  The light was the Feywild border, and beyond that, the world, and all the other planes of existence too. All those landscapes, mundane and fantastic alike, were peopled with creatures of every description, creed, and philosophy.

  Taal reflected that among those billions, perhaps only a handful were aware of the watchtowers erected thousands of years before by ancient eladrin nobles. Those ancients had determined that reality required defending against a madness that lay beyond all things.

  He would miss the tiny bird. He buried the pang of regret beneath his oath, as he buried so many other feelings.

  Finally, the bout of shaking subsided. Another would take its place, all too soon; the tower shivered more often than ever.

  Taal turned away from the side of the tower that looked toward the light, and shuffled to the other side.

  His gaze traced the watchtower’s silvery span, all the way down to the raw stone on which the sentinel tower was built. Beyond the structure’s imposing foundation, a cliff dropped away into a void of darkness. Dim specks of light glimmered out in that nothingness, like lonely stars.

  They might have been stars in truth, but if so, they were weak, old, and nearly spent. They were nothing like what Taal recalled from his youth. He could sometimes still summon the memory of true stars when he meditated.

  The cliff top stretched away to the north and the south. The pale stone ridge marked the border between substance and inchoate madness.

  Beacon fires glittered from the tops of all the other eladrin watchtowers built along existence’s raw edge. A long time before, the forces of creation had made a terrible mistake. They had left an imperfection in reality, rendering a forgotten corner of the Feywild vulnerable to the emptiness that stretched away forever beyond it.

  If only the void were truly mere nothingness.

  The tower trembled again.

  A mote of raw earth peeled away from the cliff face directly beneath the tower and sailed out into the void. Along the cliff, similar motes disengaged from the stone face and dispersed out into the dark, like seedlings blowing from tree branches in a slight breeze.

  He’d seen the launch of countless such impromptu “armadas.”

  The darkness engulfed each free-floating earthmote in turn. He waited patiently, until he saw distant flashes of green, red, and sky blue flower in the darkness. He presumed the light bursts heralded the moment a mote found a squirming monstrosity gliding inward from the discontinuity. When mote found horror, one annihilated the other. He fancied he could hear the detonations, though he knew the watchtowers were too far from the zone of engagement for sound to make the return trip.

  The earthmotes were the natural world’s defense against the aberrations.

  Taal peered into the abyss, past the flashes of light, into the eye-searing darkness. Despite never having seen it from the watchtower, Taal knew the name of the malign beachhead that existence defended itself from: the Citadel of the Outer Void.

  A wild cat’s growl jerked him from his reverie.

  The growl came from a tattoo on Taal’s upper right arm. The image, a tiger with a scorpion’s tail, was his personal totem, one he’d paid handsomely to have magically inked on his flesh.

  He’d only enjoyed its power a few tendays before he was plucked from Faerûn to swear his oath. But even in the stark realm where he served as castellan for one of the Twelve Towers, his totem warned him when potential enemies were drawing near.

  He retreated from Forever’s Edge and cast his eyes back down to the darkling plain.

  Two riders rode from the direction of the nearest neighbor tower, the Spire of Summer Mist.

  Taal called on the spirit resident in his totem, asking for sharpness of eyesight. His vision instantly pierced the relentless twilight. He saw the riders were not mere couriers, as he’d hoped, but eladrin nobles.

  Worry drew down the corners of his mouth. Why, despite all his assurances sent via beacon fire signals, were the Master and Mistress of Summer Mist personally venturing across the plain separating the towers for a visit?

  Taal hurried down the stairs that looped all the way down to the watchtower’s foundation. He passed many sealed doors. Behind these lay fell weapons, occult lore, collected omens, arcane ritual rooms, and other artifacts potentially useful in reality’s defense. Dust lay heavy on nearly every lintel.

  He left the stairs at ground level. The spiraling steps continued their lonely descent into the bedrock, where many more lightless chambers lurked.

  A larger keep surrounded the watchtower that stabbed the sky above it. Taal entered the keep’s great hall. He worked the wheel mechanism that unbarred the gate into the ward.

  The visitors had already been admitted through the outer wall into the ward by tower guards. The ward and outer wall, unlike the watchtower and inner keep, bustled with eladrin warriors and servants pledged to the spire’s upkeep and defense.

  Taal waited
in the entranceway with folded arms as the two visitors approached.

  The woman wore elaborately styled black leather armor. A rapier rode her hip, and an impious smile curled across her face when she saw Taal.

  The man’s platinum blond hair was bound in a knot, and matched the colors of his impeccably cut clothes. A glimmering bow was strapped, unstrung, to his back.

  “Welcome to the Spire of Winter’s Peace,” said Taal as they entered the great hall. “To what do we owe this unexpected visit?”

  “Taal, always a pleasure to see you,” the man replied. “You don’t come around anymore, as you used to when you first took service. Have we become so tiresome?”

  “My duties keep me busy, Lord Dramvar,” said Taal.

  “No one works harder than you,” Dramvar assured him. “Nor are hardly any of our warriors a match for your unique, um, martial skills. Our warriors still speak fondly of the weaponless techniques you used to demonstrate. Who knew a human could achieve such proficiency? Oh. I mean …”

  Dramvar’s pale skin colored slightly.

  Taal bowed his head to acknowledge the compliment, and the backhanded insult. “In my youth, even among humans, I achieved some notoriety,” he replied. “In any event, as I’ve explained, I’m consumed in my tasks. If you’ve come to invite me to the next revelry, I—”

  “Of course not,” said the woman. “Lord Dramvar is merely trying, in his inexpert fashion, to put you at your ease. But we have no time for pleasantries. We need to confer with your mistress immediately. Please inform Winter’s Peace that Summer Mist has important news that can’t wait.”

  Taal nodded, his face drawn in thought. “Lady Eloar,” he finally said, “as I communicated via beaconfire on more than one occasion, the Lady of Winter’s Peace is temporarily unavailable.”

  “Still?” said Lady Eloar. “Where did she go? The nearest kingdom of Faerie isn’t so far.”

  “The lady’s research regarding the growing instabilities in the void required she travel into the world,” replied Taal.