by Kate Novak
“First you walk in your sleep, now you dream when you’re wide awake,” Breck growled. “What manner of curse are you under?”
“I do not walk in my sleep,” Alias snapped.
“You did last night. Ask Dragonbait if you don’t believe me,” Breck replied.
Alias looked at Dragonbait, and the paladin nodded.
“It sounded as if you were singing a saurial soul song,” Grypht said. “But how can that be?” the wizard asked Dragonbait. “She’s not a saurial.”
“What’s a soul song?” Alias asked in saurial.
“Her soul and spirit are bound by magic to my own, High One,” Dragonbait explained to Grypht.
“But you haven’t received the gift of soul singing,” Grypht said, still confused.
“My mother had the gift, High One,” Dragonbait reminded the wizard.
“That’s right … so she did.” Grypht nodded, remembering.
“Would someone please tell me what a soul song is?” Alias asked again.
Grypht clapped his hands once and bounced on his heels. “This is marvelous—even better than the magic stone. If she sings what our people know, she will be our eyes and ears in the enemy’s camp.”
“What are they talking about?” Breck asked Alias. Although he was unable to follow any of the conversation in saurial, the ranger recognized Grypht’s excitement.
Alias waved Breck silent and shouted in saurial, “What is a soul song?”
“A song of our people that reflects our tribe’s state of being,” Grypht explained calmly. “When a singer of a soul song sings, her mind opens up to what is within the souls of her tribe, and she sings their song. Sometimes when she sleeps, she often dreams their dreams and wakes singing their song. The song will change as the tribe’s condition changes. It may be a song of joy or contentment, which we accept with pleasure, or it may be a song of grief, which we learn to bear. When it is a song of evil, though, we must act—fight the evil, whether it comes from without or within, until the song grows good again. Because our tribe is controlled by Moander, the tribe knows much anguish, but it also knows of the Darkbringer’s plans. You probably have just been singing of those plans. I hope you can do it again. Something opened your mind to the souls of our tribe and you began to sing. What was it? What were you thinking about before you went into the trance?”
Alias’s brow furrowed. “I … I don’t remember.”
“Your fear of Moander,” Dragonbait said.
Alias lowered her eyes, embarrassed, then it occurred to her that this soul-singing trance could explain her other problem. “That must be why I’ve been singing Nameless’s songs differently. I’ve been turning them into soul songs.”
“It is very likely,” Dragonbait agreed.
“Dragonbait, if you knew what was happening, why didn’t you try to tell me what was wrong?” Alias asked the paladin.
“I only started to suspect last night,” Dragonbait said, “when you sang in saurial. At least, you tried to sing, but your words had no feeling, since you hadn’t the power to produce scents. Just now when you sang, it was much more obvious that it was a soul song.”
“Would someone please explain what is going on?” Breck demanded, frustrated beyond endurance at not being able to understand the swordswoman’s conversation with the saurials.
Alias explained everything that Grypht and Dragonbait had just told her. “So,” she said in conclusion, staring pointedly at Akabar and Zhara, “I was right after all. I knew I wasn’t singing the songs wrong because of the gods.”
“Actually,” Dragonbait said, “our people believe that soul singing is a gift of the gods.”
Alias didn’t bother to translate the paladin’s correction. “You said I sang about Moander’s plans. What did I sing? I have no recollection of it whatsoever.”
Grypht quoted the lyrics of the first verse of Alias’s soul song. “ ‘We are ready for the seed. Where is the seed? Find the seed. Bring the seed.’ ”
“What seed?” Alias asked.
“We don’t know,” Grypht said. “Obviously it is something Moander wants very badly, and he thinks Nameless will bring it to him. The second verse of your song went, ‘Nameless is found. Nameless must join us. Nameless will find the seed. Nameless will bring the seed.’ ”
“And then you screamed,” Dragonbait interjected.
“Yes!” Alias exclaimed, suddenly remembering what had made her scream out in fear. “Nameless is in terrible danger! We must find him before it’s too late! Moander is trying to turn him into one of its minions!”
Olive shifted in her sleep from one uncomfortable position to another. Somewhere far overhead, birds started to chirp loudly. Olive came half awake, but from the back of her mind came a reminder that she didn’t want to be awake, so she kept her eyes closed and ignored the birds. A beam of sunlight struck her face. Olive drew her hood up over her eyes. Then her stomach rumbled.
“Damn!” the halfling grumbled. She glared up angrily at the well shaft overhead, which taunted her with its inaccessibility. If only it had been nearer a wall, they could escape. She was experienced at climbing walls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hang from ceilings, and the well came out in the center of the ceiling. She sat up and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.
“Stupid well!” she muttered, rummaging through her knapsack. There wasn’t any fruit left. She and Finder had finished it off last night. Buried in the bottom of the knapsack, she found three stale sweet rolls. She left two for the bard and took one for herself, nibbling at it slowly as she studied the excavation Finder had begun last night.
The bard had climbed to the top of the passageway wall, where he had dug into the dirt and pounded at the stone with Olive’s broken shovel until he’d created a second shaft in the ceiling. It was all of four feet deep. He’d finally slipped down from the wall, frustrated and exhausted. In the morning light, Olive judged the old well shaft to be at least fifty feet deep. She estimated it would take about a week for one man and a halfling to dig that far straight up. Finder was trying to angle his shaft toward the well shaft, hoping to connect with it so they could climb out the rest of the way through the well. Since the well shaft was only twenty feet from Finder’s shaft, digging to it should only take days … days without water or food.
Olive crept over to the corner where Finder lay sleeping. He slept like the dead, heavy and still. Asleep, the power of his voice and the animation of his face were not apparent, and he looked far older. Once he’d been lord of the ruined manor house somewhere above them, commanding the respect of his peers and the worship of his apprentices. Now he was curled up like a corpse, buried alive by his own magical horn.
Olive studied his face and hands carefully. There were no signs of vegetation growing out of his ears or his wrists. There was no hint of green in his skin. Maybe Finder had been right and his clothing had protected him from whatever had burst out of the burr.
Something clattered in the passage behind Olive. The halfling swung around with her dagger drawn. Pebbles were rolling from the top of the fresh wall of dirt created when Olive had collapsed the ceiling. Something was shifting inside the pile.
Olive knelt beside the bard and shook his shoulder frantically. “Finder!” she whined.
Finder groaned and looked up groggily at the halfling. “Go ’way,” he growled.
“Finder, something’s trying to get in by digging through the cave-in!” Olive whispered urgently.
The bard sat up and reached for Olive’s sword, which he’d been using as a dagger.
A large rock tumbled down the pile, and a muck-encrusted vine as thick as Olive’s arm slithered out from where the rock had been. It rose up like an angry snake, and they could see that there was a mouth at its tip—a lipless maw full of rows of sharp fangs. Olive had seen just such a growth before on Moander’s body in the Realms.
“Nameless,” the mouth called out. It spoke in the same grating, high-pitched voice as Xaran.
Finde
r rose to his feet and approached the vine carefully. “Is that you, Xaran?” he asked, halting a few feet from the mouth.
The vine twisted so that the mouth faced the bard. “You will do Moander’s bidding whether you choose to or not. It is only a matter of time,” the vine mouth said.
“You are mistaken,” Finder said heatedly. “Moander tried to pervert my singer. I will never deal with the Darkbringer.”
“In time, you will return even your precious singer to Moander,” the vine mouth said.
“You can go to hell!” Finder snarled. He slashed out with Olive’s sword and sliced the mouth off the end of the vine. The vine whipped around his sword arm. Finder tried to pull it loose with his other hand, but twinelike tendrils flared out from the vine and lashed his hands together at the wrists.
Olive leaped forward, slashing with her dagger, and hacked through the vine near where it came out of the pile of rubble. What was left of the vine retreated back into the debris. The tendrils wrapped around Finder’s arms went limp, but Olive had to help the bard free himself from them.
“Well, that was heartening,” Finder said glibly.
“What was heartening?” Olive asked incredulously. “That Xaran is still alive waiting to grab you and turn you into a vegetable?”
“No,” Finder said. “what was heartening was that Xaran used a tendril to slither in here, instead of simply disintegrating this pile of rubble. It must have injured its disintegrating eye.”
“Great. Since you stabbed its central eye, now it has only nine more to use on us,” Olive said.
“Eight. The eye that charms beasts will be useless against us,” Finder reminded the halfling. “And I imagine both of us have the will to resist the eye that causes sleep.”
“Oh … now I feel better,” Olive said sarcastically. “There are only seven ways left for it to kill or capture me.”
“Xaran doesn’t have any hands to dig himself out, but we do,” Finder said.
“But Xaran can put out another tendril and strangle us in our sleep,” Olive protested.
“We’ll just have to keep watch.”
Olive heard a shout, as if from far away. She silenced the bard with a wave of her hand and listened hard. In a few seconds, there was another shout.
“Orcs!” the halfling said in panic. “There are still orcs alive out there! They’ll dig Xaran out, then come in after us! Then what?”
“A good question,” the bard muttered. “A good question indeed.”
The Mouth of Moander peered into her scrying pool at the Nameless Bard and his halfling companion. It was only a matter of time before they were recaptured, but Moander didn’t allow her to take her eyes off them. Last night, the high priestess had felt a rare moment of pleasure and hope when the bard’s dagger had survived Xaran’s disintegration ray and destroyed the beholder’s central eye, and she had dared to gloat over her master’s setback when the bard had felled the orcs and ruined their warren with his magical horn. Now the evil god kept the priestess’s eyes fixed on the bard, savoring her fresh despair.
Coral wished fervently that she was standing at the top of the well with a rope to help the bard escape. Since the priestess had been unable to scry Akabar this morning, presumably because he’d rejoined the protected Alias, Moander was now relying on Nameless to locate the Turmishman. Without Nameless’s help, the search for Akabar could go on far too long, increasing the risk that someone would find the hiding place of the god’s new body, perhaps even someone with power enough to destroy the body and free the possessed saurials.
Moander forced Coral to speak the very words it used to taunt her. “Even if the bard could fly out of that trap, he cannot escape the Darkbringer now. The seeds of possession grow in him,” the god declared through Coral’s mouth.
“No!” Coral insisted. “Xaran’s spores exploded hours ago, and the bard still shows no signs of possession. He has resisted your evil seeds.”
“No, he hasn’t,” Moander forced Coral to say. “The seeds are simply taking longer to grow within him because he is human and such a large man.”
“You lie!” Coral shouted in anger. “You lie to torture me!”
“Do I? We shall see,” Moander said via the priestess’s voice, and the Darkbringer made Coral laugh the high-pitched cackle of the insane.
14
The Rescue
Alias held the finder’s stone at arm’s length and thought of Nameless again. Once more the stone sent out a beacon of light to the southwest.
“You know these lands,” Akabar said to Breck Orcsbane. “What places where the bard might be fall along the beacon’s path?”
Breck whistled softly. “He could be practically anywhere—Spiderhaunt Woods, Shadow Gap, Gnoll Pass, Cormyr. They all lie in that direction,” the ranger replied. “If you or Grypht could teleport us to another place, we could use the stone to triangulate and get a better fix.”
Akabar shook his head. “I do not yet possess the power for such a spell, and Grypht is not familiar enough with this world to teleport us anywhere but Shadowdale. That is not far enough off the beam’s path to triangulate accurately.”
Alias rocked nervously on the balls of her feet. She had to find a way to reach Nameless quickly. Now that the swordswoman was finally conscious of her soul song link with the saurials whom Moander had enslaved, she could no longer deny that Moander was indeed returning to the Realms. She knew, too, with absolute certainty, that Nameless was in grave danger from Moander and that all the evil god’s attention was focused on the bard. There just wasn’t time to trek across country following the stone’s light beam. She peered anxiously into the stone. The longer she looked at it, the more she remembered of its powers. It held all sorts of spells for Nameless, including spells to teleport him to safe places if he ever found himself threatened.
Alias looked up from the finder’s stone with a hopeful look on her face. “There’s a teleport spell in the finder’s stone that can transport us to the Spiderhaunt Woods,” she said. “I’m going to use it.”
“Alias, we can’t just teleport all around the Realms,” Akabar said. “We have to think this through.”
“There isn’t time!” Alias said. “I’m going.”
“Can it transport all of us?” Breck asked.
Alias nodded. “I think so,” she said. “The stone is very powerful. All we need to do is hold hands,” she said, reaching for Dragonbait with her left hand.
Dragonbait translated the plan to Grypht and reached for the wizard’s hand. Grypht took Akabar’s hand, Akabar grasped Zhara’s hand, and Zhara held Breck’s.
Alias held the finder’s stone out in her right hand and sang out a clear musical note. Immediately a yellow glow surrounded her body. The glow slid from her arm to Dragonbait and then across the chain of Grypht, Akabar, Zhara and Breck. Within moments, the light grew so bright that Alias could see nothing but yellow. Then the light faded. She and her companions stood on a grassy hillside meadow.
Alias swayed dizzily and looked down at the finder’s stone with a sense of awe. She’d never thought much about the genius it must have taken to build her own body, but now that she’d actually cast such powerful magic with one of Nameless’s other creations she was far more impressed with the bard’s skills than she’d ever been before.
Grypht recovered first from the disorienting effects of teleporting and looked around with interest. He nudged the swordswoman and pointed behind her. Atop the hill stood the remains of a crumbling stone manor. Grypht approached the ruins and walked up the front steps and through the doorless doorway. Alias raced alongside him, holding out the finder’s stone and thinking of Nameless. A light shot out toward the back of the manor house. She followed it until she reached a doorway to a dark staircase that led downward.
The other adventurers hurried to catch up to her. Breck gave a low whistle. “Nameless is really here,” he said with astonishment. “Talk about luck.”
Grypht emitted the scent of warm tar,
elated over their prospects for success. “We may actually reach him before Moander does.”
Alias had already started down the stairs with Dragonbait at her side. Akabar and Zhara followed. Grypht and Breck brought up the rear.
They hadn’t descended more than twenty steps when their way was blocked by a caved-in section of the ceiling. The finder’s stone pinpointed a tunnel, big enough for everyone but Grypht to crawl through, dug through the rubble. Once Dragonbait made it through to the other side, he whistled back the distance to Grypht, and the wizard summoned a dimensional door to carry him past the cave-in. Grypht’s head brushed the passageway ceiling, but he motioned them onward, unconcerned.
Both Grypht’s staff and the finder’s stone lit the darkness around them, glowing like torches, but the finder’s stone also sent out a bright beacon of light to indicate Nameless’s direction. The beacon led them to two more cave-ins. Each time Grypht circumvented crawling through them with dimensional doors, so that the huge lizard was the only one of them not covered with dirt when they reached the locked iron grate.
“Olive would be useful right about now,” Alias said to Akabar as she shook the door to test its strength.
Grypht motioned for everyone to back away from the grate. Lifting his robe like a grand lady crossing a puddle, the saurial wizard kicked one of his huge legs at the lock. The door flew open with a crash.
“Now, that’s a trick I’ve never seen Elminster do,” Breck said with a chuckle as he followed the others through the open grate.
The finder’s stone’s beam suddenly shifted direction, shining down a gap in the passageway’s lined stone walls. Beyond the gap lay a natural tunnel.
Dragonbait sniffed the air and hesitated.
“What is it?” Alias asked.
“Orcs,” the paladin said in saurial.
Alias whispered back to Akabar, Zhara, and Breck, “Dragonbait smells—”
“Orcs,” Breck finished the swordswoman’s sentence.
“How did you know?” Alias asked, surprised.
