The Sorcerer

by Denning, Troy

  Aris followed Galaeron through the Black Portal and into the shadow mist. The air grew frigid, and the floor turned as soft as snow.

  Aris called into the blackness, “Galaeron?”

  He took another tentative step, doing his best to continue in a straight line.

  “Where are you?”

  When no answer came, Aris decided he had waited too long. The shadows were no place to become lost. He turned around and retraced his steps exactly.

  Three steps later, he remained in the dark.

  Perhaps his first two steps had been longer than he thought. Holding his arm before him, Aris took another step forward.

  “Galaeron!”

  A small hand pressed itself to his kneecap and the elf whispered, “Quietly, my friend.”

  Aris’s sigh was anything but soft.

  “I thought you’d left me behind.”

  “I have too few friends to leave them wandering around the Fringe alone,” Galaeron replied. He pulled on the leg of Aris’s trousers, guiding him forward. “We must be careful. I don’t know who else might be watching.”

  “Watching?” Aris whispered.

  Galaeron stopped, and the black mists ahead slowly grew translucent. Aris saw that they had stopped just inside the Shadow Fringe. Ahead lay a large crater lined in obsidian, with no apparent seams and a surface as smooth as the interior of a glass bowl. Standing near the bottom, spaced at equal intervals along the inner wall, were Khelben and the four sisters. They held their arms outspread, fingertips pointing toward their comrades to either side, so that they formed a great ring around the interior. Within this circle lay a disk of gray opalescent light, which they were slowly walking toward the bottom of the basin.

  Vala was nowhere in sight. Nor were Telamont and his princes.

  Aris kneeled at Galaeron’s side and stooped down to whisper, “Perhaps they did not find—”

  Galaeron made a motion, and the rest of Aris’s sentence vanished into silence.

  The mythallar is beneath that dimensional portal, Galaeron’s voice said inside his head. Vala is here somewhere, you may be sure.

  Aris was about to ask whether Telamont was also there when, about a quarter of the way around the crater, the dark figures of all ten surviving princes emerged from the Shadow Fringe. They did not step from the obsidian lining so much as they peeled themselves out of it. They began to slide silently down the wall. Aris reached for his tool pouch for something to throw and started to rise, but Galaeron put out a restraining hand.

  The Chosen will have foreseen this.

  The princes were almost upon the Chosen when they struck an invisible barrier and came to an abrupt stop, tiny forks of golden energy crackling outward around each impact point. They leaped to their feet, wailing in pain and shock, and scrambled a few steps up the wall then stopped there, bleeding dark mist into the air. Three of them collapsed again almost immediately and melted back into the Fringe. The others hurled globes of shadow magic toward the bottom of the crater. The balls hit the barrier and erupted into huge black sprays, then rained back down in tiny beads of darkness that skittered across the invisible surface like drops of water on a hot frying pan.

  While the others continued to assail the barrier, the gaunt figure of Prince Lamorak conjured a shadow disk. He and his brother Malath stepped aboard and floated out toward the center of the crater, their fingers working madly as they twined strands of shadowsilk into the shape of a small hand axe.

  Aris grabbed one of his chisels but before he could pull it from his tool bag to throw, a bolt of golden magic streaked down from the opposite crater rim to blast Lamorak’s shadow disk into shards. Malath pitched headlong into the invisible barrier and fell instantly limp, his body first melting into a black puddle, then coming apart and skittering across the surface in steaming black globules. Lamorak hit on his back, screamed once, and managed to bounce himself into the air. He vanished with the sharp crackle of a teleport spell.

  Aris looked across the crater toward the source of the golden bolt and glimpsed a swirl of Vala’s golden hair as she dropped out of sight behind the rim. Though he had never seen her cast a spell, it was not a wild guess to think that one of the Chosen might have loaned her a ring or wand capable of hurling the magic bolts. Unfortunately, Aris was not the only one who had spotted her. Yder and Aglarel scurried after her, their lanky limbs oddly spiderlike as the princes ascended the slick wall.

  Aris glanced down and was relieved to find his friend staring after Vala, his elf brows arched high in concern. Still, Galaeron made no move to go after her. Recalling how, while facing a similar situation under the influence of his shadow self on the Saiyyadar, the elf had nearly gotten him killed by using him to bait a dragon into an ambush, Aris grabbed Galaeron’s shoulder and urged him after her.

  Galaeron pulled free of Aris’s hand.

  They would have foreseen that. We must wait here in the Fringe for what they did not foresee.

  Aris started to ask angrily what that might be, but Galaeron’s spell kept him silent. He could only wait and watch as the Chosen, ignoring the princes’ ever more frantic efforts to penetrate the mystic barrier, continued to walk the dimensional portal toward the bottom of the basin. Yder and Aglarel reached the rim of the crater and disappeared over the top. The basin began to tremble and fall away beneath them.

  Aris’s jaw dropped. The Chosen had done it—Shade was falling. He snatched Galaeron up. Determined not to become separated from the others whatever the elf said, he jumped into the basin—but landed in the same place he had been, with the basin continuing to fall away below him.

  When we are needed, Galaeron hissed. Not before.

  How long he had lain chained on Shar’s altar, Malik could not say. All he knew was he had grown so weak with hunger that his belly had lost the strength to rumble, that his tongue was so swollen with thirst he could not have drunk if someone had given him water, that his ears had become so inured by the constant hissing of the Hidden One’s worshipers that the sudden silence left him feeling deafened and dizzy.

  He had the sensation of floating—a sensation that only grew stronger when his shadow on the ceiling started to shrink and loom ever darker, when the stream of silver magic pouring from the stone began to swirl around him in beads as large as his head, and especially when the confused forms of Shar’s worshipers began to tumble through the air and bounce along the shadow-stained ceiling.

  So weakened by thirst and hunger was Malik that for a few moments, he was too confused to comprehend what he was seeing. Had he finally died and begun his journey to the Shattered Castle, or had the harlot Shar suddenly granted all her worshipers the ability to fly? Or perhaps it was an hallucination. Perhaps all the hardships he had endured on behalf of his god Cyric had finally taken their toll, leaving him as demented and mad as once his god had been.

  Then Malik hit the end of his chains and felt his withered hands nearly slip free of one of the manacles, and he knew what had happened. The One had answered a prayer. Finally, Cyric had taken mercy on his poor servant and raised a finger to help in the impossible mission he had assigned him, and soon the Sharites would pay for all of the torment and abuse they had heaped upon him while he lay chained to their goddess’s stolen altar.

  “Your doom is upon you!” Malik yelled through the floating swirl of silver beads. “Cyric has come for me at last, and he shall take a terrible vengeance on you.”

  “Fool!”—the voice that hissed this came from his own shadow, lying flat upon the ceiling not a dozen paces above him—“Nothing could be farther from Cyric’s mind than your misery.”

  “You cannot know that!” Malik said, more for his own comfort than because he believed his shadow needed to know. “You are nothing to him.” He meant to stop there, but felt more words welling up as Mystra’s curse compelled him to speak the full truth. “Except another torment for me!”

  This drew a purple smile from the shadow, which said, “The one service I am happy to
perform for your lying god, but that does not change the truth of what is happening. The city is falling.”

  “Falling?” Malik shrieked. He noticed that other voices were beginning to join him. “With me in it?”

  “A pity, is it not?” the shadow asked.

  “More than you know.”

  In this, Malik was telling the truth, for Cyric was fond of telling him the fate that awaited him if he ever failed in one of the divine missions assigned to him. It took only an instant for the thousand promised torments to flash through his mind, for in his infinite wisdom, the One had made Malik memorize them until he knew them all as well as his own name.

  But there was no way to avoid it. The city was going to crash into the desert, and he was going to die along with everyone else, no doubt crushed beneath the Karsestone, since he was still chained to it … and that was when Malik saw how he would save himself.

  Once before, when Cyric had sent Malik to fetch a sacred book from inside the Keeper’s Tower at Candlekeep, the One had told him he had only to call the name of the One and All three times once he had succeeded in his duty and he would be rescued. Given that Yder had called the Karsestone the crown of his goddess Shar, and given that it was also the only remaining source of the ancient whole magic in all of Faerûn—perhaps even Toril itself—it seemed reasonable to suppose that he who controlled the Karsestone might also control the Shadow Weave.

  The stone might be, Malik realized, just like a crown. If not actually the source of Shar’s power over the Shadow Weave, it was at least a symbol of it, and he had learned in Calimshan that he who controlled the symbol soon owned the power.

  When the city’s true caliph had lost his crown to a ring of thieves, the master of the thieves had audaciously set the crown on his own head and challenged the caliph to take it back. Try as he might, the old man never succeeded, and it was not long before the city revered the thief as the new caliph.

  And so it would be with the Karsestone, Malik believed. No—he knew. There could be no other reason the goddess of shadows would permit an artifact of such blazing light to serve as the High Altar in her holiest of temples.

  Seeing that he had floated to within five feet of the ceiling—and that his shadow was little larger than he himself, but as black as obsidian—Malik closed his eyes. He had no idea how long it would take the city to crash into Anauroch, but they had been falling for a full five or ten breaths, and they had to hit soon.

  “I have it, Mighty One! I have the Shadow Weave chained right here on my back!”

  When Mystra’s curse did not compel Malik to add anything more, or even to clarify that it was just a symbol, he decided his plan was going to work and called, “Cyric, the One, the All!”

  Nothing happened. He floated so close to the ceiling that he could not see anything except his shadow’s smirking face.

  “How pitiful you are,” it said. “It shames me to know I spring from your image. Even if Cyric could hear you, do you think he would answer?”

  “If he could hear me?” Malik screamed. “What do you mean if?”

  “What do you think I mean?” the shadow retorted. “This is the temple—”

  The explanation came to an abrupt end as Malik touched the ceiling and came into contact with his shadow. The red eyes winked out and its shape grew more squat and less monsterlike. Malik experienced a rush of cold magic as it reattached itself to his body.

  “Thish is justh what you desherve!” With his face pressed against the stone ceiling, it was impossible to speak clearly. “You will be with me when I fathe the One’sh anger!”

  The ceiling lifted away from his face, and Malik thought for a moment that his shadow had been wrong, that Cyric had come for him after all. Then he heard splashing, and screaming, and all around him he saw Shadovar flailing their arms and beads of silver magic assuming teardrop shapes as they plummeted back toward the temple floor.

  Closing his eyes, Malik yelled again, “Cyric, the One, the All!”

  Nothing happened, except that a steady roar began to build beneath Malik. No sooner had he identified the sound as the Karsestone’s steady stream of magic pouring into the pool below than the roar exploded into a thunderous splash, and the air shot from his lungs as his back slammed into the Karsestone. He bounced once and felt his legs come free as the shackle bolt holding his feet came out, then he felt bones snapping in one hand as it was pulled through the closed manacles.

  For a moment, Malik thought it would end there, that everything would go black and he would awaken on the Fugue Plain, abandoned to the rough mercy visited upon all the faithless wretches who displeased their holy masters by the thieving god of the dead, Kelemvor.

  But that was not to be. Still attached to the Karsestone by his one unbroken hand, Malik rolled off to the cracked side and caught the spray of magic full in the face. Before he could close his mouth and twist away, he swallowed three huge gulps, and of course they went down the wrong passage and immediately filled his lungs.

  Malik expected to drown—and quickly—but this was magic. It coursed through his lungs into the rest of his body, filling him with renewed vigor. The weakness brought on by his hunger and thirst vanished, and the hand he had just broke began to heal—though with the fractured bone still unset, it felt like Aris had driven a chisel through it. Malik gathered his legs beneath him and turned to find the temple filled with battered Shadovar, some floating facedown in the silver magic and some sloshing toward the exit arches as fast as their dark legs would carry them.

  A pair of fanatical Shar worshipers saw him standing beside the Karsestone and started to rush it, yelling that this was the doing of the infidel thief. It was at that very moment that the ceiling vaults gave way beneath the strain of the sudden stop and began to shower down into the temple. The largest worshiper was crushed beneath a section of a stone rib as long as Aris was tall, and the other vanished behind a screen of falling debris.

  Making good use of his Cyric-given ability to vanish, Malik ducked beneath the surface of the silver pool to hide. The surviving fanatic arrived a moment later, hacking into the water with his black sword and swearing that he would mount Malik’s horned head on his wall. Though it would have been a simple matter to follow the last manacle chain down to Malik’s hand itself, the One’s magic prevented the worshiper from seeing this. Malik came up behind him, reaching around to draw the Shadovar’s dagger from his belt. He used the worshiper’s own weapon to open his belly.

  A long section of wall collapsed behind Malik. The whole temple tilted, and he found himself being dragged along behind the Karsestone as the current carried everything in the room toward a huge whirlpool in the corner. He had just enough time to realize that he was about to be dragged down one of the drainage pits he had noticed upon his first awakening in the chamber.

  Malik felt for a moment like the city had begun to fall again, but then his manacle chain went slack, tight, and slack again as the Karsestone hit something, bounced, and began to roll. He found himself first flying wildly through the air, then watching the stone fly past over his head, then being jerked along behind it before he finally slammed into it face first and came to a rest.

  Compared to the crash and roar of the initial fall, the chamber seemed eerily quiet. That did not mean silence. The air was filled with the wailing and groaning of the injured, the staccato splashing of debris and people falling into viscous pools of magic, and the steady gurgle of the magic stream still pouring out of the cracked Karsestone. Malik slowly picked himself up, and discovering he had survived more or less intact, he turned to see where he had landed.

  He lay propped against the wall of one of the workshop caverns where the Shadovar made their shadow blankets. To his right lay the huge, comblike loom they used to weave the shadowsilk into cloth, and to his left lay the hundred-yard slit they used to provide the light they needed to create shadow. Most interesting to Malik, however, was the shallow tin pan directly in front of him. Tipped at a steep angle beca
use of the city’s tilt, the pan was easily a hundred paces square, but no more than a fingernail’s thickness in depth. At the far side—several dozen yards higher than Malik’s head—was a long collection trough still containing some of the silver magic that had once distributed evenly across the trough.

  A tremendous rumble shook the loom cavern, then it slowly righted itself. The silvery magic from the Karsestone spilled into the tin pan and began to spread toward the far corners of the room. The sun drifted briefly across the mouth of the light slit, then vanished behind the top edge and sent a narrow wedge of shadow shooting across the pan. Where the shadow came into contact with the spreading sheet of whole magic, it bonded instantly into a wafer-thin triangle of shadow blanket.

  “They use whole magic!” Malik gasped, suddenly understanding what he was seeing. “They need the Karsestone to make their blankets.”

  The city continued to tilt, going a little past center and tipping in the opposite direction. Realizing that whatever he had learned, it would do him no good if he did not survive to tell Cyric, Malik leaped to his feet. Sometimes pushing, sometimes pulling, and sometimes being swung along himself, he began to guide the Karsestone toward the sun slit along the right side of the room.

  Given his usual luck, Malik thought he would probably manage to push the Karsestone out into the desert just before the entire Shade Enclave came crashing down upon them.

  Dark as Galaeron’s heart had grown, it had nearly torn apart as he and Aris watched Aglarel and Yder vanish over the basin rim in pursuit of Vala. After the abandonment of the caravan at Eveningstar, he had no illusions about the Chosen’s willingness to risk one for the good of the many. That he was also willing to take the same risk—and with someone he loved—struck him as neither good nor evil, only necessary. That events had proven him right made him feel neither vindicated nor culpable, only sorrowful. He finally understood what Dove and the others had been trying to tell him that day—or so he believed, as his hand had finally healed and returned to its proper color—that the Chosen already carried their shadows inside, that it was not possible to bear so much responsibility and power without darkening one’s own spirit.