“Ready yourself, Aris,” he said. Galaeron spoke normally, for there was no longer any chance that the Shadovar would overhear him. “We are needed.”
Through the thickening shadow fog rising from the battle below, the Most High was barely visible, a ghostly figure standing at the edge of the Chosen’s melted defense barrier. He was staring down into the bottom of the basin, where the mythallar sat amid the fuming tatters of the dimensional portal Khelben and the others had been lowering over it when he finally revealed himself by spraying a wave of shadow fire across their overhead protection.
The battle after that had been as fast as it was furious, with the five remaining princes diving straight through the black flames to attack. In the few moments it took for the barrier to burn away enough for Galaeron to see what was happening, the dimensional portal was destroyed, the Chosen were engaged by the princes, and the city stopped falling—at least temporarily. The obsidian mythallar was a truncated sphere no more than a hundred feet high, but with ghostly shapes gliding about inside and the same dark aura as the first time Galaeron had seen it.
The fight raging around the mythallar was both fierce and wild, with shadow balls and lightning bolts crashing against spell shields, silver blades clanging against black, feet and fists flying too fast for an eye to follow. Fearful of creating more dimensional rifts like the one that had sucked Elminster into the Nine Hells, both sides were avoiding the use of pure magic. Even so, in half a dozen places there were alarming whirls of shadow-filled air, two of which seemed to be drawing spells into their spinning hearts and growing larger as they fed on the magic.
Galaeron pointed at the broad-shouldered figure of Prince Clariburnus, who was being steadily beaten back by a blinding flurry of blade and foot attacks from Dove Falconhand.
“See if you can take Clariburnus from behind,” he told Aris, “and tip the balance in our favor.”
Aris hefted his giant hammer and replied, “I’ll distract him at least, but it worries me that we see only the princes and the Most High.” The giant gestured at Telamont, who was holding his palms out toward the damaged mythallar, no doubt controlling the flow of the Shadow Weave to steady the city, and asked, “Where is their army?”
“Anywhere but here,” Galaeron replied.
It didn’t take a wild guess to know that the Shadovar would not want to run the risk that one of their soldiers would meet a stream of the Chosen’s silver fire with a shadow bolt. The resulting tear in the world fabric might well suck the entire enclave into a plane more hellish than the one they had just escaped.
Aris grunted, and asked, “Do I want to know what you will be doing?”
Galaeron pointed at Telamont and said, “I’ll be keeping the Most High busy.”
Aris’s eyes went wide.
“Has your shadow made you insane?” he gasped. “You’re no match—”
“A bloodfly is no match for a rothé, but which one does the biting?” Galaeron motioned Aris forward and said, “You will emerge behind Clariburnus.”
Aris regarded Galaeron with a skeptical expression.
“Be careful, my friend. I have not yet given up on you.”
Galaeron smiled and said, “Then it must be true, what the Sy’Tel’Quessir say—there is nothing more stubborn than a Stone Giant.” He laid a hand behind Aris’s knee and pushed. “Hurry, before those fools open another hell mouth.”
Aris lurched forward, stumbling out of the Fringe. Galaeron remained behind long enough to see him emerge from the basin’s obsidian wall a few paces behind Clariburnus, his great hammer already arcing down toward his target’s head. The prince sensed the attack at the last instant and twisted away, but the distraction was all Dove Falconhand needed to drive her own attacks home. Flinging magic with one hand and swinging steel with the other, she first dispelled the Shadovar’s blade guard, then sank her magic sword to the hilt in his abdomen. He stumbled back under Aris’s legs, letting out a throaty howl that was audible even above the battle din. The prince took his vengeance by slashing his black sword behind Aris’s leg.
The giant’s knee buckled, and that was as long as Galaeron dared watch before leaping out of the Fringe. He came out directly behind Telamont, kicking with both feet, calling a bolt of black lightning with one hand and swinging his stolen sword with the other.
The Most High did not flinch. He did not even look. He merely stepped out of the way. As Galaeron sailed past, he swung the sword and flung the lightning. As soon as his black blade touched Telamont’s robe, it shattered. The lightning bolt fizzled an inch from his hand, then Galaeron found himself hanging motionless before his target, staring into a pair of flickering platinum eyes.
“Elf!” the Most High barked. In his anger, Telamont almost balled one of his wispy hands, and the city trembled as his control over the mythallar slipped. “How did you get free?”
Galaeron smiled—it seemed the Most High did not know all that happened in his palace.
“In the most unexpected way possible …”
Galaeron opened himself to the Shadow Weave and felt its cold magic come flowing into him from every direction.
“I took your advice.”
Galaeron turned his palm outward and unleashed a bolt of pure shadow magic. The attack seemed to take Telamont by surprise, if only because he had not been prepared to see Galaeron calling upon the Shadow Weave. Unfortunately, it also had next to no effect, casting only a short-lived cloud over the Most High’s face before it vanished into the darkness beneath his cowl. The city seemed to fall once more—for just a heartbeat—then the Most High caught it again.
“You have yielded to your shadow, I see,” Telamont said. “It will not be long before you are able to return the information Melegaunt worked so hard to collect.”
“I can recall it now,” Galaeron said, “but you wouldn’t be wise to count on me for favors—and ‘yielded’ is not the word I would have used. I have joined with my shadow, but my will remains my own.”
Telamont’s platinum eyes flashed, and Galaeron’s limbs spread outward. He spun around until he was hanging upside down over the battle. Aris lay on the floor of the basin, bleeding from three different wounds and writhing in pain. The Chosen were faring far better. Though both Dove and Storm were pouring blood from rents in their armor, only three princes remained in the basin. Prince Mattick was giving ground under a furious assault of blade and spell.
All Galaeron had to do was keep Telamont’s attention focused on him instead of the fight. He tried again to open himself to the Shadow Weave, but all he felt this time was a spongy presence through which no magic would pass.
“Is something wrong, elf?” Telamont asked. “Perhaps your will is not your own, after all?”
In the basin below, Prince Mattick had dropped to a knee beneath the furious onslaught of magic coming from Alustriel and Laeral. Dove and Khelben were driving his brother Vattick away from him and would soon be in a position to finish him with a blow from behind.
“My will is enough mine to vow you shall never have the knowledge Melegaunt passed to me,” Galaeron said. “And if you doubt I have the strength to keep my oath—”
“Your strength I do not doubt. You resisted your shadow far too long.” Telamont’s voice was wispy and cold. “A pity, really. Had you surrendered to it as I urged, I could have saved you as I did Hadrhune. Now, you are useless to me. I will be forced to wring the knowledge from your worthless mind … just as I have your foolish hope for defeating my princes.”
As Telamont spoke these last words, the princes Aglarel and Yder emerged behind Alustriel and Laeral. Aglarel caught Alustriel from behind with a vicious overhand strike that cleaved her a foot and a half through the shoulder blade before she could teleport away in a wailing spray of crimson blood.
Khelben glimpsed Yder from the corner of his eye and aiming his black staff over Laeral’s shoulder blasted him with a storm of meteors that sent him tumbling halfway up the basin wall.
That le
ft Mattick free to counterattack. He rose, wielding an oversized black sword in one hand and flinging a spray of winged black spiders from the other. The spiders swarmed Khelben’s head in a droning black cloud, but it was the sword that proved most deadly, hacking Dove’s leg off at the knee. She fell cursing and saved herself from a deadly second blow by unleashing a long ribbon of silver fire.
Mattick escaped a certain death only by flinging himself off to one side and bowling Khelben over by rolling into his legs. In the meantime, Dove’s silver fire was burning through the shadowy fog above the basin, and Galaeron glimpsed a curving sweep of a sandy lakeshore far below. It took him a moment to register what he was seeing, and he realized why the mythallar was so difficult to find except through the shadows. The basin was in what had once been the top of the mountain but was now the bottom of the city, resting upside-down and looking straight down upon the desert below.
The hole in the clouds closed as quickly as it had opened, and Dove teleported to safety as well. Only Khelben, Laeral, and Storm remained, with the five Shadovar princes closing in around them and relentlessly herding the trio toward a whirling cyclone of shadow-filled air. There was Aris, too, still writhing on the floor, slowly sliding toward the middle of the basin on a sheet of his own crimson blood. No one was paying him any attention, and Galaeron quickly looked back to Telamont, lest the Most High sense the hope growing in his heart and do something to stop the clever giant.
Galaeron found even that strategy fraught with peril. Sliding down the basin wall behind Telamont was Vala, holding one hand clamped into a fist so she could point a star-shaped ring at the Most High’s back. In the other she carried her darksword, her arm cocked and ready to throw at the first sign that he knew she was there.
Desperate to keep his mind on something else—and terrified that Telamont had already sensed his thoughts—Galaeron looked back to the Chosen.
“Use the silver fire!” he shouted. “It is the only—”
“Silence, you fool!” Telamont said. “Would you destroy Faerûn rather than let us have a place—”
He too fell silent as, to Galaeron’s amazement, Khelben raised his hand and loosed a stream of the shimmering magic fire at Telamont. Crying out in rage and disbelief, Telamont had no choice but to lift both hands and raise a spell shield before him. Freed of the Most High’s grasp, Galaeron plummeted toward the bottom of the basin and barely had time to cry out a spell of soft falling before the air erupted into whistling white sparks and cracking lances of black lightning. He brought his legs around beneath him and landed atop the mythallar itself—just in time to turn and see Vala come tumbling into Telamont from behind.
What happened next was impossible to say. He saw Telamont’s shadowy feet fly, Vala’s sword arc, and a black arm whip into the crackling air. All of them dissolved into shadow. The blow of a tremendous hammer shook the mythallar, and Aris cried out in triumph. Something like a volcano exploded beneath Galaeron’s feet, and he found himself tumbling through air as black and as thick as tar.
He smashed into an obsidian wall and tumbled to his feet only to have his legs fly out from beneath him as the basin swung up beside him. He went somersaulting down toward the edge then came to a sudden stop, then went cartwheeling back toward the center. Three times he glimpsed the mythallar, chipped and pouring shadow fume out into the basin, with Aris wedging his legs beneath one side and still hammering at it with his sculpting hammer, before he hit it and stopped.
“Aha, Galaeron!” Aris cried. “It is an unworkable stone, but not too hard to flake!”
“I think—” the basin pitched wildly in the other direction, and Galaeron barely kept himself from tumbling away by grabbing hold of the giant’s tool bag—“you have done enough!”
Aris stopped hammering long enough to ask, “What else is there to do?”
Galaeron saw Vala go tumbling by—and sweep Vattick off his feet to leave a severed Shadovar leg in her wake—before she vanished into the black mist and began to scream a savage Vaasan war cry. Galaeron plucked a handful of shadowstuff from the blackening air and shaped it into a pair of spiders. One of these he passed to Aris with instructions to swallow, and the other he gulped down himself. Two quick incantations later, and they were both scrambling across the basin on all fours, their hands and feet sticking to the slick surface as though coated with paste.
They found Vala and the last three Chosen in desperate straits, unable to keep their feet and caught inside a ring of Shadovar princes. Aglarel hurled a shadow ball at Storm, who barely managed to swing her legs around in time to take the attack in the thigh instead of her chest. The orb drilled a fist-sized hole through muscle and bone that clearly left her unable to fight, yet she did not teleport away as had the other Chosen when they grew too wounded to fight. Khelben leveled his staff at the prince who had wounded her, but the only thing that shot from the end was a laughable drizzle of yellow light.
Galaeron touched a finger to his temple, then used his shadow magic to speak to Aris in his thoughts
They’re helpless! he explained. The shadowstuff is smothering their magic.
Aris nodded then pointed to Aglarel and Yder, and hefted his hammer.
Good, Galaeron sent. Go.
They sprang forward together, Aris catching the two princes by surprise, smashing their helms and sending them somersaulting across the basin floor before they vanished into the black mists. Galaeron caught Mattick from behind with a shadow bolt that sent him tumbling headlong into the Chosen’s midst, where Laeral and Khelben quickly proved that they were not entirely helpless by planting their daggers at least twice in every unarmored inch before the prince beat a hasty retreat by dissolving back into the shadows.
That left Brennus, Clariburnus, and Dethud attacking from behind. A pair of dark bolts caught Khelben in the shoulders and sent him sliding across the basin toward Aris, while a shadow claw extended from Dethud’s forearm to close around Laeral’s throat and start dragging her back toward the Shadovar’s ranks. Galaeron leaped forward to attack, but Vala was already hurling her darksword into the prince’s chest. The weapon sank to the hilt, then dropped to the floor as Dethud retreated into the shadows.
Vala called the weapon back to hand and started to charge Brennus but was knocked from her feet as that basin made another wild swing. Her hip had barely touched down before she was back on her feet and starting forward.
Galaeron caught her by the arm and said, “It’s done.”
“Not yet.” She turned and pointed up the basin wall into the black mists and said, “I got one of his arms, but Telamont’s still up there.”
A pair of dark disks came hissing across the basin and would have slashed their heads off, had Aris not knocked them off their feet before it arrived. Galaeron rolled to his knees and counterattacked with a flight of shadow arrows.
Brennus blocked them easily and sent the dark shafts streaming back in their direction. Aris took two in his arm, and Vala one in her shoulder, and three more nicked Galaeron along one side of his neck and arm.
“It’s done,” Galaeron said. They were the most difficult words he had ever been forced to say, and also the surest. He took Vala’s arm and shoved her back toward the three battered Chosen. “We aren’t going to win this.”
Aris refused to retreat.
“But the mythallar—”
“Is cracked,” Galaeron said. “Perhaps that will be enough to bring the city down.”
Aris turned and hurled his hammer at the heart of mythallar.
Clariburnus waved his hand and sent the tool somersaulting away, then Brennus sent a bank of black fog rolling toward them. Galaeron raised a wind spell that he hoped would send the fog rolling back toward the princes, but Brennus dispelled it with a gesture. Storm began to choke on the fumes, and it occurred to Galaeron that he was learning something else about power, that sometimes the most difficult part of wielding it was knowing when it was not enough.
“We’ve done as much as we can
.”
Galaeron motioned for the wounded giant to gather up Storm and the other Chosen, then he grabbed hold of Vala and shoved her into the others.
“Well said, elf,” Khelben replied. He stretched a hand behind Vala’s back to clasp Galaeron on the shoulder. “You’re learning.”
Another shadow bolt came hissing into the group to catch Storm square in the back. Laeral’s arm lashed out to catch her sister under the arm, then the basin tipped precariously in the opposite direction. Only Aris’s sticky appendages and long reach kept the group from tumbling across the basin and becoming separated again.
“All right!” Laeral cried. “Galaeron, will you please get us out of here while there’s still something left to get out of?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
2 Eleasias, the Year of Wild Magic
Ruha sat wedged in a shady cleft high in the Scimitar Spires East, watching the Shade Enclave slowly sink toward the purple waters of Shadow Lake. Enormous as it was and swaddled in black shadowstuff, the enclave resembled a storm cloud crashing down from on high, complete with sheets of silver lightning illuminating jagged sweeps of misty curtain and mysterious, half-heard roars rumbling out from its hidden heart. Veserab riders were descending from the city in masses of swirling wings, and hordes of shadow walkers were beginning to emerge from dark places all across the nearby hills. This increased the likelihood that she would be forced to flee before she found her friends—and Malik—but Ruha was glad to see so many Shadovar escaping alive. As terrible as were the calamities they had unleashed on Faerûn with their shadow blankets, she had no thirst for vengeance. The death of an entire city would do nothing to bring back the hordes who had already perished.
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