Lady of Poison

by Bruce R Cordell

  THE GREAT DALE

  RAVAGED BY DISEASE

  POISONED WITH TREACHERY

  Gameliel woke his thralls. There were preparations to make, rot to culture, spells to unsheathe. He wouldn’t allow the newest, most important outpost of the Rotting Man’s empire to fall back into the idle hands of idiot druids. He glanced at the dark shape that still hung impaled on one of the great stones, smirking. The blightlord felt the weight of the Keystone’s cord around his neck. With it, Gameliel possessed the power of the Mucklestones. There was no place the Rotting Man and his most powerful servants could not penetrate at whim. But first, he had to prepare the ambush.

  Award-winning game designer Bruce R. Cordell brings us a tale of faith, prophecy, and destiny that can only be seen through the eyes of

  THE PRIESTS

  THE PRIESTS

  Lady of Poison

  BRUCE R. CORDELL

  Mistress of the Night

  DAVE GROSS

  Queen of the Depths

  VORONICA WHITNEY-ROBINSON

  Maiden of Pain

  KAMERON M. FRANKLIN

  Also by Bruce R. Cordell

  (as T.H. Lain)

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS®

  Oath of Nerull

  FOR DEE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Story elements introduced in Unapproachable East lay foundations on which Lady of Poison was constructed. Rich Baker, Matt Forbeck, and Sean Reynolds deserve praise for their extraordinary sourcebook.

  PRELUDE

  Decay has a power all its own.

  When the healthy and whole softens, crumbles, and liquefies, an indefinable essence wafts away like putrid steam off stagnant beach sand. Decomposing flesh of what once lived radiates an essential energy in its dissipation. That power of dissolution can be siphoned by those with the proper cruel knowledge, and the appropriate twisted desire.

  The Rotting Man had both.

  A crystal vase held a single flower, its petals the color of bone. The flower had only four petals, each knife-sharp and strangely heavy. The vase stood upon a slab of rough cut stone; it was an altar. There, in the heart of the Close, light penetrated, but not easily. Natural light was stained and filtered by petrified limbs and leaves of ancient trees whose hearts were pure rot.

  A hand extended from the darkness toward the flower. The fingers, only a little less thin than the flower’s stem, stroked a petal. The entire bloom turned black with decay in seconds, and fell, stinking, to the altar-top. Somewhere in the world, a servant died. Such was the power of the Rotting Man.

  The Rotting Man was an artist of putrescence. For light, he had no use, unless he could squander its promise, turning light to malaise. In music, he preferred the decrescendo, always. Promotion was a rare event in the Rotting Man’s organization, though the Blightlords, his foul lieutenants, did achieve their position through applied deceit.

  The hand returned to the darkness, shaking just slightly. He was always in pain. Such was the price he paid for Talona’s gifts.

  A tangle of twisted thought sparked across the pits of his hungry mind. He sensed it then. It was coming. A prayer would soon be answered, the fulfillment of which would spell his end. Soon. Any moment …

  A ray of light fell secretly into the world, shining from a place so far beyond the sphere of the world that miles could not be used as a measure of distance. The light was a shaft of burning hope, let down to banish what shadows it could. The light was so fierce that it could scour evil with its mere presence. It sought the Rotting Man.

  He laughed with rare pleasure.

  The Rotting Man was ready. To him, the light’s arrival was not secret. In fact, he anticipated it.

  He recalled the years during which he had bred the perfect vessel to contain that light. Spilled blood, the trace of failed enterprise, and the mournful cries of dying prisoners shorn of freedom and dignity, all these he had incorporated into his living prison. Such a wonder of grotesquerie. Oh yes, the Rotting Man was more than ready; he was primed.

  Whence came the light, he cared not. Containing it was all that mattered. Oh, the light was so optimistic, so imbued with good intentions, so ready to be corrupted by the Rotting Man. The sentient light was oblivious of danger when it arrowed down at him from heaven.

  The golden ray was gulped down by the Rotting Man’s living vessel in a single instant. Absorbed, but for a tiny glint that escaped his notice. A flicker of hope, shorn of the flush of full strength, fell to earth unmarked and enfeebled. Too enervated to retain knowledge even of its own origin, the remnant was accepted into the mortal world in a guise not intended.

  The Rotting Man failed to realize that he had not captured the light in its entirety.

  But eventually he began to suspect.

  CHAPTER 1

  Autumn, 1368 DR

  Ash.”

  Hemish nearly dropped the child. From her lips the word issued, as plain as day. He took a deep breath, and instead of dropping her, he stroked her baby-brown hair. He continued along the road away from the small village, shaking his head. It was not the first time she had spoken.

  Hemish was a man of simple means, a keeper of cattle. He had seen small magic, wonders, and the flashy spells of hedge wizards. He’d even once visited the city of Two Stars, and there witnessed a duel between feuding sorcerers, but a baby that could speak? Never had he heard of such a thing, but in his hands he held just such a wonder, though in truth, the only word she ever said was ‘ash.’ Not knowing whence she came, Hemish had taken to calling her the name that she repeated at odd intervals.

  When he found her, she lay silent on a bed of emerald moss that grew up around her like a tiny cushion. She lay on her back, reaching up with her baby fingers as if attempting to touch the overhanging forest canopy. Appalled to see a child exposed to the elements, he scooped her up and brought her back to his home in the village straightaway. It was only later that she began to speak.

  No local farmer or forest hunter had since appeared in town to lament a lost child. There was no claim at all upon her, save his own, and he was uncertain that he wanted to press it. He had decided to seek once again the glade where she’d first come into his life. Perhaps he could discover clues of her origin that he’d earlier missed.

  He cradled the girl in his arms protectively, despite his unease. Tree branches waved idly in the late evening breeze, stirring up the scents of pine, loam, and forgotten days of sunshine. The faint smell of the child, babyish and powdery, put Hemish in mind of his own daughter, before she was grown and married away.

  Soon enough he arrived in the glade where he’d found the child. All was as he remembered, though the season had advanced, and seedlings and other forest growth were failing with the year. He scuffed around with his boots, looking to kick up any item or other telltale clue hidden beneath the layer of pine needles. When he turned up nothing, he moved to the base of the sapling where he’d found her.

  His brows furrowed. The luxuriously soft bed of moss where he’d found her three tendays past was decidedly dead. What’s more, it seemed afflicted with some brackish rot, which had eaten away at the heart of the bed before finally killing it. The rot had spread to the sapling, which drooped lifeless over the blackened moss bed. All in all, a nasty blight.

  After a search of several minutes, Hemish admitted defeat. He could find nothing—he chalked the blight up to coincidence. He sighed, chucked the baby on the chin, and made for town.

  “Looks like it’s going to be you and me after all, tyke,” said Hemish, as he looked down into the face of the child.

  The baby stared back with eyes the color of a cloudless sky. Guileless and pure they seemed, and Hemish felt his urge to protect the girl grow stronger.

  It was a journey
of less than an hour back to the village. In all that time, the child refrained from fussing or crying. Hemish headed straight down the main way. He turned a corner and spied Mausa. Before he could make a break for it, her gaze locked on him. She stood in the middle of the road, leading a nag with a bedraggled mane. He pushed on, accepting the inevitable. Mausa regarded him with a cruel turn of her lip as he moved closer.

  At first, she was content to merely skewer him with her knowing gaze. Hemish cursed his weakness in asking the woman’s advice on the child. How could he have guessed she was so superstitious and hateful?

  He hurried on, making as if to pass her. He attempted to fix an expression of defiance on his own features.

  As he pulled up even with Mausa, she murmured, “She still talking?”

  Hemish paused and sighed, “Yes. Only the one word, though.”

  As if to demonstrate to Mausa, the baby in Hemish’s arms said, “Ash.”

  As she did so, one of her infant hands reached toward the horse Mausa led.

  “What’s she want?” scowled the woman.

  Hemish moved a step closer to the bedraggled animal. Mausa was not a particularly kind master, and the draft steed was obviously sick. If Ash wanted to feel the horse’s mane, he saw no harm in it.

  As the child’s hands combed through the equine’s tangled mane, a brilliant blue spark jumped between her fingers and horse. The horse raised its head suddenly, neighing! Its clouded eyes cleared then sparked with vitality. The matted hair in its mane smoothed. The creature nearly danced, as if restraining itself from rearing.

  “By all the gods of hearth and home,” Hemish mumbled, “what happened?”

  He knew what had happened. The girl had the hands of a healer.

  “Ash,” she crooned in his arms.

  Mausa’s expression, too, changed. Scorn made way for fear. The woman pulled her horse quickly away.

  CHAPTER 2

  Spring, 1373 DR

  The air was too warm for Marrec.

  The link chain of his armor hung heavily on the padding he wore between the silver mail and his skin, causing sweat to bead and run. He removed a gauntlet, stuffed it into his belt, and mopped his brow. He felt the old scars beneath his fingers, scars hidden by his hairline. He hardly gave them a thought. After a lifetime of repressing those memories, recollections of his past rarely caught him off guard.

  Marrec looked over at his companion who walked with him down the tree-lined road. He felt a little envious of Gunggari, who didn’t wear much of anything, save for a collection of strange tattoos, thick-soled leather shoes, and a breech-clout. Earlier, the noon-day sun’s glare had been tempered by a breeze, but the road had passed into a forested acreage. The trees stood tall on either side but failed to reach their branches across the gap of the road. The sun beat down through the gap, but the trees blocked the cooling breeze.

  “Hot enough for you, Gunny?” Marrec asked his friend.

  Gunggari shrugged and smiled. “Good weather for walking.”

  “Maybe, if you’re not wearing fifty pounds of armor,” snorted Marrec.

  Gunggari Ulmarra was a strange one. Though he’d traveled with the southerner for over two years, Marrec was still unused to the man’s disdain for the trappings of civilization, especially clothing. All Gunggari cared about was the long, stout wooden tube he carried, which he was currently using as a walking staff. Marrec had seen Gunggari use the thing as a warclub and a musical instrument with equal facility. Colorful designs dotted the tube’s exterior. It was called a dizheri and was an object peculiar to Gunggari’s home. Gunggari didn’t talk much about the nation of his origin, other than to say he hailed from the far south “beyond the girdle of the world” in a place called Osse. There Gunggari was known as a tattooed soldier. Marrec wasn’t sure if the name was a designation or a title, as in The Tattooed Soldier. The Oslander had never deigned to explain, and Marrec didn’t push him on the topic, especially because so much time had passed since they took up traveling together.

  “Ask Lurue a boon—perhaps a cooling breeze?” joked Gunggari.

  Lurue was Marrec’s patron goddess, to whom he owed fealty and from which he drew much of his strength. Because he was already annoyed by the heat, Marrec chose to interpret the statement seriously.

  “Gunny, you know I can’t waste her time for personal indulgences. Besides, it’s getting worse.” He admitted the last almost under his breath.

  He sighed. Contact with his patron goddess, Lurue the Unicorn Queen, was growing ever more difficult. Just to see if he could, he mentally probed for the connection that used to form as easily as shafts of sunlight find the forest floor …

  Marrec nearly stumbled for lack of concentrating on the uneven path.

  “Watch your step,” grunted Gunggari. “The stones will catch your feet if you let them.” The Oslander pointed ahead, where the path ascended quickly to the crown of a hill. The west flank of the hill was hidden in crowding pines and firs that cast long shadows over the rocky way. Gunggari gave him a sidelong glance, “Are you tired? We could stop for a rest, if you like, or—is something else bothering you?”

  Marrec sighted. “Lurue’s silences have grown, Gunny. Last night, I almost felt as if she were absent completely. When it came time for my nightly prayer of renewal …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That ever happened before?” quizzed Gunggari.

  “No, at least not so completely. My connection has been deteriorating these last few years, like I said before, but this is the worst it’s been.”

  “And … your vision?”

  The Oslander referred to a dreamlike visitation Marrec had received several months earlier.

  Gunggari continued, “Are we close enough that you can go without guidance?”

  Marrec answered, “We’re very close. I know that much.”

  The Oslander offered, “Perhaps her attention is being drawn elsewhere.”

  Maybe so. Where before the cleric had felt the presence of Lurue in every prayer, observance, and divine ritual, the presence had become uncertain, spotty, and sometimes altogether absent. Marrec shrugged. The cleric had met other servants of the Unicorn Queen, and while most seemed unaffected, a few reported feeling similarly to Marrec. Those worst afflicted could no longer trust that the divine spells they cast in Lurue’s name would return anew each day. Marrec suffered the same humiliation.

  “Gunny, the vision was real. I didn’t dream it, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  The tattooed soldier raised both hands in a conciliatory gesture, said “I know, the ‘Child of Light in Hemish’s charge.’ “My feet grow weary—I hope we find this Hemish in Fullpoint.”

  A vision had come to Marrec. From within the brilliance of a crescent moon, the silhouette of a unicorn spoke to him. The enchanting voice instructed him to seek the Child of Light and the child’s guardian, Hemish. The voice indicated that finding the child would help both Marrec and one other in similar straits.

  “I hope so, too,” Marrec answered his friend.

  Gunggari continued, “Even if it comes to nothing, I enjoyed our trip across the Sea of Fallen Stars. It nearly rivaled my trip across the Great Sea. I trust your last divination, the most recent one.”

  Marrec realized the Oslander was not needling him. Gunggari merely said what was on his mind, nothing more or less. As his friend said, his last pure divinatory contact with neglectful Larue pointed unerringly to the village of Fullpoint. Fullpoint lay several leagues west and somewhat south of a large city called Two Stars. They’d traveled along the trade road known as the Golden Way since debarking from their ship in Telflamm. They had turned off southeast before reaching Two Stars, to Gunggari’s disappointment. The visitors had been told that Two Stars was a city where Trade was coddled as if a favorite son, and nothing was forbidden.

  Marrec said, “The closer we come to finding Hemish, and hopefully this mysterious Child of Light, the spottier becomes my c
ontact. I doubt that Lurue does not want me to answer this riddle, and I don’t think she is becoming neglectful … I think that she is somehow being prevented from making contact …”

  Marrec stopped speaking and cocked his head.

  “Did you hear that?”

  Faint cries and the ring of metal on metal echoed from over the hill. A thick stream of smoke tumbled up from behind the rise ahead. Something was burning, and it didn’t look like a chimney.

  “Let’s go!” shouted Marrec.

  Racing to the top of the hill, Marrec and Gunggari saw the source of the cries and smoke: a small village in the forest clearing was under attack. Creatures swarmed around the buildings, smiting villagers and setting fire to buildings. At first glance, the attackers seemed to be small animate trees.

  “By the Ancestor,” muttered Gunggari. The Oslander swept up his walking staff, ready for trouble, brandishing it like the warclub it actually was. He waited for Marrec’s cue.

  Marrec took a second to take stock.

  The attacking creatures were not trees after all. In fact, they somewhat resembled humans, though their skin was the deep olive-green of a pine needle. Their flesh was woody and tough, but they all sported oozing sores from which a putrid slime seeped, as if they were slowly rotting. Their hair grew out in long, thick locks scaled like the bark of a young tree. Their eyes gleamed black with hatred. The creatures seemed somewhat familiar to Marrec, something he’d learned about in his training: they were similar to creatures called volodnis, but he didn’t think true volodnis had such a sense of rot or decay about them as these oozing creatures had, but he was no expert.

  Buildings continued to burn. Several humans and attackers lay wounded or dead in the village street. If the creatures had some goal, it wasn’t apparent, unless it was simple mayhem.