Seren took a deep breath, expelled it, and began the rite.
She chanted the first stanza of the ritual, mouthing harsh fragments of ancient tongues fused with arcane syllables. Normally she didn’t have to understand what she said to perform a ritual penned on a scroll. She just followed the directions provided, no matter how obscure or even obtuse.
This would not be that simple. She repeated the previous stanza with a variation penned in glittering green ink.
Her biggest obstacle was the mere fact she’d relearned her entire craft over the last ten years. When the blue fires winked on the horizon, they’d stolen away more than the treasury of Raven’s Bluff; they’d also pilfered all her arcane achievements.
Seren began the second stanza, recalling how she’d learned magic anew. Because of her relative youth compared to many established in Mystra’s graces, the way of the Weave didn’t have too strong a hold over her. Moreover, before the disaster, many had called her a prodigy. Only a few years beyond her twentieth and she’d already been an up-and-coming Red Wizard. They used to tell stories about her uncanny knack in forging new spells. Everyone expected she’d go far.
After the disaster, Seren had a stark choice. She could abandon the art she’d worked so hard to master, and give in to Thay’s wrath, or she could fight back.
While most wizards bemoaned their loss, she found an abandoned laboratory. She didn’t give up.
And she’d been rewarded. Arcane mastery was still possible. It merely required a new way of accessing the eldritch currents that yet flowed through the world and beyond.
Morgenthel had nearly ruined it all with his surprise attack.
Seren stuttered as she moved on to the third stanza of the ritual, this one inscribed in ash. She nearly lost control—
A vision of gleaming teeth and claws slashed through her concentration. A creature of savage hunger and chaos! It bounded toward her, loosing a horrid croak. She cried out.
The image dissolved as quickly as it had formed, only a delusion pulled from the wavering threads of a ritual bent far past its purpose.
Feeling guilty, she wrenched her thoughts for the second time to the rite. If she didn’t contemplate the changes she intended, she’d fail. Perhaps spectacularly.
An unaltered performance of the ritual would call a minor dust devil and send it with a message to a distant friend. That was not what she wanted.
She adapted and shaped the ritual even as she performed it, twisting it further and further from its original aim. The addition of a gleamtail jack as a ritual component was only the first step, though a step on which all the later adaptations depended.
The incantation and physical components were the framework. To it she applied the lever of her will. Her awareness of the ship and the hard planking beneath her sandaled feet dissolved.
Instead of on the ship, it seemed she stood on a savanna of rough stone. A river of lightning cut the plain, blazing white and erratic. Beyond a ridge of basalt raged a lava sea spouting coils of flame. Above her stretched unending volumes of air whose utmost distances were hazed with smoke and mist. Here and there, shells of cloud parted and lances of fiery light blazed forth, emanating from free-floating balls of fire. Like miniature suns, they whirled through the elemental maelstrom.
Seren knew she remained on the deck of Green Siren despite the overwhelming evidence of her eyes; she could still smell the salty sea air and feel the rocking ship’s sway. She concentrated on the tiny gleamtail she’d placed at the center of the summoning circle, focusing the power of the ritual through it. Her vision of the tempestuous realm spun and plunged forward as if it were an image contained in a scryer’s crystal sphere.
And there it was—an undulating mass of living gleam-tail jacks schooling through shoals of water, stone, air, and fire. From a distance, they looked like ordinary fish—except for the way they swam as easily through air and solid rock, when they chanced upon it, as through liquid.
Colorful boulders studded the ground beneath the school. Their angular shapes tugged at Seren’s attention, but she was impatient to complete her ritual; there was no time for sightseeing.
The wizard began the final stanza of the ceremony. She would draw the entire school through to her and magically moor them to Green Siren. They wouldn’t survive more than a tenday outside their natural environment, but that would be enough.
Like stars coming out one by one after dusk, points of light appeared around the hull. The gleamtail jacks each harbored a tiny jewel-like glow. The constellation of winking gleams wheeled around the ship, hinting at paths to previously unreachable locations in every glimmer.
Seren finished the closing stanza. When the last syllable resonated in the air, her vision of the echo plane faded. But not quickly enough. The colorful stones on the edge of the shoal sprang up, revealing themselves as creatures, not scenery. Each left a wake in the air from its surprising acceleration. Some had spears, but all had claws and wide, rubbery mouths generous with teeth.
She blinked, and the echo plane was gone. Green Siren and the Sea of Fallen Stars filled her senses. The ship had gained a school of glittering stars as an escort … and something else. A tug on her mind signaled that the protective circle was breached! Seren gulped and tried to call out a warning, but her throat was dry from chanting. Nothing emerged but a hoarse whisper.
Five shapes dropped onto the deck from a barely perceptible discontinuity in the air above Green Siren. The one closest to her was a hulking, blue-skinned humanoid larger than an ogre. It had almost no neck and a massive, flat head. Wicked swordlike hooks emerged from the back of its balled fists. It uttered a croaking roar in the wizard’s face.
Finding her voice, the wizard screamed, “’Ware the slaads!”
She backed up, trying to get a mast between her and the blue-scaled horror. Not for the first time she was reminded that sandals, no matter how stylish, were more liability than asset.
The monster reached across the wide space separating them. Its wrist claws caught on but were not entirely stopped by her protective ward. They raked her stomach and face, and the impact flung her backward. A crewman’s hammock strung along the railing broke her trajectory, but her head whipped painfully back. She collapsed to the deck, blood oozing from the scratches.
Seren heard more croaking roars and fearful shouts. She pulled herself upright on the railing.
The great blue slaad hadn’t pursued her—instead, it was gutting a crewman who’d been standing too close. Behind them, four other slaads rampaged across Green Siren.
One was red and nearly as big as the blue. Belying its exceptional size, it moved like a cheetah—bunching up, then bounding forward with flippered feet and claws, covering tens of feet across the deck with each stride. It jumped to the edge of the hold and loosed a croak into the opening so horrid Seren’s stomach fluttered. Screams of terror issued from below.
The other three slaads were dull gray and only human sized. One was already chasing a pirate up the rigging, clambering and chuffing like an enraged ape.
“Die, beast!” screamed Captain Thoster, darting suddenly into the fray. He buried his poisonous sword in the breast of one gray slaad.
The slaad shrieked. In a flash of putrid air, it disappeared—only to reappear next to Seren. Blood poured from the wound Thoster had scored. Its electric smell stung her nose.
The wizard cursed the captain and raised her wand. The slaad bled so freely its ichor spattered her face and clothing. But the wound the captain had given it hardly dimmed its fervor. The damned beast eyed her with voracious delight.
She jabbed her wand at it. A pulse of concussive energy thundered from the wand’s tip, blasting the slaad in the face. The creature’s shriek was lost in the basso echoes and disarray of the broken railing as it was hurled off the ship and into the surrounding sea.
She turned just in time to see another gray muzzle descend upon her, with a wide mouth so large it could encompass her head.
Silk
y hair slid away from his touch, leaving his fingers tingling. A child’s laugh was cut short by a man’s death scream.
Raidon startled free from his waking reverie.
Monsters ran amok on Green Siren. Crew jumped overboard to escape the onslaught of vicious teeth and claws. Only Thoster, bawling orders to his fleeing crew, was putting up any kind of fight. The man engaged a blue-skinned, frog-headed monster, but a red one slipped up behind the captain even as Raidon grasped the tactical situation.
The monk charged the blue beast, leaving behind regrets and sorrows, if only for the moment. He called out, “Thoster, watch your flank!” not only to warn the captain but to draw the attention of the blue creature away from the overwhelmed man.
As he hoped, the massive beast whirled just as Raidon leaped straight upward. He jerked his right elbow up and connected with the monster’s lower jaw. The momentum of the leap combined with the elbow strike snapped the creature’s head back, shattered several of its teeth, and turned its roar into a bellow of pain.
The sword sheathed on Raidon’s back twisted, as if to remind the monk of its presence. The movement threw off Raidon’s balance. Instead of kicking away from the creature at the top of his leap, his legs found empty air. He fell at the monster’s feet, losing just enough time that one of the creature’s flailing hands clipped him. A rivulet of his own blood tickled his leg.
Raidon crabbed backward the moment he fell, away from the monster as it tried to stomp him into paste. He would censure Angul later, when time permitted, for twisting in its sheath at such an inopportune moment. He only had to get a few feet away from the creature to make room …
Raidon rolled up on his shoulders. At the very moment he started rolling back, he jackknifed his legs down to the deck, flipping himself back to his feet. He came face to face with the blue. The monk raised his arms and snaked them to either side of the creature’s massive head. Its head was too big for him to trap it, so he made do by gripping big handfuls of the creature’s puffy throat sac.
He yanked out and down with all his strength.
The monster’s fierce bellow warbled into a plaintive whistle. Raidon disengaged as it slapped its hands up to plug the wounds beneath its chin. While it was distracted, he bent one leg into his chest as if compressing a spring, then kicked straight out. The heel of his foot smashed into the creature’s knee. The crack of breaking bone ricocheted down the deck.
The beast convulsed and dropped sideways like a felled pine. Planking splintered beneath its weight.
Raidon took a moment to scan the deck as his foe twitched. Thoster remained upright, trading blows with another monster—the red one. He didn’t see Seren anywhere, but a shimmering school of gleamtail jacks swam like stars in a life-size astrolabe around the boat. That was encouraging. But he worried at Seren’s apparent absence.
A couple of the crew, more doughty than their fellows hiding in the rigging, pulled themselves up from below deck, daggers, axes, and scimitars in hand.
Another slaad leaped down at Raidon, so quickly it didn’t seem to occupy any of the space between where it started and ended its charge. A handy trick! Apparently it was tired of chasing crew around the mainmast. This one’s skin was gray and its size was equal to the monk’s. It locked eyes with Raidon. Something in its gaze sparkled, and it leaped at him.
The world blinked. He found himself hanging unsupported over the open hatch to the hold. Crewmen on the ladder to one side gaped at him.
Unprepared for the fall, he still managed to utilize the first-year lesson of Xiang Temple, a skill monks were taught before nearly any other: how to fall.
Raidon tucked into a spin and slapped onto his back at the hold’s bottom, taking the impact of the descent so perfectly that despite falling an incredible distance, he hardly felt a thing.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Leaving Darroch Castle, Feywild
Mapathious swept a sword of fire through reality, opening a rent as if cutting through tissue paper. Beyond was a tunnel walled in whirling vapor, shadow, and half-seen silhouettes. A constant roar like a waterfall’s poured from it. The spinning hollow extended to the vanishing point. The tunnel promised a turbulent passage.
In its other hand, Mapathious clutched an iron chain from which dangled a rune-scribed bell. The bell’s weight would have staggered any lesser being of the same size. But Mapathious was an angel of exploration. In pursuit of its task, strength more potent than its frame pumped from its heart and swept through its semidivine limbs.
The bell was ensorcelled to protect those within it from the ravages of travel in dangerous climes. Mapathious disdained the need for such protections. It preferred to explore alone, swooping into unfamiliar territory as a solitary scout, then reporting back to shining commanders. Were foes massed in ambush? Did demon lords ride forth? Was there truly an adamantine fortress lying across the path, and who had the power to build it in a tenday? These were the kinds of quests the angel usually accepted.
Thus, it gave fleeting consideration to dropping the trek bell into Avernus as a way to forcibly demonstrate its objection to the enterprise. The travelers would be treated to the unique vision of red smoke streaming past their view port in the floor as they plummeted toward a desert pocked with lava seas and iron cities. Even if the enchantment of the trek bell preserved its passengers from the fall, Avernus’s residents would soon be upon them.
But Mapathious was bound to preserve the bell and serve the one who had summoned him. So it would essay this journey with passengers in tow and not drop them into the Nine Hells.
In truth, once its destination was described, the angel was intrigued. Though loath to admit it, the angel might well have embarked on the journey even without being sworn to find Xxiphu. The angel’s nature was to locate, to travel, and to explore. Never before had it visited a city of aboleths, let alone the oldest one in the world.
The mere description of an ancient aboleth city hidden deep in the world’s mantle wasn’t enough direction for even an angel of exploration. But Mapathious had a guide. It wore an iron ring. Wound around the ring was a strand of dark hair—the hair of a human female whose spirit the angel of exploration could dimly feel through the connection.
It wondered, as it lowered the trek bell into the tornadic passage between space and dimensional walls, what relationship Xxiphu had with another place it had recently heard rumor of. A place called the Citadel of the Outer Void. It hoped no relationship whatever.
Then it was in the roaring passage, surfing the discontinuities of unraveled planes and stretched reality. All its conjectures burned away. Its entire concentration was turned to survival.
Japheth rearranged himself on a curved bench that ran along the bell’s interior edge. The surface was wide, padded with dark brown leather, and rose to a comfortable backrest that even included neck support. A very cozy seat, if it weren’t for the floor. Because there didn’t seem to be one.
The trek bell’s interior was divided by a straight metallic wall. He claimed one side, and the Lord of Bats occupied the other.
The warlock had considered asking Neifion to remove the partition. He worried the Lord of Bats might get up to no good, unsupervised. Then he imagined himself and the insidious creature sitting across from each other on a journey of who knew how long. The silence. Those red eyes filled with hate. The veiled threats.
No, he was happy to let the Lords of Bats keep to himself. Japheth would have to trust that the oath of alliance Neifion had sworn would prevent fatal mischief.
The warlock’s gaze fell to what would have been the floor in any normal conveyance. However, just like normal, far smaller bells, the trek bell had no floor. As with each previous glance, he blanched as his gaze fell into the snaky, howling tunnel. It was like looking down a tornado’s throat, he imagined.
Instead of the earsplitting scream he imagined such a violent scene would generate, he heard only a low, constant roar. The nois
e was somehow muted by the trek bell, he supposed.
Over this narrow abyss, Japheth’s boots dangled. A quiver passed up his spine as he imagined what might happen if the trek bell jolted, knocking him off his seat. Was that possible? Handles on the wall offered at least a semblance of security. He grabbed one. He took a breath and leaned farther over the bench’s side.
The cavity walled in swirling mist seemed to stretch down to infinity. It reminded him of something. He didn’t have to think long, of course. It was like the terminus of the crimson road, toward which addicts to traveler’s dust trudged. Japheth had learned the crimson road was more than metaphor.
He sat back and closed his eyes. His fear of the vortex beneath his feet lost its impact in comparison. He wondered, idly, what it would look like after a pinch of dust in each eye.
No.
Not yet, anyhow. He decided to have a bite to eat to distract himself. He produced a pack from the folds of his cloak, the one he’d liberated from Darroch Castle before they’d embarked. He opened it—
“By Caiphon!” he exclaimed as something inside shuddered and shifted. He overrode his instinct to toss the pack into the chasm.
A creature chittered and pulled itself forth—a tiny wrinkled man, one of Neifion’s homunculi. It had stowed away inside the voluminous pack.
Once free of the pack it stood, no more than two feet tall, and regarded Japheth expectantly, as if awaiting its next command.
“What … Why did you hide yourself inside this pack, creature?”
The homunculus made high-pitched noises, from which Japheth could only pick out broken word fragments. It pointed at the partition, where the Lord of Bats resided.
“Neifion told you to do it?”
The creature nodded.
Japheth snarled. Was the Lord of Bats spying on him?”
You take your direction from me, beast, no longer Neifion. I—”
The creature leaped at Japheth. It fastened its mouth on his neck. Pain lanced through him. A bitter stench wafted from the wound.
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