by Mel Odom
Hurt flickered in his eyes, scarcely under control. He had not known about the old mage’s death. Cordyan would have wagered anything on that.
No, child, he did not know. Nor did he realize how hurt and confused he would be by such an act.
Cordyan looked at the woman standing beside Baylee who gently put a hand to his shoulder. She was surely too young to have been the one to touch her mind. The voice that she had heard carried more age than the young woman beside the ranger.
My name is Xuxa. I am in the tree above you.
Cordyan kept her off hand on her sword pommel as she glanced up. She saw the bat hanging from a branch above her, spreading its wings to further draw her attention.
He must know the rest of it. There will be no easy way to tell him.
“What happened?” Baylee asked.
With practiced neutrality, the watch lieutenant relayed all she had learned of the old mage’s murder. She had worked the night patrol in Waterdeep long enough to know there was no proper way to tell anyone a loved one would not be returning home. Each word seemed to weigh the ranger down. The easy, light-hearted and challenging smile had dropped from his face from the beginning, and grimness hammered his features into tight, hard lines.
“Someone sent you out here to tell me about this?” Baylee asked.
The elf at Baylee’s side shook his head slowly. “They suspected you of the old mage’s death, my friend. Isn’t that right, lieutenant?”
Cordyan didn’t flinch from the question. Hiding wasn’t her way. “There has been some consideration.”
The words reached through the confusion and hurt that had surrounded Baylee. The ranger’s emotions were immediately apparent to Cordyan, as were the real concerns of his friends around him. As she watched, a portly bald man in priest’s robes materialized at his side as well, offering his sympathies.
“I am your only suspect then?” the ranger asked.
“I don’t know,” Cordyan answered. “I was given only to find you and question you. Then find out if you would be willing to accompany me back to Waterdeep. Even without the matter of the assassination, there remains the estate to be administered.”
“The estate?” Baylee looked at her, clearly puzzled.
“Yes. He had his will filed with a law-reader. The house and the surrounding grounds in Waterdeep are all yours. Most of his other belongings as well, except for a few items that are to be disbursed among other friends.”
Baylee shook his head. “When will you be ready to leave?”
“As soon as you are.”
“I would be willing to start riding tonight.”
Calebaan Lahjir shifted at the table. “My sympathies for your loss, Baylee Arnvold, but after morningfeast would be more logical.”
“Of course. I shall be ready.” Baylee looked into Cordyan’s eyes. “If there isn’t anything else, I’d like to be alone with my friends now.”
Cordyan nodded and watched the ranger walk away. She cursed the luck that she should have to tell him the old mage was dead. It would have almost been better had he been Golsway’s killer. That way her own heart wouldn’t be filled with sadness. Movement broke away from the branch overhead. She glanced up and watched as the bat flew after the ranger in a flutter of leathery wings. She signaled across the way to two of her best trackers, setting them on Baylee and his party. Even though she believed the ranger, there was a possibility other information could be gleaned from watching him.
Cordyan sat at the table, suddenly overcome from all the fatigue of the travels that had brought them to the Glass Eye Concourse. She had no stomach for the remnants of the meal she’d been enjoying only moments ago. “Some days I hate the employment I have.”
“You like him.” Calebaan seemed genuinely surprised by the announcement even though he’d uttered it.
“I feel for him,” Cordyan said. “His pain is real.”
“Yes, and I have the feeling that if we don’t leave after morningfeast, we’re going to be chasing him all the way home, hoping to catch up.”
“Captain Closl and Lord Piergeiron are not going to be happy about Baylee’s arrival there,” Cordyan prophesied. “When I first heard the stories about him, I thought perhaps they were tall tales, made up because he walked for so long in Golsway’s shadow. But now that I get the measure of the man, I don’t think that is the case at all.” She looked after the ranger, watching him disappear in the darkness between the campfires spread out across the forgathering.
“No,” Calebaan agreed. “Baylee will bear watching even after he returns to Waterdeep. I don’t think he will let—” Calebaan sat up, suddenly more straight. “Do you feel it?”
Cordyan looked at her friend. “Feel what?”
Calebaan pointed toward the east, in the direction Baylee had walked. “The cold breath of death itself.”
Knowing her friend was sometimes given to poetic expression, Cordyan turned her head. Only darkness met her gaze. Then she felt the chill, like a high wind coming across Icewind Dale. The sensation came to her sharply, bringing with it the memory of two tendays the circus had spent playing Ten Towns when she’d been yet a girl, not then allowed to swing from the high wires with her brothers and sister.
But suddenly that dark space seemed to fold in on itself. Ruby light spilled from the corners of those folds in the next moment. Then the center of that fold collapsed, opening onto a hole.
Four figures stepped through that ruby hole into the midst of approaching rangers and a horde of animals.
“Something’s wrong.” Cordyan said. She stood and loosened her sword in its sheath. The copper and gold Shandaularan coin mounted in the hilt sparked a yellow light and felt warm to the touch. The sword was the watch lieutenant’s as a reward from Khelben Arunsun for work she had done as a Harper while she was sixteen years old. The sword, Khelben had assured her, came from the renowned collection of Azoun, King of Cormyr for a bit of business the archmage had performed for the king.
The enchantment on the blade made it move lightly in her grasp, and it cleaved more surely through armor than any edged weapon she had ever owned. But the Shandaularan coin had an even further enchantment laid upon it. In the presence of drow, the coin would spark yellow.
Cordyan knew the enchantment was true because she’d seen it spark twice before. Both times, drow had been around. Once, the sword’s warning had been enough to save her from a drow down in the warrens under the Waterdhavian docks.
The Shandaularan sparked again as she studied it. “Drow,” she told Calebaan. She looked up at the glowing red hole to see the first of them step through. Her hand covered the Shandaularan coin as she bared her weapon.
12
“Hurry!” Krystarn Fellhammer ordered the three drow males hurtling through the dimension door behind her. She carried the staff in one hand and gestured with the other. Her magic swelled inside her for a moment, then burst out to roll over the line of approaching rangers.
A streak of flame leapt from her forefinger to arc across the sky above the forest. A few of the rangers managed to stop short, evidently having seen the spell before.
Krystarn narrowed her eyes as the fiery sphere took shape in the air, then burst with a low roar that spread flames in all directions. At least a handful of the rangers died in the immediate inferno, and others were dreadfully injured. Fires caught in the grasses and trees, driving the animals back in panic.
The advance of the rangers halted when they realized they faced a truly deadly foe. A number of arrows streaked toward the drow.
Krystarn loosed a second burst of magical energy. Thick strands materialized in the air, spanning the distance between the trees in front of her, becoming a mass of sticky gray webbing that ran twenty feet across, ten feet high, and forty feet deep.
The flying arrows didn’t make it through the web, getting caught in the multilayered, sticky strands. Several of the rangers were also ensnared. A moment later and the webbing touched the fires burning in several s
pots across the ground. Extremely flammable, the webbing caught fire at once.
The rangers trapped within the webbing burned with it. Several of them screamed in agony. Many of them died. None of them were Baylee, Krystarn saw.
She gestured once more, unleashing the third spell she’d prepared for the raid. She felt the calm warmth surround her as the magic threaded into place before her just in time to stop two of the arrows that had managed to get through the webbing. Less than a yard in front of her, the arrows suddenly stopped dead and dropped to the ground.
Behind her, Captain V’nk’itn shook out the bag of holding that held the other drow males. They assembled around her at once, adding to her defense with their weapons. All of them were armed with hand crossbows, quivers tied down along their thighs with extra poisoned quarrels.
“The others,” Krystarn ordered.
V’nk’itn emptied the other bag and jumped back as the four figures suddenly rose up from the ground. The drow warriors drew back from their unwelcome allies, swords and axes going up in defense.
Krystarn had seen a skeleton warrior only once before in her life, before it had ripped out the throat of the woman she had been tomb raiding with at the time. She had barely escaped with her life. The experience had left its mark upon her, and she found she had to fight to retain her calm.
Now, seeing four of the skeleton warriors take up their dread two-handed swords and immediately walk toward them, the drow elf barely managed to stand her ground.
They all wore the remnants of finery, but the holes were large enough to spot the yellowed bone through the hunks of dark purple corpse-flesh flushed with congealed blood. None of the clothing or the House markings on them looked familiar. Two of them still had fragments of ears hanging onto their hard planed faces, and the ears held elven points. The elongated hands and feet also gave away the skeleton warriors’ mortal beginnings.
They growled in shrieking voices as they closed on the drow.
“Don the circlets!” Krystarn ordered. She watched as V’nk’itn and the other two men put the circlets they held on their heads and immediately lapsed into unconsciousness while remaining on their feet.
Little more than ten feet away, three of the skeleton warriors halted. The fourth continued on toward Krystarn, drawing its sword back to strike.
Krystarn fitted the circlet on her head, having no trouble at all of fitting her mind into the magic built into the band. Her senses swirled as she watched the fourth skeleton warrior suddenly freeze into position. A further mental push put her inside the skeleton warrior’s body.
She looked back at herself, noticing the way the firelight flickered over her own ebony skin. Then she tried lifting her sword arm, watching the long two-handed sword come up in the skeleton warrior’s grip.
Movement to her right drew her attention. She whirled, finding the skeleton moved slightly slower than she was accustomed to her own body responding. Before she could fully turn around, a young male ran his heavy war spear into her.
Krystarn cursed, not believing she had left herself open to such an attack. Then she was surprised when there was no pain. The spear expertly shoved through her ribs, finding the place where a heart was supposed to be. Rotted meat broke away in chunks, streaming down to the ground in front of her.
Realizing that she was in no danger of dying, Krystarn raised the two-handed sword and smashed the blade against the spear haft. The hardened wood splintered almost effortlessly. Before the ranger could get clear, she swung the blade again, decapitating her opponent.
Krystarn grinned, then reached down and pulled the spearhead from the skeleton warrior’s dead flesh. A moment later, she waved to the other three skeleton warriors and headed in search of more victims. Baylee Arnvold was at the forgathering somewhere, and she meant to kill him. No matter how many she had to kill first to do it.
Baylee spotted the skeleton warriors moving among the twisted shadows where the fireball had detonated. He had his sling in his hand, but against the undead, he knew the weapon would be almost useless.
A woman in priest’s robes ran toward the undead warriors. She lifted her staff and drove the bottom into the ground. The holy symbol at the top glowed a lambent orange as she stood her ground.
“It’s Vithyr!” someone shouted. “She’ll turn these undead horrors!”
Baylee wanted to shout a warning to let the cleric know that even her powers wouldn’t turn a skeleton warrior. Before the first word tore free of his throat, however, the lead skeleton warrior ran her through with its spear. Then the creature hurled her body away contemptuously.
“Gond protect these people,” Carceus the priest said. His round face held intense sorrow as he surveyed the dead and dying.
By then, Baylee was already in motion, heading back toward the undead at a run.
What are you doing? Xuxa demanded.
I’m going to help, Baylee replied.
They’re skeleton warriors, the azmyth bat protested. In order to harm them, you’ll need a magic weapon. Even then, there is the skill they still possess to consider as well.
They’re killing people, Xuxa, Baylee said. People I know … friends. I can’t sit back and do nothing. And those skeleton warriors are being guided by someone. They didn’t come here on their own.
Aymric, Karg, and Serellia caught up to him, their weapons bared in their fists. “Do you know about the circlets that bind them?” the elf asked.
“Yes,” Baylee replied. “Golsway and I have—” The pain hit him again, muffled partly because he couldn’t believe everything the watch lieutenant had told him. He’d have to see Golsway’s body to believe it. “There was one we faced a few years back in Lathtarl’s Lantern.”
“You survived,” Karg growled, “that means you learned something.” He held the dwarven double-bitted axe in his hands. “Me, I’ll trust this axe of mine. She’s got a bit of magic in her that’s stood me in good stead over the years.”
“My sword has been blessed by the Lady herself,” Serellia said, her weapon in hand.
“And my father gave me my falchion and this dagger.” Aymric brandished the two weapons. “Both had been in his family for generations, and both carry magic. But you are weaponless.”
“Slow the skeleton warriors down,” Baylee said. “Xuxa and I will see if we can scout up the people controlling them.” He mentally contacted the azmyth bat, sending her winging ahead. Many of the animal followers had already fled the immediate vicinity of the attack, driven before the fire and by the fear the undead creatures instilled with their very appearance.
Then they were in the thick of the fighting. Most of the rangers tried to hold their ground, but few of them possessed magical weapons that would do any damage to the skeleton warriors. Conventional weapons shattered against them or had no effect at all. The same held true for magical spells.
Leaping forward, Karg caught one of the skeleton warriors from the side, smashing his great axe down on its left arm. The keen edge of the magical axe slashed deep into the arm bone. Fractures split through the ivory. Amazingly, the arm remained intact.
The skeleton warrior turned immediately, striking out with the two-handed sword.
Karg blocked the blow with the head of his axe, trying to capture the blade between the bits and shatter it. Serellia stepped in as the big giant killer fought for his life. She drew her blade back, then brought it crashing against the undead creature’s ribcage. Bits of bone tumbled through the ribcage.
The skeleton warrior whirled back to face her. Both hands locked around the pommel of its weapon. It swung, bringing the sword off its shoulder.
Serellia ducked, moving under the whirling blade. Then Karg chopped down on the weakened arm again, this time cutting it from the skeleton warrior while the woman swung at one of the knee joints. Aymric met a second undead warrior with a flash of steel that quickly echoed with the grate of steel on bone. Then three hawks joined the battle, attacking the pits where the skeleton warrior’s dead eye
s were. The creature itself would have known there was no hurt that could be taken, but the person controlling it didn’t. The skeleton warrior flinched away from the battering wings and tearing talons.
Baylee ran, noting that a third skeleton warrior was being delayed in its attack by the Waterdhavian watch lieutenant. Blue sparks jumped from her blade’s edge every time contact was made.
Xuxa! he called.
I have found them! she cried.
Baylee followed her directions, stepping over a man who had been disemboweled by one of the skeleton warriors. Burned bodies, the dead and the soon-to-be, lay scattered across the sward. Knots of fire hung in the trees and grew larger on the ground as more of the brush caught.
He followed the azmyth bat’s commands, going to cover when she bade him. Then he saw the drow elves spread out before him. His blood ran hot in his veins. He’d never had a love for spiders. Even during his earliest years when his tolerances were more forgiving, he’d never learned to like the eight-legged creatures. When he’d still been small, a giant spider in a dungeon Golsway had taken him to in Hluthvar had captured Baylee from the party and tied him up in its web before the old mage had found and freed him.
And the drow worshipped Lloth, Queen of the spiders.
The drow spread out in a semi-circle. A few dead surrounded them, but the rangers for the most part had fled before the skeleton warriors. A burning branch from the tree above broke loose and dropped, smashing against the invisible barrier in front of the woman Baylee surmised led the group. The drow society, he knew, was matriarchal rather than patriarchal, led by women rather than men. She would have to be the leader.
Surprise will be your only edge, Xuxa said.
Then we’ll have to make the most of it Baylee reached under his tunic and touched the white star of worked silver and the green leaf that was the older known symbol of Mielikki, his chosen goddess. He prayed to her as he touched the symbol, asking her blessing while he gathered his spell. When he felt it roaring and strong within him, he flung his hand toward the area where the drow hid behind the invisible shield.
