The Herald

by Ed Greenwood

  Alustriel spoke again, before Elminster could. “El, hear me: we have spent more than a century confined here, constraining our lives down to reading and writing and praying, to silence and holding back, to acting roles that chafe us, because we love the Realms too much to fail it. We will not be turned from this. The wards of Candlekeep and the mythal of Myth Drannor must be destroyed. Whether you stand with us or against us, this must be done.”

  There were tears in Alustriel’s eyes now, and running down Laeral’s cheeks, but their lips were firm lines of determination.

  He found his own throat closing in grief, as he asked roughly, “And if I stand against ye both, what then, old friends? Foster daughters?”

  Laeral lifted her chin. “Choose wisely, El. If you are not with the Moonstars, you are against the Moonstars.”

  El looked from one tear-wet face to the other, his face as sad as theirs as he used the Weave to spin down streamers of power from the mighty wards of Candlekeep, spiraling eel-like tongues of energy that became two cocoons of force to imprison Alustriel and Laeral.

  He saw surprise in their faces—that became astonishment as they tried to command the wards against him, and discovered that his control overrode theirs.

  He didn’t wait to see more. Not that he’d ever seen the sense of wasting time in gloating, when there was something very needful that had to be done very swiftly if all this wasn’t to end in disaster. He had to work a difficult spell of his own, and very quickly.

  He got the incantation off, and the gestures, and it began. Half-seen movement in the air in front of him, the edges of fingers, darting and interweaving like a great school of fish swarming in the air. Ghostly hands, scores of them, disembodied and swirling in front of him in a shield of sorts.

  The moment they were a little more tangible, he sent them racing at Alustriel and Laeral in their whirling, now tightening cocoons. Those streams of slapping, clutching, clawing hands should hamper any spellcastings they might attempt—and hold the two women fast if they managed to banish the cocoons.

  They didn’t try. Trading glances, they chanted the same spell in unison.

  And shattered the ceiling of the cavern so it plummeted with a thunderous roar.

  Elminster didn’t bother to stare upward. He knew what he’d see. Tons of rock, hurtling to crash down on him.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Sword of Shadows

  THE POWER OF THE BAELNORN’S SPELL WAS ENOUGH TO FORCE Helgore’s body back, arching in the throes of a violent shuddering, but his wards wrestled with the emerald flames, holding them at a standstill. Should they reach him, they would consume flesh and tissue, and send burning magic racing through his veins; the wards told him that much as they roiled and recoiled a few finger thicknesses from his skin.

  And then the spent spell fell away.

  Leaving Helgore smirking at Thurauvyn Nathalanorn, Guardian Undying of House Nathalanorn.

  Time for a little goading. Fun, but more importantly, this baelnorn might be made to reveal useful things ere he destroyed it.

  He could see the arch-topped stone double doors it guarded beyond it—through it, actually—and could just make out the House symbol sculpted in relief upon them. A salamander wreathed in flames, entwined around a great fish with long, whiplike barbels and a jutting, many-toothed lower jaw. All wreathed and overlaid with sinuous vines whose many tiny leaves looked like ivy. So, fire and water? Pah, it could signify anything.

  “So tell me, unworthy guardian,” Helgore drawled, “why the world should remember House Nathalanorn? A few forgotten elves who comported themselves with great pride, no doubt, as all elves do. But had House Nathalanorn any real grounds for such hauteur? Who were they, and what did they achieve?”

  “Nothing one who comes to destroy and despoil cares about,” the baelnorn replied coldly. “I’ll tell you nothing that will aid you in finding other crypts or making any good use of anything you find here. I am sworn, beyond death itself. So much is, I grant, obvious, but I am speaking with a human.”

  “And we hairy, grasping, reeking barbarians are beneath you oh-so-superior Tel’Quess, is that it?”

  “Race is not the major part of this. Youth and ignorance are. Grasping thieves and vandals of all shapes and natures are beneath the regard of House Nathalanorn,” said the baelnorn, drifting a little nearer.

  Helgore retreated a step in the face of its chill.

  “There is no more House Nathalanorn, old fool,” he told the undead guardian harshly. “You and your kin were forgotten an age ago, before the elves abandoned Myth Drannor to the forest, the roving beasts, and fell fiends. They remain forgotten now. I doubt if the precious coronal could name your family or recognize your blazon, if they were put before her now. You are not even memories—outside these few feet of passage and your own failing wits.”

  “I have little doubt we are as nothing in your regard, creature of Telamont. Nothing more than a stronger arcanist of your own benighted city is—and your interest is spent on such powerful beings as targets to be undermined and thrown down in time, to your own advancement. If that is a life you find worthy, revel in it. You will not find much company of worth, however, swimming with you in those waters.”

  Helgore shrugged. “I have no need of the adulation of others, dead elf. I know my place and my powers.”

  “Knowledge born of a self-delusion so mighty is sure and certain indeed,” the baelnorn agreed caustically, drifting forward again.

  This time, Helgore did not retreat, but took a deliberate step forward into the chill, his wards crackling and flaring purple in warning.

  “It is past time I shattered your grating superiority, ancient fool,” he said, showing his teeth to the translucent skull face. “So let it begin between us.”

  He drew back one arm as if to free it from sticky mud—and thrust it forward with crackling lines of purple-white lightning snarling from its fingertips.

  The baelnorn regarded him expressionlessly from mere inches away, unmoving—and as unaffected as if his spell hadn’t existed at all.

  “So, have you begun?” it asked mockingly, after Helgore’s lightning had died away. “Telamont is sure to be impressed by the swift and easy victory of his most capable agent.”

  “Still your tongue,” Helgore replied venomously. “The tongue you no longer truly possess, yes? Just as you have lost all else of worth in your existence. Lovers, a body to love them with, kin, reputation … all gone. You chose to become nothing, and have achieved it. Congratulations.”

  “Your biting scorn is wasted, Shadovar; your understanding is so imperfect as to render your taunts laughable emptiness. I had hoped you’d furnish me some entertainment, but you are such a sad and hollow excuse for a Thultanthan arcanist—even among that wretched company—as to be merely a waste of time. Time that’s precious only to you, for I have stepped beyond the demands of racing age.”

  “Undead thing,” Helgore snapped, nettled despite himself, “be still. Your prattle is the wind of the tomb.”

  “Well, at least you know the poets,” the Guardian Undying of House Nathalanorn said archly. “There may be some hope for you yet. However, you really should read more closely, being as you work with the Art. The proper words are: ‘is but as wind from a tomb.’ ”

  “Do you actually presume to toy with me, talking gatepost?”

  The baelnorn chuckled. “Nay, nay, nay! There’s an art to delivering an insult! This stiff, pompous snapping out of half-remembered barbed phrases wastes their cleverness and merely makes you seem more ridiculous!”

  “Oh, burn you!” Helgore roared, and he lashed out with his most powerful spell.

  He was rewarded by seeing Thurauvyn Nathalanorn reel back, red flames like dragonfire momentarily licking up one undead arm, as the baelnorn’s barrier spell shattered like a great pane of glass, falling to crash silently to the floor in many thousand fading shards.

  And then, as Helgore laughed in glee, the counterstrike came, and the wor
ld became an icy inferno of frigid needles piercing him in a score of places. Snatching Helgore’s breath away, and all movement, and for one agonizing and seemingly endless movement, the beat of his heart.

  Slow agony spread through Helgore like some sort of blind, bumbling caterpillar, and then—his heart fell back to beating with a sullen thud, the world rushed back to him as a place of eerie shrieking—his own, he realized dazedly—and he was falling, fingers writhing spasmodically, tongue undulating out of the side of his mouth as if flutteringly eager to be elsewhere …

  He landed on his back with a crash, and bounced, arching in helpless agony and kicking up at the sky uncontrollably. The aftershocks of both spells rolled away along the passage floor in a shared sigh of fading, racing radiances, and then … silence fell.

  A stretching quiet that was broken by both Helgore and the baelnorn saying, in almost-perfect unison, “Is that the best you can do?”

  A moment later, horribly, they both started to laugh at the same moment. Dry mirth from the baelnorn, and wild hysteria from the living man.

  Helgore found unfunniness first.

  The forest was acrawl with bands of mercenaries hastening into the fray or trudging back to their camps to rest, and it hadn’t taken Storm, Amarune, and Arclath long to trot straight into a collision with one.

  In a trice, swords had been out among the trees, and Storm’s long silver hair whirling startled hireswords into brutal thudding collisions with various handy blueleaf and duskwood trunks.

  And then it was steel against steel, blades clanging and shrieking with the fury of the hacking.

  “You’re no elf!” the burly mercenary snarled into Arclath’s face as they strained for supremacy in a clinch of steel, blades locked together and noses not all that far apart. “What in the Nine blazing Hells are you doing here?”

  “Defending Myth Drannor from the likes of you,” Lord Delcastle replied levelly, the veins standing out on his neck in his effort, as they shoved and set their teeth—and the arms of both men started to tremble.

  “Oh, stop toying with your mercenaries, dear!” Rune muttered as she ducked past in the fray, hamstringing Arclath’s foe in an instant as she went.

  The man lurched sideways with a shriek that ended abruptly as Arclath’s dagger flashed into his throat. As he collapsed like a load of dumped fish on the Suzailan docks, his slayer frowned at his lady’s slender back, now plunging into a knot of mercenaries battling a lone bladesinger. “Hoy, now, was that sporting? Honorable?”

  “I’m not here for sport, Lord Delcastle,” she called back, driving the pommel of her dagger into the back of a mercenary helm so fiercely that it rang like a bell and spun half around on its wearer’s head, blinding him. “And I think we’ve long agreed that I lack honor. I’m here to win.”

  “Hah!” a tusk-helmed mercenary jeered as he came crashing through the trees at the head of a fresh band of hireswords. “Then you’re fighting on the wrong side! You and all these long-ears are doomed!”

  “Doomed! Doomed!” various hireswords chorused, sounding like so many lowing sheep.

  “Do you mind?” Storm complained, flinging the body of her most recent assailant away and moving to intercept this new force. Alone. “ ‘Doom’ was my battle cry, I’ll have you know. A good seven centuries ago, I’ll grant, but still …”

  “Pah! Seven years ago, mayhap!” the tusk-helmed warrior spat. “Seven centuries, my left haunch!”

  “That can be arranged,” Storm told him sweetly, her tresses lashing out to hook around his elbows and ankles as their blades clashed, whisking him up and into the path of his charging fellows.

  The tusk-helmed warrior’s startled shout became a raw roar of pain as the glaive of a hard-charging hiresword thrust into his behind and tore on through. The glaive wielder was coming too fast to halt his charge or sidestep, and slammed right into the wound he’d just created, blood spraying in all directions.

  As the stricken tusk-helmed warrior shrieked, the glaive wielder slipped in gore, slid right under the man he’d just wounded—and straight into Storm.

  Or rather, into where she’d been. She’d sprung into the air, to come down hard with both feet on the sliding man, crotch and throat. Pinned, he managed a high-pitched strangling gurgle and a beached-fishlike thrashing ere a running bladesinger disgustedly drove a sword point in under his jaw.

  By then, the mercenary charge had become a wary, scattered advance, hampered by the trees and Storm’s fury. Myth Drannan bladesingers rushed to reinforce her, forming a formidable line that had more than one mercenary backing away.

  When Amarune Whitewave arose from a tangle of three large and well-armored mercenaries, covered with blood but smiling, with her three foes lolling lifeless, and Arclath Delcastle came sprinting to her side with blood on his own sword and dagger, the mercenaries had tasted enough.

  They broke and ran, leaving the human handful of Myth Drannan defenders unopposed. And trading weary smiles with the bladesingers who’d stood with them.

  “A small victory,” one elf muttered, “but victory nonetheless.”

  “Well said,” Storm agreed. “ ‘Savor victories whatever their size, and whenever they come—they are the little lights that brighten our days.’ ”

  “Thaeruld Hraumendor,” Arclath said approvingly. “From his A Life Lived Adequately. One of the better philosophers in my father’s library. Very old book; I’m surprised you know it.”

  Storm gave him a dangerous look. “I knew the man, Lord Delcastle. When he was younger than you are, to boot.”

  “Ah,” Arclath said, wincing. “Pray accept my apologies—bad manners to openly remind a lady of her age, very bad. In my defense, let it be said that my slight was entirely unwitting and unintentional.”

  Storm’s look turned sly. “ ‘Too many of our nobles, young and old, are headstrong self-centered louts, their every act unwitting of consquences, and uncaring of unintentional side effects.’ To quote Baerauble, writing back in the reign of Tharyann the Elder. And yes, Lord Delcastle, that was before my time.”

  But Arclath was staring past her, through the trees, keeping his usual watch over the nearest mercenaries. And instead of replying to her sally, he frowned and scrambled a few steps sideways, over a softly rotten stump as large around as a good-sized oval dining table, to where he could see better.

  “Well, Arclath,” Storm asked gently as Rune joined her man, and he gave her an almost absent-minded hug, “what’re the foe up to?”

  “Much discussion,” he replied. “Some of them are waving torches. Unlit, but by the way they’re pointing them, I think they’re debating trying to start a large forest fire.”

  “Much good may that do them. If there’s one thing even young elves can master, it’s firequench magic. Still, we should alert the best archers who can be spared from the lines. Fire setters have to tarry in one spot long enough to make superb targets—and if they try to use fire arrows, we can take down their archers. I—”

  The faintest of rumbles arose, and the ground under their feet rocked. Out of a nearby hollow tree burst brief tongues of red flame, amid some ghostly shards of glowing light that faded to nothingness as they started to drift away into the air.

  “What was that?” Arclath hissed. “Are the besiegers down below, blasting tunnels to get past our lines?”

  Storm shook her head. “Impossible, with all the roots—see you the size of these trees around us?—that’d be in their way. Moreover, we humans and elves aren’t the only things dwelling in this forest; the very badgers would be bolting up out of their burrows all around us, if any sustained tunneling was going on. No, that was something else.”

  She frowned. “Probably something ancient.”

  “Share,” Rune suggested sharply. “I’m beyond tired of the ‘I’m so old and wisely mysterious’ act. Thanks to Elminster.”

  Storm gave her a wry smile. “Well, then, I’ll turn to handing out sayings so hoary you’ll roll your eyes: this is goin
g to grow far worse, I fear, before it’s over.”

  Rune obligingly rolled her eyes. Then gave Storm a glare and flared her nostrils like an angry horse.

  The bard’s sudden grin made her look like a young girl. “Oh, that’s good,” she said admiringly. “Wish I could do that.”

  Arclath sighed. “Ladies, ladies.”

  Storm and Amarune turned in perfect unison to give him the same flatly withering look. “Well,” Storm remarked, “that’s not your first slip of the tongue this day, and I suppose it’ll be far from your last.”

  “Ah, the joys of growing up noble,” Lord Delcastle observed. “Surrounded by spitfires. I’m quite used to it. And before you ask, know this: my mother could surround someone all by herself.”

  The agent of Thultanthar faced the baelnorn before the doors of the crypt it was charged to guard, and it was not the undead guardian who was the angriest of the two.

  Helgore snarled wordlessly. This was taking too long, and he certainly hadn’t expected the baelnorn to have managed to hurt him this much.

  And he had so many more of them to find and destroy.

  He’d just have to—but wait, the tiresome dead elf was declaiming his defiance again.

  “I am Thurauvyn Nathalanorn, Guardian Undying of House Nathalanorn, and so long as any of me still exists, you shall neither pass nor prevail, human vandal.” The hiss sounded fierce—and desperate.

  “Well, then, baelnorn, we shall have to see about that continued existence of yours,” Helgore taunted, with a heartiness he was far from feeling. There had better be powerful magic in the Nathalanorn crypt, because he might soon be in sore need of it. “You’ve proven to be little more than feeble bluster thus far, so it should not take me long, nor much effort …”