The Herald

by Ed Greenwood

  “Come,” was all she said as they left the lines. Arclath looked back warily at the mercenaries as someone among them started to beat a drum, but Rune laid a hand on his arm to gently tug him along.

  Storm set a brisk pace through the trees, but they hadn’t come far when two elves stepped from behind trees, blades in hand—long whipswords, barb-ended blades whose slender lengths flexed and sang—and faces unfriendly.

  “Where are you headed?” one of them asked softly.

  “To the high mages working on the mythal,” Storm replied politely, not slowing.

  The elves frowned, neither stepping aside. “How is it that you know—?”

  Storm dodged between them with a liquid shift of her hips that lifted Arclath’s eyebrows appreciatively, and murmured, “I was one of several who suggested the augmentations.”

  The elves started after her, but then stopped and sighed as Arclath went wide around them one way, Amarune did the same in the other direction, and Storm turned around to watch, from well beyond them now.

  “It would be wiser, humans—” one of the elves began, but Storm shook her head and smiled.

  “I’ve never quite had leisure enough to wait to become wiser,” the silver-haired bard told the sentries. “I’ve always just had to go ahead and do things now.” A few retreating steps later she added brightly, “ ’Tis our curse, we short-lived humans!”

  Then she turned and hurried over a little ridge, to come down through duskwoods into a landscape of little lawns and grassy paths and curving stone walls amid the trees, where the wild forest gave way to soaring elven architecture.

  Arclath and Amarune joined her, looking around in pleasure at the sweeping curves and spires of the City of Song. The fighting hadn’t yet reached this far, but the litter of war was everywhere.

  And so were the sentries. None of the elves who stepped forth to challenge the three hurrying humans had ready bows or spears ready to hurl, thanks to the mythal augmentations, but they were far less than pleased at “outlanders” seeking to get to the high mages, and Storm had to talk her way past sentry post after sentry post with increasing difficulty.

  Arclath and Amarune kept their heads down and their mouths shut, knowing that without Storm—whom many of the elves knew—they’d have been attacked long ago.

  For her part, though her voice remained gentle and courteous, it was clear from the increasingly flat brevity of her converse that Storm’s temper was growing shorter and shorter.

  “Easy, Lady Storm,” Arclath muttered, as they finally won their way past a particularly rude sentry, and strode on. “Their ways are … their ways.”

  Rune gave him a withering look, and he shrugged sheepishly. Less than eloquent, to be sure, but …

  “Thank you, Arclath,” Storm told him softly, wrapping one long and shapely arm around him and squeezing. “I’ve never had much use for obstinate stupidity, but your point is taken. And your support appreciated.”

  Arclath struck a heroic pose that made her snort.

  An instant later, something crashed through the limbs of some distant trees. Boulders plummeted and rolled, downed leaves and boughs crashing in their wakes.

  “A catapult load,” Arclath murmured. “I’d been wondering why they hadn’t got around to that earlier. One could spread fire all too well …”

  His words trailed away as he realized what the arrival of the boulders meant.

  “Yes,” Storm said grimly, seeing his face. “The high mages are failing in earnest.”

  “So, should we be hurrying?” Amarune asked. “Or is there really anything we can do?”

  Storm sighed as the next sentries—a trio, this time—appeared from behind some trees ahead, and moved to intercept them.

  “ ‘One does what one can,’ ” she quoted the old saying. “ ‘And the result must be taken as good enough.’ ” She shook her head, and muttered, “Though my sister Dove always hated that saying. Now I know how she felt.”

  The next load to rain down out of the sky and bounce bloodily, right in front of Storm this time, were the dismembered limbs and torsos of battle dead. There were some human remains, but all too much of it was elf flesh.

  Fresh … and not so fresh. The staring, dusty-eyed heads were the worst.

  The sentries recoiled from what spattered or rolled at their feet, and Storm sighed again.

  It was early in the evening of this twelfth day of Marpenoth. Which meant that only the earliest and most eager of the idle and wealthy nobles in Suzail had found their ways to the Memories of Queen Fee.

  So they could be first with the latest and juiciest gossip, of course.

  “They’re saying,” Lady Shalais Wyrmwood burst out breathlessly, eyes dancing with excitement, “that Myth Drannor has fallen, and all the Dales too!”

  “As even my great-grandsire often observed, ‘they’ say many things,” Lord Illance said sourly. “Where’s the proof? Lay before us some details, lass! A vagabond hiresword army has to be paid, remember! What they can seize from the elves and the Dalefolk is their own booty, theirs in addition to their promised coin. And last I heard, they hadn’t been paid at the agreed-upon time, and were getting a mite surly about it. So before you have the fabled City of Song with all its proud elves and the Dales with their sturdy farmers overthrown, routed, and taken, hearken to this: I’ve noticed, down the years, that armies always win their greatest victories in rumor, and do rather less well on the battlefield.”

  “You’d not say that, Lord Illance,” Lady Rowanmantle snapped, “if you’d seen the wasteland that was once the glittering heart of Sembia. Why—”

  “And have you seen it, Lady?” came his frosty interruption. “Have you seen anything at all beyond what can be glimpsed from the highest towers in this city, in the last three decades? I think not. Wherefore you must needs rely on the same racing and loose-tongued rumor that so informs young Lady Wyrmwood here.”

  At the next table, Lord Harflame set down his goblet to sneer. “They’ll be at our gates next! Run and hide your jewels and your best gowns, ladies!”

  “Yes, and go about in our frilly scanties,” old Lady Rowanmantle said caustically. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Amondras? You always were a lecherous, drooling, tasteless boor!”

  “Odds blood, what a sharp-tongued liar you are, Arletta! How would you know what I taste like, hmm? And were I as lewd as you claim, I’d even want to see your old dragon-scarred hide bared, whereas the truth of the matter is that I’m far more selective! Young Shalais here, Delaunthra yonder, and one or two others, not the whole aging herd of you!”

  “Herd, Lord Harflame? Herd!?”

  “Yes, ‘herd,’ to be sure. Although perhaps that’s a disservice to my cows, who still yield milk and give me calves, and are on the whole far easier on the eyes, and most certainly on the ears, than you old battle-axes!”

  Mirt hid a wide—and getting broader—grin behind his oversized goblet. This was better than a play! They’d be throwing food and dashing wine at each other next!

  So as not to be noticed by anyone who might curb their tongue when reminded there was an outlander present, he settled himself a little lower in his seat in the darkest corner of this exclusive upper room in the Memories of Queen Fee. The most fashionable and expensive club along the Promenade in Suzail was sparsely populated just now, but then it was early yet. Many of the regular noble patrons were at home, with large and sumptuous meals and more than a few goblets of good wine still to get through, to fortify themselves for the serious imbibing that went on in the Fee.

  Rank amateurs in debauchery to a veteran glutton and drunkard like the oldest living Lord of Waterdeep, but after all, these were Cormyreans; they went at such things far more lightly than in the Deep.

  “Well,” observed Lord Renstameir Haelrood, as he swept into the room with a club servant scrambling in his wake to retrieve his casually discarded, many-feathered hat and gilt-trimmed cloak, “I see you’re all hard at work trying to dismantle each
other’s tempers and reputations, as usual, rather than concerning yourselves with the weightier matters that should ensnare the attention of us all. We’ll find it hard to go on leading a kingdom if we find it destroyed beneath us on the morrow. Care you nothing for what’s happening across Faerûn?”

  “Such as what, precisely, Renstameir? Who or what is so thundering likely to destroy Cormyr overnight, may I ask?”

  “You may, Lady Rowanmantle. Please do. Anything to keep Harflame goading you into being the old cows and battle-axes he so fondly likes to describe you as. Yet to keep matters from devolving down a dozen-some side lanes of distractions, name-calling, and riding favorite hobbyhorses, let me set before you these: the Great Rain has swollen the Sea of Fallen Stars so greatly as to restore its shores to something akin to what our grandsires remember, which means our own shores are flooding and may soon be sunken for good; priests of more faiths than I can keep track of are fighting among themselves over this or that detail of their gods, and this strife is widespread and becoming worse, so that we may yet have a score or more holy wars raging across all the lands; and it seems every third or fourth home or farm in every kingdom houses an ambitious person who thinks they are the Chosen of this or that god, and must go out into the world with fire and sword and claim the recognition of their deity by doing awful and great things that all too often seem to involve much bloodshed. Including killing others who claim to be Chosen. Something that may yet have the gods angered enough to do even more awful things to all of us.”

  Lord Haelrood sank into a chair with more sighing satisfaction than grace, and added, “I could go on, at length, but I need a drink. While all of you try to deny or dismiss everything I’ve just said so you can hurry back to arguing if Lady Such-and-Such is a trollop because she showed some knee through a slit in her gown two revels ago, or if Lord So-and-So’s piles are larger and more painful than Lord Howsoever’s. Pah. Can you not see, my lords and ladies? Toril around us is sinking into wild disaster—‘cataclysm’ is not too strong a word—and you care not, so long as the good food and better wine keeps coming. Well, the vineyards and herds and farm fields that provide such things may soon be laid waste, and then you will have to notice. Whereupon no doubt you’ll start squabbling about which of your old rivals is really to blame, rather than all this rumor from afar about Chosen and Great Rains and disasters.”

  “Rains of frogs, forty nights of torrential downpours of blood, monsters coupling with other monsters to spawn as yet unheard-of stranger monsters, taxes going down, and—gasp!—nobles telling the truth,” Lord Harflame recited to his goblet mockingly. “Whatever next?”

  Haelrood turned on him. “So you mock, and think yourself oh-so-superior, and do nothing. Steward of the realm that you are, that we all are, we lords and ladies. Beware frightened commoners with pitchforks, Harflame. When they get angry and scared enough to go looking for something to stick their forks into, your ample behind will be right there in view—and that’s when they’ll remember they don’t think much of the sneering old goat attached to it. I hope you can run faster than you can get up out of a chair here, after you’ve been guzzling firewine all night.”

  “I do not,” Harflame replied coldly, “guzzle firewine. A common beverage. I guzzle Taerluthran.” He held up his goblet, smirked, and added, “As I’m doing now.”

  Lady Wyrmwood surprised them all then by shooting to her feet, goblet in hand.

  “Drink while you can, lords,” she toasted the room grimly. “For war may yet come again to these very streets, and by then many of us may be a little too dead to drink.”

  Mirt had expected derisive jeers and laughter to greet these words, but instead a silence fell. And stretched, deepening, as lords and ladies exchanged glances and grew both pale and grim.

  Well, well. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be too late for Cormyr after all.

  The deep blue-green forest around Myth Drannor had suddenly become a din of ground-shaking cacophony.

  Catapult loads were crashing down on all sides now—huge boulders, heaps of fresh corpses, the trunks of felled trees, and the occasional smoking mass of firewood that the city’s mythal had quenched in midflight—and more than one group of sentries were dashed flat before Storm and her Cormyrean companions could reach them.

  “What’s that?” Amarune shouted suddenly from behind Storm, and the bard whirled around in time to see the air to the southwest go from faint blue to blood orange, in a swirling midair stain that spread as if some unseen titan had splashed something orange from the southwest toward the center of Myth Drannor.

  As they stared—it actually looked quite pretty, if one set aside all fear of what it probably meant—another and smaller part of the sky, off to the south beyond the roiling amber radiance, abruptly flared apple green.

  “Magic, isn’t it?” Arclath hazarded.

  Storm nodded, looking grim. “Wizards—arcanists, rather—among the besiegers are hurling spells at the mythal,” she explained. “Not doing much damage that I can see, but of course we must add the word ‘yet’ here, if we cleave to honesty.”

  “Look,” Rune hissed insistently, pointing. In the distance, through the trees, the amber radiance flashed and winked back reflections from metal—metal on the move, and a lot of it. The invading army was surging forward.

  “The elf lines must have been overwhelmed,” Amarune concluded gloomily.

  Even as Arclath nodded and turned to Storm to ask her what they should do now, the high, fluting calls of silver trumpets rang out from the tallest trees and spires at the heart of Myth Drannor.

  The call telling the defenders to rally to the breach, and fight to hold the foe back.

  Storm sighed, turned around with a wave that bade Arclath and Amarune to come with her, and answered that call.

  CHAPTER 11

  All Hail the Shadow King

  YES, OBLIVION. A TRIFLE BOASTFUL,” THE COLD VOICE OF LARLOCH added conversationally, “but such seems to be the style these days.”

  The archlich laughed, mirth that was almost immediately drowned out by a mighty roar.

  Alustriel and Laeral screamed, and—

  Suddenly the tumult and the cavern in which it had been raging were both gone, and Elminster found himself whirling silently through an endless blue void, tumbling and plunging down, down, down … to a brief flare of silver fire that transfixed him in utter spasming, gasping agony.

  That faded as abruptly as it had come, leaving him panting, pain free and whole, but staggeringly weak, standing on an unfamiliar cold and dusty stone floor.

  A brown floor, belonging to a cavernous, high-vaulted hall of brown stone. The very air around El as he swayed was ale brown and eddying, stale and tainted with the unmistakable reek of mildew.

  Elminster blinked. He was facing a tall and slender figure in black robes. It towered head and shoulders above him.

  He stared up at it. Into fell, old, and knowing eyes like two black, bottomless pools, set deep in a long, slender skull. For an instant, El was reminded of a bare, staring ox skull.

  Then those dark eyes sharpened, and it was more like being impaled on two dagger points.

  “Be welcome,” said a dry voice from behind Elminster, “in the house of Larloch, the Shadow King.”

  El didn’t turn to regard whoever had spoken—one of the Shadow King’s liches, no doubt, serving him as herald or steward—but kept his gaze fixed on the eyes of the legendary Larloch.

  Who stood confident and casual, flanked by a black staff twice as tall as Elminster, floating upright at the archlich’s shoulder. It flared out from base to top, and was studded all along its length with the yellowing skulls of all sorts of creatures, from horned devils and demons down to small serpents.

  A line of black-robed and glaring-eyed liches stood along the brown back wall of the chamber like the menacing members of a street gang, regarding Elminster as if he was a worm they itched to crush brutally in an instant.

  Larloch made a casual ges
ture without turning to look at them, and they all hastily turned and filed out of the room through a modest door El hadn’t noticed until then, behind the archlich’s looming form.

  “Your line, I believe, is ‘Where am I?’ ” Larloch informed El pleasantly.

  The Sage of Shadowdale shook his head, and found he needed to clear his throat before he could speak. “I was going to begin with ‘Why did you save me?’ ”

  Larloch smiled. “So we ride hard right at what is most important. Very well. I saved you, mage of Shadowdale, because you are the wisest and most capable of the Chosen—and always have been, with the possible exception of the Srinshee.”

  “And so? You’ve taken to collecting wise and capable Chosen?”

  Larloch’s smile went a trifle colder. “I need you, and the Realms needs you. You are the best tool at hand, to put it bluntly. And I cannot do this alone, for if just one spellcaster, in one spot, tries to call on the wards of Candlekeep to strengthen the Weave, the wards will surely collapse—like a man dropping and marring a long and heavy table he tries to carry from one end, whereas two men can readily manage the same transport, by lifting the table from both ends at once. The strengthening needs two of us, standing well apart, so we can draw on that part of the wards between us in a controlled manner, and so manage it.”

  El nodded. “And what,” he asked carefully, “does the Shadow King—who weathered the Spellplague so handily—care about the Weave?”

  Larloch tendered a cold, considering look, as if a pet had displeased him and he was reconsidering his acquisition of it.

  And then he began to speak, leaning forward and speaking in earnest, as if El was a vital pupil who had to be clearly told something of utmost importance.

  “Mystryl in my time, and two Mystras in yours, have been the goddess of magic—have been the Weave. The goddess Shar, in her pride and folly, believes that as Mystra is dead and there is still a Weave, the two are separate and can remain so. In this, she is wrong, but she also holds a belief that is correct: that control of the Weave, in the grasp of one with power enough, grants dominion over magic.”