Shadow of the Flame - Chris Pierson

by Dragonlance

  He had cast the spell before, hundreds of times, but never quite like this. Today there was other magic, hidden within the weave of the first, magic that might save him … if the Seven did not sense it, if Hith willed it, if he was lucky.

  Images of his twitching body, rippling in the bloody scrying pool, flashed through his mind. He knew his luck would run bad. Fate was fate; it could not be denied.

  There was no more time for such thoughts, however; the end of the spell had come. He swept his hands around him, and black, smoky mist trailed from his fingers. The mist hung in the air, then seemed to come alive, swirling and eddying and finally coalescing into shapes. The Seven watched it happen. Dreskith had half-drawn his scimitar, and the twins had their knives in hand, but they all relaxed once the spell took shape. They settled back, sheathing their weapons as the smoke grew solid and the hall around them changed.

  The throne room was no more; the moonstone tiles, the pillars and pools and fountains all had vanished. Instead, they stood in a cave of dark, reddish stone—a cave carved by sorcery, not flowing water or the hands of men. They were on a promontory, an outcrop that looked out over a wide, flat floor beneath a dome-shaped ceiling.

  “Behold my secret army,” said Maladar.

  And yes, there was an army in this room. Tens of thousands of soldiers stood arrayed in rows, clad in full armor and bearing swords, bows, and spears. Each of the soldiers was as tall as Bann, perhaps even taller. Full helmets, shaped into the visages of dragons, covered their faces.

  But the soldiers were not made of flesh.

  “Statues?” murmured Farashi.

  Maladar nodded. The soldiers were hewn from dark gray stone—like the cave, made by magic, not mortal hands.

  “What is this?” Iadro asked. “Where is this place?”

  “I will not tell you where,” Maladar said. “I keep this vault secret from all. I would not have anyone know the whereabouts of my tomb.”

  “Tomb?” Ettor echoed.

  “Thinking of dying soon?” asked Ettam.

  Maladar shrugged. “All men die,” he said. “I have ruled Aurim a long time. It would be foolish not to prepare for the day when my reign ends.”

  That was only a partial truth. Maladar had not delved this cave, had not sculpted the statues, until after the blood-vision. It had taken two months of spell-casting, months that had left him exhausted. And the last stage had taken as long as all the rest combined. He stepped aside, letting the Seven see what he had wrought.

  Standing upon the promontory, looking down on the stone army, was the final statue of shining black rock. It was only slightly larger than a man, but it seemed to swell with power, to suck the light and warmth out of the cave. It was the exact image of Maladar himself, cloaked and hooded as always.

  “My resting place,” he murmured, reaching out a gloved hand to touch the statue’s surface.

  The Seven stared in awe. If he could, Maladar would have smiled; instead, he nodded his head and wriggled the fingers of his right hand, just slightly, and let the second spell break free of the weave.

  Dreskith was the first; Maladar had chosen him, as the best swordsman, to die before the others. He had no time to speak, no time to move, before the magic took hold. His eyes simply widened, and he fell to his knees with an awful crack. Then his skin split open, like a hundred whips had struck him at once, and he was screaming, covered in blood as his body flayed itself open, right down to the bone. His hands clawed the air. His bright blue beard turned deep violet. He fell face-first onto the floor in tatters.

  The rest of the Seven reacted as Maladar knew they would; Bann, Iadro, and Farashi were momentarily stunned by what had happened to their sword-brother. Whisper and the twins, however, moved quicker. Ettor and Ettam had already drawn their daggers again: long, curved blades etched with glowing runes, the better to cut through armor and magic alike. They leaped forward, their faces alive with feral glee.

  Had they been two steps closer, they might have accomplished their goal. Instead, Maladar extended a hand and the twins burst, their skin ripping and sloughing away like Dreskith’s had. Their enchanted knives clattered to the floor; then they followed, howling in agony and clutching at their hideous wounds.

  Maladar cast about, looking for Whisper, but the veiled warrior was nowhere to be seen, and the others were moving, recovered from their shock. Swords in hand, Iadro and Bann and Farashi swept toward him. Again, the stupid fools were too far away. He killed each of them, Bann last of all as the giant’s greatsword was sweeping upward to deliver a blow that would have cut him in half. Maladar had to step aside to keep Bann’s shrieking, skinless body from falling on him. It hit the stones with a wet smack.

  Only Whisper remained, and still Maladar couldn’t see the elusive one. It was the darkness of the cave: Whisper could vanish in shadows, such that not even an elf’s sight could find him. He had used his talent in the empire’s service many times, to assassinate enemies both within Aurim and without. Maladar felt his heart race, knowing the most dangerous of the Seven was stalking him.

  His fear lasted only a moment, though, because he remembered something Whisper hadn’t, perhaps: the cave wasn’t real, and neither were the shadows. Maladar wriggled his fingers again and let the illusion dissolve.

  All at once, vault and statues vanished, turning back to smoke and dissipating into the air. In their place, Maladar stood once more in the sunlit throne room. He spun, looking for Whisper.

  The veiled killer had been right behind him … and close. Maladar brought up his hand to kill him, but Whisper sprang an eye’s blink before he could release the spell, a punch-dagger flashing in his hand. Hot pain raced through Maladar’s side as the blade cut through his flesh. He reached up and tore Whisper’s veil away, then wheeled with the impact of the blow. The momentum carried Whisper past him, sent him staggering, the punch-dagger trailing drops of blood … Maladar’s blood. Whisper got his balance back then turned to attack again.

  That is no man, Maladar thought as he cast the killing spell again. It hit Whisper as the punch-dagger was darting forward again, but the blade missed, snagging in Maladar’s robes. Then Whisper joined the rest of them, howling and writhing, a shredded mess on the floor that fell still after a moment of horrid suffering. In the instant before the skin tore away, though, Maladar understood why Whisper had never revealed his face. It had been the face of a woman.

  When they were all dead, the pain hit him at last. Maladar staggered, pressing a hand to his side. He had come so close, so damned close to surviving. But one had slipped through, as he’d known would happen. The Seven had killed him. He sighed, waiting for his vision to dim, his body to grow heavy and cold.

  It did not.

  Maladar felt the wound again. There was blood, yes, but not much. He stared at Whisper’s blade on the floor; there was no venom on it. He took a deep breath, then another. It hurt—but again, not as much as he’d feared. The blow he’d thought lethal had been only a graze.

  I survived, he thought, barely believing it. I denied fate!

  He turned, looking for Caspa, thinking to send her for a healer. When he saw her body, torn on the floor, he felt a moment’s regret. He had liked his chamberlain. But she had been in the wrong place, and the rending spell had caught her too. A pity. Maladar shrugged and turned back toward his throne.

  Shai stood before it, eyes wide, gaping at the blood pooling on the moonstones. In his hands he held a silver tray with eight goblets: seven of jeweled gold and one hewn from a single, enormous diamond. Maladar looked at the boy, whose face was pale. This was far from the first slaughter that had taken place in this room, but it was the first in Shai’s memory.

  “Be easy, lad,” he said. “All is well, though dear Caspa is lost. They came to kill me, but I was too quick for them.”

  “I brought …” the boy murmured, still staring at all the flayed bodies. “I brought the wine.”

  Maladar nodded. “Eight cups, I see. Well, there is on
ly need for one now.” He walked to Shai and lifted the diamond goblet—the emperor’s cup—from the tray. “A pity to waste so much fine grape and so many good swords on the same day … but there it is.”

  He turned, raising the cup to salute his fallen enemies. His wound was already feeling better. Then he drew the cup into his hood and made a horrible, wet, sucking sound. Shai didn’t flinch; he’d long since grown used to the strange noises the emperor made when he drank.

  Maladar relished the flavor of the Chakani green. It was a subtle wine, made from grapes grown on a hillside where two wizards had fought long ago. Their magic lingered in the vintage, giving it a taste unlike any other in Aurim: sweet and herbal and velvety, with a strange but not unpleasant burn beneath. He let it wash down his throat.

  Right away, he knew something was wrong. The wine’s burn changed as he swallowed. It grew stronger, harsher, and his throat started to twist and swell. In moments Maladar was wheezing, then gasping. The strength went out of his fingers, and the diamond goblet clattered to the floor, spilling green wine across the tiles to mix with the Seven’s blood.

  He stared at the goblet and knew.

  Maladar whirled, staring at Shai in shock. The boy was looking straight at him, for the first time since the slavers brought him to the City of Songs. Furious, Maladar tried to cast the rending spell one more time, to tear the boy apart, but he couldn’t move his fingers, could only raise his arm a little. Nor could he draw in enough air to speak the necessary words of enchantment. The poison was closing his lungs. Shai watched, a cruel smile curling his lips.

  The strength left Maladar’s legs, and as he fell, he knew how he would end up: in the same curled pose of agony he’d seen in the blood-filled pool. He hadn’t cheated fate after all.

  He heard a crash—Shai dropping the tray and the other seven cups—then the boy was standing over him, still smiling, his eyes looking much older than his eight years and smoldering with hatred. Maladar could do nothing to stop him as he bent down and yanked the hood from his head.

  What Shai beheld should have horrified him, but he gave no sign. Maladar’s face wasn’t a face at all, for the flesh was long gone, sacrificed for his magic many years ago. What remained was a skull surrounded by gnarled gristle with a jawless, gaping hole where his mouth should be. Maladar seldom revealed his visage, and then only to shock his enemies.

  Shai only sneered.

  “You are a monster, after all,” he said, rising again. “But you are also a fool, emperor of emperors. Did you forget who I was? I am a prince of my people, Majesty! I swore vengeance the moment I was brought here—for the honor of the Uigan, for my father and brothers when they died in your dungeons … and for myself, for all you have done to me.” His face darkened with memory; he shook his head. “Now it is done. You are slain, Majesty … and by the hand of a child. Thus shall your reign be remembered … and the Uigan will still ride upon the steppes when Aurim is nothing but ashes. Farewell, Maladar.”

  Then the boy was gone, without a look back. Maladar listened to his footfalls recede. He couldn’t breathe at all anymore, not even the slightest trickle of air. The cold and the darkness, which he’d thought he’d eluded, came all the same.

  His last thought, before they swallowed him, was that one day, the Uigan would pay.

  Silence. Darkness.

  No smells, no tastes, no feeling. Only thought.

  This was not the Abyss.

  Maladar was a powerful wizard. Using his magic, he had prolonged his life for more than two centuries. He had hoped to live for many more. The thought of his death was terrible, and he had delved deep into his grimoires, seeking answers. He had made plans, in case fate proved as unavoidable as the philosophers said. Fate had. But his plans had worked.

  He wasn’t still alive—not truly, anyway—though neither was he dead. They would find his body in the throne room, would burn it and cast the ashes out over the River Ush, as the Aurish did with all their emperors. Yet his soul would endure. He had bound his soul to this mortal world, sealed it within stone, within the black statue in its vault, deep beneath Aurim’s eastern provinces. He would stay with his army, in silence and darkness, until new flesh came for him to claim. He had sown the seeds, planning for that day. It might be centuries in coming, but Maladar the Faceless was patient. He would wait … and one day he would be free.

  He would rule Aurim again.

  Chapter

  1

  The Burning Sea

  He felt the blade go in. He felt it with each step his body took. Barreth Forlo thought he would feel it forever—every day, every moment, until he died.

  And when would that be? Soon, perhaps. Before his next breath, if he had any say. But he didn’t, of course. He hadn’t since that day, that awful day, at Akh-tazi.

  Forlo had never considered life to be fair; few soldiers did, and certainly not officers. He’d seen too many good men die untimely, too many cowards escape, too many battles lost to sheer stupid chance. The gods, if indeed there were gods, were a capricious lot at best: vain and detached, if not outright cruel. That could be the only explanation for all the suffering he’d seen in his many years.

  It was the only thing that could account for that.

  Gods, he’d come so close—chasing halfway across Taladas and back again after the bastards who’d taken his wife. It had been a long road, beginning with the damned statue, the Hooded One, which had come into his possession by chance. He’d thought the statue was simply a valuable relic left over from the long-dead empire of Aurim. He’d hoped to sell it for a fortune, so he could enjoy his recent retirement from the armies of the Minotaur League. But he’d learned different: an elf thief, Shedara of Armach, had come to steal the statue and told him the truth. It was more than just an artifact of an ancient realm, for within it slumbered the soul of Maladar the Faceless, the most wicked of Aurim’s rulers.

  Then the horde had come: thousands of horse-riding barbarians, the whole of the people known as the Uigan. Forlo had forgotten the Hooded One for a time, leaving it behind with his wife in his castle of Coldhope, to fight the savages when they crossed the straits of the Tiderun. Against all hope and odds, he’d won that battle, and—even stranger—he had found a true friend in Hult, the bodyguard of Chovuk Boyla, the prince of the Uigan.

  It had all been a ruse, though, as he discovered far too late. The horde was a distraction, one that left cities smoldering in its wake, true, but only a small piece on the shivis board … as, he supposed, was he. He’d returned to Coldhope to find it emptied, its few defenders slain, except for Shedara. The Hooded One was gone … and with it his wife, Essana, and the unborn child she carried. It was their first. A black dragon had taken her, and the only clue it left behind was one of its scales, torn off in the fighting.

  From there, it had been a race against time. He, Hult, and Shedara, joined by a wild elf named Eldako, had set out on the Hooded One’s trail. Their journeys had taken them to the mighty city of Kristophan, where he’d killed the emperor of the minotaurs, then north to the snowy wastes of Panak, where they learned the black dragon’s name—Gloomwing—from the Wyrm-namer, the oldest dragon in the world. From there they picked up Gloomwing’s trail, following him first to the kender valleys of Marak, then to the dank jungles of Neron. They had fought shadows and tentacle-mouthed creatures born of madness, and they slew Gloomwing himself. In the end, they had found the Hooded One and Essana, atop the ancient alien temple known as Akh-tazi, deep in the jungles of Neron. Her captors, the Faceless Brethren, had killed Eldako, and ensorceled Hult and Shedara. They hadn’t been able to stop Forlo, though, not even with all their magic and trickery. He’d found her, Essana, his Starlight.

  But she was not alone.

  He vividly remembered the young man who wielded the knife. The memory of his face was as hard a wound as the blade itself; it had been his own face, twenty years younger, beardless, the hair still full and dark, only with his mother’s eyes. Their son, still in Essa
na’s womb when last he saw her before riding off to battle. Perhaps half a year had passed since then, but the boy had been grown supernaturally and was already a man whose face lit with the fervor of a fanatic. He’d raised the dagger to sacrifice his own mother. If Forlo had had his sword in hand, he would have struck his son down. It would have broken his mind, but he knew it, in his heart: he would have killed his son to save Essana.

  He’d lost his sword in the fighting, though. He had only his body to block his son’s blow.

  The blade had gone in, and the moment it did, he’d known the blow was lethal. He’d been cut in battle too many times, dealt too many killing strokes himself, to believe any different. He’d found his Starlight, maybe even saved her; maybe Hult and Shedara could get to the boy before he tried a second time to kill Essana. Then it all would have been worth it. He’d let out his last breath—it felt like a sigh—and waited for death to claim him.

  Only it hadn’t.

  At first, lying there motionless atop his wife’s unconscious form, he hadn’t understood why he wasn’t dead. Then he’d felt it, the presence hanging above him, and he’d known. There had been another waiting near the altar, a ghost bound to a statue that bore its likeness, a horrible creature with a skull for a face, a mad tyrant who should have been dust a thousand years ago. It was Maladar, freed at last from his prison of stone. The sacrifice had been for him: Essana was to have died upon the altar, and her blood would have broken the binding spells, let the hideous specter claim his son as his new body. Forlo had been allowed to reach the temple so he could watch it happen; his grief, his rage, would have given Maladar, once the ruler of Aurim, new power in his son’s body.

  Forlo had thwarted that and spared his son as well as Essana. But blood had been spilled upon the altar of Akh-tazi regardless, and the magic Maladar’s ghost had set in motion would not be stopped. Forlo had felt the darkness surround him, suffuse him. It was as if every drop of blood in his body were turning to ice—only this ice burned. If his body had let him, he would have screamed, but he’d only lain there, helpless, as Maladar claimed him instead of his son.