The Cleric Quintet: Book 01 - Canticle, page 1
WARY MUST WANDERERS BE IN THE REALMS,
FOR CIVILIZATION OFTEN ENDS AT A CITY WALL
From a distance, the rocky spur at the northeastern edge of the Snowflake Mountains seemed quite unremarkable: piles of strewn boulders covering tightly packed slopes of smaller stones. But so, too, to those who didn’t know better, might a wolverine seem an innocuous creature of the forest. A dozen separate tunnels led under that rocky slope, and each of them promised only death to wayward adventurers seeking shelter from the night.
This particular mountain spur, which was far from natural, housed Castle Trinity, a castle-in-mountain’s-clothing, a fortress for an evil brotherhood determined to gain in power.
“R.A. Salvatore is the best descriptive writer ever for fantasy battle scenes. No one writes them better than he.”
—Conan Tigard, Reading Review
“The Orc King finds Drizzt’s whirling scimitar blades tackling both familiar foes and refreshingly ambiguous moral challenges … The story line marks the continuation of Salvatore’s maturation as a writer, introducing more complex themes into a frequently black-and-white fantasy landscape.”
—Kirkus
“This is pure sword and sorcery reminiscent at times of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series.”
—Don D’Ammassa on Promise of the Witch-King
“… breathes new life into the stereotypical creatures of the milieu: the motivations of his villains make sense without violating the traditions of the game. His heroes face dilemmas deeper than merely how to slay their foes. Salvatore has long used his dark elf protagonist to reflect on issues of racial prejudice … and this novel is no exception.”
—Paul Brink, School Library Journal on The Thousand Orcs
R.A. SALVATORE’S
THE CLERIC QUINTET
BOOK I
Canticle
BOOK II
In Sylvan Shadows
BOOK III
Night Masks
BOOK IV
The Fallen Fortress
BOOK V
The Chaos Curse
The Cleric Quintet, Book I
CANTICLE
©1991 TSR, Inc.
©2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC.
FORGOTTEN REALMS, D&D, Wizards of the Coast, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. Other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hasbro SA, Represented by Hasbro Europe, Stockley Park, UB11 1AZ. UK.
All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Cover art by Duane O. Myers
eISBN: 978-0-7869-5432-2
640-25326000-001-EN
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v3.1
To anyone who can honestly call himself
a friend of the Earth.
And a special thanks to Brian Newton—
he knows why.
—RAS
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One: The White Squirrel’s Pet
Chapter Two: Agent of Talona
Chapter Three: Danica
Chapter Four: Canticle
Chapter Five: To Know Your Allies
Chapter Six: Water and Dust
Chapter Seven: Sunlight and Darkness
Chapter Eight: Catalyst
Chapter Nine: Barjin’s World
Chapter Ten: The Puzzle
Chapter Eleven: Oddities
Chapter Twelve: The Time to Act
Chapter Thirteen: Cryptic
Chapter Fourteen: Disturbing Answers
Chapter Fifteen: Blood on His Hands
Chapter Sixteen: The Walking Dead
Chapter Seventeen: Danica’s Battle
Chapter Eighteen: General Druzil
Chapter Nineteen: Ghouls
Chapter Twenty: Oh, Brother, me Brother
Chapter Twenty-one: A Well-Placed Blow
Chapter Twenty-two: Face to Face
Chapter Twenty-three: In the Druid’s Heart
Chapter Twenty-four: The Most Fatal Horror
Chapter Twenty-five: Out of the Mist
Epilogue
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Aballister Bonaduce looked long and hard at the shimmering image in his mirror. Mountains of wind-driven snow and ice lay endlessly before him, the most forbidding place in all the Realms. All he had to do was step through the mirror, onto the Great Glacier.
“Are you coming, Druzil?” the wizard said to his batwinged imp.
Druzil folded his leathery wings around him as if to privately consider the question. “I am not so fond of the cold,” he said, obviously not wanting to partake of this particular hunt.
“Nor am I,” Aballister said, slipping onto his finger an enchanted ring that would protect him from the killing cold. “But only on the Great Glacier does the yote grow.” Aballister looked back to the scene in the magical mirror, one final barrier to the completion of his quest and the beginning of his conquests. The snowy region was quiet now, though dark clouds hung ominously overhead and promised an impending storm that would delay the hunt, perhaps for many days.
“There we must go,” Aballister continued, talking more to himself than to the imp. His voice trailed away as he sank within his memories, to the turning point in his life more than two years before, during the Time of Troubles. He had been powerful even then, but directionless.
The avatar of the goddess Talona had shown him the way.
Aballister’s grin became an open chuckle as he turned back to regard Druzil, the imp who had delivered to him the method to best please the Lady of Poison. “Come, dear Druzil,” Aballister said. “You brought the recipe for the chaos curse. You must come along and help to find its last ingredient.”
The imp straightened and unfolded his wings at the mention of the chaos curse. He offered no arguments. A lazy flap brought him to Aballister’s shoulder and together they walked through the mirror and into the blowing wind.
The hunched and hairy creature, resembling a more primitive form of human, grunted and growled and threw its crude spear, though Aballister and Druzil were far out of range. It howled in triumph anyway, as though its throw had served some symbolic victory, and scooted back to the large gathering of its shaggy white kin.
“Apparently they do not wish to bargain,” Druzil said, shuffling from clawed foot to clawed foot on Aballister’s shoulder.
The wizard understood his familiar’s excitement. Druzil was a creature of the lower planes, a creature of chaos, and he wanted desperately to see his master deal with the impudent fools—just an added pleasure to a long-awaited, victorious day.
“They are taers,” Aballister explained, “crude and fierce. You are quite correct. They’ll not bargain.”
Aballister’s eyes flashed and Druzil hopped again and clapped his hands together.
“They know not the might before them!” Aballister cried, his voice rising with his ire.
All the terrible trials of two long and brutal years rolled through the wizard’s thoughts in the span of a few seconds. A hundred men had died in search of the elusive ingredients for the chaos curse; a hundred men had given their lives so that Talona would be pleased. Aballister, too, had not escaped unscathed. Completing the curse had become his obsession, the driving force in his life, and he had aged with every step, had torn out clumps of his own hair every time the curse seemed to be slipping beyond his reach.
But he was close, so close that he could see the dark patch of yote just beyond the small ridge that held the taers’ cave complexes. So close, but the wretched, idiotic creatures stood in his way.
Aballister’s words had stirred the taers. They grumbled and hopped about in the shadow of the jagged mountain, shoving each other forward as if trying to select one to lead their charge.
“Do something quickly,” Druzil suggested from his perch. Aballister looked up at him and nearly laughed. “They will attack,” Druzil explained, trying to sound unconcerned, “and, worse, this cold stiffens my wings.”
Aballister nodded at the imp’s rationale. Any delay could cost him, especially if the dark clouds broke into a blinding blizzard, one that would hide both the yote and the shimmering doorway back to Aballister’s comfortable room. He pulled out a tiny ball, a mixture of bat guano and sulphur, crushed it in his fist, and pointed one finger at the group of taers. His chant echoed off the mountain face and back across the empty glacier ice, and he smiled, thinking it wonderfully ironic that the stupid creatures had no idea what he was doing.
A moment later, they found out.
Just before his spell discharged, Aballister had a cruel thought and lifted the angle of his pointing finger. The fireball exploded above the heads of the startled taers, disintegrating the frozen bindings of the ice mountain. Huge blocks rained down, and a great rush of water swallowed those who had not been crushed. Several of the band floundered in the icy morass, too overwhelmed to gain their footing as the pool quickly solidified around them.
One pitiful creature did manage to struggle free, but Druzil hopped off Aballister’s shoulder and swooped down upon him.
The imp’s claw-tipped tail whipped out as he passed by the stumbling creature, and Aballister applauded heartily.
The taer clutched at its stung shoulder, looked curiously at the departing imp, then fell dead to the ice.
“What of the rest?” Druzil asked, landing back on his perch.
Aballister considered the remaining taers. Most were dead, but some struggled futilely against the tightening grip of ice.
“Leave them to their slow deaths,” he replied, and he laughed again.
Druzil gave him an incredulous look. “The Lady of Poison would not approve,” the imp said, wagging his wicked tail before him with one hand.
“Very well,” Aballister replied, though he realized that Druzil was more interested in pleasing himself than Talona. Still, the reasoning was sound; poison was always the accepted method for completing Talona’s work. “Go and finish the task,” Aballister instructed the imp. “I will get the yote.”
A short while later, Aballister plucked the last gray-brown mushroom from its stubborn grasp on the glacier and dropped it into his bag. He called over to Druzil, who was toying with the last whining taer, snapping his tail back and forth around the terrified creature’s frantically jerking head—the only part of the taer that was free of the ice trap.
“Enough,” Aballister said.
Druzil sighed and looked mournfully at the approaching wizard. Aballister’s visage did not soften.
“Enough,” he said again.
Druzil bent over and kissed the taer on the nose. The creature stopped whimpering and looked at him curiously, but Druzil only shrugged and drove his poison-tipped stinger straight into the taer’s weeping eye.
The imp eagerly accepted the offered perch on Aballister’s shoulder. Aballister let him hold the bag of yote, just to remind the distracted imp that more important matters awaited them beyond the shimmering door.
ONE
THE WHITE SQUIRREL’S PET
The green-robed druid issued a series of chit-chits and clucks, but the white-furred squirrel seemed oblivious to it all, sitting on a branch in the towering oak tree high above the three men.
“Well, you seem to have lost your voice,” remarked another of the men, a bearded woodland priest with gentle-looking features and thick blond hair hanging well below his shoulders.
“Can you call the beast any better than I?” the green-robed druid asked. “I fear this creature is strange in more ways than the color of its coat.”
The other two laughed at their companion’s attempt to explain his ineptitude.
“I grant you,” said the third of the group, the highest ranking initiate, “the squirrel’s color is unusual, but speaking to animals is among the easiest of our abilities. Surely by now—”
“With all respect,” the frustrated druid interrupted, “I have made contact with the creature. It just refuses to reply. Try yourself, I invite you.”
“A squirrel refusing to speak?” asked the second of the group with a chuckle. “Surely they are among the chattiest—”
“Not that one,” came a reply from behind. The three druids turned to see a priest coming down the wide dirt road from the ivy-streaked building, the skip of youth evident in his steps.
He was of average height and build, though perhaps more muscular than most, with gray eyes that turned up at their corners when he smiled and curly brown locks that bounced under the wide brim of his hat. His tan-white tunic and trousers showed him to be a priest of Deneir, god of one of the host sects of the Edificant Library. Unlike most within his order, though, the young man also wore a decorative light blue silken cape and a wide-brimmed hat, also blue and banded in red, with a plume on the right-hand side. Set in the band’s center was a porcelain-and-gold pendant depicting a candle burning above an eye, the symbol of Deneir.
“That squirrel is tight-lipped, except when he chooses not to be,” the young priest went on. The normally unflappable druids’ stunned expressions amused him, so he decided to startle them a bit more. “Well met, Arcite, Newander, and Cleo. I congratulate you, Cleo, on your ascension to the status of initiate.”
“How do you know of us?” asked Arcite, the druid leader.
“We have not yet reported to the library and have told no one of our coming.” Arcite and Newander, the blond-haired priest, exchanged suspicious glances, and Arcite’s voice became stem. “Have your masters been scrying, looking for us with magical means?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” the young priest replied immediately, knowing the secretive druids’ aversion to such tactics. “I remember you, all three, from your last visit to the library.”
“Preposterous!” piped in Cleo. “That was fourteen years ago. You could not have been more than …”
“A boy,” answered the young priest. “So I was, seven years old. You had a fourth to your party, as I recall, an aging lady of great powers. Shannon, I believe was her name.”
“Incredible,” muttered Arcite. “You are correct, young priest.”
Again the druids exchanged concerned looks, suspecting trickery. Druids weren’t overly fond of anyone not of their order. They rarely came to the renowned Edificant Library, which sat high in the secluded Snowflake Mountains, and then only when they had word of a discovery of particular interest, a rare tome of herbs or animals, or a new recipe for potions to heal wounds or better grow their gardens. As a group, they began to turn away, but then Newander, on a sudden impulse, spun back around to face the young priest, who leaned casually on a fine walking stick, its silver handle sculpted masterfully into the image of a ram’s head.
“Cadderly?” Newander asked through a widening grin.
Arcite, too, recognized the young man and remembered the unusual story of the most unusual child. Cadderly had come to live at the library before his fifth birthday—rarely were any accepted before the age of ten. His mother had died several months before that, and his father, too immersed in studies of his own, had neglected the child. Thobicus, the dean of the Edificant Library, had heard of the promising boy and had generously taken him in.
“Cadderly,” Arcite echoed. “Is that really you?”
“At your service,” Cadderly replied, bowing low, “and well met. I am honored that you remember me, good Newander and venerable Arcite.”
“Who?” Cleo whispered, looking curiously to Newander.
Cleo’s face, too, brightened in recognition a few moments later.
“Yes, you were just a boy,” said Newander, “an overly curious little boy, as I recall.”
“Forgive me,” said Cadderly, bowing again. “One does not often find the opportunity to converse with a troupe of druids!”
“Few would care to,” remarked Arcite, “but you … are among that few, so it would appear.”
Cadderly nodded, but his smile disappeared. “I pray that nothing has happened to Shannon,” he said, truly concerned. The druid had treated him well on that long-ago occasion. She had shown him beneficial plants, tasty roots, and had made flowers bloom before his eyes. To Cadderly’s astonishment, Shannon had transformed herself, an ability of the most powerful druids, into a graceful swan and had flown high into the morning sky. Cadderly had dearly wished to join her—he remembered that longing most vividly—but the druid had no power to similarly transform him.
“Nothing terrible, if that is what you mean,” replied Arcite.
“She died several years back, peacefully.”
Cadderly nodded. He was about to offer his condolences, but he prudently remembered that druids neither feared nor lamented death, seeing it as the natural conclusion to life and a rather unimportant event in the overall scheme of universal order.
