The Last Mythal: A Forgotten Realms Trilogy, page 43
part #1 of Forgotten Realms: The Last Mythal Series
“What is this, Sarya?” he asked.
“A binding diagram that should hold even you, Malkizid. Simply a precaution in case you were not forthright about aiding me once summoned.”
“It is hardly necessary, I assure you. I have come to help you, after all. What could I possibly gain by betraying you now?”
“I have no idea, but I see no reason to invite treachery.” Sarya watched Malkizid carefully, a spell of dismissal only an instant from her lips.
Malkizid shrugged. Blood dripped from his wounded forehead.
“As you wish, then,” said the devil. “I can instruct you just as well from within this diagram. Now, will you speak the spell of mythal reading? You will need to make visible the threads that bind this artifice together.”
Sarya hesitated. “Is there any chance of warning the mythal’s creators by casting that spell here? Several of those who raised this mythal are still alive. I can think of at least one who wields Mystra’s silver fire.”
“I know of whom you speak,” Malkizid replied. He did not name the wizard Sarya was thinking of, for it was well known that Mystra’s Chosen could hear their names spoken anywhere in the world, and any words that the speaker uttered after the name. “I do not fear him, but then again, I am protected inside this exceedingly thorough summoning circle. However, the first thing we will do is silence the mythal’s alarms and prevent it from sending out any kind of warning to its creators. I will show you how.”
“Can you be certain that it will work?”
Malkizid’s dark eyes flashed, and a frown creased his noble countenance.
“Sarya Dlardrageth, I forgot more about mythalcraft ten thousand years ago than those who raised this stone managed to accumulate in all the time since. This mythal was raised by mere novices. Long ago I taught the Vyshaanti how to build wonders you could not conceive of! In the days of Aryvandaar’s glory mythals were weapons of war, and mythalcraft was the grandest and most terrible of the martial skills. Of course I know how to conceal my presence from such a device!”
Despite herself, Sarya took half a step back. For just a moment she glimpsed the ancient anger that Malkizid hoarded beneath his calm demeanor, and demon queen that she was, she still took note.
“You have had access to this mythal for nearly twenty years,” she observed. “If you are so knowledgeable, why haven’t you subverted it already?”
Malkizid grounded the point of his silver sword in the smooth stone floor and glowered at her. “First, I am not an elf, nor the recipient of any special blessing of Mystra’s. You still possess enough elf blood in your veins to deceive some of this mythal’s defenses, Sarya, while I do not. Second, I dare not set foot in the bounds of this mythal through any use of my own power. The wards raised by the Zhents two decades ago trap devils within the mythal’s bounds. I will show you how to modify that stricture soon, but until I found you, I had no one to bring me to this place who would not instantly trap me here.”
“You could be trapped here now,” Sarya said, nodding at her binding circle.
“Only if you wished to betray me,” Malkizid replied, “and I would advise you to carefully consider any such course of action, for the consequences would be severe. If nothing else, you would find me much less forthcoming with my secrets of mythalcraft if you thought to coerce me.”
Sarya weighed the devil’s words, comparing them with what she thought she knew.
“I will not betray you, Malkizid. I only seek to protect myself.” She indicated the mythal stone with a flick of her wing and asked, “Now, how do we proceed?”
“First,” said Malkizid, “I will show you how to inspect the mythal’s very structure and identify the properties that are useful, those that are dangerous, and those that you can modify with some work. Then, we will make you the mistress of this mythal, so that no one else can contest your mastery of the device or sever you from it in the way Myth Glaurach’s mythal was taken from you. Now that we have learned that your enemies can do such a thing, I see no reason to allow it to happen again.”
CHAPTER 5
19 Mirtul, the Year of Lightning Storms
The first portal led to a ruined chamber high on the shoulders of an icy, windswept mountain. The bitter cold struck Araevin the instant he stepped through the magical gate, and the sting of wind-driven snow and the roar of the storm left him barely able to see or hear at all in the first moments after he arrived. He threw up one arm to shield his eyes, and peered at the old stonework around him.
“Araevin!” Ilsevele shouted to make herself heard above the wind. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know!” he called back.
Araevin finally blinked his eyes clear. The others stood around him, backs to the wind, holding cloaks close around their throats as the garments flapped and fluttered. Narrow window slits looked out over a scene of magnificent desolation, a cloud-wracked sea of black peaks and deep valleys. The chamber—and presumably, whatever structure it was a part of—actually stood well above the cloud layer. Sunlight streamed into the room, painfully bright.
About the same time of day as before, Araevin noted. We haven’t moved terribly far to the east or the west. What mountains of such size stand near Myth Glaurach? The Nether Mountains, but they are not so tall. The Spine of the World, or maybe … ?
“I think these are the Ice Mountains,” he told his companions. “Two hundred miles north of Myth Glaurach, perhaps? It’s only a guess, though.”
“We can’t stay here long,” Starbrow replied. “Can we return through the portal?”
Araevin turned to examine the blank stone face of a gateway, framed by a similar rellana vine device.
“Yes,” he replied, “but we’ll need rellana again. I’ve got the rest of the blossoms if we need to go back.”
“It’s not so bad here,” Maresa observed. The genasi seemed more at home in the frigid air and howling wind than Araevin could believe. Her cloak hung from her shoulders, ruffling gently in the wind that streamed the others’ cloaks like pennants behind them, and her long white hair drifted gently. She was a creature of the elemental air, and she was well suited for high places and strong winds. “So what do we do now?”
“Explore,” said Araevin. “See if we can find any other portals the daemonfey might have used, or a trail or path leading away from this place.”
Starbrow shifted Keryvian so that the heavy sword’s hilt was close to his hand. He looked out the window slit at the steep slopes beyond.
“There might not be a road, Araevin. All the daemonfey have wings—maybe they just flew off from here.”
“We’ll consider that possibility when we have to.” Araevin looked around the tower. The row of windows overlooking the mountain slope below stood to his left. To his right a broad swath of the chamber’s wall was simply gone, as if something had cleaved the old building with a titanic axe stroke. The stonework had an elven look to it—somewhat heavier than elves might normally build, but given the evident remoteness and difficulty of the location, he could hardly blame the builders for using whatever materials were close at hand.
Was the place a watchpost of some kind? he wondered.
They made their way through an empty archway in the intact wall to another room, this one a large rectangular hall or banquet room, also brightly lit by the dazzling sunlight on the snow. Most of the roof was absent, lying in piles of rubble and debris on the floor of the chamber. Deep snowdrifts clung to the corners of the room.
It could have been a watchtower, Araevin decided. The elves of ancient Eaerlann would have wanted to keep an eye on the Spine of the World for dragon flights or armies of orcs and giants.
“What a miserable post this must have been,” he muttered.
“Yes, but the view would have been worth it,” Ilsevele replied. A gust of wind slammed into the stonework hall, kicking up high plumes of blowing ice and snow. She shivered and pulled her cloak as tight as she could. “For an hour, anyway.”
At the far end of the hall, they found a stairway leading down into a dim chamber below. Filsaelene spoke a brief prayer to Corellon and imbued a slender wooden rod with magical light, and they followed her down into the rooms below. There they found a set of chambers with thicker, sturdier walls, broken only by a couple of thin arrow slits less than a handspan wide. The roar of the ever-present wind diminished to an eerie moaning as they descended into the shelter of the lower floor.
Filsaelene raised her light rod higher then took a step back.
“There’s a body,” she said.
“Undead?” Starbrow demanded, unsheathing Keryvian. The sun elf cleric hesitated then replied, “No, simply dead.”
Araevin and Ilsevele moved up to stand on either side of Filsaelene, looking down on the corpse. The fellow had died sitting with his back to the wall, and had remained more or less in that position, his chin slumped down to his chest as if he had dozed off. The cold or the dry air had preserved him remarkably. He was human, dressed in the robes of a wizard, with a wooden staff clasped in his icy fingers. His eyes, dark and half-lidded, stared blankly into his lap.
“He just froze like that?” Ilsevele asked. “Who was he? How did he get here? Did the daemonfey kill him?”
Starbrow glanced at the dead mage and said, “Look at him. He might have been here for a hundred years, just like that. I doubt the daemonfey had much to do with it.”
“I can try to question his spirit,” Filsaelene said. “But I must prepare the proper invocations to Corellon Larethian first, and that I cannot do until moonrise tonight.” The sun elf girl frowned then added, “On the other hand, if he’s been here for a long time, this husk will hold no memory of the spirit. He might have been dead too long for my spell to work.”
“We’ll try to question him if we find nothing else here,” Araevin decided. “He isn’t going anywhere for now.”
From the chamber at the bottom of the stairs, an archway led into a long, barrel-vaulted gallery or redoubt of some kind that was illuminated by a row of shuttered arrow slits looking out over the steep mountainside. Araevin wondered who the builders regarded as enemies. The place was in such a lofty locale that it seemed hard to believe that any conventional army, the sort of enemy who might be stopped by stonework and arrow slits, would be able to reach the watchpost, let alone attack it. Then, along the back wall of the room, they discovered no less than five portals, each framed in its own stone archway, the lintels worked in the designs of various flowering plants and vines. Araevin recognized felsul and holly; the others he could not name.
“What is this place?” Ilsevele asked as the wind moaned eerily in the ruins above them.
“A portal nexus,” Araevin said. “Many portals are simple two-way devices, but sometimes portal builders wanted to link several destinations together in a network of portals. This is clearly such a place. You could step through one of those portals, and in a few moments use any of the others, choosing from a number of destinations.”
“In other words, the daemonfey could be behind any of those doors,” Starbrow said. He frowned. “Damnation. What if they lead us into a whole daisy-chain of magical doorways? We might be at this for days.”
“Or longer,” Araevin answered. “This explains the dead mage outside the room. He was probably a portal explorer, who used one of the doors leading into the nexus but then lacked the key to open another door to leave by. Without the right key, any or all of these doors would be nothing more than empty stone arches.”
Maresa shuddered. “Gods, what a lonely way to die. It just goes to show you that you should never break into a place you can’t break out of.”
“Well, I anticipated that I might have to decipher several portals today, so I have prepared a few of the right sort of spells,” Araevin said. “Give me a few moments, and I’ll see what I can divine about these doorways.”
The rest of the company stood watch, while Araevin chose the first portal on his left and spoke the words of his seeing spell. He realized at once that at least that one was damaged beyond repair. Only a fraying remnant of its magic remained, not even enough to guess at where it might have once led. He suspected that simple time and decay had been enough to ruin it. The second portal was still working and he divined its key—a small token of wood, marked with a few Elvish letters. Anyone who carried or wore such a token could use the portal, but no one else could.
I’ll wait on that one, he decided. If he needed to, he could attempt to manufacture a proper token to awake it, but first he wanted to examine the other possibilities.
The third portal was functional. Its key was a simple spell—inscribing an arcane mark on the door would open it for a short time. Many, if not most sorcerers or wizards knew that particular spell. But perhaps the dead mage in the other room hadn’t known it, or had been caught without the right spell ready. Araevin moved on to the fourth portal, and he found that this one had something close to the same key that the portal beneath Myth Glaurach had used, a rellana-blossom and a short phrase in Elvish.
He turned his attention to the last of the portals in the gallery, and he recoiled at once. It was an insidious trap. It was keyed to a simple pass phrase that was actually carved in the stone lintel above the arch, but Araevin observed that its magical strands were designed to unravel after conveying the user to some unknown destination.
“Stay away from the portal on the right,” he warned his companions. “Don’t say the word that’s carved there, and don’t touch the stone. I don’t know where it leads, but it is designed to strand you there for a tenday or more.”
Maresa happened to be nearest the trapped portal. She glanced at it suspiciously, and carefully stepped away from the device.
“Not that one, then,” she said. “Which door did the daemonfey use?”
“The third or the fourth, I think—maybe the second, but I doubt it,” Araevin answered. “Take your pick.”
“One moment, then,” Filsaelene said. She pressed her hands together before her chest, and looked up at the blank stone overhead, murmuring the words of a prayer to Corellon Larethian. “Which door did the daemonfey use?” she asked.
The others watched as the slender sun elf waited for a long moment, eyes closed. Then Filsaelene shook herself with a small start.
“Go left,” she said. “The third door is the one the daemonfey passed through.”
“Very well,” Araevin said. “Everybody, be ready to pass through the portal quickly after I activate it. Portals opened by spells normally remain open for only a few moments, so you will have to hurry after me.”
His companions gathered close around the portal. Araevin checked to make sure they were ready, and he whispered the word to the spell and traced on the stone surface the mark he used as his own sigil. Blue fire awoke in the ancient gate, rippling around its perimeter, and Araevin was snatched away to somewhere else.
He found himself in deep, near-total darkness, with only a faint glimmer of light spilling down from somewhere overhead. Despite the lack of illumination, Araevin took three quick steps away from where he had arrived, knowing that his friends would be arriving right on his heels. He barked his shin hard on something, stumbled and caught himself on a stone pedestal in front of him. Muttering a human curse—and any human tongue was much more suited to profanity than Elvish, after all—he managed to call a light spell from his staff and see where he was.
The room was a vault or cellar below a large stone building, evidently in ruins. A stairwell leading up stood across the room to his right. The soft glow of daylight filtered down, the glimmer he had seen when he first entered. He looked down, and discovered that he had very nearly tumbled headlong into a deep stone well in the center of the room. The knee-high lip surrounding the shaft was what he had walked into in the darkness.
“Damn,” Araevin breathed. He might have managed a quick spell of flying while falling in darkness—or he might not have.
Blue light crackled behind him, and Araevin turned to guide Starbrow away from the doorway. The moon elf had Keryvian out, and looked around, anxious for any sign of a foe.
“Are they here?” he hissed.
“I don’t know. Now, step aside, the rest are coming,” Araevin said. One by one Ilsevele, Maresa, and Filsaelene arrived in the same manner, simply appearing in the air next to the blank stone archway marking that end of the portal.
Araevin carefully studied the chamber of the well. It was another heavy stone room, built in the form of two intersecting barrel-vaults made of large stone blocks. At the end of three vaults stood empty stone slabs, perhaps meant to hold sarcophagi, but no such crypts were in evidence. The stairs climbed up at the end of the room’s fourth arm. The vault opened out in the center, providing a little space around the well. The portal was set in one curving wall ringing the well, with another old portal opposite. He couldn’t begin to guess what the place might once have been.
“Another portal,” Ilsevele observed.
“Let’s check the stairs and see what’s above before we try the next portal,” Araevin said. “Or for that matter, the well shaft. It might lead somewhere, too.”
Maresa leaned over to look into the dark well. A cold breeze faintly sighed up from below, musty and damp.
“There’s some light down there,” she said in surprise.
Araevin frowned. He didn’t remember seeing any such thing before. He leaned over to look, and he saw it too, a faint silver phosphorescence that danced far below them. It glimmered and swirled for a moment—then it started to rise, climbing swiftly toward them. For a moment, he continued to peer at it, trying to figure out what he was looking at, but then he decided that anything in such a place that was moving toward him and moving fast was not likely to be friendly.
He recoiled from the well, and called out a warning to his comrades. “Watch out, it’s coming up!”
Maresa retreated from the edge, too, just before a swirling stream of spectral silver light exploded up out of the well. In the baleful glow Araevin could see the misshapen form of a person, a human face with an oddly dark and downcast gaze, the suggestion of regal robes hanging in tatters, and a shining silver staff clutched in ghostly fingers.
