The Ghost King

We live in a dangerous world, and one that seems more dangerous now that the way of magic is in transition, or perhaps even collapse. If Jarlaxle’s guess is correct, we have witnessed the collision of worlds, or of planes, to the point where rifts will bring newer and perhaps greater challenges to us all. It is, I suspect, a time for heroes.

I have come to terms with my own personal need for action. I am happiest when there are challenges to be met and overcome. I feel in those times of great crisis that I am part of something larger than myself—a communal responsibility, a generational duty—and to me, that is great comfort.

We will all be needed now, every blade and every brain, every scholar and every warrior, every wizard and every priest. The events in the Silver Marches, the worry I saw on Lady Alustriel’s face, are not localized, but, I fear, resonate across the breadth of Toril. I can only imagine the chaos in Menzoberranzan with the decline of the wizards and priests; the entire matriarchal society might well be in jeopardy, and those greatest of Houses might find themselves besieged by legions of angry kobolds.

Our situation on the World Above is likely to be no less dire, and so it is the time for heroes. What does that mean, to be a hero? What is it that elevates some above the hordes of fighters and battle-mages? Certainly circumstance plays a role—extraordinary valor, or action, is more likely in moments of highest crisis.

And yet, in those moments of greatest crisis, the result is, more often than not, disaster. No hero emerges. No savior leads the charge across the battlefield, or slays the dragon, and the town is immersed in flames.

In our world, for good or for ill, the circumstances favorable to creating a hero have become all too common.

It is not, therefore, just circumstance, or just good fortune. Luck may play a part, and indeed some people—I count myself among them—are more lucky than others, but since I do not believe that there are blessed souls and cursed souls, or that this or that god is leaning over our shoulders and involving himself in our daily affairs, then I do know that there is one other necessary quality for those who find a way to step above the average.

If you set up a target thirty strides away and assemble the hundred best archers in any given area to shoot at it, they’d all hit the mark. Add in a bet of gold and a few would fall away, to the hoots of derision from their fellows.

But now replace the target with an assassin, and have that assassin holding at dagger-point the person each successive archer most loves in the world. The archer now has one shot. Just one. If he hits the mark—the assassin—his loved one will be saved. If he misses the assassin, it is certain doom for his beloved.

A hero will hit that mark. Few mere archers would.

That is the extra quality involved, the ability to hold poise and calm and rational thought no matter how devastating the consequences of failure, the ability to go to that place of pure concentration in times most emotionally and physically tumultuous. Not just once and not by luck. The hero makes that shot.

The hero lives for that shot. The hero trains for that shot, every day, for endless hours, with purest concentration.

Many fine warriors live in the world, wielding blade or lightning bolt, who serve well in their respective armies, who weather the elements and the enemies with quiet and laudable stoicism. Many are strong in their craft, and serve with distinction.

But when all teeters precariously on the precipice of disaster, when victory or defeat rests upon matters beyond simple strength and courage and valor, when all balances on that sword-edged line between victory or defeat, the hero finds a way—a way that seems impossible to those who do not truly understand the give and take of battle, the ebb and flow of sword play, the logical follow-up to counter an enemy’s advantage.

For a warrior is one trained in the techniques of various weaponry, one who knows how to lift a shield or parry a thrust and properly counter, but a true warrior, a hero, extends beyond those skills. Every movement is instinctual, is engrained into every muscle to flow with perfect and easy coordination. Every block is based on clear thinking—so clear that it is as much anticipatory as reflexive. And every weakness in an opponent becomes apparent at first glance.

The true warrior fights from a place of calm, of controlled rage and quelled fear. Every situation comes to sharpened focus, every avenue of solution shines its path clearly. And the hero goes one step beyond that, finding a way, any way, to pave a path of victory when there is no apparent route.

The hero finds a way, and when that way is shown, however difficult the path, the hero makes the thrust or the block or the last frantic riposte, stealing his opponent’s victory. As when Regis used his ruby pendant to paralyze a battle-mage in Luskan. As when Wulfgar threw himself at the yochlol to save Catti-brie. As when Catti-brie made that desperate shot in the sewers of Calimport to drive off Entreri, who had gained the advantage over me. As when Bruenor used his cunning, his strength, and his unshakable will to defeat Shimmergloom in the darkness of Mithral Hall.

Certain doom is a term not known in the vocabulary of the hero, for it is precisely at those times when doom seems most certain—when Bruenor rode the flaming shadow dragon down to the depths of Garumn’s Gorge—that the warrior who would be hero elevates himself above the others. It is, instinctually, not about him or his life.

The hero makes the shot.

We are all to be tested now, I fear. In this time of confusion and danger, many will be pulled to the precipice of disaster, and most will fall over that dark ledge. But a few will step beyond that line, will find a way and will make that shot.

In those moments, however, it is important to recognize that reputation means nothing, and while past deeds might inspire confidence, they are no guarantee of present or future victory.

I hope that Taulmaril is steady in my hands when I stand upon that precipice, for I know that I walk into the shadows of doom, where black pits await, and I need only to think of broken Regis or look at my beloved Catti-brie to understand the stakes of this contest.

I hope that I am given that shot at this assassin, whomever or whatever it may be, who holds us all at dagger-point, for if so, I intend to hit the mark.

For that is the last point to make about the hero. In the aforementioned archery contest, the hero wants to be the one chosen to take that most critical shot. When the stakes are highest, the hero wants the outcome to be in his hands. It’s not about hubris, but about necessity, and the confidence that the would-be hero has trained and prepared for exactly that one shot.

— Drizzt Do’Urden

CHAPTER 17 NOTHING BUT THE WIND

It all stopped. Everything. The battle, the fear, and the chase. It was over, replaced by only the sound of the wind and the grand view from on high. A sensation of emptiness and solitude washed over the monk. Of freedom. Of impending death.

A twist, a shift, and pure control had Danica upright immediately, and she turned around to face the cliff from which she had just tumbled. She reached out and lunged forward, her eyes scanning before her and below her, all in an instant, yielding a sudden recognition and complete sorting of the larger jags and angles. She slapped her palm against the stone, then the other one, then back and forth repeatedly. With each contact her muscles twitched against the momentum of the fall.

A jut of stone far below and to the left had her thrusting her left foot out that way, and as she slapped the stone with both hands together, she gave the slightest push, again and again, ten times in rapid succession as she descended, subtly shifting to the left.

Her toe touched a jag and she threw her weight to that foot, bending her leg to absorb the impact. She couldn’t begin to stop the momentum of her descent with just that, but she managed to push back with some success, stealing some of her speed.

It was the way of the monk. Danica could run down the wall of a tall building and land without injury. She had done it on more than one occasion. But of course, a tall building was nowhere near the height of that cliff, and the grade was more difficult, sometimes sheer and straight, sometimes less than sheer, sometimes more than sheer. But she worked with all her concentration, her muscles answering her demands.

Another jag gave her the opportunity to break a bit more of her momentum, and a narrow ledge allowed her to plant both feet and work her leg muscles against the relentless pull of gravity.

After that, halfway to the ground, the woman looked more like a spider running frantically along a wall, her arms and legs pumping furiously.

A dark form fell past her, startling her and nearly stealing her concentration. One of the fleshy beasts, she recognized, but she didn’t begin to speculate on how it might have fallen.

She had no time for that, no time for anything but absolute concentration on the task before her.

Nothing but the wind filled her senses, that and the contours of the cliff.

She was almost to the ground, still falling too quickly to survive. Danica couldn’t hope to land and roll to absorb the tremendous impact. So she hooked her feet together against the stone and threw herself over backward, rolling over just in time to see the tall pines she had viewed from above.

Then she was crashing through the branches, needles flying, wood splintering. A broken branch hooked her and tore a fair slice of skin out of her side and ripped away half her shirt. A heavier branch not much farther below didn’t break, but bent, and Danica rolled off it head over heels, tumbling and crashing, rebounding off the heaviest lower branches and breaking through amidst a spray of green needles, and still with thirty feet to fall.

Half blinded by pain, barely conscious, the monk still managed to sort herself out and spin to get her feet beneath her.

She bent and rolled sidelong as she landed. Over and over she went, three times, five times, seven times. She stopped with a gasp, explosions of pain rolling up from her legs, from her torn side, from a shoulder she knew to be dislocated.

Danica managed to turn over a bit, to see a lump of splattered black flesh.

At least she didn’t look like that, she thought. But though she had avoided the mutilation suffered by the crawlers, she feared that the result would be the same and that she would not survive the fall.

Cold darkness closed in.

But Danica fought it, telling herself that the dracolich would come l ooking for her, reminding herself that she was not safe, that even if she somehow managed to not die from the battering she had taken in the fall, the beast would have her.

She rolled to her belly and pushed up on her elbows, or tried to, but her shoulder would not allow it and the waves of agony that rippled out overwhelmed her. She propped herself up on one arm, and there vomited, gasping. Tears filled her almond-shaped eyes as her retching, and the spasms in her ribs, elicited a whole new level of agony.

She had to move, she told herself.

But she had no more to give.

The cold darkness closed in again, and even mighty Danica could not resist.

Looking out the door of the side room in the darkened gorge, Catti-brie could barely make out the forms of her companions in the other chamber’s flickering torchlight. They were all trapped at the apparent dead end, shadow hounds coming in swift pursuit, a dragon blocking the way before them. Drizzt was lost to them, and Wulfgar, beside Catti-brie, had taken the brunt of the dragon’s breath, a horrid cloud of blackness and despair that had left him numb and nearly helpless.

She peered out the door, desperate for an answer, praying that her father would find a way to save them all. She didn’t know what to make of it when Bruenor took off the gem-studded helmet and replaced it with his broken-horned old helm.

When he handed the crown to Regis and said, “Keep the helm safe. It’s the crown of the King of Mithral Hall,” his intent became all too clear.

The halfling protested, “Then it is yours,” and the same gripping fear that coursed through Catti-brie was evident in Regis’s voice.

“Nay, not by me right or me choice. Mithral Hall is no more, Rumble—Regis. Bruenor of Icewind Dale, I am, and have been for two hundred years, though me head’s too thick to know it!”

Catti-brie barely heard the next words as she gasped and understood all too clearly what Bruenor was about to do. Regis asked him something she couldn’t hear, but understood that it was the very same question whose awful answer screamed at her in her own thoughts.

Bruenor came into clear sight then, running out of the room and charging straight for the gorge. “Here’s one from yer tricks, boy!” heyelled, looking at the small side chamber concealing Catti-brie and Wulfgar. “But when me mind’s to jumping on the back of a worm, I ain’t about to miss!”

There it was, spoken openly, a declaration of the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the rest of them, trapped deep in the bowels of the caverns once known as Mithral Hall by a great dragon of shadow.

“Bruenor!” Catti-brie heard herself cry, though she was hardly conscious of speaking, so numbed was she by the realization that she was about to lose the dwarf, her beloved adoptive father, the great Bruenor who had served as the foundation of her entire life, the strength of Catti-brie Battlehammer.

The world moved in slow motion for the young woman at that terrible moment, as Bruenor sprinted across the floor to the gorge, reaching over his shoulder to set his cloak afire—and under it was a keg of oil!

The dwarf didn’t waver and didn’t slow as he reached the lip and went over, axe high, back aflame.

Compulsion and terror combined to drag Catti-brie over to that ledge, arriving at the same time as Regis, both gawking down at the burning dwarf, locked upon the back of the great shadow dragon.

Bruenor had not wavered, but his actions had taken all the strength from Catti-brie, to be sure! She could hardly hold herself upright as she watched her father die, giving his life so that she, Wulfgar, and Regis could cross the gorge and escape the darkness of Mithral Hall.

But she’d never find the strength to make it, she feared, and Bruenor would die in vain.

Wulfgar was beside her then, grimacing against the magical despair, fighting through it with the determination of a barbarian of Icewind Dale. Catti-brie could hardly comprehend his intent as he lifted his wondrous warhammer high and flung it down at the dragon.

“Are ye mad?” she cried, grabbing at him.

“Take up your bow,” he told her, and he was Wulfgar again, freed of the dragon’s insidious spell. “If a true friend of Bruenor’s you be, then let him not fall in vain!”

A true friend? The words hit Catti-brie hard, reminding her poignantly that she was so much more than a friend to that dwarf, her father, the anchor of her life.

She knew that Wulfgar was right, and took up her bow in shaking hands, and sighted her target through tear-filled eyes.

She couldn’t help Bruenor. She couldn’t save him from the choice he had made—the choice that had possibly saved the three of them. It was the toughest shot she had ever had to make, but she had to make it, for Bruenor’s sake.

The silver-flashing arrow streaked away from Taulmaril, its lightning flash filling Catti-brie’s wet eyes.

Someone grabbed her and pulled her arms down to her side. She heard the hiss of a distant whisper, but could make out no words, nor could she see the one whose touch she felt.

It was Drizzt, she knew from the tenderness and strength in those delicate hands.

But Drizzt was lost to her, to them all. It made no sense. And Bruenor….

But the gorge was gone, the dragon was gone, her father was gone, all the world was gone, replaced by that land of brown mists and crawling, shadowy beasts, coming at her, clawing at her.

They could not reach her, they could not hurt her, but Catti-brie found little comfort in the emptiness. She felt nothing, was aware of nothing but the crawling, misshapen, ugly forms in a land she did not recognize.

In a place where she was completely alone.

And worse than that, worst of all, a line of division between two realities so narrow and blurry that the sheer incongruence of it all stole from Catti-brie something much more personal than her friends and familiar surroundings.

She tried to resist, tried to focus on the feeling of those strong arms around her—it had to be Drizzt! — but she realized that she couldn’t even feel the grasp any longer, if it was there.

The huddled images began to blur. The two worlds competed with flashing scenes in her mind and a discordant cacophony of disconnected sounds, a clash of two realities from which there was no escape.

She fell within herself, trying to hold on to her memories, her reality, her individuality.

But there was nothing to hold onto, no grounding pole to remind her of anything, of Catti-brie, even.

She had no cogent thought and no clear memories, and no self-awareness. She was so utterly lost that she didn’t even know that she was utterly lost.

A speck of bright orange found its way past Danica’s closed eyelid, knifing through the blackness that had taken her senses. Wearily, she managed to crack open that eye, to be greeted by the sunrise, the brilliant orb just showing its upper edge in the east, in the V-shaped crook between two mountains. It almost seemed to Danica as if those distant mountains were guiding the light directly to her, to her eyes, to awaken her.

The events of the previous day played out in her thoughts, and she couldn’t begin to sort out where dreams had ended and awful reality had begun.

Or had it all been a dream?

But then why was she lying in a canyon beside a great cliff?

Slowly the woman started to unwind it all, and the darkness receded.

She pulled herself up to her elbows, or tried to until waves of agony in her shoulder laid her low once more. Wincing against the pain, her eyes tightly closed, Danica recalled the fall, the tumble through the trees, then she backtracked from there to the scene atop the cliff in the lair of the undead dragon.

Ivan was dead.

The weight of that hit Danica hard. She heard again the stomp of the dracolich and saw once more the splattering flesh flying about the cavern. She thought of all the times she had seen Ivan with her kids, the doting uncle offering the wisdom wrought of tough lessons, unlike the doting Pikel, who was so much softer-edged than his brother.

“Pikel,” she whispered into the grass, overwhelmed by the thought of telling him about Ivan.

The mention of Pikel brought Danica’s thoughts careening back to her own children, who were out, somewhere, with the dwarf.

She opened her eyes—the lower rim of the sun was visible, the morning moving along.

Her children were in trouble. That notion seemed inescapable. They were either in trouble or the danger had already found them and taken them, and that, Danica would not allow herself to accept.

With a growl of defiance, the monk pulled up to one arm and tucked her legs under her, then threw herself up and back into a kneeling position, her left arm hanging limp, not quite at her side but a bit behind her. She couldn’t turn her head against the pain to look at her shoulder, but she knew it was dislocated.

That wouldn’t do.

Danica scanned the area behind her, the stone of the cliff wall. With a determined nod, she leaped to her feet, and before the pain could slow her, she rushed toward the wall, jumped into the air, and turned as she descended, slamming the back of her injured shoulder against the stone.

She heard a loud popping sound and knew it was a prelude to agony. Indeed, the waves that came at her had her doubled over and vomiting.

But she could see her shoulder, aligned once more, and the pain fast subsided. She could even move her arm again, though the slightest motion hurt badly.

She stood leaning against the stone wall for a long while, falling within herself to find a place of calm against the furious storm that roiled in her battered form.

When she at last opened her eyes, she first focused upon one of the fallen crawlers, flattened and splattered against the ground. She managed to look up behind her, up the cliff, thinking of the dracolich and what she had to do to warn those who might help her defeat the beast.

She looked south, guided by her mothering instincts, toward the road to Carradoon and her children, and there she desperately wanted to go. But she focused on an area not so far to the south, trying to get a sense of the valley in proportion to the direct north-south trail to Spirit Soaring.

Danica nodded, recognizing that she wouldn’t have to cross the mountainous barrier to find that road. Fairly certain of her location—she was in a deep valley several miles from the cathedral—she started away on unsteady legs, her ankle threatening to roll under her with each step.

Soon after, she was leaning on a walking stick, fighting the pain and dreading the trail up to her home. The road was much steeper than the trail from Carradoon, and she toyed with the idea of continuing all the way around to the port city, then using the more passable pathways instead.

She couldn’t help but laugh at herself for that feeble justification. She’d lose a day and more of travel time taking that route, a day and more Cadderly and the others didn’t have to spare.

She came upon the north-south road some time after highsun, her strength sapped, her clothes sticking to her with sweat. Again she looked southeast toward unseen Carradoon, and thought of her children. She closed her eyes and turned south, then looked upon the road home, the road she needed to take for all their sakes.

She recalled that the road continued fairly flat for about a quarter of a mile, then began an onerous climb up into the Snowflakes. She had to make that climb. It was not a choice, but a duty. Cadderly had to know.

And Danica meant to walk all through the night to tell him. She started off at a slow pace, practically dragging one foot and leaning heavily on the walking stick in her right hand, her left arm hanging loose at her side. Every step jolted that shoulder, and so Danica paused and tore off a piece of her already torn shirt, fashioning it into a makeshift sling.

With a sigh of determination, the woman started away again, a little more quickly, but with her strength fast waning.

She lost track of time, but knew the shadows were lengthening around her, then she heard something—a rider or a wagon—approaching from behind. Danica shuffled off the trail and threw herself down behind a bush and a rock, crawling into a place to watch the road behind her. She chewed hard on her bottom lip to keep from gasping out in pain, but even that notion and sensation were soon lost to her as her curious quarry came into view.

She saw the horse first, a skeletal black beast with fire around its hooves. It snorted smoke from its flared nostrils. A hell horse, a nightmare, and as Danica noted the wagon driver—or more particularly, the driver’s great, wide-brimmed and plumed hat, and the ebon color of his skin—she remembered him.

“Jarlaxle?” she whispered, and more curious still, he sat with another dark elf Danica surely recognized.

The thought of that rogue Jarlaxle riding along with Drizzt Do’Urden knocked Danica even more emotionally off-balance. How could it be?

And what did it mean, for her and for Cadderly?

As the wagon neared, she made out a couple of heads above the rail of the backboard. Dwarves, obviously. A squeal from the side turned her attention to a third dwarf riding a pig that looked like it grazed on the lower planes right beside the nightmare pulling the wagon.

Danica told herself that it couldn’t be Drizzt Do’Urden, and warned herself that it was not out of the realm of possibility that the fiendish Jarlaxle might be behind all of the trouble that had come to Erlkazar. She couldn’t risk going to them, she told herself repeatedly as the wagon bounced along the trail, nearing her hiding place.

Despite those very real and grounded reservations, as the wagon rolled up barely ten feet from her, the nightmare snorting flames and pounding the road with its fiery hooves, the desperate woman, realizing instinctively that she was out of options, pulled herself up to her knees and called out for help.

“Lady Danica!” Jarlaxle cried, and Drizzt spoke her name at the same time.

Together the two drow leaped down from the wagon and ran to her, moving to opposite sides of her and falling on bended knee. Together they gently cradled and supported her, and glanced at each other with equal disbelief that anything could have so battered the magnificent warrior-monk.

“What’d’ye know, elf?” one of the dwarves called, climbing from the back of the wagon. “That Cadderly’s girl?”

“Lady Danica,” Drizzt explained.

“You must …” the woman gasped. “You must get me to Cadderly. I must warn him …”

Her voice trailed off and she faltered, her consciousness slipping away. “We will,” Drizzt promised. “Rest easy.”

Drizzt looked at Jarlaxle, grave concern evident on his face. He wasn’t sure Danica could survive the journey.

“I have potions,” Jarlaxle assured him, but with less confidence than Drizzt would have hoped for. Besides, who could be sure what effects his potions might produce in such a time of wild magic?

They made Danica as comfortable as they could in the back of the wagon, laying her beside Catti-brie, who sat against the backboard and still seemed totally unaware of her surroundings. Jarlaxle stayed beside the monk, spooning magical healing potions into her mouth, while Bruenor drove the wagon as fast as the nightmare could manage. Drizzt and Pwent ran near flank, fearing that whatever had hit Danica might not be far afield. On Jarlaxle’s bidding, Athrogate and the hell boar stayed near, riding just in front of the nightmare.

“It’s getting steeper,” Bruenor warned a short time later. “Yer horse ain’t for liking it.”

“The mules are rested now,” Jarlaxle replied. “Go as far as we can, then we’ll put them back up front.”

“Night’ll be falling by then.”

“Perhaps we should ride through.”

Bruenor didn’t want to agree, but he found himself nodding despite his reservations.

“Elf?” the dwarf asked, seeing Drizzt approach from some brush to the side of the trail.

“Nothing,” Drizzt answered. “I have seen no sign of any monsters, and no trail to be found save Danica’s own.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Bruenor said. He reached over and grabbed at Drizzt’s belt to help the drow hop up the side of the rolling wagon.

“Her breathing is steady,” Drizzt noted of Danica, and Jarlaxle nodded.

“The potions have helped,” said Jarlaxle. “There is a measure of predictable magic remaining.”

“Bah, but she ain’t said a word,” said Bruenor.

“I’ve kept her in a stupor,” Jarlaxle explained. “For her own sake. A simple enchantment,” he added reassuringly when both Drizzt and Bruenor looked at him with suspicion. He pulled from his vest a pendant with a dangling ruby, remarkably like the one worn by Regis.

“Hey, now!” Bruenor protested and pulled hard on the reins, bringing the wagon up short.

“It’s not Regis’s,” Jarlaxle assured him.

“You had his, in Luskan,” Drizzt remembered.

“For a time, yes,” said Jarlaxle. “Long enough to have my artisans replicate it.” As Bruenor and Drizzt continued to stare at him hard, Jarlaxle just shrugged and explained, “It’s what I do.”

Drizzt and Bruenor looked at each other and sighed.

“I did not steal anything from him, and I could have, easily enough,” Jarlaxle argued. “I did not kill him, or you, and I could have—”

“Easily enough,” Drizzt had to agree.

“When can you free her of the trance?” Drizzt asked.

Jarlaxle glanced down at Danica, the monk seeming much more at ease, and he started to say, “Soon.” Before the word got out of his mouth, Danica’s hand shot up and grasped the dangling chain that held the ruby pendant. With a twist and turn that appeared so subtle and simple as she sat up from the wagon bed, she spun the startled Jarlaxle around and jerked the chain behind him, twisting it even more to hold the drow fast in a devastating chokehold.

“You were told never to return, Jarlaxle Baenre,” Danica said, her mouth right beside the dark elf’s ear.

“Your gratitude overwhelms me, Lady,” the drow managed to gasp in reply.

He stiffened as Danica pulled and twisted. “Move your fingers a bit more into position to grasp a weapon, drow,” she coaxed. “I can snap your neck as easily as a dry twig.”

“A little help?” Jarlaxle whispered to Drizzt.

“Danica, let him go,” Drizzt said. “He is not our enemy. Not now.” Danica loosened her grip, just a bit, and stared skeptically at the ranger, then looked to Bruenor.

Drizzt nudged the silent dwarf.

“Good to meet ye at last, Lady Danica,” Bruenor said. “King Bruenor Battlehammer, at yer ser—” Drizzt elbowed him again.

“Aye, let the rat go,” Bruenor bade her. “‘Twas Jarlaxle that gived ye the potions that saved yer hide, and he’s been a help with me daughter there.”

Danica glanced from one to the other, then looked over at Catti-brie. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked as she released Jarlaxle, who shifted forward to get away from her.

“I never thought I would see Jarlaxle caught so easily,” Drizzt remarked.

“I share your surprise,” the mercenary admitted.

Drizzt smiled, briefly enjoying the moment. He came over the rail of the wagon then, stepping past Jarlaxle to go to Danica, who leaned against the tailgate.

“I’ll not underestimate that one again,” Jarlaxle promised quietly.

“You must get me to Spirit Soaring,” Danica said, and Drizzt nodded.

“That is where we were going,” he explained. “Catti-brie was touched by the falling Weave—some kind of blue fire. She is trapped within her own mind, it seems, and in a dark place of huddled, crawling creatures.”

Danica perked up at that description.

“You have seen them?” Jarlaxle remarked.

“Long-armed, short-legged—almost no-legged—gray-skinned beasts attacked Spirit Soaring in force last night,” she explained. “I was out scouting …” Her voice trailed off as she gave a great sigh.

“Ivan Bouldershoulder is dead,” she said. Bruenor cried out and Drizzt winced. From the side of the wagon, Thibbledorf Pwent wailed. “The dragon—a dracolich, an undead dragon … and something more …”

“A dracolich?” Jarlaxle said.

“Dead dragon walking—dead dragon talking, dead dragon furious, I’m thinking that curious!” Athrogate rhymed, and Thibbledorf Pwent nodded in appreciation, drawing a scowl from Bruenor.

A dumbfounded Danica stared at the bizarre Athrogate.

“You have to admit that one does not see a dracolich every day,” Jarlaxle deadpanned.

Danica seemed even more at a loss.

“Something stranger still, you mentioned?” Jarlaxle prompted.

“Its touch is death,” the monk explained. “I found it by following a trail of utter devastation, a complete withering of everything the beast had touched. Trees, grass, everything.”

“Never heared o’ such a thing,” said Bruenor.

“When I saw the beast, gigantic and terrible, I knew my guess to be correct. Its mere touch is death. It is death incarnate, and something more—a horn in its head, glowing with power,” Danica went on, her eyes closed as if she had to force herself to remember things she did not want to recall. “I think it was …”

“Crenshinibon, the Crystal Shard,” said Jarlaxle, nodding with every word. “Yes.”

“That durned thing again,” Bruenor grumbled. “So there ye go, elf. Ye didn’t break it.”

“I did,” Jarlaxle corrected. “And that is part of the problem, I fear.” Bruenor just shook his hairy head.

Danica pointed to a tall peak not far behind them and to the north. “He controls them.” She looked directly at Jarlaxle. “I believe the dragon is Hephaestus, the great red wyrm whose breath destroyed the artifact, or so we thought.”

“It is indeed Hephaestus,” Jarlaxle assured her.

“Ye think ye might be tellin’ us what ye’re about anytime soon?” Bruenor grumbled.

“I already told you my fears,” Jarlaxle said. “The dragon and the liches, somehow freed of the prison artifact of their own creation—”

“The Crystal Shard,” said Danica, and she tapped her forehead. “Here, on the dracolich.”

“Joined by the magic of the collapsing Weave,” said Jarlaxle, “merged by the collision of worlds.”

Danica looked at him, incredulous.

“I know not either, Lady Danica,” Jarlaxle explained. “It’s all a guess. But this is all related, of that I am certain.” He looked at Catti-brie, her eyes wide open but unseeing. “Her affliction, these beasts, the dragon risen from the dead … all of it … all part of the same catastrophe, the breadth of which we still do not know.”

“And so we have come to find out,” said Drizzt. “To bring Catti-brie to Cadderly in the hope that he might help her.”

“And I’m thinking that ye’ll be needin’ our help, too,” Bruenor said to Danica.

Danica could only sigh and nod in helpless agreement. She glanced at the distant cliff, the lair of the dracolich and the Crystal Shard, the grave of Ivan Bouldershoulder. She tried not to look past that point, but she couldn’t help herself. She feared for her children.

CHAPTER 18 THE SEVERING

It was more than independent thought, Yharaskrik knew. It was independent desire.

Such a thing could not be tolerated. The seven liches that had created the Crystal Shard were represented by the singular power of Crenshinibon only. They had no say in the matter, and no opinions or wants that were pertinent.

But to the perceptive illithid, there was no missing the desire behind Fetchigrol’s request. The creature wasn’t acting purely on expediency or any compulsion to please its three masters joined as the Ghost King. Fetchigrol wanted something.

And Crenshinibon’s addition to the internal debate brewing within the Ghost King was nothing but supportive of the lich-turned-specter.

Yharaskrik telepathically appealed to Hephaestus to deny the lich, and tried to imbue a sense of the depth of his trepidation, but he had to walk a fine line, not wanting the Crystal Shard to recognize that concern.

The illithid couldn’t tell whether the dragon caught its subtle inflection of thought, or whether Hephaestus, still less than enamored with Yharaskrik, simply didn’t care. The dragon’s response came back in the form of eagerness, exactly as Fetchigrol had requested.

“How greatly might we tap the minions of the reformed Shadowfell before we cease to be their masters in this, our world?” Yharaskrik said aloud.

Hephaestus wrestled full control of the dracolich’s mouth to respond. “You fear these huddled lumps of flesh?”

“There is more to the Shadowfell than the crawlers,” Yharaskrik replied after a brief struggle to regain the use of the voice. “Better that we use the undead of our plane for our armies—their numbers are practically unlimited.”

“And they are ineffective!” the dracolich roared, shaking the stone of the chamber. “Mindless …”

“But controllable,” the illithid interrupted, the words twisting as both creatures fought for physical control.

“We are the Ghost King!” Hephaestus bellowed. “We are supreme.”

Yharaskrik started to fight back, but paused as he considered Fetchigrol standing before him and nodding. He could feel the satisfaction coming from the shadowy creature, and he knew that Crenshinibon had sided with Hephaestus, that permission had been given to Fetchigrol to fly back to Carradoon and raise a great army of crawlers to catch and slaughter those people who had fled into the tunnels.

The satisfaction of that creature! Why could not Hephaestus understand the danger in any independent emotions emanating from one of the seven? They were to have no satisfaction, other than in serving, but Fetchigrol was acting on his own personal ego, not a compulsion to serve the greater host. He had been shown up by Solmé, who went to the Shadowfell to raise an army while Fetchigrol merely reanimated dead flesh to do his bidding. The escape of so many from Carradoon had added to that sense of failure in the specter, and so the creature was trying to rectify the situation.

But the specter should not have cared. Why could Hephaestus not understand that?

We are greater with competent generals, came a thought, and Yharaskrik knew it to be Crenshinibon, who would not speak aloud with the dragon’s voice. “They would not dare cross us,” Hephaestus agreed. Let us use their anger.

To what possible gain? Yharaskrik thought, but was careful to shield from the others. What gain would they garner by pursuing the fleeing Carradden? Why should any of them waste their moments concerned about the fate of refugees?

“Your caution grows wearying,” the dracolich said as Fetchigrol exited the cavern, bound for Carradoon. Yharaskrik’s initial recognition that it was Hephaestus speaking was given pause by the word choice and the timbre of the voice, reflecting more a reasoned remark than the bellow typical of Hephaestus. “Can we not simply destroy for the enjoyment of the act?”

The illithid had no physical body of its own, so it possessed no heels, but Yharaskrik surely fell back on its heels at that revealing moment. It had not adequately shielded its concerns from the other two. The mind flayer had no place to hide from …

From which?

The Ghost King, the mind of the dragon answered, reading every thought as if it were his own.

Yharaskrik understood at that moment that the bond between Hephaestus and Crenshinibon was tightening, that they were truly becoming one being, one mind.

The illithid couldn’t even begin to hide its fear that the same fate awaited it. As a mind flayer, Yharaskrik was well-versed in the notion of a hive mind—in its Underdark homeland, hundreds of its kind would join together in a common receptacle of intelligence and philosophy and theory-craft. But those were other illithids, equal beings of equal intelligence.

“And the Ghost King is greater than your kin,” the dracolich’s voice answered. “Is that your fear?”

Its every thought was open to them!

“There is a place for you, Yharaskrik,” the Ghost King promised. “Hephaestus is the instinct, the anger, and the physical power. Crenshinibon is the collection of near-eternal wisdom and the dispassion—hence judgment—of a true god. Yharaskrik is the freedom of far-reaching projection and the understanding of the surrealism of worlds joined.”

One word, buried in the middle of that declaration of power, revealed to Yharaskrik the truth: judgment. Of the parts of the proposed whole, judgment sat atop the hierarchy, and so it was Crenshinibon that meant to hold its identity. The dragon would be the reactive, the illithid would serve as the informative, and Crenshinibon would control it all.

And so it was Crenshinibon, Yharaskrik realized in that awful moment, who was granting the liches a greater measure of autonomy, and only because the Crystal Shard knew with full confidence that they would ever remain slaves to it, their ultimate creation.

Yharaskrik’s only chance would be to get through to Hephaestus, to convince the dragon that he would lose his own identity in that ultimately subservient role.

In response to that unhidden notion, the dracolich laughed, a horrid, scraping noise.

Solmé had bested Fetchigrol. Centuries before, they and five others had joined in common purpose, a complete unification into a singular artifact of great power and infinite duration. Fetchigrol wasn’t supposed to care that Solmé had outdone him. Crenshinibon’s explanation had been instructive, not a chastisement.

The apparition, an extension of something greater than Fetchigrol, a tool for the furthering of Crenshinibon and nothing more, wasn’t supposed to care.

But he did. When Fetchigrol stood at the docks of ruined Carradoon later that same night and reached through the planes to the Shadowfell, he felt elation. His own, not Crenshinibon’s.

And when his consciousness returned to Toril, rift in hand, and tore open the divide, he took great satisfaction—his own, not Crenshinibon’s—in knowing that the next instructive lecture would be aimed at Solmé and not at himself.

Huddled crawlers poured through the rift. Fetchigrol didn’t control them, but he guided them, showing them the little inlet just north of the docks, where the waters of Impresk Lake calmed and the tunnel complex began. The crawlers didn’t fear the tunnels. They liked the dark recesses, and no creature in all the multiverse more enjoyed the hunt than the ravenous, fleshy beasts of the dark Shadowfell.

More came through as the rift swirled in on itself and started to mend, to return to the stasis of natural order.

Fetchigrol, Crenshinibon’s blessing clear in his eager thoughts, tore it open wide again.

And he ripped it open again when it began to diminish sometime later, knowing all the while that each reopening weakened the fabric of separation between the two worlds. That fabric, that reality of what had always been, was the only real means of control. Gradually, the third tear began to mend.

Fetchigrol tore it wide yet again!

Fewer crawlers came through with each rift, for the shadowy gray region the apparitions had been inhabiting was nearly emptied of the things.

Fetchigrol, who would not lose to Solmé, reached deeper into the Shadowfell. He recklessly widened his call to the far edges of the gray plain, to regions he could not see.

He never saw or heard it coming, for the beast was a creature of shadow, and silent as such. A black cloud descended over the apparition, fully engulfing him.

In that terrible instant, he knew he had failed. It didn’t matter the issue, for there was no anchor to the specific disaster.

Just failure. Utter, complete, and irrevocable. Fetchigrol felt it profoundly. It devoured any thoughts he might have for the situation at hand.

The shadow dragon couldn’t get through the rift, but it managed to snake its head out far enough to snap its great jaws over the despairing apparition.

And Fetchigrol had no escape. To plane shift would merely place him more fully before the devouring dragon on the other side of the tear. Nor did he have any desire to escape, for the despair wrought by the shadow dragon’s black cloud of breath made Fetchigrol understand that obliteration was preferable.

And so he was obliterated.

In the Shadowfell, the dragon receded, but marked the spot of the tear, expecting that soon it might widen enough for it to pass through. When it left, other beasts found their way to the opening.

Nightwings, giant black bats, opened wide their leathery wings and took flight above the ruins of Carradoon, eager to feast on the lighter flesh of the material world.

Fearsome dread wraiths, humanoid, emaciated, and cloaked in tattered dark rags, who could leach the life-force of a victim with a touch, crawled through in hunting packs.

And a nightwalker, a giant, hairless humanoid twenty feet tall, all sinewy and with the strength of a mountain giant, squeezed its way through the rift and onto the shores of Impresk Lake.

In the cave on the cliff, the Ghost King knew.

Fetchigrol was gone, his energy winked out, lost to them.

Yharaskrik was an illithid. Illithids were creature of callous logic and did not gloat, but dragons were creatures of emotion, and so when the illithid pointed out that it had been right in its condemnation of Fetchigrol’s plan, a wall of rage came back at it.

From both Hephaestus and Crenshinibon.

For a moment, Yharaskrik didn’t understand the Crystal Shard’s agreement with the volatile beast. Crenshinibon, too, was an artifact of pragmatic and logical thinking. Unemotional, like the illithid.

But unlike Yharaskrik, Crenshinibon was also ambitious.

And so Yharaskrik knew at that moment that the bond would not hold, that the triumvirate in the dracolich’s consciousness would not and could not remain tenable. It thought to find a host outside the dragon’s body, but dismissed the notion immediately, realizing that nothing was as mighty as the dracolich, after all, and Hephaestus would not suffer the illithid to survive.

It had to fight.

Hephaestus was all anger and venom, that wall of rage, and the illithid went at him methodically, poking holes with logic and reasoning, reminding its opponent of the inarguable truths, for those truths alone—the recklessness of opening wide a gate to an unknown plane, and the needed caution in continuing against a foe as powerful as the combined might of Spirit Soaring—could serve as a premise on which to build its case.

By every measure of the principles of debate, Yharaskrik was far beyond its opponent. The simple truth and logic were on its side. The illithid poked its holes and appealed to reason over rage, repeatedly, thinking to turn the favor of Crenshinibon, who, he feared, would ultimately decide the outcome of their struggle.

The battle within became a wild assault without, as Hephaestus’s dracolich form thrashed and clawed at the stone, breathed fire that melted stone and minion alike, and bull-rushed walls, shaking the entire mountain in great tremors.

Gradually, Hephaestus began to play out his rage, and the internal battle diminished as it became a session of dialogue and discourse. With Yharaskrik leading the way, the Ghost King began to sort how it might correct for the loss of Fetchigrol. The Ghost King began to accept the past and look to the next move in the wider, and more important struggle.

Yharaskrik took some small comfort in the victory, fully recognizing that it might be temporary in nature and fully expecting that it would battle Hephaestus many more times before things were finally settled.

The illithid turned its thoughts and arguments to the very real possibility that Fetchigrol’s demise indicated that the apparition had reached too far into what had once been the Plane of Shadow. But for reasons still unknown to the Ghost King, the Plane of Shadow had become something more, something bigger and more dangerous. It also seemed to be somehow moving closer to the Prime Material Plane, and in that event, what consequences might result?

Crenshinibon seemed not to care, reasoning that out of chaos, the Ghost King could only grow stronger.

And if a dangerous and too-powerful organized force had come through the rift, the Ghost King could simply fly away. The Crystal Shard, Yharaskrik understood implicitly, was far more concerned about the loss of two of the seven.

For Hephaestus, there remained only unrelenting and simmering anger, and most of all, the dragon’s consciousness growled at the thought of not being able to exact revenge on those who had so ruined the beast in life.

While Yharaskrik thought of times to come and how to shape the wider path, and Crenshinibon considered the remaining five and whether any repairs were called for, the dragon only pressed, incessantly, for an immediate assault on Spirit Soaring.

They were not one, but three, and to Yharaskrik, the walls separating the triumvirate that was the Ghost King seemed as impenetrably thick and daunting as ever. And from that came the illithid’s inescapable conclusion that it must find a way to dominate, to force oneness under its own commanding will and intellect.

And it hoped it could hide that dangerous ambition from its too-intimate fellows.

CHAPTER 19 PRIESTS OF NOTHING

We are nothing! There is nothing!” the priest screamed, storming about the audience hall in Spirit Soaring, accentuating every word with an angry stomp of his foot. His point was furthered by the blood matting his hair and caked about the side of his face and shoulder, a wound that looked worse than it was. Of the five who had been with him out and about the Snowflakes, he had been the most fortunate by far, for the only other survivor had lost a leg and the other seemed doomed to amputation—and only if the poor woman even survived.

“Sit down, Menlidus, you old fool!” one of his peers yelled. “Do you think this tirade helpful?”

Cadderly hoped Menlidus, a fellow priest of Deneir, would take that advice, but he doubted it, and since the man was more than a decade his senior—and looked at least three decades older than Cadderly—he hoped he wouldn’t have to intervene to forcibly silence the angry man. Besides, Cadderly understood the frustration behind the priest’s rant, and didn’t wholly dismiss his despairing conclusions. Cadderly, too, had gone to Deneir and feared that his god had been lost to him forever, as if Deneir had somehow simply written himself into the numerical maze that was the Metatext.

“I am the fool?” Menlidus said, stopping his shouting and pacing, and tapping a finger to his chest as he painted a wry smile on his face. “I have called pillars of flame down upon those who are foes of our god. Or have you forgotten, Donrey?”

“Most surely, I have not,” Donrey replied. “Nor have I forgotten the Time of Troubles, or any of the many desperate situations we have faced before, and have endured.”

Cadderly appreciated those words, as apparently, he saw in looking around at the large gathering, did everyone else in the room.

Menlidus, though, began to laugh. “Not like this,” he said.

“We cannot make that judgment until we know what this silence is truly all about.”

“It is about the folly of our lives, friend,” the defeated Menlidus said quietly. “All of us, and do look at us! Artists! Painters! Poets! Man and woman, dwarf and elf, who seek deeper meaning in art and in faith. Artists, I say, who evoke emotion and profundity with our paintings and our scribblings, who cleverly place words for the effect dramatic.” His snicker cut deep. “Or are we illusionists, I wonder?”

“You do not believe that,” said Donrey.

“Who believe our own illusions,” Menlidus qualified. “Because we have to. Because the alternative, the idea that there is nothing more, that it is all a creation of imagination to maintain sanity, is too awful to contemplate, is it not? Because the truth that these gods we worship are not immortal beings, but tricksters promising us eternity to extract from us fealty, is ultimately jarring and inspiring despair, is it not?”

“I think we have heard enough, brother,” said a woman, a renowned mage who also was possessed of significant clerical prowess.

“Have we?”

“Yes,” she said, and there was no mistaking the edge to her voice, not quite threatening but certainly leading in that direction. “We are priests, one and all,” Menlidus said.

“Not so,” several wizards pointed out, and again the bloody priest gave a little laugh.

“Yes, so,” Menlidus argued. “What we call divine, you call arcane—our altars are not so different!”

Cadderly couldn’t help but wince at that, for the notion that all magic emanated from one source brought him back to his younger days in the Edificant Library. Then he had been an agnostic priest, and he too had wondered if the arcane and the divine were no more than different labels for the same energy.

“Save that ours accepts the possibility of change, as it is not rooted in dogma!” one wizard cried, and the volume began to rise about the chamber, wizards and priests lining up against each other in verbal sparring.

“Then perhaps I speak not to you,” Menlidus said after Cadderly locked him with a scowl. “But for us priests, are we not those, above all others, who claim to speak the truth? The divine truth?”

“Enough, brother, I beg,” Cadderly said then, knowing where Menlidus was going despite the man’s temporary calm, and not liking it at all.

He moved toward Menlidus slowly, wearing a carefully maintained expression of serenity. Having heard nothing from Danica or his missing children, Cadderly was anything but serene. His gut churned and his thoughts whirled.

“Do we not?” Menlidus shouted at him. “Cadderly of Deneir, above all others, who created Spirit Soaring on the good word and power of Deneir, should not doubt my claim!”

“It is more complex than that,” said Cadderly.

“Does not your experience show that our precepts are not foolish dogma, but rather divine truth?” Menlidus argued. “If you were but a conduit for Deneir in the construction of this awe-inspiring cathedral, this library for all the world, do you not laugh in the face of such doubts as expressed by our secular friends?”

“We all have our moments of doubt,” Cadderly said.

“We cannot!” Menlidus exclaimed, stamping his foot. That movement seemed to break him, though, a sudden weariness pulling his broad shoulders down in a profound slump. “And yet, we must, for we are shown the truth.” He looked across the room at poor Dahlania, one leg gone, as she lay near death. “I begged for a blessing of healing,” he mumbled. “Even a simple one—any spell at all to alleviate her pain. Deneir did not answer that plea.”

“There is more to this sad tale,” Cadderly said quietly. “You cannot blame—”

“All my life has been in service to him. And this one moment when I call upon him for my most desperate need, he ignores me.”

Cadderly heaved a sigh and placed a comforting hand on Menlidus’s shoulder, but the man grew agitated and shrugged that touch away.

“Because we are priests of nothing!” Menlidus shouted to the room. “We feign wisdom and insight, and deceive ourselves into seeing ultimate truth in the lines of a painting or the curves of a sculpture. We place meaning where there is none, I say, and if there truly are any gods left, they must surely derive great amusement from our pitiful delusions.”

Cadderly didn’t have to look around the room at the weary and beleaguered faces to understand the cancer that was spreading among them, a trial of will and faith that threatened to break them all. He thought to order Menlidus out of the room, to chastise the man loudly and forcefully, but he dismissed that idea. Menlidus wasn’t creating the illness, but was merely shouting it to the rafters.

Cadderly couldn’t find Deneir—his prayers, too, went unanswered. He feared that Deneir had left him forever, that the too-inquisitive god had written himself into the Weave or had become lost in its eternal tangle. Cadderly had found power, though, in the fight against the fleshy beasts of shadow, casting spells as mighty as any he might have asked from Deneir.

But those spells, he believed—he feared—hadn’t come from the one he had known as Deneir. He didn’t know what being, if any being, had bestowed within him the power to consecrate the ground beneath his feet with such blessed magic.

And that was most troubling of all.

For Menlidus’s point was well taken: If the gods were not immortal, then was their place for their followers any more lasting?

For if the gods were not powerful and wise enough to defeat the calamity that had come to Faerûn, then what hope for men?

And worse, what was the point of it all? Cadderly dismissed that devastating thought almost as soon as it came to him, but it indeed fluttered through his mind, and through the minds of all those gathered there.

Menlidus spat his devastating litany one emphatic last time. “Priests of nothing.”

“We are leaving,” Menlidus said to Cadderly early the next morning, after an eerily quiet night. That respite had not set well with poor Cadderly, however, for Danica had not yet returned.

No word from his wife, no word of his missing children, and perhaps worst of all, Cadderly still found no answers to his desperate calls to Deneir.

“We?” he replied.

Menlidus motioned through the door, across the hall and into a side chamber, where a group of about a dozen men and women stood dressed for the road.

“You’re all leaving?” Cadderly asked, incredulous. “Spirit Soaring is under a cloud of assault and you would desert—”

“Deneir deserted me. I did not desert him,” Menlidus replied sharply, but with a calm surety. “As their gods deserted them, and as the Weave abandoned three of them, wizards all, who find their life’s pursuit a sad joke, as is mine.”

“It didn’t take much of a test to shake your faith, Menlidus,” Cadderly scolded him, though he wanted to take the words back as soon as he heard them escape his mouth. The poor priest had suffered a failing of magic at the very worst moment, after all, and had watched a friend die because of that failure. Cadderly knew that he was wrong to judge such despair, even if he didn’t agree with the man’s conclusion.

“Perhaps not, Cadderly, Chosen of Nothing,” Menlidus replied. “I only know what I feel and believe—or no longer believe.”

“Where are you going?”

“Carradoon first, then to Cormyr, I expect.”

Cadderly perked up at that.

“Your children, of course,” said Menlidus. “Fear not, my old friend, for though I no longer share your enthusiasm for our faith, I will not forget my friendship to Cadderly Bonaduce and his family. We will seek out your children, do not doubt, and make sure that they are safe.”

Cadderly nodded, and wanted nothing more than that. Still, he felt compelled to point out the obvious problem. “Your road is a dangerous one. Perhaps you should remain here—and I’ll not lie to you, we need you here. We barely repelled that last attack, and have no idea of what may come against us next. Our dark enemies are out there, in force, as many of our patrols painfully learned.”

“We’re strong enough to punch our way through them,” Menlidus replied. “I would counsel you to convince everyone to come with us. Abandon Spirit Soaring—this is a library and a cathedral, not a fortress.”

“This is the work of Deneir. I can no more abandon it than I can abandon that who I am.”

“A priest of nothing?”

Cadderly sighed, and Menlidus patted him on the shoulder, a symbolic reversal of fortunes. “They should all leave with us, Cadderly, my old friend. For all our sakes, we should go down to Carradoon as one mighty group. Escape this place, I counsel, and raise an army to come back and—”

“No.”

Menlidus looked at him hard, but there was no arguing against that tone of finality in Cadderly’s voice.

“My place is Spirit Soaring,” Cadderly said. “To the bitter end?” Cadderly didn’t blink.

“You would condemn the others here to the same fate?” Menlidus asked.

“Their choices are their own to make. I do think we’re safer here than out there on the open trails. How many patrol parties met with disaster, your own included? Here, we have a chance to defend. Out there, we’re fighting on a battlefield of our enemy’s choosing.”

Menlidus considered Cadderly for just a moment longer, then snorted and waved his hand, motioning to the people across the hall. They hoisted bags, shields, and weapons and followed the man down the corridor.

“We’re left with less than fifty to defend Spirit Soaring,” Ginance remarked, coming to Cadderly as the angry fallen priest departed. “If the crawling beasts come at us with the ferocity of the first fight, we will be hard-pressed.”

“We are more ready for an attack now,” Cadderly replied. “Implements are more reliable than spells, it would seem.”

“That is the consensus, yes,” said Ginance. “Potions and wands did not fail in the field, even as spellcasting misfired or fell empty.”

“We have many potions. We have wands and rods and staves, enchanted weapons and shields,” said Cadderly. “Make certain that they are properly distributed as you sort our defenses. Power to every wall.”

Ginance nodded and started away, but Cadderly stopped her by adding, “Catch up to Menlidus and offer him all that we can spare to take with him on his journey. I fear that his party will need all that we can give, and a fair measure of good luck, to get down the mountainside.”

Ginance paused at the door, then smiled and nodded. “Simply because he abandons Deneir does not mean that Deneir should abandon him,” she said.

Cadderly managed a weak smile at that, all the while fearing that Deneir, though perhaps inadvertently and through circumstances beyond his control, had already done exactly that, to all of them.

But Cadderly had no time to think about any of that, he reminded himself, no time to consider his absent wife and missing children. He had found some measure of powerful magic in his moment of need. For all their sakes, he had to learn the source of that magic.

He had barely begun his contemplation when shouts interrupted him.

Their enemies had not waited for sunset.

Cadderly rushed down the stairs, strapping on his weapons as he went, nearly running over Ginance at the bottom.

“Menlidus,” she cried, pointing to the main doors, which stood open.

Cadderly ran there and fell back with a gasp. Menlidus and all the others of his band were returning, walking stiff-legged, arms hanging at their sides, vacant stares through dead eyes—for those who still had their eyes.

All around the zombies came the crawling beasts, dragging and hopping at full speed.

“Fight well!” Cadderly called out to his defenders. All about the first and second floors of Spirit Soaring, manning every wall, window, and doorway, priests and wizards lifted shields and weapons, wands and scrolls.

A couple of hundred yards ahead, a burst of flames erupted far above them—above the branches of distant trees on a high ridge on the mountain road. Drizzt, Jarlaxle, and Bruenor sat up straight on the wagon’s jockey box, startled, and behind them, Danica stirred.

“That’s Spirit Soaring,” Drizzt remarked.

“What is?” Danica asked, scooting forward to the back of the seat and peering up between Drizzt and Bruenor.

A column of black smoke began to climb into the sky above the tree line.

“It is,” Danica said breathlessly. “Drive them faster!”

Drizzt glanced at Danica and had to blink in amazement at how quickly the woman had healed. Her training and discipline, combined with Jarlaxle’s potions and monk abilities, had restored the woman greatly.

Drizzt made a mental note to speak with Danica about her training, but he ended the line of thought abruptly and nudged Bruenor. Understanding his intent, the dwarf nodded and jumped off the side of the wagon, with Drizzt fast following. Bruenor called for Pwent as they ran around the back, setting themselves against the tailgate.

“Push them hard!” Drizzt called to Jarlaxle when the three were set, and the drow snapped the reins and clicked at the mules, while the three in back put their shoulders to the wagon and shoved with all their strength, legs pumping furiously, helping the wagon up the steep incline.

Danica was out beside them in a heartbeat, and though she winced when she braced her injured shoulder against the wagon, she kept pushing.

As they crested a ridge, Jarlaxle shouted, “Jump!” and the four grabbed on tightly and lifted their legs as the wagon gained speed. It was a short-lived burst, though, for another steep incline lay before them. The mules strained, the foursome strained, too, and the wagon moved along slowly.

The huddled forms of crawlers crept out on the trail before them, but before Jarlaxle could yell out a warning, another form, a dwarf on a fiery hell boar, burst through the brush on the opposite side of the road, wisps of smoke rising from the branches behind him. Athrogate plowed into the crawlers, the demon boar hopping and stomping its hooves, sending out rings of fiery bursts. One crawler was gored and sent flying, another trampled under smoking hooves, but a third, near the other side of the road, had time to react and use its powerful arms to twist and leap up high above the snorting boar, right in the path of Athrogate.

“Bwahaha!” the dwarf howled, his morningstars already spinning in opposing circles.

The weapons swung around at the monster simultaneously, right low, left high, both connecting to send the crawling thing into an aerial sidelong spin. Athrogate expertly curled his right arm under his left in the follow-through, then reversed his momentum and snapped that weapon back in a fierce backhand that smacked the creature in its ugly face—and to add a finishing touch, the dwarf enacted the morningstar’s magic after the first strike, its nubby spikes secreting explosive oil onto the weapon head.

A pop and a flash revealed the magic to the onlookers. Even without the explosion, they quickly knew that added power was behind the strike as the creature executed several complete rotations before it hit the ground.

Hardly slowing, Athrogate charged his mount right through the brush on the far side, morningstars spinning, boar snorting fire.

He emerged after the wagon had passed, chasing and battering a crawler with every step, and as the creature fell dead, Athrogate squeezed his legs and twisted the boar into line, running fast after his companions.

He caught up to them just as the wagon came over the last ridge, the road twisting through a narrow tree line onto the open grounds of the magnificent Spirit Soaring.

The lawn was crawling with fleshy beasts, as were Spirit Soaring’s walls. The upper corner of the building was burning, belching black smoke from several windows.

Athrogate skidded his boar to a stop beside Bruenor and Pwent. “Come on, ye dwarfs, and kick yer heels! We’ll give ‘em a beatin’ that’ll make ‘em squeal!”

Bruenor gave only a cursory glance at the nodding Drizzt before scrambling around the side of the wagon bed, leaping up, and retrieving his many-notched axe. Pwent already carried his weapons, and was first to Athrogate’s side.

“Ye protect me king!” Pwent demanded of him, and Athrogate gave a hearty “Bwahaha!” in reply. That was good enough for Thibbledorf Pwent, whose idea of “defend” was to charge ahead so quickly and madly that the many enemies flanking him could never catch up.

“Ye keepin’ the pig?” Bruenor asked as he rambled up.

“Aye, she’s a good way to introduce meself!”

Athrogate spearheaded the three-dwarf wedge, trotting his boar at a pace that the two runners could easily match.

Behind them, Jarlaxle kept firm control of the mules and the wagon, and looked to Danica and Drizzt.

“To the side door on the right side!” Danica called to the dwarves.

Drizzt, scimitars drawn, ran up beside Jarlaxle.

“Go, go, go,” Danica bade them as she scrambled over the wagon rail and into the bed. “I’ll keep the wagon clear and Catti-brie safe.”

Drizzt gave her a pleading look, not wanting to drive the helpless Catti-brie into the middle of such a tumultuous fight.

“We’ve nowhere to run,” Jarlaxle said, answering that concern. “We go forward or we go back, but if Cadderly loses here, our fate will surely be the same.”

Drizzt nodded and turned to his companion.

“Clear a short path and move up the wagon,” Jarlaxle explained. “Clear a bit more and move a bit more.”

“When we get into the open, they’ll swarm,” Drizzt said with another nervous glance at the wagon bed, which held his defenseless beloved.

“More to kill, and more quickly, then,” Jarlaxle said with a tip of his hat—a tip that left the giant feather in his hand. He snapped the dagger from his enchanted bracer into the same hand, then flicked his wrist several times to elongate the magical weapon into a long sword.

Drizzt grabbed the bridle of the nearest mule and tugged the creature along with him, breaking through the tree line and out into the open, in full view of the monstrous hordes.

Directly ahead, he watched Bruenor and the other dwarves wade in with abandon.

Athrogate howled, kicked his boar into a charge, and threw his arms up, rolling over backward, executing a perfect dismount that left him on his feet behind the snorting hell beast.

Monsters swarmed at them head on and from both sides. As the boar met the frontal assault with bursts of flame from its stomping hooves, and wild and vicious head swings, Athrogate diverted to the right, morningstars spinning. He clashed with the attackers and flesh splattered far and wide, crawlers verily exploding under the weight of his swings.

Not to be outdone, Thibbledorf Pwent hit a line of charging crawlers with a sidelong tackle, as if daring them to find a weakness in his devastating armor. The Gutbuster thrashed, kicked, punched, kneed, elbowed, and head-butted with gleeful ferocity, using all of his many weapons to tear at the enemy. Thibbledorf Pwent was known as the most ferocious warrior of Mithral Hall—no small claim! — and Athrogate had been similarly regarded many years before among an even larger clan of dwarves. One after another, the crawlers were mowed down before them.

But any watching who might have thought that the pair were warriors protecting their king were soon disavowed of any notion that this particular king needed any protection.

The demon-boar faltered under a tangle of clawing arms and biting fangs. A final burst of stinging fire singed black flesh as the boar faded back to its home plane. Before those crawlers could recover from its sudden evaporation, a new enemy was among them.

Bruenor hit the group with a heavy shield rush, his solid shield cracking into one fleshy beast with enough force to imprint its foaming mug heraldry into the creature’s chest. The crawler was thrown back under the weight of the blow. Bruenor opened up, throwing his shield arm out to the left to slam a second creature, and coming across with a mighty chop of his axe that cracked the collarbone of a third enemy, driving it down with tremendous force. Barely had he finished that stroke when Bruenor tore free his axe and cut left to right with a devastating backhand. He hopped as he went out to the end of that swing, and strengthened his momentum with a sudden pirouette.

Another crawler fell away, mortally wounded.

Bruenor landed awkwardly, though, and a crawler got its arm over his shield to scratch at his face.

The dwarf just growled and threw his shield arm up, taking the crawler’s arm high with it, and as the beast tried to slash at Bruenor with its free hand, so too did Bruenor bring his axe across. The heavy axe and the powerful dwarf easily parried that strike, and worse for the crawler, Bruenor’s swing was hardly slowed by the collision, his fine weapon opening wide the crawler’s midsection.

Bruenor gave a second hoist and shoved with his shield to throw that beast away, then chopped back the other way with his axe, cracking it into the skull of another attacker. A sudden twist and reangled tug broke apart the skull and freed the axe. Bruenor waded along, flanked by his devastating team.

Twenty strides behind the ferocious dwarves, Drizzt and Jarlaxle didn’t have the luxury of watching the devastating display of martial prowess, for they, too, were quickly hard-pressed.

Drizzt broke center and right, Jarlaxle center and left, each facing their respective foes with typical drow speed and sword play. With his straight blades, Jarlaxle quick-stepped front and back, rolling his hands only so much as to align his blade tips for more deadly stabs. Every step of Jarlaxle’s dance was punctuated by forward-prodding sword blades. Those crawlers who ventured too near to Jarlaxle fell back full of small, precise holes.

For Drizzt, with his curving blades, the dance was more one of swinging swaths, each blade slicing across with such force, precision, and momentum that all before it, reaching limbs and pressing monsters, fell back or fell to the ground. While Jarlaxle rarely turned in his battle, Drizzt rarely faced the same direction for more than a heartbeat or two. Quickly realizing that his best attribute against the monsters was his agility, the drow ranger twirled and leaped, spun and dropped low as he came around.

Then up into the air he went again, once even quick-stepping atop the heads of two crawlers that futilely tried to keep pace with his movements.

Drizzt landed right behind them, with more monsters coming at him, but it was all a ruse, for he was up in the air once more, leaping backward and high, tucking his legs in a back flip over the pair of crawlers he had just trod upon. Because they turned in their efforts to keep up with him, he found himself once again behind them.

Down came his scimitars and down went the two crawlers, skulls creased.

More were there to take their places, the fearless and ravenous beasts coming on with abandon. Though both drow fought brilliantly, the pair made little headway toward Spirit Soaring.

And despite their best efforts, crawlers slipped in behind them, rushing for the wagon.

Bruenor saw them first. “Me girl!” he screamed, glancing back at a beast pulling itself up the side of the wagon.

“We’re too far!” he scolded his companions, dwarf and drow. “Turn back!”

Pwent and Athrogate, covered in the gore of splattered creatures, immediately spun around. Bruenor pivoted the formation, the three beginning a second and even more ferocious charge back the way they’d come.

“Drizzt! Elf!” Bruenor yelled with every step, desperate for his friend to reach Catti-brie’s side.

Drizzt, too, understood that the beasts had been cunning enough to get in behind them. He attempted the same kind of turn that Bruenor and his companions had taken.

But he was hard-pressed, as was Jarlaxle, each alone with crawlers intent on keeping them from retreating to the wagon. Drizzt could only fight on and hope to find a gap, and yell back warnings to Danica.

A crawler pulled itself over the rail of the wagon’s side and Drizzt sucked in his breath.

“Jarlaxle!” he begged.

Five strides away from him, Jarlaxle nodded and threw down the feather. Immediately a gigantic flightless bird stood beside the mercenary.

“Go!” Jarlaxle yelled, maneuvering to Drizzt’s side as the bird commanded the field.

Side by side they went, trying to find some rhythm, some compliment to their varied styles. But Drizzt knew that they could not reach the wagon in time.

And Bruenor, screaming from behind him, knew it too.

But all five, drow and dwarves alike, breathed easier when a form stood tall before the crawler on the wagon, for up popped Danica, her sling hanging empty, her fists balled before her chest. Up went one leg, straight above her head, and her amazing dexterity was matched by her strength as she drove her foot down atop the crawler’s head.

With a sickening crack, that head flattened even more and the beast dropped from the side of the wagon as surely and swiftly as if a mountain had fallen atop it.

All five of the companions fighting to approach the wagon shouted out to Danica as a crawler leaped over the other side of the wagon at her back. But she needed no such warning, coming out of her devastating stomp with a perfect pivot to back-kick the second beast in its ugly face. It, too, bounced away.

A third creature clambered over the rail and a circle kick suddenly filled its grinning maw. Danica remained up on her right leg and went up to the ball of her foot to execute a complete spin and slam a fourth crawler.

Yet another beast climbing up the side was met with a flurry of fists, a rapid explosion of ten short punches that turned its face to mush. Before it could fall away, Danica hooked it under the armpit and turned powerfully, launching it across the wagon to bowl over and dislodge another of its companions.

The woman turned fast and fell into a defensive crouch, seeing a pair of monsters up front on the jockey box. One jerked weirdly and the other followed, then fine drow swords exploded out of their chests. Both crawlers were jerked off opposite sides of the wagon and the swords slipped free. Jarlaxle stood on the seat alone.

With a smile, the drow snapped his right wrist up, and his magical blade transformed from sword to dirk. With a wink, Jarlaxle launched the dagger toward Danica—right past her, to impale a crawler and knock it off the wagon’s backside.

He tipped his hat, flicked another dagger from his wrist, and turned to rejoin Drizzt, who had defeated a quartet of crawlers as they had tried to attack the mules.

“You three, with the wagon,” Drizzt told the dwarves as they arrived.

As Jarlaxle leaped down beside him and gave a nod to his fellow drow, Drizzt led the way forward toward the screeching, pecking, stomping diatryma.

“You lead, I secure,” Jarlaxle said, the command ringing clearly to Drizzt Do’Urden.

In that short charge and retreat, in that moment of desperation to rescue the wagon, the two had found a level of confidence and complement that Drizzt had never thought possible. His beloved wife was in that wagon, helpless, and yet he had stopped to engage the first line of crawlers near the mules, fully confident that Jarlaxle would secure the jockey box and reinforce Danica’s desperate defense of Catti-brie.

So on they went, fighting as one. Drizzt led the way with his leaps and slashing cuts while a series of daggers reached out behind him, flew out around him. Every time he lifted a scimitar, a dagger whistled under his arm. Every time he dived and rolled right, a dagger shot past his left—or a stream of daggers, for Jarlaxle’s bracers gave him an inexhaustible and ready supply.

To their side, the crawling beasts finally pulled down the diatryma, but it didn’t matter, for behind the drow, Bruenor tugged the mules and wagon along while Pwent and Athrogate flanked him, throwing themselves at any monsters venturing too near. Danica held the wagon bed, striking with devastating effect at any who dared try to climb aboard.

Finally they were rolling along, their enemies thinning before them. Drizzt darted left and right, taking great chances, diving into rolls and leaping into spins, confident every time that a dagger would fly his way in support if any monster found a hole in his defenses.

Inside Spirit Soaring, word of the allies’ charge began to spread among the priests and wizards, and they began to call out their support and to cheer with great relief the unexpected reinforcements. And from more than one came a cry of relief at the return of Lady Danica!

All around the library, the calls went out and the defenders took heart, none more so than Cadderly. With his hand crossbows and devastating darts, he had methodically cleared most of the second story balconies of invaders, and had left a dozen dead before the front door for good measure, shooting down from on high.

But with his wife in sight, flanked by heroes of great renown, the priest was so overcome that he forgot how to breathe. He stared at the wagon, creeping across the courtyard toward Spirit Soaring, where Drizzt Do’Urden and Jarlaxle—Jarlaxle! — sprinted back and forth, working as if they were a single, four-armed warrior, Drizzt leaping and spinning, mowing down crawlers whose arms went up to grab at him always a heartbeat too late.

And Jarlaxle came behind like god-thrown lightning, stabbing the beasts with short, deadly strokes and nimbly dancing through them as they fell to the ground, mortally wounded.

There were dwarves, too, and Cadderly recognized King Bruenor from that legendary one-horned helm and the foaming mug shield, working his axe with deadly efficiency and tugging the mules along, while two other dwarf warriors flanked the team. Any beasts that ventured too near were crushed by a blur of spinning morningstars on one side, or torn apart by the multitude of spikes and ridges adorning the wild dwarf on the other.

There was Danica, and oh, but she had never looked more beautiful to Cadderly than at that very moment. She had been battered, he could see, and that stung his heart, but her warrior spirit ignored her wounds, and she worked her dance magnificently about the wagon bed. Not a creature could get close to clearing the rails.

Below the balcony where he stood, Cadderly heard his fellow priests shouting to “Form up!” and he knew they meant to go out and meet the incoming band. When he took a moment to stop gawking at the magnificence of the six warriors in action, he realized that help would be sorely needed.

Many monsters became aware of fresh meat on the approaching wagon. The attack on the building had all but ceased. Every ravenous eye turned toward easy prey.

Cadderly realized the awful truth. For all the power of those six, they would never make it. A horde of monsters stood poised to wash over them like breaking waves on a low beach.

His beloved wife would never come home.

From the balcony, he turned into the cathedral, thinking to rush to the stairwell. He skidded to an abrupt stop, hearing a distant call—as he had in that previous moment of desperation when he had been caught alone on the upper floors with the attacking crawlers.

He turned, his eyes guided to a cloud in the sky above. He reached for that cloud and called to it, and a portion of it broke away. A chariot of cloud, pulled by a winged horse, raced down from on high. Cadderly climbed atop the balcony’s rail and the speeding chariot swooped down before him. Hardly even thinking about his actions, for he was leaping onto a cloud, the priest jumped aboard. The winged horse followed his every mental command, sweeping down from the balcony right before the astonished eyes of the priests and wizards who were gathering to charge out the front door. As one, they gasped and fell back into the cathedral. Cadderly’s chariot soared out above the frightened crawlers.

Some of the undead, Menlidus among them, turned to intercept the new foe, but Cadderly looked upon them and channeled the divinity flowing within him, releasing a mighty burst of radiance that knocked the undead monsters back and blasted them to ash.

He grimaced at the destruction of his dear friend, but Cadderly pushed away the sadness and continued on, fast nearing the wagon and the six warriors and the host of crawlers battling them. Again he cast a spell, though he knew not what it was, simply trusting the power he felt within. He looked at the largest mob of monsters and shouted a single word—not just any word, but a thunderous word, an explosion of vocal power aimed at enemies alone, for it did not affect the spiked-armored dwarf, who thrashed wildly in the middle of the throng.

But the wild dwarf was struck dumbfounded and confused when all the monsters clawing and biting at him were yanked away. Through the air they went, flailing helplessly against the weight of the priest’s thunder. They landed hard some thirty steps distant, bouncing and tumbling, scrambling away, wanting no part of the godlike priest and his words of doom.

Cadderly paid them no more heed, bringing his chariot up beside the wagon and bidding his friends to climb aboard. He spoke another word of power and a great light ignited around him and the wagon. All of the crawlers caught within it began to thrash and burn, but the others, the drow, the dwarves, and the two women, felt no pain. Instead, they were washed with healing warmth, their many recent wounds mending in the brilliant yellow beams of magical light.

Bruenor yelled at Drizzt, who had told him to climb aboard the chariot. When the dwarf king hesitated, Athrogate and Pwent, running along beside him, hooked him under the arms and dragged him up.

Drizzt sprang aboard the wagon and into the bed, catching Danica’s eye. “Watch those beasts for me,” he said, trusting her fully. He sheathed his blades, went to his beloved, and scooped her into his arms. With Danica leading, they made the chariot easily.

Jarlaxle did not follow, but waved Cadderly away. He threw daggers into the nearest thrashing crawler for good measure, then brought forth his nightmare, summoning it before the terrified team. The drow ran around the mules, conjuring another sword from his enchanted bracer as he went, while his nightmare pounded the ground with fiery hooves. A few clever slashes set the mules free, and Jarlaxle, reigns in hand, ran between and past them, and jumped upon his nightmare.

He kicked the steed into a charge, galloping along the path cleared by Cadderly’s cloud chariot. He tugged the mules along and guided them up on the porch and through the open front doors before any of the crawlers could intercept him.

Priests slammed the doors closed behind the drow and his four-legged escorts. Jarlaxle immediately dismissed his nightmare and handed the mules off to astonished onlookers.

“It would not do to waste a perfectly good team,” he explained. “And these two have taken us a long way.” He finished with a laugh—which lasted only as long as it took him to turn and come face to face with Cadderly.

“I told you never to return to this place,” the priest said, ignoring the many curious onlookers crowding around him, demanding to know what sort of magic he had found to conjure a chariot of cloud, to speak thunder, to glow with the radiance of a healing god, to reduce the undead to ashes with a single word. They, who could not reliably cast the simplest of dweomers any longer, had witnessed a display of power that the greatest priests and wizards of Faerûn could hardly imagine.

Jarlaxle bowed low in response, tipping his unfeathered hat. He didn’t answer, though, other than to motion to Drizzt, who came fast to his side, as Danica was fast to Cadderly’s.

“He is not our enemy,” Danica assured her husband. “Not any more.”

“I keep trying to tell you that,” Jarlaxle agreed.

Cadderly looked to Drizzt, who nodded his agreement.

“Enough of that, and who truly cares?” a wizard yelled, bulling his way up to Cadderly. “Where did you find such power? What prayers were those? To throw a multitude of enemies aside with a mere word! A chariot of cloudstuff? Pray tell, good Cadderly. Is this Deneir, come to your call?”

Cadderly looked at the man hard, looked at them all, his face a mask of studious concentration. “I know not,” he admitted. “I do not hear the voice of Deneir, yet I believe that he is involved somehow.” He looked directly at Drizzt as he finished. “It is as if Deneir is giving this answer to me, one last gift …”

“Last?” Ginance called out with alarm, and many others mumbled and grumbled.

Cadderly looked at them and could only shrug, for he truly didn’t know the answer to the riddle that was his newfound power. He shifted his gaze to Jarlaxle. “I trust my wife, and I trust Drizzt, and so you are welcome here in this time of mutual need.”

“With information you will find valuable,” Jarlaxle assured him, but the drow was cut short by a sharp cry from the back of the gathering. All eyes turned toward Catti-brie. Drizzt had set her down on a divan at the side of the foyer, but she was floating in the air, her arms out as if she were under water, her eyes rolled to white and her hair floating around her, again as if she were weightless.

She turned her head and spat, then snapped back the other way as if someone had slapped her across the face. Her eyes once more shone blue, though they were surely seeing something other than that which was before her.

“She is demon-possessed!” a priest cried.

Drizzt donned the eye patch Jarlaxle had given to him and rushed to his wife, grabbing her in a hug and gently pulling her down.

“Take care, for she is in a dark place that welcomes new victims,” Jarlaxle said to Cadderly as he moved to join Drizzt. Cadderly looked at him curiously but went in anyway, taking Catti-brie’s hand.

Cadderly’s form jolted as if shocked by lightning. His eyes twitched and his entire form changed, a ghostly superimposition of an angelic body, complete with feathery wings, over his normal human form.

Catti-brie cried out then and so did Cadderly. Jarlaxle grabbed the priest and tugged him back. The ghostly lines of Cadderly’s form disappeared, leaving him gawking at the woman.

“She is caught between worlds,” Jarlaxle said.

Cadderly looked at him, licked his suddenly dry lips, and did not disagree.

CHAPTER 20 A DWARF’S STUBBORNNESS

He felt the sensation seeping into his consciousness, the willpower of another being trying to possess him. But Ivan Bouldershoulder was ready for it. He was no simpleton, and no novice to any kind of warfare. He had felt the dominating willpower of a vampire—right before he had utterly destroyed the thing—and he had studied the methods of wizards and illusionist, and even illithids, like any well-prepared dwarf warrior.

The creature had caught him by surprise with the first intrusion, true. Spirit Soaring and the Snowflakes had been a peaceful place for years, the one notable exception being the arrival of Artemis Entreri, Jarlaxle Baenre, and the Crystal Shard, but since Cadderly had completed the new library, Ivan and everyone else had come to think of the place as home, as peaceful, as safe.

Even with the turbulence of the wider world and the current problems with magic—the types of problems that had never really concerned the likes of Ivan Bouldershoulder, who trusted his muscle more than any waggling fingers—Ivan hadn’t been ready for the onslaught of the Ghost King. And he’d certainly not been ready for the intrusion that had overwhelmed him and stolen from him his very body. But for nearly the entire time he had been possessed, Ivan had studied his possessor. Rather than flail against an opaque wall he could not penetrate, the dwarf had bided his time, gathering what information he could, trying to take from his possessor even as it continued to rob him.

Thus, when Yharaskrik had released him on that high mountain plateau, Ivan was ready for the fight—or more accurately, for the flight. And the illithid had inadvertently shown him the way: a crack in the floor beneath the dracolich that was more than a crack, that was indeed a shaft leading down into the mountains and, Ivan had hoped, into the catacomb of tunnels that wound through the lower stones.

With nowhere else to go, and doom certain if he stayed above, Ivan had scrambled straight for that route, counting on surprise to get him past the crushing claws of the great beast.

To his good fortune, when the dragon’s foot had stomped, a host of the fleshy beasts had been right behind him, and the splatter and spray of flesh and gore and blood had provided wonderful cover for his desperate dive.

To his ultimate good fortune, the shaft had not run straight down for very far, gradually winding to the side and easing the impact as he connected with the dirt and stone. And it had widened, allowing him to twist in his descent and get his heavy boots out in front of him, digging them in against the slide. The last drop had hurt—twenty feet straight down with nothing but dark air around him as he broke through the roof of an underground chamber, but even there, the dwarf had found that extra bit of heroism, the one heroes only rarely discussed openly: good luck.

He had landed in water. It wasn’t very deep and wasn’t very clean, but it was enough to cushion his fall. He had lost his antlered helm up above but had retrieved his axe, and he was alive, and in a place where the monstrous dracolich couldn’t follow.

Luck had given him a chance.

Soon after, though, Ivan Bouldershoulder figured that his luck had run out.

For the rest of the day, he had wandered in the darkness, splashing, for he could find no dry land in the chamber, and no exit. He had felt some movement around his legs in the thigh-deep murk, and figured there might be some fish or some other crawly things in the underground pool, so maybe he could catch them and figure out a way to survive for some time.

Either way, he believed that he would surely die alone and miserable in the dark.

So be it.

Then the illithid had come calling, whispering into his subconscious, trying to pry its way back into control.

Ivan put up a wall of anger and sheer dwarven stubbornness that held the creature at bay, and he knew with confidence that he could hold it indefinitely, that he would not be possessed again.

“Go away, ye silly beast,” he said. He focused and concentrated on every word as he spoke. “What’d’ye want with me in here, where there’s no way out?”

It seemed a logical enough refutation. Indeed, what did the illithid have to gain?

But still the creature seeped into his thoughts, demanding control.

“What, can ye make me fly, then, ye fool?” Ivan shouted into the darkness. “Fly me back up to yer dead dragon and the little beasties ye so love?”

He felt the anger then, and the revulsion, and understood that he had caught the mind flayer a bit off its guard, though just for a fleeting moment.

Ivan let his own guard slip, just a bit.

He felt the other being inside his mind clearly then, striving for dominance. A wave of utter disgust nearly buckled the dwarf’s knees. But he held fast, and purposely lowered his guard just a bit more.

He was soon walking toward the northern end of the wide chamber. He could barely make out the boulders piled along that wall. Guided by Yharaskrik’s will, counting on the illithid having a wider view of his surroundings than he, the dwarf climbed up onto the lower stones. He pulled one aside and felt the slightest breeze, and as his eyes adjusted to the more intense gloom beyond, he saw that a long, wide tunnel lay before him.

Done with ye! his thoughts screamed and Ivan Bouldershoulder began the fight of his life. He pushed back against the overwhelming intellect and willpower of the mind flayer with every measure of stubbornness and anger a dwarf could muster. He thought of his brother, of his clan, of King Bruenor, of Cadderly and Danica and the kids, of everything that made him who he was, that gave joy to his life and strength to his limbs.

He denied Yharaskrik. He screamed at Yharaskrik, aloud and in his every thought. He thrashed physically, hurling himself against the stones, tearing at the tunnel opening to widen it, ignoring the falling rocks that banged off his arms and shoulders. And he thrashed mentally as well, screaming at the wretched beast to be gone from his mind.

From his mind!

Such rage enveloped him that Ivan tore the rocks free with bloody fingers and felt no pain. Such strength accompanied that rage that he flung the stones, some half his weight, far behind him to splash into the murky pool. And still he ignored the bruises and cuts, and the strain on his corded muscles. He let the rage take him fully and hold him, a wall of denial, a demand that the illithid get out.

The hole was wide enough to crawl through—wide enough for two Ivans to crawl through side by side—and still the dwarf dug at the stones with his battered hands, using that physical sensation to give focus to his rage.

He had no idea how long he went on like that, a few heartbeats or a few thousand, but finally, an exhausted Ivan Bouldershoulder fell through the opening and rolled into the tunnel. He landed flat on his face and lay there, gasping, for a long while.

Despite the pain, a wry grin widened on his hairy face, for Ivan knew that he was truly alone.

The tentacle-faced beast had been denied.

He slept, then, right there in the mud, amidst the stones, keeping himself mentally ready to fend off another intrusion and hoping that no wandering creature of the Underdark would find him and devour him as he lay exhausted and battered in the darkness.

Rorick dived to the floor, just under the clawing feet of a huge black bat. “Uncle Pikel!” he screamed, beseeching the druid to do something.

Pikel balled up his fist, pumped his arms, and stamped his feet in frustration, for he had nothing, nothing at all, to offer. Magic was gone—even his natural affinity with animals had flown. He thought back to only a few days earlier, when he had coaxed the roots out of the walls to secure the barricades—a temporary thing, apparently, since pursuit came from that direction. The dwarf knew he couldn’t reach that level of magic, perhaps not ever again, and his frustration played out, in that dark chamber deep beneath the Snowflakes.

“Ooooh!” he whined, and he stamped his sandaled feet harder. His whine became a growl as he saw the same bat that had sent Rorick diving for cover angle its wings and come around directly at him.

Pikel blamed the bat. It made no sense, of course, but none of it made a lot of sense to Pikel just then. So he blamed the bat. That bat. Only that bat. That one bat had caused the failure of magic, and had chased away his god.

He squatted and picked up his cudgel. It wasn’t enchanted anymore, no longer a magical shillelagh, but it was still a solid club, as the bat found out.

The black leathery thing swooped at Pikel, and the dwarf leaped and spun, launching the most powerful strike he had ever managed with his strong arm, even from the days when he had the use of both. The hard wood crunched against bat skull, shattering the bone.

The nightwing fell as surely as if a huge boulder had fallen upon it from on high, crashing down atop Pikel, the two of them rolling away in a tumble of dwarf and black bat.

Pikel head-butted and kicked with abandon. He bit and poked with his stubby arm. He swung his cudgel with short but heavy strokes, battering the creature relentlessly.

Nearby, a man screamed as a nightwing swooped in and caught him by the shoulders in its huge clawed feet, but Pikel didn’t hear it. Several others cried out, and a woman shrieked in horror when the bat flew straight for a wall and let loose its prey, hurling the poor man against the rocks, where his bones shattered with a sickening crackle.

Pikel didn’t hear it. He was still swinging his club and kicking with fury, though the bat that enwrapped him with those great wings was already dead.

“Get up, Uncle Pikel!” Hanaleisa yelled at him as she leaped past.

“Huh?” the dwarf replied, and he pulled one wing down from in front of his face and followed the sound to see Hanaleisa sprinting toward Rorick, who was still flat on the ground. Standing above him, Temberle cut his greatsword back and forth in long sweeping arcs above his head, trying to cut at a stubborn nightwing that fluttered up and down above him as if to taunt him. He couldn’t hit the agile bat.

But Hanaleisa did, leaping high into the air as she rushed past Temberle, somersaulting as she went to enhance the power of her kick. She kicked the bat solidly in the side, sending it several feet away as she tumbled over and landed, still in a run.

The nightwing turned its attention her way as it righted itself in the air, and swooped to give chase.

With that distraction, Temberle’s sword at last caught up to it, slashing a leathery wing back to front. The nightwing flopped weirdly in the air and fluttered down, and Hanaleisa and Temberle were upon it before it managed to get the wounded wing out from under itself.

Hanaleisa was the first to break away, calling out orders, trying to establish some measure of order and supporting lines of defense. But the whole of the wide chamber was in a frenzy, with nightwings fluttering all around them, with wounded men and woman, backs torn wide, one scalped by a raking claw, screaming and running and diving for cover.

A group of more than a dozen grabbed up all of the precious torches stored at the far end of the hall, at the mouth of a tunnel the group had planned to traverse after their rest stop, and went running away.

Others followed in the chaos.

Temberle knocked down another bat, and Hanaleisa matched him. Other nightwings swept out of the chamber in pursuit down the tunnels.

When it finally ended, just over a score of refugees remained, with three of those badly wounded.

“It won’t hold,” Hanaleisa said to her brothers and uncle as they gathered together their scant supplies and few remaining torches. “We need to find a way out of here.”

“Uh-uh!” Pikel emphatically disagreed.

“Then light your staff!” Hanaleisa yelled at him.

“Ooooh,” said the dwarf.

“Hana!” Rorick scolded.

The monk held forth her hands and took a deep breath, composing herself. “I’m sorry. But we need to move along, and quickly.”

“We cannot stay here,” Temberle agreed. “We need to get as close to Spirit Soaring as we can manage, and we need to get out of these tunnels.”

He looked at Pikel, but the dwarf just shrugged, hardly confident.

“We have no other option,” Temberle assured him.

A commotion behind them turned them around, and Rorick said, “The scout returns!”

They rushed to the fisherman, Alagist, and even in the torchlight, they could see that he was thoroughly shaken. “We feared you dead,” Hanaleisa said. “When the bats came in—”

“Forget the damned bats,” the man replied, and the punctuation of his sentence came as a thump from the distant corridor, like a rumble of thunder.

“What—?” Temberle and Rorick said together.

“A footstep,” Alagist said.

“Uh-oh,” said Pikel.

“What magic?” Hanaleisa asked the dwarf. “Uh-oh,” he repeated.

“Gather up the wounded!” Temberle called to all still in the chamber. “Take everything we can carry! We must be gone from this place!”

“He can’t be moved,” a woman called from beside an unconscious man.

“We have no choice,” Temberle said to her, rushing over to help.

The chamber shuddered under the reverberations of another heavy footstep.

The woman didn’t argue as Temberle hoisted the wounded man over one shoulder.

Pikel, torch in hand, led the way out of the chamber.

“Come on, then!” Ivan yelled into the darkness. “Not with yer head, ye damned squid, but all o’ ye! Come and play!” He didn’t have his axe, but he hoisted a pair of rocks and banged them together with enthusiasm bordering on murderous glee.

That physical manifestation of anger echoed the dwarf’s sheer rage, and once more, the intrusions of Yharaskrik faded to nothingness. If the illithid had come to him that time with any hope of possessing him again, Ivan believed with confidence, that delusion had come to an end.

But the dwarf was still alone, battered and bloody and lost in the dark, with no real expectation that there was a way out of those forever-twisting tunnels. He glanced over his shoulder to the watery cavern, and considered for a moment going back and trying to figure out a way in which he could survive on the fish, or whatever those swimming things might be. Could he somehow strain or heat the murky water enough to make it potable?

“Bah!” he snorted into the darkness, and decided that it was better to die trying than to simply exist in a dark and empty hole!

So off Ivan trudged, rocks in hands, a scowl on his face, and a wall of rage within him just looking for an outlet.

We walked for hours, often stumbling and tripping, for though his eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness, he still had to feel his way along. He found many side passages, some that led to dead ends, and others he took simply because they “felt” more promising. Even with his dwarf’s senses, so at home underground, Ivan had little idea of where he actually was in relation to the World Above, and even in relation to where he had first dropped down into the murky underground pond. With every turn, Ivan held his breath, hoping he wasn’t just going in circles.

At every turn, too, the dwarf tucked one of his stone weapons under his armpit, wetted his finger, and held it aloft in search of air currents.

Finally, he felt the slightest breeze on that upraised finger. Ivan held his breath and stared into the blackness. He knew it could be but a crack, a teasing, impassable chimney, a torturous wormhole he could never squeeze through.

He slammed his rocks together and stomped along, clinging to optimism and armoring himself with anger. An hour later, he was still in darkness, but the air felt lighter to him, and he felt a distinct sensation on that wetted finger whenever he lifted it.

Then he saw a light. A tiny spark, far away, rebounding off many turns and twists. But a light nonetheless. Along the walls, rocks took more definitive shape to the dwarf’s fine underground vision. The darkness was surely less absolute.

Ivan rumbled along, thinking about how he could organize a counter-strike against the dracolich and the illithid and their huddled, shadowy minions. His fears went from his own dilemma to his friends up above, to Cadderly and Danica, the kids and his brother. His pace increased, for Ivan was always one who would fight like a badger for his own sake, but who would fight like a horde of hell-spawned badgers when his friends were involved.

Soon, though, he slowed again, for the light was not daylight, he came to realize, nor was it any of the glowing fungi so common in the Underdark. It was firelight—torchlight, likely.

Down there, that probably meant the light of an enemy.

Ready for a fight, Ivan crept ahead. Knuckles whitening on stones, Ivan gritted his teeth and imagined the sensation of crushing a few skulls.

A single voice stole that bellicose attitude and had him blinking in astonishment.

“Oo oi!”

CHAPTER 21 FACING THE TRUTH

Cadderly emerged from the room after spending more than half the morning with Catti-brie, his face ashen, his eyes showing profound weariness. Drizzt, waiting in the anteroom, looked to him with hope, and Jarlaxle, who stood beside Drizzt, looked instead at his dark elf companion. The mercenary recognized the truth splayed on Cadderly’s face even if Drizzt did not—or could not.

“You have found her?” Drizzt asked.

Cadderly sighed, just slightly, and handed the eye patch to him. “It is as we believed,” he said, speaking to Jarlaxle more than Drizzt.

The drow mercenary nodded and Cadderly turned to face Drizzt. “Catti-brie is caught in a dark place between two worlds, our own and a place of shadow,” the priest explained. “The touch of the falling Weave has had many ill effects upon wizards and priests across Faerûn, and no two maladies appear to be the same, from what little I have seen. For Argust of Memnon, the touch proved instantly fatal, turning him to ice—just empty ice, no substance, no flesh beneath it. The desert sun reduced him to a puddle in short order. Another priest carries with him a most awful disease, with open sores across his body, and is surely failing. Many stories …”

“I care not of them,” Drizzt interrupted, and Jarlaxle, hearing the edge creeping into the ranger’s voice, put a comforting hand on Drizzt’s shoulder. “You have found Catti-brie, caught between the worlds, you say, though in truth I fear it is all a grand illusion masking a sinister design—perhaps the Red Wizards, or—”

“It is no illusion. The Weave itself has come undone, some of the gods have fled, died … we’re not yet certain. And whether it is the cause of the falling Weave, or a result of it, a second world is falling all around ours, and that junction seems also to have increased the expanse of the Plane of Shadow, or perhaps even opened doorways into some other realm of shadows and darkness,” said Cadderly.

“And you have found her—Catti-brie, I mean—trapped between this place and our own world. How do we retrieve her fully, and bring her back …” His voice trailed off as he stared into Cadderly’s too-sympathetic face.

“There is a way!” Drizzt shouted, and he grabbed the priest by the front of his tunic. “Do not tell me that it is hopeless!”

“I would not,” Cadderly replied. “All sorts of unexplained and unexpected events are occurring all around us, on a daily basis! I have found spells I did not know I possessed, and did not know Deneir could grant, and with all humility and honesty, I say that I am not certain it is even Deneir granting them to me! You ask me for answers, my friend, and I do not have them.”

Drizzt let him go, the drow’s shoulders sagging, along with his aching heart. He offered a slight nod of appreciation to Cadderly. “I will go and tell Bruenor.”

“Let me,” said Jarlaxle, and that brought a surprised look from Drizzt. “You go to your wife.”

“My wife cannot feel my touch.”

“You do not know that,” Jarlaxle scolded. “Go and hold her, for both your sakes.”

Drizzt looked from Jarlaxle to Cadderly, who nodded his agreement. The distraught drow put on the magical eye patch as he entered the adjacent chamber.

“She is lost to us,” Jarlaxle said softly to Cadderly when they were alone. “We do not know that.”

Jarlaxle continued to stare at him, and Cadderly, grim-faced, could not disagree. “I see no way for us to retrieve her,” the priest admitted. “And even if we could, I fear that the damage to her mind is already beyond repair. By any means I can fathom, Catti-brie is forever lost to us.”

Jarlaxle swallowed hard, though he was not surprised by the prognosis. He wouldn’t tell King Bruenor quite everything, he decided.

Another defeat, Yharaskrik pointed out. We weakened them!

We barely scratched their walls, the illithid imparted. And now they have new and powerful allies.

More of my enemies in one place for me to throttle!

Cadderly and Jarlaxle and Drizzt Do’Urden. I know this Drizzt Do’Urden, and he is not to be taken lightly.

I know him as well. Crenshinibon unexpectedly joined the internal dialogue, and the illithid detected a simmering hatred behind the simple telepathic statement.

We should fly from this place, Yharaskrik dared to suggest. The rift has brought uncontrollable beasts from the shadowy plane, and Cadderly has found unexpected allies …

No cogent response came from the dragon, just a continuous, angry growl reverberating through the thoughts of the triumvirate that was the Ghost King, a wall of anger and resentment, and perhaps the most resounding “no” Yharaskrik had ever heard.

Through the far-reaching mental eyes of the illithid, its consciousness flying wide to scout the region, they had seen the rift in Carradoon. They had seen the giant nightwalkers and the nightwings and understood that a new force had come to the Prime Material Plane. And through the eyes of the illithid, they had witnessed the latest battle at Spirit Soaring, the coming of the dwarves and the drow, the power revealed by Cadderly—that unknown priestly magic had unnerved Yharaskrik most of all, for he had felt the magical thunder in Cadderly’s ward and had retreated from the brilliance of the priest’s beam of light. Yharaskrik, ancient and once part of a great communal mind flayer hive, thought it knew of every magical dweomer on Toril, but it had never seen anything like the power of the unpredictable priest that day.

The melted flesh of crawlers and the ash piles of the raised dead served as grim reminders to the mind flayer that Cadderly was not to be underestimated.

Thus, the dracolich’s continuing growl of denial was not a welcome echo in Yharaskrik’s expansive mind. The illithid waited for the sound to abate, but it did not. It listened for a third voice in the conversation, one of moderation, but heard nothing.

Then it knew. In a sudden insight, a revelation of a minuscule but all-important shift, the mind flayer realized that the Ghost King was no longer a triumvirate. The resonance of the growl deepened, more a chorus of two than the grumble of one. Two that had become one.

No words filtered out of that rumbling wall of anger, but Yharaskrik knew its warnings would go unheeded. They would not flee. They—the mind flayer and that dual being with whom it shared the host dragon corpse, for no longer could Yharaskrik count Hephaestus and Crenshinibon as separate entities! — would show no restraint. Not the rift, not Cadderly’s unexplained new powers, not the arrival of powerful reinforcements for Spirit Soaring, would slow the determined vengeance of the Ghost King.

The growl continued, a maddening and incessant wall, a pervasive answer to the illithid’s concerns that brooked no intelligent debate, or, the creature understood, no room for a change of plans, whatever new circumstances or new enemies might be revealed.

The Ghost King meant to attack Spirit Soaring.

Yharaskrik tried to send its thoughts around the growl, to find Crenshinibon, or what remained of the Crystal Shard as an independent sentience. It tried to construct logic to stop the dracolich’s angry vibrations.

It found nothing, and every path led to one road only: eviction.

It was no longer a disagreement, no longer a debate about their course of action. It was a revolt, full and without resolution. Hephaestus-Crenshinibon was trying to evict Yharaskrik, as surely as had the dwarf in the tunnels below.

Unlike that occasion, however, the mind flayer had nowhere else to go.

The growl rolled on.

Yharaskrik threw wave after wave of mental energy at the dragon-shard mind. It gathered its psionic powers and released them in ways subtle and clever.

The growl rolled on.

The illithid assailed the Ghost King with a wall of discordant notions and emotions, a cacophony of twisted notes that would have driven a wise man mad.

The growl rolled on.

It attacked every fear buried within Hephaestus. It conjured images of the exploding Crystal Shard from those years before, when the light had burned the eyes from Hephaestus’s head.

The growl rolled on. The mind flayer found no wedge between the dragon and the artifact. They were one, so completely united that even Yharaskrik couldn’t fathom where one ended and the other began, or which was in control, or which even, to the illithid’s great surprise and distress, was initiating the growl.

And it went on, unabated, unflinching, incessant and forevermore if necessary, the illithid understood.

Clever beast!

There was nothing left there for the mind flayer. It would have no control of the great dracolich limbs. It would find no conversation or debate. It would find nothing there but the growl, heartbeats and days and years and centuries. Just the growl, just the opaque wall of a singular note that would forevermore dull its own sensibilities, that would steal its curiosity, that would force it to stay within, confined to an endless battle.

Against Hephaestus alone, Yharaskrik knew it could prevail. Against Crenshinibon alone, Yharaskrik held confidence that it would find a way to win.

Against both of them, there was only the growl. It all came clear to the illithid, then. The Crystal Shard, as arrogant as Yharaskrik itself, and as stubborn as the dragon, as patient as time, had chosen. To the illithid, that choice at first seemed illogical, for why would Crenshinibon side with the lesser intellect of the dragon?

Because the Crystal Shard was more possessed of ego than the illithid had recognized. More than logic drove Crenshinibon. By joining with Hephaestus, the Crystal Shard would dominate.

The growl rolled on.

Time itself lost meaning in the rumble. There was no yesterday and no tomorrow, no hope nor fear, no pleasure nor pain.

Just a wall, not thickening, not thinning, impenetrable and impassable.

Yharaskrik couldn’t win. It couldn’t hold. The Ghost King became a creature of two, not three, and those two became one, as Yharaskrik departed.

The disembodied intellect of the great mind flayer began to dissipate almost immediately, oblivion looming.

All the wizened and experienced minds remaining at Spirit Soaring gathered in lectures and seminars, sharing their observations and intuition about the crash of worlds and the advent of the dark place, a reformed Plane of Shadow they came to call the Shadowfell. All reservations were cast aside, priest and mage, human, dwarf, and drow.

They were all together, plotting and planning, seeking an answer. They were quick to agree that the fleshy beasts crawling over Spirit Soaring were likely of another plane, and no one argued the basic premise of some other world colliding, or at least interacting in dangerous ways, with their own world. But so many other questions remained.

“And the walking dead?” Danica asked.

“Crenshinibon’s addition to the tumult,” Jarlaxle explained with surprising confidence. “The Crystal Shard is an artifact of necromancy more than anything else.”

“You claimed it destroyed—Cadderly’s divination showed us the way to destroy it, and we met those conditions. How then …?”

“The collision of worlds?” Jarlaxle asked more than stated. “The fall of the Weave? The simple chaos of the times? I do not believe that it has returned to us as it was—that former incarnation of Crenshinibon was indeed destroyed. But in its destruction, it is possible that the liches who created it have come free of it. I believe that I battled one, and that you encountered one as well.”

“You make many presumptions,” Danica remarked.

“A line of reasoning to begin our investigation. Nothing more.”

“And you think these things, these liches, are the leaders?” asked Cadderly.

Before Jarlaxle could answer, Danica cut him short. “The leader is the dracolich.”

“Joined with the remnants of Crenshinibon, and thus with the liches,” said Jarlaxle.

“Well, whatever it is, something bad’s going on, something badder than anything I e’er seen in me long years o’ living,” said Bruenor, and he looked toward the doorway to Catti-brie’s room as he spoke. An uncomfortable silence ensued, and Bruenor harrumphed a great and profound frustration and took his leave to be with his wounded daughter.

To the surprise of all, especially Cadderly, the priest found himself beside Jarlaxle as the conversation resumed. The drow had surprising insights on the dual-world hypothesis. He had experience with the shadowy form they both understood to be one of the liches that had created Crenshinibon in that long-lost age. These ideas seemed to Cadderly the most informative of all.

Not Drizzt, nor Bruenor, not even Danica fathomed as clearly as Jarlaxle the trap into which Catti-brie had fallen, or the dire, likely irreparable implications of a new world imprinting on the old, or of a shattering of the wall between light and shadow. Not the other mages nor the priests quite grasped the permanence of the change that had found them all, of the loss of magic and of some, if not all the gods. But Jarlaxle understood.

Deneir was gone, Cadderly had come to accept, and the god was not coming back, at least not in the form Cadderly had come to know. The Weave, the source of Toril’s magic, could not be rewound. It appeared as though Mystra herself—all of her domain—was simply there one moment, gone the next.

“Some magic will continue,” Jarlaxle said as the discussion neared its end. It had become little more than a rehash of belabored points. “Your exploits prove that.”

“Or they are the last gasps of magic dying,” Cadderly replied. Jarlaxle shrugged and reluctantly nodded at the possibility of that theory.

“Is this world that is joining with ours a place of magic and gods?” Danica asked. “The beasts we have seen—”

“Have nothing to do with the new world, I think, which may be imbued, as is our own, with both magic and brute force,” Jarlaxle interrupted without reservation. “The crawlers come from the Shadowfell.” Cadderly nodded agreement with the drow.

“Then, is their magic dying?” Drizzt asked. “Has this collision you speak of destroyed their Weave, as well?”

“Or will the two intertwine in new ways, perhaps with this Plane of Shadow, this Shadowfell, between them?” Jarlaxle said.

“We cannot know,” said Cadderly. “Not yet.”

“What next?” asked Drizzt, and his voice took on an unusual timbre, one of distinct desperation—desperation wrought by his fears for Catti-brie, the others knew.

“We know what tools we have,” Cadderly said, and he stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. “We will match strength with strength, and hope that some magic, at least, will find its way to our many spellcasters.”

“You have shown as much already,” said Jarlaxle.

“In a manner I cannot predict, much less control or summon.”

“I have faith in you,” Jarlaxle replied, and that statement gave all four of them pause, for it seemed so impossible that Jarlaxle would be saying that of Cadderly—or anyone!

“Should Cadderly extend similar confidence?” Danica said to the drow.

Jarlaxle burst into laughter, helpless and absurd laughter, and Cadderly joined him, and Danica joined them, too.

But Drizzt could not, his gaze sliding to the side of the room, to the door behind which Catti-brie sat in unending darkness.

Lost to him.

Desperation gripped the normally serene Yharaskrik as the reality of its situation closed in around it. Memories flew away and equations became muddled. It had known physical oblivion before, when Hephaestus had released his great fiery breath upon Crenshinibon, blasting the artifact. Only through an amazing bit of good fortune—the falling Weave touching the residual power of the artifact with the remnants of Yharaskrik nearby—had the illithid come to consciousness again.

But oblivion loomed once again, and with no hope of reprieve. The disembodied intellect flailed without focus for just a few precious moments before the desperate mind flayer reached out toward the nearest vessel.

But Ivan Bouldershoulder was ready, and the dwarf put up such a wall of denial and rage that Yharaskrik couldn’t begin to make headway into his consciousness. So shut out was the illithid that Yharaskrik had no understanding of where it was, or that it was surrounded by lesser beings that might indeed prove susceptible to possession.

Yharaskrik didn’t even fight back against that refusal, for it knew that possession would not solve its problem. It could not inhabit an unwilling host forever, and should it insert all of its consciousness into the physical form of a lesser being, should it fully possess a dwarf, a human, or even an elf, it would become limited by that being’s physiology.

There was no real escape. But even as it rebounded away from Ivan Bouldershoulder, the mind flayer had another thought, and cast a wide net, its consciousness reaching out across the leagues of Faerûn. It needed another awakened intellect, another psionicist, a fellow thinker.

It knew of one. It reached for one as its homeless intellect began to flounder.

In a lavish chamber beneath the port city of Luskan, many miles to the northwest, Kimmuriel Oblodra, lieutenant of Bregan D’aerthe, second-in-command behind only Jarlaxle Baenre, felt a sensation, a calling.

A desperate plea.

CHAPTER 22 A WHISPER IN THE DARK

The night was quiet, the forest beyond the wide courtyard of Spirit Soaring dark and still.

Too quiet, Jarlaxle thought as he stared out from a second-story balcony, where he kept his assigned watch. He heard others in the hallways behind him expressing hope at the calm, but to Jarlaxle, the deceptive peace was just the opposite. The pause revealed to him that their enemies were not foolhardy. The last attack had become a massacre of fleshy crawling beasts—their burned and blasted lumps littered the lawn still.

But they weren’t finished, to be sure. Given Danica’s report, given Jarlaxle’s understanding of the hatred toward him and toward Cadderly and Danica, he saw no possibility that Spirit Soaring would suddenly be left in peace.

This night was peaceful, though—undeniably so, paradoxically so, eerily so. And in that quiet, with not even the breath of wind accompanying it, Jarlaxle, and Jarlaxle alone, heard a call.

His eyes widened despite his near-perfect control over his emotions, and he reflexively glanced around. He knew how tentative his—and Athrogate’s—welcome was at Spirit Soaring, and he could hardly believe his misfortune as another ally, one who would not likely be accepted by any at Spirit Soaring, demanded an audience.

He tried to push that quiet but insistent call away, but its urgency only heightened.

Jarlaxle looked to the forest and focused his thoughts on one large tree, just behind the foliage border. Then, with another glance around, the drow slipped over the balcony railing and nimbly climbed to the ground. He disappeared into the darkness, making his careful way across the wide courtyard.

“Bah, just as I telled ye, elf,” a sneering Bruenor Battlehammer said to Drizzt as they watched Jarlaxle slip down from his perch. “Ain’t no friend to any other’n Jarlaxle, that one.”

A profound sigh reflected Drizzt’s deep disappointment.

“I’ll go get Pwent and bottle up that damned annoying dwarf ol’ big-hat there brung with him.” Bruenor started to turn away, but Drizzt caught him by the shoulder.

“We don’t know what this is about,” he reminded them. “More scouting? Did Jarlaxle see something?”

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted, pulling away. “Go and see if ye got to see, but I’m already knowing.”

“Await my return,” Drizzt said.

Bruenor glared at him.

“Please, trust me in this,” Drizzt begged. “There is too much at stake for all of us, for Catti-brie. If anyone can help us solve the riddle of her troubles, it is Jarlaxle.”

“Thought it was Cadderly. Ain’t that why we’re here?”

“Him, too,” said Drizzt, and as Bruenor visibly relaxed, he slipped out the window and moved after Jarlaxle. Not a wary creature stirred at his silent passing.

Ever do I find you in curious places, Kimmuriel Oblodra’s fingers waggled to Jarlaxle, using the intricate hand language of the drow. With Cadderly Bonaduce and his pathetic priests? Truly?

In this time, we all share concerns, and profit from … accommodations of mutual benefit, Jarlaxle’s fingers answered. The situation here is desperate, even grave.

I know more about it than you do, Kimmuriel assured him, and Jarlaxle wore a puzzled expression.

“About the failing of the Weave, perhaps …?” he said quietly. Kimmuriel shook his head and responded aloud. “About your predicament. About Hephaestus and Crenshinibon.”

“And the illithid,” Jarlaxle added.

“Because of the illithid,” Kimmuriel corrected. “Yharaskrik, without form and dissipating, found me in Luskan. He is no more a part of this creature they call the Ghost King. He was cast out, to fade to nothingness.”

“And he seeks revenge?”

“Revenge is not the way of illithids,” Kimmuriel explained. “Though no doubt Yharaskrik enjoyed the bargain I offered.”

Do tell, said Jarlaxle, with his fingers and his amused expression.

“Its only hope was to journey to the Astral Plane, a place of consciousness without corporeal restraint,” Kimmuriel explained. “With the failure of conventional magic and divine magic, its best opportunity for such a journey was a fellow practitioner of psionics—me. Without its own body as anchor, the mind flayer could not facilitate the flight alone.”

“You let it go?” Jarlaxle asked, raising his voice just a bit. He wasn’t as angry as intrigued, however, revealed by the way he reached up to tug at the diatryma feather that was nearly fully regrown in his enchanted hat.

“To survive as the years pass, Yharaskrik must find a mind hive of illithids. We of psionic power are not unaffected by that which is occurring across the multiverse, and having such allies….”

“They are wretched creatures.”

Kimmuriel shrugged. “They are among the most brilliant of all the mortal beings. I know not what will happen to my powers, nor to magic, divine or arcane. I know only that the world is changing—has changed. Even shifting here through the dimensions proved a great risk, but one that I needed to take.”

“To warn me.”

“To warn and to instruct, for in return for passage, Yharaskrik revealed to me all it knows about the Ghost King, and about the remnants of the artifact, Crenshinibon.”

“I am touched at your concern for me.”

“You are necessary,” said Kimmuriel, drawing a laugh from Jarlaxle. “Do tell me, then,” Jarlaxle said. “How might I, might we, defeat this Ghost King?”

Kimmuriel nodded and recounted it all in detail then, echoing Yharaskrik’s lecture about the being that was both Hephaestus and Crenshinibon, about its powers and its limitations. He explained the minions and the gates that brought them to Faerûn. He talked of one such rift he had sensed, though had not yet inspected, still opened wide in the lakeside town to the southeast. He spoke of human and dwarf refugees hiding in tunnels.

“You trust this mind flayer?” Jarlaxle asked in the end.

“Illithids are trustworthy,” Kimmuriel replied. “Loathsome, at times, fascinating always, but as long as their goals are understood, their logic is easily followed. In this case, Yharaskrik’s goal was survival. Its plight was real and immediate, and caused by the Ghost King. Knowing that truth, as I did, I trust in its recounting.”

Jarlaxle believed that he held some insight into the mindset of illithids as well, for he had been a companion of Kimmuriel Oblodra for a long, long time, and if someone had ever deigned to put a squishy octopoid head on that particular drow, it surely would have fit Kimmuriel well.

In the brush not far away, Drizzt Do’Urden listened to it all with interest, though much of it was no more than a confirmation of that which they had already surmised about their mighty enemy. Then he listened to Jarlaxle’s reply and instructions, with wide-eyed disbelief, and truly he felt vindicated in trusting Jarlaxle.

“You cannot demand of me that I take such a risk with Bregan D’aerthe,” he heard Kimmuriel argue.

“It is worth the potential gain,” Jarlaxle replied. “And think of the opportunity here for you to discern so much more of the mystery that is occurring all around us!”

That last line apparently had the desired effect on Kimmuriel, for the drow bowed to Jarlaxle, turned to the side, and literally cut the air with an outstretched finger, leaving a sizzling vertical blue line in its wake. With a wave, Kimmuriel turned that two-dimensional blue line into a doorway and stepped through, disappearing from sight.

Jarlaxle stood for a bit, hands on hips, digesting it all. Then, with a shake of his head, one of disbelief, even bemusement, the mercenary headed back for Spirit Soaring.

By the time Drizzt arrived, only moments after Jarlaxle, the summons was already out for him and Bruenor to an audience with Cadderly.

And Jarlaxle, of course.

CHAPTER 23 GAUNTLET THROWN

The Ghost King emerged from its cave with a deafening roar and a stomp of clawed feet that sent fleshy crawlers flying. The magnificent creature stepped out without heed to the scrambling beasts. Its great tail, part skeletal and part rotting dragon flesh, swept aside any too near. Its torn leathery wings buffeted those to either side with a great wind.

No plotting guided the attack, no care for minions or any role they might play. Rage drove the Ghost King. Freed of the caution of Yharaskrik, the great beast followed its emotions. The Ghost King could not be defeated by mere mortals, whose magic was failing. The Ghost King need not plot and connive and tread with fearful caution.

Wings wide, the Ghost King leaped from the pinnacle and rode the updrafts to climb above the Snowflakes. With eyes magical, the Ghost King saw across the miles to the symbol of its enemies, the place on which it focused its rage.

Higher it climbed, above the few wispy clouds that dulled part of the starry night sky. And there it circled, gathering speed, gathering its hatred. And like a bolt from on high, the Ghost King folded its wings, tipped down its huge head, and plummeted for Spirit Soaring.

Though Hephaestus’s lips were mostly withered away, any watching would have noted a wicked smile upon the dracolich’s face.

Twenty-one priests and wizards, almost half the contingent of residents and visitors remaining at Spirit Soaring, licked dry lips and clutched stones coated in explosive oil. The other half tried to sleep in the too-quiet night. They checked and rechecked their other implements, weapons and armor, magical rings and wands, scrolls and potion bottles, nervously awaiting the attack they knew would come.

It would be a greater beast, too, Cadderly had informed them after his meeting with the newcomers, the drow and the dwarves. A dragon, an undead dracolich, the master of the many minions they had slaughtered, would lead the next attack, so Cadderly had assured them with confidence.

More than a few of them had seen a dragon before, a handful had even witnessed the awful splendor of a dracolich. They were seasoned veterans, after all, travelers mostly, who had come to Spirit Soaring to try to make sense of a dangerous world gone mad.

Their mouths were dry, to a man and woman, for what sort of previous experiences could have offered them—could have offered anyone—solace at that desperate time?

They stood alert, spread over every vantage point of Spirit Soaring, their counterparts sleeping in small groups nearby, weapons at their sides. The attack would come soon, Cadderly had said. Perhaps that very night.

In the central chamber of the second floor, with easy access to corridors that would deliver them to any wall in short order, Cadderly, Danica, the two drow, and the three dwarves waited as well, none of them finding sleep. All of them expected, with each arrival of Ginance and her roving patrol group, to hear that the beast was upon them.

Spirit Soaring was alert, was ready.

But nothing could have truly prepared the fifty-four souls in the cathedral for the advent of the Ghost King. Some few sentries near the northeastern corner of the great building noted the movement from high above and pointed at the giant missile hurtling down at Spirit Soaring. A few managed to scream out a warning, and one lifted a shield in ridiculous defense.

With strength unimaginable, the Ghost King pulled up from its plummet just before it slammed the building, extending its great hind legs out before it and crashing in.

Not a person, not even King Bruenor, so strong on his feet, not even Athrogate, possessed of the low center of balance of a dwarf and the strength of a mountain giant, remained on his feet under the weight of that collision. Spirit Soaring shook to its foundation, glass shattering all over the structure under the sheer force of the impact and the twist of the magical building’s indomitable frame. Doors popped open and corridors twisted. Bricks fell from every chimney.

The thunderous sound of a dragon’s roar muted every scream, crash, and shatter.

The defenders pulled themselves up and did not shy from the fray. By the time Cadderly and his elite group arrived on the scene, where the wall had been torn away and the Ghost King stood, a dozen rocks had already been thrown, their magical oil exploding at they hit the flesh and bone of the beast.

The Ghost King swiveled its great head on a serpentine neck, fiery eyes selecting a group of annoying rock-throwers, but before the beast could bring its rage to bear on those men and woman, a wizard’s fireball, thrown from a necklace of enchanted rubies, engulfed its face in biting flames.

Lightning blasts followed. A pillar of divine fire swept down from above to scorch the back of the dracolich’s neck.

And the beast roared, and the beast thrashed, and the building shook, and again men and women, elf and drow and dwarf, tumbled. A swipe of the dracolich’s mighty tail slapped the length of the building, shattering more glass, breaking stone facing and cracking thick timber supports.

The room lay broken open, the beast clearly visible to Cadderly’s approaching group. The three dwarves spearheading did not hesitate in the face of that catastrophe, and could not slow. They had to be the focus of the battle, by the plans Cadderly had drawn.

As soon as he had felt the thunder of the initial impact, the wound to the place built of his magic, Cadderly had felt the assault on his own body. As the dracolich came into sight, Cadderly felt the magic building within him. Wrought of his desperation, his anger, his denial of the horror of it, the power of spells unknown began to stir.

Whether sensing that power or just recognizing Cadderly, the Ghost King locked its eyes on the approaching group and opened wide its jaws.

“Dive!” Bruenor yelled, and Thibbledorf Pwent dived into Bruenor and knocked him aside, the two of them falling atop the rolling Athrogate.

Flanking the dwarves, Drizzt, Jarlaxle, and Danica easily sidestepped from the direct line to the beast.

But Cadderly didn’t move left or right. He thrust his hands forward, hand crossbow in one, walking stick in the other, and chanted in words he did not know.

Dragonfire poured forth from the beast, filling the room in front of them. While Spirit Soaring’s magical structure diminished the effect on the walls and floor, the furniture, books, and bric-a-brac went up in bursts of flame, and the gout of immolation rushed across the floor at its living targets, jetting for the open doorway. And there it was stopped by Cadderly’s ward.

As the conflagration lessened, the priest fired his hand crossbow, more an act of defiance and challenge than to inflict true damage to the mighty beast, though Cadderly did smile as the bolt exploded against the dracolich’s face.

Into the burning room ran the seven, meeting the beast head on. Rocks flew in from left and right, smacking the dracolich and exploding with sudden bursts of magical flame. More magic roared in as well, a hornet’s nest of stings, a hurricane of lightning, a god’s wrath of fire.

Wings beat against Spirit Soaring in reply. The great tail slapped left and right, crushing stone and wood and throwing wizards and priests aside. But the beast did not turn its focus from that one room, from those seven puny heroes.

“And so we meet,” the Ghost King said, its voice shaking the smoldering timbers.

Cadderly fired another dart into its ugly face.

Bruenor, Athrogate, and Pwent didn’t pause, bursting through the doorway and charging across the room. Dragonfire drove them back.

“In together!” Cadderly demanded, and the seven tightened ranks around the priest, with his fire ward and his protection from the dracolich’s withering touch.

Spell after spell came forth from the priest, in words none of them understood, and each of the defenders felt hardened against the deadly touch of the beast. On they went, marching right into the blinding roil of the Ghost King’s breath. Those fires parted around them and reformed behind them as the dracolich continued its long exhale, so that the group of seven was fully surrounded by opaque walls of streaming flames.

But they moved forward, and as soon as the Ghost King finished, Cadderly cried for a charge.

And charge they did, Bruenor lifting high his axe, Athrogate beside him and spinning his morningstars, and Thibbledorf Pwent darting right between them, leaping at the beast with abandon. The battlerager latched on to one of the dracolich’s great hind legs, dug his leg spikes in for support, and began whacking away with both hands, shaving skin and bone with his ridged armor as he thrashed.

Drizzt and Danica moved right behind the dwarves—Drizzt started to, but Cadderly grabbed him by the arm, then cupped his hand over Drizzt’s right fist as Drizzt held his scimitar.

“You are the agent of all that is good!” Cadderly charged the surprised drow. The priest spoke another few words that neither he nor Drizzt understood, and Icingdeath glowed more brightly with a divine white light, one that overwhelmed its normal bluish hue. “Vanquish the beast!” Cadderly demanded, except it wasn’t truly Cadderly, or only Cadderly talking, Drizzt realized to his hope and his horror. It was as if someone else, something else, some god or angel, had possessed the priest and placed that power and responsibility upon the drow.

Drizzt blinked but didn’t dare hesitate other than to call forth Guenhwyvar. He spun back with such fury that it left him stumbling at the dracolich. He moved beside Danica, who leaped and spun and kicked out wide, hitting the beast with rapid and heavy blows. The Ghost King bit down at her, but she was too quick to be caught like that, and she threw herself aside at the last moment.

The snapping jaws cracked in the empty air, and Drizzt rushed in, glowing weapon in hand. He stabbed with Twinkle, the fine blade knifing through some rotting skin to crack against bone, then he slashed with Icingdeath, with his scimitar Cadderly had somehow infused with the power of divine might.

The strike sounded like the drop of a gigantic boulder, a sudden and sharp retort that dwarfed the boom of a fireball and made Athrogate’s oil-soaked strikes seem like the tapping of a bird. The Ghost King’s head flew back, a great chunk of its cheekbone and upper jaw flying from its face to the courtyard below.

Flying, too, went Guenhwyvar, a great leap that brought the panther clawing at the beast’s ugly face.

Everyone else, even wild Pwent, paused a moment to stare in disbelief.

“Impressive,” Jarlaxle congratulated, standing beside the gawking Cadderly. The drow threw down his plume, bringing forth the giant diatryma bird. Then he lifted his arms, a wand in each hand. From one came thundering lightning, from the other a line of viscous globs of green goo that the drow aimed to splatter across the wyrm’s face, hoping to blind it or hinder its snapping jaws.

What a force they were!

But what an enemy they had found.

The Ghost King did not lift away and flee, did not shy even from Drizzt and that awful weapon. It stomped its leg, crushing through the support beams and driving straight down through the ceiling of the structure’s first floor. Poor Pwent was ground by the walls and fell away, all twisted, to the main level.

The Ghost King shook its head wildly and Guenhwyvar went flying away. Then the beast swung its head back with battering ram force at Drizzt, a blow that would have killed him had it hit him squarely. But no one ever hit Drizzt Do’Urden squarely. As the head swung in, Drizzt dived over sideways, just ahead of it. Still, the sheer weight of the glancing blow forced him to roll repeatedly in an attempt to absorb the force. He tumbled out of room, slamming hard into the wrecked chamber’s side wall, a burst of embers flying up behind him.

Stung and a bit dazed but hardly down, Drizzt rushed back at the beast. He watched Athrogate sail up in the air before him, caught by a foreleg. The dwarf’s oil-soaked morningstar crashed and exploded against the bone, splintering it, but still the Ghost King managed to throw the dwarf far.

“Me head to shake, me bones to break!” the indomitable Athrogate yelled out even as he flew across the room and crashed to the floor. “He flinged me, a flat stone across a still lake!” he finished as he skipped up from the floor and slammed the corner of the wall near the outer break—only the word “lake” came out “la-aa-aa-aa-ke” as he fell to the ground outside.

With the two dwarves and Guenhwyvar out of the fray, Danica and Bruenor were sorely pressed. Bruenor pushed back hits from under his shield, his legs bowing but not buckling, his axe ever ready to respond with a heavy chop. Danica leaped and spun, rolled and somersaulted through the air, always half a step ahead of claw or bite.

“We can’t hold it!” Jarlaxle said through gritted teeth. Even when Drizzt got back into the fight, his divinely weighted scimitar driving hard against the beast, the mercenary’s grim visage didn’t soften.

Jarlaxle spoke the painful truth. For all their power and gallant efforts, they were inflicting only minor wounds on the beast, and attrition was already working against them. Then cries went out that crawlers were swarming from the forest, and many on the periphery of the fight had to turn their attention outward.

In that awful moment of honesty, it seemed that all would end for Spirit Soaring and her defenders.

Cadderly reached up with his arms, and up further with his magic, and to all witnessing the event, it seemed as if the mighty priest had plucked a star or the sun itself from the sky and pulled it down over his own body.

Cadderly shone with such radiance that beams of his emanating light streamed through every crack in Spirit Soaring’s planking. Beyond the broken wall, the courtyard and the forest shone as though lit by a clear midday.

The night was completely gone, and so too were the wounds of all those near the priest. Pain and fatigue were replaced by warmth and invigoration, the likes of which they had never known.

The opposite effect jarred the Ghost King, and the beast recoiled in shock and torturous pain.

Beyond the wall, the approaching crawlers fell back on their flat feet, long arms flailing to try, futilely, to block the heavenly light. Wisps of smoke rose from their black skins. Those that could roll backward scrambled for the shadows of the trees.

The Ghost King’s roar shook the building to its foundation yet again. The beast did not fly away, but flailed all the more wildly, thumping Bruenor, who took every blow with a snarl and a swipe of retribution. The creature’s foreleg cut nothing but air as it swiped at Danica, whose acrobatics defied gravity as she lifted and twisted and turned. The dracolich’s great jaws snapped down on the diatryma and lifted the flailing bird into the air, where the massive head thrashed right and left and bit down, cutting the bird in half.

The creature tried to bite at the dodging woman, but there was Drizzt, rushing in, his blades rolling left and right and straight overhead, every swipe of the enchanted Icingdeath stabbing out a bit farther, slicing through dragon scale, melting dragon flesh, and exploding dragon bone.

The Ghost King slipped back from the ledge, its hind legs reaching to find footing on the ground. Barely had it stepped down before Thibbledorf Pwent hit it with a flying head butt, his helmet spike digging into the beast’s calf and securing his hold. From the other side came Athrogate, one morningstar in hand, the other lost in the fall. He spun the heavy ball above his head in both hands, brought forth its oily might, and struck the Ghost King’s other leg with such force that a red scale disintegrated beneath the blow and the beast’s desiccated flesh splintered and dissolved all the way to the bone, which cracked loudly.

And above all the pain from those furious warriors, above the continuing sting of Jarlaxle’s lightning bolts and the hindrance of the drow’s viscous globs, there was the ever-intrusive agony of Cadderly’s light. That awful light, divine spurs that permeated every inch of the Ghost King’s being.

The beast breathed its fire into the room again, but Cadderly’s ward remained to repel the effect, and his light healed his friends as soon as they were stung by the flames.

The effort cost the Ghost King dearly, for all the while it locked its great head in position to fill the room with its fires, Drizzt, who scrambled onto its leg and up to its neck, found the unhindered opportunity to pummel the dragon’s skull. Again and again, Icingdeath came down with fury, bone and flesh and scales exploding under each thunderous strike.

The dragon’s fiery breath ended abruptly with Drizzt’s last strike. The Ghost King shuddered with such force that all, Drizzt and Athrogate included, were thrown aside. The creature leaped back, far out into the courtyard.

“Finish it!” Jarlaxle cried to all, and indeed, it seemed at that moment that the dracolich was in its last throes, that a concerted assault could actually bring the beast down.

And so they tried, but their weapons and spells and missiles passed through the Ghost King without consequence. For there was suddenly nothing tangible to the beast, just its shape outlined in blue light. Thibbledorf Pwent went charging out from the base of Spirit Soaring, roaring as only a battlerager could bellow, and leaped with abandon—right through the intangible beast to bounce down on the turf.

Even more significant to Drizzt, as he moved to follow Pwent, was the apparition of Guenhwyvar across the courtyard. The panther did not charge at the Ghost King. Ears flattened with uncharacteristic trepidation, Guenhwyvar, never afraid of anything, turned and fled.

Drizzt gawked in surprise. He looked to the beast on the field, to Pwent as he ran all around the glowing form, inside it even, thrashing to no effect.

Then suddenly, nothing at all remained to be seen of the Ghost King as the beast faded, just faded to nothingness. It was gone.

The defenders looked on with shock. Cadderly stared with amazement after the blue-white image and gasped at his memories of the Prophecies of Alaundo and of this year, 1385, the Year of Blue Fire. Coincidence, or fitting representation of their greater catastrophe? Before he could delve any deeper into his contemplations, from a room much farther inside Spirit Soaring, Catti-brie screamed in abject terror.