The Lost Library of Cormanthyr

10

Krystarn Fellhammer

The drow warrior felt the words in her mind as she sat before her altar to Lloth. The rooms around her were immersed in total darkness, but her drow vision brought all the details out clearly. The smell of incense lingered in the room. "Yes," she replied. The telepathic touch of Folgrim Shallowsoul made her cringe inside.

I have found the ranger, Baylee Arnvold. Shallowsoul's voice sounded, thin, raspy, and cold.

"I am on my way." Krystarn closed her prayers to the Spider Queen, asking only for the strength to see her mission through to the end, begging forgiveness for not being able to offer up the heart of an enemy at this time in sacrifice.

She took up her weapons and her traveling clothes. Shallow-soul would not have called had she not been going somewhere. With all her gear strapped about her, she pulled on her piwafwi over it all. The last tenday had been filled with boredom awaiting Shallowsoul's attempts at finding the ranger, but she'd pursued her efforts at finding Shallowsoul's real hiding place. None of those efforts had met with success.

The rooms were elegantly furnished with furniture she had recovered from what had been the finest houses around Myth Drannor. It was a pocket-sized palace, but she knew it was only a gilded boil inside a corpse.

She warded the door behind her as she stepped through into a hallway filled with ruin Two male drow under her command stood watch over her door. They worked in shifts, making sure she was never alone or unprotected in her rooms.

"Malla," they said in unison, using the drow term for an honored one. The title always made Krystarn smirk.

"Go get the others," she ordered one of them. She couldn't remember his name.

The drow male hurried away. The remaining one fell into step with her, holding his spear butt just clear of the ground so it wouldn't make any noise.

Krystarn followed the hallway to the other end. No lights lit the walls, but she didn't need them. A wall blocked the end of the hallway. She put her hand out against it, then discovered it was still solid. She remained facing the wall, listening to the others of her entourage fall into lines behind her.

She didn't need to look to make sure they were all there. Twenty-two drow males had followed her from Menzoberranzan, their lives pledged to her task, accepting that she had been placed upon her quest by Lloth, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, herself.

The wall rippled before Krystarn, then pulsed like a great mouth about to open.

"Come." Shallowsoul's command filled her mind.

"Wait for me," Krystarn ordered the male drow warriors.

"Yes, Malla," Captain V'nk'itn responded. "We shall stand steady."

Krystarn knew that the male drow wouldn't stand there out of loyalty, but out of fear of her vengeance if they failed. When she had taken them, she had tied their blood to hers; if they fled, she could follow.

She wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the morning star and stepped through the door. Immediately, the rush of cold wind wrapped around her and she went blind and deaf. She felt like a leaf trapped in a treacherous whirlpool in the streams that cut through the Underdark. Yet, at the same time, she maintained her sense of equilibrium.

The darkness cleared like cool fog drifting in from one of the streams leading into Menzoberranzan. Cool air obscured her true Drow vision for a moment.

"Enter." Shallowsoul's physical voice sounded even worse than his mental one.

Krystarn took exactly two steps forward. As always, the room she appeared in was not one she had been in before. Her heart stilled in her chest as she gazed around at the shelves of books that occupied all four walls and stood in stacks in the center of the large room.

This was what she lusted for, what she had promised Mother Lloth her direct obedience forever after in exchange for her success. A stack of books stood so close to her that she could reach out and touch them if she but moved her arm. But she didn't, because she knew to do so would mean instant death. Shallowsoul allowed no one to touch the books.

She scanned the titles, finding them in a language she did not comprehend. Shallowsoul played his games with her avarice and she knew it. Deliberately, she was teleported of late into rooms of the vast library where she could not read the titles. Thick and pristine, arranged so neatly on the shelves, the books called out to her.

Shallowsoul laughed, and the noise sounded like bones grating, somewhere on the other side of the stacks. "Even from here I can feel your greed, drow." His voice sounded like it was squeezed from a narrowly open crypt, deep but somehow still breathless.

"Be glad of it," Krystarn said. "Else how would you know I would stay in your thrall?" She let him have his laugh. Every time she saw a new volume that she had not seen before, she carefully recorded the symbols and warped languages she remembered. Already in her bag of holding that never left her side, she possessed a book with dozens of inscriptions.

"It would do you good," Shallowsoul said, "to remember who is master in our relationship."

Krystarn bowed her head in humility. She was a drow female, not born to know the yoke of a man even among her own people, much less to subjugate herself to the whims of such a thing as Folgrim Shallowsoul. A lesser drow, one less committed to Mother Lloth, would have broken. There were some, she knew, who would have mistakenly believed that the Queen of the Demonweb Pits had deserted them.

Instead, Krystarn knew that Lloth was only molding her anger, tempering it into the greatest weapon the Queen of Spiders would ever have in her arsenal. And when the time came to bare that weapon, edged with all the knowledge she would reap from the library, all of Toril would not be safe from her unleashed hatred.

Folgrim Shallowsoul rounded the stack in front of the drow elf and stopped. Tortured nightmares had given him shape, while fierce magic had given him form. Gaunt and skeletal, his gaze burned with the pinpoints of green light surrounded by the black emptiness nesting inside the eye sockets. A fistful of dead white hair stuck to his head in a long, unkempt mane that trailed down his back. Blue-green dead flesh clung to its skull, stubbornly giving it features in spite of the immutability of nature. The lips had peeled back from its teeth, giving Shallowsoul a permanent sneering grimace.

He wore clothes of nobility, the cloth interwoven with fine strands of gold and silver, spotted with sapphire chips worked in intricate patterns. Over the long decades, the clothing had rotted and become tattered.

He held a volume in one hand. A long taloned finger with skin so thin the bone showed through marked his place. "You remember Baylee Arnvold?" he asked.

"Fannt Golsway's apprentice," Krystarn answered, knowing Shallowsoul should know by now that she never forgot anything.

"Yes. He is at a forgathering. You're aware of what that is?"

"A forgathering is a meeting place of rangers." Krystarn waited, knowing from experience that Shallowsoul would not tell her his news until he was ready.

"This one is called the Glass Eye Concourse," Shallowsoul went on. He walked through the stacks, motioning Krystarn to follow.

The drow elf waited a step before trailing. Shallowsoul was a lich, and as such he radiated an aura of cold and darkness that unsettled even her nerves. Immediately, she felt the wall of freezing despair lift from her, and it seemed as though a thousand pounds had dropped from her shoulders.

"There will be hundreds of rangers at this forgathering." Shallowsoul reached out and meticulously straightened one of the books on a shelf where the corners did not quite overlap.

Krystarn took full opportunity to gaze at all the shelves of books. The room was even more vast than she had imagined. Twenty paces in now, and she still couldn't see the other side of it.

Only one wall was visible to her left. It soared up thirty feet before meeting the ceiling. A wheeled ladder hooked to the shelves ran all the way to the top, allowing a person to climb up to reach the highest volumes.

The two walls visible to her through the gaps in the intricate shelving looked like stone. The drow believed the vast library had been initially buried underground, not sunk there as the magic of the Army of Darkness had stricken the city and the protective mythal had come apart.

The room appeared to conform to no real shape as well, furthering her suspicions that the library had been deliberately designed to confuse any who entered it. Fragments in scrolls that she had found that spoke of the library had mentioned maps being necessary to find a way through.

Without those maps, even the parts of the library that Krystarn had seen would require years to merely catalog, even without getting into the content. Once in, if a searcher allowed himself or herself to be pulled in too far, there would be no return.

"I want you to find Baylee Arnvold and kill him," Shallowsoul ordered.

"When?" Krystarn asked.

"Now." The lich rounded another stack and the way widened, leading to a high desk in front of a tall stool. A large book occupied the center of the desk, the pages still wet with ink. A quill and an ink pot sat to one side.

Krystarn surveyed the writing, finding it like nothing she'd seen before in all her studies. Liches were undead, usually long removed from any vestiges of humanity. Once she'd discovered Shallowsoul's true nature, she'd studied about liches. One of the key points of Su'vann'k'tr of the House Fla'nvm's writings, was that liches often created brand new magic items and spells that no one had heard of before. Removed from the driving needs of the flesh, a lich instead obsessed on harnessing the mystical powers it could never achieve while remaining a living being. That it would create its own language was no surprise.

"You would have me kill this ranger in the midst of hundreds of his own?" Krystarn let her incredulity sound in her voice.

"It is true that I am a harsh taskmaster, Krystarn Fellhammer," Shallowsoul said, "but it would be foolish for me to give such an assignment without giving you the means to see it through. Even while mortal, I was never a foolish man."

Krystarn had some reservations whether the lich could remember back that far to make such a statement.

Shallowsoul sat at the desk. A single candle burned at the desk, but the drow knew it was more for conducting spells that needed heat or fire rather than any need for light. The lich saw as well as the drow in the absence of light, perhaps even better.

Krystarn surveyed the room as her mother had taught her. Her peripheral vision took in the short flights of stairs heading in three different directions less than a stone's throw from the desk area. When she had time, she fully intended to map out the area in her book based on the parts of the library she had seen so far.

"Why not have Baylee killed away from the forgathering?" the drow asked.

"I want a message sent," the lich said, digging in a drawer of the desk. "Fannt Golsway found the bitter dregs of a trail better left uncovered. I will not allow it to come anywhere close to this library. I want no one else to come after Baylee Arnvold or Fannt Golsway with prying eyes. The secret dies with them."

"Are you sure that Baylee knows about the library?" Krystarn asked.

The lich regarded her with his fiery green pinpoint gaze from the hollowed eye sockets. "You ask so that you may add to your own small store of knowledge."

"I ask because I have a vested interest at stake as well." Krystarn forced herself to stare into the lich's dead gaze. Her muscles trembled against the urge to turn and flee from the cold emanating from the foul creature. "You and I have an agreement. For every five years of my servitude to you, I am allowed to make a copy of a book from this library."

The lich waved to the shelves. "A pittance against all that is actually here."

"Yet a fortune to me," Krystarn countered. "I would learn from you, as I have offered."

"I have no need of an apprentice. I do not intend to forsake this unlife."

"As you have made so clear."

Shallowsoul regarded her, and a cold smile curved his tattered lips baring his teeth even more. The drow thought she even heard the flesh crack and split. "I want you to kill the ranger, Baylee Arnvold."

"How?" Krystarn challenged.

The lich brought a bag onto the desk. Four gold bands big enough to go around Krystarn's head encircled the bag. Even as the bag lay on the desk, the cloth jumped and moved. "Do you know what these are?" He tossed one to her.

At her knowing touch, Krystarn could feel the magic within the band. "No."

"You've seen skeleton warriors, I presume?" Shallowsoul asked.

"Yes." Krystarn's stomach tightened at the thought, and the announcement confirmed the suspicion she had about the gold bands.

"These are control bands for the four skeleton warriors in this bag." Shallowsoul tossed the bag across. "Do you know how to use them?"

Krystarn caught the bag of holding. "I've been told once you're wearing a band, you have control over the skeleton warrior."

"Their souls were captured and placed within those bands," Shallowsoul agreed. "Those particular four were once enemies. I killed them, stripped their souls from their dying bodies, and enchanted them within those bands. They've been there for hundreds of years."

The bag shifted in the drow's grip. The gold bands felt chill against her skin.

"Choose three of your men and take them with you." Shallow-soul crossed the room to a stack and took down a weathered wooden staff. "This staff has already been charged with enough magic to take yourself and the three you've chosen to the forgathering. There are two charges. One to open a dimensional door to take you there, and the other to bring you back again."

Krystarn caught the staff, folding it readily into her grip.

"Go now," the lich ordered, "and do not fail me."

Questions filled the drow's mind, but she uttered none of them. She had learned never to question Shallowsoul. The lich brooked no such thing. She inclined her head again, taking one last glance around the room to memorize it, then turned and walked away. She deliberately chose another path, hoping the lich thought she'd merely gotten turned around.

Two steps forward, her eyes hungrily devouring the texts around her, searching for a clue as to what the pages might contain, the air in front of her suddenly rippled. Shallowsoul's grating bone laughter flared to harsh life around her. Then the dimensional door pulled her through.

In one cold, falling eye blink, she stood back in the tunnel. A wave of dizziness overcame her as the last of the lich's laughter faded away.

One of the males reached out to aid her.

Regaining her balance, Krystarn drew one of the short daggers secreted in her corset and raked a cruel line of blood across the male's cheek. Even as he reacted, trying to step away from the blade, Krystarn stepped forward and shoved the dagger up under his nose, hooking the tip into one nostril to freeze the male into place. A trickle of blood ran down his upper lip.

"Do not forget your station," she warned. "I've killed drow women for less, much less a member of an imperfect gender."

"Forgive me, Malla. I only forgot-"

"There is no forgetting around me," Krystarn said.

"Yes, Malla."

"Step back." When the drow warrior moved back, Krystarn flipped the dagger slightly, cutting through the male's nostril and creating a slit almost a half-inch long.

To his credit, the warrior said nothing, though his ebony face grayed in pain.

Krystarn put her dagger away, secreting it once more. "Do not ever let me think you see me in a moment of weakness," she told all of the men. "I shall not be weak because that would only encourage the craftiest among you to try to slip a blade between my ribs. And I do not intend to lose any more of you than I have to." So far, only two of her warriors had died in the tunnels surrounding the library's hiding place.

The wounded man stepped back into the military formation, ignoring the blood that streamed down his chin and dripped to his tunic.

"Captain Vnk'itn, we are traveling again. Get your men into a bag of holding."

The captain waved his arm and one of the men produced a large bag of holding from a backpack. He held it open while the man next to him climbed inside and disappeared without a sound.

"Also," Krystarn told her captain, "I want yourself and two other men whose nerve will not fail to stay with me." She grasped the staff Shallowsoul had given her and waited for her orders to be carried out.

It would be good to get back to the business of taking lives. Lloth would be pleased. The ranger was as good as dead.