Farthest Reach (12 page)

The pale glow surrounding Ilsevele faded at once, only to spring into existence on Starbrow’s back. He groaned, but keeping his back to the monster, he seemed to avoid the worst of it.

“Araevin … somebody … kill this damned thing!” he gasped.

“Maresa!” Araevin cried. “Use your wand!”

Then he seized one of the wands at his own belt and snatched it out, blasting the ghost with dart after dart of glowing energy. Maresa dropped her useless crossbow and did the same, pelting the ghost from the other side.

The ghost howled again, and wrenched its gaze away from Starbrow and Ilsevele. The moon elf crumpled to his knees, collapsing on top of her. Then the specter intoned another spell, and blasted Araevin into senselessness with a mighty word of power. Araevin staggered back and tumbled to the hard stone floor, eyes seared white, ears ringing, blood streaming from his nose. He could see nothing, hear nothing, could scarcely even move as his thoughts reeled drunkenly.

His vision cleared a little, and he looked up through unfocused eyes as Filsaelene picked herself up off the floor. She steadied herself with one hand on the wall, and presented the star-shaped holy symbol of Corellon Larethian, shouting out a prayer that Araevin couldn’t hear through the ringing in his ears. A great ring of golden light burst from her raised hand, racing through the chamber. When it touched the ghost, the apparition’s substance simply boiled away into nothing. The same golden glow washed over Araevin and the others, bringing vigor, strength, and renewal.

Buoyed by the cleric’s spell of healing, Araevin climbed to his feet as his eyes focused again and his ears stopped ringing. He groped for the magic wand he had dropped, closed his fingers around it, and hammered the ghost again with more of the magical darts. The spirit’s whole form flickered and danced uncertainly, as if it was having trouble keeping itself together.

“Keep after it!” Araevin cried. “We can destroy this thing!”

The ghost drifted down toward the floor of the chamber, reaching out with one spectral claw for Filsaelene. The cleric quickly recoiled, backing up as the apparition drew closer.

“Shield me, Corellon!” she cried, and she spoke a prayer, guarding herself with a shining golden radiance that the ghost could not seem to reach past.

She whirled her long sword in front of her, but the weapon simply passed harmlessly through the ghost.

Araevin tried another spell-a bolt of fire—but the ghost’s otherworldly body simply wasn’t affected.

Think, he told himself. What other spells do I have that might destroy a ghost?

Before he could determine the next attack to try, Starbrow scrambled to his feet and charged at the ghost’s back, Keryvian in his hands. The ancient sword burst into brilliant white flame as lie slashed at the specter. Unlike Filsaelene’s sword or Maresa’s crossbow bolts, Keryvian proved quite capable of damaging the spirit. One slash dragged Keryvian through its torso from shoulder to hip, and Starbrow’s spinning follow-up drove the point of Demron’s last and greatest blade through the center of the ghost’s forehead.

The ghost groaned horribly, a sound that chilled Araevin to the bone, and it slowly dissolved into nothingness. Starbrow held his sword ready, in case it re-formed, but the phosphorescent mist simply dimmed and vanished.

“Thank the Seldarine that’s over,” the moon elf breathed. He looked around. “Is everybody all right?”

“Thanks to Filsaelene’s spell, I am unhurt,” Araevin replied. He hurried over and knelt by Ilsevele, who still crouched by the floor, broad swaths of her flesh dead-white and ice-cold to the touch. “Ilsevele is injured!”

“Sso c-cold,” Ilsevele gasped.

She locked one of her hands around Araevin’s forearm, pulling herself close. Araevin hissed with the cold of her touch. Then Filsaelene hurried over and knelt beside them. The cleric spoke the words of a healing prayer and set her own hand over Ilsevele’s injuries. Beneath the warm golden glow of her touch, the pallor of Ilsevele’s wounds faded, and her shivering stopped.

Ilsevele shook herself and stood up slowly.

“Thank you, Filsaelene,” she said. She rubbed her arms vigorously, and the color returned to her face. She retrieved her bow, and looked over at Starbrow. “And thank you, too, Starbrow. You risked your life to shield me from the ghost. I don’t know what to say.”

Starbrow said with an awkward smile, “It just seemed like the best thing I could do, since I couldn’t reach the ghost as long as it hovered up there. I couldn’t stand there and do nothing.”

Ilsevele stepped over and reached up to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you, again.”

Araevin couldn’t help but smile at the sheepish look that came over Starbrow’s face.

“Well, come on, then,” the wizard said. “Let’s see where we are and where the daemonfey went from here.”

*****

Curnil Thordrim stalked something terrible through the forest gloom a few miles from the old Standing Stone. He didn’t know for certain what it was, but it had killed two of his fellow Riders of Mistledale in their simple camp a few hours before, and they had died badly indeed: bodies marked by odd punctures surrounded by swollen, blueblack flesh, limbs broken and twisted, and awful bites gouged out of faces and skulls. He knew all the dangerous animals and most of the deadly monsters that haunted the depths of old Cormanthor, but he had never in his thirty-five years seen anything in the woodland that killed in that manner.

Curnil was a burly man with thick black hair on his forearms and a heavy black beard. Despite his size, he glided through the underbrush without sound, his dark eyes flicking from sign to sign as he followed the trail of something that stood as tall as an ogre and had long, narrow feet with small claws at the toe. He was not entirely sure he wanted to catch up to it, if he was to be honest with himself.

He came to a small stream trickling through the woods, and looked and listened for a long time before breaking out of the ground cover. Curnil had learned his woodcraft from some of the best, the moon and wood elves of Elventree, a hundred miles to the north. Nothing but the burbling of the stream greeted his ears. Curnil drew a deep breath, and slipped out of the bushes to the stream bank, looking for a print that might show whether his quarry had continued on or turned aside there.

It only took a moment for him to find the end of the track. The creature’s footprints simply ended in the wet sand, as if it had taken to the air or just vanished outright.

“That’s impossible,” he muttered, brow furrowed in confusion. “What in the Nine Hells vanishes into thin air?”

He grimaced—the Nine Hells indeed. The pieces fit together all too well. Something wicked, something strong, something that disappeared without a trace. Myth Drannor was not far off, and he’d heard plenty of stories about the horrible devils that haunted the ruins. But they were supposed to be trapped within the old elven mythal, weren’t they?

“Some idiot set one of those things loose,” he decided.

Some cruel new plot on the part of the drow who lived in the shadows of the forest? Or a stupid blunder by some glory-hunting adventurers in Myth Drannor. Who would set such a creature free?

For that matter, why assume that only one was loose in the forest?

Curnil looked around at the silent woods, and shuddered. He was sure that he had not seen the last of the monster he’d just tracked to the empty streambed, and he didn’t look forward to finally meeting it. He didn’t look forward to that at all.

*****

The structure above the chamber in which they fought the ghost turned out to be a mausoleum of some kind, buried deep in a forest unfamiliar to Araevin. Starbrow believed it might be one of the woodlands near old Myth Drannor, possibly the old realm of Semberholme in western Cormanthor. Araevin had never visited the eastern forest, but the fact that it was near dusk when they emerged gave him reason to believe that the portal had carried them a fair distance to the east of the mountaintop stronghold.

“Why would the folk of Myth Glaurach or Semberholme have built that mountain stronghold we first explored?” Ilsevele asked Araevin. “Are you certain the portal-builders were elves?”

He nodded. “All the portals we’ve seen so far have shown the same workmanship and design. I suppose it’s possible that someone carved newer portals and attempted to match the workmanship of the older ones, but the spells that bind the portals together all seem to be about the same age, too. I favor the simpler explanation that the whole network was constructed at one time—most likely by mages of Myth Glaurach who wanted to join their city to several distant destinations.”

Starbrow studied the forests, rubbed at his jaw, and said, “You know, it might have been mages of Myth Drannor who built this portal network. They were masters of such magic, and created portals to many distant places. Myth Glaurach might have been a destination, not an origin.”

Eventually they all decided that it didn’t matter very much, since Filsaelene’s divinations revealed that the daemonfey had not emerged from the portal network there. Instead, their adversaries had fled through the second of the two portals in the chamber below. They rested for the night in the forest above the mausoleum, and returned to the vaulted chamber beneath the empty tomb.

Araevin cast his spells of portal sensing again, and studied the doorway they had passed by before. As he suspected, it was another keyed portal, requiring nothing more than a simple phrase in Elvish. However, the magic guarding it was intermittent. Once opened, the portal would not work again for hours.

“All right, I am opening the portal,” he told the others. “The portal will remain open for a short time, just a few moments likely, and it won’t open again for hours. You must follow me quickly.”

He spoke the pass phrase, and watched the old lichencovered lintel glow brightly. He reached out and tapped the blank stone of the door, and felt the familiar dizzying sense of moving without moving. All went dark for an instant, and Araevin found himself looking on a small forest glade. One side of the glade ended in a stone wall, in which the portal’s archway stood. The morning was young there as well, the sky pale gray and streaked with high, rose-colored clouds.

“Neither east nor west this time,” Araevin observed.

He stepped away from the doorway, and studied the dark forest looming around him. The broken fingers of slender stone towers rose a short distance away, glimmering softly in the coming dawn over the treetops.

Behind him, Starbrow emerged from the portal, followed by the others in short order. The moon elf warrior halted in surprise, a look of consternation on his face.

“I know this place!” he said. “We’re near the Burial Glen, only half a mile or so from Myth Drannor.”

“Myth Drannor! Are you certain?” Ilsevele said. She quickly drew an arrow and laid it across her bow, scanning the vicinity for any enemies.

“Trust me,” Starbrow said. “I know this place.”

“Aren’t the ruins supposed to be overrun by devils and dragons, monsters and ghosts of the worst kind?” Maresa asked, obviously uneasy.

“So it is said,” Ilsevele replied.

“Myth Drannor … of course,” Araevin said.

Where else would the daemonfey go? Saelethil Dlardrageth and the rest of his accursed House had arisen in the ancient realm of Arcorar, which had become Myth Drannor. He’d already seen that Sarya knew how to use mythals to anchor demons to Faerun and compel their service—and there was a mythal here, one even more powerful than the mythal that had stood over Myth Glaurach. And mythals often served to absolutely block scrying, which would explain why no one had been able to divine the whereabouts of Sarya’s defeated army.

“Be careful,” he told the others. “I think there is a very good chance we have found Sarya’s hiding place.”

“So what now?” Ilsevele asked. “Make certain that they’re here, or return and report what we’ve found so far?”

“Press on,” Araevin said at once. “If nothing else, I need to get a look at the mythal spells and see if Sarya is manipulating this mythal as she did the other one.”

“The mythal stone is in the heart of Castle Cormanthor,” Starbrow said. “I can’t imagine how we can reach it, if the whole fey’ri army is here.”

Araevin looked at Starbrow. “You know Myth Drannor well. Mythal stones are usually hidden with care.”

“I’ve spent some time here.” Starbrow shrugged and looked away, searching the trees for danger, Keryvian’s hilt in his hand.

“I don’t need to see the stone itself, at least not right this moment. I just need to be within the bounds of the mythal’s influence.”

“That’s easier, then,” the moon elf said. “We need only walk a couple of hundred yards in that direction-” he pointed toward where the old spires could still be seen over the trees-“and we’ll be within the mythal.”

“We might be walking into the middle of Sarya’s legion,” Maresa said. “Anything could be in there. Hells, even if she isn’t here, I’ve heard enough stories about Myth Drannor to think twice about setting foot in that place.”

“I’ll conceal us, at least for a short time,” Araevin promised.

He drew out a tiny pinch of spirit gum from his bandolier of spell components, and plucked out one of his eyelashes, wincing. Pressing the lash into the gum, he carefully spoke the words of a spell. The forest around them seemed to grow dimmer, more distant.

“Araevin, what did you do?” Filsaelene asked.

“A spell of invisibility. It covers all of us, but you must remain close to me. If we run into enemies, do not strike unless you’re sure it can’t be helped, because you’ll break the spell if you do.” He looked over to Starbrow. “Lead the way, since you know where we’re going.”

Starbrow nodded grimly and took the lead. They followed an old, winding path that led from the portal glen toward the city, taking pains to move quietly and avoid talking. Many things could pierce a spell of invisibility, but if they were quiet and careful, they might be able to avoid trouble of that sort.

They reached the outskirts of the city, and took cover behind a low stone wall. Araevin sensed the moment they entered the mythal. His skin tingled with the power of the ancient magic.