Final Gate (25 page)

Araevin looked back just in time to see a wall of whirling black soul-stuff reaching out for him with ethereal talons, plucking at his breast. Dozens of contorted faces leered and hissed at him, a visage of pure madness. He threw up his arm to ward off the fearsome apparition—and the chamber exploded with brilliant daylight.

Donnor stood behind him, legs thrown out shoulderwide, his cupped hands high over his helmed head. Above his outstretched arms spun a blazing orb of molten gold too bright to look at.

“Part this eternal night, Lord of Morning!” the cleric shouted. “Drive away the shadows that beset us, and shield us with your holy radiance!”

The dead souls of Lorosfyr wailed in anguish and shied away, repelled by the blistering light. The looming apparitions simply dissolved into streamers of dark mist, recoiling from the cleric. Selydra threw up an arm to shield her eyes, even as she reached out with one hand to wrench her blot of destruction out of the wall. More brick and stone disintegrated as the small manifestation of nothingness worked its way free.

“Your conjured sun will not avail you, priest!” Selydra hissed. The enchantress threw out her hand in Donnor’s direction, and the bubble of twisting, tortured space jumped forward in answer to her command.

“Aillesel Seldarie!” Araevin watched the deadly missile advancing on his friend, frozen in helplessness. He had no more spells that could counter or parry Selydra’s annihilating sphere. Furiously he cast around for something, anything, to defeat the Pale Sybil’s magic.

Donnor Kerth grimaced and shifted his shield from his shoulder, interposing the warboard. “Araevin, what do I do?” the cleric shouted.

“Keep away from it!” Araevin answered. It was not a good answer.

Selydra’s sphere was much quicker and more agile than the armored cleric, and even if Donnor did stay away from the damned thing, she would turn it against another of his companions.

Selydra smiled in cold satisfaction, amused by Araevin’s dilemma. “You have no answer to my spell, High Mage?” she taunted him.

Araevin wheeled back to face her, beginning to summon the power for a fierce attack if he could not find a way to banish her deadly orb. Many spells vanished with the death of their creator, after all. But then his eye fell on the slender black scepter hanging from the Pale Sybil’s hip.

In a lightning-swift flash of inspiration, he changed the spell he was casting and instead shouted the words of a straightforward telekinesis spell. He snatched the Pale Sybil’s magical scepter-the scepter with which Selydra had absorbed or deflected some of his best spells—from her belt in one quick move, summoning the device to his hand. Then, before Selydra could begin to even frame a protest, he turned his back on her and used the telekinesis spell to hurl the slender rod of black platinum right at the spinning sphere of nothing.

“You fool!” Selydra screeched.

The sphere’s fearsome touch destroyed the rod, and the rod’s potent negation magic dispelled the sphere. Two powerful forces that were never meant to meet struggled with each other for one impossible heartbeat, and sphere and rod together exploded in a tremendous blast of raving purple energy. Jagged rifts of fractured reality flailed out from the site of the concussion. One grazed the Pale Sybil’s left side, and in the blink of an eye she was wrenched away and hurled into some distant plane.

“Araevin! What did you do?” Maresa cried. She leaped aside from one sharp-edged rift that swept past her. “How in the Nine Hells does this make things better?”

The sun elf shook his head, trying to brush off the ringing metaphysical concussion that still echoed between his ears. He finally managed to steady himself on his feet. “Stay by me!” he called to his companions. “If we are caught in a rift, we all must be caught together!”

Jorin and Nesterin exchanged dubious looks, but they quickly backstepped from the warriors of Lorosfyr—many of whom had already been scythed to pieces in the blast, or who stood around stupefied without the Pale Sybil’s direction. Araevin’s companions gathered close, warily watching for any reality-shards that might come their way, while the mage searched for a warding spell to deflect the rifts.

“Araevin, the chest!” Jorin called.

Araevin looked back at the pedestal on which the iron coffer rested. To his horror, a flickering discontinuity drifted down toward it, spinning lazily end over end like a piece of a broken mirror. He was out of time.

“Get ready! We will teleport away from here!” he snapped.

“I thought you said you couldn’t teleport in the Underdark,” Maresa protested.

But Araevin did not answer. Instead he hurled himself at the pedestal, ignoring the fraying spell wards that surrounded it. Recklessly he scooped up the small iron coffer from its resting place and leaped back. The powerful conjuration he had sensed on the shard unleashed itself all at once. Above the pedestal a great and terrible monster began to take shape, a thing of fiery tentacles and clustered eyes-some sort of demon dragged into the vault of Lorosfyr by Selydra’s spells. But broken pieces of discontinuity scythed toward the monster.

In a distant part of his mind, the mage in Araevin wondered what would happen when a monster in the process of transitioning itself from the netherworlds encountered a drifting planar rift. He chose not to find out. Praying to the Seldarine that he did not fumble his words, he barked out his teleport spell and pulled himself and his companions out of the disintegrating vault and into a maelstrom of waiting blackness.

*****

Hundreds of campfires flickered faintly along the wooded hillsides on each side of the dusty cart-track the humans called Rauthauvyr’s Road. The Sembian army had chosen to pass the hours of darkness three miles south of Essembra, the only town of any size at all in the broad land of Battledale. Most of the townsfolk had fled south to Tasseldale several tendays ago, unwilling to become Sarya Dlardrageth’s subjects. For her own part, the daemonfey queen could not have cared less what the folk of Battledale thought of her dominion. They were simply irrelevant to her calculations.

On the other hand, the army of Sembia was not. She ground her teeth, galled at the thought that she had to account for the interference of a human realm in her affairs. But that was the simple truth of the diminished age in which she now found herself, wasn’t it? She had humbled Hillsfar and enticed Zhentil Keep away from the board, but despite her best efforts, Sembia was still a force to reckon with.

“How strong are they?” Sarya asked her warmaster. Mardeiym Reithel stood nearby in the darkness, along with half a dozen more of her fey’ri captains and lords. The daemonfey watched the humans from a circle of standing stones half a mile from the Sembian camp.

“A little more than seven thousand, my lady,” Mardeiym said quietly.

Sarya scowled and returned her attention to the foe that worried her far more than any army of human sellswords—the army of Seiveril Miritar. In the forests a short distance from the human camp gleamed the soft light of scores upon scores of elven lanterns. The two armies marched only a mile or two apart, ready to come to each other’s support should one come under attack.

“What of Miritar’s army?” Sarya asked.

“Four thousand elves, including many elite warriors and champions. Another fifteen hundred Dalesfolk march under Miritar’s banner. We do not know much about the Dalesfolk, though.”

“The palebloods are weak, and the humans are mercenary rabble,” muttered Xhalph. “We could break the Sembians in short order, I’d wager.”

“I am not so sure, Lord Xhalph,” the warmaster said carefully. “While it is true that you shattered a number of the Sembian mercenaries when you struck them near the Standing Stone, I think that many of these fellows are sellswords of a better quality. They are certainly better led now under Selkirk. The Sembians may prove more tenacious than you think.”

“In other words, all the mercenaries who were going to flee have fled already?” Sarya did not attempt to conceal the acid in her voice.

Mardeiym did not respond. The warmaster had learned to tread lightly around the daemonfey queen and her son over the last few days, as had most of the other fey’ri. If he wondered why Sarya fumed with black fury or why Xhalph’s habitual bloodlust had grown into a storm of murderous violence that exploded at the least provocation, he was clever enough not to say so. If Sarya believed that Mardeiym or any other fey’ri had the least suspicion that she had been forced to kneel to Malkizid, she would have killed him in an instant. She would have torn him to pieces with her own naked talons.

I will not be your thrall for long, Sarya silently promised the archdevil. If Malkizid thought the Dlardrageths would take him for their lord and master, then he was a fool. Sarya intended to dispense with Malkizid’s help as soon as she could … but she would have to defeat the armies of Evermeet and Sembia first, and for that she needed the archdevil’s help for a little bit longer, as much as it galled her to admit it.

When I have crushed my enemies, we will see who is the master and who is the slave, Sarya told herself for the hundredth time. I will carve out Malkizid’s heart for his arrogance and his presumption!

But first she had to defeat the enemies at her doorstep.

“We could strike them tonight with our assembled fey’ri and demons,” Jasrya Aelorothi mused aloud. “In but a short time we could bring five hundred fey’ri and half again that number of demons, yugoloths, and devils to this place.”

“We have taught our enemies to be wary of sudden attacks,” Mardeiym answered her. “They have been careful to fortify their encampment at the end of each day’s march. I advise against attacking either encampment with anything less than our whole strength.”

“Are we to simply allow them to march on Myth Drannor, then?” Jasrya snarled at Mardeiym.

“For two more days, that is exactly what we will do,” Sarya said. She turned away from the distant points of firelight and lanternlight to her assembled captains. They fell silent, sensing that she had arrived at her decision. “We will harass them, of course. Our demons will harry their march—kill stragglers, waylay scouts, and teach them to fear being out of sight of their banner. But we will not try their camp again, not yet, anyway.”

“Where do you intend to give battle, then, Mother?” Xhalph asked.

Sarya leaped across the menhir circle with one easy snap of her wings, and pointed out over the forests to the north. “There,” she breathed. “The Vale of Lost Voices. We will meet Miritar and his human allies in the Vale of Lost Voices.”

16 Eleasias, the Year of Lightning Storms

The Crusade marched through the lush forest, a river of diamond and sunlight in the warm green shadows. Seiveril rode at their head, caparisoned for battle. He did not expect to meet the daemonfey yet—after all, Myth Drannor was still sixty miles ahead of him—but a sudden demonic ambush was more than likely, now that he had led his warriors out of the ancient wards of Semberholme.

Seiveril guided his mount to one side of the hidden elven road along which his warriors marched, and paused to watch his warriors pass. His guards formed a wary ring around him, watching for any sign of daemonfey attack.

“The Sembians are keeping up?” he asked Edraele Muirreste.

“We could march to Myth Drannor and back twice in the time it would take them to get there,” the young captain said. She failed to suppress a restless flick of her head. Edraele was simply not made for standing still. “I suppose they’re still moving north, if that’s what you mean. Rauthauvyr’s Road is about two miles east of us here, but we’re still in touch with the overmaster’s banner.”

“Good,” Seiveril said. Should Sarya Dlardrageth attack the Sembians, Seiveril could join them quickly … and if the daemonfey struck at him, he intended to fall back toward the Sembians and bring both allied armies into the battle in that fashion.

For three days they’d marched north through the forest, paralleling the Sembian march along the road. A contingent of elven captains and spellcasters marched with Selkirk, while a whole company of Sembian officers and Silver Ravens remained close by Seiveril’s banner. The hope was that the exchange of trusted captains would make it easier for the leaders of the armies to coordinate their efforts when battle came. Seiveril did not know if the arrangement would work out, but any measure that reinforced cooperation over rivalry would go that much farther toward keeping their swords pointed at the daemonfey instead of each other, and that was no small thing. On the other hand, he had spent almost no time in Ilsevele’s company since the two armies started on their way north, simply because she was the elf the Sembian leaders knew the best.

He turned his attention to the warriors passing him by. Several strong companies of wood elf scouts were already well in front of the vanguard, and a mile or more ahead of him. First came the Vale Guards of Evereska, grim and purposeful, shining silver in their mail hauberks. The Evereskans noticed Seiveril watching, and hailed him. “Miritar! Miritar!” they called, raising their arms in salute.

“Quietly, now!” he answered them. “Let’s keep the daemonfey guessing about our whereabouts instead of shouting out where we are.”

The Evereskans passed into the tree-shadow, vanishing in the gloom. Behind them rode a large contingent of Seiveril’s own Silver Guards, who saluted both him and their captain Edraele. Seiveril watched them pass, and Starbrow joined him, riding up from the rear of the column The moon elf looked over the march and nodded in approval.

“We’ll be on the other side of the Vale of Lost Voices by sunset,” he said.

“I suppose Sarya has decided to wait for us in Myth Drannor,” Edraele observed. “Still, I’d like to be sure of that. With your permission, I think I’ll catch up to my company and see to our scouts.” Seiveril nodded to her, and the small moon elf tapped her heels to her horse’s flanks and cantered after the Silver Guard.

“We should make sure to provide the Sembians with plenty of guides for their crossing of the Vale,” Seiveril thought aloud. “I doubt that their rear guard or siege train will make it all the way across before sunset, and I would not want the guardians of the place to mistake our human allies for enemies.”