Forsaken House (5 page)

Philaerin lay crumpled before the open door, his staff broken in his burned hands.

“Eldest… .” Araevin whispered.

He picked his way down the scored passageway and knelt beside the high mage. A black, even hole had been blasted through the center of Philaerin’s chest by some slaying spell, but none of the attackers had managed to so much as scratch him otherwise. Araevin glanced at the passage around him, trying to guess at how many spells had been thrown there while the battle raged in the tower above. Demons, yugoloths, and such monsters summoned from the infernal planes did not leave bodies behind when they were slain—they returned to the foul hells from which they had been called forth. Philaerin might have repelled a few attackers, a small army of them, or none at all, but the battle had gone on long enough for many spells to damage the passageway.

Araevin rose and stepped into the vault of Nandiyerron, quickly examining what was left of its contents. All the Tower’s vaults stored a number of relatively minor items, such as rings bearing protective enchantments, or arms and armor that any wizard or priest of middling power might make. He was not concerned about things like that. It was not good that such devices had been stolen, but they were not truly dangerous. On the other hand some of the vaults held uniquely dangerous items, things that could do great harm in the wrong hands. And Araevin saw at once that something important was indeed missing from the vault.

“The Gatekeeper’s Crystal,” he said aloud. “Damnation.”

No one knew who had made the Gatekeeper’s Crystal, or even when it had been made, but it was a powerful weapon indeed, an artifact that could easily disjoin and destroy magical wards and protections of any sort. The device consisted of three similar shards, each a dagger-shaped wedge of pale unbreakable crystal. Tower Reilloch held only one of the shards. The other two were lost, as far as Araevin knew. But perhaps those who had attacked the Tower knew differently.

“Araevin? Is that you?” Quastarte’s voice echoed from the passages outside.

“I am here, Loremaster,” Araevin called. He stepped out

of the armory and knelt beside Philaerin again. “I have

found Philaerin And I have found what is missing.” The old sun elf entered the passageway and halted. “Is he—?”

“Yes,” said Araevin. “He was trying to keep them from the shard.”

“Ah, no,” Quastarte breathed as he hurried to the side of the Eldest, tears brimming in his eyes. “So that is what they were after, then. The Seldarine know what sort of evil they plan with it.”

“They will need the other two pieces to use the device, won’t they?” Araevin asked.

“Each shard is dangerous in its own right,” Quastarte said. “But in conjunction, the three shards together are terribly powerful. Almost one thousand years ago the joined crystal was used to destroy the defenses of Myth Ondath. Only five years past, the Harpers used the crystal to throw down the old defenses of Hellgate Keep and raze that fortress of evil. But each time the crystal is used for such a purpose, its three parts separate and hurl themselves across vast distances and into far planes. It took us two years to find this one piece after the Harpers used it against Ascalhorn.”

And now it is gone.”

Quastarte sighed and said, “We thought it would be safe here, if anywhere.”

Araevin looked down at the fallen high mage on the pocked stone floor. Philaerin’s face was not peaceful in death. His teeth were bared in a rictus of agony, and his eyes were wide and staring. He reached down to compose the Eldest’s features, but as his hand neared Philaerin’s face, a thin, cold sensation of magic at work briefly kissed his fingertips.

He drew back quickly and said, “Odd. There’s a spell on him.”

Quastarte leaned close.

“Hmm. Yes, I feel it too. A defense of his? Or some curse of his enemies?”

“It was not very powerful. Not much of a defense or a curse.” Araevin considered for a moment. “I will try to negate it.”

Quastarte nodded. Araevin drew a breath, then spoke the words of a spell of negation, canceling out the charm he had sensed. To his surprise, the spell crumpled at once, flaring bright blue as it did so. He saw at once that it was a minor dimensional pocket of some sort, a temporary storing place not much larger than a big goblet. The spell ended, and from the imaginary space a small gemstone suddenly appeared, clattering to the ground. It was a deep green, so dark as to be almost black, and a glimmering white star flickered in its depths.

“What in the world?” Araevin breathed.

“A telkiira!” Quastarte said. “I have not seen one like this before.”

Araevin leaned back, thinking. Telkiira were small gemstones that could hold the thoughts or memories of their makers, even potent arcane lore such as spells or the rites necessary to create enchanted items.

“I wonder what this one holds?” he said.

“Whatever it was, Philaerin considered it important enough to conceal from his attackers.” Quastarte frowned and picked it up in his hand, studying it carefully, and continued, “It doesn’t advertise its secret, it seems. Sometimes all one has to do is touch a telkiira in order to find out what it contains. But this one is guarded against casual contact.”

“Would the demons return for that, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” the loremaster said. “But we should make sure that it does not fall into their hands. Perhaps you should hold onto it, Araevin. If the demons do return, you will defend it better than I.”

Araevin took the stone and gazed into its depths. It seemed an ordinary gemstone, if a somewhat valuable one.

“Very well,” said Araevin. “Since our enemies have shown that they can enter our vaults and know something of where we keep our more powerful relics, it may make sense to keep it close at hand instead of simply hiding it again.”

He exchanged a dark look with Quastarte and understood that the old loremaster shared his true concern. The raiders had known their way around Tower Reilloch quite well. They might have prepared their attack for months, secretly scrying the Tower’s defenses … or perhaps they had had assistance from someone familiar with the Tower’s secrets.

“True,” Quastarte said, thinking aloud. “Of course, that suggests to me that perhaps you should remove it from the tower entirely. Do you think you might absent yourself for a short time?”

“If you are certain you will not need me here,” Araevin replied. He found a silk handkerchief in his pocket and carefully wrapped the telkiira within. “I could go to Lord Miritar’s estate and visit with Ilsevele and her father for a time. He is a councilor of the realm, and deserves a firsthand report of what happened here. And it would seem perfectly innocuous for Ilsevele and I to go to Elion for a time. No one would think it out of the ordinary, would they?”

The old loremaster grasped Araevin by the shoulder and said, “We may be jumping at shadows, but at this moment I would rather take too many precautions than too few.”

“Do not hesitate to summon me back if I am needed,” Araevin replied. He stood and slipped the small, silk-wrapped stone into his belt pouch. “Once I am away from

here, I will examine the stone more closely to see if I can determine what is hidden inside. It may shed some light on who our attackers were, and what they intend to do with the shard.”

“And I will search through Philaerin’s tomes and journals to see if he makes any mention of it.” Quastarte rose as well. “Come. Before you leave, we must summon the other mages and tell them what has been taken from the Tower.”

Nurthel Floshin stretched wide his black, leathery wings, and dropped closer to the snow-covered ground. He was in a hurry, and he beat his powerful wings tirelessly against the winter sky. Nurthel cut a striking figure, a demonic elf with scarlet-scaled skin and large batlike wings, clad in armor of enchanted golden scales, one eye covered by a rune-scribed patch.

Miles behind him, the rest of his raiding party proceeded on foot, too heavily burdened with their plunder to fly. It was not a particularly good day for flying, anyway. The clouds were low and thick, and freezing rain was falling all across the rugged hills and thick forests of the Delimbiyr Vale.

Nurthel allowed himself a smile of pleasure. The Gatekeeper’s Crystal gave him the perfect excuse to hurry on ahead of the other fey’ri. He carried the artifact inside his golden scale shirt, wrapped tightly in a leather pouch. He started gaining altitude again, as the foothills of the Nether Mountains began to mount skyward from the river vale. His mistress had chosen her stronghold with an eye toward remoteness and isolation. None but the most determined—or foolhardy—of travelers passed that way. There the Delimbiyr turned east, fed by numerous streams known as the Talons—swift, racing rivers that descended from the snow-covered mountains to the north.

Nurthel followed the Starsilver, the second of those

streams, and after a few miles found a round hilltop rising up before him. Its slopes were shaped in graceful terraces inundated by the forest, and old white ramparts green with moss and vines climbed across the hillside. Glaurachyndaar, a great city of fallen Eaerlann, had once been known as Myth Glaurach, City of Scrolls. Crumbling colonnades and empty buildings choked with rubble were all that remained of the elven city, but deep catacombs led to hidden armories and jagged chasms beneath the hill.

He wheeled once and dived down through the snow-clad fir trees, alighting in a ruined old courtyard. He shook his wings vigorously, ignoring the quiver of fatigue from his rapid flight, and folded them behind his back. Nurthel made his way through an old archway into the palace proper. A thin crust of snow lay on the uneven ground within the white walls, and most of the halls and corridors were open to the sky above. It struck Nurthel as supremely ironic that the very palace of Myth Glaurach’s grand mage should serve as the hidden citadel of she who had once been the most dangerous enemy of the realm of Eaerlann.

He came to a broken white tower and entered. That place at least still had intact floors above, so the ceiling kept out the rain and the snow, but its broad windows were blank and empty, the old theurglass that once covered them long since gone. The chamber possessed a magnificent view of forest-covered hills and snowy mountain peaks beyond Comfortable furnishings—elegant divans, credenzas, and bookshelves, with a gorgeous tapestry secured on one wall—stood carefully placed in the room’s interior so as not to be exposed to the weather.

“My lady!” he cried. “I have returned!”

“So I see, Nurthel.” A sinuously graceful figure turned from the wide, empty window. “You took care to conceal your retreat?”

“Yes, my lady. We used the ring gate to return to the ruins of Ascalhorn.”

Ascalhorn, the city later known as Hellgate Keep, and later still nothing but a windswept ruin, was almost thirty

miles away. The fey’ri lord went to one knee, bowing in the presence of his mistress.

Like the fey’ri who served her, Sarya Dlardrageth possessed both demon and elf blood. But in her case, she was a true daemonfey, and her demonic bloodline was pronounced indeed. The demonspawned sun elves known as fey’ri were descended through several generations from the mating of elf and demon, but Sarya was a princess of House Dlardrageth. Her father was a balor, a great and terrible demon lord. Sarya’s skin was deep red and her hair a blazing orange-gold as bright as a flame. She favored gold-embroidered robes of black that overlapped like plates of dark armor, carefully crafted to incorporate powerful defensive enchantments and leave her adequate room to flex her wings in flight or wield the sinister spells at her command.

“You may rise.” Sarya said.

She turned her back on the windows and came closer, moving with the restless grace of a predatory animal kept in a space too small for her. Nurthel knew that she used the tower for her own quarters because of the numerous windows and open spaces beyond, since she strongly disliked confining spaces.

“Well, Lord Floshin, let me see my prize,” she said.

Nurthel lifted his eyes to his queen’s face and stood. Despite her fiendish heritage, she was seductively beautiful, with classic elf features and the figure of a winsome girl. At a glance one might think her no more than twenty years of age … but her eyes were cold and malevolent with an ageless evil. Sarya Dlardrageth had first walked the world more than five thousand years past.

“As you command, my lady,” he said. He reached beneath his tunic of scale mail and drew out the broken crystal in its pouch, offering it to her. “The paleblood elves and their rabble were careless, as you said they would be. They were not expecting an attack, and we slew dozens before they remembered how to fight.”

“No one remembers how to fight, in this diminished age,” Sarya replied. “How many did you lose?”

She did not place any great value on her servants’ lives, but she didn’t have many fey’ri at her command. Each life was a resource not to be wasted lightly.

“Five fey’ri fell to the Tower defenders, my lady. We were careful to carry off the dead. Most of the yugoloths and demons died too, but of course they were summoned and bound for that purpose, and we expected to spend them in battle.”

“You have done well, Nurthel. Very well indeed.”

Sarya took the bundle from his hand and quickly unwrapped the crystal, discarding the cover. She caressed the device with her taloned hands. The stone was a pale, milky white, perhaps six inches long and triangular in shape, with a curiously beveled base and a long, tapering point. A glimmer of violet fire seemed to dance in its depths. Swirls of phosphorescence drifted in the wake of Sarya’s fingertips as she touched the crystal.

“For over five thousand years I dreamed of holding the key to my prison in my hand,” she mused, admiring the stone. “Fifty-eight centuries crawled by while I waited and watched. Sharrven and Siluvanede passed away, and I waited. Eaerlann—hated Eaerlann—grew old and decrepit and forgot the ancient enemies her lords had imprisoned beneath their fortresses, and still I waited and watched. The city of Ascalhorn was raised up over my living tomb, and I watched when demons and devils warred in the streets, driving out the simpering humans and their paleblooded friends. Fifty centuries I dreamed of this, Nurthel, and now only five short years after gaining my freedom, the crystal is mine. The irony of it!”