Mistshore (35 page)

Someone was at her side, hauling her roughly under a cloak.

“Get her out!” she heard her mother scream. Then her voice faded. Icelin was running, running on legs that didn’t belong to her. Elgreth had picked her up. The blue fire was everywhere— in her eyes, her mouth. She was blind. She couldn’t see either of her parents.

They broke free into daylight, but the blue fire wasn’t done with them. It stretched out hungry tendrils and snared her hair

and her arms. Elgreth dropped her to the grass.

She statted to cry. The heat was too intense. It was the wotst sunburn she’d ever had. Her flesh should be melting from her bones. She heard Elgreth next to her, screaming. She reached for him, but she couldn’t touch him. The blue light was everywhere. There were other screams, shouts her young mind couldn’t comprehend but that the adult Icelin recognized as the Elvish language.

Cerest was nearby, crying out in agony. His beautiful face was melting and being reforged into something new, a visage that more closely matched his soul. Icelin curled up in a ball on the grass and waited for it to be over. She didn’t care if she died, as long as the pain stopped.

Oblivion came, sweeping its cool hand across her body. She was resting in a dark place. She wanted to sleep there forever. To wake was to re-enter that world of horrid pain.

When she opened her eyes again, she was still on the ground. She could see the tip of the tower, weirdly, in her peripheral vision, as she stared up at the sky. Star and moonlight illuminated the scene now, and somewhere, far off, she smelled another campfire burning.

Elgreth leaned over her, adding another blanket to a growing pile on her small body. Her nose was cold. Elgreth’s breath fogged in the night ait.

“Is she awake?” It was Cerest’s voice. He spoke in the human tongue. He sounded weak.

Elgreth didn’t reply. He stroked her cheek, and threaded his fingers in her hair to push it away from her face.

He looked broken, the adult Icelin remembered. Gone were the light-hearted smile and the fringes of youth that she’d seen by the campfire. They had been replaced by a tremendous weight and sadness.

She reached up to touch him. His skin was warm, his moustache hair brittle. He smelled like smoke. It was no campfire that

burned, only the remnants of the Rikraw Tower—the funeral pyre for her parents.

When Elgreth left her at last, she crawled out from under the blankets and walked to the tower. Elgreth called to her, screamed for her to stop. But she couldn’t. Her parents were somewhere in the wreck of stones.

The tower’s collapsed wall was a black blemish on the landscape. Scorch marks sprayed out from it in jagged, oily streaks. Viewed from above, the tower might have been a stygian sun.

Elgreth was still screaming. He’s injured, Icelin thought, or he’d be running after me. I am wrong for leaving him. But she couldn’t make her feet stop walking.

She caught her foot on a rock. When she looked down, she realized the rock was a hand, clutching her ankle. The fingernails were black, the palms blistered and oozing white pus.

Frightened, Icelin jerked away. She followed the arm attached to the hand and found Cerest, cuded on the ground. He had one arm thrown across his face. The appendage’was out of its socket. His other arm stretched toward her, tiying to stop her.

Icelin looked at that blistered, trembling hand for a long time before she turned and resumed her long journey to the tower.

The stones vibrated with a power beyond sun-warmth. Everything was cold now, but she could feel where the energy had been. When her eyes adjusted to the dimness inside the tower, Icelin could see there was nothing left. Her mother’s hair, her father’s spectacles—the spellplague had burned them to ash.

She touched the blackened stones, caught the ash-falls drifting through the air. Illuminated in moonlight, they might have been dust or the remains of flesh. She caught as many as she could in her small hands and clutched them against her chest. She started to cry and found she was too dehydrated for the tears to form.

Carefully, she got down on her hands and knees and placed

her cheek against the ground. The ash stirred and warmed her skin. She stayed there, imagining her mother’s arms around her, while Elgreth screamed for her outside the tower.

Daerovus Tallmantle was a patient man, and his office demanded discipline, but, as he surveyed the wraiths circling the distant Ferryman’s “Waltz, he concluded that he’d been patient long enough.

“That’s the place,” he said.

“Can we trust him?” Tesleena asked.

The Warden thought of Tarvin, his head crushed by a plank. His body had been borne away to the Watch barracks and then to his family.

He surveyed the group of men and women that stood before him in homespun disguises. Their eyes flitted between the Ferryman’s Waltz and his face.

“You know what’s expected of you,” he said. “If any man or woman among you feels he cannot perform his duty, you may accompany Tarvin’s body back to the barracks. I look you in the eyes and ask this plainly: will you see justice done?”

A chorus of “ayes” answered him. As promised, he stared each of them in the eyes, hunting deceit. He found none, and was satisfied.

“On the boats,” he said. ” ‘Ware the wraiths, but Icelin is the one you want. Bring her in.”

“You have to untangle yourself from this,” said a voice Icelin did not, at first, recognize.

She looked up, and for some reason was unsurprised to find Aldren standing in the shadows of the tower.

“I didn’t think you could weave yourself into memories,” Icelin said.

“Only yours, it would seem,” Aldren replied. “But I would rather not be here. This is a foul place, and you’re needed elsewhere.”

“I don’t know how to leave,” she said. “What if the plague won’t let me?”

Aldren made a motion with his gnarled hand, and his staff appeared in the clawed grip, as if it had always been there, invisible.

“To weave magic requires discipline,” he said. “At the best of times, anything can go wrong, because the Art runs unchecked. We are its only shepherds now.” He held out his staff to her. “To be a weaver requires a focus,” he said, “a tool to channel your energy. You should never rely on such a thing completely, but in the worst of times it can help you endure the wildness of the raw Art.”

Icelin touched the staff and felt a pulsing energy. The Art ran through the staff like blood in wooden veins. She.could feel the contained power, frightening and pure.

“What if it gets away from me again?”

“It surely will,” Aldren said. “Such things are inevitable. The only thing you can do is focus on what is most important to you—what’s worth saving.”

“Ruen.” She remembered his name as if he had been the dream, and this her only reality. She stood up, and her body was an adult’s, though weak and fragile.

The tower melted around her. The black stones faded, as if all the filth was being drained from her memory. She closed her eyes against the swirling, turbulent cleansing.

She smelled the harbor, but when she opened her eyes, the scene had changed. Her mind couldn’t process it at first.

Ruen stood thirty feet away, fighting two men at once. A third man floated in the water, his right arm and chest contorted at an odd angle in the water.

She was lying on Ruen’s raft. Cerest crouched over her. His crumpled face showed concern, but Icelin noticed he held a dagger slackly in his fight hand.

“Are you well?” he asked.

She licked her lips and tried to speak, but she’d been in her mind too long. The words came out as incoherent mumbles.

Cerest leaned closer. “Say it again, Icelin. I didn’t hear you.”

Icelin didn’t repeat what she’d been trying to say. She brought her knee up and crushed it into Cerest’s stomach.

He lurched back onto his right elbow, losing his balance when he tried to bring the knife to bear. He pitched over the side of the raft into the water.

Icelin sprang to her feet and immediately saw that Ruen was in trouble. He held off the two men at his right and left Bank, but the man on the crow’s nest was frantically cranking a crossbow into position. He propped it on the lip of the nest to steady his aim.

Cerest thrashed in the water. He grabbed for the raft. Icelin kicked him in the face. Blood exploded from his nose; her heel had knocked it out of position. The elf cursed and backstroked, putting a safe distance between them.

Lifting her.arms, Icelin chanted a spell and brought her hands together, as if she were cupping them around the crow’s nest. The basket of rotting wood burst into flames that rose up around the man with the crossbow.

The man shrieked and dropped the weapon. It landed in the water and sank. The man dived from the nest, fistfuls of flame eating at his clothing. He hit the watet belly first.

The men fighting Ruen had their backs to the crow’s nest. They tried to turn to see their companion’s fate, but Ruen wouldn’t give them a respite. He clipped the shortet of the two in the jaw, spinning him half toward the water and upsetting his balance on the bones of the leviathan.

It was all about balance. He kept them both at bay because they couldn’t keep their feet. If they’d been on level ground, Ruen would have had several of his bones crushed by now.

While the shorter man steadied himself, Ruen dodged a

roundhouse punch from a man wearing a mail vest and thick gauntlets. Built like a brick, this man would be harder to move with simple punches.

Icelin picked her spell carefully, focusing on the chain links pressed tight against the man’s body. She could feel the trembling in her fingers as she worked through the complicated gestures.

Two spells, by the gods. Give me two spells without pain, Icelin pleaded. Lady Mystra, I can’t pray to your memory. I never knew you. But if any goddess can hear me…

She flexed her fingers and released the spell. Her vision blurred. Nausea rose in her gut, and she felt cold, sticky sweat clinging to her forehead. She forced past the sickness and concentrated on the brick man’s mail vest.

There was no visible change. Ruen took a glancing punch to his shoulder from the shorter man. He answered with a kick that took the man’s tight leg out from under him. The short man grabbed an overhanging bone, perhaps a rib of the long-dead creature. The bone snapped off. The man grabbed wildly for his companion and buried his fingers in the mail links.

The brick man roared in pain, and the shorter man cried out as well. Smoke rose from the brick man’s clothing where it had pressed against the metal links.

Wide-eyed, the brick man patted his chest, touching hot links wherever his hands rested.

Ruen shot a quick glance at Icelin across the water. He jerked his head in acknowledgment.

“Let me help you with that,” he told the brick man. He aimed a kick to the man’s midsection. The brick man howled and fell backward into the water. A chorus of snakelike hisses rose from where the hot metal touched the cold water. The brick man sank to his chin, a look of relief crossing his face.

“Get back up ere!” cried the short man. He dodged a second kick from Ruen. “Help me!”

The brick man shook his head and swam away. He was obviously done with the fight.

Icelin turned her attention from Ruen to Cerest, who was climbing onto the raft behind her. His knife was gone, but he looked furious enough to kill her with his bare hands. His nose was a red, twisted mass on his face. The blood seeping into his scars made him look like a demon. Icelin remembered the scene outside the tower, when the newly scarred elf had looked up at her young self in agony.

“I remember now,” she told him. “The tower. My parents. Elgreth. Did you really think it was safe for us to go in, Cerest? Or was that just what you told yourself? The same way you convinced yourself it wasn’t your fault that they died?”

“I had to weigh the risk and reward,” Cerest said. There was no remorse in the words. “The knowledge and artifacts we might have found would have enriched all our lives, including yours.” •

“Oh yes, my life has been enriched indeed,” Icelin said.

“I was more than willing to take care of both of you afterwards,” Cerest said. “Elgreth could have used his scar to unearth treasures unimaginable. He’d become just like my father, a god of magic—the very aberration I never thought to see again. But he refused to help me. He forced me to look to you.”

“And here we are,” Icelin said, “in another plague den.” She listened to the sounds of fighting behind her, Ruen’s muffled cry of pain as he took a blow to some vulnerable part of his body.

“I’m sorry,” she told Cerest as she came to a silent decision. “You named me, Cerest, but you were never my family. I thought my family was Waterdeep and a sundries shop. That would have been more than enough for me. But my family is everywhere: Waterdeep, the Dalelands, Aglarond, Luskan—even a burned-out tower. Their footsteps can be heard in the tombs and lost places of Faerűn.”

“You can be more than they ever were,” Cerest said. “You survived, when Elgteth did not.”

“I survived because my gift is different,” Icelin said. “Poor Cerest, I share your curse. I don’t have Elgreth’s sense of magic. I only know memory.”

She took a step toward him and lifted her hands, the palms facing each other. Cerest flinched, but only for a breath. His eyes reflected the blue glow illuminating her fingers. He was transfixed, watching the power swirl in the empty air between her hands.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Protecting what I have left,” Icelin said. She felt the cold touch her palms. She thought it was the first taste of the frost ray forming, but the sensation spread up her arms and lingered around her shoulders.

Icelin looked up and saw the wraiths swirling silently, less than ten feet above theit heads. Like Cerest, they seemed transfixed by the radiant glow that was now climbing her arms. Her flesh glowed cerulean, far beyond the scope of the attack spell.

“What’s happening?” Cerest demanded. He looked up at the wraiths. Icelin followed his gaze. Beyond the undead, another blue glow was forming on the bones of the leviathan. More of the creatures dived and chased the light around the bones. Like mad fireflies they soaked up the raw spell energy.