The Ghost King (38 page)

Two score of Bregan D’aerthe’s force had entered the tunnels beneath the Snowflakes not far from the destroyed town of Carradoon. They moved out, silent, methodical, deadly.

I
t started hesitantly, one cheer of victory among a sea of doubting and skeptical expressions. For those outside of Spirit Soaring, the dwarves on the ground and the wizards and priests fighting from the balconies and rooftops, they saw only that single image of the great dracolich dematerializing before their astonished eyes, fading to seeming nothingness under the brilliant light of Cadderly’s conjured sun.

It was gone, of that they were all certain, and the assault of its minions had also ended with the disappearance of the great wyrm. The wizards didn’t even bother sending magical bolts out at the retreating hordes, so intent were they on the empty spot where the dracolich had been.

Then that one cheer became a chorus of absolute relief. Clapping, whistling, and shouting with joy, they moved toward the spot where the beast had departed the field as if pulled by gravity.

The cheers grew louder, shouts of joy and hope. Wizards proclaimed that the Weave itself would mend. Priests cried out in joy that they would once more be able to speak with their gods. Cheers for Cadderly rolled across the walls, some proclaiming him a god, a deity who could bring the sun itself to bear on his enemies. “All fear Cadderly!”

But that was outside Spirit Soaring. That euphoria was for those who could not hear Catti-brie screaming.

With magical anklets speeding his strides, Drizzt outpaced Cadderly, Danica, and even Bruenor, desperate as the dwarf king was to reach his daughter. The drow scrambled through the corridors, leaped a banister to the fifth step of a rising staircase, and sprinted up to the third floor three steps at a time. He banged against walls so he didn’t have to slow in his turns down the side corridors, and when he came to her door, Jarlaxle’s eye patch in hand, along with his divinely weighted scimitar, he shouldered right through it.

Jarlaxle was waiting for him, though how the mercenary had beaten him to the room, Drizzt could not fathom and didn’t have time to consider.

Catti-brie huddled against the back wall, screaming no more, but trembling with abject terror. She shielded her face with upraised arms, and between those intervening limbs, Drizzt could see that her white eyes were wide indeed.

He leaped toward her, but Jarlaxle caught him and tugged him back. “The patch!” Jarlaxle warned.

Drizzt had enough of his senses remaining to pause for a moment and don the enchanted eye patch, dropping Icingdeath to the floor in the process. He went to his beloved and enveloped her, wrapping her in a great hug and trying to calm her.

Catti-brie seemed no less frightened when the other three arrived a few heartbeats later.

“What’s it about?” Bruenor demanded of both Cadderly and Jarlaxle.

Jarlaxle had his suspicions and started to answer, but he bit his response off short and shook his head. In truth, he had no real evidence, nor did Cadderly, and they all looked to Drizzt, whose eye—the one not covered by the patch—like his wife’s, had gone wide with horror.

* * * * *

They had not destroyed the Ghost King—that much was obvious to Drizzt as he hugged Catti-brie close and slipped into the pit of despair that had become her prison.

Her eyes looked into that alien world. He, briefly, resided in a gray shadow of the world around him, mountainous terrain to mimic the Snowflakes, in the Shadowfell.

The Ghost King was there.

On the plain before Catti-brie, the dracolich thrashed and roared in defiance and pain. Its bones shone whiter, its skin, where the scales had fallen away, showed an angry red mottled by great blisters. Seared by holy light, the beast seemed out of its mind with pain and rage, and though he had just faced it in battle, Drizzt could not imagine standing before it at that horrible time.

Cadderly had stung the beast profoundly, but Drizzt could easily recognize that the wounds would not prove mortal. Already the beast seemed on the mend, and that act of reconstitution was the most terrifying of all.

The beast reared up in all of its fiendish glory, and it began to turn, faster and faster, and from its spinning form emanated shadows, like demonic arms of darkness. They reached across the plain, grasping scrambling crawlers, who shrieked, but only once, then fell dead.

Drizzt had never witnessed anything like it, and he concentrated on only a small portion of the spectacle. For the sake of his own sanity, he had to keep his emotional and mental distance from the conduit that was Catti-brie.

The Ghost King was leaching the life energy out of anything it could reach, was stealing the life-force from the crawlers and using that energy to mend its considerable wounds.

Drizzt knew that the monster would recover fully, and soon. Then the Ghost King would return to Spirit Soaring.

With great effort and greater remorse, the drow pulled himself away from his beloved wife. He couldn’t comfort her. She felt not at all his embrace, and heard not at all his gentle calls.

He had to return to his companions. He had to warn them. Finally, he managed to let go, then broke the mental link to Catti-brie. The effort left him so drained that he collapsed on the floor of the room.

He felt strong hands grab him and hoist him upright, then guide him to sit on the edge of the small bed.

Drizzt opened his eyes, pulling back the eye patch.

“Bah, but another of her fits?” said Athrogate, who had just come to the door, Thibbledorf Pwent beside him.

“No,” answered Cadderly, who stared at Drizzt. All eyes went to the priest, and many of them, Danica most of all, gasped in surprise at the sight of the man.

He wasn’t young any more.

For years, it had taken first-time visitors to Spirit Soaring considerable effort to reconcile the appearance of Cadderly Bonaduce, the accomplished and
venerable priest whose remarkable exploits stretched back two decades, for he appeared as young as his own children. But before the disbelieving stares of the three dwarves, two drow, and his wife, that youth had dissipated.

Cadderly looked at least middle-aged, and more. His skin sagged, his shoulders slumped a bit, and his muscles thinned even as the others stood gawking. He looked older than Danica, older than he was, nearer to sixty than to fifty.

“Cadderly,” Danica gasped. He managed a smile back at her and held his hand up to keep her and the others at bay.

He seemed to stabilize, and he appeared as a man in his fifties, not much older than his actual age.

“Humans,” Athrogate snorted.

“The magic of the cathedral,” Jarlaxle said. “The wounded cathedral.”

“What do you know?” Danica snapped at the drow mercenary.

“The truth,” said Cadderly, and Danica turned to him, approached him, and he allowed her a hug. “My youth, my health—are wound within the walls of Spirit Soaring,” he explained to them. “The beast wounded it—wounded us!” He gave a helpless little laugh. “And surely wounded me.”

“We will fix it,” Danica breathlessly promised.

But Cadderly shook his head. “It isn’t a matter of wood and nails and stone,” he said.

“Then Deneir will fix it with you,” Jarlaxle said, drawing curious stares with his unexpected compassion.

Cadderly started to shake his head, then looked at the drow and nodded, for it was no time for any expression of pessimism.

“But first we must ready ourselves for the return of the Ghost King,” Jarlaxle remarked, and he led everyone’s gaze to Drizzt Do’Urden, who sat on the bed staring helplessly at Catti-brie.

“What’s she seeing, elf?” Athrogate demanded. “What memory this time?”

“No memory,” Drizzt whispered. He could hardly even find his voice. “She cowers before the raging Ghost King.”

“In the Shadowfell,” Cadderly reasoned, and Drizzt nodded.

“It is there, in all its fury, and there it heals its wounds,” the drow said, looking so pitifully, so helplessly, at his lost and terrified wife. He couldn’t reach her. He couldn’t help her. He could only look on and pray that somehow Catti-brie would find her way out of darkness.

For a fleeting moment, it occurred to Drizzt Do’Urden that his wife might truly be better off dead, for it seemed that her torment might have no end. He thought back to that quiet morning on the road from Silverymoon when, despite the troubles with the ways of magic, all had seemed so right in his world, beside the woman he loved. It had been only a matter of tendays since that falling magical strand had descended upon Catti-brie and had taken her from Drizzt, but to him, sitting on that bed, so near and yet so distant from his wife, it truly seemed a lifetime ago.

All of that pain and confusion showed on his face, he realized, when he looked at his companions. Bruenor stood in the doorway, trembling with rage, tears streaking his hairy cheeks, his strong fists balled at his sides so tightly that his grip could have crushed stone. He studied Danica, so troubled by her own spouse’s dilemma, still taking the time to alternate her gaze between Cadderly, whom she stood beside, and Drizzt, and with equal sympathy and fear showing for both.

Jarlaxle put a hand on Drizzt’s shoulder. “If there’s a way to get her back, we will find it,” he promised, and Drizzt knew he meant every word. When Drizzt looked past him to Bruenor, he recognized that the dwarf understood Jarlaxle’s sincerity.

But both also knew that it wouldn’t do any good.

“It heals, and it will return,” Cadderly said. “We must prepare, and quickly.”

“To what end?” asked a voice from the hallway, and they all turned to see Ginance and the others standing there. The speaker, a wizard, held one arm in close, for his robe’s sleeve had fallen to tatters and the arm underneath it had withered to dried skin and bone. One of the dracolich’s tail swipes had touched him there.

“If we defeat it again, will it not simply retreat once more to this other world of which you speak?” Ginance asked. Cadderly winced at the devastating question from his normally optimistic assistant.

Everyone understood Cadderly’s grimace, particularly Drizzt, for the simple truth of Ginance’s remark could not be denied. How could they defeat a beast who could so readily retreat, and so easily heal, as Drizzt had witnessed when he had hugged Catti-brie?

“We will find a way,” Cadderly promised. “Before Spirit Soaring, in the old structure that was the Edificant Library, we fought a vampire. That creature, too, could run from the field if the battle turned badly. But we found a way.”

“Aye, yer dwarfs sucked the gassy thing into a bellows!” howled Thibbledorf Pwent, who had made Ivan Bouldershoulder tell him that story over and over again during the time Ivan and Pikel had spent at Mithral Hall. “And spat him out into a running stream under the sunshine!”

“What’re ye saying?” Athrogate demanded, his eyes wide with intrigue and awe. “Are ye speaking true?”

“He is,” Cadderly confirmed, and he tossed a wink at the rest of the crew, all of them glad for the light-hearted respite.

“Bwahaha!” roared Athrogate. “I’m thinking that we’re needin’ a song for that one!”

The faces around them, particularly those in the hallway, didn’t change much, however, as the weight of the situation quickly pressed the brief respite away.

“We need to prepare,” Cadderly said again, when all had muted to an uncomfortable silence.

“Or we should leave this place, and quickly,” said the wizard with the withered arm. “Run fast for Baldur’s Gate, or some other great city where the beast daren’t approach.”

“Where an army of archers will greet it with doom too sudden for its clever retreat!” another voice chimed in from beyond the room’s door.

Drizzt watched Cadderly through it all, as the chorus for retreat grew louder and more insistent, and Drizzt understood the priest’s personal turmoil. Cadderly could not disagree with the logic of swift departure, of running far from that seemingly doomed place.

But Cadderly could not go. Damage to Spirit Soaring manifested in his personal being. And Cadderly and Danica could not go far, since their children were still missing and might be out there, or in Carradoon.

Drizzt looked to Bruenor for guidance.

“I ain’t leaving,” the dwarf king said without hesitation, commanding the gathering. “Let the beast come back, and we’ll pound it into dust.”

“That is foolish …” the wizard with the withered arm started to argue, but Bruenor’s expression stopped the debate before it could begin, and made the man blanch almost as surely as had the sight of the dracolich.

“I ain’t leaving,” Bruenor said again. “Unless it’s to go find Cadderly’s kids, or to go and find me missing friend, Pikel, who stood beside me and me kin in our time o’ trial. He’s lost his brother, so Lady Danica tells me, but he’s not to lose his friends from Mithral Hall.”

“Then you’ll be dead,” someone in the hall dared to say.

“We’re all to die,” Bruenor retorted. “Some of us’re already dead, though we’re not knowin’ it. For when ye’re to run and leave yer friends behind, then ye’re surely dead.”