The Ghost King (41 page)

Ivan brought them quickly into the open air. They had found more slaughtered nightwings, nightwalkers, and crawlers. Convinced that the tunnels were infested with dark elves, Ivan and the others were happy indeed to be out of them!

Getting out of the cove took longer than expected. They didn’t dare venture out near the deeper water, having seen too much of the undead fish. Getting up the cliff face, for they had come down with magical help from Pikel, was no easy task for the weary humans or the short-legged dwarves. They tried several routes unsuccessfully and eventually crossed the cove and climbed the lower northern rise. The sun was high in the eastern sky when they at last managed to circle around and come in sight of Carradoon.

For a long, long while, they stood on the high bluff looking down at the ruins, saying not a word, making not a sound other than the occasional sob.

“We got no reason to go in there,” Ivan asserted at length. “We have friends—” a man started to protest.

“Ain’t nothing alive in there,” Ivan interrupted. “Nothing alive ye’re wantin’ to see, at least.”

“Our homes!” a woman wailed. “Are gone,” Ivan replied.

“Then what are we to do?” the first man shouted at him.

“Ye get on the road and get out o’ here,” said Ivan. “Meself and me brother’re for Spirit Soaring …”

“Me brudder!” Pikel cheered, and pumped his stump into the air.

“And Cadderly’s kids with us,” Ivan added.

“Shalane is no farther, and down a safer road,” the man argued.

“Then take it,” Ivan said to him. “And good luck to ye.” It seemed as simple as that to the dwarf, and he started away to the west, a route to circumvent the destroyed Carradoon and pick up the trail that led into the mountains and back to Spirit Soaring.

“What is happening to the world, Uncle Ivan?” Hanaleisa whispered.

“Durned if I know, girl. Durned if I know.”

C
adderly tapped a finger against his lips as he studied the woman playing out the scene before him. She was talking to Guenhwyvar, he believed, and he couldn’t help but feel like a voyeur as he studied her reenactment of a private moment.

“Oh, but she’s so pretty and fancy, isn’t she?” Catti-brie said, her hand brushing the air as if she were petting the great panther as it curled near her feet. “With her lace and finery, so tall and so straight, and not a silly word to pass those painted lips, no, no.”

She was there, but she wasn’t, Cadderly sensed. Her movements were too complete and too complex to be merely a normal memory. No, she was reliving the moment precisely as it had occurred. Catti-brie’s mind was back in time while her physical form was trapped in the current time and space.

With his unique experience regarding physical aging and regression, Cadderly was struck by the woman’s apparent madness. Was she really mad, he wondered, or was she, perhaps, trapped in a bona fide but unknown series of disjointed bubbles in the vast ocean of time? Cadderly had often pondered the past, had often wondered if each passing moment was a brief observance of an eternal play, or whether the past was truly lost as soon as the next moment was found.

Watching Catti-brie, it seemed to him that the former wasn’t as unrealistic as logic implied.

Was there a way to travel in time? Was there a way to bring foresight to those unanticipated preludes to disaster?

“Do ye think her pretty, Guen?” Catti-brie asked, drawing him from his contemplation.

The door behind Cadderly opened, and he glanced to see Drizzt enter the room, the drow wincing as soon as he recognized that Catti-brie had entered another of her fits. Cadderly begged him to silence with a wave and a finger over pursed lips, and Drizzt, Catti-brie’s dinner tray in hand, stood very still, staring at his beloved wife.

“Drizzt thinks her pretty,” Catti-brie continued, oblivious to them. “He goes to Silverymoon whenever he can, and part o’ that’s because he’s thinking Alustriel pretty.” The woman paused and looked up, though surely not at Cadderly and Drizzt, and wore a smile that was both sweet and pained. “I hope he finds love, I do,” she told the panther they could not see. “But not with her, or one o’ her court, for then he’s sure to leave us. I’m wantin’ him happy, but that I could’no’ take.”

Cadderly looked at Drizzt questioningly.

“When first we retook Mithral Hall,” he said.

“You and Lady Alustriel?” Cadderly asked.

“Friends,” Drizzt replied, never taking his eyes off his wife. “She allowed me passage in Silverymoon, and there I knew I could make great strides toward finding some measure of acceptance in the World Above.” He motioned to Catti-brie. “How long?”

“She has been in this different place for quite a while.”

“And there she is my Catti,” Drizzt lamented. “In this elsewhere of her mind, she finds herself.”

The woman began to shake then, her hands twitching, her head going back, her eyes rolling up to white. The purple glow of faerie fire erupted around her once more and she rose a bit higher from the floor, arms going out wide, her auburn hair blowing in some unfelt wind.

Drizzt put the tray down and adjusted the eye patch. He hesitated only a few moments, at Cadderly’s insistence, as the priest moved closer to Catti-brie, even dared touch her during the dangerous time of transition. Cadderly closed his eyes and opened his mind to the possibilities swirling in the discordant spasms of the tortured woman.

He fell back, quickly replaced by Drizzt, who wrapped Catti-brie in a tight hug and eased her to the floor. The drow looked at Cadderly, his expression
begging for an explanation, but he saw the priest even more perplexed, wide-eyed and staring at his hand.

Drizzt, too, took note of the hand that Cadderly had placed upon Catti-brie. What appeared as a blue translucence solidified and became flesh tone once more.

“What was that?” the drow asked as soon as Catti-brie settled. “I do not know,” Cadderly admitted. “Words I hear too often in these times. “Agreed.”

“But you seem certain that my wife cannot be saved,” said Drizzt, a sharper tone edging into his voice.

“I do not wish to give such an impression.”

“I’ve seen the way you and Jarlaxle shake your heads when the conversation comes to her. You don’t believe we can bring her back to us—not whole, at least. You have lost hope for her, but would you, I wonder, if it was Lady Danica here, in that state, and not Catti-brie?”

“My friend, surely you don’t—”

“Am I to surrender my hope as well? Is that what you expect of me?”

“You’re not the only one here clinging to desperate hope, my friend,” Cadderly scolded.

Drizzt eased back a bit at that reminder. “Danica will find them,” he offered, but how hollow his words sounded. He continued in a soft voice, “I feel as if there is no firmament beneath my feet.”

Cadderly nodded in sympathy.

“Should I battle the dracolich with the hope that in its defeat, I will find again my wife?” Drizzt blurted, his voice rising again. “Or should I battle the beast with rage because I will never again find her?”

“You ask of me … these are questions …” Cadderly blew a heavy sigh and lifted his hands, helpless. “I do not know, Drizzt Do’Urden. Nothing can be certain regarding Catti-brie.”

“We know she’s mad.”

Cadderly started to reply, “Do we?” but he held it back, not wishing to involve Drizzt in his earlier ponderings.

Was Catti-brie truly insane, or was she reacting rationally to the reality that was presented to her? Was she re-living her life out of sequence or was she truly returning to those bubbles of time-space and experiencing those moments as reality?

The priest shook his head, for he had no time to travel the possibilities of such a line of reasoning, particularly since the scholars and sages, and the great wizards and great priests who had visited Spirit Soaring had thoroughly dismissed any such possibility of traveling freely through time.

“But madness can be a temporary thing,” Drizzt remarked. “And yet, you and Jarlaxle think her lost forever. Why?”

“When the madness is tortured enough, the mind can be permanently wounded,” Cadderly replied, his dour tone making it clear that such was an almost certain outcome and not a remote possibility. “And your wife’s madness seems tortured, indeed. I fear—Jarlaxle and I fear—that even if the spell that is upon her is somehow ended, a terrible scar will remain.”

“You fear, but you do not know.”

Cadderly nodded, conceding the point. “And I have witnessed miracles before, my friend. In this very place. Do not surrender your hope.”

That was all he could give, and all that Drizzt had hoped to hear, in the end. “Do you think the gods have any miracles left in them?” the dark elf quietly asked.

Cadderly gave a helpless laugh and shrugged. “I grabbed the sun itself and pulled it to me,” he reminded the drow. “I know not how, and I didn’t try to do it. I grabbed a cloud and made of it a chariot. I know not how, and didn’t try to do it. My voice became thunder … truly, my friend, I wonder why anyone would bother asking me questions at this time. And I wonder more why anyone would believe any of my answers.”

Drizzt had to smile at that, and so he did, with a nod of acceptance. He turned his gaze to Catti-brie and reached out to gently stroke her thick hair. “I cannot lose her.”

“Let us destroy our enemy, then,” Cadderly offered. “Then we will turn all of our attention, all of our thoughts, and all of our magic to Catti-brie, to find her in her … elsewhere lucidity … and bring her sense back to our time and space.”

“Guenhwyvar,” Drizzt said, and Cadderly blinked in surprise.

“She was petting the cat, yes.”

“No, I mean in the next fight,” Drizzt explained. “When the Ghost King began to leave the field, Guenhwyvar fled faster. She does not run from a fight. Not from a raging elemental or a monstrous demon, and not from a dragon or dracolich. But she fled, ears down, full speed away into the trees.”

“Perhaps she was hunting one of the crawlers.”

“She was running. Recall Jarlaxle’s tale of his encounter with the specter he believes was once a lich of the Crystal Shard.”

“Guenhwyvar is not of this plane, and she feared creating a rift as the Ghost King opened a dimensional portal,” Cadderly reasoned.

“One that perhaps Guenhwyvar could navigate,” Drizzt replied. “One that perhaps I could navigate with her, to that other place.”

Cadderly couldn’t help but smile at the reasoning, and Drizzt offered a curious expression. “There is an old saying that great minds follow similar paths to the same destination,” he said.

“Guen?” Drizzt asked hopefully, patting his belt pouch. But Cadderly was shaking his head.

“The panther is of the Astral Plane,” the priest explained. “She cannot, of her own will, go to where the Ghost King resides, unless someone there possessed a figurine akin to your own and summoned her.”

“She fled the field.”

“Because she feared a rift, a great tear that would consume all near to her, and the Ghost King, if their dangerous abilities came crashing together. Perhaps that rift would send our enemy to the Astral Plane, or to some other plane, but likely the creature is anchored enough both here and in the Shadowfell that it could return.” He was still shaking his head. “But I have little faith in that course and fear a potential for greater disaster.”

“Greater?” Drizzt asked, and he began a hollow laugh. “Greater?”

“Are we at the point where we reach blindly for the most desperate measures we can find?” Cadderly asked.

“Are we not?”

The priest shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he admitted, his gaze fixing on Catti-brie again. “Perhaps we will find another way.”

“Perhaps Deneir will deliver a miracle?”

“We can hope.”

“You mean pray.”

“That, too.”

* * * * *

He lifted the spoon to her lips and she did not resist, taking the food methodically. Drizzt dabbed a napkin into a small bowl of warm water and wiped a bit of the porridge from her lips.

She seemed not to notice, as she seemed not to notice the taste of the food he offered. Every time he put a spoonful into Catti-brie’s mouth, every time she showed no expression at all, it pained Drizzt and reminded him of the futility of it all. He had flavored the porridge exactly as his wife liked, but he understood with each spoonful that he could have skipped the cinnamon and honey and used bitter spices instead. It wouldn’t have mattered one bit to Catti-brie.

“I still remember that moment on Kelvin’s Cairn,” he said to her. “When you relived it before my eyes, it all came back into such clear focus, and I recalled your words before you spoke them. I remember the way you had your hair, with those bangs and the uneven length from side to side. Never trust a dwarf with scissors, right?”

He managed a little laugh that Catti-brie seemed not to hear.

“I did not love you then, of course. Not like this. But that moment remained so special to me, and so important. The look on your face, my love—the way you looked inside of me instead of at my skin. I knew I was home when I found you on Kelvin’s Cairn. At long last, I was home.