The Ring of Winter (20 page)

The weight of exhaustion pushed down on Artus, a feeling compounded by the drain of hunger, “I hate to say this, since I’m almost ready to eat the next beetle that crawls across the floor, but we’d better keep moving. The sun is coming up, so the goblins will be looking for a hiding place. They might stumble across this cave.” He shuffled a few steps down the tunnel, using the unstrung bow as a staff. “I’m not strong enough to fight one goblin, let alone a whole hunting party.”

Artus thought only about food as he trudged along. At least, that was all that occupied his thoughts until they came upon a stretch of tunnel limned in a strange gold radiance. It sparkled like the purest sunlight, and when Artus stepped into the glow, his hunger-induced thoughts of steak and ale and fresh-baked pics were replaced by other, more jumbled notions.

Confusion began to tug at the corners of Artus’s mind, and his thoughts turned to his plight. The explorer pictured himself lost beneath the surface of Chult, in a maze of tunnels that had but two exits—the one at the Batiri camp and the other they bad been forced to pass by. The images grew more vivid. He saw himself shriveled from hunger, dazed from lack of water. And for what? He looked around at the golden tunnel walls.

Suddenly Artus was twenty years old again and here to rescue someone. That’s right. The tunnel led under the jail in Surd, where his father was being held before his execution. The Sembians never took pity on highwaymen, especially those who preyed upon merchant caravans. Besides, hanging the notorious Shadowhawk would gain the local lords favor with the country’s overmaster.

This was the third time in as many years Artus had found himself breaking his father out of jail. Shadowhawk, indeed. The old man might have been a real threat to travelers in Cormyr and Sembia a decade ago, but not now. He was getting too slow for all this “robbing from the wealthy” stuff.

“It’s a good thing no one at the temple of Oghma knows about you, Father,” Artus grumbled. He prodded the ceiling with his staff. Yes, he might want to start digging here. “The loremasters just wouldn’t understand how I could let you keep on robbing merchants, They aren’t too open-minded, not like Nanda… .”

Artus stopped digging into the ceiling with the unstrung elven bow and put his hand to his forehead. Nanda hadn’t crept into his thoughts for years. He’d been married to her for only a few months, just after he’d turned twenty. It was a whirlwind romance, ending in a union approved by neither his parents nor her guardian. That had made it all the more attractive to both of them. Sadly, those few months had turned out to be the worst of Artus’s life, especially after he discovered his new bride’s secret devotion to Loviatar, the Goddess of Pain.

No, he wasn’t here for his father, and Nanda had left him fifteen years ago. He wasn’t even in the Heartlands now. The thoughts swirled in his mind. Chult. He was lost somewhere in Chult.

Dazed, Artus looked around the tunnel again. “What am I doing here?” he hissed.

“Looking for the Ring of Winter,” someone said.

Artus looked down, wondering how the wombats knew about the ring; he hadn’t told them about it—at least he didn’t think so. “How do you know that?”

He found his two companions in complete disarray. Byrt’s eyes were closed tightly and he was walking in a circle, whistling a cheerful tune. Lugg had collapsed onto his side. His eyes were open, but he seemed stunned.

“This is a sorry-looking group, though I’m not one to judge, I suppose.”

Pontifax cleared his throat, trying to draw Artus’s attention. He stood farther up the tunnel, ghostly and pale, just as he had appeared in the Batiri prison. The explorer took a step toward his old friend, and the phantom backed away. “This way,” Pontifax said. “Gather up your two furry cohorts, and come this way.”

“Wait,” Artus said. “Why are you here?”

“There’s no time,” the ghost wailed.

“Was your death so—”

Holding up a transparent hand, Pontifax replied, “All that matters right now is that you keep moving down the tunnel. You’ve got to get out of this golden light. It’s some sort of enchantment, a wall of confusion.”

That would explain my jumbled thoughts, Artus decided, but not the ghostly mage’s presence. But before he could question Pontifax further, the phantom mage disappeared. The explorer paused for a moment and stared at the spot where Pontifax had been. He tried to piece some reasonable explanation together, but found it increasingly difficult to concentrate.

He lifted Byrt—who was still walking in a circle, oblivious to the phantom Pontifax and everything else around him—and tucked the wombat under one arm, along with the unstrung bow. Then he leaned down and grabbed Lugg by the ear. The brown wombat followed along docilely, a blank look in his eyes. It was awkward going. The bow slipped twice and clattered to the ground. Even when it stayed under Artus’s arm, it constantly whacked Byrt on the head. That didn’t stop the gray wombat from whistling, though.

After a time, the golden fight faded and the swirl of confusion subsided from Artus’s thoughts. Soon after, Lugg realized with a start that he was being led along by the ear. With a huge frown, he pulled away from the explorer and hurried ahead. Byrt took longer to recover, but Artus found it hard to tell the difference; the little wombat acted strangely all the time. And when Artus asked Byrt and Lugg about the ghostly visitor who had rescued them, both wombats responded with looks that announced their concern for Artus’s sanity.

Finally the tunnel ended. The floor here was smooth, the walls more carefully hewn from the surrounding stone. A wide crack split the wall before the tired, hungry trio. That meant release and, hopefully, food.

The low-ceilinged cavern they entered was dark and full of debris. A quick look around told Artus the crumbling stones were the ruins of some ancient structure. Ornate columns lay in pieces near the edges of the room. Heavy, square blocks of granite, used as the bases for long tables, cluttered the center. The wooden tops from those tables, and the shelves that had once filled the iron brackets attached to the walls, had long ago crumbled to dust.

“This might have been a library at one time,” Artus ventured. He knelt to study the engravings on a fragment of masonry. The glyphs, which depicted dinosaur-headed men and women, were unlike any he’d seen before.

“Do they serve food in libraries?” Lugg asked, nosing through the rubble.

“No,” Byrt replied. “You get books from libraries, not baked goods. That question makes me wonder if you have lived a tome-free life, old man.”

Lugg snorted. “All the tomes in the world won’t ‘elp my stomach now … though I might stoop to nibbling on a picture book of onions and radishes, if one ‘appened to present itself.”

They continued on, though the next room and the one following proved to be very much like the first—crumbled columns, topless tables, and empty brackets hammered into the walls. Eventually, though, they came to a stout wooden door, around which a halo of light shone brightly. Artus pushed it open … and what lay beyond took his breath away.

The room was huge and utterly deserted. Thin stone columns stood at even intervals along the walls, supporting globes that burned with a magical radiance. Smaller globes rested upon each of the dozens of tables set in orderly rows across the floor. Books of every sort stood upon sturdy shelves, row after row, more volumes than even the much-lauded library of the Stalwarts held. Artus slipped through the door and grabbed the nearest book. The words were totally foreign to him—a mixture of symbols and picture-glyphs like the ones on the ruined columns.

“I don’t suppose either of you can read?” Artus asked.

“Most certainly I can,” Byrt replied. When Artus held the book down to him, he smacked his lips and sighed. “I stand corrected.”

All the other books on the shelves nearby proved to be written in the same unusual language. Artus was trying to decide which tome to take for more careful study when the door on the opposite end of the room swung open.

Even at such a distance, the stranger’s beard proclaimed him a man, despite the flowing tan robe that hid his frame. Close-cropped and white as snow, the beard met up with the shock of silver hair atop the man’s head, making a bright halo around his darkly tanned face. Engrossed as he was in the large volume open in his hands, he didn’t immediately notice Artus. He read as he walked, shaking his head in vehement disagreement every few steps.

With his nose buried in the pages before him, the silver-haired man walked to a table close to the still-unnoticed strangers and sat down. He leaned toward the glowing globe at the other end of the table and said something Artus could not hear. Four tiny legs sprouted from the globe, and it ran to the man’s side, coming to rest only when it was right next to his book.

It was then that Artus got his first good look at the man. “Lord Rayburton!” he exclaimed. He took a step toward the long-lost explorer, amazement clear in his eyes. “You’re alive!”

The book slipped from the table and slammed to the floor as the silver-haired man spun about. Theron was right—the man was a ringer for the statue in the society’s study. The famed explorer looked no older than that representation, though the sculptor had captured him at the age of sixty, more than twelve hundred years ago.

At the commotion, the globe light hefted itself from the table and dashed to safety far away from the noise. “Who are you?” Rayburton demanded. His features were sharp, and his mouth turned down in a frown, but kindness lurked in his clear eyes.

Seeing the apprehension on Rayburton’s face, Artus stopped and looked down at his torn clothes and the dried blood on his injured hand. “I must look pretty frightening,” he said in his best Old Cormyrian. As he put aside the unstrung bow, he added, “I came a long way to find you, sir. My name is Artus Cimber, from Cormyr. I’m a member of the Society of Stalwart Adventurers, an explorer like you.”

“Your grammar is terrible for a native speaker of Cormyrian,” Rayburton noted. “Do you speak Tabaxi?” he asked, switching effortlessly to that Chultan tongue.

Artus could only shrug and shake his head.

Rayburton studied him carefully, his brows knit in consternation. Finally the hard line of his mouth softened, replaced by a smile that matched the kindness in his eyes. “A Stalwart, you say?” He sighed. “I should have known someone from that bunch of well-meaning crackpots would find me one day. You’re a friend of that other fellow, the one we saved from the Batiri when we rescued Kwalu?”

“Yes, Theron Silvermace. He—Crackpots?” Artus stammered. “You founded the society, didn’t you?”

“I let them use my name,” Rayburton said. “Biggest mistake of my life. I never was one for clubs—just an excuse for back-slapping and group inertia. Rather talk about the past than go out and look for it. And the society’s still going you say? Amazing.” He lifted the book from the floor. “How do you know me? A portrait?”

“A statue,” Artus corrected. “In the main library.”

“And how did you get in here?” Rayburton asked. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the table.

Artus had the uncomfortable feeling of being back in the House of Oghma, held captive in the prefect’s study because of some transgression. “Through a tunnel,” he said. “It led into the ruined part of the library… .”

Lugg struggled to the top of a nearby table. He spoke neither Tabaxi nor Old Cormyrian, but he could make himself known quite clearly in the trade tongue known as Common. “Look,” he said, “if you two are going to yap all day, we want to know where the kitchens are.”

From the floor at Artus’s feet, Byrt added his approval. “A meal really is in order. Lugg gets rather cross if he’s not fed regularly. Not that he isn’t cross at other times. You know, bites when tugged and all that.”

“In a moment,” Artus said as he studied Rayburton’s hands. They were wrinkled and beginning to spot with age. Ink stains covered the fingers of his right hand, the sure mark of a scholar or scribe, but there was no ring to be seen.

Artus stepped forward and grabbed Rayburton’s shoulders. “The Ring of Winter,” he said, his eyes gone wild, “You have it. That’s how you made it snow. It kept you alive all these years.”

With one solid shove, Rayburton freed himself. “I don’t have the ring.” For the first time, anger showed on his kindly face. “If that’s what you’re here for, you’ll go back to the society empty-handed.”

Artus felt the world fall away under his feet. Before he knew it, he was sitting on the floor next to Byrt. The little gray wombat looked him in the face, worry in his vague blue eyes.

“But you must have the ring,” Artus whispered. “You’re still alive. It makes the wearer immortal….”

Rayburton kneeled beside the younger explorer. “The ring didn’t keep me alive,” he said. “It was the magic in this place. Mezro has quite a lot of wonderful things in it.”

“Mezro?” Artus managed to gasp. “I discovered the lost city of Mezro?”

Rayburton’s gentle laughter filled the library. “It’s hardly lost to the people who have lived here for four thousand years,” he noted. “But if you want to put it that way, the Mezroans probably won’t mind. I said the same thing when I stumbled across the place, and they haven’t thrown me out yet.”

He looked into Artus’s glassy eyes and mentally catalogued the cuts and bruises on his arms and face. “You’ve had a time of it, eh?” Helping the younger man to his feet, Rayburton added, “The thing for you now is rest, and maybe a surgeon’s attention. After that, we can talk about how you managed to ‘discover’ Mezro.”

Ten

From The Eternal Life of Mezro by King Osaw I, called “the Wise” by his beloved subjects: ruler of all Mezro, negus negusti, and bara of Ubtao. Translated to Cormyrian by Lord Dhalmass Rayburton, advisor to the king.

There is no exaggeration in the bold claim that Ubtao founded Mezro. The great god of the Tabaxi built the core of the city himself, the temple and amphitheater rising first from the chaos of the jungle. Mezro was to be the place where all the people of Chult could learn how to pass through the maze of life, how best to reach the heart of all and discover the true nature of the world. It became that. Yet Mezro also became a place where thieves and charlatans preyed upon pilgrims, where men and women and children came to beg Ubtao’s help with the most insignificant of problems.