Ed Greenwood - The Herald

Helgore himself wouldn’t have dreamed of crossing the Most High in the smallest detail or degree, but he wouldn’t-couldn’t-have sworn the same for any of his fellow Shadovar. Even Maerandor.

Hmm. Perhaps especially Maerandor.

Helgore thrust that darkly amusing thought aside. What was ahead needed his full attention. The camps were behind him now, and he was heading up into the trampled clearing where wounded mercenaries were tended to, and those held in reserve were assembling. Swordcaptains gave Helgore hard and suspicious stares, but he ignored them, striding on toward the din of battle and the flaring, moving glows amid the trees that marked where elven armor was being tested. The hard way.

The front lines were within sight, not that the darkness of deepening night and all the trees made it easy to actually see anything. Myth Drannor was more tended forest than it was buildings, and entirely lacked walls, moats, ditches, or any of the other usual defensive barriers besiegers faced when attacking most cities.

So this siege was an endless series of running skirmishes in the deep forest, often fought amid ancient trees with not a building in sight. At first, the Shadovar-led army had set fire to the forest to try to scour the battlefield bare and drive the elves out, but the smoke had proved deadly, choking the besiegers more than the elves-who had no doubt devised spells to protect themselves against forest fires long ages ago-and lending elf strike bands ample cover to move around, pounce, and slaughter.

Closer to the fabled elf city, the mythal prevented small fires and dampened large ones, making burning anything down nigh impossible. And in the vast forest, the elves were in their element. In the fray they melted away into the trees seemingly at will, often racing lightly aloft through the countless boughs. They knew which glades were now disguised deadfalls that would plunge unwary invaders down into the yawning cellars of vanished or overgrown buildings. And there were all too many such ruins, remnants of the halcyon days when Myth Drannor had been larger, brighter, and home to all races, the fabled City of Song of flourishing art, growth, and harmony among all peoples.

So it had come down to the Shadovar trying to bury their foes under sheer numbers, wearing down the far fewer elves but taking horrific losses as they slowly, ever so slowly, drove the defenders back. Losses that made the hireswords-men mustered from many lands, whose good pay could, after all, be spent only by the survivors-ever more wary and surly, and all too apt to retreat or take no chances at all rather than press hard in the fray and perhaps shatter the elf lines.

The Most High was both methodical and calculating, but his cold and unhurried calm did not mean his patience was endless. Myth Drannor had to fall, and had to fall soon. Unfortunately, the city’s mythal was itself the prize, so the quick victory stroke of assembling the arcanists of Thultanthar and hurling their Art against the mythal to destroy it and end this strife in a swift cataclysm of utter destruction was out of the question. Rather, this must be done the slow, hard way, sword to sword and hurling only small battle spells that would not threaten the mythal.

And so it fell to Helgore to be Telamont’s dagger unlooked for, to stab at the belly and groin of a foe whose attention was kept elsewhere by this endless hacking and stabbing amid the trees. Helgore’s task was to drain and destroy baelnorn after baelnorn, robbing Myth Drannor of its wise and mighty magical guardians who might well be able to control the mythal with adroit and precise spells to keep it as a shield for the city while also turning it into a sword against the Shadovar-led attackers. Just why the Most High valued the mythal so highly, demanding it go undamaged while swords ran red with gore within and beneath it, was none of Helgore’s business. In truth, he cared not.

His concern was to destroy baelnorns so swiftly and thoroughly that the Most High would be mightily impressed even though he was the source of all the weapons and training that made Helgore able to do so, the undead-destroying spells and the gem.

The high loregem, to be precise. How Telamont Tanthul had come by the seemingly ancient selukiira , Helgore had no idea. Again, not his affair.

What mattered to him was that it functioned as a passkey to the mythal that was all around him now, its embattled verges giving the deep forest an eerie silver-blue glow.

A handful of outnumbered elves had just been forced to abandon the trees around, as hundreds of fresh mercenaries had fallen upon them, hacking tirelessly. The Myth Drannans had fled into a deeper tangle of trees, and the besieging hireswords had rushed right after them. Giving Helgore the moment of relative peace and privacy he needed.

Shrouding himself in the usual instant of thickening darkness, like smoke suddenly tumbling through the air close around him, he put his back to the trunk of a large, old, and leaning duskwood tree, and looked all around to make certain no one was watching-or worse yet, readying a bow, spell, or charge for him. Seeing no watchers, he quickly unsealed a warded belt pouch, then drew out and unwrapped a cloaking scrap of black shadow-imbued cloth to reveal the long and sparkling loregem. Its facets winked at him as the rainbow tourmaline caught the silver-blue light of the forest. He held it up-and swallowed it.

It was hard and pointed, and hurt going down. And, he decided after a few cautious moments, didn’t make him feel one whit different.

Yet as he worked a spell that transformed him from a man to a long, fat black serpent and began to slither on through the trees, Helgore was aware that a certain tension that had been building around him as he’d walked closer to the elf city, a sometimes-crackling thickening of the air and the very blood in his veins, was suddenly … gone. The mythal was no longer fighting him; he could proceed freely. The gem was working.

Helgore tried not to pay attention to the momentary cascade of faint memories that were not his, now welling up within him. Elf memories, of course.

He didn’t want to know which proud elf House this selukiira had come from, didn’t want to know what the pointy-eared, sneering posers thought about and valued and did. Let the gem inside him be a key and nothing more. It wasn’t his high lore, and he wanted no part of it.

Helgore glanced around again, peering out of the darkness he’d shrouded himself in to keep nearby eyes from seeing he was eating a gem and taking snake shape. There was still, so far as he could tell, no one watching.

Good. The Most High had warned him that the high loregem would mark Helgore as a foe who must be destroyed to any elf who saw it. If no elf had seen it, what was coming just might be a little easier to accomplish.

He needed to find a way down into the underground levels of old Myth Drannor. Down to the oldest elf family crypts. Blasting a hole amid all the tree roots would draw unwanted attention and probably spend a lot of magic getting nowhere near where he wanted to be. Finding a chasm opened in previous fighting would be much easier. And slipping into such a handy hole unnoticed would be best.

The first furious assault had created-or rather, revealed the hard way-more than a few such holes, but Helgore, hidden away in inner chambers of Thultanthar under Telamont’s exacting tutelage, had been told rather than seen this.

Nor did the eyes of his serpent shape afford the sort of vision he was used to. He needed height, and he needed it now.

He slithered up the nearest tall tree to look around.

Ah! There, and there, and over there , too. The farthest one looked the most promising. It was the largest, and had a few faint, distant, and steady magical glows visible in its depths, suggesting that it opened into some broad expanse.