Ed Greenwood - The Herald

Mattick swung around sharply. “What?”

The silent arcanist deftly stepped to one side, eyes downcast.

Vattick watched the Shadovar’s maneuver with obvious amusement before he met Mattick’s gaze again, and said gravely, “The Most High impressed a map of sorts into my mind. I know where other nearby crypts can be found.”

Mattick stared at his brother in still silence, a deepening frown spreading across his face. Both the last arcanist and Prince Vattick knew, as clearly as if he’d shouted the words, that he was thinking “Why Vattick and not me?”

Mattick said nothing, however, until he abruptly turned away and flung back over his shoulder curtly, “Tell me, Brother: Did the Most High share anything else with you that you’ve neglected to mention until now? Orders, perhaps?”

Vattick’s laugh was brief and harsh. “No, Brother. On that, you can trust me.”

Those words fell like stones into a bottomless well of deepening silence as Mattick strode to the nearest tree root and bounced a clenched fist off it, making no reply.

When he turned around again, Vattick was strolling back down the passage the way they’d come, the arcanist walking uncertainly in his wake.

Mattick swallowed a growl and hastened to catch up.

Rocks and trees unrolled swiftly below. The breeze was stiff, and the clouds scudded like ships driven by a gale; Thultanthar was flying at speed.

“It won’t be long now,” Aglarel commented, leaning out between two merlons to peer ahead, though he knew they were still too far away to see any sign of Myth Drannor in the great sweep of Faerûn spread out below and ahead.

His father didn’t bother to reply.

Or rather, as Aglarel saw a moment later, the Most High’s attention was fixed on something in the air above them.

A black line where there should be none, in the hitherto-empty sky.

A line swiftly broadening into a dark rift-that became a black star, low overhead and seemingly of about the same size as the many-spired city flying beneath it, a star that for just a moment seemed to be one dark, coldly knowing, somehow feminine eye.

It was an orb Aglarel felt would freeze his heart if it happened to turn and gaze upon him, and he knew the deity it belonged to was aware of him-knowledge that made his heart sink into deeper despair, in that instant, than he’d ever felt in his life before.

Shar was manifesting in midair to his father. This must be urgent.

“How can you be so patient ?” Amarune burst out. “The world may be shattered before nightfall, and you’re sitting there calmly reading recipes !”

“Not calmly,” Arclath whispered, looking up from the heap of old books he’d fetched down off dusty shelves onto Storm’s kitchen table, and she saw that his hands were shaking. “Just feigning calm. Something nobles are taught young. Pretend to be calm, keep your true emotions off your face, and cultivate patience.”

“Thank the gods I’m not noble!”

“Ah, but you are now.” Lord Arclath Delcastle set the book aside and rose to go to his lady and embrace her. The look he gave her, once they were in each other’s arms, was more grim than grave. “And if there’s someone in this room who must learn patience to keep the world from being shattered, probably many times in the years ahead of us, it’s you, Rune. Haven’t you noticed that it’s one of Elminster’s best weapons?”

“No. I guess all the kingdom-shattering spell-hurling he does distracted me.”

“Misdirection,” Arclath replied, with the faintest ghost of a smile, “is another of his best weapons. That and his sense of humor.”

Rune gave him a dark look, and warned, “Don’t you say one word , Lord Delcastle, about how I’m related to him, and have inherited this or that. Just don’t.”

“All right, I won’t.” Arclath smoothly disengaged her clasping arms, returned to the table, and said, “There’s an interesting recipe here for turtle soup-”

And being noble, he watched anyone standing near out of the corner of his eye, and so was ready to duck aside as she hurled a handy onion at him.

The great black eye floating in the sky above the flying city blinked. It and its dark rays and the rift they had appeared through were all gone in an instant, and bright sun banished the temporary gloom that had fallen on the battlements.

Sunlight that lit the High Prince of Thultanthar like a torch as he turned to Aglarel in sudden haste.

“Go,” he ordered, “and fetch my herald. Don’t hurry.”

His most loyal son bowed and backed away, but was taken aback and didn’t try to hide it. “Your herald? Who-?”

“The arcanist Gwelt,” Telamont snapped. “ Go .”

Aglarel turned away, cloak swirling. “Since when have you had a herald?” he muttered, as he hastened away.

The Most High shrugged. “I’ve always needed one,” he replied, knowing his magic would take that quiet reply to his son’s ears.

Then he strode down a stair and along a passage, passed through a door and spell-sealed it behind him with the wave of a hand, and hurried to his innermost spellchamber.

He sealed its doors too, warding himself within a room that was colder and darker than it should be.

When he turned around from the doors, she was waiting for him.

There’d been a secret door in the wall of the passage just outside the doors of the second crypt they’d plundered. The time-worn stone steps beyond had come up inside a hollow tree-or rather, the crumbling stump of a long-dead and fallen shadowtop, the roofless room inside its ring as large around as a good-sized turret.

Vattick worked a disguising spell on himself without slowing that left him looking like an elf high mage, and his brother and the lone surviving arcanist hastened to follow suit. Vattick seemed to know the way onward unerringly. He went to a cleft in the stump, stepping through it into a drift of dead leaves as if walking along a passage he took every day.

Mattick and the arcanist kept close behind him, as they strode past armed elves rushing here and there through the trees, the drifting smoke of a fire, and the screams and clangor of battle that wasn’t far off at all.

They strode along like men bent on business, who had every right to be there, ignoring all elves and walking with brisk purpose. Soon enough they ducked between two old and mighty duskwoods and down into a passage so old its ceiling had collapsed, leaving it as a deep trench in the forest, open to the sky-yet shielded by the thick forest canopy high overhead, and here and there by the small trunks of fallen saplings and the living nets of forest creepers.

Vattick led the way as sure-footedly as if the rotten-leaf-strewn ditch was very familiar, and soon enough it curved to the right and angled down underground into darkness. Dirt-and-root walls soon gave way to stone every bit as ancient as the underways they’d been traversing from crypt to crypt earlier.

Ahead, something ghostly and deep blue glided into their path, to bar their way.

Vattick never slowed, even when all three elf high mage disguises melted from them to the accompaniment of a hiss of disgust from the guardian ahead.

“So, what family bones do you guard?” he asked it cheerfully.

“Human, you intrude upon the resting place of House Alavalae,” the baelnorn replied coldly. “Halt, and go back, or face mortal peril.”

“Indeed,” Vattick smiled-and let fly with the same spell he’d used on the last guardian. Not at the doors of a crypt, this time, but at the baelnorn itself, two talon-headed serpents of emerald force that the guardian countered almost casually, with some sort of barrier that held the prince’s spell at bay in front of it, writhing and clawing and spitting emerald fury in all directions.