Bruce Cordell - Key of Stars

Stop it.

He placed his hands palm to palm and closed his eyes. He imagined the thread once again, trying to detect in it the tiny shifts of tension that would betray Malyanna’s location to him.

It’d be child’s play to see where the eladrin noble was if he placed a crystal of traveler’s dust in one eye. The gates of perception would open wide, then.

No! No, not unless he’d exhausted every other method. The desire for the dust still lived in him. Thankfully the urge to dig out his supply wasn’t the irresistible geas it had once been. Lately, it was more like the memory of an urgent desire rather than the desire itself.

Was he finally leaving the crimson road behind?

“Can you sense her?” said Raidon.

“Don’t rush me,” snapped Japheth. In truth, he was embarrassed. He was allowing distractions to cloud his mind. He was scared to make a real effort and engage so intimately with the star pact.

He drew in a slow breath and released it, imagining as he did so that he expelled all the diversions, all the fears, and any concern other than the sense of connection with the stars.

There! The celestial connection pulled and shifted … that way! She was near. But something was muffling his ability to determine specific distance. It was as if Malyanna were not fully in the world.

Japheth cleared his throat. “This way, but I don’t know how far,” he said. He pointed north, away from the path, into the darkness between the trees.

“Then we’d best start,” said the monk. He stepped off the path and headed in the direction Japheth indicated.

Walking between the trees proved easier than Japheth had guessed. The trunks were several paces apart, and at least in the region they moved through, the undergrowth was suppressed beneath a layer of reddish humus. They advanced up a slope at an angle. The ground was studded with stones and larger boulders, occasional ravines, and deadfalls, requiring that they divert from the straight-line path Japheth tried to stay on.

Birdsong brightened the air, but it was infrequent and tentative. The warm smell of a growing forest was evident, but an underlying tang of sweet rot underlay everything, as if corpses of dead animals and overripe fruit lay just beneath the loam.

A few times a curling, scratchy sensation skittered across Japheth’s skin and crazed his sense of connection to his pact. When that happened, the disagreeable smell grew stronger. The first time it happened, Japheth nearly gagged. He realized then the smell wasn’t the odor of rotting flesh-it was the odor of decaying magic.

It was the aroma of a pocket of active spellplague.

Raidon didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he kept his poker face perfectly intact. The warlock resolved to do the same, but he paid careful attention to his surroundings. He didn’t want to step into an unknown sinkhole dancing with unbound wild magic.

After traveling for what seemed like a quarter hour, Japheth stopped.

“What is it?” asked Raidon.

“We’re hardly getting any closer,” the warlock replied. “I don’t understand it. It’s as if she’s moving just enough to stay ahead of us … no, that’s not it. It’s like she’s behind some sort of veil.”

“If Malyanna is looking for Stardeep, she could well be behind ‘a veil’ as you say; she could be in the Feywild,” said Raidon. “Stardeep lays in a splinter of Sildeyuir, itself a fragment of ancient Faerie. With the Feywild’s return, Sildeyuir, and perhaps the prison complex of the Keepers, was reabsorbed, and not gently.”

“How do you know that?” asked Japheth. “Sounds sort of esoteric for someone like …” He trailed off, but let his comment stand without apology.

“You know I bear the Cerulean Sign and the blade Angul,” Raidon said. “Is it really a surprise I know something of what has occurred here, where the Keepers sheltered?”

“I suppose not.”

“Before I found you in Gethshemeth’s lair, I was in communication with the last remnant of Stardeep; a sentient golem named Cynosure. It was Cynosure that transferred me across the face of Faerun more than once, first to collect Angul, then to the island where we met.”

“So this Cynosure-it’s in Stardeep?” said Japheth. “It sounds like a useful ally. Are you talking to it now?”

“No, Cynosure is gone,” replied Raidon. “It used up the last stores of its endowed life to get me to the isle, so I could sunder the Dreamheart before the Eldest woke.”

Japheth thought back to that subterranean cavern and winced. Stealing the relic, and thus preventing Raidon from concluding his quest had been his only option. But of course the monk had never forgiven him for what he’d done. Were the warlock in Raidon’s place, he’d probably feel the same way.

It was a bit unsettling to travel alone with a man who’d just tried to kill you the day before.

Japheth cleared his throat. “Right!” he said. “So you’re saying that if we find a way to step over into the Feywild, I could trace Malyanna better?”

“It could be.”

The warlock pursed his lips, considering.

Raidon said, “This forest is rife with portals into what was once Sildeyuir, though Cynosure indicated many of them were likely contaminated with spellplague.”

“More than likely; it’s a certainty,” said Japheth. “I can sense it, you know. Pockets of spellplague. Cynosure was right. It’s like a battlefield through here, scattered with dead and twisted fragments of the old Weave.”

Raidon narrowed his eyes, glanced around, then shook his head. “You can sense it? I don’t detect anything,” he said.

“Really?” said Japheth. “Trust me, we’ve passed some nasty bits I steered us around.”

“I don’t doubt it,” replied Raidon. “Most of my abilities are manifestations of the power of my mind over my body. Perhaps spellplague doesn’t pull at me like it does a spellcaster. When the Year of Blue Fire found me, it didn’t like my taste, and spit me out, though not without consequence.”

Japheth’s eyes dropped to the spellscar on the half-elf’s upper chest.

“You were lucky to get off so light,” said the warlock.

The monk made no reaction.

“Anyway, we should head back to the last concentration of spellplague I noticed,” Japheth said. “It was big. Sometimes such sharp concentrations indicate the presence of an old portal.”

They backtracked. First there was a smell of sour oranges, but soon enough, the revolting odor was turning the warlock’s stomach again. It put Japheth in mind of an undead whose flesh was nearly sloughed off. In their case, though, it was the world’s facade ready to fall away.

They skirted the bole of a large, tree that stood dead center in the spellplague pocket.

In a hollow between two of the tree’s massive roots, a sinkhole created a natural stair that apparently provided an entrance into the forest’s understory down steps of dead roots, boulders, and raw earth. Another root curled over the top of the hollow, creating a natural lintel.

Japheth advanced, one hand extended before him. When his boot heel touched the first rocky step, the “lintel” and the hollow beyond it burst into blue flame. A streamer of fire separated from the blaze and reached for him.

Japheth yelled and threw himself back. His cloak, sensing his desire to escape, automatically tried to pull him into its protective embrace.

Like the head of a striking cobra, the streamer of spellplague lunged. It speared Japheth through the gut and retracted, pulling him through the arch and in an explosion of blue flame.

Raidon leaped for the trailing hem of the warlock’s cloak. His fingers brushed the fabric, but it jerked away like a live thing.

The filament of fire retracted, and Japheth disappeared in sapphire light. The Sign on Raidon’s chest tingled in sympathy.