Richard Baker: Final Gate

Sarya wheeled on the presumptuous fey’ri with murder in her eye. Briefly, she considered killing him for his insolence. “No one tells me what to do,” she hissed. “No one!”

Vesryn bobbed his head again, and steepled his fingers in front of narrow chest. “Of course, Lady Sarya. Forgive me, I beg you, but we must not linger here.”

There is little point in killing him, she decided. She could not spare the obsequious Vesryn, not when all that was left of her kingdom were Xhalph, Vesryn Aelorothi, three warriors, and two vrock demons. Mardeiym Reithel, her faithful general, was dead. Teryani Ealoeth had simply vanished, likely using her shapechanging talents to slink away. The daemonfey queen turned away and folded her wings, her back to the pitiful stragglers, and fought to master the blinding rage that surged and roiled within her dark heart.

Betrayed! she fumed. Malkizid promised that the spells he could teach her would make Myth Drannor unassailable. Yet the cursed palebloods had found away to destroy her reweaving of the ancient wards anyway. She was throne-less again.

“Which way from here, Mother?” Xhalph rumbled. “Vesryn is right. We must decide swiftly. This place is disintegrating around us.”

“I can see that!” Sarya snapped.

She studied the Waymeet’s maze of portals and corridors with a fearsome scowl. She knew several doors that might lead to useful destinations, but something had happened to the ancient mythal only moments after she and her small entourage had emerged from the door leading back to Myth Drannor. All around her, portals were growing unstable. Some remained open continuously, others surged and closed unpredictably, and still more were guttering out into dull gray uselessness. Malkizid’s work? she wondered. Or the work of the palebloods?

“We need a place where our enemies will not follow,” she said aloud, “a place where we can rebuild our strength in secret. We must hide for now, and in time we will embark on a new campaign against the usurpers of our birthright-a campaign of stealth, subterfuge, and deceit. The next time we move against the palebloods, we will do so in secret. For now, we must survive.” If skulking and hiding was all that she could do, then she would do it as well as she could.

“What of the refuge beneath Lothen?” Xhalph said. “Our enemies do not know of it.”

“It strikes me as dangerously close to the wood elves of the High Forest, Lord Xhalph,” Vesryn Aelorothi offered. “The palebloods will certainly use divination magic to sniff us out. It might be better to hide somewhere far away.”

Xhalph did not often stand for correction from one of their lessers, but in this case he did not rebuke the vulturelike fey’ri spymaster. Even he had realized that sheer fury and bloodlust might not be the way to victory any longer. “The Abyss? I doubt the palebloods would follow us there.”

Sarya shook her head. “I will not go to the Abyss in defeat. I have no wish to beg protection from a demon lord.” There were some who might offer her refuge, but she would not allow herself to be made into a vassal again. She thought about it for a moment more and made her decision. “We will seek out a portal to some remote part of Faerun

… Chult, perhaps, or maybe the lands beyond the Unapproachable East. Come; we will find a speaking stone and make the Gatekeeper show us a suitable portal.” And if they happened to encounter Malkizid, why, she might demand an accounting from the archdevil.

She unfurled her wings and leaped into the air, soaring easily over the mazelike arrangement of corridors and walls that made up the Waymeet. She spied the cluster of higher towers and spars that marked the center of the device, and banked in that direction. Below her, she spied several dead mezzoloths, sprawled out in one of the main boulevards of the place. What is going on in this place? she wondered. Is Malkizid at war with some other infernal power?

“There has been fighting here,” Xhalph said. “Those yugoloths have not been dead long.”

The actinic flash of a lightning-spell close by threw a harsh white glare across the Waymeet’s towers and columns, followed an instant later by a sharp crack of thunder. Apparently, the fighting was not yet over. Sarya would have ignored it and continued on her way, but as it happened, her chosen course was leading her toward the place where the lightning had flashed.

“It’s the master speaking stone,” she hissed. “Allow me, Lady Sarya,” one of the fey’ri warriors said. “I will spy it out and see who is there.”

“Very well,” she agreed. “Be swift, and do not allow yourself to be seen.”

The warrior murmured a spell to cloak himself in invisibility and hurried off toward the center of the complex. Sarya alighted on a high spar to await his report. The Waymeet rumbled with a deep, ominous groan, and not far off one of the high spires lost its footing and toppled over slowly, crashing to the ground with the shriek of twisting iron and the shrill sound of shattering glass. More portals flickered and went dark.

“I do not think we will be able to return to this place once we depart,” Vesryn said quietly.

“It suits me for now,” Sarya replied. “Presently, no one will be able to follow us through this place. That may turn to our advantage.”

She heard the beat of unseen wings, and her warrior returned. He allowed his invisibility to fade. “It is the paleblood mage, Lady Sarya,” he reported.

“Araevin Teshurr?”

“Yes. He has several companions with him-a human, a half-breed, an elf of a kindred I do not recognize, and some other planetouched woman. They are in the square of the master speaking stone, as you said. They just drove off a small number of yugoloths and baatezu.”

“The mage must have damaged the Waymeet,” Sarya breathed. Malkizid had told her that he had gotten his hands on a shard of the Gatekeeper’s Crystal. Was that sufficient to explain the destruction of the mythal around her? Or, for that matter, was that how the palebloods had dealt with her defenses at Myth Drannor?

“There is something more, my queen,” the warrior said. “The mage, the strange elf, and the half-breed all are wounded. The strange elf and the half-breed can’t walk without help. They are heading that way”-he pointed, indicating a course at right angles to Sarya’s-“making for a portal.”

Sarya glanced at her small company. She had eight who could fight, including the vrocks. Araevin had half as many, and two of them were hurt. She might not be able to undo what he had done to her mythal’s defenses at Myth Drannor, but she could make sure that he paid for the trouble he had caused her.

“Then it seems we have one more enemy to deal with before we abandon this place,” she said. “Lead the way, my warrior. Araevin Teshurr is mine.”

The battle for Myth Drannor had broken down into a hundred fierce skirmishes. Bands of elves, Dalesfolk, and Sembians hunted the streets, searching out the surviving fey’ri and infernal monsters summoned by Sarya Dlardrageth. Many of those had vanished with the Araevin’s reduction of the mythal, but some still remained, creatures that had been brought to Faerun through means other than the mythal. Ilsevele did not intend to allow any of those to escape, if she could help it.

At noon she found a few moments of quiet and allowed herself to grieve for her father. He knew it was going to happen, she reflected. He understood the designs of the Seldarine, and he did not shy from the part he was given. The only thing that kept her heart from breaking was the thought that her father did not regret the time of his death… and he was once again with Ilyyela, whom he had loved for three hundred years. How could she begrudge him that reunion?