Mel Odom - The Lost Library of Cormanthyr

She scanned the titles, finding them in a language she did not comprehend. Shallowsoul played his games with her avarice and she knew it. Deliberately, she was teleported of late into rooms of the vast library where she could not read the titles. Thick and pristine, arranged so neatly on the shelves, the books called out to her.

Shallowsoul laughed, and the noise sounded like bones grating, somewhere on the other side of the stacks. "Even from here I can feel your greed, drow." His voice sounded like it was squeezed from a narrowly open crypt, deep but somehow still breathless.

"Be glad of it," Krystarn said. "Else how would you know I would stay in your thrall?" She let him have his laugh. Every time she saw a new volume that she had not seen before, she carefully recorded the symbols and warped languages she remembered. Already in her bag of holding that never left her side, she possessed a book with dozens of inscriptions.

"It would do you good," Shallowsoul said, "to remember who is master in our relationship."

Krystarn bowed her head in humility. She was a drow female, not born to know the yoke of a man even among her own people, much less to subjugate herself to the whims of such a thing as Folgrim Shallowsoul. A lesser drow, one less committed to Mother Lloth, would have broken. There were some, she knew, who would have mistakenly believed that the Queen of the Demonweb Pits had deserted them.

Instead, Krystarn knew that Lloth was only molding her anger, tempering it into the greatest weapon the Queen of Spiders would ever have in her arsenal. And when the time came to bare that weapon, edged with all the knowledge she would reap from the library, all of Toril would not be safe from her unleashed hatred.

Folgrim Shallowsoul rounded the stack in front of the drow elf and stopped. Tortured nightmares had given him shape, while fierce magic had given him form. Gaunt and skeletal, his gaze burned with the pinpoints of green light surrounded by the black emptiness nesting inside the eye sockets. A fistful of dead white hair stuck to his head in a long, unkempt mane that trailed down his back. Blue-green dead flesh clung to its skull, stubbornly giving it features in spite of the immutability of nature. The lips had peeled back from its teeth, giving Shallowsoul a permanent sneering grimace.

He wore clothes of nobility, the cloth interwoven with fine strands of gold and silver, spotted with sapphire chips worked in intricate patterns. Over the long decades, the clothing had rotted and become tattered.

He held a volume in one hand. A long taloned finger with skin so thin the bone showed through marked his place. "You remember Baylee Arnvold?" he asked.

"Fannt Golsway's apprentice," Krystarn answered, knowing Shallowsoul should know by now that she never forgot anything.

"Yes. He is at a forgathering. You're aware of what that is?"

"A forgathering is a meeting place of rangers." Krystarn waited, knowing from experience that Shallowsoul would not tell her his news until he was ready.

"This one is called the Glass Eye Concourse," Shallowsoul went on. He walked through the stacks, motioning Krystarn to follow.

The drow elf waited a step before trailing. Shallowsoul was a lich, and as such he radiated an aura of cold and darkness that unsettled even her nerves. Immediately, she felt the wall of freezing despair lift from her, and it seemed as though a thousand pounds had dropped from her shoulders.

"There will be hundreds of rangers at this forgathering." Shallowsoul reached out and meticulously straightened one of the books on a shelf where the corners did not quite overlap.

Krystarn took full opportunity to gaze at all the shelves of books. The room was even more vast than she had imagined. Twenty paces in now, and she still couldn't see the other side of it.

Only one wall was visible to her left. It soared up thirty feet before meeting the ceiling. A wheeled ladder hooked to the shelves ran all the way to the top, allowing a person to climb up to reach the highest volumes.

The two walls visible to her through the gaps in the intricate shelving looked like stone. The drow believed the vast library had been initially buried underground, not sunk there as the magic of the Army of Darkness had stricken the city and the protective mythal had come apart.

The room appeared to conform to no real shape as well, furthering her suspicions that the library had been deliberately designed to confuse any who entered it. Fragments in scrolls that she had found that spoke of the library had mentioned maps being necessary to find a way through.

Without those maps, even the parts of the library that Krystarn had seen would require years to merely catalog, even without getting into the content. Once in, if a searcher allowed himself or herself to be pulled in too far, there would be no return.

"I want you to find Baylee Arnvold and kill him," Shallowsoul ordered.

"When?" Krystarn asked.

"Now." The lich rounded another stack and the way widened, leading to a high desk in front of a tall stool. A large book occupied the center of the desk, the pages still wet with ink. A quill and an ink pot sat to one side.

Krystarn surveyed the writing, finding it like nothing she'd seen before in all her studies. Liches were undead, usually long removed from any vestiges of humanity. Once she'd discovered Shallowsoul's true nature, she'd studied about liches. One of the key points of Su'vann'k'tr of the House Fla'nvm's writings, was that liches often created brand new magic items and spells that no one had heard of before. Removed from the driving needs of the flesh, a lich instead obsessed on harnessing the mystical powers it could never achieve while remaining a living being. That it would create its own language was no surprise.

"You would have me kill this ranger in the midst of hundreds of his own?" Krystarn let her incredulity sound in her voice.

"It is true that I am a harsh taskmaster, Krystarn Fellhammer," Shallowsoul said, "but it would be foolish for me to give such an assignment without giving you the means to see it through. Even while mortal, I was never a foolish man."

Krystarn had some reservations whether the lich could remember back that far to make such a statement.

Shallowsoul sat at the desk. A single candle burned at the desk, but the drow knew it was more for conducting spells that needed heat or fire rather than any need for light. The lich saw as well as the drow in the absence of light, perhaps even better.

Krystarn surveyed the room as her mother had taught her. Her peripheral vision took in the short flights of stairs heading in three different directions less than a stone's throw from the desk area. When she had time, she fully intended to map out the area in her book based on the parts of the library she had seen so far.

"Why not have Baylee killed away from the forgathering?" the drow asked.

"I want a message sent," the lich said, digging in a drawer of the desk. "Fannt Golsway found the bitter dregs of a trail better left uncovered. I will not allow it to come anywhere close to this library. I want no one else to come after Baylee Arnvold or Fannt Golsway with prying eyes. The secret dies with them."

"Are you sure that Baylee knows about the library?" Krystarn asked.

The lich regarded her with his fiery green pinpoint gaze from the hollowed eye sockets. "You ask so that you may add to your own small store of knowledge."

"I ask because I have a vested interest at stake as well." Krystarn forced herself to stare into the lich's dead gaze. Her muscles trembled against the urge to turn and flee from the cold emanating from the foul creature. "You and I have an agreement. For every five years of my servitude to you, I am allowed to make a copy of a book from this library."