Troy Denning: Beyond the High Road

“Of what?”

Xanthon rolled his eyes. “You know the prophecy, ‘Seven scourges, five long gone, one of the day, one soon to come..? Do I really have to spell it out?”

“And you want me?” Unable to believe what he was hearing, Vangerdahast glanced over each of his shoulders in turn. This whole conversation had to be some unbalanced attempt to divert his attention. “This is an insult.”

Xanathon shrugged. “I’d rather kill you, but it you say no, there’ll be someone else. There is no shortage of traitors to Cormyr-you’ve seen to that.”

“Traitor? Me?” Vangerdahast nearly reached for a wand, but forced himself to contain his anger. There was only one explanation for Xanthon’s behavior, he was attempting to goad Vangerdahast into a rash act. “What happened to ‘you or me, old fool’?”

“You’re forgetting ‘many ways to enter, only one to leave,’” Xanthon replied. “You had to see how hopeless it is. There’s only one way out of here-and that’s with us.”

“Or past your dead body!” Vangerdahast hissed, no longer able to stand the insults to his integrity. “You have my answer.”

The wizard retreated down the tunnel, though only because he did not dare attack until he had cast the rest of his shielding magic. Assaulting the ghazneth would dispel the enchantment protecting him from evil, and despite his anger, he remained determined to emerge from this battle alive. When he reached the previous intersection, he picked a tunnel at random and streaked into it at top speed. It hardly mattered to him which direction he fled. He was lost no matter what way he turned.

But it mattered to Xanthon. The ghazneth began to stay close enough for Vangerdahast to hear at all times, yet just beyond the range of the wizard’s glowing ring. Every so often, the phantom would emerge in an intersection to taunt Vangerdahast with saccharin pleas to reconsider. The wizard never bothered to reply. He simply retreated to the previous intersection and tried another path. Xanthon was careful to keep him moving, so that he would have no time to stop and cast spells, and to keep him away from plazas and other places where he would have room to fight with anything but magic.

Vangerdahast tried several times to slow his pursuer by bringing the ceiling down on his head, but Xanthon always sensed these ambushes and rushed ahead to absorb the spell. The sorcerer soon realized he was only feeding his enemy’s magic thirst and put his wands away, concentrating instead on raising his shielding spells. He lost two enchantments to interruption-one defending him from poison and the other from blunt attacks-but he did manage to cast the spell that protected him from fang and claw. He considered it a major victory.

Eventually, the protection from evil spell expired. Xanthon began to grow more bold, sometimes attempting to ambush Vangerdahast as he passed through intersections, sometimes rushing up from behind to repeat his ‘invitation.’ The wizard resisted the temptation to renew the spell. He could sense the ghazneth’s growing excitement and knew the battle was about to come to a head. When that happened, he would need a couple of surprises to win the advantage.

Vangerdahast sensed his chance when the cramped corridors finally intersected a true goblin boulevard, a muddy passage broad enough to hold three men abreast and fully twelve feet high-as the wizard discovered when he climbed skyward and suddenly smashed into the formless black ceiling. Xanthon paused at the mouth of one of the smaller tunnels and glared up at the royal magician with ill-concealed hatred.

“Hide up there as long as you wish,” he hissed. “When you begin to starve, perhaps you will join us.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you.” Vangerdahast began to fish through his weathercloak. “I was thinking the time had come to punish your treason.”

The wizard pulled a pinch of powdered iron from his pocket and sprinkled it over his own head, at the same time uttering the spell. Xanathon’s eyes flared scarlet, then he withdrew into the tunnel, hissing and spraying a cloud of droning wasps out into the boulevard. The wizard chuckled and descended to the ground to renew his protection from evil spell-the enchantment required sprinkling a circle of powdered silver on the ground-then added a couple of extensions for good measure and shot into the tunnel after Xanthon. It was his turn to be the hunter.

Xanthon tried twice early in the chase to leap on Vangerdahast and drain the magic from his protective enchantments. Each time, the phantom was thwarted by the protection from evil spell, which prevented him from touching the wizard at all. Vangerdahast stayed close on his quarry’s tail, keeping up a constant patter about punishing him for his betrayals. Within the space of half an hour, Xanthon was reduced to mere fleeing. An hour after that, he was beginning to stumble. He grew desperate and tried to slow his pursuer with insect swarms and snake nets, but this took energy, and the wizard simply brushed them aside with a wave of the appropriate wand.

Finally, Xanthon returned to the goblin boulevard and sprinted straight down the middle in a desperate attempt to simply outrun Vangerdahast. The strategy might have worked, had the parkway not fed into a huge plaza in the middle of the city. The circle was by far the grandest in the city, surrounded by crookedly built edifices with marble pillars and sandstone porticos that had ceilings nearly eight feet high.

In the center of this plaza lay a grand pool, fully five paces across and rimmed in a broad band of golden sand. It was filled with black, shimmering water so stagnant that when Xanthon ran onto it, he did not even sink. The surface merely rippled like obsidian jelly, and his feet stuck to the surface as soon as they touched it. Two paces later, he came to a dead halt in the center of the basin.

Vangerdahast did not even slow down as he passed. He simply pulled Owden’s mace from his belt and swooped down to slam it into the back of the ghazneth’s head. There was a crack and a spray of dark blood. Xanthon pitched forward onto his knees.

Vangerdahast passed over the pool’s golden rim and wheeled around to find his foe still kneeling in the center. Xanthon’s skull had been half-shattered, with a halo of jagged black bone protruding up at wild angles and one eye dangling out on his cheek and his dark lip twisted into a smug sneer.

“Last chance,” said Xanthon. “If you let me go, you can change your mind.”

“What makes you think I’d ever let you go?” Vangerdahast streaked down for another strike.

Xanthon smiled and dived forward, disappearing into the tar headfirst. Vangerdahast managed to knock one foot off at the ankle as the phantom’s legs vanished from sight, then the surface of the dark pool returned to its syrupy tranquility.

Vangerdahast circled around and considered the dark pool for a moment, more angered by Xanthon’s escape than astonished by it. He had already seen the ghazneth vanish through a stone floor, so he supposed he should not be surprised when the creature disappeared into a pool of tar.

Vangerdahast did not even consider letting the phantom go. Xanthon Cormaeril was a traitor of the vilest kind, and, almost as importantly, he was the royal magician’s best chance to find his way back to Cormyr before the scourges ruined it. He fished two rings from his weathercloak, one to let him breathe water-if that was what the black stuff was-and the other to allow him free movement, then streaked headlong toward the center of the pool.

The wizard was just inches above the surface when a pearly skin of magic appeared over the dark liquid. He barely had time to tuck his chin and twist away before he slammed into it. A terrific jolt shot up his spine, filling him with anguish from neck to knees, and he careened back into the air.