Beyond the High Road c-2 Page 33

  One of the last things Vangerdahast had done when he felt himself nodding off last night-or whenever it had been-was to cast a simple enchantment to protect himself from evil, prolonging its duration with a couple of extension spells. He had been counting on the simple enchantment to keep his foe at bay long enough for him to awaken and escape, but the spell had apparently prevented Xanthon from touching him at all, and even a ghazneth could not drain what they could not touch.

  Beginning to see how he might defeat the phantom, Vangerdahast stopped to cast another spell to make the protection permanent. No sooner had he fetched the ingredients from his cloak pocket, however, than he heard Xanthon sloshing toward him. The wizard put the ingredients away and fled into another tunnel.

  “Wait!” Xanthon called. “We have something to-“

  Vangerdahast blasted the ceiling down as he had before, drowning out the ghazneth’s protest in midsentence. He started down the passage toward the next plaza.

  Fifty paces later, Xanthon appeared in the intersection ahead. He rolled to his haunches and raised his clawed hands in a grotesque mockery of a truce sign.

  “Hold your attack and hear me out. We can always resume fighting in a minute.”

  “You have nothing to say I would be interested in hearing.” Despite his retort, Vangerdahast made no move to attack or flee, instead, he quietly began to move his fingers through the gestures for a prismatic spray. “I doubt you are here to yield to the king’s justice.”

  “Hardly-and we’ll have none of that.” Xanthon waved a talon at the magician’s moving fingers, then waited until the magician ceased his gestures. “I was thinking of something quite the opposite.”

  “Me, surrender to you?” Vangerdahast scoffed. “I thought Boldovar was the mad one.”

  This actually drew a smile from Xanthon. “Actually, it wouldn’t be surrender. We have need of a seventh, and Luthax claims-“

  “Luthax?” Vangerdahast gasped. Luthax had been an early castellan of the War Wizards of Cormyr-and the only high-ranking member of the brotherhood to ever betray the kingdom. “You have raised him?”

  “Me?” Xanthon chuckled. “Hardly. The master… let us say I am but a tool.”

  “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 bloo
d. 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.

  Vangerdahast brought himself slowly under control, then took a moment to shake the shock from his head and inspect himself The impact had left his old body shaken and sore, but relatively unscathed, aside from one slightly separated shoulder. He circled back to the pool and descended more slowly.

  When he came to within a foot of the water, the pearly barrier appeared again-no doubt some sort of enchantment designed to repel beings of honorable intents and loyal persuasions. “It won’t be that easy, Xanthon! Do you hear me?” Vangerdahast was already summoning to mind the words that would dispel the magical barrier. “I’m coming for you!”

  After three solid days in the saddle, Azoun could not quite believe his eyes when he rode into the narrow confines of Scimitar Canyon and found a trailworn stallion standing in the open entrance of the secret cavern of the Sleeping Sword. The big horse was glassy-eyed and haggard from many days on the trail, and he was still covered with foam from a hard ride that had left him barely able to stand, but the king would have recognized the noble beast anywhere.

  “Cadimus!”

  Azoun reined his own hard-ridden mount to a stop, then leaped out of the saddle, passed his reins to one of his weary dragoneer bodyguards, and rushed up to the royal magician’s horse.

  “How have you been old boy?” He patted the stallion fondly on the neck.

  Cadimus nickered softly, then swung his nose around as though to point to his saddle. There was blood on it-a lot of blood, mostly brown and crusted, but some new enough that it was still sticky and red.

  “Kuceon!” Azoun cried, yelling for one of Owden Foley’s young priestesses. “Come quickly!”

  The girl trotted her horse to the head of the company and slipped from the saddle while the beast was still moving. Leaving the reins for someone else to collect, she came to Azoun’s side and touched her fingers to the bloody saddle.

  “A seeping wound. Probably purulent, no doubt serious.”

  The king started to ask if the victim could have cast a teleport spell, then realized that Vangerdahast would never have done such a thing from this particular location-not with the ghazneths at large. With a sinking heart, he selected a dozen dragoneers and two war wizards to accompany them into the cavern, then motioned for a man to strike the torches they had brought along to light their way. He was tempted just to slip on a Purple Dragon commander’s ring and call upon its magical light, but they had spent the last three days riding night and day precisely because he did not want to use any magic that might lead the scourges to the Sleeping Sword. Whatever lay inside, it could wait long enough to strike a fire.

  Once the first torch was lit, the king took it and led the way around a recently-moved boulder into the narrow mouth of the cavern. The air reeked of rot and decay, and Azoun knew before he had taken his third step that something terrible had become of the Lords Who Sleep.

  “Vangerdahast?” he called.

  No answer came, and they rounded the corner into the main chamber of Scimitar Cave.

  The place looked like any other crypt he had ever seen, full of moldering bones and shards of rusty armor and tattered bits of cloth-all that remained of five hundred valiant knights who had volunteered to lay in hibernation against the time when they were needed. Only one piece of equipment, the tattered and bloody cloak of a Royal Scout, lay in anything resembling one piece.

  “Sire!” gasped Kuceon. She seemed unable to say any more than that. Conscious of the effect his reaction would have on those around him, Azoun bit back his despair and snatched the bloody cape, then turned to the young priestess at his side. “See to it that these men have a proper burial,” he said. “Though they never fought, they were heroes all.”

  Vangerdahast slowly circled the basin, arms trembling and voice cracking as he waved his hands over the pool’s skin of pearly magic. He had not fought a good death match in decades, and now that victory was near, he found himself so excited he could barely twine his fingers through a simple dispel magic spell. Xanthon was hurt badly, or he would never have fled into the pool and risked showing Vangerdahast how to escape the goblin city. The ghazneth was too smart to trap himself, so there had to be a portal hidden beneath the surface. With any luck at all, the other end would open into Cormyr, and it would be there that Vangerdahast would visit the king’s justice upon his quarry.

  The wizard paused above the center of the basin and spread his hands, repeating his spell’s arcane syllables over and over again, calling into play his deepest reserves of magic power. The mystic barrier flickered, hissed, and began to lose its luster, giving Vangerdahast a glimpse into the abyssal darkness of the black waters below. He spoke the incantation one more time and flung his arms wide. The magic skin vanished. The wizard brought his hands together and dived after Xanthon.

  A yellow membrane slid across the basin, bringing Vangerdahast’s plunge to a crashing halt. A long series of dull pops resonated through his skull, then he rebounded into the air and found himself tumbling pell-mell back toward the ceiling. His neck and shoulders erupted in pain, his hands turned tingly and weak, and the mace began to slip from his grasp.

  “By the purple fang!” Vangerdahast cursed.

  He willed his numb fingers to close around the hilt of his weapon and slowly spread his limbs, bringing himself back under control-then he noticed the pit of his stomach reverberating to the pulse of a strange rumbling he could not even hear. At first, he took the sensation to be the aftereffects of crashing into the yellow membrane, but he began to feel the vibrations in his bones and teeth and soon recognized them as a powerful rumbling, too deep and sonorous for a human ear to detect.

  Vangerdahast felt hollow and sick. He craned his neck upward, expecting the cavern to come crashing down on him even as he looked. The rumble continued to grow, until it finally became an ominous, barely audible growl that reminded him faintly of a purring cat-or of a distant earthquake. He flew up to the ceiling and found his way blocked by the same spongy substance as before. He touched it. It was as still and motionless as the air in a coffin.

  Epilogue

  Tanalasta rinsed the sour taste from her mouth, then splashed her face with cool stream water. She was no longer suffering from the fever-under Owden’s care, the health of the entire company had been restored-but it w
as the third occasion that morning that some innocuous smell had triggered a bout of retching. This time it had been mountain bluebell, the time before that a field of fleabane. She was beginning to wonder if her journey into the Stonelands had given her some strange aversion to flowers.

  “Feeling better, my dear?” Alaphondar asked from behind her.

  Tanalasta nodded. “I haven’t been feeling bad-it’s all these mountain flowers.” She rinsed her mouth again, then rose and faced the sage. “Their perfume is so cloying.”

  “A strange affliction for one of Chauntea’s faithful.” The old sage was sitting astride his horse, eyeing Tanalasta thoughtfully. “Very peculiar indeed.”

  “I’m sure it will pass with prayer.” Tanalasta’s reply was almost sharp, for she had noticed the sage watching her with that same peculiar expression many times since departing the marsh. She gestured at his bandaged ribs. “And how are you?”

  “Well enough to walk, which is looking increasingly necessary,” He nodded toward a little meadow at the edge of the valley, where Alusair and the rest of the company stood clustered amidst the bed of bluebells that had triggered Tanalasta’s latest bout. “Help me down, will you?”

  The princess offered a shoulder, then the sage slipped from the saddle and led the way back to the small gathering. Tanalasta’s qualmishness returned as they approached the bluebells, but with her stomach already emptied, it was not so bad she felt it necessary to retreat.

  “…definitely Cadimus’s hoof prints,” Alusair said, making a point of ignoring Tanalasta’s return. “Why Rowen would turn north when he was so close to Goblin Mountain is beyond me.”

  After hearing Alaphondar’s description of Cadimus’s escape from the marsh battle, they had concluded that Rowen had taken the stallion and ridden off to carry the sage’s note to the king.