Farthest Reach (41 page)

He laughed richly, expansively, and the poisonous flowers of the garden quaked and trembled in reply.

Araevin frowned. Saelethil’s persona in the Nightstar was bound by laws the archmage had laid down long ago. That was why the seluhiira had been bound to instruct him instead of destroying him when first he set his hand to the stone. Yet clearly Saelethil had discerned something new, something that pleased him greatly, and Araevin suspected that he would not like it at all.

“What is it?” he demanded. “I did not come here to be laughed at, Saelethil!”

“Oh, but you did, foolish boy!” Saelethil said. His eyes were cold with contempt as he laughed again. “You have no idea what you have done, do you?”

Araevin folded his arms and simply waited. He did not care to serve as the object of Saelethil’s humor.

“When you chose Ithraides’s path instead of mine,” Saelethil hissed, “you severed yourself from your salvation. I have not been able to destroy you because I was not permitted to harm one whose soul was marked by descent from my House, no matter how remote.” He advanced a step on Araevin, and seemed to grow taller. “By infusing yourself with the celestial essence of the eladrin, you have removed the last thin vestiges of Dlardrageth blood. I am no longer required to serve you, which means that I am free to do with you as I wish.”

Araevin stared in amazement. Then he stepped back and snapped out a potent abjuration, building a spellshield to defend himself for a time while he figured out what to do.

The spell failed. The passes of his hand were nothing more than empty gestures, the words devoid of power.

Saelethil laughed aloud. “This is not a spell duel, Araevin! Your consciousness is enclosed entirely within my substance. Neither of us can work magic here. This is a contest of will.”

Saelethil grew larger than a giant, shooting up into the air like a crimson tower, so tall that Araevin stumbled back in astonishment and fell.

“You have placed yourself in my power!” Saelethil boomed. “Now, dear boy, I will repay the indignities I have accumulated in your service!”

He strode forward and set one immense foot on Araevin, crushing him to the hot flagstones below, leaning on him with the terrible weight of a malicious and living mountain.

Araevin cried out in dismay as Saelethil’s power gathered over him and crushed him down. Shadow rose up around him, and he felt his very substance, his life, his consciousness, compressed all around, being squeezed out of existence. Saelethil’s cruel laughter lashed him like the winds of a dark hurricane, and the malice and power of the Dlardrageth’s will filled the universe with black hate.

“Do not fear for your friends, Araevin!” Saelethil cried. “You will rejoin them in a moment-or at least your body will. I have yearned for flesh to wear for longer than you can imagine. You are not so handsome as I was in life, but Ilsevele will not know the difference, will she?”

“You will not lay a hand on her, monster!” Araevin screamed in empty protest.

Saelethil’s scorn battered him. “I will do whatever I like with you, fool! You will bring me to my niece Sarya, and I will take up my rightful place as a lord of House Dlardrageth. I may even allow you to retain a glimmer of awareness so that you can perceive the extent of your defeat. I owe you that much after the servitude you have visited upon me.”

Araevin despaired in the shrieking blackness beneath Saelethil’s will. He had stumbled into the very fate he had first feared when he found the Nightstar; the seluhiira would crush his sentience and seize his own empty body for its own use. The evils that might follow sickened him. What might a Dlardrageth high mage do, with the freedom of Araevin’s own body? Destroy more of Evermeet’s high mages? Lead the daemonfey legions against Seiveril Miritar’s army? Or simply murder anyone Araevin ever loved?

He struggled to fight back, to find some purchase with which to gather his will and make a stand. For a moment he battled his way back to the palace of Saelethil’s heart, struggling on the ground with the foot of a giant pinning him to the stone. But the Dlardrageth grinned at his struggles and caught him by his throat in one finetaloned hand.

“This is my mind, my soul,” Saelethil gloated. “Within these boundaries, my strength is limitless! Do you not understand that yet?”

Araevin said nothing, but grimly fought against Saelethil’s grip, his feet kicking, his chest crying out for air. But Saelethil drew back his arm and hurled him straight down into the ground. The palace of white walls and venomous flowers shattered like a broken mirror, and Araevin plunged into the bottomless darkness underneath, tumbling and falling away from the light.

He shouted in outrage, trying to fight his way up out of the gemstone, escape, return to his own mind and body so that he could simply drop the damned stone and get away from Saelethil Dlardrageth. But he could not stop himself from sinking, falling, drowning in darkness as thick and heavy as a sea of black stone.

3 Flamerule, the Year of Lightning Storms

The horrors of the last two days and nights had hardened Seiveril to death in a dozen gruesome forms, but at last he looked upon something that he could not bear. Not caring who saw him or what they might think, he staggered to his knees and covered his face.

“Ah, Corellon! How have you allowed me to fail your people so?” he cried.

Demons had fallen on a small company of wood elves—his wood elves, the merry band from Evermeet’s forest who had followed him to Faerun with such pluck and bravado—and flayed alive all they could catch. Seiveril stood in the center of the carnage, sickened by the sound of flies buzzing thickly around the dead and the mewling cries of those the demons had chosen not to kill. Starbrow let him grieve for a time, standing close by with Keryvian naked in his hand in case the demons returned. Over the past few days Sarya’s infernal hordes had struck again and again, hammering at the Crusade as the army of Evermeet fought its way back toward Mistledale to rejoin Vesilde Gaerth. They were still ten miles from Ashabenford, but the smoke of the town’s burning streaked the eastern sky.

Starbrow looked at the place where a handful of Seiveril’s soldiers had fought and died alone, with no help at hand, and shook his head.

“Gods, what a scene,” he murmured. Then he trudged over and set a hand on Seiveril’s shoulder. “Come, my friend,” he said wearily. “We cannot stay here any longer. The demons may return to attack our healers, and we cannot afford to lose any more clerics. Or you, for that matter.”

“I have led us into disaster, Starbrow,” Seiveril said. “My pride brought these wood elves to this place, and my stupidity killed them. How can I bear to live?”

“The measure of a general does not lie in victory, Seiveril. It lies in defeat. To continue after the worst has happened is hard, but if you do not lead us from this place, no one will.”

Seiveril remained motionless, giving no answer. But then he slowly came to life again, and he nodded once. “If only we had been closer… .”

“Frankly, Seiveril, it is a miracle you have kept the army together as well as you have,” Starbrow said. “Many have fallen, yes. But many have lived, too. We are not defeated yet.” He looked around at the bloodstained clearing, and the gray-cloaked healers who worked silently among those who could still be helped. “Come. You can do nothing more here.”

Seiveril followed Starbrow to the far side of the clearing, where Adresin and the rest of Seiveril’s guard waited with their mounts. They climbed up into their saddles and rode away, passing through a narrow belt of trees before emerging into the open fields and groves of the Dale proper. The weather had warmed quickly since the fight at the river, and the day was hot and humid. Seiveril could smell a thunderstorm gathering in the air. Doubtless Sarya’s demons would strike again in the storm, falling on some other part of his harried army to maim and kill and burn, melting away before he could bring them to battle. That had been the way of it for days.

“We should join up with Gaerth and the companies we left here soon,” Starbrow offered. “That’s almost two thousand bows, plus many of our best champions. Even Sarya’s demons will be deterred by that.”

Seiveril suspected that the moon elf was speaking simply to set Seiveril’s mind on something other than the horror back in the clearing, but he allowed his friend to pull his thoughts to a new course.

“Vesilde has had an easier time of things than we have,” he admitted.

The knight-commander had done as Seiveril had asked, giving ground instead of fighting. His footsoldiers had retired south and west down the Dale, covering the flight of the Dalesfolk and surrendering Ashabenford to the oncoming Sembians. Had the Sembians wanted to, they might have overrun the whole Dale with the help of the Red Plumes, and forced Gaerth to fight, but they had not moved farther into the Dale in days, and Seiveril could not fathom why.

Seiveril rode closer to Starbrow and lowered his voice. “There is something I need to know,” he asked. “In the last days of Myth Drannor, when the Army of Darkness roamed Cormanthor … Was it like this?”

Starbrow did not look at him. He kept his eyes fixed ahead, gazing on the smoke from the burnings in the distance. “Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Yes, it was like this. The orcs, ogres, and gnolls outnumbered us badly, yet we could have defeated them regardless of numbers. But not while legions of demons fought against us too.”

“I was afraid you would say that.”

Starbrow shrugged. He had always been reluctant to speak of his long-ago life in the days of Myth Drannor. “It’s harder than you might think to pick your wars. The ones you least wish are the ones you often have to fight.”

“I picked this one, didn’t I?”

Starbrow halted and set a hand on Seiveril’s reins, pulling the elflord around to face him. Seiveril’s horse nickered in protest but turned.

“Sarya Dlardrageth picked this war, Seiveril. If you hadn’t decided to stand up to her, she would have sacked Evereska and burned half of the North in her wrath. You answered the call to arms, yes. But that does not mean that you chose this fight.” The moon elf looked into Seiveril’s face, and after a moment he released the elflord’s reins. “If it’s any comfort to you, Sarya is not happy with her choice of enemies. She thought she was making war on a scattering of isolated wood elf settlements and a city weakened by a war against the phaerimm. She did not plan on you, my friend, and that is a cause for hope.”

Seiveril considered that as they rejoined the column of weary elf soldiers who marched across Mistledale’s open fields like a river of dusty steel.

“So what do I do now?” he asked Starbrow.

“Withdraw,” the moon elf said. “We don’t have the strength to move on Myth Drannor, and there’s no point in staying here. The folk from Mistledale have fled to the southern parts of the Dale. We’d be defending empty farmland.”

“I can’t bear to turn my back on Myth Drannor, not when we’re this close.”

“What do your auguries tell you?”

Seiveril looked sharply at Starbrow. He hadn’t realized that his friend knew the extent to which he had relied on his prayers and spells of guidance during the campaign.

He sighed and said, “This is not the hour to march against Myth Drannor, and disaster awaits us if we stay here. But I can’t see what follows from this, Starbrow. If we retreat, what must change for the better before we can take the fight to Sarya again?”

“If we don’t retreat, will any of our army be left to draw sword against her in the first place?” Starbrow asked. “There will be another day, Seiveril. The Seldarine did not bring you to this place-or me to this place, for that matter-without a purpose.”

Seiveril nodded. He, of all people, was not likely to forget that. “Call the captains, Starbrow. We must plan a fighting retreat.”

Starbrow clapped him once on the shoulder, and rode off, calling for the captains of the Crusade. The elflord watched him ride off, and looked again to the east. The thunderheads gathered there, moving lazily against the wind. Ominous rumbles rolled across the dry fields.

The storm is upon us, he thought. In more ways than one.

*****

Araevin plummeted through darkness, an infinite abyss in which the vast power of Saelethil’s will threatened to swallow him completely. Grimly, he resolved to endure as long as he could. Even if he was to be extinguished in Saelethil’s black hate, he would not go gently.

“You are not real!” he shouted into the endless night. “You are a ghost, a reflection, an echo of a mage who died five thousand years ago! You are not Saelethil Dlardrageth!”

He felt his fall begin to slow, and he turned his will toward arresting his plunge.

“You are nothing, Saelethil! A ghost!”

Saelethil’s face appeared before him in the darkness, a titanic apparition that dwarfed Araevin.

“I am substantial enough to destroy you!” the Dlardrageth thundered. “And in your body I will be as real and alive as I ever was. You do not know my strength!”

“You do not know mine,” Araevin replied.

He curled into a ball and closed his eyes, blocking out the maddening plunge and terrible vistas of purple towers and bottomless violet wells surrounding him. He envisioned himself as a shining white light smothered in darkness, a diamond glittering under the blow of a terrible black hammer, and he threw his full will into resisting Saelethil as long as he could.

“That will not avail you,” Saelethil laughed.

He gathered up the force of his will, and hurled himself down on Araevin’s last resistance with the force of a thunderbolt. Araevin screamed with the power of the attack, and darkness welled up to fill his being … but somehow he survived the blow.

Saelethil roared in frustration and attacked again, clutching at him, stabbing into his mind with dark blades that seared and cut Araevin’s very soul, but Araevin battled on, repelling the blows. Saelethil’s voice became the hissing of a demon, great and terrible, and black fires roared up out of the night to incinerate Araevin where he huddled, alone in the dark.

“Yield, curse you! You cannot endure me,” Saelethil demanded. “Yield!”