Forsaken House (37 page)

“Can we take them, do you think?” Seiveril asked.

Fflar replied, “That is your decision, not mine.”

“I am asking you for your assessment of the situation.”

The big moon elf studied the enemy ranks for a while then said, “You can’t win this war by seizing some piece of territory these demonspawn control. They have no cities for you to raze, no castles to pull down. If you want to end this threat, you have to beat their army, and that means you have to wait for them come to you, or you have to run them down. I faced this same dilemma in the Weeping War, except that time I faced an army that outnumbered mine by ten to one. This foe you can defeat, if you are certain that the fight is necessary.”

Seiveril studied the distant ranks of the enemy army, searching for certainty. He frowned, recalling his misgivings, and wondering what had changed for the daemonfey that had encouraged them to halt their retreat and turn back. Did they like the battleground? Had they garnered reinforcements? Or had they simply reached the right time to execute some greater plan of which he was not aware?

“Well?” asked Fflar.

Corellon, grant me wisdom, Seiveril prayed silently.

He wheeled his horse around to face the officers and messengers who followed him and snapped, “Send word to all the captains. We will attack!”

Araevin found himself standing in a strange, spherical chamber of pale white stone. The room was perhaps three times his height, and the center of the floor had been leveled, so that it was not a true sphere. The walls shone with a pale radiance that illuminated the entire chamber with a strange and threatening light. He could feel the powerful spell wards that pervaded the place, spells to foil scrying, spells to make the walls impervious.… The room was without exit, as he knew it would be-the chamber had been carved out of the bedrock hundreds of feet below the ghost’s hall, and it was only accessible by magic.

The Nightstar hovered in the center of the room, held aloft by the spells of the ancient wizard who had built the place. It was exactly as Araevin had seen, a dagger-shaped crystal about three inches long. In color it was a deep, iridescent purple reminiscent of the last gloaming of a storm-clouded sunset, and pale lavender glyphs were etched into its surface. Unseen emanations of magical power ringed the device like heat shimmering in the air, an aura of arcane potency that halted Araevin even in the face of his compulsion to seize the gem.

For all his years of study alongside high mages and loremasters, he had never seen a selukiira before. Like their lesser kindred the telkiira, they served to store knowledge—memories, spells, secrets, whatever their creators chose to infuse them with. But the high loregems were also reputed to be teaching devices, a means by which the arcane study of a hundred years might be conferred to the wearer in the blink of an eye. A selukiira might make a novice into a powerful mage in a single searing instant. If what Sarya had said was true, then locked inside its violet depths lay the secrets to high magic, knowledge of ancient rites and mighty spells that otherwise might take decades of study to encompass.

This was made by a Dlardrageth, he reminded himself. A Dlardrageth who studied firsthand the forgotten magic of old Aryvandaar, the most powerful realm of elves that ever existed. From their mighty towers in the North the High Mages of Aryvandaar launched spells

that destroyed entire nations and enslaved half a continent. What would Sarya do with such knowledge?

It did not matter. He didn’t have the ability to refuse.

Since the gemstone hovered ten feet above the marble floor, Araevin cast a simple spell to catch hold of it and draw it down to him—but the spell failed. The Nightstar was not to be moved by such a minor magic. He stood silent, thinking, then he muttered the words of his spell of flying, and willed himself into the air. Moving slowly, as if he watched himself in a dream, he reached out to touch the crystal. Dread welled up in his mind as his fingertips neared the gem, yet he was helpless to turn away his face or even wince in anticipation of what might happen when his flesh touched the crystal.

Selukiira burn out the minds of those who are not meant to handle them, he reminded himself. They recognize those who are false, and destroy them utterly.

“I refuse,” Araevin whispered.

For an awful moment he fought to keep his hand from moving an inch nearer, his muscles straining to obey Sarya’s command while his mind and will woke to full power, shaking off the daemonfey enchantment. He closed his eyes and bared his teeth, throwing the entirety of his consciousness into the simple effort to hold his hand still.

“I refuse!” he snarled, and he drew his hand back half an inch. Sarya’s spell enticed him toward his doom with the seductiveness of a high, rocky clifftop and the lure of the leap, but Araevin proved the stronger.

He snatched his hand away, and howled, “I refuse!”

The Nightstar hung before his face, less than an arm’s length from his eyes. It stood quiescent, showing not a hint of the fearsome doom it held for him. Araevin drifted back in midair, thinking hard. He took a deep breath.

“Now what?” he asked aloud.

Though his free will had been restored, the fact remained that he could not escape the chamber except by means of the portal, and that would return him to the hall where the daemonfey waited. Any teleportation he attempted there would destroy him, as surely as the vrock had been destroyed in the rooms above. He could try to surprise Nurthel with his sudden return, and attack—but Araevin had not had the opportunity to replenish his magic since before they entered Grimlight’s lair, and few of his spells remained. It did not seem realistic to hope that he could defeat Nurthel, the other daemonfey, and the surviving demons with a single swift assault.

Would I have time enough to flee? he wondered. If I could escape the misty hall … but there again the barrier against teleportation would foil me. At best I could try to outrun the daemonfey, but they have wings, don’t they?

He could try to feign compliance, returning to offer Nurthel a fake Nightstar. It was possible that the fey’ri sorcerer didn’t know what the device would look like. That might give him an opportunity to flee later, but if Nurthel discovered the deception he would know that Sarya’s compulsion had failed. Perhaps the best thing would be to simply wait in the buried chamber without ever returning, and make sure that the daemonfey were denied the Nightstar forever. Would it be worth his life to keep the selukiira out of their hands?

“Not just your life, Araevin,” he reminded himself.

Sarya still held Ilsevele and Maresa in her stronghold. If he did not return there quickly, and with his will untrammeled by the daemonfey enchantments, Ilsevele and Maresa would suffer for it, and he could imagine only too well what form their tortures might take.

There is no way out, he realized.

Even if he regarded his own life as forfeit, he could not do the same for Ilsevele and Maresa. He had to find the path that offered him some chance to return and free them.

If he simply seized the gemstone and let it have him, there was a chance that Ilsevele and Maresa might be rescued by some other agency. Seiveril might divine her location and send help. At the very least, Araevin’s resistance would not be an excuse for Sarya to kill his companions. There was at least some small possibility

that the selukiira was not programmed to destroy its defiler. How much of a risk it would be, he had no way of knowing.

And when it came down to it, he was curious. Even if it destroyed him, he wanted to know what secrets the Nightstar concealed.

“Damn,” he breathed.

He reached out and grasped the Nightstar.

His vision whirled, and in a flash of lambent light he felt himself drawn into the dormant consciousness of the gemstone. It engulfed him like a violet sea, smothering him in its power. He felt its might rising around him, ramparts and battlements of dangerous lore looming around him on all sides, penning him in, trapping him. Then the edifices vanished, leaving him to plummet screaming into a terrible and dark abyss, falling for what seemed to be hours through a cosmos of purple facets and white-glowing runes of fire. Darkness came, and a flash of brilliant light.

Araevin opened his eyes, and found himself standing in a wondrous and terrible garden. Walls of perfect white stone, graced by elegant arches, seemed to wall out some place of infernal terror. Brutal red firelight shone through the gaps, and the sky overhead was a sickly yellow-brown, streaked with columns of toxic smoke. The garden was home to scores of exotic plants and stunningly colorful blossoms, but they were alive and predatory, slow-moving things that writhed like serpents and dripped venom from their delicate structures. The golden fountain showed a marvelous sculpted scene of elf maidens and dancing satyrs, yet on a closer look the maidens’ faces gaped with terror and the satyrs were scaly devils.

A flicker of light caught his eye, and he turned to look. From a soft sparkle of lavender a handsome sun elf stepped into the garden, appearing from the air itself. He was a regal fellow, tall and broad-shouldered, and he wore long crimson robes with a shorter vestment of gold-embroidered black over his torso. His face was sharp-featured, and his eyes were a startling, powerful green in color.

“Well,” he said, his voice lilting with sinister beauty. “You are not what I expected. Who are you?”

Araevin steeled himself, determined not to show his dread, and replied, “I am Araevin Teshurr. Who are you?”

“I am Saelethil Dlardrageth. Or at least, a facsimile of him—me. I am the Nightstar.”

“What is this place?”

“I am holding your mind within mine, as I assay you. Of course, your body still holds me in its hand.” Saelethil paced nearer, his hands clasped before him, a sinister smile on his face. “I have taken the liberty of examining your predicament, at least as you perceive it. I am rather astonished to find that five millennia have passed, while I waited in Ithraides’ prison. Saelethil did not—that is, I did not-anticipate this turn of events. If he had, I would know better what to do with you.”

“If you mean to destroy me, then get on with it. I have had enough of bantering with daemonfey.”

“Destroy you? Why, it’s a lovely offer, but I am afraid I cannot oblige.”

Araevin narrowed his eyes and studied the strange apparition more closely.

“I thought selukiira destroyed those unfit for their use,” Araevin said.

“Of course I would do that. However, you are not unfit,” Saelethil replied. His smirk faded a bit, and his eyes darkened with ire. “My purpose, as Saelethil himself inscribed it within me, is to teach sun elves of House Dlardrageth the secrets of Aryvandaar’s high magic, provided they are sufficiently skilled in the study of magic to comprehend such things. You are a mage whose skill, while modest, still falls within acceptable limits. Therefore, I am not to destroy you.”

“But I am not a Dlardrageth,” Araevin replied, even as he wondered how hard he ought to argue that point with the Nightstar.

Saelethil laughed darkly and said, “Well, you may think you are not, but evidently you are. I have an infallible sense for this, and cannot be mistaken.”

Could it be true? Araevin wondered. He thought back to what he knew of his ancestors … and he recalled his kinship to Elorfindar Floshin. Elorfindar and he shared an ancestor, a Floshin. And House Floshin had been one of the Houses of ancient Siluvanede, a House whose name was claimed by some among the fey’ri.

“I am a Floshin,” he mumbled.

“That does not make you a Dlardrageth,” Saelethil observed. “However, I would guess that one of my family chose to favor one of the Floshins with a child. The Floshins served us long and well, after all. Your heritage likely derives from such a dalliance.” The cruel sun elf shook his head. “I was not nearly specific enough when I created the descriptions of who could use this device. Of course, I had no idea that five thousand years and dozens of generations would pass, allowing Dlardrageth blood to surface in some unexpected places.”

“If I am a Dlardrageth, then how did I manage to unlock Ithraides’ telkiira or gain access to this chamber?” Araevin asked. “These things were locked against the daemonfey.”

Saelethil pursed his lips in displeasure and said, “Take up that question with Ithraides’ shade, not mine. If I were to guess, I would suppose that his defenses were designed to hinder those with the stain of evil marking their souls. Your high and useless morals likely met the stodgy old bastard’s approval.”

Araevin closed his eyes and laughed bitterly.

“So I represent the one contradiction that neither you nor Ithraides foresaw,” he said, “a Dlardrageth free of the supernatural evil of the rest of the House. Had I been evil, I never could have found this place. Had I not been a Dlardrageth, I never could have survived it.”

“The irony overwhelms me,” Saelethil said, grimacing. “So, what now?”

“What now?” Saelethil repeated. He fixed his emerald eyes on Araevin, and a cruel smile grew slowly on his features. “What now? Now, my weak-minded bastard whelp who happens to be blessed with a genealogy you do not appreciate or deserve, I am going to do what I was made to do and instruct you in the things that Saelethil wished to see preserved. And we’ll see if you are Dlardrageth enough to survive the scars I’m going to sear into your soul.”

Saelethil stood before Araevin, who started to protest, but Saelethil seized his head with both hands and pressed his fingertips into Araevin’s skull.

The world exploded with crimson pain.

11 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms

Silver moonlight streamed down the shoulders of Daelyth’s Dagger until the stark cliffs of the forest mountain shone like white beacons in the night. Nervous, Gaerradh studied the sky and the high slopes overhead, searching for any sign of daemonfey sorcerers above the vale. The deeply cleft valley was so narrow and high that the winged fey’ri would have to choose between staying so far above the gorge that they could not reach the elves below with their spells and quarrels, or descending into the straits of stone where it would be difficult to maneuver between the cliffs. On the other hand any fey’ri who remained above the Dagger could simply hurl stones into the deeps below and create no small danger for anyone sheltering on the valley floor below, even if their boulders were dropped