The Sorcerer (32 page)

“That’s human,” Galaeron said. “Male and large. Very large.”

“Vaasan,” Khelben growled. He looked into the woods, and in Common yelled, “Kuhl! Burlen!”

Their answer came in riotous motion as a dozen elf warriors sprang out from behind tree trunks, under logs, beneath piles of dead leaves, and rushed to attack. Only the slim advantage of their faster-moving time stream spared Galaeron and his fellow Chosen from being chopped into a dozen pieces each by the darkswords that had once belonged to Vala’s slain company of warriors.

“Up!” Galaeron cried in Common. “Watch yourselves!”

As he yelled the warning, he was already rising above the reach of his attackers. Khelben and the other Chosen followed, but poor Aris found himself surrounded by half a dozen elves tossing their glassy black swords from hand to hand.

The elves below Galaeron and the Chosen drew their arms back to throw.

“Hold!” Galaeron cried, speaking Elvish. “I am Galaeron Nihmedu, a citizen of Evereska, once a Tomb Guard princep patrolling the Desert Border South, who resides in Treetop in Starmeadow, son to Aubric Nihmedu and brother to Keya Nihmedu of the Long Watch, friend to—”

“Strange how you do not look much like an elf,” said a familiar—though much hardened—female voice.

A young moon elf of little more than eighty appeared from behind the trunk of a bluetop, her turquoise hair tucked up beneath an ostentatious battle helm that could only have been made by the Gold elves of Evermeet Her gold-flecked eyes were shot through with red lines, and her cupid’s bow smile had gone straight and grim with worry, but Galaeron would have known his sister had she looked a hundred times more drained. His heart drummed in joy.

“Keya! You’re alive!”

Keya narrowed her eyes in suspicion and said, “So it seems, for now.”

There was a slight drawl as she spoke, just enough to suggest the slower passage of forest time. She reached behind a tree and pulled Vala into view, and Galaeron was astonished to see that someone had actually taken Vala’s darksword and bound her hands in elven rope.

“Where did you come by this mind-slave?” Keya asked. “Tell me that, and we will let you live—so long as you swear to leave Evereska and never return.”

“You are not a very good liar, Keya.” He dispelled the masking magic that made him look like a phaerimm, then drifted down toward the ground, adding, “But neither you nor Evereska has anything to fear from us.”

“Hold there, you devil!” Keya ordered. “Any lower, and IT! give you the death you deserve for impersonating my brother.”

This drew a snicker from Vala, which drew an angry glower from Keya.

“Keya!” Khelben snapped in Elvish. “He is your brother. Release Vala and flee this area—now!”

“Do you think I take orders from worms?”

To demonstrate that she did not, Keya hurled her darksword. Even with the faster speed of his time stream, Khelben barely had time to pivot out of the way and let the weapon tumble past Two dozen archers suddenly appeared from their hiding places, arrows nocked and arms drawing their bows back to fire. Storm and Laeral were already casting spells of paralyzation. Keya’s entire company froze where they were, bows half flexed and swords half raised.

Khelben retrieved Keya’s darksword from the tree where it had lodged itself, then flew down to her. Burlen stepped into view from behind the tree where Vala had been held, his own arm rising to throw his darksword.

Galaeron stopped him with a shadow web.

Khelben nodded his thanks, then flipped the weapon around and shook the hilt in Keya’s face.

“You are trying my patience, young lady. We have reasons

for our appearance, and no time to explain them to you now.”

A loud crackle sounded from the direction of the Groaning Cave. Galaeron glanced back and saw a tiny brilliance flickering down through the bluetop boughs.

Khelben continued to lecture Keya, “When we release you and your company, you are going to take it on faith that I am telling you the truth and flee this area—”

“Uh, Khelben?” As Galaeron spoke, he was watching the tiny sphere of brilliance expand above the trees. “There isn’t going to be—”

“Starmeadow!” Laeral yelled, already laying a portal on the ground in the center of the elven company. ‘Teleport!”

Storm was already shoving paralyzed elves into the circle. Khelben took one look at the expanding circle of light and cursed, then wrapped his arms around Keya, Burlen, and two more elves, and vanished. Galaeron sprang to Vala’s side, grabbing her bound hands, and started back toward Laeral’s teleportation circle.

Vala jerked him back, nearly pulling him off his feet.

“Not without my sword!”

Back near the Groaning Cave, crooked forks of light began to dance down through the trees, and the war rumble there fell into a sudden silence. Galaeron stepped around Vala and found her sword leaning against the tree. He snatched it up and cut her bindings—no other blade would have severed the elven rope—then handed the weapon back to her.

“Now can we go?”

Galaeron grabbed her wrist and turned toward the teleportation circle and ran headlong into a small wood elf with doe-brown eyes, an impish smile, and a bared long sword.

“Well met, Galaeron,” she said. “Still rescuing Vala, I see.”

Galaeron’s jaw fell. “T-Takari?”

Takari smiled and said, “So you do remember.”

Galaeron surprised her with a heartfelt embrace, and she surprised him by returning it just as warmly.

“I was afraid I’d never see you again,” he said.

A long, deafening crackle sounded from the direction of the Groaning Cave, and a column of leaden light appeared in the forest in front of the veranda.

Vala appeared beside them.

“Break it up, you two!” She slid an arm between them and used a deft elbow to force Takari back, then said, “No offense, but we’ve got to go.”

Takari glanced at the offending elbow as though she might remove it, then smiled sweetly and said, “No offense taken.”

She glanced back in the direction of the brightening column of light, then turned and waved at what appeared to be a pile of leaves.

“Come along, Kuhl! We’ll let Galaeron teleport us out of here.”

Galaeron arrived in a tangle of arms both human and elf, Vala clasping his shoulders on one side, Takari tucked against his ribs on the other, Kuhl standing opposite, encompassing them all in a great bear hug and glaring down as though he wasn’t quite convinced that Galaeron’s transformation from phaerimm to elf was a return to true form.

The air reeked of brimstone and charred flesh, and it resounded with booms and cracks and wails. Still struggling with teleport afterdaze, Galaeron recalled he had been somewhere else trying to flee some impending cataclysm. The air had smelled the same there, and the battle din had been just as loud. He began to fear they had not escaped after all, that they were about to suffer the consequences of whatever terrible event they had been fleeing.

Galaeron glanced up at the canopy of a bluetop forest and cringed at the familiarity of it.

“I think the mythal rebuffed—”

He was about to say “my teleport spell” when a leaden brilliance filtered through the wood. He was jolted by a tremendous concussion—a concussion that erupted in the pit of his stomach and blasted outward. His palms and soles went numb, his eardrums thumped, and pain filled his head.

He found himself on his hands and knees with Vala, Takari, and Kuhl, thinking they were all going to die and wondering why the mythal had interfered with his magic when it normally deflected translocational spells only when they crossed its perimeter. Of course, Galaeron had used shadow magic. Months before a healthy mythal had prevented Melegaunt from touching the Shadow Weave, but in its weakened state, it had not obstructed any of the shadow spells Galaeron cast outside the Groaning Cave.

This was as far as Galaeron’s thoughts went before it occurred to him that he had already survived the shock wave. The roaring in his ears was actually a deafening silence, he realized, and the ground beneath him had not shuddered once with the impact of a falling bluetop. He rose to his knees, glancing around, and saw that while the wood was familiar, it was not the one beneath the Groaning Cave. The undergrowth had been allowed to offer shelter to the birds and animals, and the terrain was not as steep.

Perhaps they had reached Starmeadow after all. Galaeron started to rise… and was pulled back down by Kuhl’s meaty paw. The Vaasan used fingertalk to call for silence, then slipped back into the underbrush as stealthily as any elf. When Vala and Takari did the same, Galaeron dropped to his belly and followed, then turned and peered through a bush.

Starmeadow lay directly ahead, its small expanse layered in acrid fume and its lush grasses blackened from battle. At the far end, Dawnsglory Pond had turned pink with spilled blood and was still boiling from some blast of

magical heat. Bodies both elf and otherwise lay strewn along the far side, where the Chosen and the Company of the Cold Hand had been attacked while still dazed. Like Galaeron and his companions, those out on the battlefield were already starting to recover and rise. Both sides seemed to have been unprepared for the fighting, with the elves and their allies caught out in the open and the phaerimm and their mind-slaves strewn haphazardly along the meadow edge adjacent to Galaeron and his companions.

An elf in tattered armor picked up a darksword and used it to lop off the tentacled head of a mind flayer. A phaerimm floated up and countered with a black ray that left a melon-sized hole in the warrior’s chest. Another elf sprang up, catching the sword before it hit the ground, and charged the killer. The battle burst into full rage, silver bolts and white flashes tracing brilliant streaks through the air, flames bursting up from the blackened ground, heads and chests and bodies rupturing from no visible cause. Even the mythal exerted itself to join in, pelting Evereska’s enemies with a hail of slushy pellets that dissolved on their shoulders and had no effect except to make the elves fight harder.

Galaeron thought of Keya and wanted to charge out onto the field to find her, but the calmer part of him—the darker, more cunning part—held back. Foolish heroics would accomplish nothing except a foolish death, and Keya needed him alive. The entire Company of the Cold Hand needed him, as did Khelben and the other Chosen, as did all of Evereska. He was the only one who understood the phaerimm, who knew how to defeat them. He had to work toward his purpose and trust his sister to keep herself alive. To do anything less was to betray the warrior spirit in her… and that of Evereska herself.

Galaeron found the Chosen near Dawnsglory Pond, still in their phaerimm disguises and hurling spells back into the main body of the Company of the Cold Hand. At first, he

thought they were just trying to protect their identities and escape until they could execute his plan. It took a moment of careful observation before he realized that their spells were all flash and thunder, and that they were carefully positioning themselves to catch the phaerimm in a flanking attack. Seeing they could do even better, he backed deeper into the underbrush, then motioned for the others to arm themselves and follow.

Kuhl moved more like a forest cat than the cave bear he so resembled, and the four companions slipped around the phaerimm flank guard. Galaeron sprang out of a bush behind an illithid, and the thing’s heart stopped beating before it realized someone had driven a sword through it. As Galaeron was dropping back out of sight, Takari’s death arrow droned past his head and killed the illithid’s beholder partner, then Vala and Kuhl charged out of the underbrush to attack four astonished bugbears. The closest pair raised their battle-axes to block. The Vaasans’ darkswords slashed through the thick oak shafts like bread, then opened the throats of both creatures. The second pair of bugbears, alarmed as well as stunned, thought better of fighting and turned to roar the alarm.

It was a bad mistake. Galaeron hurled a dark bolt, Takari fired two more death arrows, and the Vaasans threw their darkswords. Only Vala targeted the nearest one, but her black blade sank to the hilt between the monster’s shoulder blades. He took three more steps, then crashed to the ground in a lifeless heap. The other bugbear fell where he was, head lost to Galaeron’s magic, heart burst by Kuhl’s darksword, legs shriveling around Takari’s black arrows.

The first sign of a counterattack came when a huge bluetop trunk burst into flaming splinters. A terrific cracking echoed down through the boughs, and Galaeron looked up to find what seemed an entire sky of leaves and trunk crashing down toward him. He flicked a wad of shadowstuff up at it and shouted a word in ancient Netherese. A web of dark strands

appeared overhead, anchoring itself to surrounding trees to catch the falling bluetop.

The swirling crackle of meteor stones reverberated through woods from somewhere ahead. Galaeron dived behind the nearest bluetop and glimpsed a smoke trail bending toward him as the pebbles adjusted course. They struck the tree with a series of staccato bangs. He scrambled forward and peered around the other side of the trunk and almost lost his head to a black ray. He rolled back in the other direction and was flash-blinded by a fork of oncoming lightning.

Galaeron dropped flat and bit dirt as the bolt cracked past overhead. With time passing at the same rate for everyone, he was no match for a phaerimm. He pulled back, readied a shadow shield, and barely had time to raise it before the undergrowth parted a dozen paces away and a thornback head rose into view.

Vala emerged behind it, ran her darksword down the length of its back, and disappeared back into the brush just before a beam of green radiance disintegrated the foliage where she had been standing. Takari’s bow sang, and the ray vanished. Vala leaped up, waving a severed phaerimm tail in Galaeron’s direction, and started through the forest again.

Before following, Galaeron said, “Khelben, they’re trapped between us. We’re coming from the opposite end.”