Dawn of Night (33 page)

But it did not, and instead the Skull cocked itself curiously to the side and eyed the blade. It spoke a long string of phrases, each in a different language. Cale understood almost nothing, catching only one word that he knew: coluk, a Turmish verb meaning, “to absorb.”

Behind the Skull, the battle raged on. Fire and lightning lit the cavern. The stone was awash in magical energy and blood. The Skull before Cale uttered a piercing, keening wail. A second Skull engaged in the battle turned sharply at the sound. It turned from the battle and veered toward the ledge.

Cale’s heart hammered in his chest. He could not manage two Skulls.

Still holding Weaveshear between himself and the Skull, he moved nearer to Jak and Magadon, knelt, and grabbed the halfling by the cloak.

“Get up, Jak,” he hissed. “Mags… up. Now.”

With Cale’s help, his two stunned companions climbed to their feet, still smoking and dazed from the fireball. The second Skull was nearly to the ledge. The first kept its impassive gaze fixed squarely on Cale.

“Riven!” Cale called, not seeing the assassin.

“Here,” Riven’s voice called from behind them and to their right.

Cale glanced over his shoulder to see Riven crouched against the wall, his one eye fixed on the Skull. He held throwing daggers in each hand—paltry weapons against so formidable a foe. His clothes were blackened, but he looked generally unharmed by the fireball.

“We’re leaving,” Cale said, speaking as much to the Skull as to his comrades. “We’re leaving,’ he said again, but in Turmish, hoping the Skull would understand.

The Skull softly muttered something in reply. The second Skull was nearly there.

Pulling Magadon and Jak along, Cale backed toward Riven.

Mags, he projected, show me where the slaadi went.

The Skull began to mouth arcane words. The second Skull fell in beside it and joined its incantation. Cale feared that Weaveshear would not be able to absorb whatever was coming next.

Put your hand on me, Riven! Cale projected. Mo,gs, now!

Riven grabbed a fistful of Cale’s cloak as a mental image formed in Cale’s brain: a smooth walled cavern with a formation of stalagmites on the right and a shallow pool. While Cale knew that teleporting in the Underdark presented danger, he had no choice. He drew the shadows around him as quickly as he could and willed them to move to the cavern—willed them to move that instant.

The Skulls’ dead eyes stared holes into Cale. Their power gathered, and Cale summoned power of his own.

With alarming suddenness, a wave of incredible magical force exploded outward from the Skulls.

Cale closed his eyes against the impact. He felt a flutter in his gut, and everything went black.

Cale materialized in a ready crouch, Weaveshear in hand. He took a quick scan of the tunnel. It extended in both directions to the limits of his darkvision. Clusters of stalagmites stood at intervals on the uneven floor, and stalactites hung from the ceiling like drips of stone. A still pool was along the wall to the right, its dark water smeared with a gray fungal growth that floated on top. Cale had no sense of how far they were from either Skullport of the battle they’d just fled. He found the feeling disorienting, isolating.

The tunnel was silent but for their breathing. The slaadi were nowhere in sight.

“Where are we?” Jak asked.

“Somewhere in the Underdark,” Cale replied. “Light, little man. Mags, find them.”

Beside Cale, Jak struck a sunrod on the rocky ground. The thin shaft of alchemically treated metal rang softly off the stone and began to glow more brightly than a torch. It would last an hour or so. Jak held it aloft, illuminating the tunnel for all of them. Though Cale had not needed the sunrod to see, he welcomed its dim luminescence for the shadows it cast.

Magadon’s knucklebone eyes took in the surroundings, and scoured the floor.

“Blood,” the guide said.

He moved to a splotch of dark matter on the floor. Cale followed the guide’s gaze and saw a large smear of black blood, intermixed with chunks of flesh and a shard of bone. The stone floor near the remains looked malformed, as though it might have melted and been reformed.

Magadon put his fingers to the blood, studied it. He rubbed the flesh between two fingers.

“Slaadi,” he said. “And still damp. One of them was wounded here.”

He wiped his fingers clean on his trousers.

“Which way, Mags?” Cale asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

He knew they had only moments to stop the slaadi, and they could ill afford to get the direction wrong.

Magadon studied the floor near the blood while Cale silently implored him to hurry. The guide brushed his fingers along the stone as if communing with it. He moved across the stone, stopping here and there to examine the floor more carefully.

“What is it?” Jak asked.

Magadon replied, “Scratches from their hind claws. Very faint. They must have transformed back to their natural forms.” He stood and nodded down the tunnel. “They went that way.”

Cale exhaled and thumped him on the shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.

They sped down the tunnel. Magadon ran at Cale’s side, while Jak and Riven brought up the rear. Weaveshear still vibrated in Cale’s hand and continued leaking shadows.

Not more than two hundred paces later they found a wide corridor that opened off the tunnel. Unlike the rough, natural walls of the cave, the corridor had a finished floor lined with marble. It looked like a road, or some kind of processional. It curved after a short distance, and from around the curve emanated a soft orange glow.

Weapons and holy symbols ready, Cale led them forward.

The corridor went on for only a short time after the curve before it ended, as though cut off with a knife, and opened onto a breathtaking panorama.

“Trickster’s hairy toes,” Jak oathed.

Cale could only agree.

They stood at the edge of the corridor, in an opening halfway up a sheer cavern wall that was easily as tall as three bowshots. A great circular cavern stretched before and below them, nearly as large as the one that contained Skullport. Within the cavern lay ruins. Toppled buildings of gray granite, impossibly thin towers of stone carved from stalactites, and collapsed temples of white marble littered the cavern’s floor in a chaotic jumble. Their stone skeletons obscured the otherwise mathematically precise web of wide roads and broad avenues that once had connected the districts of the city. The ruins reminded Cale of Elgrin Fau, but instead of a necropolis of intact tombs, only one structure remained whole.

In the center of the cavern, glowing orange with power, towered an immense spire of rough gray stone like the finger of a god. It appeared unworked but for a covered cupola of metal that capped its top. Open archways yawned in the cupola, one on each of the four sides of the spire, and all of them leaking orange light. It was impossible to see within.

Tumors of clear crystal bulged here and there from the stone of the spire. A thin strip of protruding crystal, like wire around a sword hilt, wound a path from the base of pole. It took Cale a moment to realize that the crystalline spiral was either a stairway or a ramp.

A beam of orange light as thick around as an ogre emanated from the tower through a hole in the top of the cupola. The orange beam shot toward the ceiling and cast the entire cavern in soft orange luminescence. The light caused Cale to squint with minor discomfort but didn’t burn like the sun, steal his powers like daylight, or take his hand as a tithe.

When the beam reached the ceiling, it spread out and dispersed into ten thinner beams that wove amongst the stalactites like veins. In turn, each of those separated into ten still thinner beams, and so on until the threads became so tiny as to be invisible. The entire chamber was roofed by a lattice of power, and Cale had no doubt that the lattice extended its invisible grasp into Skullport’s chamber, buttressing the stone, preventing it from collapsing of its own weight. They must have been nearer to Skullport than he’d thought.

“That tower is the hidden chamber where the Skulls lair,” Cale said, realizing the truth even as the words passed his lips. “It must be the source of their power. Azriim has lured the Skulls away from their secret chamber and the source lays exposed. He wants to use the Weave Tap to somehow drain the tower and the web of energy… perhaps even destroy it.”

Jak let out a long, low whistle. Riven and Magadon remained silent.

Cale realized that if Azriim was successful, it would result in a catastrophe for Skullport—a catastrophe for Varra.

“We can’t let it happen,” he said.

“The rock must have shifted over the years,” Magadon observed. “This tunnel must once have been at ground level.”

Cale nodded and said, “Or it could be just as likely that this corridor was once attached to the upper levels of a soaring tower.”

Roads spanning the sky had not been uncommon in that city. Cale could sense it. The magical skill evidenced

by the spire suggested to him that the ruined metropolis, that even Skullport, had once been places of grandeur. He wondered at the true origin of the Skulls.

Putting the awe out of his mind, he eyed the ruins below, searching for any sign of the slaadi. He did not see them.

“We need to get to that spire,” he said. “The slaadi must be heading there. That spire is the origin of the lattice, and that’s where Azriim will use the Weave Tap.”

As though affirming his words, the shadows leaking from Weaveshear floated into the air and across the cavern toward the spire. The height at which the companions stood was about two-thirds of the way up the tower.

“Teleport us there, Cale,” Riven said.

Cale shook his head and replied, “I can call upon the shadows only infrequently. I can shadow-step often, but teleport only rarely. The slaadi, on the other hand have no such limitation with their teleportation rods. Likely, they’re already inside the cupola. We need another way.”

Cale ignored the. look of satisfaction in Riven’s eye, and realized then that the assassin cared more about being Mask’s second than he did about stopping the slaadi. He didn’t have time to give it further thought.

“Look!” Jak said, pointing at the tower.

The slaadi emerged from around the back of the tower, loping up the crystalline staircase for the cupola. The largest of the three hobbled along with a limp.

“Why didn’t they teleport into the cupola’?” Magadon asked of no one in particular.

“The magic of the tower must interfere with transport magic of that kind,” Cale said. “They probably teleported to near the tower’s base. We weren’t that far behind them and yet they’re already halfway up the tower.”

“Can you get us there,” Magadon said. “Without magic.” Cale turned to face the guide and asked, “What can you do?”

Magadon, already drawn and haggard from all of the psionic energy he had expended in recent hours, said,

“Attune our bodies to the air. We’ll be able to run above the city to the tower.”

“Dark,” Jak whispered.

“What will you have left?” Cale asked him.

Magadon shook his head and replied, “I’ll drop the mind-link. But still, not much.”

Cale took only a moment to decide.

“Do it.”

Magadon nodded and held his left hand to his temple. A dim white light originated at the crown of his head and spread downward until it sheathed his entire boy. There was a sound like the whoosh of a wind. Magadon touched each of Cale, Riven, and Jak in turn, causing a similar light to limn their bodies, eliciting a similar sound.

“Now,” Magadon said, and the light flared.

A tremor ran the length of Cale’s body. He felt lighter, as ephemeral as a spirit. The white light rapidly diminished to nothingness, but the feeling of insubstantiality remained.

“Walk on the air as though it’s solid earth,” Magadon said. “Vertical movement is controlled by your mind. Imagine stairs or a ramp as you run, and you’ll move up or down.”

Without another word, the guide stepped off the corridor’s edge and into the open air. Jak audibly gasped, but instead of plummeting to his death, the guide stood suspended on nothing.

Cale took a deep breath and followed suit. The air felt spongy under his feet, but solid enough. He could see the ruins of the city far below and had to fight down a wave of dizziness.

He said to Riven and Jak, “Come on.”

They did, and when all four had tested the air, they turned and ran across the sky for the tower. Magadon and Cale led. Jak and Riven followed hard after.

With nothing but air and orange light around him, Cale felt exposed, visible. He yearned for the comfort of shadow. He toyed with the idea of making himself invisible but saw

no point. He could do nothing to hide his comrades, so he would stand with them.

When they had made it halfway across the city, the biggest of the three slaadi-Dolgan—saw them. The fat slaad, wobbling on his wounded leg, made an obscene gesture in their direction and shouted to his fellows.

The creatures were almost to the cupola. One more twist around the tower and they would be at the top.

Cale could see Azriim’s fanged grin, even from that distance. An itch manifested deep in the base of Cale’s brain, an itch that became a whisper, then a voice.

It is my pleasure to see you again, Azriim said into Cale’s mind. Unlike the feeling elicited by Magadon’s mind-link, the slaad’s psionic touch felt greasy, hostile. You are a persistent creature.

I’m going to kill you, Cale projected back.

Hardly a novel plan for you, priest, Azriim replied with a mental sneer.

The slaad broke the contact and spoke to his fellows. As one, the three slaadi pointed in the direction of Cale and his companions, each mouthed an arcane word, and fired three pea-sized orange balls from their outstretched palms.

“Cover!” Cale shouted, and immediately realized how foolish the exclamation sounded.

They were running across the open air. There was nowhere to hide.

He turned, grabbed Jak, and threw himself face down over the halfling as orange fire exploded in their midst. He prayed that Magadon would survive the blast, knowing that if the guide was killed, their ability to walk on air would cease.