Stardeep (22 page)

Or you could allow me to manage the transfer, offered Nis. Telarian looked down and saw his hand absentmind-edly draped on Nis’s pommel. Where were his gloves? No matter.

“Perhaps I shall,” muttered Telarian. Time was of the essence. Who knew what the swordswoman was doing beyond the Causeway? With the Causeway Gate sealed and Cynosure unavailable to relay external events, he was blind. Time to teturn control of the situation to his own hand. Like Nis, Angul was indispensable to his world-saving plan.

Telarian left his room. Tardoun Hall curved into dimness to the left and right, the friezes intricately carved onto the facing walls blurring into obscurity. He’d always hated the carvings.

As he walked, the unusual quiet cloaking the hall seeped into his awareness. Normally a constant susurrus of bangs, clicks, and whistles bled from the chamber where Cynosure Prime was housed. Not now.

Silence reigned because the idol was asleep, of course. It was pulled back into its original self, alone with its thoughts.

He paused. Now that he thought of it, perhaps it would be prudent to confer with the disconnected construct before he talked with Delphe. He was sure all traces of his

interference with the sentient object were hidden, most of all from Cynosure itself, but it wouldn’t hurt to check.

He started forward down the curving corridor, but stopped short of his destination at double doors that opened onto Cynosure Prime’s chamber. Each was carved with a great white tree bordered in cerulean.

He threw wide the doors and entered.

The chamber was a great vault filled with hulking, dimly glowing rectangular objects. Most protruded from the floor, but some stuck out from the walls and several hung from the ceiling. Ancient magical script glimmered across the face of each shape; the source of each object’s glow was this script-born light. Cords extended from each stone shape, some bulky and metallic, others thin, fleshy, and moist. The cords trailed away from the blocks and were gathered in thick bundles, suspended from the high ceiling.

Telarian walked to the center of the chamber, following the fattest cord bundle to its nexus: a great humanoid shape standing in darkness. The cords plunged onto the shape on every side, as if catching the figure in a great web. But it was not caught—quite the opposite. The many connections offered transcendence. For this shape was Cynosure Prime, the artificial entity that served as Stardeep’s sleepless warden. Normally, the cords pulsed with light, indicating the distribution of the constructs mind across the citadel. Their dullness revealed the idol’s mind was, after centuries, reduced to the single node before him.

Cynosure Prime was the shape the construct had used upon first entering Stardeep, before the incorporation of its mind into the very fabric of the dungeon stronghold. Despite the constructs diminishment, Prime remained an immense humanoid forged of crystal, stone, iron, and more exotic components, now rusted, pitted, streaked, and stained. Standing nearly thirty feet tall, its dimly shining scarlet eyes calmly

observed the approaching Keeper. A design was fused onto its metallic chest, unblemished by time—The Cerulean Sign.

Delphe stood at the consttuct’s feet.

The diviner caught his breath as she turned and saw him. He smoothed his features—quickly enough, he hoped, to hide his consternation.

She said, “Telatian. Just the man I wanted to see.”

“Ah, um… Delphe! You surprised me!”

“My apologies.” She continued looking at him, her head cocked to one side.

Telarian’s face grew warm. He spoke, “After our talk, this is the last place I expected to find you.”

She nodded and said, “I thought more about your arguments. Perhaps you had the right of it.”

“My argument?” The diviner’s mind swirled, his surprise muddling his ability to concentrate. He resisted the urge to grasp Nis’s hilt.

“You argued Cynosure’s reconnection was vital. I’m afraid I put you off. But the more time I spend in the Well, the more I realize the task of sole wardenship is beyond me—no spell I erect in my absence can hold a candle to Cynosure’s constant surveillance.”

“Of course,” exclaimed Telarian. In fact, he’d atgued from that point of view, though his hidden goal was to reconnect Cynosure so he could open the Causeway Gate without alerting Delphe. Without Cynosure, revealing the Causeway required a mutual effort from both Keepers. He’d prefer not to answer her pointed questions if he made such a request.

“So,” he continued, “shall we reintroduce Cynosure to Stardeep?”

“Fitst,” she said, turning her gaze back to the stony figure, “I must satisfy myself that its mind is not touched by corruption.”

“Right, right. And what have you found?”

The massive form of Cynosure Prime shifted its weight, evet so slightly, as it fixed its granite visage on Telarian. The construct spoke, its voice resonant and sure. “Delphe has riddled me with questions, and we’ve discovered I remain inviolate.”

“That’s a relief—”

“However,” continued the smooth voice of the construct, “we suspect some of the outlying nodes have been partly compromised.”

They knew! He managed to avoid flinching. Were they waiting for him to bolt, confess, or attack?

“Compromised?” Telarian inquired. Grab the blade and end this—no. He didn’t know if Nis could stand before Cynosure’s original avatar.

Delphe said, “It is the only conclusion that fits all the criteria. Thankfully, the avatar poised above the Well seems to be untouched.”

True enough, thought Telarian guiltily. Most of Cynosure’s homunculi scattered about the dungeon were too visible, too open to scrutiny by Cynosure itself. He recalled his covert interactions with Cynosure’s most vulnerable node: a miniature statue carved of jade currently hidden at the bottom of a silver chest in his quarters.

Without so much as the ability to articulate its limbs, the jade sculpture was merely a handspan in length. The ancient statuette was a prototype created to test the possibility of adopting Cynosure as Stardeep’s warden mind. When perusing the oldest documents in the archive, Telarian had stumbled across the reference. Sure enough, he’d found a proto-node in the dusty, cryptlike recesses of the repository. With his divinatory craft, he had soon determined how to inject the sculpture back into Cynosure’s mental loop as a fully functioning node. Functioning save for a lack of wards against magical manipulations. Through this tiny flawed

foothold, Telarian had begun to subvett the entire distributed intelligence of Stardeep, node by node.

“You have no idea what a weight is lifted from my mind to hear the avatar in the Throat is clean. Have you found the vulnerable node?”

Delphe shook her head. “Without bringing Cynosure back into the loop, no method exists to trace the corruption back to its origin.”

It dawned on Telarian they didn’t suspect he was the culprit. Yet. His mind whirled. Could he completely throw them off the trail of his culpability?

Telarian took a deep breath, said, “You should have come to me right away, the moment you suspected node corruption. I have an idea. What if we selectively activate Cynosure’s nodes? We don’t have to distribute Cynosure’s cognizance across Stardeep all at once. Let us begin with nodes we know to be safe, as is the one in the Thioat, and work from there, one by one, carefully checking each node for distortion. Bring Cynosure back into the loop in controlled steps.”

Cynosure’s voice rang out. “A teasonable approach.”

Delphe’s frown finally broke. She said, “So simple and obvious. You may have just saved us, Telarian.”

He spread his hands. “Keep me apprised of your progress— I must return to the Outer Bastion and review the disposition of the Knights.”

“Certainly. Convey my thanks for their bravery as well.”

Telarian waved at Prime’s massive figure and took his leave. Through his own words, he’d guaranteed Cynosure’s higher functions would remain unavailable. He would not be able to command the idol to open the Causeway Gate. But he’d had no choice. If he hadn’t produced such a reasonable plan with aplomb, how long would he have been able to sidestep Delphe’s suspicions? This way, he put himself beyond all questions.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that he could inject his prototype node into a fledgling network as easily as into the complete Stardeep-spanning mind Cynosure earlier possessed. In a day, perhaps two, he’d do just that. Unless the sentient idol managed to discover the recollections he’d blocked its higher mind from incorporating… a possibility.

Either way, by then Kiril and her blade Angul would be long gone. His spy, the roguish Gage, would likely be dead in the bargain, too. He’d frankly been surprised the man had flown so long beneath the former Keeper’s notice. But his foreteller’s sense told him that ruse had now run its course.

Regardless, the hook had been set. She couldn’t open the Causeway, but she would not give up entering Stardeep. So what would she do? What could she?

It was obvious.

She would attempt the “long way around,” a path open only to natives of Sildeyuir. She would attempt to slip in through the underdungeon!

Telarian hurried past the doors open to the dining room, ignoring the fabulous smells emanating from within. When was his last real meal? Later. He turned onto the marble dressed stairs and took them two at a time down to the thick iron doors that opened onto the Outer Bastion.

He’d promoted someone to the position of Knight Commander with Brathtar’s… departure. Dharvanum. Of course, he’d had to kill Dharvanum moments later. After that, he’d walked down to the War Room and promoted the first Knight he’d seen. An elf named Thindhul? No matter. Telarian smiled. He had a task for the new Knight Commander. A force of Knights must be prepared to enter the subterranean dungeon tunnels in which lesser criminals were housed. Those tunnels were widely known to connect, in their meandering, dangerous fashion, directly onto Sildeyuir.

And it must be an overwhelming force of Knights! Not because Angul represented a thteat—the blade had already shown himself uninterested in turning his energies against pledged Cerulean Knights.

No, the force must be overwhelming because nothing less would survive that which stalked those long-abandoned passages and crawlways beneath ancient Stardeep.

Aglarond, Yuirwood Forest

Raidon Kane followed the elf Kiril Duskmourn as she stalked through shallow snow drifts. She was of the same fey race to which he was kin, if he could believe her claims. She was a harsh woman, a lodestone of reluctant authority, a comet trailing foul language, threats of bodily harm, and the smell of strong drink. Nothing like his memory of his mother—were they truly of the same race?

Yet during theif walk, she had relented and spoken more of the strange realm Sildeyuir. She told Raidon and Adrik the star elves had created the hidden land as a refuge, a place to which they could retreat from the cruel and ambitious human empites of old. More than a thousand years before the raising of the Standing Stone in the Dales, the human kingdoms of Narfell and Raumauthar, as well as Unther and Mulhorand, had fought furiously for dominion in the region. In western Faerun many elves had retreated to Evermeet to avoid human ambitions, but the star elves had decided to move their entire realm rather than abandon it. All Sildeyuir was a construction of high magic, an echo of

the Yuirwood itself spun into starshine and dusk through mighty craft of old.

Since the creation of Sildeyuir, the star elves had slowly slipped farther and farther from Faerun, leaving the daylight world to its own devices. Some still traveled through the old elfgates and roamed Aglarond or the Inner Sea, but they passed themselves off as elves of other regions, and did not speak of their homeland to strangers. And of the star elves that remained in Sildeyuir, only a fraction cared enough for the Cerulean Sign to take up its practice. Had his mother been one?

The monk considered the moment, tendays past, when he’d fought Chun, a member of the Nine Golden Swords, in the Shou Town streets. His mental discipline allowed him to perfectly picture the moment he’d retrieved the daito from Chun’s limp grasp. He’d clutched his grandfather’s blade, raising it in a salute. On that day the honor of his family had been restored. And on that day he quit his old life, lest Nine Golden Swords vengeance find him.

If he hadn’t retrieved the daito but instead turned his back on family honor, as would have been the far easier road, Shou Town would yet be his home. Perhaps he would even now be called master by fledgling students in Xiang Temple, and by old Shou merchants in the colonnaded bazaar he walked past each day. A safe life, if honorless. A familiar life, if without meaning or purpose.

Looking back, he couldn’t find a time when he’d pondered the two possibilities, then decided between them. He’d never considered not reclaiming the daito. And once free of Shou Town, on what course other than finding his vanished mother could he have embarked?

From Raidon’s perspective, he rode a narrow river of fate. On it he rushed, sometimes through rapids, other times on calm water, but always too swiftly for him to pause. While

it was his grandfather’s daito that seemed to precipitate his exit from Telflamm, he suspected the origin of his current circumstance was his mothet’s forget-me-not. He’d learned it possessed a mysterious power. Perhaps that power had reached out and guided the threads of his destiny.

Now fate was drawing him toward a realm few knew existed, a realm Kiril claimed was synonymous with eldritch beauty, a land of perpetual twilight illuminated only by glittering stars. She said the star elves dwelled there in glass citadels. He looked forward to seeing that.

Then there was his forget-me-not. Not merely a reminder of maternal affection, but apparently an object whose power could prove useful against monsters. Was it fate, serendipity, ot cruel chance that pulled him into an age-old conflict? A conflict in which the enemy was shrouded in an evil so cruel it eclipsed the Nine Golden Swords as a mountain overwhelms a pebble.

They’d spent a bitterly cold night sheltering from another snowfall beneath the downwatd branches of a mighty conifer. Adrik had gathered several cones and exclaimed over theit novelty. Only Xet seemed to caie.