The Summoning (15 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Galaeron said. “I mean him no harm.”

“Good.” She smiled artificially. “I’d miss you.”

Melegaunt spun away from the treants and started eastward along the edge of the forest. Vala motioned Galaeron ahead of her, then slipped in behind him, and they both had to scurry to keep pace with the wizard’s long strides.

Galaeron was not sure when Vala finally sheathed her sword, but it was in its scabbard when they reached the Lonely Moor just before dusk. Galaeron and Vala took a minute to bask in the sun’s fading radiance, then set up camp and cooked a meal of marsh voles over a black-flamed fire Melegaunt had struck. Despite the glyphs and wards the wizard set around the perimeter of the camp, they divided the watch into three shifts and settled in for a wet night.

As it turned out, Galaeron could have taken all three watches himself. Whether it was because of Vala’s distrust or worry for his father and Takari back in Evereska, he was never able to slip into the Reverie. He spent the whole night

huddled in his cloak, staring at the stars and wrestling with feelings of guilt so vague and ambiguous he could only guess at their source. Of course, he was troubled by the part he had played in releasing the phaerimm, but his regret over that was real and tangible, an emotion so manifest he could almost touch it. The thing bothering him was much more subtle, a queasy hollowness that smacked of disloyalty and betrayal, though he was left to wonder just who he had betrayed. Had he been wrong to distrust Melegaunt? Or to accept so easily the wizard’s explanation for the casual betrayal of Imesfor? Whatever the answer, Galaeron feared he would not enjoy a revitalizing Reverie until he had it.

Dawn found them all cold and awake, ready to warm themselves with a brisk prebreakfast march. Before departing, Melegaunt insisted on kneeling between Galaeron and Vala, holding his hands in their shadows, peering first into one, then the other, from the moment the sun broke the horizon until the moment the bottom edge no longer touched it. Only then did he rise.

“Come along, sun lovers. There will be no shadow walking for us today.”

“Not that I’m complaining, but why?” asked Galaeron.

“Because I have read the day to come and have no desire to fight shadow dragons. The bugbears will be much easier.”

“Bugbears?” Galaeron gasped. “The phaerimm have bugbears?”

Melegaunt shrugged. “Perhaps. The phaerimm control many creatures, most who do not even know it, but I cannot tell everything. I’m only reading shadows.” He started northward, motioning Galaeron and Vala to follow. “Keep a sharp watch. We should be all right as long as we don’t let them surprise us.”

This proved much easier said than done, of course. They slogged northward across a few miles of peat moor, then slipped around the northern tip of the Forgotten Forest and started northwest across the Forsaken Dale. As they crossed

the snowy flats, Galaeron kept a watchful eye on the birds, but knew they would not have much to worry about until they reached the Greypeaks in the distance.

Just after highsun, the foothills drew near enough to make out individual gullies, and the pinnacles of the snowcapped mountains themselves began to show above the horizon. Galaeron’s thoughts kept returning to his inability to enter the Reverie the night before. The explanation Melegaunt had given for using Imesfor as a decoy was sensible enough, but it still smacked of deceit, and it occurred to Galaeron that he was placing a great deal of trust in a human he really did not know very well. He allowed Melegaunt to drift a short distance out of earshot, then spoke over his shoulder to Vala.

“If 1 offended you by doubting Melegaunt, I apologize,” he said. “Perhaps if 1 knew more about him…”

“You know he is trying to save Evereska.” Vala said, prodding Galaeron in the back, urging him to catch up to Melegaunt. “You know he is trying to undo a mistake you made. How much more do you need to know?”

“How much do you know?” asked Galaeron, doing his best to ignore the barb about his “mistake.” “He claims much, but reveals little.”

“He is a good man.”

“From where?” asked Galaeron. “I have never seen the likes of his magic before.”

“That does not mean it is evil.” Vala’s voice was sharp enough that it caused Melegaunt to cock his head to one side. “The Melegaunt Tanthul 1 know is not evil.”

“But
do not know him,” Galaeron said. “I might find it easier to trust him if I knew more about your relationship. Now that you are no longer Evereska’s prisoner, perhaps—p>

“Very well,” Vala sighed. “A hundred years ago, my ancestors were living in log longhouses roofed in thatch and chinked with mud, battling the ore hordes with weapons of cold-forged iron and losing children to worgs and gnolls faster than our women could birth them.”

“And I suppose Melegaunt changed that?”

“He did,” said Vala. Twenty paces ahead, the wizard seemed to nod smugly to himself. “In return for a pittance of service, he offered to build my great grandfather an impregnable keep of black granite, and to arm twenty warriors with black swords that would cleave any enemy’s armor.”

“A bargain your ancestor obviously accepted,” said Galaeron.

“Not as quick as you believe, for we Vaasans have always been hard bargainers,” said Vala. “The debt would be called at some time in the future, when a company of warriors armed with those same black swords would be summoned to service. Bodvar agreed, providing only that all of the swords remained unbroken and the granite keep was never breached.”

“I take it the conditions were fulfilled.”

Vala nodded. “My own father heard the voice less than a year ago, but he was too old and sick to lead the men. It was left to me to take up the sword.”

“And that’s all you know of Melegaunt?” asked Galaeron.

“It’s all I need to know.” Vala’s tone was almost soft. “The service of twenty warriors for the kindness he has done my clan? You elves are too distrustful.”

“Perhaps so,” allowed Galaeron. “We weren’t always distrustful. That we learned from humans.”

He spied the long valley that led to Dekanter and began to angle toward it, his thoughts consumed by questions of why Melegaunt would want to visit the ruins if the help he sought wasn’t there—and what kind of help he might be seeking if it was.

They caught up to Melegaunt and entered the gulch together, and Galaeron was instantly too busy looking for bugbears to concern himself with anything else. The gully was perfect for an ambush, with an abundance of cliff-flanked narrows and blind corners, but they resisted the temptation to climb to higher ground for fear of making themselves more

visible to phaerimm searchers. Twice, they were actually ambushed by goblin tribes, but a simple display of magic was enough to send the creatures skittering away

When they reached the head of the gulch without meeting any bugbears and climbed into the hills themselves, Galaeron began to think Melegaunt was not as infallible as he appeared. The ruined towers of Dekanter were just visible in the distance, a short row of absurdly twisted and impossibly leaning spires silhouetted against snow-blanketed slopes, and the sun was already sinking into the narrow rift of the Bleached Bones Pass.

The sight of the towers seemed to invigorate Melegaunt. Abandoning all effort at keeping a low profile, he clambered along a boulder-strewn ridge toward the sunken roadbed that had once connected Dekanter to the rest of the Netherese empire. Vala scurried after him, apparently abandoning her resolve to never again let Galaeron behind her.

“Melegaunt, what about the bugbears?” she asked.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure they’re here somewhere,” he said. “But the ruins are still a good mile away, and I must be there when the sun goes down,”

The wizard continued forward at a near run, giving Vala and Galaeron no choice except to keep a watchful eye and hope for the best Soon enough, the towers resolved themselves into jewel-colored oddities of architectural corruption, grotesque forms that arced and twisted in impossible directions with no thought of form or function. Some had no doors or windows, one seemed to be a single warped door spiraling into the sky, another looked to be a huge window with no interior depth at all.

The towers were scattered among the great mines that had been the reason for Dekanter’s existence in the days of Netheril. Now long played out, all that remained of the ancient workings were snowy dumps of waste rock and the yawning portals and abysmal shafts of the holes themselves. Even Melegaunt seemed to sense the melancholy insanity of

the place. He walked among the ruins silently, inspecting each warped spire like a wandering son returned home to find his house occupied by another family.

When the bottom curve of the sun finally touched the distant saddle of Bleached Bones Pass, he kneeled in the shadow of the door tower and pressed his brow to the dark ground. He spoke a few syllables in some tongue Galaeron did not understand, then lifted his body and shook his head slowly.

“The folly,” he said. “The unbelievable folly.”

When the tears began to roll down his cheeks, Vala went to his side and slipped a hand under his arm. “Is there time to try another tower?” she asked. “Every story can’t be the same.”

The thought seemed to cheer Melegaunt. He allowed her to pull him up, then started along a boulder-lined trail toward the window tower. “Yes, another tower would be good.”

They had taken no more than a dozen steps when Galaeron noticed a trio of crows circling overhead. Instead of calling to each other in their usual raucous voices, the birds were unusually silent, like anglers afraid their voices might frighten the fish.

“Stop.”

Galaeron had barely spoken the word before Vala had her darksword in hand and Melegaunt behind her.

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” Galaeron said. “Here.”

A half dozen paces up the trail, a pair of pointed ears appeared over the top of a horse-sized boulder. Vala spotted them instantly and gestured silently with her sword. Grousing under his breath, Melegaunt fetched something from his robe pocket, and Galaeron realized the emergence of the ears had been too convenient. Bugbears rarely made such foolish mistakes.

“Melegaunt, wa—”

He was too late. The wizard pointed a finger and spoke a

single word, and a shadowy bolt of darkness drilled straight through the boulder. There was no thud or anguished roar or any other sound to suggest the attack had hit anything living. Rather, a slimy mauve face with a snout of tentacles rose up behind the adjacent snow bank, fixing Melegaunt with a white-eyed stare.

The wizard screamed once, then clutched at his eyes and crumpled to the ground.

“An illithid?” Even as Vala shrieked the question, she was flinging her darksword at the creature in a backhand flip. “Melegaunt said nothing about illithids!”

The blade pirouetted through the air and took the illithid’s head off cleanly.

In the next instant, a dozen bugbears sprang from behind boulders, rock dumps, and snowdrifts to both sides of the trail. Galaeron pulled his sword from its scabbard with one hand and reached into his cloak pocket with the other.

“Vala,” the elf shouted, “sword!”

He tossed the sword toward her hilt-first, then pulled his other hand from his pocket and flung a pair of green leaves in the direction of the nearest bugbears. The brutes were huge, a full head taller than Vala’s burly men and far broader across the shoulders, but with ugly batlike snouts and gleaming red eyes. Vala caught Galaeron’s sword with her off hand and whirled the blade around to point at the charging beasts.

Galaeron uttered his incantation, but instead of feeling the magic flow into his body from the all-encompassing Weave, it surged up through his legs in a cold bolt. With a dozen screaming bugbears on the way, there was no time to be shocked. He simply waved his hand across the hillside, and a cloud of putrid brown miasma filled the air around the bugbears’ heads. Four out of the first five creatures collapsed gagging. The fifth perished when Vala dived at its feet, then somersaulted between its legs and slashed Galaeron’s magic blade across the front of its belly.

Galaeron slowed the remaining beasts with a pinch of

sand and a quick word of magic, sending two into a deep slumber. Vala toppled another with a knee slash, then caught a heavy axe swing against the flat of Galaeron’s blade. The bugbear continued to push, confident its strength would simply collapse Vala’s guard.

She thrust a hand out in the direction of the dead illithid, and her darksword came flying back into her grasp. She brought the black blade beneath her attacker’s big belly, driving the point clear to its heart. Galaeron pointed at the bugbear nearest Vala. Again, the magic shot into him from the cold ground, and the shaft that leaped from his finger to tear open the bugbear’s chest was as black as night.

Seeing they were still three paces away from Vala and unlikely to get any closer, the last two beasts turned to flee. There was no question of letting them escape, for their illithid companion made plain the identity of their masters. Galaeron blasted one down from behind with another magic bolt. Vala sprang after the other as it bounded over the edge of the hill, and a strangled howl echoed up the slope.

Galaeron used a pair of lightning bolts and a fireball to finish the bugbears he had incapacitated with his earlier spells. He felt the same surge of cold magic when he cast the first lightning bolt, but found that by concentrating on the living Weave all around him, he could create spells normally Still, Vala returned from her trip down the hill to find him shivering with cold; it seemed to be welling up inside him, as though the marrow in his bones had turned to shadow.

“Something wrong?” She returned his sword. “You look like that’s the first time you ever killed anything.”

“Would that it were.” Galaeron pulled his cloak more tightly around him. He turned to face Melegaunt, who was lying glassy eyed and drooling on the ground. “I’m fine, but what about him?”

Vala considered him for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, at least he saw his towers.”