Twenty Lords of Shade stood chest-deep in a lake that had never before known the color of light, pulling strands of shadow up from the milky bottom and splicing them into a curtain of umbral darkness that hung down from the cavern's thousand-needled ceiling. Save for the ripples of grime rinsing out of their travel-worn cloaks, the water was as clear as air, and thou-sands of limestone cave pearls could be seen gleaming in the inch-deep shallows along the shore. Farther out in the heart of the pool, a gar-den of white faerie stalks rose out of the limpid depths and blossomed across the surface in a carpet of alabaster mineral pads. Of the hundred natural wonders Vala Thorsdotter had witnessed since departing her home in Vaasa, this one was

Galaeron Nihmedu was sitting on his haunches beside Vala, watching the shadow lords work. Tall and solidly built for a moon elf, he had the pale skin and regal features common to his race, but two decades of Tomb Guard postings along the Desert Border South had left his face rugged and weather-beaten enough to be considered handsome even by Vaasan standards.

"The ruin of what?" she asked.

"Spoken like a human." Galaeron's tone was more remorseful than unkind. "And I find myself in agreement. How sad is that?"

Galaeron looked back to the lake, watching the shadow lords weave their dark curtain, then laid a hand on Vala's arm.

"Not much gardening in Vaasa," Vala commented, trying to wrap her mind around the idea of twisting a dimension. "You can tell that just by watching?"

He half turned, a wild look in his eyes, and spoke over his shoulder. "You know how they like that, Vala, putting an egg in some wretch's gut and watching it grow until it's as big as his arm and squirming up his throat. They love that. It's the only thing they love at all."

Vala let her armor clank to the stone and splashed in after him, her shins still covered by her greaves. The Change had never been this deranged before.

"There is a difference between can and have, elf." It took a moment to recognize the raspy voice. While Prince Escanor was ten places away splicing strands into the shadow curtain, his magic made him sound as though he were in the water beside them. "If the phaerimm were here, they would have attacked by now."

"The phaerimm are here—they must be—and have they attacked?" Galaeron asked, facing the prince. "No, they haven't. So, you're wrong. Absolutely wrong."

"What you say stands to reason, as far as it goes." Escanor glanced over as Vala touched bottom beside them, then looked back to Galaeron. "But if the phaerimm were here, we would have detected their magic. They cannot hide that from us."

"Only phaerimm know what the phaerimm can do," Galaeron said. He was looking past the prince into the darkness, studying it as though he could find the enemy by sheer force of will. "And only a fool would believe otherwise."

Escanor's eyes brightened to a fiery red. "Watch that tongue, elf. A shadow crisis excuses only so much."

He looked to Escanor, but his eyes retrained distant and dark. "The prince is right. If the phaerimm were using magic to conceal themselves, I'm sure your divination spells would reveal where they're hiding."

Galaeron held Escanor's gaze a moment, then glanced toward the cave ceiling. The prince seemed oblivious. "Good." His eyes did not even stray from Galaeron's face. "We're almost done with the Splicing. Evereska need hold only a few months longer, elf. The phaerimm are doomed."

"Is what right?" Hoping that all the blood had not drained from her face, Vala tore her gaze from the ceiling and tried to look calm. "Sorry."

had only taken up its study as a way to pass the time while Galaeron lay immobile with a pair of broken ankles. Dry tips and a dark line where they're pressing their bases to the ceiling.

Galaeron raised his brow. I missed the lines, he said. We can't run the risk of alerting them. We have to take them ourselves.

normal Weave magic. If a magic-user overreached his limits, he invited in just the sort of darkness already consuming Galaeron. You're barely holding on as it is. Then it's good you are watching over me. I am grateful—very grateful. Vala looked away, then spoke aloud. "Galaeron, it isn't fair to hold me to that

promise ... not now."

Galaeron had sensed the enemy's presence—or why that had brought on a Change—but she felt confident in his conclusions. Every good warrior knew the value of camouflage, and the thornbacks were nothing if not good warriors.

When Vala drew within throwing range of the nearest phaerimm, she stopped and looked back. Galaeron was just setting a loop of shadowsilk on a stone beside him. He peeled another strand off the mat of dull fabric he was holding, then soaked it in a drop of armor oil and glanced in Vala's direction. She nodded. He pressed the filament to the limestone wall, his lips already moving as he spoke his spell incantation.

A film of oily shadow spread across the ceiling, filling the cavern with a soft, rainlike patter as thousands of drops of water lost their tenuous hold and plummeted into the lake. Vala drew her darksword and in a single smooth motion sent it whirling up at the nearest phaerimm. The glassy black blade tore a three-foot gash across the thornback's body and became lodged with little more than the hilt showing.

The stain on the ceiling swept past overhead. The astonished phaerimm came loose one after the other, the hardened lime-mud camouflage falling in cakes from their squirming bodies and their strange language of winds stirring the air into whistling vortexes. The phaerimm hit the water almost as one and sank beneath the surface.

Escanor and his shadow lords stopped working and whirled toward the splash rings, shouting to each other in their own language and trying to make sense of what was happening.

She heard Galaeron intoning his second spell and looked over to see him flipping the ring of shadowsilk toward the place the third phaerimm had entered the water. A disk of black shadow appeared two inches above the surface. Vala was distracted as the startled phaerimm activated their floating magic and began rising out of the water. The two nearest the curtain came up in the midst of the astonished shadow lords, who quickly proved the truth of Escanor’s boasts by assailing them with shadow webs and darkswords.

Even caught off guard, the phaerimm reacted like the terrors they were, unleashing a flurry of fire strikes and lightning bolts that left a dozen Shadovar bobbing dead in the darkening waters. A pair of scorched shadow lords popped up beside Vala, their arms and legs blasted off by the force of the strike that had killed them. Vala threw her sword again, only to see her target scythed down the middle by a falling wall of black glass as Escanor unleashed his own magic.

Vala glanced over to see the third phaerimm's tail vanishing into the circle of shadow Galaeron had placed over its splash ring. The elf himself was pointing across the lake roughly in her direction. Knowing the creature would be disoriented for a moment when it emerged from Galaeron's shadow door, Vala nodded and reached out to summon her sword back.

Galaeron's finger shifted in Prince Escanor's direction.

Vala glanced at the prince, who, unlike most of his wounded lords, was at least floating face up. She decided to place her trust in Galaeron a little longer. She sprang at the phaerimm, her black sword blocking the tail as it arced toward her throat, lopping the dangerous barb off at the root. On the backswing, she removed two of the thing's four arms, then reversed her grip, jammed the blade into the creature's enormous mouth, and split it down the side.

The dark aura vanished from around the phaerimm— only to reappear an instant later as Galaeron recast his snare spell. The phaerimm flickered between materiality and immateriality again as it tried once more to teleport away, and again Vala sank her sword deep into its body. It pummeled her with one of its remaining arms, and the other clamped onto her throat, trying to crush her windpipe. She kneed it in the flank and felt sharp pain as one of its body thorns impaled her thigh. The phaerimm began to overpower her, pulling her face toward the fang-filled mouth atop its shoulders. She croaked in Galaeron’s direction.

He was already pointing a sliver of obsidian at the creature and yelling a string of mystic syllables. A finger-thin ray of darkness left his hand, catching the phaerimm in one of its remaining arms and severing it at the elbow. Vala snapped the other with a palm strike, then kicked free and brought her darksword around in three eviscerating swings.

The thing's heart slipped out of the second gash, still beating. Vala sent it flying off with a flick of her blade, and the phaerimm dropped, motionless, into the water. She struck again and again, not stopping until she had opened it from tail to lip and left it floating in the water like a dressed eel.

"I'm alive." She shook her head clear and gave herself a cursory glance, then looked over and found herself staring into a pair of black, empty eyes. "G-Galaeron? How many spells did you cast?"

Instead of answering. Galaeron pushed her toward Escanor's floating form. "See to the prince and the others," he said as he turned and started toward the shadow curtain. "I'll finish the Splicing."

CHAPTER TWO

until he was filled with the power of shadow and beyond mortal frailty. Instead, he pointed at the floating city and said, "See it?"

A pudgy little man with a moon-shaped face and bug eyes, Malik el Sami yn Nasser was the Seraph of Lies, a favored servant of the evil god Cyric and an oddly stalwart traveling companion who had saved Galaeron's life more than once.

"I apologize for my accursed luck," the little man said. "It has always been its nature that just when I think matters could seem no worse, a turn of bad fortune comes along to prove me wrong."

"In this desert, things look farther than they are," Vala said. Limping a little from her wounded thigh, she started down the dry wash at their backs. "We'd better get moving, or we'll lose sight of it when dark really falls."

Nodding, Galaeron turned to follow. As a precaution against attack, Shade Enclave appeared only briefly each evening and always in a different place. Given that Escanor's company had failed to finish the Splicing and raise the shadowshell at the appointed time, it made sense to put some distance between the floating city and the Sharaedim battlefields. Assuming they were lucky enough to reach the city before it vanished again, Galaeron only hoped they would not fall victim to any new defenses intended for the phaerimm.

In the bottom of the wash, they found the Shadovar survivors preparing the company's mounts for departure. Though most of the shadow lords had already recovered from the cavern battle, Escanor had taken an egg when he was impaled and remained incoherent with fever. The longer it stayed inside him, the harder it would be to remove, but his chances were far better than

Galaeron followed Vala over to the nominal leader of the group in Escanor's incapacity, a ruby-eyed lord so swarthy that he looked more like an obsidian statue than a live man.

"Lord Rapha," Vala said, "we've located the enclave."

Galaeron and his companions waited for Rapha to ask where or how far off the enclave was, or to give some indication that he was concerned about getting Escanor to the city quickly.

"Of course," Vala said.

This drew a sour smile from the shadow lord. Like everyone in the company, Rapha knew that Malik had been cursed by the goddess Mystra to speak only the truth or not all. It was an irony in which Shadovar seemed to take special delight.

I meant no harm to the prince."

"But I can be sure that he needs a healer—and soon," Galaeron interrupted. This Rapha was a sly one, accusing Galaeron of trying to harm the prince—and wasting valuable time. "Unless you have some reason for delaying? Perhaps you'd like to see Escanor hatch a thorn-back egg?"

Rapha's eyes flared from ruby to white-orange. "I have nothing but love for all the princes of Shade, elf."

Underdark and do his part to seal the fate of the phaerimm."

The precaution was not a frivolous one. The Shadovar's flying mounts—veserabs— were odd, furless creatures that had no faces and uniform midnight-blue skin. With four spindly legs, fan-shaped ears, and a pair of gargoyle-like wings folded alongside their tubular bodies, they looked like an unfortunate cross between bats and earthworms. Once they impressed on a rider, their devotion was absolute—to the point that they would spit noxious fumes into the face of anyone else who tried to mount them.

Galaeron followed her down the draw until they found a trio of veserabs wearing copper bands on their legs. Vala pointed to one with a band on its right foreleg. Galaeron gave the wing joint a tentative squeeze and slipped a foot into the stirrup. The creature did not react until he lowered his full weight into the saddle, when— much to his relief—an undulation of pleasure ran down its long body.

A few moments later, Malik returned and climbed into his saddle, and Rapha signaled the departure. The veserabs charged down the wash until they gathered enough speed, then spread their wings and rose into the air in flawless formation. Many of the shadow lords were tied across their saddles, but only Escanor's mount was riderless. The company had recovered all of its casualties and carried them through fifty twining Underdark miles back to the surface.

As they climbed out of the wash, a huge dome of darkness rose into view over their shoulders at Anauroch's western edge. Even from a dozen miles into the desert, the barrier was immense, curving away high into the sky and stretching north and south as far as the eye could see. Through its black translucency, Galaeron could just make out the stacked crests of the foothills of the Desert Border South and, looming behind, the familiar crags of High Sharaedim itself. He could not help thinking of what lay beyond those peaks, the vale and city of Evereska—and his sister, Keya, safe within the city's protective mythal. He knew better than to think that his warrior father had been lucky enough to survive his duties to return to her side, but Lord Aubric Nihmedu was as resourceful as he was brave, and there was no harm in praying it so.

Once the veserabs had ascended high enough to avoid being surprised by an attack from the ground, Aris rose into the air on an ancient Netherese flying disk. Though the bronze saucer was neither as swift nor as maneuverable as a veserab, it was capable of carrying not only the giant's weight but also that of the wounded prince, his campaign tent, and Aris's half-completed statue. Its one drawback was that Aris could not defend himself in an air battle. The disks had been designed as battle platforms for Netherese archwizards, not stone giant clerics.

As the company leveled off and fixed their course on the murky silhouette of Shade Enclave, the formation began to loosen, giving the veserabs room to relax and stretch their wings. The creatures did not fly so much as swim through the atmosphere, reaching forward to grab a piece of air, then pulling themselves past. The turbulence and slipstreams created by tight formations made it more difficult to stay aloft with this strange motion, so

they usually divided into smaller groups and flew side by side when traveling long distances. Vala and Malik drew up on opposite sides of Galaeron, spacing themselves about thirty feet apart.

Even had they been close enough to speak comfortably, the pounding veserab wings would have made it impossible to hear. They continued toward the dusk with only their own thoughts for company, leaving it to their mounts to steer a course toward the enclave while they watched their assigned slice of sky. Though most of the phaerimm were trapped inside the shadowshell, their hosts of servants and slaves remained free and apt to attack at any time. Twice, Rapha dispatched fliers to chase down and slay asabi lizardmen lest they were scouting for a larger company, and once they themselves had to swing into the shadows beneath a long line of cliffs when Vala spied the fleasized spheres of a distant beholder troop bobbing across the moon's face.

Galaeron spent most of the trip brooding over the bitter words that had passed between him and Rapha. When they reached Shade Enclave, the lord clearly intended to blame him for what had befallen Escanor, and part of Galaeron even wondered if that could be justified. His shadow self was as insidious as it was dark, always working to make him see dishonorable motives in the actions of everyone around him, and for some time he had been growing angry about the hungry look in Escanor's eyes whenever he addressed Vala. Was it possible that Galaeron had sent the phaerimm to Escanor not because he wanted to be certain of killing it, but because his shadow self wanted to see the prince harmed instead?

from his mind as quickly as it had arrived, though. The prince had already killed one phaerimm and was about to slay the second, so it just seemed wisest to send him the third as well. Besides, if he really thought about it, Escanor deserved what had happened. Had he listened to Galaeron in the first place, the company would have been ready for the attack, and—

Galaeron spoke the word aloud and, alarmed at how powerful his shadow was growing, shook his head clear. The rationalization had come so smoothly, felt so natural that he had almost accepted the reasoning as his own. He would have to speak with his friends about this as soon as they landed. Aris had suggested that the best way to combat the influence of his shadow self was to be completely open about what he was thinking and feeling and let the opinions of his friends guide him. So far—as long as he didn't listen to Malik—the stone giant's strategy had not only worked, it had kept Galaeron more or less in control of himself. It had also brought him closer to Vala than was probably wise, considering the fleeting and intense nature of human lives.

Galaeron's thoughts came to an end when the veserabs let out a single high-pitched screech and abruptly started to climb. Night had fallen and it was so dark that he could see clearly no more than sixty feet in front of his face, but the light of the stars above was being blocked by Shade Enclave's looming form. It was not long before a few bats from the growing colony on the enclave's underside began to flit about their heads. Rapha called the company back into a tight formation, and the shadowy crags of a capsized mountaintop appeared over their heads. They circled the funnel-shaped peak in an ever-growing spiral, exchanging silent salutes with the jewel-eyed sentries watching from

hidden nooks and crannies. Finally, they came to the Cave Gate, hidden in the deep shadows beneath a massive overhang and all but invisible even to Galaeron's dark sight. The veserabs climbed so close to the roof that the riders had to lean forward and

press tight against the creatures' fleshy backs. Then, one after the other, the veserabs gave short screeches, folded their wings tight against their bodies, and dived through a square of nothingness so dark that Galaeron could not tell it from the black gates themselves. He felt his sleeve brush against one edge of the wicket gate, then the air grew muggy and warm and he knew they had entered the vast Wing Court.

His mount spiraled downward into a dimly lit mezzanine area and landed in formation, six places behind Rapha and between Vala and Malik. Galaeron was astonished to see the Princes Rivalen, Brennus, and Lamorak standing at the head of the landing yard with a full company of shadow warriors.

Following the lead of Rapha and the rest of the Shadovar, Galaeron slipped off his veserab and kneeled on the floor, pressing his forehead to the cold stone. He cast an apprehensive glance in Vala's direction and saw her looking at him just as nervously, but neither dared to speak the question on their minds.

When the rest of the riders had dismounted and assumed similar positions, Galaeron sensed the princes and their guards coming across the floor. There was no sound—no tramping feet or clinking armor, nor even the whisper of boots scuffing cold stone— only a growing sense of stillness and apprehension.

He stood and gasped softly, then described what had occurred at the underground lake, making clear what he had observed with his own eyes and what had been reported to him by others. When Rapha came to the attack on Prince Escanor, he took care to relay only the facts, though his acid tone made clear—at least to Galaeron—where he was trying to lay the blame. The shadow lord finished by reporting the successful completion of the Splicing and venturing the opinion that the phaerimm trapped within the Sharaedim would perish within a few months.

"And what of Escanor?" The voice that asked this was sibilant and pervasive, like a whisper echoing into the chamber from some distant passage. "Where is he now?"

"To prevent it from escaping with the secret of the shell." Galaeron did not enjoy speaking to the floor, and he could not keep his irritation from creeping into his voice. "That was why the phaerimm were there, to learn how to defeat the shell so they could take Shade Enclave unawares later."

The voice remained silent.

was still a question to be answered.

The voice asked, "You are struggling with your shadow, are you not, elf?" "Losing, I think," Galaeron said. This time, he needed only the hint of a silence before realizing that he was to continue. "Prince Escanor has been looking at Vala. I didn't like it."

Though the month of Tarsakh had nearly passed and the Greengrass festival was fast approaching in Water-deep, a fierce blizzard was roaring in from the east, battering the window panes with its angry winds and dropping more snow on a city already buried to the doorknockers. Nor was this the wet slosh that blew in from the sea early every Greening. This was needle-snow, tiny spears of ice crystals formed over the High Ice and swept across the continent in howling walls of frostbite.

There was no prospect of it melting any time soon. Melting required warm breezes and bright sun, and the closest thing to either that Waterdeep had seen in three months was the steady flow of pearl-colored storm clouds sweeping across the sky. Matters had grown so bad that the city guard had covered the frozen harbor in mountains of excess snow, the woodcutters were finding it impossible to keep smoke in the city's chimneys, and the area farmers had yet to till their frozen fields. In short, Waterdeep was facing a natural disaster of the worst proportions, which was what made the news Prince Aglarel brought so fortuitous — suspiciously so, at least to anyone who knew how such things worked.

The Shadovar stood before Piergeiron Paladinson and seven of the Masked Lords of Waterdeep, his eyes glowing silver and his ceremonial fangs flashing white as he addressed the imposing assembly in the marble-walled majesty of the palace's Court Hall. In addition to Piergeiron and the Masked Lords, the gathering included the Silverhand sisters Storm and Laeral, Lord Tereal Dyndaryl from

the isle of Evermeet, Lord Gervas Imesfor of Evereska, and the inevitable host of gawkers that could be expected whenever such a group of dignitaries came together. If Aglarel was aware of the power and influence of those whom he addressed, his easy manner and confident voice betrayed no sign of the knowledge. Huge and dark, with a blocky face and long ebony hair, he wore a flowing black cape and purple tabard

that almost gave him the appearance of floating as he strode back and forth behind the podium, now and again emphasizing a point by stabbing the air with a black talon that looked more like a shard of obsidian than a human fingernail.

"The Sharaedim has become the prison of the phaerimm," the prince was saying. "Now that my people have completed the shadowshell, the wisest thing to do is to wait and let it do its work."

"Wisest for you humans, perhaps," said Lord Imesfor. Though a powerful, wellrespected lord in Evereska, he was a withered and disheartened husk of an elf whose fingers had been so badly mangled by a group of phaerimm captors that he could barely dress himself, much less cast a spell. "What of the elves still trapped in Evereska? What of our lands?"

"The enemy has already ravaged your lands. The shell will do nothing to change that," Aglarel answered. "As for your elves besieged in Evereska, we can only hope we reach them before the phaerimm do."

"We will reach no one hiding behind this shadowshell of yours," Tereal Dyndaryl said. Relatively tall for even a Gold elf, he had a gaunt face that made his already sour countenance seem absolutely bitter. "We don't have time to starve the phaerimm out. We must carry the fight to them!"

Dyndaryl's flaxen cheeks darkened to amber. "We are working on a few ideas, but nothing I can share at the moment."

"What, exactly, is the nature of these dangers?" Piergeiron asked. As the Open Lord, it was his duty to serve as the council's common face and speak for the others in public. "It does us little good to know of them without knowing what they are."

Aglarel cast a meaningful glance over his shoulder at the gawkers in the public gallery. "It wouldn't be wise to reveal the shadowshell's nature at present," he said. "Suffice it to say that we all know what happened when a mere Tomb Guard's magic hit a shadow spell."

Along with Deliah the White and several others, Piergeiron found himself nodding. This whole mess had started when a patrol of Evereskan Tomb Guards interrupted a rendezvous between a powerful Shadovar wizard and what the elves took to be a company of human tomb robbers. A phaerimm had been drawn to the sound of the resulting turmoil, and during the terrible battle that followed, the patrol leader's Weavebased magic had clashed with the Shadovar's shadow-based magic. Nobody really understood what had happened next, except that the result had torn a hole in the mystic barrier that had kept the phaerimm imprisoned beneath Anauroch for over fifteen hundred years.

After allowing his audience a moment to contemplate his words, Aglarel continued, "Can you imagine the consequences if that spell had been loosed by one of Water-deep's battle wizards?" He glanced at Gervas Imesfor. "Or perhaps a high mage from Evereska?"

"There is no need to imagine," Storm said darkly. "We all know what happened at Shadowdale—which is why I am finding your concern for our welfare so difficult to believe now."

"That was never our intention," Aglarel said. "Rivalen and the others were there to talk—"

seen for myself what the Shadovar can do against the phaerimm. We need all the help they can provide."

said. "Leave us to Anauroch, and no one on Faer ыn need fear Shade Enclave." "Anauroch is not Waterdeep's to grant or deny," Piergeiron said, trying to guide the

looked back to Piergeiron and said, "If the Lords of Waterdeep find our leadership uncomfortable, we would not be adverse to naming Lord Imesfor master of the council. It is, after all, his home that is in peril."

Piergeiron was almost too astonished to reply. The discussions between the masked lords were shielded by the same magic that protected their identities, yet Aglarel had plainly heard what Brian had said.

"The lords will discuss the council you propose later—in private," Piergeiron said, "but we do appreciate your suggestion."

"You have doubts that the shell will hold?" Lord Dyndaryl asked.

"We are not asking for any of your secrets," Laeral said, straining to sound patient "Only the simple courtesy of—"

There was only one way to find out. Piergeiron drew himself up to his full height, then called, "Prince Aglarel!"

CHAPTER THREE

allure of darkness and beauty half-glimpsed. The gates opened into a round courtyard paved in gray pearl—not stone exactly, but not quite glass either. In the center, a small fountain stood bubbling water into a black pool. The colonnade ringing the enclosure was deep and shadowed, with nine arched doorways opening like cave mouths into the house interior. In front of each pillar lay one of the precious urns wealthy Shadovar used for decoration, a hole knocked in one side to let the magic shadow spray gurgle out in a formless knob.

"A sign of mourning," explained their guide, Hadrhune. A slender man dressed in a flowing black robe, he was swaddled in so much shadow magic that at times he seemed to vanish into his own umbral aura. He used the black staff in his hand to point at the half-completed statue beneath Aris's arm and said, "Your work is of suitable quality that no one would object if you replaced them with your own sculptures."

The giant nodded. "It would be my privilege."

"Until then, it is the hope of the Most High that you will find this one adequate," Hadrhune said. He took the dipper from its hook and pointedly offered it to Malik. "Consider it your home."

"Indeed?" Ignoring the dipper, Malik wiped his hands on his tunic and studied the courtyard with an appraising eye. "This is a little cramped for Kelda, but—"

his disappointment and said, "There is room enough for me to sleep."

have been staying. He was quite taken with your depiction of Escanor's fight." This actually drew a smile from the grim giant. "Then he shall have it when I finish." "Arts will fill the city with his work, if you let him," Galaeron said, stepping to

Hadrhune's side. "When am I to begin my lessons with the Most High?" Hadrhune ran a black thumbnail along a deeply worn groove near the head of his

Moving more slowly, he waved his staff over their heads and aimed the tip at the gate, where a dark-haired woman dressed in the robe and veil of the Bedine desert people was attempting to sneak into the courtyard. Judging by her kohl-rimmed eyes— all Galaeron could see of her—she was a little older than Vala and not quite as swarthy as the Shadovar.

The hint of a cringe flashed across the woman's eyes, then she drew herself up straight. "From all I can tell, you harbor them." She spoke Common without a trace of Bedine accent. She locked gazes with Hadrhune and crossed the courtyard, a silver harp-and-moon pinned to her collar growing visible as she drew near. "I am searching for one rumored to keep company with these people."

She regarded Galaeron and Vala as though they did not deserve the honor of her gaze, then glanced past Aris's kneecap and into the shadowy depths of the colonnade. Galaeron was not ail that surprised to realize Malik had vanished. The little man had an astonishing capacity for stealth, and he had mentioned his troubles with a certain Harper often enough for Galaeron to guess who this was. Vala caught his eye and barely raised her brow. He flattened his fingers in a signal to wait, and the Bedine Harper looked away, pretending not to see.

Her dark brows arched. "In the usual way," she said. "I have been serving Princes Clariburnus and Brennus as a desert guide, a position arranged in Waterdeep through Laeral Silverhand and Prince Aglarel. If there are closed districts, they did not inform me when they brought me into the city."

"The district is not closed," Hadrhune clarified, "but it is well guarded." "And you would know everyone who enters?"

A twinkle came to the woman's eyes, and she said, "I think not."

Hadrhune spoke a word, and a tiny sphere of shadow shot from the tip and struck the ground at Malik's feet. He cried out and tried to leap away, but the dark circle expanded beneath him. When he came down, he fell in as though it was a hole. The shadow circle drew in on itself and vanished from sight.

Aris, who had been watching all this from far above, groaned and dropped to a knee, his big hand already reaching for Hadrhune. The seneschal raised his staff overhead and caught the middle of the giant's hand on its tip.

"There is no need to pay today, my large friend," Hadrhune said, lowering his staff. "I just wanted time to sort matters out."

Hadrhune's black staff.

"Galaeron, Hadrhune's not asking you to betray anyone," Vala said. "I am only asking for the truth," Hadrhune said. "If you cannot see that, you are in the grasp of your shadow." Leaving Galaeron to fume, Hadrhune turned and craned his neck up at Aris. "What would you tell the Most High, my friend?"

Even Ruha's heavy veil could not hide her smirk.

"Moving?" Galaeron echoed. "It's always moving."

back. "You promised!"

Turban half undone, Malik whirled on Hadrhune and said, "If you knew what I had for a heart, you would not think that funny—not at all." Seeming to forget all about Ruha, Malik started toward the seneschal, wagging his finger. "It is a good thing for you that I did not die of fright in there, or the One would surely visit on you a hell a thousand times worse—or else laugh so hard at my miserable fate that he split his rotten sides."

This last admission, forced by Mystra's truth curse, seemed to take the fire out of him. Malik spent a moment taking in the scene in the courtyard, then slipped to Ruha's helpless form and raked his foot down her shin.

Ruha's eyes flared, but she showed no other sign of pain. "Why is it you care more for your horse than for your friends?"

Hadrhune considered this for a moment, then shook his head wearily. "You place Shade Enclave in a difficult position, Harper. Either we harbor this miscreant against you or we allow you to violate our guest guard."

"There is no reason to concern yourself with that," Galaeron said, glaring up at Hadrhune. "We'll be leaving within the hour."

"He will," Hadrhune insisted. "He wanted to explain himself why the city was moving. That's why I didn't tell you."

How the mammals had bypassed his teleport traps, Malygris did not know, or how they had avoided activating his alarm magic. What he did know was that he could bear only so much and that this entering of his lair was the final insult. He opened his jaws and loosed a mouthful of lightning. In the crackling flash that filled the cavern, he glimpsed a pair of swarthy humans in dark robes cartwheeling across his hoard and smashing headlong into his wall. They collapsed among his diamonds and lay there scorched, smoking, and—amazingly— more or less alive.

Malygris continued to look in their direction. When Namirrha had made him a dracolich, he had grown acutely aware of everything alive within a wingspread of himself, and he knew the two humans were badly injured. Mammals were fragile, so they seemed likely to die within a few hours anyway, and he was not about to waste another breath attack on them. If he conserved, he still had two good lightning blasts left before he would have to leave his lair and eat.

But the pair did not expire. Instead, over the next hour, they grew steadily stronger, first crawling behind a pile of gold coins fused into a solid lump by the heat of his lightning, then hiding there and recovering by the minute, speaking to each other in some ancient human tongue even Malygris had never before heard. It was the ultimate warmblood insult—not being frightened enough to flee or at least to cower in silence. Malygris would have torn them limb from limb, save that over the last year, his hideless skeleton had sunken to his spine in his nest of sapphires, and he simply did not want to abandon such a comfortable bed.

A voice, deep and booming, at least by human standards, called out in Common, "Most Mighty Malygris, there is no need to attack. We come in peace."

No, not cowering.

"We are princes of Shade Enclave," said the bronze-eyed one. "I am Clariburnus. My brother is Brennus."

"Clariburnus and I are shades," the one with steel eyes said. "But not all Shadovar are shades, and not all shades are Shadovar. A Shadovar is a citizen of Shade Enclave."

"You warmbloods!" he hissed. "Do you all think my lair yours for the entering?" Namirrha made a show of appearing frightened, stopping to steeple his fingertips together and bow deeply. "A thousand pardons, Sacred One. I was informed that you have been hurling lightning about and thought you might be in need of assistance."

Malygris's anger drained away.

"Remove them?" Malygris growled. "What will my followers eat? I would sooner remove you—"

Namirrha grew serious. "Malygris would like to see them gone—wiped from the face of Faerыn."

"Good." Brennus smiled broadly, baring a mouthful of needle-tip fangs that even Malygris had to envy. "Done."

CHAPTER FOUR

heavy and tepid and drew in on itself in inky mist. Galaeron sat on the balcony outside Villa Dusari's master bedchamber, not keeping watch, but watching. Despite the hour, the steady murmur and clatter of passing traffic growled up out of the ebony gloom, just loud enough to keep a company of restless householders from their pillows. Aris was down in the lower warrens of the city, plinking away in his workshop. Ruha was skulking about the house searching for Malik, who was obviously somewhere other than his chamber. Only Vala was in bed, on the other side of the door from where Galaeron sat. She was not sleeping, just staring into the blade of her black

She was, Galaeron knew, looking in on her son in Vaasa. At night, her darksword often lulled her into a trance and showed her what was happening in the bedchambers of the Granite Tower—'dream walking' she called it, though it was more akin to spying. During their months together, he had learned to read her expression and tell when she was visiting Sheldon. That the sword seemed to be looking in on the boy more often these days was one of few things that made Galaeron think the weapon might not be entirely sinister.

Though he did not begrudge Vala these glimpses of her son, Galaeron did envy them. His own father and sister were lost to the fog of war—dead or beyond reach, he did not know which. The Swords of Evereska's desperate attempt to save the gate at the Rocnest had already become the stuff of legend. By all accounts, Aubric Nihmedu had been leading the charge, and Galaeron was not fool enough to believe a mere bladesinger likely to survive any combat in which Khelben Arunsun—one of Mystra's Chosen—had vanished without a trace.

His sister, Keya, remained trapped in Evereska— though Galaeron could not be certain of even that much, as the phaerimm had long ago stopped all communication with the Lasthaven by raising a magic deadwall around the Sharaedim. He could hardly bear to think of his little sister—at eighty, barely an adult— sitting alone in Treetop, sad and frightened, probably hungry and perhaps even in despair, while outside the phaerimm circled the city waiting for a chance to enter. Yet, the alternative—that the mythal had already collapsed and Evereska fallen—was too horrible to contemplate.

And it was Galaeron's doing—the escape of the phaerimm, the besieging of Evereska, the whole war. He had caused it in one of those terrible moments a person replayed in his mind a thousand times, telling himself that if he had done this, or said that, or just left it all alone, everything would have been fine. Instead, Galaeron and his Tomb Guards had followed a band of crypt-breakers down into the long-forgotten workings of a dwarven mine and found Vala and her Vaasan warriors preparing to rendezvous with their shadow mage master, Melegaunt Tanthul. In the confusion that followed, Galaeron had given the order that breached the Sharn Wall, nearly two dozen men and elves had died, and the phaerimm had escaped to begin their assault on Evereska.

Vala and the Shadovar had told him a hundred times that he had only been performing his duty and wasn't to blame, but their words could not change what had happened—or how he felt about it. Eager to undo his mistake, Galaeron had joined forces with Vala and her shadow mage master and set out to summon the only help that seemed capable of defeating the evil he had unleashed. Along the way, he had learned to use shadow magic and had overreached his limits, opening himself to the corrupting influences of the Shadow Weave and beginning a desperate battle against his own shadow for the possession of his spirit. At every step of the way, it seemed, he had made the wrong decision, and now that he could not be certain whether the thoughts running through his mind belonged to him or his shadow self, he was almost afraid to decide anything at all.

Galaeron settled back and tried to clear his mind, but found himself too agitated. His thoughts kept returning to the morning, wondering whether Hadrhune would arrange the promised audience or find yet another excuse to put it off—and whether the Most High's help would be the solution to his shadow problems, or just one more mistake. Certainly, it did not bode well that the Shadovar had concealed the fact that Shade Enclave was moving away from Evereska. But even Galaeron could see how his shadow would have used that information to feed his suspicions and make him distrust the one most able to help him win his spirit back.

While there was a time when he could have stilled his thoughts by retreating into the Reverie, Galaeron had lost touch with that facet of elf nature when he allowed his shadow to invade. Instead of slipping into a semi lucid trance of memories and the shared emotions of other elves, he sank into the same insensible, nightmare-filled slumber as humans.

But this night even sleep would not come. He passed the black hours staring out into the darkness, listening to the city clatter past beneath his balcony, replaying the same thoughts and doubts over and over again until the gloom paled from night-ebony to dawn-gray and Aris came striding out of the murk carrying his statue of Escanor's battle against the phaerimm.

Already completed, the piece was Aris's finest yet, so flowing it seemed in danger of writhing from the giant's hands. The prince's figure was noble and majestic, one hand still stretched toward the phaerimm he had just killed as he twisted around to face his new attacker. The creature itself was connected to him by the tail piercing his abdomen, and also by two hands wrapped around his throat, an artistic license taken to impart the impression that the beast was hovering beside him unsupported.

"Aris, it's magnificent!" Vala said, joining Galaeron on the balcony as the stone giant stepped into the courtyard. "You did that in one night?"

"Very lifelike," he said. Though Escanor had spent three days in bed recovering from the removal of the phaerimm egg, he showed no sign of weakness. "I could swear it's moving."

"In truth, I am so fond of it I would like it for my villa," Escanor said. He motioned an unarmored servant forward. "Mees will pay whatever you think fair."

to show you the way to the palace." He stopped in front of Vala and took her hands in his own. "I wanted to thank you for saving my life. Rapha tells me you were really quite the trazt fiend."

Vala actually blushed, and Galaeron instantly resented the way her green eyes held the prince's gaze.

Vala nodded and started forward. Galaeron stepped to her side, making sure to place himself between her and Escanor as the others closed around them. Whether the prince noticed the maneuver was impossible to say, but Vala's frown was unmistakable.

A twinkle came to Vala's green eyes, and she surprised him by smiling. "So you are jealous."

called greetings and fond wishes to Escanor as the procession passed. There were not many side streets, and those that they did intersect always ran uphill to the left and downhill to the right. It slowly grew apparent to Galaeron that they were spiraling up a gentle mound, though one so encrusted in looming structures that its terrain was all but impossible to discern. As they ascended, the villas grew ever larger and more magnificent, eventually becoming so enormous that it required the entourage close to a minute to pass by.

As they passed one of the largest, a many-spired mansion with flying buttresses and a line of long barrel vaults leading into the shadowed interior, Prince Escanor stopped long enough to wave in its direction.

"My abode," he said. "I hope you will attend me here soon, when we are not quite so occupied with our war duties."

"There must thousands!" Vala gasped.

the assaults of the malaugrym."

the umbral haze above. like so much in Shade Enclave, it seemed all sinuous curves and exaggerated proportions, with a shape that could not be named, nor even held in mind for more than a passing impression. Paying no noticeable attention as a company of Shadovar spell-guards snapped to attention, Escanor steered his entourage into a keel-arched portal so high that Aris barely had to duck his head.

After passing through a short vaultway, the entryway opened into a vast hall of glassy curves and dusky translucence where every buttress soared into darkness and each corridor vanished into shadow. A hundred or more high-born Shadovar drifted in and out of the doorways, or stood rasping in tight knots of conversation, or sat patiently on the benches along the walls, their gem-colored eyes glowing bright against the murk at their backs. Ignoring the bustle of murmured greetings and inquisitive stares shot the entourage's way as it passed, Escanor marched his group down the center of the floor to a crowded seating area outside an enormous pair of guarded doors.

The detachment commander kneeled and informed Escanor that he had already sent word of the prince's arrival. A few moments later, one the doors opened and Hadrhune slipped out to inform them that the Most High was engaged and would see them as soon as he was able.

Escanor's eyes looked as though they might burn holes through the chamberlain. "You informed him that I am here with the elf?"

Hadrhune waved Galaeron and his companions through, but Mees, Rapha, and the rest of the prince's entourage remained behind. They found themselves in a room even murkier than the great reception hall, where the gloom fell on their skin like ash and wisps of shadow-stuff floated past in long smoky ribbons. As Hadrhune and Escanor marched the group forward, the voices of unseen whisperers rose and fell in the surrounding darkness, and cold chilblains rose to prickle Galaeron's skin.

Finally, they approached a set of whispers that did not fade and, as they continued walking, eventually hardened into the fuller tones of normal speech. Galaeron recognized one speaker as a female and the other as the voice that had addressed him in the Wing Court. Before they drew near enough to understand what was being said, Hadrhune had them kneel and press their brows to the floor.

If the prince replied, Galaeron did not hear it.

Galaeron and the others stood and found themselves facing at set of stairs at the base of a murk-swaddled dais. Escanor pointed toward the rear of the party.

"Stop!" Ruha was instantly rushing toward him, tossing sand at his hidden hand and uttering some kind of Bedine nature magic.

Escanor bowed briefly to Vala, then took Galaeron's arm and led him away. "Galaeron?" Vala called.

He paused there, trying to sort out what he believed from what his shadow believed—but Telamont was in no mood to wait.

was surprised to find himself looking at nothing but storm clouds. As he watched, the clouds grew larger and darker, with flashes of lightning stabbing through their roiling heads. Then he was through, diving into a vast, rain-soaked swamp where hundreds of lizardmen were swarming a much smaller company of Shadovar.

"The Marsh of Chelimber, on the far side of the Grey-cloaks," Telamont said, just a trace of pride in his voice. "You see, Shade Enclave does not need to be near to project its strength. Our warriors are shades who can walk the shadows and cross the breadth of Faerыn at will. Evereska will not suffer for our absence."

Armed as the Shadovar were with shadow magic and shadow weapons, the shade warriors were holding their own against the primitive lizardmen. Galaeron would even have gone so far as to say it looked like they would carry the day—but it was not like lizardmen to march so steadfastly to their deaths, and never in the even ranks of a disciplined army. There was something forcing them to attack, something that made them hate the Shadovar beyond all reason—or something they feared more.

"Can you call them out?" Galaeron asked, not bothering to conceal the panic in his voice.

Galaeron considered this, then reluctantly shook his head. "It's a feeling, but not as strong. It just makes sense—lizardmen don't fight like that. Something must be driving them."

"Phaerimm?" asked Rivalen. "We always expected a few would be outside the shell when Escanor raised it."

"You were with Melegaunt when he died," Telamont said. "Something passed between you."

CHAPTER FIVE

shoulder, too weak to burn through the dusky mantle Evereska's enemies had drawn over the Sharaedim, too pale to feed the few light-starved buds dauntless enough to emerge on the scorched and withered stalks of the Vine Vale. Murky as the morning was, it was bright enough for Keya Nihmedu's elf eyes to make out the faint swirl of ash and dust drifting down the other side of the Meadow Wall. A couple of lance-lengths from her hiding tree, it was moving slowly, quietly and carefully, bouncing along Evereska's protective mythal, trying again and again to cross the boundary into the untouched fields beyond.

Every instinct screamed at Keya to throw off her camouflage and flee for the cliff gates. She stayed. The mythal would protect her, and she had promised to be there when Khelben and the Vaasans returned. If they returned. Keya looked at the pale disk in the sky and wondered if even the Chosen of Mystra could be that good. A full night among the phaerimm.

The swirl halted in front of Keya's tree, so faint she began to doubt she was seeing it. Perhaps the whorl had been just a breeze stirring up ash as it rolled down the Meadow Wall. Not every dust devil dancing down a scorched terrace was an invisible phaerimm—but a lot of them were. Had she been at her post inside one of the city towers, Keya could have waved a wand and known at once what she was looking at, but the thornbacks could see mystic energy the way dwarves saw body heat, and so the Long Watch did not use any magic—did not even carry it—this close to the boundary.

The swirl vanished, but Keya could still hear dead vine stalks stirring in the breeze and the distinct sibilation of air moving over the stones of the Meadow Wall, and she knew. The phaerimm were surrounded by an aura of moving air, which they used to communicate among themselves in a strange language of whistles and roars. There was not just one invisible thornback pausing on his circuit of the mythal—there were two, whispering quietly, lurking directly in front of Keya's tree—the same tree she had told Khelben Arunsun and the Vaasans to mark as their rendezvous point when they returned to the city.

Keya remained in her hollow in the linden's thick trunk, standing behind her screen of bark, hardly daring to breathe. She spent the next few minutes wondering why the phaerimm had picked this particular place on this particular morning to hold a conversation and what

she was going to do if—when—Khelben and the Vaasans returned. She could not speak the word of passing with two thornbacks lurking outside—not even for one of the Chosen, not for her Vaasan friends, not even if her own brother Galaeron were to suddenly appear outside Meadow Wall. When an elf opened a gate in the mythal, she could not control who used it. Once the phaerimm were inside, it would take only a moment to cast the same life-draining magic that had already withered the vineyards of the Vine Vale and denuded the once-majestic spruce stands of the Upper Vale, and that was something Keya could not permit—not when the mythal was already growing weak.

It took Keya a moment to realize it when the phaerimm fell silent, for the difference between stillness and the sibilation of their whispering voices was no more than the flutter of a moth's wings. She thought for a moment the phaerimm had moved on, but when she looked along the Meadow Wall, she saw no swirling ash or any other sign of their departure. The thornbacks had fallen quiet for the same reason they were invisible, because they wanted to keep their presence secret, and their prey was close enough to hear them.

It had to be Khelben and the Vaasans, as invisible as the phaerimm, but walking into a trap. Keya knew Khelben would have his detection magic up and—assuming he was still with the group—see the enemy as soon as he came into range. The thornbacks would know that as well. The war around Evereska had become one of stealth and magic, with the combatants sneaking through the barren landscape, silent and invisible, searching for foes who were just as silent and just as invisible. More often than not, the victor was the one who detected his enemy first—and the phaerimm had obviously already detected Khelben and Vaasans.

Keya knew she could warn Khelben simply by speaking his name, for he had told her that the Chosen heard a few words whenever their names were spoken anywhere on Faerыn, but that was really not much different from a magic sending. She had to assume that the phaerimm would detect it just as easily. No, she needed to startle the thornbacks, to confuse them for just the half-second it would take Khelben and the others to discern the trap and react.

Assuming they were really out there.

Two swirls of ash and dust went up behind the Meadow Wall as the startled phaerimm reacted. She angled toward the one on the right for no other reason than it was half a step closer than the other. The thing reacted by instinct, spraying bolts of golden magic in Keya's direction and growing instantly visible. The bolts blossomed harmlessly against the mythal, then Keya was at the Meadow Wall, shoving her spear through the magic barrier to strike at the creature's scaly midsection.

The phaerimm's magic defenses turned her spear as easily as the mythal had turned its golden bolts. A ball of Khelben's silver spellfire exploded into the thing from behind, pinning it against the mythal and holding it there as it was incinerated by the special magic of the Chosen.

Shielding her eyes from the silver brilliance, Keya stumbled away and turned to see the other phaerimm coming apart beneath the Vaasans' darkswords. One of the black blades was emitting a sort of musical purr—a

brisk tune that sounded almost like someone humming. The song sent a shiver down Keya's spine. She had heard Dexon's sword talking while he slept and seen Kuhl's grow pallid because he had neglected to plunge it into a vat of mead that day, but this was the eeriest oddity of all. The melody was joyful and light, as though the weapon enjoyed its bloody work.

The three Vaasans finished the phaerimm quickly, then cut off its tail barb and fell to arguing as only Vaasans could about who deserved the trophy. Khelben appeared behind the trio and silenced them with a sharp word before turning to Keya with a grateful bow.

"Quick wit and brave deeds, Keya Nihmedu," he said. Tall and dark-bearded, Khelben had a grim manner that lent a sullen dignity to even his simplest acts. "You have our gratitude."

"It was nothing." Keya spoke the word of passing, then motioned the wizard and the others over the Meadow Wall. "I was never in danger."

When the Vaasan seemed too shocked to do more than stare at Keya, Burlen stepped forward to take his place. "What's wrong with you, Dex? You can't keep our hostess waiting."

Burlen spread his burly arms wide and closed his eyes . . . and suddenly found himself holding a glowering Khelben.

Galaeron stood in the cold stillness at the Most High's side, peering down into the world-window, watching a miles-long column of mixed volunteers trudge along the knee-deep mud trough that had once been the Trade Way. There were folk from ail over the northwest—Evermeetian elves, Adbarrim dwarves, Waterdhavian men— but only the Uthgardt barbarians seemed untroubled by the blizzards and constant downpours that had been plaguing western Faerыn all spring. The rest of the volunteers were coughing and staggering, so weakened by fever and fatigue that the army could barely slog three miles a day, much less join battle at the end of the march.

Yet fight they must. Telamont's cowled head looked toward the High Moor, and the scene in the world-window shifted to a horde of bugbears being herded through a waterfall of rain by a troop of beholder officers. Supporting them were two companies of illithids and another of Zhentilar battle mages—though why the enemy would need human spell-flingers with five phaerimm overseeing their attack was beyond Galaeron.

Telamont's gaze shifted again, this time to a rocky ridge of ground that stood along the Trade Way opposite the High Moor. Laeral Silverhand and her sister Storm already stood atop the ridge, their long tresses streaming in the gale wind as they laid magic traps. Though it was far from certain that their army would cover the mile and a half remaining to it before the phaerimm's bugbears covered the eight remaining to them, the ridge meant everything. The army that controlled it would have the advantages of both height and solid ground, while the one that did not would be forced to wade into battle through a muddy morass.

Withdrawal was not an option for either force, not with

Telamont's attention turned to the phaerimm themselves, and the scene shifted yet again. Accustomed to the Most High's rapid changes of focus, Galaeron turned his own attention to the thornbacks and began to let his thoughts wander over the question of why so many had gathered in one place. He had been coming to the palace every day since their initial meeting, spending most of that time peering into the world-window and trying to get in touch with whatever Melegaunt had passed on to him during those last few moments of life. Sometimes it worked, and he was able to divine the enemy's intentions in time to save a few dozen—or even a few hundred— lives. More often, he had no more to offer than anyone else.

Regardless, Telamont Tanthul spent part of each day—sometimes most of it—with Galaeron, never teaching him directly, but always approaching the subject obliquely, as if concentrating too bright a light on his shadow self would only send it into hiding. No matter how long these sessions lasted, Galaeron always returned to Villa Dusari exhausted, numb, and irritable— so much so that Vala was beginning to question whether Telamont was helping him control his shadow or the other way around. Though she was not allowed into the war room—even Escanor had not been able to prevail on the Most High to allow her inside—she insisted on coming to the palace each day and waiting out in the throne room's whispering murk. Given how peevish that was making her, Galaeron was beginning to think

Telamont stepped away from the rim of the world-window and fixed his platinum eyes on Galaeron, and— as always—Galaeron felt the question on the Most High's mind.

"I can't see the sense in forcing this battle," he admitted. "When we raised the shadowshell, there were only ten phaerimm outside—"

Galaeron felt the weight of Telamont's unspoken question and knew that something was being demanded of him that had, until now, only been asked. He turned to the world-window and focused his attention on the High Moor, then on the horde of tiny figures swarming over it, then on the five figures drifting along behind it between the two companies of illithids. Each time, the window responded to his will, the image shifting and growing larger to show him what he wished to see.

When Galaeron was finally looking at only the thorn-backs themselves, he shifted from one to the other, studying each one in turn, looking for scars or scale patterns or anything that might trigger one of Melegaunt's memories. Had the world-window been capable of carrying sound, he would have cast the spell that Melegaunt had taught him to understand their languages, but even the Shadovar could not eavesdrop without sending a spy. The Most High had already made clear to Galaeron that until he grew adept enough with shadow magic to find and pass on the knowledge that Melegaunt had entrusted to him, he would not be allowed to risk his life in any manner. For a Tomb Guard princep accustomed to chasing cutthroat crypt breakers down narrow passages strewn with magic death traps, the restriction was not an easy one to observe.

Galaeron.

Telamont's eyes twinkled beneath his cowl, and there was a flash of what might have been a white-fanged grin. "You are always trying to control your shadow, elf. You are the kind who must control what he fears."

"What I fear is becoming a monster," Galaeron insisted. "Of course I want to control my shadow."

that merged into broad creeks and vanished down the blue crevasses in silver horsetails of falling water.

Galaeron concentrated on a larger area of the High Ice. Sensing his change of focus, Telamont yielded control of the world-window, and the scene drew back to show the hundreds of vapor columns rising off the ice.

"You're changing Faer ыn’s weather!"

dozens of huge rivers were gushing out of blue-tinged caves in the base of a mountainous wall of snow and ice. The water was pouring into enormous basins that had been dry for a thousand years, recreating the lakes that had once lain along the northern fringes of Netheril.

"Cold air is rolling down from the High Ice and picking up moisture as it sweeps across the lakes and grows warm," Telamont explained. "As the effect grows stronger, the winds will carry rain and fog farther south into Anauroch, forcing the hot desert air to rise and draw more winds down from the High Ice. The system feeds on itself. We are already seeing showers as far south as the Columns of the Sky."

Though Galaeron had no idea where the Columns of the Sky were—the name had a Netherese ring—he needed no explanation of what the shadow blankets meant for western Faerыn. He had already seen it in the

blizzards plaguing Waterdeep and the deluges that had turned most of the farms south of the Ardeep Forest into hip-deep marshes.

He looked toward the west, and the scene shifted to Daggerford, where the River Delimbyr's frigid waters had risen into the streets, and residents kept boats tied outside their second-story windows.

"Surely, you could pursue a more gradual approach, one that would not force so many into homelessness and hunger."

Something cold and angry rose inside him, and he understood. The Shadovar were trying to trap him, trying to corrupt him, perhaps, or test him, or move the burden of all those deaths from their heads to his.

The scene had returned to the High Moor, where the princes of Shade and their legions were just rising from the dusky ground, thousands upon thousands of silhouettes peeling themselves out of the shadows and growing whole as they charged, flinging spells of umbral death and waving weapons of indestructible black glass.

Caught from the rear and the flank, the bugbears were roaring in confusion and fighting their beholder masters with far more ferocity than they were the Shadovar. One company of illithids was already under the black sword, while the other was rushing to fan out behind their battle lines and find the most powerful spell-flingers to target with their mind blasts. The search was proving a difficult one, for most warriors of Shade Enclave fought with both spell and blade, often slipping from one to the other with a grace that even an elf bladesinger would envy.

No more eager to engage the princes than the princes were to engage them, the five phaerimm hung back, assailing their enemy's ranks with fireballs, lightning bolts, and sheets of burning light that felled whole ranks of Shadovar. Though this last spell was one that Galaeron had never seen before, it bore a semblance to certain elements of a prismatic wall, and he felt sure it was little more than a simple modification the thornbacks had developed especially for combat against shades.

That was when it hit him. "This battle is a diversion."

'Tour agents don't know the phaerimm well enough to make that judgment," Galaeron replied, somewhat surprised to discover he felt he did. He pointed at a flickering fan of azure light. "That spell is a new one, designed for battle against Shadovar."

"Even if you could know that," Hadrhune began, "I fail to see—"

"Our watchers would know if they were simulacrums or magic images," Telamont said. "Perhaps this is no diversion, after all."

"Many things are better kept secret," Telamont said. "Among them, deeds of shame done in moments of necessity."

"It was an accident," Hadrhune said firmly.

He was growing angrier by the moment, and not just because of what they had done to Elminster. He saw how Telamont had manipulated him as well, deliberately drawing his shadow out by showing him the shadow blankets and telling him he must choose between saving Evereska or the whole west. Though Telamont remained silent, the force of his unspoken question pressed down like a boulder. So infuriated was Galaeron that he wanted not to answer, to deny what he saw so clearly, or lie about it, or do something to make the Shadovar pay—but he could not hold the knowledge inside. The pressure of the Most High's will was insufferable, as though he had somehow brought the entire weight of Shade Enclave to bear on that one pressure point.

"That's what they'll attack."

The Most High turned to Galaeron and said, "You know our defenses. Can the phaerimm breach them?"

"An entire company?" Hadrhune shook his gaunt head. "Impossible." "It would not hurt to be certain," Telamont said.

They were somewhere else, dropping out of the shadows into a huge obsidian basin, sliding down the glassy slopes with purple sheets of light burning all around them, voices screaming, bolts cracking, air reeking of charred flesh. It took Galaeron a moment to recall where he was and why, a moment longer to realize the pain in his arm was Vala's free hand digging into his biceps, then he finally began to make sense of what he was seeing.

At the bottom of the basin sat a huge ball of obsidian, easily a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, with pale, ghostly shapes gliding about inside and a halo of deepening darkness radiating from its surface. A flight of phaerimm were descending out of the gloom above, flinging spells of fire and light as they came, trying to fight their way through the swarm of teleport-dazed Shadovar tumbling and sliding down the slopes of the glassy basin along with Galaeron and Vala.

An orb of darkness streaked up out of the basin and drilled a fist-sized hole through a creature close over their heads. It dropped onto the slope above and started to slide down toward them, roaring its pain in a swirling tempest of winds and lashing out with a wild flurry of lightning and burning light. Galaeron took a white fork of energy in the shoulder and went rigid, biting down on his tongue so hard that his teeth met through the flesh.

Vala hurled her sword, slicing off one of the phaerimm’s arms and a good portion of its sinewy shoulder. The creature rolled away, then whistled something in the phaerimm wind language and vanished.

Galaeron felt Vala catch him by the collar, then their descent began to slow as they reached the bottom of the basin and the slope lost its steepness. She called her darksword back to her hand, and only after it had

Galaeron managed to unclench his jaw and, with a mouthful of blood, said, "Stiff, but all right."

Vala wrapped him in a supporting arm and started toward the Most High. "Telamont isn't going to like this. Didn't he order you to stay out of fights until you're able to pass on Melegaunt's knowledge?"

Galaeron nodded at the huge sphere of obsidian they were circling past. "He seems to have made an exception for the mythallar."

at his back, stepped out of the murk at the rim of the basin and began to descend the slick wall. Galaeron recognized Brennus by his large, crescent-shaped mouth and the orange tinge of his iron-colored eyes. Not slipping on the steep obsidian slope, he and the others began to angle more or less in Telamont's direction, their faces showing no reaction at all to the carnage around them. When they reached the body piles at the bottom they began to clamber across without drawing so much as a moan or disturbing even one arm.

Galaeron began the incantation of a shadow divination—a more powerful one than he should have been using but necessary if he was to dispel a phaerimm's disguise magic. A surge of cold shadow magic rushed into his body, chilling him down to the marrow in his bones and filling him with a cold, bitter resentment at... well, everyone: Melegaunt and the other princes, Telamont, Hadrhune—even Vala.

The spell ended as the "prince" and his escorts were stepping over the last of the casualties onto the basin floor. The shadow drained from their bodies like water, revealing six phaerimm and a strange, three-eyed, three-tentacled orb with a huge, finch like beak.

That was as far as Vala's warning got before the basin erupted into flying shadow balls and sizzling fans of light. Two of the phaerimm and fifty Shadovar fell in the battle's first breath, and the three-eyed creature spun toward Galaeron, its tentacles whirling like the scimitars of a drow blademaster. Vala intercepted it, her darksword rising to meet the spinning tentacles—and fell back as the thing beat down her guard, slashing her up the cheek, above the eye, and then across the neck.

Galaeron pulled her back and drew his own sword, his elven steel severing one hooked tentacle as it struck at the hollow of her throat, then falling to his back as the thing's wicked beak clacked at his head. Another hook came whipping down toward Galaeron's unarmored heart—and was intercepted by Vala's darksword. She twined her black blade into the tentacle and pulled the creature toward her, bringing her iron dagger up to meet it The blade sank a finger's depth, and the third tentacle came around, burying its hook in the back of her knee and trying to jerk her off her feet Vala was too nimble. She gave it a dead leg, letting her foot rise while she pushed and twisted the dagger. The blade sank perhaps another knuckle.

Galaeron pulled a strand of shadowsilk from his pocket and wadded it into a ball, beginning the incantation for a shadow ball.

Galaeron kicked the thing's beak off of him and rammed his sword up through its body. Leaving it buried there, he pulled a small cylinder of glass from his pocket and rolled through the incantation for a normal lightning bolt and felt nothing.

Well, not nothing, exactly. There was a cold prickling as the shadow magic tried to rise into him where his body was touching the ground, but he pushed this down and opened himself to the Weave so he could cast a normal, bright, searing lightning bolt— and there was nothing. He had lost the Weave.

Vala exchanged her dagger for his sword's hilt, pushed, twisted, slashed, then cried out in alarm as the thing wrapped its dehooked tentacle around her ankle. Instead of allowing it to pull her foot out from under her, Vala dropped to her back, pulling Galaeron's sword from the creature's body and bringing a cascade of entrails with it.

The thing screeched in anguish and exploded into a bloody cloud as a huge shadow ball burst through its center. What remained plopped down between Galaeron and Vala, its slimy tentacles still twined around Vala and her darksword. She quickly used Galaeron's sword to cut herself free, then flipped it around and shoved the hilt at him.

"Don't ever—I don't care how darkly shadowed you are—don't ever tell me to shut up."

behind the monster's disemboweled body. The Most High nudged it with a dark boot. "Our enemies from the shadow plane attack us even here," he said. "The 'monster' is called a malaugrym. You did well to unmask it. One might even say that we all owe you our lives."

"One might," Galaeron said, struggling to his feet, "but it seems a simple 'thank you' is too much to ask."

CHAPTER SIX

the plains north of the Trollclaws, Laeral's relief army was crossing the Winding Water on a fleet of rain-soaked log rafts. Laeral herself had flown three magic guidelines across two miles of muddy water, and along with her hippogriff-mounted scouts and several dozen of her best battle mages she was standing guard on the western shore, expecting a phaerimm attack at any moment.

This was the last river they would cross before reaching Evereska, and if the enemy meant to stop them, it would be there, and Laeral knew there was a good chance that they would.

In addition to slowing the progress of the relief army to a crawl, the horrid weather was taking a terrible toll on the health and spirit of the army. There was not a fighter among them who doubted that they owed their lives to the forces of Shade. Had the Shadovar not appeared when they did at the High Moor, the enemy horde would have beaten them to the high ground and obliterated the army to a warrior.

Many officers were beginning to question the wisdom of continuing the march at all. While the priests and healers were keeping deaths from illness to a bare minimum, most soldiers were feverish and—with the constant rainfall spoiling rations—weak from hunger. Even if they reached Evereska in time, it seemed likely that their poor condition would only be a burden on those already in place.

Laeral refused to hear these arguments. Sooner or later, the weather would break—it had to—and a few days of sunshine would do wonders to rejuvenate the army. More importantly, she felt certain the phaerimm would eventually find a way to defeat the shadowshell. When that happened, the thornbacks would learn from their mistake and scatter across Faerыn, and the only thing capable of stopping them would be the sheer numbers of Laeral's relief army.

Most of all, there was her beloved Khelben to think about. He had vanished at the Battle of Rocnest, defending a trio of Evermeet's high mages as they attempted to open a translocational gate that would have allowed Waterdeep to send relief forces in a matter of moments instead of months, and Laeral was determined to find out what had become of him. She would have known if he had died—as a Chosen herself, she would have felt his loss in the Weave—so he had either been sucked into another plane when the phaerimm captured the gate, or

trapped inside Evereska with the elves. She was gambling on Evereska, if for no other reason than she had already done what little was possible to contact him in the planes beyond.

The first rafts appeared out of the rain, the deep voices of two hundred Uthgardt barbarians chanting a somber hauling song as they pulled themselves along the guide rope. Laeral began to think her army would actually make the crossing successfully. The rafts were spaced about thirty paces apart, just far enough to avoid being caught if a magic fireball, meteor storm, or some other area attack struck the raft in front, yet close enough that the warriors on any one raft could help the others if they did come under attack.

A distant thunder began to roll over the horizon from the direction of the Forest of Wyrms. Laeral assigned her battle mages to ground defense, then took her hippogriff riders into the air to establish a protective screen fifty paces ahead of the shoreline. The thunder grew into the unmistakable roar of pounding boots and growling voices, but the rain clouds were so thick that Laeral couldn't see their enemies even from a hundred feet above the ground.

The roar grew steadily louder and passed underneath her. Laeral dropped down until she saw first the hazy darkness of land, then thousands of oblong boot prints simply appearing in the mud. Someone had turned the entire army invisible, and that meant phaerimm—probably several of them.

She aimed her palm at the front rank and spoke a few syllables of dispelling magic, and a ten-yard circle of charging bugbears appeared no more than thirty paces from the shoreline.

the first rank of bugbears. Most fell where they stood, but hundreds of the beasts stumbled forward, roaring in pain and raising huge double-headed axes as they staggered toward the thin line of mages. The first Uthgardts were already splashing ashore to meet the beasts, but the mud was deep, they were few, and time was short.

Laeral pulled a nugget of coal from her spell pocket and flew low in front of the burning bugbears, crumbling the coal into powder and uttering a complicated incantation. The ground turned black and viscous beneath the charging beasts, miring them to their knees, then to their waists and, as they continued to struggle, their chests. Wherever their flaming bodies came into contact with the black sludge, it began to burn as well, and the band was soon filled with roaring scarecrows of orange flame.

At the end of her attack run, Laeral rose into a storm of sling stones and hand axes. None of the attacks penetrated her shielding magic, but the sheer volume was enough to slow her ascent. She turned and found herself staring out over a sea of bugbears and gnolls, all visible the moment some had begun to attack. Pushing through the horde were small bands of beholders and tentacle-faced illithids, coming forward to punch holes in the magic defenses holding their masses at bay.

Of the phaerimm who controlled the army, Laeral saw no sign at all. It was even possible that the illithids and beholders themselves did not know where the creatures were or even that they were there. The phaerimm delighted in using their magic to make other beings do their will, and often the victims were not even aware they were being controlled.

flicked a finger over her thumb ring to activate its sending magic. She pictured the craggy face of the leader of her hippogriff scouts and thought, Aelburn, they're trying to take the rafts from the flanks.

As you predicted, Milady, came Aelburn's reply. We'll turn that against 'em. Aelburn's mount voiced a series of sharp screeches that caused the scouts to divide into two groups and wheel around to dive on the two flights of beholders from behind. Laeral watched the gray sky to be certain that no phaerimm emerged from the clouds behind her scouts. A tempest of crackling and booming exploded over the river as the mages and clerics on the rafts began to fling spells at the attacking beholders. An instant later, the sound was joined by the screams and shrieks of drowning warriors as the creatures responded with disintegration rays and death beams. Hippogriffs started shrieking and crossbows clacking, and bodies from both sides began to splash into the water.

met by storms of fiery meteors and dancing chains of lightning, but the battle mages could not stop them all. The meager bands of Uthgardts were forced to meet them at Laeral's tar trench, and all too often it was the barbarians who fell. More warriors were rushing up from the second and third waves of rafts, but with the raft convoy still under attack from the beholders the flow would soon stop.

Laeral finished her run and took out the last of the beholders—then turned and found another two dozen assailing the fire wall behind her. She started down the line again and felt a mental jolt as an illithid tried to blast her with its mind numbing powers. Her thought shield held firm against the assault, but she knew it would only be a matter of time before the creature had one of its beholder companions turn its magic-dispelling ray on her and tried again, and that would work.

She would have to call her sister ... again.

Laeral was still speaking when Storm appeared, reeling from teleport afterdaze and plummeting toward the ground. Laeral barely caught hold of her wrist in time to keep her from falling into the morass of bugbears and gnolls clamoring to get past the fiery wall below.

"By the bleeding stars, where do they find so many brutes?" Storm asked, getting her bearings and staring down on the horde below. Having been warned about the crossing, she was fully armed and armored. "No help from Shade this time, I see."

"The Shadovar may have better things to do than look after me," Laeral said. "That doesn't mean they're betraying us."

monstrous foes remained to fight that there were still phaerimm somewhere in the horde, but they also knew that the creatures would be careful not to reveal themselves in the presence of Mystra's Chosen. The special weapon of the Chosen, silver fire, was one of the few forms of magic that was sure to harm thornbacks, and the creatures were nothing if not cautious.

Once the last of the rafts was across, Laeral and Storm descended to join the commanders of each of the different companies in a war council. It was raining harder than ever, their warriors were exhausted from the crossing, and their foes were both fresher and stronger. On the other hand, they had a slight advantage in numbers and a large advantage in magic, and Laeral felt confident they could carry the day.

Though the wall of flame was a good twenty paces behind her, Laeral could feel its heat chasing the dampness from her rain-soaked clothes.

herself and forced a smile.

gnolls and bugbears?"

known what was coming by the sight of so many fang-filled mouths.

Through the world-window in Telamont Tanthul's palace in Shade Enclave, the dragons looked like an expanse of blue sea shining up through a hole in the clouds, their great wings undulating like waves, their blue scales flashing like light on water—all but the leader. The leader was naked bone, with blue embers gleaming in the empty eye sockets of its skull and claws large enough to grasp the heads of even its biggest followers.

It could only be Malygris, the foolish blue who had traded his soul to the Cult of the Dragon in order to slay his hated ruler, Sussethilasis, and claim for himself the title of the Blue Suzerain of Anauroch. Though Galaeron had never met the dracolich himself, the younger blues who came to the edge of the desert to feed on tomb thieves and their horses often made a show of defiance by speaking of their suzerain's folly. They were not too rebellious, though—several of the smallest wyrms in the Rage were the very ones who had taken such delight in deriding their ruler to Galaeron.

A tilted plain of brown appeared before the dragons, with an orange half-circle of fire lighting the top edge and thousands of tiny flecks blackening the surrounding ground. Galaeron recognized the specks as warriors, but he didn't identify the brown plain as a river in flood until a few moments later, when the diving dragons drew near enough for him to see the current pouring over a barn's roof.

one, composed of larger figures as well as superior numbers, was being held at bay by the crackling wall of fire. The smaller army was trapped against the river, with a flotilla of log rafts beached on the muddy shore behind them and the much larger army in front of them. They were, by all appearances, aware of the dragons swooping down behind them, for their orderly ranks were dissolving into chaos, bleeding into the river or bunching against the wall of fire.

The image in the world-window began to grow blurry and coarse, with wisps of shadow closing in around the edges. Galaeron focused his attention in the center of the panicking army, where a small knot of figures stood looking up toward the dragons in relative calm. The world-window struggled to obey his will, but whatever was interfering with it was too powerful. He glimpsed a pair of women with familiar faces and long silver tresses, a frightened Gold elf, and a black-bearded, blue-eyed Uthgardt barbarian. Then the image became an unrecognizable blur and the shadows rolled in, and there was nothing but darkness.

A cold and familiar stillness settled over Galaeron. He turned and found the platinum eyes of Telamont Tanthul shining out at him from beneath his shadowy cowl.

Galaeron's skin prickled beneath Telamont's sigh. "Not everything is my doing, elf. The fear of the Chosen's army is to blame. The fools are sending thoughts to their loved ones, and the magic they use to carry them is interfering with that of the world-window. The image will clear in a few minutes."

And show us what, Galaeron wondered. He felt the weight of another question but could not quite sense what the Most High wished to know.

Myth Drannor phaerimm."

Galaeron nodded. "I need to know she's there to keep it."

Galaeron inclined his head. "You are capable of many things, Most High, but even you cannot solve my shadow crisis for me, as you have said—"

Galaeron's head was swirling. He had, of course, been aware of his growing attraction to Vala but had never called it love, even in his mind. Elves had to know each other for years—sometimes decades—before they felt anything close to what humans described as love, and he had only known Vala for a few months. To say that he loved her . . . well, most elves didn't sleep or dream, either. Galaeron felt the weight of a question and looked up to find Telamont's gaze still fixed on him.

"Studies?" he asked, hoping to cover what was really going through his mind. Telamont's eyes twinkled. "Your magic studies," he said. "You are quite a gifted innatoth. Once you are at peace with your shadow, I will begin to teach you in earnest."

"Truly?" Even to Galaeron, the response sounded less than enthusiastic, but he kept seeing Vala in Escanor's arms, and that was an image he never wanted to feel comfortable with. "This comes as something of a surprise. Melegaunt warned me to stop using magic altogether."

"Melegaunt was ever the cautious one," Telamont returned. "A fine attribute for spies ... but limiting."

Galaeron left the sitting room with the hair prickling on his neck and his thoughts roaring like one of the sandstorms that occasionally forced the city to rise into the cold air miles above the desert. Like Melegaunt before him, the Most High clearly had plans to help Galaeron realize his full potential as a magic-user—and no hesitation about what it might cost Galaeron or those around him. Given the price he had paid merely for learning how to draw on the Shadow Weave, he was not at all eager to increase the depth of his knowledge—especially considering what Telamont had just said it would cost him. He was still enough of an elf to balk at the idea of giving up his emotions, but losing Vala was unthinkable—especially losing her to Escanor.

Galaeron arrived at Villa Dusari angry and determined. He found his companions gathered in the courtyard, sitting on cushions on the ground so they could share the evening meal with Aris, who was reclining along one side of the courtyard with his head propped on a palm as large as a saddle.

There was no real enthusiasm in her voice. She had yet to forget the sharp words he had spoken to her after the battle at the mythallar, and every time Galaeron thought to apologize, the shadow in him seemed to turn the moment into something awkward or bitter.

Instead of stepping into the shadowed colonnade to do as Vala suggested, Galaeron crossed straight to the group. Ruha glanced from him to Vala, then back again, and rose with ghostlike grace. Malik kept his seat,

She vanished into the building. Vala reluctantly moved over to make a place for Galaeron, but he stopped at her side and remained standing, ignoring Malik and the giant altogether.

An angry heat rose to Galaeron's face. "I... I..."

"You made a promise to me," he said.

moment to cairn himself—and to quell his shadow, which was whispering dark warnings about the sincerity of the threat implied in her words.

Vala cocked an eyebrow and said nothing.

Vala frowned. "Now is fine."

"The need cannot be that great," Vala countered, "or he would not have moved the enclave so far from the battlefront."

Face darkening, his beady eyes caught Ruha as she returned to the courtyard with a mug and plate for Galaeron. "It is what is safest The minute we are gone from this city, the hellwitch will plant a jambiya in my back."

"Only if you are fleeing the Harp's justice," Ruha said from behind her veil. "But why be fearful? You are safe in Shade Enclave ... unless you are planning to leave?"

Galaeron shook his head. "That is beyond me."

desert"

"Galaeron, don't do this." Vala's expression turned from angry to sad. "You have to go."

Vala raised a hand. "Yes, I would, Aris." She turned to Galaeron. "You're right, Galaeron—I haven't felt anything for you since the mythallar."

CHAPTER SEVEN

to find the captain of the City Watch and his senior armmaster and wizards-commander already in conference with their counterparts from the City Guard. Brian the Swordmaster was also present, hidden behind his Lord's cloak and helm. Even the Master of the Watchful Order of Magists and Protectors was there. Strictly speaking, the order was a civilian guild and not subject to military edict, but these were extraordinary times, and Piergeiron had often called private citizens to service when the security of the city was threatened. The question was, when the threat lay five hundred miles distant at Boareskyr Bridge, would they answer?

Piergeiron stepped over to a free seat—there was no head at the circular table—but did not sit. "You heard?"

any reminder of the danger posed to their city since the phaerimm had escaped their prison in Anauroch. He found no questions in the eyes of the gathered commanders. "Good," Piergeiron said. "As we speak, Maliantor is calling Force Grey to my

palace. She will begin a scrying to determine what she can about the course of the battle. What I would like from you is to send a force of volunteers—a hundred battle mages and two hundred swordsmen—to meet her at the palace within the quarter hour. I have a store of teleport scrolls—"

Piergeiron turned to find Prince Aglarel's swarthy form stepping out of the shadows beside the fireplace, his black cape and purple tabard almost seeming to solidify out of the darkness.

"How dare you!" Piergeiron demanded. What he really wanted to know was just plain "how." The room was supposed to be shielded against magic intrusions of any kind, though this obviously did not seem to apply to Shadovar shadow magic. "This is a private council."

"Forgive me," Aglarel said, stopping to bow, "but I wanted to save you the trouble of teleporting a company to rescue your relief army."

sendings from their relatives accompanying the Chosen." The prince did not bother to explain how he knew this. "Knowing the kind of men you Waterdhavians are, it only stood to reason that you would want to do something to help. I called at the palace and was told that Lord Paladinson had left to attend to an urgent matter of state."

"Which begs the question of how you slipped past the invader wards that guard the castle," said Thyriellentha, "or knew to look for Lord Paladinson in this chamber."

"The dragons weren't sent by the phaerimm?" Piergeiron gasped, unable to tear his eyes from the tabletop.

Aglarel waved his hand over the scene, and the table returned to its normal brown surface.

attest to the wisdom of that decision . . . just as I'm sure that Waterdeep and its allies would benefit from a similar arrangement. Shade Enclave has demonstrated the benefits of working with us twice already."

Piergeiron. "There may be more to this than is apparent... or less."

easily as a scrying." The helm turned briefly toward Thyriellentha, who could only shrug and spread her hands, then he demanded, "How do we know those dragons aren't tearing Laeral's army apart right now?"

"Because you must have half a wit somewhere inside that helmet," Aglarel said, growing exasperated. "Why would we save the army at the High Moor, only to summon a flight of dragons to destroy it later?"

"I don't pretend to know the ways of shadow," Brian said, "but I do know better than to trust those who bargain with dracoliches."

"Because we were not even here when Khelben vanished," Aglarel said, not unreasonably. He turned to Piergeiron. "Milord, this really is too much. I demand an apology."

"Prince Aglarel, there are those in this room who have relatives in the relief army," he began. "You can understand their concern. When our own mages have confirmed what you showed us, I'm sure the Masked Lord will reconsider his opinion."

"It is not my place to speak for another Lord," Piergeiron said, reminding himself not to look away. "Any more than it would be yours to speak for another prince."

"Of course," Piergeiron said. "All are welcome in Waterdeep. I'm sure this will blow over — "

cavern lay a hundred-yard slit through which the purple light of the predawn morning could be glimpsed outside. Several dozen Shadovar were pulling a large, comb like device back toward the slit. Closer by, several dozen more were folding a huge section of shadow blanket into a compact bundle similar to several others stacked neatly along the near wall.

When the laborers saw Telamont Tanthul and his party in the room, they immediately dropped to the floor and pressed their brows to the floor. Though this hardly seemed the sort of place where the Shadovar confined their prisoners, Galaeron's heart beat no easier. Malik and Aris had left Villa Dusari before Hadrhune arrived with the Most High's summons. Once Aris had collected his supplies, Malik would stage a diversion to make it easier for Galaeron and the giant to slip away from the enclave unnoticed.

"One of our shadow looms," Telamont explained. He waved a sleeve toward the comb like device being drawn toward the slit at the opposite end of the room, then motioned his guards onward. "Not what I brought you to see."

They followed the guards around the edge of the room, then stepped through another archway into an even larger chamber where hundreds of Shadovar were busy sewing sections of blanket together with strands of shadowsilk. Again, the laborers stopped work to press their brows to the floor as Telamont entered. This time, the Most High turned to Hadrhune, his platinum eyes flaring with displeasure.

"We cannot have this," he said.

The workers scrambled to return to their sewing, though all were careful to keep their gazes fixed on the area directly in front of their noses. Telamont motioned Galaeron to his side, then led the way along the edge of the work floor through a broad archway at the far end. In the room beyond, Prince Escanor stood on a bronze flying disk, holding a folded shadow blanket, while Vala, suspended by a new pair of magic wings, flew a line over the top.

"This is what I brought you to see, Galaeron," Telamont said, crossing to the disk. "I thought you might wish to say farewell."

shallow than any of us thought. I'm glad to be rid of him."

"Yours to see, Most High—but we must remember that only one of us serves the enclave." Hadrhune allowed his glare to linger on Galaeron just a second too long, then turned to Telamont and said, "I am afraid I must beg my leave, Most High. There is a disturbance in the Trades Ward that requires my attention."

"Of course." Telamont had barely raised his hand to dismiss Hadrhune before the seneschal melted into the darkness and was gone. The Most High turned to Galaeron and said, "If you will allow me a few moments, the battle with the Myth Drannor phaerimm is going to be a difficult one. I would like a few words with Escanor before he departs."

"Take all the time you need. Most High." Though Galaeron's voice was calm, his heart was pounding. The disturbance in the Trades Ward was Malik's diversion. Aris would be expecting Galaeron at the Cave Gate within a quarter hour. "With your permission, I can find my own way home. The route was not complicated, and the company here is not to my liking."

He cast a meaningful glance at Vala, who smiled cruelly and brushed the edge of her new wing against Escanor.

Galaeron bowed, more to hide his smile than to show subservience, then turned and left. He did not say goodbye to Vala or even wish her well in combat. He could think of nothing but of how she had betrayed him for Escanor, how Escanor had stolen her from him, how Telamont had permitted it ... and, most especially, how he was going to make them pay.

AU of them.

unconscious against the enclave's stony underside — though they might. The greatest danger was the lazy vultures who spent their lives in search of easy meals from the city rubbish chutes. Already, one creature was perched atop his right shoulder pecking at his fingers, and two more were circling above his head fighting over the left shoulder, and a dozen more were circling beneath his dangling feet, ready to snatch up any bloody morsels the others let fall.

Malik craned his neck and ran his gaze up ten feet of camel-wool haik to the jagged breach they had punched through the exterior wall of the workshop. Aris had care-fully sculpted the hole to look like the crater of a powerful blasting spell, ingeniously fashioning two cragged teeth into the edge to bind the upper end of the cloth.

Malik did not look down. He had already done that once and through a hole in the murky haze glimpsed Anauroch's sands drifting past a thousand feet below.

"Save me! Help!"

of her face, a dusky complexion. The face was the last one he had hoped to see. "So there you are," Ruha said. She squatted above the teeth where her haik was

Pulling her kuerabiche shoulder bag around with her, Ruha spun around to face him, exposing her throat just as he had hoped, and started to reach for her own dagger—then she fell backward as a swarthy Shadovar hand caught the strap of her kuerabiche and jerked her away from the edge.

Malik shoved his jambiya back in its sheath and began to scream. "Help! I am down here!"

"I see." Hadrhune flicked a hand in Ruha's direction, and suddenly she was swaddled in black shadow web. "You will be executed as soon as the Most High pronounces your sentence. What do you wish done with your property?"

"Nothing. I killed no one, and he knows it" Ruha glared at Malik, and in her stare he felt the unspoken threat to reveal Galaeron's escape plans. "Ask him. He has no choice but to tell the truth."

Hadrhune considered this for a moment, then nodded. "A reasonable request." He turned to Malik. "Did she kill Aris?"

"Not at all. It will be enough to banish her from the city."

"On my head?"

Hadrhune nodded. "Did she kill him?"

law."

CHAPTER EIGHT

shadowy pennants that curved down toward the east and vanished into the umbral mists beneath the city. Galaeron waited until the last rank of riders was well past the Livery Most High, then walked his veserab out to join the rear of the great formation. When no one objected—or even seemed to notice—he waved to Aris, who drifted into the Marshaling Court kneeling on a flying disk so overloaded with waterskins that it wobbled under the giant's slightest gesture.

"You're sure the guards won't notice?" asked the giant.

then they were curving down under the enclave with the rest of Escanor's army. Once they had passed out of view of the Cave Gate, they began to lag behind the others, and Galaeron used his shadow magic to make them both invisible. He was not really surprised to find the familiar chill of the Shadow Weave quenching a thirst that had lain buried just beneath the surface of his subconscious.

They dropped out of the shadow haze to find themselves over a mazelike warren of deep ravines and sheer pinnacles that marked the transition between the rolling sea of sand dunes over which the city had been drifting for most of the past tenday and the jagged spine of desert mountains toward which it was floating. Escanor's army was flying more or less in the same direction as the enclave but angling just a little bit south straight into the rising sun. Whistling an elven tune to help Aris keep track of him, Galaeron turned in the opposite direction— west toward Evereska.

"If one can call that lip-trilling music, yes," Aris replied, "but shouldn't we have a look down there? It looks like someone might be in trouble."

down toward the desert at a gentle angle. After a few moments, he saw the tiny dimple toward which they were descending, a circle the size of his fingertip with a minuscule fleck of darkness in the center. The fleck gradually grew large enough so that Galaeron could see it was indeed wriggling about like a chrysalis struggling to escape its cocoon.

"He lied!" Aris boomed.

"How could it not be?" Aris demanded. "How many dark-haired women in veils do you expect to find lying about in this desert?"

for a Bedine. Swaddled in a cocoon of shadow web that would have dissolved in another hour anyway, she was writhing about, rolling back and forth in an effort to work her hands free so she could dispel the magic that held her bound.

"Don't hurt yourself," Galaeron called. "We're here."

"Meant to?" Aris said, speaking from the side opposite Galaeron. "We did not mean to do anything. It is a lucky thing we saw you at all. How did you end up here?"

Aris looking more than a little chagrined.

attacked Malik and knocked me out of the enclave."

Frontier and Sword Coast.

"In the name of Kozah!" Ruha cursed. Still encased in her shadow web, she began to roll toward the shadowy side of the dune. "Quick, send your veserab and flying disk into the west. We will hide beneath the sands, then sneak away after they pass by."

Galaeron nodded and sent his veserab into the sky, then turned and rushed across the crater to where Aris was unloading his waterskins.

in its wake, filling the air with the acrid stench of brimstone and lamp oil. When Keya closed her eyes, she could not sense it at all, could not see its glow shining through her eyelids or feel its heat sinking into her skin. It was as though the magicstar cast only the illusion of light or that its radiance simply lacked the true substance of sunlight.

It lacked something. Though there were more than a hundred of the spheres floating in and around Evereska, the grass continued to yellow, the great bluetops and sycamores still dropped their leaves, and the liliap blossoms withered and grayed. Even Zharilee and the other sun elves were beginning to lose their color and turn sickly shades of saffron and ocher.

Something would have to be done to bring real sun to the Vale, and Keya was not the only one who thought so. Khelben Arunsun was standing at the next window with Kiinyon Colbathin and Lord Duirsar, staring out at dying lands within the mythal and quietly arguing for an assault on the enemy shadow mantle.

"We need only a company of spellblades, a dozen Long Watch sentries, and the Cloudtop Magi Circle," Khelben was saying behind her. He motioned at Dexon and the other Vaasans, who had become a more or less permanent escort—when they were not at Treetop, eating and drinking the Nihmedu larder into nothingness. "We just need to hold our position long enough to attach a magicstar—"

"The shadow mantle's appearance suggested an interesting possibility," Khelben continued. "I'm beginning to think that the deadwall is actually three walls, a sphere of imprisoning magic sandwiched between two layers of dead magic."

Duirsar nodded eagerly. "That would explain why no spells can pass through it." "Exactly," Khelben said. "So I may be able to burn through with my silver fire." "Surely you've tried that before," Kiinyon Colbathin said, his too-gaunt face sneering

in disapproval.

"About Khelben's mission!" Kiinyon snapped. "This is no time to play coy, Watcher. If we didn't want you to hear, we would have sent you to the rooftop."

the two Chosen spent a few minutes filling each other in on events inside and outside of the Sharaedim. Once they each had a basic idea of what the other had been doing for the four months or so, they began to test the extent to which the deadwall had been weakened, trying various forms of communication magic. When all of their spells proved unable to penetrate the barrier, Khelben decided to try another tack and used a spell to send his dagger to Laeral's hand. The weapon vanished when he uttered the incantation.

"Laeral, it's on its way." Khelben was silent for a moment, then frowned. "It didn't— er, Laeral, it didn't?"

then took Lord Duirsar's arm and started for the stairs. "Perhaps we should discuss this in Cloudtop. There are difficult decisions to make, and you may have need of the Hill Elders' advice."

Keya bit her lip and managed to remain silent, even when Khelben started down the stairs with Kiinyon and Lord Duirsar.

flitting through the treetops or hares scurrying through the underbrush. A few minutes later, Aris had spotted the dragon, a young blue tucked onto a hidden ledge just above the treetops, little more than its eyes and horns visible at one end and a tip of dangling tail at the other.

Galaeron motioned to his companions, and they slipped down behind the crest of the dune and retreated into the trough nearly four hundred feet below. There was no shade, so Aris dropped to his seat on the stolen shadow blanket, which lay folded on the face of the opposite dune. His eyes were glassy and sunken with dehydration, his lips cracking and his nostrils inflamed.

"The dragon will only be the beginning," Galaeron said. "It looks too small to have many spells, but 111 wager the Shadovar have arranged a way for it to communicate with Malygris."

"Maybe it has nothing to do with them," Aris said. "It seems like oases would be good places for young dragons to hunt."

Aris glanced toward the crest of the dune, his eyes growing large and wild. "Then we have to kill it," he said. "We have to sneak up and kill it."

Galaeron spent much of that time seething over Vala's desertion, relishing the prospect of the vengeance he would extract on Telamont for refusing to intervene with Escanor, and plotting how he would emphasize the prince's part in the melting of the High Ice.

The Shadovar had betrayed him, had stolen Vala away and made her turn a blind eye to the promise she had sworn to him, and for that they would pay. For that, he would expose their true nature to the world, reveal how they were melting the High Ice and upsetting the weather all along the Sword Coast. What that decision might mean for Evereska, Galaeron did not even consider. Shade Enclave had its own reasons for destroying the phaerimm, and his departure was unlikely to have any impact on their plans.

Finally, as the afternoon shadows began to extend their stretch toward evening, they crested a dune and found themselves looking over a vast prairie of pale green grasslands. In the distance, the brown blot of a gazelle herd was slowly drifting over the purple horizon, while the rest of the plain was speckled with the tiny flecks of foraging birds. Scattered here and there along the course of a dry riverbed were the puffy crowns of several dozen big cottonwood trees.

"Only on the surface." Ruha slipped over the crest of the dune and started down the other side. "There is water underneath."

"Aris! Wait until dark!" Ruha called. "The birds!"

"On occasion," Galaeron said. "The Tomb Guard had an arrangement with several young blues."

"Perhaps so," Ruha said, "but had you taken his water-skins from the flying disk instead of your shadow blanket, his thirst would not be so great."

sapphires in the dusky light. It leveled off a dozen feet from the ground and, starting at one end of the fleeing replicas, opened its mouth and loosed a huge bolt of lightning that stretched in front of three of the fleeing shadow giants.

Lacking any wits of their own, the images continued straight into the bolt and vanished from sight.

She started across the plain at a run, pointing her fingers at the huge dragon. Blood boiling at her insult, Galaeron started after her—then stopped as she poured a volley of golden bolts into the wyrm's flank. The resulting blast sent a fountain of blue scales spraying into the air, along with a fair amount of draconian blood and flesh.

The dragon roared and brought its huge head around—only to receive another volley of the witch's golden bolts in the snout. This time, the eruption sent a nostril, two horns, and one slit-pupiled eye tumbling away over its shoulder. As surprised by Ruha's power as was Galaeron, the creature spread its great wings and launched itself into the air.

It was clutching Aris and the shadow blanket in its massive claws.

dragon hit the end of the line, the noose closed and the filament contracted to a small fraction of its previous length, both cutting off the wyrm's air supply and jerking it around to crash down within a few dozen paces of Galaeron.

The stunned wyrm impacted face first, then lay in a crumpled, convulsing heap as it clawed in vain at the magic line. Keeping his foot on his end of the line to keep the noose tight, Galaeron leveled his palm at its already mangled head and drilled a hole through its skull with a single shadow bolt. His body was filled with so much shadow magic that it was almost numb, but he didn't mind at all. The cold felt good.

Ruha came to his side and paused as though to say something, then thought better of it and went to the dragon's head.

Ruha snapped her head around to glare at him. "Yes, the blanket is still in one piece." She dropped out of sight behind the dragon, then added, "Which is more than I can say for your friend."

"Yes, and badly." Ruha peered over the wyrm's back, then said, "That is what happens when you use someone for dragon bait."

CHAPTER NINE

shadow blanket over legendary Myth Drannor. The cracked spires and vine-wrapped columns of the city, already half-hidden behind a wall of spring mist, vanished beneath an undulating mantle of darkness, and a silence that had been eerie and foreboding for most of the day grew perfect and still. As the edges were affixed to the ground, a few birds and other woodland animals rushed to escape in ones and twos. These creatures were allowed to flee, but companies of warriors were waiting to slay any monster that might return later to harass the veserabs. From her airborne vantage point at the western end of the city, Vala saw them strike down a

The blanket would prevent their quarry from teleporting away or using the translocational gates rumored to be still functional inside the city, but that only meant the phaerimm would be even more dangerous and ferocious than usual. According to the Shadovar scouts and diviners, there were still close to thirty thornbacks inhabiting the ruins' subterranean levels, and if the attack was to succeed, most would have to be slain in their own lairs. For the first time in her life, Vala wished she could write. She would have liked to set down some thoughts for her son before the blade work began.

Vala dipped a magic wing toward the rolling meadow at the western end of the city and landed in the trampled grass outside Escanor's pavilion tent. The prince was waiting in the entrance, his coppery eyes watching every move as she undid her breastplate so she could remove the wing harness. His retinue of aides and subcommanders was there as well, though most seemed more interested in watching him watch her.

Though Vala had never been particularly shy—and even less so after her time among the elves—Escanor's gaze made her uncomfortable in a way that even the hungry leers of her own Vaasans never had. Instead of turning away, however, she smiled and cocked a playful eyebrow as she raised her tunic to undo the chest buckles.

Something that resembled a grin crossed the prince's face. "It was not your wings that caught my eye." Escanor left the pavilion tent, not coming to her so much as emerging out of the shadows at her side. "You are growing more comfortable with them?"

back to the prince, placing the wings more or less in his hands. She let the shadowsilk straps slide through the slots in the back of her tunic, then began to roll her weary shoulders. "We are going to sleep before the assault, aren't we?"

"That will be up to you." Escanor waited for Vala to put herself in order again. When she had, he said, "I have some news."

Escanor knew how she really felt, he would conceal his knowledge and play on her emotions to make her reveal what she knew. "The Most High had turned him against me. You saw."

Vala almost smiled. If the Shadovar didn't know where Galaeron was, he was still free. "I'd watch for him at Evereska, were I you."

"I have more self-respect than that." As she told this lie, Vala made a point of staring directly into the prince's eyes. "All I am to him is a promise."

" Wash' is a figure of speech," Vala said. While hardly above sharing a man's bed for her own reasons, she was not in the practice of allowing herself to be ordered into one. The prince was pushing too hard, too fast. He was up to something, and she had to buy time to puzzle out what. "What I really have to do is—"

"You can do that in the garderobe behind my tent," Escanor interrupted. "It opens into the Gray Wastes."

said. "You could even return to Vaasa yourself—with Bodvar's debt repaid in full." It was nearly enough to make Vala step into the tent. She had been gone from the Granite Tower for more than a year and longed for nothing more than to return to raise her son and see her aging parents—and that was what made the prince's offer too good

to be true. He wanted more from her than to share the fur. There were a thousand courtesans in the Palace Most High that he could have for a smile, and most were— though it stung her pride to admit it—far more desirable than she.

She stepped away from the tent and narrowed her eyes at Escanor. "What does all this generosity cost me? My life? My will?"

Escanor surprised her by laughing—not a cold, threatening chuckle, but a warm, almost respectful guffaw.

"Good." Escanor thrust Vala forward. "Tell her what we've been able to learn about this place."

Granite Tower will be informed of your bravery and devotion to duty." "That's not what I meant," Vala said. "What do I get if we kill all the phaerimm? The

Yoraedia stepped back, reaching for his sword—and was promptly knocked forward again when Skarn Brassaxe crashed into him from behind.

overcast and drizzly, and she could barely make out the main Shadovar camp, positioned for easy defense atop a low butte at Anauroch's edge. The murky silhouettes of several dozen sentries stood at the brink of the cliff, using their dark spears to point down at the arriving army while their astonished comrades rushed up behind them.

Laeral raised an arm arid waved at the astonished sentries, then used a sending spell to address the closest one. Give your prince the compliments of Laeral Silver-hand and tell him the Army of the North has arrived.

The warrior cocked his head in surprise, then raised his spear in acknowledgement and turned to go. It shall be done.

The prince's lead-colored eyes lit with pleasure, then his silhouette peeled itself off the ground and, still expanding into its normal form, bowed.

fact, it did," she said, "and not only the sending spells. We tried transferring items, opening dimensional doors, and about a dozen other things. Nothing worked."

It was the patrol's fifth casualty, and they had not even seen a phaerimm. Vala felt a sudden chill. Though the sensation seemed likely to be her own reaction to another casualty, she took the precaution of glancing around the immediate area to make certain nothing was creeping up on her. She thought she glimpsed a gray figure slipping behind the pillar where the latch was hidden but found only empty darkness when she stepped around the other side.

"What is it?" Parth called.

know," he replied.

Eltargrim.

Vala rose slowly and went to the column. Half-expecting the Shadovar to tell her to wait for him to send someone forward to check for traps, she took a deep breath, then gave it the gentlest of pushes. The entire shaft swung aside, revealing a narrow staircase spiraling down into the darkness beneath its false base. When no clouds of poison gas came billowing out, she waved the tip of her darksword around the entrance to check for motion activated traps, then pushed down on the first stair.

"No traps so far," she reported, "and no cobwebs. Something comes down here, and it doesn't leave tracks."

could look far enough up the passage to see a series of arched doorways opening off to either side at irregular intervals, but the magic of her darksword did not allow her to see all the way to the end of the hallway. When nothing came charging up the stairs to meet her, she descended the first ten feet in two quick bounds, braced her hand on the banister, and leaped into the corridor facing the opposite direction she had been descending.

Vala found herself facing a large round silhouette with a wriggling crown of bulbous-ended tentacles. She had just enough time to recognize the silhouette as that of a large beholder before several eyestalks began to swing in her direction. Leaping into a foot-first slide underneath the thing, she flipped her darksword toward its huge central eye and grabbed for her dagger.

Vala hit the floor at about the same time her darksword found its mark—though, without the weapon in her hand, she could no longer see in the dark and knew that she'd hit the beholder only by the bloodcurdling screech that echoed down the corridor. She was showered in warm gore as she slid under the still-floating eye tyrant. Knowing better than to think even a perfect slash to the central eye could kill a monster this big, she reached up and caught the bottom of the cut with her free hand, then jerked its wounded side to the floor and smashed it into the stone. At the same time, she was bringing her dagger up behind it, driving the steel blade through its thick skull once, twice, half a dozen times, until the trapped beholder finally collapsed in a limp heap atop the arm that had been holding it pinned to the floor.

Vala pushed the thing aside.

"Coward," Vala muttered.

knees and took the weapon in hand—and, once she could see in the darkness again, found herself looking into a huge, toothy mouth surrounded by four arms. Even at this unfortunate angle, she recognized it instantly as a large phaerimm.

Why pray to Tempus, my dear? I am your god now. The raspy voice came to Vala inside her head, not like the single whispered Eltargrim she had thought she heard earlier but definitely inside her thoughts. Set aside your sword, and we will talk.

Vala gathered her legs beneath her and sprang to her feet—then found herself rolling head over heels down the dark corridor.

and suddenly Vala understood. The phaerimm did not want to kill her. It had trapped her alone, believing that it could turn her into one of its mind-slaves—but Vala's helmet protected her against that.

"Y-yes," she said. Moving very slowly, she dropped to her haunches and set the sword on the floor. "I want to talk."

And could you?

do you feel about him now?

"Perhaps," Vala said. A low rumble shook the ceiling as the false column began to slide aside. "He is very powerful."

"Vala, answer me, or we're coming down!" The darksword arrived.

As Vala yelled this, she was already bringing the dark-sword across the phaerimm's midsection. Her dark vision returned and she saw a fang-filled mouth the size of a cavern yawning before her. Instead of trying to back away or strike again, she twirled along the phaerimm's thorny body and saw a fiery column scorch the stone where she had been standing. Reversing her grip as she moved, she drove her black blade through the thorn-back's midsection and rolled back in the opposite direction, using the edge of the wound as a fulcrum to pry the darksword through three feet of tough flesh and scaly thorn.

The corridor exploded into howling winds as the phaerimm bellowed its rage and brought its barbed tail around in a classic distraction maneuver. It was a fatal mistake. Vala was already vaulting onto its thorny back, lopping off first one, then two more flame-shooting hands. She brought the darksword down on the rim of its mouth, and the phaerimm dropped to the floor, its tail lashing ineffectually at the stone where it had expected her to be standing. She spun around and risked another blow from her same location, this time slicing the creature cleanly in two behind her.

The tail struck at the stone twice more, then fell limp and lay motionless. Vala took the precaution of slicing the thing into a few more pieces, then finally heard boots pounding down the stairs and turned to find the first pair of Shadovar legs descending into view.

A loud thrum sounded from the stairwell, and a chorus of Shadovar voices cried out in astonishment. The first pair of legs buckled, then Parth's limp body tumbled into view. It was followed by Carlig's, Elar's, and four more, all that remained of the reconnaissance patrol.

Vala slipped over to the wall beneath the stairwell and pressed her back to the stone, darksword ready to lop off the next foot that came within reach. When none did, she hazarded a glance at the bodies at the base of the stairs. All seven Shadovar were dead, their faces, necks, and other areas of unarmored flesh flecked with tiny, cone-shaped darts. She waited a moment longer, then peered up into the spiraling stairwell itself. The steps were littered with spent darts, and the walls were flecked with the tiny holes from which they had come.

A voice at the top of the stairs, a voice so wispy that it seemed barely a hiss, called, "Eltargrim."

Vala grew so cold her flesh broke into goose bumps. Whatever this was, it could not be good. She took a deep breath and spun away from the wall, then brought her darksword around to strike the feet off at the ankles— and barely stopped her blade in time to keep it from burying itself in the stone steps.

Vala stepped away from the wall and found a small figure with alabaster skin and a willowy build watching her from the base of the stairs. Clothed in the tattered remains of what had once been a fine cowled robe, the stranger's features were sunken and shriveled, his eyes glowing orbs of pure white.

CHAPTER TEN

murky corridor.

turned to face her, his neck giving a mushy crackle as it traveled the last few inches to sit backward on his shoulders. "From what I saw, I will be of more use to you than they were."

The elf rotated his head forward again. Deciding there was truth in what he said, Vala lowered her guard and moved to within four paces of him, where his chill aura grew so uncomfortable she began to shiver. She had seen enough undead in the past six months to recognize him as some sort of lich, but his presence did not engender the same sense of fear and corruption she had experienced back in Karsus when she and Galaeron and their companions had fought the lich Wulgreth. What she wouldn't have given to have Galaeron at her side, with his Tomb Guard's knowledge of all things unliving—but the old Galaeron before he fell victim to the corrupting influence of the Shadow Weave. Gods, how she missed that one, the Galaeron who had been so steady and earnest and noble.

The lich-elf turned down a smaller side corridor— still so wide three Vaasans could have stood abreast— and sent a spider the size of a pony skittering along the wall. Hanging in its web overhead were several silk-wrapped packages, some with clawed feet or beastly snouts poking out. From one dangled a halfling-sized boot, the toe still twitching. As she passed beneath this cocoon, Vala slowed and raised her sword to cut the halfling free.

Vala looked up to find the lich-elf's head turned backward on his shoulders again, watching her.

"I'll say this, you make this place a lot safer," Vala observed.

The lich-elf pointed at a glob of green mucus bubbling on the surface of Vala's armor. "Wipe that off before it takes root," he said. "The last thing I want is you spreading devil spawn through my Irithlium."

"Your Irithlium?" Vala tore a strip from the hem of her undertunic and wrapped it over the back of her dark-sword, then scraped the stuff off and flung the cloth into the creature's cage. "Who were you?"

The lich-elf's eyes brightened. "Were?"

continued through the chamber without speaking. Taking care to avoid the occasional glob of mucus that came flying her way, Vala followed as closely behind as her tolerance for cold allowed. They passed through the strange prison and wandered the dark caverns beneath the Irithlium until her legs grew weary with exhaustion. Periodically, she would try to learn more about her guide by engaging the lich-elf in conversation, but he only spoke to utter a word of passing or warn her about some deadly hazard into which she had nearly stumbled. Twice they were ambushed by spellflinging dark nagas, one of which actually succeeded in wrapping the lich-elf in a web spell before Vala diced it into six three-yard pieces. Before continuing on, her guide was grateful enough to inform her that his name was Corineus Drannaeken.

Finally, they ascended a vertical shaft into the sub-basement levels, emerging in what had once been the central fountain in an elaborate two-story complex of work chambers. Clambering past a giant constrictor

snake that had been immobilized by Corineus's aura of cold, they slipped out of the basin and sneaked down a narrow service corridor. Near the back, the white elf stopped and pulled a loose wall stone out of place. A section of stone wall grated open and rumbled aside. He uttered a word of passing, then motioned Vala through the opening.

Ever the cautious one, she dropped to a knee and peered around the corner—and found herself looking underneath a floating beholder into a large room filled with wands, crowns, bracers, and other items even she recognized as magical. There was also a mind flayer, whirling toward Vala's door, and half a dozen confused bugbears scrambling for their weapons.

Cursing herself for a fool and Corineus for a faithless double crosser, Vala whipped her darksword at the mind flayer. Waiting only long enough to see that the spinning blade was flying toward its target, she launched herself forward and rose beneath the beholder, pinning it against the ceiling of the opening while she drew her dagger.

Vala drove her dagger into the monster's underside. The resulting shriek was more angry than pained, and the mordant smell of powdered stone filled the air as the beholder began to spray the rock above with its disintegration ray.

"Ressamon!"

sword. It flashed between two of the charging bugbears, slashing open a furry knee and buckling the leg. The astonished brute collapsed in front of two companions and sent them sprawling, prompting the rest of the band to stop and whirl around to see who was attacking from behind.

The darksword arrived in Vala's hand, and the beholder's disintegration ray finally cut through the keystone of the hidden archway. With a thousand tons of stone settling on her shoulders, she had no choice except to leap into the chamber ahead and let the wounded eye tyrant escape behind her. She tucked into a diving somersault, taking a bugbear's legs off at the knees as she rolled past, then came to her feet and brought her dagger over her head, driving it to the hilt in the nearest furry back.

The roars of the wounded bugbears were lost to the sound of the collapsing doorway. Vala ducked a massive axe as the quickest of the bugbears whirled to attack, then removed the arm holding it and opened its chest on the backstroke. She glimpsed another axe coming and barely managed to pivot away, though not before the blade slashed along her chest, denting steel scales and hurling her into a pair of hairy arms as big around as her waist. With her arms pinned at her sides, Vala brought her feet up over her head and smashed her booted feet into her captor's face.

The blow was not sufficient to drop a bugbear, but it did startle it. The creature's grasp loosened enough for her to bring her sword around beneath her. So weak was the attack that not even the sharpest steel would have penetrated the bugbear's thick hide, much less the apron of leather armor it wore over its loins.

and started to squeeze, and Vala cocked her wrist, driving the tip of her weapon deep into its abdomen. The hairy arms went limp and dropped her on her shoulders, her captor's huge body doubling over above her face. Reaching up behind it, she grabbed a handful of fur and pulled herself through its legs and to her feet.

A huge hand axe came tumbling through the air and smashed into her helmet, breaking one of the horns off and knocking it from her head. Sure of only the direction the attack had come from, Vala spun around to the opposite side of the bugbear she'd just wounded and found another big axe swinging toward her throat. Barely flipping her darksword up in time, she caught the weapon near the top, using the attack's own momentum to cleave the shaft and send the head spinning off to lodge itself in one of the attacker's wounded companions.

Faster than the others, this bugbear followed its first attack by slamming a huge fist into Vala's armored ribs, launching her across the room into a shelf full of artifacts. She dropped to the ground in a limp heap, still holding her sword and struggling to get the wind back in her lungs.

Snorting in triumph, the bugbear snatched a weapon from a wounded companion and stomped toward Vala. Behind it, she saw a spherical form float out of the dust cloud rising from the collapsed doorway. Of Corineus, there was no sign.

Vala bounced to her feet and raised her darksword to throw. The bugbear pivoted away and brought its big axe around to block. Vala hurled the blade anyway. As the weapon sailed past the astonished brute to split the beholder down the center, she charged after it. Seeing its mistake too late, the bugbear swung back into the attack, but Vala was inside the arc of its weapon by then, her boot heels driving for its face in a flying side kick.

The bugbear leaned aside in an attempt to slip the blow. Vala kicked her feet apart and caught its head between her ankles. As she swung into its torso, she scissored her legs and swung herself around to the side. Though the bugbear was easily three times her size, the weight of her body acted like a pendulum, pulling it down face first. It slammed to the stone floor with a heavy thump and immediately began to push itself up again.

Vala's sword was already returning to her hand. She brought it down on the back of her attacker's neck, then leaped up and dispatched the wounded bugbears in a series of cautious, darting attacks from the rear. By the time she finished, the dust in the fallen doorway had cleared enough for her to see Corineus standing in the service corridor on the other side of the rubble.

"Well done, woman." he said, pointing past her toward an iron door on the adjacent wall. "Above the door, you will find a holy symbol painted in black blood. Break it."

"Not so fast," Vala said, retrieving her helm. She had no idea whether it would still protect her from the phaerimm mind control with only one horn, but it was worth a try. "Not until you answer a few questions."

"The phaerimm who claims this laboratory lair will soon realize it has been broken into and return," Corineus replied. "That is the only question you need answered."

A dull clunk sounded from the other side of the door.

wildly. Vala brought her darksword down across the thick part of its body and clove it cleanly in two, then stepped back and opened both halves along their length. When she was certain the thing was dead, she cut off the wicked tail barb, then finally reached up with her sword and broke the holy symbol painted above the door.

Corineus rushed into the room, his white eyes shining bright with rage. "How dare you disobey—"

carved out of the dry riverbank by some long-ago flood. Galaeron, standing watch outside, dropped to his haunches and peered inside, where Ruha kneeled beside the unconscious giant's head, using a wet rag to drip water onto his cracked lips. His broken arm was stretched out beside him, splinted to the straightest pair of branches Galaeron had been able to find in a mile of dry riverbed. A shield-sized circle of charred flesh on his chest marked where the dragon's lightning bolt had entered his body, and a blackened foot marked where it had left. Of the most concern to Galaeron, however, were the giant's black and sunken eyes, which Ruha said were signs of the head injury he had suffered.

Aris groaned again, and a gray tongue appeared between his lips. Ruha squeezed the cloth hard, dribbling water directly onto the tip of the tongue, then tilted her head at the pair of empty waterskins resting on the shadow blanket beside the giant.

"More?" Each skin held two gallons, and Galaeron had filled them twice already since the dragon attack. "That's a good sign, isn't it?"

responsible for the giant's injuries, and he was not so sure he disagreed. The shock of seeing Aris pinned beneath the dragon had jolted his conscience into asserting itself again, driving his shadow self back down into the dark realm beneath his

conscious mind, and he had instantly realized how his actions must have seemed to someone else. Even given the spell he had cast to confuse the dragon when it wheeled on Aris, preventing the witch from attacking the dragon's belly must have reeked of cowardice. If Galaeron doubted his own motivations in that first instance, he did not in the second, when he had used a shadow snare to drag the dragon back to ground. At that point, his only concern had been for the shadow blanket, and it had not even occurred to him that Aris would be further injured when the wyrm crashed into the ground.

The dragon's corpse still lay out on the Saiyaddar, surrounded by a ring of glutted predators and blanketed beneath a mountain of flicking feathers. Galaeron longed to move beyond sight of it, and not only because looking at it reminded him of his terrible selfishness. If a Shadovar patrol or another of Malygris's dragons happened across the corpse, he and his companions were certain to be found. Ruha lacked the magic to move Aris a long distance, and Galaeron was determined never again to use his own. He could no longer touch the Weave at all, and he recognized he was far past the point where he could wield shadow magic without yielding control of himself to his shadow. The next time he cast a spell, he feared, even causing a friend's injury would not be enough to bring him back.

tree's roots. Though the bottom was concealed in shadow, there should have been enough light for an elf to see whether it contained any water.

"Well met, Lady Silverhand," Galaeron said, holding out one of the waterskins. "If you're not my dying hallucination . .."

Galaeron was so astonished he couldn't quite think of what to say. The Chosen of Mystra seldom took an interest in the affairs of individual people—how could they, when they were so few and those who needed them so many?—yet here was Storm Silverhand, delivering a message from Khelben Arunsun about his younger sister Keya. It was so far beyond likely that Galaeron grew convinced he was suffering heat hallucinations.

Resolving to waste no more of his energy on illusions, he clamped his jaw shut and fixed his attention on the undercut where Aris lay resting.

The hallucination shook her head. "He died in the battle." For the first time, a soft look came to her eyes. "I'm sorry."

Instead of answering, Storm exchanged glances with Ruha, and Galaeron suddenly knew the answer to his own question.

"Says you are free to fight in my company, if I have a place for you," Khelben translated. "Welcome."

"Which is all the more reason we should hurry." Khelben stepped through the door and continuing to speak over his shoulder, led the way head-first down the exterior of the tower. "Their success is not certain, but it is very possible. The more we kill—and the faster—the better the mythal's chances of holding."

"We're attacking?" Dexon gasped from a few feet above and behind Keya. "That's what I intend to recommend to Lord Duirsar, yes," Khelben said. He reached the bottom of the tower and dropped off the wall into the Starmeadow, then turned to face Dexon. "Unless you know of a better way to kill phaerimm."

to his fellows for help—and finding nothing but amused grins, "b-but you don't have a darksword."

like dragons that way—and they would fight just as ferociously to protect their hoard. If, on the battlefield, Keya were to be threatened, Dexon would forget all else—his own safety, his duty to help Khelben, even the many thousand Evereskans whose lives were at peril—and rush to defend her.

They reached Dawnsglory Pond, where Khelben turned uphill toward Cloudhome, Lord Duirsar's citadel. Burlen and Kuhl started after him at once, but Keya stopped and turned down the slope toward the Livery Gate.

Dexon caught her arm and motioned up the hill. "Lord Blackstaff went this way." "I know," Keya said, pointing down the hill, "but I must go that way." "Then you're not coming with us?" Dexon looked almost as confused as he did

relieved.

brave. We'll give a good accounting of ourselves."

"Yes, Dexon, you can, and you will." Khelben's strong hand caught him by the shoulder and pulled him back. "Say your farewells."

CHAPTER ELEVEN 20 Mirtul, the Year of Wild Magic

Keya released her bowstring on command. Her arrow hissed skyward with a thousand others, passing through the mythal and arcing down toward the thin line of beholders and phaerimm floating out in the Vine Vale. Shimmering rays of disintegration magic swept back and forth across the volley, dissolving hundreds of shafts before they neared the blackened vineyards. One of the mythal's golden meteors came streaking down from the heavens and burned a twenty-foot swath through the sizzling cloud of sticks. Hundreds of missiles missed their targets and planted themselves in the soil like a crop of newly sprouted feather sticks. Of the few dozen arrows that found their marks, most were deflected by

One phaerimm and two beholders went limp and began to sink toward the ground, then a fierce counterattack blossomed against the mythal and prevented Keya from seeing if they recovered. She nocked another arrow—the last in her quiver—and awaited the next command. Like the rest of the Long Watch, she was standing inside the Meadow Wall with nothing between her and the enemy but the battered mythal and seventy paces of open ground—close enough that when she was not trying to blink the magic-dazzle from her eyes, she could see the big central eyes of the attacking beholders.

What Keya could not see were any bugbears, illithids, captured elves, or any other phaerimm mind-slaves. There were only the thornbacks themselves—less than two hundred in the whole vale, according to rumor—and perhaps a thousand beholders. With a full ten thousand elves ringing the city, it definitely appeared that the odds favored Evereska, but where the phaerimm were concerned, appearances were always deceiving. The mind-slaves could be anywhere, lurking invisibly on the other side of the Meadow Wall or hiding in tunnels under the Vine Vale, ready to burrow under the elven defenses the instant their masters weakened the mythal.

Keya set her aim on the eye of the closest beholder and released her bowstring. She lost sight of her arrow as it joined the dark cloud sailing into the Vine Vale, but she chose to believe that hers was the shaft that survived to plant itself between two of her target's writhing eye-stalks. Another phaerimm spell-storm exploded against the mythal.

An arrow runner lifted Keya's empty quiver off her belt and replaced it with a full one. She grabbed the next shaft and was horrified to feel green, moist wood. To save Evereska, even the trees had to sacrifice—not that they would live long if the mythal fell. She slipped the nock onto her bowstring and raised the tip to the air.

The phaerimm began to retreat, fleeing so fast that one flew into a mythal-meteor and vanished in a golden flash. In the next instant, a cone of sparkling gray flame shot out from behind the Meadow Wall, engulfing a pair of phaerimm who had made the mistake of drifting into a single line. They erupted into screeching tornadoes of silver fire.

Khelben Arunsun appeared at the Meadow Wall where the cone had originated, his hand still pointing at the two burning phaerimm. In the next instant, the Vaasans and the rest of the archmage's escort appeared to both sides of him, ail grunting with effort as they hurled a flight of golden javelins after the fleeing phaerimm. The beholders caught the first wave of spears in their disintegration rays, which only turned them into pure magic and sent them streaking into their targets with the speed of lightning bolts. The second wave followed a little more slowly, but two dozen weapons found their marks. Three phaerimm dropped to the ground and disintegrated into piles of dust, and two more were injured so badly they teleported away.

The surviving thornbacks came streaking back, driving their beholder slaves ahead of them and hurling such a spell tempest at the mythal that Keya had to turn her face away from the heat of the dissipating magic. Khelben and his escort simply laughed and strolled calmly away from the Meadow Wall, their backs to the enemy. They passed through the Long Watch lines not twenty paces from where Keya stood awaiting the command to

loose her next arrow. If Dexon—or any of the Vaasans— noticed her standing in line, they did not betray the fact by looking in her direction.

we could kill them all—but we don't. We're not going to save the mythal by teleporting in to attack once every hour."

kills we can from the safety of the mythal—"

lords to her cherished Dexon. To her dismay, the Vaasan had noticed her as he passed through the lines of the Long Watch—was, in fact, studying her with the dark look of an angry bear, holding his darksword across his breast and towering over not only the elves, but Khelben and even his fellow Vaasans. Even the night before, when she had spent so many hours climbing over that massive body, she had not realized just how large—how brutish—a man he really was.

When he noticed her watching him, Dexon gave a melancholy smile and extended an index finger in her direction. At first, Keya thought he was trying to use elven fingertalk, but then she sensed someone looking over her shoulder and realized he was pointing. She looked forward again to find Zharilee, the sun elf who commanded her company, standing in front of her impatiently tapping a long finger on her extravagant armor of gold scales.

'Truly, Keya, it is nothing to me if you are attracted to these hairy brutes, but I insist that you leave the flirting until after the battle." Zharilee turned away, then raised her magic command horn to her lips and shouted, "Loose!"

Keya drew her bowstring back and sent an arrow arcing over the Meadow Wall into the blinding storm of flame and lightning that was the Vine Vale. She reached for another of the green shafts in her quiver.

Heart leaping into her throat, Keya slung her bow over her shoulder and pulled her spear out of the ground beside her. Khelben's argument had prevailed, and Lord Duirsar had given the order to leave the mythal to engage the phaerimm. A low, ground-shaking rumble rolled up from the rear as the elite companies trotted up to take attack positions behind the Long Watch.

Even had Keya not learned tactics on her father's knee, she would have known what was happening. As the most inexperienced element of Evereska's military, the Long Watch would lead the charge over the wall and absorb the brunt of the phaerimm attack. With any luck, the elite companies following behind would reach the enemy ranks intact and force the thornbacks to engage in their least favorite kind of combat—close.

Though Keya desperately wanted to steal a last glance over her shoulder at Dexon, she resisted the temptation. Looking at him would only make him worry about her when he should be thinking of killing their enemies. As the rightful wielder of a darksword, he was one of Evereska's most potent weapons against the phaerimm. His shadowy blade could cut through even their mightiest defenses, and he already had three of their tails tucked into his belt to prove he knew how to get close enough to use it.

Keya counted a one second delay, then set her spear tip at a slight incline and started forward at a two-step-per-second run—swift enough to cover ground quickly, but not so fast that the charge would disorganize their formation. Instead of starting forward to meet the charge, the phaerimm and beholders hung back, content to hurl spells at the mythal and create a gauntlet of magic

for their attackers to struggle through. It was a tactic that would serve them well against the Long Watch—but bring the elite companies behind into the middle of their ranks.

Who's afraid? she retorted. Just kill the thornbacks— and tell Dex to keep his mind—

Much of the third rank simply leaped onto the backs of the second rank, forcing them over the wall into the Vine Vale and beyond the protection of the mythal. As soon as their feet touched the blackened ground, their bodies crumbled into cinders and collapsed.

Without the constant rain of arrows from the Long Watch, the phaerimm and beholders finally began to float forward, coming closer to the mythal. Keya glanced back and, over the retching figure of the elf who had nearly pushed her to her death, saw the Company of the Cold Hand charging up to vault the wall behind them.

Still sitting astride the wall, Keya raised both hands. "Khelben, stop them! You made a mistake!"

Keya suppressed a gasp and rolled into a crouch, then poked her head up to find a beholder hovering not a spear's length away, its great central eye projecting a powerful antimagic ray into the failing mythal. Behind it, a phaerimm was floating forward to exploit the resulting gap in the LastHaven's magic defenses.

Keya had just time enough to see that the scene was much the same in other places along the wall before the phaerimm pointed in her direction. A stream of stones rose off a vineyard wall and came streaking in her direction. She rolled away. The rocks slammed into the Meadow Wall behind her, smashing through and raining shards of broken granite into the meadow. Finding herself alone next to the breach, she took a deep breath and reached for her sword.

Keya, no! came Dexon's voice.

In that moment Dexon added, Here!

Deciding those were much better last words than what she had been thinking a moment before, she brought the darksword up before her and spun into the gap in a squat—and came nose-to-mouth with a crawling phaerimm. For an instant, she was almost too stunned to comprehend what she was seeing. Thornbacks did not crawl, they floated . . . and why was she still alive anyway? It had only to think a spell and she would be an elf-shaped cinder.

She brought Dexon's darksword down, splitting it open for two feet past its mouth, then brought the blade around and slashed it in the opposite direction. The phaerimm whistled and recoiled, grabbing Keya by the shoulders and rearing up on its tail. She kicked at its torso with both feet, hacking herself free of its arms and dropping on her shoulder.

Still using no magic, the thing lunged and snapped at Keya's feet. She kicked free and rolled over her shoulder—then glimpsed one of the beholders shining its antimagic ray over the phaerimm and understood. She drew her dagger with her free hand and flipped it at the eye tyrant in one swift motion.

Keya was no bladesinger. The dagger struck pommel first—hardly fatal, but enough. The beholder blinked, and in that instant, the mythal's magic returned to the gap. The phaerimm screeched and started to retreat back into the Vine Vale, but not quickly enough to avoid the golden meteor that streaked down from the heavens and slammed it to ground—where it quickly dissolved into a pile of ash only a little larger than those left behind by the first wave of the Long Watch.

Before the stunned beholder could recover, Keya leaped onto the Meadow Wall rubble and brought the darksword across the middle of its spherical body. A cascade of dark gore spilled out of the wound, and it dropped to the ground without so much as a curse. Keya brought the darksword around and started down the wall toward the next beholder, then cried out in astonishment when she felt a magic hand pluck her off the crest and carry her back into the Company of the Cold Hand.

"Let's not get carried away, young lady," Kiinyon Colbathin said, stepping to her side. He gestured down the way, to where the survivors of the Long Watch were charging back to the Meadow Wall behind a storm of

spears and arrows. "Let someone else have a go at them."

"As a matter of fact, no." She displayed her hands. Aside from the calluses she had earned in weapons practice, they remained as healthy as her eighty-year-old cheeks. "They didn't even get cold."

Dexon's jaw dropped, and Burlen and Kuhl fell to chuckling.

From the ruins of the Secret Gate, high in Evereska's Upper Vale, Laeral had watched in horror as the first rank of elves poured over the Meadow Wall and disintegrated into swirling piles of ash. When the phaerimm launched their counterattack, using their magic to hurl half the stones in the Vine Vale through the breaches the beholders had opened in the mythal, she had gasped out loud. As the young warriors of the Long Watch somehow rallied themselves and came charging back to drive off the beholders, she felt tears sliding down her cheeks.

"The stuff of legends, my friend," Laeral said, looking across the window to Lord Imesfor. "If those are raw recruits in Evereska, I shudder to think what will become of the phaerimm when the time comes to unleash your seasoned warriors."

"I just wish I could be there with them," Imesfor said. Though the magic of Waterdeep's clerics had regrown his fingers, they were still too clumsy and stiff to cast spells, or even hold a sword in combat. "It is good to watch, to remind myself that the Tel'Quess never lose hope."

Forcing their mind-slaves to hold at the mythal's edge, the phaerimm continued to hurl whole stretches of vineyard wall into the meadow. The Long Watch fell by the dozens and continued to attack, playing a deadly game of dodge as they tried to avoid breaches in the mythal while continuing to pour arrows into the beholders. One eye tyrant after another sprouted more spines than a hedgehog, then sank to the ground and disintegrated. Some, maddened by pain, finally broke free of their masters' hold and turned to leave, only to be struck down by the phaerimm themselves. Though it would have been a simple matter to send the elite companies forward to support the Long Watch and finish off the beholders, Khelben and the elf commanders wisely resisted the

Laeral could see just see Khelben in the heart of one of the elite companies, a swarthy figure in black robes, his namesake black staff cradled in the croak of one arm as he discussed strategy with the elf lords clustered around him. How good it was to see her beloved again, even if he was little more than a black speck in a square of gleaming gray mithral.

"Lord Blackstaff seems to have them quite distracted," said Prince Clariburnus, peering out the watch-loop adjacent to Laeral and Lord Imesfor. "What say you, Lady Laeral?"

"I would say we dare not wait—the mythal is growing weak," Laeral said, noting that the rain of golden meteors had tapered to a drizzle. "You've seen their trap. We can't dismount."

"That trap we will turn against them," said Lamorak, who was watching opposite Clariburnus, "but let us be alert for more phaerimm trickery. You Chosen are not the only ones who know the value of guile in war."

Laeral met the prince's orange eyes. "Always a good thing to remember," she said, starting downstairs. "I will hold it in mind."

the shadow fringe into the Secret Gate and safely past hundreds of elven traps—a gauntlet so devious and powerful that it had claimed several of the phaerimm before they finally gave up on clearing the passage and simply sealed the entrances—at least those they could find.

Laeral reached the exit vestibule at the bottom of the stairs, where a company of Shadovar cavalry stood beside its mounts in a long line stretching back across a marble bridge into the murky recesses of the Passing. With little more than lances, darkswords, and black helms, the veserab riders were lightly armed and thinly armored. Behind the cavalry, Laeral knew, ran an even longer line of infantry equipped just as sparingly. Against the magic of the phaerimm, massive blades and heavy armor counted for less than the swiftness of the strike and the agility with which one dodged.

Lamorak came and gave his orders, then turned to Laeral and said, "This is your plan. Would you care to launch the attack?"

The cavalry commander reported his readiness, and the two Shadovar princes mounted their own veserabs. Laeral cast a flying spell on herself, then raised her arm and led the way out of the Secret Gate down a hanging gorge that opened into the High Vale itself. The life-draining magic of the phaerimm had reduced the slopes to barren pitches of rock and dirt, lacking even a rotted stump to hint at the forest of old growth spruce that had once covered the valley.

As soon as Laeral cleared the shelter of the hanging vale, she turned and streaked for the Vine Vale as fast as she could fly. The cavalry came behind her, fanning out across the slopes in a great blanket of flapping black wings. Mistaking the Shadovar and their mounts for a legion of some new, hell-spawned horrors come to aid the phaerimm, the elite companies of Evereska raised their voices and weapons and started to press forward.

Khelben raised his arms and staff and called out something in a thunderous voice that brought the Evereskan companies up short, but the damage was done. First one, then a dozen, then half the phaerimm at the Meadow Wall drifted away from the mythal and swung their toothy jaws toward the descending Shadovar. Laeral reached the highest terrace of the Vine Vale.

A scintillating wall of colors rose in front of her. Foolish phaerimm—still didn't know who they were dealing with. Laeral dispelled it with a gesture, then did the same to the curtain of flame that appeared next. By then, the Shadovar were sweeping past to both sides, spraying dark bolts into the enemy. The valley ahead became a storm of shadow magic and black flapping wings. Laeral

saw a dozen thornbacks drop out from beneath the tempest and disintegrate into long mounds of ash. An instant later, she was in among them, flashing past scaly, worm-like bodies and deflecting barbed tails with her quarter-staff.

Climb! Lamorak's voice came to Laeral as a bare, faint whisper inside her head. Cast the shadow zone!

on the beholders. Unlike the Shadow Weave spells of her allies, the phaerimm were less likely to be injured by anything she hurled at them than they were to absorb it and heal themselves. Of course, a blast of her silver fire was sure to slay even the mightiest phaerimm, but she could use that only once an hour, and so it seemed wisest to hold that particular attack in reserve.

A flash of silver light lit the vale behind Laeral. Her entire body erupted into fiery nettling as a bolt of lightning caught her in the flank and sent her tumbling through the air head over heels. She bounced off the mythal and quickly brought herself back under control, then turned to find a pair of cinder clouds settling to ground where the attack had blasted through two Shadovar warriors before exhausting itself on her.

About twenty yards away floated the phaerimm that had hurled the lightning, its toothy mouth turned in her direction and hanging agape. The bolt had been a powerful one. By all rights, it should have torn through her and continued on to another five or six targets, but Laeral was one of the Chosen. She could use the Weave to protect herself from many forms of magical attack, and this was one of the most obvious ones.

Laeral raised her hands and was about to blast her attacker with silver fire when a pair of Shadovar warriors swooped down on it from behind, their veserabs engulfing it in a cloud of noxious black fume that made Laeral's eyes sting even at a distance.

Guiding their mounts with their knees, they poured shadow bolts into it with one hand and raised their black swords with the other, hacking it into three pieces as they flashed past. Laeral waved her thanks and praying that Waterdeep's hippogriff riders never found themselves taking the sky against such a deadly air cavalry, she turned back to the mission she had assigned herself.

Not far ahead, a pair of beholders were using their antimagic beams to cover each other as they retreated from the Meadow Wall and laced the sky above with disintegration rays. Laeral cast a quick invisibility spell on herself and dropped to a few inches above the ground, then came up beneath the creatures, pouring golden streams of magic into them. Both beholders erupted into crimson starbursts, coating her head to toe in foul-smelling gore.

Laeral only hoped that Pleufan Trueshot still allowed humans into the Hall of the High Hunt. She had not seen Khelben in nearly four months, and she could see that she would need a long dip in the Singing Spring before their reunion could be a proper one.

Khelben's first glimpse of Laeral in the battle came when she emerged from the starburst of viscera and entrails that, until a few moments earlier, had been two beholders holding Keya Nihmedu's company of the Long Watch at bay. Even smeared in crimson, she was a sight for weary eyes — and not only because she had broken the siege of Evereska. Never had he spent four months as long as the last four, when he had not known when he would see his beloved Laeral — or even whether he would survive to do so. The Chosen did die, and — as he had so nearly learned at the Rocnest — the job of killing them required far fewer than two hundred phaerimm.

Khelben watched Laeral vanish back into the magic storm, then stood staring into the flashing bolts and scintillating sprays for a few minutes longer. Though the sheets of fire and swirling clouds of veserab breath made it impossible to catch more than glimpses of the action,

the battle roar was as ferocious as ever, and the number of Shadovar wheeling up into sight was steadily diminishing. The phaerimm were standing their ground, no doubt because they understood what was at stake in this battle as well as Khelben did.

"Lord Duirsar, the time has come to commit Evereska's army," he said, speaking to the Hill Elders as much as he was to Duirsar. "We must break the siege now, while the phaerimm are still reeling."

"What remains to us is hardly an army," Kiinyon objected, "and even less so, after we followed your advice the last time."

would have reduced even the most stalwart company of veterans to a disorganized horde. At Khelben's side, however, Keya Nihmedu was cinching her chin strap and checking her armor. He turned a disapproving eye on her and was rewarded with a glare that could have cracked stone.

"Of course." Keya's expression changed to dutiful, and she slipped the bracers onto her biceps. "What are they?"

ground with clusters of smoking holes drilled clear through their spherical bodies, but one of the creatures managed to sweep its antimagic beam up in time to block Khelben's counterattack.

A tumbling darksword split this one down the center, then the Company of the Cold Hand was streaming past into the Vine Vale, leaping the bodies of deflated beholders, wounded veserabs, and groaning Shadovar ... even a few hacked and mutilated phaerimm.

Khelben sensed his bracers drifting off to the left and turned to see Keya Nihmedu leading Dexon and the other two Vaasans through the remains of the vineyard gate. Cursing her impetuousness, he circled around to meet her from the other direction—and found himself somersaulting backward through the air as a flurry of golden magic bolts caught him in the chest.

Sting though they might, the attacks harmed him no more than had the lightning bolt that had sent Laeral tumbling. He righted himself and returned more cautiously, weaving and bobbing, coming in fast and low, staff at the ready and silver fire crackling on his fingertips. He found Keya and the Vaasans battling a pair of phaerimm, the elf dodging and somersaulting as black death rays and tongues of fire erupted all around her. Dexon barely stood on a withered, smoking leg, Burlen had one arm hanging limp at his side, and Kuhl was still attempting to sneak up behind the nearest creature for a killing blow.

Khelben loosed a bolt of silver fire into the nearest phaerimm. That was all it took. As the first crumbled to cinders, the second creature attempted to teleport away— attempted, because Kuhl was already leaping on it from behind, driving his sword down into its mouth. The Vaasan landed face first on the ground, his sword coated in foulsmelling gore.

Khelben circled the vineyard once to make certain there were no more unseen threats, then dropped to the ground beside Keya, who was examining Dexon's mangled leg and assuring him—or perhaps herself—that Pleufan Trueshot and Hanali's priestesses were perfectly capable of restoring the limb. Dexon's face was pained, but he seemed more concerned about the possibility of another attack than his gruesome injury.

As he spoke, he noted that the battle roar had all but vanished. Shadovar veserab riders were flying toward the edges of the valley, swarming around the tentacled orbs of fleeing beholders—the phaerimm had abandoned their mind-slaves and teleported away.

Looking back to Keya, Khelben gestured at the bracers. "What if I had needed those?"

CHAPTER TWELVE

around the sanctum below, slashing eyestalks from beholder heads and cratering illithid chests with bolts of golden magic, somersaulting under bugbears and diving over kobolds. All the while, he somehow kept himself between his enemies and the four spellbooks resting on a dusty oak table in the corner, amidst a pile of crowns, scepters, rings, bracers, and other magic relics recovered from the lairs of the phaerimm they had slain so far. The monster bodies were beginning to pile up, slowing the baelnorn's bladedance to the point that he began to take hits. It hardly mattered. Steel weapons only bounced off his white flesh, and

he absorbed disintegration rays and mind blasts the way leaves drank sunlight. Even antimagic beams had no effect. The beholders casting them never lived long enough for their blade-wielding comrades to take advantage.

Finally, there were just too many bodies for Corineus to continue his bladedance. He stumbled spinning in for a kill, and two kobolds bounced across the carnage into the corner, each grabbing for one of the spellbooks on the desk. Though they were no more than twelve feet below Vala, close enough that she could smell their musky odor even over the charnel stench that filled the room, she continued to hang under the ceiling, her arms and legs aching from the strain of holding herself in such an unaccustomed position. This time, Corineus had told her to be a spider, to let the prey twist itself into their web before striking.

As Corineus struggled to regain his balance, a pair of bugbears leaped onto his back and bowled him over. He started to throw them off, and more started to squeeze through the doors one after the other, adding their weight to the heap. The pile continued to rise, but more slowly, then finally sank back toward the floor. The baelnorn’s muffled voice called out an incantation, and a brilliant spark flashed somewhere under the tangle of hairy limbs.

A sheet of silver lightning fanned across the room, momentarily blinding Vala. There was a single communal death-growl, then the room fell silent. The reek of scorched flesh pervaded her nostrils, and her chill-numbed flesh began to prickle as the baelnorn's cold aura suddenly vanished. She blinked the dazzle from her eyes to find the sanctum piled three layers deep in scorched body halves, many pouring smoke into the air and some still twitching.

Corineus was encased in a shimmering sphere of force, his withered face twisted into a mask of agony as he struggled to his feet. He was moving only slowly and with great effort, with his eyes bulging out of their sockets and lines of black blood running from his ears and nostrils. The sphere was contracting visibly, crushing the baelnorn in its inexorable grasp.

Vala remained where she was, all too conscious of the shiny red diamonds starting to peer at her from the corners of the web-strewn ceiling. The giant spiders had vanished through their hidden bolt holes the instant Corineus entered the sanctum, but with his chill aura gone, they were eager to return and reclaim their webs. Her goose bumps rose again, though this time they had nothing to do with being cold.

Finally, the object of her ambush appeared, the largest phaerimm yet, with amber scales and a tail-barb as long as the blade of her darksword. The creature paused a moment in the door, then floated over to the sphere in which Corineus was imprisoned and stopped. The baelnorn turned his head in its direction. His eyes were bulging so badly they were about to pop their sockets, and the black stuff running from his nose and ears had fanned across his entire lower face. The undead elf began to fumble through the gestures of an enchantment.

So clumsy were his efforts that even Vala knew the spell would never go off. The phaerimm simply floated there before him, and eventually Corineus stopped trying. The pair simply stood beside each other and did nothing. Vala was confused for the first several moments, until the baelnorn's gaze shifted to the captured spellbooks, and she recalled that phaerimm communicated with their captives telepathically. The thing was interrogating him, no doubt trying to learn how he

had been slipping past the wards designed to keep him at bay.

A tremble in the web drew Vala's gaze to the opposite corner of the ceiling, where a wolf-sized spider was creeping out of its bolt hole. She fixed it in place with a glare but did not dare do more. Corineus had warned her not to move until the instant she attacked. Her only camouflage was spider silk and darkness; any magic that the baelnorn might have used to hide her would have drawn the phaerimm's attention as surely as a flame.

Emboldened by the first, a second spider crept out onto the web, this one only half a dozen yards from Vala's feet. She glanced toward the phaerimm, trying to gauge her chances of making the leap. Not good. The thornback was over by the main door with the baelnorn; she was in the opposite corner, above the spellbooks. Corineus had said the thing would not be able to resist such a treasure. So far, it seemed to be withstanding the temptation all too well.

A third spider crept onto the web, this one in the corner above Corineus, who was enduring long past the point when a living elf would have been crushed. His eyes were hanging out of their sockets, flattened against his cheeks, while his arms and legs were bent at impossible angles and pressed back against his body. Vala wanted to yell at the baelnorn to give up and let himself be destroyed already, but she didn't even know if that was possible. Besides, he had to make it look real. If he

The web began to tremble violently as the first spider darted for Vala, fangs dripping venom and pedipalps reaching out. The second made a dash for her legs but stopped to face the other one when it changed its direction.

Vala started to throw her sword in desperation—then had a better idea and looked back to the spiders. She ran her blade through the spider web, cutting a huge crescent around the bottom of her feet. The web came free with a series of brittle pops, and she swung down from the ceiling, descending toward her target in a swift-moving arc. The phaerimm swung its huge mouth toward her.

Vala leaped straight at it, whipping the darksword around for a vicious, two-handed down strike. She heard scales cracking and felt the blade splitting flesh. A pair of phaerimm hands caught her by the throat and began to squeeze. She turned the blade and began to drag it through the thing's body. The barbed tail arced up, clanked off her backplate, and drew back to try again.

Vala knocked a phaerimm hand from her throat—only to have it replaced by two more. Her vision began to fade, and her right leg erupted into fiery pain as the tail barb penetrated her armor and began to pump its poison into her body. She pried her darksword free, swinging the blade up through two feet of tendon and flesh. Her vision darkened to something darker than black, and Vala's stomach suddenly rose into her chest. A bitter chill stung her flesh, and there was an endless eternity of falling. She grew queasy and weak and heard nothing but the pounding of her own heart, slowing with each beat, then even that was gone.

Vala's first hint that she was not... well, gone, was the reek of battle gore. The second was pain. Something was lodged in her leg, holding up her whole body by the big thigh muscle and flicking across the bone. She thought for a moment that she was dead and in the Nine Hells with no memory of how she had come to be there. Then she saw a huge, amber-colored phaerimm lying flayed and motionless on the floor above her—no, below—and recalled the fight in the sanctum.

Vala was not in the sanctum. Instead of the four captured spellbooks and great heap of recovered magic she and Corineus had piled in the corner, there was a single open book floating in a green spell field and several shelves of neatly arranged relics. There were the mind-slaves' sleeping palettes lined up along the wall, and the ward symbol above the door that kept her baelnorn ally at bay. Most of all, there was the thornback itself, lying motionless and gutted on the floor beneath her, its long tail preventing her from floating to the ceiling by the painful barb lodged in her thigh.

After Vala's attack, the thing had attempted to teleport to the safety of its lair and arrived dead. At least she thought it was dead. She brought her arm down to cut herself free—or, rather, tried to bring her arm down. It didn't move in response to her will, nor did her legs or neck when she tested them—or even her tongue, when she attempted to curse.

Eventually, Vala knew, the crushing sphere would destroy Corineus's body and free his spirit to seek one of the spare bodies he had hidden in the Irithlium—but that was not going to help her. Until she broke the warding symbol above the door, the baelnorn could not enter the lair. There was nothing to do but hang there in pain until the poison wore off.

The Shadovar were not conspicuous in Arabel—or rather in what had been Arabel before the ghazneths and their ore hordes reduced it to rubble—but they were there. On the dark side of a broken tower, a pair of swarthy masons were using a shadow saw to size blocks. Through the window of a bakery, a potter with gleaming amethyst eyes was fashioning an oven from darkclay. In an alley, a tall and gaunt carpenter was installing an ebon-wood door.

None of them more than glanced in Galaeron's direction as he passed by with Aris and Ruha, but that meant nothing. With an elf, a Bedine witch, and a stone giant traveling together, the Shadovar had to know who they were looking at.

Aris stooped down to within three feet of Galaeron and Ruha. Though the giant had spent much of the past two days sipping Storm Silverhand's healing potions, he remained unsteady enough that Galaeron would rather he wasn't leaning over them.

"So many?" Ruha shook her head. "The Shadovar have easier ways of watching than rebuilding a whole city."

Galaeron considered first the foundation, then the rest of the broad street, and had to nod. While the city still looked like a rubble heap at first glance, the outlines of its former shape were beginning to re-emerge. Many of the larger buildings were already rising to the second or third story, and most showed signs of Shadovar work— if not in the mortar then in the precision fit of the stones and the dark wood of the balconies, or even in the depth of the shadowed window alcoves.

"You're right, of course," Galaeron said, transferring his ire from Ruha to Storm Silverhand. "Even the Shadovar couldn't do this overnight—and Storm had to know it when she teleported us here."

"Perhaps you have answered your own question," Ruha said. "That is what the Shadovar would expect Or matters in Waterdeep may be more complicated than we know. I am given to understand that Storm's sister Laeral is friendly with the Shadovar."

"Say no more," Galaeron grumbled.

them, and getting Elminster banished to the Nine Hells—never.

Galaeron shrugged. "How can I know? But she has to have a better hope in Waterdeep than I do. Lord Piergeiron certainly isn't going to take my word over Laeral's."

An approving twinkle came to Ruha's eyes. "You may survive this yet. I think you are finally learning to control your shadow self." She glanced over at a pair of Shadovar stone cutters who had stopped work to watch them pass, then added, "But perhaps we would draw less attention if we disguised ourselves and found a safe place to leave Aris."

"At this point, speed is better than stealth," Galaeron said. "The sooner we present ourselves at the palace, the more difficult it will be for Telamont Tanthul to have a troop of his lords spirit us back to the enclave."

"Well said," Aris agreed, glancing out over the half-built city. "Besides, there isn't a place to hide a stone giant within twenty miles of here."

on its way over the kingdom, the change of weather might actually have helped matters. Instead, the air remained miserly with its water until it crashed into the northern Stormhorns and abruptly cooled. As a result, the kingdom was enduring its worst, hottest, most miserable drought in a thousand years, while at the same time its two largest rivers, the Starwater and the Wyvernflow, were flooding their banks and washing away whole villages.

Galaeron was far from certain that he would be able to secure an audience with the rulers of the kingdom, much less persuade the Cormyreans that Shade Enclave was causing their problems. But, as Storm had said, they would be eager for an explanation and inclined to listen. All he had to do was get the shadow blanket into Vangerdahast's hands. After that, the royal wizard would convince himself.

They reached the city palace, which—to Galaeron's great disappointment—had been rebuilt from the second story in the same pearly stone as Villa Dusari. Atop the highest spires, dozens of Shadovar polishers were crawling over the turrets like spiders, putting the final touches on the magnificent building. Fortunately, the guards at the door still wore Cormyr's purple dragon, or Galaeron would have concluded that the Shadovar had claimed Arabel for their own and left immediately.

As the trio ascended the steps, two of the guards crossed their halberds in front of the entrance. The sergeant—no older than his comrades, but with a badly scarred face and an eye patch—stepped forward to address them.

The sergeant seemed not to hear the last part of his explanation. "This is the palace of Myrmeen Lhal," he said. "The Steel Regent keeps her home—and her wizard—in Suzail."

Alarm bells started clanging inside Galaeron's mind. "You are saying Arabel is no longer part of Cormyr?"

Dauneth's brow rose in shock, but he managed to recover himself. "Well met, Galaeron. I have heard of your bravery." He extended a hand and clasped Galaeron's wrist in the human fashion. "Prince Rivalen tells me that his father has been most concerned since your disappearance."

"Yes, I'm sure he has," Galaeron replied, surprised by the coldness in his own voice. "He has good reason to be."

instead of her in the final battle against Wulgreth, he had wounded her more deeply than any lich could have. He knew there could be nothing between them but pain. For the rest of her life, whenever she thought of him, it would fill her with feelings of betrayal and loss.

How could he have been such a coward? Perhaps there had always been a shadow on his heart because of his fear of following it—because in trying to avoid his own pain, he had inflicted it on others. Certainly his father had never turned his back on his feelings. He had loved Morgwais completely from the moment he had met her, all the years they had lived together in Evereska and all the years she had lived apart in the High Forest, and if her absence had caused him anguish, their love had given him the strength to endure it without bitterness or regret.

They reached the double doors and were admitted at once. Aris had to hunch his shoulders to squeeze through this entrance, but inside lay the palace's formal audience hall, with an arched ceiling high enough that the giant could still stand upright by walking down the center of the aisle.

In a raised throne at the far end sat a striking woman with oak-brown eyes and amber hair, one arm resting on her knee as she conversed with a huge Shadovar beside her. Even had Galaeron not glimpsed the man's golden eyes and ceremonial fangs, he would have recognized Prince Rivalen by his immense shoulders and narrow waist. Next to the throne and a little behind it stood an elderly, tired-looking man in a voluminous robe and long white beard who could only be Cormyr's royal wizard, Vangerdahast. Adjacent to him stood the final member of the little group, a statuesque woman with dark hair and eyes as blue as a mountain lake.

Dauneth stopped opposite the throne and presented

Lhal, the King's Lord of Arabel.

Vangerdahast laid a restraining hand on her shoulder. "Princess, this matter really has nothing to do with Cormyr."

"I will not," Alusair said, raising a hand to silence the witch. "The prince is speaking."

"Every gift comes with a price," Alusair shot back. "If you mean to waste the crown's time on such tripe, I'll have your tongue before I return you to Rivalen."

anger when she thought she was being manipulated. He swallowed and tried again. "The price of this gift is higher than you think." Galaeron sneaked a glance at Rivalen, who caught him looking and made a derisive motion for him to continue. He did. "The droughts and floods Cormyr has been suffering, they are the Shadovar's doing."

Myrmeen and Dauneth sighed audibly, and Vangerdahast looked as though he were struggling not to laugh.

window so that it would absorb the sun's heat. The wizard rubbed his hand first over one side of the surface, then the other, and the way his eyes widened made clear that he had noted how efficiently it trapped heat.

Galaeron glanced over at Rivalen and found the prince's golden eyes locked on his face. In that moment, he knew that he had succeeded—and the prince knew it, too. Were it not for the knowledge Melegaunt had secreted inside his head, Galaeron had no doubt that Rivalen would have killed him on the spot and fled into the shadows. As it was, however, the prince had no choice but to play the game a little longer.

After a time, Vangerdahast removed a wand from inside his robe and waved it over the shadow blanket, then put it back and repeated the process three more times. Finally, he stepped away, folded his hands behind his back, and said nothing.

Alusair nodded at the shadow blanket. "The umbral mantle," she prompted. "Can it do what the elf claims?"

Rivalen flashed his fangs in Galaeron's direction, then turned to Alusair. "If they have had their say, Princess, I will summon my lords."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

and scuttled down the ancient sewer in a low crouch. A knot the size of a fist was throbbing atop her thigh, and the wound itself oozed a steady stream of hot fluid. Fortunately, the cause of Vala's injuries had died without depositing its egg. She found the thing in the phaerimm's tail when she cut off the barb to add to her collection. After the levitation magic had finally lapsed, she'd fallen onto the dead creature and had to wait for the paralyzation poison to wear off. If the egg had been implanted, she would still have been lying atop the dead phaerimm with her face buried in its entrails.

As it was, Vala was so feverish that catching up to her quarry was out of the question. It required all of her strength just to limp down the tunnel in such an awkward stoop and avoid splashing her bandage with the cloudy fluid standing stagnant in the bottom. Though the sewer had not been used for its intended purpose in six centuries, the filth that filled it had been spawned of constant death and decay and reeked even more horribly than the offal it had been intended to carry. She came to a T in the passage and, ten paces up the right branch, glimpsed a short length of thorny tail disappearing around another corner.

Vala stepped into the mouth of the opposite fork and brushed her shoulder and arm against the filthy wall, leaving a broad drag mark in the mildew, then retreated back to the intersection and pressed her back to the wall. Having predicted the little phaerimm would flee to the right, Corineus was waiting a hundred paces up the tunnel, ready to drive the thing back toward its lair. Vala would have preferred to force the thornback into the baelnorn's ambush, but his aura of cold made it impossible for him to surprise anything in the dungeon.

The crack and rumble of an approaching spell battle heralded the return of the phaerimm. Vala kissed the blade of her darksword and said a prayer for her son in case Tempus should decide to take her in this rank place, then held her weapon ready next to the intersection. A few moments later, a brilliant orange light erupted from the tunnel mouth, blinding Vala and scalding her skin. She turned away, raising her free hand to shield her face as a crackling ball of flame hissed past and vanished down the opposite passage.

throat, or it could have been lurking ten feet up the passage, waiting to see what its spell flushed out. Guessing the phaerimm would be a little behind its spell, she counted three seconds, brought her sword down, and hit something solid.

A fierce wind gusted through the sewer and died almost instantly. When Vala's sword fell free and touched the floor and she found herself still alive she deduced that she had at least hit the thing and began to slash about the intersection at random, weaving her blade through a blind figure-eight defense and trying to blink the orange spots from her eyes.

"You killed the phaerimm," Corineus said from up the passage. "Are you trying to kill its ghost as well, or do you have no further use for me now that we have destroyed the last phaerimm?"

"It's dead?" Vala stopped weaving but did not return her sword to its scabbard. Phaerimm were tricky creatures, and even if the Shadovar helmet protected her from its mind control, it would be an easy matter for it to use its magic to impersonate the baelnorn. "You're sure?"

"I am sure." An icy hand grabbed hers and guided the darksword back toward its scabbard. "Put that away. I have something I want to give you."

He turned the ring a quarter turn, and Vala's vision returned to normal—which was to say that she couldn't see a thing, since her hand was not on her darksword.

locked in stocks and gags in their mouths. Here, Galaeron and Ruha sat in side by side cages, with Aris chained to a wall in the interrogation chamber outside. There were no rats and only the typical human infestations of fleas and lice. Save for the acrid stench of the impure oil used in the wall lamps, the place didn't even smell that bad.

But it was secure. Aris had been scratching at the mortar around his chain mountings for half the night and done nothing more than bloody his fingertips. Ruha had tried half a dozen spells, only to have the magic sputter away as soon as it left her hands. Galaeron had kicked at the latch of his door until an ominous rumble sounded from above and he looked up to realize that the cell ceiling was a set of interlocked dropblocks, with the keystone supported by the same jamb he was kicking. Fearful that illconsidered attempts might cost his life, he had given up trying to escape the cell at all.

Galaeron pressed his face to the bars and strained to see if there was anyone in the guard station, which was positioned at the end of the row of cages where it was almost impossible to see from inside a cell. He could see flamelight dancing on the walls, but no shadows that suggested someone upright and moving.

"No one there," Aris hissed, his whisper as loud as wind in trees. "The last check was about an hour ago."

Rivalen to erect his own—"

began to tie it into a closed loop. "I'll have us out of here with one spell." "And then what?" Aris demanded. "Wait until we are counting on you again, then let

She slipped her hand down to his and tried, gently, to pluck the shadowsilk from his fingers. He held tight.

Galaeron. If you yield to it— even for a minute—we are lost."

Melegaunt's warning and used more shadow magic than he had the strength to control. He had loosed the Shadovar on Faerыn when he brought their flying city into the world to save Evereska from the phaerimm. He had lost Vala when he had been foolish enough to believe that Telamont Tanthul would teach him to control his shadow self. And he had nearly lost his closest friend in pursuit of an easy vengeance. The time had come to start doing the hard thing.

Galaeron looked across the interrogation chamber and said, "You're right. On my word as a Tomb Guard, I promise never to use shadow magic again."

that might have been blood or shadow—without dark-sight, it was impossible to tell which. Rivalen and half a dozen Shadovar lords were stepping out of the shadows behind them.

Galaeron's throat went dry. The moment had come sooner than expected, but he knew that his temptation would have been the same in the morning—or anytime. His body was fairly aching for him to cast a spell. He felt feverish and hollow and thirsty for the cool sensation of the Shadow Weave, but even aside from his promise, it was too late for that. He could never hope to best Rivalen in a duel of magic. Still, when their eyes met, Galaeron maintained a calm composure and gave a nonchalant tip of his head. "Rather early, aren't we?" the elf said.

Rivalen motioned a trio of warriors toward Aris and two more toward Ruha, then had the last one accompany him to Galaeron's cell.

The prince drew a set of lock picks from his cloak pocket and kneeled in front of the door. "In a few more hours, you would have escaped and been in another realm betraying the Most High to someone else."

He fell silent and allowed the prince to work. On the other side of the interrogation chamber, Aris's escorts finished binding his wrists and ankles with shadow line and set to work on the chains binding him to the wail. The giant kept jerking his arms and legs away, complicating their task to the point that one of them was drawing his sword.

"Aris, don't get yourself hurt," Galaeron ordered. He was beginning to see how he might help Aris and Ruha escape, but he needed the giant free of the chains. "It isn't worth it"

"Yes, you must be careful with those hands," Rivalen called, still working on Galaeron's lock. "The Most High values them nearly as highly as he does the secrets Galaeron carries from Melegaunt."

Ruha's escorts succeeded in opening her cell and motioned the witch out. As she approached the door, she glanced over her shoulder and raised her brow.

One of Ruha's escorts pressed a glassy dagger blade to her throat, and Rivalen's assistant began to bind Galaeron's wrists.

Galaeron looked over to Ruha, and she shook her head. The issue remained in doubt. Her confidence in Storm had not been because she knew they were being watched.

"Go ahead, Rivalen," he said. "Abduct me now, and all Faer ыn will know I am telling the truth."

Rivalen cast a disparaging look in Galaeron's direction, then said, "The princess surely knows that every kingdom has its disaffected. A discontented elf saying a thing does not make it true."

"Us, Majesty?" Rivalen gasped. "We are only one city."

Myrmeen Lhal stepped through the illusionary wall, bringing with her half a dozen Arabellan nobles bearing the shadow blanket confiscated from Galaeron and his companions. She directed the nobles to drop the blanket at the prince's feet.

Shadovar in Arabel may return it to your father with my compliments."

"By the right of law—and of arms." She shoved him back into Galaeron's cage, then turned to Dauneth Marliir and waved at the two Shadovar locked in the cell that had been Ruha's. "Are those the ones who killed our guards?"

Rivalen opened his mouth to object, but Dauneth was already dropping his arm. Two dozen crossbows clacked, peppering the two Shadovar inside with iron bolts. Both warriors fell without a scream, their faces and throats studded with expertly placed quarrels.

Alusair turned to Rivalen. "I believe that makes our position clear, does it not?" * * * * *

"For killing the phaerimm beneath the Irithlium." Vala slapped the tails into his hand. "There are six tails there. Count them."

wisps of shadow started to coalesce in smoky ribbons. The voices of unseen whisperers rose and fell in the surrounding darkness. Gradually, a set of murmurs hardened into the fuller tones of normal speech, and Vala recognized the sibilant voice of Telamont Tanthul Most High. He was speaking harshly to someone—shouting, in fact—and there was an angry murmur in the air around him.

The figures of several shadow lords appeared in the murk surrounding Telamont's throne. Standing closest to the dais were the princes Rivalen and Lamorak, with Hadrhune a quarter of the way up the stairs. To Vala's astonishment, Malik was on a step between the seneschal and the princes, his cuckold's horns no longer hidden by his customary turban. Galaeron was nowhere in sight. Escanor brushed past the lords and stopped at the base of the dais.

"Most High, had the harlot dared utter a word against you, I would have stricken her down myself," Rivalen said, cringing visibly in the heat of his father's anger. "As her outrages were merely directed at me, I thought it best to endure them and return to consult."

"Return without the elf?"

"When it remained possible, I still had hopes of salvaging our relationship with Arabel," the prince continued. "I know the value you place on controlling the border cities."

Corineus, and thumbed her ring around. The murk paled to the color of fog, thin enough for her to see that the throne room was really a vast courtyard surrounded in the distance by dark bands she took to be walls. Beyond the dais in front of her rose the shapes of many other platforms, their silhouettes growing progressively more indistinct with distance, but each surrounded by a crowd of shadow lords similar to those ringing Vala and the princes.

The shadow lords themselves were wrinkled, ghoul-like figures with sunken, redrimmed eyes and leathery black skin often pocked by white sores. Rivalen and Lamorak appeared much the same as had Escanor when Vala looked at him during the journey from Myth Drannor, varying only in how much of their skeleton remained attached to the black ribs that enclosed their black hearts. Surprisingly, Hadrhune appeared the same as before Vala had turned the ring—as did Malik, save that he held himself more erectly and seemed far more wiry than Vala had grown accustomed to thinking of him.

Finally, Telamont sent Vala's heart jumping into her throat by crying, "Betrayer!" It was at first impossible to tell whom the Most High was addressing, for he was only two platinum eyes floating in a vaguely man-shaped pillar of darkness. The gray fog that filled the throne room seemed to be flowing through him, entering his "body" in the general area of the feet and leaving at the hands. In the area behind one of the eyes, in what should have been the temple area, there was something black and wrinkled, about half the size of Vala's fist, pulsing in beat to the Most High's words.

Praying that Telamont had not sensed her magic ring, Vala raised her chin and forced herself to meet his angry glare. "Mine, Most High? I have not been anywhere near Cormyr."

The last thing Vala wanted to do was admit her complicity in Galaeron's escape, but Malik had almost certainly revealed her role already, and she knew better than to think the Most High would be swayed by any lie she could tell.

"Yet you went to Myth Drannor with Escanor."

"Execute?" Malik interrupted, stepping to the Most High's side. "You cannot execute Vala!"

used it to free himself and escape us."

Vala had an unpleasant feeling that she knew what the drop pits were, but it hardly mattered. Any torture that kept her alive to return to her son was one she could endure.

Until then, Vala had felt a debt of gratitude to the little man for saving her life. For telling them to take her visits, she could have killed him—in fact, she might have, had Escanor's powerful hand not closed around her wrist and prevented her from drawing her sword.

Telamont's eyes sparkled with delight "I think Malik is correct." He turned his gaze on the little man. "You are proving yourself a surprisingly capable advisor."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

high, circling the walled city of Tilverton in search of some garbage-loving raccoon to feed the nestlings in its aerie. He had a view of the entire town and the four roads leading into it, yet he could still make out details as fine as shield insignia carried by the growing number of warriors encamped among the mansions and temples of the Knoll District. There were plenty of Cormyr's Purple Dragons, of course, but also the Twisted Tower of Shadowdale, the White Horse of Mistledale, even the Raven and Silver of Sembia and dozens of other symbols Galaeron did not recognize.

According to Vangerdahast, Cormyr's neighbors had sent more than a hundred companies to help persuade Shade Enclave to rethink its melting of the High Ice, some as small as twenty well-mounted riders, but several numbering in the thousands—and with a generous mix of clerics and battle mages. To Alusair's dismay, the most enthusiastic response had come from the merchant princes of Sembia, some of whom stood to lose their entire fortunes if the weather disturbances continued. Always suspicious of Sembian designs on Cormyrean lands, the Steel Regent had not even informed the merchant princes of the alliance she was forming. They had sent large forces anyway, threatening to form their own alliance if she failed to accept their troops.

What Galaeron did not see were any companies on the roads outside the city. Though warriors were pouring into the Knoll District by the hundreds, trampling the grounds of the great estates in search of bivouacs, they were not entering through Tilverton's gates. The companies seemed to be sprouting from the city itself, marching out of shadowy cul-de-sacs or emerging from some ancient tower or keep to form up in the street.

Galaeron raised his gaze and looked over the scrying ball to Vangerdahast's bushybrowed eyes.

implications for Evereska were distressing. If Vangerdahast could find a way to negate the Shadovar's spells, so could the phaerimm. "How?"

"Not in Tilverton—or any other Cormyrean city." Vangerdahast displayed a tile with a magic ward etched onto the surface. "My war wizards have been busy."

Vangerdahast's eyes slid toward the ward.

shadow ball. "I am very different. What I do, I do for the good of Cormyr." "Then you would do well to stay clear of the Shadow Weave," Galaeron started for

"Really?" Vangerdahast chuckled. "I thought you were trying to control your 'shadow self.'"

Laeral smiled. To everyone else, Khelben might be the stern and dour Blackstaff, Lord Mage of Waterdeep and founder of the Moonstars. To her, he was a hopeless romantic, given to outrageous professions of love and a touch so gentle it wouldn't break soap bubbles.

She whispered, "Come here, you."

Khelben kissed her again, then slipped off to the side and set to work on her laces with his dexterous fingers. By the time the next sound came—this time the distinctive crackle-boom of a lightning bolt—he had Laeral out of her doublet and her trouser laces untied.

Laeral jumped to her feet and, throwing her cloak around her shoulders, followed him out the door of the tent. Scattered across the plain at the foot of their rise were hundreds of campfires, by the light of which it was possible to see thousands of silhouettes milling about in confusion, pulling on armor and buckling sword belts. Though no one seemed to have any more idea what was happening than Laeral and Khelben, an increasing number of figures appeared to be looking toward the area of inky darkness that marked the Shadovar camp.

Laeral turned to call for a messenger and found two of Khelben's Vaasan escorts, Kuhl and Burlen, rushing up fully armored—as always. Vaasans, as far as Laeral could tell, slept in armor. The third of their number, Dexon,

"Gone as in 'departed'?" Khelben asked, not even bothering to clarify that the Vaasan was talking about the Shadovar. "Or gone as in 'dead?' "

A pair of the sergeant's subordinates came rushing up, "You there, wizard!" Instead of stopping to help their superior, they stepped over his groaning figure and split up to come at Khelben and Laeral from opposite sides. "Who do you think you're batting around with that thing?"

Laeral's assessment of the situation took a decided turn for the worse. She leveled her wand at the nearest figure and said, "Hare."

"Liar!" Claw deliberately stepped into Yoraedia, bumping the elf with his stomach and sending him stumbling half a dozen steps back. "My lookouts only found that the camp was empty. Your watchers are the ones who fell asleep."

Yoraedia caught himself after three paces and stepped back toward the barbarian, his hand dropping toward his dagger. "One more time, walrus, and I'll slit that gu—"

has goblin blood running in their veins."

go limp. Claw and Yoraedia continued to trade insults, with most of their followers adding their own voices to the tumult, and the dwarves and hippogriff scouts were starting in as well. It would have been a simple matter for Laeral and Khelben to start dispelling whatever magic was causing this madness, but until she knew whether the casters were Shadovar or phaerimm, it was better to let them believe their tactic was working.

Laeral found what she was looking for and unobtrusively began to sprinkle diamond dust in each direction, at the same time mouthing an incantation and running her fingers through the gestures of her most powerful spell. As the magic took effect, she had to bite her tongue to keep from gasping.

On the western side of the square, Sharn’s dwarves were stomping in from their own camp flanked by the silvery blurs of well over a dozen invisible phaerimm. The scene was much the same on the north side, save that it was Waterdhavian volunteers and Aelburn's scouts who were being marched in. The situation to the east and south was even worse. With most of the barbarians and elves already in the square, the thornbacks had already formed themselves into battle ranks.

With more leaders marching their companies into the dusty square every minute, Khelben had given up on ending the argument between Yoraedia and Claw and was using his magic to intervene in actual outbreaks of violence.

Khelben pointed at a scowling dwarf in the gleaming armor of the Knights in Silver who was charging toward the center of the quarrel with a drawn hand axe and asked, "Would you mind?"

Laeral pulled two beads of tar from her cloak pocket. Voicing a short spell, she flicked first one, then the other bead at the scowling dwarf, whose progress immediately slowed to a sluggish crawl.

"As I was saying," Laeral said, "do you remember those detection amulets we passed out so the sentries would be able to see invisible infiltrators?"

"What now, Khelben?" Laeral asked. She saw an elf reaching for his sword and waved her wand, turning him into a sleek hart. "Start dispelling and hope for the best?"

Finally, a dome of faintly shimmering golden light rose up in the middle of the assembly square, prompting the phaerimm to reveal themselves by vainly hurling magic bolts and flame strikes against its wall. The dazed warriors stopped arguing and looked around with stunned expressions and arched brows. Leaving it to Khelben to help them recover, Laeral turned toward her tent and opened another translocational gate.

There was the familiar instant of falling before she emerged adjacent to the worst battle din she had ever heard. Blades were clanging off armor in mad cacophony and anguished voices were shrieking their pain. The air reeked of blood and opened guts, and warriors were streaming past in a torrent of dark silhouettes. A few were doubled over and some were missing limbs or pieces of limbs, but none had weapons in their scabbards or hands.

Still struggling with afterdaze and unable to make sense of what she was seeing, Laeral nevertheless responded instantly. She pulled a vial of granite dust from her cloak pocket and sprinkled it over her head, speaking the words of an armoring spell. Her skin grew cold and numb and as hard as rock. She turned toward the furor and found herself looking across the body-strewn cloth of a collapsed camp tent and finally recalled where she was and what she had come to do.

She was too late.

The edge of the blade-storm reached her side of the tent. Swords and daggers began to shatter against her spell-hardened skin. The shards were sucked back into the tornado, more deadly than before. Laeral waded into the tempest, staggering under the constant hail of weapons slamming into her from the side. The tent cloth was slick with blood and strewn with bodies and pieces of bodies, some still animated enough to reach out and clutch her ankles. Several times, she stumbled and nearly fell, and once she had to kick herself free of a blood-soaked half-elf who managed to wrap both arms around her legs begging for her to save him.

Finally, Laeral began to glimpse the heart of the storm, where the cone-shaped silhouette of a phaerimm was floating toward her at an oblique angle. She raised her hand and loosed her silver fire. In the same instant, the terrain opened beneath her feet as the thornback tried to suck her into the ground. Quick as the counterattack came, the tactic was a tired one against which Laeral had long ago developed a magic immunity. The Weave simply kept her suspended over the hole until it closed.

In all likelihood, the phaerimm never knew its attack had failed. It was engulfed in silver fire and spent the next few seconds whirling around madly as it disintegrated into ashes. The blade-storm came to a sudden halt, covering Laeral's collapsed tent in a steel carpet as a thousand swords clanged to the ground.

By the light of the fires raging in every camp, Laeral could make out the broad swath of motionless silhouettes and writhing forms the phaerimm had cut through her army. It was a broad belt beginning over by Silvery

moon's Knights of Silver and curving steadily inward, razing the entire camp of the Bloodaxe mercenaries sent on behalf of Sundabar and tearing a broad tract through the tents of the Slugsmashers representing Citadel Adbar before spiraling through the Waterdhavian encampment and coming up the hill to Laeral and Khelben’s tent.

Nor was this phaerimm the only one to attack the outlying camps while its companions prepared the main ambush. There were firestorms and lightning squalls everywhere, another blade-storm, and more mind-enslaved warriors fighting each other than the phaerimm. Heart sinking with sorrow and despair—and more than a little guilt at having failed to foresee the Shadovar betrayal—Laeral removed a silver thimble from her pocket, then uttered a spell and held it to her lips like a miniature horn.

"The Shadovar have betrayed us. Take who you can save and flee." Though she spoke softly, Laeral's voice would be heard by every commander and wizard in her army, save those who had fallen under the mental sway of the enemy—she had designed the spell with the phaerimm in mind. "We'll form again at the Halfway Inn. May the gods speed you."

From behind her came the sound of chiming steel as someone approached across the carpet of fallen blades. She turned and glimpsed the hulking form of a Vaasan running in her direction—then cried out in confusion as his sword came tumbling at her. She twisted away and instinctively raised her arm, but trying to block a dark-sword was a bad idea even for one of the Chosen.

A wave of searing cold shot up her arm, and the limb went numb below the elbow. She cried out more in shock than pain and dropped to her knees and nearly fainted when she saw her hand and forearm lying on the

Laeral turned her head and saw Burlen's hulking form striding toward her, his hand stretched toward the floating sword. Too dazed to understand why he had attacked her, she nevertheless knew that she had to stop him before he did it again. She reached into her cloak for a spell component—then experienced a wave of excruciating pain and recalled she was reaching with a stump. She reached with her other hand, but the angle was awkward and the movement unfamiliar. Burlen was almost on her by the time she found what she was searching for.

The Vaasan raised his darksword and said, "Your fault."

The pommel of Kuhl's sword caught Burlen at the base of the jaw, lifting him off his feet and dropping him flat on his back in the carpet of swords. Kuhl took a moment to make sure his comrade was out cold, then turned to Laeral—who, still in shock and uncertain of what was happening—was pointing the iron bar at him.

"My apologies, Lady Arunsun. There are infiltrators everywhere." He tucked a pair of phaerimm tails into his belt, then picked up Burlen's sword and sheathed it in his own scabbard. "Can you stand?"

A raw potato in one hand and a drawn throwing dagger in the other, Galaeron stepped off Aris's upraised palm directly onto the sill of the third-story lodging chamber Vangerdahast was using as a council room. The half-dozen war wizards gathered around the table cried out in surprise and reached for spell components, and one actually stood, pointing at the window and opening his mouth to loose a spray of magic bolts. Galaeron bounced the potato off the fellow's head, shocking more than knocking the wizard back into his seat, then turned his attention toward a large blonde woman holding a finger-length cylinder of glass.

"You don't want to point that in my direction," he said, raising his throwing dagger. "This is my good hand."

"That would be your fourth question, if a question it is," Vangerdahast interrupted. He pointed at the wall, and a chair walked over to place itself behind Galaeron. "Have a seat and explain what you mean by palace gossip. Surely, the whole palace can't know so soon?"

"The whole city knows, as far as I can tell. I heard it from a gate guard." Galaeron ignored the chair. "What I want to know is why wasn't I told? Were you afraid I'd go back to the enclave?"

Vangerdahast cocked his bushy brow. "Actually, that's the last thing I would have expected from you," he said, "but the fact of the matter is that we only found out ourselves a few minutes ago. I was about to send for you to see if you might have any thoughts on their departure."

A twinkle of comprehension came to Vangerdahast's eyes. "Then you didn't know," he said. Several of the wizards sighed in relief. "The Shadovar have left the Sharaedim—sneaked out in the middle of the night Laeral's relief army was decimated, and she was horribly wounded."

Galaeron sat—fell, actually—into the chair. "What?" he gasped. "Is Keya—?" "The mythal wasn't breached," offered the woman Galaeron had threatened with the throwing dagger. "Your sister and everyone inside Evereska are no worse off than before—better, in fact, since they've been reinforced and resupplied—but with the relief army decimated and Laeral wounded, the phaerimm will be free to focus their attention on the city again."

Vangerdahast sighed in relief. "Good. Then our only problem is the additional magic the extra troops will require when the Heartland Alliance attacks the flying city." He looked around the table. "I think we can take this redeployment as Telamont Tanthul's answer to our demand that he stop the melting of the High Ice."

The looks that came to the faces of the war wizards made clear what they thought of the theory.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

over a salt-pan as flat as a mirror, rife with tragedy and hardship, and she had considered herself lucky to reach the other side. Such a journey would have been impossible, save by ship or wing. Where once she had feared death be-cause a camel collapsed and burst a waterskin, there lay an entire lake, vast beyond the belief of most Bedine and blanketed beneath the shadows of an evening rain.

lake along with Ruha and a Cormyrean war wizard named Caladnei.

young date palms already pushing their crowns above the foliage. Ruha did not see what he was indicating until a herd of gazelle emerged from an expanse of tall grass and began to drink. Apparently, whatever magic had made a lake of the Shoal of Thirst had also removed its salinity, for gazelle did not drink brackish water.

Though it had been many years since Ruha lived in Anauroch—much less crossed the Shoal of Thirst—she felt violated. Undeniable as was the lake's beauty, it was already changing the surrounding desert, bringing with it an abundance and leisure that would destroy the Bedine's nomadic way of life.

The sheikh furrowed his brow. "How can that be? I have drank from its waters many times myself, and you see for yourself that I am stronger than ever."

"Then it is good I have you." Sa'ar looked away from the lake and locked gazes with the war wizard. "Your magic must be very strong as well, for you to dress as you dare."

In truth, Ruha thought it likely they had been discovered already. When Vangerdahast had asked her to lead a scouting party into Anauroch to locate the flying city so Cormyr could launch a surprise attack, Ruha had asked for a company of swarthy, brown-eyed volunteers whom she could disguise as Bedine. Instead, the wizard had provided her with Caladnei and her equally stubborn superior, Hhormun, two fools who seemed to believe that riding camels and wearing abas was all that was required to disguise a company of fair-skinned Cormyreans as a Bedine khowwan. Had she not known that Alusair was preparing to launch a surprise teleport-attack from a secret base in Tilverton, she would have sworn the wizards wanted the Shadovar to notice them.

"You are sure Hhormun will agree?" Ruha asked, sliding down to join the pair before they clasped hands. "The bargain is yours if you make it."

surprisingly energetic in directing the activities of the company, from picking campsites to dictating the pace of the daily marches. When they reached the bottom of the ridge, however, he surprised

A few minutes later, Ruha, Caladnei, the sheikh and a dozen of his men were rubbing themselves and the Mahwa tribe's strongest camels in veserab dung, collected by the warriors a few days earlier for just that purpose.

"You're sure this is necessary?" Caladnei asked, wrinkling her nose at the awful stench of the stuff. "I'm sure someone in the company has a spell that could eliminate our smell."

"It is not enough to eliminate our own odor," Sa'ar said. "We must smell like what we want. It pleases the little gods."

them to stand guard at the edges of the flight, trusting that the creatures' instincts would make them follow when the rest were moved. Ruha, who was leading the raid by virtue of being the only person present with any experience at all handling veserabs, picked a serpentine course around the beasts, giving them as wide a berth as possible.

Once, when they entered an area of tall marsh grass, a nearby bull flared its wings and started over to investigate. Sa'ar released a sand grouse he had brought along as a diversion, and the bird burst skyward with such a riot of flapping wings and terrified screeching that it drew three veserabs into the air after it. Ruha made good use of the distraction, leading the party to within twenty paces of the three Shadovar herders camped on that side of the flight

A tug on a guideline attached to her waist brought her to a stop. Several moments later, ten fist-sized sling stones appeared in the darkening sky and rained down on the sentries. Two fell unconscious. By the time the third made enough sense of the assault to turn and see the raiding party—rendered visible when they attacked—galloping toward him on their camels, two warriors were already clubbing him senseless. Bruised as the young herder might be when he awoke, Ruha took the fact that the warriors used the butts of their lances instead of the tips as a sign of Sa'ar's concern about angering the Shadovar. Bedine raiders usually killed the sentries, so there would be that many fewer warriors available for the counter raid.

The sheikh and his other warriors were already charging into the flight of resting veserabs, hurling loops of braided rope around the necks of the smallest beasts and securing the other ends to their saddles. Most of them were coughing and reeling, struggling to stay on

their mounts as the veserabs filled the air with their noxious fumes. Ruha cleared the air with a powerful wind spell, then saw an angry veserab cow leap onto a camel's neck and rip the thing's head off with four sharp-taloned feet.

More veserabs began to rise all around, filling the dusk air with fluttering clouds of dark wings. Most were simply trying to escape, but a few, especially those with calves whistling for help, were beginning to wheel toward the Bedine warriors. A veserab dived low in front of Sa'ar, pulling a grizzled warrior off the camel ahead, then dropping him back to the ground in pieces. Ruha dismissed the silence spell and pointed toward the wadi they had chosen as their escape route.

The sheikh did not need to be told twice. He sounded three notes on his amarat. His warriors—those who were not fleeing already—turned as one, each pulling two or three panicked veserab calves through the air behind them. Ruha hurled a flurry of magic bolts into the air and dusted half a dozen adults off the raiders' tails, then Caladnei raised a force barrier behind them. A dozen veserabs slammed into the invisible wall and dropped to the ground with broken necks and wings. The confused survivors circled away, whistling in frustration and sorrow.

Ruha and Caladnei followed. By the time they reached the mouth of the wadi, the veserabs were beginning to find their way over the force barrier. Ruha leaped off her camel and scraped up a handful of sand, then voiced an incantation and blew it toward the growing number of creatures streaming after them. A howling wind rose at her back and, scraping the canyon mouth clean of sand and dust, roared out toward the lake. The veserabs vanished into a cloud of swirling dust and did not emerge.

"Your magic has grown stronger, witch," Sa'ar observed behind her. "Remind me to be patient with you."

Ruha grabbed Caladnei under the arms and pulled her from under her camel. "Are you hurt?"

She had no idea how close they were to the city, but she knew the Shadovar well enough to feel certain this was just the first wave of the attack. Even if they didn't realize there were Cormyreans involved in the raid, they would send a company of veserab riders to make an example of any tribe that dared steal from them.

"They're just trying to delay us," Ruha said.

struggling to slip a hood and wing jacket over the last veserab tied to his dead camel. When the attack succeeded only in stunning the shadow warriors back into the murk, Ruha left Caladnei's side and dodging one black sword and reducing the owner of the second to a cinder even darker than his normally swarthy complexion, stopped at the sheikh's side.

"Are you mad, Sa'ar?" She swatted the creature's head aside as it swung around to bite at her knee, then continued, "Let it go! A few veserabs cannot be worth so many Mahwa lives."

The sheikh did not even look up from his work. "Mounts that can fly across the sky? The Mahwa will be the masters of the desert!"

her for the half second it took the shadow warrior to close. Ruha came up beneath his guard and opened him from groin to ribs. She was mildly surprised to see that the stuff spilling out of him looked much the same as that coming out of the Bedine.

"May Elah smile on you," Sa'ar gasped, his good arm thrown over the veserab's back, supporting him. "How many times have you saved my life, now?"

"The fool!" Ruha hissed. "Does he think no one will see him? Or that the Most High will think the iron bolts came from Bedine crossbows?"

"Or we all might have lost more," Caladnei said. "This way, it was the Shadovar who were surprised, not us."

run for the nearest shadow. When no one else started a spell, Ruha scraped a handful of sand off the ground and started hers—only to be interrupted when Hhormun brought his arm down across her wrists.

"Will he?" A faint smile came to Hhormun’s bearded lips, and he turned up the wadi. "Then we had better hurry to our next campsite, hadn't we?"

the world-window, mind you, but looking straight down on it from the Most High's personal observation balcony in the Palace Most High. Staring down through the shadow mists at an imminently defensible camp, located in a maze of canyons so narrow a veserab's wings would touch both sides. A maze of canyons flooded by magic light with no particular source, where the few shadows that did exist were guarded by a squad of sentries armed with both magic and steel. A maze of canyons where the Shadovar would have to fight their way in like common ore foot soldiers, and a maze of canyons with plenty of room for more Cormyreans . . . and Sembians . . . and Dalesmen . .. and the Hidden One only knew who else, all determined to deny the lands of lost Netheril to the Shadovar.

The witch could not see them, of course. Certainly, her Bedine vassals had reported to her the stream of veserabs that constantly dropped into the lake there, and no doubt remarked on the dark storm cloud that never seemed to leave the area, but she could not see Shade Enclave. There were still the shadow mists and the thousands of feet above ground and, not least of all, the Most High's magic, but Rivalen was not so sure.

Rivalen felt the weight of the Most High's gaze upon him. He did not bother to look up. There was nothing there to see anyway. He simply swallowed his fear, then addressed his father.

"There is a reason Ruha hides her face behind a veil, Most High," he said. "Of all the races on Toril, the Shadovar have more reason than any to know the power of the hidden."

The Most High was silent.

"My mistake, Most High?"

Escanor was the first who dared to speak. "What does the witch matter? If she cannot enter the city, what does it matter if she camps below us for a century?"

The question hung in the air as heavy as lead. None of the brothers dared answer. Finally, the Most High said, "You have all failed me. All of you princes." The shadow mists briefly obscured the tents of the Cormyrean camp, and when they cleared again, the princes were looking at a circle of white rocks. "Do you see that circle?" "A teleportation circle," Rivalen said.

more conservative strategy, perhaps we should call our armies home and defend the enclave."

struck him—and sent the prince sprawling. "That I ought to allow."

Clariburnus said. "It will reach Tilverton by tomorrow evening."

"I am sure you can spare half your troops," the Most High said. "Our victory in Tilverton must be quick. We must return our largest army to the Sharaedim within the month, before the shadowshell fails. The phaerimm are our greatest threat."

Escanor glanced at Rivalen, his coppery eyes burning with anger. "But if our losses are heavy—"

I could have sworn she was a thousand miles away."

For a moment, Rivalen thought Malik would leave the matter at that, then the little man's face contorted into a mask of displeasure, and he said, "Only, I think it would be wiser to advise you to give all your troops to Rivalen and order him to attack."

Telamont's empty hood swung in Rivalen's direction, and Rivalen felt the weight of his father's question pressing down on his shoulders.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

darkening sky and painting the jagged Stonelands in a fiery copper glow. Behind the lonely trees and distant monoliths, the shadows were lengthening, stretching their pointed tips across the parched pasturelands toward the city of Tilverton. To the north, purple darkness already cloaked the Desertsmouth Mountains. To the south, a lake of umbral murk was spreading outward from the foot of the Stormhorns. The attack could come from any direction or from all three, and with no more warning than the time a shadow needed to sweep across the plain. Or it might not come at all, though Galaeron knew better than to count on that.

Along with Vangerdahast, Alusair, Lady Regent Alasalynn Rowanmantle, and more aides than was safe, Galaeron was atop an unfinished wall tower in the Knoll District of Old Town, standing on a makeshift scaffolding that creaked every time someone shifted his weight, watching the darkness for the first hint of the enemy. Vangerdahast's attention was fixed on the south, as that was the only side of the city without a gate and he was convinced the Shadovar would want time to form ranks before the battle began. Most of the aides were convinced they would come out of the Desertsmouth foothills, since that was both the shortest route to Anauroch and one of the most sheltered. Alusair was keeping her eye—and her archers' arrows— trained on the sky, for she was troubled by the descriptions of veserab riders and the fact of the Shadovar’s alliance with Malygris and his blue dragons. Galaeron didn't know what to expect, but he felt sure that whatever the Shadovar did, it would be as unexpected as it was devastating.

A soft clatter sounded below as the bodyguard companies at the base of the tower ran through the procedure of admitting a runner. Finally, a herald called for permission to send up one of Vangerdahast's wizards, and a surprised murmur rose atop the keep as the aides nearest the ladder saw who it was. Galaeron looked down to see a willowy woman in a red cape ascending the long ladder. With red hair and golden eyes, even he recognized her as Vangerdahast's favorite aide—and, some said, lover—Caladnei.

The old wizard stepped over to the ladder and, as she neared the top, extended a hand. "About time, my dear," he said, pulling her onto the scaffolding. "What news?"

has found the flying city, and it appears but lightly defended."

Alusair considered the report for a moment, then said, "There's a reason the city is only lightly defended."

"What do you think?"

"True," Alusair said without losing enthusiasm, "but Cormyr has many cities. The Shadovar have only one."

At the bottom, they gathered Aris and Vangerdahast's troop of bodyguards and threaded their way down the knoll past company after company forming up for the short march to the translocational circle. The officers were engaging in no bluster or bravado and offered relatively few words of encouragement. Everyone knew the Shadovar were a strange and powerful enemy, and most wise commanders had prayed that the mere fact of the Heartlands Alliance would force the princes to reconsider the melting of the High Ice. That the Alliance was being marshaled for a night march put to rest any hope of ending the matter without a fight.

At the base of the hill, where the mansions of the Knoll District gave way to the exorbitant shops and inns that populated the rest of Old Town, Vangerdahast turned through the gate of the Windlord's Rest, which he had appropriated to serve as the headquarters of the war wizards. Instead of entering the cozy inn itself, he led the way past a mixed troop of war wizards and Purple Dragons into the livery.

Inside, the "device" sat covered in its wagon, fans of golden light spilling through the slats of the cargo bed to illuminate the stable floor. The light was incredibly bright, though it did not seem to burn the eyes of either Vangerdahast or the guards the way it did Galaeron's. He had to shield his face, and his palm began to nettle.

Vangerdahast smirked at Galaeron's reaction, then removed from his pocket a ring bearing a crude copy of the Purple Dragon of Cormyr.

"Interesting," he said. "How does it work?"

Galaeron stepped to the door and saw a company of dark forms peeling themselves out of the shadows, spraying the astonished guard companies outside with darts of black glass and bolts of shadow magic.

Aris cried out as a dark ray lanced out to pierce his forearm, then lashed out at his attacker with the same hand. Before the giant could close his fingers, the Shadovar changed back to shadow and drained away, then emerged behind him and pierced his thigh with another beam.

Aris screamed and whirled around. Galaeron saw a trio of Shadovar emerging adjacent to the door and could pay no more attention to the giant. He drew his sword and, waiting until the warriors began to assume a semblance of solidity, beheaded the nearest one. The body simply drained back into the shadow, but the dead man's companions whirled on Galaeron, their hands rising to unleash shadow spells.

Galaeron ducked back into the stable. "Warn the princess!" he yelled. "They've found me!"

His bodyguards were beginning to counterattack with lightning bolts, crossbow quarrels, and—Galaeron was disappointed to see—bolts of raw magic. Even after hearing how the Sharn Wall had been breached, Vangerdahast had ignored Galaeron's suggestion that the War Wizards strike all spells of raw magic from their battle lists.

"I told you those wards were useless," Galaeron said, "as the Shadovar are about to prove."

himself. He took shelter behind the wizard's ample form.

Vangerdahast beamed. "Imagine what I could have learned, had you actually demonstrated shadow magic." The wizard went to the front of the wagon and picked up the hitch. "Help me get this out where it will do some good."

Galaeron went to the other side and began to push against the crossbar. The wagon was incredibly heavy, as if the orb it carried were made of gold metal instead of gold light.

Vangerdahast said, frowning across the bar at him. "A wise woman taught me that." "So you're saying you'll need your telekinesis spells later," Galaeron surmised. "Exactly." Vangerdahast leaned into the hitch. "Now put your back into it." Galaeron braced his feet and did as the wizard commanded. The effort was almost

enough to make him break his promise not to use shadow magic. The floor was slick with dust and there was a slight incline at the threshold, and the battle raging in the courtyard had already become a desperate one. Purple Dragons lay two and three bodies deep, and Vangerdahast's war wizards were having to stand back to back to keep their Shadovar attackers from slipping through the

shadows to attack from behind. Even then, the Shadovar were far more adept at using their defenses to stop Weave spells than the Cormyreans were at using their magic to stop shadow spells, and more than a dozen of the kingdom's battle mages already lay among the fallen dragoneers.

Aris was staggering around like a drunken fire dancer, bleeding from a dozen wounds, alternately trying to stomp enemy warriors flat or kick them out over the inn's roof.

"Aris!" Galaeron yelled. "Help us!" The giant crossed the battle in a stride, scattering a trio of shadow warriors with a sweep of his large foot. He dropped to a knee and pulled the wagon across the threshold so quickly that Galaeron and Vangerdahast had to leap aside to keep from being crushed under the wheels. The silhouettes of the old wizard's glyphs danced over the surrounding walls for less than a second, then began to settle on their targets. The wispy screams of anguished Shadovar filled the air, then a thicket of golden flames flared to life across the courtyard, and their attackers vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Galaeron rolled to his knees and found Vangerdahast lying against the opposite doorjamb, his chest heaving and his face contorted with pain. Galaeron's mind leaped immediately to the worst possible conclusion.

"Vangerdahast?" He scrambled across the doorway and pulled the portly wizard into his lap. It wasn't easy. "Are you hit?"

"We lost thirteen war wizards and most of your dragoneers." The fellow used both hands to pull Vangerdahast to his feet—then grinned broadly. "But you were right about those ward tiles, milord. They lured the Shadovar in through the fringe just like you—"

"Yes, well, we've no time to waste congratulating ourselves," Vangerdahast growled, casting a sidelong glance in Galaeron's direction. "Let's finish this."

Galaeron was too stunned to laugh. Though Tilverton's evacuation was under way, he had seen for himself that there had still been hundreds of women and children in the city earlier that evening—and the Cormyrean plan risked them all. How hard, he wondered, had been the lessons they learned in their last war against the dragon Nalavarauthatoryl? Had they truly grown so cold that they would knowingly sacrifice so many to win a quick victory—and save how many more? Perhaps that was what it required to defeat the Shadovar, and, more importantly, the phaerimm.

They reached the wagon, and the wizard stopped beside Aris's knee. "Stay close," Vangerdahast said. "I may have need of your talents."

Vangerdahast was shaking him by the arm and pointing down at the ground. "What's that he's doing?"

shadow of the building into the orb-lit street—and swirling about the shins of a company of Sembian mercenaries who had been attempting to sneak up on the object of their attention. Though the general battle din was too loud to hear their screams, their writhing arms and contorted postures left no doubt about their pain.

As Galaeron and the others watched, the warriors plunged to mid-thigh in the fog, then fell prone and vanished entirely. A moment later, the light of Vangerdahast’s orb turned the shadowstuff itself to ash. It sank to the ground, covering the street in an inky stain of darkness devoid of shape or texture—or even any apparent substance.

Vangerdahast pointed at the fog and cast what Galaeron recognized as a spell of magic dismissal. The shadowstuff continued to roll out of the Shadovar's hiding place, floating across the dark stain to brush against the orb-lit foundation of the mansion across the street. The stone disintegrated as had the legs of the Sembian mercenaries, and the building itself collapsed into the inky murk that had been, until a few moments earlier, a cobblestone street.

It vanished without raising so much as a dust plume.

orb-lit areas, then gradually developing into a solid disk of murk as adjacent areas were exposed to the golden light. The battle at the edge of the circle grew wildly intense as Shadovar and Alliance warriors fought for control of the escape lanes, filling the dusk sky with flashing lightning bolts and hissing rays of darkness. Only the patio where the fog-summoner himself stood remained untouched, revealing a huge figure in a horned helm still waving his outstretched arms, calling more shadowstuff up into the streets.

Galaeron clasped Vangerdahast's arm. "You're destroying the city.'" he said. "Annul your spell, or at least move it out over the plain."

Aris nodded. "I would recognize that face anywhere. Can you not see his golden eyes?"

"My dear, what took you so long?" Vangerdahast mocked. As the wizardess struggled to recover from her afterdaze, he guided her hand to Aris's knee. "Take the giant and go to Alusair. If that shadow fog does not stop expanding in the next few minutes, you are to sound the retreat, then teleport to safety with the princess and as many others as you can take."

"We'll decide that later," Vangerdahast said, taking his arm. "Just have your sword ready and start cutting when we get there."

and sank deep into his thigh, sending a bolt of fiery agony shooting up through his body. He hung for a moment high up beneath the awning, until whatever he had landed on toppled over and dropped, crashing, onto a wooden table.

A raspy voice screamed in agony. The sharp point pulled free of Galaeron's thigh. He fell off the table onto a hard stone floor, then rolled to his knees and found himself peering over the table at the figure of a hulking Shadovar holding a horned helm in his hands.

"Elf!" Rivalen said, tossing the helm aside. "I thought we would need to look for you in Suzail by now." - "Here I am." Galaeron rose from behind the table and, glancing at the broad swath of orb-light that separated them, tried to appear confident. "All you need do is come get me."

Rivalen peered up at the rip in the canopy. "Yes, I'm certain you would like that." He smiled, then glanced over Galaeron's shoulders. "I think I will have my guards do it. Seize him!"

Heart sinking at the sudden clamor that erupted from the patio edge behind him, Galaeron vaulted the table into the swath of orb light, landing so that he had the prince on one flank and the approaching bodyguards on the other. Of course there were guards.

There were always guards.

"Don't let him get away!" Rivalen ordered, starting forward from his side— apparently unaware that Galaeron had come with company. At least that much of Vangerdahast’s plan was working. "Take him now!"

The guards, already rushing across the patio, began to vault tables and kick chairs aside. Galaeron leaped as high as he could and slashed at the torn edge of the awning.

to see the prince's body crashing to the floor and Vangerdahast standing behind him with ten smoking fingertips. Galaeron stepped into the safety of the awning shadows.

Vangerdahast bellowed—more in rage than pain—and filled the cage of black ribs with magic fire.

leaving only the corner with the shadowstuff fountain standing upright. Galaeron pulled Vangerdahast back under the awning and began to go through the pockets of the wizard's cloak.

"Do you have any healing potions?" Galaeron asked, tossing aside feathers and satchels full of iron filings.

Finding no possibility of help there, Galaeron hopped down and went to the uphill side of the patio. The scene there was much the same as below, save that most of the shadowstuff had rolled downhill into the lower city, sparing much of the Knoll District, the jagged ruins of Tilver's Palace, and a lengthy section of wall.

It was there, atop one of the as yet unfinished wall towers, that he found their salvation. Atop one of the spires, no more than two hundred paces distant, stood Aris's looming figure, illuminated in the yellow light of Vangerdahast's orb, one hand raised to his brow as he searched the city. Galaeron stepped as near the edge of the awning as he dared and waved. For a moment, there was no response, and he began to fear that even the stone giant's keen sight would not be able to see him beneath the canopy.

When Aris pointed in his direction, Galaeron knew they were saved. He waited a couple of moments for the giant to return his wave, then dropped off the table to return to Vangerdahast's side—and found Caladnei already kneeling there, pouring a healing potion down the wizard's throat one drop at a time.

As Galaeron limped over, she looked up with an angry scowl on her face. "When you need help, call for it." She pointed her chin at the ring Vangerdahast had given him. "That's what the purple dragon is for."

"What in the name of all the drow gods," the Steel Regent demanded, pacing back and forth in front of Galaeron, "did you do to my Royal Magician?"

Tilverton. The shadowstuff had consumed the city almost completely, spreading well beyond the walls to engulf even the outlying stock pens and caravan campsites. All that remained of the city was the wail atop the Knoll District and the jagged ruins of Tilver's Palace, now back lit by the sinking sphere of Vangerdahast's magic orb.

Alusair waved a hand at the golden ball. "He won't look at anything but that damnable globe, and he keeps asking if we won. What do I tell him? That we won because we had more survivors than the Shadovar? Or that we lost because we lost our entire army? How do I snap him out of this?"

"Tell him the truth," Galaeron suggested. "Tell him that no one won." "That would not be the truth," Aris said.

plain, taking with it the last bitter reminders of the Heartlands Alliance—and all of Faerыn’s hopes for a season without starvation. Soon, all that remained of the city were the back lit ruins of Tilver's Palace, surrounded by smaller piles of dark rubble. The last rays of Vangerdahast’s light paled to darkness, and eventually even they were lost.

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