2 Eleasias, the Year of Wild Magic
To Aris's dismay, elegance had not returned with strength. With Malik gone, the giant found himself secretly in the service of Prince Yder. He stood over the High Altar in Malik's Temple of the One and All, cutting a relief of Shar's Black Moon around the oblong skull-and-starburst he'd done when the temple still belonged to Malik.
He could hardly ask for better working conditions, even were he a free giant. He had only to ask, and whatever he wanted to eat or drink would be brought from any far corner of Faer?n. A company of assistants attended to his every need, and he worked at his pleasure and was free to do whatever he wished at other times. He was not even much of a captive, as he was free to wander the city of Shade at will-so long as he did not mind an escort of several armed shadow lords.
His tool control had returned to normal after he'd slept off the effects of hiding the Chosen in his body, and the Dark Moon was cut shallowly enough so that it did not draw attention to itself. Still, there was something intrinsic to the goddess's hidden nature that he was not quite conveying. A viewer had only to look at Cyric's skull-and-starburst to see that it floated inside Shar's Dark Moon, and that would not do at all. She was more subtle than that, more mysterious.
Aris stepped away to gain some perspective, barely noticed as he sent a dozen attendants scrambling for cover, and decided he would have to rethink the whole thing. He dropped his hammer and chisel into the tool bag on his belt and backed out of the chancel area.
"Go to my workshop," he said, motioning the attendants toward the door in the north transept. "Bring a stack of sail canvases and a barrel of sketching charcoal."
The attendants rushed to obey, leaving only four shadow lord guards who did their utmost to remain quiet and out of sight. Yder had apparently ordered them to avoid reminding Aris that he was a captive, but it made no difference. He always knew they were behind him. He could feel them there, just out of sight.
A throaty rasp came up the nave's center aisle as someone pushed open the Black Portal. Aris waved an absentminded hand in the direction of the sound and kept his attention fixed on the object of his frustration. A pair of guards rushed off to send the visitor away. There followed the hiss of whispered conversation, then a scuffle, a few syllables of magic, and the clatter of armored bodies hitting the floor.
"What's wrong with you oafs?" Aris snapped, too absorbed in aesthetics to register anything but an annoying disturbance. "Can you not see I'm trying to think?"
The other two guards were already stomping down the aisle to intercept the intruder. This time, the incantation ended in a sharp crack. The flash of lightning lit the chancel, and at last Aris saw the solution to his problem. The entire High Altar would become the Dark Moon, with the upper hemisphere forming a semicircular back panel at the rear and the lower hemisphere descending down into the choir. The trick would be to get the right foreshortening where the level changed, and to find a way to round the staircase toward the bottom. Growing ever more excited, Aris dropped to his knees and began to search his belt bag for a nubbin of sketching charcoal.
"Difficult to tell who's the slave here and who are the guards." The voice registered vaguely as a familiar one. "You weren't this difficult back in Arabel."
"Do you have something to sketch with?" Aris lowered a hand without looking. "I must get this down while I still have it in mind."
"Aris!" the voice barked. "Leave it You're done here."
"Done?"
Scowling at the interruption, Aris shook his head and found Galaeron standing at his side. The elf looked much as he had when they were separated at the Cave Gate, save that his face was lined with fatigue and his eyes veiled behind a glossy darkness.
"Galaeron…"
Aris could feel the details of his idea slipping away even as he spoke, but he was so happy to see his old friend alive that he didn't care… much.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"What do you think?" Galaeron retorted. "I escaped."
"Escaped? From the Palace Most High?"
Galaeron nodded. "I had to use the Shadow Weave," he said, looking back down the main aisle of the nave, where Aris's four guards lay in various forms of death. Tm sorry."
Aris's heart went out to his friend.
"You have not failed anyone." He laid two fingers on the elf's shoulder and said, "I am proud you did not yield before this."
"I didn't yield," Galaeron said. "I chose. Telamont is after Vala."
Aris went hollow inside.
"Then he knows?" asked the giant.
"Knows?"
"About the Chosen," Aris said. "They couldn't find the mythallar, so I sent them to Vala."
A shadow descended over Galaeron's face.
"The Chosen must have freed her," he said. Galaeron motioned Aris to his feet and turned toward the Black Portal. "I gave them away. That’s s what he meant."
Aris rose, but made no move to follow.
"What who meant?"
"The sharn," Galaeron answered as he continued down the aisle. "He appeared to me in the Palace Most High. He said he had come to repay the favor he owed us, and told me I had a choice to make."
"And?"
"And he left, and I made my choice," Galaeron replied. "I couldn't bear the thought that Telamont would capture Vala again, but now I see he was talking about more-much more."
Seeing that Galaeron was not going to wait, Aris caught up to him with a single step. He plucked Galaeron off the floor and held him at head height.
"The sharn from Karse came to you in the Palace Most High?"
"Isn't that what I just said? Put me down. We need to go find Vala and the Chosen."
Aris continued to hold Galaeron and said, The sharn left you there to free yourself? He left you and told you to use the Shadow Weave?"
If Galaeron saw the reason for Aris's alarm, he showed no sign.
"The sharn was warning me," the elf said. 'Telamont had just been there, trying to convince me to use the Shadow
Weave to save Vala. When I refused, a strange look came over him. Telamont said hope was stronger than he had imagined and left."
"That was what the sharn was warning you about?"
Galaeron shook his head and replied, "I think Telamont knew I was defying him because I expected something to happen soon. It must have dawned on him that Vala had help escaping, because he left in a hurry. We have to find the Chosen and warn them."
"All very plausible," Aris said. "But the sharn left you there with no way to escape except to use the Shadow Weave."
Galaeron shrugged and said, "I had to accept the inevitable, and I'm the stronger for it."
He peeled Aris's thumb back and slipped free, landing on the floor in an easy crouch.
"Who is stronger?" Aris asked, a little frightened by how easily Galaeron had broken his grasp. "How can you be certain it was the sharn you saw and not some trick of Telamont’s?"
"Because we beat him," Galaeron replied, starting toward the Black Portal again. "My shadow and I matched wills with Telamont Tanthul, and we beat him."
"Galaeron, listen to yourself," Aris said. He stepped over the elf, then spun and stooped down to block his way. 'Telamont Tanthul has been trying to trick you into yielding to your shadow since the day we arrived in Shade. You finally do it, and suddenly you're stronger than he is?"
"Yes," Galaeron said simply. "The Shadovar thrive on deception and subterfuge, I know that, but the biggest fraud they ever committed on me was when Melegaunt tricked me into fighting my own shadow. He filled me with doubt, and doubt made me weak."
"And now you are sure," Aris said, filling his voice with mockery and mistrust. "Now you are strong."
"Now I am whole," Galaeron snapped back. "That makes me strong. I have no time to explain it now."
He whispered a mystic word and waved his hand at Aris's foot, and the foot started to slide across the floor.
"I am going to the mythallar," Galaeron said, stepping under Aris toward the Black Portal.
"Wait!" Aris turned, growing ever more suspicious, and said, "Back in Arabel, you told me you didn't know how to find the mythallar."
"Not on this plane."
Galaeron pressed a palm to the Black Portal and spoke a few words in ancient Netherese. The door dissolved into shadow mist.
The elf turned to Aris and said, "I hope you'll come with me. One way or the other, I don't think Shade will be safe for you very much longer."
Aris's mind was whirling with suspicions, foremost among them the fear that Telamont was using Galaeron to reveal Vala and the Chosen to the Shadovar. But for that to be so, Galaeron could not be under the Most High's sway, for if he were Telamont would have only to ask to learn what he wished to know.
"I'll come," he said, stepping toward the shadowy portal, "but first you must promise that when this is done, you will never touch the Shadow Weave again. You can still be saved."
"I was inviting you, Aris, not begging," Galaeron said in a voice that held both scorn and patience. "I don't need to be saved from anything."
Galaeron turned and stepped through the Black Portal, leaving Aris alone in the Temple of the One and All, alone and feeling angry and abandoned. He could not decide whether it was Galaeron who had just departed or Galaeron's shadow-or someone Aris did not even know. The elf's parting rebuke had left him feeling both resentful and hurt, and such rudeness simply was not like his friend. It made Aris want to retreat into his work, but of course that was foolish. If Galaeron's plan worked, it would all be rubble in a few minutes anyway, and if the plan failed, the last thing he wanted to do for the next few hundred years was devote his talent to hiding Dark Moons in the sacred sculpture of other deities. Besides, whether or not he still knew the elf, Galaeron was his friend, and no matter how strange they became, one did not desert one's friends as they went off to fight Telamont Tanthul and the Princes of Shade-at least stone giants did not.
Aris followed Galaeron through the Black Portal and into the shadow mist. The air grew frigid, and the floor turned as soft as snow.
Aris called into the blackness, "Galaeron?"
He took another tentative step, doing his best to continue in a straight line.
"Where are you?"
When no answer came, Aris decided he had waited too long. The shadows were no place to become lost. He turned around and retraced his steps exactly.
Three steps later, he remained in the dark.
Perhaps his first two steps had been longer than he thought. Holding his arm before him, Aris took another step forward.
"Galaeron!"
A small hand pressed itself to his kneecap and the elf whispered, "Quietly, my friend."
Aris's sigh was anything but soft.
"I thought you'd left me behind."
"I have too few friends to leave them wandering around the Fringe alone," Galaeron replied. He pulled on the leg of Aris's trousers, guiding him forward. "We must be careful. I don't know who else might be watching."
"Watching?" Aris whispered.
Galaeron stopped, and the black mists ahead slowly grew translucent. Aris saw that they had stopped just inside the Shadow Fringe. Ahead lay a large crater lined in obsidian, with no apparent seams and a surface as smooth as the interior of a glass bowl. Standing near the bottom, spaced at equal intervals along the inner wall, were Khelben and the four sisters. They held their arms outspread, fingertips pointing toward their comrades to either side, so that they formed a great ring around the interior. Within this circle lay a disk of gray opalescent light, which they were slowly walking toward the bottom of the basin.
Vala was nowhere in sight. Nor were Telamont and his princes.
Aris kneeled at Galaeron's side and stooped down to whisper, "Perhaps they did not find-
Galaeron made a motion, and the rest of Aris's sentence vanished into silence.
The mythallar is beneath that dimensional portal, Galaeron's voice said inside his head. Vala is here somewhere, you may be sure.
Aris was about to ask whether Telamont was also there when, about a quarter of the way around the crater, the dark figures of all ten surviving princes emerged from the Shadow Fringe. They did not step from the obsidian lining so much as they peeled themselves out of it. They began to slide silently down the wall. Aris reached for his tool pouch for something to throw and started to rise, but Galaeron put out a restraining hand.
The Chosen will have foreseen this.
The princes were almost upon the Chosen when they struck an invisible barrier and came to an abrupt stop, tiny forks of golden energy crackling outward around each impact point. They leaped to their feet, wailing in pain and shock, and scrambled a few steps up the wall then stopped there, bleeding dark mist into the air. Three of them collapsed again almost immediately and melted back into the Fringe. The others hurled globes of shadow magic toward the bottom of the crater. The bails hit the barrier and erupted into huge black sprays, then rained back down in tiny beads of darkness that skittered across the invisible surface like drops of water on a hot frying pan.
While the others continued to assail the barrier, the gaunt figure of Prince Lamorak conjured a shadow disk. He and his brother Malath stepped aboard and floated out toward the center of the crater, their fingers working madly as they twined strands of shadowsilk into the shape of a small hand axe.
Aris grabbed one of his chisels but before he could pull it from his tool bag to throw, a bolt of golden magic streaked down from the opposite crater rim to blast Lamorak's shadow disk into shards. Malath pitched headlong into the invisible barrier and fell instantly limp, his body first melting into a black puddle, then coming apart and skittering across the surface in steaming black globules. Lamorak hit on his back, screamed once, and managed to bounce himself into the air. He vanished with the sharp crackle of a teleport spell.
Aris looked across the crater toward the source of the golden bolt and glimpsed a swirl of Vala's golden hair as she dropped out of sight behind the rim. Though he had never seen her cast a spell, it was not a wild guess to think that one of the Chosen might have loaned her a ring or wand capable of hurling the magic bolts. Unfortunately, Aris was not the only one who had spotted her. Yder and Aglarel scurried after her, their lanky limbs oddly spider like as the princes ascended the slick wall.
Aris glanced down and was relieved to find his friend staring after Vala, his elf brows arched high in concern. Still, Galaeron made no move to go after her. Recalling how, while facing a similar situation under the influence of his shadow self on the Saiyyadar, the elf had nearly gotten him killed by using him to bait a dragon into an ambush, Aris grabbed Galaeron's shoulder and urged him after her.
Galaeron pulled free of Aris's hand.
They would have foreseen that. We must wait here in the Fringe for what they did not foresee.
Aris started to ask angrily what that might be, but Galaeron's spell kept him silent. He could only wait and watch as the Chosen, ignoring the princes' ever more frantic efforts to penetrate the mystic barrier, continued to walk the dimensional portal toward the bottom of the basin. Yder and Aglarel reached the rim of the crater and disappeared over the top. The basin began to tremble and fall away beneath them.
Aris's jaw dropped. The Chosen had done it — Shade was falling. He snatched Galaeron up. Determined not to become separated from the others whatever the elf said, he jumped into the basin — but landed in the same place he had been, with the basin continuing to fail away below him.
When we are needed, Galaeron hissed. Not before.
How long he had lain chained on Shar's altar, Malik could not say. All he knew was he had grown so weak with hunger that his belly had lost the strength to rumble, that his tongue was so swollen with thirst he could not have drunk if someone had given him water, that his ears had become so inured by the constant hissing of the Hidden One's worshipers that the sudden silence left him feeling deafened and dizzy.
He had the sensation of floating — a sensation that only grew stronger when his shadow on the ceiling started to shrink and loom ever darker, when the stream of silver magic pouring from the stone began to swirl around him in beads as large as his head, and especially when the confused forms of Shar's worshipers began to tumble through the air and bounce along the shadow-stained ceiling.
So weakened by thirst and hunger was Malik that for a few moments, he was too confused to comprehend what he was seeing. Had he finally died and begun his journey to the Shattered Castle, or had the harlot Shar suddenly granted all her worshipers the ability to fly? Or perhaps it was an hallucination. Perhaps all the hardships he had endured on behalf of his god Cyric had finally taken their toll, leaving him as demented and mad as once his god had been.
Then Malik hit the end of his chains and felt his withered hands nearly slip free of one of the manacles, and he knew what had happened. The One had answered a prayer. Finally, Cyric had taken mercy on his poor servant and raised a finger to help in the impossible mission he had assigned him, and soon the Sharites would pay for all of the torment and abuse they had heaped upon him while he lay chained to their goddess's stolen altar.
"Your doom is upon you!" Malik yelled through the floating swirl of silver beads. "Cyric has come for me at last, and he shall take a terrible vengeance on you."
"Fool!" — the voice that hissed this came from his own shadow, lying flat upon the ceiling not a dozen paces above him-"Nothing could be farther from Cyric's mind than your misery."
"You cannot know that!" Malik said, more for his own comfort than because he believed his shadow needed to know. "You are nothing to him." He meant to stop there, but felt more words welling up as Mystra's curse compelled him to speak the full truth. "Except another torment for me!"
This drew a purple smile from the shadow, which said, The one service I am happy to perform for your lying god, but that does not change the truth of what is happening. The city is falling."
"Falling?" Malik shrieked. He noticed that other voices were beginning to join him. "With me in it?"
"A pity, is it not?" the shadow asked.
"More than you know." hi this, Malik was telling the truth, for Cyric was fond of telling him the fate that awaited him if he ever failed in one of the divine missions assigned to him. It took only an instant for the thousand promised torments to flash through his mind, for in his infinite wisdom, the One had made Malik memorize them until he knew them all as well as his own name.
But there was no way to avoid it. The city was going to crash into the desert, and he was going to die along with everyone else, no doubt crushed beneath the Karsestone, since he was still chained to it… and that was when Malik saw how he would save himself.
Once before, when Cyric had sent Malik to fetch a sacred book from inside the Keeper's Tower at Candlekeep, the One had told him he had only to call the name of the One and All three times once he had succeeded in his duty and he would be rescued. Given that Yder had called the Karsestone the crown of his goddess Shar, and given that it was also the only remaining source of the ancient whole magic in all of Faer?n-perhaps even Toril itself-it seemed reasonable to suppose that he who controlled the Karsestone might also control the Shadow Weave.
The stone might be, Malik realized, just like a crown. If not actually the source of Shar's power over the Shadow Weave, it was at least a symbol of it, and he had learned in Calimshan that he who controlled the symbol soon owned the power.
When the city's true caliph had lost his crown to a ring of thieves, the master of the thieves had audaciously set the crown on his own head and challenged the caliph to take it back. Try as he might, the old man never succeeded, and it was not long before the city revered the thief as the new caliph.
And so it would be with the Karsestone, Malik believed. No-he knew. There could be no other reason the goddess of shadows would permit an artifact of such blazing light to serve as the High Altar in her holiest of temples.
Seeing that he had floated to within five feet of the ceiling- and that his shadow was little larger than he himself, but as black as obsidian-Malik closed his eyes. He had no idea how long it would take the city to crash into Anauroch, but they had been falling for a full five or ten breaths, and they had to hit soon.
"I have it, Mighty One! I have the Shadow Weave chained right here on my back!"
When Mystra's curse did not compel Malik to add anything more, or even to clarify that it was just a symbol, he decided his plan was going to work and called, "Cyric, the One, the All!"
Nothing happened. He floated so close to the ceiling that he could not see anything except his shadow's smirking face.
"How pitiful you are," it said. "It shames me to know I spring from your image. Even if Cyric could hear you, do you think he would answer?"
"If he could hear me?" Malik screamed. "What do you mean if?"
"What do you think I mean?" the shadow retorted. "This is the temple-"
The explanation came to an abrupt end as Malik touched the ceiling and came into contact with his shadow. The red eyes winked out and its shape grew more squat and less monster like. Malik experienced a rush of cold magic as it reattached itself to his body.
"Thish is justh what you desherve!" With his face pressed against the stone ceiling, it was impossible to speak clearly. "You will be with me when I fathe the One'sh anger!"
The ceiling lifted away from his face, and Malik thought for a moment that his shadow had been wrong, that Cyric had come for him after all. Then he heard splashing, and screaming, and all around him he saw Shadovar flailing their arms and beads of silver magic assuming teardrop shapes as they plummeted back toward the temple floor.
Closing his eyes, Malik yelled again, "Cyric, the One, the All!"
Nothing happened, except that a steady roar began to build beneath Malik. No sooner had he identified the sound as the Karsestone's steady stream of magic pouring into the pool below than the roar exploded into a thunderous splash, and the air shot from his lungs as his back slammed into the Karsestone. He bounced once and felt his legs come free as the shackle bolt holding his feet came out, then he felt bones snapping in one hand as it was pulled through the closed manacles.
For a moment, Malik thought it would end there, that everything would go black and he would awaken on the Fugue Plain, abandoned to the rough mercy visited upon all the faithless wretches who displeased their holy masters by the thieving god of the dead, Kelemvor.
But that was not to be. Still attached to the Karsestone by his one unbroken hand, Malik rolled off to the cracked side and caught the spray of magic full in the face. Before he could close his mouth and twist away, he swallowed three huge gulps, and of course they went down the wrong passage and immediately filled his lungs.
Malik expected to drown-and quickly-but this was magic. It coursed through his lungs into the rest of his body, filling him with renewed vigor. The weakness brought on by his hunger and thirst vanished, and the hand he had just broke began to heal-though with the fractured bone still unset, it felt like Aris had driven a chisel through it. Malik gathered his legs beneath him and turned to find the temple filled with battered Shadovar, some floating facedown in the silver magic and some sloshing toward the exit arches as fast as their dark legs would carry them.
A pair of fanatical Shar worshipers saw him standing beside the Karsestone and started to rush it, yelling that this was the doing of the infidel thief. It was at that very moment that the ceiling vaults gave way beneath the strain of the sudden stop and began to shower down into the temple. The largest worshiper was crushed beneath a section of a stone rib as long as Aris was tall, and the other vanished behind a screen of falling debris.
Making good use of his Cyric-given ability to vanish, Malik ducked beneath the surface of the silver pool to hide. The surviving fanatic arrived a moment later, hacking into the water with his black sword and swearing that he would mount Malik’s horned head on his wall. Though it would have been a simple matter to follow the last manacle chain down to Malik's hand itself, the One's magic prevented the worshiper from seeing this. Malik came up behind him, reaching around to draw the Shadovar’s dagger from his belt He used the worshiper's own weapon to open his belly.
A long section of wall collapsed behind Malik. The whole temple tilted, and he found himself being dragged along behind the Karsestone as the current carried everything in the room toward a huge whirlpool in the corner. He had just enough time to realize that he was about to be dragged down one of (he drainage pits he had noticed upon his first awakening in the chamber.
Malik felt for a moment like the city had begun to fall again, but then his manacle chain went slack, tight, and slack again as the Karsestone hit something, bounced, and began to roll. He found himself first flying wildly through the air, then watching the stone fly past over his head, then being jerked along behind it before he finally slammed into it face first and came to a rest.
Compared to the crash and roar of the initial fall, the chamber seemed eerily quiet. That did not mean silence. The air was filled with the wailing and groaning of the injured, the staccato splashing of debris and people falling into viscous pools of magic, and the steady gurgle of the magic stream still pouring out of the cracked Karsestone. Malik slowly picked himself up, and discovering he had survived more or less intact, he turned to see where he had landed.
He lay propped against the wall of one of the workshop caverns where the Shadovar made their shadow blankets. To his right lay the huge, comblike loom they used to weave the shadowsilk into cloth, and to his left lay the hundred-yard slit they used to provide the light they needed to create shadow. Most interesting to Malik, however, was the shallow tin pan directly in front of him. Tipped at a steep angle because of the city's tilt, the pan was easily a hundred paces square, but no more than a fingernail’s thickness in depth. At the far side-several dozen yards higher than Malik's head-was a long collection trough still containing some of the silver magic that had once distributed evenly across the trough.
A tremendous rumble shook the loom cavern, then it slowly righted itself. The silvery magic from the Karsestone spilled into the tin pan and began to spread toward the far corners of the room. The sun drifted briefly across the mouth of the light slit, then vanished behind the top edge and sent a narrow wedge of shadow shooting across the pan. Where the shadow came into contact with the spreading sheet of whole magic, it bonded instantly into a wafer-thin triangle of shadow blanket
They use whole magic!" Malik gasped, suddenly understanding what he was seeing. "They need the Karsestone to make their blankets."
The city continued to tilt, going a little past center and tipping in the opposite direction. Realizing that whatever he had learned, it would do him no good if he did not survive to tell Cyric, Malik leaped to his feet. Sometimes pushing, sometimes pulling, and sometimes being swung along himself, he began to guide the Karsestone toward the sun slit along the right side of the room.
Given his usual luck, Malik thought he would probably manage to push the Karsestone out into the desert just before the entire Shade Enclave came crashing down upon them.
Dark as Galaeron's heart had grown, it had nearly torn apart as he and Aris watched Aglarel and Yder vanish over the basin rim in pursuit of Vala. After the abandonment of the caravan at Eveningstar, he had no illusions about the Chosen's willingness to risk one for the good of the many. That he was also willing to take the same risk-and with someone he loved-struck him as neither good nor evil, only necessary. That events had proven him right made him feel neither vindicated nor culpable, only sorrowful. He finally understood what Dove and the others had been trying to tell him that day-or so he believed, as his hand had finally healed and returned to its proper color-that the Chosen already carried their shadows inside, that it was not possible to bear so much responsibility and power without darkening one's own spirit.
"Ready yourself, Aris," he said. Galaeron spoke normally, for there was no longer any chance that the Shadovar would overhear him. "We are needed."
Through the thickening shadow fog rising from the battle below, the Most High was barely visible, a ghostly figure standing at the edge of the Chosen's melted defense barrier. He was staring down into the bottom of the basin, where the mythallar sat amid the fuming tatters of the dimensional portal Khelben and the others had been lowering over it when he finally revealed himself by spraying a wave of shadow fire across their overhead protection.
The battle after that had been as fast as it was furious, with the five remaining princes diving straight through the black flames to attack. In the few moments it took for the barrier to burn away enough for Galaeron to see what was happening, the dimensional portal was destroyed, the Chosen were engaged by the princes, and the city stopped falling-at least temporarily. The obsidian mythallar was a truncated sphere no more than a hundred feet high, but with ghostly shapes gliding about inside and the same dark aura as the first time Galaeron had seen it
The fight raging around the mythallar was both fierce and wild, with shadow balls and lightning bolts crashing against spell shields, silver blades clanging against black, feet and fists flying too fast for an eye to follow. Fearful of creating more dimensional rifts like the one that had sucked Elminster into the Nine Hells, both sides were avoiding the use of pure magic. Even so, in half a dozen places there were alarming whirls of shadow-filled air, two of which seemed to be drawing spells into their spinning hearts and growing larger as they fed on the magic.
Galaeron pointed at the broad-shouldered figure of Prince Clariburnus, who was being steadily beaten back by a blinding flurry of blade and foot attacks from Dove Falconhand.
"See if you can take Clariburnus from behind," he told Aris, "and tip the balance in our favor."
Aris hefted his giant hammer and replied, "111 distract him at least, but it worries me that we see only the princes and the Most High." The giant gestured at Telamont, who was holding his palms out toward the damaged mythallar, no doubt controlling the flow of the Shadow Weave to steady the city, and asked, "Where is their army?"
"Anywhere but here," Galaeron replied.
It didn't take a wild guess to know that the Shadovar would not want to run the risk that one of their soldiers would meet a stream of the Chosen's silver fire with a shadow bolt The resulting tear in the world fabric might well suck the entire enclave into a plane more hellish than the one they had just escaped.
Aris grunted, and asked, "Do I want to know what you will be doing?"
Galaeron pointed at Telamont and said, "111 be keeping the Most High busy."
Aris's eyes went wide.
"Has your shadow made you insane?" he gasped. "You're no match-"
"A bloodfly is no match for a roth? but which one does the biting?" Galaeron motioned Aris forward and said, "You will emerge behind Clariburnus."
Aris regarded Galaeron with a skeptical expression.
"Be careful, my friend. I have not yet given up on you."
Galaeron smiled and said, "Then it must be true, what the Sy'Tel'Quessir say-there is nothing more stubborn than a Stone Giant." He laid a hand behind Aris's knee and pushed.
"Hurry, before those fools open another hell mouth."
Aris lurched forward, stumbling out of the Fringe. Galaeron remained behind long enough to see him emerge from the basin's obsidian wall a few paces behind Clariburnus, his great hammer already arcing down toward his target's head. The prince sensed the attack at the last instant and twisted away, but the distraction was all Dove Falconhand needed to drive her own attacks home. Flinging magic with one hand and swinging steel with the other, she first dispelled the Shadovar's blade guard, then sank her magic sword to the hilt in his abdomen. He stumbled back under Aris's legs, letting out a throaty howl that was audible even above the battle din. The prince took his vengeance by slashing his black sword behind Aris's leg.
The giant's knee buckled, and that was as long as Galaeron dared watch before leaping out of the Fringe. He came out directly behind Telamont, kicking with both feet, calling a bolt of black lightning with one hand and swinging his stolen sword with the other.
The Most High did not flinch. He did not even look. He merely stepped out of the way. As Galaeron sailed past, he swung the sword and flung the lightning. As soon as his black blade touched Telamont's robe, it shattered. The lightning bolt fizzled an inch from his hand, then Galaeron found himself hanging motionless before his target, staring into a pair of flickering platinum eyes.
"Elf!" the Most High barked. In his anger, Telamont almost balled one of his wispy hands, and the city trembled as his control over the mythallar slipped. "How did you get free?"
Galaeron smiled-it seemed the Most High did not know all that happened in his palace.
"In the most unexpected way possible…"
Galaeron opened himself to the Shadow Weave and felt its cold magic come flowing into him from every direction.
"I took your advice."
Galaeron turned his palm outward and unleashed a bolt of pure shadow magic. The attack seemed to take Telamont by surprise, if only because he had not been prepared to see Galaeron calling upon the Shadow Weave. Unfortunately, it also had next to no effect, casting only a short-lived cloud over the Most High's face before it vanished into the darkness beneath his cowl. The city seemed to fall once more-for just a heartbeat-then the Most High caught it again.
"You have yielded to your shadow, I see," Telamont said. "It will not be long before you are able to return the information Melegaunt worked so hard to collect."
"I can recall it now," Galaeron said, "but you wouldn't be wise to count on me for favors-and 'yielded' is not the word I would have used. I have joined with my shadow, but my will remains my own."
Telamont's platinum eyes flashed, and Galaeron's limbs spread outward. He spun around until he was hanging upside down over the battle. Aris lay on the floor of the basin, bleeding from three different wounds and writhing in pain. The Chosen were faring far better. Though both Dove and Storm were pouring blood from rents in their armor, only three princes remained in the basin. Prince Mattick was giving ground under a furious assault of blade and spell.
All Galaeron had to do was keep Telamont's attention focused on him instead of the fight. He tried again to open himself to the Shadow Weave, but all he felt this time was a spongy presence through which no magic would pass.
"Is something wrong, eh?" Telamont asked. "Perhaps your will is not your own, after all?"
In the basin below, Prince Mattick had dropped to a knee beneath the furious onslaught of magic coming from Alustriel and Laeral. Dove and Khelben were driving his brother Vattick away from him and would soon be in a position to finish him with a blow from behind.
"My will is enough mine to vow you shall never have the knowledge Melegaunt passed to me," Galaeron said. "And if you doubt I have the strength to keep my oath-"
"Your strength I do not doubt. You resisted your shadow far too long." Telamont's voice was wispy and cold. "A pity, really. Had you surrendered to it as I urged, I could have saved you as I did Hadrhune. Now, you are useless to me. I will be forced to wring the knowledge from your worthless mind… just as I have your foolish hope for defeating my princes."
As Telamont spoke these last words, the princes Aglarel and Yder emerged behind Alustriel and Laeral. Aglarel caught Alustriel from behind with a vicious overhand strike that cleaved her a foot and a half through the shoulder blade before she could teleport away in a wailing spray of crimson blood.
Khelben glimpsed Yder from the corner of his eye and aiming his black staff over Laeral's shoulder blasted him with a storm of meteors that sent him tumbling halfway up the basin wall.
That left Mattick free to counterattack. He rose, wielding an oversized black sword in one hand and flinging a spray of winged black spiders from the other. The spiders swarmed Khelben's head in a droning black cloud, but it was the sword that proved most deadly, hacking Dove's leg off at the knee. She fell cursing and saved herself from a deadly second blow by unleashing a long ribbon of silver fire.
Mattick escaped a certain death only by flinging himself off to one side and bowling Khelben over by rolling into his legs. In the meantime, Dove's silver fire was burning through the shadowy fog above the basin, and Galaeron glimpsed a curving sweep of a sandy lakeshore far below. It took him a moment to register what he was seeing, and he realized why the mythallar was so difficult to find except through the shadows. The basin was in what had once been the top of the mountain but was now the bottom of the city, resting upside-down and looking straight down upon the desert below.
The hole in the clouds closed as quickly as it had opened, and Dove teleported to safety as well. Only Khelben, Laeral, and Storm remained, with the five Shadovar princes closing in around them and relentlessly herding the trio toward a whirling cyclone of shadow-filled air. There was Aris, too, still writhing on the floor, slowly sliding toward the middle of the basin on a sheet of his own crimson blood. No one was paying him any attention, and Galaeron quickly looked back to Telamont, lest the Most High sense the hope growing in his heart and do something to stop the clever giant.
Galaeron found even that strategy fraught with peril. Sliding down the basin wall behind Telamont was Vala, holding one hand clamped into a fist so she could point a star-shaped ring at the Most High's back. In the other she carried her darksword, her arm cocked and ready to throw at the first sign that he knew she was there.
Desperate to keep his mind on something else-and terrified that Telamont had already sensed his thoughts- Galaeron looked back to the Chosen.
"Use the silver fire!" he shouted. "It is the only-"
"Silence, you fool!" Telamont said. "Would you destroy Faer?n rather than let us have a place-"
He too fell silent as, to Galaeron's amazement, Khelben raised his hand and loosed a stream of the shimmering magic fire at Telamont. Crying out in rage and disbelief, Telamont had no choice but to lift both hands and raise a spell shield before him. Freed of the Most High's grasp, Galaeron plummeted toward the bottom of the basin and barely had time to cry out a spell of soft falling before the air erupted into whistling white sparks and cracking lances of black lightning. He brought his legs around beneath him and landed atop the mythallar itself-just in time to turn and see Vala come tumbling into Telamont from behind.
What happened next was impossible to say. He saw Telamont’s shadowy feet fly, Vala's sword arc, and a black arm whip into the crackling air. All of them dissolved into shadow.
The blow of a tremendous hammer shook the mythallar, and Aris cried out in triumph. Something like a volcano exploded beneath Galaeron's feet, and he found himself tumbling through air as black and as thick as tar.
He smashed into an obsidian wall and tumbled to his feet only to have his legs fly out from beneath him as the basin swung up beside him. He went somersaulting down toward the edge then came to a sudden stop, then went cartwheeling back toward the center. Three times he glimpsed the mythallar, chipped and pouring shadow fume out into the basin, with Aris wedging his legs beneath one side and still hammering at it with his sculpting hammer, before he hit it and stopped.
"Aha, Galaeron!" Aris cried. "It is an unworkable stone, but not too hard to flake!"
"I think-" the basin pitched wildly in the other direction, and Galaeron barely kept himself from tumbling away by grabbing hold of the giant's tool bag-"you have done enough!"
Aris stopped hammering long enough to ask, "What else is there to do?"
Galaeron saw Vala go tumbling by-and sweep Vattick off his feet to leave a severed Shadovar leg in her wake-before she vanished into the black mist and began to scream a savage Vaasan war cry. Galaeron plucked a handful of shadowstuff from the blackening air and shaped it into a pair of spiders. One of these he passed to Aris with instructions to swallow, and the other he gulped down himself. Two quick incantations later, and they were both scrambling across the basin on all fours, their hands and feet sticking to the slick surface as though coated with paste.
They found Vala and the last three Chosen in desperate straits, unable to keep their feet and caught inside a ring of Shadovar princes. Aglarel hurled a shadow ball at Storm, who barely managed to swing her legs around in time to take the attack in the thigh instead of her chest. The orb drilled a fist-sized hole through muscle and bone that clearly left her unable to fight, yet she did not teleport away as had the other Chosen when they grew too wounded to fight. Khelben leveled his staff at the prince who had wounded her, but the only thing that shot from the end was a laughable drizzle of yellow light.
Galaeron touched a finger to his temple, then used his shadow magic to speak to Aris in his thoughts
They're helpless! he explained. The shadowstuff is smothering their magic.
Aris nodded then pointed to Aglarel and Yder, and hefted his hammer.
Good, Galaeron sent. Go.
They sprang forward together, Aris catching the two princes by surprise, smashing their helms and sending them somersaulting across the basin floor before they vanished into the black mists. Galaeron caught Mattick from behind with a shadow bolt that sent him tumbling headlong into the Chosen's midst, where Laeral and Khelben quickly proved that they were not entirely helpless by planting their daggers at least twice in every unarmored inch before the prince beat a hasty retreat by dissolving back into the shadows.
That left Brennus, Clariburnus, and Dethud attacking from behind. A pair of dark bolts caught Khelben in the shoulders and sent him sliding across the basin toward Aris, while a shadow claw extended from Dethud's forearm to close around Laeral's throat and start dragging her back toward the Shadovar's ranks. Galaeron leaped forward to attack, but Vala was already hurling her darksword into the prince's chest. The weapon sank to the hilt, then dropped to the floor as Dethud retreated into the shadows.
Vala called the weapon back to hand and started to charge Brennus but was knocked from her feet as that basin made another wild swing. Her hip had barely touched down before she was back on her feet and starting forward.
Galaeron caught her by the arm and said, "It's done."
"Not yet." She turned and pointed up the basin wall into the black mists and said, "I got one of his arms, but Telamont’s still up there."
A pair of dark disks came hissing across the basin and would have slashed their heads off, had Aris not knocked them off their feet before it arrived. Galaeron rolled to his knees and counterattacked with a flight of shadow arrows.
Brennus blocked them easily and sent the dark shafts streaming back in their direction. Aris took two in his arm, and Vala one in her shoulder, and three more nicked Galaeron along one side of his neck and arm.
"If s done," Galaeron said. They were the most difficult words he had ever been forced to say, and also the surest. He took Vala's arm and shoved her back toward the three battered Chosen. "We aren't going to win this."
Aris refused to retreat.
"But the mythallar-"
"Is cracked," Galaeron said. "Perhaps that will be enough to bring the city down."
Aris turned and hurled his hammer at the heart of mythallar.
Clariburnus waved his hand and sent the tool somersaulting away, then Brennus sent a bank of black fog rolling toward them. Galaeron raised a wind spell that he hoped would send the fog rolling back toward the princes, but Brennus dispelled it with a gesture. Storm began to choke on the fumes, and it occurred to Galaeron that he was learning something else about power, that sometimes the most difficult part of wielding it was knowing when it was not enough.
"We've done as much as we can."
Galaeron motioned for the wounded giant to gather up Storm and the other Chosen, then he grabbed hold of Vala and shoved her into the others.
"Well said, elf," Khelben replied. He stretched a hand behind Vala's back to clasp Galaeron on the shoulder. "You're learning."
Another shadow bolt came hissing into the group to catch Storm square in the back. Laeral's arm lashed out to catch her sister under the arm, then the basin tipped precariously in the opposite direction. Only Aris's sticky appendages and long reach kept the group from tumbling across the basin and becoming separated again.
"All right!" Laeral cried. "Galaeron, will you please get us out of here while there's still something left to get out of?"