The Nether Scroll le-4 Read online

  Knowing there were undead in the fog, he changed course and headed for the hilltop. If the red-cloaked wizards were so confident of their strength that they relied on zombies for physical protection, then there was a chance-a slim but real chance-that he could stab one or two of them before he died.

  But the red-cloaked wizards weren't as reckless as he'd hoped. Halfway up the hill, Dru met another luminous creature. As dead, or undead, as the zombie, its eyes shone with sentience. It knew what to do with the steel halberd it carried.

  Druhallen dodged the undead warrior's first thrust and successfully beat the second aside without losing his right arm, but his knife was woefully inadequate against the halberd. Guessing that he was stronger than the creature, he slammed the blade into its sheath and clamped his hands on the halberd's shaft. The undead warrior howled. Spider-silk strands of red magic spun out of the wood. They numbed Dru's nerves and paralyzed his muscles. He couldn't release the shaft.

  Dru was screaming when the undead jerked the halberd and flung him through the inky fog like a stone from a sling. He never felt the landing.

  The world was dark when Druhallen next opened his eyes-new-moon dark with a thousand stars overhead. With his first waking breath, he was grateful to be alive. With his second, he recalled what had happened and what he had lost. A part of him would have preferred never to have awakened, but that was the lesser part of his spirit.

  He had to move, had to stand, had to find his way back to Elversult, but first he had to conquer his pain. The stranded magic of the undead's halberd had left him aching from the roots of his toenails to the root of each hair on his head. The cumulative ache was such that Dru didn't realize he had a more serious injury until he tried propping himself up on his left arm.

  His left wrist was broken and his efforts dislodged the bones, grinding the shards against one another. Dru cursed the world and returned to oblivion.

  Amber-rose glowed on the eastern horizon when Dru regained consciousness. Dawn wasn't more than an hour away. The all-body aches had subsided, and though his wrist had swollen to a ridiculous size, he managed to stand.

  The battleground was quiet, except for the crackle of fire in the wagons. The flames were starving. Whatever their purpose, the red-cloaked enemy had abandoned this place hours ago.

  There were no obvious survivors. None of the dark mounds strewn near the wagons moved or groaned. Druhallen realized he owed his life to the undead who'd hurled him off the battlefield. It was not a comforting thought. He began to search for Ansoain and Galimer, the tragic bride and her maids, the captain and his men.

  Druhallen's mind relived the ambush: A dozen magicians, each wearing a red cloak, had stood in a circle. His mind wandered far to the south and east, to the land called Thay. He'd never met a Red Wizard, at least not one who admitted his affiliation, but Ansoain had lectured him about their habits. More important, the Zhentarim had heard of them and regarded them as rivals.

  Ansoain had been adamant that she'd never worked for the Black Network of the Zhentarim, but she had contacts inside their organization. A few of those contacts might be termed "friends," and one or two of those might choose to avenge her.

  Dru's vision blurred. He raised his good arm and wiped away tears had hadn't known he was shedding. He looked down at another body. It had been the captain, and it had been savaged. A pack of wolves could not have done more damage. Even his mail had been shredded.

  The world began to spin. Druhallen dropped to his knees before they buckled. He retched violently. His tears were as hot as the acid churning in his gut and for several moments Dru was helpless in his grief. Then sanity returned. He stood and called the names he knew best.

  "Ansoain! Galimer! I live. Druhallen lives for you! Can you hear me?"

  In the lengthening silence, he seized a piece of smoking wood and hurled it at the empty hilltop.

  "Galimer. Galimer Longfingers!"

  Dru heard a sound, spun around, and laid his good hand on the hilt of his knife.

  Nothing. Not another peep or a twitch. Dru sighed. The east was brighter now. Soon, the ruins would stand revealed in all their horror and there'd be no need to bend low over each corpse with a mixture of hope and dread.

  Though not a religious youth, and utterly unaware of the affiliations of the men and women whose lives he'd briefly shared, Druhallen paused beside each body. He recited, as best he could remember them, the prayers of peace and safe-passage his grandmother had taught him. He was chanting safe-passage for one of the carters when he heard a second sound. This time, as he spun around, Dru glimpsed movement near a smoldering wagon.

  Leaving his prayer unfinished, he ran to the spot.

  "Dru-? Druhallen, is that you?"

  The voice, though weak, was unmistakable. Galimer Longfingers had survived!

  Stretched face down in the dirt, Galimer's legs were pinned beneath charred planks from one of the stone-filled wagons. Fearing the worst, Dru put his shoulder against the wreckage and bulled it aside. Galimer's fine clothes were ruined, but-miraculously-he appeared unbloodied, unburnt. Dru cautiously rolled him onto his back.

  "Tell me where it hurts, Gal-"

  "All over. I tried-My mind went blank of everything except dust," he said sobbing, "and I couldn't get it cast. I panicked. I hid, Dru. I hid. When they lifted their fog and called off their minions, I just stayed here where I'd hidden myself. Even when they ransacked the wagons and set them ablaze, I couldn't make myself move. I should have died."

  Druhallen closed his good hand over Galimer's. "It didn't matter. They had us beat from the first scent. At least you know what they did and said. I tangled with something undead and wound up out cold, two hundred paces away from everyone."

  "At least you fought! You cast what you could and then you fought." Galimer pulled his hand away from Dru and covered his face. "I should have died."

  "What's cut, stays cut," the carpenter's son advised. "If you hadn't hidden, you might well have died, and I'd be facing the road to Elversult with only a broken wrist for company."

  Galimer expressed concern for his friend's injury, but Druhallen wasn't interested in sympathy.

  "Can you stand? Walk? We need to find your mother. You said you saw them-"

  "Heard them," Galimer corrected as he grabbed Dru's shoulder and sat himself up. "I didn't see anything."

  "Kept your eyes closed, eh?" Dru laughed and stood.

  "I got hit by something bright when it all started. Everything's been blurred since." He flailed for Dru's arm with an awkwardness that lent credence to his claim. "I heard them, and that's about it. I didn't recognize their language. They came a damn long way to steal that girl and her dowry."

  Druhallen pitied the misbegotten girl, but cut was cut and his pity was worthless. He hoped she was dead. The dead didn't remember… usually.

  Leaning on each other, the friends surveyed the killing ground. It was just as well that Galimer's eyes weren't working too well. He was spared what Dru saw all too clearly once the sun was up. Whatever had killed Ansoain had torn her apart like so much stale bread. He recognized her by pieces: bits of cloth and scalp, a bloody chunk of her hand with fingers and rings still attached.

  Fighting nausea, Druhallen retrieved her rings. They were magically potent, not to mention intrinsically valuable. It was difficult, for many reasons, to understand why they'd been left behind.

  "She'd want you to have them," he told Galimer as he pressed the metal bits into his friend's hand. "Now, let's get out of here. I can see a few of the horses. You be the hands, I'll be the eyes…"

  Galimer balked. "Guide me to the hilltop. Maybe those bastards left something traceable behind."

  "Cut is cut," Druhallen muttered, but he led Galimer through the grass.

  The scents of spellcraft and malice lingered on the hilltop, and something else: a palm-sized glass disk. The disk was dark, but neither black nor completely opaque. So smooth and slick that it slipped through Druhallen's fingers when
he tried to retrieve it. The disk was colder than the claw of winter when he finally had it in his grasp.

  Ignoring numbed fingers, Dru held it up to the risen sun. Gold flecks sparkled within the icy glass.

  "There's something written on the edge," Galimer interrupted.

  "I thought your eyes were bad."

  "My body's eyes. My mind's eye sees clearly enough. That thing reeks of sorcery and there's writing on the edge."

  Dru rearranged his fingers and saw the truth of Galimer's statement. "I don't recognize the script."

  "Doesn't it tell you something through your fingertips?" Galimer asked.

  "Only that it's colder than winter."

  Dru balanced the lens in his left hand. It was an agonizing error. He gasped and the disk thumped to the grass. While Druhallen swore at himself and his pain, Galimer swept the grass with his hands.

  "Sweet Mystra!" the gold-haired mage swore as he clutched, then dropped, the glass. "Cold's not the half of it!"

  "Aye, but what is that other half?"

  Galimer pinched his fingertips to the scripted edge and lifted the disk carefully. "How about a way to control their undead minions?"

  Dru considered the possibility. "Did you see the robes they were wearing when they first appeared?"

  "That was the last thing I did see. Their robes were red."

  "Red robes. Red-robed wizards. The Red Wizards of Thay. They pool their magic and one wizard casts the spells for all of them. Nobody-nobody-knows how they do it. Until now."

  Druhallen fumbled with his folded magic box. It would have been easier to manipulate with both hands, but he'd designed it for single-handed work. As the hidden locks opened, the box unfolded, increasing in size and complexity. Reagents filled the revealed compartments. Dru's traveling spells were etched into the compartment dividers. With the third unfolding, he found an empty compartment large enough to hold the disk.

  Galimer squirted the disk into the empty compartment. "Being cold and dark, it's more likely a device for controlling the undead."

  "It's the circles." Dru clung to his opinion as if it were one he'd held for a lifetime though, before today, he hadn't given more than ten thoughts to Thay in the last year. "Anyone can control the undead. You or I could, if we chose to learn the art. But only the Red Wizards rely on the undead, because their circles make it feasible to control whole bone-yards. The arrogance! They descend from nowhere, take what they want, leave everyone for dead, and don't even bother to collect their trash."

  "Is it trash? How can you be sure? It didn't feel spent to me."

  "It's cold and dark," he snapped. "If it's not spent, it's useless."

  "Not useless," Galimer countered thoughtfully. "We can use it to prove that we were ambushed by the Red Wizards. That ought to put the wind in the Zhentarim."

  "Mind what you say," Dru said, sobering quickly though he had had similar thoughts a few moments ago. "Or we'll get caught between the Black Network and the Red Wizards." He folded the box and let it hang against his hip. "When we get to Elversult, we tell the Network that we were ambushed, but that we never saw what hit us. And we don't tell them about finding the disk."

  "Mother…" Galimer protested. "The girl, the captain and his men, the damn carters… We've got to tell the truth, Dru. There won't be justice without the truth."

  "What justice is there between Thay and the Zhentarim? We'll need a lifetime of luck just to clear our names of this disaster. Talk about red-robed wizards won't help us do that, and neither will a lump of rotten glass-"

  "I can't accept that, Dru. Not for her."

  "You don't have to. We'll avenge her ourselves. I swear to you right now and forever: We'll hunt those wizards down. We'll go to Thay, if we have to. We'll find out how they beat us, and well use their secrets against them."

  2

  28 Eleasias, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR) West of the Dawn Pass

  Druhallen leaned against a rough-plank wall. Fifteen years after Ansoain's death and the thought of her could still set his wrist aching. Especially in a Zhentarim village like Parnast, on the rump of the Dawn Pass Trail, when the natural heat of a northern summer met the unnatural heat creeping off the nearby Anauroch desert.

  The breeze coming through the open window was moving heat. The shade where Dru sat was dark heat. The air burned with the yellow dust of Anauroch. A storm was coming-possibly from the desert, certainly in the rented room he shared with his partners.

  "I'll lodge a protest. There's law in this town," Galimer fumed as he paced the room's not-considerable width. "They've forfeited their earnest money, that's given."

  "Wonderful! I'm sure they cared about their earnest money!" Rozt'a shot back.

  Florozt'a had come into Dru and Galimer's lives a few years after Ansoain's death. They were all younger then and she'd been new to the journeying life. She'd sold her sword to a Zhentilar captain who'd only pretended to value her fighting skills. When he'd tried, one too many times, to demonstrate what he did value from women, she'd left him writhing on the ground.

  It had been a short-lived victory. Rozt'a had quickly found herself without a contract and stranded on the empty road east of Triel with no more than her sword, the clothes on her back, and a leaking waterskin. The gods knew what might have happened next if Druhallen and Galimer hadn't been riding magic with the next eastbound caravan. They'd both remembered the striking woman and her boorish captain, and judged that he'd deserved whatever damage she'd done to him, maybe more.

  Riding double behind Galimer, she'd said that wizards who journeyed the Western Heartlands should hire their own bodyguards and not rely on someone else's muscle to protect them when the going got rough. Dru and Galimer, who scarcely needed words to exchange ideas, then or now, had hired her on the spot, more from pity than need. But Rozt'a fit comfortably between them, and by the end of that season they were a threesome.

  Rozt'a's hair was a few shades yellower than Galimer's and cropped ragged just below her ears. She was tall for a woman. In the sun, with her hair standing wild, she was nearly as tall as Druhallen and broader across through shoulders, in any weather, than Galimer. She and Galimer could pass themselves off as siblings. From behind, with her weapons and leathers about her, Rozt'a passed for the brother.

  When her temper was blazing as it did in the rented room, a wise man kept his head tucked low.

  "What's a bit of earnest to the likes of them?" she ranted. "If they cared about their precious earnest, they'd have waited for us. They were in one damn hurry and we're three full, forsaken days early ourselves! Helm's eyes! One nose-full of trouble and they ran with the first Zhentarim spend-spell who admired the shine in their purses. I tell you, this has nothing to do with Dekanter or the Beast Lord-those dogs meant to betray our faith from the start."

  She got Dru's attention with that last remark. Any time Rozt'a uttered the words "love", "betray", and "faith" in close order, she could count on Druhallen's full attention.

  It had been nearly nine years since she accepted Galimer's marriage proposal and, despite occasional outbursts, their union endured, but-make no mistake about it-the gold-haired mage hadn't been Rozt'a's first choice.

  Dru had missed all the signals. Galimer had been smitten with Rozt'a from the start, and what woman would be interested in a carpenter's burly son when she had the likes of Galimer Longfingers waiting on her every wish? Of course, he'd valued her company. Of course, he would have liked more-but the carpenter's son didn't poach, not on Galimer, not on his true friend.

  Then came the night when Rozt'a had ambushed him with a not-at-all-friendly kiss. He'd muttered something about honor and she'd replied that she was in love… with him. Galimer gallantly proclaimed that he couldn't be happier than to see them together. She began to talk of marriage, of children, and settling down in one place. The problem was that, as attractive as Druhallen found Rozt'a, he didn't love her as she loved him and talk of marriage, children, or rooting himself in the ground like a tree turned
his blood to ice.

  Druhallen had kept his reservations to himself for over a year. He came up with excuses-good excuses-to postpone the wedding until they reached Berdusk, on their way home to Scornubel for the winter, when Rozt'a announced that they'd be having a child come spring. The announcement was more of a surprise than it should have been and Dru would go to his grave knowing that he'd reacted poorly.

  Very poorly.

  They'd had a row that awakened the entire neighborhood. When the guard came to the door, Dru had walked out, leaving Rozt'a in tears and Galimer standing beside her. By spring, when guilt dragged him back, Rozt'a and Gal were married… and childless. The baby who would have been Dru's daughter had died in Rozt'a's womb and nearly killed her.

  Galimer had taken Rozt'a to Berdusk's Chauntean infirmary where priests had kept her alive with prayers and rare medicines. The newlyweds were deep in debt and desperately glad to see Druhallen of Sunderath.

  I've lined up enough journeywork that we'll have everything paid come autumn, but it would be a blessing if you rode with us, Dru. I can handle the steady magic-wards, scrys, and deceits-but I'm nervous in the pinch.

  Nervous in the pinch! Since his mother's death, Galimer hadn't cast a single spell from horseback and his mind blanked at the least surprise. He could line up the work, but he couldn't deliver it. Dru could, and backing the newlyweds for a season was the least he could do.

  We'll ride together, Dru had said to his friend, while Rozt'a stays here and rebuilds her strength. Come autumn, you and she will be ready to start your own family…

  Not at all, Galimer had replied. The Chauntean priests had been explicit: fever had put an end to Rozt'a's dreams of motherhood. Their future lay on the road, as it always had, with him. What had been cut could be made whole again, if he'd consent.