The Thieves’ Guild Page 19

  “More Knights will be here shortly to take you away. In the meantime, I think a small spell to immobilize you would be in order. You thieves are notoriously slippery. Besides, it is not often that I get to try my magic against living subjects these days.”

  Alynthia turned quickly to face Cael, her eyes twinkling. Reading her meaning, Cael stepped toward the Thorn Knight, his staff gripped crosswise before him.

  Sir Arach jumped back and held up one hand, palm forward. “Halt! I command you!” he shouted in a resounding voice. His outstretched hand glowed with silver light, and a shimmering cloud of tiny silver stars descended upon the two thieves.

  Cael froze, waiting, but nothing seemed to happen. Sir Arach smiled and relaxed, turning away to see if his guards were nearing. Cael looked at Alynthia, who merely shrugged.

  Cael took another step toward the Thorn Knight, who spun round at the sound of his footstep, surprise and contempt in his rodent eyes. The Knight whipped his still-cocked crossbow from his robes and held it tremblingly pointed at Cael’s chest. “No closer, thief,” he warned.

  In a flash Cael reached out and cracked the Knight’s hand with his staff. Bones crunched, and the crossbow went sailing over their heads, loosing its bolt into the night. Sir Arach staggered back, startled by the speed of the elf’s attack. He sucked his broken fingers for a moment, then spun and fled down the dark alley, his gray robes flapping.

  Alynthia pushed past Cael and snatched her dagger from the cobblestones. In the same movement, she reversed it with a flip and raised her arm to throw, but Cael caught her by the wrist.

  “He’ll raise the alarm!” she hissed.

  “Kill a Lord Knight, and not even Mulciber can protect you,” Cael calmly stated. He held her wrist a moment longer, then released it. She jerked away from him, then turned and watched the Thorn Knight vanish around a corner.

  “You’re right,” she said reluctantly. “We’d better go.” Without turning to see if he followed, she stalked away. She paused at the alley’s end, glanced over her shoulder, then slipped around a corner into the night.

  “You’re welcome,” Cael called as he dashed after her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They paused an hour later and looked behind them. A hundred feet back, the gray-robed Thorn Knight appeared from a darkened alleyway. Surrounding him were six other Knights of Neraka, their swords drawn and gleaming in the moonlight.

  “Damn,” Alynthia swore. “We’ll never lose him. He uses magic to follow us, I’ll warrant. However, I know just the place to elude him, if you have nerves of steel.”

  “Where you lead, I shall follow, be it even unto the gates of the Abyss, Captain,” Cael said theatrically.

  His chest heaved, his lungs burned. They’d been running in circles for what seemed like hours, trying to elude the patrols of Knights. They had taken to the sewers, only to be forced back into the streets and alleys to avoid being captured by a veritable legion of torch-wielding city guards.

  “Follow me,” Alynthia ordered, as she took his hand and tugged him along.

  The dusky-skinned thief led him along a winding path, down alleys and streets, keeping to the evening’s deepening shadows. Ahead, there loomed a larger shadow, darker than the surrounding night, and as they neared it, Cael realized that it was a grove of trees. A chill wind, not born of the mountain heights but of fear and death, blew from it. Alynthia’s hand in his began to tremble, her steps faltered, but her eyes dared him onward. He followed, feeling an unaccountable abhorrence and loathing fill his very soul.

  Finally, they stopped, unwilling or unable to go further. Before them, the Shoikan Grove sighed as some inner wind stirred its branches. This legendary place had once guarded the fabled Tower of High Sorcery, but now the tower was gone, vanished from the face of Krynn for almost forty years. The grove itself was said to have been created during the Age of Might, when the wizards of the Tower, besieged by public hatred and prejudices inflamed by the reign of the Kingpriest, abandoned their Tower, surrendering it to the Lord of the City rather than battle the citizens of Palanthas in a war that could only end in destruction. But as the Master of the Tower placed its keys in the hands of the city’s greedy lord, a black-robed mage appeared on the Tower’s highest balcony. He leaped into the empty air and impaled himself on the gates below. With his dying breath, he cast a curse on the grounds, and from that curse was born the Shoikan Grove, to protect the Tower from all trespassers until the Master of Past and Present returned.

  In time, the master did return and claim his own, but the grove remained, ever a watchful guardian. When, almost forty years ago, the Tower vanished, still the grove endured and even now stood guard over the empty, eerie grounds.

  Now, Alynthia and Cael stood in its moon shadow. High above, the pale white moon of Krynn shone down in all its full radiance upon them, but its rays could not penetrate the shadows beneath the trees. Even Cael’s elven sight failed to function in that awful place. He looked away, settling his gaze on Alynthia. Beads of sweat stood out on her quivering lip.

  “You want to hide here?” Cael whispered.

  “Are you afraid?” she asked in a voice cracking with fear.

  “Not in the least,” he lied.

  “Neither am I. Go ahead. Lead the way.”

  Cael took a step forward, steeling himself for the next, and the next. His foot sank into the soft mould lying just beneath the eaves of the outer trees. It seemed he heard voices whispering, inviting and yet cold and harsh, promising both rest and torment. He summoned his courage and took another step, passing into the trees’ deepest shadows.

  He pulled Alynthia after him and heard her cry out in fear. Looking back, he saw her despite the darkness, visible by her body’s heat. Her image was faint, as though the surrounding trees sucked the very warmth from her blood.

  He saw her staring in horror at her feet, her mouth open in a silent scream. The ground about them was heaving, the trees swaying, and they drew closer, their bony branches waving and reaching, clawing at her arms, tearing back her hood, tangling themselves in the tight ringlets of her curly black hair. Behind her, ghostly faces floated among the black trunks of the trees, chill white hands beckoning, blue lips crying for warmth and blood. Below, clasping one ankle, was the shadow of a skeletal hand. Where it touched her flesh, darkness spread. Without thinking, Cael swung at it with his staff and missed, striking instead the soft leafy ground.

  It was as though a pebble had been dropped in a pool. Ripples spread out from his blow throughout the grove, stilling the wind and silencing the voices. The hand clutching Alynthia’s ankle withdrew into the soil, the faces of the dead fled into the darkness, their eyes glowing red with hate but shrinking in fear. Alynthia swayed, and Cael caught her in his arms. Her lips were purple, her breathing shallow. She clung to him.

  Though the numbing fear did not lessen, the trees about them parted and drew back, or so it seemed, clearing a narrow lane to the grove’s heart, where once the tower stood. Cael lifted Alynthia in his arms and hurried along this path, stumbling at last into the moonlight once again. He set her down in the midst of a wide glade, at the center of which lay a circular pool, a still tarn of black water or oil that reflected the moonlight like polished glass. They cast themselves beside this, though they both felt a strange reluctance to touch it.

  Instead, they huddled together for warmth. Alynthia rested her head on Cael’s shoulder. Cael drank in the scent of her hair. The perfume of the yellow Ergothian lotus stilled the thundering of his heart. He pulled his cloak closer around them as the full moon climbed in the sky. Her trembling reminded him of a child he’d once held in his arms, a child he had found on the beach near his home, long ago. The child was the sole survivor of a shipwreck. He’d found her clinging to the body of her mother and had been forced to pry the girl’s fingers from the dead woman’s hair. His warmth and his strength had gradually eased her terrors even as her body gave way to shock and exhaustion. That night, the girl child ha
d died, and then there were no longer any survivors of the shipwreck.

  With the memory of her burning pyre in his mind, he pulled Alynthia closer still.

  The city beyond the magical grove had ceased even to exist. It was though they were the first children of a strange god, awakening in a strange new world. All around them, the trees watched. They formed a great black wall, lurking with an evil that had been temporarily subdued by Cael’s staff. Not banished. The leaves began to stir anew, and whispers cold as death crept like a fog across the glade.

  As the fresh chill began to increase, Alynthia stirred and looked into the elf’s face. His green eyes glittered in the moonlight. He did not notice her watching him. His eyes were on the accursed grove, his arms wrapped protectively around her. His gaze darted here and there, as though he saw hidden things moving among the deep shadows beneath the trees.

  The beautiful captain of thieves stirred, trying to wriggle free of him. “Let go,” she mumbled.

  Cael released her without a sarcastic remark. She rose and stepped toward the pool, then stopped suddenly. She turned back to him. “I’m sorry,” she said in an odd tone. “I shouldn’t have…”

  “Shouldn’t have what?” he asked.

  “I am your captain,” she answered firmly.

  Cael wearily rose to his feet. “Very well then, Captain. What now? It looks as though the Knights have no appetite to follow us here. So, how do we get out?”

  She turned away again and gazed at the pool. Cael couldn’t tell if she was hurt by his flippant tone or merely considering the options. She said without turning, “The same way we entered, I suppose.”

  Cael gazed at the weapon in his hands. Many times this day it had exhibited powers quite beyond his experience. Perhaps the proximity of so much arcane magic had triggered certain latent abilities, he speculated. Nevertheless, it seemed to wield power both against magic and the undead. It had even parted the trees of the Shoikan Grove. His master had mentioned no such powers when he gave it into his hands a little more than a year ago. Cael wondered if even his venerable shalifi was aware of the staff’s full potential.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Cael said, hoisting the staff before him. He placed a hand on Alynthia’s shoulder. “With this, we shall dare the trees again,” he said.

  She began to turn but immediately froze. A gasp of awe escaped her lips. “The pool,” she whispered. “Look at the pool!”

  Now close enough to see into its inky depths, Cael stared in wonder at what he saw reflected there. The Tower of High Sorcery stood once more. In the pool’s shining reflection, it rose high above the treetops of the Shoikan Grove, a shape of both beauty and horror. Before it, the old gate still stood, its rusted bars twisted into phantasmagoric shapes by the power of the Black Robe’s dying curse. Cael could see the remnant of the mages robe’s still dangling from the spike on which he perished.

  Above the image of the tower, stars wheeled in unfamiliar courses, stars arranged in constellations that shocked the elf to the core of his being. The constellations were those of the platinum dragon facing a five-headed dragon across an open book. Other figures took shape in the surrounding stars—scales, a harp, a vulture, a ram, and many others.

  Chasing each other across the night sky, reflected in the pool, were three moons. Each was more beautiful and captivating than the cold white moon that shone in the real sky. One moon shone with a bright silver light, the other was a red as elven wine, the third an ebon hole evoking the tapestry of the night.

  Cael knew these moons, he remembered these stars. A vision came unbidden to his mind. He remembered waking as a child and seeing through his bedroom window the red moon, Lunitari, rising from the Sirrion Sea.

  Cael’s staff began to glow. A nimbus of silver light spread along its length, then a red glow rose at the tips. Finally, the black ironwood of the staff itself seemed to throb with energy, not light and not an absence of light, but somehow, light’s antithesis.

  These moons, these stars, had vanished after the Chaos War, almost forty years ago. They could not be, and yet they were there, reflected in the mysterious pool. Both thieves looked up, only to find the familiar field of stars above them, the familiar white moon still racing among tatters of clouds.

  They returned their gaze to the pool. Now, they saw on the tower’s highest balcony a figure robed in darkness. He was neither an illusion nor a trick of the mind. Both Alynthia and the elf felt as though this black figure were staring fiercely at them, angry at their intrusion upon his solitude. He raised his hands, the sleeves of his ebon robes slid back, revealing milky white skin. Nimble hands scribed cabalistic symbols on the air, lips writhed. They heard a voice, filled with power yet far away, speaking not on the air but in the secrecy of their minds, as though in a dream, uttering words of magic.

  Cael struck the surface of the pool with his staff. The strange liquid, thicker than water yet thinner than oil, writhed like something alive. When it finally grew still, the image was gone, the Tower was no more. The two thieves backed away until the dead grass hid the pool from their eyes.

  “Let us leave this place,” Cael said with a shudder.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  This way. In here,” Alynthia whispered urgently as Cael hurried up the rickety stairs. She stood at the stair’s top, just beside a door and beneath a hanging sign painted with a large spreading tree. Below them, booted feet marched heavily down an alley slick with offal. Swords clanged against armored thighs, and spears clashed hollowly on shields as a patrol of Knights of Neraka passed almost beneath their feet.

  “Where are we?” Cael asked as Alynthia swung open the door. A wave of light, noise, and heat, and a greasy odor of fried potatoes struck him full in the face. Just to the right of the door, a long bar stretched curvingly away into smoky shadows. Behind it stood a huge man with unshaven jowls and a great belly stretching his beer-stained apron. He looked at the two of them expectantly but said nothing as he pulled a pint and slid it down the bar to one of his customers.

  “The Solace Inn,” Alynthia answered. They stepped inside. The door, hanging on titled hinges, banged shut behind them. “One of ours. We’ll be safe here.”

  The common room of the inn was large and bean-shaped, wrapping around an irregularly curved wall painted to resemble the trunk of a massive tree. The beams of the roof were likewise made to look like tree limbs. About two-thirds of the way back into the room, a large stone fireplace crackled with flame, making the warm, early summer night even-more stifling, but it proved. a welcome sight to two adventurers who had just come through the Shoikan Grove. Directly across from the fireplace, a long narrow table was shoved almost up against the curved wall. It left a wide empty space in the center of the room.

  “Some people call this place the Inn of the Next to the Last Home,” Alynthia said with a laugh as she slid into one of the six chairs surrounding the long table.

  “Why is that?” Cael asked with perfect seriousness. He dropped into the chair beside her.

  “I assumed you would know.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because… your father…”

  “Oh, that,” he said offhandedly. “I have only once visited the village he frequented, and that long ago. Is there a waitress?” He glanced around as he pounded the table with his fist.

  The inn was uncommonly empty this evening. A few customers huddled over their drinks at the bar, while a pair of dwarves sat at a table near the door and spoke in muted whispers, and an old man in a battered hat snored in one of the chairs by the fireplace. Cael again rapped his knuckles against their table and shouted for wine.

  Behind the bar, a pair of doors swung open, emitting a great fat slug of a woman. She crept around the bar and slowly approached their table. Her hair, once red as a bonfire, was shot through with silvery gray locks, while her huge freckled bosom hung half out of her frowzy dress. She smiled wantonly at the elf as she neared, revealing mossy brown teeth.

  “Wine fo
r me and my friend,” Alynthia said to the woman. “We’ll pay with circles of steel.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, madam,” the woman said, bowing a hasty retreat to the kitchen.

  “What was that?” Cael asked.

  “They call her Big Tika. By paying with ‘circles of steel,’ I informed her that we are of the Guild.”

  “But I thought—” Cael began, before a warning glance from Alynthia silenced him. The innkeeper approached, a pair of brown crockery mugs dangling from his fist. He clapped them onto the table, then drew a bottle from his apron and filled the cups to the brim with a thick yellow fluid.

  “Best of the house, Captains,” he said proudly.

  “I am sure,” Cael said uncertainly as he eyed his cup. He raised it to his lips, sniffed, sipped, winced, and set the cup on the table. Alynthia took a long draught of hers and sighed.

  “It is good, no?” the innkeeper asked.

  “Very,” Alynthia said. “Now leave us.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The man bowed his way to the kitchen.

  “What irks me,” Alynthia said while thoughtfully staring into her cup, “is that we’re still in the Old City. We can’t pass the gates, not tonight, so we’re stuck here, unless you care to hazard another journey through the sewers. They’ll be full of Knights and city guards.”

  “Not particularly,” Cael answered. “Where would we go? Back to the Guild so that my sentence can be executed?”

  Alynthia shook her head, then took another long draught of her wine. She set the cup down with a clunk and scrubbed her lips with the back of her hand. “I take full responsibility for our failure,” she said. “They cannot blame you. Oros will give us another chance.”

  “What of Mulciber?”

  “She is not unreasonable. No, the only reason she would order your death is if you tried to escape or if you betrayed us.”

  “You keep calling Mulciber ‘she’. Why is that?” Cael asked. “The voice I heard that morning when I was judged was neither male nor female, and I can find no one who has ever seen her. Have you?”