Song of the Saurials Page 34

  “Alias,” Finder whispered, “that’s not true. I love you with all my heart.”

  “No, you don’t,” the swordswoman declared. “You don’t understand the first thing about love.”

  Finder was silent for a moment, too ashamed to argue further. All the things Alias had said were true except one. He did love her, even enough to admit he was wrong. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I should have used the stone before. It’s too late now, I know, but I’m sorry.”

  “Prove it! Release the ice from the stone!” Alias replied vehemently. “Use it to stab Moander through the heart and freeze it to death! Then we can rescue Akabar!”

  “I’m … not sure that will work,” Finder said hesitantly.

  “It just might,” Grypht interjected hurriedly, “if we can attach the para-elemental ice to something that can withstand that much cold … a magical weapon or staff, perhaps.”

  Dragonbait took his sword from Alias and offered it to the wizard, hilt first.

  “Para-elemental ice on a magically flaming sword?” Grypht said dubiously. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  Finder looked at Alias’s tear-stained face. Now he had some idea how she had felt when he had scolded her for the heresy of changing his songs. The bard struggled against an uncontrollable desire to make her smile again. In the end, he lost the struggle. He drew out his dagger. “This belonged to my grandfather,” he said. “It has certain power against evil creatures.”

  “That should do nicely,” Grypht said. “Now, do we break the stone to get at the ice?” he asked.

  “Can you levitate the stone?” the bard asked, holding out the finder’s stone.

  Grypht nodded and pulled out a tiny golden wire from the pocket of his robe. As he concentrated on summoning the magical power to him, the smell of fresh-mown hay began to fill the cave. “Rise,” he said, shaping the wire into a scoop and lifting it into the air. The wire glittered and vanished as Finder’s magical stone drifted out of the bard’s hands.

  From outside came the sound of splintering wood as Moander made its way through the forest below the cave, ingesting the trees into its body.

  Finder tapped on his magical stone with the tip of his dagger until he had positioned it so that the long axis was perpendicular to the floor. “Olive,” the bard said calmly, “I need your steady halfling hands and your sweet halfling voice. Are you still wearing that ring I gave you?”

  “Yes,” Olive said. “Do you want it back?”

  “No. I want you to be wearing it for protection. Take this one, too, to keep the chill off.” The bard slid a second ring from one of his fingers and slipped it on Olive’s finger beside the one he’d given her earlier.

  He looked up at Alias. “I need you to sing a high C,” he said, “on cue. Hold it until I motion for you to stop.”

  Alias nodded.

  “Olive, a high G for you, and hold it.” Finder motioned for the two women to begin. As their voices blended in a chord, the bard began singing a series of random atonal notes. Then he motioned for the women to stop. He tapped his dagger on the side of the Finder’s stone, and a tiny crack appeared at the center of the stone along the facet lines.

  From outside, the sound of the toppling trees and the rumbling of the ground as Moander advanced grew so loud the adventurers had to raise their voices to be heard. They could hear Moander’s cacophonous chanting of its name clearly now. Dragonbait moved to the cave entrance to keep an eye on the god’s progress.

  Handing his dagger to the halfling, Finder ordered her, “Hold it so the blade is level to the ground.” Olive held the dagger out with both hands.

  The bard lifted the top of his magical stone away from the bottom. A terrible cold filled the cave instantly, causing their breath to steam. The water droplets on the walls of the cave froze; the ferns on the ground turned gray and brittle, and the swallows nesting in various nooks and crannies began twittering in alarm. Alias’s arms began to turn blue and she started to shiver uncontrollably. Grypht moved toward the mouth of the cave, where the air was warmer. Protected by Finder’s ring of cold resistance, Olive didn’t notice the chill. Finder simply ignored it.

  “Alias, take this,” the bard said, handing the swordswoman the top of the stone.

  Alias took the piece of crystal gingerly, expecting it to be cold, too, but it felt as warm as Finder’s hand.

  Sticking out of the center of the bottom of the stone, like a needle in a pincushion, was a sliver of ice as clear as glass. Finder held his hands beneath the stone and ordered Grypht to release it from his levitation spell.

  “Done,” the wizard replied from the mouth of the cave.

  Finder knelt down in front of Olive. He huffed once on the tip of the dagger blade to cover it with moisture. “Steady now, Olive girl,” he said. He tilted the stone so that the tip of the ice needle touched the dagger’s groove. As he slipped the stone away, the needle of ice fell into the groove, with the end of the needle hanging out over the tip of the dagger. Finder breathed on the blade once again to freeze the needle of para-elemental ice to the dagger’s blade.

  The bard stood up and tossed the bottom of the finder’s stone in his hand. “There may just be enough power in this piece to light my way to Akabar,” he explained to the swordswoman. “If I succeed in destroying Moander but fail to come out of the pile, you must try to use the top half of the stone to locate the mage.”

  “Can’t you put both halves together again?” Alias asked.

  Finder shook his head. “Never again,” he said.

  Suddenly Alias realized that Finder’s immortality might not protect him from death at the hands of a god. He might never come back to her. She’d asked him to sacrificed his stone, but she didn’t want him to sacrifice his life.

  “Let me take the dagger,” the swordswoman said. “Moander is as much my enemy as anyone’s.”

  Finder shook his head. “No. This is my responsibility,” he said firmly.

  The walls and floor of the cave began to shake from Moander’s approach. The swallows in the cave abandoned their nests and swarmed outside, fleeing from the quaking mountain.

  “Set the dagger down carefully, Olive,” Finder ordered. “Then I’ll have to ask for my ring of cold resistance back. Keep the ring of protection. As careless as you are, you need it.”

  Olive laid the dagger down in the frozen ferns. Finder took back the ring of cold resistance and slipped it on his finger. Hastily Olive pulled out the silver Harpers pin Finder had given her. As the bard bent over to pick up the dagger, Olive fastened the pin to his tunic, saying, “Wear this for luck.”

  “But I gave you that pin. It’s yours,” Finder objected.

  “Then you’d better bring it back to me, hadn’t you?” the halfling said with a wink.

  “Take care, little Lady Luck,” Finder whispered, kissing her gently on the forehead. He stood and looked into Alias’s eyes. “Remember, no matter what happens, I love you,” he said. Touching the sigil of Moander on her arm, he promised, “I will rid you of this.”

  “Moander is starting to move faster!” Dragonbait shouted. “You must hurry!”

  Finder kissed Alias’s cheek and rushed to the mouth of the cave. The pile of greenery was only a hundred feet away, and the top of the pile was now level with the cave entrance. Eight long tendrils, tipped with fanged mouths, snaked out from the god’s body toward the cave.

  Grypht drew back into the cave and began chanting.

  Dragonbait drew his sword, prepared to fend off the god, but Finder pushed the paladin back inside the cave. “Look after Alias,” he shouted over the din.

  Three of the tendrils snaked out and grabbed Finder, pulling him from the cave entrance. The remaining tendrils reached into the cave after Grypht and the others, but the slimy vines slammed into an invisible wall of force cast by the wizard. The saurials and the two women were safe for the moment, but they could only watch helplessly as the bard was drawn toward Moander’s body.


  As Moander constricted its tendrils around Finder’s limbs and torso, the bard forced himself to remain calm. There was a protective enchantment on the sliver of para-elemental ice that helped insulate the ice. He still needed to dispel that enchantment. The tendrils drew Finder to the top of Moander’s body, which now stood several hundred feet above the ground. The decaying greenery steamed about the bard, giving off a pungent, earthy smell. Hundreds of tendrils tipped with eyes and mouths waved over the surface of the god. One tendril, lipped with the eye of a deer, snaked toward him, studying him curiously. “You are possessed by my vines,” its mouth declared. “Why don’t you obey?”

  Finder laughed. “Because I’m not your servant, Darkbringer! I’m your doom.” The bard sang out a shrill note, dispelling the enchantment about the para-elemental ice, leaving it completely exposed to the air. Cold shot out from tip of Finder’s dagger in a blast of icy wind.

  The mouths shrieked as the tendrils supporting them froze and turned as brittle as glass. Finder slashed at the constricting vines with his dagger, and they shattered into pieces.

  Moander realized immediately it had made a mistake. The god had instructed its minions to channel most of its power into protecting it from fire, leaving it vulnerable to freezing. The para-elemental cold emanating from the tip of the bard’s dagger was a dangerous threat. The god abandoned the idea of capturing the bard. Survival had higher priority.

  As Finder hovered above the god’s body, holding out half of his magical stone, he thought of Akabar Bel Akash. The arguments the two of them had had over the finder’s stone brought the Turmish mage’s face readily to the bard’s mind. A beam of bright light sprang out from the piece of the stone, aimed at the center of the the pile of rotting vegetation.

  The eyes at the end of the tendrils blinked shut in the light. Without warning, a whole tree shot out from the god’s body, aimed right at Finder. The bard dodged to one side—right into an ambush.

  Finder suddenly found himself pelted with spears fashioned from the trunks of sapling trees. Several struck him glancing blows, then bounced away, but one pierced his thigh. The bard eased the spear out of his flesh. It was time to stop being a target. With his dagger held out before him, Finder plunged toward Moander, following the beacon light from the piece of magical stone.

  The vegetation on the surface of the god’s body shriveled as the bard approached it and crackled like glass as he shot straight through it into Moander’s interior. The bard could hear the mouths of the god’s body shrieking in pain. As the pile shifted and tumbled, Finder was slammed about like a die rattling in a cup. With every tumble, he crashed through frozen branches and vines and corpses of wild animals.

  Suddenly the tumbling stopped. Finder pulled himself together and began to follow the light from the finder’s stone once again. The deeper he moved into the god’s body, the warmer it became, so the cold from the para-elemental ice took longer to freeze the vines that tried to choke and entangle the bard. Finder was forced to expend more and more energy slashing and hacking with his dagger to clear his path.

  The bard began to feel weak from exhaustion and the blood he’d lost from the wound in his leg. Just as he began to consider abandoning his quest, the beam from the piece of the finder’s stone struck a patch of darkness it couldn’t penetrate. Finder halted in surprise and fear.

  The patch of darkness was shaped like a doorway, and Finder recognized it immediately. It was the gate between the Lost Vale and the plane of Tarterus, the gate that Moander had used to transport its saurial minions to the Realms. The entire body of the god had been built around the gate.

  Moander’s normal abode was the Abyss, but one could reach the Abyss from Tarterus. Moander must have sucked Akabar through the gate, through Tarterus, to its abode in the Abyss.

  A small, brilliant gem near the base of the gate caught the bard’s eye. He picked it up to examine it more closely. It was the shape and color of a drop of blood, and it felt warm in his hand. Very warm. It seemed to throb with great power. Could it be the seed that had resurrected Moander? Finder wondered. What would happen to the god’s new body if it was separated from the seed by a gate?

  The bard tried to toss the gem through the gate, but it bounced back. It would have to be carried through by a living person, he realized. Finder retrieved the gem and slipped it inside his boot. He approached the gate, but he hesitated before stepping through it.

  In his youth, the bard had visited the ethereal and astral planes a number of times. As an older man, he’d investigated several of the elemental and para-elemental planes. As a prisoner of the Harpers, he’d been exiled to the region between the positive energy plane and a quasi-elemental plane. The thought of stepping through a gate leading to an outer plane, though, filled him with horror—especially so fell a region as Tarterus, where, the sages said, creatures from the Abyss and from Hades constantly fought one another for control of the land, foul and poisonous as it was, and enslaved any beings they discovered.

  Dragonbait had leaped through such a gate into Tarterus to stalk evil creatures; that was how the paladin had come to be captured by the fiend Phalse and brought to the Realms. The paladin had suffered greatly at Phalse’s hands, but he had emerged from Tarterus alive. Moander’s saurial minions had survived their forced march through the plane, as well. The bard chided himself aloud for his trepidity. “Surely Finder Wyvernspur can brave its dangers.” It would be easier than facing Alias without Akabar at his side, he decided.

  Finder took a deep breath and flew through the dark hole, following the light of the piece of finder’s stone.

  As Alias, Olive, Dragonbait, and Grypht watched Finder dive into Moander’s body, they were filled with hope. The god cried out in agony and lost its balance on the mountain slope, tumbling down the slope into the vale, shedding great chunks of its body. Then it lay still. The adventurers emerged from the cave and for a long time continued their vigil over the god’s fallen body, but neither Finder nor Akabar emerged from the mass of greenery.

  Alias was beginning to consider climbing into the vale to do battle with the god herself, when suddenly she felt as if a burning brand had touched her sword arm. She looked down at her arm and shouted with joy, “It’s gone! Moander’s sigil is gone! The god is dead!”

  Dragonbait clutched at his chest from the pain the disappearing sigil had caused him, then embraced the swordswoman.

  “Finder’s destroyed Moander!” Olive shouted with glee.

  “No … he has only destroyed the body Moander occupied in this world,” Grypht reminded the others, and his words cast a shadow of foreboding on their elation.

  20

  Finder in the

  Underworld

  Once he’d passed through the dark gate inside Moander’s Realmsian body, Finder found himself hovering a few feet over a bog bordering a river. The soil from the bog glowed a dull red, bathing the surface of the plane about him in a hellish light. The plants of the bog lay on their sides, withered and brown. He was grateful his flying spell hadn’t worn off yet, for he would just as soon not touch the soil or the plants. The river was as black as night and flowed fast and smooth. Although the bard had never been to Tarterus, he knew enough about the plane to realize that the river was the Styx, and that to touch or drink from it would bring complete oblivion.

  The air of the plane might have been warm before he arrived, but around his freezing dagger it remained chill. In the sky overhead, he could see a line of receding spheres, like pearls spread out on an invisible string, all glowing a dull red. There was a different sphere of Tarterus for every world in the prime material plane. He was on the sphere connected to the Realms, and somewhere out there was the sphere of Tarterus that was linked to the saurial’s home world. There was air between the spheres, and he could fly from this sphere of Tarterus to the saurials’ sphere of Tarterus, but that was not his destination.

  The light from his half of the finder’s stone glowed much more dimly in this place,
like a candle burning in a nearly airless room. The bard could just barely pick out the trace of the beam of light indicating Akabar’s direction. Finder flew along its path. The light led to the river’s edge and stopped.

  He would have to take a boat, he realized. If he tried to travel by himself, he would attract the attention of the myriad of evil creatures that dwelled in this plane, creatures like Phalse, who captured fools like Dragonbait and himself who traveled where they shouldn’t. Even if he could keep from the notice of such creatures, he could easily get lost in this place and wander for centuries.

  He had only a vague idea of how one went about summoning Charon, the Boatman of the Styx. It required some magical spells that he didn’t possess. In lieu of that, Finder decided to try the only other magic he had beyond the broken finder’s stone and the dagger he might still need to use to wrest Akabar from Moander’s grasp. He pulled the horn of blasting from his belt. If it failed to bring Charon, it might at least hail one of the lesser boatmen who carried passengers along the river.

  Finder didn’t trigger the instrument’s destructive magic, but blew into it as he would a normal horn. He blew a fanfare he’d once composed in honor of a legion of soldiers who had all been killed in a single day in battle. It seemed an appropriate tune for this place. Then he waited.

  In less than a minute, the black water began to churn and froth; then a heavy, sparkling silver mist appeared upriver and drifted downstream with the current. As the mist drew closer, Finder could just barely make out the pointed bow of a boat shrouded within it. Then suddenly the boat, as black as the water of the Styx, emerged from the silver mist, and the mist dissolved into nothingness.

  A single boatman stood in the back of the boat and steered it toward the shore with a pole. The boat halted beside Finder, and the boatman held it stationary without any apparent effort, despite the swift current that flowed around it. Finder’s eyes widened at the sight of the boatman. It was Charon himself, not one of his helpers. The Lord of the Styx wore a full-length hooded cloak of black silk, trimmed with ermine. Beneath the hood, his face was haggard and his eyes glowed a fiery red. The hands that held the pole were nearly skeletal. The figure stood in the boat without speaking.