"Back at the start," she said, "I hired some of you to help me. Obviously, we"ve come a long way since then, far beyond notions of pay and employment. But I still want to share what I have, as a token of my grat.i.tude and love."
She upended her pouch and dumped the treasure clattering on a table. The coins, gems, and jewelry gleamed in the light of the fire crackling in the hearth.
Will craned on tiptoe so he could take a proper look, then, to her surprise, took only a single gold band set with a ruby. "This will do me for a keepsake. I picked up plenty on our way back through Brimstone"s cave. You can give the rest of my share to a temple of Lathander." His face twisted, and he blinked.
Raryn clasped the halfling"s shoulder. "He was the best of us," the ranger said.
"He was a useless charlatan!" Will spat. "But I miss him. A little."
Raryn turned to the pile and pulled out a fistful of gold and a truesilver armband set with emeralds. "I don"t need much, either, where I"m headed. But I might want some."
"Are you going somewhere?" asked Dorn, sprawled on a couch, a cup of brandy in his remaining hand.
"Back to the Great Glacier. Joylin"s there, with no kin left to look after her. I have to make sure she"s all right. I need to see my tribe again, too, now that they"ve betrayed me. I don"t want revenge, but I have to talk to them if I"m ever to forgive them."
"I"ll tag along," said Will, "if you"ll have me. I feel like doing something."
"I don"t envy you a second journey on the ice," Taegan said, elegant in the new blue and scarlet suit a tailor, extravagantly rewarded, had labored day and night to finish. "Particularly at this time of year. For my part, I intend to winter savoring the luxuries of Lyrabar, and resume my forays into the wilderness come spring."
"Where will you go then?" Kara asked.
"Back to my own tribe in the Earthwood, and then to other avariel enclaves, if I can find them. I finally understand why we hide from the world. To say the least, there"s no shame in it, but millennia after the chromatics gave up trying to exterminate us, there"s no longer any necessity, either. Someone ought to speak to the others of that, and of the advantages of rejoining the rest of civilization."
Perched on the mantelpiece, tail dangling, Jivex snorted. "I suppose that means the Gray Forest will have to do without me for a while longer. Since it"s clear you"re helpless without me. Now it"s my turn to choose." He lashed his wings, hurtled across the room, and landed amid the ma.s.s of gems and precious metal.
"If you"ll recall," Taegan drawled, "you and I never were in Lady Kara"s employ."
"It doesn"t matter," she said, smiling. "Both of you, take anything you want."
After the division of the treasure came the finest meal the kitchen could provide, its best wine, and toasts to Pavel, Chatulio, Gorstag, Igan, Madislak, Drigor, and everybody else who"d given his life to end the Rage. The company traded reminiscences of their lost comrades, and after some coaxing, Kara sang her first attempt at a ballad describing the dive into Northkeep. Everyone professed to find it splendid, though to her ear, it was still a raw, unpolished thing.
Finally, one by one, the others stumbled off to seek their beds. Until only she and Dorn remained.
He sighed. "Everyone"s leaving."
"As they probably should," she replied, holding his hand. "We"re all tipsy."
"I don"t mean now. In the days to come. I don"t blame them. They have things to do, and I obviously can"t follow."
"Do you believe," she asked, "they"re abandoning you forever? That you"ll never see them again?"
Scowling, he continued as if he hadn"t heard her. "You need to go, too. Pavel was was the best of us. You should always have been with him, not a freak like me, and now that I"m crippled again, our being together is just ridiculous. You-" the best of us. You should always have been with him, not a freak like me, and now that I"m crippled again, our being together is just ridiculous. You-"
She slapped the human side of his face.
"Any more prattle like that," she said, "and you"ll get another. In the first place, I would no more forsake you for possessing a maimed body than you deserted me for suffering a stricken mind. In the second, do you imagine that Nexus, Firefingers, Sureene, and the others are going to leave you like this? I don"t know if they"ll fit you out with iron limbs again, but they"ll do something. You"re one of the champions who saved dragonkind, all the world, perhaps, and a good many people love you. Stop sulking, open your eyes, and see what"s real!"
His lips quirked into a smile. "I guess that sometimes, I still have a sour way of thinking."
"Then I"ll have to train it out of you."
Brimstone floated in howling darkness. There was nothing to see, but he felt an invisible maelstrom whirling and churning below him. Striving to suck him down.
Though his thoughts were muddled, he sensed it was natural, probably even inevitable that he succ.u.mb to the vortex. Yet at the same time, he dreaded it, and so he resisted. Not by flapping his wings, for his body had become as diffuse and abstract a thing as his mind. By sheer will.
It was impossible to tell how long he struggled, but eventually, a point of light appeared. He strained for it, and gradually crept closer, or perhaps pulled it toward him. It became a pale, glimmering rectangle with a sparkling circle in the center, then the white glow of it was all around him, washing away the dark.
He realized he once again possessed physicality in his form of smoke and embers. The whiteness held him strait as a torturer"s cage, and he probed it, seeking release. He couldn"t find an opening as such, but there was a pathway, an accommodating vector, and he flowed along it.
He boiled up into frigid air. Into a valley girt with dark mountains and covered with a black and starry sky. His thoughts snapped into clarity, and he remembered this was the place where Sammaster had destroyed him.
Except, not quite. Peering down, he found a single link of his collar lying on the ground. Somehow, that one piece had survived the lich"s spell of annihilation to serve as his anchor as he hung between undeath and oblivion. To enable him to clamber back into the mortal world.
He took on solid form, gashed his chest with a talon, and tucked the diamond-and-platinum link into the wound. As it healed over, he looked around.
Still wearing the dracolich form he"d a.s.sumed at the end, Sammaster-or rather, his shattered corpse-lay some yards away. Brimstone had kept the madman from translating himself away, and afterward his allies had somehow managed to slay him.
Or had they? Brimstone knew better than anyone how powerful and wily Sammaster was. Perhaps his seeming demise had been a trick. Perhaps he"d risen from this husk to a.s.sail his foes anew.
But there were cairns on the battlefield. Brimstone tumbled stones from the top of one and found a silver beneath. Only the victors could have erected the piles, and Sammaster would scarcely have bothered to give one of the metallics an honorable interment.
Still, Brimstone couldn"t find it in his heart to be certain. He prowled into the citadel to seek the source of the Rage.
Golems guarded the threshold, but paid no heed to his smoky shape. Beyond, in a vault begemmed to resemble the heavens, lay the body of Pavel Shemov. Brimstone reflected that he and the sun priest would never have the final confrontation they"d both desired, then spotted a litter of black dust and fragments.
He was mystic enough to discern that he was looking at the remains of Sammaster"s phylactery, which the lich had evidently integrated into the mythal, and at last he believed. He and his allies had prevailed, not merely putting an end to the Rage, but expunging its master from the world for good and all.
The realization left him feeling a strange jumble of emotions: Exultation, certainly, but annealed with regret that he hadn"t witnessed Sammaster"s downfall, as well as an underlying emptiness. The struggle for revenge had consumed him for much of his existence, and abruptly it was over. What was he supposed to do?
Then he sneered at his mawkish feelings, for the answer was obvious. He still thirsted for blood and power, and with a goodly number of the metallics who might have opposed him slain, and much of Faerun still in turmoil in the aftermath of the dragon flights, it was a perfect time to strike for both. He flowed back past the golems to discover what other secrets the ruined castle held.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
A resident of the Tampa Bay area, the setting for much of his horror fiction, Richard Lee Byers spends a good deal of his free time fencing foil, epee, and saber, often competing in local tournaments. He"s a devoted gamer (GMing mostly, since his lazy friends never want to do it) and a frequent guest at Florida SF conventions.