The Sorcerer (24 page)

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.