Upon reaching the next landing, Vangerdahast looked up and saw the stairs ascending into pitch darkness. The wizard climbed to within arm’s reach of it, then looked down and decided to cast one last spell before departing the goblin city. He pulled a small handful of sulfur and bat guano from his cloak and began to roll it into a sticky ball-then saw the glowing eyes of a ghazneth watching him from the mouth of a goblin tunnel.
One pearly eye vanished and reappeared. Vangerdahast stopped rolling his fingers. The thing had winked at him. Forgetting about the spell components in his hand, the wizard bounded up the last few steps in a dead sprint-and crashed headlong into the cavern’s spongy ceiling.
The surface parted and yielded ever so slightly, then suddenly stiffened and forced his head downward, so that he found himself staring at the goblins below. The ball of sulfur slipped from his fingers half-combined and plummeted groundward. He feared for an instant that he would follow, but the ceiling held him fast, spread-eagled forty feet above the legion.
Vangerdahast lost sight of the sulfur ball, then heard a dull ping and saw a goblin centurion drop to a surprised squat. The soldier pulled his helmet off and craned his neck to look-of all directions for a goblin to look-up.
Even then, Vangerdahast thought he might remain undetected. He was, after all, forty feet in the air, invisible, and camouflaged in a black weathercloak, but the goblin’s eyes grew round and white… and vanished into pitch darkness.
The wizard dared to hope he was being drawn through the ceiling into the Wolf Woods-known in his own day as Cormyr-when a high little voice began to chitter far below, and the scaffold began to groan and sway beneath the trammeling of little boots. Vangerdahast realized that the spongy barrier holding him fast was also drawing the magic from his spells. He could no longer see in the dark, nor-in all likelihood-fly.
Vangerdahast glanced toward the tunnel where he had seen the pearly eyes and found nothing but darkness. Having no doubts about what the thing would do next, he reached for his weathercloak’s escape pocket and found his arm stuck fast to the ceiling. Shrill goblin voices began to chitter below, not more than ten feet away.
Knowing he could never teleport out of the cavern-he had tried it a dozen times before and never found himself anywhere but the immense goblin city-Vangerdahast elected to try something simpler. He closed his eyes and spoke the incantation of a blink spell.
There was a fizzle and a hiss, then a dozen tiny hands clutching him from below, tugging at his lapels and jerking the throat clasp from his collar, fishing through his pockets and pulling out wands, potions, and rings, little bundles of dried toad tongue and chopped rock lichen and powdered newt eye of no use to anyone but him.
A pair of shining pearl eyes appeared in the darkness below, more or less where Vangerdahast remembered the corner of the scaffold to be. The goblins began to shriek and yammer madly. The eyes grew steadily, rapidly larger. The ghazneth was coming.
Finally, a goblin leaped up and caught hold of Vangerdahast’s sleeve, then began to work its way hand-over-hand toward his wrist. The wizard’s heart rose into his throat. He closed his eyes and tried one more time to decide whether Nalavara needed his ring of wishes or was frightened of it.
When the goblin grabbed hold of his wrist, he still had not decided. He closed his eyes and began, “I wish-“
A deafening clap of thunder interrupted the command. Vangerdahast’s eyes were pained by a brilliant flash of light, and the goblin’s weight vanished from his arm. A smell like scorched rabbit permeated the air.
“Do not!” growled a raspy voice. “As it is, you have nearly freed her!”
After squeezing his eyes open and shut several times, Vangerdahast was finally able to see a small cascade of flames licking the scaffold below him. The goblin leaders were chittering angrily and pointing at the flames. A moment later, several brave goblin warriors hurled themselves into the conflagration, using their own bodies and bare hands to beat out the fire.
Vangerdahast ignored their selfless display and stared into the ghazneth’s gray eyes. “Do I… know you?”
“No,” came the answer. The ghazneth pulled his shadowy body onto the landing beneath Vangerdahast, then plucked a pair of wands from a squealing goblin’s wrist and began to absorb the magic. “Nobody knows me.”
“You’re lying,” Vangerdahast said. Though the voice was far raspier than any he knew intimately, there was something familiar in its dry huskiness and crisp northern accent. “Where have we met?”
“Nowhere but here in this hell.”
The ghazneth spun away and began to knock goblins off the scaffold, crying out when one little warrior managed to thrust an iron javelin through his abdomen. Vangerdahast watched in astonishment, at first confused as to why the phantom had come to his aid, then growing more frightened as the obvious answer occurred to him. He was a magician, and ghazneths needed magic the way vultures needed death.
After clearing the immediate area of goblins, the ghazneth spun around to point down the stairs. As the phantom turned, Vangerdahast glimpsed a dark but handsome face with reasonably human features and a grotesquely cleft chin. Before the wizard could see more, a torrent of water shot from the ghazneth’s hand and blasted twenty goblins off the scaffold. The spray doused the fire they had been fighting and plunged the cavern back into darkness.
A powerful hand reached up and pulled Vangerdahast out of his wizard’s cloak, then turned to throw him off the tower.
“Wait!” Vangerdahast cried, finally putting the chiseled face and northern accent together. “I do know you!”
“No longer,” said the voice. “Now, go back to your nest and do not make me sorry I saved you.”
The ghazneth pitched him into the darkness, and Vangerdahast barely had time to picture his snug little hammock before he heard himself shout the syllables of his teleport spell.
11
“These tuskers are so ugly,” Lancelord Raddlesar grunted, as his blade ripped apart a fat-bellied orc’s belly from its crotch to its breastbone, “that you’d think orc mothers’d soon lose interest in mothering more of them, hey?”
“They never do, Keldyn,” another lancelord replied mournfully. “They just never do.”
Those were the last words he ever uttered-a black blade burst through his helm and cheek and out his mouth in a red froth, and Lancelord Garthin toppled into the blood-churned mud without a sound, his dreams of settling his sweetheart in a grand house in Suzail swept away in one bright and terrible instant. His fall went unseen by his fellows in the frantic, hacking tumult.
“I’ve slain at least thirty,” a swordcaptain gasped, bringing his blade around in an arc that struck sparks and rang shrieks of protesting weapon steel from a dozen orc swords.
The endmost orc reeled back from that clash of arms, and Swordcaptain Thorn’s blade darted in like the fangs of a springing rock viper, in and out of a fat tusker’s throat so swiftly that one might have been forgiven for not seeing the slaying stroke-at least until the blood started to jet, and a fat, dirty body staggered helplessly back.
“Is that all, Thorn?” Lord Braerwinter called, over the surging shoulders of two orcs that were hacking an already dead armsman to the ground. “Whatever have you been doing all this time?”
The swordcaptain chuckled. “Sharpening my steel,” he roared back, trading deafening blows with a snarling orc captain larger than he was. “And tempering it-“