But he was grinning from ear to ear. Across the entire ship, kuo-toa turned from their onslaught. One by one, they returned to the Sea of Fallen Stars.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Feywild
Taal strode across a vista of bare rock, jagged boulders, and the occasional stunted tree. Malyanna went before him, silhouetted by the golden illumination that rimmed the approaching horizon. The black hound Tamur slipped in and out of the shadows at the periphery of his vision.
They were leaving the Watch on Forever’s Edge behind. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be giddy at the prospect.
A thought occurred to him.
“My lady,” he said, “Why do we travel by long roads when your shadow beast could whisk us through shadow to our destination in an instant?”
“The roads we must ultimately travel are broken, and lie tangled in half-meshed demiplanes,” the eladrin noble said. “Even routes through shadow would prove laborious, since Tamur has never physically visited the site we seek.”
“I see,” said Taal, even though he didn’t, really. What did it matter? The Edge dropped farther and farther into the darkness behind them, while ahead, the trees grew thicker, the light more glorious, and the sense of desolation lighter.
Finally they topped a rise, and looked down into a valley verdant with growth, ringing with bird song, and brightened by slanting beams of sunlight. Tears welled in his eyes.
Fireflylike motes of brilliance darted on gusts of cool wind. Falls in the far distance were a thread of silver that plunged down from majestic cliffs. The land was effervescent and alive, filled with a vigor that burned in every blade of grass, every tree leaf, and even in the towering white clouds that loomed above in the sky.
“Faerie,” he said, his throat tight.
“Just so,” Malyanna replied.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked.
“From here-Oh!” she cried.
Malyanna clutched her temple. “Something’s happening. Tamur!” she said.
The hound looked up from the root tangle of a large tree it was sniffing. Its ears twitched. Its tail was curled down and its ears laid back. The dog did not like the Feywild. It slunk over to Malyanna.
“To the observation balcony, Tamur,” the woman said. “The last one we visited. As quick as you can!”
The great dog lifted its head in the air, sniffed, then padded down the slope to where the ground was broken with several jutting rocks. Malyanna and Taal followed.
“What is it?” asked Taal.
The eladrin noble ignored him.
As Tamur drew closer to the stones, their shadows lengthened and deepened. The mastiff passed into the dimness.
Taal followed Malyanna into the stone’s murky shade.
Cold whispered against his neck.
From within the boulder’s shadow, the stone seemed like a hole in the Feywild itself. Tamur stepped through, and they followed.
Beyond lay a shifting corridor of gloom.
Taal’s boots sunk a few inches with each step into the floor. The air was as cold and as still as a winter’s night. Taal’s breath steamed, though Tamur’s and Malyanna’s did not.
He’d wondered, having seen Malyanna and the mastiff fade into shadow on more occasions than he could count, what they experienced. And he knew it for what it was: a bleak, cold path with nothing to recommend it except speed of travel.
They followed the sniffing hound down the interminable corridor for what must have been at least a bell, maybe two. So much for speed …
When the cold threatened to become unbearable, he called upon the power of his totem. A layer of warmth, like invisible tiger fur, formed around him.
When the corridor ended, Taal was unprepared. One moment he trudged through shadow. The next, he was standing on a roofed stone balcony overlooking a stormy seascape from a staggering height. His totem yowled in sudden, tense warning. Wherever they were, it wasn’t a safe place.
At least it wasn’t as cold … though the tang of brine and rotting fish wrinkled his nose.
Malyanna rushed to the curblike railing and looked over. He joined her. The moment he did so, he knew why his totem had cried warning. He was standing on a balcony of what could only be the aboleth city of Xxiphu.
His gaze fell down the side of a clifflike drop: Xxiphu’s exterior face. Terrible images were carved on the age-worn exterior, depicting thousands of interconnected images he couldn’t quite comprehend. Some inscriptions flowed and changed their shape.
The city’s base was lodged in the foot of a snow-topped mountain. No … that wasn’t what he was really seeing. It was a cloud top! Xxiphu rode the storm face like an observation tower. And miles lower yet stretched the dappled surface of the Sea of Fallen Stars.
Taal’s head threatened to spin, but iron discipline proved his anchor. He avoided showing any visible reaction.
Malyanna stabbed a finger down toward the water. “It’s that ship, Green Siren! Always meddling!”
Taal narrowed his eyes, searching. He saw a dot trailing a hair-thin wake almost lost in the glare off the sea. Was that it? The speck didn’t seem especially threatening from their position.
“I divined no one would have the stomach to continue opposing me,” the eladrin noble continued, “but they found determination somewhere. Fools. I should have made a greater effort to destroy them instead of letting them flee.”
“What, they think to enter Xxiphu again now that it’s partly roused?” he said.
She swung around to glare at him. “Who knows?” she replied. “I hope they do; they’ll find many more aboleths awake this time! But they’ve disrupted the Calling.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Ancient bloodlines, touched ages ago by the aboleths, yet live and breed on Faerun,” Malyanna explained. “Xxiphu can command their loyalty by calling in the debts of their dead ancestors. Somehow, someone on that craft severed what I set in motion days ago. Japheth, I expect. I wonder …”
“Yes?” Taal said.
“Why hasn’t the Lord of Bats slain him yet?”
Taal had no answer.
Malyanna leaned farther over the curb and studied the point, her eyes narrowed with concentration. Taal asked for sharpness of eyesight from his totem. The dot instantly enlarged, becoming a ship in truth. He saw figures on deck, but they were too far away to make out as individuals. None had the dark clothing and milk-colored skin he associated with the Lord of Bats.
“Perhaps he grew tired of the chase?” Taal said.
“Or they slew him,” she said, shrugging. “Anyhow, if Green Siren is here, I can leave to retrieve the Key of Stars unopposed. The pretend Keeper who sought to bind the Eldest in the crown chamber, or Japheth with his Dreamheart-sworn pact, will count for nothing once I have the Key.”
Before Taal could ask what Malyanna meant by “pretend Keeper,” his attention was drawn to a shadow on a nearby cloud. He shifted his gaze and couldn’t restrain a gasp.
A kraken writhed through the air, no more then a hundred yards from the balcony. One dinner-plate eye fixed on Taal as it passed. He shuddered and looked away.
The eladrin paid the swooping horror only a passing glance. “Tamur! Take us to the Forest of Moths,” she said.
A lane of shadow whisked them away from the hovering atrocity called Xxiphu.
The darkling road deposited them in the middle of a thousand birdsongs. Trills, coos, and shrill whistles resounded through the living, bark-wrapped pillars enclosing them, all of which glowed with a silver radiance. The trees supported layer upon layer of mounting canopy. Breaks in the canopy revealed stars in a vast darkness. They were at least as grand as the stars of Taal’s long vanished youth.