“Why would the wizard have done this?” Vanderjack asked.
“Oh, no!” Gredchen cried, darting forward to trace her hands over the places where the axe head had struck. “Wait.”
“Yes, I see now. Those aren’t actual cuts,” Theodenes observed, folding his arms across his chest. “Those have been painted on. Under the varnish. Clever. But why?”
Vanderjack turned to Gredchen. “Got an explanation for this one?”
Cazuvel swept through the dusty halls of the Lyceum.
Once he had left the highmaster’s presence, he had spoken the words of power that brought him back to his sanctum, the place he had hidden Vanderjack’s sword. His eldritch connection to the wards set up around Castle Glayward had triggered shortly afterward, alerting him to the highmaster’s interference. With Aggurat freed, the highmaster would know that Cazuvel had been acting behind her back. The half-elf was a powerful enough mage that she had somehow untethered the draconian from Cazuvel’s mystic bonds, despite all of the energy he had flooded into them.
Cazuvel did not care. It was just a slightly premature digression from a path he had carefully laid out, the path that had begun months earlier. He had his mirror and its magic. He had the star metal-forged sword of Vand Erj-Ackal, and he suspected there was a great deal of powerful enchantment tied up into that weapon.
The black-robed mage arrived at the grand cloister, the chamber in which the mirror hung suspended within its multiple arcane wards. He walked in and looked to the center of the room. The mirror was exactly as he had left it, so he proceeded over to a narrow table against the far wall, outside of the complex summoning circles and runic labyrinths. Lying upon the table was Lifecleaver.
Cazuvel had not yet drawn the sword. One of the kapak scouts had tried doing just that after he had recovered it from the jungle, and within moments the draconian shrieked and collapsed, catatonic. The mage wasn’t prepared to have that happen to him, so he’d been careful to relocate the weapon from the baron’s castle to the grand cloister without physically touching it. It was wrapped up in thin layers of magically resistant cloth, preventing whatever effect that had felled the draconian from plaguing him.
Looking over again at the mirror, Cazuvel spoke the incantations that would bring the imprisoned Cazuvel to the mirror’s surface so the fiend who had taken his place could draw additional power.
“Cermindaya, cermindaya, saya memanggil anda dan mengikat anda!”
The surface of the mirror became briefly incandescent, and the brilliant metal swam with an image. It coalesced, and the true Cazuvel, his cheeks sunken and eyes rheumy, appeared within the mirror.
“I have nothing left. Nothing left to give you. You already took it all,” said the weary voice.
Cazuvel snatched up the sword by the hilt, and stalked back to face the mirror, pointing one slender finger at the image of his captive. “Lies!” he shrieked. “I know how the enchantment works. You are a catalyst, an intermediary between me and the limitless powers of the Abyss. I need more power, and you will grant it to me!”
The Cazuvel-image moaned as his captor seemed to claw at the air with his hand, as if clutching something thick and viscous. Arcs of lightning once again leaped from the hammered-steel mirror and into Cazuvel, filling him with the howling forces he demanded. The image screamed, Cazuvel laughed. The noise was so loud and the play of purple and orange electricity so bright that at first the fiend did not notice the eight spectral figures manifesting behind him.
“Cease this!” bellowed the Conjuror above the din.
“Leave him alone!” cried the Apothecary.
“Your dark work is over!” said the Aristocrat.
Cazuvel stopped, and the myriad threads of energy feeding into him abruptly vanished. The man in the mirror looked emaciated, his stark white skin stretched across his skull, eye sockets sunken, lips drawn back in a hideous grimace.
“What is this? How did you get into my sanctum?” demanded Cazuvel to the array of spirits floating before him.
“We are the Sword Chorus,” said the Philosopher.
“You are not of this world,” said the Balladeer.
“You don’t even smell human,” the Hunter sniffed.
“Sword Chorus?” repeated Cazuvel. “So you are the sword’s enchantments?”
“We are the souls of those slain by the sword before their time,” explained the Cavalier.
“Fascinating. And you haunt the bearer of the weapon?”
The wizard splayed his fingers over the blade, invoking the magical forces he’d just drawn from the mirror and using them to peer into the sword’s construction, revealing layer upon layer of eldritch craftsmanship.
“A nine-lives stealer!” Cazuvel said, triumphant. “One of the legendary soul swords, said to have been crafted by the Smith God himself in the Age of Dreams. I should have recognized it, the blue-black star metal blade, and the sigils in ancient Ergothian. How fortuitous! There is magic bound into this blade, magic that the wizard whose form I have taken sought all of his life to master.”
“This sword is not yours,” assured the Aristocrat.
“We’ve been watching you, you know,” said a ghost who had not spoken yet. “Don’t think we don’t know what you’re up to.”
Cazuvel narrowed his eyes at that eighth ghost, who appeared to be dressed in a cook’s apron. “You are but a bound spirit,” he hissed. “And I am-”
“A creature of the Abyss,” finished the Conjuror.
“You’re a fetch!” said the Cook. “Of course! A mirror fiend!”
“Fetches are incapable of taking mortal form,” said the Balladeer.
“Nightmares that strike from the Abyss through reflective surfaces,” said the Philosopher.
“It was the real Cazuvel, wasn’t it?” said the Cook. “Black Robes are always making dark pacts with evil. Did he realize what he was doing?”
“He tried it once before,” said Cazuvel. “The painting in the baron’s castle. An imperfect medium, the wrong subject. He needed a true reflection, a reflection of himself. He-”
“He needed a mirror,” said the Cook. “He’d created that painting of the baron’s daughter, but that was just practice.”
The other ghosts were quite different from the Cook, Cazuvel realized. Cazuvel spoke a word of divinatory magic at the Cook, but it failed, dissipating before it could reveal anything. “You. Ghost. You are the most recent addition to this Sword Chorus, aren’t you?”
“Silence, fetch!” said the Cavalier.
“You shall not gain the sword’s power,” said the Aristocrat.
“Vanderjack will find and defeat you,” said the Hunter.
“I doubt that,” said Cazuvel. “Even now, I would hazard a guess, the highmaster has thrown him into a cell beneath Wulfgar so that he might rot away for his interference.”
“That’s where you’re wrong!” said the Cook.
The other ghosts moved close to the Cook, muttering at him. Cazuvel stared, curious, as they tried to stop the cook from blathering and boasting. Still, he reflected, they were behaving quite oddly for bound spirits.
“I’ve figured it out. You fetches are fiends from the Abyss,” the Cook continued, despite the protestations of his fellows, “servants of the powers of darkness and chaos. You’ve been using this mirror to keep your connection to the Abyss active? Give you power!”
“Yes,” said the fetch, pleased that somebody had noticed his extraordinary work. “It is not perfect power, but it has its definite uses. No other wizard on Krynn has access to it in the way I do. I can use the Black Robe’s imprisoned soul as a template, channel raw power from the Abyss and through him. In doing so, I eschew the magic of the moons, the magic of the gods.”
“Ingenious but aberrant,” the Conjuror said begrudgingly.
“An active conduit like that could backfire,” warned the Cook, “funnel magic back into the Abyss, or worse, open a permanent gate. The consequences could be catastrophic!”