He was already pointing a sliver of obsidian at the creature and yelling a string of mystic syllables. A finger-thin ray of darkness left his hand, catching the phaerimm in one of its remaining arms and severing it at the elbow. Vala snapped the other with a palm strike, then kicked free and brought her darksword around in three eviscerating swings.
The thing's heart slipped out of the second gash, still beating. Vala sent it flying off with a flick of her blade, and the phaerimm dropped, motionless, into the water. She struck again and again, not stopping until she had opened it from tail to lip and left it floating in the water like a dressed eel. Galaeron waded up. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm alive." She shook her head clear and gave herself a cursory glance, then looked over and found herself staring into a pair of black, empty eyes. "G-Galaeron? How many spells did you cast?"
Instead of answering. Galaeron pushed her toward Escanor's floating form. "See to the prince and the others," he said as he turned and started toward the shadow curtain. "I'll finish the Splicing."
CHAPTER TWO
28 Tarsakh, the Year of Wild Magic
The city appeared just before dusk, hovering low over a rosy desert butte, a distant diamond of umbral murk silhouetted against the purple twilight of the eastern sky. As usual, it was surrounded by wisps of black fog, giving it the appearance of a storm cloud, a mirage, or an angry djinn. The V-shaped specks of a hundred or so vultures wheeled in lazy circles beneath the city, chasing the constant rain of garbage that dropped from its refuse chutes. "There," Galaeron said.
Though it had been two days since he'd completed the Splicing, the icy tingle of shadow magic still permeated his body-and he hungered for more, longed to cast spells until he was numb and cold from head to foot, until he was filled with the power of shadow and beyond mortal frailty. Instead, he pointed at the floating city and said, "See it?" "So far?" Malik complained.
A pudgy little man with a moon-shaped face and bug eyes, Malik el Sami yn Nasser was the Seraph of Lies, a favored servant of the evil god Cyric and an oddly stalwart traveling companion who had saved Galaeron's life more than once.
"I apologize for my accursed luck," the little man said. "It has always been its nature that just when I think matters could seem no worse, a turn of bad fortune comes along to prove me wrong."
"In this desert, things look farther than they are," Vala said. Limping a little from her wounded thigh, she started down the dry wash at their backs. "We'd better get moving, or we'll lose sight of it when dark really falls."
Nodding, Galaeron turned to follow. As a precaution against attack, Shade Enclave appeared only briefly each evening and always in a different place. Given that Escanor's company had failed to finish the Splicing and raise the shadowshell at the appointed time, it made sense to put some distance between the floating city and the Sharaedim battlefields. Assuming they were lucky enough to reach the city before it vanished again, Galaeron only hoped they would not fall victim to any new defenses intended for the phaerimm.
In the bottom of the wash, they found the Shadovar survivors preparing the company's mounts for departure. Though most of the shadow lords had already recovered from the cavern battle, Escanor had taken an egg when he was impaled and remained incoherent with fever. The longer it stayed inside him, the harder it would be to remove, but his chances were far better than those of most humans would have been. Shadovar were fast healers. Most of their wounds had closed within an hour after the battle, so it seemed likely that the prince would survive even a difficult extraction.
Galaeron followed Vala over to the nominal leader of the group in Escanor's incapacity, a ruby-eyed lord so swarthy that he looked more like an obsidian statue than a live man. "Lord Rapha," Vala said, "we've located the enclave."
"That is well." Rapha did not look up. He was looping a length of shadow strand around the hands of a dead comrade, using it to secure the man in his saddle. "We'll soon be ready."
Galaeron and his companions waited for Rapha to ask where or how far off the enclave was, or to give some indication that he was concerned about getting Escanor to the city quickly. Rapha ignored them.
Finally, Galaeron said, "The enclave is a long way off. You might want to send Escanor ahead."
The Shadovar fixed his ruby eyes on Galaeron. "Concerned for the prince, are we?" "Of course," Vala said.
"Most concerned," Malik agreed. He hesitated for a moment, then was unable to keep from adding, "But we are even more concerned for ourselves. We know who will be blamed if he dies."
This drew a sour smile from the shadow lord. Like everyone in the company, Rapha knew that Malik had been cursed by the goddess Mystra to speak only the truth or not all. It was an irony in which Shadovar seemed to take special delight.
Rapha clapped a hand on the little man's shoulder. "You have nothing to fear, my stubby friend. You were not even at the Splicing."
"But››0M were," Galaeron said, wondering what Rapha was playing at. "You know I meant no harm to the prince."
"I know what I saw," Rapha said. "You used a shadow snare to keep the thornback trapped beside the prince."
"Had I let the thing teleport away, the shadowshell would be no prison at all," Galaeron retorted. "Those phaerimm were there to learn its secret, and what they discovered was important, or they would have attacked us long before I found them."
Rapha considered this, then his voice grew quiet and menacing. "How is it you know so much about the phaerimm, elf? Why could you find them when twenty shadow lords could not?"
Galaeron glanced away. "I can't say why," he admitted. "It just seemed right that they would be there." "It just seemed right," Rapha echoed dubiously.
"I think his shadow knew," Vala said. "He didn't say anything about them until his shadow self asserted itself."
Rapha shook his head impatiently. "The shadow self is only an absence of what a person is, a darker image of himself that he creates simply by being what he is. It cannot know more than its creator, any more than its creator can know it."
Galaeron shrugged. "Then I can't explain it," he said. "I just had a feeling they would be there-and I was right"
"And risking Prince Escanor's life?" Rapha asked. "You just had a feeling about that?"
"I had to do it to save the shell," Galaeron said. "I knew that, just like I knew the phaerimm would try to teleport away."
Rapha shook his head. "You can't be sure," he insisted. "Your shadow self has you in its grasp. Your thinking could have been subverted-"
"But I can be sure that he needs a healer-and soon," Galaeron interrupted. This Rapha was a sly one, accusing Galaeron of trying to harm the prince-and wasting valuable time. "Unless you have some reason for delaying? Perhaps you'd like to see Escanor hatch a thorn-back egg?"
Rapha's eyes flared from ruby to white-orange. "I have nothing but love for all the princes of Shade, elf."
"Then wouldn't it be wise to have someone return him to the enclave at once?"
"It would, had Prince Escanor been lucid enough to tell us today's word of passing," Rapha said. "As it is, anyone who tries to enter through the shadows will find himself plummeting through to the Barrens of Doom and Despair."
"So we must return the slow way," Vala said, placing herself between Galaeron and Rapha to cut off further argument. "Can Escanor ride?"
"It would be better if he didn't," Rapha said. "Perhaps your friend would be kind enough to take a passenger."
The shadow lord motioned across the wash, to where a grim-faced stone giant with sad gray eyes was kneeling over a ten-foot block of quartzite. He was clinking away with his sculptor's tools, fashioning a life-sized model of the struggle between Escanor and the phaerimm that had wounded him. Though the work was still rough, it was obvious by the snaking forms and undulating hollows that he had captured not only the details, but the spirit and swiftness of the battle-and from little more than a description of the events.