He was bruised but otherwise unharmed. The niggling Aunt Dorath-like voice inside his head said, “I told you so,” and Giogi began to think he would be lucky if he could reach the top before the light failed and he fell in the drink.
The sky at that moment grew very, very dark. Giogi hesitated. Maybe it’s just a darker than average storm cloud over the setting sun, he hoped. He waited on the ledge for a minute, then another, for light to return. The forest around him remained dark.
Giogi realized he’d miscalculated. The sun had set already, and twilight in the dense woods had been very short. The moon would be full tonight, though, he remembered. It should rise soon, now that the sun has set, he reassured himself.
In the meantime, the nobleman couldn’t help feeling there was something malicious about the darkness. It was filled with rustling and twig-snapping, which he could hear uncomfortably well over the rush of the cascade. Unwilling to wait for Selûne’s light, Giogi crawled toward the cascade and began climbing the rocks by feel.
Something scaly brushed against Giogi’s hand, and he pulled it back with a jerk, lost his balance, and tumbled sideways, landing with a splash in the pool of water below.
Giogi surfaced immediately, sputtering water and soaked to the skin. The water was only three feet deep, but that was more than enough to submerge his clodders, and the young noble could feel icy water creeping down his stockings.
A beam of moonlight broke through the clouds in the east, illuminating the pool around him. Giogi stifled a shriek and began to back away. In the hip-high water all around him bobbed the bloated corpses of men.
As he stepped backward, one of the corpses in front of him sprang to life, lunging out of the water at him like a trout striking at a lure. Rows of needle-sharp teeth gnashed inches from his face. Giogi shrieked without inhibition, terrified.
He recognized the creatures from Uncle Drone’s books. They weren’t just corpses, but lacedons, undead monsters that preyed on the flesh of the drowned. Giogi took another step backward, but the lacedons had him surrounded. The nobleman had just enough presence of mind to draw his foil.
A second lacedon breached directly in front of him with its hands raised over its head. Giogi could smell the fetid, mossy scent of the creature’s breath as it brought its decayed face close to his own. Then the monster’s sharp, algae-covered fingernails struck at his forehead. Giogi jabbed his weapon into the creature’s flesh, but the lacedon wriggled itself free and swam off.
The remaining lacedons swam slowly around him, thumping up against his legs, trying to knock him off balance, and occasionally breaking the surface to leer and gnash and slash at his face. They’re playing with their food, Giogi thought, fighting back his nausea.
Blood dripping from his wounded brow obscured his vision in one eye and splashed into the water—spurring the undead into a frenzy. Giogi screamed again and stabbed at the hideous beings, trying to clear a path to the shore. It was hard to lunge into the water accurately, though, and there were too many of them to concentrate on one direction at once, without risking attack in the rear.
One of the lacedons toward the back of the pack reared up and began walking forward, so Giogi had a better view of its scaly body, water-rotted face, and bulging, yellow eyes. Another lacedon adopted an erect stance, and another and another, until all the corpses advanced on him like soldiers.
The noble turned in the frigid water, unable to decide on a direction to run. He caught sight of the glimmering gemstone in the top of his boot. The light of the finder’s stone pulsed in the darkness, even beneath the water.
Giogi drew the finder’s stone out, hoping the light it would cast might frighten off the monsters, or at least hurt their eyes. He tried to recall the bit of rhyme he knew as a child: Vampires fear the morning’s lights, something, something, something, and wights.
The finder’s stone cast a bright beam to the shoreline, but its light had no effect on the undead monsters’ behavior.
The undead began gurgling like the drowned men they were. From the way they raised their claws in unison, Giogi guessed they were making some sort of battle cry. They all leered at him with their fanged mouths. I’m finished, the nobleman thought.
From the top of the cascade behind Giogi came a great roar. Before Giogi’s eyes, the lacedons’ bodies ignited into cool, blue flames. The corpses slumped back into the pool. The water in the stream sparkled with the blue fire still consuming the undead. The pool turned murky with the disintegrated bodies. Then the murkiness washed downstream, and the pool’s water was clear again.
Giogi saw that only two monsters remained in the water with him, both to his left. As the young noble splashed in the direction of the right-hand bank, praying the creatures would be unable to follow him on land, a dark, hulking shape plunged from the top of the cascade, over his head, and into the pool beyond. Giogi threw himself out of the water and landed with a thud on the rocky shore, knocking all the air out of himself.
More splashing and a second roar came from the pool behind him. It took a moment before Giogi could summon the energy to roll over to see what had joined the lacedons in the water.
The headless body of a lacedon floated past the near shore. The second lacedon lay on the opposite bank, pinned beneath the paws of a huge black bear. The monster struggled feebly before the bear ripped it, throat to belly, with a single swipe of its paw.
“Sweet Selûne,” Giogioni whispered.
The bear looked up at him when he spoke. Giogi froze. He’d never seen a bear so large in all of Cormyr. The creature’s coat was as dark as the night, except for two silvery gray, crescent-shaped patches, one on its underbelly, the other on its forehead.
The bear stared at the nobleman for a moment with its head tilted to the side. It snuffled, and great clouds of steam rose from the bear’s nostrils. Then it turned and bounded into the darkness of the woods.
Giogi pulled himself up the last cascade and left the dark woods behind him. Atop Spring Hill, a moonlit meadow surrounded the temple. Giogi collapsed on the grass beside the water, shivering and gasping for breath. His head was on fire, but the rest of him was freezing.
In all his years in Immersea, he’d never been attacked by undead. What were lacedons doing in a stream sacred to Selûne? Did Mother Lleddew know about them? Giogi wondered. Is it possible she’s getting too old to defend the hill from evil?
In the east, the sleet-filled clouds began to break up, as if evaporated by the full moon’s light. Moonbeams shimmered across the Wyvernwater, along the Immer Stream, and up Selûne’s Stair. The moonbeams continued past Giogi, turning the stream, which meandered through the meadow, into a silver ribbon.
Giogi pulled himself to his feet and followed the stream to the temple, water squelching in his boots with his every step. Silvery, moonlit water flowed from inside the temple and down a channel cut into its steps. Giogi climbed the steps beside the channel and entered the House of the Lady.
The House of the Lady, the temple Mother Lleddew had built to Selûne, was really not a house, but an open-air shrine. A circle of white stone pillars rose from the temple’s floor and supported the domed roof. There were no walls. The rising moon’s light shone past the pillars and silvered the spring-fed pool bubbling in the center of the temple.
A slender young girl in an acolyte’s robes sat beside the pool, gazing into the spring’s depths. The ends of her long tresses trailed along the surface of the water. By some trick of the light, her hair appeared as silver as the water, so it seemed that water flowed from her hair into the pool.
Giogi rang the silver bell hanging from one of the pillars beside the water channel.