The Ghost King

CHAPTER 17

NOTHING BUT THE WIND
It all stopped. Everything. The battle, the fear, and the chase. It was over, replaced by only the sound of the wind and the grand view from on high. A sensation of emptiness and solitude washed over the monk. Of freedom. Of impending death.
A twist, a shift, and pure control had Danica upright immediately, and she turned around to face the cliff from which she had just tumbled. She reached out and lunged forward, her eyes scanning before her and below her, all in an instant, yielding a sudden recognition and complete sorting of the larger jags and angles. She slapped her palm against the stone, then the other one, then back and forth repeatedly. With each contact her muscles twitched against the momentum of the fall.
A jut of stone far below and to the left had her thrusting her left foot out that way, and as she slapped the stone with both hands together, she gave the slightest push, again and again, ten times in rapid succession as she descended, subtly shifting to the left.
Her toe touched a jag and she threw her weight to that foot, bending her leg to absorb the impact. She couldn't begin to stop the momentum of her descent with just that, but she managed to push back with some success, stealing some of her speed.
It was the way of the monk. Danica could run down the wall of a tall building and land without injury. She had done it on more than one occasion. But of course, a tall building was nowhere near the height of that cliff, and the grade was more difficult, sometimes sheer and straight, sometimes less than sheer, sometimes more than sheer. But she worked with all her concentration, her muscles answering her demands.
Another jag gave her the opportunity to break a bit more of her momentum, and a narrow ledge allowed her to plant both feet and work her leg muscles against the relentless pull of gravity.
After that, halfway to the ground, the woman looked more like a spider running frantically along a wall, her arms and legs pumping furiously.
A dark form fell past her, startling her and nearly stealing her concentration. One of the fleshy beasts, she recognized, but she didn't begin to speculate on how it might have fallen.
She had no time for that, no time for anything but absolute concentration on the task before her.
Nothing but the wind filled her senses, that and the contours of the cliff.
She was almost to the ground, still falling too quickly to survive. Danica couldn't hope to land and roll to absorb the tremendous impact. So she hooked her feet together against the stone and threw herself over backward, rolling over just in time to see the tall pines she had viewed from above.
Then she was crashing through the branches, needles flying, wood splintering. A broken branch hooked her and tore a fair slice of skin out of her side and ripped away half her shirt. A heavier branch not much farther below didn't break, but bent, and Danica rolled off it head over heels, tumbling and crashing, rebounding off the heaviest lower branches and breaking through amidst a spray of green needles, and still with thirty feet to fall.
Half blinded by pain, barely conscious, the monk still managed to sort herself out and spin to get her feet beneath her.
She bent and rolled sidelong as she landed. Over and over she went, three times, five times, seven times. She stopped with a gasp, explosions of pain rolling up from her legs, from her torn side, from a shoulder she knew to be dislocated.
Danica managed to turn over a bit, to see a lump of splattered black flesh.
At least she didn't look like that, she thought. But though she had avoided the mutilation suffered by the crawlers, she feared that the result would be the same and that she would not survive the fall.
Cold darkness closed in.
But Danica fought it, telling herself that the dracolich would come l ooking for her, reminding herself that she was not safe, that even if she somehow managed to not die from the battering she had taken in the fall, the beast would have her.
She rolled to her belly and pushed up on her elbows, or tried to, but her shoulder would not allow it and the waves of agony that rippled out overwhelmed her. She propped herself up on one arm, and there vomited, gasping. Tears filled her almond-shaped eyes as her retching, and the spasms in her ribs, elicited a whole new level of agony.
She had to move, she told herself.
But she had no more to give.
The cold darkness closed in again, and even mighty Danica could not resist.
* * * * *
Looking out the door of the side room in the darkened gorge, Catti-brie could barely make out the forms of her companions in the other chamber's flickering torchlight. They were all trapped at the apparent dead end, shadow hounds coming in swift pursuit, a dragon blocking the way before them. Drizzt was lost to them, and Wulfgar, beside Catti-brie, had taken the brunt of the dragon's breath, a horrid cloud of blackness and despair that had left him numb and nearly helpless.
She peered out the door, desperate for an answer, praying that her father would find a way to save them all. She didn't know what to make of it when Bruenor took off the gem-studded helmet and replaced it with his broken-horned old helm.
When he handed the crown to Regis and said, "Keep the helm safe. It's the crown of the King of Mithral Hall," his intent became all too clear.
The halfling protested, "Then it is yours," and the same gripping fear that coursed through Catti-brie was evident in Regis's voice.
"Nay, not by me right or me choice. Mithral Hall is no more, Rumble - Regis. Bruenor of Icewind Dale, I am, and have been for two hundred years, though me head's too thick to know it!"
Catti-brie barely heard the next words as she gasped and understood all too clearly what Bruenor was about to do. Regis asked him something she couldn't hear, but understood that it was the very same question whose awful answer screamed at her in her own thoughts.
Bruenor came into clear sight then, running out of the room and charging straight for the gorge. "Here's one from yer tricks, boy!" heyelled, looking at the small side chamber concealing Catti-brie and Wulfgar. "But when me mind's to jumping on the back of a worm, I ain't about to miss!"
There it was, spoken openly, a declaration of the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the rest of them, trapped deep in the bowels of the caverns once known as Mithral Hall by a great dragon of shadow.
"Bruenor!" Catti-brie heard herself cry, though she was hardly conscious of speaking, so numbed was she by the realization that she was about to lose the dwarf, her beloved adoptive father, the great Bruenor who had served as the foundation of her entire life, the strength of Catti-brie Battlehammer.
The world moved in slow motion for the young woman at that terrible moment, as Bruenor sprinted across the floor to the gorge, reaching over his shoulder to set his cloak afire - and under it was a keg of oil!
The dwarf didn't waver and didn't slow as he reached the lip and went over, axe high, back aflame.
Compulsion and terror combined to drag Catti-brie over to that ledge, arriving at the same time as Regis, both gawking down at the burning dwarf, locked upon the back of the great shadow dragon.
Bruenor had not wavered, but his actions had taken all the strength from Catti-brie, to be sure! She could hardly hold herself upright as she watched her father die, giving his life so that she, Wulfgar, and Regis could cross the gorge and escape the darkness of Mithral Hall.
But she'd never find the strength to make it, she feared, and Bruenor would die in vain.
Wulfgar was beside her then, grimacing against the magical despair, fighting through it with the determination of a barbarian of Icewind Dale. Catti-brie could hardly comprehend his intent as he lifted his wondrous warhammer high and flung it down at the dragon.
"Are ye mad?" she cried, grabbing at him.
"Take up your bow," he told her, and he was Wulfgar again, freed of the dragon's insidious spell. "If a true friend of Bruenor's you be, then let him not fall in vain!"
A true friend? The words hit Catti-brie hard, reminding her poignantly that she was so much more than a friend to that dwarf, her father, the anchor of her life.
She knew that Wulfgar was right, and took up her bow in shaking hands, and sighted her target through tear-filled eyes.
She couldn't help Bruenor. She couldn't save him from the choice he had made - the choice that had possibly saved the three of them. It was the toughest shot she had ever had to make, but she had to make it, for Bruenor's sake.
The silver-flashing arrow streaked away from Taulmaril, its lightning flash filling Catti-brie's wet eyes.
* * * * *
Someone grabbed her and pulled her arms down to her side. She heard the hiss of a distant whisper, but could make out no words, nor could she see the one whose touch she felt.
It was Drizzt, she knew from the tenderness and strength in those delicate hands.
But Drizzt was lost to her, to them all. It made no sense. And Bruenor....
But the gorge was gone, the dragon was gone, her father was gone, all the world was gone, replaced by that land of brown mists and crawling, shadowy beasts, coming at her, clawing at her.
They could not reach her, they could not hurt her, but Catti-brie found little comfort in the emptiness. She felt nothing, was aware of nothing but the crawling, misshapen, ugly forms in a land she did not recognize.
In a place where she was completely alone.
And worse than that, worst of all, a line of division between two realities so narrow and blurry that the sheer incongruence of it all stole from Catti-brie something much more personal than her friends and familiar surroundings.
She tried to resist, tried to focus on the feeling of those strong arms around her - it had to be Drizzt!  -  but she realized that she couldn't even feel the grasp any longer, if it was there.
The huddled images began to blur. The two worlds competed with flashing scenes in her mind and a discordant cacophony of disconnected sounds, a clash of two realities from which there was no escape.
She fell within herself, trying to hold on to her memories, her reality, her individuality.
But there was nothing to hold onto, no grounding pole to remind her of anything, of Catti-brie, even.
She had no cogent thought and no clear memories, and no self-awareness. She was so utterly lost that she didn't even know that she was utterly lost.
* * * * *
A speck of bright orange found its way past Danica's closed eyelid, knifing through the blackness that had taken her senses. Wearily, she managed to crack open that eye, to be greeted by the sunrise, the brilliant orb just showing its upper edge in the east, in the V-shaped crook between two mountains. It almost seemed to Danica as if those distant mountains were guiding the light directly to her, to her eyes, to awaken her.
The events of the previous day played out in her thoughts, and she couldn't begin to sort out where dreams had ended and awful reality had begun.
Or had it all been a dream?
But then why was she lying in a canyon beside a great cliff?
Slowly the woman started to unwind it all, and the darkness receded.
She pulled herself up to her elbows, or tried to until waves of agony in her shoulder laid her low once more. Wincing against the pain, her eyes tightly closed, Danica recalled the fall, the tumble through the trees, then she backtracked from there to the scene atop the cliff in the lair of the undead dragon.
Ivan was dead.
The weight of that hit Danica hard. She heard again the stomp of the dracolich and saw once more the splattering flesh flying about the cavern. She thought of all the times she had seen Ivan with her kids, the doting uncle offering the wisdom wrought of tough lessons, unlike the doting Pikel, who was so much softer-edged than his brother.
"Pikel," she whispered into the grass, overwhelmed by the thought of telling him about Ivan.
The mention of Pikel brought Danica's thoughts careening back to her own children, who were out, somewhere, with the dwarf.
She opened her eyes - the lower rim of the sun was visible, the morning moving along.
Her children were in trouble. That notion seemed inescapable. They were either in trouble or the danger had already found them and taken them, and that, Danica would not allow herself to accept.
With a growl of defiance, the monk pulled up to one arm and tucked her legs under her, then threw herself up and back into a kneeling position, her left arm hanging limp, not quite at her side but a bit behind her. She couldn't turn her head against the pain to look at her shoulder, but she knew it was dislocated.
That wouldn't do.
Danica scanned the area behind her, the stone of the cliff wall. With a determined nod, she leaped to her feet, and before the pain could slow her, she rushed toward the wall, jumped into the air, and turned as she descended, slamming the back of her injured shoulder against the stone.
She heard a loud popping sound and knew it was a prelude to agony. Indeed, the waves that came at her had her doubled over and vomiting.
But she could see her shoulder, aligned once more, and the pain fast subsided. She could even move her arm again, though the slightest motion hurt badly.
She stood leaning against the stone wall for a long while, falling within herself to find a place of calm against the furious storm that roiled in her battered form.
When she at last opened her eyes, she first focused upon one of the fallen crawlers, flattened and splattered against the ground. She managed to look up behind her, up the cliff, thinking of the dracolich and what she had to do to warn those who might help her defeat the beast.
She looked south, guided by her mothering instincts, toward the road to Carradoon and her children, and there she desperately wanted to go. But she focused on an area not so far to the south, trying to get a sense of the valley in proportion to the direct north-south trail to Spirit Soaring.
Danica nodded, recognizing that she wouldn't have to cross the mountainous barrier to find that road. Fairly certain of her location - she was in a deep valley several miles from the cathedral - she started away on unsteady legs, her ankle threatening to roll under her with each step.
Soon after, she was leaning on a walking stick, fighting the pain and dreading the trail up to her home. The road was much steeper than the trail from Carradoon, and she toyed with the idea of continuing all the way around to the port city, then using the more passable pathways instead.
She couldn't help but laugh at herself for that feeble justification. She'd lose a day and more of travel time taking that route, a day and more Cadderly and the others didn't have to spare.
She came upon the north-south road some time after highsun, her strength sapped, her clothes sticking to her with sweat. Again she looked southeast toward unseen Carradoon, and thought of her children. She closed her eyes and turned south, then looked upon the road home, the road she needed to take for all their sakes.
She recalled that the road continued fairly flat for about a quarter of a mile, then began an onerous climb up into the Snowflakes. She had to make that climb. It was not a choice, but a duty. Cadderly had to know.
And Danica meant to walk all through the night to tell him. She started off at a slow pace, practically dragging one foot and leaning heavily on the walking stick in her right hand, her left arm hanging loose at her side. Every step jolted that shoulder, and so Danica paused and tore off a piece of her already torn shirt, fashioning it into a makeshift sling.
With a sigh of determination, the woman started away again, a little more quickly, but with her strength fast waning.
She lost track of time, but knew the shadows were lengthening around her, then she heard something - a rider or a wagon - approaching from behind. Danica shuffled off the trail and threw herself down behind a bush and a rock, crawling into a place to watch the road behind her. She chewed hard on her bottom lip to keep from gasping out in pain, but even that notion and sensation were soon lost to her as her curious quarry came into view.
She saw the horse first, a skeletal black beast with fire around its hooves. It snorted smoke from its flared nostrils. A hell horse, a nightmare, and as Danica noted the wagon driver - or more particularly, the driver's great, wide-brimmed and plumed hat, and the ebon color of his skin - she remembered him.
"Jarlaxle?" she whispered, and more curious still, he sat with another dark elf Danica surely recognized.
The thought of that rogue Jarlaxle riding along with Drizzt Do'Urden knocked Danica even more emotionally off-balance. How could it be?
And what did it mean, for her and for Cadderly?
As the wagon neared, she made out a couple of heads above the rail of the backboard. Dwarves, obviously. A squeal from the side turned her attention to a third dwarf riding a pig that looked like it grazed on the lower planes right beside the nightmare pulling the wagon.
Danica told herself that it couldn't be Drizzt Do'Urden, and warned herself that it was not out of the realm of possibility that the fiendish Jarlaxle might be behind all of the trouble that had come to Erlkazar. She couldn't risk going to them, she told herself repeatedly as the wagon bounced along the trail, nearing her hiding place.
Despite those very real and grounded reservations, as the wagon rolled up barely ten feet from her, the nightmare snorting flames and pounding the road with its fiery hooves, the desperate woman, realizing instinctively that she was out of options, pulled herself up to her knees and called out for help.
"Lady Danica!" Jarlaxle cried, and Drizzt spoke her name at the same time.
Together the two drow leaped down from the wagon and ran to her, moving to opposite sides of her and falling on bended knee. Together they gently cradled and supported her, and glanced at each other with equal disbelief that anything could have so battered the magnificent warrior-monk.
"What'd'ye know, elf?" one of the dwarves called, climbing from the back of the wagon. "That Cadderly's girl?"
"Lady Danica," Drizzt explained.
"You must ..." the woman gasped. "You must get me to Cadderly. I must warn him ..."
Her voice trailed off and she faltered, her consciousness slipping away. "We will," Drizzt promised. "Rest easy."
* * * * *
Drizzt looked at Jarlaxle, grave concern evident on his face. He wasn't sure Danica could survive the journey.
"I have potions," Jarlaxle assured him, but with less confidence than Drizzt would have hoped for. Besides, who could be sure what effects his potions might produce in such a time of wild magic?
They made Danica as comfortable as they could in the back of the wagon, laying her beside Catti-brie, who sat against the backboard and still seemed totally unaware of her surroundings. Jarlaxle stayed beside the monk, spooning magical healing potions into her mouth, while Bruenor drove the wagon as fast as the nightmare could manage. Drizzt and Pwent ran near flank, fearing that whatever had hit Danica might not be far afield. On Jarlaxle's bidding, Athrogate and the hell boar stayed near, riding just in front of the nightmare.
"It's getting steeper," Bruenor warned a short time later. "Yer horse ain't for liking it."
"The mules are rested now," Jarlaxle replied. "Go as far as we can, then we'll put them back up front."
"Night'll be falling by then."
"Perhaps we should ride through."
Bruenor didn't want to agree, but he found himself nodding despite his reservations.
"Elf?" the dwarf asked, seeing Drizzt approach from some brush to the side of the trail.
"Nothing," Drizzt answered. "I have seen no sign of any monsters, and no trail to be found save Danica's own."
"Well, that's a good thing," Bruenor said. He reached over and grabbed at Drizzt's belt to help the drow hop up the side of the rolling wagon.
"Her breathing is steady," Drizzt noted of Danica, and Jarlaxle nodded.
"The potions have helped," said Jarlaxle. "There is a measure of predictable magic remaining."
"Bah, but she ain't said a word," said Bruenor.
"I've kept her in a stupor," Jarlaxle explained. "For her own sake. A simple enchantment," he added reassuringly when both Drizzt and Bruenor looked at him with suspicion. He pulled from his vest a pendant with a dangling ruby, remarkably like the one worn by Regis.
"Hey, now!" Bruenor protested and pulled hard on the reins, bringing the wagon up short.
"It's not Regis's," Jarlaxle assured him.
"You had his, in Luskan," Drizzt remembered.
"For a time, yes," said Jarlaxle. "Long enough to have my artisans replicate it." As Bruenor and Drizzt continued to stare at him hard, Jarlaxle just shrugged and explained, "It's what I do."
Drizzt and Bruenor looked at each other and sighed.
"I did not steal anything from him, and I could have, easily enough," Jarlaxle argued. "I did not kill him, or you, and I could have - "
"Easily enough," Drizzt had to agree.
"When can you free her of the trance?" Drizzt asked.
Jarlaxle glanced down at Danica, the monk seeming much more at ease, and he started to say, "Soon." Before the word got out of his mouth, Danica's hand shot up and grasped the dangling chain that held the ruby pendant. With a twist and turn that appeared so subtle and simple as she sat up from the wagon bed, she spun the startled Jarlaxle around and jerked the chain behind him, twisting it even more to hold the drow fast in a devastating chokehold.
"You were told never to return, Jarlaxle Baenre," Danica said, her mouth right beside the dark elf's ear.
"Your gratitude overwhelms me, Lady," the drow managed to gasp in reply.
He stiffened as Danica pulled and twisted. "Move your fingers a bit more into position to grasp a weapon, drow," she coaxed. "I can snap your neck as easily as a dry twig."
"A little help?" Jarlaxle whispered to Drizzt.
"Danica, let him go," Drizzt said. "He is not our enemy. Not now." Danica loosened her grip, just a bit, and stared skeptically at the ranger, then looked to Bruenor.
Drizzt nudged the silent dwarf.
"Good to meet ye at last, Lady Danica," Bruenor said. "King Bruenor Battlehammer, at yer ser - " Drizzt elbowed him again.
"Aye, let the rat go," Bruenor bade her. "'Twas Jarlaxle that gived ye the potions that saved yer hide, and he's been a help with me daughter there."
Danica glanced from one to the other, then looked over at Catti-brie. "What's wrong with her?" she asked as she released Jarlaxle, who shifted forward to get away from her.
"I never thought I would see Jarlaxle caught so easily," Drizzt remarked.
"I share your surprise," the mercenary admitted.
Drizzt smiled, briefly enjoying the moment. He came over the rail of the wagon then, stepping past Jarlaxle to go to Danica, who leaned against the tailgate.
"I'll not underestimate that one again," Jarlaxle promised quietly.
"You must get me to Spirit Soaring," Danica said, and Drizzt nodded.
"That is where we were going," he explained. "Catti-brie was touched by the falling Weave - some kind of blue fire. She is trapped within her own mind, it seems, and in a dark place of huddled, crawling creatures."
Danica perked up at that description.
"You have seen them?" Jarlaxle remarked.
"Long-armed, short-legged - almost no-legged - gray-skinned beasts attacked Spirit Soaring in force last night," she explained. "I was out scouting ..." Her voice trailed off as she gave a great sigh.
"Ivan Bouldershoulder is dead," she said. Bruenor cried out and Drizzt winced. From the side of the wagon, Thibbledorf Pwent wailed. "The dragon - a dracolich, an undead dragon ... and something more ..."
"A dracolich?" Jarlaxle said.
"Dead dragon walking - dead dragon talking, dead dragon furious, I'm thinking that curious!" Athrogate rhymed, and Thibbledorf Pwent nodded in appreciation, drawing a scowl from Bruenor.
A dumbfounded Danica stared at the bizarre Athrogate.
"You have to admit that one does not see a dracolich every day," Jarlaxle deadpanned.
Danica seemed even more at a loss.
"Something stranger still, you mentioned?" Jarlaxle prompted.
"Its touch is death," the monk explained. "I found it by following a trail of utter devastation, a complete withering of everything the beast had touched. Trees, grass, everything."
"Never heared o' such a thing," said Bruenor.
"When I saw the beast, gigantic and terrible, I knew my guess to be correct. Its mere touch is death. It is death incarnate, and something more - a horn in its head, glowing with power," Danica went on, her eyes closed as if she had to force herself to remember things she did not want to recall. "I think it was ..."
"Crenshinibon, the Crystal Shard," said Jarlaxle, nodding with every word. "Yes."
"That durned thing again," Bruenor grumbled. "So there ye go, elf. Ye didn't break it."
"I did," Jarlaxle corrected. "And that is part of the problem, I fear." Bruenor just shook his hairy head.
Danica pointed to a tall peak not far behind them and to the north. "He controls them." She looked directly at Jarlaxle. "I believe the dragon is Hephaestus, the great red wyrm whose breath destroyed the artifact, or so we thought."
"It is indeed Hephaestus," Jarlaxle assured her.
"Ye think ye might be tellin' us what ye're about anytime soon?" Bruenor grumbled.
"I already told you my fears," Jarlaxle said. "The dragon and the liches, somehow freed of the prison artifact of their own creation - "
"The Crystal Shard," said Danica, and she tapped her forehead. "Here, on the dracolich."
"Joined by the magic of the collapsing Weave," said Jarlaxle, "merged by the collision of worlds."
Danica looked at him, incredulous.
"I know not either, Lady Danica," Jarlaxle explained. "It's all a guess. But this is all related, of that I am certain." He looked at Catti-brie, her eyes wide open but unseeing. "Her affliction, these beasts, the dragon risen from the dead ... all of it ... all part of the same catastrophe, the breadth of which we still do not know."
"And so we have come to find out," said Drizzt. "To bring Catti-brie to Cadderly in the hope that he might help her."
"And I'm thinking that ye'll be needin' our help, too," Bruenor said to Danica.
Danica could only sigh and nod in helpless agreement. She glanced at the distant cliff, the lair of the dracolich and the Crystal Shard, the grave of Ivan Bouldershoulder. She tried not to look past that point, but she couldn't help herself. She feared for her children.