The Ghost King

CHAPTER 21

FACING THE TRUTH
Cadderly emerged from the room after spending more than half the morning with Catti-brie, his face ashen, his eyes showing profound weariness. Drizzt, waiting in the anteroom, looked to him with hope, and Jarlaxle, who stood beside Drizzt, looked instead at his dark elf companion. The mercenary recognized the truth splayed on Cadderly's face even if Drizzt did not - or could not.
"You have found her?" Drizzt asked.
Cadderly sighed, just slightly, and handed the eye patch to him. "It is as we believed," he said, speaking to Jarlaxle more than Drizzt.
The drow mercenary nodded and Cadderly turned to face Drizzt. "Catti-brie is caught in a dark place between two worlds, our own and a place of shadow," the priest explained. "The touch of the falling Weave has had many ill effects upon wizards and priests across Faerun, and no two maladies appear to be the same, from what little I have seen. For Argust of Memnon, the touch proved instantly fatal, turning him to ice - just empty ice, no substance, no flesh beneath it. The desert sun reduced him to a puddle in short order. Another priest carries with him a most awful disease, with open sores across his body, and is surely failing. Many stories ..."
"I care not of them," Drizzt interrupted, and Jarlaxle, hearing the edge creeping into the ranger's voice, put a comforting hand on Drizzt's shoulder. "You have found Catti-brie, caught between the worlds, you say, though in truth I fear it is all a grand illusion masking a sinister design - perhaps the Red Wizards, or - "
"It is no illusion. The Weave itself has come undone, some of the gods have fled, died ... we're not yet certain. And whether it is the cause of the falling Weave, or a result of it, a second world is falling all around ours, and that junction seems also to have increased the expanse of the Plane of Shadow, or perhaps even opened doorways into some other realm of shadows and darkness," said Cadderly.
"And you have found her - Catti-brie, I mean - trapped between this place and our own world. How do we retrieve her fully, and bring her back ..." His voice trailed off as he stared into Cadderly's too-sympathetic face.
"There is a way!" Drizzt shouted, and he grabbed the priest by the front of his tunic. "Do not tell me that it is hopeless!"
"I would not," Cadderly replied. "All sorts of unexplained and unexpected events are occurring all around us, on a daily basis! I have found spells I did not know I possessed, and did not know Deneir could grant, and with all humility and honesty, I say that I am not certain it is even Deneir granting them to me! You ask me for answers, my friend, and I do not have them."
Drizzt let him go, the drow's shoulders sagging, along with his aching heart. He offered a slight nod of appreciation to Cadderly. "I will go and tell Bruenor."
"Let me," said Jarlaxle, and that brought a surprised look from Drizzt. "You go to your wife."
"My wife cannot feel my touch."
"You do not know that," Jarlaxle scolded. "Go and hold her, for both your sakes."
Drizzt looked from Jarlaxle to Cadderly, who nodded his agreement. The distraught drow put on the magical eye patch as he entered the adjacent chamber.
"She is lost to us," Jarlaxle said softly to Cadderly when they were alone. "We do not know that."
Jarlaxle continued to stare at him, and Cadderly, grim-faced, could not disagree. "I see no way for us to retrieve her," the priest admitted. "And even if we could, I fear that the damage to her mind is already beyond repair. By any means I can fathom, Catti-brie is forever lost to us."
Jarlaxle swallowed hard, though he was not surprised by the prognosis. He wouldn't tell King Bruenor quite everything, he decided.
* * * * *
Another defeat, Yharaskrik pointed out. We weakened them!
We barely scratched their walls, the illithid imparted. And now they have new and powerful allies.
More of my enemies in one place for me to throttle!
Cadderly and Jarlaxle and Drizzt Do'Urden. I know this Drizzt Do'Urden, and he is not to be taken lightly.
I know him as well. Crenshinibon unexpectedly joined the internal dialogue, and the illithid detected a simmering hatred behind the simple telepathic statement.
We should fly from this place, Yharaskrik dared to suggest. The rift has brought uncontrollable beasts from the shadowy plane, and Cadderly has found unexpected allies ...
No cogent response came from the dragon, just a continuous, angry growl reverberating through the thoughts of the triumvirate that was the Ghost King, a wall of anger and resentment, and perhaps the most resounding "no" Yharaskrik had ever heard.
Through the far-reaching mental eyes of the illithid, its consciousness flying wide to scout the region, they had seen the rift in Carradoon. They had seen the giant nightwalkers and the nightwings and understood that a new force had come to the Prime Material Plane. And through the eyes of the illithid, they had witnessed the latest battle at Spirit Soaring, the coming of the dwarves and the drow, the power revealed by Cadderly - that unknown priestly magic had unnerved Yharaskrik most of all, for he had felt the magical thunder in Cadderly's ward and had retreated from the brilliance of the priest's beam of light. Yharaskrik, ancient and once part of a great communal mind flayer hive, thought it knew of every magical dweomer on Toril, but it had never seen anything like the power of the unpredictable priest that day.
The melted flesh of crawlers and the ash piles of the raised dead served as grim reminders to the mind flayer that Cadderly was not to be underestimated.
Thus, the dracolich's continuing growl of denial was not a welcome echo in Yharaskrik's expansive mind. The illithid waited for the sound to abate, but it did not. It listened for a third voice in the conversation, one of moderation, but heard nothing.
Then it knew. In a sudden insight, a revelation of a minuscule but all-important shift, the mind flayer realized that the Ghost King was no longer a triumvirate. The resonance of the growl deepened, more a chorus of two than the grumble of one. Two that had become one.
No words filtered out of that rumbling wall of anger, but Yharaskrik knew its warnings would go unheeded. They would not flee. They - the mind flayer and that dual being with whom it shared the host dragon corpse, for no longer could Yharaskrik count Hephaestus and Crenshinibon as separate entities!  -  would show no restraint. Not the rift, not Cadderly's unexplained new powers, not the arrival of powerful reinforcements for Spirit Soaring, would slow the determined vengeance of the Ghost King.
The growl continued, a maddening and incessant wall, a pervasive answer to the illithid's concerns that brooked no intelligent debate, or, the creature understood, no room for a change of plans, whatever new circumstances or new enemies might be revealed.
The Ghost King meant to attack Spirit Soaring.
Yharaskrik tried to send its thoughts around the growl, to find Crenshinibon, or what remained of the Crystal Shard as an independent sentience. It tried to construct logic to stop the dracolich's angry vibrations.
It found nothing, and every path led to one road only: eviction.
It was no longer a disagreement, no longer a debate about their course of action. It was a revolt, full and without resolution. Hephaestus-Crenshinibon was trying to evict Yharaskrik, as surely as had the dwarf in the tunnels below.
Unlike that occasion, however, the mind flayer had nowhere else to go.
The growl rolled on.
Yharaskrik threw wave after wave of mental energy at the dragon-shard mind. It gathered its psionic powers and released them in ways subtle and clever.
The growl rolled on.
The illithid assailed the Ghost King with a wall of discordant notions and emotions, a cacophony of twisted notes that would have driven a wise man mad.
The growl rolled on.
It attacked every fear buried within Hephaestus. It conjured images of the exploding Crystal Shard from those years before, when the light had burned the eyes from Hephaestus's head.
The growl rolled on. The mind flayer found no wedge between the dragon and the artifact. They were one, so completely united that even Yharaskrik couldn't fathom where one ended and the other began, or which was in control, or which even, to the illithid's great surprise and distress, was initiating the growl.
And it went on, unabated, unflinching, incessant and forevermore if necessary, the illithid understood.
Clever beast!
There was nothing left there for the mind flayer. It would have no control of the great dracolich limbs. It would find no conversation or debate. It would find nothing there but the growl, heartbeats and days and years and centuries. Just the growl, just the opaque wall of a singular note that would forevermore dull its own sensibilities, that would steal its curiosity, that would force it to stay within, confined to an endless battle.
Against Hephaestus alone, Yharaskrik knew it could prevail. Against Crenshinibon alone, Yharaskrik held confidence that it would find a way to win.
Against both of them, there was only the growl. It all came clear to the illithid, then. The Crystal Shard, as arrogant as Yharaskrik itself, and as stubborn as the dragon, as patient as time, had chosen. To the illithid, that choice at first seemed illogical, for why would Crenshinibon side with the lesser intellect of the dragon?
Because the Crystal Shard was more possessed of ego than the illithid had recognized. More than logic drove Crenshinibon. By joining with Hephaestus, the Crystal Shard would dominate.
The growl rolled on.
Time itself lost meaning in the rumble. There was no yesterday and no tomorrow, no hope nor fear, no pleasure nor pain.
Just a wall, not thickening, not thinning, impenetrable and impassable.
Yharaskrik couldn't win. It couldn't hold. The Ghost King became a creature of two, not three, and those two became one, as Yharaskrik departed.
The disembodied intellect of the great mind flayer began to dissipate almost immediately, oblivion looming.
* * * * *
All the wizened and experienced minds remaining at Spirit Soaring gathered in lectures and seminars, sharing their observations and intuition about the crash of worlds and the advent of the dark place, a reformed Plane of Shadow they came to call the Shadowfell. All reservations were cast aside, priest and mage, human, dwarf, and drow.
They were all together, plotting and planning, seeking an answer. They were quick to agree that the fleshy beasts crawling over Spirit Soaring were likely of another plane, and no one argued the basic premise of some other world colliding, or at least interacting in dangerous ways, with their own world. But so many other questions remained.
"And the walking dead?" Danica asked.
"Crenshinibon's addition to the tumult," Jarlaxle explained with surprising confidence. "The Crystal Shard is an artifact of necromancy more than anything else."
"You claimed it destroyed - Cadderly's divination showed us the way to destroy it, and we met those conditions. How then ...?"
"The collision of worlds?" Jarlaxle asked more than stated. "The fall of the Weave? The simple chaos of the times? I do not believe that it has returned to us as it was - that former incarnation of Crenshinibon was indeed destroyed. But in its destruction, it is possible that the liches who created it have come free of it. I believe that I battled one, and that you encountered one as well."
"You make many presumptions," Danica remarked.
"A line of reasoning to begin our investigation. Nothing more."
"And you think these things, these liches, are the leaders?" asked Cadderly.
Before Jarlaxle could answer, Danica cut him short. "The leader is the dracolich."
"Joined with the remnants of Crenshinibon, and thus with the liches," said Jarlaxle.
"Well, whatever it is, something bad's going on, something badder than anything I e'er seen in me long years o' living," said Bruenor, and he looked toward the doorway to Catti-brie's room as he spoke. An uncomfortable silence ensued, and Bruenor harrumphed a great and profound frustration and took his leave to be with his wounded daughter.
To the surprise of all, especially Cadderly, the priest found himself beside Jarlaxle as the conversation resumed. The drow had surprising insights on the dual-world hypothesis. He had experience with the shadowy form they both understood to be one of the liches that had created Crenshinibon in that long-lost age. These ideas seemed to Cadderly the most informative of all.
Not Drizzt, nor Bruenor, not even Danica fathomed as clearly as Jarlaxle the trap into which Catti-brie had fallen, or the dire, likely irreparable implications of a new world imprinting on the old, or of a shattering of the wall between light and shadow. Not the other mages nor the priests quite grasped the permanence of the change that had found them all, of the loss of magic and of some, if not all the gods. But Jarlaxle understood.
Deneir was gone, Cadderly had come to accept, and the god was not coming back, at least not in the form Cadderly had come to know. The Weave, the source of Toril's magic, could not be rewound. It appeared as though Mystra herself - all of her domain - was simply there one moment, gone the next.
"Some magic will continue," Jarlaxle said as the discussion neared its end. It had become little more than a rehash of belabored points. "Your exploits prove that."
"Or they are the last gasps of magic dying," Cadderly replied. Jarlaxle shrugged and reluctantly nodded at the possibility of that theory.
"Is this world that is joining with ours a place of magic and gods?" Danica asked. "The beasts we have seen - "
"Have nothing to do with the new world, I think, which may be imbued, as is our own, with both magic and brute force," Jarlaxle interrupted without reservation. "The crawlers come from the Shadowfell." Cadderly nodded agreement with the drow.
"Then, is their magic dying?" Drizzt asked. "Has this collision you speak of destroyed their Weave, as well?"
"Or will the two intertwine in new ways, perhaps with this Plane of Shadow, this Shadowfell, between them?" Jarlaxle said.
"We cannot know," said Cadderly. "Not yet."
"What next?" asked Drizzt, and his voice took on an unusual timbre, one of distinct desperation - desperation wrought by his fears for Catti-brie, the others knew.
"We know what tools we have," Cadderly said, and he stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. "We will match strength with strength, and hope that some magic, at least, will find its way to our many spellcasters."
"You have shown as much already," said Jarlaxle.
"In a manner I cannot predict, much less control or summon."
"I have faith in you," Jarlaxle replied, and that statement gave all four of them pause, for it seemed so impossible that Jarlaxle would be saying that of Cadderly - or anyone!
"Should Cadderly extend similar confidence?" Danica said to the drow.
Jarlaxle burst into laughter, helpless and absurd laughter, and Cadderly joined him, and Danica joined them, too.
But Drizzt could not, his gaze sliding to the side of the room, to the door behind which Catti-brie sat in unending darkness.
Lost to him.
* * * * *
Desperation gripped the normally serene Yharaskrik as the reality of its situation closed in around it. Memories flew away and equations became muddled. It had known physical oblivion before, when Hephaestus had released his great fiery breath upon Crenshinibon, blasting the artifact. Only through an amazing bit of good fortune - the falling Weave touching the residual power of the artifact with the remnants of Yharaskrik nearby - had the illithid come to consciousness again.
But oblivion loomed once again, and with no hope of reprieve. The disembodied intellect flailed without focus for just a few precious moments before the desperate mind flayer reached out toward the nearest vessel.
But Ivan Bouldershoulder was ready, and the dwarf put up such a wall of denial and rage that Yharaskrik couldn't begin to make headway into his consciousness. So shut out was the illithid that Yharaskrik had no understanding of where it was, or that it was surrounded by lesser beings that might indeed prove susceptible to possession.
Yharaskrik didn't even fight back against that refusal, for it knew that possession would not solve its problem. It could not inhabit an unwilling host forever, and should it insert all of its consciousness into the physical form of a lesser being, should it fully possess a dwarf, a human, or even an elf, it would become limited by that being's physiology.
There was no real escape. But even as it rebounded away from Ivan Bouldershoulder, the mind flayer had another thought, and cast a wide net, its consciousness reaching out across the leagues of Faerun. It needed another awakened intellect, another psionicist, a fellow thinker.
It knew of one. It reached for one as its homeless intellect began to flounder.
In a lavish chamber beneath the port city of Luskan, many miles to the northwest, Kimmuriel Oblodra, lieutenant of Bregan D'aerthe, second-in-command behind only Jarlaxle Baenre, felt a sensation, a calling.
A desperate plea.