Shards of light pricked at Alias’s vision and then faded. Her head dropped to the floor, and she allowed the darkness of unconsciousness to take her.
Through it all Akabar had remained asleep, snoring softly.
Alias awoke to the sound of Olive and Akabar arguing. By the sun’s position, she could tell it was late morning. She felt a little hungover, and it took her a moment to remember the wine Nameless had helped her guzzle.
“Your story is most amusing, little one,” the Turmishman was saying to Olive, “but just not probable. My dreams were pleasant and my sleep uninterrupted. I would have been awake in an instant if the events you described had truly occurred.”
“I tell you, this thing was huge and black and had more fangs than you have hairs in your beard. Its mouth opened so wide—” Olive flung her arms out as far as they would stretch “—that it could have swallowed itself.
Akabar laughed. “It sounds to me as though perhaps my cooking was mer a lammer for you,” the mage commented, using an expression in his native tongue. “Much and too much,” he translated for the halfling.
Alias shook the last bits of sleep from her head. “Olive’s telling you the truth, Akabar. Hard to credit, I’ll admit, but she wasn’t the only witness to the attack.”
The grin disappeared from Akabar’s face. “Why did it strike at me first, I wonder.”
“Maybe you looked the tastiest,” Olive suggested.
“The creature was a kalmari, impervious to normal attacks,” Alias said. “It probably recognized you as a mage, and hence the greatest threat.”
Then Alias remembered what Cassana had said in her dream. “I have reason to believe that it was waiting here for me,” she added, “and that it belonged to one of the wizards who branded me. When I got close to it, the sigils began to glow again, something that also happened in the presence of the crystal elemental. Perhaps my foes have judged you too useful to me and have decided to have you removed. A demonstration to prove the futility of defiance.”
“A kalmari,” Akabar mused, no longer puzzled. “Yes, such things can hold a man in slumber. How did you defeat it?”
“Chopped it with a sword it had already swallowed.”
“Ah, yes,” the southerner nodded. “They cannot digest steel, so they spit it out. They can be poisoned by the very secretions that they’ve left on the blade.
“You’ve fought one before?” Alias asked.
“No,” Akabar admitted. “I have read of them. They are a horror attributed to the Red Wizards of Thay, I believe.”
Alias nodded.
“Even with a regorged weapon, it could not have been an easy battle. However did you manage?” he asked Olive.
Alias smiled. No doubt the bard had exaggerated her role in the destruction of the monster.
Olive looked down at her furry hands. “I got some help from Dragonbait.”
“Where is Dragonbait, anyway?” Alias asked.
“I noticed him climbing that hill,” Akabar said, pointing to the western slope looming over the top of the pass. “He was carrying a monstrous sword.”
“Hmmm. You two start breaking camp,” the adventureress ordered. “I’ll fetch him, and we’ll be off. I’m not inclined to hang around here.”
Climbing toward the western slope, Alias heard Akabar chiding Olive. “Why didn’t you tell me it was a kalmari instead of babbling on about a big, black, fang-toothed thing?”
Catching the sound of soft, whistling tones, Alias followed them to a spring-fed pool, where she found Dragonbait. The lizard had made a set of bird pipes, and the tune he twisted out of them, while sad and plaintive, was also exultant, a cry of loss and pain spun into beautiful music. Somehow Alias knew it was made to honor a fallen hero.
She sat beside the lizard and waited for him to finish. A long, low mound of dirt stretched before him. When he was finished, he lay the pipes, very gently, on top of the newly turned earth and bowed his head silently.
A bird twittered in some distant glade. The air smelled of roses. Dragonbait finally looked up at her and smiled. Not really a happy smile, but a bittersweet one, though Alias doubted anyone but she could tell the difference.
“That the sword?” she asked, pointing at the thin grave.
Dragonbait nodded.
Alias sighed. “It could be magical. We could use a weapon like that.”
Dragonbait shook his head, though Alias could not tell if he was denying the sword’s possible enchantment or their need for such a thing.
“Someone else will only dig it up,” she argued, though her own heart wasn’t really in it.
Dragonbait shook his head again.
Alias sighed. “Okay. We’ll leave it as a memorial. Come on now. We’ve already lost half a day, and we’re tempting untrustworthy gods by staying here any longer.” She patted the lizard’s arm as she rose. His tightly knit scales reminded her of warm jewels, dry and smooth.
As she turned to make her way down the slope, it occurred to her that Dragonbait couldn’t have known about the sword’s owner. Unless he had the ability to sense an object’s past or he had read her mind or … Alias halted in mid-step and turned around. “Did you dream the same dream?”
The lizard cocked his head as if he didn’t understand.
“Never mind,” she said, realizing that, though they did communicate with one another in a fashion, some questions were just too complicated for her to convey. “Just finish up here. We’ll be waiting at the camp.”
Dragonbait remained at the grave for a few moments, then rose and followed his lady out of the glade. The birds picked up his pipe-song and carried it throughout Shadow Gap, south into the Stonelands and north into the Dales.
13
Shadowdale
After inspecting his maps Akabar had assumed that Alias had overestimated the time it would take to reach Yulash. Her experience of the roads north, however, proved more accurate than the parchment image of the land he had purchased in Suzail. On his map, the road from Shadow Gap to Shadowdale passed through clear terrain, but in reality the land was quite different.
The route twisted out of Shadow Gap, and approaching the dalelands it climbed and descended numerous hillocks. Akabar found the land pleasing to the eye. Sheltered from the Great Desert by mountains, the Dales were nothing at all like the barren Stonelands to the south of Shadow Gap. The hills were lush with greenery and wildflowers.
On the third afternoon outside of Shadow Gap, a storm lost them half a day’s travel. As they cowered in a vale beneath their waxed tarps, the sheet of black water falling from the sky was broken only by flashes of lightning.
The next day the rain continued, but with only half the ferocity. Horses, supplies, and clothing drenched, they took a quick vote. They decided to push on to Shadowdale rather than sleeping on wet ground again, even if it meant riding all through the day and night. Dragonbait abstained.
With the coming of night, the rain let up, but the moon and stars remained hidden behind dark clouds. They all shivered with damp and fatigue, but they pressed on. Just as the dawn light began to highlight ominous purple clouds with red streaks, they crossed the ancient bridge spanning the Ashaba River and looked out over Shadowdale.
The town of Shadowdale was the southern entrance to the region of Shadowdale. Olive rambled on about the myriad legendary adventurers who had come from Shadowdale or had made it their base or who had retired there. She had never been there herself, she admitted, but Shadowdale was mentioned in more ballads, lays, and drinking songs than any other city in all the Realms.
As they passed the Tower of Ashaba, Olive tugged excitedly on the mage’s robes, insisting he take in the sight of the off-center spire with its landing decks for aerial mounts.